13500	----	A HEROINE OF FRANCE The Story of Joan of Arc by EVELYN EVERETT-GREEN Contents CHAPTER I. HOW I FIRST HEARD OF THE MAID. CHAPTER II. HOW I FIRST SAW THE MAID. CHAPTER III. HOW THE MAID CAME TO VAUCOULEURS. CHAPTER IV. HOW THE MAID WAS TRIED AND TESTED. CHAPTER V. HOW THE MAID JOURNEYED TO CHINON. CHAPTER VI. HOW THE MAID CAME TO THE KING. CHAPTER VII. HOW THE MAID WAS HINDERED; YET MADE PREPARATION. CHAPTER VIII. HOW THE MAID MARCHED FOR ORLEANS. CHAPTER IX. HOW THE MAID ASSUMED COMMAND AT ORLEANS. CHAPTER X. HOW THE MAID LED US INTO BATTLE. CHAPTER XI. HOW THE MAID BORE TRIUMPH AND TROUBLE. CHAPTER XII. HOW THE MAID RAISED THE SIEGE. CHAPTER XIII. HOW THE MAID WON A NEW NAME. CHAPTER XIV. HOW THE MAID CLEARED THE KING'S WAY. CHAPTER XV. HOW THE MAID RODE WITH THE KING. CHAPTER XVI. HOW THE MAID ACCOMPLISHED HER MISSION. CHAPTER XVII. HOW THE MAID WAS PERSUADED. CHAPTER XVIII. HOW I LAST SAW THE MAID. CHAPTER I. HOW I FIRST HEARD OF THE MAID. "The age of Chivalry--alas!--is dead. The days of miracles are past and gone! What future is there for hapless France? She lies in the dust. How can she hope to rise?" Sir Guy de Laval looked full in our faces as he spoke these words, and what could one reply? Ah me!--those were sad and sorrowful days for France--and for those who thought upon the bygone glories of the past, when she was mistress of herself, held high her head, and was a power with hostile nations. What would the great Charlemagne say, could he see us now? What would even St. Louis of blessed memory feel, could he witness the changes wrought by only a century and a half? Surely it were enough to cause them to turn in their graves! The north lying supine at the feet of the English conqueror; licking his hand, as a dog licks that of his master, lost to all sense of shame that an English infant in his cradle (so to speak) should rule through a regent the fair realm of France, whilst its own lawful King, banished from his capital and from half his kingdom, should keep his Court at Bourges or Chinon, passing his days in idle revelry, heedless of the eclipse of former greatness, careless of the further aggressions threatened by the ever-encroaching foe. Was Orleans to fall next into the greedy maw of the English adventurers? Was it not already threatened? And how could it be saved if nothing could rouse the King from his slothful indifference? O for the days of Chivalry!--the days so long gone by! Whilst I, Jean de Novelpont, was musing thus, a curious look overshadowed the face of Bertrand de Poulengy, our comrade and friend, with whom, when we had said adieu to Sir Guy a few miles farther on, I was to return to Vaucouleurs, to pay a long-promised visit there. I had been journeying awhile with Sir Guy in Germany, and he was on his way to the Court at Chinon; for we were all of the Armagnac party, loyal to our rightful monarch, whether King or only Dauphin still, since he had not been crowned, and had adopted no truly regal state or authority; and we were earnestly desirous of seeing him awaken from his lethargy and put himself at the head of an army, resolved to drive out the invaders from the land, and be King of France in truth as well as in name. But so far it seemed as though nothing short of a miracle would effect this, and the days of miracles, as Sir Guy had said, were now past and gone. Then came the voice of Bertrand, speaking in low tones, as a man speaks who communes with himself; but we heard him, for we were riding over the thick moss of the forest glade, and the horses' feet sank deep and noiseless in the sod, and our fellows had fallen far behind, so that their laughter and talk no longer broke upon our ears. The dreamy stillness of the autumn woodlands was about us, when the songs of the birds are hushed, and the light falls golden through the yellowing leaves, and a glory more solemn than that of springtide lies upon the land. Methinks there is something in the gradual death of the year which attunes our hearts to a certain gentle melancholy; and perchance this was why Sir Guy's words had lacked the ring of hopeful bravery that was natural to one of his temperament, and why Bertrand's eyes were so grave and dreamy, and his voice seemed to come from far away. "And yet I do bethink me that six months agone I did behold a scene which seems to me to hold within its scope something of miracle and of mystery. I have thought of it by day, and dreamed of it by night, and the memory of it will not leave me, I trow, so long as breath and being remain!" We turned and looked at him--the pair of us--with eyes which questioned better than our tongues. Bertrand and I had been comrades and friends in boyhood; but of late years we had been much sundered. I had not seen him for above a year, till he joined us the previous Wednesday at Nancy, having received a letter I did send to him from thence. He came to beg of me to visit him at his kinsman's house, the Seigneur Robert de Baudricourt of Vaucouleurs; and since my thirst for travel was assuaged, and my purse something over light to go to Court, I was glad to end my wanderings for the nonce, in the company of one whom I still loved as a brother. From the first I had noted that Bertrand was something graver and more thoughtful than had been his wont. Now I did look at him with wonder in my eyes. What could he be speaking of? He answered as though the question had passed my lips. "It was May of this present year of grace," he said, "I mind it the better that it was the Feast of the Ascension, and I had kept fast and vigil, had made my confession and received the Holy Sacrament early in the day. I was in my lodging overlooking the market place, and hard by the Castle which as you know hangs, as it were, over the town, guarding or threatening it, as the case may be, when a messenger arrived from my kinsman, De Baudricourt, bidding me to a council which he was holding at noon that day. I went to him without delay; and he did tell me a strange tale. "Not long since, so he said, an honest prud'homme of the neighbouring village of Burey le Petit, Durand Laxart by name, had asked speech with him, and had then told him that a young niece of his, dwelling in the village of Domremy, had come to him a few days since, saying it had been revealed to her how that she was to be used by the God of Heaven as an instrument in His hands for the redemption of France; and she had been told in a vision to go first to the Seigneur de Baudricourt, who would then find means whereby she should be sent to the Dauphin (as she called him), whom she was to cause to be made King of France." "Mort de Dieu!" cried Sir Guy, as he gazed at Bertrand with a look betwixt laughter and amaze, "and what said your worshipful uncle to that same message?" "At the first, he told me, he broke into a great laugh, and bid the honest fellow box the girl's ears well, and send her back to her mother. But he added that the man had been to him once again, and had pleaded that at least he would see his niece before sending her away; and since by this time he was himself somewhat curious to see and to question this village maiden, who came with so strange a tale, he had told Laxart to bring her at noon that very day, and he desired that I and certain others should be there in the hall with him, to hear her story, and perhaps suggest some shrewd question which might help to test her good faith." "A good thought," spoke Sir Guy, "for it is hard to believe in these dreamers of dreams. I have met such myself--they talk great swelling words, but the world wags on its way in spite of them. They are no prophets; they are bags of wind. They make a stir and a commotion for a brief while, and then they vanish to be heard of no more." "It may be so," answered Bertrand, whose face was grave, and whose steadfast dark-blue eyes had taken a strange shining, "I can only speak of that which I did see and hear. What the future may hold none can say. God alone doth know that." "Then you saw this maid--and heard her speech. What looked she like?--and what said she?" "I will tell you all the tale. We were gathered there in the great hall. There were perhaps a score of us; the Seigneur at the head of the council table, the Abbe Perigord on his right, and the Count of La Roche on his left. There were two priests also present, and the chiefest knights and gentlemen of the town. We had all been laughing gaily at the thought of what a village maid of but seventeen summers--or thereabouts--would feel on being introduced into the presence of such a company. We surmised that she would shrink into the very ground for shame. One gentleman declared that it was cruel to ask her to face so many strangers of condition so much more exalted than her own; but De Baudricourt cried out, 'Why man, the wench is clamouring to be taken to the King at his Court! If she cannot face a score of simple country nobles here, how can she present herself at Chinon? Let her learn her place by a sharp lesson here; so may she understand that she had best return to her distaff and spindle and leave the crowning of Kings to other hands!' And it was in the midst of the roar of laughter which greeted this speech that the door opened slowly--and we saw the maid of whom we had been talking." "And she doubtless heard your mirth," spoke I, and he bent his head in assent. "I trow she did," he answered, "but think you that the ribald jests of mortal men can touch one of the angels of God? She stood for a moment framed in the doorway, and I tell you I lie not when I declare that it seemed to all present as though a halo of pure white light encircled her. Where the light came from I know not; but many there were, like myself, who noted it. The far end of the hall was dim and dark; but yet we saw her clear as she moved forward. Upon her face was a shining such as I have seen upon none other. She wore the simple peasant dress of her class, with the coif upon her head; yet it seemed to me--ay, and to others too--as though she was habited in rich apparel. Perchance it was that when one had seen her face, one could no longer think upon her raiment. If a queen--if an angel--if a saint from heaven stood in stately calm and dignity before one's eyes, how could we think of the raiment worn? We should see nothing but the grandeur and beauty of the face and form!" "Mort de Dieu!" cried Sir Guy with his favourite oath, "but you look, good Bertrand, as though you had gazed upon some vision from the unseen world!" "Nay," he answered gravely, "but I have looked upon the face of one whom God has visited through His saints. I have seen the reflection of His glory in human eyes; and so I can never say with others that the days of miracles are past." Bertrand spoke with a solemnity and earnestness which could not but impress us deeply. Our eyes begged him to continue, and he told the rest of his tale very simply. "She came forward with this strange shining in her eyes. She bent before us with simple reverence; but then lifted herself up to her full height and looked straight at De Baudricourt without boldness and without fear, as though she saw in him a tool in the hand of God, and had no other thought for him besides. "'Seigneur,' she said, 'my Lord has bidden me come to you, that you may send me to the Dauphin; for He has given me a message to him which none else may bear; and He has told me that you will do it, therefore I know that you will not fail Him, and your laughter troubles me not.' "'Who is your Lord, my child?' asked De Baudricourt, not laughing now, but pulling at his beard and frowning in perplexity. "'Even the Lord of Heaven, Sire,' she answered, and her hands clasped themselves loosely together whilst her eyes looked upward with a smile such as I have seen on none other face before. 'He that is my Lord and your Lord and the Lord of this realm of France. But it is His holy will that the Dauphin shall be its King, and that he shall drive back the English, and that the crown shall be set upon his head. And this, with other matters which are for his ear alone I am sent to tell him; and you, good my lord, are he who shall send me to my King.' "Thus she spoke, and looked at us all with those shining eyes of hers; yet it seemed to me she scarce saw us. Her glance did go beyond, as though she were gazing in vision upon the things which were to be." "She was beautiful, you say?" asked Sir Guy, whose interest was keenly aroused; but who, I saw, was doubtful whether Bertrand had not been deceived by some witchery of fair face and graceful form; for Bertrand, albeit a man of thews and sinews and bold as a lion in fight, was something of the dreamer too, as warriors in all ages have sometimes been. "Yes--as an angel of God is beautiful," he answered, "ask me not of that; for I can tell you nothing. I know not the hue of her hair or of her eyes, nor what her face was like, nor her form, save that she was tall and very slender; but beautiful--ah yes!--with the beauty which this world cannot give; a beauty which silenced every flippant jest, shamed every scoffing thought, turned ridicule into wonder, contempt into reverence. Whether this wonderful maiden came in truth as a messenger of God or no, at least not one present but saw well that she herself believed heart and soul in her divine commission." "And what answer did the Seigneur de Baudricourt make to her?" "He gazed upon her full for awhile, and then he suddenly asked of her, 'And when shall all these wonders come to pass?' "She, with her gaze fixed still a little upwards, answered, 'Before mid-Lent next year shall succour reach him; then will the city of Orleans be in sore straight; but help shall come, and the English shall fly before the sword of the Lord. Afterwards shall the Dauphin receive consecration at Rheims, and the crown of France shall be set upon his head, in token that he is the anointed of the Lord.' "'And who has told you all this, my child?' asked De Baudricourt then, answering gently, as one speaks within a church. "'Mes voix,' she answered, speaking as one who dreams, and in dreaming listens. "'What voices?' asked De Baudricourt, 'and have you naught but voices to instruct you in such great matters?' "'Yes, Sire,' she answered softly, 'I have seen the great Archangel Michael, his sword drawn in his hand; and I know that he has drawn it for the deliverance of France, and that though he has chosen so humble an instrument as myself, yet that to him and to the Lord of Heaven will he the victory and the glory.' "When she had thus spoken there was a great silence in the hall, in which might have been heard the fall of a pin, and I vow that whether it were trick of summer sunshine or no, the light about the maiden seemed to grow brighter and brighter. Her face was just slightly uplifted as one who listens, and upon her lips there was a smile. "'And I know that you will send me to the Dauphin, Robert de Baudricourt,' she suddenly said, 'because my voices tell me so.' "We all looked at De Baudricourt, who sat chin on hand, gazing at the maiden as though he would read her very soul. We waited, wondering, for him to speak At last he did. "'Well, my girl, I will think of all this. We have till next year, by your own showing, ere these great things shall come to pass. So get you home, and see what your father and mother say to all this, and whether the Archangel Michael comes again or no. Go home--be a good girl, and we will see what we will see.'" "Was that all he promised?" spoke Sir Guy with a short laugh. "I trow the maiden dreamer would not thank him for that word! A deliverer of princes to be bidden to go home and be a good girl! What said she to that counsel?" "Ay, well you may ask," spoke Bertrand with subdued emotion. "Just such a question sprang to my lips as I heard my kinsman's answer. I looked to see her face fall, to see sparks of anger flash from her eyes, or a great disappointment cloud the serene beauty of her countenance. But instead of this a wonderful smile lighted it, and her sweet and resonant voice sounded clear through the hall. "'Ah, now Seigneur, I know you for a good and true man! You speak as did my voices when first I heard them. "Jeanne, sois bonne et sage enfant; va souvent a l'eglise"; that was their first message to me, when I was but a child; and now you say the same to me--be a good girl. Thus I know that your heart is right, and that when my Lord's time is come you will send me with His message to the Dauphin.' "And so saying she bent again in a modest reverence before us. Yet let me tell you that as she did so, every man of us sprang to his feet by an impulse which each one felt, yet none could explain. As one man we rose, and bowed before her, as she retired from the hail with the simple, stately grace of a young queen. Not till the door had closed behind her did we bethink us that it was to a humble peasant girl we had paid unconscious homage. We who had thought she would well-nigh sink to the dust at sight of us, had been made to feel that we were in the presence of royalty!" "Tu Dieu! but that is a strange story!" quoth Sir Guy with knitted brows. "For many a long day I have heard nought so strange! What think you of it yourself, good Bertrand? For by my troth you speak like a man convinced that a miracle may even yet be wrought for France at the hand of this maid." "And if I do, is that so strange? Cannot it be that the good God may still speak through His saints to the sons of men, and may raise up a deliverer for us, even as He did in the days of old for His chosen people? Is His arm shortened at all? And is it meet that we Christian knights should trust Him less than did the Jews of old?" Sir Guy made no reply, but fell into thought, and then asked a sudden question: "Who is this peasant maid of whom you speak? And where is she now? Is she still abiding content at home, awaiting the time appointed by her visions?" "I trow that she is," answered Bertrand. "I did hear that she went home without delay, as quietly as she had come. Her name is Jeanne d'Arc. She dwells in the village of Domremy over yonder. Her father is an honest prud'homme of the place. She has brothers and a sister. She is known in the village as a pious and gentle maid, ever ready to tend the sick, hold vigil for the dead, take charge of an ailing child, or do any such simple service for the neighbours. She is beloved of all, full of piety and good works, constant in attendance at church, regular in her confession and at mass. So much have I heard from her kinsman Laxart, though for mine own part I have not seen her again." "And what thinks De Baudricourt of her mission? Does he ever speak of it?" "Not often; and yet I know that he has not forgotten it. For ofttimes he does sink into a deep reverie; and disjointed words break from him, which tell me whither his thoughts have flown. "At the first he did say to me, 'Let the girl go home; let us see if we hear more of her. If this be but a phantasy on her part; if she has been fasting and praying and dreaming, till she knows not what is true and what is her own imagining, why, time will cure her of her fancies and follies. If otherwise--well, we will see when the time comes. To act in haste were to act with folly.' "And so he dismissed the matter, though, as I say, he doth not forget it, and I think never a day comes but he thinks on it." "And while the Lord waits, the English are active!" cried Sir Guy with a note of impatience in his voice. "They are already threatening Orleans. Soon they will march in strength upon it. And if that city once fall, why what hope is there even for such remnants of his kingdom as still remain faithful south of the Loire? The English will have them all. Already they call our King in mockery 'the King of Bourges;' soon even that small domain will be reft away, and then what will remain for him or for us? If the visions of the maiden had been true, why doth not the Lord strike now, before Salisbury of England can invest the city? If Orleans fall, all is lost!" "But Jeanne says that Orleans shall be saved," spoke Bertrand in a low voice, "and if she speaks sooth, must not she and we alike leave the times and seasons in the hand of the Lord?" Sir Guy shrugged his shoulders, and gave me a shrewd glance, the meaning of which I was at no loss to understand. He thought that Bertrand's head had been something turned, and that he had become a visionary, looking rather for a miracle from heaven than for deliverance from the foe through hard fighting by loyal men marching under the banner of their King. Truth we all knew well that little short of a miracle would arouse the indolent and discouraged Charles, cowed by the English foe, doubtful of his own right to call himself Dauphin, distrustful of his friends, despairing of winning the love or trust of his subjects. But could it indeed be possible that such a miracle could be wrought, and by an instrument so humble as a village maid--this Jeanne d'Arc? But the time had come when we must say adieu to our comrade, and turn ourselves back to Vaucouleurs, if we were not to be benighted in the forest ere we could reach that place. We halted for our serving men to come up; and as we did so Bertrand said in a low voice to Sir Guy: "I pray you, Seigneur de Laval, speak no word to His Majesty of this maid and her mission, until such time as news may reach him of her from other sources." "I will say no word," answered the other, smiling, and so with many friendly words we parted, and Bertrand and I, with one servant behind us, turned our horses' heads back along the road by which we had come. "Bertrand," I said, as the shadows lengthened, the soft dusk fell in the forest, and the witchery of the evening hour fell upon my heart, "I would that I could see this maiden of whom you speak, this Jeanne d'Arc of the village of Domremy." He turned and looked me full in the face; I saw his eyes glow and the colour deepen in his cheeks. "You would not go to mock, friend Jean de Metz?" he said, for so I am generally named amongst my friends. "Nay," I answered truthfully, "there is no thought of mockery in my heart; yet I fain would see the Maid." He paused awhile in thought and then made answer: "At least we may ride together one day to Domremy; but whether or no we see the Maid will be according to the will of Heaven." CHAPTER II. HOW I FIRST SAW THE MAID. I did not forget my desire to see this maiden of Domremy, nor did Bertrand, I trow, forget the promise, albeit some days passed by ere we put our plan into action. Bad news kept coming in to the little loyal township of Vaucouleurs. There was no manner of doubt but that the English Regent, Bedford, was resolved to lose no more time, but seek to put beneath his iron heel the whole of the realm of France. Gascony had been English so long that the people could remember nothing different than the rule of the Roy Outremer--as of old they called him. Now all France north of the Loire owned the same sway, and as all men know, the Duke of Burgundy was ally to the English, and hated the Dauphin with a deadly hatred, for the murder of his father--for which no man can justly blame him. True, his love for the English had cooled manifestly since that affair of Duke Humphrey of Gloucester and Jacquelaine of Brabant, in which as was natural, he took the part of his brother; but although the Duke of Bedford was highly indignant with Duke Humphrey, and gave him no manner of support in his rash expedition, yet the Duke of Burgundy resented upon the English what had been done, and although it did not drive him into the arms of the Dauphin, whom he hated worse, it loosened the bond between him and our foes, and we had hoped it might bring about a better state of things for our party. Yet alas!--this seemed as far as ever from being so; and the Burgundian soldiers still ravaged along our borders, and it seemed ofttimes as though we little loyal community of the Duchy of Bar would be swallowed up altogether betwixt the two encroaching foes. So our hearts were often heavy and our faces grave with fear. I noted in the manner of the Governor, whose guest I had now become, a great gravity, which in old days had not been there; for Robert de Baudricourt, as I remembered him, had ever been a man of merry mood, with a great laugh, a ready jest, and that sort of rough, bluff courage that makes light of trouble and peril. Now, however, we often saw him sunk in some deep reverie, his chin upon his hand, his eyes gazing full into the blaze of the leaping fire of logs, which always flamed upon the hearth in the great hall, where the most part of his time was spent. He would go hunting or hawking by day, or ride hither and thither through the town, looking into matters there, or sit to listen to the affairs of the citizens or soldiers as they were brought before him; and at such times his manner would be much as it had ever been of yore--quick, almost rough, yet not unkindly--whilst the shrewd justice he always meted out won the respect of the people, and made him a favourite in the town. But when the evening fell, and the day's work was done, and after supper we sat in the hall, with the dogs slumbering around us, talking of any news which might have come in, either of raids by the roving Burgundians, or the advance of the English towards Orleans, then these darker moods would fall upon him; and once when he had sat for well-nigh an hour without moving, his brow drawn and furrowed, and his eyes seemingly sunk deeper in his head, Bertrand leaned towards me and whispered in mine ear: "He is thinking of the Maid of Domremy!" De Baudricourt could not have heard the words, yet when he spoke a brief while later, it almost seemed as though he might have done so. "Nephew," he said, lifting his head abruptly and gazing across at us, "tell me again the words of that prophecy of Merlin's, spoken long, long ago, of which men whisper in these days, and of which you did speak to me awhile back." "Marry, good mine uncle, the prophecy runs thus," answered Bertrand, rising and crossing over towards the great fire before which his kinsman sat, "'That France should be destroyed by the wiles of a woman, and saved and redeemed by a maiden.'" The bushy brows met in a fierce scowl over the burning eyes; his words came in a great burst of indignation and scorn. "Ay, truly--he spake truly--the wise man--the wizard! A woman to be the ruin of the kingdom! Ay, verily, and has it not been so? Who but that wicked Queen Isabeau is at the bottom of the disgraceful Treaty of Troyes, wherein France sold herself into the hands of the English? Did she not repudiate her own son? Did not her hatred burn so fiercely against him that she was ready to tarnish her own good fame and declare him illegitimate, rather than that he should succeed his father as King of France? Did she not give her daughter to the English King in wedlock, that their child might reign over this fair realm? Truly has the kingdom been destroyed by the wiles of a woman! But I vow it will take more than the strength of any maiden to save and redeem it from the woes beneath which it lies crushed!" "In sooth it doth seem so," answered Bertrand with grave and earnest countenance, "but yet with the good God nothing is impossible. Hath He not said before this that He doth take of the mean and humble to confound the great of the earth? Did not the three hundred with Gideon overcome the hosts of the Moabites? Did not the cake of barley bread overturn the tent and the camp of the foe?" "Ay, if the good God will arise to work miracles again, such things might be; but how can we look for Him to do so? What manner of man is the Dauphin of France that he should look for divine deliverance? 'God helps those who help themselves,' so says the proverb; but what of those who lie sunk in lethargy or despair, and seek to drown thought or care in folly and riotous living--heedless of the ruin of the realm?" "There is another proverb, good mine uncle, that tells how man's extremity is God's opportunity," quoth Bertrand thoughtfully; "if we did judge of God's mercy by man's worthiness to receive the same, we might well sink in despair. But His power and His goodness are not limited by our infirmities, and therein alone lies our hope." De Baudricourt uttered a sound between a snort and a grunt. I knew not what he thought of Bertrand's answer; but that brief dialogue aroused within me afresh the desire I had before expressed to see the maid, Jeanne of Domremy; and as the sun upon the morrow shone out bright and clear, after a week of heavy rain storms, we agreed that no better opportunity could we hope for to ride across to the little village, and try whether it were possible to obtain speech with the young girl about whom such interest had been aroused in some breasts. We spoke no word to De Baudricourt of our intention. Bertrand knew from his manner that he was thinking more and more earnestly of that declaration on the part of the village maiden that her Lord--the King of Heaven--had revealed to her that she must be sent to the Dauphin, to help him to drive out the English from his country, and to place the crown of France upon his head, and that he, Robert de Baudricourt, was the instrument who would be used to speed her on her way. Bertrand knew that this thought was weighing upon the mind of his kinsman, and the more so as the time for the fulfilment of the prophecy drew nearer. Autumn had come. Winter was hard at hand; and before Mid-Lent the promised succour to France was to arrive through the means of this maiden--this Jeanne d'Arc. "He is waiting and watching," spoke Bertrand, as we rode through the forest, the thinning leaves of which allowed the sunlight to play merrily upon our path. "He says in his heart that if this thing be of God, the Maid will come again when the time draws near; but that if it is phantasy, or if she be deluded of the Devil, perchance his backwardness will put a check upon her ardour, and we shall hear no more of it. The Abbe Perigord, his Confessor, has bidden him beware lest it be a snare of the Evil One"--and as he spoke these words Bertrand crossed himself, and I did the like, for the forest is an ill place in which to talk of the Devil, as all men know. "But for my part, when I think upon her words, and see again the look of her young face, I cannot believe that she has been thus deceived; albeit we are told that the Devil can make himself appear as an angel of light." This was the puzzle, of course. But surely the Church had power to discern betwixt the wiles of the Evil One and the finger of God. There were words and signs which any possessed of the Devil must needs fly before. I could not think that the Church need fear deception, even though a village maid might be deceived. The forest was very beautiful that day, albeit travelling was something slow, owing to the softness of the ground, and the swollen condition of the brooks, which often forced us to go round by the bridges instead of taking the fords; so that we halted a few miles from Domremy to bait our horses and to appease our own hunger, for by that time our appetite was sharp set. It was there, as we sat at table, and talked with mine host, that we heard somewhat more of this Maid, whom we had started forth in hopes to see. Bertrand was known for the kinsman of De Baudricourt and all the countryside knew well the tale, how that Jeanne d'Arc had gone to him in the springtide of the year, demanding an escort to the Dauphin King of France, for whom she had a message from the King of Heaven, and whom she was to set upon his throne. "When she came home again, having accomplished nothing," spoke the innkeeper, leaning his hands upon the table and greatly enjoying the sound of his own voice, "all the village made great mock of her! They called her the King's Marshal, the Little Queen, Jeanne the Prophetess, and I know not what beside. Her father was right wroth with her. Long ago he had a dream about her, which troubled him somewhat, as he seemed to see his daughter in the midst of fighting men, leading them on to battle." "Did he dream that? Surely that is something strange for the vision of a village prud'homme anent his little daughter." "Ay truly, though at the time he thought little of it, but when all this came to pass he recalled it again; and he smote Jeanne upon the ear with his open hand, and bid her return to her needle and her household tasks, and think no more of matters too great for her. Moreover, he declared that if ever she were to disgrace herself by mingling with men-at-arms, he would call upon her brothers to drown her, and if they disobeyed him, he would take and do it with his own hands!" "A Spartan father, truly!" murmured Bertrand. "O ay--but he is a very honest man, is Jacques d'Arc; and he was very wroth at all the talk about his daughter, and he vowed she should wed an honest man, as she is now of age to do, and so forget her dreams and her visions, and take care of her house and her husband and the children the good God should send them--like other wedded wives." "Then has she indeed wedded?" asked Bertrand earnestly. "Ah, that is another story!" answered our host, wagging his head and spreading out his hands. "It would take too long were I to tell you all, messires; but so much will I tell. They did find a man who had long desired the pretty Jeanne for his wife, and he did forswear himself and vow that he had been betrothed to Jeanne with her own free will and consent, and that now he claimed her as his wife. Jeanne, whose courage is high, though she be so quiet and modest in her daily life, did vehemently deny the charge, whereupon the angry father and his friend, the claimant of her hand, did bring it into the court, and the Maid had to defend herself there from the accusation of broken faith. But by St. Michael and all his angels!--how she did confound them all! She asked no help from lawyers, though one did offer himself to her. She called no witnesses herself; but she questioned the witnesses brought against her, and also the man who would fain have become her lord, and out of their own mouths did she convict them of lying and hypocrisy and conspiracy, so that she was triumphantly acquitted, and her judges called her a most wonderful child, and told her mother to be proud of such a daughter!" I saw a flush rise to Bertrand's cheek, a flush as of pride and joy. And indeed, I myself rejoiced to hear the end of the tale; for it did seem as though this maiden had been persecuted with rancour and injustice, and that is a thing which no man can quietly endure to hear or see. "And how have they of Domremy behaved themselves to her since?" I asked; and Bertrand listened eagerly for the answer. "Oh, they have taken her to favour once more; her father has been kind again; her mother ever loved Jeanne much, for her gentleness and beauty and helpfulness at home. All the people love her, when not stirred to mockery by such fine pretensions. If she will remain quietly at home like a wise and discreet maiden, no one will long remember against her her foolish words and dreams." As we rode through the fields and woodlands towards Domremy, the light began to take the golden hue which it does upon the autumn afternoon, and upon that day it shone with a wonderful radiance such as is not uncommon after rain. We were later than we had meant, but there would be a moon to light us when the sun sank, and both we and our horses knew the roads well; or we could even sleep, if we were so minded, at the auberge where we had dined. So we were in no haste or hurry. We picked our way leisurely towards the village, and Bertrand told me of the Fairy Well and the Fairy Tree in the forest hard by, so beloved of the children of Domremy, and of which so much has been heard of late, though at that time I knew nothing of any such things. But fairy lore has ever a charm for me, and I bid him show me these same things. So we turned a little aside into the forest, and found ourselves in a lovely glade, where the light shone so soft and golden, and where the songs of the birds sounded so sweet and melodious, that I felt as though we were stepping through an enchanted world, and well could I believe that the fairies danced around the well, sunk deep in its mossy dell, and fringed about with ferns and flowers and the shade of drooping trees. But fairies there were none visible to our eyes, and we moved softly onwards towards the spreading tree hard by. But ere we reached it, we both drew rein as by a common impulse, for we had seen a sight which arrested and held us spellbound, ay, and more than that, for the wonder and amaze of it fell also upon the horses we bestrode. For scarcely had we drawn rein, before they both began to tremble and to sweat, and stood with their forefeet planted, their necks outstretched, their nostrils distended; uttering short, gasping, snorting sounds, as a horse will do when overcome by some terror. But for all this they were as rigid as if they had been carved in stone. And now, what did we see? Let me try and tell, so far as my poor words may avail. Beneath a spreading tree just a stone's throw to the right of where we stood, and with nothing between to hinder our view of her, a peasant maiden, dressed in the white coif, red skirt, and jacket and kerchief of her class, had been bending over some fine embroidery which she held in her hands. We just caught a glimpse of her thus before the strange thing happened which caused us to stop short, as though some power from without restrained us. Hard by, as I know now, stood the village, shut out from view by the trees, with its little church, and the homestead of Jacques d'Arc nestling almost within its shadow. At the moment of which I speak the bell rang forth for the Angelus, with a full, sweet tone of silvery melody; and at the very same instant the work dropped from the girl's hands, and she sank upon her knees. At the first moment, although instinctively, we reined back our horses and uncovered our heads, I had no thought but that she was a devout maiden following the office of the Church out here in the wood. But as she turned her upraised face a little towards us, I saw upon it such a look as I have never seen on human countenance before, nor have ever seen (save upon hers) since. A light seemed to shine either from it or upon it--how can I tell which?--a light so pure and heavenly that no words can fully describe it, but which seemed like the radiance of heaven itself. Her eyes were raised towards the sky, her lips parted, and through the breathless hush of silence which had fallen upon the wood, we heard the soft, sweet tones of her voice. "Speak, my Lord--Thy servant heareth!" It was then that our horses showed the signs of terror of which I have before spoken. For myself, I saw nothing save the shining face of the Maid--I knew who it was--there was no need for Bertrand's breathless whisper--"It is she--herself!"--I knew it in my heart before. She knelt there amid the fallen leaves, her face raised, her lips parted, her eyes shining as surely never human eyes have shone before. A deep strange hush had fallen over all nature, broken only by the gentle music of the bell. The ruddy gold light of approaching sunset bathed all the wood in glory, and the rays fell upon the kneeling figure, forming a halo of glory round it. But she did not heed, she did not see. She was as one in a trance, insensible to outward vision. Once and again her lips moved, but we heard no word proceed from them, only the rapt look upon her face increased in intensity, and once I thought (for I could not turn my gaze away) that I saw the gleam of tears in her eyes. The bell ceased as we stood thus motionless, and as the last note vibrated through the still air, a change came over the Maid. Her head drooped, she hid her face in her hands, and thus she knelt as one absorbed in an intensity of prayer. Even as this happened, the peculiar glory of the sunlight seemed to change. It shone still, but without such wonderful glow, and our horses at the same time ceased their trembling and their rigid stillness of pose. They shook their heads and jingled their bits, as though striving to throw off some terrifying impression. "Let us withdraw from her sight," whispered Bertrand touching my arm, and very willingly I acceded to this suggestion, and we silently pressed into the shadow of some great oaks, which stood hard by, the trunks of which hid us well from view. It seemed almost like a species of sacrilege to stand there watching the Maid at her prayers, and yet I vow, that until the bell ceased we had no more power to move than our horses. Why we were holden by this strange spell I know not. I can only speak the truth. We saw nothing and we heard nothing of any miraculous kind, and yet we were like men in a dream, bound hand and foot by invisible bonds, a witness of something unseen to ourselves, which we saw was visible to another. Beneath the deep shadow of the oaks we looked back. The Maid had risen to her feet by this, and was stooping to pick up her fallen work. That done, she stood awhile in deep thought, her face turned towards the little church, whence the bell had only just ceased to sound. I saw her clearly then--a maiden slim and tall, so slender that the rather clumsy peasant dress she wore could not give breadth or awkwardness to her lithe figure. The coif had slipped a little out of place, and some tresses of waving hair had escaped from beneath it, tresses that looked dark till the sun touched them, and then glowed like burnished gold. Her face was pale, with features in no way marked, but so sweet and serene was the expression of the face, so wonderful was the depth of the great dark eyes, that one was lost in admiration of her beauty, albeit unable to define wherein that beauty lay. When we started forth, I had meant to try and seek speech with this Jeanne--this Maid of Domremy--and to ask her of her mission, and whether she were still believing that she would have power to carry it out; but this purpose now died within me. How could I dare question such a being as to her visions? Had I not seen how she was visited by sound or sight not sensible to those around her? Had I not in some sort been witness to a miracle? Was it for us to approach and ask of her what had been thus revealed? No!--a thousand times no! If the good God had given her a message, she would know when and where to deliver it. She had spoken before of her voices. Let them instruct her. Let not men seek to interfere. And so we remained where we were, hidden in the deep shadows, whilst Jeanne, with bent head and lingering, graceful steps, utterly unconscious of the eyes that watched her, went slowly out of sight along the glade leading towards the village and her home. Only when she had disappeared did we venture to move on in her wake, and so passed by the low-browed house, set in its well-tended little garden, where the d'Arc family lived. It lay close to the church, and bore a look of pleasant homelike comfort. We saw Jeanne bending tenderly over a chair, in which reclined the bent form of a little crippled sister. We even heard the soft, sweet voice of the Maid, as she answered some question asked her from within the open door. Then she lifted the bent form in her arms, and I did note how strong that slim frame must be, for the burden seemed as nothing to her as she bore it within the house; and then she disappeared from view, and we rode onwards together. "There, my friend," spoke Bertrand at last, "I have kept my promise, you have seen the Maid." "Yes," I answered gravely, "I have seen the Maid," and after that we spoke no word for many a mile. CHAPTER III. HOW THE MAID CAME TO VAUCOULEURS. It may yet be remembered by some how early the snow came that year, to the eastern portion of France at least. I think scarce a week had passed since our journey to Domremy, before a wild gale from the northeast brought heavy snow, which lay white upon the ground for many long weeks, and grew deeper and deeper as more fell, till the wolves ravaged right up to the very walls of Vaucouleurs, and some of the country villages were quite cut off from intercourse with the world. Thus it came about that I was shut up in Vaucouleurs with my good comrade and friend Bertrand, in the Castle of which Robert de Baudricourt was governor, and for awhile little news reached us from the outside world, though such news as did penetrate to our solitude was all of disaster for the arms of France. We never spoke to De Baudricourt of our expedition to Domremy, nor told him that we had seen the Maid again. Yet methinks not a day passed without our thinking of her, recalling something of that wonderful look we had seen upon her face, and asking in our hearts whether indeed she were truly visited by heavenly visions sent by God, and whether she indeed heard voices which could reach no ears but hers. I observed that Bertrand was more regular in attendance at the services of the Church, and especially at Mass, than was usual with young knights in those days, and for my part, I felt a stronger desire after such spiritual aids than I ever remember to have done in my life before. It became a regular thing with us to attend the early Mass in the little chapel of the Castle; and, instead of growing lax (as I had done before many times in my roving life), as to attending confession and receiving the Holy Sacrament, I now began to feel the need for both, as though I were preparing me for some great and solemn undertaking. I cannot well express in words the feeling which possessed me--ay, and Bertrand too--for we began to speak of the matter one with another--but it seemed to us both as though a high and holy task lay before us, for which we must needs prepare ourselves with fasting and prayer; I wondered if, perhaps, it was thus that knights and men in days of old felt when they had taken the Red Cross, and had pledged themselves to some Crusade in the East. Well, thus matters went on, quietly enough outwardly, till the Feast of the Nativity had come and gone, and with that feast came a wonderful change in the weather. The frost yielded, the south wind blew soft, the snow melted away one scarce knew how, and a breath of spring seemed already in the air, though we did not dare to hope that winter was gone for good and all. It was just when the year had turned that we heard a rumour in the town, and it was in this wise that it reached our ears. De Baudricourt had been out with his dogs, chasing away the wolves back into their forest lairs. He had left us some business to attend to for him within the Castle, else should we doubtless have been of the party. But he was the most sagacious huntsman of the district, and a rare day's sport they did have, killing more than a score of wolves, to the great joy of the townsfolk and of the country people without the walls. It was dark ere he got home, and he came in covered with mud from head to foot; the dogs, too, were so plastered over, that they had to be given to the servants to clean ere they could take their wonted places beside the fire; and some of the poor beasts had ugly wounds which needed to be washed and dressed. But what struck us most was that De Baudricourt, albeit so successful in his hunt, seemed little pleased with his day's work. His face was dark, as though a thunder cloud lay athwart it, and he gave but curt answers to our questions, as he stood steaming before the fire and quaffing a great tankard of spiced wine which was brought to him. Then he betook himself to his own chamber to get him dry garments, and when he came down supper was already served. He sat him down at the head of the table, still silent and morose; and though he fell with right good will upon the viands, he scarce opened his lips the while, and we in our turn grew silent, for we feared that he had heard the news of some disaster to the French arms, which he was brooding over in silent gloom. But when the retainers and men-at-arms had disappeared, and we had gathered round the fire at the far end of the hall, as was our wont, then he suddenly began to speak. "Went ye into the town today?" he suddenly asked of us. We answered him, Nay, that we had been occupied all day within the Castle over the services there he had left us to perform. "And have you heard nought of the commotion going on there?" "We have heard nought. Pray what hath befallen, good sir? Is it some disaster? Hath Orleans fallen into the hands of the English?" For that was the great fear possessing all loyal minds at this period. "Nay, it is nought so bad as that," answered De Baudricourt, "and yet it is bad enough, I trow. That mad girl from Domremy is now in the town, telling all men that Robert de Baudricourt hath been appointed of God to send her to the Dauphin at Chinon, and that she must needs start thither soon, to do the work appointed her of heaven. "Dents de Dieu!--the folly of it is enough to raise the hair on one's head! Send a little paysanne to the King with a wild story like hers! 'Tis enough to make the name of De Baudricourt the laughingstock of the whole country!" I felt a great throb at heart when I heard these words. Then the Maid had not forgot! This time of waiting had not bred either indifference or doubt. The time appointed was drawing near, and she had come to Vaucouleurs once more, to do that which was required of her! O, was it not wonderful? Must not it be of heaven, this thing? And should we seek to put the message aside as a thing of nought? Bertrand was already speaking eagerly with his kinsman; but it seemed as though his words did only serve to irritate the Governor the more. In my heart I was sure that had he been certain the Maid was an impostor, he would have been in no wise troubled or disturbed, but would have contented himself by sharply ordering her to leave the town and return home and trouble him no more. It was because he was torn by doubts as to her mission that he was thus perturbed in spirit. He dared not treat her in this summary fashion, lest haply he should be found to be fighting against God; and yet he found it hard to believe that any deliverance for hapless France could come through the hands of a simple, unlettered peasant girl; and he shrank with a strong man's dislike from making himself in any sort an object of ridicule, or of seeming to give credence to a wild tale of visions and voices, such as the world would laugh to scorn. So he was filled with doubt and perplexity, and this betrayed itself in gloomy looks and in harsh speech. "Tush, boy! You are but an idle dreamer. I saw before that you were fooled by a pretty face and a silvery voice. Go to!--your words are but phantasy! Who believes in miracles now?" "If we believe in the power of the good God, shall we not also believe that He can work even miracles at His holy will?" "Poof--miracles!--the dreams of a vain and silly girl!" scoffed De Baudricourt, "I am sick of her name already!" Then he suddenly turned upon me and spoke. "Jean de Metz, you are a knight of parts. You have sense and discretion above your years, and are no featherhead like Bertrand here. Will you undertake a mission from me to this maiden? Ask of her the story of her pretended mission. Seek to discover from her whether she be speaking truth, or whether she be seeking to deceive. Catch her in her speech if it may be. See whether the tale she tells hang together, and then come and report to me. If she be a mad woman, why should I be troubled with her? She cannot go to the Dauphin yet, come what may. The melting snows have laid the valleys under water, the roads are impassable; horses would stick fast in the mire, and we are not at the end of winter yet. She must needs wait awhile, whatever her message may be, but I would have you get speech of her, and straightly question her from me. Then if it seem well, I can see her again; but if you be willing, you shall do so first." I was more than willing. I was rejoiced to have this occasion for getting speech with the Maid. I spoke no word of having had sight of her already, but fell in with De Baudricourt's wish that I should go to her as if a mere passing stranger, and only afterwards reveal myself as his emissary. I slept but little all that night, making plans as to all that I should speak when I saw her on the morrow, and, rising early, I betook myself to Mass, not to the private chapel of the Castle, but to one of the churches in the town, though I could not have said why it was that I was moved to do this. Yet as I knelt in my place I knew, for there amongst the worshippers, her face upraised and full of holy joy, her eyes alight with the depth of her devotion, her hands clasped in an ecstasy of prayer, was the Maid herself; and I found it hard to turn my eyes from her wonderful face, to think upon the office as it was recited by the priest. I did not seek speech of her then, for she tarried long in the church over her prayers. I felt at last like one espying on another, and so I came away. But after breakfast, as the sun shone forth and began to light up the narrow streets of the little town, I sallied forth again alone, and asked of the first citizen I met where could be found the dwelling place of one Jeanne d'Arc, from Domremy, who was paying a visit to the town. I had scarce need to say so much as this. It seemed that all the people in the town had heard of the arrival of the Maid. I know not whether they believed in her mission, or whether they scoffed at it; but at least it was the talk of the place how she had come before, and fearlessly faced the Governor and his council, and had made her great demand from him, and how she had come once again, now that the year was born and Lent approaching, in the which she had said she must seek and find the Dauphin. Thus the man was able at once to give me the information I asked, and told me that the girl was lodging with Henri Leroyer the saddler, and Catherine his wife, naming the street where they dwelt, but adding that I should have no trouble in finding the house, for the people flocked to it to get a sight of the Maid, and to ask her questions concerning her mission hither, and what she thought she was about to accomplish. And truly I did find that this honest citizen had spoken the truth, for as I turned into the narrow street where Leroyer lived, I saw quite a concourse of people gathered about the house, and though they made way for me to approach, knowing that I was from the Castle, I saw that they were very eager to get sight or speech of the Maid, who was standing at the open door of the shop, and speaking in an earnest fashion to those nearest her. I made as though I were a passing stranger, who had just heard somewhat of her matter from the bystanders, and I addressed her in friendly fashion, rather as one who laughs. "What are you doing here, ma mie? And what is this I hear? Is it not written in the book of fate that the King or Dauphin of France must be overcome of England's King, and that we must all become English, or else be driven into the sea, or banished from the realm?" Then for the first time her wonderful eyes fastened themselves on my face, and I felt as though my very soul were being read. "Nay, sire," she answered, and there was something so flute-like and penetrating in her tones that they seemed to sink into my very soul, "but the Lord of Heaven Himself is about to fight for France, and He has sent me to the Governor here, who will direct me to the Dauphin, who knows nothing of me as yet. But I am to bring him help, and that by Mid-Lent. So I pray you, gentle knight, go tell Robert de Baudricourt that he must needs bestir himself in this business, for my voices tell me that the hour is at hand when, come what may, I must to Chinon, even though I wear my legs to the knees in going thither." "Why should I tell this to the Seigneur de Baudricourt?" I asked, marvelling at her words and the fashion of her speech. "Because he has sent you to me," she answered, her eyes still on my face, "and I thank him for having chosen so gracious a messenger; for you have a good heart, and you are no mocker of the things my Lord has revealed to me; and you will be one of those to do His will, and to bring me safely to the Dauphin." Half confounded by her words I asked: "Who is your Lord?" "It is God," she answered, and bent her head in lowly reverence. And then I did a strange thing; but it seemed to be forced upon me from above by a power which I could not withstand. I fell suddenly to my knees before her, and put up my clasped hands, as we do when we pay homage for our lands and honours to our liege lord. And, I speak truth, and nought else, the Maid put her hands over mine just as our lord or sovereign should do, and though I dare swear she had never heard my name before, she said: "Jean de Novelpont de Metz, my Lord receives you as His faithful knight and servant. He will be with us now and to the end." And the people all uncovered and stood bareheaded round us, whilst I felt as though I had received a mandate from Heaven. Then I went into the house with Jeanne, and asked her of herself, and of her visions and voices. She told me of them with the gentle frankness of a child, but with a reverence and humility that was beautiful to see, and which was in strange contrast to some of the things she spoke, wherein she told how that she herself was to be used of Heaven for the salvation of France. I cannot give her words as she spoke them, sitting there in the window, the light upon her face, her eyes fixed more often upon the sunny sky than upon her interlocutor, though now and again she swept me with one of her wonderful glances. She told me how from a child she had heard voices, which she knew to be from above, speaking to her, bidding her to be good, to go to the church, to attend to her simple duties at home. But as she grew older there came a change. She remembered the day when first she saw a wonderful white light hovering above her; and this light came again, and yet again; and the third time she saw in it the figure of an angel--more than that--of the Archangel Michael himself--the warrior of Heaven; and from him she first received the message that she was to be used for the deliverance of her people. She was long in understanding what this meant. St. Michael told her she should receive other angelic visitors, and often after this St. Catherine and St. Margaret appeared to her, and told her what was required of her, and what she must do. At first she was greatly affrighted, and wept, and besought them to find some other for the task, since she was but a humble country maid, and knew nothing of the art of warfare, and shuddered at the sight of blood. But they told her to be brave, to trust in the Lord, to think only of Him and of His holy will towards her. And so, by degrees, she lost all her fears, knowing that it was not of herself she would do this thing, and that her angels would be with her, her saints would watch over her, and her voices direct her in all that she should speak or do. "And now," she added, clasping her hands, and looking full into my face, "now do they tell me that the time is at hand. Since last Ascensiontide they have bid me wait in quietness for the appointed hour; but of late my voices have spoken words which may not be set aside. I must be sent to the Dauphin. Orleans must be saved from the hosts of the English which encompass it. I am appointed for this task, and I shall accomplish it by the grace of my Lord and His holy saints. Then the crown must be set upon the head of the Dauphin, and he must be anointed as the king. After that my task will be done; but not till then. And now I must needs set forth upon the appointed way. To the Dauphin I must go, to speak to him of things I may tell to none other; and the Sieur Robert de Baudricourt is appointed of Heaven to send me to Chinon. Wherefore, I pray you, gentle knight, bid him no longer delay; for I am straitened in spirit till I may be about my Lord's business, and He would not have me tarry longer." I talked with her long and earnestly. Not that I doubted her. I could not do so. Although no voices came to me, yet my heart was penetrated by a conviction so deep and poignant that to doubt would have been impossible. France had been sold and betrayed by one bad woman; but here was the Maid who should arise to save! I knew it in my heart; yet I still spoke on and asked questions, for I must needs satisfy De Baudricourt, I must needs be able to answer all that he would certainly ask. "How old are you, fair maiden?" I asked, as at length I rose to depart, and she stood, tall and slim, before me, straight as a young poplar, graceful, despite her coarse raiment, her feet and hands well fashioned, her limbs shapely and supple. "I was seventeen last week," she answered simply, "the fifth of January is my jour de fete." "And your parents, what think they of this? What said they when you bid them farewell for such an errand?" The tears gathered slowly in her beautiful eyes; but they did not fall. She answered in a low voice: "In sooth they know not for what I did leave them. They believed I went but to visit a sick friend. I did not dare to tell them all, lest my father should hold me back: He is very slow to believe my mission; he chides me bitterly if ever word be spoken anent it. Is it not always so when the Lord uses one of His children? Even our Lord's brethren and sisters believed not on Him. How can the servant be greater than his Lord?" "You fear not, then, to disobey your parents?" I had need to put this question; for it was one that De Baudricourt had insisted upon; for he knew something of Jacques d'Arc's opposition to his daughter's proposed campaign. "I must obey my Lord even above my earthly parents," was her steadfast reply; "His word must stand the first. He knows all, and He will pardon. He knows that I love my father and my mother, and that if I only pleased myself I should never leave their side." Then suddenly as she spoke a strange look of awe fell upon her; I think she had forgotten my presence, for when she spoke, her words were so low that I could scarce hear them. "I go to my death!" she whispered, the colour ebbing from her face, "but I am in the hands of my Lord; His will alone can be done." I went out from her presence with bent head. What did those last words signify--when hitherto all she had spoken was of deliverance, of victory? She spoke them without knowing it. Of that I was assured; and therefore I vowed to keep them locked in my heart. But I knew that I should never forget them. I found Robert de Baudricourt awaiting my coming in the great hall, pacing restlessly to and fro. Bertrand was with him, and I saw by the tense expression upon his face that he was eager for my report. I gave him one quick glance upon entering, which I trow he read and understood; but to De Baudricourt I spoke with caution and with measured words, for he was a man whose scorn and ridicule were easily aroused, and I knew that Bertrand had fallen into a kind of contempt with him, in that he had so quickly believed in the mission of the Maid. "Well, and what make you of the girl? Is she witch, or mad, or possessed by some spirit of vainglory and ambition? What has she said to you, and what think you of her?" "In all truth, my lord, I believe her to be honest; and more than this, I believe her to be directed of God. Strange as it may seem, yet such things have been before, and who are we to say that God's arm is shortened, or that He is not the same as in the days of old? I have closely questioned the Maid as to her visions and voices, and I cannot believe them delusions of the senses. You may ask, are they of the Devil? Then would I say, if there be doubt, let the Abbe Perigord approach her with holy water, with exorcisms, or with such sacred words and signs as devils must needs flee before. Then if it be established that the thing is not of the Evil One, we may the better regard it as from the Lord of whom she speaks. At least, if she can stand this test, I would do this much for her--give her a small escort to Chinon, with a letter to the Dauphin. After that your responsibility will cease. The matter will be in the hands of the King and his advisers." "Ay, after I have made myself the laughingstock of the realm!" burst out De Baudricourt grimly; yet after he had questioned me again, and yet again, and had even held one interview himself with the Maid, who came of her own accord to the Castle to ask for him one day, he seemed to come to some decision, after much thought and wavering. Bringing out one of his rattling oaths, he cried: "Then if she can bear the touch of holy water, and the sign of book and taper and bell--and I know not what beside--then shall she be sent to the King at Chinon, and I, Robert de Baudricourt, will send her--come what may of the mission!" CHAPTER IV. HOW THE MAID WAS TRIED AND TESTED. I had myself proposed the test, and yet when the moment came I was ashamed of myself. The Abbe had put on his robes and his stole; a vessel containing holy water stood before him on the table; the book of the Blessed Gospels was in his hands, a boy with a taper stood at his side. The place was the hall of the Castle, and the Governor with a few of those most in his confidence stood by to see what would follow. I was at his right hand. Bertrand brought in the Maid. I know not what he had said to her, or whether he had prepared her for what was about to take place; but however that may have been, her face wore that calm and lofty serenity of expression which seemed to belong to her. As she approached she made a lowly reverence to the priest, and stood before him where Bertrand placed her, looking at him with earnest, shining eyes. "My daughter," spoke the Abbe gravely, "have you security in your heart that the visions and voices sent to you come of good and not of evil? Many men and women have, ere this, been deceived--yea, even the holy Saints themselves have been tempted of the devil, that old serpent, who is the great deceiver of the hearts and spirits of men. Are you well assured in your heart that you are not thus deceived and led away by whispers and suggestions from the father of lies?" There was no anger in her face, but a beautiful look of reverent, yet joyful, confidence and peace. "I am well assured, my father, that it is my Lord who speaks to me through His most holy and blessed Saints, and through the ever-glorious Archangel Michael." "And yet, my daughter, you know that it is written in the Holy Scriptures that the devil can transform himself into an angel of light." "Truly that is so, my father; but is it not also written that those who put their trust in the Lord shall never be confounded?" "Yes, my daughter; and I pray God you may not be confounded. But it is my duty to try and test the spirits, so as to be a rock of defence to those beneath my care. Yet if things be with you as you say, you will have no fear." "I have no fear, my father," she answered, and stood with folded hands and serene and smiling face whilst he went through those forms of exorcism and adjuration which, it is said, no evil spirit can endure without crying aloud, or causing that the person possessed should roll and grovel in agony upon the ground, or rush frantically forth out of sight and hearing. But the Maid never moved, save to bend her head in reverence as the Thrice Holy Name was proclaimed, and as the drops of holy water fell upon her brow. To me it seemed almost like sacrilege, in face of that pure and holy calm, to entertain for one moment a doubt of the origin of her mission. Yet it may be that the test was a wise one; for De Baudricourt and those about him watched it with close and breathless wonder, and one and another whispered behind his hand: "Of a surety she is no witch. She could never stand thus if there was aught of evil in her. Truly she is a marvellous Maid. If this thing be of the Lord, let us not fight against Him." The trial was over. The Maid received the blessing of the Abbe, who, if not convinced of the sacredness of her mission, was yet impotent to prove aught against her. It is strange to me, looking back at those days, how far less ready of heart the ecclesiastics were to receive her testimony and recognise in her the messenger of the Most High than were the soldiers, whether the generals whom she afterwards came to know, or the men who crowded to fight beneath her banner. One would have thought that to priests and clergy a greater grace and power of understanding would have been vouchsafed; but so far from this, they always held her in doubt and suspicion, and were her secret foes from first to last. I made it my task to see her safely home; and as we went, I asked: "Was it an offence to you, fair Maid, that he should thus seek to test and try you?" "Not an offence to me, Seigneur," she answered gently, "but he should not have had need to do it. For he did hear my confession on Friday. Therefore he should have known better. It is no offence to me, save inasmuch as it doth seem a slighting of my Lord." The people flocked around her as she passed through the streets. It was wonderful how the common townsfolk believed in her. Already she was spoken of as a deliverer and a saviour of her country. Nay, more, her gentleness and sweetness so won upon the hearts of those who came in contact with her, that mothers prayed of her to come and visit their sick children, or to speak words of comfort to those in pain and suffering; and such was the comfort and strength she brought with her, that there were whispers of miraculous cures being performed by her. In truth, I have no knowledge myself of any miracle performed by her, and the Maid denied that she possessed such gifts of healing. But that she brought comfort and joy and peace with her I can well believe, and she had some skill with the sick whom she tended in her own village, so that it is likely that some may have begun to mend from the time she began to visit them. As for De Baudricourt, his mind was made up. There was something about this girl which was past his understanding. Just at present it was not possible to send her to the King, for the rains, sometimes mingled with blinding snow storms, were almost incessant, the country lay partially under water, and though such a journey might be possible to a seasoned soldier, he declared it would be rank murder to send a young girl, who, perchance, had never mounted a horse before, all that great distance. She must needs wait till the waters had somewhat subsided, and till the cold had abated, and the days were somewhat longer. The Maid heard these words with grave regret, and even disapproval. "My Lord would take care of me. I have no fear," she said; but De Baudricourt, although he now faithfully promised to send her to Chinon, would not be moved from his resolution to wait. For my part, I have always suspected that he sent a private messenger to Chinon to ask advice what he should do, and desired to await his return ere acting. But of that I cannot speak certainly, since he never admitted it himself. If the delay fretted the Maid's spirit, she never spoke with anger or impatience; much of her time was spent in a little chapel in the crypt of the church at Vaucouleurs, where stood an image of Our Lady, before which she would kneel sometimes for hours together in rapt devotion. I myself went thither sometimes to pray; and often have I seen her there, so absorbed in her devotions that she knew nothing of who came or went. By this time Bertrand and I had steadfastly resolved to accompany the Maid not only to Chinon, but upon whatsoever campaign her voices should afterwards send her. Although we were knights, we neither of us possessed great wealth; indeed, we had only small estates, and these were much diminished in value from the wasting war and misfortunes of the country. Still we resolved to muster each a few men-at-arms, and form for her a small train; for De Baudricourt, albeit willing to send her with a small escort to Chinon, had neither the wish nor the power to equip any sort of force to accompany her, though there would be no small danger on the journey, both from the proximity of the English in some parts, and the greater danger from roving bands of Burgundians, whose sole object was spoil and plunder, and their pastime the slaughter of all who opposed them. And now we began to ask one another in what guise the Maid should travel; for it was obvious that her cumbrous peasant garb was little suited for the work she had in hand, and we made many fanciful plans of robing her after the fashion of some old-time queen, such as Boadicea or Semiramis, and wondered whether we could afford to purchase some rich clothing and a noble charger, and so convey her to the King in something of regal state and pomp. But when, one day, we spoke something of this to the Maid herself, she shook her head with a smile, and said: "Gentle knights, I give you humble and hearty thanks; but such rich robes and gay trappings are not for me. My voices have bidden me what to do. I am to assume the dress of a boy, since I must needs live for a while amongst soldiers and men. I am sent to do a man's work, therefore in the garb of a man must I set forth. Our good citizens of Vaucouleurs are already busy with the dress I must shortly assume. There is none other in which my work can be so well accomplished." And in truth we saw at once the sense of her words. She had before her a toilsome journey in the companionship of men. She must needs ride, since there was no other way of travelling possible; and why should the frailest and tenderest of the party be burdened by a dress that would incommode her at every turn? And when upon the very next day she appeared in the Castle yard in the hose and doublet and breeches of a boy, and asked of us to give her her first lesson in horsemanship, all our doubts and misgivings fled away. She wore her dress with such grace, such ease, such simplicity, that it seemed at once the right and fitting thing; and not one of the soldiers in the courtyard who watched her feats that day, passed so much as a rude jest upon her, far less offered her any insult. In truth, they were speedily falling beneath the spell which she was soon to exercise upon a whole army, and it is no marvel to me that this was so; for every day I felt the charm of her presence deepening its hold upon my heart. Never have I witnessed such quickness of mastery as the Maid showed, both in her acquirement of horsemanship and in the use of arms, in both of which arts we instructed her day by day. I had noted her strength and suppleness of limb the very first day I had seen her; and she gave marvellous proof of it now. She possessed also that power over her horse which she exercised over men, and each charger that she rode in turn answered almost at once to her voice and hand, with a docility he never showed to other riders. Yet she never smote or spurred them; the sound of her voice, or the light pressure of knee or hand was enough. She had never any fear from the first, and was never unhorsed. Very soon she acquired such skill and ease that we had no fears for her with regard to the journey she soon must take. Although filling the time up thus usefully, her heart was ever set upon her plan, and daily she would wistfully ask: "May we not yet sally forth to the Dauphin?" Still she bore the delay well, never losing opportunities for learning such things as might be useful to her; and towards the end of the month there came a peremptory summons to her from the Duke of Lorraine, who was lying very ill at Nancy. "They tell me," he wrote to De Baudricourt, "that you have at Vaucouleurs a woman who may be in sooth that Maid of Lorraine who, it has been prophesied, is to arise and save France. I have a great curiosity to see her; wherefore, I pray you, send her to me without delay. It may be that she will recover me of my sickness. In any case, I would fain have speech of her; so do not fail to send her forthwith." De Baudricourt had no desire to offend his powerful neighbour, and he forthwith went down to the house of Leroyer, taking Bertrand and me with him, to ask of the Maid whether she would go to see the Duke at his Court, since the journey thither was but short, and would be a fitting preparation for the longer one. We found her sitting in the saddler's shop, with one of his children on her lap, watching whilst he fashioned for her a saddle, which the citizens of Vaucouleurs were to give her. Bertrand and I were to present the horse she was to ride, and I had also sent to my home for a certain holiday suit and light armour made for a brother of mine who had died young. I had noted that the Maid had just such a slim, tall figure as he, and was certain that this suit, laid away by our mother in a cedar chest, would fit her as though made for her. But it had not come yet, and she was habited in the tunic and hose she now wore at all times. Her beautiful hair still hung in heavy masses round her shoulders, giving to her something of the look of a saintly warrior on painted window. Later on, when she had to wear a headpiece, she cut off her long curling locks, and then her hair just framed her face like a nimbus; but today it was still hanging loose upon her shoulders, and the laughing child had got his little hands well twisted in the waving mass, upon which the midday sun was shining clear and strong. She had risen, and was looking earnestly at De Baudricourt; yet all the while she seemed to be, as it were, listening for other sounds than those of his voice. When he ceased she was silent for a brief while, and then spoke. "I would fain it had been to the Dauphin you would send me, Seigneur; but since that may not be yet, I will gladly go to the Duke, if I may but turn aside to make my pilgrimage to the shrine of St Nicholas, where I would say some prayers, and ask help." "Visit as many shrines as you like, so as you visit the Duke as well," answered De Baudricourt, who always spoke with a sort of rough bluffness to the Maid, not unkindly, though it lacked gentleness. But she never evinced fear of him, and for that he respected her. She showed plenty of good sense whilst the details of the journey were being arranged, and was in no wise abashed at the prospect of appearing at a Court. How should she be, indeed, who was looking forward with impatience to her appearance at the Court of an uncrowned King? Bertrand and I, with some half-dozen men-at-arms, were to form her escort, and upon the very next day, the sun shining bright, and the wind blowing fresh from the north over the wet lands, drying them somewhat after the long rains, we set forth. The Maid rode the horse which afterwards was to carry her so many long, weary miles. He was a tall chestnut, deep in the chest, strong in the flank, with a proudly arching neck, a great mane of flowing hair, a haughty fashion of lifting his shapely feet, and an eye that could be either mild or fierce, according to the fashion in which he was treated. On his brow was a curious mark, something like a cross in shape, and the colour of it was something deeper than the chestnut of his coat. The Maid marked this sign at the first glance, and she called the horse her Crusader. Methinks she was cheered and pleased by the red cross she thus carried before her, and she and her good steed formed one of those friendships which are good to see betwixt man and beast. Our journey was not adventurous; nor will I waste time in telling overmuch about it. We visited the shrine, where the Maid passed a night in fasting and vigil, and laid thereon a little simple offering, such as her humble state permitted. The next day she was presented to the Duke of Lorraine, as he lay wrapped in costly silken coverlets upon his great bed in one of the most sumptuous apartments of his Castle. He gazed long and earnestly at the Maid, who stood beside him, flinching neither from his hollow gaze, nor from the more open curiosity or admiration bestowed upon her by the lords and ladies assembled out of desire to see her. I doubt me if she gave them a thought. She had come to see the sick Duke, and her thoughts were for him alone. There was something very strange and beautiful in her aspect as she stood there. Her face was pale from her vigil and fast; her hair hung round it in a dark waving mass, that lighted up at the edges with gold where the light touched it. Her simple boy's dress was splashed and travel stained; but her wonderful serene composure was as marked here as it had been throughout. No fears or tremors shook her, nor did any sort of consciousness of self or of the strangeness of her position come to mar the gentle dignity of her mien or the calm loveliness of her face. The Duke raised himself on his elbow the better to look at her. "Is this true what I have heard of you, that you are the Maid of Lorraine, raised up, according to the word of the wizard Merlin, to save France in the hour of her extremity?" "I am come to save France from the English," she answered at once; "to drive them from the city of Orleans, to bring the Dauphin to Rheims, and there see the crown set upon his head. This I know, for my Lord has said it. Who I am matters nothing, save only as I accomplish the purpose for which I am sent." Her sweet ringing voice sounded like a silver trumpet through the room, and the lords and ladies pressed nearer to hear and see. "In sooth, the Maid herself--the Maid who comes to save France!" Such was the whisper which went round; and I marvelled not; for the look upon that face, the glorious shining in those eyes, was enough to convince the most sceptical that the beatific vision had indeed been vouchsafed to them. The Duke fell back on his pillows, regarding her attentively. "If then, Maiden, you can thus read the future, tell me, shall I recover me of this sickness?" he gasped. "Of that, sire, I have no knowledge," she answered. "That lies with God alone; but if you would be His servant, flee from the wrath to come, which your sins have drawn upon you. Turn to the Lord in penitence. Do His will. Be reconciled to your wife; for such is the commandment of God. Perchance then you will find healing for body and soul. But seek not that which is hidden. Do only the will of the Lord, and trust all to Him." She was hustled from the room by the frightened attendants, who feared for her very life at the hands of their irate lord. He had done many a man to death for less than such counsel. But the Maid felt not fear. "He cannot touch me," she said, "I have my Lord's work yet to accomplish." And in truth the Duke wished her no ill, though he asked not to see her more. Perhaps--who knows--these words may have aroused in him some gleams of penitence for his past life. I have heard he made a better end than was expected of him when his time came. And before the Maid left the Castle he sent her a present of money, and said he might even send his son to help the Dauphin, if once Orleans were relieved, and her words began to fulfil themselves. So then we journeyed home again, and we reached Vaucouleurs on the afternoon of the twelfth day of February. The Maid had been smiling and happy up till that time, and, since the weather was improving, we had great hopes of soon starting forth upon the journey for Chinon. Nevertheless, the streams were still much swollen, and in some places the ground was so soft that it quaked beneath our horses' feet. We travelled without misadventure, however, and I wondered what it was that brought the cloud to the brow of the Maid as we drew nearer and nearer to Vaucouleurs. But I was to know ere long; for as we rode into the courtyard of the Castle the Maid slipped from her horse ere any could help her, and went straight into the room where the Governor was sitting, with her fearless air of mastery. "My lord of Baudricourt, you do great ill to your master the Dauphin in thus keeping me from him in the time of his great need. Today a battle has been fought hard by the city of Orleans, and the arms of the French have suffered disaster and disgrace. If this go on, the hearts of the soldiers will be as water, the purpose of the Lord will be hindered, and you, Seigneur, will be the cause, in that you have not hearkened unto me, nor believed that I am sent of Him." "How know you the thing of which you speak, girl?" asked De Baudricourt, startled at the firmness of her speech. "My voices have told me," she answered; "voices that cannot lie. The French have met with disaster. The English have triumphed, and I still waste my time in idleness here! How long is this to continue, Robert de Baudricourt?" A new note had come into her voice--the note of the general who commands. We heard it often enough later; but this was the first time I had noted it. How would De Baudricourt take it? "Girl," he said, "I will send forth a courier at once to ride with all speed to the westward. If this thing be so, he will quickly meet some messenger with the news. If it be as you have said, if this battle has been fought and lost, then will I send you forth without a day's delay to join the King at Chinon." "So be it," answered the Maid; and turned herself to the chapel, where she spent the night in prayer. It was Bertrand who rode forth in search of tidings, his heart burning within him. It was he who nine days later entered Vaucouleurs again, weary and jaded, but with a great triumph light in his eyes. He stood before De Baudricourt and spoke. "It is even as the Maid hath said. Upon the very day when we returned to Vaucouleurs, the English--a small handful of men--overthrew at Rouvray a large squadron of the French, utterly routing and well-nigh destroying them. The English were but a small party, convoying herrings to the besiegers of Orleans. The ground was strewn with herrings after the fight, which men call the Battle of the Herrings. Consternation reigns in the hearts of the French--an army flies before a handful! The Maid spake truly; the need is desperate. If help reach not the Dauphin soon, all will be lost!" "Then let the Maid go!" thundered the old man, roused at last like an angry lion; "and may the God she trusts in guard and keep her, and give to her the victory!" CHAPTER V. HOW THE MAID JOURNEYED TO CHINON. So the thing had come to pass at last--as she had always said it must. Robert de Baudricourt was about to send her to the Court of the Dauphin at Chinon. The weary days of waiting were at an end. She was to start forthwith; she and her escort were alike ready, willing, and eager. Her strange mystic faith and lofty courage seemed to have spread through the ranks of the chosen few who were to attend her. I trow, had she asked it, half the men of Vaucouleurs would have gladly followed in her train; for the whole town was moved to its core by the presence of the Maid in its midst. Almost were the townsfolk ready to worship her, only that there was something in her own simplicity and earnest piety which forbade such demonstration. All knew that the Maid herself would be first to rebuke any person offering to her homage other than true man can and ought to offer to true woman. And now let me speak here, once and for all, of the love and reverence and devotion which the Maid had power to kindle in the hearts of those with whom she came in contact. I can indeed speak of this, for I am proud to this day to call myself her true knight. From the first I felt towards her as I have felt to none since--not even to the wife of my manhood's tried affections. It was such a love as may be inspired by some almost angelic, presence--there was no passion in it. I believe I speak truly when I say that not one of the Maid's true followers and knights and comrades-in-arms, ever thought of her as possible wife--ever even dreamed of her as lover. She moved amongst us as a being from another sphere. She inspired us with a courage, a power, and a confidence in her and in our cause, which nothing could shake or daunt. She was like a star, set in the firmament of heaven. Our eyes, our hearts turned towards her, but she was never as one of us. Still less was she as other women are, fashioned for soft flatteries, ready to be wooed and won. Ah, no! With the Maid it was far otherwise. Truly do I think that of herself she had no thought, save as she was the instrument appointed of her Lord to do the appointed work. To that task her whole soul was bent. It filled her to the full with an ecstasy of devotion which required no words in which to express itself. And I can faithfully say that it was not the beauty of her face, the sweetness of her ringing voice, nor the grace and strength of her supple form which made of men her willing followers and servants. No, it was a power stronger and more sacred than any such carnal admiration. It came from the conviction, which none could fail to reach, that this Maid was indeed chosen and set apart of Heaven for a great and mighty work, and that in obeying her, one was obeying the will of God, and working out some purpose determined in the counsels of the heavenlies. With her man's garb and light armour, the Maid had assumed an air of unconscious command which sat with curious graceful dignity upon the serene calm of her ordinary demeanour. Towards her followers of the humbler sort she ever showed herself full of consideration and kindliness. She felt for their fatigues or privations in marching, was tenderly solicitous later on for the wounded. Above all, she was insistent that the dying should receive the consolations of religion, and it was a terrible thought to her that either friend or foe should perish unshriven and unassoiled. Her last act at Vaucouleurs, ere we started off in the early dawn of a late February day, was to attend Mass with all her following. An hour later, after a hasty meal provided by De Baudricourt, we were all in the saddle, equipped and eager for the start. The Maid sat her chestnut charger as to the manner born. The pawings of the impatient animal caused her no anxiety. She was looking with a keen eye over her little band of followers, taking in, as a practised leader of men might do, their equipment and general readiness for the road. She pointed out to me several small defects which required adjusting and rectifying. Already she seemed to have assumed without effort, and as a matter of course, the position of leader and general. There was no abatement of her gentle sweetness of voice or aspect, but the air of command combined with it as though it came direct and without effort as a gift from heaven. None resented it; all submitted to it, and submitted with a sense of lofty joy and satisfaction which I have never experienced since, and which is beyond my power to describe. There was one change in the outward aspect of the Maid, for her beautiful hair had been cut off, and now her head was crowned only by its cluster of short curling locks, upon which today she wore a cloth cap, though soon she was to adopt the headpiece which belonged to the light armour provided. She had been pleased by the dress of white and blue cut-cloth which I had humbly offered her, and right well did it become her. The other suit provided by the townsfolk was carried by one of the squires, that she might have change of garment if (as was but too probable) we should encounter drenching rains or blustering snow storms. So far she had no sword of her own, nor had she spoken of the need of such a weapon for herself. But as we assembled in the courtyard of the Castle, getting ourselves into the order of the march, De Baudricourt himself appeared upon the steps leading into the building, bearing in his hands a sword in a velvet scabbard, which he gravely presented to the Maid. "A soldier, lady, has need of a weapon," were his words, as he placed it in her hands; "take this sword, then. I trow it will do you faithful service; and may the Lord in whom you trust lead you to victory, and save this distracted realm of France from the perils which threaten to overwhelm her!" "I thank you, Seigneur de Baudricourt," she answered, as she took the weapon, and permitted me to sling it for her in the belt for the purpose which she already wore, "I will keep your gift, and remember your good words, and how that you have been chosen of heaven to send me forth thus, and have done the bidding of the Lord, as I knew that so true a man must needs do at the appointed time. For the rest, have no fear. The Lord will accomplish that which He has promised. Before the season now beginning so tardily has reached its height, the Dauphin will be the anointed King of France, the English will have suffered defeat and Orleans will be free!" "Heaven send you speak sooth, fair Maid," answered the rugged old soldier, as he eyed the slim figure before him with something of mingled doubt, wonder, and reverence in his eyes. Then as though some strange impulse possessed him, he took her hand and kissed it, and bending the knee before her, said: "Give me, I pray you, a blessing, ere you depart!" A wonderful light sprang into her eyes. She laid her hand upon the grizzled head, and lifted her own face, as was her wont, to the sunny sky. "The blessing of the King of Heaven be upon you, Robert de Baudricourt, in that you have been an instrument chosen of Him. The grace and love of our Blessed Lady be yours, in that you have shown kindness and favour to a simple maid of the people, set apart by Heaven for a certain task. The favour and protection of the Saints be yours, in that you have believed the words of one who spake of them, and have been obedient to the command sent to you from them!" She ceased speaking; but still continued to gaze upward with rapt and earnest eyes. Every head was bared, and we all gazed upon her, as upon one who looks through the open Gate of Heaven, and to whom is vouchsafed a glimpse of the Beatific Vision. Then clear and sweet her voice rose once more. Her face was transfigured; a great light seemed to shine either upon or from it, no man could say which. "O Lord God, Father of the Heavenlies, O sweet Jesu, Saviour of mankind, O Blessed Mother, Queen of Heaven, O Holy Michael, Archangel of the shining sword, O Blessed Saints--Catherine and Margaret, beloved of Heaven--give to these, Your children, Your blessing, Your help, Your protection, Your counsel! Be with us in our journeyings--in our uprising and down lying, in our going out and coming in--in all we put our hands unto! Be with us and uphold us, and bring us in safety to our journey's end; for we go forth in the strength which is from above, and which can never fail us till the work appointed be accomplished!" Then we rode forth, out of the courtyard, and into the streets of the town, which were thronged and lined with townsfolk, and with people from the surrounding villages, who had crowded in to see the wonderful Maid, and witness the outgoing of the little band which was to accompany her to Chinon. Two of the Maid's brothers had sought to be of her train, and one went with us upon that day. The second she sent back with a letter (written at her dictation by my fingers, for she herself knew not letters, though of so quick an understanding in other matters) to her parents, praying earnestly for their forgiveness for what must seem to them like disobedience, and imploring their blessing. And this letter she dispatched by Jean, permitting Pierre to accompany us on the march. Her mother and two younger brothers, at least, believed in her mission by this time; but her father was doubtful and displeased, fearful for her safety, and suspicious of her credentials; and the eldest son remained of necessity at home to help his father, and whether or no he believed in his sister's call, I have never truly heard. But I know it pleased her that Pierre should be in her escort, though she was careful not to show him any marked favour above others; and as in days to come she was more and more thrown with the great ones of the land, she of necessity was much parted from him, though the bond of sisterly love was never slackened; and both Pierre, and afterwards Jean, followed her through all the earlier parts of her victorious career. Leaving Vaucouleurs, we had need to march with circumspection, for the country was in no settled state, and it was probable that rumours of our march might have got abroad, and that roving bands of English or Burgundian soldiers might be on the look out for us; for already it was being noised abroad that a miraculous Maid had appeared to the aid of France, and though, no doubt, men jeered, and professed incredulity, still it was likely that she would be regarded in the light of a valuable prize if she could be carried off, and taken either to Duke Philip or to the Regent Bedford in Paris. We had with us a King's archer from Chinon, who had been sent with news of the disaster at Rouvray. He was to conduct us back to Chinon by the best and safest routes. But he told us that the country was beset by roving bands of hostile soldiers, that his comrades had been slain, and that he himself only escaped as by a miracle; and his advice was urgent that after the first day we should travel by night, and lie in hiding during the hours of daylight--a piece of advice which we were fain to follow, being no strong force, able to fight our way through a disturbed country, and being very solicitous for the safety of the precious Maid who was at once our chiefest hope and chiefest care. This, then, we did, after that first day's travel in the bright springtide sunshine. We were attended for many a mile by a following of mounted men from the district round, and when, as the sun began to wester in the sky, they took their leave of us, the Maid thanked them with gracious words for their company and good wishes, though she would not suffer them to kiss her hand or pay her homage; and after that they had departed, we did halt for many hours, eating and resting ourselves; for we meant to march again when the moon was up, and not lose a single night, so eager was the Maid to press on towards Chinon. Of our journey I will not speak too particularly. Ofttimes we were in peril from the close proximity of armed bands, as we lay in woods and thickets by day, avoiding towns and villages, lest we should draw too much notice upon ourselves. Ofttimes we suffered from cold, from hunger, from drenching rains and bitter winds. Once our way was barred by snow drifts, and often the swollen rivers and streams forced us to wander for miles seeking a ford that was practicable. But whatever were the hardships encountered, no word of murmuring ever escaped the lips of the Maid; rather her courage and sweet serenity upheld us all, and her example of patience and unselfishness inspired even the roughest of the men-at-arms with a desire to emulate it. Never, methinks, on such a toilsome march was so little grumbling, so little discouragement, and, above all, so little swearing. And this, in particular, was the doing of the Maid. For habit is strong with us all, and when things went amiss the oath would rise to the lips of the men about her, and be uttered without a thought. But that was a thing she could not bear. Her sweet pained face would be turned upon the speaker. Her clear, ringing tones would ask the question: "Shall we, who go forward in the name of the Lord, dare to take His holy name lightly upon our lips? What are His own words? Swear not at all. Shall we not seek to obey Him? Are we not vowed to His service? And must not the soldier be obedient above all others? Shall we mock Him by calling ourselves His followers, and yet doing that without a thought which He hath forbidden?" Not once nor twice, but many times the Maid had to speak such words as these; but she never feared to speak them, and her courage and her purity of heart and life threw its spell over the rough men she had led, and they became docile in her hands like children, ready to worship the very ground she trod on. Long afterwards it was told me by one of mine own men-at-arms that there had been a regular plot amongst the rougher of the soldiers at the outset to do her a mischief, and to sell her into the hands of the Burgundians or the English. But even before leaving Vaucouleurs the men had wavered, half ashamed of their own doubts and thoughts, and before we had proceeded two days' journey forward, all, to a man, would have laid down their lives in her service. The only matter that troubled the Maid was that we were unable to hear Mass, as she longed to do daily. The risk of showing ourselves in town or village was too great. But there came a night, when, as we journeyed, we approached the town of Fierbois, a place very well known to me; and when we halted in a wood with the first light of day, and the wearied soldiers made themselves beds amid the dried fern and fallen leaves, I approached the Maid, who was gazing wistfully towards the tapering spire of a church, visible at some distance away, and I said to her: "Gentle Maid, yonder is the church of Sainte Catherine at Fierbois, and there will be, without doubt, early Mass celebrated within its walls. If you will trust yourself with Bertrand and myself, I trow we could safely convey you thither, and bring you back again, ere the day be so far advanced that the world will be astir to wonder at us." Her face brightened as though a sunbeam had touched it. She needed not to reply in words. A few minutes later, and we were walking together through the wood, and had quickly reached the church, where the chiming of the bell told us that we should not be disappointed of our hope. We knelt at the back of the church, and there were few worshippers there that morning. I could not but watch the face of the Maid, and suddenly I felt a curious thrill run through me, as though I had been touched by an unseen hand. I looked at her, and upon her face had come a look which told me that she was listening to some voice unheard by me. She clasped her hands, her eyes travelled toward the altar, and remained fixed upon it, as though she saw a vision. Her lips moved, and I thought I heard the murmured words: "Blessed Sainte Catherine, I hear. I will remember. When the time comes I shall know what to do." When the priest had finished his office we slipped out before any one else moved, and reached the shelter of the woods again without encountering any other person. I almost hoped that the Maid would speak to us of what had been revealed to her in that church, but she kept the matter in her own heart. Yet, methinks, she pondered it long and earnestly; for although she laid her down as if to sleep, her eyes were generally wide open, looking upwards through the leafless budding boughs of the trees as though they beheld things not of this earth. It was upon this day that I wrote, at the Maid's request, a letter to the uncrowned King at Chinon, asking of him an audience on behalf of Jeanne d'Arc, the maiden from Domremy, of whom he had probably heard. This letter I dispatched to Sir Guy de Laval, asking him to deliver it to the King with his own hands, and to bring us an answer ere we reached Chinon, which we hoped now to do in a short while. The missive was carried by the King's archer, who knew his road right well, and was acquainted with the person of Sir Guy. He was to ride forward in all haste, whilst we were to follow in slower and more cautious fashion. I think it was about the fifth day of March when the great towers of Chinon first broke upon our gaze. We had been travelling all the night, and it was just as the dawn was breaking that we espied the huge round turrets rising, as it were, from amid the mists which clung about the river and its banks. There we halted, for no message had yet come from the King; but upon the Maid's face was a look of awe and radiant joy as she stood a little apart, gazing upon the goal of her toilsome journey. No fear beset her as to her reception, just as no fears had troubled her with regard to perils by the way. "God clears the road for me," she said, when news had been brought from time to time of bands of soldiers whom we had narrowly escaped; and now, as she looked upon the towers of Chinon, growing more and more distinct as the daylight strengthened, her face wore a smile of serene confidence in which natural fear and shrinking had no part. "The Dauphin will receive me. Fear nothing. The work which is begun will go forward to its completion. God hath spoken in His power. He hath spoken, and His word cannot fail." So after we had fed she lay down, wrapped in a cloak, and fell asleep like a child; whilst I rode forward a little way along the plain, for I had seen a handful of horsemen sallying forth, as it seemed from the Castle, and I hoped that it was Sir Guy bearing letter or message from the King. Nor was I mistaken in this hope. Soon I was certain of my man, and Sir Guy in turn recognising me, spurred forward in advance of his followers, and we met alone in the plain, Bertrand, my companion, being with me. "So there really is to be a miracle worked, and by a Maid!" cried Sir Guy, as we rode with him towards our camp; "Mort de Dieu--but it is passing strange! All the Court is in a fever of wonder about this Angelic Maid, as some call her; whilst others vow she is either impostor or witch. Is it the same, Bertrand, of whom you did speak upon the day we parted company?" "The same; and yet in one way not the same, for since then she hath grown apace in power and wonder, so that all who see her marvel at her, and some be ready to worship her. But we will say no more. You shall see for yourself, and the King also shall see, if he refuse not to receive one who comes to him as the messenger of God." "I am sent to conduct the Maid presently to the Castle," answered Sir Guy. "There is now great desire to see her and hear her, and to try and test the truth of her mission. The Generals scoff aloud at the thought of going to battle with a maid for leader. The Churchmen look grave, and talk of witchcraft and delusion. The ladies of the Court are in a fever to see her. As for the King and his Ministers, they are divided in mind 'twixt hope and fear; but truly matters are come to such desperate pass with us that, if some help come not quickly, the King will flee him away from his distracted realm, and leave the English and Burgundians to ravage and subdue at will!" "God forbid!" said I, and crossed myself. Scarce had I spoken the words before I saw approaching us on her chestnut charger the Maid herself, who rode forward to meet us at a foot's pace, and reined back a few yards from us, her eyes fixed full upon the face of Sir Guy, who uncovered, I scarce know why, for how should he know that this youthful soldier was indeed the Maid herself? "You come from the Dauphin," she said; "go tell him that the darkest hour but heralds the dawn. He must not flee away. He must stay to face his foes. I will lead his armies to victory, and he shall yet be crowned King of France. Let him never speak more of deserting his realm. That shall not--that must not be!" Sir Guy was off his horse by now; he bent his knee to the Maid. "I will tell the King that the Deliverer hath truly come," he said; and taking her hand, ere she could prevent it, he reverently kissed it. CHAPTER VI. HOW THE MAID CAME TO THE KING. So Guy de Laval had fallen beneath the spell of the Maid, even as we had done. He spoke of it to me afterwards. It was not because of her words, albeit she had plainly shown knowledge of that which he had been saying before her approach. It was not the beauty of her serene face, or the dignity of her mien. It was as though some power outside of himself urged him to some act of submission. An overshadowing presence seemed to rest upon him as with the touch of a hand, and he who had laughed at the idea of the restoration of miracles suddenly felt all his doubts and misgivings fall away. We rode together back to our camp, and there we talked long and earnestly of many things. The Maid had much to ask of Sir Guy, but her questions were not such as one would have guessed. She never inquired how the Dauphin (as she always called him) had first heard of her, how he regarded her, what his Ministers and the Court thought of her mission, whether they would receive her in good part, what treatment she might expect when she should appear at Chinon. No; such thoughts as these seemed never to enter her head. She was in no wise troubled as to the things which appertained to herself. Not once did a natural curiosity on this ground suggest such inquiries; and though we, her followers, would fain have asked many of these questions, something in her own absence of interest, her own earnestness as to other matters, restrained us from putting them. It was of the city of Orleans she desired to know. What was the condition of the garrison? What were the armies of England doing? What was the disposition of the beleaguering force? Was any project of relief on foot amongst the Dauphin's soldiers? Did they understand how much depended upon the rescue of the devoted town? Guy de Laval was able to answer these questions, for he had himself ridden from Chinon to Orleans with messages to the Generals in the beleaguered city. He reported that the blockade was not perfected; that provisions could still find their way--though with risk, and danger of loss--into the town, and that messengers with letters could pass to and fro by exercising great caution, and by the grace of Heaven. He told her of the great fortresses the English had built, where they dwelt in safety, and menaced the town and battered its walls with their engines of war. The garrison and the city were yet holding bravely out, and the Generals Dunois and La Hire were men of courage and capacity. But when the Maid asked how it came about that the English--who could not be so numerous as the French forces in the town--had been suffered to make these great works unmolested, he could only reply with a shake of the head, and with words of evil omen. "It is the terror of the English which has fallen upon them. Since the victory of Agincourt, none have ever been able to see English soldiers drawn up in battle array without feeling their blood turn to water, and their knees quake under them. I know not what the power is; but at Rouvray it was shown forth again. A small force of soldiers--but a convoy with provisions for the English lines--overcame and chased to destruction a French army ten times its own strength. It is as though the English had woven some spell about us. We cannot face them--to our shame be it spoken! The glorious days of old are past. If Heaven come not to our aid, the cause of France is lost!" "Heaven has come to the aid of France," spoke the Maid, with that calm certainty which never deserted her; "have no fear, gentle knight. Let the Dauphin but send me to Orleans, and the English will speedily be chased away." "It will need a great army to achieve that, fair Maid," spoke Sir Guy; "and alas, the King has but a small force at his disposal, and the men are faint hearted and fearful." "It is no matter," answered the Maid, with shining eyes; "is it anything to my Lord whether He overcomes by many or by few? Is His arm shortened at all, that He should not fulfil that which He has promised? France shall see ere long that the Lord of Hosts fights for her. Will not that be enough?" "I trow it will," answered De Laval, baring his head. It was not until the evening was drawing on that we entered the fortress of Chinon, where the King held his Court. A very splendid castle it was, and when, later in my life, I once visited the realm of England, and looked upon the Castle of Windsor there, it did bring back greatly to my mind that Castle of Chinon, with its towers and battlements overhanging, as it were, the river, and the town clustered at its foot. We had delayed our approach that our wearied and way-worn men might rest and give a little care to their clothes and arms, so that we presented not too travel-stained and forlorn an appearance. We desired to do honour to the Maid we escorted, and to assume an air of martial pomp, so far as it was possible to us. Sir Guy had ridden on in front to announce our coming. He told me that the King was full of curiosity about the Maid, and that the ladies of the Court were consumed with wonder and amaze; but that the Prime Minister, De la Tremouille, was strenuously set against having aught to do with that "dreamer of dreams," as he slightingly called her, whilst the King's confessor was much of the same mind, in spite of what was reported about her from the priests who had seen and examined her. There was no mistaking the sensation which our approach occasioned when at last we reached the walls of the Castle. Soldiers and townspeople, gentlemen and servants, were assembled at every coign of vantage to watch us ride in; and every eye was fixed upon the Maid, who rode as one in a dream, her face slightly raised, her eyes shining with the great joy of an object at last achieved, and who seemed unconscious of the scrutiny to which she was subjected, and unaware of the excitement which her presence occasioned. For the most part deep silence reigned as we passed by. No acclamation of welcome greeted us, nor did any murmurs of distrust smite upon our ears. There was whispering and a rustling of garments, and the clank of arms; but no articulate words, either friendly or hostile, till, as we passed the drawbridge, one of the sentries, a great, brawny fellow, half French half Scottish, uttered an insult to the Maid, accompanying his words by a horrible blasphemy. My hand was upon my sword hilt. I could have slain the man where he stood; but I felt the Maid's touch on my shoulder, and my hand sank to my side. She paused before the sentry, gazing at him with earnest eyes, full of mournful reproach and sorrow. "O Lord Jesu, forgive him!" she breathed softly, and as the fellow, half ashamed, but truculent still, and defiant, turned upon her as though he would have repeated either his insult or his blasphemy, she held up her hand and spoke aloud, so that all who stood by might hear her words: "O, my friend, speak not so rashly, but seek to make your peace with God. Know you not how near you stand to death this night? May God pardon and receive your soul!" The man shrank back as one affrighted. It was scarce two hours later that as he was crossing a narrow bridge-like parapet, leading from one part of the Castle to another, he fell into the swollen and rapid stream beneath, and was heard of no more. Some called it witchcraft, and said that the Maid had overlooked him; but the more part regarded it as a sign that she could read the future, and that things unknown to others were open to her eyes; and this, indeed, none could doubt who were with her at this time, as I shall presently show. I had expected that Sir Guy would come to lead us into the chamber of audience, where we were told the King would receive us. But he did not come, and we were handed on from corridor to corridor, from room to room, first by one richly-apparelled servant of the Court, then by another. Our men-at-arms, of course, had been detained in one of the courtyards, where their lodgings were provided. Only Bertrand and I were suffered, by virtue of our knighthood, to accompany the Maid into the presence of royalty; and neither of us had ever seen the King, or knew what his outward man was like. But she asked no questions of us as to that, nor how she was to comport herself when she reached the audience chamber. Neither had she desired to change her travel-stained suit for any other, though, in truth, there was little to choose betwixt them now; only methinks most in her case would have provided some sort of gay raiment wherewith to appear before the King. But the Maid thought nought of herself, but all of her mission, and she held that this was a matter which could be touched by no outward adorning or bravery of apparel. None who passed through the galleries and corridors of the Castle of Chinon in these days would have guessed to what a desperate pass the young King's affairs had come. Music and laughter resounded there. Courtiers fluttered about in gorgeous array, and fine ladies like painted butterflies bore them company. Feasting and revelry swallowed up the days and nights. No clang of arms disturbed the gaieties of the careless young monarch. If despair and desperation were in his heart, he pushed them back with a strong hand. He desired only to live in the present. He would not look beyond. So long as he could keep his Court about him, he would live after this fashion; and when the English had swept away the last barriers, and were at the very gates, then he would decide whether to surrender himself upon terms, or to fly to some foreign land. But to face the foe in gallant fight was an alternative which had never been entertained by him, until such time as he had received the message from the Maid; and then it was rather with wonder and curiosity than any belief in her mission that he had consented to receive her. A pair of great double doors was flung open before us. We stood upon the threshold of a vast room, lighted by some fifty torches, and by the blaze of a gigantic fire which roared halfway up the vast chimney. This great audience chamber seemed full of dazzling jewels and gorgeous raiment. One could scarce see the faces and figures in the shifting throng for the wonder of this blaze of colour. But there was no dais on which the King was seated in state, as I had expected. No figure stood out conspicuous in the throng as that of royalty. I gazed at one and another, as we stood in the doorway, our eyes still half dazzled by the glare of light and by the brilliance of the assembled company, but I could by no means distinguish the King from any of the rest. Many men, by their gorgeous raiment, might well be the greatest one present; but how to tell? All were quiet now. They had fallen a little back, as though to gaze upon the newcomer. Smiling faces were turned upon us. Eager eyes were fastened upon the Maid's face. She stood there, with the glare of the torches shining over her, looking upon the scene with her calm, direct gaze, without tremor of fear or thought of shame. One of the great Seigneurs--I know not which--came forward with a smile and a bow, and gave her his hand to lead her forward. "I will present you to the King," he said; and made in a certain direction, as though he would lead her to a very kingly-looking personage in white and crimson velvet, blazing with diamonds; but ere he had taken many steps, the Maid drew her hand from his, and turning herself in a different direction, went forward without the least wavering, and knelt down before a young man in whose attire there was nothing in any way gorgeous or notable. "Gentle Dauphin," she said, in that clear voice of hers which always made itself heard above other sounds, though at this moment a great hush prevailed throughout the audience chamber, and wondering eyes were fixed full upon the Maid, "God give you good life, and victory over your enemies!" Astonishment was in the young man's face; but he took the Maid by the hand, and said: "You mistake, fair damsel; it is not I that am the King. See, he is there; let me take you to him." But she would not be raised; she knelt still at his feet, and the hand which he had given her she held to her lips. "Gentle Dauphin, think not to deceive me. I know you, who you are. You are he to whom I am sent, to win you the victory first, and then to place the crown of France upon your head. It is you, and none other, who shall rule in France!" The young man's face had changed greatly now. A deep agitation replaced the former smile of mockery and amusement. Several of the courtiers were exchanging meaning glances; in the hush of the hall every spoken word could be heard. "Child, how dost thou know me?" asked the King, and his voice shook with emotion. Her answer was not strange to us, though it might have been so to others. "I am Jeanne the Maid," she replied, as if in so saying she was saying enough to explain all; "I am sent to you by the King of Heaven; and it is His Word that I have spoken. You shall be crowned and consecrated at Rheims, and shall be lieutenant of the King of Heaven, Who is King of France, but Who wills that you shall reign over that fair realm!" "Have you a message from Him to me?" asked the King, speaking like a man in a dream. "Ay, verily I have," answered the Maid, "a message which none but you must hear; for it is to you alone that I may tell it." Then the King took her by the hand, and raised her up, gazing at her with a great wonder and curiosity; and he led her behind a curtain into a deep recess of the window, where prying eyes could not see them, nor inquisitive ears overhear her words. And so soon as they had disappeared there, a great hum and buzz of wonder ran throughout the hall, and we saw Sir Guy detach himself from a knot of gay courtiers, and come hastily towards us. "Is it not wonderful!" he cried. "And I had feared that she would be deceived, and that the mockers would have the laugh against her in the first moment. Though how they looked for her to have knowledge of the King's person I know not. Surely none can doubt but that she is taught by the Spirit of God." "It was done to prove her!" "Ay, it was the thought of De la Tremouille, who has ridiculed her pretensions (the word is his) from first to last. But it was a thought welcomed by all, as a passing merry jest. Thus was it that I was not permitted to come and lead you in. They did fear lest I should tell what was intended, and describe to the Maid the person or the dress of the King. And now none can doubt; and, in sooth, it may be a wondrous thing for His Majesty himself, and take from him for ever that hateful fear which I always do declare has helped to paralyse him, and hold him back from action." I lowered my voice to a whisper as I said: "You mean the fear lest he was not the true son of the King?" "Yes; his wicked mother hinted away her own honour in her desire to rob him of his crown. He has known her for an evil woman. Was it not likely he would fear she might speak truth? Those who know him best know that he has often doubted his right to style himself Dauphin or King; but methinks after today that doubt must needs be set at rest. If the Maid who comes from the King of Heaven puts that name upon him, need he fear to take it for his own?" As we were thus speaking the Sieur de Boisi joined us. He was perchance more fully in the King's confidence than any other person at Court, and he was kinsman to De Laval, with whom he had plainly already had much talk upon this subject. He drew us aside, and whispered a story in our ears. "His Majesty did tell it me himself," he said, "for there be nights when he cannot sleep, and he calls me from my couch at his bed's foot, and makes me lie beside him, that we may talk at ease; and he told me, not long since, how that this trouble and doubt were so growing upon him, that once he had fasted for a whole day, and had passed the night upon his knees in the oratory, praying for a sign whereby he might truly know whether he were the real heir, and the kingdom justly his. For that were it not so, he would sooner escape to Spain or Scotland to pass his days in peace; but that if the Lord would send him a sign, then he would seek to do his duty by the realm." With awe we looked into each other's faces. "The sign has come!" whispered Bertrand. "Truly I do think it," answered De Boisi. "Surely His Majesty will recognise it as such!" said Sir Guy. "I see not how it can be otherwise; and it will be like a great load lifted from his heart." "And he will surely hesitate no more," I said, "but will forthwith give her a band of armed men, that she may sally forth to the aid of the beleaguered Orleans!" But De Boisi and De Laval looked doubtful. "I know not how that will be. For there are many who will even now seek to dissuade the King, and will talk of witchcraft, and I know not what beside. The Abbes and the Bishops and the priests are alike distrustful and hostile. The Generals of the army openly scoff and jeer. Some say that if the Maid be sent to Orleans, both La Hire and Dunois will forthwith retire, and refuse all further office there. What can a peasant maid know of the art of war? they ask, and how can she command troops and lead them on to victory, where veterans have failed again and again? And then the King knows not what to reply--" "But she hath given him wherewith to reply!" broke out Bertrand, with indignation in his tones. "She comes not in her own strength, but as the envoy of the King of Heaven. Is that not enough?" "Enough for us who have seen and heard her," answered Sir Guy; "but will it prove enough for those who only hear of her from others, and who call her a witch, and say that she works by evil spells, and has been sent of the Devil for our deception and destruction and undoing?" "Then let them send for one of the Generals from Orleans, and let him judge for himself!" cried Bertrand hotly; "you say the city is not so closely blockaded but that with care and caution men may get in or out? Then let some one send and fetch one of these commanders; and if he be not convinced when he sees her, then he will be of very different stuff from all else who have doubted, but whose doubts have been dispelled." "In faith, that is no bad thought," spoke De Boisi thoughtfully, "and I trow it might be possible of accomplishment. I will certainly speak with the King of it. He is young; he is not firm of purpose; his own heart has never before been set upon his kingdom. One cannot expect a man's nature to change in a day, even though his eyes may have been opened, and his misgivings set at rest. If one of the Generals were won to her side, the troubles that beset us would be well-nigh overcome." A great clamour of sound from the larger audience chamber, from which we had retired to talk at ease, warned us now that the King and the Maid had appeared from their private conference. His face was very grave, and there was more of earnestness and nobility in his expression than I had thought that countenance capable of expressing. The Maid was pale, as though with deep emotion; but a glorious light shone in her eyes, and when the Court ladies and gallants crowded round her, asking her questions, and gazing upon her as though she were a being from another sphere, she seemed lifted up above them into another region, and though she answered them without fear, she put aside, in some wonderful way, all those questions which were intrusions into holy things, speaking so fearlessly and so simply that all were amazed at her. She came to us at last, weary, yet glad at heart; and her first question was for her followers, and whether they had been lodged and fed. We supped with her at her request, and in private, and her face was very calm and glad, though she spoke nothing of what had passed between her and the King. Only when Bertrand said: "You have done a great work today," did she look at him with a smile as she replied: "My work hath but just begun, and may yet be hindered; but have no fear. The Lord has spoken, and He will bring it to pass. He will not fail us till all be accomplished." CHAPTER VII. HOW THE MAID WAS HINDERED; YET MADE PREPARATION. I have no patience to write of the things which followed. I blush for the King, for his Council, yea, even for the Church itself! Here was a messenger sent from God, sent to France in the hour of her direst need. This messenger had been tried and tested by a score of different methods already, and had in every case come forth from the trial like gold submitted to the fire. Priests had examined and found nothing evil in her. Again and again had she spoken of that which must follow--and so it had been. If her voices were not from God, then must they be from the devil; yet it had been proved again, and yet again, that this was impossible, since she feared nought that was holy or good, but clave unto such, and was never so joyful and glad at heart as when she was able to receive the Holy Sacrament, or kneel before the Altar of God whilst Mass was being said. She had proved her claim to be called God's messenger. She had justified herself as such in the eyes of the King and in the judgment of the two Queens and of half the Court. And yet, forsooth, he must waver and doubt, and let himself be led by the counsels of those who had ever set themselves against the Maid and her mission; and to the shame of the Church be it spoken, the Archbishop of Rheims was one of those who most zealously sought to persuade him of the folly of entrusting great matters to the hands of a simple peasant girl, and warned the whole Court of the perils of witchcraft and sorcery which were like to be the undoing of all who meddled therein. I could have wrung the neck of the wily old fox, whom I did more blame than I did his friend and advocate, De la Tremouille; for the latter only professed carnal wisdom and prudence, but the Archbishop spoke as one who has a mandate from God, and he at least should have known better. And so they must needs send her to Poictiers, to a gathering of ecclesiastics, assembled by her enemy, the Archbishop himself, to examine into her claims to be that which she professed, and also into her past life, and what it had been. I scarce have patience to write of all the wearisome weeks which were wasted thus, whilst this assembly sat; and the Maid--all alone in her innocence, her purity, her sweetness, and gentle reverence--stood before them, day after day, to answer subtle questions, face a casuistry which sought to entrap her into contradiction or confusion, or to wring from her a confession that she was no heaven-sent messenger, but was led away by her own imaginations and ambitions. It was an ordeal which made even her devoutest adherents tremble; for we knew the astuteness of the churchmen, and how that they would seek to win admissions which they would pervert to their own uses afterwards. Yet we need not have feared; for the Maid's simplicity and perfectly fearless faith in her mission carried her triumphant through all; or perhaps, indeed, her voices whispered to her what answers she should make, for some of them were remembered long, and evoked great wonder in the hearts of those who heard them. One Dominican monk sought to perplex her by asking why, since God had willed that France should be delivered through her, she had need of armed men? Full fearlessly and sweetly she looked at him as she made answer: "It is my Lord's will that I ask for soldiers, and that the Dauphin shall give me them. The men shall fight; it is God who gives the victory." Another rough questioner amongst her judges sought to confuse her by asking what language her voices spoke. They say that a flash flew from her eyes, though her sweet voice was as gentle as ever as she made answer: "A better language than yours, my father." And again, when the same man sought to know more of her faith and her love of God, having shown himself very sceptical of her voices and visions, she answered him, with grave dignity and an earnest, steadfast gaze: "I trow I have a better faith than yours, my father." And so, through all, her courage never failed, her faith never faltered, her hope shone undimmed. "They must give me that which I ask; they cannot withstand God. They cannot hurt me. For this work was I born, and until it be accomplished I am safe. I have no fear." Only once did she show anger, and then it was with a quiet dignity of displeasure, far removed from petulance or impatience. They asked of her a sign that she was what she professed to be. "I have not come to Poictiers to give a sign," she answered, holding her head high, and looking fearlessly into the faces of those who sat to judge her. "Send me to Orleans, with as small a band as you will. But send me there, and you shall see signs and to spare that I come in the power of the King of Heaven." And so in the end her faith and courage triumphed. The verdict ran somewhat thus: "We have found in her nothing but what is good. To deny or hinder her intentions to serve the King would be to show ourselves unworthy of the assistance of God." Yes, they had to come to it; and I trust that there were many sitting there whose hearts smote them for ever having doubted, or sought to baffle or entrap her. I cannot tell how far the judges were moved by the growing feeling in the town and throughout the district. But the people crowded to see the Maid pass by, and all were ready to fall at her feet and worship her. In the evenings they visited her at the house of Jean Ratabeau, the Advocate General, whose wife formed for her (as did every good and true woman with whom she came into contact during her life) an ardent admiration and affection. And to their earnest questions she gave ready answer, sitting in the midst of an eager crowd, and telling them in her sweet and simple way the story of her life in Domremy, and how she had first heard these voices from Heaven, or seen wondrous visions of unspeakable glories; and how she had learnt, by slow degrees, that which her Lord had for her to do, and had lost, by little and little, the fear which first possessed her, till now she knew not of the name of the word. She had but to follow where her voices guided. And the people believed in her, heart and soul. Her fame spread far and wide, and had she lifted but a finger, she might have been at the head of an armed band of citizens and soldiers, yea, and many gentlemen and knights as well, all vowed to live and die in her service. But this was not what was her destiny. "I thank you, my friends," she would say, if such a step were proposed by any ardent soul, impatient of this long delay; "but thus it may not be. My Lord has decreed that the Dauphin shall send me forth at the head of his armies, and with a troop of his soldiers; and he will do this ere long. Be not afraid. We must needs have patience, as did our Lord Himself, and be obedient, as He was. For only as we look to Him for grace and guidance can we hope to do His perfect will." Thus spoke the Maid, who, being without letters, and knowing, as she said, no prayers save the Pater Noster, Ave Maria, and Credo, yet could speak in such fashion to those who sought her. Was it wonder that the people believed in her? that they would have been ready to tear in pieces any who durst contemn her mission, or declare her possessed of evil spirits? Yet I will not say that it was fear which possessed the hearts of her judges, and decided their ruling in this matter. I trow they could not look upon her, or hear her, without conviction of heart. Nevertheless it is possible that the respect for popular enthusiasm led them to speak in such high praise of the Maid, and to add that she was in the right in assuming the dress which she wore. For she had been sent to do man's work, and for this a man's garb was the only fitting one to wear. And this ruling was heard with great acclamation of satisfaction; for her dress had been almost more commented upon than any other matter by some, and that the Church had set its sanction upon that which common sense deemed most right and fitting, robbed the most doubtful of all scruple, and gave to the Maid herself no small pleasure. "I do in this, as in all other things, that which I have been bidden," she said. "But I would not willingly act unseemly in the eyes of good men and virtuous women; wherefore I am glad that my judges have spoken thus, and I thank them from my heart for their gentle treatment of me." It was ever thus with the Maid. No anger or impatience overset her sweet serenity and humility. She would not let herself take offence, or resent these ordeals to which, time after time, she was subjected. Nay, it was she who defended the proceedings when we attacked them, saying that it behoved men to act with care and caution in these great matters, and that her only trouble in the delay was the sufferings and sorrows of the poor beleaguered garrison and citizens in Orleans, to whose help and relief she longed to fly. So certain was she that before long she would be upon her way, that at Poictiers she composed that letter to the English King, his Regent, and his Generals which has been so much talked of since. It was a truly wonderful document to be penned by a village maiden; for in it she adjured them to cease from warring with the rightful King of France, whom God would have to rule the realm for Him, to go back to their own country, leaving peace behind them instead of war, and imploring them then to join with the King of France in a crusade against the Saracens. She speaks of herself as one who has power to drive them from the kingdom if they will not go in peace as adjured. Calling herself throughout "The Maid," she tells them plainly that they will not be able to stand against her; that she will come against them in the power of the King of Heaven, Who will give to her more strength than ever can be brought against her; and in particular she begs of them to retire from the city of Orleans; else, if they do not, they shall come to great misfortune there. This letter took some time in the composition, and was written for her by Sir Guy de Laval, though we were all in her counsel as she dictated it. By this I do not mean that we advised her. On the contrary, we gazed at her amazed, knowing how fruitless such an injunction must be to the haughty victorious nation, who had us, so to speak, in the dust at her feet. But the Maid saw with other eyes than ours. "It may be that there will be some holy man of God in their camp to whom my Lord will reveal His will, as He hath done to me, and will show the things which must come to pass. I would so willingly spare all the bloodshed and misery which war will bring. It is so terrible a thing for Christian men to war one with another!" So this letter, with its superscription "JHESUS MARIA," was written and dispatched to the English, and the Maid turned her attention to other matters near her heart, such as the design and execution of those banners which were to be carried before her armies in battle, and lead them on to victory. And these same words, "Jhesus Maria," she decreed should appear upon each of the three standards, in token that she went not forth in her own strength, nor even in that of the King of France; but in the power which was from above, and in the strength given by those who sent her. Now there came to Poictiers to see the Maid at this time many persons from other places, and amongst these was a Scotchman called Hauves Polnoir, who brought with him his daughter, a fair girl, between whom and the Maid a great love speedily sprang up. These Polnoirs were the most skilful workers in embroideries and such like of all the country round, and to them was entrusted the making of the three banners, according to the instructions of the Maid. There was first the great white silken standard, with the golden fleur-de-lys of France, and a representation on the reverse of the Almighty God between two adoring angels; then a smaller banner, with a device representing the Annunciation, which she always gave to one of her immediate attendants or squires to carry into battle; and for herself she had a little triangular banneret of white, with an image of the Crucified Christ upon it, and this she carried herself, and it was destined to be the rallying point of innumerable engagements, for the sight of that little fluttering pennon showed the soldiers where the Maid was leading them, and though this was in the thickest and sorest of the strife, they would press towards it with shouts of joy and triumph, knowing that, where the Maid led, there victory was won. All these matters were arranged whilst we were kept in waiting at Poictiers; and the Polnoirs returned to Tours to execute the orders there in their own workshop. The Maid promised to visit them on her way from Chinon to Orleans, and so bid them a kindly farewell. Perhaps I may here add that when the Dauphin, upon his coronation, insisted upon presenting the Maid with a sum of money, the use she made of it, after offering at various shrines, was to provide a marriage dowry for Janet Polnoir. Never did she think of herself; never did she desire this world's goods. This was shown very plainly upon her triumphant return to Chinon, with the blessing and sanction of the Church upon her mission, with the enthusiasm of the people growing and increasing every day, and her fame flying throughout the length and breadth of the realm. By this time the King and all his Court knew that a deliverer had been raised up in our midst, and instead of lowly lodgings being allotted to the Maid and her train, the whole Tower of Coudray was set apart for the use of herself and her suite. The custodian De Belier and his wife had charge of her, and to her were now appointed a staff, of which the brave Jean d'Aulon was the chief, and to which Bertrand and Sir Guy de Laval and myself belonged, together with many more knights and gentlemen, all anxious to do service under her banner. Also she had in her train some persons of lowlier degree, such as her brothers, for whom she always had tender care, and who believed devoutly in her mission, although they saw of necessity less and less of one another as the Maid's mission progressed, and took her into a different world. But all this grandeur was no delight to her, save inasmuch as it showed that at last her mission was recognised and honoured. When asked what she would have for herself in the matter of dress and armour, her answer was that she had already all she required, although she only possessed at this time one suit more than she had started forth with from Vaucouleurs. Although she saw the courtiers fluttering about like butterflies, and noted how men, as well as women, decked themselves in choice stuffs and flashing jewels, she asked none of these things for herself; and when the Queen of Sicily, always her best and kindest friend, sent to her some clothing of her own designing--all white, and beautifully worked, some with silver, and some with gold thread and cord, and a mantle of white velvet, lined with cloth of silver--she looked at the beautiful garments with something between a smile and a sigh; then turning towards the great lady who stood by to watch her, she first kissed her hand, and then, with a sudden impulse of affection, put her arms about her neck, and was drawn into a close embrace. "Are you not pleased with them, my child?" spoke Queen Yolande gently; "they would have decked you in all the colours of the rainbow, and made you to blaze with jewels; but I would not have it The Virgin Maid, I told them, should be clad all in white, and my word prevailed, and thus you see your snowy raiment. I had thought you would be pleased with it, ma mie." "Madame, it is beautiful; I have never dreamed of such. It is too fine, too costly for such as I. I am but a peasant maid--" "You are the chosen of the King of Heaven, my child. You must think also of that. You are now the leader of the King's armies. You have to do honour alike to a Heavenly and an earthly Monarch; and shall we let our champion go forth without such raiment as is fitting to her mission?" Then the Maid bent her head, and answered with sweet gladness: "If it is thus that the world regards me, I will wear these trappings with a glad and thankful heart; for in sooth I would seek to do honour to His Majesty. As for my Lord in the Heavens, I trow that He doth look beneath such matters of gay adornment; yet even so, I would have His mission honoured in the sight of all men, and His messenger fitly arrayed." So the Maid put on her spotless apparel, and looked more than ever like a youthful warrior, going forth with stainless shield, in the quest of chivalrous adventure. The whole Court was entranced by her beauty, her lofty dignity, her strange air of aloofness from the world, which made her move amongst them as a thing apart, and seemed to set a seal upon her every word and act. When she spoke of the coming strife, and her plans for the relief of the beleaguered city, her eyes would shine, a ringing note of authority would be heard in her voice, she would fearlessly enter into debate with the King and his Ministers, and tell them that which she was resolved to do, whether they counselled it or no. At such moments she appeared gifted with a power impossible rightly to describe. Without setting herself up in haughtiness, she yet overbore all opposition by her serene composure and calm serenity in the result. Men of war said that she spoke like a soldier and a strategist; they listened to her in amaze, and wondered what the great La Hire would say when he should arrive, to find that a country maiden had been set over his head. In other matters, too, the Maid knew her mind, and spoke it with calm decision. The Queen of Sicily had not been content with ordering the Maid's dress alone, she had also given orders to the first armourer in Tours to fashion her a suit of light armour for the coming strife. This armour was of white metal, and richly inlaid with silver, so that when the sun glinted upon it, it shone with a dazzling white radiance, almost blinding to behold. The King, also, resolved to do his share, had ordered for her a light sword, with a blade of Toledo steel; but though the Maid gratefully accepted the gift of the white armour, and appeared before all the Court attired therein, and with her headpiece, with its floating white plumes crowning it all, yet, as she made her reverence before the King, she gently put aside his gift of the sword. "Gentle Dauphin," she said, "I thank you from my heart; but for me there is another sword which I must needs carry with me into battle; and I pray you give me leave to send and fetch it from where it lies unknown and forgotten." "Why, Maiden, of what speak you?" he answered; "is not this jewelled weapon good enough? You will find its temper of the best. I know not where you will find a better!" "No better a sword, Sire," she answered; "and yet the one which I must use; for so it hath been told me of my Lord. In the church of Fierbois, six leagues from hence, beneath the high altar, there lies a sword, and this sword must I use. Suffer me, I pray you, to send and fetch it thence. Then shall I be ready and equipped to sally forth against the foes of my country." "But who has told you of this sword, my maiden?" "My Lord did tell me of it, as I knelt before the altar, ere I came to Chinon. It is in the church of St. Catherine; and suffer only my good knight, Jean de Metz, to go and make search for it, and he will surely bring it hither to me." Now I did well remember how, as we knelt in the church at Fierbois in the dimness of the early morn, the Maid had received some message, unheard by those beside her; and gladly did I set forth upon mine errand to seek and bring to her this sword. When I reached Fierbois, which was in the forenoon of the day following, the good priests of the church knew nothing of any such sword; but the fame of the Maid having reached their ears, they were proud and glad that their church of St. Catherine should be honoured thus, and calling together some workmen, they made careful search, and sure enough, before we had dug deep, the spade struck and clinked against metal, and forth from beneath the altar we drew a sword, once a strong and well-tempered weapon, doubtless, but now covered with rust, so that the good priests looked askance at it, and begged to have it to cleanse and polish. It was then too late for my return the same day, so I left it to them, and lodged me in the town, where all the people flocked to hear news of the Maid and of the coming campaign. Then in the morning, with the first of the light, the sword was brought to me; and surely many persons in Fierbois must have sat up all the night, for every speck of rust had been cleansed away, and a velvet scabbard made or found for the weapon, which the priests begged of me to take with it to the Maid as their gift, and with their benediction upon it and her. My return was awaited with some stir of interest, and before I had well dismounted I was hurried, all travel stained as I was, into the presence of the King. There was the Maid waiting also, calm and serene, and when she saw the thing which I carried in my hands, her face lighted; she took several steps forward, and bent her knee as she reverently took the sword, as though she received it from some Higher Power. "It was even as she said?" questioned the King, quickly. "Even so, Sire; the sword of which no man knew aught, was lying buried beneath the high altar of St. Catherine's Church, in Fierbois." A murmur of surprise and gratification ran through the assembly. But there was no surprise upon the Maid's face. "Did you doubt, Sire?" she asked, and he could not meet the glance of her clear eyes. CHAPTER VIII. HOW THE MAID MARCHED FOR ORLEANS. Methinks the Maid loved that ancient sword better than all her shining armour of silver! Strange to say, the jewelled sheath of the King's Toledo blade fitted the weapon from Fierbois, and he supplemented the priests' gift of a scabbard by this second rich one. The Maid accepted it with graceful thanks; yet both the gorgeous cases were laid away, and a simple sheath of leather made; for the sword was to be carried at her side into battle, and neither white nor crimson velvet was suited to such a purpose. Nor would the Maid let us have her sword sharpened for her. A curious look came upon her face as Bertrand pointed out that although now clean and shining, its edges were too blunt for real use. She looked round upon us as we stood before her, and passed her fingers lovingly down the edges of the weapon. "I will keep it as it is," she answered; "for though I must needs carry it into battle with me, I pray my Lord that it may never be my duty to shed Christian blood. And if the English King will but listen to the words of counsel which I have sent to him, perchance it may even now be that bloodshed will be spared." In sooth, I believe that she would far rather have seen the enemy disperse of their own accord, than win the honour and glory of the campaign, which she knew beforehand would bring to her renown, the like of which no woman in the world's history has ever won. She would have gone back gladly, I truly believe, to her home in Domremy, and uttered no plaint, even though men ceased after the event to give her the praise and glory; for herself she never desired such. But we, who knew the temper of the English, were well aware that this would never be. Even though they might by this time have heard somewhat of the strange thing which had happened, and how the French were rallying round the standard of the Angelic Maid, yet would they not readily believe that their crushed and beaten foes would have power to stand against them. More ready would they be to scoff than to fear. Now, at last, after all these many hindrances and delays, all was in readiness for the start. April had well nigh run its course, and nature was looking her gayest and loveliest when the day came that we marched forth out of the Castle of Chinon, a gallant little army, with the Maid in her shining white armour and her fluttering white pennon at our head, and took the road to Tours, where the great and redoubtable La Hire was to meet us, and where we were to find a great band of recruits and soldiers, all eager now to be led against the foe. Much did we wonder how the Generals of the French army would receive the Maid, set, in a sense, over them as Commander-in-Chief of this expedition, with a mandate from the King that she was to be obeyed, and that her counsels and directions were to be followed. We heard conflicting rumours on this score. There were those who declared that so desperate was the condition of the city, and so disheartened the garrison and citizens that they welcomed with joy the thought of this deliverer, and believed already that she was sent of God for their succour and salvation. Others, on the contrary, averred that the officers of the army laughed to scorn the thought of being aided or led by a woman--a peasant--une peronelle de bas lieu, as they scornfully called her--and that they would never permit themselves to be led or guided by one who could have no knowledge of war, even though she might be able to read the secrets of the future. In spite of what had been now ruled by the Church concerning her, there were always those, both in the French and English camps, who called her a witch; and we, who heard so many flying rumours, wondered greatly what view the redoubtable La Hire took of this matter, and Dunois, the Bastard of Orleans, as he was often called. For these two men, with Xaintrailles, were the ruling Generals in Orleans, and their voice would be paramount with the army there, and would carry much weight with those reinforcements for the relieving force which we were to find awaiting us at Tours and at Blois. Now La Hire, as all men know, was a man of great renown, and of immense personal weight and influence. He was a giant in stature, with a voice like a trumpet, and thews of steel; a mighty man in battle, a daring leader, yet cautious and sagacious withal; a man feared and beloved by those whom he led in warfare; a gay roysterer at other times, with as many strange oaths upon his lips as there are saints in the calendar; what the English call a swashbuckler and daredevil; a man whom one would little look to be led or guided by a woman, for he was impatient of counsel, and headstrong alike in thought and action. And this was the man who was to meet us at Tours, form his impression of the Maid, and throw the great weight of his personal influence either into one scale or the other. Truth to tell, I was something nervous of this ordeal, and there were many who shared my doubts and fears. But the Maid rode onward, serene and calm, the light of joy and hope in her eyes, untroubled by any doubts. At last she was on her way to the relief of the beleaguered city; there was no room for misgiving in her faithful heart. We entered Tours amid the clashing of joy bells, the plaudits of the soldiers, and the laughter, the weeping, the blessings of an excited populace, who regarded the Maid as the saviour of the realm. They crowded to their windows and waved flags and kerchiefs. They thronged upon her in the streets to gaze at her fair face and greet her as a deliverer. It was indeed a moving scene; but she rode through it, calm and tranquil, pausing in the press to speak a few words of thanks and greeting, but preserving always her gentle maidenly air of dignity and reserve. And so we came to the house which had been set apart for her use on her stay, and there we saw, standing at the foot of the steps which led from the courtyard into the house, a mighty, mailed figure, the headpiece alone lacking of his full armour, a carven warrior, as it seemed, with folded arms and bent brows, gazing upon us as we filed in under the archway, but making no move to approach us. I did not need the whisper which ran through the ranks of our escort to know that this man was the great and valiant La Hire. As the Maid's charger paused at the foot of the steps, this man strode forward with his hand upraised as in a salute, and giving her his arm, he assisted her to alight, and for a few moments the two stood looking into each other's eyes with mutual recognition, taking, as it were, each the measure of the other. The Maid was the first to speak, her eyes lighting with that deep down, indescribable smile, which she kept for her friends alone. When I saw that smile in her eyes, as they were upraised to La Hire's face, all my fears vanished in a moment. "You are the Dauphin's brave General La Hire, from Orleans," she said; "I thank you, monsieur, for your courtesy in coming thus to meet me. For so can we take counsel together how best the enemies of our country may be overthrown." "You are the Maid, sent of God and the King for the deliverance of the realm," answered La Hire, as he lifted her hand to his lips, "I bid you welcome in the name of Orleans, its soldiers, and its citizens. For we have been like men beneath a spell--a spell too strong for us to break. You come to snap the spell, to break the yoke, and therefore I bid you great welcome on the part of myself and the citizens and soldiers of Orleans. Without your counsels to His Majesty, and the aid you have persuaded him to send, the city must assuredly have fallen ere this. Only the knowledge that help was surely coming has kept us from surrender." "I would the help had come sooner, my General," spoke the Maid; "but soon or late it is one with my Lord, who will give us the promised victory." From that moment friendship, warm and true, was established betwixt the bronzed warrior and the gentle Maid, who took up, as by natural right, her position of equal--indeed, of superior--in command, not with any haughty assumption, not with any arrogant words or looks, but sweetly and simply, as though there were no question but that the place was hers; that to her belonged the ordering of the forces, the overlooking of all. Again and again, even we, who had come to believe so truly in her divine commission, were astonished at the insight she showed, the sagacity of her counsels, the wonderful authority she was able to exert over the soldiers brought together, a rude, untrained, insubordinate mass of men, collected from all ranks and classes of the people, some being little better than bands of marauders, living on prey and plunder, since of regular fighting there had been little of late; others, mercenaries hired by the nobles to swell their own retinues; many raw recruits, fired by ardour at the thought of the promised deliverance; a few regular trained bands, with their own officers in command, but forming altogether a heterogeneous company, by no means easy to drill into order, and swelled by another contingent at Blois, of very much the same material. But the Maid assembled the army together, and thus addressed them. At least, this was the substance of her words; nothing can reproduce the wonderful earnestness and power of her voice and look, for her face kindled as she spoke, and the sunshine playing upon her as she sat her charger in the glory of her silver armour, seemed to encompass her with a pure white light, so that men's eyes were dazzled as they looked upon her, and they whispered one to the other: "The Angelic Maid! The Angelic Maid! surely it is an Angel of God come straight down from Heaven to aid and lead us." "My friends," she spoke, and her voice carried easily to every corner of the great square, packed with a human mass, motionless, hanging upon her words; "My friends, we are about to start forth upon a crusade as holy as it is possible for men to be concerned in, for it is as saviours and deliverers of your brethren and our country that we go; and the Lord of Hosts is with us. He has bidden us march, and He has promised to go with us, even as He was with the Israelites of old. And if we do not see His presence in pillar of cloud by day, and pillar of fire by night, we yet do know and feel Him near us; and He will give abundant proof that He fights upon our side!" She lifted her face for a moment to the sky. She was bareheaded, and every head was bared in that vast crowd as she uttered the name of the Most High. It seemed as though a light from Heaven fell upon her as she spoke, and a deep murmur ran through the throng. It was as if they answered that they needed no other vision than that of the Maid herself. "If then the Lord be with us, must we not show ourselves worthy of His holy presence in our midst? O my friends, since I have been with you these few days, my heart has been pained and grieved by that which I have heard and seen. Oaths and blasphemies fall from your lips, and you scarce know it yourselves. Drunkenness and vice prevail. O my friends, let this no longer be amongst us! Let us cleanse ourselves from all impurities; let our conversation be yea, yea, nay, nay. Let none take the name of the Lord in vain, nor soil His holy cause by vice and uncleanness. O let us all, day by day, as the sun rises anew each morning, assemble to hear Mass, and to receive the Holy Sacrament. Let every man make his confession. Holy priests are with us to hear all, and to give absolution. Let us start forth upon the morrow purified and blessed of God, and let us day by day renew that holy cleansing and blessing, that the Lord may indeed be with us and rest amongst us, and that His heart be not grieved and burdened by that which He shall see and hear amongst those to whom He has promised His help and blessing!" Thus she spoke; and a deep silence fell upon all, in the which it seemed to me the fall of a pin might have been heard. The Maid sat quite still for a moment, her own head bent as though in prayer. Then she lifted it, and a radiant smile passed over her face, a smile as of assurance and thankful joy. She raised her hand and waved it, almost as though she blessed, whilst she greeted her soldiers, and then she turned her horse, the crowd making way for her in deep reverential silence, and rode towards her own lodging, where she remained shut up in her own room for the rest of the day. But upon the following morning a strange thing had happened. Every single camp follower--all the women and all the disorderly rabble that hangs upon the march of an army--had disappeared. They had slunk off in the night, and were utterly gone. The soldiers were gathered in the churches to hear Mass. All that could do so attended where it was known the Maid would be, and when she had received the Sacrament herself, hundreds crowded to do the like; and I suppose there were thousands in the city that day, who, having confessed and received absolution, received the pledge of the Lord's death, though perhaps some of them had not thought of such a duty for years and years. And here I may say that this was not an act for once and all. Day by day in the camp Mass was celebrated, and the Holy Sacrament given to all who asked and came. The Maid ever sought to begin the day thus, and we of her personal household generally followed her example. Even La Hire would come and kneel beside her, a little behind, though it was some while before he desired to partake of the Sacrament himself. But to be near her in this act of devotion seemed to give him joy and confidence and for her sake, because he saw it pained her, he sought to break off his habit of profane swearing, and the use of those strange oaths before which men had been wont to quake. And she, seeing how sorely tried he was to keep from his accustomed habit, did come to his aid with one of her frank and almost boy-like smiles, and told him that he might swear by his baton if he needs must use some expletive; but that no holy name must lightly pass his lips. Strange indeed was it to see the friendship which had so quickly sprung up between that rough warrior and the Maid, whom he could almost have crushed to death between his mighty hands. If all the Generals in the army were as noble minded as he, and as ready to receive her whom God had sent them, we should have little to fear; but there was Dunois yet to reckon with, who had promised to come forth and meet her outside the town (for the blockade, as I have before said, was not perfect; and on the south side men could still come and go with caution and care), and to lead her in triumph within its walls, if the English showed not too great resistance. But even now we were to find how that they did not yet trust the Maid's authority as it should be trusted; and even La Hire was in fault here, as afterwards he freely owned. For the Maid had told them to lead her to the city on the north side, as her plan was to strike straight through the English lines, and scatter the besieging force ere ever she entered the town at all. But since the city lies to the north of the river, and the English had built around it twelve great bastilles, as they called them, and lay in all their strength on this side, it seemed too venturesome to attack in such a manner; and in this La Hire and Dunois were both agreed. But La Hire did not tell the Maid of any disagreements, but knowing the country to be strange to her, he led her and the army by a route which she believed the right one, till suddenly we beheld the towers of Orleans and the great surrounding fortifications rising up before our eyes; and, behold! the wide river with its bridge more than half destroyed, lay between us and our goal! At this sight the eyes of the Maid flashed fire, and she turned them upon La Hire, but spoke never a word. His face flushed a dull crimson with a sudden, unexpected shame. To do him justice be it said, that (as we later heard) he had been against this deception after having seen the Maid; but there were now many notable generals and marshals and officers with the army, all of whom were resolved upon this course of action, which had been agreed upon beforehand with Dunois, and they had overborne his objections, which were something faint-hearted perhaps, for with his love and admiration for the Maid, he trembled, as he now explained to her, to lead her by so perilous a route, and declared that she could well be conducted into the city through the Burgundy gate, by water, without striking a blow, instead of having to fight her way in past the English bastions. "I thank you for your care for me, my friend," she answered, "but it were better to have obeyed my voice. The English arrows could not have touched me. We should have entered unopposed. Now much precious time must needs be lost, for how can this great army be transported across yonder river?--and the bridge, even if we could dislodge the English from the tower of Les Tourelles, is broken down and useless." Indeed it seemed plain to all that the Generals had made a great blunder; for though we marched on to Checy, where Dunois met us, and whence some of the provisions brought for the starving city could be dispatched in the boats assembled there, it was plain that there was no transport sufficient for the bulk of the army; and the Maid, as she and Dunois stood face to face, at last regarded him with a look of grave and searching scrutiny. "Are you he whom men call the Bastard of Orleans?" "Lady, I am; and I come to welcome you with gladness, for we are sore beset by our foes; yet all within the city are taking heart of grace, believing that a Deliverer from Heaven has been sent to them." "They think well," answered the Maid, "and right glad am I to come. But wherefore have I been led hither by this bank, instead of the one upon which Talbot and his English lie?" "Lady, the wisest of our leaders held that this would be the safest way." "The counsel of God and our Lord is more sure and more powerful than that of generals and soldiers," she answered gravely. "You have made an error in this. See to it that such error be not repeated. I will that in all things my Lord be obeyed." The Generals stood dumb and discomfited before her; a thrill ran through the army when her words were repeated there; but, indeed, we all quickly saw the wisdom of her counsel and the folly of her adversaries; for the bulk of the army had perforce to march back to Blois to cross the river there, whilst only a thousand picked men with the chiefest of the Generals and the convoys of provisions prepared to enter the city by water and pass through the Burgundy Gate. At the first it seemed as though even this would be a dangerous task, for the wind blew hard in a contrary direction, and the deeply-laden boats began to be in peril of foundering. But as we stood watching them from the bank, and saw their jeopardy, and some were for recalling them and waiting, the Maid's voice suddenly rang forth in command: "Leave them alone, and hasten forward with the others. The wind will change, and a favouring breeze shall carry us all safe into the city. The English shall not fire a shot to hinder us, for the fear of the Maid has fallen upon them!" We gazed at her in wonder as she stood a little apart, her face full of power and calm certainty. And indeed, it was but a very few minutes later that the wind dropped to a dead calm, and a light air sprang up from a contrary direction, and the laden boats gladly spreading sail, floated quietly onwards with their precious load towards the suffering city. Then we embarked, somewhat silently, for the awe which fell upon those who had never seen the Maid before, extended even to us. Moreover, with those frowning towers of the English so close upon us, crowded with soldiers who seemed to know what was happening, and who were coming into Orleans, it was scarce possible not to look for resistance and hostile attack. But curious as it may seem, not a shot was fired as we passed along. A silence strange and sinister seemed to hang over the lines of the enemy; but when we reached the city how all was changed! It was about eight o'clock in the evening when at last we finished our journey by water and land, and entered the devoted town. There the chiefest citizens came hurrying to meet us, leading a white charger for their Deliverer to ride upon. And when she was mounted, the people thronged about her weeping and shouting, blessing and hailing her as their champion and saviour. The streets were thronged with pale-faced men; women and children hung from the windows, showering flowers at our feet. Torches lit up the darkening scene, and shone from the breastplates and headpieces of the mailed men. But the Maid in her white armour seemed like a being from another sphere; and the cry of "St. Michael! St. Michael himself!" resounded on all sides, and one did not wonder. Nothing would serve the Maid but to go straight to the Cathedral first, and offer thanksgiving for her arrival here, and the people flocked with her, till the great building was filled to overflowing with her retinue of soldiers and her self-constituted followers. Some begged of her to address them from the steps at the conclusion of the brief service, but she shook her head. "I have no words for them--only I love them all," she answered, with a little natural quiver of emotion in her voice. "Tell them so, and that I have come to save them. And then let me go home." So La Hire stood forth and gave the Maid's message in his trumpet tones, and the Maid was escorted by the whole of the joyful and loving crowd to the house of the Treasurer Boucher, where were her quarters, and where she was received with acclamation and joy. And thus the Maid entered the beleaguered city of Orleans. CHAPTER IX. HOW THE MAID ASSUMED COMMAND AT ORLEANS. The house of the Treasurer was a beautiful building in the Gothic style, and weary as was the Maid with the toils and excitements through which she had passed, I saw her eyes kindle with pleasure and admiration as she was ceremoniously led into the great banqueting hall, where the tables were spread with abundant good cheer (despite the reduced condition of the city), to do honour to her who came as its Deliverer. There was something solemn and church-like in these surroundings which appealed at once to the Maid. She had a keen eye for beauty, whether of nature or in the handiwork of man, and her quick penetrating glances missed nothing of the stately grandeur of the house, the ceremonious and courtly welcome of the Treasurer, its master, or the earnest, wistful gaze of his little daughter Charlotte, who stood holding fast to her mother's hand in the background, but feasting her great dark eyes upon the wonderful shining figure of the Maid, from whose white armour the lights of the great hall flashed back in a hundred points of fire. The greeting of the master of the house being over, the Maid threw off for a moment the grave dignity of her bearing throughout this trying day, and became a simple girl again. With a quick grace of movement she crossed the space which divided her from the little child, and kneeling suddenly down, took the wondering little one in her arms, and held her in a close embrace. "Ma petite, ma mie, ma tres chere," those nearest heard her murmur. "Love me, darling, love me! I have a little sister at home who loves me, but I had to go away and leave her. Perhaps I may never see her again. Try to love me instead, and comfort my heart, for sometimes I am very, very weary, and hungry for the love that I have lost!" Now, one might have thought that so young a child--for she was not more than eight years old, and small for her years--would have been affrighted at the sudden approach of the shining warrior, about whom so many stories had been told, and who looked more like the Archangel Michael, as many thought, than a creature of human flesh and blood. But instead of showing any fear, the child flung her arms about the neck of the Maid, and pressed kisses upon her face--her headpiece she had removed at her entrance--and when the mother would have loosened her hold, and sent the child away with her attendant, little Charlotte resisted, clinging to her new friend with all her baby strength, and the Maid looked pleadingly up into the kindly face of the lady, and said: "Ah, madame, I pray you let her remain with me. It is so long since I felt the arms of a child about my neck!" And so the little one stayed to the banquet, and was given the place of honour beside the Maid. But neither of these twain had any relish for the dainty meats and rich dishes served for us. As on the march, so now in the walls of the city, the Maid fared as simply as the rudest of her soldiers. She mixed water with her wine, took little save a slice or two of bread, and though to please her hosts she just touched one or two specially prepared dishes, it was without any real relish for them, and she was evidently glad when she was able to make excuse to leave the table and go to the room prepared for her. But here again she showed her simple tastes, for when the great guest chamber was shown her she shrank a little at its size and luxury, and, still holding the child's hand in hers, she turned to the mother who was in attendance and said: "I pray you, sweet lady, let me whilst I am your guest share the room of this little daughter of yours. I am but a simple country girl, all this grandeur weighs me down. If I might but sleep with this little one in my arms--as the little sister at home loved to lie--I should sleep so peacefully and have such happy dreams! Ah, madame!--let me have my will in this!" And Madame Boucher, being a mother and a true woman, understood; and answered by taking the Maid in her arms and kissing her. And so, as long as the Maid remained in Orleans, she shared the little white bedroom of the child of the house, which opened from that of the mother, and the bond which grew up between the three was so close and tender a one, that I trow the good Treasurer and his wife would fain have regarded this wonderful Maid as their own daughter, and kept her ever with them, had duty and her voices not called her elsewhere when the first part of her task was done. Now Bertrand and I, together with Pierre, her brother, and the Chevalier d'Aulon and Sir Guy de Laval, were lodged in the same house, and entertained most hospitably by the Treasurer, who sat up with us far into the night after our arrival, listening with earnest attention to all we could tell him respecting the Maid, and telling us on his part of the feeling in Orleans anent her and her mission, and what we might expect to follow her arrival here. "The townsfolk seem well-nigh wild for joy at sight of her," spoke De Laval, "and the more they see of her, the more they will love her and reverence her mission. I was one who did openly scoff, or at least had no faith in any miracle, until that I saw her with mine own eyes; and then some voice in my heart--I know not how to speak more plainly of it--or some wonderful power in her glance or in her voice, overcame me. And I knew that she had in very truth come from God, and I have never doubted of her divine commission from that day to this. It will be the same here in Orleans, if, indeed, there be any that doubt." "Alas! there are--too many!" spoke the Treasurer, shaking his head, "I am rejoiced that our two greatest Generals, Dunois and La Hire, have become her adherents, for I myself believe that she has been sent of God for our deliverance, and so do the townsfolk almost to a man. But there are numbers of the lesser officers--bold men and true--who have fought valiantly throughout the siege, and who have great influence with the soldiers they lead, and these men are full of disgust at the thought of being led by a woman--a girl--and one of low degree. They would be willing for her to stand aloft and prophesy victory for their arms, but that she should arm herself and lead them in battle, and direct operations herself, fills them with disgust and contempt. There is like to be trouble, I fear, with some of these. There is bold De Gamache, for example, who declares he would sooner fold up his banner and serve as a simple soldier in the ranks, than hold a command subservient to that of a low-born woman!" That name as applied to the Angelic Maid set our teeth on edge; yet was it wonderful that some should so regard her? "Let them but see her--and they will change their tune!" spake Bertrand quickly. "A low-born woman! Would they speak thus of the Blessed Virgin? And yet according to the wisdom of the flesh it would be as true of one as of the other." The Treasurer spoke with grave thoughtfulness: "Truly do I think that any person honoured by the Lord with a direct mission from Himself becomes something different by virtue of that mission from what he or she was before. Yet we may not confound this mission of the Maid here in Orleans with that one which came to the Blessed Mary." "Nor had I any thought," answered Bertrand, "of likening one to the other, save inasmuch as both have been maidens, born in lowly surroundings, yet chosen for purity of heart and life, and for childlike faith and obedience, for the honour of receiving a divine commission. There the parallel stops; for there can be no comparison regarding the work appointed to each. Yet even as this Maid shall fulfil her appointed task in obedience to the injunctions received, she is worthy to be called the handmaid of the Lord." "To that I have nought to say but yea," answered the Treasurer heartily, "and I pray our Lord and the Blessed Virgin to be with her and strengthen her, for I fear me she will have foes to contend with from within as well as from without the city; and as all men know, it is the distrust and contradiction of so-called friends which is harder to bear than the open enmity of the foe." It was difficult for us, vowed heart and soul to the cause of the Maid, and honoured by her friendship and confidence, to believe that any could be so blind as not to recognise in her a God-sent messenger, whom they would delight to follow and to honour. Yet when I walked out upon the following morning--a sunny first of May--to have a good look round at the position of the fortifications, the ring of English bastilles to the north, the blockading towers upon the southern bank, I was quickly aware of a great deal of talk going on amongst the soldiers and the officers which was by no means favourable to the cause of the Maid. Voices were hushed somewhat at my approach, for though none knew me, I was of course a stranger, and therefore likely to have entered the town in the train of the Maid, who had yesterday made her appearance there. But I heard enough to be sure that what the Treasurer had said last evening was likely to be true. The soldiers were disposed to scoff at being led by a woman, and the officers to grumble at having had to bear all the burden of the long siege, and then when the King did send an army for the relief, to send it under the command of this Maid, who would bear away the honour and glory which otherwise all might have shared. From their point of view, perhaps, this discontent was not unreasonable; but as I looked upon the works around me, I marvelled how it had been possible for the English, unprotected as they must have originally been, to erect these great towers for their own shelter, and from which to batter the town with their cannon and great stone balls, when the French in great numbers and protected by strong walls, ought to have been able to sally forth continually and so to harass them that the construction of such buildings should have been impossible. The great Dunois had shown considerable acumen. He had himself destroyed all the suburbs of the town which lay without the walls, so that the English might find no shelter there, and when they had effected a lodgment on the south side of the river, he had destroyed the greater part of the bridge, thus making it impossible for the enemy to cross and take possession of the town. But he had not stopped the erection of those threatening towers circling round the city to the north, nor the construction of those still stronger blockading fortresses on the south side, Les Tourelles guarding the fragment of the broken bridge, and Les Augustins not far away. When I spoke to one grizzled old soldier about it, he shrugged his shoulders and made reply: "What would you? Those English are helped of the devil himself. We have tried to stand against them, but it is all to no purpose. Some demon of fighting enters into them, and they know that we shall fly--and fly we do. At last there were none who would face them. Our generals sought in vain to lead them. You should have heard La Hire swearing at them. O-he, O-he, he is a master of the art! Some of us would have followed him; but the rest--one might as well have asked a flock of sheep to go against the wolf, telling them they were fifty to one! Not they! It was witchcraft, or something like it. They sat still on these ramparts and watched the English working like moles or like ants, and never lifted a finger. Pouf! When men get to that they are not fit to fight They had better go home and ply the distaff with the women." "And let a woman come and lead their comrades to battle!" I said, laughing. "Have you seen the wonderful Maid of whom all the world is talking?" "No; at least, I only caught a gleam of light upon her white armour last night; but as I said to the boys in the guardroom, I care not whether she be woman, witch, or angel; if she will bring back heart and courage, and make men again of all these chicken-hearted poltroons, I will follow her to the death wherever she may lead. I am sick with shame for the arms of France!" "Bravely spoken, my friend!" I cried, giving him my hand; "and if that be the spirit of the army, I doubt not but that a few days will see such a turn in the tide of warfare as shall make the whole world stand aghast!" "Then you believe in her?" quoth the old soldier, looking me shrewdly up and down. "With my whole heart!" I answered, as I turned and took my way back to my quarters. That same day the Maid held a council of war, at which all the officers of any importance were permitted to attend; and here it was that she received the first real check since she had received the King's commission and royal command. "Let us attack the foe at once, and without delay, messires!" she said, sitting at the head of the council table, fully armed, save for her headpiece, and speaking in her clear, sweet, full tones, wherein power and confidence were blended; "the Lord of Hosts is on our side. Let us go forth in His strength, and the victory will be ours." But they listened to her in silent consternation and amaze. Here was this inexperienced girl, blind with enthusiasm, drunk with success, her head completely turned by her reception last night, actually advising an assault upon the enemy before the arrival of the army of relief, which had been forced to return to Blois to cross the river, and which could not arrive for a few more days. What madness would she next propose? Well, at least La Hire and Dunois were there to curb her folly and impetuosity. A chit of a girl like that to sit and tell them all to go forth to certain death at her command! As though they would not want all their strength to aid the relieving army to enter when it should appear! As though they were going to weaken themselves beforehand by any mad scheme of hers! Thus the storm arose. Even La Hire, Dunois, and the Treasurer himself, were against her. As for the lesser officers, when they began to speak, they scarce knew how to contain themselves, and restrain their anger and scorn from showing itself too markedly towards one who held the King's mandate of command. And of late the Maid had always been listened to with such honour and respect! How would she bear this contradiction and veiled contempt, she who had come to assume the command of the city and its armies at the King's desire? She sat very still and quiet at the table, as the storm hummed about her. Her clear gaze travelled from face to face as one or another of the officers rose and spoke. Sometimes a slight flush of red dyed her cheek for a moment; but never once did anger cloud her brow, or impatience or contempt mar the wonderful serenity of her beautiful eyes. Only once did she speak during the whole of the debate, after her opening words had been delivered, and that was after a very fiery oration on the part of a youthful officer, whose words contained more veiled scorn of her and her mission than any other had dared to show. Instead of looking at him either in anger or in reproach, the Maid's own wonderful smile shone suddenly upon him as he concluded. Then she spoke: "Captain de Gamache, you think yourself my foe now; but that will soon be changed, and I thank you beforehand for the brave, true service which you shall presently render me. But meantime, beware of rashness; for victory shall not come to the city without the Maid." He gazed at her--we all gazed at her--in amaze, not knowing what her words portended. But she gave no explanation. She only rose to her feet and said: "Then, gentlemen, since the attack is not to be yet--not till the arrival of the relieving force, let me make the tour of the battlements, and examine the defences of the city. I would that you had faith to let me lead you forth today; but the time will come when I shall not have to plead with you--you will follow gladly in my wake. For the rest, it would perchance be a sorrow to my brave men, who have marched so far with me, not to partake in the victory which the Lord is about to send us; wherefore I will the more readily consent to delay, though, let me tell you, you are in the wrong to withstand the wishes of the Commander of the King's armies, and the messenger of the King of Kings." I verily believe that she shamed them by her gentle friendliness more than she would have done by any outburst of wrath. Had she urged them now, I am not sure but what they would have given her her way; but she did not. She put her white velvet cap, with its nodding plumes, upon her head, and taking with her the chiefest of the generals and her own immediate retinue, she made the tour of the walls and defences of the city, showing such a marvellous insight into the tactics of war that she astonished all by her remarks and by her injunctions. Suddenly, as we were walking onwards, she paused and lifted her face with a wonderful rapt expression upon it. Then she turned to Dunois, and said with quiet authority: "Mon General, I must ask of you to take a small body of picked men, and ride forth towards Blois, and see what bechances there. I trow there is trouble among the men. Traitors are at work to daunt their hearts. Go and say that the Maid bids them fear nothing, and that they shall enter Orleans in safety. The English shall not be suffered to touch them. Go at once!" "In broad daylight, lady, and before the very eyes of the foe?" "Yes, yes," she answered instantly; "I will stand here and watch you. No hurt shall be done to you or to your company." So Dunois went at her command, and we saw him and his little band ride fearlessly through the English lines; and scarce could we believe our eyes when we noted that no weapon was raised against them; not even an arrow was shot off as they passed. "She speaks the words of God. She is His messenger!" whispered the men who stood by; and her fame flew from mouth to mouth, till a strange awe fell upon all. She was never idle during those days of waiting. She asked news of the letter she had sent to the English, and heard it had been delivered duly, though the herald had not returned. She gave commission to La Hire to demand his instant release, and this was accomplished speedily; for the bold captain, of his own initiative, vowed he would behead every prisoner they had in the city if the man were not given up at the command of the Maid. I am very sure no such act of summary vengeance would have been permitted, but the man was instantly released and came and told us how that the letter had been read with shouts of insulting laughter, and many derisive answers suggested; none of which, however, had been dispatched, as Talbot, the chief in command of the English armies, had finally decreed that it became not his dignity to hold any parley with a witch. And yet she could scarce believe that they should none of them understand how that she was indeed come from God, and that they must be lamentably overthrown if they would not hear her words. On the third day of her stay in the city she caused her great white banner to be carried forth before her, and riding a white horse, clad in her silver armour, and clasping her banneret in her hand she rode slowly out upon the broken fragment of the bridge opposite to the tower of Les Tourelles, and begged a parley from the English general in command. It was not Lord Talbot who came forth and stood upon his own end of the bridge, gazing haughtily across the space which divided them; but it was a notable soldier, whom the French called Classidas, though I have been told that his real name was Sir William Glassdale. To him the Maid addressed herself in her clear mellow voice, which could be heard across the flowing river: "Retournez de la part Dieu a l'Angleterre!" was the burden of her charge, imploring him to have mercy upon himself and his soldiers, as else many hundreds of them, and himself also, must perish miserably, and perchance even without the offices of the Church. But she was answered by roars of mocking laughter from the soldiers of the fort, and worse still, by gross insults from Classidas himself, hurled across at her from a biting tongue, which carried like the note of a trumpet. Silently she stood and gazed at him; mournfully she turned and rode back to the town. "May God have mercy upon their souls!" she prayed; and for the rest of the day she was sorrowful and sad. "If it could have been done without bloodshed!" she murmured again and yet again. Ah, and then the day when the news came that the relieving army was in sight! Was she sad or pensive then? No! She sprang to her feet; she set down the little Charlotte, who was playing in her arms; she seized her weapons, her page flew to bring her full armour. Her horse was already in waiting; she swung upon his back. She waved her hand and called to us to rally about her. "The English are preparing to fight!" she cried (how did she know? none had told her), "but follow me, and they will strike no blow." Already La Hire was at her side, seeking to dissuade her from leaving the shelter of the town. She smiled at him, and rode through the gate, her white banner floating in the wind. "See yonder; that is the point of danger. We will station ourselves there, and watch our brave army march past. They shall not be hurt nor dismayed. All shall be well!" So we rode, wondering and amazed, behind and around her, and at the appointed spot, in the very midst of the English lines, we halted, and made a great avenue for the army from Blois to pass through. All gazed in wonder at the Maid. All saluted deeply. The English in their towers gazed in amaze, but fired no shot. We all passed into the city in safety. Great God, but how would it be with our Maid when the real battle and bloodshed should begin? CHAPTER X. HOW THE MAID LED US INTO BATTLE. "It was well indeed that you sent me forth on that mission, my Chieftainess," spoke Dunois, as we sat at the long table in the Treasurer's house, refreshing ourselves after the fatigues of the march to and from the city, and the anxiety of awaiting an attack, which had not come. He bowed towards the Maid in speaking, calling her by a playful title in vogue amongst the officers and Generals who were her friends. "Though what prompted you to that act of sagacity is more than I know. I had no misgivings that there would be trouble with the army." "My voices warned me," answered the Maid gently. "It was not much; yet a little leaven often leavens the whole lump. They needed just the leader's eye and voice to recall them to their duty." "Truly that is just how the matter stood," spoke Sir Guy in low tones to us twain, Bertram and I, who sat on either side of him at the other end of the board. He had been one to depart and return with Dunois, and we looked eagerly to him for explanation. "There are ever timid spirits in all ranks, and traitors or faint-hearted friends are never far away in such times as these. The army which would have followed the Maid to the death with joy, felt depression and disappointment at being parted from her. Had they been able to ford the river and march straight into the city, there would have been no trouble, no tremors or doubts; but the turning back was a discouragement, and alas! the French have had too much of this of late. There were whisperers at work seeking to undermine faith in the Maid and her mission. As she says, no great hurt was done; it was but the work of a few--and some of these priests, who should better have understood the counsels of God--but a little leaven will work mightily in the lump, as she herself did justly remark; and ere we reached Blois, we had heard rumours that the army was talking of disbanding itself and dispersing hither and thither. The truth was not so bad as that; but there was wavering and doubt in the ranks. "Our appearance with the message from the Maid worked like a charm. The soldiers, when they knew that she had been told of their hesitation, were instantly horribly ashamed. They clamoured to be led back to her, to show the mettle of which they were made. I trow they will not waver again, now that she hath them beneath her eye." "It is marvellous how she doth hold them by the power of her glance, by her gentleness and devotion. And, look you, what hath she done to the English? It was rumoured through the city that so soon as the relief army approached the English lines, there would be an attack in force, and our comrades would be driven back at the sword's point, and have to fight every inch of the way. Yet what has been the truth? The Maid led us to the spot which commanded the road--well in the heart of the English lines. Their fortresses were humming like hives of bees disturbed. The English knew what was being done, and watched it all; yet not a gun was fired, not an archer launched his shaft, not a man moved out to oppose the entrance of the relief force nor even the convoy of provisions for the garrison. They watched it all as men in a dream, not a dog moved his tongue against us." "She told us it would be so," spoke I, leaning towards Sir Guy, "there will be fighting anon; but it was not to be then. Surely their arms were holden by a power they wot not of. If she herself had not gone forth to guard the way--standing like the flaming cherubim with the sword which turned every way--I misdoubt me but that a heavy action must have been fought, ere the army was suffered to enter the gates." There was much talk all down the table of these matters; but the Maid took little part in this. Her eyes were heavy, and she looked weary and pale. I doubt not she had spent the night previous in vigil and prayer, as was so often her wont. When we rose from our repast, she retired into a small inner room reserved for her use, and the little Charlotte went with her. A curtain, partly drawn, shut off this room from the outer one in which we knights and some of her pages and gentlemen sat talking; and I was just able to see from where I sat that the Maid had laid herself down upon a couch, the little one nestled beside her, and I felt sure by her stillness and immobility that she was soon soundly asleep, taking the rest she sorely needed after the exertions and excitements of the early hours of the day. Our conversation languished somewhat, for the warmth of the May afternoon made us all drowsy. We, like the Maid herself, had laid aside our coats of mail, and were enjoying a spell of rest and leisure; and there was silence in both the rooms, when suddenly we--if indeed we slept--were awakened by the voice of the Maid speaking in the tones of one who dreams. "I must up and against the English!" she cried, and at the first word I started broad awake and was on my feet at the door of communication, looking towards her. She still lay upon the couch, but her eyes were wide open and fixed; her lips moved. "I hear! I hear!" she went on, yet still as one who dreams, "I am ready--I will obey. Only tell me what I must do. Is it against the towers I must go, to assail them? Or is it that Fastolffe comes against us with yet another host?" Little Charlotte here pulled the Maid by the hand, crying out: "What are you saying? To whom do you speak? There is nobody here but you and me!" The Maid sprang to her feet, wide awake now in an instant. She bent for one moment over the wondering child, and kissed her tenderly, as though to soothe the alarm in the baby eyes. "Run to your mother, ma mie, for I must off and away on the instant," then wheeling round with her air of martial command, she called to me and said, "To arms at once! I must to the front! French blood is flowing. They are seeking to act without me. O my poor soldiers, they are falling and dying! To horse! to horse! I come to save them!" Was she dreaming? What did it mean? The town seemed as quiet as the still summer afternoon! Not a sound of tumult broke the silence of the streets. Yet the Maid was having us arm her with lightning speed, and Bertrand had rushed off at the first word for her horse and ours. "I know not what they are doing," spoke the Maid, "but my voices tell me to fly to their succour! Ah! why could they not have told me before! Have I not ever been ready and longing to lead them against the foe?" She was ready now. We were all ready, and the echoes of the quiet house awoke beneath our feet as we clattered down the staircase to the courtyard below, where already the horses were standing pawing the ground with impatience, seeming to scent the battle from afar. The Maid swung herself lightly to the saddle with scarce a touch from me. "My banner! My banner!" she suddenly cried; and looking upwards we saw a pretty sight. The little Charlotte, her mother beside her, was hanging out of the window, the light staff of the Maid's white banneret clasped in her chubby hands; and she was leaning out of the window, holding it towards the white mailed figure, of whom (in armour) she always spoke, in hushed tone, as mon ange. The Maid looked upwards, kissed her gauntletted hand to the little one, seized the staff of her banner, and then, calling upon her followers in clear tones of command, dashed out through the gateway into the street beyond, and without an instant's hesitation turned towards that gate of the city nearest to the English bastille named St. Loup. And though we all spurred after her, so that the sparks flew from under our horses' feet, and the Chevalier d'Aulon brought up the rear bearing the great white standard, which was to lead the armies into battle, we none of us knew wherefore we had come forth nor whither we were going; and the city being yet still and quiet, the citizens rushed to doors and windows to watch us pass by, and shouted questions to us which we were not able to answer. Now, the house of the Treasurer is hard by the Renart Gate, and we were making for the Burgundy Gate; so you who know Orleans will understand that we had the whole distance of the city to traverse ere we cleared the walls. And sure enough, as we approached the fortifications upon the eastern side, a change came over the spirit of the scene; signs of excitement and fear and wonder began to show themselves; the walls were alive with men at arms, gazing fixedly out eastward, shouting, gesticulating, wild with a tumult of emotion. Soldiers buckling on their arms, citizens with pale, yet resolute, faces, and swords or axes in their hands, were hurrying forth, and at sight of the Maid on her chestnut charger (for the Crusader was ever her favourite horse, and she had declared that he must carry her into her first battle whenever that should be) they shouted aloud with joy, and vowed themselves her servants and followers, wherever she should lead them. A young blacksmith, armed with a great club, was hanging upon my stirrup, and bounding along beside my horse with a swiftness and strength which excited my admiration. From him I heard first of the thing which had taken place. "It was De Gamache and some of the other lesser officers who designed it," he cried. "They declared that the power of the English was already broken; that they would not leave their walls or show fight today; that already they had grown faint hearted, and were ready to fly before the French. "My Captain, I tell you the truth, these men are jealous of the Angelic Maid whom Heaven has sent us. They say that she will take from them all the honour and glory; that they will fight and risk their lives, but that she alone will have the praise. So they were full of bitterness and anger; and some, methinks, may have thought to shame her by showing that they could act without her aid, and do the work she has come to do, whilst she takes her rest and holds her councils. So, gathering a band of soldiers together, these officers have sallied forth to try and storm and take the fortress of St. Loup, which lies some two thousand English yards from the walls along the river banks. But the soldiers on the walls are shouting out that the English have swarmed forth like angry bees, and are beating back our soldiers and slaying them by the score." "They should have known better than to go forth without the knowledge and command of the Maid," I said sternly, and the young man at my side nodded vehemently, his face alight. "That is what we said--we others--we citizens, who have seen how powerless the soldiers are against the English. Have they not fought again and again, and what has come of it but loss and defeat? And now that the good God has sent a Deliverer, it is like flying in His face to seek and do without her. I said as much again and again. I knew no good would come of it. But when we saw the Maid herself flying to the rescue, then did I vow that I, too, would fight under her banner. For now I know that God will give us the victory!" We were at the Burgundy Gate by this time and, dashing through, we saw a terrible sight. The whole open plain between the walls of the town and the fortress of St. Loup was covered with soldiers, strewn with dying and dead. A horrible sort of fight was going on, horrible to us, because the French were in full retreat before our foe, going down like sheep before the butcher's knife, rushing panic stricken hither and thither as men demented, whilst the English soldiers, as though ashamed of their recent inaction and paralysis, were fiercely pursuing, shouting "Kill! kill! kill!" as they went about their work of slaughter, driving back their enemies, and striking at them remorselessly. Here and there a brave officer, with his band of chosen followers, would be presenting a bold face to the foe, making a stand and seeking to rally the flying ranks. I was certain that I saw De Gamache himself, hewing his way like a very Paladin through the ranks of the English, and dealing death and destruction wherever he went. But the valour of a few had no power to turn the fortunes of the field; and the rout had already begun, when the Maid and her attendants, closely followed by an enthusiastic band of soldiers and citizens, dashed forth from the Burgundy Gate, and mingled with the flying French hastening towards the city for safety. "Courage, my children, courage!" cried the Maid, waving her white pennon. "Be not dismayed. The Lord has heard your cries. He has sent me to your aid. Take courage! Fear nothing, for the victory shall be ours!" She did not even pause to note the effect of her words upon them, but sped onwards, fearless of danger, right into the very heart of the battle. We followed and closed up round her; but that shining white figure could not be hidden. The English saw it bearing down upon them, and instantly there was wavering in their ranks. Before our swords had had time to strike at them, something touched them as with an icy hand. "The Maid! the Maid! The White Witch!" they cried, and they paused in their pursuit to gaze upon that dazzling figure, and methinks their hearts melted like wax within them. From behind now arose a mighty tumult, and shouts and cries as of triumph thundered from the city walls. Dunois and La Hire, more tardily advised of what was happening, but prompt and decisive in action, were galloping out of the Gate at the head of the picked soldiers under their command. Rank behind rank we could see them flashing through the shadow into the sunshine, and dashing forward in compact order, their gaze fixed full upon the Maid in the centre of the plain, who stood with uplifted sword and fluttering pennon, a veritable angel of the battle. But we saw other sights, too; for Lord Talbot was not idle on his side, but sent forth from other of the bastilles bodies of men to the aid of the defenders of St. Loup. The whole plain was filled with surging masses of soldiers, rushing one upon the other in the fury of the fray. How would the Maid bear it? She whose tender heart ached at the thought of human suffering, and whose soul was filled with yearning sorrow for men struck down in their sins. I pressed up towards her and saw her pitiful eyes fixed upon a convoy of wounded men, whom we had sent to rescue from their peril, lying as they did in the very heart of the plain. The eyes which had been flashing fire a moment before, were suffused with tears, as the melancholy procession passed her by. She turned to her page and said, "Ride quickly into the city, and bid the priests come forth to hear the confessions and give absolution to the dying. Lose not a moment! Tell them that souls are every moment being hurried to their last account. Bid them make haste and come, and let them give equal care to friend and foe; for in death all men are equal in the sight of God, and I would not that any English soldier or prisoner should fall without the consolations of religion." Then, having thus done all that she could for the wounded and the dying, the Maid was once again the resolute soldier. Her keen eyes swept the plain; she saw with lightning speed where the need was the greatest, where the peril to the French cause was direst, and sweeping into the midst of the press, her sword and her banner flashing in the sunshine, she ever brought succour and victory in her wake. No foe could stand before her. Not that she struck blows with her own hand. There seemed no need for that, and when at the close of the day I relieved her of her arms, there was no spot of blood upon her shining blade, though her coat of silver mail had received stains from the fray. She was like the Angel of Victory, flashing through the ranks of the combatants. Wherever she appeared, the flying French turned back to face the foe, and the pursuing English wavered, paused, and finally broke rank and fled backwards to the shelter of their walls and forts. Our men fought gallantly--let me not deny them their due--soldiers and citizens alike, who had come forth with and after the Maid, all were inspired by confidence and courage. But it was her presence in the ranks which gave assurance of victory. Wherever French soldiers wavered it was when she was far away and her back towards them. Yet so soon as she turned in their direction--and some power seemed to whisper to her whenever her soldiers were dismayed--and galloped to their assistance, all was well again; and ere an hour had passed the English were driven back within their towers, and the victory was ours. Dunois and La Hire rode up to the Maid and saluted. From the city in our rear we could already hear the pealing of the joy bells, the triumphant acclamation of the populace. "Let us lead you back thither to receive the plaudits you have so well deserved," spoke Dunois, who was man enough to give all the credit of the victory to the Maid. "Right valiantly have you accomplished your task. Now let us take you to receive the gratitude of the town." "Accomplished!" repeated the Maid with a glance of surprise. "Why, my friends, the task is scarcely yet begun!" They gazed at her in amazement; but she calmly pointed towards the frowning walls and battlements of St. Loup. "We must take yonder tower," she said quietly, "that is what our brave, but rash young officers set themselves to do. They shall not be disappointed. It shall be ours ere night fall upon us. Call to me the bold De Gamache; I would have speech with him and his comrades." The greater Generals looked at her and at one another, speaking no word. The walls and battlements of St. Loup were strong and well defended. The tower could spout fire and smoke like a living monster. Already the troops had marched far and fought hotly. Surely if assault were to be made it should wait for another day. Thus they communed together a stone's throw from the Maid; but she only looked upon them with her deep inward smile, and softly I heard her speak the words: "No, it must be done today." De Gamache rode up, and some half dozen other officers with him. His face was stained with blood and blackened by smoke. He had a scarf bound about his left arm; but his bearing was bold and resolute, and though his cheek flushed at the clear, direct gaze of the Maid's eyes, he neither faltered nor trembled as he stood before her. "You did desire a good thing, my Captain," she said, "and had you told me of your brave wish, I would have put myself at your head and led you to victory forthwith. Yet this victory has not been forfeited, only delayed by your eager rashness. Say, if I lead you myself, this very hour, against yon frowning tower, will you follow me like brave soldiers of the Cross, and not turn back till my Lord has given us the victory? For He will deliver yon place into our hands, albeit not without bloodshed, not without stress or strife. Many must be slain ere we can call it ours, but will you follow and take it?" The shout which arose from a thousand throats rang to the welkin, and methinks must have smote with dread import upon the English ears. The Maid's voice seemed to float through the air, and penetrate to the extreme limits of the crowd, or else her words were taken up and repeated by a score of eager tongues, and so ran through the mighty muster with thrilling import. The eyes were dazzled by the flashing blades as men swung them above their heads. "Lead us, O Maid, lead us! We follow to death or victory! We fear nothing so that you are our leader and our guide!" There was no withstanding a spirit like that! La Hire's voice was one of the foremost in the cry; his great blade the first to leap from its scabbard. Sage counsels of war, prompted by experience, had to give way before a power different from anything which the veterans had known before. With a dash, the elan of which was a marvellous sight to see, the soldiers poured themselves like a living stream against the walls of St. Loup. The English behind the fortifications rained upon them missiles of every description. The air was darkened by a cloud of arrows. The cannon from the walls belched forth smoke and flame, and great stone and iron balls came hurtling down into our midst, dealing death and destruction. The English soldiers with their characteristic daring sallied forth sword in hand to beat us back and yet we pressed on and ever on; driven backwards here and there by stress of fighting; but never giving great way, and always rallied by the sight of that gleaming white armour, and by the clear, sweet voice ringing out through all the tumult of arms. "Courage, my children, courage. The fight is fierce; but my Lord gives you the victory. A little more courage, a little more patience, and the day is ours!" She stood unscathed amid the hail of stones and arrows. Her clear glance never quailed; her sweet voice never faltered; she had thought for everyone but herself. Again and again with her own hands she snatched some follower from a danger unseen by him, but which a moment later would have been his death. She herself stood unmoved in the awful tumult. She even smiled when Dunois and La Hire would have drawn her from the hottest of the fighting. "No, no, my friends, my place is here. Have no fear. I shall not suffer. I have guardians watching over me that you wot not of." And so she stood unmoved at the foot of the tower, till the English, overcome with amaze, gave up the defence, and fled from a place they believed must surely be bewitched. And as the last of the sunlight faded from the sky, the fortress of St. Loup was ours. The Maid had fought her first battle, and had triumphed. CHAPTER XI. HOW THE MAID BORE TRIUMPH AND TROUBLE. The people of Orleans, and we her knights and followers, were well-nigh wild with joy. I do not think I had ever doubted how she would bear herself in battle; and yet my heart had sometimes trembled at the thought of it. For, after all, speaking humanly, she was but a girl, a gentle maid, loving and tender-hearted, to whom the sight of suffering was always a sorrow and a pain. And to picture a young girl, who had perhaps never seen blows struck in anger in her life--save perchance in some village brawl--suddenly set in the midst of a battle, arms clashing, blood flowing, all the hideous din of warfare around her, exposed to all its fearful risks and perils--was it strange we should ask ourselves how she would bear it? Was it wonderful that her confidence and calmness and steadfast courage under the trial should convince us, as never perhaps we had been convinced before, of the nearness of those supernatural beings who guarded her so closely, who warned her of danger, who inspired her with courage, and yet never robbed her for one moment of the grace and beauty and crown of her pure womanhood? And so, whilst we were well-nigh mad with joy and triumph, whilst joy bells pealed from the city, and the soldiers and citizens were ready to do her homage as a veritable saint from heaven, she was just her own quiet, thoughtful, retiring self. She put aside the plaudits of the Generals; she hushed the excited shouting of the soldiers. She exercised her authority to check and stop the carnage, to insist that quarter should be given to all who asked it, to see that the wounded upon both sides were carried into the city to receive attention and care, and in particular that the prisoners--amongst whom were several priests--should receive humane treatment, and escape any sort of insult or reprisal. These matters occupied her time and thought to the exclusion of any personal pride or triumph. It was with difficulty that the Generals could persuade her to ride at their head into the city, to receive the applause and joyful gratitude of the people; and as soon as she could without discourtesy extricate herself from the crowd pressing round to kiss her hands or her feet, or even the horse upon which she rode, she slipped away to give orders that certain badly wounded English prisoners were to be carried to the Treasurer's house, and laid in the spacious guest chamber, which, having been prepared for her own reception, had been permitted to no one else. Here she begged of Madame Boucher permission to lodge them, that she might tend their hurts herself, and assure herself that all was well with them. No one could deny the Maid those things she asked, knowing well that others in her place would have issued commands without stooping to petition. But with the Maid it was never so. Her gentle courtesy never deserted her. No association with men, no military dignity of command, which she could so well assume, ever tarnished the lustre of her sweet humility. A gentle maiden, full of tenderness and compassion, she showed herself now. Instead of resting after the sore strife of the battle, which had exhausted even strong men, nothing would serve her but that she must herself dress the wounds of these English prisoners; and so deft was her touch, and so soft and tender her methods with them, that not a groan passed the lips of any of them; they only watched her with wondering eyes of gratitude; and when she had left the room they looked at each other and asked: "Who is it? Is it boy, or angel, or what? The voice is as the voice of a woman, and the touch is as soft; but the dress is the dress of a man. Who can it be?" I understood them, for I knew something of the English tongue, and I saw that they were in great amazement; for all who had seen the Maid bore her image stamped upon their hearts; and yet it was impossible for these prisoners of war to believe that the triumphant, angelic Commander of the Forces could stoop to tend the hurts of wounded prisoners with her own hands. "Gentlemen," I said, "that is the Angelic Maid herself--she who has been sent of Heaven for the deliverance of France. I trow that you soldiers and knights of England have called her witch, and threatened to burn her if you can lay hands upon her. Perchance now that you have seen her thus face to face, your thoughts towards her will somewhat change." They gazed at me and at one another in amaze. They broke into questions, eager and full of curiosity. When I had answered them they were ready to tell me what was spoken of her in the English ranks; all averred that some strange power seemed to fall upon them with the advent of the Maid into the city--a power that withheld them from sallying forth to hinder her coming, or that of the relieving army. "We had meant to fight her to the death," spoke one English knight. "I was in counsel with the Generals when it was so proposed; and yet more resolved were we to keep out the army from Blois, which we heard must needs pass straight through our lines--an easy prey, we said, to our gunners, archers and swordsmen. All was in readiness for the attack--and yet no word was ever given. No trumpet sounded, though the men were drawn up ready. We all stood to arms; but the sight of that dazzling white figure seemed to close the lips of our commanders, to numb the limbs of our soldiers. I can say no more. When the chance was gone--the hour passed--we gazed into each other's face as men awaking from a dream. We cursed ourselves. We cursed the witch who had bound us by her spells. We vowed to redeem and revenge ourselves another day. And when we saw the French issuing forward to the attack scarce two hours after the entry of the relieving army, and there was no white figure with them, then indeed did we tell ourselves that our time was come; and we thought to win a speedy victory over the men who had so often fled before us. Yet you know how the day did end. The Maid came--victory rode beside her! Nought we could do availed when she appeared. I had thought to be left to die upon the battlefield, but behold I am here, and she has dressed my wounds with her own hands! It is wonderful! Past belief! Tell me who and what is she? A creature of earth or of heaven?" I had already told him all I knew; but they were never tired of hearing the story of the Maid; and as I, at her request, watched beside them during the night, ministering to their wants, and doing what I was able to relieve their pain, I found that nothing so helped them to forget the smart of their wounds as the narration of all the wonderful words and deeds of this Heavenly Deliverer of France. They were frank enough on their side also, and told me much of the disposition of their forces, and how that they were expecting a strong army to join them quickly, headed by Sir John Fastolffe, a notable knight, whose name we well knew, and had trembled before ere this. They admitted that their ranks were somewhat thinned by disease and death, and that they had scarce sufficient force both to maintain all the bastilles erected on the north side of the river and also to hold the great forts of Les Tourelles and Les Augustins on the south; but that when the reinforcements should arrive all would be well, and but for the marvellous power of the Maid, they would have felt no doubt whatever as to the speedy reduction of the city either by assault or blockade. With the first golden shafts of sunlight came the Maid once more, little Charlotte beside her, both bearing in their hands such cooling drinks and light sustenance as the condition of the wounded men required. The Maid wore the white, silver embroidered tunic and silken hose which Queen Yolande had provided for her indoor dress; she carried no arms, and her clustering curls framed her lovely face like a nimbus. All eyes were fixed upon her as upon a vision, and as she bent over each wounded man in turn, asking him of his welfare and holding a cup to his lips, I could see the amazement deepening in their eyes; and I am sure that they were well-nigh ready to worship the ground upon which she trod, so deep was the impression made upon them by her beauty and her gentle treatment. When she left the room I followed her at her sign, and asked: "Then you go not forth to battle today, General?" "Nay," she replied, "for today the Church keeps the blessed Feast of the Ascension; which should be to all a day of peace and thanksgiving and holy joy. I am going forthwith to hear Mass and receive the Holy Sacrament; and I would have my faithful knights about me. Let us forget warfare and strife for this day." Her own face was transfigured as she spoke. The light shone upon it all the time that she knelt before the high altar in the Cathedral, rapt in a mystery of thanksgiving and heavenly joy. O how real it all was to her--those things which were to us articles of faith, grounds of hope, yet matters which seemed too far above us to arouse that personal rapture which was shining from the eyes and irradiating the whole face of the Maid. It was a beautiful beginning to the day; and all the early hours were spent by the Maid in meditation and prayer within the walls of the Cathedral, where the people flocked, as perhaps they had never done before, to give thanks for the mercies received with the advent of the Maid, and to gaze upon her, as she knelt in a trance of rapture and devotion in her appointed place not far from the altar. We, her knights, went to and fro, some of us always near to her, that the crowd might not too curiously press upon her when she went forth, or disturb her devotions by too close an approach. I noted that none of the Generals appeared or took part in the acts of devotion that day. And as I issued forth into the sunny street at the close of the High Mass, Bertrand met me with a look of trouble and anger on his face. "They are all sitting in council of war together," he said, "and they have not even told her of it, nor suffered her to join them! How can they treat her so--even Dunois and La Hire--when they have seen again and yet again how futile are all plans made by their skill without the sanction of her voice? It makes my gorge rise! Do they think her a mere beautiful image, to ride before them and carry a white banner to affright the foe? It is a shame, a shame, that they should treat her so, after all that they have seen and heard!" I was as wroth as Bertrand, and as full of surprise. Even now, looking back after all these years, the blindness of these men of war astonishes and exasperates me. They had seen with their own eyes what the Maid could accomplish; again and again she had proved herself the abler in counsel as in fight; and yet they now deliberately desired to set her aside from their councils, and only inform her of their decisions when made, and permit her to take a share in the fighting they had planned. Bertrand was furiously angry. He led me up into a lofty turret which commanded a bird's-eye view of the whole city and its environs, and he pointed out that which the Maid had declared she would straightway do, so soon as the Feast of the Ascension was over, and how the Generals were about to follow a quite different course. Orleans, as all men know, lies upon the right--the north--bank of the Loire, and the country to the north was then altogether in the power of the English; wherefore they had built their great bastilles around the city upon that side without molestation, and were able to receive supplies from their countrymen without let or hindrance. But these bastilles were not the chiefest danger to the city, or rather I should say, it was not these which were the chiefest cause of peril, since no help could reach the garrison from that side. They looked to the country to the south to help them, and it was to stop supplies from reaching them by water or from the south that the English had long since crossed the river and had established themselves in certain forts along the south bank. Of these, St. Jean le Blanc was one; but by far the most important and dangerous to the city were the two great towers commanding the bridge, whose names I have given before. Let me explain how these great fortifications stood. Les Augustins had once been a convent, and it stood on the south bank, very near to the end of the bridge, guarding it securely from attack, and commanding the waterway and the approach to the city. Les Tourelles was an even stronger tower, constructed upon the very bridge itself, and menacing the town in formidable fashion. Dunois had broken down the main portion of the bridge on the north side to prevent the advance into the city of the English from their tower; so it stood grimly isolated from either bank; for the permanent bridge at the south end had been destroyed to be replaced by a drawbridge which could rise or fall at will. And it was these towers of Les Augustins and Les Tourelles which had reduced the city to such straits by hindering the entrance of food supplies. Moreover, from Les Tourelles great stone cannon balls had been hurled into the city in vast numbers, battering down walls and doing untold damage to buildings and their inhabitants. Now it was evident to all that these fortresses must be taken if the city were to be relieved and the siege raised. But the Maid, with her far-seeing eyes, had decreed that first the bastilles upon the north bank should be attacked and destroyed; and it was easy to follow her reasoning; "For," she said, "when the English are fiercely attacked there, they will, without doubt, yield up these lesser fortresses without a great struggle, concentrating themselves in force upon the left bank, where they think to do us most hurt. We shall then destroy their bastilles, so that they will have no place of shelter to fly back to; and then we shall fall upon them hip and thigh on the south side, and drive them before us as chaff before the wind. They must needs then disperse themselves altogether, having no more cover to hide themselves in; so will the enemies of the Lord be dispersed, and the siege of Orleans be raised." This was the plan she had confided to her own immediate attendants and staff the previous evening, and which Bertrand repeated to me, gazing over the ramparts, and pointing out each fortress and bastion as it was named. But now the Generals in Council, without reference to the Maid, had decreed something altogether different. What they desired to do was not to make any real or vigorous attack upon any of the English forts, but to feign an assault upon the towers on the south bank, and whilst the attention of the foe was thus engaged, get great quantifies of stores--all lying in readiness at hand--into the city, enough to last for a long while, and then quietly sit down behind the strong walls, and tire out the English, forcing them thus to retreat of their own accord! Think of it! After all that had been promised, all that had been performed! To be content to shut ourselves in a well-provisioned town, and just weary out the patience of the foe! And, moreover, of a foe who expected daily reinforcements from the north, and who would be quite capable of exercising as much patience, and perhaps more daring than ourselves. Even now my blood boils at the thought, and I find it hard to conceive how such men as Dunois and La Hire let themselves be led from their allegiance and confidence in the Maid to listen to such counsel as this from her detractors, and those many lesser commanders who were sorely jealous of her success and influence. But so it was, not once nor twice, but again and again; though in action they were staunch to her, would follow her everywhere, rally round her standard, fly to her defence when danger threatened, and show themselves gallant soldiers and generous-hearted men, never denying her all her share of praise and honour. But when sitting in the council room, surrounded by officers and men of experience in war disposed to scorn the counsels of an unlettered girl, and scoff at her pretensions to military rule, they were invariably led away and overborne, agreeing to act without her sanction, or even contrary to her advice, notwithstanding their belief in her mission, and their trust in her power as a leader. The shades of evening had fallen in the Treasurer's house before word was brought to the Maid of the decision of the Generals in Council. We were sitting around her after supper; and she had fallen into a very thoughtful mood. The Chevalier d'Aulon had been called away, and now returned with a troubled face. He stood just within the doorway, as though half afraid to advance. The Maid lifted her eyes to his and smiled. "Do not fear to tell me your news, my kind friend. I know that your faithful heart is sore at the dishonour done to me; but let us not judge harshly. It is hard for men full of courage and fleshly power to understand how the Lord works with such humble instruments. Perchance, in their place, we should not be greatly different. "So they have refused my plan, and made one of their own. We are to attack the foe upon the south? Is that agreed? And even so not with all our heart and strength?" D'Aulon recoiled a step in amaze. "Madame, that is indeed so--a feint upon the south bank has been decreed, whilst provisions are thrown into the city--" "Yes, yes, I know. Well, so be it. We will attack on the south bank. It must have come sooner or later, and if we fight with a will, the Lord will be with us and uphold our cause. But, my friends, understand this, and let the men likewise understand it. There shall be no mockery of fighting. It shall be true and desperate warfare. Let the Generals decree what they will, the Maid will lead her soldiers to victory! Tomorrow Les Augustins shall be ours; upon the next day Les Tourelles shall fall--" she paused suddenly and turned towards Bertrand. "What day will that be--the day after to-morrow?" "The seventh day of May," he answered at once. "Ah!" she said, "then it will be on that day--the day which shall see Orleans relieved--the power of the English broken." She spoke dreamily, and only Madame Boucher, who sat in the shadows with her child upon her lap, ventured to ask of her: "What will be on that day, gentle Jeanne?" "That I shall be wounded," she answered quietly. "Did I not tell you long since," turning to Bertrand and me, "that I should not come unscathed through the assault; but that on a certain day I should receive a wound?" I pulled out my tablets, upon which I often recorded the sayings of the Maid, and sure enough there it was written down as she said. We felt a great burning revolt at the thought of any hurt befalling her, and somebody spoke vehemently, saying that the holy Saints would surely protect her from harm. But she lifted her hand with her gentle authority of gesture, and spoke: "Nay, my kind friends, but thus it must needs be; nor would I have it otherwise. Listen, and I will tell you all. I often had my days and hours of fear because this great work was put upon one so weak and ignorant as I, and it was long before I clearly understood that I was but the instrument in a mighty Hand, and that power for all would be given me. Then my fear left and great joy came; perhaps even some pride and haughtiness of spirit in that I had been chosen for such a task. "And then it was that my voices asked of me: 'Jeanne, hast thou no fear?' "And I answered without pause, 'I fear nothing now.' "Then St. Catherine herself suddenly appeared to me in a great white light and said: 'Child, thou art highly favoured of heaven; but the flesh is easily puffed up. And for this cause, and because it may be well that thou thyself and all men shall know that thou art but human flesh and blood, thou shalt not escape unscathed in warfare; but thou too shalt feel the sting of fiery dart, and know the scald of flowing blood.' "I bowed my head and made answer I would bear whatever my Lord thought fit to lay upon me; and I asked if I might know when this thing would happen. It was not told me then; but later it was revealed to me; and I know that upon the seventh day of May I shall be wounded--" and she touched her right shoulder as she spoke, just below the neck. "But what matter will that be, when the siege of Orleans shall be raised?" Her face was aglow; nothing could touch her joy, not the insults of the proud Generals, nor the knowledge of coming pain for herself. Her thought was all of the mission entrusted to her; and so, though thwarted and set aside, she showed no petty anger, dreamed not of any paltry vengeance such as others might have dealt the soldiers, by refusing to march with them on the morrow. Oh, no; hurt she might be--indeed we knew she was--her pain being for the dishonour done her Lord in this disrespect of His messenger; but no thought of reprisal entered her head. She rose from her seat, and lifted the little Charlotte in her strong young arms. "Gentlemen, let us early to rest," she said, holding her head proudly, "for tomorrow a great work shall be done, and we must all have our share in it." CHAPTER XII. HOW THE MAID RAISED THE SIEGE. To tell the tale of how Les Augustins was taken is but to tell again the tale of St Loup. I know not precisely what instructions the lesser officers received, nor what they told their men. But whether from preconcerted arrangement that the attack was only to be a feint, or whether from the dash and energy of the English, it appeared at first as though the tide of war was rolling back in its old track, and that the prowess of the English as destined to win the day. For one thing the assault was commenced before the Maid had crossed the river and could put herself at the head of the men. A large body of troops had been transported to the south side in boats during the night, under cover of darkness; and this was all very well; but they should have waited hen daylight came for the Maid to march at their head, instead of which they sought to rush the fortress before ever she had appeared at all; and when we arrived at the river's bank, it was to see a furious battle raging round the base of Les Augustins, and ere we were half across the river, we saw only too plainly that the French were being badly beaten, were fleeing in all directions from the pursuing foe, and were making for the river bank once more as fast as their legs could carry them. The Maid watched it all, with that strange, inscrutable look upon her face, and that battle light in her eyes which we were all learning to know. She was sitting upon her horse; for though a number of animals had been taken across in the night, no horse of hers had been so conducted, and we had led the creature with its rider into the great flat-bottomed boat; so that she was on a higher level than the rest of us, and could better see what was passing, though it was plain to all that our soldiers were getting badly beaten. "O foolish children, silly sheep!" murmured the Maid as she watched, "and yet you are not to blame, but those who lead you. When will they understand? When will they believe?" We reached the shore, and the Maid, without waiting for any of us to mount or form a bodyguard round her, leaped her horse to the bank, and charged up it, her pennon flying, her eyes alight with the greatness of her purpose. But even as she climbed the slippery bank, a great rush of flying soldiers met her, and by their sheer weight forced back horse and rider almost to the river's brink before they were aware who or what it was. Then her silver trumpet voice rang out. She called upon them to reform, to follow her. She cried that her Lord would give them the victory, and almost before we who had accompanied her had formed into rank for the charge, the flying, panic-stricken men from the front, ashamed and filled with fresh ardour, had turned themselves about, closed up their scattered ranks, and were ready to follow her whithersoever she might lead them. Yet it was to no speedy victory she urged them. No angel with a flaming sword came forth to fight and overcome as by a miracle. But it was enough for that white-clad figure to stand revealed in the thickest of the carnage to animate the men to heroic effort. As I say, it was the story of St. Loup over again; but if anything the fighting was more severe. What the Generals had meant for a mere feint, the Maid turned into a desperate battle. The English were reinforced many times; it seemed as though we had a hopeless task before us. But confidence and assurance of victory were in our hearts as we saw our Deliverer stand in the thick of the fight and heard her clarion voice ringing over the field. Ere the shades of night fell, not only was Les Augustins ours, but its stores of food and ammunition had been safely transported into the city, and the place so destroyed and dismantled that never again could it be a source of peril to the town. And now the Maid's eyes were fixed full upon the frowning bulk of Les Tourelles, rising grim and black against the darkening sky, with its little "tower of the Boulevard," on this side the drawbridge. Thither had the whole English force retired--all who were not lying dead or desperately wounded on the plain or round the gutted tower of Les Augustins--we saw their threatening faces looking down fiercely upon us, and heard the angry voices from the walls, heaping abuse and curses upon the "White Witch," who had wrought them this evil. "Would that we could attack at once!" spoke the Maid. "Would that the sun would stay his course! Truly I do believe that we should carry all before us!" The leaders came up to praise and glorify her prowess. They heard her words, but answered how that the men must needs have a night's rest ere they tried this second great feat of arms. But, they added, there should be no going back into the city, no delay on the morrow in crossing the river. It was a warm summer-like night. Provisions were abundant, shelter could be obtained beneath the walls of the captured citadel. They, with the bulk of the army, would remain on the south bank for the nonce, and the Maid should return to the city with the convoys of wounded, to spend a quiet night there, returning with the dawn of the morrow to renew the attack and take Les Tourelles. Thus they spoke, and spoke suavely and courteously. But I did note a strange look in the eyes of the Maid; and I wondered why it was that Dunois, the speaker, grew red and stumbled over his words, whilst that La Hire, who had done a giant's work in the fighting that day, ground his teeth and looked both ashamed and disturbed. The Maid stood a brief while as though in doubt. But then she made quiet reply: "Then, gentlemen, it shall be as you will. I will return to the city for the night. But with the dawn of day I will be here, and Les Tourelles shall be ours. The siege of Orleans shall be raised!" They bowed low to her; every one of them made obeisance. Yet was there something ironical in the very humility of some? I could not tell; yet my heart burned within me as I followed our mistress; and never had I known her so silent as she was upon our journey back, or as we sat at supper, the rest of us telling of the day's doings, but the Maid speechless, save when she bent her head to answer some eager question of little Charlotte's, or to smile at her childish prattle. Suddenly the door was flung open, and Sir Guy strode in with a face like a thundercloud. Behind him came a messenger sent by the Generals to the Maid, and this was the news he brought: There had been a council held after dark, and it was then unanimously agreed that all now had been done that was necessary. The city was provisioned, the power of the English had been greatly weakened and broken. The army would now be content with the triumphs already won, and would quietly await further reinforcements before taking any fresh step. The man who brought this message faltered as he delivered it. The Maid sat very still and quiet, her head lifted in a dignified but most expressive disdain. "Monsieur," she replied, when the envoy ceased speaking, "go back to those who sent you. Tell them that they have had their council and I have had mine. I leave the city at dawn as I have said. I return not to it till the siege has been raised." The man bowed and retired confusedly. The Maid lifted the little child in her arms, as was her wont, to carry her to bed. She turned to her chaplain as she did so: "Come to me at dawn, my father, to hear my confession; and I pray you accompany me upon the morrow; for my blood will be shed. But do not weep or fear for me, my friends, nor spread any banquet for me ere I start forth upon the morrow; but keep all for my return in the evening, when I will come to you by the bridge." She was gone as she spoke, and we gazed at her and each other in amaze; for how could she come back by a bridge which had been destroyed, and how did she brook such slights as were heaped upon her without showing anger and hurt pride? "And there is worse yet to come!" cried Sir Guy in a fury of rage, "for I lingered behind to hear and see. If you will believe it, there are numbers and numbers of the lesser officers who would desire that the Maid should now be told that her work is done, and that she can retire to her home in Domremy; that the King will come himself with another reinforcing army to raise the siege, so that they may get rid of her, and take the glory to themselves whenever the place shall be truly relieved. Could you believe such folly, such treachery?" We could not; we could scarce believe our ears, and right glad was I to hear how that La Hire had had no part in this shameful council; and I hope that Dunois had not either, though I fear me he was less staunch. La Hire had returned to the city to seek to infuse into the citizens some of the spirit of the Maid. He was always for bold attack, and would be ready on the morrow, we did not doubt, for whatever might betide. It was little after dawn when we rode forth, the Maid in her white armour at our head, carrying her small pennon, whilst D'Aulon bore the great white standard close behind. Her face was pale and rapt. None of us spoke to her, and Pasquerel, her good chaplain, rode behind telling his beads as he went. We reached the Burgundy Gate; and behold it was fast shut. At the portal stood De Gaucourt, a notable warrior, with a grim look about his mouth. The Maid saluted him courteously, and quietly bid him open the gate. But he budged not an inch. "Madam," he said, "I have my commands from the Generals of the army. The gate is to remain shut. No one is to be suffered to pass forth today." We understood in a moment. This was a ruse to trap the Maid within the city walls. Our hands were upon the hilts of our swords. At a word from her, they would have flashed forth, and De Gaucourt would have been a dead man had he sought to hinder us in the opening of the gate. But the Maid read our purpose in our eyes and in our gestures, and she stayed us by her lifted hand. "Not so, my friends," she answered gravely, "but the Chevalier de Gaucourt will himself order the opening of the gate. I have to ride through it and at once. My Lord bids it!" Her eyes flashed full and suddenly upon him. We saw him quiver from head to foot. With his own hands he unlocked the gate, and it seemed to swing of its own accord wide open before us. The Maid bent her head in gracious acknowledgment, swept through and was off to the river like a flash of white lightning. The river lay golden in the glory of the morning. The boats which had transported us across last night bore us bravely over now. I know not how the Generals felt when they saw the Maid, a dazzling vision of brightness, her great white standard close behind, her phalanx of knights and gentlemen in attendance, gallop up to the scene of action, from which they thought they had successfully banished her. I only know that from the throats of the soldiers there arose a deafening shout of welcome. They at least believed in her. They looked to her as to none else. They would follow her unwaveringly, when no other commander could make them budge. A yell that rent the very firmament went up at sight of her, and every man seized his arms and sprang to his post, as though inspired by the very genius of victory. "Courage, my children, forward! The day shall be ours!" she cried, as she took her place at the head of the formidable charge against the walls which frowned and bristled with the pikes and arrows of the English. Her voice, like a silver clarion, rang clear through the din of the furious battle which followed: "Bon coeur, bonne esperance, mes enfants, the hour of victory is at hand! De la part de Dieu! De la part de Dieu!" That was her favourite battle cry! It was God who should give the victory. But it was no easy victory we were to win that day. The English fought with the energy of despair. They knew as well as we that when Les Tourelles fell the siege would be raised. True they had their bastilles upon the north side of the river to fall back upon, since the Maid's counsel of destruction had not been followed. But once dislodged from the south bank, and Orleans would lie open to the support of her friends in the south, and the position of the English army would be one of dire peril. For now the French were no more cowed by craven fear of the power of their enemies. They had found them capable of defeat and overthrow; the spell was broken. And it was the Maid who had done it! Oh, how we fought around her that day! She was on foot now, for the banks of the moat were slippery, and the press around the walls was too great to admit easily of the tactics of horsemen. I never saw her strike at any foe. It was her pennon rather than her sword in which she trusted. Here was the rallying point for the bravest and most desperate of the assailants, ever in the thickest of the strife, ever pointing the way to victory. It was the tower of the Boulevard against which we were directing our attack. If that fell, Les Tourelles itself must needs follow, isolated as it would then be in the midst of the river. We did not know it then, but we were to learn later, that La Hire in the city with a great band of citizens and soldiers to help him, was already hard at work constructing a bridge which should carry him and his men across to Les Tourelles, to take the English in the rear, whilst their attention was concentrated upon our work on the other side. No wonder that the clash and din was something deafening, that the boom of the great cannon ceased not; smoke and fire seemed to envelop the walls of the towers; the air was darkened by clouds of arrows; great stones came crashing into our midst. Men fell on every side; we had much ado to press on without treading under foot the dead and dying; but the white pennon fluttered before us, and foot by foot we crept up towards the base of the tower. Victory! Victory! was the cry of our hearts. We were close to the walls now--the Maid had seized a ladder, and with her own hands was setting it in position, when--O woe! woe!--a great cloth-yard shaft from an English bow, tipped with iron and winged with an eagle's plume, struck upon that white armour with such crashing force that a rent was made in its shining surface, and the Maid was borne to the ground. Oh, the terrible fear of that moment! The yell of triumph and joy which arose from the walls of the fortress seemed to turn my blood into liquid fire. The English had seen the fall of our champion. They shouted like men drunk with victory! They knew well enough that were she dead, they would drive back the French as sheep are driven by wolves. I had been close beside the Maid for hours; for I never forgot what she had spoken about being wounded that day; yet when she fell I had been parted from her a brief space, by one of those battle waves too strong for resistance. But now I fought my way to her side with irresistible fury, though there was such a struggling press all about her that I had much ado to force my way through it. But I was known as one of her especial personal attendants, and way was made for me somehow; yet it was not I who was the first to render her assistance. When I arrived, De Gamache was holding her in his arms; someone had removed her headpiece, and though her face was as white as the snowy plumes, her eyes were open, and there was a faint brave smile upon her lips. De Gamache had his horse beside him, his arm slipped through the reins. "My brave General," he said, as the Maid looked in his face, "let me lift you to my saddle and convey you to a place of safety. I have done you wrong before; but I pray you forgive me, and bear no malice; for I am yours till death. Never was woman so brave." "I should be wrong indeed to bear malice against any, my good friend," spoke the Maid, in her gentle tones, "above all against one so courteous, so brave." We lifted her upon the horse. We formed a bodyguard round her. We drew her out of the thick of the press, for once unresisting; and we laid her down in a little adjacent vineyard, where the good Pasquerel came instantly, and knelt beside her offering prayers for her recovery. But the great arrow had pierced right through her shoulder, and stood out a handbreadth upon the other side. We had sent for a surgeon; but we dreaded to think of the pain she must suffer; must be suffering even now. Her face was white; her brow was furrowed. But suddenly, as we stood looking at her in dismay, she sat up, took firm hold of the cruel barb with her own hands, and drew it steadily from the wound. Was ever courage like hers? As the blood came gushing forth, staining her white armour red, she uttered a little cry and her lips grew pale. Yet I think the cry was less from pain than to see the marring of her shining breastplate; and the tears started to her eyes. Never before had this suffered hurt; the sight of the envious rent hurt her, I trow, as much as did the smart of her wound. The surgeon came hurrying up, and dressed the wound with a pledget of linen steeped in oil; and the Maid lay very white and still, almost like one dying or dead, so that we all held our breath in fear. In sooth, the faintness was deathlike for awhile, and she did beckon to her priest to come close to her and receive her confession, whilst we formed round her in a circle, keeping off all idle gazers, and standing facing away from her, with bent, uncovered heads. Was it possible that her Lord was about to take her from us, her task yet unfulfilled? It was hard to believe it, and yet we could not but fear; wherefore our hearts were heavy within us during that long hour which followed. And the battle? It was raging still, but the heart of it seemed to be lacking. The English were crying out that the White Witch was dead, taunting their foes with being led by a woman, and asking them where she was gone to now. Dunois came hurrying up for news of her. The Maid roused herself and beckoned to him to come to her where she lay, and asked him of the battle. Dunois told her that the courage of the men seemed failing, that he thought of sounding the retreat. For a few moments she lay still; her eyes bent full upon the blinding blue of the sunny sky. Then she spoke: "Sound no retreat, my General," she spoke, "but give the men a breathing space. Let them draw off for a brief moment. Let them eat and drink and refresh themselves. Tell them that I will come to them again; and when you and they see my standard floating against the wall, then know by that token that the place is yours." Dunois went his way, and soon the sound of the struggle ceased. There came a strange hush in the heat of the noontide hours. The Maid lay still a while longer; then raising herself, asked that water should be brought to cleanse away all stains from her hands and face and her white armour. That being done she called to D'Aulon and said to him: "Take the great standard; plant it again upon the edge of the moat; and when the silken folds touch the tower wall, call and tell me; and you, my knights and gentlemen, be ready to follow me to victory!" Did we doubt her ability, wounded as she was, to lead us? Not one whit. We looked to our arms; we stood silently beside her. We watched D'Aulon move quietly forward to the appointed place, and unfold the great white banner, which hung down limply in the sultry heat of the May afternoon. He stood there, and we stood beside the Maid a great while; she lay upon the heap of cloaks which had been spread to form a couch for her; her hands were clasped and her eyes closed as though in prayer. Then a little puff of wind arose, followed by another, and yet another--soft, warm wind, but we saw the folds of the banner begin to unfurl. Little by little the breeze strengthened; breathlessly we watched the gradual lifting of the silken standard, till, with an indescribably proud motion--as though some spirit was infused into the lifeless silk--it launched itself like a living thing against the tower wall. "It touches! It touches!" cried D'Aulon. "It touches! It touches!" we shouted in response. "It touches! It touches!" came an echoing wave sound from the soldiers watching from their resting places. The Maid was on her feet in a moment. Where was the weakness, the feebleness, the faintness of the wounded girl? All gone--all swallowed up in the triumph of the victorious warrior. "Onward! Onward, my children. Onward, de la part de Dieu! He has given you the victory! Onwards and take the tower! Nothing can resist you now!" Her voice was heard all over the field. The white folds of the banner still fluttered against the wall, the white armour of the Maid shone dazzling in the sunshine as she dashed forward. The army to a man sprang forward in her wake with that rush, with that power of confidence against which nothing can stand. The English shrieked in their astonishment and affright. The dead had come to life! The White Witch, struck down as they thought by mortal wound, was charging at the head of her armies. The French were swarming up the scaling ladders, pouring into their tower, carrying all before them. Fighting was useless. Nothing remained but flight. Helter skelter, like rabbits or rats, they fled this way and that before us. Not an Englishman remained upon the south side of the river. The French flag waved from the top of the tower. The seven months' siege was raised by the Maid eight days after her entrance into the city. CHAPTER XIII. HOW THE MAID WON A NEW NAME. "Entrez, entrez--de la part de Dieu--all is yours!" Thus spoke the Maid, as we rushed the tower of the boulevard, the English flying this way and that before us. The Maid found herself face to face with the commander--that Sir William Glasdale, who had called her vile names a few days before, and had promised to burn her for a witch if once she fell into his hands. But she had no ill words for him, as she saw him, sword in hand, seeking to make a last stand upon the drawbridge leading to Les Tourelles. "Now yield you, Classidas," she said; "I bear you no ill will. I have great pity for your soul. Yield you, and all shall be well." But he would not listen; his face was black like a thundercloud, and with his picked bodyguard of men, he retreated backwards, sword in hand, upon the bridge, seeking to gain the other tower, not knowing its desperate condition, and hoping there to make a last stand. But he was not destined to achieve his end. Suddenly the bridge gave way beneath his feet, and he and his men were all precipitated into the water. It looked to us as though a miracle had been wrought before our eyes; as though the gaze of the Maid had done it. But the truth was afterwards told us, that a fire ship from the city had been sent across and had burned the bridge, cutting off the retreat of the English that way. And now we heard the din of battle going on within Les Tourelles; for La Hire had crossed the repaired bridge with a gallant band of soldiers, and our men, hearing the shouts of their comrades, and the cries of the trapped English, flung themselves into boats, or swam over, sword in mouth, anything to get to the scene of the fray; whilst others set to work with planks, and whatever they could lay hands upon, to mend the broken drawbridge that they might swarm across into Les Tourelles and join in the final act of victory, that should free Orleans from the iron grip in which she had been held so long. But the face of the Maid was troubled, as she looked into the dark water which had closed over the head of Glasdale and his men. She had seized upon a coil of rope; she stood ready to fling it towards them when they rose; but encased as they were in their heavy mail, there was no rising for them. Long did she gaze into the black, bloodstained water; but she gazed in vain; and when she raised her eyes, I saw that they were swimming in tears. "I would we might have saved them," she spoke, with a little catch in her voice, "I have such great pity for their souls!" These were the first words I heard the Maid speak after her wonderful victory had been won; and whilst others went hither and thither, mad or drunk with joy, she busied herself about the wounded, making no distinction betwixt friend or foe, sending urgent message into the city for priests to come forth and bring the last Sacraments with them, and so long as there were any dying to be confessed or consoled, or wounded to be cared for and transported into the city, she seemed to have no thought for aught beside. Thankful joy was indeed in her heart, but her tender woman's pity was so stirred by sights of suffering and death that for the moment she could think of nothing else. Thus the daylight faded, and we began to think of return. How shall I describe the sight which greeted our eyes in the gathering dusk, as we looked towards the city? One might have thought that the English had fired it, so bright was the glare in which it was enveloped; but we knew better. Bonfires were blazing in every square, in every open place. Nay, more, from the very roofs of tower and church great pillars of flame were ascending to the heavens. Joy bells had rung before this, but never with such a wild jubilation, such a clamour of palpitating triumph. The city had gone mad in its joy--and it was no marvel--and all were awaiting the return of the Maid, to whom this miraculous deliverance was due. Eight days--eight days of the Maid--and the seven-months' siege was raised! Was it wonderful they should hunger for her presence amongst them? Was it wonderful that every house should seek to hang out a white banner in honour of the Angelic Maid, and her pure whiteness of soul and body? "I will come to you by the bridge," had been her own word; and now, behold, the bridge was there! Like Trojans had the men worked beneath the eagle eyes of La Hire. An army had already crossed from the city; now that their task was done, the Maid's white charger had been led across, and the cry was all for her, for her; that she should let the people see her alive and well, now that her task was accomplished and Orleans was free! She let us mount her upon her horse, and D'Aulon marched in front with the great white standard. Weary and white and wan was she, with the stress of the fight, with the pain and loss of blood from her wound, above all, with her deep, unfailing pity for the sufferings she had been forced to witness, for the souls gone to their last account without the sacred offices of the Church. All this weighed upon her young spirit, and gave a strange, ethereal loveliness to her pale face and shining eyes. Methought she seemed almost more like some angelic presence in our midst than a creature of human flesh and blood. The Generals formed an advance guard before her. The soldiers followed, rank behind rank, in the rear. We of her household rode immediately in her wake, ready to protect her, if need be, from the too great pressure of the crowd. And so we crossed the hastily-repaired bridge, and entered by the Bride Gate--or St. Catherine's gate, as it was equally called; for a figure of St. Catherine stands carved in a niche above the porch, and I saw the Maid glance upwards at it as she passed through, a smile upon her lips. Shall I ever forget the thunder of applause which fell upon our ears as we passed into the city through the bridge? It was like the "sound of many waters"--deafening in volume and intensity. And was it wonder? Had not something very like a miracle been wrought? For had not rumours reached the city many times that day of the death of the Deliverer in the hour of victory? None well knew what to believe till they saw her in their midst, and then the cry which rent the heavens was such as methinks is heard but once in a lifetime. I know not who first spoke the words; but once spoken, they were caught up by ten thousand lips, and the blazing heavens echoed them back in great waves of rolling sound: "THE MAID OF ORLEANS! THE MAID OF ORLEANS! Welcome, honour, glory, praise to THE MAID OF ORLEANS!" The people were well-nigh mad with joy; they rushed upon her to kiss her hands, her knees, the folds of her banner, the neck or the flanks of her horse. In the red glare of the hundred bonfires the whiteness of her armour seemed to take a new lustre. The rent upon the shoulder could be plainly seen, showing where the arrow had torn its way. Women sobbed aloud as they looked; men cursed the hand which had shot the bolt; all joined in frantic cheers of joy to see her riding alone, erect and smiling, though with a dreamy stillness of countenance which physical lassitude in part accounted for. "I thank you, my friends, I thank you," she kept saying, as though no other words would come, save when now and again she would add, "But to God must you give your thanks and blessings. It is He who has delivered you." It was not far to the house of the Treasurer, and there in the threshold stood the little Charlotte, a great wreath of bay and laurel in her tiny hands. She was lifted up in her father's strong arms, and ere the Maid was able to dismount from her horse the little one had placed the triumphal wreath upon her fair head. O, what a shout arose! It was like the mighty burst of some great thunderstorm. The Maid, blushing now at the tumult of applause, stretched out her arms, took the little one into them, and held her in a close embrace whilst she bowed her last graceful thanks to the joy-maddened crowd. Then she slipped from her horse, and holding the little one fast by the hand, disappeared into the house, whilst the people reluctantly dispersed to hear the story all over again from the soldiers pouring in, each with some tale of his own to tell of the prowess of THE MAID OF ORLEANS. Yes, that was the name by which she was henceforth to be known. The city was wild with joy and pride thus to christen her. And she, having crossed by the bridge, as she had said, sat down for a brief while to that festal board which had been spread for her. But fatigue soon over-mastering her, she retired to her room, only pausing to look at us all and say: "Tomorrow is the Lord's own day of rest. Remember that, my friends. Let there be no fighting, no pursuit, no martial exercise, whatever the foe may threaten or do. Tomorrow must be a day of thanksgiving and praise. Look to it that my words are obeyed." They said she slept like a child that night; yet with the early light of day she was up, kneeling in the Cathedral with her household beside her, listening to the sound of chant and prayer, receiving the Holy Sacrament, the pledge of her Lord's love. Not until we had returned from that first duty did she listen to what was told her anent the movements of the English. They were drawn up in battle array upon the north side of the river, spoke those who had gone to the battlements to look. Thinned as were their ranks, they were still a formidable host, and from the menace of their attitude it might be that they expected the arrival of reinforcements. Would it not be well, spoke La Hire, to go forth against them at once, whilst the soldiers' hearts were flushed with victory, whilst the memory of yesterday's triumphs was green within them? But the Maid, hitherto all in favour of the most dashing and daring policy, answered now, with a shake of the head: "It is Sunday, my Generals," she replied; "the day of my Lord. The day He has hallowed to His service." She paused a moment, and added, quite gently, and without reproach, "Had you acted as I did counsel, the English would now have had no footing on the north side of the river; they must needs have fled altogether from the neighbourhood of the city. Nevertheless, my Lord is merciful. He helps, though men hinder His designs. Let no man stir forth with carnal weapons against the foe this day. We will use other means to vanquish them." Then turning to me, she bid me go to the Bishop, and ask him to give her audience; and shortly she was ushered into his presence, and we waited long for her to reappear. How shall I tell of the wonderful scene which the sun looked down upon that bright May morning, when the purpose of the Maid became fully revealed to us? Even now it seems rather as a dream, than as an incident in a terrible war. Out upon the level plain, in full sight of the city, in full view of the serried ranks of the English army, a great white altar was set up. The army from Orleans marched out and stood bareheaded beneath the walls, unarmed by order of the Maid, save for the small weapon every man habitually carried at his belt, citizen as well as soldier. The townspeople flocked to the walls, or out into the plain, as pleased them best; and from the Renart Gate there issued forth a grave and sumptuous procession; the Bishop in his vestments, accompanied by all the ecclesiastics within the city walls, each of them robed, attended by acolytes swinging censers, the incense cloud ascending through the sunny air, tapers swaying in the breeze, their light extinguished by the brilliance of the sunshine. The Maid in her white tunic, with a white mantle over her shoulders, followed with bent head, leading the little Charlotte by the hand succeeded by her household. And there, in the sight of the rival armies, High Mass was celebrated by the Bishop, both armies kneeling devoutly, and turning towards the Altar as one man. Never have I witnessed such a scene. Never shall I witness such another. The Mass over, the procession filed back through the gate, both armies kneeling motionless till it had disappeared. Then the Maid rose, and we with her, and followed her in its wake, and the French army, in perfect order, re-entered the city by the appointed gates, as had been ordered. One hour later and the Maid sent D'Aulon up to the battlements to look what the English army was doing. He returned to say that they were still drawn up in rank as before. "Which way are their faces?" she asked. "Their faces are turned away from the city," was the reply. The countenance of the Maid brightened with a great light. "Then let them go, a part de Dieu!" she answered. "My God, I thank Thee for this great grace!" And so, without further battle or bloodshed, the English army marched away from Orleans; and upon the next morning not a man of the foe was left; and the citizens pouring out from the town, destroyed, with acclamations of joy, those great bastilles, which had so long sheltered the foe and threatened the safety of the city. It was a day ever to be remembered. The bells pealed ceaselessly, the houses were decked with garlands, white banners or silken pennons floated everywhere, the townsfolk arrayed themselves in holiday garb, and poured out through the gates to wander at will over the plain, so lately held by the English. Gladness and the wonder of a great relief was stamped upon every face, and constantly songs of triumph arose or thunders of applause, of which the burden always was--THE MAID OF ORLEANS! THE MAID OF ORLEANS! They would have kept her with them for ever, if it might so have been. They talked wildly, yet earnestly, of building her a palace, where she should live at ease all the rest of her days, the object of universal admiration and homage. But the Maid listened to such words, when repeated to her, with a dreamy smile. Her wound required rest; and for two days she consented to remain quiet in the house of the Treasurer, lying for the most part upon a couch in a great cool chamber, with the little Charlotte for her companion and playfellow. She sometimes rose and showed herself at a window in answer to the tumultuous shoutings of the crowd without; and she received with pleasure some great baskets and bouquets of flowers which the wives and children of the citizens had culled for her. But she gently put aside all suggestions of rewards for herself, which some would fain have bestowed upon the Deliverer, and which men of all ranks were but too ready to claim and receive for service rendered. "I have all that I want, myself--and more," she said; "if any would offer gifts, let them be thank offerings to the Lord. Let the poor receive alms, let Masses be sung for the souls of those killed in the war; but for me--I want nothing but the love of the people of France. I am come to do the will of my Lord. I ask only His approving smile." And all the while she was eagerly desirous to return to the King, and urge upon him the need to repair instantly to Rheims, and there receive his crown. To her he was not truly King till he had been anointed as such. She knew that the blow to the English arms just struck must have a paralysing effect upon their forces, and that a rapid march with even a small army would be accomplished without resistance, if only it were quickly made. I need not say that the city of Rheims lay in the very heart of territory owning the English sway. To reach that city we must perforce march right through a hostile country, garrisoned by the enemy. But of that the Maid made light. "The hearts of the people will turn towards us," she said. "They have submitted to the English yoke; but they are Frenchmen still. Once let them see that the power of the enemy is broken, and they will rally to our standard. But precious time should not be lost. The Dauphin should place himself at the head of such an army as he can spare for the march, and journey forthwith to Rheims. There shall the crown be set upon his head--the pledge and earnest that one day he shall rule the whole realm of France, as his fathers did before him!" And so, before a week had passed, we set forth with the Maid to go to the King, who had by this time moved his Court from Chinon to Loches, another fortress upon the Loire, where there was space for his train, and which could, if necessary, be fortified against a siege. It was a strange journey--more like a triumphal progress than anything we had yet met with. The fame of the Maid and her miraculous exploit in the matter of the siege of Orleans had gone before her, and from every town or village through which she passed the people flocked out to see her, bearing garlands and banners, crowding about her, asking her blessing, seeking to touch her, pouring out blessings and praises, so that the heart of anyone less filled with the humility which comes from above must needs have been altogether puffed up and filled with pride. But it was never so with the Maid. Her gentle courtesy and devout humility never failed her. Lovingly and gratefully she received love and affection, but praise and honour she set aside, bidding all remember that to God alone belonged the issues from death, and that she was but an instrument in His mighty hands. We wondered how she would be received at the Court, and whether La Tremouille and her other adversaries had been convinced of her divine mission, and would now remove all opposition. As we approached the fortress we saw that flags were floating from every tower; that the place wore a festive aspect, and that the town was pouring out to welcome us and gaze upon the Maid. Then, with a great fanfare of trumpets, the gates of the fortress were flung wide open, and forth came a gay procession, in the midst of which, we could not doubt, rode the King himself. Yes, there was no doubt of it. The crowd parted this way and that, and we saw how the young King himself was marching towards us, and at the sight of the Maid, not only did every courtier in the train uncover, but the King himself bared his head, and bowed low to the MAID OF ORLEANS. She was off her horse in a moment, kneeling at his feet; but he raised her instantly, held her hands in his, gave her thanks with true emotion in face and voice, and, turning to her brothers, who rode amongst us of her household, he cried to them in loud tones, saying how he had decreed that the family of the D'Arcs should henceforth have the right to quarter the hues of France on their arms! An empty honour, perhaps, to simple peasants; and yet an honour that the proudest families in the land might envy! They carried her into the fortress. The two Queens and the ladies of the Court knew not how to make enough of her. They seemed to think that our coming must be regarded as the signal for an outburst of merrymaking and carousing, such as the King found so much to his liking. It amazed us to find him still wrapped in idle luxury, joyful, it is true, over the relief of Orleans, over the discomfiture of the English; but as indisposed as ever to take the field himself, or to put himself at the head of an army and march to his coronation as the Maid instantly urged him. "Gentle Dauphin, the Lord would have you King of your realm; He would set the crown upon your head. He has smitten your enemies and scattered them. Then wherefore not do His will and march to the appointed spot? All will be well if you but follow His counsels." "But, Maiden, I have so few troops; and I have no money; and the way lies through a hostile land," the King would urge, when day after day she pleaded with him. "All my counsellors advise delay. Is it not right that I should listen to them as well as to you? Wherefore such haste? Is it not wiser to act with deliberation and prudence?" "It is right to follow the voice of the Lord," spoke the Maid with grave and forceful earnestness, "and to put your trust in Him rather than in any child of man." But the King could not be persuaded; indolence and fear held him captive, whilst his traitorous advisers sought by every means to undermine the influence of the Maid. And although in this they were not successful, for he believed in her mission, admired her prowess, and looked to her for guidance and help, he must needs listen also to these others who were of contrary mind, and so the weary days dragged on, and nothing was done. "Noble Dauphin," pleaded the Maid at last, "hold not such long or so many councils; or if, indeed, these be needful to you, let me, I pray you, go forth again with a small army and clear the way. And when all the country betwixt this place and Rheims has submitted to your power, then follow yourself, and take your kingdom!" Ah me!--to think that he, a King, could consent again to let her go thus, whilst he remained in ease and indolence surrounded by his Court! But so it was. What she could not persuade him to do himself, she at last obtained leave to do for him, and with a joyful face she came to us with the news: "Gentlemen and my good comrades, be ready for a speedy march; we will go forward and clear the way; and afterwards the Dauphin shall follow and be made King!" CHAPTER XIV. HOW THE MAID CLEARED THE KING'S WAY. We started forth from Selles, where the army which was to do this work had assembled. It was not so great a force as it would have been but for the hesitations of the King, and the delays imposed by his Council. For the men who had marched from Orleans, flushed with victory, eager to rush headlong upon the foe and drive them back to their own shores, had grown weary of the long waiting, and had been infected by the timidity or the treachery of those about the Court. They had melted away by little and little, carrying with them the booty they had found in the English bastilles round Orleans, glad to return to their homes and their families without further fighting, though had the Maid been permitted to place herself at their head at once, as she did desire, they would have followed her to the death. Still, when all was said and done, it was a gallant troop that responded to her call and mustered at her summons. The magic of her name still thrilled all hearts, and throughout the march of events which followed, it was always the common soldiers who trusted implicitly in the Maid; they left doubts and disputings and unworthy jealousies to the officers and the statesmen. The Maid went forth with a greater glory and honour than has, methinks, ever been bestowed upon woman before--certainly upon no humbly-born maiden of seventeen years. Some said that she was actually ennobled in her own person by the grant to quarter the lilies of France, and that her brothers ranked now amongst the knights and nobles. Others declared that she had refused all personal honours, and that she still remained a humble peasant, though so high in the favour of the King, and so great a personage in the realm. As for me, I cared nothing for all this. To me she was always the Angelic Maid, heaven sent, miraculous, apart from the earth, though living amongst us and leading us on to victory. To the army she was--and that was enough. She was the companion and friend of princes, nobles, and knights; but she was never as others were. An atmosphere of sanctity seemed ever to encompass her. All who approached her did her unconscious homage. None could be with her long without being conscious that she was visited by sounds unheard by them, that her eyes saw sights to which theirs were closed. We were to have added witness to this in the days which followed. So here we were gathered at Selles upon that bright June morning, just one month after the relief of Orleans. The King had presented to the Maid a great black charger; a mighty creature of immense strength and spirit, but with something of a wicked look in his rolling eyes which made me anxious as he was led forward. The Maid in her white armour--its rent deftly mended, its silver brilliance fully restored--with her velvet white-plumed cap upon her head and a little axe in her hand, stood waiting to mount. But perhaps it was the gleaming whiteness of this slender figure that startled the horse, or else the cries and shouts of the populace at sight of the Maid excited him to the verge of terror; for he reared and plunged so madly as his rider approached that it was with difficulty he was held by two stalwart troopers, and we all begged of the Maid not to trust herself upon his back. She looked at us with a smile, and made a little courteous gesture with her hand; then turning to the attendants she said: "Lead him yonder to the cross at the entrance to the church; I will mount him there." Snorting and struggling, casting foam flakes from his lips, and fighting every inch of the way, the great charger was led whither the Maid had said. But once arrived at the foot of the cross, he suddenly became perfectly quiet. He stood like a statue whilst the Maid approached, caressed him gently with the hand from which she had drawn her mailed gauntlet, and, after speaking kindly words to him, vaulted lightly on his back. From that moment her conquest of the fierce creature was complete. He carried her throughout that wonderful week with a gentleness and docility, and an untiring strength which was beautiful to see. The brute creation owned her sway as well as did men of understanding, who could watch and weigh her acts and deeds. So, amid the plaudits of the people, the fanfare of trumpets, the rolling of drums, the rhythmical tread of thousands of mailed feet, we rode forth from Selles, led by the Maid, beside whom rode the King's cousin, the Duc d'Alencon, now resolved to join us, despite his former hesitancy and the fears of his wife. He had marched with us to Orleans, but had then turned back, perhaps with the not unnatural fear of again falling into the hands of the English. This had happened to him at Agincourt, and only lately had he been released. Perhaps his fears were pardonable, and those of his wife more so. She had sought earnestly to hold him hack from this new campaign; and, when she could not prevail with him, she had addressed herself to the Maid with tears in her eyes, telling her how long had been his captivity in England, and with how great a sum he had been ransomed. Why must he adventure himself again into danger? The Maid had listened to all with gentle sympathy. Though so fearless herself she was never harsh to those who feared, and the appeal of the Duchesse touched her. "Fear nothing, Madame," she answered, "I will bring him back to you safe and sound. Only pray for him always--pray for us day and night. I will make his safety my special care. He shall return to you unharmed; but I pray you hinder him not from serving his country in this great hour of need." So the Maid prevailed, and the Duc was entrusted with the command of the army, second only to the Maid herself, who was distinctly placed at the head of all--whose word was to be supreme; whilst the King's fiat went forth that no Council should be held without her, and that she was to be obeyed as the head in all things! And men like Dunois, La Hire, and the Chevalier Gaucourt heard this without a murmur! Think of it!--a campaign conducted by a girl of seventeen, who, until a few weeks before, had never seen a shot fired in her life! Ah; but all men remembered Orleans, and were not surprised at the King's decree. As we marched along in close array, we gathered many recruits by the way, notwithstanding that we were in the territory which had submitted to the English rule. Knights and gentlemen flocked forth from many a chateau to join themselves to the army of the miraculous Maid, whilst humble peasants, fired by patriotism and zeal, came nightly into our camp seeking to be enrolled amid those who followed and fought beneath her banner. And so for three days we marched, our ranks swelling, our hearts full of zeal and confidence, till news was brought us that the Duke of Suffolk, one of the bravest and most chivalrous of English knights and soldiers, had thrown himself and his followers into Jargeau, and was hastily fortifying it for a siege. This news reached us at Orleans itself, whither we had returned in the course of our march, to be received with wild acclamations by the people there. So loving were the citizens, that they were loth indeed to see the Maid set forth upon any mission which threatened danger to herself or her army; and their protestations and arguments so wrought upon many of the generals and officers, that they united to beg her to remain inactive awhile, and send to the King for fresh reinforcements before attempting any such arduous task. The Maid listened with her grave eyes wide in amazement. "You say this to me--here in Orleans! You who have seen what my Lord accomplished for us before! Shame upon you for your lack of faith--for your unworthy thoughts. We march for Jargeau at dawn tomorrow!" Never before had we heard the Maid speak with quite such severity of tone and word. Her glorious eyes flashed with a strange lambent light. She looked every inch the ruler of men. All heads were bent before her. None dared speak a word to hinder her in her purpose. The morrow saw us before Jargeau. Its walls were strong, it was well supplied with those great guns that belched forth fire and smoke, and scattered huge stone balls against any attacking force. But we had brought guns with us--great pieces of ordnance, to set against the city walls, and the Maid ordered these to be brought and placed in certain positions, never asking counsel, always acting on her own initiative, without hesitation and without haste, calm and serene; with that deep, farseeing gaze of hers turned from her own position to the city and back again, as though she saw in some miraculous vision what must be the end of all this toil. "Mort de Dieu!" cried La Hire, forgetting in his wonder the loyally kept promise to swear only by his baton, "but the Maid has nothing to learn in the art of gunnery! Where hath she learnt such skill, such wisdom! We never had guns to place at Orleans! Where has the child seen warfare, that she places her artillery with the skill of a tried general of forces!" Ah!--where had the Maid learned her skill in any kind of warfare? Had we not been asking this from the first? This was but another development of the same miracle. For my part I had ceased now to wonder at anything which she said or did. At daybreak on the morrow the roar of battle began. The air was shaken by the crash and thunder of the guns from both sides. But it was plain to all eyes how that the cunning disposition of our pieces, set just where they could deal most effectively with a weak point in the fortifications, or a gateway less capable than others of defence, were doing far more hurt to the enemy than their fire did to us. For the most part their balls passed harmlessly over our heads, and the clouds of arrows were for us the greater danger, though our armour protected us from over-much damage. But it was before Jargeau that the incident happened, which so many writers have told of the Maid and the Duc d'Alencon; how that she did suddenly call to him, nay more, drew him with her own hand out of the place where he had stood for some time near to her, saying in a voice of warning, "Have a care, my lord, there is death at hand!" Another young knight boldly stepped into that very position from which she had snatched Alencon, and an instant afterwards his head was struck off by a cannon ball. The Maid saw and covered her eyes for a moment with her mailed hand. "Lord have mercy on that brave soul!" she whispered, "but why did he not heed the warning?" Well, the fighting round Jargeau was fierce and long; but the Maid with her standard held stubbornly to the place beside the wall which she had taken up, and at sight of her, and at the sound of her clear, silvery voice, encouraging and commanding, the men came ever on and on, regardless of peril, till the scaling ladders were set, and through the breaches torn in the walls by the guns, our soldiers swarmed over into the town, shouting with the shout of those with whom is the victory. Again the Maid triumphed. Again the hearts of the English melted within them at the sight of the White Witch, as they would tauntingly call her, even whilst they cowered and fled before her. The French were swarming into the city; the great gates were flung open with acclamations of triumph; and the Maid marched in to take possession, her white banner floating proudly before her, her eyes alight, her cheeks flushed. One of the young gentlemen not long since added to her household, Guillame Regnault by name, from Auvergne, a very knightly youth, a favourite with us all, came striding up to the Maid, and saluting with deep reverence, begged speech with her. She was never too much occupied to receive those who came to her, and instantly he had her ear. "My General," he said, "the Duke of Suffolk is close at hand. We pressed him hard, and it seemed as though he would die sword in hand, ere he would yield. But I did beg of him in his own tongues with which I am acquainted, not to throw away his noble life; whereupon he did look hard at me, pausing the while in thrust and parry, as all others did pause, for us to parley; and he said that he would give up his sword to THE MAID OF ORLEANS, and to none other. Wherefore I did tell him that I would run and fetch her to receive his submission, or take him to her myself. But then his mind did change, and he said to me, 'Are you noble?' So I told him that my family was noble, but that I had not yet won my knighthood's spurs. Then forthwith did he uplift his sword, and I read his meaning in his eyes. I bent my knee, and there and then he dubbed me knight, and afterwards would have tendered me his sword, but I said, 'Not so, gentle Duke, but I hear by the sound of the silver trumpet that the Maid, our General, is close at hand. Suffer me to tell her of what has passed, and I trow that she will herself receive your sword at her hands.'" "You did well, Sir Guillame," spoke the Maid, using the new title for the first time, whereat the youth's face kindled and glowed with pleasure. "Bring the Duke at once to me here. I will receive his surrender in person." Truly it was a pretty sight to watch--the dignified approach of the stalwart soldier; tall, upright, a knightly figure in battered coat of mail; bleeding from several wounds, but undaunted and undauntable; and the slim, youthful white figure, with uncovered head, and a face regal in its dignity; and yet so full of sweet courtesy and honourable admiration for a beaten, yet noble foe. He gazed upon her with a great wonder in his eyes, and then, dropping upon one knee, tendered his sword to her, which the Maid took, held in her hands awhile, deep in thought, and then, with one of her wonderfully sweet smiles, held out to him again. "Gentle Duke," she said, "it hath been told me that you are known in France as the English Roland; and if so, I would be loth to deprive so noble a foe of his knightly weapon. Keep it, then, and all I ask of you is that you use it no more against the soldiers of France. And now, if you will let my gentlemen lead you to my tent, your hurts shall be dressed, and you shall receive such tendance as your condition requires." But I may not linger over every incident of that march, nor all the achievements of the Maid in the arts both of peace and of war. Towns and castles surrendered at her summons, or flung wide their gates at the news of her approach. Sometimes we fought, but more often the very sound of her name, or the sight of the white figure upon the great black horse was sufficient, and fortress after fortress upon the Loire fell before her, the English garrisons melting away or marching out, unable or unwilling to try conclusions with so notable a warrior, who came, as it were, in the power of the King of Heaven. And not only did she achieve triumphs in war's domains; she was equally victorious as a promoter of peace. For when the news was brought to us that the Comte de Richemont, Constable of France, but hitherto inimical to the King, desired to join us with a body of men, the Duc d'Alencon would have sent him away with insult and refused his proffer of help; but the Maid, with her gentle authority and reasonable counsel, brought him to a different frame of mind, and the Constable was received with a fair show of graciousness. And although in the days which immediately followed his aid was not of great importance (for when France had the Maid to fight for her she wanted none beside), yet in the time to come, when she was no longer there to battle for the salvation of her country, De Richemont's loyal service to the King was of inestimable value, and had it not been for the Maid at this juncture, he might have been lost for ever to the French cause. Her generosity shone out the more in that De Richemont was no friend to her; indeed, he had regarded her as little better than a witch before he came under the magic of her personality. His greeting to her was rough and blunt. "Maiden," he said, "they tell me that you are against me, and that you are a witch. I know not whether you are from God or not. If you are from Him, I do not fear you. If you are from the devil, I fear you still less." She looked him full in the face, gravely at first, but with a smile kindling deep down in her eyes. Then she held out her hand in token of amity. "Brave Constable, this is well spoken. You have no cause to fear me. You are not here by my will, it is true; for I have enough men with me to do the will of my Lord; but since you have come for love of the Dauphin, who soon must be crowned King, you are welcome indeed; and I know that you will live to serve him faithfully, though in the present you have foes at Court who turn his heart from you." So again she saw what lay beyond our ken, and which the future has brought to light. Alas, that she never saw the day when the King threw off his supine fear and idleness, and played the man in the conquest of his kingdom, and when De Richemont fought like a lion at his side! Yet who dare say that she did not see and did not rejoice even then? If the light came only in gleams and flashes, surely it came to her charged with an infinite joy! And now I must tell of the last exploit of this wonderful eight days' triumphal march through a hostile country--that battle of Patay, where, for the first time, the Maid met the foe in the open, and directed operations not against stone walls, as in every case before, but against an army drawn up in a plain. There had been marching and counter-marching which only a map could make clear. What matters it the route we pursued, so long only as our progress had been attended by victory, and the fortresses cleared of foes, so that the journey of the King could now be taken in safety? Yet there was one more peril to face; for the army so long expected, under Sir John Fastolffe, was now heard of somewhere close at hand. He had joined himself to Talbot, so it was rumoured, and now a great host was somewhere in our neighbourhood, ready to fall upon us if they could find us, and cut us to pieces, as they had done so often before--witness the fields of Crecy, Poictiers, and Agincourt! For the first time there was uneasiness and fear in the ranks of the soldiers. They had infinite confidence in the Maid as a leader against stone walls, for had they not seen her take tower after tower, city after city? But she had never led them in the open field; and how could they expect to meet and triumph over the English, who had always vanquished them heretofore? We knew not where the foe lay; all we knew was that it was somewhere close at hand; and so strong grew the fear in the hearts of Alencon and many others, that they begged the Maid to fall back upon the camp at Beaugency, and to wait there for further reinforcements. But she shook her head with decision. "Let us find them first, and then ride boldly at them. Be not afraid; they will not stand. My Lord will give us the victory!" And how did we come upon them at last? Verily, by a mere accident. We were marching in good order towards the great plain of Beauce, which at this time of the year was so thickly overgrown with vineyards and cornfields that we saw nothing of any lurking foe; and I trow that we were not seen of them, although a great host was lying at ease in the noontide heat, watching for our coming, I doubt not; but not yet drawn up in battle array. A stag, frightened by our approach, broke from the thicket, and went thundering across the plain. All at once a shower of arrows let loose from English bows followed the creature's flight, together with eager shouts and laughter, betraying the presence of the unsuspecting foe. With a lightning swiftness the Maid grasped the whole situation. Here was an army, waiting to fight, it is true, but for the moment off its guard. Here were we, in order of march. One word from her, and our whole force would charge straight upon the foe! And was that word lacking? Was there an instant's hesitation? Need such a question be asked of the Maid? Clear and sweet rose her wonderful voice, thrilling through the hot summer air. "Forward, my children, forward, and fear not. Fly boldly upon them, and the day shall be yours!" She charged, herself, at the head of one column; but La Hire, in the vanguard, was before her. With shouts of triumph and joy the old veteran and his followers thundered into the very midst of the startled English, and we followed in their wake. The Duc d'Alencon rode beside the Maid. His face was pale with excitement--perhaps with a touch of fear. He remembered the fight at Agincourt, and the wound received there, the captivity and weary waiting for release. "How will it end, my General, how will it end?" he said, and I heard his words and her reply, for I was riding close behind. "Have you good spurs, M. de Duc?" she asked, with one flashing smile showing the gleam of white teeth. "Ah Ciel!" he cried in dismay; "then shall we fly before them?" "Not so," she answered; "but they will fly so fast before us that we shall need good spurs to keep up with them!" And so, indeed, it was. Perhaps it was the sight of the elan of the French troops, perhaps the fear of the White Witch, perhaps because taken at unawares and in confusion, but the English for once made no stand. Fastolffe and his men, on the outer skirts of the force, rode off at once in some order, heading straight for Paris, but the braver and less prudent Talbot sought, again and again, to rally his men, and bring them to face the foe. But it was useless. The rout was utter and complete. They could not stand before the Maid; and when Talbot himself had fallen a prisoner into our hands, the army melted away and ran for its life, so that this engagement is called the "Chasse de Patay" to this day. CHAPTER XV. HOW THE MAID RODE WITH THE KING. Thus the English were routed with great loss, their leading generals prisoners in the hands of the Maid, and the road for the King open, not to Rheims alone, but to the very walls of Paris, had he so chosen. Indeed, there were those amongst us who would gladly and joyfully have marched under our great white banner right to the capital of the kingdom, and driven forth from it the English Regent and all the soldiers with him, whether Burgundians or those of his own nation. For Fastolffe was flying along the road which led him thither, and it would have been a joy to many of us to pursue and overtake, to rout him and his army, or put them to the sword, and to march up beneath the walls of Paris itself, and demand its surrender in the name of the Maid! Those there were amongst us who even came and petitioned of her to lead us thither, and strike a death blow, once and for all, against the power of the alien foe who had ruled our fair realm too long; but though her eyes brightened as we spoke, and though all that was martial in her nature responded to the appeal thus made to her--for by this time she was a soldier through every fibre of her being, and albeit ever extraordinarily tender towards the wounded, the suffering, the dying--be they friends or foes--the soldier spirit within her burned ever higher and higher, and she knew in her clear head that humanly speaking, we could embark upon such a victorious march as perchance the world has never seen before--certainly not beneath such a leader. And yet she shook her head, even whilst her cheek flushed and her eyes sparkled. Little as the King had done to merit the deep devotion of such a nature as hers, the Maid's loving loyalty towards, and faith in him never wavered. Although we all saw in him the idle, pleasure loving, indolent weakling, which in those days he was, she could, or would, find no fault with him. Often as he disappointed her, she never ceased to love and honour him. Perchance it was given to her to see something of that manlier nature which must have underlaid even then that which we saw and grieved over. For she would hear no word against him. He was the centre and sun of her purpose, and her answer to us was spoken without hesitation. "Nay, my friends, we have other work to do ere we may stand before the walls of Paris. The Dauphin must be brought to Rheims, and the crown set upon his head; for thus hath my Lord decreed, and I may not act other than as my voices direct." And when the Maid spoke thus, there was no contradicting or gainsaying her. We had such confidence in her by this, that whatever she did was right in our eyes The soldiers would have followed her eagerly to the very walls of Paris; but at her command they turned back and marched, with pennons flying and music sounding, to the Court of the King, where news of the Chasse of Patay had already preceded us, and where a joyous welcome awaited our return, though even now there were sour and jealous faces amongst the nearest advisers of the King. If you would believe it, they still opposed the journey of the King to Rheims, working on his fears, his irresolution, his indolence, and seeking to undermine the influence of the Maid, when she went personally to see him, that she might speak with him face to face. He himself had many excuses to offer. "Sweet Chevaliere," he would say, calling her by one of the names which circulated through the Court, "why such haste? Is it not time that you should rest and take your ease after your many and arduous toils? Think what you have accomplished in these few days! Flesh and blood cannot continue at such a strain. Let us now enjoy the fruits of these wonderful victories; let us feast and rejoice and enjoy a period of repose. Surely that is prudent counsel; for we must have care for our precious Maid, whom none can replace in our army, if she, by too arduous toil, should do herself an injury!" But the Maid looked at him with her grave eyes full of earnest pleading and searching questioning. "Gentle Dauphin, I beseech you speak not thus, nor reason after such carnal fashion. Think of what your Lord and my Lord has done for you! Think of what hath been accomplished by Him since first it was given to me to look upon your face. Think what He hath decreed and what He hath already wrought for the furtherance of His purpose towards your Majesty and this realm! And shall His will be set aside? Shall we, His children, hang back and thwart Him, just in the hour when He has put the victory in our hands? Ah, sweet Dauphin, that would be shame, indeed! That would be pain and grief to Him. Cast away all such unworthy thought! Press on to the goal, now in sight! When you stand, crowned and anointed, King of France, you shall know the power wherewith you have been upheld, and lifted from the very mire of humiliation and disgrace!" And at these words the Duc d'Alencon, who was by this an ardent believer in the Maid, and devotedly attached to her service, prostrated himself before the King, and cried: "Sire, this Maid speaks words of wisdom. I pray your Majesty to give full heed to what she says. Had you watched her as I have done, had you marched with her and seen her in battle as well as in scenes of peace, you would know well that the power of God is with her. Fear not to do her bidding! Go forth as she bids. Let us hail you King of your fair realm, and then let the Maid lead us on to other and greater victories!" We all joined our entreaties to that of the Duke. We marvelled how the King could be so blind. But whilst others spoke and urged him, whilst we saw the light kindle in the monarch's eyes, and knew that her words had prevailed with him, she stood apart as one who dreams; and over her face there stole a strange, pale shadow, unlike anything I had seen there before. She saw nothing of the scene about her; heard no word of what passed. I think she did not even know what was meant by the great shout which suddenly went up when the King arose and declared, once and for all, that his mind was made up, that he would march with the Maid to Rheims; that he would not be daunted by the fact that in Troyes and in Chalons English garrisons yet remained, which might give him trouble in passing. What the Maid had done before she could do again. All that hitherto she had promised had been fulfilled; the fear of her had fallen upon the English, and the terror of the English no longer weighed upon the spirits of the French. He would go, come what might. He would trust in the power of the Maid to finish that which she had begun. The shouts and plaudits of the courtiers within the castle, and of the soldiers without, when this thing was known, was evidence enough of the confidence and enthusiasm which the exploits of the Maid had awakened. Not a soldier who had followed her heretofore but would follow her now, wherever she should lead them. Surely her heart must have swelled with joy and pride as she heard the clamour of frantic applause ringing through the place. But when she was back in her own apartments, and I was able to approach her alone, I ventured to ask her something concerning her silence of a short time back. I always think with a great pride and tender joy of the trust and friendship which the Maid reposed in me, thereby doing me a vast honour. I had often ridden beside her on our marches, especially in the earlier days, when she had not so many to claim her words and counsels. Methinks she had spoken to Bertrand, to me, and to Sir Guy de Laval with more freedom respecting her voices and her visions than to any others, save, perhaps, the King himself, of whom she had ever said she had revelations for his ear alone. She would talk to us of things which for the most part she kept locked away in her own breast; and now when I did ask her what it was that had robbed her cheek of its colour, and wrapped her in a strange trance of grave musing, she passed her hand across her eyes, and then looked at me full, with a strange intensity of gaze. "If I only knew! If I only knew myself!" she murmured. "Did your voices speak to you, mistress mine? I have seen you fall into such musing fits before this, when something has been revealed; but then your eyes have been bright with joy--this time they were clouded as with trouble." "It was when the Duke spoke of other victories," she said, dreamily; "I seemed to see before me a great confusion as of men fighting and struggling. I saw my white banner fluttering, as it were, victoriously; and yet there was a darkness upon my spirit. I saw blackness--darkness--confusion; there was battle and strife--garments rolled in blood. My own white pennon was the centre of some furious struggle. I could not see what it was, waves of black vapour rose and obscured my view. Then, in the midst of the smoke and vapour, I saw a great pillar of fire, rising up as to the very sky itself, and out of the fire flew a white dove. Then a voice spoke--one of my own voices; but in tones different from any I have heard before--'Have courage, even to death, Jeanne,' it said, 'for we will still be with you.' Then everything faded once more, and I heard only the shouting of the people, and knew that the King had made his decision, and that he had promised to receive his crown, which has waited for him so long." As she spoke these last words, the cloud seemed to lift. Her own wonderful smile shone forth again. "If this be so; if, indeed, the Dauphin shall be made King, what matters that I be taken away? My work will end when the crown shall be set upon his head. Then, indeed, my soul shall say: 'Lord, now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace.'" Her face was suddenly transfigured--radiant--with some great and glorious thought. I was glad at heart to see that the shadow had passed entirely away. Only for a moment could any presage of personal fear cloud the sweet serenity of the Maid's nature. And yet I went from her something troubled myself; for had I not reason to know what strange power she possessed of reading the future, and what did it mean, that confusion of battle, that intermingling of victory and defeat, that darkness of smoke and blaze of fire, and the white dove flying forth unscathed? I had heard too often the shouts of the infuriated English--"We will take you and burn you, you White Witch! You shall perish in the flames from whence the devil, your father, has sent you forth!"--not to hear with a shudder any vision of smoke and of fire. But again, had not the Maid ever prevailed in battle over her foes? Might she not laugh to scorn all such threats? Ah me! It is well that we may not read the future, else how could we bear the burden of life? Joyous and triumphant was the day upon which, after some inevitable delays, we started forth--a goodly company in sooth--an army at our back, swelling with pride and triumph--to take our young King to the appointed place, and see the crown of France there set upon his head. From all quarters news was pouring in of the hopeless disruption of the power of the English after the Chasse de Patay. Towns and villages which had submitted in sullen acquiescence before, now sent messages of loyalty and love to the King. Men flocked daily to join our standard as we marched. It was a sight to see the villagers come forth, clad in their holiday dress, eager to see and pay homage to the King, but yet more eager to look upon the white mailed figure at his side and shout aloud the name of THE MAID OF ORLEANS! For the place of honour at the King's right hand was reserved for the Maid, and she rode beside him without fear, without protest, without shame. Gentle, humble, and simple as she always was, she knew herself the Messenger of a greater King than that of France, and the honour done to her she accepted as done to her Lord, and never faltered beneath it, as she was never puffed up or made haughty or arrogant thereby. Nor did she ever lose her tenderness of heart, nor her quick observation of trivial detail in the absorbing interests of her greatness. She was the first to note signs of distress upon the part of the soldiers, during this march in the midsummer heat. It was she who would suggest a halt in the noontide, in some wooded spot, that "her children" might rest and refresh themselves, and it was she who, never tired herself, would go amongst them, asking them of their well being, and bringing with her own hands some luscious fruit or some cooling draught to any soldier who might be suffering from the effects of the sun. She who rode beside a King, who was the greatest and most renowned of that great company, would minister with her own hands to the humblest of her followers; and if ever King or Duke or courtier jested or remonstrated with her on the matter, her answer was always something like this: "They are my own people. I am one of them. At home when any was sick in the village, I was always sent for. And wherefore not now? I am the same as I was then. Soon I shall be going back to them, my task accomplished. Wherefore should I not be their friend and sister still?" Then all would laugh to think of the Maid of Orleans going back to take up the life of a peasant again at Domremy; but the Maid's face grew grave and earnest as she would make reply: "Indeed, if my work for my King is accomplished, I would fain do so. I was so happy, so happy in my sweet home." But now our triumphal march was suddenly brought to a halt; for we were approaching the town of Troyes--a place of ill omen to France, and to the young King in particular, for there the shameful treaty was signed which robbed him of his crown; and great was the dissension amongst the King's counsellors as to what should be done. The place was strong, the English garrison there large. A summons to surrender sent on in advance had been ignored, and now came the question--should the army pass on its way to Rheims leaving this place in the rear unattacked and untaken, or should it run the risk of a long delay, and perhaps some peril and loss in attempting to reduce it? La Hire and Dunois spoke out insistently. At all costs the town must be taken. It would be folly and madness to leave such a stronghold of the enemy in the rear. Other places had fallen before the victorious Maid, and why not this? The army would go anywhere with her. The soldiers only desired to be told what she counselled, and to a man they would support her. They had lost all fear of the foe, if only the Maid led them into battle, whether in the open or against massive walls. But as usual the King's nearest counsellors were all for delay, for avoiding battle, for retreat rather than risk. The Archbishop of Rheims, instead of being eager to push on to the place which so far was only his in name, for he had never been aught but titular Archbishop as yet, was always one with La Tremouille in advising caution and a timid policy. Both were the enemies of the Maid, jealous of her gifts and of her influence with the King, and fearful lest her power over him should grow and increase. They even plotted that she should be excluded from the council now sitting anent this very matter, and it was only when the King and the Duc d'Alencon, growing restless and impatient at her absence, desired her presence instantly, that she was sent for. There was a grave dignity about her as she entered, which sat impressively upon her young face, so fair and sweet and gentle. She knew that timid counsels were being held, and that she, the Commander-in-Chief of the army, was being set aside--the Messenger from the Lord was being ignored. Not for herself, but for Him was her spirit moved. The Archbishop with much circumlocution told her of the difficulty in which the King's Council was placed, and would have discoursed for long upon the situation, only that in his first pause the Maid spoke, addressing herself to the King: "Shall I be believed if I speak my counsel?" she asked. "You will be believed according as you speak," answered the King, thoroughly uneasy, as he ever was, when torn in twain by the multitude of counsellors with whom he must needs surround himself, though his heart ever inclined towards the Maid. "I speak that which my Lord gives me to speak," she answered, her wonderful eyes full upon the King. "Shall I be believed?" "If you speak that which is reasonable and profitable, I will certainly believe you," he answered, still uneasy beneath her look. "Shall I be believed?" she questioned a third time, and there was a fire in her eyes which seemed to leap out and scathe the pusillanimous monarch as he sat quaking in his Council. "Speak, Maiden," he cried out then, "I at least will believe!" "Then, noble Dauphin," she cried, "order your army to assault this city of Troyes, where such despite has been done you, and hold no more councils; for my Lord has told me that within three days I shall lead you into the town, and false Burgundy and proud England shall there be overthrown!" "Pouf!" cried the Chancellor, one of the Maid's worst foes, "if there was a chance of doing such a thing in six days we would willingly wait; but--" He stopped suddenly--none knew why, save that the Maid's eyes were fixed full upon him, and in those eyes was that strange shining light which some of us knew so well. She did not speak to him, but when his voice suddenly wavered and broke, she addressed herself to the King, speaking as one who repeats a message. "You shall be master of the city of Troyes, noble Dauphin, not in six days--but tomorrow." And even as she spoke, without waiting for any response, she turned and went forth, walking with her head well up, and her eyes fixed straight before her, yet as one who walks in sleep, and pays no heed to what lies before him. She called for her horse; and leaping into the saddle, rode out bareheaded in the summer sun to the camp where the soldiers lay, in doubt and wonderment at this delay; and as they sprang up to a man at sight of her, and broke into the acclamations which always greeted her appearance amongst them, she lifted up her clear ringing voice and cried: "Be ready, my children, against the morrow, confess your sins, make your peace with God and man. For tomorrow He will lead you victorious into yonder frowning city, and not a hair of your heads shall suffer!" They crowded about her, filling the air with shouts of triumph; they clamoured to be led at once against the grim frowning walls. I verily believe, had she put herself at their head then and there, that nothing could have withstood the elan of their attack; but the Maid received her orders from a source we knew not of, and fleshly pride never tempted her to swerve from the appointed path. She smiled at the enthusiasm of the men, but she shook her head gently and firmly. "Do my bidding, my children, confess yourselves and pray till set of sun. Then I will come to you and set you your appointed tasks, and tomorrow I will lead you into the city!" That night there was no sleep for the Maid or for her soldiers. At no time was it dark, for midsummer was over the land, and the moon hung in the sky like a silver lamp when the sun had set. The Maid came forth as she had said with the last of the daylight, and at her command a great mound was speedily raised, of earth, brushwood, faggots, stones--anything that the soldiers could lay hands upon; and when this hillock was of height sufficient to satisfy the young General, the great guns were brought and set upon it in such masterly fashion, and in such a commanding way, that La Hire, Dunois and Xantrailles, who came to see, marvelled at it, and we could note from the top of this earthwork that within the city great commotion reigned, and that it was as busy as a hive that has been disturbed. As the first mystic glow of the summer's dawn kindled in the eastern sky, the Maid stood, a white luminous figure in full armour, poised lightly on the top of one of our pieces of ordnance, her drawn sword in her hand, pointing full in the direction of the city. I have heard since from those within that the anxious garrison and citizens saw this motionless figure, and cried aloud in terror and awe. To them it seemed as though St. Michael himself had come down to fight against them, and terror stricken they ran to the governors of the city and implored that surrender might be made, ere the heavens opened and rained lightnings down upon them. And thus it came about that ere the dawn had fairly come, an embassy was sent to the King and terms of surrender offered. The King, from motives of policy or fear, the Maid, from pity and generosity, accepted the messengers graciously, and granted the garrison leave to depart with their horses and their arms, if the town were peacefully given up; and thus it came about that after the King had finished his night's slumber, and the Maid had done her gracious part in redeeming and releasing the French prisoners, which, but for her, would have been carried away by the retiring English and Burgundians, she rode beside the King, and at the head of the cheering and tumultuous army into the city of Troyes, which had surrendered to the magic of her name without striking a blow. "O my Chevaliere," cried the happy and triumphant monarch, as he turned to look into her grave serene face. "What a wonderful Maid you are! Stay always with me, Jeanne, and be my friend and General to my life's end." She looked at him long and earnestly as she made answer: "Alas, Sire, it may not be! For a year--perhaps for a year. But I shall last no longer than that!" CHAPTER XVI. HOW THE MAID ACCOMPLISHED HER MISSION. Shall I ever forget that evening? No, not if I live to be a hundred! June had well-nigh passed ere we began our march from Gien--that triumphant march headed by the King and the Maid--and July had run half its course since we had been upon the road. For we had had a great tract of country to traverse, and a large army must needs have time in which to move itself. And now upon a glorious golden evening in that month of sunshine and summertide, we saw before us--shining in a floating mist of reflected glory--the spires and towers, the walls and gates of the great city of Rheims--the goal of our journeyings--the promised land of the Maid's visions and voices! Was it indeed a city of stone and wood which shone before us in the level rays of the sinking sun? I asked that question of myself; methinks that the Maid was asking it in her heart; for when I turned my eyes upon her, I caught my breath in amaze at her aspect, and I know now what it is to say that I have looked upon the face of an angel! She had dropped her reins, and they hung loose upon her horse's neck; her hands were clasped together in a strange rapture of devotion. Her head was bare; for she often gave her headpiece to her page to carry for her, and in the evenings did not always replace it by any other covering. Her hair had grown a little longer during these months, and curled round her face in a loose halo, which in the strong and ruddy light of the setting sun, shone a glorious golden colour, as though a ray of heavenly light were enmeshed within it. But it was the extraordinary brightness of those great luminous eyes, the rapt and intense expression of her face which arrested my attention, and seemed for a moment to stop the triumphant beating of my heart. It was not triumph which I read there, though there was joy and rapture and peace, beyond all power of understanding. It was the face of one who sees heaven open, and in the wonder and awe of the beatific vision forgets all else, and feels not the fetters of the flesh, heeds not those things which must needs intervene ere the spirit can finally be loosed to enter upon blessedness and rest, but soars upwards at once into heavenly regions. The town of Rheims lay before us. The inhabitants were pouring forth to meet us. We saw them coming over the plain, as we watched the walls and buildings, glowing in the mystic radiance of the summer's evening, loom up larger and grander and sharper before us. It was no dream! And yet who would have thought it possible three months ago? In mid-April the iron grip of the English lay all over the land north of the Loire, and the south lay supine and helpless, stricken with the terror of the victorious conqueror. Orleans was at its last gasp, and with its fall the last bulwark would be swept away; all France must own the sway of the conqueror. The King was powerless, indolent, ready to fly at the first approach of peril, with no hope and no desire for rule, doubtful even if he had the right to take upon himself the title of King, careless in his despair and his difficulties. The army was almost non-existent; the soldiers could scarce be brought to face the foe. One Englishman could chase ten of ours. The horror as of a great darkness seemed to have fallen upon the land. And yet in three months' time what had not been accomplished! The King was riding into the ancient city of Rheims, to be crowned King of France; Orleans was relieved; a score of fortresses had been snatched from the hands of the English. These were fleeing from us in all directions back to Paris; where they hoped to make a stand against us, but were in mortal fear of attack; and now it was our soldiers who clamoured to be led against the English--the English who fled helter-skelter before the rush and the dash of the men whom heretofore they had despised. And all this was the work of yonder marvellous Maid--a girl of seventeen summers, who, clad in white armour, shining like an angelic vision, was riding at the King's side towards the city. He turned and looked at her at the moment my gaze was thus arrested, and I saw his face change. He put out his hand and touched hers gently; but he had to touch her twice and to speak twice ere she heard or knew. "Jeanne--fairest maiden--what do you see?" She turned her gaze upon him--radiant, misty, marvellous. "I see the Land of Promise," she answered, speaking very low, yet so clearly that I heard every word. "The chosen of the Lord will go forward to victory. He will drive out the enemy before the face of him upon whom He shall set the crown of pure gold. France shall prosper--her enemies shall be confounded. What matter whose the work, or whose the triumph? What matter who shall fall ere the task be accomplished--so that it be done according to the mind of the Lord?" "And by the power of the Maid--the Deliverer!" spoke the King, a gush of gratitude filling his heart, as he looked first at the slight figure and inspired face of the Maid, and then at the city towards which we were riding, the faint clash of joy bells borne softly to our ears. "For to you, O my General, I owe it all; and may the Lord judge betwixt us twain if I share not every honour that I may yet win with her who has accomplished this miracle!" But her gaze was full of an inexplicable mystery. "Nay, gentle Dauphin, but that will not be," she said; "One shall increase, another shall decrease--hath it not ever been so? My task is accomplished. My work is done. Let another take my place after tomorrow, for my mission will be accomplished." "Never!" cried the King firmly and earnestly, and when I heard him thus speak my heart rejoiced; for I, no more than others, believed that success could attend the King's further efforts without her who was the inspiration of the army, and the worker of these great miracles which had been wrought. How often have I wondered since--but that is no part of my story. Let me tell those things which did happen to us. How can I tell of our entry into Rheims? Have I not spoken in other places of other such scenes, often in the early dusk of evening, when whole cities flocked out to meet the Maid, to gaze in awe and wonder upon her, to kiss her hands, her feet, her knees, the neck and flanks of the horse she rode, and even his very footprints in the road, as he moved along with his precious burden? As it was there, so was it here--the same joy, the same wonder, the same enthusiasm. The King was greeted with shouts and acclamations, it is true; but the greater admiration and wonder was reserved for the Maid, and he knew it, and smiled, well pleased that it should be so; for at that time his heart was full of a great gratitude and affection, and never did he seek to belittle that which she had wrought on his behalf. Thankfulness, peace, and happiness shone in the eyes of the Maid as she rode; but there was a nearer and more personal joy in store for her; for as we passed through the town, with many pauses on account of the greatness of the throng, pouring in and out of the churches (for it was the vigil of the Madelaine), or crowding about the King and the Maid, she chanced to lift her eyes to the windows of an inn in the place, and behold her face kindled with a look different from any I had seen there before, and she looked around for me, and beckoning with her hand, she pointed upwards, and cried in tones of strange delight and exultation: "My father, fair knight, my father! I saw his face!" Now, I knew that Jacques d'Arc had been greatly set against his daughter's mission, and it had been declared that he had disowned her, and would have withheld her from going forth, had such a thing been within his power. She had never received any message of love or forgiveness from him all these weeks, though her two younger brothers had joined the army, and were always included in her household. So that I was not surprised at the kindling of her glance, nor at the next words she spoke. "Go to him, my friend; tell him that I must needs have speech with him. Ah, say that I would fain return home with him when my task is done, if it be permitted me. Go, find him speedily, ere he can betake himself away. My father! My father! I had scarce hoped to look upon his face again!" So whilst the King and the Maid and their train rode on to the huge old palace of the Archeveche, hard by the Cathedral, I slipped out of my place in the ranks, and passed beneath the archway into the courtyard of the old inn, where the Maid declared that she had seen the face of her father looking forth. I had not much trouble in finding him; for already a whisper had gone forth that certain friends and relatives of the wonderful Maid had journeyed from Domremy to witness her triumphant entry into Rheims. Indeed, some of these had followed us from Chalons, all unknown to her, who would so gladly have welcomed them. Chalons, though a fortified town, and with a hostile garrison, had opened its gates to us without resistance, feeling how hopeless it was to strive against the power of the Maid. The wonder and awe inspired by her presence, and by her marvellous achievements, had sunk deeply into the spirits of these simple country folk, who had only heretofore known Jeanne d'Arc as a gentle village maiden, beloved of all, but seeming not in any way separated from her companions and friends. Now they had seen her, white and glistening, in martial array, riding beside a King, an army at her back, acclaimed of the multitude, the idol of the hour, a victor in a three months' campaign, the like of which never was before, and methinks can never be again. So now, when I stood face to face with the rugged prud'homme, the father of this wonderful Maid, and told him of her desire to speak with him upon the morrow, when the King should have received his crown, I saw that many emotions were struggling together in his breast; for his soul revolted yet, in some measure, at the thought of his girl a leader of men, the head of an army, the friend of kings and courtiers, whilst it was impossible but that some measure of pride and joy should be his at the thought of her achievements, and in the assurance that at last the King, whom loyal little Domremy had ever served and loved, was to receive his crown, and be the anointed sovereign of the land. "She desires speech with me? She, whom I have seen riding beside the King? What have I to do with the friends of royalty? How can she consort with princes and with peasants?" "Let her show you that herself, my friend," I answered. "We, who have companied with her through these wonderful weeks, know well how that she is no less a loving daughter, a friend of the people, for being the friend of a King and the idol of an army. Give me some message for her. She longs for a kind word from you. Let me only take her word that you will see her and receive her as a father should receive his child, and I trow that it will give her almost the same joy as the knowledge that by her miraculous call she has saved her country and crowned her King." I scarce know what answer Jacques d'Arc would have made, for he was a proud, unbending man, and his face was sternly set whilst I pleaded with him. But there were others from Domremy, entirely filled with admiration of the Maid, and with desire to see her again; and their voices prevailed, so that he gave the answer for which I waited. He would remain at the inn over the morrow of the great function of the coronation, and would receive his daughter there, and have speech with her. "Tell her that I will take her home with me, if she will come," he spoke; "for she herself did say that her work would be accomplished when the crown was placed upon the King's head. Let her be true to her word; let her return home, and become a modest maiden again beneath her mother's care, and all shall be well betwixt us. But if pride and haughtiness possess her soul, and she prefers the company of courtiers and soldiers to that of her own people, and the life of camps to the life of home, then I wash my hands of her. Let her go her own way. She shall no longer be daughter of mine!" I did not tell those words to the Maid. My lips refused to speak them. But I told her that her father would remain in the place till she had leisure to have speech with him; and her eyes kindled with joy at hearing such news, for it seemed to her as though this would be the pledge of his forgiveness, the forgiveness for which she had longed, and for the lack of which none of her triumphs could altogether compensate. There was no sleep for the city of Rheims upon that hot summer's night. Although the coming of the King had been rumoured for some time, it had never been fully believed possible till news had been brought of the fall of Troyes, and the instant submission of Chalons. Then, and only then, did citizens and prelates truly realise that the talked-of ceremony could become an accomplished fact, and almost before they had recovered from their amazement at the rapidity of the march of events, courtiers brought in word that the King and his army were approaching. So all night long the people were hard at work decorating their city, their churches, above all their Cathedral; and the priests and prelates were in close conference debating what vestments, what vessels, what rites and ceremonies should be employed, and how the lack of certain necessary articles, far away at St. Denis, could be supplied out of the rich treasuries of the Cathedral. As the dawn of the morning brightened in the east, the sun rose upon a scene of such splendour and magnificence as perhaps has seldom been witnessed at such short notice. The whole city seemed one blaze of triumphal arches, of summer flowers, of costly stuffs and rich decoration. Every citizen had donned his best and brightest suit; the girls and children had clothed themselves in white, and crowned themselves with flowers. Even the war-worn soldiers had polished their arms, furbished up their clothes, and borrowed or bought from the townsfolk such things as were most lacking; and now, drawn up in array in the great square, with tossing banners, and all the gay panoply of martial glory, they looked like some great victorious band--as, indeed, they were--celebrating the last act of a great and wonderful triumph. As for the knights, nobles, and courtiers, one need not speak of the outward glory of their aspect--the shining armour, the gay dresses, the magnificent trappings of the sleek horses--that can well be pictured by those who have ever witnessed a like brilliant scene. But for the first part of the day, with its many and varied ceremonies, there was lacking the shining figure of the Maid; nor did the King himself appear. But forth from the Palace of the Archeveche rode four of the greatest and most notable peers of the realm, attended by a gorgeous retinue; and with banners waving, and trumpets blowing great martial blasts, they paced proudly through the streets, between the closely-packed ranks of soldiers and citizens, till they reached the ancient Abbey of Sainte Remy, where the monks of Sainte Ampoule guard within their shrine the holy oil of consecration, in that most precious vial which, they said, was sent down from heaven itself for the consecration of King Clovis and his successors. Upon bended knees and with bared heads these great peers of France then took their solemn oath that the sacred vial should never leave their sight or care, night or day, till it was restored to the keeping of the shrine from which the Abbot was about to take it. Then, and only then, would the Abbot, clothed in his most sumptuous vestments, and attended by his robed monks, take from its place that holy vessel, and place it in the hands of the messengers--Knights Hostages, as they were termed for the nonce--and as they carried it slowly and reverently forth, and retraced their steps to the Cathedral, accompanied now by the Abbot and monks, every knee was bent and every head bowed. But all the while that this ceremony was taking place, the Maid was shut up in her room in the Palace, dictating a letter of appeal to the Duke of Burgundy, and praying him in gentle, yet authoritative terms, to be reconciled to his King, join hands with him against the English foe, and then, if need there were to fight, to turn his arms against the Saracens, instead of warring with his brethren and kinsmen. I trow that this thing was urged upon her at this time, in that she believed her mission so nearly accomplished, and that soon she would have no longer right to style herself "Jeanne the Maid," and to speak with authority to princes and nobles. As yet she was the appointed messenger of Heaven. Her words and acts all partook of that almost miraculous character which they had borne from the first. I will not quote the letter here; but it is writ in the page of history; and I ask of all scholars who peruse its words, whether any village maiden of but seventeen years, unlettered, and ignorant of statecraft, could of herself compose so lofty and dignified an appeal, or speak with such serene authority to one who ranked as well-nigh the equal of kings. It was her last act ere she donned her white armour, and passed forth from her chamber to take part in the ceremony of the coronation. In some sort it was the last of her acts performed whilst she was yet the deliverer of her people. When I looked upon those words, long after they had been penned, I felt the tears rising in mine eyes. I could have wept tears of blood to think of the fate which had befallen one whose thoughts were ever of peace and mercy, even in the hour of her supremest triumph. How can my poor pen describe the wonders of the great scene, of which I was a spectator upon that day? Nay, rather will I only seek to speak of the Maid, and how she bore herself upon that great occasion. She would have been content with a very humble place in the vast Cathedral today; she had no desire to bear a part in the pageant which had filled the city and packed the great edifice from end to end. But the King and the people willed it otherwise. The thing which was about to be done was the work of the Maid, and she must be there to see all, and the people should see her, too--see her close to the King himself, who owed to her dauntless courage and devotion the crown he was about to assume, the realm he had begun to conquer. So she stood near at hand to him all through that long, impressive ceremony--a still, almost solemn figure in her silver armour, a long white velvet mantle, embroidered in silver, flowing from her shoulders, her hand grasping the staff of her great white banner, which had been borne into the Cathedral by D'Aulon, and beside which she stood, her hand upon the staff. She was bareheaded, and the many-coloured lights streamed in upon her slim, motionless figure, and the face which she lifted in adoration and thanksgiving. I trow that none in that vast assembly, who could see her as she thus stood, doubted but that she stood there the accredited messenger of the Most High. The light from Heaven itself was shining on her upturned face, the reflection of an unearthly glory beamed in her eyes. From time to time her lips moved, as though words of thanksgiving broke silently forth; but save for that she scarcely moved all through the long and solemn ceremony. Methinks that she saw it rather in the spirit than in the flesh; and the knights and nobles who had poured in from the surrounding country to witness this great function, and had not companied with the Maid before, but had only heard of her fame from afar, these regarded her with looks of wonder and of awe, and whispering together, asked of each other whether in truth she were a creature of flesh and blood, or whether it were not some angelic presence, sent down direct from Heaven. And so at last the King was anointed and crowned! The blare of the thousand trumpets, the acclamations of a vast multitude proclaimed the thing done! Charles the Seventh stood before his people, their King, in fact as well as in name. The work of the Maid was indeed accomplished! CHAPTER XVII. HOW THE MAID WAS PERSUADED. The ceremony was over. The Dauphin stood in our midst a crowned and anointed King. We were back in the great hall of the Archeveche, and the thunders of triumphant applause which had been restrained within the precincts of the sacred edifice now broke forth again, and yet again, in long bursts of cheering, which were echoed from without by the multitudes in the street and great square Place, and came rolling through the open windows in waves of sound like the beating of the surf upon the shore. The King stood upon a raised dais; his chiefest nobles and peers around him. He was magnificently robed, as became so great an occasion, and for the first time that I had ever seen, he looked an imposing and a dignified figure. Something there was of true kingliness in his aspect. It seemed as though the scene through which he had passed had not been without effect upon his nature, and that something regal had been conveyed to him through the solemnities which had just taken place. The Maid was present also; but she had sought to efface herself in the crowd, and stood thoughtfully apart in an embrasure of the wall, half concealed by the arras, till the sound of her name, proclaimed aloud in a hundred different tones, warned her that something was required of her, and she stepped forward with a questioning look in her startled eyes, as though just roused from some dream. She had been one of the first to prostrate herself at the new-made King's feet when the coronation ceremony was over; and the tears streaming down her face had been eloquent testimony of her deep emotion. But she had only breathed a few broken words of devotion and of joy, and had added something in a choked whisper which none but he had been able to hear. "The King calls for the Maid! The King desires speech with the Maid!" such was the word ringing through the hall; and she came quietly forth from her nook, the crowd parting this way and that before her, till she was walking up through a living avenue to the place where the King was now seated upon a throne-like chair on the dais at the far end of the hall. As she came towards him the King extended his hand, as though he would meet her still rather as friend than as subject; but she kneeled down at his feet, and pressing her lips to the extended hand, she spoke in a voice full of emotion: "Gentle King, now is the pleasure of God fulfilled towards you. Now is the will of my Lord accomplished. To Him alone be the praise and glory! It was His will that I should be sent before you to raise the siege of Orleans, to lead you to this city of Rheims, there to receive your consecration. Now has He shown to all the world that you are the true King--that it is His will you should reign over this fair realm, that this kingdom of France belongs to you and you alone. My task is now accomplished. His will in me is fulfilled. Go forward, then, noble King--strong in the power of your kingly might and right, doubting not that He will aid you still; though He will work with other instruments, with other means, for my task in this is now accomplished!" There was a little stir and thrill throughout the hall as these words were spoken. Dismay fell upon many, wonder upon all, triumph gleamed from the eyes of a few; but most men looked one at the other in consternation. What did she mean by these words?--this Heaven-sent Maid to whom we owed so much? Surely she did not think to leave us just in the hour of her supreme triumph? How could we hope to lead on the armies to fresh victories, if the soldiers were told that the Maid would no longer march with them? Who would direct us with heavenly counsel, or with that marvellous clearness of vision which is given only to a few in this sinful world, and to those only whose hearts are consecrated by a great devotion, and a great love? She could not mean that! She loved France with an overwhelming fervour. She was devoted to the service of the King, in whom she had never been able or willing to see wrong. She knew her power with the army; she loved the rough soldiers who followed her unshrinkingly in the teeth of the very fiercest perils, and who would answer to her least command, when they would obey none other general. O no, she could not think of deserting France in this her hour of need! Much had been done; but much yet remained to do. If she were to quit her post, there could be no telling what might not follow. The English, cowed and bewildered now, might well pluck up heart of grace, and sweep back through the country once owning their sway, driving all foes before them as in the days of old. The victories won in these last weeks might soon be swallowed up in fresh defeat and disaster. How could we expect it to be otherwise if the presence of the Maid were withdrawn? These and a hundred other questions and conjectures were buzzing through the great hall. Wonder and amaze was on every face. The King himself looked grave for a moment; but then his smile shone out carelessly gay and confident. He looked down at the Maid, and there was tender friendliness in his glance. He spoke nothing to her at the first as to what she had said; he merely asked of her a question. "My Chevaliere, my guardian angel, tell me this, I pray. You have done all these great things for me; what am I to do in return for you?" She raised her eyes towards him, and the light sprang into them--that beautiful, fearless light which shone there when she led her soldiers into battle. "Go forward fearlessly, noble King. Go forward in the power of your anointing; and fear nothing. That is all I ask of you. Do that, and you will give to me my heart's desire." "We will talk of that later, Jeanne," he answered, "I have many things to speak upon that matter yet. But today I would ask you of something different. You have done great things for me; it is not fitting that you should refuse to receive something at my hands. This day I sit a King upon my father's throne. Ask of me some gift and grace for yourself--I your King and your friend demand it of you!" It was spoken in a right kingly and gracious fashion, and we all held our breath to listen for the answer the Maid should give. We had known her so long and so well, and we had learned how little she desired for herself, how hard it was to induce her to express any wish for her own gratification. She was gentle and gracious in her acceptance of the gifts received from friends who had furnished her from the beginning with such things as were needful for her altered life; but she had ever retained her simplicity of thought and habit; and though often living in the midst of luxury and extravagance, she was never touched by those vices herself. And now she was bidden to ask a boon; and she must needs do it, or the displeasure of the King would light upon her. He had raised her to her feet by this time, and she stood before him, a slim boy-like figure in her white point-device dress, her cheeks a little flushed, her slender fingers tightly entwined, the breath coming and going through her parted lips. "Gentle King," she answered, and her low full voice thrilled through the hall to its farthermost end in the deep hush which had fallen upon it, "there is one grace and gift that I would right gladly ask of you. Here in this city of Rheims are assembled a few of mine own people from Domremy; my father, my uncle, and with them some others whom I have known and loved from childhood. I would ask this thing of you, noble King. Give me at your royal pleasure a deed, duly signed and sealed by your royal hand, exempting the village of Domremy, where I was born, from all taxes such as are levied elsewhere throughout the realm. Let me have this deed to give to those who have come to see me here, and thus when I return with them to my beloved childhood's home, I shall be witness to the joy and gladness which such a kingly boon will convey. Grant me this--only this, gentle King, and you will grant me all my heart desires!" The King spoke aside a few words to one of those who stood about him, and this person silently bowed and quitted the hail; then he turned once more to the Maid, standing before him still with a happy and almost childlike smile playing over her lips. "The thing shall be done, Jeanne," he said; "and it shall be done right soon. The first deed to which I set my hand as King shall be the one which shall for ever exempt Domremy from all taxation. You shall give it to your father this very day, to take home with him when he goes. But as for those other words of yours--what did you mean by them? How can you witness the joy of a distant village, when you will be leading forward the armies of France to fresh victories?" He gazed searchingly into her face as he spoke; and she looked back at him with a sudden shrinking in her beautiful eyes. "Sire," she faltered--and anything like uncertainty in that voice was something new to us--"of what victories do you speak? I have done my part. I have accomplished that which my Lord has set me to do. My task ends here. My mission has been fulfilled. I have no command from Him to go forward. I pray you let me return home to my mother and my friends." "Nay, Jeanne, your friends are here," spoke the King gravely, "and your country is your mother. Would you neglect to hear her cry to you in the hour of her need? Her voice it was that called you forth from your obscurity; she calls you yet. Will you cease to hear and to obey?" The trouble and perplexity deepened in the eyes of the Maid. "My voices have not bidden me to go forward," she faltered. "Have they bidden you to go back--to do no more for France?" "No," she answered, throwing back her head, her eyes kindling once again with ardour; "they have not bidden me return, or I would have done it without wavering. They tell me nothing, save to be of a good heart and courage. They promise to be with me--my saints, whom I love. But they give me no commands. I see not the path before me, as I have seen it hitherto. That is why I say, let me go home. My work is done; I have no mission more. Shall I take upon me that which my Lord puts not upon me--whether it be honour or toil or pain?" "Yes, Jeanne, you shall take that upon you which your country calls upon you to take, which your King puts upon you, which even your saints demand of you, though perchance with no such insistence as before, since that is no longer needed. Can you think that the mind of the Lord has changed towards me and towards France? Yet you must know as well as I and my Generals do, that without you to lead them against the foe, the soldiers will waver and tremble, and perchance turn their backs upon our enemies once more. You they will follow to a man; but will they follow others when they know that you have deserted them? You tell me to go forward and be of good courage. How can I do this if you turn back, and take with you the hearts of my men?" "Sire, I know not that such would be the case," spoke the Maid gravely. "You stand amongst them now as their crowned and anointed King. What need have they of other leader? They have followed me heretofore, waiting for you; but now--" "Now they will want you more than ever, since you have ever led them to victory!" cried the King; and raising his voice and looking about him, especially to those generals and officers of his staff who had seen so much of the recent events of the campaign, he cried out: "What say you, gentlemen? What is our chance to drive away the English and become masters of this realm if the MAID OF ORLEANS take herself away from us, and the soldiers no longer see her standard floating before them, or hear her voice cheering them to the battle?" Some of those present looked sullenly on the ground, unwilling to own that the Maid was a power greater than any other which could be brought into the field; but there were numbers of other and greater men, who had never denied her her meed of praise, though they had thwarted her at times in the council room; and these with one accord declared that should the Maid betake herself back to Domremy, leaving the army to its fate, they would not answer for the effect which this desertion would have, but would, in fact, almost expect the melting away of the great body of the trained soldiers and recruits who had fought with her, and had come to regard her presence with them as the essential to a perfect victory. But we were destined to have a greater testimony than this, for a whisper of what was passing within the great hall had now filtered forth into the streets, and all in a moment we were aware of a mighty tumult and hubbub without, a clamour of voices louder and more insistent than those which had hailed the King a short time before, and the words which seemed to form themselves out of the clamour and gradually grow into the burden of the people's cry was the repeated and vehement shout, "THE MAID OF ORLEANS! THE MAID OF ORLEANS! We will fight if the Maid goes with us--without her we be all dead men!" They came and told us what the crowd of soldiers in the street was shouting; they begged that the Maid would show herself at some window, and promise that she would remain with the army. Indeed, there was almost a danger of riot and disaster if something were not done to quell the excitement of the soldiery and the populace; and at this news the Maid suddenly drew her slender, drooping figure to its full height, and looked long and steadfastly at the King. "Sire," she said, "I give myself to you and to France. My Lord knows that I seek in this to do His will, though differently from heretofore. You will be disappointed. Many will misjudge me. There will be sorrow and anguish of heart as well as triumph and joy. But if my country calls, I go forth gladly to meet her cry--even though I go to my death!" I do not know how many heard her last words; for they were drowned in the roar of joyful applause which followed her declaration. The King gave her his hand, and led her forth upon a balcony, where the great concourse in the street below could see them; and by signs he made them understand that she would continue with him as one of his Commanders-in-Chief; and in hearing this the city well nigh went mad with joy; bonfires blazed and bells pealed madly; and the cry heard in the streets was less "Long live the King!" than that other frantic shout, "THE MAID OF ORLEANS! THE MAID OF ORLEANS!" But the Maid returned to her apartments with a strange look upon her face; and she held out her hand to me as one who would fain ask help and sympathy of a trusted comrade, as I am proud to think I was regarded at that time by her. "The King's word has prevailed, O my friend," she said, "but I would that I were sure it will be for the best!" "How can it be otherwise than for the best?" I answered as I held her hand in mine, and looked searchingly into her fair, grave face. "Will not your Lord help you yet? Do not all men trust in you? Will not the soldiers fight for and with you? And are you not sure in your heart that the cause of the French King will yet triumph?" Her eyes were misty with unshed tears as she made reply: "I know that my Lord will not desert me; and I trust I may serve Him yet, and the King whom I love. I know that all will be well--at the last--for this fair realm of France. But I have no commission direct from my Lord as I have had hitherto. My voices yet speak gentle and kindly words. I trow that my saints will watch over me, and that they will give me strength to strive and to overcome. For myself I fear not--I am ready to die for my King and my country if that be the will of God. Only the shadow lies athwart my path, where until today all was brightness and sunshine. It would have been so sweet to go home to my mother, to see the Fairy Tree, and the old familiar faces, and listen once more to the Angelus bell! I had thought that I should by this have earned my rest. I had not thought that with so many to serve him, the King would have had further use for me." "Yet how could it be otherwise, my General, when the soldiers will follow you alone?--when all look to you as their champion and their friend?" "Nay, but I have enemies too," she answered sadly, "and I know that they will work me ill--greater ill in the future than they have had power to do heretofore, when I was watched over and guarded for the task that was set me. That task is now accomplished. Can I look to receive the same protection as before? The Lord may have other instruments prepared to carry on His work of deliverance. I doubt not that He will use me yet, and that I shall never be forsaken; but my time will not be long. I shall only last a year. Let the King use me for all that I am worth!--after that he must look for others to aid him!" I could not bear to hear her speak so. I would have broken in with protestations and denials; but something in the look upon her face silenced me. My heart sank strangely within me, for had I not learned to know how truly the Maid did read that which the future hid from our eyes? I could only seek to believe that in this she might be mistaken, since she herself did say how that things were something different with her now. She seemed to read the thoughts that crowded my brain; for she looked into my face with her tender, far-seeing smile. "You are sad, my kind friend, my faithful knight, and sometimes mine own heart is sad also. But yet why should we fear? I know that I have enemies, and I know that they will have more power to hurt me in the times that are coming, than has been permitted hitherto, yet--" With an uncontrollable impulse I flung myself at her feet. "O my General--O my dear lady--speak not such things--it breaks my heart. Or if, indeed, the peril be so great, then let all else go, and bid your father to take you back to Domremy with him. There, at least, you will be safe and happy!" Her eyes were deep with the intensity of her emotion. "It may not be," she said with grave gentleness and decision. "I had hoped it for myself, but it may not be. My word is pledged. My King has commanded. I, too, must learn, in my measure, the lesson of obedience, even unto death!" Her hands were clasped; her eyes were lifted heavenwards. A shaft of light from the sinking sun struck in through the coloured window behind her, and fell across her face with an indescribable glory. I was still upon my knees and I could not rise, for it seemed to me as though at that moment another Presence than that of the Maid was with us in the room. My limbs shook. My heart seemed to melt within me; and yet it was not fear which possessed me, but a mysterious rapture the like of which I can in no wise fathom. How long it lasted I know not. The light had faded when I rose to my feet and met her wonderful gaze. She spoke just a few words. "Now you know what help is given us in our hours of need. My faithful knight need never mourn or weep for me; for that help and comfort will never be withheld. Of this I have the promise clear and steadfast!" I was with her when she went to see her father. It was dark, and the old man sat with his brother-in-law, Durand Laxart--he who had helped her to her first interview with De Baudricourt--in one of the best rooms of the inn. Since it had been known that these men were the kinsfolk of the Maid, everything of the best had been put at their disposal by the desire of the citizens, and horses had been provided for them for their return to Domremy. For the city of Rheims was filled with joy at that which had been accomplished, and the Maid was the hero of the hour. But I could see that there was a cloud upon the old man's face--the father's; and he did not rise as his daughter entered--she before whom nobles had learnt to bend, and who sat at the Council of the King. His sombre eyes dwelt upon her with a strange expression in their depths. His rugged face was hard; his knotted hands were closely locked together. The Maid gazed at him for a moment, a world of tender emotions in her eyes; and then she quickly crossed the room and threw herself at his feet. "My father! My father! My father!" The cry seemed to come from her heart, and I saw the old man's face quiver and twitch; but he did not touch or embrace her. "It is the dress he cannot bear," whispered Laxart distressfully to me, "it is as gall and wormwood to him to see his daughter go about in the garb of a man." The Maid's face was raised in tender entreaty; she had hold of her father's hands by now. She was covering them with kisses. "O my father, have you no word for me? Have you not yet forgiven your little Jeanne? I have but obeyed our Blessed Lord and His holy Saints. And see how they have helped and blessed and guided me! O my father, can you doubt that I was sent of them for this work? How then could I refuse to do it?" Then the stern face seemed to melt with a repressed tenderness, and the father bent and touched the girl's brow with his lips. She uttered a little cry of joy, and would have flung herself into his arms; but he held her a little off, his hands upon her shoulders, and he looked into her face searchingly. "That may have been well done, my daughter; I will not say, I will not judge. But your task is now accomplished--your own lips have said it; and yet you still are to march with the King's army, I am told. You love better the clash of arms, the glory of victory, the companionship of soldiers and courtiers to the simple duties which await you at home, and the protection of your mother's love. That is not well. That is what no modest maiden should choose. I had hoped and believed that I should take my daughter home with me. But she has chosen otherwise. Do I not well to be angry?" The Maid's face was buried in her hands. She would have buried it in her father's breast, but he would not have it so. I could have wept tears myself at the sight of her sorrow. I saw how utterly impossible it would be to make this sturdy peasant understand the difficulty of the Maid's position, and the claims upon her great abilities, her mysterious influence upon the soldiers. The worthy prud'homme would look upon this as rather a dishonour and disgrace than a gift from Heaven. The words I longed to speak died away upon my tongue. I felt that to speak them would be a waste of breath. Moreover, I was here as a spectator, not as a partaker in this scene. I held the document, signed and sealed by the King, which I was prepared to read to the visitors from Domremy. That was to be my share in this interview--not to interpose betwixt father and child. For a few moments there was deep silence in the room; then the Maid took her hands from her face, and she was calm and tranquil once again. She possessed herself of one of her father's reluctant hands. "My father, I know that this thing is hard for you to understand. It may be that my brothers could explain it better than I, had you patience to hear them. But this I say, that I long with an unspeakable desire to return home with you, for I know that the path I must tread will darken about me, and that the end will be sad and bitter. And yet I may not choose for myself. My King commands. My country calls. I must needs listen to those voices. Oh, forgive me that I may not follow yours, nor the yearnings of mine own heart!" The old man dropped her hand and turned away. He spoke no word; I think perchance his heart was touched by the tone of the Maid's voice, by the appealing look in her beautiful eyes. But he would not betray any sign of weakness. He turned away and leant his brow upon the hand with which he had grasped the high-carved ledge of the panelled shelf beside him. The Maid glanced at him, her lips quivering; and she spoke again in a brighter tone. "And yet, my father, though you may not take me back with you, you shall not go away empty-handed. I have that to send home with you which shall, I trust, rejoice the hearts of all Domremy; and if you find it hard to forgive that which your child has been called upon to do, yet methinks there will be others to bless her name and pray for her, when they learn that which she has been able to accomplish." Then she made a little sign to me, and I stepped forward with the parchment, signed and sealed, and held it towards the Maid's father. He turned to look at me, and his eyes widened in wonder and some uneasiness; for the sight of so great a deed filled him and his kinsman with a vague alarm. "What is it?" he asked, turning full round, and I made answer: "A deed signed by the King, exempting Domremy from all taxation, henceforward and for ever, by right of the great and notable services rendered to the realm by one born and brought up there--Jeanne d'Arc, now better known as THE MAID OF ORLEANS." The two men exchanged wondering glances, and over Laxart's face there dawned a smile of intense joy and wonder. "Nay, but this is a wonderful thing--a miracle--the like of which was never heard or known before! I pray you, noble knight, let me call hither those of our kinsfolk and acquaintance from Domremy as have accompanied us hither, that they may hear and understand this marvellous grace which hath been done us!" I was glad enough that all should come and hear that which I read to them from the great document, explaining every phrase that was hard of comprehension. It was good to see how all faces glowed and kindled, and how the people crowded about the Maid with words of gratitude and blessing. Only the father stood a little apart, sorrowful and stern. And yet I am sure that his heart, though grieved, was not altogether hardened against his child; for when at the last, with tears in her eyes (all other farewells being said), she knelt at his feet begging his blessing and forgiveness, he laid his hand upon her head for a moment, and let her embrace his knees with her arms. "Go your way, my girl, if needs must be. Your mother will ever pray for you, and I trust the Lord whom you serve will not leave you, though His ways are too hard of understanding for me." That was all she could win from him; but her heart was comforted, I think; for as she reached her lodging and turned at the door of her room to thank me in the gracious way she never forgot, for such poor services as I had rendered, she said in a soft and happy voice: "I think that in his heart my father hath forgiven me!" CHAPTER XVIII. HOW I LAST SAW THE MAID. I had thought, when I started, to tell the whole tale of the Angelic Maid and all the things which she accomplished, and all that we who companied with her did and saw, both of success and of failure. But now my brain and my pen alike refuse the task. I must needs shorten it. I think my heart would well nigh break a second time, if I were to seek to tell all that terrible tale which the world knows so well by now. Ah me! Ah me!--what a world is this wherein we live, in which such things can be! I wake sometimes even yet in the night, a cold sweat upon my limbs, my heart beating to suffocation, a terror as of great darkness enfolding my spirit. And is it wonderful that it should be so? Can any man pass through such experiences as mine, and not receive a wound which time can never wholly heal? And though great things have of late been done, and the Pope and his Court have swept away all such stain and taint as men sought to fasten upon the pure nature of the wonderful and miraculous Maid, we who lived through those awful days, and heard and saw the things which happened at that time, can never forget them, and (God pardon me if I sin in this) never forgive. There are men, some living still, and some passed to their last account, whom I would doom to the nethermost hell for their deeds in the days of which I must now write--though my words will be so few. And (with horror and shame be it spoken) many of these men were consecrated servants of the Holy Church, whose very office made the evil of their deeds to stand out in blacker hues. It is easy for us to seek to fasten the blame of all upon the English, who in the end accomplished the hideous task; but at least the English were the foes against whom she had fought, and they had the right to hold her as an adversary whose death was necessary for their success; and had the English had their way she would have met her end quickly, and without all that long-drawn-out agony and mockery of a trial, every step and process of which was an outrage upon the laws of God and of man. No, it was Frenchmen who doomed her to this--Frenchmen and priests. The University of Paris, the officers of the Inquisition, the Bishops of the realm. These it was who formed that hideous Court, whose judgments have now been set aside with contumely and loathing. These it was who after endless formalities, against which even some of themselves were forced in honour to protest, played so base and infamous a part--culminating in that so-called "Abjuration," as false as those who plotted for it--capped by their own infamous trick to render even that "Abjuration" null and void, that she might be given up into the hands of those who were thirsting for her life! Oh, how can I write of it? How can I think of it? There be times yet when Bertrand, and Guy de Laval, and I, talking together of those days, feel our hearts swell, and the blood course wildly in our veins, and truly I do marvel sometimes how it was that we and others were held back from committing some desperate crime to revenge those horrid deeds, wrought by men who in blasphemous mockery called themselves the servants and consecrated priests of God. But hold! I must not let my pen run away too fast with me! I am leaping to the end, before the end has come. But, as I say, I have no heart to write of all those weary months of wearing inactivity, wherein the spirit of the Maid chafed like that of a caged eagle, whilst the counsellors of the King--her bitter foes--had his ear, and held him back from following the course which her spirit and her knowledge alike advocated. And yet we made none so bad a start. "We must march upon Paris next," spoke the Maid at the first Council of War held in Rheims after the coronation of the King; and La Hire and the soldiers applauded the bold resolve, whilst La Tremouille and other timid and treacherous spirits sought ever to hold him back. I often thought of the words spoken by the Maid to those friends of hers from Domremy, when she bid them farewell on the evening of which I have just written. "Are you not afraid, Jeanne," they asked, "of going into battle, of living so strange a life, of being the companion of the great men of the earth?" And she, looking at them with those big grave eyes of hers, had made answer thus: "I fear nothing but treachery." I wondered when she spoke what treachery she was to meet with; but soon it became all too apparent. The King's ministers were treacherously negotiating with false Burgundy, some say with the Regent Bedford himself. They cared not to save France. They cared only to keep out of harm's way--to avoid all peril and danger, and to thwart the Maid, whose patriotism and lofty courage was such a foil to their pusillanimity and cowardice. So that though she led us to the very walls of Paris, and would have taken the whole city without a doubt, had she been permitted, though the Duc d'Alencon, now her devoted adherent, went down upon his very knees to beg of the King to fear nothing, but trust all to her genius, her judgment; he could not prevail, and orders were sent forth to break down the bridge that she had built for the storming party to pass over, and that the army should fall back with their task undone! Oh, the folly, the ingratitude, the baseness of it all! How well do I remember the face of the Maid, as she said: "The King's word must be obeyed; but truly it will take him seven years--ah, and twenty years now--to accomplish that which I would do for him in less than twenty days!" Think of it--you who have seen what followed. Was Paris in the King's hands in less than seven years? Were the English driven from France in less than twenty? She was wounded, too; and had been forcibly carried away from the field of battle; but it was against her own will. She would have fought through thick and thin, had the King's commands not prevailed; and even then she begged to be left with a band of soldiers at St. Denis. "My voices tell me to remain here," she said; but alas! her voices were regarded no longer by the King, whose foolish head and cowardly heart were under other influences than that of the Maid, to whom he had promised so much such a short while since. And so his word prevailed, and we were perforce obliged to retreat from those walls we had so confidently desired to storm. And there in the church of St. Denis, where she had knelt so many hours in prayer and supplication, the Maid left her beautiful silver armour, which had so often flashed its radiant message of triumph to her soldiers, and with it that broken sword--broken outside the walls of Paris, and which no skill had sufficed to mend--which had been taken from St Catherine's Church in Fierbois. It was not altogether an unwonted act for knights to deposit their arms in churches, though the custom is dying away, with so many other relics of chivalry; but there was something very strange and solemn in this act of the Maid. It was to us a significant sign of that which she saw before her. We dared not ask her wherefore she did it. Something in her sad, gentle face forbade us. But I felt the tears rising to my eyes as I watched her kneel long in prayer when the deed was done, and I heard stifled sobs arising from that end of the building where some women and children knelt. For the Maid was ever the friend of all such, and never a woman or child whom she approached, whether she were clad in peasant's homespun or in shining coat of mail, but gave her love and trust and friendship at sight. Henceforth the Maid went clothed in a light suit of mail, such as any youthful knight might wear. She never spoke again of her fair white armour, or of the sword which had shivered in her hand, none save herself knew how or when. Alas! for the days of glory which had gone before! Why did we keep her with the King's armies, when the monarch's ear was engrossed by adverse counsel, and his heart turned away from her who had been his Deliverer in the hour of his greatest need? Methinks she would even now have returned home, but for the devotion of the soldiers and the persuasions of the Duc d'Alencon, and of some of the other generals, amongst whom the foremost were Dunois and La Hire. These chafed equally with the Maid at the supine attitude of the King; and the Duke, his kinsman, spoke out boldly and fearlessly, warning him of the peril he was doing to his kingdom, and the wrong to the Maid who had served him so faithfully and well, and to whom he had made such fair promises. But for the present all such entreaties or warnings fell upon deaf ears. The time for the King's awakening had not yet come. Nevertheless, we had our days of glory still, under the banner of the Maid, when, after many months of idleness, the springtide again awoke the world, and she sallied forth strong in the assurance of victory, whilst fortress after fortress fell before her, as in the days of yore. Oh, how joyous were our hearts! Now did we believe truly that the tide had turned, and that we were marching on to victory. But upon the Maid's face a shadow might often be seen to rest; and once or twice when I would ask her of it, she replied in a low, sorrowful voice: "My year is well-nigh ended. Something looms before me. My voices have told me to be ready for what is coming. I fear me it will be my fate to fall into the hands of the foe!" I would not believe it! Almost I was resolved to plunge mine own dagger into her heart sooner than she should fall into the hand of the pitiless English. But woe is me! I was not at her side that dreadful evening at Compiegne, when this terrible mishap befell. I had been stricken down in that horrid death trap, when, hemmed in between the ranks of the Burgundians and English, we found our retreat into the city cut off. Was it treachery? Was it incapacity upon the part of the leaders of the garrison, or what was the reason that no rush from the city behind took the English in the rear, and effected the rescue of the Maid? I know not--I have never known--all to me is black mystery. I was one of those to see the peril first, and with Bertrand and Guy de Laval beside me, to charge furiously upon the advancing foe, crying aloud to others to close round the Maid and bear her away into safety, whilst we engaged the enemy and gave them time. That is all I know. All the rest vanishes in the mists. When these mists cleared away, Bertrand and I were in the home of Sir Guy, tended by his mother and grandmother--both of whom had seen and loved well the wonderful Maid--and she was in a terrible prison, some said an iron cage, guarded by brutal English soldiers, and declared a witch or a sorceress, not fit to live, nor to die a soldier's death, but only to perish at the stake as an outcast from God and man. Months had passed since the battle of Compiegne. Fever had had me fast in its grip all that while, and the news I heard on recovery brought it all back again. Bertrand and Guy were in little better case. We were like pale ghosts of our former selves during those winter months, when, hemmed in by snow, we could learn so little news from without, and could only eat out our hearts in rage and grief. With the spring came the news of the trial at Rouen--the bitter hatred of Bishop Cauchon--the awful consummation he had vowed to bring about. I know not whether it were folly to hope such a thing, but we three knights made instantly for the coast and crossed to England, to seek the ear of the young King there, and plead the cause of the Maid before him. I need not say how our mission failed. I care not to recall those sickening days of anxiety and hope deferred, and utter defeat at the last. Heartbroken and desperate we returned; and made our way to Rouen. The whole city was in confusion. Need I say more? That very day, within an hour, the Maid, the Messenger from God, the Deliverer of the King, the Saviour of France, was to die by fire, to perish as a heretic. And the King whom she had saved had not lifted a hand to save her; the country she had delivered from a crushing disgrace, stood idly by to watch her perish thus! Oh, the shame!--the treachery!--the horror! Let me not try to write of it. The King has striven now to make amends; but I wonder how he feels sometimes when he sees the May sunshine streaming over the fair earth--over that realm which he now rules from sea to sea, when he thinks of the Maid who was led forth in that blaze of glory to meet her fiery doom. O God of Heaven look down and judge! How shall I tell of the sight I beheld? Suddenly I came upon it--mad with my grief, desperate with horror and despair. I saw the face of the Maid again! I saw her upraised eyes, and her hands clasped to her breast, holding thereto a rough wooden cross, whilst someone from below held high in the air a crucifix taken from some church and fastened upon a long wand. The pile on which she stood was so high--so high; they said it was done in mercy, that the rising clouds of smoke might choke her ere the flame touched her. She was clad in a long white garment from head to foot; her hair had grown and fell about and back from her face in a soft cloud gilded by the sun's rays. Her face was rapt--smiling--yes, I will swear it--smiling, as a child smiles up into the face of its father. There was an awful hush throughout the wide place. Everything reeled and swam before me; but I saw that face--that serene and smiling face, wan and pale, but tranquil and glad and triumphant. Then came the rush of smoke, and the glare of ruddy fire. A stifled cry, like one immense groan rose from below--above in the reek and blaze all was silent. But from out that fire I saw--yes, and another saw it too (an English soldier, rushing to add a faggot to the pyre, a token of his hate to the Maid), and it so wrought upon him that he dropped his burden, fell upon his knees and was like to die of the fear--I saw a white dove rise from the smoke wreaths of that ghastly pile, hover a moment, just touched by the glare of the fire, and then dart heavenwards as upon eagle's wings. Yes, I saw it. To the day of my death will I swear it. I saw what she had seen in vision long ago; and upon my heart there fell a strange sense of peace and calm. It had not hurt her--it had been as she once said. Her saints had been with her to the end. She had triumphed. All was well. Called of her Country, she had answered nobly to the call. Her Country had awarded her a fiery death; but in that fiery chariot she had ascended to the Lord, in whom she trusted, hereafter to receive the crown of glory that fadeth not away. 
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14072	----	PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN WORSHIP OR, THE EVIDENCE OF HOLY SCRIPTURE AND THE CHURCH, AGAINST THE INVOCATION OF SAINTS AND ANGELS, AND THE BLESSED VIRGIN MARY. * * * * * BY J. ENDELL TYLER, B.D. RECTOR OF ST. GILES-IN-THE-FIELDS, AND CANON RESIDENTIARY OF ST. PAUL'S. * * * * * Speaking the truth in love.--EPH. iv. 15 Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.--1 THESS. v. 21. SECOND EDITION LONDON Printed for the SOCIETY FOR PROMOTING CHRISTIAN KNOWLEDGE; SOLD AT THE DEPOSITORY, GREAT QUEEN STREET, LINCOLN'S INN FIELDS, NO. 4, ROYAL EXCHANGE; AND BY ALL BOOKSELLERS. * * * * * 1847. TO THE ONE HOLY, CATHOLIC, AND APOSTOLIC CHURCH, AS A TRIBUTE OF VENERATION AND LOVE, THIS WORK IS DEDICATED, BY HER DEVOTED SERVANT AND SON. Nov. 25, 1840. * * * * * PREFACE. Members of the Church of Rome, and members of the Church of England, have too long entertained towards each other feelings of hostility. Instead of being drawn together as brethren by the cords of that one faith which all Catholics hold dear, their sentiments of sympathy and affection have been absorbed by the abhorrence with which each body has regarded the characteristic tenets of its adversary; whilst the terms "heretic" on the one side, and "idolater" on the opposite, have rendered any attempt to bring about a free and friendly discussion of each other's views almost hopeless. Every Christian must wish that such animosities, always ill-becoming the servants and children of the God of love, should cease for ever. Truth indeed must never be sacrificed to secure peace; nor must we be tempted by the seductiveness of a liberality, falsely so called, to soften down and make light of those differences which keep the Churches of England and Rome asunder. But surely the points at issue may be examined without exasperation and rancour; and the results of inquiries carried on with a singleness of mind, in search only for the truth, may be offered on the one side without insult or offence, and should be received and examined without contempt and scorn on the other. The writer of this address is not one in whom early associations would foster sentiments of evil will against members of the Church of Rome; or encourage any feeling, incompatible with regard and kindness, towards the conscientious defenders of her creed. From his boyhood he has lived on terms of friendly intercourse and intimacy with individuals among her laity and of her priesthood. In his theological pursuits, he has often studied her ritual, consulted her commentators, and perused the homilies of her divines; and, withal, he has mourned over her errors and misdoings, as he would have sighed over the faults of a friend, who, with many good qualities still to endear him, had unhappily swerved from the straight path of rectitude and integrity. In preparing these pages, the author is not conscious of having been influenced by any motive in the least degree inconsistent with sentiments of charity and respect; at all events, he would hope that no single expression may have escaped from his pen tending to hurt unnecessarily the feelings of any sincere Christian. He has been prompted by a hope that he may perhaps induce some individuals to investigate with candour, and freedom, and with a genuine desire of arriving at the truth, the subjects here discussed; and that whilst some, even of those who may have hitherto acquiesced in erroneous doctrines and practices, may be convinced of their departure from Christian verity; others, if tempted to desert the straight path of primitive worship, may be somewhat strengthened and armed by the views presented to them here, against the captivating allurements of religious error. Whether the present work may, by the Divine favour, be made in some degree instrumental in forwarding these results, or in effecting any good, the author presumes not to anticipate; but he will hope for the best. He believes that the honest pursuit of the truth, undertaken with an humble zeal for God's glory, and in dependence on his guidance and light, is often made successful beyond our own sanguine expectations. With these views the following pages are offered, as the result of an inquiry into the doctrine and practice of the Invocation of Saints and Angels, and of the Blessed Virgin Mary. To prevent misconception as to the nature of this work, the author would observe, that since the single subject here proposed to be investigated is, "The Invocation of Saints and Angels and the Blessed Virgin Mary," he has scrupulously avoided the discussion of many important and interesting questions usually considered to be connected with it. He has not, for example, discussed the practice of praying for the dead; he has investigated no theory relating to the soul's intermediate state between our dissolution and the final judgment; he has canvassed no opinion as to any power in the saints and the faithful departed to succour either by their prayers or by any other offices, those who are still on earth, and on their way to God. From these and such like topics he has abstained, not because he thinks lightly of their importance, nor because his own mind is perplexed by doubts concerning them; but because the introduction of such points would tend to distract the thoughts from the exclusive contemplation of the one distinct question to be investigated. He is also induced to apprise the reader, that in his work, as he originally prepared it, a far wider field, even on the single subject of the present inquiry, was contemplated than this volume now embraces. His intention was to present an historical survey of the doctrine and practice of the invocation of Saints and Angels, and the Virgin, tracing it from the first intimation of any thing of the kind through its various progressive stages, till it had reached its widest prevalence in Christendom. When, however, he had arranged and filled up the results of the inquiries which he made into the sentiments and habits of those later writers of the Church, whose works he considered it necessary to examine with this specific object in view, he found that the bulk of the work would be swollen far beyond the limits which he had prescribed to himself; he felt also that the protracted investigation would materially interfere with the solution of that one independent question which he trusts now is kept unmixed with any other. He has, consequently, in the present address limited the range of his researches on the nature of Primitive Christian Worship, to the writers of the Church Catholic who lived before the Nicene Council, or were members of it. In one department, however, he has been under the necessity of making, to a certain extent, an exception to this rule. Having found no allusion to the doctrine of the Assumption of the Virgin, on which much of the religious worship now paid to her seems to be founded, in any work written before the middle of the fifth century, he has been induced, in his examination of the grounds on which that doctrine professes to be built, to cite authors who flourished subsequently to the Nicene Council. The author would also mention, that although in substance he has prepared this work for the examination of all Christians equally, and trusts that it will be found not less interesting or profitable to the members of his own Church than to any other, yet he has throughout adopted the form of an address to his Roman Catholic countrymen. Such a mode of conveying his sentiments he considered to be less controversial, while the facts and the arguments would remain the same. His object is not to condemn, but to convince: not to hold up to obloquy those who are in error, but, as far as he may be allowed, to diminish an evil where it already exists, and to check its further prevalence. * * * * * CONTENTS. PART I.--CHAPTER I. Introduction--The duty of examining the grounds of our Faith--Principles of conducting that examination--Errors to be avoided--Proposed plan of the present work. CHAPTER II. § 1. Evidence of Holy Scripture, how to be ascertained 2. Direct Evidence of the Old Testament 3. Evidence of the Old Testament, continued 4. ------ New Testament CHAPTER III. § 1. Evidence of Primitive Writers 2. ------ Apostolic Fathers CHAPTER IV. § 1. Evidence of Justin Martyr See also Appendix 2. Evidence of Irenæus 3. ------ Clement of Alexandria 4. ------ Tertullian ------ Methodius 5. ------ Origen See also Appendix 6. Supplementary Section on Origen See also Appendix 7. Evidence of St. Cyprian See also Appendix 8. Evidence of Lactantius 9. ------ Eusebius See also Appendix 10. Apostolical Canons and Constitutions 11. Evidence of St. Athanasius See also Appendix PART II.--CHAPTER I. State of Worship at the time of the Reformation § 1. "Hours of the Virgin" 2. Service of Thomas Becket CHAPTER II. Council of Trent See also Appendix CHAPTER III. Present Service in the Church of Rome PART III. WORSHIP OF THE VIRGIN MARY. CHAPTER I. § 1. Introductory Remarks 2. Evidence of Holy Scripture CHAPTER II. Evidence of Primitive Writers CHAPTER III. Assumption of the Virgin Mary CHAPTER IV. Councils of Constantinople, Ephesus, and Chalcedon CHAPTER V. § 1. Present authorized Worship of the Virgin 2. Worship of the Virgin, continued 3. Bonaventura 4. Biel, Damianus, Bernardinus de Bustis, Bernardinus Senensis,&c. See also Appendix 5. Modern Works of Devotion See also Appendix CONCLUSION * * * * * {1} PART I. CHAPTER I. THE DUTY OF PRIVATE JUDGMENT. Fellow Christians, Whilst I invite you to accompany me in a free and full investigation of one of those tenets and practices which keep asunder the Roman and the Anglican Church, I am conscious in how thankless an undertaking I have engaged, and how unwelcome to some is the task in which I call upon you to join. Many among the celebrated doctors of the Roman Church have taught their disciples to acquiesce in a view of their religious obligation widely different from the laborious and delicate office of ascertaining for themselves the soundness of the principles in which they have been brought up. It has been with many accredited teachers a favourite maxim, that individuals will most acceptably fulfil their duty by abstaining {2} from active and personal inquiries into the foundations of their faith; and by giving an implicit credence to whatever the Roman Church pronounces to be the truth[1]. Should this book fall into the hands of any who have adopted that maxim for the rule of their own conduct as believers, its pages will of course afford them no help; nor can they take any interest in our pursuit, or its results. Whilst, however, I am aware, that until the previous question (involving the grounds on which the Church of Rome builds her claim to be the sole, exclusive, and infallible teacher of Christians in all the doctrines of religion,) shall have been solved, many members of her body would throw aside, as preposterous, any treatise which professed to review the soundness of her instructions; I have been at the same time assured, that with many of her communion the case is far otherwise; and that instead of their being averse to all investigation, a calm, candid, and friendly, but still a free and unreserved inquiry into the disputed articles of their creed, is an object of their sincere desire. On this ground I trust some preliminary reflections upon the duty of proving all things, with a view of holding the more fast {3} and sure what is good, may be considered as neither superfluous nor out of place. [Footnote 1: It is sometimes curious to observe the language in which the teachers and doctors themselves profess their entire, unlimited, and implicit submission of all their doctrines, even in the most minute particulars, to the judgment and will of the authorities of Rome. Instances are of very frequent occurrence. Thus Joannes de Carthagena, a very voluminous writer of homilies, closes different parts of his work in these words, "These and all mine I willingly subject to the judgment of the Catholic Roman Church, ready, if there be written any thing in any way in the very least point contrary to her doctrine, to correct, amend, erase, and utterly abolish it." Hom. Cath. De Sacris Arcanis Deiparæ et Josephi. Paris, 1615. page 921.] But just as it would belong to another and a separate province to examine, at such length as its importance demands, the claims of the Church of Rome to be acknowledged as that universal interpreter of the word and will of God, from whose decisions there is no appeal; so would it evidently be incompatible with the nature of the present address, to dwell in any way corresponding with the magnitude and delicacy of the subject, on the duty, the responsibility, and the privilege of private judgment; on the dangers to which an unchastened exercise of it may expose both an individual, and the cause of Christian truth; or on the rules which sound wisdom and the analogy of faith may prescribe to us in the government of ourselves with respect to it. My remarks, therefore, on this subject will be as few and brief as I believe to be consistent with an acknowledgment of the principles upon which this work has been conducted. The foundation, then, on which, to be safe and beneficial, the duty of private judgment, as we maintain, must be built, is very far indeed removed from that common and mischievous notion of it which would encourage us to draw immediate and crude deductions from Holy Scripture, subject only to the control and the colouring of our own minds, responsible for nothing further than our own consciousness of an honest intention. Whilst we claim a release from that degrading yoke which neither are we nor were our fathers able to bear, we deprecate for ourselves and for our fellow-believers that licentiousness which in doctrine and practice tempts a man to follow merely what is right in his own eyes, uninfluenced by the example, the precepts, {4} and the authority of others, and owning no submissive allegiance to those laws which the wise and good have established for the benefit of the whole body. The freedom which we ask for ourselves, and desire to see imparted to all, is a rational liberty, tending to the good, not operating to the bane of its possessors; ministering to the general welfare, not to disorder and confusion. In the enjoyment of this liberty, or rather in the discharge of the duties and trusts which this liberty brings with it, we feel ourselves under an obligation to examine the foundations of our faith, to the very best of our abilities, according to our opportunities, and with the most faithful use of all the means afforded to us by its divine Author and finisher. Among those means, whilst we regard the Holy Scriptures as paramount and supreme, we appeal to the witness and mind of the Church as secondary and subsidiary; a witness not at all competing with Scripture, never to be balanced against it; but competing with our own less able and less pure apprehension of Scripture. In ascertaining the testimony of this witness, we examine the sentiments and practice of the ancient teachers of the Church; not as infallible guides, not as uniformly holding all of them the same opinions, but as most valuable helps in our examination of the evidence of the Church, who is, after all, our appointed instructor in the truths of the Gospel,--fallible in her individual members and branches, yet the sure witness and keeper of Holy Writ, and our safest guide on earth to the mind and will of God. When we have once satisfied ourselves that a doctrine is founded on Scripture, we receive it with implicit faith, and maintain it as a sacred deposit, entrusted to our keeping, to be delivered down whole and entire without our adding {5} thereto what to us may seem needful, or taking away what we may think superfluous. The state of the Christian thus employed, in acting for himself in a work peculiarly his own, is very far removed from the condition of one who labours in bondage, without any sense of liberty and responsibility, unconscious of the dignity of a free and accountable agent, and surrendering himself wholly to the control of a task-master. Equally is it distant from the conduct of one who indignantly casting off all regard for authority, and all deference to the opinions of others, boldly and proudly sets up his own will and pleasure as the only standard to which he will submit. For the model which we would adopt, as members of the Church, in our pursuit of Christian truth, we find a parallel and analogous case in a well-principled and well-disciplined son, with his way of life before him, exercising a large and liberal discretion in the choice of his pursuits; not fettered by peremptory paternal mandates, but ever voluntarily referring to those principles of moral obligation and of practical wisdom with which his mind has been imbued; shaping his course with modest diffidence in himself, and habitual deference to others older and wiser than himself, yet acting with the firmness and intrepidity of conscious rectitude of principle, and integrity of purpose; and under a constant sense of his responsibility, as well for his principles as for his conduct. Against the cogency of these maxims various objections have been urged from time to time. We have been told, that the exercise of private judgment in matters of religion, tends to foster errors of every diversity of character, and leads to heresy, scepticism, and infidelity: it is represented as rending the Church of Christ, and totally {6} subverting Christian unity, and snapping asunder at once the bond of peace. So also it has been often maintained, that the same cause robs individual Christians of that freedom from all disquietude and perplexity and anxious responsibility, that peace of mind, satisfaction, and content, which those personally enjoy, who surrender themselves implicitly to a guide, whom they believe to be unerring and infallible. For a moment let us pause to ascertain the soundness of such objections. And here anticipating, for argument's sake, the worst result, let us suppose that the exercise of individual inquiry and judgment (such as the best teachers in the Anglican Church are wont to inculcate) may lead in some cases even to professed infidelity; is it right and wise and justifiable to be driven by an abuse of God's gifts to denounce the legitimate and faithful employment of them? What human faculty--which among the most precious of the Almighty's blessings is not liable to perversion? What unquestionable moral duty can be found, which has not been transformed by man's waywardness into an instrument of evil? Nay, what doctrine of our holy faith has not the wickedness or the folly of unworthy men employed as a cloke for unrighteousness, and a vehicle for blasphemy? But by a consciousness of this liability in all things human, must we be tempted to suppress the truth? to disparage those moral duties? or to discountenance the cultivation of those gifts and faculties? Rather would not sound philosophy and Christian wisdom jointly enforce the necessity of improving the gifts zealously, of discharging the moral obligation to the full, and of maintaining the doctrine in all its integrity; but guarding withal, to the utmost of our power and watchfulness, against the abuses to which {7} any of these things may be exposed? And we may trust in humble but assured confidence, that as it is the duty of a rational being, alive to his own responsibility, to inquire and judge for himself in things concerning the soul, with the most faithful exercise of his abilities and means; so the wise and merciful Ruler of our destinies will provide us with a sure way of escaping from all evils incident to the discharge of that duty, if, in reliance on his blessing, we honestly seek the truth, and perseveringly adhere to that way in which He will be our guide. It is a question very generally and very reasonably entertained among us, whether the implicit submission and unreserved surrender of ourselves to any human authority in matters of faith, (though whilst it lasts, it of course affords an effectual check to open scepticism,) does not ultimately and in very deed prove a far more prolific source of disguised infidelity. Doubts repressed as they arise, but not solved, silenced but not satisfied, gradually accumulate in spite of all external precaution; and at length (like streams pent back by some temporary barrier) break forth at once to an utter discarding of all authority, and an irrecoverable rejection of the Christian faith. From unlimited acquiescence in a guide whom our associations have invested with infallibility, the step is very short, and frequently taken, to entire apostasy and the renunciation of all belief. The state of undisturbed tranquillity and repose in one, who has divested himself of all responsibility in matters of religious belief and practice, enjoying an entire immunity from the anxious and painful labour of trying for himself the purity and soundness of his faith, is often painted in strong contrast with the {8} lamentable condition of those who are driven about by every wind of novelty. The condition of such a man may doubtless be far more enviable than theirs, who have no settled fixed principles, and who wander from creed to creed, and from sect to sect, just as their fickle and roving minds suggest some transitory preference. But the believer must not be driven by the evils of one extreme to take refuge in the opposite. The whirlpool may be the more perilous, but the Christian mariner must avoid the rock also, or he will equally make shipwreck of his faith. He must with all his skill, and all his might, keep to the middle course, shunning that presumptuous confidence which scorns all authority, and boldly constitutes itself sole judge and legislator; but equally rescuing his mind from the thraldom which prostrates his reason, and paralyzes all the faculties of his judgment in a matter of indefeasible and awful responsibility. Here, too, it is questioned, and not without cause, whether the satisfaction and comfort so often represented in warm and fascinating colours, be really a spiritual blessing; or whether it be not a deception and fallacy, frequently ending in lamentable perplexity and confusion; like guarantees in secular concerns, which as long as they maintain unsuspected credit afford a most pleasing and happy security to any one who depends upon them; but which, when adverse fortune puts their responsibility to the test, may prove utterly worthless, and be traced only by losses and disappointments. Such a blind reliance on authority may doubtless be more easy and more free from care, than it is to gird up the loins of our mind, and engage in toilsome spiritual labour. But with a view to our own ultimate safety, wisdom bids us look to our foundations in time, and assure ourselves {9} of them; admonishing us that if they are unsound, the spiritual edifice reared upon them, however pleasing to the eye, or abounding in present enjoyments, will at length fall, and bury our hopes in its ruin. On these and similar principles, we maintain that it well becomes Christians, when the soundness of their faith, and the rectitude of their acts of worship, are called in question, "to prove all things, and hold fast that which is good." Thus, when the unbeliever charges us with credulity in receiving as a divine revelation what he scornfully rejects, it behoves us all (every one to the extent of his means and opportunities) to possess ourselves of the accumulated evidences of our holy faith, so that we may be able to give to our own minds, and to those who ask it of us, a reason for our hope. The result can assuredly be only the comfort of a still more unshaken conviction. Thus, too, when the misbeliever charges us with an undue and an unauthorized ascription of the Divine attributes to our Redeemer and to our Sanctifier, which he would confine to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, exclusively of the Eternal Son and the Blessed Spirit, it well becomes every Catholic Christian to assure himself of the evidence borne by the Scriptures to the divinity of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, together with the inseparable doctrines of redemption by the blood of Christ, and sanctification by the Spirit of grace; appealing also in this investigation to the tradition of the Church, and the testimony of her individual members from the earliest times, as under God his surest and best guides. In both these cases, I can say for myself that I have acted upon my own principles, and to the very utmost of my faculties have scrutinized the foundations {10} of my faith, and from each of those inquiries and researches I have risen with a satisfaction increased far beyond my first anticipations. What I had taken up in my youth on authority, I have been long assured of by a moral demonstration, which nothing can shake; and I cling to it with an affection, which, guarded by God's good providence, nothing in this world can dissolve or weaken. It is to engage in a similar investigation that I now most earnestly but affectionately invite the members of the Church of Rome, in order to ascertain for themselves the ground of their faith and practice in a matter of vast moment, and which, with other points, involves the principle of separation between the Roman and Anglican branches of the universal Church. Were the subjects of minor importance, or what the ancient writers were wont to call "things indifferent," reason and charity would prescribe that we should bear with each other, allowing a free and large discretion in any body of Christians, and not severing ourselves from them because we deemed our views preferable to theirs. In such a case we might well walk in the house of God as friends, without any interruption of the harmony which should exist between those who worship the true God with one heart and one mind, ever striving to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. But when the points at issue are of so vast moment; when two persons agreeing in the general principles of belief in the Gospel and its chief characteristic doctrines, yet find it impossible to join conscientiously in the same prayer, or the same acts of faith and worship, then the necessity is imperative on all who would not be parties to the utter breaking up of Christian unity, nor assist in propagating error, to make sure of their {11} foundations; and satisfy themselves by an honest inquiry and upright judgment, that the fault does not rest with them. Such appear to me both the doctrine and the practice of the INVOCATION OF SAINTS. I have endeavoured to conjecture in what light this doctrine and this practice would have presented itself to my mind, after a full and free inquiry into the nature and history and circumstances of the case, had I been brought up in communion with the Church of Rome; the question to be solved being, "Could I continue in her communion?" And the result of my inquiry is, that I must have either discarded that doctrine at once and for ever, or have joined with my lips and my knees in a worship which my reason condemned, and from which my heart shrunk. I must have either left the communion of Rome, or have continued to offer prayers to angels, and the spirits of departed mortals. Unless I had resolved at once to shut my eyes upon my own personal responsibility, and to surrender myself, mind and reason, soul and body, to the sovereign and undisputed control of others, never presuming to inquire into the foundation of what the Church of Rome taught; I must have sought some purer portion of the Catholic Church, in which her members addressed the One Supreme Being exclusively, without contemplating any other in the act of religious invocation. The distinction invented in comparatively late years, of the three kinds of worship; one for God, the second for the Virgin Mary, the third for Angels and Saints;--the distinction, too, between praying to a saint to give us good things, and praying to that saint to procure them for us at God's hand, (or, as the distinction {12} is sometimes made, into prayer direct, absolute, final, sovereign, confined to the Supreme Being on the one hand; and prayer oblique, relative, transitory, subordinate, offered to saints on the other,) would have appeared to me the ingenious and finely-drawn inventions of an advocate, not such a sound process of Christian simplicity as the mind could rest upon, with an undoubting persuasion that all was right. This, however, involves the very point at issue; and I now invite you, my Christian Brethren, to join with me, step by step, in a review of those several positions which have left on my mind the indelible conviction that I could never have passed my life in communion with that Church whose articles of fellowship maintained the duty of invoking saints and angels; and whose public offices were inseparably interwoven with addresses in prayer to other beings, than the Holy and undivided Trinity, the one only God. In pursuing this inquiry I have thought the most convenient and satisfactory division of our work would be-- First, to ascertain what inference an unprejudiced study of the revealed will of God would lead us to make; both in the times of the elder covenant, when "holy men of old spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost," and in that "fulness of time" when God spoke to us by his Son. Secondly, to examine into the belief and practice of the Primitive Church, beginning with the inspired Apostles of our Lord. Thirdly, to compare the results of those inquiries with the tenets and practice of the Church of Rome, with reference to three periods; the first immediately {13} preceding the Reformation; the second comprising the Reformation, and the proceedings of the Council of Trent; the third embracing the belief and practice of the present day. In this investigation, I purpose to reserve the worship of the Virgin Mary, called by Roman Catholic writers "Hyperdulia," and for various reasons the most important and interesting portion of the whole inquiry, for separate and distinct examination; except only so far as our review of any of the primitive writers may occasion some incidental departure from that rule. May God guide us to his truth! {14} * * * * * CHAPTER II. SECTION I.--THE EVIDENCE OF THE HOLY SCRIPTURES. Here, Christian Brethren, bear with me if I briefly, but freely, recall to our thoughts on this first entrance upon a review of the inspired volume, the principles, and tone of mind, the temper and feelings, in a word, the frame both of the understanding and of the heart, with which we should study the sacred pages, on whatever subject we would try all things, and hold fast what should prove itself to be most in accordance with the will of God. Whether we would regard the two great parts into which the Holy Scriptures are divided, as the Old and the New Covenants; or whether we would prefer to call them the Old and the New Testaments, it matters not. Although different ideas and associations are suggested by those different names, yet, under either view, the same honest and good heart, the same patience of investigation, the same upright and unprejudiced judgment, the same exercise of our mental faculties, and the same enlightened conscience, must be brought to the investigation. In the one case we must endeavour to ascertain for ourselves the true intent and {15} meaning of the inspired word of God, on the very same principles with those on which we would interpret a covenant between ourselves, and a person who had made it in full and unreserved reliance on our integrity, and on our high sense of equity, justice, and honour. In the other case we must bring the selfsame principles and feelings to bear on our inquiry, as we should apply in the interpretation of the last will and testament of a kind father, who with implicit confidence in our uprightness and straightforward dealing and affectionate anxiety to fulfil his intentions to the very utmost, had assigned to us the sacred duty of executor or trustee. Under the former supposition, our sincere solicitude would be to ascertain the true intent and meaning of the contracting parties, not to seek out plausible excuses for departing from it; not to cull out and exaggerate beyond their simple and natural bearing, such expressions in the deed of agreement, as might seem to justify us in adopting the view of the contract most agreeable to our present wishes and most favourable to our own interests. Rather it would be our fixed and hearty resolution, at whatever cost of time, or labour, or pecuniary sacrifice, or personal discomfort, to apply to the instrument our unbiassed powers of upright and honest interpretation. Or adopting the latter analogy, we should sincerely strive to ascertain the chief and leading objects of our parent's will; what were his intentions generally; what ruling principles seemed to pervade his views in framing the testament; and in all cases of obscurity and doubt, in every thing approaching an appearance of inconsistency, we should refer to that paramount principle as our test and guide. We should not for a moment {16} suffer ourselves to be tempted to seek for ambiguous expressions, which ingenuity might interpret so as to countenance our departure from the general drift of our parent's will, in cases where it was at variance with our own inclination, and where we could have wished that he had made another disposition of his property, or given to us a different direction, or trusted us with larger discretion. Moreover, in any points of difficulty, we should apply for assistance, in solving our doubts, to such persons as were most likely to have the power of judging correctly, and whose judgment would be least biassed by partiality and prejudice;--not to those whose credit was staked on the maintenance of those principles which best accorded with our own inclination. Especially if in either case some strong feeling should have been raised and spread abroad on any point, we should seek the judgment and counsel of those who had been familiar with the testator's intentions, or with the views of the covenanting party, before such points had become matter of discussion. Now only let us act upon these principles in the interpretation of THAT COVENANT in which the Almighty has vouchsafed to make Himself one of the contracting parties, and man, the creature of his hand, is the other: only let us act on these principles in the interpretation of THAT TESTAMENT of which the Saviour of the world is the Testator; and with God's blessing on our labours (a blessing never denied to sincere prayer and faithful exertions) we need not fear the result. Any other principle of interpretation will only confirm us in our prejudices, and involve us more inextricably in error. {17} * * * * * SECTION II.--DIRECT EVIDENCE OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. The first step in our proposed inquiry is to ascertain what evidence on the doctrine and practice of the Invocation of Saints and Angels can be fairly drawn from the revealed word of God in the Old Testament. Now, let us suppose that a person of a cultivated and enlightened mind, and of a sound and clear judgment, but hitherto a stranger to revelation, were required to study the ancient Scriptures with the single view of ascertaining what one object more than any other, subordinate to the great end of preparing the world for the advent of Messiah, seemed to be proposed by the wisdom of the Almighty in imparting to mankind that revelation; could he fix upon any other point as the one paramount and pervading principle with so much reason, as upon this, the preservation in the world of a practical belief in the perfect unity of God, and the fencing of his worship against the admixture of any other, of whatever character or form; The announcement that the Creator and Governor of the universe is the sole Giver of every temporal and spiritual blessing; the one only Being to whom, his rational creatures on earth should pay any religious service whatever; the one only Being to whom mortals must seek by prayer and invocation for the supply of any of their wants? Through the entire volume the inquirer would find that the unity of God is announced in every variety of expression; and that the exclusive worship {18} of HIM alone is insisted upon and guarded with the utmost jealousy by assurances, by threats, and by promises, as the God who heareth prayer, alone to be called upon, alone to be invoked, alone to be adored. So to speak, he would find that recourse was had to every expedient for the express purpose of protecting God's people from the fatal error of embracing in their worship any other being or name whatever; not reserving supreme adoration for the Supreme Being, and admitting a sort of secondary honour and inferior mode of invocation to his exalted saints and servants; but banishing at once and for ever the most distant approximation towards religious honour--the veriest shadow of spiritual invocation to any other Being than Jehovah HIMSELF ALONE. In process of time, the heathen began to deify those mortals who had conferred signal benefits on the human race, or had distinguished themselves by their power and skill above their fellow-countrymen. Male and female divinities were multiplying on every side. Together with Jupiter, the fabled father of gods and men, worshipped under different names among the various tribes, were associated those "gods many and lords many," which ignorance and superstition, or policy and craft, had invented; and which shared some a greater, some a less portion of popular veneration and religious worship. To the people of God, the worshippers of Jehovah, it was again and again most solemnly and awfully denounced, that no such thing should be. "Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and Him only shalt thou serve," is a mandate repeated in every variety of language, and under every diversity of circumstance. In some passages, indeed, together with the most clear assurances, {19} that mankind need apply to no other dispenser of good, and can want no other as Saviour, advocate, or intercessor, that same truth is announced with such superabundance of repetition, that in the productions of any human writer the style would be chargeable with tautology. In the Bible, this repetition only the more forces upon the mind, and fixes there, that same principle as an eternal verity never to be questioned; never to be dispensed with; never to be diluted or qualified; never to be invaded by any service, worship, prayer, invocation, or adoration of any other being whatever. Let us take, for example, the forty-fifth chapter of Isaiah, in which the principle is most strongly and clearly illustrated. "I am the LORD, and there is none else: there is no God beside me; I girded thee, though thou hast not known me; that they may know from the rising of the sun and from the west, that there is none beside me: I am the Lord, and there is none else. They shall be ashamed, and also confounded, all of them; they shall go to confusion together, that are makers of idols. But Israel shall be saved in the Lord with an everlasting salvation: ye shall not be ashamed nor confounded world without end: I am the Lord, and there is none else. I said not unto the seed of Jacob, Seek ye me in vain. They have no knowledge that set up the wood of their graven image, and pray unto a god that cannot save. There is no god beside me; a just God and a Saviour; there is none beside me. Look unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth; for I am God, and there is none else." But it is needless to multiply these passages; and members of the Church of Rome will say, that they themselves acknowledge, as fully as members of the Anglican Church can do, that there is but one supreme {20} God and Lord, to whom alone they intend to offer the worship due to God; and that the appeals which they offer by way of invocation to saints and angels for their services and intercession, do not militate against this principle. But here let us ask ourselves these few questions:-- First, if it had been intended by the Almighty to forbid any religious application, such as is now professedly the invocation of saints and angels, to any other being than Himself alone, what words could have been employed more stringently prohibitory? Secondly, had such an address to saints and angels, as the Church of Rome now confessedly makes, been contemplated by our heavenly Lawgiver as an exception to the general rule, would not some saving clause, some expressions indicative of such an intended exception, have been discovered in some page or other of his revealed will? Thirdly, if such an appeal to the angels of heaven, or to the spirits of the just in heaven, had been sanctioned under the elder covenant, would not some example, some solitary instance, have been recorded of a faithful servant of Jehovah offering such a prayer with the Divine approbation? Lastly, when such strong and repeated declarations and injunctions interspersed through the entire volume of the Old Testament, unequivocally show the will of God to be, that no other object of religious worship should have place in the heart or on the tongue of his own true sons and daughters, can it become a faithful child of our Heavenly Father to be seeking for excuses and palliations, and to invent distinctions between one kind of worship and another? God Himself includes all in one universal prohibitory {21} mandate, "Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and Him only shalt thou serve." So far from according with those general rules for the interpretation of the revealed will of God, which we have already stated, and from which, in the abstract, probably few would dissent, an anxiety to force the word of God into at least an acquiescence in the invocation of saints and angels, indicates a disposition to comply with his injunctions, wherever they seem to clash with our own view, only so far as we cannot avoid compliance; and to seek how we may with any show of propriety evade the spirit of those commands. Instead of that full, free, and unstinted submission of our own inclinations and propensities to the Almighty's will wherever we can discover it, which those entertain whom the Lord seeketh to worship Him; to look for exceptions and to act upon them, bears upon it the stamp of a reserved and grudging service. After so many positive warnings, enactments, and denunciations, against seeking by prayer the aid of any other being whatever, surely a positive command would have been absolutely necessary to justify a mortal man in preferring any prayer to any being, saint, angel, or archangel, save only the Supreme Deity alone. Instead of any such command or even permission appearing, not one single word occurs, from the first syllable in the Book of Genesis to the last of the prophet Malachi, which could even by implication be brought to countenance the practice of approaching any created being in prayer. But let us now look to the examples on this subject afforded in the Old Testament. Many, very many a prayer is recorded of holy men, of inspired men, of men, to whose holiness and integrity and acceptance {22} the Holy Spirit bears witness; yet among these prayers there is not found one invocation addressed to saint or angel. I will not here anticipate the observations which it will be necessary to make in consequence of the extraordinary argument which has been devised, to account for the absence of invocations to saints before the resurrection of Christ, namely, that before that event the saints were not admitted into heaven. Although pressed forward with such unhesitating confidence in its validity, that argument is so singular in its nature, and so important in its consequences, and withal so utterly groundless, as to call for a separate examination, on which we will shortly enter: meanwhile, we are now inquiring into the matter of fact. The whole Book of Psalms is a manual of devotion, consisting alternately, or rather intermixedly, of prayers and praises, composed some by Moses, some by other inspired Israelites of less note, but the greater part by David himself; and what is the force and tendency of their example? Words are spoken in collaudation of "Moses and Aaron among the saints of the Lord," and of "Samuel among such as called upon his name;" and mention is made with becoming reverence of the holy angels; but not one word ever falls from the pen of the Psalmist, addressed, by way of invocation, to saint or angel. In the Roman Ritual supplication is made to Abel and Abraham as well as to Michael and all angels. If it is now lawful, if it is now the duty of the worshippers of the true God to seek his aid through the mediation of those holy men, can we avoid asking, Why the inspired patriarchs did not appeal to Abel for his mediation? Why did not the inspired David invoke the father of the faithful to intercede for him with God? If the departed spirits {23} of faithful men may be safely addressed in prayer; if those who in their lifetime have, to their fellow-mortals, (who can judge only from outward actions, and cannot penetrate the heart,) appeared accepted servants and honoured saints of our Creator, may now be invoked by an act of religious supplication either to grant us aid, or to intercede with God for aid in our behalf, why did not men whom God declared to be partakers of his Spirit of truth, offer the same supplication to those departed spirits, who, before and after their decease, had this testimony from Omniscience itself, that they pleased God? Why is no intimation given in the later books of the Old Testament that such supplications were offered to Moses, or Aaron, or Abraham, or Noah? When wrath was gone out from the presence of the Lord, and the plague was begun among the people, Aaron took a censer in his hand, and stood between the living and the dead, and the plague was stayed. If the soul of Aaron was therefore to be regarded as a spirit influential with God, one whose intercession could avail, one who ought to be approached in prayer, were it only for his intercession, could a stronger motive be conceived for suggesting that invocation, than David must have felt, when the pestilence was destroying its thousands around him, and all his glory and strength, and his very life too, were threatened by its resistless ravages? But no! neither Abel, nor Abraham, nor Moses, nor Aaron, must be petitioned to intercede with God, and to pray that God would stay his hand. To God and God alone, for his own mercy's sake, must his afflicted servant turn in supplication. We find among his prayers no "Holy Abraham, pray for us,"--"Holy Abel, pray for us." His own Psalm of thanksgiving describes full well the object and the nature of his {24} prayer: "When the waves of death compassed me, the floods of ungodly men made me afraid, the sorrows of hell compassed me about, the snares of death prevented me; in my distress I called upon the Lord, and cried to my God; and He did hear my voice out of his temple, and my cry did enter into his ears." [2 Sam. (2 Kings Vulg.) xxii. 5. or Ps. xviii.] Abraham, when on earth, prayed God to spare the offending-people; but he invoked neither Noah, nor Abel, nor any of the faithful departed, to join their intercessions with his own. Isaac prayed to God for his son Jacob, but he did not ask the mediation of his father Abraham in his behalf; and when Jacob in his turn supplicated an especial blessing upon his grandsons Ephraim and Manasseh, though he called with gratitude to his mind, and expressed with his tongue, the devotedness both of Abraham and of Isaac to the Almighty, yet we do not find him appealing to them, or invoking their intercession with Jehovah. When the conscience-struck Israelites felt that they had exposed themselves to the wrath of Almighty God, whose sovereign power, put forth at the prayer of Samuel, they then witnessed, distrusting the efficacy of their own supplication, and confiding in the intercession of that man of God, they implored him to intercede for them; and Samuel emphatically responded to their appeal, with an assurance of his earnestly undertaking to plead their cause with heaven: "And all the people said unto Samuel, Pray for thy servants unto the Lord thy God, that we die not. And Samuel said unto the people, Fear not.... The Lord will not forsake his people, for his great name's {25} sake.... Moreover, God forbid that I should sin against the Lord in ceasing to pray for you." [1 Sam. (1 Kings Vulg.) xii. 19.] Samuel is one whom the Holy Spirit numbers among those "who called upon God's name;" and when Samuel died, all Israel gathered together to lament and to bury him,--but we read of no petition being offered to him to carry on the same intercessory office, when he was once removed from them. As long as he was entabernacled in the flesh and sojourned on earth with his brethren, they besought him to pray for them, to intercede with their God and his God for blessings at his hand, (just as among ourselves one Christian asks another to pray for him,) but when Samuel's body had been buried in peace, and his soul had returned to God who gave it, the Bible never records any further application to him; we no where read, "Holy Samuel, pray for us." Again, what announcement could God Himself make more expressive of his acceptance of the persons of any, than He actually and repeatedly made to Moses with regard to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob? How could He more clearly intimate that if the spirits of the faithful departed could exercise intercessory or mediatorial influence with Him, those three holy patriarchs would possess such power above all others who had ever lived on the earth? "I am the God of your fathers; the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob: and Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look upon God." "Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, The God of thy fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, hath sent me unto you. This is my name for ever, and this is my memorial throughout all generations." [Exod. iii. 6. 15.] Did Moses in his alarm and dread, when he was afraid {26} to look upon God, call upon those holy and accepted servants to aid him in his perplexity, and intercede for him and his people with the awful Eternal Being on whose majesty he dared not to look? Did he teach his people to invoke Abraham? That was far from him. When Moses, that saint of the Lord, was himself called hence and was buried, (though no mortal man was allowed to know the place of his sepulture,) did the surviving faithful pray to him for his help and intercession with God? He had wrought so many and great miracles as never had been before witnessed on earth; whilst in the tabernacle of the flesh he had talked with God as a man talketh with his friend; and yet the sacred page records no invocation ever breathed to his departed spirit. The same is the result of our inquiry throughout. I will specify only one more example--Hezekiah, who "trusted in the Lord God of Israel, and clave to the Lord, and departed not from following him, but kept his commandments," when he and his people were in great peril, addressed his prayer only to God. He offered no invocation to holy David to intercede with the Almighty for his own Jerusalem; he made his supplication directly and exclusively to Jehovah; and, yet, the very answer made to that prayer would surely have seemed to justify Hezekiah in seeking holy David's mediation, if prayer for the intercession of any departed mortal could ever have been sanctioned by Heaven: "Thus saith the Lord, the God of David thy father; I have heard thy prayer, I have seen thy tears; _I_ will heal thee. I will save this city for mine own sake, and for my servant David's sake." [2 Kings (Vulg. 4 Kings) xix. 15. and xx. 6.] Of what saint in the calendar was ever such a thing as this spoken? {27} I have already intimated my intention of referring, with somewhat more than a cursory remark, to the position assumed, and the argument built upon it by writers in communion with Rome, for the purpose of nullifying or escaping from the evidence borne by the examples of the Old Testament against the invocation of saints. The writers to whom I refer, with Bellarmin at their head, openly confess that the pages of the Old Testament afford no instance of invocation being offered to the spirits of departed mortals; and the reason which they allege is this, No one can be invoked who is not admitted to the presence of God in heaven; but before Christ went down to hell[2] and released the spirits from prison, no mortal was admitted into heaven; consequently, before the resurrection of Christ the spirit of no mortal was invoked. The following are the words of Bellarmin at the close of the preface to his "Church Triumphant:"--"The spirits of the patriarchs and prophets before the coming of Christ were for this reason not worshipped and invoked, as we now worship and invoke the Apostles and martyrs, because they were yet shut up and detained in prisons below[3]." Again, he says, "Because before {28} the coming of Christ the saints who died did not enter heaven and saw not God, nor could ordinarily know the prayers of suppliants, therefore, it was not customary in the Old Testament to say, 'Holy Abraham, pray for me,' &c.; but the men of that time prayed to God only, and alleged the merits of the saints who had already departed, that their own prayers might be aided by them." [Footnote 2: The word Hell, signifying, in Saxon, a hidden-place, altogether corresponding in its etymology with "hades," is now used for the place of torment called by the Hebrews "Gehennah;" and we must perhaps regret that the same Saxon word is employed to signify also the unseen region of departed spirits. This circumstance has been the source of much difficulty and confusion.] [Footnote 3: "Nam idcirco ante Christi adventum non ita colebantur neque invocabantur spiritus patriarcharum atque prophetarum, quemadmodum nunc Apostolos et martyres colimus et invocamus, quod illi adhuc infernis carceribus clausi detinebantur."--Ingolstadii, 1601. vol. ii. p. 833. "The last edition, enlarged and corrected by the Author."] Now let us inquire into this statement thus broadly made, and ascertain for ourselves whether the point assumed and the argument built upon it can stand the test of examination. Is this argument such as ought to satisfy the mind of one, who would humbly but honestly follow the apostolic rule, "Prove all things: hold fast that which is good?" Is this such an exposition as that the reason of a cultivated mind, and the faith of an enlightened Christian, can acquiesce in it? Let it be examined neither with prejudice in its favour, nor with any undue suspicion of its soundness, but with candour and impartiality throughout. It is not necessary to dwell at any length on the inconsistencies and perplexities involved in this assumed abstract theory with regard to the souls of the faithful who died before the resurrection of Christ, and which require to be cleared away before its advocates can reasonably expect to obtain for it any general acceptance among thinking men. I do not wish to contravene the theory, far less to substitute another in its stead. On the contrary, I am fully content, in company with some of the most valuable among Roman Catholic writers, following the example of Augustin [Aug. De Pecc. Orig. c. 23. tom. vii. p. 338.--Quoted by De Sacy. 2 Kings (Vulg. 4 Kings) ii.], to leave the subject where Scripture has left it. To the arguments {29} alleged, I would wish to reply independently of any opinion, as a matter of Christian belief, with regard to the place, the condition, and the circumstances of the souls of the patriarchs and prophets before our blessed Lord's resurrection. It may, nevertheless, materially facilitate an inquiry into the soundness of the reasons alleged for the total absence of invocation to those souls, if we briefly contemplate some of the difficulties which surround this novel theory. At all events, such a process will incline us to abstain from bold assumptions on a point upon which the Almighty has been pleased to throw so little light in his Holy Word, or at least avoid all severity of condemnation towards those who may differ from our views. It is very easy to assert, that all the souls of the faithful departed were kept in the prison-house of Hades, and to allege in its behalf an obscure passage of St. Peter, to which many of the most learned and unprejudiced Christian teachers assign a meaning totally unconnected with the subject of departed spirits. But surely the case of Enoch's translation from this life to heaven, making, as it has been beautifully expressed, but one step from earth to glory, which St. Paul, in his Epistle to the Hebrews, cites with a most important comment of his own, requires to be well and patiently weighed. He was taken from the earth by an immediate act of Providence, that he should not see death; and before his translation he had this testimony, that he pleased God. Surely the case of Elijah too, when we would ascertain the soundness of this theory, must not be dismissed summarily from our thoughts, of whom the book of eternal truth declares, that Jehovah took him {30} in a whirlwind into heaven; his ascent being made visible to mortal eyes, as was afterwards the ascension of the blessed Saviour Himself. Indeed the accounts of Elijah's translation, and of our Lord's ascension, whether in the Septuagint and Greek Testament, the Vulgate, or our own authorized version, present a similarity of expression very striking and remarkable. On this subject we are strongly reminded, first, with what care and candour and patience the language of Holy Scripture should be weighed, which so positively declares, that Moses and Elijah, both in glory, appeared visibly to the Apostles at the transfiguration of our blessed Saviour, and conversed with Him on the holy mount: "And behold there talked with Him two men, who were Moses and Elias, who appeared in glory (in majesty, as the Vulgate renders the word), and spake of his decease which He should accomplish at Jerusalem;" [Luke ix. 30.]--and, secondly, how unwise it is to dogmatize on such subjects beyond the plain declaration of the sacred narrative. Moreover, how very unsatisfactory is the theory which we are examining as to the state of the souls of the faithful who died before Christ, even the words of Jerome himself prove, who, commenting on the transfiguration of the blessed Jesus, is unhappily led to represent the Almighty as having summoned Elijah to descend from heaven, and Moses to ascend from Hades, to meet our Lord in the Mount[4]. [Footnote 4: "Elia inde descendente quo conscenderat, et Moyse ab inferis resurgente."--Hieron. in Matt. xvii. 1. Paris, 1706. vol. iv. p. 77.] Strange and startling as is this sentiment of Jerome, it is, you will observe, utterly irreconcileable with the theory, that the reason why the ancient Church did not {31} pray to the saints departed, was because they were not yet in heaven. On this point, among Roman Catholic writers themselves, there prevails a very great diversity of opinion, arising probably from the difficulty which they have experienced in their endeavours to make all facts and doctrines square with the present tenets and practices of their Church[5]. Thus, whilst some maintain that Elijah was translated to the terrestrial paradise in which Adam had been placed, not enjoying the immediate divine presence; others cite the passage as justifying the belief that the saints departed pray for us[6]. But not only are different authors at variance with each other on very many points here; the same writer in his zeal is betrayed into great and palpable inconsistency. Bellarmin, anxious to enlist the account given by our Lord of the rich man and Lazarus, to countenance the invocation of saints by the example of the rich man appealing to Abraham, maintains that section of Holy Writ to be not a parable, but a true history of a matter of fact which took place between two real individuals; and of his assertion he adduces this proof, that "the Church worships that Lazarus as verily a holy man[7];" and yet he denies that any of the holy men were in heaven before the {32} death of Christ. Either Abraham was in heaven in the presence of God, or not; if he was in heaven, why did not his descendants invoke his aid? if he was not in heaven, the whole argument drawn from the rich man's supplication falls to the ground. [Footnote 5: See De Sacy on 4 Kings i. 1. See also Estius, 1629. p. 168. Pope Gregory's Exposition; Rome, 1553. p. 99. Stephen's Bible in loc. 1557, &c. The Vulgate ed. Antwerp, 1624, cites a note, "Thy prayers are stronger than chariots and horsemen."] [Footnote 6: Gaspar Sanctius, Antwerp, 1624. p. 1360, considers the fable not improbable, that Elijah, living in the terrestrial paradise, wrote there the letters to Joram (mentioned 2 Chron. xxi. 12), and sent them by angels.] [Footnote 7: Colit Lazarum ilium ut vere sanctum hominem.--Bellarm. De Ecd. Triumph, p. 864.] Another very extraordinary inconsistency, arising from the same solicitude, forces itself upon our notice, when the same author urges a passage in Leviticus [Levit. xix. 13.] to prove, that the saints are now admitted at once into the enjoyment of the presence of God in heaven, without waiting for the day of final judgment. [Bell vol. ii. p. 865.] "God (such are his words) commanded it to be written, 'The work of the hireling shall not remain with thee till the morning;' therefore, unless God would appear inconsistent with Himself, He will not keep back the reward of his saints to the end of the world." How strange, that in the same treatise [Ibid. p. 833.] this author should expressly maintain, that the reward of Abel and Abraham, and the holy prophet and lawgiver Moses, the very man who was commanded to write that law in Leviticus, was kept back,--the last for a longer period than a thousand years; the first well nigh four thousand years. I mention these particulars merely to point out how very unsatisfactory and unsound is the attempted solution of the difficulties which surround on every side the theory of those who maintain, that the reason why we have no instance of the righteous departed being invoked in the times of the elder covenant is, that they were not as yet admitted into heaven, but were kept in prison till the resurrection of Christ. I would also observe, even at the risk {33} of repetition, that I am here not maintaining any opinion as to the appointed abiding-place, the condition, and circumstances, the powers of consciousness, volition or enjoyment of the departed, before Christ's resurrection; on the contrary, I am rather urging the consideration of the great and serious caution requisite before we espouse, as an article of faith, any opinion which rests on so questionable a foundation, and which involves such interminable difficulties. But while we need not dwell longer on this immediate point, yet there are two considerations which appear to be altogether decisive as to the evidence borne against the Invocation of Saints by the writers of the Old Testament. If the spirits of the saints departed were not invoked before the resurrection of Christ, purely because they were not then admitted into heaven; the first consideration I would suggest is this: Why did the faithful and inspired servants of Jehovah not invoke the angels and archangels who were in heaven? The second is this: Why did not the inspired Apostles and faithful disciples of our Lord invoke the spirits of those saints after his resurrection; that is (according to the theory before us), after those saints had been taken by Christ with him into his Father's presence? I wish not to anticipate here our inquiry into the testimony borne by the writers of the New Testament as to the doctrine and practice of the Roman Church in this particular; and I will only add, that whatever be the cause of the absence from the Old Testament of all worship and invocation of Abel and Abraham, whom the Roman Church now invokes, the alleged reason that it was because they were not in heaven till after Christ's resurrection, is utterly set aside by the conduct of the Apostles and disciples of our Lord recorded in the New {34} Testament, for more than half a century after his return to his Father's glory. This, however, seems to be the proper place for entertaining the first consideration, Why did not the holy men of old, under the elder covenant, invoke angels and archangels, as the Roman Church now does? Writers, indeed, who have declared themselves the defenders of that doctrine and practice, refer us to passages, which they cite, as affording examples of the worship of angels; and we will not knowingly allow any one of those sections of Holy Writ to remain unexamined. We must first endeavour to ascertain the testimony borne by the books of the Old Testament: and that presents to us such a body of evidence as greatly increases our surprise at the perseverance with which the invocation of angels has been maintained by any community of men acknowledging the inspiration of the sacred volume. The inspired writers of the Old Testament, and those to whom through their mouth and pen the Divine word was addressed, were as fully as ourselves acquainted with the existence of angelic beings. They were aware of the station of those angels in the court of heaven, of their power as God's ambassadors, and agents for good. Either their own eyes had seen the mighty operations of God by the hands of those celestial messengers; or their ears had heard their fathers tell what HE had done by their instrumentality in times of old. Why then did not God's chosen people offer to the angels the same worship and invocation which the Church of Rome now addresses to them in common with the patriarchs and prophets of the elder covenant, and with saints and martyrs under the new? In the condition of the holy angels no one ever suggests that {35} any change, affecting the argument, has taken place since the time when man was created and made. And as the angels of heaven were in themselves the same, equally in the presence of God, and equally able to succour men through that long space of four thousand years, which intervened between Adam's creation and the birth of HIM who was Son of Adam and Son of God, so was man in the same dependent state, needing the guidance and protection of a power above his own. Nay, surely, if there was in man any difference affecting the argument, it would all add weight to the reason against the invocation of angels by Christians. The Israelites of old had no clear knowledge, as we have, of one great Mediator, who is ever making intercession for us; and yet they sought not the mediation and intercession and good offices of those superhuman beings, of whose existence and power, and employment in works of blessing to man, they had no doubt[8]. This is a point of great importance to our argument, and I will refer to a few passages in support of it. [Footnote 8: A small section indeed of their countrymen in our Saviour's time denied the reality of a future state, and the existence of angels and spirits; but the sect was of then recent origin, and the overwhelming majority believed as their fathers had believed.] When David, who had, as we know [1 Chron. xxi. 16.], visible demonstration afforded him of the existence and ministration of the angels, called upon them to unite with his own soul, and with all the works of creation through all places of God's dominion, in praising their merciful, glorious, and powerful Creator, he thus conveys to us the exalted ideas with which he had been filled of their nature, their excellence, and their ministration. "The Lord hath prepared his throne in the heavens, and his {36} kingdom ruleth over all: Bless the Lord, ye his angels that excel in strength, that do his commandments, hearkening unto the voice of his word. Bless ye the Lord, all ye his hosts, ye ministers of his that do his pleasure." [Ps. ciii. 19-21.] David knew moreover that one of the offices, in the execution of which the angels do God's pleasure, is that of succouring and defending us on earth. For example, in one of the psalms used by the Church of Rome at complin, and with the rest repeated in the Church of England, and prophetic of the Redeemer, David, to whom this psalm is probably to be ascribed, declares of the man who had made the Most High his refuge and strength, "There shall no evil befall thee, neither shall any plague come nigh thy dwelling; for he shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways; they shall bear thee up in their hands lest thou dash thy foot against a stone." [Ps. xci. 10-12.] And again, with exquisitely beautiful imagery, he represents those same blessed servants of heaven as an army, as a host of God's spiritual soldiers keeping watch and ward over the poorest of the children of men, who would take refuge in his mercy: "The angel of the Lord encampeth round about them that fear him, and delivereth them[9]." And yet David, the prophet of the Lord, never addresses to these beings, high and glorious though they are, one single invocation: he neither asks them to assist him, nor to pray for him, nor to pray with him in his behalf. [Footnote 9: Ps. xxxiv. 7. (Vulg. xxxiii. 8.) "Immittet angelus Domini in circuitu timentium eum, et eripiet eos." In the Vulgate the beauty of the figure is lost; which, however, Roman Catholic writers restore in their comments. Basil makes a beautiful use of the metaphor. See De Sacy in loc.] {37} Isaiah was admitted by the Holy Spirit to witness in the fulness of its glory the court and the throne of heaven; and he heard the voices of the seraphim proclaiming their Maker's praise; he experienced also personally the effect of their ministration, when one of them said, "Lo, this hath touched thy lips, and thine iniquity is taken away, and thy sin purged." [Isaiah vi. 7.] Still, though Isaiah must have regarded this angel as his benefactor under God, yet neither to this seraph, nor to any of the host of heaven, does he offer one prayer for their good offices, even by their intercession. He ever ascribes all to God alone; and never joins any other name with His either in supplication or in praise. Let us also take the case of Daniel. He acknowledges not only that the Lord's omnipotent hand had rescued him from the jaws of the lions, but that the deliverance was brought about by the ministration of an angel. "My God hath sent his angel, and hath shut the lions' mouths, that they have not hurt me." [Dan. vi. 22.] Yet when we look through Daniel's prayers, we find no allusion to any of the highest angels. He had seen Gabriel before his prayer; he had heard the voice and felt the hand of that heavenly messenger who was commissioned to reveal to him what should be done in the latter end; and immediately after the offering of his prayer, the same Gabriel announces himself as one who was come forth to give the prophet skill and understanding. And yet neither towards Gabriel, nor any other of the angels of God, does one word of invocation fall from the lips of Daniel. In the supplications of that holy, intrepid, and blessed servant and child of God, we search in vain for any thing approaching in spirit to the invocation, "Sancte Gabriel, ora pro nobis." {38} * * * * * SECTION III.--EVIDENCE OF THE OLD TESTAMENT (continued) We must now briefly refer to those passages, by which Roman Catholic writers have endeavoured to maintain that religious adoration was paid to angels by the faithful sons of God. The two principal instances cited are, first, the case of Abraham bowing down before three men, whom he recognizes as messengers from heaven; and, secondly, the words of Jacob when he gave his benediction to his grandsons. With regard to the first instance, how very far the prostration of Abraham was in itself from implying an act of religious worship, being as it was the ordinary mode of paying respect to a fellow mortal, is evident from the very words of Scripture. The Hebrew word, which we translate by "bowed himself," and which the Vulgate unhappily renders "adoravit" ("adored"), is, letter for letter, the same in the case of Abraham saluting his three heavenly visitors, and in the case of Jacob saluting his brother Esau. The parallelism of the two passages is very striking. GEN. xviii. 2. GEN. xxxiii. 1 and 3. And he [Abraham] lift up his And Jacob lifted up his eyes, eyes, and lo! three men stood and looked, and behold! Esau by him; and when he saw them, came ... And he passed over, and he ran to meet them from the _bowed himself to the ground_ seven tent door; and _bowed himself_ times until he came near to his _toward the ground_. brother. {39} By rendering the Hebrew word[10], which means to "bow or bend oneself," by the word "adoravit," which is literally "to pray to," the Latin Vulgate has laid the foundation for much unsound and misleading criticism. But suppose the word had meant, what it does not mean, an act of solemn religious worship; and let it be granted (as I am not only ready to grant, but prepared to maintain) that Abraham paid religious adoration at that time, what inference can fairly and honestly be drawn from that circumstance in favour of the invocation of angels? The ancient writers of the Christian Church, and those whom the Church of Rome habitually holds in great respect, are full and clear in maintaining that the person whom Abraham then addressed, was no created being, neither angel nor seraph; but the Angel of the Covenant; the Word, the eternal Son of God, Himself God[11]. Before the visible and miraculous presence of the God of heaven, who for his own glory and in carrying on the work of man's salvation, sometimes deigned so to reveal Himself, the patriarchs of old bowed themselves to the earth. Can this, with any shadow of {40} reason, be employed to sanction the invocation of Michael and all the myriads of angels who fill the court of heaven? [Footnote 10: Not only is the Hebrew word precisely the same, letter for letter, and point for point, [Hebrew: shahah], but the Septuagint in each case employs the same, [Greek: prosekunaesen]; and the Vulgate in each case renders it by the same word, "adoravit." The Roman Catholic commentator De Sacy renders it in each case, "se prosternavit," which corresponds exactly with our English version. The Douay Bible in each case renders it "adored."] [Footnote 11: Many early Christian writers may be cited to the same purpose: it is enough, however, to refer to Justin Martyr and to Athanasius; who are very full and elaborate in maintaining, that the angel here mentioned was no created being, but was the Angel of the Covenant, God, in the fulness of time manifested in the flesh. The passage from Athanasius will be quoted at some length, when we come to examine that father's testimony. For Justin Martyr, see Dial. cum Tryph. ch. 56, &c. p. 150, &c. (Paris, 1742.)] The only other instance to which it will be necessary to call your attention, occurs in the forty-eighth chapter of Genesis. The passage, however, is so palpably and on the very face of it inapplicable, that its examination needs not detain us long. "And he [Jacob] blessed Joseph, and said, God, before whom my fathers Abraham and Isaac did walk, the God who fed me all my life long unto this day, the ANGEL which redeemed me from all evil, bless the lads." [Gen. xlviii. 15.] Here the patriarch speaks of God as the Angel, and the Angel as God: being the Angel or Messenger of the Covenant--God manifested to man. He speaks not of Michael or Gabriel, or archangel or seraph, or any created being; but of the Lord Himself, who appeared to him, agreeably to the revelation of God Himself recorded in a previous chapter, and thus communicated by the patriarch to Rachel and Leah: "And the ANGEL of God spake unto me in a dream, saying, Jacob; and I said, Here am I. And he said ... _I_ am the GOD of Bethel, where thou anointedst the pillar, and vowedst a vow unto me." [Gen. xxxi. 11.] The Angel whose blessing he desired for the lads was the God[12], to whom he had vowed a vow in Bethel, the Lord Himself. [Footnote 12: It may not be superfluous to add, that this is the interpretation of the passage adopted by primitive writers, Among others see Eusebius Demonstr. Evan. lib. v. ch. 10: who declares that the Angel spoken of by Jacob was God the Son.] Independently, however, of this conclusive consideration, if the latter member of this sentence had merely expressed a wish, that an angel might be employed as {41} an instrument of good in behalf of Ephraim and Manasseh, I could readily offer such a prayer for a blessing on my own children. My prayer would be addressed to the angel neither immediately nor transitively, but exclusively to God alone, supplicating Him graciously to employ the service of those ministering spirits for our good. Such a prayer every Catholic in communion with the Church of England is taught and directed to offer. Such a prayer is primitive and scriptural; and such is offered in the Church on the anniversary of Saint Michael and all angels: "O Everlasting God, who hast ordained and constituted the services of angels and men in a wonderful order, mercifully grant that as Thy holy angels alway do Thee service in heaven, so by Thy appointment they may succour and defend us on earth; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen." Such is the prayer of the Church Catholic, whether of the Roman or the Anglican branch; it is in spirit and in truth a Christian prayer, fit for faithful mortals to offer on earth to the Lord of men and of angels in heaven. Would that the Church of Rome, preserving, as she has preserved, this prayer in all its original purity, had never been successfully tempted to mingle in the same service, supplications, which rob the one only God of his exclusive honour and glory, as the God "who heareth prayer;" and to rob Christ of his exclusive honour and glory, as our only Mediator and Advocate! Here, though unwilling, by departing from the order of our argument, to anticipate our examination in its place of the Roman ritual, I cannot refrain from contrasting this prayer, the genuine offspring of Christian faith, with some forms of invocation contained in {42} the Roman service on St. Michael's day, in which I could not join, and the adoption of which I deeply lament. The first is appointed to be said at the part of the Mass called "The Secret:" "We offer to Thee, O Lord, the sacrifice of praise, humbly beseeching Thee, That by the intervention of the prayers of the angels for us, Thou, being appeased, mayest both accept the same, and make them profitable for our salvation. Through ..." The second is offered at the Post Communion: "Supported [propped up, suffulti] by the intercession of Thy blessed archangel Michael, we humbly beseech Thee, O Lord, that what with honour we follow[13], we may obtain also in mind. Through ..." [Footnote 13: I do not understand the exact meaning of these words, which however contain no portion of that sentiment, the presence of which in this prayer I deplore. The original is this: "Beati archangeli tui Michaelis intercessione suffulti, supplices te Domine deprecamur, ut quod honore prosequimur, contingamus et in mente. Per ..." Probably the general sense is, that what we reverently seek we may actually realize.] Still, though here the Christian seems to be taught to rest on a broken reed, to support and prop himself up by a staff which must bend and break; yet I acknowledge that so much violence is not done to my Christian principles, nor do my feelings, as a believer in God and his ever-blessed Son, meet with so severe a shock by either of these prayers, as by the invocation addressed to the archangel himself in the "Gradual" on that same day: "O holy Michael, O archangel, defend us in battle, that we perish not in the dreadful judgment." Christians of the Church of Rome! for one moment meditate, I beseech you, on this prayer. It is not addressed to God; in it there is no mention made of {43} Christ: having called upon the angels, and on your own soul in the words of the psalmist, to praise the Lord, you address your supplication to Michael himself; not even invoking him for his intercession, but imploring of him his protection. If it be said, that his intercession is all that is meant, with most unfeigned sincerity I request you to judge for yourselves, whether any prayer from poor sinful man, putting his whole trust in the Lord and imploring his help, could be addressed to our God and Saviour more immediate and direct than this? In the place of the name of his servant Michael, substitute the highest and the holiest name ever uttered in heaven or on earth, and can words form a prayer more direct to God? "O Lord God Almighty, O Lord Jesus our only Saviour, defend us in battle, that we perish not in the dreadful judgment. Hallelujah!"--Can this be right? Were the archangel allowed now, by his Lord and ours, to make his voice heard upon earth by Christians offering to him this prayer, would he utter any other words, than the angel, his fellow-servant and ours, once addressed to Saint John, when he fell down to worship before him, "See thou do it not; for I am thy fellow-servant: worship God." Such then is the evidence borne by the writers of the Old Testament. No prayer to angel or beatified spirit occurs from its first to its last page. The theory which would have us account for the absence of all prayer to the saints before the advent of Messiah, by reason of their not having been then admitted into their everlasting habitations, and the immediate presence of God proves to be utterly groundless. The holy angels were confessedly in heaven [Matt. xviii. 10.], beholding the face of {44} God; but no invocation was ever addressed to them, by patriarch, or prophet, or people, as mediators or intercessors. God, and God alone, the one eternal Jehovah, is proclaimed by Himself throughout, and is acknowledged throughout to be the only object of any kind of spiritual worship; the only Being who heareth prayer, to whom alone therefore all mankind should approach with the words and with the spirit of invocation. It has been argued by some writers, that in the times of the Old Testament, prayer was not offered to God through a mediator at all; and that as the one Mediator was not then revealed in his person and his offices, the subsidiary intercessors could not of course act; and therefore could not be invoked by man. The answer to this remark is conclusive. That Mediator has been revealed in his person and his offices; and has been expressly declared to be the one Mediator between God and man: we therefore seek God's covenanted mercies through Him. Those subsidiary intercessors have never been revealed; and therefore we do not seek their aid. To assure us that it was the mind and will of our Heavenly Father that we should approach Him by secondary and subsidiary mediators and intercessors, the same clear and unquestionable revelation of their persons and their offices as mediators would have been required, as He has vouchsafed of the mediation of his Son. Had God willed that the faithful should approach Him by the intercessions of the saints and martyrs, is it conceivable that He would not have given some intimation of his will in this respect? If believers in the Gospel were to have unnumbered mediators of intercession in heaven, as well as the one Mediator of redemption, would not the {45} Gospel itself have announced it? Could such declarations as these have remained on record without any qualifying or limiting expression, "He[14] is able also to save to the uttermost them who come unto God by Him, seeing He ever liveth to make intercession for them." "There is one God, and one Mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus." But this involves the question to which the next section must be devoted. All I would anticipate here is, that if the irresistible argument from the Old Testament is sought to be evaded on the ground that no mediator at all was then revealed, we must require a distinct revelation of the existence and offices of other mediators and intercessors, before we can be justified in applying to them for their intervention in our behalf. And the question now is. Are they so revealed? [Footnote 14: Heb. vii. 25. I Tim. ii. 5.--Unde et salvare in perpetuum potest accedentes per semetipsum ad Deum, semper vivens ad interpellandum pro nobis.--_Vulg._] * * * * * SECTION IV.--EVIDENCE OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. Though such is the evidence borne against the invocation of saints and angels by the Old Testament, yet it has been said that we are living neither under the patriarchal, nor the Mosaic dispensation, but under the Gospel, to whom therefore as Christians neither the precepts nor the examples of those ancient times are applicable: {46} the injunctions consequently given of old to preserve the chosen people from idolatry and paganism, cannot be held to prohibit Christians from seeking the aid of those departed saints who are now reigning with Christ. But, surely, those precepts, and denunciations, and commands, are still most strictly applicable, as conveying to us a knowledge of the will of our Heavenly Father, that his sons and daughters on earth should associate no name, however exalted among the principalities and powers in heavenly places, with his own holy name in prayer, and spiritual invocation. I am throughout this address supposing myself to be speaking to those whose heart's desire is to fulfil the will of God in all things; not those who are contented to depart from the spirit of that will, whenever they can devise plausible arguments to countenance such departure. The cases both of precept and example through the Old Testament affording so stringent and so universal a rule against the association of any name with the name of the Almighty in our prayers; before we can conclude that Christians have a liberty denied to believers under the former dispensations, we must surely produce a declaration to that effect, clear, unequivocal, and precisely in point. Nothing short of an enactment, rescinding in terms the former prohibitory law, and positively sanctioning supplications and prayers to saints and angels, seems capable of satisfying any Christian bent on discovering the will of God, and resolved to worship Him agreeably to the spirit of that will as it has been revealed. But let us read the New Testament from its first to its very last word, and we shall find, that the doctrines, the precepts, and the examples, the pervading reigning spirit of the entire {47} volume, combine in addressing us with voices loud and clear. Pray to God Almighty solely in the name and for the sake of his dear and only Son Jesus Christ our Lord, and offer no prayer, no supplication, no intreaty, to any other being or power, saint or angel, though it be only to ask for their intercession with the great God. But this involves the whole question, and must be sifted thoroughly. Let us then review the entire volume with close and minute scrutiny, and ask ourselves, Is there a single passage, interpreted to the best of our skill, with the aid of those on whose integrity and learning we can rely, which directly and unequivocally sanctions any religious invocation of whatever kind to any being except God alone? And then let us calmly and deliberately resolve this point: In a matter of so vital importance, of so immense interest, and of so sacred a character as the worship of the Supreme Being, who declares Himself to be a jealous God, ought we to suffer any refinements of casuistry to entice us from the broad, clear light of revelation? If it were God's good pleasure to make exceptions to his rule--a rule so repeatedly, and so positively enacted and enforced--surely the analogy of his gracious dealings with mankind would have taught us to look for an announcement of the exceptions in terms equally forcible and explicit. Instead, however, of this, we find no single act, no single word, nothing which even by implication can be forced to sanction any prayer or religious invocation, of whatever kind, to any other being save to God alone. Let us first look to the language and conduct of our blessed Lord, whose prayers to his Father are upon record for our instruction and comfort, and whose precepts and example form the best rule of a Christian's {48} life. So far from repealing the ancient law, he repeats in his own person its solemn announcement, "Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord." [Mark xii. 29.] While the same heavenly Teacher commands us with authority, "When thou prayest, pray to thy Father which is in secret, and thy Father, who seeth in secret, shall reward thee openly." [Matt. vi. 6.] No allusion in any word of His do we find to any prayer from a mortal on this earth to an angel or saint in heaven. And yet occasions were multiplied on which a reference to the invocation of angels would have been natural, and apparently called for. He again and again places beyond all doubt the reality of their good services towards mankind, but it is as God's servants, and at God's bidding; not in answer to any supplication or invoking of ours. The parable of the rich man and Lazarus has been cited [Bellarmin, p. 895.] to bear contrary evidence; but, in the first place, that parable does not offer a case in point; in the second place, were it in point, it might be fairly and strongly urged against the practice of invoking the spirit of any departed mortal, even the father of the faithful himself. For what are the circumstances of the parabolic representation? A lost spirit in the regions of torment prays to Abraham in the regions of the blessed, and the spirit of the departed patriarch professes himself to have no power to grant the request of the departed and condemned spirit. [Luke xvi. 19.] The practice indeed of our Roman Catholic brethren would have been exemplified, had our blessed Lord represented the rich man's five brethren still on earth as pious men, and as supplicating Abraham in heaven to pray for themselves, or to mitigate {49} their lost brother's punishment and his woes. But then it would have afforded Christians little encouragement to follow their example, when they found Abraham declaring himself unable to aid them in attaining the object of their prayer, or in any way to assist them at all. Without one single exception, we find our blessed Lord's example, precepts, and doctrines to be decidedly against the practice of invoking saint or angel; whilst not one solitary act or word of His can be cited to countenance or palliate it. Next it follows, that we inquire into the conduct and the writings of Christ's Apostles and immediate followers, to whom He graciously promised that the Holy Spirit should guide them into all truth. In the Acts of the Apostles, various instances of prayer attract our notice, but not one ejaculation is found there to any other being save God alone. Neither angel nor saint is invoked. The Apostles prayed for guidance in the government of Christ's infant Church, but it was, "Thou, Lord, who knowest the hearts of all men." [Acts i. 24.] They prayed for their own acceptance, but it was "Lord Jesus, receive my spirit." [Acts vii. 59.] They prayed for each other, as in behalf of St. Peter when in prison; but we are expressly told, that the prayer which was made without ceasing by the Church for him was addressed to GOD. [Acts xii. 5.] To deliver St. Peter from his chains, an angel was sent on an especial mission from heaven; but though St. Peter saw him, and heard his voice, and followed him, and knew of a surety that the Almighty had employed the ministration of an angel to liberate him from his bonds, yet we do not hear thereafter of {50} Peter having himself prayed to an angel to secure his good offices, and his intercession with God, nor has he once indirectly intimated to others that such supplications would be of avail, or were even allowable. He exhorts his fellow-Christians to pray, "Watch unto prayer," but it is because "The eyes of the LORD are over the righteous, and his ears are open unto their prayers." [1 Pet. iv. 7; iii. 12.] He Himself prays for them, but it is, that the God of all grace might make them perfect, stablish, strengthen, settle them. He suggests no invocation of saint or angel to intercede with God for them. He bids them cast all their care upon GOD, on the assurance that God Himself careth for them. Precisely the same result issues from a contemplation of the acts and exhortation of St. Paul. He too experienced in his own person the comfort of an angel's ministration, bidding him cast off all fear when in the extreme of imminent peril. [Acts xxvii. 23, 24.] Many a prayer of that holy Apostle is upon record; many an earnest exhortation to prayer was made by him; we find many a declaration relative to his own habits of prayer. But with him God and God alone is the object of prayer throughout: by him no saint or angel or archangel is alluded to, as one whose intercession might be sought by himself or by us. He could speak in glowing language of patriarchs, prophets, and angels, but unto none of these would he turn. "Be careful for nothing, but in every thing by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known unto God." [Phil. iv. 6.] And let any one receive, in the plain meaning of his words, his prohibitory monition [Col. ii. 18.], and say, could St. Paul have {51} uttered these words without any qualifying expression, had he worshipped angels by invocation, even asking them only to aid him by their prayers. "Let no one beguile you of your reward in a voluntary humility and worshipping of angels; not holding the Head," which Head he had in the first chapter (v. 18) declared to be the dear Son of God, "in whom we have redemption through his blood, even the forgiveness of our sins." The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews could bring before our minds with most fervent uplifting eloquence Abel and Abraham and David,--that goodly fellowship of the prophets, that holy army of martyrs; he could speak as though he were an eye-witness of what he describes, of the general assembly and church of the first-born, whose names are written in heaven. And, surely, had the thought of seeking the support or intercession of saint or angel by invocation addressed to them, been familiar to him; had the thought even occurred to his mind with approbation, he would not have allowed such an occasion to pass by, without even alluding to any benefit that might arise from our invoking such friends of God. So far from that allusion, the utmost which he says at the close of his eulogy is this, "These all, having obtained a good report through faith, received not the promise; God having provided some better thing for us, that they without us should not be made perfect." [Heb. xi. 39, 40.] The beloved Apostle who could look forward in full assurance of faith to the day of Christ's second coming, and knew that "when He shall appear we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is," has left us this record of his sentiments concerning prayer: {52} "This is the confidence that we have in HIM, that, if we ask any thing according to his will, he heareth us; and if we know that he hear us, whatsoever we ask, we know that we have the petitions that we desired of him." [1 John v. 14, 15.] St. John alludes to no intercessor, to no advocate, save only that "Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous, who is also the propitiation for our sins." [1 John ii. 1.] St. John never suggests to us the advocacy or intercession of saint or angel; with him God in Christ is all in all. I will only refer to one more example, that of St. James: the instance is equally to the point, and is strongly illustrative of the truth. This Apostle is anxious to impress on his fellow-Christians a due sense of the efficacy of our intercessions: "The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much." [James v. 16.] He instances its power with God by the case of Elijah, a man so holy, that the Almighty suffered him not to pass through the regions of death and the grave, but translated him at once from this life to glory: "Elias was a man subject to like passions as we are, and he prayed that it might not rain; and it rained not on the earth by the space of three years and six months; and he prayed again, and the heaven gave rain, and the earth brought forth her fruit." [James v. 17, 18.] And yet St. James is very far from suggesting the lawfulness or efficacy of any invocation to the hallowed spirit of this man, to whose prayer the elements and natural powers of the sky and the earth had been made obedient. He exhorts all men to pray, but it must be to God alone, and directly to God, without applying for the intervention of any mediators or intercessors from among angels or men. {53} "If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, who giveth liberally to all men, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him; but let him ask in faith, nothing wavering." [James i. 5, 6.] Like the writer to the Hebrews, he would have us come ourselves "boldly" and directly "to the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need." Surely, these Apostles, chosen vessels for conveying the truths of salvation throughout the world, knew well how the Almighty could best be approached by his children on earth; and had the invocation of saint or angel found a place in their creed, they would not have kept so important a truth from us. Before leaving this part of our inquiry, I would propose the patient and unprejudiced weighing of the import of two passages in the New Testament, often quoted on this subject; one in the Acts of the Apostles, the other in the Apocalypse. The holy Apostles Barnabas and Paul, by the performance of a striking miracle, had excited feelings of religious reverence and devotion among the people of Lystra, who prepared to offer sacrifice to them as two of their fabled deities. [Acts xiv. 11-18.] The indignant zeal with which these two holy men rushed forward to prevent such an act of impiety, however admirable and affecting, does not constitute the chief point for which reference is here made to this incident. They were men, still clothed with the tabernacle of the flesh, and the weakness of human nature; and the priests and people were ready to offer to them the wonted victims, the abomination of the heathen. Now, I am fully aware of the wide difference, in many {54} particulars, between such an act and the act of a Christian praying to their spirits after their departure hence, and supplicating them to intercede with the true God in his behalf: and on this difference Roman Catholic writers have maintained the total inapplicability of this incident to the present state of things. But, surely, if any such prayer to departed saints had been familiar to their minds, instead of repelling the religious address of the inhabitants of Lystra at once and for ever, they would have altered the tone of their remonstrance, and not have suppressed the truth when a good opportunity offered itself for imparting it. And, supposing that it was part of their commission to announce and explain the invocation of saints at all, on what occasion could an explanation of the just and proper invocation of angels and saints departed have been more appropriate in the Apostles, than when they were denouncing the unjustifiable offering of sacrifice to themselves while living? But whether the more appropriate place for such an announcement were at Lystra, in Corinth, at Athens, or at Rome, it matters not; nor whether it would have been more advantageously communicated by their oral teaching, or in their epistles. Doubtless, had the Apostles, by their example or teaching, sanctioned the invocation of saints and angels, in the course of fifty years or more after our blessed Saviour's resurrection, it would infallibly have appeared in some page or other of the New Testament. Instead of this the whole tenor of the Holy Volume breathes in perfect accordance with the spirit of the apostolical remonstrance at Lystra, to the fullest and utmost extent of its meaning, "We preach unto you that ye should turn from these vanities to serve the living God." {55} Of the other instance, it well becomes every Catholic Christian to ponder on the weight and cogency. John, the beloved disciple of our Lord, when admitted to view with his own eyes and hear with his mortal ears the things of heaven, rapt in amazement and awe, fell down to worship before the feet of the angel who showed him these things. [Rev. xxii. 8, 9.] If the adoration of angels were ever justifiable, surely it was then; and what a testimony to the end of the world would have been put upon record, had the adoration of an angel by the blessed John at such a moment, when he had the mysteries and the glories of heaven before him, been received and sanctioned. But what is the fact? "Then saith he to me, See thou do it not. I am thy fellow-servant, and of thy brethren the prophets, and of them who keep the sayings of this book. Worship God." I cannot understand the criticism by which the conclusiveness of this direct renouncement of all religious adoration and worship is attempted to be set aside. To my mind these words, uttered without any qualification at such a time, by such a being, to such a man, are conclusive beyond gainsaying. The interpretation put upon this transaction, and the words in which it is recorded, and the inference drawn from them by a series of the best divines, with St. Athanasius at their head, presents so entirely the plain common-sense view of the case to our minds, that all the subtilty of casuists, and all the ingenuity of modern refinements, will never be able to substitute any other in its stead. "The angel (such are the words of that ancient defender of the true faith), in the Apocalypse, forbids John, when desiring to worship him, saying, 'See thou {56} do it not; I am thy fellow-servant, and of thy brethren the prophets, and of them who keep the sayings of this book. Worship God.' Therefore, to be the object of worship belongs to God only; and this even the angels themselves know: though they surpass others in glory, but they are all creatures, and are not among objects of worship, but among those who worship the sovereign Lord." [Athan. Orat. 2. Cont. Ar. vol. i. p. 491.] To say that St. John was too fully illuminated by the Holy Spirit to do, especially a second time, what was wrong; and thence to infer that what he did was right, is as untenable as to maintain, that St. Peter could not, especially thrice, have done wrong in denying our Lord. He did wrong, or the angel would not have chided and warned him. And to say that the angel here forbade John personally to worship him, because he was a fellow-servant and one of the prophets; and thus that the prohibition only tended to exalt the prophetic character, not to condemn the worship of angels, is proved to be also a groundless assumption, from the angel's own words, who reckons himself as a fellow-servant with not St. John only, but all those also who keep the words of the book of God,--thus equally forbidding every faithful Christian to worship their fellow-servants the angels. They are almost the last words in the volume of inspired truth, and to me, together with those last words, they seem with "the voice of a great multitude, and of many waters, and of mighty thunderings," from the very throne itself of the Most High, to proclaim to every inhabiter of the earth, Fall down before no created being; adore no created being; pray to, invoke, call upon no created being, whether saint or angel: worship {57} and adore God only; pray to God only. Trust to his mercy; seek no other mediator or intercessor than his own only and blessed Son. "He who testifieth these things saith, Surely, I come quickly. Amen. Even so, come, Lord Jesus. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all. Amen." [Rev. xxii. 20, 21.] Thus the New Testament, so far from mitigating the stringency of the former law, so far from countenancing any departure from the obligation of that code which limits religious worship to God alone, so far from suggesting to us invocation to sainted men, and to angels as intercessors with the eternal Giver of all good, reiterates the injunction, and declares, that invocation in order to be Christian must be addressed to God alone; and that there is one and only one Mediator between God and men, the man Jesus Christ, who is at the right hand of his Father, a merciful High Priest sympathizing with us in our infirmities, ever making intercession for us, able to save to the uttermost those who come unto God through Him. The present seems to be a convenient place for observing, that however the distinction is strongly insisted upon, or rather implicitly acquiesced in by many, which would admit of a worship or service called dulia (the Greek [Greek: douleia]) to saints and angels, and would limit the worship or service called latria ([Greek: latreia]) to the supreme God only, yet that such distinction has no ground whatever to rest upon beyond the will and the imagination of those who draw it. The two words are used in the Septuagint translation of the Old Testament, and in the original Greek of the {58} New promiscuously, without any such distinction whatever. The word which this distinction would limit to the supreme worship of the Most High, is used to express the bodily service paid by the vanquished to their conquerors, as well as the religious service paid by idolaters to their fabled deities, and by the true worshippers to the Most High. The word which this distinction would reserve for the secondary worship paid to saints and angels, is employed to express not only the service paid by man to man, but also the service and worship paid to God alone, even when mentioned in contradistinction to other worship. It will be necessary to establish this by one or two instances; and first as to "latria." One single chapter in the Book of Deuteronomy supplies us with instances of the word used in the three senses, of service to men, service to idols, and service to God, xxviii. 36. 47, 48: "Because thou servedst [Greek: elatreusas] not the Lord thy God with joyfulness and gladness of heart; Therefore thou shalt serve [Greek: latreuseis] thine enemies which the Lord shall send against thee in hunger and in thirst and nakedness." "The Lord shall bring thee unto a nation which neither thou nor thy fathers have known; and there shalt thou serve [Greek: latreuseis] other gods, wood and stone." Next as to the word "dulia." The First Book of Samuel (called also the First of Kings) alone supplies us with instances of this word being used in each of the same three senses of service from man to man, from man to idols, and from man to his Maker and God. 1 Sam. xvii. 9. "Ye shall be our servants and serve [Greek: douleusite haemin] us." xii. 24. "Only fear the Lord, and serve [Greek: douleusate] him in truth with all your heart." xxvi. 19. {59} "They have driven me out from the inheritance of the Lord, saying, Go, serve[15] other gods." [Footnote 15: [Greek: douleue]. In this case also the Vulgate translates all the three passages alike by the same verb, "servire."] It is worthy of remark, that the same word "dulia[16]" is employed, when the Lord by his prophet speaks of the most solemn acts of religious worship; not in general obedience only, but in the offerings and oblations of their holy things. Ezek. xx. 40. "In mine holy mountain, in the mountain of the height of Israel, saith the Lord God, there shall all the house of Israel, all of them in the land, serve me [Greek: douleusousi. Vulg: serviet.]; there will I accept them, and there will I require your offerings, and the first-fruits of your oblations, with all your holy things." St. Matthew also uses the same word when he records the saying of our blessed Lord, "Ye cannot serve God and mammon." [Matt. vi. 24.; Greek: douleuein. Vulg: servire.] [Footnote 16: It is also remarkable that in all these cases, whether the Septuagint employs the word "dulia," or "latria," the word in the Hebrew is precisely the same, [Hebrew: avad]. That in the fifth century the words were synonymous is evident from Theodoret. I. 319. See Edit. Halle.--Index.] I will only detain you by one more example, drawn from two passages, which seems the more striking because each of the two words "dulia" and "latria" is used to imply the true worship of God in a person, who was changed from a state of alienation to a state of holiness. The first is in St. Paul's 1st Epistle to the Thessalonians, i. 9. "How ye turned to God from idols, to serve [Greek: douleuein theo zonti] the living and true God." The second is in Heb. ix. 14. "How much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself {60} without spot to God, purge your conscience from dead works to serve[17] the living God." [Footnote 17: [Greek: latoeuein theo zonti.] In each of these two cases the Vulgate uses "servire."] The word "hyperdulia," now used to signify the worship proper to the Virgin Mary, as being a worship of a more exalted character than the worship offered to saints and angels, archangels, and cherubim and seraphim, will not require a similar examination. The word was invented in later times, and has been used chiefly to signify the worship of the Virgin, and is of course found neither in the Scriptures, nor in any ancient classical or ecclesiastical author. {61} * * * * * CHAPTER III. SECTION I.--THE EVIDENCE OF PRIMITIVE WRITERS. Before we enter upon the next branch of our proposed inquiry, allow me to premise that I am induced to examine into the evidence of Christian antiquity not by any misgiving, lest the testimony of Scripture might appear defective or doubtful; far less by any unworthy notion that God's word needs the additional support of the suffrages of man[18]. On the contrary, the voice of God in his revealed word is clear, certain, and indisputable, commanding the invocation of Himself alone in acts of religious worship, and condemning any such departure from that singleness of adoration, as they are {62} seduced into, who invoke saints and angels. And it is a fixed principle in our creed, that where God's written word is clear and certain, human evidence cannot be weighed against it in the balance of the sanctuary. When the Lord hath spoken, well does it become the whole earth to be silent before him; when the eternal Judge Himself hath decided, the witness of man bears on its very face the stamp of incompetency and presumption. [Footnote 18: While some authors seem to go far towards the substitution of the fathers for the written word of God, others in their abhorrence of that excess have run into the opposite, fancying, as it would seem, that they exalt the Divine oracles just in the same proportion as they disparage the uninspired writers of the Church. The great body of the Church of England adhere to a middle course, and adopt that golden mean, which ascribes to the written Word its paramount authority, from which is no appeal, and yet honours Catholic tradition as the handmaid of the truth.] For myself I can say (what I have good hope these pages will of themselves evince) that no one can value the testimony of Christian tradition within its own legitimate sphere more sincerely, or more highly, than the individual who is now soliciting your attention to the conclusions which he has himself drawn from it. When Scripture is silent, or where its meaning is doubtful, Catholic tradition is to me a guide, which I feel myself bound to follow with watchful care and submissive reverence. Now let it be for the present supposed, that instead of the oracles of God having spoken, as we believe them to have spoken, with a voice clear, strong, and uniform against the doctrine and practice of the invocation of saints and angels, their voices had been weak, doubtful, and vague; in other words, suppose in this case the question had been left by the Holy Scriptures an open question, then what evidence would have been deducible from the writings of the primitive Church? What testimony do the first years and the first ages after the canon of Scripture was closed, bear upon this point? And here I would repeat the principle of inquiry, proposed above for our adoption in the more important and solemn examination of the Holy Volume itself.--We ought to endeavour to ascertain what may {63} fairly and honestly be regarded as the real bearing of each author's remains, and not suffer the general tone and spirit of a writer to be counterbalanced by single expressions, which may be so interpreted as to convey an opposite meaning. Rather we should endeavour to reconcile with that general spirit and pervading tendency of a writer's sentiments any casual expressions which may admit of two acceptations. We adopt this principle in our researches into the remains of classical antiquity; we adopt the same principle in estimating the testimony of a living witness. In the latter case, indeed, the ingenuity of the adverse advocate is often exercised in magnifying the discrepancies between some minor facts or incidental expressions with the broad and leading assertions of the witness, with a view to invalidate his testimony altogether, or at least to weaken the impression made by it. But then a wise and upright judge, assured of the truth of the evidence in the main, and of the integrity of the individual, will not suffer unessential, apparent inconsistencies to stifle and bury the body of testimony at large, but will either extract from the witness what may account for them, or show them to be immaterial. Inviting, therefore, your best thoughts to this branch of our subject, I ask you to ascertain, by a full and candid process of induction, this important and interesting point,--Whether we of the Anglican Church, by religiously abstaining from the presentation, in word or in thought, of any thing approaching prayer or supplication, entreaty, request, or any invocation whatever, to any other being except God alone, do or do not tread in the steps of the first Christians, and adhere to the very pattern which they set; and whether members of the Church of Rome by addressing angel or saint in any form of invocation seeking {64} their aid, either by their intercession or otherwise, have not unhappily swerved decidedly and far from those same footsteps, and departed widely from that pattern? In one point of view it might perhaps be preferable to enter at once upon our investigation, without previously stating the conclusions to which my own inquiries have led; but, on the whole, I think it more fair to make that statement, in order, that having the inferences already drawn placed before the mind, the inquirer may in each case weigh the several items of evidence bearing upon them separately, and more justly estimate its whole weight collectively at the last. After then having examined the passages collected by the most celebrated Roman Catholic writers, and after having searched the undisputed original works of the primitive writers of the Greek and Latin Churches, the conclusion to which I came, and in which every day of further inquiry and deliberation confirms me more and more in this:-- In the first place, negatively, that the Christian writers, through the first three centuries and more, never refer to the invocation of saints and angels as a practice with which they were familiar: that they have not recorded or alluded to any forms of invocation of the kind used by themselves or by the Church in their days; and that no services of the earliest times contain hymns, litanies, or collects to angels, or to the spirits of the faithful departed. In the second place, positively, that the principles which they habitually maintain and advocate are irreconcileable with such a practice. In tracing the history of the worship of saints and angels, we proceed (gradually, indeed, though by no {65} means at all periods, and through every stage, with equal rapidity,) from the earliest custom established and practised in the Church,--of addressing prayers to Almighty God alone for the sake of the merits of his blessed Son, the only Mediator and Intercessor between God and man,--to the lamentable innovation both of praying to God for the sake of the merits, and through the mediation of departed mortals, and of invoking those mortals themselves as the actual dispensers of the spiritual blessings which the suppliant seeks from above. It is not only a necessary part of our inquiry for ascertaining the very truth of the case; it is also curious and painfully interesting, to trace the several steps, one after another, beginning with the doctrine maintained by various early writers, both Greek and Latin, that the souls of the saints are not yet reigning with Christ in heaven, and ending with the anathema of the Council of Trent, against all who should maintain that doctrine; beginning with prayer and thanksgiving to Almighty God alone, and ending with daily prayers both to saints and angels; one deviation from the strict line of religious duty, and the pure singleness of Christian worship, successively gliding into another, till at length the whole of Christendom, with a few remarkable exceptions, was seen to acquiesce in public and private devotions, which, if proposed, the whole of Christendom would once with unanimity have rejected. Before I offer to you the result of my inquiries as to the progressive stages of degeneracy and innovation in the worship of Almighty God, I would premise two considerations: First, I would observe, that the soundness of my conclusion on the general points at issue does not depend at all on the accuracy of the arrangement of those stages {66} which I have adopted. Should any one, for example, think there is evidence that two or more of those progressive steps, which I have regarded as consecutive, were simultaneous changes, or that any one which I have ranked as subsequent took rather the lead in order of time, such an opinion would not tend in the least to invalidate my argument; the substantial and essential point at issue being this: Is the invocation of saints and angels, as now practised in the Church of Rome, agreeable to the primitive usage of the earliest Christians? Secondly, I would observe, that the places and occasions most favourable for witnessing and correctly estimating the changes and gradual innovations in the worship of those early times, are the tombs of the martyrs, and the Churches in which their remains were deposited; and at the periods of the annual celebration of their martyrdom, or in some instances at what was called their translation,--the removal, that is, of their mortal remains from their former resting-place to a church, for the most part dedicated to their memory. On these occasions the most extraordinary enthusiasm prevailed; sometimes the ardour of the worshippers, as St. Chrysostom [St. Chrys. Paris, 1718. Vol. xii. p. 330.] tells us, approaching madness. But even at times of less excitement, by contemplating, immediately after his death, the acts and sufferings of the martyr, and recalling his words, and looks, and stedfast bearing, and exhorting each other to picture to themselves his holy countenance then fixed on them, his tongue addressing them, his sufferings before their eyes, encouraging all to follow his example, they began habitually to consider him as actually himself one of the faithful assembled round {67} his tomb. Hence they believed that he was praying with them as well as for them; that he heard their eulogy on his merits, and was pleased with the honours paid to his memory: hence they felt sure of his goodwill towards them, and his ability, as when on earth, to promote their welfare. Hence they proceeded, by a fatal step, first, to implore him to give them bodily relief from some present sufferings; then invoking him to plead their cause with God, and to intercede for the supply of their spiritual wants, and the ultimate salvation of their souls; and, lastly, they prayed to him generally as himself the dispenser of temporal and spiritual blessings. The following then is the order in which the innovations in Christian worship seem to have taken place, being chiefly introduced at the annual celebrations of the martyrs:-- 1st. In the first ages confession and prayer and praise were offered to the Supreme Being alone, and that for the sake of his Son our only Saviour and Advocate: when mention was made of saint or martyr, it was to thank God for the graces bestowed on his departed holy ones when on earth, and to pray to God for grace that we might follow their good examples, and attain, through Christ, to the same end and crown of our earthly struggles. This act of worship was usually accompanied by a homily setting forth the Christian excellences of the saint, and encouraging the survivors so to follow him, as he followed Christ. 2nd. The second stage seems to have been a prayer to Almighty God, that He would suffer the supplications and intercessions[19] of angels and saints to prevail {68} with him, and bring down a blessing on their fellow-petitioners on earth; the idea having spread among enthusiastic worshippers, as I have already observed, that the spirits of the saints were suffered to be present around their tombs, and to join with the faithful in their addresses to the throne of grace. [Footnote 19: The Greek word [Greek: presbeia], "embassy," employed on such occasions, is still used in some eastern Churches in the same sense.] 3rd. The third stage seems to have owed its origin to orators constantly dwelling upon the excellences of the saints in the panegyrics delivered over their remains, representing their constancy and Christian virtues as superhuman and divine, and as having conferred lasting benefits on the Church. By these benefits at first was meant the comfort and encouragement of their good example, and the honour procured to the religion of the cross by their bearing witness to its truth even unto death; but in process of time the habit grew of attaching a sort of mysterious efficacy to their merits; hence this third gradation in religious worship, namely, prayers to God that "He would hear his suppliants, and grant their requests for the sake of his martyred servant, and by the efficacy of that martyr's merits." 4th. Hitherto, unauthorized and objectionable as the two last forms of prayer are, still the petitions in each case were directed to God alone. The next step swerved lamentably from that principle of worship, and the petitioners addressed their requests to angels and sainted men in heaven; at first, however, confining their petitions to the asking for their prayers and intercessions with Almighty God. 5th. The last stage in this progressive degeneracy of Christian worship was to petition the saints and angels, directly and immediately themselves, at first for the temporal, and afterwards for the spiritual benefits which the petitioners desired to obtain from heaven. For it {69} is very curious, but not more curious than evident, that the worshippers seem for some time to have petitioned their saints for temporal and bodily benefits, before they proceeded to ask for spiritual blessings at their hands, or by their prayers. (See Basil. Oral. in Mamanta Martyrem.) Of these several gradations and stages we find traces in the records of Christian antiquity, after superstition and corruption had spread through Christian worship, and leavened the whole. Of all of them we have lamentable instances in the present ritual of the Church of Rome, as we shall see somewhat at large when we reach that division of our inquiry. But from the beginning it was not so. In the earliest ages we find only the first of these forms of worship exemplified, and it is the only form now retained in the Anglican Ritual; of which, among other examples, the following passage in the prayer for Christ's Church militant on earth supplies a beautiful specimen: "We bless Thy holy name for all Thy servants departed this life in Thy faith and fear; beseeching Thee to give us grace so to follow their good examples, that with them we may be partakers of Thy heavenly kingdom: Grant this, O Father, for Jesus Christ's sake, our only Mediator and Advocate. Amen." We now proceed to examine the invaluable remains of Christian antiquity, not for the purpose of testing the accuracy of the above catalogue of gradations _seriatim_ and in order of time; but to satisfy ourselves on the question, whether the invocation of saints and angels prevailed from the first in the Christian Church; or whether it was an innovation introduced after pagan superstition had begun to mingle its poisonous corruptions with the pure worship of {70} Almighty God. And here, I conceive, few persons will be disposed to doubt, that if the primitive believers were taught by the Apostles to address the saints reigning in heaven and the holy angels, and the Virgin Mother of our Lord, with adoration and prayers, the earliest Christian records must have contained clear and indisputable references to the fact, and that undesigned allusions to the custom would inevitably be found offering themselves to our notice here and there. I do not mean that we should expect to meet with full and explicit statements either of the doctrine or the practice of the primitive Church in this particular; much less such apologies and elaborate defences of the practice as abound to the overflow in later times. But, what is more satisfactory in proof of the general and established prevalence of any opinions or customs, we should surely find expressions incidentally occurring, which implied an habitual familiarity with such opinions or customs. In every record, for example, of primitive antiquity, from the very earliest of all, expressions are constantly meeting us which involve the doctrine of the ever-blessed Trinity, the atoning sacrifice of Christ's death, the influences of the Holy Spirit; habitual prayer and praise offered to the Saviour of the world, as very and eternal God; the holy Sacraments of Baptism and the Lord's Supper; with other tenets and practices of the Apostolic Church. It is impossible to study the remains of Christian antiquity without being assured beyond the reach of doubt, that such were the doctrines and practice of the universal Church from the days of the Apostles. Is the invocation of saints and angels and the blessed Virgin to be made an exception to this rule? Can it stand this test? The great anxiety and labour of Roman Catholic {71} writers to press the authors of every age to bear witness on their side in this behalf, proves that in their judgment no such exception is admissible. It is clearly beyond gainsaying, that if the present doctrine of the Church of Rome, with respect to the worship of angels and saints, as propounded by the Council of Trent; and if her present practice as set forth in her authorized liturgies and devotional services, and professed by her popes, bishops, clergy, and people, had been the doctrine and practice of the primitive Church, we should have found evident and indisputable traces of it in the earliest works of primitive antiquity, in the earliest liturgies, and in the forms of prayer and exhortations to prayer with which those works abound. It by no means follows that if some such allusions were partially discoverable, therefore the doctrines and practice must forthwith be pronounced to be apostolical; but if no such traces can be found, their absence bears witness that neither did those doctrines nor that practice exist. If, for example, through the remains of the first three centuries we could have discovered no trace of the doctrine or practice of holy Baptism and the Eucharist, we must have concluded that the doctrine and the practice were the offspring of later years. But when we read every where, in those remains, exhortations to approach those holy mysteries with a pure heart and faith unfeigned; when we find rules prescribed for the more orderly administration of the rites; in a word, when we perceive throughout as familiar references to these ordinances as could be now made by Catholics either of Rome or of England, while this would not of itself necessarily prove their divine origin, we should with equal plausibility question the existence of Jerusalem or Constantinople, or of David or Constantine, as we {72} should doubt the prevalence both of the doctrine and practice of the Church in these particulars, even from the Apostles' days. With these principles present to our minds, I now invite you to accompany me in a review of the testimonies of primitive Christian antiquity with regard to supplications and invocations of saints and angels, and of the blessed Virgin Mary. * * * * * SECTION II--CENTURY I.--THE EVIDENCE OF THE APOSTOLIC FATHERS. It will be necessary for the satisfaction of all parties, that we examine, in the first place, those ancient writings which are ascribed to an Apostle, or to fellow-labourers of the Apostles; familiarly known as the writings of the Apostolic Fathers. They are five in number, Barnabas, Clement, Hermas, Ignatius, and Polycarp. Many able writers, as well of the Roman as of the Anglican communion, have discussed at large the genuineness of these writings; and have come to very different results. Some critics are of opposite and extreme opinions, others ranging between them with every degree and shade of variation. Some of these works have been considered spurious; others have been pronounced genuine; though, even these have been thought to be, in many parts, interpolated. The question, however, of their genuineness, though deeply interesting in itself, will not affect their testimony with {73} regard to the subject before us[20]. They were all in existence before the Council of Nicæa; and we shall probably not be wrong in assigning to the first two a date at the very lowest computation not less remote than the middle of the second century; somewhere, it may be, at the furthest, about one hundred years after the death of our Lord. (A.D. 130-150.) With all their errors and blemishes and interpolations taken at the worst, after every reasonable deduction for defects in matter, taste, and style, the writings which are ascribed to the Apostolic Fathers are too venerable for their antiquity, too often quoted with reverence and affection by some who have been the brightest ornaments of the Christian Church, and possess too copious a store of genuine evangelical truth, sound principle, primitive simplicity, and pious sentiment, to be passed over with neglect by any Catholic Christian. The few extracts {74} made here will, I am assured, be not unacceptable to any one, who holds dear the religion of Christ[21]. [Footnote 20: I do not think it suitable in this address to enter upon the difficult field of inquiry, whether all or which of these works were the genuine productions of those whose names they bear; and whether the Barnabas, Clement, and Hermas to which three of them are ascribed, were the Barnabas, Clement, and Hermas of whom express mention is made in the pages of Holy Scripture. I have determined, in conducting my argument, to affix to them in each case the lowest proposed antiquity. The edition of Archbishop Wake, (who maintains the highest antiquity for these works, though I have not here adopted his translation,) may be consulted with much profit. Did the question before us relate to the genuineness and dates of these works, they could not, with any approach to fairness, be all five placed without distinction under the same category. The evidence for the genuineness of Clement, Ignatius in the shorter copy, and Polycarp, is too valuable to be confounded with that of the others, which are indisputably subject to much greater doubt. But this question has only an incidental bearing on our present inquiry, and will be well spared.] [Footnote 21: The edition of the works of these Apostolic Fathers used here is that of Cotelerius as revised by Le Clerc, Antwerp, 1698.] * * * * * THE EPISTLE OF ST. BARNABAS. In the work entitled The Catholic Epistle of Barnabas, which was written probably by a Jew converted to the Christian faith, about the close of the first century, or certainly before the middle of the second[22], I have searched in vain for any thing like the faintest trace of the invocation of saint or angel. The writer gives directions on the subject of prayer; he speaks of angels as the ministers of God; he speaks of the reward of the righteous at the day of judgment; but he suggests not the shadow of a supposition, that he either held the doctrine himself which the Church of Rome now holds, or was aware of its existence among Christians. In his very beautiful but incomplete summary of Christian duty [Sect. 18, 19. p. 50, 51, 52.], which he calls "The Way of Light," we perceive more than one most natural opening for reference to that doctrine, had it been familiar to his mind. In the midst indeed of his brief precepts of religious and moral obligation, he directs the Christian to seek out every day "the persons of the saints," but they are our fellow-believers on earth; those saints or holy ones, for administering to whose necessities, the Scripture assures us that God will not forget our work and labour of love [Heb. vi. 10.]: these the author bids the Christians {75} search out daily, for the purposes of religious intercourse, and of encouragement by the word. [Footnote 22: Archbishop Wake considers this Epistle to have been written by St. Barnabas to the Jews, soon after the destruction of Jerusalem.] The following interesting extracts shall conclude our reference to this work:-- "There are two ways of doctrine and authority, one of light, the other of darkness; and the difference between the two ways is great. Over the one are appointed angels of God, conductors of the light; over the other, angels of Satan: and the one (God) is Lord from everlasting to everlasting; the other (Satan) is ruler of the age of iniquity. The way of light is this ... Thou shalt love Him that made thee; thou shalt glorify Him that redeemed thee from death. Thou shalt be single in heart, and rich in spirit. Thou shalt not join thyself to those who are walking in the path of death. Thou shalt hate to do what is displeasing to God; thou shalt hate all hypocrisy. Thou shalt entertain no evil counsel against thy neighbour. Thou shalt not take away thy hand from thy son or thy daughter, but shalt teach them the fear of the Lord from their youth. Thou shalt communicate with thy neighbour in all things, and call not things thine own. Thou shalt not be of a froward tongue, for the mouth is the snare of death. To the very utmost of thy power keep thy soul chaste. Do not open thine hand to receive, and close it against giving. Thou shalt love as the apple of thine eye every one who speaketh to thee the word of the Lord. Call to remembrance the day of judgment, night and day. Thou shalt search out every day the persons of the saints [23]; both meditating by the word, {76} and proceeding to exhort them, and anxiously caring to save a soul by the word. Thou shalt preserve what thou hast received, neither adding thereto, nor taking therefrom. Thou shalt not come with a bad conscience to thy prayer." [Footnote 23: There is much obscurity in the phraseology of this passage: [Greek: ekzaetaeseis kath hekastaen haemeran ta prosopa ton hagion kai dia logou skopion kai poreuomenos eis to parakalesai, kai meleton eis sosai psuchaen to logo]. In the corresponding exhortation among the Apostolical Constitutions (book vii. ch. 9), the expression is, "Thou shalt seek the person ([Greek: prosopon]) of the saints, that thou mayest find rest (or find refreshment, or refresh thyself) ([Greek: in epanapanae tois logois auton]) in their words." The author seems evidently to allude to the reciprocal advantage derived by Christians from religious intercourse.] The closing sentences contain this blessing: "Now God, who is the Lord of all the world, give to you wisdom, skill, understanding, knowledge of his judgments, with patience. And be ye taught of God; seeking what the Lord requires of you, and do it, that ye may be saved in the day of judgment.... The Lord of glory and of all grace be with your spirit. Amen." * * * * * THE SHEPHERD OF HERMAS. This work, which derives its title from the circumstance of an angelic teacher being represented as a shepherd, is now considered by many to have been the production of Hermas, a brother of Pius, Bishop of Rome[24] though others are persuaded that the work is of a much earlier date[25]. The author speaks of guardian angels and of evil angels, and he speaks much of prayer; but not the faintest hint shows itself throughout the three books, of which the work consists, that he had {77} any idea of prayer being addressed to any created being, whether saint or angel. On the evidence of this writer I will not detain you much longer than by the translation of a passage as it is found in the Greek quotation from Hermas, made by Antiochus (Homil. 85), on a point the most nearly, of all that I can find, connected with the immediate subject of our inquiry. The Latin is found in the second book, ninth mandate. It contains sound spiritual advice, of universal application. [Footnote 24: Ecclesiastical writers refer the appointment of Pius, as Bishop of Rome, to the year 153.] [Footnote 25: Archbishop Wake thinks it not improbable that this book was written by the same Hermas, of whom mention is made by St. Paul.] "Let us then remove from us double-heartedness and faint-heartedness, and never at all doubt of supplicating any thing from God; saying within ourselves, 'How can I, who have been guilty of so many sins against Him, ask of the Lord and receive?' But with thine whole heart turn to the Lord, and ask of Him without doubting; and thou shalt know his great mercy, that He will not forsake thee, but will fulfil the desire of thy soul. For God is not as men are, a rememberer of evil, but is Himself one who remembers not evil, and is moved with compassion towards his creature. Do thou, therefore, cleanse thy heart of doubt, and ask of Him, and thou shalt receive thy request. But when thou doubtest, thou shalt not receive. For they who doubt towards God are the double-hearted, and shall receive nothing whatever of their desires. For those who are whole in the faith, ask every thing, trusting in the Lord, and they receive because they ask nothing doubting. [See St. James i. 6.] And if thou shouldest be tardy in receiving, do not doubt in thy mind because thou dost not receive soon the request of thy soul. For the cause of the tardiness of thy receiving is some trial, or some transgression which thou knowest not of. Do thou then {78} not cease to offer the request of thy soul, and thou shalt receive it. But if thou grow faint in asking, accuse thyself, and not the Giver. For double-heartedness is a daughter of the devil, and works much mischief towards the servants of God. Do thou, therefore, take to thyself the faith that is strong." In the twelfth section of the ninth Similitude, in the third book, in the midst of much to the same import, and of much, too, which is strange and altogether unworthy of the pen from which the previous quotation proceeded, he thus writes, as the Latin records his words, the Greek of this passage having been lost. "These all are messengers to be reverenced for their dignity. By these, therefore, as it were by a wall, the Lord is girded round. But the gate is the Son of God, who is the only way to God. For no one shall enter in to God except by his Son." [Book iii. Simil. 2.] On the subject of prayer, I cannot refrain from referring you to a beautiful similitude, illustrative of the powerful and beneficial effects of the intercession of Christians for each other. The author compares a rich man, abounding in deeds of charity, to a vine full of fruit supported by an elm. The elm seems not to bear fruit at all; but by supporting the vine, which, without that support, would bear no fruit to perfection, it may be said to bear fruit itself. So the poor man, who has nothing to give in return for the rich man's fruits of charity, beyond the support which his prayers and praises ascending to God in his behalf will obtain, confers a far more substantial benefit on the rich man than the most liberal outpouring of alms from the rich can confer on the poor. [Ibid.] Yet the writer, who {79} had formed such strong notions of the benefits mutually obtained by the prayers of Christians for each other, says not a word about the intercession of saints and angels, nor of our invoking them. He will not suffer us to be deterred by any consciousness of our own transgressions from approaching God Himself, directly and immediately ourselves; but He bids us draw near ourselves to the throne and mercy seat of our heavenly Father. * * * * * ST. CLEMENT, BISHOP OF ROME. It is impossible to read the testimony borne by Eusebius, and other most ancient writers, to the character and circumstances of Clement, without feeling a deep interest in whatever production of his pen may have escaped the ravages of time. "Third from the Apostles," says Eusebius, "Clement obtained the bishopric of Rome; one who had seen the Apostles and conversed with them, and had still the sound of their preaching in his ears, and their tradition before his eyes;--and not he alone, for many others[26] at that time were still living, who had been taught by the Apostles. In the time of this Clement, no small schism having arisen among the brethren in Corinth, the Church in Rome sent a most important letter to the Corinthians, urging them to return to peace, renewing {80} their faith, and [reminding them of] the tradition which had been so lately received from the Apostles." [Euseb. Eccl. Hist. v. c. 6.] [Footnote 26: See St. Paul to the Philippians, iv. 3. "And I entreat thee also, true yoke-fellow, help those women which laboured with me in the gospel, with Clement also, and with other my fellow-labourers, whose names are in the book of life."] Of the many works which have been attributed to Clement, it is now generally agreed, that one, and only one, can be safely received as genuine, whilst some maintain that even that one is not altogether free from interpolations, if not itself spurious[27]. But though we must believe the other works to have been assigned improperly to Clement; yet I have not thought it safe to pass them by unexamined, both because some of them are held in high estimation by writers of the Church of Rome, and especially because whatever pen first composed them, of their very great antiquity there can be entertained no reasonable doubt. Indeed, the Apostolical Canons, and the Apostolical Constitutions, both ascribed to Clement as their author, acting under the direction of the Apostolic Council, stand first among the records of the Councils received by the Church of Rome. [Footnote 27: Archbishop Wake concludes that this first Epistle was written shortly after the end of Nero's persecution, and before A.D. 70.] To Clement's first Epistle to the Corinthians, now regarded by many as the only genuine work of that primitive writer, the date of which is considered by many to be about A.D. 90, Jerome bears this very interesting testimony in his book on illustrious men: "He, Clement, wrote in the person of the Church of Rome, to the Church in Corinth, a very useful epistle, which is publicly read in some places; in its character agreeing with St. Paul's Epistle to the Hebrews, not only in the sense, but even in the words: and indeed the resemblance is very striking in each." [Catalogus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum, Jeron., vol. iv, part ii. p. 107, edit. Benedict. Paris, 1706.] {81} It is impossible to read this Epistle of one of the earliest bishops of Christ's flock in the proper frame of mind, without spiritual edification. A tone of primitive simplicity pervades it, which is quite delightful. His witness to the redemption by the atoning sacrifice of Christ's death, and to the life-giving influences of the Spirit of grace, is clear, repeated, and direct. His familiar acquaintance with the ancient Scriptures is very remarkable; though we might not always acquiesce in the critical accuracy of his application. His reference to the Epistles written by St. Paul to the same Church at Corinth that he was then addressing, affords one of those unobtrusive and undesigned collateral evidences to the Holy Scriptures, which are as abundant in the primitive writings, as they are invaluable. No one can read this Epistle of Clement, without acquiescing in the expression of Jerome, that it is "very admirable." Perhaps in the present work the Epistle of Clement becomes even more interesting from the circumstance of his having been a bishop of the Church founded by the Apostles themselves in the very place where that Church exists, to whose members this inquiry is more especially addressed. In his writings I have searched diligently for every expression which might throw light upon the opinions and practice either of the author or of the Church in whose name he wrote; of the Church which he addressed, or of the Catholic Church at large to which he refers, on the subject of our inquiry. So far, however, from any word occurring, which could be brought to bear in favour of the adoration of saints and angels, or of any supplication to them for their succour or their prayers, the peculiar turn and character of his Epistle in many parts seems to supply {82} more than negative evidence against the prevalence of any such belief or practice. Clement speaks of angels; he speaks of the holy men of old, who pleased God, and were blessed, and were taken to their reward; he speaks of prayer; he urges to prayer; he specifies the object of our prayers; he particularizes the subjects of our prayers; but there is not the most distant allusion to the saints and angels as persons to whom supplications could be addressed. Pray for yourselves (such are the sentiments of this holy man); pray for your brethren who have fallen from their integrity; pray to God Almighty, for the sake of his Son, and your prayer will be heard and granted. Of any other intercessor or advocate, angel, saint, or Virgin Mother; of any other being to whom the invocations of the faithful should be offered, Clement seems to have had no knowledge. Could this have been so, if those who received the Gospel from the very fountain-head had been accustomed to pray to those holy men who had finished their course on earth, and were gone to their reward in heaven? Clement invites us to contemplate Enoch, and Abraham, and David, and Elijah, and Job, with many of their brethren in faith and holiness; he bids us look to them with reverence and gratitude, but it is only to imitate their good examples. He tells us to think of St. Paul and St. Peter and their brethren in faith and holiness; but it is in order to listen to their godly admonitions, and to follow them in all pious obedience to the will of our heavenly Father, as they followed Christ. I must content myself with a very few brief extracts from this Epistle[28]: [Footnote 28: I am induced to mention here that two Epistles, ascribed to St. Clement, written in Arabic, and now appended to Wetstein's Greek Testament (Amsterdam, 1751), are believed by many to be genuine, whilst others say they are spurious. At all events they are productions of the earliest times. The manuscript was procured at Constantinople. I have examined the Latin translation carefully, and in some points submitted my doubts to a very learned Syriac scholar. The general subject is the conduct of those who have professed celibacy, whilst of the invocation of saints no trace whatever is to be found. The passages most closely bearing on the point before us are to the following effect: The writer urges Christians to be careful to maintain good works, especially in the cause of charity, visiting the sick and afflicted, praying with them, and praying for them, and persevering always in prayer; asking and seeking of God in joy and watchfulness, without hatred or malice. In the Lord's husbandry, he says, it well becomes us to be good workmen, who are like the Apostles, imitating the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, who are ever anxious for the salvation of men. "Therefore (he adds, at the close of the first of these Epistles) let us look to and imitate those faithful ones, that we may behave ourselves as is meet in the Lord. So shall we serve the Lord, and please him, in righteousness and justice without a stain. Finally, farewell in the Lord, and rejoice in the Lord, all ye holy ones. Peace and joy be with you from God the Father, by Jesus Christ our Lord."] {83} Ch. 21. "Take heed, beloved, lest the many loving-kindnesses of the Lord prove our condemnation, if we do not live as is worthy of him, nor do with one accord what is good and well-pleasing in his sight.... Let us consider how nigh to us he is, and that nothing of our thoughts or reasonings is concealed from him. Justice it is that we should not become deserters from his will.... Let us venerate the Lord Jesus, whose blood was given for us." Ch. 29. "Let us then approach him in holiness of soul, lifting up holy and undefiled hands towards him; loving our merciful and tender Father who hath made us a portion of his elect." {84} Ch. 36. "This is the way, beloved, in which we find Jesus Christ our salvation, the chief-priest of our offerings, our protector, and the succourer of our weakness. By him let us look stedfastly to the heights of heaven; by him let us behold his most high and spotless face: by him the eyes of our heart are opened; by him our ignorant and darkened minds shoot forth into his marvellous light; by him the Supreme Governor willed that we should taste immortal knowledge: who, being the brightness of his magnificence, is so much greater than the angels, as he hath by inheritance obtained a more excellent name than they." Ch. 49. "He who hath love in Christ, let him keep the commandments of Christ. Who can tell of the bond of the love of God? The greatness of his goodness who can adequately express?... Love unites us to God.... By love the Lord took us; by the love which he had for us Christ our Lord gave his blood for us by the will of God, and his flesh for our flesh, and his life for our lives." Ch. 56. "Let us pray for those who are in any transgression, that meekness and humility may be granted to them; that they may submit, not to us, but to the will of God; for thus to them will the remembrance towards God and the saints, with mercies, be fruitful and perfect[29]." [Footnote 29: The original is obscure, and has been variously rendered, [Greek: outos gar estai autois egkarpos kai teleia hae pros ton theon kai tous hagious met oiktirmon mneia.] The Editor refers his readers to Rom. xii. 13. "Distributing to the necessity of saints." The received translation is this, "Sic enim erit ipsis fructuosa et perfecta quæ est apud Deum et sanctos cum misericordia recordatio."] Ch. 58. "The all-seeing God, the Sovereign Ruler {85} of spirits, and the Lord of all flesh, who hath chosen the Lord Jesus, and us through him, to be a peculiar people; grant to every soul that calleth on his glorious and holy name, faith, fear, peace, patience, long-suffering, self-control, purity, and temperance, to the good pleasure of his name, through our high-priest and protector Jesus Christ; through whom to him be glory and majesty, dominion and honour, now and for ever and ever, world without end. Amen." * * * * * SAINT IGNATIUS. This martyr to the truth as it is in Jesus sealed that truth with his blood about seventy years after the death of our Lord. From Antioch in Syria, of which place he was bishop, he was sent to the imperial city, Rome; and there he ended his mortal career by a death which he had long expected, and which he was prepared to meet not only with resignation to the Divine will, but even with joy and gladness. His Epistles are written with much of the florid colouring of Asiatic eloquence; but they have all the raciness of originality, and they glow with that Christian fervour and charity which compels us to love him as a father and a friend, a father and friend in Christ. The remains of this apostolic father I have carefully studied, with the single view of ascertaining whether any vestige, however faint, might be traced in him of the invocation of saints and angels; but I can find none. Neither here, nor in the case of any of the apostolical fathers, whose remains we are examining, have I contented myself with merely ascertaining that they bear no direct and palpable evidence; I have always endeavoured to find, and then thoroughly to sift, any expressions which might with {86} the slightest plea of justification be urged in testimony of primitive belief and practice sanctioning the invocation of saints. I find none. Brethren of the Church of Rome, search diligently for yourselves; "I speak as to wise men: Judge ye what I say." The remains of Ignatius offer to us many a passage on which a Christian pastor would delight to dwell: but my province here is not to recommend his works to the notice of Christians; I am only to report the result of my inquiries touching the matter in question; and as bearing on that question, the following extracts will not be deemed burdensome in this place:-- In his Epistle to the Ephesians, exhorting Christians to united prayer, he says, "For if the prayer of one or two possesses such strength, how much more shall the prayer both of the bishop and of the whole Church?" [Page 13. § 5-7.] "For there is one physician of a corporeal and a spiritual nature, begotten and not begotten; become God in the flesh, true life in death, both from Mary and from God; first liable to suffering, and then incapable of suffering." [In the majority of the manuscripts the reading is, "in an immortal true life."] Here we must observe that these Epistles of Ignatius have come down to us also in an interpolated form, abounding indeed with substitutions and additions, but generally resembling paraphrases of the original text. Of the general character of that supposititious work, two passages corresponding with our quotations from the genuine productions of Ignatius may give a sufficiently accurate idea. The first passage above quoted is thus paraphrased: "For if the prayer of one or two possesses {87} such strength that Christ stands among them, how much more shall the prayer both of the bishop and of the whole Church, ascending with one voice to God, induce him to grant all their requests made in Jesus Christ?" [Page 47. c. 5.] The paraphrase of the second is more full: "Our physician is the only true God, ungenerated and unapproachable; the Lord of all things, but the Father and Generator of the only-begotten Son. We have also as our physician our Lord God, Jesus Christ, who was before the world, the only-begotten Son and the Word, but also afterwards man of the Virgin Mary; 'for the Word was made flesh.' He who was incorporeal, now in a body; he who could not suffer, now in a body capable of suffering; he who was immortal in a mortal body, life in corruption--in order that he might free our immortal souls from death and corruption, and heal them, diseased with ungodliness and evil desires as they were." [Page 48. c. 7.] It must here be observed, that though these are indisputably not the genuine works of Ignatius, but were the productions of a later age, yet no trace is to be found in them of the doctrine, or practice, of the invocation of saints. In this point of view their testimony is nothing more nor less than that of an anonymous paraphrast, who certainly had many opportunities of referring to that doctrine and practice; but who by his total silence seems to have been as ignorant of them as the author himself whose works he is paraphrasing. To return to his genuine works: In his Epistle to the Magnesians we find these expressions: "For as the Lord did nothing without the Father, being one with {88} him, neither by himself, nor by his Apostles; so neither do ye any thing without the bishop and priests, nor attempt to make any thing appear reasonable to yourselves individually. But at one place be there one prayer, and one supplication, one mind, one hope in love, in blameless rejoicing: Jesus Christ is one; than which nothing is better. All, then, throng as to one temple, as to one altar, as to one Jesus Christ, who proceeded from one Father, and is in one, and returned to one." [Page 19. § 7.] Again he says, "Remember me in your prayers, that I may attain to God. I am in need of your united prayer in God, and of your love." In his Epistle to the Trallians, he expresses himself in words to which no Anglican Catholic would hesitate to respond: "Ye ought to comfort the bishop, to the honour of God, and of Jesus Christ, and of the Apostles." [Page 25. § 12.] He speaks in this Epistle with humility and reverence of the powers and hosts of heaven; but he makes no allusion to any religious worship or invocation of them. The following extract is from his Epistle to the Philadelphians: "My brethren, I am altogether poured forth in love for you; and in exceeding joy I make you secure; yet not I, but Jesus Christ, bound in whom I am the more afraid, as being already seized[30]; but your prayer to God will perfect me, that I may obtain the lot mercifully assigned to me. Betaking myself to the Gospel as to the flesh of Jesus, and to the Apostles as the presbytery of the Church; let us also love the prophets, because they also have proclaimed the Gospel, and hoped in him, and waited for him; in whom also {89} trusting, they were saved in the unity of Jesus Christ, being holy ones worthy of love and admiration, who have received testimony from Jesus Christ, and are numbered together in the Gospel of our common hope." [Page 32. § 5.] [Footnote 30: This clause is very obscure, and perhaps imperfect.] I am induced to add the paraphrase on this passage also. "My brethren, I am very much poured out in loving you, and with exceeding joy I make you secure; not I, but by me, Jesus Christ, in whom bound I am the more afraid. For I am yet not perfected, but your prayer to God will perfect me; so that I may obtain that to which I was called, flying to the Gospel as the flesh of Jesus Christ, and to the Apostles as the presbytery of the Church. And the prophets also I love, as persons who announce Christ, as partaking of the same spirit with the Apostles. For just as the false prophets and false apostles have drawn one and the same wicked and deceitful and seducing spirit, so also the prophets and the apostles, one and the same holy spirit, good, leading, true, and instructing. For one is the God of the Old and the New Testament. One is Mediator between God and man, for the production of the creatures endued with reason and perception, and for the provision of what is useful, and adapted to them: and one is the Comforter who wrought in Moses and the prophets and the apostles. All the saints therefore were saved in Christ, hoping in him, and waiting for him; and through him they obtained salvation, being saints worthy of love and of admiration, having obtained a testimony from Jesus Christ in the Gospel of our common hope." [Page 81. § 5.] In his Epistle to the Romans he speaks to them of his own prayer to God, and repeatedly implores them {90} to pray for him. "Pray to Christ for me, that by these instruments [the teeth of the wild beasts] I may become a sacrifice of God. I do not, as Peter and Paul, command you: they were Apostles, I am a condemned man. They were free; but I am still a servant. Yet if I suffer, I shall become the freedman of Jesus Christ, and shall rise again free: and now in my bonds I learn to covet nothing." [Page 28. § 4.] Again he says, "Remember the Church in Syria in your prayers." [Page 30. § 9.] He prays for his fellow-labourers in the Lord: he implores them to approach the throne of grace with supplications for mercy on his own soul. Of prayer to saint or angel he says nothing. Of any invocation offered to them by himself or his fellow-believers, Ignatius appears entirely ignorant. * * * * * SAINT POLYCARP. The only remaining name among those, whom the Church has reverenced as apostolical fathers, is the venerable Polycarp. He suffered martyrdom by fire, at a very advanced age, in Smyrna, about one hundred and thirty years after his Saviour's death. Of Polycarp, the apostolical bishop of the Catholic Church of Smyrna, only one Epistle has survived. It is addressed to the Philippians. In it he speaks to his brother Christians of prayer, constant, incessant prayer; but the prayer of which he speaks is supplication addressed only to God [31]. He marks out for our imitation the good example of St. Paul and the other Apostles; assuring us that they had not run in vain, {91} but were gone to the place prepared for them by the Lord, as the reward of their labours. But not one word does he utter bearing upon the invocation of saints in prayer; he makes no allusion to the Virgin Mary. [Footnote 31: [Greek: deaesesin aitoumenoi ton pantepoptaen Theon]. Sect. 7.] Before we close our examination of the recorded sentiments of the apostolical fathers on the immediate subject of our inquiry, we must refer, though briefly, to the Epistle generally received as the genuine letter from the Church of Smyrna to the neighbouring Churches, narrating the martyrdom of Polycarp. It belongs, perhaps, more strictly to this place than to the remains of Eusebius, because, together with the sentiments of his contemporaries who witnessed his death and dictated the letter, it purports to contain the very words of the martyr himself in the last prayer which he ever offered upon earth. With some variations from the copy generally circulated, this letter is preserved in the works of Eusebius. [Euseb. Paris, 1628, dedicated to the Archbishop by Franciscus Vigerus.] On the subject of our present research the evidence of this letter is not merely negative. So far from countenancing any invocation of saint or martyr, it contains a remarkable and very interesting passage, the plain common-sense rendering of which bears decidedly against all exaltation of mortals into objects of religious worship. The letter, however, is too well known to need any further preliminary remarks; and we must content ourselves with such references and extracts as may appear to bear most directly on our subject. "The Church of God, which is in Smyrna, to the Church in Philomela, and to all the branches [Greek: paroikais] {92} of the holy Catholic Church dwelling in any place, mercy, peace, and love of God the Father, and our Lord Jesus Christ be multiplied." [Book i. Hist. iv. c. xv. p. 163.] "The Proconsul, in astonishment, caused it to be proclaimed thrice, Polycarp has confessed himself to be a Christian. On this they all shouted, that the Proconsul should let a lion loose on Polycarp. But the games were over, and that could not be done: they then with one accord insisted on his being burnt alive." Polycarp, before his death, offered this prayer, or rather perhaps we should call it this thanksgiving, to God for his mercy in thus deeming him worthy to suffer death for the truth, "Father of thy beloved and blessed Son Jesus Christ, by whom we have received our knowledge concerning thee, the God of angels and power, and of the whole creation, and of the whole family of the just, who live before thee; I bless thee because thou hast deemed me worthy of this day and this hour to receive my portion among the number of the martyrs, in the cup of Christ, to the resurrection both of soul and body in the incorruption of the Holy Ghost; among whom may I be received before thee this day in a rich and acceptable sacrifice, even as thou, the true God, who canst not lie, foreshowing and fulfilling, hast beforehand prepared. For this, and for all I praise thee, I bless thee; I glorify thee, through the eternal high-priest Jesus Christ thy beloved Son, through whom to thee, with him in the Holy Ghost, be glory both now and for future ages. Amen." (I cannot help suggesting a comparison between the prayer of this primitive martyr bound to the stake, with the prayer of Thomas Becket, of Canterbury, as stated in the ancient services for his day, when he was murdered in his own cathedral, to which we shall hereafter refer at length. The comparison will impress us with the difference between religion and superstition, between the purity of primitive Christian worship, and the unhappy corruptions of a degenerate age. "To God and the Blessed Mary, and Saint Dionysius, and the holy patrons of this Church, I commend myself and the Church.") {93} After his death, the narrative proceeds, "But the envious adversary of the just observed the honour put upon the greatness of his testimony, [or of his martyrdom [Greek: to megethos autou taes marturias],] and his blameless life from the first, and knowing that he was now crowned with immortality, and the prize of undoubted victory, resisted, though many of us desired to take his body, and have fellowship with his holy flesh. Some then suggested to Nicetes, the father of Herod, and brother of Dalce, to entreat the governor not to give his body, 'Lest,' said he, 'leaving the crucified One they should begin to worship this man [Greek: sebein];' and this they said at the suggestion and importunity of the Jews, who also watched us when we would take the body from the fire. This they did, not knowing that we can never either leave Christ, who suffered for the salvation of all who will be saved in all the world, or worship any other." [The Paris translation adds "ut Deum."] "For him being the Son of God we worship [Greek: proskunumen], but the martyrs, as disciples and imitators of our Lord, we worthily love[32], because of their pre-eminent [Greek: anuperblaeton] good-will towards their {94} own king and teacher, with whom may we become partakers and fellow-disciples." [Footnote 32: [Greek: axios agapomen]. Ruffinus translates it by "diligimus et veneramur," and it is so quoted by Bellarmin.] "The centurion, seeing the determination of the Jews, placed him in the midst, and burnt him as their manner is. And thus we collecting his bones, more valuable than precious stones, and more esteemed than gold, we deposited them where it was meet. There, as we are able, collecting ourselves together in rejoicing and gladness, the Lord will grant to us to observe the birth-day of his martyrdom, for the remembrance of those who have before undergone the conflict, and for exercise and preparation of those who are to come." [Greek: hos dunaton haemin sunagomenois en agalliasei kai chara parexei ho Kurios epitelein taen tou martyriou autou haemeran genethlion, eis te ton proaethlaekoton mnaemaen, kai ton mellonton askaesin te kai hetoimasian.] In this relic of primitive antiquity, we have the prayer of a holy martyr, at his last hour, offered to God alone, through Christ alone. Here we find no allusion to any other intercessor; no commending of the dying Christian's soul to saint or angel. Here also we find an explicit declaration, that Christians offered religious worship to no one but Christ, whilst they loved the martyrs, and kept their names in grateful remembrance, and honoured even their ashes when the spirit had fled. Polycarp pleads no other merits; he seeks no intercession; he prays for no aid, save only his Redeemer's. Here too we find, that the place of a martyr's burial was the place which the early Christians loved to frequent; but then we are expressly told with what intent they met there,--not, as in later times, to invoke the departed spirit of the martyr, but to call to mind, in grateful remembrance, the sufferings of those who had already endured the awful struggle; and by {95} their example to encourage and prepare other soldiers of the cross thereafter to fight the good fight of faith; assured that they would be more than conquerors through Him who loved them. * * * * * We have now examined those works which are regarded by us all, whether of the Roman or Anglican Church, as the remains of apostolical fathers,--Christians who, at the very lowest calculation, lived close upon the Apostles' time, and who, according to the firm conviction of many, had all of them conversed with the Apostles, and heard the word of truth from their mouths. I do from my heart rejoice with you, that these holy men bear direct, clear, and irrefragable testimony to those fundamental truths which the Church of Rome and the Church of England both hold inviolate--the doctrine of the ever-blessed Trinity, with its essential and inseparable concomitants, the atonement by the blood of a crucified Redeemer, and the vivifying and sanctifying influences of the Holy Spirit. Supposing for a moment no trace of such fundamental doctrines could be discovered in these writings, would not the absence of such vestige have been urged by those who differ from us, as a strong argument that the doctrine of the ever-blessed Trinity was an innovation of a later date; and would not such an argument have been urged with reason? How, in plain honesty, can we avoid coming to the same conclusion on the subject of the invocation of saints? If the doctrine and the practice of praying to saints, or to angels, for their succour, or even their intercession, had been known {96} and recognised, and approved and acted upon by the Apostles, and those who were the very disciples of the Apostles, not only deriving the truth from their written works, but having heard it from their own living tongue,--in the nature of things would not some plain, palpable, intelligible, and unequivocal indications of it have appeared in such writings as these; writings in which much is said of prayer, of intercessory prayer, of the one object of prayer, of the subjects of prayer, of the nature of prayer, the time and place of prayer, the spirit in which we are to offer prayer, and the persons for whom we ought to pray? Does it accord with common sense, and common experience, with what we should expect in other cases, with the analogy of history, and the analogy of faith, that we should find a profound and total silence on the subject of any prayer or invocation to saints and angels, if prayer or invocation of saints and angels had been recognised, approved, and practised by the primitive Church? At the risk of repetition, or surplusage, I would beg to call your attention to one point in this argument. I am far from saying that no practice is apostolical which cannot be proved from the writings of these apostolical fathers: that would be a fallacy of an opposite kind. I ground my inference specifically and directly on the fact, that these writers are full, and copious, and explicit, and cogent on the nature and duty of prayer and supplications, as well for public as for private blessings; and of intercessions by one Christian for another, and for the whole race of mankind no less than for mercy on himself; and yet though openings of every kind palpably offered themselves for a natural introduction of the subject, there is in no one single instance any reference or allusion to the {97} invocation of saint or angel, as a practice either approved or even known. When indeed I call to mind the general tendency of the natural man to multiply to himself the objects of religious worship, and to create, by the help of superstition, and the delusive workings of the imagination, a variety of unearthly beings whose wrath he must appease, or whose favour he may conciliate; when I reflect how great is the temptation in unenlightened or fraudulent teachers to accommodate the dictates of truth to the prejudices and desires of those whom they instruct, my wonder is rather that Christianity was so long preserved pure and uncontaminated in this respect, than that corruptions should gradually and stealthily have mingled themselves with the simplicity of Gospel worship. That tendency is plainly evinced by the history of every nation under heaven: Greek and Barbarian, Egyptian and Scythian, would have their gods many, and their lords many. From one they would look for one good; on another they would depend for a different benefit, in mind, body, and estate. Some were of the highest grade, and to be worshipped with supreme honours; others were of a lower rank, to whom an inferior homage was addressed; whilst a third class held a sort of middle place, and were approached with reverence as much above the least, as it fell short of the greatest. In the heathen world you will find exact types of the dulia, the hyperdulia, and the latria, with which unhappily the practical theology of modern Christian Rome is burdened. Indeed, my wonder is, that under the Christian dispensation, when the household and local gods, the heathen's tutelary deities, and the genii, had been dislodged by the light of the Gospel, saints and angels had not at a much {98} earlier period been forced by superstition to occupy their room. We shall be led to refer to some passages in the earliest Christian writers, especially in Origen, which bear immediately on this point, representing in strong but true colours the futility of deeming a multitude of inferior divinities necessary for the dispensation of benefits throughout the universe, whose good offices we must secure by acts of attention and worship. I anticipate the circumstance in this place merely to show that the tendency of the human mind, clinging to a variety of preternatural protectors and benefactors, was among the obstacles with which the first preachers of the Gospel had to struggle. In the proper place I shall beg you to observe how hardly possible it would have been for those early Christian writers, to whom I have referred above, to express themselves in so strong, so sweeping, and so unqualified a manner, had the practice of applying by invocation to saints and angels then been prevalent among the disciples of the Cross. We may, I believe, safely conclude, that in these primitive writings, which are called the works of the Apostolical Fathers, there is no intimation that the present belief and practice of the Church of Rome were received, or even known by Christians. The evidence is all the other way. Indeed, Bellarmin, though he appeals to these remains for other purposes, and boldly asserts that "all the fathers, Greek and Latin, with unanimous consent, sanction and teach the adoration of saints and angels," yet does not refer to a single passage in any one of these remains for establishing this point. He cites a clause from the spurious work strangely ascribed to Dionysius the Areopagite, which was the forged production, as the learned are all {99} agreed, of some centuries later; and he cites a pious sentiment of Ignatius, expressing his hope that by martyrdom he might go to Christ, and thence he infers that Ignatius believed in the immediate transfer of the soul from this life to glory and happiness in heaven, though Ignatius refers there distinctly to the resurrection. [Epist. ad Rom. c. iv. See above, p. 90.] But Bellarmin cites no passage whatever from these remains to countenance the doctrine and practice of the adoration of saints and angels. {100} * * * * * CHAPTER IV. SECTION I.--THE EVIDENCE OF JUSTIN MARTYR. Justin, who flourished about the year 150, was trained from his early youth in all the learning of Greece and of Egypt. He was born in Palestine, of heathen parents; and after a patient examination of the evidences of Christianity, and a close comparison of them with the systems of philosophy with which he had long been familiar, he became a disciple of the Cross. In those systems he found nothing solid, or satisfactory; nothing on which his mind could rest. In the Gospel he gained all that his soul yearned for, as a being destined for immortal life, conscious of that destiny, and longing for its accomplishment. His understanding was convinced, and his heart was touched; and regardless of every worldly consideration, and devoted to the cause of truth, he openly embraced Christianity; and before kings and people, Jews and Gentiles, he pleaded the religion of the crucified One with unquenchable zeal and astonishing power. The evidence of such a man on any doctrine {101} connected with our Christian faith must be looked to with great interest. In the volumes which contain Justin's works we find "Books of Questions," in which many inquiries, doubts, and objections, as well of Jews as of Gentiles, are stated and answered. It is agreed on all sides that these are not the genuine productions of Justin, but the work of a later hand. Bellarmin appeals to them, acknowledging at the same time their less remote origin. The evidence, indeed, appears very strong, which would lead us to regard them as the composition of a Syrian Christian, and assign to them the date of the fifth century; and as offering indications of the opinions of Christians at the time of their being put together, they are certainly interesting documents. When fairly quoted, the passages alleged in defence of the invocation of saints, so far from countenancing the practice, assail irresistibly that principle, which, with other writers, Bellarmin himself confesses to be the foundation of that doctrine. For these Books of Questions assert that the souls of the faithful are not yet in glory with God, but are reserved in a separate state, apart from the wicked, awaiting the great day of final and universal doom. In answer to Question 60, the author distinctly says:--"Before the resurrection the recompense is not made for the things done in this life by each individual." [Quæstiones et Responsiones ad Orthodoxos, p. 464.] In reply to the 75th Question, inquiring into the condition of man after death, this very remarkable answer is returned:-- "The same relative condition which souls have with the body now, they have not after the departure from the body. For here all the circumstances of the union {102} are in common to the just and the unjust, and no difference is in them in this respect,--as to be born and to die, to be in health and to be in sickness, to be rich and to be poor, and the other points of this nature. But after the departure from the body, forthwith takes place the distinction of the just and the unjust: for they are conducted by the angels to places corresponding with their deserts: the souls of the just to paradise, where is the company and the sight of angels and archangels, and also, by vision, of the Saviour Christ, according to what is said, 'Being absent from the body, and present with the Lord;' and the souls of the unjust to the places in hades, according to what is said of Nebucodonosor king of Babylon, 'Hades from beneath hath been embittered, meeting thee.'--And in the places corresponding with their deserts they are kept in ward unto the day of the resurrection and of retribution." [Page 469.] I much regret to observe that Bellarmin omits to quote the latter part of this passage, stopping short with an "&c." at the words _hades_, or _inferorum loca_, although the whole of the writer's testimony in it turns upon the very last clause. [Bellarmin, c. iv. p. 851. "Improborum autem ad inferorum loca."] The next question (76) runs thus: "If the retribution of our deeds does not take place before the resurrection, what advantage accrued to the thief that his soul was introduced into paradise; especially since paradise is an object of sense, and the substance of the soul is not an object of sense? "Answer. It was an advantage to the thief entering into paradise to learn by fact the benefits of the faith by which he was deemed worthy of the assembly of the {103} saints, in which he is kept till the day of judgment and restitution; and he has the perception of paradise by that which is called intellectual perception, by which souls see both themselves and the things under them, and moreover also the angels and demons. For a soul doth not perceive or see a soul, nor an angel an angel, nor a demon a demon; except that according to the said intellectual perception they see both themselves and each other, and moreover also all corporeal objects." [Page 470.] On this same point I must here subjoin a passage from one of Justin's own undisputed works. In his Dialogue with Trypho the Jew, sect. 5, he says, "Nevertheless I do not say that souls all die; for that were in truth a boon to the wicked. But what? That the souls of the pious remain somewhere in a better place, and the unjust and wicked in a worse, waiting for the time of judgment, when it shall be: thus the one appearing worthy of God do not die any more; and the others are punished as long as God wills them both to exist and to be punished." [Page 107.] Not only so; Justin classes among renouncers of the faith those who maintain the doctrine which is now acknowledged to be the doctrine of the Church of Rome, and to be indispensable as the groundwork of the adoration of saints. In his Trypho, sect. 80, he states his sentiment thus strongly: "If you should meet with any persons called Christians, who confess not this, but dare to blaspheme the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, and say there is no resurrection of the dead ([Greek: nekron]), but that their souls, at the very time of their death, are taken up into heaven; do not regard them as Christians." [Page 178.] {104} This, according to Bellarmin's own principle, is fatal evidence: if the redeemed and the saints departed are not in glory with God already, they cannot intercede with him for men. On the subject, however, of worship and prayer, Justin Martyr has left us some testimonies as to the primitive practice, full of interest in themselves, independently of their bearing on the points at issue. At the same time I am not aware of a single expression which can be so construed as to imply the doctrine or practice among Christians of invoking the souls of the faithful. He speaks of public and private prayer; he offers prayer, but the prayer of which he speaks, and the prayer which he offers are to God alone; and he alludes to no advocate or intercessor in heaven, except only the eternal Son of God himself. In his first Apologia (or Defence addressed to the Emperor Antoninus Pius) he thus describes the proceedings at the baptism of a convert:-- "Now, we will explain to you how we dedicate ourselves to God, being made new by Christ.... As many as are persuaded, and believe the things which by us are taught and declared to be true, and who promise that they can so live, are taught to pray and implore, with fasting, forgiveness of God for their former sins, we ourselves joining with them in fasting and prayer; and then they are taken by us to a place where there is water, and by the same manner of regeneration as we ourselves were regenerated, they are regenerated; for they undergo this washing in the water in the name of God the Father and Lord of all, and of our Saviour Jesus Christ, and of the Holy Ghost." [Apol. i. sect 61, page 79.] The following is his description of the Christian {105} Eucharist, subsequently to the baptism of a convert: "Afterwards we conduct him to those who are called brethren, where they are assembled together to offer earnestly our united prayers for ourselves and for the enlightened one [the newly baptized convert], and for all others every where, that we, having learned the truth, may be thought worthy to be found in our deeds good livers, and keepers of the commandments, that we may be saved with the everlasting salvation. Having ceased from prayers, we salute each other with a kiss; and then bread is brought to him who presides over the brethren, and a cup of water and wine; and he taking it, sends up prayer and praise to the Father of all, through the name of the Son and the Holy Spirit; and offers much thanksgiving for our being thought by him worthy of these things. When he has finished the prayers and thanksgivings, all the people present respond, saying, 'Amen.' Now, Amen in the Hebrew tongue means, 'So be it.' And when the presider has given thanks, and all the people have responded, those who are called Deacons among us give to every one present to partake of the bread and wine and water that has been blessed, and take some away for those who were not present." [Sect. 65. p. 82.] The following is Justin's account of their worship on the Lord's day: "In all our oblations we bless the Creator of all things, through his Son Jesus Christ, and through the Holy Spirit. And upon the day called Sunday, there is an assembly of all who dwell in the several cities or in the country, in one place where the records of the apostles, or the writings of the prophets are read, as time allows. When the reader has ceased, {106} the presider makes a discourse for the edification of the people, and to animate them to the practice of such excellent things [or the imitation of such excellent persons]. At the conclusion we all rise up together and pray; and, as we have said, when we have ceased from prayer, the bread and wine and water are brought forward, and the presider sends up prayer and thanksgiving alike, to the utmost of his power. And the people respond, saying, Amen. And then is made to each the distribution and participation of the consecrated elements ([Greek: eucharistauthenton]). And of those who have the means and will, each according to his disposition gives what he will; and the collected sum is deposited with the presider, and he aids the orphans and widows, and those who through sickness or other cause are in need, and those in bonds, and strangers; and, in a word, he becomes the reliever of all who are in want." [Sect. 67. p. 83.] * * * * * In Justin Martyr I am unable to find even a single vestige of the invocation of Saints. With regard to Angels, however, there is a very celebrated passage, to which Bellarmin and others appeal, as conclusive evidence that the worship of them prevailed among Christians in his time, and was professed by Justin himself. Justin, in his first Apology, having stated that the Christians could never be induced to worship the demons, whom the heathen worshipped and invoked, proceeds thus[33]: "Whence also we are called Atheists, {107} [men without God]; and we confess that with regard to such supposed gods we are atheists, but not so with regard to the most true God, the Father of justice and temperance, and of the other virtues without any mixture of evil. But both HIM and the SON, who came from Him, and taught these things to us, and THE HOST OF THE OTHER GOOD ANGELS ACCOMPANYING AND MADE LIKE, and THE PROPHETIC SPIRIT, we reverence and worship, honouring them in reason and truth; and without grudging, delivering the doctrine to every one who is willing to learn as we were taught." [Page 47.] Governing the words "the host of the other good angels," as much as the words "Him" and "His Son," and "the prophetic Spirit," by the verbs "we reverence and worship," Bellarmin and others[34] maintain, that Justin bears testimony in this passage to the worship of angels. That this cannot be the true interpretation of Justin's words will be acknowledged, I think, by every Catholic, whether Anglican or Roman, when he contemplates it in all its naked plainness; all will revolt from it as impious and contrary to the principles professed by the most celebrated and honoured among Roman Catholic writers. This interpretation of the passage, when analysed, implies the awful thought, that we Christians pay to the host of angels, God's ministers and our own fellow-servants, the same reverence, worship, and honour which we pay to the supreme Father, and his ever-blessed Son, and the Holy Spirit, without any difference or inequality. No principles of interpretation can avoid that inference. [Footnote 33: The genuineness of this passage has been doubted. But I see no ground for suspicion that it is spurious. It is found in the manuscripts of Justin's works; of which the most ancient perhaps are in the King's Library in Paris. I examined one there of a remote date.] [Footnote 34: The Benedictine Editor puts this note in the margin, "Justin teaches that angels following the Son are worshipped by Christians."--Preface, p. xxi.] {108} "Him the most true Father of righteousness we reverence and worship, honouring him in reason and truth." "The Son who came from him, and taught us these things, we reverence and worship, honouring him in reason and truth." "The army of the other good angels accompanying and assimilated, we reverence and worship, honouring them in reason and truth." "The Prophetic Spirit we reverence and worship, honouring him in reason and truth." Is it possible to conceive that any Christian would thus ascribe the same religious worship to a host of God's creatures, which he would ascribe to God, as GOD? "We are accused," said Justin, "of being atheists, of having no God. How can this be? We do not worship your false gods, but we have our own most true God. We are not without a God. We have the Father, and the Son, and the Good Angels, and the Holy Spirit." If Justin meant that they honoured the good angels, but not as GOD, that would be no answer to those who called the Christians atheists. The charge was, that "they had no God." The answer is, "We have a God;" and then Justin describes the God of Christians. Can the army of angels be included in that description? If they are, then they are made to share in the adoration, worship, homage, and reverence of the one only God Most High; if they are not, then Justin does not answer the objectors[35]. [Footnote 35: And surely if Justin had intended to represent the holy angels as objects of religious worship, he would not so violently have thrust the mention of them among the Persons of the ever-blessed Trinity, assigning to them a place between the second and third Persons of the eternal hypostatic union.] {109} To evade this charge of impiety, some writers (among others, M. Maran, the Benedictine editor of Justin,) have attempted to draw a distinction between the two verbs in this passage, alleging that the lower degree of reverence expressed by the latter applies to the angels; whilst the former verb, implying the higher degree of worship, alone relates to the Godhead. But this distinction rests on a false assumption; the two words being used equally to convey the idea, of the highest religious worship[36]. [Footnote 36: For example, the first word ([Greek: sebometha]), "we reverence," is used to mean the whole of religious worship, as well with regard to the true God, as with reference to Diana [Acts xviii. 7. 13; xix. 27.]; whilst the second word ([Greek: proskunoumen]), "we worship," is constantly employed in the same sense of divine worship, throughout the Septuagint [Exod. xxxiv. 14. Ps. xciv. (xcv.) 6. I Sam. (1 Kings) xv. 25. 2 Kings (4 Kings) xvii. 36. Heb. i. 6.], (with which Justin was most familiar,) and is used in the Epistle to the Hebrews to signify the worship due from the angels themselves to God, "Let all the angels of God worship him." The very same word is also soon after employed by Justin himself (sect. xvi. p. 53) to mean the whole entire worship of the Most High God: "That we ought to worship ([Greek: proskumein]) God alone, Christ thus proves," &c. Moreover, the word which Justin uses at the close of the sentence, "honouring them" ([Greek: timontes]), is the identical word four times employed by St. John [John v. 23.], in the same verse, to record our Saviour's saying, "That all men might honour the Son, even as they honour the Father; he that honoureth not the Son, honoureth not the Father, who hath sent him."] But in determining the true meaning of an obscure passage, grammatically susceptible of different acceptations, the author himself is often his own best interpreter. If he has expressed in another place the same leading sentiment, yet without the same obscurity, and free from all doubt, the light borrowed from that passage {110} will frequently fix the sense of the ambiguous expression, and establish the author's consistency. On this acknowledged principle of criticism, I would call your attention to a passage in the very same treatise of Justin, a few pages further on, in which he again defends the Christians against the same charge of being atheists, and on the self-same ground, "that they worship the Father who is maker of all; secondly, the Son proceeding from Him; and thirdly, the Holy Spirit." In both cases he refers to the same attributes of the Son as the teacher of Christian truth, and of the Holy Ghost, as the Prophetic Spirit. His language throughout the two passages is remarkably similar, and in the expressions on the true meaning of which we have already dwelt, it is most strikingly identical; but by omitting all allusion to the angels after the Son, his own words proving that the introduction of them could have no place there, (for he specifies that the third in order was the Holy Spirit,) Justin has left us a comment on the passage under consideration conclusive as to the object of religious worship in his creed. The whole passage is well worth the attention of the reader. The following extracts are the only parts necessary for our present purpose:-- "Who of sound mind will not confess that we are not Atheists, reverencing as we do the Maker of the Universe.... and Him, who taught us these things, and who was born for this purpose, Jesus Christ, crucified under Pontius Pilate.... instructed, as we are, that He is the Son of the True God, and holding Him in the second place; and the Prophetic Spirit in the third order, we with reason honour." [Sect. xiii. p. 50.] {111} The impiety apparently inseparable from Bellarmin's interpretation has induced many, even among Roman Catholic writers, to discard that acceptation altogether, and to substitute others, which, though involving no grammatical inaccuracy, are still not free from difficulty.[37] After weighing the passage with all the means in my power, and after testing the various interpretations offered by writers, whether of the Church of Rome or not, by the sentiments of Justin himself, and others of the same early age, I am fully persuaded that the following is the only true rendering of Justin's words: "Honouring in reason and truth, we reverence and worship HIM, the Father of Righteousness, and the Son (who proceeded from Him, and instructed in these things both ourselves and the host of the other good angels following Him and being made like unto Him), and the Prophetic Spirit." [Footnote 37: Le Nourry (Apparatus ad Bibliothecam Maximam Veterum Patrum. Paris, 1697. vol. ii. p. 305), himself a Benedictine, rejects Bellarmin's and his brother Benedictine Maran's interpretation, and conceives Justin to mean, that the Son of God not only taught us those truths to which he was referring, with regard to the being and attributes of God, but also taught us that there were hosts of spiritual beings, called Angels; good beings, opposed to the demons of paganism. Bishop Kaye, in his excellent work on Justin Martyr, which the reader will do well to consult (p. 53), tells us he was sometimes inclined to think that Justin referred to the host of good angels who should surround the Son of God when he should come to judge the world. The view adopted by myself here was recommended by Grabe and by Langus, called The Interpreter of Justin; whilst Petavius, a Jesuit, though he does not adopt it, yet acknowledges that the Greek admits of our interpretation. Any one who would pursue the subject further may with advantage consult the preface to the Benedictine edition referred to in this work. Lumper Hist. Part ii. p. 225. Augustæ Vindelicorum, 1784. Petavius, Theologicorum Dogmatum tom. vi. p. 298. lib. xv. c. v. s. 5. Antwerp, 1700. The whole passage is thus rendered by Langus (as read in Lumper), "Verum hunc ipsum, et qui ab eo venit, atque ista nos et aliorum obsequentium exæquatorumque ad ejus voluntatem bonorum Angelorum exercitura docuit, Filium, et Spiritum ejus propheticum, colimus et adoramus."] This interpretation is strongly confirmed by the professed sentiments both of Justin and of his contemporaries, {112} with regard to the Son of God and the holy angels. It was a principle generally received among the early Christians, that whatever the Almighty did, either by creation or by the communication of his will, on earth or in heaven, was done by the Eternal Word. It was God the Son, the Logos, who created the angels[38], as well as ourselves; it was He who spoke to Moses, to Abraham, and to Lot; and it was He who conveyed the Supreme will, and the knowledge of the only true God, to the inhabitants of the world of spirits. Agreeably to this principle, in the passage under consideration, Justin affirms (not that Christians revered and worshipped the angels, but), that God the Son, whom Christians worshipped as the eternal Prophet, Angel, and Apostle, of the Most High, instructed not only us men on earth, but also the host of heavenly angels[39], in these eternal verities, {113} which embrace God's nature and the duty of his creatures. [Trypho, § 141. p. 231.] [Footnote 38: Thus Tatian (p. 249 in the same edition of Justin), "Before men were prepared, the Word was the Maker of angels."] [Footnote 39: "The OTHER good angels." Justin (Apol. i. sect. lxiii. p. 81.) reminds us that Christ, the first-begotten of the Father, Himself God, was also an Angel (or Messenger), and an Apostle; and here Christ, as the Angel of the Covenant and the chief Apostle, is represented as instructing THE OTHER ANGELS in the truths of the economy of grace, just as he instructed his Apostles on earth,--"As my Father hath sent me, even so send I you."] It is evident that Justin himself considered the host of angels to be equally with ourselves in a state of probation, requiring divine instruction, and partaking of it. It is also evident that many of his contemporaries entertained the same views; among others, Irenæus and Origen. [Irenæus, book ii. c. 30. p. 163. Origen, Hom. xxxii. in Joann. § 10. vol. iv. p. 430.] I will not swell this dissertation by quoting the passages at length; though the passages referred to in the margin will well repay any one's careful examination. But I cannot refrain from extracting the words in which each of those writers confirms the view here taken of Justin's sentiments. Irenæus, for example, says distinctly, "The Son ever, anciently and from the beginning co-existing with the Father, always reveals the Father both to angels and archangels, and powers, and excellencies, and to all to whom God wishes to make a revelation[40]." And not less distinctly does Origen assert the same thing,--"Our Saviour therefore teaches, and the Holy Spirit, {114} who spake in the prophets, teaches not only men, but also angels and invisible excellencies." [Footnote 40: So far did some of the early Christians include the hosts of angels within the covenant of the Gospel, that Ignatius (Epist. ad Smyrn. § 6. p. 36.) does not hesitate to pronounce that the angels incur the Divine judgment, if they do not receive the doctrine of the atonement: "Let no one be deceived. The things in heaven, and the glory of angels, and the powers visible and invisible, if they do not believe on the blood of Christ--for them is judgment." They seem to have founded their opinion on the declaration of St. Paul (Eph. iii. 10): "That now to the principalities and powers in heavenly places might be made known through the Church the manifold wisdom of God."] I will only add one more ancient authority, in confirmation of the view here taken of Justin's words. The passage is from Athenagoras[41] and seems to be the exact counterpart of Justin's paragraph. [Footnote 41: Athenagoras presented his defence, in which these words occur, to the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, and his son Commodus, in the year 177.] "Who would not wonder on hearing us called Atheists? we who call the Father God, and the Son God, and the Holy Ghost, showing both their power in the unity, and their distinction in order. Nor does our theology rest here; but we say, moreover, that there is a multitude of angels and ministers whom God, the Maker and Creator of the world, BY THE WORD PROCEEDING FROM HIM, distributed and appointed, both about the elements, and the heavens, and the world, and the things therein, and the good order thereof." [Sect. 10. p. 287. edit. Just. Mart.] I have already stated my inability to discover a single word in Justin Martyr which could be brought to sanction the invocation of saints; but his testimony is far from being merely negative. He admonishes us strongly against our looking to any other being for help or assistance, than to God only. Even when speaking of those who confide in their own strength, and fortune, and other sources of good, he says, in perfect unison with the pervading principles and associations of his whole mind, as far as we can read them in his works, without any modification or any exception in favour of saint or angel: "In that Christ {115} said, 'Thou art my God, go not far from me,' He at the same time taught, that all persons ought to hope in God, who made all things, and seek for safety and health from Him alone" [Trypho, § 102, p. 197.] * * * * * SECTION II.--IRENÆUS. Justin sealed his faith by his blood about the year 165; and next to him, in the noble army of martyrs, we must examine the evidence of Irenæus, Bishop of Lyons. Of this writer's works a very small proportion survives in the original Greek; but that little is such as might well make every scholar and divine lament the calamity which theology and literature have sustained by the loss of the author's own language. It is not perhaps beyond the range of hope that future researches may yet recover at least some part of the treasure. Meanwhile we must avail ourselves with thankfulness of the nervous though inelegant copy of that original, which the Latin translation affords; imperfect and corrupt in many parts, as that copy evidently is. This, however, is not the place for recommending a study of the remains of Irenæus; and every one at all acquainted with the literature of the early Church, knows well how valuable a store of ancient Christian learning is preserved even in the wreck of his works. On the subject of the invocation of saints, an appeal {116} has been made only to a few passages in Irenæus. With regard, indeed, to one section, I would gladly have been spared the duty of commenting upon the unjustifiable mode of citing his evidence adopted by Bellarmin. It forces upon our notice an example either of such inaccuracy of quotation as would shake our confidence in him as an author, or of such misrepresentation as must lower him in our estimation as a man of integrity. Bellarmin asserts, building upon it as the very foundation-stone of his argument for the invocation of saints, that the souls of the saints are removed immediately on their dissolution by death, without waiting for the day of judgment, into the presence of God, and the enjoyment of HIM in heaven. This point, he says, must first be established; for if they are not already in the presence of God, they cannot pray for us, and prayer to them would be preposterous. [Bell. lib. i. c. 4. vol. ii. p. 851.] Among the authorities cited by him to establish this point is the evidence of Irenæus (book i. c. 2). [See Benedictine ed, Paris, 1710. book i. c. 10. p. 48.] Bellarmin quotes that passage in these words: "To the just and righteous, and to those who keep his commandments, and persevere in his love, some indeed from the beginning but some from repentance, he giving life CONFERS by way of gift incorruption, and CLOTHES them with eternal glory." To the quotation he appends this note "Mark '_to some_' that is, to those who presently after baptism die, or who lay down their life for Christ; or finally to the perfect is given immediately life and eternal glory; to others not, except after repentance, that is, satisfaction made in another world[42]." [Footnote 42: Agreeably to the principles laid down in my preface, I will not here allude to the doctrine of purgatory, on which Bellarmin considers this passage to bear; nor will I say one word on the intermediate state of the soul between death and the resurrection, on which I am now showing that the words of Irenæus cannot at all be made to bear.] {117} Here I am compelled to confess that I never found a more palpable misquotation of an author than this. I will readily grant that Bellarmin may have quoted from memory, or have borrowed from some corrupt version of the passage; and that he has unintentionally changed the moods of two verbs from the subjunctive to the indicative, and inadvertently changed the entire construction and the sense of the passage. But then what becomes of his authority as a writer citing testimony? Irenæus in this passage is speaking not of what our Lord does now, but what he will do at the last day; he refers only to the second coming of Christ to judgment at the final consummation of all things, not using a single expression which can be made by fair criticism to have any reference whatever to the condition of souls on their separation from the body. I have consulted the old editions, some at least published before the date of Bellarmin's work; the suggestion offering itself to my mind, that perhaps the ancient translation was in error, from which he might have quoted. But I cannot find that to have been the case. The old Latin version of this passage agreeing very closely with the Greek still preserved in Epiphanius, and quoted by Roman Catholic writers as authentic, conveys this magnificent though brief summary of the Christian faith: "The Church spread throughout the whole world, even to the ends of the earth, received both from the Apostles and their disciples that faith which is in one {118} God omnipotent, who made heaven and earth, the sea, and all things therein, and in one Jesus Christ, the Son of God, for our salvation made flesh, and in the Holy Ghost, who by the prophets announced the dispensations (of God[43]), and the Advent, and the being born of a Virgin, and the suffering, and the resurrection from the dead, and the bodily ascension into heaven of the beloved Jesus Christ our Lord, and his coming from heaven in the glory of the Father for the consummation of all things, and for raising again all flesh of the human race, THAT, in order that ([Greek: ina]), to Christ Jesus our Lord and God, and Saviour and King, according to the good pleasure of the invisible Father, every knee should bow of things in heaven and in earth, and under the earth, and that every tongue should confess to Him, and that he should execute just judgment on all: that he should send the spirits of wickedness, and the transgressing and rebel angels, and the impious and unjust, and wicked and blaspheming men into eternal fire; but to the just and righteous, and to those who keep his commandments, and persevere in his love,--some indeed from the beginning, and some from their repentance,--he granting life, by way of gift, SHOULD CONFER incorruption, and SHOULD CLOTHE them with eternal glory." [Hæres. xxxi. c. 30.] [Footnote 43: The words "of God" are in the Latin, but not in the Greek.] The words, "some from the beginning," "others from their repentance," can refer only to the two conditions of believers; some of whom have grace to keep the commandments, and persevere in the love of God from the beginning of their Christian course, whilst others, for a time, transgress and wax cold in love, but by repentance, through God's grace, are renewed and {119} restored to their former state of obedience and love. On both these classes of Christians, according to the faith as here summed up by Irenæus, our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, when He comes in glory for the consummation of all things, and for the resurrection of the dead, will confer glory and immortality. No ingenuity of criticism can extract from this passage any allusion to the intercession of saints, or to their being with God before the end of the world[44]. But I am not {120} here condemning Bellarmin's untenable criticism: what I lament is the negligence or the disingenuousness with which he misquotes the words of Irenæus, and makes him say what he never did say. To extract from an author's words, correctly reported, a meaning which he did not intend to convey, however reprehensible and unworthy a follower of truth, is one act of injustice: to report him, whether wilfully or carelessly, as using words which he never did use, is far worse. [Footnote 44: It will be well to see the words of Bellarmin and those of the translation side by side: (Transcriber's note: They are shown here one after the other.) _Bellarmin_ lib. i. c. iv. p. 851. "Quartus Irenæus, lib. i. c. 2. 'Justis, inquit, et æquis, et præcepta ejus servantibus et in dilectione perseverantibus, quibusdam quidem ab initio, quibusdam autem ex poenitentia, vitam donans, incorruptelam loco muneris CONFERT, et claritatem æternam CIRCUMDAT.' Nota '_quibusdam_,' id est, iis qui mox a Baptismo moriuntur, vel qui pro Christo vitam ponunt; vel denique perfectis statim donari vitam et claritatem æternam; aliis non nisi post poenitentiam, id est, satisfactionem in futuro sæculo actam." _Latin Translation_. "Et de coelis in gloria Patris adventum ejus ad recapitulanda universa et resuscitandam omnem carnem humani generis, UT Christo Jesu Domino nostro et Deo, et Salvatori, et Regi, secundum placitum Patris invisibilis, 'omne genu curvet coelestium, et terrestrium, et infernorum, et omnis lingua confiteatur ei,' et judicium justum in omnibus faciat; spiritalia quidem nequitiæ, et angelos transgresses, atque apostatas factos, et impios et injustos et iniquos, et blasphemos homines in æternum ignem mittat;--Justis autem et æquis et præcepta ejus servantibus et in dilectione ejus perseverantibus, quibusdam quidem ab initio, quibusdam autem ex poenitentia, vitam donans, incorruptelam loco muneris CONFERAT, et claritatem æternam CIRCUMDET."--Irenæi liber i. cap. x. p. 48. Interpretatio Vetus.] Another expression of Irenæus is appealed to by Bellarmin, and continues to be cited at the present day in defence of the invocation of saints; the precise bearing of which upon the subject I confess myself unable to see, whilst I am very far from understanding the passage from which it is an extract. Bellarmin cites the passage not to show that the saints in glory pray for us,--that argument he had dismissed before,--but to prove that they are to be invoked by us. The insulated passage as quoted by him is this: "And as she (Eve) was induced to fly from God, so she (Mary) was persuaded to obey God, that of the Virgin Eve the Virgin Mary might become the advocate." After the quotation he says, "What can be clearer?" [Benedict, lib. v. cap. xix. p. 316.] In whatever sense we may suppose Irenæus to have employed the word here translated "advocata," it is difficult to see how the circumstance of Mary becoming the advocate of Eve, who lived so many generations before her, can bear upon the question, Is it lawful and right for us, now dwelling on the earth, to invoke those saints whom we believe to be in heaven? I will not dwell on the argument urged very cogently by some critics on this passage, that the word "advocata," found {121} in the Latin version of Irenæus, is the translation of the original word, now lost [[Greek: paraklaetos]--paraclete], which, by the early writers, was used for "comforter and consoler," or "restorer;" because, as I have above intimated, whatever may have been the word employed by Irenæus, the passage proves nothing as to the lawfulness of our praying to the saints. If the angels at God's bidding minister unto the heirs of salvation; or further, if they plead our cause with God, that would be no reason why we should invoke them and pray to them. This distinction between what they may do for us, and what we ought to do with regard to them, is an essential distinction, and must not be lost sight of. We shall have occasion hereafter to refer to it repeatedly, especially in the instances of Origen and Cyprian. I will now do no more than copy in a note the entire passage from which the sentence now under consideration has been extracted, that the reader may judge whether on such a passage, the original of which, in whatever words Irenæus may have expressed himself, is utterly lost, any reliance can satisfactorily be placed. ("Manifeste itaque in sua propria venientem Dominum et sua propria eum bajulantem conditione quæ bajulatur ab ipso, et recapitulationem ejus quæ in ligno fuit inobedientiæ per eam quæ in ligno est obedientiam facientem, et seductionem illam solutam qua seducta est male illa, quæ jam viro destinata erat virgo Eva, per veritatem evangelizata est bene ab angelo jam sub viro virgo Maria. Quemadmodum enim illa per angeli sermonem seducta est ut effugeret Deum prævaricata verbum ejus, ita et hæc per angelicum sermonem evangelizata est ut portaret Deum obediens ejus verbo. Et si ea inobedierat Deo, sed hæc suasa est obedire Deo, uti virginis Evæ virgo Maria fieret advocata. Et quemadmodum astrictum est morti genus humanum per virginem, salvatur per virginem, æqua lance disposita virginalis inobedientia per virginalem obedientiam. Adhuc enim protoplasti peccatum per correptionem primogeniti emendationem accipiens, et serpentis prudentia devicta in columbæ simplicitate, vinculis autem illis resolutis, per quæ alligati eramus morti." St. Augustin (Paris, 1690. vol. x. p. 500.) refers to the latter part of this passage, as implying the doctrine of original sin; but since his quotation does not embrace any portion of the clause at present under our consideration, no additional light from him is thrown on the meaning of Irenæus.) {122} But passages occur in Irenæus, which seem to leave doubt, that neither in faith nor in practice would he countenance in the very lowest degree the adoration of saints and angels, or any invocation of them. For example, in one part of his works we read, "Nor does it [the Church] do any thing by invocations of angels, nor by incantations, nor other depraved and curious means, but with cleanliness, purity, and openness, directing prayers to the Lord who made all things, and calling upon the name of Jesus Christ our Lord, it exercises its powers for the benefit, and not for the seducing, of mankind." [Benedictine Ed. lib. ii. c. 32. § 5. p. 166.] It has been said that, by angelic invocations, Irenæus means the addresses to evil angels and genii, such as the heathen superstitiously made. Be it so; though that is a mere assumption, not warranted by the passage or its context. But, surely, had Irenæus known that Christians prayed to angels, as well as to their Maker and their Saviour, he would not have used such an unguarded expression; he would have cautioned his readers against so serious, but so natural, a misapprehension of his meaning. With one more reference, we must bring our inquiry into the testimony of Irenæus to a close. The passage occurs in the fifth book, chapter 31. [Benedict. lib. v. c. 32. § 2. p, 331.] The principal and most important, though not the longest, part of {123} the passage is happily still found in the original Greek, preserved in the "Parallels" of Damascenus. In its plain, natural, and unforced sense, this passage is so decidedly conclusive on the question at issue, that various attempts have been made to explain away its meaning, so as not to represent Irenæus as believing that the souls of departed saints, between their death and the day of judgment, exist otherwise than in bliss and glory in heaven. But those attempts have been altogether unsuccessful. I believe the view here presented to us by the plain and obvious sense of the words of Irenæus, is the view at present acquiesced in by a large proportion of our fellow-believers. The Anglican Church has made no article of faith whatever on the subject. The clause within brackets is found both in the Latin and the Greek. "Since the Lord[45] in the midst of the shadow of death went where the souls of the dead were, and then afterwards rose bodily, and after his resurrection was taken up, it is evident that of his disciples also, for whom the Lord wrought these things, [the souls go into the unseen[46] place assigned to them by God, and there remain till the resurrection, waiting for the resurrection; afterwards receiving again their bodies and rising perfectly [[Greek: holoklaeros], perfecte], that is, bodily, even as the Lord also rose again, so will they come into the presence of God.] {124} For no disciple is above his master; but every one that is perfect shall be as his master. As, therefore, our Master did not immediately flee away and depart, but waited for the time of his resurrection appointed by his Father (which is evident, even by the case of Jonah); after the third day, rising again, he was taken up; so we too must wait for the time of our resurrection appointed by God, and fore-announced by the prophets; and thus rising again, be taken up, as many as the Lord shall have deemed worthy of this." [Footnote 45: Bellarmin, rather than allow the testimony of Irenæus to weigh at all against the doctrine which he is defending, seems determined to combat and challenge that father himself. "Non ausus est dicere," "He has not dared to say, that the souls go to the regions below," &c.] [Footnote 46: There is no word in the Greek copy corresponding with the Latin "invisibilem."] * * * * * SECTION III.--CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA--ABOUT THE YEAR 180. Contemporary with Irenæus, and probably less than twenty years his junior, was Clement, the celebrated Christian philosopher of Alexandria. I am not aware that any Roman Catholic writer has appealed to the testimony of Clement in favour of the invocation of saints, nor have I found a single passage which the defenders of that practice would be likely to quote; and yet there are many passages which no one, anxious to trace the Catholic faith, would willingly neglect. The tendency of Clement's mind to blend with the simplicity of the Gospel of Christ the philosophy in which he so fully abounded, renders him far less valuable as a Christian teacher; but his evidence as to the matter of fact, is even rendered more cogent and pointed by this tendency of his mind. I would {125} willingly have transferred to these pages whole passages of Clement, but the very nature of my address forbids it. Some sentences bearing on the subject immediately before us, we must not omit. Clement has left on record many of his meditations upon the efficacy, the duty, and the blessed comfort of prayer. When he speaks of God, and of the Christian in prayer, (for prayer he defines to be "communion or intercourse with God,") his language becomes often exquisitely beautiful, and sometimes sublime. It is impossible by a few detached passages to convey an adequate estimate of the original; and yet a few sentences may show that Clement is a man whose testimony should not be slighted. "Therefore, keeping the whole of our life as a feast every where, and on every part persuaded that God is present, we praise him as we till our lands; we sing hymns as we are sailing. The Christian is persuaded that God hears every thing; not the voice only, but the thoughts.... Suppose any one should say, that the voice does not reach God, revolving as it does in the air below; yet the thoughts of the saints cut not only through the air, but the whole world. And the divine power like the light is beforehand in seeing through the soul.... He" (the Christian whom he speaks of throughout as the man of divine knowledge) "prays for things essentially good. "Wherefore it best becomes those to pray who have an adequate knowledge of God, and possess virtue in accordance with Him--who know what are real goods, and what we should petition for, and when, and how in each case. But it is the extreme of ignorance to ask {126} from those who are not gods as though they were gods.... Whence since there is one only good God, both we ourselves and the angels supplicate from Him alone, that some good things might be given to us, and others might remain with us. In this way he (the Christian) is always in a state of purity fit for prayer. He prays with angels, as being himself equal with angels; and as one who is never beyond the holy protecting guard. And if he pray alone he has the whole choir of angels with him." [Stromata, lib. vii. § 7. p. 851, &c.; Section xii. p. 879.] Clement has alluded to instances alleged by the Greeks of the effects of prayer, and he adds, "Our whole Scripture is full of instances of God hearing and granting every request according to the prayers of the just." [Lib. vi. § iii. p. 753.] Having in the same section referred to the opinion of some Greeks as to the power of demons over the affairs of mortals, he adds, "But they think it matters nothing whether we speak of these as gods or as angels, calling the spirits of such 'demons,' and teaching that they should be worshipped by men, as having, by divine providence, on account of the purity of their lives, received authority to be conversant about earthly places, in order that they may minister to mortals." [Lib. vi. § iii. p. 755.] Is it possible to suppose that this teacher in Christ's school had any idea of a Christian praying to saints or angels? In the last passage, the language in which he quotes the errors of heathen superstition to refute them, so nearly approaches the language of the Church of Rome when speaking of the powers of saints and angels to assist the suppliant, that if Clement had entertained {127} any thought whatever of a Christian praying for aid and intercession to saint or angel, he must have mentioned it, especially after the previous passage on the absurdity and gross ignorance of praying for any good at the hands of any other than the one true God. In common with his contemporaries, Clement considered the angels to be, as we mortals are, in a state requiring all the protection and help to be obtained by prayer; he believed that the angels pray with us, and carry our prayers to God: but the thought of addressing them by invocation does not appear to have occurred to his mind. At the close of his Pædagogus he has left on record a form of prayer to God alone very peculiar and interesting. He closes it by an ascription of glory to the blessed Trinity. But there is no allusion to saint, or angel, or virgin mother. * * * * * SECTION IV.--TERTULLIAN. Tertullian, of Carthage, was a contemporary of Clement of Alexandria, and so nearly of the same age, that doubts have existed, which of the two should take priority in point of time. There is a very wide difference in the character and tone of their works, as there was in the frame and constitution of their minds. The lenient and liberal views of the erudite and accomplished master of the school of Alexandria, stand out in prominent and broad contrast with the harsh and austere doctrines of Tertullian. Tertullian fell into errors of a very serious kind by joining himself to the heretic Montanus; still on his {128} mind is discoverable the working of that spirit which animated the early converts of Christianity; and his whole soul seems to have been filled with a desire to promote the practical influence of the Gospel. Jerome, the oracle on such subjects, from whom the Roman Catholic Church is unwilling to allow any appeal, expressly tells us that Cyprian[47], who called Tertullian the Master, never passed a single day without studying his works; and that after Tertullian had remained a presbyter of the Church to middle age, he was driven, by the envy and revilings of the members of the Roman Church, to fall from its unity, and espouse Montanism. Bellarmin calls him a heretic, and says he is the first heretic who denied that the saints went at once and forthwith to glory. [Hieron. edit. 1684. tom. i. p. 183.] [Footnote 47: The words of Jerome, who refers to the circumstance more than once, are very striking: "I saw one Paulus, who said that he had seen the secretary (notarium) of Cyprian at Rome, who used to tell him that Cyprian never passed a single day without reading Tertullian; and that he often said to him, 'Give me the Master,' meaning Tertullian."--Hieron. vol. iv. part ii. p. 115.] A decided line of distinction is drawn by Roman Catholic writers between the works of Tertullian written before he espoused the errors of Montanus, and his works written after that unhappy step. The former they hold in great estimation, the latter are by many considered of far less authority. I do not see how such a distinction ought to affect his testimony on the historical point immediately before us. If indeed he had held the doctrine of the invocation of saints whilst he continued in the full communion of the Church, and rejected it afterwards, no honest and sensible writer would quote his later opinions against the practice. But we are only seeking in his works for evidence of the {129} matter of fact,--Is there any proof in the works of Tertullian that the invocation of saints formed a part of the doctrine and practice of the Catholic Church in his time[48]? His works will be found in the note, arranged under those two heads, as nearly as I can ascertain the preponderating sentiments of critics[49]. [Footnote 48: The reader, who may be induced to consult the work of the present Bishop of Lincoln, entitled, "The Ecclesiastical History of the second and third Centuries, illustrated from the writings of Tertullian," will there find, in the examination and application of Tertullian's remains, the union of sound judgment, diligence in research, clearness of perception, acuteness in discovery, and great erudition mingled with charity.] [Footnote 49: Works of Tertullian before he became a Montanist:-- Adversus Judæos. The Tract ad Martyres. The two Books ad Nationes. The Apology, and the Tract de Præscriptione Hæreticorum. The Tract de Testimonio Animæ. The Tracts de Patientia, de Oratione, de Baptismo, de Poenitentia. The two books ad Uxorem. Works written after he espoused Montanism:-- The Tracts de Spectaculis and de Idololatria, though others say these should be ranked among the first class. The Tracts de Corona, and de Fuga in persecutione, Scorpiace, and ad Scapulam. The Tracts de Exhortatione Castitatis, de Monogamia, de Pudicitia, de Jejuniis, de Virginibus Velandis, de Pallio, the five books against Marcion, the Tracts adversus Valentinianos, de Carne Christi, de Resurrectione Carnis, adversus Hermogenem, de Anima, adversus Praxeam, de Cultu Foeminarum.] I will detain you only by a very few quotations from this father. In his Apology, sect. 30, we read this very remarkable passage, "We invoke the eternal God, the true God, the living God, for the safety of the emperor.... {130} Thither (heavenward) looking up, with hands extended, because they are innocent; with our head bare, because we are not ashamed; in fine, without a prompter, because it is from the heart; we Christians pray for all rulers a long life, a secure government, a safe home, brave armies, a faithful senate, a good people, a quiet world.... For these things I cannot ask in prayer from any other except Him from whom I know that I shall obtain; because both He is the one who alone grants, and I am the one whom it behoveth to obtain by prayer;--his servant, who looks to him alone, who for the sake of his religion am put to death, who offer to him a rich and a greater victim, which He has commanded; prayer from a chaste frame, from a harmless soul, from a holy spirit.... So, let hoofs dig into us, thus stretched forward to God, let crosses suspend us, let fires embrace us, let swords sever our necks from the body, let beasts rush upon us,--the very frame of mind of a praying Christian is prepared for every torment. This do, ye good presidents; tear ye away the soul that is praying for the emperor." [Page 27.] In the opening of his reflections on the Lord's Prayer, he says,-- "Let us consider therefore, beloved, in the first place, the heavenly wisdom in the precept of praying in secret, by which he required, in a man, faith to believe that both the sight and the hearing of the Omnipotent God is present under our roofs and in our secret places; and desired the lowliness of faith, that to Him alone, whom he believed to hear and to see every where, he would offer his worship." [Page 129.] The only other reference which I will make, is to {131} the solemn declaration of Tertullian's Creed; the last clause of which, though in perfect accordance with the sentiments of his contemporaries, seems to have been regarded with hostile eyes by modern writers of the Church of Rome, because it decidedly bids us look to the day of judgment for the saints being taken to the enjoyment of heaven; and consequently implies that they cannot be properly invoked now. "To profess now what we defend: By the rule of our faith we believe that God is altogether one, and no other than the Creator of the world, who produced all things out of nothing by his Word first of all sent down. That that Word, called his Son, was variously seen by the patriarchs in the name of God; was always heard in the prophets; at length, borne by the spirit and power of God the Father into the Virgin Mary, was made flesh in her womb, was born of her, and was Jesus Christ. Afterwards He preached a new law and a new promise of the kingdom of heaven; wrought miracles, was crucified, rose again the third day, and, being taken up into heaven, sat on the right hand of the Father; and He sent in his own stead the power of the Holy Ghost, to guide believers; that He shall come with glory to take the saints to the enjoyment of eternal life and the heavenly promises, and to condemn the impious to eternal fire, making a reviving of both classes with the restoration of the body." [De Præscriptione Hæreticorum, § 13. p. 206.] * * * * * Some notice must here be taken of METHODIUS, a pious Christian, of the third century. A work (Methodius, Gl. Combes. Paris, 1644) {132} formerly attributed to him has been quoted in proof of the early invocation of saints; but the work, among many others, has been long ago allowed by the best Roman Catholic critics to be the production of a later age. (Fabricius, vol. vii. p. 268, and vol. x. p. 241.) Many homilies, purporting to have been delivered on the festival of our Lord's presentation in the temple, at so early a period, must be received as the works of a later age, because that feast began to be observed in the Church so late as the fifteenth year of Justinian, in the sixth century. Evidently, moreover, the theological language of the homily is of a period long subsequent to the date assigned to Methodius. In speaking of our blessed Saviour, for example, he employs expressions to guard against the Arian heresy, and makes extracts apparently from the Nicene creed, "God of himself, and not by grace," "Very God of very God, very light of very light, who for us men and our salvation, &c." The general opinion indeed seems to be that this, and many other writings formerly ascribed to the first Methodius, were written by persons of a subsequent age, who either were of the same name or assumed his. Even were the work genuine, it would afford just as strong a demonstration that Methodius believed that the city of Jerusalem could hear his salutation, as that the saints could hear his prayer; for he addresses the same "Hail" to Mary, Symeon, and the Holy City alike, calling it the "earthly heaven." [Greek: Chairois hae polis, ho epigeios ouranos.] {133} * * * * * SECTION V.--THE EVIDENCE OF ORIGEN. Jerome informs us that Tertullian, whose remains we have last examined, lived to a very advanced age. Long, therefore, before his death flourished Origen, one of the most celebrated lights of the primitive Church. He was educated a Christian. Indeed his father is said to have suffered martyrdom about the year 202. Origen was a pupil of Clement of Alexandria. His virtues and his labours have called forth the admiration of all ages; and though he cannot be implicitly followed as a teacher, what still remains of his works will be delivered down as a rich treasure to succeeding times. He was a most voluminous writer; and Jerome asked the members of his church, "Who is there among us that can read as many books as Origen has composed?" [Vol. iv. epist. xli. p. 346.] A large proportion of his works are lost; and of those which remain, few are preserved in the original Greek. We are often obliged to study Origen through the medium of a translation, the accuracy of which we have no means of verifying. A difficult and delicate duty also devolves upon the theological student to determine which of the works attributed to Origen are genuine and which are spurious; and what parts, moreover, of the works received on the whole as genuine came from his pen. Of {134} the spurious works, some are so palpably written in a much later age, and by authors of different religious views, that no one, after weighing the evidence, can be at a loss what decision to make concerning them; in the case of others, claims and objections may appear to be more evenly balanced. I trust on the one hand to refer to no works for Origen's testimony which are not confessedly his, nor on the other to exclude any passage which is not decidedly spurious; whilst in one particular case more immediately connected with our subject, I am induced to enter further in detail into a critical examination of the genuineness and value of a passage than the character of this work generally requires. The great importance attached to the testimony of that passage by some defenders of the worship paid to angels, may be admitted to justify the fulness of the criticism. Lest, however, its insertion in the body of the work might seem inconveniently to interfere with the reader's progress in our argument, I have thought it best to include it in a supplementary section at the close of our inquiry into the evidence of Origen. Coccius, in his elaborate work, quotes the two following passages as Origen's, without expressing any hesitation or doubt respecting their genuineness, in which he is followed by writers of the present day. The passages are alleged in proof that Origen held and put in practice the doctrine of the invocation of saints; and they form the first quotations made by Coccius under the section headed by this title: "That the saints are to be invoked, proved by the testimony of the Greek Fathers." The first passage is couched in these words: "I will {135} begin to throw myself upon my knees, and pray to all the saints to come to my aid; for I do not dare, in consequence of my excess of wickedness, to call upon God. O Saints of God, you I pray with weeping full of grief, that ye would propitiate his mercies for me miserable. Alas me! Father Abraham, pray for me, that I be not driven from thy bosom, which I greatly long for, and yet not worthily, because of the greatness of my sins." Coccius cites this passage as from "Origen in Lament," and it has been recently appealed to under the title of "Origen on the Lamentations." Here, however, is a very great mistake. Origen's work on the Lamentations, called also "Selecta in Threnos," and inserted in the Benedictine edition (Vol. iii. p. 321.), is entirely a different production from the work which contains the above extract. This apocryphal work, on the other hand, does not profess to be the comment of Origen on the Lamentations, but the Lament or Wailing of Origen himself; or, as it used to be called, the Penitence of Origen. (In the Paris edition of 1519 it is called "Planctus, seu Lamentum Origenis." Pope Gelasius refers to it as "Poenitentia Origenis.") That this work has no pretensions whatever to be regarded as Origen's, has been long placed beyond doubt. Even in the edition of 1545, this treatise is prefaced by Erasmus in these words, "This Lamentation was neither written by Origen nor translated by Jerome, but is the fiction of some unlearned man, who attempted, under colour of this, to throw disgrace upon Origen." [Basil, 1545. vol. i. p. 498.] In the Benedictine edition (Paris, 1733.) no trace of this work is to be found. They do not admit it among the doubtful, or even the spurious works; they do not so {136} much as give room for it in the appendix; on the contrary, they drop it altogether as utterly unworthy of being any longer preserved. Instead, however, of admitting the work itself, these editors have supplied abundant reason for its exclusion, by inserting the sentiments of Huetius, or Huet, the very learned bishop of Avranches. He tells us, that formerly to Origen's work on Principles used to be appended a treatise called, the Lament of Origen, the Latin translation of which Guido referred to Jerome. After quoting the passage of Erasmus (as above cited from the edition of 1545) in proof of its having been "neither written by Origen nor translated by Jerome, but the fabrication of some unlearned man, who attempted, under colour of this, to throw disgrace on Origen, just as they forged a letter in Jerome's name, lamenting that he had ever thought with Origen," Huet proceeds thus: "And Gelasius in the Roman Council writes, 'The book which is called The Repentance of Origen, apocryphal.' It is wonderful, therefore, that without any mark of its false character, it should be sometimes cited by some theologians in evidence. Here we may smile at the supineness of a certain heterodox man of the present age, who thought the 'Lament,' ascribed to Origen, to be something different from the Book of Repentance." [Vol. iv. part ii. p. 326.] The Decree here referred to of Pope Gelasius, made in the Roman Council, A.D. 494, by that pontiff, in conjunction with seventy bishops, contains these strong expressions, before enumerating some few of the books then condemned: "Other works written by heretics and schismatics, the Catholic and Apostolic Church by {137} no means receives; of them we think it right to subjoin a few which have occurred to our memory, and are to be avoided by Catholics." [Conc. Labb. vol. iv. p. 1265.] Then follows a list of prohibited works, among which we read, "the book called The Repentance of Origen, apocryphal," the very book which Huet identifies with the "Lament of Origen," still cited as evidence even in the present day. (See Appendix A.) The second passage cited by Coccius, and also by writers of the present time, as Origen's, without any allusion to its spurious and apocryphal character, is from the second book of the work called Origen on Job. The words cited run thus: "O blessed Job, who art living for ever with God, and remainest conqueror in the sight of the Lord the King, pray for us wretched, that the mercy of the terrible God may protect us in all our afflictions, and deliver us from all oppressions of the wicked one; and number us with the just, and enrol us among those who are saved, and make us rest with them in his kingdom, where for ever with the saints we may magnify him." This work, like the former, has no claim whatever to be regarded as Origen's. It has long been discarded by the learned. Indeed so far back as 1545, Erasmus, in his Censura, proved that it was written long after the time of Origen by an Arian. (Basil, 1545. vol. i. p. 408; and "Censura.") By the Benedictine editors it is transferred to an appendix as the Commentary of an anonymous writer on Job; and they thus express their judgment as to its being a forgery: "The Commentary of an anonymous writer on Job, in previous editions, is ascribed to Origen; {138} but that it is not his, Huet proves by unconquerable arguments. This translation is assigned to Hilary, the bishop; but although it is clear from various proofs of Jerome, that St. Hilary translated the tracts or homilies of Origen on Job, yet there is no reason why that man who wrote with the highest praise against the Arians, should be considered as the translator of this work, which is infected with the corruption of Arianism, and which is not Origen's." [Vol. ii. p. 894.] Erasmus calls the prologue to this treatise on Job "the production of a silly talkative man, neither learned nor modest." It is impossible not to feel, with regard to these two works, the sentiments which, as we have already seen, the Bishop of Avranches has so strongly expressed on one. "It is wonderful, that they should be sometimes cited in evidence by some theologians, without any mark of their being forgeries." Proceeding with our examination of the sentiments of Origen, I would here premise, that not the smallest doubt can be entertained that Origen believed the angels to be ministering spirits, real, active, zealous workmen and fellow-labourers with us in the momentous and awful business of our eternal salvation. He represents the angels as members of the same family with ourselves, as worshippers of the same God, as servants of the same master, as children of the same father, as disciples of the same heavenly teacher, as learners of one and the same heavenly doctrine. He contemplates them as members of our Christian congregations, as joining with us in prayer to our heavenly Benefactor, as taking pleasure when they hear in our {139} assemblies what is agreeable to the will of God, and as being present too not only generally in the Christian Church, but also with individual members of it[50]. But does Origen, therefore, countenance any invocation of them? Let us appeal to himself. [Footnote 50: One or two references will supply abundant proof of this: "I do not doubt that in our congregation angels are present, not only in general to the whole Church, but also individually with those of whom it is said, 'Their angels do always behold the face of my Father who is in heaven.' A twofold Church is here: one of men, the other of angels. If we say any thing agreeably to reason and the mind of Scripture, the angels rejoice to pray with us." And a little above, "Our Saviour, therefore, as well as the Holy Spirit, who spoke by the prophets, instructs not only men, but angels and invisible powers."--Hom, xxiii. in Luc. vol. iii. p. 961. "Whoever, therefore, confessing his sins, repents, or confesses Christ before men in persecutions, is applauded by his brethren. For there is joy and gladness to the angels in heaven over one sinner that repenteth. By them, therefore, as by brethren (for both men and angels are sons of the same Creator and Father) they are praised."--In Genes. Hom. xvii. p. 110.] Celsus accused the Christians of being atheists, godless, men without God, because they would not worship those gods many and lords many, and those secondary, subordinate, auxiliary, and ministering divinities with which the heathen mythology abounded: Origen answers, we are not godless, we are not without an object of our prayer; we pray to God Almighty alone through the mediation only of his Son. "We must pray to God alone ([Greek: Mono gar proseukteon to epi pasi Theo]), who is over all things; and we must pray also to the only-begotten and first-born of every creature, the Word of God; and we must implore him as our High Priest to carry our prayer, first coming to him, to his God and our {140} God, to his Father and the Father of those who live agreeably to the word of God." [Cont. Cels. § 8. c. xxvi. vol. i. p. 761.] But Celsus, in this well representing the weakness and failings of human nature, still urged on the Christian the necessity, or at all events the expediency, of conciliating those intermediate beings who executed the will of the Supreme Being, and might haply have much left at their own will and discretion to give or to withhold; and therefore the desirableness of securing their good offices by prayer. To this Origen answers: "The one God ([Greek: Hena oun ton epi pasi theon haemin exenmenisteon])--the God who is over all, is to be propitiated by us, and to be appeased by prayer; the God who is rendered favourable by piety and all virtue. But if he (Celsus) is desirous, after the supreme God, to propitiate some others also, let him bear in mind, that just as a body in motion is accompanied by the motion of its shadow, so also by rendering the supreme God favourable, it follows that the person has all his (God's) friends, angels, souls, spirits, favourable also; for they sympathize with those who are worthy of God's favour; and not only do they become kindly affected towards the worthy, but they also join in their work with those who desire to worship the supreme God; and they propitiate him, and they pray with us, and supplicate with us; so that we boldly say, that together with men who on principle prefer the better part, and pray to God, ten thousands of holy powers join in prayer UNASKED ([Greek: aklaetoi])," [UNBIDDEN, UNCALLED upon.] [Cont. Cels. lib. viii. § 64. vol. i. p. 789.] What an opportunity was here for Origen to have stated, that though Christians do not call upon demons and the subordinate divinities of heathenism to aid {141} them, yet that they do call upon the ministering spirits, the true holy angels, messengers and servants of the most High God! But whilst speaking of them, and magnifying the blessings derived to man through their ministry, so far from encouraging us to ask them for their good offices, his testimony on the contrary is not merely negative; he positively asserts that when they assist mankind, it is without any request or prayer from man. Could this come from one who invoked angels? Another passage, although it adds little to the evidence of the above extract, I am unwilling to pass by, because it beautifully illustrates by the doctrine and practice of Origen the prayer, the only one adopted by the Anglican Church, offered by the Church to God for the succour and defence of the holy angels. Speaking of the unsatisfactory slippery road which they tread, who either depend upon the agency of demons for good, or are distressed by the fear of evil from them, Origen adds, "How far better ([Greek: poso Beltion]) were it to commit oneself to God who is over all, through Him who instructed us in this doctrine, Jesus Christ, and OF HIM to ask for every aid from the holy angels and the just, that they may rescue us from the earthly demons." [Cont. Cels. lib. viii. § 60. vol. i. p. 786.] In the following passage Origen answers the question of Celsus: "If you Christians admit the existence of angels, tell us what you consider their nature to be?" [Cont. Cels. lib. v. § 4. p. 579.] "Come," replies Origen, "let us consider these points. Now we confessedly say, that the angels are ministering spirits, and sent to minister on account of those who are to be heirs of salvation; that they ascend, bearing with them the supplications of men into the most pure {142} heavenly places of the world; and that they again descend from thence, bearing to each in proportion to what is appointed by God for them to minister to the well-doers. And learning that these are, from their work, called angels ([Greek: aggeloi], messengers, ministers sent to execute some commission), we find them, because they are divine, sometimes called even gods in the Holy Scriptures; but not so, as for any injunction to be given to us to worship and adore, instead of God, those who minister, and bring to us the things of God. For every request and prayer, and supplication and thanksgiving, must be sent up to Him who is God above all, through the High Priest, who is above all angels, even the living Word of God. And we also make our requests to the Word, and supplicate Him, and moreover offer our prayer to Him; if we can understand the difference between the right use and the abuse of prayer. For it is not reasonable for us to call upon angels, without receiving a knowledge concerning them which is above man. But supposing the knowledge concerning them, wonderful and unutterable as it is, had been received; that very knowledge describing their nature, and those to whom they are respectively assigned, would not give confidence in praying to any other than to Him who is sufficient for every thing, God who is above all, through our Saviour, the Son of God, who is the word, and wisdom, and the truth, and whatsoever else the writings of the prophets of God, and the Apostles of Jesus say concerning Him. But for the angels of God to be favourable to us, and to do all things for us, our disposition towards God is sufficient; we copy them to the utmost of human strength, {143} as they copy God. And our conception concerning his Son, the Word, according to what is come to us, is not opposed to the more clear conception of the holy angels concerning Him, but is daily approximating towards it in clearness and perspicuity." Again, he thus writes: "But Celsus wishes us to dedicate the first-fruits unto the demons; but we to Him who said, Let the earth bring forth grass, &c. But to whom we give the first-fruits, to him we send up also our prayers; having a great High Priest who is entered into the heavens, Jesus the Son of God; and this confession we hold fast as long as we live, having God favourable unto us, and his only-begotten Son being manifested among us, Jesus Christ. But if we wish to have a multitude favourable unto us, we learn that thousand thousands stand by Him, and ten thousand thousands minister unto Him; who, regarding those as kinsfolks and friends who imitate their piety to God, work together for the salvation of them who call upon God and pray sincerely; appearing also, and thinking that they ought to listen to them, and as if upon one watchword to go forth for the benefit and salvation of those who pray to God, to whom they also pray." [Cont. Cels. lib. viii. § 34. (Benedict, p. 766.)] After these multiplied declarations of Origen, not only confessing that Christians did not pray to the angels, but vindicating them from the charge of impiety brought against them by their enemies for their neglect of the worship of angels, is it possible to regard him as a witness in favour of prayer to angels? But it has been said that Origen in another passage (Cont. Cels. lib. viii. § 13. p. 751.) {144} plainly implies, that he would not be unwilling to discuss the question of some worship being due to angels and archangels, provided the idea of that worship, and the acts of the worshippers, were first cleared of all misapprehension. And I would not that any Catholic, whether in communion with the Church of England or of Rome, should make any other answer than Origen here gave to Celsus. Let me speak freely on this point. I should not respect the memory of Origen as I do, had he taught differently. The word which he uses is the Greek word "therapeusis," precisely the same word with that which the learned in medicine now use to describe the means of healing diseases. It is a word of very wide import. It signifies the care which a physician takes of his patient; the service paid to a master; the attention given to a superior; the affectionate attendance of a friend; the allegiance of a subject; the worship of the Supreme Being. Origen says, Provided Celsus will specify what kind of "therapeusis" he would wish to be paid to those angels and archangels whose existence we acknowledge, I am ready to enter upon the subject with him. This is all he says. And we of the Anglican Church are ready from our hearts to join him. Call it by what name we may, we are never backward in acknowledging ourselves bound to render it. We pay to the angels and archangels, and all the company of heaven, the homage of respect, and veneration, and love. They are indeed our fellow-servants; they are, like ourselves, creatures of God's hand; but they are exalted far above us in nature and in office. By the grace of God, we would daily endeavour to become less distant from {145} them in purity, in zeal, in obedience. Origen here speaks not one word of adoration, of invocation, of prayer. He speaks of a feeling and a behaviour, which the Greeks called "therapeusis," and which we best render by "respect, veneration, and love." Far from us be the thought of lowering the holy angels in the eyes of our fellow-creatures; equally far from us be the thought of invoking them, of asking them even for their prayers. They are holy creatures and holy messengers: we will think and speak of them with reverence, and gratitude, and affection; but they are creatures and messengers still, and when we think or speak of the object of prayer, we think and speak solely and exclusively of God. With regard to Origen's opinion, as to the invocation of the souls of saints departed, a very few words will suffice. He clearly records his opinion that the faithful are still waiting for us, and that till we all rejoice together, their joy will not be full: he leaves among the mysteries not to be solved now the question whether the departed can benefit the human race at all; and he has added reflections, full of edifying and solemn admonition, which would dissuade his fellow-believers from placing their confidence in any virtues, or intercessions, or merits of saints, and in any thing except the mere mercy of God, through Jesus Christ, and our own individual labour in the work of the Lord. In his seventh homily on Leviticus, in a passage partly quoted by Bellarmin, we read[51]--"Not even the Apostles have yet received their joy, but even they are waiting, in order that I also may become a partaker of {146} their joy. For the saints departing hence do not immediately receive all the rewards of their deserts; but they wait even for us, though we be delaying and dilatory[52]. For they have not perfect joy as long as they grieve for our errors, and mourn for our sins." Then, having quoted the Epistle to the Hebrews, he proceeds,--"You see, therefore, that Abraham is yet waiting to obtain those things that are perfect; so is Isaac and Jacob; and so all the prophets are waiting for us, that they might obtain eternal blessedness with us. Wherefore, even this mystery is kept, to the last day of delayed judgment." [Footnote 51: Vol. ii. p. 222. Nondum enim receperunt lætitiam suam, ne apostoli quidem, &c. But see Huetius on Origen, lib. ii. q. 11. No. 10.] [Footnote 52: He thinks it probable, that the saints departed feel an interest in the welfare of men on earth. See vol. iv. p. 273.] Modern Roman Catholic writers tell us, that we must consider Origen here as only referring to the reunion of the soul with the body; but his words cannot be so interpreted. The cause of the saints still waiting for their consummation of bliss, is stated to be the will of God, that all the faithful should enter upon their full enjoyment of blessedness together. Again: it may be asked, whether the following passage could have come from the pen of one who prayed to the saints, as already reigning with Christ in heaven. "But now whether the saints who are removed from the body and are with Christ, act at all, and labour for us, like the angels who minister to our salvation; or whether, again, the wicked removed from the body act at all according to the purpose of their own mind, like the bad angels, with whom, it is said by Christ, that they will be sent into eternal fires;--let this too be {147} considered among the secret things of God, mysteries not to be committed to writing." [Epist. ad Rom. lib. ii. (Benedict. vol. iv. p. 479.) "Jam vero si etiam," &c.] In a passage found in Origen's Comment on Ezekiel's text, "Though Noah, Daniel, and Job, were in it, they should deliver neither son nor daughter, they should deliver only their own souls by their righteousness," [Hom. iii. vol. iii. p. 372.] independently of the testimony borne to the point before us, we read a very interesting and awakening lesson of general application:-- "First, let us expound the passage agreeably to its plain sense, in consequence of the ignorance of some who maintain the ideas of their own mind to be the truth of God, and often say, 'Every one of us will be able by his prayers to snatch whomsoever he will from hell,' and introduce iniquity to the Lord; not seeing that the righteousness of the righteous shall be upon him, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon him; so that each shall die in his own sin, and each live in his own person. My father being a martyr profits me nothing, if I shall not live well, and adorn the nobleness of my race,--that is, his testimony and confession, by which he was glorified in Christ. It profiteth not the Jews to say, 'We were not born of fornication, we have one father, the Lord;' and, a little after, 'Abraham is our father.' Whatever they may say, whatever they will assume, if they have not the faith of Abraham they make their boast in vain; for they will not be saved on account of their being children of Abraham. Since, therefore, some have formed incorrect notions, we have necessarily brought in the plain sense of the passage as to the letter, saying, Noah, Daniel, and Job will not rescue sons or daughters; they only will be saved. Let no {149} one of us put his trust in a just father, a holy mother, chaste brethren. Blessed is the man who hath his hope in himself, and in the right way. But to those who place confident trust in the saints, we bring forward no improper example,--'Cursed is the man whose hope is in man;' and again, 'Trust ye not in man.' And this also, 'It is good to trust in the Lord rather than in princes[53].' If we must hope in some object, leaving all others, let us hope in the Lord, saying, 'Though a host of men were set against me, yet shall not my heart be afraid.'" [Footnote 53: These observations may perhaps refer more especially to the saints still on earth; but they apply to all helpers, save God alone.] He finishes the homily thus: "The righteous see three periods; the present, the period of change when the Lord will judge, and that which will be after the resurrection,--that is, the eternity of life in heaven in Jesus Christ, to whom be glory and dominion for ever and ever. Amen." Can this confessor of the Christian faith have ever taught his fellow-believers to plead the merits of the saints, or to pray for their intercessions? How strongly are the above sentiments contrasted with a passage in the third of the spurious homilies called In Diversos; the first clause of which is referred to by Bellarmin, as containing Origen's approbation of giving honour to the saints[54]. [Footnote 54: I hardly need detain the reader by any proof of the spuriousness of this passage; the whole work from which it is taken is rejected altogether by the Benedictine editors: "Reliqua ejusmodi spuria omittenda censuimus, qualia sunt ... Homiliæ in diversos;" and they have not allowed a single line of it to appear in their volumes, not even in the small character.--Vol. iv. p. 1.] "The memory of these (the Innocents) is always {149} celebrated, as is right, in the Churches. These, therefore, since they were unjustly or impiously put to death in peace and rest, having suffered much for the name of the Lord, were taken from this world, to remain in the eternal Church for ever in Christ. But their parents for the merits of their suffering will receive a worthy recompense of reward from the just and eternal Lord God." Here we have strongly marked indeed the difference between Origen himself, and the errors fastened upon him by the design or ignorance of subsequent times. Were not his testimony a subject of great moment, I should plead guilty to having detained my readers too long on Origen; and yet I cannot dismiss him without first refreshing our minds with the remembrance of some of his beautiful reflections on a Christian's prayer. We need not read them with a controversial eye, and they may be profitable to us all. "I think, then, (says this early teacher in Christ's school) that when proceeding to prayer, a Christian will be more readily disposed, and be in a better tone for the general work of prayer, if he will first tarry a little, and put himself into the right frame, casting off every distracting and disturbing thought, and with his best endeavour recalling to mind the vastness of HIM to whom he is drawing near, and how unholy a thing it is to approach him with a carelessness and indifference, and, as it were, contempt; laying aside also every thing foreign to the subject;--so to come to prayer as one who stretcheth forth his soul first, before his hands; and lifts up his mind first, before his eyes, to God; and before he stands up, raising from the ground the leading [150} principle of his nature, and lifting that up to the Lord of all. So far casting away all remembrance of evil towards any of those who may seem to have injured him, as he wishes God not to remember evil against him, who has himself been guilty, and has trespassed against many of his neighbours, or in whatever he is conscious to have done contrary to right reason." [De Oratione, vol. i. § 31. p. 267.] "Having divided prayer into its several parts" (he continues), "I may bring my work to a close. There are then four parts of prayer requiring description, which I have found scattered in the Scriptures, all of which every one should embody in his prayer:-- "First, we must offer glory (doxologies) to the best of our ability in the opening and commencement of our prayer, to God through Christ who is glorified with Him in the Holy Spirit, who is praised together. After this each person should offer general thanksgivings both for the blessings granted to all, and for those which he has individually obtained from God. After the thanksgiving, it appears to me right, that becoming, as it were, a bitter accuser of his own sins to God, he should petition first of all for a remedy to release him from the habit which impels him to transgress, and then for remission of the past. And after the confession, I think he ought in the fourth place, to add a supplication for great and heavenly things, both individual and universal, and for his relations and friends. After all, he should close his prayer with an ascription of glory to God through Christ in the Holy Ghost." [Sect. 33. p. 271.] {151} * * * * * SECTION VI.--SUPPLEMENTARY SECTION ON ORIGEN. I have above intimated my intention of reserving for a separate section our examination of a passage ascribed to Origen, in which he is represented as having invoked an angel to come down from heaven, to succour him and his fellow-creatures on earth. The passage purports to be part of Origen's comment on the opening verse of the prophecy of Ezekiel, "The heavens were opened." After the fullest investigation, and patient weighing of the whole section, I am fully persuaded, first, that the passage is an interpolation, never having come from the pen of Origen; and secondly, that, whoever were its author, it can be regarded only as an instance of those impassioned apostrophes, which are found in great variety in the addresses of ancient Christian orators. But since some of the most respected writers of the Church of Rome have regarded it as genuine, and deemed it worthy of being cited in evidence, I feel it incumbent to state at length, for those readers who may desire to enter at once fully into the question, the reasons on which my judgment is founded; whilst others, who may perhaps consider the discussion of the several points here as too great an interruption to the general argument, may for the present pass this section, and reserve it for subsequent inquiry. It will be, in the first place, necessary to quote the whole passage entire, however long; for the mere extract of that portion which is cited as Origen's prayer to an {152} angel, might leave a false impression as to the real merits of the case. "The heavens are opened. The heavens were closed, and at the coming of Christ they were opened, IN ORDER THAT THEY BEING LAID OPEN THE HOLY GHOST MIGHT COME UPON HIM in the appearance of a dove. For he could not come to us unless he had first descended on one who partook of his own nature. Jesus ascended up on high, he led captivity captive, he received gifts for men. He who descended is the same who ascended above all heavens, that he might fill all things; and he gave some as apostles, some as prophets, some as evangelists, some as pastors and masters, for the perfecting of the saints." [Vol. iii. p. 358. Hom. i. in Ezek.] "[The heavens were opened. It is not enough for one heaven to be opened: very many are opened, that not from one, but from all, angels may descend to those who are to be saved; angels who ascended and descended upon the Son of man, and came to him, and ministered to him. Now the angels descended because Christ first descended, fearing to descend before the Lord of all powers and things commanded. But when they saw the chieftain of the army of heaven dwelling in earthly places, then they entered through the opened road, following their Lord, and obeying his will, who distributes them as guardians of those that believe on his name. Thou yesterday wast under a devil, to-day thou art under an angel. Do not ye, saith the Lord, despise one of the least of those who are in the Church? Verily, I say unto you, that their angels through all things see the face of the Father who is in heaven. The angels attend on thy salvation; they were granted for the ministry of the Son of God, and {153} they say among themselves, If he descended, and descended into a body, if he is clothed in mortal flesh, and endured the cross, and died for man, why are we resting idle? Why do we spare ourselves? Haste away! Let all of us angels descend from heaven! Thus also was there a multitude of the heavenly host praising and blessing God when Christ was born. All things are full of angels. COME, ANGEL, take up one who by the word is converted from former error, from the doctrine of demons, from iniquity speaking on high, and taking him up like a good physician, cherish him, and instruct him. He is a little child, to-day he is born, an old man again growing young; and undertake him, granting him the baptism of the second regeneration; and summon to thyself other companions of thy ministry, that you all may together train for the faith those who have been sometime deceived. For there is greater joy in heaven over one sinner repenting, than over ninety and nine just persons who need no repentance. Every creature exults, rejoices with, and with applause addresses those who are to be saved; for the expectation of the creature waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of God. And although those who have interpolated the apostolical writings are unwilling that such passages should be in their books as may prove Christ to be the Creator, yet every creature waiteth for the sons of God when they shall be freed from sin, when they shall be taken away from the hand of Zabulon[55], when they shall be regenerated by Christ. But now it is time that we touch somewhat on the present place. The Prophet sees not a vision, but visions of God. {154} Why did he see not one, but many visions? Hear the Lord promising and saying, I have multiplied visions. 8. 'The fifth month.' This was the fifth year of the captivity of king Joachim. In the thirtieth year of Ezekiel's age, and the fifth of the captivity of Joachim, the prophet is sent to the Jews. The most merciful Father did not despise the people, nor leave them a long time unadmonished. It is the fifth year. How much time intervened? Five years elapsed since they were captives in bondage.] (The portion between brackets is what I regard as an interpolation.) [Footnote 55: This word is frequently used for "Diabolum." Thus in a hymn used in the Roman ritual on Michaelmas-day we read, "Michaelem in virtute conterentem Zabulum."] "Immediately the Holy Spirit descends. He opened the heavens, that they who were oppressed by the yoke of bondage might see those things which were seen by the prophet. For when he says, The heavens were opened, in some measure they see with the eyes of their heart what he had seen even with the eyes of his flesh." Now the question is, Can this apostrophe to an angel be admitted as evidence that Origen held, and in his own person acted upon the doctrine of the Invocation of Angels? The nature of the present work precludes us from entering at length on the broad question, how far we can with safety regard the several writings which now purport to be translations of Origen's compositions, as on the whole the works of that early Christian writer. A multitude of those works which, until almost the middle of the sixteenth century, were circulated as Origen's, have long been by common consent excluded from the catalogue of his works[56]. On this subject I {155} would refer any one, who desires to enter upon the inquiry, to the several prefaces of the Benedictine editors, who point out many sources of information, as well from among their friends as from those with whom they differ. Our inquiry must be limited within far narrower bounds, though I trust our arguments may assist somewhat in establishing the principles on which the student may at first guide himself in the wider range of investigation. [Footnote 56: See preface to vol. iv. of the Benedictine edition.] We will first look to the external evidence bearing on the passage in question, and then to the internal character of the passage itself. Origen's Commentaries on Ezekiel were divided into no fewer than twenty-five volumes, which he is said to have begun in Cæsarea of Palestine, and to have finished in Athens. Of these only one single fragment remains, namely, part of the twenty-first volume[57]. Jerome says that he translated fourteen of Origen's homilies on Ezekiel. Of these not one passage in the original language of Origen is known to be in existence. We must now, therefore, either receive the existing translations generally as Origen's, (whether they are Jerome's translations or not,) or we must consider Origen's homilies on Ezekiel as altogether lost to us. But supposing that we receive these works as containing, on the whole, traditionary translations of Origen, the genuineness of any one passage may yet become the subject of fair criticism. And whilst some persons reject whole masses of them altogether, the history of his works cannot but suggest some very perplexing points of suspicion and doubt. [Footnote 57: See Benedictine edition, vol. iii. p. 351. and Eusebius, Eccl. Hist. lib. vi. c. 6. there referred to.] {156} The great body of his homilies, Origen probably delivered extempore in the early part of his ministry to the Christians of Cæsarea. Eusebius tells us, that not before Origen had reached his sixtieth year did he sanction the notaries (persons well known to history and corresponding to the short-hand writers[58] of the present day) in publishing any of his homilies. [Eccles. Hist. lib. vi. c. 36.] But the Benedictine editor, De la Rue, conceives that those men might surreptitiously and against the preacher's wishes have published some of Origen's homilies. Be this as it may. Suppose that the homilies on Ezekiel were published by Origen himself, and were translated by Jerome himself, our doubts are not removed even by that supposition. The same editor in the same preface tells us, "It is known to the learned that it was Jerome's habit, in translating Greek, sometimes to insert some things of his own[59]." Not that I for a moment conceive the passage under consideration to have come in its Latin dress from the pen of Jerome; for my conviction being that it is an interpolation of a much later date, I mention the circumstance to show, that even when Jerome, with his professed accuracy, is the translator, we can in no case feel sure that we are reading the exact and precise sentiments of Origen. [Footnote 58: The Latin word "notarius" (notary) does not come so near as our own English expression, "short-hand writer," to the Greek word used by Eusebius,--"tachygraphus," "quick-writer." The report of Eusebius as to the homilies of Origen having been delivered extempore, and taken down by these "quick-writers," is confirmed by Pamphilus the martyr, as quoted by Valesius, in the annotations on this passage of Eusebius.--Apol. Orig. lib. i.] [Footnote 59: Cui in vertendis Græcis sciunt eruditi solemne esse nonnulla interdum de suo inserere.] {157} Ruffinus, his celebrated contemporary, accused Jerome of many inaccuracies in his translations; and yet what were the principles of translation adopted by Ruffinus himself, as his own, we are not left to infer; for we learn it from his own pen. His voluntary acknowledgment in the peroration which he added to Origen's Comment on the Epistle of St. Paul to the Romans, strongly and painfully exhibits to us how little dependence can safely be placed on such translations whenever the original is lost; how utterly insufficient and unsatisfactory is any evidence drawn from them, as to the real genuine sentiments and expressions of the author. Ruffinus informs us, that with regard to many of the various works of Origen, he changed the preacher's extemporary addresses, as delivered in the Church, into a more explanatory form, "adding, supplying, filling up what he thought wanting[60]." [Footnote 60: Dum supplere cupimus ea quæ ab Origene in auditorio Ecclesiæ extempore (non tam explanationis quam ædificationis intentione) perorata sunt.... Si addere quod videar, et explere quæ desunt.--Orig. vol. iv. p. 688.] Moreover, he proceeds so far as to tell us[61] that his false {158} friends had remonstrated with him for not publishing the works under his own name, instead of retaining Origen's, his changes having been so great; a point, which he was far from unwilling to acknowledge. This must appear to every one unsatisfactory in the extreme, and to shake one's confidence in any evidence drawn from such a source. Indeed, the Benedictine editor, with great cause and candour, laments this course of proceeding on the part of Ruffinus, as throwing a doubt and uncertainty, and suspicion, over all the works so tampered with. "This one thing (observes that honest editor) would the learned desire, that Ruffinus had spared himself the labour of filling up what he thought deficient. For since the Greek text has perished, it can scarcely with certainty be distinguished, where Origen himself speaks, or where Ruffinus obtrudes his own merchandise upon us." This is more than enough to justify our remarks. I must, however, refer to the conduct of another editor and translator of Origen, of a similar tendency. It unhappily shows the disposition to sacrifice every thing to the received opinions of the Church of Rome, rather than place the whole evidence of antiquity before the world, and abide by the result. How many works this principle, in worse hands, may have mutilated, or utterly buried in oblivion, and left to perish, it is impossible to conjecture; that the principle is unworthy the spirit of Christianity will not now be questioned. That editor and translator, in his advertisement on the Commentary upon St. John, thus professes the principles which he had adopted: "Know, moreover, that I have found nothing in this book which {159} seemed to be inconsistent with the decrees of holy Mother Church: for had I found any, I would not have translated the book, or would have marked the suspected place." [Quoted by the Benedictine, vol. iv. p. viii.] The Benedictine proceeds to say, that the writer had not kept his word, but had allowed many heterodox passages to escape, whilst he had deliberately withdrawn others. [Footnote 61: His words, as indicative of his principles of translation, and bearing immediately on the question, as to the degree of authority which should be assigned to the remains of Origen, when the original is lost, deserve a place here: "I am exposed to a new sort of charge at their hands; for thus they address me,--In your writings, since very many parts in them (plurima in eis) are considered to be of your own production, give the title of your own name, and write, for example, The Books of Explanations of Ruffinus on the Epistle to the Romans,--but the whole of this they offer me, not from any love of me, but from hatred to the author. But I, who consult my conscience more than my fame, even if I am seen to add some things, and to fill up what are wanting, or to shorten what are too long, yet I do not think it right to steal the title of him, who laid the foundations of the works, and supplied the materials for the buildings. Yet, in truth, it may be at the option of the reader, when he shall have approved of the work, to ascribe the merits to whom he will."] Many works probably, of the earliest ages, have been wholly or in part lost to us from the working of the same principle in its excess. Rather than perpetuate any sentiments at variance with the received doctrines of the Church, it was considered the duty of the faithful to let works, in themselves valuable, but containing such sentiments, altogether perish, or to exclude the objectionable passages. I would now invite you to examine the passage itself, and determine whether it does not bear within it internal evidence of its having been altogether interpolated. In the first place, on the words upon which it professes to be a comment, the author had already given his comment, and assigned to them another meaning. "The heavens were opened," he says: "Before the time of Christ the heavens were shut; but at his advent they were opened, THAT THE HOLY SPIRIT MIGHT DESCEND FIRST ON HIM;" quoting also among others the passage which speaks of Christ taking captivity captive. And then after the passage in question, in which he assigns a totally different reason for the opening of the heavens; without any allusion to the intervening ideas, he carries on, and concludes the comment which he had begun,--in words which fit on well with the close of that comment, but which, as they stand now at the close of the intervening passage about the angels, are abrupt and incoherent--"Forthwith the Holy Spirit {160} descended;" recurring also again to the idea which he had before introduced of Christ benefiting those who were in captivity. A passage which affixes to the words commented upon, a different interpretation from one already given in the same paragraph; and which forces itself abruptly and incoherently in the middle of a brief comment, must offer itself to our examination under strong grounds of suspicion, that it has been interpolated. But when we examine the substance of the passage, its sentiments, the ideas conveyed, and the associations suggested, and then think of the author to whom it is ascribed, few probably will be disposed to regard it as a faithful mirror in which to contemplate the real sentiments of Origen. How utterly unworthy of the sublime burst of Christian eloquence which now delights us in undoubted works of Origen, is this strange and degrading fiction! The true Origen THERE represents the tens of thousands of angelic spirits ten thousand times told, as ever surrounding the throne of God, and ministering for the blessing of those in whose behalf God himself wills them to serve. [Vol. i. p. 767. Contr. Cels. viii. 34.] Here he represents the revelation of the holiest of holies as a throwing open of the various divisions or compartments of the celestial kingdom for all the angels to hasten forth together, from their several places of indolence and carelessness and self-indulgence, (for such he represents their state to have been,) to visit this earth. Surely such a comment would better suit the mythology of the cave and dens of Æolus and his imprisoned winds (velut agmine facto qua data porta ruunt) than the awfully sublime revelation vouchsafed to the prophet Ezekiel. And how unworthy and degrading is that representation of the {161} heavenly host, resting inactive, and sparing themselves from toil, until they witnessed Christ's descent and humiliation; and then when chid and put to shame and rebuke, and mutually roused to action by their fellows, coming down to visit this earth, and rushing through the opened portals of heaven. Again, we see how incoherent is the whole section which contains the alleged prayer to angels: "Thou wast yesterday under a demon, to-day thou art under an angel: the angels minister to thy salvation; they are granted for the ministry of the Son of God, &c. All things are full of angels. Come, Angel, take up one who is converted from his ancient error, &c. And call to thee other companions of thy ministry, that all of you alike may train up to the faith those who were once deceived." Indeed the passage seems to carry within itself its own condemnation so entirely, that what we have before alleged, both of internal and external evidence, may appear superfluous. Surely the conceit of a preacher of God's word addressing an angel, (which of them he thus individually addresses does not appear; for he says not "My Angel," as though he were appealing to one whom he regarded as his guardian, the view gratuitously suggested in the marginal note of the Benedictine editor, "the invocation of a guardian angel,") and bidding some one angel, as a sort of summoner, to go and call to himself all the angels of heaven to come in one body, and instruct those who are in error, is, even as a rhetorical apostrophe, as unworthy the mind of a Christian philosopher, as it is in the light of a prayer totally inconsistent with the plain sentiments of Origen on the very subject of angelic invocation. Even had Origen not left us his deliberate opinions in works of undoubted genuineness, such a {162} strange, incoherent, and childish rhapsody could never be relied upon by sober and upright men as a precedent sanctioning a Christian's prayer to angels; no one would rely upon such evidence in points of far less moment, even were it uncontradicted by the same witness. * * * * * SECTION VII.--ST. CYPRIAN. In the middle of the third century, Cyprian [Jerom, vol. iv. p. 342.], a man of substance and a rhetorician of Carthage, was converted to Christianity. He was then fifty years of age; and his learning, virtues, and devotedness to the cause which he had espoused, very soon raised him to the dignity, the responsibility, and, in those days, the great danger, of the Episcopate. (Cyprian is said to have been converted about A.D. 246, to have been consecrated A.D. 248, and to have suffered martyrdom A.D. 258.) Many of his writings of undoubted genuineness are preserved, and they have been appealed to in every age as the works of a faithful son of the Catholic Church. On the subject of prayer he has written very powerfully and affectingly; but I find no expression which can by possibility imply that he practised or countenanced the invocation of saints and angels. I have carefully examined every sentence alleged by its most strenuous defenders, and I cannot extract from them one single grain of evidence which can bear the test of inquiry. Even did the passages quoted require to be taken in the sense affixed to them {163} by those advocates, they prove nothing; they do not bear even remotely upon the subject, whilst I am persuaded that to every unprejudiced mind a meaning will appear to have been attached to them which the author did not intend to convey. The first quotation to which our attention is called is from the close of his treatise De Habitu Virginum, which contains some very edifying reflections. In the last clause of that treatise the advocates for the invocation of saints represent Cyprian as requesting the virgins to remember him in their prayers at the throne of grace when they shall have been taken to heaven. "As we have borne the image of Him who is of the earth, let us also bear the image of him who is from heaven. This image the virgin-state bears,--integrity bears it, holiness and truth bear it; rules of discipline mindful of God bear it, retaining justice with religion, firm in the faith, humble in fear, strong to endure all things, gentle to receive an injury, readily disposed to pity, with one mind and with one heart in brotherly peace. All which ye ought, O good virgins, to observe, to love and fulfil; ye who, retired for the service of God and Christ, with your greater and better part are going before towards the Lord to whom you have devoted yourselves. Let those who are advanced in age exercise rule over the younger; ye younger, offer to your equals a stimulus; encourage yourselves by mutual exhortations; by examples emulous of virtue invite each other to glory; remain firm; conduct yourselves spiritually; gain the end happily. Only remember us then, when your virgin-state shall begin to be honoured." [Tantum mementote tunc nostri, cum incipiet in vobis virginitas honorari.--Page 180.] {164} The second instance, from the close of his letter to Cornelius, puts before us a beautiful act of friendship and brotherly affection worthy of every Christian brother's and friend's imitation. But how it can be applied in supporting the cause of the invocation of saints, I cannot see. The supporters of that doctrine say that Cyprian suggests to his friend, still living on earth, that whichever of the two should be first called away, he should continue when in heaven to pray for the survivor on earth. Suppose it to be so. That has not any approximation to our praying to one who is already dead and gone to his reward. But Cyprian surely intended to convey a very different meaning, namely this, that the two friends should continue to pray, each in his place, mutually for each other and for their friends, and relieve each other's wants and necessities whilst both survived; and whenever death should remove the one from earth to happiness, the survivor should not forget their bond of friendship, but should still continue to pray to God for their brothers and sisters. The passage translated to the letter, runs thus: "Let us be mutually mindful of each other, with one mind and one heart. On both sides, let us always pray for each other; let us by mutual love relieve each other's pressures and distresses; and if either of us from hence, by the speed of the Divine favour, go on before the {165} other, let our love persevere before the Lord; for our brothers and sisters with the Father's mercy let not prayer cease. My desire, most dear brother, is that you may always prosper." [Epist. 57. Benedict, p. 96.--Memores nostri invicem simus concordes atque unanimes: utrobique pro nobis semper oremus, pressuras et angustias mutua caritate relevemus, et si quis istinc nostrum prior divinæ dignationis celeritate præcesserit, perseveret apud Dominum nostra dilectio; pro fratribus et sororibus nostris apud misericordiam Patris non cesset oratio. Opto te, frater carissime, semper bene valere.--This epistle is by some editors numbered as the 60th, by others as the 61st, the 7th, and the 69th, &c.] Whether the above view of this passage be founded in reason or not, it matters little to the point at issue. Let both these passages be accepted in the sense assigned to them by some Roman Catholic writers, yet there is not a shadow of analogy between the language and conduct of Cyprian, and the language and conduct of those who now invoke saints departed. In each case Cyprian, still in the body, was addressing fellow-creatures still sojourning on earth. The very utmost which these passages could be forced to countenance would be, that the righteous, when in heaven, may be mindful in their prayers of their friends, who are still exposed to the dangers from which they have themselves finally escaped, and who, when both were on earth, requested them to remember the survivors in their prayers. But this is a question totally different from our addressing them in supplication and prayer; a difference which I am most anxious that both myself and my readers should keep in mind throughout. In the extract from Cyprian's letter, a modern author having rendered the single word "utrobique," by the words "in this world and the next" I am induced to add a few further observations on the passage. (The Latin original and the version here referred to, will be placed side by side in the Appendix.) It will, I think, appear to most readers on a careful examination of the passage, that the expression "utrobique[62]" "on both sides," or "on both parts," whatever be its precise {166} meaning, so far from referring to "this world and the next," must evidently be confined to the condition of both parties now in this life, because it stands in direct contradistinction to what follows, the supposed case of the death of either of the two; and because it applies no less to the mutual relief of each other's sufferings and afflictions during their joint lives, than to their mutual prayers: it cannot mean that all the mutual benefits to be derived from their mutual remembrance of each other, were to come solely through the means of their prayers. They were doubtless mutually to pray for each other; but, in addition to their prayers, they were also to relieve each other's pressures and difficulties with mutual love, and that too before the event afterwards contemplated, namely, the removal of one of them by death. [Footnote 62: Utrobique is rendered by Facciolati [Greek: hekaterothi]--"in utraque parte, utrimque."] Bishop Fell thus comments on the passage: "The sense seems to be, When either of us shall die; whether I, who preside at Carthage, or you, who are presiding at Rome, shall be the survivor, let the prayer to God of him whose lot shall be to remain the longest among the living, persevere, and continue." "Meanwhile," continues the Bishop[63], "we by no means doubt that souls admitted into heaven apply to God, the best and greatest of Beings, that he would have compassion on those who are dwelling on the earth. But it does not thence follow, that prayers should be offered to the saints. THE MAN WHO PETITIONS THEM MAKES THEM GODS (Deos qui rogat ille facit)." [Oxford, 1682, p. 143.] Rigaltius, himself {167} a Roman Catholic, doubts whether, when Cyprian wrote this letter, he had any idea before his mind of saints departed praying for the living. He translates "utrobique" very much as I have done, "with reciprocal love, with mutual charity." His last observations on this passage are very remarkable. After having confessed the sentiments to be worthy of a Christian, that the saints pray for us, and having argued that Cyprian could not have thought it necessary to ask a saint to retain his brotherly kindness in heaven, for he could not be a saint if he did not continue to love his brethren, he thus concludes: "In truth it is a pious and faithful saying, That of those who having already put off mortality are made joint-heirs with Christ, and of those who surviving on earth will hereafter be joint-heirs with Christ, the Church is one, and is by the Holy Spirit so well joined together as not to be torn asunder by the dissolution of the body. They pray to God for us, and we praise God for them, and thus with mutual affection (utrobique) we always pray for each other." [Paris, 1666. p. 92.] [Footnote 63: See the note of the Benedictine editors on this passage (p. 467), in which they refer to the sentiments of Rigaltius, Pamelius, and Bishop Fell, whom they call "the most illustrious Bishop of Oxford."] I will detain you only by one or two more extracts from Cyprian; one forming part of the introduction to his Comment on the Lord's Prayer, which is fitted for the edification of Christians in every age; the other closing his treatise on Mortality, one of those beautiful productions by which, during the plague which raged at Carthage in the year 252, he comforted and exhorted the Christians, that they might meet death without fear or amazement, in sure and certain hope of eternal blessedness in heaven. The sentiments in the latter passage will be responded to by every good Catholic, whether in communion with the Church of Rome or {168} with the Church of England; whilst in the former we are reminded, that to pray as Cyprian prayed, we must address ourselves to God alone in the name and trusting to the merits only of his blessed Son. "He who caused us to live, taught us also to pray, with that kindness evidently by which He deigns to give and confer on us every other blessing; that when we speak to the Father in the prayer and supplication which his Son taught, we might the more readily be heard. He had already foretold, that the hour was coming when the true worshippers should worship the Father in spirit and in truth; and He fulfilled what He before promised, that we, who have received the spirit and truth from his sanctification, may from his instruction offer adoration truly and spiritually. For what prayer can be more spiritual than that which is given to us by Christ, by whom even the Holy Spirit is sent to us? What can be a more true prayer with the Father than that which came from the lips of the Son, who is Truth? So that to pray otherwise than He taught, is not only ignorance, but a fault; since He has himself laid it down and said, Ye reject the Commandment of God to establish your own traditions. Let us pray then, most beloved brethren, as our teacher, God, has instructed us. It is a welcome and friendly prayer to petition God from his own, to mount up to his ears by the prayer of Christ. Let the Father recognize the words of his Son. When we offer a prayer let Him who dwelleth inwardly in our breast, Himself be in our voice; and since we have Him as our advocate with the Father for our sins, when as sinners we are petitioning for our sins let us put forth the words of our Advocate." [De Orat. Dom. p. 204.] "We must consider, (he says at the close of his {169} treatise on the Mortality [Page 236.],) most beloved brethren, and frequently reflect that we have renounced the world, and are meanwhile living here as strangers and pilgrims. Let us embrace the day which assigns each to his own home ... which restores us to paradise and the kingdom of heaven, snatched from hence and liberated from the entanglements of the world. What man, when he is in a foreign country, would not hasten to return to his native land?... We regard paradise as our country.... We have begun already to have the patriarchs for our parents. Why do we not hasten and run that we may see our country, and salute our parents? There a large number of dear ones are waiting for us, of parents, brothers, children; a numerous and full crowd are longing for us; already secure of their own immortality, and still anxious for our safety. To come to the sight and the embrace of these, how great will be the mutual joy to them and to us! What a pleasure of the kingdom of heaven is there without the fear of dying, and with an eternity of living! How consummate and never-ending a happiness! There is the glorious company of the apostles; there is the assembly of exulting prophets; there is the unnumbered family of martyrs crowned for the victory of their struggles and suffering; there are virgins triumphing, who, by the power of chastity, have subdued the lusts of the flesh and the body; there are the merciful recompensed, who with food and bounty to the poor have done the works of righteousness, who keeping the Lord's commands have transferred their earthly inheritance into heavenly treasures. To these, O most dearly beloved brethren, let us hasten with most eager longing; {170} let us desire that our lot may be to be with these speedily; to come speedily to Christ. Let God see this to be our thought; let our Lord Christ behold this to be the purpose of our mind and faith, who will give more abundant rewards of his glory to them, whose desires for himself have been the greater." Such is the evidence of St. Cyprian. * * * * * SECTION VIII.--LACTANTIUS. Cyprian suffered martyrdom about the year 260. Towards the close of this century, and at the beginning of the fourth, flourished Lactantius. He was deeply imbued with classical learning and philosophy. Before he became a writer (as Jerome informs us [Jerom, vol. iv. part ii. p. 119. Paris, 1706]) he taught rhetoric at Nicomedia; and afterwards in extreme old age he was the tutor of Cæsar Crispus, son of Constantine, in Gaul. Among many other writings which Jerome enumerates, he specifies the book, "On the Anger of God," as a most beautiful work. Bellarmin, however, speaks of him disparagingly, as one who had fallen into many errors, and was better versed in Cicero than in the Holy Scriptures. His testimony is allowed by the supporters of the adoration of spirits and angels to be decidedly against them; they do not refer to a single passage likely to aid their cause; and they are chiefly anxious to depreciate his evidence. I will call your attention only to two passages in his works. The {171} one is in his first book on False Religion: "God hath created ministers, whom we call messengers (angels);... but neither are these gods, nor do they wish to be called gods, nor to be worshipped, as being those who do nothing beyond the command and will of God." [Vol. i. p. 31.] The other passage is from his work on a Happy Life: "Nor let any one think that souls are judged immediately after death. For all are kept in one common place of guard, until the time come when the great Judge will institute an inquiry into their deserts. Then those whose righteousness shall be approved, will receive the reward of immortality; and those whose sins and crimes are laid open shall not rise again, but shall be hidden in the same darkness with the wicked--appointed to fixed punishments." [Chap. xxi. p. 574.] This composition is generally believed to have been written about the year 317. * * * * * SECTION IX.--EUSEBIUS. The evidence of Eusebius, on any subject connected with primitive faith and practice, cannot be looked to without feelings of deep interest. He flourished about the beginning of the fourth century, and was Bishop of Caesarea, in Palestine. His testimony has always been appealed to in the Catholic Church, as an authority not likely to be gainsaid. He was a voluminous writer, and his writings were very diversified in their character. {172} Whatever be our previous sentiments we cannot too carefully examine the remains of this learned man. But in his writings, historical, biographical, controversial, or by whatever name they may be called, overflowing as they are with learning, philosophical and scriptural, I can find no one single passage which countenances the decrees of the Council of Trent; not one passage which would encourage me to hope that I prayed as the primitive Church was wont to pray, if by invocation I requested an angel or a saint to procure me any favour, or to pray for me. The testimony of Eusebius has a directly contrary tendency. Among the authorities quoted by the champions of the invocation of saints, I can find only three from Eusebius; and I sincerely lament the observations which truth and justice require me to make here, in consequence of the manner in which his evidence has been cited. The first passage to which I refer is quoted by Bellarmin from the history of Eusebius, to prove that the spirit of a holy one goes direct from earth to heaven. This passage is not from the pen of Eusebius; and if it were, it would not bear on our inquiry. The second is quoted by the same author, from the Evangelica Præparatio, to prove that the primitive Christians offered prayers to the saints. Neither is this from the pen of Eusebius. The third Extract, from the account of the martyrdom of Polycarp, is intended to prove that the martyrs were worshipped. Even this, one of the most beautiful passages in ancient history, as it is represented by Bellarmin and others, is interpolated. The first passage, which follows a description of the {173} martyr Potamiæna's sufferings, is thus quoted by Bellarmin: "In this manner the blessed virgin, Potamniæna, emigrated from earth to heaven." [Hoc modo beata Virgo emigravit e terris ad coelum. Vol. ii. p. 854.] And such, doubtless, is the passage in the translation of Eusebius, ascribed to Ruffinus [Basil, 1535. p. 134]; but the original is, "And such a struggle was thus accomplished by this celebrated virgin;" ([Greek: kai ho men taes aoidimou koraes toioutos kataegoisisto athlos]; Tale certamen ab hac percelebri et gloriosa virgine confectum fait.); and such is the Parisian translation of 1581. The second misquotation is far more serious. Bellarmin thus quotes Eusebius: "These things we do daily, who honouring the soldiers of true religion as the friends of God, approach to their respective monuments, and make OUR PRAYERS TO THEM, as holy men, by whose intercession to God, we profess to be not a little aided." [Hæc nos, inquit, quotidie factitamus qui veras pietatis milites ut Dei amicos honorantes, ad monumenta quoque eorum accedimus, votaque ipsis facimus tanquam viris sanctis quorum intercessione ad Deum non parum juvari profitemur.--p. 902. He quotes it as c. 7.] By one who has not by experience become familiar with these things it would scarcely be believed, that whilst the readers of Bellarmin have been taught to regard these as the words of Eusebius, in the original there is no mention whatever made of the intercession of the saints; that there is no allusion to prayer to them; that there is no admission even of any benefit derived from them at all. This quotation Bellarmin makes from the Latin version, published in Paris in 1581, or from some common source: it is word for word the same. We must either allow him to be ignorant of the truth, or to have designedly preferred error. {174} The copy which I have before me of the "Evangelica Præparatio," in Greek and Latin, was printed in 1628, and dedicated by Viger Franciscus, a priest of the order of Jesuits, to the Archbishop of Paris. Eusebius, marking the resemblance in many points between Plato's doctrine and the tenets of Christianity, on the reverence which, according to Plato, ought to be paid to the good departed, makes this observation: "And this corresponds with what takes place on the death of those lovers of God, whom you would not be wrong in calling the soldiers of the true religion. Whence also it is our custom to proceed to their tombs, and AT THEM [the tombs] to make our prayers, and to honour their blessed souls, inasmuch as these things are with reason done by us." [Greek: kai tauta de armozei epi tae ton theophilon teleutae ous stratiotas taes alaethous eusebeius ouk an hamartois eipon paralambanesthai othen kai epi tas thaekas auton ethos haemin parienai kai tas euchas para tautais poieisthai, timan te tas makarias auton psychas, os eulogos kai touton uph haemon giguomenon.] This translation agrees to a certain extent with the Latin of Viger's edition ("Quæ quidem in hominum Deo carissimorum obitus egregie conveniunt, quos veræ pietatis milites jure appellaris. Nam et eorum sepulchra celebrare et preces ibi votaque nuncupare et beatas illorum animas venerari consuevimus, idque a nobis merito fieri statuimus"); though the translator there has employed words more favourable to the doctrine of the saints' adoration, than he could in strictness justify. The celebrated letter from the Church of Smyrna (Euseb. Cantab. 1720. vol. i. p. 163), relating the martyrdom of Polycarp, one of the most precious relics of Christian antiquity, has already been examined by us, when we were inquiring into the recorded {175} sentiments of Polycarp; and to our reflections in that place we have little to add. The interpolations to which we have now referred, are intended to take off the edge of the evidence borne by this passage of Eusebius against the invocation of saints. First, whereas the Christians of Smyrna are recorded by Eusebius to have declared, without any limitation or qualification whatever, that they could never worship any fellow-mortal however honoured and beloved, the Parisian edition limits and qualifies their declaration by interpolating the word "as God," implying that they would offer a secondary worship to a saint. Again, whereas Eusebius in contrasting the worship paid to Christ, with the feelings of the Christians towards a martyr, employs only the word "love," Bellarmin, following Ruffinus, interpolates the word "veneramur" after "diligimus," a word which may be innocently used with reference to the holy saints and servants of God, though it is often in ancient writers employed to mean the religious worship of man to God. Still how lamentable is it to attempt by such tampering with ancient documents to maintain a cause, whatever be our feelings with regard to it! With two more brief quotations we will close our report of Eusebius. They occur in the third chapter of the third book of his Demonstratio Evangelica, and give the same view of the feelings and sentiments of the primitive Christians towards the holy angels, which we have found Origen and all the other fathers to have acknowledged. "In the doctrine of his word we have learned that there exists, after the most high God, certain powers, {176} in their nature incorporeal and intellectual, rational and purely virtuous, who ([Greek: choreuousas]) keep their station around the sovereign King,--the greater part of whom, by certain dispensations of salvation, are sent at the will of the Father even as far as to men; whom, indeed, we have been taught to know and to honour, according to the measure of their dignity, rendering to God alone, the sovereign King, the honour of worship." ([Greek: gnorizein kai timain kata to metron taes axias edidachthaemen, mono toi pambasilei Theoi taen sebasmion timaen aponemontes]) Again: "Knowing the divine, the serving and ministering powers of the sovereign God, and honouring them to the extent of propriety; but confessing God alone, and Him alone worshipping." ([Greek: theias men dynameis hypaeretikas tou pambasileos Theou kai leitourgikas eidotes, kai kata to prosaekon timontes monon de Theon homologountes, kai monon ekeinon sebontes]) [Demonst. Evang. Paris, 1628. p. 106.; Præpar. Evang. lib. vii. c. 15. p. 237.] * * * * * SECTION X.--APOSTOLICAL CANONS AND CONSTITUTIONS. The works known by the name of the Apostolical Constitutions and Apostolical Canons, though confessedly not the genuine productions of the Apostles, or of their age, have been always held in much veneration by the Church of Rome. The most learned writers fix their date at a period not more remote than the beginning of the fourth century. (See Cotelerius; vol. i. p. 194 and 424. Beveridge, in the same vol. p. 427. Conc. Gen. Florence, 1759, tom. i. p. 29 and 254.) I invite the reader {177} to examine both these documents, but especially the Constitutions, and to decide whether they do not contain strong and convincing evidence, that the invocation of saints was not practised or known in the Church when they were written. Minute rules are given for the conducting of public worship; forms of prayer are prescribed to be used in the Church, by the bishops and clergy, and by the people; forms of prayer and of thanksgiving are recommended for the use of the faithful in private, in the morning, at night, and at their meals; forms, too, there are of creeds and confessions;--but not one single allusion to any religious address to angel or saint; whilst occasions most opportune for the introduction of such doctrine and practice repeatedly occur, and are uniformly passed by. Again and again prayer is directed to be made to the one only living and true God, exclusively through the mediation and intercession of the one only Saviour Jesus Christ. Honourable mention is made of the saints of the Old Testament, and the apostles and martyrs of the New; directions are also given for the observance of their festivals [Book viii. p. 415]; but not the shadow of a thought appears that their good offices could benefit us; much less the most distant intimation that Christians might invoke them for their prayers and intercessions. There is indeed very much in these early productions of the Christian world to interest every Catholic Christian; and although a general admiration of the principles for the most part pervading them does not involve an entire approbation of them all, yet perhaps few would think the time misapplied which they should devote to the examination of these documents. {178} In book v. c. 6. of the Constitutions, the martyr is represented as "trusting in the one only true God and Father, through Jesus Christ, the great High Priest, the Redeemer of souls, the Dispenser of rewards; to whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen." [Cotel. vol. i. p. 304.] In the same book and in the following chapter we find an exceedingly interesting dissertation on the general resurrection, but not one word of saint or martyr being beforehand admitted to glory; on the contrary, the declaration is distinct, that not the martyrs only, but all men will rise. Surely such an opportunity would not have been lost of stating the doctrine of martyrs being now reigning with Christ, had such been the doctrine of the Church at that early period. In the eighth chapter is contained an injunction to honour the martyrs in these words: "We say that they should be in all honour with you, as the blessed James the bishop and our holy fellow-minister Stephen were honoured with us. For they are blessed by God and honoured by holy men, pure from all blame, never bent towards sins, never turned away from good,--undoubtedly to be praised. Of whom David spake, 'Honourable before God is the death of his saints;' and Solomon, 'The memory of the just is with praise.' Of whom the prophet also said, 'Just men are taken away.'" [p. 309.] And in book viii. c. 13. we read this exhortation,--"Let us remember the holy martyrs, that we may be counted worthy to be partakers of their conflict." [p. 404.] Does this sound any thing at all like adoration or invocation? The word which is used in the above {179} passage, _honour_ [[Greek: timê] p. 241], is employed when (book ii. c. 28.) the respect is prescribed which the laity ought to show to the clergy. To the very marked silence as to any invocation or honour, to be shown to the Virgin Mary, I shall call your attention in our separate dissertation on the worship now offered to her. * * * * * SECTION XI.--SAINT ATHANASIUS. The renowned and undaunted defender of the Catholic faith against the errors which in his day threatened to overwhelm Gospel-truth, Athanasius (the last of those ante-Nicene writers into whose testimony we have instituted this inquiry), was born about the year 296, and, after having presided in the Church as Bishop for more than forty-six years, died in 373, on the verge of his eightieth year. It is impossible for any one interested in the question of primitive truth to look upon the belief and practice of this Christian champion with indifference. When I first read Bellarmin's quotations from Athanasius, in justification of the Roman Catholic worship in the adoration of saints, I was made not a little anxious to ascertain the accuracy of his allegations. The inquiry amply repaid me for my anxiety and the labour of research; not merely by proving the unsoundness of Bellarmin's representation, but also by directing my thoughts more especially, as my acquaintance with his {180} works increased, to the true and scriptural views taken by Athanasius of the Christian's hope and confidence in God alone; the glowing fervour of his piety centering only in the Lord; his sure and certain hope in life and in death anchored only in the mercies of God, through the merits and mediation of Jesus Christ alone. Bellarmin, in his appeal to Athanasius as a witness in behalf of the invocation of saints, cites two passages; the one of which, though appearing in the edition of the Benedictines, amongst the works called doubtful, has been adjudged by those editors [Vol. ii. p. 110 and 122] to be not genuine; the other is placed by them among the confessedly spurious works, and is treated as a forgery. The first passage is from a treatise called De Virginitate, and even were that work the genuine production of Athanasius, would make against the religious worship of the saints rather than in its favour, for it would show, that the respect which the author intended to be paid to them, was precisely the same with what he would have us pay to holy men in this life, who might come to visit us. "If a just man enter into thine house, thou shalt meet him with fear and trembling, and shalt worship before his feet to the ground: for thou wilt not worship him, but God who sent him." The other passage would have been decisive as to the belief of Athanasius, had it come from his pen. "Incline thine ear, O Mary, to our prayers, and forget not thy people. We cry to thee. Remember us, O Holy Virgin. Intercede for us, O mistress, lady, queen, and mother of God." [Vol. ii. p. 390-401.] Had Bellarmin been the only writer, or the last who cited this passage as the testimony of St. Athanasius, {181} it would have been enough for us to refer to the judgment of the Benedictine editors, who have classed the homily containing these words among the spurious works ascribed to Athanasius; or rather we might have appealed to Bellarmin himself. For it is very remarkable, that though in his anxiety to enlist every able writer to defend the cause of the invocation of saints, he has cited this passage in his Church Triumphant as containing the words of Athanasius, without any allusion to its decided spuriousness, or even to its suspicious character; yet when he is pronouncing his judgment on the different works assigned to Athanasius, declaring the evidence against this treatise to be irresistible, he condemns it as a forgery. [Bellarm. de Scriptoribus Ecclesiasticis, Cologne, 1617, vol. vii. p. 50.] Since, however, this passage has been cited in different Roman Catholic writers of our own time as containing the words of Athanasius, and in evidence of his genuine belief and practice, and that without an allusion even to any thing doubtful and questionable in its character, it becomes necessary to enter more in detail into the circumstances under which the passage is offered to our notice. The passage is found in a homily called The Annunciation of the Mother of God. How long this homily has been discarded as spurious, or how long its genuineness had been suspected before the time of Baronius, I have not discovered; but certainly two centuries and a half ago, and repeatedly since, it has been condemned as totally and indisputably spurious, and has been excluded from the works of Athanasius as a forgery, not by members of the Reformed Church, but {182} by most zealous and steady adherents to the Church of Rome, and the most strenuous defenders of her doctrines and practice. The Benedictine editors[64], who published the remains of St. Athanasius in 1698, class the works contained in the second volume under two heads, the doubtful and the spurious; and the homily under consideration is ranked, without hesitation, among the spurious. In the middle of that volume they not only declare the work to be unquestionably a forgery, assigning the reasons for their decision, but they fortify their judgment by quoting at length the letter written by the celebrated Baronius, more than a century before, to our countryman, Stapleton. Both these documents are very interesting. [Footnote 64: Here I would observe, that though the Benedictine editors differ widely from each other in talent, and learning, and candour, yet, as a body, they have conferred on Christendom, and on literature, benefits for which every impartial and right-minded man will feel gratitude. In the works of some of these editors, far more than in others, we perceive the same reigning principle--a principle which some will regard as an uncompromising adherence to the faith of the Church; but which others can regard only in the light of a prejudice, and a rooted habit of viewing all things through the eyes of Rome.] The Benedictine editors begin their preface thus: "That this discourse is spurious, there is NO LEARNED MAN WHO DOES NOT NOW ADJUDGE ... The style proves itself more clear than the sun, to be different from that of Athanasius. Besides this, very many trifles show themselves here unworthy of any sensible man whatever, not to say Athanasius ... and a great number of expressions unknown to Athanasius ... so that it savours of inferior Greek. And truly his subtle disputation {183} on the hypostasis of Christ, and on the two natures in Christ, persuades us, that he lived after the councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon; of which councils moreover he uses the identical words, whereas his dissertation on the two wills in Christ seems to argue, that he lived after the spreading of the error of the Monothelites. But (continue these Benedictine editors) we would add here the dissertation of Baronius on this subject, sent to us by our brethren from Rome. That illustrious annotator, indeed, having read only the Latin version of Nannius, which is clearer than the Greek, did not observe the astonishing perplexity of the style[65]." [Footnote 65: Even in the Bibliotheca Patrum Concionatoria the homily is declared to be not the work of Athanasius, but to have been written after the sixth general council. "It is evident," say the editors, "that it is the monument of a very learned man, though he has his own blemishes, on which, for the most part, we have remarked in the margin." Paris, 1662. p. 336.] The dissertation which the Benedictine editors append, was contained in a letter written by Baronius to Stapleton, in consequence of some animadversions which Stapleton had communicated to Cardinal Allen on the judgment of Baronius. The letter is dated Rome, November, 1592. The judgment of Baronius on the spurious character of this homily had been published to the world some time previously; for after some preliminary words of kindness and respect to his correspondent, Baronius proceeds to say, that when he previously published his sentiments on this homily, it was only cursorily and by the way, his work then being on another subject. Nevertheless he conceived, {184} that the little he had then stated would be sufficient to show, that the homily was not the production of Athanasius, and that all persons of learning, WHO WERE DESIROUS OF THE TRUTH, would freely agree with him; nor was he in this expectation disappointed; for very many persons expressed their agreement with him, congratulating him on separating legitimate from spurious children. He then states the arguments which the Benedictine editors adopted after him, and which we need not repeat. But he also urges this fact, that though Cyril had the works of Athanasius in his custody, and though both the disputing parties ransacked every place for sentiments of Athanasius countenancing their tenets, yet neither at Ephesus nor at Chalcedon was this homily quoted, though it must have altogether driven Eutyches and Nestorius from the field, so exact are its definitions and statements on the points then at issue. Baronius then adds, that so far from reversing the judgment which he had before passed against the genuineness of this homily, he was compelled in justice to declare his conviction, that it could not have been written till after the heresy of the Monothelites had been spread abroad. This we know would fix its date, at the very earliest, subsequently to the commencement of the SEVENTH century, three hundred years after Athanasius attended the Council of Nice. Among the last sentiments of Baronius in this letter, is one which implies a principle worthy of Christian wisdom, and which can never be neglected without injury to the cause of truth. "These sentiments concerning Athanasius I do not think are affirmed with any detriment to the Church; for the Church does not suffer a loss on this account; who being the pillar {185} and ground of the truth, very far shrinks from seeking, like Æsop's Jackdaw, helps and ornaments which are not her own: the bare truth shines more beautiful in her own naked simplicity." Were this principle acted upon uniformly in our discussions on religious points of faith or practice, controversy would soon be drawn within far narrower limits; and would gradually be softened into a friendly interchange of sentiments, and would well-nigh be banished from the world. No person does the cause of truth so much injury, as one who attempts to support it by arguments which will not bear the test of full and enlightened investigation. And however an unsound principle may be for a while maintained by unsound arguments, the momentary triumph must ultimately end in disappointment. Coccius also cites two passages as conveying the evidence of Athanasius on this same point; one from the spurious letter addressed to Felix, the pope; the other from the treatise to Marcellus, on the interpretation of the Psalms. On the former, I need not detain you by any observation; it would be fighting with a shadow. The latter, which only recognises what I have never affirmed or denied here,--the interest in our welfare taken by holy souls departed, and their co-operation with us when we are working out our own salvation,--contains a valuable suggestion on the principles of devotion. "Let no one, however, set about to adorn these Psalms for the sake of effect with words from without, [artificial and secular phrases,] nor transpose, nor alter the expressions. But let every one inartificially read and repeat what is written, that those holy persons who employed themselves in their production, recognising their own works, may join with us in prayer; or {186} rather that the Holy Spirit, who spake in those holy men, observing the words with which his voice inspired them, may assist us. For just as much as the life of those holy men is more pure than ours, so far are their words preferable to any production of our own." But whilst there is not found a single passage in Athanasius to give the faintest countenance to the invocation of saints, there are various arguments and expressions which go far to demonstrate that such a belief and such practices as are now acknowledged and insisted upon by the Church of Rome, were neither adopted nor sanctioned by him. Had he adopted that belief and practice for his own, he would scarcely have spoken, as he repeatedly has, of the exclusion of angels and men from any share in the work of man's restoration, without any expressions to qualify it, and to protect his assertions from being misunderstood. Again, he bids us look to the holy men and holy fathers as our examples, in whose footsteps we should tread, if we would be safe; but not a hint escapes him that they are to be invoked. I must detain you by rather a long quotation from this father, and will, therefore, now do nothing more than refer you to two passages expressive of those sentiments to which I have above alluded. In the thirteenth section of his Treatise on the Incarnation of the Word of God, he argues, that neither could men restore us to the image of God, nor could angels, but the word of God, Jesus Christ, &c. [Vol. i. part i. p. 58.] In his Epistle to Dracontius, he says, "We ought to conduct ourselves agreeably to the principles of the saints and fathers, and to imitate them,--assured that if we {187} swerve from them, we become alienated also from their communion." [Vol. i. part i, p. 265.] The passage, however, to which I would invite the reader's patient and impartial thoughts, occurs in the third oration against the Arians, when he is proving the unity of the Father and the Son, from the expression of St. Paul in the eleventh verse of the third chapter of his first Epistle to the Thessalonians. "Thus then again ([Greek: outo g' oun palin]), when he is praying for the Thessalonians, and saying, 'Now our God and Father himself and the Lord Jesus Christ direct our way to you,' he preserves the unity of the Father and the Son. For he says not 'may THEY direct ([Greek: kateuthunoien]),' as though a twofold grace were given from Him AND Him, but 'may HE direct ([Greek: katenthunai]),' to show that the Father giveth this through the Son. For if there was not an unity, and the Word was not the proper offspring of the Father's substance, as the eradiation of the light, but the Son was distinct in nature from the Father,--it had sufficed for the Father alone to have made the gift, no generated being partaking with the Maker in the gifts. But now such a giving proves the unity of the Father and the Son. Consequently, no one would pray to receive any thing from God AND the angels, or from any other created being; nor would any one say 'May God AND the angels give it thee;' but from the Father and the Son, because of their unity and the oneness of the gift. For whatever is given, is given through the Son,--nor is there any thing which the Father works except through the Son; for thus the receiver has the gracious favour without fail. But if the patriarch Jacob, blessing his descendants Ephraim and Manasseh, said, 'The God who nourished {188} me from my youth unto this day, the Angel who delivered me from all the evils, bless these lads;' he does not join one of created beings, and by nature angels, with God who created them; nor dismissing Him who nourished him, God, does he ask the blessing for his descendants from an angel, but by saying 'He who delivered me from all the evils,' he showed that it was not one of created angels, but the WORD OF GOD; and joining him with the Father, he supplicated him through whom also God delivers whom he will. For he used the expression, knowing him who is called the Messenger of the great counsel of the Father to be no other than the very one who blessed and delivered from evil. For surely he did not aspire to be blessed himself by God, and was willing for his descendants to be blessed by an angel. But the same whom he addressed, saying, I will not let Thee go, except thou bless me (and this was God, as he says, 'I saw God face to face'), Him he prayed to bless the sons of Joseph. The peculiar office of an angel is to minister at the appointment of God; and often he went onwards to cast out the Amorite, and is sent to guard the people in the way; but these are not the doings of him, but of God, who appointed him and sent him,--whose also it is to deliver whom he will." [Vol i. p. 561.] "For this cause David addressed no other on the subject of deliverance but God Himself. But if it belongs to no other than God to bless and deliver, and it was no other who delivered Jacob than the Lord Himself, and the patriarch invoked for his descendants Him who delivered him, it is evident that he connected no one in his prayer except His Word, whom for this reason he called an angel, because he alone reveals the Father." {189} "But this no one would say of beings produced and created; for neither when the Father worketh does any one of the angels, or any other of created beings, work the things; for no one of such beings is an effective cause, but they themselves belong to things produced. The angels then, as it is written, are ministering spirits sent to minister; and the gifts given by Him through the Word they announce to those who receive them." Now if the invocation of angels had been practised by the Church at that time, can it be for a moment believed, that a man of such a mind as was the mind of Athanasius, a mind strong, clear, logical, cultivated with ardent zeal for the doctrines of the Church, and fervent piety, would have suffered such passages as these to fall from him, without one saving clause in favour of the invocation of angels? He tells us in the most unqualified manner, that they act merely as ministers; ready indeed, and rejoicing to be employed on errands of mercy, but not going one step without the commands of the Lord, or doing one thing beyond his word. Had the idea been familiar to the mind of Athanasius, of the lawfulness, the duty, the privilege, the benefit of invoking them, would he have avoided the introduction of some words to prevent his expressions from being misunderstood and misapplied, as subsequent writers did long before the time when the denial of the doctrine might seem to have made such precaution more necessary? I close then the catalogue of our witnesses before the Council of Nicæa with the testimony of St. Athanasius; whose genuine and acknowledged works afford not one jot or tittle in support of the doctrine and practice of the invocation of angels and saints, as now insisted upon by the Church of Rome; and the direct {190} tendency of whose evidence is decidedly hostile both to that doctrine and that practice. I have seen it observed by some who are satisfied, that the records of primitive antiquity do not contain such references to the invocation of saints and angels, as we might have expected to find had the custom then prevailed, that the earliest Christians kept back the doctrine and concealed it, though they held it; fearing lest their heathen neighbours should upbraid them with being as much polytheists as themselves[66]. This is altogether a gratuitous assumption, directly contrary to evidence, and totally inconsistent with their conduct. Had those first Christians acted upon such a debasing principle, they would have kept back and concealed their worship of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, as exposing them to a similar charge. They were constantly upbraided with worshipping a crucified {191} mortal; but instead of either meeting that charge by denying that they worshipped Jesus as their God, or of concealing the worship of Him, lest they should expose themselves again to such upbraidings, they publicly professed, that He whom the Jews had murdered, they believed in as the Son of God, Himself their God. They gloried in the doctrine of the ever-blessed Trinity, and did not fear what men might do to them, or say of them in consequence. Had they believed in the duty of invoking saints and angels, the high principle of Christian integrity would not have suffered them to be ashamed to confess it, or to practise openly what they believed. [Footnote 66: Bishop Morley, (London, 1683,) in a letter written whilst he was in exile at Breda, to J. Ulitius, refers to Cardinal Perron, "Réplique à la Resp. du Roy de la Grande Bret." p. 1402 and 4, for this sentiment: "The Fathers do not always speak what they think, but conceal their real sentiments, and say that which best serves the cause which they sustain, so as to protect it against the objections of the gentiles. The Fathers, as much as in them lies, and as far as they can, avoid and decline all occasions of speaking about the invocation of saints then practised in the Church, fearing lest to the gentiles there might appear a sort of similarity, although untrue and equivocal, between the worship paid to the saints by the Church, and by the Pagans to their false divinities; and lest the Pagans might thence seize a handle, however unfair, of retorting upon them that custom of the Church." Had a member of the Anglican Church thus spoken of the Fathers, and thus pleaded in their name guilty of subterfuge and duplicity, he would have been immediately charged with irreverence and wanton insult, and that with good reason. These sentiments of the Cardinal are in p. 982 of the Paris edition of 1620.] {192} * * * * * PART II. CHAPTER I. STATE OF WORSHIP AT THE TIME OF THE REFORMATION. One of the points proposed for our inquiry was the state of religious worship, with reference to the invocation of saints, at the time immediately preceding the reformation. Very far from entertaining a wish to fasten upon the Church of Rome now, what then deformed religion among us, in any department where that Church has practically reformed her services, I would most thankfully have found her ritual in a more purified state than it is. My more especial object in referring to this period is twofold: first, to show, that consistently with Catholic and primitive principles, the Catholic Christians of England ought not to have continued to participate in the worship which at that time prevailed in our country; and, secondly, by that example both to illustrate the great danger of allowing ourselves to countenance the very first stages of superstition, and also to impress upon our minds the duty of checking in its germ any the least deviation from the primitive principles of faith and worship; convinced that by the general tendency of human nature, one wrong step will, though imperceptibly, yet almost inevitably lead to another; and that only whilst we adhere with uncompromising steadiness {193} to the Scripture as our foundation, and to the primitive Church, under God, as a guide, can we be saved from the danger of making shipwreck of our faith. On this branch of our subject I propose to do no more than to lay before my readers the witness borne to the state of religion in England at that time, by two works, which have been in an especial manner forced upon my notice. Many other testimonies of a similar tendency might readily be adduced; but these will probably appear sufficient for the purposes above mentioned; and to dwell longer than is necessary on this point would be neither pleasant nor profitable. * * * * * SECTION I. The first book to which I shall refer is called The Hours of the most blessed Virgin Mary, according to the legitimate use of the Church of Salisbury. This book was printed in Paris in the year 1526. The prayers in this volume relate chiefly to the Virgin: and I should, under other circumstances, have reserved all allusion to it for our separate inquiry into the faith and practice of the Church of Rome with regard to her. But its historical position and general character seemed to recommend our reference to it here. Without anticipating, therefore, the facts or the arguments, which will hereafter be submitted to the reader's consideration on the worship of the Virgin, I refer to this work now solely as illustrative of the lamentable state of superstition which three centuries ago overran our country. The volume abounds with forms of prayer to the Virgin, many of them prefaced by extraordinary notifications of indulgences promised to those who duly utter {194} the prayers. These indulgences are granted by Popes and by Bishops; some on their own mere motion, others at the request of influential persons. They guarantee remission of punishment for different spaces of time, varying from forty days to ninety thousand years; they undertake to secure freedom from hell; they promise pardon for deadly sins, and for venial sins to the same person for the same act; they assure to those who comply with their directions a change of the pain of eternal damnation into the pain of purgatory, and the pain of purgatory into a free and full pardon. It may be said that the Church of Rome is not responsible for all these things. But we need not tarry here to discuss the question how far it was then competent for a church or nation to have any service-book or manual of devotion for the faithful, without first obtaining the papal sanction. For clear it is beyond all question, that such frightful corruptions as these, of which we are now to give instances, were spread throughout the land; that such was the religion then imposed on the people of England; and it was from such dreadful enormities, that our Reformation, to whatever secondary cause that reformation is to be attributed--by the providence of Almighty God rescued us. No one laments more than I do, the extremes into which many opponents of papal Rome have allowed themselves to run; but no one can feel a more anxious desire than myself to preserve our Church and people from a return of such spiritual degradation and wretchedness; and to keep far from us the most distant approaches of such lamentable and ensnaring superstitions. In this feeling moreover I am assured that I am joined by many of the most respected and influential members of the Roman Catholic Church among us. {195} Still what has been may be; and it is the bounden duty of all members of Christ's Catholic Church, to whatever branch of it they belong, to join in guarding his sanctuary against such enemies to the truth as it is in HIM. At the same time it would not be honest and candid in me, were I to abstain from urging those, who, with ourselves, deprecate these excesses, to carry their reflections further; and determine whether the spirit of the Gospel does not require a total rejection, even in its less startling forms, of every departure from the principle of invoking God alone; and of looking for acceptance with Him solely to the mediation of his Son, without the intervention of any other merits. As we regard it, it is not a question of degree; it is a question of principle: one degree may be less revolting to our sense of right than another, but it is not on that account justifiable. The following specimens, a few selected from an overabundant supply, will justify the several particulars in the summary which I have above given: 1. "The Right Reverend Father in God, Laurence[67], Bishop of Assaven, hath granted forty days of pardon to all them that devoutly say this prayer in the worship of our blessed Lady, being penitent, and truly confessed of all their sins. Oratio, 'Gaude Virgo, Mater Christi,' &c. Rejoice, Virgin, Mother of Christ. [Fol. 35.] [Footnote 67: This was Laurence Child, who, by papal provision, was made Bishop of St. Asaph, June 18, 1382. He is called also Penitentiary to the Pope. Le Neve, p. 21. Beatson, vol. i. p. 115.] 2. "To all them that be in the state of grace, that daily say devoutly this prayer before our blessed Lady of Pity, she will show them her blessed visage, and warn them the day and the hour of death; and in their last {196} end the angels of God shall yield their souls to heaven; and[68] he shall obtain five hundred years, and so many Lents of pardon, granted by five holy fathers, Popes of Rome. [Fol. 38.] [Footnote 68: The language in many of these passages is very imperfect; but I have thought it right to copy them verbatim.] 3. "This prayer showed our Lady to a devout person, saying, that this golden prayer is the most sweetest and acceptablest to me: and in her appearing she had this salutation and prayer written with letters of gold in her breast, 'Ave Rosa sine spinis'--Hail Rose without thorns. [Fol. 41.] 4. "Our holy Father, Sixtus the fourth, pope, hath granted to all them that devoutly say this prayer before the image of our Lady the sum of XI.M. [eleven thousand] years of pardon. 'Ave Sanctissima Maria, Mater Dei, Regina Coeli,' &c. Hail most holy Mary, Mother of God, Queen of Heaven. [Fol. 42.] 5. "Our holy Father, Pope Sixtus, hath granted at the instance of the highmost and excellent Princess Elizabeth, late Queen of England, and wife to our sovereign liege Lord, King Henry the Seventh, (God have mercy on her sweet soul, and on all Christian souls,) that every day in the morning, after three tollings of the Ave bell, say three times the whole salutation of our Lady Ave Maria gratia; that is to say, at 6 the clock in the morning 3 Ave Maria, at 12 the clock at noon 3 Ave M., and at 6 the clock at even, for every time so doing is granted of the SPIRITUAL TREASURE OF HOLY CHURCH 300 days of pardon totiens quotiens; and also our holy father, the Archbishop of Canterbury and York, with other nine Bishops of this realm, have {197} granted 3 times in the day 40 days of pardon to all them that be in the state of grace able to receive pardon: the which begun the 26th day of March, Anno MCCCCXCII. Anno Henrici VII.[69] And the sum of the indulgence and pardon for every Ave Maria VIII hondred days an LX totiens quotiens, this prayer shall be said at the tolling of the Ave Bell, 'Suscipe,' &c. Receive the word, O Virgin Mary, which was sent to thee from the Lord by an angel. Hail, Mary, full of grace: the Lord with thee, &c. Say this 3 times, &c. [Fol. 42.] [Footnote 69: Henry VII. began to reign in 1485.] 6. "This prayer was showed to St. Bernard by the messenger of God, saying, that as gold is the most precious of all other metals, so exceedeth this prayer all other prayers, and who that devoutly sayeth it shall have a singular reward of our blessed Lady, and her sweet Son Jesus. 'Ave,' &c. Hail, Mary, most humble handmaid of the Trinity, &c. Hail, Mary, most prompt Comforter of the living and the dead. Be thou with me in all my tribulations and distresses with maternal pity, and at the hour of my death take my soul, and offer it to thy most beloved Son Jesus, with all them who have commended themselves to our prayers. [Fol. 46.] 7. "Our holy father, the Pope Bonifacius, hath granted to all them that devoutly say this lamentable contemplation of our blessed Lady, standing under the Cross weeping, and having compassion with her sweet Son Jesus, 7 years of pardon and forty Lents, and also Pope John the 22 hath granted three hondred days of pardon. 'Stabat Mater dolorosa.' [Fol. 47.] 8. "To all them that before this image of Pity devoutly say 5 Pat. Nos., and 5 Aves, and a Credo, piteously beholding these arms of Christ's passion, are {198} granted XXXII.M.VII hondred, and LV (32755) years of pardon; and Sixtus the 4th, Pope of Rome hath made the 4 and the 5 prayer, and hath doubled his aforesaid pardon. [Fol. 54.] 9. "Our holy Father the Pope John 22 hath granted to all them that devoutly say this prayer, after the elevation of our Lord Jesu Christ, 3000 days of pardon for deadly sins. [Fol. 58.] 10. "This prayer was showed to Saint Augustine by revelation of the Holy Ghost, and who that devoutly say this prayer, or hear read, or beareth about them, shall not perish in fire or water, nother in battle or judgment, and he shall not die of sudden death, and no venom shall poison him that day, and what he asketh of God he shall obtain if it be to the salvation of his soul; and when thy soul shall depart from thy body it shall not enter hell." This prayer ends with three invocations of the Cross, thus: "O Cross of Christ [cross] save us, O Cross of Christ [cross] protect us, O Cross of Christ [cross] defend us. In the name of the [cross] Father, [cross] Son, and Holy [cross] Ghost. Amen." [Fol. 62.] 11. "Our holy Father Pope Innocent III. hath granted to all them that say these III prayers following devoutly, remission of all their sins confessed and contrite. [Fol. 63.] 12. "These 3 prayers be written in the Chapel of the Holy Cross, in Rome, otherwise called Sacellum Sanctæ Crucis septem Romanorum; who that devoutly say them shall obtain X.C.M. [ninety thousand] years of pardon for deadly sins granted of our holy Father, John 22, Pope of Rome. [Fol. 66.] 13. "Who that devoutly beholdeth these arms of {199} our Lord Jesus Christ, shall obtain six thousand years of pardon of our holy Father Saint Peter, the first pope of Rome, and of XXX [thirty] other popes of the Church of Rome, successors after him; and our holy Father, Pope John 22, hath granted unto all them very contrite and truly confessed, that say these devout prayers following in the commemoration of the bitter passion of our Lord Jesus Christ, 3000 years of pardon for DEADLY SINS, and other 3000 for venial sins." [Fol. 68.] I will only add one more instance. The following announcement accompanies a prayer of St. Bernard: "Who that devoutly with a contrite heart daily say this orison, if he be that day in a state of eternal damnation, then this eternal pain shall be changed him in temporal pain of purgatory; then if he hath deserved the pain of purgatory it shall be forgotten and forgiven through the infinite mercy of God." It is indeed very melancholy to reflect that our country has witnessed the time, when the bread of life had been taken from the children, and such husks as these substituted in its stead. Accredited ministers of the Roman Catholic Church have lately assured us that the pardons and indulgences granted now, relate only to the remission of the penances imposed by the Church in this life, and presume not to interfere with the province of the Most High in the rewards and punishments of the next. But, I repeat it, what has been in former days may be again; and whenever Christians depart from the doctrine and practice of prayer to God alone, through Christ alone, a door is opened to superstitions and abuses of every kind; and we cannot too anxiously and too jealously guard and fence about, with all our power and skill, the fundamental principle, one God and one Mediator. {200} * * * * * SECTION II.--SERVICE OF THOMAS BECKET, ON THE ANNIVERSARY OF HIS MARTYRDOM, DEC. 29. The other instance by which I propose to illustrate the state of religion in England before the reformation, is the service of Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, a canonized saint and martyr of the Church of Rome. The interest attaching to so remarkable a period in ecclesiastical history, and to an event so intimately interwoven with the former state of our native land, appears to justify the introduction of the entire service, rather than extracts from it, in this place. Whilst it bears throughout immediately on the subject of our present inquiry, it supplies us at the same time with the strong views entertained by the authors of the service, on points which gave rise to great and repeated discussion, not only in England, but in various parts also of continental Europe, with regard to the moral and spiritual merits or demerits of Becket, as a subject of the realm and a Christian minister. It is, moreover, only by becoming familiar in all their details with some such remains of past times, that we can form any adequate idea of the great and deplorable extent to which the legends had banished the reading and expounding of Holy Scriptures from our churches; and also how much the praises of mortal man had encroached upon those hours of public worship, which should be devoted to meditations on our Maker, Redeemer, and Sanctifier; to the exclusive praises of his holy name; and to supplications {201} to Him alone for blessings at his hand, and for his mercy through Christ. There is much obscurity in the few first paragraphs. The historical or biographical part begins at Lesson the First, and continues throughout, only interspersed with canticles in general referring to the incidents in the narrative preceding each. * * * * * THE SERVICE OF THOMAS BECKET[70]. [Footnote 70: The copies which I have chiefly consulted for the purposes of the present inquiry, are two large folio manuscripts, in good preservation, No. 1512 and No. 2785 of the Harleian MSS. in the British Museum. The service commences about the 49th page, B. of No. 2785. This MS. is considered to be of a date somewhere about 1430. The first parts of the service are preserved also in a Breviary printed in Paris in 1556, with some variations and omissions. There are various other copies in the British Museum, as well printed as in manuscript.] Let them without change of vestments and without tapers in their hands, proceed to the altar of St. Thomas the Martyr, chanting the requiem, the chanter beginning, _Req._ The grain lies buried beneath the straw; The just man is slain by the spear of the wicked; The guardian of the vine falls in the vineyard, The chieftain in the camp, the husbandman in the threshing-floor. Then the prose is said by all who choose, in surplices before the altar. "Let the Shepherd sound his trumpet of horn." Let the choir respond to the chant of the prose after every verse, upon the letter [super litteram]. {202} That the vineyard of Christ might be free, Which he assumed under a robe of flesh, He liberated it by the purple cross. The adversary, the erring sheep, Becomes bloodstained by the slaughter of the shepherd. The marble pavements of Christ Are wetted, ruddy with sacred gore; The martyr presented with the laurel of life. Like a grain cleansed from the straw, Is translated to the divine garners. But whilst the prose is being sung, let the priest incense the altar, and then the image of the blessed Thomas the Martyr; and afterwards shall be said with an humble voice: Pray for us, Blessed Thomas. _The Prayer[71]._ O God for whose Church the glorious {203} high-priest and martyr Thomas fell beneath the swords of the wicked, grant, we beseech thee, that all who implore his aid may obtain the salutary effect of their petition, through Christ. [Footnote 71: This Collect is still preserved in the Roman ritual, and is offered on the anniversary of Becket's death. In a very ancient pontifical, preserved in the chapter-house of Bangor, and which belonged to Anianus, who was Bishop of that see (1268), among the "Proper Benedictions for the circuit of the year," are two relating to Thomas Becket; one on the anniversary of his death, the other on the day of his translation. The former is couched in these words: "O God, who hast not without reason mingled the birthday of the glorious high-priest, Thomas, with the joys of thy nativity, by the intervention of his merits" (ipsius mentis intervenientibus), "make these thy servants venerate thy majesty with the reverence of due honour. Amen. And as he, according to the rule of a good shepherd, gave his life for his sheep, so grant thou to thy faithful ones, to fear no tyrannical madness to the prejudice of Catholic truth. Amen. We ask that they, by his example, for obedience to the holy laws, may learn to despise persons, and by suffering manfully to triumph over tyrannical madness. Amen." The latter runs thus: "May God, by whose pity the bodies of saints rest in the sabbath of peace, turn your hearts to the desire of the resurrection to come. Amen. And may he who orders us to bury with honour due the members of the saints whose death is precious, by the merits of the glorious martyr, Thomas, vouchsafe to raise you from the dust of vanity. Amen. Where at length by the power of his benediction ye may be clothed with doubled festive robes of body and soul. Amen."] The shepherd slain in the midst of the flock, Purchased peace at the price of his blood. O joyous grief, in mournful gladness! The flock breathes when the shepherd is dead; The mother wailing, sings for joy in her son, Because he lives under the sword a conqueror. The solemnities of Thomas the Martyr are come. Let the Virgin Mother, the Church, rejoice; Thomas being raised to the highest priesthood, Is suddenly changed into another man. A monk, under [the garb of?] a clerk, secretly clothed with haircloth, More strong than the flesh subdues the attempts of the flesh; Whilst the tiller of the Lord's field pulls up the thistles, And drives away and banishes the foxes from the vineyard. _The First Lesson._ Dearest Brethren, celebrating now the birth-day of the martyr Thomas, because we have not power to recount his whole life and conversation, let our brief discourse run through the manner and cause of his passion. The blessed Thomas, therefore, as in the office of Chancellor, or Archdeacon, he proved incomparably strenuous {204} in the conduct of affairs, so after he had undertaken the office of pastor, he became devoted to God beyond man's estimation. For, when consecrated, he suddenly is changed into another man: he secretly put on the hair shirt, and wore also hair drawers down to the knee. And under the respectable appearance of the clerical garb, concealing the monk's dress, he entirely compelled the flesh to obey the spirit; studying by the exercise of every virtue without intermission to please God. Knowing, therefore, that he was placed a husbandman in the field of the Lord, a shepherd in the fold, he carefully discharged the ministry entrusted to him. The rights and dignities of the Church, which the public authority had usurped, he deemed it right to restore, and to recall to their proper state. Whence a grave question on the ecclesiastical law and the customs of the realm, having arisen between him and the king of the English, a council being convened, those customs were proposed which the king pertinaciously required to be confirmed by the signatures as well of the archbishop as of his suffragans. The archbishop with constancy refused, asserting that in them was manifest the subversion of the freedom of the Church. He was in consequence treated with immense insults, oppressed with severe losses, and provoked with innumerable injuries. At length, being threatened with death, (because the case of the Church had not yet become fully known, and the persecution seemed to be personal,) he determined that he ought to give place to malice. Being driven, therefore, into exile, he was honourably received by our lord the pope Alexander[72] at Senon, and recommended {205} with especial care to the Monastery of Pontinea (Pontigny). [Footnote 72: Pope Alexander III. was at this time residing as a refugee at Sens, having been driven from Italy a few years before by Frederick Barbarossa.] Malice, bent on the punishment of Thomas, Condemns to banishment the race of Thomas. The whole family goes forth together. No order, sex, age, or condition Here enjoys any privilege. _Lesson the Second._ Meanwhile in England all the revenues of the archbishop are confiscated, his estates are laid waste, his possessions are plundered, and by the invention of a new kind of punishment, the whole kin of Thomas is proscribed together. For all his friends or acquaintance, or whoever was connected with him, by whatever title, without distinction of state or fortune, dignity or rank, age or sex, were alike exiled. For as well the old and decrepit, as infants in the cradle and women lying in childbirth, were driven into banishment; whilst as many as had reached the years of discretion were compelled to swear upon the holy [Gospels][73] that immediately on crossing the sea they would present themselves to the Archbishop of Canterbury; in order that being so oftentimes pierced even by the sword of sympathy, he would bend his strength of mind to the king's pleasure. But the man of God, putting his hand to deeds of fortitude, with constancy bore exile, reproaches, insults, the proscription of parents and friends, for the name of Christ; he was never, by any injury, at all broken or changed. For so great was the firmness of this confessor of Christ, that he seemed to teach all his fellow exiles, that every soil is the brave man's country. [Footnote 73: Tactis sacrosanctis. It may mean reliques, or other sacred things.] {206} Thomas put his hands to deeds of fortitude, He despised losses, he despised reproaches, No injury breaks down Thomas: The firmness of Thomas exclaimed to all, "Every soil is the brave man's country." _Third Lesson._ The king therefore hearing of his immoveable constancy, having directed commendatory letters by some abbots of the Cistertian order to the General Chapter, caused him to be driven from Pontinea. But the blessed Thomas fearing that, by occasion of his right, injury would befal the saints, retired of his own accord. Yet before he set out from thence he was comforted by a divine revelation: a declaration being made to him from heaven, that he should return to his Church with glory, and by the palm of martyrdom depart to the Lord. When he was disturbed and sent from his retreat at Pontinea, Louis, the most Christian king of the French, received him with the greatest honour, and supported him most courteously till peace was restored. But even he too was often, though in vain, urged not to show any grace of kindness towards a traitor to the king of England. The hand of fury proceeded further, and a cruelty dreadful for pious ears to hear. For whereas the Catholic Church prays even for heretics, and schismatics, and faithless Jews, it was forbidden that any one should assist him by the supplications of prayer. Exiled, then, for six continuous years, afflicted with varied and unnumbered injuries, and like a living stone squared by various cuttings and pressures for the building of the heavenly edifice, the more he was thrust at that he might fall, the more firm and immoveable was he enabled to stand. {207} For neither could gold so carefully tried be burned away, nor a house, founded on a firm rock, be torn down. Neither does he suffer the wolves to rage against the lambs, nor the vineyard to pass into a garden of herbs. The best of men, holy, and renowned is banished, Lest the dignity of the Church should yield to the unworthy. The estates of the exiled man are the spoil of the malignant, But when placed in the fire, the fire burns him not. _Fourth Lesson._ At length by the exertions, as well of the aforesaid pontiff as of the king of the French, many days were appointed for re-establishing peace: and because the servant of God would not accept of peace, unless with safety to the honour of God, and the character of the Church, they departed in discord from each other. At length the supreme Pontiff, pitying the desolation of the Anglican Church, with difficulty at the last extorted by threatening measures, that peace should be restored to the Church. The realms indeed rejoiced, that the King had been reconciled to the Archbishop, whilst some believed that the affair was carried on in good faith, and others formed different conjectures. Consequently in the seventh year of his exile the noble pastor returned into England, that he might either rescue the sheep of Christ from the jaws of the wolves, or sacrifice himself for the flock intrusted to his care. He is received by the clergy and the people with incalculable joy; all shedding tears, and saying, Blessed is he who cometh in the name of the Lord. But after a few days he was again afflicted by losses and miseries beyond measure and number. Whoever offered to him, {208} or to any one connected with him, a cheerful countenance was reckoned a public enemy. In all these things his mind was unbroken; but his hand was still stretched out for the liberation of the Church. For this he incessantly sighed; for this he persevered in watchings, fastings, and prayers; to obtain this he ardently desired to sacrifice himself. From the greatest joy of affairs, The greatest wailing is in the Church, For the absence of so great a patron. But when the miracles return, Joy to the people returns. The crowd of sick flock together, And obtain the grace of benefits. _Fifth Lesson._ Now on the fifth day after the birth-day of our Lord, four persons of the palace came to Canterbury, men indeed of high birth, but famous for their wicked deeds; and having entered, they attack the archbishop with reproachful words, provoke him with insults, and at length assail him with threats. The man of God modestly answered, to every thing, whatever reason required, adding that many injuries had been inflicted upon him and the Church of God, since the re-establishment of peace, and there was no one to correct what was wrong; that he neither could nor would dissemble thereafter, so as not to exercise the duties of his function. The men, foolish in heart, were disturbed by this, and having loudly given utterance to their iniquity they forthwith went out. On their retiring, the prelate proceeded to the Church, to offer the evening praises to Christ. The mail-clad satellites of Satan followed him from behind with drawn swords, a {209} large band of armed men accompanying them. On the monks barring the entrance to the Church, the priest of God, destined soon to become a victim of Christ, running up re-opened the door to the enemy; "For," said he, "a Church must not be barricaded like a castle." As they burst in, and some shouted with a voice of phrenzy, "Where is the traitor?" others, "Where is the Archbishop?" the fearless confessor of Christ went to meet them. When they pressed on to murder him, he said, "For myself I cheerfully meet death for the Church of God; but on the part of God I charge you to do no hurt to any of mine"--imitating Christ in his passion, when he said, "If ye seek me, let these go their way." Then rush the ravening wolves on the pious shepherd, degenerate sons on their own father, cruel lictors on the victim of Christ, and with fatal swords cut off the consecrated crown of his head; and hurling down to the ground the Christ [the anointed] of the Lord, in savage manner, horrible to be said, scattered the brains with the blood over the pavement. Thus does the straw press down the grain of corn; Thus is slain the guard of the vineyard in the vineyard; Thus the general in the camp, the shepherd in the fold, the husbandman in the threshing-floor. Thus the just, slain by the unjust, has changed his house of clay for a heavenly palace. Rachel, weeping, now cease thou to mourn That the flower of the world is bruised by the world. When the slain Thomas is borne to his funeral, A new Abel succeeds to the old. The voice of blood, the voice of his scattered brains, Fills heaven with a marvellous cry. {210} _Sixth Lesson._ But the last words of the martyr, which from the confused clamour could scarcely be distinguished, according to the testimony of those who stood near, were these,--"To God, and the blessed Mary, and Saint Dionysius, and the holy patrons of this Church, I commend myself and the cause of the Church[74]." Moreover, in all the torments which this unvanquished champion of God endured, he sent forth no cry, he uttered no groan, he opposed neither his arm nor his garment to the man who struck him, but held his head, which he had bent towards the swords, unmoved till the consummation came; prostrated as if for prayer, he fell asleep in the Lord. The perpetrators of the crime, returning into the palace of the holy prelate, that they might make the passion of the servant more fully resemble the passion of his Lord, divided among them his garments, the gold and silver and precious vessels, choice horses, and whatever of value they could find, allotting what each should take. These things therefore the soldiers did. Who, without weeping, can relate the rest? So great was the sorrow of all, so great the laments of each, that you would think the prophecy were a second time fulfilled, "A voice is heard in Rama, lamentation and great mourning." Nevertheless the divine mercy, when temptation was multiplied, made a way to escape; and by certain visions, giving as it were a prelude to the future miracles, [declared that] the martyr was thereafter to be glorified by wonders, that joy would return after sorrow, {211} and a crowd of sick would obtain the grace of benefits. [Footnote 74: I have already suggested a comparison between this prayer and the commendatory prayer of the Martyr Polycarp, page 92.] O Christ Jesus[75], BY THE WOUNDS OF THOMAS, Loosen the sins which bind us; Lest the enemy, the world, or the works of the flesh. Bear us captive to hell. By[76] THEE, O Thomas ... Let the right hand of God embrace us. The satellites of Satan rushing into the temple Perpetrate an unexampled, unheard-of, crime. Thomas proceeds to meet their drawn swords: He yields not to threats, to swords, nor even to death. Happy place! Happy Church, In which the memory of Thomas lives! Happy the land which gave the prelate! Happy the land which supported him in exile! Happy Father! succour us miserable, That we may be happy, and joined with those above! [Footnote 75: Christe Jesu per Thomæ vulnera, Quæ nos ligant relaxa scelera Ne captivos ferant ad infera Hostis, mundus, vel carnis opera. ] [Footnote 76: Per te, Thoma, post lævæ munera Amplexetur nos Dei dextera. ] _Seventh Lesson._ Jesus said unto his disciples, I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd layeth down his life for the sheep. THE HOMILY OF S. GREGORY, POPE. Ye have heard, most dear brethren, from the reading of the Gospel, your instruction; ye have heard also {212} your danger. For behold! he who is not from any gift happening to him, but who is essentially good, says, I am the good shepherd; and he adds the character of the same goodness, which we may imitate, saying, The good shepherd layeth down his life for his sheep. He did what he taught; he showed what he commanded. The good shepherd laid down his life for his sheep; that in our sacrament he might change his body and blood, and satisfy, by the nourishment of his flesh, the sheep which he had redeemed. Here is shown to us the way, concerning the contempt of death, which we should follow; the character is placed before us to which we should conform. [In the first place, we should of our pity sacrifice our external good for his sheep; and at last, if it be necessary, give up our own life for the same sheep. From that smallest point we proceed to this last and greater. But since the soul by which we live is incomparably better than the earthly substance which we outwardly possess, who would not give for the sheep his substance, when he would give his life for them? And there are some who, whilst they love their earthly substance more than the sheep, deservedly lose the name of shepherd: of whom it is immediately added, But the hireling who is not the shepherd, whose own the sheep are not, seeth the wolf coming, and leaveth the sheep and fleeth. He is called not a shepherd, but a hireling, who feeds the Lord's sheep not for inward love, but with a view to temporal wages. He is a mercenary who seeks indeed the place of shepherd, but seeks not the gain of souls.] (The sentences between brackets are not in MS. No. 1512.) To Thomas all things yield and are obedient: Plagues, diseases, death, and devils, {213} Fire, air, land, and seas. Thomas filled the world with glory. The world offers obeisance to Thomas[77]. [Footnote 77: Thomæ cedunt et parent omnia: Pestes, morbi, mors, et dæmonia, Ignis, aer, tellus, et maria. Thomas mundum replevit gloria. Thomæ mundus præstat obsequia. ] _Eighth Lesson._ In good truth, the holy Thomas, the precious champion of God, was to be worthily glorified. For if the cause, yea, forasmuch as the cause makes the martyr, did ever a title of holy martyrs exist more glorious? Contending for the Church, in the Church he suffered; in a holy place, at the holy time of the Lord's nativity, in the midst of his fellow-priests and the companies of the religious: since in the agony of the prelate all the circumstances seemed so to concur, as perpetually to illustrate the title of the sufferer, and reveal the wickedness of his persecutors, and stain their name with never-ending infamy. But so did the divine vengeance rage against the persecutors of the martyr, that in a short time, being carried away from the midst, they nowhere appeared. And some, without confession, or the viaticum, were suddenly snatched away; others tearing piecemeal their own fingers or tongues; others pining with hunger, and corrupting in their whole body, and racked with unheard-of tortures before their death, and broken up by paralysis; others bereft of their intellects; others expiring with madness;--left manifest proofs that they were suffering the penalty of unjust persecution and premeditated murder. Let, therefore, the Virgin Mother, the Church, rejoice that the new martyr has borne away the triumph over the {214} enemies. Let her rejoice that a new Zacharias has been for her freedom sacrificed in the temple. Let her rejoice that a new Abel's blood hath cried unto God for her against the men of blood. For the voice of his blood shed, the-voice of his brain scattered by the swords of those deadly satellites, hath filled heaven at once and the world with its far-famed cry. Thomas shines with new miracles; He adorns with sight those who had lost their eyes; He cleanses those who were stained with the spots of leprosy; He looses those that were bound with the bonds of death. _Ninth Lesson._ For at the cry of this blood the earth was moved and trembled. Nay, moreover, the powers of the heavens were moved; so that, as if for the avenging of innocent blood, nation rose against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; nay, a kingdom was divided against itself, and terrors from heaven and great signs took place. Yet, from the first period of his martyrdom, the martyr began to shine forth with miracles, restoring sight to the blind, walking to the lame, hearing to the deaf, language to the dumb. Afterwards, cleansing the lepers, making the paralytic sound, healing the dropsy, and all kinds of incurable diseases; restoring the dead to life; in a wonderful manner commanding the devils and all the elements: he also put forth his hand to unwonted and unheard-of signs of his own power; for persons deprived of their eyes merited by his merits to obtain new members. But some {215} who presumed to disparage his miracles, struck on a sudden, were compelled to publish them even unwillingly. At length, against all his enemies the martyr so far prevailed, that almost every day you might see that to be repeated in the servant which is read of the Only-begotten: "They who spoke evil of thee shall come unto thee, and adore the traces of thy feet." Now the celebrated champion and martyr of God, Thomas, suffered in the year from the incarnation of the Lord, according to Dionysius, 1171, on the fourth of the kalends of January, on the third day of the week, about the eleventh hour, that the birth-day of the Lord might be for labour, and his for rest; to which rest the same our God and Lord Jesus Christ vouchsafe to bring us; who with the Father and the Holy Spirit liveth and reigneth God, for ever and ever. Amen. O good Jesus, BY THE MERITS OF THOMAS, Forgive us our debts; Visit the house, the gate, the grave; And raise us from the threefold death. What has been lost by act, in mind, or use, Restore with thy wonted pity. Pray for us, O blessed Thomas. N.B. This appears to be the end of the first service in honour of Thomas Becket[78]; and at this point {216} another service seems to commence, with a kind of new heading, "In the commemoration of St. Thomas[79]." [Footnote 78: All the Lessons between this passage and "In Lauds," are wanting in MS. 1512.] [Footnote 79: Another Feast was kept in honour of his translation, on the 7th of July.] _The First Lesson._ When Archbishop Theobald, of happy memory, in a good old age, slept with his fathers, Thomas, archdeacon of the Church of Canterbury, is solemnly chosen, in the name of the Holy Trinity, to be archbishop and primate of all England, and afterwards is consecrated. Then pious minds entertained firm hope and confidence in the Lord[80]. [Footnote 80: There is much of obscurity in the next paragraph. Reference seems to be made to his twofold character of a regular and a secular clergyman, and to his improved state morally. The Latin is this: "Erat autem piis mentibus spes firma et fiducia in Domino, quod idem consecratus utriusque hominis, habitu mutato moribus melioratus præsideret. Probatissimum siquidem tenebatur sedem illam sedem sanctorum esse sanctam recipere aut facere, vel citius et facile indignum abicere, quod et in beato Thoma Martyre misericorditer impletum est."] _Second Lesson._ Therefore the chosen prelate of God being elected, and anointed with the sanctifying of the sacred oil, immediately obtained a most hallowed thing, and was filled with manifold grace of the Holy Spirit. For walking in newness of life, a new man, he was changed into another man, all things belonging to whom were changed for the better; and with so great grace did he consecrate the commencement of his bishopric, that clothing himself with a monk's form secretly, he fulfilled the work and merit of a monk. {217} _Third Lesson._ But he, who after the example of the Baptist, with constancy had conceived in a perfect heart that the zeal of righteousness should be purified, studied also to imitate him in the garb of penitence. For casting off the fine linen which hitherto he had been accustomed to use, whilst the soft delicacies of kings pleased him, he was clothed on his naked body with a most rough hair shirt. He added, moreover, hair drawers, that he might the more effectually mortify the flesh, and make the spirit live. But these, as also the other exercises of his spiritual life, very few indeed being aware of it, he removed from the eyes and knowledge of men by superadding other garments, because he sought glory not from man, but from God. Even then the man of virtue entering upon the justifications of God, began to be more complete in abstinence, more frequent in watching, longer in prayer, more anxious in preaching. The pastoral office intrusted to him by God, he executed with so great diligence, as to suffer the rights neither of the clergy nor of the Church to be in any degree curtailed. * * * * * There seems here also to be another commencement, for the next lesson is called the First. _Lesson First._ So large a grace of compunction was he wont to possess, between the secrets of prayer or the solemnities of masses, that with eyes trained to weeping he would be wholly dissolved in tears; and in the office {218} of the altar his appearance was as though he was witnessing the Lord's passion in the flesh. Knowing also that mercy softens justice, and that pity hath the promise of the life that now is, and of that which is to come, therefore towards the poor and the afflicted did he bear the bowels of mercy piteously, and was anxious to reach the poor by the blessings of his alms. _Lesson Second._ The more humble of those whom a character for religion raised high, he made his acquaintance and intimates; and that he might learn from them to hunger and thirst after righteousness, he enjoyed more frequently their secret conversation. Towards such servants and soldiers of Christ this merciful man preferred to be liberal and abundant in food and raiment, he who determined in himself to be moderate and sparing. For what would he deny to Christ, who for Christ was about to shed his blood? He who owed his coat or cloak to one who asked it, desired to add, moreover, his own flesh. For he knew that the man would never freely give his own flesh, who showed himself greedy of any temporal thing. _Lesson Third._ Hitherto the merciful Lord, who maketh poor and enricheth, bringeth low and lifteth up, wished to load his servant with riches, and exalt him with honours; and afterwards he was pleased to try him with adversity. By trying whether he loved Him, He proved it the more certainly; but He supplied grace more abundantly. For with the temptation He made a way to escape, that he might be able to bear it. Therefore, the envious enemy, considering that the new prelate {219} and the new man was flourishing with so manifold a grace of virtues, devised to send a burning blight of temptation, which might suffocate the germ of his merits already put forth. Nor was there any delay. He who severs a man from his God, and one friend from his neighbour, sowed irreconcileable quarrels between the king and the archbishop. Pray for us, O blessed Thomas. _In Lauds._ A grain falls and gives birth to an abundance of corn. The alabaster-box is broken, and the odour of the ointment is powerful. The whole world vies in love to the martyr, Whose wonderful signs strike all with astonishment. The water for Thomas five times changing colour, Once was turned into milk, four times into blood. At the shrine[81] of Thomas four times the light came down, And to the glory of the saint kindled the wax-tapers. DO THOU BY THE BLOOD OF THOMAS, WHICH HE[82] SHED FOR THEE; MAKE US, O CHRIST, ASCEND, Whither Thomas has ascended. Extend[83] succour to us, O Thomas, Guide those who stand, {220} Raise up those who fall, Correct our morals, actions, and life; And guide us into the way of peace. [Footnote 81: Ad Thomæ memoriam.] [Footnote 82: Tu per Thomæ sanguinem quem pro te impendit, Fac nos, Christe, scandere, quo Thomas ascendit.] [Footnote 83: Opem nobis, O Thoma, porrige, Rege stantes, jacentes erige, Mores, actus, et vitam corrige, Et in pacis nos viam dirige. ] _Final Anthem._ Hail, O Thomas, the Rod of Justice;[84] The Brightness of the World; The Strength of the Church; The Love of the People; The Delight of the Clergy. Hail, glorious Guardian of the Flock; Save those who rejoice in thy glory. [Footnote 84: Salve, Thomas, Virga Justitiæ, Mundi Jubar, Robur Ecclesiæ, Plebis Amor, Cleri Delicia. Salve Gregis Tutor egregie, Salva tuæ gaudentes gloriæ.] The end of the service of Thomas of Canterbury. * * * * * Now for a few moments only let us meditate on this service. I have already referred to the lamentable practice of substituting biographical legends for the word of God. And what is the tendency of this service? What impression was it likely to make, and to leave on minds of ordinary powers and instruction? Must it not, of necessity, tend to withdraw them from contemplating Christ, and to fix their thoughts on the powers, the glory, the exaltation, the merits of a fellow-sinner? It will be said, that they will look beyond the martyr, and trace the blessings, here enumerated, to Christ, as their primary cause, and will think of the merits of Thomas as efficacious only through the merits of their Saviour; that in their invocation of Thomas they will implore him only to pray for them. But can this be so? Does not the ascription of miracles to him {221} and to his power; does not the very form of enumerating those miracles tend much to exalt the servant to an equality with the Master? Whilst Thomas by being thus, in words at least, presented to the people as working those miracles by his own power, (for there is throughout a lamentable absence of immediate ascription of glory to God,) is raised to an equality with Christ our Lord; many passages in this service have the tendency also of withdrawing the minds of the worshippers from an implicit and exclusive dependence on the merits of Christ alone, and of tempting them to admit the merits of Thomas to share at least with Christ in the work of grace and salvation. Let us place some texts of Scripture and some passages of this service side by side. [Transcriber's note: They are shown here one after the other.] _Scripture._ But after that the kindness and love of God towards man appeared, not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us.--Titus iii. 4, 5. He who spared not his own Son, but gave him up for us all, how shall he not with him also freely give us all things?--Rom. viii. 32. The blood of Jesus Christ cleanseth us from all sin.--1 John i. 7. One Mediator.--1 Tim. ii. 5. Who also maketh intercession for us.--Rom. viii. 34. He ever liveth to make intercession for them.--Heb. vii. 25. _Service of Thomas Becket._ O Christ Jesus, by the wounds of Thomas loosen the sins which bind us. O blessed Jesus, BY THE MERITS OF THOMAS, forgive us our debts, raise us from the threefold death, and restore what has been lost with thy accustomed pity. Do thou, O Christ, by the blood of Thomas, which he shed for thee, make us ascend whither Thomas has ascended. Holy Thomas, pray for us. And if this service thus seems to mingle the merits of Christ, the merits of his blood and of his death, with {222} the merits of a mortal man, the immediate address to that mortal as the giver of good things temporal and spiritual, very awfully trespasses on that high, exclusive, and incommunicable prerogative of the one Lord God Omnipotent, which his Spirit hath proclaimed solemnly and repeatedly, and which he has fenced around against all invasion with so many warnings and denunciations. _Scripture._ _Service of Becket_ 1. O thou that hearest prayer, 1. For they sake, O Thomas, unto thee shall all flesh come.-- let the right hand of God embrace Ps. lxv. [vulg. lxiv.] 2. us. By prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known unto God.--Phil. iv. 6. 2. Lord, be thou my helper.-- 2. Send help to us, O Thomas; Ps. xxx. [xxix.] 10. 3. Thou shalt guide me by thy 3. Guide thou those who stand; counsel.--Ps. lxxiii. [lxxii.] 24. He, The Holy Spirit, shall guide you into all truth.--John xvi. 13. 4. The Lord upholdeth all that 4. Raise up those who fall; fall, and raiseth up all those that be bowed down.--Psalm cxlv. [cxliv.] 14. 5. Create in me a clean heart, 5. Correct our morals, actions O God.--Ps. li. [l.] 10. and life; 6. The steps of a good man are 6. And guide us into the way ordered by the Lord. Though of peace. he fall, he shall not be utterly cast down, for the Lord upholdeth him.--Ps. xxxvii. [xxxvi.] 23. The day-spring from on high hath visited us, to guide our feet into the way of peace.--Luke i. 78, 79. And then again, in celebrating the praises of a mortal {223} man, recourse is had to language which can fitly be used only in our hymns and praises to the supreme Lord of our destinies, the eternal Creator, Redeemer, and Comforter, the only wise God our Saviour. _Address to Thomas._ _Language of Scripture._ 1. Hail, Thomas, Rod of Justice! 1. There shall come a rod out of the stem of Jesse. Ye denied the Holy One, and the Just--Isaiah xi. 1. Acts iii. 14. 2. The brightness of the world. 2. The brightness of his glory. I am the light of the world--Heb. i. 3. John viii. 12. 3. The strength of the Church. 3. I can do all things through Christ, that strengthened me. Christ loved the Church, and gave himself for it.--Phil. iv. 13. Eph. v. 25. 4. The love of the people: the 4. Grace be with all them that delight of the Clergy. love our Lord Jesus Christ in sincerity. Delight thyself in the Lord.--Eph. vi. 24. Ps. xxxvii. 4. 5. Hail, glorious Guardian of 5. Our Lord Jesus, that great the Flock. Save those who rejoice Shepherd of the sheep. Give ear, in thy glory. O Shepherd of Israel; come and save us. He that glorieth, let him glory in the Lord.--Heb. xiii. 20. Psalm lxxx. [lxxix.] 1. 1 Cor. i. 31. Can that worship become the disciples of the Gospel and the Cross, which addresses such prayers and such praises to the spirit of a mortal man? Every prayer, and every form of praise here used in honour of Thomas Becket, it would well become Christians to offer to the Giver of all good, trusting solely and exclusively to the mediation of Christ Jesus our Lord for acceptance; and pleading-only the merits of his most precious blood. {224} And yet I am bound to confess, that in principle, in spirit, and in fact, I can find no substantial difference between this service of Thomas of Canterbury, and the service which all in communion with the Church of Rome are under an obligation to use even at the present hour. This point remains next for our inquiry, and we will draw from the well-head. I would, however, first suggest the application of a general test for ascertaining the real _bona-fide_ nature of these prayers and praises. The test I would apply is, to try with the change only of the name, substituting the holiest name ever named in heaven or in earth for the name of Thomas of Canterbury--whether these prayers and praises should not be offered to the Supreme Being alone through the atoning merits of his Blessed Son; whether they are not exclusively appropriate to HIM. To (Thomas/God Almighty) all things bow and are obedient. Plagues, diseases, death, and devils, Fire, air, land, and sea. (Thomas/The Almighty) fills the world with glory. The world offers obeisance to (Thomas/Almighty God). (The Martyr Thomas/Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ) began to shine forth with miracles [John ii. 11]; restoring sight to the blind [Luke vii. 21]; walking to the lame; hearing to the deaf; speech to the dumb; cleansing to the lepers [Matt. xi. 5]; making the paralytic sound [Matt. iv. 24]; healing the dropsy [Luke xiv. 4]; and all kinds of incurable diseases [Luke iv. 40]; restoring the dead to {225} life [Luke viii. 43. 55]; in a wonderful manner commanding the devils [Matt. viii. 16], and all the elements [Luke viii. 25]. He put forth his hand to unwonted and unheard-of signs of his own power [Mark ii. 12. John ix. 30]. Do thou, O Lord, by the blood of (Thomas/Christ) cause us to ascend whither (Thomas/Christ) has ascended. (O Thomas/O God), send help to us. Guide those who stand; raise up those who fall; correct our morals, actions, and life; and guide us into the way of peace. Hail, (Thomas!/Jesus!) Rod of Justice, the Brightness of the world, the Strength of the Church, the Love of the people, the Delight of the Clergy. Hail, Glorious Guardian of the flock! Save Thou those who delight in Thy glory. * * * * * We shall apply this same test to many of the collects and prayers used, and of necessity to be used, because they are authorized and appointed, even at the present day, in the ministrations of the Church of Rome. The impiety in many of those instances is not couched in such startling language; but it is not the less real. God forbid that we should charge our fellow-creatures with idolatry, who declare that they offer divine worship to the Supreme Being only; or that we should pronounce any professed Christian to have cast off his {226} dependence on the merits of Christ alone, who assures us that he looks for mercy only through those merits. But I know and feel, that according to the standard of Christian truth, and of the pure worship of Almighty God, which the Scriptures and primitive antiquity compel me to adopt, I should stain my own soul with the guilt of idolatry, and with the sin of relying on other merits than Christ's, were I myself to offer those prayers. That this service excited much disgust among the early reformers, we learn from various writers[85]. On the merits of the struggle between Becket and his king; on the question of Becket's moral and religious worth, (a question long and often discussed among the exercises of the masters of Paris in the full assembly of the Sorbonne[86],) or on the motives which influenced Henry the Eighth, I intend not to say one word: those points belong not to our present inquiry. It may not, however, be thought irrelevant here to quote a passage {227} from the ordinance of this latter monarch for erasing Becket's service out of the books, and his name from the calendar of the saints. [Footnote 85: See Mornay "De la Messe," Saumur, 1604. p. 826. Becon, in his "New Year's Gift," London, 1564, p. 183, thus speaks: "What saint at any time thought himself so pure, immaculate, and without all spot of sin, that he durst presume to die for us, and to avouch his death to be an oblation and sacrifice for our lives to God the Father, except peradventure we will admit for good payment these and such like blasphemies, which were wont full solemnly to be sung in the temples unto the great ignominy of the glorious name of God, and the dishonour of Christ's most precious blood." Then quoting the lines from the service of Thomas Becket, on which we have above commented, he adds, "I will let pass many more which are easy to be searched and found out." Becon preached and wrote in the reign of Henry VIII. and was then persecuted for his religion, as he was afterwards in the reign of Mary.] [Footnote 86: We are told that forty-eight years after his death, the masters of Paris disputed whether Thomas was a condemned sinner, or admitted into heaven.] In Henry the Eighth's proclamation, dated Westminster, 16th November, in the thirtieth year of his reign, printed by Bertholet, is the following very curious passage:-- "ITEM, for as moche as it appereth now clerely, that Thomas Becket, sometyme Archbyshop of Canterburie, stubburnly to withstand the holsome lawes establyshed agaynste the enormities of the clergie, by the kynges highness mooste noble progenitour, kynge HENRY the Seconde, for the common welthe, reste, and tranquillitie of this realme, of his frowarde mynde fledde the realme into Fraunce, and to the bishop of Rome, mayntenour of those enormities, to procure the abrogation of the sayd lawes, whereby arose moch trouble in this said realme, and that his dethe, which they untruely called martyrdome, happened upon a reskewe by him made, and that, as it is written, he gave opprobrious wordes to the gentyllmen, whiche than counsayled hym to leave his stubbernesse, and to avoyde the commocion of the people, rysen up for that rescue. And he not only callyd the one of them bawde, but also toke Tracy by the bosome, and violently shoke and plucked hym in suche maner, that he had almoste overthrowen hym to the pavement of the Churche; so that upon this fray one of their company, perceivynge the same, strake hym, and so in the thronge Becket was slayne. And further that his canonization was made onely by the bysshop of Rome, bycause he had ben a champion of maynteyne his usurped auctoritie, and a bearer of the iniquitie of the clergie, for these and for other great and urgent causes, longe to recyte, the Kynge's {228} Maiestie, by the advyse of his counsayle, hath thought expedient to declare to his lovynge subjectes, that notwithstandynge the sayde canonization, there appereth nothynge in his lyfe and exteriour conversation, wherby he shuld be callyd a sainct, but rather estemed to have ben a rebell and traytour to his prynce. Therefore his Grace strayghtly chargeth and commandeth that from henseforth the sayde Thomas Becket shall not be estemed, named, reputed, nor called a sayncte, but bysshop Becket; and that his ymages and pictures, through the hole realme, shall be putte downe, and avoyded out of all churches, chapelles, and other places; and that from henseforthe, the dayes used to be festivall in his name shall not be observed, nor the service, office, antiphoners, colletes, and prayers, in his name redde, but rased and put out of all the bokes[87]." [Footnote 87: In the Roman Breviary, adapted to England, several biographical lessons are appointed for the Anniversary of "St. Thomas, bishop and martyr," interspersed with canticles. In one of these we read, "This is truly a martyr, who, for the name of Christ, shed blood; who feared not the threats of judges, nor sought the glory of earthly dignity. But he reached the heavenly kingdom."--Norwich, 1830. Hiem. p. 251.] {229} * * * * * CHAPTER II. COUNCIL OF TRENT. In the process of ascertaining the real state of doctrine and practice in the worship of the Church of Rome at the present day, we must first gain as clear and accurate a knowledge of the decree of the Council of Trent, as its words will enable us to form. Into the character of that Council, and of those who constituted it, our present investigation does not lead us to inquire. It is now, I believe, generally understood, that its decrees are binding on all who profess allegiance to the Sovereign Roman Pontiff; and that the man would be considered to have renounced the Roman Catholic Communion, who should professedly withhold his assent from the doctrines there promulgated as vital, or against the oppugners of which the Council itself pronounced an anathema. Ecclesiastical writers[88] assure us, that the wording of the decrees of that Council was in many cases on purpose framed ambiguously and vaguely. The latitude, however, of the expressions employed, does not in itself {230} of necessity imply any of those sinister and unworthy motives to which it has been usual with many writers to attribute it. In charity, and without any improbable assumption, it may be referred to an honest and laudable desire of making the terms of communion as wide as might be, with a view of comprehending within what was regarded the pale of the Catholic Church, the greatest number of those who professed and called themselves Christians. Be this as it may, the vagueness and uncertainty of the terms employed, compel us in many instances to have recourse to the actual practice of the Church of Rome, as the best interpreter of doubtful expressions in the articles of that Council. The decree which bears on the subject of this volume is drawn up in the following words:-- [Footnote 88: See Mosheim, xvi. Cent. c. i. vol. iv. p. 196. London, 1811.] "SESSION XXV.[89] "On the invocation, veneration, and reliques of saints, and of sacred images. "The Holy Council commands all bishops and others bearing the office and care of instruction, that according to the usage of the Catholic and Apostolic Church, received from the primitive times of the Christian religion, and the consent of holy fathers, and decrees of sacred councils, they in the first place should instruct the faithful concerning the intercession and invocation of saints, the honour of reliques, and the lawful use of images, teaching them, that the SAINTS REIGNING TOGETHER WITH CHRIST, offer their own {231} prayers for men to God: that it is good and profitable SUPPLIANTLY TO INVOKE THEM: and to fly to their PRAYERS, HELP, and ASSISTANCE, for obtaining benefits from God, by his Son Jesus Christ our Lord, who is our only Redeemer and Saviour. But that those who deny that the saints, enjoying everlasting happiness in heaven, are to be invoked; or who assert either that they do not pray for us; or that the invocation of them to pray for us even as individuals is idolatry, or is repugnant to the word of God, and is opposed to the honour of the one Mediator of God and man, Jesus Christ; or that it is folly, by voice or mentally, to supplicate those who reign in heaven, hold impious sentiments. "That the bodies also of the holy martyrs and others living with Christ, which were living members of Christ, and a temple of the Holy Ghost to be raised by Him to eternal life, and to be glorified, are to be worshipped by the faithful; by means of which many benefits are conferred on men by God; so that those who affirm that worship and honour are not due to the reliques of the saints, or that they and other sacred monuments are unprofitably honoured by the faithful; and that the shrines of the saints are frequented in vain for the purpose of obtaining their succour, are altogether to be condemned, as the Church has long ago condemned them, and now also condemns them." [Footnote 89: The Latin, which will be found in the Appendix, is a transcript from a printed copy of the Acts of the Council of Trent, preserved in the British Museum, to which are annexed the autograph signatures of the secretaries (notarii), and their seals.] An examination of this decree, in comparison with the form and language of other decrees of the same Council, forces the remark upon us, That the Council does not assert that the practice of invoking saints has any foundation in Holy Scripture. The absence of all such declaration is the more striking and important, because in the very decree immediately preceding this, {232} which establishes Purgatory as a doctrine of the Church of Rome, the Council declares that doctrine to be drawn from the Holy Scriptures. In the present instance the Council proceeds no further than to charge with impiety those who maintain the invocation of saints to be contrary to the word of God. Many a doctrine or practice, not found in Scripture, may nevertheless be not contrary to the word of God; but here the Council abstains from affirming any thing whatever as to the scriptural origin of the doctrine and practice which it authoritatively enforces. In this respect the framers of the decree acted with far more caution and wisdom than they had shown in wording the decree on Purgatory; and with far more caution and wisdom too than they exercised in this decree, when they affirmed that the doctrine of the invocation of saints was to be taught the people according to the usage of the Catholic and Apostolic Church, received from the primitive times of the Christian religion, and the consent of the holy fathers. I have good hope that these pages have already proved beyond gainsaying, that the invocation of saints is a manifest departure from the usage of the Primitive Church, and contrary to the testimony of "the holy fathers." However, the fact of the Council not having professed to trace the doctrine, or its promulgation, to any authority of Holy Scripture, is of very serious import, and deserves to be well weighed in all its bearings. With regard to the condemnatory clauses of this decree, I would for myself observe, that I should never have engaged in preparing this volume, had I not believed, "that it was neither good nor profitable to invoke the saints, or to fly to their prayers, their assistance, and succour." I am bound, with this decree {233} before me, to pronounce, that it is a vain thing to offer supplications, either by the voice or in the mind, to the saints, even if they be reigning in heaven; and that it is also in vain for Christians to frequent the shrines of the saints for the purpose of obtaining their succour. I am, moreover, under a deep conviction, that the invocation of them is both at variance with the word of God, and contrary to the honour of the one Mediator between God and man, Jesus Christ. On this last point, indeed, I am aware of an anxious desire prevailing on the part of many Roman Catholics, to establish a distinction between a mediation of Redemption, and a mediation of Intercession: and thus by limiting the mediation of the saints and angels to intercession, and reserving the mediation of redemption to Christ only, to avoid the setting up of another to share the office of Mediator with Him, who is so solemnly declared in Scripture to be the one Mediator between God and man. But this distinction has no foundation in the revealed will of God; on the contrary, it is directly at variance with the words and with the spirit of many portions of the sacred volume. There we find the two offices of redemption and mediation joined together in Christ. "If any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the Righteous, and He is the propitiation for our sins." [1 John ii. 1, 2. Heb. ix. 12. vii. 25.] In the Epistle to the Hebrews, the same Saviour who is declared "by his own blood to have obtained eternal redemption," is announced also as the Mediator of Intercession. "Wherefore he is able to save them to the uttermost who come unto God through him, seeing he ever liveth to make intercession for them." The {234} redemption wrought by Christ, and the intercession still made in our behalf by Christ, are both equally declared to us by the most sure warrant of Holy Scripture; of any other intercession by saints in glory, by angels, or Virgin, to be sought by our suppliant invocations to them, the covenant of God speaks not. It may be observed, that the enactment of this decree by the Council of Trent, has been chiefly lamented by some persons on the ground of its presenting the most formidable barrier against any reconciliation between the Church of Rome, and those who hold the unlawfulness of the invocation of saints. Indeed persons of erudition, judgment, piety, and charity, in communion with Rome, have not been wanting to express openly their regret, that decrees so positive, peremptory, and exclusive, should have been adopted. They would have been better satisfied with the terms of communion in the Church to which they still adhered, had individuals been left to their own responsibility on questions of disputable origin and doubtful antiquity, involving rather the subtilty of metaphysical disquisitions, than agreeable to the simplicity of Gospel truth, and essential Christian doctrine. On this point I would content myself with quoting the sentiments of a Roman Catholic author. Many of the facts alleged in his interesting comments deserve the patient consideration of every Christian. Here (observes the commentator on Paoli Sarpi's History of the Council of Trent[90]) the Council makes it a duty to pray to saints, though the ancient Church never regarded it as necessary. The practice cannot be proved to be introduced into public worship {235} before the sixth century; and it is certain, that in the ancient liturgies and sacramentaries no direct invocation is found. Even in our modern missals, being those of our ecclesiastical books in which the ancient form has been longest retained, scarcely is there a collect [those he means in which mention is made of the saints] where the address is not offered directly to God, imploring Him to hear the prayers of the saints for us; and this is the ancient form of invocation. It is true, that in the Breviaries and other ecclesiastical books, direct prayers to the saints have been subsequently introduced, as in litanies, hymns, and even some collects. But the usage is more modern, and cannot be evidence for ancient tradition. For this [ancient tradition] only some invocations addressed to saints in public harangues are alleged, but which ought to be regarded as figures of rhetoric, _apostrophes_, rather than real invocations; though at the same time some fathers laid the foundation for such a practice by asserting that one could address himself to the saints, and hope for succour from them. [Footnote 90: Histoire du Conc. de Trent, par Fra. Paoli Sarpi, traduit par Pierre François de Courayer. Amsterdam, note 31. 1751. vol. iii. p. 182.] We have already alluded to the very great latitude of interpretation which the words of this Council admit. The expressions indeed are most remarkably elastic; capable of being expanded widely enough to justify those of the Church of Rome who allow themselves in the practice of asking for aid and assistance, temporal and spiritual, to be expected from the saints themselves; and at the same time, the words of the decree admit of being so far contracted as not in appearance palpably to contradict those who allege, that the Church of Rome never addresses a saint with any other petition, than purely and simply that the saint would by prayer intercede for the worshippers. The words "suppliantly {236} to invoke them," and "to fly to their prayers, HELP, and SUCCOUR," are sufficiently comprehensive to cover all kinds of prayer for all kinds of benefits, whilst "the invocation of them to pray for us even individually," will countenance those who would restrict the faithful to an entreaty for their prayers only. Whatever may be the advantage of this latitude of interpretation, in one point of view it must be a subject of regret. Complaints had long been made in Christendom, that other prayers were offered to the saints, besides those which petitioned only for their intercession; and if the Council of Trent had intended it to be a rule of universal application, that in whatever words the invocations of the saints might be couched, they should be taken to mean only requests for their prayers, it may be lamented, that no declaration to that effect was given. The manner in which writers of the Church of Rome have attempted to reconcile the prayers actually offered in her ritual, with the principle of invoking the saints only for their prayers, is indeed most unsatisfactory. Whilst to some minds the expedient to which those writers have had recourse carries with it the stamp of mental reservation, and spiritual subterfuge, and moral obliquity; others under the influence of the purest charity will regret in it the absence of that simplicity, and direct openness in word and deed, which we regard as characteristic of the religion of the Gospel; and will deprecate its adoption as tending, in many cases inevitably, to become a most dangerous snare to the conscience. I will here refer only to the profession of that principle as made by Bellarmin. Subsequent writers seem to have adopted his sentiments, and to have expressed themselves very much in his words. {237} Bellarmin unreservedly asserts that Christians are to invoke the saints solely and exclusively for their prayers, and not for any benefits as from the saints themselves. But then he seems to paralyse that declaration by this refinement: "It must nevertheless be observed that we have not to do with words, but with the meaning of words; for as far as concerns the words, it is lawful to say, 'Saint Peter, have mercy on me! Save me! Open to me the entrance of heaven!' So also, 'Give to me health of body, Give me patience, Give me fortitude!' Whilst only we understand 'Save me, and have mercy upon me BY PRAYING for me: Give me this and that, BY THY PRAYERS AND MERITS.' For thus Gregory of Nazianzen, in his Oratio in Cyprianum; and the Universal Church, when in the hymn to the Virgin she says, Mary, Mother of Grace, Mother of Mercy, Do thou protect us from the enemy, And take us in the hour of death. "And in that of the Apostles, 'To whose command is subject' The health and weakness of all: Heal us who are morally diseased; Restore us to virtue. "And as the Apostle says of himself 'that I might save some,' [Rom. xi.] and 'that he might save all,' [I Cor. ix.] not as God, but Thy prayer and counsel." I wish not to enter upon the question how far this distinction is consistent with that openness and straightforward undisguised dealing which is alone allowable when we are contending for the truth; nor how far the {238} charge of moral obliquity and double dealing, often brought against it, can be satisfactorily met. But suppose for a moment that we grant (what is not the case) that in the metaphysical disquisitions of the experienced casuist such a distinction might be maintained, how can we expect it to be recognized, and felt, and acted upon by the large body of Christians? Abstractedly considered, such an interpretation in a religious act of daily recurrence by the mass of unlearned believers would, I conceive, appear to reflecting minds most improbable, if not utterly impossible. And as to its actual _bona-fide_ result in practice, a very brief sojourn in countries where the religion of Rome is dominant, will suffice to convince us, that such subtilties of the casuist are neither received nor understood by the great body of worshippers; and that the large majority of them, when they pray to an individual saint to deliver them from any evil, or to put them in possession of some good, do in very deed look to the saint himself for the fulfilment of their wishes. It is a snare to the conscience only too evidently successful. And I regret to add, that in the errors into which such language of their prayers may unhappily betray them, they cannot be otherwise than confirmed as well by the recorded sentiments of men in past years, whom they have been taught to reverence, as by the sentiments which are circulated through the world now, even by what they are accustomed to regard as the highest authority on earth[91]. [Footnote 91: See in subsequent parts of this work the references to Bonaventura, Bernardin Sen., Bernardin de Bust., &c.; and also the encyclical letter of the present (A.D. 1840) reigning pontiff.] To this point, however, we must repeatedly revert {239} hereafter; at present, I will only add one further consideration. If, as we are now repeatedly told, the utmost sought by the invocation of saints is that they would intercede for the supplicants; that no more is meant than we of the Anglican Church mean when we earnestly entreat our fellow-Christians on earth to pray for us,--why should not the prayers to the saints be confined exclusively to that form of words which would convey the meaning intended? why should other forms of supplicating them be adopted, whose obvious and direct meaning implies a different thing? If we request a Christian friend to pray for us, that we may be strengthened and supported under a trial and struggle in our spiritual warfare, we do not say, "Friend, strengthen me; Friend, support me." That entreaty would imply our desire to be, that he would visit us himself, and comfort and strengthen us by his own kind words and cheering offices of consolation and encouragement. To convey our meaning, our words would be, "Pray for me; remember me in your supplications to the throne of grace. Implore God, of his mercy, to give me the strength and comfort of his Holy Spirit." If nothing more is ever intended to be conveyed, than a similar request for their prayers, when the saints are "suppliantly invoked," in a case of such delicacy, and where there is so much danger of words misleading, why have other expressions of every variety been employed in the Roman Liturgies, as well as in the devotions of individuals, which in words appeal to the saints, not for their prayers, but for their own immediate exertion in our behalf, their assistance, succour, defence, and comfort,--"Protect us from our enemies--Heal the diseases of our minds--Release us from our sin--Receive us at the hour of death?" {240} In the present work, however, were it not for the example and warning set us by this still greater departure from Scripture and the primitive Church, we need not have dwelt on this immediate point; because we maintain that any invocation of saint or angel, even if it were confined to a petitioning for their prayers and intercessions, is contrary both to God's word and to the faith and practice of the primitive, Catholic, and Apostolic Church. We now proceed to the next portion of our proposed inquiry,--the present state of Roman Catholic worship, with respect to the invocation of saints and angels. {241} * * * * * CHAPTER III. SECTION I.--PRESENT SERVICE IN THE CHURCH OF ROME. In submitting to the reader's consideration the actual state of Roman Catholic worship at the present hour, I disclaim all desire to fasten upon the Church of Rome any of the follies and extravagancies of individual superstition. Probably many English Roman Catholics have been themselves shocked and scandalized by the scenes which their own eyes have witnessed in various parts of continental Europe. It would be no less unfair in us to represent the excesses of superstition there forced on our notice as the genuine legitimate fruits of the religion of Rome, than it would be in Roman Catholics to affiliate on the Catholics of the Anglican Church the wild theories and revolting tenets of all who assume the name of opponents to Rome. Well indeed does it become us of both Churches to watch jealously and adversely as against ourselves the errors into which our doctrines, if not preserved and guarded in their purity and simplicity, might have a tendency to seduce the unwary. And whilst I am fully alive to the necessity of us Anglican Catholics prescribing to ourselves a {242} practical application of the same rule in various points of faith and discipline, I would with all delicacy and respect invite Roman Catholics to do likewise. Especially would I entreat them to reflect with more than ordinary scrutiny and solicitude on the vast evils into which the practice of praying to saints and angels, and of pleading their merits at the throne of grace, has a tendency to betray those who are unenlightened and off their guard; and unless my eyes and my ears and my powers of discernment have altogether often deceived and failed me, I must add, actually betrays thousands. Often when I have witnessed abroad multitudes of pilgrims prostrate before an image of the Virgin, their arms extended, their eyes fixed on her countenance, their words in their native language pouring forth her praises and imploring her aid, I have asked myself, If this be not religious worship, what is? If I could transport myself into the midst of pagans in some distant part of the world at the present day; or could I have mingled with the crowd of worshippers surrounding the image of Minerva in Athens, or of Diana in Ephesus, when the servants of the only God called their fellow-creatures from such vanities, should I have seen or heard more unequivocal proofs that the worshippers were addressing their prayers to the idols as representations of their deities? Would any difference have appeared in their external worship? When the Ephesians worshipped their "great goddess Diana and the image which fell down from Jupiter," could their attitude, their eyes, or their words more clearly have indicated an assurance in the worshipper, that the Spirit of the Deity was especially present in that image, than the attitude, the eyes, the words of the pilgrims at Einsiedlin for example, are indications of the same {243} belief and assurance with regard to the statue of the Virgin Mary? These thoughts would force themselves again and again on my mind; and though since I first witnessed such things many years have intervened, chequered with various events of life, yet whilst I am writing, the scenes are brought again fresh to my remembrance; the same train of thought is awakened; and the lapse of time has not in the least diminished the estimate then formed of the danger, the awful peril, to which the practice of addressing saints and angels in prayer, even in its most modified and mitigated form, exposes those who are in communion with Rome. I am unwilling to dwell on this point longer, or to paint in deeper or more vivid colours the scenes which I have witnessed, than the necessity of the case requires. But it would have been the fruit of a morbid delicacy rather than of brotherly love, had I disguised, in this part of my address, the full extent of the awful dread with which I contemplate any approximation to prayers, of whatever kind, uttered by the lips or mentally conceived, to any spiritual existence in heaven above, save only to the one God exclusively. It is indeed a dread suggested by the highest and purest feelings of which I believe my frame of mind to be susceptible; it is sanctioned and enforced by my reason; and it is confirmed and strengthened more and more by every year's additional reflection and experience. Ardently as I long and pray for Christian unity, I could not join in communion with a Church, one of whose fundamental articles accuses of impiety those who deny the lawfulness of the invocations of saints. But I return from this digression on the peril of idolatry, to which as well the theory as the practice of {244} the Roman Catholic Church exposes her members; and willingly repeat my disclaimer of any wish or intention whatever to fasten and filiate upon the Church of Rome the doctrines or the practice of individuals, or even of different sections of her communion. Still, in the same manner as I have referred to the extravagancies which offend us in many parts of Christendom now, I would recall some of the excesses into which renowned and approved authors of her communion have been betrayed. I seek not to fix on those members of the Roman Church who disclaim any participation in such excesses, the folly or guilt of others; but when we find many of the most celebrated among her sons tempted into such lamentable departures from primitive Christian worship, we are naturally led to ascertain whether the doctrine be not itself the genuine cause and source of the mischief;--whether the malady be not the immediate and natural effect of the tenet and practice operating generally, and not to be referred to the idiosyncrasy of the patient. A voice seems to address us from every side, when such excesses are witnessed, Firmly resist the beginnings of the evil; oppose its very commencement; it is not a question of degree, exclude the principle itself from your worship; give utterance to no invocation; mentally conceive no prayer to any being, save God alone; plead no other merits with Him than the merits of his only Son. Then, and then only, are you safe. Then, and then only, is your prayer catholic, primitive, apostolic, and scriptural. The[92] most satisfactory method of conducting this {245} branch of our inquiry seems to be, that we should examine the Roman Ritual with reference to those several and progressive stages to which I have before generally referred; from the mere rhetorical apostrophe to the direct prayer for spiritual blessings petitioned for immediately from the person addressed. I am neither anxious to establish the progress historically, nor do I wish to tie myself down in all cases to the exact order of those successive stages, in my present citation of testimonies from the Roman Ritual. My anxiety is to give a fair view of what is now the real character of Roman Catholic worship, rather than to draw fine distinctions. I shall therefore survey within the same field of view the two fatal errors by which, as we believe, the worship of the Church of Rome is rendered unfit for the family of Christ to acknowledge it generally as their own: I mean the adoration of saints, and the pleading of their merits at the throne of grace, instead of trusting to the alone exclusive merits of the one only Mediator Jesus Christ our Lord, and addressing God Almighty alone. [Footnote 92: I believe the method best calculated to supply us with the very truth is, as I have before observed, to trace the conduct of Christians at the shrines of the martyrs, and follow them in their successive departures further and further from primitive purity and simplicity, on the anniversaries of those servants of God. What was hailed there first in the full warmth of admiration and zeal for the honour and glory of a national or favourite martyr, crept stealthily, and step by step, into the regular and stated services of the Church.] I. In the original form of those prayers in which mention was made of the saints departed, Christians addressed the Supreme Being alone, either in praise for the mercies shown to the saints themselves, and to the Church through their means; or else in supplication, that the worshippers might have grace to follow their example, and profit by their instruction. Such, for instance, is the prayer in the Roman ritual[93] on St. {246} John's day[94] which is evidently the foundation of the beautiful Collect now used in the Anglican Church,--"Merciful Lord, we beseech thee to cast thy bright beams of light upon thy Church, that it being enlightened by the doctrine of thy Apostle and Evangelist St. John, may so walk in the light of thy truth, that it may at length attain to the light of everlasting life, through Jesus our Lord. Amen." Such too is the close of the Prayer for the whole state of Christ's Church militant here on earth, offered in our Anglican service,--"We bless thy holy name for all thy servants departed this life in thy faith and fear, beseeching thee to give us grace so to follow their good examples, that with them we may be partakers of thy heavenly kingdom. Grant this, O Father, for the sake of Jesus Christ our only Mediator and Advocate. Amen." [Footnote 93: The references will generally be given to the Roman Breviary as edited by F.C. Husenbeth, Norwich, 1830. That work consists of four volumes, corresponding with the four quarters of the ecclesiastical year--Winter, Hiem.; Spring, Vern.; Summer, _Æstiv_.; Autumn, Aut.; and the volumes will be designated by the corresponding initials, H. V. Æ. A.] [Footnote 94: "Ecclesiam, tuam, Domine, benignus illustra, ut beati Johannis Apostoli tui et evangelistæ illuminata doctrinis, ad dona perveniat sempiterna. Per Dominum."--Husen. H. p. 243.] II. The second stage supplies examples of a kind of rhetorical apostrophe; the speaker addressing one who was departed as though he had ears to hear. Were not this the foundation stone on which the rest of the edifice seems to have been built, we might have passed it by unnoticed. Of this we have an instance in the address to the Shepherds on Christmas-day. "Whom have ye seen, ye shepherds? Say ye, tell ye, who hath appeared on the earth? Say ye, what saw ye? Announce to us the nativity of Christ[95]." [Footnote 95: Quem vidistis, Pastores? Dicite, Annunciate nobis. In terris quis apparuit? Dicite quidnam vidistis? Et annunciate Christi nativitatem.--H. 219.] {247} Another instance is seen in that beautiful song ascribed to Prudentius and used on the day of Holy Innocents: "Hail! ye flowers of Martyrs." [Salvete flores martyrum. H. 249.] It is of the same character with other songs, said to be from the same pen, in which the town of Bethlehem is addressed, and even the Cross. "O Thou of mighty cities." [O sola magnarum urbium. H. 306.] "Bend thy boughs, thou lofty tree...." [Flecte ramos arbor alta, &c. Aut. 344.] "Worthy wast thou alone To bear the victim of the world." Thus, on the feast of the exaltation of the Cross, this anthem is sung,--"O blessed Cross, who wast alone worthy to bear the King of the heavens and the Lord." [O crux benedicta, quæ sola fuisti digna portare Regem coelorum et Dominum. Alleluia. A. 345.] Though unhappily, in an anthem on St. Andrew's day, this apostrophe becomes painful and distressing, in which not only is the cross thus apostrophised, but it is prayed to, as though it had ears to hear, and a mind to understand, and power to act,--"Hail, precious Cross! do thou receive the disciple of Him who hung upon thee, my master, Christ." [Salve, crux pretiosa suscipe discipulum ejus, qui pependit in te, magister meus Christus. A. 547.] The Church of Rome, in this instance, gives us a vivid example of the ease with which exclamations and apostrophes are made the ground-work of invocations. In the legend of the day similar, though not the same, words form a part of the salutation, which St. Andrew is there said to have addressed {248} to the cross of wood prepared for his own martyrdom, and then bodily before his eyes. There are many such addresses to the Cross, in various parts of the Roman ritual. (See A. 344.) In such apostrophes the whole of the Song of the Three Children abounds; and we meet with many such in the early writers. III. The third stage supplies instances of prayer to God, imploring him to allow the supplication of his saints to be offered for us. Of this we find examples in the Collects for St. Andrew's Eve and Anniversary, for the feast of St. Anthony, and various others. "We beseech thee, Almighty God, that he whose feast we are about to celebrate may implore thy aid for us," &c. [Quæsumus omnipotens Deus, ut beatus Andreas Apostolus cujus prævenimus festivitatem, tuum pro nobis imploret auxilium. A. 545.] "That he may be for us a perpetual intercessor." [Ut apud te sit pro nobis perpetuus intercessor. A. 551.] "We beseech thee, O Lord, let the intercession of the blessed Anthony the Abbot commend us, that what we cannot effect by our own merits, we may obtain by his patronage [Ejus patrocinio assequamur. H. 490.]: through the Lord." These prayers I could not offer in faith. I am taught in the written word to look for no other intercessor in heaven, than one who is eternal and divine, therefore I can need no other. Had God, by his revealed word, told me that the intercessions of his servants departed should prevail with Him, provided I sought that benefit by prayer, I should, without any misgiving, have implored Him to receive their {249} prayers in my behalf; but I can find no such an intimation in the covenant. In that covenant the word of the God of truth and mercy is pledged to receive those, and to grant the prayers of those who come to him through his blessed Son. In that covenant, I am strictly commanded and most lovingly invited to approach boldly the Supreme Giver of all good things myself, and to ask in faith nothing wavering, with an assurance that He who spared not his own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, will, with Him, also freely give us all things. In this assurance I place implicit trust; and as long as I have my being in this earthly tabernacle, I will, by his gracious permission and help, pray for whatever is needful for the soul and the body; I will pray not for myself only, but for all, individually and collectively, who are near and dear to me, and all who are far from me; for my friends, and for those who wish me ill; for my fellow Christians, and for those who are walking still in darkness and sin;--I will pray for mercy on all mankind. And I will, as occasion offers, desire others among the faithful on earth to pray for me; and will take comfort and encouragement and holy hope from the reflection that their prayers are presented to God in my behalf, and that they will continue to pray for me when my own strength shall fail and the hour of my departure shall draw nigh. But for the acceptance of my own prayers and of theirs I can depend on no other Mediator in the world of spirits, than on HIM, whom his own Word declares to be the one Mediator between God and men, who prayed for me when He was on earth, who is ever making intercession for me in heaven. I know of no other in the unseen world, by whom I can have access to the Father; I find no other offered to me, I seek no {250} other, I want no other. I trust my cause,--the cause of my present life, the cause of my soul's eternal happiness,--to HIM and to his intercession. I thank God for the blessing. I am satisfied; and in the assurance of the omnipotence of his intercession, and the perfect fulness of his mediation, I am happy. On this point it were well to compare two prayers both offered to God; the one pleading with Him the intercession of the passion of his only Son, the other pleading the prayers of a mortal man. The first prayer is a collect in Holy Week, the second is a collect on St. Gregory's Day. We beseech thee, Almighty God, that we who among so many adversities from our own infirmity fail, the passion of thy only begotten Son interceding for us, may revive. V. 243. O God, who hast granted the rewards of eternal blessedness[96] to the soul of thy servant Gregory, mercifully grant that we who are pressed down by the weight of our sins, may, by his prayers with Thee, be raised up. V. 480. [Footnote 96: I can never read this, and such passages as this, without asking myself, can such an assertion be in accordance with the inspired teaching?--"Judge nothing before the time, until the Lord come, who both will bring to light the hidden things of darkness, and will make manifest the counsels of the hearts: and then shall every man have praise of God." I Cor. iv. 5.] IV. The next form of prayer to which I would invite your serious attention, is one from which my judgment and my feelings revolt far more decidedly even than from the last-mentioned; and I have the most clear denouncement of my conscience, that by offering it I should do a wrong to my Saviour, and ungratefully disparage his inestimable merits, and the full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice and satisfaction of his omnipotent {251} atonement: I mean those prayers, still addressed to God, which supplicate that our present and future good may be advanced by the merits of departed mortals, that by their merits our sins may be forgiven, and our salvation secured; that by their merits our souls may be made fit for celestial joys, and be finally admitted into heaven. Of these prayers the Roman Breviary contains a great variety of examples, some exceeding others very much in their apparent forgetfulness and disregard of the merits of the only Saviour, and consequently far more shocking to the reason and affections of us who hold it a point of conscience to make the merits of Christ alone, all in all, exclusive of any other to be joined with them, the only ground of our acceptance with God. We find an example of this prayer in the collect on the day of St. Saturnine. "O God, who grantest us to enjoy the birth-day of the blessed Saturnine, thy martyr, grant that we may be aided by his merits, through the Lord." [Ejus nos tribue meritis adjuvari per Dominum. A. 544.] Another example, in which the supplicants plead for deliverance from hell, to be obtained by the merits and prayers of the saint together, is the Collect for December 6th, the day of St. Nicolas. "O God, who didst adorn the blessed Pontiff Nicolas with unnumbered miracles, grant, we beseech Thee, that by his merits and prayers we may be set free from the fires of hell, through," &c. [Ut ejus meritis et precibus à gehennæ incendiis liberemur. H. 436.] Another example, in like manner specifying both the merits and intercession of the departed saint, contains {252} expressions very unacceptable to many of those who are accustomed to make the Bible their study. It is a prayer to Joseph, the espoused husband of the Virgin Mary. Of him mention is made by name in the Gospel just before and just after the birth of Christ, as an upright, merciful man, to whom God on three several occasions made a direct revelation of his will, by the medium of a dream, with reference to the incarnate Saviour. Again, on the holy family visiting Jerusalem, when our Lord was twelve years of age, Mary, his mother, in her remonstrance with her Son, speaks to Him of Joseph thus: "Why hast Thou thus dealt with us? Behold thy father and I have sought Thee sorrowing." Upon which not one word was uttered by our Saviour that would enable us to form an opinion as to his own will with regard to Joseph. Our Lord seems purposely to have drawn their thoughts from his earthly connexion with them, and to have raised their minds to a contemplation of his unearthly, his heavenly, and eternal origin. "How is it that ye sought me? Wist ye not that I must be about my Father's business?" After this time, though the writings of the Holy Book, either historical, doctrinal, or prophetic, at the lowest calculation embrace a period of fourscore years, no allusion is made to Joseph as a man still living, or to his memory as one already dead. And yet he is one of those for the benefit of whose intercession the Church of Rome teaches her members to pray to God, and from whose merits they are taught to hope for succour. On the 19th of March the following Collect is offered to the Saviour of the world:-- "We beseech thee, O Lord, that we may be succoured by the merits of the husband of thy most holy mother, {253} so that what we cannot obtain by our own power, may be granted to us by his intercession. Who livest," &c. [V. 486.] It is anticipating our instances of the different stages observable in the invocation of saints, to quote here direct addresses to Joseph himself; still it may be well to bring at once to a close our remarks with regard to the worship paid to him. We find that in the Litany of the Saints, "St. Joseph, pray for us," is one of the supplications; but on his day (March 19) there are three hymns addressed to Joseph, which appear to be full of lamentable superstition, assigning, as they do, to him a share at least in the work of our salvation, and solemnly stating, as a truth, what, whether true or not, depends upon a groundless tradition, namely, that our blessed Lord and Mary watched by him at his death; ascribing to Joseph also that honour and praise, which the Church was wont to offer to God alone. The following are extracts from those hymns: First hymn. "Thee, Joseph, let the companies of heaven celebrate; thee let all the choirs of Christian people resound; who, bright in merits, wast joined in chaste covenant with the renowned Virgin. Others their pious death consecrates after death; and glory awaits those who deserve the palm. Thou alive, equal to those above, enjoyest God, more blessed by wondrous lot. O Trinity, most High, spare us who pray; grant us to reach heaven [to scale the stars] BY THE MERITS OF JOSEPH, that at length we may perpetually offer to thee a grateful song." [Te Joseph celebrent agmina coelitum. V. 485.] Second hymn. "O, Joseph, the glory of those in heaven, and the sure hope of our life, and the safeguard {254} of the world, benignly ACCEPT THE PRAISES WHICH WE joyfully sing TO THEE.... Perpetual praise to the most High Trinity, who granting to thee honours on high, give to us, BY THY MERITS, the joys of a blessed life." [Coelitum, Joseph, Decus. V. 486.] Third hymn. "He whom we, the faithful, worship with joy, whose exalted triumphs we celebrate, Joseph, on this day obtained by merit the joys of eternal life. O too happy! O too blessed! at whose last hour Christ and the Virgin together, with serene countenance, stood watching. Hence, conqueror of hell, freed from the bands of the flesh, he removes in placid sleep to the everlasting seats, and binds his temples with bright chaplets. Him, therefore, reigning, let us all importune, that he would be present with us, and that he obtaining pardon for our transgressions, would assign to us the rewards of peace on high. Be praises to thee, be honours to thee, O Trine God, who reignest, and assignest golden crowns to thy faithful servant for ever. Amen." [Iste, quem læti colimus fideles. V. 490.] It is painful to remark, that in these last clauses the very same word is employed when the Church of Rome applies to Joseph to assign to the faithful the rewards of peace, and when she ascribes glory to God for assigning to his faithful servants crowns of gold. Indeed these hymns contain many expressions which ought to be addressed to the Saviour alone, whose "glory is in the heavens," who is "the hope of us on earth," and "the safeguard of the world." * * * * * Under this fourth head I will add only one more specimen. Would it were not to be found in the Roman {255} Liturgies since the Council of Trent: God grant it may ere long be wiped out of the book of Christian worship! It is a collect in which the Church of Rome offers this prayer to God the Son:-- "O God, whose right hand raised the blessed Peter when walking on the waves, that he sank not; and rescued his fellow-apostle Paul, for the third time suffering shipwreck, from the depth of the sea; mercifully hear us, and grant that by the merits of both we may obtain the glory of eternity." [H. 149.] Now suppose for a moment it had been intended in any one prayer negatively to exclude the merits of Christ from the great work of our eternal salvation, and to limit our hopes of everlasting glory to the merits of St. Peter and St. Paul, could that object have been more effectually and fully secured than by this prayer? Not one word alluding to the redemption which is in Christ can be found in this prayer. The sentiment in the first member of the prayer refers us to the power exercised by the Son of God, and Son of man, when he was intabernacled in our flesh; and the second expression teaches us to contemplate the providence of our Almighty Saviour in his deeds of beneficence. But no reference, even by allusion, is here made to the merits of Christ's death--none to his merits as our great Redeemer; none to his merits as our never-ceasing and never-failing Intercessor. We are led to approach the throne of grace only with the merits of the two Apostles on our tongue. If those who offer it hope for acceptance through THE MEDIATION of Jesus Christ, and for the sake of his merits, that hope is neither suggested nor fostered by this prayer. The truth, as it is in Jesus, would compel us in addressing {256} Him, the Saviour of the world, to think of the merits of neither Peter nor Paul, of neither angel nor spirit. Instead of praying to him that we may obtain the glories of eternity for their merits, true faith in Christ would bid us throw ourselves implicitly on his omnipotent merits alone, and implore so great a blessing for his own mercy's sake. If we receive the whole truth, can it appear otherwise than a disparagement of his perfect and omnipotent merits, to plead with Him the merits of one, whom the Saviour himself rebuked with as severe a sentence as ever fell from his lips, "Get thee behind me, Satan, thou art an offence to me; for thou savourest not the things that be of God, but those that be of men;" [Matt. xvi. 23.] and of another who after his conversion, when speaking of the salvation wrought by Christ, in profound humility confesses himself to be a chief of those sinners for whom the Saviour died, "This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am chief?" [1 Tim. i. 15.] We feel, indeed, a sure and certain hope that these two fellow-creatures, once sinners, but by God's grace afterwards saints, have found mercy with God, and will live with Christ for ever; but to pray for the same mercy at his gracious hands for the sake of their merits is repugnant to our first principles of Christian faith. When we think of merits, for which to plead for mercy, we can think of Christ's, and of Christ's alone. V. Our thoughts are next invited to that class of prayers which the Church of Rome authorizes and directs to be addressed immediately to the Saints themselves. {257} Of these there are different kinds, some far more objectionable than others, though all are directly at variance with that one single and simple principle, to which, as we believe, a disciple of the cross can alone safely adhere--prayer to God, and only to God. The words of the Council of Trent are, as we have already observed, very comprehensive on this subject. They not only declare it to be a good and useful thing supplicantly to invoke the saints reigning with Christ: but also for the obtaining of benefits from God, through Jesus Christ our Lord, who is our only Redeemer and Saviour, to fly to their prayers, HELP, and ASSISTANCE. Whether these last words can be interpreted as merely words of surplusage, or whether they must be understood to mean that the faithful must have recourse to some help and assistance of the saints beyond their intercession, is a question to which we need not again revert. If it had been intended to embrace other kinds of beneficial succour, and other help and assistance, perhaps it would be difficult to find words more expressive of such general aid and support as a human being might hope to derive, in answer to prayer from the Giver of all good. And certainly they are words employed by the Church, when addressing prayers directly to God. Be this as it may, the public service-books of the Church of Rome unquestionably, by no means adhere exclusively to such addresses to the saints, as supplicate them to pray for the faithful on earth. Many a prayer is couched in language which can be interpreted only as conveying a petition to them immediately for their assistance, temporal and spiritual. But let us calmly review some of the prayers, supplications, invocations, or by whatever name religious addresses now offered to the saints may be called; and {258} first, we will examine that class in which the petitioners ask merely for the intercession of the saints. We have an example of this class in an invocation addressed to St. Ambrose on his day, December 7; the very servant of Christ in whose hymns and prayers no address of prayer or invocation to any saint or martyr can be found. "O thou most excellent teacher, the light of the Holy Church, O blessed Ambrose, thou lover of the divine law, deprecate for us [or intercede for us with] the Son of God[97]." [Footnote 97: H. 438. "Deprecare pro nobis Filium Dei." This invocation to Ambrose is instantly followed by this prayer to God: "O God, who didst assign to thy people the blessed Ambrose as a minister of eternal salvation, grant, we beseech Thee, that we may deserve to have him as our intercessor in heaven, whom we had as a teacher of life on earth."] The Church of Rome has wisely availed herself of the pious labours of Ambrose, Bishop of Milan; and has introduced into her public worship many of the hymns usually ascribed to him. Would she had followed his example, and addressed her invocations to no one but our Creator, our Redeemer, and our Sanctifier! Could that holy man hear the supplications now offered to him, and could be make his voice heard in return among those who now invoke him, that voice, we believe, would only convey a prohibitory monition like that of the Angel to St. John when he fell down before him, See thou do it not; I am thy fellow-servant; worship God. It is needless to multiply instances of this fifth kind of invocation. In the "Litany of the Saints" more than fifty different saints are enumerated by name, and are invoked to pray and intercede for those who join in {259} it. Among the persons invoked are Raphael [Æ. cxcii.], Gervasius, Protasius, and Mary Magdalene; whilst in the Litany [Æ. cxcvi.] for the recommendation of the soul of the sick and dying, the names of Abel, and Abraham, are specified. Under this head I will call your attention only to one more example. Indeed I scarcely know whether this hymn would more properly be classed under this head, or reserved for the next; since it appears to partake of the nature of each. It supplicates the martyr to obtain by his prayers spiritual blessings, and yet addresses him as the person who is to grant those blessings. It implores him to liberate us by the love of Christ; but so should we implore the Father of mercies himself. Still, as the more safe course, I would regard it as a prayer to St. Stephen only to intercede for us. But it may be well to derive from it a lesson on this point; how easily the transition glides from one false step to a worse; how infinitely wiser and safer it is to avoid evil in its very lowest and least noxious appearance: "Martyr of God [or Unconquered Martyr], who, by following the only Son of the Father, triumphest over thy conquered enemies, and, as conqueror, enjoyest heavenly things; by the office of thy prayer wash out our guilt; driving away the contagion of evil; removing the weariness of life. The bands of thy hallowed body are already loosed; loose thou us from the bands of the world, by the love of the Son of God [or by the gift of God Most High]." [H. 237.] In the above hymn the words included within brackets are the readings adopted in the last English edition of the Roman Breviary; and in this place, when we are about to refer to many hymns now in use, it may be well to observe, that in the present day we find {260} various readings in the hymns as they are still printed for the use of Roman Catholics in different countries. In some instances the changes are curious and striking. Grancolas, in his historical commentary on the Roman Breviary (Venice, 1734, p. 84), furnishes us with interesting information as to the chief cause of this diversity. He tells us that Pope Urban VIII., who filled the papal throne from 1623 to 1644, a man well versed in literature, especially in Latin poetry, and himself one of the distinguished poets of his time, took measures for the emendation of the hymns in the Roman Breviary. He was offended by the many defects in their metrical composition, and it is said that upwards of nine hundred and fifty faults in metre were corrected, which gave to Urban occasion to say that the Fathers had begun rather than completed the hymns. These, as corrected, he caused to be inserted in the Breviary. Grancolas proceeds to tell us that many complained of these changes, alleging that the primitive simplicity and piety which breathed in the hymns had been sacrificed to the niceties of poetry. "Accessit Latinitas, et recessit pietas." The verse was neater, but the thought was chilled. VI. But the Roman Church by no means limits herself to this kind of invocation; prayers are addressed to saints, imploring them to hear, and, as of themselves, to grant the prayers of the faithful on earth, and to release them from the bands of sin, without any allusion to prayers to be made by those saints. It grieves me to copy out the invocation made to St. Peter on the 18th of January, called the anniversary of the Chair of St. Peter at Rome; the words of our Blessed Lord himself, and of his beloved and inspired Apostle, seem to rise up in judgment against that prayer, and condemn it. It {261} will be well to place that hymn addressed to St. Peter, side by side with the very word of God, and then ask, Can this prayer be safe? 1. Now, O good Shepherd, 1. Jesus saith, I am the good merciful Peter, Shepherd. John x. 11. 2. Accept the prayers of us 2. Whatsoever ye shall ask in who supplicate, my name, that will I do. That whatsoever ye shall ask the Father in my name, he may give it you. John xiv. 13; xv. 16. 3. And loose the bands of our 3. The blood of Jesus Christ sins, by the power committed to his Son cleanseth us from all sin. thee, 1 John i. 7. 4. By which thou shuttest 4. These things saith he that heaven against all by a word, is holy, he that is true, he that and openest it[98]. openeth and no man shutteth, and shutteth and no man openeth. Rev. iii. 7. I am he that liveth and was dead, and am alive for evermore, and have the keys of hell and of death. Rev. i. 18. [Footnote 98: This hymn is variously read. In the edition of Mr. Husenbeth (H. 497.) it is: "O Peter, blessed shepherd, of thy mercy receive the prayers of us who supplicate, and loose by thy word the bands of our sins, thou to whom is given the power of opening heaven to the earth, and of shutting it when open."--"Beate pastor, Petre, clemens accipe voces precantum, criminumque vincula verbo resolve, cui potestas tradita aperire terris coelum, apertum claudere." H. 497.] Let it not be answered that many a Christian minister is now called a good shepherd. Let it not be said that the very words of our ordination imply the conveyance of the power of loosing and binding, of opening and shutting the gates of heaven. When prayer is contemplated, we can think only of One, HIM, who has appropriated the title of Good Shepherd to {262} himself. And we must see that Peter cannot, by any latitude of interpretation, be reckoned now among those to whom the awful duty is assigned of binding and loosing upon earth. The same unsatisfactory associations must be excited in the mind of every one who takes a similar view of Christian worship with myself, by the following supplication to various saints on St. John's day: "Let the heaven exult with praises[99], Let the earth resound with joy; {263} The sacred solemnities sing The glory of the Apostles. O ye Just Judges of the age, And true lights of the world, We pray you with the vows of our hearts, Hear the prayers of your suppliants. Ye who shut the heaven by a word, And loose its bars, Loose us by command, we beseech you, From all our sins. Ye to whose word is subject The health and weakness of all, Cure us who are diseased in morals, Restore us to virtues. So that when Christ shall come, The Judge at the end of the world, He may make us partakers Of eternal joy. To God the Father be Glory, And to his only Son, With the Spirit the Comforter, Now and for ever. Amen[100]." [Footnote 99: Having inserted in the text a translation of this hymn from a copy with which I had been long familiar, I think it right to insert here the two forms side by side. They supply an example of the changes to which we have already alluded. _Lille_, 1823. _Norwich_, 1830. OLD VERSION. POPE URBAN'S VERSION. Exultet coelum laudibus, Exultet orbis gaudiis, Resultet terra gaudiis, Coelum resultet laudibus, Apostolorum gloriam Apostolorum gloriam Sacra canunt solemnia. Tellus et astra concinunt. Vos sæcli justi judices Vos sæculorum judices Et vera mundi lamina, Et vera mundi lumina, Votis precamur cordium Votis precamur cordium Audite preces supplicum. Audite voces supplicum. Qui coelum verbo clauditis Qui templa coeli clauditis Serasque ejus solvitis, Serasque verbo solvitis, Nos a peccatis omnibus Nos a reatu noxios Solvite jussu, quæsumus. Solvi jubete quæsumus. Quorum præcepto subditur Præcepta quorum protinus Salus et languor omnium, Languor salusque sentiunt, Sanate ægros moribus, Sanate mentes languidas, Nos reddentes virtutibus. Augete nos virtutibus. Ut cum judex advenerit Ut cum redibit arbiter Christus in fine sæculi, In fine Christus sæculi, Nos sempiterni gaudii Nos sempiterni gaudii Faciat esse compotes. Concedat esse compotes. Deo Patri sit gloria, Jesu, tibi sit gloria Ejusque soli Filio, Qui natus es de virgine, Cum Spiritu paracleto, Cum Patre et Almo Spiritu, Et nunc et in perpetuum. In sempiterna sæcula. Amen. Amen. (H. 243.) ] [Footnote 100: Or as in the present Roman Breviary:-- Let the world exult with joy, Let the heaven resound with praise; The earth and stars sing together The glory of the Apostles. Ye judges of the ages And true lights of the world, With the prayers of our hearts we implore, Hear the voices of your suppliants. Ye who shut the temples of heaven, And loose its bars by a word, Command ye us, who are guilty, To be released from our sins; we pray. Ye whose commands forthwith Sickness and health feel, Heal our languid minds, Increase us in virtues, That when Christ, the Judge, shall return, In the end of the world, He may grant us to be partakers Of eternal joy. Jesus, to thee be glory, Who wast born of a virgin, With the Father and the Benign Spirit, Through eternal ages. Amen. {264} ] Many a pious and humble Catholic of the Roman Communion, I have no doubt, would regard these prayers as little more than an application to Peter and the rest of the Apostles for absolution, and would interpret its several clauses as an acknowledgment only of that power, which Christ himself delegated to them of binding and loosing sins on earth. But the gulf fixed between these prayers, and the lawful use of the power given to Christ's ordained ministers on earth, is great indeed. To satisfy the mind of this, it is not necessary to enter upon even the confines of the wide field of controversy, as to what was really conveyed by Christ to his Apostles. I would ask only two questions. Could any of us address these same words to one of Christ's ministers on earth? And could we address our blessed Saviour himself in stronger or more appropriate language, as the Lord of our destinies--the God who heareth prayer--the Physician of our souls? Suppose for example we were celebrating the anniversary of Christ's Nativity, of his Resurrection, or his Ascension, what word in this hymn, expressive of {265} power, and honour, and justice, and mercy, would not be appropriate? What word would not apply to Him, in most perfect accordance with Scripture language? And can we without offence, without doing wrong to his great Name, address the same to our fellow-servants, even though we may believe them to be with Him in glory? Let the heaven exult with praises-- Let the earth resound with joy; The sacred solemnities sing The glory of the Lord. O Thou just Judge of the age, And true light of the world, We pray Thee with the supplications of our hearts Hear the prayers of Thy suppliants, Thou who shuttest the heavens by a word, And loosest its bars. Loose us by command, we beseech Thee, From all our sins. Thou to whose word is subject The health and weakness of all, Cure us who are diseased in morals, Restoring us to virtue. So that when Thou shalt come, The Judge at the end of the world, Thou mayest make us partakers Of eternal joy. Glory to Thee, O Lord, Who wast born of a virgin, With the Father and the Holy Spirit, For ever and ever. Amen. Only for a moment let us see how peculiarly all these expressions are fitting in a hymn of prayer and praise {266} to our God and Saviour, recalling to our minds the words of inspiration; and then again let us put the question to our conscience, Is this language fit for us to use to a fellow-creature? Let the heaven exult with praises, Let the heavens rejoice, and Let the earth resound with joy: let the earth be glad ... (exultet is the very word used in the Vulgate translation of the Psalm)--before the Lord, for He cometh to judge the earth.--Ps. xcvi (xcv). 11. The holy solemnities sing Ye shall have a song, as in the The glory of the Lord. night when a holy solemnity is kept ... And the Lord shall cause His glorious voice to be heard. Isa. xxx. 29. Let the heaven and earth praise Him. Ps. lxix (lxviii). 34. Thou just Judge of mankind, All judgment is committed And true light of the world, unto the Son. John v. 22. That was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world. John i. 9. With the prayers of our hearts we With my whole heart have I pray Thee, sought Thee. Ps. cxix (cxviii). Hear the prayers of Thy suppliants. 10. Hear my prayer, O God. Ps. lxi (lx). 1. Whom have I in heaven but Thee? Ps. lxxiii (lxxii). 25. And this is the confidence that we have in Him, that if we ask any thing according to His will, He heareth us. 1 John v. 14. Thou who shuttest heaven by I have the keys of death and of Thy word, hell. These things saith He that And loosest its bars, is holy, He that is true: He that hath the key of David. He that openeth and no man shutteth, and shutteth and no man {267} openeth. I have set before thee an open door, and no man can shut it. Rev. i. 18; iii. 7,8 Release us by command, we pray Thy sins be forgiven thee. Thee, Matt. ix. 22. Bless the Lord, O From all our sins. my soul ... who forgiveth all thine iniquities. Ps. ciii. 2. This is your blood of the New Testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins. Matt. xxvi. 28. Have mercy upon me, O God ... according to the multitude of Thy tender mercies, blot out my transgressions. Wash me throughly from mine iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin. Ps. li (l). Thou to whose word is subject Bless the Lord, O my soul ... The health and weakness of all, who healeth all thy diseases. Ps. ciii (cii). 2, 3. Do Thou heal us who are morally Create in me a clean heart, O diseased, God, and renew a right spirit Restoring us to virtue; within me. Ps. li. 10 (4.) That when Thou, the Judge, shalt appear in the end of the world, Thou mayest grant us to be partakers of eternal joy. This would be a Christian prayer, a primitive prayer, a scriptural prayer, a prayer well fitting mortal man to utter by his tongue and from his heart, to the God who heareth prayer; and him who shall in sincere faith offer such a prayer, Christ will never send empty away. But if this prayer, fitted as it seems only to be addressed to God, be offered to the soul of a departed saint--I will not talk of blasphemy, and deadly sin, and idolatry,--I will only ask members of the Church of Rome to weigh all these things well, one by one. These are not subjects for crimination and recrimination. {268} We have had far too much of those unholy weapons on both sides. Speaking the truth in love, I should be verily guilty of a sin in my own conscience were I, with my views of Christian worship, to offer this prayer to the soul of a man however holy, however blessed, however exalted. The next part of our work will be given exclusively to the worship of the Blessed Virgin Mary. {269} * * * * * PART III. CHAPTER I. SECTION I.--THE VIRGIN MARY. The worship of the blessed Virgin Mary is so highly exalted in the Church of Rome, as to require the formation of a new name to express its high character. Neither could the Latin language provide a word which would give an adequate idea of its excellence, nor could any word previously employed by the writers in Greek, meet the case satisfactorily. The newly invented term Hyperdulia, meaning "a service above others," seems to place the service of the Virgin on a footing peculiarly its own, as raised above the worship of the saints departed, and of the angels of God, cherubim and seraphim, with all the hosts of principalities and powers in heavenly places. The service of the Virgin Mary thus appears not only to justify, but even to require a separate and distinct examination in this volume. The general principles, however, which we have already endeavoured to establish and illustrate with regard as well to the study of the Holy Scriptures as to the evidence of primitive antiquity, are equally applicable here; and with those principles present to our minds, {270} we will endeavour now to ascertain the truth with regard to the worship of the Virgin as now witnessed in the Roman Catholic Church. Of the Virgin Mary, think not, brethren of the Church of Rome, that a true member of the Anglican branch of the Catholic Church will speak disparagingly or irreverently. Were such an one found among us, we should say of him, he knows not what spirit he is of. Our church, in her Liturgy, her homilies, her articles, in the works too of the best and most approved among her divines and teachers, ever speaks of Saint Mary, the blessed Virgin, in the language of reverence, affection, and gratitude. She was a holy virgin and a holy mother. She was highly favoured, blessed among women. The Lord was with her, and she was the mother of our only Saviour. She was herself blessed, and blessed was the fruit of her womb. We delight in the language of our ancestors, in which they were used to call her "Mary, the Blissful Maid." Should any one of those who profess and call themselves Christians and Catholics, entertain a wish to interrupt the testimony of every succeeding age, and to interpose a check to the fulfilment of her own recorded prophecy, "All generations shall call me blessed," certainly the Anglican Catholic Church will never acknowledge that wish to be the genuine desire of one of her own sons. The Lord hath blessed her; yea, and she shall be blessed. But when we are required either to address our supplications to her, or else to sever ourselves from the communion of a large portion of our fellow-Christians, we have no room for hesitation; the case offers us no alternative. Our love of unity must yield to our love {271} of truth; we cannot join in that worship which in our conscience we believe to be a sin against God. Whether we are right or wrong in this matter, God will himself judge: and, compared with his acquittal and approval, the severity of man's judgment cannot turn us aside from our purpose. But before any one pronounces a sentence of condemnation against us, or of approval on himself, it well becomes him patiently and dispassionately to weigh the evidence; lest his decision may not be consistent with justice and truth. In addition to what has been already said on the general subject of addressing our invocation to any created being--to any one among the principalities and thrones, dominions, powers, angels, archangels, and all the hosts of heaven, to any one among the saints, martyrs, confessors, and holy men departed hence in the Lord--I would submit to my brethren of the Roman Catholic Church some considerations specifically applicable to the case of the blessed Virgin, and to the practice of the Church of Rome in the religious worship paid to her. First, it will be well for us to possess ourselves afresh of whatever light is thrown on this subject by the Scriptures themselves. * * * * * SECTION II.--EVIDENCE OF HOLY SCRIPTURE. The first intimation given to us that a woman was in the providence of God appointed to be the instrument, or channel by which the Saviour of mankind should be brought into the world, was made immediately after the Fall, and at the very first dawn of the day of salvation. {272} I am fully aware how the various criticisms on the words in which that first promise of a Saviour is couched, have been the well-spring of angry controversy. I will not enter upon that field. The authorized English version thus renders the passage: "I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel." [Gen. iii. 15.] The Roman Vulgate, instead of the word "it," reads "she." Surely such a point as this should be made a subject of calm and enlightened criticism, without warmth or heart-burnings on either side. But for our present purpose, it matters little what turn that controversy may take. I believe our own to be the true rendering: but whether the word dictated here by the Holy Spirit to Moses should be so translated as to refer to the seed of the woman generally, as in our authorized version, or to the male child, the descendant of the woman, as the Septuagint renders it, or to the word "woman" itself; and if the latter, whether it refer to Eve, the mother of every child of a mortal parent, or to Mary, the immediate mother of our Saviour: whatever view of that Hebrew word be taken, no Christian can doubt, that before the foundations of the world were laid, it was foreordained in the counsels of the Eternal Godhead, that the future Messiah, the Redeemer of Mankind, should be of the seed of Eve, and in the fulness of time be born of a Virgin of the name of Mary, and that in the mystery of that incarnation should the serpent's head be bruised. I wish not to dwell on this, because it bears but remotely and incidentally on the question at issue. I will, therefore, pass on, quoting {273} only the words of one of the most laborious among Roman Catholic commentators, De Sacy. "The sense is the same in the one and in the other, though the expression varies. The sense of the Hebrew is, The Son of the Woman, Jesus Christ, Son of God, and Son of a Virgin, shall bruise thy head, and by establishing the kingdom of God on earth, destroy thine. The sense of the Vulgate is, The woman, by whom thou hast conquered man, shall bruise thy head, not by herself, but by Jesus Christ." [Vol. i. p. 132.] The only other passage in which reference appears to be made in the Old Testament to the Mother of our Lord, contains that celebrated prophecy in the seventh chapter of Isaiah, about which I am not aware that any difference exists between the Anglican and the Roman Churches. "A Virgin shall conceive and bear a Son, and shall call his name Immanuel." [Isaiah vii. 4.] I find no passage in the Old Testament which can by any inferential application be brought to bear on the question of Mary's being a proper object of invocation. * * * * * In the New Testament, mention by name is made of the Virgin Mary by St. Matthew, St. Mark, and St. Luke, and by St. John in his Gospel, as the Mother of our Lord, but not by name; and by no other writer. Neither St. Paul in any one of his many Epistles, though he mentions the names of many of our Lord's disciples, nor St. James, nor St. Peter, who must often have seen her during our Lord's ministry, nor St. Jude, nor St. John in any of his three Epistles, or in the {274} Revelation (though, as we learn from his own Gospel, she had of especial trust been committed to his care)--no one of these either mentions her as living, or alludes to her memory as dead. The first occasion on which any reference is made in the New Testament to the Virgin Mary is the salutation of the Angel, as recorded by St. Luke in the opening chapter of his Gospel. The last occasion is when she is mentioned by the same Evangelist, as "Mary the Mother of Jesus," in conjunction with his brethren and with the Apostles and the women all continuing in prayer and supplication, immediately after the ascension of our blessed Lord. Between these two occasions the name of Mary occurs under a variety of circumstances, on every one of which we shall do well to reflect. The first occasion, we have already said, is the salutation of Mary by the angel, announcing to her that she should be the Mother of the Son of God. Surely no daughter of Eve was ever so distinguished among women; and well does it become us to cherish her memory with affectionate reverence. The words addressed to her when on earth by the angel in that announcement, with a little variation of expression, are daily addressed to her by the Roman Catholic Church, now that she is no longer seen, but is removed to the invisible world. "Hail, thou that art highly favoured!" (or as the Vulgate reads it, "full of grace") "the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women." [Luke i. 28.] On the substitution of the expression, "full of grace," for "highly favoured," or, as our margin suggests, "graciously accepted, or much graced," I am not desirous {275} of troubling you with any lengthened remark. I could have wished that since the Greek is different in this passage, and in the first chapter of St. John, where the words "full of grace" are applied to our Saviour, a similar distinction had been observed in the Roman translation. But the variation is unessential. The other expression, "Blessed art thou among women," is precisely and identically the same with the ascription of blessedness made by an inspired tongue, under the elder covenant, to another daughter of Eve. "Blessed above women," or (as both the Septuagint and the Vulgate render the word) "Blessed among women shall Jael the wife of Heber the Kenite be." [Judges v. 24.] We can see no ground in such ascription of blessedness for any posthumous adoration of the Virgin Mary. The same observation applies with at least equal strictness to that affecting interview between Mary and Elizabeth, when, enlightened doubtless by an especial revelation, Elizabeth returned the salutation of her cousin by addressing her as the Mother of her Lord, and hailing her visit as an instance of most welcome and condescending kindness, "Whence is this to me, that the mother of my Lord should come unto me?" [Luke i. 43.] Members of the Anglican Church are taught to refer to this event in Mary's life with feelings of delight and gratitude. On this occasion she uttered that beautiful hymn, "The Song of the blessed Virgin Mary," which our Church has selected for daily use at Evening Prayer. These incidents bring before our minds the image of a spotless Virgin, humble, pious, obedient, holy: a chosen servant of God--an exalted pattern for her fellow-creatures; but still a fellow-creature, and a fellow-servant: {276} a virgin pronounced by an angel blessed on earth. But further than this we cannot go. We read of no power, no authority, neither the power and influence of intercession, nor the authority or right of command being ever, even by implication, committed to her; and we dare not of our own minds venture to take for granted a statement of so vast magnitude, involving associations so awful. We reverence her memory as a blessed woman, the virgin mother of our Lord. We cannot supplicate any blessing at her hand; we cannot pray to her for her intercession. The angel's announcement to Joseph, whether before or after the birth of Christ, the visit of the Magi, the flight into Egypt, and the return thence, in the record of all of which events by St. Matthew the name of Mary occurs, however interesting and important in themselves, seem to require no especial attention with reference to the immediate subject of our inquiry. To Joseph the angel speaks of the blessed Virgin as "Mary thy wife." [Matt. i. 20.] In every other instance she is called "The young child's mother," or "His mother." In relating the circumstances of Christ's birth the Evangelist employs no words which seem to invite any particular examination. Joseph went up into the city of David to be taxed with Mary his espoused wife; and there she brought forth her first-born son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger. And the shepherds found Mary and Joseph, and the babe lying in a manger. And Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart. [Luke ii. 19.] Between the birth of Christ, and the flight into Egypt, St. Luke records an event to have happened by no means unimportant--the presentation of Christ in {277} the temple. "And when the days of her purification according to the law of Moses were accomplished, they brought him to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord. And he (Simeon) came by the Spirit into the temple; and when the parents brought in the child Jesus to do for him after the custom of the law, then took he him up in his arms, and blessed God, and said, Lord, &c. And Joseph and his mother marvelled at those things which were spoken of him. And Simeon blessed them, and said unto Mary his mother, Behold, this child is set for the fall and rising again of many in Israel; and for a sign that shall be spoken against, (yea, a sword shall pierce through thine own soul also) that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed." [Luke ii. 28.] In this incident it is worthy of remark, that Joseph and Mary are both mentioned by name, that they are both called the parents of the young child; that both are equally blessed by Simeon; and that the good old Israelite, illumined by the spirit of prophecy, when he addresses himself immediately to Mary, speaks only of her future sorrow, and does not even most remotely or faintly allude to any exaltation of her above the other daughters of Abraham. "A sword shall pass through thine own soul also," a prophecy, as St. Augustine interprets it, accomplished when she witnessed the sufferings and death of her Son. (See De Sacy, vol. xxxii. p. 138.) The next occasion on which the name of the Virgin Mary is found in Scripture, is the memorable visit of herself, her husband, and her Son, to Jerusalem, when he was twelve years old. And the manner in which this incident is related by the inspired Evangelist, so far from intimating that Mary was destined to be an object of worship to the believers in her Son, affords {278} evidence which exhibits strongly a bearing the direct contrary. Here again Joseph and Mary are both called his parents: Joseph is once mentioned by name, and so is Mary. If the language had been so framed as on purpose to take away all distinction of preference or superiority, it could not more successfully have effected its purpose. But not only so, of the three addresses recorded as having been made by our blessed Lord to his beloved mother (and only three are recorded in the New Testament), the first occurs during this visit to Jerusalem. It was in answer to the remonstrance made by Mary, "Son, why hast thou thus dealt with us? Behold, thy father and I have sought thee sorrowing." [Luke ii. 48.] "How is it that ye sought me? Knew ye not that I must be about my Father's business?"--[or in my Father's house, as some render it.] He lifts up their minds from earth to heaven, from his human to his eternal origin. He makes no distinction here,--"Wist YE not." Again, I would appeal to any dispassionate person to pronounce, whether this reproof, couched in these words, countenances the idea that our blessed Lord intended his human mother to receive such divine honour from his followers to the end of time as the Church of Rome now pays? and whether St. Luke, whose pen wrote this account, could have been made cognizant of any such right invested in the Virgin? The next passage calling for our consideration is that which records the first miracle: "And the third day there was a marriage in Cana of Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there, and both Jesus was called and his disciples to the marriage. And when they wanted wine (when the wine failed), the mother of {279} Jesus saith unto him, They have no wine. Jesus saith unto her, Woman, what have I to do with thee? mine hour is not yet come." [John ii. 1.] I have carefully read the comments on this passage, which different writers of the Roman Catholic communion have recommended for the adoption of the faithful, and I desire not to make any remarks upon them. Let the passage be interpreted in any way which enlightened criticism and the analogy of Scripture will sanction, and I would ask, after a careful weighing of this incident, the facts, and the words in all their bearings, would any unprejudiced mind expect that the holy and beloved person, towards whom the meek and tender and loving Jesus employed this address, was destined by that omniscient and omnipotent Saviour to be an object of those religious acts with which, as we shall soon be reminded, the Church of Rome now daily approaches her? It is pain and grief to me thus to extract and to comment upon these passages of Holy Writ. The feelings of affection and of reverence approaching awe, with which I hold the memory of that blessed Virgin Mother of my Lord, raise in me a sincere repugnance against dwelling on this branch of our subject, beyond what the cause of the truth as it is in Jesus absolutely requires; and very little more of the same irksome task awaits us. You will of course expect me to refer to an incident recorded with little variety of expression, and with no essential difference, by the first three Evangelists. St. Matthew's is the most full account, and is this,--"While he yet talked to the people, behold his mother and his brethren stood without desiring to speak with him. Then one said unto him, {280} Behold, thy mother and thy brethren stand without, desiring to speak with thee. But he answered and said unto him that told him, Who is my mother, and who are my brethren? And he stretched forth his hand toward his disciples and said, Behold my mother and my brethren. For whosoever shall do the will of my Father which is in heaven, the same is my brother and sister and mother." [Matt. xii. 46.] Or, as St. Luke expresses it,--"And he answered and said unto them, My mother and my brethren are these, who hear the word of God and do it." [Luke viii. 21.] Humanly speaking, could a more favourable opportunity have presented itself to our blessed Lord of referring to his beloved mother, in such a manner as to exalt her above her fellow daughters of Eve,--in such a manner too, as that Christians in after days, when the Saviour's bodily presence should have been taken away from them, and the extraordinary communications of the Spirit of truth should have been withdrawn, might have remembered that He had spoken these things, and have been countenanced by his words in doing her homage? But so far is this from the plain and natural tendency of the words of her blessed Son, that, had He of acknowledged purpose (and He has condescended to announce to us, in another place (John xiii. 19, &c.), the purpose of his words) wished to guard his disciples, whilst the world should last, against being seduced by any reverence and love which they might feel towards Himself into a belief that they ought to exalt his mother above all other created beings, and pay her holy worship, we know not what words He could have adopted more fitted for that purpose. There was nothing in the communication which seemed to call for {281} such a remark. A plain message announces to Him as a matter of fact one of the most common occurrences of daily life. And yet He fixes upon the circumstance as the groundwork not only of declaring the close union which it was his good pleasure should exist between obedient and true believers and Himself, but of cautioning all against any superstitious feelings towards those who were nearly allied to Him by the ties of his human nature. With reverence I would say, it is as though He desired to record his foreknowledge of the errors into which his disciples were likely to be seduced, and warned them beforehand to shun and resist the temptation. The evidence borne by this passage against our offering any religious worship to the Virgin, on the ground of her having been the mother of our Lord, seems clear, strong, direct, and inevitable. She was the mother of the Redeemer of the world, and blessed is she among women; but that very Redeemer Himself, with his own lips, assures us that every faithful servant of his heavenly Father shall be equally honoured with her, and possess all the privileges which so near and dear a relationship with Himself might be supposed to convey.--Who is my mother? Or, who are my brethren? Behold my mother and my brethren! Whosoever shall do the will of my Father in heaven, the same is my brother, and my sister, and my mother. No less should we be expected in this place to take notice of that most remarkable passage of Holy Scripture, [Luke xi. 27.] in which our blessed Lord is recorded under different circumstances to have expressed the same sentiments, but in words which will appear to many even more strongly indicative of his desire to prevent any {282} undue exaltation of his mother. "As he spake these things, a certain woman of the company lifted up her voice and said unto him, Blessed is the womb that bare thee, and the paps which thou hast sucked." On the truth or wisdom of that exclamation our Lord makes no remark; He refers not to his mother at all, not even to assure them (as St. Augustine in after-ages taught, see De Sacy, vol. xxxii. p. 35.), that however blessed Mary was in her corporeal conception of the Saviour, yet far more blessed was she because she had fully borne Him spiritually in her heart. He alludes not to his mother except for the purpose of instantly drawing the minds of his hearers from contemplating any supposed blessedness in her, and of fixing them on the sure and greater blessedness of his true, humble, faithful, and obedient disciples, to the end of time. "But he said, Yea, rather [or, as some prefer, yea, verily, and] blessed are they that hear the word of God, and keep it." Again, it must be asked, could such an exclamation have been met by such a reply, had our Lord's will been to exalt his mother, as she is now exalted by the Church of Rome? Rather, we would reverently ask, would He have given this turn to such an address, had He not desired to check any such feeling towards her? That most truly affecting and edifying incident recorded by St. John as having taken place whilst Jesus was hanging in his agony on the cross, an incident which speaks to every one who has a mind to understand and a heart to feel, presents to us the last occasion on which the name of the Virgin Mother of our Lord occurs in the Gospels. No paraphrase could add force, or clearness, or beauty to the simple narrative of the Evangelist; no exposition could bring out its parts more prominently or {283} affectingly. The calmness and authority of our blessed Lord, his tenderness and affection, his filial love in the very midst of his agony, it is impossible to describe with more heart-stirring and heart-soothing pathos than is conveyed in the simple language of him whom the Saviour at that awful hour addressed, as He committed his mother to him of especial trust. But not one syllable falls from the lips of Christ, or from the pen of the beloved disciple, who records this act of his blessed Master's filial piety, which can by possibility be construed to imply, that our blessed Lord intended Mary to be held in such honour by his disciples, as would be shown in the offering of prayer and praise to her after her dissolution. He who could by a word, rather by the mere motion of his will, have bidden the whole course of nature and of providence, so to proceed as that all its operations should provide for the health and safety, the support and comfort of his mother--He, when He was on the cross, and when He was on the point of committing his soul into the hands of his Father, leaves her to the care of one whom He loved, and whose sincerity and devotedness to Him He had, humanly speaking, long experienced. He bids him treat Mary as his own mother, He bids Mary look to John as to her own son for support and solace: "Now there stood by the cross of Jesus his mother, and his mother's sister, Mary the wife of Cleophas, and Mary Magdalene. When Jesus, therefore, saw his mother and the disciple standing by whom he loved, he saith unto his mother, Woman, behold thy son; then saith he to the disciple, Behold thy mother." [John xix. 25.] And He added no more. If Christ willed that his beloved mother should end her days in peace, removed equally {284} from want and the desolation of widowhood on the one hand, and from splendour and notoriety on the other, nothing could be more natural than such conduct in such a Being at such a time. But if his purpose was to exalt her into an object of religious adoration, that nations should kneel before her, and all people do her homage, then the words and the conduct of our Lord at this hour seem altogether unaccountable: and so would the words of the Evangelist also be, "And from that hour that disciple took her unto his own home." After this not another word falls from the pen of St. John which can be made to bear on the station, the character, the person, or circumstances of Mary. After his resurrection our Saviour remained on earth forty days before He finally ascended into heaven. Many of his interviews and conversations with his disciples during that interval are recorded in the Gospel. Every one of the four Evangelists relates some act or some saying of our Lord on one or more of those occasions. Mention is made by name of Mary Magdalene, of Mary [the mother] of Joses, of Mary [the mother] of James, of Salome, of Joanna, of Peter, of Cleophas, of the disciple whom Jesus loved, at whose house the mother of our Lord then was; of Thomas, of Nathanael. The eleven also are mentioned generally. But by no one of the Evangelists is reference made at all to Mary the mother of our Lord, as having been present at any one of those interviews; her name is not alluded to throughout. On one solitary occasion subsequently to the ascension of Christ, mention is made of Mary his mother, in company with many others, and without any further distinction to separate her from the rest: "And when {285} they were come in (from having witnessed the ascension of our Saviour), they went up into an upper room, where abode both Peter, and James, and John, and Andrew, Philip, and Thomas, Bartholomew and Matthew, James the son of Alphaeus, and Simon Zelotes, and Judas the brother of James. These all continued with one accord in prayer and supplication with the women, and Mary the mother of Jesus, and with his brethren." [Acts i. 13.] Not one word is said of Mary having been present to witness even the ascension of her blessed Son; we read no command of our Lord, no wish expressed, no distant intimation to his disciples that they should even show to her marks of respect and honour; not an allusion is there made to any superiority or distinction and preeminence. Sixty years at the least are generally considered to be comprehended within the subsequent history of the New Testament before the Apocalypse was written; but neither in the narrative, nor in the Epistles, nor yet in the prophetic part of the Holy Book, is there the most distant allusion to Mary. Of him to whose loving care our dying Lord committed his beloved mother of especial trust, we hear much. John, we find, putting forth the miraculous power of Christ at the Beautiful Gate of the Temple; we find him imprisoned and arraigned before the Jewish authorities; but not one word is mentioned as to what meanwhile became of Mary. We find John confirming the Church in Samaria; we find him an exile in the island of Patmos; but no mention is made of Mary. Nay, though we have three of his epistles, and the second of them addressed to one "whom he loved in the truth," we find neither from the tongue nor from the pen of St. John, one single allusion to the mother of our Lord alive or dead. And then, whatever may have been the matter {286} of fact as to St. Paul, neither the many letters of that Apostle, nor the numerous biographical incidents recorded of him, intimate in the most remote degree that he knew any thing whatever concerning her individually. St. Paul does indeed refer to the human nature of Christ derived from his human mother, and had he been taught by his Lord to entertain towards her such sentiments as the Roman Church now professes to entertain, he could not have had a more inviting occasion to give utterance to them. But instead of thus speaking of the Virgin Mary, he does not even mention her name or state at all, but refers only in the most general way to her nature and her sex as a daughter of Adam: "But when the fulness of time was come, God sent forth his Son, MADE OF A WOMAN, made under the law; to redeem them that were under the Law, that we might receive the adoption of sons." [Gal. iv. 4.] From a time certainly within a few days of our Saviour's ascension the Scriptures are totally silent throughout as to Mary, whether in life or in death. Here we might well proceed to contrast this view which the Scriptures of eternal truth give of the blessed Virgin Mary with the authorized and appointed worship of that branch of the Christian Church which is in communion with Rome. We must first, however, here also examine the treasures of Christian antiquity, and ascertain what witness the earliest uninspired records bear on this immediate point. {287} * * * * * CHAPTER II.--EVIDENCE OF PRIMITIVE WRITERS. Closing the inspired volume, and seeking at the fountain-head for the evidence of Christian antiquity, what do we find? For upwards of three centuries and a half (the limit put to our present inquiry) we discover in no author, Christian or heathen, any trace whatever of the invocation of the Virgin Mary by Catholic Christians. I have examined every passage which I have found adduced by writers of the Church of Rome, and have searched for any other passages which might appear to deserve consideration as bearing favourably on their view of the subject; and the worship of the Virgin, such as is now insisted upon by the Council of Trent, prescribed by the Roman ritual, and practised in the Church of Rome, is proved by such an examination to have had neither name, nor place, nor existence among the early Christians. Forgive my importunity if I again and again urge you to join us in weighing these facts well; and to take your view of them from no advocate on the one side or the other. Search the Scriptures for yourselves, search the earliest writers for yourselves, and for yourselves search with all diligence into the authentic and authorized liturgies of your own Church, your missals, and breviaries, and formularies. Hearsay evidence, testimony {288} taken at second or third hand, vague rumours and surmises will probably expose us, on either side, to error. Let well-sifted genuine evidence be brought by an upright and an enlightened mind to bear on the point at issue, and let the issue joined be this, Is the practice of praying to the Virgin, and praising her, in the language of the prayers and praises now used in the prescribed formularies of the Roman Church, primitive. Catholic, Apostolical? I am aware that among those who adhere to the Tridentine Confession of faith, there are many on whom this investigation will not be allowed to exercise any influence. The sentiments of Huet, wherever they are adopted, would operate to the total rejection of such inquiries as we are instituting in this work. His words on the immaculate conception of the Virgin are of far wider application than the immediate occasion on which he used them, "That the blessed Mary never conceived any sin in herself is in the present day an established principle of the Church, and confirmed by the Council of Trent. In which it is our duty to acquiesce, rather than in the dicta of the ancients, if any seem to think otherwise, among whom must be numbered Origen." [Origen's Works, vol. iv. part 2, p. 156.] In this address, however, we take for granted that the reader is open to conviction, desirous of arriving at the truth, and, with that view, ready to examine and sift the evidence of primitive antiquity. In that investigation our attention is very soon called to the remarkable fact, that, whereas in the case of the invocation of saints and angels, the defenders of that doctrine and practice bring forward a great variety of passages, in which mention is supposed to be made of {289} those beings as objects of honour and reverential and grateful remembrance, the passages quoted with a similar view, as regards the Virgin Mary, are very few indeed: whilst the passages which intimate that the early Christians paid her no extraordinary honour (certainly not more than we of the Anglican Church do now) are innumerable. I have thought that it might be satisfactory here to refer to each separately of those earliest writers, whose testimony we have already examined on the general question of the invocation of saints and angels, and, as nearly as may be, in the same order. In the former department of our investigation we first endeavoured to ascertain the evidence of those five primitive writers, who are called the Apostolical Fathers; and, with regard to the subject now before us, the result of our inquiry into the same works is this: 1. In the Epistle ascribed to BARNABAS we find no allusion to Mary. 2. The same must be affirmed of the book called The Shepherd of HERMAS. 3. In CLEMENT of Rome, who speaks of the Lord Jesus having descended from Abraham according to the flesh, no mention is made of that daughter of Abraham of whom he was born. 4. IGNATIUS in a passage already quoted (Ad Eph. vii. p. 13 and 16) speaks of Christ both in his divine and human nature as Son of God and man, and he mentions the name of Mary, but it is without any adjunct or observation whatever, "both of Mary and of God." In another place he speaks of her virgin state, and the fruit of her womb; and of her having borne our God Jesus the Christ; but he adds no {290} more; not even calling her "The blessed," or "The Virgin." In the interpolated Epistle to the Ephesians, the former passage adds "the Virgin" after "Mary," but nothing more. 5. In the Epistle of POLYCARP we find an admonition to virgins (Page 186), how they ought to walk with a spotless and chaste conscience, but there is no allusion to the Virgin Mary. JUSTIN MARTYR. In this writer I do not find any passage so much in point as the following, in which we discover no epithet expressive of honour, or dignity, or exaltation, though it refers to Mary in her capacity of the Virgin mother of our Lord:--"He therefore calls Himself the Son of Man, either from his birth of a virgin, who was of the race of David, and Jacob, and Isaac, and Abraham, or because Abraham himself was the father of those persons enumerated, from whom Mary drew her origin." [Trypho, § 100. p. 195.] And a little below he adds, "For Eve being a virgin and incorrupt, having received the word from the serpent, brought forth transgression and death; but Mary the Virgin having received faith and joy (on the angel Gabriel announcing to her the glad tidings, that the Spirit of the Lord should come upon her, and the power of the Highest overshadow her) answered, Be it unto me according to thy word. And of her was born He of whom we have shown that so many Scriptures have been spoken; He by whom God destroys the serpent, and angels and men resembling [the serpent]; but works a rescue from death for such as repent of evil and believe in Him." One more passage will suffice, "And according to the command of God, Joseph, taking Him with Mary, went into Egypt." [Trypho, § 102. p. 196.] {291} Among those "Questions" to which we have referred under the head of Justin Martyr's works, but which are confessedly of a much less remote date, probably of the fifth century, an inquiry is made, How could Christ be free from blame, who so often set at nought his parent? The answer is, that He did not set her at nought; that He honoured her in deed, and would not have hurt her by his words;--but then the respondent adds, that Christ chiefly honoured Mary in that view of her maternal character, under which all who heard the word of God and kept it, were his brothers and sisters and mother; and that she surpassed all women in virtue. [Qu. 136. p. 500.] IRENÆUS. To the confused passage relied upon by Bellarmin, in which Irenæus is supposed to represent Mary as the advocate of Eve, we have already fully referred (page 120 of this work). In that passage there is no allusion to any honour paid, or to be paid to her, nor to any invocation of her. In every passage to which my attention has been drawn, Irenæus speaks of the mother of our Lord as Mary, or the Virgin, without any adjunct, or term of reverence. CLEMENT of Alexandria speaks of the Virgin, and refers to an opinion relative to her virgin-state, but without one word of honour. [Stromat. vii. 16. p. 889.] TERTULLIAN[101]. The passages in which this ancient writer refers to the mother of our Lord are very far from countenancing the religious worship now paid to her by Roman Catholics: "The brothers of the Lord had not believed on him, as it is contained in the Gospel published {292} before Marcion. His mother likewise is not shown to have adhered to him; whereas others, Marys and Marthas, were frequently in his company." (See Tert. De carne Christi, c. 7. (p. 364. De Sacy, 29. 439.)) And he tells us that Christ was brought forth by a virgin, who was also about to be married once after the birth, that the two titles of sanctity might be united in Christ by a mother who was both a virgin and also once married[102]. [Footnote 101: Paris, 1675. De carne Christi, vii. p. 315. De Monogamia, vii. p. 529. N.B. Both these treatises were probably written after he became a Montanist.] [Footnote 102: On the works once ascribed to Methodius, but now pronounced to be spurious, see above, p. 131.] ORIGEN thus speaks: "Announcing to Zacharias the birth of John, and to Mary the advent of our Saviour among men." [Comment on John, § 24. vol. iv. p. 82.] In his eighth homily on Leviticus, he refers to Mary as a pure Virgin. [Vol. ii. p. 228.] In the forged work of later times, the writer, speaking of our Saviour, says, "He had on earth an immaculate and chaste mother, this much blessed Virgin Mary." [Hom. iii. in Diversos.] In CYPRIAN we do not find one word expressive of honour or reverence towards the Virgin Mary. Nor is her name mentioned in the letter of his correspondent Firmilian, Bishop of Cappadocia. LACTANTIUS speaks of "a holy virgin" [Vol. i. p. 299.] chosen for the work of Christ but not one other word of honour, or tending to adoration; though whilst dwelling on the incarnation of the Son of God, had he or his fellow-believers paid religious honour to her, he could scarcely have avoided all allusion to it. EUSEBIUS speaks of the Virgin Mary, but is altogether silent as to any religious honour of any kind being due to her. In the Oration of the Emperor Constantine (as it is recorded by Eusebius), direct mention is made of the "chaste virginity," and of the maid who was mother {293} of God, and yet remained a virgin. But the object present to the author's mind was so exclusively God manifest in the flesh, that he does not throughout even mention the name of Mary, or allude to any honour paid or due to her. [Cantab. 1720. § 11. p. 689. and § 19. p. 703.] ATHANASIUS, bent ever on establishing the perfect divinity and humanity of Christ, thus speaks: "The general scope of Holy Scripture is to make a twofold announcement concerning the Saviour, that He was always God, and is a Son; being the Word and the brightness and wisdom of the Father, and that He afterwards became man for us, taking flesh of the Virgin Mary, who bare God ([Greek: taes theotokou])." [Athan. Orat. iii. Cont. Arian. p. 579.] The work which we have already examined, called The Apostolical Constitutions, compiled probably about the commencement of the fourth century, cannot be read without leaving an impression clear and powerful on the mind, that no religious honour was paid to the Virgin Mary at the time when they were written; certainly not more than is now cheerfully paid to her memory by us of the Anglican Church. Take, for example, the prayer prescribed to be used on the appointment of a Deaconess; the inference from it must be, that others with whom the Lord's Spirit had dwelt, were at least held in equal honour with Mary: "O Eternal God, Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, Maker of male and female, who didst fill with thy Spirit Miriam, and Hannah, and Holda, and didst not disdain that thy Son should be born of a woman," &c. [Book viii. c. 20.] Thus, {294} too, in another passage, Mary is spoken of just as other women who had the gift of prophecy; and of her equally and in conjunction with the others it is said, that they were not elated by the gift, nor lifted themselves up against the men. "But even have women prophesied; in ancient times Miriam, the sister of Aaron and Moses; after her Deborah; and afterwards Huldah and Judith; one under Josiah, the other under Darius; and the mother of the Lord also prophesied, and Elizabeth her kinswoman; and Anna; and in our day the daughters of Philip; yet they were not lifted up against the men, but observed their own measure. Therefore among you also should any man or woman have such a grace, let them be humble, that God may take pleasure in them." [Book viii. c. 2.] In the Apostolical Canons I find no reference to Mary; nor indeed any passage bearing on our present inquiry, except the last clause of all, containing the benediction. In this passage not only is the prayer for spiritual blessings addressed to God alone, but it is offered exclusively through the mediation of Christ alone, without alluding to intercessions of angels saints, or the Virgin: "Now may God, the only unproduced Being, the Creator of all things, unite you all by peace in the Holy Ghost; make you perfect unto every good work, not to be turned aside, unblameable, not deserving reproof; and may He deem you worthy of eternal life with us, by the mediation of his beloved Son Jesus Christ our God and Saviour: with whom be glory to Him the Sovereign God and Father, in the Holy Ghost the Comforter, now and ever, world without end. Amen." [Vol. i. p. 450.] I have not intentionally omitted any ancient author {295} falling within the limits of our present inquiry, nor have I neglected any one passage which I could find bearing testimony to any honour paid to the Virgin. The result of my research is, that I have not discovered one solitary expression which implies that religious invocation and honour, such as is now offered to Mary by the Church of Rome, was addressed to her by the members of the primitive Catholic Church. {296} * * * * * CHAPTER III.--THE ASSUMPTION OF THE VIRGIN MARY. By the Church of England, two festivals are observed in grateful commemoration of two events relating to Mary as the mother of our Lord:--the announcement of the Saviour's birth by the message of an angel, called, "The Annunciation of the blessed Virgin Mary," and "The Presentation of Christ in the Temple," called also, "The Purification of Saint Mary the Virgin." In the service for the first of these solemnities, we are taught to pray that, as we have known the incarnation of the Son of God by the message of an angel, so by his Cross and Passion we may be brought to the glory of his resurrection. In the second, we humbly beseech the Divine Majesty that, as his only-begotten Son was presented in the Temple in the substance of our flesh, so we may be presented unto Him with pure and clean hearts by the same, his Son Jesus Christ our Lord. These days are observed to commemorate events declared to us on the most sure warrant of Holy Scripture; and these prayers are primitive and evangelical. They pray only to God for spiritual blessings through his Son. The second prayer was used in the Church {297} from very early times, and is still retained in the Roman Breviary (Hus. Brev. Rom. H. 536.); whereas, instead of the first[103], we find there unhappily a prayer now supplicating that those who offer it, "believing Mary to be truly the Mother of God, might be aided by her intercessions with Him." [V. 496.] [Footnote 103: This collect also is found in the Roman Missal, as a Prayer at the Post Communion; though it does not appear in the Breviarium Romanum.] In the Roman Catholic Church, on the other hand, feasts are observed to the honour of the Virgin Mary, in which the Anglican Church cannot join; such as the Nativity of the Virgin Mary, and the immaculate conception of her by her mother. On the origin and nature of these feasts it is not my intention to dwell. I can only express my regret, that by appointing a service and a collect commemorative of the Conception of the Virgin[104] in her mother's womb, and praying that the observance of that solemnity may procure the votaries an increase of peace, the Church of Rome has given countenance to a superstition, against which at its commencement, so late as the 12th century, St. Bernard strongly remonstrated, in an epistle to the monks of Lyons; a superstition which has been supported and explained by discussions in no way profitable to the head or the heart. [Epist. 174. Paris, 1632, p. 1538.] [Footnote 104: Ut quibus beatæ Virginis partus exstitit salutis exordium, conceptionis ejus votiva solemnitas pacis tribuat incrementum. H. 445.] Of all these institutions however in honour of the Virgin, the Feast of the ASSUMPTION appears to be as it were the crown and the consummation[105]. This festival {298} is kept to celebrate the miraculous taking up (assumptio) of the Virgin Mary into heaven. And its celebration, in Roman Catholic countries, is observed in a manner worthy a cause to which our judgment would give deliberately its sanction; in which our feelings would safely and with satisfaction rest on the firmness of our faith; from joining in which a truly pious mind would have no ground for inward misgiving, nor for the aspiration, Would it were founded in truth! [Footnote 105: "The Assumption of the Virgin Mary is the greatest of all the festivals which the Church celebrates in her honour. It is the consummation of all the other great mysteries by which her life was rendered most wonderful. It is the birthday of her true greatness and glory, and the crown of all the virtues of her whole life, which we admire single in her other festivals." Alban Butler, vol. viii. p. 175.] Before such a solemn office of praise and worship were ever admitted among the institutions of the religion of truth, its originators and compilers should have built upon sure grounds; careful too should they also be who now join in the service, and so lend it the countenance of their example; more especially should those sift the evidence well, who, by their doctrine and writings, uphold, and defend, and advance it; lest they prove at the last to love Rome rather than the truth as it is in Jesus. So solemn, so marked, a religious service in the temples and at the altar of HIM who is the truth, a service so exalted above his fellows, ought beyond question to be founded on the most sure warrant of Holy Scripture, or at the least on undisputed historical evidence, as to the alleged matter of fact on which it is built,--the certain, acknowledged, uninterrupted, and universal testimony of the Church Catholic from the very time. They incur a momentous responsibility who aid in propagating for religious truths the inventions of men[106]. [Footnote 106: Very different opinions are held by Roman Catholic writers as to the antiquity of this feast. All, indeed, maintain that it is of very ancient introduction; but whilst some, with Lambecius (lib. viii. p. 286), maintain the antiquity of the festival to be so remote, that its origin cannot be traced; and thence infer that it was instituted by a silent and unrecorded act of the Apostles themselves; others (among whom Kollarius, the learned annotator on the opinion of Lambecius) acknowledged, that it was introduced by an ordinance of the Church, though not at the same time in all countries of Christendom. That annotator assigns its introduction at Rome to the fourth century; at Constantinople to the sixth; in Germany and France to the ninth.] {299} But what is the real state of the case with regard to the fact of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary? It rests (as we shall soon see) on no authentic history; it is supported by no primitive tradition. I profess my surprise to have been great, when I found the most celebrated defenders of the Roman Catholic cause, instead of citing such evidence as would bear with it even the appearance of probability, appealing to histories written more than a thousand years after the alleged event, to forged documents and vague rumours. I was willing to doubt the sufficiency of my research; till I found its defenders, instead of alleging and establishing by evidence what God was by them said to have done, contenting themselves with asserting his omnipotence, in proof that the doctrine implied no impossibility; dwelling on the fitness and reasonableness of his working such a miracle in the honour of her who was chosen to be the mother of his eternal Son; and whilst they took the fact as granted, substituting for argument glowing and fervent descriptions of what might have been the joy in heaven, and what ought to be the feelings of mortals on earth. At every step of the inquiry into the merits of this case, the principle recurs to the mind, that, as men really and in earnest looking onward to a life after this, our duty is to ascertain to the utmost of our {300} power, not what God could do, not what we or others might pronounce it fit that God should do, but what He has done; not what would be agreeable to our feelings, were it true, but what, whether agreeably or adversely to our feelings or wishes, is proved to be true. The very moment a Christian writer refers me from evidence to possibilities, I feel that he knows not the nature of Christianity; he throws me back from the sure and certain hope of the Gospel to the "beautiful fable" of Socrates,--"It were better to be there than here, IF THESE THINGS ARE TRUE." But let us inquire into the facts of the case. First, I would observe that it is by no means agreed among all who have written upon the subject, what was the place, or what was the time of the Virgin's death. Whilst some have maintained that she breathed her last at Ephesus, the large majority assert that her departure from this world took place at Jerusalem. And as to the time of her death, some have assigned it to the year 48 of the Christian era, about the time at which Paul and Barnabas (as we read in Holy Scripture) returned to Antioch; whilst others refer it to a later date. I am not, however, aware of any supposition which fixes it at a period subsequent to that at which the canon of Scripture closes. Epiphanius indeed, towards the close of the fourth century, reminding us that Scripture is totally and purely silent on the subject as well of Mary's death and burial, as of her having accompanied St. John in his travels or not, without alluding to any tradition as to her assumption, thus sums up his sentiments: "I dare to say nothing; but considering it, I observe silence." [Epiph. vol. i. p. 1043.] {301} Should any of my readers have deliberately adopted as the rule of their faith the present practice of the Church of Rome, I cannot hope that they will take any interest in the following inquiry; but I have been assured, by most sensible and well-informed members of that Church, that there is a very general desire entertained to have this and other questions connected with our subject examined without prejudice, and calmly placed before them. To such persons I trust this chapter may not appear altogether unworthy of their consideration. Those who would turn from it on the principle to which we have here alluded, will find themselves very closely responding to the sentiments professed by St. Bernard, "Exalt her who is exalted above the choirs of angels to the heavenly kingdom. These things the Church sings to me of her, and has taught me to sing the same to others. For my part, what I have received from it, I am secure in holding and delivering; which also, I confess, I am not OVER-SCRUPULOUS in admitting. (Quod non scrupulosius fateor admiserim.) I have received in truth from the Church that that day is to be observed with the highest veneration on which she was TAKEN up (assumpta) from this wicked world, and carrying with her into heaven feasts of the most celebrated joys[107]." [Footnote 107: See Lambecius, book viii. p. 286. The letter of St. Bernard is addressed to the Canons of Lyons on the Conception of the holy Mary. Paris, 1632, p. 1538. His observations in that letter, with a view of discountenancing the rising superstition, in juxtaposition with these sentiments, are well deserving the serious consideration of every one.] Let us then, with the authorized and enjoined service of the Church of Rome for the 15th of August before us, examine the evidence on which that religious {302} service, the most solemn consummation of all the rest, is founded. In the service of the Assumption, more than twice seven times is it reiterated in a very brief space, and with slight variations of expression, that Mary was taken up into heaven; and that, not on any general and indefinite idea of her beatific and glorified state, but with reference to one specific single act of divine favour, performed at a fixed time, effecting her assumption, as it is called, "to-day." [Æs. 595.] "To-day Mary the Virgin ascended the heavens. Rejoice, because she is reigning with Christ for ever." "Mary the Virgin is taken up into heaven, to the ethereal chamber in which the King of kings sits on his starry throne." "The holy mother of God hath been exalted above the choirs of angels to the heavenly realms." "Come, let us worship the King of kings, to whose ethereal heaven the Virgin Mother was taken up to-day." And that it is her bodily ascension, her corporeal assumption into heaven, and not merely the transit of her soul[108] from mortal life to eternal bliss, which the Roman Church maintains and propagates by this service, is put beyond doubt by the service itself. In the fourth and sixth reading[109], or lesson, for example, we find these {303} sentences:--"She returned not into the earth but is seated in the heavenly tabernacles." "How could death devour, how could those below receive, how could corruption invade, THAT BODY, in which life was received? For it a direct, plain, and easy path to heaven was prepared." [Footnote 108: Lambecius, indeed (book viii. p. 306), distinctly affirms, that one object which the Church had in view was to condemn the HERESY of those who maintain that the reception of the Virgin into heaven, was the reception of her soul only, and not also of her body. "Ut damnet eorum hæresin qui sanctissimæ Dei genetricis rcceptionem in coelum ad animam ipsius tantum, non vero simul etiam ad corpus pertinere existimant."] [Footnote 109: Non reversa est in terram, sed ... in coelestibus tabernaculis collocatum. Quomodo mois devoraret, quomodo inferi susciperent, quomodo corruptio invaderit CORPUS ILLUD in quo vita suscepta est? Huic recta plana et facilis ad coelum parata est via. Æs. 603, 604.] Now, on what authority does this doctrine rest? On what foundation stone is this religious worship built? The holy Scriptures are totally and profoundly silent, as to the time, the place, the manner of Mary's death. Once after the ascension of our Lord, and that within eight days, we find mentioned the name of Mary promiscuously with others; after that, no allusion is made to her in life or in death; and no account, as far as I can find, places her death too late for mention to have been made of it in the Acts of the Apostles. The historian, Nicephorus Callistus, refers it to the 5th year of Claudius, that is about A.D. 47: after which period, events through more than fifteen years are recorded in that book of sacred Scripture. But closing the holy volume, what light does primitive antiquity enable us to throw on this subject? The earliest testimony quoted by the defenders of the doctrine, that Mary was at her death taken up bodily into heaven, is a supposed entry in the Chronicon of Eusebius, opposite the year of our Lord 48. This is cited by Coccius without any remark; and even Baronius rests the date of Mary's assumption upon this testimony. [Vol. i. 403.] The words referred to are these,--"Mary the Virgin, the mother of Jesus, was taken up into heaven; as some write that it had been revealed to them." {304} Now, suppose for one moment that this came from the pen of Eusebius himself, to what does it amount? A chronologist in the fourth century records that some persons, whom he does not name, not even stating when they lived, had written down, not what they had heard as matter of fact, or received by tradition, but that a revelation had been made to them of a fact alleged to have taken place nearly three centuries before the time of that writer. But instead of this passage deserving the name of Eusebius as its author, it is now on all sides acknowledged to be altogether a palpable interpolation. Suspicions, one would suppose, must have been at a very remote date suggested as to the genuineness of this sentence. Many manuscripts, especially the seven in the Vatican, were known to contain nothing of the kind; and the Roman Catholic editor of the Chronicon at Bordeaux, A.D. 1604, tells us that he was restrained from expunging it, only because nothing certain as to the assumption of the Virgin could be substituted in its stead. [P. 566.] Its spuriousness however can no longer be a question of dispute or doubt; it is excluded from the Milan edition of 1818, by Angelo Maio and John Zohrab; and no trace of it is to be found in the Armenian[110] version, published by the monks of the Armenian convent at Venice, in 1818. [Footnote 110: The author visited that convent whilst this edition of the Chronicon of Eusebius was going through the press, and can testify to the apparent anxiety of the monks to make it worthy of the patronage of Christians.] The next authority, to which we are referred, is a letter[111] said to have been written by Sophronius the {305} presbyter, about the commencement of the fifth century. The letter used to be ascribed to Jerome; Erasmus referred it to Sophronius; but Baronius says it was written "by an egregious forger of lies," ("egregius mendaciorum concinnator,") who lived after the heresies of Nestorius and Eutyches had been condemned. I am not at all anxious to enter upon that point of criticism; that the letter is of very ancient origin cannot be doubted. This document would lead us to conclude, that so far from the tradition regarding the Virgin's assumption being general in the Church, it was a point of grave doubt and discussion among the faithful, many of whom thought it an act of pious forbearance to abstain altogether from pronouncing any opinion on the subject. Whoever penned the letter, and whether we look to the sensible and pious sentiments contained in it, or to its undisputed antiquity, the following extract cannot fail to be interesting[112]. [Footnote 111: The letter is entitled "Ad Paulam et Eustochium de Assumptione B.M. Virginis." It is found in the fifth volume of Jerome's works, p. 82. Edit. Jo. Martian.] [Footnote 112: Baronius shows great anxiety (Cologne, 1609, vol. i. p. 408) to detract from the value of this author's testimony, whoever he was; sharply criticising him because he asserts, that the faithful in his time still expressed doubts as to the matter of fact of Mary's assumption. By assigning, however, to the letter a still later date than the works of Sophronius, Baronius adds strength to the arguments for the comparatively recent origin of the tradition of her assumption. See Fabricius (Hamburgh, 1804), vol. ix. p. 160.] "Many of our people doubt whether Mary was taken up together with her body, or went away, leaving the body. But how, or at what time, or by what persons her most holy body was taken hence, or whither removed, or whether it rose again, is not known; although some will maintain that she is already revived, and is clothed with a blessed immortality with Christ in heavenly places, which very many affirm also of the blessed {306} John, the Evangelist, his servant, to whom being a virgin, the virgin was intrusted by Christ, because in his sepulchre, as it is reported, nothing is found but manna, which also is seen to flow forth. Nevertheless which of these opinions should be thought the more true we doubt. Yet it is better to commit all to God, to whom nothing is impossible, than to wish to define rashly[113] by our own authority any thing, which we do not approve of.... Because nothing is impossible with God, we do not deny that something of the kind was done with regard to the blessed Virgin Mary; although for caution's sake (salva fide) preserving our faith, we ought rather with pious desire to think, than inconsiderately to define, what without danger may remain unknown." This letter, at the earliest, was not written until the beginning of the fifth century. [Footnote 113: These last words, stamping the author's own opinion, "Which we do not approve of," are left out in the quotation of Coccius.] Subsequent writers were not wanting to fill up what this letter declares to have been at its own date unknown, as to the manner and time of Mary's assumption, and the persons employed in effecting it. The first authority appealed to in defence of the tradition relating to the assumption of the Virgin[114], is usually cited as a well-known work written by Euthymius, who was contemporary with Juvenal, Archbishop of Jerusalem. And the testimony simply quoted as his, offers to us the following account of the miraculous transaction[115]:-- [Footnote 114: Coccius heads the extract merely with these words: "Euthumius Eremita Historiæ Ecclesiasticæ, lib. iii. c. 40;" assigning the date A.D. 549.] [Footnote 115: This version by Coccius differs in some points from the original. Jo. Dam. vol. ii. p. 879.] "It has been above said, that the holy Pulcheria {307} built many churches to Christ at Constantinople. Of these, however, there is one which was built in Blachernæ, in the beginning of Marcian I's _reign_ of divine memory. These, therefore, namely, Marcian and Pulcheria, when they had built a venerable temple to the greatly to be celebrated and most holy mother of God and ever Virgin Mary, and had decked it with all ornaments, sought her most holy body, which had conceived God. And having sent for Juvenal, Archbishop of Jerusalem, and the bishops of Palestine, who were living in the royal city on account of the synod then held at Chalcedon, they say to them, 'We hear that there is in Jerusalem the first and famous Church of Mary, mother of God and ever Virgin, in the garden called Gethsemane, where her body which bore the Life was deposited in a coffin. We wish, therefore, her relics to be brought here for the protection of this royal city. But Juvenal answered, 'In the holy and divinely inspired Scripture, indeed, nothing is recorded of the departure of holy Mary, mother of God. But from an ancient and most true tradition we have received, that at the time of her glorious falling asleep, all the holy Apostles who were going through the world for the salvation of the nations, in a moment of time borne aloft, came together at Jerusalem. And when they were near her, they had a vision of angels, and divine melody of the highest powers was heard: and thus with divine and more than heavenly glory, she delivered her holy soul into the hands of God in an unspeakable manner. But that which had conceived God being borne with angelic and apostolic psalmody, with funeral rites, was deposited in a coffin in Gethsemane. In this place the chorus and singing of the angels continued for three whole days. But {308} after three days, on the angelic music ceasing, since one of the Apostles had been absent, and came after the third day, and wished to adore the body which had conceived God, the Apostles, who were present, opened the coffin; but the body, pure and every way to be praised, they could not at all find. And when they found only those things in which it had been laid out and placed there, and were filled with an ineffable fragrancy proceeding from those things, they shut the coffin. Being astounded at the miraculous mystery, they could form no other thought, but that He, who in his own person had vouchsafed to be clothed with flesh, and to be made man of the most holy Virgin, and to be born in the flesh, God the Word, and Lord of Glory, and who after birth had preserved her virginity immaculate, had seen it good after she had departed from among the living, to honour her uncontaminated and unpolluted body by a translation before the common and universal resurrection." Such is the passage offered to us in its insulated form, as an extract from Euthymius. To be enabled, however, to estimate its worth, the inquirer must submit to the labour of considerable research. He will not have pursued his investigation far, before he will find, that a thick cloud of uncertainty and doubt hangs over this page of ecclesiastical history. Not that the evidence alleged in support of the reputed miracle can leave us in doubt as to the credibility of the tradition; for that tradition can scarcely be now countenanced by the most zealous and uncompromising maintainers of the assumption of the Virgin. What I would say is, that the question as to the genuineness and authenticity of the works by which the tradition is said to have been preserved, is far more difficult and complicated, than {309} those writers must have believed, who appeal to such testimony without any doubt or qualification. The result of my own inquiries I submit to your candid acceptance. The earliest author in whose reputed writings I have found the tradition, is John Damascenus, a monk of Jerusalem, who flourished somewhat before the middle of the eighth century. The passage is found in the second of three homilies on the "Sleep of the Virgin," a term generally used by the Greeks as an equivalent for the Latin word "Assumptio." The original publication of these homilies in Greek and Latin is comparatively of a late date. Lambecius, whose work is dated 1665, says he was not aware that any one had so published them before his time[116]. But not to raise the question of their genuineness, the preacher's introduction of this passage into his homily is preceded by a very remarkable section, affording a striking example of the manner in which Christian orators used to indulge in addresses and appeals not only to the spirits of departed men, but even to things which never had life. The speaker here in his sermon addresses the tomb of Mary, as though it had ears to hear, and an understanding to comprehend; and then represents the tomb as having a tongue to answer, and as calling forth from the preacher and his congregation an address of admiration and reverence. Such apostrophes as these cannot be too steadily borne in mind, or too carefully weighed, when any argument is sought to be drawn from similar salutations offered by ancient Christian orators to saint, or angel, or the Virgin. [Footnote 116: Vol. viii. p. 281. Le Quien, who published them in 1712, refers to earlier homilies on the Dormitio Virginis. Jo. Damas. Paris, 1712. vol. ii. p. 857.] {310} The following are among the expressions in which the preacher, in the passage under consideration, addresses the Virgin's tomb: "Thou, O Tomb, of holy things most holy (for I will address thee as a living being), where is the much desired and much beloved body of the mother of God?" [Vol. ii. p. 875.] The answer of the tomb begins thus, "Why seek ye her in a tomb, who has been taken up on high to the heavenly tabernacles?" In reply to this, the preacher first deliberating with his hearers what answer he should make, thus addresses the tomb: "Thy grace indeed is never-failing and eternal," &c. [P. 881.] By the maintainers of the invocation of saints, many a passage far less unequivocal and less cogent than this has been adduced to show, that saints and martyrs were invoked by primitive worshippers. We find John Damascenus thus introducing the passage of Euthymius, "Ye see, beloved fathers and brethren, what answer the all-glorious tomb makes to us; and that these things are so, in the EUTHYMIAC HISTORY, the third book and fortieth chapter, is thus written word for word." [P. 877.] Lambecius maintains, that the history here quoted by John Damascenus was not an ecclesiastical history, written by Euthymius, who died in A.D. 472, but a biographical history concerning Euthymius himself, written by an ecclesiastic, whom he supposes to be Cyril, the monk, who died in A.D. 531. This opinion of Lambecius is combated by Cotelerius; the discussion only adding to the denseness of the cloud which involves the whole tradition. But whether the work quoted had Euthymius for its author or its subject, the work itself is lost; and an epitome only of such a work has come down to {311} our time. In that abridgment the passage quoted by Damascenus is not found. The editor of John Damascenus, Le Quien, in his annotations on this portion of his work, offers to us some very interesting remarks, which bear immediately on the agitated question as to the first observance of the feast of the Assumption, as well as on the tradition itself. Le Quien infers, from the words of Modestus, patriarch of Jerusalem, that scarcely any preachers before him had addressed their congregations on the departure of the Virgin out of this life; he thinks, moreover, that the Feast of the Assumption was at the commencement of the seventh century only recently instituted. Though all later writers affirm that the Virgin was buried in the valley of Jehoshaphat, in the garden of Gethsemane, the same editor says, that this could not have been known to Jerome, who passed a great part of his life in Bethlehem, and yet observes a total silence on the subject; though in his "Epitaph on Paula," [Jerome, Paris, 1706. Vol. iv. p. 670-688, ep. 86.] he enumerates all the places in Palestine consecrated by any remarkable event. Neither, he adds, could it have been known to Epiphanius, who, though he lived long in Palestine, yet declares that nothing was known as to the death or burial of the Virgin. [Vol. ii, p. 858.] Again, in his remarks upon the writings falsely attributed to Melito, the same editor says, that since this Pseudo-Melito speaks many jejune things of the Virgin Mary, (such for example as at the approach of death her exceeding fear of being exposed to the wiles of Satan,) he concludes, from that circumstance, that the work was written before the Council of Ephesus; alleging this very remarkable reason, that "after that {312} time there BEGAN TO BE ENTERTAINED, as was right, not only in the East, but also in the West, a far better estimate of the parent of God." [P. 880.] Many of the remarks of this editor would appear to savour of prejudice had they come from the pen of one who denied the reality of the assumption, or oppugned the honour and worship now paid by members of the Church of Rome to the Virgin. Nor could the suspicion of such prejudice be otherwise than increased by the insinuation which the same editor throws out against the honesty of Archbishop Juvenal, and on the possibility of his having invented the whole story, and so for sinister purposes deceived Marcian and Pulcheria; just as he fabricated the writings which he forged for the purpose of securing the primacy of Palestine; a crime laid to the charge of Juvenal by Leo the Great, in his letter to Maximus, Bishop of Antioch. [P. 879. See Leo. vol. i. p. 1215. Epist. cxix.] It is moreover much to be regretted that in making the extract from John Damascenus those who employ it as evidence of primitive belief, have not presented it to their readers whole and entire. In the present case the system of quoting garbled extracts is particularly to be lamented, because the paragraphs omitted in the quotation carry in themselves clear proof that Juvenal's answer, as it now appears in John Damascenus, could not have been made by Juvenal to Marcian and Pulcheria. For in it is quoted from Dionysius the Areopagite by name, a passage still found in the works ascribed to him; whereas by the judgment of the most learned Roman Catholic writers, those spurious works did not make their appearance in Christendom till the beginning of the sixth century, fifty years after the Council of Chalcedon, to assist at which {313} Juvenal is said to have been present in Constantinople when the emperor and empress held the alleged conversation with him. The remainder of the passage from the history of Euthymius, rehearsed in this oration of John Damascenus, is as follows: "There were present with the Apostles at that time both the most honoured Timothy the Apostle, and first bishop of the Ephesians, and Dionysius the Areopagite, himself, as the great Dionysius testifies in the laboured words concerning the blessed Hierotheus, himself also then being present, to the above-named apostle Timothy, saying thus, Since with the inspired hierarchs themselves, when we also as thou knowest, and yourself, and many of our holy brethren had come together to the sight of the body which gave the principle of life; and there was present too James the brother of the Lord ([Greek: adelphotheos]), and Peter the chief and the most revered head of the apostles ([Greek: theologon]); then it seemed right, after the spectacle, that all the hierarchs (as each was able) should sing of the boundless goodness of the divine power. After the apostles, as you know, he surpassed all the other sacred persons, wholly carried away, and altogether in an ecstasy, and feeling an entire sympathy with what was sung; and by all by whom he was heard, and seen, and known (and he[117] knew it not), he was considered to be an inspired and divine hymnologist. And why should I speak to you about the things there divinely said, for unless I have even forgotten myself, I know that I have often heard from you some portions also of those inspired canticles? And the royal personages having heard this, requested of Juvenal the archbishop, that the holy coffin, with the {314} clothes of the glorious and all-holy Mary, mother of God, sealed up, might be sent to them. And this, when sent, they deposited in the venerable temple of the Mother of God, built in Blachernae; and these things were so." [Footnote 117: This seems confused in the original ([Greek: kai eginosketo, kai ouk eginoske]). The whole passage is involved in great obscurity.] It is a fact no less lamentable than remarkable, that out of the lessons appointed by the Church of Rome for the feast of the Assumption, to be read to believers assembled in God's house of prayer, three of those lessons are selected and taken entirely from this very oration of John Damascenus[118]. [Footnote 118: The Fourth Lesson begins "Hodie sacra et animata arca." The Fifth " " "Hodie virgo immaculata." The Sixth " " "Eva quæ serpentis," &c.--Æ. 603. These contain the passages to which we have before referred as fixing the belief of the Church of Rome to be in the CORPOREAL assumption of Mary. "Quomodo corruptio invaderet CORPUS ILLUD in quo vita suscepta est? [Greek: pos diaphthora tou zoodochon katatolmaeseie somatos.]"] This, then, is the account nearest to the time of the supposed event; and yet can any thing be more vague, and by way of testimony, more worthless? A writer near the middle of the sixth century refers to a conversation, said to have taken place in the middle of the fifth century; in this reported conversation at Constantinople, the Bishop of Jerusalem is represented to have informed the Emperor and Empress of an ancient tradition, which was believed, concerning a miraculous event, said to have taken place nearly four hundred years before, that the body was taken out of a coffin without the knowledge of those who had deposited it there: Whilst the primitive and inspired account, recording most minutely the journeys and proceedings of some of those very persons, and the letters of others, makes no mention at all of any transaction of the kind; and of {315} all the intermediate historians and ecclesiastical writers not one gives the slightest intimation that any rumour of it had reached them[119]. [Footnote 119: Baronius appears not to have referred to this history of Euthymius, but he refers to Nicephorus, and also to a work ascribed to Melito, c. 4, 5. Nicephorus, Paris, 1630. vol. i. p. 168. lib. ii. c. 21. Baronius also refers to lib. 15. c. 14. This Nicephorus was Patriarch of Constantinople. He lived during the reign of our Edward the First, or Edward the Second, and cannot, therefore, be cited in any sense of the word as an ancient author writing on the events of the primitive ages; though the manner in which his testimony is appealed to would imply, that he was a man to whose authority on early ecclesiastical affairs we were now expected to defer.] Another authority to which the writers on the assumption of the Virgin appeal, is that of Nicephorus Callistus, who, at the end of the thirteenth or the beginning of the fourteenth century, dedicated his work to Andronicus Palæologus. The account given by Nicephorus is this: In the fifth year of Claudius, the Virgin at the age of fifty-nine, was made acquainted with her approaching death. Christ himself then descended from heaven with a countless multitude of angels, to take up the soul of his mother; He summoned his disciples by thunder and storm from all parts of the world. The Virgin then bade Peter first, and afterwards the rest of the Apostles, to come with burning torches[120]. The Apostles surrounded her bed, and "an outpouring of miracles flowed forth." The blind beheld the sun, the deaf heard, the lame walked, and every disease fled away. The Apostles and others sang, as the coffin was borne from Sion to Gethsemane, angels preceding, surrounding, and following it. {316} A wonderful thing then took place. The Jews were indignant and enraged, and one more desperately bold than the rest rushed forward, intending to throw down the holy corpse to the ground. Vengeance was not tardy; for his hands were cut off from his arms[121]. The procession stopped; and at the command of Peter, on the man shedding tears of penitence, his hands were joined on again and restored whole. At Gethsemane she was put into a tomb, but her Son transferred her to the divine habitation. [Footnote 120: This author here quotes the forged work ascribed to Dionysius the Areopagite, to which we have before referred.] [Footnote 121: This tradition seems to have been much referred to at a time just preceding our Reformation. In a volume called "The Hours of the most blessed Mary, according to the legitimate rite of the Church of Salisbury," printed in Paris in 1526, from which we have made many extracts in the second part of this work, the frontispiece gives an exact representation of the story at the moment of the Jew's hands being cut off. They are severed at the wrist, and are lying on the coffin, on which his arms also are resting. In the sky the Virgin appears between the Father and the Son, the Holy Dove being seen above her. The same print occurs also in another part of the volume.] Nicephorus then refers to Juvenal, Archbishop of Jerusalem, as the authority on which the tradition was received, that the Apostles opened the coffin to enable St. Thomas (the one stated to have been absent) to embrace the body; and then he proceeds to describe the personal appearance of the Virgin. [Vol. i. p. 171.] I am unwilling to trespass upon the patience of my readers by any comment upon such evidence as this. Is it within the verge of credibility that had such an event as Mary's assumption taken place under the extraordinary circumstances which now invest the tradition, or under any circumstances whatever, there would have been a total silence respecting it in the Holy Scriptures? {317} That the writers of the first four centuries should never have referred to such a fact? That the first writer who alludes to it, should have lived in the middle of the fifth century, or later; and that he should have declared in a letter to his contemporaries that the subject was one on which many doubted; and that he himself would not deny it, not because it rested upon probable evidence, but because nothing was impossible with God; and that nothing was known as to the time, the manner, or the persons concerned, even had the assumption taken place? Can we place any confidence in the relation of a writer in the middle of the sixth century, as to a tradition of what an archbishop of Jerusalem attending the council of Chalcedon, had told the sovereigns at Constantinople of a tradition, as to what was said to have happened nearly four hundred years before, whilst in the "Acts" of that Council, not the faintest trace is found of any allusion to the supposed fact or the alleged tradition, though the transactions of that Council in many of its most minute circumstances are recorded, and though the discussions of that Council brought the name and circumstances of the Virgin Mary continually before the minds of all who attended it? This, however, is a point of too great importance to be dismissed summarily; and seems to require us to examine, however briefly, into the circumstances of that Council. {318} * * * * * CHAPTER IV.--COUNCILS OF CONSTANTINOPLE, EPHESUS, AND THE GENERAL COUNCIL OF CHALCEDON The legend on which the doctrine of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary is founded professes to trace the tradition to Juvenal, Archbishop of Jerusalem, when he was sojourning in Constantinople for the purpose of attending the General Council of Chalcedon. To the Emperor and Empress, who presided at that council, Juvenal is said to have communicated the tradition, as received in Palestine, of the miraculous taking up of Mary's body into heaven. This circumstance seems, as we have already intimated, of itself, to require us to examine the records of that Council, with the view of ascertaining whether any traces may be found confirmatory of the tradition, or otherwise; and since that Council cannot be regarded as an insulated assembly, but as a continuation rather or resumption of the preceding minor Councils of Constantinople and Ephesus, we must briefly refer to the occasion and nature generally of that succession of Christian synods. I am not aware that in the previous Councils any thing had transpired {319} which could be brought as evidence on the subject of our inquiry. The questions which had disturbed the peace of Christendom, and which were agitated in these Councils, inseparable from a repeated mention of the Virgin Mary's name, afforded an opportunity at every turn for an expression of the sentiments of those who composed the Councils, and of all connected with them, including the Bishop of Rome himself, towards her. It would be altogether foreign from the purpose of this address to enter in any way at large upon the character and history of those or the preceding Councils, yet a few words seem necessary, to enable us to judge of the nature and weight of the evidence borne by them on the question immediately before us. The source of all the disputes which then rent the Church of HIM who had bequeathed peace as his last and best gift to his followers, was the anxiety to define and explain the nature of the great Christian mystery, the Incarnation of the Son of God; a point on which it were well for all Christians to follow only so far as the Holy Scriptures lead them by the hand. All parties appealed to the Nicene Council; though there seems to have been, to say the least, much misunderstanding and unnecessary violence and party spirit on all sides. The celebrated Eutyches of Constantinople was charged with having espoused heterodox doctrine, by maintaining that in Christ was only one nature, the incarnate Word. On this charge he was accused before a Council held at Constantinople in A.D. 448. His doctrine was considered to involve a denial of the human nature of the Son of God. The Council condemned him of heresy, deposed, and excommunicated him. From this proceeding Eutyches appealed to a General Council. A council (the authority of which, however, {320} has been solemnly, but with what adequate reason we need not stop to examine, repudiated), was convened at Ephesus in the following year, by the Emperor Theodosius. The proceedings of this assembly were accompanied by lamentable unfairness and violence. Eutyches was acquitted, and restored by this council[122]; and his accusers were condemned and persecuted; Flavianus, Archbishop of Constantinople, who had summoned the preceding council, being even scourged and exiled. In his distress that patriarch sought the good offices of Leo, Bishop of Rome, who espoused his cause, but who failed nevertheless of inducing Theodosius to convene a General Council. His successor Marcian, however, consented; and in the year 451 the Council of Chalcedon was convened, first meeting at Nice, and by adjournment being removed to Chalcedon. In this council all the proceedings as well of the Council of Constantinople as of Ephesus, were rehearsed at length; and from a close examination of the proceedings of those three councils, only one inference seems deducible, namely, that the invocation and worship of saints and of the Virgin Mary had not then obtained that place in the Christian {321} Church, which the Church of Rome now assigns to it; a place, however, which the Church of England, among other branches of the Catholic Church, maintains that it has usurped, and cannot, without a sacrifice of the only sound principle of religious worship, be suffered to retain. [Footnote 122: The sentiments of Eutyches, even as they are recorded by the party who charged him with heresy, seem to imply so much of soundness in his principles, and of moderation in his maintenance of those principles, that one must feel sorrow on finding such a man maintaining error at any time. The following is among the records of transactions rehearsed at Chalcedon: "He, Eutyches, professed that he followed the expositions of the holy and blessed Fathers who formed the Councils of Nicæa and Ephesus, and was ready to subscribe to them. But if any where it might chance, as he said, that our fathers were deceived and led astray, that as for himself he neither accepted nor accused those things, but he only on such points investigated the divine Scriptures as more to be depended upon [Greek: os bebaioteras]."] The grand question then agitated with too much asperity, and too little charity, was, whether by the incarnation our blessed Saviour became possessed of two natures, the divine and human. Subordinate to this, and necessary for its decision, was involved the question, What part of his nature, if any, Christ derived from the Virgin Mary? Again and again does this question bring the name, the office, the circumstances, and the nature of that holy and blessed mother of our Lord before these Councils. The name of Mary is continually in the mouth of the accusers, the accused, the judges, and the witnesses; and had Christian pastors then entertained the same feelings of devotion towards her; had they professed the same belief as to her assumption into heaven, and her influence and authority in directing the destinies of man, and in protecting the Church on earth; had they habitually appealed to her with the same prayers for her intercession and good offices, and placed the same confidence in her as we find now exhibited in the authorized services of the Roman Ritual, it is impossible to conceive that no signs, no intimation of such views and feelings, would, either directly or incidentally, have shown themselves, somewhere or other, among the manifold and protracted proceedings of these Councils. I have searched diligently, but I can find no expression as to her nature and office, or as to our feelings and conduct towards Mary, in which, as a {322} Catholic of the Anglican Church, I should not heartily acquiesce. I can find no sentiment implying invocation, or religious worship of any kind, or in any degree; I find no allusion to her Assumption. Pope Leo, who is frequently in these documents [Vol. v. p. 1418.] called Archbishop of Rome, in a letter to Julianus, Bishop of Cos, speaks of Christ as born of "A Virgin," "The blessed Virgin," "The pure, undefiled Virgin;" and in a letter to the empress Pulcheria, he calls Mary simply "The Virgin Mary." In his celebrated letter to Flavianus, not one iota of which (according to the decree of the Roman council under Pope Gelasius) was to be questioned by any man on pain of incurring an anathema, Pope Leo says that Christ was conceived by the Holy Ghost in the womb of the Virgin Mary his mother, who brought him forth with the same virgin purity as she had conceived him. Flavianus, Archbishop of Constantinople, in his Declaration of faith to the Emperor Theodosius, affirms, that Christ was born "of Mary, the Virgin--of the same substance with the Father according to his Godhead--of the same substance with his mother according to his manhood." [Vol. vi. p. 539.] He speaks of her afterwards as "The holy Virgin." There is, indeed, one word used in a quotation from Cyril of Alexandria, and adopted in these transactions, which requires a few words of especial observation. The word is _theotocos_[123], which the Latins were accustomed {323} to transfer into their works, substituting only Roman instead of Greek characters, but which afterwards the authors of the Church of Rome translated by Deipara, and in more recent ages by Dei Mater, Dei Genetrix, Creatoris Genetrix, &c. employing those terms not in explanation of the twofold nature of Christ's person, as was the case in these Councils, but in exaltation of Mary, his Virgin mother. This word was adopted by Christians in much earlier times than the Council of Chalcedon; but it was employed only to express more strongly the Catholic belief in the union of the divine and human nature in Him who was Son both of God and man; and by no means for the purpose of raising Mary into an object of religious adoration. The sense in which it was used was explained in the seventh Act of the Council of Constantinople, (repeated at Chalcedon) as given by Cyril of Alexandria. "According to this sense of an unconfused union, we confess the holy Virgin to be theotocos, because that God the Word was made flesh, and became man, and from that very conception united with himself the temple received from her." [Footnote 123: [Greek: Theotokos]. To those who would depend upon this word _theotocos_ as a proof of the exalted honour in which the early Christians held the Virgin, and not as indicative of an anxiety to preserve whole and entire the doctrine of the union of perfect God and perfect man in Christ, deriving his manhood through her, I would suggest the necessity of weighing well that argument with this fact before them; that to the Apostle James, called in Scripture the Lord's brother, was assigned the name of Adelphotheos, or God's brother. This name was given to James, not to exalt him above his fellow-apostles, but to declare the faith of those who gave it him in the union of the divine and human nature of Christ.--See Joan. Damascenus, Hom. ii. c. 18. In Dormit. Virg. vol. ii. p. 881. Le Quien, Paris, 1712. The Latin translation renders it Domini frater.] Nothing in our present inquiry turns upon the real {324} meaning of that word _theotocos_. Some who have been among the brightest ornaments of the Anglican Church have adopted the translation "mother of God," whilst many others among us believe that the original sense would be more correctly conveyed by the expression "mother of Him who was God." I am induced here to lay side by side, with the second Article of our Anglican Church, the Confession of Faith from Cyril, first recited at Constantinople, then repeated at Ephesus, and afterwards again rehearsed at Chalcedon; in its last clause the expression occurs which gave rise to these remarks. _Ancient Confession._ We confess that our Lord Jesus, the Christ, the only begotten Son of God, perfect God and perfect man, from a reasonable soul and body, begotten from everlasting of the Father according to his Godhead, and in these last days, He the same for us and for our salvation [was born] of Mary, the Virgin, according to his manhood--of the same substance with the Father according to his Godhead, of the same substance with us according to his manhood. For of two natures there became an union. Wherefore we confess one Christ, one Lord. According to this sense of the unconfused union, we confess the holy Virgin to be theotocos, because that God the Word was made flesh, and became man, and from that very conception united with himself the temple received from her. [Vol. vi. p. 736.] _Second Article of Anglican Church._ The Son, which is the Word of the Father, begotten from everlasting of the Father, the very and eternal God, and of one substance with the Father, took man's nature in the womb of the blessed Virgin, of her substance: so that two whole and perfect natures, that is to say, the Godhead and Manhood, were joined together in one Person, never to be divided, whereof is one Christ, very God, and very man; who truly suffered, was crucified, dead and buried, to reconcile his Father to us, and to be a sacrifice, not only for original guilt, but also for actual sins of men. {325} But there are other points in the course of these important proceedings to which I would solicit your especial attention, with the view of comparing the sentiments of the Bishop of Rome at that day, and also the expressions employed by other Chief Pastors of Christ's flock, with the language of the appointed authorized services of the Roman Church now, and the sentiments of her reigning Pontiff, and of his accredited ministers. The circumstances of the Church Catholic, as represented in Leo's letter in the fifth century, and the circumstances of the Church of Rome, as lamented by the present Pope in 1832[124], are in many respects very similar. The end desired by Leo and Flavianus, his brother pastor and contemporary, Bishop of Constantinople, and by Gregory, now Bishop of Rome, is one and the same, namely, the suppression of heresy, the prevalence of the truth, and the unity of the Christian Church. But how widely and how strikingly different are the foundations on which they respectively build their hopes for the attainment of that end! [Footnote 124: "The encyclical letter of our most holy Father, Pope Gregory, by divine providence, the sixteenth of that name, to all patriarchs, primates, archbishops, and bishops."] The present Roman Pontiff's hopes, and desires, and exhortations are thus expressed[125]:-- [Footnote 125: This is the translation circulated in the Roman Catholic Annual, p. 15, called, The Laity's Directory for the year 1833; on the title page of which is this notice: "The Directory for the Church Service, printed by Messrs. Keating and Brown, is the only one which is published with the authority of the Vicars Apostolic in England.--London, Nov. 12, 1829." Signed "James, Bishop of Usula, Vic. Ap. Lond."] "That all may have a successful and happy issue, let us raise our eyes to the most blessed Virgin Mary, {326} WHO ALONE DESTROYS HERESIES, who is our GREATEST HOPE, yea, the ENTIRE GROUND OF OUR HOPE[126]. May she exert her patronage to draw down an efficacious blessing on our desires, our plans, and proceedings in the present straitened condition of the Lord's flock. We will also implore, in humble prayer, from Peter, the prince of the Apostles, and from his fellow-Apostle Paul, that you may all stand as a wall to prevent any other foundation than what hath been laid; and supported by this cheering hope, we have confidence that the author and finisher of faith, Jesus Christ, will at last console us all in the tribulations which have found us exceedingly." [Footnote 126: On this word there is a note of reference to S. Bern. Serm. de Nat. B.M.V. 7.] "To you, venerable brethren, and the flocks committed to your care, we most lovingly impart, as auspicious of celestial help, the Apostolic Benediction. Given at Rome from St. Mary Major's, August 15th, the Festival of the Assumption of the same blessed Virgin Mary, the year of our Lord 1832, of our Pontificate the Second." How deplorable a change, how melancholy a degeneracy is here evinced from the faith, and hopes, and sentiments of Christian bishops in days of old! In the expressed hopes of Leo and Flavianus, you will seek in vain for any reference or allusion "to the blessed Virgin Mary, as the destroyer of heresies, the greatest hope, the entire ground of a Christian's hope;" you will in vain seek for any exhortation for the faithful "to raise their eyes to her in order to obtain a merciful and happy issue." Equally vain would be your search for any "imploring in humble prayer," of Peter and Paul, or any even distant allusion to help from them. {327} To God and God alone are the faithful exhorted to pray; on God and God alone do those Christians express that their hopes rely; God alone they regard as the destroyer of heresy, the restorer of peace, and the protector of the Church's unity. "Their greatest hope, yea, the entire ground of their hope," the Being to be "implored in humble prayer," is not Mary, nor Peter, nor Paul, but God alone, the Creator, the Redeemer, the Sanctifier of Mary, and of Peter, and of Paul. Thus Flavian writing to Leo says, "Wherefore (in consequence of those errors, and heresies, and distractions, which he had deplored) we must be sober and watch unto prayer, and draw nigh to God." [Vol. v. 1330.] And again, "Thus will the heresy which has arisen, and the consequent commotion, be easily destroyed by your holy letters with the assistance of God." [Vol. v. 1355.] Thus Leo in his turn writing to Julian, Bishop of Cos, utters this truly Christian sentiment. "May the mercy of God, as we trust, grant that without the loss of any soul, against the darts of the devil the sound parts may be entirely preserved, and the wounded parts may be healed. May God preserve you safe and sound, most honoured brother!" [Vol. v. 1423.] Thus the same Bishop of Rome writing to Flavian, expresses his hopes in these words: "Confidently trusting that the help of God will be present, so that one who has been misled, condemning the vanity of his own thoughts, may be saved. May God preserve you in health and strength, most beloved brother!" [Vol. v. 1390.] I will detain you by only one more reference to these most interesting documents. The whole Council of Chalcedon, at the conclusion of all, and when the {328} triumph was considered to have been secured over Eutyches, and their gratitude was expressed that the heresies had been destroyed--instead of referring to Mary as the "sole destroyer of heresies," shout, as if with the voice of one man, from every side, "It is God alone who hath done this!" [Vol. vii. p. 174.] Neither antecedently did their chief pastors exhort them to raise their eyes to Mary, and promise to "implore" the blessing they needed, "in humble prayer from Peter and Paul." Neither "in the straitened condition of the Lord's flock" did they invoke any other than God. And when truth prevailed, and the victory was won, whilst they were lavish of their grateful thanks to the emperor and his queen, who were present and had succoured them; of help from the invisible world they make no mention, save only of the Lord's; they had implored neither angel, nor saints, nor Virgin to be their protector and patron; no angel, nor saint, nor virgin, shared their praises;--God alone was exalted in that day. And, let not the answer, ever at hand when reference is thus made to the prayers or professions of individuals, whether popes or canonized saints, seduce any now from a pursuit of the very truth. These, it is said, "are the prayers and professions of individuals, it is unfair then to make the Church responsible for them; we appeal from them to the Church." But in this case the words of the Sovereign Pontiff are in good faith the words of the Church of Rome; not because I at all would identify the words of a Pope with the Church, but because the prayers of the Church of Rome in her authorized solemn services and acts of worship justify {329} Pope Gregory in every sentiment he utters, and every expression he employs. Does Gregory bid the faithful lift up their eyes to Mary the sole destroyer of heresies? The Roman ritual in the Lesser Office of the holy Virgin thus addresses her, "Rejoice, O Mary Virgin; thou alone hast destroyed all heresies in the whole world:" And again: "Under thy protection we take refuge, holy parent of God; despise not thou our prayers in our necessities, but from all dangers ever deliver us, O glorious and blessed Virgin." Does Gregory assure the faithful that he will implore in humble prayer of Peter and Paul? in doing so he is only treading in the very footsteps of the Roman Church itself. In an address, which we have already quoted (see p. 262), Peter is thus invoked. "Now O good shepherd, merciful Peter, accept the prayers of us who supplicate, and loose the bands of our sins, by the power committed to thee, by which thou shuttest heaven against all by a word, and openest it." These things are now; but from the beginning it was not so. {330} * * * * * CHAPTER V. SECTION I.--PRESENT WORSHIP OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN IN THE AUTHORIZED AND ENJOINED SERVICES OF THE CHURCH OF ROME. When from examining the evidence of antiquity we turn to the present enjoined services of the Church of Rome, it is impossible not to be struck by the fact repeatedly forced upon our notice, that whereas the invocation of the Virgin seems to have been introduced at a period much later than those addresses to the martyrs which have already invited our attention, her worship now assumes so much higher a place, and claims so large a share in the public worship of the Roman Catholic portions of Christendom above martyrs, saints, and angels. The offices of the Virgin present instances of all those various and progressive stages of divine worship, which we have already exemplified in the case of the martyrs, from the first primitive and Christian practice of making the anniversary of the Saint a day either of especial praise and prayer to God for the mercies of redemption generally, or of returning thanks to God for the graces manifested in his holy servants now in peace, with prayers for light and strength to enable the worshippers to follow them, as they followed Christ--down to the last and worst stage, the consummation {331} of all, namely, prayer directly to saints and angels for protection, succour, and spiritual benefits at their hands. I. Of the first class is the following collect, retained almost word for word in our Anglican service. _On the day of the Purification._ "Almighty and everlasting God, we humbly beseech thy majesty, that as thy only begotten Son was this day presented in the temple in substance of our flesh, so Thou wouldest cause us to be presented unto Thee with purified minds. Through the same." (Omnipotens sempiterne Deus, majestatem tuam supplices exoramus, ut sicut unigenitus Filius tuus hodierna die cum nostræ carnis substantia est præsentatus, ita nos facias purificatis tibi mentibus præsentari. Per eundem Dominum.--H. 536.) Such a prayer is founded on the facts of revelation, and is primitive, catholic, apostolic, and evangelical. II. Of the second progressive stage towards the adoration of the saints, the offices of the Virgin supply us with various instances; the case, namely, of the Christian orator being led by the flow of his eloquence to apostrophize the spirit of the Saint, and address him as though he were present, witnessing the celebration of his day, hearing the panegyrics uttered for his honour, and partaking with the congregation in their religious acts of worship. "O holy and spotless virginhood; with what praises to extol thee I know not: because Him, whom the heavens could not contain, thou didst bear in thy bosom. {332} Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb. Thou art blessed, O Virgin Mary, who didst carry the Lord, the Creator of the world. Thou didst give birth to Him who made thee, and remainest a virgin for ever. [Beata es Virgo Maria, quæ Dominum portasti Creatorem mundi: genuisti qui te fecit, et in æternum permanes virgo.--Vern. clxii.] Hail, holy parent, who didst in child-birth bring forth the King who ruleth heaven and earth for ever and ever. Amen." [Salve sacra parens enixa puerpera regem, qui coelum terramque regit in sæcula sæculorum. Amen.--Introit. at the mass on the Nativity of the Virgin.] In apostrophes like these, the members of the Anglican Church see nothing in itself harmful, so long as they are kept within due bounds. Many of the passages cited from the ancient writers in proof of their having espoused the doctrine, and exemplified in themselves the practice of invoking saints, are nothing more than these glowing addresses. They have been responded to by one of the brightest ornaments, and sweetest minstrels of the Anglican Church, whose apostrophe at the same time by its own words would guard us against the abuses and excesses in which in the Roman Catholic Church this practice, followed without restraint and indulged in with less and less of caution and soberness, unhappily ended; abuses against which also we cannot ourselves now be too constantly and carefully on our guard. "Ave Maria! Blessed maid, Lily of Eden's fragrant shade, Who can express the love, That nurtured thee so pure and sweet; Making thy heart a shelter meet For Jesus' holy Dove? {333} Ave Maria! mother blest, To whom, caressing and caress'd, Clings the Eternal Child! Favour'd beyond archangel's dream, When first on thee with tenderest gleam The newborn Saviour smiled. Ave Maria! thou whose name, ALL BUT ADORING love may claim, Yet may we reach thy shrine; For HE, thy Son and Saviour, vows, To crown all lowly lofty brows With love and joy like thine. Bless'd is the womb that bare Him,--bless'd The bosom where his lips were press'd; But rather bless'd are they Who hear his word and keep it well, The living homes where Christ shall dwell, And never pass away." J. Keble's Christian Year. "The Annunciation." Would that no branch of the Church Catholic had ever passed the boundary line drawn here so exquisitely by this Anglican Catholic, from whose lips or pen no syllable could ever fall in disparagement of the holy Virgin, as blessed among women, and the holy mother of our Lord. To bring about the re-union of Christians would in that case have been a far more hopeful task than it is now. III. In the third stage, a prayer was offered to God, that He would permit the intercessions of the saints to help us; or the prayer contained the expression of a wish,--a desire not addressed either to God or to the saint, merely words expressive of the hope of the individual. The following are some of the many instances now contained in the Roman Breviary: {334} "May the Virgin of virgins herself intercede for us to the Lord. Amen." [Ipsa Virgo virginum intercedat pro nobis ad Dominum. Amen.--Vern. cxlviii.] In the Post-communion, on the day of the Assumption, this prayer is offered:--"Partakers of the heavenly table, we implore thy clemency, O Lord our God, that we who celebrate the Assumption of the mother of God, may, by her intercession, be freed from all impending evils. Through," &c. [Mensæ coelestis participes effecti imploramus clementiam tuam, Domine Deus noster, ut qui Assumptionem Dei Genetricis colimus, a cunctis malis imminentibus ejus intercessione liberemur. Per.--Miss. Rom.] "We beseech Thee, O Lord, let the glorious intercession of the blessed and glorious ever Virgin Mary protect us and bring us to life eternal." [Beatæ et gloriosæ semper Virginia Mariæ, quæsumus, Domine, intercessio gloriosa nos protegat, et ad vitam producat æternam.--Vern. clv.] "Pardon, we beseech Thee, O Lord, the offences of thy servants, that we, who cannot please Thee of our own act, may be saved by the intercession of the mother of thy Son, our Lord, who liveth with Thee." [Famulorum tuorum quæsumus, Domine, delictis ignosce, ut qui tibi placere de nostris actibus non valemus, Genetricis Filii tui, Domini nostri, intercessione salvemur, qui tecum vivit.--Vern. clxix.] On the vigil of the Epiphany, this prayer is offered in the Post-communion at the mass,--"Let this communion, O Lord, purge us from guilt, and by the intercession of the blessed Virgin, mother of God, let it make us partakers of the heavenly cure. Through the same." [Hæc nos communio, Domine, purget a crimine, et intercedente beata Virgine Dei genetrice coelestis remedii faciat esse consortes. Per eundem.--Miss. Rom.] "Grant, we beseech Thee, O Lord God, that we thy {335} servants may enjoy perpetual health of body and mind, and be freed from present sorrow, and enjoy eternal gladness, by the glorious intercession of the blessed Mary, ever Virgin. Through." [Concede nos famulos tuos, quæsumus, Domine Deus, perpetua mentis et corporis sanitate gaudere, et gloriosa beatæ Mariæ semper Virginis intercessione a præsenti liberari tristitia, et æterna perfrui lætitia. Per Dominum.--Vern. cxlvi.] On the second Sunday after Easter, we find a further and more sad departure from the simplicity of Christian worship, in which the Church of Rome declares that the offerings made to God at the Lord's Supper were made for the honour of the Virgin.--"Having received, O Lord, the helps of our salvation, grant, we beseech Thee, that by the patronage of Mary, ever Virgin, we may be every where protected; in veneration of whom we make these offerings to thy Majesty." [Sumptis, Domine, salutis nostræ subsidiis, da, quæsumus, beatæ Mariæ semper Virginis patrociniis ubique protegi, _in cujus veneratione_ hæc tuæ obtulimus Majestati.--Post Commun. Mis. Rom.] On the octave of Easter, at the celebration of mass, in the Secret, the intercession of the Virgin is made to appear as essential a cause of our peace and blessedness as the propitiation of Christ; or rather, the two are represented as joint concurrent causes; as though the office of the Saviour was confined to propitiation, exclusive altogether of intercession, whilst the office of intercession was assigned to the Virgin.--"By thy propitiation, O Lord, and by the intercession of the blessed Mary, ever Virgin, may this offering be profitable to us for perpetual and present prosperity and peace." [Tua, Domine, propitiatione et beatæ Marisæ semper Virginis intercessione ad perpetuam atque prsesentem hæc oblatio nobis profecerit prosperitatem et pacem.] {336} IV. A fourth station in this lamentable progress was evidenced when Christians at the tombs of martyrs implored, yet still in prayer to God, that He would, for the sake of the martyrs, and by their merits and good offices, grant to the petitioner some benefit temporal or spiritual. Of that practice, we have an example in this prayer: "O God, who didst deign to choose the blessed Virgin's womb in which to dwell, vouchsafe, we beseech thee, to make us, defended by her protection, to take pleasure in her commemoration." [Deus qui virginalem aulam beatæ Mariæ in qua habitares eligerere dignatus es, da, quæsumus, ut sua nos defensione munitos jucundos facias suæ interesse commemorationi.--Æst. clvi.] "By the Virgin mother, may the Lord grant us health and peace. Amen." [Per Virginem Matrem concedat nobis Dominus salutem et pacem. Amen.--Vern. cxliii.] "By the prayers and merits of the blessed Mary, ever Virgin, and of all saints, may the Lord bring us to the kingdom of heaven." [Precibus et meritis beatæ Mariæ Virginis et omnium sanctorum perducat nos Dominus ad regna coelorum.--Vern. cxlvii.] "May the Virgin Mary bless us, together with a pious offspring." [Nos cum prole pia benedicat Virgo Maria.--Vern. cxlvii.] V. The fifth grade involves a still more melancholy departure from Christian truth and primitive simplicity, when the prayer is no longer addressed to God, but is offered to the Virgin, imploring her to intercede with God for the supplicants, yet still asking nothing but her prayers. "Blessed mother, Virgin undefiled, glorious Queen of the world, intercede for us with the Lord." [Beata Mater, et intacta Virgo, gloriosa regina mundi, intercede pro nobis ad Dominum.--Aut. cxliv.] {337} "Blessed mother of God, Mary, perpetual Virgin, the temple of the Lord, the holy place of the holy Spirit, thou alone without example hast pleased our Lord Jesus Christ: Pray for the people, mediate for the clergy, intercede for the female sex who are under a vow." [Beata Dei Genitrix, Maria Virgo perpetua, templum Domini, sacrarium Spiritus Sancti, sola sine exemplo placuisti Domino nostro Jesu Christo; ora pro populo, interveni pro clero, intercede pro devoto femineo sexu.--Vern. clxiii.] "Holy Mary, pray for us! Holy mother of God, pray for us! Holy Virgin of virgins, pray for us!" In the form of prayer called Litaniæ Lauretanæ, between the most solemn addresses to the ever blessed Trinity, and to the Lamb of God that taketh away the sins of the world, are inserted more than forty addresses to the Virgin, invoking her under as many varieties of title. She is appealed to as--The Mirror of Justice, The Cause of our Joy, The mystical Rose, The Tower of David, The Tower of Ivory, The House of Gold, The Arc of the Covenant, The Gate of Heaven, The Refuge of Sinners, The Queen of Angels, the Queen of all Saints. [Vern. ccxxxix.] In examining the case of the invocation of saints, we placed under this head, as the safer course, a kind of invocation which seemed to vacillate between this appeal to them merely for intercession, and the last consummation of all, direct prayer to them for blessings. We exemplified it by the hymn to St. Stephen. The following seems very much of the same character, addressed to the Virgin:-- "Hail, O Queen, Mother of mercy, our life, sweetness, and hope, Hail! To thee we cry, banished sons {338} of Eve. To thee we sigh, groaning and weeping in this valley of tears. Come then, our Advocate, turn those compassionate eyes of thine on us, and after this exile show to us Jesus, the blessed fruit of thy womb. O merciful! O pious! O sweet Virgin Mary! [Salve, Regina, Mater Misericordiæ, vita, dulcedo, et spes nostra, salve. Ad te clamamus exules filii Evæ. Ad te suspiramus gementes et flentes in hac lachrymarum valle. Eja ergo Advocata nostra, illos tuos misericordes oculos ad nos converte, et Jesum benedictum fructum ventris tui nobis post hoc exilium ostende. O clemens! O pia! O dulcis Virgo Maria!] "Pray for us, O holy Mother of God, that we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ." [Ora pro nobis, Sancta Dei Genetrix, ut digni efficiamur promissionibus Christi.--Æst. 151.] VI. Unhappily, in the appointed religious services of the Roman ritual, we have too many examples of prayer for benefits spiritual and temporal, addressed directly to the Virgin. It is in vain to say that all that is meant is to ask her intercession; the people will not, cannot, do not, regard it in that light. It is affirmed that when the Church of Rome guides and directs her sons and daughters to pray for specific benefits at the hands of the Virgin mother, without any mention of her prayers, without specifying that her petitions are all that they ask; yet they are taught only to ask for her intercession, and are not encouraged to look for the blessings as her gift and at her hands. But, can this be right and safe? In an act of all human acts the most solemn and holy, can recourse be had to such refinements without great danger? Among many others of a similar kind this invocation frequently recurs, "Deem me worthy to praise thee, {339} O sacred Virgin; give to me strength against thy enemies." [Dignare me laudare te, Virgo sacrata. Da mihi virtutem contra hostes tuos.--Æst. clvi.] The following seems to be among the most favourite addresses to the Virgin:--"Hail, Star of the Sea, kind Mother of God, and ever Virgin! Happy Gate of Heaven, taking that 'Hail!' from the mouth of Gabriel, establish us in peace,--changing the name of Eve. For the guilty, loose their bonds; bring forth light for the blind; drive away our evils; demand for us all good things. SHOW THAT THOU ART A MOTHER. Let Him who endured for us to be thy Son, through thee receive our prayers. O excellent Virgin, meek among all, us, FREED FROM FAULT, MAKE MEEK AND CHASTE; make our life pure; prepare a safe journey; that, beholding Jesus, we may always rejoice. Praise be to God the Father, glory to Christ most high, and to the Holy Spirit; one honour to the three. Amen." [Ave Man's Stella, Dei Mater alma, Atque semper Virgo! Felix coeli porta, Sumens illud Ave Gabrielis ore, Funda nos in pace, Mutans Evæ nomen. Solve vincla reis, Profer lumen cæcis, Mala nostra pelle, Bona cuncta posce. MONSTRA TE ESSE MATREM; Sumat per te preces, Qui pro nobis natus Tulit esse tuus. Virgo singularis, Inter omnes mitis, Nos culpa solutos, Mites fac et castos, Vitam præsta puram, Iter para tutum, Ut videntes Jesum Semper collætemur. Sit laus Deo Patri, summo Christo decus, Spiritui Sancto, tribus honor unus. Amen.--Æst. 597. ] In the body of this hymn, there is undoubtedly reference to an application to be made to the Son, &c.; but can it be fitting that such language as is here suggested to the Virgin, for her to use, should be addressed by a {340} mortal to God? can such a call upon her to show her power and influence over the eternal Son of the eternal Father be fitting--"Show that thou art a mother?" I confess that against what is here implied, my understanding and my heart entirely revolt.[127] [Footnote 127: At the present day some versions, contrary to the whole drift and plain sense and meaning of the passage, have translated it, as though the prayer was, that Mary would, by her maternal good offices in our behalf, prove to us that she was our mother. An instance of what I mean occurs in a work called "Nouveau Recueil de Cantiques," p. 353. "Monstra te esse Matrem: Faites voir que vous êtes véritablement notre mère." In an English manual, first printed in 1688, and then called "The Prince of Wales's Manual," the lines are thus rendered-- Shew us a Mother's care, To Him convey our prayer, Who for our sake put on The title of thy Son. I rejoice to see an indication of a feeling of impropriety in the sentiment in its plain, obvious meaning; still the change is inadmissible. She is addressed above, in the second line, as the mother of God; Jesus is immediately mentioned, in the very next line, and through the entire stanza, as her Son; and the prayer is, that through her that Being who endured to be her Son would hear the prayers of the worshippers. Since I first prepared this note for the press, I have found a proof, that the obvious grammatical and logical meaning, "show thyself to be His mother," is the sense in which it was received and interpreted before the Reformation. In a work dedicated to the "Youth of England studious of good morals," and entitled "Expositio Sequentiarum," the only interpretation given to this passage is thus expressed: "Show thyself to be a MOTHER, namely BY APPEASING THY SON, and let thy Son take our prayers through thee, who (namely, the Son born of the Virgin Mary,) for us miserable sinners endured to be thy Son." "Monstra te esse MATREM (sc.) placando TILIUM TUUM, et filius tuus sumat precem, id est, deprecationes nostras per te qui (sc.) filius natus ex Virgine Maria pro nobis (sc.) miseris peccatoribus tulit, id est, sustinuit esse tuus filius." It must be observed, that this work was expressly written for the purpose of explaining these parts of the ritual according to the use of Sarum. It was printed by the famous W. de Worde, at the sign of the Sun in Fleet-street, 1508. The passage occurs in p. 33. b. This is by no means the only book of the kind. I have before me one printed at Basil, in 1504, and another at Cologne the same year. They are evidently all drawn from some common source, but are not reprints all of the same work, for there are in each some variations. The Cologne edition tells us, that it was the reprint of a familiar commentary long ago (jamdudum) published on the hymns. All these join in construing the passage so as to represent the prayer to the Virgin to be, that she would show and prove that she was mother by appeasing her Son, and causing him to hear our prayers. Nor can any other meaning be attached to the translation of the words as given by Cardinal Du Perron (Replique à la Rep. du Roy de la G. Bretagne. Paris, 1620, p. 970). "Et pourtant quand l'Eglise dit à la saincte Vierge, 'Defends nous de l'ennemy, et nous reçoy à l'heure delamort,' elle n'entend pas prier la Vierge qu'elle nous reçoive par sa propre virtu, mais par impetration de la grace de son Fils, comme l'Eglise le temoigne en ces mots: 'Monstre que tu es mère, reçoive par toy nos prieres celuy, qui né pour nous a eu agreeable d'être tien!'" This novel interpretation I have not found in any one book of former days.] {341} Another prayer runs thus: "Under thy protection we take refuge, Holy Mother of God. Despise not our supplications in our necessities; but from all dangers ever deliver us, O glorious and Blessed Virgin." [Sub tuum præsidium confugimus, sancta Dei Genetrix; nostras deprecationes ne despicias in necessitatibus, sed a periculis cunctis libera nos semper, Virgo gloriosa et benedicta.--Æst. cxlvi.] Let us suppose the object of these addresses to be changed; and instead of the Virgin let us substitute the name of the ever-blessed God and Father of us all. The very words here addressed to the Virgin are offered to Him, and spoken of Him in some of the most affecting prayers and praises recorded in the Bible[128]. [Footnote 128: The identity of the prayers offered to the Virgin with those offered in the Book of inspiration, or in the Roman Ritual to the Almighty, becomes very striking, if we lay side by side the authorized language of the Roman Liturgy, and the only translation of the Scriptures authorized by the Roman Church. _Roman Ritual in addressing the _Roman Ritual, or Translation Virgin_ of the Bible, in addressing the Almighty_. Sub tuum præsidium confugimus. Dominus, firmamentum meum et refugium meum. Ad te confugi.--Ps. xvii. 1; cxlii. 11. Nostras deprecationes ne despicias Ne despexeris deprecationem in necessitatibus. meam.--Ps. liv. 1. Sed a periculis cunctis libera nos. Libera, Domine, animam servi tui ab omnibus periculis inferni. Hiem. ccvi. Libera nos a malo. Orat. Dom. A periculo mortis libera nos, Domine.--Hiem. cciv. Tu nos ab hoste protege. Eripe me de inimicis meis, Domine.--Ps. cxlii. 11. Et hora mortis SUSPICE. _Suscipe_, Domine, servum tuum.--Hiem. ccvi. {342} ] But another hymn in the office of the Virgin, addressed in part to the blessed Saviour himself, and partly to the Virgin Mary, is still more revolting to all my feelings with regard to religious worship. The Redeemer is only asked to remember his mortal birth; no blessing is here supplicated for at his hands; his protection is not sought; no deliverance of our souls at the hour of death is implored from Him; these blessings, and these heavenly benefits, and these divine mercies, are sought for exclusively at the hands of the Virgin alone. Can such a mingled prayer, can such a contrast in prayer, be the genuine fruit of that Gospel which bids us ask for all we need in prayer to God in the name and for the sake of his blessed Son? "Author of our salvation, remember that once, by {343} being born of a spotless virgin, thou didst take the form of our body! Mary, mother of grace, mother of mercy, do thou protect us from the enemy, and receive us at the hour of death. Glory to thee, O Lord, who wast born of a Virgin, with the Father and the Holy Spirit, through eternal ages. Amen[129]." [Footnote 129: Memento, Salutis Auctor, Tu nos ab hoste protege, Quod nostri quondam corporis, Et hora mortis suscipe. Ex illibata Virgine, Gloria tibi, Domine, Nascendo formam sumpseris. Qui natus es de Virgine, Maria mater gratiæ, Cum Patre et Sancto Spiritu, Mater misericordiæ, In sempiterna sæcula. Amen. In the new version, (referred to in page 260 of the present work,) this hymn stands thus:-- Memento, rerum Conctitor, Maria mater gratiæ, Nostri quod olim corporis, Dulcis parens clementiæ, Sacrata ab alvo Virginis, Tu nos ab hoste protege, Nascendo forrnam sumpseris. In mortis hora suscipe, &c. Æst. clv.] Could the beloved John, to whose kind and tender care our blessed Lord gave his mother of especial trust, have offered to her such a prayer as this? To God alone surely would he have prayed for deliverance from all evil and mischief. To God alone would he have prayed:--"In the hour of death, good Lord, deliver us, and all for Jesus Christ's sake, our only Saviour and Mediator." To one other example of the practice of the Church of Rome I must refer. The rubric in our Book of Common Prayer directs that "at the end of every Psalm throughout the year, shall be repeated, Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost: As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen." In the Roman Breviary also we find this rubric: "This verse, _Gloria_, is always said in the end of all psalms, EXCEPT IT BE OTHERWISE {344} NOTED." [Æst. 3.] Such notifications occur at the end of various psalms. On the Feast of the Assumption [Æst. 595.], fourteen psalms are appointed to be used. At the close of every one of these psalms, without however any note that the Gloria is not to be said, there is appended an anthem to the Virgin. In some cases, so intimately is the anthem interwoven with the closing words of the psalm, as that under other circumstances it would induce us to infer that the Gloria was intended to be left out, especially as in the Parvum Officium of the Virgin [Æst. clv.], though to the various psalms anthems in the same manner have been annexed, yet the words "Gloria Patri et Filio" are inserted in each case between the psalm and the anthem. Be this as it may, the annexation of the anthem has a lamentable tendency to withdraw the thoughts of the worshippers from the truths contained in the inspired psalm, and to fix them upon Mary and her Assumption; changing the Church's address from the Eternal Being, alone invoked by the Psalmist, to one, who though a virgin blessed among women, is a creature of God's hand. Thus, at the conclusion of the 8th psalm; "O Lord, our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the world," we find immediately annexed these two anthems, "The holy mother of God is exalted above the choirs of angels to the heavenly realms. The gates of paradise are opened to us by thee, [by thee, O Virgin [Quæ gloriosa]] who glorious triumphest with the angels." Thus again, an anthem is attached to the last verse of the 95th (in the Hebrew and English versions the 96th). "He shall judge the earth in equity, and the people with his truth. Rejoice, {345} O Virgin Mary; thou alone hast destroyed all heresies in the whole world. Deem me worthy to praise thee, hallowed Virgin: Give me strength against thy enemies." To the 96th (97th), the latter clause of that address is repeated, with the addition of the following: "After the birth thou didst remain a virgin inviolate. Mother of God, intercede for us." An instance of the anthem being so intimately interwoven with the psalm, as to render the insertion of the "Gloria," between the two, to say the least, forced and unnatural, occurs at the close of the 86th (87th) psalm. The vulgate translation of the last verse, differing entirely from the English, is this: "As the habitation of all who rejoice is in thee." This sentence of the Psalmist is thus taken up in the Roman Ritual: "As the habitation of all us who rejoice is in THEE, Holy Mother of God." The object proposed by the Church from of old in concluding each psalm by an ascription of glory to the eternal Trinity, was to lead the worshipper to apply the sentiments of the psalm to the work of our salvation accomplished by the three Persons of the Godhead. The analogous end of these anthems in the present service of the Church of Rome is to fix the thoughts of the worshipper upon Mary. This practice unhappily sanctions the excesses into which Bonaventura and others have run in their departures from the purity and integrity of primitive worship. Cardinal du Perron informs us, that at the altar in the office of the mass, prayer is not made directly to any saint, but only obliquely, the address being always made to God. But if prayers are offered in other parts of the service directly to them, it is difficult to see what is gained by that announcement. Surely it is trifling {346} to make such immaterial distinctions. If as a priest I could address the following prayer to the Virgin in preparing for offering mass, why should I not offer a prayer to the same being during its celebration? "O mother of pity and mercy, blessed Virgin Mary, I a miserable and unworthy sinner, flee to thee with my whole heart and affection, and I pray thy most sweet pity, that as thou didst stand by thy most sweet Son hanging upon the cross, so thou wouldest vouchsafe mercifully to stand by me a miserable priest, and by all priests who here and in all the holy Church offer Him this day, that, aided by thy grace, we may be enabled to offer a worthy and acceptable victim in the sight of the most high and undivided Trinity. Amen." [O Mater pietatis et misericordiæ, beatissima Virgo Maria, ego miser et indignus peccator ad te confugio toto corde et affectu. Et precor dulcissimam pietatem tuam, ut sicut dulcissimo Filio tuo in cruce pendenti astitisti, ita et mihi misero sacerdoti et sacerdotibus omnibus hic et in tota sancta ecclesia ipsum hodie offerentibus, clementer assistere digneris, ut tua gratia adjuti dignam et acceptabilem hostiam in conspectu summæ et individuæ Trinitatis offerre valeamus. Amen.--Rom. Brev. Hus. Hiem. p. ccxxxiii.] This is called, in the Roman Breviary, "A PRAYER to the blessed Virgin before the celebration of the mass," and is immediately followed by another prayer directed to be offered to any saint, male or female, whose feast is on that day celebrated. "O Holy N. behold I, a miserable sinner, DERIVING CONFIDENCE FROM THY MERITS, now offer the most holy sacrament of the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, FOR THY HONOUR AND GLORY. I humbly and devotedly pray thee that thou wouldest deign to intercede for me to-day, that I may be enabled to offer so great a sacrifice {347} worthily and acceptably, and to praise Him eternally with thee and with all his elect, and that I may live with Him for ever." [O sancte N. ecce ego miser peccator de tuis mentis confisus, offero nunc sacratissimura sacramentum corporis et sanguinis Domini nostri Jesu Christ! PRO TUO HONORE ET GLORIA; precor te humiliter et devote ut pro me hodie intercedere digneris, ut tantum sacrificium digne et acceptabiliter offerre valeam, ut Eum tecum et cum omnibus electis ejus æternaliter laudare et cum eo semper regnare valeam.--Hiem. ccxxxiii.] * * * * * Such, Christian brethren, is the result of our inquiries into the real practice of the Church of Rome with regard to the worship of the Virgin Mary at the present day, in every part of the world where allegiance to that Church is acknowledged. Can we wonder that individuals, high in honour with that Church, have carried out the same worship to far greater lengths? I have ever present to my mind the principle of fixing upon the Church of Rome herself that only which is to be found in her canons, acknowledged decrees, and formularies. And unhappily of that which directly contravenes the Gospel-rule and primitive practice, far more than enough is found in her authorized rituals to compel all who hold to the Gospel and the integrity of primitive times, to withdraw their assent and consent from her worship. But with this principle before us, surely common justice and common prudence require that we should see for ourselves the practical workings of the system. "By their fruits ye shall know them," is a principle no less sanctioned by the Gospel than suggested by common sense and experience And, indeed, the shocking lengths to which priests, bishops, cardinals, and canonized persons have gone in this particular of the worship of the Virgin, might well {348} cause every upright and enlightened Roman Catholic to look anxiously to the foundation; to determine honestly, though with tender caution and pious care, for himself, whether the corruption be not in the well-head, whether the stream do not flow impregnated with the poison from the very fountain itself; whether the prayers authorized and directed by the Church of Rome to be offered to the Virgin be not in themselves at variance with the first principles of the Gospel--Faith in one God, the giver of every good, and in one Mediator and Intercessor between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, whose blood cleanseth from all sin: in a word, to see whether all the aberrations of her children in this department of religious duty have not their prototype in the laws and ordinances, the rules and injunctions, the example and practice of their mother herself. Indeed I am compelled here to say, that, however revolting to us as believers in Jesus, and as worshippers of the one true God, are those extravagant excesses into which the votaries of the Virgin Mary have run, I have found few of their most unequivocal ascriptions of divine worship to her, for a justification of which they cannot with reason appeal to the authorized ritual of the Church of Rome. In leaving this point of our inquiry, I would suggest two considerations: 1st, If it was intended that the invocation of the Virgin should be exclusively confined to requests, praying her to pray and intercede by prayer for the petitioners, why should language be addressed to her which in its plain, obvious, grammatical, and common sense interpretation conveys the form of direct prayers to her for benefits believed to be at her disposal? And, 2ndly, If the Church had {349} intended that her members, when they suppliantly invoked the Virgin Mary, and had recourse to her aid, should have offered to her direct and immediate prayers that she would grant temporal and spiritual benefits, to be dispensed at her own will, and by her own authority and power, in that case, what words could the Church have put into the mouth of the petitioners which would more explicitly and unequivocally have conveyed that idea? * * * * * SECTION II.--WORSHIP OF THE VIRGIN, CONTINUED. I have no intention of dwelling at any length on the extraordinary excesses to which the adoration of the Virgin Mary has been carried in the Church of Rome, I do not mean by obscure and illiterate or fanatical individuals, but by her celebrated prelates, doctors, and saints. My researches have brought to my knowledge such a mass of error and corruption in the worship of Christians as I never before had any conception of; and rather than bring it all forward, and exhibit it to others, I would turn my own eyes from it altogether. Still many reasons render it absolutely necessary that we should not pass over the subject entirely in silence. Few in England, I believe, are aware of the real facts of the case; and it well becomes us to guard ourselves and others against such melancholy results as would appear to be inseparable from the invocation and worship of the Virgin. If indeed we could be justified in regarding such palpable instances of her worship in its most objectionable form as the {350} marks of former and less enlightened times, most gladly would I draw a veil over them, and hide them from our sight for ever. But when I find the solemn addresses of the present chief authorities in the Church, nay, the epistles of the present sovereign Pontiff himself, cherishing, countenancing, and encouraging the selfsame evil departures from primitive truth and worship, it becomes a matter not of choice, but of necessity, to give examples at least of the deplorable excesses into which the highest and most honoured in that communion have been betrayed. On the present Pope's encyclical letter [A.D. 1840] we have already observed; and in this place I propose to examine only one more of those many excesses meeting us on every side, which characterize the public worship of the Virgin. The instance to which I refer seems to take a sort of middle station between the authorized enjoined services of the Church of Rome, and the devotions of individuals and family worship. It partakes on the one hand far too much of a public character to be considered in the light of private religious exercises; and on the other it wants that authority which would rank it among the appointed services of the Church. The devotional parts of the services are found neither in the Missals nor the Breviaries, and the adoption and celebration of the service seems to be left to the option and care of individuals. But the service is performed in the Churches,--a Priest presides,--the Host is presented to the adorations of the people,--and a sermon is preached by an appointed minister. The service to which I am referring is performed every evening through the entire month of May, and is celebrated expressly in honour of the Virgin Mary. {351} The month of May is dedicated to her, and is called Mary's month. Temporary altars are raised to her honour, surrounded by flowers and adorned with garlands and drapery; her image usually standing before the altar. Societies are formed chiefly for the celebration of the Virgin's praises, and in some Churches the effect, both to the eye and to the ear, corresponds with the preparation. One thing only is wanting--the proper object of worship. I have now before me a book of hymns published professedly for the religious fraternities in Paris, and used in the Churches there. [Nouveau Recueil de Cantiques à l'usage des confréries des Paroisses de Paris. Paris, 1839.] Many of these hymns are addressed to the Virgin alone; some without any reference to the Son of God and Man, the only Saviour, and without any allusion to the God of Christians; indeed, an address to a heathen Goddess more entirely destitute of Christianity can scarcely be conceived. I copy one hymn entire. "Around the altars of Mary Let us, her children, press; To that mother so endeared Let us address the sweetest prayers. Let a lively and holy mirth Animate us in this holy day: There exists no sadness For a heart full of her love. Let us adorn this sanctuary with flowers; Let us deck her revered altar; Let us redouble our efforts to please her. Be this month consecrated to her; Let the perfume of these crowns Form a delicious incense, {352} Which ascending even to her throne May carry to her both our hearts and our prayers. Let the holy name of Mary Be for us a name of salvation! Let our softened soul Ever pay to her a sweet tribute of love. Let us join the choirs of angels The more to celebrate her beauty; And may our songs of praise Resound in eternity. O holy Virgin! O our mother! Watch over us from fhe height of heaven; And when from this sojourning of misery, We present our prayers to you; O sweet, O divine Mary! Lend an ear to our sighs, And after this life Make us to taste of immortal pleasures." [Autour des autels de Marie Nous ses enfants, empressons-nous; A cette Mère si chérie, Adressons les voeux les plus doux. Qu'une vive et sainte allégresse Nous anime dans ce saint jour; Il n'existe point de tristesse Pour un coeur plein de son amour. Ornons des fleurs ce sanctuaire, Parons son autel révéré, Redoublons d'efforts pour lui plaire. Que ce mois lui soi, consacré; Que le parfume de ces couronnes Forme un encens délicieux, Qui s'élevant jusqu'à son trône, Lui porte et nos coeurs et nos voeux. Que le nom sacré de Marie Soit pour nous un nom de salut; Que toujours notre âme attendrie, D'amour lui paie un doux tribut. Unissons-nous aux choeurs des anges, Pour mieux célébrer sa beauté. Et puissent nos chants de louanges Retentir dans l'éternité. O Vierge sainte! ô notre Mère! Veillez sur nous du haut des cieux; Et de ce séjour de misère, Quand nous vous présentons nos voeux, O douce, ô divine Marie! Prêtez l'oreille à nos soupirs;-- Et faites qu'après cette vie, Nous goûtions d'immortels plaisirs. --"Cantiques à l'usage des Confréries." Paris, 1839, p. 175.] In the course of the present work I have already suggested the propriety of trying the real import, {353} the true intent, and meaning and force of an address to a Saint, by substituting the holiest name ever uttered on earth, for the name of the Saint to whom such address is offered; and if the same words, without any change, form a prayer fit to be offered by us sinners to the Saviour of the world, then to ask ourselves, Can this be right? I would earnestly recommend the application of the same test here; and in many other of the prayers now offered (for many such there are now offered) by Roman Catholics to the Virgin. Suppose, instead of offering these songs of praise and prayer, and self-devotion to Mary in the month of May, we were to offer them, on the day of his nativity, to our blessed Lord, would they not form an act of faith in Him as our Saviour and our God? "Around the altar of Jesus, Let us, his children, press; To that Saviour so endeared Let us address the sweetest prayers. {354} Let a lively and holy mirth Animate us in this holy day: There exists no sadness For a heart full of his love. Let the holy name of Jesus Be for us a name of salvation! Let our softened soul Ever pay to HIM a sweet tribute of love. O holy Jesus! O our Saviour! Watch over us from the height of heaven; And when from this sojourning of misery, We present our prayers to Thee; O sweet, O divine Redeemer, Lend an ear to our sighs; and after this life, Make Thou us to taste of immortal pleasures." * * * * * SECTION III.--BONAVENTURA. I will now briefly call your attention to the devotional works of the celebrated Bonaventura. He is no ordinary man; and the circumstances under which his works were commended to the world are indeed remarkable. I know not how a Church can give the impress of its own name and approval in a more full or unequivocal manner to the works of any human being, than the Church of Rome has stamped her authority on the works of this her saint. In the "Acta Sanctorum", [Antwerp, 1723, July 14, p. 811-823.] it is stated, that this celebrated man was born in 1221, and died in 1274. He passed through all degrees of ecclesiastical dignities, {355} short only of the pontifical throne itself. He was of the order of St. Francis, and refused the archbishopric of York, when it was offered to him by Pope Clement the Fourth, in 1265; whose successor, Gregory the Tenth, elevated him to the dignity of cardinal bishop. His biographer expresses his astonishment, that such a man's memory should have been so long buried with his body; but adds, that the tardiness of his honours was compensated by their splendour. More than two centuries after his death, his claims to canonization were urged upon Sixtus the Fourth; and that Pope raised him to the dignity of saint; the diploma of his canonization bearing date 18 kalends of May, 1482, the eleventh year of that pope's reign. Before a saint is canonized by the Pope, it is usually required, that miracles wrought by him, or upon him, or at his tomb, be proved to the satisfaction of the Roman court[130]. We need not dwell on the nature of an inquiry into a matter-of-fact, alleged to have been done by an individual two hundred years before; and whose memory is said to have lain buried with his corpse. Among the miracles specified, it is recorded, that on one occasion, when he was filled with solemn awe and fear at the celebration of the Lord's Supper, God, by an angel, took a particle of the consecrated host from the hands of the priest, and gently placed it in the holy man's mouth. But, with these transactions, I am not anxious to interfere, except so far as to ascertain the degree of authority with which any pious Roman Catholic must be induced to invest Bonaventura as a teacher and instructor in the doctrines of Christianity, authorized and appointed by his Church. The case stands thus:--Pope Sixtus IV. states in his {356} diploma, that the proctor of the order of Minors, proved by a dissertation on the passage of St. John, "There are three that bear record in heaven," that the blessed Trinity had borne testimony to the fact of Bonaventura being a saint in heaven: the Father proving it by the attested miracles; the Son, in the WISDOM OF HIS DOCTRINE; the Holy Spirit, by the goodness of his life. The pontiff then adds, in his own words, "He so wrote on divine subjects, THAT THE HOLY SPIRIT SEEMS TO HAVE SPOKEN IN HIM." [Page 831. "Ea de divinis rebus scripsit, ut in eo Spiritus Sanctus locutus videatur."] A testimony referred to by Pope Sixtus the Fifth. [Footnote 130: See the canonization of St. Bonaventura in the Acta Sanctorum.] This latter pontiff was crowned May 1, 1585, more than a century after the canonization of Bonaventura, and more than three centuries after his death. By his order, the works of Bonaventura were "most carefully emendated." The decretal letters, A.D. 1588, pronounced him to be an acknowledged doctor of Holy Church, directing his authority to be cited and employed in all places of education, and in all ecclesiastical discussions and studies. The same act offers plenary indulgence to all who assist at the mass on his feast, in certain specified places, with other minor immunities on the conditions annexed. [Page 837.] In these documents Bonaventura[131] is called the Seraphic Doctor; and I repeat my doubt, whether it is possible for any human authority to give a more full, entire, and unreserved sanction to the works of any human being than the Church of Rome has given to {357} the writings of Bonaventura. And what do those works present to us, on the subject of the Invocation and worship of the Virgin Mary? [Footnote 131: The edition of his works which I have used was published at Mentz in 1609; and the passages referred to are in vol. vi. between pp. 400 and 500.] Taking every one of the one hundred and fifty psalms[132], Bonaventura so changes the commencement of each, as to address them not as the inspired Psalmist did, to the Lord Jehovah, the One only Lord God Almighty, but to the Virgin Mary; inserting much of his own composition, and then adding the Gloria Patri to each. It is very painful to refer to these prostitutions of any part of the Holy Book of revealed truth; but we must not be deterred from looking this evil in the face. A few examples, however, will suffice. [Footnote 132: It is curious to find the Cardinal Du Perron, in his answer to our King James, declaring that he had never seen nor met with this Psalter in his life, and he was sure it was never written by Bonaventura; alleging that it was not mentioned by Trithemius or Gesner. The Vatican editors, however, have set that question at rest. They assure us that they have thrown into the appendix all the works about the genuineness of which there was any doubt, and that Bonaventura wrote many works not mentioned by Trithemius, which they have published from the Vatican press. Of this Psalter there is no doubt. See Cardinal Du Perron, Replique à la Rep. du Roi de Grand Bretagne. Paris, 1620, p. 974.] In the 30th psalm. "In thee, O Lord, have I trusted; let me not be confounded for ever," &c., the Psalter of the Virgin substitutes these words: [In te, Domina, speravi; non confundar in æternum, &c. &c. In manus tuas, Domina, commendo spiritum meum, totam vitam meam, et diem ultimum meum.--P. 480.] "In thee, O Lady, have I trusted; let me not be confounded for ever: in thy grace take me. "Thou art my fortitude and my refuge; my consolation and my protection. {358} "To thee, O Lady, have I cried, while my heart was in heaviness; and thou didst hear me from the top of the eternal hills. "Bring thou me out of the snare which they have hid for me; for thou art my succour. "Into thy hands, O Lady, I commend my spirit, my whole life, and my last day.--Gloria Patri," &c. In the 31st psalm we read, "Blessed are they whose hearts love thee, O Virgin Mary; their sins shall be mercifully blotted out BY THEE...." [Beati quorum corda te diligunt, Virgo Maria; peccata ipsorum A TE misericorditer diluentur.--P. 481.] In the 35th, v. 2. "Incline thou the countenance of God upon us; COMPEL HIM to have mercy upon sinners. O Lady, thy mercy is in the heaven, and thy grace is spread over the whole earth." [Inclina vultum Dei super nos. COGE illum peccatoribus misereri; Domina, in coelo misericordia tua, et gratia diffusa est super terram.] In the 67th, instead of, "Let God arise, and let his enemies be scattered," the Psalter of the Virgin has, "Let Mary arise, and let her enemies be scattered." [Exurgat Maria, et dissipentur inimici ejus.--P. 483.] In the opening of the 93rd psalm there is a most extraordinary, rather, as it sounds to me, a most impious and blasphemous comparison of the Supreme God with the Virgin Mary, in reference to the very Attribute, which shines first, last, and brightest in HIM,--His eternal mercy. Nay, it draws the contrast in favour of the Virgin, and against God. Most glad should I be, to find that I had misunderstood this passage; and that it admits of another acceptation[133]. But I fear its real meaning is beyond controversy. [Footnote 133: A similar idea indeed pervades some addresses to the Virgin of the present day, representing the great and only potentate as her heavenly husband, in himself full of rage, but softened into tenderness towards her votaries by her influence. See a hymn, in the Paris collection already referred to, p. 353, &c. of this work (Nouveau Recueil de Cantiques, p. 183). Daignez, Marie, en ce jour Vouchsafe, Mary, on this day Ecouter nos soupirs, To hear our sighs, Et seconder nos désirs. And to second our desires. Daignez, Marie, en ce jour Vouchsafe, Mary, on this day Recevoir notre encens, notre amour. To receive our incense, our love. Du céleste époux Calm the rage Calmez le courroux, Of thy heavenly husband, Qu'il se montre doux Let HIM show himself kind A tous qui sont à vous. To all those who are thine. Du céleste époux Of thy heavenly husband Calmez le courroux, Calm the rage, Que son coeur s'attendrisse sur nous. Let his heart be softened towards us. {359} ] "The Lord is a God of vengeance; but thou, O Mother of Mercy, bendest to be merciful." [Deus ultionum Dominus; sed tu, Mater Misericordiæ, ad miserandum inflectis.--P. 485.] The well known and dearly valued penitentiary psalm (129th) "De profundis," is thus addressed to Mary:-- "Out of the depths have I called to thee, O Lady: "O Lady, hear my voice. Let thine ears be attent to the voice of thy praise and glorifying: deliver me from the hand of my enemies: confound their imaginations and attempts against me. Rescue me in the evil day; and, in the day of death, forget not my soul. Carry me into the haven of safety: let my name be enrolled among the just." [De profundis clamavi ad te, Domina: Domina, exaudi vocem meam. Fiant aures tuæ intendentes in vocem laudis et glorificationis tuæ. Libera me de manu adversariorum meorum: confunde ingenia et conatus eorum contra me. Erue me in die mala: et in die mortis ne obliviscaris animæ meæ. Deduc me ad portum salutis: inter justos scribatur nomen meum.--P. 489.] {360} But, as the penitential psalms are thus turned, from Him to whom the Psalmist addressed them, so his hymns of praise to Jehovah, are made to flow through the same channel to the Virgin. And all nature in the sea, on the earth, in the heavens, and heaven of heavens, is called upon to praise and glorify Mary. Thus, in the 148th psalm, we read,-- "Praise our Lady of heaven, glorify her in the highest. Praise her, all ye men and cattle, ye birds of the heaven, and fishes of the sea. Praise her, sun and moon; ye stars and circles of the planets. Praise her, cherubim and seraphim, thrones and dominions, and powers. Praise her, all ye legions of angels. Praise her, all ye orders of spirits above." [Laudate Dominam nostram de coelis: glorificate eam in excelsis. Laudate eam omnes homines et jumenta: volucres coeli et pisces maris. Laudate eam sol et luna: stellæ, et circuli planetarum. Laudate eam cherubim et seraphim: throni et dominationes, et potestates. Laudate eam omnes legiones angelorum. Laudate eam omnes ordines spirituum supernorum.--P. 491.] The last sentence of the psalms is thus rendered,--"Let every spirit [_or_ every thing that hath breath] praise our Lady." To this Psalter are added many hymns changed in the same manner. One, entitled, "A Canticle, like that of Habakkuk iii." presents to us an address to the Virgin Mary, of the very words which our blessed Saviour most solemnly addressed to his heavenly Father. O Lord, I have heard thy O Lady, I have heard thy report, speech, and was afraid, &c. &c. and was astonished; I considered thy works, O Lady, and I was afraid at thy work. In the midst of the years thou hast revived it. {361} I will confess to thee, O Lady, because thou hast hid these things from the wise, and hast revealed them to babes. Thy glory hath covered the heavens, and the earth is full of thy mercy. Thou, O Virgin, wentest forth for the salvation of thy people, for salvation with thy Christ [thy anointed]. O thou Blessed, our salvation rests in thy hands. Remember our poverty, O thou pious One. WHOM THOU WILLEST, HE SHALL BE SAVED; AND HE FROM WHOM THOU TURNEST AWAY THY COUNTENANCE, GOETH INTO DESTRUCTION. [Domina, audivi auditionem tuam, et obstupui: consideravi opera tua, et expavi, Domina, opus tuum: circa medium annorum vivificasti illud. Confitebor tibi, Domina: quia abscondisti hæc a sapientibus: et revelasti ea parvulis. Operuit coelos gloria tua, et misericordia tua plena est terra. Egressa es, Virgo, in salutem populi tui: in salutem cum Christo tuo. O Benedicta, in manibus tuis est reposita nostra salus; recordare, pia, paupertatis nostræ. Quem vis, ipse salvus erit, et a quo avertis vultum tuum, vadit in interitum.--G.P., &c.] The song of the Three Children is altered in the same manner. In it as well as in the Canticle of Zacharias, these prayers are introduced; "O Mother of Mercy, have mercy upon us miserable sinners; who neglect to repent of our past sins, and commit every day many to be repented of." [Miserere, misericordiæ Mater, nobis miseris peccatoribus, qui retroacta peccata poenitere negligimus, ac multa quotidie poenitenda committimus.] {362} The Te Deum is thus lamentably perverted: "We praise thee, Mother of God; we acknowledge thee, Mary the Virgin. [Te Matrem Dei laudamus; Te Mariam Virginem profitemur.] "All the earth doth worship thee, spouse of the eternal Father. "To thee all Angels and Archangels, Thrones and Principalities, faithfully do service.... "To thee the whole angelic creation with incessant voice proclaim, "Holy! Holy! Holy! Mary, parent, mother of God, and virgin!... "... Thou with thy Son sittest at the right hand of the Father.... "O Lady, SAVE THY PEOPLE, that we may partake of the inheritance of thy Son. "And rule us and guard us for ever.... "Day by day we salute thee, O pious One; and we desire to praise thee in mind and voice even for ever. "Vouchsafe, O sweet Mary, now and for ever, to keep us without sin. "Have mercy upon us, O pious One; have mercy upon us. "Let thy great mercy be with us, because we put our trust in thee, O Virgin Mary. "In thee, sweet Mary, do we hope, defend thou us eternally. {363} "Praise becomes thee, empire becomes thee; to thee be virtue and glory for ever and ever. Amen." [SALVUM FAC POPULUM tuum, Domina, ut simus participes hæreditatis Filii tui, Et rege nos et custodi nos in æternum. Dignare, Dulcis Maria, mine et semper nos sine delicto conservare. Miserere, Pia, nobis! miserere nobis! Fiat misericordia tua magna nobiscum, quia in te, Virgo Maria, confidimus. In te, Dulcis Maria, speramus, nos defendas in æternum. Te decet laus, te decet imperium, tibi virtus et gloria in sæcula sæculorum, Amen.] Can this by any the most subtle refinement be understood to be a mere request to her to pray for us? The Athanasian Creed is employed in the same manner; and it is very remarkable that the Assumption itself of the Virgin into heaven is there specified as one of the points to be believed on pain of losing all hopes of salvation. "Whosoever will be saved, before all things it is necessary that he hold firm the faith concerning the Virgin Mary: which except a man keep whole and undefiled, without doubt he shall perish everlastingly.... [Quicunque vult salvus esse, ante omnia opus est ut teneat de Maria firmam fidem.] "Whom at length He took up (assumpsit) unto heaven, and she sitteth at the right hand of her Son, not ceasing to pray to her Son for us. [Quam demum ipse in coelum assumpsit, et sedit ad dexteram Filii, non cessans pro nobis Filium exorare.] "This is the faith concerning Mary the Virgin, which except every one believe faithfully and firmly he cannot be saved." [Hæc est fides de Maria Virgine: quam nisi quisque fideliter firmiterque crediderit, salvus esse non poterit.] In the Litany addressed to her, these sentences are found. "Holy Mary, whom all things praise and venerate, pray for us,--be propitious,--spare us, O Lady. "From all evil deliver us, O Lady. "In the devastating hour of death, deliver us, O Lady. "From the horrible torments of hell, deliver us, O Lady. "We sinners do beseech thee to hear us. "That thou wouldest vouchsafe to give eternal rest {364} to all the faithful departed, we beseech thee to hear us. &c. &c." [Sancta Maria, quam omnia laudant Et venerantur, ora pro nobis. Propitia esto. Parce nobis, Domina. Ab omni malo libera nos, Domina. In hora mortis devastante libera nos, Domina. Ab inferni horribili cruciamine libera nos, Domina. Peccatores te rogamus, audi nos. Ut cunctis fidelibus defunctis requiem Æternam donare digneris, te rogamus, audi nos.] I will add to this catalogue of prayers and praises to the Virgin, only the translation of one prayer more from the same canonized Saint; it contains a passage often referred to, but the existence of which has been denied. It stands, however, in his works, vol. vi. page 466. "Therefore, O Empress, and our most benign Lady, by THY RIGHT OF MOTHER COMMAND thy most beloved Son [JURE MATRIS IMPERA tuo dilectissimo Filio], our Lord, Jesus Christ, that He vouchsafe to raise our minds from the love of earthly things to heavenly desires, who liveth and reigneth." * * * * * Now let any man of common understanding and straightforward principles say, whether any, the most ingenious refinement can interpret all this to mean merely that Bonaventura invoked the Virgin Mary to pray for him, or for his fellow-creatures. It looks as though he were resolved on set purpose to exalt her to an equality with the Almighty, when we find him not once, not casually, not in the fervent rapture of momentary excitement, but deliberately, through one hundred and fifty Psalms, applying to Mary the very words dictated by the Holy Spirit to the Psalmist, and consecrated {365} to the worship of the one supreme God; and then selecting the most solemn expressions by which the Christian Church approaches the Lord of heaven and earth, our Father, our Saviour, our Sanctifier: employing too the very words of her most solemn form of belief in the ever-blessed Trinity, and substituting Mary's name for the God of Christians. On the words, "By thy right of mother command thy Son," beyond the assertion of the fact that there they are to this day, I wish to add nothing, because the very denial of their existence often repeated shows, that many Roman Catholics themselves regard them as objectionable. But, if such a man as Bonaventura, one of the most learned and celebrated men of his age, could be tempted by the views cherished by the Church of Rome, to indulge in such language, what can be fairly expected of the large mass of persons who find that language published to the world with the highest sanction which their religion can give, as the work of a man whom the Almighty declared when on earth, by miracles, to be a chosen vessel, and to be under the guidance of the Holy Spirit; and of whom they are taught by the infallible testimony[134] of his canonization, that he is now reigning with Christ in heaven, and is himself the lawful and appointed object of religious invocation. I profess to you that I see no way by which Christians can hold and encourage this doctrine of the Invocation of Saints, without at the same time countenancing and cherishing what, were I to join in such invocation, would stain my soul with the guilt of idolatry. If the doctrine were confessedly Scriptural, come what would come, our duty would be to maintain it at all hazards, {366} and to brave every danger rather than from fear of consequences to renounce what we believe to have come from God; securing the doctrine at all events, and then putting forth our very best to guard against its perversion and abuse. But surely, it well becomes our brethren of the Church of Rome, to examine with most rigid and unsparing scrutiny into the very foundation of such a doctrine as this; a doctrine which in its mildest and most guarded form is considered by a very large number of their fellow Christians, as a dishonouring of God and of his Son, our Saviour; and which in its excess, an excess witnessed in the books of learned and sainted authors, and in the every day practice of worshippers, seems to be in no wise distinguishable from the practices of acknowledged polytheism, and pagan worship. If that foundation, after honest and persevering examination, approves itself as based sure and deep on the word of God, and the faith and practice of the apostles and the Church founded by them from the first, I have not another word to say, beyond a fervent prayer that the God in whom we trust would pour the bright beams of his Gospel abundantly into the hearts of all who receive that Gospel as the word of life. But were they my dying words to my dearest friend who had espoused that doctrine, I would say to him, Look well yourself to the foundation, because I am, after long examination, convinced, beyond a shadow of doubt that the doctrine and practice of the Invocation of Saints and Angels is as contrary to the doctrine and practice of the primitive Church, as it is in direct opposition to the express words of Scripture, and totally abhorrent from the spirit which pervades the whole of the Old, and the whole of the New Testament of God's eternal truth. [Footnote 134: Bellarmin, in his Church Triumphant, maintains that in the act of Canonization, the Church is infallible. Vol. ii. p. 871.] {367} * * * * * SECTION IV.--BIEL, DAMIANUS, BERNARDINUS DE BUSTIS, BERNARDINUS SENENSIS, &c. Unhappily these excesses in the worship of the Virgin Mary are not confined to Bonaventura, or to his age. We have too many examples of the same extravagant exaltation of her as an object of adoration and praise in men, whose station and abilities seemed to hold them forth to the world as burning and shining lights. Again, let me repeat, that in thus soliciting your attention to the doctrines and expressed feelings of a few from among the host of the Virgin's worshippers, I am far from believing that the enlightened Roman Catholics in England now are ready to respond to such sentiments. My desire is that all persons should be made aware of the excesses into which even celebrated teachers have been tempted to run, when they once admitted the least inroad to be made upon the integrity of God's worship; and I am anxious also, without offence, but with all openness, to caution my countrymen against encouraging that revival of the worship of the Virgin in England, to promote which the highest authorities in the Church of Rome have lately expressed their solicitude, intimating, at the same time, their regret that the worship of the Virgin at the present time has, in England, degenerated from its exaltation in former ages, and that England is now far behind her continental neighbours in her worship. Though these excessive departures from Gospel truth and the primitive worship of one God by one Mediator may not be the doctrines of all who belong to the Church of Rome, yet they are the tenets of some of her most {368} celebrated doctors, of men who were raised to her highest dignities in their lifetime, and solemnly enrolled by her among the saints of glory after their death. Their words and their actions are appealed to now in support of similar tenets and doctrines, though few, in this country at least, are found to put them forth in all their magnitude and fulness. But even in their mildest and least startling form these doctrines are awfully dangerous. The fact is, that the direct tendency of the worship of the Virgin, as practically illustrated in the Church of Rome, is to make GOD himself an object of FEAR, and the VIRGIN an object of LOVE; to invest Him, who is the Father of mercy and God of all comfort, with awfulness, and majesty, and with the terrors of eternal justice, and in direct and striking contrast to array the Virgin mother with mercy and benignity, and compassionate tenderness. Christians cannot be too constantly and too carefully on their guard against doing this wrong to our heavenly Father. His own inspired word invites us to regard Him not only as the God of love, but as Love itself. "God is love;" [1 John iv. 8.] and so far from terrifying us by representations of his tremendous majesty, and by declarations that we cannot ourselves draw nigh to God; so far from bidding us to approach Him with our suits and supplications through mediators whom we should regard as having, more than our blessed Redeemer, a fellow-feeling with us, and at the same time resistless influence with Him; his own invitation and assurance is, "Come unto me, and I will give you rest:" [Matt. xi. 28.] "No one cometh unto the Father but by me:" [John xiv. 6.] "Him that cometh to me I will {369} in no wise cast out:" [John vi. 37.] "Let us come boldly unto the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need." [Heb. iv. 16.] How entirely opposed to such passages as these, breathing the spirit that pervades the whole Bible, are those doctrines which represent the Virgin Mary as the Mediatrix by whom we must sue for the divine clemency; as the dispenser of all God's mercies and graces; as the sharer of God's kingdom, as the fountain of pity, as the moderator of God's justice, and the appeaser of his wrath. "Show thyself a mother." "Compel thy Son to have pity." "By thy right of mother command thy Son." "God is a God of vengeance; but thou, Mary, dost incline to mercy;" such expressions convey sentiments and associations shocking to our feelings, and from which our reason turns away, when we think of God's perfections, and the full atonement and omnipotent intercession of his Son Christ our Redeemer. But it must not be disguised, that these are the very sentiments in which the most celebrated defenders of the worship of the Virgin, in the Church of Rome, teach their disciples to acquiesce, and in which they must have themselves fully acquiesced, if they practised what they taught. It is very painful to make such extracts as leave us no alternative in forming our opinions on this point; but it is necessary to do so, otherwise we may injure the cause of truth by suppressing the reality; a reality over which there seems to be a strong disposition, in the present day, in part at least, to draw a veil; an expedient which can only increase the danger. The first author, whose sentiments I would request you to weigh, is Gabriel Biel, a schoolman of great celebrity[135]. {370} In his thirty-second lecture, on the Canon of the Mass, he thus expresses himself, referring to a sermon of St. Bernard, "The will of God was, that we should have all through Mary.... You were afraid to approach the Father, frightened by only hearing of Him.... He gave you Jesus for a Mediator. What could not such a Son obtain with such a Father? He will surely be heard for his own reverence-sake; for the Father loveth the Son. But, are you afraid to approach even Him? He is your brother and your flesh; tempted through all, that He might become merciful. THIS BROTHER MARY GAVE TO YOU. But, perhaps, even in Him you fear the divine Majesty, because, although He was made man, yet He remained God. You wish to have an advocate even to Him. Betake yourself to Mary. For, in Mary is pure humanity, not only pure from all contamination, but pure also by the singleness of her nature[136]. Nor should I, with any doubt say, she too will be heard for her own reverence-sake. The Son, surely, will hear the Mother, and the Father will hear the Son." [Footnote 135: Tubingen, 1499. Gabriel Biel, born at Spires about A.D. 1425, was in A.D. 1484 appointed the first Professor of Theology in the then newly founded University of Tubingen. He afterwards retired to a monastery, and died A.D. 1495.] [Footnote 136: This is a very favourite argument in the present day, often heard in the pulpits on the Continent.] In his 80th lecture, the same author comments on this prayer, which is still offered in the service of the Mass: "Deliver us, we beseech thee, O Lord, from all evils past, present, and future; and by the intercession of the blessed and glorious ever-virgin mother of God, Mary, with thy blessed apostles, Peter and Paul, and Andrew, and all saints, mercifully grant peace in our days, that, aided by the help of thy mercy, we may be both ever {371} free from sin, and free from all disquietude. Through the same our Lord, &c." On this prayer Biel observes, "Again we ask, in this prayer, the defence of peace; and since we cannot, nor do we presume to obtain this by our own merit, ... therefore, in order to obtain this, we have recourse, in the second part of this prayer, to the suffrages of all his saints, whom He hath constituted, in the court of his kingdom, as our mediators, most acceptable to himself, whose prayers his love does not reject. But, of them, we fly, in the first place, to the most blessed Virgin, the Queen of Heaven, to whom the King of kings, the heavenly Father, has given the half of his kingdom; which was signified in Hester, the queen, to whom, when she approached to appease king Asuerus, the king said to her, Even if thou shalt ask the half of my kingdom, it shall be given thee. So the heavenly Father, inasmuch as He has justice and mercy as the more valued possessions of his kingdom, RETAINING JUSTICE TO HIMSELF, GRANTED MERCY to the Virgin Mother. We, therefore, ask for peace, by the intercession of the blessed and glorious Virgin." [Cum habeat justitiam et misericordiam tanquam potiora regni sui bona, justitia sibi retenta, misericordiam Matri Virgini concessit.] The very same partition of the kingdom of heaven, is declared to have been made between God himself and the Virgin by one who was dignified by the name of the "venerable and most Christian Doctor," John Gerson[137], who died in 1429; excepting that, instead of justice and mercy, Gerson mentions power and mercy as the two parts of which God's kingdom consists, and that, whilst power remained with the Lord, the part of mercy ceded "to the mother of Christ, and the reigning {372} spouse; hence, by the whole Church, she is saluted as Queen of Mercy." [Footnote 137: Paris, 1606. Tract iv. Super "Magnificat," part iii. p. 754. See Fabricius, vol. iii. p. 49. Patav. 1754.] I would next refer to a writer who lived four centuries before Biel, but whose works received the papal sanction so late as the commencement of the seventeenth century, Petrus Damianus, Cardinal and Bishop. His works were published at the command of Pope Clement VIII., who died A.D. 1604, and were dedicated to his successor, Paul V., who gave the copyright for fifteen years to the Editor, Constantine Cajetan, A.D. 1606. I will quote only one passage from this author. It is found in his sermon on the nativity of the Virgin, whom he thus addresses: "Nothing is impossible with thee, with whom it is possible to restore those in despair to the hope of blessedness. For how could that authority, which derived its flesh from thy flesh, oppose thy power? For thou approachest before that golden altar of human reconciliation not only asking, but commanding; a mistress, not a handmaid." [Accedis enim ante illud aureum humanæ reconciliationis altare, non solum rogans, sed imperans; Domina, non ancilla. Paris, 1743. vol. ii. p. 107. Serm. 44.] I must now solicit your attention to the sentiments of two writers, whose partial identity of name has naturally led, in some instances, to the one being mistaken for the other, Bernardinus de Bustis, and Bernardinus Senensis. Bernardinus de Bustis, [Fabricius, vol. i. 215.] in the country of Milan, was the celebrated author of the "Office of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin," which was confirmed by the bull of Sixtus the Fourth, and has since been celebrated on the 8th of December. He composed different works in honour of the Virgin, {373} to one of which he gave the title "Mariale." In this work, with a great variety of sentiments of a similar tendency, he thus expresses himself:-- "Of so great authority in the heavenly palace is that empress, that, omitting all other intermediate saints, we may appeal to her from every grievance.... With confidence, then, let every one appeal to her, whether he be aggrieved by the devil, or by any tyrant, or by his own body, or by divine justice;" [Cologne, 1607. Part iii. Serm. ii. p. 176.] and then, having specified and illustrated the three other sources of grievance, he thus proceeds: "In the fourth place, he may APPEAL TO HER, if any one feels himself AGGRIEVED BY THE JUSTICE OF GOD [Licet ad ipsam appellare, si quis a Dei justitia se gravari sentit.] ... That empress, therefore, Hester, was a figure of this empress of the heavens, with whom God divided his kingdom. For, whereas God has justice and mercy, He retained justice to himself to be exercised in this world, and granted mercy to his mother; and thus, if any one feels himself to be aggrieved in the court of God's justice, let him appeal to the court of mercy of his mother." [Ideo si quis sentit se gravari in foro justitiæ Dei, appellet ad forum misericordiæ matris ejus.] For one moment, let us calmly weigh the import of these words:--Is it any thing short of robbing the Eternal Father of the brightest jewel in his crown, and sharing his glory with another? Is it not encouraging us to turn our eyes from the God of mercy as a stern and ruthless judge, and habitually to fix them upon Mary as the dispenser of all we want for the comfort and happiness of our souls? In another place, this same author thus exalts Mary: "Since the Virgin Mary is mother of God, and God is her Son; and every son is naturally inferior to his {374} mother, and subject to her; and the mother is preferred above, and is superior to her son, it follows that the blessed Virgin is herself superior to God, and God himself is her subject, by reason of the humanity derived from her;" [Part ix. Serm. ii. p. 605.] and again. "O the unspeakable dignity of Mary, who was worthy to command the Commander of all." [Part xii. Serm, ii. p. 816.] I will detain you by only one more quotation from this famed Doctor. It appears to rob God of his justice and power, as well as of his mercy; and to turn our eyes to Mary for the enjoyment of all we can desire, and for safety from all we can dread. Would that Bernardine stood alone in the propagation of such doctrines. "We may say, that the blessed Virgin is chancellor in the court of heaven. For we see, that in the chancery of our lord the pope, three kinds of letters are granted: some are of simple justice, others are of pure grace, and the third mixed, containing justice and grace.... The third chancellor is he to whom it appertains to give letters of pure grace and mercy. And this office hath the blessed Virgin; and therefore she is called the mother of grace and mercy: but those letters of mercy she gives only in the present life. For, to some souls, as they are departing, she gives letters of pure grace; to others, of simple justice; and to others, mixed, namely, of justice and grace. For some were very much devoted to her, and to them she gives letters of pure grace, by which she COMMANDS, that glory be given to them without any pain of purgatory: others were miserable sinners, and not devoted to her, and to them she gives letters of simple justice, by which she COMMANDS that condign vengeance be done upon them; others were lukewarm and remiss in devotion, and to them she gives letters of justice and grace, by which {375} she COMMANDS that grace be given to them, and yet, on account of their negligence and sloth, some pain of purgatory be also inflicted on them." [Part xii. Serm. ii. On the twenty-second excellence, p. 825.] The only remaining author, to whom I will at present refer you, is a canonized saint, Bernardinus Senensis. A full account of his life, his miracles, and his enrolment among the saints in heaven, is found in the Acta Sanctorum, vol. v. under the 20th of May, the day especially dedicated to his honour. Eugenius IV. died before the canonization of Bernardine could be completed: the next pope, Nicholas V. on Whitsunday 1450, in full conclave, enrolled him among the saints, to the joy, we are told, of all Italy. In 1461, Pius the Second said that Bernardine was taken for a saint even in his lifetime; and, in 1472, Sixtus IV. issued a bull, in which he extols the saint, and authorizes the translation of his body into a new church, dedicated, as others had been, to his honour. This Bernardine is equally explicit with others, in maintaining, that all the blessings which Christians can receive on earth are dispensed by Mary; that her princedom equals the princedom of the Eternal Father; that all are her servants and subjects, who are the subjects and servants of the Most High; that all who adore the Son of God should adore his virgin-mother, and that the Virgin has repaid the Almighty for all that He has done for the human race. Some of these doctrines were to me quite startling; I was not prepared for them; but I have been assured they find an echo in the pulpits in many parts of the continent. Very few quotations will suffice. [Opera, per John de la Haye. Paris, 1636. Five volumes bound in two.] {376} "As many creatures do service to the glorious Mary, as do service to the Trinity.... For he who is the Son of God, and of the blessed Virgin, wishing (so to speak) to make, in a manner, the princedom of his mother equal to the princedom of his father, he who was God, served his mother on earth. Moreover, this is true, all things, even the Virgin, are servants of the divine empire; and again, this is true, all things, even God, are servants of the empire of the Virgin." [Vol. iv. Serm. v. c. vi. p. 118.] "Therefore, all the angelic spirits are the ministers and servants of this glorious Virgin." [Serm. iii. c. iii. p. 104.] "To comprise all in a brief sentence, I do not doubt that God made all the liberations and pardons in the Old Testament on account of the reverence and love of this blessed maid, by which God preordained from eternity, that she should be, by predestination, honoured above all his works. On account of the immense love of the Virgin, as well Christ himself, as the whole most blessed Trinity, frequently grants pardon to the most wicked sinners." [Serm. v. c. ii. p. 116.] "By the law of succession, and the right of inheritance, the primacy and kingdom of the whole universe is due to the blessed Virgin. Nay, when her only Son died on the cross, since He had no one on earth to succeed Him of right, his mother, by the laws of all, succeeded, and by this acquired the principality of all. [Serm. v. c. vii. p. 118.] ... But, of the monarchy of the universe, Christ never made any testamentary bequest, because that could never be done without prejudice to his mother. Moreover, HE KNEW THAT A MOTHER CAN ANNUL THE {377} WILL OF HER SON, IF IT BE MADE TO THE PREJUDICE OF HERSELF." [Insuper noverat quod potest mater irritare Filii testamentum si in sui præjudicium sit confectum.--P. 118.] "The Virgin Mother[138], from the time she conceived God, obtained a certain jurisdiction and authority in every temporal procession of the Holy Spirit, so that no creature could obtain any grace of virtue from God except according to the dispensation of his Virgin mother[139]. As through the neck the vital breathings descend from the head into the body, so the vital graces are transfused from the head Christ into his mystical body, through the Virgin. I fear not to say, that this Virgin has a certain jurisdiction over the flowing of all graces. And, because she is the mother of such a Son of God, who produces the Holy Spirit; THEREFORE, ALL THE GIFTS, VIRTUES, AND GRACES OF THE HOLY SPIRIT ARE ADMINISTERED BY THE HANDS OF HERSELF, TO WHOM SHE WILL, WHEN SHE WILL, HOW SHE WILL, AND IN WHAT QUANTITY SHE WILL." [Serm. v. p. 119.] [Footnote 138: Serm. v. c. viii. and Serm. vi. c. ii. p. 120 and 122. There is an omission (probably by an error of the press) in the first passage, which the second enables us to supply.] [Footnote 139: This writer is constantly referring to St. Bernard's doctrine, "No grace comes from heaven upon the earth, but what passes through the hands of Mary."] "She is the queen of mercy, the temple of God, the habitation of the Holy Spirit, always sitting at the right hand of Christ in eternal glory. Therefore she is to be venerated, to be saluted, and to be adored with the adoration of hyperdulia. And therefore she sits at the right hand of the King, that as often as you adore Christ the king you may adore also the mother of Christ." [Serm. vi. p. 121.] "The blessed Virgin Mary alone has done more for {378} God; or as much (so to speak) as God hath done for the whole human race. For I verily believe that God will grant me indulgence if I now speak for the Virgin. Let us gather together into one what things God hath done for man, and let us consider what satisfaction the Virgin Mary hath rendered to the Lord." Bernardine here enumerates many particulars, placing one against the other, which for many reasons I cannot induce myself to transfer into these pages, and then he sums up the whole thus: "Therefore, setting each individual thing one against another, namely, what things God had done for man, and what things the blessed Virgin has done for God, you will see that Mary has done more for God, than God has for man; so that thus, on account of the blessed Virgin, (whom, nevertheless, He himself made,) God is in a certain manner under greater obligations to us than we are to Him." [Serm. vi. p. 120.] The whole treatise he finishes with this address to the Virgin:-- "Truly by mere babbling are we uttering these thy praises and excellences; but we suppliantly pray thy immense sweetness. Do thou, by thy benignity, supply our insufficiencies, that we may worthily praise thee through the endless ages of ages. Amen." In closing these brief extracts I would observe, that by almost every writer in support of the worship of the Virgin, an appeal is made to St. Bernard[140] as their chief authority. Especially is the following passage quoted by many, either whole or in part, at almost every turn of their argument:-- [Footnote 140: The present Pope, in the same manner, refers to him in his Encyclical Letter.--A.D. 1840.] "If thou art disturbed by the heinousness of thy crimes, and confounded by the foulness of thy conscience, {379} if terrified by the horror of judgment thou begin to be swallowed up in the gulf of despair, think of Mary, invoke Mary; let her not depart from thy heart, let her not depart from thy mouth. For whilst thinking of her, thou dost not err; imploring her, thou dost not despair; following her, thou dost not lose thy way; whilst she holds thee, thou dost not fall; whilst she protects thee, thou dost not fear; whilst she is thy leader, thou art not wearied; whilst she is favourable, thou reachest thy end[141]." [Footnote 141: See Bern. Sen. vol. iv. p. 124. The passage is found in Bernard, Paris, 1640. p. 25.] If the Virgin Mary is thus regarded as the source and well-head of all safety and blessing, we cannot wonder, that glory and praise are ascribed in the selfsame terms to her as to the Almighty. Cardinal Bellarmin closes the several portions of his writings with "Praise to God and the blessed Virgin Mary[142]." It is painful to reflect, that either the highest glory, due to that God who will not share his glory with another, is here ascribed to one of the creatures of his hand (however highly favoured and full of grace), or else that to the most high God is ascribed an inferior glory and praise, such as it is lawful for us to address to an exalted fellow-creature. Surely the only ascription fitting the lips and the heart of those who have been enlightened by the bright beams of Gospel truth, is Glory to God alone through Christ his Son. [Footnote 142: Such ascriptions are very common. Joannes de Carthagena, a most voluminous writer of homilies, adopts this as the close of his sections: "Praise and glory to the Triune God, to the Humanity of Christ, to the Blessed Virgin Mary his mother, and to St. Joseph her dearest spouse."--Catholic Homilies on the Sacred Secrets of the Mother of God, and Joseph, p. 921. Paris, 1615.] {380} * * * * * SECTION V.--MODERN WORKS OF DEVOTION AMONG ROMAN CATHOLICS. It may perhaps be surmised, that the authors referred to in the last section lived many years ago, and that the sentiments of the faithful members of the Church of Rome have undergone material changes on these points. Assurances are given on every side, that the invocation of the saints and of the Virgin is nothing more than a request, that they would intercede with God, and implore his mercy for the suppliants. But whatever implicit reliance we may place on the good faith with which these declarations are made, we can discover no new key by which to interpret the forms of prayer and praise satisfactorily. Confessedly there are no changes in the authorized services. We discover no traces of change in the worship of private devotion. The Breviary and Missal contain the same offices of the Virgin Mary as in former days. The same sentiments are expressed towards her in public; the same forms of devotion[143], both in prayer and praise, are prepared for the use of individuals in their daily exercises. Whatever meaning is to be attached to the expressions employed, the prevailing expressions themselves remain the same as we found them to have been in past ages. [Footnote 143: Works of this character abound in every place, where Catholic books may be purchased.] Since I made these extracts from the learned and celebrated doctors and canonized saints of former ages, my attention has been invited to the language now {381} used in forms of devotion, the spirit of which implies similar views of the power and love of the Virgin Mary, as the fountain of mercies to mankind, and the dispenser of every heavenly blessing. At the head of these modern works, I was led to read over again the encyclical letter of the present sovereign pontiff, from the closing sentences of which I have already made extracts. And referring his words to a test which we have more than once applied in a similar case--that of changing the name of the person, and substituting the name of God, or his blessed Son, I cannot see how the spirit of his sentiments falls in the least below the highest degree of religious worship. His words, in the third paragraph of his letter, as they appear in the Laity's Directory for 1833, are these:-- "But having at length taken possession of our see in the Lateran Basilic according to the custom and institution of our predecessors, we turn to you without delay, venerable brethren, and in testimony of our feelings towards you, we select for the date of our letter this most joyful day on which we celebrate the solemn festival of the most blessed Virgin's triumphant assumption into heaven, that she who has been through every great calamity our patroness and protectress, may WATCH OVER US WRITING TO YOU, AND LEAD OUR MIND BY HER HEAVENLY INFLUENCE to those counsels which may prove most salutary to Christ's flock." Let us substitute for the name of Mary, the holiest of all, The Eternal Spirit of Jehovah Himself; and will not these words be a proper vehicle of the sentiments of a Christian pastor? Let us fix upon Christmas-day, or Easter, or Holy Thursday, and what word expressive {382} of gratitude for past mercies to the supreme Giver of all good things, or of hope and trust in the guidance of the Spirit of counsel, and wisdom, and strength--of the most High God, who alone can order the wills and ways of men--might not a bishop of Christ's flock take from this declaration of the Sovereign Pontiff, and use in its first and natural sense, when speaking of the Lord Jehovah Himself? "We select for the date of our letter this most joyful day on which we celebrate the solemn festival of the most blessed Redeemer's nativity, (or glorious resurrection, or ascension,) that He who has been through every great calamity our patron and protector, may watch over us writing to you, and lead our mind by his heavenly influence to those counsels which may prove most salutary to Christ's flock." In these sentiments of the present Pope there is no allusion (as there is in the other clause) to Mary's prayers and intercessions. Looking to and weighing the words employed, and as far as words can be relied upon as interpreters of the thoughts, looking to the spirit of his profession, only one inference can be fairly drawn. However direct and immediate the prayers of the suppliants may be to the Virgin for her protection and defence from all dangers, spiritual and bodily, and for the guidance of the inmost thoughts in the right way, (blessings which we of the Anglican Catholic Church, following the footsteps of the primitive flock of Christ, have always looked for at the hand of God Almighty only, to be granted by Him for the sake of his blessed Son,) such petitioners to Mary would be sanctioned to the utmost by the principles and example of the present Roman Pontiff. We have already, when examining the records of {383} the Council of Chalcedon, compared the closing words of this encyclical letter with the more holy and primitive aspirations of the Bishops of Rome and Constantinople in those earlier days; and the comparison is striking between the sentiments now expressed in the opening parts of the same letter, and the spirit of the collects which were adopted for the use of the faithful, before the invocation of saints and of the Virgin had gained its present strong hold in the Church of Rome. For example, a collect at Vespers teaches us to pray to God as the source from whom all holy desires and all good counsels proceed [Hiem. 149.]; and on the fifth Sunday after Easter this prayer is offered: "O God, from whom all good things do come, grant, we pray Thee, that by thy inspiration we may think those things that be good; and by thy guidance may perform the same;" whilst on the fifth Sunday after the Epiphany, in a collect, the spirit of which is strongly contrasted with the sentiments in both parts of this encyclical letter, God is thus addressed: "We beseech thee, O Lord, with thy continual pity, guard thy family, that, leaning on the sole hope of heavenly grace, it may ever be defended by thy protection." [Ut quæ in _sola_ spe gratiæ coelestis innititur, tua semper protectione muniatur.--Hiem, 364. "Let us raise our eyes to the Blessed Virgin, who is our greatest hope, yea, the entire ground of our hope."] Similar materials are abundant. A whole volume, indeed, might readily be composed consisting solely of rules and instructions, confessions and forms of prayer, appertaining to the Virgin and the Saints, published by authority at the present day, both in our country and on the Continent, for the use of our Roman Catholic {384} brethren; but to which the word of God, and the doctrine and practice of the primitive Church, are in our estimation as much opposed as to the prayers of Bonaventura, or to the doctrine of either of the Bernardins. It would, however, be unprofitable to dwell on this subject at any great length. I will, therefore, only briefly refer to two publications of this sort, to which my own attention has been accidentally drawn: "The Imitation of the Blessed Virgin,"[144] and "The Little Testament of the Holy Virgin."[145] [Footnote 144: "The Imitation of the Blessed Virgin, composed on the plan of the Imitation of Christ. London, 1816. Approved by T.R. Asselini, Doctor of Sorbonne, last Bishop of Boulogne. From the French."] [Footnote 145: "The Little Testament of the Holy Virgin, translated from the French, and revised by a Catholic Priest. Third Edition. Dublin, 1836."] The first professes to be "composed on the plan of the 'Imitation of Christ.'" This is, in itself, highly objectionable; its tendency is to exalt Mary, by association, to the same place in our hearts and minds, which Thomas à Kempis had laboured, in his "Imitation of Christ," to secure for the Saviour; and it reminds us of the proceedings of Bonaventura, who wrote psalms to the honour of the Virgin after the manner which David used in his hymns to the Lord of Glory. In this work we read the following prayer to the Virgin, which seems to be stained with the error, the existence of which elsewhere we have already noticed, of contrasting the justice and the stern dealings even of the Saviour, with the mercy, and loving-kindness, and fellow-feeling of Mary; making God an object of fear, Mary an object of love. "Mother of my Redeemer, O Mary, in the last moments {385} of my life, I implore thy assistance with more earnestness than ever. I find myself, as it were, placed between heaven and hell. Alas! what will become of me, if thou do not exert, in my behalf, thy powerful influence with Jesus?... I die with SUBMISSION since JESUS has ORDAINED it; but notwithstanding the natural horror which I have of death, I die with PLEASURE, because I die under THY protection." [Chap. xiii. p. 344.] In the fourteenth chapter the following passage occurs: "It is giving to the blessed Virgin a testimony of love particularly dear and precious to her, to make her holy spouse Joseph the first object of our devotion, next to that which consecrates us to her service.... The name of Joseph is invoked with singular devotion by all the true faithful. They frequently join it with the sacred names of Jesus and Mary. Whilst Jesus and Mary lived at Nazareth, if we had wished to obtain some favour from them, could we have employed a more powerful protector than St. Joseph? Will he now have less power and credit? GO THEREFORE TO JOSEPH, (Gen. xli. 55.) that he may intercede for you. Whatever favour you ask, God will grant it you at his request.... Go to Joseph in all your necessities; but especially to obtain the grace of a happy death. The general opinion that he died in the arms of Jesus and Mary has inspired the faithful with great confidence, that, through his intercession, they will have an end as happy and consoling as his. In effect, it has been remarked, that it is particularly at the hour of death that those who have been during their life careful to honour this great saint, reap the fruit of their devotion." [P. 347.] In this passage the unworthy idea, itself formed on a groundless tradition, is introduced of paying reverence {386} to one saint, in order to gratify and conciliate another. Joseph must be especially honoured in order to do what is most acceptable to Mary. Surely this tends to withdraw the mind from that habitual reference of all our actions immediately to God, which the primitive teachers were so anxious to cultivate in all Christians. In the "Little Testament of the Holy Virgin," the following (p. 46) is called, "A Prayer to the blessed Virgin." Can any words place more on an entire level with each other, the eternal Son of God and the Virgin? "Jesus and Mary?!" "O Mary! what would be our poverty and misery if the Father of Mercies had not drawn you from his treasury to give you to earth! Oh! my Life and Consolation, I trust and confide in your holy name. My heart wishes to love you; my mouth to praise you; my mind to contemplate you; my soul sighs to be yours. Receive me, defend me, preserve me; I cannot perish in your hands. Let the demons tremble when I pronounce your holy name, since you have ruined their empire; but we shall say with Saint Anselm, that he does not know God, who has not an idea sufficiently high of your greatness and glory. We shall esteem it the greatest honour to be of the number of your servants. Let your glory, blessed Mother, be equal to the extent of your name; reign, after God, over all that is beneath God; but, above all, reign in my heart; you will be my consolation in suffering, my strength in weakness, my counsel in doubt. At the name of Mary my hope shall be enlightened, my love inflamed. Oh! that I could deeply engrave the dear name on every heart, suggest it to every tongue, and make all celebrate it with me. Mary! sacred name, under which no one {387} should despair. Mary! sacred name, often assaulted, but always victorious. Mary! it shall be my life, my strength, my comfort! Every day shall I envoke IT AND THE DIVINE NAME OF JESUS. The Son will awake the recollection of the mother, and the mother that of the Son. JESUS AND MARY! this is what my heart shall say at the last hour, if my tongue cannot; I shall hear them on my death bed,--they shall be wafted on my expiring breath, and I with them, to see THEM, know THEM, bless and love THEM for eternity. Amen." There may, perhaps, be a reasonable ground for our hoping that these are not the sentiments entertained by the enlightened Roman Catholics of our country and age. Any one has a full right to say, "These are productions of individuals for which we and the Church to which we belong are not responsible, any more than the Church of England is responsible for all doctrines and sentiments expressed by writers in her communion! Even the sentiments above referred to of the present reigning pope, you have no right to allege as the doctrines of the Church!" But I would again venture to suggest to every one, who would thus speak, the duty of ascertaining for himself, whether the sentiments of those who at present fill the highest places, and which fully justify these devotional exercises and prayers to the Virgin and the Saints, be not themselves fully justified by the authorized ritual of the Roman Church. On this point are supplied, even in this volume, materials sufficiently diversified and abundant in quantity to enable any one to form a correct judgment. By two brief extracts I will now bring this branch of our inquiry to a close. The first is from the concluding paragraphs of a discourse lately delivered and {388} published. In principle, the sentiments here professed apparently admit not only of being identified with those of the authorized services of the Church of Rome, but also, though not so naked and revolting in appearance as the doctrines of Bonaventura, Biel, and the two Bernardins, yet in reality they equally depart from the simplicity of the Gospel, and are equally at direct variance with that, its first and its last principle, ONE GOD AND ONE MEDIATOR BETWEEN GOD AND MEN, THE MAN CHRIST JESUS. "Remember that this day you have put yourselves and your families under the protection of the ever-blessed Mother of God, and Her chaste Spouse, St. Joseph; of those who were chosen of God to protect the infancy of Jesus from the danger by a persecuting world. ENTREAT THEM TO PROTECT YOU AND YOURS FROM THE PERILS of a seducing and ensnaring world; to plead your interests in heaven, and secure by their intercession your everlasting crown. Loudly proclaim the praises of your heavenly Queen, but at the same time turn Her power to your everlasting advantage by your earnest supplications to HER." (See Appendix.) The other extract, which sanctions to the full whatever offerings of praise and ascriptions of glory we have found individuals making to the Virgin and to Saints, is from an announcement in, I believe, the last English edition of the Roman Breviary published, in its present form, under the sanction of the Pope himself. "To those who devoutly recite the following prayer after the office, Pope Leo the Tenth hath granted pardon (indulsit) for the defects and faults in celebrating it, contracted by human frailty. "To the most holy and undivided Trinity; to the manhood {389} of our crucified Lord Jesus Christ; to the fruitful spotlessness of the most blessed and most glorious and ever-Virgin Mary; and to the entire body of all the Saints, be eternal praise, honour, virtue, and glory, from every creature, and to us remission of all sins, through endless ages of ages. Amen." [Norwich, 1830. Æst.] On the indulgence for pardon given by Pope Leo the Tenth, more than 300 years ago, for such defects and faults in celebrating a religious service as may be contracted by human frailty; and on the fact of the notification of that indulgence being retained, and set forth so prominently in the service books at the present day, I will say nothing. Whatever associations may be raised in our minds by these circumstances, the subject does not fall within our present field of inquiry. But to join the Holy Trinity with the Virgin Mother, and all the Saints in one and the same ascription of ETERNAL PRAISE, HONOUR, and GLORY, is as utterly subversive of the integrity of primitive Christian Worship, as it is repugnant to the plainest sense of holy Scripture, and derogatory to the dignity of that Supreme Being, who declares Himself to be a jealous God. It has, indeed, been maintained that such ascriptions of glory and praise jointly to God and his Saints, is sanctioned by the language of our blessed Saviour Himself when He speaks of his having given his glory to his disciples [John xvii. 22.], and of his second advent, when He shall come in his own glory, and in his Father's, and of the holy angels. [Luke ix. 26.] But between the two cases there is no analogy whatever; the inference is utterly fallacious. We know that the Lord of Hosts is the King of glory, and that his eternal Son shared the glory of his Father before the foundations {390} of the world were laid. We know, too, that the Almighty has been pleased to create beings of various degrees and orders, differing from each other in kind or in excellence according to his supreme will. Among those creatures of his hand are the angels whom we reverence and love, as his faithful servants and his ministers to us for good. But when we speak and think of religious adoration; of giving thanks; and ascribing eternal glory and honour, we have only one object in our minds,--the supreme Sovereign Lord of all. With regard to the gracious words of our Saviour in his prayer to the Father, on the eve of his death, St. Peter's acts and words supply us with a plain and conclusive comment. He was himself one of those to whom Christ had declared that He had given the glory which his Father had given to Him; and yet when Cornelius fell down at his feet to worship him, he took him up, saying, "Stand up; I myself also am a man." [Acts x. 26.] The Saviour was pleased to impart his glory to his Apostles, dividing to them his heavenly gifts severally as He willed. We praise Him for those graces which shone so brightly in them, and we pray to Him to enable us by his grace to follow them, as they followed his blessed steps. We reverence their memory, but we give God alone the praise. As to the other instance, the words of our Lord (assuring us that the angels should accompany Him at his second advent in their glory, the glory which He assigned to them in the order of creation,) no more authorize us to ascribe praise and glory by a religious act to them, when we praise the God of angels and men, than would {391} the assurance of an inspired apostle, that "there is one glory of the sun, another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars," sanction us in joining those luminaries in the same ascription of glory with their Almighty Creator and ours. Just as reasonably would a pagan justify his worship of the sun, the moon, and the stars, by this passage of Scripture, as our Roman Catholic brethren would justify themselves by the former passage in their ascription of praise and glory to the holy angels, and saints, and the blessed Virgin. We honour the holy angels, we praise God for the glory which He has imparted to them, and for the share which He has been pleased to assign to them in executing his decrees of mercy in the heavenly work of our salvation; and we pray to HIM to grant that they may by his appointment succour and defend us on earth, through Jesus Christ our Lord. But we address no invocation to them; we ascribe no glory to them as an act of religious worship. By offering thanks and praise to God He declares that we honour HIM; by offering thanks and praise, and by ascribing glory and honour to angel, saint, or virgin, we make them gods. {392} * * * * * CONCLUSION. We have now, my fellow Christians, arrived at the conclusion of the task which I proposed to undertake. I have laid before you, to the utmost of my abilities and means, the result of my inquiry into the evidence of holy Scripture and primitive antiquity, on the invocation of saints and angels, and the blessed Virgin Mary. In this inquiry, excepting so far as was necessary to elucidate the origin and history of the Roman Catholic tenet of the Assumption of the Virgin, we have limited our researches to the writers who lived before the Nicene Council. That Council has always been considered a cardinal point,--a sort of climacteric in the history of the early Church. It was the first Council to which all the bishops of Christendom were summoned; and the influence of its decrees is felt beneficially in the Catholic Church to this very day. In fixing upon this Council as our present boundary line, I was influenced by a conviction, that the large body of Christians, whether of the Roman, the Anglican, or any other branch of the Church Catholic, would consent to this as an indisputable axiom,--that what the Church Catholic did not believe or practise up to {393} that date of her existence upon earth, cannot be regarded as either Catholic or primitive, or apostolical. Ending with St. Athanasius, (who, though he was present at that Council, yet brings his testimony down through almost another half century, his death not having taken place till A.D. 873, on the verge of his eightieth year,) we have examined the remains of Christian antiquity, reckoning forward to that Council from the times of the Apostles. We have searched diligently into the writings, the sentiments, and the conduct of those first disciples of our Lord. We have contemplated the words of our blessed Saviour himself, and the inspired narrative of his life and teaching. With the same object in view we have studied the prophets of the Old Testament, and the works of Moses; and we have endeavoured, at the fountainhead, to ascertain what is the mind and will of God, as revealed to the world from the day when He made man, on the question of our invoking the angels and saints to intercede with Him in our behalf, or to assist and succour us on the earth. And the result is this:--From first to last, the voice of God Himself, and the voices of the inspired messengers of heaven, whether under the patriarchal, the Mosaic, or the Christian dispensations, the voices too of those maintainers of our common faith in Christ, who prayed, and taught, in the Church, before the corruptions of a degenerate world had mingled themselves with the purity of Christian worship, combine all, in publishing, throughout the earth, one and the self-same principle, "Pray only to God; draw nigh to Him alone; invoke no other; seek no other in the world of spirits, neither angel, nor beatified saint; seek Him, and He will favourably, with mercy, hear your prayers." To this one {394} principle, when the Gospel announced the whole counsel of God in the salvation of man, our Lord himself, his Apostles, and his Church, unite in adding another principle of eternal obligation,--There is one Mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus; whatsoever the faithful shall ask the Father in the name of that Mediator, He will grant it to them: He is ever living to make intercession for those who believe in Him: Invoke we no other intercessor, apply we neither to saint nor angel, plead we the merits of no other. Let us lift up our hearts to God Almighty himself, and make our requests known to Him in the name, and through the mediation of Christ, and He will fulfil our desires and petitions as may be most expedient for us; He will grant to us, in this world, a knowledge of his truth, and in the world to come life everlasting! Watching the tide of evidence through its whole progress, we find it to flow all in this one direction. Here and there indeed attempts have been made to raise some mounds and barriers of human structure, in order to arrest its progress, and turn it from its straight course, but in vain; unchecked by any such endeavours, it rolls on in one full, steady, strong, and resistless current. Until we have long passed the Nicene Council, we find no one writer of the Christian Church, whose remains tell us, that he either himself invoked saints and angels, and the Virgin Mary, or was at all aware of any such practice prevailing in Christendom. Suppose, for one moment, that our doctrine is right; and then we find the whole tenour of the Old and New Testaments, and the ancient writers, in their plain meaning, agreeably to the interpretation of the most learned and unbiassed critics, fully coinciding in every respect with our view of God being the sole object of invocation, {395} and of the exclusive character of Christ's intercession, mediation, and advocacy. Suppose, for another moment, the Roman Catholic theory to be correct, then the whole general tenour and drift of Scripture must be evaded; the clearest statements and announcements must be explained away by subtle distinctions, gratuitous definitions, and casuistical refinements, altogether foreign from the broad and simple truths of Revelation; then, too, in ascertaining the sentiments of an author, not his general and pervading principles, evidenced throughout his writings, must be appealed to; but casual and insulated expressions must be contracted or expanded as may best seem to counteract the impression made by the testimony of those principles. We may safely ask, Is there such evidence, that the primitive Church offered invocations to saints and angels, and the Virgin, as would satisfy us in the case of any secular dispute with regard to ancient usage? On the contrary, is not the evidence clear to a moral demonstration, that the offering of such addresses is an innovation of later days, unknown to the primitive Christians till after the middle of the fourth century, and never pronounced to be an article of faith, until the Council of Trent, more than a thousand years after its first appearance in Christendom, so decreed it. The tendency, indeed, of some Roman Catholic writings, especially of late years, is to draw off our minds on these points from the written word of God, and the testimony of the earliest Church, and to dwell upon the possibility, the reasonableness of the doctrines of the Church of Rome in this respect, their accordance with our natural feelings, and their charitableness. But in points of such vast moment, in things concerning the soul's salvation, we can depend with satisfaction and {396} without misgiving, only on the sure word of promise; nothing short of God's own pledge of his own eternal truth can assure us, that all is safe. Such substitution of what may appear to us reasonable, and agreeable to our natural sentiments, and desirable if true, in place of the assurances of God's revealed Will, may correspond with the arguments of a heathen philosopher unacquainted with the truth as it is in Jesus, but cannot satisfy disciples of Him who brought life and immortality to light by his Gospel. Such questions as these, "Is there any thing unreasonable in this? Would not this be a welcome tenet, if true?" well became the lips of Socrates in his defence before his judges, but are in the strict sense of the word preposterous in a Christian. With the Christian the first question is, What is the truth? What is revealed? What has God promised? What has He taught man to hope for? What has He commanded man to do? By his own words, by the words and by the example of his inspired messengers, by the doctrine and practice of his Church, the witness and interpreter of the truth, how has He directed us to sue for his mercy and all its blessings? On what foundation, sure and certain, can we build our hopes that "He will favourably with mercy hear our prayers?" For in this matter, a matter of spiritual life and death, we can anchor our hope on no other rock than his sure word of promise. That sure word of promise, if I am a faithful believer, I have; but it is exclusive of any invocation by me of saint, or angel, or virgin. The pledge of heaven is most solemnly and repeatedly given; God, who cannot lie, has, in language so plain, that he may run who readeth it, assured me that if I come to HIMSELF by HIS SON, my prayer shall not be cast out, my suit shall {397} not be denied, I shall not be sent empty away. In every variety of form which language can assume, this assurance is ratified and confirmed. His own revealed will directs me to pray for my fellow-creatures, and to expect a beneficial effect from the prayers of the faithful upon earth in my behalf. To pray for them, therefore, and to seek their prayers, and to wait patiently for an answer to both, are acts of faith and of duty. And were it also appointed by God's will to be an act of faith and duty in a Christian to seek the prayers, and aid, and assistance, of saints and angels by supplicatingly invoking them, surely the same word of truth would have revealed that also. Whereas the reverse shows itself under every diversified state of things, from the opening of the sacred book to its very last page. The subtle distinction of religious worship into latria, dulia, and hyperdulia, the refined classification of prayer under the two heads of direct, absolute, final, sovereign, on the one hand, and of oblique, relative, transitory, subaltern, on the other, swell indeed many elaborate works of casuistry, but are not discoverable in the remains of primitive Christians, nor in the writings of God's word have they any place. I cannot find in the inspired Apostles any reference to the necessity, the duty, the lawfulness, the expediency of our seeking by prayer the good offices of the holy dead, or of the angels of light. In their successors the earliest inspired teachers and pastors of Christ's fold, I seek in vain for any precept, or example, or suggestion, or incidental allusion looking that way. Why then should a Christian wish to add to that which God has been pleased to appoint and to reveal? Why should I attempt to enter heaven through any other gate than {398} that gate which the Lord of heaven has opened for me? or why should I seek to reach that gate by any other way than the way which He has made for me; which He has Himself plainly prescribed to me; in which He has promised that his word shall be a lantern unto my feet; and along which those saints and servants of his, who received the truth from his own lips, and sealed it by their blood, have gone before? Whenever a maintainer of the doctrine and practice of invoking the Saints asks me, as we have lately been asked in these words, "May I not reasonably hope that their prayers will be more efficacious than my own and those of my friends? And, under this persuasion, I say to them, as I just now said to you, holy Mary, holy Peter, holy Paul, pray for me. What is there in reason or revelation to forbid me to do so?" To this and similar questions and suggestions, I answer at once, God has solemnly covenanted to grant the petitions of those who ask HIM for his mercy, in the name and for the sake of his Son; and in his holy word has, both by precept and example, taught us in this life to pray for each other, and to ask each other's prayers [James v. 16; I Tim. ii. 1.]; but that He will favourably answer the prayers which we supplicate angels to offer, or which we offer to Himself through the merits and by the intercession of departed mortals, is no where in the covenant. Moreover, when God invites me and commands me to approach Him myself, in the name of his Son, and trusting to his merits, it is not Christian humility, rather it savours of presumption, and intruding into those things which we have not seen [Coloss. ii. 18.], to seek to prevail with Him by {399} pleading other merits, and petitioning creatures, however glorious, to interest themselves with Him in our behalf, angels and saints, of whose power even to hear us we have no evidence. When Jesus Himself, who knows both the deep counsels of the Eternal Spirit, and man's wants and weaknesses and unworthiness, and who loveth his own to the end, pledges his never-failing word, that whatsoever we ask the Father in his name, He will give it us, can it be less than an unworthy distrust of his truth and faithfulness to ask the Father for the merits and by the intercession of another? and as though in fear lest God should fail of his promise, or be unmindful of us Himself, to invoke angels and the good departed to make our wants known unto HIM, and prevail with HIM to relieve us? Surely it were wiser and safer to adhere religiously to that one way which cannot fail, than to adopt for ourselves methods and systems, for the success of which we have no guarantee; which may be unacceptable in his sight; and the tendency of which may be to bring down a curse and not a blessing. May the great Shepherd and Bishop of souls pour down upon his Church the abundance of his mercy, preserving those in the truth who now possess it, restoring it to those by whom it has been lost, and imparting it to all who are yet in darkness. And, whilst we speak the truth in love, and endeavour to keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace, may HE, for his own glory, and for the safety and comfort of his people, shed this truth abroad in our hearts, and enlighten us to receive it in all its fulness and integrity, and in the very sense in which the Holy Spirit, when He guided {400} the pen of St. Paul, willed the Church to interpret it, "There is one God and one Mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus." * * * * * O everlasting God, who hast ordained and constituted the services of Angels and men in a wonderful order; Mercifully grant, that as thy holy Angels alway do Thee service in heaven, so by thy appointment they may succour and defend us on earth, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. O Almighty God, who hast built thy Church upon the foundation of the Apostles and Prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the head corner-stone; Grant us so to be joined together in unity of spirit by their doctrine, that we may be made an holy temple, acceptable unto Thee, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. O Almighty God, who hast knit together thine elect in one communion and fellowship, in the mystical body of thy Son Christ our Lord; Grant us grace, so to follow thy blessed Saints in all virtuous and godly living, that we may come to those unspeakable joys, which Thou hast prepared for them that unfeignedly love Thee; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. {401} * * * * * APPENDIX. * * * * * Note.--Pages 107 and 110. The following is the original of the passages discussed in the text. Justin Martyr, Apol. I. p. 47. § vi. Benedictine Edition by P. Maran. Paris, A.D. 1742. [Greek: Enthende kai atheoi keklaemetha; kai homologoumen ton toiouton nomizomenon theon atheoi einai, all' ouchi tou alaethestatou, kai patros dikaiosunaes kai sophrosunaes, kai ton allon areton, anepimiktou te kakias Theou; all' ekeinon te, kai ton par' autou huion elthonta kai didaxanta haemas tauta, kai ton ton allon hepomenon kai exomoioumenon agathon angelon straton, pneuma te to prophaetikon sebometha, kai proskunoumen, logoi kai alaetheiai timontes, kai panti boulomenoi mathein, hos edidachthaemen, aphthonos paradidontes.] Ibid. page 50, 51. sect. xiii.--[Greek: 'Atheoi men oun hos ouk esmen, ton daemiourgon toude tou pantos sebomenoi, ... ton didaskalon te touton genomenon haemin, kai eis touto genaethenta Iaesoun Christon ton staurothenta epi Pontiou Pilatou, tou genomenou en Ioudaiai epi chronois Tiberiou Kaisaros epitropou, huion autou tou ontos Theou mathontes, kai en deuterai chorai echontes, pneuma te prophaetikon en tritaei taxei, hoti meta logou timomen, apodeixomen....] Note.--Page 134. In the text it has been observed, that "Coccius in his elaborate work quotes the two following passages as Origen's, without expressing {402} any hesitation or doubt respecting their genuineness; in which he is followed by writers of the present day." The modern works, to which reference is here made, are chiefly the Lectures delivered by Dr. Wiseman, in the Roman Catholic Chapel in Moorfields in the year 1836, and the compilation of Messrs. Berington and Kirk [Berington and Kirk. London, 1830, p. 403.], from which Dr. Wiseman in his preface to his Lectures (p. ix.) informs us, that in general he had drawn his quotations of the Fathers. In citing the testimony of Origen in support of the invocation of saints, it is evident that Dr. Wiseman has drawn from that source; for whereas the two confessedly spurious passages, from the Lament, and from the Book on Job, are in that compilation quoted in the same page, Dr. Wiseman cites only the passage from the Lament, as from a work on the Lamentations, but gives his reference to the Book on Job. His words are these:--"Again he (Origen) thus writes on the Lamentations: 'I will fall down on my knees, and not presuming, on account of my crimes, to present my prayer to God, I will invoke all the saints to my assistance. O ye saints of heaven, I beseech you with a sorrow full of sighs and tears; fall at the feet of the Lord of mercies for me, a miserable sinner,'--Lib. ii. De Job." [Lectures on the Principal Doctrines and Practices of the Catholic Church, by Nicholas Wiseman, D.D. London, 1836. Vol. i. preface, p. ix. and vol. ii. p. 107.] When we find such passages as these, which have been so long ago and so repeatedly pronounced to be utterly spurious, yet cited in evidence at the present time, and represented as conveying the genuine testimony of Origen, we shall be pardoned for repeating the sentiments expressed so many years ago by the learned Bishop of Avranches with regard to the very work here cited, "It is wonderful that, WITHOUT ANY MARK OF THEIR BEING FORGERIES, they should be sometimes cited in evidence by some theologians." Note.--Page 151. The whole passage cited as Origen's comment on the words of Ezekiel, "The heavens are opened," is in the Latin version as follows. The Greek original, if it ever existed, is lost. The portion between brackets is the part suspected of being an interpolation. 6. _Et aperti sunt coeli_. Clausi erant coeli, et ad adventum Christi aperti sunt, ut reseratis illis veniret super eum Spiritus Sanctus in specie columbæ. Neque enirn poterat ad nos commeare nisi primum {403} ad suæ naturæ consortem descendisset. _Ascendit Jesus in altum, captivam duxit captivitatem, accepit dona in hominibus. Qui descendit, ipse est qui ascendit super omnes coelos ut impleret omnia. Et ipse dedit alios apostolos, alios prophetas, alios evangelistas, alios pastores et magistros in perfectionem sanctorum_. [7. _Aperti sunt coeli_. Non sufficit unum coelum aperiri: aperiuntur plurimi, ut descendant non ab uno, sed ab omnibus coelis angeli ad eos qui salvandi sunt. Angeli qui ascendebant et descendebant super Filium hominis, et accesserunt as eum, et ministrabant ei. Descenderunt autem angeli, quia prior descenderat Christus, metuentes descendere priusquam Dominus virtutum omnium rerumque præciperet. Quando autem viderunt principem militiæ coelestis in terrestribus locis commorari, tunc per apertam viam ingressi sunt sequentes Dominum suum, et parentes voluntati ejus qui distribuit eos custodes credentium nomini suo. Tu heri sub dæmonio eras, hodie sub angelo. _Nolite_, inquit Dominus, _contemnere unum de minimis istis_ qui sunt in ecclesia. _Amen enim dico vobis, quia angeli eorum per omnia vident faciem Patris qui est in coelis_. Obsequuntur saluti tuæ angeli, concessi sunt ad ministerium Filii Dei, et dicuntinter se: si ille descendit, et descendit in corpus; si mortali indutus est carne, et sustinuit crucem, et pro hominibus mortuus est, quit nos quiescimus? quid parcimus nobis? Eja omnes angeli descendamus e coelo. Ideo et multitudo militiæ coelestis erat laudantium et glorificantium Deum, quando natus est Christus. Omnia angelis plena sunt: veni, angeli, suscipe sermone conversum ab errore pristino, a doctrina dæmoniorum, ab iniquitate in altum loquente: et suscipiens eum quasi medicus bonus confove atque institue, parvulus est, hodie nascitur senex repuerascens: et suscipe tribuens ei baptismum secundæ regenerationis, et advoca tibi alios socios ministerii tui, ut concti pariter eos qui aliquando decepti sunt, erudiatis ad fidem. _Gaudium enim est majus in coelis super unum peccatorem poenitentiam agentem, quam supra nonaginta novem justos quibus non opus est poenitentia_. Exultat omnis creatura, collætatur et applaudit his qui salvandi sunt. Nam _expectatio creaturæ revelationem filiorum Dei expectat_. Et licet nolint ii qui scripturas apostolicas interpolaverunt istiusmodi sermones inesse libris eorum quibus possit Creator Christus approbari, expectat tamen omnis creatura filios Dei, quando liberentur a delicto, quando auferentur de Zabuli manu, quando regenerentur a Christo. Verum jam tempus est, ut de præsenti loco aliqua tangamus. Vidit Propheta non visionem, sed visiones Dei. {404} Quare non vidat unam, sed plurimas visiones? Audi Dominum pollicentem atque dicentem: _Ego visiones multiplicavi_. 8. _Quinta mensis_. Hic annus quinta captivitatis regis Joachim. Trigesimo anno ætatis Ezekielis, et quinto captivitatis Joachim, Propheta mittiur ad Judæos. Non despexit clementissimus pater, nec longo tempore incommonitum populum dereliquit. Quintus est annus. Quantum temporis intercessit? Quinque anni interfluxerunt ex quo captivi serviunt.] Statim descendit Spiritus Sanctus,--aperuit coelos, ut hi qui captivitatis jugo premebantur, viderent ea quæ videbantur a Propheta. Dicente quippe eo, _Et aperti sunt coeli_, quodam modo et ipsi intuebantur oculis cordis quæ ille etiam oculis carnis aspexerat.--Vol. iii. p. 358. Note.--Page 165. In a note on the Epistle of St. Cyprian to his brother, reference was made to the Appendix for a closer comparison of Cyprian's original letter with the modern translation of the passage under consideration. By placing the two versions in parallel columns side by side, we shall immediately see, that the mode of citing the testimony of St. Cyprian adopted in Dr. Wiseman's Lectures, from the compilation of Messrs. Berington and Kirk, is rather to substitute his own comment and inference, than to allow the witness to speak for himself in his own words. The whole paragraph, as it appears in Dr. Wiseman's Lectures, is this:-- "St. Cyprian in the same century: 'Let us be mindful of one another in our prayers; with one mind and with one heart, in this world and in the next, let us always pray with mutual charity relieving our sufferings and afflictions. And may the charity of him, who, by the divine favour, shall first depart hence, still persevere before the Lord; may his prayer, for our brethren and sisters, not cease.' Therefore, after having departed this life, the same offices of charity are to continue, by praying for those who remain on earth." [Lect. xiii. vol. ii. p. 107, and Berington and Kirk, p. 430.] _St. Cyprian's words_. _Epist._ lvii. _p._ 96. _Translation adopted by Dr. Wiseman from Berington and Kirk._ 1. Memories nostri invicem simus, 1. Let us be mindful of one another IN OUR PRAYERS; {405} 2. Concordes atque unanimes, 2. With one mind and with one heart. 3. Utrobique. 3. In this world and in the next, 4. PRO NOBIS semper oremus, 4. Let us always pray, 5. Pressuras et angustias mutua 5. With mutual charity RELIEVING out caritate relevemus, sufferings and afflictions. 6. Et si quis istinc nostrum 6. And may the CHARITY OF HIM, prior divinæ dignationis celeritate who, by the divine facour, shall præcesserit, perseveret apud Dominum first depart hence, still persevere NOSTRA DILECTIO, before the Lord; 7. Pro fratribus et sororibus 7. May HIS prayer, for our brethren nostris apud misericordiam patris and sisters, not cease. non cesset oratio. In this translation, by inserting the words, _in our prayers_, which are not in the original in the first clause; by rendering the adverb _utrobique_, IN THIS WORLD AND IN THE NEXT, in the third clause; by omitting the words _pro nobis, for each other_, which are in the original, in the fourth clause; by changing in the fifth the verb _relevemus, let us relieve_, implying another branch of their mutual kindness, into the participle _relieving_, which may imply, that the relief alluded to was also to be conveyed by the medium of their prayers; by substituting _the charity of him_, in place of _nostra dilectio, our charity_, in the sixth; and by inserting the word _his_, which is not in the original, before _prayer_, where the grammar of the sentence requires _our_, in the seventh clause;--by these means the translator makes Cyprian express a sentiment far removed from what the words of Cyprian, in their plain and natural sense, convey. It must, however, be borne in mind, as we have shown in our examination of the passage, that the sentiment of Cyprian, even as it is thus unduly extracted from his words, would not in the remotest degree countenance the invocation of saints. It would do no more than imply his belief, that the faithful departed may take an interest in the welfare of their surviving friends on earth, and promote that welfare by their prayers; a point which, in the preface, is mentioned as one of those topics, the discussion of which would be avoided in this inquiry, as quite distinct from the invocation of saints. {406} Note.--Page 176. An extract from Eusebius, unnoticed in the text of this work, has recently been cited as conveying his testimony in favour of the invocation of saints. I have judged it better to defer the consideration of it to the appendix. It has been cited in these terms: "In the fourth century Eusebius of Cæsarea thus writes: 'May we be found worthy by the prayers and intercessions of all the saints.'" [Dr. Wiseman's Lectures, vol. ii. p. 107. Lect. xiii. Berington and Kirk, p. 431.] To form a just estimate of this alleged testimony, it is requisite that we have before us not only that incomplete clause, but the whole passage purporting to contain, in these words, the closing sentences of a commentary on Isaiah: [Tom. ii. p. 593, ed. Paris, 1707. Dr. Wiseman's reference is "Com. in Isai. Tom. ii. p. 593, ed. Paris, 1706."] "'And they shall be for a spectacle to all flesh.' To what flesh? Altogether to that which shall be somewhere punished? Nay, to that which shall of the heavenly vision be deemed worthy, concerning which it was said before, All flesh shall come to worship before me, of which may we also be deemed worthy by the prayers and intercessions of all the saints. Amen." In examining this passage I am willing for the present that all its clauses should be accepted as the genuine words of Eusebius, and accepted too in the meaning attached to them by those who have cited them. And to what do they amount? If these are indeed his expressions, Eusebius believed that the saints departed can forward our spiritual welfare by their prayers and ministering offices; and he uttered his desire that we might thus be benefited. Now whether we agree with him or not in that belief; whether we consider the faithful departed as able to take an interest in our welfare and to promote it, or regard such an opinion as without foundation in the word of God and in primitive doctrine; the belief implied and the wish expressed here by Eusebius, are widely indeed removed from the act of suppliantly invoking the saints departed, and resorting to them with entreaties for their prayers and intercessions in our behalf. These two things, although often confounded, are far from being equivalent; and by all who would investigate with fairness the subject of our inquiry, they must be carefully kept distinct. The invocation of saints being the single point in question, our business is to ascertain, not what opinions Eusebius may have {407} entertained as to the condition, and power, and offices of the saints departed, but whether he invoked them; whether he had recourse to them with supplications for their prayers, or aid and succour. And keeping this closely in view, even if we admit this passage to be genuine, and interpret it as those who have cited it wish it to be interpreted, we find in it no authority for the invocation of saints. A Christian would be no more countenanced by this language of Eusebius in suppliantly invoking departed saints, than he would in praying to the angels for their help and mediation be countenanced by the terms of the prayer in regard to them, addressed by the Anglican Church to God, "O everlasting God, who hast ordained and constituted the services of angels and men in a wonderful order; Mercifully grant, that as thy holy angels alway do Thee service in heaven, so by THY appointment they may succour and defend us on earth; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen." Whoever petitions them, makes them Gods--Deos qui rogat ille facit. But whilst, for the sake of the argument, I have admitted this passage to be genuine, and correctly translated, and have shown that whether genuine or not, and even if it be thus correctly translated, it affects not in the least the issue of our inquiry, I do not feel at liberty to withhold the acknowledgment of my persuasion that in this concession I grant too much. For, in the first place, I am assured, that if the passage came from the pen of Eusebius, no one is justified in confining the desire and wish contained in it to the intercessions and prayers of the saints in heaven; and, secondly, I see reasons for inferring that the last clause was framed and attached to this work, not by Eusebius himself, but by some editor or scribe. In support of my first persuasion, I would observe that the very language of the writer of these comments on Isaiah and the Psalms precludes us from regarding the Saints departed as exclusively constituting those "holy ones" by whose intercessions and prayers he expresses his desire that our spiritual welfare may be promoted. In this very comment on Isaiah (ch. vi. 2. p. 376), when he is speaking of the heavenly inhabitants, and illustrates his views by God's dealings towards the children of men in this world, he employs this expression: "For as among men the Saints of God partake of more excellent graces." On the 67th (68th) Ps. v. 34, having interpreted the words, "his strength is in the clouds," as referring to the {408} prophets and teachers of divine wisdom, under the guidance of the Spirit, pouring heavenly truths upon the souls of men as the clouds drop rain on fertile lands, he proceeds thus to comment on the expression, "God is wonderful among his Saints." [Vol. i. p. 364. The English translation refers the word "holy" to places, not persons.] "These Saints are different from those before called Apostles and prophets. And who can they be, except those who out of all nations are deemed worthy of purity and holiness, among whom God is wonderful, giving to them power and strength?" Thus in perfect accordance with the language of this writer, the Saints, from whose prayers and intercessions he desires to derive spiritual benefits, may be the Saints of God on earth--in the same state with those saints still living in the flesh, whose prayers St. Paul desired to be offered up for himself, that by them a door of utterance to speak the mystery of Christ might be opened unto him [Coloss. i. 2; iv. 2, 3.]--and with those saints to whom the same Apostle wrote at Philippi: "To all the saints in Christ Jesus:" and to whom he sent the greetings of the saints who then surrounded him: "ALL the SAINTS salute you." [Phil i. 1; iv. 22.] But before the closing words of this paragraph, whatever be its meaning, be acknowledged as the genuine and undoubted production of Eusebius, I would suggest the careful weighing of some considerations, which appear to me to involve serious difficulties. 1. First, through all the voluminous works of Eusebius, I have found in no single passage any allusion to the prayers of saints departed, or to their ministering offices in our behalf, though numberless openings show themselves for the natural introduction of such a subject. 2. Secondly, among all the various works and treatises of Eusebius, I have not found one which is closed by any termination of the kind; on the contrary, they all end with remarkable suddenness and abruptness, precisely as this comment would end, were the sentence under consideration removed. Each, indeed, of the books of his Ecclesiastical History, is followed by a notice of the close of the book, in some cases too that notice involving a religious sentiment: for example, at the close of the 10th book we read: "With the help of God, the end of the tenth book." But that these are appendages made by an editor or scribe is evident in itself, and moreover {409} in many instances is shown by such sentences as these, "And this we have found in a certain copy in the 8th volume:" "This is in some copies, as if omitted from the 8th book." I find no one instance of Eusebius bringing a chapter or a treatise to its close by any religious sentiment, or any termination of the nature here contemplated. It is also difficult to conceive that any author, having the flow and connexion of the whole passage present to his mind, would himself have appended this ejaculation as we now find it. We know that editors and scribes often attached a sentiment of their own to the closing words of an author. And it seems far more probable, that a scribe not having the full drift of the argument mainly before him, but catching the expression, "heavenly vision," appended such an ejaculation. That the writer himself should introduce such a sentence by the connecting link of a relative pronoun feminine, which must of necessity be referred, not as the grammatical construction would suggest to the feminine noun preceding it,--not to any word expressed or understood in the intervening clause preceding it,--not to the last word in the sentence even before that intervening clause, nor yet to the principal and leading subject immediately under discussion and thrice repeated,--but to a noun incidentally introduced, seems, to say the least, strange and unnatural. "And they shall be for a spectacle to all flesh. To what flesh? Altogether to that which shall be somewhere punished? Nay, to that which shall of the heavenly vision be deemed worthy, concerning WHICH it was said before, All FLESH shall come to worship before me, of which may we also be deemed worthy by the prayers and intercessions of all the saints. Amen." But the classical reader will appreciate these remarks more satisfactorily by examining them with reference to the passage in the original language. [Greek: Kai esontai eis orasin pasaei sarki. poiai de sarki; ae pantos pou taei kolasthaesomenaei; taes de epouraniou theas kataxiothaesomenaei peri HAES anotero elegeto aexei pasa sarx tou proskunaesai enopion mou, HAES kai haemeis axiotheiaemen euchais kai presbeiais panton ton hagion, amaen.] Note.--Page 181. ATHANASIUS. In the text I observed that some Roman Catholic writers of the present day had cited the homily there shown to be utterly spurious, {410} as the genuine work of St. Athanasius, and as recording his testimony in defence of the invocation of Saints. The passage there referred to Dr. Wiseman thus introduces, and comments upon. "St. Athanasius, the most zealous and strenuous supporter that the Church ever possessed of the divinity of Jesus Christ, and consequently of his infinite superiority over all the saints, thus enthusiastically addresses his ever-blessed Mother: 'Hear now, O daughter of David; incline thine ear to our prayers. We raise our cry to thee. Remember us, O most holy Virgin, and for the feeble eulogiums we give thee, grant us great gifts from the treasures of thy graces, thou who art full of grace. Hail, Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Queen and mother of God, intercede for us.' Mark well," continues Dr. Wiseman, "these words; 'grant us great gifts, from the treasures of thy graces;' as if he hoped directly to receive them from her. Do Catholics use stronger words than these? Or did St. Athanasius think or speak with us, or with Protestants?" In answer to these questions I reply with sure and certain confidence, first, that the genuine words of St. Athanasius himself prove him to have spoken and thought with the Anglican Church, and not with the Roman Church on the invocation of saints and angels, and the blessed Virgin Mary; and secondly, that whatever words Roman Catholics use, whether stronger or not than these, these words on which the above questions are put, never came forth from the pen of St. Athanasius. Their spuriousness is not a question of doubt or difficulty. It has been shown in the text that the whole homily has been for ages utterly repudiated, as a work falsely attributed to St. Athanasius. It is indeed very disheartening to those, whose object is the discovery and the establishment of the truth, to find works cited in evidence as the genuine productions of primitive Christian teachers, which have been so long ago, and so repeatedly, and that not by members of another communion, but by the most learned men of the Church of Rome, adjudged to be spurious. I do not mean that I think it not fully competent for a writer of the present day to call in question, and overrule and set aside the decisions of former editors, as to the genuine or the spurious character of any work. On the contrary I am persuaded that a field is open in that department of theology, which would richly repay all the time and labour and expense, which persons well qualified for the task could bestow upon its culture. What I lament is this, that after a work has been deliberately condemned as unquestionably {411} spurious, by competent and accredited judges for two centuries and a half at the least, that very work should be now cited as genuine and conclusive evidence, without any the most distant allusion to the judgment which had condemned it, or even to any suspicion of its being a forgery. In this instance, also, Dr. Wiseman has implicitly followed the compilation of Messrs. Berington and Kirk. This is evident, because the extract, as it stands word for word the same in his Lectures and their compilation, is not found as one passage in the spurious homily, but is made up of sentences selected from different clauses, and put together so as to make one paragraph. It is worthy of notice, that in quoting their authority, both Dr. Wiseman, and those whom he follows, refer us to the very volume in which the Benedictine editors declare that there was no learned man, who did not pronounce the work to be spurious; and in which also they quote at length the letter of Baronius which had proved it to be a forgery. [Dr. Wiseman's Lectures, vol. ii. p. 108, from Berington and Kirk, p. 430, 431.] Note.--Page 231. (Decree of the Council of Trent.) [Canones et Decreta Sacros. OEcumen. et Genera. Concilii Tridentini, &c. Rom. fol. A.D. 1564.] Mandat sancta Synodus omnibus Episcopis, et ceteris docendi munus curamque sustinentibus, ut juxta Catholicæ, et Apostolicæ Ecclesiæ usum, a primævis Christianæ religionis temporibus receptum, sanctorumque Patrum consensionem, et sacrorum Conciliorum decreta, inprimis de Sanctorum intercessione, invocatione, Reliquiarum honore, et legitimo imaginum usu, fideles diligenter instruant, docentes eos, Sanctos, una cum Christo regnantes, orationes suas pro hominibus Deo offerre; bonum atque utile esse suppliciter eos invocare; et ob beneficia impetranda a Deo per Filium ejus Jesum Christum, Dominum nostrum, qui solus noster Redemptor et Salvator est, ad eorum orationes, opem, auxiliumque confugere: illos vero, qui negant sanctos æternâ felicitate in coelo fruentes, invocandos esse; aut qui asserunt, vel illos pro hominibus non orare, vel eorum, ut pro nobis etiam singulis orent, invocationem esse idololatriam, vel pugnare cum verbo Dei, adversarique honori unius Mediatoris Dei et hominum, Jesu Christi, vel stultum esse, in coelo regnantibus voce, vel mente supplicare, impie sentire. Sanctorum quoque Martyrum, et aliorum cum Christo viventium Sancta corpora, {412} quæ viva membra fuerunt Christi, et templum Spiritus Sancti, ab ipso ad æternam vitam suscitanda et glorificanda, a fidelibus veneranda esse; per quæ multa beneficia a Deo hominibus præstantur: ita ut affirmantes, Sanctorum Reliquiis venerationem, atque honorem non deberi; vel eas, aliaque sacra monumenta a fidelibus inutiliter honorari; atque eorum opis impetrandæ causa sanctorum memorias frustra frequentari; omnino damnandos esse, prout jampridem eos damnavit, et nunc etiam damnat Ecclesia. [De Invocatione, Veneratione, et Reliquiis Sanctorum, et Sacris Imaginibus, p. 202.] Note.--Pages 369 and 390. In a prefatory epistle, addressed to the "Chaplains, Wardens, and Brethren of the Holy Catholic Gild," in Huddersfield, Dr. Wiseman (p. 4) expresses himself thus: "Yesterday I laid the badge of your association at the feet of the sovereign pontiff, and it was most condescendingly and graciously received. But this is not all. As I had foretold, I found His Holiness fully informed of your establishment and public manifestation; and I had the satisfaction of hearing him express his WISH THAT SIMILAR INSTITUTIONS SHOULD REVIVE ALL OVER THE COUNTRY." Towards the close of the sermon, to which this preface is prefixed, and which was preached at St. Patrick's Chapel, Huddersfield, Sept. 26th, 1839, and was printed at York in the present year [A.D. 1840], the preacher draws the comparison, referred to in page 370 of this work, between England and the continent, and between England as it is, and England as it once was, and as, in his view, it ought to be again. After describing the scenes which you may witness in Roman Catholic countries, "where you might see the poor and the afflicted crowding round some altar, where their pious confidence or experience of past favours leads them to hope that their prayers will best be heard through the intercession of our dear Lady," he thus proceeds: "Oh that the time had come, when a similar expression of our devout feelings towards her should publicly be made, and all should unite to show her that honour, that reverence, and love which she deserves from all Christians, and which has so long been denied her amongst us. There was a time when England was second to {413} no other country upon earth in the discharge of this holy duty; and it will be only PART OF THE RESTORATION OF OUR GOOD AND GLORIOUS DAYS OF OLD to revive to the utmost this part of ancient piety. Therefore do I feel sincere joy at witnessing the establishment of this excellent brotherhood, and its public manifestation in this town this day, both as a means of encouraging devotion and virtue, and as a return to one of the venerable institutions of our forefathers. Enter then fully into its spirit." ["A Sermon delivered at St. Patrick's, Huddersfield, Sept. 26th, 1839, on occasion of the Holy Catholic Gild there established, by the Rev. N. Wiseman, D.D., Professor in the University of Rome. York, 1840," p. 22, 23. The first quotation made in p. 390, is from this Sermon.] 
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16772	----	ST. THÉRÈSE OF LISIEUX THE STORY OF A SOUL (L'HISTOIRE D'UNE ÂME): THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ST. THÉRÈSE OF LISIEUX WITH ADDITIONAL WRITINGS AND SAYINGS OF ST. THÉRÈSE ______________________________ NOTE TO THIS ELECTRONIC EDITION This electronic edition of the autobiography of St. Thérèse of Lisieux (_The Story of a Soul_) includes much, but not all, of the content of _Soeur Thérèse of Lisieux_ (London: Burns, Oates & Washbourne, 1912; 8th ed., 1922), edited by Rev. T.N. Taylor. All the translated writings and sayings of St. Thérèse contained in that book are in this electronic edition, including the autobiography as well as "Counsels and Reminiscences," letters, and selected poems. Also included are the preface by Cardinal Bourne, the prologue relating Thérèse's parentage and birth, and the epilogue describing her final illness, her death, and related events. Not included are the illustrations, the list of illustrations, accounts of favors attributed to the intercession of St. Thérèse, documents related to her beatification, and some other material not written by her. Footnotes have been re-numbered sequentially in each chapter. They are presented at the end of each chapter, and some have been slightly modified for ease of reference. A few footnotes, referring to page numbers in the original, have been modified or omitted. Citations to the Psalms, many of which were numbered differently in Catholic Bibles of St. Thérèse's time than they commonly are today, have the "new" number in brackets next to the "old" number from the original--e.g., "Psalm 22[23]:1-4." Footnote numbers are shown in brackets, e.g., "[1]." The original page headers, page numbering, disclaimer of any intention to anticipate the judgment of the Church in calling St. Thérèse a "saint" before her canonization, and other extraneous matter, which were deemed suitable for a printed book in 1922 but not for an e-book in 2005, are not here. The French "oe" ligature, in words such as "soeur," is not available in the standard ISO-8859-1 character set, and obviously is represented here by the two-letter combination "oe." Italics are represented by underscores at the beginning and end, _like this._ The first word of each chapter is not set in all caps as it was in the printed book. A few obvious typographical errors have been corrected, with the changes in brackets, e.g., "[s]he" for "the" in Chapter IX. All else, including capitalization, punctuation, grammar, and British spelling, is intended to reflect the content of the eighth edition of _Soeur Thérèse of Lisieux._ If it does not, the fault is that of the transcriber (me, David McClamrock). ______________________________ SOEUR THÉRÈSE OF LISIEUX, THE LITTLE FLOWER OF JESUS A NEW AND COMPLETE TRANSLATION OF L'HISTOIRE D'UNE ÂME, WITH AN ACCOUNT OF SOME FAVOURS ATTRIBUTED TO THE INTERCESSION OF SOEUR THÉRÈSE EDITED BY T. N. TAYLOR: PRIEST OF THE ARCHDIOCESE OF GLASGOW: WITNESS BEFORE THE TRIBUNAL OF THE BEATIFICATION BURNS, OATES & WASHBOURNE LD. TWENTY-EIGHT ORCHARD STREET, LONDON, W., AND EIGHT TO TEN PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON, E.C. ______________________________ NIHIL OBSTAT JOANNES N. STRASSMAIER, S.J. Censor Deputatus IMPRIMATUR EDMUNDUS Canonicus SURMONT Vicarius Generalis WESTMONASTERII, die nonâ Decembris, 1912. ______________________________ CONTENTS ______________________________ DEDICATION PREFACE BY H.E. CARDINAL BOURNE PROLOGUE: PARENTAGE AND BIRTH AUTOBIOGRAPHY Chapter I. Earliest Memories " II. A Catholic Household " III. Pauline Enters the Carmel " IV. First Communion and Confirmation " V. Vocation of Thérèse " VI. A Pilgrimage to Rome " VII. The Little Flower Enters the Carmel " VIII. Profession of Soeur Thérèse " IX. The Night of the Soul " X. The New Commandment " XI. A Canticle of Love EPILOGUE: A VICTIM OF DIVINE LOVE COUNSELS AND REMINISCENCES LETTERS OF SOEUR THÉRÈSE To Céline To Mother Agnes of Jesus To Sister Mary of the Sacred Heart To Sister Frances Teresa To Marie Guérin To Jeanne Guérin To Missionaries PRAYERS OF SOEUR THÉRÈSE Her Act of Oblation A Morning Prayer Act of Consecration to the Holy Face Prayer in Honour of the Holy Child Prayer to the Holy Child Prayer to the Holy Face Prayer in Honour of St. Joan of Arc Prayer to Obtain Humility DAYS OF GRACE SELECTED POEMS My Song of To-day Memories I Thirst for Love To Scatter Flowers Why I Love Thee, Mary SHOWER OF ROSES [omitted] PROCESS OF BEATIFICATION [omitted] LETTERS OF PIUS X AND OTHERS [omitted] INDULGENCED PRAYERS [omitted] SUPPLEMENT [omitted] ______________________________ THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO THE SERVANT OF GOD, SOEUR THÉRÈSE, IN THANKSGIVING FOR GRACES OBTAINED, AND TO HER "PETITE MÈRE," MOTHER AGNES OF JESUS, IN GRATEFUL MEMORY OF INNUMERABLE KINDNESSES EXTENDING OVER MANY YEARS ______________________________ PREFACE As we become acquainted with the histories of those in whom, in long succession, God has been pleased to show forth examples of holiness of life, it seems as if every phase of human existence had in the history of the Church received its consecration as a power to bring men nearer to their Maker. But there is no limit to the types of sanctity which the Creator is pleased to unfold before His Creatures. To many, on reading for the first time the story of Sister Teresa of the Child Jesus and of the Holy Face, it came almost as a shock to find a very youthful member of an austere Order, strictly retired from the world, engaged in hidden prayer and mortification, appearing before us to reveal to the whole world the wonders of the close intimacy of friendship to which her Divine Spouse had been pleased to call her. Certainly the way by which Soeur Thérèse was led is not the normal life of Carmel, nor hers the manner whereby most Carmelites are called to accomplish the wondrous apostolate of intercession to which their lives are given. But no less certain is it that, in her particular case, her work for God and her apostolate were not to be confined between the walls of her religious home, or to be limited by her few years on earth. In the first place, we know that it was by obedience that the record of God's dealings with her soul were set down in writing. And again, the long tale of graces granted in such strange profusion through her intercession is proof sufficient that it was not without Divine permission and guidance that the history of her special and peculiar vocation has become the property of all Catholics in every land. It is for God to keep, and for Him to make known the secrets of His Love for men. And in the case of Soeur Thérèse it has been His Will to divulge His secrets in most generous consideration for our needs. What are the hidden treasures which Our Divine Master thus reveals to us through His chosen little servant? It is the old story of simplicity in God's service, of the perfect accomplishment of small recurring duties, of trustful confidence in Him who made and has redeemed and sanctified us. Humility, self-effacement, obedience, hiddenness, unfaltering charity, with all the self-control and constant effort that they imply, are written on every page of the history of this little Saint. And, as we turn its pages, the lesson is borne in upon our souls that there is no surer nor safer way of pleasing Our Father Who is in Heaven than by remaining ever as little children in His sight. Doubtless for many of her clients whose hearts are kindled as they read this book, Soeur Thérèse will obtain, as she has done so often in the past, wonderful gifts for health of soul and body. But may she win for all of us without exception a deep and fruitful conviction of the unchanging truth, that unless we become as little children in the doing of our Heavenly Father's Will, we cannot enter into our Eternal Home. FRANCIS CARDINAL BOURNE, Archbishop of Westminster. Feast of the Presentation of Our Blessed Lady, 1912. ______________________________ PROLOGUE: THE PARENTAGE & BIRTH OF MARIE FRANÇOISE THÉRÈSE MARTIN In the month of September, 1843, a young man of twenty climbed the mountain of the Great St. Bernard. His eyes shone with a holy enthusiasm as the splendour of the Alps stirred to the depths his responsive nature. Presently, accustomed as they were to discern God's beauty in the beauty of His handiwork, they glistened with tears. He paused for a space, then, continuing his journey, soon reached the celebrated monastery that like a beacon on those heights darts afar its beams of faith and magnificent charity. The Prior, struck by the frank and open countenance of his guest, welcomed him with more than wonted hospitality. Louis Joseph Stanislaus Martin was the pilgrim's name. He was born on August 22, 1823, at Bordeaux, while his father, a brave and devout soldier, was captain in the garrison there. "God has predestined this little one for Himself," said the saintly Bishop of Bordeaux on the occasion of his baptism, and events have proved the truth of his words. From this town, by the banks of the Garonne, his parents went to Alençon in lower Normandy, and there in their new home, as in their old one, Louis was the cherished Benjamin. It was not the loveliness of Swiss lakes and mountains and skies that had drawn the traveller from distant Alençon. He came to the monastery--and his journey was chiefly on foot--to consecrate his days to God. On learning his purpose the Prior questioned him upon his knowledge of Latin, only to discover that the young aspirant had not completed his course of studies in that language. "I am indeed sorry, my child," said the venerable monk, "since this is an essential condition, but you must not be disheartened. Go back to your own country, apply yourself diligently, and when you have ended your studies we shall receive you with open arms." Louis was disappointed. He set out for home--for exile he would have said--but ere long he saw clearly that his life was to be dedicated to God in another and equally fruitful way, and that the Alpine monastery was to be nothing more to him than a sweet memory. * * * * * * A few years after the vain quest of Louis Martin, a similar scene was enacted in Alençon itself. Accompanied by her mother, Zélie Guérin--an attractive and pious girl--presented herself at the Convent of the Sisters of Charity in the hope of gaining admission. For years it had been her desire to share the Sisters' work, but this was not to be. In the interview that followed, the Superioress--guided by the Holy Ghost--decided unhesitatingly that Zélie's vocation was not for the religious life. God wanted her in the world, and so she returned to her parents, and to the companionship of her elder sister and her younger brother. Shortly afterwards the gates of the Visitation Convent at Le Mans closed upon her beloved sister, and Zélie's thoughts turned to the Sacrament of Holy Matrimony. "O my God"--she repeated constantly-- "since I am unworthy to be Thy Spouse, like my dear sister, I shall enter the married state to fulfill Thy Holy Will, and I beseech Thee to make me the mother of many children, and to grant that all of them may be dedicated to Thee." God gave ear to her prayer, and His Finger was visible in the circumstances which led to her becoming the wife of Louis Martin, on July 12, 1858, in Alençon's lovely Church of Notre Dame. Like the chaste Tobias, they were joined together in matrimony--"solely for the love of children, in whom God's Name might be blessed for ever and ever." Nine white flowers bloomed in this sacred garden. Of the nine, four were transplanted to Paradise ere their buds had quite unfolded, while five were gathered in God's walled gardens upon earth, one entering the Visitation Convent at Caen, the others the Carmel of Lisieux. From the cradle all were dedicated to Mary Immaculate, and all received her name: Marie Louise, Marie Pauline, Marie Léonie, Marie Hélène, who died at the age of four and a half, Marie Joseph Louis, Marie Joseph Jean Baptiste, Marie Céline, Marie Mélanie Therèse, who died when three months old, and lastly, _Marie Françoise Thérèse._ The two boys were the fruit of prayers and tears. After the birth of the four elder girls, their parents entreated St. Joseph to obtain for them the favour of a son who should become a priest and a missionary. Marie Joseph soon was given them, and his pretty ways appealed to all hearts, but only five months had run their course when Heaven demanded what it had lent. Then followed more urgent novenas. The grandeur of the Priesthood, glorious upon earth, ineffable in eternity, was so well understood by those Christian parents, that their hearts coveted it most dearly. At all costs the family must have a Priest of the Lord, one who would be an apostle, peradventure a martyr. But, "the thoughts of the Lord are not our thoughts, His ways are not our ways." Another little Joseph was born, and with him hope once again grew strong. Alas! Nine months had scarcely passed when he, too, fled from this world and joined his angel brother. They did not ask again. Yet, could the veil of the future have been lifted, their heavy hearts would, of a surety, have been comforted. A child was to be vouchsafed them who would be a herald of Divine love, not to China alone, but to all the ends of the earth. Nay, they themselves were destined to shine as apostles, and we read on one of the first pages of the Portuguese edition of the Autobiography, these significant words of an eminent Jesuit: "To the Sacred Memory of Louis Joseph Stanislaus Martin and of Zélie Guérin, the blessed parents of Sister Teresa of the Child Jesus, for an example to all Christian parents." They little dreamed of this future apostolate, nevertheless they made ready their souls day by day to be God's own instruments in God's good time. With most loving resignation they greeted the many crosses which the Lord laid upon them--the Lord whose tender name of Father is truest in the dark hour of trial. Every morning saw them at Mass; together they knelt at the Holy Table. They strictly observed the fasts and abstinences of the Church, kept Sunday as a day of complete rest from work in spite of the remonstrance of friends, and found in pious reading their most delightful recreation. They prayed in common--after the touching example of Captain Martin, whose devout way of repeating the _Our Father_ brought tears to all eyes. Thus the great Christian virtues flourished in their home. Wealth did not bring luxury in its train, and a strict simplicity was invariably observed. "How mistaken are the great majority of men!" Madame Martin used often to say. "If they are rich, they at once desire honours; and if these are obtained, they are still unhappy; for never can that heart be satisfied which seeks anything but God." Her whole ambition as a mother was directed to Heaven. "Four of my children are already well settled in life," she once wrote; "and the others will go likewise to that Heavenly Kingdom--enriched with greater merit because the combat will have been more prolonged." Charity in all its forms was a natural outlet to the piety of these simple hearts. Husband and wife set aside each year a considerable portion of their earnings for the Propagation of the Faith; they relieved poor persons in distress, and ministered to them with their own hands. On one occasion Monsieur Martin, like a good Samaritan, was seen to raise a drunken man from the ground in a busy thoroughfare, take his bag of tools, support him on his arm, and lead him home. Another time when he saw, in a railway station, a poor and starving epileptic without the means to return to his distant home, he was so touched with pity that he took off his hat and, placing in it an alms, proceeded to beg from the passengers on behalf of the sufferer. Money poured in, and it was with a heart brimming over with gratitude that the sick man blessed his benefactor. Never did he allow the meannesses of human respect to degrade his Christian dignity. In whatever company he might be, he always saluted the Blessed Sacrament when passing a Church; and he never met a priest without paying him a mark of respect. A word from his lips sufficed to silence whosoever dared blaspheme in his presence. In reward for his virtues, God showered even temporal blessings on His faithful servant. In 1871 he was able to give up his business as a jeweller, and retire to a house in the Rue St. Blaise. The making of point-lace, however, begun by Madame Martin, was still carried on. In that house the "Little Flower of Jesus" first saw the sunshine. Again and again, in the pages of her Autobiography, she calls herself by this modest name of the _Little Flower,_ emblematic of her humility, her purity, her simplicity, and it may be added, of the poetry of her soul. The reader will learn in the Epilogue how it was also used by one of her favourite martyr-saints--the now Blessed Théophane Vénard. On the manuscript of her Autobiography she set the title: _"The Story of the Springtime of a little white Flower,"_ and in truth such it was, for long ere the rigours of life's winter came round, the Flower was blossoming in Paradise. It was, however, in mid-winter, January 2, 1873, that this ninth child of Louis Martin and Zélie Guérin was born. Marie and Pauline were at home for the Christmas holidays from the Visitation Convent at Le Mans, and though there was, it is true, a slight disappointment that the future priest was still denied them, it quickly passed, and the little one was regarded as a special gift from Heaven. Later on, her beloved Father delighted in calling her his "Little Queen," adding at times the high-sounding titles--"Of France and Navarre." The Little Queen was indeed well received that winter's morning, and in the course of the day a poor waif rang timidly at the door of the happy home, and presented a paper bearing the following simple stanza: "Smile and swiftly grow; All beckons thee to joy, Sweet love, and tenderest care. Smile gladly at the dawn, Bud of an hour!--for thou Shalt be a stately rose." It was a charming prophecy, for the bud unfolded its petals and became a rose--a rose of love--but not for long, "for the space of a morn!" * * * * * * On January 4, she was carried to the Church of Notre Dame to receive the Sacrament of Baptism; her eldest sister, Marie, was her godmother, and she was given the name of _Marie Françoise Thérèse._[1] All was joy at first, but soon the tender bud drooped on its delicate stem: little hope was held out--it must wither and die. "You must pray to St. Francis de Sales," wrote her aunt from the convent at Le Mans, "and you must promise, if the child recovers, to call her by her second name, Frances." This was a sword-thrust for the Mother. Leaning over the cradle of her Thérèse, she awaited the coming of the end, saying: "Only when the last hope has gone, will I promise to call her Frances." The gentle St. Francis waived his claim in favour of the great Reformer of the Carmelite Order: the child recovered, and so retained her sweet name of Thérèse. Sorrow, however, was mixed with the Mother's joy, when it became necessary to send the babe to a foster-mother in the country. There the "little rose-bud" grew in beauty, and after some months had gained strength sufficient to allow of her being brought back to Alençon. Her memory of this short but happy time spent with her sainted Mother in the Rue St. Blaise was extraordinarily vivid. To-day a tablet on the balcony of No. 42 informs the passers-by that here was born a certain Carmelite, by name, Sister Teresa of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face. Fifteen years have gone since the meeting in Heaven of Madame Martin and her Carmelite child, and if the pilgrimage to where the Little Flower first saw the light of day, be not so large as that to the grave where her remains await their glorious resurrection, it may nevertheless be numbered in thousands. And to the English-speaking pilgrim there is an added pleasure in the fact that her most notable convert, the first minister of the United Free Church of Scotland to enter the True Fold, performs, with his convert wife, the courteous duties of host. * * * * * * It will not be amiss to say a brief word here on the brother and sister of Madame Martin. Her sister--in religion, Sister Marie Dosithea--led a life so holy at Le Mans that she was cited by Dom Guéranger, perhaps the most distinguished Benedictine of the nineteenth century, as the model of a perfect nun. By her own confession, she had never been guilty from earliest childhood of the smallest deliberate fault. She died on February 24, 1877. It was in the convent made fragrant by such holiness that her niece Pauline Martin, elder sister and "little mother" of Thérèse, and for five years her Prioress at the Carmel, received her education. And if the Little Flower may have imbibed the liturgical spirit from her teachers, the daughters of St. Benedict in Lisieux, so that she could say before her death: "I do not think it is possible for anyone to have desired more than I to assist properly at choir and to recite perfectly the Divine Office"--may it not be to the influences from Le Mans that may be traced something of the honey-sweet spirit of St. Francis de Sales which pervades the pages of the Autobiography? With the brother of Zélie Guérin the reader will make acquaintance in the narrative of Thérèse. He was a chemist in Lisieux, and it was there his daughter Jeanne Guérin married Dr. La Néele and his younger child Marie entered the Carmel. Our foreign missionaries had a warm friend in the uncle of Thérèse--for his charities he was made godfather to an African King; and to the Catholic Press--that home missionary--he was ever most devoted. Founder, at Lisieux, of the Nocturnal Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, and a zealous member of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, he was called to his abundant reward on September 28, 1909. Verily the lamp of faith is not extinct in the land of the Norman. The Father of Thérèse, after the death of his wife, likewise made his home in the delightful town which lies amid the beautiful apple orchards of the valley of the Touques. Lisieux is deeply interesting by reason of its fine old churches of St. Jacques and St. Pierre, and its wonderful specimens of quaint houses, some of which date from the twelfth century. In matters of faith it is neither fervent nor hostile, and in 1877 its inhabitants little thought that through their new citizen, Marie Françoise Thérèse Martin, their town would be rendered immortal. * * * * * * "The cell at Lisieux reminds us of the cell of the Blessed Gabriel at Isola. There is the same even tenor of way, the same magnificant fidelity in little things, the same flames of divine charity, consuming but concealed. Nazareth, with the simplicity of its Child, and the calm abysmal love of Mary and Joseph--Nazareth, adorable but imitable, gives the key to her spirit, and her Autobiography does but repeat the lessons of the thirty hidden years."[2] And it repeats them with an unrivalled charm. "This master of asceticism," writes a biographer[3] of St. Ignatius Loyola, "loved the garden and loved the flowers. In the balcony of his study he sat gazing on the stars: it was then Lainez heard him say: 'Oh, how earth grows base to me when I look on Heaven!' . . . The like imaginative strain, so scorned of our petty day, inhered in all the lofty souls of that age. Even the Saints of our day speak a less radiant language: and sanctity shows 'shorn of its rays' through the black fog of universal utilitarianism, the materiality which men have drawn into the very lungs of their souls." This is not true of the sainted authoress of the chapters that follow--"less radiant," in the medium of a translation. In her own inimitable pages, as in those of a Campion or an Ignatius, a Teresa of Avila, or a John of the Cross--the Spirit of Poetry is the handmaiden of Holiness. This new lover of flowers and student of the stars, this "strewer of roses," has uplifted a million hearts from the "base earth" and "black fog" to the very throne of God, and her mission is as yet but begun. The pen of Soeur Thérèse herself must now take up the narrative. It will do so in words that do not merely tell of love but set the heart on fire, and at the same time lay bare the workings of God in a soul that "since the age of three never refused the Good God anything." The writing of this Autobiography was an act of obedience, and the Prioress who imposed the task sought, in all simplicity, her own personal edification. But the fragrance of its pages was such that she was advised to publish them to the world. She did so in 1899 under the title of _L'Histoire d'une Âme._ An English version by M. H. Dziewicki appeared in 1901. This new translation relates more fully the story of the childhood, girlhood, and brief convent days of Soeur Thérèse. It tells of her "Roses," and sets forth again, in our world-wide tongue, her world-wide embassy--the ever ancient message of God's Merciful Love, the ever new _way_ to Him of "confidence and self-surrender." The Editor. ______________________________ [1] The baptismal entry, with its numerous signatures, is shown to visitors, and a tablet in the baptistry of the beautiful Gothic church tells the pilgrim that here the "Little Queen" was made a child of God. [Ed.] [2] _"As Little Children"_: the abridged life of Soeur Thérèse. Published at the Orphans' Press, Rochdale. [3] Francis Thompson. ______________________________ THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF SOEUR THÉRÈSE OF LISIEUX, ENTITLED BY HERSELF: "THE STORY OF THE SPRINGTIME OF A LITTLE WHITE FLOWER" ______________________________ CHAPTER I EARLIEST MEMORIES It is to you, dear Mother, that I am about to confide the story of my soul. When you asked me to write it, I feared the task might unsettle me, but since then Our Lord has deigned to make me understand that by simple obedience I shall please Him best. I begin therefore to sing what must be my eternal song: "the Mercies of the Lord."[1] Before setting about my task I knelt before the statue of Our Lady which had given my family so many proofs of Our Heavenly Mother's loving care.[2] As I knelt I begged of that dear Mother to guide my hand, and thus ensure that only what was pleasing to her should find place here. Then opening the Gospels, my eyes fell on these words: "Jesus, going up into a mountain, called unto Him whom He would Himself."[3] They threw a clear light upon the mystery of my vocation and of my entire life, and above all upon the favours which Our Lord has granted to my soul. He does not call those who are worthy, but those whom He will. As St. Paul says: "God will have mercy on whom He will have mercy.[4] So then it is not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth, but of God that showeth mercy."[5] I often asked myself why God had preferences, why all souls did not receive an equal measure of grace. I was filled with wonder when I saw extraordinary favours showered on great sinners like St. Paul, St. Augustine, St. Mary Magdalen, and many others, whom He forced, so to speak, to receive His grace. In reading the lives of the Saints I was surprised to see that there were certain privileged souls, whom Our Lord favoured from the cradle to the grave, allowing no obstacle in their path which might keep them from mounting towards Him, permitting no sin to soil the spotless brightness of their baptismal robe. And again it puzzled me why so many poor savages should die without having even heard the name of God. Our Lord has deigned to explain this mystery to me. He showed me the book of nature, and I understood that every flower created by Him is beautiful, that the brilliance of the rose and the whiteness of the lily do not lessen the perfume of the violet or the sweet simplicity of the daisy. I understood that if all the lowly flowers wished to be roses, nature would lose its springtide beauty, and the fields would no longer be enamelled with lovely hues. And so it is in the world of souls, Our Lord's living garden. He has been pleased to create great Saints who may be compared to the lily and the rose, but He has also created lesser ones, who must be content to be daisies or simple violets flowering at His Feet, and whose mission it is to gladden His Divine Eyes when He deigns to look down on them. And the more gladly they do His Will the greater is their perfection. I understood this also, that God's Love is made manifest as well in a simple soul which does not resist His grace as in one more highly endowed. In fact, the characteristic of love being self-abasement, if all souls resembled the holy Doctors who have illuminated the Church, it seems that God in coming to them would not stoop low enough. But He has created the little child, who knows nothing and can but utter feeble cries, and the poor savage who has only the natural law to guide him, and it is to their hearts that He deigns to stoop. These are the field flowers whose simplicity charms Him; and by His condescension to them Our Saviour shows His infinite greatness. As the sun shines both on the cedar and on the floweret, so the Divine Sun illumines every soul, great and small, and all correspond to His care--just as in nature the seasons are so disposed that on the appointed day the humblest daisy shall unfold its petals. You will wonder, dear Mother, to what all this is leading, for till now I have said nothing that sounds like the story of my life; but did you not tell me to write quite freely whatever came into my mind? So, it will not be my life properly speaking, that you will find in these pages, but my thoughts about the graces which it has pleased Our Lord to bestow on me. I am now at a time of life when I can look back on the past, for my soul has been refined in the crucible of interior and exterior trials. Now, like a flower after the storm, I can raise my head and see that the words of the Psalm are realised in me: "The Lord is my Shepherd and I shall want nothing. He hath set me in a place of pasture. He hath brought me up on the water of refreshment. He hath converted my soul. He hath led me on the paths of justice for His own Name's sake. For though I should walk in the midst of the shadow of death, I will fear no evils for Thou are with me."[6] Yes, to me Our Lord has always been "compassionate and merciful, long-suffering and plenteous in mercy."[7] And so it gives me great joy, dear Mother, to come to you and sing His unspeakable mercies. It is for you alone that I write the story of the little flower gathered by Jesus. This thought will help me to speak freely, without troubling either about style or about the many digressions that I shall make; for a Mother's heart always understands her child, even when it can only lisp, and so I am sure of being understood and my meaning appreciated. If a little flower could speak, it seems to me that it would tell us quite simply all that God has done for it, without hiding any of its gifts. It would not, under the pretext of humility, say that it was not pretty, or that it had not a sweet scent, that the sun had withered its petals, or the storm bruised its stem, if it knew that such were not the case. The Little Flower, that now tells her tale, rejoiced in having to publish the wholly undeserved favours bestowed upon her by Our Lord. She knows that she had nothing in herself worthy of attracting Him: His Mercy alone showered blessings on her. He allowed her to grow in holy soil enriched with the odour of purity, and preceded by eight lilies of shining whiteness. In His Love He willed to preserve her from the poisoned breath of the world--hardly had her petals unfolded when this good Master transplanted her to the mountain of Carmel, Our Lady's chosen garden. And now, dear Mother, having summed up in a few words all that God's goodness has done for me, I will relate in detail the story of my childhood. I know that, though to others it may seem wearisome, your motherly heart will find pleasure in it. In the story of my soul, up to the time of my entry into the Carmel, there are three clearly marked periods: the first, in spite of its shortness, is by no means the least rich in memories. It extends from the dawn of reason to the death of my dearly loved Mother; in other words, till I was four years and eight months old. God, in His goodness, did me the favour of awakening my intelligence very early, and He has imprinted the recollections of my childhood so deeply in my memory that past events seem to have happened but yesterday. Without doubt He wished to make me know and appreciate the Mother He had given me. Alas! His Divine Hand soon took her from me to crown her in Heaven. All my life it has pleased Him to surround me with affection. My first recollections are of loving smiles and tender caresses; but if He made others love me so much, He made me love them too, for I was of an affectionate nature. You can hardly imagine how much I loved my Father and Mother, and, being very demonstrative, I showed my love in a thousand little ways, though the means I employed make me smile now when I think of them. Dear Mother, you have given me the letters which my Mother wrote at this time to Pauline, who was at school at the Visitation Convent at Le Mans. I remember perfectly the events they refer to, but it will be easier for me simply to quote some passages, though these charming letters, inspired by a Mother's love, are too often full of my praises. In proof of what I have said about my way of showing affection for my parents, here is an example: "Baby is the dearest little rogue; she comes to kiss me, and at the same time wishes me to die. 'Oh, how I wish you would die, dear Mamma,' she said, and when she was scolded she was quite astonished, and answered: 'But I want you to go to Heaven, and you say we must die to go there'; and in her outburst of affection for her Father she wishes him to die too. The dear little thing will hardly leave me, she follows me everywhere, but likes going into the garden best; when I am not there she refuses to stay, and cries so much that they are obliged to bring her back. She will not even go upstairs alone without calling me at each step, 'Mamma! Mamma!' and if I forget to answer 'Yes, darling!' she waits where she is, and will not move." I was nearly three years old when my Mother wrote: "Little Thérèse asked me the other day if she would go to Heaven. 'Yes, if you are good,' I told her. 'Oh, Mamma,' she answered, 'then if I am not good, shall I go to Hell? Well, you know what I will do--I shall fly to you in Heaven, and you will hold me tight in your arms, and how could God take me away then?' I saw that she was convinced that God could do nothing to her if she hid herself in my arms." "Marie loves her little sister very much; indeed she is a child who delights us all. She is extraordinarily outspoken, and it is charming to see her run after me to confess her childish faults: 'Mamma, I have pushed Céline; I slapped her once, but I'll not do it again.' The moment she has done anything mischievous, everyone must know. Yesterday, without meaning to do so, she tore off a small piece of wall paper; you would have been sorry for her--she wanted to tell her father immediately. When he came home four hours later, everyone else had forgotten about it, but she ran at once to Marie saying: 'Tell Papa that I tore the paper.' She waited there like a criminal for sentence; but she thinks she is more easily forgiven if she accuses herself." Papa's name fills me with many happy memories. Mamma laughingly said he always did whatever I wanted, but he answered: "Well, why not? She is the Queen!" Then he would lift me on to his shoulder, and caress me in all sorts of ways. Yet I cannot say that he spoilt me. I remember one day while I was swinging he called out as he passed: "Come and kiss me, little Queen." Contrary to my usual custom, I would not stir, and answered pertly: "You must come for it, Papa." He refused quite rightly, and went away. Marie was there and scolded me, saying: "How naughty to answer Papa like that!" Her reproof took effect; I got off the swing at once, and the whole house resounded with my cries. I hurried upstairs, not waiting this time to call Mamma at each step; my one thought was to find Papa and make my peace with him. I need not tell you that this was soon done. I could not bear to think I had grieved my beloved parents, and I acknowledged my faults instantly, as this little anecdote, related by my Mother, will show: "One morning before going downstairs I wanted to kiss Thérèse; she seemed to be fast asleep, and I did not like to wake her, but Marie said: 'Mamma, I am sure she is only pretending.' So I bent down to kiss her forehead, and immediately she hid herself under the clothes, saying in the tone of a spoilt child: 'I don't want anyone to look at me.' I was not pleased with her, and told her so. A minute or two afterwards I heard her crying, and was surprised to see her by my side. She had got out of her cot by herself, and had come downstairs with bare feet, stumbling over her long nightdress. Her little face was wet with tears: 'Mamma,' she said, throwing herself on my knee, 'I am sorry for being naughty--forgive me!' Pardon was quickly granted; I took the little angel in my arms and pressed her to my heart, smothering her with kisses." I remember also my great affection for my eldest sister Marie, who had just left school. Without seeming to do so, I took in all that I saw and heard, and I think that I reflected on things then as I do now. I listened attentively while she taught Céline, and was very good and obedient, so as to obtain the privilege of being allowed in the room during lessons. She gave me many trifling presents which pleased me greatly. I was proud of my two big sisters; but as Pauline seemed so far away from us, I thought of her all day long. When I was only just learning to talk, and Mamma asked: "What are you thinking about?" my answer invariably was: "Pauline." Sometimes I heard people saying that Pauline would be a nun, and, without quite knowing what it meant, I thought: "I will be a nun too." This is one of my first recollections, and I have never changed my mind; so it was the example of this beloved sister which, from the age of two, drew me to the Divine Spouse of Virgins. My dearest Mother, what tender memories of Pauline I could confide to you here! But it would take me too long. Léonie had also a very warm place in my heart; she loved me very much, and her love was returned. In the evening when she came home from school she used to take care of me while the others went out, and it seems to me I can still hear the sweet songs she sang to put me to sleep. I remember perfectly the day of her First Communion, and I remember also her companion, the poor child whom my Mother dressed, according to the touching custom of the well-to-do families in Alençon. This child did not leave Léonie for an instant on that happy day, and in the evening at the grand dinner she sat in the place of honour. Alas! I was too small to stay up for this feast, but I shared in it a little, thanks to Papa's goodness, for he came himself to bring his little Queen a piece of the iced cake. The only one now left to speak of is Céline, the companion of my childhood. My memories of her are so many that I do not know which to choose. We understood each other perfectly, but I was much more forward and lively, and far less ingenuous. Here is a letter which will show you, dear Mother, how sweet was Céline, and how naughty Thérèse. I was then nearly three years old, and Céline six and a half. "Céline is naturally inclined to be good; as to the little puss, Thérèse, one cannot tell how she will turn out, she is so young and heedless. She is a very intelligent child, but has not nearly so sweet a disposition as her sister, and her stubbornness is almost unconquerable. When she has said 'No,' nothing will make her change; one could leave her all day in the cellar without getting her to say 'Yes.' She would sooner sleep there." I had another fault also, of which my Mother did not speak in her letters: it was self-love. Here are two instances: --One day, no doubt wishing to see how far my pride would go, she smiled and said to me, "Thérèse, if you will kiss the ground I will give you a halfpenny." In those days a halfpenny was a fortune, and in order to gain it I had not far to stoop, for I was so tiny there was not much distance between me and the ground; but my pride was up in arms, and holding myself very erect, I said, "No, thank you, Mamma, I would rather go without it." Another time we were going into the country to see some friends. Mamma told Marie to put on my prettiest frock, but not to let me have bare arms. I did not say a word, and appeared as indifferent as children of that age should be, but I said to myself, "I should have looked much prettier with bare arms." With such a disposition I feel sure that had I been brought up by careless parents I should have become very wicked, and perhaps have lost my soul. But Jesus watched over His little Spouse, and turned even her faults to advantage, for, being checked early in life, they became a means of leading her towards perfection. For instance, as I had great self-love and an innate love of good as well, it was enough to tell me once: "You must not do that," and I never wanted to do it again. Having only good example before my eyes, I naturally wished to follow it, and I see with pleasure in my Mother's letters that as I grew older I began to be a greater comfort. This is what she writes in 1876: "Even Thérèse is anxious to make sacrifices. Marie has given her little sisters a string of beads on purpose to count their acts of self-denial. They have really spiritual, but very amusing, conversations together. Céline said the other day: 'How can God be in such a tiny Host?' Thérèse answered: 'That is not strange, because God is Almighty!' 'And what does Almighty mean?' 'It means that He can do whatever He likes.' "But it is more amusing still to see Thérèse put her hand in her pocket, time after time, to pull a bead along the string, whenever she makes a little sacrifice. The children are inseparable, and are quite sufficient company for one another. Nurse has given Thérèse two bantams, and every day after dinner she and Céline sit by the fire and play with them. "One morning Thérèse got out of her cot and climbed into Céline's. The nurse went to fetch her to be dressed, and, when at last she found her, the little thing said, hugging her sister very hard: 'Oh, Louise! leave me here, don't you see that we are like the little white bantams, we can't be separated from one another.'" It is quite true that I could not be separated from Céline; I would rather leave my dessert unfinished at table than let her go without me, and I would get down from my high chair when she did, and off we went to play together. On Sundays, as I was still too small to go to the long services, Mamma stayed at home to take care of me. I was always very good, walking about on tip-toe; but as soon as I heard the door open there was a tremendous outburst of joy--I threw myself on my dear little sister, exclaiming: "Oh, Céline! give me the blessed bread, quick!"[8] One day she had not brought any--what was to be done? I could not do without it, for I called this little feast my Mass. A bright idea struck me: "You have no blessed bread! --make some." Céline immediately opened the cupboard, took out the bread, cut a tiny bit off, and after saying a Hail Mary quite solemnly over it, triumphantly presented it to me; and I, making the sign of the Cross, ate it with devotion, fancying it tasted exactly like the real blessed bread. One day Léonie, thinking no doubt that she was too big to play with dolls, brought us a basket filled with clothes, pretty pieces of stuff, and other trifles on which her doll was laid: "Here, dears," she said, "choose whatever you like." Céline looked at it, and took a woollen ball. After thinking about it for a minute, I put out my hand saying: "I choose everything," and I carried off both doll and basket without more ado. This childish incident was a forecast, so to speak, of my whole life. Later on, when the way of perfection was opened out before me, I realised that in order to become a Saint one must suffer much, always seek the most perfect path, and forget oneself. I also understood that there are many degrees of holiness, that each soul is free to respond to the calls of Our Lord, to do much or little for His Love--in a word, to choose amongst the sacrifices He asks. And then also, as in the days of my childhood, I cried out: "My God, I choose everything, I will not be a Saint by halves, I am not afraid of suffering for Thee, I only fear one thing, and that is to do my own will. Accept the offering of my will, for I choose all that Thou willest." But, dear Mother, I am forgetting myself--I must not tell you yet of my girlhood, I am still speaking of the baby of three and four years old. I remember a dream I had at that age which impressed itself very deeply on my memory. I thought I was walking alone in the garden when, suddenly, I saw near the arbour two hideous little devils dancing with surprising agility on a barrel of lime, in spite of the heavy irons attached to their feet. At first they cast fiery glances at me; then, as though suddenly terrified, I saw them, in the twinkling of an eye, throw themselves down to the bottom of the barrel, from which they came out somehow, only to run and hide themselves in the laundry which opened into the garden. Finding them such cowards, I wanted to know what they were going to do, and, overcoming my fears, I went to the window. The wretched little creatures were there, running about on the tables, not knowing how to hide themselves from my gaze. From time to time they came nearer, peering through the windows with an uneasy air, then, seeing that I was still there, they began to run about again looking quite desperate. Of course this dream was nothing extraordinary; yet I think Our Lord made use of it to show me that a soul in the state of grace has nothing to fear from the devil, who is a coward, and will even fly from the gaze of a little child. Dear Mother, how happy I was at that age! I was beginning to enjoy life, and goodness itself seemed full of charms. Probably my character was the same as it is now, for even then I had great self-command, and made a practice of never complaining when my things were taken; even if I was unjustly accused, I preferred to keep silence. There was no merit in this, for I did it naturally. How quickly those sunny years of my childhood passed away, and what tender memories they have imprinted on my mind! I remember the Sunday walks when my dear Mother always accompanied us; and I can still feel the impression made on my childish heart at the sight of the fields bright with cornflowers, poppies, and marguerites. Even at that age I loved far-stretching views, sunlit spaces and stately trees; in a word, all nature charmed me and lifted up my soul to Heaven. Often, during these walks, we met poor people. I was always chosen to give them an alms, which made me feel very happy. Sometimes, my dear Father, knowing the way was too long for his little Queen, took me home. This was a cause of grief, and to console me Céline would fill her basket with daisies, and give them to me on her return. Truly everything on earth smiled on me; I found flowers strewn at every step, and my naturally happy disposition helped to make life bright. But a new era was about to dawn. I was to be the Spouse of Our Lord at such an early age that it was necessary I should suffer from my childhood. As the early spring flowers begin to come up under the snow and open at the first rays of the sun, so the Little Flower whose story I am writing had to pass through the winter of trial and to have her tender cup filled with the dew of tears. ______________________________ [1] Ps. 88[89]:1. [2] This statue twice appeared as if endowed with life, in order to enlighten and console Mme. Martin, mother of Thérèse. A like favour was granted to Thérèse herself, as will be seen in the course of the narrative. [3] Mark 3:13. [4] Cf. Exodus 33:19. [5] Cf. Rom. 9:16. [6] Cf. Ps. 22[23]:1-4. [7] Ps. 102[103]:8. [8] The custom still prevails in some parts of France of blessing bread at the Offertory of the Mass and then distributing it to the faithful. It is known as _pain bénit._ This blessing only takes place at the Parochial Mass. [Ed.] ______________________________ CHAPTER II A CATHOLIC HOUSEHOLD All the details of my Mother's illness are still fresh in my mind. I remember especially her last weeks on earth, when Céline and I felt like poor little exiles. Every morning a friend came to fetch us, and we spent the day with her. Once, we had not had time to say our prayers before starting, and on the way my little sister whispered: "Must we tell her that we have not said our prayers?" "Yes," I answered. So, very timidly, Céline confided our secret to her, and she exclaimed: "Well, well, children, you shall say them." Then she took us to a large room, and left us there. Céline looked at me in amazement. I was equally astonished, and exclaimed: "This is not like Mamma, she always said our prayers with us." During the day, in spite of all efforts to amuse us, the thought of our dear Mother was constantly in our minds. I remember once, when my sister had an apricot given to her, she leant towards me and said: "We will not eat it, I will give it to Mamma." Alas! our beloved Mother was now too ill to eat any earthly fruit; she would never more be satisfied but by the glory of Heaven. There she would drink of the mysterious wine which Jesus, at His Last Supper, promised to share with us in the Kingdom of His Father. The touching ceremony of Extreme Unction made a deep impression on me. I can still see the place where I knelt, and hear my poor Father's sobs. My dear Mother died on August 28, 1877, in her forty-sixth year. The day after her death my Father took me in his arms and said: "Come and kiss your dear Mother for the last time." Without saying a word I put my lips to her icy forehead. I do not remember having cried much, and I did not talk to anyone of all that filled my heart; I looked and listened in silence, and I saw many things they would have hidden from me. Once I found myself close to the coffin in the passage. I stood looking at it for a long time; I had never seen one before, but I knew what it was. I was so small that I had to lift up my head to see its whole length, and it seemed to me very big and very sad. Fifteen years later I was again standing by another coffin, that of our holy Mother Genevieve,[1] and I was carried back to the days of my childhood. Memories crowded upon me; it was the same little Thérèse who looked at it, but she had grown, and the coffin seemed small. She had not to lift up her head to it, now she only raised her eyes to contemplate Heaven which seemed to her very full of joy, for trials had matured and strengthened her soul, so that nothing on earth could make her grieve. Our Lord did not leave me wholly an orphan; on the day of my Mother's funeral He gave me another mother, and allowed me to choose her freely. We were all five together, looking at one another sadly, when our nurse, overcome with emotion, said, turning to Céline and to me: "Poor little dears, you no longer have a Mother." Then Céline threw herself into Marie's arms, crying: "Well, you will be my Mother now." I was so accustomed to imitate Céline that I should undoubtedly have followed her example, but I feared Pauline would be sad and feel herself left out if she too had not a little daughter. So, with a loving look, I hid my face on her breast saying in my turn: "And Pauline will be my Mother." That day, as I have said, began the second period of my life. It was the most sorrowful of all, especially after Pauline, my second Mother, entered the Carmel; and it lasted from the time I was four years old until I was fourteen, when I recovered much of my childish gaiety, even though I understood more fully the serious side of life. I must tell you that after my Mother's death my naturally happy disposition completely changed. Instead of being lively and demonstrative as I had been, I became timid, shy, and extremely sensitive; a look was enough to make me burst into tears. I could not bear to be noticed or to meet strangers, and was only at ease in my own family circle. There I was always cherished with the most loving care; my Father's affectionate heart seemed endowed with a mother's love, and my sisters were no less tender and devoted. If Our Lord had not lavished so much love and sunshine on His Little Flower, she never could have become acclimatised to this earth. Still too weak to bear the storm, she needed warmth, refreshing dew, and soft breezes, and these gifts were never wanting to her, even in the chilling seasons of trials. Soon after my Mother's death, Papa made up his mind to leave Alençon and live at Lisieux, so that we might be near our uncle, my Mother's brother. He made this sacrifice in order that my young sisters should have the benefit of their aunt's guidance in their new life, and that she might act as a mother towards them. I did not feel any grief at leaving my native town: children love change and anything out of the common, and so I was pleased to come to Lisieux. I remember the journey quite well, and our arrival in the evening at my uncle's house, and I can still see my little cousins, Jeanne and Marie, waiting on the doorstep with my aunt. How touching was the affection all these dear ones showed us! The next day they took us to our new home, _Les Buissonets,_[2] situated in a quiet part of the town. I was charmed with the house my Father had taken. The large upper window from which there was an extensive view, the flower garden in front, and the kitchen garden at the back--all these seemed delightfully new to my childish mind; and this happy home became the scene of many joys and of family gatherings which I can never forget. Elsewhere, as I said before, I felt an exile, I cried and fretted for my Mother; but here my little heart expanded, and I smiled on life once more. When I woke there were my sisters ready to caress me, and I said my prayers kneeling between them. Then Pauline gave me my reading lesson, and I remember that "Heaven" was the first word I could read alone. When lessons were over I went upstairs, where Papa was generally to be found, and how pleased I was when I had good marks to show. Every afternoon I went out for a walk with him, and we paid a visit to the Blessed Sacrament in one or other of the Churches. It was in this way that I first saw the Chapel of the Carmel: "Look, little Queen," Papa said to me, "behind that big grating there are holy nuns who are always praying to Almighty God." Little did I think that nine years later I should be amongst them, that in this blessed Carmel I should receive so many graces. On returning home I learnt my lessons, and then spent the rest of the day playing in the garden near Papa. I never cared for dolls, but one of my favourite amusements was making coloured mixtures with seeds and the bark of trees. If the colours were pretty, I would promptly offer them to Papa in a little cup and entice him to taste them; then my dearest Father would leave his work and smilingly pretend to drink. I was very fond of flowers, and amused myself by making little altars in holes which I happened to find in the middle of my garden wall. When finished I would run and call Papa, and he seemed delighted with them. I should never stop if I told you of the thousand and one incidents of this kind that I can remember. How shall I make you understand the love that my Father lavished on his little Queen! Those were specially happy days for me when I went fishing with my dear "King," as I used to call him. Sometimes I tried my hand with a small rod of my own, but generally I preferred to sit on the grass some distance away. Then my reflections became really deep, and, without knowing what meditation meant, my soul was absorbed in prayer. Far-off sounds reached me, the murmuring of the wind, sometimes a few uncertain notes of music from a military band in the town a long way off; all this imparted a touch of melancholy to my thoughts. Earth seemed a place of exile, and I dreamed of Heaven. The afternoon passed quickly away, and it was soon time to go home, but before packing up I would eat the provisions I had brought in a small basket. Somehow the slices of bread and jam, prepared by my sisters, looked different; they had seemed so tempting, and now they looked stale and uninviting. Even such a trifle as this made the earth seem sadder, and I realised that only in Heaven will there be unclouded joy. Speaking of clouds, I remember how one day when we were out, the blue sky became overcast and a storm came on, accompanied by vivid lightning. I looked round on every side, so as to lose nothing of the grand sight. A thunderbolt fell in a field close by, and, far from feeling the least bit afraid, I was delighted--it seemed that God was so near. Papa was not so pleased, and put an end to my reverie, for already the tall grass and daisies, taller than I, were sparkling with rain-drops, and we had to cross several fields to reach the road. In spite of his fishing tackle, he carried me in his arms while I looked down in the beautiful jewelled drops, almost sorry that I could not be drenched by them. I do not think I have told you that in our daily walks at Lisieux, as in Alençon, I often used to give alms to the beggars. One day we came upon a poor old man who dragged himself painfully along on crutches. I went up to give him a penny. He looked sadly at me for a long time, and then, shaking his head with a sorrowful smile, he refused my alms. I cannot tell you what I felt; I had wished to help and comfort him, and instead of that, I had, perhaps, hurt him and caused him pain. He must have guessed my thought, for I saw him turn round and smile at me when we were some way off. Just then Papa bought me a cake. I wished very much to run after the old man and give it to him, for I thought: "Well, he did not want money, but I am sure he would like to have a cake." I do not know what held me back, and I felt so sad I could hardly keep from crying; then I remembered having heard that one obtains all the favours asked for on one's First Communion Day. This thought consoled me immediately, and though I was only six years old at the time, I said to myself: "I will pray for my poor old man on the day of my First Communion." Five years later I faithfully kept my resolution. I have always thought that my childish prayer for this suffering member of Christ has been blessed and rewarded. As I grew older my love of God grew more and more. I often offered my heart to Him, using the words my Mother had taught me, and I tried very hard to please Him in all my actions, taking great care never to offend Him. And yet one day I committed a fault which I must tell you here--it gives me a good opportunity of humbling myself, though I believe I have grieved over it with perfect contrition. It was the month of May, 1878. My sisters decided that I was too small to go to the May devotions every evening, so I stayed at home with the nurse and said my prayers with her before the little altar which I had arranged according to my own taste. Everything was small--candlesticks, vases, and the rest; two wax vestas were quite sufficient to light it up properly. Sometimes Victoire, the maid, gave me some little bits of real candle, but not often. One evening, when we went to our prayers, I said to her: "Will you begin the _Memorare?_ I am going to light the candles." She tried to begin, and then looked at me and burst out laughing. Seeing my precious vestas burning quickly away, I begged her once more to say the _Memorare._ Again there was silence, broken only by bursts of laughter. All my natural good temper deserted me. I got up feeling dreadfully angry, and, stamping my foot furiously, I cried out: "Victoire, you naughty girl!" She stopped laughing at once, and looked at me in utter astonishment, then showed me--too late--the surprise she had in store hidden under her apron--two pieces of candle. My tears of anger were soon changed into tears of sorrow; I was very much ashamed and grieved, and made a firm resolution never to act in such a way again. Shortly after this I made my first confession.[3] It is a very sweet memory. Pauline had warned me: "Thérèse, darling, it is not to a man but to God Himself that you are going to tell your sins." I was so persuaded of this that I asked her quite seriously if I should not tell Father Ducellier that I loved him "with my whole heart," as it was really God I was going to speak to in his person. Well instructed as to what I was to do, I entered the confessional, and turning round to the priest, so as to see him better, I made my confession and received absolution in a spirit of lively faith--my sister having assured me that at this solemn moment the tears of the Holy Child Jesus would purify my soul. I remember well that he exhorted me above all to a tender devotion towards Our Lady, and I promised to redouble my love for her who already filled so large a place in my heart. Then I passed him my Rosary to be blessed, and came out of the Confessional more joyful and lighthearted than I had ever felt before. It was evening, and as soon as I got to a street lamp I stopped and took the newly blessed Rosary out of my pocket, turning it over and over. "What are you looking at, Thérèse, dear?" asked Pauline. "I am seeing what a blessed Rosary looks like." This childish answer amused my sisters very much. I was deeply impressed by the graces I had received, and wished to go to confession again for all the big feasts, for these confessions filled me with joy. The feasts! What precious memories these simple words bring to me. I loved them; and my sisters knew so well how to explain the mysteries hidden in each one. Those days of earth became days of Heaven. Above all I loved the procession of the Blessed Sacrament: what a joy it was to strew flowers in God's path! But before scattering them on the ground I threw them high in the air, and was never so happy as when I saw my rose-leaves touch the sacred Monstrance. And if the great feasts came but seldom, each week brought one very dear to my heart, and that was Sunday. What a glorious day! The Feast of God! The day of rest! First of all the whole family went to High Mass, and I remember that before the sermon we had to come down from our places, which were some way from the pulpit, and find seats in the nave. This was not always easy, but to little Thérèse and her Father everyone offered a place. My uncle was delighted when he saw us come down; he called me his "Sunbeam," and said that to see the venerable old man leading his little daughter by the hand was a sight which always filled him with joy. I never troubled myself if people looked at me, I was only occupied in listening attentively to the preacher. A sermon on the Passion of our Blessed Lord was the first I understood, and it touched me deeply. I was then five and a half, and after that time I was able to understand and appreciate all instructions. If St. Teresa was mentioned, my Father would bend down and whisper to me: "Listen attentively, little Queen, he is speaking of your holy patroness." I really did listen attentively, but I must own I looked at Papa more than at the preacher, for I read many things in his face. Sometimes his eyes were filled with tears which he strove in vain to keep back; and as he listened to the eternal truths he seemed no longer of this earth, his soul was absorbed in the thought of another world. Alas! Many long and sorrowful years had to pass before Heaven was to be opened to him, and Our Lord with His Own Divine Hand was to wipe away the bitter tears of His faithful servant. To go back to the description of our Sundays. This happy day which passed so quickly had also its touch of melancholy; my happiness was full till Compline, but after that a feeling of sadness took possession of me. I thought of the morrow when one had to begin again the daily life of work and lessons, and my heart, feeling like an exile on this earth, longed for the repose of Heaven--the never ending Sabbath of our true Home. Every Sunday my aunt invited us in turns to spend the evening with her. I was always glad when mine came, and it was a pleasure to listen to my uncle's conversation. His talk was serious, but it interested me, and he little knew that I paid such attention; but my joy was not unmixed with fear when he took me on his knee and sang "Bluebeard" in his deep voice. About eight o'clock Papa would come to fetch me. I remember that I used to look up at the stars with inexpressible delight. Orion's belt fascinated me especially, for I saw in it a likeness to the letter "T." "Look, Papa," I would cry, "my name is written in Heaven!" Then, not wishing to see this dull earth any longer, I asked him to lead me, and with my head thrown back, I gazed unweariedly at the starry skies. I could tell you much about our winter evenings at home. After a game of draughts my sisters read aloud Dom Guéranger's _Liturgical Year,_ and then a few pages of some other interesting and instructive book. While this was going on I established myself on Papa's knee, and when the reading was done he used to sing soothing snatches of melody in his beautiful voice, as if to lull me to sleep, and I would lay my head on his breast while he rocked me gently to and fro. Later on we went upstairs for night prayers, and there again my place was beside my beloved Father, and I had only to look at him to know how the Saints pray. Pauline put me to bed, and I invariably asked her: "Have I been good to-day? Is God pleased with me? Will the Angels watch over me?" The answer was always "Yes," otherwise I should have spent the whole night in tears. After these questions my sisters kissed me, and little Thérèse was left alone in the dark. I look on it as a real grace that from childhood I was taught to overcome my fears. Sometimes in the evening Pauline would send me to fetch something from a distant room; she would take no refusal, and she was quite right, for otherwise I should have become very nervous, whereas now it is difficult to frighten me. I wonder sometimes how my little Mother was able to bring me up with so much tenderness, and yet without spoiling me, for she did not pass over the least fault. It is true she never scolded me without cause, and I knew well she would never change her mind when once a thing was decided upon. To this dearly loved sister I confided my most intimate thoughts; she cleared up all my doubts. One day I expressed surprise that God does not give an equal amount of glory to all the elect in Heaven--I was afraid that they would not all be quite happy. She sent me to fetch Papa's big tumbler, and put it beside my tiny thimble, then, filling both with water, she asked me which seemed the fuller. I replied that one was as full as the other--it was impossible to pour more water into either of them, for they could not hold it. In this way Pauline made it clear to me that in Heaven the least of the Blessed does not envy the happiness of the greatest; and so, by bringing the highest mysteries down to the level of my understanding, she gave my soul the food it needed. Joyfully each year I welcomed the prize day. Though I was the only competitor, justice was none the less strictly observed, and I never received rewards unless they were well merited. My heart used to beat with excitement when I heard the decisions, and in presence of the whole family received prizes from Papa's hands. It was to me like a picture of the Judgment Day! Seeing Papa so cheerful, no suspicion of the terrible trials which awaited him crossed my mind; but one day God showed me, in an extraordinary vision, a vivid picture of the trouble to come. My Father was away on a journey, and could not return as early as usual. It was about two or three o'clock in the afternoon; the sun was shining brightly, and all the world seemed gay. I was alone at the window, looking on to the kitchen garden, my mind full of cheerful thoughts, when I saw before me, in front of the wash-house, a man dressed exactly like Papa, of the same height and appearance, but more bent and aged. I say _aged,_ to describe his general appearance, for I did not see his face as his head was covered with a thick veil. He advanced slowly, with measured step, along my little garden; at that instant a feeling of supernatural fear seized me, and I called out loudly in a trembling voice: "Papa, Papa!" The mysterious person seemed not to hear, he continued his walk without even turning, and went towards a clump of firs which grew in the middle of the garden. I expected to see him reappear at the other side of the big trees, but the prophetic vision had vanished. It was all over in a moment, but it was a moment which impressed itself so deeply on my memory that even now, after so many years, the remembrance of it is as vivid as the vision itself. My sisters were all together in an adjoining room. Hearing me call "Papa!" they were frightened themselves, but Marie, hiding her feelings, ran to me and said: "Why are you calling Papa, when he is at Alençon?" I told her what I had seen, and to reassure me they said that Nurse must have covered her head with her apron on purpose to frighten me. Victoire, however, when questioned, declared she had not left the kitchen--besides, the truth was too deeply impressed on my mind: I had seen a man, and that man was exactly like my Father. We all went to look behind the clump of trees, and, finding nothing, my sisters told me to think no more about it. Ah, that was not in my power! Often and often my imagination brought before me this mysterious vision, often and often I tried to raise the veil which hid its true meaning, and deep down in my heart I had a conviction that some day it would be fully revealed to me. And you know all, dear Mother. You know that it was really my Father whom God showed me, bent by age, and bearing on his venerable face and his white head the symbol of his terrible trial.[4] As the Adorable Face of Jesus was veiled during His Passion, so it was fitting that the face of His humble servant should be veiled during the days of his humiliation, in order that it might shine with greater brilliancy in Heaven. How I admire God's ways! He showed us this precious cross beforehand, as a father shows his children the glorious future he is preparing for them--a future which will bring them an inheritance of priceless treasures. But a thought comes into my mind: "Why did God give this light to a child who, if she had understood it, would have died of grief?" "Why?" Here is one of those incomprehensible mysteries which we shall only understand in Heaven, where they will be the subject of our eternal admiration. My God, how good Thou art! How well dost Thou suit the trial to our strength! At that time I had not courage even to think that Papa could die, without being terrified. One day he was standing on a high step-ladder, and as I was close by he called out: "Move away, little Queen; if I fall I shall crush you." Instantly I felt an inward shock, and, going still nearer to the ladder, I thought: "At least if Papa falls I shall not have the pain of seeing him die, for I shall die with him." I could never say how much I loved him. I admired everything he did. When he explained his ideas on serious matters, as if I were a big girl, I answered him naïvely: "It is quite certain, Papa, that if you spoke like that to the great men who govern the country they would take you and make you King. Then France would be happier than it was ever been; but you would be unhappy, because that is the lot of kings; besides you would no longer be my King alone, so I am glad that they do not know you." When I was six or seven years old I saw the sea for the first time. The sight made a deep impression on me, I could not take my eyes off it. Its majesty, and the roar of the waves, all spoke to my soul of the greatness and power of God. I remember, when we were on the beach, a man and woman looked at me for a long time, then, asking Papa if I was his child, they remarked that I was a very pretty little girl. Papa at once made a sign to them not to flatter me; I was delighted to hear what they said, for I did not think I was pretty. My sisters were most careful never to talk before me in such a way as to spoil my simplicity and childish innocence; and, because I believed so implicitly in them, I attached little importance to the admiration of these people and thought no more about it. That evening at the hour when the sun seems to sink into the vast ocean, leaving behind it a trail of glory, I sat with Pauline on a bare rock, and gazed for long on this golden furrow which she told me was an image of grace illumining the way of faithful souls here below. Then I pictured my soul as a tiny barque, with a graceful white sail, in the midst of the furrow, and I resolved never to let it withdraw from the sight of Jesus, so that it might sail peacefully and quickly towards the Heavenly Shore. ______________________________ [1] This holy nun had been professed at the Carmel of Poitiers, and was sent from there to make the foundation at Lisieux in 1838. Her memory is held in benediction in both these convents; in the sight of God she constantly practised the most heroic virtue, and on December 5, 1891, crowned a life of good works by a holy death. She was then eighty-six years of age. [2] This house, an object of deep interest to the clients of Soeur Thérèse, is much frequented by pilgrims to Lisieux. [Ed.] [3] This first confession was made in the beautiful church of St. Pierre, formerly the cathedral of Lisieux. [Ed.] [4] It seems advisable, on account of the vague allusions which occur here and elsewhere, to state what happened to M. Louis Martin. At the age of sixty-six, having already had several partial attacks, he was struck with general paralysis, and his mind gave way altogether. ______________________________ CHAPTER III PAULINE ENTERS THE CARMEL I was eight and a half when Léonie left school, and I took her place at the Benedictine Abbey in Lisieux. The girls of my class were all older than myself; one of them was fourteen, and, though not clever, she knew how to impose on the little ones. Seeing me so young, nearly always first in class, and a favourite with all the nuns, she was jealous, and used to pay me out in a thousand ways. Naturally timid and sensitive, I did not know how to defend myself, and could only cry in silence. Céline and my elder sisters did not know of my grief, and, not being advanced enough in virtue to rise above these troubles, I suffered considerably. Every evening I went home, and then my spirits rose. I would climb on to Papa's knee, telling him what marks I had, and his caresses made me forget all my troubles. With what delight I announced the result of my first essay, for I won the maximum number of marks. In reward I received a silver coin which I put in my money box for the poor, and nearly every Thursday I was able to increase the fund. Indeed, to be spoilt was a real necessity for me. The Little Flower had need to strike its tender roots deeper and deeper into the dearly loved garden of home, for nowhere else could it find the nourishment it required. Thursday was a holiday, but it was not like the holidays I had under Pauline, which I generally spent upstairs with Papa. Not knowing how to play like other children, I felt myself a dull companion. I tried my best to do as the others did, but without success. After Céline, who was, so to say, indispensable to me, I sought the company of my little cousin Marie, because she left me free to choose the games I liked best. We were already closely united in heart and will, as if God were showing us in advance how one day in the Carmel we should embrace the same religious life.[1] Very often, at my uncle's house, we used to play at being two austere hermits, with only a poor hut, a little patch of corn, and a garden in which to grow a few vegetables. Our life was to be spent in continual contemplation, one praying while the other engaged in active duties. All was done with religious gravity and decorum. If we went out, the make-believe continued even in the street; the two hermits would say the Rosary, using their fingers to count on, so as not to display their devotion before those who might scoff. One day, however, the hermit Thérèse forgot herself--before eating a cake, given her for lunch, she made a large Sign of the Cross, and some worldly folk did not repress a smile. We were so bent on always doing the same thing that sometimes we carried it too far. Endeavouring one evening, on our way home from school, to imitate the modest demeanour of the hermits, I said to Marie: "Lead me, I am going to shut my eyes." "So am I," she answered. Being on the pavement we were in no fear of vehicles, and for a short while all went well, and we enjoyed walking with our eyes shut; but presently we both fell over some boxes standing at a shop door and knocked them down. The shopkeeper came out in a rage to replace them, but the would-be blind pair picked themselves up and ran off as fast as they could, with eyes wide open. Then the hermits had to listen to a well-deserved scolding from Jeanne, the maid, who seemed as vexed as the shopkeeper. I have not yet told you how Céline and I altered when we came to Lisieux. She had now become the little romp, full of mischief, while Thérèse had turned into a very quiet little girl, far too much inclined to tears. I needed a champion, and who can say how courageously my dear little sister played that part. We used to enjoy making each other little presents, for, at that age, the simplicity of our hearts was unspoiled. Like the spring flowers they unfolded, glad to receive the morning dew, while the same soft breezes swayed their petals. Yes, our joys were mutual. I felt this especially on the happy day of Céline's First Communion; I was only seven years old, and had not yet begun school at the Abbey. How sweet is the remembrance of her preparation! Every evening during its last weeks my sisters talked to her of the great event. I listened, eager to prepare myself too, and my heart swelled with grief when I was told to go away because I was still too young. I thought that four years was not too long to spend in making ready to receive Our dear Lord. One evening I heard someone say to my happy little sister: "From the time of your First Communion you must begin an entirely new life." At once I made a resolution not to wait till the time of my First Communion, but to begin with Céline. During her retreat she remained as a boarder at the Abbey, and it seemed to me she was away a long time; but at last the happy day came. What a delightful impression it has left on my mind--it was like a foretaste of my own First Communion! How many graces I received that day! I look on it as one of the most beautiful of my life. I have gone back a little in order to recall these happy memories; but now I must tell you of the mournful parting which crushed my heart when Our Lord took from me my little Mother whom I loved so dearly. I told her once that I would like to go away with her to a far-off desert; she replied that it was her wish too, but that she was waiting till I was big enough to set out. This impossible promise I took in earnest, and what was my grief when I heard Pauline talking to Marie about soon entering the Carmel! I did not know the Carmel; but I knew that she was leaving me to enter a convent, and that she would not wait for me. How can I describe the anguish I suffered! In a flash I saw life spread out before me as it really is, full of sufferings and frequent partings, and I shed bitter tears. At that time I did not know the joy of sacrifice; I was weak--so weak that I look on it as a great grace that I was able to bear such a trial, one seemingly so much beyond my strength--and yet live. I shall never forget how tenderly my little Mother consoled me, while explaining the religious life. Then one evening, when I was thinking over the picture she had drawn, I felt that the Carmel was the desert where God wished me also to hide. I felt this so strongly that I had not the least doubt about it; nor was it a childish dream, but the certainty of a Divine Call. This impression, which I cannot properly describe, left me with a feeling of great inward peace. Next day I confided my desires to Pauline. They seemed to her as a proof of God's Will, and she promised to take me soon to the Carmel, to see the Mother Prioress and to tell her my secret. This solemn visit was fixed for a certain Sunday, and great was my embarrassment on hearing that my cousin Marie--who was still young enough to be allowed to see the Carmelites--was to come with us.[2] I had to contrive a means of being alone with the Reverend Mother, and this is what I planned. I told Marie, that, as we were to have the great privilege of seeing her, we must be very good and polite, and tell her our little secrets, and in order to do that, we must go out of the room in turns. Though she did not quite like it, because she had no secrets to confide, Marie took me at my word, and so I was able to be alone with you, dear Mother. You listened to my great disclosure, and believed in my vocation, but you told me that postulants were not received at the age of nine, and that I must wait till I was sixteen. In spite of my ardent desire to enter with Pauline and make my First Communion on her clothing day, I had to be resigned. At last the 2nd of October came--a day of tears, but also of blessings, when Our Lord gathered the first of His flowers, the chosen flower who, later on, was to become the Mother of her sisters.[3] Whilst Papa, with my uncle and Marie, climbed the mountain of Carmel to offer his first sacrifice, my aunt took me to Mass, with my sisters and cousins. We were bathed in tears, and people gazed at us in astonishment when we entered the church, but that did not stop our crying. I even wondered how the sun could go on shining. Perhaps, dear Mother, you think I exaggerate my grief a little. I confess that this parting ought not to have upset me so much, but my soul was yet far from mature, and I had to pass through many trials before reaching the haven of peace, before tasting the delicious fruits of perfect love and of complete abandonment to God's Will. In the afternoon of that October day, 1882, behind the grating of the Carmel, I saw my beloved Pauline, now become Sister Agnes of Jesus. Oh, how much I suffered in that parlour! As I am writing the story of my soul, it seems to me that I ought to tell you everything. Well, I acknowledge that I hardly counted the first pains of this parting, in comparison with those which followed. I, who had been accustomed to talk with my little Mother of all that was in my heart, could now scarcely snatch two or three minutes with her at the end of the family visits; even these short minutes were passed in tears, and I went away with my heart torn with grief. I did not realise that it was impossible to give us each half an hour, and that of course Papa and Marie must have the largest share. I could not understand all this, and I said from the depths of my heart: "Pauline is lost to me." This suffering so affected me that I soon became seriously ill. The illness was undoubtedly the work of the devil, who, in his fury at this first entry into the Carmel, tried to avenge himself on me for the great harm my family was to do him in the future. However, he little knew that the Queen of Heaven was watching faithfully over her Little Flower, that she was smiling upon it from on high, ready to still the tempest just when the delicate and fragile stalk was in danger of being broken once and for all. At the close of the year 1882 I began to suffer from constant headaches; they were bearable, however, and did not prevent me from continuing my studies. This lasted till the Easter of 1883. Just then Papa went to Paris with my elder sisters, and confided Céline and me to the care of our uncle and aunt. One evening I was alone with my uncle, and he talked so tenderly of my Mother and of bygone days that I was deeply moved and began to cry. My sensitiveness touched him too; he was surprised that one of my age should feel as I did. So he determined to do all he could to divert my mind during the holidays. But God had decided otherwise. That very evening my headache became acute, and I was seized with a strange shivering which lasted all night. My aunt, like a real mother, never left me for a moment; all through my illness she lavished on me the most tender and devoted care. You may imagine my poor Father's grief when he returned from Paris to find me in this hopeless state; he thought I was going to die, but Our Lord might have said to him: "This sickness is not unto death, but for the glory of God."[4] Yes, God was glorified by means of this trial, by the wonderful resignation of my Father and sisters. And to Marie especially what suffering it brought, and how grateful I am to this dear sister! She seemed to divine my wants by instinct, for a mother's heart is more knowing than the science of the most skilful doctors. And now Pauline's clothing day was drawing near; but, fearing to distress me, no one dared mention it in my presence, since it was taken for granted that I should not be well enough to be there. Deep down in my heart, however, I firmly believed that God would give me the consolation of seeing dear Pauline on that day. I was quite sure that this feast would be unclouded; I knew that Our Lord would not try His Spouse by depriving her of my presence, she had already suffered so much on account of my illness. And so it turned out. I was there, able to embrace my dear little Mother, to sit on her knee, and, hiding myself under her veil, to receive her loving caresses. I was able to feast my eyes upon her--she looked so lovely in her veil and mantle of white. Truly it was a day of happiness in the midst of heavy trials; but this day, or rather this hour, passed only too quickly, and soon we were in the carriage which was to take us away from the Carmel. On reaching home I was made to lie down, though I did not feel at all tired; but next day I had a serious relapse, and became so ill that, humanly speaking, there was no hope of any recovery. I do not know how to describe this extraordinary illness. I said things which I had never thought of; I acted as though I were forced to act in spite of myself; I seemed nearly always to be delirious; and yet I feel certain that I was never, for a minute, deprived of my reason. Sometimes I remained in a state of extreme exhaustion for hours together, unable to make the least movement, and yet, in spite of this extraordinary torpor, hearing the least whisper. I remember it still. And what fears the devil inspired! I was afraid of everything; my bed seemed to be surrounded by frightful precipices; nails in the wall took the terrifying appearance of long fingers, shrivelled and blackened with fire, making me cry out in terror. One day, while Papa stood looking at me in silence, the hat in his hand was suddenly transformed into some horrible shape, and I was so frightened that he went away sobbing. But if God allowed the devil to approach me in this open way, Angels too were sent to console and strengthen me. Marie never left me, and never showed the least trace of weariness in spite of all the trouble I gave her--for I could not rest when she was away. During meals, when Victoire took care of me, I never ceased calling tearfully "Marie! Marie!" When she wanted to go out, it was only if she were going to Mass or to see Pauline that I kept quiet. As for Léonie and my little Céline, they could not do enough for me. On Sundays they shut themselves up for hours with a poor child who seemed almost to have lost her reason. My own dear sisters, how much I made you suffer! My uncle and aunt were also devoted to me. My aunt came to see me every day, and brought me many little gifts. I could never tell you how my love for these dear ones increased during this illness. I understood better than ever what Papa had so often told us: "Always remember, children, that your uncle and aunt have devoted themselves to you in a way that is quite exceptional." In his old age he experienced this himself, and now he must bless and protect those who lavished upon him such affectionate care.[5] When my sufferings grew less, my great delight was to weave garlands of daisies and forget-me-nots for Our Lady's statue. We were in the beautiful month of May, when all nature is clothed with the flowers of spring; the Little Flower alone drooped, and seemed as though it had withered for ever. Yet she too had a shining sun, the miraculous statue of the Queen of Heaven. How often did not the Little Flower turn towards this glorious Sun! One day Papa came into my room in the deepest distress, and I watched him go up to Marie and give her some money, bidding her write to Paris, and have a novena of Masses said at the shrine of Our Lady of Victories,[6] to obtain the cure of his poor little Queen. How touching were his faith and love! How much I longed to get up and tell him I was cured! Alas! my wishes could not work a miracle, and it needed one to restore me to health. Yes, it needed a great miracle, and this was wrought by Our Lady of Victories herself. One Sunday, during the novena, Marie went into the garden, leaving me with Léonie, who was reading by the window. After a short time I began to call: "Marie! Marie!" very softly. Léonie, accustomed to hear me fret like this, took no notice, so I called louder, until Marie came back to me. I saw her come into the room quite well, but, for the first time, I failed to recognise her. I looked all round and glanced anxiously into the garden, still calling: "Marie! Marie!" Her anguish was perhaps greater than mine, and that was unutterable. At last, after many fruitless efforts to make me recognise her, she whispered a few words to Léonie, and went away pale and trembling. Léonie presently carried me to the window. There I saw the garden, and Marie walking up and down, but still I did not recognise her; she came forward, smiling, and held out her arms to me calling tenderly: "Thérèse, dear little Thérèse!" This last effort failing, she came in again and knelt in tears at the foot of my bed; turning towards the statue of Our Lady, she entreated her with the fervour of a mother who begs the life of her child and will not be refused. Léonie and Céline joined her, and that cry of faith forced the gates of Heaven. I too, finding no help on earth and nearly dead with pain, turned to my Heavenly Mother, begging her from the bottom of my heart to have pity on me. Suddenly the statue seemed to come to life and grow beautiful, with a divine beauty that I shall never find words to describe. The expression of Our Lady's face was ineffably sweet, tender, and compassionate; but what touched me to the very depths of my soul was her gracious smile. Then, all my pain vanished, two big tears started to my eyes and fell silently. . . . They were indeed tears of unmixed heavenly joy. "Our Blessed Lady has come to me, she has smiled at me. How happy I am, but I shall tell no one, or my happiness will leave me!" Such were my thoughts. Looking around, I recognised Marie; she seemed very much overcome, and looked lovingly at me, as though she guessed that I had just received a great grace. Indeed her prayers had gained me this unspeakable favour--a smile from the Blessed Virgin! When she saw me with my eyes fixed on the statue, she said to herself: "Thérèse is cured!" And it was true. The Little Flower had come to life again--a bright ray from its glorious Sun had warmed and set it free for ever from its cruel enemy. "The dark winter is past, the rain is over and gone,"[7] and Our Lady's Little Flower gathered such strength that five years later it opened wide its petals on the fertile mountain of Carmel. As I said before, Marie was convinced that Our Blessed Lady, while restoring my bodily health, had granted me some hidden grace. So, when I was alone with her, I could not resist her tender and pressing inquiries. I was so astonished to find my secret already known, without my having said a word, that I told her everything. Alas! as I had foreseen, my joy was turned into bitterness. For four years the remembrance of this grace was a cause of real pain to me, and it was only in the blessed sanctuary of Our Lady of Victories, at my Mother's feet, that I once again found peace. There it was restored to me in all its fulness, as I will tell you later. This is how my joy was changed into sadness. When Marie had heard the childish, but perfectly sincere, account of the grace I had received, she begged my leave to tell them at the Carmel, and I did not like to refuse her. My first visit there after my illness was full of joy at seeing Pauline clothed in the habit of Our Lady of Carmel. It was a happy time for us both, we had so much to say, we had both suffered so much. My heart was so full that I could hardly speak. You were there, dear Mother, and plainly showed your affection for me; I saw several other Sisters too, and you must remember how they questioned me about my cure. Some asked if Our Lady was holding the Infant Jesus in her arms, others if the Angels were with her, and so on. All these questions distressed and grieved me, and I could only make one answer: "Our Lady looked very beautiful; I saw her come towards me and smile." But noticing that the nuns thought something quite different had happened from what I had told them, I began to persuade myself that I had been guilty of an untruth. If only I had kept my secret I should have kept my happiness also. But Our Lady allowed this trouble to befall me for the good of my soul; perhaps without it vanity would have crept into my heart, whereas now I was humbled, and I looked on myself with feelings of contempt. My God, Thou alone knowest all that I suffered! ______________________________ [1] Marie Guérin entered the Carmel at Lisieux on August 15, 1895, and took the name of Sister Mary of the Eucharist. She died on April 14, 1905, aged thirty-four. [2] With the Carmelites the grating is only opened for near relatives and very young children. [Ed.] [3] "Pauline" has several times been Prioress of the Carmel of Lisieux, and in 1909 again succeeded to that office on the death of the young and saintly Mother Mary of St. Angelus of the Child Jesus. [Ed.] [4] John 11:4. [5] Mme. Guérin died holily on February 13, 1900, aged fifty-two. During her illness Thérèse assisted her in an extraordinary way, several times making her presence felt. Monsieur Guérin, having for many years used his pen in defence of the Church, and his fortune in the support of good works, died a beautiful death on September 28, 1909, in his sixty-ninth year. [Ed.] [6] It was in this small church--once deserted and to-day perhaps the most frequented in Paris--that the saintly Abbé Desgenettes was inspired by Our Lady, in 1836, to establish the Confraternity of the Immaculate Heart of Mary for the conversion of sinners. [Ed.] [7] Cant. 2:11. ______________________________ CHAPTER IV FIRST COMMUNION AND CONFIRMATION While describing this visit to the Carmel, my thoughts are carried back to the first one which I paid after Pauline entered. On the morning of that happy day, I wondered what name would be given to me later on. I knew that there was already a Sister Teresa of Jesus; nevertheless, my beautiful name of Thérèse could not be taken from me. Suddenly I thought of the Child Jesus whom I loved so dearly, and I felt how much I should like to be called Teresa of the Child Jesus. I was careful not to tell you of my wish, dear Mother, yet you said to me, in the middle of our conversation: "When you come to us, little one, you will be called 'Teresa of the Child Jesus.'" My joy was great indeed. This happy coincidence of thought seemed a special favour from the Holy Child. So far I have not said anything about my love for pictures and books, and yet I owe some of the happiest and strongest impressions which have encouraged me in the practice of virtue to the beautiful pictures Pauline used to show me. Everything was forgotten while looking at them. For instance, "The Little Flower of the Divine Prisoner" suggested so many thoughts that I would remain gazing at it in a kind of ecstasy. I offered myself to Our Lord to be His Little Flower; I longed to console Him, to draw as near as possible to the Tabernacle, to be looked on, cared for, and gathered by Him. As I was of no use at games, I should have preferred to spend all my time in reading. Happily for me, I had visible guardian angels to guide me in this matter; they chose books suitable to my age, which interested me and at the same time provided food for my thoughts and affections. I was only allowed a limited time for this favourite recreation, and it became an occasion of much self-sacrifice, for as soon as the time had elapsed I made it my duty to stop instantly, even in the middle of a most interesting passage. As to the impressions produced on me by these books, I must frankly own that, in reading certain tales of chivalry, I did not always understand the realities of life. And so, in my admiration of the patriotic deeds of the heroines of France, especially of the Venerable Joan of Arc, I longed to do what they had done. About this time I received what I have looked on as one of the greatest graces of my life, for, at that age, I was not favoured with lights from Heaven, as I am now. Our Lord made me understand that the only true glory is that which lasts for ever; and that to attain it there is no necessity to do brilliant deeds, but rather to hide from the eyes of others, and even from oneself, so that "the left hand knows not what the right hand does."[1] Then, as I reflected that I was born for great things, and sought the means to attain them, it was made known to me interiorly that my personal glory would never reveal itself before the eyes of men, but that it would consist in becoming a Saint. This aspiration may very well appear rash, seeing how imperfect I was, and am, even now, after so many years of religious life; yet I still feel the same daring confidence that one day I shall become a great Saint. I am not trusting in my own merits, for I have none; but I trust in Him Who is Virtue and Holiness itself. It is He alone Who, pleased with my feeble efforts, will raise me to Himself, and, by clothing me with His merits, make me a Saint. At that time I did not realise that to become one it is necessary to suffer a great deal; but God soon disclosed this secret to me by means of the trials I have related. I must now continue my story where I left off. Three months after my cure Papa took me away for a change. It was a very pleasant time, and I began to see something of the world. All around me was joy and gladness; I was petted, made much of, admired--in fact, for a whole fortnight my path was strewn with flowers. The Wise Man is right when he says: "The bewitching of vanity overturneth the innocent mind."[2] At ten years of age the heart is easily fascinated, and I confess that in my case this kind of life had its charms. Alas! the world knows well how to combine its pleasures with the service of God. How little it thinks of death! And yet death has come to many people I knew then, young, rich, and happy. I recall to mind the delightful places where they lived, and ask myself where they are now, and what profit they derive to-day from the beautiful houses and grounds where I saw them enjoying all the good things of this life, and I reflect that "All is vanity besides loving God and serving Him alone."[3] Perhaps Our Lord wished me to know something of the world before He paid His first visit to my soul, so that I might choose more deliberately the way in which I was to follow Him. I shall always remember my First Communion Day as one of unclouded happiness. It seems to me that I could not have been better prepared. Do you remember, dear Mother, the charming little book you gave me three months before the great day? I found in it a helpful method which prepared me gradually and thoroughly. It is true I had been thinking about my First Communion for a long time, but, as your precious manuscript told me, I must stir up in my heart fresh transports of love and fill it anew with flowers. So, each day I made a number of little sacrifices and acts of love, which were to be changed into so many flowers: now violets, another time roses, then cornflowers, daisies, or forget-me-nots--in a word, all nature's blossoms were to form in me a cradle for the Holy Child. I had Marie, too, who took Pauline's place. Every evening I spent a long time with her, listening eagerly to all she said. How delightfully she talked to me! I felt myself set on fire by her noble, generous spirit. As the warriors of old trained their children in the profession of arms, so she trained me for the battle of life, and roused my ardour by pointing to the victor's glorious palm. She spoke, too, of the imperishable riches which are so easy to amass each day, and of the folly of trampling them under foot when one has but to stoop and gather them. When she talked so eloquently, I was sorry that I was the only one to listen to her teaching, for, in my simplicity, it seemed to me that the greatest sinners would be converted if they but heard her, and that, forsaking the perishable riches of this world, they would seek none but the riches of Heaven. I should have liked at this time to practise mental prayer, but Marie, finding me sufficiently devout, only let me say my vocal prayers. A mistress at the Abbey asked me once what I did on holidays, when I stayed at home. I answered timidly: "I often hide myself in a corner of my room where I can shut myself in with the bed curtains, and then I think." "But what do you think about?" said the good nun, laughing. "I think about the Good God, about the shortness of life, and about eternity: in a word, I _think."_ My mistress did not forget this, and later on she used to remind me of the time when I thought, asking me if I still _thought._ . . . Now, I know that I was really praying, while my Divine Master gently instructed me. The three months' preparation for First Communion passed quickly by; it was soon time for me to begin my retreat, and, during it, I stayed at the Abbey. Oh, what a blessed retreat it was! I do not think that one can experience such joy except in a religious house; there, with only a few children, it is easy for each one to receive special attention. I write this in a spirit of filial gratitude; our mistresses at the Abbey showed us a true motherly affection. I do not know why, but I saw plainly that they watched over me more carefully than they did over the others. Every night the first mistress, carrying her little lamp, opened my bed curtains softly, and kissed me tenderly on the forehead. She showed me such affection that, touched by her kindness, I said one night: "Mother, I love you so much that I am going to tell you a great secret." Then I took from under my pillow the precious little book you had given me, and showed it to her, my eyes sparkling with pleasure. She opened it with care, and, looking through it attentively, told me how privileged I was. In fact, several times during the retreat, the truth came home to me that very few motherless children of my age are as lovingly cared for as I was then. I listened most attentively to the instructions given us by Father Domin, and wrote careful notes on them, but I did not put down any of my own thoughts, as I knew I should remember them quite well. And so it proved. How happy I was to attend Divine Office as the nuns did! I was easily distinguished from my companions by a large crucifix, which Léonie had given me, and which, like the missionaries, I carried in my belt. They thought I was trying to imitate my Carmelite sister, and indeed my thoughts did often turn lovingly to her. I knew she was in retreat too, not that Jesus might give Himself to her, but that she might give herself entirely to Jesus, and this on the same day as I made my First Communion. The time of quiet waiting was therefore doubly dear to me. At last there dawned the most beautiful day of all the days of my life. How perfectly I remember even the smallest details of those sacred hours! the joyful awakening, the reverent and tender embraces of my mistresses and older companions, the room filled with snow-white frocks, where each child was dressed in turn, and, above all, our entrance into the chapel and the melody of the morning hymn: "O Altar of God, where the Angels are hovering." But I would not and I could not tell you all. Some things lose their fragrance when exposed to the air, and so, too, one's inmost thoughts cannot be translated into earthly words without instantly losing their deep and heavenly meaning. How sweet was the first embrace of Jesus! It was indeed an embrace of love. I felt that I was loved, and I said: "I love Thee, and I give myself to Thee for ever." Jesus asked nothing of me, and claimed no sacrifice; for a long time He and little Thérèse had known and understood one another. That day our meeting was more than simple recognition, it was perfect union. We were no longer two. Thérèse had disappeared like a drop of water lost in the immensity of the ocean; Jesus alone remained--He was the Master, the King! Had not Thérèse asked Him to take away her liberty which frightened her? She felt herself so weak and frail, that she wished to be for ever united to the Divine Strength. And then my joy became so intense, so deep, that it could not be restrained; tears of happiness welled up and overflowed. My companions were astonished, and asked each other afterwards: "Why did she cry? Had she anything on her conscience? No, it is because neither her Mother nor her dearly loved Carmelite sister is here." And no one understood that all the joy of Heaven had come down into one heart, and that this heart, exiled, weak, and mortal as it was, could not contain it without tears. How could my Mother's absence grieve me on my First Communion Day? As Heaven itself dwelt in my soul, in receiving a visit from Our Divine Lord I received one from my dear Mother too. Nor was I crying on account of Pauline's absence, for we were even more closely united than before. No, I repeat it--joy alone, a joy too deep for words, overflowed within me. During the afternoon I read the act of consecration to Our Lady, for myself and my companions. I was chosen probably because I had been deprived of my earthly Mother while still so young. With all my heart I consecrated myself to the Blessed Virgin Mary, and asked her to watch over me. She seemed to look lovingly on her Little Flower and to smile at her again, and I thought of the visible smile which had once cured me, and of all I owed her. Had she not herself, on the morning of that 8th of May, placed in the garden of my soul her Son Jesus--"the Flower of the field and the Lily of the valleys"?[4] On the evening of this happy day Papa and I went to the Carmel, and I saw Pauline, now become the Spouse of Christ. She wore a white veil like mine and a crown of roses. My joy was unclouded, for I hoped soon to join her, and at her side to wait for Heaven. I was pleased with the feast prepared for me at home, and was delighted with the beautiful watch given to me by Papa. My happiness was perfect, and nothing troubled the inward peace of my soul. Night came, and so ended that beautiful day. Even the brightest days are followed by darkness; one alone will know no setting, the day of the First and Eternal Communion in our true Home. Somehow the next day seemed sorrowful. The pretty clothes and the presents I had received could not satisfy me. Henceforth Our Lord alone could fill my heart, and all I longed for was the blissful moment when I should receive Him again. I made my second Communion on Ascension Day, and had the happiness of kneeling at the rails between Papa and Marie. My tears flowed with inexpressible sweetness; I kept repeating those words of St. Paul: "I live now, not I; but Christ liveth in me."[5] After this second visit of Our Lord I longed for nothing else but to receive Him. Alas! the feasts seemed so far apart. . . . On the eve of these happy days Marie helped me to prepare, as she had done for my First Communion. I remember once she spoke of suffering, and said that in all probability, instead of making me walk by this road, God, in His goodness, would carry me always like a little child. Her words came into my mind next day after my Communion; my heart became inflamed with an ardent desire for suffering, and I felt convinced that many crosses were in store for me. Then my soul was flooded with such consolation as I have never since experienced. Suffering became attractive, and I found in it charms which held me spellbound, though as yet I did not appreciate them to the full. I had one other great wish; it was to love God only, and to find my joy in Him alone. During my thanksgiving after Holy Communion I often repeated this passage from the _Imitation of Christ:_ "O my God, who art unspeakable sweetness, turn for me into bitterness all the consolations of earth."[6] These words rose to my lips quite naturally; I said them like a child, who, without well understanding, repeats what a friend may suggest. Later on I will tell you, dear Mother, how Our Lord has been pleased to fulfill my desire, how He, and He alone, has always been my joy; but if I were to speak of it now I should have to pass on to my girlhood, and there is still much to tell you of my early days. Soon after my First Communion I went into retreat again, before being confirmed. I prepared myself with the greatest care for the coming of the Holy Ghost; I could not understand anyone not doing so before receiving this Sacrament of Love. As the ceremony could not take place on the day fixed, I had the consolation of remaining somewhat longer in retreat. How happy I felt! Like the Apostles, I looked with joy for the promised Comforter, gladdened by the thought that I should soon be a perfect Christan, and have the holy Cross, the symbol of this wondrous Sacrament, traced upon my forehead for eternity. I did not feel the mighty wind of the first Pentecost, but rather the gentle breeze which the prophet Elias heard on Mount Horeb. On that day I received the gift of fortitude in suffering--a gift I needed sorely, for the martyrdom of my soul was soon to begin. When these delightful feasts, which can never be forgotten, were over, I had to resume my life as a day scholar, at the Abbey. I made good progress with my lessons, and remembered easily the sense of what I read, but I had the greatest difficulty in learning by heart; only at catechism were my efforts crowned with success. The Chaplain called me his little "Doctor of Theology,"[7] no doubt because of my name, Thérèse. During recreation I often gave myself up to serious thoughts, while from a distance I watched my companions at play. This was my favourite occupation, but I had another which gave me real pleasure. I would search carefully for any poor little birds that had fallen dead under the big trees, and I then buried them with great ceremony, all in the same cemetery, in a special grass plot. Sometimes I told stories to my companions, and often even the big girls came to listen; but soon our mistress, very rightly, brought my career as an orator to an end, saying she wanted us to exercise our bodies and not our brains. At this time I chose as friends two little girls of my own age; but how shallow are the hearts of creatures! One of them had to stay at home for some months; while she was away I thought about her very often, and on her return I showed how pleased I was. However, all I got was a glance of indifference--my friendship was not appreciated. I felt this very keenly, and I no longer sought an affection which had proved so inconstant. Nevertheless I still love my little school friend, and continue to pray for her, for God has given me a faithful heart, and when once I love, I love for ever. Observing that some of the girls were very devoted to one or other of the mistresses, I tried to imitate them, but I never succeeded in winning special favour. O happy failure, from how many evils have you saved me! I am most thankful to Our Lord that He let me find only bitterness in earthly friendships. With a heart like mine, I should have been taken captive and had my wings clipped, and how then should I have been able to "fly away and be at rest"?[8] How can a heart given up to human affections be closely united to God? It seems to me that it is impossible. I have seen so many souls, allured by this false light, fly right into it like poor moths, and burn their wings, and then return, wounded, to Our Lord, the Divine fire which burns and does not consume. I know well Our Lord saw that I was too weak to be exposed to temptation, for, without doubt, had the deceitful light of created love dazzled my eyes, I should have been entirely consumed. Where strong souls find joy and practise detachment faithfully, I only found bitterness. No merit, then, is due to me for not having given up to these frail ties, since I was only preserved from them by the Mercy of God. I fully realised that without Him I should have fallen as low as St. Mary Magdalen, and the Divine Master's words re-echoed sweetly in my soul. Yes, I know that "To whom less is forgiven he loveth less,"[9] but I know too that Our Lord has forgiven me more than St. Mary Magdalen. Here is an example which will, at any rate, show you some of my thoughts. Let us suppose that the son of a very clever doctor, stumbling over a stone on the road, falls and breaks his leg. His father hastens to him, lifts him lovingly, and binds up the fractured limb, putting forth all his skill. The son, when cured, displays the utmost gratitude, and he has excellent reason for doing so. But let us take another supposition. The father, aware that a dangerous stone lies in his son's path, is beforehand with the danger and removes it, unseen by anyone. The son, thus tenderly cared for, not knowing of the mishap from which his father's hand has saved him, naturally will not show him any gratitude, and will love him less than if he had cured him of a grievous wound. But suppose he heard the whole truth, would he not in that case love him still more? Well now, I am this child, the object of the foreseeing love of a Father "Who did not send His son to call the just, but sinners."[10] He wishes me to love Him, because He has forgiven me, not much, but everything. Without waiting for me to love Him much, as St. Mary Magdalen did, He has made me understand how He has loved me with an ineffable love and forethought, so that now my love may know no bounds. I had often heard it said, both in retreats and elsewhere, that He is more deeply loved by repentant souls than by those who have not lost their baptismal innocence. Ah! If I could but give the lie to those words. . . . But I have wandered so far from my subject that I hardly know where to begin again. It was during the retreat before my second Communion that I was attacked by the terrible disease of scruples. One must have passed through this martyrdom to understand it. It would be quite impossible for me to tell you what I suffered for nearly two years. All my thoughts and actions, even the simplest, were a source of trouble and anguish to me; I had no peace till I had told Marie everything, and this was most painful, since I imagined I was obliged to tell absolutely all my thoughts, even the most extravagant. As soon as I had unburdened myself I felt a momentary peace, but it passed like a flash, and my martyrdom began again. Many an occasion for patience did I provide for my dear sister. That year we spent a fortnight of our holidays at the sea-side. My aunt, who always showed us such motherly care, treated us to all possible pleasures--donkey rides, shrimping, and the rest. She even spoiled us in the matter of clothes. I remember one day she gave me some pale blue ribbon; although I was twelve and a half, I was still such a child that I quite enjoyed tying it in my hair. But this childish pleasure seemed sinful to me, and I had so many scruples that I had to go to Confession, even at Trouville. While I was there I had an experience which did me good. My cousin Marie often suffered from sick headaches. On these occasions my aunt used to fondle her and coax her with the most endearing names, but the only response was continual tears and the unceasing cry: "My head aches!" I had a headache nearly every day, though I did not say so; but one evening I thought I would imitate Marie. So I sat down in an armchair in a corner of the room, and set to work to cry. My aunt, as well as my cousin Jeanne, to whom I was very devoted, hastened to me to know what was the matter. I answered like Marie: "My head aches." It would seem that complaining was not in my line; no one would believe that a headache was the reason of my tears. Instead of petting me as usual, my aunt spoke to me seriously. Even Jeanne reproached me, very kindly it is true, and was grieved at my want of simplicity and trust in my aunt. She thought I had a big scruple, and was not giving the real reason of my tears. At last, getting nothing for my pains, I made up my mind not to imitate other people any more. I thought of the fable of the ass and the little dog; I was the ass, who, seeing that the little dog got all the petting, put his clumsy hoof on the table to try and secure his share. If I did not have a beating like the poor beast, at any rate I got what I deserved--a severe lesson, which cured me once for all of the desire to attract attention. I must go back now to the subject of my scruples. They made me so ill that I was obliged to leave school when I was thirteen. In order to continue my education, Papa took me several times a week to a lady who was an excellent teacher. Her lessons served the double purpose of instructing me and making me associate with other people. Visitors were often shown into the old-fashioned room where I sat with my books and exercises. As far as possible my teacher's mother carried on the conversation, but still I did not learn much while it lasted. Seemingly absorbed in my book, I could hear many things it would have been better for me not to hear. One lady said I had beautiful hair; another asked, as she left, who was that pretty little girl. Such remarks, the more flattering because I was not meant to hear them, gave me a feeling of pleasure which showed plainly that I was full of self-love. I am very sorry for souls who lose themselves in this way. It is so easy to go astray in the seductive paths of the world. Without doubt, for a soul somewhat advanced in virtue, the sweetness offered by the world is mingled with bitterness, and the immense void of its desires cannot be filled by the flattery of a moment; but I repeat, if my heart had not been lifted up towards God from the first moment of consciousness, if the world had smiled on me from the beginning of my life, what should I have become? Dearest Mother, with what a grateful heart do I sing "the Mercies of the Lord!" Has He not, according to the words of Holy Wisdom, "taken me away from the world lest wickedness should alter my understanding, or deceit beguile my soul?"[11] Meanwhile I resolved to consecrate myself in a special way to Our Blessed Lady, and I begged to be enrolled among the Children of Mary.[12] To gain this favour I had to go twice a week to the Convent, and I must confess this cost me something, I was so shy. There was no question of the affection I felt towards my mistresses, but, as I said before, I had no special friend among them, with whom I could have spent many hours like other old pupils. So I worked in silence till the end of the lesson, and then, as no one took any notice of me, I went to the tribune in the Chapel till Papa came to fetch me home. Here, during this silent visit, I found my one consolation--for was not Jesus my only Friend? To Him alone could I open my heart; all conversation with creatures, even on holy subjects, wearied me. It is true that in these periods of loneliness I sometimes felt sad, and I used often to console myself by repeating this line of a beautiful poem Papa had taught me: "Time is thy barque, and not thy dwelling-place." Young as I was, these words restored my courage, and even now, in spite of having outgrown many pious impressions of childhood, the symbol of a ship always delights me and helps me to bear the exile of this life. Does not the Wise Man tell us--"Life is like a ship that passeth through the waves: when it is gone by, the trace thereof cannot be found"?[13] When my thoughts run on in this way, my soul loses itself as it were in the infinite; I seem already to touch the Heavenly Shore and to receive Our Lord's embrace. I fancy I can see Our Blessed Lady coming to meet me, with my Father and Mother, my little brothers and sisters; and I picture myself enjoying true family joys for all eternity. But before reaching Our Father's Home in Heaven, I had to go through many partings on this earth. The year in which I was made a Child of Mary, Our Lady took from me my sister Marie, the only support of my soul,[14] my oracle and inseparable companion since the departure of Pauline. As soon as I knew of her decision, I made up my mind to take no further pleasure in anything here below. I could not tell you how many tears I shed. But at this time I was much given to crying, not only over big things, but over trifling ones too. For instance: I was very anxious to advance in virtue, but I went about it in a strange way. I was not accustomed to wait on myself; Céline always arranged our room, and I never did any household work. Sometimes, in order to please Our Lord, I used to make my bed, or, if she were out in the evening, to bring in her plants and seedlings. As I said before, it was simply to please Our Lord that I did these things, and so I ought not to have expected any thanks from creatures. But, alas! I did expect them, and, if unfortunately Céline did not seem surprised and grateful for my little services, I was not pleased, and tears rose to my eyes. Again, if by accident I offended anyone, instead of taking it in the right way, I fretted till I made myself ill, thus making my fault worse, instead of mending it; and when I began to realise my foolishness, I would cry for having cried. In fact, I made troubles out of everything. Now, things are quite different. God in His goodness has given me grace not to be cast down by any passing difficulty. When I think of what I used to be, my heart overflows with gratitude. The graces I have received have changed me so completely, that I am scarcely the same person. After Marie entered the Carmel, and I no longer had her to listen to my scruples, I turned towards Heaven and confided them to the four little angels who had already gone before me, for I thought that these innocent souls, who had never known sorrow or fear, ought to have pity on their poor little suffering sister. I talked to them with childish simplicity, telling them that, as I was the youngest of the family, I had always been the most petted and loved by my parents and sisters; that if they had remained on earth they would no doubt have given me the same proofs of their affection. The fact that they had gone to Heaven seemed no reason why they should forget me--on the contrary, as they were able to draw form the treasury of Heaven, they ought to obtain for me the grace of peace, and prove that they still knew how to love me. The answer was not long in coming; soon my soul was flooded with the sweetest peace. I knew that I was loved, not only on earth but also in Heaven. From that time my devotion for these little brothers and sisters increased; I loved to talk to them and tell them of all the sorrows of this exile, and of my wish to join them soon in our Eternal Home. ______________________________ [1] Cf. Matt. 6:3. [2] Wisdom 4:12. [3] _Imit.,_ I, ch. i. 3. [4] Cant. 2:1. [5] Gal. 2:20. [6] _Imit.,_ III, ch. xxvi. 3. [7] St. Teresa, who reformed the Carmelite Order, and died in 1582, is sometimes called the Doctor of Mystical Theology, because of her luminous writings on the relations of the soul with God in prayer. [Ed.] [8] Ps. 54[55]:7. [9] Luke 7:47. [10] Luke 5:32. [11] Cf. Wisdom 4:11. [12] It was on May 31, 1886, that she became a Sodalist of Our Lady. [Ed.] [13] Wisdom 5:10. [14] Marie entered the Carmel of Lisieux on October 15, 1886, taking the name of Sister Mary of the Sacred Heart. ______________________________ CHAPTER V VOCATION OF THÉRÈSE I was far from meriting all the graces which Our Lord showered on me. I had a constant and ardent desire to advance in virtue, but often my actions were spoilt by imperfections. My extreme sensitiveness made me almost unbearable. All arguments were useless. I simply could not correct myself of this miserable fault. How, then, could I hope soon to be admitted to the Carmel? A miracle on a small scale was needed to give me strength of character all at once, and God worked this long-desired miracle on Christmas Day, 1886. On that blessed night the sweet Infant Jesus, scarce an hour old, filled the darkness of my soul with floods of light. By becoming weak and little, for love of me, He made me strong and brave; He put His own weapons into my hands, so that I went from victory to victory, beginning, if I may say so, "to run as a giant."[1] The fountain of my tears was dried up, and from that time they flowed neither easily nor often. Now I will tell you, dear Mother, how I received this inestimable grace of complete conversion. I knew that when we reached home after Midnight Mass I should find my shoes in the chimney-corner, filled with presents, just as when I was a little child, which proves that my sisters still treated me as a baby. Papa, too, liked to watch my enjoyment and hear my cries of delight at each fresh surprise that came from the magic shoes, and his pleasure added to mine. But the time had come when Our Lord wished to free me from childhood's failings, and even withdraw me from its innocent pleasures. On this occasion, instead of indulging me as he generally did, Papa seemed vexed, and on my way upstairs I heard him say: "Really all this is too babyish for a big girl like Thérèse, and I hope it is the last year it will happen." His words cut me to the quick. Céline, knowing how sensitive I was, whispered: "Don't go downstairs just yet--wait a little, you would cry too much if you looked at your presents before Papa." But Thérèse was no longer the same--Jesus had changed her heart. Choking back my tears, I ran down to the dining-room, and, though my heart beat fast, I picked up my shoes, and gaily pulled out all the things, looking as happy as a queen. Papa laughed, and did not show any trace of displeasure, and Céline thought she must be dreaming. But happily it was a reality; little Thérèse had regained, once for all, the strength of mind which she had lost at the age of four and a half. On this night of grace, the third period of my life began--the most beautiful of all, the one most filled with heavenly favours. In an instant Our Lord, satisfied with my good will, accomplished the work I had not been able to do during all these years. Like the Apostle I could say: "Master, we have laboured all night, and have taken nothing."[2] More merciful to me even than to His beloved disciples, Our Lord Himself took the net, cast it, and drew it out full of fishes. He made me a fisher of men. Love and a spirit of self-forgetfulness took possession of me, and from that time I was perfectly happy. One Sunday, closing my book at the end of Mass, a picture of Our Lord on the Cross half slipped out, showing only one of His Divine Hands, pierced and bleeding. I felt an indescribable thrill such as I had never felt before. My heart was torn with grief to see that Precious Blood falling to the ground, and no one caring to treasure It as It fell, and I resolved to remain continually in spirit at the foot of the Cross, that I might receive the Divine Dew of Salvation and pour it forth upon souls. From that day the cry of my dying Saviour--"I thirst!"--sounded incessantly in my heart, and kindled therein a burning zeal hitherto unknown to me. My one desire was to give my Beloved to drink; I felt myself consumed with thirst for souls, and I longed at any cost to snatch sinners from the everlasting flames of hell. In order still further to enkindle my ardour, Our Divine Master soon proved to me how pleasing to him was my desire. Just then I heard much talk of a notorious criminal, Pranzini, who was sentenced to death for several shocking murders, and, as he was quite impenitent, everyone feared he would be eternally lost. How I longed to avert this irreparable calamity! In order to do so I employed all the spiritual means I could think of, and, knowing that my own efforts were unavailing, I offered for his pardon the infinite merits of Our Saviour and the treasures of Holy Church. Need I say that in the depths of my heart I felt certain my request would be granted? But, that I might gain courage to persevere in the quest for souls, I said in all simplicity: "My God, I am quite sure that Thou wilt pardon this unhappy Pranzini. I should still think so if he did not confess his sins or give any sign of sorrow, because I have such confidence in Thy unbounded Mercy; but this is my first sinner, and therefore I beg for just one sign of repentance to reassure me." My prayer was granted to the letter. My Father never allowed us to read the papers, but I did not think there was any disobedience in looking at the part about Pranzini. The day after his execution I hastily opened the paper, _La Croix,_ and what did I see? Tears betrayed my emotion; I was obliged to run out of the room. Pranzini had mounted the scaffold without confessing or receiving absolution, and the executioners were already dragging him towards the fatal block, when all at once, apparently in answer to a sudden inspiration, he turned round, seized the crucifix which the Priest was offering to him, and kissed Our Lord's Sacred Wounds three times. . . . I had obtained the sign I asked for, and to me it was especially sweet. Was it not when I saw the Precious Blood flowing from the Wounds of Jesus that the thirst for souls first took possession of me? I wished to give them to drink of the Blood of the Immaculate Lamb that It might wash away their stains, and the lips of "my first born" had been pressed to these Divine Wounds. What a wonderful answer! After receiving this grace my desire for the salvation of souls increased day by day. I seemed to hear Our Lord whispering to me, as He did to the Samaritan woman: "Give me to drink!"[3] It was indeed an exchange of love: upon souls I poured forth the Precious Blood of Jesus, and to Jesus I offered these souls refreshed with the Dew of Calvary. In this way I thought to quench His Thirst; but the more I gave Him to drink, so much the more did the thirst of my own poor soul increase, and I accepted it as the most delightful recompense. In a short time God, in His goodness, had lifted me out of the narrow sphere in which I lived. The great step was taken; but, alas! I had still a long road to travel. Now that I was free from scruples and morbid sensitiveness, my mind developed. I had always loved what was noble and beautiful, and about this time I was seized with a passionate desire for learning. Not content with lessons from my teachers, I took up certain subjects by myself, and learnt more in a few months than I had in my whole school life. Was not this ardour--"vanity and vexation of spirit"?[4] For me, with my impetuous nature, this was one of the most dangerous times of my life, but Our Lord fulfilled in me those words of Ezechiel's prophecy: "Behold thy time was the time of lovers: and I spread my garment over thee. And I swore to thee, and I entered into a covenant with thee, saith the Lord God, and thou becamest Mine. And I washed thee with water, and I anointed thee with oil. I clothed thee with fine garments, and put a chain about thy neck. Thou didst eat fine flour and honey and oil, and wast made exceedingly beautiful, and wast advanced to be a queen."[5] Yes, Our Lord has done all this for me. I might take each word of that striking passage and show how it has been completely realised in me, but the graces of which I have already told you are sufficient proof. So I will only speak now of the food with which my Divine Master abundantly provided me. For a long time I had nourished my spiritual life with the "fine flour" contained in the _Imitation of Christ._ It was the only book which did me good, for I had not yet found the treasures hidden in the Holy Gospels. I always had it with me, to the amusement of my people at home. My aunt used often to open it, and make me repeat by heart the first chapter she chanced to light upon. Seeing my great thirst for knowledge, God was pleased, when I was fourteen, to add to the "fine flour," "honey" and "oil" in abundance. This "honey" and "oil" I found in the conferences of Father Arminjon on _The End of this World and the Mysteries of the World to Come._ While reading this book my soul was flooded with a happiness quite supernatural. I experienced a foretaste of what God has prepared for those who love Him; and, seeing that eternal rewards are so much in excess of the petty sacrifices of this life, I yearned to love Our Lord, to love Him passionately, and to give Him countless proofs of affection while this was still in my power. Céline had become the most intimate sharer of my thoughts, especially since Christmas. Our Lord, Who wished to make us advance in virtue together, drew us to one another by ties stronger than blood. He made us sisters in spirit as well as in the flesh. The words of our Holy Father, St. John of the Cross, were realised in us: Treading within Thy Footsteps Young maidens lightly run upon the way. From the spark's contact, And the spicèd wine, They give forth aspirations of a balm divine. It was lightly indeed that we followed in the footsteps of Our Saviour. The burning sparks which He cast into our souls, the strong wine which He gave us to drink, made us lose sight of all earthly things, and we breathed forth sighs of love. Very sweet is the memory of our intercourse. Every evening we went up to our attic window together and gazed at the starry depths of the sky, and I think very precious graces were bestowed on us then. As the _Imitation_ says: "God communicates Himself sometimes amid great light, at other times sweetly in signs and figures."[6] In this way He deigned to manifest Himself to our hearts; but how slight and transparent was the veil! Doubt was no longer possible; already Faith and Hope had given place to Love, which made us find Him whom we sought, even on this earth. When He found us alone--"He gave us His kiss, and now no one may despise us."[7] These divine impressions could not but bear fruit. The practice of virtue gradually became sweet and natural to me. At first my looks betrayed the effort, but, little by little, self-sacrifice seemed to come more easily and without hesitation. Our Lord has said: "To everyone that hath shall be given, and he shall abound."[8] Each grace faithfully received brought many others. He gave Himself to me in Holy Communion oftener than I should have dared to hope. I had made it my practice to go to Communion as often as my confessor allowed me, but never to ask for leave to go more frequently. Now, however, I should act differently, for I am convinced that a soul ought to disclose to her director the longing she has to receive her God. He does not come down from Heaven each day in order to remain in a golden ciborium, but to find another Heaven--the Heaven of our souls in which He takes such delight. Our Lord, Who knew my desire, inspired my confessor to allow me to go to Communion several times a week, and this permission, coming as it did straight from Him, filled me with joy. In those days I did not dare to speak of my inner feelings; the road which I trod was so direct, so clear, that I did not feel the need of any guide but Jesus. I compared directors to mirrors who faithfully reflect Our Saviour to the souls under their care, and I thought that in my case He did not use an intermediary but acted directly. When a gardener gives special attention to a fruit which he wishes to ripen early, he does so, not with a view to leaving it on the tree, but in order to place it on a well-spread table. Our Lord lavished His favours on His Little Flower in the same way. He wishes His Mercies to shine forth in me--He Who, while on earth, cried out in a transport of joy: "I bless Thee, O Father, because Thou hast hidden these things from the wise and prudent and hast revealed them to little ones."[9] And because I was small and frail, He bent down to me and instructed me sweetly in the secrets of His love. As St. John of the Cross says in his "Canticle of the Soul": On that happy night In secret I went forth, beheld by none, And seeing naught; Having no light nor guide Excepting that which burned within my heart, Which lit my way More safely than the glare of noon-day sun To where, expectant, He waited for me Who doth know me well, Where none appeared but He. This place was Carmel, but before I could "sit down under His Shadow Whom I desired,"[10] I had to pass through many trials. And yet the Divine Call was becoming so insistent that, had it been necessary for me to go through fire, I would have thrown myself into it to follow my Divine Master. Pauline[11] was the only one who encouraged me in my vocation; Marie thought I was too young, and you, dear Mother, no doubt to prove me, tried to restrain my ardour. From the start I encountered nothing but difficulties. Then, too, I dared not speak of it to Céline, and this silence pained me deeply; it was so hard to have a secret she did not share. However, this dear sister soon found out my intention, and, far from wishing to keep me back, she accepted the sacrifice with wonderful courage. As she also wished to be a nun, she ought to have been given the first opportunity; but, imitating the martyrs of old, who used joyfully to embrace those chosen to go before them into the arena, she allowed me to leave her, and took my troubles as much to heart as if it were a question of her own vocation. From Céline, then, I had nothing to fear, but I did not know how to set about telling Papa. How could his little Queen talk of leaving him when he had already parted with his two eldest daughters? Moreover, this year he had been stricken with a serious attack of paralysis, and though he recovered quickly we were full of anxiety for the future. What struggles I went through before I could make up my mind to speak! But I had to act decisively; I was now fourteen and a half, and in six months' time the blessed feast of Christmas would be here. I had resolved to enter the Carmel at the same hour at which a year before I had received the grace of conversion. I chose the feast of Pentecost on which to make my great disclosure. All day I was praying for light from the Holy Ghost, and begging the Apostles to pray for me, to inspire me with the words I ought to use. Were they not the very ones to help a timid child whom God destines to become an apostle of apostles by prayer and sacrifice? In the afternoon, when Vespers were over, I found the opportunity I wanted. My Father was sitting in the garden, his hands clasped, admiring the wonders of nature. The rays of the setting sun gilded the tops of the tall trees, and the birds chanted their evening prayer. His beautiful face wore a heavenly expression--I could feel that his soul was full of peace. Without a word, I sat down by his side, my eyes already wet with tears. He looked at me with indescribable tenderness, and, pressing me to his heart, said: "What is it, little Queen? Tell me everything." Then, in order to hide his own emotion, he rose and walked slowly up and down, still holding me close to him. Through my tears I spoke of the Carmel and of my great wish to enter soon. He, too, wept, but did not say a word to turn me from my vocation; he only told me that I was very young to make such a grave decision, and as I insisted, and fully explained my reasons, my noble and generous Father was soon convinced. We walked about for a long time; my heart was lightened, and Papa no longer shed tears. He spoke to me as Saints speak, and showed me some flowers growing in the low stone wall. Picking one of them, he gave it to me, and explained the loving care with which God had made it spring up and grow till now. I fancied myself listening to my own story, so close was the resemblance between the little flower and little Thérèse. I received this floweret as a relic, and noticed that in gathering it my Father had pulled it up by the roots without breaking them; it seemed destined to live on, but in other and more fertile soil. Papa had just done the same for me. He allowed me to leave the sweet valley, where I had passed the first years of my life, for the mountain of Carmel. I fastened my little white flower to a picture of Our Lady of Victories--the Blessed Virgin smiles on it, and the Infant Jesus seems to hold it in His Hand. It is there still, but the stalk is broken close to the root. God doubtless wishes me to understand that He will soon break all the earthly ties of His Little Flower and will not leave her to wither on this earth. Having obtained my Father's consent, I thought I could now fly to the Carmel without hindrance. Far from it! When I told my uncle of my project, he declared that to enter such a severe Order at the age of fifteen seemed to him against all common sense, and that it would be doing a wrong to religion to let a child embrace such a life. He added that he should oppose it in every way possible, and that nothing short of a miracle would make him change his mind. I could see that all arguments were useless, so I left him, my heart weighed down by profound sadness. My only consolation was prayer. I entreated Our Lord to work this miracle for me because thus only could I respond to His appeal. Some time went by, and my uncle did not seem even to remember our conversation, though I learnt later that it had been constantly in his thoughts. Before allowing a ray of hope to shine on my soul, Our Lord deigned to send me another most painful trial which lasted for three days. Never had I understood so well the bitter grief of Our Lady and St. Joseph when they were searching the streets of Jerusalem for the Divine Child. I seemed to be in a frightful desert, or rather, my soul was like a frail skiff, without a pilot, at the mercy of the stormy waves. I knew that Jesus was there asleep in my little boat, but how could I see Him while the night was so dark? If the storm had really broken, a flash of lightning would perhaps have pierced the clouds that hung over me: even though it were but a passing ray, it would have enabled me to catch a momentary glimpse of the Beloved of my heart--but this was denied me. Instead, it was night, dark night, utter desolation, death! Like my Divine Master in the Agony in the Garden, I felt that I was alone, and found no comfort on earth or in Heaven. Nature itself seemed to share my bitter sadness, for during these three days there was not a ray of sunshine and the rain fell in torrents. I have noticed again and again that in all the important events of my life nature has reflected my feelings. When I wept, the skies wept with me; when I rejoiced, no cloud darkened the blue of the heavens. On the fourth day, a Saturday, I went to see my uncle. What was my surprise when I found his attitude towards me entirely changed! He invited me into his study, a privilege I had not asked for; then, after gently reproaching me for being a little constrained with him, he told me that the miracle of which he had spoken was no longer needed. He had prayed God to guide his heart aright, and his prayer had been heard. I felt as if I hardly knew him, he seemed so different. He embraced me with fatherly affection, saying with much feeling: "Go in peace, my dear child, you are a privileged little flower which Our Lord wishes to gather. I will put no obstacle in the way." Joyfully I went home. . . . The clouds had quite disappeared from the sky, and in my soul also dark night was over. Jesus had awakened to gladden my heart. I no longer heard the roar of the waves. Instead of the bitter wind of trial, a light breeze swelled my sail, and I fancied myself safe in port. Alas! more than one storm was yet to rise, sometimes even making me fear that I should be driven, without hope of return, from the shore which I longed to reach. I had obtained my uncle's consent, only to be told by you, dear Mother, that the Superior of the Carmelites would not allow me to enter till I was twenty-one. No one had dreamt of this serious opposition, the hardest of all to overcome. And yet, without losing courage, I went with Papa to lay my request before him. He received me very coldly, and could not be induced to change his mind. We left him at last with a very decided "No." "Of course," he added, "I am only the Bishop's delegate; if he allows you to enter, I shall have nothing more to say." When we came out of the Presbytery again, it was raining in torrents, and my soul, too, was overcast with heavy clouds. Papa did not know how to console me, but he promised, if I wished, to take me to Bayeux to see the Bishop, and to this I eagerly consented. Many things happened, however, before we were able to go. To all appearances my life seemed to continue as formerly. I went on studying, and, what is more important, I went on growing in the love of God. Now and then I experienced what were indeed raptures of love. One evening, not knowing in what words to tell Our Lord how much I loved him, and how much I wished that He was served and honoured everywhere, I thought sorrowfully that from the depths of hell there does not go up to Him one single act of love. Then, from my inmost heart, I cried out that I would gladly be cast into that place of torment and blasphemy so that He might be eternally loved even there. This could not be for His Glory, since He only wishes our happiness, but love feels the need of saying foolish things. If I spoke in this way, it was not that I did not long to go to Heaven, but for me Heaven was nothing else than Love, and in my ardour I felt that nothing could separate me from the Divine Being Who held me captive. About this time Our Lord gave me the consolation of an intimate knowledge of the souls of children. I gained it in this way. During the illness of a poor woman, I interested myself in her two little girls, the elder of whom was not yet six. It was a real pleasure to see how simply they believed all that I told them. Baptism does indeed plant deeply in our souls the theological virtues, since from early childhood the hope of heavenly reward is strong enough to make us practise self-denial. When I wanted my two little girls to be specially kind to one another, instead of promising them toys and sweets, I talked to them about the eternal recompense the Holy Child Jesus would give to good children. The elder one, who was coming to the use of reason, used to look quite pleased and asked me charming questions about the little Jesus and His beautiful Heaven. She promised me faithfully always to give in to her little sister, adding that all through her life she would never forget what I had taught her. I used to compare these innocent souls to soft wax, ready to receive any impression--evil, alas! as well as good, and I understood the words of Our Lord: "It were better to be thrown into the sea than to scandalise one of these little ones."[12] How many souls might attain to great sanctity if only they were directed aright from the first! I know God has not need of anyone to help Him in His work of sanctification, but as He allows a clever gardener to cultivate rare and delicate plants, giving him the skill to accomplish it, while reserving to Himself the right of making them grow, so does He wish to be helped in the cultivation of souls. What would happen if an ignorant gardener did not graft his trees in the right way? if he did not understand the nature of each, and wished, for instance, to make roses grow on peach trees? This reminds me that I used to have among my birds a canary which sang beautifully, and also a little linnet taken from the nest, of which I was very fond. This poor little prisoner, deprived of the teaching it should have received from its parents, and hearing the joyous trills of the canary from morning to night, tried hard to imitate them. A difficult task indeed for a linnet! It was delightful to follow the efforts of the poor little thing; his sweet voice found great difficulty in accommodating itself to the vibrant notes of his master, but he succeeded in time, and, to my great surprise, his song became exactly like the song of the canary. Oh, dear Mother, you know who taught me to sing from the days of my earliest childhood! You know the voices which drew me on. And now I trust that one day, in spite of my weakness, I may sing for ever the Canticle of Love, the harmonious notes of which I have often heard sweetly sounding here below. But where am I? These thoughts have carried me too far, and I must resume the history of my vocation. On October 31, 1887, alone with Papa, I started for Bayeux, my heart full of hope, but also excited at the idea of presenting myself at the Bishop's house. For the first time in my life, I was going to pay a visit without any of my sisters, and this to a Bishop. I, who had never yet had to speak except to answer questions addressed to me, would have to explain and enlarge on my reasons for begging to enter the Carmel, and so give proofs of the genuineness of my vocation. It cost me a great effort to overcome my shyness sufficiently to do this. But it is true that Love knows no such word as "impossible," for it deems "all things possible, all things allowed." Nothing whatsoever but the love of Jesus could have made me face these difficulties and others which followed, for I had to purchase my happiness by heavy trials. Now, it is true, I think I bought it very cheaply, and I would willingly bear a thousand times more bitter suffering to gain it, if it were not already mine. When we reached the Bishop's house, the floodgates of Heaven seemed open once more. The Vicar-General, Father Révérony, who had settled the date of our coming, received us very kindly, though he looked a little surprised, and seeing tears in my eyes said: "Those diamonds must not be shown to His Lordship!" We were led through large reception-rooms which made me feel how small I was, and I wondered what I should dare say. The Bishop was walking in a corridor with two Priests. I saw the Vicar-General speak a few words to him, then they came into the room where we were waiting. There were three large armchairs in front of the fireplace, where a bright fire blazed. As his Lordship entered, my Father and I knelt for his blessing; then he made us sit down. Father Révérony offered me the armchair in the middle. I excused myself politely, but he insisted, telling me to show if I knew how to obey. I did so without any more hesitation, and was mortified to see him take an ordinary chair while I was buried in an enormous seat that would comfortably have held four children like me--more comfortably in fact, for I was far from being at ease. I hoped that Papa was going to do all the talking, but he told me to explain the reason of our visit. I did so as eloquently as I could, though I knew well that one word from the Superior would have carried more weight than all my reasons, while his opposition told strongly against me. The Bishop asked how long I had wanted to enter the Carmel. "A very long time, my Lord!" "Come!" said the Vicar-General, laughing, "it cannot be as long as fifteen years." "That is true," I answered, "but it is not much less, for I have wished to give myself to God from the time I was three." The Bishop, no doubt to please Papa, tried to explain that I ought to remain some time longer with him; but, to his great surprise and edification, my Father took my part, adding respectfully that we were going to Rome with the diocesan pilgrimage, and that I should not hesitate to speak to the Holy Father if I could not obtain permission before then. However, it was decided that, previous to giving an answer, an interview with the Superior was absolutely necessary. This was particularly unpleasant hearing, for I knew his declared and determined opposition; and, in spite of the advice not to allow the Bishop to see any diamonds, I not only showed them but let them fall. He seemed touched, and caressed me fondly. I was afterwards told he had never treated any child so kindly. "All is not lost, little one," he said, "but I am very glad that you are going to Rome with your good Father; you will thus strengthen your vocation. Instead of weeping, you ought to rejoice. I am going to Lisieux next week, and I will talk to the Superior about you. You shall certainly have my answer when you are in Italy." His Lordship then took us to the garden, and was much interested when Papa told him that, to make myself look older, I had put up my hair for the first time that very morning. This was not forgotten, for I know that even now, whenever the Bishop tells anyone about his "little daughter," he always repeats the story about her hair. I must say I should prefer my little secret to have been kept. As he took us to the door, the Vicar-General remarked that such a thing had never been seen--a father as anxious to give his child to God as the child was to offer herself. We had to return to Lisieux without a favourable answer. It seemed to me as though my future were shattered for ever; the nearer I drew to the goal, the greater my difficulties became. But all the time I felt deep down in my heart a wondrous peace, because I knew that I was only seeking the Will of my Lord. ______________________________ [1] Cf. Psalm 18[19]:5. [2] Luke 5:5. [3] John 4:7. [4] Eccl. 1:14. [5] Ezechiel 16:8, 9, 13. [6] Cf. _Imit.,_ III, ch. xliii. 4. [7] Cf. Cant. 8:1. [8] Luke 19:26. [9] Cf. Luke 10:21. [10] Cant. 2:3. [11] Sister Agnes of Jesus. [12] Cf. Matt. 18:6. ______________________________ CHAPTER VI A PILGRIMAGE TO ROME Three days after the journey to Bayeux, I started on a much longer one--to the Eternal City. This journey taught me the vanity of all that passes away. Nevertheless I saw splendid monuments; I studied the countless wonders of art and religion; and better than all, I trod the very ground the Holy Apostles had trodden--the ground watered by the blood of martyrs--and my soul grew by contact with these holy things. I was delighted to go to Rome; but I could quite understand people crediting Papa with the hope that in this way I should be brought to change my mind about the religious life. It might certainly have upset a vocation that was not very strong. To begin with, Céline and I found ourselves in the company of many distinguished people. In fact, there were scarcely any others in the pilgrimage; but, far from being dazzled thereby, titles seemed to us but a "vapour of smoke,"[1] and I understood the words of the _Imitation:_ "Be not solicitous for the shadow of a great name."[2] I understood that true greatness is not found in a name but in the soul. The Prophet Isaias tells us: "The Lord shall call His servants by another name,"[3] and we read in St. John: "To him that overcometh I will give a white counter, and on the counter a new name written which no man knoweth but he that receiveth it."[4] In Heaven, therefore, we shall know our titles of nobility, and "then shall every man have praise from God,"[5] and he who on earth chose to be poorest and least known for love of his Saviour, he will be the first, the noblest, and the richest. The second thing I learnt had to do with Priests. Up to this time I had not understood the chief aim of the Carmelite Reform. To pray for sinners delighted me; to pray for Priests, whose souls seemed pure as crystal, that indeed astonished me. But in Italy I realised my vocation, and even so long a journey was a small price to pay for such valuable knowledge. During that month I met with many holy Priests, and yet I saw that even though the sublime dignity of Priesthood raises them higher than the Angels, they are still but weak and imperfect men. And so if holy Priests, whom Our Lord in the Gospel calls the salt of the earth, have need of our prayers, what must we think of the lukewarm? Has not Our Lord said: "If the salt lose its savour wherewith shall it be salted?"[6] Oh, dear Mother, how beautiful is our vocation! We Carmelites are called to preserve "the salt of the earth." We offer our prayers and sacrifices for the apostles of the Lord; we ourselves ought to be their apostles, while they, by word and example, are preaching the Gospel to our brethren. Have we not a glorious mission to fulfill? But I must say no more, for I feel that on this subject my pen would run on for ever. Now let me describe my journey in some detail. At three o'clock in the morning of November 4, we passed through the silent streets. Lisieux still lay shrouded in the darkness of night. I felt that I was going out into the unknown, and that great things were awaiting me in Rome. When we reached Paris, Papa took us to see all the sights. For me there was but one--Our Lady of Victories. I can never tell you what I felt at her shrine; the graces Our Lady granted me were like those of my First Communion Day. I was filled with peace and happiness. In this holy spot the Blessed Virgin, my Mother, told me plainly that it was really she who had smiled on me and cured me. With intense fervour I entreated her to keep me always, and to realise my heart's desire by hiding me under her spotless mantle, and I also asked her to remove from me every occasion of sin. I was well aware that during this journey I should come across things that might disturb me; knowing nothing of evil, I feared I might discover it. As yet I had not experienced that "to the pure all things are pure,"[7] that a simple and upright soul does not see evil in anything, because evil only exists in impure hearts and not in inanimate objects. I prayed specially to St. Joseph to watch over me; from my childhood, devotion to him has been interwoven with my love for our Blessed Lady. Every day I said the prayer beginning: "St. Joseph, Father and Protector of Virgins" . . . so I felt I was well protected and quite safe from danger. We left Paris on November 7, after our solemn Consecration to the Sacred Heart in the Basilica of Montmartre.[8] Each compartment of the train was named after a Saint, and the selection was made in honour of some Priest occupying it--his own patron or that of his parish being chosen. But in the presence of all the pilgrims our compartment was named after St. Martin! My Father, deeply touched by this compliment, went at once to thank Mgr. Legoux, Vicar-General of Coutances and director of the pilgrimage. From this onwards he was often called "Monsieur Saint Martin." Father Révérony watched my behaviour closely. I could tell that he was doing so; at table, if I were not opposite to him, he would lean forward to look at me and listen to what I was saying. I think he must have been satisfied with his investigations, for, towards the end of the journey, he seemed more favourably disposed. I say towards the end, for in Rome he was far from being my advocate, as I will tell you presently. Still I would not have it thought he deceived me in any way by falling short of the good will he had shown at Bayeux. On the contrary, I am sure that he always felt kindly towards me, and that if he opposed my wishes it was only to put me to the test. On our way into Italy we passed through Switzerland, with its high mountains, their snowy peaks lost in the clouds, its rushing torrents, and its deep valleys filled with giant ferns and purple heather. Great good was wrought in my soul by these beauties of nature so abundantly scattered abroad. They lifted it to Him Who had been pleased to lavish such masterpieces upon this transient earth. Sometimes we were high up the mountain side, while at our feet an unfathomable abyss seemed ready to engulf us. A little later we were passing through a charming village with its cottages and graceful belfry, above which light fleecy clouds floated lazily. Farther on a great lake with its blue waters, so calm and clear, would blend with the glowing splendour of the setting sun. I cannot tell you how deeply I was impressed with this scenery so full of poetry and grandeur. It was a foretaste of the wonders of Heaven. Then the thought of religious life would come before me, as it really is, with its constraints and its little daily sacrifices made in secret. I understood how easily one might become wrapped in self and forget the sublime end of one's vocation, and I thought: "Later on, when the time of trial comes, when I am enclosed in the Carmel and shall only be able to see a little bit of sky, I will remember this day and it will encourage me. I will make light of my own small interests by thinking of the greatness and majesty of God; I will love Him alone, and will not be so foolish as to attach myself to the fleeting trifles of this world, now that my heart has had a glimpse of what is reserved for those who love Him." After having contemplated the works of God, I turned next to admire those of His creatures. Milan was the first Italian town we visited, and we carefully studied its Cathedral of white marble, adorned with countless statues. Céline and I left the timid ones, who hid their faces in fear after climbing to the first stage, and, following the bolder pilgrims, we reached the top, from whence we viewed the city below. When we came down we started on the first of our expeditions; these lasted the whole month of the pilgrimage, and quite cured me of a desire to be always lazily riding in a carriage. The "Campo Santo"[9] charmed us. The whole vast enclosure is covered with marble statues, so exquisitely carved as to be life-like, and placed with an apparent negligence that only enhances their charm. You feel almost tempted to console the imaginary personages that surround you, their expression so exactly portrays a calm and Christian sorrow. And what works of art! Here is a child putting flowers on its father's grave--one forgets how solid is marble--the delicate petals appear to slip through its fingers. Sometimes the light veils of the widows, and the ribbons of the young girls, seem floating on the breeze. We could not find words to express our admiration, but an old gentleman who followed us everywhere--regretting no doubt his inability to share our sentiments--said in a tone of ill-temper: "Oh, what enthusiasts these French people are!" and yet he also was French. I think the poor man would have done better to stay at home. Instead of enjoying the journey he was always grumbling: nothing pleased him, neither cities, hotels, people, nor anything else. My Father, whose disposition was the exact opposite, was quite content, no matter what happened, and tried to cheer our friend, offering him his place in the carriage or elsewhere, and with his wonted goodness encouraging him to look on the bright side of things. But nothing could cheer him. How many different kinds of people we saw and how interesting it is to study the world when one is just about to leave it! In Venice the scene changed completely. Instead of the bustle of a large city, silence reigned, broken only by the lapping of the waters and the cries of the gondoliers as they plied their oars; it is a city full of charm but full of sadness. Even the Palace of the Doges, splendid though it be, is sad; we walked through halls whose vaulted roofs have long since ceased to re-echo the voices of the governors in their sentences of life and death. Its dark dungeons are no longer a living tomb for unfortunate prisoners to pine within. While visiting these dreadful prisons I fancied myself in the times of the martyrs, and gladly would I have chosen this sombre abode for my dwelling if there had been any question of confessing my faith. Presently the guide's voice roused me from my reverie, and I crossed the "Bridge of Sighs," so called because of the sighs uttered by the wretched prisoners as they passed from their dungeons to sentence and to death. After leaving Venice we visited Padua and there venerated the relic of St. Anthony's tongue; then Bologna, where St. Catherine's body rests. Her face still bears the impress of the kiss bestowed on her by the Infant Jesus. I was indeed happy when on the way to Loreto. Our Lady had chosen an ideal spot in which to place her Holy House. Everything is poor, simple, and primitive; the women still wear the graceful dress of the country and have not, as in the large towns, adopted the modern Paris fashions. I found Loreto enchanting. And what shall I say of the Holy House? I was overwhelmed with emotion when I realised that I was under the very roof that had sheltered the Holy Family. I gazed on the same walls Our Lord had looked on. I trod the ground once moistened with the sweat of St. Joseph's toil, and saw the little chamber of the Annunciation, where the Blessed Virgin Mary held Jesus in her arms after she had borne Him there in her virginal womb. I even put my Rosary into the little porringer used by the Divine Child. How sweet those memories! But our greatest joy was to receive Jesus in His own House, and thus become His living temple in the very place which He had honoured by His Divine Presence. According to Roman custom the Blessed Sacrament is reserved at one Altar in each Church, and there only is it given to the faithful. At Loreto this Altar was in the Basilica--which is built round the Holy House, enclosing it as a precious stone might be enclosed in a casket of white marble. The exterior mattered little to us, it was in the _diamond_ itself that we wished to receive the Bread of Angels. My Father, with his habitual gentleness, followed the other pilgrims, but his daughters, less easily satisfied, went towards the Holy House. God favoured us, for a Priest was on the point of celebrating Mass; we told him of our great wish, and he immediately asked for two hosts, which he placed on the paten. You may picture, dear Mother, the ecstatic happiness of that Communion; no words can describe it. What will be our joy when we communicate eternally in the dwelling of the King of Heaven? It will be undimmed by the grief of parting, and will know no end. His House will be ours for all eternity, and there will be no need to covet fragments from the walls hallowed by the Divine Presence. He will not give us His earthly Home--He only shows it to us to make us love poverty and the hidden life. What He has in store for us is the Palace of His Glory, where we shall no longer see Him veiled under the form of a child or the appearance of bread, but as He is, in the brightness of His Infinite Beauty. Now I am going to tell you about Rome--Rome, where I thought to find comfort and where I found the cross. It was night when we arrived. I was asleep, and was awakened by the porters calling: "Roma!" The pilgrims caught up the cry and repeated: "Roma, Roma!" Then I knew that it was not a dream, I was really in Rome! Our first day, and perhaps the most enjoyable, was spent outside the walls. There, everything retains its stamp of antiquity, whilst in Rome, with its hotels and shops, one might fancy oneself in Paris. This drive in the Roman Campagna has left a specially delightful impression on my mind. How shall I describe the feelings which thrilled me when I gazed on the Coliseum? At last I saw the arena where so many Martyrs had shed their blood for Christ. My first impulse was to kiss the ground sanctified by their glorious combats. But what a disappointment! The soil has been raised, and the real arena is now buried at the depth of about twenty-six feet. As the result of excavations the centre is nothing but a mass of rubbish, and an insurmountable barrier guards the entrance; in any case no one dare penetrate into the midst of these dangerous ruins. But was it possible to be in Rome and not go down to the real Coliseum? No, indeed! And I no longer listened to the guide's explanations: one thought only filled my mind--I must reach the arena. We are told in the Gospel that St. Mary Magdalen remained close to the Sepulchre and stooped down constantly to look in; she was rewarded by seeing two Angels. So, like her, I kept stooping down and I saw, not two Angels, but what I was in search of. I uttered a cry of joy and called out to my sister: "Come, follow me, we shall be able to get through." We hurried on at once, scrambling over the ruins which crumbled under our feet. Papa, aghast at our boldness, called out to us, but we did not hear. As the warriors of old felt their courage grow in face of peril, so our joy increased in proportion to the fatigue and danger we had to face to attain the object of our desires. Céline, more foreseeing than I, had listened to the guide. She remembered that he had pointed out a particular stone marked with a cross, and had told us it was the place where the Martyrs had fought the good fight. She set to work to find it, and having done so we threw ourselves on our knees on this sacred ground. Our souls united in one and the same prayer. My heart beat violently when I pressed my lips to the dust reddened with the blood of the early Christians. I begged for the grace to be a martyr for Jesus, and I felt in the depths of my heart that my prayer was heard. All this took but a short time. After collecting some stones we approached the walls once more to face the danger. We were so happy that Papa had not the heart to scold us, and I could see that he was proud of our courage. From the Coliseum we went to the Catacombs, and there Céline and I laid ourselves down in what had once been the tomb of St. Cecilia, and took some of the earth sanctified by her holy remains. Before our journey to Rome I had not felt any special devotion to St. Cecilia, but on visiting the house where she was martyred, and hearing her proclaimed "Queen of harmony"--because of the sweet song she sang in her heart to her Divine Spouse--I felt more than devotion towards her, it was real love as for a friend. She became my chosen patroness, and the keeper of all my secrets; her abandonment to God and her boundless confidence delighted me beyond measure. They were so great that they enabled her to make souls pure which had never till then desired aught but earthly pleasures. St. Cecilia is like the Spouse in the Canticles. I find in her the Scriptural "choir in an armed camp."[10] Her life was one melodious song in the midst of the greatest trials; and this is not strange, because we read that "the Book of the Holy Gospels lay ever on her heart,"[11] while in her heart reposed the Spouse of Virgins. Our visit to the Church of St. Agnes was also very delightful. I tried, but without success, to obtain a relic to take back to my little Mother, Sister Agnes of Jesus. Men refused me, but God Himself came to my aid: a little bit of red marble, from an ancient mosaic dating back to the time of the sweet martyr, fell as my feet. Was this not touching? St. Agnes herself gave me a keepsake from her house. We spent six days in visiting the great wonders in Rome, and on the seventh saw the greatest of all--Leo XIII. I longed for, yet dreaded, that day, for on it depended my vocation. I had received no answer from the Bishop of Bayeux, and so the Holy Father's permission was my one and only hope. But in order to obtain this permission I had first to ask it. The mere thought made me tremble, for I must dare speak to the Pope, and that, in presence of many Cardinals, Archbishops, and Bishops! On Sunday morning, November 20, we went to the Vatican, and were taken to the Pope's private chapel. At eight o'clock we assisted at his Mass, during which his fervent piety, worthy of the Vicar of Christ, gave evidence that he was in truth the "Holy Father." The Gospel for that day contained these touching words: "Fear not, little flock, for it hath pleased your Father to give you a Kingdom."[12] My heart was filled with perfect confidence. No, I would not fear, I would trust that the Kingdom of the Carmel would soon be mine. I did not think of those other words of Our Lord: "I dispose to you, as my Father hath disposed to Me, a Kingdom."[13] That is to say, I will give you crosses and trials, and thus will you become worthy to possess My Kingdom. _If you desire to sit on His right hand you must drink the chalice which He has drunk Himself._[14] "Ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and so to enter into His glory?"[15] A Mass of thanksgiving followed, and then the audience began. Leo XIII, whose cassock and cape were of white, was seated on a raised chair, and round him were grouped various dignitaries of the church. According to custom each visitor knelt in turn and kissed, first the foot and next the hand of the venerable Pontiff, and finally received his blessing; then two of the Noble Guard signed to the pilgrim that he must rise and pass on to the adjoining room to make way for those who followed. No one uttered a word, but I was firmly determined to speak, when suddenly the Vicar-General of Bayeux, Father Révérony, who was standing at the Pope's right hand, told us in a loud voice that he absolutely forbade anyone to address the Holy Father. My heart beat fast. I turned to Céline, mutely inquiring what I should do. "Speak!" she said. The next moment I found myself on my knees before the Holy Father. I kissed his foot and he held out his hand; then raising my eyes, which were filled with tears, I said entreatingly: "Holy Father, I have a great favour to ask you." At once he bent towards me till his face almost touched mine, and his piercing black eyes seemed to read my very soul. "Holy Father," I repeated, "in honour of your jubilee, will you allow me to enter the Carmel when I am fifteen?" The Vicar-General, surprised and displeased, said quickly: "Holy Father, this is a child who desires to become a Carmelite, but the Superiors of the Carmel are looking into the matter." "Well, my child," said His Holiness, "do whatever the Superiors decide." Clasping my hands and resting them on his knee, I made a final effort: "Holy Father, if only you say 'yes,' everyone else would agree." He looked at me fixedly and said clearly and emphatically: "Well, well! You will enter if it is God's Will." I was going to speak again, when the Noble Guards motioned to me. As I paid little attention they came forward, the Vicar-General with them, for I was still kneeling before the Pope with my hands resting on his knee. Just as I was forced to rise, the dear Holy Father gently placed his hand on my lips, then lifted it to bless me, letting his eyes follow me for quite a long time. My Father was much distressed to find me coming from the audience in tears; he had passed out before me, and so did not know anything about my request. The Vicar-General had shown him unusual kindness, presenting him to Leo XIII as the father of two Carmelites. The Sovereign Pontiff, as a special sign of benevolence, had placed his hand on his head, thus appearing in the name of Christ Himself to mark him with a mysterious seal. But now that this father of _four_ Carmelites is in Heaven, it is no longer the hand of Christ's Vicar which rests on his brow, prophesying his martyrdom: it is the hand of the Spouse of Virgins, of the King of Heaven; and this Divine Hand will never be taken away from the head which it has blessed. This trial was indeed a heavy one, but I must admit that in spite of my tears I felt a deep inward peace, for I had made every effort in my power to respond to the appeal of my Divine Master. This peace, however, dwelt in the depths of my soul--on the surface all was bitterness; and Jesus was silent--absent it would seem, for nothing revealed that He was there. On that day, too, the sun dared not shine, and the beautiful blue sky of Italy, hidden by dark clouds, mingled its tears with mine. All was at an end. My journey had no further charm for me since it had failed in its object. It is true the Holy Father's words: "You will enter if it is God's Will," should have consoled me, they were indeed a prophecy. In spite of all these obstacles, what God in His goodness willed, has come to pass. He has not allowed His creatures to do what they will but only what He wills. Sometime before this took place I had offered myself to the Child Jesus to be His little plaything. I told Him not to treat me like one of those precious toys which children only look at and dare not touch, but to treat me like a little ball of no value, that could be thrown on the ground, kicked about, pierced, left in a corner, or pressed to His Heart just as it might please Him. In a word I wished to amuse the Holy child and to let Him play with me as He fancied. Here indeed He was answering my prayer. In Rome Jesus pierced His little plaything. He wanted to see what was inside . . . and when satisfied, He let it drop and went to sleep. What was He doing during His sweet slumber, and what became of the ball thus cast on one side? He dreamed that He was still at play, that He took it up or threw it down, that He rolled it far away, but at last He pressed it to His Heart, nor did He allow it again to slip from His tiny Hand. Dear Mother, you can imagine the sadness of the little ball lying neglected on the ground! And yet it continued to hope against hope. After our audience my Father went to call on Brother Simeon--the founder and director of St. Joseph's College--and there he met Father Révérony. He reproached him gently for not having helped me in my difficult task, and told the whole story to Brother Simeon. The good old man listened with much interest and even made notes, saying with evident feeling: "This kind of thing is not seen in Italy." The next day we started for Naples and Pompeii. Vesuvius did us the honour of emitting from its crater a thick volume of smoke, accompanied by numerous loud reports. The traces of the devastation of Pompeii are terrifying. They show forth the power of God: "He looketh upon the earth, and maketh it tremble; He toucheth the mountains and they smoke." I should like to have wandered alone among its ruins, meditating on the instability of human things, but such solitude was not to be thought of. At Naples we made an expedition to the monastery of San Martino; it crowns a high hill overlooking the whole city. On the way back the horses took the bit in their teeth, and it is solely to our Guardian Angels that I attribute our safe return to the splendid hotel. This word "splendid" is not too strong to describe it; in fact during the whole journey we stayed only at the most expansive hotels. I had never been surrounded by such luxury, but it is indeed a true saying that riches do not make happiness. I should have been a thousand times more contented under a thatched room, with the hope of entering the Carmel, than I was amid marble staircases, gilded ceilings, and silken hangings, with my heart full of sorrow. I realised thoroughly that joy is not found in the things which surround us, but lives only in the soul. One could possess it as well in an obscure prison as in the palace of a king. And so now I am happier at the Carmel, in the midst of trials within and without, than I was in the world where I had everything I wanted, and, above all, the joys of a happy home. Although I felt heavy of heart, outwardly I was as usual, for I thought no one had any knowledge of my petition to the Pope. I was mistaken. One day, when the other pilgrims had gone to the refreshment-room and Céline and I were alone, Mgr. Legoux came to the door of the carriage. He looked at me attentively and smiling said: "Well, and how is our little Carmelite?" This showed me that my secret was known to all the pilgrims, and I gathered it, too, from their kindly looks; but happily no one spoke to me on the subject. At Assisi I had a little adventure. While visiting the places sanctified by the virtues of St. Francis and St. Clare I lost the buckle of my belt in the monastery. It took me some time to find and put it back in place, and when I reached the door all the carriages had started except one; that belonged to the Vicar-General of Bayeux! Should I run after those which were no longer in sight and so perhaps miss the train, or should I beg for a seat in the carriage of Father Révérony? I decided that this was the wiser plan. I tried to hide my extreme embarrassment and explained things. He was placed in a difficulty himself, for all the seats were occupied, but one of the party promptly gave me his place and sat by the driver. I felt like a squirrel caught in a snare. I was ill at ease in the midst of these great people, and I had to sit face to face with the most formidable of all. He was exceedingly kind, however, and now and then interrupted his conversation to talk to me about the Carmel and promise that he would do all in his power to realise my desire of entering at fifteen. This meeting was like balm to my wounds, though it did not prevent me from suffering. I had now lost all trust in creatures and could only lean on God Himself. And yet my distress did not hinder me from taking a deep interest in the holy places we visited. In Florence we saw the shrine of St. Mary Magdalen of Pazzi, in the choir of the Carmelite Church. All the pilgrims wanted to touch the Saint's tomb with their Rosaries, but my hand was the only one small enough to pass through the grating. So I was deputed for this important and lengthy task, and I did it with pride. It was not the first time I had obtained special favours. One day, at _Santa Croce,_ in Rome, we venerated the relics of the True Cross, together with two of the Thorns, and one of the Sacred Nails. I wanted to examine them closely, so I remained behind, and when the monk in charge was going to replace them on the Altar, I asked if I might touch the precious treasures. He said I might do so, but was doubtful if I should succeed; however, I put my little finger into one of the openings of the reliquary and was able to touch the Sacred Nail once hallowed by the Blood of Our Saviour. You see I behaved towards Him like a child who thinks it may do as it pleases and looks on its Father's treasures as its own. Having passed through Pisa and Genoa we came back to France by one of the loveliest routes. At times we were close to the sea, and one day during a storm it seemed as though the waves would reach the train. Farther on we travelled through plains covered with orange trees, olives, and feathery palms, while at night the numerous seaports twinkled with lights, and stars came out in the deep blue sky. But I watched the fairy picture fade away from my eyes without any regret--my heart was set elsewhere. My Father proposed to take me to Jerusalem, but in spite of the natural wish I had to visit the places sanctified by Our Lord's Footsteps, I was weary of earthly pilgrimages and only longed for the beauties of Heaven. In order to win these beauties for souls I wanted to become a prisoner as quickly as possible. I felt that I must suffer and struggle still more before the gates of my blessed prison would open; yet my trust in God did not grow less, and I still hoped to enter at Christmas. We had hardly reached home when I paid a visit to the Carmel. You must remember well that interview, dear Mother. I left myself entirely in your hands, for I had exhausted all my resources. You told me to write to the Bishop and remind him of his promise. I obeyed at once, and as soon as my letter was posted I felt I should obtain the coveted permission without any delay. Alas! each day brought fresh disappointments. The beautiful feast of Christmas dawned; still Jesus slept. He left His little ball on the ground without even glancing that way. This was indeed a sore trial, but Our Lord, Whose Heart is always watching, taught me that He granted miracles to those whose faith is small as a grain of mustard seed, in the hope of strengthening this slender faith; whilst for His intimate friends, for His Mother, He did not work miracles till He had proved their faith. Did He not permit Lazarus to die even though Mary and Martha had sent word that he was sick? And at the marriage feast of Cana, when Our Lady asked her Divine Son to aid the master of the house, did He not answer that His hour had not yet come? But after the trial what a reward! Water is changed into wine, and Lazarus rises from the dead. In this way did my Beloved act with His little Thérèse; after He had tried her for a long time He granted all her desires. For my New Year's gift of 1888, Jesus again gave me His Cross. You told me, dear Mother, that you had had the Bishop's answer since December 28, the feast of Holy Innocents; that he authorised my immediate entry into the Carmel, but that nevertheless you had decided not to open its doors till after Lent. I could not restrain my tears at the thought of such a long delay. This trial affected me in a special manner, for I felt my earthly ties were severed, and yet the Ark in its turn refused to admit the poor little dove. How did these three months pass? They were fruitful in sufferings and still more so in other graces. At first the thought came into my mind that I would not put any extra restraint on myself, I would lead a life somewhat less strictly ordered than was my custom. But Our Lord made me understand the benefit I might derive from this time He had granted me, and I then resolved to give myself up to a more serious and mortified life. When I say mortified, I do not mean that I imitated the penances of the Saints; far from resembling those beautiful souls who have practised all sorts of mortifications from their infancy, I made mine consist in simply checking my inclinations, keeping back an impatient answer, doing little services to those around me without setting store thereby, and a hundred other things of the kind. By practising these trifles I prepared myself to become the Spouse of Jesus, and I can never tell you, Mother, how much the added delay helped me to grow in abandonment, in humility, and in other virtues. ______________________________ [1] Joel 2:19. [2] _Imitation of Christ,_ III, xxiv. 2. [3] Isa. 65:15. [4] Apoc. 2:17. [5] 1 Cor. 4:5. [6] Matt. 5:13. [7] Tit. 1:15. [8] Montmartre--the "Mount of Martyrs"--is the hill whereon St. Denis, apostle and bishop of Paris, was martyred with his two companions in the third century. It was a famous place of pilgrimage in medieval times, and here St. Ignatius and the first Jesuits took their vows. Under the presidency of Marshal MacMahon, the erection of the well-known Basilica was voted in 1873 by the French Chamber of Deputies as a national act of reparation to the Sacred Heart. [Ed.] [9] Cemetery. [10] Cf. Cant. 7:1. [11] Office of St. Cecilia. [12] Luke 12:32. [13] Luke 22:29. [14] Cf. Matt. 20:22. [15] Luke 24:26. ______________________________ CHAPTER VII THE LITTLE FLOWER ENTERS THE CARMEL Monday, April 9, 1888, being the Feast of the Annunciation, transferred from Passiontide, was the day chosen for me to enter the Carmel. On the evening before, we were gathered around the table where I was to take my place for the last time. These farewells are in themselves heartrending, and just when I would have liked to be forgotten I received the tenderest expressions of affection, as if to increase the pain of parting. The next morning, after a last look at the happy home of my childhood, I set out for the Carmel, where we all heard Mass. At the moment of Communion, when Jesus had entered our hearts, I heard sobs on all sides. I did not shed a tear, but as I led the way to the cloister door my heart beat so violently that I wondered if I were going to die. Oh, the agony of that moment! One must have experienced it in order to understand. I embraced all my dear ones and knelt for my Father's blessing. He, too, knelt down and blessed me through his tears. It was a sight to gladden the Angels, this old man giving his child to God while she was yet in the springtime of life. At length the doors of the Carmel closed upon me. . . . I found a welcome in your arms, dear Mother, and received the embraces of another family, whose devotedness and love is not dreamt of by the outside world. At last my desires were realised, and I cannot describe the deep sweet peace which filled my soul. This peace has remained with me during the eight and a half years of my life here, and has never left me even amid the greatest trials. Everything in the Convent delighted me, especially our little cell.[1] I fancied myself transported to the desert. I repeat that my happiness was calm and peaceful--not even the lightest breeze ruffled the tranquil waters on which my little barque sailed; no cloud darkened the blue sky. I felt fully recompensed for all I had gone through, and I kept saying: "Now I am here for ever." Mine was no passing joy, it did not fade like first illusions. From illusions God in His Mercy has ever preserved me. I found the religious life just what I expected, and sacrifice was never a matter of surprise. Yet you know well that from the beginning my ways was strewn with thorns rather than with roses. In the first place, my soul had for its daily food the bread of spiritual dryness. Then, too, dear Mother, Our Lord allowed you, unconsciously, to treat me very severely. You found fault with me whenever you met me. I remember once I had left a cobweb in the cloister, and you said to me before the whole community: "It is easy to see that our cloisters are swept by a child of fifteen. It is disgraceful! Go and sweep away that cobweb, and be more careful in future." On the rare occasions when I spent an hour with you for spiritual direction, you seemed to be scolding me nearly all the time, and what pained me most of all was that I did not see how to correct my faults: for instance, my slow ways and want of thoroughness in my duties, faults which you were careful to point out. One day it occurred to me that you would certainly prefer me to spend my free time in work instead of in prayer, as was my custom; so I plied my needle industriously without even raising my eyes. No one ever knew of this, as I wished to be faithful to Our Lord and do things solely for Him to see. When I was a postulant our Mistress used to send me every afternoon at half-past four to weed the garden. This was a real penance, the more so, dear Mother, because I was almost sure to meet you on the way, and once you remarked: "Really, this child does absolutely nothing. What are we to think of a novice who must have a walk every day?" And yet, dear Mother, how grateful I am to you for giving me such a sound and valuable training. It was an inestimable grace. What should I have become, if, as the world outside believed, I had been but the pet of the Community? Perhaps, instead of seeing Our Lord in the person of my superiors, I should only have considered the creature, and my heart, which had been so carefully guarded in the world, would have been ensnared by human affection in the cloister. Happily, your motherly prudence saved me from such a disaster. And not only in this matter, but in other and more bitter trials, I can truly say that Suffering opened her arms to me from the first, and I took her to my heart. In the solemn examination before my profession I declared--as was customary--the reason of my entry into the Carmel: "I have come to save souls, and especially to pray for Priests." One cannot attain the end without adopting the means, and as Our Lord made me understand that it was by the Cross He would give me souls, the more crosses I met with, the stronger grew my attraction to suffering. For five years this way was mine, but I alone knew it; this was precisely the flower I wished to offer to Jesus, a hidden flower which keeps its perfume only for Heaven. Two months after my entry Father Pichon was surprised at the workings of grace in my soul; he thought my piety childlike and my path an easy one. My conversation with this good Father would have brought me great comfort, had it not been for the extreme difficulty I found in opening my heart. Nevertheless I made a general confession, and after it he said to me: "Before God, the Blessed Virgin, and Angels, and all the Saints, I declare that you have never committed a mortal sin. Thank God for the favours He has so freely bestowed on you without any merit on your part." Without any merit on my part! That was not difficult to believe. Fully conscious of my weakness and imperfection, my heart overflowed with gratitude. I had distressed myself, fearing I might have stained my baptismal robe, and this assurance, coming as it did from the lips of a director, a man of wisdom and holiness, such as our Mother St. Teresa desired, seemed to come from God Himself. Father Pichon added: "May Our Lord always be your Superior and your Novice Master!" And indeed He ever was, and likewise my Director. In saying this I do not mean to imply that I was not communicative with my superiors; far from being reserved, I always tried to be as an open book. Our Mistress was a true saint, the perfect type of the first Carmelites, and I seldom left her side, for she had to teach me how to work. Her kindness was beyond words, I loved and appreciated her, and yet my soul did not expand. I could not explain myself, words failed me, and so the time of spiritual direction became a veritable martyrdom. One of the older nuns seemed to understand what I felt, for she once said to me during recreation: "I should think, child, you have not much to tell your superiors." "Why do you think that, dear Mother?" I asked. "Because your soul is very simple; but when you are perfect you will become more simple still. The nearer one approaches God, the simpler one becomes." This good Mother was right. Nevertheless the great difficulty I found in opening my heart, though it came from simplicity, was a genuine trial. Now, however, without having lost my simplicity, I am able to express my thoughts with the greatest ease. I have already said that Our Lord Himself had acted as my Spiritual Guide. Hardly had Father Pichon become my director when his Superiors sent him to Canada. I was only able to hear from him once in the year, so now the Little Flower which had been transplanted to the mountain of Carmel quickly turned to the Director of Directors, and unfolded itself under the shadow of His Cross, having for refreshing dew His Tears, His Precious Blood, and for radiant sun His Adorable Face. Until then I had not appreciated the beauties of the Holy Face; it was my dear Mother, Agnes of Jesus, who unveiled them to me. As she had been the first of her sisters to enter the Carmel, so she was the first to penetrate the mysteries of love hidden in the Face of Our Divine Spouse. Then she showed them to me and I understood better than ever, in what true glory consists. He whose "Kingdom is not of this world"[2] taught me that the only royalty to be coveted lies in being "unknown and esteemed as naught,"[3] and in the joy of self-abasement. And I wished that my face, like the Face of Jesus, "should be, as it were, hidden and despised,"[4] so that no one on earth should esteem me. I thirsted to suffer and to be forgotten. Most merciful has been the way by which the Divine Master has ever led me. He has never inspired me with any desire and left it unsatisfied, and that is why I have always found His bitter chalice full of sweetness. At the end of May, Marie, our eldest, was professed, and Thérèse, the Benjamin, had the privilege of crowning her with roses on the day of her mystical espousals. After this happy feast trials again came upon us. Ever since his first attack of paralysis we realised that my Father was very easily tired. During our journey to Rome I often noticed that he seemed exhausted and in pain. But, above all, I remarked his progress in the path of holiness; he had succeeded in obtaining a complete mastery over the impetuosity of his natural disposition, and earthly things were unable to ruffle his calm. Let me give you an instance. During our pilgrimage we were in the train for days and nights together, and to wile away the time our companions played cards, and occasionally grew very noisy. One day they asked us to join them, but we refused, saying we knew little about the game; we did not find the time long--only too short, indeed, to enjoy the beautiful views which opened before us. Presently their annoyance became evident, and then dear Papa began quietly to defend us, pointing out that as we were on pilgrimage, more of our time might be given to prayer. One of the players, forgetting the respect due to age, called out thoughtlessly: "Thank God, Pharisees are rare!" My Father did not answer a word, he even seemed pleased; and later on he found an opportunity of shaking hands with this man, and of speaking so pleasantly that the latter must have thought his rude words had either not been heard, or at least were forgotten. His habit of forgiveness did not date from this day; my Mother and all who knew him bore witness that no uncharitable word ever passed his lips. His faith and generosity were likewise equal to any trial. This is how he announced my departure to one of his friends: "Thérèse, my little Queen, entered the Carmel yesterday. God alone could ask such a sacrifice; but He helps me so mightily that even in the midst of tears my heart is overflowing with joy." This faithful servant must needs receive a reward worthy of his virtues, and he himself claimed that reward. You remember the interview when he said to us: "Children, I have just come back from Alençon, and there, in the Church of Notre Dame, I received such graces and consolations that I made this prayer: 'My God, it is too much, yes, I am too happy; I shall not get to Heaven like this, I wish to suffer something for Thee--and I offered myself as a'"--the word _victim_ died on his lips. He dared not pronounce it before us, but we understood. You know, dear Mother, the story of our trial; I need not recall its sorrowful details. And now my clothing day drew near. Contrary to all expectations, my Father had recovered from a second attack, and the Bishop fixed the ceremony for January 10. The time of waiting had been long indeed, but now what a beautiful feast! Nothing was wanting, not even snow. Do you remember my telling you, dear Mother, how fond I am of snow? While I was still quite small, its whiteness entranced me. Why had I such a fancy for snow? Perhaps it was because, being a little winter flower, my eyes first saw the earth clad in its beautiful white mantle. So, on my clothing day, I wished to see it decked, like myself, in spotless white. The weather was so mild that it might have been spring, and I no longer dared hope for snow. The morning of the feast brought no change and I gave up my childish desire, as impossible to be realised. My Father came to meet me at the enclosure door, his eyes full of tears, and pressing me to his heart exclaimed: "Ah! Here is my little Queen!" Then, giving me his arm, we made our solemn entry into the public Chapel. This was his day of triumph, his last feast on earth; now his sacrifice was complete, and his children belonged to God.[5] Céline had already confided to him that later on she also wished to leave the world for the Carmel. On hearing this he was beside himself with joy: "Let us go before the Blessed Sacrament," he said, "and thank God for all the graces He has granted us and the honour He has paid me in choosing His Spouses from my household. God has indeed done me great honour in asking for my children. If I possessed anything better I would hasten to offer it to Him." That something better was himself, "and God received him as a victim of holocaust; He tried him as gold in the furnace, and found him worthy of Himself."[6] After the ceremony in the Chapel I re-entered the Convent and the Bishop intoned the _Te Deum._ One of the Priests observed to him that this hymn of thanksgiving was only sung at professions, but, once begun, it was continued to the end. Was it not right that this feast should be complete, since in it all other joyful days were reunited? The instant I set foot in the enclosure again my eyes fell on the statue of the Child Jesus smiling on me amid the flowers and lights; then, turning towards the quadrangle, I saw that, in spite of the mildness of the weather, it was covered with snow. What a delicate attention on the part of Jesus! Gratifying the least wish of His little Spouse, He even sent her this. Where is the creature so mighty that he can make one flake of it fall to please his beloved? Everyone was amazed, and since then many people, hearing of my desire, have described this event as "the little miracle" of my clothing day, and thought it strange I should be so fond of snow. So much the better, it shows still more the wonderful condescension of the Spouse of Virgins--of Him Who loves lilies white as the snow. After the ceremony the Bishop entered. He gave me many proofs of his fatherly tenderness, and, in presence of all the Priests, spoke of my visit to Bayeux and the journey to Rome; nor did he forget to tell them how I had put up my hair before visiting him. Then, laying his hand on my head, he blessed me affectionately. My mind dwelt with ineffable sweetness on the caresses Our Lord will soon lavish upon me before all the Saints, and this consoling thought was a foretaste of Heaven. I have just said that January 10 was a day of triumph for my dear Father. I liken it to the feast of the entry of Christ into Jerusalem, on Palm Sunday. As in the case of Our Divine Master, his day of triumph was followed by long days of sorrow; and, even as the agony of Jesus pierced the heart of His divine Mother, so our hearts were deeply wounded by the humiliations and sufferings of him, whom we loved best on earth. . . . I remember that in the month of June 1888, when we were fearing another stroke of paralysis, I surprised our Novice Mistress by saying: "I am suffering a great deal, Mother, yet I feel I can suffer still more." I did not then foresee the trial awaiting us. I did not know that on February 12, one month after my clothing day, our beloved Father would drink so deeply of such a bitter chalice. I no longer said I could suffer more, words cannot express our grief; nor shall I attempt to describe it here. In Heaven, we shall enjoy dwelling on these dark days of exile. Yet the three years of my Father's martyrdom seem to me the sweetest and most fruitful of our lives. I would not exchange them for the most sublime ecstasies, and my heart cries out in gratitude for such a priceless treasure: "We have rejoiced for the days wherein Thou hast afflicted us."[7] Precious and sweet was this bitter cross, and our hearts only breathed out sighs of grateful love. We no longer walked--we ran, we flew along the path of perfection. Léonie and Céline, though living in the world, were no longer of the world. The letters they wrote were full of the most edifying resignation. And what talks I had with Céline! Far from separating us, the grating of the Carmel united us more closely: the same thoughts, the same desires, the same love for Our Lord and for souls, made our very life. Not a word concerning things of earth entered into our conversation; but, just as in former days we lifted longing eyes to Heaven, so now our hearts strained after the joys beyond time and space, and, for the sake of an eternal happiness, we chose to suffer and be despised here below. Though my suffering seemed to have reached its height, yet my attraction thereto did not grow less, and soon my soul shared in the trials my heart had to bear. My spiritual aridity increased, and I found no comfort either in Heaven or on earth; yet, amid these waters of tribulation that I had so thirsted for, I was the happiest of mortals. Thus passed the time of my betrothal, too long a time for me. At the end of the year you told me, dear Mother, that I must not yet think of my profession, as our Ecclesiastical Superior expressly forbade it. I had therefore to wait for eight months more. At first I found it very difficult to be resigned to such a sacrifice, but divine light penetrated my soul before long. At this time I was using for my meditations Surin's _Foundations of the Spiritual life._ One day during prayer, it was brought home to me that my too eager desire to take my vows was mingled with much self-love; as I belonged to Our Lord and was His little plaything to console and please Him, it was for me to do His Will, not for Him to do mine. I also understood that a bride would not be pleasing to the bridegroom on her wedding day were she not magnificently attired. But, what had I made ready? So I said to Our Lord: "I do not ask Thee to hasten the day of my profession, I will wait as long as Thou pleasest, only I cannot bear that through any fault of mine my union with Thee should be delayed; I will set to work and carefully prepare a wedding-dress enriched with diamonds and precious stones, and, when Thou findest it sufficiently rich, I am sure that nothing will keep Thee from accepting me as Thy Spouse." I took up the task with renewed zest. Since my clothing day I had received abundant lights on religious perfection, chiefly concerning the vow of poverty. Whilst I was a postulant I liked to have nice things to use and to find everything needful ready to hand. Jesus bore with me patiently, for He gives His light little by little. At the beginning of my spiritual life, about the age of fourteen, I used to ask myself how, in days to come, I should more clearly understand the true meaning of perfection. I imagined I then understood it completely, but I soon came to realise that the more one advances along this path the farther one seems from the goal, and now I am resigned to be always imperfect, and I even find joy therein. To return to the lessons which Our Lord taught me. One evening after Compline I searched in vain for our lamp on the shelves where they are kept, and, as it was the time of the "Great Silence," I could not recover it. I guessed rightly that a Sister, believing it to be her own, had taken it; but just on that evening I had counted much on doing some work, and was I to spend a whole hour in the dark on account of this mistake? Without the interior light of grace I should undoubtedly have pitied myself, but, with that light, I felt happy instead of aggrieved, and reflected that poverty consists in being deprived not only of what is convenient, but of what is necessary. And, in this exterior darkness, I found my soul illumined by a brightness that was divine. At this time I was seized with a craving for whatever was ugly and inconvenient; and was thus quite pleased when a pretty little jug was taken from our cell and a large chipped one put in its place. I also tried hard not to make excuses, but I found this very difficult, especially with our Mistress; from her I did not like to hide anything. My first victory was not a great one, but it cost me a good deal. A small jar, left behind a window, was found broken. No one knew who had put it there, but our Mistress was displeased, and, thinking I was to blame in leaving it about, told me I was very untidy and must be more careful in future. Without answering, I kissed the ground and promised to be more observant. I was so little advanced in virtue that these small sacrifices cost me dear, and I had to console myself with the thought that at the day of Judgment all would be known. Above all I endeavoured to practise little hidden acts of virtue; thus I took pleasure in folding the mantles forgotten by the Sisters, and I sought for every possible occasion of helping them. One of God's gifts was a great attraction towards penance, but I was not permitted to satisfy it; the only mortification allowed me consisted in mortifying my self-love, and this did me far more good than bodily penance would have done. However, Our Lady helped me with my wedding-dress, and, as soon as it was finished, every obstacle vanished and my profession was fixed for September 8, 1890. All that I have set down in these few words would take many pages to relate; but those pages will never be read on earth. . . . ______________________________ [1] Nuns, in the spirit of poverty, avoid using the word _my,_ as denoting private possessions; so, later on, "our lamp," "our handkerchief," will occur. [Ed.] [2] John 18:36. [3] _Imit.,_ I, ii. 3. [4] Is. 53:3. [5] Léonie, having entered an order too severe for her delicate health, had been obliged to return home to her Father. Later she became a Visitation nun at Caen, and took the name of Sister Frances Teresa. [6] Cf. Wisdom 3:5,6. [7] Ps. 89[90]:15. ______________________________ CHAPTER VIII PROFESSION OF SOEUR THÉRÈSE Need I tell you, dear Mother, about the retreat before my profession? Far from receiving consolation, I went through it in a state of utter dryness and as if abandoned by God. Jesus, as was His wont, slept in my little barque. How rarely do souls suffer Him to sleep in peace! This Good Master is so wearied with continually making fresh advances that He eagerly avails Himself of the repose I offer Him, and, no doubt, He will sleep on until my great and everlasting retreat; but, instead of being grieved at this, I am glad. In truth I am no Saint, as this frame of mind well shows. I ought not to rejoice in my dryness of soul, but rather attribute it to my want of fervour and fidelity. That I fall asleep so often during meditation, and thanksgiving after Communion, should distress me. Well, I am not distressed. I reflect that little children are equally dear to their parents whether they are asleep or awake; that, in order to perform operations, doctors put their patients to sleep; and finally that "The Lord knoweth our frame, He remembereth that we are but dust."[1] Yet, apparently barren as was my retreat--and those which followed have been no less so--I unconsciously received many interior lights on the best means of pleasing God, and practising virtue. I have often observed that Our Lord will not give me any store of provisions, but nourishes me each moment with food that is ever new; I find it within me without knowing how it has come there. I simply believe that it is Jesus Himself hidden in my poor heart, who is secretly at work, inspiring me with what He wishes me to do as each occasion arises. Shortly before my profession I received the Holy Father's blessing, through the hands of Brother Simeon; and this precious Blessing undoubtedly helped me through the most terrible storm of my whole life. On the eve of the great day, instead of being filled with the customary sweetness, my vocation suddenly seemed to me as unreal as a dream. The devil--for it was he--made me feel sure that I was wholly unsuited for life in the Carmel, and that I was deceiving my superiors by entering on a way to which I was not called. The darkness was so bewildering that I understood but one thing--I had no religious vocation, and must return to the world. I cannot describe the agony I endured. What was I to do in such a difficulty? I chose the right course, deciding to tell my Novice Mistress of the temptation without delay. I sent for her to come out of choir, and though full of confusion, I confessed the state of my soul. Fortunately she saw more clearly than I did, and reassured me completely by laughing frankly at my story. The devil was put to instant flight by my humble avowal; what he wanted was to keep me from speaking, and thus draw me into his snares. But it was my turn now to ensnare him, for, to make my humiliation more complete, I also told you everything, dear Mother, and your consoling words dispelled my last fears. On the morning of September 8, a wave of peace flooded my soul, and, in "that peace which surpasseth all understanding,"[2] I pronounced my holy vows. Many were the graces I asked. I felt myself truly a queen and took advantage of my title to obtain every favour from the King for His ungrateful subjects. No one was forgotten. I wished that every sinner on earth might be converted; that on that day Purgatory should set its captives free; and I bore upon my heart this letter containing what I desired for myself: "O Jesus, my Divine Spouse, grant that my baptismal robe may never be sullied. Take me from this world rather than let me stain my soul by committing the least wilful fault. May I never seek or find aught but Thee alone! May all creatures be nothing to me and I nothing to them! May no earthly thing disturb my peace! "O Jesus, I ask but Peace. . . . Peace, and above all, Love. . . . Love--without limit. Jesus, I ask that for Thy sake I may die a Martyr; give me martyrdom of soul or body. Or rather give me both the one and the other. "Grant that I may fulfill my engagements in all their perfection; that no one may think of me; that I may be trodden under foot, forgotten, as a little grain of sand. I offer myself to Thee, O my Beloved, that Thou mayest ever perfectly accomplish in me Thy Holy Will, without let or hindrance from creatures." When at the close of this glorious day I laid my crown of roses, according to custom, at Our Lady's feet, it was without regret. I felt that time would never lessen my happiness. It was the Nativity of Mary. What a beautiful feast on which to become the Spouse of Jesus! It was the _little_ new-born Holy Virgin who presented her _little_ Flower to the _little_ Jesus. That day everything was little except the graces I received--except my peace and joy in gazing upon the beautiful star-lit sky at night, and in thinking that soon I should fly away to Heaven and be united to my Divine Spouse amid eternal bliss. On September 24 took place the ceremony of my receiving the veil. This feast was indeed _veiled_ in tears. Papa was too ill to come and bless his little Queen; at the last minute Mgr. Hugonin, who should have presided, was unable to do so, and, for other reasons also, the day was a painful one. And yet amid it all, my soul was profoundly at peace. That day it pleased Our Lord that I should not be able to restrain my tears, and those tears were not understood. It is true I had borne far harder trials without shedding a tear; but then I had been helped by special graces, whilst on this day Jesus left me to myself, and I soon showed my weakness. Eight days after I had taken the veil my cousin, Jeanne Guérin, was married to Dr. La Néele. When she came to see us afterwards and I heard of all the little attentions she lavished on her husband, my heart thrilled and I thought: "It shall never be said that a woman in the world does more for her husband than I do for Jesus, my Beloved." And, filled with fresh ardour, I set myself more earnestly than ever to please my Heavenly Spouse, the King of Kings, Who had deigned to honour me by a divine alliance. Having seen the letter announcing the marriage, I amused myself by composing the following invitation, which I read to the novices in order to bring home to them what had struck me so forcibly--that the glory of all earthly unions is as nothing compared to the titles of a Spouse of Our Divine Lord. "God Almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth, Sovereign Ruler of the Universe, and the Glorious Virgin Mary, Queen of the Heavenly Court, announce to you the Spiritual Espousals of their August Son, Jesus, King of Kings and Lord of Lords, with little Thérèse Martin, now Princess and Lady of His Kingdoms of the Holy Childhood and the Passion, assigned to her as a dowry, by her Divine Spouse, from which Kingdoms she holds her titles of nobility--_of the Child Jesus and of the Holy Face._ It was not possible to invite you to the Wedding Feast which took place on the Mountain of Carmel, September 8, 1890--the Heavenly Court was alone admitted--but you are requested to be present at the Wedding Feast which will take place to-morrow, the day of Eternity, when Jesus, the Son of God, will come in the clouds of Heaven, in the splendour of His Majesty, to judge the living and the dead. "The hour being still uncertain, you are asked to hold yourselves in readiness and watch."[3] And now, Mother, what more shall I say? It was through your hands that I gave myself to Our Lord, and you have known me from childhood--need I write my secrets? Forgive me if I cut short the story of my religious life. During the general retreat following my profession I received great graces. As a rule I find preached retreats most trying, but this one was quite an exception. I anticipated so much suffering that I prepared myself by a fervent novena. It was said that the good Priest understood better how to convert sinners than to direct the souls of nuns. Well then, I must be a great sinner, for God made use of this holy religious to bring me much consolation. At that time I had all kinds of interior trials which I found it impossible to explain to anyone; suddenly, I was able to lay open my whole soul. The Father understood me in a marvellous way; he seemed to divine my state, and launched me full sail upon that ocean of confidence and love in which I had longed to advance, but so far had not dared. He told me that my faults did not pain the Good God, and added: "At this moment I hold His place, and I assure you from Him that He is well pleased with your soul." How happy these consoling words made me! I had never been told before that it was possible for faults not to pain the Sacred Heart; this assurance filled me with joy and helped me to bear with patience the exile of this life. It was also the echo of my inmost thoughts. In truth I had long known that the Lord is more tender than a mother, and I have sounded the depths of more than one mother's heart. I know that a mother is ever ready to forgive her child's small thoughtless faults. How often have I not had this sweet experience! No reproach could have touched me more than one single kiss from my Mother. My nature is such that fear makes me shrink, while, under love's sweet rule, I not only advance--I fly. Two months after this happy retreat our Venerable Foundress, Mother Genevieve of St. Teresa, quitted our little convent to enter the Heavenly Carmel. Before speaking of my impressions at the time of her death, I should like to tell you what a joy it was to have lived for some years with a soul whose holiness was not inimitable, but lay in the practice of simple and hidden virtues. More than once she was to me a source of great consolation. One Sunday I went to the infirmary to pay her a visit, but, as two of the older nuns were there, I was retiring quietly, when she called me and said, with something of inspiration in her manner: "Wait, my child, I have just a word for you; you are always asking me for a spiritual bouquet, well, to-day I give you this one: Serve the Lord in peace and in joy. Remember that Our God is the God of peace." I thanked her quite simply and went out of the room. I was moved almost to tears, and was convinced that God had revealed to her the state of my soul. That day I had been sorely tried, almost to sadness. Such was the darkness that I no longer knew if I were beloved of God, and so, dear Mother, you can understand what light and consolation succeeded this gloom. The following Sunday I asked her whether she had received any revelation about me, but she assured me that she had not, and this only made me admire her the more, for it showed how intimately Jesus lived in her soul and directed her words and actions. Such holiness seems to me the most true, the most holy; it is the holiness I desire, for it is free from all illusion. On the day when this revered Mother ended her exile, I received a very special grace. It was the first time I had assisted at a death-bed, yet though the sight enchanted me by its beauty, my two hours of watching had made me very drowsy. I was grieved at this, but, at the moment her soul took its flight to Heaven, my feelings were completely changed. In an instant I was filled with an indescribable joy and fervour, as if the soul of our blessed Foundress made me share in the happiness she already enjoyed--for I am quite convinced she went straight to Heaven. I had said to her some time previously: "You will not go to Purgatory, dear Mother." "I hope not," she answered sweetly. Certainly God would not disappoint a hope so full of humility; and the proof that He did not, lies in the many favours we have received. The Sisters hastened to claim something belonging to our beloved Mother, and you know what a precious relic is mine. During her agony I had noticed a tear glistening like a beautiful diamond. That tear, the last she shed on this earth, did not fall, I still saw it shining when her body was exposed in the choir. When evening came, I made bold to approach unseen, with a little piece of linen, and I now have the happiness of possessing the last tear of a Saint. I attach no importance to my dreams, and indeed, they seldom have any special meaning, though I do often wonder how it is that, as I think of God all the day, my mind does not dwell on Him more in my sleep. Generally I dream of the woods and the flowers, the brooks and the sea, and nearly always of pretty children; or I chase birds and butterflies such as I have never seen. But, if my dreams are sometimes poetical, they are never mystical. However, one night after Mother Genevieve's death, I had a more consoling one. I thought I saw her giving to each of us something that had belonged to herself. When my turn came, her hands were empty, and I was afraid I was not to receive anything; but she looked at me lovingly, and said three times: "To you I leave my heart." About a month after that seraphic death, towards the close of the year 1891, an epidemic of influenza raged in the Community; I only had it slightly and was able to be about with two other Sisters. It is impossible to imagine the heartrending state of our Carmel throughout those days of sorrow. The worst sufferers were nursed by those who could hardly drag themselves about; death was all around us, and, when a Sister had breathed her last, we had to leave her instantly. My nineteenth birthday was saddened by the death of Mother Sub-Prioress; I assisted with the infirmarian during her agony, and two more deaths quickly followed. I now had to do the Sacristy work single-handed, and I wonder sometimes how I was equal to it all. One morning, when it was time to rise, I had a presentiment that Sister Magdalen was no more. The dormitory was quite in darkness, no one was leaving her cell. I decided, however, to go in to Sister Magdalen, and I found her dressed, but lying dead on her bed. I was not in the least afraid, and running to the Sacristy I quickly brought a blessed candle, and placed on her head a wreath of roses. Amid all this desolation I felt the Hand of God and knew that His Heart was watching over us. Our dear Sisters left this life for a happier one without any struggle; an expression of heavenly joy shone on their faces, and they seemed only to be enjoying a pleasant sleep. During all these long and trying weeks I had the unspeakable consolation of receiving Holy Communion every day. How sweet it was! For a long time Jesus treated me as a spoilt child, for a longer time than His more faithful Spouses. He came to me daily for several months after the influenza had ceased, a privilege not granted to the Community. I had not asked this favour, but I was unspeakably happy to be united day after day to my Beloved. Great was my joy in being allowed to touch the Sacred Vessels and prepare the Altar linen on which Our Lord was to be laid. I felt that I must increase in fervour, and I often recalled those words addressed to deacons at their ordination: "Be you holy, you who carry the Vessels of the Lord." What can I tell you, dear Mother, about my thanksgivings after Communion? There is no time when I taste less consolation. But this is what I should expect. I desire to receive Our Lord, not for my own satisfaction, but simply to give Him pleasure. I picture my soul as a piece of waste ground and beg Our Blessed Lady to take away my imperfections--which are as heaps of rubbish--and to build upon it a splendid tabernacle worthy of Heaven, and adorn it with her own adornments. Then I invite all the Angels and Saints to come and sing canticles of love, and it seems to me that Jesus is well pleased to see Himself received so grandly, and I share in His joy. But all this does not prevent distractions and drowsiness from troubling me, and not unfrequently I resolve to continue my thanksgiving throughout the day, since I made it so badly in choir. You see, dear Mother, that my way is not the way of fear; I can always make myself happy, and profit by my imperfections, and Our Lord Himself encourages me in this path. Once, contrary to my usual custom, I felt troubled when I approached the Holy Table. For several days there had not been a sufficient number of Hosts, and I had only received a small part of one; this morning I foolishly thought: "If the same thing happens to-day, I shall imagine that Jesus does not care to come into my heart." I approached the rails. What a joy awaited me! The Priest hesitated a moment, then gave me two entire Hosts. Was this not a sweet response? I have much to be thankful for. I will tell you quite openly what the Lord has done for me. He has shown unto me the same mercy as unto King Solomon. All my desires have been satisfied; not only my desires of perfection, but even those of which I understood the vanity, in theory, if not in practice. I had always looked on Sister Agnes of Jesus as my model, and I wished to be like her in everything. She used to paint exquisite miniatures and write beautiful poems, and this inspired me with a desire to learn to paint,[4] and express my thoughts in verse, that I might do some good to those around me. But I would not ask for these natural gifts, and my desire remained hidden in my heart. Jesus, too, had hidden Himself in this poor little heart, and He was pleased to show me once more the vanity of all that passes. To the great astonishment of the Community, I succeeded in painting several pictures and in writing poems which have been a help to certain souls. And just as Solomon, "turning to all the works which his hand had wrought, and to the labours wherein he had laboured in vain, saw in all things vanity and vexation of mind,"[5] so experience showed me that the sole happiness of earth consists in lying hidden, and remaining in total ignorance of created things. I understood that without love even the most brilliant deeds count for nothing. These gifts, which Our Lord lavished upon me, far from doing me any harm, drew me towards Him; I saw that He alone is unchangeable, He alone can fill the vast abyss of my desires. Talking of my desires, I must tell you about others of quite a different kind, which the Divine Master has also been pleased to grant: childish desires, like the wish for snow on my clothing day. You know, dear Mother, how fond I am of flowers. When I made myself a prisoner at the age of fifteen, I gave up for ever the delights of rambling through meadows bright with the treasures of spring. Well, I never possessed so many flowers as I have had since entering the Carmel. In the world young men present their betrothed with beautiful bouquets, and Jesus did not forget me. For His Altar I received, in abundance, all the flowers I loved best: cornflowers, poppies, marguerites--one little friend only was missing, the purple vetch. I longed to see it again, and at last it came to gladden me and show that, in the least as in the greatest, God gives a hundred-fold, even in this life, to those who have left all for His Love. But one desire, the dearest of all, and for many reasons the most difficult, remained unfulfilled. It was to see Céline enter the Carmel of Lisieux. However, I had made a sacrifice of my longing, and committed to God alone the future of my loved sister. I was willing she should be sent to far distant lands if it must be so; but I wanted above all things to see her like myself, the Spouse of Jesus. I suffered deeply, aware that she was exposed in the world to dangers I had never even known. My affection for her was maternal rather than sisterly, and I was filled with solicitude for the welfare of her soul. She was to go one evening with my aunt and cousins to a dance. I know not why, but I felt more anxious than usual, and I shed many tears, imploring Our Lord to hinder her dancing. And this was just what happened; for He did not suffer His little Spouse to dance that evening, although as a rule she did so most gracefully. And, to the astonishment of everyone, her partner, too, found that he was only able to walk gravely up and down with Mademoiselle. The poor young man slipped away in confusion, and did not dare appear again that evening. This unique occurrence increased my confidence in Our Lord, and showed me clearly that He had already set His seal on my sister's brow. On July 29, 1894, God called my saintly and much-tried Father to Himself. For the last two years of his life he was completely paralysed; so my uncle took him into his house and surrounded him with the tenderest care. He became quite helpless and was only able to visit us once during the whole course of his illness. It was a sad interview. At the moment of parting, as we said good-bye, he raised his eyes, and pointing upwards said in a voice full of tears: "In Heaven!" Now that he was with God, the last ties which kept his consoling Angel in the world were broken. Angels do not remain on this earth; when they have accomplished their mission, they return instantly to Heaven. That is why they have wings. Céline tried therefore to fly to the Carmel; but the obstacles seemed insurmountable. One day, when matters were going from bad to worse, I said to Our Lord after Holy Communion: "Thou knowest, dear Jesus, how earnestly I have desired that the trials my Father endured should serve as his purgatory. I long to know if my wish is granted. I do not ask Thee to speak to me, I only want a sign. Thou knowest how much opposed is Sister N. to Céline's entering; if she withdraw her opposition, I shall regard it as an answer from Thee, and in this way I shall know that my Father went straight to Heaven." God, Who holds in His Hand the hearts of His creatures, and inclines them as He will, deigned in His infinite mercy and ineffable condescension to change that Sister's mind. She was the first person I met after my thanksgiving, and, with tears in her eyes, she spoke of Céline's entrance, which she now ardently desired. Shortly afterwards the Bishop set every obstacle aside, and then you were able, dear Mother, without any hesitation, to open our doors to the poor little exile.[6] Now I have no desire left, unless it be to love Jesus even unto folly! It is Love alone that draws me. I no longer wish either for suffering or death, yet both are precious to me. Long did I call upon them as the messengers of joy. I have suffered much, and I have thought my barque near indeed to the Everlasting Shore. From earliest childhood I have imagined that the Little Flower would be gathered in its springtime; now, the spirit of self-abandonment alone is my guide. I have no other compass, and know not how to ask anything with eagerness, save the perfect accomplishment of God's designs upon my soul. I can say these words of the Canticle of our Father, St. John of the Cross: "I drank deep in the cellar of my Friend, And, coming forth again, Knew naught of all this plain, And lost the flock I erst was wont to tend. My soul and all its wealth I gave to be His Own; No more I tend my flock, all other work is done, And all my exercise is Love alone."[7] Or rather: "Love hath so wrought in me Since I have known its sway, That all within me, whether good or ill, It makes subservient to the end it seeks, And soon transforms my soul into itself."[8] Full sweet is the way of Love. It is true one may fall and be unfaithful to grace; but Love, knowing how to profit by everything, quickly consumes whatever is displeasing to Jesus, leaving in the heart only a deep and humble peace. I have obtained many spiritual lights through the works of St. John of the Cross. When I was seventeen and eighteen they were my only food; but, later on, and even now, all spiritual authors leave me cold and dry. However beautiful and touching a book may be, my heart does not respond, and I read without understanding, or, if I understand, I cannot meditate. In my helplessness the Holy Scriptures and the _Imitation_ are of the greatest assistance; in them I find a hidden manna, genuine and pure. But it is from the Gospels that I find most help in the time of prayer; from them I draw all that I need for my poor soul. I am always discovering in them new lights and hidden mysterious meanings. I know and I have experienced that "the Kingdom of God is within us."[9] Our Lord has no need of books or teachers to instruct our souls. He, the Teacher of Teachers, instructs us without any noise of words. I have never heard Him speak, yet I know He is within me. He is there, always guiding and inspiring me; and just when I need them, lights, hitherto unseen, break in. This is not as a rule during my prayers, but in the midst of my daily duties. Sometimes, however, as this evening, at the close of a meditation spent in utter dryness, a word of comfort is given to me: "Here is the Master I give thee, He will teach thee all that thou shouldst do. I wish thee to read in the Book of Life in which is contained the science of love. . . ."[10] The Science of Love! How sweetly do these words echo in my soul! That science alone do I desire. Having given all my substance for it, like the Spouse in the Canticles, "I think that I have given nothing."[11] After so many graces, may I not sing with the Psalmist that "the Lord is good, that His Mercy endureth for ever"?[12] It seems to me that if everyone were to receive such favours God would be feared by none, but loved to excess; that no one would ever commit the least wilful fault--and this through love, not fear. Yet all souls cannot be alike. It is necessary that they should differ from one another in order that each Divine Perfection may receive its special honour. To me, He has given His Infinite Mercy, and it is in this ineffable mirror that I contemplate his other attributes. Therein all appear to me radiant with Love. His Justice, even more perhaps than the rest, seems to me to be clothed with Love. What joy to think that Our Lord is just, that is to say, that He takes our weakness into account, that He knows perfectly the frailty of our nature! Of what, then, need I be afraid? Will not the God of Infinite Justice, Who deigns so lovingly to pardon the sins of the Prodigal Son, be also just to me "who am always with Him"?[13] In the year 1895 I received the grace to understand, more than ever, how much Jesus desires to be loved. Thinking one day of those who offer themselves as victims to the Justice of God, in order to turn aside the punishment reserved for sinners by taking it upon themselves, I felt this offering to be noble and generous, but was very far from feeling myself drawn to make it. "O my Divine Master," I cried from the bottom of my heart, "shall Thy Justice alone receive victims of holocaust? Has not Thy Merciful Love also need thereof? On all sides it is ignored, rejected . . . the hearts on which Thou wouldst lavish it turn to creatures, there to seek their happiness in the miserable satisfaction of a moment, instead of casting themselves into Thine Arms, into the unfathomable furnace of Thine Infinite Love. "O my God! must Thy Love which is disdained lie hidden in Thy Heart? Methinks, if Thou shouldst find souls offering themselves as victims of holocaust to Thy Love, Thou wouldst consume them rapidly; Thou wouldst be well pleased to suffer the flames of infinite tenderness to escape that are imprisoned in Thy Heart. "If Thy Justice--which is of earth--must needs be satisfied, how much more must Thy Merciful Love desire to inflame souls, since _"Thy mercy reacheth even to the Heavens"_?[14] O Jesus! Let me be that happy victim--consume Thy holocaust with the Fire of Divine Love!" Dear Mother, you know the love, or rather the oceans of grace which flooded my soul immediately after I made that Act of Oblation on June 9, 1895. From that day I have been penetrated and surrounded with love. Every moment this Merciful Love renews me and purifies me, leaving in my soul no trace of sin. I cannot fear Purgatory; I know I do not merit to enter, even, into that place of expiation with the Holy Souls, but I also know that the fire of Love is more sanctifying than the fire of Purgatory. I know that Jesus could not wish useless suffering for us, and He would not inspire me with the desires I feel, were He not willing to fulfill them. ______________________________ [1] Psalm 102[103]:14. [2] Phil. 4:7. [3] This letter, the style of which may seem strange to English ears, is modelled closely on the formal and quaint letters whereby French parents of the better class announce to their friends the marriage of their children. Such letters of _"faire-part"_ are issued in the name of relatives to the third or fourth degree. [Ed.] [4] Thérèse had kept this wish hidden in her heart from the days of her childhood, and later in life she made the following confidence: "I was ten the day Papa told Céline that she was to begin painting lessons. I felt quite envious. Then he turned to me and said: 'Well, little Queen, would you like to learn painting too?' I was going to say: 'Yes, indeed I should,' when Marie remarked that I had not the same taste for it as Céline. She carried her point, and I said nothing, thinking it was a splendid opportunity to make a big sacrifice for Our Lord; I was so anxious to learn, that even now I wonder how I was able to keep silence." [5] Eccl. 2:11. [6] Céline entered the Convent on September 14, 1894, and took the name of Sister Genevieve of St. Teresa. [7] Spiritual Canticle: Stanzas 18 and 20. [8] Hymn to the Deity. [9] Luke 17:21. [10] Revelation of Our Lord to Bd. Margaret Mary. [11] Cant. 8:7. [12] Psalm 103[104]:1. [13] Luke 15:31. [14] Cf. Psalm 35[36]:6. ______________________________ CHAPTER IX THE NIGHT OF THE SOUL Dear Mother, I thought I had written enough, and now you wish for more details of my religious life. I will not argue, but I cannot help smiling when I have to tell you things that you know quite as well as I do. Nevertheless, I will obey. I do not ask what use this manuscript can be to any one, I assure you that even were you to burn it before my eyes, without having read it, I should not mind in the least. The opinion is not uncommon in the Community that you have always indulged me, ever since I entered the Convent; however, "Man seeth those things that appear, but the Lord beholdeth the heart."[1] Dear Mother, once again I thank you for not having spared me. Jesus knew well that His Little Flower needed the life-giving water of humiliation--it was too weak to take root otherwise, and to you it owes so great a blessing. But for some months, the Divine Master has entirely changed His method of cultivating His Little Flower. Finding no doubt that it has been sufficiently watered, He now allows it to expand under the warm rays of a brilliant sun. He smiles on it, and this favour also comes through you, dear Mother, but far from doing it harm, those smiles make the Little Flower grow in a wondrous way. Deep down in its heart it treasures those precious drops of dew--the mortifications of other days--and they remind it that it is small and frail. Even were all creatures to draw near to admire and flatter it, that would not add a shade of idle satisfaction to the true joy which thrills it, on realising that in God's Eyes it is but a poor, worthless thing, and nothing more. When I say that I am indifferent to praise, I am not speaking, dear Mother, of the love and confidence you show me; on the contrary I am deeply touched thereby, but I feel that I have now nothing to fear, and I can listen to those praises unperturbed, attributing to God all that is good in me. If it please Him to make me appear better than I am, it is nothing to me, He can act as He will. My God, how many ways dost Thou lead souls! We read of Saints who left absolutely nothing at their death, not the least thing by which to remember them, not even a single line of writing; and there are others like our holy Mother, St. Teresa, who have enriched the Church with their sublime teaching, and have not hesitated to reveal "the secrets of the King,"[2] that He may be better known and better loved. Which of these two ways is more pleasing to Our Lord? It seems to me that they are equally so. All those beloved by God have followed the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, who commanded the prophets to write: "Tell the just man that all is well."[3] Yes, all is well when one seeks only the Master's Will, and so I, poor Little Flower, obey my Jesus when I try to please you, who represent him here on earth. You know it has ever been my desire to become a Saint, but I have always felt, in comparing myself with the Saints, that I am as far removed from them as the grain of sand, which the passer-by tramples underfoot, is remote from the mountain whose summit is lost in the clouds. Instead of being discouraged, I concluded that God would not inspire desires which could not be realised, and that I may aspire to sanctity in spite of my littleness. For me to become great is impossible. I must bear with myself and my many imperfections; but I will seek out a means of getting to Heaven by a little way--very short and very straight, a little way that is wholly new. We live in an age of inventions; nowadays the rich need not trouble to climb the stairs, they have lifts instead. Well, I mean to try and find a lift by which I may be raised unto God, for I am too tiny to climb the steep stairway of perfection. I have sought to find in Holy Scripture some suggestion as to what this lift might be which I so much desired, and I read these words uttered by the Eternal Wisdom Itself: "Whosoever is a little one, let him come to Me."[4] Then I drew near to God, feeling sure that I had discovered what I sought; but wishing to know further what He would do to the little one, I continued my search and this is what I found: "You shall be carried at the breasts and upon the knees; as one whom the mother caresseth, so will I comfort you."[5] Never have I been consoled by words more tender and sweet. Thine Arms, then, O Jesus, are the lift which must raise me up even unto Heaven. To get there I need not grow; on the contrary, I must remain little, I must become still less. O my God, thou hast gone beyond my expectation, and I . . . "I will sing Thy mercies! Thou hast taught me, O Lord, from my youth and till now I have declared Thy wonderful works, and thus unto old age and grey hairs."[6] What will this old age be for me? It seems to me that it could as well be now as later: two thousand years are no more in the Eyes of the Lord than twenty years . . . than a single day! But do not think, dear Mother, that your child is anxious to leave you, and deems it a greater grace to die in the morning rather than in the evening of life; to please Jesus is what [s]he really values and desires above all things. Now that He seems to come near and draw her to His Heavenly Home, she is glad; she has understood that God has need of no one to do good upon earth, still less of her than of others. Meantime I know your will, dear Mother. You wish me to carry out, at your side, a work which is both sweet and easy,[7] and this work I shall complete in Heaven. You have said to me, as Our Lord said to St. Peter: "Feed my lambs." I am amazed, for I feel that I am so little. I have entreated you to feed your little lambs yourself and to keep me among them. You have complied in part with my reasonable wish, and have called me their companion, rather than their mistress, telling me nevertheless to lead them through fertile and shady pastures, to point out where the grass is sweetest and best, and warn them against the brilliant but poisonous flowers, which they must never touch except to crush under foot. How is it, dear Mother, that my youth and inexperience have not frightened you? Are you not afraid that I shall let your lambs stray afar? In acting as you have done, perhaps you remembered that Our Lord is often pleased to give wisdom to little ones. On this earth it is rare indeed to find souls who do not measure God's Omnipotence by their own narrow thoughts. The world is always ready to admit exceptions everywhere here below. God alone is denied this liberty. It has long been the custom among men to reckon experience by age, for in his youth the holy King David sang to His Lord: "I am young and despised,"[8] but in the same Psalm he does not fear to say: "I have had understanding above old men, because I have sought Thy commandments, Thy word is a lamp to my feet, and a light to my paths; I have sworn, and I am determined, to keep the judgments of Thy Justice."[9] And you did not even consider it imprudent to assure me one day, that the Divine Master had enlightened my soul and given me the experience of years. I am too little now to be guilty of vanity; I am likewise too little to endeavour to prove my humility by fine-sounding words. I prefer to own in all simplicity that "He that is mighty hath done great things to me"--[10] and the greatest is that He has shown me my littleness and how incapable I am of anything good. My soul has known trials of many kinds. I have suffered much on this earth. In my childhood I suffered with sadness, but now I find sweetness in all things. Anyone but you, dear Mother, who know me thoroughly, would smile at reading these pages, for has ever a soul seemed less tried than mine? But if the martyrdom which I have endured for the past year were made known, how astonished everyone would be! Since it is your wish I will try to describe it, but there are no words really to explain these things. The words will always fall short of the reality. During Lent last year I felt much better than ever and continued so until Holy Week, in spite of the fast which I observed in all its rigour. But in the early hours of Good Friday, Jesus gave me to hope that I should soon join Him in His beautiful Home. How sweet is this memory! I could not obtain permission to remain watching at the Altar of Repose throughout the Thursday night, and I returned to our cell at midnight. Scarcely was my head laid on the pillow when I felt a hot stream rise to my lips. I thought I was going to die, and my heart nearly broke with joy. But as I had already put out our lamp, I mortified my curiosity until the morning and slept in peace. At five o'clock, when it was time to get up, I remembered at once that I had some good news to learn, and going to the window I found, as I had expected, that our handkerchief was soaked with blood. Dearest Mother, what hope was mine! I was firmly convinced that on this anniversary of His Death, my Beloved had allowed me to hear His first call, like a sweet, distant murmur, heralding His joyful approach. I assisted at Prime and Chapter most fervently, and then I hastened to cast myself at my Mother's knees and confide to her my happiness. I did not feel the least pain, so I easily obtained permission to finish Lent as I had begun, and on this Good Friday I shared in all the austerities of the Carmel without any relaxation. Never had these austerities seemed sweeter to me; the hope of soon entering Heaven transported me with joy. Still full of joy, I returned to our cell on the evening of that happy day, and was quietly falling asleep, when my sweet Jesus gave me the same sign as on the previous night, of my speedy entrance to Eternal Life. I felt such a clear and lively Faith that the thought of Heaven was my sole delight. I could not believe it possible for men to be utterly devoid of Faith, and I was convinced that those who deny the existence of another world really lie in their hearts. But during the Paschal days, so full of light, our Lord made me understand that there really are in truth souls bereft of Faith and Hope, who, through abuse of grace, lose these precious treasures, the only source of pure and lasting joy. He allowed my soul to be overwhelmed with darkness, and the thought of Heaven, which had consoled me from my earliest childhood, now became a subject of conflict and torture. This trial did not last merely for days or weeks; I have been suffering for months, and I still await deliverance. I wish I could express what I feel, but it is beyond me. One must have passed through this dark tunnel to understand its blackness. However, I will try to explain it by means of a comparison. Let me suppose that I had been born in a land of thick fogs, and had never seen the beauties of nature, or a single ray of sunshine, although I had heard of these wonders from my early youth, and knew that the country wherein I dwelt was not my real home--there was another land, unto which I should always look forward. Now this is not a fable, invented by an inhabitant of the land of fogs, it is the solemn truth, for the King of that sunlit country dwelt for three and thirty years in the land of darkness, and alas!--the darkness did not understand that He was the Light of the World._[11] But, dear Lord, Thy child has understood Thou art the Light Divine; she asks Thy pardon for her unbelieving brethren, and is willing to eat the bread of sorrow as long as Thou mayest wish. For love of Thee she will sit at that table of bitterness where these poor sinners take their food, and she will not stir from it until Thou givest the sign. But may she not say in her own name, and the name of her guilty brethren: "O God, be merciful to us sinners!"[12] Send us away justified. May all those on whom Faith does not shine see the light at last! O my God, if that table which they profane can be purified by one that loves Thee, I am willing to remain there alone to eat the bread of tears, until it shall please Thee to bring me to Thy Kingdom of Light: the only favour I ask is, that I may never give Thee cause for offence. From the time of my childhood I felt that one day I should be set free from this land of darkness. I believed it, not only because I had been told so by others, but my heart's most secret and deepest longings assured me that there was in store for me another and more beautiful country--an abiding dwelling-place. I was like Christopher Columbus, whose genius anticipated the discovery of the New World. And suddenly the mists about me have penetrated my very soul and have enveloped me so completely that I cannot even picture to myself this promised country . . . all has faded away. When my heart, weary of the surrounding darkness, tries to find some rest in the thought of a life to come, my anguish increases. It seems to me that out of the darkness I hear the mocking voice of the unbeliever: "You dream of a land of light and fragrance, you dream that the Creator of these wonders will be yours for ever, you think one day to escape from these mists where you now languish. Nay, rejoice in death, which will give you, not what you hope for, but a night darker still, the night of utter nothingness!" . . . Dear Mother, this description of what I suffer is as far removed from reality as the first rough outline is from the model, but I fear that to write more were to blaspheme . . . even now I may have said too much. May God forgive me! He knows that I try to live by Faith, though it does not afford me the least consolation. I have made more acts of Faith in this last year than during all the rest of my life. Each time that my enemy would provoke me to combat, I behave as a gallant soldier. I know that a duel is an act of cowardice, and so, without once looking him in the face, I turn my back on the foe, then I hasten to my Saviour, and vow that I am ready to shed my blood in witness of my belief in Heaven. I tell him, if only He will deign to open it to poor unbelievers, I am content to sacrifice all pleasure in the thought of it as long as I live. And in spite of this trial, which robs me of all comfort, I still can say: "Thou hast given me, O Lord, delight in all Thou dost."[13] For what joy can be greater than to suffer for Thy Love? The more the suffering is and the less it appears before men, the more is it to Thy Honour and Glory. Even if--but I know it to be impossible--Thou shouldst not deign to heed my sufferings, I should still be happy to bear them, in the hope that by my tears I might perhaps prevent or atone for one sin against Faith. No doubt, dear Mother, you will think I exaggerate somewhat _the night of my soul._ If you judge by the poems I have composed this year, it must seem as though I have been flooded with consolations, like a child for whom the veil of Faith is almost rent asunder. And yet it is not a veil--it is a wall which rises to the very heavens and shuts out the starry sky. When I sing of the happiness of Heaven and the eternal possession of God, I do not feel any joy therein, for I sing only of what I wish to believe. Sometimes, I confess, a little ray of sunshine illumines my dark night, and I enjoy peace for an instant, but later, the remembrance of this ray of light, instead of consoling me, makes the blackness thicker still. And yet never have I felt so deeply how sweet and merciful is the Lord. He did not send me this heavy cross when it might have discouraged me, but at a time when I was able to bear it. Now it simply takes from me all natural satisfaction I might feel in my longing for Heaven. Dear Mother, it seems to me that at present there is nothing to impede my upward flight, for I have no longer any desire save to love Him till I die. I am free; I fear nothing now, not even what I dreaded more than anything else, a long illness which would make me a burden to the Community. Should it please the Good God, I am quite content to have my bodily and mental sufferings prolonged for years. I do not fear a long life; I do not shrink from the struggle. The Lord is the rock upon which I stand--"Who teacheth my hands to fight, and my fingers to war. He is my Protector and I have hoped in Him."[14] I have never asked God to let me die young, It is true I have always thought I should do so, but it is a favour I have not tried to obtain. Our Lord is often content with the wish to do something for His Glory, and you know the immensity of my desires. You know also that Jesus has offered me more than one bitter chalice through my dearly loved sisters. The holy King David was right when he sang: "Behold how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity."[15] But such unity can only exist upon earth in the midst of sacrifice. It was not in order to be with my sisters that I came to this holy Carmel; on the contrary, I knew well that in curbing my natural affection I should have much to suffer. How can it be said that it is more perfect to separate oneself from home and friends? Has anyone ever reproached brothers who fight side by side, or together win the martyr's palm? It is true, no doubt, they encourage each other; but it is also true that the martyrdom of each is a martyrdom to them all. And so it is in the religious life; theologians call it a martyrdom. A heart given to God loses nothing of its natural affection--on the contrary, this affection grows stronger by becoming purer and more spiritual. It is with this love, dear Mother, that I love you and my sisters. I am glad to fight beside you for the glory of the King of Heaven, but I am ready to go to another battlefield, did the Divine Commander but express a wish. An order would not be necessary: a simple look, a sign, would suffice. Ever since I came to the Carmel I have thought that if Our Lord did not take me quickly to Heaven, my lot would be that of Noe's dove, and that one day he would open the window of the Ark and bid me fly to heathen lands, bearing the olive branch. This thought has helped me to soar above all created things. Knowing that even in the Carmel there must be partings, I tried to make my abode in Heaven; and I accepted not only exile in the midst of an unknown people, but what was far more bitter, I accepted exile for my sisters. And indeed, two of them were asked for by the Carmel of Saïgon, our own foundation. For a time there was serious question of their being sent, and I would not say a word to hold them back, though my heart ached at the thought of the trials awaiting them. Now all that is at an end; the superiors were absolutely opposed to their departure, and I only touched the cup with my lips long enough to taste of its bitterness. Let me tell you, dear Mother, why, if Our Lady cures me, I wish to respond to the call from our Mothers of Hanoï. It appears that to live in foreign Carmels, a very special vocation is needed, and many souls think they are called without being so in reality. You have told me that I have this vocation, and that my health alone stands in the way. But if I am destined one day to leave this Carmel, it will not be without a pang. My heart is naturally sensitive, and because this is a cause of much suffering, I wish to offer Jesus whatsoever it can bear. Here, I am loved by you and all the Sisters, and this love is very sweet to me, and I dream of a convent where I should be unknown, where I should taste the bitterness of exile. I know only too well how useless I am, and so it is not for the sake of the services I might render to the Carmel of Hanoï that I would leave all that is dearest to me--my sole reason would be to do God's Will, and sacrifice myself for Him. And I should not suffer any disappointment, for when we expect nothing but suffering, then the least joy is a surprise; and later on suffering itself becomes the greatest of all joys, when we seek it as a precious treasure. But I know I shall never recover from this sickness, and yet I am at peace. For years I have not belonged to myself, I have surrendered myself wholly to Jesus, and He is free to do with me whatsoever He pleases. He has spoken to me of exile, and has asked me if I would consent to drink of that chalice. At once I essayed to grasp it, but He, withdrawing His Hand, showed me that my consent was all He desired. O my God! from how much disquiet do we free ourselves by the vow of obedience! Happy is the simple religious. Her one guide being the will of her superiors, she is ever sure of following the right path, and has no fear of being mistaken, even when it seems that her superiors are making a mistake. But if she ceases to consult the unerring compass, then at once her soul goes astray in barren wastes, where the waters of grace quickly fail. Dear Mother, you are the compass Jesus has given me to direct me safely to the Eternal Shore. I find it most sweet to fix my eyes upon you, and then do the Will of my Lord. By allowing me to suffer these temptations against Faith, He has greatly increased the spirit of Faith, which makes me see Him living in your soul, and through you communicating His holy commands. I am well aware that you lighten the burden of obedience for me, but deep in my heart I feel that my attitude would not change, nor would my filial affection grow less, were you to treat me with severity: and this because I should still see the Will of God manifesting itself in another way for the greater good of my soul. Among the numberless graces that I have received this year, not the least is an understanding of how far-reaching is the precept of charity. I had never before fathomed these words of Our Lord: "The second commandment is like to the first: Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself."[16] I had set myself above all to love God, and it was in loving Him that I discovered the hidden meaning of these other words: "It is not those who say, Lord, Lord! who enter into the Kingdom of Heaven, but he who does the Will of My Father."[17] Jesus revealed me this Will when at the Last Supper He gave His New Commandment in telling His Apostles to _love one another as He had loved them._[18] I set myself to find out how He had loved His Apostles; and I saw that it was not for their natural qualities, for they were ignorant men, full of earthly ideas. And yet He calls them His Friends, His Brethren; He desires to see them near Him in the Kingdom of His Father, and in order to admit them to this Kingdom He wills to die on the Cross, saying: "Greater love than this no man hath, that a man lay down his life for his friends."[19] As I meditated on these Divine words, I saw how imperfect was the love I bore my Sisters in religion. I understood that I did not love them as Our Lord loves them. I know now that true charity consists in bearing all our neighbours' defects--not being surprised at their weakness, but edified at their smallest virtues. Above all I know that charity must not remain shut up in the heart, for "No man lighteth a candle, and putteth it in a hidden place, nor under a bushel; but upon a candlestick, that they who come in may see the light."[20] It seems to me, dear Mother, this candle represents that charity which enlightens and gladdens, not only those who are dear to us, but all _those who are of the household._ In the Old Law, when God told His people to love their neighbour as themselves, He had not yet come down upon earth; and knowing full well how man loves himself, He could not ask anything greater. But when Our Lord gave His Apostles a New Commandment--"His own commandment"[21]--He was not content with saying: "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself," but would have them love even as He had loved, and as He will love till the end of time. O my Jesus! Thou does never ask what is impossible; Thou knowest better than I, how frail and imperfect I am, and Thou knowest that I shall never love my Sisters as Thou hast loved them, unless within me Thou lovest them, dear Lord! It is because Thou dost desire to grant me this grace that Thou hast given a New Commandment. Oh how I love it, since I am assured thereby that it is Thy Will to love in me all those Thou dost bid me love! Yes, I know when I show charity to others, it is simply Jesus acting in me, and the more closely I am united to Him, the more dearly I love my Sisters. If I wish to increase this love in my heart, and the devil tries to bring before me the defects of a Sister, I hasten to look for her virtues, her good motives; I call to mind that though I may have seen her fall once, no doubt she has gained many victories over herself, which in her humility she conceals. It is even possible that what seems to me a fault, may very likely, on account of her good intention, be an act of virtue. I have no difficulty in persuading myself of this, because I have had the same experience. One day, during recreation, the portress came to ask for a Sister to help her. I had a childish longing to do this work, and it happened the choice fell upon me. I therefore began to fold up our needlework, but so slowly that my neighbour, who I knew would like to take my place, was ready before me. The Sister who had asked for help, seeing how deliberate I was, said laughingly: "I thought you would not add this pearl to your crown, you are so extremely slow," and all the Community thought I had yielded to natural reluctance. I cannot tell you what profit I derived from this incident, and it made me indulgent towards others. It still checks any feelings of vanity, when I am praised, for I reflect that since my small acts of virtue can be mistaken for imperfections, why should not my imperfections be mistaken for virtue? And I say with St. Paul: "To me it is a very small thing to be judged by you, or by man's day. But neither do I judge myself. He that judgeth me is the Lord."[22] And it is the Lord, it is Jesus, Who is my judge. Therefore I will try always to think leniently of others, that He may judge me leniently, or rather not at all, since He says: "Judge not, and ye shall not be judged."[23] But returning to the Holy Gospel where Our Lord explains to me clearly in what His New Commandment consists, I read in St. Matthew: "You have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thy enemy: but I say unto you, Love your enemies, and pray for them that persecute you."[24] There are, of course, no enemies in the Carmel; but, after all, we have our natural likes and dislikes. We may feel drawn towards one Sister, and may be tempted to go a long way round to avoid meeting another. Well, Our Lord tells me that this is the Sister to love and pray for, even though her behaviour may make me imagine she does not care for me. "If you love them that love you, what thanks are to you? For sinners also love those that love them."[25] And it is not enough to love, we must prove our love; naturally one likes to please a friend, but that is not charity, for sinners do the same. Our Lord also taught me: "Give to everyone that asketh thee; and of him that taketh away thy goods, ask them not again."[26] To give to everyone who asks is not so pleasant as to give of one's own accord. If we are asked pleasantly, it is easy to give; but if we are asked discourteously, then, unless we are perfect in charity, there is an inward rebellion, and we find no end of excuses for refusing. Perhaps, after first pointing out the rudeness of the request, we make such a favour of consenting thereto, that the slight service takes far less time to perform than was lost in arguing the point. And if it is difficult to give to whosoever asks, it is far more difficult to let what belongs to us be taken without asking it again. Dear Mother, I say this is hard, but I should rather say that it seems hard, for "The yoke of the Lord is sweet and His burden light."[27] And when we submit to that yoke, we at once feel its sweetness. I have said Jesus does not wish me to ask again for what is my own. This ought to seem quite easy, for, in reality, nothing is mine. I ought, then, to be glad when an occasion arises which brings home to me the poverty to which I am vowed. I used to think myself completely detached, but since Our Lord's words have become clear, I see that I am indeed very imperfect. For instance: when starting to paint, if I find the brushes in disorder, and a ruler or penknife gone, I feel inclined to lose patience, and have to keep a firm hold over myself not to betray my feelings. Of course I may ask for these needful things, and if I do so humbly I am not disobeying Our Lord's command. I am then like the poor who hold out their hands for the necessaries of life, and, if refused, are not surprised, since no one owes them anything. Deep peace inundates the soul when it soars above mere natural sentiments. There is no joy equal to that which is shared by the truly poor in spirit. If they ask with detachment for something necessary, and not only is it refused, but an attempt is made to take away what they already possess, they are following the Master's advice: "If any man will take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also."[28] To give up one's cloak is, it seems to me, to renounce every right, and to regard oneself as the servant, the slave, of all. Without a cloak it is easier to walk or run, and so the Master adds: "And whosoever shall force thee to go one mile, go with him other two."[29] It is therefore not enough for me to give to whoever asks--I ought to anticipate the wish, and show myself glad to be of service; but if anything of mine be taken away, I should show myself glad to be rid of it. I cannot always carry out to the letter the words of the Gospel, for there are occasions when I am compelled to refuse some request. Yet when charity is deeply rooted in the soul it lets itself be outwardly seen, and there is a way of refusing so graciously what one is unable to give, that the refusal affords as much pleasure as the gift would have done. It is true that people do not hesitate to ask from those who readily oblige, nevertheless I ought not to avoid importunate Sisters on the pretext that I shall be forced to refuse. The Divine Master has said: "From him that would borrow of thee turn not away."[30] Nor should I be kind in order to appear so, or in the hope that the Sister will return the service, for once more it is written: "If you lend to them of whom you hope to receive, what thanks are to you? For sinners also lend to sinners for to receive as much. But you do good and lend, hoping for nothing thereby, and your reward shall be great."[31] Verily, the reward is great even on earth. In this path it is only the first step which costs. To lend without hope of being repaid seems hard; one would rather give outright, for what you give is no longer yours. When a Sister says confidently: "I want your help for some hours--I have our Mother's leave, and be assured I will do as much for you later," one may know well that these hours _lent_ will not be repaid, and be sorely tempted to say: "I prefer to _give_ them." But that would gratify self-love, besides letting the Sister feel that you do not rely much on her promise. The Divine precepts run contrary to our natural inclinations, and without the help of grace it would be impossible to understand them, far less to put them in practice. Dear Mother, I feel that I have expressed myself with more than usual confusion, and I do not know what you can find to interest you in these rambling pages, but I am not aiming at a literary masterpiece, and if I weary you by this discourse on charity, it will at least prove your child's good will. I must confess I am far from living up to my ideal, and yet the very desire to do so gives me a feeling of peace. If I fall into some fault, I arise again at once--and for some months now I have not even had to struggle. I have been able to say with our holy Father, St. John of the Cross: "My house is entirely at peace," and I attribute this interior peace to a victory I gained over myself. Since that victory, the hosts of Heaven have hastened to my aid, for they will not allow me to be wounded, now that I have fought so valiantly. A holy nun of our community annoyed me in all that she did; the devil must have had something to do with it, and he it was undoubtedly who made me see in her so many disagreeable points. I did not want to yield to my natural antipathy, for I remembered that charity ought to betray itself in deeds, and not exist merely in the feelings, so I set myself to do for this sister all I should do for the one I loved most. Every time I met her I prayed for her, and offered to God her virtues and merits. I felt that this was very pleasing to Our Lord, for there is no artist who is not gratified when his works are praised, and the Divine Artist of souls is pleased when we do not stop at the exterior, but, penetrating to the inner sanctuary He has chosen, admire its beauty. I did not rest satisfied with praying for this Sister, who gave me such occasions for self-mastery, I tried to render her as many services as I could, and when tempted to answer her sharply, I made haste to smile and change the subject, for the _Imitation_ says: "It is more profitable to leave everyone to his way of thinking than to give way to contentious discourses." And sometimes when the temptation was very severe, I would run like a deserter from the battlefield if I could do so without letting the Sister guess my inward struggle. One day she said to me with a beaming face: "My dear Soeur Thérèse, tell me what attraction you find in me, for whenever we meet, you greet me with such a sweet smile." Ah! What attracted me was Jesus hidden in the depths of her soul--Jesus who maketh sweet even that which is most bitter. I spoke just now, dear Mother, of the flight that is my last resource to escape defeat. It is not honourable, I confess, but during my noviciate, whenever I had recourse to this means, it invariably succeeded. I will give you a striking example, which will, I am sure, amuse you. You had been ill with bronchitis for several days, and we were all uneasy about you. One morning, in my duty as sacristan, I came to put back the keys of the Communion-grating. This was my work, and I was very pleased to have an opportunity of seeing you, though I took good care not to show it. One of the Sisters, full of solicitude, feared I should awake you, and tried to take the keys from me. I told her as politely as I could, that I was quite as anxious as she was there should be no noise, and added that it was my right to return them. I see now that it would have been more perfect simply to yield, but I did not see it then, and so I followed her into the room. Very soon what she feared came to pass: the noise did awaken you. All the blame fell upon me; the Sister I had argued with began a long discourse, of which the point was: Soeur Thérèse made all the noise. I was burning to defend myself, but a happy inspiration of grace came to me. I thought that if I began to justify myself I should certainly lose my peace of mind, and as I had too little virtue to let myself be unjustly accused without answering, my last chance of safety lay in flight. No sooner thought than done. I hurried away, but my heart beat so violently, I could not go far, and I was obliged to sit down on the stairs to enjoy in quiet the fruit of my victory. This is an odd kind of courage, undoubtedly, but I think it is best not to expose oneself in the face of certain defeat. When I recall these days of my noviciate I understand how far I was from perfection, and the memory of certain things makes me laugh. How good God has been, to have trained my soul and given it wings All the snares of the hunter can no longer frighten me, for "A net is spread in vain before the eyes of them that have wings."[32] It may be that some day my present state will appear to me full of defects, but nothing now surprises me, and I do not even distress myself because I am so weak. On the contrary I glory therein, and expect each day to find fresh imperfections. Nay, I must confess, these lights on my own nothingness are of more good to my soul than lights on matters of Faith. Remembering that "Charity covereth a multitude of sins,"[33] I draw from this rich mine, which Our Saviour has opened to us in the Gospels. I search the depths of His adorable words, and cry out with David: "I have run in the way of Thy commandments since Thou hast enlarged my heart."[34] And charity alone can make wide the heart. O Jesus! Since its sweet flame consumes my heart, I run with delight in the way of Thy New Commandment, and I desire to run therein until that blessed day when, with Thy company of Virgins, I shall follow Thee through Thy boundless Realm, singing Thy New Canticle--The Canticle of Love. ______________________________ [1] 1 Kings 16:7. [2] Tobias 12:7. [3] Cf. Isaias 3:10. [4] Prov. 9:4. [5] Isa. 66:12, 13. [6] Cf. Ps. 70[71]:17, 18. [7] Soeur Thérèse had charge of the novices without being given the title of Novice Mistress. [8] Ps. 118[119]:141. [9] Ps. 118[119]:100, 105, 106. [10] Luke 1:49. [11] Cf. John 1:5. [12] Cf. Luke 18:13. [13] Ps. 91[92]:5. [14] Ps. 143[144]:1, 2. [15] Ps. 132[133]:1. [16] Matt. 22:39. [17] Cf. Matt. 7:21. [18] Cf. John 13:34. [19] John 15:12. [20] Luke 11:33. [21] John 15:12. [22] 1 Cor. 4:3,4. [23] Luke 6:37. [24] Matt. 5:43, 44. [25] Luke 6:32. [26] Luke 6:30. [27] Matt. 11:30. [28] Matt. 5:40. [29] Matt. 5:41. [30] Matt. 5:42. [31] Luke 6:34, 35. [32] Prov. 1:27. [33] Prov. 10:12. [34] Ps. 118[119]:32. ______________________________ CHAPTER X THE NEW COMMANDMENT Dear Mother, God in His infinite goodness has given me a clear insight into the deep mysteries of Charity. If I could but express what I know, you would hear a heavenly music; but alas! I can only stammer like a child, and if God's own words were not my support, I should be tempted to beg leave to hold my peace. When the Divine Master tells me to give to whosoever asks of me, and to let what is mine be taken without asking it again, it seems to me that He speaks not only of the goods of earth, but also of the goods of Heaven. Besides, neither one nor the other are really mine; I renounced the former by the vow of poverty, and the latter gifts are simply lent. If God withdraw them, I have no right to complain. But our very own ideas, the fruit of our mind and heart, form a treasury on which none dare lay hands. For instance, if I reveal to a Sister some light given me in prayer, and she repeats it later on as though it were her own, it seems as though she appropriates what is mine. Or, if during recreation someone makes an apt and witty remark, which her neighbour repeats to the Community, without acknowledging whence it came, it is a sort of theft; and the person who originated the remark is naturally inclined to seize the first opportunity of delicately insinuating that her thoughts have been borrowed. I could not so well explain all these weaknesses of human nature had I not experienced them. I should have preferred to indulge in the illusion that I was the only one who suffered thus, had you not bidden me advise the novices in their difficulties. I have learnt much in the discharge of this duty, and especially I feel bound to put in practice what I teach. I can say with truth that by God's grace I am no more attached to the gifts of the intellect than to material things. If it happens that a thought of mine should please my Sisters, I find it quite easy to let them regard it as their own. My thoughts belong to the Holy Ghost. They are not mine. St. Paul assures us that _without the Spirit of Love, we cannot call God our Father._[1] And besides, though far from depreciating those beautiful thoughts which bring us nearer to God, I have long been of opinion that we must be careful not to over-estimate their worth. The highest inspirations are of no value without good works. It is true that others may derive much profit therefrom, if they are duly grateful to our Lord for allowing them to share in the abundance of one of His privileged souls; but should this privileged soul take pride in spiritual wealth, and imitate the Pharisee, she becomes like to a hostess dying of starvation at a well-spread table, while her guests enjoy the richest fare, and perhaps cast envious glances at the possessor of so many treasures. Verily it is true that God alone can sound the heart. How short-sighted are His creatures! When they see a soul whose lights surpass their own, they conclude that the Divine Master loves them less. Since when has He lost the right to make use of one of His children, in order to supply the others with the nourishment they need? That right was not lost in the days of Pharaoh, for God said unto him: "And therefore have I raised thee, that I may show My power in thee, and My name may be spoken of throughout all the earth."[2] Generations have passed away since the Most High spoke these words, and His ways have not changed. He has ever chosen human instruments for the accomplishment of His work. If an artist's canvas could but think and speak, surely it would never complain of being touched and re-touched by the brush, nor would it feel envious thereof, knowing that all its beauty is due to the artist alone. So, too, the brush itself could not boast of the masterpiece it had helped to produce, for it must know that an artist is never at a loss; that difficulties do but stimulate him; and that at times it pleases him to make use of instruments the most unlikely and defective. Dear Mother, I am the little brush that Jesus has chosen to paint His likeness in the souls you have confided to my care. Now an artist has several brushes--two at the least: the first, which is more useful, gives the ground tints and rapidly covers the whole canvas; the other, and smaller one, puts in the lesser touches. Mother, you represent the big brush which our Lord holds lovingly in His Hand when He wishes to do some great work in the souls of your children; and I am the little one He deigns to use afterwards, to fill in the minor details. The first time the Divine Master took up His little brush was about December 8, 1892. I shall always remember that time as one of special grace. When I entered the Carmel, I found in the noviciate a companion about eight years older than I was. In spite of this difference of age, we became the closest friends, and to encourage an affection which gave promise of fostering virtue we were allowed to converse together on spiritual subjects. My companion charmed me by her innocence and by her open and frank disposition, though I was surprised to find how her love for you differed from mine; and besides, I regretted many things in her behaviour. But God had already given me to understand that there are souls for whom in His Mercy He waits unweariedly, and to whom He gives His light by degrees; so I was very careful not to forestall Him. One day when I was thinking over the permission we had to talk together, so that we might--as our holy constitutions tells us--incite ourselves more ardently to the love of our Divine Spouse, it came home to me sadly that our conversations did not attain the desired end; and I understood that either I must no longer fear to speak out, or else I must put an end to what was degenerating into mere worldly talk. I begged our Lord to inspire me with words, kind and convincing; or better still, to speak Himself for me. He heard my prayer, for those _who look upon Him shall be enlightened,_[3] and "to the upright a light is risen in the darkness."[4] The first of these texts I apply to myself, the other to my companion, who was truly upright in heart. The next time we met, the poor little Sister saw at once that my manner had changed, and, blushing deeply, she sat down beside me. I pressed her to my heart, and told her gently what was in my mind; then I pointed out to her in what true love consists, and proved that in loving her Prioress with such natural affection she was in reality loving herself. I confided to her the sacrifices of this kind which I had been obliged to make at the beginning of my religious life, and before long her tears were mingled with mine. She admitted very humbly that she was in the wrong and that I was right, and, begging me as a favour always to point out her faults, she promised to begin a new life. From this time our love for one another became truly spiritual; in us were fulfilled these words of the Holy Ghost: "A brother that is helped by his brother is like a strong city."[5] Dear Mother, you know very well that it was not my wish to turn my companion away from you, I only wanted her to grasp that true love feeds on sacrifice, and that in proportion as our souls renounce natural enjoyments our affections become stronger and more detached. I remember that when I was a postulant I was sometimes so violently tempted to seek my own satisfaction by having a word with you, that I was obliged to hurry past your cell and hold on to the banisters to keep myself from turning back. Numerous permissions I wanted to ask, and a hundred pretexts for yielding to my desires suggested themselves, but now I am truly glad that I did not listen. I already enjoy the reward promised to those who fight bravely. I no longer feel the need of refusing myself these consolations, for my heart is fixed on God. Because it has loved Him only, it has grown, little by little, and now it can give to those who are dear to Him a far deeper and truer love than if it were centred in a barren and selfish affection. I have told you of the first piece of work which you accomplished together with Our Lord by means of the little brush, but that was only the prelude to the masterpiece which was afterwards to be painted. From the moment I entered the sanctuary of souls, I saw at a glance that the task was beyond my strength. Throwing myself without delay into Our Lord's Arms, I imitated those tiny children, who, when they are frightened, hide their faces on their father's shoulder, and I said: "Dear Lord, Thou seest that I am too small to feed these little ones, but if through me Thou wilt give to each what is suitable, then fill my hands, and without leaving the shelter of Thine Arms, or even turning away, I will distribute Thy treasures to the souls who come to me asking for food. Should they find it to their taste, I shall know that this is due not to me, but to Thee; and if, on the contrary, they find fault with its bitterness, I shall not be cast down, but try to persuade them that it cometh from Thee, while taking good care to make no change in it." The knowledge that it was impossible to do anything of myself rendered my task easier. My one interior occupation was to unite myself more and more closely to God, knowing that the rest would be given to me over and above. And indeed my hope has never been deceived; I have always found my hands filled when sustenance was needed for the souls of my Sisters. But had I done otherwise, and relied on my own strength, I should very soon have been forced to abandon my task. From afar it seems so easy to do good to souls, to teach them to love God more, and to model them according to one's own ideas. But, when we draw nearer, we quickly feel that without God's help this is quite as impossible as to bring back the sun when once it has set. We must forget ourselves, and put aside our tastes and ideas, and guide souls not by our own way, but along the path which Our Lord points out. Even this is not the most difficult part; what costs me more than all is having to observe their faults, their slightest imperfections, and wage war against them. Unhappily for me--I was going to say, but that would be cowardly, so I will say--happily for my Sisters, ever since I placed myself in the Arms of Jesus I have been like a watchman on the look-out for the enemy from the highest turret of a fortified castle. Nothing escapes my vigilance; indeed, I am sometimes surprised at my own clear-sightedness, and I think it was quite excusable in the prophet Jonas to fly before the face of the Lord, that he might not have to announce the ruin of Ninive. Rather than make one single reproach, I would prefer to receive a thousand, yet I feel it is necessary that the task should cause me pain, for if I spoke only through natural impulse, then the soul in fault would not understand its defects and would simply think: "This Sister is displeased, and her displeasure falls on me although I am full of the best intentions." But in this, as in all else, I must practise sacrifice and self-denial. Even in the matter of writing a letter, I feel that it will produce no fruit, unless I am disinclined to write, and only do so from obedience. When conversing with a novice I am on the watch to mortify myself, and I avoid asking questions which would satisfy my curiosity. If she begins to speak on an interesting subject, and, leaving it unfinished, passes on to another that wearies me, I take care not to remind her of the interruption, for it seems to me that no good can come of self-seeking. I know, dear Mother, that your little lambs find me severe; if they were to read these lines, they would say that, so far as they can see, it does not distress me to run after them, and show them how they have soiled their beautiful white fleece, or torn it in the brambles. Well, the little lambs may say what they like--in their hearts they know I love them dearly; there is no fear of my imitating "the hireling . . . who seeth the wolf coming and leaveth the sheep, and flieth."[6] I am ready to lay down my life for them, and my affection is so disinterested that I would not have my novices know this. By God's help, I have never tried to draw their hearts to myself, for I have always understood that my mission was to lead them to Him and to you, dear Mother, who on this earth hold His place in their regard, and whom, therefore, they must love and respect. I said before, that I have learnt much by guiding others. In the first place I see that all souls have more or less the same battles to fight, and on the other hand, that one soul differs widely from another, so each must be dealt with differently. With some I must humble myself, and not shrink from acknowledging my own struggles and defeats; then they confess more readily the faults into which they fall, and are pleased that I know by experience what they suffer. With others, my only means of success is to be firm, and never go back on what I have once said; self-abasement would be taken for weakness. Our Lord has granted me the grace never to fear the conflict; at all costs I must do my duty. I have more than once been told: "If you want me to obey, you must be gentle and not severe, otherwise you will gain nothing." But no one is a good judge in his own case. During a painful operation a child will be sure to cry out and say that the remedy is worse than the disease; but if after a few days he is cured, then he is greatly delighted that he can run about and play. And it is the same with souls: they soon recognise that a little bitter is better than too much sweet, and they are not afraid to make the acknowledgment. Sometimes the change which takes place from one day to another seems almost magical. A novice will say to me: "You did well to be severe yesterday; at first I was indignant, but when I thought it all over, I saw that you were quite right. I left your cell thinking: 'This ends it. I will tell Our Mother that I shall never go to Soeur Thérèse again'; but I knew this was the devil's suggestion, and then I felt you were praying for me, and I grew calm. I began to see things more clearly, and now I come to you for further guidance." I am only too happy to follow the dictates of my heart and hasten to console with a little sweetness, but I see that one must not press forward too quickly--a word might undo the work that cost so many tears. If I say the least thing which seems to tone down the hard truths of the previous day, I see my little Sister trying to take advantage of the opening thus given her. At once I have recourse to prayer, I turn to Our Blessed Lady, and Jesus always triumphs. Verily in prayer and sacrifice lies all my strength, they are my invincible arms; experience has taught me that they touch hearts far more easily than words. Two years ago, during Lent, a novice came to me smiling, and said: "You would never imagine what I dreamt last night--I thought I was with my sister, who is so worldly, and I wanted to withdraw her from all vain things; to this end I explained the words of your hymn: 'They richly lose who love Thee, dearest Lord; Thine are my perfumes, Thine for evermore.' I felt that my words sank deep into her soul, and I was overjoyed. This morning it seems to me that perhaps Our Lord would like me to gain Him this soul. How would it do if I wrote at Easter and described my dream, telling her that Jesus desires to have her for His Spouse?" I answered that she might certainly ask permission. As Lent was not nearly over, you were surprised, dear Mother, at such a premature request, and, evidently guided by God, you replied that Carmelites should save souls by prayer rather than by letters. When I heard your decision I said to the little Sister: "We must set to work and pray hard; if our prayers are answered at the end of Lent, what a joy it will be!" O Infinite Mercy of our Lord! At the close of Lent, one soul more had given herself to God. It was a real miracle of grace--a miracle obtained through the fervour of a humble novice. How wonderful is the power of prayer! It is like unto a queen, who, having free access to the king, obtains whatsoever she asks. In order to secure a hearing there is no need to recite set prayers composed for the occasion--were it so, I ought indeed to be pitied! Apart from the Divine Office, which in spite of my unworthiness is a daily joy, I have not the courage to look through books for beautiful prayers. I only get a headache because of their number, and besides, one is more lovely than another. Unable therefore to say them all, and lost in choice, I do as children who have not learnt to read--I simply tell Our Lord all that I want, and He always understands. With me prayer is an uplifting of the heart; a glance towards heaven; a cry of gratitude and love, uttered equally in sorrow and in joy. In a word, it is something noble, supernatural, which expands my soul and unites it to God. Sometimes when I am in such a state of spiritual dryness that not a single good thought occurs to me, I say very slowly the "Our Father" or the "Hail Mary," and these prayers suffice to take me out of myself, and wonderfully refresh me. But what was I speaking of? Again I am lost in a maze of reflections. Forgive me, dear Mother, for wandering thus. My story is like a tangled skein, but I fear I can do no better. I write my thoughts as they come; I fish at random in the stream of my heart, and offer you all that I catch. I was telling you about the novices. They often say: "You have an answer for everything. This time I thought I should puzzle you. Where do you find all that you teach us?" Some are even simple enough to think I can read their souls, because at times it happens I discover to them--without revelation--the subject of their thoughts. The senior novice had determined to hide from me a great sorrow. She spent the night in anguish, keeping back her tears lest her eyes might betray her. Yet she came to me with a smile next day, seeming even more cheerful than usual, and when I said: "You are in trouble, I am sure," she looked at me in inexpressible amazement. Her surprise was so great that it reacted on me, and imparted a sense of the supernatural. I felt that God was close to us. Unwittingly--for I have not the gift of reading souls--I had spoken as one inspired, and was able to console her completely. And now, dear Mother, I will tell you wherein I gain most with the novices. You know they are allowed without restriction to say anything to me, agreeable or the reverse; this is all the easier since they do not owe me the respect due to a Novice-Mistress. I cannot say that Our Lord makes me walk in the way of exterior humiliation; He is satisfied with humbling me in my inmost soul. In the eyes of creatures all is success, and I walk in the dangerous path of honour--if a religious may so speak. I understand God's way and that of my superiors in this respect; for if the Community thought me incapable, unintelligent, and wanting in judgment, I could be of no possible use to you, dear Mother. This is why the Divine Master has thrown a veil over all my shortcomings, both interior and exterior. Because of this veil I receive many compliments from the novices--compliments without flattery, for they really mean what they say; and they do not inspire me with vanity, for the remembrance of my weakness is ever before me. At times my soul tires of this over-sweet food, and I long to hear something other than praise; then Our Lord serves me with a nice little salad, well spiced, with plenty of vinegar--oil alone is wanting, and this it is which makes it more to my taste. And the salad is offered to me by the novices at the moment I least expect. God lifts the veil that hides my faults, and my dear little Sisters, beholding me as I really am, do not find me altogether agreeable. With charming simplicity, they tell me how I try them and what they dislike in me; in fact, they are as frank as though they were speaking of someone else, for they are aware that I am pleased when they act in this way. I am more than pleased--I am transported with delight by this splendid banquet set before me. How can anything so contrary to our natural inclinations afford such extraordinary pleasure? Had I not experienced it, I could not have believed it possible. One day, when I was ardently longing for some humiliation, a young postulant came to me and sated my desire so completely, that I was reminded of the occasion when Semei cursed David, and I repeated to myself the words of the holy King: "Yea, it is the Lord who hath bidden him say all these things."[7] In this way God takes care of me. He cannot always provide that strength-giving bread, exterior humiliation, but from time to time He allows me to eat of "the crumbs from the table of the children."[8] How magnificent are His Mercies! Dear Mother, since that Infinite Mercy is the subject of this my earthly song, I ought also to discover to you one real advantage, reaped with many others in the discharge of my task. Formerly, if I saw a Sister acting in a way that displeased me, and was seemingly contrary to rule, I would think: "Ah, how glad I should be if only I could warn her and point out where she is wrong." Since, however, this burden has been laid upon me my ideas have changed, and when I happen to see something not quite right, I say with a sigh of relief: "Thank God! It is not a novice, and I am not obliged to correct"; and at once I try to find excuses, and credit the doer with the good intentions she no doubt possesses. Your devotedness, dear Mother, now that I am ill, has also taught me many a lesson of charity. No remedy is too costly, and if one does not succeed, you unhesitatingly try something new. When I am present at recreation, how careful you are to shield me from draughts. I feel that I ought to be as compassionate for the spiritual infirmities of my Sisters as you are for my bodily ills. I have noticed that it is the holiest nuns who are most deeply loved; everyone is anxious to seek their company, and do them service, without even being asked. These very souls who are well able to bear with want of affection and little attentions are always surrounded by an atmosphere of love. Our Father, St. John of the Cross, says with great truth: "All good things have come unto me, since I no longer sought them for myself." Imperfect souls, on the contrary, are left alone. They are treated, it is true, with the measure of politeness which religious life demands; yet their company is avoided, lest a word might be said which would hurt their feelings. When I say imperfect souls, I am not referring to souls with spiritual imperfections only, for the holiest souls will not be perfect till they are in heaven. I mean those who are also afflicted with want of tact and refinement, as well as ultra-sensitive souls. I know such defects are incurable, but I also know how patient you would be, in nursing and striving to relieve me, were my illness to last for many years. From all this I draw the conclusion:--I ought to seek the companionship of those Sisters towards whom I feel a natural aversion, and try to be their good Samaritan. A word or a smile is often enough to put fresh life in a despondent soul. And yet it is not merely in the hope of giving consolation that I try to be kind. If it were, I know that I should soon be discouraged, for well-intentioned words are often totally misunderstood. Consequently, not to lose my time or labour, I try to act solely to please Our Lord, and follow this precept of the Gospel: "When thou makest a dinner or a supper, call not thy friends or thy brethren, lest perhaps they also invite thee again and a recompense be made to thee. But when thou makest a feast, call the poor, the maimed, the blind, and the lame, and thou shalt be blessed, because they have naught wherewith to make thee recompense, and thy Father Who seeth in secret will repay thee."[9] What feast can I offer my Sisters but a spiritual one of sweet and joyful charity! I know none other, and I wish to imitate St. Paul, who rejoiced with those who rejoiced. It is true that he wept with those who wept, and at my feast, too, the tears must sometimes fall, still I shall always try to change them into smiles, for "God loveth a cheerful giver."[10] I remember an act of charity with which God inspired me while I was still a novice, and this act, though seemingly small, has been rewarded even in this life by Our Heavenly Father, "Who seeth in secret." Shortly before Sister St. Peter became quite bedridden, it was necessary every evening, at ten minutes to six, for someone to leave meditation and take her to the refectory. It cost me a good deal to offer my services, for I knew the difficulty, or I should say the impossibility, of pleasing the poor invalid. But I did not want to lose such a good opportunity, for I recalled Our Lord's words: "As long as you did it to one of these my least brethren, you did it to Me."[11] I therefore humbly offered my aid. It was not without difficulty I induced her to accept it, but after considerable persuasion I succeeded. Every evening, when I saw her shake her sand-glass, I understood that she meant: "Let us go!" Summoning up all my courage I rose, and the ceremony began. First of all, her stool had to be moved and carried in a particular way, and on no account must there be any hurry. The solemn procession ensued. I had to follow the good Sister, supporting her by her girdle; I did it as gently as possible, but if by some mischance she stumbled, she imagined I had not a firm hold, and that she was going to fall. "You are going too fast," she would say, "I shall fall and hurt myself!" Then when I tried to lead her more quietly: "Come quicker . . . I cannot feel you . . . you are letting me go! I was right when I said you were too young to take care of me." When we reached the refectory without further mishap, more troubles were in store. I had to settle my poor invalid in her place, taking great pains not to hurt her. Then I had to turn back her sleeves, always according to her own special rubric, and after that I was allowed to go. But I soon noticed that she found it very difficult to cut her bread, so I did not leave her till I had performed this last service. She was much touched by this attention on my part, for she had not expressed any wish on the subject; it was by this unsought-for kindness that I gained her entire confidence, and chiefly because--as I learnt later--at the end of my humble task I bestowed upon her my sweetest smile. Dear Mother, it is long since all this happened, but Our Lord allows the memory of it to linger with me like a perfume from Heaven. One cold winter evening, I was occupied in the lowly work of which I have just spoken, when suddenly I heard in the distance the harmonious strains of music outside the convent walls. I pictured a drawing-room, brilliantly lighted and decorated, and richly furnished. Young ladies, elegantly dressed, exchanged a thousand compliments, as is the way of the world. Then I looked on the poor invalid I was tending. Instead of sweet music I heard her complaints, instead of rich gilding I saw the brick walls of our bare cloister, scarcely visible in the dim light. The contrast was very moving. Our Lord so illuminated my soul with the rays of truth, before which the pleasures of the world are but as darkness, that for a thousand years of such worldly delights, I would not have bartered even the ten minutes spent in my act of charity. If even now, in days of pain and amid the smoke of battle, the thought that God has withdrawn us from the world is so entrancing, what will it be when, in eternal glory and everlasting repose, we realise the favour beyond compare He has done us here, by singling us out to dwell in His Carmel, the very portal of Heaven? I have not always felt these transports of joy in performing acts of charity, but at the beginning of my religious life Jesus wished to make me feel how sweet to Him is charity, when found in the hearts of his Spouses. Thus when I led Sister St. Peter, it was with so much love that I could not have shown more were I guiding Our Divine Lord Himself. The practice of charity has not always been so pleasant as I have just pointed out, dear Mother, and to prove it I will recount some of my many struggles. For a long time my place at meditation was near a Sister who fidgeted continually, either with her Rosary, or something else; possibly, as I am very quick of hearing, I alone heard her, but I cannot tell you how much it tried me. I should have liked to turn round, and by looking at the offender, make her stop the noise; but in my heart I knew that I ought to bear it tranquilly, both for the love of God and to avoid giving pain. So I kept quiet, but the effort cost me so much that sometimes I was bathed in perspiration, and my meditation consisted merely in suffering with patience. After a time I tried to endure it in peace and joy, at least deep down in my soul, and I strove to take actual pleasure in the disagreeable little noise. Instead of trying not to hear it, which was impossible, I set myself to listen, as though it had been some delightful music, and my meditation--which was not the "prayer of quiet"--was passed in offering this music to Our Lord. Another time I was working in the laundry, and the Sister opposite, while washing handkerchiefs, repeatedly splashed me with dirty water. My first impulse was to draw back and wipe my face, to show the offender I should be glad if she would behave more quietly; but the next minute I thought how foolish it was to refuse the treasures God offered me so generously, and I refrained from betraying my annoyance. On the contrary, I made such efforts to welcome the shower of dirty water, that at the end of half an hour I had taken quite a fancy to this novel kind of aspersion, and I resolved to come as often as I could to the happy spot where such treasures were freely bestowed. Dear Mother, you see that I am a very little soul, who can only offer very little things to Our Lord. It still happens that I frequently let slip the occasion of these slender sacrifices, which bring so much peace, but this does not discourage me; I bear the loss of a little peace, and I try to be more watchful for the future. How happy does Our Lord make me, and how sweet and easy is His service on this earth! He has always given me what I desired, or rather He has made me desire what He wishes to give. A short time before my terrible temptation against Faith, I had reflected how few exterior trials, worthy of mention, had fallen to my lot, and that if I were to have interior trials, God must change my path; and this I did not think He would do. Yet I could not always live at ease. Of what means, then, would He make use? I had not long to wait for an answer, and it showed me that He whom I love is never at a loss, for without changing my way, He sent me this great trial; and thus mingled a healing bitterness with all the sweet. ______________________________ [1] Cf. Rom. 8:15. [2] Exod. 9:16. [3] Cf. Ps. 33[34]:6. [4] Ps. 111[112]:4. [5] Prov. 18:19. [6] John 10:12. [7] Cf. 2 Kings 16:10. [8] Mark 7:28. [9] Cf. Luke 14:12, 13, 14. [10] 2 Cor. 9:7. [11] Matt. 25:40. ______________________________ CHAPTER XI A CANTICLE OF LOVE It is not only when He is about to send me some trial that Our Lord gives me warning and awakens my desire for it. For years I had cherished a longing which seemed impossible of realisation--to have a brother a Priest. I often used to think that if my little brothers had not gone to Heaven, I should have had the happiness of seeing them at the Altar. I greatly regretted being deprived of this joy. Yet God went beyond my dream; I only asked for one brother who would remember me each day at the Holy Altar, and He has united me in the bonds of spiritual friendship with two of His apostles. I should like to tell you, dear Mother, how Our Divine Master fulfilled my desire. In 1895 our holy Mother, St. Teresa, sent my first brother as a gift for my feast. It was washing day, and I was busy at my work, when Mother Agnes of Jesus, then Prioress, called me aside and read me a letter from a young Seminarist, in which he said he had been inspired by St. Teresa to ask for a sister who would devote herself specially to his salvation, and to the salvation of his future flock. He promised always to remember this spiritual sister when saying Mass, and the choice fell upon me. Dear Mother, I cannot tell you how happy this made me. Such unlooked-for fulfillment of my desire awoke in my heart the joy of a child; it carried me back to those early days, when pleasures were so keen, that my heart seemed too small to contain them. Years had passed since I had tasted a like happiness, so fresh, so unfamiliar, as if forgotten chords had been stirred within me. Fully aware of my obligations, I set to work, and strove to redouble my fervour. Now and again I wrote to my new brother. Undoubtedly, it is by prayer and sacrifice that we can help our missionaries, but sometimes, when it pleases Our Lord to unite two souls for His Glory, He permits them to communicate their thoughts, and thus inspire each other to love God more. Of course an express command from those in authority is needed for this, otherwise, it seems to me, that such a correspondence would do more harm than good, if not to the missionary, at least to the Carmelite, whose manner of life tends to continual introversion. This exchange of letters, though rare, would occupy her mind uselessly; instead of uniting her to God, she would perhaps fancy she was doing wonders, when in reality, under cover of zeal, she was doing nothing but producing needless distraction.--And here am I, launched, not upon a distraction, but upon a dissertation equally superfluous. I shall never be able to correct myself of these lengthy digressions which must be so wearisome to you, dear Mother. Forgive me, should I offend again. Last year, at the end of May, it was your turn to give me my second brother, and when I represented that, having given all my merits to one future apostle, I feared they could not be given to another, you told me that obedience would double their value. In the depths of my heart I thought the same thing, and, since the zeal of a Carmelite ought to embrace the whole world, I hope, with God's help, to be of use to even more than two missionaries. I pray for all, not forgetting our Priests at home, whose ministry is quite as difficult as that of the missionary preaching to the heathen. . . . In a word, I wish to be a true daughter of the Church, like our holy Mother St. Teresa, and pray for all the intentions of Christ's Vicar. That is the one great aim of my life. But just as I should have had a special interest in my little brothers had they lived, and that, without neglecting the general interests of the Church, so now, I unite myself in a special way to the new brothers whom Jesus has given me. All that I possess is theirs also. God is too good to give by halves; He is so rich that He gives me all I ask for, even though I do not lose myself in lengthy enumerations. As I have two brothers and my little sisters, the novices, the days would be too short were I to ask in detail for the needs of each soul, and I fear I might forget something important. Simple souls cannot understand complicated methods, and, as I am one of their number, Our Lord has inspired me with a very simple way of fulfilling my obligations. One day, after Holy Communion, He made me understand these words of the Canticles: "Draw me: we will run after Thee to the odour of Thy ointments."[1] O my Jesus, there is no need to say: "In drawing me, draw also the souls that I love": these words, "Draw me," suffice. When a soul has let herself be taken captive by the inebriating odour of Thy perfumes, she cannot run alone; as a natural consequence of her attraction towards Thee, the souls of all those she loves are drawn in her train. Just as a torrent carries into the depths of the sea all that it meets on its way, so, my Jesus, does the soul who plunges into the shoreless ocean of Thy Love bring with it all its treasures. My treasures are the souls it has pleased thee to unite with mine; Thou hast confided them to me, and therefore I do not fear to use Thy own words, uttered by Thee on the last night that saw Thee still a traveller on this earth. Jesus, my Beloved! I know not when my exile will have an end. Many a night I may yet sing Thy Mercies here below, but for me also will come the last night, and then I shall be able to say: "I have glorified Thee upon earth: I have finished the work which Thou gavest me to do. I have manifested Thy name to the men whom Thou hast given me out of the world. Thine they were, and to me Thou gavest them; and they have kept Thy word. Now they have known that all things which Thou hast given me are from Thee: because the words which Thou gavest me I have given to them; and they have received them, and have known for certain that I came forth from Thee, and they have believed that Thou didst send me. I pray for them: I pray not for the world, but for them whom Thou hast given me, because they are Thine. And all mine are Thine, and Thine are mine; and I am glorified in them. And now I am no more in the world, and these are in the world, and I come to Thee. Holy Father, keep them in Thy name, whom Thou hast given me, that they may be one, as we also are one. And now I come to Thee, and these things I speak in the world, that they may have my joy filled in themselves. I do not ask that Thou take them away out of the world, but that Thou preserve them from evil. They are not of the world, as I also am not of the world. And not for them only do I pray, but for those also who through their word shall believe in me. Father, I will that where I am they also whom Thou hast given me may be with me, that they may see my glory which Thou hast given me, because Thou hast loved me before the foundation of the world. And I have made known Thy name unto them, and will make it known, that the love wherewith Thou hast loved me may be in them and I in them."[2] Yea, Lord, thus would I repeat Thy words, before losing myself in Thy loving embrace. Perhaps it is daring, but, for a long time, hast thou not allowed me to be daring with Thee? Thou hast said to me, as the Prodigal's father to his elder son: "All I have is thine."[3] And therefore I may use thy very own words to draw down favours from Our Heavenly Father on all who are dear to me. My God, Thou knowest that I have ever desired to love Thee alone. It has been my only ambition. Thy love has gone before me, even from the days of my childhood. It has grown with my growth, and now it is an abyss whose depths I cannot fathom. Love attracts love; mine darts towards Thee, and would fain make the abyss brim over, but alas! it is not even as a dewdrop in the ocean. To love Thee as Thou lovest me, I must make Thy Love mine own. Thus alone can I find rest. O my Jesus, it seems to me that Thou couldst not have overwhelmed a soul with more love than Thou hast poured out on mine, and that is why I dare ask Thee to love those Thou hast given me, even as Thou lovest me. If, in Heaven, I find that thou lovest them more than Thou lovest me, I shall rejoice, for I acknowledge that their deserts are greater than mine, but now, I can conceive no love more vast than that with which Thou hast favoured me, without any merit on my part. . . . . . . . Dear Mother, what I have just written amazes me. I had no intention of writing it. When I said: "The words which Thou gavest me I have given unto them," I was thinking only of my little sisters in the noviciate. I am not able to teach missionaries, and the words I wrote for them were from the prayer of Our Lord: "I do not ask that Thou shouldst take them out of the world; I pray also for them who through their word shall believe in Thee." How could I forget those souls they are to win by their sufferings and exhortations? But I have not told you all my thoughts on this passage of the Sacred Canticles: "Draw me--we will run!" Our Lord has said: "No man can come to Me except the Father Who hath sent Me, draw him,"[4] and later He tells us that _whosoever seeks shall find, whosoever asks shall receive, that unto him that knocks it shall be opened,_ and He adds that whatever we ask the Father in His Name shall be given us. It was no doubt for this reason that, long before the birth of Our Lord, the Holy Spirit dictated these prophetic words: "Draw me--we will run!" By asking to be drawn, we desire an intimate union with the object of our love. If iron and fire were endowed with reason, and the iron could say: "Draw me!" would not that prove its desire to be identified with the fire to the point of sharing its substance? Well, this is precisely my prayer. I asked Jesus to draw me into the Fire of His love, and to unite me so closely to Himself that He may live and act in me. I feel that the more the fire of love consumes my heart, so much the more shall I say: "Draw me!" and the more also will souls who draw near me _run swiftly in the sweet odour of the Beloved._ Yes, they will run--we shall all run together, for souls that are on fire can never be at rest. They may indeed, like St. Mary Magdalen, sit at the feet of Jesus, listening to His sweet and burning words, but, though they seem to give Him nothing, they give much more than Martha, who busied herself about many things. It is not Martha's work that Our Lord blames, but her over-solicitude; His Blessed Mother humbly occupied herself in the same kind of work when she prepared the meals for the Holy Family. All the Saints have understood this, especially those who have illumined the earth with the light of Christ's teaching. Was it not from prayer that St. Paul, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. John of the Cross, St. Teresa, and so many other friends of God drew that wonderful science which has enthralled the loftiest minds? "Give me a lever and a fulcrum on which to lean it," said Archimedes, "and I will lift the world." What he could not obtain because his request had only a material end, without reference to God, the Saints have obtained in all its fulness. They lean on God Almighty's power itself and their lever is the prayer that inflames with love's fire. With this lever they have raised the world--with this lever the Saints of the Church Militant still raise it, and will raise it to the end of time. Dear Mother, I have still to tell you what I understand by the _sweet odour of the Beloved._ As Our Lord is now in Heaven, I can only follow Him by the footprints He has left--footprints full of life, full of fragrance. I have only to open the Holy Gospels and at once I breathe the perfume of Jesus, and then I know which way to run; and it is not to the first place, but to the last, that I hasten. I leave the Pharisee to go up, and full of confidence I repeat the humble prayer of the Publican. Above all I follow Magdalen, for the amazing, rather I should say, the loving audacity, that delights the Heart of Jesus, has cast its spell upon mine. It is not because I have been preserved from mortal sin that I lift up my heart to God in trust and love. I feel that even had I on my conscience every crime one could commit, I should lose nothing of my confidence: my heart broken with sorrow, I would throw myself into the Arms of my Saviour. I know that He loves the Prodigal Son, I have heard His words to St. Mary Magdalen, to the woman taken in adultery, and to the woman of Samaria. No one could frighten me, for I know what to believe concerning His Mercy and His Love. And I know that all that multitude of sins would disappear in an instant, even as a drop of water cast into a flaming furnace. It is told in the Lives of the Fathers of the Desert how one of them converted a public sinner, whose evil deeds were the scandal of the whole country. This wicked woman, touched by grace, followed the Saint into the desert, there to perform rigorous penance. But on the first night of the journey, before even reaching the place of her retirement, the bonds that bound her to earth were broken by the vehemence of her loving sorrow. The holy man, at the same instant, saw her soul borne by Angels to the Bosom of God. This is a striking example of what I want to say, but these things cannot be expressed. Dearest Mother, if weak and imperfect souls like mine felt what I feel, none would despair of reaching the summit of the Mountain of Love, since Jesus does not ask for great deeds, but only for gratitude and self-surrender. He says: "I will not take the he-goats from out of the flocks, for all the beasts of the forests are mine, the cattle on the hills and the oxen. I know all the fowls of the air. If I were hungry, I would not tell thee, for the world is Mine, and the fulness thereof. Shall I eat the flesh of bullocks, or shall I drink the blood of goats? Offer to God the sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving."[5] This is all Our Lord claims from us. He has need of our love--He has no need of our works. The same God, Who declares that He has no need to tell us if He be hungry, did not disdain to beg a little water from the Samaritan woman. He was athirst, but when He said: "Give me to drink,"[6] He, the Creator of the Universe, asked for the love of His creature. He thirsted for love. And this thirst of Our Divine Lord was ever on the increase. Amongst the disciples of the world, He meets with nothing but indifference and ingratitude, and alas! among His own, how few hearts surrender themselves without reserve to the infinite tenderness of His Love. Happy are we who are privileged to understand the inmost secrets of Our Divine Spouse. If you, dear Mother, would but set down in writing all you know, what wonders could you not unfold! But, like Our Blessed Lady, you prefer to _keep all these things in your heart._[7] To me you say that "It is honourable to reveal and confess the world of God."[8] Yet you are right to keep silence, for no earthly words can convey the secrets of Heaven. As for me, in spite of all I have written, I have not as yet begun. I see so many beautiful horizons, such infinitely varied tints, that the palette of the Divine Painter will alone, after the darkness of this life, be able to supply me with the colours wherewith I may portray the wonders that my soul descries. Since, however, you have expressed a desire to penetrate into the hidden sanctuary of my heart, and to have in writing what was the most consoling dream of my life, I will end this story of my soul, by an act of obedience. If you will allow me, it is to Jesus I will address myself, for in this way I shall speak more easily. You may find my expressions somewhat exaggerated, but I assure you there is no exaggeration in my heart--there all is calm and peace. O my Jesus, who can say how tenderly and gently Thou dost lead my soul! The storm had raged there ever since Easter, the glorious feast of Thy triumph, until, in the month of May, there shone through the darkness of my night one bright ray of grace. . . . My mind dwelt on mysterious dreams sent sometimes to Thy favoured ones, and I thought how such a consolation was not to be mine--that for me, it was night, always the dark night. And in the midst of the storm I fell asleep. The following day, May 10, just at dawn, I dreamt that I was walking in a gallery alone with Our Mother. Suddenly, without knowing how they had entered, I perceived three Carmelites, in mantles and long veils, and I knew that they came from Heaven. "Ah!" I thought, "how glad I should be if I could but look on the face of one of these Carmelites!" And, as if my wish had been heard, I saw the tallest of the three Saints advance towards me. An inexpressible joy took possession of me as she raised her veil, and then covered me with it. At once I recognised our Venerable Mother, Anne of Jesus, foundress of the Carmel in France.[9] Her face was beautiful with an unearthly beauty; no rays came from it, and yet, in spite of the thick veil which enveloped us, I could see it suffused by a soft light, which seemed to emanate from her heavenly countenance. She caressed me tenderly, and seeing myself the object of such affection, I made bold to say: "Dear Mother, I entreat you, tell me, will Our Lord leave me much longer in this world? Will He not soon come to fetch me?" She smiled sweetly, and answered, "Yes, soon . . . very soon . . . I promise you." "Dear Mother," I asked again, "tell me if He does not want more from me than these poor little acts and desires that I offer Him. Is He pleased with me?" Then our Venerable Mother's face shone with a new splendour, and her expression became still more gracious: "The Good God asks no more of you," she said, "He is pleased, quite pleased," and, taking my head between her hands, she kissed me so tenderly that it would be impossible to describe the joy I felt. My heart was overflowing with gladness, and, remembering my Sisters, I was about to beseech some favour for them, when, alas! I awoke. My happiness was too great for words. Many months have passed since I had this wonderful dream, and yet its memory is as fresh and delightful as ever. I can still picture the loving smiles of this holy Carmelite and feel her fond caresses. O Jesus! "Thou didst command the winds and the storm, and there came a great calm."[10] On waking, I realised that Heaven does indeed exist, and that this Heaven is peopled with souls who cherish me as their child, and this impression still remains with me--all the sweeter, because, up to that time, I had but little devotion to the Venerable Mother Anne of Jesus. I had never sought her help, and but rarely heard her name. And now I know and understand how constantly I was in her thoughts, and the knowledge adds to my love for her and for all the dear ones in my Father's Home. O my Beloved! this was but the prelude of graces yet greater which Thou didst desire to heap upon me. Let me remind Thee of them to-day, and forgive my folly if I venture to tell Thee once more of my hopes, and my heart's well nigh infinite longings--forgive me and grant my desire, that it may be well with my soul. To be Thy Spouse, O my Jesus, to be a daughter of Carmel, and by my union with Thee to be the mother of souls, should not all this content me? And yet other vocations make themselves felt--I feel called to the Priesthood and to the Apostolate--I would be a Martyr, a Doctor of the Church. I should like to accomplish the most heroic deeds--the spirit of the Crusader burns within me, and I long to die on the field of battle in defence of Holy Church. The vocation of a Priest! With what love, my Jesus, would I bear Thee in my hand, when my words brought Thee down from Heaven! With what love would I give Thee to souls! And yet, while longing to be a Priest, I admire and envy the humility of St. Francis of Assisi, and am drawn to imitate him by refusing the sublime dignity of the Priesthood. How reconcile these opposite tendencies?[11] Like the Prophets and Doctors, I would be a light unto souls, I would travel to every land to preach Thy name, O my Beloved, and raise on heathen soil the glorious standard of Thy Cross. One mission alone would not satisfy my longings. I would spread the Gospel to the ends of the earth, even to the most distant isles. I would be a Missionary, not for a few years only, but, were it possible, from the beginning of the world till the consummation of time. Above all, I thirst for the Martyr's crown. It was the desire of my earliest days, and the desire has deepened with the years passed in the Carmel's narrow cell. But this too is folly, since I do not sigh for one torment; I need them all to slake my thirst. Like Thee, O Adorable Spouse, I would be scourged, I would be crucified! I would be flayed like St. Bartholomew, plunged into boiling oil like St. John, or, like St. Ignatius of Antioch, ground by the teeth of wild beasts into a bread worthy of God.[12] With St. Agnes and St. Cecilia I would offer my neck to the sword of the executioner, and like Joan of Arc I would murmur the name of Jesus at the stake. My heart thrills at the thought of the frightful tortures Christians are to suffer at the time of Anti-Christ, and I long to undergo them all. Open, O Jesus, the Book of Life, in which are written the deeds of Thy Saints: all the deeds told in that book I long to have accomplished for Thee. To such folly as this what answer wilt Thou make? Is there on the face of this earth a soul more feeble than mine? And yet, precisely because I am feeble, it has delighted Thee to accede to my least and most child-like desires, and to-day it is Thy good pleasure to realise those other desires, more vast than the Universe. These aspirations becoming a true martyrdom, I opened, one day, the Epistles of St. Paul to seek relief in my sufferings. My eyes fell on the 12th and 13th chapters of the First Epistle to the Corinthians. I read that all cannot become Apostles, Prophets, and Doctors; that the Church is composed of different members; that the eye cannot also be the hand. The answer was clear, but it did not fulfill my desires, or give to me the peace I sought. "Then descending into the depths of my nothingness, I was so lifted up that I reached my aim."[13] Without being discouraged I read on, and found comfort in this counsel: "Be zealous for the better gifts. And I show unto you a yet more excellent way."[14] The Apostle then explains how all perfect gifts are nothing without Love, that Charity is the most excellent way of going surely to God. At last I had found rest. Meditating on the mystical Body of Holy Church, I could not recognise myself among any of its members as described by St. Paul, or was it not rather that I wished to recognise myself in all? Charity provided me with the key to my vocation. I understood that since the Church is a body composed of different members, the noblest and most important of all the organs would not be wanting. I knew that the Church has a heart, that this heart burns with love, and that it is love alone which gives life to its members. I knew that if this love were extinguished, the Apostles would no longer preach the Gospel, and the Martyrs would refuse to shed their blood. I understood that love embraces all vocations, that it is all things, and that it reaches out through all the ages, and to the uttermost limits of the earth, because it is eternal. Then, beside myself with joy, I cried out: "O Jesus, my Love, at last I have found my vocation. My vocation is love! Yes, I have found my place in the bosom of the Church, and this place, O my God, Thou hast Thyself given to me: in the heart of the Church, my Mother, I will be LOVE! . . . Thus I shall be all things: thus will my dream be realised. . . ." Why do I say I am beside myself with joy? This does not convey my thought. Rather is it peace which has become my portion--the calm peace of the sailor when he catches sight of the beacon which lights him to port. O luminous Beacon of Love! I know how to come even unto Thee, I have found the means of borrowing Thy Fires. I am but a weak and helpless child, yet it is my very weakness which makes me dare to offer myself, O Jesus, as victim to Thy Love. In olden days pure and spotless holocausts alone were acceptable to the Omnipotent God. Nor could His Justice be appeased, save by the most perfect sacrifices. But the law of fear has given place to the law of love, and Love has chosen me, a weak and imperfect creature, as its victim. Is not such a choice worthy of God's Love? Yea, for in order that Love may be fully satisfied, it must stoop even unto nothingness, and must transform that nothingness into fire. O my God, I know it--"Love is repaid by love alone."[15] Therefore I have sought, I have found, how to ease my heart, by rendering Thee love for love. "Use the riches that make men unjust, to find you friends who may receive you into everlasting dwellings."[16] This, O Lord, is the advice Thou gavest to Thy disciples after complaining that "the children of this world are wiser in their generation than the children of light."[17] Child of light, as I am, I understood that my desires to be all things, and to embrace all vocations, were riches that might well make me unjust; so I set to work to use them for the making of friends. Mindful of the prayer of Eliseus when he asked the Prophet Elias for his double spirit, I presented myself before the company of the Angels and Saints and addressed them thus: "I am the least of all creatures. I know my mean estate, but I know that noble and generous hearts love to do good. Therefore, O Blessed Inhabitants of the Celestial City, I entreat you to adopt me as your child. All the glory that you help me to acquire, will be yours; only deign to hear my prayer, and obtain for me a double portion of the love of God." O my God! I cannot measure the extent of my request, I should fear to be crushed by the very weight of its audacity. My only excuse is my claim to childhood, and that children do not grasp the full meaning of their words. Yet if a father or mother were on the throne and possessed vast treasures, they would not hesitate to grant the desires of those little ones, more dear to them than life itself. To give them pleasure they will stoop even unto folly. Well, I am a child of Holy Church, and the Church is a Queen, because she is now espoused to the Divine King of Kings. I ask not for riches or glory, not even the glory of Heaven--that belongs by right to my brothers the Angels and Saints, and my own glory shall be the radiance that streams from the queenly brow of my Mother, the Church. Nay, I ask for Love. To love Thee, Jesus, is now my only desire. Great deeds are not for me; I cannot preach the Gospel or shed my blood. No matter! My brothers work in my stead, and I, a little child, stay close to the throne, and love Thee for all who are in the strife. But how shall I show my love, since love proves itself by deeds? Well! The little child will strew flowers . . . she will embrace the Divine Throne with their fragrance, she will sing Love's Canticle in silvery tones. Yes, my Beloved, it is thus my short life shall be spent in Thy sight. The only way I have of proving my love is to strew flowers before Thee--that is to say, I will let no tiny sacrifice pass, no look, no word. I wish to profit by the smallest actions, and to do them for Love. I wish to suffer for Love's sake, and for Love's sake even to rejoice: thus shall I strew flowers. Not one shall I find without scattering its petals before Thee . . . and I will sing . . . I will sing always, even if my roses must be gathered from amidst thorns; and the longer and sharper the thorns, the sweeter shall be my song. But of what avail to thee, my Jesus, are my flowers and my songs? I know it well: this fragrant shower, these delicate petals of little price, these songs of love from a poor little heart like mine, will nevertheless be pleasing unto Thee. Trifles they are, but Thou wilt smile on them. The Church Triumphant, stooping towards her child, will gather up these scattered rose leaves, and, placing them in Thy Divine Hands, there to acquire an infinite value, will shower them on the Church Suffering to extinguish its flames, and on the Church Militant to obtain its victory. O my Jesus, I love Thee! I love my Mother, the Church; I bear in mind that "the least act of pure love is of more value to her than all other works together."[18] But is this pure love really in my heart? Are not my boundless desires but dreams--but foolishness? If this be so, I beseech Thee to enlighten me; Thou knowest I seek but the truth. If my desires be rash, then deliver me from them, and from this most grievous of all martyrdoms. And yet I confess, if I reach not those heights to which my soul aspires, this very martyrdom, this foolishness, will have been sweeter to me than eternal bliss will be, unless by a miracle Thou shouldst take from me all memory of the hopes I entertained upon earth. Jesus, Jesus! If the mere desire of Thy Love awakens such delight, what will it be to possess it, to enjoy it for ever? How can a soul so imperfect as mine aspire to the plenitude of Love? What is the key of this mystery? O my only Friend, why dost Thou not reserve these infinite longings to lofty souls, to the eagles that soar in the heights? Alas! I am but a poor little unfledged bird. I am not an eagle, I have but the eagle's eyes and heart! Yet, notwithstanding my exceeding littleless, I dare to gaze upon the Divine Sun of Love, and I burn to dart upwards unto Him! I would fly, I would imitate the eagles; but all that I can do is to lift up my little wings--it is beyond my feeble power to soar. What is to become of me? Must I die of sorrow because of my helplessness? Oh, no! I will not even grieve. With daring self-abandonment there will I remain until death, my gaze fixed upon that Divine Sun. Nothing shall affright me, nor wind nor rain. And should impenetrable clouds conceal the Orb of Love, and should I seem to believe that beyond this life there is darkness only, that would be the hour of perfect joy, the hour in which to push my confidence to its uttermost bounds. I should not dare to detach my gaze, well knowing that beyond the dark clouds the sweet Sun still shines. So far, O my God, I understand Thy Love for me. But Thou knowest how often I forget this, my only care. I stray from Thy side, and my scarcely fledged wings become draggled in the muddy pools of earth; then I lament "like a young swallow,"[19] and my lament tells Thee all, and I remember, O Infinite Mercy! that "Thou didst not come to call the just, but sinners."[20] Yet shouldst Thou still be deaf to the plaintive cries of Thy feeble creature, shouldst Thou still be veiled, then I am content to remain benumbed with cold, my wings bedraggled, and once more I rejoice in this well-deserved suffering. O Sun, my only Love, I am happy to feel myself so small, so frail in Thy sunshine, and I am in peace . . . I know that all the eagles of Thy Celestial Court have pity on me, they guard and defend me, they put to flight the vultures--the demons that fain would devour me. I fear them not, these demons, I am not destined to be their prey, but the prey of the Divine Eagle. O Eternal Word! O my Saviour! Thou art the Divine Eagle Whom I love--Who lurest me. Thou Who, descending to this land of exile, didst will to suffer and to die, in order to bear away the souls of men and plunge them into the very heart of the Blessed Trinity--Love's Eternal Home! Thou Who, reascending into inaccessible light, dost still remain concealed here in our vale of tears under the snow-white semblance of the Host, and this, to nourish me with Thine own substance! O Jesus! forgive me if I tell Thee that Thy Love reacheth even unto folly. And in face of this folly, what wilt Thou, but that my heart leap up to Thee? How could my trust have any limits? I know that the Saints have made themselves as fools for Thy sake; being 'eagles,' they have done great things. I am too little for great things, and my folly it is to hope that Thy Love accepts me as victim; my folly it is to count on the aid of Angels and Saints, in order that I may fly unto Thee with thine own wings, O my Divine Eagle! For as long a time as Thou willest I shall remain--my eyes fixed upon Thee. I long to be allured by Thy Divine Eyes; I would become Love's prey. I have the hope that Thou wilt one day swoop down upon me, and, bearing me away to the Source of all Love, Thou wilt plunge me at last into that glowing abyss, that I may become for ever its happy Victim. O Jesus! would that I could tell all _little souls_ of Thine ineffable condescension! I feel that if by any possibility Thou couldst find one weaker than my own, Thou wouldst take delight in loading her with still greater favours, provided that she abandoned herself with entire confidence to Thine Infinite Mercy. But, O my Spouse, why these desires of mine to make known the secrets of Thy Love? Is it not Thyself alone Who hast taught them to me, and canst Thou not unveil them to others? Yea! I know it, and this I implore Thee! . . . I ENTREAT THEE TO LET THY DIVINE EYES REST UPON A VAST NUMBER OF LITTLE SOULS, I ENTREAT THEE TO CHOOSE, IN THIS WORLD, A LEGION OF LITTLE VICTIMS OF THY LOVE. _____________________________ [1] Cant. 1:3. [2] Cf. John 17. [3] Luke 15:31. [4] John 6:44. [5] Ps. 49[50]:9-14. [6] John 4:7. [7] Cf. Luke 2:19. [8] Tob. 12:7. [9] The Venerable Mother Anne of Jesus--in the world, Anne of Lobera--was born in Spain in 1545. She entered the Carmelite Order in 1570, in the first convent of St. Joseph of Avila, and shortly afterwards became the counsellor and coadjutor of St. Teresa, who called her, "her daughter and her crown." St. John of the Cross, who was her spiritual director for fourteen years, described her as "a seraph incarnate," and her prudence and sanctity were held in such esteem that the most learned men consulted her in their doubts, and accepted her answers as oracles. She was always faithful to the spirit of St. Teresa, and had received from Heaven the mission to restore the Carmel to its primitive perfection. Having founded three convents of the Reform in Spain, she established one in France, and another in Belgium. She died in the odor of sanctity in the Carmel of Brussels on March 4, 1621. On May 3, 1878, His Holiness Pope Leo XIII signed the Decree introducing the Cause of her Beatification. [10] Matt. 8:10. [11] St. Francis of Assisi, out of humility, refused to accept the sublime dignity of the Priesthood, and remained a Deacon until his death. [Ed.] [12] An allusion to the beautiful words of the martyr St. Ignatius of Antioch, uttered when he heard the roar of the lions in the Roman arena. "I am the wheat of Christ; let me be ground by the teeth of the wild beasts, that I may become clean bread." [Ed.] [13] St. John of the Cross. [14] 1 Cor. 12:31. [15] St. John of the Cross. [16] Cf. Luke 16:9. [17] Luke 16:8. [18] St. John of the Cross. [19] Isa. 38:14. [20] Matt. 9:15. _____________________________ END OF THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY _____________________________ EPILOGUE: A VICTIM OF DIVINE LOVE "Many pages of this story"--said its writer--"will never be read upon earth." It is necessary to repeat and emphasize her words. There are sufferings which are not to be disclosed here below; Our Lord has jealously reserved to Himself the right to reveal their merit and glory, in the clear vision where all veils shall be removed. "My God," she cried on the day of her religious profession, "give me martyrdom of soul or body . . . or rather give me both the one and the other!" And Our Lord Who, as she herself avowed, fulfilled all her desires, granted this one also, and in more abundant measure than the rest. He caused "the floods of infinite tenderness pent up in His Divine Heart to overflow into the soul of His little Spouse." This was the "Martyrdom of Love," so well described in her melodious song. But it was her own doctrine that, "to dedicate oneself as a Victim of Love is not to be dedicated to sweetness and consolations; it is to offer oneself to all that is painful and bitter, because Love lives only by sacrifice . . . and the more we would surrender ourselves to Love, the more we must surrender ourselves to suffering." Therefore, because she desired to attain "the loftiest height of Love," the Divine Master led her thither by the rugged path of sorrow, and it was only on its bleak summit that she died a _Victim of Love._ . . . . . . . We have seen how great was her sacrifice in leaving her happy home and the Father who loved her so tenderly. It may be imagined that this sacrifice was softened, because at the Carmel she found again her two elder and dearly loved sisters. On the contrary, this afforded the young postulant many an occasion for repressing her strong natural affections. The rules of solitude and silence were strictly observed, and she only saw her sisters at recreation. Had she been less mortified, she might often have sat beside them, but "by preference she sought out the company of those religious who were least agreeable to her," and no one could tell whether or not she bore a special affection towards her own sisters. Some time after her entrance, she was appointed as "aid" to Sister Agnes of Jesus, her dear "Pauline"; this was a fresh occasion for sacrifice. Thérèse knew that all unnecessary conversation was forbidden, and therefore she never allowed herself even the least word. "O my little Mother," she said later, "how I suffered! I could not open my heart to you, and I thought you no longer knew me!" After five years of this heroic silence, Sister Agnes of Jesus was elected Prioress. On the evening of the election Thérèse might well have rejoiced that henceforth she could speak freely to her "little Mother," and, as of old, pour out her soul. But sacrifice had become her daily food. If she sought one favour more than another, it was that she might be looked on as the lowest and the least; and, among all the religious, not one saw less of the Mother Prioress. She desired to live the life of Carmel with all the perfection required by St. Teresa, and, although a martyr to habitual dryness, her prayer was continuous. On one occasion a novice, entering her cell, was struck by the heavenly expression of her countenance. She was sewing industriously, and yet seemed lost in deep contemplation. "What are you thinking of?" the young Sister asked. "I am meditating on the 'Our Father,'" Thérèse answered. "It is so sweet to call God, 'Our Father!'" . . . and tears glistened in her eyes. Another time she said, "I cannot well see what more I shall have in Heaven than I have now; I shall see God, it is true, but, as to being with Him, I am that already even on earth." The flame of Divine Love consumed her, and this is what she herself relates: "A few days after the oblation of myself to God's Merciful Love, I was in the choir, beginning the Way of the Cross, when I felt myself suddenly wounded by a dart of fire so ardent that I thought I should die. I do not know how to explain this transport; there is no comparison to describe the intensity of that flame. It seemed as though an invisible force plunged me wholly into fire. . . . But oh! what fire! what sweetness!" When Mother Prioress asked her if this rapture was the first she had experienced, she answered simply: "Dear Mother, I have had several transports of love, and one in particular during my Noviciate, when I remained for a whole week far removed from this world. It seemed as though a veil were thrown over all earthly things. But, I was not then consumed by a real fire. I was able to bear those transports of love without expecting to see the ties that bound me to earth give way; whilst, on the day of which I now speak, one minute--one second--more and my soul must have been set free. Alas! I found myself again on earth, and dryness at once returned to my heart." True, the Divine Hand had withdrawn the fiery dart--but the wound was unto death! In that close union with God, Thérèse acquired a remarkable mastery over self. All sweet virtues flourished in the garden of her soul, but do not let us imagine that these wondrous flowers grew without effort on her part. "In this world there is no fruitfulness without suffering--either physical pain, secret sorrow, or trials known sometimes only to God. When good thoughts and generous resolutions have sprung up in our souls through reading the lives of the Saints, we ought not to content ourselves, as in the case of profane books, with paying a certain tribute of admiration to the genius of their authors--we should rather consider the price which, doubtless, they have paid for that supernatural good they have produced."[1] And, if to-day Thérèse transforms so many hearts, and the good she does on earth is beyond reckoning, we may well believe she bought it all at the price with which Jesus bought back our souls: by suffering and the Cross! Not the least of these sufferings was the unceasing war she waged against herself, refusing every satisfaction to the demands of her naturally proud and impetuous nature. While still a child she had acquired the habit of never excusing herself or making a complaint; at the Carmel she strove to be the little servant of her Sisters in religion, and in that same spirit of humility she endeavoured to obey all without distinction. One evening, during her illness, the Community had assembled in the garden to sing a hymn before an Altar of the Sacred Heart. Soeur Thérèse, who was already wasted by fever, joined them with difficulty, and, arriving quite exhausted, was obliged to sit down at once. When the hymn began, one of the Sisters made her a sign to stand up. Without hesitation, the humble child rose, and, in spite of the fever and great oppression from which she was suffering, remained standing to the end. The Infirmarian had advised her to take a little walk in the garden for a quarter of an hour each day. This recommendation was for her a command. One afternoon a Sister, noticing what an effort it cost her, said: "Soeur Thérèse, you would do much better to rest; walking like this cannot do you any good. You only tire yourself!" "That is true," she replied, "but, do you know what gives me strength? I offer each step for some missionary. I think that possibly, over there, far away, one of them is weary and tired in his apostolic labours, and to lessen his fatigue I offer mine to the Good God." She gave her novices some beautiful examples of detachment. One year the relations of the Sisters and the servants of the Convent had sent bouquets of flowers for Mother Prioress's feast. Thérèse was arranging them most tastefully, when a Lay-sister said crossly: "It is easy to see that the large bouquets have been given by your friends. I suppose those sent by the poor will again be put in the background!" . . . A sweet smile was the only reply, and notwithstanding the unpleasing effect, she immediately put the flowers sent by the servants in the most conspicuous place. Struck with admiration, the Lay-sister went at once to the Prioress to accuse herself of her unkindness, and to praise the patience and humility shown by Soeur Thérèse. After the death of Thérèse that same Sister, full of confidence, pressed her forehead against the feet of the saintly nun, once more asking forgiveness for her fault. At the same instant she felt herself cured of cerebral anæmia, from which she had suffered for many years, and which had prevented her from applying herself either to reading or mental prayer. Far from avoiding humiliations, Soeur Thérèse sought them eagerly, and for that reason she offered herself as "aid" to a Sister who, she well knew, was difficult to please, and her generous proposal was accepted. One day, when she had suffered much from this Sister, a novice asked her why she looked so happy. Great was her surprise on receiving the reply: "It is because Sister N. has just been saying disagreeable things to me. What pleasure she has given me! I wish I could meet her now, and give her a sweet smile." . . . As she was still speaking, the Sister in question knocked at the door, and the astonished novice could see for herself how the Saints forgive. Soeur Thérèse acknowledged later on, she "soared so high above earthly things that humiliations did but make her stronger." To all these virtues she joined a wonderful courage. From her entrance into the Carmel, at the age of fifteen, she was allowed to follow all the practices of its austere Rule, the fasts alone excepted. Sometimes her companions in the noviciate, seeing how pale she looked, tried to obtain a dispensation for her, either from the Night Office, or from rising at the usual hour in the morning, but the Mother Prioress would never yield to these requests. "A soul of such mettle," she would say, "ought not to be dealt with as a child; dispensations are not meant for her. Let her be, for God sustains her. Besides, if she is really ill, she should come and tell me herself."[2] But it was always a principle with Thérèse that "We should go to the end of our strength before we complain." How many times did she assist at Matins suffering from vertigo or violent headaches! "I am able to walk," she would say, "and so I ought to be at my duty." And, thanks to this undaunted energy, she performed acts that were heroic. It was with difficulty that her delicate stomach accustomed itself to the frugal fare of the Carmel. Certain things made her ill, but she knew so well how to hide this, that no one ever suspected it. Her neighbour at table said that she had tried in vain to discover the dishes that she preferred, and the kitchen Sisters, finding her so easy to please, invariably served her with what was left. It was only during her last illness, when she was ordered to say what disagreed with her, that her mortifications came to light. "When Jesus wishes us to suffer," she said at that time, "there can be no evading it. And so, when Sister Mary of the Sacred Heart[3] was procuratrix, she endeavoured to look after me with a mother's tenderness. To all appearances, I was well cared for, and yet what mortifications did she not impose upon me! for she served me according to her own taste, which was entirely opposed to mine." Thérèse's spirit of sacrifice was far-reaching; she eagerly sought what was painful and disagreeable, as her rightful share. All that God asked she gave Him without hesitation or reserve. "During my postulancy," she said, "it cost me a great deal to perform certain exterior penances, customary in our convents, but I never yielded to these repugnances; it seemed to me that the image of my Crucified Lord looked at me with beseeching eyes, and begged these sacrifices." Her vigilance was so keen, that she never left unobserved any little recommendations of the Mother Prioress, or any of the small rules which render the religious life so meritorious. One of the old nuns, having remarked her extraordinary fidelity on this point, ever afterwards regarded her as a Saint. Soeur Thérèse was accustomed to say that she never did any great penances. That was because her fervour counted as nothing the few that were allowed her. It happened, however, that she fell ill through wearing for too long a time a small iron Cross, studded with sharp points, that pressed into her flesh. "Such a trifle would not have caused this," she said afterwards, "if God had not wished thus to make me understand that the greater austerities of the Saints are not meant for me--nor for the souls that walk in the path of 'spiritual childhood.'" . . . . . . . "The souls that are the most dear to My Father," Our Lord once said to Saint Teresa, "are those He tries the most, and the greatness of their trials is the measure of His Love." Thérèse was a soul most dear to God, and He was about to fill up the measure of His Love by making her pass through a veritable martyrdom. The reader will remember the call on Good Friday, April 3, 1896, when, to use her own expression, she heard the "distant murmur which announced the approach of the Bridegroom"; but she had still to endure long months of pain before the blessed hour of her deliverance. On the morning of that Good Friday, she made so little of the hæmorrhage of the previous night, that Mother Prioress allowed her to practise all the penances prescribed by the Rule for that day. In the afternoon, a novice saw her cleaning windows. Her face was livid, and, in spite of her great energy, it was evident that her strength was almost spent. Seeing her fatigue, the novice, who loved her dearly, burst into tears, and begged leave to obtain her some little reprieve. But the young novice-mistress strictly forbade her, saying that she was quite able to bear this slight fatigue on the day on which Jesus had suffered and died. Soon a persistent cough made the Mother Prioress feel anxious; she ordered Soeur Thérèse a more strengthening diet, and the cough ceased for some time. "Truly sickness is too slow a liberator," exclaimed our dear little Sister, "I can only rely upon Love." She was strongly tempted to respond to the appeal of the Carmelites of Hanoï, who much desired to have her, and began a novena to the Venerable Théophane Vénard[4] to obtain her cure, but alas! that novena proved but the beginning of a more serious phase of her malady. Like her Divine Master, she passed through the world doing good; like Him, she had been forgotten and unknown, and now, still following in His Footsteps, she was to climb the hill of Calvary. Accustomed to see her always suffering, yet always joyous and brave, Mother Prioress, doubtless inspired by God, allowed her to take part in the Community exercises, some of which tired her extremely. At night, she would courageously mount the stairs alone, pausing at each step to take breath. It was with difficulty that she reached her cell, and then in so exhausted a state, that sometimes, as she avowed later, it took her quite an hour to undress. After all this exertion it was upon a hard pallet that she took her rest. Her nights, too, were very bad, and when asked if she would not like someone to be near her in her hours of pain, she replied: "Oh, no! on the contrary, I am only too glad to be in a cell away from my Sisters, that I may not be heard. I am content to suffer alone--as soon as I am pitied and loaded with attentions, my happiness leaves me." What strength of soul these words betray! Where we find sorrow she found joy. What to us is to hard to bear--being overlooked and ignored by creatures--became to her a source of delight. And her Divine Spouse knew well how to provide that bitter joy she found so sweet. Painful remedies had often to be applied. One day, when she had suffered from them more than usual, she was resting in her cell during recreation, and overheard a Sister in the kitchen speaking of her thus: "Soeur Thérèse will not live long, and really sometimes I wonder what our Mother Prioress will find to say about her when she dies.[5] She will be sorely puzzled, for this little Sister, amiable as she is, has certainly never done anything worth speaking about." The Infirmarian, who had also overheard the remark, turned to Thérèse and said: "If you relied upon the opinion of creatures you would indeed be disillusioned today." "The opinion of creatures!" she replied; "happily God has given me the grace to be absolutely indifferent to that. Let me tell you something which showed me, once and for all, how much it is worth. A few days after my Clothing, I went to our dear Mother's room, and one of the Sisters who happened to be there, said on seeing me: 'Dear Mother, this novice certainly does you credit. How well she looks! I hope she may be able to observe the Rule for many years to come.' I was feeling decidedly pleased at this compliment when another Sister came in, and, looking at me, said: 'Poor little Soeur Thérèse, how very tired you seem! You quite alarm me. If you do not soon improve, I am afraid you will not be able to keep the Rule very long.' I was then only sixteen, but this little incident made such an impression on me, that I never again set store on the varying opinion of creatures." On another occasion someone remarked: "It is said that you have never suffered much." Smiling, she pointed to a glass containing medicine of a bright red colour. "You see this little glass?" she said. "One would suppose that it contained a most delicious draught, whereas, in reality, it is more bitter than anything else I take. It is the image of my life. To others it has been all rose colour; they have thought that I continually drank of a most delicious wine; yet to me it has been full of bitterness. I say bitterness, and yet my life has not been a bitter one, for I have learned to find my joy and sweetness in all that is bitter." "You are suffering very much just now, are you not?" "Yes, but then I have so longed to suffer." "How it distresses us to see you in such pain, and to think that it may increase!" said her novices. "Oh! Do not grieve about me. I have reached a point where I can no longer suffer, because all suffering is become so sweet. Besides, it is quite a mistake to trouble yourselves as to what I may still have to undergo. It is like meddling with God's work. We who run in the way of Love must never allow ourselves to be disturbed by anything. If I did not simply live from one moment to another, it would be impossible for me to be patient; but I only look at the present, I forget the past, and I take good care not to forestall the future. When we yield to discouragement or despair, it is usually because we think too much about the past and the future. But pray much for me, for it is often just when I cry to Heaven for help that I feel most abandoned." "How do you manage not to give way to discouragement at such times?" "I turn to God and all His Saints, and thank them notwithstanding; I believe they want to see how far my trust may extend. But the words of Job have not entered my heart in vain: 'Even if God should kill me, I would still trust in Him.'[6] I own it has taken a long time to arrive at this degree of self-abandonment; but I have reached it now, and it is the Lord Himself Who has brought me there." Another time she said: "Our Lord's Will fills my heart to the brim, and hence, if aught else is added, it cannot penetrate to any depth, but, like oil on the surface of limpid waters, glides easily across. If my heart were not already brimming over, and must needs be filled by the feelings of joy and sadness that alternate so rapidly, then indeed would it be flooded by a wave of bitter pain; but these quick-succeeding changes scarcely ruffle the surface of my soul, and in its depths there reigns a peace that nothing can disturb." And yet her soul was enveloped in thick darkness, and her temptations against Faith, ever conquered but ever returning, were there to rob her of all feeling of happiness at the thought of her approaching death. "Were it not for this trial, which is impossible to understand," she would say, "I think I should die of joy at the prospect of soon leaving this earth." By this trial, the Divine Master wished to put the finishing touches to her purification, and thus enable her not only to walk with rapid steps, but to run in her little way of confidence and abandonment. Her words repeatedly proved this. "I desire neither death nor life. Were Our Lord to offer me my choice, I would not choose. I only will what He wills; it is what He does that I love. I do not fear the last struggle, nor any pains--however great--my illness may bring. God has always been my help. He has led me by the hand from my earliest childhood, and on Him I rely. My agony may reach the furthest limits, but I am convinced He will never forsake me." Such confidence in God, of necessity stirred the fury of the devil--of him who, at life's close, tries every ruse to sow the seeds of despair in the hearts of the dying. "Last night I was seized with a terrible feeling of anguish," she confessed to Mother Agnes of Jesus on one occasion; "I was lost in darkness, and from out of it came an accursed voice: 'Are you certain God loves you? Has He Himself told you so? The opinion of creatures will not justify you in His sight.' These thoughts had long tortured me, when your little note, like a message from Heaven, was brought to me. You recalled to me, dear Mother, the special graces Jesus had lavished upon me, and, as though you had had a revelation concerning my trial, you assured me I was deeply loved by God, and was on the eve of receiving from His Hands my eternal crown. Immediately peace and joy were restored to my heart. Yet the thought came to me, 'It is my little Mother's affection that makes her write these words.' Straightway I felt inspired to take up the Gospels, and, opening the book at random, I lighted on a passage which had hitherto escaped me: 'He whom God hath sent speaketh the Words of God, for God doth not give the Spirit by measure.'[7] Then I fell asleep fully consoled. It was you, dear Mother, whom the Good God sent me, and I must believe you, because you speak the Words of God." For several days, during the month of August, Thérèse remained, so to speak, beside herself, and implored that prayers might be offered for her. She had never before been seen in this state, and in her inexpressible anguish she kept repeating: "Oh! how necessary it is to pray for the agonising! If one only knew!" One night she entreated the Infirmarian to sprinkle her bed with Holy Water, saying: "I am besieged by the devil. I do not see him, but I feel him; he torments me and holds me with a grip of iron, that I may not find one crumb of comfort; he augments my woes, that I may be driven to despair. . . . And I cannot pray. I can only look at Our Blessed Lady and say: 'Jesus!' How needful is that prayer we use at Compline: 'Procul recedant somnia et noctium phantasmata!' ('Free us from the phantoms of the night.') Something mysterious is happening within me. I am not suffering for myself, but for some other soul, and satan is angry." The Infirmarian, startled, lighted a blessed candle, and the spirit of darkness fled, never to return; but the sufferer remained to the end in a state of extreme anguish. One day, while she was contemplating the beautiful heavens, some one said to her: "soon your home will be there, beyond the blue sky. How lovingly you gaze at it!" She only smiled, but afterwards she said to the Mother Prioress: "Dear Mother, the Sisters do not realise my sufferings. Just now, when looking at the sky, I merely admired the beauty of the material heaven--the true Heaven seems more than ever closed against me. At first their words troubled me, but an interior voice whispered: 'Yes, you were looking to Heaven out of love. Since your soul is entirely delivered up to love, all your actions, even the most indifferent, are marked with this divine seal.' At once I was consoled." In spite of the darkness which enveloped her, her Divine Saviour sometimes left the door of her prison ajar. Those were moments in which her soul lost itself in transports of confidence and love. Thus it happened that on a certain day, when walking in the garden supported by one of her own sisters, she stopped at the charming spectacle of a hen sheltering its pretty little ones under its wing. Her eyes filled with tears, and, turning to her companion, she said: "I cannot remain here any longer, let us go in!" And even when she reached her cell, her tears continued to fall, and it was some time before she could speak. At last she looked at her sister with a heavenly expression, and said: "I was thinking of Our Lord, and the beautiful comparison He chose in order to make us understand His ineffable tenderness. This is what He has done for me all the days of my life. He has completely hidden me under His Wing. I cannot express all that has just stirred my heart; it is well for me that God conceals Himself, and lets me see the effects of His Mercy but rarely, and as it were from 'behind the lattices.' Were it not so I could never bear such sweetness." . . . . . . . Disconsolate at the prospect of losing their treasure, the Community began a novena to Our Lady of Victories on June 5, 1897, in the fervent hope that she would once again miraculously raise the drooping Little Flower. But her answer was the same as that given by the blessed Martyr, Théophane Vénard, and they were forced to accept with generosity the bitterness of the coming separation. At the beginning of July, her state became very serious, and she was at last removed to the Infirmary. Seeing her empty cell, and knowing she would never return to it, Mother Agnes of Jesus said to her: "When you are no longer with us, how sad I shall feel when I look at this cell!" "For consolation, little Mother, you can think how happy I am up there, and remember that much of my happiness was acquired in that little cell; for," she added, raising her beautiful eyes to Heaven, "I have suffered so much there, and I should have been happy to die there." As she entered the Infirmary she looked towards the miraculous statue of Our Lady, which had been brought thither. It would be impossible to describe that look. "What is it you see?" said her sister Marie, the witness of her miraculous cure as a child. And Thérèse answered: "Never has she seemed to me so beautiful . . . but to-day it is the statue, whereas that other day, as you well know, it was not the statue!" And from that time she often received similar consolations. One evening she exclaimed: "Oh, how I love Our Blessed Lady! Had I been a Priest, how I would have sung her praises! She is spoken of as unapproachable, whereas she should be represented as easy of imitation. . . . She is more Mother than Queen. I have heard it said that her splendour eclipses that of all the Saints as the rising sun makes all the stars disappear. It sounds so strange. That a Mother should take away the glory of her children! I think quite the reverse. I believe that she will greatly increase the splendour of the elect . . . Our Mother Mary! Oh! how simple her life must have been!" and, continuing her discourse, she drew such a sweet and delightful picture of the Holy Family that all present were lost in admiration. A very heavy cross awaited her before going to join her Spouse. From August 16 to September 30, the happy day of her death, she was unable to receive Holy Communion, because of her continual sickness. Few have hungered for the Bread of Angels like this seraph of earth. Again and again during that last winter of her life, after nights of intolerable pain, she rose at early morn to partake of the Manna of Heaven, and she thought no price too heavy to pay for the bliss of feeding upon God. Before depriving her altogether of this Heavenly Food, Our Lord often visited her on her bed of pain. Her Communion on July 16, the feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, was specially touching. During the previous night she composed some verses which were to be sung before Communion. Thou know'st the baseness of my soul, O Lord, Yet fearest not to stoop and enter me. Come to my heart, O Sacrament adored! Come to my heart . . . it craveth but for Thee! And when Thou comest, straightway let me die Of very love for Thee; this boon impart! Oh, hearken Jesus, to my suppliant cry: Come to my heart! In the morning, when the Holy Viaticum was carried to the Infirmary, the cloisters were thickly strewn with wild flowers and rose-petals. A young Priest, who was about to say his first Mass that day in the Chapel of the Carmel, bore the Blessed Sacrament to the dying Sister; and at her desire, Sister Mary of the Eucharist--whose voice was exceptionally sweet--sang the following couplet: Sweet martyrdom! to die of love's keen fire: The martyrdom of which my heart is fain! Hasten, ye Cherubim, to tune your lyre; I shall not linger long in exile's pain! . . . . . . . Fulfill my dream, O Jesus, since I sigh Of love to die! A few days later Thérèse grew worse, and on July 30 she received Extreme Unction. Radiant with delight the little Victim of Love said to us: "The door of my dark prison is ajar. I am steeped in joy, especially since our Father Superior has assured me that to-day my soul is like unto that of a little child after Baptism." No doubt she thought she was quickly to join the white-robed band of the Holy Innocents. She little knew that two long months of martyrdom had still to run their course. "Dear Mother," she said, "I entreat you, give me leave to die. Let me offer my life for such and such an intention"--naming it to the Prioress. And when the permission was refused, she replied: "Well, I know that just at this moment Our Lord has such a longing for a tiny bunch of grapes--which no one will give Him--that He will perforce have to come and steal it. . . . I do not ask anything; this would be to stray from my path of self-surrender. I only beseech Our Lady to remind her Jesus of the title of _Thief,_ which He takes to Himself in the Gospels, so that He may not forget to come and carry me away." . . . . . . . One day Soeur Thérèse took an ear of corn from a sheaf they had brought her. It was so laden with grain that it bent on its stalk, and after gazing upon it for some time she said to the Mother Prioress: "Mother, that ear of corn is the image of my soul. God has loaded it with graces for me and for many others. And it is my dearest wish ever to bend beneath the weight of God's gifts, acknowledging that all comes from Him." She was right. Her soul was indeed laden with graces, and it was easy to discern the Spirit of God speaking His praises out of the mouth of that innocent child. Had not this Spirit of Truth already dictated these words to the great Teresa of Avila: "Let those souls who have reached to perfect union with God hold themselves in high esteem, with a humble and holy presumption. Let them keep unceasingly before their eyes the remembrance of the good things they have received, and beware of the thought that they are practising humility in not recognising the gifts of God. Is it not clear that the constant remembrance of gifts bestowed serves to increase the love of the giver? How can he who ignores the riches he possesses, spend them generously upon others?" But the above was not the only occasion on which the "little Thérèse of Lisieux"[8] gave utterance to words that proved prophetic. In the month of April, 1895, while she was still in excellent health, she said in confidence to one of the older nuns: "I shall die soon. I do not say that it will be in a few months, but in two or three years at most; I know it because of what is taking place in my soul." The novices betrayed surprise when she read their inmost thoughts. "This is my secret," she said to them: "I never reprimand you without first invoking Our Blessed Lady, and asking her to inspire me as to what will be most for your good, and I am often astonished myself at the things I teach you. At such times I feel that I make no mistake, and that it is Jesus Who speak by my lips." During her illness one of her sisters had experienced some moments of acute distress, amounting almost to discouragement, at the thought of the inevitable parting. Immediately afterwards she went to the Infirmary, but was careful not to let any sign of grief be seen. What was her surprise when Thérèse, in a sad and serious tone, thus addressed her: "We ought not to weep like those who have no hope." One of the Mothers, having come to visit her, did her a trifling service. "How happy I should be," thought the Mother, "if this Angel would only say: 'I will repay you in Heaven!' At that instant Soeur Thérèse, turning to her, said: "Mother, I will repay you in Heaven!" But more surprising than all, was her consciousness of the mission for which Our Lord had destined her. The veil which hides the future seemed lifted, and more than once she revealed to us its secrets, in prophecies which have already been realised. "I have never given the Good God aught but love; it is with Love He will repay. AFTER MY DEATH I WILL LET FALL A SHOWER OF ROSES." At another time she interrupted a Sister, who was speaking to her of the happiness of Heaven, by the sublime words: "It is not that which attracts me." "And what attracts you?" asked the other. "Oh! it is Love! To love, to be beloved, and _to return to earth to win love for our Love!"_ One evening, she welcomed Mother Agnes of Jesus with an extraordinary expression of joy: "Mother!" she said, "some notes from a concert far away have just reached my ears, and have made me think that soon I shall be listening to the wondrous melodies of Paradise. The thought, however, gave me but a moment's joy--one hope alone makes my heart beat fast: the Love that I shall receive and the Love I shall be able to give! "I feel that my mission is soon to begin--my mission to make others love God as I love Him . . . to each souls my _little way_ . . . I WILL SPEND MY HEAVEN IN DOING GOOD UPON EARTH. Nor is this impossible, since from the very heart of the Beatific Vision, the Angels keep watch over us. No, there can be no rest for me until the end of the world. But when the Angel shall have said: 'Time is no more!' then I shall rest, then I shall be able to rejoice, because the number of the elect will be complete." "And what is this _little way_ that you would teach to souls?" "IT IS THE WAY OF SPIRITUAL CHILDHOOD, THE WAY OF TRUST AND ABSOLUTE SELF-SURRENDER. I want to point out to them the means that I have always found so perfectly successful, to tell them that there is but one thing to do here below: we must offer Jesus _the flowers of little sacrifices_ and win Him by a caress. That is how I have won Him, and that is why I shall be made so welcome." "Should I guide you wrongly by my _little way_ of love," she said to a novice, "do not fear that I shall allow you to continue therein; I should soon come back to the earth, and tell you to take another road. If I do not return, then believe in the truth of these my words: We can never have too much confidence in the Good God, He is so mighty, so merciful. As we hope in Him so shall we receive." On the eve of the feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, a novice said to her: "I think that if you were to die to-morrow, after Holy Communion, I should be quite consoled--it would be such a beautiful death!" Thérèse answered quickly: "Die after Holy Communion! Upon a great feast! Nay, not so. _In my 'little way' everything is most ordinary; all that I do, little souls must be able to do likewise."_ And to one of her missionary brothers she wrote: "What draws me to my Heavenly Home is the summons of my Lord, together with the hope that at length I shall love Him as my heart desires, and shall be able to make Him loved by a multitude of souls who will bless Him throughout eternity." And in another letter to China: "I trust fully that I shall not remain idle in Heaven; my desire is to continue my work for the Church and for souls. I ask this of God, and I am convinced He will hear my prayer. You see that if I quit the battle-field so soon, it is not from a selfish desire of repose. For a long time now, suffering has been my Heaven here upon earth, and I can hardly conceive how I shall become acclimatised to a land where joy is unmixed with sorrow. Jesus will certainly have to work a complete change in my soul--else I could never support the ecstasies of Paradise." It was quite true, suffering had become her Heaven upon earth--she welcomed it as we do happiness. "When I suffer much," she would say, "when something painful or disagreeable happens to me, instead of a melancholy look, I answer by a smile. At first I did not always succeed, but now it has become a habit which I am glad to have acquired." A certain Sister entertained doubts concerning the patience of Thérèse. One day, during a visit, she remarked that the invalid's face wore an expression of unearthly joy, and she sought to know the reason. "It is because the pain is so acute just now," Thérèse replied; "I have always forced myself to love suffering and to give it a glad welcome." "Why are you so bright this morning?" asked Mother Agnes of Jesus. "Because of two little crosses. Nothing gives me 'little joys' like 'little crosses.'" And another time: "You have had many trials to-day?" "Yes, but I love them! . . . I love all the Good God sends me!" "Your sufferings are terrible!" "No--they are not terrible: can a little Victim of Love find anything terrible that is sent by her Spouse? Each moment He sends me what I am able to bear, and nothing more, and if He increase the pain, my strength is increased as well. But I could never ask for greater sufferings--I am too little a soul. They would then be of my own choice. I should have to bear them all without Him, and I have never been able to do anything when left to myself." Thus spoke that wise and prudent Virgin on her deathbed, and her lamp, filled to the brim with the oil of virtue, burned brightly to the end. If, as the Holy Spirit reminds us in the Book of Proverbs: _"A man's doctrine is proved by his patience,"_[9] those who have heard her may well believe in her doctrine, for she has proved it by a patience no test could overcome. At each visit the doctor expressed his admiration. "If only you knew what she has to endure! I have never seen any one suffer so intensely with such a look of supernatural joy. . . . I shall not be able to cure her; she was not made for this earth." In view of her extreme weakness, he ordered some strengthening remedies. Thérèse was at first distressed because of their cost, but she afterwards admitted: "I am no longer troubled at having to take those expensive remedies, for I have read that when they were given to St. Gertrude, she was gladdened by the thought that it would redound to the good of our benefactors, since Our Lord Himself has said: 'Whatever you do to the least of My little ones, you do unto Me.'"[10] "I am convinced that medicines are powerless to cure me," she added, "but I have made a covenant with God that the poor missionaries who have neither time nor means to take care of themselves may profit thereby." She was much moved by the constant gifts of flowers made to her by her friends outside the Convent, and again by the visits of a sweet little redbreast that loved to play about her bed. She saw in these things the Hand of God. "Mother, I feel deeply the many touching proofs of God's Love for me. I am laden with them . . . nevertheless, I continue in the deepest gloom! . . . I suffer much . . . very much! and yet my state is one of profound peace. All my longings have been realised . . . I am full of confidence." Shortly afterwards she told me this touching little incident: "One evening, during the 'Great Silence,' the Infirmarian brought me a hot-water bottle for my feet, and put tincture of iodine on my chest. I was in a burning fever, and parched with thirst, and, whilst submitting to these remedies, I could not help saying to Our Lord: 'My Jesus, Thou seest I am already burning, and they have brought me more heat and fire. Oh! if they had brought me even half a glass of water, what a comfort it would have been! . . . My Jesus! Thy little child is so thirsty. But she is glad to have this opportunity of resembling Thee more closely, and thus helping Thee to save souls.' The Infirmarian soon left me, and I did not expect to see her again until the following morning. What was my surprise when she returned a few minutes later with a refreshing drink! 'It has just struck me that you may be thirsty,' she said, 'so I shall bring you something every evening.' I looked at her astounded, and when I was once more alone, I melted into tears. Oh! how good Jesus is! how tender and loving! How easy it is to reach His Heart!" . . . . . . . On September 6, the little Spouse of Jesus received a touching proof of the loving thought of His Sacred Heart. She had frequently expressed a wish to possess a relic of her special patron, the Venerable Théophane Vénard, but as her desire was not realised, she said no more. She was quite overcome, therefore, when Mother Prioress brought her the longed-for treasure--received that very day. She kissed it repeatedly, and would not consent to part with it. It may be asked why she was so devoted to this young Martyr. She herself explained the reason in an affectionate interview with her own sisters: "Théophane Vénard is a _little_ saint; his life was not marked by anything extraordinary. He had an ardent devotion to Our Immaculate Mother and a tender love of his own family." Dwelling on these words she added: "And I, too, love my family with a tender love; I fail to understand those Saints who do not share my feelings. As a parting gift I have copied for you some passages from his last letters home. His soul and mine have many points of resemblance, and his words do but re-echo my thoughts." We give here a copy of that letter, which one might have believed was composed by Thérèse herself: "I can find nothing on earth that can make me truly happy; the desires of my heart are too vast, and nothing of what the world calls happiness can satisfy it. Time for me will soon be no more, my thoughts are fixed on Eternity. My heart is full of peace, like a tranquil lake or a cloudless sky. I do not regret this life on earth. I thirst for the waters of Life Eternal. "Yet a little while and my soul will have quitted this earth, will have finished her exile, will have ended her combat. I go to Heaven. I am about to enter the Abode of the Blessed--to see what the eye hath never seen, to hear what the ear hath never heard, to enjoy those things the heart of man hath not conceived . . . I have reached the hour so coveted by us all. It is indeed true that Our Lord chooses the little ones to confound the great ones of this earth. I do not rely upon my own strength but upon Him Who, on the Cross, vanquished the powers of hell. "I am a spring flower which the Divine Master culls for His pleasure. We are all flowers, planted on this earth, and God will gather us in His own good time--some sooner, some later . . . I, little flower of one day, am the first to be gathered! But we shall meet again in Paradise, where lasting joy will be our portion. "Sister Teresa of the Child Jesus, using the words of the angelic martyr--Théophane Vénard." Toward the end of September, when something was repeated to her that had been said at recreation, concerning the responsibility of those who have care of souls, she seemed to revive a little and gave utterance to these beautiful words: "To him that is little, mercy is granted.[11] It is possible to remain _little_ even in the most responsible position, and is it not written that, at the last day, 'the Lord will arise to save the meek and lowly ones of the earth'?[12] He does not say 'to judge,' but 'to save!'" As time went on, the tide of suffering rose higher and higher, and she became so weak, that she was unable to make the slightest movement without assistance. Even to hear anyone whisper increased her discomfort; and the fever and oppression were so extreme that it was with the greatest difficulty she was able to articulate a word. And yet a sweet smile was always on her lips. Her only fear was lest she should give her Sisters any extra trouble, and until two days before her death she would never allow any one to remain with her during the night. However, in spite of her entreaties, the Infirmarian would visit her from time to time. On one occasion she found Thérèse with hands joined and eyes raised to Heaven. "What are you doing?" she asked; "you ought to try and go to sleep." "I cannot, Sister, I am suffering too much, so I am praying. . . ." "And what do you say to Jesus?" "I say nothing--I only love Him!" "Oh! how good God is!" . . . she sometimes exclaimed. "Truly He must be very good to give me strength to bear all I have to suffer." One day she said to the Mother Prioress: "Mother, I would like to make known to you the state of my soul; but I cannot, I feel too much overcome just now." In the evening Thérèse sent her these lines, written in pencil with a trembling hand: "O my God! how good Thou art to the little Victim of Thy Merciful Love! Now, even when Thou joinest these bodily pains to those of my soul, I cannot bring myself to say: 'The anguish of death hath encompassed me.'[13] I rather cry out in my gratitude: 'I have gone down into the valley of the shadow of death, but I fear no evil, because Thou, O Lord, art with me.'"[14] Her little Mother said to her: "Some think that you are afraid of death." "That may easily come to pass," she answered; "I do not rely on my own feelings, for I know how frail I am. It will be time enough to bear that cross if it comes, meantime I wish to rejoice in my present happiness. When the Chaplain asked me if I was resigned to die, I answered: 'Father, I need rather to be resigned to live--I feel nothing but joy at the thought of death.' Do not be troubled, dear Mother, if I suffer much and show no sign of happiness at the end. Did not Our Lord Himself die 'a Victim of Love,' and see how great was His Agony!" . . . . . . . At last dawned the eternal day. It was Thursday, September 30, 1897. In the morning, the sweet Victim, her eyes fixed on Our Lady's statue, spoke thus of her last night on earth: "Oh! with what fervour I have prayed to her! . . . And yet it has been pure agony, without a ray of consolation. . . . Earth's air is failing me: when shall I breathe the air of Heaven?" For weeks she had been unable to raise herself in bed, but, at half-past two in the afternoon, she sat up and exclaimed: "Dear Mother, the chalice is full to overflowing! I could never have believed that it was possible to suffer so intensely. . . . I can only explain it by my extreme desire to save souls. . . ." And a little while after: "Yes, all that I have written about my thirst for suffering is really true! I do not regret having surrendered myself to Love." She repeated these last words several times. A little later she added: "Mother, prepare me to die well." The good Mother Prioress encouraged her with these words: "My child, you are quite ready to appear before God, for you have always understood the virtue of humility." Then, in striking words, Thérèse bore witness to herself: "Yes, I feel it; my soul has ever sought the truth. . . . I have understood humility of heart!" . . . . . . . At half-past four, her agony began--the agony of this "Victim of Divine Love." When the Community gathered round her, she thanked them with the sweetest smile, and then, completely given over to love and suffering, the Crucifix clasped in her failing hands, she entered on the final combat. The sweat of death lay heavy on her brow . . . she trembled . . . but, as a pilot, when close to harbour, is not dismayed by the fury of the storm, so this soul, strong in faith, saw close at hand the beacon-lights of Heaven, and valiantly put forth every effort to reach the shore. As the convent bells rang the evening Angelus, she fixed an inexpressible look upon the statue of the Immaculate Virgin, the Star of the Sea. Was it not the moment to repeat her beautiful prayer: "O thou who camest to smile on me in the morn of my life, come once again and smile, Mother, for now it is eventide!"[15] A few minutes after seven, turning to the Prioress, the poor little Martyr asked: "Mother, is it not the agony? . . . am I not going to die?" "Yes, my child, it is the agony, but Jesus perhaps wills that it be prolonged for some hours." In a sweet and plaintive voice she replied: "Ah, very well then . . . very well . . . I do not wish to suffer less!" Then, looking at her crucifix: "Oh! . . . I love Him! . . . My God, I . . . love . . . Thee!" These were her last words. She had scarcely uttered them when, to our great surprise, she sank down quite suddenly, her head inclined a little to the right, in the attitude of the Virgin Martyrs offering themselves to the sword; or rather, as a Victim of Love, awaiting from the Divine Archer the fiery shaft, by which she longs to die. Suddenly she raised herself, as though called by a mysterious voice; and opening her eyes, which shone with unutterable happiness and peace, fixed her gaze a little above the statue of Our Lady. Thus she remained for about the space of a _Credo,_ when her blessed soul, now become the prey of the "Divine Eagle," was borne away to the heights of Heaven. . . . . . . . A few days before her death, this little Saint had said: "The death of Love which I so much desire is that of Jesus upon the Cross." Her prayer was fully granted. Darkness enveloped her, and her soul was steeped in anguish. And yet, may we not apply to her also that sublime prophecy of St. John of the Cross, referring to souls consumed by the fire of Divine Love: "They die Victims of the onslaughts of Love, in raptured ecstasies--like the swan, whose song grows sweeter as death draws nigh. Wherefore the Psalmist declared: 'Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of His Saints.'[16] For then it is that the rivers of love burst forth from the soul and are whelmed in the Ocean of Divine Love." No sooner had her spotless soul taken its flight than the joy of that last rapture imprinted itself on her brow, and a radiant smile illumined her face. We placed a palm-branch in her hand; and the lilies and roses that adorned her in death were figures of her white robe of baptism made red by her Martyrdom of Love. On the Saturday and Sunday a large crowd passed before the grating of the nuns' chapel, to gaze on the mortal remains of the "Little Flower of Jesus." Hundreds of medals and rosaries were brought to touch the "Little Queen" as she lay in the triumphant beauty of her last sleep. . . . . . . . On October 4, the day of the funeral, there gathered in the Chapel of the Carmel a goodly company of Priests. The honour was surely due to one who had prayed so earnestly for those called to that sacred office. After a last solemn blessing, this grain of priceless wheat was cast into the furrow by the hands of Holy Mother Church. Who shall tell how many ripened ears have sprung forth since, how many the sheaves that are yet to come? "Amen, amen, I say to you, unless the grain of wheat, falling into the ground, die, itself remaineth alone. But if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit."[17] Once more the word of the Divine Reaper has been magnificently fulfilled. THE PRIORESS OF THE CARMEL. _____________________________ [1] Dom Guéranger. [2] Mother Mary of Gonzaga died Dec. 17, 1904, at the age of 71. Mother Agnes of Jesus (Pauline) was at that time Prioress. The former--herself of the line of St. Antony of Padua--recognized in Soeur Thérèse "an heroic soul, filled with holiness, and capable of becoming one day an excellent Prioress." With this end in view, she trained her with a strictness for which the young Saint was most grateful. In the arms of Mother Mary of Gonzaga the "Little Flower of Jesus" was welcomed to the Carmel, and in those arms she died--"happy," she declared, "not to have in that hour as Superioress her 'little Mother,' in order the better to exercise her spirit of faith in authority." [Ed.] [3] As will be remembered, this was Marie, her eldest sister. [Ed.] [4] The Blessed Théophane Vénard was born at St. Loup, in the diocese of Poitiers, on the Feast of the Presentation of Our Lady, Nov. 21, 1829. He was martyred at Kecho, Tong-King, on the Feast of the Presentation of Our Lord, Feb. 2, 1861, at the age of 32. A long and delightful correspondence with his family, begun in his college days and completed from his "cage" at Kecho, reveals a kinship of poesy as well as of sanctity and of the love of home, between the two "spring flowers." The beauty of his soul was so visible in his boyish face that he was spared all torture during his two months in the "cage." In 1909, the year in which Thérèse became "Servant of God" by the commencement of the Episcopal Process, her patron received the honours of Beatification. Another child of France--Joan, its "Martyr-Maid"--whose praises have been sung in affectionate verse by the Saints of St. Loup and Lisieux, was beatified that same year. [Ed.] [5] An allusion to the obituary notice sent to each of the French Carmels when a Carmelite nun dies in that country. In the case of those who die in the odour of sanctity these notices sometimes run to considerable length. Four notices issued from the Carmel of Lisieux are of great interest to the clients of Soeur Thérèse, and are in course of publication at the Orphans' Press, Rochdale; those of the Carmel's saintly Foundress, Mother Genevieve of St. Teresa, whose death is referred to in Chapter VIII; Mother Mary of Gonzaga, the Prioress of Thérèse; Sister Mary of the Eucharist (Marie Guérin), the cousin of Thérèse (Chapter III); and most interesting of all, the long sketch, partly autobiographical, of Mother Mary of St. Angelus (Marie Ange), the "trophy of Thérèse," brought by her intercession to the Carmel in 1902--where the writer made her acquaintance in the following spring; she became Prioress in 1908, dying eighteen months later in the odour of sanctity, aged only 28. [Ed.] [6] Cf. Job 13:15. [7] John 3:34. [8] When asked before her death how they should pray to her in Heaven, Soeur Thérèse, with her wonted simplicity, made answer: "You will call me 'Little Thérèse'--_petite Thérèse."_ And at Gallipoli, on the occasion of her celebrated apparition in the Carmel there, when the Prioress, taking her to be St. Teresa of Avila, addressed her as "our holy Mother," the visitor, adopting her then official title, replied:--"Nay, I am not our holy Mother, I am the Servant of God, _Soeur Thérèse of Lisieux_." This, her own name of Soeur Thérèse, has been retained in the present edition, unless where it was advisable to set down her name in full--Sister Teresa of the Child Jesus and of the Holy Face. The name of the "Little Flower," borrowed by her from the Blessed Théophane Vénard, and used so extensively in the pages of her manuscript, is the one by which she is best known in English-speaking lands. [Ed.] [9] Cf. Prov. 19:11. [10] Matt. 25:49. [11] Wisdom 6:7. [12] Cf. Ps. 75[76]:10. [13] Cf. Ps. 17[18]:5. [14] Cf. Ps. 22[23]:4. [15] From the last poem written by Soeur Thérèse. [16] Ps. 115[116]:15. [17] John 12:24, 25. _____________________________ COUNSELS AND REMINISCENCES OF SOEUR THÉRÈSE, THE LITTLE FLOWER OF JESUS _____________________________ Most of what follows has been gathered from the conversations of Soeur Thérèse with her novices. Her advice cannot but prove helpful to souls within the cloister, and likewise to many in the world who may be attracted by her simple and easy _little way_ to God. * * * * * * One of the novices, greatly discouraged at the thought of her imperfections, tells us that her mistress spoke to her as follows: "You make me think of a little child that is learning to stand but does not yet know how to walk. In his desire to reach the top of the stairs to find his mother, he lifts his little foot to climb the first step. It is all in vain, and at each renewed effort he falls. Well, be like that little child. Always keep lifting your foot to climb the ladder of holiness, and do not imagine that you can mount even the first step. All God asks of you is good will. From the top of the ladder He looks lovingly upon you, and soon, touched by your fruitless efforts, He will Himself come down, and, taking you in His Arms, will carry you to His Kingdom never again to leave Him. But should you cease to raise your foot, you will be left for long on the earth." * * * * * * "The only way to advance rapidly in the path of love is to remain always very little. That is what I did, and now I can sing with our holy Father, St. John of the Cross: 'Then I abased myself so low, so very low, That I ascended to such heights, such heights indeed, That I did overtake the prey I chased!'" * * * * * * Under a temptation which seemed to me irresistible, I said to her: "This time, I cannot surmount it." She replied: "Why seek to surmount it? Rather pass beneath. It is all well for great souls to soar above the clouds when the storm rages; we have simply to suffer the showers. What does it matter if we get wet? We shall dry ourselves in the sunshine of love. "It recalls a little incident of my childhood. One day a horse was standing in front of the garden gate, and preventing us from getting through. My companions talked to him and tried to make him move off, but while they were still talking I quietly slipped between his legs . . . Such is the advantage of remaining small." * * * * * * Our Lord said to the mother of the sons of Zebedee: 'To sit on my right or left hand is for them for whom it is prepared by my Father.'[1] I imagine that these chosen places, which have been refused alike to great Saints and Martyrs, will be reserved for little children; and did not David foretell it when he said, that 'the little Benjamin will preside amidst the assemblies[2] of the Saints.'" * * * * * * "You are wrong to find fault with this thing and with that, or to try and make everyone see things as you see them. We desire to be 'as little children,' and little children do not know what is best: to them all seems right. Let us imitate their ways. Besides, there is no merit in doing what reason dictates." * * * * * * "My patrons and my special favourites in Heaven are those who, so to speak, stole it, such as the Holy Innocents and the Good Thief. The great Saints won it by their works; I wish to be like the thieves and to win it by stratagem--a stratagem of love which will open its gates both to me and to poor sinners. In the Book of Proverbs the Holy Ghost encourages me, for He says: 'Come to me, little one, to learn subtlety!'"[3] * * * * * * "What would you do if you could begin over again your religious life?" "I think I should do as I have already done." "Then you do not share the feeling of the hermit who said: 'While a quarter of an hour, or even a breath of life still remains to me, I shall fear the fires of hell even though I should have spent long years in penance'?" "No, I do not share that fear; I am too small. Little children are not damned." "You are ever seeking to be as little children are, but tell us what must be done to obtain that childlike spirit. 'Remaining little'--what does it mean?" "'Remaining little' means--to recognise one's nothingness, to await everything from the Goodness of God, to avoid being too much troubled at our faults; finally, not to worry over amassing spiritual riches, not to be solicitous about anything. Even amongst the poor, while a child is still small, he is given what is necessary; but, once he is grown up, his father will no longer feed him, and tells him to seek work and support himself. Well, it was to avoid hearing this, that I have never wished to grow up, for I feel incapable of earning my livelihood, which is Life Eternal!" * * * * * * In imitation of our saintly Mistress I also wished never to grow up; she called me therefore "the little one," and during a retreat she wrote to me the following notes: "Do not fear to tell Jesus that you love him, even though you may not feel that love. In this way you will compel Him to come to your aid, and to carry you like a little child who is too weak to walk. "It is indeed a great source of trial, when everything looks black, but this does not depend entirely on yourself. Do all in your power to detach your heart from earthly cares, especially from creatures; then be assured Our Lord will do the rest. He could not permit you to fall into the abyss. Be comforted, little one! In Heaven everything will no longer look black, but dazzling white. There all will be clothed in the Divine radiance of Our Spouse--the Lily of the Valley. Together we will follow Him whithersoever He goeth. Meantime we must make good use of this life's brief day. Let us give Our Lord pleasure, let us by self-sacrifice give Him souls! Above all, let us be little--so little that everyone might tread us underfoot without our even seeming to suffer pain. "I am not surprised at the failures of the little one; she forgets that in her rôle of missionary and warrior she ought to forgo all childish consolations. It is wrong to pass one's time in fretting, instead of sleeping on the Heart of Jesus. "Should the little one fear the dark of the night, or complain at not seeing Him who carries her, let her shut her eyes. It is the one sacrifice God asks. By remaining thus, the dark will cease to terrify, because she will not see it, and before long, peace--if not joy--will re-enter her soul." * * * * * * To help me accept a humiliation she confided to me what follows: "If I had not been received into the Carmel, I would have entered a Refuge, and lived there unknown and despised among the poor 'penitents.' My joy would have been to pass for one, and I would have become an apostle among my companions, telling them my thoughts on the Infinite Mercy of God." "But how could you have hidden your innocence from your Confessor?" "I would have told him that while still in the world I made a general confession, and that it was forbidden me to repeat it." * * * * * * "Oh! When I think of all I have to acquire!" "Or rather to lose! It is Jesus Who takes upon Himself to fill your soul according as you rid it of imperfections. I see clearly that you are mistaking the road, and that you will never arrive at the end of your journey. You want to climb the mountain, whereas God wishes you to descend it. He is awaiting you in the fruitful valley of humility." * * * * * * "To me it seems that humility is truth. I do not know whether I am humble, but I do know that I see the truth in all things." * * * * * * "Indeed you are a Saint!" "No, I am not a Saint. I have never wrought the works of a Saint. _I am but a tiny soul whom Almighty God has loaded with His favours._ "The truth of what I say will be made known to you in Heaven." "But have you not always been faithful to those favours?" "Yes, _from the age of three I have never refused our Good God anything._ Still I cannot glorify myself. See how this evening the tree-tops are gilded by the setting sun. So likewise my soul appears to you all shining and golden because it is exposed to the rays of Love. But should the Divine Sun no longer shine thereon, it would instantly be sunk in gloom." "We too would like to become all golden--what must we do?" "You must practise the little virtues. This is sometimes difficult, but God never refuses the first grace--courage for self-conquest; and if the soul correspond to that grace, she at once finds herself in God's sunlight. The praise given to Judith has always struck me: 'Thou hast done manfully, and thy heart has been strengthened.'[4] In the onset we must act with courage. By this means the heart gains strength, and victory follows victory." * * * * * * In conformity with the Rule, Soeur Thérèse never raised her eyes in the refectory, and, as I found great difficulty in this observance, she composed for me the following prayer. It reveals her exceeding humility, because in it she asked a grace of which I alone stood in need: "O Jesus, in honour and in imitation of the example Thou gavest in the house of Herod, Thy two little Spouses resolve to keep their eyes cast down in the refectory. When that impious king scoffed at Thee, O Infinite Beauty, no complaint came from Thy Lips. Thou didst not even deign to fix on him Thy Adorable Eyes. He was not worthy of the favour, but we who are Thy Spouses, we desire to draw Thy Divine Gaze upon ourselves. As often as we refrain from raising our eyes, we beg Thee to reward us by a glance of love, and we even dare ask Thee not to refuse this sweet glance when we fail in our self-control, for we will humble ourselves most sincerely before Thee." * * * * * * I confided to her that I made no progress, and that consequently I had lost heart. "Up to the age of fourteen," she said, "I practised virtue without tasting its sweetness. I desired suffering, but I did not think of making it my joy; that grace was vouchsafed me later. My soul was like a beautiful tree the flowers of which had scarcely opened when they fell. "Offer to God the sacrifice of never gathering any fruit. If He will that throughout your whole life you should feel a repugnance to suffering and humiliation--if He permit that all the flowers of your desires and of your good will should fall to the ground without any fruit appearing, do not worry. At the hour of death, in the twinkling of an eye, He will cause fair fruits to ripen on the tree of your soul. "We read in the Book of Ecclesiasticus: 'There is an inactive man that wanteth help, is very weak in ability, and full of poverty: yet the Eye of God hath looked upon him for good, and hath lifted him up from his low estate, and hath exalted his head: and many have wondered at him, and have glorified God. . . . Trust in God, and stay in thy place. For it is easy in the Eyes of God, on a sudden, to make the poor man rich. The blessing of God maketh haste to reward the just, and in a swift hour His blessing beareth fruit.'"[5] "But if I fall, I shall always be found imperfect; whereas you are looked upon as holy." "That is, perhaps, because I have never desired to be considered so. . . . But that you should be found imperfect is just what is best. Here is your harvest. To believe oneself imperfect and others perfect--this is true happiness. Should earthly creatures think you devoid of holiness, they rob you of nothing, and you are none the poorer: it is they who lose. For is there anything more sweet than the inward joy of thinking well of our neighbour? "As for myself I am glad and rejoice, not only when I am looked upon as imperfect, but above all when I feel that it is true. Compliments, on the contrary, do but displease me." * * * * * * "God has a special love for you since He entrusts souls to your care." "That makes no difference, and I am really only what I am in His Eyes. It is not because He wills me to be His interpreter among you, that He loves me more; rather, He makes me your little handmaid. It is for you, and not for myself, that He has bestowed upon me those charms and those virtues which you see. "I often compare myself to a little bowl filled by God with good things. All the kittens come to eat from it, and they sometimes quarrel as to which will have the largest share. But the Holy Child Jesus keeps a sharp watch. 'I am willing you should feed from My little bowl,' He says, 'but take heed lest you upset and break it.' "In truth there is no great danger, because I am already on the ground. Not so with Prioresses; set, as they are, on tables, they run far more risks. Honours are always dangerous. What poisonous food is served daily to those in high positions! What deadly fumes of incense! A soul must be well detached from herself to pass unscathed through it all." * * * * * * "It is a consolation for you to do good and to procure the Glory of God. I wish I were equally favoured." "What if God does make use of me, rather than of another, to procure His Glory! Provided His Kingdom be established among souls, the instrument matters not. Besides, He has no need of anyone. "Some time ago I was watching the flicker, almost invisible, of a tiny night-light, when one of the Sisters drew near, and, lighting her candle in the dying flame, passed it round to light all those of the Community. 'Who dare glory in his own good works?' I reflected. 'From one faint spark such as this, it would be possible to set the whole earth on fire.' We often think we receive graces and are divinely illumined by means of brilliant candles. But from whence comes their light? From the prayers, perhaps, of some humble, hidden soul, whose inward shining is not apparent to human eyes; a soul of unrecognised virtue and, in her own sight, of little value--a dying flame. "What mysteries will yet be unveiled to us! I have often thought that perhaps I owe all the graces with which I am laden, to some little soul whom I shall know only in Heaven. "It is God's Will that in this world souls shall dispense to each other, by prayer, the treasures of Heaven, in order that when they reach their Everlasting Home they may love one another with grateful hearts, and with an affection far in excess of that which reigns in the most perfect family on earth. "There no looks of indifference will meet us, because all the Saints will be mutually indebted to each other. No envious glances will be cast, for the happiness of each one of the Blessed will be the happiness of all. With the Doctors of the Church we shall be like unto Doctors; with the Martyrs, like unto Martyrs; with the Virgins, like unto Virgins; and just as the members of one family are proud one of the other, so without the least jealousy shall we take pride in our brothers and sisters. "When we see the glory of the great Saints, and know that through the secret working of Providence we have contributed to it, who knows whether the joy we shall feel will not be as intense, perhaps sweeter, than the happiness they themselves possess? "And do you not think that the great Saints, on their side, seeing what they owe to all little souls, will love them with a love beyond compare? The friendships of Paradise will be both sweet and full of surprise, of this I am certain. The familiar friend of an Apostle, or of a great Doctor of the Church, may be a shepherd boy, and a simple little child may be united in closest intimacy with a Patriarch. . . . I long to enter that Kingdom of Love!" * * * * * * "Believe me, the writing of pious books, the composing of the sublimest poetry, all that does not equal the smallest act of self-denial. When, however, our inability to do good gives us pain, our only resource is to offer up the good works of others, and in this lies the benefit of the Communion of Saints. Recall to mind that beautiful verse of the canticle of our Father, St. John of the Cross: 'Return, my dove! See on the height The wounded Hart, To whom refreshment brings The breeze, stirred by thy wings.' "Thus the Spouse, the wounded Hart, is not attracted by the height, but only by the breeze from the pinions of the dove--a breeze which one single stroke of wing is sufficient to create." * * * * * * "The one thing which is not open to envy is the lowest place. Here alone, therefore, there is neither vanity nor affliction of spirit. Yet, 'the way of a man is not his own,'[6] and sometimes we find ourselves wishing for what dazzles. In that hour let us in all humility take our place among the imperfect, and look upon ourselves as little souls who at every instant need to be upheld by the goodness of God. From the moment He sees us fully convinced of our nothingness, and hears us cry out: 'My foot stumbles, Lord, but Thy Mercy is my strength,'[7] He reaches out His Hand to us. But, should we attempt great things, even under pretext of zeal, He deserts us. It suffices, therefore, to humble ourselves, to bear with meekness our imperfections. Herein lies--for us--true holiness." * * * * * * One day I was complaining of being more tired than my Sisters, for, besides the ordinary duties, I had other work unknown to the rest. Soeur Thérèse replied: "I should like always to see you a brave soldier, never grumblng at hardships, but considering the wounds of your companions as most serious, and your own as mere scratches. You feel this fatigue so much because no one is aware of it. "Now the Blessed Margaret Mary, at the time she had two whitlows, confessed that she really suffered from the hidden one only. The other, which she was unable to hide, excited her Sisters' pity and made her an object of compassion. This is indeed a very natural feeling, the desire that people should know of our aches and pains, but in giving way to it we play the coward." * * * * * * "When we are guilty of a fault we must never attribute it to some physical cause, such as illness or the weather. We must ascribe it to our own imperfections, without being discouraged thereby. 'Occasions do not make a man frail, but show what he is.'"[8] * * * * * * "God did not permit that our Mother should tell me to write my poems as soon as I had composed them, and, fearful of committing a sin against poverty, I would not ask leave. I had therefore to wait for some free time, and at eight o'clock in the evening I often found it extremely difficult to remember what I had composed in the morning. "True, these trifles are a species of martyrdom; but we must be careful not to alleviate the pain of the martyrdom by permitting ourselves, or securing permission for, a thousand and one things which would tend to make the religious life both comfortable and agreeable." * * * * * * One day, as I was in tears, Soeur Thérèse told me to avoid the habit of allowing others to see the trifles that worried me, adding that nothing made community life more trying than unevenness of temper. "You are indeed right," I answered, "such was my own thought. Henceforward my tears will be for God alone. I shall confide my worries to One Who will understand and console me." "Tears for God!" she promptly replied, "that must not be. Far less to Him than to creatures ought you to show a mournful face. Our Divine Master has only our monasteries where He may obtain some solace for His Heart. He comes to us in search of rest--to forget the unceasing complaints of His friends in the world, who, instead of appreciating the value of the Cross, receive it far more often with moans and tears. Would you then be as the mediocre souls? Frankly, this is not disinterested love. . . . _It is for us to console our Lord, and not for Him to console us._ His Heart is so tender that if you cry He will dry your tears; but thereafter He will go away sad, since you did not suffer Him to repose tranquilly within you. Our Lord loves the glad of heart, the children that greet Him with a smile. When will you learn to hide your troubles from Him, or to tell Him gaily that you are happy to suffer for Him?" "The face is the mirror of the soul," she said once, "and yours, like that of a contented little child, should always be calm and serene. Even when alone, be cheerful, remembering always that you are in the sight of the Angels." * * * * * * I was anxious she should congratulate me on what, in my eyes, was an heroic act of virtue; but she said to me: "Compare this little act of virtue with what our Lord has the right to expect of you! Rather should you humble yourself for having lost so many opportunities of proving your love." Little satisfied with this answer, I awaited an opportunity of finding out how Soeur Thérèse herself would act under trial, and the occasion was not long in coming. Reverend Mother asked us to do some extremely tiring work which bristled with difficulties, and, on purpose, I made it still more difficult for our Mistress. Not for one second, however, could I detect her in fault, and, heedless of the fatigue involved, she remained gracious and amiable, eager throughout to help others at her own expense. At last I could resist no longer, and I confessed to her what my thoughts had been. "How comes it," I said, "that you can be so patient? You are ever the same--calm and full of joy." "It was not always the case with me," she replied, "but since I have abandoned all thought of self-seeking, I live the happiest life possible." * * * * * * Our dear Mistress used to say that during recreation, more than at any other time, we should find opportunities for practising virtue. "If your desire be to draw great profit, do not go with the idea of procuring relaxation, but rather with the intention of entertaining others and practising complete detachment from self. Thus, for instance, if you are telling one of the Sisters something you think entertaining, and she should interrupt to tell you something else, show yourself interested, even though in reality her story may not interest you in the least. Be careful, also, not to try to resume what you were saying. In this way you will leave recreation filled with a great interior peace and endowed with fresh strength for the practice of virtue, because you have not sought to please yourself, but others. If only we could realise what we gain by self-denial in all things!" "You realise it, certainly, for you have always practised self-denial." "Yes, I have forgotten myself, and I have tried not to see myself in anything." * * * * * * "When some one knocks at our door, or when we are rung for, we must practise mortification and refrain from doing even another stitch before answering. I have practised this myself, and I assure you that it is a source of peace." After this advice, and according as occasion offered, I promptly answered every summons. One day, during her illness, she was witness of this, and said: "At the hour of death you will be very happy to find this to your account. You have just done something more glorious than if, through clever diplomacy, you had procured the good-will of the Government for all religious communities and had been proclaimed throughout France as a second Judith." * * * * * * Questioned as to her method of sanctifying meals, she answered: "In the refectory we have but one thing to do: perform a lowly action with lofty thoughts. I confess that the sweetest aspirations of love often come to me in the refectory. Sometimes I am brought to a standstill by the thought that were Our Lord in my place He would certainly partake of those same dishes which are served to me. It is quite probable that during His lifetime He tasted of similar food--He must have eaten bread and fruit. "Here are my little rubrics: "I imagine myself at Nazareth, in the house of the Holy Family. If, for instance, I am served with salad, cold fish, wine, or anything pungent in taste, I offer it to St. Joseph. To our Blessed Lady I offer hot foods and ripe fruit, and to the Infant Jesus our feast-day fare, especially rice and preserves. Lastly, when I am served a wretched dinner I say cheerfully: 'To-day, my little one, it is all for you!'" Thus in many pretty ways she hid her mortifications. One fast-day, however, when our Reverend Mother ordered her some special food, I found her seasoning it with wormwood because it was too much to her taste. On another occasion I saw her drinking very slowly a most unpleasant medicine. "Make haste," I said, "drink it off at once!" "Oh, no!" she answered; "must I not profit of these small opportunities for penance since the greater ones are forbidden me?" Toward the end of her life I learned that, during her noviciate, one of our Sisters, when fastening the scapular for her, ran the large pin through her shoulder, and for hours she bore the pain with joy. On another occasion she gave me proof of her interior mortification. I had received a most interesting letter which was read aloud at recreation, during her absence. In the evening she expressed the wish to read it, and I gave it to her. Later on, when she returned it, I begged her to tell me what she thought of one of the points of the letter which I knew ought to have charmed her. She seemed rather confused, and after a pause she answered: "God asked of me the sacrifice of this letter because of the eagerness I displayed the other day . . . so I have not read it." * * * * * * When speaking to her of the mortifications of the Saints, she remarked: "It was well that Our Lord warned us: 'In My Father's House there are many mansions, otherwise I would have told you.'[9] For, if every soul called to perfection were obliged to perform these austerities in order to enter Heaven, He would have told us, and we should have willingly undertaken them. But He has declared that, 'there are many mansions in His House.' If there are some for great souls, for the Fathers of the Desert and for Martyrs of penance, there must also be one for little children. And in that one a place is kept for us, if we but love Him dearly together with Our Father and the Spirit of Love." * * * * * * "While in the world, I used, on waking, to think of all the pleasant or unpleasant things which might happen throughout the day, and if I foresaw nothing but worries I got up with a heavy heart. Now it is quite the reverse. I think of the pains and of the sufferings awaiting me, and I rise, feeling all the more courageous and light of heart in proportion to the opportunities I foresee of proving my love for Our Lord, and of gaining--mother of souls as I am--my children's livelihood. Then I kiss my crucifix, and, laying it gently on my pillow, I leave it there while I dress, and I say: 'My Jesus, Thou hast toiled and wept enough during Thy three-and-thirty years on this miserable earth. Rest Thee, to-day! It is my turn to suffer and to fight.'" * * * * * * One washing-day I was sauntering towards the laundry, and looking at the flowers as I passed. Soeur Thérèse was following, and quickly overtook me: "Is that," she said quietly, "how people hurry themselves when they have children, and are obliged to work to procure them food?" * * * * * * "Do you know which are my Sundays and feast-days? They are the days on which God tries me the most." * * * * * * I was distressed at my want of courage, and Soeur Thérèse said to me: "You are complaining of what should be your greatest happiness. If you fought only when you felt eagerness, where would be your merit? What does it matter, even if you are devoid of courage, provided you act as though you possessed it? If you feel too lazy to pick up a bit of thread, and yet do so for love of Jesus, you acquire more merit than for a much nobler action done in a moment of fervour. Instead of grieving, be glad that, by allowing you to feel your own weakness, Our Lord is furnishing you with an opportunity of saving a greater number of souls." * * * * * * I asked her whether Our Lord were not displeased at the sight of my many failings. This was her answer: "Be comforted, for He Whom you have chosen as your Spouse has every imaginable perfection; but--dare I say it?--He has one great infirmity too--He is blind! And there is a science about which He knows nothing--addition! These two great defects, much to be deplored in an earthly bridegroom, do but make ours infinitely more lovable. Were it necessary that He should be clear-sighted, and familiar with the science of figures, do you not think that, confronted with our many sins, He would send us back to our nothingness? But His Love for us makes him actually blind. "If the greatest sinner on earth should repent at the moment of his death, and draw His last breath in an act of love, neither the many graces he had abused, nor the multiplied crimes he had committed, would stand in his way. Our Lord would see nothing, count nothing, but the sinner's last prayer, and without delay He would receive him into the arms of His Mercy. "But, to make Him thus blind and to prevent Him doing the smallest sum of addition, we must approach Him through His Heart--on that side He is vulnerable and defenceless." * * * * * * I had grieved her, and had gone to ask her pardon: "If you but knew what I feel!" she exclaimed. "Never have I more clearly understood the love with which Jesus receives us when we seek His forgiveness. If I, His poor little creature, feel so tenderly towards you when you come back to me, what must pass through Our Lord's Divine Heart when we return to Him? Far more quickly than I have just done will He blot out our sins from His memory. . . . Nay, He will even love us more tenderly than before we fell." * * * * * * I had an immense dread of the judgments of God, and no argument of Soeur Thérèse could remove it. One day I put to her the following objection: "It is often said to us that in God's sight the angels themselves are not pure. How, therefore, can you expect me to be otherwise than filled with fear?" She replied: "There is but one means of compelling God not to judge us, and it is--to appear before Him empty-handed." "And how can that be done?" "It is quite simple: lay nothing by, spend your treasures as you gain them. Were I to live to be eighty, I should always be poor, because I cannot economise. All my earnings are immediately spent on the ransom of souls. "Were I to await the hour of death to offer my trifling coins for valuation, Our Lord would not fail to discover in them some base metal, and they would certainly have to be refined in Purgatory. Is it not recorded of certain great Saints that, on appearing before the Tribunal of God, their hands laden with merit, they have yet been sent to that place of expiation, because in God's Eyes all our justice is unclean?" "But," I replied, "if God does not judge our good actions, He will judge our bad ones." "Do not say that! Our Lord is Justice itself, and if He does not judge our good actions, neither will He judge our bad ones. It seems to me, that for Victims of Love there will be no judgment. God will rather hasten to reward with eternal delights His own Love which He will behold burning in their hearts." "To enjoy such a privilege, would it suffice to repeat that Act of Oblation which you have composed?" "Oh, no! words do not suffice. To be a true Victim of Love we must surrender ourselves entirely. . . . _Love will consume us only in the measure of our self-surrender."_ * * * * * * I was grieving bitterly over a fault I had committed. "Take your Crucifix," she said, "and kiss it." I kissed the Feet. "Is that how a child kisses its father? Throw your arms at once round His Neck and kiss His Face." When I had done so, she continued: "That is not sufficient--He must return your caress." I had to press the Crucifix to both my cheeks, whereupon she added: "Now, all is forgiven." * * * * * * I told her one day that if I must be reproached I preferred deserving it to being unjustly accused. "For my part," she replied, "I prefer to be charged unjustly, because, having nothing to reproach myself with, I offer gladly this little injustice to God. Then, humbling myself, I think how easily I might have deserved the reproach. The more you advance, the fewer the combats; or rather, the more easy the victory, because the good side of things will be more visible. Then your soul will soar above creatures. As for me, I feel utterly indifferent to all accusations because I have learned the hollowness of human judgment." She added further: "When misunderstood and judged unfavourably, what benefit do we derive from defending ourselves? Leave things as they are, and say nothing. It is so sweet to allow ourselves to be judged anyhow, rightly or wrongly. "It is not written in the Gospel that Saint Mary Magdalen put forth excuses when charged by her sister with sitting idle at Our Lord's Feet. She did not say: 'Martha, if you knew the happiness that is mine and if you heard the words that I hear, you too would leave everything to share my joy and my repose.' No, she preferred to keep silent. . . . Blessed silence which giveth such peace to the soul!" * * * * * * At a moment of temptation and struggle I received this note: "'The just man shall correct me in mercy and shall reprove me; but let not the oil of the sinner perfume my head.'[10] It is only by the just that I can be either reproved or corrected, because all my Sisters are pleasing to God. It is less bitter to be rebuked by a sinner than by a just man; but through compassion for sinners, to obtain their conversion, I beseech Thee, O my God, to permit that I may be well rebuked by those just souls who surround me. I ask also that the _oil of praise,_ so sweet to our nature, _may not perfume my head,_ that is to say, my mind, by making me believe that I possess virtues when I have merely performed a few good actions. "Jesus! 'Thy Name is as oil poured out,'[11] and it is into this divine perfume that I desire wholly to plunge myself, far from the gaze of mankind." * * * * * * "It is not playing the game to argue with a Sister that she is in the wrong, even when it is true, because we are not answerable for her conduct. We must not be _Justices of the peace,_ but _Angels of peace_ only." * * * * * * "You give yourselves up too much to what you are doing," she used to say to us; "you worry about the future as though it were in your hands. Are you much concerned at this moment as to what is happening in other Carmelite convents, and whether the nuns there are busy or otherwise? Does their work prevent you praying or meditating? Well, just in the same way, you ought to detach yourselves from your own personal labours, conscientiously spending on them the time prescribed, but with perfect freedom of heart. We read that the Israelites, while building the walls of Jerusalem, worked with one hand and held a sword in the other.[12] This is an image of what we should do: avoid being wholly absorbed in our work." * * * * * * "One Sunday," Thérèse relates, "I was going toward the chestnut avenue, full of rejoicing, for it was spring-time, and I wanted to enjoy nature's beauties. What a bitter disappointment! My dear chestnuts had been pruned, and the branches, already covered with buds, now lay on the ground. On seeing this havoc, and thinking that three years must elapse before it could be repaired, my heart felt very sore. But the grief did not last long. 'If I were in another convent,' I reflected, 'what would it matter to me if the chestnut-trees of the Carmel at Lisieux were entirely cut down?' I will not worry about things that pass. God shall be my all. I will take my walks in the wooded groves of His Love, whereon none dare lay hands." * * * * * * A novice asked her Sisters to help her shake some blankets. As they were somewhat liable to tear because of their worn condition, she insisted, rather sharply, on their being handled with care. "What would you do," said Thérèse to the impatient one, "if it were not your duty to mend these blankets? There would be no thought of self in the matter, and if you did call attention to the fact that they are easily torn, it would be done in quite an impersonal way. In all your actions, you should avoid the least trace of self-seeking." * * * * * * Seeing one of our Sisters very much fatigued, I said to Soeur Thérèse: "It grieves me to see people suffer, especially those who are holy." She instantly replied: "I do not feel as you do. Saints who suffer never excite my pity. I know they have strength to bear their sufferings, and that through them they are giving great glory to God. But I compassionate greatly those who are not Saints, and who do not know how to profit by suffering. They indeed awake my pity. I would strain every nerve to help and comfort them." * * * * * * "Were I to live longer, it is the office of Infirmarian that would most please me. I would not ask for it, but were it imposed through obedience, I should consider myself highly favoured. I think I should fulfill its duties with much affection, always mindful of Our Lord's words: 'I was sick, and you visited Me.'[13] The infirmary bell should be for you as heavenly music, and you ought purposely to pass by the windows of the sick that it might be easy for them to summon you. Consider yourself as a little slave whom everyone has the right to command. Could you but see the Angels who from the heights of Heaven watch your combats in the arena! They are awaiting the end of the fight to crown you and cover you with flowers. You know that we claim to rank as _little Martyrs_ . . . . but we must win our palms. "God does not despise these hidden struggles with ourselves, so much richer in merit because they are unseen: 'The patient man is better than the valiant, and he that ruleth his spirit than he that taketh cities.'[14] Through our little acts of charity, practised in the dark, as it were, we obtain the conversion of the heathen, help the missionaries, and gain for them plentiful alms, thus building both spiritual and material dwellings for Our Eucharistic God." * * * * * * I had seen Mother Prioress showing, as I thought, more confidence and affection to one of our Sisters than she extended to me. Expecting to win sympathy, I told my trouble to Soeur Thérèse, and great was my surprise when she put me the question: "Do you think you love our Mother very much?" "Certainly! otherwise I should be indifferent if others were preferred to me." "Well, I shall prove that you are absolutely mistaken, and that it is not our Mother that you love, but yourself. When we really love others, we rejoice at their happiness, and we make every sacrifice to procure it. Therefore if you had this true, disinterested affection, and loved our Mother for her own sake, you would be glad to see her find pleasure even at your expense; and since you think she has less satisfaction in talking with you than with another Sister, you ought not to grieve at being apparently neglected." * * * * * * I was distressed at my many distractions during prayers: "I also have many," she said, "but as soon as I am aware of them, I pray for those people the thought of whom is diverting my attention, and in this way they reap benefit from my distractions. . . . I accept all for the love of God, even the wildest fancies that cross my mind." * * * * * * I was regretting a pin which I had been asked for, and which I had found most useful. "How rich you are," said Thérèse, "you will never be happy!" * * * * * * The grotto of the Holy Child was in her charge, and, knowing that one of our Mothers greatly disliked perfumes, she never put any sweet-smelling flowers there, not even a tiny violet. This cost her many a real sacrifice. One day, just as she had placed a beautiful artificial rose at the foot of the statue, the Mother called her. Soeur Thérèse, surmising that it was to bid her remove the rose, was anxious to spare her any humiliation. She therefore took the flower to the good Sister, and, forestalling all observations, said: "Look, Mother, how well nature is imitated nowadays: would you not think this rose had been freshly gathered from the garden?" * * * * * * "There are moments," she told us, "when we are so miserable within, that there is nothing for it but to get away from ourselves. At those times God does not oblige us to remain at home. He even permits our own company to become distasteful to us in order that we may leave it. Now I know no other means of exit save through the doorway of charitable works, on a visit to Jesus and Mary." * * * * * * "When I picture the Holy Family, the thought that does me most good is--the simplicity of their home-life. Our Lady and St. Joseph were well aware that Jesus was God, while at the same time great wonders were hidden from them, and--like us--they lived by faith. You have heard those words of the Gospel: 'They understood not the word that He spoke unto them';[15] and those others no less mysterious: 'His Father and Mother were wondering at those things which were spoken concerning Him.'[16] They seemed to be learning something new, for this word 'wondering' implies a certain amount of surprise." * * * * * * "There is a verse in the Divine Office which I recite each day with reluctance: 'I have inclined my heart to do Thy justifications for ever, because of the reward.'[17] I hasten to add in my heart: 'My Jesus, Thou knowest I do not serve Thee for sake of reward, but solely out of love, and a desire to win Thee souls." * * * * * * "In Heaven only shall we be in possession of the clear truth. On earth, even in matters of Holy Scripture, our vision is dim. It distresses me to see the differences in its translations, and had I been a Priest I would have learned Hebrew, so as to read the Word of God as He deigned to utter it in human speech." * * * * * * Soeur Thérèse often spoke to me of a well-known toy with which she had amused herself when a child. This was the kaleidoscope, shaped like a small telescope, through which, as it is made to revolve, one perceives an endless variety of pretty-coloured figures. "This toy," she said, "excited my admiration, and I wondered what could provide so charming a phenomenon, when one day, after a lengthy examination, I found that it consisted simply of tiny bits of paper and cloth scattered inside. A further examination revealed that there were three mirrors inside the tube, and the problem was solved. It became for me the illustration of a great truth. "So long as our actions, even the most trivial, remain within Love's kaleidoscope, so long the Blessed Trinity, figured by the three mirrors, imparts to them a wonderful brightness and beauty. The eye-piece is Jesus Christ, and He, looking from outside through Himself into the kaleidoscope, finds perfect all our works. But, should we leave that ineffable abode of Love, He would see but the rags and chaff of unclean and worthless deeds." * * * * * * I told Soeur Thérèse of the strange phenomena produced by magnetism on persons who surrender their will to the hypnotiser. It seemed to interest her greatly, and next day she said to me: "Your conversation yesterday did me so much good! How I long to be hypnotised by Our Lord! It was my waking thought, and verily it was sweet to surrender Him my will. I want Him to take possession of my faculties in such wise that my acts may no more be mine, or human, but Divine--inspired and guided by the Spirit of Love." * * * * * * Before my profession I received through my saintly Novice-mistress a very special grace. We had been washing all day. I was worn-out with fatigue and harassed with spiritual worries. That night, before meditation, I wanted to speak to her, but she dismissed me with the remark: "That is the bell for meditation, and I have not time to console you; besides, I see plainly that it would be useless trouble. For the present, God wishes you to suffer alone." I followed her to meditation so discouraged that, for the first time, I doubted of my vocation. I should never be able to be a Carmelite. The life was too hard. I had been kneeling for some minutes, when all at once, in the midst of this interior struggle--without having asked or even wished for peace--I felt a sudden and extraordinary change of soul. I no longer knew myself. My vocation appeared to me both lovely and lovable. I saw the sweetness and priceless value of suffering. All the privations and fatigues of the religious life appeared to me infinitely preferable to worldly pleasures, and I came away from my meditation completely transformed. Next day I told my Mistress what had taken place, and, seeing she was deeply touched, I begged to know the reason. "God is good," she exclaimed. "Last evening you inspired me with such profound pity that I prayed incessantly for you at the beginning of meditation. I besought Our Lord to bring you comfort, to change your dispositions, and show you the value of suffering. He has indeed heard my prayers." * * * * * * Being somewhat of a child in my ways, the Holy Child--to help me in the practice of virtue--inspired me with the thought of amusing myself with Him, and I chose the game of _ninepins._ I imagined them of all sizes and colours, representing the souls I wished to reach. The ball was--_love._ In December, 1896, the novices received, for the benefit of the Foreign Missions, various trifles towards a Christmas tree, and at the bottom of the box containing them was a _top_--a rare thing in a Carmelite convent. My companions remarked: "What an ugly thing!--of what use will it be?" But I, who knew the game, caught hold of it, exclaiming: "Nay, what fun! it will spin a whole day without stopping if it be well whipped"; and thereupon I spun it around to their great surprise. Soeur Thérèse was quietly watching us, and on Christmas night, after midnight Mass, I found in our cell the famous top, with a delightful letter addressed as follows: _To My Beloved Little Spouse_ _Player of Ninepins on the Mountain of Carmel_ _Christmas Night, 1896._ MY BELOVED LITTLE SPOUSE,--I am well pleased with thee! All the year round thou hast amused Me by playing at _ninepins._ I was so overjoyed that the whole court of Angels was surprised and charmed. Several little cherubs have asked me why I did not make them children. Others wanted to know if the melody of their instruments were not more pleasing to me than thy joyous laugh when a ninepin fell at the stroke of thy love-ball. My answer to them was, that they must not regret they are not children, since one day they would play with thee in the meadows of Heaven. I told them also that thy smiles were certainly more sweet to Me than their harmonies, because these smiles were purchased by suffering and forgetfulness of self. And now, my cherished Spouse, it is my turn to ask something of thee. Thou wilt not refuse Me--thou lovest Me too much. Let us change the game. Ninepins amuse me greatly, but at present I should like to play at spinning a top, and, if thou dost consent, thou shalt be the top. I give thee one as a model. Thou seest that it is ugly to look at, and would be kicked aside by whosoever did not know the game. But at the sight of it a child would leap for joy and shout: "What fun! it will spin a whole day without stopping!" Although thou too art not attractive, I--the little Jesus--love thee, and beg of thee to keep always spinning to amuse Me. True, it needs a whip to make a top spin. Then let thy Sisters supply the whip, and be thou most grateful to those who shall make thee turn fastest. When I shall have had plenty of fun, I will bring thee to join Me here, and our games shall be full of unalloyed delight.--Thy little Brother, JESUS. * * * * * * I had the habit of constantly crying about the merest trifles, and this was a source of great pain to Soeur Thérèse. One day a bright idea occurred to her: taking a mussel-shell from her painting table, and, holding my hands lest I should prevent her, she gathered my tears in the shell, and soon they were turned into merry laughter. "There," she said, "from this onwards I permit you to cry as much as you like on condition that it is into the shell!" A week, however, before her death I spent a whole evening in tears at the thought of her fast-approaching end. She knew it, and said: "You have been crying. Was it into the shell?" I was unable to tell an untruth, and my answer grieved her. "I am going to die," she continued, "and I shall not be at rest about you unless you promise to follow faithfully my advice. I consider it of the utmost importance for the good of your soul." I promised what she asked, begging leave, however, as a favour, to be allowed to cry at her death. "But," she answered, "why cry at my death? Those tears will certainly be useless. You will be bewailing my happiness! Still I have pity on your weakness, and for the first few days you have leave to cry, though afterwards you must again take up the shell." It has cost me some heroic efforts, but I have been faithful. I have kept the shell at hand, and each time the wish to cry overcame me, I laid hold of the pitiless thing. However urgent the tears, the trouble of passing it from one eye to the other so distracted my thoughts, that before very long this ingenious method entirely cured me of my sensibility. * * * * * * Owing to a fault which had caused Soeur Thérèse much pain, but of which I had deeply repented, I intended to deprive myself of Holy Communion. I wrote to her of my resolution, and this was her reply: "Little flower, most dear to Jesus, by this humiliation your roots are feeding upon the earth. You must now open wide your petals, or rather lift high your head, so that the Manna of the Angels may, like a divine dew, come down to strengthen you and supply all your wants. Good-night, poor little flower! Ask of Jesus that all the prayers offered for my cure may serve to increase the fire which ought to consume me." * * * * * * "At the moment of Communion I sometimes liken my soul to that of a little child of three or four, whose hair has been ruffled and clothes soiled at play. This is a picture of what befalls me in my struggling with souls. But Our Blessed Lady comes promptly to the rescue, takes off _my soiled pinafore,_ and arranges my hair, adorning it with a pretty ribbon or a simple flower. . . . Then I am quite nice, and able, without any shame, to seat myself at the Banquet of Angels." * * * * * * In the infirmary we scarcely waited for the end of her thanksgiving before seeking her advice. At first, this somewhat distressed her, and she would make gentle reproaches, but soon she yielded to us, saying: "I must not wish for more rest than Our Lord. When He withdrew into the desert after preaching, the crowds would come and intrude upon His solitude. Come, then, to me as much as you like; I must die sword in hand--'the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God.'"[18] * * * * * * "Advise us," we said to her, "how to profit by our spiritual instructions." "Go for guidance with great simplicity, not counting too much on help which may fail you at any moment. You would then have to say with the Spouse in the Canticles: 'The keepers took away my cloak and wounded me; when I had a little passed by them, I found Him whom my soul loveth.'[19] If you ask with humility and with detachment after your Beloved, the _keepers_ will tell you. More often, you will find Jesus only when you have passed by all creatures. Many times have I repeated this verse of the Spiritual Canticle of St. John of the Cross: 'Messengers, I pray, no more Between us send, who know not how To tell me what my spirit longs to know. For they Thy charms who read--For ever telling of a thousand more--Make all my wounds to bleed, While deeper then before Doth an--I know not what!--my spirit grieve With stammerings vague, and of all life bereave.'" * * * * * * "If, supposing the impossible, God Himself could not see my good actions, I would not be troubled. I love Him so much I would like to give Him joy without His knowing who gave. When He sees the gift being made, He is, as it were, obliged to make a return. . . . I should wish to spare Him the trouble." * * * * * * "Had I been rich, I could never have seen a poor person hungry without giving him to eat. This is my way also in the spiritual life. There are many souls on the brink of hell, and as my earnings come to hand they are scattered among these sinners. The time has never yet been when I could say: 'Now I am going to work for myself.'" * * * * * * "There are people who make the worst of everything. As for me, I do just the contrary. I always see the good side of things, and even if my portion be suffering, without a glimmer of solace, well, I make it my joy." * * * * * * "Whatever has come from God's Hands has always pleased me, even those things which have seemed to me less good and less beautiful than the gifts made to others." * * * * * * "When staying with my aunt, while I was still a little girl, I was given a certain book to read. In one of the stories great praise was bestowed on a schoolmistress who by her tact escaped from every difficulty without hurting anyone's feelings. Her method of saying to one person: 'You are right,' and to another: 'You are not wrong,' struck me particularly, and as I read I reflected that I would not have acted in that way because we should always tell the truth. And this I always do, though I grant it is much more difficult. It would be far less trouble for us, when told of a worry, to cast the blame on the absent. Less trouble . . . nevertheless I do just the contrary, and if I am disliked it cannot be helped. Let the novices not come to me if they do not want to learn the truth." * * * * * * "Before a reproof[20] bear fruit it must cost something and be free from the least trace of passion. Kindness must not degenerate into weakness. When we have had good reason for finding fault, we must leave it, and not allow ourselves to worry over having given pain. To seek out the delinquent for the purpose of consoling her, is to do more harm than good. Left alone, she is compelled to look beyond creatures, and to turn to God; she is forced to see her faults and to humble herself. Otherwise she would become accustomed to expect consolation after a merited rebuke, and would act like a spoilt child who stamps and screams, knowing well that by this means its mother will be forced to return and dry its tears." * * * * * * "'Let the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God, be ever in your mouth and in your hearts.'[21] If we find any one particular person disagreeable we should never be disheartened, much less cease our endeavour to reform that soul. We should wield _the sword of the Spirit,_ and so correct her faults. Things should never be allowed to pass for the sake of our own ease. We must carry on the war even when there is no hope of victory. Success matters nothing, and we must fight on and never complain: 'I shall gain nothing from that soul, she does not understand, there is nothing for it but to abandon her.' That would be the act of a coward. We must do our duty to the very end." * * * * * * "Formerly, if any of my friends were in trouble, and I did not succeed in consoling them when they came to see me, I left the parlour quite heart-broken. Soon, however, Our Lord made me understand how incapable I was of bringing comfort to a soul, and from that day I no longer grieved when my visitors went away downcast. I confided to God the sufferings of those so dear to me, and I felt sure that He heard my prayer. At their next visit I learned that I was not mistaken. After this experience, I no longer worry when I have involuntarily given pain. . . . I simply ask Our Lord to make amends." * * * * * * "What do you think of all the graces that have been heaped upon you?"--"I think 'the Spirit of God breatheth where He will.'"[22] * * * * * * "Mother," she one day said to the Prioress, "were I unfaithful, were I to commit even the smallest infidelity, I feel that my soul would be plunged into the most terrible anguish, and I should be unable to welcome death." Mother Prioress evinced surprise at hearing her speak in this strain, and she continued: "I am speaking of infidelity in the matter of pride. If, for example, I were to say: 'I have acquired such or such a virtue and I can practise it'; or again: 'My God, Thou knowest I love Thee too much to dwell on one single thought against faith,' straightway I should be assailed by the most dangerous temptations and should certainly yield. To prevent this misfortune I have but to say humbly and from my heart: 'My God, I beseech Thee not to let me be unfaithful.' "I understand clearly how St. Peter fell. He placed too much reliance on his own ardent nature, instead of leaning solely on the Divine strength. Had he only said: 'Lord, give me strength to follow Thee unto death!' the grace would not have been refused him. "How is it, Mother, that Our Lord, knowing what was about to happen, did not say to him: 'Ask of Me the strength to do what is in thy mind?' I think His purpose was to give us a twofold lesson--first: that He taught His Apostles nothing by His presence which He does not teach us through the inspirations of grace; and secondly: that, having made choice of St. Peter to govern the whole Church, wherein there are many sinners, He wished him to test in himself what man can do without God's help. This is why Jesus said to him before his fall: 'Thou being once converted confirm thy brethren';[23] that is, 'Tell them the story of thy sin--show them by thy own experience, how necessary it is for salvation to rely solely upon Me.'" * * * * * * I was much afflicted at seeing her ill, and I often exclaimed: "Life is so dreary!" "Life is not dreary"--she would immediately say; "on the contrary, it is most gay. Now if you said: 'Exile is dreary,' I could understand. It is a mistake to call 'life' that which must have an end. Such a word should be only used of the joys of Heaven--joys that are unfading--and in this true meaning life is not sad but gay--most gay. . . ." Her own gaiety was a thing of delight. For several days she had been much better, and we were saying to her: "We do not yet know of what disease you will die. . . ." "But," she answered, "I shall die of death! Did not God tell Adam of what he would die when He said to him: 'Thou shalt die of death'?"[24] "Then death will come to fetch you?"--"No, not death, but the Good God. Death is not, as pictures tell us, a phantom, a horrid spectre. The Catechism says that it is the separation of soul and body--no more! Well, I do not fear a separation which will unite me for ever to God." "Will the _Divine Thief,"_ some one asked, "soon come to steal His little bunch of grapes?" "I see Him in the distance, and I take good care not to cry out: 'Stop thief!' Rather, I call to Him: 'This way, this way!'" * * * * * * Asked under what name we should pray to her in Heaven, she answered humbly: "Call me _Little Thérèse."_ * * * * * * I was telling her that the most beautiful angels, all robed in white, would bear her soul to Heaven: "Fancies like those," she answered, "do not help me, and my soul can only feed upon truth. God and His Angels are pure spirits. No human eye can see them as they really are. That is why I have never asked extraordinary favours. I prefer to await the Eternal Vision." "To console me at your death I have asked God to send me a beautiful dream."--"That is a thing I would never do . . . ask for consolations. Since you wish to resemble me, you know what are my ideas on this: 'Fear not, O Lord, that I shall waken Thee: I shall await in peace the Heavenly Shore.' "It is so sweet to serve God in the dark night and in the midst of trial. After all, we have but this life in which to live by faith." * * * * * * "I am happy at the thought of going to Heaven, but when I reflect on these words of Our Lord: 'I come quickly, and My reward is with Me, to render to every man according to his works,'[25] I think that He will find my case a puzzle: I have no works. . . . Well, He will render unto me _according to His own works!"_ * * * * * * "The chief plenary indulgence, which is within reach of everybody, and can be gained without the ordinary conditions, is that of charity--which 'covereth a multitude of sins.'"[26] * * * * * * "Surely you will not even pass through Purgatory. If such a thing should happen, then certainly nobody goes straight to Heaven."--"That gives me little thought. I shall be quite content with the Merciful God's decision. Should I go to Purgatory, I shall--like the three Hebrew children in the furnace--walk amid the flames singing the Canticle of Love." * * * * * * "In Heaven you will be placed among the Seraphim." "If so, I shall not imitate them. At the sight of God _they cover themselves with their wings_[27]: I shall take good care not to hide myself with mine." * * * * * * I showed her a picture which represented Joan of Arc being comforted in prison by her Voices, and she remarked: "I also am comforted by an interior voice. From above, the Saints encourage me, saying: 'So long as thou art a captive in chains, thou canst not fulfill thy mission, but later on, after thy death, will come thy day of triumph.'" * * * * * * "In Heaven, God will do all I desire, because on earth I have never done my own will." * * * * * * "You will look down upon us from Heaven, will you not?"--"No, I will come down." * * * * * * Some months before the death of Soeur Thérèse, _The Life of St. Aloysius_ was being read in the refectory, and one of the Mothers was struck by the mutual and tender affection which existed between the young Saint and the aged Jesuit, Father Corbinelli. "You are little Aloysius," she said to Thérèse, "and I am old Father Corbinelli--be mindful of me when you enter Heaven." "Would you like me to fetch you thither soon, dear Mother?" "No, I have not yet suffered enough." "Nay, Mother, I tell you that you have suffered quite enough." To which Mother Hermance replied: "I dare not say Yes. . . . In so grave a matter I must have the sanction of authority." So the request was made to Mother Prioress, who, without attaching much importance to it, gave her sanction. Now, on one of the last days of her life, Soeur Thérèse, scarcely able to speak owing to her great weakness, received through the infirmarian a bouquet of flowers. It had been gathered by Mother Hermance, and was accompanied by an entreaty for one word of affection. The message: "Tell Mother Hermance of the Heart of Jesus that during Mass this morning I saw Father Corbinelli's grave close to that of little Aloysius." "That is well," replied the good Mother, greatly touched; "tell Soeur Thérèse that I have understood. . . ." And from that moment she felt convinced her death was near. It took place just one year later, and, according to the prediction of the "Little Aloysius," the two graves lie side by side. * * * * * * The last words penned by the hand of Soeur Thérèse were: "O Mary, were I Queen of Heaven, and wert thou Thérèse, I should wish to be Thérèse, that I might see thee Queen of Heaven!" _____________________________ [1] Cf. Matt. 20:23. [2] Cf. Ps. 67[68]:28. [3] Cf. Prov. 1:4. [4] Judith 15:11. [5] Ecclus. 11:12, 13, 22, 23, 24. [6] Jer. 10:23. [7] Cf. Psalm 93[94]:18. [8] _Imit.,_ I, xvi. 4. [9] John 14:2. [10] Cf. Psalm 111[112]:5. [11] Cant. 1:2. [12] Cf. 2 Esdras 4:17. [13] Matt. 25:36. [14] Prov. 16:32. [15] Luke 2:50. [16] Luke 2:33. [17] Ps. 118[119]:112. [18] Ephes. 6:17. [19] Cf. Cant. 5:7, 3:4. [20] In this and the following "counsel" it should be remembered that it is a Novice-Mistress who is speaking. [Ed.] [21] Cf. Ephes. 6:17; Isaias 61:21. [22] Cf. John 3:8. [23] Luke 22:32. [24] Cf. Gen. 2:17. A play on the French: _Tu mourras de mort._ [Ed.] [25] Apoc. 22:12. [26] Prov. 10:12. [27] Cf. Isaias 6:2. _____________________________ LETTERS OF SOEUR THÉRÈSE THE LITTLE FLOWER OF JESUS _____________________________ LETTERS OF SOEUR THÉRÈSE TO HER SISTER CÉLINE I J.M.J.T. May 8, 1888. DEAREST CÉLINE,--There are moments when I wonder whether I am really and truly in the Carmel; sometimes I can scarcely believe it. What have I done for God that He should shower so many graces upon me? A whole month has passed since we parted; but why do I say parted? Even were the wide ocean between us, our souls would remain as one. And yet I know that not to have me is real suffering, and if I listened to myself I should ask Jesus to let me bear the sadness in your stead! I do not listen, as you see; I should be afraid of being selfish in wishing for myself the better part--I mean the suffering. You are right--life is often burdensome and bitter. It is painful to begin a day of toil, especially when Jesus hides Himself from our love. What is this sweet Friend about? Does He not see our anguish and the burden that weighs us down? Why does He not come and comfort us? Be not afraid. . . . He is here at hand. He is watching, and it is He who begs from us this pain, these tears. . . . He needs them for souls, for our souls, and He longs to give us a magnificent reward. I assure you that it costs Him dear to fill us with bitterness, but He knows that it is the only means of preparing us to know Him as He knows Himself, and to become ourselves Divine! Our soul is indeed great and our destiny glorious. Let us lift ourselves above all things that pass, and hold ourselves far from the earth! Up above, the air is so pure. . . . Jesus may hide Himself, but we know that He is there. II October 20, 1888. MY DEAREST SISTER,--Do not let your weakness make you unhappy. When, in the morning, we feel no courage or strength for the practice of virtue, it is really a grace: it is the time to "lay the axe to the root of the tree,"[1] relying upon Jesus alone. If we fall, an act of love will set all right, and Jesus smiles. He helps us without seeming to do so; and the tears which sinners cause Him to shed are wiped away by our poor weak love. Love can do all things. The most impossible tasks seem to it easy and sweet. You know well that Our Lord does not look so much at the greatness of our actions, nor even at their difficulty, as at the love with which we do them. What, then, have we to fear? You wish to become a Saint, and you ask me if this is not attempting too much. Céline, I will not tell you to aim at the seraphic holiness of the most privileged souls, but rather to be "perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect."[2] You see that your dream--that our dreams and our desires--are not fancies, since Jesus Himself has laid their realisation upon us as a commandment. III January, 1889. MY DEAR LITTLE CÉLINE,--Jesus offers you the cross, a very heavy cross, and you are afraid of not being able to carry it without giving way. Why? Our Beloved Himself fell three times on the way to Calvary, and why should we not imitate our Spouse? What a favour from Jesus, and how He must love us to send us so great a sorrow! Eternity itself will not be long enough to bless Him for it. He heaps his favours upon us as upon the greatest Saints. What, then, are His loving designs for our souls? That is a secret which will only be revealed to us in our Heavenly Home, on the day when "the Lord shall wipe away all our tears."[3] Now we have nothing more to hope for on earth--"the cool evenings are passed"[4]--for us suffering alone remains! Ours is an enviable lot, and the Seraphim in Heaven are jealous of our happiness. The other day I came across this striking passage: "To be resigned and to be united to the will of God are not the same; there is the same difference between them as that which exists between union and unity; in union there are still two, in unity there is but one."[5] Yes, let us be one with God even in this life; and for this we should be more than resigned, we should embrace the Cross with joy. IV February 28, 1889. MY DEAR LITTLE SISTER,--Jesus is "a Spouse of blood."[6] He wishes for Himself all the blood of our hearts. You are right--it costs us dear to give Him what He asks. But what a joy that it does cost! It is happiness to bear our crosses, and to feel our weakness in doing so. Céline, far from complaining to Our Lord of this cross which He sends us, I cannot fathom the Infinite Love which had led Him to treat us in this way. Our dear Father must indeed be loved by God to have so much suffering given to him. I know that by humiliation alone can Saints be made, and I also know that our trial is a mine of gold for us to turn to account. I, who am but a little grain of sand, wish to set to work, though I have neither courage nor strength. Now this very want of power will make my task easier, for I wish to work for love. Our martyrdom is beginning . . . Let us go forth to suffer together, dear sister, and let us offer our sufferings to Jesus for the salvation of souls. V March 12, 1899. . . . I must forget this world. Here everything wearies me--I find only one joy, that of suffering, and this joy, which is not one of sense, is above all joy. Life is passing, and eternity is drawing near. Soon we shall live the very life of God. After we have been filled at the source of all bitterness, our thirst will be quenched at the very Fountain of all sweetness. "The figure of this world passeth away"[7]--soon we shall see new skies--a more radiant sun will light with its splendour crystal seas and infinite horizons. We shall no longer be prisoners in a land of exile, all will have passed away, and with our Heavenly Spouse we shall sail upon boundless seas. Now, "our harps are hanging on the willows which grow by the rivers of Babylon,"[8] but in the day of our deliverance what harmonies will they not give forth, how joyfully shall we make all their strings vibrate! Now, "we shed tears as we remember Sion, for how can we sing the songs of the Lord in a land of exile?"[9] The burden of our song is suffering. Jesus offers us a chalice of great bitterness. Let us not withdraw our lips from it, but suffer in peace. He who says _peace_ does not say _joy,_ or at least sensible joy: to suffer in peace it is enough to will heartily all that Our Lord wills. Do not think we can find love without suffering, for our nature remains and must be taken into account; but it puts great treasures within our reach. Suffering is indeed our very livelihood, and is so precious that Jesus came down upon earth on purpose to possess it. We should like to suffer generously and nobly; we should like never to fall. What an illusion! What does it matter to me if I fall at every moment! In that way I realise my weakness, and I gain thereby. My God, Thou seest how little I am good for, when Thou dost carry me in Thy Arms; and if Thou leavest me alone, well, it is because it pleases Thee to see me lie on the ground. Then why should I be troubled? If you are willing to bear in peace the trial of not being pleased with yourself, you will be offering the Divine Master a home in your heart. It is true that you will suffer, because you will be like a stranger to your own house; but do not be afraid--the poorer you are, the more Jesus will love you. I know that He is better pleased to see you stumbling in the night upon a stony road, than walking in the full light of day upon a path carpeted with flowers, because these flowers might hinder your advance. VI July 14, 1889. MY DARLING SISTER,--I am ever with you in spirit. Yes, it is very hard to live upon this earth, but to-morrow, in a brief hour, we shall be at rest. O my God, what shall we then see? What is this life which will have no end? Our Lord will be the soul of our soul. O unsearchable mystery! "Eye hath not seen nor ear heard, neither hath it entered into the heart of man what things God hath prepared for them that love Him."[10] And all this will come soon--very soon--if we love Jesus ardently. It seems to me that God has no need of years to perfect His labour of love in a soul. One ray from His Heart can in an instant make His flower blossom forth, never to fade. . . . Céline, during the fleeting moments that remain to us, let us save souls! I feel that Our Spouse asks us for souls--above all, for the souls of Priests. . . . It is He Who bids me tell you this. There is but one thing to be done here below: to love Jesus, and to save souls for Him that He may be more loved. We must not let slip the smallest opportunity of giving Him joy. We must refuse Him nothing. He is in such need of love. We are His chosen lilies. He dwells as a King in our midst--He lets us share the honours of His Royalty--His Divine Blood bedews our petals--and His Thorns as they wound us spread abroad the perfume of our love. VII October 22, 1889. MY DEAREST CÉLINE,--I send you a picture of the Holy Face. The contemplation of this Divine subject seems to me to belong in a special way to my little sister, truly the sister of my soul. May she be another Veronica, and wipe away all the Blood and Tears of Jesus, her only Love! May she give Him souls! May she force her way through the soldiers--that is, the world--to come close to His side. . . . Happy will she be when she sees in Heaven the value of that mysterious draught with which she quenched the thirst of her Heavenly Spouse; when she sees His Lips, once parched with burning thirst, speaking to her the one eternal word--love, and the thanks which shall have no end. . . . Good-bye, dear little Veronica;[11] to-morrow, no doubt, your Beloved will ask some new sacrifice, a fresh relief for His thirst . . . but "let us go and die with Him!" VIII July 18, 1890. MY DEAR LITTLE SISTER,--I send you a passage from Isaias which will comfort you. Long ago the Prophet's soul was filled with the thought of the hidden beauties of the Divine Face, as our souls are now. Many a century has passed since then. It makes me wonder what is Time. Time is but a mirage, a dream. Already God sees us in glory, and rejoices in our everlasting bliss. How much good I derive from this thought! I understand now why He allows us to suffer. Since Our Beloved has "trodden the wine-press alone,"[12] the wine-press from which He gives us to drink--on our side let us not refuse to be clothed in blood-stained garments, or to tread out for Jesus a new wine which may quench His thirst! When "He looks around Him," He will not be able to say now that "He is alone"[13]--we shall be there to help Him. "His look as it were hidden."[14] Alas! it is so even to this day, and no one understands His Tears. "Open to Me, My Sister, My Spouse," he says to us, "for My Head is full of dew and My Locks of the drops of the night."[15] Thus Jesus complains to our souls when He is deserted and forgotten . . . _To be forgotten._ It is this, I think, which gives Him most pain. And our dear Father!--it is heartrending, but how can we repine since Our Lord Himself was looked upon "as one struck by God and afflicted"?[16] In this great sorrow we should forget ourselves, and pray for Priests--our lives must be entirely devoted to them. Our Divine Master makes me feel more and more that this is what He asks of you and me. IX September 23, 1890. O Céline, how can I tell you all that is happening within me? What a wound I have received! And yet I feel it is inflicted by a loving Hand, by a Hand divinely jealous. All was ready for my espousals;[17] but do you not think that something was still wanting to the feast? It is true, Jesus had already enriched me with many jewels, but no doubt there was one of incomparable beauty still missing; this priceless diamond He has given me to-day . . . Papa will not be here to-morrow! Céline, I confess that I have cried bitterly. . . . I am still crying so that I can scarcely hold my pen. You know how intensely I longed to see our dearest Father again; but now I feel that it is God's Will that he should not be at my feast. God has allowed it simply to try our love. Jesus wishes me to be an orphan . . . to be alone, with Him alone, so that He may unite Himself more closely to me. He wishes, too, to give me back in Heaven this joy so lawfully desired, but which He has denied me here on earth. To-day's trial is one of those sorrows that are difficult to understand: a joy was set before us, one most natural and easy of attainment. We stretched forth our hands . . . and the coveted joy was withdrawn. But it is not the hand of man which has done this thing--it is God's work. Céline, understand your Thérèse, and let us accept cheerfully the thorn which is offered us. To-morrow's feast will be one of tears, but I feel that Jesus will be greatly consoled. . . . X October 14, 1890. MY DARLING SISTER,--I know quite well all you are suffering. I know your anguish, and I share it. Oh! If I could but impart to you the peace which Jesus has put into my soul amid my most bitter tears. Be comforted--all passes away. Our life of yesterday is spent; death too will come and go, and then we shall rejoice in life, true life, for countless ages, for evermore. Meanwhile let us make of our heart a garden of delights where Our sweet Saviour may come and take His rest. Let us plant only lilies there, and sing with St. John of the Cross: "There I remained in deep oblivion, My head reposing upon Him I love, Lost to myself and all! I cast my cares away And let them, heedless, mid the lilies lie."[18] XI April 26, 1891. MY DEAR LITTLE SISTER,--Three years ago our hearts had not yet been bruised, and life was one glad smile. Then Jesus looked down upon us, and all things were changed into an ocean of tears . . . but likewise into an ocean of grace and of love. God has taken from us him whom we loved so tenderly--was it not that we might be able to say more truly than ever: "Our Father Who art in heaven"? How consoling is this divine word, and what vast horizons it opens before us! My darling Céline, you who asked me so many questions when we were little, I wonder how it was you never asked: "Why has God not made me an Angel?" Well, I am going to tell you. Our Lord wishes to have His Court here on earth, as He has in Heaven; He wishes for angel-martyrs and angel-apostles; and if He has not made you an Angel in Heaven, it is because He wishes you to be an Angel of earth, so that you may be able to suffer for His Love. Dearest sister, the shadows will soon disappear, the rays of the Eternal Sun will thaw the hoar frost of winter. . . . A little longer, and we shall be in our true country, and our childhood's joys--those Sunday evenings, those outpourings of the heart--will be given back to us for ever! XII August 15, 1892. MY DEAR LITTLE SISTER,--To write to you to-day I am obliged to steal a little time from Our Lord. He will forgive, because it is of Him that we are going to speak together. The vast solitudes and enchanting views which unfold themselves before you ought to uplift your soul. I do not see those things, and I content myself by saying with St. John of the Cross in his Spiritual Canticle: In Christ I have the mountains, The quiet, wooded valleys. Lately I have been thinking what I could undertake for the salvation of souls, and these simple words of the Gospel have given me light. Pointing to the fields of ripe corn, Jesus once said to His disciples: "Lift up your eyes and see the fields, for they are already white with the harvest";[19] and again: "The harvest indeed is great, but the labourers are few; pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest that He send forth labourers."[20] Here is a mystery indeed! Is not Jesus all-powerful? Do not creatures belong to Him who made them? Why does He deign to say: "Pray ye the Lord of the harvest that He send forth labourers"? It is because His Love for us is so unsearchable, so tender, that He wishes us to share in all He does. The Creator of the Universe awaits the prayer of a poor little soul to save a multitude of other souls, ransomed, like her, at the price of His Blood. Our vocation is not to go forth and reap in Our Father's fields. Jesus does not say to us: "Look down and reap the harvest." Our mission is even more sublime. "Lift up your eyes and see," saith our Divine Master, "see how in Heaven there are empty thrones. It is for you to fill them. . . . You are as Moses praying on the mountain, so ask Me for labourers and they shall be sent. I only await a prayer, a sigh! Is not the apostolate of prayer--so to speak--higher than that of the spoken word? It is for us by prayer to train workers who will spread the glad tidings of the Gospel and who will save countless souls--the souls to whom we shall be the spiritual Mothers. What, then, have we to envy in the Priests of the Lord? XIII MY DARLING SISTER,--The affection of our childhood days has changed into a closest union of mind and heart. Jesus has drawn us to Him together, for are you not already His? He has put the world beneath our feet. Like Zaccheus we have climbed into a tree to behold Him--mysterious tree, raising us high above all things, from whence we can say: "All is mine, all is for me: the Earth and the Heavens are mine, God Himself is mine, and the Mother of my God is for me."[21] Speaking of that Blessed Mother, I must tell you of one of my simple ways. Sometimes I find myself saying to her: "Dearest Mother, it seems to me that I am happier than you. I have you for my Mother, and you have no Blessed Virgin to love. . . . It is true, you are the Mother of Jesus, but you have given Him to me; and He, from the Cross, has given you to be our Mother--thus we are richer than you! Long ago, in your humility, you wished to become the little handmaid of the Mother of God; and I--poor little creature--am not your handmaid but your child! You are the Mother of Jesus, and you are also _mine!"_ Our greatness in Jesus is verily marvellous, my Céline. He has unveiled for us many a mystery by making us climb the mystical tree of which I spoke above. And now what science is He going to teach? Have we not learned all things from Him? "Make haste to come down, for this day I must abide in thy house."[22] Jesus bids us come down. Where, then, must we go? The Jews asked Him: "Master, where dwellest thou?"[23] And He answered, "The foxes have holes and the birds of the air nests, but the Son of Man hath not where to lay His Head."[24] If we are to be the dwelling-place of Jesus, we must come down even to this--we must be so poor that we have not where to lay our heads. This grace of light has been given to me during my retreat. Our Lord desires that we should receive Him into our hearts, and no doubt they are empty of creatures. Alas! mine is not empty of self; that is why He bids me come down. And I shall come down even to the very ground, that Jesus may find within my heart a resting-place for His Divine Head, and may feel that there at least He is loved and understood. XIV April 25, 1893. MY LITTLE CÉLINE,--I must come and disclose the desires of Jesus with regard to your soul. Remember that He did not say: "I am the flower of the gardens, a carefully-tended Rose"; but, "I am the Flower of the fields and the Lily of the valleys."[25] Well, you must be always as a drop of dew hidden in the heart of this beautiful Lily of the valley. The dew-drop--what could be simpler, what more pure? It is not the child of the clouds; it is born beneath the starry sky, and survives but a night. When the sun darts forth its ardent rays, the delicate pearls adorning each blade of grass quickly pass into the lightest of vapour. . . . There is the portrait of my little Céline! She is a drop of dew, an offspring of Heaven--her true Home. Through the night of this life she must hide herself in the _Field-flower's_ golden cup; no eye must discover her abode. Happy dewdrop, known to God alone, think not of the rushing torrents of this world! Envy not even the crystal stream which winds among the meadows. The ripple of its waters is sweet indeed, but it can be heard by creatures. Besides, the Field-flower could never contain it in its cup. One must be so little to draw near to Jesus, and few are the souls that aspire to be little and unknown. "Are not the river and the brook," they urge, "of more use than a dewdrop? Of what avail is it? Its only purpose is to refresh for one moment some poor little field-flower." Ah! They little know the true _Flower of the field._ Did they know Him they would understand better Our Lord's reproach to Martha. Our Beloved needs neither our brilliant deeds nor our beautiful thoughts. Were He in search of lofty ideas, has He not His Angels, whose knowledge infinitely surpasses that of the greatest genius of earth? Neither intellect nor other talents has He come to seek among us. . . . He has become the _Flower of the field_ to show how much He loves simplicity. _The Lily of the valley_ asks but a single dewdrop, which for one night shall rest in its cup, hidden from all human eyes. But when the shadows shall begin to fade, when the _Flower of the field_ shall have become the _Sun of Justice,_[26] then the dewdrop--the humble sharer of His exile--will rise up to Him as love's vapour. He will shed on her a ray of His light, and before the whole court of Heaven she will shine eternally like a precious pearl, a dazzling mirror of the Divine Sun. XV August 2, 1893. MY DEAR CÉLINE,--What you write fills me with joy; you are making your way by a royal road. The Spouse in the Canticles, unable to find her Beloved in the time of repose, went forth to seek Him in the city. But in vain . . . it was only without the walls she found Him. It is not in the sweetness of repose that Jesus would have us discover His Adorable Presence. He hides Himself and shrouds Himself in darkness. True, this was not His way with the multitude, for we read that all the people were carried away as soon as He spoke to them. The weaker souls He charmed by His divine eloquence with the aim of strengthening them against the day of temptation and trial, but His faithful friends were few that day when "He was silent"[27] in the presence of His judges. Sweet melody to my heart is that silence of the Divine Master! He would have us give Him alms as to a poor man, and puts Himself--so to speak--at our mercy. He will take nothing that is not cheerfully given, and the veriest trifle is precious in His Divine Eyes. He stretches forth His Hand to receive a little love, that in the radiant day of the Judgment He may speak to us those ineffably sweet words: "Come, ye blessed of My Father, for I was hungry and you gave Me to drink, I was a stranger and you took Me in, I was sick and you visited Me, I was in prison and you came to Me."[28] Dearest Céline, let us rejoice in the lot that is ours! Let us give and give again, and give royally, never forgetting that Our Beloved is a hidden Treasure which few souls know how to find. Now to discover that which is hidden we must needs hide ourselves in the hiding-place. Let our life, then, be one of concealment. The author of the _Imitation_ tells us: "If thou would'st know and learn something to the purpose, love to be unknown, and to be esteemed as nothing . . . [29] Having forsaken all things, a man should forsake himself. . . [30] Let this man glory in this and another in that, but thou for thy part rejoice neither in this nor in that, but in the contempt of thyself."[31] XVI MY DEAR CÉLINE,--You tell me that my letters do good to you. I am indeed glad, but I assure you that I am under no misapprehension: "Unless the Lord build the house, they labour in vain who build it."[32] The greatest eloquence cannot call forth a single act of love without that grace which touches the heart. Think of a beautiful peach with its delicate tint of rose, with its flavour so sweet that no human skill could invent such nectar. Tell me, Céline, is it for the peach's own sake that God created that colour so fair to the eye, that velvety covering so soft to the touch? Is it for itself that He made it so sweet? Nay, it is for us; the only thing that is all its own and is essential to its being, is the stone; it possesses nothing beyond. Thus also it pleases Jesus to lavish His gifts on certain souls in order to draw yet others to Himself; in His Mercy He humbles them inwardly and gently compels them to recognise their nothingness and His Almighty Power. Now this sentiment of humility is like a kernel of grace which God hastens to develop against that blessed day, when, clothed with an imperishable beauty, they will be placed, without danger, on the banqueting-table of Paradise. Dear little sister, sweet echo of my soul, Thérèse is far from the heights of fervour at this moment; but when I am in this state of spiritual dryness, unable to pray, or to practise virtue, I look for little opportunities, for the smallest trifles, to please my Jesus: a smile or a kind word, for instance, when I would wish to be silent, or to show that I am bored. If no such occasion offer, I try at least to say over and over again that I love Him. This is not hard, and it keeps alive the fire in my heart. Even should the fire of love seem dead, I would still throw my tiny straws on the ashes, and I am confident it would light up again. It is true I am not always faithful, but I never lose courage. I leave myself in the Arms of Our Lord. He teaches me to draw profit from everything, from the good and from the bad which He finds in me.[33] He teaches me to speculate in the Bank of Love, or rather it is He Who speculates for me, without telling me how He does it--that is His affair, not mine. I have but to surrender myself wholly to Him, to do so without reserve, without even the satisfaction of knowing what it is all bringing to me. . . . After all, I am not the prodigal child, and Jesus need not trouble about a feast for me, _because I am always with Him._[34] I have read in the Gospel that the Good Shepherd leaves the faithful ones of His flock in the desert to hasten after the lost sheep. This confidence touches me deeply. You see He is sure of them. How could they stray away? They are prisoners of Love. In like manner does the Beloved Shepherd of our souls deprive us of the sweets of His Presence, to give His consolations to sinners; or if He lead us to Mount Thabor it is but for one brief moment . . . the pasture land is nearly always in the valleys, "it is there that He takes His rest at mid-day."[35] XVII October 20, 1893. MY DEAR SISTER,--I find in the Canticle of Canticles this passage which may be fitly applied to you: "What dost thou see in thy beloved but a band of musicians in an armed camp?"[36] Through suffering, your life has in truth become a battle-field, and there must be a band of musicians, so you shall be the little harp of Jesus. But no concert is complete without singing, and if Jesus plays, must not Céline make melody with her voice? When the music is plaintive, she will sing the songs of exile; when the music is gay, she will lilt the airs of her Heavenly Home. . . . Whatever may happen, all earthly events, be they happy or sad, will be but distant sounds, unable to awake a vibration from the harp of Jesus. He reserves to Himself alone the right of lightly touching its strings. I cannot think without delight of that sweet saint, Cecilia. What an example she gives us! In the midst of a pagan world, in the very heart of danger, at the moment when she was to be united to a man whose love was so utterly of earth, it seems to me as if she should have wept and trembled with fear. But instead, "during the music of the marriage-feast Cecilia kept singing in her heart."[37] What perfect resignation! No doubt she heard other melodies than those of this world; her Divine Spouse too was singing, and the Angels repeated in chorus the refrain of Bethlehem's blessed night: "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men of goodwill."[38] The Glory of God! St. Cecilia understood it well, and longed for it with all her heart. She guessed that her Jesus was thirsting for souls . . . and that is why her whole desire was to bring to Him quickly the soul of the young Roman, whose only thought was of human glory. This wise Virgin will make of him a Martyr, and multitudes will follow in his footsteps. She knows no fear: the Angels in their song made promise of peace. She knows that the Prince of Peace is bound to protect her, to guard her virginity, and to make her recompense. . . . "Oh, how beautiful is the chaste generation!"[39] Dearest sister, I hardly know what I write; I let my pen follow the dictates of my heart. You tell me that you feel your weakness, but that is a grace. It is Our Lord Who sows the seeds of distrust of self in your soul. Do not be afraid! If you do not fail to give Him pleasure in small things, he will be obliged to help you in great ones. The Apostles laboured long without Him, they toiled a whole night and caught no fish. Their labours were not inacceptable to him, but He wished to prove that He is the Giver of all things. So an act of humility was asked of the Apostles, and Our loving Lord called to them: "Children, have you anything to eat?"[40] St. Peter, avowing his helplessness, cried out: "Lord, we have laboured all the night, and have taken nothing."[41] It is enough, the Heart of Jesus is touched. . . . Had the Apostle caught some small fish, perhaps our Divine Master would not have worked a miracle; but he had caught _nothing,_ and so through the power and goodness of God his nets were soon filled with great fishes. Such is Our Lord's way. He gives as God--with divine largesse--but He insists on humility of heart. XVIII July 7, 1894. MY DEAR LITTLE SISTER,--I do not know if you are still in the same frame of mind as when you last wrote to me; I presume that you are, and I answer with this passage of the Canticle of Canticles, which explains so well the state of a soul in utter dryness, a soul which cannot find joy or consolation in anything: "I went down into the garden of nut-trees to see the fruits of the valleys, and to look if the vineyard had flourished, and the pomegranates were in bud. I no longer knew where I was: my soul was troubled because of the chariots of Aminadab."[42] There is the true picture of our souls. Often we go down in the fertile valleys where our heart loves to find its nourishment; and the vast fields of Holy Scripture, which have so often opened to yield us richest treasures, now seem but an arid and waterless waste. We no longer even know where we stand. In place of peace and light, all is sorrow and darkness. But, like the Spouse in the Canticles, we know the cause of this trial: "My soul was troubled because of the chariots of Aminadab." We are not as yet in our true country, and as gold is tired in the fire so must our souls be purified by temptation. We sometimes think we are abandoned. Alas! _the chariots_--that is to say, the idle clamours which beset and disturb us--are they within the soul or without? We cannot tell, but Jesus knows; He sees all our grief, and in the night, on a sudden, His Voice is heard: "Return, return, O Sulamitess: return, return, that we may behold thee."[43] O gracious call! We dared no longer even look upon ourselves, the sight filled us with horror, and Jesus calls us that He may look upon us at leisure. He wills to see us; He comes, and with Him come the other two Persons of the Adorable Trinity to take possession of our soul. Our Lord had promised this, when, with unspeakable tenderness, He had said of old: "If anyone love Me he will keep My word, and My Father will love him, and We will come to him, and will make Our abode with him."[44] To keep the word of Jesus, then, is one condition of our happiness, the proof of our love for Him; and this word seems to me to be His very Self, for He calls Himself the Uncreated _Word_ of the Father. In the same Gospel of St. John He makes the sublime prayer: "Sanctify them by Thy word, Thy word is truth."[45] And in another passage Jesus teaches us that He is "the Way and the Truth and the Life."[46] We know, then, what is this word which must be kept; we cannot say, like Pilate: "What is truth?"[47] We possess the Truth, for our Beloved dwells in our hearts. Often _this Beloved is to us a bundle of myrrh._[48] We share the chalice of His sufferings; but how sweet it will be to us one day to hear these gentle words: "You are they who have continued with Me in My temptations, and I dispose to you, as My Father hath disposed to Me, a kingdom."[49] XIX August 19, 1894. This is perhaps the last time that I need have recourse to writing in order to talk to you, my dear little sister. God in His goodness has granted my dearest wish. Come, and we will suffer together . . . Then Jesus will take one of us, and the others will remain in exile yet a little longer. Now, listen well to what I am going to say: God will never, never separate us; and if I die before you, do not think that I shall be far away--never shall we have been more closely united. You must not be grieved at my childish prophecy. I am not ill, I have an iron constitution; but the Lord can break iron as if it were clay. Our dear Father makes his presence felt in a way which touches me deeply. After a death lasting for five long years, what joy to find him as he used to be, nay, more a father than ever! How well he is going to repay you for the care you so generously bestowed on him! You were his Angel, now he will be yours. He has only been one month in heaven, and already, through the power of his intercession, all your plans are succeeding. It is easy for him now to arrange matters for us, and he has had less to suffer on Céline's account than he had for his poor little Queen. For a long time you have been asking me for news about the noviciate, especially about my work, and now I am going to satisfy you. In my dealings with the novices I am like a setter on the scent of game. The rôle gives me much anxiety because it so very exacting. You shall decide for yourself if this be not the case. All day long, from morn till night, I am in pursuit of game. Mother Prioress and the Novice Mistress play the part of sportsmen--but sportsmen are too big to be creeping through the cover, whereas a little dog can push its way in anywhere . . . and then its scent is so keen! I keep a close watch upon my little rabbits; I do not want to do them any harm, but I tell them gently: "You must keep your fur glossy, and must not look foolishly about as does a rabbit of the warren." In fact, I try to make them such as the Hunter of Souls would have them, simple little creatures that go on browsing heedless of everything else. I laugh now, but seriously I am quite convinced that one of these rabbits--you know which one I mean--is worth a hundred times more than the setter; it has run through many a danger, and I own that, had I been in its place, I should have long since been lost for ever in the great forest of the world. XX I am so glad, dearest Céline, that you do not feel any particular attraction at the thought of entering the Carmel. This is really a mark of Our Lord's favour, and shows that He looks for a gift from your hands. He knows that it is so much sweeter to give than to receive. What happiness to suffer for Him Who loves us even unto folly, and to pass for fools in the eyes of the world! We judge others by ourselves, and, as the world will not hearken to reason, it calls us unreasonable too. We may console ourselves, we are not the first. Folly was the only crime with which Herod could reproach Our Lord . . . and, after all, Herod was right. Yes, indeed, it was folly to come and seek the poor hearts of mortal men to make them thrones for Him, the King of Glory, Who sitteth above the Cherubim! Was He not supremely happy in the company of His Father and the Holy Spirit of Love? Why, then, come down on earth to seek sinners and make of them His closest friends? Nay, our folly could never exceed His, and our deeds are quite within the bounds of reason. The world may leave us alone. I repeat, it is the world that is _insane,_ because it heeds not what Jesus has done and suffered to save it from eternal damnation. We are neither idlers nor spendthrifts. Our Divine Master has taken our defence upon Himself. Remember the scene in the house of Lazarus: Martha was serving, while Mary had no thought of food but only of how she could please her Beloved. And "she broke her alabaster box, and poured out upon her Saviour's Head the precious spikenard,[50] and the house was filled with the odour of the ointment."[51] The Apostles murmured against Magdalen. This still happens, for so do men murmur against us. Even some fervent Catholics think our ways are exaggerated, and that--with Martha--we ought to wait upon Jesus, instead of pouring out on Him the odorous ointment of our lives. Yet what does it matter if these ointment-jars--our lives--be broken, since Our Lord is consoled, and the world in spite of itself is forced to inhale the perfumes they give forth? It has much need of these perfumes to purify the unwholesome air it breathes. For a while only, good-bye, dearest sister. Your barque is near to port. The breezes filling its sails are the zephyrs of Love--breezes that speed more swiftly than the lightning-flash. Good-bye! in a few days we shall be together within these Carmel walls . . . and in the after days together in Paradise. Did not Jesus say during His Passion: "Hereafter you shall see the Son of Man sitting on the right hand of the power of God and coming in the clouds of heaven"?[52] . . . We shall be there! THÉRÈSE. _____________________________ [1] Matt. 3:10. [2] Matt. 5:48. [3] Apoc. 21:4. [4] St. John of the Cross. [5] Mme. Swetchine. [6] Exodus 4:25. [7] I Cor. 7:31. [8] Cf. Ps. 136:2. [9] Cf. Ps. 136:1, 4. [10] I Cor. 2:9. [11] It is remarkable that Soeur Thérèse applied this name to her sister Céline, who, under her inspiration, was later to reproduce so faithfully the true likeness of Our Lord, from the Holy Winding Sheet of Turin. [Ed.] [Remainder of long footnote, discussing this likeness, its reproduction, and related matters, omitted from this electronic edition.] [12] Isa. 63:3. [13] Cf. Isa. 63:5. [14] Isa. 53:3. [15] Cant. 5:2. [16] Is. 53:4. [17] Soeur Thérèse received the veil on September 24, 1890. [18] St. John of the Cross: _The Night of the Soul,_ 8th stanza. [19] John 4:35. [20] Matt. 9:37, 38. [21] St. John of the Cross. [22] Luke 19:5. [23] John 1:38. [24] Luke 9:58. [25] Cant. 2:1. [26] Malachias 4:2. [27] Matt. 26:23. [28] Matt. 25:34-36. [29] _Imit.,_ Bk. I, ch. ii. 3. [30] _Ib.,_ Bk. II, ch. xi. 4. [31] _Ib.,_ Bk. III, ch. xlix. 7. [32] Ps. 126[127]:1. [33] St. John of the Cross. [34] Cf. Luke 15:31. [35] Cant. 1:6. [36] Cf. Cant. 7:1. [37] Office of St. Cecilia. [38] Luke 2:14. [39] Wisdom 4:1. [40] John 21:5. [41] Luke 5:5. Soeur Thérèse joins in one the two miraculous draughts of fishes. [Ed.] [42] Cf. Cant. 6:10, 11. [43] Cant. 6:12. [44] John 14:23. [45] Cf. John 17:17. [46] John 14:6. [47] John 18:38. [48] Cf. Cant. 1:12. [49] Luke 22:28, 29. [50] Cf. Mark 14:3. [51] John 12:3. [52] Matt. 26:64. _____________________________ LETTERS TO MOTHER AGNES OF JESUS Selections I (Written in 1887, shortly before Thérèse entered the Carmel.) MY DARLING LITTLE MOTHER,--You are right when you tell me that every cup must contain its drop of gall. I find that trials are a great help towards detachment from the things of earth: they make one look higher than this world. Nothing here can satisfy, and we can find rest only in holding ourselves ready to do God's will. My frail barque has great difficulty in reaching port. I sighted it long since, and still I find myself afar off. Yet Jesus steers this little barque, and I am sure that on His appointed day it will come safely to the blessed haven of the Carmel. O Pauline! when Jesus shall have vouchsafed me this grace, I wish to give myself entirely to Him, to suffer always for Him, to live for Him alone. I do not fear His rod, for even when the smart is keenest we feel that it is His sweet Hand which strikes. It is such joy to think that for each pain cheerfully borne we shall love God more through eternity. Happy should I be if at the hour of my death I could offer Jesus a single soul. There would be one soul less in hell, and one more to bless God in Heaven. II (Written during her retreat before receiving the habit.) January, 1889. Dryness and drowsiness--such is the state of my soul in its intercourse with Jesus! But since my Beloved wishes to sleep I shall not prevent Him. I am only too happy that He does not treat me as a stranger, but rather in a homely way. He riddles his "little ball" with pin-pricks that hurt indeed, though when they come from the Hand of this loving Friend, the pain is all sweetness, so gentle in His touch. How different the hand of man! Yet I am happy, most happy to suffer! If Jesus Himself does not pierce me, He guides the hand which does. Mother! If you knew how utterly indifferent to earthly things I desire to be, and of how little concern to me are all the beauties of creation. I should be wretched were I to possess them. My heart seems so vast when I think of the goods of earth--all of them together unable to fill it. But by the side of Jesus how small does it appear! He is full good to me--this God who soon will be my Spouse. He is divinely lovable for not permitting me to be the captive of any passing joy. He knows well that if He sent me but a shadow of earthly happiness I should cling to it with all the intense ardour of my heart, and He refuses even this shadow . . . He prefers to leave me in darkness, rather than afford me a false glimmer which would not be Himself. I do not wish creatures to have one atom of my love. I wish to give all to Jesus, since He makes me understand that He alone is perfect happiness. All!--all shall be for Him! And even when I have nothing, as is the case to-night, I will give Him this nothing . . . III 1889. . . . . . . . I have a longing for those heart-wounds, those pin-pricks which inflict so much pain. I know of no ecstasy to which I do not prefer sacrifice. There I find happiness, and there alone. The slender reed has no fear of being broken, for it is planted beside the waters of Love. When, therefore, it bends before the gale, it gathers strength in the refreshing stream, and longs for yet another storm to pass and sway its head. My very weakness makes me strong. No harm can come to me since, in whatever happens, I see only the tender Hand of Jesus . . . Besides, no suffering is too big a price to pay for the glorious palm. IV (Written during her retreat before profession.) September, 1890. MY DEAREST MOTHER,--Your little hermit must give you an account of her journey. Before starting, my Beloved asked me in what land I wished to travel, and what road I wished to take. I told him that I had only one desire, that of reaching the summit of the _Mountain of Love._ Thereupon roads innumerable spread before my gaze, but so many of these were perfect that I felt incapable of choosing any of my own free will. Then I said to my Divine Guide: "Thou knowest where lies the goal of my desire, and for Whose sake I would climb the Mountain. Thou knowest Who possesses the love of my heart. For Him only I set out on this journey; lead me therefore by the paths of His choosing: my joy shall be full if only He is pleased." And Our Lord took me by the hand, and led me through an underground passage where it is neither hot nor cold, where the sun shines not, and where neither wind nor rain can enter--a place where I see nothing but a half-veiled light, the light that gleams from the downcast Eyes of the Face of Jesus. My Spouse speaks not a word, and I say nothing save that I love Him more than myself; and in the depths of my heart I know this is true, for I am more His than mine. I cannot see that we are advancing toward our journey's goal since we travel by a subterranean way; and yet, without knowing how, it seems to me that we are nearing the summit of the Mountain. I give thanks to my Jesus for making me walk in darkness, and in this darkness I enjoy profound peace. Willingly do I consent to remain through all my religious life in this gloomy passage into which He has led me. I desire only that my darkness may obtain light for sinners. I am content, nay, full of joy, to be without all consolation. I should be ashamed if my love were like that of those earthly brides who are ever looking for gifts from their bridegrooms, or seeking to catch the loving smile which fills them with delight. Thérèse, the little Spouse of Jesus, loves Him for Himself; she only looks on the Face of her Beloved to catch a glimpse of the Tears which delight her with their secret charm. She longs to wipe away those Tears, or to gather them up like priceless diamonds with which to adorn her bridal dress. _Jesus!_ . . . _Oh! I would so love Him! Love Him as He has never yet been loved!_ . . . At all cost I must win the palm of St. Agnes; if it cannot be mine through blood, I must win it by Love. V 1891. Love can take the place of a long life. Jesus does not consider time, for He is Eternal. He only looks at the love. My little Mother, beg Him to bestow it upon me in full measure. I do not desire that thrill of love which I can feel; if Jesus feel its thrill, then that is enough for me. It is so sweet to love Him, to make Him loved. Ask Him to take me to Him on my profession-day, if by living on I should ever offend Him, because I wish to bear unsullied to Heaven the white robe of my second Baptism.[1] Now Jesus can grant me the grace never to offend Him more, or rather never to commit any faults but those which do not offend Him or give Him pain; faults which serve but to humble me and strengthen my love. There is no one to lean on apart from Jesus. He alone faileth not, and it is exceeding joy to think that He can never change. VI 1891. MY DEAREST LITTLE MOTHER,--Your letter has done me such good. The sentence: "Let us refrain from saying a word which could raise us in the eyes of others," has indeed enlightened my soul. Yes, we must keep all for Jesus with jealous care. It is so good to work for Him alone. How it fills the heart with joy, and lends wings to the soul! Ask of Jesus that Thérèse--His _grain of sand_--may save Him a multitude of souls in a short space of time, so that she may the sooner behold His Adorable Face. VII 1892. Here is the dream of this "grain of sand": Love Jesus alone, and naught else beside! The grain of sand is so small that if it wished to open its heart to any other but Jesus, there would no longer be room for this Beloved. What happiness to be so entirely hidden that no one gives us a thought--to be unknown even to those with whom we live! My little Mother, I long to be unknown to everyone of God's creatures! I have never desired glory amongst men, and if their contempt used to attract my heart, I have realized that even this is too glorious for me, and I thirst to be forgotten. The Glory of Jesus--this is my sole ambition. I abandon my glory to Him; and if He seem to forget me, well, He is free to do so since I am no longer my own, but His. He will weary sooner of making me wait than I shall of waiting. VIII [One day when Soeur Thérèse was suffering acutely from feverishness, one of the Sisters urged her to help in a difficult piece of painting. For a moment Thérèse's countenance betrayed an inward struggle, which did not escape the notice of Mother Agnes of Jesus. That same evening Thérèse wrote her the following letter.] May 28, 1897. MY DEAREST MOTHER,--I have just been shedding sweet tears--tears of repentance, but still more of thankfulness and love. To-day I showed you the treasure of my patience, and how virtuous I am--I who preach so well to others! I am glad that you have seen my want of perfection. You did not scold me, and yet I deserved it. But at all times your gentleness speaks to me more forcibly than would severe words. To me you are the image of God's Mercy. Sister N., on the contrary, is more often the image of God's severity. Well, I have just met her, and, instead of passing me coldly by, she embraced me and said: "Poor little Sister, I am so sorry . . . I do not want to tire you; it was wrong of me to ask your help; leave the work alone." In my heart I felt perfect sorrow, and I was much surprised to escape all blame. I know she must really deem me imperfect. She spoke in this way because she thinks I am soon to die. However that may be, I have heard nothing but kind and tender words from her; and so I consider her most kind, and myself an unamiable creatures. When I returned to our cell, I was wondering what Jesus thought, when all at once I remembered His words to the woman taken in adultery: "Hath no man condemned thee?"[2] With tears in my eyes, I answered Him: "No one, Lord, . . . neither my little Mother--the image of Thy Mercy--nor Sister N., the image of Thy Justice. I feel that I can go in peace, because neither wilt Thou condemn me." I confess I am much happier because of my weakness than if--sustained by grace--I had been a model of patience. It does me so much good to see that Jesus is always sweet and tender towards me. Truly it is enough to make me die of grateful love. My little Mother, you will understand how this evening the vessel of God's Mercy has overflowed for your child. . . . _Even now I know it! Yea, all my hopes will be fulfilled_ . . . VERILY THE LORD WILL WORK WONDERS FOR ME, AND THEY WILL INFINITELY SURPASS MY BOUNDLESS DESIRES. _____________________________ [1] Soeur Thérèse here alludes to the probable opinion of theologians that--as in Baptism--all stain of sin is removed and all temporal punishment for sin remitted, by the vows taken on the day of religious profession. [Ed.] [2] John 8:10. _____________________________ LETTERS TO SISTER MARY OF THE SACRED HEART I February 21, 1888. MY DEAR MARIE,--You cannot think what a lovely present Papa made me last week; I believe if I gave you a hundred or even a thousand guesses you would never find out what it was. Well, my dear Father bought me a new-born lamb, all white and fleecy. He said that before I entered the Carmel he wanted me to have this pleasure. We were all delighted, especially Céline. What touched me more than anything was Papa's thoughtfulness. Besides, a lamb is symbolic, and it made me think of Pauline. So far, so good, but now for the sequel. We were already building castles in the air, and expected that in two or three days the lamb would be frisking round us. But the pretty creature died that same afternoon. Poor little thing, scarcely was it born when it suffered and died. It looked so gentle and innocent that Céline made a sketch of it, and then we laid it in a grave dug by Papa. It appeared to be asleep. I did not want the earth to be its covering, so we put snow upon our pet, and all was over. You do not know, dearest Godmother, how this little creature's death has made me reflect. Clearly we must not become attached to anything, no matter how innocent, because it will slip from our grasp when least expected; nothing but the eternal can content us. II (Written during her retreat before receiving the habit.) January 8, 1889. Your little _Lamb_--as you love to call me, dearest sister--would borrow from you some strength and courage. I cannot speak to Our Lord, and He is silent too. Pray that my retreat may be pleasing to the Heart of Him Who alone reads the secrets of the soul. Life is full of sacrifice, it is true, but why seek happiness here? For life is but "a night to be spent in a wretched inn," as our holy Mother St. Teresa says. I assure you my heart thirsts ardently for happiness, but I see clearly that no creature can quench that thirst. On the contrary, the oftener I would drink from these seductive waters the more burning will my thirst become. I know a source where "they that drink shall yet thirst,"[1] but with a delicious thirst, a thirst one can always allay. . . . That source is the suffering known to Jesus only. III August 14, 1889. You ask for a word from your little Lamb. But what shall I say? Is it not you who have taught me? Remember those days when I sat upon your knee, and you talked to me of Heaven. I can still hear you say: "Look at those who want to become rich, and see how they toil to obtain money. Now, my little Thérèse, through every moment of the day and with far less trouble, we can lay up riches in Heaven. Diamonds are so plentiful, we can gather them together as with a rake, and we do this by performing all our actions for the love of God." Then I would leave you, my heart overflowing with joy, and fully bent on amassing great wealth. Time has flown since those happy hours spent together in our dear nest. Jesus has visited us, and has found us worthy to be tried in the crucible of suffering. God has said that on the last day "He will wipe away all tears from our eyes,"[2] and no doubt the more tears there are to dry, the greater will be the happiness. Pray to-morrow for the little one who owes you her upbringing, and who, without you, might never have come to the Carmel. IV (During her retreat before profession) September 4, 1890. The heavenly music falls but faintly on the ear of your child, and it has been a dreary journey towards her Bridal Day. It is true her Betrothed has led her through fertile lands and gorgeous scenery, but the dark night has prevented her admiring, much less revelling in, the beauty all around. Perhaps you think this grieved her. Oh, no! she is happy to follow her Betrothed for His own sake, and not for the sake of His gifts. He is so ravishingly beautiful, even when silent--even when concealed. Weary of earthly consolation, your little child wishes for her Beloved alone. I believe that the work of Jesus during this retreat has been to detach me from everything but Himself. My only comfort is the exceeding strength and peace that is mine. Besides, I hope to be just what He wills I should be, and in this lies all my happiness. Did you but know how great is my joy at giving pleasure to Jesus through being utterly deprived of all joy! . . . . Truly this is the very refinement of all joy--joy we do not feel. V September 7, 1890. To-morrow I shall be the Spouse of Jesus, of Him Whose "look was as it were hidden and despised."[3] What a future this alliance opens up! How can I thank Him, how render myself less unworthy of so great a favour? I thirst after Heaven, that blessed abode where our love for Jesus will be without bounds. True, we must pass through suffering and tears to reach that home, but I wish to suffer all that my Beloved is pleased to send me; I wish to let Him do as He wills with His "little ball." You tell me, dearest Godmother, that my Holy Child is beautifully adorned for my wedding-day;[4] perhaps, however, you wonder why I have not put new rose-coloured candles. The old ones appeal to me more because they were lighted for the first time on my clothing-day. They were then fresh and of rosy hue. Papa had given them to me; he was there, and all was joyful. But now their tint has faded. Are there yet any rose-coloured joys on earth for your little Thérèse? No, for her there are only heavenly joys; joys where the hollowness of all things gives place to the Uncreated Reality. VI MY DEAREST SISTER,--I do not find it difficult to answer you. . . . How can you ask me if it be possible for you to love God as I love Him! My desire for martyrdom is as nothing; it is not to that I owe the boundless confidence that fills my heart. Such desires might be described as spiritual riches, which are _the unjust mammon,_[5] when one is complacent in them as in something great. . . . These aspirations are a consolation Jesus sometimes grants to weak souls like mine--and there are many such! But when He withholds this consolation, it is a special grace. Remember these words of a holy monk: "The martyrs suffered with joy, and the King of Martyrs in sorrow." Did not Jesus cry out: "My father, remove this chalice from Me"?[6] Do not think, then, that my desires are a proof of my love. Indeed I know well that it is certainly not these desires which make God take pleasure in my soul. What does please Him is to find me love my littleness, my poverty: it is the blind trust which I have in His Mercy. . . . There is my sole treasure, dearest Godmother, and why should it not be yours? Are you not ready to suffer all that God wills? Assuredly; and so if you wish to know joy and to love suffering, you are really seeking your own consolation, because once we love, all suffering disappears. Verily, if we were to go together to martyrdom, you would gain great merit, and I should have none, unless it pleased Our Lord to change my dispositions. Dear sister, do you not understand that to love Jesus and to be His Victim of Love, the more weak and wretched we are the better material do we make for this consuming and transfiguring Love? . . . The simple desire to be a Victim suffices, but we must also consent to ever remain poor and helpless, and here lies the difficulty: "Where shall we find one that is truly poor in spirit? We must seek him afar off," says the author of the _Imitation._[7] He does not say that we must search among great souls, but "afar off"--that is to say, in abasement and in nothingness. Let us remain far from all that dazzles, loving our littleness, and content to have no joy. Then we shall be truly poor in spirit, and Jesus will come to seek us however far off we may be, and transform us into flames of Love. . . . I long to make you understand what I feel. Confidence alone must lead us to Love. . . . Does not fear lead to the thought of the strict justice that is threatened to sinners? But that is not the justice Jesus will show to such as love Him. God would not vouchsafe you the desire to be the Victim of His Merciful Love, were this not a favour in store--or rather already granted, since you are wholly surrendered unto Him and long to be consumed by Him, and God never inspires a longing which He cannot fulfill. The road lies clear, and along it we must run together. I feel that Jesus wishes to bestow on us the same graces; He wishes to grant us both a free entrance into His Heavenly Kingdom. Dearest Godmother, you would like to hear still more of the secrets which Jesus confides to your child, but human speech cannot tell what the human heart itself can scarcely conceive. Besides, Jesus confides His secrets to you likewise. This I know, for you it was who taught me to listen to His Divine teaching. On the day of my Baptism you promised in my name that I would serve Him alone. You were the Angel who led me and guided me in my days of exile and offered me to Our Lord. As a child loves its mother, I love you; in Heaven only will you realise the gratitude with which my heart is full to overflowing. Your little daughter, Teresa of the Child Jesus. _____________________________ [1] Eccles. 24:29. [2] Apoc. 21:4. [3] Isa. 53:3. [4] She alludes to the Statue of the Holy Child in the cloister, which was under her own special care. [Ed.] [5] Luke 16:2. [6] Luke 22:42. [7] Cf. _Imit.,_ II, xi. 4. _____________________________ LETTERS TO SISTER FRANCES TERESA[1] I August 13, 1893. DEAR LITTLE SISTER,--At last your desires are satisfied. Like the dove sent forth from the ark, you have been unable to find a spot on earth whereon to rest, and have long been on the wing seeking to re-enter the blessed abode where your heart had for ever fixed its home. Jesus has kept you waiting, but at last, touched by the plaintive cry of His dove, He has put forth His Divine Hand, and, taking hold of it, has set it in His Heart--that sanctuary of His Love. It is quite a spiritual joy, this joy of mine. For I shall never look upon you again, never hear your voice as I outpour my heart into yours. Yet I know that earth is but a halting-place to us who journey towards a Heavenly Home. What matter if the routes we follow lie apart? Our goal is the same--that Heaven where we shall meet, no more to be separated. There we shall taste for ever the sweets of our earthly home. We shall have much to tell one another when this exile is ended. Speech here below is so inadequate, but a single glance will be enough for perfect understanding in our home beyond; and I believe that our happiness will be greater than if we had never been parted here. Meanwhile we must live by sacrifice. Without it there would be no merit in the religious life. As someone told us in a conference: "The reason why the forest oak raises its head so high is because, hemmed in on all sides, it wastes no sap in putting forth branches underneath, but towers aloft. Thus in the religious life the soul, hedged in all around by the rule and by the practice of community life, of necessity finds there a means of lifting a high head towards Heaven." Dearest sister, pray for your little Thérèse that she may draw profit from her exile on earth and from the plentiful means granted her of meriting Heaven. II January, 1895. DEAR LITTLE SISTER,--How fruitful for Heaven has been the year that is gone! . . . Our dear Father has seen that which the eye of man cannot see, he has heard the minstrelsy of the angels . . . now his heart understands, and his soul enjoys "the things which God hath prepared for those who love Him."[2] . . . Our turn will come, and it is full sweet to think our sails are set towards the Eternal Shore. Do you not find, as I do, that our beloved Father's death has drawn us nearer to Heaven? More than half of our loved ones already enjoy the Vision of God, and the five who remain in exile will follow soon. This thought of the shortness of life gives me courage, and helps me to put up with the weariness of the journey. What matters a little toil upon earth? We pass . . . "We have not here a lasting city."[3] Think of your Thérèse during this month consecrated to the Infant Jesus, and beg of Him that she may always remain a very little child. I will offer the same prayer for you, because I know your desires, and that humility is your favourite virtue. Which Thérèse will be the more fervent? . . . She who will be the more humble, the more closely united to Jesus, and the more faithful in making love the mainspring of every action. We must not let slip one single occasion of sacrifice, everything has such value in the religious life . . . Pick up a pin from a motive of love, and you may thereby convert a soul. Jesus alone can make our deeds of such worth, so let us love Him with every fibre of our heart. III July 12, 1896. MY DEAR LITTLE LÉONIE,--I should have answered your letter last Sunday if it had been given to me, but you know that, being the youngest, I run the risk of not seeing letters for some considerable time after my sisters, and occasionally not at all. I only read yours on Friday, so forgive my delay. You are right--Jesus is content with a tender look or a sigh of love. For my part, I find it quite easy to practise perfection, now that I realise it only means making Jesus captive through His Heart. Look at a little child who has just vexed its mother, either by giving way to temper or by disobedience. If it hides in a corner and is sulky, or if it cries for fear of being punished, its mother will certainly not forgive the fault. But should it run to her with its little arms outstreteched, and say; "Kiss me, Mother; I will not do it again!" what mother would not straightway clasp her child lovingly to her heart, and forget all it had done? . . . She knows quite well that her little one will repeat the fault--no matter, her darling will escape all punishment so long as it makes appeal to her heart. Even when the law of fear was in force, before Our Lord's coming, the prophet Isaias said--speaking in the name of the King of Heaven: "Can a woman forget her babe? . . . And if she should forget, yet will I not forget thee."[4] What a touching promise! We who live under the law of Love, shall we not profit by the loving advances made by our Spouse? How can anybody fear Him Who allows Himself to be made captive "with one hair of our neck"?[5] Let us learn to keep Him prisoner--this God, the Divine Beggar of love. By telling us that a single hair can work this wonder, He shows us that the smallest actions done for His Love are those which charm His Heart. If it were necessary to do great things, we should be deserving of pity, but we are happy beyond measure, because Jesus lets Himself be led captive by the smallest action. . . . With you, dear Léonie, little sacrifices are never lacking. Is not your life made up of them? I rejoice to see you in presence of such wealth, especially when I remember that you know how to make profit thereby, not only for yourself but likewise for poor sinners. It is so sweet to help Jesus to save the souls which He has ransomed at the price of His Precious Blood, and which only await our help to keep them from the abyss. It seems to me that if our sacrifices take Jesus captive, our joys make Him prisoner too. All that is needful to attain this end is, that instead of giving ourselves over to selfish happiness, we offer to our Spouse the little joys He scatters in our path, to charm our hearts and draw them towards Him. You ask for news of my health. Well, my cough has quite disappeared. Does that please you? It will not prevent Our Lord from taking me to Himself whensoever He wishes. And I need not prepare for that journey, since my whole endeavour is to remain as a little child. Jesus Himself must pay all its expenses, as well as the price of my admission to Heaven. Good-bye, dearest one, pray to Him without fail for the last and least of your sisters. IV July 17, 1897. MY DEAR LÉONIE,--I am so pleased to be able to write to you again. Some days ago I thought I should never again have this consolation, but it seems God wishes to prolong somewhat the time of my exile. This does not trouble me--I would not enter Heaven one moment sooner through my own will. The only real happiness on earth is to strive always to think "how goodly is the chalice"[6] that Jesus give us. Yours is indeed a goodly one, dear Léonie. If you wish to be a Saint--and it will not be hard--keep only one end in view: give pleasure to Jesus, and bind yourself more closely to Him. Good-bye, my dear sister, I should wish the thought of my entering Heaven to fill you with joy, because I shall then be better able to give you proof of my tender love. In the Heart of our Heavenly Spouse we shall live His very life, and through eternity I shall remain, Your very little sister, TERESA OF THE CHILD JESUS. _____________________________ [1] Nearly all the letters written by Soeur Thérèse to her sister Léonie are lost. These few have been recovered. It will be remembered that Léonie entered the Convent of the Visitation at Caen. See note, page 113. [2] Cf. I Cor. 2:9. [3] Heb. 13:14. [4] Isa. 49:15. [5] Cant. 4:9. [6] Ps. 22[23]:5. _____________________________ LETTERS TO HER COUSIN MARIE GUÉRIN I 1888. Before you confided in me,[1] I felt you were suffering, and my heart was one with yours. Since you have the humility to ask advice of your little Thérèse, this is what she thinks: you have grieved me greatly by abstaining from Holy Communion, because you have grieved Our Lord. The devil must be very cunning to deceive a soul in this way. Do you not know, dear Marie, that by acting thus you help him to accomplish his end? The treacherous creature knows quite well that when a soul is striving to belong wholly to God he cannot cause her to sin, so he merely tries to persuade her that she has sinned. This is a considerable gain, but not enough to satisfy his hatred, so he aims at something more, and tries to shut out Jesus from a tabernacle which Jesus covets. Unable to enter this sanctuary himself, he wishes that at least it remain empty and without its God. Alas, what will become of that poor little heart? When the devil has succeeded in keeping a soul from Holy Communion he has gained all his ends . . . while Jesus weeps! . . . Remember, little Marie, that this sweet Jesus is there in the Tabernacle expressly for you and you alone. Remember that He burns with the desire to enter your heart. Do not listen to satan. Laugh him to scorn, and go without fear to receive Jesus, the God of peace and of love. "Thérèse thinks all this"--you say--"because she does not know my difficulties." She does know, and knows them well; she understands everything, and she tells you confidently that you can go without fear to receive your only true Friend. She, too, has passed through the martyrdom of scruples, but Jesus gave her the grace to receive the Blessed Sacrament always, even when she imagined she had committed great sins. I assure you I have found that this is the only means of ridding oneself of the devil. When he sees that he is losing his time he leaves us in peace. In truth it is impossible that a heart which can only find rest in contemplation of the Tabernacle--and yours is such, you tell me--could so far offend Our Lord as not to be able to receive Him . . . What does offend Jesus, what wounds Him to the Heart, is want of confidence. Pray much that the best portion of your life may not be overshadowed by idle fears. We have only life's brief moments to spend for the Glory of God, and well does satan know it. This is why he employs every ruse to make us consume them in useless labour. Dear sister, go often to Holy Communion, go very often--that is your one remedy. II 1894 You are like some little village maiden who, when sought in marriage by a mighty king would not dare to accept him, on the plea that she is not rich enough, and is strange to the ways of a court. But does not her royal lover know better than she does, the extent of her poverty and ignorance? Marie, though you are nothing, do not forget that Jesus is All. You have only to lose your own nothingness in that Infinite All, and thenceforth to think only of that All who alone is worthy of your love. You tell me you wish to see the fruit of your efforts. That is exactly what Jesus would hide from you. He likes to contemplate by Himself these little fruits of our virtue. They console Him. You are quite wrong, Marie, if you think that Thérèse walks eagerly along the way of Sacrifice: her weakness is still very great, and every day some new and wholesome experience brings this home more clearly. Yet Jesus delights to teach her how to _glory in her infirmities._[2] It is a great grace, and I pray Him to give it to you, for with it come peace and tranquillity of heart. When we see our misery we do not like to look at ourselves but only upon our Beloved. You ask me for a method of obtaining perfection. I know of Love--and Love only! Our hearts are made for this alone. Sometimes I endeavour to find some other word for love; but in a land of exile "words which have a beginning and an end"[3] are quite unable to render adequately the emotions of the soul, and so we must keep to the one simple word--LOVE. But on whom shall our poor hearts lavish this love, and who will be worthy of this treasure? Is there anyone who will understand it and--above all--is there anyone who will be able to repay? Marie, Jesus alone understands love: He alone can give back all--yea, infinitely more than the utmost we can give. _____________________________ [1] The allusion is to the scruples from which Marie suffered. Having read this letter--which is a strong plea for Frequent Communion--Pope Pius X declared it "most opportune." Thérèse was but fifteen when she wrote it. [Ed.] [2] 2 Cor. 11:5. [3] St. Augustine. _____________________________ LETTER TO HER COUSIN, JEANNE GUÉRIN (MADAME LA NÉELE) August, 1895. It is a very great sacrifice that God has asked of you, my dear Jeanne, in calling your little Marie to the Carmel; but remember that He has promised a hundredfold to anyone who for His Love hath left father or mother or _sister._[1] Now, for love of Jesus, you have not hesitated to part with a sister dearer to you than words can say, and therefore He is bound to keep His promise. I know that these words are generally applied to those who enter the religious life, but my heart tells me they were spoken, too, for those whose generosity is such that they will sacrifice to God even the loved ones they hold dearer than life itself. _____________________________ [1] Mark 10:30. _____________________________ LETTERS TO HER BROTHER MISSIONARIES I 1895. Our Divine Lord asks no sacrifice beyond our strength. At times, it is true, He makes us taste to the full the bitterness of the chalice He puts to our lips. And when He demands the sacrifice of all that is dearest on earth, it is impossible without a very special grace not to cry out as He did during His Agony in the Garden: "My Father, let this chalice pass from me!" But we must hasten to add: "Yet not as I will, but as Thou wilt."[1] It is so consoling to think that Jesus, "the Strong God,"[2] has felt all our weaknesses and shuddered at the sight of the bitter chalice--that very chalice He had so ardently desired. Your lot is indeed a beautiful one, since Our Lord has chosen it for you, and has first touched with His own Lips the cup which He holds out to yours. A Saint has said: "The greatest honour God can bestow upon a soul is not to give to it great things, but to ask of it great things." Jesus treats you as a privileged child. It is His wish you should begin your mission even now,[3] and save souls through the Cross. Was it not by suffering and death that He ransomed the world? I know that you aspire to the happiness of laying down your life for Him; but the martyrdom of the heart is not less fruitful than the shedding of blood, and this martyrdom is already yours. Have I not, then, good reason to say that your lot is a beautiful one--worthy an apostle of Christ? II 1896. Let us work together for the salvation of souls! We have but the one day of this life to save them, and so give to Our Lord a proof of our love. To-morrow will be Eternity, then Jesus will reward you a hundredfold for the sweet joys you have given up for Him. He knows the extent of your sacrifice. He knows that the sufferings of those you hold dear increase your own; but He has suffered this same martyrdom for our salvation. He, too, left His Mother; He beheld that sinless Virgin standing at the foot of the Cross, her heart pierced through with a sword of sorrow, and I hope he will console your own dear mother. . . . I beg Him most earnestly to do so. Ah! If the Divine Master would permit those you are about to leave for His Love but one glimpse of the glory in store, and the vast retinue of souls that will escort you to Heaven, already they would be repaid for the great sacrifice that is at hand. III February 24, 1896. Please say this little prayer for me each day; it sums up all my desires: "Merciful Father, in the name of Thy sweet Jesus, of the Blessed Virgin, and all the Saints, I beg Thee to consume my sister with Thy spirit of love, and to grant her the grace to make Thee greatly loved." If Our Lord takes me soon to Himself, I ask you still to continue this prayer, because my longing will be the same in Heaven as upon earth: _to love Jesus and to make Him loved._ IV . . . . . . . All I desire is God's Holy Will, and if in Heaven I could no longer work for His glory, I should prefer exile to Home. V June 21, 1897 You may well sing of the Mercies of God! They shine forth in you with splendour. You love St. Augustine and St. Mary Magdalen, those souls to whom many sins were forgiven because they loved much. I love them too; I love their sorrow, and especially their audacious love. When I see Mary Magdalen come forth before all Simon's guests to wash with her tears her Master's Feet--those Feet that for the first time she touches--I feel her heart has fathomed that abyss of love and mercy, the Heart of Jesus; and I feel, too, that not only was He willing to forgive, but even liberally to dispense the favours of a Divine and intimate friendship, and to raise her to the loftiest heights of prayer. My Brother, since I also have been given to understand the Love of the Heart of Jesus, I confess that all fear has been driven from mine. The remembrance of my faults humbles me; and it helps me never to rely upon my own strength--which is but weakness--but more than all, it speaks to me of mercy and of love. When a soul with childlike trust casts her faults into Love's all-devouring furnace, how shall they escape being utterly consumed? I know that many Saints have passed their lives in the practice of amazing penance for the sake of expiating their sins. But what of that? "In my Father's house there are many mansions."[4] These are the words of Jesus, and therefore I follow the path He marks out for me; I try to be nowise concerned about myself and what Jesus deigns to accomplish in my soul. VI 1897. On this earth where everything changes, one thing alone does never change--our Heavenly King's treatment of His friends. From the day He raised the standard of the Cross, in its shadow all must fight and win. "The life of every missionary abounds in crosses," said Théophane Vénard. And again: "True happiness consists in suffering, and in order to live we must die." Rejoice, my Brother, that the first efforts of your Apostolate are stamped with the seal of the Cross. Far more by suffering and by persecution than by eloquent discourses does Jesus wish to build up His Kingdom. You are still--you tell me--a little child who cannot speak. Neither could Father Mazel, who was ordained with you, and yet he has already won the palm . . . Far beyond our thoughts are the thoughts of God! When I learnt that this young missionary had died before he had set foot on the field of his labours, I felt myself drawn to invoke him. I seemed to see him amidst the glorious Martyr choir. No doubt, in the eyes of men he does not merit the title of Martyr, but in the eyes of God this inglorious death is no less precious than the sacrifice of him who lays down his life for the Faith. Though one must be exceeding pure before appearing in the sight of the All-Holy God, still I know that He is infinitely just, and this very Justice which terrifies so many souls is the source of all my confidence and joy. Justice is not only stern severity towards the guilty; it takes account of the good intention, and gives to virtue its reward. Indeed I hope as much from the Justice of God as from His Mercy. It is because He is just, that "He is compassionate and merciful, longsuffering, and plenteous in mercy. For He knoweth our frame, He remembereth that we are dust. As a father hath compassion on his children, so hath the Lord compassion on us."[5] O my Brother, after these beautiful and consoling words of the Royal Prophet, how can we doubt God's power to open the gates of His Kingdom to His children who have loved Him unto perfect sacrifice, who have not only left home and country so as to make Him known and loved, but even long to lay down their lives for Him? . . . Jesus said truly there is no greater love than this. Nor will He be outdone in generosity. How could He cleanse in the flames of Purgatory souls consumed with the fire of Divine Love? I have used many words to express my thought, and yet I fear I have failed. What I wish to convey is, that in my opinion all missionaries are Martyrs by will and desire, and not even one should pass through the purifying flames. This, then, is what I think about the Justice of God; my own way is all confidence and love, and I cannot understand those souls who are afraid of so affectionate a Friend. Sometimes, when I read books in which perfection is put before us with the goal obstructed by a thousand obstacles, my poor little head is quickly fatigued. I close the learned treatise, which tires my brain and dries up my heart, and I turn to the Sacred Scriptures. Then all becomes clear and lightsome--a single word opens out infinite vistas, perfection appears easy, and I see that it is enough to acknowledge our nothingness, and like children surrender ourselves into the Arms of the Good God. Leaving to great and lofty minds the beautiful books which I cannot understand, still less put in practice, I rejoice in my littleness because "only little children and those who are like them shall be admitted to the Heavenly banquet."[6] Fortunately--"there are many mansions in my Father's House":[7] if there were only those--to me--incomprehensible mansions with their baffling roads, I should certainly never enter there . . . VII July 13, 1897. Your soul is too great to cling to the consolations of earth, and even now its abode should be in Heaven, for it is written: "Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also."[8] Is not Jesus your only treasure? Now that He is in Heaven, it is there your heart should dwell. This sweet Saviour has long since forgotten your infidelities. He sees only your longing after perfection, and the sight makes glad His Heart. Stay no longer at His Feet, I beseech you, but follow this first impulse to throw yourself into His Arms. Your place is there, and I see clearly--more clearly than in your former letters--that all other heavenly route is barred to you save the way your little sister treads. I hold with you when you say that the Heart of Jesus is more grieved by the thousand little imperfections of His friends than by the faults, even grave, which His enemies commit. Yet it seems to me, dear Brother, it is only when those who are His own are habitually guilty of want of thought, and neglect to seek His pardon, that He can say: "These Wounds which you see in the midst of My Hands, I have received in the house of those who love Me."[9] But His Heart thrills with you when He had to deal with all those who truly love, and who after each little fault come to fling themselves into His Arms imploring forgiveness. He says to His Angels what the prodigal's father said to his servants: "Put a ring upon his finger, and let us rejoice."[10] O Brother! Verily the Divine Heart's Goodness and Merciful Love are little known! It is true that to enjoy these treasures we must humble ourselves, must confess our nothingness . . . and here is where many a soul draws back. VIII 1897. What attracts me towards our Heavenly Home is the Master's call--the hope of loving Him at last to the fulfilling of all my desire--the thought that I shall be able to win Him the love of a multitude of souls, who will bless Him through all eternity. I have never asked God that I might die young--that to me were a cowardly prayer; but from my childhood He has deigned to inspire me with a strong conviction that my life would be a short one. I feel we must tread the same road to Heaven--the road of suffering and love. When I myself have reached the port, I will teach you how best to sail the world's tempestuous sea--with the self-abandonment of a child well aware of a father's love, and of his vigilance in the hour of danger. I long so much to make you understand the expectant love of the Heart of Jesus. Your last letter has made my own heart thrill sweetly. I learnt how closely your soul is sister to mine, since God calls that soul to mount to Himself by the _lift of love,_ without climbing the steep stairway of fear. I am not surprised you find it hard to be familiar with Jesus--one cannot become so in a day; but this I do know, I shall aid you much more to tread this beautiful path when I lay aside the burden of this perishable body. Ere long you will exclaim with St. Augustine: "Love is my lodestone!" IX July 26, 1897. When you read these few lines I shall perhaps be no more. I know not the future; yet I can confidently say that my Spouse is at the door. It would need a miracle to keep me in exile, and I do not think that Jesus will work that miracle--He does nothing that is of no avail. Brother, I am so happy to die! Yes, happy . . . not because I shall be free from suffering: on the contrary, suffering combined with love seems the one thing worthy of desire in this vale of tears; but happy to die because far more than on earth I shall help the souls I hold dear. Jesus has always treated me as a spoilt child. . . . It is true that His Cross has been with me from the cradle, but for that Cross He has given me a passionate love . . . X August 14, 1897. I am about to go before God, and I understand now more than ever that one thing only is needful--to work for Him alone, and do nothing for self or creatures. Jesus wishes to own your heart completely. Before this can be, you will have much to suffer . . . but oh! what joy when comes the happy hour of going Home! I shall not die--I do but enter into Life . . . and whatsoever I cannot tell you here upon earth I will make you understand from the heights of Heaven. . . . _____________________________ [1] Matt. 26:39. [2] Isa. 9:6. [3] This letter and the following are addressed to a Seminarist. [Ed.] [4] John 14:2. [5] Ps. 102[103]:8, 14, 13. [6] Cf. Matt. 19:14. [7] John 14:2. [8] Luke 12:34. [9] Cf. Zach. 13:6. [10] Cf. Luke 15:22. _____________________________ PRAYERS OF SOEUR THÉRÈSE, THE LITTLE FLOWER OF JESUS _____________________________ AN ACT OF OBLATION AS A VICTIM OF DIVINE LOVE _This Prayer was found after the death of Sister Teresa of the Child Jesus and of the Holy Face in the copy of the Gospels which she carried night and day close to her heart._ O my God, O Most Blessed Trinity, I desire to love Thee and to make Thee loved--to labour for the glory of Holy Church by saving souls here upon earth and by delivering those suffering in Purgatory. I desire to fulfill perfectly Thy Holy Will, and to reach the degree of glory Thou hast prepared for me in Thy Kingdom. In a word, I wish to be holy, but, knowing how helpless I am, I beseech Thee, my God, to be Thyself my holiness. Since Thou hast loved me so much as to give me Thy Only-Begotten Son to be my Saviour and my Spouse, the infinite treasures of His merits are mine. Gladly do I offer them to Thee, and I beg of Thee to behold me only through the Eyes of Jesus, and in His Heart aflame with love. Moreover, I offer Thee all the merits of the Saints both of Heaven and of earth, together with their acts of love, and those of the holy Angels. Lastly, I offer Thee, O Blessed Trinity, the love and the merits of the Blessed Virgin, my dearest Mother--to her I commit this Oblation, praying her to present it to Thee. During the days of His life on earth her Divine Son, my sweet Spouse, spake these words: "If you ask the Father anything in My Name, He will give it you."[1] Therefore I am certain Thou wilt fulfill my longing. O my God, I know that the more Thou wishest to bestow, the more Thou dost make us desire. In my heart I feel boundless desires, and I confidently beseech Thee to take possession of my soul. I cannot receive Thee in Holy Communion as often as I should wish; but, O Lord, art Thou not all-powerful? Abide in me as Thou dost in the Tabernacle--never abandon Thy Little Victim. I long to console Thee for ungrateful sinners, and I implore Thee to take from me all liberty to sin. If through weakness I should chance to fall, may a glance from Thine Eyes straightway cleanse my soul, and consume all my imperfections--as fire transforms all things into itself. I thank Thee, O my God, for all the graces Thou hast granted me: especially for having purified me in the crucible of suffering. At the Day of Judgment I shall gaze on Thee with joy, as Thou bearest Thy sceptre of the Cross. And since Thou hast deigned to give me this precious Cross as my portion, I hope to be like unto Thee in Paradise and to behold the Sacred Wounds of Thy Passion shine on my glorified body. After earth's exile I trust to possess Thee in the Home of our Father; but I do not seek to lay up treasures in Heaven. I wish to labour for Thy Love alone--with the sole aim of pleasing Thee, of consoling Thy Sacred Heart, and of saving souls who will love Thee through eternity. When comes the evening of life, I shall stand before Thee with empty hands, because I do not ask Thee, my God, to take account of my works. All our works of justice are blemished in Thine Eyes. I wish therefore to be robed with Thine own Justice, and to receive from Thy Love the everlasting gift of Thyself. I desire no other Throne, no other Crown but Thee, O my Beloved! In Thy sight time is naught--"one day is a thousand years."[2] Thou canst in a single instant prepare me to appear before Thee. * * * * * * * In order that my life may be one Act of perfect Love, I offer myself as a Victim of Holocaust to Thy Merciful Love, imploring Thee to consume me unceasingly, and to allow the floods of infinite tenderness gathered up in Thee to overflow into my soul, that so I may become a very martyr of Thy Love, O my God! May this martyrdom, after having prepared me to appear in Thy Presence, free me from this life at the last, and may my soul take its flight--without delay--into the eternal embrace of Thy Merciful Love! * * * * * * * O my Beloved, I desire at every beat of my heart to renew this Oblation an infinite number of times, "till the shadows retire,"[3] and everlastingly I can tell Thee my love face to face. MARY FRANCES TERESA OF THE CHILD JESUS AND OF THE HOLY FACE. The ninth of June, Feast of the Most Blessed Trinity, In the year of grace, 1895. A MORNING PRAYER O my God! I offer Thee all my actions of this day for the intentions and for the glory of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. I desire to sanctify every beat of my heart, my every thought, my simplest works, by uniting them to Its infinite merits; and I wish to make reparation for my sins by casting them into the furnace of Its Merciful Love. O my God! I ask of Thee for myself and for those whom I hold dear, the grace to fulfil perfectly Thy Holy Will, to accept for love of Thee the joys and sorrows of this passing life, so that we may one day be united together in Heaven for all Eternity. Amen. AN ACT OF CONSECRATION TO THE HOLY FACE Written for the Novices O Adorable Face of Jesus, since Thou hast deigned to make special choice of our souls, in order to give Thyself to them, we come to consecrate these souls to Thee. We seem, O Jesus, to hear Thee say: "Open to Me, My Sisters, My Spouses, for My Face is wet with the dew, and My Locks with the drops of the night."[4] Our souls understand Thy language of love; we desire to wipe Thy sweet Face, and to console Thee for the contempt of the wicked. In their eyes Thou art still "as it were hidden . . . they esteem Thee an object of reproach."[5] O Blessed Face, more lovely than the lilies and the roses of the spring, Thou art not hidden from us. The tears which dim Thine Eyes are as precious pearls which we delight to gather, and, through their infinite value, to purchase the souls of our brethren. From Thy Adorable Lips we have heard Thy loving plaint: "I thirst." Since we know that this thirst which consumes Thee is a thirst for love, to quench it we would wish to possess an infinite love. Dear Spouse of our souls, if we could love with the love of all hearts, that love would be Thine. . . . Give us, O Lord, this love! Then come to thy Spouses and satisfy Thy Thirst. And give to us souls, dear Lord . . . We thirst for souls!--Above all for the souls of Apostles and Martyrs . . . that through them we may inflame all poor sinners with love of Thee. O Adorable Face, we shall succeed in winning this grace from Thee! Unmindful of our exile, "by the rivers of Babylon," we will sing in Thine Ears the sweetest of melodies. Since Thou art the true and only Home of our souls, _our songs shall not be sung in a strange land._[6] O Beloved Face of Jesus, while we await the Eternal Day when we shall gaze upon Thine Infinite Glory, our only desire is to delight Thy Divine Eyes by keeping our faces hidden too, so that no one on earth may recognize us . . . Dear Jesus, Heaven for us is Thy Hidden Face! VARIOUS PRAYERS _"If you ask the Father anything in My Name, He will give it you."_-- John 16:23. O Eternal Father, Thy Only-Begotten Son, the dear Child Jesus, belongs to me since Thou hast given Him. I offer Thee the infinite merits of His Divine Childhood, and I beseech Thee in His Name to open the gates of Heaven to a countless host of little ones who will for ever follow this Divine Lamb. _"Just as the King's image is a talisman through which anything may be purchased in his Kingdom, so through My Adorable Face--that priceless coin of my Humanity--you will obtain all you desire."_ Our Lord to Sister Mary of St. Peter.[7] Eternal Father, since Thou hast given me for my inheritance the Adorable Face of Thy Divine Son, I offer that Face to Thee, and I beg Thee, in exchange for this _coin_ of infinite value, to forget the ingratitude of those souls who are consecrated to Thee, and to pardon all poor sinners. PRAYER TO THE HOLY CHILD O Jesus, dear Holy Child, my only treasure, I abandon myself to Thy every whim. I seek no other joy than that of calling forth Thy sweet Smile. Vouchsafe to me the graces and the virtues of Thy Holy Childhood, so that on the day of my birth into Heaven the Angels and Saints may recognise in Thy Spouse: _Teresa of the Child Jesus._ PRAYER TO THE HOLY FACE O Adorable Face of Jesus, sole beauty which ravisheth my heart, vouchsafe to impress on my soul Thy Divine Likeness, so that it may not be possible for Thee to look at Thy Spouse without beholding Thyself. O my Beloved, for love of Thee I am content not to see here on earth the sweetness of Thy Glance, nor to feel the ineffable Kiss of Thy Sacred Lips, but I beg of Thee to inflame me with Thy Love, so that it may consume me quickly, and that soon _Teresa of the Holy Face_ may behold Thy glorious Countenance in Heaven. PRAYER _Inspired by the sight of a statue of The Blessed Joan of Arc_ O Lord God of Hosts, who hast said in Thy Gospel: "I am not come to bring peace but a sword,"[8] arm me for the combat. I burn to do battle for Thy Glory, but I pray Thee to enliven my courage. . . . Then with holy David I shall be able to exclaim: "Thou alone art my shield; it is Thou, O Lord Who teachest my hands to fight."[9] O my Beloved, I know the warfare in which I am to engage; it is not on the open field I shall fight. . . . I am a prisoner held captive by Thy Love; of my own free will I have riveted the fetters which bind me to Thee, and cut me off for ever from the world. My sword is Love! with it--like Joan of Arc--"I will drive the strangers from the land, and I will have Thee proclaimed King"--over the Kingdom of souls. Of a truth Thou hast no need of so weak an instrument as I, but Joan, thy chaste and valiant Spouse, has said: "We must do battle before God gives the victory." O my Jesus! I will do battle, then, for Thy love, until the evening of my life. As Thou didst not will to enjoy rest upon earth, I wish to follow Thy example; and then this promise which came from thy Sacred Lips will be fulfilled in me: "If any man minister to me, let him follow Me, and where I am there also shall My servant be, and . . . him will My Father honour."[10] To be with Thee, to be in Thee, that is my one desire; this promise of fulfilment, which Thou dost give, helps me to bear with my exile as I wait the joyous Eternal Day when I shall see Thee face to face. PRAYER TO OBTAIN HUMILITY _Written for a Novice_ O JESUS! When Thou wast a wayfarer upon earth, Thou didst say:--"Learn of Me, for I am Meek and Humble of Heart, and you shall find rest to your souls."[11] O Almighty King of Heaven! my soul indeed finds rest in seeing Thee condescend to wash the feet of Thy Apostles--"having taken the form of a slave."[12] I recall the words Thou didst utter to teach me the practice of humility: "I have given you an example, that as I have done to you, so you do also. The servant is not greater than his Lord . . . If you know these things, you shall be blessed if you do them."[13] I understand, dear Lord, these words which come from Thy Meek and Humble Heart, and I wish to put them in practice with the help of Thy grace. I desire to humble myself in all sincerity, and to submit my will to that of my Sisters, without ever contradicting them, and without questioning whether they have the right to command. No one, O my Beloved! had that right over Thee, and yet Thou didst obey not only the Blessed Virgin and St. Joseph, but even Thy executioners. And now, in the Holy Eucharist, I see Thee complete Thy self-abasement. O Divine King of Glory, with wondrous humility, Thou dost submit Thyself to all Thy Priests, without any distinction between those who love Thee and those who, alas! are lukewarm or cold in Thy service. They may advance or delay the hour of the Holy Sacrifice: Thou art always ready to come down from Heaven at their call. O my Beloved, under the white Eucharistic Veil Thou dost indeed appear to me Meek and Humble of Heart! To teach me humility, Thou canst not further abase Thyself, and so I wish to respond to Thy Love, by putting myself in the lowest place, by sharing Thy humiliations, so that I may "have part with Thee"[14] in the Kingdom of Heaven. I implore Thee, dear Jesus, to send me a humiliation whensoever I try to set myself above others. And yet, dear Lord, Thou knowest my weakness. Each morning I resolve to be humble, and in the evening I recognise that I have often been guilty of pride. The sight of these faults tempts me to discouragement; yet I know that discouragement is itself but a form of pride. I wish, therefore, O my God, to build all my trust upon Thee. As Thou canst do all things, deign to implant in my soul this virtue which I desire, and to obtain it from Thy Infinite Mercy, I will often say to Thee: "Jesus, Meek and Humble of Heart, make my heart like unto Thine." _____________________________ [1] John 16:23. [2] Ps. 39[40]:4. [3] Cant. 4:6. [4] Cf. Cant. 5:2. [5] Cf. Isa. 53:3. [6] Cf. Ps. 136[137]:4. [7] Sister Mary of St. Peter entered the Carmel of Tours in 1840. Three years later she had the first of a series of revelations concerning devotion to the Holy Face as a means of reparation for blasphemy. See _Life of Léon Papin-Dupont,_ known as "The Holy Man of Tours." [8] Matt. 10:34. [9] Cf. Ps. 143[144]:1, 2. [10] John 12:26. [11] Matt. 11:29. [12] Phil. 2:7. [13] John 13:15-17. [14] Cf. John 13:8. _____________________________ MOTTO OF THE LITTLE FLOWER From St. John of the Cross "LOVE IS REPAID BY LOVE ALONE" _____________________________ "MY DAYS OF GRACE" Birthday . . . . January 2, 1873 Baptism . . . . January 4, 1873 The Smile of Our Lady . May 10, 1883 First Communion . . May 8, 1884 Confirmation . . . June 14, 1884 Conversion. . . . December 25, 1886 Audience with Leo XIII. November 20, 1887 Entry into the Carmel . April 9, 1888 Clothing . . . . January 10, 1889 Profession. . . . September 8, 1890 Taking of the Veil. . September 24, 1890 Act of Oblation . . June 9, 1895 [ENTRY INTO HEAVEN--September 30, 1897] _____________________________ SELECTED POEMS OF SOEUR THÉRÈSE, THE LITTLE FLOWER OF JESUS MY SONG OF TO-DAY Oh! how I love Thee, Jesus! my soul aspires to Thee-- And yet for one day only my simple prayer I pray! Come reign within my heart, smile tenderly on me, To-day, dear Lord, to-day! But if I dare take thought of what the morrow brings, It fills my fickle heart with dreary, dull dismay; I crave, indeed, my God, the Cross and sufferings, But only for to-day! O sweetest Star of Heaven! O Virgin, spotless, blest, Shining with Jesus' light, guiding to Him my way! Mother! beneath thy veil let my tired spirit rest, For this brief passing day! Soon shall I fly afar among the holy choirs, Then shall be mine the joy that knoweth no decay; And then my lips shall sing, to Heaven's angelic lyres, The eternal, glad To-day! June, 1894. MEMORIES Selected Stanzas "I find in my Beloved the mountains, the lonely and wooded vales, the distant isles, the murmur of the waters, the soft whisper of the zephyrs . . . the quiet night with its sister the dawn, the perfect solitude--all that delights and all that fires our love."--St. John of the Cross. I hold full sweet your memory, My childhood days, so glad, so free. To keep my innocence, dear Lord, for Thee, Thy Love came to me night and day, Alway. . . . . . . . I loved the swallows' graceful flight, The turtle doves' low chant at night, The pleasant sound of insects gay and bright, The grassy vale where doth belong Their song. . . . . . . . I loved the glow-worm on the sod; The countless stars, so near to God, But most I loved, in all the sky abroad, The shining moon of silver bright, At night. . . . . . . . The grass is withered in its bed; The flowers within my hands are dead. Would that my weary feet, Jesu! might tread Thy Heavenly Fields, and I might be With Thee! . . . . . . . My rainbow in the rain-washed skies-- Horizon where my suns arise-- My isle in far-off seas--pearl I most prize-- Sweet spring and butterflies--I see In Thee! . . . . . . . In Thee I have the springs, the rills, The mignonette, the daffodils, The Eglantine, the harebell on the hills, The trembling poplar, sighing low And slow. . . . . . . . The lovely lake, the valley fair And lonely in the lambent air, The ocean touched with silver everywhere-- In Thee their treasures, all combined, I find. . . . . . . . I go to chant, with Angel-throngs, The homage that to Thee belongs. Soon let me fly away, to join their songs! Oh, let me die of love, I pray, One day! . . . . . . . I hear, e'en I, Thy last and least, The music from Thy Heavenly Feast; There, deign receive me as Thy loving guest And, to my harp, let me but sing, My King! . . . . . . . Unto the Saints I shall be near, To Mary, and those once treasured here. Life is all past, and dried is every tear; To me my home again is given-- In Heaven. April 28, 1895. I THIRST FOR LOVE In wondrous Love, Thou didst come down from Heaven To immolate Thyself, O Christ, for me; So, in my turn, my love to Thee is given-- I wish to suffer and to die for Thee. Thou, Lord, didst speak this truth benign: "To die for one loved tenderly, Of greatest love on earth is sign"; And now, such love is mine-- Such love for Thee! Do Thou abide with me, O Pilgrim blest! Behind the hill fast sinks the dying day. Helped by Thy Cross, I mount the rocky crest; Oh, come, to guide me on my Heavenward Way. To be like Thee is my desire; Thy Voice finds echo in my soul. Suffering I crave! Thy words of fire Lift me above earth's mire, And sin's control. Chanting Thy victories, gloriously sublime, The Seraphim--all Heaven--cry to me, That even Thou, to conquer sin and crime, Upon this earth a sufferer needs must be. For me upon life's dreary way What scorn, what anguish, Thou didst bear! Let me but hide me day by day, Be least of all, alway, Thy lot to share. Ah, Christ! Thy great example teaches me Myself to humble, honours to despise. A little one--as Thou--I choose to be, Forgetting self, so I may charm Thine Eyes. My peace I find in solitude, Nor ask I more, dear Lord, than this: Be Thou my sole beatitude, And ever--in Thee--renewed My joy, my bliss! Thou, the great God Whom earth and Heaven adore, Thou dwell'st a prisoner for me night and day; And every hour I hear Thy Voice implore: "I thirst--I thirst--I thirst--for love alway!" I, too, Thy prisoner am I; I, too, cry ever unto Thee Thine own divine and tender cry: "I thirst!" Oh, let me die Of love for Thee. For love of Thee I thirst! fulfil my hope; Augment in me Thine own celestial flame! For love of Thee I thirst! too scant earth's scope: The glorious Vision of Thy Face I claim! My long, slow martyrdom of fire Still more and more consumeth me. Thou art my joy, my one desire, Jesu! may I expire Of love for Thee. April 30, 1896. TO SCATTER FLOWERS O Jesus! O my Love! each eve I come to fling My springtide roses sweet before Thy Cross divine; By their plucked petals fair, my hands so gladly bring, I long to dry Thine every tear! To scatter flowers!--that means each sacrifice: My lightest sighs and pains, my heaviest, saddest hours, My hopes, my joys, my prayers--I will not count the price-- Behold my flowers! With deep untold delight Thy beauty fills my soul, Would I might light this love in hearts of all who live! For this, my fairest flowers, all things in my control, How fondly, gladly would I give! To scatter flowers!--behold my chosen sword For saving sinners' souls and filling Heaven's bowers: The victory is mine--yea, I disarm Thee, Lord, With these my flowers! The petals in their flight caress Thy Holy Face; They tell Thee that my heart is Thine, and Thine alone. Thou knowest what these leaves are saying in my place: On me Thou smilest from Thy Throne. To scatter flowers!--that means, to speak of Thee-- My only pleasure here, where tears fill all the hours; But soon, with Angel Hosts, my spirit shall be free To scatter flowers. June 28, 1896. WHY I LOVE THEE, MARY! Last Poem written by Soeur Thérèse Concluding Stanzas Henceforth thy shelter in thy woe was John's most humble dwelling; The son of Zebedee replaced the Son Whom Heaven adored. Naught else the Gospels tell us of thy life, in grace excelling; It is the last they say of thee, sweet Mother of my Lord! But oh! I think that silence means that, high in Heaven's Glory, When time is past, and to their House thy children safe are come, The Eternal Word, my Mother dear, Himself will tell thy story, To charm our souls--thy children's souls--in our Eternal Home. Soon I shall hear that harmony, that blissful, wondrous singing; Soon, unto Heaven that waits for us, my soul shall swiftly fly. O thou who cam'st to smile on me at dawn of life's beginning! Come once again to smile on me . . . Mother! the night is nigh. I fear no more thy majesty, so far removed above me, For I have suffered sore with thee: now hear me, Mother mild! Oh, let me tell thee face to face, dear Mary! how I love thee; And say to thee for evermore: I am Thy little child. May 1897. NOTE.--The above poems are reprinted from the translation of the Little Flower's poems made by Susan L. Emery, of Dorchester, Mass., U.S.A., and published by the Carmel of Boston. [Ed.] 
2139	----	Alvira: The Heroine of Vesuvius by Rev. A. J. O'Reilly, D.D. Introduction The Penitent Saints The interesting and instructive character of this sensational narrative, which we cull from the traditions of a past generation, must cover the shortcomings of the pen that has labored to present it in an English dress. We are aware that the propriety of drawing from the oblivion of forgotten literature such a story will be questioned. The decay of the chivalrous spirit of the middle ages, and the prudish, puritanical code of morality that has superseded the simple manners of our forefathers, render it hazardous to cast into the hands of the present generation the thrilling records of sin and repentance such as they were seen and recorded in days gone by. Yet in the midst of a literature professedly false, and which paints in fascinating colors the various phases of unrepented vice and crime, without the redeeming shadows of honor and Christian morality, our little volume must fall a welcome sunbeam. The strange career of our heroine constitutes a sensational biography charming and beautiful in the moral it presents. The evils of mixed marriages, of secret societies, of intemperance, and the indulgence of self-love in ardent and enthusiastic youth, find here the record of their fatal influence on social life, reflected through the medium of historical facts. Therefore we present to the young a chapter of warning--a tale of the past with a deep moral for the present. The circumstances of our tale are extraordinary. A young girl dresses in male attire, murders her father, becomes an officer in the army, goes through the horrors of battle, and dies a SAINT. Truly we have here matter sensational enough for the most exacting novelist; but we disclaim all effort to play upon the passions, or add another work of fiction to the mass of irreligious trash so powerful in the employ of the evil one for the seduction of youth. In the varied scenes of life there are many actions influenced by secret motives known only to the heart that harbors them. Not all are dishonorable. It takes a great deal of guilt to make a person as black as he is painted by his enemies. Many a brave heart has, under the garb of an impropriety, accomplished heroic acts of self-denial. History is teeming with instances where the love of creatures, and even the holier and more sublime love of the Creator, have, in moments of enthusiasm, induced tender females to forget the weakness of their sex and successfully fulfil the spheres of manhood. These scenes, so censurable, are extraordinary more from the rarity of their occurrence than from the motives that inspire them, and thus our tale draws much of its thrilling interest from the unique character of its details. "But what a saint!" we fancy we hear whispered by the fastidious and scrupulous into whose hand our little work may fall. Inadvertently the thought will find a similar expression from the superficial reader; but if we consider a little, our heroine presents a career not more extraordinary than those that excite our surprise in the lives of the penitent saints venerated on the alters of the Church. Sanctity is not to be judged by antecedents. The soul crimsoned with guilt may, in the crucible of repentance, become white like the crystal snow before it touches the earth. This consoling thought is not a mere assertion, but a matter of faith confirmed by fact. There are as great names among the penitent saints of the Church as amongst the few brilliant stars whose baptismal innocence was never dimmed by any cloud. Advance the rule that the early excesses of the penitent stains must debar them from the esteem their heroic repentance has won; then we must tear to pieces the consoling volumes of hagiology, we must drag down Paul, Peter, Augustine, Jerome, Magdalen, and a host of illustrious penitents from their thrones amongst the galaxy of the elect, and cast the thrilling records of their repentance into the oblivion their early career would seem to merit. If we are to have no saints but those of whom it is testified they never did a wrong act, then the catalogue of sanctity will be reduced to baptized infants who died before coming to the use of reason, and a few favored adults who could be counted on the fingers. Is it not rather the spirit and practice of the Church to propose to her erring children the heroic example of souls who passed through the storms and trials of life, who had the same weaknesses to contend with, the same enemies to combat, as they have, whose triumph is her glory and her crown? The Catholic Church, which has so successfully promoted the civilization of society and the moral regeneration of nations, achieved her triumph by the conversion of those she first drew from darkness. Placed as lights on the rocks of eternity, and shining on us who are yet tossed about on the stormy seas of time, the penitent saints serve us as saving beacons to guide our course during the tempest. Many a feeble soul would have suffered shipwreck had it not taken refuge near those tutelary towers where are suspended the memorial deeds of the sainted heroes whose armor was sackcloth, whose watchword the sigh of repentance poured out in the lonely midnight. While Augustine was struggling with the attractions of the world which had seduced his warm African heart, whose gilded chains seemed once so light, he animated himself to Christian courage by the examples of virtue which he had seen crowned in the Church triumphant. "Canst thou not do," he said to himself, "what these have done? Timid youths and tender maidens have abandoned the deceitful joys of time for the imperishable goods of eternity; canst thou not do likewise? Were these lions, and art thou a timid deer?" Thus this illustrious penitent, who was one of the brightest lights of Christianity, has made known to us the triumph he gained in his internal struggles by the examples of his predecessors in the brave band of penitents who shed a luminous ray on the pitchy darkness of his path. The life of St. Anthony, written by St. Athanasius, produced such a sensation in the Christian world that the desolate caverns of Thebias were not able to receive all who wished to imitate that holy solitary. Roman matrons were then seen to create for themselves a solitude in the heart of their luxurious capital; offices of the palace, bedizened in purple and gold, deserted the court, amid the rejoicings of a festival, for the date-tree and the brackish rivulets of Upper Egypt! Where, then, our error in drawing from the archives of the past another beautiful and thrilling tale of repentance which may fall with cheerful rays of encouragement on the soul engaged in the fierce combat with self? To us the simple, touching story of Alvira has brought a charm and a balm. Seeking to impart to others its interest, its amusement, and its moral, we cast it afloat on the sea of literature, to meet, probably, a premature grave in this age of irreligion and presumptuous denial of the necessities of penance. Contents Chapter I. Page Paris One Hundred and Fifty Years Ago . . . . . . 5 Chapter II. The Usurer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Chapter III. A Mixed Marriage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 Chapter IV. A Youth Trained in the Way he should Walk . . . . 18 Chapter V. Our Heroines . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 Chapter VI. A Secret Revealed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 Chapter VII. Tears on Earth, Joy in Heaven . . . . . . . . . . 42 Chapter VIII. Madeleine's Happy Death . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48 Chapter IX. One Abyss Invokes Another . . . . . . . . . . . . 52 Chapter X. On the Trail . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57 Chapter XI. The Flight . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62 Chapter XII. Geneva . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71 Chapter XIII. The Secret Societies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75 Chapter XIV. The Freemason's Home . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89 Chapter XV. Tragedy in the Mountains . . . . . . . . . . . . 96 Chapter XVI. A Funeral in the Snow . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110 Chapter XVII. An Unwritten Page . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115 Chapter XVIII. In Uniform . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125 Chapter XIX. Remorse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131 Chapter XX. Naples . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141 Chapter XXI. Engagement with Brigands . . . . . . . . . . . . 147 Chapter XXII. The Morning After the Battle . . . . . . . . . . 156 Chapter XXIII. Return--A Triumph . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161 Chapter XXIV. Alvira's Confession . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165 Chapter XXV. Honor Saved . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183 Chapter XXVI. Repentance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 190 Chapter XXVII. The Privileges of Holy Souls . . . . . . . . . . 199 Chapter XXVIII. A Vision of Purgatory--A Dear One Saved . . . . . 202 Chapter XXIX. Unexpected Meeting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207 Chapter XXX. Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 214 Chapter I. Paris One Hundred and Fifty Years Ago. "Paris is on fire!" "The Tuileries burnt!" "The Hotel de Ville in ashes!" There are few who do not remember how the world was electrified with the telegrams that a few years ago announced the destruction of the French capital. It was the tragic finale of a disastrous war between rival nations; yet the flames were not sent on high to the neutral heavens to be the beacon of triumph and revenge of a conquering army, but set on fire by its own people, who, in a fanaticism unequalled in the history of nations would see their beautiful city a heap of ashes rather than a flourishing capital in the power of its rightful rulers. Fast were the devouring elements leaping through the palaces and superb public buildings of the city; the petroleum flames were ascending from basement to roof; streets were in sheets of fire; the charred beams were breaking; the walls fell with thundering crash--the empress city was indeed on fire. Like the winds unchained by the storm-god, the passions of men marked their accursed sweep over the fairest city of Europe in torrents of human blood and the wreck of material grandeur. Those who have visited the superb queen of cities as she once flourished in our days could not, even in imagination, grasp the contrast between Paris of the present and the Paris of two hundred years ago. With a power more destructive than the petroleum of the Commune, we must, in though, sweep away the Tuileries, the boulevards, the Opera-House and superb buildings that surround the Champs Elysees; on their sites we must build old, tottering, ill-shaped houses, six and seven stories high, confining narrow and dirty streets that wind in lanes and alleys into serpentine labyrinths, reeking with filthy odors and noxious vapors. Fill those narrow streets with a lazy, ill-clad people--men in short skirts and clogs, squatting on the steps of antiquated cafes, smoking canes steeped in opium, awaiting the beck of some political firebrand to tear each other to pieces--and in this description you place before the mind's eye the city some writers have painted as the Paris of two hundred years ago. But the old city has passed away. Like the fabulous creations we have read of in the tales of childhood, palaces, temples, boulevards, and theatres have sprung up on the site of the antiquated and labyrinthine city. Under the dynasty of the Napoleons the capital was rebuilt with lavish magnificence. Accustomed to gaze on the splendor of the sun, we seldom advert to its real magnificence in our universe; but pour its golden flood on the sightless eyeball, and all language would fail to tell the impression upon the paralyzed soul. Thus, in a minor degree, the emigrant from the southern seas who has been for years amongst the cabins on the outskirts of uncultivated plains, where cities were built of huts, where spireless churches of thatched roof served for the basilicas of divine worship, and where public justice was administered under canvas, is startled and delighted with the refinement and civilization of his more favored fellow-mortal who lives in the French capital. Paris has been rudely disfigured in the fury of her Communist storm; yet, in the invincible energy of the French character, the people who paid to the conquering nation in fifteen months nine milliards of francs will restore the broken ornaments of the empress city. From the smoking walls and unsightly ruins of bureaux and palaces that wring a tear from the patriot, France will see life restored to the emblem of her greatness, the phoenix-like, will rise on the horizon of time to claim for the future generation her position among the first-rate powers of Europe. To the old city we must wend our way in thought. Crossing the venerable bridge at Notre Dame, we enter at once the Rue de Seine, where we pause before the bank and residence of Cassier. Chapter II. The Usurer. At a desk in the office we observe a lowsized, whiskered man. Intelligence beams from a lofty brow; sharp features an aquiline nose tell of Jewish character; his eye glistens and dulls as the heaving heart throbs with its tides of joy and sorrow. Speculation, that glides at times into golden dreams, brightens his whole features with a sunbeam of joy; but suddenly it is clouded. Some unseen intruder casts a baneful shadow on the ungrasped prize; the features of the usurer contract, the hand is clenched, the brow is wrinkled, and woe betide the luckless debtor whose misfortunes would lead him to the banker's bureau during the eclipse of his good-humor! Cassier was a banker by name, but in reality dealt in usurious loans, Shylock-like wringing the pound of flesh from the victims of his avarice. He was known and dreaded by all the honest tradesmen of the city; the curse of the orphan and the widow, whom he unfeelingly drove into the streets, followed in his path; the children stopped their games and hid until he passed. That repulsive character which haunts the evil-doers of society marked the aged banker as an object of dread and scorn to his immediate neighbors. In religion Cassier at first strongly advocated the principles of Lutheranism; but, as is ever the case with those set adrift on the sea of doubt, freed from the anchor of faith, the definite character of his belief was shipwrecked in a confusion of ideas. At length he lapsed into the negative deism of the French infidels, just then commencing to gain ground in France. He joined them, too, in open blasphemies against God and plotting against the stability of the Government. The blood chills at reading some of the awful oaths administered to the partisans of those secret societies. They proposed to war against God, to sweep away all salutary checks against the indulgence of passion, to level the alter and the throne, and advocated the claims of those impious theories that in modern times have found their fullest development in Mormonism and Communism. Further on we shall find this noxious weed, that flourishes in the vineyards whose hedges are broken down, producing its poisonous fruit. But it was at this period of our history that he became a frequent attendant at their reunions, returning at midnight, half intoxicated, to pour into the horrified ears of his wife and children the issue of the last blasphemous and revolutionary debate that marked the progress and development of their impious tendencies. No wonder Heaven sent on the Cassier family the curse that forms the thrill of our tragic memoir. Chapter III. A Mixed Marriage. The Catholic Church has placed restrictions on unions that are not blessed by Heaven. Benedict XIV. has called them DETESTABLE. A sad experience has proved the wisdom of the warning. When the love that has existed in the blinding fervor of passion has subsided into the realities of every-day life, the bond of nuptial duty will be religion. But the conflict of religious sentiment produces a divided camp. The offspring must of necessity be of negative faith. When intelligence dawns on the young soul, its first reasoning powers are caught in a dilemma. Reverential and filial awe chains the child to the father and chains it to the mother; but the father may sternly command the Methodist chapel for Sunday service; the mother will wish to see her little one worship before the alters of the Church. Fear or love wins the trusting child, but neither gains a sincere believer. See that young mother, silent and fretful; the rouge that grief gives the moistened eye tells its own tale of secret weeping. Trusting, confiding in the power of young love, attracted by the wealth, the family, or the manners of her suitor, she allows the indissoluble tie to bind her in unholy wedlock. Soon the faith she has trifled with assumes its mastery in her repentant heart, but liberty is gone; for the dream of conjugal bliss which dazzled when making her choice, she finds herself plunged for life into the most galling and irremediable of human sorrows--secret domestic persecution. Few brave the trial; the largest number go with the current to the greater evil of apostasy. Cassier loved a beautiful Catholic girl named Madeleine. Blinded by the stronger passion, he waived religious prejudice. He wooed, he promised, he won. The timid Madeleine, beneath her rich suitor in position, dazzled by wealth, and decoyed by the fair promises that so often deceive the confiding character of girlhood, gave her hand and her heart to a destiny she soon learned to lament. Fancy had built castles of future enjoyment; dress, ornament, and society waved their fascinating wings over her path. Unacquainted with their shadowy pleasures, her preparations for her nuptials were a dream of joy, too soon to be blasted with the realities of suffering that characterize the union not blessed by Heaven. Amid the music and flowers, amid the congratulations of a thousand admiring friends, with heart and step as light as childhood, Madeleine, like victims, dressed in flowers and gold, led to the alter of Jupiter in the Capitol of old, was conducted from the bridal alter to the sacrifice of her future joy. Story oft told in the vicissitudes of betrayed innocence and in the fate of those who build their happiness in the castles of fancy: like the brilliancy of sunset her moment of pleasure faded; the novelty and tinsel of her gilded home lost their charm, and the virtue of her childhood was wrecked on golden rocks. She no longer went to daily Mass; her visits to the convent became less frequent, her dress lighter; her conversation, toned by the ideas of pride and self-love reflected from the society she moved in, was profane and irreligious; and soon the roses of Christian virtue that bloom in the cheek of innocent maidenhood became sick and withered in the heated, feverish air of perverse influences that tainted her gilded home. Sixteen years of sorrow and repentance had passed over Madeleine, and found her, at the commencement of our narrative, the victim of consumption and internal anguish, the more keen because the more secret. The outward world believed her happy; many silly maidens, in moments of vanity, deemed they could have gained heaven if they were possessed of Madeleine's wealth, her jewels, her carriages, her dresses; but were the veils that shroud the hypocrisy of human joy raised for the warning of the uninitiated, many a noble heart like Madeleine's would show the blight of disappointment, with the thorns thick and sharp under the flowers that are strewn on their path. The sympathy of manhood, ever flung over the couch of suffering beauty, must hover in sighs of regret over the ill-fated Madeleine, whose discolored eye and attenuated form, whose pallid cheek, furrowed by incessant tears, told the wreck of a beautiful girl sinking to an early tomb. Her children--three in number--cause her deepest anxiety; they are the heroes of our tale, and must at once be introduced to the reader. Chapter IV. A Youth Trained in the Way He Should Walk. To-morrow-- 'Tis a period nowhere to be found In all the hoary registers of time, Unless, perchance, in the fool's calendar. Wisdom disdains the word, nor holds society With those who own it. 'Tis Fancy's child, and Folly is its father; Wrought of such stuff as dreams are, and as baseless As the fantastic visions of the evening. --Coulton. Like one of those rare and beautiful flowers found on the mountain-side in fellowship with plants of inferior beauty, the heir of the Cassier family is a strange exception of heroic virtue in the midst of a school of seduction. The saints were never exotics in their own circle. Their early histories are filled with sad records confirming the prophecy of our blessed Lord: "The world will hate you because it loves not me." The student of hagiology recalls with a sight the touching fate of a Dympna who was the martyred victim of a father's impiety; of a Stanislaus pursued by brothers who thirsted for his blood; of a Damian who nearly starved under his stepfather's cruelty; of martyrs led to the criminal stone for decapitation by inhuman parents. Louis Marie, the eldest of Cassier's children, was of a naturally good disposition. Through the solicitations of his mother and the guidance of an unseen Providence that watched over his youth, he was early sent to the care of the Jesuits. Under the direction of the holy and sainted members of this order he soon gave hope of a religious and virtuous manhood. Away from the scoffs of an unbelieving father and the weakening seductions of pleasure, he opened his generous soul to those salutary impressions of virtue which draw the soul to God and enable it to despise the frivolities of life. The vacation, to other youths a time of pleasure, to Louis was tedious. Though passionately attached to his mother, yet the impious and often blasphemous remarks of his father chilled his heart; the levity with which his sisters ridiculed his piety was very disagreeable; hence, under the guidance of a supernatural call to grace, he longed to be back with the kind fathers, where the quiet joys of study and solitude far outweighed the short-lived excitement called pleasure by his worldly sisters. This religious tendency found at last its consummation in an act of heroic self-denial which leads us to scenes of touching interest on the threshold of this extraordinary historical drama. At the time our narrative commences Louis was seriously meditating his flight from home and the world to bury himself in some cloister of religion. His studies of philosophy and history had convinced him of the immortality of the soul and the vanity of all human greatness. In his frequent meditations he became more and more attracted towards the only lasting, imperishable Good which the soul will one day find in its possession. "Made for God!" he would say to himself, "my soul is borne with an impetuous impulse towards him; like the dove sent from the ark, it floats over the vast waters, and seeks in vain a resting place for its wearied wing; it must return again to the ark." The history of the great ones of the world produced a deep impression on Louis' mind. Emblazoned on the annals of the past he read the names of great men who played their part for a brief hour on the stage of life. They grasped for a moment the gilded bubble of wealth, of glory, and power; but scarcely had they raised the cup of joy to their lips when it was dashed from them by some stroke of misfortune or death. The pageant of pride, the tinsel of glory, were not more lasting than the fantastic castles that are built in the luminous clouds that hang around the sunset. At college Louis was called on with his companions to write a thesis on the downfall of Marius. Nothing more congenial to his convictions or more encouraging to the deep resolution growing in his heart could be selected. The picture he drew from the sad history of the conqueror of the Cimbri was long remembered among his school companions. Marius was seven times Consul of Rome; in the hapless day of his ascendancy he threatened to stain three-fourths of the empire with human blood. Blasted in his golden dream of ambition, driven into exile by victorious enemies, he was cast by a storm on the shores of Africa, homeless and friendless; in cold and hunger he sought shelter amidst the ruins of Carthage. Carthage, whose fallen towers lay in crumbling masses around him, was once the rival city of imperial Rome herself, and, under the able leadership of Hannibal, threatened to wrest from the queen of the Seven Hills the rule of the world. Now its streets are covered with grass; the wild scream of the bird of solitude and the moanings of the night-owl mingle with the sobs of a fallen demigod who once made the earth shake under his tyranny. Louis read of the facts and sayings that doled out the sad tale of disappointment felt by those who seemed to possess all that the wildest ambition could dream of. "Yesterday the world was not large enough for him," said a sage on the death of Alexander the Great; "to-day he is content with six feet of earth." "What a miserable tomb is erected to the man that once had temples erected to his honor!" sighed a philosopher on viewing a mean monument on the sea-shore erected to the great Pompey, who could raise armies by stamping his feet. "This is all the great Saladin brings to the grave," was announced by a courier who carried the great ruler's winding-sheet before him to the grave. "Would I had been a poor lay brother," cried out the dying Philip II. of Spain, "washing the plates in some obscure monastery, rather than have borne the crown of Spain!" That which took most effect on the mind of Louis was the eloquence of Ignatius when he met the young Xavier in the streets of Paris. "And then?" asked by another saint of an ambitious youth, did not lose its force with the holy youth who found himself, by some freak of blind fortune heir to one of the millionaires of the French Capital. Louis, like St. Ignatius, would often stray to a shady corner of the garden, and there, with eyes fixed on the blue vault of heaven, he would sigh: "Oh! quam sordet tellus dum coelum aspicio"--"How vile is earth whilst I look on heaven!" One evening Louis had wandered into the garden to give full vent to a flood of thought that urged him on to give immediate answer to the calls of grace. God was pleased to pour additional light on his soul; and grace urged the immediate execution of his generous resolutions. That very morning the angry temper of his father and the bitter sarcasms against the faith Louis loved had embittered everything around his home. In tears, but with the fearless ABANDON of the true call, he resolved to quit his father's home that very night, and to break his purpose to his mother. She was the only one he really loved, and in wounding her tender heart was the hardest part of the sacrifice. In filial deference he prepared his mind to break the matter to his kind-hearted mother as gently as he could. He would submit the resolution to our Blessed Lord in the most Holy Sacrament. Whilst going out to the venerable church of Notre Dame, a beautiful caleche is at the door, and two young girls, dressed in extravagant richness, are hurrying off to the fashionable rendezvous of the city; mildly refusing the invitation to accompany them, he hastens to accomplish the vows he has just taken before the altar. Leaving Louis to his devotions, we pause to catch a glimpse of the lovely girls who see happiness in another but less successful manner. The reader must know those interesting children bursting like fragrant flowers into the bloom of their maidenhood; they are the sisters of Louis, Alvira and Aloysia. Read those traits of innocence, of character, of future promise; treasure the beautiful picture for future reference; they are the heroines of our story. Chapter V. Our Heroines. Alvira was tall for her age; she had a graceful, majestic carriage, and, although eminently handsome, there was a something in the tone of her voice and in the impression of her features that reflected a masculine firmness. Accomplished and intelligent, gay in society, and affable to all, she was a general favorite amongst her school companions. Yet she was at times of violent temper, and deep in the recesses of her heart there lurked the germs of the strongest passions. These passions, like lentils, grew with time and crept around that heart, until they concealed the noble trunk they clung to and made it their own. Alvira was often crimsoned with the blush of passion; a gentle rebuke or a contradiction was sufficient to fire the hidden mine and send to the countenance the flash of haughty indignation. Whilst yet in her maidenhood she longed for distinction. Fame leaped before her ardent imagination as a gilded bubble she loved to grasp. Tales of knight-errantry and chivalry were always in her hands, and bore their noxious fruit in the wild dreams of ambition they fired in the girl's mind. Often, when alone with her sister, with book closed in her hand and eye fixed on some article of furniture, her thoughts would be away winning crowns of fame on battle-fields of her own creation, urging on gallant knights to deeds of bravery, or arranging with humbled foes the terms of peace. She would start from her reverie with a sigh that told of the imprisonment of a bold, ambitious spirit that felt itself destined to wield a needle rather than a sword. Aloysia is a sweet, blooming girl of fourteen. It often happens that fruits borne on the same stem are different in color and taste; so these two sisters were different in personal appearance and character. Nature seems to have presided in a special manner over the moulding of Aloysia's exquisite frame. The symmetry of her person, hand and foot of charming delicacy, azure eye and rosy cheek, garlanded with nature's golden tresses, and the sweet expression of innocence in her features, would suggest her at once as a model for one of Raphael's Madonnas. Her disposition, too, comported with the beauty of her person. She loved retirement, and read only books of the noblest sentiment. The poets were familiar to her; she copied and committed to memory the passages of exquisite beauty. There was one feature in her character which bore a marked influence on her future destinies: it was her love for her sister. We do not believe at all times in the genuineness of brotherly or sisterly love. Perhaps familiarity has deadened its keenness. Like the appreciation of the sunlight which rushes with thrilling force on the victim of blindness, separation or misfortune may rouse the dormant affection and prove its nobility and its power; but in our experience manifest fraternal charity is one of those things even the wise man knew to be rare under the sun. Where we have been privileged to look in behind the veil of the family circle, we are more convinced than ever that fraternal affection an all the boasted nobility of sisterly love dwindle down to a series of petty quarrels and jealousies as painful as they are unchristian and unbecoming. The reserve, or rather the hypocrisy of politeness, put on before strangers, is no criterion of the inward domestic life. Some one has said of ladies, "A point yielded or a pardon begged in public means so many hair-pullings behind the scenes." But this is too sweeping; there are noble, glorious exceptions in families where religion reigns, where fraternal charity finds a congenial soil; for it blooms in the fragrance of the other virtues, and is the first characteristic of a pious family. The world around are told to look for this as a sign by which they are to recognize the disciples of Him who loved so much. Aloysia, in a true, genuine feeling of love, was bound in adamantine chains to her sister. Time and fortune, that shatter all human institutions and prove human feelings, consolidated the union of their hearts and their destinies. A stranger on stronger proof of the influence of sisterly affection could not be adduced; it dragged the beautiful, blushing Aloysia from the sphere of girlhood, to follow in the track of hypocrisy and of bloodshed so desperately trodden by her brave sister. Our tale opens when the two girls had finished their education and were living in luxury and enjoyment. The days and hours passed merrily by. They would read in the shade, play and sing on the harp, would paint or work at wool, and in the afternoon, when the burning sun had left the world to the shade of evening, they would drive out in a magnificent attelage to the fashionable rendezvous of Paris. Dream too bright to last! On the horizon is gathering the dark cloud that will dim the sunlight of their bliss, and cause them, in the dark and trying hour of trouble, to look back with the sigh of regret over the brilliant hours of youthful enjoyment. Chapter VI. A Secret Revealed. I thought to pass away before, and yet alive I am; And in the fields all round I hear the bleating of the lamb. How sadly, I remember, rose the morning of the year! To die before the snow-drop came, and now the violet's here. Oh! sweet is the new violet that comes beneath the skies And sweeter is the young lamb's voice to me that cannot rise; And sweet is all the land about, and all the flowers that blow; And sweeter far is death than life to me that long to go. --Tennyson. It was a bright, cheerful morning in June. The sinking, feeble Madeleine had requested her domestics to carry her to the conservatory, that she might gaze again on the flowers that were soon to blossom on her grave. Death had lingered in his approach. The gay, the ambitious, and healthy he had taken all too soon; but for Madeleine, WHO LONGED TO GO, he tarried. Her little violets had already given their first fragrant kiss to breezes that passed with no mournful cadence through the cypresses of the lonely cemetery. Crumbling in her hand a faded rose, she breathed the thought so beautifully versified in after-times by the immortal bard of Erin: So soon may I follow When friendships decay, And from love's shining circle The gems drop away. When true hearts lie withered And fond ones are flown, Oh! who would inhabit This bleak world alone? The sentiment was prophetic: other flowers of affection will be withered by the vicissitudes of destiny; fond ones will flee, leaving the world a wilderness for her last hours! It often happens in the course of life that we are driven by some inexplicable fatality to suffer those very afflictions we dread the most. We are told of persons who trembled for a lifetime at the horrid anticipation of being one day mad; it was the shadow of the judgement that was creeping on them, which cast them finally amongst the victims of the lunatic asylum. The suicide is the prophet of his own doom; the presentiment of death by drowning has but too often ended in a watery grave. Perhaps where the fibres of the heart are weakest, the strain brought on them by excited fancy snaps them in the misfortune that is dreaded; or perhaps some unseen spirit, charged with the decree of our individual sorrow, casts the dark shadow of his wing over our thoughts, and communicates the gloomy foreboding of a presentiment. They dying mother had one of these heart-tearing presentiments, so frequent and so mysterious in the history of human suffering. She was guilty of a species of maternal idolatry; centered in her child Louis Marie as rays gathered up into a focus, were all her hopes, her aspirations, her ideas of the future. If she could be assured she would live to see her son leading the armies of the empire, ruling in the cabinets of state or worshipped in the circles of the great and learned, Heaven itself could not build up a greater joy in the limited horizon of her hopes; but an awful conviction crept over her that some misfortune would tear from her the object of her love like the fruit torn from the stem, like the young branch from the oak. In dreams she saw him struggling in the torrent which bore him away, or dragged to the hills at the feet of a wild horse. More than once she saw him on board a Government vessel, sailing with the hapless children of guilt to the convict settlements of southern seas--not as a felon, but an angel of light amongst the condemned.' Whilst Madeleine was sitting in the conservatory, musing over the gloomy anticipations her dreams had cast over her thoughts, Louis Marie came towards her. A beam of joy lit up her hectic cheek; she impressed a kiss on the forehead of her darling son, and playfully reproved him for the dreams that gave her so much trouble. "Mother," we fancy we hear Louis reply, "you would not surely give much credence to the imaginary evils of a dream. You know nothing can happen to us except by the arrangement of God; not even a hair can fall to the ground without his permission. I remember in college I was very much delighted with a thesis one of the fathers gave us on the Providence of God; it was so strange and so consoling to think that great Being who created so many millions of worlds, and keeps them flying around him with immense velocity, could occupy himself with us human beings, who are no more than insects moving on this world, which is but a speck in the immensity of the universe. But I know how it is--our souls are immortal, and hence we must soar higher than the countless worlds, were they ten times as great. Our blessed Lord, by coming amongst us and dying to save those souls, showed us that he thought more of us than of the bird of the air or the lily of the field, clothed in such charming magnificence. Is it unreasonable that, since he has given to each star a course, to each lily and each bird a time and a clime, he should also determine for us the course we should follow for his greater glory? And what, mother, if some unseen, invisible destiny should really call me away; if it were for the glory of God and the salvation of souls, would you not rejoice?" Madeleine paused for a moment before venturing a reply. She trembled; a struggle between affection and duty passed within. Pleased with the rich flow of virtuous sentiment that made her still more proud of her child, she had caught the end of a golden thread and wished to unravel it further, but feared it would be snapped by some unpleasant discovery. Full of excitement, and her eyes filled with a penetrating, enquiring gaze upon Louis, she answered: "Louis, I should be false to the lessons I have endeavored to teach you in these last fleeting hours of my ill-spent life, were I not to rejoice in any destiny that would wrap up your future career in the glory of God; but I fear the enthusiasm of your young heart will misguide you. I know, from the serious tone of your voice and look in asking that question, you have been feeling your way to make some crushing disclosure. I saw you crying in the garden this afternoon, and for some time past I have noticed a cloud of anxiety hanging over you. I had determined the first moment we were alone to know the cause of this trouble; and I now conjure you, by the affection and duty which you owe me as your mother, to let me share in your anxieties and in your councils." Louis had really come to broach the terrible secret to his mother, but he had not yet courage; he struggled manfully to suppress internal motions that might at any moment, like sullen rivers, overflow and betray their existence in a flood of tears. Fearing to venture suddenly on the subject that was fullest in his heart, he partly evaded his mother's energetic appeal, and made such a reply as would elicit from her quick perception the declaration that trembled on his lips. "If war were declared with our frontier foes, and our beloved King commanded the youth of the country to gird on the sword for our national defence, you, mother, would help me to buckle on mine?" "Yes, Louis, I would give you proudly to the cause of France," continued Madeleine, feigning a patriotism she scarcely felt. "But, thanks be to God, I am not called on now to claim an honor that is at best a sacrifice and a calamity." "But, mother, the war is declared, and I am to be a soldier in a sacred cause." "How!" cried Madeleine excitedly. "Are the followers of the Black Prince again attacking us? The Turks seeking revenge for the defeat of Lepanto? or Christian Spain still intoxicated with its own dream of ambition? Whence come the sound of arms, Louis, to fire thy young ambition? If I judge rightly, thy disposition leads thee more to the cloister than to the battle-field." "'Tis so," replied Louis, who had adroitly brought the conversation to the subject that occupied his thoughts, and to the announcement that would ring with such thrill on his mother's ears. "And I am going to join a religious community immediately, to become a soldier in the great war of right against wrong--of this world against the next. To this war the trumpet-calls of grace have summoned me, and I come to ask the mother who would give me to the cause of my country to do the same for Almighty God." A step was heard outside. Louis glided into the garden, and Madeleine was again found by her husband buried in tears. Chapter VII. Tears on Earth, Joy in Heaven. Madeleine, with all the keenness of her maternal heart, had caught the drift of Louis' mind, and felt the disclosure before it was made. A rough, rude remark from Cassier, and he left her to the silence and reflection she then vehemently desired. Reflection, in bringing before her a beautiful but sad picture, crumbled before her mental vision the castles that her affection and her hopes had built on the shadowy basis of Louis' future temporal glory. She felt, however, from the inspiration of faith a feeling of spiritual joy that he was called to the higher destiny of a favorite of Heaven. Had the fire of divine love glowed more fervently in her heart, she would feel the joy of ecstasy, such as consoled the death-bled of the mothers of the saints when the revelation of the sanctity of their children was the last crown of earthly joy. Anticipating the privilege the fond maternal heart would fain claim even in the kingdom free from all care, Madeleine often found herself contemplating her son fighting the brave fight, winning crown upon crown, and virtue flinging around him a shield more impenetrable than the fabulous Aegis of pagan mythology. In the flippant boastings of Christian mothers there are many who pretend they have the fire of faith and divine love like the brave Machabean woman; but when the sore hour of real separation comes, the soft, loving heart bends and weeps. Nature, corrupt nature, resists the arrangements of God, and nature triumphs in the maternal tie. The spirit of Madeleine had made the sacrifice of her son, but the rude hand of nature swept the fibres of her heart and tore them asunder. Night has gathered around the house of Cassier. Sleep has brought the silence of the tomb on the inmates. One alone is awake; gentle sobs tell of a heart struggling with its own desires, but a faint ray of moonlight shows him seeking strength on his knees before a crucifix. Guide him, ye angels, in the sublime destiny to which Heaven calls! Treasure up those tears of affection; they are pearls for a crown in eternity! A long, farewell look at the old homestead, and Louis has fled. In the night, when all were asleep, he stole down-stairs and into the silent street. The moon brightened the tears of his farewell; only his guardian angel saw to register for his eternal crown, the inward struggle in which he had trampled on every tie of affection and pleasure. Disappearing in the narrow streets, he disappears also from the pages of our narrative until, in the extraordinary vicissitudes of time, he makes his appearance again in a scene both touching and edifying. The morning dawn revealed the broken circle, the vacant chair in the family. Cassier was confused. Whilst others wept he moved about in deep thought. Stoic in his feelings and hardened in sympathies, he still felt all the tender anxieties of an affectionate parent. There are moments in the career of even the greatest sinners when sleeping conscience is roused to remorse. The shock the old man received in the loss of his amiable child opened his eyes to the unhappy state of his own soul; every act of ridicule he cast on the religious tendencies of Louis became arrows of memory to sting him with regret. But these were transient moments of a better light. As meteors, darting across the sky, illumine for a few seconds the dark vault of heaven, and in the sudden exit of their brilliant flash seem to leave greater darkness in the night, thus the impulses of grace shot across the soul of Cassier; he struggled in the grasp of an unseen power, but suddenly lapsed into the awful callousness which characterizes the relapses of confirmed guilt; he pretended to smile at his weakness, and found a sorry relief in cursing and scoffing at everything the virtuous love. Yet he offered immense rewards for information that would bring him in presence of the boy whose form he loved, but whose virtue he despised. Like the pagan persecutors of old, he vainly hoped, by fear or the tinsel of gold, to win back to the world and sin the magnanimous youth who had broken through the stronger argument of a mother's tears. Messengers were dispatched in every direction; the police scoured the roads for miles outside the city; friends and acquaintances were warned not to harbor the truant. A week passed, and no cheerful tidings came to lessen the gloom of bereavement. That Providence which made Louis a vessel of election had covered him with its protective shield, and bore him like a vessel under propitious winds to the port of his destination. In all the soft tenderness of girlhood the two sisters lamented their absconding brother. They, too, had been unkind to him. The sweet, patient smile that ever met their taunts, the mild reproof when they concealed his beads or prayer-book, his willingness to oblige on all occasions, were remembered with tears. When sitting by the mother's bed, the conversation invariably turned on Louis. In cruel fancy they deepened the real sorrow of separation by casting imaginary misfortunes on the track of the absent boy. One would sigh with the ominous PERHAPS. "Poor Louis is now hungry!" "Perhaps he is now lying sick and footsore on the side of some highway, without a friend, without money." "Perhaps he has fallen in with robbers and is stripped of the few articles of dress he took with him." "Perhaps he is now sorry for leaving us," sighed the tender-hearted Aloysia, "and would give the world to kiss again his poor sick mamma!" But futile tears flowed with each surmise. No welcome messenger returned to bring tidings of the missing youth. 'Tis thus we love virtue; we sigh over departed worth when its brilliancy has faded from our sight. Chapter VIII. Madeleine's Happy Death. Troubles, like migratory birds, never travel alone. As heavier billows cling together and roll in rapid succession and in thundering force on the rock-built barriers of nature, so the waves of trial and misfortune break on frail humanity in crushing proximity. The second and third billows of misfortune are fast undulating on the tide of time, and will sweep over the home of Cassier, leaving it a miserable wreck, a theme for the sympathy and the moral of a historian's pen. The weakened, consumptive frame of Madeleine did not long survive the blow that Louis had prepared for her--not, indeed, in the sense of a guilty and blood-stained hand, but with the merit of an Abraham who, at the command of Heaven, prepared a funeral pyre for his child. Madeleine could scarcely weep; the grief of nature was calmed by the impulses of grace, and she felt in her heart a holy joy in the sublime destinies of her son. Could we, in the face of the holy teachings of the Church, institute a comparison between the mother of the soldier and the mother of a priest? Amidst sighs that were but the convulsive throes of a heart's emotion, she breathed often and aloud the "Deo gratias" of the faithful soul. But like certain forces in nature that require but the slightest shock to give them irresistible power, by which they burst through their confining cells and set themselves free, the immortal spirit of Madeleine burst its prison cell and soared to its home beyond the skies. We need not tarry over the painful, touching scene oft-told, and felt sooner or later in every home. Like snow disappearing under the sunshine, the life of Madeleine was fast melting away. At length, as if she knew when the absorbing heat would melt the last crystal of the vital principle, she summoned her family around her to wish them that last thrilling farewell which is never erased from the tablet of memory. In the farewell of the emigrant, torn by cruel fate from country and friends, hope smiles in his tears; the fortune that drives away can bring back; but the farewell of death leaves no fissure in its cloud for the gleam of hope--it is final, terrible, and, on this side the grave, irrevocable. With faltering voice she doled out the last terrible warning that speaks so eloquently from the bed of death. Whilst the aged priest recited the Litanies she raised her last, dying looks towards heaven, and whispered loud enough to be heard, "O Mary! pray for my children." Madeleine was no more. Her last sigh was a prayer that went like lightning to the throne of God from a repentant, reconciled spirit; at the same moment her liberated soul had travelled the vast gulf between time and eternity, and there, in the books held by the guardian angels of her children, she saw registered the answer to her prayer. Madeleine was laid in a marble tomb amongst the first occupants of Pere la Chaise. A small but artistic monument, still extant, and not far from the famous tomb of Abelard and Eloise, would point out to the curious or interested where sleeps among the great of the past the much-loved Madeleine Cassier. "God's peace be with her!" they did say, And laughed at their next breath. O busy world! how poor is thy display Of sympathy with death. Chapter IX. One Abyss Invokes Another. In times gone by, in the so-called darkness of the Middle Ages, there were certain countries in Europe that believed in the existence of a fiend or ghoul that inhabited lonely places and unfrequented woods, and tore to pieces the imprudent traveller that ventured on its path. This fiend of the desert and lonely wood was at best but a fabrication of an excited fancy; it has long since passed away with the myths of the past, and exists only in the nursery rhymes of our literature. Yet in its place a malignant spirit of evil revels in the ruin of the human race; it delights in the crowd; it loves the gaslight, the lascivious song and wanton dance; it presides over our convivial banquets with brow crowned with ivy and faded roses; whilst all the unholy delights of earth sacrifice to it, in return it scatters amongst its adorers all the ills and sorrows that flow from the curse of Eden, making a libation to the infernal gods of the honor, the fortune, and the lives of men. The ghoul or fiend of modern society is the demon of alcohol. History records a remarkable victim in the ill fated Cassier. When grief falls on the irreligious soul, it seeks relief in crime. The shadow of death that fell on his family circle, and the flight of his son in daring forgetfulness of his parental authority, which he had overrated, broke the last link of Christian forbearance in his unbelieving heart; when wearied of blaspheming the providence of God, he quaffed the fatal cup which hell gives as a balm to its sorrow-stricken votaries. A cloud of oblivion must hide from the tender gaze of the young and the innocent the harrowing scenes that brought misery on his home, ruin on his financial condition, and a deeper hue to the moral depravity of his blighted character. One look of sympathy at our young heroines, and we will pass on to the thrilling course of events. Like beautiful yachts on a stormy lake, without pilot, without hands to steady the white sail to catch the favorable wind, Alvira and Aloysia were tossed on a sea of trial which cast a baneful shadow over their future destinies. Tears had cast the halo of their own peculiar beauty over their delicate features; mourning and sombre costume wrapt around them the gravity of sorrow and the adulation of a universal sympathy, pretended or real, supplied the attentions that flattered and pleased when they led the giddy world of fashion. The silence of grief hung around the magnificent saloons, once so gay; the wardrobe that contained the costly apparel, the casket that treasured the pearls of Ceylon and gems of Golconda, were all closed and neglected. The treatment of their father was an agony of domestic trouble, in which they were tried as in a furnace. A few weeks, however, and the darkest hour of the storm had passed. Moments of relaxation brought beams of sunlight through the dissolving beams of sunlight through the dissolving clouds; drives, walks, and even visits were gradually resumed. A fit of illness brought Cassier to his senses. A forced abstinence for a few weeks saved him from the last and most terrible lot of confirmed drunkenness; but ruin was written with his own hand on the firm that made him wealthy. Quick-footed rumor, that hates the well-being of man, was abroad at its deadly work; public confidence in the bank began to wane, and each depositor lent the weight of his individual interest to accelerate the financial crash. The stone set in motion down the mountain assumes a force that no power could stay; on it will go until it rests in the plain From the eminence of his boasted wealth the usurer found this turn come to whirl around on the wheel of fortune and yield to some other mortal, who is the toy of fortune, to grasp for a moment the golden key of avarice and ambition. At length the crash has come. One of the largest depositors sends notice that in a week he will withdraw his funds. Cassier saw ruin staring him in the face; when this sum was paid he would be a pauper. He would not dig, and in the pride of his heart he would not beg. Conscience, long seared in the path of impiety, has no voice to warn, no staff to strike. Cassier, wise in his generation of dishonesty, knows what he will do, and nerves himself for a desperate undertaking which leads us deeper and deeper into the history of crime, into the abysses of iniquity which invoke each other. In a few days Paris is startled. Cassier has fled, and robbed his creditors of a million francs. Chapter X. On the Trail. Evening has fallen over the city, and the busy turmoil of the streets had ceased; the laborer had repaired to his family, the wealthy had gone to their suburban villas, and licentious youth had sought the amusements over which darkness draws its veil. Politicians, newsmongers, and travellers made the cafe salons ring with their animated discussions. The policy of the Prime Minister, the probabilities of war, the royal sports of Versailles, and daring deeds of crime gathered from the police reports were inexhaustive topics for debate. In one of the popular cafes there was a small gathering of men threatening vengeance on the delinquent Cassier; they had more or less suffered from his robbery, and they listened with avidity to every rumor that might lead to the probability of his capture. Amongst them there was an aged man of grayish beard, who was particularly loud and zealous in his condemnation of the dishonest banker. He railed against the Government, which, he said, was priest-ridden under the whip of Mazarin; the imbecility of the police; and the apathy of the citizens, who bore so peaceably such glaring acts of injustice and imposition. He poured out a volume of calumny against the priesthood, and blasphemed so as to cast a chill of terror through his less impious hearers. He was suddenly stopped in his harangue by the entrance of a stranger in the coffee-room. He was a tall, thin man, wrapped in an over-cloak; he paced majestically across the room, and took a seat opposite the old man, who had suddenly become silent and was busily occupied reading the criminal bulletin. Over the edges of his paper the old man took a furtive glance at the stranger; their eyes met; a recognition followed, but as silent and as deep as with the criminal and the Masonic judge. The old man rang the bell, and called for writing materials. He hastily scribbled a few words, closed, sealed the letter, then bade the waiter take it to his eldest son, who had retired to his apartments. He immediately took his hat and went out. "Who is that old man?" asked the tall stranger, rising and advancing excitedly towards the waiter. "That's Senor Pereira from Cadiz," retorted the waiter. "Senor Pereira from Cadiz!" repeated the stranger. "No," he continued emphatically; "he is Senor Cassier from Paris." "Cassier!" was muttered by the astounded debaters who had listened to the vituperative philippics of the Portuguese merchant. "Cassier!" was echoed from the furthest end of the salon, where some quiet and peaceful citizens were sipping their coffee and rum apart from the stormy politics of the centre-table. Whilst an animated conversation was carried on two young lads came running down-stairs and rushed into the street through the front door. "Who are those young men?" asked again the stranger of the waiter. "They are the sons of Senor Pereira," was the answer. "The sons of Pereira! They are the daughters of Cassier!" said the stranger in a loud voice, who had now become the hero of the room and had penetrated a deep and clever plot. He ran to the street, but the fugitives had disappeared in the darkness; their gentle tread was not heard on the pavement, and no observer was near to indicate the course they had taken. The whole scheme of Cassier's bold disguise flashed with unerring conviction on the stranger's mind--the voice, the eye, the gait were Cassier's. He was familiar with the family, and in the hurried glance he got of the youths rushing by the saloon door he thought he recognized the contour of Alvira's beautiful face. He hastened to communicate his startling discovery to the Superintendent of the Police, and the city was once more in a state of excitement. Chapter XI. The Flight. The sensation caused by the startling failure and embezzlement of the wealthy banker had scarcely subsided when the city rang with the news of his clever disguise and daring escape. Angry Justice, foiled in her revenge, lashed herself to rage, and moaned her defeat like the forest queen robbed of her young. The Government feared the popular cry, and proved its zeal by offering immense rewards for the arrest of the delinquent banker. The country around the city was guarded, every suspicious vehicle examined, and strangers ran the risk of being mobbed before they could prove their identity. False rumors now and then ran through the city, raising and quelling the passions like a tide. At one time the culprit is caught and safely lodged in the Bastile; at another he is as free as the deer on the plains. Cassier did escape, but some incidents of the chase were perilous and exciting. Travelling in those days was slow and difficult. The giant steam-engines that now sweep over hills and torrents with a speed that rivals the swoop of the sea-bird were unknown. The rickety old diligence or stage-coach was only found on the principal thoroughfares between the large cities. Cassier knew these roads would be the first taken in pursuit, and carefully avoided them. Seeking a destination where the chances of detection would be lessened, he was attracted towards Geneva, already famous as the hot-bed of secret societies and the rallying-point of infidelity. He would reach it by a circuitous route. From Paris to the historic old capital of Switzerland, in the centre of mountains and the heart of Europe, was a herculean journey for the fugitives. On they went for two and three days' journey, stopping at humble inns on the roadside where the news of the capital had not reached. Time inured them to danger and calmed the fever of anxiety consequent upon their hurried and hazardous flight. But the avenging law had followed in close pursuit. The officers of the Government were directed from village to village; they found themselves on the track of an old man and two beardless youths in naval cadet costume. The chase became exciting. Wealth and fame awaited their capture. One evening, in the glow of a magnificent sunset, Cassier and his daughters were wending their way along one of the picturesque roads of the Cote d'Or. They were on the slope of a shady mountain, and through a vista of green foliage they could see the road they had passed for miles in the distance. The silence of the mountainside was unbroken, save by the music of wild birds and the roar of a torrent that leaped through the moss-covered rocks towards the valley. The wild flowers gave aromatic sweetness to the mountain-breeze, and the orb of day, slowly sinking in a bank of luminous crimson clouds in the distant horizon, made the scene all that could be painted by the most brilliant fancy. Our young heroines gave frequent expression to their delight, but their aged sire was silent and watchful. He frequently took long and piercing looks on the road he had passed. Anxiety mantled on his wrinkled brow; a foreboding of danger cast its prophetic gloom over his spirits. Suddenly he turned from a long, fixed look through the trees, and with a thrill of alarm cried out: "They are coming!" For a moment he gave the jaded horses the whip. He refused any further information to the terrified girls; he bit his lip, drew his sword close to him, and prepared for a struggle; for he had resolved to die rather than go back a prisoner to Paris. The pursuers were each moment gaining ground; the costume of the gendarmes was discernible as they galloped in a cloud of dust along the plain. The hill was long and heavy before the wearied horses of Cassier. He saw flight was vain; stratagem must come to his aid in the emergency. At this moment he came to a turn in the mountain road where the trees were thicker and the shade more dense. Like a skilful general in the critical moment when victory and defeat hang, as it were, on the cast of a die, he conceived instantaneously the plan of a desperate expedient. He drew up his horses and bade his trembling children await his return. Returning a few paces he secreted himself behind an oak-tree and calmly awaited the arrival of the Government officers. Soon the clatter of the galloping horses was heard in the distance. The wild scream of startled birds resounded through the groves; the sun seemed to glow in a deeper crimson, the breezes sighed a mournful cadence through the waving foliage. On the troopers came up the side of the hill. Cassier had counted them--they are but two; despair has lent courage to his heart, and will give a giant stroke to his aged arm. At the sight of the suspected caleche drawn up in the shady road, one of the pursuing officers gave spurs to his horse, and flew out before his companion to seize the prey--to be the first captor of the delinquent fugitive. Fatal indiscretion! Plunging along at desperate speed, and dreaming of gold and renown, the burnished sword of Cassier took his horse on the flank. Its rider fell to the earth; before he had seen his enemy, the sword of Cassier had pierced his heart. A scream from the carriage announced that the scene had been witnessed by tender girls who had not been accustomed to deeds of violence and bloodshed. But the combat has now but commenced. The battle of the Horatii and Curatii, on which an empire depended, was not more fierce. The second gendarme saw the fate of his companion; he reined his horse, dismounted, and came with drawn sword to meet the Parisian banker, who had now become a mountain bandit. When Greek met Greek in the days of old, the earth trembled. Never was more equal or deadly fight. Cassier had learned the sword exercise in his youth as a useful art; the police officer was a swordsman from profession. For a moment sparks flew from the whirling, burnished blades. The silence of deep resolve wrapt the features of the combatant in fierce rigidity. Again and again they struck and parried, struck and parried, until wearied nature gave feeble response to the maddened soul. The aged Cassier felt, from his age and fatigue, about to succumb; gathering all his strength for a desperate effort, he threw his weight into a well-measured shoulder stroke, when, lo! his antagonist's sword flew in pieces--the brave gendarme fell weltering in the blood of his murdered companion. All is still again. The sun has gone down in murky splendor, the birds are silent, and the solitude of the wild mountain-pass is like the night, that is darker after the flash of the meteor. The hapless but brave soldiers of justice lie in their armor on the field of battle; the fresh blood gurgles from the gaping wounds, and the madness of defeat is fiercely stamped on their bronzed features; one holds in death-grasp the unsheathed sword he had not time to wield, the other sill stares with open eye on the broken blade that proved his ruin. A heavy splash and a crimson streak in the foam announce that the torrent has become the grave of the fallen police; the road, steeped with blood, is covered with fresh earth; the scene that witnessed the tragedy is fair and beautiful as before. Cassier, reassured, with bold step and pulse of pride, turns towards his conveyance to resume his journey. Aloysia was just recovering from a fainting fit, and her sister had labored to restore her during the exciting moments of the deadly strife that had just been concluded. Neither of them saw the perilous situation of their father, and were thus saved the shock the extremity of his peril was calculated to have produced. A few days found them safely across the frontiers of France, threading the passes of the Alps, and away from the grasp of justice, that pursued them in vain. Chapter XII. Geneva. As the wearied stag that has eluded the chasing dogs rests in safety in the covert of its native mountains, our fugitives at length breathed freely in the beautiful city of Geneva. Wild and grand as had been the scenery they passed through, the excitement of the flight and the fear of seizure had, to them, robbed nature of her charms. Ever and anon, indeed, they had looked around with searching eyes, but not to gaze in rapture on the snow-capped mountains, the green valleys, and crystal streams; it was rather to peer along the road they had passed, to see if any speck on the horizon would indicate the pursuing horses of the gendarmes. But now for the first time the magnificence of the Alpine scenery and the charm of the lovely queen of the Swiss valleys burst on their view. Mont Blanc, already seen from the north, seemed to lift its snowy drapery higher into the blue sky, and stood out more majestic in its crystallized peaks when seen from the bridges of the Rhone. Another firmament was seen through the clear azure water of the beautiful lake; and although the air was cold and fresh in the icy chill of the mountains, and nature stripped of her green, yet our young heroines were charmed with their first view of the city, and rejoiced in the prospect of a long sojourn. There are few spots in the world where the lovers of the sublimities of nature can drink in such visual feasts as at Geneva. Since railways have shortened distance and cut through mountains, there is no more fashionable rendezvous for the world of art than the suburbs of the Swiss capital. During the summer months every little nook on the surrounding mountain-sides is occupied by artists of every sex and of every nation. What juvenile album is complete without a sketch of Mont Blanc? The old mountain stands out in its eternal majesty as a vision of awful beauty for old and young; and many a noble soul has been borne from the contemplation of the grandeur of nature to study in awe the greatness of Him "who makes mountains his footstools." The artificial beauties of the modern Geneva far surpass the old; yet those mountains, those peaks and snows and lakes, were always there. It was known to Constantine, and crept into importance and worth in proportion as science and art were developed in the civilization of Europe. At the time we write the beautiful Swiss capital was one of the principal seats of learning in Europe. But, alas! its literature was blasted by the false principles of the Reformation. Like marble cenotaphs that have corruption within, Geneva, clothed with all the beauties of nature and art, was rotten to the core in her moral and religious character. She became the mother of heresiarchs, the theatre of infidelity, and by her press and preaching scattered far and wide the wildest theories of deism and unbelief. All the secret societies of the world were represented in her lodges, and within her walls, were gathered men of desparate and socialistic politics who had sworn to overturn as far as they could the authority of society, to despise the rights of property, and to trample on the laws of order. There was no city in the world guilty of more blasphemy than this beautiful Geneva; and even to this day, as the sins of fathers descend to their children, the teachings of Calvin, of Bayle, and of Servetus hang like a chronic curse over the city to warp every noble feeling of Christian virtue. Amongst the leaders of the secret societies, amongst the socialists who plot the ruin of their fellow-citizens, and amongst the infidels who blasphemously ridicule the mysteries of Christianity, we must now seek the unfortunate Cassier, who has arrived in Geneva. Chapter XIII. The Secret Societies. To outsiders Masonry is a mystery. When Masons speak or write of themselves they give the world to understand the are but a harmless union for mutual benefit, and for the promotion of works of benevolence. That such is the belief of many individuals in the lower grades of Masonry, and even of some lodges amongst the thousands scattered over the face of the earth, we have no doubt; but that charity in its varied branches has been either the teaching or the fact amongst the great bulk of Freemasons during the last two hundred years we unhesitatingly deny. In the ceremony of making a master-mason, and in a dark room, with a coffin in the centre covered with a pall, the brethren standing around in attitudes denoting grief and sorrow, the mysterious official who has the privilege of three stars before his name gives the aspirant this interesting history of the origin and aim of his office. "Over the workmen who were building the temple erected by Solomon's orders there presided Adoniram. There were about 3,000 workmen. That each one might receive his due, Adoniram divided them into three classes--apprentices, fellow-craftsmen, and masters. He entrusted each class with a word, signs, and a grip by which they might be recognized. Each class was to preserve the greatest secrecy as to these signs and words. Three of the fellow-crafts, wishing to know the word of the master, and by that means obtain his salary, hid themselves in the temple, and each posted himself at a different gate. At the usual time when Adoniram came to shut the gates of the temple, the first of the three fellow-crafts met him, and demanded the word of the masters. Adoniram refused to give it, and received a violent blow with a stick on the head. He flies to another gate, is met, challenged, and treated in a similar manner by the second. Flying to the third door, he is killed by the fellow-craft posted there on his refusing to betray the word. His assassins bury him under a heap of ruins, and mark the spot with a branch of acacia. "Adoniram's absence gives great uneasiness to Solomon and the masters. He is sought for everywhere; at length one of the masters discovers a corpse, ad, taking it by the finger, the finger parts from the hand; he takes it by the wrist, and it parts from the arm; when the master in astonishment, cries out 'Mac Benac,' which the craft interprets by the words, 'The flesh parts from the bones.'" The history finished, the adept is informed that the object of the degree which he has just received is to recover the word lost by the death of Adoniram, and to revenge this martyr of the Masonic secrecy. Thousands of years have rolled over since the alleged death of the clerk of works at Solomon's temple, and if the streams of human blood that his would-be avengers have caused to flow have not satiated this blood-thirsty shade, those that Masons, Communists, Internationals, and other secret societies will yet cause to flow in the cities of Europe will surely avenge the ill fated Adoniram. It is also asserted by some Masons of strong powers of imagination that they take their origin from the Eleusinian Mysteries. These were pagan orgies attached to some Grecian temples. Surrounded by mysterious ceremonies and symbols, and supported by every mythical and allegorical illusion that could inspire awe or confidence, these mysteries were very popular amongst the Greeks. "The mysteries of Eleusis," says the profound German mythologist, Creuzer, "did not only teach resignation, but, as we see by the verses of Homer to Ceres sung on those occasions, they afforded consoling promises of a better futurity. 'Happy is the mortal,' it is said there, 'who hath been able to contemplate these grand scenes! But he who hath not taken part in these holy ceremonies is fore ever deprived of a like lot, even when death has drawn him down into its gloomy abodes.'" Harmless and absurd as these mysteries were in the commencement, they afterwards lapsed into all the immoralities of pagan worship. But to give such a remote, and even such a noble, origin to the frivolous deism of modern Masonry is about as absurd as to say that men were at one time all monkeys. The truth is, Freemasonry was never heard of until the latter part of the Middle Ages. It found its infancy among the works of the great cathedral of Strasburg. Erwin of Steinbach, the leading architect employed in the erection of this beautiful and stupendous work of architectural beauty, called around him other noted men from the different cities of Germany, Switzerland, and France; he formed the first lodge. The members became deputies for the formation of lodges in other cities, and thus in 1459 the heads of these lodges assembled at Ratisbon, and drew up their Act of Incorporation, which instituted in perpetuity the lodge of Strasburg as the chief lodge, and its president as the Grand Master of the Freemasons of Germany. The masters, journeymen, and apprentices formed a corporation having special jurisdiction in different localities. In order not to be confounded with the vulgar mechanics who could only use the hammer and the trowel, the Freemasons invented signs of mutual recognition and certain ceremonies of initiation. A traditionary secret was handed down, revealed to the initiated, and that only according to the degrees they had attained. They adopted for symbols the square, the level, the compass, and the hammer. In some lodges and in higher grades (for they differ almost in every nation) we find the Bible, compass, and square only. But the Bible given to the aspirant he is to understand he is to acknowledge no other law but that of Adam--the law which Almighty god had engraved on his heart, and which is called the law of nature (thereby rejecting the laws of the Church and society). The compass recalls to his mind that God is the central point of everything, from which everything is equally distant, and to which everything is equally near. By the square he is to learn that God made everything equal. The drift of these symbolic explanations is obvious. In the ceremonies of initiation into the various degrees everything was devised that could strike the imagination, awaken curiosity, or excite terror. The awful oath that has been administered in some Continental lodges would send a thrill of horror through every right-minded person, whilst the lugubrious ceremonies the aspirant has to pass elicit a smile--such, for instance, of leading the young Mason with bandaged eyes around the inner temple, and in the higher grades presenting him with a dagger, which he is to plunge into a manikin stuffed with bladders full of blood, and declare that thus he will be avenged of the death of Adoniram! Then he is instructed in the code of secret signals by which he can recognize a brother on the street, on the bench, or on the field of battle. Carousing till midnight is a befitting finale to the proceedings of the lodge. The doctrines or religious code of the Masons are, as their symbols indicate, deistic and anti-Christian. They openly shake off the control of all religion, and pretend to be in possession of a secret to make men better and happier than Christ, his apostles, and his Church have made them or can make them. "The pretension," says Professor Robertson, "is monstrous!" How is this exoteric teaching consistent with the full and final revelation of divine truths? If in the deep midnight of heathenism the sage had been justified in seeking in the mysteries of Eleusis for a keener apprehension of the truths of primitive religion, how does this justify the Mason, in the midday effulgence of Christianity, in telling mankind he has a wonderful secret for advancing them in virtue and happiness--a secret unknown to the incarnate God, and to the Church with which he has promised the Paraclete should abide for ever? And even the Protestant, who rejects the teaching of that unerring Church, if he admits Christianity to be a final revelation, must scout the pretensions of a society that claims the possession of moral truths unknown to the Christian religion. Whatever may have been the original cast of the religious views of the Masonic order, it is certain in its development it has become impious and blaspheming. In the latter part of the seventeenth century the Masonic lodges were the hot-beds of sedition and revolution; and long before the popes from their high watch-tower of the Vatican had hurled on these secret gatherings the anathema of condemnation, they were interdicted in England by the Government of Queen Elizabeth; they were checked in France by Louis XV. (1729); they were prescribed in Holland in 1735, and successively in Flanders, in Sweden, in Poland, in Spain, in Portugal, in Hungary, and in Switzerland. In Vienna, in 1743, a lodge was burst into by soldiers. The Freemasons had to give up their swords and were conducted to prison; but as there were personages of high rank among them, they were let free on parole and their assemblies finally prohibited. These facts prove there was something more than mutual benefit associations in Masonry. "When we consider," says M. Picot, "that Freemasonry was born with irreligion; that it grew up with it; that it has kept pace with its progress; that it has never pleased any men but those who were impious or indifferent about religion; and that it has always been regarded with disfavor by zealous Catholics, we can only regard it as an institution bad in itself and dangerous in its effects." Robinson of Edinburgh, who was a Protestant and at on time a Mason himself, says: "I believe no ordinary brother will say that the occupations of the lodges are anything better than frivolous, very frivolous indeed. The distribution of charity needs to be no secret, and it is but a small part of the employment of the meeting. Mere frivolity can never occupy men come to age, and accordingly we see in every part of Europe where Freemasonry has been established the lodges have become seed-beds of public mischief." This was particularly true of the lodges of the central cities of Europe in the latter part of the seventeenth century. They were not only politically obnoxious to governments, but they became the agents and supporters of all the heretical theories of the day, and their evil effects were felt in the domestic circle. Like animals that hate the light and crawl out from their hiding-places when the world is abandoned by man, the members of those impious gatherings passed their nights in mysterious conclave. Fancy can paint the scene: weak-minded men of every shade of unbelief, men of dishonest and immoral sentiments, men who, if justice had her due, should have swung on the gallows or eked out a miserable existence in some criminal's cell, joined in league to trample on the laws and constitution of order, and, in the awful callousness of intoxication, uttering every blasphemous and improper thought the evil one could suggest. What must have been the character of the homes that received such men after their midnight revels? Many a happy household has been turned into grief through their demoralizing influence; mothers, wives, and daughters have often, in the lonely hours of midnight, sat up with a scanty light and a dying fire awaiting the late return of a son, a husband, or a brother; with many a sigh they would trace the ruin of their domestic felicity and the wreck of their family to some lodge of the secret societies. Before appealing to facts and bringing the reader to a scene of domestic misery caused by those societies, we will conclude these remarks by quoting one or two verses from a parody on a very popular American song. We believe the lines representing the poor little child calling in the middle of the night, in the cold and wet, at the Masonic lodge for its father, to be as truthful in the realities of domestic suffering as they are beautiful and touching in poetic sentiment: "Father, dear father, stop home with us pray You never stop home with us now; 'Tis always the 'lodge' or 'lodge business,' you say, That will not home pleasures allow. Poor mother says benevolence is all very well, And your efforts would yield her delight, If they did not take up so much of your time, And keep you from home every night. "Father, dear father, stop home with us pray! Poor mother's deserted, she said, And she wept o'er your absence one night, till away From our home to your lodge-room I sped. A man with a red collar came out and smiled, And patted my cheeks, cold and blue, And I told him I was a good Templar's child, And was waiting, dear father, for you. "Father, dear father, come home with me now; You left us before half-past seven. Don't say you'll come soon, with a frown on your brow; 'Twill soon, father dear, be eleven. Your supper is cold, for the fire is quite dead, And mother to bed has gone, too; And these were the very last words that she said; 'I hate those Freemasons, I do!'" Chapter XIV. The Freemason's Home. Late on a dark night in the commencement of November, wind and rain blowing with violence from the mountains, and the streets of Geneva abandoned, we find our young heroines sitting in a comfortable room. They are lounging on easy-chairs before a warm fire; the eldest is reading, and the youngest, although dressed in the pretty uniform of a naval cadet, is working at embroidery with colored wools. Alvira and Aloysia, at the command of their father, have still preserved their disguise, at first irksome to their habits and delicacy of maidenhood; but necessity and fear toned down their objection, and they gradually accustomed themselves to the change. In girlish simplicity they were pleased with the novelty of their position. They knew each other as Charles and Henry, and by these names we must now call them. The old clock of the church on the hill sent the mournful tones of the eleventh hour over the silent city. Charles counted the solemn booms of the church bell, and then, as if resuming the conversation with Henry: "Eleven o'clock, and father not come home yet! I am sure I don't know what keeps father out every night so late; if poor mother were alive, she would never stand this." "But perhaps pa may have important business and can't come home," we hear the amiable Henry suggesting. "Business! Nothing of the kind. He has got in amongst some old fools who pretend to have more knowledge than their grandfathers, and are deceiving old women of both sexes to such a degree that they actually fancy they are inspired to make new Bibles, new commandments, and new churches." "But father might be trying to put them right," replied Henry softly, "and perhaps feels as you do. How sad to see them going astray!" "No," answered the other with greater animation, "he is as bad as any of them. You remember long ago how he used to make poor mother cry when speaking of the great mystery of Redemption; he called it the greatest swindle the world ever saw. You remember what blasphemous and insulting language he addressed to the Sisters of St. Vincent when they asked for alms in honor of the Blessed Virgin; and you know how he is always reading the most impious works. "He is now shut up in one of those mysterious rooms called Freemason lodges, where, if report be true, the enemies of the Church and state plot the ruin of mankind. Henry, he is not only an infidel and a Freemason, but he is unkind to us." Saying these last words, Charles rose and paced up and down the room, as if full of passion. Faith, like anemones that flourish in the depths of the ocean when the surface is tossed with storm, was concealed in the heart of Charles, and inspired those feelings of holy indignation which live in secret in the heart even when passion rages in triumph without. Henry ventured a reply, but the excited manner of her sister checked her, and, burying her face in her hands, she remained in silence. Well she knew Charles was right, and in the deep sympathy of her innocent, loving heart her feelings crept into prayer for her erring parent, and silent tears suffused her eyes. Whilst the two girls were thus engaged--the one pacing the room and biting her lips with annoyance, the other wrapt in prayer and tears--the step of Cassier was heard on the stairs. It was unfortunate for Charles. He had given loose rein to his passion, and it was at this moment beyond control. The scene reminds us of a poor wife, the hapless victim of a drunkard's home, drawing on herself brutal treatment, when, in the lonely hours of midnight and in the pent-up feelings of a breaking heart, she would incautiously reprove the maddened retch who is reeling home to her under the fumes of intoxication; thus Charles gave vent to feelings she had long nursed in her bosom, and spoke in disrespectful language of reproof to her intoxicated father. Cassier had come from the carousals of the lodge. The fumes of the old wines had reached his brain; the fearless and unexpected reproof of Charles startled him. In an instant the demon of intemperance reigned in his heart; without waiting to answer, he approached the girl, gave her a severe slap on the face, and ordered her to her apartments. Charles and Henry retired to a sleepless couch, and their pillow was moistened with many bitter tears before the dawn of the morning. In a small spark commences the conflagration that destroys cities; the broad river that flows with irresistible majesty through our plains commences in a rivulet leaping and sparkling on the green hill-side; the almighty avalanche that sweeps with the roar of thunder through the Alpine ravines commences in a handful of loosened snow. Thus to a thought, a guilty desire uncontrolled, may be traced the greatest moral catastrophes. A cloud passed over the thoughts of Charles. From the momentous evening she received the rebuke of her father, her heart became the battle-field of contending emotions. She brooded in silence over imaginary wrongs, and thus gave to a latent passion the first impulse that led to disastrous consequences. Diseased fancy lent a charm to thoughts long forgotten, and recalled the pictures of pride and ambition that had so often gilded the horizon of her young hopes. To be free and have wealth, she thought, was worth swimming across a river of blood to gain. A temptation seized the thoughts of Charles. It clung to her like the bloodsucker drawing fresh streams from young veins. Notwithstanding her efforts to shake off the terrible temptation, and because she did not seek aid in the sacraments of the Church, it lived and haunted her in spite of her will. We tremble to write it--'twas to murder her father. Chapter XV. Tragedy in the Mountains. Come, you spirits That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, And fill me from the crown to the toe topful Of direst cruelty! Make thick my blood; Stop up the access and passage to remorse, That no compunctious visitings of nature Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between The effect and it. Come to my woman's breasts, And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers, Wherever in your sightless substances You wait on nature's mischief! Come, thick night, And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell, That my keen knife see not the wound it makes, Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark, To cry, "Hold!, hold!" --Macbeth. Poor Alvira! Her morning dawned after a restless, sleepless night. Phantoms of terror haunted her couch. The agonies of anticipated remorse had cast a withering shadow on her thoughts. She could not believe her own depravity in entertaining for a moment such a thrilling temptation. Was it a dream? Was it the hallucination of a spirit of evil that revels in the human passions? "I, who love my father notwithstanding his faults, who would tremble at the gaze of my mother looking down from heaven on my awful impiety, and would hear from her tomb her scream of terror, her curse of vengeance on my parricidal guilt--could I be the foolish wretch that would consent to a deed of crime which would make me a fugitive from the face of men, and haunt my rest with the ghost of a murdered father?" Thus Alvira mused. But a demon laughed at her tender conscience; deep in hell they had forged a terrible temptation. They knew the walls of the citadel of morality, built alone on natural virtue and unaided by divine grace, would soon crumble before their powerful machinations. In moments of sober reflection our resolutions are like prisms of basalt, that will not be riven by the lightning, but which in the hour of real trial prove to be ice-crystals that a sunbeam can dissolve. The powers that wage war with frail humanity have hung on the portals of the infernal kingdom, as trophies of triumph over man and insult to God, the resolutions of mortals made in moments of fervor and broken in weakness. Days roll on; they bring their sunshine and clouds, but no change in the unhappy family; a change there was for the worse in the appalling development of the infidel and socialistic tendencies of their impious father. His language, less guarded, seemed to teem with new insults against religion and God, and contributed to confirm the chill of horror with which he was met by hapless children that sighed over the loss of filial love. His late returns from the lodge, and occasionally those sad ebullitions of intemperance, continued to be their deep affliction. In proportion as love twines itself around the heart it absorbs all other feelings, it draws the passions like lentils around itself; so the contrary feeling of hatred, when permitted to enter the sanctuary of the heart, assumes at once a tyrannical sway, whose wicked demands of gratification become more and more imperious and exacting day by day, and rears a throne that becomes impregnable in proportion as the sun is allowed to set on its possessions. Even filial love has withered under the shadow of Cassier's worthlessness. In lonely walks along the lake, in conversations, and in tears the two girls lamented their fate. The beauty of virtue withered within their bosoms. The resembled two beautiful flowers torn from their bed, and cast with the weeds of the garden to taint in their decay the breezes they would sweeten if left on their stem. They longed for the pleasures that pleased in the day of prosperity; the dance, the banquet, and those visits that won the momentary gratification of flattery and admiration were sighed for. So irksome was the monotony and so uncongenial the role forced upon them by disguise, they hailed with joy the least circumstance that might be the harbinger of a change. It is at hand. Once more the excitement of chase! The vigilance of their astute father has placed them again in the caleche, and spirited horses are galloping from the Swiss capital. News from Paris has arrived; the failure, the flight, the reward, are passed around in a sensational romance, and the disappearance of two police officers lends the charms of mystery to the embellished rumor. Cassier--the hero of the tale, the unsuspected guilty one--went around and told the news with all the sanctimonious whining and eye-uplifting of a ranting preacher. In the meantime he matured his plans, and before suspicion could point her finger at him he fled to another retreat to elude for a while the justice of man to meet his awful doom from the hands of God. During the night Cassier and his children ascend the terrific pass of the Tete Noir; he proposes to hide from the threatened storm in the cloister of Martigny. This is a venerable Benedictine monastery, erected in the eleventh century by a Catholic prince, under the sanction of Urban II., possessing, besides many other privileges, that of sanctuary for fugitive prisoners. The dangers of the road and the fear of pursuit lent additional terror to the wild mountain scenery; at one moment they are dizzy looking into awful chasms formed by huge perpendicular rocks; then the overhanging cliffs would seem every moment to break from their frail support and rush down the steep mountain in an avalanche of stone. In cold that penetrated to the very bones, amidst the roar of torrents leaping through caverns of ice, and in dangers unseen and therefore more dreadful, they passed a restless journey through the mountains, and arrived at the charming village of Martigny, over which the monastery presided like the fortress of a mediaeval castle protecting the feudal territory of the petty ruler. Wearied, but pleased at the novel situation into which chance had cast them, Charles and Henry approached the venerable pile with feelings of reverence they had never felt. The silence of the tomb reigned around, and the old gate was closed. Whilst wondering how men could come voluntarily to live in such a solitude, and how they got the necessaries of life, a bell tolled solemnly from one of the towers; its soft, mellow tones rolled in sweet echoes across the mountains. Immediately the place became thronged with men in the habit of the Benedictine Order, hastening to and fro to commence their daily work. An aged porter bowed the strangers into a neat apartment, and summoned the Superior. No questions were asked, but comfortable rooms were appointed to them, and they were conducted in silence to the refectory, where a plain but substantial meal was placed before them. Thus commenced a visit the most extraordinary in the records of this venerable mountain cloister. Charles and Henry were charmed with everything, although they found themselves in strange contrast with desires of worldly pleasure they had recently entertained. The wild, rugged scenery, the solemn silence of the house, and the sanctity of the mortified monks made a deep and solemn impression on the tender hearts of the young visitors, who felt the delicacy of their position in enjoying a forbidden hospitality. The example of the evangelical perfection practised by these holy servants of God insensibly drew Charles and Henry to love the sublime virtues they practised. Nothing impressed them more than the solemn chant of the Office at midnight. The slow, solemn enunciation of each word by a choir of hoary anchorets rolled in majestic cadence through the precipices of the mountains, and died away in the distant ravines in echoes of heavenly harmony. An aged father was appointed to entertain the strangers. He led them to points on the mountain where the view was most enchanting; skilled in ancient monastic lore, he entertained them with anecdotes and histories from which he drew the most instructive morals. One cheerful afternoon, when seated on the rocks viewing a magnificent sunset, the aged monk told them his own history. He had been a soldier of fortune. In youth his ambition was as boundless as the horizon; he worshipped his sword and loved the terrors of battle. Fortune smiled on his hopes, and he moved on from grade to grade, until he became commander of a division. He was present at the fatal field of Salzbach, where the great General Turenne fell in the commencement of the battle. The aged warrior, forgetting the gravity of his years and his habit, would speak in the fire of other days, suiting his action to the word. He told his listeners the touching tale of his conversion. The death of the beloved Turenne, and at the same time the demise of his mother, made him enter seriously into self, repeating the farewell words of a celebrated courtier who left the French court to don the habit: "Some time of preparation should pass between the life of a solider and his grave." He heard the great St. Vincent de Paul preaching on the vanities of life; his resolutions were confirmed, and tears started to his eyes as he recounted how happy he was in his home in the cliffs and the clouds. Charles loved to hear the aged man's reminiscences of his military career. Fired with chivalrous aspirations, she could spend a lifetime in the regions of fancy so fervidly depicted from their Alpine retreat. Poor Aloysia was attracted to the higher and more real glories of the virtuous lives of these holy men. She felt she could stay with them for ever; and there, in the secrecy of her own heart, and before the alter of our Holy Mother, she made promises that shared in the merits of vows. When free, she would give herself to the love of God and the preparation for eternity in some secluded retreat of religion and virginity. But the nearer the alter, the further from God. Reverse the picture, and another must be contemplated. Is it the venerable cloister buried in the snow, buffeted by the storm, and threatened by the avalanche? is it the awful death of starvation hanging in all its gloomy anticipations over the community isolated by the snow-storm from the civilized world around? Or will it be the just indignation of the holy monks in finding the true character of the refugees whom they have sheltered in ignorance, contrary to the canons of the Church? Or will the still more devastating and ruthless storm of religious persecution seek the sanctuary in the clouds to desecrate it, to scatter its inmates and wreck its cloisters? A calamity as thrilling and not less anticipated will fling a sad memory around the venerable cloisters of Martigny. Cassier is in the group listening to the aged monk recount his adventures; with knitted eyebrows he hears him moralizing on the awful destiny of the future. He is a silent listener; the conversation is carried on by the garrulous and interested youths and the happy, virtuous old monk. A forced sobriety, or the atmosphere of virtue which he dreads, has cast a gloom over him. His thoughts are still reeking with the blasphemy of the Masonic lodges, and, though restrained by politeness from intruding his unbelief, he expresses in scowls and monosyllables his dissentient feelings. Charles still burns with indignation at her father's irreligion and personal ill-treatment. Her flushed countenance and agitated manner were at times indexes of passion, revenge, and self-love; for a moment the feeling is strong and irresistible, then calms again with the holier sentiments of remorse and self-condemnation. A morning as brilliant as ever lit up the glaciers of Mt. Blank rose over the cloisters. Charles and Henry accompany their father on a stroll through the mountain. They miss their kind Mentor, who is on a retreat for some days. Henry, commencing to love solitude, strays from her father and Charles to gather ferns and wild flowers creeping from the crevices of the rocks, or rising with exquisite beauty from a layer of snow. They are emblems of her own innocence and fragrant as her virtue, growing in the wilderness and shedding their charms on rocks and snow-peaks, instead of ornamenting gardens of culture and beauty. Poor Aloysia would be more at home in some arbor of innocence where angels love to tarry, and where the voice and gaze of the worldly-minded have never fallen. Cassier and Charles had slowly climbed to a projecting rock where nature had made a large table covered with grass. On one side the ascent was easy, but the other overhung a frightful precipice. They had entered into an animated conversation; Aloysia, down beneath, could hear the sharp, quick answers of Charles, but, as such was usual in the temper of Charles, she did not notice it. But lo! another moment, and a wild, shrill scream bade her look up; her father was no longer on the ledge of rock, and Charles flung her arms towards heaven and fell in a swoon on the edge of the precipice. Chapter XVI. A Funeral in the Snow. When Charles had recovered her consciousness, she found herself reclining on the lap of Henry, who had been bathing her face with snow and tears. A long, painful call of her name had reached the inmost recess of her being whither consciousness had repaired. Springing to her feet, startled as if from a frightful dream, she gazed around. Memory and sight returned; folding her face in her hands, she cried in a paroxysm of grief: "My God! what have I done?" This was the only intimation she ever gave Aloysia that in the heat of passion she had pushed her father over the precipice; she was his murderer. In their conversation the old man, more, perhaps, through impiety than conviction, misrepresented the good monks. We will not reproduce the stereotyped calumnies that even nowadays unbelievers love to heap upon the religious communities of the Catholic Church. The madness of passion took control in the breast of Charles. Scarcely knowing what she did, she pushed her aged father towards the precipice; he slipped, fell over into the chasm, and passed into eternity with blasphemy on his guilty lips. The two sisters wept together for hours. Innocence, guilt, and retribution blended together in a scene of awful tragedy amid the glaciers of Mt. Blanc. Seldom in the deeds of brigandage, in crimes committed in dark caves and lonely mountain paths, was there perpetrated a fouler murder; seldom in the sensational records of human depravity do we find the desperado of parricidal guilt under the delicate frame of girlhood. Yet was she rather an instrument in the hands of avenging Heaven than a monster of moral iniquity. At that moment the cup of iniquity was full for the wretch who had long tested the mercy of God. That Providence which blinded the Jews in judgement for ingratitude, and made them the instruments for the fulfilment of eternal decrees of redemption, withdrew from Alvira the protection that made her, whilst she accepted the guilt, the instrument of judgment. Rising to her feet with a sense of her desperate condition, making a few hurried explanations how her father slipped and lost his balance, she approached tremblingly the fatal edge. Leaning over, she saw the corpse of her father lying in a pool of blood in the deep chasm below. The scene of that sad moment was indelibly impressed on her memory, and in after-hours of remorse haunted her with its horrors. With nerve and courage, called forth by the awful circumstances of the moment, they descended the mountain to the foot of the ravine where the body lay in the snow. The descent was steep and treacherous, and guilty conscience made Charles tremble lest at any moment she would lose footing and be precipitated down the dark and gaping chasms formed by glaciers and rocks. After hours of toil, and with imminent peril, they found the body of Cassier. A dark pallor had clouded his features, a ghastly stare, closed teeth, and clenched hand bespoke the last sentiment of human passion. Alvira trembled and stood powerless for a few moments. Still, necessity nerved her to action. She removed the money and valuables from the body of her father, and, in the midst of wailings that echoed mournfully through the lonely mountain, they made a grave in the snow. Wrapping him in his cloak, they laid him in a bank of soft crystals through which the blood had trickled in crimson streams. Thrilling and sad for Aloysia and Alvira the last moments of this funeral ceremony. Gently they placed the cold snow on the remains of their father. The wild eagle swooped around in anger, and the wind swept with ominous sighs through deep ravines of the rugged mountain. The gigantic cliff over which Cassier had been hurled by his maddened child frowned over them in awful majesty. It would be in centuries to come the cenotaph of a dishonored tomb. The winter would come again with fresh snow to cover this valley of death; the sun would pour its cold rays on the frozen mound that marked the grave of Cassier. No tear of affection would moisten the icy shroud, but, in sympathy for the hapless child stained with his blood, whose crime was condoned in the provocation caused, the world has cast its abhorrent curse on the grave of the reprobate. "There let every noxious thing Trail its filth and fix its sting; In his ears and eyeballs tingling, With his blood their poison mingling, Till beneath the solar fires. Rankling all, the curse expires." Chapter XVII. An Unwritten Page. The noise of life can ne'er so dull our ear, Nor passion's waves, though in their wildest mood, That oft above their surge we should not hear The solemn voices of the great and good. As oft in icicles a flower remaineth Unwithered until spring its buds unchain, The young heart through lifes change a good retaineth, And will exhume its summer leaves again. When Charles and Henry had breathed their last sigh over the snowy mound that covered the earthly remains of the hapless Cassier, they continued their descent down the mountain. They dared not go back to the cloister; they fled when no one pursued, for outraged conscience is its own avenger. Each stir in the brushwood, a loosened stone rolling quickly by, or the fluttering and scream of startled birds of the solitude, made them tremble. Night was fast coming on; the sharp peaks of the Tete Noir were dimmed with clouds, and frowned with ominous terror on the path of the terrified fugitives. Through dangers of every kind, with bruises and wounds all over their delicate frames, they reached in the night the beautiful village of Chamounix. Refreshed with sleep and food, they prepared themselves for their future course, which for a while will be perilous, sensational, and extraordinary. Free from the control of an intemperate and tyrannical father, possessing immense wealth, they cast themselves into a whirlpool of deceitful pleasure, and for a while, in yielding to the longings of misguided youth, hushed the qualms of conscience, which can only rest in the bosom of virtue. Once more free, the thought naturally came of returning to the dress that became their sex. Aloysia, whose sense of delicacy was still as tender as the sensitive plant yielding to human touch, pleaded in tears for a return to the simple ways of girlhood, to the life and society more congenial to their habits and more in keeping with the laws of God and nature. Alvira had yielded for a moment. But the love of travel, which in those days could not be gratified in their true condition of young and handsome girls without guardians, whilst in their male disguise not a shadow of suspicion or impropriety would interfere with them; the novelty of their condition, assuming each day some new attractions; the curiosity innate in the feminine breast to hear and see things outside her own circle; above all the hallucinations flung on the path of disguise by the fiend of evil, who thus intrigued for the final ruin of his unsuspecting victims, made them agree mutually to pass a short time in travelling around as naval cadets; then, tired and surfeited with their triumph over nature, they hoped to retire into the sphere of utility destined for them by Providence. But, to our own and to our readers' regret, we must pause in our biography. The sources from which we cull these interesting details have cast historic silence over our heroines' ramblings of three years. What a volume of sensation they suggest! Were we given to the doubtful utility of fictional biography, were we weak enough to enrich ourselves by pandering to the morbid and often depraved longings of modern literary taste, we might fill a couple of volumes with scenes of excitement, of "hair-breadth 'scapes," and with heart-palpitating suspenses of misplaced love. We could not draw a picture more interesting or strange than those two sweet maidens in their disguise. We see them in the salons of the wealthy, in the clubs of the politicians, and at the billiard-tables of giddy youth who little dream of the intrusion, which, if they understood, would make them more happy. We fancy we see those youths, so polished, so gay, and withal so handsome, the idols of the society they move in; we hear compliments about those delicate hands, those small feet, those charming eyes. Our sympathy would chronicle the end fate of many an unsuspecting maiden who loved and pined in the dream of secret love towards the young officers that had crossed their path, whilst they revelled in cruel delight in their triumph over their own frail, tender-hearted sex. Our tale might unravel the plottings of hopeful mothers who vainly plied the utmost worldly ingenuity to gain for their daughters already passed the meridian of youth such promising and charming husbands. What skill it would demand to describe the chagrin of those old and young ladies, if they discovered the fraud which so heartlessly trifled with the sacred feeling of love! We will not tarry over imaginary incidents whilst terrible and thrilling scenes are before us. The record of those extraordinary maidens is only now commending in all its romantic attraction. It is not the vicissitudes of an erring life that inspire our pen in this brief sketch, but the merciful designs of Providence in following and wresting from perdition a noble soul, endeared to heaven by the prayers of a repentant mother, by the sighs of a saintly religious, and by its own love for the immaculate Queen of Heaven. Alvira opens her soul to the impulses of grace, but in dangerous and guilty procrastination she passes through some startling vicissitudes before the Almighty, impatient as it were for her love, draws her to him by one of the most touching miracles recorded in the wonders of hagiology. We will hurry on to those events, which will warm our hearts with love towards God, and make us look up with a deep feeling of awe towards that "mercy which is above all his works." Three years of strange vicissitude rolled over the career of our heroines. Some thousands of pounds gilded the path they passed over. With all the recklessness of youth, they squandered their ill-gotten money. Many a poor ruined family eked out a miserable existence, whilst their gold, entrusted to the wretched banker who had gone to his account, was flung recklessly on the tables of chance by the children he had nursed in the school of iniquity. Like sand passing through the fingers, like corn through perforated sack, their thousands dwindled away, giving place to the bitter hour of retaliation, of punishment, which will yet come for those hapless children of folly. It did not please Almighty God to hurry them to a dreadful judgement by sudden or awful death. He has other and even keener pangs than those of death, but they come rather from the hand of mercy than of justice. They are the pangs of remorse, which tear the heart of their victims with agonizing stings that are known only in the deep secrets of the soul. A dark and secret hour of retribution is at hand for Charles; the heavy but merciful hand of God will touch her, although she will still follow the mad career of her hypocrisy and the wild dreams of her ambition. Alvira, still in her disguise of Charles, endeavored to forget the crimes she committed in the dissipation in which she indulged. Whilst wealth and friends were around she feigned a gay heart and flattered herself she was not so bad. She involuntarily blushed at rude remarks made by gentlemen amongst whom she passed as a companion, and in the unsullied innocence of her sister she found a guardian for herself. They invariably shunned low society, and thus they won the esteem of all; they passed as young men of virtue as well as of beauty and of grace. The immorality that dishonored the manhood around them, the indecency of the conversations they heard, and the open and blasphemous impiety that often thrilled their dove-like hearts, made them form a pleasing contrast with themselves and the corrupted society they had now known to the core; yet, "Say not I have sinned, and what evil hath befallen me." Who can flee from the eye of God? There's a sting in the conviction of guilt that will follow its victim through the ballroom, the mountain cave, or the cloister, to the very side of the bed of death. It was when Charles and Henry found their money nearly gone, and the prospect of poverty before them, they felt in all its painful anticipations the prospect of a gloomy and unknown future. There is no pang, perhaps, in nature so keen as that which pierces the rich and ambitious when certain poverty stares them in the face; perhaps 'tis shame, perhaps 'tis pride, perhaps 'tis the despair that arises from the shock of blasted hopes--or all together--that weight on the sinking heart, and make each vital throb like the last heavy thud of death. Then suicide has a charm and self-destruction a temptation. Many a turbulent wave has closed the career of a the beggared spendthrift and the thwarted man of ambition. Charles commenced now to suffer in anticipation all the pangs of coming shame, poverty, and humiliation. With remorse returned the virtuous impressions of childhood, instilled into her tender mind by her penitent mother. She longed to return to the circle nature had destined for her, but which seemed more difficult now than to commence a new disguise. Although she yielded in all virtuous impulses to that "procrastination which is the thief of time," yet in her after-career there was a wonderful combination of events, extraordinary and interesting, which prove a loving and forgiving Providence hearing the prayer of a penitent mother. But we must raise the curtain and proceed with the drama of sacred romance whose first cats have given so much interest and sympathy. Chapter XVIII. In Uniform. It was a bright morning in November, in the year 1684. The people of Milan were all flocking to the cathedral. It was the feast of the great St. Charles. The magnificent Duomo which now covers the shrine of this great saint was not in existence then; nevertheless, the devotion of the people towards their apostle and patron was deep and sincere. Perhaps in no city in Italy is there greater pomp thrown around the patron's festival than at Milan. From morning to night thousands gather around that venerated shrine. The prince with his liveried servants, and the poor peasant with the snow-white handkerchief tied on her head, kneel there side by side. From the first anniversary of the great saint's death to the present day the musical services of the great cathedral have been rendered by the greatest talent in Italy, Professionals and amateurs flocked from every side to do honor to the man who did so much honor to the city of Milan. Nowadays, since science has shortened distance, it is one of the autumnal amusements of the wealthy Englishman to be present at the Feast of St. Charles at Milan. The gorgeous Duomo, hewn, as it were, out of Carrara marble, covered with five thousand statues and pinnacles, illumined with hundreds of thousands of lights swinging in the lofty aisles in chandeliers of sparkling crystal; the majestic organs, accompanied in musical harmony by hundreds of the best of human voices, rolling in soul-stirring majesty over the heads of tens of thousands of the kneeling children of the saint--all leave an impression never to be forgotten. Although in modern days the city of Milan has nurtured in her bosom some of the firebrands of Italian revolution, yet the city honored with the names and relics of Ambrose, Augustine, and Charles has yet thousands of pious and holy souls, who still gather with filial devotion around the tombs of the sainted dead. On the morning of the festival of St. Charles our heroine awoke with a heavy heart. She knew the city was astir and repairing to the cathedral. How strange she should have chosen the name of Charles! How great, how holy everything connected with that name! Could the man of God who made it so venerable to his people meet the wretch who had assumed it to dishonor it? Could even the pious people who flocked to the cathedral know there was amongst them a Charles whose hands were stained with parricidal guilt? Like the wicked man who fleeth when no man pursueth, Charles trembled lest the indignation of the people, of the saint, and of God should crush her in punishment of her sins. With thoughts like these she entered the cathedral. Henry was by her side. The Pontifical High Mass had commenced, and the organ rolled its majestic tones through the aisles of the old church. Immense crowds had already gathered around the tomb, and Charles and Henry repaired to a quiet and obscure portion of the building, where they could observe without being observed. Some years had now passed since Charles had breathed a prayer. There was something in everything around her that softened her heart; she buried her face in her hands and wept. An eloquent panegyric was preached by a Dominican Father. The peroration was an appeal to the assembled thousands to kneel and implore the blessing of the saint on the city and on themselves. Few sent a more fervent appeal than the poor, sinful girls who shunned the gaze of the crowd. The prayer of Charles was heard, and God, who works wonders in the least of his works, brought about the conversion of this child of predestination in a manner as strange as it is interesting. The crowd have left the cathedral. The lights are extinguished. The service is over. Charles and Henry are amongst the last to leave. On coming into the great square before the church they were surprised to see large groups of men in deep conversation. Their excited and animated manner showed at once something strange had happened. Men of strange dress appeared also in the crowd. Charles enquired what was the matter, and was informed that word had just come that Charles II. of Spain had declared war with Naples, and, as the state of Milan was subsidiary to the kingdom of the latter, he had sent officers to cause an enrolment of troops. Large inducements were offered to all who would join, and numbers of the youth of the city had already given their names. Charles scarcely hesitated in coming to a conclusion. The reduced state of their circumstances, the perfection of her disguise, and the still unconquered ambition of her heart made the circumstance a change of golden hope in the sinking prospects of her career. One thought alone deterred her. Could the delicate frame and soul of her little sister bear the hardships of a soldier's life? She breathed her thoughts to Henry. The latter cried and trembled. The one and only scene of blood she had witnessed still haunted her soul with horror--'twas in the ravine near Chamounix. But Charles still urged on the necessity of some desperate movement, and persuaded her, if they succeeded in joining this new service as officers, their position would be much the same as that they had passed through during the last two years. Poor Henry had but one tie to live for in the world; she preferred death to separation from her sister, and in the bravery of sisterly affection, she told Charles she would swim by her side in the river of blood she might cause to flow. The next morning found them enrolled as officers in the army of the King of Naples. Chapter XIX. Remorse. They call'd her cold and proud, Because her lip and brow Amid the mirthful crowd No kindred mirth avowed; Alas! nor look nor language e'er reveal How much the sad can love, the lonely feel. The peopled earth appears A dreary desert wide; Her gloominess and tears The stern and gay deride. O God! life's heartless mockeries who can bear When grief is dumb and deep thought brings despair? During the terrible storm that passed over the Church at the commencement of the third century, we have a thrilling incident which shows the terror and remorse of the pagan emperors when they returned to their golden house after witnessing the execution of their martyred victims. Diocletian, being enraged with Adrian, the governor of Aninoe--who, from being an ardent persecutor of the Church, had become a fervent follower of Christ--caused him to be dragged to Nicomedia, where, seized with implacable rage a the sight of the constancy of the martyr, who had once been his friend and confidant, he ordered him to be thrown chained hand and foot, at the decline of day, into a deep pit, which was filled with earth and stones before the emperor's eyes. When the last cry of the victim had been stifled under the accumulated earth, the emperor stamped on it with his feet and cried out in a tone of defiance: "Now, Adrian, if thy Christ loves thee, let him show it." He then quitted the field of punishment, but felt himself so overpowered by such an extraordinary feeling that he knew not whether it was the termination of his passion or the commencement of his remorse. His Thessalian courtiers bore him rapidly away from the accursed spot. Night fell; Diocletian, agitated and restless, prepared to retire to rest, for his head was burning. He entered his chamber, which was hung around with purple, but the walls of which now seemed to distil blood. He advanced a few steps, when, lo! a corpse appeared to rise slowly on his golden couch; his bed was occupied by a spectre, and near the costly lamp, which shed a pale light round the chamber, the chains of the martyr seemed to descend from the ceiling. Diocletian uttered a cry that might have penetrated the grave. His guards ran in, but instantly grew pale, drew back, and, pointing to the object which caused an icy sweat to cover the imperial brow, they said with horror to each other: "It is the Christian." Thus a guilty conscience summons imaginary terrors around it. Cain fled when no one pursued. Nero heard invisible trumpets ringing his death-knell around the tomb of his mother. How often has the mountain bandit, whose hand trembled not at murder, shuddered with fear, as he hastened through the forest, at the sound of a branch waving in the wind, or felt his hair stand erect with terror on beholding a distant bush fantastically enlightened by the moon! Conscience has made cowards of the most sanguinary freebooters and the most shameless oppressors. The dreadful "worm that dieth not," and banishes every cheerful thought from the guilty soul, is not inaptly compared to the wretch we read of in the annals of Eastern crime, condemned to carry about with him the dead and decomposing body of his murdered victim. It is not to be expected that Charles escaped the agonies of a guilty conscience. From the moment she left the church in Milan the usual and dreadful struggle between shame and grace, humility and pride, commenced in her heart. Although now and then forgotten in the excitement of the extraordinary disguise she had assumed, nevertheless the feeling of remorse dampened every pleasure, and added to the disguise of her person another disguise of false joy to her countenance. This reaction caused an important feature in the life of Alvira during her stay in the beautiful town of Messina, whither we must ask our reader to follow our heroines to commence in their military career the most interesting part of his historical romance. The Milanese recruits were busily engaged in going through military instruction, when orders were received that the division should sail immediately for Messina. There are few acquainted with the military life who do not know how disagreeable are orders to move. The bustle, the packing, the breaking up of associations, and the inevitable want of comfort in the military march try the courage of the brave man more than the din of battle, and robs the military career of much of its boasted enthusiasm. The stalwart son of Mars, who forgets there are such things as danger and fatigue in the exciting hour of battle, will grumble his discontent at the inconveniences of the hour of peace. We will leave it to the imagination of the reader to conceive the feelings, the regrets and misgivings, of our young heroines as their little vessel set sail from the town of Spezzia for the fortress of Messina. Although their biographers say nothing of their voyage, we cannot but imagine it was an unpleasant one. Although the blue headlands of the Italian coast, and the snow-capped Apennines in the distance, supplied the place of the compass, and their calls at the different ports deprived their journey of the painful monotony of a long sea-voyage, yet the associations, the cloud that hung over their thoughts, embittered every source of pleasure. Arrived at Messina, Charles and Henry were quartered in the old fortress. It was an antiquated, quadrangular edifice, perched high up on the side of the hill, looking down on beautiful white houses built one over the other, and descending in terraces to the sea. Its old walls were dilapidated and discovered by the touch of time, and threatened every minute, as it afterwards did in the earthquake of 1769, to commence the awful avalanche of destruction that swept this fair city into the sea. The first glimpse of their barracks did not rouse in Henry any ejaculations of gladness. The old Castello, as the people called it, ill-agreed with the noble edifices she was wont to call castles in her earlier days--no lofty battlements crested with clouds; no drawbridges swung on ponderous chains; no mysterious keeps haunted with traditionary horrors; no myriads of archers in gold and blue to rend the heavens with a mighty shout of welcome. Alvira's dream of military glory was a veritable castle in the air in the presence of the ruinous, ill-kept, and dilapidated fortress they had come to reinforce. Everything around seemed to increase the gloom that hung over Charles's heart. The ill-clad and poverty-stricken people, squatting in idleness and dirt in the streets; the miserable shops; the doce far niente so conspicuously characteristic of Italian towns, were contrasted with the beautiful and busy capitals Charles and Henry had come from. But nowhere was this contrast so keen as in their domestic arrangements. The bleak apartments, the campbed, the iron washstand, and the rough cuisine contrasted sadly with the magnificence of their father's splendid mansion in Paris. No wonder our young heroines wept when alone over the memories of the past. Charles and Henry kept together; they avoided all society; they loved to ramble along the beautiful beach that ran for some miles on the north side of the town, and there, in floods of tears, seek relief for their broken hearts. Oh! how memory will on these occasions wake up the happy past lost and gone, and the wicked past yet to be atoned for. What heart weighted with the agony of remorse will not feel the sting of guilt more keen in the rememberance of the blissful days of innocence and childhood? Many a blue wave has wrapt in its icy shroud the child of misfortune who was unable to bear the shame and reproof of her own conscience. It was in the recollection of virtuous childhood that Charles and Henry felt their greatest sorrows. Every tender admonition of their dying mother; the instruction of the aged abbe who prepared them for their first confession and communion; and the piety and noble example of their little brother, Louis Marie, who had fled in his childhood from the world they now hated, were subjects often brought up in their lonely rambles. At night Charles would often awake with frightful dreams. The cold, bloodstained face of her murdered father would come in awful proximity to her. Her screams would bring her fellow-officers to her assistance, but they knew not the cause of her terror. The young officers had the sympathy of the whole garrison; even the people who saw them return from their evening walk remarked them to be lonely and sad, and their eyes often red from crying. Three long and miserable months were thus passed by our heroines at Messina. They were now as skilful in their military exercises as they were in their disguise. But wearied of the military life, and longing to return to the society of their sex, they had determined to leave, to declare who they were, and endeavor, by some means, to get back to France. Whilst deliberating on this movement an incident occurred which changed their plans and cast them again into an extraordinary circle of vicissitudes. Chapter XX. Naples. Whilst Charles and Henry were one evening walking along the beautiful beach they saw a ship nearing the land. A strong breeze was blowing at the time, and whilst they paused to admire the noble bark, all sails set, ploughing the crested billows, and floating over them like an enormous sea-gull, she came nearer and nearer to the young officers. Another minute the sails were lowered and anchor was cast. A small boat was dispatched from the ship, and made for the beach just where Charles and Henry were standing. They formed a thousand conjectures of the meaning of this movement. When the boat came near the land, a tall young man, dressed in the uniform of the Neapolitan service, leaped on shore and advanced towards the young officers. A few words of recognition passed. He was a lieutenant in the Neopolitan army, sent with despatches for the commandant of the garrison of Messina to send two or three companies of the newly-enrolled troops to the capital. On the way to the garrison he informed Charles and Henry that the war was nearly at an end, but there was a great deal of disturbance and sedition in the city of Naples, and that the garrison there had to be doubled. The object in anchoring the ship on the coast was for fear the garrison of Messina might have been surprised and taken by the Carlists. Having assured himself all was safe, he entered the citadel with the young officers, and was presented to the captain, to whom he handed his despatches from headquarters. The next evening found Henry and Charles, with two hundred men, on board the ship that had anchored on the coast the day before. The The excitement and bustle of departure had silenced for a while all feelings of remorse, and the old passions that reigned in the soul of Charles rose again from their dormant state. Her eye flashed with life and her lips quivered with joy; there was still within her grasp the chance of fame. Ambition fanned the dying embers of decaying hope, and every pious resolve was thrown aside until the course of events would realize or blast her new dream of greatness. A few days brought them in sight of the beautiful capital of the south of Italy. The modern aphorism, "See Naples and then die," was said in other words in old times, when the Caesars and Senators of the empire enriched its beautiful shores with superb villas. There is not in Europe a bluer sky and, true in its refection of the azure firmament, a bluer sea than around Naples. The coast undulates to the sea in verdant slopes, which in autumn have a rich golden hue from the yellow tinge of the vine-leaf. Its classic fame casts a halo around its charms; its history in the far past, its terrible mountain and periodical convulsions from the burning womb of the earth, render it an object of attraction to all classes. Charles and Henry were quite alive to the impressions felt by tourists when, whirled along by the panting steam-horse through the luxuriant Campo Flice, they see for the first time the column of murky smoke that rises to the clouds over the terrible Vesuvius. The old mountain was then, as it is now, the terror and the attraction of tourists. The catastrophes it has caused, the cities it has swallowed up in molten ashes, the thunder of its roar when roused from its sleep, and the unhealthy, sulphurous vapors ever vomited from its cone, render it a veritable giant that the human race loves to see at a distance. Our heroines were already acquainted with the "Light-house of the Mediterranean," and from afar the lofty and ever-blazing, active Etna; hence Vesuvius was not so attractive as a volcano as in the halo of classic lore that hung around it. At a distance the mountain seems to be harmless, the blue outline of the lofty cone terminating in a dense bank of smoke, like stormclouds gathering around the snowy peaks of the distant Apennines; but when the adventurous tourist wishes to approach nearer to its blazing crater, and toils up its torn and blackened sides, he will see in the immense chasms and rents traces of might convulsions. Deep rivers of molten lava that take twenty and thirty years to cool; the quantity of ashes and cinders that could change the whole face of a country and bury five cities in a few hours, must tell of the enormous furnace raging in the bowels of the earth, of which Vesuvius is but its chimney. Strange, Charles longed to see Vesuvius when but a tender girl in Paris. She little thought the extraordinary course of human events would bring her, not only under the shadow of the terrible mountain itself, but send her through a most thrilling scene on its barren slopes. Let us hasten on to the course of events that rendered the extraordinary life of this girl so romantic. Chapter XXI. Engagement with Brigands. Arrived in Naples, our heroines were quartered in the Molo. This is an old fortress still used as a barrack in Naples. Its massive, quadrangular walls were erected in the middle ages, and have withstood many a desperate siege in the civil wars of Italy. The detachment from the Messina garrison found the city in a state of disturbance and confusion. Armed troops paraded the streets, houses were burning on every side, and bands of revolutionists were running frantically to and fro through the streets, yelling in the most unearthly tones their whoops of political antagonism to the Government; yet it was evident the Government had the upper hand, and the mob was gradually dispersing; they fled from the city, and order was restored. In the meantime word was received in Naples that a large body of these ruffians had settled themselves on the sides of Vesuvius, and supported themselves by the wholesale plunder and pillage of the farms and villages on the slopes of the hill. An order was immediately given that two hundred men should march to the mountain to destroy this band of brigands. The company selected was that belonging to Charles and Henry. The next day found our young heroines on the road to the field of battle. We can fancy the position and thoughts of those tender, delicate girls, marching side by side with the rough, bearded soldiers of Italy--the one rejoicing in the wild dream of her foolish ambition; the other trembling in her timid heart, and dragged into scenes she loathed by the irresistible chain of affection which bound her to her sister. No wonder the tender frame of girlhood yielded to the severity of the march--for amongst those who were first to fail was the amiable Henry; yet there were amongst the troops men whose constitutions were shattered by the excesses of their youth, and Henry became less remarkable as a young officer when stalwart men who had felt ere then the fatigues of war were falling at her side. Charles hired a loose horse in one of the villages they passed through, and thus arrived fresh and strong at the place of encampment, a few miles from the stronghold of the brigands. Henry came up in the afternoon, accompanied by about thirty men who, like herself, failed under the fatigues of the march. Rest under the circumstances was impossible. The brigands were all around and no one could tell the moment of attack. Some men were sent on as scouts to explore the hillside; they never returned. This was sufficient indication of an ambuscade and the captain bravely determined to march his whole force at once into their hiding-place, knowing, when they were once surprised, they had no shelter afterwards. Those who have been to Mount Vesuvius, and who have had the hardihood to seek the exquisite Lacryma produced on the southwester slopes of the hill, will remember a peculiar ravine running for nearly a mile from the sandy part of the cone, and covered with a stunted green bush of fern-like leaves. It is the nearest green spot to the calcined cone. It assumes a gentle declivity towards the sea, and is then lost in the beautiful vineyards and gardens that cover the slopes of the mountain down to the houses of Torre del Greco. The view from this spot is magnificent. On the left is the beautiful town of Sorento, with houses as white as snow, running in detached villas along the sea-shore up to the smoky and roofless walls of Pompeii, whose unsightly ruins lend contrast to the scene around. The azure bay seems to borrow more of the blue of heaven as it stretches far away to the horizon; the little steamers and innumerable yachts that ply between the islands give the scene animation and variety. Around to the right we have the classic hills of Baia, the Campo Santo in its fantastic architecture, and then the green and leafy plains of the Campo Felice; beneath, the great city with its four hundred thousand souls, its red tiles and irregular masses of brick-work, contrasting with the gilded domes of the superb churches; and above, the terrible cone, vomiting forth its sulfurous smoke and darkening the sky with clouds of its own creation. The view that can be had from this place, and the interesting history of every inch of the country around, render it one of the most romantic spots in the world. But, alas! it is now, as it was two hundred years ago, the home and retreat of those desperate Italian robbers known as brigands. Woe betide the incautious traveller whom curiosity leads through the vineyards of that lonely scene! The deeds of its outlawed and daring inhabitants would fill volumes. It was here, too, as far as we can learn, our heroines found their field of battle. The troops had scarcely entered this ravine when a sharp, shrill whistle rang from one side of the mountain to the other. Immediately human voices were heard on all sides, repeating in every pitch of tone, from bass to soprano, the word "Rione." For several minutes the mountain echoed with the weird sound of the brigand war-cry; the troops were ordered to stand in readiness, and timid hearts like Henry's quailed at the awful moment. The earth rumbled under their feet, and dark, bluish columns of smoke curled in the air from the terrible cone; the sun was setting over the beautiful Bay of Naples in the color of blood, and the air was impregnated with the fumes of sulphur. The wilderness of the spot, and nature's terrors convulsing the elements around, made, indeed, the moment before battle a dreadful moment for the delicate children of the French banker. A few minutes, and the battle was at its height. A long and dreadful contest ensued. The numbers were about equal on both sides. Fortunately, the brigands had not time to muster all at once, and the royalist troops met them in small but desperate bands. No sooner was one defeated than another and another poured down from the sides of the mountain and disputed every inch of the way. The brigands fought bravely, but were outnumbered, and towards midnight the bloodshed ceased. All sounds had died away save the groans of the wounded and dying, and now and then a solitary whoop of a brigand chief from the distant hills, calling together the few straggling and scattered bands of rebels. The moment the heat of the combat was over the first thought that struck Charles was to look for Henry. They were separated in the confusion of the fight. She ran through the men, but could not find her. Here and there she could discern in the pale light of a clouded moon some knot of soldiers binding up their wounds and recounting their escapes and their triumphs. She hurriedly ran through them, enquiring for her brother-officer, but none knew anything of her. She scanned every feature, she called her in every group, but in vain--no Henry was there. The awful thought struck her--and her heart nearly broke under its pang--perhaps she is killed! She flew across the bloody path they had passed; her mournful and shrill cry of "Enrico!" rolled over the bodies of the slain, and was echoed again and again with plaintive intensity from the surrounding hills. Sometimes she even fancied the dying echo of her own shrill cry was the feeble answer of her wounded sister; and when she would pause to listen again, the valley around was wrapt in the stillness of death. At length she came to the spot where the battle first commenced, and there, with a shriek that was heard in the distant encampment, she found among the first victims of that bloody night the lifeless corpse of her sister. Chapter XXII. The Morning After the Battle. The morning sun rose dimly in a bank of clouds. It found Charles still clinging to the remains of poor Aloysia, and bathing with kisses and tears the stiffened features of her beloved sister. With a silken kerchief she had bandaged the fatal gash on her neck, believing she might be only in a swoon and might recover. Hope, which is the last comfort to abandon man in his most desperate condition, scarcely retarded for Charles the awful reality of her bereavement. The pale moon that has rolled over so many generations, and lent its dim, silvery light to so many thrilling vicissitudes, never looked down on a sadder scene. Death has no pang equal to the blow it give true affection. No language could describe what the heart feels on occasions like this. There sat the delicate French girl, alone in the dark night, on the side of Vesuvius, in the midst of the bleeding victims of the bloody fight, and clasping to her heart the cold, lifeless body of her ill-fated sister. Her sudden and awful end, swept, perhaps, into eternity without a moment's notice, to be buried in the ashes of the volcano, amidst the dishonored remains of outlaws and murderers--does not the thought strike us that this sad fate was more the due of Alvira than the innocent and harmless Aloysia? Alvira felt it, and her repentant heart was almost broke. "O Aloysia!" hear her moan over the angelic form, "you innocent and I guilty; you slain, judged, and I free to heap greater ingratitude on the Being who has saved me. Aloysia, forgive! Thou wert dragged up unwillingly to these desperate scenes of bloodshed by my infatuation. O God! strike me. I am the wretch; let this angel live to honor thee in the angelic simplicity of innocence!" Never was a fairer flower blasted by the lightning of Heaven. Neither Charles nor Henry knew what was before them in their march to Vesuvius. To surround and capture a few runaways was perhaps the most they expected; and Henry, in the confiding affection of her heart, clung to Charles, determined to bear fatigue and hardship rather than be separated from her. It must be a painful picture that fancy will paint of the last hour of this lovely child. The anguish of her heart must have been keener than the deep wound that sent the life-streams to mingle with the lava of the mountain: no one to minister a drop of water to her parched lips; no friendly voice to console her; the moans and imprecations of the wounded brigands grating on her ears; the thought that her sister, too, was perhaps lying in pain, and sinking from her wounds; and, above all--that which, perhaps, sent the last blush to her cheek--the fear of the discovery of her sex, and the rough gaze of a brutal soldiery. But Heaven's sympathizing spirits were gathered around this child of misfortune, and doubtless with her last sigh he breathed her pure soul into their hands, and the last wish was answered--for she was good and innocent before God. When the sun had fully risen, Charles was approached by a sergeant of the troops, who announced to her that the captain had died during the night from his wounds, and, as she was the senior officer, they waited her orders. Dissembling her grief, Charles rose to her feet and gave directions that the bodies of the captain and her brother should be buried in their clothes and wrapped in the flag of the country. The hardy veterans raised the delicate frame of Henry, and carried it on a rude bier to the hut where the remains of the captain were prepared for interment. Silent and solemn was the funeral cortege. No drum, not a funeral note, was heard. Every eye was wet, and the breast of Charles was not the only one that heaved the farewell sigh over the young and beautiful officer. Charles stood by to see the last of her sister. The dark, black sand was poured down on her lovely face, and silently and quickly her mountain grave was filled by the blood-stained hands of her companions in arms. Chapter XXIII. Return--A Triumph. Charles had dreamt a golden dream. Ambition's cup is full, but its draught is bitter. On the march to Naples, in triumph, commanding the royal troops, who had completely beaten the brigands, were glories Charles never thought she was one day to obtain. With her return to the city the war was ended, and the people were rejoicing in the restoration of peace. The young captain who had returned so victorious from Vesuvius was the lion of the day. The city gave her an ovation far beyond her most sanguine hopes. Illuminations were instituted in her honor, her name was shouted in the streets, and the nobles and great ones of the state gathered around her as if the safety of the kingdom had depended on her own personal efforts. For some time crowds of lazzaroli gathered around the entrance of the Molo to see the young and beautiful captain who had achieved such wonders; and we can fancy how sweetly would ring on the ears of our ambitious heroine the shout of the enthusiastic crowd sending far and wide the "Erira Carlo Pimontel!" The King confirmed her position of captain, and sent her the iron and golden crosses of honor, only given to the bravest of the brave in those days of strife and warfare. But vanity of vanities, and all is vanity! Let us raise the veil of deception that shrouds the emptiness of human joy. Alvira has now gratified her heart's desires in everything she could have under the sun. She had beauty, wealth, and fame, but she was like the pretty moth that hovers around the flame of the candle, and finds its ruin in the touch of the splendor it loves. Poor Alvira was another child of Solomon that sighed over the emptiness of human joy; for bitter disappointment is the sad tale ever told in the realization of misguided hope. Often, at midnight, when the unknown captain would return from the theatre or some festive entertainment given in her honor, she would sit at her table, wearied and disgusted, and weep bitterly. The unnatural restraint necessary to preserve her disguise, the separation from all the comforts and sympathies common to her sex, and the painful reminiscences of the past wrung tears of misery from her aching heart. The dreams of Messina haunted her still, but increased in anguish and terror, as her thoughts could now fly from the lonely cave on the Alps to the battle-field on the side of Vesuvius. Again the pangs of remorse poisoned every joy; again the angry countenance and clenched hand of her murdered father would bend over her restless couch; and again the scream of terror in the dark, silent midnight would summon her friends around her. Deep and fervent the prayer that was poured forth from that sad and breaking heart that some providential circumstance would enable her to make the change she had no long premeditated. That change is at hand. Her mother's prayer is still pleading for her before the throne of God; he who cast an eye of mercy on the erring Magdalen had already written the name of Alvira in the book of life, and destined her to be one of the noblest models of repentance that adorn the latter history of the Church. Let us come to the sequel of this extraordinary history; but first we must introduce our readers to a new character--a great and holy man, destined by Providence to save Alvira, and give the most interesting and most remarkable chapter in this romance of real life. Chapter XXIV. Alvira's Confession. Tremble, thou wretch, Though hast within thee undivulged crimes, Unwhipped of justice: hide thee, thou bloody hand; Thou perjured, and thou simular man of virtue, Thou art incestuous: caitiff, to pieces shake, That under covert and convenient seeming Hast practised on man's life: close pent-up guilts, Rive your concealing continents, and cry These dreadful summoners grace. -- Lear. It was a beautiful morning in the Lent of 1678. The sun had risen over the Apennines, and flung its magnificence over the Bay of Naples. The smoke of Vesuvius cast its shadow like a monstrous pine over the vineyards and villas that adorned the mountain-side to the sea-shore. The morning was such as Byron gazed on in fancy through the sorrowful eyes of the eloquent heroine of one of his tragedies: "So bright, so rolling back the clouds into Vapors more lovely than the unclouded sky, With golden pinnacles and snowy mountains, And billows purpler than the ocean's, making In heaven a glorious mockery of the earth, So like we almost deem it permanent, So fleeting we can scarcely call it aught Beyond a vision, 'tis so transiently Scattered along the eternal vault!" Whilst the eight hour was chiming from the tower of the old Gesu there issued from the monastery attacked to the church a priest accompanied by an acolyte bearing a large, plain cross and ringing a small bell. They moved in the direction of the mole or old fortress of the city. Soon a crowd followed--some bare-headed; others, especially the females, told their beads in silence. The traveller in Italy is aware of the pious custom practised by some of the religious communities of preaching in the open air to the people during the season of Lent. Extraordinary things are related of these harangues. The lives of the sainted missionaries ring with tales of the marvellous and miraculous powers given to God's servants when, in moments of fire and zeal, they went from their cloisters like beings of another world to awaken sinners to a sense of future terrors. At one time we read of the saint's voice carried miraculously to a distance of several miles; the peasant working in the fields would hear the sweet sounds without seeing the speaker. At another the funeral procession was arrested and the dead called from the bier to testify to the truth of their teaching. Curing the cripple and restoring health to the sick were of ordinary occurrence. Our blessed Lord told the messengers who came to enquire about him to report his miracles as a proof of his divinity: the blind see, the lame walk, the sick are restored to health; but greater than all his reversions of the natural laws were the humility and the mysterious arrangement of his providence which he prophetically announced when he told his disciples that those who should come after him would perform greater miracles than he. There are few of the Thaumaturgi more celebrated than the humble father who has just issued from the Gesu to thunder forth with superhuman eloquence the truths of God and religion. No sooner had the people heard the little bell of the attendant and seen the venerable priest leave the college than they gathered from various quarters, and seemed to vie with each other in getting nearest to him. He was a tall, thin man, his hair gray, shading a majestic forehead, and but slightly wrinkled with the summers of over sixty years; his eyes were partly closed, but when preaching they glowed with animation, and were brightened by the tears that dimmed them; his long, wiry fingers were interlocked and raised towards his breast in the attitude of deep contemplation. The rough soutane and leather belt, the beads and missionary cross partly hid in his breast, declared him to be a follower of St. Ignatius. In the hallowed austerity of his whole appearance, in the sweetness blended with religious gravity, and in the respect and love manifested in the ever increasing crowd, one easily learned he was more than an ordinary man. The people of Naples knew him by the endearing name of Brother Francis; history has since written his name in letters of gold on the alters of the Catholic Church as St. Francis of Jerome. It must have been a treat to the people who heard such saints as Francis of Jerome preach. Natural eloquences is a rare and powerful gift; when guided by education and study, the talent exercises a marvellous influence on man; but add to these two a zeal and fervor of spirit such as burned in the mortified spirit of the man of God, and we have a power that is nothing short of supernatural and irresistible. From a heart all aglow with divine love he soon enkindled in his hearers that fire his divine Master came to kindle on earth. His sermons were miracles. So great was the crowd around him at times that it would be impossible for any human voice to reach his furthest hearers. Yet every word of the great preacher went with silvery tone and moving power, as if wafted on angel breathings, to the ears of sinners whom chance or grace had brought to join the immense crowd that surrounded his rude platform. Each sermon brought hundreds to repentance. Eyes that were long dry melted into tears, and hearts that were strangers to every sweet and holy influence throbbed with emotion. Efforts to check the pent-up feelings were expressed by louder and convulsive sobs; some knelt and prayed, others beat their breasts in the agony of contrition. The immense concourse of people, simple and religious minded, at all times impressionable, were, under the appeals of Francis, moved as in times of public calamity, and the whole crowd swayed to and fro as the deep moved by the storm--now trembling in terror, now ashamed of sin and ingratitude, and again encouraged with hope, whose cheerful beams the orator would cause to dart through the dark clouds he himself had gathered over their mental vision. On one occasion a courtesan ridiculed from her bed-room window the words of the saint. She fell dead immediately. When he heard of the awful judgement passed on this hapless woman, he ordered her body to be brought to him. Then, amidst a death-like silence, he cried out in a voice of thunder that penetrated the regions of the damned: "Catherine, where art thou now?" The soul answered with a shriek that sent a thrill through the assembled thousands: "In hell!" Although in scenes of terror like these Francis thundered forth the awful destinies of the judged, yet the mercy of God towards the sinner was his favorite theme. He looked on himself as called in a special manner to seek out the lost sheep, to soften down the roughness found on the path of repentance, to aid in the struggles willing souls find in their efforts at reformation. Francis knew, as all masters of the spiritual life have learned, there is more power in the eloquence of forgiving love than in the terrors of retribution; hence, with tears and burning sentiments of sympathy for the erring children of men, he led his hearers as it were by the hand to the Father of the prodigal--to that Jesus who forgave and loved the penitent Magdalen. Francis has now ascended his platform. The crowd are swelling around. He raises the sign of redemption over their heads; in a few majestic sentences he commences his subject; the fire is kindling in his eye, and the thunder is deepening in his splendid voice. The listeners are wrapt in breathless attention. On the outskirts of the crowd there is a young officer, slender, graceful, tidy to a fault. It is Alvira. She was passing down the Toledo, and had already heard the saint before she had seen him. She had heard of the great preacher, but was afraid to meet him. Grace had followed her in all her wanderings, and the prayers of her mother were still heard at the throne of God. The crowd is so great Alvira cannot pass to the Molo, where she was quartered with her regiment. She must listen. Strange, consoling ways of divine grace! It was thee, O Lord! who drew they servant from his convent on that auspicious morning; thou did'st gather the crowd around him, and inspire him with the words and theme of his moving discourse! It was thy mercy, smiling with compassion on a noble but erring soul, which brought her to listen to those words that would bring thy grace to her heart! Like one whose eye has caught a brilliant meteor flying through the heavens, and remains gazing on it until it has disappeared, Alvira could not remove her eyes from Francis. When she saw his saintly figure standing on the rude platform, holding in his outstretched hand the saving sign of redemption, she was seized with an unaccountable feeling of awe. Although every word of the sermon was heard and weighed, it seemed as if the pent-up memories of her soul took precedence of her thoughts, and rushed on her with overwhelming force, like the winds let loose by the storm-god of old. Everything strange or sad in her past career lent its quota of color to the dark picture remorse, with cruel and masterly hand, delineated before her troubled spirit. The struggle, the agony she had learned to brave in the Duomo at Milan and the fortress of Messina, rose again with hydra fangs from the tomb of oblivion in which recent excitements had buried it. None but her guardian angel knew her soul was once more the battle-field of contending feelings. At length a crimson blush passed over her marble features; a crystal tear-drop dimmed her eye; another sprang from the reservoirs of the heart and stole down the blushing cheek. Alvira wept. Tears have a language of their own deep and powerful; they tell of the weakness of the human heart, not its triumphs; for passion has a throne that tears may wash in vain. It is easier to drive the mighty river from its long-loved bed than the soul from the normal state of its gratified tendencies. "The heart," says St. Liguori, "where passion reigns, has become a crystal vase filled with earth no longer penetrated by the rays of the sun." The iron pedestal of passion's throne was not yet shivered in the heart of Alvira, nor were tears a sign that the sun of grace had pierced the crystal vase of the worldly heart. Great will be the grace that will draw Alvira from the zenith of a golden dream in which a triumphant ambition has placed her above her sex, and great amongst the heroes of the manly sex she feigned. Her conversion will be a miracle--a miracle of sweet violence, such as drew the Magdalens, the Augustines, and the Cortonas from the trammels of vice to the holy and happy path of repentance. The sermon is over. The crowd is still between Alvira and the Molo; she must wait. The people are gradually dispersing. Some go to the church to follow up the holy inspirations given, to throw themselves at the feet of a confessor, to break the chains of sin; others hasten to their homes or daily avocations, wondering, pleased, and sanctified in good desires and resolutions that came gushing from their hearts. Alvira is standing to one side alone and wrapt in thought. Suddenly she looks up. Something catches her eye. She starts; a tremble passes from head to foot. She looks again; her worst terrors are realized. It is--Father Francis is coming towards her! "But he can't be coming to me," she thought to herself. She looked around to see if there were any other object to bring the father in that direction; but there was no poor creature to ask his charity, no poor cripple to seek his sympathy; she was almost alone. She could have fled, but felt herself fixed to the ground, and with desperate efforts endeavored to conceal her excitement. He approaches nearer; with glistening eye she watches and hopes some fortuitous circumstances may call him aside. Their glance meets; she blushes and trembles, Father Francis is before her. For a moment he gazed on the young captain with a kind, penetrating look; and a smile on his features seemed to express a friendly recognition. Calling her by her assumed name, he said to her, almost in a whisper: "Charles, go to confession; God wishes thee well." Alvira was relieved. The kind, gentle manner of the father calmed the storm of conflicting fears. Rejecting the inward calls of grace, and hoping she was not discovered, she replied with some hesitation: "But, father, I don't require to go to confession. I have not done anything wrong." Her voice faltered, and the blush of conscious falsehood grew deeper and deeper on her glowing features. Father Francis drew himself up with majesty; his eye beamed with the glow of inspiration, and in a solemn reproof he addressed the trembling girl: "You have done nothing wrong, nothing to merit the judgments of a terrible God--you, who murdered your father in the snows of the Alps, robbed him of ill-gotten wealth, spent it in gaming, and dragged your innocent sister in the path or your own shameless adventure!" "Father! father!" cried Alvira, bursting into convulsive sobs. "Maria Alvira Cassier," continued the man of God in a milder tone, "go and change those garments; cease this tale of guilty hypocrisy. But--" Advancing towards her, he took her hand, and, resuming the paternal smile that relaxed his solemn features and banished her fears, said in a low tone: "But come with me to the Gesu." Alvira obeyed. She was thunderstruck. The revelation of the great secrets of her life summoned up paralyzing fears; but, accustomed to brave the succumbing weakness of the feminine character, and encouraged by the paternal manner of the father, she did not faint, but buried her face in her hands and wept. In silence she followed Father Francis. She skilfully concealed her emotions; the tears were brushed away as rapidly as they overflowed. In passing the squares that separated them from the church, Alvira had resolved to unbosom herself to the good father. Like the angel that led Peter from his prison, she knew this sainted man was destined to lead her from the prison of her hypocrisy. Where grace has not conquered, consequences are weighed, the future becomes too dark and unknown for the cowardly heart, and temporal evils assume the weight of eternal woes; the blinded self-love yields, and the moment of grace is abandoned. But Alvira's conversion was complete, and, without one doubt or fear for the future, she handed herself to the guidance of the venerable father, who had learned by inspiration from heaven the spiritual maladies of her soul. The whole of that day was spent in the church. She crouched into an angle behind one of the large pillars. Like the dew that freshens and vivifies the vegetation that has been dried up by the parching sun, the exhilarating breathings of the divine Spirit spread over her soul that peace which surpasseth all understanding. In the fervor of her first real moments of prayer, the hours passed as seconds; unmindful of food, of the duties incumbent on her military profession, and of the busy world around, she was not roused from her reverie until the golden floods of the setting sunlight fell in tinted splendor through the stained-glass windows of the old Gothic church. As the church bells were merrily chiming the Ave Maria, a gentle tap on her shoulder called her attention. It was Father Francis. He had watched her all the day with a secret joy; he knew the value of moments like these in maturing the resolutions of the converted soul, and, as he had not yet completed his arrangements, he was afraid his penitent might slip from him in the crowd and be exposed to temptations that might discourage her; the cold blast of the world might shake to the ground the fabric he had commenced to build. He bent his venerable countenance to her ear, whispered a word of consolation, and bade her not leave till he came for her. The father moved silently and thoughtfully through the sombre aisles; now and then he would stop to converse with some child of grace, for he had many awaiting his spiritual aid. With smiles of holy joy, he imparted consolation to each, and sent them to their homes accompanied by those spirits that rejoice in the conversion of the sinner. A few moments, and the lights were extinguished, the crowd is gone. The cough and suppressed sigh are no longer heard from the deep aisles, and the footsteps of the ever-changing crowd have ceased to clatter on the marble pavement. The solitary lamp in the sanctuary cast a fitful shadow through the silent and abandoned church, and was the only indication of the presence of Him who rules in the vast spheres of the heavens. Alvira felt happier in this lonely moment before the Most Holy Sacrament. The fruit of years of penance, and the conquest of turbulent, rebellious passions, have often been gained in moments of fervor before the alter. Like sand, changed to transparent crystal glass under the blow-pipe, the heart is melted and purified under the fire of love that darts in invisible streams from the loving Victim of the tabernacle. The closing of the church door and the rattling of carriage wheels in the direction of the Chaja close an eventful day, recorded in golden letter in heaven's history of repentant humanity. Chapter XXV. Honor Saved. A series of surprises followed this memorable conversion. Alvira's absence from the garrison was the subject of serious comment. Rumor was busy, and disposed of the young captain by every imaginable violent death. One report seemed the most probable and gained ground. It was thought the partisans of the defeated party, remembering the victory of Vesuvius, and galled at the popularity of the young captain, had waylaid and murdered him. At the same time the mangled body of a young man was found washed into the river by the tide; it was mutilated and disfigured beyond recognition; the populace claimed it to be the body of their favorite, and loud and still rang the indignant cry for vengeance. The city was in commotion. The authorities were induced to believe the report, and large rewards were offered for the apprehension of the murderers. 'Tis but a spark that may set the wood on fire; and popular feeling, fired by a random rumor, now blazed in all the fury of a political conflagration. In the midst of the commotion the commandant of the forces received a polite note requesting his presence at the residence of the Marchioness de Stefano. Puzzled at the strange summons, but polite to a fault, he appeared in grand tenu at the appointed hour in the salons of the Marchioness. A young lady was ushered in to the apartment. She was dressed in black, wore no jewelry, and seemed a little confused; a majestic mien set off some natural charms, but her features had an expression of care and sadness such as is read on the countenance of the loving fair one who has been widowed in her bloom. Her eyes were red, for many tears had dimmed them; her voice was weak, for shame had choked the utterances in their birth; her whole demeanor expressed deep anxiety and trouble. The commandant was kind-hearted, but a stern ruler in those days of trouble; he had seen in the revolutions of many years the miseries and sorrows of life; though insensible to the horrors of the battle-field, he felt a deep, touching sympathy with its real victims who survive and suffer for years in silent woe, in affections that have been ruthlessly blasted by cruel war. The feeling of compassion towards the strange lady introduced to him were deeply enhanced by the remarks by which she opened the conversation. "I sent for you, sir," commenced the lady in a subdued tone, "to speak to you about Captain Charles Pimontel." The veteran soldier, believing she was his betrothed, that she was torn by cruel destiny from the object of her affections, endeavored to soothe her troubled spirit by the balm of kindness and consolation. "Ah! madame," he replied in his blandest manner, "if report be true, a cruel fate has removed him for a while from thy embrace. Young, brave, and amiable, he was the darling of our troops, and fortune seemed to lead our gallant young captain to a brilliant career; but some foul assassin's hand has cut the flower ere it bloomed; destiny, as cruel as it has been mysterious, has darkened his sun ere yet it shone in the zenith of day!" "Oh! sir, it may not yet be true that he has met such a sad fate," retorted the lady. "Alas!" replied the commandant, "yesterday evening the youth's body was washed up on our beach; the wounds of twenty stilettos gaped on his mangled corpse, and the lampreys of our bay fed on his noble flesh as they would on the vile slaves cast to them by the monster Nero. These eyes have seen the horrid sight; though we could not recognize the brave youth, we wept as if our own son had fallen by cowardly hands." The old commandant was somewhat excited; before the warm tear had welled from the fountains of sympathy, the young lady spoke in an animated and excited manner: "But, sir, there is surely some mistake. It cannot be said Charles Pimontel was murdered; does it follow because the unrecognized body of some hapless victim of a street brawl has been washed on the beach that it must necessarily be the body of the captain? Do you not think his murderers would pay dearly for this attack on him? Have any witnesses come forward to swear to his assassination? I will not believe in his death until stronger proofs have been given; and I may be intruding on the precious time of our commandant, but I have sought this interview with you have found the murdered remains of Charles Pimontel." "Love, madame," rejoined the commandant sentimentally, "clings to forlorn hopes, and in its sea of trouble will grasp at straws. The whole city has proclaimed the murder of the captain; our military chapel is draped in gloom, and I have given orders that all the garrison be in attendance on the morrow at the obsequies." The lady, who at first intended a strange surprise for the commanding officer, began to fear things were going too far, and that no time was to be lost in declaring the real fate of the captain. She arose quickly, and, approaching near to him, spoke with strong emphasis: "I beseech you, sir, to stay these proceedings; I tell you on my word of honor the captain is not dead." "Then you know something of him?" interrupted the commandant. "I command you, madame, in the name of the King, to tell me of his whereabouts. If he has, without sufficient cause, absented himself from military duty, by my sword the rash youth shall be punished. Besides playing the fool with the people, the inviolable sanctity of the military constitutions has been violated. Madame, your lover, perhaps, has forgotten himself over his cups. If secreted within these walls, produce him, that he may know, for thy sake, and in consideration of his first fault, the leniency of his sentence for violation of our military rule." "Sir," replied the young woman, drawing herself up majestically, and fearlessly confronting the aged officer, whose inviolable fidelity to military honor made him warm in his indignation at the supposed delinquency of his subaltern--"sir, the secret of the captain's absence and his present abode is committed to me; but I shall not divulge the information you ask until you promise me that, having shown you reasonable cause for his seeming fault, you will not only acquit him of his supposed crime of dereliction of duty, but that his honor shall be preserved unstained before his fellow-officers and men." The proposition seemed honorable to the commandant, and he immediately replied: "I swear by my sword it shall be so." "Then, sir, see before you the offender. I am Charles Pimontel!" Chapter XXVI. Repentance. On the road that led the traveller to the ancient village of Torre del Greco, and about a mile from the populous parts of the city, there stood a neat little cottage. In the front there was a flower garden, small but charmingly pretty; the doors and windows were surrounded with a woodbine creeper that gave an air of comfort to the little dwelling. The door was ever closed. Few were seen to pass in and out, and no noise ever betrayed the presence of its inmates. Here for many years our young penitent Alvira passed a holy and solitary life. After the stirring scenes of the preceding chapters, Father Francis procured from the military authorities for his Magdalen, as he was wont to call her, the full pay of a captain as a retiring pension. This remarkable circumstance may be authenticated by reference to the military books still preserved in the archives of the Molo at Naples. Her rank and pension were confirmed by the king. Under the able direction of the man of God, Alvira gave herself to full correspondence with the extraordinary graces offered by our blessed Lord. Her austerities and fervor increased until they reached the degrees of heroic sanctity. She knelt and wept for hours before her crucifix; she slept on hard boards and only allowed herself sufficient to meet the demands of nature. She lived on herbs, and the fast of Lent was so severe that Father Francis saw a miraculous preservation. Long before daylight she knelt on the steps of the Gesu waiting for the opening of the doors, and this austerity she never failed to practice in the midst of rain or cold, until her last illness chained her involuntarily to her couch, where her submission to the will of God was equally meritorious. Several terrible scenes of judgement, sent by Almighty God on unrepentant sinners, had, in the very commencement of her conversion, a most salutary influence on the feeble struggles of Alvira. Her confidence in the Blessed Virgin was much enhanced by a severe act of St. Francis towards one of the members of the Congregation of the Most Holy Mother. A young man of this congregation got suddenly rich, and, with wealth, self-conceit and pride entered his heart. He considered it necessary, to preserve his respectability, to separate himself from the humble society he hitherto frequented, and cease to be a member of the Congregation of the Madonna, composed of industrious and virtuous youths who labored honestly for their livelihood. St. Francis, on hearing of this slight on the congregation and insult to Mary, was fired with a holy indignation. He sought the young man, and rang in his ears the prophetic warnings which, in the case of this great saint, were never uttered in vain to the unheeding. Again and again St. Francis warned, but pride was still triumphant. One Sunday afternoon, after the usual meeting of the confraternity, the saint went to the alter of sodality; it was the altar of the Dolors. Seven daggers seemed to pierce the Virgin's heart. Ascending the altar, he cast a sorrowful glance on the weeping countenance of the Queen of Sorrows, and said: "Most Holy Virgin, this young man has been for you a most acute sword, piercing your heart; behold, I will relieve you of it." So saying, he took one of the poniards from the statue, and at the same time announced to the members that the proud young man was expelled from the congregation. Let those who fancy that such reprobations have not a corresponding echo in the judgements of God tremble in reading the effects of this simple but terrible excommunication. Like sand through the perforated vessel, the young man's wealth passed away; one month found him a cringing debtor, another found him a beggar, a third found him dying in a public institution, abandoned by God and man. On another occasion Alvira was present when a terrible judgement of God upon a hardened sinner thrilled the whole city with awe. St. Francis was preaching in one of the streets during Lent. He happened to pause and address a crowd near the house of an impious, ill conducted woman, who came immediately to her window to laugh and mock at the man of God. Having gratified herself tot he disgust of the crowd, she finally slammed to the window violently, uttering at the same time some filthy and unbecoming remark. St. Francis stood immovable fro a moment; his eye was fixed on heaven; and then, in a voice head half over the city, he cried out: "My God, how terrible are thy judgments! That unfortunate woman has dropped dead." The groans and confusion of the inmates soon convinced the crowd of the awful fact, for the corpse of the hapless wretch was brought into the street where it was exposed to the terrified people. These and similar instances of the judgement of God witnessed by Alvira had a salutary effect on her trembling soul. The fear of God, which is the beginning of wisdom, erected its watch-tower around the citadel of her heart; the virtues, once entered, were not permitted to flee, and soon won for this penitent soul the sweets of the illuminative degree of sanctity. St. Francis, a master in the science of the saints, soon recognized the extraordinary graces destined for this chosen soul. Full of gratitude and love for God, he spared no effort to correspond with the sublime destiny entrusted to him; hence in the after-history of those two holy souls the marvels of virtue and sanctity intermingled, so that at times it would seem doubtful whether the miracles recorded were given to the exalted sanctity and zeal of the holy priest or to the weeping virgin penitent, so privileged and so loved in the forgiving memory of God. On one occasion a young mother lost her infant. Death had stricken the little flower ere it had blossomed. The mother was poor and unable to bury the child. With an unbounded confidence in the charity and zeal of St. Francis, the bright thought struck her: If she could only get this good man interested in her behalf, all would be accomplished. Accordingly, she made for the church of the Gesu by daylight. Only one individual was before her waiting for the church to be opened. It was Magdalen. Even from Magdalen she concealed the object of her early visit, and pressed closer to her heart the dead treasure she intended as a present for Father Francis. The church opened; she stole around the dark aisles, whence the daylight had not yet banished the shades of night, and noiselessly approached the confessional of the holy man. She placed the dead child on the seat, and hurried to some recess of the great church, where she could watch the happy issue of this ingenious mode of disposing of her child. The early morning hours wore away, and at length the wished for moment came. The vestry door is opened. The tall, mortified form of St. Francis appeared at the foot of the altar. He prayed awhile, and rose to go to his confessional. But the young mother watched with her heart leaping to her mouth. He did not go to his tribunal; he moved majestically down the church, and came to Magdalen's corner where Alvira was wrapt in prayer. He whispered something to her. They prayed for a moment, then Alvira flitted like a shadow through the dark aisles towards the confessional of Father Francis. She entered and took the infant child in her arms. The child was alive. The mother came rushing from her hiding-place to claim the infant, and when she received it into her embrace the man of God raised his index finger in the act of warning, and with a sweet, forgiving smile on his countenance, said to the young mother: "My child, don't put any more dead babies in my confessional." Alvira had to undergo a severe trial in the absence of Father Francis. He was directed by his superiors to commence his missions in the country districts, and was virtually removed from Naples for some years. Before leaving, he fortified his chosen children with salutary admonitions, but for Alvira he had special words of encouragement and consolation. It pleased God to let him know in her behalf that, in return for her sincere repentance and deep devotion to the Blessed Virgin, before her death three extraordinary favors would be conferred on her, which would also be the warning of the setting sun of her career in life. Alvira treasured his words in her heart, and in deep humility wondered at the goodness of God. Chapter XXVII. The Privileges of Holy Souls. An extraordinary miracle is said, in the life of St. Francis, to have taken place in the house where Alvira was present. St. Francis had an aged brother living in the city--a man of eminent sanctity, but suffering much from his infirmities. St. Francis prevailed on Alvira to attend him and nurse him in his illness. He could not have been trusted to more tender or willing hands. Virtue and affection lent their powerful aids to render Alvira a charming nurse. But her labor of love was not very protracted, for it pleased God to cast the last and fatal fever on Cataldus, the invalid brother of the saint. At the time the malady was increasing and death imminent, St. Francis was absent from the city on a mission to Recale, a place about sixteen miles from Naples. Cataldus prayed to be permitted to see his brother before death but the malady seemed to increase so rapidly there was very slight probability of his return in time. Alvira had retired to an adjoining apartment to seek relief in prayer. She suddenly heard some strange sounds in the room of her patient. She flew towards the chamber, and there, to her astonishment, she beheld St. Francis embracing his brother. "Go," said the saintly man to the invalid--"go with courage and confidence whither God thy father calls thee, and where the saints await thee. Remember God is a good master, and know that in a short time I will follow thee." Then drawing Alvira aside, he whispered to her: "My child, know that Cataldus is going with rapid strides to eternity. You must still assist him with love and patience. To-night at four he will die. I must be away now, but I hope to see him again before he dies." Having thus spoken, alone and, contrary to his custom, without any one to accompany him, he left the house. Cataldus, Alvira, and a servant in the house testified to having seen him in Naples in their house; the servant even testified that he entered through closed doors; whilst two fathers who were with him at Recale gave sworn testimony that St. Francis was with them at the very time he was seen and spoken to at Naples. And when the hour foreseen by this great saint, in which death was to place his cold hand on the brow of Cataldus, was at hand, the couch of the dying was again blessed by his spirit; but Alvira did not on this occasion see him, but she saw the recognition that cast a beam of joy over the face of the dying man, and she heard the sweet accents of consolation the saint was permitted to impart. Chapter XXVIII. A Vision of Purgatory--A Dear One Saved. Like lengthening shadows of evening creeping over the silent ruin, death was fast drawing the shades of its final night over the austerities and the virtues of Alvira. The promises of St. Francis filled her heart with a cup of joy that rarely falls to the lot of mortals this side of the grave. Vespers are finished at the Gesu; the organ is silent, the crowd have departed, and, in the mellow twilight of an autumn eve, we discern only a few pious souls crouched behind the pillars, or pouring forth their last fervent aspirations before some favorite altar or saintly shrine. Soon all have left, and the silence of the abandoned sanctuary shrouds the fabric in greater solemnity. The aromatic incense still floats in nebulous veils around the tabernacle. A loud breathing, an expression of joy from a dark recess, announced the presence of some one still in the church. The sounds came from the quarter known to the pious frequenters of the church as Magdalen's corner, so named because there was near to it an altar dedicated to the great penitent St. Magdalen, and because here St. Francis' Magdalen spent long hours in tears and prayer. On the evening in question Alvira had remained longer than usual to commune with Almighty God. It was a festival day, and her soul felt all the glow of fervor and spiritual joy which at times wraps the pious spirit into foretastes of celestial happiness. The hours passed swiftly by, for fervent prayer is not tedious to the loving. She pondered in her mind what could be the graces or favors promised her in the last interview with her spiritual director. Her humility had not dared to seek favors; she was still overwhelmed with the thought of the bitter past; more time for repentance would be the signal favor she would venture to solicit from the God she had so much offended. Yet the mercy and goodness of God are more mysterious to us mortals when we consider them lavished in extraordinary munificence on the souls of poor sinners. When we feel crushed to the earth in our unworthiness, the forgiving spirit of God lifts us up and pours around us consolations which are the privilege of the innocent. Thus the humble Alvira little dreamt what might be the grand consolations destined for her; but the time of their fulfilment has come, and we find her startled from an ecstasy in the church in which one of the promised favors was bestowed on this child of grace. She described to Father Francis what happened with many tears of joy. Whilst wrapt in prayer in the lonely moments that followed the Benediction of the Most Holy Sacrament and the closing of the church doors, she suddenly saw the altar and sanctuary disappear, and in their stead a luminous bank of moving clouds; they were white as the snow-drift, and crystallized in a flood of light like Alpine peaks in the winter sunshine. These clouds moved rapidly before her astonished gaze, occasionally she saw through their rents a tinge of red flame that glowed in the fleecy mist like the crimson linings of sunset. The brighter clouds gradually faded; the flames became fiercer and more distinct; they seemed to leap in fury around the altar and sanctuary. Alvira struggled in doubt for a moment. Perhaps a real conflagration was consuming the tabernacle. A scream of agony was already on her lips, when the scene glided into a still more vivid reality, leaving no doubt as to its character. In the burning element human beings appeared writhing in pain; angels of dazzling brightness floated over the fire, and every moment caught the outstretched arms of some fortunate soul whose purgatorial probation had terminated; the angel would carry the soul to a distant sphere of brightness whither Alvira's weak mortal gaze could not follow. Suddenly there darted from the far light an angel clothed with the brilliancy of the sun. With the speed of lightning he plunged far down the purgatory fire; his brightness was so great that Alvira could follow him even through the flames. There the angel found a young, beautiful soul, deep in agony, clothed with crimson fire. A smile of ineffable joy lit up the countenance of the sufferer--the message from heaven was understood. The angel lifted this soul from the fire, and, pausing for a moment on the peak of a lambent flame, the angelic deliverer and the liberated soul, now became angelic in brilliancy, paused to look and smile on Alvira. Her heart leaped, her soul trembled. She recognized the features. In a convulsive effort to utter the loved name of Aloysia, the vision passed away, and she found herself in the dark church and on the cold flags, weeping away the overflow of a heart too full of joy. Chapter XXIX. Unexpected Meeting. Late on a cold night in the winter of 1706 a sick-call came to the Jesuit college attached to the Gesu. Alvira Cassier was ill, and requested the attendance of one of the fathers. Some months had passed since the consoling vision in which she saw the purified soul of Aloysia carried to a crown of immortal bliss. Since then the great St. Francis had passed to his crown. His holy spirit hovered in protecting love over Alvira. She recurred to him in her troubles, and always with remarkable success. Miracles of cures and conversion, effected through the humble prayers of the penitent and the powerful intercession of the deceased apostle, are registered in the great book of life, to be read on the great accounting-day. Alvira sighed over the prolongation of her exile. Her heart longed to be with Christ; she soared in spirit over the abyss that separated her from the object she loved. Yet two more signs were to announce the happy moment of her freedom. She knew the fate of Aloysia, raised from the searching flame and introduced to the saints, was the first of these favors promised by St. Francis. The other was equally extraordinary. The illness of Alvira caused a sigh of regret at the Jesuit College. Every one whose heart was interested in the glory of God would have reason to sigh over her lost example, her influence over sinners, and the edification of her exalted virtues. A priest is wrapped in his cloak; he carries the most Holy Sacrament and the holy oils. A levite accompanies him, carrying a lamp and ringing a bell. Unmindful of the inclemency of the weather, they move on through the abandoned streets, now filled by crowds of unseen angels, who take the place of man and honor the Holy of Holies. The priest is a young Frenchman who has just come to Naples. To confer a favor on Alvira, the superior sent him to St. Francis's penitent that she might have the consolation of her own language at the trying hour of her death. He is a tall, thin figure on the decline of manhood; in the graceful outline of features sweet and attractive we read the marks of much mortification. A halo of religion and sanctity envelopes him with that reverential awe we give to true virtue. He has entered the room. Alvira starts. She has seen that face before; that noble brow; that lofty mien; that irresistible sweetness of look. He is some acquaintance, perhaps met casually in the rambles of youthful folly. Reverence for the Blessed Sacrament banished further curiosity, and Alvira, with closed eyes and hands folded on her crucifix, joined in the solemn prayers recited on such occasions. When all the prescribed ceremonies were completed, the good priest drew near the couch of the suffering invalid, and, allowing a moment for a relaxation of thought and for conversation, mildly enquired if she suffered much pain. "So they tell me you have come from Paris, my child," we fancy we hear the good father commencing a conversation that leads to a strange discovery. "Yes, father, 'tis my native city." "And what was your family name?" "Cassier." "Cassier!" replied the priest, with a thrill of surprise. "Did he live in Rue de Seine?" "Yes, father." "You had a sister?" "Yes; but she is now in heaven. She was killed on Mount Vesuvius." Alvira wept. A startling suspicion had crept over the good priest. Was it possible that the invalid sinking into eternity in a sunset of sanctity and of heroic penance, formerly the chivalrous captain of Vesuvian fame, was no other than his own sister? "And what became of your brother?" asked the Jesuit after a pause, and looking anxiously into Alvira's emaciated countenance. "Ah! father," she replied, "I would give worlds to know. About thirty years ago, when our home was comfortable, he suddenly disappeared from us; no one could tell what became of him; we knew he was called by God to a holier life, and it was our impression at the time he fled to join some strict religious order. Poor dear Aloysia and myself used to pain him by turning his pious intentions to ridicule. His disappearance broke my poor mother's heart, for she died very soon afterwards." A long, deep silence ensued. Pere Augustin--for that was his name in religion--held his hands clasped up at his lips whilst Alvira was speaking. He remained motionless; his eyes were fixed on a spot on the floor. It was evident a struggle was going on within him. There could be no longer any doubt, and he was puzzled whether he should declare himself at once to be the lost Louis Marie, or bide his time and break it gently to her. As if seeking more time for deliberation, he asked her another question "And, my child, what became of your father?" Ah! how little did he dream of the wound he was tearing open. His enquiry was the signal for a new burst of grief from the broken-hearted Alvira. She buried her face in the pillow and wept violently. She remained so for several minutes. This made Pere Augustin determine his course of action. As he had caused her so much pain, he must now console her by letting her know who he is. Drawing nearer to her, he bade her be consoled, for he had some good news to give her; and Alvira, after a great effort, raised her head and said: "It is kind of you father, very kind of you indeed, to take interest in my affairs; but perhaps, as you are acquainted with Paris and belong to the Society of Jesus, you many know something of my brother. Poor Louis Marie! I should like to know if he is well, and happy, and good. Do tell me, father, if you know anything of him." "Yes, I do," answered the father quickly. "Is he alive?" "Yes!" "And happy?" "Yes." "Where is he?" "Here!" cried Louis Marie, bursting into tears--"here, within the grasp of your hand." Could joy be greater? Those two holy souls blended into one. Like Benedict and Scholastica, they wept and smiled together in alternate raptures of joy and grief. Chapter XXX. Conclusion. Now reft of all, faint, feeble, prest with age, We mark her feelings in the last great stage; The feverish hopes, the fears, the cares of life, No more oppress her with torturing strife; The chivalrous spirit of her early day Has passed with beauty and with youth away. As oft the traveller who beholds the sun Sinking before him ere yet his journey's done, Regrets in vain to lose its noontide power, Yet hails the coolness of the evening hour, She feels a holy and divine repose Rest on her spirit in the twilight close; Although her passions ruled in their might, Now vanquished, brighter burns the inward light, Guiding the spirit by its sacred ray To cast its mortal oil and cares away, And list its summons to eternal day. Tossed on a restless ocean, and surviving a long and stormy voyage, how the sight of the verdant hills and spires of the nearing port must cheer the wearied mariner! Joy has its sunbeams to light up every countenance. Merry the song that keeps tune with the revolving capstan. Old memories are awakened and dormant affections roused; the husband, the father, the exile, each has a train of though laden with bright anticipations. Fancy and hope hasten to wave their magic wings over the elated heart, and contribute the balm of ideal charms to make even one moment of mortal life a happiness without alloy. The wearied mariner returning home, quaffing a cup of joy, is a faint but truthful simile to represent the pious soul in sight of the port of eternal bliss, where loved ones are hailing from afar their welcome to the successful mariner from the troubled sea of time. Life has its storms and its calms, its casualties and dangers; it also has the bright twilight in the shadow of those eternal hills where existence is immortal and joy beatific and unclouded. Alvira, the heroine of our sketch, is now the faithful soul standing on the bark in view of her eternal home. The consolations promised by her sainted guardian have twice tolled the death knell; once more some great joy will strike the last fibre of her heart long tuned to spiritual happiness, and will break the last chain that imprisons a spirit longing to soar on high. In the deceptive phases of the consumptive malady she rallied at times; she felt stronger--would venture out to the homes of the poor, and faint at the alter of Jesus. In her weakness she did not moderate her austerities, save where the express command of her spiritual director manifested to her the will of God. Her little cottage was surrounded daily by the poor and sick, who were her friends, and many and sincere were the blessings invoked over their benefactress. Long and interesting were her conversations with her brother Louis. Her history as known to herself must have been replete with many striking events besides those we have caught up from a scanty tradition and a brief pamphlet biography. How the secrets of her rambles in disguise must have brought the smile and the blush to the countenance of her simple-minded and sainted brother! In deep and natural fraternal affection, which is more powerful when mellowed by virtue, Pere Augustin saw the hand of death making each day new traces on the frame of Alvira. The hectic flush, the frequent faintings, and the cold, icy grasp of her hand told the energy of the poison that gnawed at the vital cords. Sweet and gentle words of encouragement ever flowed from his lips. With eye and finger ever turning towards heaven, whither his own soul yearned, he calmed the anxious and penitent spirit of Alvira, who still feared her repentance was incomplete. She received Holy Communion every day from the hands of her brother. What ecstasies of grateful love filled her breast when preparing for those blissful moments of union with our Blessed Lord! Deep and eloquent the mysterious breathings of the pure, loving heart. It has a language known and understood only by angels. As the sun melts the rocky iceberg, the coldest heart melts under the loving, burning Sun of the most Holy Eucharist. At length the bark is anchored in the port of rest; Alvira is summoned to her crown. The midnight of July 16, 1717, finds her in her agony; the blest candle is lighted; the faithful brother priest is kneeling by her bed; the solemn wail of the privileged few of the grateful poor is carried in mournful cadence from the chamber of death. Yet the bell has not tolled the third stroke of consolation. Could she have misunderstood the prophetic voice of her sainted Father Francis, who knew the secrets of God in her behalf? But no; the favor will come--the last crowning, ineffable favor will come; it is at hand. Alvira has opened her eyes. She calls her brother near; with a smile, the sweetest that ever lit up those expressive features, she told him what the favor would be. Father Francis and the Blessed Virgin would see her before she should die. Pere Augustin believes the shock of approaching dissolution has weakened her reasoning faculty; he gently chides her, whispers some sweet thought of humility, and breathes the holy name that banishes temptation. But, lo! Alvira's features have changed; a glow of ecstatic beauty has suffused around her; the light of another land is shed on her couch. Recognition is read on her looks. Pere Augustin, whose innocence and virtue entitled him to understand the privileges of the saints, saw the splendor of a heavenly light that filled the room, and heard from Alvira's lips expressions that left no doubt on his mind of the promised visit of celestial beings. The light faded, and from the feeble glare of the candle of death he saw the holy spirit of his sister had fled; the sweetness of heavenly joy still played on her marble features, and the smile that greeted the heavenly visitors still rested on her lips. Pere Augustin stood over the couch he had bedewed with tears, and taking a long and affectionate glance at the hollowed form of his repentant sister, turned towards the weeping people; he raised his hand towards heaven, and solemnly announced the event that gave a festival to the angels. His voice faltered; he pronounced a short and eloquent panegyric--"A saint is dead!" The tableau is worth remembering; 'tis the last beautiful scene in the eventful career of Maria Alvira Cassier! 
27706	----	SAINT VINCENT DE PAUL c. 1581-1660 By F.A. [Francis Alice] Forbes "Blessed is he that understandeth concerning the needy and the poor: the Lord will deliver him in the evil day." --Psalm 40:2 "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me. Wherefore he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor, he hath sent me to heal the contrite of heart, to preach deliverance to the captives, and sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord, and the day of reward." --Luke 4:18-19 Nihil Obstat: Francis M. Canon Wyndham Censor Deputatus Imprimatur: Edmund Canon Surmont Vicar General Westminster July 2, 1919 Originally published in 1919 by R. & T. Washbourne, Limited, London, as _Life of St. Vincent de Paul_ in the series _Standard-bearers of the Faith: A Series of Lives of the Saints for Young and Old._ "Extend mercy towards others, so that there can be no one in need whom you meet without helping. For what hope is there for us if God should withdraw His mercy from us?" --St. Vincent de Paul CONTENTS 1. A Peasant's Son 2. Slavery 3. A Great Household 4. The Galleys 5. Mission Work 6. The Grey Sisters 7. The Foundlings 8. At Court 9. The Jansenists 10. Troubles in Paris 11. "Confido" SAINT VINCENT DE PAUL "Dearly beloved, let us love one another, for charity is of God. And every one that loveth, is born of God, and knoweth God. He that loveth not, knoweth not God: for God is charity." --1 John 4:7-8 Chapter 1 A PEASANT'S SON A MONOTONOUS line of sand hills and the sea; a vast barren land stretching away in wave-like undulations far as eye can reach; marsh and heath and sand, sand and heath and marsh; here and there a stretch of scant coarse grass, a mass of waving reeds, a patch of golden-brown fern--the Landes. It was through this desolate country in France that a little peasant boy whose name was destined to become famous in the annals of his country led his father's sheep, that they might crop the scanty pasture. Vincent was a homely little boy, but he had the soul of a knight-errant, and the grace of God shone from eyes that were never to lose their merry gleam even in extreme old age. He was intelligent, too, so intelligent that the neighbors said that Jean de Paul was a fool to set such a boy to tend sheep when he had three other sons who would never be good for anything else. There was a family in the neighborhood, they reminded him, who had had a bright boy like Vincent, and had put him to school--with what result? Why, he had taken Orders and got a benefice, and was able to support his parents now that they were getting old, besides helping his brothers to get on in the world. It was well worthwhile pinching a little for such a result as that. Jean de Paul listened and drank in their arguments. It would be a fine thing to have a son a priest; perhaps, with luck, even a Bishop--the family fortunes would be made forever. With a good deal of difficulty the necessary money was scraped together, and Vincent was sent to the Franciscans' school at Dax, the nearest town. There the boy made such good use of his time that four years later, when he was only sixteen, he was engaged as tutor to the children of M. de Commet, a lawyer, who had taken a fancy to the clever, hardworking young scholar. At M. de Commet's suggestion, Vincent began to study for the priesthood, while continuing the education of his young charges to the satisfaction of everybody concerned. Five years later he took minor Orders and, feeling the need of further theological studies, set his heart on a university training and a degree. But life at a university costs money, however thrifty one may be, and although Jean de Paul sold a yoke of oxen to start his son on his career at Toulouse, at the end of a year Vincent was in difficulties. The only chance for a poor student like himself was a tutorship during the summer vacation, and here Vincent was lucky. The nobleman who engaged him was so delighted with the results that, when the vacation was over, he insisted on the young tutor taking his pupils back with him to Toulouse. There, while they attended the college, Vincent continued to direct their studies, with such success that several other noblemen confided their sons to him, and he was soon at the head of a small school. To carry on such an establishment and to devote oneself to study at the same time was not the easiest of tasks; but Vincent was a hard and conscientious worker, and he seems to have had, even then, a strange gift of influencing others for good. For seven years he continued this double task with thorough success, completed his course of theology, took his degree, and was ordained priest in the opening years of that seventeenth century which was to be so full of consequences both for France and for himself. Up to this time there had been nothing to distinguish Vincent from any other young student of his day. Those who knew him well respected him and loved him, and that was all. But with the priesthood came a change. From thenceforward he was to strike out a definite line of his own--a line that set him apart from the men of his time and faintly foreshadowed the Vincent of later days. The first Mass of a newly ordained priest was usually celebrated with a certain amount of pomp and ceremony. If a cleric wanted to obtain a good living it was well to let people know that he was eligible for it; humility was not a fashionable virtue. People were therefore not a little astonished when Vincent, flatly refusing to allow any outsiders to be present, said his first Mass in a lonely little chapel in a wood near Bajet, beloved by him on account of its solitude and silence. There, entirely alone save for the acolyte and server required by the rubrics, and trembling at the thought of his own unworthiness, the newly made priest, celebrating the great Sacrifice for the first time, offered himself for life and death to be the faithful servant of his Lord. So high were his ideals of what the priestly life should be that in his saintly old age he would often say that, were he not already a priest, he would never dare to become one. Vincent's old friend and patron, M. de Commet, was eager to do a good turn to the young cleric. He had plenty of influence and succeeded in getting him named to the rectorship of the important parish of Thil, close to the town of Dax. This was a piece of good fortune which many would have envied; but it came to Vincent's ears that there was another claimant, who declared that the benefice had been promised to him in Rome. Rather than contest the matter in the law courts Vincent gave up the rectorship and went back to Toulouse, where he continued to teach and to study. Some years later he was called suddenly to Bordeaux on business, and while there heard that an old lady of his acquaintance had left him all her property. This was welcome news, for Vincent was sadly in need of money, his journey to Bordeaux having cost more than he was able to pay. On returning to Toulouse, however, he found that the prospect was not so bright as he had been led to expect. The chief part of his inheritance consisted of a debt of four or five hundred crowns owed to the old lady by a scoundrel who, as soon as he heard of her death, made off to Marseilles, thinking to escape without paying. He was enjoying life and congratulating himself on his cleverness when Vincent, to whom the sum was a little fortune, and who had determined to pursue his debtor, suddenly appeared on the scene. The thief was let off on the payment of three hundred crowns, and Vincent, thinking that he had made not too bad a bargain, was preparing to return to Toulouse by road, the usual mode of traveling in those days, when a friend suggested that to go by sea was not only cheaper, but more agreeable. It was summer weather; the journey could be accomplished in one day; the sea was smooth; everything seemed favorable; the two friends set out together. A sea voyage in the seventeenth century was by no means like a sea voyage of the present day. There were no steamers, and vessels depended on a favorable wind or on hard rowing. The Mediterranean was infested with Turkish pirates, who robbed and plundered to the very coasts of France and Italy, carrying off the crews of captured vessels to prison or slavery. The day that the two friends had chosen for their journey was that of the great fair of Beaucaire, which was famous throughout Christendom. Ships were sailing backwards and forwards along the coast with cargoes of rich goods or the money for which they had been sold, and the Turkish pirates were on the lookout. The boat in which Vincent was sailing was coasting along the Gulf of Lyons when the sailors became aware that they were being pursued by three Turkish brigantines. In vain they crowded on all sail; escape was impossible. After a sharp fight, in which all the men on Vincent's ship were either killed or wounded--Vincent himself receiving an arrow wound the effects of which remained with him for life--the French ship was captured. But the Turks had not come off unscathed, and so enraged were they at their losses that their first action on boarding the French vessel was to hack its unfortunate pilot into a thousand pieces. Having thus relieved their feelings, they put their prisoners in chains. But then, fearing lest the prisoners die of loss of blood and so cheat them of the money for which they meant to sell them, they bound up their wounds and went on their way of destruction and pillage. After four or five days of piracy on the high seas, they started, laden with plunder, for the coast of Barbary, noted throughout the world at that time as a stronghold of sea robbers and thieves. Chapter 2 SLAVERY THE pirates were bound for the port of Tunis, the largest city of Barbary. But the sight of the glittering white town with its background of mountains, set in the gorgeous coloring of the African landscape, brought no gleam of joy or comfort to the sad hearts of the prisoners. Before them lay a life of slavery which might be worse than death; there was small prospect that they would ever see their native land again. To one faint hope, however, they clung desperately, as a drowning man clings to a straw. There was a French consul in Tunis whose business it was to look after the trade interests of his country, and it was just possible that he might use his influence to set them free. The hope was short-lived. The pirates, expecting to make a good deal of money out of their prisoners, were equally aware of this fact, and their first act on landing was to post a notice that the captives they had for sale were Spaniards. Nothing was left to Vincent and his companions, who did not know a word of the language of the country, but to endure their cruel fate. The Turks, having stripped their prisoners and clothed them in a kind of rough uniform, fastened chains round their necks and marched them through the town to the marketplace, where they were exhibited for sale much as cattle are at the present day. They were carefully inspected by the dealers, who looked at their teeth, felt their muscles, made them run and walk--with loads and without--to satisfy themselves that they were in good condition, and finally selected their victims. Vincent was bought by a fisherman who, finding that his new slave got hopelessly ill whenever they put out to sea, repented of his bargain and sold him to an alchemist. In the West, as well as in the East, there were still men who believed in the Philosopher's Stone and the Elixir of Life. By means of the still undiscovered Stone they hoped to change base metals into gold, while the equally undiscovered Elixir was to prolong life indefinitely, and to make old people young. Vincent's master was an enthusiast in his profession and kept ten or fifteen furnaces always burning in which to conduct his experiments. His slave, whose business it was to keep them alight, was kindly treated; the old man soon grew very fond of him and would harangue him by the hour on the subject of metals and essences. His great desire was that Vincent should become a Mohammedan like himself, a desire which, needless to say, remained unfulfilled, in spite of the large sums of money he promised if his slave would only oblige him in this matter. The old alchemist, however, had a certain reputation in his own country. Having been sent for one day to the Sultan's Court, he died on the way, leaving his slave to his nephew, who lost no time in getting rid of him. Vincent's next master was a Frenchman who had apostatized and was living as a Mohammedan on his farm in the mountains. This man had three wives, who were very kind to the poor captive--especially one of them, who, although herself a Mohammedan, was to be the cause of her husband's conversion and Vincent's release. She would go out to the fields where the Christian slave was working and bid him tell her about his country and his religion. His answers seemed to impress her greatly, and one day she asked him to sing her one of the hymns they sang in France in praise of their God. The request brought tears to Vincent's eyes. He thought of the Israelites captive in Babylon, and of their answer to a similar demand. With an aching heart he intoned the psalm, "By the waters of Babylon," while the woman, strangely impressed by the plaintive chant, listened attentively and, when he had ended, begged for more. The _Salve Regina_ followed, and other songs of praise, after which she went home silent and thoughtful. That night she spoke to her husband. "I cannot understand," she said, "why you have given up a religion which is so good and holy. Your Christian slave has been telling me of your Faith and of your God, and has sung songs in His praise. My heart was so full of joy while he sang that I do not believe I shall be so happy even in the paradise of my fathers." Her husband, whose conscience was not quite dead within him, listened silent and abashed. "Ah," she continued, "there is something wonderful in that religion!" The woman's words bore fruit. All day long, as her husband went about his business, the remembrance of his lost Faith was tugging at his heartstrings. Catching sight of Vincent digging in the fields, he went to him and bade him take courage. "At the first opportunity," he said, "I will escape with you to France." It was nine long months before that opportunity came, for the Frenchman was in the Sultan's service and was not able to leave the country. At last, however, the two men, escaping together in a small boat, succeeded in reaching Avignon, and Vincent was free once more. Cardinal Montorio, the Pope's legate, was deeply interested in the two fugitives, and a few days later reconciled the apostate, now deeply repentant, to the Church. The Cardinal, who shortly afterwards returned to Rome, took Vincent with him, showing him great kindness and introducing him to several people of importance. The opinion they formed of him is shown by the fact that he was chosen not long after to go on a secret mission to the court of Henry IV, King of France. An interview--or rather several interviews--with a reigning monarch would have been considered in those days as a first-rate chance for anyone who had a spark of ambition. Nothing would have been easier than to put in a plea for a benefice or a bishopric; but Vincent, who was both humble and unselfish, had no thought of his own advancement. His only desire was to get his business over and to leave the Court as quickly as possible. The question of how he was to live remaining still unanswered, he took a room in a house near one of the largest hospitals in Paris and devoted himself to the service of the sick and dying. But even the rent of the little room was more than he could afford to pay, and he was glad to share it with a companion. This was a judge from his own part of the country who was in Paris on account of a lawsuit and who, not being overburdened with money, offered to share the lodging and the rent. It was at this time that Vincent met Father--afterwards Cardinal--de Bérulle, one of the most holy and learned priests of his time, who was occupied at that moment in founding the French Congregation of the Oratory, destined to do such good work for the clergy of France. De Bérulle was quick to recognize holiness and merit, and he and Vincent soon became fast friends. But it did not seem to be God's will that our hero should prosper in Paris; he fell ill, and one day while he was lying in bed waiting for some medicine which had been ordered, his companion went out, leaving the cupboard in which he kept his money unlocked. The chemist's assistant, arriving shortly afterwards with the medicine and opening the cupboard to get a glass for the patient, caught sight of the purse, slipped it into his pocket, and made off. No sooner had the judge returned than he went to the cupboard and discovered the theft. Turning furiously on the sick man, he accused him of having stolen his property and overwhelmed him with insults and abuse. Vincent, unmoved by his threats, only answered gently that he had seen nothing of the money and did not know what had become of it; but his companion, refusing to listen to reason, rushed out and accused him to the police. This led to nothing, as neither witness nor proof could be brought forward by the judge, who, furious at the failure of his accusation, went about Paris denouncing Vincent as a thief. So determined was he to ruin the poor priest whose room he had shared that he obtained an introduction to Father de Bérulle for the express purpose of making Vincent's guilt known to him. As for the latter, he bore the affront in silence, making no attempt to justify himself beyond his first declaration that he was innocent. "God knows the truth," he would reply to all accusations. The true thief was only discovered six months later. The chemist's assistant had fallen ill and was lying at the point of death at a hospital, when, repenting of his crime, he sent to implore forgiveness of the man he had robbed. The judge, stricken with remorse, wrote at once to Vincent, offering to come and ask his pardon on his knees for the wrong he had done him. Vincent was then living at the Oratory with Father de Bérulle, who had never doubted his innocence. He hastened to assure his old roommate that he desired no such apology and begged him to say no more about the matter. Such was his treatment of the man who had done him so grievous an injury. It was during these years that Vincent de Paul had another strange experience in which he showed heroic courage and steadfastness. He made the acquaintance of a learned doctor of the Sorbonne who was so tormented with doubts against the Faith that his reason was in danger. This man confided his distress to Vincent, who explained to him that a temptation to doubt does not constitute unbelief, and that as long as his will remained firm he was safe. It happens, however, that such temptations often cloud the reason, and Vincent's labors to restore the man's peace of mind were in vain. The priest, deeply moved at the sight of a soul in such danger, besought God for help, offering himself to bear the temptation in the doctor's place. It was the inspiration of a saint, and the prayer was granted. The man was instantly delivered from his doubts, which took possession of Vincent himself. The trial was long and painful. For several years this humble and fervent soul endured the agony of an incessant temptation to unbelief. But Vincent knew how to resist this most subtle snare of the Evil One, and, although the anguish was continual, his will never wavered. Copying out the _Credo_ on a small sheet of parchment, he placed it over his heart, and his only answer to the fearful doubts that harassed him was to lay his hand upon it as he made his act of Faith. To prevent himself from dwelling on such thoughts, he devoted himself more than ever to works of charity, spending himself in the service of the sick and poor and comforting others when he himself was often in greater need of comfort. One day when the temptation was almost more than he could bear and he felt himself on the point of yielding, he made a vow to consecrate himself to Jesus Christ in the person of His poor. As he made the promise the temptation vanished, and forever. His faith henceforward was a faith that had been tried and had conquered; strong and firm as such a faith must be, it held him ready for all that God might send. Chapter 3 A GREAT HOUSEHOLD VINCENT remained two years in the house of Father de Bérulle, in the hope of obtaining permanent work. The administration of a poor country parish was, he maintained, the only thing he was fit for, but de Bérulle thought otherwise. "This humble priest," he predicted one day to a friend, "will render great service to the Church and will work much for God's glory." St. Francis de Sales, who made Vincent's acquaintance while he was with de Bérulle, was of the same opinion. "He will be the holiest priest of his time," he said one day as he watched him. As for Vincent, he was completely won by the gentle serenity of St. Francis and took him as model in his relations with others. "I am by nature a country clod," he would say in after years, "and if I had not met the Bishop of Geneva, I should have remained a bundle of thorns all my life." At last Vincent's desire seemed about to be fulfilled. A friend of de Bérulle's, curé of the country parish of Clichy, near Paris, announced his intention of entering the Oratory, and at de Bérulle's request chose Vincent de Paul as his successor. Here, amidst his beloved poor, Vincent was completely happy. In him the sick and the infirm found a friend such as they had never dreamed of and any son of poor parents who showed a vocation for the priesthood was taken into the presbytery and taught by Vincent himself. The parish church, which was in great disrepair, was rebuilt; old, standing quarrels were made up; men who had not been to the Sacraments for years came back to God. Such was the influence of the Curé of Clichy that priests from the neighboring parishes came to learn the secret of his success and to ask his advice. Vincent was looking forward to a life spent in earnest work among his people when a summons from Father de Bérulle recalled him suddenly to Paris. Nothing less than the resignation of his beloved Clichy was now asked of him by this friend to whom he owed so much. One of the greatest noblemen of France, Messire de Gondi, Count of Joigny and General of the King's Galleys, was in need of a tutor for his children and had commissioned Father de Bérulle to find him what he wanted. De Bérulle decided at once that Vincent de Paul was the man for the position and that, as he was evidently destined to do great work for God, it would be to his advantage to have powerful and influential friends. Although the prospect of such a post filled the humble parish priest with consternation, he owed too much to de Bérulle to refuse. Setting out from Clichy with his worldly goods on a hand-barrow, he arrived at the Oratory, from whence he was to proceed to his new abode. The house of Messire de Gondi was one of the most magnificent in Paris. The Count, one of the bravest and handsomest men of his day, was in high favor at Court; while his wife, at a time when the lives of most of the great ladies of the Court were anything but edifying, was remarkable for her fervor and piety. The de Gondi children, unfortunately, did not take after their parents, and the two boys whose education Vincent was to undertake and whose character he was to form were described by their aunt as "regular little demons." The youngest of the family, the famous, or rather infamous, Cardinal de Retz, was not yet born, but Vincent's hands were sufficiently full without him. "I should like my children to be saints rather than great noblemen," said Madame de Gondi when she presented the boys to their tutor, but the prospect seemed remote enough. The violent temper and obstinacy of his charges were a great trial to Vincent, who used to say in later life that they had taught him, cross-grained as he was by nature, how to be gentle and patient. The position of a man of low birth as tutor in that princely household was not without its difficulties. Vincent was a dependent; but there was a quiet dignity about him which forbade liberties. With the servants, and there were many of every grade, he was always cordial and polite, losing no chance of winning their confidence, that he might influence them for good. His duties over, he would retire to his own room, refusing, unless especially sent for, to mix with the great people who frequented the house. Madame de Gondi, with a woman's intuition, was the first to realize the sanctity of her sons' tutor and resolved to put herself under his direction. Knowing enough of his humility to be certain that he would refuse such a request, she applied to Father de Bérulle to use his influence in the matter, and thus obtained her desire. At Vincent's suggestion she soon afterwards undertook certain works of charity, which were destined to be the seed of a great enterprise. The Count, too, began to feel the effects of Vincent's presence in his household. It was the age of dueling, and hundreds of lives were lost in this barbarous practice. De Gondi was a famous swordsman, and although the life he led was a great deal better than that of the majority of his contemporaries, the possibility of refusing to fight when challenged, or of refraining from challenging another when his honor was at stake, had never occurred to him. Vincent had been some time at the de Gondis' when it came to his ears that the Count intended to fight a duel on a certain day, and he resolved, if possible, to prevent it. De Gondi was present at Mass in the morning and remained on afterwards in the chapel, praying, probably, that he might prevail over his enemy. Vincent waited till everyone had gone out, and then approached him softly. "Monsieur," he said, "I know that you intend to fight a duel; and I tell you, as a message from my Saviour, before whom you kneel, that if you do not renounce this intention His judgment will fall on you and yours." The Count, after a moment's silence, promised to give up his project, and faithfully kept his word. It was the greatest sacrifice that could have been asked of a man in de Gondi's position, and it was a thing unheard of at the time for a priest to lay down the law to a great nobleman. But the influence of sanctity is strong, and the Count was noble; for him it was the beginning of a better life. The de Gondis usually spent part of the year at their country house in Picardy, where they had large estates. Here the love of the poor which Vincent had fostered in Madame de Gondi was in its element, and she delighted in visiting her tenants, tending the sick with her own hands, and seconding all M. Vincent's plans for their welfare. It happened one day that Vincent was sent to the bedside of a dying peasant who had always borne a good character and was considered an excellent Christian. The man was conscious, and Vincent--moved, no doubt, by the direct inspiration of God--urged him to make a General Confession. There was much need, for he had been concealing for long years several mortal sins which he was ashamed to confess, profaning the Sacraments and deceiving all who knew him. Moved with contrition by M. Vincent's words, he confessed his crimes, acknowledging his guilt also to Madame de Gondi, who came to visit him after Vincent had departed. "Ah Madame," he cried, "if I had not made that General Confession my soul would have been lost for all eternity!" The incident made a lasting impression on both Vincent and the Countess. Here was a man who for years had been living in deceit and making an unworthy use of the Sacraments. How many others might be in like case! It was a terrible thought. "Ah, Monsieur Vincent," cried the great lady, "how many souls are being lost! Can you do nothing to help them?" Her words found an echo in Vincent's heart. Next Sunday he preached a sermon in the parish church on the necessity of General Confession. It was the first of the famous mission sermons destined to do so much good in France. While he spoke, Madame de Gondi prayed, and the result far surpassed their expectations. So great were the crowds that flocked to Confession that Vincent was unable to cope with them and had to apply to the Jesuits at Amiens for help. The other villages on the estate were visited in turn, with equal success. Vincent used to look back in later life to this first mission sermon as the beginning of his work for souls. The result of all this for the preacher, however, was a certain prestige, and his humility took alarm. Monsieur and Madame de Gondi now treated their sons' tutor with the reverence due to a saint. His name was on the lips of everybody; and yet, as Vincent sadly acknowledged to himself, the work for which he had been engaged was a failure. The "little demons" were as headstrong and violent as ever; it was only on their parents that he had been able to make any impression. Fearful of being caught in the snare of worldly honors, he resolved to seek safety in flight. Father de Bérulle had sent him to the house of Monsieur de Gondi; to him did he appeal in his distress. His work as a tutor had been a failure, he told him; he could do nothing with his pupils, and he was receiving honor which he in no way deserved. He ended by begging to be allowed to work for the poor in some humble and lonely place, and de Bérulle decided to grant his wish. The country parish of Châtillon was in need of workers, was the answer; let him go there and exercise his zeal for souls. The only remaining difficulty was to get away from the great house. Dreading the outcry that he knew would follow the announcement of his resolution, and the arguments that would be used against him, Vincent departed, declaring simply that personal affairs called him away from Paris. Only when he had been already established for some time in his new parish did it dawn on the de Gondis that his absence was not to be merely temporary. They were in desperation. Madame de Gondi did nothing but weep, while her husband applied to everyone whom he thought to have any influence with Vincent to persuade him to return. "If he has not the gift of teaching children," he wrote to a friend, "it does not matter; he shall have a tutor to work under him. He shall live exactly as he likes if he will only come back. Get de Bérulle to persuade him. I shall be a good man some day," ends this great nobleman pathetically, "if only he will stay with me." Chapter 4 THE GALLEYS M. DE BÉRULLE had certainly not exaggerated matters when he said that the parish of Châtillon-les-Dombes was in need of earnest workers. Vincent looked about him and set to work at once. The first thing to be done was to clean out the church, which was in such a state of dirt and squalor that people had some excuse for not wishing to enter it. He then turned his attention to the clergy already there. They were ignorant and easygoing men, for the most part, who thought a good deal more of their own amusement than of the needs of their flock, but they were not bad at heart. Vincent's representations of what a priest's life ought to be astonished them at first and convinced them later--all the more so in that they saw in him the very ideal that he strove to set before them. There was no presbytery at Châtillon, and to the astonishment of everyone, Vincent hired a lodging in the house of a young gentleman who had the reputation of being one of the most riotous livers in the town. He was, moreover, half a heretic, and Vincent had been warned to have nothing to do with him. But the new rector had his own ideas on the subject, and the ill-assorted pair soon became very good friends. The change in the young man's mode of life was gradual. His first step was to be reconciled to the Church, his second to begin to interest himself in the poor. Gradually his bad companions dropped away, until one day Châtillon suddenly awoke to the fact that this most rackety of individuals was taking life seriously--was, in fact, a changed man. The whole town was in a stir. Who was this priest who had so suddenly come among them, so self-forgetful, so simple, so unassuming, yet whose influence was so strong with all classes? It was a question that might well be asked in the light of what was yet to come. There lived near Châtillon a certain Count de Rougemont, a noted duelist, whose violence and immorality were the talk of the neighborhood. Having heard people speak of the wonderful eloquence of M. Vincent, this man came one day out of curiosity to hear him preach. Surprised and touched in spite of himself, he determined to make the preacher's acquaintance and, hastening into his presence, flung himself on his knees before him. "I am a wretch and a sinner!" he cried, "but tell me what to do and I will do it." Raising him with gentle courtesy, Vincent bade him take courage, and spoke to him of all the good that a man of his position might do in the world. The Count, profoundly struck by the contrast between this man's life and his own--the one so powerful for good, and the other so strong for evil--vowed to mend his ways. And he kept his word. One by one he sold his estates to find the wherewithal for Vincent's schemes of charity, and he would have stripped himself of all that he had, had not Vincent himself forbidden it. His sword, which had served him in all his duels, and to which he was very much attached, he broke in pieces on a rock. His great chateau, the walls of which had rung to the sound of wild carousals, was now thrown open to the sick and the poor, whom the once-dreaded Count insisted on serving with his own hands. He died the death of a saint a few years later, amid the blessings of all the people whom he had helped. The ladies of the parish, to whom before Vincent's arrival the hour of the Sunday Mass had seemed too long for God's service and who had spent it chattering behind their fans, began also to realize that there was something in life besides selfish amusement. Some of them, moved by curiosity, went to see the new preacher, who, receiving them with his usual kindness and courtesy, drew a touching picture of the suffering and poverty that surrounded them and begged them to think sometimes of their less fortunate brothers and sisters. Two of the richest and most fashionable ladies of the district, touched by Vincent's words and example, gave themselves up entirely to the service of the poor, traveling about the country nursing the sick, and even risking their lives in the care of the plague-stricken. They were the forerunners of those "Sisters of Charity" who were in after years to carry help and comfort among the poor of every country. One day, as Vincent was about to say Mass, one of these ladies begged him to speak to the congregation in favor of a poor family whose members were sick and starving. So successful was his appeal that when he himself went a few hours later to see what could be done, he found the road thronged with people carrying food and necessaries. This, Vincent at once realized, was not practical. There would be far too much today and nothing tomorrow. There was no want of charity, but it needed organization. Sending for the two ladies, he explained to them a scheme which he had thought out on his way home. Those who were ready to help the poor were to band themselves together, each in turn promising to provide a day's food for starving families. Thus was founded the first confraternity of the "Ladies of Charity," who were to work in concert for the relief of their poorer brethren. The association was to be under the management of the curé of the parish, and every good woman might belong to it. Its members were to devote themselves to the service of the poor for the love of Our Lord Jesus Christ, their Patron. They were to tend the sick cheerfully and kindly, as they would their own children, not disdaining to minister to them with their own hands. The work developed quickly; confraternities of charity were soon adopted in nearly all the parishes of France and have since extended over the whole Christian world. The de Gondis, in the meantime, had discovered the place of Vincent's retreat and had written him several letters, piteously urging him to return. They had succeeded in enlisting as their advocate a certain M. du Fresne, a friend of Vincent's, who had promised to plead their cause and who set about it with a shrewd common sense that was not without its effect. The work at Châtillon, he represented to Vincent, could be carried on by any good priest now that it had been set agoing, whereas in refusing to return to the de Gondis he was neglecting an opportunity for doing good on a very much larger scale. Helped by their money and their influence, not only their vast estates, but Paris itself, lay open to him as a field for his labors. Moreover, he had taken his own way in going to Châtillon; was he sure that it was God's way? Vincent was humble enough to believe that he might be in the wrong. He consented to go to Paris to see M. de Bérulle and to allow himself to be guided by his advice. The result was a foregone conclusion, for the de Gondis had won over de Bérulle completely to their side. The next day Vincent returned to the Hôtel de Gondi, where he promised to remain during the lifetime of the Countess. Delighted to have him back at any price, Vincent's noble patrons asked for nothing better than to further all his schemes for the welfare of the poor and infirm. Confraternities of charity like that of Châtillon were established on all the de Gondi estates, Madame de Gondi herself setting the example of what a perfect Lady of Charity should be. Neither dirt, discourtesy nor risk of infection could discourage this earnest disciple of Vincent. In spite of weak health she gave freely of her time, her energy and her money. M. de Gondi was, as we have already seen, General of the King's Galleys, or, as we should now say, Admiral of the Fleet. It was no easy post in days when the Mediterranean was infested with Turkish pirates, to whom the royal ships had to give frequent chase; but the General had distinguished himself more than once by his skill and courage at this difficult task. The use of steam was as yet unknown, and the King's galleys were rowed by the convicts and prisoners of France, for it would have been impossible to find volunteers for the work. Chained to their oars night and day, kept in order by cruel cuts of the lash on their bare shoulders, these men lived and died on the rowers' bench without spiritual help or assistance of any kind. The conditions of service were such that many prisoners took their own lives rather than face the torments of such an existence. As Vincent went about his works of charity in Paris it occurred to him to visit the dungeons where the men who had been condemned to the galleys were confined. What he saw filled him with horror. Huddled together in damp and filthy prisons, crawling with vermin, covered with sores and ulcers, brawling, blaspheming and fighting, the galley slaves made a picture suggestive only of Hell. Vincent hastened to M. de Gondi and, trembling with emotion, poured forth a description of the horrors he had seen. "These are your people, Monseigneur!" he cried; "you will have to answer for them before God." The General was aghast; it had never occurred to him to think of the condition of the men who rowed his ships, and he gladly gave Vincent a free hand to do whatever he could to relieve them. Calling two other priests to his assistance, Vincent set to work at once to visit the convicts in the Paris prisons; but the men were so brutalized that it was difficult to know how to win them. The first advances were met with cursing and blasphemy, but Vincent was not to be discouraged. With his own gentle charity he performed the lowest offices for these poor wretches to whom his heart went out with such an ardent pity; he cleansed them from the vermin which infested them and dressed their neglected sores. Gradually they were softened and would listen while he spoke to them of the Saviour who had died to save their souls. At Vincent's earnest request, money was collected among his friends and patrons, and a hospital built where the prisoners condemned to the galleys might be nursed into good health before they went on board. In due time the rumor of the good work that was being done reached the ears of Louis XIII, who promptly made Vincent de Paul Almoner to the King's ships, with the honors and privileges of a naval officer and a salary of six hundred livres. This enabled Vincent to carry his mission farther afield, and he determined to visit all the convict prisons in the seaport towns, taking Marseilles as his first station. Here, where the conditions were perhaps even worse than in Paris, Vincent met them in the same spirit and conquered by the same means. The fact that he had once been a slave himself gave him an insight into the sufferings of the galley slaves and a wonderful influence over them. Accustomed as they were to be looked upon as brutes, it was a new experience to be treated as if it were a privilege to be in their company. This strange new friend who went about among them, kissing their chains, sympathizing with their sufferings and attending to their lowest needs seemed to them like an Angel from Heaven; even the most hardened could not resist such treatment. In the meantime, through the generosity of Vincent's friends, hospitals were being built and men and women were offering themselves to help in any capacity in this work of charity. Many of these earnest Christians gave their very lives for the galley slaves; for fevers, plague and contagious diseases of every kind raged in the filthy convict prisons, and many priests and lay helpers died of the infection. Yet other devoted workers were always found to take their place, and the work which Vincent had inaugurated thrived and prospered. Chapter 5 MISSION WORK THE incident which had given rise to Vincent's first mission at Folleville had never been forgotten by Madame de Gondi. It seemed to her that there was need to multiply such missions among the country poor, and no sooner had Vincent returned to her house than she offered him a large sum of money to endow a band of priests who would devote their lives to evangelizing the peasantry on her estates. Vincent was delighted, but considering himself unfit to undertake the management of such an enterprise, he proposed that it should be put into the hands of the Jesuits or the Oratorians. Madame de Gondi, although convinced in her own mind that Vincent, and Vincent alone, was the man to carry out the enterprise, obediently suggested it to one religious Order after another. In every case some obstacle intervened, until the Countess was more than ever persuaded that her first instinct had been right. Knowing Vincent's loyalty to Holy Church and his obedience to authority, she determined to have recourse to her brother-in-law, the Archbishop of Paris. An old house called the Collège des Bons Enfants was at that moment vacant. She asked it of the Archbishop, whom she had interested in her scheme, and who proposed to Vincent to undertake the foundation. There was no longer room for hesitation; the will of God seemed plain; indeed, Vincent's love of the poor had been for some time struggling with his humility. The new Congregation was to consist of a few good priests who, renouncing all thought of honor and worldly advancement, were to devote their lives to preaching in the villages and small towns of France. Their traveling expenses were to be paid from a common fund. They were to spend themselves in the service of their neighbor, instructing, catechizing and exhorting; and they were to take nothing in return for their labors. Nine months of the year were to be given to this kind of work; the other three to prayer and preparation. In March, 1625, the foundation was made, and Vincent de Paul was named the first superior. It was stipulated, however, that he should remain, as he had already promised, in the house of the founders, a condition which seemed likely to doom the enterprise to failure. Vincent could hardly fail to realize how necessary it was that the superior of a new Congregation should be in residence in his own house, but he confided the little company to God and awaited the development of events. The solution was altogether unexpected. Two months after the signing of the contract of foundation, Madame de Gondi was taken suddenly ill, and she died a few days later. Her broken-hearted husband not only consented to Vincent's residence in the Collège des Bons Enfants, but shortly afterwards, leaving that world where he had shone so brilliantly, he himself became a postulant at the Oratory. The beginnings of the new Congregation were humble enough. Its members were three in number: Vincent, his friend M. Portail, and a poor priest who had lately joined them. Before setting out on their mission journeys they used to give the key of the house to a neighbor; but as there was nothing in it to steal, there was little cause for anxiety. In the course of their travels other priests, realizing the greatness of the work, asked to be enrolled in the little company. Its growth, nevertheless, was slow; ten years after the foundation the Congregation only numbered thirty-three members; but Vincent had no desire that it should be otherwise. In 1652 it was recognized by Pope Urban VIII under the name of the Congregation of the Mission. Vincent lavished the greatest care on the training of his priests. They were to be simple and frank in their relations with the poor, modest in manner, friendly and easy of access. "Our sermons must go straight to the point," he would say, "so that the humblest of our hearers may understand; our language must be clear and unaffected." The love of virtue and the hatred of evil were the points to be insisted on; the people were to be shown where virtue lay and how to attain it. For "fine sermons" Vincent had the greatest contempt; he would use his merry wit to make fun of the pompous preachers whose only thought was to impress their audience with an idea of their own eloquence. "Of what good is a display of rhetoric?" he would ask; "who is the better for it? It serves no purpose but self-advertisement." The Mission Priests did good wherever they went; everybody wanted them, and it was hard to satisfy the appeals for missions which came from all over the country. In due time the Congregation outgrew the Collège des Bons Enfants, and was transferred to a large Augustinian priory which had originally been a leper hospital, and still bore the name of St. Lazare. Up to this time the Mission Priests had contented themselves with ministering to the peasantry, but in the course of their travels it had become painfully apparent that the clergy themselves were in urgent need of some awakening force. Those of good family led, for the most part, worldly and frivolous lives, while the humbler sort were as ignorant as the peasants among whom they lived. The religious wars had led to laxity and carelessness; drunkenness and vice were fearfully prevalent. To Vincent, with his high ideals of the priesthood, this was a terrible revelation. The old custom of giving a retreat to priests who were about to be ordained had fallen into disuse. With the assistance of some of the French bishops he determined to revive it, and retreats of ten or fourteen days were organized at St. Lazare for candidates to the priesthood. Here, in an atmosphere of prayer and recollection, those who were about to be ordained had every opportunity of realizing the greatness of the step that they were taking and of making resolutions for their future lives. The Mission Priests were to help in this work more by example than by precept; they were to preach by humility and simplicity. "It is not by knowledge that you will do them good," Vincent often repeated, "or by the fine things you say, for they are more learned than you--they have read or heard it all before. It is by what they see of your lives that you will help them; if you yourselves are striving for perfection, God will use you to lead these gentlemen in the right way." The blessing of God seemed, indeed, to rest upon the ordination retreats; nearly all who made them carried away something of Vincent's noble ideal of the priestly life. Many to whom they had been the turning point of a lifetime, felt the need of further help and instruction from the man who had awakened all that was noblest in their natures. To meet this necessity Vincent inaugurated a kind of guild for young priests who desire to live worthy of their vocation. Weekly gatherings were held at St. Lazare under the name of "Tuesday Conferences," where difficulties were discussed, debates held and counsels given. It was not easy to belong to the "Conferences." Members were pledged to offer their lives completely to God and to renounce all self-interest. Nevertheless, they increased rapidly in number, and the Conferences were attended by all the most influential priests in Paris. But Vincent's zeal was boundless, and one good work grew out of another. The retreats for ordination candidates having been so successful, he conceived the idea of giving retreats on the same lines for the laity. The work thrived beyond all expectation. All were admitted without exception: noblemen and beggars, young men and old, the learned and the ignorant, priests and laymen. St. Lazare at such times, Vincent once said, was like Noah's ark: every kind of creature was to be found in it. The only difficulty was the expense entailed, for many of the retreatants could pay nothing toward their board and lodging, and Vincent would refuse nobody. Here, as in so many other cases, it was the Congregation of the Ladies of Charity, founded by Vincent in Paris, that came nobly to his rescue. There was Madame de Maignelais, sister of M. de Gondi, who, left a widow at the age of twenty, devoted herself and her enormous fortune to alms and good works. There was the Duchesse d'Aiguillon, niece of the great Richelieu; Madame de Miramion, beautiful and pious; Madame Goussault, the first President of the Dames de Charité; and many others, whose purses were always at Vincent's disposal. The Congregation of the Mission Priests was to inaugurate another good work for which there was an urgent necessity in the world of Vincent's day. While yet at the Collège des Bons Enfants, he had realized how great was the need of a special training for young men destined for the priesthood and had founded a small seminary. After the move to St. Lazare the undertaking had grown and prospered. A college of the same kind had been lately founded by M. Olier, the zealous curé of St. Sulpice; and these two institutions, the first of the famous seminaries which were later to spread all over France, were powerful for the reform of the clergy. One hundred and fifty years later the Mission Priests of St. Lazare alone were at the head of sixty such seminaries. So the work of the Congregation increased and multiplied until it seemed almost too much for human capacity. But Vincent knew wherein lay the strength of the Mission Priests. "How may we hope to do our work?" he would ask. "How can we lead souls to God? How can we stem the tide of wickedness among the people? Let us realize that this is not man's work at all, it is God's. Human energy will only hinder it unless directed by God. The most important point of all is that we should be in touch with Our Lord in prayer." Dearest to his heart of all his undertakings was the first and chief work of the Congregation--the holding of missions for the poor. By twos and threes he would send out his sons to their labors, bidding them travel to their destination in the cheapest possible way. They were to accept neither free quarters nor gifts of any kind. All their thoughts and prayers were to be concentrated on their work: they were to live for their mission. Two sermons were to be preached daily--simple instructions on the great truths--and those who had not yet made their First Communion were to be catechized. The mission lasted ten or fourteen days, during which the Mission Priests were to have as much personal contact with the people as possible, visiting the sick and the infirm, reconciling enemies and showing themselves as the friends of all. It was no easy task to be a good Mission Priest. It meant self-mastery, self-renunciation, self-forgetfulness total and complete. It meant the laying aside of much that lies very close to a man's heart. "Unless the Congregation of the Mission is humble," said Vincent, "and realizes that it can accomplish nothing of any value, but that it is more apt to mar than to make, it will never be of much effect; but when it has this spirit it will be fit for the purposes of God." Yet, in spite of all that such a vocation meant of self-renunciation, year after year the Mission Priests increased in number. "This work is not human, it is from God," was Vincent's answer to those who marvelled at the power of the company for good. Chapter 6 THE GREY SISTERS ALTHOUGH many of the great ladies of Paris had enrolled themselves among the Ladies of Charity and were ready to help Vincent to the utmost of their ability, much of the work to be done in that great town was hardly within their scope. The care of the sick in the hospitals alone demanded ceaseless labor and an amount of time which few wives and mothers could give. There was a gap which needed filling, as Vincent could not but see, and he took immediate steps to fill it. The instrument he required lay close to his hand in the person of Louise le Gras, a widow lady who had devoted her life to the service of the poor. She had gathered in her house a few young working women from the country to help her in her labors; these were the people needed to step in where the Ladies of Charity fell short. A larger house was taken on the outskirts of Paris; good country girls who were ready to give their services without payment were encouraged to devote themselves to the work, and Louise le Gras, with all the enthusiasm of her unselfish nature, set to work to train the little company to efficiency. Of one thing this holy woman was absolutely convinced--unless the motive with which the work was undertaken was supernatural, neither perseverance nor success could be expected. "It is of little use for us to run about the streets with bowls of soup," she would say, "if we do not make the love of God the object of our effort. If we let go of the thought that the poor are His members, our love for them will soon grow cold." To pray, to labor and to obey was to be the whole duty of the members of the little sisterhood. The strength of their influence was to be the fact that it was Christ to whom they ministered in the person of His poor. To many of these girls, rough and ignorant as they were for the most part, life in a great town was full of dangers. Such work as theirs could only be adequately done by women whose lives were consecrated to God, who were prepared to spend themselves without stint or measure in His service. "If you aspire to perfection, you must learn to die to self" was the teaching of their foundress. Louise le Gras was a soul of prayer, and she knew that more was needed than fervent philanthropy and a heart full of pity to give the Sisters courage for the lives they had undertaken to lead. Uncloistered nuns were at that time a thing unheard of, and in the first days of the little company the Sisters were often greeted with insults when they appeared in the streets. In Vincent's own words, they were "a community who had no monastery but the houses of the sick, no cells but a lodging of the poorest room, no cloisters but the streets, no grille but the fear of God, and no veil but their own modesty." Their life was hard. They rose at four, their food was of the plainest description, they spent their days in an unhealthy atmosphere and were habitually overworked. The life of a true Sister of Charity needed to be rooted and nourished in the love of God, and no one realized it more completely than Vincent himself. In his weekly conferences, when they met together at St. Lazare, he would set before them the ideals of their vocation, bidding them above all things to be humble and simple. "You see, my sisters," he would say to them, "you are only rough country girls, brought up like myself to keep the flocks." He understood their temptations and knew their weaknesses, but the standard was never to be lowered. "The Daughters of Charity must go wherever they are needed," he said, "but this obligation exposes them to many temptations, and therefore they have special need of strictness." They were never to pay a visit unless it was part of their work; they were never to receive one; they were not to stand talking in the street unless it was absolutely necessary; they were never to go out without leave. "What?" Vincent makes them say in one of his conferences, "do you ask me to be my own enemy, to be forever denying myself, to do everything I have no wish to do, to destroy self altogether?" "Yes, my sisters," he answers; "and unless you do so, you will be slipping back in the way of righteousness." Their lives were of necessity full of temptations, and only in this spirit could they resist them. Life in the streets of a great city was full of interest to these country girls, and it required a superhuman self-control to go about with downcast eyes, noticing nothing. At the weekly conference one of the Sisters acknowledged that if she passed a troop of mountebanks or a peepshow, the desire to look was so strong upon her that she could only resist it by pressing her crucifix to her heart and repeating, "O Jesus, Thou art worth it all." One day Vincent appeared among them in great joy. He had just met a gentleman in the street, who had said to him, "Monsieur, today I saw two of your daughters carrying food to the sick, and so great was the modesty of one of them that she never even raised her eyes." It was many years before he would allow the Sisters, however great their desire, to bind themselves by vows to the service of Christ in His poor. When at last the permission was given, the formula of the vows, which were taken for one year only, ran thus: "I the undersigned, in the Presence of God, renew the promises of my Baptism, and make the vow of poverty, of chastity, and of obedience to the Venerable Superior General of the Priests of the Mission in the Company of the Sisters of Charity, that I may bind myself all this year to the service, bodily and spiritual, of the poor and sick our masters. And this by the aid of God, which I ask through His Son Jesus Christ Crucified, and through the prayers of the Holy Virgin." Although vows taken thus annually did not imply a lifelong dedication, the Sisters of Charity who returned to the world were few. Many heroic women spent their lives, unknown and unnoticed, in the daily drudgery of nursing the sick or trying to maintain order in country hospitals. "The saintliness of a Daughter of Charity," said Vincent, "rests on faithful adherence to the Rule; on faithful service to the nameless poor; in love and charity and pity; in faithful obedience to the doctor's orders . . . It keeps us humble to be quite ordinary . . ." "For the greater honor of Our Lord, their Master and Patron," runs a certain passage in their Rule, "the Sisters of Charity shall have in everything they do a definite intention to please Him, and shall try to conform their life to His, especially in His poverty, His humility, His gentleness, His simplicity and austerity." Therein was to lie their strength and the secret of their courage; before them stood their crucified Lord, bidding them suffer and be strong. The "Grey Sisters," as they were called by the poor, not only nursed in the hospitals of Paris, but went far and wide on their errands of mercy. Scarcely a day passed without an appeal. After the siege of Arras in 1656, Louise le Gras was implored to send help to those of the inhabitants who had survived the horrors of the war. Only two Sisters could be spared to meet the requirements of eight parishes; dirt, disease and famine reigned supreme; yet one of them, writing to her Superior to tell her that the other had been obliged to stop working from sheer exhaustion, says: "I have never heard a word of complaint from her lips or seen anything in her face but perfect content." A little later the Sisters were sent for to nurse the wounded soldiers in the hospitals of Calais. "My dear daughters," said Vincent, as he bade them farewell, "be sure that, wherever you go, God will take care of you." Only four could be spared, and the soldiers were dying in scores of an infectious disease. It was at the risk of their lives that the Sisters went among them, and two out of the four caught the infection and died. When the news reached Paris, there were numbers eager to take their place, and the four who were chosen set off rejoicing. The hospitals all over the country were in need of reform, and in Paris every new scheme for the relief of the poor called for the Sisters' assistance. In the hospital at Marseilles they were tending the convicts; when the home for the aged poor was instituted, it was under their government; the Foundling Hospital was in their hands. Wherever there was need for zeal and self-denial, there these devoted women were to be found, ready to lay down their lives in the service of their neighbor. They had renounced what pleasures the world might hold for them for a life of toil and discomfort; their sacrifice was hidden; they lived and died unnoticed. "We have no knowledge of our way except that we follow Jesus," writes the Mother and Foundress of the company, "always working and always suffering. He could never have led us unless His own resolve had taken Him as far as death on the Cross." In 1641 the Sisters of Charity had taken up a fresh work, one which lay very close to Vincent's heart, the teaching of little children. It should be, he told them, as much a part of their vocation as the care of the poor and the sick, and they were to spare no pains to give these little creatures the solid Christian teaching which nothing can replace. As the years went on, many ladies of noble birth enrolled themselves in the company, working side by side with their humbler sisters in the relief of every kind of misery; but daughter of peer or of peasant, the Sister of Charity was and is, before all else, the daughter of God and the servant of the poor. Louise le Gras rejoiced one day when she heard that one of the Sisters had been severely beaten by a patient and had borne it without a murmur. She, their Superior, and a woman of gentle birth, led the way in that humility which was their strength. She had been trained by Vincent de Paul and had learned from a living model. Chapter 7 THE FOUNDLINGS M. VINCENT was passing one day through the streets of Paris on one of his errands of mercy when he saw a beggar mutilating a newborn baby in order to expose it to the public as an object of pity. Snatching the poor little creature out of the hands of its tormentor, Vincent carried it to the "Couche St. Landry," an institution which had been founded for the care of children left homeless and deserted in the streets. The state of things in that household filled him with horror. The "Couche" was managed by a widow, who, helped by two servants, received about four hundred children within the year. These unfortunate little creatures, in a state of semi-starvation and utter neglect, were crowded together into two filthy holes, where the greater number died of pestilence. Of those who survived, some were drugged with laudanum to silence their cries, while others were put an end to by any other method that suggested itself to the wretched women into whose hands they had fallen. The sight of the "Couche" was one that could not fail to rouse any mother's heart to indignation. Vincent took one or two of the Ladies of Charity to the place and let them judge for themselves. The result was a resolve to rescue the little victims at any cost. It was not difficult to get possession of the babies; their inhuman guardians were in the habit of selling them for the modest sum of one franc each to anyone who would take them off their hands. But the cost of maintenance was a more serious matter. A house was taken near the Collège des Bons Enfants, and twelve of the miserable little victims were ransomed and installed there under the care of Louise le Gras and the Sisters of Charity. But this was only a beginning. The work appealed all the more strongly to the Ladies of Charity for the reason that most of the babies were unbaptized. It was a question of saving souls as well as bodies, and every effort was made to empty the Couche. The Ladies, often at the cost of real self-denial, gave every penny they could afford; Louis XIII and his Queen, Anne of Austria, contributed liberally. In ten years' time Vincent's institution had grown to such an extent that it was able to open its doors to all the foundlings in Paris. Four thousand children had been adopted and cared for, and the numbers were still increasing; finances had been stretched to the breaking point; there came a moment when it seemed impossible to meet the expenses any longer. The Thirty Years' War was raging, and the eastern provinces of France, which had served as a battlefield for the nations, were reduced to the utmost misery. There were many other claims on the purses of the Ladies of Charity; the time had come when it looked as if there was nothing to be done but sorrowfully give up an undertaking that was altogether beyond their power. But the very thought of such a possibility nearly broke Vincent's heart; he determined to make one last effort, and, gathering the Ladies together, laid the case before them in all simplicity. "I ask of you to say only one word," he said to them: "will you go on with the work or no? You are perfectly free; you are bound by no promise. Yet, before you decide, reflect for one moment on what you have done, and what you are doing. Your loving care has preserved the lives of a very great number of children, who without your help would have been lost in time as well as eternity; for these innocent creatures have learned to know and serve God as soon as they were able to speak. Some of them are beginning to work and to be self-supporting. Does not so good a beginning promise yet better results? "Ladies, it was pity and charity that moved you to adopt these little ones as your children. You were their mothers by grace when their mothers by nature had deserted them. Are you going to abandon them now? If you cease to be their mothers you become their judges; their lives are in your hands. I will now ask you to give your votes: it is time for you to give sentence and to make up your minds that you have no longer any mercy to spare for them. If in your charity you continue to take care of them, they will live; if not, they will certainly die. It is impossible to deny what your own experience must tell you is true." Vincent paused; his voice was trembling with emotion; he was answered by the tears of the assembly. It was decided that at any cost the Foundling Hospital must be supported. The work was saved. The practical question of expenses, however, remained yet to be faced, and although the King increased his subscription, the funds were still insufficient. But the Ladies made still greater sacrifices; the Sisters of Charity limited themselves to one meal a day, and Vincent, who had already reduced himself to the direst poverty, strained every nerve to help. The Foundling Hospital was thus kept going until some years after Vincent's death, when the State took over the responsibility, and the work ceased to depend on voluntary support. Of all the good works on which he had spent himself, this was the one, it is said, that appealed to him the most strongly. He knew every baby in the Foundling Hospital by name; the death of any one of them caused him a very real sorrow, and he would appear among them at the most unexpected hours. Their innocence and happiness rejoiced him, and he delighted in watching their pretty baby ways. At the sight of his kind, homely face, they would gather round him, clinging to his hands or his cassock, certain of a smile or a caress. He came across much that was neither innocent nor attractive in his dealings with the world; he was one who never judged harshly, and who could always see in man, however depraved, the image of his Maker; yet the innocence and purity of his own soul found their best solace in the company of these little creatures whom he had rescued from a double death. They were his recreation in the moments of depression which all who work for the welfare of mankind must experience and which are more intense in proportion as the zeal is stronger. He was blamed one day, when the difficulty of providing for the foundlings was at its height, for having spent upon them alms destined for the support of the Mission. "Ah!" he cried, "do you think Our Lord will be less good to us because we put the welfare of these poor children before our own? Since that merciful Saviour said to His disciples, 'suffer the little children to come unto Me,' can we who wish to follow Him reject these babies when they come to us?" But if the foundlings had a large share of Vincent's heart, it was great enough for all who were in suffering or distress. The misery in the provinces of Lorraine and Picardy was hardly to be described; the people were literally dying of hunger. The Ladies of Charity had at first come nobly to the rescue, but the Foundling Hospital was now absorbing all their funds; they could do no more. Then Vincent conceived the idea of printing leaflets describing the sufferings of the people and what was being done to help them by the Mission Priests. These were sold at the church doors, in the public squares and in the streets, and people bought them with such avidity that Vincent soon realized a steady little income. In days when there were no such things as newspapers, regular tidings from the provinces were as welcome as they were unexpected. "God showered such blessings on the work," says Vincent, "that the greater number of those who read these narratives opened their hands for the relief of the poor." The next step was to institute in all the regions where famine was prevalent public soup kitchens, where nourishing soup, made at the lowest possible cost, was portioned out among the poor. Vincent himself gave minute directions for its making, prescribing the ingredients so that the greatest number of people might be maintained at the least expense. In many places laid waste by fire and sword, the dead remained unburied for days or even weeks. Heaps of filth and garbage were left to rot at the doors of houses and in the streets; pestilence and fever reigned supreme. Here, again, the Priests of the Mission and the Sisters of Charity devoted themselves to the work that no one else would do. Organizing themselves into bands, they went about burying the dead, nursing the sick and cleansing the streets, many of them dying of the pestilence. It was very necessary, moreover, to take steps to bring back some kind of prosperity to the devastated country. Seeds and grain were distributed among the peasants, who were encouraged to cultivate the land and taught the best methods of doing so. All these different undertakings were carried out with the regularity and practical common sense that were characteristic of the sons of St. Vincent de Paul, accustomed as they were to brave hardship and danger without a thought of their own safety. If their Superior asked much of others, he himself set the example in generosity. It was said of him that he never could keep anything for his own use, either clothes or money; everything that came into his hands went straight to the poor. There were days at St. Lazare when it seemed uncertain where the daily bread was to come from, or whether it was to come at all; but Vincent put his trust in God, who never failed him, and he gave while there was anything to give. Several times, while he was organizing relief for the eastern provinces, his heart almost failed him at the magnitude of the work he had undertaken, and it was at one of these moments that he dared to face the terrible Richelieu, to demand peace in the name of the suffering people. "Monseigneur!" he cried, appearing before the great Cardinal with tears streaming down his cheeks, "give us peace! Have pity on France and give us peace." Richelieu's heart was certainly none of the softest, but even he seems to have been touched by this earnest appeal. At all events, he showed no anger. "I wish for peace," he declared, "and I am taking means to procure it, but it does not depend on me alone"; and he dismissed Vincent with an unwonted urbanity. His was not the only hard nature that was softened by contact with St. Vincent de Paul. The love of this man for his fellow men was infectious, for it was born of his love for Christ. Chapter 8 AT COURT WHEN Louis XIII was on his deathbed, with all the Bishops and Archbishops of France ready to offer him their services, it was M. Vincent, the humble Mission Priest, who prepared him to meet his God. During the last days of the King's life, Vincent never left him, and in his arms Louis XIII breathed his last. Then, having done the work for which he had come, Vincent slipped quietly out of the palace to hasten back to St. Lazare and his beloved poor. Some remarks made by the King during his illness and certain other words of Vincent's were remembered by the Queen, Anne of Austria, who had been left Regent during the minority of her son. Richelieu was dead, and Mazarin, his pupil, a crafty and unscrupulous Italian, had succeeded him as chief Minister of State. His influence over the Queen was growing daily, but it was not yet strong enough to override all her scruples. She was a good-natured woman, quite ready to do right when it was not too inconvenient, and it was clear to her that of late years bishoprics and abbeys had been too often given to most unworthy persons. In France the Crown was almost supreme in such matters; the Queen therefore determined to appoint a "Council of Conscience" consisting of five members, whose business it would be to help her with advice as to ecclesiastical preferment. Mazarin's astonishment and disgust when he heard that Vincent de Paul had been appointed one of the number were as great as Vincent's own consternation. The responsibility and the difficulties which he would have to face filled the humble Mission Priest with the desire to escape such an honor at any price; he even applied to the Queen in person to beg her to reconsider her decision. But Anne was obdurate, and Vincent was forced to yield. "I have never been more worthy of compassion or in greater need of prayers than now," he wrote to one of his friends, and his forebodings were not without cause. If Mazarin had been unable to prevent the Queen from naming Vincent as one of the Council of Conscience, he had at least succeeded in securing his own nomination. In the cause of honesty and justice, and for the Church's welfare, the Superior of St. Lazare would have to contend with the foremost statesman of the day, a Minister who had built up his reputation by trading on the vices of men who were less cunning than he. Well did Vincent know that he was no match for such a diplomatist; but having once realized that the duty must be undertaken, he determined that there should be no flinching. He went to Court in the old cassock in which he went about his daily work, and which was probably the only one he had. "You are not going to the palace in that cassock?" cried one of the Mission Priests in consternation. "Why not?" replied Vincent quietly; "it is neither stained nor torn." The answer was noteworthy, for a scrupulous cleanliness was characteristic of the man. As he passed through the long galleries of the Louvre he caught sight of his homely face and figure in one of the great mirrors that lined the walls. "A nice clodhopper you are!" he said amiably to his own reflection, and passed on, smiling. Among the magnificently attired courtiers his shabby appearance created not a little merriment. "Admire the beautiful sash in which M. Vincent comes to Court," said Mazarin one day to the Queen, laying hold of the coarse woolen braid that did duty with poor country priests for the handsome silken sash worn by the prelates who frequented the palace. Vincent only smiled--these were not the things that abashed him; he made no change in his attire. At first it seemed as if his influence were to be paramount in the Council. Nearly all the priests of Paris had passed through his hands at the ordination retreats and those who belonged to the "Tuesday Conferences" were intimately known to him. Who could be better fitted to select those who were suitable for preferment? Mazarin, it is true, objected to the Council on principle, but that was simply because he considered that bishoprics and abbeys were useful things to keep in reserve as bribes for his wavering adherents. Certain reforms on which Vincent insisted were not to his mind either, although he offered no opposition. It was not his way to act openly, and he bided his time; the wonder was that Vincent was able to do what he did so thoroughly. In the meantime it began to dawn upon the public that the Superior of St. Lazare was for the moment a man of influence. It was already well known that he was a man of immense charity, with many institutions on his hands, several of which were in urgent need of funds. It seemed a very simple thing to offer him a large sum of money for the poor on condition that he would put in a good word for a brother or a nephew who was just the man for a bishopric or anything else that might offer. Vincent's reception of these proposals was disconcerting. "God forbid!" he would cry indignantly. "Better that we should all go without the barest necessities of life." Some would come with a recommendation from the Queen herself, which made things doubly embarrassing; but in spite of everything Vincent remained faithful to his first determination to choose for bishoprics no priests save those worthy of the position by reason of their virtue and learning. Now, it was exceedingly unpleasant for needy noblemen to be obliged to sue to a peasant priest in a shabby cassock for the preferment of their relations; but it became quite intolerable when the shabby priest refused to listen. "You are an old lunatic," said a young man who had been refused a benefice through Vincent's agency. "You are quite right," was the only answer, accompanied by a good-natured smile. Another day a gentleman who had come to recommend his son for a bishopric was so angry when Vincent explained that he did not see his way to grant his request that he answered the "impertinent peasant" with a blow. Vincent, without the slightest allusion to this treatment, quietly escorted him downstairs and saw him into his carriage. Insulted another day in public by a magistrate whose interests he had refused to forward, the Superior of St. Lazare made the noble answer: "Sir, I am sure that you try to acquit yourself worthily in your office; you must allow me the same freedom of action in mine." But Vincent's strangest adventure was with a Court lady of high rank, a certain Duchess in the household of the Queen. Catching her royal mistress in an unguarded moment, this lady succeeded in inducing the Queen to promise the bishopric of Poitiers to her son, a young man of very bad character. The Queen's courage, however, failed her at the prospect of breaking the news to M. Vincent, and she commissioned the Duchess to let him know of the appointment. Off went the great lady to St. Lazare, and, flouncing into the Superior's presence, haughtily declared her errand. Vincent, aghast, begged her to sit down and talk the matter over, but Madame declined curtly. She was in a great hurry, she replied; the Queen had spoken; there was nothing more to be said. She would be obliged if he would make out the deed of nomination and take it to Her Majesty to sign. What was to be done? To resist would only provoke; submission seemed the wisest, if not the only course. Next morning at an early hour M. Vincent made his appearance at the palace with a roll of paper in his hand and was shown into the Queen's presence. "Oh," said Her Majesty, not without some embarrassment, "you have brought me the nomination of the Bishop of Poitiers." Without a word, Vincent handed her the roll, which she proceeded to unfold. "Why," she cried, "what is this? It is blank! The form is not drawn up at all!" "If Your Majesty's mind is made up," said Vincent quietly, "I must beg you to write down your wishes yourself; it is a responsibility which my conscience forbids me to take." Then, noticing the hesitation of the Queen: "Madame," he said hotly, "this man whom you intend to make a bishop spends his life in public houses and is carried home drunk every night. That his family should want to get him out of Paris is not surprising, but I ask you if an episcopal see is a fitting retreat for such a person." Convinced by Vincent's vehement presentation of the facts of the case, the Queen consented to revoke the nomination, but she openly confessed to him that she had not courage to face the Duchess. "Suppose you go and make my peace with her," she said pleasantly, despatching the unfortunate Vincent on this very disagreeable errand. He was shown into the lady's presence and carried out his mission with the greatest possible tact, but the Duchess could not control her fury. Seizing a heavy stool, she flung it at the head of the unwelcome messenger, who bowed and retired from the house with the blood streaming from a wound in his forehead. The brother who had accompanied him and who was waiting in the antechamber, justly indignant, begged to be allowed to give the great lady a piece of his mind. "Come on," said Vincent; "our business lies in another direction." "Is it not strange," he said, smiling, a few moments later, as he tried to staunch the blood with his handkerchief, "to what lengths the affection of a mother for her son will go!" Such incidents did not pass unnoticed by Mazarin, who looked with jealous eyes on Vincent's influence with the Queen. As time went on he resolved at any cost to rid the Court of the presence of this man, whose simple, straightforward conduct baffled the wily and defeated their plans; but an attempt to get him ejected from the Council met with such stormy opposition that the Prime Minister determined to change his tactics. There was no man whom he revered or admired so much as M. Vincent, he declared enthusiastically; no one who was of such use in the Council of Conscience. But the summoning of the Council rested with Mazarin, and the intervals between its meetings became longer and longer. Anne of Austria's sudden spurt of energy--she was a thoroughly indolent woman by nature--began to die out as she became accustomed to her new responsibilities; she was only too glad to leave all matters of State to a man who declared that his only desire was to save her worry and trouble. In course of time the Council of Conscience ceased to meet, and the distribution of bishoprics and abbeys fell once more into the hands of Mazarin, who used them, as of old, for his own ends. Vincent de Paul, in bitter grief and sorrow, was forced to witness an abuse that he had no longer any power to check. "I fear," he wrote in after years to a friend, "that this detestable barter of bishoprics will bring down the curse of God upon the country." A few years later, when civil war, pestilence and famine were devastating France, and Jansenism was going far to substitute despair for hope in the hearts of men, his words were remembered. Chapter 9 THE JANSENISTS WHILE Vincent de Paul was striving, by charity and patience, to renew all things in Christ, the Jansenists* were busy spreading their dangerous doctrines. When the Abbé de St. Cyran, the apostle of Jansenism in France, first came to Paris, Vincent, like many other holy men, was taken in by the apparent piety and austerity of his life. It was only when he knew him better, and when St. Cyran had begun to impart to him some of his ideas on grace and the authority of the Church, that Vincent realized on what dangerous ground he was standing. * So called from their founder, Cornelius Jansen, Bishop of Utrecht, who died, however, before his heresy had been condemned. "He said to me one day," wrote the Saint long afterwards to one of his Mission Priests, "that it was God's intention to destroy the Church as it is now, and that all who labor to uphold it are working against His will; and when I told him that these were the statements made by heretics such as Calvin, he replied that Calvin had not been altogether in the wrong, but that he had not known how to make a good defense." After such a statement as that there could be no longer question of friendship between Vincent and St. Cyran, although the latter, anxious not to break with a man who was held in such universal esteem as Vincent de Paul, tried to persuade him that he, St. Cyran, was really in the right, justifying himself in the elusive language which was more characteristic of the Jansenists than the frank declaration he had just made. Vincent, however, was too honest and straightforward, too loyal a son of the Church, to be deceived. Realizing fully the danger of such opinions, he soon became one of the most vigorous opponents of the Jansenists, who, indeed, soon had cause to look upon Vincent as one of the most powerful of their enemies. But although he hated the heresy with all the strength of his upright soul, Vincent's charitable heart went out in pity to those who were infected with its taint, and it was with compassion rather than indignation that he would speak of St. Cyran and his adherents. Not until they had been definitely condemned by the Church did he cease his efforts to win them from their errors--efforts which were received, for the most part, in a spirit of vindictive bitterness. The teaching of the Jansenists, like that of most other heretics, had begun by being fairly plausible. The necessity of reform among the clergy had come home to them forcibly, as it had to Vincent himself; the Jansenists' lives were austere and mortified. The book which contained their heretical doctrines, the Augustinus of Jansenius, was read by only a few, and these mostly scholars. That the Sacraments should be treated with the greatest respect and approached only by those who were fit to approach them seemed at first sight a very reverent and very proper maxim. Many people of holy lives took up this teaching enthusiastically, among them some of Vincent's own Mission Priests. When Antoine Arnauld, the youngest of the famous family which did so much to further Jansenism, published his book _Frequent Communion_, which might more truly have been called "_In_frequent Communion," it was received with delight and eagerly read. That Vincent clearly saw the danger is shown by one of his letters to a member of the Jansenist company who had written protesting against the attitude that St. Lazare was taking in the matter: "Your last letter says that we have done wrong in going against public opinion concerning the book _Frequent Communion_ and the teaching of Jansenius. It is true that there are only too many who misuse this Divine Sacrament. I myself am the most guilty, and I beg you to pray that God may pardon me . . . . You say also that as Jansenius read all the works of St. Augustine ten times, and his treatises on grace thirty times, the Mission Priests cannot safely question his opinions. To which I reply that those who wish to establish new doctrines are always learned and always study deeply the authors of which they make use. But that does not prevent them from falling into error, and we shall have no excuse for sharing in their opinions in defiance of the censure of their doctrine." The letter was answered by a second protest in favor of Arnauld's book, which was met by Vincent with equal energy: "It may be, as you say," he writes, "that certain people in France and Italy have drawn benefit from the book; but for a hundred to whom it has been useful in teaching more reverence in approaching the Sacrament, ten thousand have been driven away . . . For my part, I tell you that if I paid the same attention to M. Arnauld's book as you do, I should give up both Mass and Communion from a sense of humility, and I should be in terror of the Sacrament, regarding it, in the spirit of the book, as a snare of Satan and as poison to the souls of those who receive it under the usual conditions approved by the Church. Moreover, if we confine ourselves only to what he says of the perfect disposition without which one should not go to Communion, is there anyone on earth who has such a high idea of his own virtue as to think himself worthy? Such an opinion seems to be held by M. Arnauld alone, who, having made the necessary conditions so difficult that St. Paul himself might have feared to approach, does not hesitate to tell us repeatedly that he says Mass daily." It is evident that so cold and narrow a teaching could not but be repugnant to a man of Vincent's breadth and charity. The monstrous heresy held by the Jansenists that Christ did not die for all men, but for the favored few alone, filled him with a burning indignation. No one could have deplored more than he did the unworthy use of the Sacraments; but he held firmly to the truth that they had been instituted by a loving Saviour as man's greatest strength and as a protection against temptation and sin. And he was not going to believe that He who had been called the Friend of sinners and had eaten and drunk in their company would exact from men as a condition of approaching Him a perfection that they could never hope to attain without Him. Indeed, the chief aim of the company of Mission Priests was to draw the people to the Sacraments as to the great source of grace, and it seemed to Vincent that the means taken by the Jansenists to destroy certain evils were very much more dangerous than the evils themselves. It was better, according to his opinion, even at the risk of abuse, to make the reconciliation of a sinner to his God too easy rather than too hard. The rule of the Mission Priests lays down that "one of the principal points of our Mission is to inspire others to receive the Sacraments of Penance and of the Eucharist frequently and worthily." The teaching of the Jansenists sought, on the contrary, to inspire such awe of the Sacraments that neither priests nor people would dare to approach them save at very rare intervals. It was the great mass of the people--poor, simple and suffering, those children of God whom Vincent loved and in whose service the whole of his life had been spent--whose salvation was in danger. It was against them that the Jansenists were shutting the doors of salvation. Is it any wonder that Vincent de Paul fought against them as only men of strong conviction can fight, with heart and soul aglow in the battle? Compared with this all other evils were light. His business was to relieve suffering, to comfort sorrow, but above all to help men to save their souls. There could be no yielding, no compromise with error. Rightly, therefore, did the Jansenists see in Vincent de Paul the most dangerous of their enemies, and it was not surprising that both during his life and after his death they hated him and assailed him with abuse. He was "insincere, treacherous, a coward," they declared. They spoke of the "great betrayal"; they held him up to ridicule as an ignorant peasant; but Vincent went quietly on his way. The question "What will people say?" did not exist for him. He simply did his duty as it was made clear to him by God and his own conscience. It was hard to fight against such uncompromising honesty as his, and more than once the man whose ignorance the Jansenists had ridiculed tore their specious arguments to tatters with the weapon of his strong common sense. Nevertheless, the dangers of Jansenism were a continual anxiety to Vincent, and there were other sorrows no less poignant to be borne. Foreign missions had been established in Africa and Madagascar, and in the latter station no less than twenty-seven Mission Priests had lost their lives. Some, it is true, had died the martyr's death; but the work had not prospered. It was difficult to get news from far countries in those days, and there were often such long intervals between the death of one priest and the arrival of another that any good that had been done was lost. "There is nothing on earth that I desire so much as to go as your companion in the place of M. Gondrée," wrote Vincent to one who was just about to set forth on this dangerous mission; but the darker side of the picture is not left untouched. "You will need the strongest courage," he writes; "you will need faith as great as that of Abraham." The Madagascar Mission was, humanly speaking, a failure; the natives were hostile, the missionaries not sufficiently numerous; it was necessary in the end to give up the enterprise. The Lazarists were at work also in Poland, in Ireland, and in the Hebrides. Vincent had a gift for rousing zeal and charity in the hearts of others, and there were always plenty of volunteers for the most dangerous posts. But there were times when his heart nearly failed him at the news that came to him of the sufferings of some of his sons on their far-distant missions. There were times when apparent failure weighed him down with sorrow, and the death of young Mission Priests who had given their lives for the salvation of their fellowmen caused a grief almost too heavy to be borne. But Vincent knew How far high failure overtops the bounds Of low success. He could afford to leave his work and theirs in the hands of God. He had done what he could, and God asks no more of any man. Chapter 10 TROUBLES IN PARIS The Parliament at last took up the matter; men went about the streets of Paris shouting "Down with Mazarin!" A revolution was feared, and the Queen, with her young son, fled to St. Germain. The Royal troops in the meantime, under Condé, were blockading Paris; the rebellion known as the "Fronde" had begun. Vincent de Paul was in a difficult position. His sympathies were wholly with the suffering people; but, although it had long ceased to meet, he was still a member of the Council of Conscience and owed allegiance to the Royal party. What would become of the poor in Paris if the town were reduced to famine? This was the thought that was uppermost in his mind. On the other hand, he had always insisted that the Congregation of the Mission should in no way mix itself up with politics. The life of its members was to be a hidden life of prayer and labor for souls. The safest course was obviously to remain neutral and take no part in the matter; but his own safety was the last consideration likely to move him. Was it his duty to remain silent? That was the vital question. Could he do any good by speaking? Long and earnestly did he pray for guidance and, without a thought of the consequences to himself, decided at last to act. Judging of others in the light of his own straightforward honesty, it seemed to him that if it were once clearly represented to the Queen that it was Mazarin's presence alone that prevented peace, she could not fail to see that it was her duty to force him to withdraw. Surrounded as she was by courtiers who did not dare to tell her the truth, she might be ignorant of how much she herself was to blame in the matter. He had shamed her into doing what was right in the matter of the Bishop of Poitiers. Might he not succeed in awakening her conscience once more? It was on his knees in the Church of St. Lazare that Vincent resolved on the action that was at best only a forlorn hope, but still worth trying. With his usual prompt energy, the old man of seventy-three mounted his horse and, accompanied only by his secretary, du Courneau, set out for St. Germain. The Seine was in flood and the water breast-deep on the bridge over which they had to ride. Du Corneau [sic] avowed afterwards that he was quaking with fright; but Vincent, though wet to the skin, scarcely seemed to notice that all was not as usual and rode on through the floods in silence. Arrived at St. Germain, he asked to see the Queen, who, thinking that he had been sent by the people to make their peace with her, admitted him at once to her presence. With the straightforward simplicity that characterized all his dealings, he proceeded to state his errand. He had come, he said, to ask the Queen, for the sake of her country and her people, to rid herself of Mazarin and to forgive the rebels. Anne of Austria listened in silence and gave no sign of either sympathy or displeasure. When the speaker had ended, she quietly referred him to Mazarin himself. Vincent's hopes must have sunk low indeed at such a suggestion, but he was determined to go through with what he had begun. Confronted with the Cardinal, he earnestly represented to him that it was his duty to sacrifice himself for the good of the country; that his retirement would be an act of noble unselfishness which could not fail to win the blessing of Christ; that it would put an end to the sufferings under which France was groaning and save many innocent people from a fearful and horrible death. Mazarin had a sense of humor, and it was perhaps the only thing about him that responded to this appeal to his better feelings. It no doubt appeared to him sufficiently ludicrous that anyone should expect him to sacrifice himself for the sake of others, and probably those around him would have shared his opinion. Yet Vincent was justified in his experiment. Long as had been his experience of the sin and misery of men, it had not taught him, any more than it did his Divine Master, to despair of human nature. He had only employed his usual methods with Mazarin: methods that had prevailed with so many souls. He had appealed to the desire for good which he believed lay hidden in the heart of every man, no matter how deeply it might be buried under the refuse of a wasted life. He had appealed and failed--his mission had borne no fruit, yet he could not regret that he had undertaken it, although the consequences were to be serious for himself. For during his absence the fact that he had gone to St. Germain had leaked out among the people, and in one moment of anger all his claims on their love and gratitude were forgotten. "M. Vincent has betrayed us to the Queen!" was the cry in the streets of Paris, while the mob, falling on St. Lazare, pillaged it from top to bottom, carrying off everything on which they could lay hands. Vincent had gained nothing and lost all; it was not even safe for him to return to Paris, so great was the fury of the people; he had also won for himself the ill will of both Mazarin and the Queen. Yet with his usual humility and patience, he blamed no one but himself. He had done, he declared solemnly to du Courneau, that which he would have wished to have done were he lying on his deathbed; that he had failed was due solely and entirely to his own unworthiness. And now, since it was better for every reason that he should not return to Paris, he determined to undertake a visitation of the Congregation of the Mission Priests and Sisters of Charity in every center where they were working in France. In spite of his weariness and his seventy-three years, he set forth on his journey, riding the old horse that was kept to carry him now that he could no longer travel on foot. The suffering and misery that he witnessed, the horrors of famine and of war, only seemed to redouble his zeal to win the souls of men for their Maker. He knew the purifying force of suffering borne for God; he knew also the danger of despair. These poor creatures must be taught at any cost to lift their hearts to God, to bear their anguish patiently, to remember amid what agonies the Son of God had given His life for them. Wherever he went, his burning words and heroic example infused new life and courage into the hearts of his sons and daughters in Christ, who, in the life of abnegation they had undertaken, had often good reason for despondency. Traveling in these lawless times was both difficult and dangerous, for the country roads were infested with robbers, but Vincent had no fear. He was seldom free from illness, which was sometimes increased by the privations he had to undergo, but he traveled on without resting. Yet, amid all the new suffering which he had to witness and relieve, he was always mindful of his dear poor in Paris, which was still besieged by the troops of Condé. He had obtained a promise from the Queen during their last interview to let grain be taken into the town to feed the starving inhabitants, but she had not had sufficient energy to see that it was carried out. The people were beginning to realize what they had lost in M. Vincent and to suspect that they had misjudged him. Hunger at last forced them to make terms with the Royal party, although the hated Mazarin was still supreme, and the Queen and her young son re-entered Paris in triumph. But even Anne of Austria was not so foolish as to make her entry with the Cardinal at her side, and during the few weeks which still elapsed before he made his appearance in the capital, the Queen, free for a moment from the evil influence that stifled all her better impulses, wrote to Vincent, begging him to return. He was ill at Richelieu when the message reached him, and the Duchess d'Aiguillon, one of the most devoted of his Ladies of Charity, sent a little carriage to fetch him. She had known him long enough, however, to be sure that his love of mortification would prevent him from availing himself of what he would certainly look upon as a luxury. The carriage was accompanied by a letter from the Queen and the Archbishop of Paris ordering him in virtue of obedience to use it in the future for all his journeys. He obeyed, but sorely against the grain, and as long as he was obliged to avail himself of it always referred to the little carriage as his "disgrace." "Come and see the son of a poor villager riding in a carriage," he would say to his friends when he took leave of them; and indeed, "M. Vincent's little carriage" soon became well known in Paris. It was always at the disposal of anyone who wanted it, and when Vincent used it himself it was generally shared by some of his beloved poor. The fact that it came in handy for taking cripples for a drive or the sick to the hospital was the only thing that reconciled him to its possession. But the troubles of the Fronde were not yet at an end, and with Mazarin's return to Paris the discontent broke out afresh. The people were glad enough during the troublous times that followed to have Vincent once more in their midst. Chapter 11 "CONFIDO" WHEN at last peace was partially restored to the country, the number of poor people had enormously increased, and the charities that already existed were unable to cope with the misery and poverty in Paris. It was at this time that Vincent conceived the idea of founding a house of refuge for old men and women who had no means of gaining a livelihood. The foundation was placed in the charge of the Sisters of Charity. Work was provided for those who were able to do it; the proceeds went to keep up the establishment. So successful was the venture and so happy were the poor creatures who found a comfortable home and kind treatment in their old age that the Ladies of Charity determined to found an institution on the same lines for all the beggars of Paris. A large piece of ground that had been used for the manufacture of saltpetre was accordingly obtained from the King, who also gave a large contribution of money toward the undertaking. The hospital, known as "La Salpêtrière" from the use to which the ground had formerly been put, was soon in course of building, but the beggars who were destined to 1711 it, many of whom were worthless vagabonds, showed very little desire for being shut up and employed in regular work. Vincent would have preferred to begin in a small way with those who were willing to come in; but the Ladies of Charity, in their enthusiasm, declared that it would be for the beggars' own good to bring them in by force, and the King was of their opinion. The Salpêtrière was soon crowded, while the sturdy rascals who infested the streets and begged under pretense of infirmity were suddenly cured at the prospect of leading a regular life and working for their living. Begging, at the risk of being taken off to the Salpêtrière, soon became an unpopular occupation, and the streets of Paris were a good deal safer in consequence. In 1658, two years before his death, Vincent de Paul gave to the Congregation of Mission Priests its Rule and Constitutions. It was the work of God, he explained to them; there was nothing of his own in it. If there had been, he confessed humbly, it would only make him fearful lest his touch might spoil the rest. Those who listened to him and who had been witnesses of his long and holy life, his wisdom and his charity, knew better. St. Lazare was a center where all fervent souls zealous for the service of God and the good of others met to find counsel and inspiration at the feet of its holy founder. Letters from all parts of the world and from all kinds of people in need of help and counsel kept the old man continually busy during the time he was not giving instructions, visiting the sick, or receiving those who came to ask his advice. He rose at four o'clock to the very end of his life and spent the first hours of the day in prayer, and this in spite of the fact that the last years of his life were years of acute bodily suffering. His legs and feet, which for a long time had caused him great pain, became so swollen and inflamed that every step was torture. Ulcers, which opened and left gaping wounds, next made their appearance. It was said that in earlier years he had taken the place of an unfortunate man who had been condemned to the galleys and who was in consequence on the verge of despair, and that the malady from which he suffered had been caused by the heavy fetters with which his legs had been chained to the rowers' bench. It was several months, ran the tale, before his heroic action had been discovered and he was set at liberty, to bear for the rest of his life the penalty of his noble deed. When asked if this story were true, Vincent would change the subject as quickly as possible--which to those who knew how eagerly he always disclaimed, if he could, any action likely to bring honor to himself, seemed a convincing proof of its truth. With the greatest difficulty he was induced during the last years of his life to have a fire in his room and to use an extra coverlet, though he reproached himself bitterly in his last conferences to the Mission Priests and the Sisters of Charity "for this immortification." But there were sufferings harder than those of the body. Mazarin was still in power; the "accursed barter of bishoprics" was still going on; and Vincent was forced to witness the very abuses against which he had fought so bravely during the brief time of his influence at Court. The year 1660 brought two great sorrows: the death of M. Portail, the oldest and best beloved of Vincent's companions at St. Lazare, and that of Louise le Gras, the devoted Superior of the Sisters of Charity and the woman who would become known as St. Louise de Marillac. "You are going a little before me," he wrote to the latter when he heard that her life was despaired of, "but I shall meet you soon in Heaven." He was unable to go to her, for he could scarcely walk and was racked with fever. He would struggle on his crutches as far as the chapel to hear the Mass that he could no longer say and then go back again to his room, where he sat at a little table, working to the last, with a gentle smile of welcome for all who sought him. The letters written during the last days of Vincent's life are full of the same good sense, the same lucid clearness of thought, the same sympathy and knowledge of the human heart that always characterized him. Two months before his death he gathered the Sisters of Charity together and gave them a conference on the saintly death of their Superior. With touching humility he asked his dear daughters to pardon him for all the faults by which he might have offended them, for any annoyance that his "want of polish" might have caused them, and he thanked them for their faithful cooperation in all his schemes of charity. It was now such agony for him to walk to the chapel that his sons begged him to allow them to fit up a little oratory next to his room where Mass might be said, but Vincent would not hear of it. Then they implored him to allow himself to be carried in a chair, but, unwilling to give others the trouble of carrying him, he evaded the question until six weeks before his death, when he could no longer support himself on his crutches. During the nights of anguish, when his tortured limbs could find no rest on the hard straw mattress which he could never be prevailed upon to change for something softer, no complaint ever passed his lips. "My Saviour, my dear Saviour" was his only exclamation. On the days that followed these sleepless nights of pain, he was always smiling and serene. In spite of the weakness that oppressed him, he had help, advice and sympathy for everybody. His reward was close at hand. On the 26th of September, 1660, having been carried to the chapel for Mass and Holy Communion, he was taken back to his room, where he fell asleep in his chair from sheer exhaustion, as he had so often done before. The brother who had charge of him, thinking that he slept longer and more heavily than usual, awakened him and spoke to him. Vincent smiled and answered, but instantly fell asleep again. The doctor was sent for, and roused him again. Once more the same bright smile lit up the old face; he answered, but had not sufficient strength to speak more than a few words. In the evening they gave him the Last Sacraments, and he passed the night in silent prayer. In the early morning one of the priests who belonged to the "Conferences," and who was making a retreat in the house, asked the dying man to bless all the priests for whom he had done so much and to pray that his spirit might be with them. "May God, who began the good work, bring it to perfection," was the humble answer. A little later he was heard to murmur softly, "_Confido_"--"I trust"; and with these words on his lips, as a child puts its hand into that of his Father, he gently gave up his soul to God. 
21454	----	The Seven Champions of Christendom, by W H G Kingston. ________________________________________________________________________ A most unusual book, especially from this author, erudite though he is. The seven champions are the Patron Saints of England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, France, Italy and Spain. These rove about Europe and beyond, slaying Enchanters, Dragons, and other nuisances, accompanied by their Squires, who, although they put on weight and become obese, help as best they can, and carry their masters' trophies for them. That they all knew one another and were living at the same time is a novel idea, but it all adds to quite a good story, however whimsical. It is alleged that the book is no more than an edited transcription of a book written at the end of the fifteen hundreds. It may well be, but it stands quite well on its own for what it is--an amusement for the children: that, and no more. ________________________________________________________________________ THE SEVEN CHAMPIONS OF CHRISTENDOM, BY W H G KINGSTON. The following pages should not go forth into the world without due acknowledgment being made to that worthy old Dominie, Richard Johnson, to whose erudite but somewhat unreadable work the author is so largely indebted. As he flourished at the end of the sixteenth century, and the commencement of the seventeenth, great allowances should be made for his style, which is certainly not suited to the taste of this generation. It is to be hoped that the present version, while much of his vivid imagery is retained, may be free from his more glaring errors. And, thus quoting the Dominie's dedication:-- "To all courteous readers The Author wisheth encrease of vertuous knowledge. "Gentle readers, in kindness accept my labours, and be not like the chattering cranes, nor Momus' mates, that carp at everything. What the simple say I care not; what the spightful speak I pass not; only the censure of the conceited I stand unto; that is the mark I aym at; whose good likings if I obtain, I have won my race; if not, I faint in the first attempt, and so lose the quiet of my happy goal. "Yours in kindness and command,-- "R.J." CHAPTER ONE. THE BIRTH OF SAINT GEORGE. Who has not heard of the Seven Champions of Christendom--of the wonderful adventures they went through--of the dangers they encountered, and the heroic deeds they performed? Should any persons exist ignorant of the history of those noble knights, let them with attentive ears now listen to my veracious chronicle. Gallant and dauntless as were all those seven heroes, yet not one equalled in valour "Saint George of Merrie England." Many countries have in consequence claimed him as their own especial Champion. Portugal, Germany, Greece, and Russia, for what is known to the contrary, would be glad to have him; but we have proof undoubted that to England he alone belongs, even if we did not see him, on many a golden guinea, engaged in his desperate encounter with the most terribly terrific and greenest of green dragons. Not only are his orders worn by nobles, but by British monarchs themselves, while, in memory of his heroic deeds, they lead forth their armies under his banner. However, many long years have passed away since he astonished the world by his prowess. Of royal birth was his mother, the daughter of one of England's early kings; a Duke and High Steward of the realm was his father. Of the name of the king history is most mysteriously silent, or of the extent of his dominions; but there can be no doubt that the ancient city of Coventry was situated within them, and that, if not the principal, it was one of the principal cities of the realm, and, moreover, that a prison existed there on the silent system. Thus, when people are unfit to be spoken to, it is said, by a figure of speech, that they are sent to Coventry. In Coventry the Lord High Steward and his royal bride resided. Now, some time before the Princess was about to present her husband with a babe, she dreamed a dream; it was enough to terrify her, for she dreamed that, instead of a smiling infant, she should have to nurse a little green dragon. To nurse a small crocodile or alligator, or even a young hippopotamus, would have been bad enough, but a green dragon, with claws and a long wriggling fork-pointed tail, was out of the question; the very idea was enough to drive her distracted. The Lord High Steward was a man who always took the bull by the horns in a dilemma, and so he resolved forthwith to take steps to solve the mystery. He had heard that in the Black Forest in Germany there lived a powerful enchantress, Kalyb by name, who would, without doubt, be able at once to give him all the information he required. Sir Albert, for that was the High Steward's name, instantly set off across the seas, accompanied only by his faithful Squire, De Fistycuff. They bore offerings of gold and silver and precious stones with which to propitiate her. For many days they voyaged, tossed by the stormy billows, and for many days they travelled on till they arrived at the dreary precincts of the Black Forest. Boldly plunging into it, they reached a dense part of the wood, composed of withered, hollow, and distorted trees, whence proceeded sounds the most unearthly and terrific. The dismal croaking of the night raven, the hissing of serpents, the hoarse bellowing of wild bulls, the roaring of lions, the laughing of hyenas, and other hideous cries of all sorts of savage beasts. Some men would have stood astounded. Not so Sir Albert and his faithful Squire. On they went till they found themselves in front of a dark and lofty rock, within which was seen a vast and gloomy cavern. The entrance was secured by a massive iron gate studded over with huge knots and bars of steel. Near it hung a brazen trumpet, the use of which the Knight full readily guessed. He blew a blast which rung through the vaulted cave, echoing away till the sounds were lost in the distance, while it made the very earth rock and tremble. Scarcely had the echoes of the magic horn died away than a terrifically loud, discordant, hollow voice, proceeding out of the very depths of the cavern, inquired:--"Mortal, what want you here?" Sir Albert briefly told his errand, and said that he had brought gifts which he desired to offer to the famous Enchantress Kalyb, the lady of the Black Forest. As he was a courteous knight, and had spoken the Enchantress fair, so he expected a courteous and satisfactory reply. What, then, was his amazement when he heard these words proceeding from the cavern:-- "Whatever must be--must be there's no doubt; You've got an answer, and so turn about!" In vain he protested that such a reply was far from satisfactory; that he should go back as wise as he came; that it would have been better had he stayed at home; that he should have had all his pains for nothing. No other answer could he get. Though a courteous knight, he was yet somewhat irascible; and this was an occasion to try the temper of a milder man than a knight of those days. He seized the trumpet, and blew till it refused to give forth any further sound. He handed it to De Fistycuff, and told him to blow till he cracked his own cheeks or the trumpet. In vain the Squire puffed and puffed, not a sound could he produce. He holloed and shouted, and so did De Fistycuff; but to their united voices no answer was returned. Then Sir Albert began to shower abuse on the Enchantress; he told her some awkward truths, and called her some names which were far from complimentary; but the only answer he received was in shouts of hollow and mocking laughter which proceeded out of the recesses of the cavern. At length Sir Albert turned his horse's head, and in high dudgeon rode off, followed by De Fistycuff, who first pocketed the gifts they had brought to propitiate the Enchantress. Dull and dreary was their homeward journey; and, if truth must be told, the Lord High Steward could not help feeling remarkably small at the result of their expedition. After having been tossed about for many days by a storm, and made very sick in the German Ocean, they at length reached Coventry. The master of his household, his family physician, and a numerous assemblage of knights and ladies, rushed out of his castle to tell Sir Albert the news. Neither an hippopotamus nor an alligator had been born to him, but a right merry, rosy, bouncing infant. Alas! however, there was grief in store for the gallant knight, the partner of his joys and cares, his beautiful princess, was dead! Deeply he mourned his loss, and then he inquired if any one could solve the mystery of the dream which had caused him so long a journey. He found that had he waited patiently at home, like a wise man, all would have been known. The smiling infant was brought to him; and then, wonderful to relate, he discovered on its breast the portrait of a green dragon, just as his wife had described it to him; and, moreover, a blood-red cross marked on the boy's right hand, and a golden garter below his knee on the left. "He'll do something wonderful!" exclaimed the proud father; and he was not mistaken. The name of George was given to the boy; and forthwith the Lord High Steward, retiring from the cares of state, bestowed on him all his thoughts and attention. He selected three nurses to watch over him, called Prudence, Firmness, and Gentleness. One to prepare his nourishment, another to feed him, and the last to lull him to sleep. All would have gone well, but unhappily the boy's grandfather suggested that another nurse was necessary, and Carelessness was introduced into the household. It should be known that all this time the wicked Enchantress Kalyb had been well aware who it was who had come to her cavern and blown so furiously on her magic horn. Every word the Knight had uttered, and every opprobrious epithet which he had so lavishly bestowed, had been heard by her. She nourished, in consequence, in her evil heart, a spirit of revenge, which she waited a convenient opportunity to gratify. Oh, anger! oh, loss of temper! how blind art thou! How dost thou make wise men become like the most foolish! Revenge, too, how dost thou, malignant spirit, fall into the trap thou hast thyself laid, as will be soon seen! Wicked Kalyb waited her time. She knew of the young Prince's birth, she knew how his father doated on him, and she resolved to carry him off; but when she heard of the three nurses appointed to guard over him she despaired of succeeding in her object. The boy grew and flourished. Every day he became more beautiful, every day he gave proofs of a noble and gallant spirit. Truly was he his father's pride; worthy was he of the admiration of all the people of Coventry. When, however, Kalyb found out that Carelessness had become his nurse, instantly she hurried to the sea-shore; when, embarking in an egg-shell,--the shell, be it known, of a huge roc's egg--she set sail for the shores of England. Quickly she spun over the ocean, round and round, faster than any ordinary ship could sail, till she reached the land; and, arriving in the neighbourhood of Coventry, she hid herself in a thick wood, till she could pounce out on the young Prince and carry him off. However, she had long to wait. Sometimes Prudence walked out with him, sometimes Gentleness, and sometimes Firmness; and all kept so careful a watch over him that she had no opportunity of effecting her purpose. At length, Carelessness one fatal day had charge of him. Kalyb immediately changed herself into a lovely butterfly. Off ran the boy with his velvet cap to catch the fluttering insect. Carelessness sat down on a bank and fell asleep. Soon Kalyb led the boy into the recesses of the forest; then seizing him, in spite of his cries, she placed him in a chariot with ten fiery steeds which she had conjured up, and darting off like a flash of lightning, reached the coast, embarked in her egg-shell, which whirled round and round as before, and then she travelled on till she arrived once more, with her captive, at the magic cavern in the Black Forest. The massive gates flew asunder at a touch of her silver wand, and the Prince found himself among wonders which his imagination had never before conceived, which far surpassed anything he had ever beheld even in the beautiful city of Coventry. He soon, however, grew weary of them, and longed to return to his fond father and careful nurses; but he found himself a prisoner, and no outlet could he discover by which he could make his escape from the cavern--the massive gates prevented all egress to any who had once entered within them. The wicked Kalyb watched the sorrow of the boy, and knowing that his father was still more sorrowful, rejoiced in her revenge. She had numerous attendants to do her will. Among them was a dwarf, a misshapen, ill-favoured creature. To his care the boy was confided, with directions to beat and teaze him whenever he had nothing else to do. The noble child bore every indignity with equanimity and good humour, and, instead of harbouring revenge, took every opportunity of doing a kindness to the poor dwarf, who was himself the peculiar object of the wicked Kalyb's ill-treatment. Crumpleback was the dwarf's name. Often poor Crumpleback's body was black and blue with the pommelling he received from the furious Kalyb, while his cheeks were thin and haggard from want of food and rest. One day Kalyb was absent when Crumpleback addressed the Prince:--"Know," said he, "kind boy, that I am a fairy in disguise, and though less powerful than the fell Enchantress Kalyb, I may yet circumvent her acts. Your kindness and gentleness, and forgiveness of the injuries I was forced to do you, have won my heart. I have vowed to serve you to the best of my power. Let not Kalyb know what has passed between us, but wait patiently, and see what will happen." The young Prince thanked the fairy, and his hopes of escaping once more revived. He had long to wait. In the mean time, whenever Kalyb was absent, the seeming dwarf gave him instructions in all the arts which would fit him to become an accomplished knight. Book learning, though not much in vogue in those days, was not neglected. Sometimes the fairy put a shining sword into his grasp, and showed him how to wield it with a force no one could withstand; sometimes he was mounted on a fiery steed which few mortals could have bestrode, and with lance in hand he was taught to tilt against phantom knights, which, in the most desperate encounters, he invariably overthrew. Thus, by the time he had attained to man's estate, no knight in Europe was so accomplished, while none surpassed him in virtue or valour. Meantime the Lord High Steward bitterly mourned the loss of his promising son. In vain he sent messengers throughout the world to find him, and at last, remembering the ancient proverb, "Who wants goes, who does not want sends," he resolved to go in search of the boy himself. Storing himself with gold and precious jewels, he set off, attended only by his faithful De Fistycuff. From place to place he wandered, year after year, till his locks were turned to silvery grey, and his beard became like the down of a thistle. One evening his heart fainting, and his once firm knees trembling, he reached the gate of a monastery in Bohemia. Then he sunk down before even his Squire could ring the bell to summon the monks to his assistance. When the porter opened the door, the Lord High Steward of England had breathed his last, and poor De Fistycuff was bewailing his loved master's death, and his own hard fate, in being thus left alone in a foreign land. The monks buried Sir Albert hard by, and raised a monument, covered with some of his own jewels, over his grave, reserving the remainder to pay the expenses of his funeral. The worthy De Fistycuff they recommended to return to his native land, unless he wished to become a monk; an honour he declined, having his faithful Grumculda waiting for him at home. So, paying a farewell visit to his master's tomb, the jewels on which he found had by enchantment been changed to glass, he set off on his journey. Happily he had, however, some of the presents intended for the wicked Kalyb in his pockets; so, like an honest Briton, he was able to pay his way, and be no discredit to his country. Leaving him to pursue his toilsome peregrination, we return once more to the cavern of Kalyb. CHAPTER TWO. SAINT GEORGE RELEASES THE SIX CHAMPIONS. Even the Enchantress wondered at the progress in the arts and sciences her captive was making; but, as she knew that he was destined to become a great man, she was aware that she could not hope to stop his progress. All she could do was to keep him shut up till fate set him free. One day the friendly fairy addressed the Prince:--"Know," she said, "the Enchantress sleeps once, and once only, for one week every hundred years. Her magic art depends on her silver wand, which on that occasion she hides away so carefully that it is scarcely possible to discover it. Still, we will search. For that opportunity I have long been waiting. If we can possess ourselves of it, she will be completely in our power, and we can work our will within the magic cavern. Know also that I am an English fairy, Sabrina by name. I love you because you are kind to me, and because you come of an honest English stock. If we can overcome the Enchantress, I will enable you to commence that career of glory for which I know that your heart is even now thirsting." The young Prince's heart beat high with joy and hope on hearing these words. Anxiously they watched the Enchantress, to try and discover where she would place her silver wand. Day after day they followed her through all the vast interminable recesses of her magic cavern. Every day she grew more drowsy and less inclined to speak; which is not surprising, considering how long she had been awake, and how sleepy she must have become. In spite of all this vigilance, however, at last she appeared without her silver wand; and soon after they saw her sink down on a couch of rose-leaves she had prepared for herself in a sumptuous apartment, where, had it not been for her hideous countenance, where all the malignant passions were portrayed, she would have looked like a sovereign resting on her bed of state. The Prince was eager instantly to set off to look for the silver wand. "Stay," whispered the Fairy Sabrina, "she yet deeps with one eye open, like a weasel; wait till she closes both, and snores." Accordingly they waited till both Kalyb's eyes were closed, and loud snores echoed along the vaulted roof. Then off they set. "Nothing worth having can be gained without toil and trouble," observed the Dwarf, as he parted from the Prince. All the other attendants of the Enchantress had taken the opportunity to go to sleep likewise; so silence profound reigned throughout the cavern, broken only by her snores. The Prince searched and searched in every direction, under heaps of costly jewels and glittering robes, piles of gold and silver, and rich armour; but they had now no charms for him: the silver wand which was to set him free to commence his noble career was all he sought for--that wand, the type of knowledge, which can only be obtained by study and perseverance. Day after day he sought for it; but at the end of each day all he could say was that he believed he could tell where it was not. The Dwarf came back equally unsuccessful; but still numberless heaps had been turned over, intricate passages explored, profound depths dived into, and unthought of recesses in the cavern discovered. Five days had thus passed away; the Prince knew more about the cavern than he had ever known before; the sixth day came, and that, too, ended. He had added to his knowledge, but the silver wand had not been found. He became anxious, as well he might. On the seventh the Enchantress would awake and resume her power. More diligently than ever he searched about; the Dwarf seconded his efforts. Before him appeared, as he wandered on, a golden door. After many a hearty shove he forced it open. A steep flight of rugged stone steps led winding upwards he knew not where. Boldly he entered, and climbed on, on, on. Though rough and steep were the steps he did not weary or hesitate. Sometimes the stair was spiral, and he went round and round, and sometimes it led him directly upwards. Scarcely a glimmer of light enabled him to find his way; but the Dwarf was at his heels, encouraging him, and he recollected the silver wand of which he was in search, and persevered. Strong and healthy as he was he began to draw his breath quickly, when the full light of the glorious sun burst on him, and he found himself in a magnificent temple of alabaster, on the summit of a lofty mountain. From the windows of the temple he could behold the whole surrounding country to a vast distance, far, far beyond the forest which grew round the base of the mountain. There were cities and palaces, and silvery streams, and rich fields, and glowing orchards, and meadows full of cattle, and grassy downs covered with sheep--such a scene as he had not beheld since his boyhood, when Kalyb first got possession of him. He stood contemplating it with delight. How long he might have stood it is impossible to say, when the sound of a distant church-bell was wafted up to his ears. It reminded him that the hour was approaching when the dreadful Kalyb would awake. He thought to make his escape out of the temple, but that he found was impossible; the walls of the tower in which he stood were a hundred feet high, with pointed iron spikes below, to catch any who might fall on them. Again must he sink into the power of the cruel Kalyb? His brave heart rebelled at the thought; he would dare and do anything to avoid it. He spoke aloud. "You are right," said the Dwarf; "but look! what is that?" He turned his head, and beheld before him, on a velvet cushion, which covered a marble table, the silver wand of which he had been so long in search. He grasped it eagerly. "Follow me," said the Dwarf, hastening onward, "no time is to be lost." Down the steps they sped. "No time is to be lost," cried the Dwarf again. Faster, faster went the Prince's feet. On he rattled--on--on-- often several steps at a time. Nothing stopped him. The bottom was reached; the massive door was closed; in vain he pushed against it. He touched it with his silver wand; open it flew. Along the vaulted passages of the cavern he sped. Many a hideous monster started up, but a wave of the silver wand put them to flight. The Prince and his attendant reached the chamber of the Enchantress. Her snoring had ceased. She had begun to rub her eyes and move uneasily, with many a grunt and snort. She was about to awake. Who could have told what mischief one glance of her evil eye would have effected. "Strike! strike!" said the Fairy. The Prince struck the bed. Instantly loud shrieks and groans, and cries most terrific, were heard filling the air, and shouts most horrible of mocking laughter, and bellowings, and roarings, and hissings, and the walls of the chamber began to rock, and the bed began to sink, and flames burst forth, and stenches most overwhelming arose. The horrible noises increased till dense lurid vapours concealed the spot where the Enchantress's chamber had been, though her helpless cries were heard far, far down in the depths of the earth; and the Prince found himself standing in the wild cavern, but, in the place of the Dwarf, there stood a beautiful Fairy by his side. "I prepared you for a change," said the Fairy, with a smile; "but come, we are not the only ones to be set free. Let us not forget our companions in misfortune any more than those in our prosperity." The Prince made the politest of bows, and said he was completely under the Lady Sabrina's directions. "Then come with me," she said, and led the way till they reached a vast castle of brass, with battlements and towers glittering in the sun. "Within this castle lie imprisoned six valiant knights, worthy champions of Christendom, bemoaning their hard fate, and longing to be free. Had the vile Kalyb retained her power, you would have been shut up there likewise. But know, brave Prince, as by your perseverance, valour, and judgment you have overcome her and her enchantments, it is destined that you shall become the seventh and most renowned of all, and so I hail you as `Saint George of Merrie England.' Thus you shall be called for ages yet to come, wherever England's might and England's deeds throughout the world are known." The roseate hue of modesty suffused the cheek of the young knight as he heard these words, and he vowed that he would ever strive to prove worthy of the honourable title he had received. Then thrice he struck the gates of the brazen castle. The portals flew open, and he and the Fairy entering, found the six knights sitting lonely and sad in separate chambers, not knowing what had happened. They started as they heard the voice of Sabrina mentioning their names. "The first is Saint Denis of France," said she. With many a bow he rapidly sprang forward and saluted Saint George. The second, Saint James of Spain, slowly stalked on, and lifting his casque bowed haughtily. The third, Saint Anthony of Italy, advanced more rapidly, and, with a flourish of his helmet, gave him an embrace. Saint Andrew of Scotland, the fourth, rising from his couch, inquired whence he had come, and whither he was going, and thanked him for the valour he had displayed; while Saint Patrick, the fifth, almost wrung off his hand, as he expressed his delight in meeting so gallant a knight; and the sixth, Saint David of Wales, vowed that no pleasure could surpass what he felt at being thus set free by a knight second only to himself in all knightly accomplishments. Besides the knights, six faithful squires, who had followed their fortunes for many years, lay imprisoned in a separate dungeon. These also Saint George had the great satisfaction of setting free; when once more they rejoined their beloved masters, and assisted, as was their wont, in preparing them for their journey. Then Saint George and all the knights, following Sabrina, led the way to the stables of the castle, where stood, ready caparisoned, seven of the most superb steeds mortal eye ever beheld. "Six of them are for those brave knights," she said; "the seventh, Bayard by name, is reserved for you; while six other most excellent horses are for their six faithful squires." The knights, eager to be gone, mounted their steeds, as did their squires theirs, while Sabrina conducted Saint George back to the castle, where, in a chamber, hung numberless suits of the most magnificent armour. Choosing out the strongest corselet, Sabrina buckled it on his breast; she laced on his helmet, and completely clothed him in glittering steel. Then bringing forth a mighty falchion, she placed it in his hand, and said:--"No monarch was ever clothed in richer armour. Of such strength and invincible power is your steed, that while you are on his back no knight shall be able to conquer you. Your armour is of steel so pure that no battle-axe can bruise, no weapon pierce it. Your sword, which is called Ascalon, was made by the Cyclops. It will hew asunder the hardest flint, or cut the strongest steel, and in its pummel such magic virtue lies, that neither treason nor witchcraft can prevail against you, or any violence be offered as long as you wear it." The good fairy thus having spoken, Saint George, fully caparisoned, went forth from the castle, and mounting Bayard, prepared with the other champions to leave the Black Forest--Sabrina, in her own chariot, drawn by ten peacocks, leading the way. Just then a stranger appeared in sight, sad and sorrowful, travelling on. "De Fistycuff!" exclaimed Saint George, in a cheerful voice, "my honest parent's faithful squire." De Fistycuff started, as well he might, and rushed forward. He knew the voice, but whence it had come he could not tell. Saint George tore off his corselet, and exposed to view the green dragon on his bosom. Thus De Fistycuff knew who it was, and, embracing him, burst into tears. Having recovered himself, and once more buckled on his young master's armour, De Fistycuff mounted his steed. Then the whole party set forward, and travelled on till they reached the coast. Then they took shipping, and, at Saint George's particular request, proceeded to his paternal castle, near the beautiful city of Coventry. There having dwelt for the space of nine months, and erected a sumptuous monument over the grave of the hapless princess, Saint George's mother, they expressed their desire to set forth once more in search of those noble adventures to which they had devoted their lives. Saint George, nothing loath, promised to accompany them, and the faithful De Fistycuff entreated that he might not be left behind; so, all accoutred, and lavishly supplied with everything they required, they set forth with their faithful squires, and travelled on till the time arrived for their separating in different directions. What then befell them, and what wondrous deeds they performed, shall in course of time be told. CHAPTER THREE. THE ADVENTURES OF SAINT GEORGE OF ENGLAND. The Seven Champions having crossed the British Channel to France, and traversed that lovely country, where they banqueted, to their heart's content, on fricassees and ragouts, washed down by huge draughts of Burgundy and claret, reached at length a broad plain where stood a brazen pillar. Here seven ways met, and here the noble knights, with many a flourish of their spears and not a few in their speeches, though history does not record them, parted with expressions of mutual esteem, to follow out with their faithful squires their separate adventures. Saint George, accompanied only by the faithful De Fistycuff, at once passed over to the coast of Africa, knowing full well that in that unknown land of wonders he was more likely to meet with adventures worthy of his prowess than in any other part of the world. He journeyed on for many a mile over burning sands, his polished steel armour glittering in the sun, striking terror into all beholders, and almost blinding his poor squire, who, hot and panting, followed him wearily. Far across the plains of Africa he travelled till he reached the very ancient, though little known kingdom of Timbuctoo. King Bobadildo, the sable monarch of that empire, so wonderfully renowned in its own annals, if not in those of other countries, received him with all the courtesy due to his rank as a British knight, and the renown which the faithful De Fistycuff, who never lost an opportunity of putting in a good word for his master, stated that he intended to acquire. The Knight was feasted sumptuously, and magnificent shows were got up for his entertainment, while the King, who had taken a great fancy to him, from believing that he would be of great use in leading his warriors to the fight against the enemies of his realm, pressed him to remain, hoping that by his falling in love with his lovely daughter he might be induced to become his son-in-law. The colour of the young princess's complexion, which was of the most sable hue, shining lustrously with palm oil, although much admired in her native country, was to the British knight an insuperable objection to a closer alliance than that of the friendship he enjoyed, though he did not say so; but stated that he was anxious to go where glory awaited him, and that all matrimonial arrangements he must defer till he had won that fame for which his heart panted. Accordingly, the next morning, followed by De Fistycuff, who had some difficulty in buckling his belt after the good fare he had enjoyed, he set forth from the southern gate of the capital towards the unknown regions which lay beyond. The sweet Princess looked out of a turret window, and waved her coal-black hand, while tears coursed each other down her sable cheeks as she saw the Knight going away and leaving her all forlorn; for in her bright eyes not one of the neighbouring princes, nor any of her father's courtiers, could in any way be compared to the gallant Saint George. Many other sweet princesses, at the various courts he visited in his travels, held the same opinion--a circumstance which caused a considerable amount of perplexity to the gentle-hearted and gallant Knight. As she gazed she sighed, and then she sang words to the following effect:-- "Go away, go away, oh, hard-hearted knight, Go away to glory and fame; If you ever come back You'll not find me slack To change my state and name!" Much relieved by the impromptu expressions of her feelings, she turned from the window, Saint George having disappeared among the distant sand-heaps, and went to attend her honoured sire at his matutinal meal. Saint George and his Squire travelled on day after day, mounting higher and higher till they reached a region where the heat was no longer so oppressive as in the plains, and where scenes new and beautiful opened on their enravished sight. There were beautiful lakes of the clearest water, full of fish of strange shapes and gorgeous hues, which swam up to the surface, and gazed with curious eyes at the strangers. The trees and shrubs were of the most gigantic proportions, the former towering high into the sky, and a single leaf affording ample shade to the Knight and Squire and their horses. So luscious and luxuriant, too, was the grass that a few tufts were sufficient for a meal for the noble steeds, and put such strength and spirit into them, that, in spite of the fatigues they underwent, they were ever ready for any task they might be called on to perform. Even the shrubs were so high that they could ride beneath some of them. Others were covered with leaves of such thickness that a spear could scarcely pierce them, while they were armed with spikes of length so formidable that it was dangerous to approach the branches, and impossible to force a passage through them. Strange, too, were the plants. Some were like a mass of twisting serpents which wriggled about and hissed as the travellers passed, and though Saint George cut off their heads with his sword, they so quickly again grew up that he perceived that the attempt to destroy them was labour lost. "So is it," he moralised, "with vicious propensities; the nature of the plant must be changed, or the branches will spring forth, and evil fruit will continually be produced." Other plants of the most fantastic shapes and most lovely hues seemed endued with life. One covering a wide circle of ground, and tinted with every colour of the rainbow, they stopped to admire. Suddenly it darted forth feelers of great length high into the air, and drew back hundreds of gay-coloured butterflies, and moths, and beetles, which were flying near. Numerous birds also of the most gorgeous plumage, which darted down, attracted by the flies, were seized hold of and dragged within the capacious mouth of the plant. "On, on," cried Saint George, pricking forward his steed. "If we stop to admire all these separate wonders we shall never attain the great objects of our expedition." The Squire if he heard did not heed his master, for he kept gazing at the proceedings of the strange plant, and trying to count the number of insects it gobbled up in a minute. Thoughtlessly he drew closer and closer, till suddenly the monster plant darted forth all its feelers and grasped him round the body. He felt himself dragged helplessly towards the capacious maw where he had already seen so many creatures conveyed. "Oh, master, master! help, help!" he shouted at the top of his voice, though a feeler getting round his neck almost stopped his breath. Saint George, seeing what had occurred, spurred back in hot haste, and, slashing away with his trusty falchion, severed the feelers after vast exertions and rescued his frightened squire. "If you had done as I told you this would not have happened," he observed, as he freed him from the thick masses of sinew which surrounded his body. "Oh, De Fistycuff, remember to do right and what you are bid by those who know best what is for your good, and then don't fear the consequences; but never stand gazing at what is bad or dangerous, and fancy that you run no risk of being drawn into the snare laid for you!" The Squire listened respectfully to his master's lecture, and then followed him at a humble distance, resolving to profit by his advice. Night with her sable wings was about to overspread the earth, and the tall woods resounded with strangest cries, and shrieks, and hisses of the wonderful wild animals which roamed through them, when the Knight thought it high time to look about for some place of shelter, where, free from their attacks, he and his squire might repose till the return of the rosy dawn would enable them to discern their foes, and face them bravely. A large rock appeared before them. Within it was a cave with a rude porch in front. In this rough habitation dwelt a hermit, whose voice they heard bewailing the sad fate to which his country was doomed. The Knight entered; a lamp stood on a table in the centre of the cave. The hermit rose from his couch and welcomed Saint George and De Fistycuff. He was a venerable man, with a long beard of silvery whiteness; and as he tottered forward he seemed bowed almost to the ground with the weight of years. "Gladly will I afford you shelter and such food as my cell can furnish, most gallant Knight," he said; and, suiting the action to the word, he placed a variety of provisions on the table. "I need not inquire to what country you belong, for I see by the arms of England engraven on your burgonet whence you come. I know the knights of that land are brave and gallant, and ready to do battle in aid of the distressed. Here, then, you will find an opportunity for distinguishing yourself by a deed which will make your name renowned throughout the world." Saint George pricked up his ears at this, and eagerly inquired what it was. "This, you must understand, most noble Knight, is the renowned territory of Bagabornabou, second to none in the world in importance in the opinion of its inhabitants. None was so prosperous, none so flourishing, when a most horrible misfortune befell the land, in the appearance of a terrific green dragon, of huge proportions, who ranges up and down the country, creating devastation and dismay in every direction. No corner of the land is safe from his ravages; no one can hope to escape the consequences of his appearance. Every day his insatiable maw must be fed with the body of a young maiden, while so pestiferous is the breath which exhales from his throat that it causes a plague of a character so violent that whole districts have been depopulated by it. He commences his career of destruction at dawn every morning, and till his victim is ready he continues to ravage the land. When he has swallowed his lamentable repast he remains asleep till next morning, and then he proceeds as before. "Many attempts have been made to capture him during the night, but they have proved as fruitless as trying to catch a weasel (if you happen to have heard of such an animal, Saint George, in your travels) asleep. Fruitless I will not say to him, for he has invariably destroyed the brave men who have gone out to attack him, and has swallowed them for his supper. For no less than twenty-four long years has this dreadful infliction been suffered by our beloved country, till scarcely a maiden remains alive, nor does a brave man continue in it. The most lovely and perfect of her sex, the King's only daughter, the charming Sabra, is to be made an offering to the fell dragon to-morrow, unless a knight can be found gallant and brave enough to risk his life in mortal combat with the monster, and with skill and strength sufficient to destroy him. "The King has promised, in his royal word, that, should such a knight appear and come off victorious, he will give him his daughter in marriage and the crown of Bagabornabou at his decease." "Ah!" exclaimed the English Knight, his whole countenance beaming with satisfaction, "here is a deed to be done truly worthy of my prowess! What think you of that, reverend hermit?" And he bared his breast, exhibiting the portrait of the green dragon which had been marked there at his birth. "A circumstance ominous of deep import," observed the Hermit, nodding his head; "either the green dragon will kill you, or you will kill the green dragon." "Now, by my halidom, but I fully purpose to kill the dragon and rescue the Princess," cried the Knight, in a cheerful voice. "Won't we, my brave De Fistycuff?" "What men dare they can do," answered the Squire, nodding his head, for he was very sleepy. Accordingly, the hermit having prepared couches of leaves, the Knight and his attendant rested till the cheerful cock, true messenger of day, gave notice that the sun was about to uprise from his sandy bed. Then, springing to his feet after a hurried meal, aided by his squire and the trembling fingers of the hermit, he carefully buckled on his armour, and mounting his richly caparisoned steed, he declared himself ready for the combat. Followed by De Fistycuff, and preceded by the hermit on a mule, who went to show the way, he proceeded to the valley where the dragon was asleep, and where the King's daughter was to be offered up as a sacrifice. As he came in sight of it his eyes rested on one of the sweetest and most lovely maidens he had ever beheld, arrayed in pure white Arabian silk, and led to the place of death by a numerous band of sage and modest matrons, who mourned with bitter tears her hard fate. This melancholy spectacle still further stimulated the overflowing courage of the English Knight, so spurring on towards the mourning group, he assured the lovely maiden that he was prepared to battle bravely in her cause, and entreated her to return to her father's court till the result of the coming contest became known. "He'll do it if it is to be done," observed De Fistycuff, wishing to add his mite of consolation to the ladies' hearts, and pointing to his master, who had ridden slowly on; and having thus delivered himself he spurred after him. The daring Knight and his faithful squire now entered the valley where the terrific green dragon had his abode. No sooner did the fiery eyes of the hideous monster fall on the steel-clad warrior, instead of the fair maiden he expected to see, than from his leathern throat he sent forth a cry of rage louder and more tremendous than thunder, and arousing himself he prepared for the contest about to occur. As he reared up on his hind legs, with his wings outspread, and his long scaly tail, with a huge red fork, extending far away behind him, his sharp claws wide open, each of the size of a large ship's anchor, his gaping mouth armed with double rows of huge teeth, between which appeared a fiery red tongue, and vast eyes blazing like burning coals, while his nostrils spouted forth fire, and the upper part of his body was covered with glittering green scales brighter than polished silver, and harder than brass, the under part being of a deep golden hue, his appearance might well have made even one of the bravest of men unwilling to attack him. Saint George trembled not, but thought of the lovely Sabra, and nerved himself for the encounter. De Fistycuff did not like his looks, and had he been alone would have been tempted to beat a retreat, but his love for his master kept him by his side. "See," said the Hermit, who had come thus far, "there is the dragon! He is a monster huge and horrible; but I believe that, like other monsters, by bravery and skill he can be overcome. See, the valley is full of fruit-trees! Should he wound you, and should you faint, you will find one bearing oranges of qualities so beneficial, that, should you be able to procure one plucked fresh from the tree, it will instantly revive you. Now, farewell! See, the brute is approaching!" "Remember," cried Saint George, turning to De Fistycuff, "this fight is to be all my own. You stand by and see fair play. Only, if I am down, and the brute dares to hit me, then rush in to my rescue." The faithful squire nodded his assent. On came the monster dragon, flapping his wings, spouting fire from his nostrils, and roaring loudly with his mouth. Saint George couched his sharp spear, and spurring his steed, dashed onward to the combat. So terrific was the shock that the Knight was almost hurled from his saddle, while his horse, driven back on his haunches, lay, almost crushed, beneath the monster's superincumbent weight; but both man and steed extricating themselves with marvellous agility, Saint George made another thrust of his spear, with all his might, against the scaly breast of the dragon. He might as well have struck against a gate of brass. In a moment the stout spear was shivered into a thousand fragments, and the dragon uttered a loud roar of derision. At the same time, to show what he could do, he whisked round his venomous pointed tail with so rapid a movement that he brought both man and horse sorely bruised to the ground. There they lay, almost senseless from the blow, while the dragon retreated backward some hundred paces or more, with the intention of coming back with greater force than before, and completing the victory he had almost won. Happily De Fistycuff divined the monster's purpose, and seeing one of the orange-trees of which the hermit had spoken, he picked an orange and hurried with it to his master. Scarcely had the Knight tasted it than he felt his strength revive, and leaping to his feet, he gave the remainder of it to his trusty steed, on whose back instantly mounting, he stood prepared, with his famous sword Ascalon in his hand, to receive the furious charge which the dragon was about to make. Though his spear had failed him at a pinch, his trusty falchion was true as ever; and making his horse spring forward, he struck the monster such a blow on his golden-coloured breast that the point entered between the scales, inflicting a wound which made it roar with pain and rage. Slight, however, was the advantage which the Knight thereby gained, for there issued forth from the wound so copious a stream of black gore, with an odour so terrible, that it drove him back, almost drowning him and his brave steed, while the noxious fumes, entering their nostrils, brought them both fainting and helpless to the ground. De Fistycuff, mindful of his master's commands, narrowly eyed the dragon, to see what he was about to do. Staunching his wound with a touch of his fiery tail, he flapped his green wings, roaring hoarsely, and shook his vast body, preparatory to another attack on the Knight. "Is that it?" cried the Squire; and running to the orange-tree, whence he plucked a couple of the golden fruit, he poured the juice of one down the throat of his master, and of the other down that of Bayard. Both revived in an instant, and Saint George, springing on Bayard's back, felt as fresh and ready for the fight as ever. Both had learned the importance of avoiding the dragon's tail, and when he whisked it on one side Bayard sprang to the other, and so on backwards and forwards, nimbly avoiding the blows aimed by the venomous instrument at him or his rider. Again and again the dragon reared itself up, attempting to drop down and crush his gallant assailant; but Bayard, with wonderful sagacity comprehending exactly what was to be done, sprung backwards or aside each time the monster descended, and thus avoided the threatened catastrophe. Still the dragon appeared as able as ever to endure the combat. Saint George saw that a strenuous effort must be made, and taking a fresh grasp of Ascalon, he spurred onward to meet the monster, who once more advanced, with outstretched wings, with the full purpose of destroying him. This time Saint George kept his spurs in the horse's flanks. "Death or victory must be the result of this charge," he shouted to De Fistycuff. With Ascalon's bright point kept well before him, he drove directly at the breast of the monster. The sword struck him under the wing; through the thick flesh it went, and nothing stopped it till it pierced the monster's heart. Uttering a loud groan, which resounded through the neighbouring woods and mountains, and made even the wild beasts tremble with consternation, the furious green dragon fell over on its side, when Saint George, drawing his falchion from the wound, dashed on over the prostrate form of the monster, and, ere it could rise to revenge itself on its destroyer, with many a blow he severed the head from the body. So vast was the stream which flowed forth from the wound that the whole valley speedily became a lake of blood, and the river which ran down from it first gave notice, by its sanguineous hue, to the inhabitants of the neighbouring districts that the noble Champion of England had slain their long tormenting enemy. The victorious Knight now refreshed himself and his steed with a couple of the oranges which De Fistycuff brought him, and which completely restored them to the vigour with which they began the combat. He then stuck the huge head of the once terrific dragon on a truncheon, which was formed by his faithful Squire out of the handle of the spear, the head of which had been shivered against the scaly sides of the monster at the commencement of the combat. Having delivered the trophy of his prowess to De Fistycuff, to be borne before him, he rode on towards the capital of the kingdom, where he expected to be welcomed by the lovely Sabra, to be received by the sovereign and his people as a conqueror, to have heard all the bells in the empire ringing, and to have seen every house illuminated, and bonfires blazing in every street. He had to learn the bitter lesson that success frequently only creates enemies and detractors. Now, there was residing at the court of King Battabolo, the sovereign of Bagabornabou, Almidor, the black King of Morocco, who had long in vain sought the hand of the Princess Sabra. For many reasons she could not abide him; and now, when he heard of the successful combat of Saint George with the dragon, he knew that he should have less chance than ever of winning her love. With baseness unparalleled he resolved to make one desperate effort to gain her. Accordingly, he, by the most extensive promises, engaged the services of twelve warriors of renown to waylay the British Champion, in order to deprive him of his trophy and of his life, intending to present himself before the fair Sabra, and to boast that he had himself destroyed the dragon. Passing through a narrow defile, Saint George beheld the twelve African knights flourishing their swords, and prepared to intercept his progress. "Take charge of Bayard," quoth he to De Fistycuff; "I'll meet these recreants sword in hand on foot." Thus speaking, he drew Ascalon from the scabbard, and advanced towards his foes. From the narrowness of the defile only three could engage in the fight at once. Sharply clashed the steel. Loud rang their swords upon his polished armour; but Ascalon soon found an entrance through their coats of mail, and one after the other fell breathless to the ground. Three more then came on; but standing on the bodies of the prostrate steeds, he with one stroke of his falchion severed their heads from their bodies, which rolled over in the ensanguined dust. With three equal downward strokes he cut in two, from the crown to the saddle, the next three which advanced, while the remainder turning to fly, he pierced them with Ascalon ignominiously through the back. Almidor had all the time stood on the summit of a mountain hard by to witness the defeat of the British Champion; but when he saw that instead he remained victor of the field, he hastened back to the city to announce the death of the dragon by the sword of the strange Knight. Pen might fail to do justice to the magnificent preparations made to do honour to the brave Champion who had conquered the Green Dragon. As he approached the city he was met by a sumptuous chariot of massive gold, drawn by fifty milk-white steeds; the wheels were of the purest ebony, and the covering was of silk embossed with gold. On either side rode a hundred of the noblest peers of Bagabornabou, attired in crimson velvet, and mounted on chargers of the same pure colour as those which drew the chariot. Stepping into the chariot, while De Fistycuff led Bayard with one hand, and carried aloft the dragon's head with the other, he entered the city amid strains of delicious and martial music, and beneath banners and embroidered tapestry and rich arras waving from every window, from which looked down thousands of bright eyes to admire him. But none were so bright as those of the beauteous Sabra, who welcomed him in a rich pavilion prepared for his reception, where he laid at her feet the trophies of his prowess; and as she gazed at the dragon's monstrous jaws she shuddered to think that she might have had to go down them, and felt her gratitude and eke a warmer feeling increase for the gallant stranger who had preserved her from a fate so terrible. Here all the first physicians in the land stood around with precious salves to dress his wounds, and administer specifics against the effects of the dragon's poisonous breath and venom. The Knight, having requested that they might all be left by his bed-side, and that he might be left alone, aided by De Fistycuff, emptied them all out of the window, and having declared himself next morning infinitely better, thereby gained immense popularity among the disciples of Aesculapius, who each rested under the pleasing belief that his own nostrum had worked the cure. CHAPTER FOUR. THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF SAINT GEORGE. No sooner had the blushing morn displayed her beauties in the east, and gilded with her radiant beams the mountain tops, than Sabra repaired to the Champion's pavilion, and presented him with a diamond ring of inestimable value, which she prayed him to wear on his finger, not only as an ornament, but because it was endued with many excellent and occult virtues. That day the British Champion was entertained with one of the most magnificent banquets that had ever taken place in Africa. Ample justice was done to it by all present, especially by De Fistycuff, who eat away most heartily, and quaffed down huge beakers of rosy wine--all, as he declared, for the honour of Old England. Ere the feast was ended, Almidor, the black King of Morocco, under pretence of doing honour to the Christian Knight, rose from his seat, and presented him with a bowl of Samian wine. The noble Champion took it, thoughtless of treachery; but as he lifted it to his lips the magic ring touched the rim, when, to the astonishment of all present, it shivered into a thousand fragments. The Princess Sabra shrieked out that some vile treachery was intended; but so firm was the confidence of the King, her father, in the honour of Almidor, that he refused to credit the accusation. Thus a second time was Saint George saved from the machinations of his enemy. Like a lynx, however, Almidor watched for another opportunity of gratifying his hatred. In tournaments, dances, and other heroic exercises, the Champion passed his time, until the faithful De Fistycuff reminded him that he was sadly wasting it, if he wished to gain a name to be handed down to posterity. "You are right, my faithful monitor," he answered, "I'll bid farewell to the Princess, and be gone." The Knight found out Sabra seated in a bower of jessamine. He told her his errand. "Refuse not," she replied, "my dear, loved lord of England, her who, for thy sake, would leave parents, country, and the inheritance of the crown of Bagabornabou, and would follow thee as a pilgrim through the wide world. The sun shall sooner lose his splendour, the pale moon drop from her orb, the sea forget to ebb and flow, and all things change their course, than Sabra prove inconstant to Saint George of England. Let, then, the priest of Hymen knit that gordian knot, the knot of wedlock, which death alone has power to untie." The Champion, suddenly recollecting that it was leap year, and delighted with the maiden who had so ably put in a word in her own favour, allowed his heart, which had never before beat with any other passion but that of arms, to yield to the tender one of love. Yet, willing to try her longer, he replied--"Sweet Princess, not content that I have risked my life to preserve yours, would you have me sacrifice my honour, give over the chase of dazzling glory, lay all my warlike trophies in a woman's lap, and change my truncheon for a distaff? No, Sabra, George of England was born in a country where true chivalry is nourished, and hath sworn to see the world, as far as the lamp of heaven can lend him light, before he is fettered in the golden chains of wedlock. Why decline the suit of King Almidor, fit consort for one of your high rank?" "Because," she replied, with a curl of her lip, "the fell King of Morocco is more bloody-minded than a crocodile, but thou gentle as a lamb; his tongue more ominous of ill than that of a screeching night-owl, but thine sweeter than the morning lark; his touch more odious than that of a venomous serpent, but thine more pleasant than that of the curling vine." "But stay, Princess," put in Saint George; "I am a Christian--you a Pagan." "I've thought of that," she replied. "I will forsake my country's gods, and, like you, become a Christian." Saying this she broke a golden ring, giving, as a pledge of her love, one-half to the Knight, and keeping the other herself. Thereon Saint George, resisting no longer, owned his love, and promised, on his knightly word, to come back when he had achieved a few more heroic deeds and wed her. The treacherous Almidor, hiding behind the jessamine bower, had overheard all the uncomplimentary references to himself, and, burning with a desire of vengeance, hastened to the King, and told him that his daughter intended quitting the faith of her ancestors and flying with the Christian Knight. This so enraged the King that, yielding to the suggestions of the wicked Almidor, he agreed to send him, with treacherous intent, to the court of Egypt, as bearer of a sealed letter, in which document he entreated King Ptolemy to take an early opportunity of destroying one who was a despiser and uprooter of their ancient belief. Summoning Saint George, with expressions of great esteem, while Almidor stood at his right hand, glancing unutterable hatred from his large eyes, the King informed him that to do him honour he would send him as an ambassador to the court of the magnificent Sovereign of Egypt, a country in which he was sure to meet with adventures worthy of his arms. The true-hearted Knight fell into the trap, and, dazzled with the thought of fresh adventures, agreed to set forth. Summoning De Fistycuff, he buckled on his armour, and set out towards the rising of the sun. Many adventures he met with; many monsters he slew. On approaching the famed river Nile, De Fistycuff, weary with the heat, sat himself down on what he took to be the trunk of a large tree, fastening the bridle of his steed to, as he believed, one of the branches, while his master was scouring over the plain after a troop of tawny lions, which had been committing great depredations in the neighbouring lands. Sleep overtook the Squire. He slept he knew not how long, when he was awoke by the loud snorts and cries of his steed, and by finding himself borne along in a most uneasy manner. What was his horror, on opening his eyes, to discover a huge head, with terrific jaws, projecting from the seeming log before him, snapping at everything as it moved swiftly towards the broad stream of the Nile, while his horse, frantic with terror, was tugging at the bridle behind, in vain attempting to get loose, or stop the progress of the monster, which was one of the largest of the crocodiles of that famed stream, and held in especial reverence by the heathen priests of that district! The Squire dared not jump off, for fear of being trampled on by the hind feet of the brute, nor could he, for reasons into which most stout squires will enter, leap on to his horse's back and cut the bridle, so he sat still, waving and shouting to Saint George to come to his assistance. At last, Saint George, having killed a dozen of the lions, beheld the peril of his faithful follower, and spurred onward to his aid. Charging with a new spear, which had been presented to him by the matrons of Bagabornabou, as a mark of their admiration of his prowess in having slain the dragon, he bore down upon the crocodile. He charged directly at its mouth, and inflicted a deep wound in its throat. The monster snapped its jaws, hoping to bite off the spear-head; but the Knight was too quick for him, and again had his spear ready for another thrust. Again he charged, putting out the brute's right eye; and the third time he charged the left was driven in. All the time the crocodile was wriggling his tail, greatly to the terror of the horse and the discomfort of De Fistycuff, who found himself every moment borne nearer and nearer to the Nile. "One charge more, and you shall be safe," cried the Knight; and, true to his word, his spear entered the monster's heart, and it rolled over, very nearly, however, crushing the faithful Squire by its weight. Scarcely had De Fistycuff been liberated by his kind master's aid, and set on his steed, than there sallied forth from a heathen temple hard by a procession of priests, some walking under silk or velvet canopies of crimson or yellow, or blue and gold; others swinging censers of incense; and others bearing aloft on platforms large images of white bulls and apes, and snakes and crocodiles, while gay banners floated in the air. When they beheld the huge monster just slain they all set up loud lamentations, bitterly cursing whoever had destroyed this their god. "Now, by my halidom, this is more than I can bear!" cried Saint George. "On, De Fistycuff, on! Down with the infidels!" With this shout he and his Squire rode in among them, overthrowing their canopies and images, tearing down their banner, and putting the priests and their followers to flight. King Ptolemy, having heard of this deed, sent forth a hundred of his best warriors, to bring before him in chains the audacious strangers; but Saint George treated them much the same as he did the knights of Bagabornabou, and not one returned alive to tell of their defeat. Then he rode on to the city of Memphis, to deliver his letter. Weary and faint from his fatigues, instead of meeting with the reception he had a right to expect, he and his Squire found themselves surrounded by the whole populace of the city, set on by the King and his ministers. The gates were shut. Brickbats and tiles came showering down on their heads. In vain they charged right and left. Aided by a thousand warriors, clad in chain armour, the infuriated populace, threatening vengeance on the despisers of their religion, hemmed them in. De Fistycuff was torn from his horse. Saint George, after performing feats of unheard-of valour, was ignominiously dragged from his, and borne, faint and bleeding, into the presence of the King. "Is this the way you treat strangers?" exclaimed he, indignantly. "I came to your country as an ambassador. Here are my credentials;" and, drawing the letter from the lining of his helmet, he presented it in due form. "Ah! ah! what you are your deeds and this letter show," cried King Ptolemy, stamping with rage. "You despise our ancient religion, and would make converts of our people. Bear him and his attendant off to prison." The King pondered all night how he should destroy the strangers, and he resolved to make them join in combat with a hundred of the fiercest lions ever collected, to make sport for his subjects. The day arrived when the dreadful combat was to take place, and thousands of people assembled in the vast amphitheatre built for the purpose, to which even the huge pyramids seemed as pismires' nests. Saint George claimed the right of having his sword and steed; and the King, little dreaming of the courage and sagacity of Bayard, and the virtues which existed in Ascalon, and believing that, although a few lions might be killed thereby, greater sport would be afforded to his people, as he had no doubt the rest would easily tear him from his horse, and crush him in his armour, granted his request. With a flourish of trumpets the Knight and his Squire entered the arena. De Fistycuff kept carefully behind his master. With terrific roars the hundred lions rushed in at once, amidst the loud plaudits of the spectators. On they bounded towards the Knight. Ascalon was in his hand. One after the other their heads fell, severed from their tawny bodies by the trusty steel. The Squire's chief labour was to keep them off Bayard's tail, lest, when he flung his heels out behind, the Champion's aim might be less certain. The plaudits of the spectators were changed to groans of rage when they saw the carcasses of their favourite lions, who had already swallowed so many thousand slaves, strewing the wide arena. They shouted loudly to have an end put to the pleasant pastime. "Fair play!" cried De Fistycuff, in return brandishing his sword. "In the name of my noble master, I demand fair play!" And Saint George went on riding round and round, and slashing away with Ascalon, till he had slain every one of the hundred lions. The treacherous King, fearing what might occur should so brave a champion wander freely through his dominions, had, in the meantime, summoned five thousand chosen warriors, and charged them to bring the Knight, dead or alive, bound before him. Scarcely was the last lion killed than they rushed into the arena, and before he and his squire had time to offer any effectual resistance, they had borne him to the ground. Then, throwing chains of steel around him, they carried him, helpless as an infant, before the King. Thence, without form of trial, he was cast into a dungeon, so massive that no strength could break through it. There, guarded night and day by lynx-eyed warders, he languished for many long years, his only companion being the faithful De Fistycuff; their chief subject of conversation being the deeds that they had done, and the wonders they had seen, and the deeds they would do, and the wonders they hoped to see. There we must leave them, to tell what became of the Princess Sabra. In vain she waited and pined for the return of her gallant and true knight, Saint George. He came not, because, as has been seen, he could not, while the black King of Morocco, with every art he could devise, prosecuted his hateful suit. Whether or not he might have succeeded is doubtful, when one night, as the Princess slept on her couch she dreamed that Saint George appeared, not, as she had seen him, in shining armour, with his burgonet of glittering steel, and crimson plume of spangled feathers, but in overworn and simple attire, with pale countenance and emaciated form; and thus he spoke:-- "Sabra, I am betray'd for love of thee, And lodged in cave as dark as night, From whence in vain I seek--ah! woe is me! To fly and revel in thy beauteous sight. Remain thou true and constant for my sake, That of my absence none may vantage take. "Let tyrants know, if ever I obtain The freedom lost by treason's wicked guile, False Afric's scourge I ever will remain, And turn to streaming blood Morocco's soil; That hateful Prince of Barbary shall rue The just reward which is his treason's due." These words so encouraged the Princess that when she awoke she went to her sire, and entreated him, with scalding tears, to dismiss Almidor from his court, and to allow her to enjoy that single blessedness for which she professed to have for the present so ardent an admiration. The King at length, softened by her grief, consented to her request, and, with many courteous expressions, informed the black Monarch that his daughter had finally resolved to decline his proposals. This announcement created the greatest fury in the breast of Almidor. Calling around him all the knights and the numerous other attendants who had followed him to the court of Bagabornabou, he told them that, as he had been insulted and deceived, he was determined to be revenged. With loud cries and burning brands the treacherous Moors that night attacked the palace where they had been long hospitably entertained, and, amid the confusion, Almidor, seizing the Princess, bore her off on his coal-black charger. In vain her father with his warriors pursued. The fierce Almidor galloped with his captive across the burning sands, which none but Moorish steed could traverse at the speed he went. Hatred, not love, animated his bosom, and thus, instead of wedding her as he had purposed, he cast her into a dark dungeon, where, her beauteous charms concealed from the light of day, she for many a long and anxious year bewailed her pitiable and cruel fate. Happily, ere she left her father's home, a kind fairy, knowing full well what was to be her fate, had presented her with a golden chain of most rare workmanship. Seven days had it been steeped in tiger's blood, and seven nights in dragon's milk, by which it had attained such excellent virtue, that, as the fairy told her, if she wore it wrapped seven times round her alabaster neck, it would preserve her from all violence, and enable her to retain that enchanting beauty which had won the noble Champion's heart, and brought so many suitors to her feet. Thus armed, she feared not even the fierce Almidor's cruelty. CHAPTER FIVE. THE ADVENTURES OF SAINT DENIS OF FRANCE. On parting from his comrades, the gallant Champion of France, the famed Saint Denis, attended by his squire, Le Crapeau, wandered away through many lands, slaying many hideous monsters, terrible wild beasts, and frightful giants, combating in many tournaments, and paying his devoirs to many fair princesses, as well as other maidens of high and low degree, in which latter employment he was closely imitated by his admiring Squire, who jocosely spoke of his master as "that gay young Knight who laughs and rides away." At length he reached a magnificent castle in Asia, surrounded by a forest of trees of every conceivable hue, and bearing fruits tempting to the eye and luscious to the taste. "If the outside is so attractive, what must the inside be!" quoth he to Le Crapeau. "Marbleu! but we'll knock and see." Thereupon the Squire blew the horn which hung at the iron gate; but instead of its being opened by a burly porter, or by a steel-clad warrior, a troop of fair damsels appeared, who, with sweet smiles, invited the Knight to enter, and told him that they would conduct him to their mistress. Joyfully he followed them, when, in a superb hall, he beheld, seated on an ivory throne, glittering with diamonds of the purest water, a lady of beauty more radiant than possessed by any of the many he counted among his acquaintance. With agile steps, and many a bow and flourish of his helmet, followed nimbly by Le Crapeau, he approached the lady, and knelt at her feet. "Rise, rise, brave Knight! I have heard of your fame and the gallant deeds you have done, and gladly I welcome you to my humble castle," said the lady, with a smile so sweet that it went right through the tender heart of Saint Denis. He bowed, as did his Squire, and assured the lady that she was in no way deceived by the reports which had reached her ears, but that what they had done was as nothing compared with what they purposed to do, and would do most assuredly. A magnificent banquet then suddenly appeared, spread out in the hall across which they had lately passed, and strains of softest music broke forth to give notice that the feast was ready. The lady, led by the Knight, approached the table, and he took his seat by her side, while Le Crapeau stood behind his chair, as in duty bound, to serve him. "We should have guests to meet you," said the lady, "but I live alone, and your arrival was somewhat sudden, though not unexpected. I have sent forth to summon some to appear at a ball by-and-bye, as I fancy it is an entertainment in which your countrymen delight." "Oui, Madam," cried Le Crapeau, making a pirouette expressive of his delight; "you will see what my master and I can do when the time comes." Thus, with agreeable and lively conversation, ample justice was done to the feast, which was composed of the lightest and most delicate viands, such as the Knight vowed he had not tasted since he had left his native land. While the Knight lay back in his chair, to luxuriate on the thought of the pleasure his palate had enjoyed, the banqueting-table disappeared, and when he looked up, troops of gallant knights, in silk attire, and fair dames, clad in the most dazzling garments, were entering the hall. Up sprang the Knight, and, offering his hand to the lady, he led her forth to the centre of the hall, where, to the admiration of all beholders, and very much to his own satisfaction, he performed a minuette never surpassed in all Asia. Le Crapeau, meantime, seeing another damsel of radiant beauty, inferior only to that of the lady of the castle, led her forth, and bounded away, round and round the hall, to strains of the most inspiriting and lively music. His only perplexity was discovering that his fair partner did not speak; indeed, although all the knights and ladies danced in the most lively way, closely imitating the two Frenchmen, not a sound escaped their lips. A variety of dances succeeded, in all of which the Knight and his Squire excelled all competitors; nor did the festivities cease till the rosy dawn appearing in the eastern sky, the guests disappeared as silently as they had entered from the hall, and the lady and the Knight and his Squire remained its sole occupants. Le Crapeau's partner was the last to quit it, and as he rushed after her to utter a tender adieu, instead of the lady, his nose came with such force in contact with a pillar that he was sent sprawling backwards into the hall. "Never mind," said the lady, as he picked himself up, "you will see her to-morrow, and then remember the lesson you have just received, and don't talk nonsense to her." A dozen very ugly little black dwarfs, bearing torches in their hands, now made their appearance, and conducted the Knight to a magnificent couch prepared for him, while another stood in an adjoining room, ready for Le Crapeau, after he had performed the duty of disrobing his master. The dwarfs meantime placed themselves at the door, and intimated that they would remain there to watch over the strangers while they slumbered. After a matutinal meal of delicacies, of which even the Knight had never heard, the lady conducted him through the castle, and exhibited to him statues, and pictures, and gems most rare and beautiful, and then she led him through gardens full of flowers, shrubs, and trees, of forms and hues and scents most strange and lovely and sweet. Thus occupied, the banqueting time arrived, followed by a ball as on the previous evening. Unhappily, Le Crapeau, forgetting the warning he had received, followed his partner as before, when a hand, coming suddenly out of the wall, gave him so severe a cuff upon the cheek that for many minutes he lay unable to move, when at length, much crest-fallen, he slowly crept back to his post behind his master. Thus the days passed away. Sometimes the lady led the Knight forth, mounted on cream-coloured steeds; at others, in a chariot drawn by twenty beautiful peacocks; at others, they glided over the surface of a lake in a barge, towed by thirty milk-white swans, and visited scenes of the most enchanting beauty. At length, however, the Knight began to weary of the monotony of his existence, and to sigh for fresh adventures and more excitement. The Squire, too, wished for change, and was not altogether pleased with the buffet he regularly got every evening at the termination of the ball. "A parting scene is always painful," exclaimed the Knight. "It is," answered the Squire. "I understand your wishes. I will have the steeds ready, and at early dawn we will ride forth, and leave a sweet-scented billet to thank the lady for her courtesy, and to inform her of our departure." Less difficulty occurred in the execution of the design than might have been expected, and, rejoicing in their liberty, the Knight and his Squire rode gaily forth towards the confines of Armenia. "But we have got well out of that," quoth the Squire to his master. "By my faith, I like more animation, less formality, and greater variety than we enjoyed down there." "You speak the truth, my Le Crapeau; yet she was a sweet creature, that lady of the castle." Now, the lady of the castle was no other than a powerful fairy, very kind and very woman-like, who had conceived an affection for the French Champion, when she chanced to see him as he journeyed through her realm. Even good fairies will inflict a punishment. By means for which they could not account, the Knight and his Squire lost their way. Round and round they wandered among hills and forests, till hunger almost drove them to despair, when they were compelled to sustain nature on the berries and wild fruits which they could pluck from the trees and shrubs, and on the roots which they dug up with the points of their swords. After living many months on this hard fare a mulberry-tree, loaded with luscious fruit, appeared before them. "Ah!" exclaimed Saint Denis, "on this at least we may banquet with some pleasure;" and filling his casque with the fruit, his example being imitated by Le Crapeau, they sat themselves down, with their head-pieces between their legs, to indulge, to their heart's content, in the unexpected treat. The Knight, who eat more leisurely than his Squire, had scarcely finished his portion when he heard a loud bray close to him, and looking round, instead of his Squire, to his amazement he beheld a starved-looking donkey standing near him, and poking his nose into Le Crapeau's now empty casque. While yet wondering and mechanically finishing his mulberries, he felt a very uncomfortable sensation coming over his own head and legs. He rose from the ground and shook himself, but instead of the accustomed rattle of his steel armour no sound was produced. He wished to scratch his nose, but his arms appeared kept down before him. He tried to call Le Crapeau, but instead of his manly voice, which had so often shouted loudly in the battle, a timid cry alone proceeded from his throat. He looked at the donkey, and the donkey looked at him, and shook its head with an expression truly mournful. Something strange must have occurred he feared. Wherever he went the donkey followed. He wandered away from the mulberry-tree till he reached a lake of crystal water; he approached it, when, on its mirror-like surface, instead of a steel-clad warrior, he beheld a deer with long antlers and shaggy hide, he started back with dismay. When hunger pressed him he found himself cropping the grass or thrusting his nose into the purling brook, with his attendant donkey ever by his side. Pitiable as was Saint George's condition that of Saint Denis was infinitely worse. Thus for many years he continued unable to recover his natural form. Often he returned to the mulberry-tree, the cause, as he believed, of his misfortune. It did not occur to him that the fairy, whose hospitality he had enjoyed, had anything to do with it. Once, as he came to the tree, so enraged was he that he ran his horns against it and nearly broke them. His attendant donkey did the same, and not having the same protection to his scull, he received a blow so severe that he was sent reeling backwards till he sunk exhausted on the ground. Saint Denis was a second time going to butt, when he heard a hollow voice breathe forth from the trunk the following words:-- "Cease to lament, thou famous man of France, With gentle ears, oh, listen to my moan! Once on a time it was my fatal chance To be the proudest maid that ere was known. By birth I am the daughter of a king, Though now a breathless tree and senseless thing. "My pride was such that Heaven confounded me-- A goddess in my own conceit I was: What nature lent too base I thought to be, But deem'd myself all others to surpass. And therefore nectar and ambrosia sweet, The food of demigods, for me I counted meet. "My pride despised the finest bread of wheat, And richer food I daily sought to find; Refined gold was boil'd up with my meat, Such self-conceit my senses all did blind. For which the cruel fates transformed me, From human substance to this senseless tree. "Seven years in shape of stag thou must remain, And then a purple rose, by magic's firm decree, Shall bring thee to thy former shape again, And end at last thy woeful misery: When this is done, be sure you cut in twain This fatal tree, wherein I do remain." The Knight almost fainted when he heard these strange words, and understood the length of time he was to remain in his transformed condition. His attendant donkey had also heard the words, and treasured them up in his memory. Every day, while his master slept, he ranged the country round, searching for the purple rose, but every evening returned as wise as he set out. Thus the seven years passed mournfully away. One day, unmindful how the time had sped, as he trotted on, every now and then stopping and uttering a melancholy bray, his nostrils scented the fragrance of some roses; and though his first impulse was to eat them, on examining them more closely, he observed that they were of lustrous beauty and of a purple hue. Plucking a number of them, he trotted back to Saint Denis. He would have brayed with delight, but, had he done so, he would have dropped the roses, so he restrained himself till he had laid them before his master's nose. Instantly the Knight began to devour them, as did the faithful donkey, when, a stupor coming over them, they couched down on the green-sward. Presently extraordinary sensations came over them both, and the horns and hoofs began to loosen, and the skin to roll up in folds, and a refreshing shower falling, both Knight and Squire, on opening their eyes, discovered, to their infinite satisfaction, that they were no longer brute beasts, but that they had recovered their former comely shapes, and that their hairy hides lay vacant on the ground. Near them were their arms, now sadly in want of polishing, while their trusty steeds, long roaming the rich pastures around, no sooner beheld than recognising them, trotted up to bear them once more to the field of battle or of fame. Their first care was to burnish up their armour and their weapons. For many a weary hour they rubbed. "We might have saved ourselves all this trouble, and spent the last seven years more pleasantly and profitably, had we not idled away our time in the magnificent castle of that beautiful lady down there," observed Saint Denis, as he scrubbed away. "Certes, Master dear, it's a failing I for one have when I get into the society of the fair sex, I feel little inclination to leave them; but we have had a pretty sharp lesson, and I hope to amend for the future." The task was performed at last. Then the Champion, recollecting what the mulberry-tree had said, drew his sword, and with one blow cut the stout trunk quite asunder. Instantly there issued forth a bright flame, from the midst of which appeared a lovely damsel, clothed in a robe of yellow silk, made from the cocoons of the innumerable silk-worms, which fed on the tree. "Oh, most sweet and singular ornament of nature!" exclaimed the Knight, bowing low before her, as did his Squire; "fairer than the feathers of the graceful swan, and far more beautiful than Aurora's morning countenance, to thee, the fairest of all fair ones, most humbly and only to thy beauty do I here submit my affections. Tell me, therefore, to whom my heart must pay its true devotions, thy birth, parentage, and name." The maiden, to whom it was long since such words had been addressed, was highly delighted with them, and informed the Knight that her name was Eglantine, that she was the daughter of the King of the neighbouring country, Armenia, and assured him that he would be welcomed at her father's court. It is not recounted how many ferocious giants and furious lions he and Le Crapeau slew on the road while escorting the princess, though they were very numerous. They put to flight also a whole army of Pagans, who came to carry off their precious charge. Le Crapeau himself, however, took care not to omit the details, nor did Saint Denis pass them by in silence. The King of Armenia, who had long mourned his daughter as lost to him for ever, was so grateful to the French Knight that he at once promised her to him in marriage, and entertained him with the most sumptuous banquets and balls, and other pleasant divertisements which his court could produce. CHAPTER SIX. THE ADVENTURES OF SAINT JAMES OF SPAIN. Saint James, the Champion of Spain, on parting from his comrades at the brazen pillar, took ship, and was wrecked on the coast of Sicily. Travelling through the island, followed by his Squire, Pedrillo, he reached the foot of Etna, then terrifically spouting forth vast masses of flame and boiling metal, and ashes, and smoke. Unappalled by the sight, he climbed the mountain's height, where, perched on a pinnacle of rock, appeared a mighty bird, with fiery pinions--a winged phoenix. No sooner did the monster see him than, darting down, it attacked him with its red-hot beak, for having dared thus to enter its dominions. Saint James drew his trusty falchion, and, whirling it round his head, kept the fearful beak from approaching his helmet, for well he knew that one thrust from its deadly point would pierce through steel and skull as easily as a lady's bodkin through her kerchief. The fearful combat lasted for many hours, till the monster, hopeless of triumph, flew back to its nest within the crater's fiery bosom. The following day the fight was renewed, while the faithful Pedrillo stood at a distance, counting his rosaries, and called loudly on all the saints to aid his master. At length the Knight and the monster, seeing that no profit or glory was to be acquired, retired, by mutual consent, from the combat. Saint James then passed into Africa, where, passing through a region infested by monsters, he slew so many that the inhabitants wished to adopt him as their Sovereign. Crossing the Red Sea, he was once more shipwrecked, when, had not a troop of mermaids carried him and his Squire, with their horses and furniture to the shore, they would all have been drowned. At length he reached the beautiful city of Ispahan, the capital of Persia. As he stood gazing on her fortified walls, built of pure silver; on her towers of jasper and ebony; on her glittering spires of gold and precious stones; on her houses of marble and alabaster, the streets between which were paved with tin--he heard the cheerful echoes of a thousand brazen trumpets, and saw issuing from the brazen gates a hundred armed knights, bearing blood-red streamers in their hands, and riding on as many coal-black coursers; then came the Shah, guarded by a hundred tawny Moors, with bows, and darts feathered with ravens' wings; and after them rode Celestine, the Shah's fair daughter, mounted on an unicorn, and guarded by a hundred Amazonian dames, clad in green silk. In her hand was a javelin of silver, while her fair bosom was shielded by a breastplate of gold, artificially wrought with the scales of a crocodile. A vast concourse of gentlemen and squires followed, some on horse-back and some on foot. Thus Nebazaradan, the Shah of Persia, rode forth with his daughter to the chase. The country had been terribly overrun with wild beasts, and the Knight heard it proclaimed that the Shah would give a corselet of finest steel, inlaid with gold, to whomsoever killed the first wild beast that day. "Come," cried Saint James, "let us after the savage beasts, and win the corselet!" Away scoured the Knight and his Squire over the plain till they reached a forest, in the confines of which they beheld a monstrous wild boar, devouring the remains of some passengers he had slain. The eyes of the brute sparkled like a furnace; his tusks were sharper than spikes of steel; and the breath, as it issued from his nostrils, seemed like a whirlwind; his bristles looked like so many spear-heads, and his tail was like a wreath of serpents. Saint James blew his silver horn, which hung by a green silk scarf to the pommel of his saddle. The blast aroused the boar, who made at him furiously. His spear shivered against its bristly hide into a hundred fragments, when, leaping from his steed, which he directed Pedrillo to hold, he drew his falchion of Toledo steel, and valiantly on foot assailed the monster. From side to side he sprung to avoid its fearful tusks; but in vain did the point of his weapon seek an entrance to its case-hardened flesh. At last, unslinging his battle-axe, he clove the head of the monster down to the mouth, and with a second blow cut it completely off; then placing it on the staff of his spear, he ordered Pedrillo to bear it behind him. Thus, riding on, he met the Shah and his daughter. The Shah at first was highly pleased with his prowess; but when he heard that he was a Christian Knight, his admiration was turned to rage, and he informed him that he must either become a Pagan worshipper of the sun or quit the country. The Knight proudly answered that no one should make him quit the country unless of his own free will. On this the Shah's army surrounded him and Pedrillo, and, after a desperate resistance on their parts, bore them to the ground. "Now, Sir Knight, what will you do?" sneered the Shah. "However, you have killed the greatest boar in the country, and, as your reward, you shall choose the manner in which you and your Squire will be put to death." The Champion, who was gallant on all occasions, replied that he would be shot to death by the fair damsels he had seen going forth to the chase. But when they were informed of this, none were found willing to undertake the cruel office. This so enraged the Shah, that he ordained that they should cast lots to decide who should perform the task. The lot fell on Celestine and one of her maidens. She was to kill the Knight, and her maiden Pedrillo. Instead, however, of death's fatal instrument, a steel-tipped arrow, she shot a sigh--true messenger of love--as did her maiden; and then she hastened to her father to entreat him, with bitter, scalding tears, to liberate the strangers. At last he yielded, on condition that they should forthwith quit the country. Already had Saint James commenced his homeward journey, when, looking back on the towers of Ispahan, so inflamed was his heart with the love of Celestine, that he resolved to return and win her. He and Pedrillo, therefore, staining their skins with the juice of some blackberries, and at the same time habiting themselves in the costume of Moors, pretending to be dumb, returned to the city. Then Saint James presented himself as an Indian knight, and, entering the army of the Shah, won such renown by his heroic deeds, that he was soon raised to the highest posts of honour. Now, there came from the far east two sovereigns, claiming the hand of the fair Celestine; but she, thinking only of Saint James, refused to entertain their proposals. At a great tournament given in their honour, they both, clothed in glittering armour, entered the lists; so did the seeming Moorish knight. What was the surprise of the King and all his courtiers to behold him overthrow them both! Then he rode up beneath the pavilion of the Princess Celestine, and exhibited to her a ring which she had long before given him. By this she knew that he was her own true knight. He soon found means to tell her of his love, and all that had happened, while Pedrillo did not forget to put in a word in his own favour with her maiden. They agreed that very night to fly to Spain. Pedrillo, who was cunning in devices, turned their horses' shoes backwards, and thus, when they were seeking safety in the west, it appeared as if they were flying towards the east. Thus evading pursuit, they galloped on, crossed the Red Sea, and, travelling through Africa, the whole party arrived safely in that wondrous town of Seville, in Spain, where Saint James was born, and which justly holds itself, in consequence, in the very highest estimation. CHAPTER SEVEN. THE ADVENTURES OF SAINT ANTHONY OF ITALY. The adventures of the great Saint Anthony of Italy, after he parted from his friends at the brazen pillar, are now to be described. Taking ship, like Father Aeneas of old, he and his attendant Squire traversed the Mediterranean Sea, only he sailed eastward, while the pious Aeneas sailed westward, over it. Numberless were the adventures he encountered. Now his ship was tossed by storms, now pursued by a huge sea monster, with jaws so wide that the affrighted mariners believed that it was about to swallow up bodily both them and their ship; but Saint Anthony, putting on his armour, and standing on the poop, brandished his spear so manfully in the monster's face that he effectually kept him at bay. His faithful Squire shouted also with such good effect, that the monster was fain to turn tail and to leave the ship and its honoured freight to proceed unmolested. At length Asia's ancient shores were reached, and travelling on, performing every day unheard-of wonders, combating with terrible monsters, and destroying wild beasts innumerable, he and Niccolo arrived at the far-famed kingdom of Georgia. They wandered on till they began to ascend, amid narrow defiles and dark gorges, the rugged ranges of the mighty Caucasus, high above which Elborus towers with gigantic splendour. As they climbed upwards, higher and higher, there appeared before them a marble castle with gates of brass, which they guessed, from inquiries they had made, belonged to the giant Blanderon. Over the principal gate were these verses:-- "Within this castle lives the scourge of kings; A furious giant, whose unconquer'd power The Georgian monarch in subjection brings, And keeps his daughters prisoners in his tower: Seven damsels fair this monstrous giant keeps, That sing him music while he nightly sleeps. "His sword of steel a thousand knights have felt, Who for these maidens' sakes have lost their lives; Yet, though on many knights he hath death dealt, This most inhuman giant still survives. Let simple passengers take heed in time, When up this mountain height they thoughtless climb. "But knights of worth, and men of noble mind, If any chance to travel by this tower, That for these maidens' sake will be so kind To try their strength against the giant's power, Shall have a maiden's prayer, both day and night, To prosper them with good successful fight." These lines were placed there by the power of the good fairy of Asia, and were unseen by the Giant, or he would not, it is presumed, have allowed them to remain. They so encouraged the valiant Knight, that, resolving to liberate the ladies, he struck so mighty a blow on the gate of the castle, with the pommel of his sword, that it sounded like a clap of the loudest thunder. On hearing it, Blanderon, who had been asleep, started up, and came forth to the gate with a huge oak-tree in his hand, which he flourished about his head as if it had been a light battle-axe, in a loud voice comparing the Knight's spear to a bulrush, and threatening to hurl him and his Squire down the side of the mountain. "Words without deeds are mere empty things," retorted the Knight. "Try what you can do." And giving his steed to his Squire to hold, he drew his trusty falchion, and stood ready to receive the onslaught of his huge antagonist. Blanderon, however, flourished his oak so furiously that Saint Anthony had to jump here and there with the greatest activity to avoid his strokes. Now the very earth seemed to shake; now the castle-walls resounded with the blows. The Knight relaxed not a moment in his efforts, for he saw that the Giant was stout; and as the sun's heat was very great, he panted more and more till the moisture from his brows ran down into his eyes, and almost blinded him. Observing this, the Knight plied him with his battle-axe more vigorously than before, till he was compelled to seek for safety within his castle-walls; but ere he reached them he let fall from his grasp his huge oak-tree; on which Saint Anthony, redoubling his efforts, smote him so fiercely, that he sunk down on his knees, unable to fly further. Still undaunted, the Giant drew a dagger twice the size of any ordinary two-handed sword. With this he struck right and left so rapidly that the Knight had hard work indeed to escape its blows, and still greater to discover a spot in his huge body in which he might plant a deadly one in return. At length, however, the Giant grew weary, and Saint Anthony, springing forward, with one stroke clove his hideous head almost in twain. Then, with another blow he cut it off, and handed it to Niccolo, to be carried before him as a trophy of his prowess. So violent, however, had been the efforts of the Knight that he also sank fainting on the ground, when his faithful Squire, believing him to be dead, knelt by his side, and, weeping, mourned bitterly his loss. Now, it happened that the lovely Rosalinde, one of the daughters of the King of Georgia, who had been taken captive by the Giant, looked over the battlements, and seeing his headless trunk guessed that he had been slain by some gallant knight, and that the end of her servitude had arrived. Descending to the gate, she beheld the seeming lifeless body of the Champion, and, kneeling opposite to Niccolo, joined her salt tears with his in mourning the fate of so brave a Knight. Then, remembering that there were some precious balms within the castle, she went and fetched them; and having applied them to the limbs of the Champion, their effect was so great that he instantly revived, and sitting up gazed at her with admiration, and inquired who she was. They entreated him to wait till he had been fed and rested within the castle. While the faithful Niccolo watched by his master's couch, as he slept, the lady Rosalinde was preparing delicates for his repast. He at length awoke, restored to health and strength; and then, by the lady's advice, he ordered Niccolo to drag the Giant's carcass down upon a craggy rock, to be devoured by hungry ravens; which being done, the Georgian maiden exhibited to him the wonders of the castle. First she conducted him to a brazen tower where were a hundred corselets and other martial furniture of the knights slain by the Giant. Then she conducted him to the stables, where were a hundred steeds, thin and jaded, which they had once bestrode. There was also the Giant's bed of iron, with a covering of carved brass, and with curtains of leaves of gold. After this she pointed out to him a pond of crystal water, on which swam six milk-white swans, with crowns of gold upon their heads. "Know, brave Champion, that these six swans are my sisters," she observed. "We all seven are the daughters of the King of Georgia. As we were out hunting one day the Giant from the battlements of his castle espied us, and, rushing down, bore us off under his arms before anyone could come to our rescue. My sisters, by the power of a kind fairy who had attended at their birth, were transformed into swans, that they might escape the tyranny of the Giant, though she was unable to release them altogether. I, the eldest, retained my natural form; for, from my skill in music, I could always quell his anger and tame him into subjection. Though I might perchance have escaped, I remained, in hope some day of liberating my sisters. Now, if the good fairy can be found, we may tell her of the Giant's death, and bring her hither to restore them to their natural shapes." "Most lovely lady, we will fly at once to your father's capital, and send the fairy hither to perform her grateful task," exclaimed the Knight, placing the hand of the Princess in his own. So, taking the keys of the castle, which were of wonderous weight, they locked up the gates, and mounting their steeds, followed by Niccolo with the Giant's gory head, they proceeded to the Georgian Court. On reaching the gate of the city they heard a peal of bells solemnly tolling forth a funeral knell. On inquiring the cause of this, the aged porter replied:-- "The bells toll for the King's seven daughters. There are seven bells, each one called after the name of a Princess, which never have ceased this doleful melody since the loss of the unhappy ladies, nor ever will till they return." "Then their tasks are finished," answered the noble-minded Rosalinde. "We bring you tidings of the Princesses." Whereat the aged porter, ravished with joy, ran to the steeple and stopped the bells. Hearing the bells cease their wonted mournful melody, up started the King of Georgia, and hastened to the gate to inquire the cause. There, to his joy, he beheld his long-lost daughter in company with a strange knight and attendant squire. Hearing the wonderful tale, he commanded all his courtiers to put on the lugubrious weeds of mourning, and to accompany him to the castle of the Giant, that there perchance he might discover some means of releasing his six other daughters, while the noble-minded Rosalinde and Saint Anthony were left to take care of the city till his return. When the King of Georgia, after long delay, did not return, the Italian Knight declared, in impassioned words, that he must proceed in search of those adventures for the sake of which he had left his native land. To this the noble-minded Rosalinde replied:-- "Oh! most princely-minded Champion of Italy! It is not Georgia can harbour me when thou art absent. The sky shall be no sky, the sea no sea, the earth no earth, if thou do prove inconstant; but if you will not take me with you, these tender hands of mine shall hang upon your horse's bridle, till my body, like Theseus's son, be dashed against the hard flint stones; yet, hard as they are, not harder than I shall deem your heart." One only reply to this appeal could the princely-minded Champion make. It was to tell her that he would bear her away forthwith as his own true bride. And they thus both being agreed, habited as a page in green sarcenet, her buskins of the smoothest kid-skin, and her rapier of Lydian steel, secured over her shoulder by an orange-coloured scarf, and mounted on a gentle palfrey, she quitted the land of Georgia; one of her maidens, habited also in page's guise, attending, whom Niccolo took under his especial care. Thus they travelled; he the bravest, boldest knight that ever wandered by the way, and she the loveliest lady that ever mortal eye beheld. CHAPTER EIGHT. THE ADVENTURES OF SAINT ANDREW OF SCOTLAND. And now the adventures of the far-famed Saint Andrew of Scotland claim our attention, after he quitted the brazen pillar, followed by his faithful Squire, Murdoch McAlpine of that ilk. On he travelled eastward, in the face of the rays of the glittering sun, which sparkled on his shield and casque with dazzling brightness, and so astonished all beholders that they fled dismayed before him, till he crossed the wild territories of Russia, and entered the wilder deserts of Siberia. Then, turning north, he found himself in a region where, for many weary months, the sun never rose, and he and the faithful Murdoch had to discover their way by poking before them with their spears, every moment expecting to meet with some huge monster with whom they might be called to combat. Nor did they expect in vain, for suddenly a loud growl assailed their ears, and the moon, just then rising, exhibited to them a whole army of bears, prepared to dispute their onward progress. "Draw your broad-sword, mon, and follow me," cried Saint Andrew, shaking his spear. The Squire, tucking up his plaid carefully, that it might not be torn or soiled, with loud shouts obeyed, and soon both were dashing and slashing away among the infuriated brutes. The heads of numbers rolled upon the snow, which for miles round was ensanguined with their blood. "Few creatures are more difficult to get rid of than bears," observed the Knight, charging again. "On, Murdoch, on, we'll do it if it is to be done, for what men dare they can do!" Thus shouting and slaying, the Knight and his Squire fought on for many hours, till the survivors of the bears, discovering that they were likely to get the worst of it in the end, took to flight, and stopped not till they reached the North Pole, where they stopped only because they could go no further, and where Saint Andrew agreed that it was not worth while following them. His next encounter was with a nation of people with heads like foxes, from whose cunning arts and guiles he had the greatest difficulty in escaping. Although conquered by the power of his arms, they still appeared with fresh tricks to entrap him. When, at length, he had fought his way out from among them, he found himself in a dismal vale, the air still dark as Erebus, where he heard the blowing of unseen furnaces, the boiling of cauldrons, the rattling or armour, the trampling of horses, the jingling of chains, the roaring of wild beasts, the hissing of serpents, and the cries of unearthly spirits, and such like dreadful sounds, which would have made any other hearts than those of Saint Andrew of Scotland, and of his faithful squire, Murdoch McAlpine of that ilk, quake and tremble with fear; but passing calmly amid them, and undergoing hardships incredible, under which knights and squires, born in more southern climes, would have sunk exhausted, they arrived in the kingdom of Georgia, nor rested till they reached the foot of the mountain on which stood the castle within whose iron walls the six fair daughters of the King were still held in durance, in the shape of swans, with golden crowns upon their heads. When the valiant Champion of Scotland beheld the lofty situation of the castle, and the invincible strength it seemed to be of, he suspected some strange adventure to befall him; so, buckling close his armour, which, on account of the heat he had loosened, and drawing his sword, he climbed the mountain, when he espied, on a craggy rock, the headless body of the Giant, on which the ravens and other birds of prey were feeding. Then he approached the castle gate, when, what was his astonishment to see a long procession of mourners come forth, with the King of Georgia at their head; and, on inquiry, was told that the old man mourned for his six daughters, whom he could by no means get changed back into their natural shapes. Saint Andrew, on hearing this strange tale, expressed his firm belief, in language somewhat strong, that such things could not be. Whereon the King and all his courtiers were highly indignant, and numberless knights stepped forth, and challenged the stranger to mortal combat. The lists were quickly prepared. Then the valiant Champion of Christendom entered the arena, when the King, in company with many Georgian lords, was present to behold the contest. Thrice had Saint Andrew traced his war-steed up and down the lists, flourishing his lance, at the top whereof hung a pendant of gold, on which, in silver letters, was traced, "This day a martyr or a conqueror!" Whereon there entered a knight in exceeding bright armour, mounted on a courser as white as snow, whose caparison was the colour of the elements. A fierce encounter followed; but the Georgian was defeated, and retired in disgrace from the lists. Then entered a knight in green armour, his steed an iron grey. Loud rang their spears against their shields, fierce clashed their swords, and clanged their battle-axes, till the Georgian warrior fairly took to flight. The third knight who entered wore a black corselet, and his huge war-horse was covered with a veil of sable silk. In his hand he bore a baton of mighty weight, and bound round with iron; but no sooner did the champions meet than their lances shivered in pieces from the furious shock, and flew high up into the air, when, alighting from their steeds, they resumed the combat with their keen-edged falchions, the sparks flying from their helmets as from a blacksmith's anvil. The faithful Murdoch meantime looked on with anxious gaze, when he was accosted by a little old woman of mean aspect, who had in vain tried to obtain information from the other bystanders. "Why is it you want to know, Mother?" he asked, careful not to give a hurried answer, though he bowed politely. The old woman, who was in reality a good fairy, replied, "Because I have come here to do some good; but while a scene of mortal strife is taking place I cannot employ my power." Then Murdoch told her all he knew about the matter; whereon she advised him to hurry to his master when the present combat should be over, and to bid him declare his belief that the account was true, and to offer to bring the Princesses forth in their proper shapes. Meantime the combat between the Scottish Champion and the Black Knight continued with unabated fury. Any advantage gained by one was foiled by the other, till at length Saint Andrew, uttering his battle-cry, struck so mighty a blow with his battle-axe, that he clave the Georgian's burgonet, and his head beneath, from his crown to his shoulders, and his body fell lifeless on the ground. This so enraged the King that he would have ordered the Scottish Knight to have been slain, when Murdoch rushed forward and gave the fairy's message. The Champion spoke as she had directed, when the King, who was of a placable disposition, though somewhat hasty, consented to his request. "Swear, most noble King, upon my sword, that you will not attempt any foul treachery to me or my follower, on account of the Champion I have slain, until I have accomplished the task I have now undertaken." On this the old King, descending from his throne, bent over the gallant Saint Andrew's sword, and swore as he desired. The Knight entered the castle, and repaired to the garden, when, instead of finding an ugly old woman, he beheld a lady of radiant beauty, for such was indeed the Fairy. "You see yonder six swans," said she; "as they approach strike boldly with your sword six strokes, nor fear the consequences." The Knight stood by the side of the crystal lake, and as he stood, his glittering falchion in his hand, the six swans swam gracefully up. Six times he struck, and each time the head of one of the swans flew up; but in its stead appeared, wonderful to relate, a beautiful maiden, whom the Knight handed with true courtesy off her liquid pedestal on to dry land. Thus, in a few minutes, the Champion was surrounded by six of the most lovely damsels the world ever saw, habited in green hunting-suits, each almost equal to Diana herself, going forth armed for the chase. "You have done well, noble Champion," said the Fairy. "You did not despise me, or my words, when I appeared old and ugly, and from henceforth you will find me ever ready to aid and protect you, as you travel on in search of those heroic adventures after which your heart pants. I bid you farewell; though, remember, that I will come when you summon me;" saying this the Fairy mounted a golden chariot drawn by peacocks, and, rapidly gliding through the air, disappeared amid the clouds which floated round the sides of that lofty mountain. Scarcely had she gone, and the six ladies were pouring forth their thanks to the noble Knight who had delivered them from their cruel bondage, when the King of Georgia, followed by all his knights and courtiers, entered the garden of the castle to ascertain what had become of the strange Knight. Nothing could exceed his astonishment, and delight, and gratitude, when Saint Andrew presented to him his six daughters in their proper forms. "You deserve them all," exclaimed the Monarch, in the warmth of his emotion. To which the Scottish Knight, with true modesty, replied, that he considered one far more than he deserved, and that as yet he felt inclined to remain a bachelor. The next day, after a sumptuous banquet which the King's cooks prepared in the Giant's castle, the whole party marched back to the palace of the Georgian Monarch with banners streaming, cymbals clashing, and drums and trumpets sounding joyful melody. When, however, sad to relate, the King inquired for his eldest daughter, he found that she had fled away with the Champion of Italy. This event, so grievous to the heart of the King, made him defer all the triumphant arrangements which were forming to do honour to the Scottish Knight and to his six fair daughters. When, also, Saint Andrew heard that one of his noble comrades was so near at hand, calling Murdoch to his side, he bade him prepare for their departure. Wishing to avoid the pain of parting with the six Princesses, and, lest their honoured sire might renew his generous offer, Saint Andrew, without bidding farewell to the King of Georgia, or to his chief councillors and ministers of state, and other great lords of the realm, set off from the capital in pursuit of Saint Anthony of Italy and the fair Rosalinde. The next day, when the six Princesses heard of the departure of the Knight they so much admired, providing themselves with sufficient treasure and habiliments suited for travelling, they left by stealth their father's palace, mounted on six white palfreys, and attended by six maidens on asses, intending to find out the victorious and renowned Champion of Scotland, or to end their lives in single blessedness in some pious retirement in a foreign land. No sooner did the news of his daughters' flight reach the King of Georgia, than attiring himself in homely russet, like a pilgrim, with an ebony staff in his hand, tipped with silver, he took his departure, all alone, from his palace, resolved to recover his beloved children, or to lay his bones to rest in some unknown spot, where, forgotten, he might rest at peace. When his councillors, ministers of state, and other great lords heard of his sudden and secret departure, grief intolerable struck their hearts, the palace gates were covered with sable cloth, all pleasures were at an end, and ladies and courtly dames sat sighing in their chambers; where, for the present, we will leave them to speak of other themes. CHAPTER NINE. THE ADVENTURES OF SAINT PATRICK OF IRELAND. The noble, illustrious, and wonderful deeds of Saint Patrick, the far-famed and renowned Champion of Old Ireland, that gem of the ocean, are now to be recounted--not forgetting those of his faithful and attached squire, Terence O'Grady; though of the latter many less partial histories are somewhat unaccountably silent. After they quitted the brazen pillar, they, too, traversed that sea so famed in ancient story. But their ship being wrecked as they were approaching the land, and sinking beneath their feet, they mounted on the backs of two huge dolphins, which were swimming by at the time, and which Saint Patrick caught with cunningly-devised hooks; and thus towing their steeds, they reached in safety the sandy shores of Africa. There landing, while they sat by the sea-side burnishing their arms, which were slightly rusty from the salt air, the sweetest strains of music struck upon their ears. The Squire listened, and rising from the rock on which he sat, he wandered on to discover whence they proceeded. What was his astonishment, as he looked into a cavern half filled with water, to behold a dozen lovely nymphs, almost immersed in the crystal sea, combing their golden locks, while from their throats came forth those warbling sounds. The Squire gazed enravished. "Och, but you are beautiful creatures!" he exclaimed, forgetting that his voice might be heard. The maidens started, like frightened deer, at the sound; and then, seeing the faithful Terence as he looked over the rock, they swam towards him, putting out their arms, and endeavouring to grasp his hands. A more prudent person would have withdrawn, and suspected treachery; but such an idea never occurred to the mind of the warm-hearted Irishman. "A pleasant morning to ye, my pretty damsels!" quoth he, offering his hand to the first who came up, expecting to assist her to land; for, as they were dressed in sea-green garments, and had wreaths of red and white coral on their heads, he thought that they would have no objection to come out of the water. Instead, however, of coming out themselves, the first held him tight, and others arriving caught hold of him likewise, and began to pull and pull away till the faithful Terence discovered, without a doubt, that it was their purpose to pull him in. "But I can't swim, Ladies!" he exclaimed. "I shall spoil my armour and wet my clothes--let me go, if you please, now." He wished to speak them fair, though doubts as to what they were began to rise up in his mind. "Och, now, let me go, I say! A joke's a joke all the world over; but if you souse me head over ears in that pool, and drown me entirely, it will be a very bad one to my taste now." The more, however, he shouted and struggled the harder the damsels pulled. Though Terence was a stout fellow, and had been in many a hot fight in foreign lands, and not a few scrimmages in Old Ireland, he never had had such a struggle in his life. At last his cries brought Saint Patrick to his aid, (for who would the Champion of Ireland have helped more willingly than Terence O'Grady?) and seizing the other arm, he hauled away lustily against the twelve sea-nymphs, whom he at once discovered to be mermaids, who had set their hearts on carrying off his faithful Squire to their coral homes beneath the waves. Between the mermaids on one side, and his master on the other, hauling away with all their might, poor Terence was very nearly torn in pieces. Still he struggled and strove, entreating his master not to let him go. Shouts of merry laughter issued from the throats of the mermaids; but though they diverted themselves with the terror of the faithful Terence, they did not cease to pull at him the less hard, till he began to fear that, if they could not have the whole, they would have a bit of him to a certainty. Saint Patrick himself saw full well that the matter was no joke; but how to rescue his Squire without using his sword, and against that all his knightly feelings revolted, even he was sorely puzzled to discover. As it happened, there dwelt not far off, in a lofty castle of iron walls and golden battlements, a monstrous giant, who had long sought one of these mermaids in marriage; but she fearing his temper, and not wishing to leave her watery home had ever disdainfully refused to listen to his proposals. He now was wandering along the shore in search of her to prosecute his suit. As he looked down into the cave and saw the mermaids, one of whom was his beloved, pulling away on one side at the faithful Terence, while Saint Patrick pulled on the other, he uttered a loud roar of rage and fury. The sound so alarmed the mermaids that they let go their hold, and fled away in terror, to hide themselves in their coral homes, while Saint Patrick, looking up, beheld the Giant frowning down defiance at him. The Irish Champion, nothing daunted, drew his falchion. "Ah, my trusty weapon, thou hast at length found a worthy enemy!" he exclaimed, climbing up the cliff towards the Giant, closely followed by the faithful Terence. Black as jet was the Giant, but blacker were his looks, yet blackest of all were his intentions. Behind him stood a huge crocodile, opening wide its immense jaws, and threatening to devour anyone who came within their compass. Many a stout warrior would have avoided the encounter; but Saint Patrick boldly advanced, trusting in a good cause, his own arm, and his well-tempered sword, feeling assured, also, that Terence would give a good account of the crocodile. Quickly were heard to sound the ringing strokes of the Champion's trusty falchion against the black shield of the Giant, whose huge battle-axe dealt many a fearful blow in return. Fiercely raged the combat. Blow after blow was given and taken with right good will, while the Giant bellowed out so loudly his threats of vengeance against the valiant Knight, that the rocks and distant mountains resounded with his cries mingled with the clang of desperate strife. Terence stood by to watch the contest, not to deprive his loved master of a shred of glory, till he saw the crocodile opening his monstrous jaws to snap at his legs. Then he saw that the time for action had arrived, and, rushing up, began to assail the brute with right good will. The crocodile snapped and snapped his huge jaws with a sound which made the hills ring and ring again; but he failed to get the faithful Terence within the power of his grinders; at the same time, in vain the Squire sought a vulnerable point into which to thrust his trusty sword. The length of the monster's snout prevented him from reaching his eyes, and, as to getting a fair thrust at his shoulders, that seemed utterly impossible. All this time Saint Patrick and the Giant, it must not be forgotten, were fighting furiously. "Let my tame crocodile alone, or I'll make mincemeat of you when I have killed your master!" cried the Giant hoarsely, through his clinched teeth. "Faith, then, I hope that time will never arrive then, my beauty," answered the faithful Terence, making a spring, and leaping nimbly on the crocodile's back. "It's not exactly the sort of steed I'd choose, except for the honour of riding, but I'll make him pay the piper, at all events;" whereupon he began slashing away with his trusty sword most furiously on the neck and shoulders of the crocodile. A delicate maiden might as well have tried to pierce the hide of an aged hippopotamus with a bodkin. At last, losing patience, he sprang to his feet on the back of the monster, and plunged his sword into one of his eyes, just as he was about to make a snap at Saint Patrick's thigh. The crocodile, feeling itself wounded, turned aside, when the Squire plunged his weapon into the other eye. Thus blinded, and furious with pain, the brute rushed forward, snapping in every direction, and running against his master, caught hold of the calf of his leg with a gripe so firm that the Giant, groaning with pain, turned aside his proud looks to see what was the matter. The opportunity was not lost on Saint Patrick, who, pressing forward, plunged his falchion into the neck of his antagonist, who, bellowing louder than ten thousand bulls, made a desperate cut with his battle-axe at the helm of the Knight. The Champion sprang aside, and the blow descended on the neck of the tame crocodile, whereby its head was severed from its body, Terence narrowly escaping from the effects of the blow. The death of his favourite brute enraged the Giant still further; but rage invariably blinds judgment, and neglecting his proper guards, he soon found himself treated as he had treated the crocodile, his head, by a stroke of the Knight's battle-axe, falling on the sand, while his eyes continued to roll most horribly, as if still animated with fury and malicious hatred. The faithful Terence having found a huge brazen key, and a purse of gold, in the Giant's pocket, and transferred the latter to his own, to be ready for future emergencies, Saint Patrick and he left the two carcasses to be devoured by the birds of the air, and proceeded to the Giant's castle. The huge brazen key opened the castle gate; when entering, they wandered amazed through the spacious halls, and courts, and galleries, admiring the wonders there collected. In the armoury were numerous tall and straight trees of cocoa-nut and pine, with iron or steel points, which served the Giant as spears; his sword even Saint Patrick could scarcely lift, while near was another tree, taller than all the rest, with a cable at one end, and a hook bigger than a huge ship's anchor, with which in his hand the Giant sat on a rock and bobbed for whales. In the stables, instead of some vast horses, which they expected to find, capable of carrying so monstrous a being, they beheld rows of alligators and hippopotami, which the Giant was wont to harness to his brazen chariots when he went to war, or out a pleasuring; while, as no saddles or bridles were found, it was evident that he possessed no steed capable of bearing his ponderous weight. Saint Patrick and his Squire, making themselves at home in the Giant's castle, passed several pleasant days, while they recovered from the fatigues of their combat and refreshed themselves after their voyage. Then, that they might keep their own steeds ready for any emergency, they harnessed a dozen hippopotami, and as many tame crocodiles, to one of the Giant's chariots, and so, with great comfort and convenience, proceeded on their journey. The canopy of the chariot was of azure silk fringed with silver, which sheltered them from the warm rays of the sun. "Faith, this is pleasanter far than riding along over a dusty road!" quoth the Squire to the Knight, with that easy familiarity which the superior delighted to encourage in his faithful attendant. "What would they say in Old Ireland if they saw us two now a travelling along, quite at our ease, over the burning plains of Africa!" Whereat Saint Patrick made some suitable reply. But their pleasant conversation was cut short by the sounds of some terrible wails and laments, uttered by female voices, and at the same time of loud harsh voices and rude laughter, proceeding from out of a neighbouring wood, which they beheld before them. On this Terence whipped on the crocodiles and hippopotami with right good will, their own trusty steeds trotting behind till they arrived at the borders of the wood; when, securely fastening their chariot to a stout tree, they mounted their chargers, and dashed forward, in the direction from whence the cries proceeded. Louder and louder grew the shrieks and lamentations, till the Knight and his Squire arrived at a spot whence, looking down into a sylvan dell, they beheld a sight which made their hearts melt with pity, and their blood run cold with horror. There, with the salt tears running down their cheeks, and their eyes imploring mercy and pity, they saw six lovely damsels, clad in green garments, bound to as many trees, while round them danced a hundred fierce satyrs, terrible of aspect, and hideous to behold. Each satyr was armed with a huge club of the size of a tree, which he flourished wildly, and on his other arm he bore a shield of vast proportions, like the moon at the full, as she rises over the housetops; while scabbardless two-handed swords hung with brazen chains by their sides, and long-bows and quivers full of arrows were suspended at their backs; their voices as they danced giving forth those hideous sounds which had attracted the Knight and Squire. Near the ladies stood six milk-white palfreys, and a little way behind, who had not at first been seen, six other damsels, their dress and bearing showing them to be the serving maidens of the lovely ladies in green. In an instant the heart of the Champion of Ireland, and of his faithful Squire, were all in a flame, burning to rescue these six lovely ladies and their six inestimable serving women from the power of those hideous satyrs; so, drawing their falchions, and uttering the war-cry of Old Ireland, they dashed with headlong speed in among them, cutting and slashing and hewing away before any of those terrific beings had any knowledge of their approach. Soon recovering themselves, after a few of their number had bitten the dust, the hideous satyrs, uniting in one body, and seeing that their enemies consisted but of a single knight and his squire, flourished their huge clubs, and with loud shouts, louder than the roaring of ten thousand bulls, advanced towards them. Heroically fought Saint Patrick, and manfully combated his Squire. The blows from the monstrous clubs of the hideous satyrs fell like hail about their helmets; but their thirsty swords rapidly drank the life-blood of their foes, and now one satyr, now another, was overthrown. Still more came on. Some stood at a distance, shooting their arrows from their long-bows; others came around, with their two-handed swords, and struck and slashed so fiercely that it required all the activity and courage of both Knight and Squire, of which they fortunately possessed so large a portion, to keep their enemies at bay. Still the sight of the lovely ladies tied to the trees, not forgetting the six serving maidens, as well as their own honour, and desire for glory and renown, induced them to persevere. Full one-third of the hideous satyrs had sunk lifeless from their stalwart blows, while many others limped off sorely wounded and maimed; yet the remainder, with a perseverance worthy of a better cause, fiercely continued the combat. At length, Saint Patrick telling Terence to escape, wheeled his horse round as if to fly, but it was only a cunning device, as his faithful Squire well knew; for, instantly returning to the charge with redoubled vigour among the scattered ranks of his foes, he dealt such slaughter and destruction among them, that the survivors were fain to fly far away, howling, into the distant woods, which resounded with their mournful cries, leaving the six ladies and their six serving maidens to the care and protection of the gallant Knight and his attendant. While Saint Patrick cut loose the cords from the fair limbs of the six ladies all clothed in green, Terence performed the same office for the serving maidens. After they had been refreshed by some pure draughts from the neighbouring crystal brook, and partaken of such fare as the Champion could offer them, he led them forth from the wood, and with courteous attentions, and many polite expressions, placed them in his chariot drawn by the crocodiles and hippopotami. Then, and not till then, did he inquire their names, and state, and nation. The eldest replied:--"Know, most puissant and valiant Knight, that we are the unfortunate daughters of the King of Georgia. Our lives since our births have been unhappy. First, we were carried off by a monstrous giant, and, being turned into swans for seven long years, lost sight of the outer world, neither knowing what dresses were worn, how fashions were changed, and many other important matters. "At length, through the courage of a noble Knight, Saint Andrew of Scotland, of whom you have doubtless heard, we were happily released from our thraldom. What, however, was our astonishment when we got back to our father's court to find that our eldest sister had departed as the bride of another famed Champion, Saint Anthony of Italy, by whose mighty prowess the giant had been slain; and in a brief time Saint Andrew, hearing or this, also set off in search of his former comrade and brother knight. "Now--why need we be ashamed to confess it?--we had allowed a feeling of regard to spring up in our bosoms for that worthy Knight, and we all agreed that we could no longer exist out of his society; and so we also set off from our father's court, resolved to search for him the world around, and bring him back to our native land, or lie down, and mournful die beside his tomb." "The noble Champion for whom you took in hand this weary travel is my much approved good friend," exclaimed Saint Patrick. "To get a sight of him I would go more miles than there are trees throughout this mighty continent; therefore, will my faithful squire, Terence O'Grady, whom I now crave leave to make known unto you, and I travel in your company, and in that of your six serving maidens, till we have found the right noble Saint Andrew, or some other of those six brave Knights of Christendom who for seven summers I have not seen." Much pleased with the discourse and the polished courtesy of Saint Patrick, the six princesses consented to his proposal; and thus we will, for the present, leave them journeying in the giant's chariot, drawn by the dozen crocodiles and hippopotami, and followed by the six maidens and their six milk-white palfreys, and escorted on either side by Saint Patrick and his faithful Squire, in the direction they believed Saint Andrew had taken. CHAPTER TEN. THE ADVENTURES OF SAINT DAVID OF WALES. The last but not the least of all the Seven Champions to be mentioned famed for heroic courage and gallantry is that most noble and renowned Knight, Saint David of Wales. After he had quitted the brazen pillar, followed by his faithful attendant, Owen ap Rice, he proceeded towards the up-rising of the sun, visiting many of the courts of the first monarchs of Europe, attending many tournaments, engaging in many desperate battles, and performing innumerable heroic deeds; which his faithful Squire took very great care to recount, nor did he allow his histories to lose anything in the telling. Wonderful indeed were the numbers of foes his master's sword had slain; huge were the giants he had overthrown; savage were the wild beasts he had slaughtered; terrific were the monsters he had put to flight; powerful were the magicians whose guiles he had circumvented; and horrible were the spirits, and ghosts, and goblins amid whom he had fought his onward way; indeed few could hear the faithful Owen recount his master's deeds, and eke his own, without being impressed with the belief that more heroic Knight did not exist, nor more brave and trusty Squire. Thus they journeyed on till Europe was left behind; and entering the ancient continent of Asia, they arrived at the court of the far-famed Emperor of Tartary. Here Saint David's fame had preceded him, and they were received with all that courtesy which to so valiant a Knight was due. On the day of their arrival a sumptuous entertainment was prepared, at which all the chief lords and nobles of the realm were present, when huge beakers of rosy wine were quaffed; nor could anyone compete with Saint David in the quantity of the generous liquor he imbibed. For the following day a grand tournament was arranged, when it was expected that the noblest feats of arms ever beheld in the empire would be performed. From far and near came valiant knights from all the neighbouring provinces, habited in every conceivable style of richest armour; yet none surpassed Saint David in the sumptuousness of his plume and burgonet, the trappings of his steed, the richness of his scarf, the splendour of his shield and breastplate, or of his whole armour, which, from his lofty helm to his knightly spurs, shone with resplendent beauty. Numerous champions entered the lists, and many desperate encounters took place. At length Saint David rode in, followed by the faithful Owen carrying his spear. The trumpets sounded, Saint David took his spear, and shaking it aloft prepared for the encounter. A Knight, one of the chief nobles of Tartary, was his first opponent. Of blue steel was his casque, and armour, and mighty shield, while a blue scarf floated from his shoulders. Bravely the Tartar Knight bore himself, and bravely he withstood the terrible shock of Saint David's lance. A second time the two Knights charged, when Saint David, mustering all his powers, struck the Tartar a blow so terrible that he sent him reeling from his saddle, and with a hollow groan he fell senseless on the ground; but time will not permit an account of each separate combat of that far-famed tournament. Six valiant Knights did Saint David meet, each of whom was vanquished by his arm. At length, the only son and heir of the Emperor, seeing that no more worthy antagonist could be found, and willing to retrieve the disgrace he conceived his countrymen had received, entered the lists, and bravely challenged the Champion of Wales. The heart of the gallant Saint David bounded at the thought of engaging in so noble a contest as that with the Emperor's son, and he declared himself ready to commence the course whenever it was the pleasure of the noble prince to meet his lance. "No time like the present, Sir Knight," replied the gallant Tartar, who was arrayed in armour of rare and curious workmanship, studded all over with gold and precious gems. "It were a pity to slay so brave a prince," thought Saint David; "yet for the honour of my country, than which no nobler exists, as also for my own, than whom no..." (what Saint David thought need not be repeated). "If he presses me it must be done." The trumpets sounded, the steeds sprang forward, the ground trembled beneath their feet, clouds of dust arose in the air; terrific was the shock, but both Knights kept their seats, though both were sorely pressed. Again they charged, with a like result. A third time they met, and Saint David felt that he was reeling in his saddle; but recovering himself by a mighty effort, he prepared for another and more desperate encounter. Little wotted the proud son of the great Emperor of all the Tartars with what a doughty Champion he had to contend; little thought he of the gallant heroes that far-distant land of Cambria was able to produce. Shaking his spear, he shouted loudly to Saint David to prepare himself for an overthrow. The Welsh Knight only grasped his own spear the tighter in consequence, and pressed his knees the firmer against his charger's sides. "And the Prince expects that he is going to throw my master, does he?" observed the faithful Owen. "Let him beware of Saint David; I may tell him he has borne down to the ground twelve as good men as he is, with one thrust of his lance, before now." The trumpets sounded, and the Tartar Prince and the Champion of Wales met in the middle of the lists. Terrific was the encounter; the spear of the Tartar Prince was shivered into a thousand fragments; but the Welsh Knight, with true gallantry, let his fall by his side, and grasped his battle-axe, that they might light on equal terms. Already, however, had the spear inflicted a desperate wound on the Prince's side; but his pride would not let him yield. Now sparks of fire flew thickly around them from the extraordinary rapidity of their strokes, so that they appeared to be fighting in the midst of a furnace (so Owen the faithful Squire ever afterwards averred), till at length Saint David's axe descended with force so terrific on the helm of the Tartar Prince that he clove it in two, nor did the cruel weapon stop till it had pierced the brain of the hapless heir to the throne of the great Emperor of Tartary. When the spectators beheld what had occurred, loud cries of grief, anger, and dismay rent the air; the great Emperor and all his courtiers, from the highest to the lowest, crying louder than anyone else. The lists were immediately broken up, and the Emperor, ordering the Welsh Knight to be brought before him, retired into his palace. The obsequies of that precious jewel of Tartary, now dimmed by death, being concluded, the Emperor, having ceased his woeful lamentations and sad sighs, thus addressed the Welsh Champion:-- "Know that there dwells on the borders of Tartary a mighty Magician, Ormandine by name who holds an enchanted castle and garden, within the magic walls of which whoever enters never again returns. Now truly, although thou deservest death for what thou hast done, yet if thou wilt adventure into the Magician's domains, and bring hither his head, I grant thee not only life, but therewithal the crown of Tartary after my death." This strange adventure highly pleased the noble Champion of Wales, and he expressed himself ready forthwith to depart about it. On which the Emperor bound him by his oath of knighthood, and by the love he bore his native country, never to follow any other adventure till he had performed the promise he now had given. In three days he and the faithful Owen, having made all preparation, were ready to set out. Travelling eastward for many a weary day, though conversing pleasantly to beguile the way, they at length reached the confines of a dreadful forest, the trees twisting and twining in every direction, and briars and creepers of all sorts, with long thorns and hooks, hanging from all the branches. Mysterious flames seemed to be bursting forth, wavering and flickering in the dark recesses of the forest, while amid the boughs flew birds of evil omen, night-owls, and ravens, and bats, and other winged things of hideous form, with harsh and croaking voices. Within this forest, so Saint David had learned, stood the castle of the Magician Ormandine. "My faithful Owen," he exclaimed, "by my honour and my oath of knighthood, I am bound to enter and to traverse this strange and woeful wood; but do you wait my return without, and if I never do return, go to my kinsmen, in our native land, and tell them all about my sad and melancholy end." The faithful Owen, on hearing these words, burst into tears, and replied: "My long-loved honoured Master, if there were ten thousand forests, and if in each thrice ten thousand ill-doing necromancers lived, and if through each you had to fight your way, I would remain steadfast by your side, and fight as long as arm, and hand, and sword could do their work." "Then onward into this dreadful forest, my faithful Owen, let us go!" exclaimed Saint David, drawing his sword, and beginning to hew away at the creepers and briars which impeded their progress. In this labour he was ably seconded by the faithful Owen; and thus, by slow degrees, they worked their onward way. As they proceeded, the shouts and shrieks increased, the sky overhead was filled with lurid meteors, and hideous and ill-omened birds flew thickly around their heads, screeching their terrific notes into the ears of the adventurous strangers. "Few things worth having can be obtained without difficulty and perseverance," exclaimed Saint David, as he went on cutting and cutting away at the creepers. "As to all the hooting, and the screeching, and crying which assail our ears, it cannot hurt us if we take no heed to it. Few noble enterprises have ever been undertaken without numbers of people, like those hideous night-owls, endeavouring to hoot them down." Thus manfully cutting and hewing away, they at length came in sight of the dark and frowning, damp, and moss-overgrown walls of an ancient castle. Near it was a huge rock, still more damp and moss-covered than the castle-walls. In this rock, by magic art, was enclosed a sword, the hilt being the only part which could be seen. It was of steel work, engraven curiously, and set with jaspers, sapphires, and other precious gems. Around the pommel was engraven, in golden letters, the following words:-- "By magic spells remain most firmly bound, The world's strange wonder unknown by anyone, Till that a knight within the north be found To pull the sword from out this rock of stone: Then end my charms, my magic arts and all, By whose strong hand sage Ormandine must fall." "A northern knight!--that must mean me," exclaimed Saint David. "Undoubtedly, I am destined to pull the magic sword from out of that rock. See how I'll do it!" On this, dismounting from his steed, he grasped hold of the hilt, and began to pull and pull away right manfully; but in vain he pulled, and tugged, and hauled; not a hundredth part of an inch had he drawn forth of the sword, but, still persevering, he would not let go. At length, the faithful Owen entreated that he might be allowed to come and help. Then Knight and Squire tugged and tugged away, but still the sword would not move. Next, putting both their hands to the huge hilt, and their feet against the rock, they bethought them most surely that they would move it. Scarcely, however, had they in that guise begun to pull, than there arose around them fearful shouts of mocking laughter, and, the gates of the castle opening wide, twelve hideous dwarfs, with faces black as coal, and bodies horribly deformed, issued forth, and bearing in their hands some iron chains, which clanged as they moved, approached, with grinning mouths and threatening gestures, the Knight and his Squire. Saint David and the faithful Owen would fain have let go the richly gemmed hilt of the magic sword, but when they strove to do so they found their hands clinched firmly to it. Now they struggled as much to free their hands as before they had to draw out the sword. But in vain was all their tugging and struggling. The dwarfs stood round awhile to enjoy their dismay, and then throwing the iron chains around them, they bound them in fetters which no earthly power could undo, and carried them away, helpless as infants in their nurses' arms, to the magic castle. There, in the centre of an iron hall of vast dimensions and sombre hue--the only light emitted from a lurid torch burning at the further end--on iron beds, of which a countless number appeared ranged around, lay writhing the victims which the fell Magician's cruelty had left bound. There, for many years, till the full term of seven was accomplished, we, too, will leave them, daily visited by the Enchanter Ormandine, who came to mock at, and gloat over their misery. "Ah! ah!" he exclaimed, with a voice croaking like ten thousand frogs, and loud as thunder, "you came to cut off my head, and carry the gory trophy to the Emperor; but now you find, my friends, you've caught a Tartar." Notwithstanding, however, this conduct of the Enchanter, his chief captive was not so miserable as he supposed. A kind fairy all the time watched over him; and as Saint David lay on his couch she sent four of her attendant spirits, in the form of damsels, of no mean beauty, who tended him with the gentlest care, and brought him fruits and other luxuries, which they offered whenever he awoke, and then sang him to sleep again with their sweet voices, so that his time passed far more agreeably than would certainly otherwise have been the case, or the Enchanter had any idea of. CHAPTER ELEVEN. THE RELEASE OF SAINT GEORGE. Seven times had frosty-bearded winter covered the ground with snow, and behung the trees with crystal icicles, since the Champion Saint George, and the faithful De Fistycuff, lay groaning in their far-off dungeon in Egypt, for having ventured to assert that crocodiles, and apes, and snakes, were not fit objects of reverence. One day, as by chance the Knight was wringing his hands, in despair of ever getting free, he chanced to rub in a peculiar manner the magic ring which the Fairy Sabrina had given him. A bright light was forthwith emitted from it, which increased and increased till it filled the chamber, and from the midst of it appeared the Fairy herself, in her chariot drawn by ten peacocks. "Gallant Knight, why did you not summon me before?" she asked, in her sweet voice; and Saint George had to confess, with shame, that he had forgotten all about the power of the magic ring. "I cannot free you from this prison by magic power; but I will give you tools with which you may free yourselves, and then you will set more value on your liberty than if you had gained it without toil. I never afford aid to any who are not ready to labour for themselves." The Fairy having thus spoken, supplied the Knight and his Squire with hammers, chisels, spades, mattocks, and crowbars. "Your steeds and weapons you will find ready outside the gates," added the Fairy. "When once more prepared for battle, go forth, and conquer." The Knight and De Fistycuff felt their strength and spirits wonderfully improved at these words, and already they fancied themselves scouring over the plain in pursuit of a thousand flying foes. "But is there no gallant achievement, no heroic deed, which you would desire me to perform, as a mark of my gratitude?" asked Saint George, after he had duly thanked the Fairy for the aid she had wrought him. "Well spoken," answered the Fairy; "yes, there languishes, even now, a brother knight, one for whose country I have a fond regard, Saint David, of Wales, in the gloomy castle of the Magician Ormandine, on the borders of Tartary. Go and free him. From trusting entirely to his own strength, and not seeking rightly for all other aids, he failed in what he undertook to accomplish. A magic sword, by which alone the Magician can be conquered, is held in a rock near his castle. No human strength can pull it out; but take this flask of oil, pour it into the rock, and, waiting patiently, you will find the sword easily come forth." The Knight promised to obey the Fairy's directions; and she having disappeared, he and De Fistycuff set to work so manfully, although not accustomed to handle such tools, that in a few days they hewed themselves a subterranean passage beneath the walls of the city. Through iron plates, and thick walls, and granite rocks, and mud, and sand, they worked, the last, like slippery people, giving them the greatest difficulty to deal with. At length the sky appeared; and there, at the mouth of the cave out of which they emerged, stood their steeds, held by two dwarfs of ugly aspect, who presented them with their spears, and swords, and other weapons. No sooner were they mounted, and Saint George was about, to reward the dwarfs, than he found that they had disappeared. Accordingly, they set off, as fast as Bayard and the Squire's steed could carry them, along the neck of land which joins Africa to Asia, and then galloped rapidly northward. In wonderful condition were the horses, while the pure, fresh air their riders breathed, after their long imprisonment, added fresh vigour to their limbs, and courage to their hearts. Many adventures, which cannot here be recorded, were met with; and at length they reached the magic forest which surrounded the castle of the fell Enchanter. They witnessed the same terrific sights, and heard the same sounds as did Saint David and the faithful Owen; but, equally dauntless, they clove their onward way through brake and briar, in spite of the hissing of serpents and hooting of owls, groans and shrieks, and other similar sounds, to which they were pretty well accustomed by this time, till they reached the Magician's castle. There, in the rock, they beheld the hilt of the magic sword. De Fistycuff was about to seize hold of it at once; but Saint George warned him to desist till he wisely had obeyed the Fairy's directions, and poured the oil upon the rock. Slowly it trickled down through many a crevice, when the Knight, waiting patiently for the oil to take effect, grasped the sword with his left hand, while he kept his own falchion ready to use in the right. "Who knows but the Magician may come forth to attack me before I have freed the sword?" he observed to his Squire. Gradually, but surely, the sword yielded to his unwearied and long-sustained efforts. While still drawing it forth, a terrific uproar was heard within the castle; the ground shook, trembled violently, rocking to and fro, and flames darted forth from the rock; but the Knight held fast the weapon. Suddenly the brazen gates of the castle burst open, and there issued forth the Necromancer Ormandine, arrayed in all the terrors with which he could clothe himself. His helmet had a fiery plume, hissing snakes were writhing about his casque and shoulders, his armour seemed of red-hot metal. A hooting owl of hideous aspect sat on his shoulder, while he brandished an iron club covered with spikes, like his armour, red-hot. He made directly at Saint George; but Ascalon was in the Knight's grasp, and wielding it, as he well knew how, he kept the Magician at bay, while he tugged more vehemently than ever at the magic sword. With a clap louder than that of any thunder, it came at length forth from the rock, and taking it in his right hand he with it furiously assailed the Magician, who no sooner felt its keen edge than his club fell from his nerveless grasp, the owl flew hooting away, the serpents crawled hissing off, and the once-powerful Magician fell humbly on his knees and craved for mercy. Saint George, telling De Fistycuff to guard him, entered the castle, where, on iron beds, he found, bound with chains, his friend and comrade Saint David, and the faithful Owen, groaning, and sighing, and mourning their hard fate. Cutting the chains, with as much ease as if they had been cords of silk, with the magic sword, he set them, to their great joy, on their legs, when, with a profusion of words, they poured out their expressions of gratitude. Saint David then told Saint George of his vow to the Emperor of Tartary; when the English Knight informed him that the Enchanter was in his power, but that he was unwilling to take his life. "But, behold the signs of his cruelty!" said Saint David, pointing out to Saint George the other nine hundred and ninety-eight iron beds in the hall. "There lie bound many other noble knights and squires who for many long years have been prevented from engaging in any deeds of heroism. Think how many victories they might have won; how many captive knights released; how many forlorn maidens rescued from durance vile; how many other noble deeds they might have done!" This speech so completely changed Saint George's view of things, that he told Saint David he would hand over the Magician to him. Then the Champion of Wales went forth from the castle, and with one blow of his sword cut off Ormandine's hideous head, and sticking it on a pole, which he delivered to the faithful Owen to carry, informed his brother Champion that he was ready forthwith to depart for the court of the Emperor of Tartary. The other nine hundred and ninety-eight gallant knights and squires, released by the courage and wisdom of Saint George, having expressed a strong desire to follow his fortunes, he undertook to lead them round the world in search of adventures worthy of their prowess. Saint David, also, promised, when he had fulfilled his vow to the Emperor of Tartary, to search him out and aid him. Often had the noble Champion of England thought of the lovely Sabra, but knew not where she was. At length, with his army of valiant knights and trusty squires, having reached the kingdom of Bagabornabou, he, on inquiring for her, heard, with dismay, that she had been carried off a prisoner by Almidor, the black King of Morocco, and had ever since been pining in a dungeon. Calling his knights around him, he told them of the occurrence, and with loud shouts, waving on high their swords, they promised to accompany him to rescue her, or to die in the attempt. Setting off forthwith, they reached the dominions of the black King; when Saint George, disguising himself as a humble palmer, entered the city, followed by De Fistycuff, in the same habit, to ascertain in what vile dungeon the lovely Sabra was shut up. In vain he wandered up and down, whispering her name, and inquiring of all he met, till, at length, he saw a beautiful white dove fly upward from a hole in the ground beneath the massive wall of a huge castle. Catching the dove, he wrote on a slip of parchment, which he placed under its wing, "Saint George of England has come to Sabra's rescue. Tell me if you are here!" Soon the dove, having entered the hole, returned to the Knight, when he discovered, under its wing, on the same parchment: "I, the hapless Sabra, am here; oh, free me, and receive a maiden's grateful love!" Instantly returning to his knights, and throwing off his palmer garments, Saint George led them to the assault. On every side the castle-walls were stormed. Some climbed up ladders, some over each other's backs, with such desperate valour, that the Moorish soldiers gave way on every side; till Almidor, hearing the turmoil and loud shouts of war, rushed to the battlements. Then ensued a fight most desperate between the noble Champion of England and the black King, in which the latter would most assuredly have been slain had he not, like a recreant, turned his back and fled, among his followers, through a postern gate, which, happily for him, stood open,--proudly asserting that he would return and fight another day. Having thus victoriously taken possession of the Moorish castle, Saint George and all his knights and squires burst open all the doors and gates, and explored all the passages they could find, till they arrived at a gloomy vault. Within it was a little door. Saint George thundered at it with his battle-axe. It burst open; and there he beheld his lovely and beloved Sabra, her beauty dimmed, but not extinguished, by her long imprisonment. Saint George and his knights having taken possession of the Moorish capital, he held a grand banquet in honour of the occasion, when a herald announced, in due form, that the British Champion was about to wed the lovely African Princess. Thrice was the announcement made; and no one objecting, the fair Sabra, after all her misfortune, became, as her reward, the bride of the noblest Knight Europe, or the world, has ever known. So enchanted were the Moors with the valour and courtesy of Saint George, that their chiefs, lords, and nobles, and the councillors of state, came in humble guise and proffered him the crown of their country; but he declared, with many expressions suitable to the occasion, that he had not yet won that renown for which his soul panted, and must decline the honour. Having dismissed the nine hundred and ninety-eight knights and squires, whom he had rescued from the castle of Ormandine, with warm thanks for the assistance they had rendered him, and sincere wishes for their welfare, they all departed to their separate countries and homes, and such as were married to their wives and children, who had long been mourning their absence, and in most cases, though not in all, wishing for their return; Saint George and his beautiful bride, the enchanting Sabra, set out on their travels, through many unknown and strange lands, attended by the faithful De Fistycuff, whose wife would much rather that he had gone back to look after her and their children in England. CHAPTER TWELVE. THE TOURNAMENT AT CONSTANTINOPLE. Now it happened that the great Emperor of the East held a grand tournament at Constantinople, to which all the knights and nobles of Christendom were invited, to do honour to his nuptials with a princess he was about to wed. Thither came the Seven Champions, not knowing each other after their long separation, but each believing the others in some distant quarter of the globe. The Emperor had, however, pitched seven tents of seven different colours, wherein the Seven Champions might remain till the sound of the silver trumpets summoned them to appear. Seven days the tournament was to last, and each day a different Knight was to be Champion of the field. The first day, Saint Denis of France, under the title of the Golden Knight, was the Champion. His tent was of the colour of the celandine, and on the summit flamed a sun of wondrous brilliancy. His horse, an iron grey, was graced with a plume of gold-bespangled feathers. Before him rode the faithful Le Crapeau, bearing his banner, on which was designed the golden _fleur-de-lys_. Numberless were the foreign knights with whom he tilted, every one of whom he overthrew. Next day, Saint James of Spain, habited in silver armour, rode forth as the Champion; his Squire, the faithful Pedrillo, bearing aloft four banners, on each of which were inscribed his names and titles, and those of his ancestors, so that not a spot of silk remained uncovered. Well he behaved himself, to the admiration of all beholders. Clad in blue steel, and called the Azure Knight, on the third day, Saint Anthony of Italy rode forth as the chief Champion, attended by the faithful Niccolo, bearing his standard, an eagle on a field of blue. Above his tent was a smaller pavilion in the shape of a watch-tower, in which was seated, as spectatress of the fights, the Georgian Princess, the strong-minded Rosalinde, who had, by praiseworthy perseverance, and allowing no trifles to stand in her way, completely won the heart of Saint Anthony, and had become his bride. Well, also, did he, the Italian Champion, acquit himself, and many valiant knights were by his spear unhorsed. On the fourth day, Saint Andrew of Scotland was the chief Challenger for the tournament. His tent was framed in the manner of a ship swimming on the waves of the sea, environed about with dolphins, tritons, and many strangely-contrived mermaids; on the top stood a figure of Neptune, the god of the sea, bearing in his hand a streamer, whereon, in one corner, was wrought a cross in crimson silk. He was called the Red Knight, for a blood-red cloth completely covered his charger. His worthy achievements obtained such favour in the Emperor's eyes, that he threw him his silver gauntlet, which was prized at a thousand portagues, and the which Murdoch McAlpine, lifting it from the ground, bore with no little satisfaction to his master's tent; where the Champion also retired, and after his noble encounters enjoyed a sweet repose. The fifth day, Saint Patrick of Ireland, as chief Champion, entered the lists, mounted on an Irish hobby, covered with a green veil. He was attended by the faithful Terence O'Grady, in sylvan habit, bearing on his shoulder a blooming tree, his motto, _virtus semper viret_. His tent resembled a summer bower, formed chiefly of the shamrock, and beautified with wreaths of roses. He was named the Green Knight; but he was green only in name, for no Knight proved himself more accomplished, or performed nobler deeds. Upon the sixth day, the famed Champion of Wales entered the lists, mounted on a Tartar steed, which was covered with a black cloth, to signify, as Owen ap Rice made known, that a black and tragical day was this for all Knights of every nation who durst approve his fortitude. On his shield was portrayed a silver griffin rampant, and upon a golden helmet, the ancient arms of Britain. His tent was in the form of a castle, the battlements guarded by numerous sturdy men-at-arms. His princely achievements not only obtained due commendations at the Emperor's hands, but all the fair and high-born dames present (so the faithful Owen ever afterwards averred) applauded him as the most noble Knight that ever shivered lance, and the most fortunate Champion that ever appeared at the Court of the Eastern Emperor. Upon the seventh and last day, Saint George of England entered the lists as chief Challenger, mounted on a sable-coloured steed, betrapped with bars of burnished gold, and whose forehead was beautiful with a gorgeous plume of purple feathers, from whence hung many pendants of gold. The Knight's armour was of the purest steel inlaid with silver; his helmet was richly adorned with pearls and many precious stones; and on his banner, borne before him by the faithful De Fistycuff, was pictured, on a blood-red field, a lion rampant, bearing three crowns upon his head. His tent, white as the feathers of the swan, was supported by figures of four elephants of purest brass. Before it stood an ivory chariot, guarded by twelve coal-black negroes, and in it sat his lovely bride, the Princess Sabra, spectatress of the tournament. All eyes turned towards the English Champion, to gaze and admire. His steed bore him right nobly, and never gave encounter to any knight but both man and horse were speedily hurled helpless to the ground. That day the tournament lasted from the sun's up-rising till the evening star appeared, during which time he conquered five hundred of the hardiest knights of Asia, and shivered a thousand lances, to the admiration of all beholders. The tournament being over, the Emperor sent to Saint George's tent a golden tree with seven branches, to be divided equally among the seven foreign Champions. There they all assembled; and what was their astonishment, when they removed their casques, to discover that they were the long parted and ancient comrades! Warmly they grasped each other's hands, and talked and laughed right pleasantly. High revelry, also, did they hold that evening in Saint George's tent, and told each other of their adventures, exploits, and achievements. Jovially they quaffed full golden beakers of rosy in wine, and many a jovial song they sang, and many a tale they told. All inquired who the lady could be who had been seen on the summit of Saint Anthony's tent; when he confessed that the strong-minded Princess Rosalinde of Georgia had won his heart and hand. "She, then, is sister of the six lovely Princesses I had the happiness of being instrumental in turning from swans into young ladies. Your bride will be glad to hear that they appeared none the worse for their transformation!" exclaimed Saint Andrew. "Ah! you do not know, then, what happened after you left the country, my cousin of Scotland!" cried Saint Patrick. "Ha! ha! ha! They all set off to follow you, unknown to their father. I met them in a wood with their six maidens, wandering alone, and had the satisfaction of rescuing them from the power of some unpleasant enemies, among whom they had fallen. I thought they would have found you out before now." "No, indeed, I have escaped them hitherto," answered Saint Andrew, rubbing his hands. "One of them might have persuaded me to marry her, and that would not at all have suited me. I intend to remain a bachelor for many a year to come." "I wonder you did not offer to marry one of them, at least, my brave Irish friend," observed Saint Anthony; "it would have been but in accordance with the acknowledged gallantry of your countrymen. I, too, should have been glad to have hailed you as a brother-in-law." "Faith! so I would have married one or all of them, if it hadn't been from the difficulty of making a selection, and hurting the feelings of the rest; for a more amiable collection of young ladies I never set eyes on; so I gave them a little chariot I had got, drawn by a few alligators and hippopotami, and advised them to go quietly back to their father's court, instead of gadding about the world as they were then doing. Whether or not they took my advice I cannot say, for when they went north I turned my horse's head, and, with my faithful Squire, rode away south." Many other similar adventures to these were told by the old comrades, of which there is no space to tell. But if the Knights were merry, much more so were their Squires. Joyfully they discovered each other, and agreed to meet together in the tent of the faithful De Fistycuff. Right jovial was the meeting, and huge the amount of the viands they consumed, and innumerable the beakers of Samian and Falernian wine they quaffed. Merry the stories they told of their numberless adventures, and facetious the songs they sang. Each Squire boasted loudly of the deeds of his master, and of the country to which he belonged; but no one boasted louder than did the faithful Owen ap Rice, of Saint David especially, and of his own loved country, Wales. Terence O'Grady was not much behind him in that respect; while Murdoch McAlpine declared that Saint Andrew was one of the best of masters, and that if Scotland was not the finest and the largest country in the world, it was, at all events, the one he loved the best, just because it was Scotland and his native land. "Your hand, old comrade," exclaimed De Fistycuff, springing up, "that's the very reason why I like Merrie England. She has her faults, I'll allow; but though I've wandered nearly all the world around, there's no country in my mind to be compared to her, and with all her faults I love her still." "Bah!" exclaimed Le Crapeau, "she is not equal to _la belle_ France, at all events." "Inferior to Italy, without doubt. Look, what noble people the ancient Romans were!" observed Niccolo, swallowing a handful of macaroni. "The idea of comparing a little island to a magnificent territory like Spain!" cried Pedrillo. "Why, we were civilised, and a province of Rome, while the British were painted barbarians, unknown to all the rest of the world." Thus they disputed, but all in good humour, and many a joke was bartered on the subject. All things terrestrial must come to an end, and so did, at length, the Knights' banquet and the Squires' jovial supper. The next day, scarcely had the Champions arisen from their downy couches, whereon they had rested their weary limbs, after the fatigues of the numberless combats in which they had been engaged, when it was announced that six foreign Princesses, of great beauty, had arrived in the capital, and had been witnesses of the tournament, in disguise. Some said they had come in one way, some in another; and among other descriptions of the mode in which they travelled, it was asserted that they came in a chariot, drawn by twelve tame alligators and as many hippopotami. "The Georgian Princesses, a crown against a baubee!" exclaimed Saint Andrew, starting up from his couch. "Murdoch, go and find out, with all speed, and if it is the case, get ready our steeds and baggage without delay, or one of these strong-minded young ladies will be insisting on accompanying me to my ancestral halls in bonnie Scotland." "They've run their game to earth; there's no doubt about it," cried Saint Patrick, who had been fond of sporting in his youth, when he heard the news. "They deserve our brushes for their pains; and one thing must be said in their favour, that they are very pretty young women, and not at all afflicted with the ordinary prejudices and bashfulness which stands in the way of so many young ladies in finding themselves comfortable establishments. What say you, Terence? Don't you think that I might go further and fare worse?" "Ah! faith! noble Master, that you might, unless, mark me, you get back to old Ireland; and there it isn't much difficulty I'd have in finding many a score of sweet creatures, to whom, it's my belief, these Georgian Princesses couldn't hold a candle." The mention of his fair countrywomen (of whom Saint Patrick was a warm admirer, and who is not who knows them?) artfully thrown in by his Squire, turned the Knight from the intention he began to entertain of making one of the Princesses his bride. When the Seven Champions met at breakfast, they talked the matter over with due gravity. They recollected that there were six ladies and only five bachelor knights, two only being benedicts. "But suppose we five were to marry five of the Princesses, one still would be like puss in the corner--she must be left out," observed Saint Andrew, who was evidently the least inclined of any of the party to wed, and had arranged to start away directly after breakfast. "Oh! one must become a nun," observed Saint Patrick. "It's a mighty pleasant sort of life to those who don't like work, and are fond of being utterly useless." Scarcely was the breakfast over than the Champions were summoned into the presence of the Emperor; and there, seated around him, were the six Princesses of Georgia, radiant in beauty, and looking bewitching and killing in the extreme. "Fair ladies, and right noble strong-minded Princesses, here are the Seven Champions of Christendom. It has come to our imperial knowledge that you have left the Court of my brother of Georgia, your royal father, for the purpose of wedding one, if not more, of these right valorous Champions, for in that matter there seems to be some little difficulty. Make your choice, therefore, most strong-minded Princesses; whom will you wed? For, from the observations I have made of these Knights' gallantry, I can pledge my imperial word that they will not refuse your moderate and modest requests." Now, the six Princesses, on hearing these words, looked unutterable things, and a roseate hue rushed into their lily-like cheeks; but their eyes did not wander up and down the hall among the Knights, for, with a constancy worthy of all admiration and imitation, they fixed them on Saint Andrew. "He is the Knight who changed us from swans into maidens, he is the Knight, for love of whom we left our father's home, and in search of whom we wandered, all forlorn, the world up and down, and with him alone do any of us wish to wed." "Well spoken, fair Princesses," observed the Emperor. "That much circumscribes the question, and decreases the difficulty. Which of you desires to wed with the gallant Christian Knight? For, remember, that only one wife can he have, whatever may be the custom in Asia." Saint Andrew, who had never feared mortal foe or foes, giants, wild beasts, or evil spirits, began at these words to tremble in his shoes, and to regret that he had not recommenced his travels by daybreak. The strong-minded Princesses all sat looking at him. "I'm the one to marry him," cried the eldest. The Champion's heart began to sink within him. "I'm the one to marry him," cried the second. "But I'm the one to marry him," cried the third. "But I say that I'm the one to marry him," cried the fourth. "But I declare that I'm the one to marry him," cried the fifth. "You are all wrong!" exclaimed the sixth. "From the very first I am sure that it was understood clearly that I was to be his wife." "Stay, sweet Princesses," observed the Emperor, calmly, "I see clearly that there has been some slight misunderstanding among you about this matter, and I am sure Saint Andrew is too gallant a Knight to desire to make any five of you unhappy, or jealous of the sixth. I, therefore, purpose to send you all back, under a proper escort, to your father's court, and I hope that you will there speedily find six noble knights to lead you to the altar of Hymen." The six strong-minded Princesses made very long faces at the decision of the Emperor; but, as his decisions were always final, they could make no reply; though, when they once more turned their eyes towards the Scottish Knight, the spectators could not but remark that their expression was very much changed, and Saint Andrew evidently thought it wise to keep at a respectful distance from their fingers. "Certes, Master," whispered Murdoch to Saint Andrew, "you are, to my belief, very well out of it." "It's a mighty easy way of settling the matter," said Terence O'Grady, "but I wonder what the six serving maids are to do!" History reports, however, that they went back to Georgia, married six stalwart knights, and lived very happily afterwards, as did their six fair attendants, who, in like manner, married six faithful squires, who all in time became knights and great lords of the realm. After the tournament and all the festivities were over, the Seven Champions prepared to depart, each for his own country; but, ere they commenced their journey, news arrived that all the great Pagan Powers had banded together to overthrow the Christian Emperor of the East, who, therefore, sent to entreat all the aid they and their followers could afford. With one accord they promised to raise an army, and to hurry back to his assistance. Saint George, leaving his youthful bride, the lovely Princess Sabra, in his castle near Coventry, soon levied a powerful army; and, setting sail, no longer as a knight-errant, but as a renowned general, he arrived with his forces on the coast of Portugal, where he was joined by the other six Champions, who each brought troops in proportion to the size of his country. So enchanted were the Portuguese with Saint George, that, having no Champion of their own, they entreated him to become theirs, and have ever since retained him among their most honoured saints and heroes. Here Saint George was chosen generalissimo of all the Christian forces, and, once more setting sail, he entered the Mediterranean. Then, landing on the coast of Morocco, he bethought him of punishing Almidor, the black King of that country, who was about to join the Pagan armies. The Moors in vain endeavoured to prevent the landing of the Christian Champions. The battle was hot and furious. Almidor rushed to the van, where quickly he was singled out by Saint George. Terrific was the combat, and never before was the Moorish Monarch so hotly pressed. Now he had prepared, in full expectation of victory, a vast cauldron of boiling metal, in which he purposed, with fell intent, to cast the Christian Champions and their followers; but when at length, unable any longer to withstand the far-famed sword of Saint George, he fled in despair, to cast himself headlong in, and his example being followed by his generals and chief officers, the furious battle was brought to a speedy end, and the Princess Sabra was well avenged for the cruelties the black Almidor had inflicted on her. Scarcely had this satisfactory event been brought about than Saint George received the unwelcome news that the Earl of Coventry was besieging his castle in England, for the purpose of carrying off the Lady Sabra, his bride, and now the mother of three blooming boys,--the wicked Earl having spread a report that the great Champion of England, whom no other foe could conquer, had yielded to the inevitable hand of death. The brave Knight hastened back with the speed of lightning, when sad was the sight which met his eyes. His castle was burnt to the ground, and his lady had been carried off by the wicked Earl, and, as she had refused all his offers of marriage, had been accused of witchcraft, and lay in prison, condemned to be burned alive. What had become of his three blooming boys he could not tell. Putting spurs to his horse, the Knight and De Fistycuff galloped into Coventry. There he met the Earl going out hunting; and there, in mortal combat, he laid him low. Scarcely had the Earl breathed his last, acknowledging with his dying breath the lady's innocence, than the Princess Sabra was led forth to execution. Quickly her guards were put to flight, and mounting her on his horse, he bore her off to a neighbouring forest, where he might defy pursuit. There, as they wandered up and down, one day they espied three beauteous boys, sleeping on a bed of roses, beneath a shady bower. The parents' hearts told them that the children were their own. They flew towards them, when they saw, seated at the further end of the bower a beautiful lady. Instantly Saint George knew her as the kind Fairy who so often before befriended him, and who had now saved his children from the burning castle. Again and again he thanked the Fairy, who, smiling sweetly, vanished from his sight. Leaving his children under the care of those wise tutors, named Industry, Attention, and Teachableness, taking his wife, he once more set out to rejoin the army engaged in the war with the Pagans. CHAPTER THIRTEEN. SAINT GEORGE KILLS THE ENCHANTER OSMOND. Saint George and his virtuous Lady, having arrived in Africa, were travelling to Egypt from the west, when they chanced to arrive at a magnificent country, inhabited only by Amazonians. Journeying along, great was their surprise to find every town and village desolate of people; the fields untilled; and fields overgrown with weeds: nor man, nor woman, nor child was to be seen. Scarcely food even from the berries in the woods could they procure to satisfy their hunger. In this extremity, after many days, they arrived before a rich pavilion--all of green and crimson, bordered with gold and azure--the hooks of ivory, the cords of silk, while at the top stood a golden eagle, and at each corner a green silver griffin shining in the sun. Beautiful as was the tent, still more lovely was the lady who stood before it--a maiden queen--crowned with an imperial diadem, and clothed in a robe of green, with the body formed of lace of gold, and her crimson kirtle bound with violet-coloured velvet, the wide sleeves being embroidered with flowers of gold and rich pearls. Around her stood her maiden attendants in comely attire, with silver coronets on their heads, and silver bows in their hands, while at their backs hung quivers full of golden arrows. With courteous words the Queen invited the Knight and his Lady to enter her pavilion, when she told him that her country was sorely afflicted by the arts of a wicked magician, named Osmond, who had sought her love, and having been rejected had conceived the most deadly hatred against her. "He has built," she said, "a mighty tower on the borders of my realm, from which issues so deadly and dark a smoke that my people are driven from their homes, and the country remains desolate. He has left the guarding of the castle to a terrible giant, the ugliest monster eyes ever beheld. He is thirty feet in height, his head three times the size of that of the largest ox, his eyes larger than two sunflowers, and his teeth, with which he can break a bar of iron, standing out a foot from his mouth; his arms long and bony, his skin black as coal and hard as brass, and his strength so great that he can carry away three knights in armour, and their steeds, with the greatest ease." "Now, by my halidom, but I will fetter this monster and break the enchantment, or never see this place again." In vain the Princess Sabra entreated him not to undertake the adventure. Even the Amazonian Queen thought it beyond his power. At daybreak, accompanied by De Fistycuff, he set forth, leaving the side of his weeping wife, and assuring her that he would return in safety. As he and his Squire advanced into the enchanted district the light of day decreased; darker and darker it grew, till they could with difficulty grope their way before them, while dense clouds of smoke seemed to be rolling thicker and thicker over their heads. Nothing could surpass the melancholy and depressing gloom of the air. At length, by a faint glimmer of lurid light, they beheld the gates of the enchanted tower, at which sat, on a block of rock, a huge giant in his iron coat, with a mace of steel in his hand. At first sight of Saint George and his Squire, he beat his teeth so mightily together that they rang like the stroke of an anvil; and then he sprang up and rushed forward, thinking to take the Champion, horse and all, within his mouth, with the Squire under one arm, and to bear them into the tower. When, however, the giant opened his mouth, showing his teeth sharp as steel, Saint George thrust his trusty sword Ascalon so far down it, that the monster cried out loud as thunder in his pain and terror; the very earth trembled, his mouth smoked like a fiery furnace, and his eyes rolled in his head like brands of flaming fire: but the Champion pressed him harder and harder, the blood flowing in a great stream from his mouth, till he was forced to cry out for mercy, and to beg for life. This Saint George granted him, on condition that he would discover all the secrets of the tower, and ever after be his true servant. Then the giant swore to speak the truth, and told him that the necromancer had made a huge fire in a deep vault whence all the smoke came forth, but that near the fire was a fair and pleasant fountain, the water of which, if any knight could cast it on the fire, the smoke would cease and the fire be put out. This sufficed Saint George. Ordering the giant to keep the door, and leaving De Fistycuff to watch over him, he advanced into the tower, which was full of vast windows; and then he entered a long dark passage with a door at one end, set as thick with spikes of steel as are the prickles of a sea-urchin's skin; yet, dashing open the door, in spite of the clouds of smoke which rushed out, he descended in total darkness, thundering blows all the time raining down on his burgonet, which he guarded off with his shield, and voices from unseen spirits screeching in his ears, while the heat, great at first, increased so fiercely that he was almost melted, his armour becoming nearly red-hot. Just as he was about to faint he espied the crystal fountain, and quickly filling his shield from it, he cast the water on the fire. Backwards and forwards he went, till, to his joy, he saw the smoke ceasing and the blue sky appearing, when the light of the sun entering the dark passage, he saw on the stairs many great images of brass, with mighty maces of steel, which had struck him the heavy blows as he descended. The fire being quenched, and the enchantment being thus happily quashed, the country was restored to its former prosperous condition, while Saint George received warm thanks of the Amazonian Queen; and then, with the Princess Sabra by his side, and followed by De Fistycuff, and the huge Giant Orcus as he was called, he set off to join the Christian army in the south. On their way, however, finding that they were not far from Bagabornabou, the native land of the lovely Sabra, they determined to journey thither. De Fistycuff, as a herald, went before to announce their arrival, whereon they were received right royally. Such joyful sounds of bells, trumpets, cymbals, and drums, were scarce ever heard before in the kingdom; nor had such stately pageants ever been seen as those which welcomed them; the walls were hung with Indian coverlets and curious tapestry, and the pavement was strewed with odoriferous flowers of every lovely hue. This being over, the Princess Sabra was crowned Queen of the country, and for many days she and her noble lord reigned there in peace and prosperity, till the desire of martial glory summoned Saint George once more to buckle on his armour, and to join the Christian forces now marching towards Egypt. Time will not allow a full description of the bloody battle which took place between the Christians and the Pagans, or of the magic arts practised by the fell Enchanter Osmond, who strove with all his power to overthrow or circumvent the former; or how he raised an army of evil spirits from the earth, the air, and fire, and water; and besides a mighty tempest by which huge oaks were torn up by the roots, houses and temples were unroofed, and men and horses carried high up into the air, and let down again with terrific crashes. While the tempest was raging, they charged into the Christian host with flaming falchions, firing their horses' manes, burning their trappings, and consuming their banners; but undaunted they stood, headed by Saint George and the six other Champions, till the Pagan forces were compelled at length to give way, and to retire from the field. The acts of the Enchanter were not yet concluded, for he erected a magic tent, with arts so subtle, that the interior seemed like a large country full of gardens, fields, and orchards, and palaces. There he caused six of his spirits to assume the guise of six lovely princesses, travelling the country round in search of six gallant knights who would break some lances in their services. By artful guile the seeming royal ladies persuaded the six Champions to accompany them to their pavilion, where they announced that a right royal banquet was prepared to do them honour. The Champions departed, unsuspicious of ill; but day after day passed by and they did not return. The troops, by degrees, began to complain that they were left without their leaders; when Saint George, inquiring into the matter, right wisely supposed that it might be some cunning device of the Enchanter Osmond. On inquiring of his slave, the Giant Orcus, he found that this was indeed too true, and that the Knights were kept in servile bonds in the magic pavilion. Addressing his warriors, he told them of the discovery he had made, when, with loud shouts, they vowed to follow wherever he might lead. Thus trusting in the noble Champion, they neither feared the necromancer's charms, the flaming dragons, the fierce drakes, the flashing lurid lights, or the legions of hideous monsters armed with burning falchions, which surrounded them as they marched towards the enchanted pavilion. Far more dangerous were the sounds of sweet music which struck upon their ears, and the enchanting sights which their eyes beheld, as they surrounded the magic tent; but Saint George, recollecting the honour of his knighthood, let drive at the tent with his sword, so furiously, that he cut it into a thousand pieces; when there was exposed to view the fell Enchanter Osmond, sitting on a rock of iron, feeding hideous spirits, who obeyed his will, with drops of blood. The Champion and his soldiers rushed upon him so furiously that, seizing him unawares, they carried him off, and bound him with chains to the root of a blasted oak, whence neither his own art nor all the spirits he once commanded could release him. Saint George then set at liberty the six captive Knights, when the lovely princesses, turning into their proper shapes of six hideous spirits, flew off with loud shrieks and hisses through the air. The necromancer then shrieking forth that all his magic arts and devices had come to nought, tore out his eyes, bit his tongue in two, because that it had so often uttered curses, cut off his hands, which had held his silver wand, the cause of so much evil; and finally ended his existence by devouring his own inside, dying thus a warning to all magicians for future ages. This adventure being happily terminated, the Christian army advanced towards Egypt and Persia; nor did the Champions ever again sheathe their swords, or unlock their armour, till the subversion of those ancient Empires was accomplished. This being done, they took truce of the world, and triumphantly marched towards Christendom; in which journey they erected many stately monuments in remembrance of their victories and heroical achievements; and through every country that they marched there flocked to them an innumerable company of Pagans, that desired to follow Saint George into Christendom, protesting that they wished to forsake their heathen gods, whose worshippers' chief delight is in the shedding of human blood and every cruelty. To their requests Saint George at once condescended, not only in granting them their desires, but also in honouring them with the favour of his princely countenance. Once more did the gallant Champion return to England, with the faithful De Fistycuff, and this time he invited the other six Champions to accompany him. Pen would fail properly to describe the magnificent entertainments with which they were honoured, and the pleasant time they spent there, before they again set forward on their adventures. There, sad to relate, the Princess Sabra sickened and died, and with grief and anguish Saint George raised a magnificent tomb to her memory, and placed it above her grave. Then, after embracing his three young sons, he once more set out on his travels. CHAPTER FOURTEEN. THE ADVENTURE OF THE THREE SONS OF SAINT GEORGE. Numberless were the strange adventures in which the gallant Champions of Christendom were engaged, and numberless the noble deeds they performed; of the greater number of which this history, by stern necessity, must be silent, and many of which can be but briefly described. For many years Saint George had travelled up and down the world, the faithful De Fistycuff by his side, nor had news of them been received in England. His three noble sons had now grown to man's estate, and had received the honour of knighthood from their Sovereign. When, as they were visiting one night their mother's tomb, her spirit, in the gentle form she wore on earth, rose from out of it before their enravished eyes, and counselled them, as they loved their honoured father's memory, to go and search him out, and bring him back in safety to his native land. Thus having spoken, with a sweet smile, she vanished from their sight. Well furnished, they set off from England. Scarcely had they travelled far through Normandy, than, as they were passing through a wood, a loud shriek assailed their ears. Charging amid the trees, they beheld a lovely damsel in the hands of a dozen armed men; fierce pirates, from their dress and weapons, they appeared. With the war-cry of their father's name, they rushed on the marauders, and, as none would yield, they slew them all, and then loosed the lady and her attendants, whom the pirates had bound to the surrounding trees. With grateful words and tears, which chased each other down her cheeks of lily white, she told them that she was the daughter of a Duke, whose castle was hard by. Then the three young Knights were sumptuously entertained and pressed by the Duke to stay; but mindful of their duty, they speedily set forth again to search out their father. They journeyed on for many days, through countries where no houses or habitations were to be found; they rested, therefore, at night in the woods or on the open downs, having only the starry firmament for their canopy. Thus sweetly reposing on their mother earth, they slept as soundly as if they had rested on beds of feathers, and had been surrounded with curtains of the purest Arabian silk. One night they had been sleeping securely, until such time as Aurora began to gild the firmament with her bright rays, and to usher in Phoebus's golden light, when suddenly a terrific noise, which seemed to arise from some deep abyss, and to be about to rend the rocks asunder, assailed their ears. Awaking, they leaped to their feet, and buckling on their armour, stood on their guard. High time it was for them so to do; had they slept but another minute sad would have been their fate. As they gazed around, to discover whence the noise could have proceeded, they saw coming towards them a most hideous monster, of excessive size and terrible shape. His eyes were like burning saucers, so round and large were they; his mouth was like that of some huge bird of prey, and his front claws were like those of eagles, but infinitely larger and sharper; he had ears like a fox, with a scaly breast, and wings like a bird; but his body was shaggy, and his hinder feet were like those of a lion. Again and again he roared most terrifically, and as he moved along his head reached high up among the boughs of the tallest trees. Their three horses, as he drew near, snorted and stamped on the earth, rearing up with terror, and almost broke from the ropes which secured them, for the young knights, disdaining to fly as they might have done, had kept on foot. They felt, also, how perfectly and completely they could trust each other, and thus they stood, fearless of the coming danger. The monster, with loud cries, spreading out his wings, and lifting up his terrible talons, rushed towards them. Side by side, at a little distance apart, they stood ready to receive him. He ran at the centre one, who, stepping back a pace, made a furious cut at him with his sword, while the other two assailed him on either side. Quick as hail fell their blows on his hard side, but, hard and tough as was his skin, their sharp swords soon found entrance, and the blood of the monster began to flow in torrents, rising quickly over their feet, for they fought in a valley from whence there was no means for it to escape; blood not being able of itself to run up hill in any way more easily than water, which cannot do it at all. The young Knights thus saw that if they desired to escape drowning, they must finish the combat without further delay; the odour of the monster was excessively disagreeable to their olfactory nerves, being like the essence of ten thousand pole-cats, weasels, skunks, ferrets, and similar vermin. Now they plied their blows more furiously than ever, till at length Sir Guy, the eldest, plunged his weapon into the monster's scaly breast, and roars of pain and rage, louder than that which ten thousand elephants, lions, and donkeys united could make, were sent forth by the terrific brute, who threw himself headlong on the gallant knights; but they nimbly skipped out of the way; and, as his face lay submerged in his own blood, they again thrust their swords into his back and sides, while thousands of bubbles, floating up from the surface of the pool of Wood, showed that, at length, he had breathed out his hideous life. The Knights, having ascertained that he was dead, retired from the field; the neighbourhood of which soon became unbearable, from the horrid odour which proceeded from it. Having thus washed away all the stains of the combat, in a neighbouring stream, for they were all three very nice young men, and hated to be more dirty than was necessary, they proceeded on their journey. Time will not allow me to dwell long on their subsequent adventures. As they journeyed on, faint and weary, and sadly wanting refreshment, they met a herald loudly proclaiming, on his brazen horn, the greatest rewards to whoever would slay the Monster Pongo, who was ravaging the country. They stopped him and told him that they had slain the monster. On this, after they had shown him where the brute lay, the herald conducted them to the Court of the King, who received them with unbounded joy, and loaded them with honours. Now it had happened, that, while the Monster Pongo was ravaging the country, and the King and all his Court, and ministers, and generals, and his army were distracted and entirely beside themselves, a band of pirates, led by a noted chief, had landed on their shores, and carried off the fair and young daughter of the King, the Princess Urania. No sooner did the young Knights hear the tale, than they offered to go in search of her, as a work worthy of their arms. In a stout vessel, rowed by sturdy men, they set forth. Many tempests they met with, and much were they tossed about by the waves. Little did they think at the time that their honoured sire and his six friends, the other Champions of Christendom, were likewise making a long voyage, and were the sport of the winds and waves; the only powers, indeed, which could make sport of such doughty Knights. Weeks had passed away, and still they were ploughing the waves, and wishing that Britannia, when she was about it, had ruled them straighter, when they perceived, at a distance, several vessels. They made towards them. A desperate combat was taking place, and fierce pirates, with burning torches in their hands, were endeavouring to set fire to the barks of their opponents. On the deck of one of them, yet at a little distance, who should they behold but two of the great Champions of Christendom, their honoured father, Saint George, and his dear friend, Saint Andrew, standing calm and undismayed, waiting the time for their vessel to approach near enough to take part in the combat. As they guessed, rightly, the rest of the Champions lay on their couches below, overcome by the power of the sea, wishing themselves safe on dry land again, and caring very little whether they then and there went to the bottom. Instantly the three young Knights, urging on their bark, threw themselves on the pirates, whom, after a desperate combat, they compelled to surrender; many having leaped overboard, and others having been slain. One of the pirate vessels was almost in a sinking state. A cry proceeded from her hold; it was that of a female in distress. The young Knights rushed on board, when, ere the vessel sank, they drew forth a young and lovely damsel, and carried her in safety to their own bark. A few words sufficed to tell them that she was no other than the Princess Urania, of whom they were in search. Saint George was highly delighted with the prowess of his sons, and he and his friends accompanied them to the Court of Urania's father, where they were all, as might have been expected, sumptuously entertained. From thence they again set forth in search of fresh adventures, which were no less wonderful than those I have already narrated, but which require a longer pen than mine to tell. CHAPTER FIFTEEN. THE DEATH OF SAINT PATRICK. Time, which spares not kings or princes, any more than other people, at length laid his heavy hand on the Seven Great Champions of Christendom, and eke on their once doughty Squires. Hard knocks in battles and tournaments, voyages by sea, and travels by land, hard fare as well as gay revellings, fights with giants, monsters, wild beasts, and evil spirits, had done their work, unnerved their once iron arms, and turned their raven or auburn locks to grey; while from their chins, instead of full bushy beards, hung down long silvery streamers of white; and those lion voices, which once had been heard high above the din of battle, and had braved kings on their thrones and giants in their dens, were now changed to weak and trembling trebles, which could scarce be heard even above the summer breeze. First, of Saint Patrick I will tell. Laying aside his lance, and trusty sword, and armour, which he committed to the care of his ancient follower and faithful squire, Terence O'Grady, (now the father of a fine family, and settled on his own estate in Ireland, which has been handed down to his descendants from generation to generation,) he assumed the humble palmer's guise, and resolved to wander up and down the world, not, as before, to perform feats of arms, but to collect all sorts of information which might be useful to his beloved native land, where he proposed ultimately to lay his bones. No longer was he accompanied by his faithful Terence, but solitary and alone did the aged Palmer go forth. Great as he was, many sins had he to mourn, and much had he to be sorry for. Among the things he most regretted were the opportunities he had lost of doing good, and of gaining that knowledge which would have made him useful in his generation. However, he thought that he would make amends for his early neglect; but even the great Saint had to learn that lost opportunities in the days of our youth and strength can seldom or never be recovered when years advance with rapid strides and lay a heavy hand upon us. Thus, resting on his staff, with a scallop shell in front of his broad-brimmed hat, in russet coat and wallet at his back, the old hero set out once more on his adventurous journey. Many strange adventures even then befell him. Often was he assailed by fierce temptations, but bravely he resisted them, as he had done his enemies of old. The laws and institutions of foreign countries were the chief objects of his inquiries. Nothing came amiss to him; he asked about everything he saw, and never seemed weary of gaining information. Even into cook-shops and kitchens he found his way; and some assert that the Irish from him learned how to cook potatoes properly, though I do not see exactly how that can be the case, seeing, as may be remembered, that potatoes came from America, and that America did not happen to be known in those days. Perhaps he, however, may have been over there unknown to the rest of the world. Others say that, at all events, he introduced the Irish-stew; but to that there seems also some little objection of the same character, as "praties" enter largely into its composition. Then, again, that objection is overruled by those who assert that some other root or some cereal might have been used in their stead. No true Irishman, however, doubts the following fact, which is about to be described. Travelling onwards, he at length reached a part of Africa, often much infested by serpents. He was there told of a rare and wonderful means which the inhabitants employed to get rid of the serpents. Having caught them, they tied fish-hooks to their tails. No sooner did the serpents find this incumberance attached to them, than in their rage they never failed to turn round and bite at their other extremities. In this way they invariably caught their mouths in the hooks, and thus being turned into hoops or rings, from which uncomfortable position being utterly unable to escape, they were easily caught up on long sticks and thrown over the left shoulder into the nearest lake or river, from which they were certain never again to come back. This was only one, it must be remembered, of the many important pieces of information that blessed Saint and great man Saint Patrick picked up in his latter travels. Some say that he taught the Irish to read and write. Certain, at all events, it is that he introduced that fine and glorious weapon, the shillelagh, among them; and, moreover, taught them the use of it, for which his memory is ever to be held in due reverence, not to speak of many other reasons why he should be loved and admired by all the sons of Erin. At length, Saint Patrick, feeling that his latter days were approaching, got back safe to Old Ireland, there firmly purposed to leave his bones. The country, at that time there can be no manner of doubt about it, was overrun with serpents, big and little, in great numbers, whose bite was so venomous, that, if a man got stung by one of them, he in a minute or less swelled up into a mountain. So the people came to Saint Patrick,-- for to whom else should they go, seeing that, of course, he was one of the wisest men in the kingdom?--and they told him that it was their firm belief that the whole land, from north to south, would be depopulated before long if the snakes were not driven out of it. So, just then thinking of something else, he told them to take their shillelaghs and to knock the snakes on the head, and to drive them into the sea, he himself setting the example; and right lustily he laid about him, as he was wont to do in his early days, among Pagan hosts, or wild beasts, or giants, or ogres. Suddenly, as he was attacking a monstrous serpent wriggling about before him, he recollected the way in which he had seen the snakes got rid of in Africa. So, ordering all the fish-hooks to be procured throughout Ireland to be brought to him, he had them tied on to the tails of all the serpents to be found. Instantly the serpents were turned into hoops, and calling his faithful followers, he showed them how to ring them all on their shillelaghs. This done, staggering away with them at their backs, all the serpents, and snakes, and vipers, were carried off to the sea, into which they were thrown and drowned, and from that day to this not one has ever ventured to come back to the shores of Old Ireland, and none ever will, that we may be assured. After this great and important achievement, the pious Saint wished to retire altogether from public life. So he had a hermitage cut for himself out of a big grey moss-overgrown rock, on an island in a lake surrounded by trees, where very few people ever thought of coming to see him; but some good pious families, who lived near, used to take him fish, and other provisions, to supply his daily wants, which were, indeed, but few. There he lived on for some years, his existence being neither very useful nor very interesting, and the puzzle was how he managed to pass his time. His hair grew longer than ever, and so did his nails; and at length it was discovered that he was with them, day after day, engaged in digging his own grave. Like the mole, working away, he turned up the earth till he had made it deep enough and long enough to suit his taste. When it was completed he laid himself down in it, weary of the world, and never rose from it again. When the peasants came the next morning, they found the old Saint dead; so, mournfully they threw back the earth he had turned up; and many years afterwards, the exact spot being ascertained, a magnificent church was raised over it to his memory. CHAPTER SIXTEEN. THE DEATH OF SAINT DAVID. Pen would fail to write, or man to tell, all the gallant achievements which the noble Knight, Saint David of Wales, and his faithful Squire, Owen ap Rice, performed during their foreign travels. At length even they began to weary of the constant hazardous adventures in which they were engaged. Age had begun to dim the lustre of Saint David's eye, and to unnerve his arm, but not to lower the courage of his heart. News was now brought him that an army of Pagan barbarians was about to attack his native land. No time was to be lost if he would render service to his country. On his homeward way he collected all the gallant knights, and their squires, and men-at-arms, with whom he and the faithful Owen had, in their travels, become acquainted. Thus, by the time he reached the borders of Wales, he had assembled an army which, though small, was well able to perform deeds such as ten times the number of ordinary men would not have dared to attempt. Sad was the state of Wales when they entered it in battle-array, seeking the enemy,--towns were unpeopled, houses overthrown, monasteries pillaged, corn-fields burnt, farms destroyed, while from the caves and woods came forth the unhappy people, to welcome him as their deliverer, and to pray for his success. These sights so fired the spirit of the aged Champion, that he vowed never to rest till he had driven the enemy from his native soil. Still the task was no easy one. They were very numerous, fierce, and brave, and trained to arms. The aged bards of Wales struck their harps to encourage the warriors to strive bravely in the fight. It was, however, discovered that many recreant knights had joined the forces of the Pagans; they and their followers being habited in armour little differing from that of the Champion of Wales and those knights who had accompanied him from abroad. Summoning his warriors around him, he addressed them in a speech which encouraged and animated their valour to the highest pitch. Thus he concluded:-- "Then follow me, my gallant warriors! I will give the signal for the onset, which will lay thousands of our foemen low; and see, for my ensign, I do wear upon my burgonet this leek, which will, if we gain the victory, be ever after held in honour throughout Wales, and on this first day of March be worn by all Welshmen in commemoration of our victory." Thrice struck the bards their harps, while cheers, loud and long, replied to the speech, each warrior of Wales forthwith plucking up a great leek, and placing it on his casque, or head-piece, so that in the thickest light friends might be known from foes. Now there stepped forth a bard, and struck a mournful strain. "Sad, sad are the notes I sing, And sad the news I bring, For many a gallant knight, and many a warrior bold, Will fall to-day, And turn to clay, Before swift time grows old. The noblest and the best before the eve must die, Ere the fell Pagan host are taught to turn and fly." These words struck the gallant old Champion's ears. He had never at any time thought little of his own prowess, while he, like a true patriot, had always been ready to sacrifice himself for the good of his country. He resolved, accordingly, should the tide of battle set strong against his followers, to charge onward amid the hosts of the enemy, and to fall nobly among them, knowing that his friends, for the love they bore him, would, for the sake of recovering his body, charge into the midst of the foe, and assuredly retrieve the fortunes of the day. With a cheerful voice, as if he had been giving orders for the commencement of a tournament, the noble old Champion gave the promised signal for the onset. Furiously charged the army of Welshmen. Bravely were they met by their Pagan foes, who, with valour worthy of a better cause, charged in return, and many on both sides sunk on the ensanguined plain never to rise again. Knight after knight sank down under the terrific blows of the Pagan clubs and battle-axes, till there seemed but little prospect that the patriot army would gain the victory. In vain the Christian army shouted and charged. The sturdy Pagans refused to give way. At length, Saint David, recollecting the words uttered by the prophetic bard in the morning, assembled round him his bravest knights, and, throwing up his visor, exhibited his countenance, whereon sat a beaming smile, expressive of patriotism and valour. "One of the noblest in the land, it is said, must this day fall before the battle is won!" he exclaimed. "If such I am, then happy shall I be to be thus honoured in my death. Charge! brave knights, charge!" With these words, the last he ever uttered, the noble Champion rushed into the thickest of the fight, where a hundred battle-axes rattled on his helmet, a hundred swords were pointed at his side, a hundred spears thrust against his fearless breast, and a hundred arrows shot at his head. Pierced by a hundred wounds he fell, but his followers bravely avenged his death. The Pagan hordes were put to flight; and Saint David has ever since, even to the present day, been held in affectionate remembrance, as he fully deserved, by all Welshmen. CHAPTER SEVENTEEN. THE DEATH OF SAINT DENIS. Saint Denis of France, like his brother Champions, much desired, after his long wanderings, to see once more the smiling fields of _la belle_ France, and thus he, too, followed by the faithful Le Crapeau, turned his steps homeward. Time had not failed to leave its hoary marks on him, and his snowy locks and flowing beard showed full well that the winter of his life had at length overtaken him. Still he kept his armour on, though his shrunken form often seemed to rattle within it; and the chill blasts, as they entered the crevices, blew round and round him, and made him often wish for his armchair, and dressing-gown, and slippers, as does many another elderly gentleman, who would be far wiser if he kept by his own fireside, instead of allowing himself to be dragged about the world, in search of a very doubtful sort of advantage or amusement for the younger branches of his family. Saint Denis had not neglected in his travels to discover many things which he thought might be with advantage introduced into his native country. He taught the people how to cultivate the vine, and make _chausse_ roads, though the latter were never very satisfactory. But many cunning arts and manufactures also he introduced from the far east, of which there is not space now to speak. The greatest benefit, however, he conferred on his countrymen was in instructing them in the important art of cookery. Fricassees and ragouts were by his means brought to great perfection, and, more than all, he instructed them how to dress frogs and snails, of which art they were before his time totally ignorant. Who could ever imagine that there was a time when Frenchmen knew nothing of that important part of the culinary art? Till Saint Denis, the hero of a hundred fights, aided by the faithful Le Crapeau, caught the frogs and cooked them, and, moreover, eat them, the ignorant Frenchmen could not believe that they were intended to be used as food. But mark the ingratitude of a people--the fickleness of a crowd. The great Saint Denis, who had fought so long, and upheld the name of France in so many strange lands, was accused by a recreant knight of heresy and of high treason, and of endeavouring to introduce bad and mischievous customs among the people. Old as he was, although he had long laid aside his armour, the fire of his youth burned up within him, and he challenged his malignant accuser to mortal combat. The Champion and the false knight met; but the latter, by the arts of a wicked enchanter, had come so prepared by talismans for the fight, that all the skill and courage of Saint Denis could not overthrow him. Again and again the aged Champion charged with all the agility and courage of a young man, and few would have supposed that he who sat within that iron mask, and wielded that heavy lance, had seen near eighty winters pass over his hoary head. Once more he charged--his lance was shivered, and he was borne helpless to the ground. Then were the evil designs of his fell enemy victorious. He was condemned to death. No rescue came, and he was led, yet habited in his armour, to the block. With a courageous look he lay down his head; but scarcely had the axe of the cruel executioner fallen upon it, than a fearful tempest burst forth. The headsman, the recreant knight, and all who had assisted willingly at the execution, were struck to the ground, becoming black masses of cinder, by a flash of fearful lightning; and then the people learned and acknowledged that right and justice were on the Champion's side. Monuments were built and churches erected to his memory, and he was ever after reverenced as the Patron Saint of France and of all Frenchmen. CHAPTER EIGHTEEN. THE DEATH OF SAINT JAMES. Saint James, as long as his arm could wield a lance, continued his heroic combats with pagans and infidels of all sorts, magicians and necromancers, giants and ogres, wild beasts and evil spirits of every kind, sort, and description; but he, at length, too, finding his strength departing, and his hair growing grey, resolved to return home. One day, however, as he was about to put on his armour, to ride forth as usual, he discovered that he could scarcely lift it. "The time has come, my faithful Pedrillo, when no longer as a steel-clad knight, but as a humble pilgrim, I must wander through the world," he remarked, sitting down again on the couch from which he had risen. "Go forth, my faithful Squire, and purchase me a palmer's habit, a hat of grey colour, and a broad scallop shell. Never more will I put on yonder coat of steel. I should but disgrace the name I have so long borne as one of the bravest knights of Christendom." [Well would it be if other generals and admirals would take a hint from Saint James, and, following his example, would retire, when their powers are failing them, from public life.] With a sigh the faithful Pedrillo went forth, and procured, as he was directed, a palmer's habit for his master, and one for himself. Their armour being packed up and carried on their war-steeds, they now, as pilgrims, journeyed homewards; but all who met them knew full well what they had been, and even midnight robbers and outlaws respected them, and allowed them to pass unmolested. Thus travelling on, they reached at length the wide plains of sunny Spain. There Saint James resolved to build a chapel, and to devote himself to its service. He erected also a hermitage hard by, where he and his faithful Pedrillo, who would not quit him, took up their abode as hermits. Then the peasantry from far and near came to visit them. Much good advice Saint James could give them, and many things he taught them, while numberless were the strange stories he could tell of the wonderful things he had seen and done in foreign lands. In time, his chapel, from the gifts brought to it, became one of the richest in the land; and this so excited the envy and anger of the monks of a neighbouring convent, that they conspired together to accuse him of necromancy and other terrible crimes. Saint James boldly refuted the accusations, and offered, once more, to try his lance against any friar among them who was man enough to put on armour and meet him in single combat; but they all declined the honour, though they did not the less hurl their invectives against him, and seek opportunities for his destruction. At length, he and some of his more pious fellow-worshippers were caught one day inside their chapel. The doors were closed upon them, and the wicked monks, hiring a band of Pagan mercenaries, had them all shot to death by poisoned arrows. In spite of the pain they suffered, the Saint and his companions continued singing their hymns to the last, while a bright silvery light burst forth in the chapel--(so says the ancient chronicler)--which continued burning glorious as ever; and when, at length, the chapel was opened, the body of Saint James and the bodies of his companions were found to be perfectly embalmed. Then they were placed in marble tombs with silver lids; and, to the present day, Saint James, by all real Spaniards, is held in the highest esteem and reverence. CHAPTER NINETEEN. THE DEATH OF SAINT ANTHONY. About the same time that his brother knights ended their martial career, Saint Anthony, with his faithful follower, Niccolo, likewise, for the same reason, resolved to turn his face homewards. Rome was the city of his birth, and to Rome he went. Rome was a Christian city, but there were still many Pagans in the neighbourhood, and many of the shrines had as yet scarcely been accommodated to the new faith, so that the pious Saint Anthony had considerable difficulty in distinguishing one from the other. This very much grieved his heart. Even when he went among the priests he could not always make out to which faith they belonged. They made him long harangues, and assured him that their great wish was to develop their ancient and time-honoured institutions into whatever form was likely to prove most popular. Saint Anthony, who was a simple-minded man, was sorely puzzled by all this; so, after vainly endeavouring to comprehend the state of things in the ancient capital of the world, he retired to a hermitage, where he lived for the remainder of his days; nor would he ever again enter Rome. Thus, in the fragrant odour of sanctity, he died at a green old age. CHAPTER TWENTY. THE DEATH OF SAINT ANDREW. Saint George and Saint Andrew were the last of all the Seven Champions who remained together, rivalling each other in gallant deeds of arms. Where breathes the Scotchman who does not desire, when his life's work seems almost done, to return once more to scent the air of his own free heathery hills, to climb their rocky heights, and to wander around their fertile vales? Strongly did the desire to turn homeward seize the heart of Scotland's Champion. He, however, did not lay aside his spear and sword; but old as he was, still clad in his armour, bestriding his war-horse, and followed by the faithful Murdoch, he kept steadily travelling on, day by day, towards the north. Thus should the true knight do. Life is a battle from the beginning to the end--as the brave Saint Andrew well knew; and never should the armour, the shield, or sword, be laid aside till death strikes the knell which summons the warrior from the world. Many were the adventures he and the faithful Murdoch met with on their journey. More than one giant was slain, numbers of unhappy people released from slavery, and many districts cleared of wild beasts, before the aged Knight and his faithful Squire reached the fair shores of Scotia. The fame of their deeds had gone before them, and all the nobility of the realm, and a vast concourse of people, assembled to do them honour. It was a proud day for the aged Saint Andrew, when, clothed in his well-worn suit of armour, with Murdoch McAlpine of that ilk carrying his spear by his side, he rode through the streets of auld Reekie, with the shouts of the delighted populace sounding in his ears and singing his praises. "Long live Saint Andrew! Long live Saint Andrew! Wherever the Scottish name is known there will we Scotchmen boast of our own Saint Andrew--of the gallant deeds he has done--of the name and of the fame he has won!" Such were the cries which from far and near saluted his ears. A grand tournament was also given in Saint Andrew's honour, at which the aged Knight sat as umpire, though he wisely refrained from running a tilt, much as his heart tempted him to put on armour for the occasion. Soon after this, being assured that feats of arms were no longer suited to him, he resolved to instruct his countrymen in certain important branches of knowledge which he had acquired in his foreign travels. To prepare himself for this new work he retired to a hermitage he had built high up on the side of a mountain. Thither, however, in a short time, resorted to him all the youths of aspiring minds who desired to acquire information, and to receive instruction from the sage. Thus, in process of time, the rude hut became a spot celebrated for learning and piety. There, happily and usefully employed, the old warrior spent many years of his declining life. But, alas! what virtue, what piety, can enable a man to escape from the snares of enemies and detractors? Accused of witchcraft, and other malpractices, the aged Saint was brought before some stern judges, who forthwith condemned him to death. Scarcely, however, had his head been cut off than his innocence was discovered, and a church was raised to his memory; and he has ever since been held in honourable recollection by all Scotchmen as the Champion of whom his country should be proud--a knight _sans peur et sans reproche_. Such, however, is the way of the world. CHAPTER TWENTY ONE. THE DEATH OF SAINT GEORGE. The last Champion who appears in this wondrous, strange, and eventful history, is the great Saint George. Towards the fair land of his birth, right Merrie England, he, too, when he found age creeping on him, resolved to turn his steps. Still lance in hand, and clad in steel, his brave lion heart yet undaunted, with the faithful De Fistycuff by his side, he at length homeward set his eyes. His faithful chronicler relates numberless adventures he met with, scarcely less marvellous than those he encountered in his youth. Many a hard blow he got, which he still was able to return with interest, ably seconded by De Fistycuff, though, it must be confessed, his Squire had grown somewhat obese and unwieldy. At length, the chalky cliffs of Britain, which for twice twelve years the noble Champion had never seen, came in sight. Joyful to him was the prospect; more joyful still the towns and villages, the pleasant aspect of the fields, and the green waving woods, as he travelled on towards Coventry. There, with warm greetings, the inhabitants of high and low degree received him. Sadness, however, he saw on the countenances of many; and this was owing, as the veracious chronicler, from whose erudite work this history is drawn, informs us, to "a doleful report--how, upon Dunmore Heath, there raged up and down an infectious dragon, that so annoyed the country that the inhabitants thereabouts could not pass by without great danger; how that fifteen knights of the kingdom had already lost their lives in adventuring to suppress the same." Saint George no sooner heard thereof, and what wrongs his country received by this infectious dragon, than he purposed to put the adventure to trial, and either to free the land from so great a danger, or to finish his days in the attempt. So, taking leave of all present, he rode forward with as noble a spirit as he did in Africa, when he combated the mighty green dragon. So, coming to the middle of the plain, he there saw his dreadful enemy, crouching on the ground in a deep cave. The monster, by a strange instinct knowing that his death drew nigh, made such a hideous yelling, that it seemed as if the sky was bursting with thunder, and the earth rocking with an earthquake. Then, bounding forth from his den, and espying the aged Champion, he ran with a fury so great against him as if he would devour both knight and steed, armour and all, in a moment. But the brave Saint George, knowing well how to deal with dragons, and all such-like monsters, quickly wheeled his horse out of his way, and with such force did the monster rush on that he drove his sting full three feet into the ground. Returning again, however, with furious rage, he made at the Knight, and would have carried both him and his charger to the ground, but that Saint George, thrusting his spear at his throat, the monster, to avoid it, threw himself back, and fell happily over, with his back on the turf and his feet in the air, wriggling about all the time his long forked tail. Whereat the noble Champion taking advantage, leaped from his horse, and, throwing down his sword, seized him in his arms before he could rise, and pressed his huge body so tightly in his arms, and held him there, that he squeezed the very life out of him; but alas! the dragon's sting annoyed the good Knight in such sort, that the dragon being no sooner slain and weltering in his venomous gore, than Saint George likewise took his death's wound by the deep strokes of the dragon's sting, which he received in divers parts of his body, and bled in such abundance that his strength began to enfeeble and grow weak: yet, retaining his true nobleness of mind, he valiantly returned victor to the city of Coventry, where all the inhabitants stood without the gates to receive him in great royalty, and to give him the honour that belonged to so worthy a conqueror. No sooner, alas! had the brave old Knight arrived before the city, and presented the people with the head of the dragon which had so long annoyed the country, which was borne before him by the trusty old De Fistycuff, than, what with the abundance of blood that issued from his deep wounds, and the long bleeding without stopping of the same, he sunk back into the arms of his faithful Squire, and, without a sigh, he yielded up his breath. Great was the moan that was made for him throughout the country, and all in the land, from the King to the shepherd, mourned him for the space of a month. The King also, in remembrance of him, ordained for ever after to be kept a solemn procession by all the princes and chief nobility of the country upon the twenty-third day of April, naming it Saint George's Day; on which day the brave old Knight was most solemnly interred in the city where he was born. The King likewise decreed, by the consent of the whole kingdom, that the patron of the land should be named Saint George our Christian Champion, in that he had fought so many battles to the honour of Christendom. Thus ends the ancient, authentic, and most credible chronicle from which I have quoted. There are many other documents extant, giving accounts of the exploits of Saint George's three sons, and of the sons of some of the other Champions of Christendom; but as I do not consider that they emanated from sources so reliable and unexceptionable as those chronicles from which I have quoted, I have not thought it advisable to introduce them in the present veracious narrative. THE END. 
26130	----	[Illustration: BY CANDLE-LIGHT. _Frontispiece._] STORIES OF THE SAINTS BY CANDLE-LIGHT BY VERA C. BARCLAY 1922 THE FAITH PRESS, LTD. LONDON: THE FAITH HOUSE, 22, BUCKINGHAM ST., CHARING CROSS, W.C. 2 =TO= THE MEMORY OF SIXER FRANK SPARKS AND SECOND BOB SMITH TWO FAITHFUL CUBS OF THE "CARDINAL'S OWN" PACK THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED BY THEIR OLD WOLF. R.I.P. CONTENTS NINE DAYS IN CAMP, AND NINE STORIES BY CANDLE-LIGHT ABOUT THIS BOOK 1 THE FIRST DAY: GETTING THERE. THE STORY OF ST. BENEDICT 2 THE SECOND DAY: THE STORY OF ST. GUTHLAC 17 THE THIRD DAY: THE STORY OF ST. MARTIN 27 THE FOURTH DAY: THE STORY OF ST. EDMUND, KING AND MARTYR 42 THE FIFTH DAY (SUNDAY): THE STORY OF ST. FRANCIS (I.) 56 THE SIXTH DAY: THE STORY OF ST. FRANCIS (II.) 67 THE SEVENTH DAY: THE STORY OF ST. ANTONY 83 THE EIGHTH DAY: THE STORY OF ST. PATRICK 96 THE NINTH DAY: THE STORY OF ST. GEORGE 107 GOOD-BYE 118 STORIES OF THE SAINTS BY CANDLE-LIGHT NINE DAYS IN CAMP, AND NINE STORIES BY CANDLE-LIGHT ABOUT THIS BOOK Once upon a time there were fifteen Cubs who spent nine wonderful days in camp. They were London Cubs, and the camp was on a beautiful little green island whose rocky shore ran down in green, tree-covered points into the bluest sea you ever saw. These nine days were the most splendid days in those Cubs' lives. And so they often think of them, and dream about them, and live them over again in memory. So that they may more easily go over those days their Old Wolf has written down all about them in this book. Perhaps other Cubs will like to come away, in imagination, to that fair, green island, and so have a share in the nine days. Now, one of the very "special things" about those days in camp were the candle-light stories which the Cubs listened to every night, seated in a big, happy pile, pyjama-clad, on their palliasses. All day they used to look forward to those stories, and sometimes, in the middle of a shrimping expedition, or a paddling party, one or another would remark, "Story to-night, boys!" and turn his thumbs up to show he was pleased at the thought. And so you will find the candle-light stories, too, in this book; and remember that all the stories in this book are _true_--both those about the Cubs and those about the Saints. THE FIRST DAY The train steamed slowly out of Victoria Station. "Now we're off!" shouted a Cub, and he and all the others began to jump for joy, which was not easy in a railway compartment packed like a sardine-tin. Then someone began to sing the Pack chorus, and everyone joined in with all their strength: Let the great big world keep turning, Now I've joined a Wolf Cub Pack; And I only know That I want to go To camp--to _camp_--to CAMP! Oh, I long to set off marching With my kit-bag on my back. Let the great big world keep on turning round, Now I've joined a Wolf Cub Pack! Then someone yelled "Are we down-hearted?" and the Cubs yelled "No!" so loudly that Akela thought she would be deafened for life. Presently the train ran out into the country, and plodded along between woods and fields. And the early morning sun shone brightly, and the sky was very blue. The country, the country! And, very soon, the sea! There were some of them who had never been to the country, and "Spongey," the youngest of the party, had never even been in a real train. "Talk about _hot_!" said someone, panting, when the train had thundered on for about an hour. And, my word, it _was_ hot! Besides, there were blacks and dust, and everyone began to get very grimy--specially the people who were eating bread-and-jam and sticky fruit, and the people who had to crawl under the seat to pick up things that had got lost. "Never mind," said Akela, "we shall be in the sea this evening, and then we shall be cool." That started everyone jumping for joy again, of course. Presently the train passed Arundel Castle--its white towers and turrets and battlements rising up amidst the dark green woods like an enchanted castle in the days of knights and fairies--and the Cubs learnt that there are castles in real life as well as in story-books. After that they began looking out of the window to see who would be the first one to catch sight of the sea. "Bunny" was the first to, and his friend Bert, the Senior Sixer, came a close second. At last the train got to Portsmouth Harbour, and, shouldering their kit-bags, the Cubs ran down on to the steamer. The harbour was thrilling: battleships, cruisers, torpedo-boats, the Royal yacht, the Admiralty yacht, and, most interesting of all, Nelson's ship, the _Victory_. As if the steamer knew that a crowd of eager Cubs were longing to see all round the _Victory_, it went out of its way to steam right round it, slowly and quite near, and the Cubs had a splendid view. The boys all wanted to be the first to _touch_ the sea, but Bunny, who had _seen_ it first, forestalled them again, by letting down a ball of string over the edge of the boat and pulling it up all wet. At last the ship reached the Isle of Wight, and the Cubs and their great mountain of camp luggage went down the long pier. I forgot to tell you that besides Akela there was the Senior Sixer's father and mother, who were coming to help look after the camp--they became the "Father and Mother of Camp"; and there was also a lady who was a very kind camp Godmother. The grown-ups and the luggage were soon packed into a large motor-car, and then, relieved of their kit-bags, the Cubs set out to walk the two miles along the sea-front to the village called Sea View. The way lay along a thing called a "sea-wall"--a high stone wall about six feet broad running along above the shore, with the sea lapping up against it at high tide. Along this the Cubs walked (or rather ran and jumped), their eyes big with wonder at the great stretch of blue, blue sea, with here and there a distant sailing-boat, and, above, the sky even bluer than the sea. "I didn't know the sky _could_ be so blue!" said a Cub; and that was just how they all felt. It was very hot walking in the midday sun. There was no hurry--nine days to do just as they liked in--so halfway along the sea-wall the Cubs and Akela scrambled down some steep stone steps on to a tiny stretch of sand not yet covered by the incoming tide. Boots and stockings were soon off, sleeves and shorts tucked up, and everybody paddling deep in the cool green water. When they had all got thoroughly cool they went on their way, and at last arrived at the Stable. This was where they were to sleep. It consisted of a courtyard, a couple of stalls, a coach-house, a shed, and two tiny rooms. Akela occupied one of these, and the Cubs were divided into two groups. The Stable was in charge of Bert, the Senior Sixer, and in his stall he had Bunny (a Second), Dick (a big Cub very nearly ready to go up to the Scouts), and Patsy, a small but lively Irishman. Sam, another Sixer, had in his stall four young terrors--Terry, Wooler, Jack, and "Spongey" Ward. Then there was the coach-house. This was in charge of Bill, the last Senior Sixer, now a Cub Instructor. The other occupants were Jim, a Sixer (Bill's young brother), "Mac," a Second, two brothers, "Big Andy" and "Little Andy," and a rather new Cub called Bob. It took a good while to stuff the palliasses with straw and unpack. But when this was finished everyone had a good wash and changed into cool old clothes--shorts and cotton shirts. Tea followed, in a jolly old garden behind the bake-house. There was a seesaw in it, and the grass was long and soft, and the shade of the apple-trees very cool. Then the party ran up the hill to the camp field. Here there was a lot to do: the bell tent to be pitched, the fireplace made, wood to be chopped, water fetched, all the pots and pans unpacked, a swing and a couple of hammocks to be put up, the two great sacks of loaves to be fetched, and, oh! a hundred other things. But all the Cubs set to and did their best, and at last all was ready. "Now for the shore!" said Akela, and everyone cheered and ran for their towels and bathing-drawers. It was only a few minutes' walk down to the most lovely shore you can imagine--stretches and stretches of golden sand and little, lapping waves. On one side you could see rocky points running down into the greeny-blue sea, with trees growing right down to the shore. An old, brown-sailed coal barge moved slowly past on the gentle wind, the many browns of its patched sails forming a rich splash of colour in the evening sun. The Cubs soon turned into "water babies." Boots and stockings had been left behind at the Stable, and now they got rid of clothes as well. How cool the sea was! That first bathe seemed to wash away all the heat and smoke and grubbiness of dear old London. After the bathe came a splendid paddle among brown, sea-weedy rocks, and the Cubs caught their first baby crabs and found their first shells, and got just as wet as they liked. But the sun was sinking down behind the grey line of sea, and the clock there is inside every Cub was telling supper-time. So, with hands full of sea-weed and shells, they made their way back to camp. The camp-fire was burning merrily. "Godmother," in a large blue overall, was stirring a steaming dixie of cocoa, and "Mother and Father" were cutting up bread and cheese. After supper there was time for a little play in the field. Then, as it began to get dusk, a whistle-blast called the Cubs in for night prayers. It was still quite light enough to read, so each Cub had a little homemade book of Morning and Night Camp Prayers. Kneeling in a quiet corner of the field, with just the evening sky overhead, with a pale star or two beginning to appear, it was easy to feel God near and to pray. The camp prayers started with "A prayer that we may pray well." It was a very old prayer, really, but it seemed just to fit the Cubs, and help them to _do their best_ in their prayers as in all other things. The prayer was this: "Open Thou, O Lord, my mouth to bless Thy Holy Name; cleanse also my heart from wandering thoughts, so that I may worthily, devoutly, and attentively recite these prayers, and deserve to be heard in the sight of Thy Divine Majesty. Through Christ Our Lord. Amen." Then followed the "Our Father" and some short prayers. And after that the Cubs said altogether: "I confess to Almighty God that I have sinned against Him in thought, word, and deed." Then Akela read out very slowly the following questions, and each Cub answered them in his heart--not out loud, but silently, for God only to hear: "Have I done my best to pray well when saying my private prayers and at camp prayers? "Have I really meant to please God to-day? "Have I done my best in my orderly duties, and in other things I have had to do? "Have I given in to other people quickly and cheerfully when given an order? "Have I spoken as I should not? "Have I been disobedient? "Have I been unkind to another boy--selfish? quarrelsome? unfair? "Have I told a lie? "Have I done anything else I am sorry for?" Then, after a pause, Akela said: "Tell God you are truly sorry, on your honour as a Cub, that you have grieved Him by the sins of to-day." Then there was perfect silence for a moment, and after that, the Cubs said, all together: "May Almighty God have mercy upon us, and forgive us our sins, and bring us to life everlasting." Then they said a short psalm, and the following beautiful little hymn: Now with the fast departing light, Maker of all, we ask of Thee, Of Thy great mercy, through the night Our guardian and defence to be. Far off let idle visions fly, And dreams that might disturb our sleep; Naught shall we fear if Thou art nigh, Our souls and bodies safe to keep. Father of mercies, hear our cry; Hear us, O sole-begotten Son! Who with the Holy Ghost most high Reignest while endless ages run. Amen. Then came "A prayer that we may be forgiven any wandering thoughts we have had while reciting these prayers," and, to end up with, "Our Father" once again, because it is the prayer that Christ Our Lord specially told His friends to use. The nine o'clock gun booms out across the Solent as the Cubs and Akela, having bidden good-night to Father and Mother and Godmother, walk down the hill to the Stable. The sea looks like a great piece of shimmering grey silk. "Look at the little twinkle lights!" says a Cub. It is the street lamps over on the mainland, but they look like so many winking diamonds. There is quite a cluster of them on the grey ghost of a battleship, and the old, round fort has a light which looks like the red end of a cigar. "Please, _please_ let us go down to the front and look at the little twinkling lights," beg the Cubs. So, on condition they get undressed in five minutes, Akela says "Yes." A few minutes later the Stable and the Coach-house are having an undressing race. One of the two tiny rooms has been made into a little chapel. In less than two minutes the first Cub ready whisks once round the yard in his night-shirt, like a white moth in the dusk, and into the chapel to say his prayers. The door stands open. In the red light of the tiny lamp you can see the little white form kneeling on the floor, very quiet and devout. Presently he is silently joined by another--there is only room for two, it is such a wee chapel. Several impatient people in pyjamas think it would be fun to start jazzing in the courtyard, till Akela warns them, "No story if you start ragging." Soon all prayers are said, and the people in the Coach-house are in bed, and ready to "invite" the Stable. The Stable having been duly invited, its eight occupants come in, and each finds a place on a palliasse. It is a warm, still night. The great doors of the Coach-house stand wide open. The stars are out thick by this time. Little black bats flit and swoop about in the darkness. If you keep very still you can just hear the gentle "hshshsh, hshshsh" of the sea. The candle flickers as the night gives a little sigh. A few Cubs are rolling about on their straw beds. "Shut up, all!" commands an imperious Sixer. "Now, miss, go ahead." Akela is sitting on a palliasse already occupied by two people. Silence reigns, for these Cubs belong to a story-telling Pack, and it is almost the only time they are ever quite quiet. "Well," begins Akela, "many hundreds of years ago there lived a boy----" THE STORY OF ST. BENEDICT. Many hundreds of years ago there lived a boy called Benedict. He lived in Italy. His father and mother were rich people, and lived in a beautiful house on a beautiful estate. St. Benedict and his twin sister must have been very happy playing among the olive-trees and vines of sunny Italy, where the sky is nearly always blue, and where there are all sorts of lovely wild-flowers and fruits we don't get in England, and lizards and butterflies and all sorts of things. St. Benedict was brought up a good Christian, though lots of the people round were still pagans in those days. There were terrible wars and troubles going on in Italy and in all the countries round, like there have been in our days. But the boy Benedict in his happy home knew little of these. Little did he know that the beautiful fields of Italy were being left to be overgrown with weeds and over-run with wild beasts; that the children had never heard of God; that the poor were dying of starvation. To him the world was a happy place, where one played and had a good time, and where people loved Christ and obeyed His words. But some day he was to learn the truth. For God was going to use the boy Benedict to do more than any _one_ man has ever done to _civilize_ the world. This story I'm telling you is the story of how St. Benedict discovered all God's great plan for him, and worked it out, bit by bit. When St. Benedict had learnt all that his tutors could teach him at home his father sent him to the great city of Rome to learn there from the scholars and learned men, and attend lectures and classes. St. Benedict was a very clever boy, and he must have got on very quickly and pleased his masters very much. He could probably have carried off all sorts of prizes and won great fame and praise for himself, but there was something which stopped him caring for things like that. In the great city of Rome he saw two things--one of them was all sorts of wicked, selfish, horrible, and ungodly pleasures in which men wasted their lives and altogether forgot God; and the other was the beautiful, holy lives of the Christians, many of whom could tell wonderful stories of the martyrs who had been killed in Rome not so very long before, and whose bodies lay in the Catacombs. There were some beautiful churches in the city, and St. Benedict loved to go to the solemn services. As he knelt there in the holy stillness, or listened to the chanting, he began to _think_. And more and more he felt that all the glamour and selfish pleasures and greediness of the people was stupid and wrong, and that what was really worth having was a good conscience, and peace, and the friendship of God. And as he thought, he began to care less and less for his learning and his chances of glory, and he began to feel as if he wanted to get right away from people and have the chance of thinking about God. When St. Benedict had these feelings he knew they came from God, and so, instead of not listening and just letting himself get keen on his study and his amusements, he made up his mind that he would always _do his best_ to follow God's will, and would keep his heart _always listening_, so that if God _did_ want to call him away to some special kind of life he would be ready to hear and to obey. Well, when anybody does this God does not fail to tell him what to do, and so, when St. Benedict had been seven years in Rome, and was still only a boy, God made known to him that he must leave Rome, and his friends and his masters, and go right away into the mountains. His old nurse, Cyrilla, had always stayed with him, faithfully; and now she decided to go with him wherever it was that God was leading him. So, one day, St. Benedict and Cyrilla set out secretly, and made their way by hidden paths towards the mountains. At last they reached a certain village, and St. Benedict went into the church to pray God to make known His will. When he came out the peasants who lived near the church pressed him to stay with them. St. Benedict took their kindness as a sign that it was God's will, so he and his old nurse settled down in the village. It was while the boy was living here that (so the old books tell us) a miracle happened which made people feel sure that God was specially pleased with him. One day, as St. Benedict returned home from the church where he had been praying, he found his old nurse very unhappy; in fact, she was crying. This distressed him very much, because he hated to see other people miserable. At first he wondered why Cyrilla was crying, and then he saw the cause. She had accidentally broken an earthenware bowl that one of the good villagers had lent her. Full of pity for his old friend, St. Benedict took up the two pieces and went outside the house with them, and knelt down. Then he prayed very hard that the bowl might be mended. And, as he opened his eyes and looked at it, sure enough, it was whole! Very pleased, and thinking how good God is to those who really trust Him, he ran into the house and gave it to Cyrilla. St. Benedict had not thought of himself, but only of God's wonderful power and kindness. But Cyrilla and the village people to whom she told the miracle all began to talk a lot about St. Benedict, and say he was a young saint, since he could do miracles. People even came in from the places round to stare at him. Do you think this pleased him? No; he wasn't that sort of boy. If he had been, God would never have done anything for him. He was very distressed at the way people went on; and more and more he felt that God was calling him away, and had something very important to say to him. And one day it came to him that he must leave even his faithful old nurse and go away. You can imagine how terribly sad he must have been at that thought, not only because he loved her and had always had her near him since he could remember, but because he knew how very, very much she loved him, and that if he left her she would be sad and lonely, with no one to comfort her. But you remember what I told you about how St. Benedict had made up his mind to do his best always to carry out God's will, and not give in to himself and pretend he had not heard; so, because he knew that it is more important to be faithful to God than to any person on earth, he made up his mind to go away. He did not tell his old nurse, but one day he set out, alone. He must have felt very strongly that it was God's will, otherwise he would not have dared go out all alone and unarmed into the mountains, and with no money or food. Don't you think it was very brave of him? Perhaps you think it was foolish? Well, people have often been thought fools for doing God's will faithfully, but in the end God proves that really they were quite right. Anyway, something very soon happened to St. Benedict to show that God was with him. As he tramped on, along the mountain-sides, between the flower-covered banks and thickets full of birds' songs, he prayed to God to guide him in the right way. And so when, after some hours of solitary tramping, he saw a man coming towards him out of a lonely mountain pass, he felt sure this was someone sent by God to help him. The man's clothes showed that he was a monk. As he drew near he looked curiously at St. Benedict, wondering who this noble-looking boy could be walking all alone among the wild mountains. He, himself, had come out there to meditate and be alone with God and his thoughts. Stopping St. Benedict, he asked him kindly who he was and where he was going. St. Benedict quite simply told him the truth: that he had come out to seek God's will, and didn't know where he was going, except that he was seeking some place where he could live hidden from the whole world. At first the monk Romanus tried to argue with him and show him that it was foolish to come out like that alone. But St. Benedict spoke so wonderfully about God's call that Romanus saw he was right, and made up his mind to help him find somewhere where he could live alone for a while. So he led him up a steep winding path, and showed him a cave opening into the rugged mountain-side. The cave was about seven feet deep and four feet broad, and there was just room on the rocky ledge outside to make a little garden. St. Benedict stepped into the cave with his heart full of joy, feeling sure that at last he had found the place he was seeking. Before going away, Romanus gave him a long garment made of sheep-skin, which was what the monks of those days used to wear. He also promised to supply him with food. His monastery was far up, on the top of the great rock in which the cave was. He said that every day he would let down a basket with bread in it for St. Benedict, and he promised faithfully to keep his secret. Then he went away. What happened in the time that followed no one knows--it is a secret between God and St. Benedict. But we can guess that God made known many wonderful things to His faithful young servant--things that later he was to teach to thousands of men; and that He filled him with grace and strength to do what he would have to do, to make the world a better place. Also, we can be sure that he was very, very happy, in spite of the loneliness, and the dark, cold nights, and the hard ground he had for his bed. Three years St. Benedict lived like this, and then one sunny Easter morning God made known St. Benedict's secret to a certain holy man who lived in those parts, and told him to go to the cave and take St. Benedict some of his Easter fare. St. Benedict was very pleased to see him, but surprised to hear it was Easter, for he had lost all count of time. So the priest laid out the good things he had brought, and they said grace, and then they had a meal together, and then a talk. After the priest had gone some shepherds and country-folk climbed up the steep little path to see where he had been, and they found St. Benedict. He welcomed them, and spoke so wonderfully to them that they saw he was a man specially taught by God. They felt he was their true friend and loved them for God's sake, and so they often climbed the steep path to visit him and ask his help and advice. But very soon news of him spread beyond the mountain shepherds, and people of all sorts from far and near flocked to see the holy man and ask his prayers and his advice. Sad, wicked people went away with sorrow for their sins, and became good. Cowards went away full of strength and courage. And many people began to learn a new way of serving God truly, always _doing their best_ for love of Him, and never "giving in to themselves." It was then that God allowed St. Benedict to have a terrible temptation, to test him. Suddenly he felt within him a great desire to give up all he was doing for God and return to the wicked city he had left and live a life of ease and pleasure. It was the Devil who put this thought into his mind, but God's grace in St. Benedict was stronger than the Devil. With all his heart he vowed that he would _never_ give up doing God's will, and, to punish himself for the thoughts that had entered his mind, he threw himself into a mass of sharp, thorny briars and stinging-nettles, so that his flesh was all torn and stung. After that he was so strong that no temptation was ever able to conquer him, and he was able to lead thousands of souls to victory. The time had come when God wanted St. Benedict to leave his cave. He had learnt what God had to tell him in secret, and now his great work was to begin. A large number of men who wished to serve God with all their hearts began to collect round St. Benedict. Gradually they formed twelve monasteries, all within about two miles, and got St. Benedict to rule over them all. This was the beginning of St. Benedict's great work for God. He drew up a Rule which showed men how they could live in the way most pleasing to God. It was not so terribly hard as to be impossible for ordinary men, like some of the holy hermits and Saints in the past had taught. And so thousands and thousands of men began to promise to keep this Rule and to live together in monasteries, doing good. St. Benedict had many wonderful adventures during the rest of his life, but I must keep those stories to tell you another time. The end of this one is that after God had called St. Benedict to Heaven, his great work went on. His followers began to travel all over the world as missionaries, teaching the pagans about Christ, and bringing peace and goodness to the poor, sad, wicked world. They cultivated the land and made it fruitful; and built churches and hospitals and schools; and taught the children, and looked after the poor, and _civilized_ the world. It was they who brought the Christian Faith to England, for St. Augustine was one of St. Benedict's monks, and did more than anybody else to make England the great country which she became; for before St. Benedict's monks came the country was all wild and the Saxons were heathen. So, you see, by listening for God's voice, and doing his best to obey faithfully, the boy Benedict became one of the men who have done very great things for the world. * * * * * "Tell us some more," said the Cubs sleepily. "Tell us all the adventures St. Benedict had." "No, no," said Akela; "that was a long story. Now you must go to sleep and dream about St. Benedict, and then you will be ready to get up and have a glorious day to-morrow." So the Stable boys stumbled sleepily back to their own quarters, and Akela tucked each of them up in his blankets. A quarter of an hour later everyone was asleep. As Akela crept softly round she could only hear the regular breathing of sound sleepers. True, at midnight Patsy made some loud conversation, and thought he could do without any blankets at all, but he did not wake up even then, and was soon tucked up quietly again. So ended the First Day. THE SECOND DAY The sun has already been up some time when the first Cub wakes up and wonders where he is. Finding he is in camp, he feels sure it would be a good turn if he thumped the sleeping form next him and woke him up, that he, too, may have the delight of remembering that "to-morrow" has actually come--the first real day in camp! These two make conversation to each other, and become so cheery that soon everybody else has woke up. It is 6.30, so Akela gives leave for everyone to turn out. There is a tap in the Stable-yard. Soon everyone is washing in a tin basin. The two cooks have dressed quickly, said their prayers in the little chapel, and are off up the hill to the camp field. At the Stable it is some time before everyone is thoroughly washed and dressed, beds are tidied, and everything spick and span. Then the crowd of happy Cubs race off to the field. The fire is burning merrily, and a big dixie of porridge bubbling for all it is worth. Away, between the trees, you can see the blue sea glinting and sparkling. Overhead the sea-gulls circle on silver wings, and cry good-morning to each other as they pass with swoops and dips, like so many tiny aeroplanes. The dew is thick on the grass, the blackbirds sing, the sun shines, and the camp-fire sends a steady column of blue smoke into the fresh morning air. How different to early morning in London! With a howl of joy the Cubs scatter over the field. Here comes Godmother in a big blue overall and a sun hat; and Father and Mother appear at the same moment from the farther corner of the field. They take over the cooking, and the two cooks run off for a bit of sport after their labours. Then everyone collects in the council circle for prayers. A short run wild again, and then a series of whistle-blasts calls the Pack in for breakfast. In come rushing the ravenous Cubs, and each squats down where the cooks have placed their mugs in a circle. Caps off, and all stand quiet for a moment, for grace, and then porridge and mountains of bread-and-butter begin to disappear at a great rate. Breakfast finished, the pots and the pans washed up, the Pack invades the post office, and, armed with picture postcards and pencils, the Cubs squat along the sea-wall and write to their mothers. That duty done, and spades, pails, boats, and shrimping-nets bought, they lose no more time in getting down on to the shore. It is a happy and hungry crowd with wet and rumpled hair that turns up again at camp, all ready for the splendid dinner Mother and Father have cooked. After dinner a rest, while Godmother reads aloud. The day ends up with a wonderful shrimping-party. Besides shrimps, the Cubs catch every kind of funny little sea-creature--star-fishes, jelly-fishes, baby sea-anemones, tiny, tiny crabs, a devil-fish, baby dabs, and everything else you can think of. The tide is right out, and there are mysterious green pools under the pier, full of feathery red sea-weed and little darting fishes. Of course, Sam falls into one in his clothes, and comes out looking like a drowned rat. Akela wrings him out and sends him home to get into dry clothes, for the sun is beginning to sink. Supper, night prayers, a race down the hill, a few minutes, to see the little twinkling lights, and the happy family is getting undressed in double quick time, for Akela has promised a good story to-night--a "nexiting" one about a robber chief. Soon everyone in the coach-house is settled on his palliasse, and has invited a Stable Cub to share it with him. The candle has been lighted and stuck with a dab of grease on the ledge. "Fire ahead, miss," commands a Sixer. Silence reigns. "The story I told you yesterday," said Akela, "was about a boy who started good, and went on being good all his life. To-night I am going to tell you about a boy who started good, but became bad, and was very wicked until he grew up, when something happened which sent him on the great adventure of serving God." THE STORY OF ST. GUTHLAC. Many hundreds of years ago, in the days when England was ruled over by the Saxon Kings, there lived a boy called Guthlac. He was a very intelligent boy, not dull, like some children; he was obedient to the grown-ups, and, as the old book says, "blithe in countenance, pure and clean and innocent in his ways; and in him was the lustre of Divine brightness so shining that all men who saw him could perceive the promise of what should hereafter happen to him." But when he got to be about fifteen he forgot all the things he had been taught as a child. When he felt a kind of restless longing for adventure rising up inside him, and a desire to do wild things, and a cruel feeling that he did not care what happened to other people so long as he had a good time, he _gave in to himself_ and began the most wild and reckless life you can imagine. He armed himself with a great ash-bow and a sharp spear from his father's armoury. He slung a shield on his back, and stuck his belt full of knives and daggers and arrows. Then he went about and collected a gang of all the wildest boys he could find, and put himself at their head. Then, going through all the country round, these wild boys attacked anybody they thought was an enemy of theirs, paid off old grudges, killed and wounded innocent people, set fire to their houses, and did all the damage they could. Mad with excitement and lust for blood, they soon became just a robber band, attacking friend and foe alike, killing just for the pleasure of killing, or sacking farms and houses to satisfy their greed. They knew all the woods and by-ways so well that no one could catch them. After a time they began to build themselves huts where they could sleep, and also hide the treasure they had plundered from rich men. You can't imagine any wicked or horrible thing they did not do. And, of course, they forgot God entirely, though once they had been Christian children and had been brought up to know and love God. Nine years passed like this, and then something happened. One night as Guthlac, the chief, lay on his bed of rushes and soft, warm skins in the darkness of the wooden cabin, thinking over the excitements of the day and planning all the wicked things he would do the next day, a wonderful thought flashed into his mind, and it seemed to swallow up all the other thoughts. He lay still, gazing into the darkness and trying to understand what it was. Then, gradually, he found that it was _God_ he was thinking about--God, Whom he had forgotten for nine long years. He did not turn away his mind, but went on thinking about God until his heart was full of a kind of glow that was _love_. He was surprised, for he knew he did not really love God; for he was spending all his days fighting against Him by every wicked thing he could imagine. And then he began to understand that this feeling inside him was sent by God--it was God's love for him, and not his love for God. Could it really be that God loved him? He was so very wicked and cruel, and God--God was so good and just and merciful. The robbers, sleeping on their rush beds, breathed heavily; they were tired after a hard day. Guthlac listened to their breathing. They were his men; they obeyed him as their chief. He remembered the day, nine years ago, when he had thought of the bold robbers and sea-kings and brave men of the past, and longed to show that he was as daring as they, and could lead men to war. But as he lay, very wide awake, with the strange feeling of God near, he began to think of other great men he had heard of in his childhood--men just as brave and daring as the sea-kings, just as good leaders of men, more famous and wonderful, and--lovers of God. God loved them, and they loved God and gave all their strength and courage to serve Him. They were His special friends. And now it seemed to Guthlac that God was filling his heart with love and asking him to be His special friend. A great feeling of shame came over him. How could God forgive him and want him for a friend after all the terrible things he had done? But suddenly a great longing filled him to be one of God's special friends, and obey Him, and go on always loving Him. He longed for Christ to become his Chief and Leader; and then he began to understand that this would mean he must tell God from the bottom of his heart that he was sorry for all the wicked things he had ever done, and must promise on his honour that he would never again do a single one of them. Guthlac sat up in bed and thought hard. This would mean that he must give up being a robber, give up his free life in the woods, give up leading his daring followers, give up all the unlawful pleasures of which his life was made up. It would be a terribly big giving up . . . but then, what a big, big thing he would get in exchange! He would get the friendship of God, and the knowledge that he had become very pleasing to Him. Stretching wide his arms in the darkness, he told God that he gave up _all_, _all_, _all_ that was wicked, and he begged to be forgiven and made clean once more, like an innocent little child. Then, very happy, he lay back on his bed of skins and fell asleep. The sun was streaming into the long, low room when Guthlac awoke. It was a glorious English spring morning. The sleeping robbers were stirring, one by one, beneath their warm deer-skins. They little thought that their chief, sitting up in bed with the morning sun in his eyes, was thinking about God, and how wonderful it was that He had come to him in the night and called him to become one of His friends. It was rather difficult to believe, in the light of day, with the coarse laughter and wild voices of the robbers ringing out on the morning air, and yet Guthlac knew it was true, and _knew that he had made a great promise_. He was too brave a man to go back on a promise, however hard to keep, so he stood up with a strong purpose in his heart. The first step would be to tell his men. That would be terribly hard. He suddenly felt very lonely, and wished there was someone else there to back him up. Then he remembered that the Lord Christ was his Chief. Surely He would be near and help him in his first adventure? So he stepped out into the dewy woods, where all the birds were singing as if they, too, loved God with all their hearts. And he called his men about him to hear the important thing he had to say. They all came crowding round, expecting to hear some splendid new adventure that Guthlac, their chief, had planned for them. Then he stood up, taller than any of them and more splendid, and in his clear, ringing voice he told them that a wonderful thing had happened--God had called him to join the band of His brave friends. When God calls there's no hanging back. And so he had given up for ever the robber's life. He was no longer their chief. He had found a new Chief for himself, and was off, at once, on the adventure of God's service. And so he bade them--good-bye. The robbers looked at each other in horror and surprise. What had happened to their chief? Was he mad? What would happen to them without their brave leader? Falling down on their knees about him, they begged him to stay; but Guthlac's eyes were already looking away at the new adventure he saw before him. The pleasures of his old life did not seem worth anything now; he scarcely heard the voices of his friends as they pleaded with him. At last they gave up all hope of persuading him, and Guthlac walked away through the woods, leaving his old life behind him for ever. He did not know where to go at first, but he felt sure Christ, his new Chief, would help him; and, sure enough, he presently remembered that not very far away there was an abbey of St. Benedict's monks. He knew those men were all Christ's friends, and he was quite sure they would welcome him. So he walked through the woods until he came to the abbey. There he knocked loudly on the great door, and presently a brother opened it. He must have been terrified when he saw the tall young chieftain standing before him, for all the countryside feared Guthlac. But very soon the brother saw the love of God shining in Guthlac's eyes, and the gentle humility in his voice showed that he was no longer the cruel robber, but a servant of Christ. The monks took Guthlac in and made him welcome. Soon he found that conquering himself and the Devil was a harder fight than he had ever fought against his enemies in the world, but he threw himself into the battle with all his heart. He did not do things by halves, but began to serve God with all his might, because before he had fought so hard against Him. Remembering how often he had got drunk with the wine he had stolen, he now would not drink one single drop even of the wine the monks were allowed to have. At first the brothers did not like this, but soon they began to understand the strong resolve of the young robber, and, seeing how very pure his heart was and how much he loved God, they all loved him. The curious old book which tells all about him says: "He was in figure tall, and pure in body, cheerful in mood, and in countenance handsome; he was modest in his discourse, and he was patient and humble, and ever in his heart was Divine love hot and burning." For two years he lived in that monastery, and then he began to long to live a harder life for Christ's sake. He heard about the hermits of old days who used to live apart from other men in wild places, and he got leave from the Abbot to follow their example. So one day he set out. He did not choose the beautiful green woods that he had once roamed in, but turned towards a most horrible place--a great marsh full of pools of slimy black water, and reeds, and rough scrub and bushes. It was the most lonely place you can imagine, and people feared to go there because they said it was haunted by evil spirits. On an island in this lonely fen St. Guthlac settled down with two servants. It was a very hard life, and the Devil sent him all sorts of horrible temptations and haunted him and gave him no rest; but St. Guthlac rejoiced in the chance of fighting under his Captain, Christ, against the evil spirits. It would take too long now to tell you of all the wonderful things that happened to St. Guthlac on this island--we must keep them for another time. For God rewarded his love and his courage by giving him a wonderful gift of miracles and of great wisdom, so that the news of him gradually spread all over the country, and people began to understand that the great robber had now become a great Saint. And so from far and near, the people flocked to him. But one thing more about him I will tell you. Though he had now no human companions, and chose to set all his love on God, he had a wonderful friendship with the wild animals that shared the island with him. In those days there were many wild beasts in England, such as wolves. These would come to St. Guthlac and eat out of his hand. Even the fishes would come to him; and as to the birds, they did not fear him at all. The swallows, which are very timid birds, would come and settle all about on him, and there were some ravens which were a trouble because they were so tame and would come and steal things from his house. Once a holy man called Wilfrith, who had come to see St. Guthlac, was surprised to see the swallows settle on him, and (as the old book says) asked him "wherefore the wild birds of the waste sat so submissively upon him." St. Guthlac explained to him in these words: "Hast thou never learnt, Brother Wilfrith, in Holy Writ, that he who hath led his life after God's will, the wild beasts and wild birds have become the more intimate with him? And the man who would pass his life apart from worldly men, to him the angels approach nearer." So it was that the wild place called Croyland became a place of God, and St. Guthlac, through God's power, was able to do more good to his fellow-men than ever he had done them harm in his wild days. But though St. Guthlac was doing miracles as wonderful as those of the Old Testament prophets, and preaching in his wilderness as wonderfully as St. John the Baptist did in his, God did not mean to leave him there very long, for He wished to have His brave and true friend in heaven. After fifteen years St. Guthlac, who was still almost a young man, fell ill. Knowing that God was calling him to Heaven, he gladly began to prepare. His illness lasted only seven days, and he himself knew that he would die on the eighth. But he had nothing to fear, for he had so truly repented of his sins that night when God spoke to him first that they had been all washed away. So he lay in his little house waiting. And when one of his faithful servants, who was some way off, at his prayers, chanced to look up, he saw the house with a kind of bright cloud of glory round it. And this brightness stayed there till day broke. And at dawn St. Guthlac called his servant and gave him last messages for his friends. "And after that," says the old book, "he raised his eyes to heaven and stretched out his arms, and then sent forth his spirit with joy and bliss to the eternal happiness of the heavenly kingdom." * * * * * "That was a good one," said the Cubs. But they were too sleepy to ask for another story, as usual, and in less than five minutes every one was asleep, sailing away through the dream-sea towards the golden, sunlit country called "To-morrow." THE THIRD DAY Seven o'clock and no one awake yet! Akela crept softly out and roused the cooks. Sam woke quickly, but Bill was just like a hermit crab--the more you poked him, the more he drew back into his shell and hid his head under his blanket. Presently, however, he began to uncurl, opened his eyes very wide, sat up, and discovered it was not his mother calling him, but that he was at camp. He got up quickly, and was the first ready. Gradually they all woke up, but no one was in such a hurry to turn out this morning. They put on uniform and boots and stockings, for it was not to be a shore day. Breakfast over, haversacks were packed with grub, and the whole party tramped off along the sea-wall to Ryde. The first thing that happened was a beautiful service in a very beautiful little church, for on this day (August 15th) the Pack always goes to church. Then five of the younger ones who didn't fancy a long tramp went home with Father and Mother, and the rest set off on an adventure. Along the roads and lanes they went, but the way did not seem long, for they talked of so many interesting things. After about two miles, as they were going along a narrow lane, they suddenly came on a man sitting on the bank, who stood up and said, "Hullo!" The Cubs gave a yell and fell upon him, for, you see, he was their Scoutmaster. He led the way past an old ruin, under a ruined archway, and along a little path, till they got to a great building called Quarr Abbey, where he was staying. There, under the shade of the trees, the weary travellers sat and had an enormous lunch. Three big jugs of cider had been provided for them. It was the first time they had ever tasted cider, and Akela began to be afraid they would never be able to walk home straight if they drank any more; so it was decided to pour the remainder into the water-bottles, and take it back for the five boys in camp. After dinner the Scoutmaster took the Cubs for a row in the creek, and afterwards they bathed. Then they had a good tea, and were allowed to see over the abbey and go down in the crypt under the church. It interested them very much to see a wonderful library of eighty thousand books! Some were hundreds and hundreds of years old, and all done in writing and painting, because there was no printing in those days. Some were books done in the very first days of printing. There was one enormous book you could hardly carry, and by it a tiny wee little book you could put in your waistcoat-pocket. At last it was time to go home, and they set out once more to tramp along the lanes. The evening sun shone down through the thick green leaves, and the blackbirds sang as if they were saying all sorts of important things to each other, if only you could understand. The grey, broken arches of the ruined abbey seemed to tell sad tales of long ago--seemed full of secrets nobody will ever hear. "It's been a good adventure," said the Cubs, and they tramped home contentedly, for their minds were full of things to think about. Even at the end of a four-mile tramp they were ready to run up the grassy hill into the camp, each keen to be the first one to tell Father and Mother about the eighty thousand books, and the ruin, and the cider, and the crypt. The five Cubs enjoyed the cider, and everyone talked at the same time round the camp-fire that night, all telling different things. "Story to-night, miss?" said a Cub, suddenly. "Yes," said Akela. "Good one?" "Yes--a very good one about a soldier-Saint." "Hooray! Buck up, boys, and let's get down to the Stable for the story," cried the Cub, cramming the last bit of bread-and-cheese into his mouth. The trampers were quite ready to lie down on their beds that night. "It's been the best day we've had yet," they said; "and now, please, tell the story." So Akela curled up on someone's palliasse, and silence fell. THE STORY OF ST. MARTIN. A little more than three hundred years after Our Lord formed the Christian Church and then went back to Heaven, having promised always to be in spirit with His people, a boy called Martin was born in Hungary. This boy God chose to be a very great leader among His people, the Christians, and so He began to arrange Martin's life in such a way that he should be led, little by little, to the fulfilment of God's plans. Now, part of God's plan was that Martin should be given the chance of _conquering himself_, and, with the addition of a lot of God's grace, be made strong and able to bear bravely the terrible dangers and hardships that were bound to go with a high position in the Church of Christ in those days of persecution. This story I am going to tell you is the story of all the hard things and disappointments and adventures God sent to the boy Martin, in order to prepare him well, and bring him, at last, to the position he was to fill in the Church. Well, the first thing that happened was that the Holy Spirit put into the little boy's heart the idea of praying to a wonderful, unknown being, Whom he called "the God of the Christians." You see, his father was a pagan, and Martin had never been taught anything about God, and must have picked up this idea all on his own. He had no church to go to, or anything, so he set to and built himself a little chapel on the top of a hill near his home, and there he often ran off and prayed to the God he knew so little about, but Who, he felt sure, was a kind and loving friend of little boys. Well, God was pleased to see that Martin had answered so well to the idea He had sent into his heart, so He rewarded him by making something happen, which was the next bit of His plan, so to speak. Martin's father was a soldier, and had risen from the ranks to the position of Colonel in the Roman Army. To repay him for his good services he was given a farm in Italy. And so, when Martin was ten years old, his father and mother moved to this farm, and Martin found himself living in a country where the Christian Faith was openly practised and people loved and served "the God of the Christians," Whom Martin had so much longed to know more about. You can imagine how pleased the boy was; and before long he had discovered the house of the priests who taught young pagans all about the Christian faith, and had begun to go to them regularly to learn. His father did not take much notice of this, and thought his small son would soon forget all about it when he got old enough to enter the life his father had decided he should follow--the exciting life of a soldier. But Martin was not dreaming of battles and the adventures of a soldier's life, for he had discovered that among Christians there was such a thing as specially giving yourself to God, and bravely breaking away from all the things you love by nature--like riches and fine clothes, and nice food, and friends, and adventures in the world, so as to love Christ only, and follow the adventures of the spirit to which He will lead His loyal soldiers. While still a boy Martin decided that this was the life for him, and he began to long to leave his comfortable home and go and join the hermits who lived in caves. So you can imagine that when his father began to talk about his starting his military training he was very much dismayed. Being a frank and honest kind of boy, he looked his father bravely in the face, and told him straight out that he wanted to be a Christian and give up his whole life to it. Martin's father was very angry indeed. He stormed at the boy, and when he found that was no good, he thrashed him. But nothing could make Martin change his mind, and at last he decided the only way was to run away from home. But I told you God meant Martin to become a leader. To have run away and lived with the hermits would not have given him just the kind of training he needed, and the chance of showing he could stick to God through real difficulties. So God let the next bit of His plan happen. Martin's father told the Roman officials that his son had come to the age at which all boys had to undergo their military training (though he hadn't, really). And as Martin would not go and "join up," a kind of press-gang lay in ambush one day and captured him, and he was led away in chains and forced to take the oath of military allegiance. His father being a Colonel, Martin was given a good position in the army straight off, and had his own horse and his own servant. Of course, nearly all his companions were pagans, and the life of the army was of a pretty low standard. But Martin stuck faithfully to the kind of life he knew was pleasing to God, and tried in his dealings with his fellow-men to do things in the brave, kind, generous, unselfish way Christ would have done them. Of course, this made all the soldiers and his fellow-officers love him, and they must often have wondered why he never got angry, or cheated, or grumbled and swore at unpleasant things; and why he was so very kind to his servant, and always ready to give up his place or any little privilege to other people. Though no one knew it, even his pay he gave away to the poor. And yet he was not yet a baptized Christian, for in those days people used to wait a long time and prepare themselves very carefully for the great honour of being made one of the children of God; and during this time of waiting they were called catechumens. It was at this time, while Martin's regiment was stationed in France, that a very wonderful thing happened to him--for God was still planning his life and giving him chances; and, if he took them, rewarding him with special graces which should turn him gradually into a brave "soldier of Jesus Christ." One cold wintry day, as the wind whistled down the narrow streets of Amiens, Martin's troop came clattering through the old gateway, the soldiers wrapping their great military cloaks close round them, for the bitter French winter seemed to freeze their Southern blood. By the gate of the city they noticed, as they swung by, an old, ragged man. The wind fluttered his tattered rags about, and he stretched out his thin hands, all blue with cold, hoping for a few pence to buy himself some food. The soldiers, however, passed him by and gave him nothing. But when Martin reached the corner and saw the piteous sight his heart was touched, and he reined in his horse. He felt in his pockets, but, alas! they were empty, for he had given away all he had to some other poor person. He was very sad, because he always felt the poor were a kind of _chance_ given him by God of showing his love for the Lord Christ, Who had said that if you served the poor and naked and hungry and unhappy you really served _Him_. Well, Martin felt he simply _couldn't_ pass on and give the old man nothing. And suddenly the idea came to him that he was warm in his big cloak, and the old man very cold. What if he gave his cloak? But it was his uniform, and he knew that he must not ride out without it altogether, so he took it off, drew his sword, slashed it in half, and then, bending down with a smile, put the warm folds about the old man's cowering shoulders. Of course, the soldiers and other officers laughed; but Martin didn't care--he was willing to be what St. Paul calls "a fool for Christ's sake." And now comes the wonderful thing. That night as Martin lay in bed, asleep, a wonderful vision came to him. Suddenly his room seemed full of angels, and in the midst of them was Christ. _And_--on His shoulders was Martin's half-cloak! Then Our Lord spoke. "Martin," He said, "dost thou know this mantle?" And then He turned to the angels, and He said: "Martin, yet a catechumen, hath clothed Me with this garment." You can imagine what St. Martin felt! But besides the joy in him, there was a feeling that Our Lord was a little disappointed because he was only a catechumen still, and not yet baptized and made a real part of His Church, a real child of God. And so, feeling that God wished him to have the great honour of Baptism, he went to the priests, and started on the long, hard preparation that they used to have in those days. No meat might he have, nor wine, and he must pray a lot, and often watch in the church the whole night, and in many other ways practise not giving in to himself. Only at Easter and Whitsun were the catechumens baptized; and then they were clothed in white garments, which they wore for a week. These were meant to show the perfect purity of their souls, from which all stain of sin had been washed away by the waters of Baptism. At last the great day came, and Martin received the wonderful Sacrament with great love and humility. But now he felt that he simply couldn't let his hands be stained with the blood of his fellow-men, and that the soldier's life was not for him. And so, when the Emperor came one day and inspected his regiment, which was shortly to go into battle, he asked him if he might leave the army. "Until now I have fought for you," he said; "let me henceforth fight for God. . . . I am a soldier of Christ, and it is not lawful for me to take part in a bloody battle." The Emperor was very angry. "Coward!" he cried. "It is not religion that causes you to refuse to fight--you are _afraid_." So, to show them he was not afraid, Martin offered to go into battle in the very front rank, but to go unarmed (since he would not shed human blood). And, to show that he trusted in Christ as his protector, he said he would go without armour or helmet. His challenge was accepted, and he was put under arrest, lest he might try to escape. Of course, he spent the night praying, and the next day everyone was astonished by some strange news. The enemy had sent a despatch to sue for peace, and to say they would agree to the Emperor's terms. So there was no battle; and not only was Martin's life saved, but the lives of many other brave men. Probably the Emperor saw God's hand in the unexpected action of his powerful enemy, for he at once gave Martin leave to go free. At last Martin found himself at liberty to follow the life he had always felt called to; and once again God sent him where things should happen to him which would finally lead to the accomplishment of God's great plan. After making a pilgrimage to Rome, which was now not only the head of the worldwide Empire, but the kind of headquarters of the Christians, he returned to France, so as to put himself under the guidance of a very holy man, called St. Hilary, the Bishop of Poitiers. St. Hilary soon saw that Martin was no ordinary young soldier, but was a very promising "soldier of Jesus Christ," and that his services would be very valuable. He saw, also, that he had received a special call from God, so he proposed to ordain him deacon. But Martin was very humble, and he refused the honour. In the end he let St. Hilary ordain him exorcist. But directly after this he was ordered by God in a dream to go back to his native land and visit his relations and bring them into the Christian Faith. St. Hilary was disappointed, but he let him go, making him promise, however, that he would return to the Diocese of Poitiers, to which he now belonged. After many adventures, including falling into the hands of robbers and escaping in a marvellous way, which must have been through God's help, Martin reached his old home, and had the joy of seeing his mother received into the Church, as well as seven of his cousins and his two great-uncles. At this time the Church was being persecuted by a very strong party called the Arians. They were heretics, who taught that Our Lord was only a man and not God, and as the Church turned them out on account of their false teaching, they did nothing but fight against her. Of course, Martin, the brave soldier of Christ, stood up for what he believed, so that one day he was seized by the Arians, beaten, and banished from his own country. He began to make his way back to St. Hilary, but when he reached Milan he learned that his friend had been banished from Poitiers, and that an Arian Bishop ruled in his place. So Martin stayed at Milan; and this, too, was a part of God's plan, because it was his stay here which started him on an idea which in the end developed into one of the most important things in his life. This idea was to form a kind of little monastery outside the city, where he and a handful of other young men lived, and tried to do good and to live in a way specially pleasing to God, and more perfect than they could do in the busy rush of the ordinary world. But after a while the Arians got strong in Milan, and drove out Martin and his followers. For a while Martin and a friend of his lived as hermits on a wild little island off the coast of Spain. But, hearing that St. Hilary had been restored to his see, Martin went to Poitiers so as to fulfil his solemn promise. But once more St. Hilary was to be disappointed, for this time Martin begged to be allowed to continue his hermit's life. St. Hilary gave him leave, and Martin now withdrew to a forest about eight miles from Poitiers. Here he built himself a hut, and was soon surrounded by men who wished to lead the same kind of holy life. This was the beginning of all the wonderful monasteries of France, which civilized the whole country in time and taught it to be Christian. That Martin's new life was really pleasing to God was soon shown, for God gave him the gift of doing miracles, and twice he even raised the dead to life. You will remember how Our Lord specially promised that His faithful followers, in the years to come, should do miracles like He had done, and even greater ones. Well, St. Martin was one of the men who showed that Our Lord's promise was fulfilled. All the men to whom the Church has given the title "Saint" have done wonderful miracles, that God's name might be glorified and people see that "with God all things are possible." St. Martin now lived in very close communion with God, and his miracles showed that he was not just an _ordinary_ good man. Besides training his monks, St. Martin was working very hard among the heathen Gauls. He would press forward through the forests and preach in the little villages, and do miracles, and, after instructing the people in the true Faith, baptize them all, and leave a happy Christian village where he had found a miserable, frightened, heathen one. St. Martin's tender pity for all suffering things is shown by this little story. One day, as he walked in the country, he saw a poor, terrified hare dashing along with starting eyes, and nearly exhausted, for a party of huntsmen and their hounds were close upon it. St. Martin saw that in a few minutes it must be torn to bits by the hounds, for there was no cover for it. His tender heart longed to help it to escape, because it was weak and small and frightened. So he called out to the hounds to stop! And, strange to say, they pulled up short in their mad rush, and all stood still as if frozen to the ground, and the poor little hare scurried away into safety. Now, this kind of life was just what suited St. Martin, and he was very happy. He lived apart with God, and yet had work to do in training his monks in the way of perfection and teaching the Faith to the ignorant pagans. But he had not yet arrived at the end of God's great plan for him. And if God now called him away from the life he loved to a life he did not want at all, we must not be surprised, for Christ said that those who would be His disciples must _deny themselves_ and take up their _cross_ and follow Him, and that is what all good Christians must be ready to do--that is, live according to _the way God wants_ instead of according to the way _they want_ themselves. Well, the change came when St. Hilary died; for of course the people wanted St. Martin to become Bishop in his place. To be Bishop was a very great honour, and one that many men would have been glad to accept. But St. Martin was humble, like all Saints; and he also felt that if he was to remain pure of heart and close to God he must live in the quiet solitude and silence of his monastery, so he refused to become Bishop. But that he should be Bishop was God's will, and also the people were quite determined to have him. They got him by making him think there was a poor sick woman who wanted him to come to her. He came out of his monastery, all unsuspecting, and the people carried him off by force to Poitiers, and he had to consent to be consecrated Bishop. He did not look very like a Bishop as he was brought into the city. He was clad in a poor, thin old habit, and his head was closely shaved, as the monks were accustomed to do, and he was thin and pale with fasting and his hard life. But even his humble appearance made the people cheer him all the more; and the church was absolutely packed at the solemn service of his consecration as Bishop. Now began a life in which his own will was altogether given up to that of God. He lived in a poor little hut adjoining the church--the poorness of it pleased him; but all day he was at it, doing things for people--now visiting a sick man to pray over him, now making peace between quarrelsome people, now blessing oils, that they might bring healing to the sick; preaching sermons, talking to people, and explaining Holy Scripture in the way he could do so wonderfully; visiting his priests, or listening to the worries and troubles they came to tell him; and when there was nothing else, there was always a crowd of people waiting just to see their beloved Bishop's holy face and go away cheered with a patient smile from him. But just sometimes he slipped away for a little peace alone with God, at a beautiful monastery called Marmontier, which he formed near the city, and which later became very famous, and kept the Rule of St. Benedict I told you about before. There were many things that were serious worries and very bitter sorrows and trials to St. Martin at this time, but I can't tell you all about these now. But there were also joys; and one of these I will tell you about, because it was the companionship of a little boy. He was nearly ten when St. Martin baptized him and then adopted him. As they travelled together soon after the boy's Baptism, and while he still had on the beautiful white robe I told you about, which showed outwardly the new purity of his soul, they came to the River Loire. A little way ahead of them they saw a poor blind beggar waiting for someone to help him across. "Son," said St. Martin to the boy, Victorius, "go to that man; wash his face and eyes with water from the river; then bring him to me." So the boy went and did as St. Martin had told him; and as soon as he had washed the poor man's eyes, the man opened them and found he could see! With joy he looked about at the blue sky and the river; and when he heard that it was the holy Bishop who had sent the white-robed boy to him, he praised God for what had happened, and ran and fell down at St. Martin's feet. The poor beggar was very excited about it all, and didn't know how to thank St. Martin and the boy. So St. Martin said: "Calm thyself, cease talking, and come; for with me in this boat thou shalt cross the river." So the beggar stayed with them three days, and Victorius was allowed to look after him, and, as the old book says, "eagerly brought him everything to eat that he liked best." Victorius stayed always with St. Martin, and went about everywhere with him, scarcely ever leaving his side. Even to the church he would go with him for the night offices; or on his tours visiting the churches or preaching to the heathen. St. Martin taught Victorius, and in return the boy waited on him; also, I think, he must have cheered up the old Bishop, and often made him feel a boy again. But don't you think Victorius was a very lucky boy? He saw a great many wonderful miracles of the Saint, and was even allowed to have a hand in the doing of some of them, as in the case of the blind beggar. When Victorius was old enough, St. Martin made him a priest, and _himself_ cut off the young man's hair in the way priests used to have it cut. There are a great many more wonderful stories about St. Martin which I haven't time to tell you now; but gradually, gradually he was establishing the Christian Faith very firmly in France. God's great plan was being fully worked out, for, you see, St. Martin had never resisted God's will in any point; always he had done just what he felt God was gently leading him to do, never mind what it cost him at the time. And so he took each step that God arranged for him, and each one led on to the next, and all led on to the wonderful life of building up the Church of Christ, and making it bigger, stronger, purer, more healthy; and the great work, too, of turning a heathen land into a powerful Christian country. At last came the day when the tired old Bishop felt, with unspeakable joy, that he was to go and receive his reward at the hands of Christ, Whom he had loved so faithfully and so long, and was to enter into his rest. One day, after a long journey, St. Martin was thinking of returning to his beloved Marmontier, when a great weakness came over him. "The moment of my deliverance is at hand," he said. His monks and other faithful companions were nearly broken-hearted. "Oh, Father, will you then leave us?" they cried. "Ravening wolves will fall on your flock, and who will protect it when the shepherd is struck? We know your longing to depart and to be with Christ, but your reward is assured and will be greater by delay. Have pity on us who must remain." So St. Martin prayed a beautiful prayer, because he loved his children more than himself, and he was even willing to put off his reward and his longed-for rest for love of them. "Lord," he said, "if indeed I still be necessary to Thy people, I refuse not the labour. Let only Thy will be done." [Illustration: S. MARTIN, VICTORIUS AND THE BLIND BEGGAR. _See page 39._ ] But it was not Our Lord's will that His faithful soldier should fight any longer. Christ was waiting for him, all ready to say, "Well done, good and faithful servant, enter thou into the joy of thy Lord." And so, lying humbly upon a bed of sackcloth, St. Martin, Apostle of France, finished the work that God had given him to do, and passed into the glory and eternal rest of the Blessed. THE FOURTH DAY A gorgeous day of steady, hot sun that made the sea sparkle like a million diamonds scattered on a great stretch of blue, blue satin. The tide was very far out, leaving a golden stretch of sand that simply asked to be tunnelled into and dug into holes and trenches and castles. The Cubs all got into their bathing-costumes (the Cubs' "costumes" were _mostly_ bare Cub!), and spent the whole morning burrowing like moles into the sand, and getting cool in the sea when they felt like it. Akela tried to write something "very important," but the Cubs didn't seem to think it nearly as important as Akela did, and not much writing got done. After dinner and rest, when the tide had come up, like a great green monster swallowing up the shore, and clutching with foamy fingers at the rocks, Akela hired a boat and took half the Cubs at a time for a row, while the other half ran along the shore ready to scramble in, when their turn came. The wind had got up, and out to sea there were no end of "white horses" shaking their manes and galloping after each other. Do you know what "white horses" are? They are the white crests of the waves that break out all over the sea on windy days. Some of the "white horses" came galloping close in to shore, and the Cubs had a very exciting time landing to give the others a turn. This is how they did it. One large Cub rolled up his shorts as far as they would go, and stood ready in the bow. Akela then turned the boat shorewards suddenly, and pulled at the oars for dear life, and all the Cubs helped by cheering. "Crash--scrunch," the boat went ashore; the Cub in the bow leapt out, and held her nose steady while everyone else scrambled out. A few "white horses" jumped over the stern and made things a bit wet, but nobody minded. In scrambled the next boatful of Cubs, and, with a good shove, the boat was out again. A very little make-believe and you were lifeboat-men landing survivors from a wreck. There was to be a long and _very exciting_ story to-night, so the Cubs bustled down to the Stable extra early, and were undressed before you could say "Jack Robinson." In fact, Terry began to undress in the street, and was out in the Stable-yard in his night-shirt before Akela and the last Cub had got through the gate. "Tell us a long, long, long one," begged the Cubs; "we aren't a bit sleepy. Let it last till midnight." "I'll tell as long as the candle lasts," said Akela, sticking a stump of candle on the ledge. The Cubs curled up, and the candle-light fell in a golden flicker on their ruddy, sunburnt faces. Fifteen pairs of eyes were fixed on Akela. You couldn't hear a straw rustle. Only the faint "Swish-sh-sh--_Sha-a-a-ah_" of the "white horses" breaking on the shore broke the stillness. "Now we are going back, back, back into a thousand years ago," began Akela, and the Cubs gave a wriggle of satisfaction, and prepared to take that mighty journey with the greatest ease. THE STORY OF ST. EDMUND, KING AND MARTYR. Now we are going back, back, back into a thousand years ago, and more. We shall stay in England, but it is a strange, wild England, covered with deep, mysterious green forests, where speckled deer roam about, and on moonlight nights you can hear the wolves howling. The Englishmen of these days are nearly as fierce as the wolves. If you met one coming down a forest path I believe you'd be a bit afraid of him, with his fierce eyes and shaggy head of hair, his round shield and sharp spear. A good many of these Englishmen are still heathens. But St. Benedict's monks have been hard at work for the last few hundred years turning the wild country into the beautiful England we know, and the fierce, cruel Saxons into brave Christian knights, with kindly, noble hearts as well as fearless spirits. Well, in a part of the country called East Anglia there lived an old King called Offa. He was a Christian, and descended from a line of brave and noble Kings called the Uffings. Poor old Offa was very sad, because he felt he was getting old, and he thought that when he died the royal line of Uffings would end, for he had no son to succeed him. As a matter of fact he _had_ got a son, but many years before God had called this boy to give up all thoughts of worldly glory and become a holy hermit, giving up his life to prayer. When God calls a man to serve Him and Him alone, He does not let the world suffer by his loss. God had a plan of His own for replacing Offa's hermit son by one of the most glorious Kings that ever reigned in England, and it is the wonderful story of how he was found, and of his thrilling adventures as the young King of East Anglia, that I'm going to tell you to-night. Well, something--perhaps it was a whisper from the Holy Spirit--made old King Offa feel that if he prayed very hard he might in some wonderful way obtain an heir to his throne. In those days, when people wanted to pray very hard and show God they _really_ wanted a thing, and really believed He would give it them, they used to do what was called "going on a pilgrimage." It was like _doing_ instead of only _saying_ a great prayer, for the whole, long, dangerous journey was one act of faith and devotion or of thanksgiving. So old Offa set out on a pilgrimage to the very best place you could pilgrimage to--the land where Our Blessed Lord lived and died, where there are still the very same rocky paths His Blessed Feet touched, the same mountains and lakes His Eyes rested on, the very hill where His Precious Blood poured down from the Cross, dyeing the grass and the little white daisies red. Somehow the King felt that if he could go and pray where Our Lord had prayed he would get some wonderful answer. So he started off, crossed the blue sea and landed on the opposite coast. Now, God is so ready to grant the prayers of people who have so much love and faith that He sometimes answers almost before they have asked. That's what happened with the old King. His way lay through Saxony, the kingdom of his cousin Acmund. One day he rode up with his men-at-arms to the Court, and decided to spend a few days there. Acmund, of course, welcomed his cousin, and received him joyfully to the palace. Well, as King Offa sat resting on one of the low couches covered with the skins of wild beasts that Acmund had killed in the chase, there was a light footfall outside the chamber, the heavy curtain was drawn back from the doorway, and there stood before him a tall, slim boy of thirteen, with fair hair, truthful blue eyes, and a face tanned with the sun and wind of his open-air life. Something seemed to jump up in the old King's sad heart. Oh, if only that noble boy were his son, his heir! He was a true Uffing. What a King he would make for East Anglia! In the next few days Offa and the King's son, Edmund, became great friends. Edmund took upon himself the job of looking after his old cousin, and seeing that he had all he needed and enjoyed his visit at the Court. And Offa watched Edmund with a feeling of love and interest such as he would have had for his own son. He saw that the boy was brave and clever, a good shot with his bow, able to throw a spear straight and ride a horse. He saw that he was loved by all, and always ready to do good turns and put the wishes of others before his own. But he saw something that pleased him more--that Edmund was a true, loyal Christian. In all the excitement of the chase and the gaiety of the Court, his first thought was of God--to serve Him and please Him, to keep from all sin for His sake. The more Offa saw of Edmund, the more sure he felt that God had led him to this Court that he might find his heir. Still, though it seemed as if his request was already granted, he did not give up his pilgrimage, but decided to press on, if only as an act of thanksgiving to God. Before starting once more on his way, the King called Edmund aside. Taking a gold ring from his finger, he put it on Edmund's hand, and told him that if it were God's will this might some day mean great things for him. Then he said good-bye, and rode away towards the East. Young Edmund must often have wondered what it was that God held in store for him, and as he looked at the gold ring on his finger I feel sure he used to promise God that whatever it was he would _do his best_ to fulfil His Holy Will. Well, old Offa reached Palestine all right. His heart thrilled with joy and love as he saw the very village where Jesus was born, and where the shepherds came that early Christmas morning to adore the little new-born King. He remembered the three Kings of the East, who came plodding along on their camels, bearing gifts for Mary's little Son. Then he went on to Mount Calvary, and the tears ran down his old face as he saw the hill where Our Blessed Lord suffered such agony, with such glorious courage, for our sakes. He prayed and gave thanks, and then, with a confident heart, left all the future in God's Hands and started homewards. But he had not got very far before he fell ill, and soon his men saw that he was dying. Calling them about him, he told them that it was God's will that young Edmund, Acmund's son, should be their King. Taking from his finger the signet-ring that had been placed upon it by the Bishop at his coronation, he commanded that when he was dead it should be carried as quickly as possible to the boy. Then, heaving a last sigh of peace and gratitude, he closed his eyes on the world, and his faithful soul went to God. _The Coming of St. Edmund._ Now we will go back to England. The people have heard of the death of their King, and they are not at all sure that they want a strange young Prince from Saxony to come and rule over them. They have collected in a great crowd on the shore, for the galleys from across the sea have come in sight, bearing down before the wind. The ships draw every moment nearer, and the people wait. As long as most of them can remember they have been ruled over by King Offa; and for many generations their Kings have been Uffings--tall, fair, blue-eyed men, with noble, fearless hearts. What will this strange boy be like? And on the ship young Edmund pushed his way forward to the prow. He could see the green, tree-covered cliffs of his new kingdom, and the crowd of people on the shore. His heart beat fast, and he fingered the ring old Offa had put on his hand. Oh, if only these people knew that he came to them ready to _do his best_ to be to them a good King--to _do his best_ for them, for the love of God! Splash, splash!--the big anchors go overboard and the chains rattle as they run out over the bows. Soon Edmund and his men are in small boats, being rowed swiftly to the shore. Edmund's boat is the foremost and he himself stands up on the prow, ready to leap ashore. As the men of England look at him they see that he is no stranger, but one of themselves, a true Uffing, and then and there a sense of loyalty springs up in their rough hearts. The nose of the boat grates on the shore. With a leap Edmund has cleared the water, and is standing on the land of which he is to be King. His first act is to fall on his knees and ask God's blessing on himself and his people. His short prayer ended, he gets up and turns to greet his new friends; but to his surprise they are all falling on their knees, murmuring to one another, "A miracle, a miracle!" For a spring of clear water has bubbled up where Edmund's knees touched the ground--a sign from Heaven that he is the true King, a symbol of the power of the Holy Ghost that will well up like a spring in his heart. _The Crowning of St. Edmund._ After a time of study and preparation under a holy man, called Bishop Humbert, who became a true father to the boy and his lifelong friend, the time of St. Edmund's coronation drew near. It took place on Christmas Day, and the old books tell us of the gorgeous procession and the wonderful service. St. Edmund had to make a solemn promise of loyalty to God and his people, and after being anointed with holy oil he was clothed in certain royal garments by the Bishop, while a thane stepped forward and put sandals on his feet, a purple cloak was put upon his shoulders, and in his hand a sceptre of mercy and an iron rod of justice. After that a naked sword was presented to him, and a helmet put on his head. Then, laying aside all these, St. Edmund stepped forward, and standing before the altar declared solemnly that by the grace of God he would fulfil all the duties of a good King. The Bishop placed the crown upon his head, saying, "Live the King for ever," and the people all cried, "Amen, amen, amen." After that there was a solemn service of praise and thanksgiving to God, and the new King received Holy Communion. You can imagine how happy it made the holy young King that this should be the very first act of his reign, and what confidence it gave him that Christ would stay with him through all the difficult years to come. _War._ For a long time there was peace in St. Edmund's kingdom, though the people in other parts of the country were suffering terribly from their enemies, the Danes, who came over in wild hordes from the North in their low, black-sailed boats, and, landing on the coast, went through the country burning and plundering and killing. St. Edmund knew they would sooner or later invade his kingdom too. So he set to work to prepare for them. His chief way of doing this was to win the loyalty of all his subjects, so that if there was war he knew they would all rally round him. He made wise laws, and he was so fair to all, and so ready to listen to the poor and oppressed and help them, that soon everyone in the kingdom loved the young King and would do anything for him. They could see that God was with him, and they could not help feeling that in serving the humblest of his subjects he felt that it was Christ Himself that he served. St. Edmund had, of course, prepared his army and had thrown up defences to try and keep the enemy out as long as possible. You can still see one of his great earthworks running from Newmarket to the Fen country. For hundreds of years it was called "Edmund's Dyke." He placed scouts and outposts all round his borders, and prepared in every way he could. At last the day came when the country people came running into the towns in terror. They had seen along the borders huge, fierce men, with flashing eyes and long red hair and beards. Their leather tunics were stained dark with blood. Huge round shields were slung across their backs; they were armed with spears, bows, clubs, and knives, and they shouted to one another in a strange language. St. Edmund's scouts came running in to say that the Danes were collecting in great crowds on the frontiers. Soon they began creeping in at every point, burning houses and churches, and killing people, especially the Christians. Though it was an almost hopeless job, St. Edmund led his brave army forward, and whenever it was possible he engaged the enemy in battles and drove them out. The Danes had never before been so powerfully resisted, and thousands of them were killed. There's not time now to tell you all of the thrilling adventures St. Edmund had at this time, and of his wonderful escapes from the Danes. Anyhow, the Danes were so much weakened that they asked for peace, and after spending the winter in a great camp at Thetford, they sailed away, full of rage and hatred and desire for revenge. _A Cowardly Plot._ For a time there was peace, and then a sad thing happened. One stormy day when the waves dashed and foamed up the shingly beach, and the sea and sky were a leaden grey, the fisher-folk who lived down by the shore saw a small boat, with tattered sails and broken mast, being driven before the wind. There seemed to be a man in it, but he was evidently weak and exhausted, and was doing nothing to help himself. Presently the boat was thrown up on the shore, and the fishermen ran down and collected in a little crowd round it. Looking down at the helpless man, still clinging to a spar and drenched with foam and sea-water, they soon saw he was not one of their people. "A Dane, a Dane!" they murmured with sullen hate. Then one who had served in St. Edmund's army suddenly gave a wild exclamation. "By Heaven," he said, "it's Lothparch!" Lothparch was the leader of the Danish army who had done such awful harm to East Anglia only a few years before. "Kill him!" growled one man. "Throw him back on the mercy of the sea!" hissed another. But the man who had fought under St. Edmund would have nothing of the kind. The King never allowed a helpless man, even a cruel enemy, to be killed. So Lothparch was carried up to the royal palace. To the surprise of the fierce Angles, St. Edmund not only made the stranger welcome, but showed him every kindness. "Love your enemies," said Our Lord, and sure enough St. Edmund seemed truly to be obeying that command. Everything the King did seemed right to his loyal subjects; but there was one man--Berne, the King's huntsman--whose jealousy was so bitter at St. Edmund's showing favour to a Dane that he waited till he had an opportunity, and then he murdered Lothparch. The King was very angry, of course; but he said that, though Berne deserved to die for the crime, he would give him a faint chance of escape; he should be put in an open boat, and pushed out to sea and left to the mercy of the waves. After tossing for many days, Berne was washed up on a strange coast. During those lonely days of tossing on the waves, instead of repenting of his crime, Berne's wicked heart had been full of hatred for the King. So when he heard that the land he had come to was Lothparch's own kingdom, and that his two sons, Inguar and Hubba, were reigning in his place, a horrible idea came into his mind. Asking to be taken before the Princes, he made up and told them an awful lie, saying that when their father, Lothparch, had been washed up, helpless, on the coast of England, Edmund the King had caused him to be cruelly put to death. Of course, this enraged Inguar and Hubba, and they at once collected a huge and fierce army, and set out once more for East Anglia. _A Fight to the Death._ Landing in the North, and marching from York southward, the Danes plundered every city they passed through. They burned the monastery that had been built at Croyland (St. Guthlac's isle), and also those at Peterborough, Ramsey, Soham, and Ely. Meeting St. Edmund's army, they defeated it completely, killed the brave General who commanded it, and took Thetford by storm. Then they sent St. Edmund a message to say that he must give up half his kingdom and pay heavy taxes, or they would do the most terrible "frightfulness" throughout the land. But St. Edmund and his men decided to make one great effort to keep their land in liberty and true to the Christian Faith. At the head of his gallant army, St. Edmund marched on Inguar's army, and a ghastly battle began. Arrows flew thick; swords clashed on shields; great spears tore men open and left them to bleed to death. All day the battle raged, but at night the Danes fell back exhausted, and St. Edmund held the field, victorious. But as he stood in the moonlight and looked upon the scene his heart sank. Before him stretched the great battlefield, its trampled grass all soaked in blood; and around him, silent for ever, lay his great army--an army of dead men. With a heavy heart he led back his little handful of tired and wounded soldiers to the camp. The next day came terrible news. Hubba, with ten thousand men, had marched up and joined his brother. _The Martyr._ It was hopeless to try and resist any more--the King knew it, and his people knew it, and they shuddered to think of their fate. Then a great idea came to the King. It was he himself the Danes hated so. If only they had him in their power, perhaps they would leave his beloved country in peace! The more he thought of this, the more certain he felt that, by giving himself up, he could buy the peace and happiness and safety of his people. Christ, his Captain, had done this--He had not feared to face the most cruel death to save mankind, and St. Edmund's heart suddenly leapt with the thought that he would follow Christ and do the same! At first his old friend the Bishop, St. Humbert, tried to hold him back. But after a while he saw that St. Edmund was quite resolved. He spoke of it with such courage and joy that the aged Bishop knew the Holy Spirit must be in his heart leading him to this glorious sacrifice of himself, this giving of his very life for his God and his friends, this quest for the martyr's crown. And so he gave him his blessing and bade him do as his brave heart prompted him. So, calling together his people, St. Edmund told them what he was going to do. You can imagine what they felt--how they begged him with tears not to do it. But nothing would make him change his mind--he knew it was God's Will. Bravely he gave his last order to his men. It was that all the gates of the fortress should be thrown open, all the defences left unguarded, nothing done to stop the Danes entering it. Then he made his way to the chapel. Unbuckling his faithful sword, he laid it on the steps of the altar, and knelt down, with no protection save God's mercy. The little chapel was very dim, and full of a holy feeling. All was still. It seemed to the young King as if he were far, far away from the rest of the world, from all the horror of bloodshed and crashing battle-axes that had filled the last few weeks like some horrible dream. He let his mind just rest on the thought of God and His love, and a wonderful peace came over him. Near him knelt the old Bishop, and his heart was near to breaking, for he loved St. Edmund very much. The tears ran down his furrowed cheeks, and fell silently on the steps of the altar, but he spoke no word. Silently the moments passed, and then, suddenly, a sound broke the stillness that sent a cold shiver through St. Humbert. Wild shouts, coarse laughter, the clash and clatter of armed men rushing in wild triumph through the fortress. It was the King they were seeking. Where was he? They cared for nothing but to find him and wreak their revenge. The shouts came nearer . . . the tramp of feet . . . the clang and scrape of spears against the wall. Nearer, nearer, until the chapel door burst open and a crowd of cruel faces peered in. Then a wild oath rang through the quiet of the chapel. They had found the King! Rushing in, they seized him and dragged him out. _"Faithful unto Death."_ In a field beyond the town the Danes tied St. Edmund to a tree. They were determined to have a full revenge. With long whips they began to scourge his naked body. Each lash was like the touch of a red-hot iron, and left a long, bleeding wound in the bare flesh. But St. Edmund only rejoiced that, at last, he could share truly what Christ had suffered from the Roman soldiers. No cry escaped him, except now and then the name of Jesus. Then, throwing down their whips, the Danes took up their bows. The arrows fell thickly round St. Edmund, piercing him in every part, until, as the old book says, he was as covered with arrows as a porcupine with quills. Inguar, the Danish Prince, looked on with a horrible smile of cruel enjoyment. Hearing the Holy Name break like a sob from the mouth of the martyr, he began to taunt him, telling him to give up his faith in Christ, since it had only brought him to this. But St. Edmund was "faithful unto death." Soon, soon he would receive the "crown of life," the welcome of the King of kings. Seeing that nothing could make St. Edmund cry for mercy or give up his faith in God, Inguar drew his long sword, and, with a hoarse laugh of triumph, cut the martyr's head from his body. Free and glorious the soul of King Edmund rose from his bloodstained body into the sunlight of heaven. * * * * * St. Edmund had not sacrificed himself in vain. The Danes, so greatly weakened by the bloody battles they had fought, gave up the idea of ruling East Anglia, and sailed away to their country, leaving St. Edmund's people in peace, and free to practise the Christian Faith. THE FIFTH DAY (SUNDAY) Everyone dressed quickly and quietly, found his Prayer-Book somewhere in the far depths of his kit-bag, and ran down to sit on the sea wall and wait for Akela and the last Cub or two (the ones whose boots had got lost, or who were so fussy about parting their hair, etc., that dressing took rather a long time). Very reverently they went into church, and very quietly came out again and up to the field. Breakfast, a run round the field to let off steam, and then down to the shore for a bathe. In the afternoon every Cub got hold of a piece of paper and a pencil, and sat, lay, knelt, or squatted in some corner, his tongue well out and his brow furrowed with thought, to write home. Some wrote very private letters, all on their own, and didn't give the show away even to ask how to spell the hardest words, like "library" (which might just as well be "lybary," or "librurry," or "lieberry"). Of course, library, in some form or other, came into all their letters, because they all wanted to tell about the adventure of going to Quarr Abbey. Some Cubs, sacrificing the privateness of their letters, decided that if Akela or Godmother did the writing, while they did the _saying what_, it would be much quicker, and much more could be told to "mother and all at home." So they brought their paper and pencils, and asked Akela to do it in "proper, quick writing." They told _everything_--even what they had had for dinner each day, and one said his bed at camp was much "comfortabler" than his bed at home. After tea there was a little cricket practice and some tree-climbing, and then supper and, of course, night prayers. And then, feeling as if they had lived in camp all their lives, instead of only five days, the Cubs walked contentedly down the hill to bed. Patsy, as usual, was having a free ride on Akela's back, and he was certainly quite a lot heavier than the first day. Before long everyone was established in the Coach-house and the candle lighted. "To-night," said Akela, "I'm going to tell you about a very Cubby Saint. I know he would have loved Cubs, because he loved small boys and wild animals; in fact, a certain wolf was a great friend of his; and he thought it worth while, once, to preach a beautiful sermon to a flock of birds. He was always laughing or singing or doing something Cubby, and he had ideas he used to teach his followers, very much like our Cub Law and Motto. His name was St. Francis of Assisi. Now listen, for I specially want you to make friends with St. Francis, because I love him very much." THE STORY OF ST. FRANCIS--I. There was once a boy called Francis, who lived in a curious old town in the mountains of Italy. The town was called Assisi. It was all funny little up-and-down streets and flights of long, crooked stone steps; and there was a wall all round (to keep enemies out), and big gates in the wall that were closed at night. The purple hills and mountains spread away as far as you could see beneath a blue, blue sky, and all round the city there were vineyards, and lovely little rocky paths winding about among the silvery olive-trees. Francis was the son of a rich merchant called Peter Bernardone. He was a regular Cubby boy--always laughing and singing, ready for mischief, but still more ready to do anyone a good turn. He was Peter Bernardone's only son, and he had a jolly good time of it, because his father had made up his mind that young Francis should make a success of life, and end by being a great man in the town. He used to smile to himself and rub his hands together as he saw what a clever, handsome boy Francis was growing up into, and how everybody loved him, and how he was always the ringleader in all the fun. As Francis grew to be a young man his father would encourage him to give lots of feasts to his friends, not minding how much they cost, and it pleased him to see that it was always Francis who was the life of these feasts, making jokes, leading cheerful singsongs, enjoying himself no end, and making everyone else enjoy themselves. But while Peter Bernardone chuckled to see young Francis so gay and popular, Francis' mother, Pica, used to notice little things that made her happy too, only in a different way. She noticed that Francis never really gave in to himself, like his wild friends; never overate himself in a greedy way or drank enough wine to make him drunk; never thought it funny to tell nasty stories or swear; and if ever God's name was mentioned, it seemed to make him serious for a moment. "One day," she said, "he will become a son of God." But her friends thought it a silly remark to make, for Francis seemed to be living just to please himself and have a jolly time. But mothers are generally right in what they prophesy about their sons, and Pica's remark was really a very true one. This story is all about how Francis gave up being a rich merchant's son and became a poor man who found all his joy and his riches in calling _God_ his _Father_. The change did not come easily, and a great many wonderful adventures befell him, which I am going to tell you now. It all began with a war between Assisi and another city. Of course, Francis and his pals joined in the fray and thought it great sport, till they got captured and carried off prisoners. It was not sport at all being shut up in stuffy old houses with only a little food and nothing to do. Francis used to cheer them up with troubadour songs and stories. But although he always seemed so cheerful, it was doing great harm to his health, and when, after a year, the prisoners were freed and returned to Assisi, Francis became very ill indeed. So ill was he that he came near dying, and this experience of nearly passing out into the next life made him begin to think seriously. When he was well enough to go out, walking slowly with a stick because of his weakness, he felt that life could never be quite the same; he must _do_ something, take a man's place in the world. Well, the chance soon came, for all the young Christian men were called out to fight in a Crusade. A certain nobleman of Assisi started getting up a party, and Francis decided to join him. He soon had all his kit--armour, a bright sword, a good horse, and all complete; and with a gay heart, full of a thirst for adventure and a determination to do great things, he waited impatiently for the start. He had been rather puzzled as to what to do with himself, and now he felt he had hit on the right plan. So it was a bit of a surprise when, his very first night away, something happened which unsettled his mind altogether and made him feel it was not God's will that he should go to the Crusades. The night before the party set out Francis had had a very curious dream, about a beautiful palace, all hung round with knightly arms, which a mysterious voice told him was for him and his followers. This made him so happy that the next day, when someone asked him what good fortune he had had, he replied that now he knew for certain he was to be a great prince and leader of men. But the next night, as he lay in the hostelry on the first halt along the road, something still more strange happened. He was not asleep, and yet, through the still darkness, he heard the mysterious voice of his dream, and it said: "Francis, whom is it better to serve, the lord or the servant?" "Surely it is better to serve the lord," replied Francis, softly, into the dark. And the voice answered: "Why, then, dost thou make a lord of the servant?" Then it all seemed to flash on Francis, and he felt sure this was a Voice from heaven, and he replied very humbly: "Lord, what dost Thou wish me to do?" And the Voice said: "Return to the land of thy birth, and there it will be told thee what thou shalt do; for it may behove thee to give another meaning to thy dream." He felt so positive that the Voice was from heaven, that he felt he simply could not disobey it. So, although it cost him a lot to do it, he turned his horse's head northwards and rode home. There was nothing to do now but wait for God to show him His Will. He tried to settle down again to his old life of feasting and gaiety, but somehow he couldn't throw himself into it. There was something he was feeling after, but he didn't know what. One day something happened which was the beginning of great things. Francis had been out for a ride beyond the city. As he turned his horse's head homewards and rode slowly back towards the golden sunset, he suddenly saw, a little way ahead, something that made him shudder and almost turn aside on to another path. It was a poor leper, his filthy rags only half covering his wretched body, with its horrible running sores. His face was swollen and disfigured, and his eyes full of the frightened misery of a hunted animal. Now, seeing lepers always made Francis feel quite sick. He hated horrible sights. But somehow, to-night, a new feeling woke up in him--a sudden feeling of brotherhood with this poor man, almost of love for him. It was such terribly bad luck that he had caught leprosy and become a ghastly sight, so that he could not earn any money nor come near the town. Francis felt in his wallet for a silver piece to give him, and then he thought how sad it must be to have money flung at you by strangers, who passed by with head turned away because they loathed the very sight of you. How the lepers must long for just a friendly look, a smile! A great idea suddenly leapt up in Francis's mind, and it took all his courage not to give in to himself. As he came up with the leper, he jumped off his horse, took a silver piece from his pocket, and held it out to the man. The leper, full of surprise, held out his poor swollen stump of a hand, with several fingers already rotted away, to take the coin. But meeting the man's eyes, and seeing in them the look of hunger for friendship, Francis took the poor hand in his, as he would the hand of his friend, pressed the coin into it, and then, stooping, pressed his lips upon it in a kiss. Then, with his heart full of joy, he remounted his horse and rode home. With that kiss a wonderful new idea had sprung up in Francis's heart--a sense of love for the poor, of longing not only to help them, but to share their very lives, to be one of them. At first he tried to satisfy his longing to help them by making great feasts and serving his poor guests with his own hands. One day he went on a pilgrimage to Rome, and as he saw the crowd of beggars clustering round a certain shrine in hope that the pilgrims would give them money, he longed to become just one of them. So, taking one of them aside, he exchanged his fine clothes with the beggar for his dirty rags, and spent the whole day with his poor brothers in the dust and the scorching sun, enjoying the sense of being a mere outcast to whom rich men threw ha'pence. Still, when he returned to his home he was as puzzled as ever as to what he should do. He took to spending long hours at prayer in a certain cave begging God to make known His Will; and at last God answered his prayer, and I will tell you how. Francis had been for a long walk outside the city, and as he returned along the stony little mountain paths, the evening sunlight dazzling his eyes, and the olive-trees whispering to each other in the soft evening air, he noticed a tumble-down little wayside church. Something made him stop and turn in. It was very dim and cool and quiet. There was no one there--except God. A lamp burned with a feeble flicker in the sanctuary. Francis knelt down and began to pray. Then, out of the stillness a strange, wonderful Voice spoke his name--"_Francis_." He knew directly Whose Voice it was--Our Blessed Lord's. "Yes, Lord," he answered, his heart beating rather fast, though he felt very happy. "Francis, go and repair My church, which thou seest falling," said the Voice. Then all was still. The tones of that Voice seemed to vibrate through and through Francis. He was filled with a great desire to obey--to do anything, anything Our Lord wanted. "Repair My church," He had said. He must mean this poor little tumble-down house of His, that was certainly on the point of falling. So Francis jumped up from his knees and went out into the sunlight very happy. He found the old priest, who lived in a poor little house near by, and, telling him the wonderful thing that had happened, gave him all the money he had, and promised to return soon with enough to rebuild the church. Then he hurried home. His father was away on a journey. So Francis went down to the warehouse and picked out the most costly bale of rich stuff he could find. Then he took a good horse, and, putting the bale of stuff on his back, set out for the town of Foligno. Here he sold both the stuff and the horse, and returned with a good sum of money. Full of joy, he hurried along the little mountain path to the old priest's house, and held out the heavy purse of gold to him. But the priest was afraid to accept it, for he was not at all sure that Francis's father would be pleased about it. Francis was disappointed. He had got the money for the church, and certainly wasn't going to carry it home again; so he threw it into the deep recess of one of the windows of the little church, and left it there. Then he told the priest he meant to stay, for here Our Lord had spoken to him, and he must stay and see to the building of the church. The old priest was very kind, and let Francis share his little house and his poor fare, and Francis began to feel like a kind of hermit, living a life of prayer. Meanwhile Peter Bernardone returned from his journey. When he heard what Francis had done, and his new, mad idea of living like a hermit on the mountain-side, he was furiously angry. Taking a stick in his hand, he set out, saying he would teach the young fool a good lesson and bring him home. But one of the servants ran ahead by a short cut and warned Francis. Francis had no wish to meet his angry father armed with a stout stick, so he fled and hid himself in a cave, and Peter Bernardone had to go home again, even angrier than he set out. For about ten days Francis stayed in hiding, the servant bringing him food. He spent this time in prayer. This made him braver, and he began to think that he had been a "funk" to run away and hide and not face the music, so he decided to make up for it by being braver. His time of hiding in the dark, dirty cave, with little food, had made him look thin, untidy, and a bit of a scarecrow. The people of Assisi had heard what he had done, and they decided he must have gone mad. So when he appeared in the city the boys began throwing stones and rubbish at him, and calling after him. Francis bore it all patiently, and felt rather a hero. But presently Peter Bernardone discovered that his son was being insulted in the streets. It filled him with rage, and he rushed out, dragged Francis indoors, gave him a good flogging and shut him up in a little cell. Here he had to stay for some time, until his father went on another journey and his mother let him out. Of course, he went straight back to the little church on the hill-side, and here, when his father came back, he found him. Peter Bernardone stormed at him and demanded the money back, but Francis would not give it, saying he had given it to God. So Peter Bernardone went to the Bishop about it. The matter came up at the Bishop's Court, and the Bishop had to tell Francis to give back the money. Bernardone was so angry with his son that he then and there disinherited him, and said he would not own him as his son any more. So Francis took off his very clothes and gave them back to his father, saying, "Now will I say no more Peter Bernardone is my father, but only 'Our Father Who art in heaven.'" So, taking the bundle of clothes, old Bernardone stalked out of the Court. Someone fetched Francis a rough habit, such as was worn by the farm-hands. On this Francis chalked a big cross, and, putting it on, stepped out joyfully, feeling that at last he was free to serve God, in whatever way He wanted him to, and share the life of the poor. He felt somehow that he must get right away, alone; so he started walking up over the mountains, not caring where he went. Soon he was right up among the pines, and as night fell he found it was pretty cold, for the winter's snow still lay in the deep shade of the trees. But he was so happy that he did not care for anything, and as he went he sang aloud for joy. Then, suddenly, out of the dark wood a band of robbers pounced on him. "Who are you?" they cried. "I am the herald of the great King!" answered Francis. So they stripped him of his habit, and threw him in a ditch full of snow. Luckily, the next day he found a friend in a town the other side of the mountains, who gave him a pilgrim's cloak, a pair of shoes, and a staff. Then, after a bit more wandering, St. Francis returned to the little church and settled down with the old priest, meaning now in good earnest to build up the church. Since he had no money to buy what was needed, the only thing was to beg. So he went out in the streets begging for stones to build up the little church. The poor people were very kind, and gave him stones, and some of them came and helped, and soon they and Francis together had begun rebuilding the walls. Every day Francis went begging, and sometimes it was very hard not to _give in to himself_ and go skulking down a side-street when he saw a group of his old friends ahead. But he went bravely on, and faced their stares and laughter. One day it struck Francis that he ought not to be eating the old priest's scanty store of food, which he noticed his kind old friend used to cook and try and prepare as nicely as possible for him. This was not what a true lover of poverty should do. "Rise up, thou lazy one," he said to himself, "and go begging from door to door the leavings of the table." So, taking a big dish, he went round the houses of the townspeople asking for scraps. They gave him broken bits of messy old food, and he returned with his dish full. But when he sat down to supper he didn't feel at all like eating from that pile of scraps--the very thought made him feel quite sick. But he was learning to conquer himself, and by the time the meal was done he felt he had really accomplished something, and was at last really a poor man and ready to live on what God's mercy would give him from day to day. All this time he had been praying a great deal, and learning to know God very much better. More and more he felt that God meant to use him for something special--_what_ he did not know. At last the little grey church was all built up new and strong, and Francis felt the job Our Lord had given him was done. But as God had not shown him anything else to do, he set out and found another tumble-down little church to build up, and started on that. When that, too, was finished, he started on a third one. The third one had been restored, and a service was being held in it for the first time since its restoration, and Francis was assisting at this service, when something happened which sent him on a new adventure, and which proved to be the beginning of the great adventure which filled all the rest of his life. * * * * * "That's a good stop," said Akela. "If we started on St. Francis's next adventure, we could not finish it before you all fell asleep. So we will keep it for to-morrow night. To-morrow you will hear how the boy Francis turns into the man St. Francis, and what a wonderful life of service and suffering for God he begins to have, and how he ends in becoming a great Saint, and one of the greatest leaders of men." THE SIXTH DAY The splashing sound of Cubs making good use of soap and water; snatches of cheerful song; the lamentation of someone who had lost the "relation" of his left sand-shoe; the sound of a Sixer trying to make a sleepy-head turn out--all these sounds filled the sunny morning. Presently there fell on the ears of Akela (who was still in her "den") the sound of an argument. "I say it's _dirt_," cried one; "he's a dirty-neck, who doesn't know how to wash himself. . . ." "'Taint!" squealed a small Cub; "it's the sun what's made my neck _brown_." "Garn! it's not using soap what's made your neck that colour, dirty little. . . ." _Splosh!_ Somebody got a wet flannel in the eye that time. "Now, then, what's up?" cries a Sixer, coming up to the group. Quite a little crowd collects. "He says my neck's _dirty_," wails the small Cub, "and really it's the sun. . . ." Someone has a bright idea: "Let's ask Miss." So Akela comes out, and scrubs the neck in question with soap and flannel. It turns out to be nearly all sunburn, with just a _little_ dirt. The sun is shining, and the sky is full of "flocks of sheep"--those tiny, steady white clouds that stretch in close rows across the sky in fine weather. The dew on the grass is nearly dry already when the Cubs get to the field. "Prayers!" calls Akela, and the Cubs come up quietly and form a kneeling circle. I haven't told you what the morning prayers of the Cubs were, so I will tell you now. A PRAYER THAT WE MAY PRAY WELL (_see page 6_). OUR FATHER. _V._ Incline unto mine aid, O God. _R._ O Lord, make haste to help me. Glory be to the Father, etc. HYMN. The star of morn to night succeeds, We therefore meekly pray: May God in all our words and deeds Keep us from harm this day. May He in love restrain us still From tones of strife and words of ill; And may earth's beauties that we see Remind us always, Lord, of Thee. _Amen._ CONFESSION. I confess to Almighty God that I have sinned against Him in thought, word, and deed. (_Pause a moment and think of your sins._) May Almighty God have mercy upon us, and forgive us our sins, and bring us to life everlasting. _Let us pray_ A PRAYER THAT THIS DAY MAY BE PLEASING TO GOD. O Lord God Almighty, Who hast brought us to the beginning of this day, defend us in the same by Thy power, that we may not fall this day into any sin, but that all our thoughts, words, and works may be directed to the fulfilment of THY WILL. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, Thy Son. _Amen._ OUR FATHER. A PRAYER THAT WE MAY BE FORGIVEN ANY WANDERING THOUGHTS WE HAVE HAD WHILE RECITING THESE PRAYERS. Breakfast over, and orderly jobs finished, the Pack went down to the shore and had a splendid bathe. Several of the Cubs had really begun to swim; while Bill, Dick, and Mac, who could swim already, were getting good practice. Mac meant to get his Swimmer's Badge as soon as he got back to London, so he practised floating and duck's diving and the other things you have to do. After dinner and rest Father took some cricket practice, because to-morrow there was to be a match. "No one must talk to me," said Akela, settling down in a sunny corner with some papers; "I'm doing something very important." Cubs always want to know everything, so of course they said, _What was the important thing?_ "Reading proof," said Akela. "What's 'proof'?" said the Cubs. "This is proof," said Akela, holding out a long narrow strip of printed paper. "It's the way they print stories at first, and it has mistakes in it. I have to read it through and correct the mistakes. Now, if you don't shut up and go away, the next instalment in the _Wolf Cub_ will have mistakes in it--see?" "Is it the next bit of the 'Mysterious Tramp'?" cried the Cubs. "Yes." That did it. A Cub sat down each side of Akela and read over her shoulder, and one jumped up and down in front, saying: "Miss, is it good?" Every now and then Akela made strange little squiggles in the margin--secret signs only the printer-man could understand. "_Coo!_ what silly mistakes he makes!" said one of the Cubs in derision. "I wouldn't have done that in dictation even when I was in Standard I.!" "_I_ think he makes very few mistakes," said Akela; "other printer-men make lots more. You see, this one is printing the _Wolf Cub_, so he has to _do his best_." The cricket people had been "doing _their_ best" at cricket to such good purpose that they had succeeded in splitting one of the bats. So after tea Akela and some of them went down to the man who sells bats and golf-balls, down by the tennis-courts. The road where his shop is runs between the seashore and a big stretch of grassy land, called the Dover. "That," said Akela, "is the very place where Billy got carried up by the giant kite." It was a favourite story of the Cubs, so they were pleased to see the place. "Is that the fierce bull?" said one. "No," said Akela, "that's a sleepy old cow." The man said he would mend the bat in time for to-morrow's match. THE STORY OF ST. FRANCIS.--II. The little church St. Francis had last restored was very wee, but it had a very long name. It was called the Portiuncola, which meant "the little portion." It was built all among the trees and long grass, and mossy, fern-covered rocks; and the birds sang around it. St. Francis loved the spot very much--it was like home to him--and he spent a lot of time there. Besides, it was not far from the leper settlement, and he had now taken on himself the rather horrible job of serving the poor lepers--a job that was very pleasing to Our Lord, specially as He saw St. Francis did it all for love of Him, and served each wretched man as if he was Jesus Christ. Then, too, the Portiuncola was not very far from the town where Francis begged his food. Well, early one morning, while the sun shone outside on the dewy world, and the birds sang their morning hymns of praise, a priest said Mass in the little chapel, and St. Francis knelt praying with all his heart. Presently the priest read out the Gospel, and, as usual, St. Francis listened with great attention. And suddenly, as he listened, he felt that those words of Our Lord which the priest was reading out were a message from heaven for _him_--_the very "orders" he had been waiting for_! These were the words: "Going forth, preach, saying: The kingdom of heaven is at hand. . . . Possess not gold, nor silver, nor money in your houses, nor scrip for your journey, nor two coats, nor shoes, nor a staff; for the workman is worthy of his meat. And into whatsoever city or town you shall enter, inquire who in it is worthy, and there abide till you go hence. And when you come into a house, salute it, saying: Peace be to this house. . . . Behold I send you as sheep in the midst of wolves. Be ye therefore wise as serpents, but simple as doves. . . . But when they shall deliver you up, take no thought how or what to speak: for it shall be given you in that hour what to speak" (Matt. x. 7-19). Here were clear orders. Something in St. Francis answered to that call, and this something was the Holy Spirit of God speaking in his heart, as He always does in those who really wait and listen and _mean_ to obey should God speak. When the Mass was finished, St. Francis got the priest to read the words over to him again. And then, feeling quite sure he had discovered God's Holy Will, he began to obey it _at once_. He took off his shoes; he laid aside his second garment, making himself a rough brown habit; he put down his staff, and he exchanged his belt for a bit of rope. Then, feeling full of joy, he set out along the stony road on his bare feet, towards the town--not to beg this time, but to give the greeting of "Peace," and to tell the people to make up their quarrels and forgive each other, and turn with all their hearts to the Lord Christ. The people of the town did not laugh now, and jeer; they saw that St. Francis was speaking to them from the bottom of his pure heart--a heart on fire with the love of God--and that the grace of Jesus Christ, his Master, was upon him. And before long two men of Assisi had joined him as the first of the great company who were to follow him--for you remember how he was to be a leader, and that the palace of his dream had been promised to him and his followers. This is the story of St. Francis's first recruit. His name was Bernard de Quintavalle, and he was a rich merchant, serious and God-fearing, and not a bit like the gay, eager St. Francis. But seeing how unselfish and hard-working a life St. Francis led, and that God's Holy Spirit was with him, he began to visit the young preacher, and to receive him in his house. St. Francis willingly gave his friendship to such a good man. Bernard used to like St. Francis to sleep on a bed in his own room. Often at night he would lie awake, thinking; and he would notice that after a short sleep St. Francis got out of bed and knelt down, and spent the rest of the night praying to God. The only words Bernard could hear were just "My God and my All, my God and my All," which St. Francis repeated over and over again, as if his soul was really seeing God, and his heart was so full of love for Him that he could say nothing else. And Bernard understood the secret of St. Francis's holiness and purity, for to one who prays like that God pours out very much grace, so that he can begin to be all that he knows he ought to be if he is really to please the Lord Christ, his Master. So one day Bernard told St. Francis that he wanted to give back to God all his riches and become his poor brother. So St. Francis said what they ought to do would be to go to the church and read in the Gospel, where the words of Jesus Christ would show them what to do. Before going to the church, however, they called for another friend of theirs--a learned man called Peter Cathanii, who also wanted to serve God perfectly, and had been trying humbly to learn how from St. Francis. But St. Francis, though holy, and Bernard, though rich, and Peter, though clever at his books, did not any of them know their way about in the big Bible that was kept open in the church for all to read (for there were no printed books in those days, and a Bible was very costly, so that few people had a copy of their own). So St. Francis prayed that he might come on the right place, and then he opened the book. This was what he read out: "If thou wouldst be perfect, go, sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven; and come, follow Me" (Matt. xix. 21). That seemed just right! But perhaps Our Lord had still another message. So he shut the big book, and opened it again, just anywhere, and it said: "Take nothing for your journey, neither staff, nor scrip, nor bread, nor money; neither have two coats" (Luke ix. 3). Splendid! "Just _one_ more, please, Lord," he said in his heart, as he opened the book for the third time. And Our Lord told him something very wonderful and hard to follow, which was really the explanation of all the others: "If any man will come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me" (Matt. xvi. 24). So the three friends left the church very happy. And Bernard sold all his rich stuffs and his house and his land; and Peter sold all his precious books; and they carried all the gold to a square in front of the old church of St. George, and St. Francis sat on the steps with his lap full of money, and gave away great glittering handfuls to all the poor people who crowded round. When none was left, the three poor brothers, smiling with delight at being really poor and true followers of Christ, went off to the dear little chapel in the woods and began the life of the Friars. Not long after, a third recruit turned up, and I _must_ tell you about him. He was a simple working-man called Giles. When he heard about St. Francis and his two Friars, and of this new way of learning to serve God perfectly, he laid down his tools, and left the vineyards and tramped into the town. He went to an early Mass at St. George's Church, hoping to find St. Francis there, as it was St. George's Day; but not doing so, he set out for the Portiuncola. He didn't know where that was, so when he came to the crossroads he stopped and began to ask God somehow to show him the way. And just then St. Francis came out of the wood. Giles was delighted that God answered his prayer so quickly, and, kneeling down at St. Francis's feet, "Brother Francis," he said, "I want to be with you for the love of God." St. Francis saw at once that this was a true brother, so he said: "Knowest thou how great a favour the Lord has given thee? If, my brother, the Emperor came to Assisi and wished to choose one of the citizens to be his knight or chamberlain, many are they who would come forward to claim the honour. How much more highly, then, shouldest thou esteem it to be chosen by the Lord from out of so many, and to be called to His Court!" Then St. Francis took him back and showed him to Bernard and Peter, and said: "See what a good brother the Lord hath sent us!" Soon after this the four Friars set out, St. Francis and Brother Giles going together, and Bernard and Peter, to tramp the roads from place to place, and preach to the little knots of country or town people who collected round them in the market-places. So strange did they look, and so full of joy and love did they seem to be, that the people wondered at them very much, and though some believed them to be servants of God, others thought them mad. When they returned to the Portiuncola three more men joined them. It was then that the townspeople began to get angry, and say that St. Francis was turning rich men into _beggars_. Even the Bishop spoke seriously to him. Now, if St. Francis had not been so _sure_ that what he was doing was _God's plan_, and not his own, he might have got discouraged and given up trying to carry it out; but, relying on God's grace, he listened humbly while people spoke angrily, or scoffed, or argued, or pleaded, and then he bravely "carried on." For the first few months the brothers lived in their little hut at the Portiuncola, and prepared themselves (by prayer and the studying of the perfect way of life and the correction of their faults) for the great work God held for them. Part of the day was spent serving the lepers and doing simple work in the fields. One more journey they went, and then, four more brethren having joined them, and St. Francis having had a wonderful vision which showed him that hundreds would soon be flocking to join his Order from France and Germany and England and all the countries, he set out for Rome, to get the Pope's approval of his work. At first the Pope would not listen to this poor, unknown beggar-man, full of eager new ideas, but in the end he received him kindly and, after hearing all he had to tell, said: "My son, go and pray to Jesus Christ that He may show us His will; and when we know His will more certainly, we shall the more safely sanction your pious purpose." So the brethren all prayed hard. When St. Francis went again, the Pope was even more kind, for he recognized St. Francis as the man he had seen in a dream. In his dream he saw a church nearly falling and being held up by a small man in a poor habit, and he knew it meant the Church of Christ was in trouble, and that this man was going to make it strong again through all the earth. So the Pope gave the Friars his blessing, saying: "Go forth in the Lord, brothers." And he gave them leave to preach penance, and told them to come back to him later and he would do even more for them. So the Friars went back to Assisi full of joy. For a time they lived in a kind of wayside shelter called Rivo Torto; but later on the monks on whose land was the Portiuncola gave the little chapel and the bit of land to St. Francis (or rather rented it to him, the payment being one basket of fish per year, caught in the river--for St. Francis did not wish the Friars to _own_ anything). Some more men joined the brothers, and now they lived as a very happy family in their little huts, built of branches, around their beloved chapel. St. Francis was like the loving Father of this family, always kind, patient, cheery, ready to comfort the sad or nurse the sick, or explain things to those who felt worried and did not understand how to get rid of their faults and serve Christ in perfect purity of heart. You Cubs would have loved St. Francis, for he was just like a boy himself. I wish I had time to tell you all the lovely little stories about him and the Friars at this time while his family was still small, but we must keep them for another time, and go on now to the time when the Order had grown so large that the Friars could no longer all live at the Portiuncola, and began to have their poor, simple houses all over the place, while hundreds of brothers set forth, tramping the world over, preaching the Gospel of Christ, not only to the poor, but to the heathen in barbarous countries. Some of the brothers were cruelly martyred, and all had to suffer a lot of hardships, for often people would drive them away, so that they had to go hungry and cold, with nowhere to lay their heads for the night. We cannot follow all the brothers and hear all their adventures, so I will just tell you one or two which show what kind of men St. Francis and his Friars were. Here is one which shows you their obedience and humility. I daresay it will make you laugh! The Friars had by now become quite noted for their preaching, and would often go up into the pulpits of the churches, where large crowds gathered to hear them, the Bishop even inviting St. Francis to preach in the cathedral. Now, among the brethren there was one called Ruffino, who was very shy and nervous and felt he simply _couldn't_ preach and face a great crowd of people, all staring at him and waiting for his words. Now, St. Francis hated that any of his Friars should _give in to themselves_ about _anything_. He also loved them to _obey quickly_, and do everything they were told at once, without a murmur. So one day he told Brother Ruffino to go to a big church in the city and preach. But Brother Ruffino, instead of obeying at once, begged St. Francis not to command him this, as he had not the gift of preaching. St. Francis was not pleased at this, and he said that, as Brother Ruffino had not obeyed quickly, he must now take off his habit and go to the city and preach, clad only in his breeches, and otherwise naked! So Brother Ruffino stripped, and went off humble and obedient. But, of course, when he went into the church and up into the pulpit dressed like that the men and children of Assisi began to laugh and say the Friars had gone mad. Meanwhile St. Francis presently began to be sorry he had sent off poor Brother Ruffino clad only in breeches, especially considering he had once been one of the noblest men in Assisi. He began to call himself names for having been so hard on him; and, saying he would do himself what he had told his poor brother to do, he stripped himself of his habit and also set out, half naked, for the town! When he got to the church, of course everyone laughed all the more to see _another_ Friar in his breeches. Poor Brother Ruffino was in the pulpit struggling bravely to preach in simple words. Then St. Francis mounted the pulpit, and, standing by Brother Ruffino, preached a most wonderful sermon, so that all the people of Assisi were touched to the heart, and many wept to think of their sins and of the Passion of Christ. Then St. Francis gave Brother Ruffino his habit and put on his own (for Brother Leo had brought them to the church), and they returned home rejoicing. Once when St. Francis was walking along the road he saw a great crowd of birds in a field, and saying he _must_ go and preach to his "little sisters, the birds," he went among them and preached a wonderful sermon to them, telling them how they ought to praise God for all he had given them. And the birds didn't fly away, but all crowded round to listen. At the end St. Francis gave them his blessing and told them to fly away, and they rose up in the air and flew away in the form of a great cross, to north, south, east, and west. St. Francis loved all animals, even earthworms, which he would pick up tenderly from the path and put into safety. And he would never allow people to cut trees quite down, but made them leave the roots, so that they might grow up all green and beautiful once more. Little children he loved, too. Some day I will tell you the story of a little boy who joined his Order and became a little Friar, and had the great joy of seeing St. Francis at prayer one night out on the mountain-side, with a wonderful gold light all round him, and heavenly visions comforting him. But the little boy had to promise St. Francis he would never tell anyone what he had seen as long as St. Francis was living. I must leave, too, the story of how St. Francis tamed a huge, fierce wolf; and of how he went right into the Saracen camp during a Crusade and preached to the Sultan of Turkey, and told him to be a Christian; and how he called a great gathering of the Friars at the Portiuncola, to which _five thousand brothers_ came, and how the people of the cities round came with carts full of food and fed the Friars for more than a week's time, freely. All these stories and many more I must leave, and go on now to tell you of the wonderful, beautiful, and holy end of St. Francis's life, and of the mysterious thing that happened to him. I want you to remember that this mysterious thing is _perfectly true_, and really did happen to St. Francis, and is a sign of how very closely his soul had become united to Jesus Christ and His Passion on the Cross--for he had never forgotten the heavenly message he had found in the book of the Gospels: "He that will come after Me, let him deny himself, _and take up his cross_, and follow Me." St. Francis's Order was now established, and his Friars were renewing the life of the Church by their wonderful preaching, their holy example, and their pure lives. St. Francis himself, though not really old at all, was almost worn out. His life of hardships; his great worries (for his enormous family gave him much trouble as well as joy); his burning zeal and passionate love of God and his fellow-men--all this had nearly used up his strength, and now he was in constant pain, and very nearly blind. He was always patient and happy--even merry, as of old. But at last came a day when he felt he must go away and be alone a little with God. So, taking a few chosen brothers with him, he retired to the top of a beautiful mountain, called Mount Alverna, which belonged to a nobleman who was a friend of St. Francis. On this mountain, with only the sky and the rocks and the trees for company, with the lovely peaks of other mountains stretching away as far as eye could see, the six Friars made themselves a little camp of huts; but St. Francis had his hut right away from the other Friars, and across a little rocky ravine which was crossed by a plank. Here he could feel _quite alone_ with God. Looking up, there was just the blue, blue sky and the steady clouds; and looking down, there was a steep rock falling away below him to a great depth, with little ferns and flowers clinging to it. In this rocky solitude lived a falcon who became a very dear friend of St. Francis, and for whom he had a great love. It knew the time he liked to rise and pray in the night, and it would come and flap against his hut and wake him at the right time, and then stay near him while he prayed. The Friars were not allowed to come near the spot; only Brother Leo came with a little bread and water each day, and to join at midnight with St. Francis in the Divine Office. At times St. Francis was very happy, and the joy that fills the Blessed in heaven seemed to glow in his heart, so that he understood the secrets of God; and wonderful visions he had too. But sometimes he was filled with sorrow and pain and temptation, for the Devil would torment him and try in every way he could to separate the heart of St. Francis from God. One day, after he had had a very wonderful vision, he went with Brother Leo to the little chapel the Friars had made, and, casting himself on the ground before the Altar, he prayed to God to make known to him the mystery which He would teach him--for he felt there was some mysterious reason why God had made him come up this mountain and dwell apart. Then he told Leo to open the book of the Gospels three times, and see what it said. And each place Leo opened on was about Christ's Passion. Then St. Francis felt quite sure that it was God's will that somehow he should share his Lord's pain, and reach the kingdom of God through suffering. And he longed very much for this, and also to have in his heart the love which made Christ so willing to suffer for men. It was a few days after this that the strange and wonderful thing happened. St. Francis was kneeling, absorbed in prayer, when suddenly a wonderful Form came towards him, and stood on a stone a little above him. Bright and shining was the Form, with the most beautiful, beautiful face; and His arms were stretched out upon a cross, and feet joined together. And He had two great wings with which He flew, and two stretched up above His head, and two covered His body. And as St. Francis gazed upon this crucified Seraph with the beautiful face full of pain, a great throb of intense agony shot through his soul and his body, so that he had never felt such pain or sorrow before. And then the Seraph spoke to him as to a friend and revealed many mysteries. When He had gone St. Francis rose from his knees and wondered what it could mean; and then he saw what it meant. For in his own hands and feet had come the marks of the crucified Christ: his hands and his feet were pierced right through with red wounds, and in the palms of the hands and on the instep of his feet were the round black heads of the nails, and their points came out the other side, bent back. And in his side was a big wound, as if made by a spear. And the pain of them all was very great. And St. Francis understood that he had been allowed by God to share in Our Lord's Passion. At first he said nothing to the Friars; but after a while he told them, but he did not show them the wounds, but kept his hands hidden in his big sleeves. Only to Leo did he show them, so that he might wash and bandage them because of the pain and the bleeding. Then, leaving the Friars on the holy mountain, St. Francis went down with Leo; but he rode on a donkey, because of the nails in his feet. He scarcely noticed the places he passed through or the people he saw, though he did several wonderful miracles. And at last he came home to his beloved Portiuncola. St. Francis's body was almost worn out, and greatly weakened, too, by the bleeding from his wounds, but his soul seemed full of new life and joy and energy. So, riding upon a donkey, he set out for a last journey through the country he had loved so much, and along the familiar roads he had so often tramped. I cannot now tell you of all that happened on this journey and of the miracles that St. Francis performed; but it was a wonderful last journey, and already the people had begun to speak of him as "the Saint." But towards the end of his journey St. Francis became so ill that he had to be carried in a litter; and so it was that at last he came back to the little Portiuncola chapel to die. As you can imagine, he was not only brave in the face of death, but gay and cheerful. Many Friars had gathered round their beloved Father, and he spoke comforting words to them and blessed them; but he gave a very special blessing to Bernard, who had been the first man to come and join him in those early days when he was still alone. And he made the brothers sing, joyful and loud, the song he had himself made up on his last journey, called "The Canticle of Brother Sun"--a beautiful song all about Brother Sun and Sister Moon, and the stars, and flowers, and birds, and grass, and Brother Wind, and how they must all praise God Who made them. And when he knew he must very soon die, he cried, "Welcome, Sister Death!" And he made them lay him on the ground, without even his habit, and spread sackcloth over him and sprinkle ashes upon him, and read to him the story of Our Blessed Lord's Passion and Death from the Gospel of St. John. All was still, and outside in the twilight the larks had gathered, and were soaring up into the evening sky, singing with all their hearts, as if rejoicing that in a few minutes the soul of their brother Francis would be free to soar up with them, and away beyond even the reach of their swift wings, to the beautiful garden of God. And in the house all was of a sudden marvellously still. And the brothers, bending down over the form on the floor, saw, through their tears, that their friend and father had gone. Only for themselves they wept, for they knew that St. Francis, beautiful and young and strong and gay once more, was already with his Friend and Master, the Lord Christ, Who with smile and outstretched hand would welcome him to his glorious reward. And the Divine Hand outstretched, and the hand of St. Francis, would bear the same print of nails, and St. Francis would understand the great and wonderful thing that God had granted him. THE SEVENTH DAY When Akela woke up she could hear the roar of the sea dashing up on the rocks. There was a regular gale blowing, and every now and then the wind brought a lash of rain out of the grey sky. So she decided to let the Cubs sleep as late as possible. It was 8.30 before the first one woke up. Arriving at the field, they found that Father and Mother and the two orderlies had succeeded in getting the fire to burn (though the rain was coming down pretty fast now), and hot porridge and tea were all ready. Prayers and breakfast both had to be in the store tent--a bit of a squash, but everyone was as cheery as usual. After breakfast it cleared up--luckily, for a party of choirboys from Portsmouth were coming over for the day. They arrived about 1.0, and were quite ready for dinner, after the tossing they had had on the boat. Dinner consisted of large beef and ham sandwiches, and "spuds," and jam roly-poly. There was a real hurricane blowing; the beef and ham and bread got blown off the plates as the orderlies handed it round! When everyone had eaten as much as they could hold, the Cubs collected in the lee of the tent for their rest, and the choirboys, not being Cubs, thought it a suitable moment to go in the swings and hammocks. After that there was a cricket match, and then the Cubs and some of the choirboys bathed. A big London scout, who had met the Cubs in the street and claimed brotherhood, also spent the day in camp. No one knew his name, and he was just called "Kangaroo," because that was his patrol. When the choirboys had gone, Kangaroo and the Cubs had a good rag. That night in the Coach-house the big doors had to be shut, or the candle would never have kept alight. You could hear the wind whipping up the white horses all over the great black sea, and laughing to see the way they jumped up over the rocks. But it was nice and cosy in the Coach-house. The Cubs had got out some extra blankets, and sat wrapped up in them like so many Indian chiefs. "You promised to tell us St. Antony to-night," said Sam. "Yes," said Akela; "I know you will like the story of his life. Well, he was one of St. Francis's Friars--the most famous one of all. But when you have heard his story you will see that with the Saints it was possible for a man to be a 'wonder-worker,' as St. Antony was called, and yet think nothing of himself at all, and expect no one else to pay him honour and respect. So much did St. Antony hate swank and love humility that he let no one know what wonderful powers he had, until one day God made an adventure happen which showed everybody what he really was." "Tell us--tell us," said the Cubs. So Akela squatted down in the middle of the listening Cubs, and began. THE STORY OF ST. ANTONY. To understand the story of St. Antony you must picture yourselves in the beautiful, sunny land of Portugal. Oranges and purple grapes and all kinds of lovely fruits ripen in the old gardens. Galleys full of rich merchandise come sailing across the blue, blue sea and touch at the port of Lisbon. All along the banks of the River Tagus are the big houses of the nobility. It is in one of these houses that there lives a boy called Fernando. Fernando is one of those boys who will always have a good time. He is very clever and quick, handsome, and full of life. He gets on wonderfully well at school, and he has a fine time in the holidays, for his people lead a gay life--feasts, sports, the chase, grand parties of every sort. Fernando has the chance of seeing a good deal of life, for he is the kind of boy the grown-ups are always ready to take out. He gets a lot of admiration, and he enjoys everything to the full. But, do you know, when he is alone there is a certain idea that often comes to him, and he sits on his window-sill and gazes away across the purple hills, and thinks and thinks and thinks. The idea is this: that, after all, this pleasure and gaiety is not worth much; it's all rather selfish and greedy and stupid. There must be something more worth while in life. For one thing, there's _God_. How little we know of God! And yet there is a lot to be learnt and understood about Him if only there was time and quiet and books, and not all this bustle of parties and grand people. Surely God wants men to get to know Him, and not be so busy pleasing themselves that they quite forget all about Him. Then, again, how rotten it would be to die and feel you had _done_ nothing in life but please yourself! After all, there's no end of things to be done to make the world a better, holier, wiser place. Fancy going out of the world knowing you were leaving it no better than when you came--or perhaps a little worse. Surely a man must feel rather nervous about dying, and about the Judgment Day, when he knows he hasn't ever done anything useful or kind. Why should God give such men the reward of heaven? _Rewards_ are for people who have _worked hard_; and so is _rest_. And then, again, when God came to earth and lived among men, He didn't just spend His time seeking for pleasures; in fact, He seemed never to think of Himself at all, but always of other people. That thought held the boy Fernando more than all the others--the thought of Christ, Who could have made Himself a King if He had liked, spending His days for others, preaching and doing miracles, and the whole long night out under the stars, under the whispering olive-trees talking to God. These thoughts used to come to Fernando when he was quite a little chap, and he had a kind of idea that when he was a man he would give himself to God. But when he began to grow up a bit, and got about thirteen or fourteen, he found that if he didn't look out he would get so keen on the life of pleasure that he would become like the gay young men about him, and quite forget all about God. He began to see that if he meant to stick to his good ideas he must _do something_ about it before it was too late. So, after a very hard struggle, he promised God the whole of himself, with all his love and all the keen, strong desire within him to do great things. He knew it would mean giving up all the pleasures that filled his life, and all the riches and glory that would some day be his. But somehow nothing mattered so long as he obeyed this sense that God was calling. Of course, his people told him he was a young fool, and did all they could to stop him; but he stuck to his idea, and at the age of fifteen he was admitted to a monastery of Canons, just outside the city, and exchanged his rich clothes for the white habit. It was a beautiful monastery, full of holy men and hundreds of wonderful books, and in the quiet and peace young Fernando was very happy. He felt he had really got near to God. He worked so hard at his studies that by the time he had become a young man he was admired by all the Canons, who thought him very clever and gifted, and told each other that some day he would be a famous scholar and do great things. Fernando himself felt that God had given him the gift of preaching; and that if he went out and preached he would be able to attract great crowds to listen, and win souls for God; so he worked and worked to learn all he could, so as to be ready to stand up and defend the Christian Faith against heretics. Fernando had gone to another great monastery at Coimbra, and had been there eight years, when something happened which was the beginning of a great change in his life--the beginning of a great adventure. One day five dusty wayfarers tramped into the town and stopped at the little house of the Franciscans, not far from the monastery of the White Canons. The five strangers were really five heroes, for they were five of St. Francis's Friars, bound on a quest so thrilling and so dangerous that they felt quite sure they would never come back. They were going to Morocco, in Africa, to preach to the heathen, and with shining eyes they spoke of dying there, for the love of Christ, and winning the martyr's crown! Full of joy they went on their way; but without knowing it they had set on fire the heart of the young Canon, Fernando. In the quiet of his peaceful monastery he could think of nothing but Africa, the heathen, the chance of sharing Christ's suffering, and dying for His sake. It was really the Holy Spirit Who was stirring up those thoughts in Fernando's heart. Well, some months later news came that the five brave Friars had been put to a most horrible death by the Saracens. They were first scourged till the whiplashes had almost cut their bodies to pieces. Boiling oil and vinegar was then poured over them, and they were rolled on the ground, over fragments of broken glass and pottery. They were then promised their lives if they would give up Christ; but as, of course, they wouldn't, they were beheaded. These were the first martyrs of St. Francis's Order. Can you imagine what Fernando felt when one day a solemn procession stopped outside the church of his own monastery, and the coffins containing the bodies of the martyrs were laid within it for a while on their way to Spain? Fernando now felt more sure than ever that God was calling him to be a poor Friar, and to set out barefoot for some hot, dusty land away beyond the seas, where cruel hands would torture him to death. Once again he offered himself to God, but this time it took an even harder struggle than it had before, for he loved his quiet life of prayer and study in the beautiful monastery even more than he had loved the gay life of his boyhood. Still, he did not _give in to himself_. Next time the poor Friars came, in their old, patched habits, to beg at the rich monastery, can you imagine their surprise when one of the most learned and famous young Canons came out to them, in his stately white habit, his beautiful face lighted up with a great resolve, and asked them if they would give him a brown habit, and make him a Friar, and send him to the Saracen country to win a martyr's crown? Of course, they were delighted, and promised to bring him a habit the very next day. Fernando had a hard job to persuade the Canons to let him go. But at last they did; and once more he turned his back on a happy home and set out on an unknown adventure. As he left the monastery, one of the Canons, a great friend of his, called after him: "Go--go! You will doubtless become a Saint!" And Fernando called back to him: "When you hear that I am a Saint give glory to God!" for he knew very well that it is only God Who can make a man into a Saint, and that the man's own efforts can never do it. It must have been a great change for Fernando to find himself in the poor little huts belonging to the Friars, and obliged to go barefoot, dressed in a rough habit and cord, with only scraps of food to eat, begged from the houses of the rich. These Friars were only poor, ignorant men--very holy, but with no learning or refinement. They did not know Fernando was a very clever man, a scholar. Of course, he did not tell them, but humbly took his place as the newest and least important of the brothers, never letting them see that he missed the wonderful library, or the beautiful music of the monastery, or the quiet cell where he had been able to pray and work in peace. So as to start life quite fresh, he even gave up his noble name, Fernando, and took the name of "Antony." So now we will begin to call him St. Antony. [Illustration: S. FRANCIS RECEIVES THE MARKS OF THE PASSION. _See page 81._] Of course, the one thing he kept thinking about was the quest of the martyr's crown, and at last he got his Superiors to send him, with one companion, to the Saracen country. But now came the greatest disappointment of his life, for no sooner had he got there than he fell ill. All the winter he lay between life and death, with a terrible fever, so ill that he could do nothing. He knew that he was now so weak that he would never be able to go and preach to the Saracens and be martyred. He would have to go home again, a failure. This was much harder to him than any danger or suffering, and the way he bore it, cheerfully and patiently for the love of Christ, made him much more pleasing to God than anything else. For God loves humble people, who are willing to do His Will, instead of choosing for themselves. Seeing that God wanted his life rather than his death, St. Antony decided to go back to his own country and become as strong and well as possible. So he set sail. But when God sees that a man has altogether given up his own will, He takes full control of his journey through life, and makes things happen to show the man what to do. In this case God made St. Antony's ship get driven ashore on the island of Sicily. Here there happened to be a small house belonging to the Franciscans. It was while St. Antony was resting there that he heard that there was going to be a great chapter (or general meeting) of the Friars, at Assisi, and that St. Francis would be there; so he asked leave to go, and then set forth. This was to be the beginning of a new adventure. When he got to Assisi he found two thousand Friars collected there for the chapter. The country people were providing all their food free. You can imagine what St. Antony felt when he saw St. Francis! But when St. Francis called for volunteers to go on a dangerous mission to the fierce Germans, it must have cost him an awful lot to keep quiet. But he had learnt his lesson--God did not want of him a glorious death, only a patient life. When the chapter came to an end all the Friars dispersed, some going gladly off on their dangerous quests, others collecting in little bands under their "ministers," as the head ones were called, and starting to tramp back to their friaries. But St. Antony stood all alone. He had no brave quest to follow; no minister looked for him to go home with a party of cheerful Friars; no one cared what became of the young Portuguese stranger. So St. Antony asked one of the ministers to take him and "form him in the practice of religious discipline." The minister little knew the wonderful gifts of this pale young stranger, with the beautiful, sad face, and sent him to a humble friary on the top of a steep, rocky mountain. There were only a few simple Friars there. One of them had hewed out a little cave in the rock. This he gave to St. Antony, who made it his cell. There he spent most of his day in prayer. But one job he specially made his own. What do you think it was? Why, washing up the plates and greasy dishes. He didn't tell the Friars anything about himself, and of course they never guessed that their new brother, who always chose the meanest jobs, was a nobleman's son and a famous scholar of one of the greatest monasteries in Portugal. For a whole year St. Antony lived like this. Do you think he wished himself back in the beautiful monastery in Portugal, with his books and his clever, interesting friends? No; for he loved what was God's Will for him above all things. People should not pine for the past, nor be impatient for the future; they should live heart and soul in the present, because the present is always what has just been provided by God, and so it is the best possible thing. But God meant His faithful servant to be made known, and I will tell you, now, the wonderful way in which He made it happen. In the town, not far from St. Antony's little friary, there was one day a meeting of Franciscan and Dominican Friars for an important ceremony. After the service the Superior asked the Dominicans, who were clever men and good preachers, to preach a sermon. But they all said they were not prepared; and so did the Franciscans. So the Superior turned to St. Antony, who had come as a companion of his Minister, and ordered him to preach. St. Antony tried to get out of it, but, finding he must obey, he walked slowly up into the pulpit. The Friars did not expect much of a sermon. This was only poor Brother Antony, whose chief job was washing dishes. St. Antony, ready to _do his best_ for God, did not think of himself a bit. He just turned over in his mind what would be the best thing to preach on so as to help his brothers and bring honour and glory to his God. By the time he was in the pulpit the Holy Spirit had put a text into his mind. He gave it out in his clear, ringing voice: "For us Christ became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross." Then he began to preach. The Friars sat up and stared. The young, unknown Friar was pouring forth a wonderful flood of eloquence, full of the deepest thought, and showing such learning as none of them possessed. Only a scholar could preach like that; and only a scholar who was full of the fire of the Holy Ghost could move the hearts of his hearers as this man did! The Friars and their Superiors sat spellbound. They quite forgot the preacher, and were carried away by his words into a greater love of God. When at last he ceased, and walked quietly down from the pulpit, his eyes on the ground, deep humility in his heart, his hearers turned to each other in wonder and delight, and all said they had never heard such a preacher in their lives. Of course, the Superiors hurried off and told St. Francis all about it, and you can imagine how delighted St. Francis was to hear he had such a wonderful man among his Friars. It ended in St. Francis sending St. Antony to do what many years ago he had longed to do--that is, preach to the heretics who were teaching wrong things about the Christian Faith. Still as humble as ever, St. Antony set out to tramp along the roads to the places at which he was to preach. Through Italy he went, and then France, and then Spain, and back to Italy, and on these journeys the most wonderful things happened. Not only did God give him the power of preaching such marvellous sermons that the people crowded in thousands to hear him, but He gave him the power to do miracles, like He once gave to His Apostles. As to the heretics, they simply couldn't stand up against St. Antony, and thousands of them either had to stop their false teaching and keep quiet, or else were converted and came over to St. Antony's side. Because of this he got the name, "Hammer of Heretics." But it wasn't only to the heretics he preached. The ordinary people used to come in such crowds that there simply wasn't room in the churches for them, and St. Antony had to preach out in the fields and plains. Rich and poor used to come, clergy and ignorant peasants. The shopkeepers used to shut up their shops. The people were so much moved by his sermons that enemies forgave each other, men paid their debts, or creditors forgave their debtors; wicked people gave up their sinful life, and started trying to _do their best_ to become pleasing to God. One day a band of twelve brigands who lived in the forest and robbed passers-by heard about the famous preacher. So they disguised themselves, and went to see if what was said of him was true. When he began to preach he completely won their hearts, and they repented of their sinful life. After the sermon they spoke to St. Antony, and confessed what wicked men they had been. He told them they must never go back to their robber life, and he said that those who gave it up would go some day to heaven, but that if any went back to it they would have miserable ends. And, sure enough, some who went back soon died horrible deaths. St. Antony told them to try and do something to make up for having been so wicked. One of them, he said, was to go twelve times in pilgrimage to the tomb of St. Peter and St. Paul at Rome. Years and years after, when this robber was an old, old man, he met a Friar on the road, and he told him how when he was young he had heard St. Antony preach, and how he had told him to go to Rome twelve times. "And now I am on my way back from Rome for the twelfth time," he said. That shows you what power St. Antony had. There's no time now to tell you of all the miracles he did; but they were so wonderful that he came to be called the "Wonder-worker," and it showed everyone that God was with him. And do you think all this honour and glory, and big crowds running after him, and great men praising him, made St. Antony proud or even the least bit pleased with himself? No; he stayed just as humble and retiring as he was in the days when he used to wash dishes in the mountain friary. But St. Antony's hard life was beginning to tell on his health. For a long time he had secretly suffered from a very painful disease. It was now about nine years since the day he preached his first sermon and was sent forth by St. Francis on his great mission. As the summer drew on St. Antony ceased to preach, so as not to hinder the people's work in the vineyards. Also, he knew the end of his life was near. He longed for a little peace and solitude and silence; he longed to be alone with God to prepare for his great journey into the next world. There was a nobleman called Count Tiso, who had a beautiful estate not far from Padua, a city St. Antony loved very much. Here St. Antony went for a time of rest. There was no rocky hill-side to make a cave which he might use as his cell, so he got Count Tiso to make him a cell in the great branches of a walnut-tree. These branches spread out not far above the ground, and between them Count Tiso wove reeds and willow twigs, and made a lovely little house for St. Antony. The thick, leafy branches above sheltered him from the hot sun; a few rough steps led up to it; and here St. Antony could spend his days in complete solitude. But one evening when he had come down to have his evening meal with his companions, in the little friary near by, he was taken very ill, and his pain was so great that he could no longer sit upright. He knew he was soon to die, and he longed to die at his beloved city, Padua. He was really much too ill to be moved, but when his companions saw how much he wanted this, they fetched a rough ox-cart and laid St. Antony in it. I told you how St. Antony had longed to share Christ's sufferings and die a martyr's death--well, now was his chance. He was in such frightful pain that any tiny movement hurt him, and now he had to go mile after mile in a rough cart with no springs, jolting over the stony roads, the broiling Italian sun beating down upon him, the thick white dust choking his parched throat, the flies tormenting him. You can't imagine the agony he must have suffered. And yet he never grumbled--he was _glad_ of this chance of suffering; he felt he was really taking up his cross and following his beloved Master along the painful way to Calvary. When the cart had nearly reached Padua, a Friar who had been sent to inquire after St. Antony met the little procession. He saw at once that St. Antony would not live to reach the city, so he made the Friars lift him from the cart and carry him to a little house of the Friars near by. It had been St. Antony's last great wish to die at Padua; but even this he gave up patiently and gladly and without a murmur. In the little cell he lay, his pain getting worse and worse, and his weakness greater and greater. The Friars gave him the last rites of religion. "Then, raising his eyes," the old book says, "he looked fixedly on high. As he continued to gaze steadfastly towards heaven, the Friars asked him what he saw. He answered: 'I see my Lord.'" Not long after, like one falling quietly asleep, he breathed out his last breath. "His loving, holy soul quitted the body, and, conducted by the good Jesus, entered into the joy of his Lord." The little cell where St. Antony died still stands, and people can go in and look on the very walls his eyes looked on, the very floor on which his body lay. It is such a holy spot that a church has been built over it, and the little square cell stands inside the church. That is the story of one of the holiest and humblest men who ever lived. * * * * * Very quietly the Cubs lay down on their palliasses, and fell asleep thinking of their new friend, St. Antony. THE EIGHTH DAY A pouring day! Luckily the Cubs remained in the sunny land of dreams till eight. Meals had to be in the bell-tent. This was great fun! There was just room for a council circle, only you had to be careful not to put your feet in other people's porridge, or let your head rub against the tent. If you did, a stream of water soon began to run down your neck, and Akela said it _served you right_. Every now and then the rain _nearly_ stopped, and everybody dashed out for a few minutes; but no sooner were you out, than the weather-fairy seemed to say, "Yah! Sold again!" and down came another sheet of rain that sent everyone scuttling for shelter. The Cubs decided that it would be a good day to have a concert, and that there might be a rehearsal in the morning and the grand performance later on. So they sat round and made a lovely row; and some people sang some very pretty solos--but I will tell you about them when I tell you about the grand performance. It cleared up for a little while before dinner, and the Cubs went out for a search for dry wood. Some of them went down to the shore, and there they found some boys with donkeys and ponies for hire, so they had some lovely rides up and down the sand, and no one fell off. Just as they got home the rain started again in torrents. In the tent they found two visitors--old friends who had once known them in London. This made them think how lucky it was they had had a rehearsal, for now they would be able to give the visitors a concert, and then they would not be disappointed because of the rain. So after dinner the concert began. First the whole Pack shouted the camp chorus--the same one which I told you they sang in the train. They then sang "John Peel." Then Bunny sang a solo called "Hush thee, my Baby." This was followed by a very pretty duet by Patsy and Mac--"'Tis the Last Rose of Summer" (Mac sang the alto very well). Then the whole Pack sang a song called "Robin Hood," which Akela had once made up for them. After that Bunny recited Brutus' speech from Shakespeare's play, "Julius Cæsar"--he made you feel he really _was_ Brutus, and everyone clapped him. Then four Cubs sang "Annie Laurie," in parts. Then they all made Spongey sing a song. Spongey was very shy, and said he couldn't. But in the end he sang a very short song, in a very deep voice, called, "Oh-oh-oh, it's a Loverly War." Of course, everyone cheered themselves hoarse. Then the Pack sang "The Golden Vanity" right through all its many verses. This was followed by a solo from Mac--a sad little Irish song--and another duet by Mac and Patsy, "When Irish Eyes are Smiling," followed by "Oh Wert Thou in the Cauld Blast," sung in parts by Jack, Patsy, and Mac. Then everyone sang choruses. The visitors enjoyed it very much. By the end of the programme it was quite impossible for the Cubs to sit still for another moment. You can't get much exercise in a wet bell-tent. So Akela had a bright idea. If you were _in_ the sea the rain couldn't wet you--what about a bathe? Everyone cheered, and got into their coats and macs, and ran down to the Stable, where they changed into their bathing things. The sea felt awfully warm, and everyone shrieked and splashed and made such a row that the visitors, all shut up stuffy and cross in their lodgings, looked out of their windows and wondered who _could_ be so cheerful on such a day. Coming back to tea, the Cubs were delighted to find their Scoutmaster sitting on the floor of the bell-tent, a large bun in one hand and a mug of tea in the other. He had tramped all the way over from Quarr to see how far the whole camp had been drowned. In case there were any survivors, he brought two enormous bags of sweets. That night all the Cubs prayed very hard for a real, proper, hot day for their last in camp. It certainly did not look possible. But Spongey put the matter in a nutshell when he stood in his long night-shirt, one eye shut as usual, and remarked: "I think it'll sunshine to-morrer, 'cos I've prayed very hard it will." The Cubs had turned in early, to get out of the wet world into their dry, cosy beds. There was plenty of time for a good long story, and they settled down with wriggles of satisfaction and waited for Akela to begin. THE STORY OF ST. PATRICK. Nearly four hundred years after Our Lord had gone up to heaven, and left His disciples and their followers to carry on, a boy was born who was destined to be one of God's greatest Saints, and to bring thousands and thousands of pagans into the Christian Faith. This boy was St. Patrick, called the Apostle of Ireland, because he turned the whole of Ireland Christian. For many hundreds of years after St. Patrick had died, Ireland was like a fruitful garden in which sprang up hundreds of Saints and holy and learned men, who helped to spread the knowledge and love of Christ all over the world. So St. Patrick was truly an Apostle, and, like St. John and St. Andrew and the others, one of the foundation-stones of Christ's great Church. But though he _ended_ in being so very important, and doing things that made a great difference to the whole world, he _began_ as an ordinary boy--and rather a naughty one, as he tells us himself. We know a great deal about St. Patrick, and we know it is quite true, because when he was over one hundred years old he wrote it all down himself. He called the book his "Confession," and though he told us such a lot about himself, beginning with the adventures of his boyhood, there is one thing he did not put down in the book. Can you guess what? Well, he did not put down how good he was. For, you see, the Saints never thought themselves good, because, instead of comparing themselves with people _less good than themselves_, as we are all so fond of doing, they kept on comparing themselves with Our Blessed Lord, and of course, that made them seem very, very far from perfect. When St. Patrick was a boy he did not love God or believe all his Christian teachers told him, nor was he obedient or ready to _do his best_. One day some fierce pirates raided the land where he lived with his father and mother, and carried him off captive with lots of other boys. Sailing across the sea to Ireland, the pirates sold the boys as slaves. St. Patrick was bought by a great chief called Milcho, and sent out on to the hill-sides to watch the sheep. Do you think he was lonely and afraid? No. For, when torn away from his home, from the friends who loved him, he had discovered that there is one Friend that you can't be dragged away from, and Who can be with you even in the midst of the tossing green sea, on a pirate ship. For, though Patrick had forgotten God, God had not forgotten Patrick. "The Lord," he says, "showed me my unbelief, and had pity on my youth and ignorance." So when he trudged out on to the mountain-side, he was not sad and alone, but glad in the knowledge that his unseen Friend was with him. "Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me, Christ in me, Christ above me, Christ beneath me, Christ in the chariot, Christ in the fort, Christ in the ship." That is a prayer St. Patrick made up himself. There, on the rough mountain-side, the boy St. Patrick spent all his lonely days talking to God, so that, he says, "more and more the love of God and His faith and fear grew in me, and my spirit was stirred." He tells us that he would recite one hundred prayers in one day, and nearly as many in the night. He had to sleep out with the sheep in some rough cave or hut. "Before the dawn," he says, "I was called to pray by the snow, the ice, and the rain." But he did not mind this outward cold, because of the burning heart within him. St. Patrick had learnt his lesson--the lesson of where to find the only comfort and friendship and help worth having. God wanted him, now, for the great work he was to do. One night a mysterious voice told him that if he went to a certain place he would find a ship ready to take him home. The place was about two hundred miles away, and St. Patrick had never been there. However, trusting in God's help, he started off. At last, after a long tramp, he reached the town, and, sure enough, there was a ship at the quay about to set sail. St. Patrick asked to be taken on board, but when the sailors heard he had no money they refused him a passage. St. Patrick went sadly away, but as he went he prayed. Before long he heard someone coming after him. Turning round, he found it was one of the sailors, who said after all they would take him. I can't tell you now of the adventures St. Patrick had on his way home, but after being shipwrecked and nearly starved, and each time wonderfully saved by God, he reached his father's house. But though he was home again with those he loved, he did not forget the Friend Who had been his all in those cold, hard days in Ireland. He thought of Him all day, and of how best to please Him. He had already begun studying for a life in God's service, when he had a wonderful vision of the people of Ireland calling him to come to their help, and he knew it was a sign from God that this was the work he was to do. You can imagine how impatient he must have been to get a ship and go sailing back to Ireland to tell the people about the true God, and how Christ had died on the Cross for them, and all the rest; but for such a difficult and dangerous job he needed a lot of training--not only in learning, but in the strength and holiness and obedience to God which should make him able to face the task before him. How long do you think God kept him at his training? Thirty-eight years! At the end of this time a holy man who was his friend and guide was sent to preach in Britain. St. Patrick went with him. This was the first step, and it ended in his being made a Bishop and sent--at last--to the lifework he had so long waited for, the conversion of Ireland. When St. Patrick's ship came to shore, the wild men of Leinster would not let him land. So, trusting as usual to God, he sailed out again to sea, and landed a little farther to the south. There seemed to be nobody about, to stop him; and, tired out, I suppose, with a day of exploring in the strange land, St. Patrick lay down and fell asleep. A little Irish boy chanced to come along, and, seeing a stranger asleep, crept up on tip-toe to look at him. What a lovely, kind face he had! The boy thought to himself that he had never before seen anybody who looked so nice, and he longed to do him some good turn. He couldn't think of anything to do for someone who was asleep, but at last he got an idea. Picking all the best flowers he could find, he put them round St. Patrick for a surprise for him. When St. Patrick woke up you can imagine how pleased he was with the flowers, and still more pleased to see a little Irish boy smiling at him shyly from among the bushes. Before long St. Patrick and the boy had become great friends, and the boy simply wouldn't go away, but stuck to St. Patrick. Then God made known a secret of the future to St. Patrick, and he said: "Some day he will be the heir to my kingdom." And, sure enough, the boy, whose name was Benignus, succeeded St. Patrick as Bishop of Armagh. Don't you wish you were that boy, always to stay with St. Patrick? After this the most wonderful adventures began to befall St. Patrick; but even more wonderful than the adventures were the miracles by which he managed to escape out of them, not only alive, but victorious. Getting into his ship again, St. Patrick landed farther north. Once more the fierce Irish set on him and his little band, and their chief, Dichu, raised his sword to bring it crashing down on St. Patrick's head. But, somehow, his arm stayed stiff in mid-air, and he could not strike the blow. Dichu was an honest man, and soon understood that such a miracle must be a sign from the true God. If once you believe in God--well, the only possible thing is to serve Him. So Dichu became a Christian, and humbly learned from St. Patrick how he should serve God. Then St. Patrick went to the house of the very chief who had kept him as a slave, and converted his children to the true Faith. But it was at Easter that something very thrilling happened, and was the beginning of St. Patrick's real triumphs. The Chief-King of Erin (as Ireland was called) was just going to hold his solemn festival at Tara. All the Irish princes and all the priests of the pagan religion had collected together. One of their ceremonies was the lighting of fire at dawn, with magic rites and ceremonies. It happened to be Holy Saturday, and on that day the Christians used to light a beacon. St. Patrick lit his holy fire, as usual. The King saw it blazing on a hill-top, and was very angry. One of his priests (or Druids, as they were called) said: "If that fire is not put out before morning, it never will be put out," and he meant the Christian Faith. So the King sent for St. Patrick. Surrounded by his Druids and bards, and all the Irish princes, the King sat, fierce and proud, and awaited the strangers. It was Easter morning, so, as St. Patrick and his little band advanced, they chanted the Easter litanies. So noble and holy did St. Patrick look that one of the bards rose as he drew near. This little act of politeness on the part of the bard brought him special grace from heaven, and he accepted the Christian Faith. Standing quietly in the midst of the circle of priests and princes, St. Patrick looked around him. He met countless pairs of fierce eyes fixed upon him, as the princes sat in silence, "with the rims of their shields against their chins"; and as he looked at them he longed to win them all for God, and he prayed for grace and power to do what was needed. Then he told them why he had come to Ireland. The King left his Druids to reply. They did so by doing all sorts of horrible magic. And certainly they made things happen, much as people called "spiritists" do nowadays; but it was not by God's power, so it must have been the Devil who helped them. Whatever the Druids did, St. Patrick undid, and then did something more wonderful. The Druids were furious, and no one knows what might have happened had not St. Patrick caused an earthquake to happen, by God's power. So terrified were the Irish that they went half mad and began killing each other, and St. Patrick and his men escaped. But the next day St. Patrick boldly came back, though he knew the King meant to kill him. He was given a cup of poisoned wine to drink. Well, what of that? Did not Our Lord say to His disciples, when He sent them out to convert the world, "If you drink any deadly thing it shall not hurt you"? St. Patrick made the sign of the cross over the cup and drank it, and nothing happened. Then the Druids arranged a horrible test. They laid two great fires, one of dry faggots and the other of wet, green wood. On the dry wood they laid the boy Benignus, dressed in a Druid's white robe. On the green they put a Druid, clad in St. Patrick's cloak. Then they said they would set fire to both piles. St. Patrick accepted the challenge. (If you had been the boy, would you have "got the wind up," do you think, or would you have trusted St. Patrick?) Well, they set fire to the two piles of wood. Strange to say, the green wood blazed up, with many sizzlings and cracklings and much smoke, but the dry wood simply wouldn't light. There was, however, a sudden flame, and the Druid's robe on the boy flared up and was soon burnt to ashes, leaving Benignus quite all right, and, I expect, very pleased with himself! Meanwhile, horrible noises had been coming from the other pile, and when the smoke and flames died down there were only charred cinders where there had once been a Druid. But St. Patrick's cloak had not been burnt at all. As the King still would not believe, St. Patrick had to make another earthquake happen, which swallowed up so many of the King's subjects that he gave in, and said St. Patrick might preach, though he himself never accepted the Faith. So, on the green plains of Tara, St. Patrick preached a wonderful sermon to the Irish, who by this time had come crowding round to see the stranger who could beat the Druids at their own game. During this sermon St. Patrick stooped down and picked a leaf of shamrock, and, holding it up, showed the people how the little green leaf was _three_ and yet _one_. He said that would help them to understand how the Blessed Trinity is three--God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost--and yet is really only _one God_. That is why the Irish wear shamrock on St. Patrick's Day (March 17th). [Illustration: S. PATRICK AND THE LITTLE BOY BENIGNUS. _See page 101._] Many more miracles did St. Patrick which I can't tell you about now; and he went from place to place, winning thousands of men for Christ, and giving spiritual life to their souls by baptizing them. One Shrove Tuesday St. Patrick went up on to the top of a lonely, rugged mountain above the sea, and there he stayed without any food all through Lent till Easter. And all the time he prayed and prayed and prayed for the men of Ireland and their fate on the Judgment Day. At the end of his long and painful time of prayer God sent an angel to tell him his request was granted. So, with his heart full of joy, St. Patrick knelt and blessed Ireland, and as he gave his blessing hundreds of poisonous snakes came out of their holes and went slithering away into the sea, where they were all drowned. (That is why you see pictures of St. Patrick with snakes.) And now, every year, thousands of Irish people go on pilgrimage up that mountain. Before I end I must just tell you one little story about a young Irish Prince who _didn't give in to himself_. This Prince and his followers, after hearing St. Patrick preach, decided to become followers of Christ and be baptized. St. Patrick, being a Bishop, carried a thing called a crozier--a kind of long staff, like a shepherd's crook, because _Bishop_ means _shepherd_. St. Patrick's crozier had rather a sharp point at the end, and during the ceremony of Baptism, somehow, by accident, he pierced the Prince's bare foot with it, but did not notice what he had done. The Prince said nothing, and did not wince or seem surprised. Afterwards, when St. Patrick found out what he had done, and asked the Prince why he had said nothing, the Prince replied: "I thought it was the rule of faith." A bit of poetry has been written about it, which puts it rather nicely. The Prince says, in it: "I thought, thus called to follow Him Whose Feet Were pierced with nails, haply the blissful rite Some little pain included." Everywhere St. Patrick went he was loved, and soon the fame of him had spread through the whole country. The superstitious religion of the Druids altogether died down, and Ireland became a Christian country. St. Patrick made a set of wise laws, and by these the Irish were governed for a thousand years. At last came the time when his great work was finished. The little boy, Benignus, had grown up and taken over St. Patrick's work. St. Patrick had written his "Confession." And now, at one hundred and twenty, he was quite ready for the rest and the reward of heaven. He was very happy; his great work had been accomplished. God had been very good to him. And so, satisfied, he lay down to die, knowing that all the men of Ireland were praying for their beloved father. So, on March 17th, in the year 493, St. Patrick passed from this world into the glory of Heaven. THE NINTH DAY As the Cubs one by one opened their eyes on the last day at camp, the first thing they saw was that their prayers of last night had been fully, _wonderfully_ answered. The sun shone with that clear golden radiance of early morning sun. The sky was a misty blue, with just a few small "flocks of sheep." The wind had dropped, and the world, washed clean by the rain, was going to enjoy itself to-day. Quickly the Cubs washed themselves and scrambled into their old clothes, and were away up to the field in record time. The smell of wood smoke; the cry of the sea-gulls; the _bigness_ of God's beautiful world--only one more day of it all! Porridge out in the sunshine, and lots and lots of bread-and-jam. Then down to the shore. On the way shorewards the Cubs met a kind lady who lived in the little house at the end of the sea-wall. She had often seen them run past, and now she stopped and asked Akela what they were. When she heard it was their last day she said they might have her boat for the whole morning! So the Cubs and Akela all got into their bathing things, and the boat was rowed round from where it was anchored to the bit of the shore where they always played. When everyone had been out and had learnt to row, first with one oar and then with two; and when the tide had gone down, down, down, as far as it could, Akela anchored the boat in shallow water, and took away all the oars but one. Then the Cubs had a gorgeous time, rowing by themselves, as far as the long rope would allow. I don't know what that boat turned into--pirate vessels, the _Golden Hind_, and everything else you can imagine, while the gallant crew had many an adventure. Meanwhile, _another_ kind lady had appeared on the scene. She lived in a nice house, with a very sloping lawn in front, and her garden steps came right down on to the bit of sand where the Cubs always played. She came down and offered a prize for the best little house or model village or garden the Cubs could make. Four couples set to work, and by dinner-time there were some splendid models ready. Then "Big Andy and Little Andy," clad only in their bathing-drawers, walked demurely up to the front-door of the house, and asked the lady to come and see. She came out carrying two lovely spades, two splendid shrimping-nets, and two very nice rubber balls. She decided the "Andies" had got first prize; they had made a model of Quarr Abbey; Sam and Dick were second, with a church; while Bert and Bunny came in a good third, with a very nice house standing in a large and luxurious garden. After giving the prizes, this fairy godmother invited the whole Pack to tea in her garden, at four o'clock, after the afternoon bathe! So, after dinner, they went to the Stable and made themselves a little bit respectable, and then down to the shore and bathed, and afterwards went up the smooth, steep lawn to the fairy godmother's house. Soon a maid brought out tea; and it was _some_ tea--cake of all sorts, and real bread-and-butter (not "marg."), and little jam-sandwiches (but, as one Cub remarked, "it didn't _fill you up_, like camp-tea"). After tea, during which the Cubs were wonderfully quiet and well-behaved, they entertained their hostess with various kinds of somersaults and cart-wheels, and then went through a large part of the famous concert for her benefit. Before going they gave her a Grand Howl, and then all shook hands with her. After that they played on the shore, and then ended up with a last bathe, about seven. Back to supper. Camp prayers for the last time in the soft evening light. Good-night to Father and Mother and Godmother; and then to the Stable, for the last story. But as they squatted round waiting for the story, someone made a remark that was the beginning of quite a long pow-wow. "Miss," he said, "shall we be Cubs in _Heaven_, and will you be our Cubmaster?" Everyone had questions to ask about Heaven--more than Akela knew how to answer! And then they grew serious as someone mentioned two Cubs who had died a year before. "Do you think Frank and Bob have found each other in heaven?" "Yes," said Akela, "I'm sure they have; and I expect they've found those two Cubs from two other Westminster Packs, who died of 'flu, last winter." And that is why this book is dedicated to Frank and Bob, for they were two of the most faithful Cubs who ever lived. They died brave and unselfish--Bob after a long and very painful illness, in which he never _gave in to himself_, but was always thinking of other people and his "little 'uns." At last, as he lay delirious, he used to think he was in camp again, and say: "Oh, mother, look at the green fields--aren't they lovely?" And as Akela knelt by his bed, holding his poor little hot hand, she felt sure that soon he would be playing in the green fields of Heaven--the best camp of all, where the Good Shepherd was already waiting to carry him in His strong, kind arms. And now someone else had a splendid idea: "Perhaps they've talked to the Saints!" "_We_ shall know a lot of the Saints when _we_ go to Heaven," said another Cub; "_I_ shall look out for St. Antony first." And so they decided to try and get to know as many Saints as possible before they died, _and to try and copy them_, so that some day they would find lots of friends in Heaven, who would not be ashamed to receive the salutes of their little brothers, and to return them with kind smiles of welcome. Then the Cubs settled down for a last story. THE STORY OF ST. GEORGE. "And now," said the Cubs, "a last story! Go on, Miss--make it an _extra_ good one, exciting and full of adventures, and the best of all, because it's the last night." "Very well," said Akela, "I'll tell you the story of the Patron Saint of all Cubs and Scouts, and of England. Who's that?" "St. George!" cried the Cubs in chorus. And although many of them knew the story very well, they snuggled down in their blankets and prepared to enjoy themselves. Well (said Akela), I'm going to tell you the story of the Saint who was more thought about and honoured in the old days than, perhaps, any other Saint who ever lived. He was from the very earliest times--in fact, from directly after his death--called "the Great Martyr." He became the patron of many countries and orders of knighthood, but specially in England was he loved, and his feast was kept as a great holiday, equal to Christmas. Already, before William the Conqueror came to England, our forefathers had begun to build churches in honour of St. George. But it was King Richard Coeur de Lion who specially spread devotion to St. George in England, because he took him as his own patron, and used his name as his battle-cry. "For God and St. George!" he would shout, as he swung his mighty battle-axe in the air and charged at the head of his knights toward the Saracen lines. St. George several times appeared on a white horse, and led the Crusaders to victory when it seemed as if the enemy were going to put them to flight and come off victorious. Many people think of St. George as a knight on a prancing horse, who killed a dragon and rescued a maiden in distress. But this is only a kind of parable or picture of the real St. George and what he did. The dragon is a picture of the wicked, heathen religion that tried to kill the beautiful young Church that Our Lord had made. St. George fought this dragon, and gave his life in the battle, but he rescued the maiden (who represents the Church); for his death seems to have rallied the Christians and filled them with new courage to fight bravely and stick to it, until at last the heathen dragon was overcome, and the Church of Christ was able to fill all the world with joy and truth and light. Well, now I will tell you what the old books say about St. George; but we have not many details about his life, as we have about St. Francis's. St. George lived a bit more than three hundred years after Christ. He was the son of a Roman soldier, a Christian, stationed in Palestine, which was a Roman colony. St. George was one of those brave, straightforward boys who are afraid of nothing--neither of themselves and their weakness, nor of other people and their unkindness. He practised "not giving in to himself," like a good Cub; and he thought a great deal of his _honour_, like a good Scout. And he knew that everything brave or good that he ever did was by the grace of his Captain, Christ, and not because he was any better himself than anybody else. He could ride well, shoot an arrow straight, and use a spear or a broadsword as well as any Roman boy. But it was not so much this as his way of obeying quickly, and keeping his word, and never giving in to himself, which made him rise from promotion to promotion when he joined the Roman army. He was still very young when he was made what we should now call a Colonel, and given a great deal of responsibility. In fact, the Emperor thought no end of him, and people whispered that some day he would be head of the army and one of the most important men in the Roman Empire. This was rather wonderful, because the Emperor, Diocletian, was a heathen and hated Christians, and, as I told you, St. George was a very good Christian. In those days the Christian Church was no longer hiding in the Catacombs, but had come out into the open, and nearly half Diocletian's Empire was Christian. But something--probably pride--made Diocletian hate the Christians, and he decided to do all he could to destroy the Church of Christ, and force the people back into the old religion, and worship a god that was really not very different from Cæsar, the Emperor, himself. So he first tried burning down the churches, and then imprisoning the priests and bishops. But one day he suddenly got mad, and gave an order that if the people would not worship the Roman gods and offer incense to them, and swear that they no longer believed in Christ, his soldiers would kill them like beasts and leave them in the streets, as a ghastly warning to any other fools who refused to obey. So the soldiers went forth, sword in hand, and every man, woman, and child who refused to give up Christ was killed, or wounded and left to bleed to death. Now, no one had thought that Diocletian would ever go as far as this, and when the horrible news was brought to St. George he was filled with rage. The Emperor was, of course, his master, but there and then he vowed that he would not stay in the service of a vile murderer, a coward who could stain his sword with the blood of women and little children; and he prepared at once to go to the Emperor, and say straight out all that was burning in his heart. Now, his friends knew that nothing would more enrage the Emperor than this, because he thought a lot of St. George, and yet he was proud and obstinate, and nothing would make him stop persecuting the Christians. If St. George spoke as he said he would, it would certainly mean _no chance of promotion_, no becoming head of the army; perhaps, even, it would mean imprisonment; possibly death. So they simply _begged_ St. George not to go. But do you think he was that sort? Not much! The last thing he wanted was promotion in the army of a man who was the cruel enemy of Christ and the murderer of his fellow-Christians. So he set spurs to his horse, and rode off for the Emperor's Court. Diocletian was surprised to see him arrive suddenly, travel-stained and apparently in a great hurry; and still more was he surprised when, instead of speaking with reverence and respect, he let the words almost burst forth from his full heart, and told the Emperor that it would be better if he paid honour to the God from Whom he had received his sceptre, instead of murdering the faithful servants of that God. Diocletian was first surprised and then angry. But he tried to laugh it off, because he was really fond of St. George. Then he tried reasoning with the young soldier, and explaining that he had to keep the Christians in good discipline in case they might revolt or get proud and rebellious. But St. George would listen to no reasons or excuses, and, unbuckling his sword, he laid it down, resigning his commission in the army of a man who could act so dishonourably. Then Diocletian got very angry indeed. He gave orders that St. George should be put in a dark dungeon, and loaded with chains until his pride should be broken, and he should be willing to humble himself before the Emperor. So angry was he that he made up his cruel mind that now he would even force St. George to give up the Christian religion himself, and that no pains should be spared to make him do this. Alone in the dark, dank, icy-cold dungeon, St. George lay in his heavy chains, and wondered what was going to happen next. It was very horrible, down there, and he ached in every limb, and he was very hungry; but somehow he felt kind of glad inside, because he knew he was suffering all this for Christ's sake. One day, when his gaoler brought him his ration of hard bread, he told him that he had heard a rumour that the executioner was coming to the dungeon, and that if St. George did not give a satisfactory answer he would be put to torture. The gaoler said it would, he thought, be a very painful kind of torture, and St. George had better be reasonable. When he had gone St. George sat in the darkness with his heart beating rather fast. He wondered what sort of torture it would be, and if he would be able to stick it. Then he remembered that Our Lord had suffered awful tortures, and had foretold that His friends would have to, as well. So he asked Our Lord to give him grace to be able to stick _anything_ the Emperor should do, and then he felt quite happy again. Well, the hours dragged by, and at last St. George heard the tramp of feet on the stone stairs. Then there was a creak as the great key was turned in the lock, and bolts were shot back. The door opened, and there stood the executioner and two soldiers, one carrying a lantern. The executioner, who had known St. George as a Colonel in the army, spoke respectfully. He gave St. George a message from the Emperor, saying that if he would come back and offer incense to the gods, and apologize for his proud words, he would get his liberty and be given back his commission. St. George laughed, and said he certainly wouldn't. Then the executioner said that in that case the Emperor had commanded that he should be tortured till he agreed to do all he was told. The soldiers loosened his chains, and he was led out and up the stairs. The blazing, blinding sun dazzled his eyes after the dimness of the dungeon. The pavement of the courtyard seemed burning to his cold, bare feet. Soldiers looked curiously at him as he passed, but of course didn't salute, now. He was taken away to the horrible place of execution, and there a new form of torture was applied to him--a great wheel full of spikes into which he was thrust. When he was dragged out his body was one mass of wounds, and his blood dripped down on to the floor. He was carried on a stretcher back to the dungeon; and the executioner felt quite sure that when he was well enough to answer he would agree to do anything the Emperor wanted. St. George was dazed with pain and loss of blood. His body seemed to burn all over. The darkness made his eyes ache, and he lay hour after hour, wondering how soon he would die. He had got to the point when he thought he simply couldn't bear another moment, when he heard a Voice in the darkness, and It said: "Fear not, George, for I am with thee." His heart seemed to leap up, for he knew for certain that it was Our Lord's Voice--he could not possibly mistake it. And suddenly all the pain seemed a thousand times worth while, and he was glad he had had it; and he didn't feel lonely any more; and he just lay in the darkness and talked to Our Lord, knowing that He was near. And he forgot his pain. Well, when a Roman officer came to receive his message to the Emperor St. George was able to laugh--rather weakly this time--and say he had no message for the Emperor, except that he had better stop murdering Christians, and beg God's mercy before it was too late. The officer thought St. George was rather a fool, and a very brave man, and he went back to the Emperor. A few days later the executioner arrived once more, and again led St. George across the sunny courtyard. St. George remembered the Voice of Christ saying, "I am with thee," and he was not afraid. This time they rolled a great heavy stone over his body, so that his bones were crushed and bruised, and then they carried him back to the dungeon. When the officer came for his answer he could hardly believe that St. George dared still to refuse. He told the Emperor what St. George had said. The Emperor was surprised and sorry, for he saw that St. George must be a very brave man. He also saw that it was no good waiting any longer, or trying to force him, so he sent the executioner once again. This time the executioner told St. George that his last chance had come. Either he must give up Christ, or he must face death. The words sent a kind of thrill through St. George--a thrill of horror at the thought of death, which turned into a thrill of joy at the thought of going into the presence of Christ, and hearing His wonderful Voice again, only this time seeing Him, too. And he rejoiced, also, to think he would really be a _martyr_. So he whispered faintly--for he could hardly speak now--that nothing in all the world would make him give up Christ. So the soldiers took off his chains and dragged him up to his feet, and he walked slowly, with weak, swaying steps, into the sun. "Fear not." He said the words over to himself. No, he wouldn't fear! "I am with thee." How wonderful! "And soon," he said in his heart, "_I_ shall be with _Thee_!" And so he knelt down and waited. And the executioner's great axe flashed in the sun as he swung it aloft, and the next instant the blood of "the Great Martyr" was streaming across the white pavement, as St. George's Cross streams scarlet across the white ground of his flag. The soul of "the Great Martyr" had entered Heaven, where the angels rejoiced at his coming, when the Christians picked up his poor, broken body and carried it away. It was buried in a beautiful tomb, and before long a great church had been built over it. On every hand people talked of "the Great Martyr," and the Christians rejoiced at his courage, and cheered each other on to resist bravely. Many of the heathen, seeing that St. George could suffer tortures and die for his faith, began to believe in the Christ he loved, and were baptized. Diocletian himself began to fear a little, and the butchering stopped. And so it was that the maiden in distress, the persecuted Church of Christ, was saved by her brave knight, St. George. GOOD-BYE A grey morning, but quite fine. Some of the Cubs went off to bathe after breakfast, others to do final shopping and buying of presents to take home, while some stayed in the field to help with the packing. The tent was struck and rolled up, swings and hammocks taken down, palliasses emptied and done up in bales, and by twelve o'clock all was finished, and the time came to change out of the comfy old camp clothes into full uniform. How tight and hot boots and stockings seemed! After dinner the Cubs gathered round into the council circle. Everyone was feeling rather quiet. Akela had a short pow-wow, and then the Cubs squatted and let off a mighty Grand Howl, as a "thank you" to everyone concerned for the glorious time they had had, and as a sign that they were going back to London meaning to _do their best_ as never before. Then they fell in, two deep, and, with a last look at the field, marched away. There was plenty of time before the boat was due to sail from Ryde, so, after marching smartly through the village, they fell out and strolled along the wall or the seashore. On reaching Ryde they fell in again, and halted near the fountain, two at a time falling out for drinks. At Smith's bookstall Akela bought a supply of "comics" to read in the train. On board the ship an adventure happened. Big Andy _of course_ dropped his cap overboard. The sea was rather rough and it seemed as if the cap must be lost, two stars and all. It was too far down to reach with the ship's mop or any stick. But luckily some thoughtful Cub had brought a long piece of string with an open safety-pin on the end, in hopes of catching a fish on the crossing. With this the cap was fished for, while the people on the pier and the first-class passengers on the upper deck looked on with eager interest. Akela thought there was no hope of ever seeing the cap again on Andy's head. She little knew that two pious Cubs were busy _praying_! Presently the cap was triumphantly pulled up, amidst cheers from the pier and the upper deck. "I prayed he'd get it!" cried a Cub. "And so did I!" exclaimed another. At Portsmouth there was a terrible crush for the train, but, as usual, the Cubs did well, for the kind guard gave them two first-class compartments and locked them in. And so they travelled back to dear, smoky old London, very much browner and a good deal fatter than when they set out. THE END PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY BILLING AND SONS, LTD., GUILDFORD AND ESHER * * * * * Transcriber's Notes: Obvious punctuation errors repaired. Page 42, "at" changed to "as" (important as Akela) 
27707	----	SAINT ATHANASIUS c. 297-373 THE FATHER OF ORTHODOXY By F.A. [Francis Alice] Forbes "Jesus said to them: Amen, Amen I say to you, before Abraham was made, I am." --John 8:58 "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. . . . And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us." --John 1:14 Nihil Obstat: J.N. Strassmaier, S.J. Censor Deputatus Imprimatur: Edmund Canon Surmont Vicar General Westminster August 5, 1919 Originally published in 1919 by R. & T. Washbourne, Ltd., London, as part of the series _Standard-bearers of the Faith: A Series of Lives of the Saints for Young and Old_. "Born of the Father before all ages, God of God, Light of Light, true God of true God, begotten not made, consubstantial with the Father . . . " --From the Nicene Creed CONTENTS 1. A Foreshadowing 2. Arius the Heresiarch 3. The Great Council 4. The Calm Before the Storm 5. False Witnesses 6. A Royal-Hearted Exile 7. The Day of Rejoicing 8. The Invisible Patriarch 9. A Short-Lived Peace 10. The Last Exile 11. The Truce of God SAINT ATHANASIUS "I and the Father are one." --Words of Our Lord (John 10:30) Chapter 1 A FORESHADOWING THE Patriarch of Alexandria, Egypt was expecting company. He stood at the window of his palace looking down the long road, that at the first sign of his guests' arrival he might go forth and welcome them. Before him, like a white pearl in the blue waters of the Mediterranean, lay the city of Alexandria--"the beautiful," as men loved to call it. Across the harbor the marble tower of the great lighthouse soared up into the clear Eastern sky, white as the white cliffs of the Island of Pharos from which it sprang. It was noonday, and the sunshine lay like a veil of gold over all. The Patriarch's thoughts were wandering in the past. He had been celebrating the anniversary of his holy predecessor Peter, the previous Bishop, who had won the crown of martyrdom during the terrible persecution of the Christians not so many years before. Several of the clergy present had come from afar to assist at the festival, and these were to be his expected guests. The time of suffering was past and over, and yet it seemed to Alexander as if it had all happened yesterday and might happen again tomorrow. There stood the great palace of the Caesars, where the pagan emperor had sat in judgment upon the lambs of Christ's flock; there the famous temple of Serapis, where the Christians had been dragged to offer incense to the gods; there the amphitheater where they had been torn to pieces by beasts and slain with the sword for confessing the Name of Christ. And all through those dark days, firm and steadfast as the lighthouse on the cliffs of Pharos, had stood the Patriarch Peter, a tower of strength and comfort to his persecuted children. A hundred Bishops and more had looked to him as their head, for the See of Alexandria in the East was second only to that of Rome in the West, and the burden of responsibility was heavy. But, thanks to the example of its chief, the Church in Egypt had borne the trial bravely, and if some had quailed before the torture and the rack and had fallen away, by far the greater number had been true. Even the unheroic souls, who had loved their lives better than their God, had not been lost beyond hope, for they had come back during the lulls in the storm, begging to be absolved from their sin. And Peter, mindful of his Master's words that he should not quench the smoking flax nor break the bruised reed, received them back, after they had done penance, into the fold of Christ with mercy and compassion. There were some who had not scrupled to protest against such mercy. "Were these apostates," cried Meletius, Bishop of Lykopolis, "to be made equal to those who had borne the burden and the heat of the day?" And he had rebelled against the decision of the Patriarch and made a schism in the Church. Even the martyrdom of the holy Peter had not brought him back to his allegiance: the Meletians were rebels still, to the crying scandal of Christians and pagans alike. They were a hard people to govern, these Alexandrians--subtle, passionate and unstable, ready to follow any preacher of novelties. Alexander half envied Peter his martyr's crown as he stood musing over the past. What was delaying his guests? he wondered, as he looked down the long road, where there was as yet no sign of them. On the shore, at a little distance, a group of boys were playing, their bare legs and white tunics flashing hither and thither as they ran. One of them, a tall slim lad, whose aureole of ruddy hair seemed to catch every wandering sunbeam, was evidently directing the game, for all seemed to look to him for orders. "A leader of men," smiled the Patriarch to himself, as a vigorous wave of the boy's hand brought all his companions round him. They were building some kind of a platform now, on to which he of the ruddy locks was promptly hoisted, while the others appeared to be forming a procession. "A church ceremony," murmured the Patriarch to himself, remembering his own boyhood days. Presently a little boy advanced solemnly and presented some kind of a vessel to the youthful bishop, who, with a magnificent gesture, beckoned to the procession to approach. Then, as the foremost boy advanced and knelt at his feet, he raised the vessel and poured some of its contents over his head. "The baptism of the catechumens!" exclaimed the Patriarch; "but this looks a good deal too much like earnest!" Hastily calling a servant, he bade him go down to the shore and bring up the band of boys who were playing there. Summoned thus hastily to appear before authority, they approached with some uneasiness, and there was a certain amount of scuffling among them which resulted in the appearance of the would-be bishop in the forefront of the group--and where should a bishop be if not at the head of his flock? "What were you doing down there on the shore?" asked the Patriarch. The boy's clear eyes looked at him with interest, but without a vestige of fear. "We were playing," he said. "It was the baptism of the catechumens. I was the bishop, and they"--pointing to his companions--were the catechumens." "Are you a Christian?" asked Alexander. "Yes," answered the boy proudly. "And these?" "Catechumens." "What did you do?" "I poured the water on them and said the words." "What words?" The boy repeated the formula in perfect Greek. "Did you pour the water as you said the words?" "Yes." The Patriarch's face was troubled. "It is a dangerous game to play at," he said. "What would you say if I told you that you had really baptized them?" The boy looked at him in amazement. "But I am not a bishop," he said. The Patriarch could not help smiling. "Although the bishop usually does baptize the catechumens," he said, "it is not necessary that it should be a bishop, not even necessary that it should be a priest." The boy-bishop looked grave, his companions frightened, the Patriarch thoughtful. "What is your name?" he asked suddenly, laying his hand on the ruddy locks. "Athanasius," answered the boy. "What would you like to be?" he asked. "A priest," was the prompt answer. "A bishop perhaps?" asked Alexander with a smile; "you think it is an easy and a glorious life?" The boy's eyes looked straight into the Patriarch's. "The blessed Peter was a martyr," he answered. "You need much learning to be a priest." "I love learning," said the boy. Alexander noted the broad, intelligent brow, the keen eyes and the clear-cut face before him. His heart went out to this frank and fearless lad who loved the martyrs. "Come to me this evening, and we will talk of this," he said, for his guests were at last to be seen approaching, and his duty lay with them. That evening the boy and the Patriarch had much to say to each other as they walked under the palm trees in the garden of the episcopal palace. Alexander learned how Athanasius had been brought up in the Christian Faith under the shadow of the great persecution, among those who counted it the highest honor to shed their blood for Christ. He had been well taught in the famous Greek schools of Alexandria and was full of enthusiasm for the great Greek philosophers and poets. Strong of will, noble of heart and keen of intellect, the boy was born to something great--of that the Patriarch felt assured. The Church had need of such men in these troublous times, when the dangers of heresy had succeeded to those of persecution. Alexander at once resolved to take Athanasius into his household and to bring him up as his own son, an inspiration for which he was often to thank God in the years to come. The boy soon grew to love the gentle and holy Patriarch, who could act with such strength and decision when it was needful for the good of the Church. He was constantly in touch with men of every rank and country, for Alexandria was a city where people of all nations and of all creeds met. Pagans, Jews and Christians lived side by side in their various quarters; there even existed a set of philosophers who tried to make a religion for themselves out of an amalgamation of several others. Athanasius was still very young when he began to act as secretary to the Patriarch, accompanying him on all his journeys throughout his vast diocese; and he himself tells us how he stayed for a time among the monks in the desert of Egypt and how his young soul was set on fire by the holiness of their lives. Neither science nor logic nor philosophy offered any difficulty to the brilliant young scholar, whose knowledge of Scripture and of theology was to astonish the men of his time. Alexander himself as he grew older leaned more and more on Athanasius, consulting him, young as he was, on the most important matters. So the years rolled on, and the boy grew into manhood, "gentle and strong," as we are told by one who knew him, "high in prowess, humble in spirit, full of sympathy, angelic in mind and face." That he would make his mark on the world of his time, few who knew him doubted; but of the dauntless soldier-spirit that slumbered behind that gentle mien, of the steadfast will that no human power could shake, they knew but little. God's moment had not yet come. Chapter 2 ARIUS THE HERESIARCH THE night before the martyrdom of the Patriarch Peter, as he had lain in prison praying and waiting for that dawn which was to be his last on earth, there had come to him a few of his faithful clergy. They had braved many dangers to look once more upon the face of their beloved Bishop and to obtain his blessing and his last instructions; they had come also to plead for one who had asked their help. But a short time before, a certain man called Arius had been excommunicated by the Patriarch for having joined the schism of Meletius. He it was who that very day had visited them, beseeching them with tears to use their influence with Peter to obtain his pardon. The clerics knew the tenderness of their Bishop's heart and his readiness to forgive the erring; they were therefore greatly surprised when their petition met with a stern refusal. "Never," said Peter. "Arius is separated from the glory of the Son of God both in this world and in the next." Then, as Achillas and Alexander, his dearest and most intimate friends, had drawn him apart to ask the reason for such unusual severity-- "This night," he said, "as I prayed, Our Lord appeared to me in glory, but His robe was rent from top to bottom. 'Who has treated Thee thus, my Lord!' I cried, 'and rent Thy garments?' "'It is Arius,' He replied, 'who has torn My robe, and tomorrow they will come to you to intercede for him. Therefore I have warned you to keep him from the fold. But you shall die for Me tomorrow.'" Then Achillas and Alexander, and they that were with them, prayed once more with their Bishop, and he blessed them and bade them depart in peace. And when the morning came, the promise of Christ was fulfilled, and His faithfu1 servant received the martyr's crown. Achillas succeeded Peter as Patriarch, and in course of time, yielding to the entreaties of Arius and deceived by his apparent good faith, he received him back into the fold and gave him charge of one of the largest churches in Alexandria in a district called Baukalis. Tall and striking in appearance, with a certain eloquence and a great pretense of holiness, Arius soon became a popular preacher. He had even hoped, it was said, to succeed Achillas as Patriarch; and when, on the death of Achillas, Alexander was elected to take his place, Arius' anger and envy knew no bounds. Since he could find no fault with the conduct of the new Patriarch, whom everyone acknowledged to be blameless and holy, he proceeded to find fault with his doctrine. "In teaching that Christ was the Eternal Son of God," said the priest of Baukalis, "Alexander and his clergy made a great mistake. Since Christ was the creation of God the Father, how could He Himself be God?" It was a heresy that struck at the very roots of Christianity. Alexander remembered, too late, the warning of Peter. Gentle and peaceful by nature, he tried at first to win Arius by kindness. "Let him explain his difficulty," he said, "and discuss the question with theologians"; but all such suggestions were met with pride and obstinacy. Arius at last sent a haughty statement of his opinions, which were condemned by nearly all the Bishops of Egypt. He was therefore deposed and forbidden to preach, but he was not the man to take his defeat humbly. Hastening to Caesarea in Palestine, where he had influential friends, he gave himself out as "the very famous, the much suffering for God's glory, who, taught of God, has acquired wisdom and knowledge." Many were seduced by his insidious persuasions, among them Eusebius, the Bishop of Caesarea in Palestine, who, thoroughly taken in by the deceits and false holiness of the heretic, wrote a letter to Alexander in his favor. The Patriarch replied by a detailed account of Arius' teaching and his trial, giving the reasons why the Synod had thought fit to depose him. This letter had an effect on the clergy and Bishops of Palestine which Arius was quick enough to see. He therefore retired into Syria, where he made great friends with another Eusebius, the clever and crafty Bishop of Nicomedia, who had gained an unfortunate influence over the Emperor. It was now nearly twelve years since Constantine, himself a pagan, though the son of St. Helena, had prayed to the God of the Christians to give him the victory over his enemies. His prayers had been heard. In the brightness of the noonday sky there appeared a sign which outshone the sun in splendor--the image of the Cross of Christ. "In this sign thou shalt conquer" was traced in fiery letters across it, and the Emperor and all his army saw and believed. With the Cross as standard, Constantine marched against his enemies and defeated them. From that day forth he became a catechumen and the protector and friend of the Christians. His first act was to publish an edict, the Edict of Milan, which gave them full liberty to practice their religion, build churches and preach. Thus the Church came forth at last from the dark night of persecution, but her life on earth is ever a warfare against the powers of evil, and other dangers lay ahead. The Emperor began by making humane laws. He abolished the punishment of crucifixion out of reverence for the Son of God, who had died upon the Cross, put a stop to the cruel games of the arena and bettered the condition of the slaves. Constantine's nature was really a noble one, but there was much in him still of the pagan and the barbarian. Unfortunately for himself and for the world, he fell under the influence of Eusebius, Bishop of Nicomedia. This man, who was said to have apostatized during the persecution of Maxentius and who had intruded himself, no one quite knew how, into the See of Nicomedia, had begun by winning the good graces of Constantia, the Emperor's sister. During the time when Constantia's husband, Licinius, was at war with her brother, Eusebius was his staunch friend, upholding him in his rebellion against the Emperor; but on the defeat of Licinius, the Bishop at once transferred his friendship to the conqueror, Constantine. Bishop Eusebius resembled Arius in his want of reverence and of honesty, and had taken Arius' side against the Patriarch, Alexander, praising openly the teaching of Arius and declaring that his only wish was that all men should share his opinions. He had even dared to write in Arius' favor to the Patriarch, declaring insolently that he had been unjustly deposed. Alexander was growing old, but the Faith was in peril; it was a moment for vigorous action. Moreover, at his side, like a faithful watchdog, stood his secretary, the young deacon Athanasius. Circular letters were sent to Pope St. Sylvester and to all the Bishops warning them of the new danger that was threatening the Church. "Since Eusebius has placed himself at the head of these apostates," wrote Alexander, "it is necessary that it should be made known to all the faithful, lest they should be deceived by their hypocrisy." Eusebius and Arius were both astonished and disgusted at the firm attitude of the Patriarch. Athanasius was at the bottom of it, they declared, and they vowed an undying hatred against him. The Emperor Constantine, who happened at this moment to be visiting Nicomedia, where he had spent a great part of his youth, heard Eusebius' version of the story. It was only a question of words, said the wily Bishop; what was really distressing about it was the spite and the venom with which the Patriarch of Alexandria had pursued an innocent and holy man for having dared to differ from him in opinion. Arius was then presented to the Emperor as a faithful and unjustly persecuted priest, a part which he knew how to play to perfection. It was well known to Eusebius that the great desire of Constantine was to preserve and maintain peace in his empire. If this quarrel were allowed to go on, said the Bishop, there would soon be strife throughout the whole of the East, for there was much bitterness already. On the other hand, Constantine was known to all Christians as the protector and generous benefactor of the Church. Would it not be well for him, suggested Eusebius, to use his influence for good and to write to Alexander, bidding him lay aside this most unchristian dispute and make peace with Arius and his followers? The Emperor, as Eusebius had hoped, took alarm at the prospect of disunion in his dominions. A catechumen himself, and knowing but little of the great truths of Christianity, he was easily deceived by Eusebius' story and hastened to take his advice. It was a scandalous thing, he wrote, that the peace of the Church should be disturbed for such a trivial matter. Let Alexander and Arius forgive one another; let them each keep their own opinion if they chose, but in concord and in quiet. He ended by begging both to give him peace by making peace among themselves and by putting an end to all such quarrels. The letter was entrusted to Hosius, Bishop of Cordova, a confessor of the Faith, venerated throughout the Church for his wisdom and holiness. He was to deliver it personally to the Patriarch of Alexandria. Now, Hosius was a Bishop of the Western Church and had heard but vague rumors of the doings of Arius and his followers in the East. His first interview with the Patriarch of Alexandria opened his eyes to the importance of the matter. It was no question of a war of words or a difference of opinion--Christianity itself was at stake; the Emperor must be warned, and warned at once. A letter was therefore written by the two Bishops, assisted probably by Athanasius, in which the Emperor was earnestly begged to take steps to summon a universal Council of the Church to decide the question. It was dispatched to him by a trusty messenger and in due time reached his hands. Constantine, who was really anxious to do what was right, appealed to the Pope, St. Sylvester, to unite with him in summoning a Council. To the Bishops who were too poor to undertake a long journey with the usual attendance of clergy, the Emperor offered the necessary means. He undertook also to house and provide for the members of the Council as long as it lasted. The town of Nicea in Bithynia, about twenty miles from Nicomedia, was chosen as the meeting place. It was hoped by all devout Christians that peace and unity in the Church would be the result. Chapter 3 THE GREAT COUNCIL IN the early summer of the year 325 the Council of Nicea met. Three hundred eighteen Bishops were present, besides a multitude of priests, deacons and acolytes. It was like the Day of Pentecost, said the people: "men of all nations and of all tongues." Many bore the glorious marks of the sufferings they had endured for Christ; others were wasted with long years of prison. There were the hermit Bishops of Egypt, Paphnutius and Potamon, who had each lost an eye for the Faith; Paul of Neo-Caesarea, whose muscles had been burned with red-hot irons and whose paralyzed hands bore witness to the fact; Cecilian of Carthage, intrepid and faithful guardian of his flock; James of Nisibis, who had lived for years in the desert in caves and mountains; Spyridion, the shepherd Bishop of Cyprus, and the great St. Nicholas of Myra, both famed for their miracles. Among the Bishops of the West were Theophilus the Goth, golden-haired and ruddy, who had won thousands to the Faith; and Hosius the Spaniard, known as "the holy," who had been named by the Pope as his representative; together with the two Papal Legates, Vito and Vincent. Among those of the Eastern Church were the venerable St. Macarius, Bishop of Jerusalem, and St. Amphion, who had been put to the torture in the reign of Diocletian. Last but not least came the aged Patriarch of Alexandria, the chief prelate of the Eastern Church, who had brought with him as his assistant the young deacon Athanasius. Of the 318 Bishops present, seventeen, headed by Eusebius of Nicomedia, were in sympathy with Arius. They were but a small number, it is true, yet Eusebius was the adviser of Constantine and the friend of his sister Constantia. He relied on his influence with the Emperor and his well-known powers of persuasion. * * * * * The day has come for the opening of the Council. The Bishops and clergy are assembled in a great hall which has been prepared for this purpose. In the center, upon a splendid throne, lies a copy of the Four Gospels, symbol of the presence of Christ in the midst of His Church. At the upper end a small gilt throne has been erected for the Emperor, while the Bishops and the clergy sit on seats and benches running the whole way around the hall. A quick whisper suddenly breaks the silence: "The Emperor!" and the whole assembly rises to its feet. Few of those present have seen the man whose name is on every lip, a Caesar and a Christian! Alone and unattended, with bent head and humble mien, the Emperor crosses the threshold. A man of noble presence and of royal dignity, he wears the robe of Imperial purple blazing with gold and precious stones; the Imperial crown is on his head. There are some there who have seen that Imperial purple before, but under what different circumstances--"Hail, Caesar; those about to die salute thee!" He advances slowly and with faltering footsteps between the ranks of Bishops standing to do him honor. Constantine the Great, the conqueror of the Roman world, trembles in the presence of these intrepid Confessors of the Faith who bear upon them the marks of the conflict. In the midst of that august assembly he, the catechumen, is as a little child. He will not even take his seat upon the throne prepared for him until the Bishops urge him to do so. The Emperor speaks to them with deference and courtesy. It is not for him, he says, to dictate to them, for here he is but fellow servant with them of a glorious Lord and Master. They had met to preserve peace and concord in the Church and to put an end to all causes of strife. Let them do what they can to that end. There are two men in that assembly on whom all eyes are bent. One of them is about sixty years of age, tall, thin and poorly clad, as one who leads an austere life. A wild shock of hair overshadows his face, which is of a deathly pallor; his eyes are usually downcast, owing to a weakness of sight. He has a curious way of writhing when he speaks, which his enemies compare to the wriggling of a snake. He is given to fits of frenzy and wild excitement, but has withal, when he chooses, a most winning and earnest manner, fascinating to men and women alike--Arius the heresiarch. The other, seated on a low seat beside the Patriarch of Alexandria, is slight, fair and young; only his broad brow and keen, earnest eyes betray something of the spirit within; he shows no excitement. Serene and watchful, silent yet quick in his movements, he is like a young St. Michael leaning on his sword, ready to strike for the truth when the moment shall come--Athanasius the deacon. The heresiarch is called upon to explain his doctrines. His discourse is long and eloquent. He uses to the utmost his powers of fascination. He tries to hide the full meaning of his words under beautiful expressions, but his meaning is clear to all--"Jesus Christ is not God." The Fathers and Confessors of the Faith, stricken with horror at the blasphemy, cry out and stop their ears. The indignation is universal. Eusebius and his party are in consternation. Arius has been too outspoken. He has stated his opinions too crudely; such frankness will not do here; he is no longer among the ignorant. Eusebius himself rises to speak and, with the insinuating and charming manner for which he is famous, tries to gloss over what Arius has said. The Son of God is infinitely holy, he says, the holiest of all the creations of the Father and far above them all. Very, very close to the Father Himself, so close that He is very nearly God. As a matter of fact, he declares, the Arians believe all that the Church teaches. A letter is produced and read by one of the prelates; it was written by Eusebius himself to a friend. Full of heresy, it shows most clearly the double-dealing of the Arian Bishop and his party. The indignation breaks out afresh, and the letter is torn to shreds in the presence of the Council. Even Eusebius is abashed, but there are others to take his place. The Arians continue the argument. Silent and watchful at his post sits the young man who is destined to be the champion of the Faith through all the troublous years to come. He has not spoken yet, but now Alexander makes him a sign. The sword flashes from its scabbard; woe to those on whom its blows shall fall! In a few words, sharp and clear as diamonds, Athanasius tears to pieces the veils in which the Arians had shrouded their true meaning. "Who has deceived you, O senseless," he asks, "to call the Creator a creature?" He is the champion of Christ, the champion of the truth. The Bishops marvel at his words, which are as of one inspired; they thank God who has raised up so strong a bulwark against error. Alexander's eyes are aglow; it is for this that he has lived; he knew how it would be. His long life's work is nearly at an end; he can go now in peace. Athanasius is at his post. But it is time to put an end to the discussion; Arius and his opinions are abhorred by everyone. A profession of Faith is drawn up by Hosius, the representative of Pope St. Sylvester, and presented for all to sign. It establishes forever the Godhead of Christ. To this day it is the profession of Faith of the whole Catholic world--the Nicene Creed. "Born of the Father before all ages, God of God, Light of Light, true God of true God, begotten not made, consubstantial with the Father . . ." The Emperor has listened earnestly to the discussion, following it as well as he can with his limited knowledge of doctrine. He approves the profession of Faith with his whole heart; let it be presented to all to sign. But first--one moment--this heresy must be stamped out once and forever or there will be trouble in the days to come. An addition must be made before the signatures are affixed. It runs thus: "And if any say, 'There was a time when God was not; or if any hold that the Son is not of the same substance with the Father, or is . . . like a created being,' the Holy Catholic Apostolic Church condemns him, as it condemns forever Arius and his writings." The text is then presented to the Bishops to sign. All are content but the seventeen Arians. The Emperor expresses his entire satisfaction with the decisions of the Council; he will uphold the law of the Church with the law of the State, he declares, and those who rebel will be punished. The ranks of the Arians begin to waver; several Bishops sign the Creed; soon there are only five left--Eusebius at their head. The Emperor speaks of banishment. The argument is a powerful one. Eusebius wavers. He receives a message from Constantia bidding him give way; resistance is useless. He signs the profession in company with Theognis of Nicea, his friend. Arius, with several of his supporters, is then condemned to banishment, and his writings are to be burned publicly. The minds of all are at rest. Several other matters of less importance are settled satisfactorily. The Council is at an end. But Constantine has not finished with the Bishops. Today begins the twentieth year of his reign, a day kept with great rejoicing by the Roman Emperors. A banquet has been prepared at the palace; he claims the honor of entertaining the Confessors and Fathers of the Faith. Times have changed indeed. The soldiers of the Imperial Guard salute with drawn swords the guests of the Emperor as they pass between them into the palace--that Imperial Guard who in other days, which many there remember, had dragged the Christians to torture and to death. The Emperor receives them with veneration, kissing devoutly the scars of those who have suffered for the Faith. The banquet over, he begs their prayers and loads them with gifts, giving to each of the Bishops a letter to the governor of his province ordering a distribution of wheat to the churches for the use of the poor. The hearts of all are full of joy and thankfulness. Taking leave of the Emperor, they return, each man to his own country. The Council of Nicea is over. But there were two in whose hearts there was neither joy nor peace nor thankfulness; they were Eusebius of Nicomedia and Theognis of Nicea. Were they to return to their sees and confess themselves beaten? It would be a bitter homecoming. The officials of the palace were well known to Eusebius. He bribed the librarian to let him see once more the famous document that had just been signed by so many Bishops. Then, seizing a moment when the guardian's back was turned, the two Arians deleted their names from the profession of Faith and, returning home, continued to teach the doctrines which the Church had condemned. They counted on the protection of Constantia and her influence with the Emperor, but they were mistaken. Three months after the Council of Nicea, Eusebius and Theognis were deposed by Alexander and the Bishops of Egypt, who elected Catholic prelates in their stead. The Emperor supported the decision of the Church, pronouncing a sentence of banishment on the rebels. "Eusebius has deceived me shamefully," he wrote to the faithful in Nicomedia. Who could foresee that the Emperor, whose eyes were at last opened to the perfidy of his friend, would before long allow himself to be deceived more shamefully still by the very man whose dishonesty he had proved? Chapter 4 THE CALM BEFORE THE STORM WITH the enemies of the Church in exile, for a time there was peace. The heathen came flocking from every side to embrace the Faith. Pagan temples were overthrown and Christian churches were erected in their place. The Emperor himself built no less than eight in Rome, under the direction of Pope St. Sylvester, and furnished them with all that was required for the worship of God. But Constantine was a stranger in the capital of his kingdom; he had spent his youth at the court of Nicomedia, and looked upon the East as his home. Rome, moreover, had tragic associations for him. It was there that he had caused his young son Crispus, falsely accused of treason by his stepmother Fausta, to be put to death. The young Caesar had been brave and upright and a favorite with all. Too late did his father learn that he was innocent. Fausta paid the penalty for her evil deed, but her death could not give life to the innocent victim. Constantine resolved, therefore, to build himself an Imperial city in the land which he loved, far from the scene of the tragedy. He laid its foundations in Byzantium and gave it the name of Constantinople, or the city of Constantine. Everything was done to make the new capital the most magnificent city in the world. Works of art were brought from afar, the most skillful artists and builders were assembled from all the cities of Europe and of the East, enormous sums of money were spent, Christian churches were built; but Constantine could not give to his Imperial city what was wanting to himself--a pure and steadfast faith. Constantinople was destined to be the home of every heresy. In the meantime the holy Patriarch Alexander had gone to his rest. As he lay on his deathbed he called for his beloved Athanasius, but there was no reply. Athanasius had fled from the city, fearing from certain words of the old man that he would be chosen to succeed him. "Athanasius!" called the Patriarch once more. There was one present who bore the same name, a not uncommon one in the East; they brought him to the bedside of the dying Bishop, but his eyes looked past him into space. "Athanasius!" he called once more, "you think you can escape, but it shall not be so." And with these words he died. The same thought had been in the hearts of all. Athanasius was known for his zeal and learning, his mortified life and his ardent love of God. He was young, it was true, but he was wiser than many older men. When the Bishops of the Church assembled to elect their new Patriarch, the whole Catholic population surrounded the church, holding up their hands to Heaven and crying, "Give us Athanasius!" The Bishops asked nothing better. Athanasius was thus elected, as St. Gregory tells us, by the suffrages of the whole people and by the choice of the Bishops of the Church. It was a heavy burden to be laid on the shoulders of a young man scarcely thirty years of age. There were trials and combats ahead before which, if Athanasius had seen them, even his bold and undaunted spirit might have quailed. But the will of God, once made known to him, was accepted bravely. He would bear the burden with all the courage of his strong heart until the time came to lay it down. The first few years of Athanasius' rule were years of peace during which he devoted himself to the work he loved, the conversion of the pagans and the visitation of his huge diocese, the Patriarchate of Alexander. He traveled from city to city confirming and strengthening the Church and making friends with the holy men over whom he had been called to rule. One day, when he had been but a few months Patriarch, a message was brought to him from a stranger who wished to speak with him. His name was Frumentius, and he had traveled from a distant country. Athanasius was presiding at a meeting of Bishops. "Let him be brought in," he said, "and let him tell us what he desires." The stranger was a man of noble bearing and gentle manners. He had a wondrous tale to tell. He and his brother �desius, left orphans at an early age, had been adopted by an uncle who was a learned man and a philosopher. Desiring greatly to undertake a voyage to Abyssinia to study the geography of the country and unwilling to interrupt the education of his two young charges, he took them with him, that they might continue their studies under his care. His work finished, he set sail for home with the two boys, but the boat, having put into a port for provisions, was set upon by savages, and everyone on board was killed. Now, it happened that the boys had landed and were reading together under a tree on the shore. The savages had pity on their youth and, instead of killing them, carried them off and presented them to their King as slaves. The boys, who were intelligent and lovable, soon gained the affections of their barbarian master. Arrived at manhood, they were given positions of trust in the kingdom and loaded with every honor. Frumentius, the elder, was especially beloved by the King, over whom he gained a great influence for good. But the King fell sick and, being near to death, called his wife, to whom he had left the guardianship of his young son. "Let Frumentius help you in the government," he said; "he is wiser and more faithful than any in the kingdom." The Queen Mother accordingly appointed Frumentius as the tutor of the young King, and Governor of the State, while his brother �desius was given a less important position. Frumentius, whose earnest desire was to see the land that he governed Christian, summoned all the Christian merchants who came to trade in the country and, giving them presents, begged them to build houses of prayer and to do their utmost to win the barbarians to the Faith. There were many conversions, and by the time the young King had reached his majority, several Christian communities were scattered throughout the State. His task being now at an end, Frumentius asked leave to return to his own land with his brother �desius. They had a hard task to persuade the King and the Queen Mother to let them go, but at last they prevailed. Frumentius, whose heart was yearning over the country to which he owed so much, had come straight to the Patriarch of Alexandria to beg of him that he would send a Bishop to preside over the growing number of churches in Abyssinia and to preach the Faith in the districts where it was not yet known. The Patriarch and the Bishops had followed the story with the greatest interest. When Frumentius ceased speaking, there was a moment of silence, broken suddenly by Athanasius himself. "Who is more worthy of such a ministry," he cried, "than the man who stands before us?" The suggestion was approved by all. Frumentius was ordained by the Patriarch, who gave him his blessing and bade him return to his mission. He was honored as a Saint in Abyssinia, where he labored zealously all his life for Christ. �desius, his brother, became a priest also and helped in the good work. Athanasius, as we have already seen, had spent a part of his youth with the monks of the desert. It was his proudest boast that he had acted as acolyte to the great St. Antony. He resolved, therefore, to visit the district known as the Thebaid, where St. Pachomius, the father of monasticism in the East, had founded many monasteries and drawn up a rule for the monks. Pachomius had been one of a body of young soldiers seized against their will and forced to fight in the wars between Constantine and Maxentius. It happened one day during a journey that they landed at Thebes in Egypt, where they were treated with harshness and cruelty. Hungry, poorly clad and miserable, the young soldiers were lamenting their ill fortune when a party of strangers approached them from the town, welcoming them as friends and brothers and giving them food, garments and all that they so badly needed. "Who are these good men?" asked Pachomius of a bystander. "They are Christians," was the answer. "They are kind to everyone, but especially to strangers." "What is a Christian?" persisted the young soldier. "A man who believes in Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, and does good to all," was the reply. Pachomius reflected for a few minutes and then withdrew a little way from his companions. "Almighty God, who have made Heaven and earth," he cried, lifting his hands to Heaven, "if You will hear my prayer and give me a knowledge of Your Holy Name, and deliver me from the position in which I am, I promise You that I will consecrate myself to Your service forever." Not long after, Pachomius was set free and, seeking out a Christian priest, received Baptism and instruction. Then, going at once to the cell of an old hermit called Palemon, famous for his holy and mortified life, he knocked at the door of his hut. "Who are you, and what do you want?" asked the old man, opening his door a few inches. "I am called Pachomius, and I want to be a monk," was the answer. "You cannot be a monk here," said Palemon. "It is a hard thing to be a true monk, and there few who persevere." "Perhaps so," replied Pachomius; "but all people are not alike." "I have already told you," repeated the old man, "that you cannot be a monk here. Go elsewhere and try; if you persevere you can come back." "I would rather stay with you," said Pachomius. "You do not know what you are asking," answered Palemon. "I live on bread and salt; I pray and do penance the greater part of the night--sometimes the whole night through." Pachomius shivered, for he was a sound sleeper, but he replied sturdily enough: "I hope in Jesus Christ that, helped by your prayers, I shall persevere." Palemon could resist him no longer. He took the young man to live with him and found him a humble and faithful disciple. After some years, the two hermits went together to the desert of the Thebaid and began the work to which God had called Pachomius, for Palemon died soon after. Many monasteries were founded, and men flocked to the desert to give themselves to God. They slept on the bare ground, fasted continually and cultivated the barren earth or made baskets and mats of the coarse reeds that grew in the marshes, selling them for the profit of the poor. Twice during the night the weird blast of the horn that summoned them to prayer broke the vast silence of the desert. Hearing of the arrival of Athanasius, Pachomius came down from his lonely monastery of Tabenna, surrounded by his monks; but he hid himself among them from humility, or from the fear that Athanasius would do him too much honor. The Saint, however, detected the Saint, and they were soon firm friends. To the Patriarch, the monks of Egypt represented all that was best and strongest in the national spirit. On these men he knew he could rely, and his hopes were not disappointed. The solitaries of the desert, to a man, would be faithful to Athanasius during the years of trial that followed. Indeed, wherever Athanasius went throughout his vast diocese, the hearts of all loyal and noble men went out to him instinctively. He was a precious gift of God to Egypt--a precious gift of God to the whole Catholic Church. Chapter 5 FALSE WITNESSES THE storm of persecution which was to fall with such fury upon St. Athanasius was already gathering. Constantia, the Emperor's favorite sister, who had always been strongly in favor of the Arians, became very ill. The priest who attended her on her deathbed, a friend and tool of Eusebius of Nicomedia, induced her to persuade Constantine, who visited her continually during her illness, that Arius and his friends had been unjustly condemned and that the judgment of God would fall on him and his empire in consequence. Constantine, always easily influenced by his immediate surroundings, began to waver. Constantia soon died, but the Arian priest continued the work that had been so successfully begun. Arius believed all that the Church believed, he pleaded; let him at least be allowed to come into the presence of the Emperor; let him have a chance to prove his innocence. Although Constantine had heard with his own ears the blasphemies of the heresiarch, although he had approved so heartily of the decision of the Council which condemned him and had enforced it with the power of the State, he gave way before the persuasions of this stranger. "If Arius can assure me that he believes the profession of Faith set forth by the Council of Nicea," he said, "he may return." The good news was instantly made known to the heretic and his friends, and Arius hastened to Constantinople, where he was admitted into the Emperor's presence. "Is it true that you believe what the Church teaches?" asked Constantine. "I take my solemn oath that I believe what I hold in my hand," replied Arius, unfolding the Nicene Creed. In the hollow of his palm was concealed a statement of his own false doctrines, but this the Emperor could not know. He professed himself satisfied, and thus the seed was sown which was to bring forth bitter fruit during centuries to come. With Arius recalled, there was no longer any reason why Eusebius and Theognis, who declared that they shared his opinions, should remain in banishment. Once in Constantinople, Eusebius regained all his old influence over the Emperor. From that day forth, the Constantine of the heavenly vision, the Constantine of the Council of Nicea, noble, wise and humble, disappears from the pages of history, and a man changeable, capricious and uncertain takes his place. The first act of Eusebius and Theognis was to drive out the Catholic Bishops who had been elected to replace them in their sees; the second was to look about them to see who was likely to stand in their way. Eustathius, the Bishop of Antioch, an intrepid defender of the Faith, must be gotten rid of at once, they decided, and they proceeded to plot his ruin. They started for Jerusalem to visit--or at least, so they said--the beautiful Church of the Holy Cross which the Emperor had just built. On their way home, they announced that they would stay for a short time at Antioch, and they invited all the Bishops who were likely to be friendly to meet them there in council. They were received with the greatest courtesy by Eustathius, who did all that he could to make their visit pleasant. They had, however, bribed an abandoned wretch of the town to enter while the council was sitting and accuse Eustathius before all present of a scandalous crime. Affecting to be greatly grieved and horrified at the accusation, they deposed Eustathius and elected an Arian in his place, silencing those who opposed their unjust and unlawful conduct by declaring that they acted by command of the Emperor. Constantine was then appealed to, but in vain. The Arians were all-powerful. The next obstacle to be removed was Athanasius, but Eusebius was clever enough to realize that this would be no easy task. Athanasius was not only the chief Bishop of the Eastern Church, but one who had defeated the Arians several times before on their own ground. He began by writing a letter to the Patriarch in which he informed him that Constantine, having learned that the views of Arius were quite correct, had been pleased to recall him from banishment. It was only just and fair, therefore, that Athanasius should receive him into communion; Eusebius, indeed, had reason to know that the Emperor would be greatly displeased if he refused to do so. Athanasius' reply to this threatening message was short and decided. Neither threats nor persecution, he said, would induce him to go against the decrees of the Council of Nicea. Arius had been condemned by the universal Catholic Church; by that decision all true Catholics must stand. Eusebius was not at all discouraged. He wrote to the Emperor and told him how lightly the Patriarch had treated his wishes. "Athanasius is much too young for such a responsible position," he wrote, "and is of a quarrelsome and obstinate temper. He is the last man in the world to fill a post which, if peace is to be kept in the Church, requires the greatest tact and charity." Perhaps, he suggested, if the Emperor himself were to write to him, he might be made to see the matter in a different light. A threat of banishment is always a powerful argument. On receiving this letter, the Emperor--to his shame, be it said--wrote to the Patriarch as follows: "Being informed of my pleasure, admit all who wish to communion with the Church. If I hear of your standing in the way of any who seek it, I will send at once those who will depose you from your see." The reply of the Patriarch was firm and courageous. "It is impossible," he answered, "for the Catholic Church to hold communion with those who deny the Divinity of the Son of God and who are therefore fighting against Him." Eusebius was absent when the letter arrived, and the changeable Constantine was favorably impressed by its noble and fearless tone; the matter was therefore dropped. Eusebius, still determined on the Patriarch's ruin, looked about him for a tool. He found the Meletians always troublesome and ready to join in a plot against those in authority. Three of them, appearing suddenly at Nicomedia where Constantine was then staying, accused Athanasius of having usurped the Royal power by levying an unlawful tax upon the people. Unfortunately for the success of this little plot, there were present at Court at that moment two priests of Alexandria who were able to prove to the Emperor that the Patriarch was completely innocent. Constantine even wrote a letter to Athanasius telling him of the false charge brought against him, severely blaming those who had made it and inviting him to come himself to Nicomedia. This was not at all what Eusebius wanted. He could not prevent the arrival of Athanasius; he therefore set to work once more to prejudice Constantine against him before he came. The Meletians were pressed into service again, and accused the Patriarch of treason. He had sent a purse of gold, they said, to a certain rebel, who had stirred up a rising against the Emperor. But when Athanasius appeared at Nicomedia, he was able to prove that the story was a falsehood; and, to the disgust of Eusebius and his party, he returned to Alexandria bearing a letter from the Emperor fully establishing his innocence and the perfidy of his accusers. Rumors of what was passing had even reached St. Antony in his desert solitude, and the old man, on hearing of all that his friend and disciple had had to suffer, came down from his mountain cave to praise him for his courage and to speak to the people. "Have nothing to do with the Arians," he said; "you are Christians, and they say that the Son of God is a creature." Crowds came flocking to see the old man, for all had heard of his miracles and of his holiness. He blessed them all and exhorted them to hold fast to the true faith of Christ, so steadfastly upheld by their Patriarch, after which, having done the work he had come to do, he returned to his solitude. The Arians were still plotting. Some time before, when Athanasius had been visiting that part of his diocese called the Mareotis, he had heard that a certain Ischyras, who gave himself out as a priest although he had never been validly ordained, was causing scandal. He celebrated, so people said, or pretended to celebrate, the Holy Mysteries in a little cottage in the village where he lived, in the presence of his own relations and a few ignorant peasants. Athanasius sent one of his priests, called Macarius, to inquire into the matter and to bring the impostor back with him. Macarius, on his arrival, found Ischyras ill in bed and unable to undertake the journey. He therefore warned one of his relations that the sick man had been forbidden by the Patriarch to continue his so-called ministry, and departed. Ischyras, on his recovery, joined himself to the Meletians, who, urged on by the Arians, were moving heaven and earth to find a fresh charge against Athanasius. On hearing his story, they compelled him by threats and by violence to swear that Macarius had burst in upon him while he was giving Holy Communion in the church, had overturned the altar, broken the chalice, trampled the sacred Host underfoot and burned the holy books. They reported that all this had been done by order of the Patriarch. Once more Athanasius had to defend himself, and once more he triumphantly cleared himself of the accusation brought against him. In the first place, as he proved to the Emperor, there was no church in the village where Ischyras lived. In the second, the man himself had been ill in bed. In the third, even if he had been up and well, he could not have consecrated, since he had never been validly ordained. Ischyras himself, not long after, escaping from the hands of the Meletians, swore in the presence of thirteen witnesses that he had been induced by threats to bear witness to the lie. But the failure of this plot was only the signal for hatching another. A certain Meletian Bishop called Arsenius, whom Athanasius had deposed for refusing to obey the decrees of the Council of Nicea, was induced to hide himself away in the desert. The Meletians then gave out that he had been murdered by order of the Patriarch, who kept his withered hand for purposes of magic. A wooden box was even produced containing a hand which was said to be that of the dead man. Constantine seems to have believed the story, for he summoned Athanasius to come to Antioch to stand his trial, at which Eusebius and Theognis of Nicea were to preside. Athanasius did nothing of the sort. He sent trusty men into the desert to make a diligent search for the missing Arsenius, who, after some difficulty, was found. The fact was made known to the Emperor, who wrote once more to the persecuted Patriarch, affirming his innocence and threatening the Meletians with severe punishment if they invented any more calumnies against him. Arsenius himself, having repented of his part in the matter, asked pardon of Athanasius and promised obedience for the future. Chapter 6 A ROYAL-HEARTED EXILE ATHANASIUS had prevailed once more over his enemies, but Eusebius was always at the Emperor's side and knew how to play upon his weakness. Was it possible, he asked, that so many and such various charges could be brought up against a man if he were innocent? Athanasius was clever and had many friends, he continued, who were ready to swear that black was white for his sake. Let him be forced to appear alone before his accusers, and the Emperor would soon find out the truth. As a matter of fact, such charges could only be dealt with by a council; let one be held at once, and let Athanasius be summoned to attend. Constantine fell into the trap. A council was summoned, and letters were sent to Alexandria. Athanasius, however, clearly saw that he could expect no justice in the midst of his enemies, and for a long time refused to leave his see. In the meantime the place of meeting had been changed from Caesarea to Tyre, and Athanasius was accused by Eusebius of having obstinately resisted the Emperor's orders. His reasons, they added, were plain to all; conscious of his guilt, he dared not face the assembly. The Emperor threatened to send and bring him by force if he did not come. Further resistance was useless, so he set out for Tyre. It was a strange Council. Of the sixty Bishops present, nearly all were Arians and open enemies of Athanasius. The Meletians were also present. Jailers were at the doors instead of deacons. The priest Macarius, to whose innocence Constantine himself had testified, was brought in guarded by soldiers and loaded with chains. Athanasius himself was obliged to stand as a criminal before his judges. A few of the Egyptian Bishops who were present loudly protested against such behavior, but their protests were insultingly set aside. The old charges were brought up one by one. Athanasius was accused of being violent and cruel in conduct, a perpetual center of strife. To this he answered that the trial was not a fair one, considering that nearly all who were present were his enemies. The affair of Ischyras was then brought up, but nothing could be proved. Lastly, a Meletian Bishop told, with thrilling and tragic details, the story of the cruel murder of Arsenius. "Here is the very hand of the murdered man," he concluded, producing and opening the famous box. A cry of well-feigned horror burst from the Arians. "Did any of you know Arsenius?" asked Athanasius calmly. Several rose to their feet. "Then, behold my witness," said the Patriarch, signing to a priest who stood near the door. A man was brought in whose face and figure were hidden in a long cloak, which Athanasius drew slowly away. It was Arsenius himself who stood before them! "Here is one hand," continued the Patriarch, drawing it out from the cloak, "and here is the other. I presume that to no man God has given more. Perhaps those who maintain that that severed hand is the hand of Arsenius can show us where it was affixed." There was a moment of general confusion, during which the Meletian who had so graphically told the story of Arsenius' murder concluded that prudence was the better part of valor and hastily disappeared from the assembly. But the Arians were never at a loss. It was by magic, they declared, that Athanasius had caused the dead man to appear in their midst. It was useless to continue the argument against such persistent injustice. Athanasius left the Council abruptly and set out for Constantinople to place himself, a stern and accusing figure, in the Emperor's way as he rode out from his palace. Constantine, recognizing who it was, tried to pass in silence, but Athanasius stood firm. "The Lord judge between me and you," he said solemnly, "if you take the part of my enemies against me." The Emperor halted. "What do you wish?" he asked. "Let me be tried by a lawful council, or let me meet my accusers face to face in your presence," said Athanasius. "It shall be done," replied Constantine. The Arians, meanwhile, had declared Athanasius guilty of all the charges brought against him and had deposed him from his see. They were congratulating themselves on the success of their enterprise when they received an alarming letter from the Emperor accusing them of concealing the truth and bidding them come at once to Constantinople. Several of them, seized with fear, returned to their homes; a few others, who were bolder, headed by Eusebius and Theognis of Nicea, set out for the Imperial city. They made their plans on the way. Once arrived, instead of bringing up the old charges, they accused Athanasius of having prevented the sailing of the grain vessels from Alexandria to Constantinople in order to cause a famine. It was a clever trick. Constantine was extremely touchy about the prosperity of his new city and had just condemned to death a friend of his own for the same crime. He turned on Athanasius in anger. "How could I, a poor man and a Bishop, do such a thing?" asked the Patriarch. "You are rich enough and powerful enough for anything," retorted Eusebius bitterly. As for Constantine, he declared that he would uphold the decisions of the Council. Athanasius deserved to lose his life, but he would show indulgence. He therefore banished him to Treves in Gaul, and the Arians triumphed. There was mourning and lamentation in Alexandria and throughout all Egypt when the tidings came. Many appeals were made for justice, but in vain. Even St. Antony, though he wrote to Constantine, could not move him. One thing alone the Emperor would not do in spite of all the persuasions of the Arians--appoint a successor to the absent Patriarch. Athanasius, indeed, continued to govern the diocese from his distant exile, writing continually to his Bishops and clergy, exhorting them to stand fast in the Faith and reminding them that the road to consolation lay through affliction. Eusebius, in the meantime, was trying to force Alexander, the aged Bishop of Constantinople, to admit Arius to communion. Although ninety years old, he stood firm, and neither threats nor persuasions could move him. The Emperor was at last induced to fix a day on which Alexander was to receive the heretic or be driven from his see. The Bishop appealed to Heaven. He ordered a seven days' fast throughout his diocese, during which the faithful were to pray that God would prevent such a sacrilege. On the eve of the appointed day, the aged prelate, having heard that Arius had arrived in the town, prostrated himself on his face before the altar. "Lord," he prayed, "if Arius must be received to communion in this church tomorrow, take me, I beseech Thee, from this world. But if Thou hast pity on Thy Church, suffer not, I pray Thee, that such a thing should be." Arius at that very moment was being escorted in triumph around the city by his followers. Suddenly the heresiarch turned pale and trembled. He did not feel well, he said; he would rejoin them presently. The time passed, and he did not return. At last they went to look for him. It was but a dead body which they found, a sight before which even they turned pale. Arius had been overtaken by a sudden and horrible death. The fate of the heresiarch made a great impression on the Emperor, who had himself but a short time to live. During his last illness he was haunted by the thought of Athanasius. His eldest son, Constantine II, who held his court at Treves, was a firm friend of the exiled Bishop; the dying Emperor sent him a secret message to restore Athanasius to his see. He then received Baptism at the hands of Eusebius of Nicomedia, and died a few days later. Constantine's empire was divided between his three sons, Constantine, Constans and Constantius. The two former, who were staunch friends of Athanasius, would die within twelve years of their father. Then Constantius, who had inherited all the weakness and none of the good qualities of Constantine the Great, and was, moreover, the tool of the Arians and the bitter enemy of those who were true to Athanasius, would be left master of the whole Roman Empire. One of the first acts of Constantine II was to bring Athanasius back to Alexandria. He had been absent for over two years, and the rejoicings attending his return were great. They were not to last long, however, for Egypt and the East made up that part of the Empire which had been left to Constantius, who was completely in the toils of Eusebius. Now, Eusebius had long been coveting the see of Constantinople; he therefore proceeded, with the Emperor's assistance, to depose the rightful Bishop and to install himself in his place. He was, as he thought, in a position to carry all things before him, when Athanasius, firm and undaunted as ever, appearing suddenly on the scene, upset all his plans. Both Constantine and Constans were Athanasius' friends, and Constantius was not strong enough to resist them. Eusebius determined to take a bold step--he would appeal to the Pope, and he promptly set to work to compose a letter which was a masterpiece of deceit. "Athanasius has been deposed by a Council of the Church," he wrote. "His return was therefore unlawful." An account of all the charges brought against the Patriarch at the Council of Tyre followed. "Ink does not stain the soul," observed Eusebius lightly, as lie after lie took shape upon the paper. The letter was sent to Rome by three trusty friends, but Pope Julius was not so easily deceived. He knew more about the matter than the Arians thought--so much, indeed, that the chief of the three envoys left suddenly during the night, fearful of what might come to light on the morrow. The two others, losing their heads completely, agreed to meet Athanasius at a synod at which the Pope himself should preside. Eusebius was beside himself when he heard of this arrangement. To appear in some Western town, with no Emperor to back him up, and to urge against Athanasius, in the presence of the Pope, charges which he knew to be false, was a program which did not appeal to him at all. Taking the law into his own hands, he called a council of his friends and elected an Arian called Gregory in Athanasius' place. Even if the Patriarch had been rightly deposed, the Egyptian Bishops alone could have elected his successor; but Eusebius and his party had long since ceased to care for right or justice. Theodore, the Governor of Egypt, was known to be a good Catholic and friendly to Athanasius. He was therefore removed, and an apostate called Philagrius, notorious for his violence and cruelty, was put in his place. The first act of this man was to publish an edict stating that Gregory was the Patriarch of Alexandria and that Athanasius was to be treated as an enemy. With armed troops he then took possession of the city churches, while Gregory, with a strong escort of soldiers, made his entrance into the town. All who resisted were imprisoned, scourged or slain. To prevent further bloodshed, Athanasius left Alexandria and set out for Rome. The first news that he heard on reaching Italy was that his friend and patron Constantine II was dead. Chapter 7 THE DAY OF REJOICING IT was an evil day for Alexandria. Most of the Egyptian Bishops refused to acknowledge Gregory and were instantly arrested. Some were banished, some tortured, some imprisoned. St. Potamon, who had narrowly missed martyrdom during the persecution of Diocletian, was scourged with rods until he died. The many cruelties of the usurper made him so hateful to the Alexandrians that, after four years of tyranny, he was killed by the mob in a sudden outbreak of fury. Athanasius, in the meantime, had made his way to Rome, where he was received by St. Julius I as a champion of the Faith. The case should be tried in his own presence, the Pope declared; but it was impossible to get the Arians to Rome. Excuse followed excuse, pretext followed pretext. Eusebius, the head of the Arian party, died at last in his usurped see, but his spirit survived in his followers. They drew up a creed of their own and sent it to the Pope, who rejected it at the Council of Milan. The Nicene Creed was the confession of Faith of the Catholic Church, he said. But the Nicene Creed, which proved so fully the divinity of Christ, was just what the Arians would not accept. A fresh Council was called at Sardica, at which they were at last induced to be present. But when Athanasius was proved innocent, and the Bishops whom the Arians had banished appeared to bear witness to the violence and cruelty with which they had been treated, the Arians abruptly left the Council and returned to Philippopolis. Here they formed a council of their own, in which they not only excommunicated Athanasius, but had the impudence to "excommunicate" Pope Julius himself. The Council of Sardica, at which were present the orthodox Bishops of Italy, Spain, Gaul, Africa, Greece, Palestine and Egypt, was very well able to get on without them. The innocence of Athanasius was finally established, the Arians and their creed condemned. A circular letter was then written to all the Churches, informing them of what had passed, and legates were dispatched to the two Emperors, Constans and Constantius. Constantius dared not resist. Urged by his brother, who did his best to show the conduct of the Arians in its true light and threatened him with civil war if he persisted in upholding them, he sent letters to Alexandria ordering that Athanasius should be honorably received. Gregory had met his death a short time before, so there was no obstacle to Athanasius' return. The Alexandrians, in the meantime, had received a letter from Pope Julius in praise of their Patriarch. "If precious metals," he wrote, "such as gold and silver, are tried in the fire, what can we say of so great a man, who has been through so many perils and afflictions, and who returns to you having been declared innocent by the judgment of the whole Synod? Receive, therefore, beloved, with all joy and glory to God, your Bishop Athanasius." Never had Alexandria seen such rejoicings. The people thronged forth from the city to meet their exiled Patriarch, singing hymns of rejoicing, waving branches of trees and throwing rich carpets upon the road along which he was to pass. Every little hill was crowded with people thirsting for a sight of that beloved face and figure. It was six years since they had seen him, and what had they not suffered during his absence? As for Athanasius, his one thought, as usual, was to establish his people in the Faith. Those who had been led astray by the Arians were pardoned and received with the greatest charity. The weak ones who had given in through fear were strengthened with tender forbearance. Those who had been Athanasius' enemies were greeted as friends on their first sign of repentance. For the time, the Arians were defeated; they could do nothing. Constans was too strong for them. The present moment was the Patriarch's, and he determined to use it to the full. The Bishops of Egypt gathered around him; widows and orphans were provided for, the poor housed and fed and the faithful warned against false doctrines. The churches were not large enough to hold the crowds that flocked to them. It was a time of peace which God vouchsafed to His people to strengthen them for the coming storm. New Bishops were consecrated, men of holy life who could be trusted. Even the monks in their distant monasteries received inspiring letters from their Patriarch, stirring them up to realize the ideals of the spiritual life and to pray for the peace of the Church. For in the midst of all his labors Athanasius still found time to write--letters against the Arians, treatises in defense of the Faith and on the religious life, brilliant, strong and convincing. It was necessary to be vigilant, for the Arians were everywhere trying to seduce men by their false doctrines, teaching that Christ was not God. Letters from Athanasius were a powerful weapon in defense of the truth. So the years passed in incessant prayer and labor, until the whole of Egypt was strong and steadfast in the Faith. "The Saints of the fourth century were giants," says a modern writer, "but he of Alexandria was the greatest of them all." The time was coming in which his work was to be tried as gold in the fire. Constans was killed in battle, leaving Constantius master of the whole empire. It was a moment for misgivings; but for some time the new Emperor seemed favorably disposed, even going so far as to assure Athanasius of his friendship. It was a friendship which might well be mistrusted. Pope Julius had also died and had been succeeded by Liberius. One of the first acts of Constantius was to write to the new Pope, offering him handsome presents and urging him to condemn Athanasius. Letters from the Arians containing all the old charges followed, but in vain. Liberius refused with indignation both presents and requests. A fresh persecution broke out. Athanasius, it is true, was not molested, but his enemies were only waiting for a pretext to attack him. This pretext they soon found. At Easter of the year 354, the churches of Alexandria were so crowded with worshippers that there was scarcely room to breathe. It was proposed to Athanasius that he should hold the Easter services in a large church that had been lately built but was not yet dedicated. Athanasius hesitated to do this without leave, as it was built on the Emperor's property, but he was at last persuaded by the people to yield. The Patriarch Alexander had done the very same thing, they urged, in the Church of St. Theonas on just such an occasion; in a case of necessity it was certainly lawful. But they had counted without the Arians, who instantly accused Athanasius of having usurped the royal authority. The Patriarch, in his famous "Apology to Constantius," stated the reasons for his act, but it was useless; other false charges were scraped up against him, and his doom was sealed. In the spring of the next year, Constantius, who was now master of both the East and the West, succeeded by force of persecution in inducing the members of a large council, which he had had summoned at Arles in France, to condemn Athanasius as guilty. The Emperor himself was present with his troops and threatened with drawn sword those who resisted his will. The Bishops who refused to sign were scourged, tortured or exiled; the Pope was banished to Berea, where he was treated with harshness and cruelty. In the winter of the next year, a General called Syrianus came to Alexandria with a large army. He was an Arian, and the people suspected a plot. Athanasius asked him if he brought any message from the Emperor; Syrianus replied that he had none. He was then reminded that Constantius had promised to leave Alexandria in peace. To this he agreed, but gave no reason for his presence. Things went on as usual for three weeks, when the blow that all had been expecting fell. It was midnight, and the Bishop was holding a vigil service in the Church of St. Theonas, when suddenly shouts and cries broke the silence of the night. Syrianus with five thousand men had surrounded the building, determined to take the Patriarch, alive or dead. In the dim light of the sanctuary Athanasius sat on the Bishop's throne, calm and unmoved in the midst of the tumult. "Read the 135th Psalm," he said to one of the deacons, "and when it is finished, all will leave the church." The words rang out through the building with their message of hope and confidence and were answered by the people: "Praise the Lord, for He is good: for His mercy endureth forever. "Praise ye the God of gods: for His mercy endureth forever." Those who were nearest the Bishop pressed him to escape. "The shepherd's place is with his flock," he answered firmly. Hardly was the Psalm ended when the soldiers rushed in with drawn swords. Many of the people fled; others were trampled underfoot or slain. Athanasius sat still, his hands folded in prayer. Again they urged him to flee. "Not until all have left the church," he replied. In desperation, the clergy and monks ended by taking the matter into their own hands. Seizing Athanasius in their arms, they bore him out of the church, passing right through the midst of the soldiers, who were searching everywhere for the Patriarch. It seemed, indeed, as Athanasius himself said later, as if God had covered their eyes. Into the darkness of the winter's night he fled, an exile and a fugitive once more. Chapter 8 THE INVISIBLE PATRIARCH IT was indeed the hour of darkness, and it seemed as if the powers of evil were let loose upon the world. The Arians, with the Emperor on their side, were carrying everything before them. Nearly all the Bishops who had upheld the Nicene faith were in exile or in prison. St. Antony, over a hundred years old, was on his deathbed. His monks, crowding around the dying Saint, groaned over the evil days that had befallen the Church. "Fear not," replied the old man, "for this power is of the earth and cannot last. As for the sufferings of the Church, was it not so from the beginning, and will it not be so until the end? Did not the Master Himself say, 'They have persecuted Me, they will persecute you also'? Did not the 'perils from false brethren' begin even in the lifetime of those who had been the companions of Christ? And yet, did not the Master Himself promise that, although she must live in the midst of persecution, He would be with His Church forever and that the gates of Hell should not prevail against her?" With these words of hope and comfort on his lips, St. Antony passed to his reward, and they laid him in his lonely desert grave. His coat of sheepskin, given him by Athanasius long years before, he sent with his dying blessing to the Patriarch, who cherished it as his most precious possession. The Alexandrians had not given in without a struggle. They had protested openly against the violence of Syrianus, proclaiming throughout the city that Athanasius was their true Patriarch and that they would never acknowledge another. It was of no use; a new reign of terror began in which all who refused to accept the Arian creed were treated as criminals. Men and women were seized and scourged; some were slain. Athanasius was denounced as a "runaway, an evildoer, a cheat and an impostor, deserving of death." Letters came from the Emperor ordering all the churches in the city to be given up to the Arians and requiring the people to receive without objections the new Patriarch whom he would shortly send them. As time went on, things grew worse. The churches were invaded; altars, vestments and books were burned and incense thrown on the flames. An ox was sacrificed in the sanctuary; priests, monks and nuns were seized and tortured; the houses of the faithful were broken into and robbed. Bishops were driven into exile and their sees filled by Arians, those who were ready to give the most money being generally chosen. Some of them were even pagans; the people were ready to bear any suffering rather than hold communion with them. When the Emperor Constantius considered that the resistance of the Alexandrians had been sufficiently broken, he addressed them in a conciliatory letter. Now that the impostor had been driven out, he said, he was about to send them a Patriarch above praise. They would find in the venerable George of Cappadocia the wisest of teachers, one who was fit in every way to lead them to the kingdom of Heaven and to raise their hearts from earthly to heavenly things. The "venerable" George was not unknown to them by repute, at least. He had begun his career as seller of pork to the Roman army. It was a position in which a clever man might have made a comfortable fortune. But George was not a clever man, and he was in too great a hurry to get rich. Such impudent dishonesty as his could not pass unnoticed; a precipitate flight alone saved him from a State prison. He was said to have been ordained a priest by the Arians before he was even a Christian. In that case he was no priest, but a useful tool in their hands, for he was capable of anything. Ignorant and unlettered, he had studied neither theology nor the Scriptures; he was, moreover, a man of bad life, heartless, cruel and greedy. His aim both as Patriarch and as pork-butcher was to make money--as much and as quickly as possible. This was the "wise teacher who was to raise them from the things of earth to those of Heaven." The faithful, with true instinct, prepared for the worst. They had not long to wait. Even Gregory had been humane compared with George of Cappadocia. Monasteries were burned down; Bishops, priests, virgins, widows--all, in fact, who were faithful to the Church--were insulted, tortured or slain. Many died in consequence of the treatment they had received; others were forced into compliance. The troops of the Emperor, with an Arian at their head, were there to do George's bidding. The new Patriarch, undisturbed by the sufferings of his victims, was busy enriching himself. Gradually he got control of all the trades in the city; he even made himself chief undertaker and passed a law by which those who dared to bury their dead in a coffin not of his providing could be severely punished. That his coffins cost a small fortune was only to be expected. At the end of two years he had exhausted the patience of the Alexandrians, pagans and Christians alike. There was a popular rising, in which the Patriarch, not having the qualities of a hero, fled for his life. For the next three years he wandered about in the East, lending a hand to every Arian scheme. In the meantime, where was Athanasius? No one knew or, at least, so it seemed. He had vanished into the darkness of the night. He was invisible, but his voice could not be silenced, and it was a voice that moved the world. Treatise after treatise in defense of the true Faith; letter after letter to the Bishops of Egypt, to his friends and to the faithful--was carried far and wide by the hands of trusty messengers. The Arians had the Roman Emperor on their side, but the pen of Athanasius was more powerful than the armies of Constantius. "God will comfort you," he wrote to his people in Alexandria on hearing that the churches were in the hands of the Arians. "If they have the temples, you have the Faith of the Apostles. If they are in the place, they are far from the Faith; but you, even if you are cast out from the churches, possess the Faith in your hearts. Which is the greater, the place or the Faith? The place is good only when the Faith of the Apostles is taught there; it is holy only when it is the home of holiness." Rumor said that Athanasius was in hiding in the Thebaid among the monks. The Arians searched the desert foot by foot to find him, but in vain. The monks themselves might have thrown some light upon the matter, but they were silent men, given to prayer and labor; they did not seem to understand what was asked of them, even when questioned with a dagger at their throats. Silent but faithful, their sentinels were everywhere, watching for the enemy's approach. Athanasius was always warned in time and led by trusty guides to another and a safer place. Sometimes it was only by a hair's breadth that he escaped, but for six years he eluded his enemies. There was not one of the monks who would not gladly have laid down his life for him. He lived among them as one of themselves, and they learned more from him of the religious life than they could teach. As mortified as the holiest among them, always serene and forgetful of self in the midst of hardships and danger, forced sometimes to hide for months in the mountain caves where his only food was what the faithful could bring him, his one thought was the Church. The Arians had made Constantius their spiritual head. They had given him that title of "Eternal" which they had denied to the Son of God. Their Bishops and teachers were everywhere; but Athanasius, like Antony, leaned strongly on Christ's promise. It would have been madness to return openly to Alexandria while Constantius lived, but several times during those dreadful years Athanasius visited the city in secret and at the risk of his life. In hiding, with a price on his head, he was as formidable an enemy to the Arians as he would have been at Alexandria. His spirit was abroad among the people, encouraging them to persevere, cheering them when downcast, comforting and consoling them in suffering. Though absent, he was their Father and their Bishop still. His voice reached even to distant Gaul, where it encouraged St. Hilary of Poitiers and others, who were striving, even as he was, against heresy. The Arians were behaving in their usual way--"always slippery, always shuffling," as one who knew them asserted.* At one council, having been accused of denying the Divinity of Christ, they had said: "Let anyone who says that Jesus Christ is a creature like unto other creatures be anathema" (accursed). At another which followed it closely--for the Arians and Constantius held a council every few months to gain their ends--they openly stated that Jesus Christ was not God, but a creature. Someone present who had been at the previous council reminded them of the statement they had made on that occasion. "We never meant that Jesus Christ was not a creature," they retorted, "only that he was a different kind of creature from the others!" * The Arians, seeing that their original doctrines were offensive to all Catholic consciences, had now taken up the position known as "Semi-Arian." The Son was like the Father, they declared, though not of one substance with Him. In the meantime, as things had quieted down a little in Alexandria, George of Cappadocia resolved to return and see if he could not make a little more money. He was received in an ominous silence, for he was held in abhorrence almost as much by the pagans as by the Christians. A few days later the news reached the city that Constantius was dead and that his nephew Julian had succeeded him as Emperor. The moment of reckoning had come. George was seized by the pagan population and literally torn to pieces; his body was burned and its ashes scattered to the winds. Thus perished Constantius' "prelate above all praise," and it was not likely that the new Emperor would take much trouble to avenge his death. Julian, known as "the Apostate," had been a pupil of Eusebius of Nicomedia and a model of youthful piety; but the Christianity of which Eusebius was a living example had struck but shallow roots. Later he went to Athens, where St. Basil and St. Gregory, the two great doctors of the Church, were his fellow students. "What a viper the Roman Empire is cherishing in its bosom!" exclaimed Gregory, no mean judge of character, "but God grant that I prove a false prophet." No sooner was Julian crowned Emperor than he threw off the mask and openly declared himself a pagan. The temples of the gods were now rebuilt, sacrifices were offered, and wealth and honors were given to all the Christians who would apostatize. An edict was published allowing the people to practice whatever religion they chose and recalling everybody who had been banished during the reign of Constantius. This seemed generous, but Julian did not believe in persecution; its results in the past had only been to strengthen the Christians in their faith. His methods were different. Privileges were granted to the pagans which were denied to the Church; the Galileans, as Julian called the Christians, were ridiculed, and paganism was praised as the only religion worthy of educated men. The results were not what the Emperor had expected, and he complained bitterly that there were so few who responded to his efforts to enlighten them. As for the Church, she knew at least what she had to expect; an open enemy is less dangerous than a false friend. Chapter 9 A SHORT-LIVED PEACE ATHANASIUS was quick to take advantage of the decree which allowed the banished Bishops to return to their sees. On the way to Alexandria he stopped to talk over matters with other noble exiles who, like himself, had suffered for the Truth. Many of the faithful had been compelled by force or induced by threats or persuasion to accept the creed of the Arians; what was to be done in order that these weak ones might be brought back to the Faith? Athanasius and those who with him had been ready to give their lives for the Truth being, like all brave and noble men, gentle and compassionate, they resolved to make it as easy as possible. They announced that absolution would be given freely to all who accepted the Creed of Nicea. Those who had fallen away were mostly good men and true believers who had yielded in a moment of weakness or of fear, or who had been deceived by the protestations of the Arians. They had been thoroughly miserable, but now the proclamation of Athanasius set them free from what had seemed like a bad dream. The Pope himself expressed his approval of Athanasius' forbearance, and the Bishops of the West hastened to follow his example. In other places, Antioch and Constantinople especially, Arianism had taken deeper root. These were the strongholds of heresy, where the spirit of Eusebius of Nicomedia still prevailed. Men of his stamp were not likely to be ready to enter into communion with that Athanasius whom they had looked upon for years as their mortal enemy, nor was it to be expected that they would allow the true Faith to prevail without a struggle. It was thanks to Athanasius and his untiring efforts that Egypt and Alexandria were still, in the main, true to the Catholic Church. We can imagine the joy with which the Alexandrians received their exiled Patriarch after his six years' absence. They had been worthy of their Bishop, for they too had made a brave fight for the Faith. Blood had been shed for Christ, and much had been suffered by the Catholics; they could face their Patriarch without shame. Many pagans who had watched the behavior of the Christians under persecution now came forward and asked to join the Church, among them some Greek ladies of noble family whom Athanasius himself instructed and baptized. News of this reached the ears of the Emperor Julian, who was already furious at the influence that this Christian Bishop of Alexandria was exercising throughout the whole empire. He had hoped that Athanasius' return from exile would have been a cause for division among the people, instead of which it had been the signal for everyone to make peace with his neighbor. Never, he foresaw, as long as the voice of this undaunted champion of the Catholic Church was ringing in the ears of his subjects, would paganism triumph. There were others who saw the matter in the same light. These were the magicians, diviners, fortune-tellers, all the servants of idolatry who had risen up at Julian's bidding and were swarming in Alexandria as everywhere else. The presence of Athanasius in their midst, they complained to the Emperor, was the ruin of their trade. Even their charms would not work as long as he was near them. There would soon not be a pagan left in the city if he were allowed to remain. The Patriarch had been barely eight months in Alexandria when the Governor of Egypt received a message from his royal master. "Nothing that I could hear of would give me greater pleasure," he wrote, "than the news that you have driven that miscreant out of the country." Soon after, the Alexandrians themselves were addressed. "We have allowed the Galileans," wrote Julian, "to return to their country, but not to their churches. Nevertheless, we hear that Athanasius, with his accustomed boldness, has replaced himself on what they call his 'episcopal throne.' We therefore order him to leave the town at once or take the consequences." The Governor of Egypt, who knew the affection of the Alexandrians for their Patriarch, dared not take any steps against him; the citizens in the meantime had addressed a letter to the Emperor, begging him to reconsider the matter and to leave Athanasius in his see. This only served to anger Julian the more. "I am painfully surprised that you Alexandrians," he wrote, "who have the great god Serapis and Isis his Queen for your patrons, should ask permission to keep such a man in your midst. I can only hope that those of the citizens who are wiser have not been consulted and that this is the action of a few. I blush to think that any of you could call himself a Galilean. I order Athanasius to leave not only Alexandria, but Egypt." The Governor also received a curt message. "If the enemy of the gods, Athanasius, remains in Egypt after the kalends of December," it ran, "you and your troops shall pay a hundred pounds in gold. The gods are despised and I am insulted." Julian, however, had not much confidence in the Governor, or in the Alexandrians either. In order to make things doubly sure, messengers of his own were sent to Alexandria with orders to put the Patriarch to death. The people were inconsolable, but Athanasius comforted them. "This time it is only a passing cloud," he said; "it will soon be over." Then, recommending his flock to the most trusted of his clergy, he left the city, an exile once more. It was not a moment too soon. Scarcely had he vanished when the messengers of Julian arrived. "Where is Athanasius?" they asked; but a grim silence was the only answer. The Patriarch, in the meantime, had reached the Nile; on the banks of the river a boat was waiting; he entered it, and they rowed swiftly upstream toward the Thebaid. It was a dangerous moment, but the faithful were watching. A message was brought to the fugitives that soldiers of the Emperor who had orders to seize and kill the Saint had learned his whereabouts and had sworn to overtake him. They implored him to land and take refuge in the desert. "No," said Athanasius; "turn the boat's head and row toward Alexandria." They thought he was mad, but dared not disobey his orders. "He who is for us is greater than he who is against us," he said, smiling at their terrified faces. Presently the Imperial boat came in sight, rowing hard in pursuit of the fugitive. "Have you seen Athanasius? Is he far off?" they shouted, as the little boat drew near. "He is quite close," answered the Patriarch calmly; "press on." The crew bent to their oars, the skiff was soon out of sight, but needless to say they did not find their prey. As for Athanasius, he continued his journey to Alexandria, where he landed once more, remaining there for a few days in hiding before he set out for the deserts of the Thebaid. "The enemy of the gods" had been gotten rid of--for a time, at least, but Julian had still to wait for the triumph of paganism. The gods themselves seemed to be against him. Never had a year been so unlucky as that which followed the banishment of Athanasius. There were earthquakes everywhere; Nicea and Nicomedia were reduced to ruins and Constantinople severely damaged. An extraordinary tidal wave swept over the lower part of the city of Alexandria, leaving shells and seaweed on the roofs of the houses. Famine and plague followed, and it was remarked that the famine seemed to dog the steps of the Emperor wherever he went. People dreaded his arrival in their city; at Antioch, where he stayed for a considerable time, the sufferings were terrible. Julian ordered sacrifices to the gods. So many white oxen were slain that it was said that soon there would be none left in the empire; but still things did not improve. Julian had begun by being tolerant, but disappointment was making him savage. It was all the fault of the Galileans, he declared. He ordered the Christian soldiers in his army to tear the Cross from Constantine's sacred standard, and he put them to death when they refused. Many Christian churches were closed, and the sacred vessels of the altar seized and profaned. Those who dared resist were imprisoned or slain. Wine that had been offered to the gods was thrown into the public wells and fountains, and all the food that was sold in the markets was defiled in the same way. Two of his officers who complained of this profanation were put to death--not for their religion, Julian hastened to explain, but for their insolence. The Emperor posed as a philosopher. His long, dirty nails and ragged, uncombed hair and beard were intended to impress his subjects with the wisdom of a man so absorbed in learning that he was above such things as cleanliness. Unfortunately, they had just the opposite effect, and the people made fun of him. They laughed at his sacrifices, where he was often to be seen tearing open with his own hands the bleeding victim to see if he could read inside the signs of success or failure. They laughed at his writings in praise of the gods, where he represented himself as receiving compliments from them all. They laughed at his short stature, at his narrow shoulders and at the huge steps he took in walking, as if, they said, he had been the near relation of one of Homer's giants. Julian revenged himself upon them in his writings satires in which Constantine, the first Christian Emperor, was especially held up to ridicule. The Galileans were at the bottom of this as of all other contradictions, he declared, and continued to vent his spleen upon the Christians. It was the last stand of ancient paganism before it died out forever. Chapter 10 THE LAST EXILE IT was not safe for Athanasius to remain long in the neighborhood of Alexandria, for the pagans were now having it all their own way. Two of the bravest and most faithful of his clergy had been seized and exiled, and Julian's troops were searching everywhere for the Patriarch. Athanasius made his way to the Thebaid, where he was received with all the old enthusiasm. Under cover of the night, he came up the river to Hermopolis, intending to stay there for some time to preach to the people. The banks of the river were crowded with bishops, monks and clergy who had come out to welcome their Father. Athanasius landed and, mounted on an ass led by Theodore, Abbot of Tabenna, proceeded to the town escorted by a vast throng of people carrying torches and singing hymns of praise. Here he dismounted, and the monks asked him for his blessing. "Blessed indeed and worthy of all praise are these men who carry always the cross of the Lord," he replied. After having stayed for some time at Hermopolis, he went with the Abbot Theodore to his monastery of Tabenna, where he was already beloved by all. He took the keenest interest in everything that related to the religious life, even to the work of the humblest brother. "It is these men, devoted to humility and obedience," he would often say, "who are our fathers, rather than we theirs." Round about him lay the great cities of ancient Egypt--"Thebes of the Hundred Gates" and Memphis, the old capital of the kingdom--cities of the dead whose glories had already passed away. The glory that these men had come to seek in their humble monasteries was one which is eternal. The things of this world were small and fleeting to those who lived in the thought of eternity. It was a country full of holy memories. On the banks of that Nile that flowed so tranquilly among the ancient cities of Egypt, Moses himself had stood lifting hands of prayer for the deliverance of his people. Later, the Salvation of the world Himself had come to dwell for a time beside it, sowing the seeds that were now bringing forth so great a harvest. It was midsummer, and Athanasius was at Arsinoe when the news came that the enemy was on his track once more. The Abbot Theodore, who was visiting the Patriarch, persuaded him to embark in his covered boat and to return with him to Tabenna. Tide and wind were against them; the monks had to land and tow the boat; progress was slow, and the soldiers of Julian were not far off. Athanasius was absorbed in prayer, preparing for the martyr's death that, this time at least, seemed very near. "Fear not," said one of the monks called Ammon, "for God is our protection." "I have no fear," answered Athanasius; "for many long years I have suffered persecution, and never has it disturbed the peace of my soul. It is a joy to suffer, and the greatest of all joys is to give one's life for Christ." There was a silence during which all gave themselves to prayer. As the Abbot Theodore besought God to save their Patriarch, it was suddenly made known to him by a divine revelation that at that very moment the Emperor Julian had met his death in battle against the Persians, and that he had been succeeded by Jovian, a Christian and a Catholic. At once he told the good news to Athanasius, advising him to go without delay to the new Emperor and ask to be restored to his see. In the meantime they had arrived in safety at Tabenna, where the monks had assembled with joy on hearing of Athanasius' approach. Great was their sorrow when they learned that he had only come to bid them farewell. They gathered around him weeping, begging that he would remember them in his prayers. "If I forget thee, O Jerusalem," cried Athanasius in the words of the Psalmist, "let my right hand be forgotten." The Emperor Jovian had been an officer in the Roman Army, where his cheerful good nature had so endeared him to the soldiers that he was proclaimed Emperor immediately on Julian's death. There was no need to plead for justice with such a man; scarcely had Athanasius arrived in Alexandria when he received a cordial letter from the Emperor himself. "Jovian--to Athanasius, the faithful servant of God," it ran. "As we are full of admiration for the holiness of your life and your zeal in the service of Christ our Saviour, we take you from this day forth under our royal protection. We are aware of the courage which makes you count as nothing the heaviest labors, the greatest dangers, the sufferings of persecution and the fear of death. You have fought faithfully for the Truth and edified the whole Christian world, which looks to you as a model of every virtue. It is therefore our desire that you should return to your See and teach the doctrine of salvation. Come back to your people, feed the flock of Christ and pray for our person, for it is through your prayers that we hope for the blessing of God." Another letter followed shortly afterward from the Emperor, asking Athanasius to tell him plainly what was the true faith of the Catholic Church and inviting him to visit him at Antioch. The faith of Nicea was alone to be believed and held, replied the Patriarch; it was that of the whole Catholic world, with the exception of a few men who still held the doctrines of Arius. Nevertheless, he thought it prudent to accept the Emperor's invitation and set out shortly afterward for Antioch. It was well that he did so, for the Arians were already on the spot. They had brought with them a man called Lucius in the hope that they would be able to induce Jovian to name him Patriarch of Alexandria in place of Athanasius. "We are Alexandrians," they declared, "and we beseech your Majesty to give us a Bishop." "I have already ordered Athanasius to return to his See," was the reply. "We have proofs against him," they said; "he was condemned and banished by Constantine and Constantius of blessed memory." "All that was ten or twenty years ago," answered the Emperor; "it is too late to rake it up again now. Besides, I know all about it by whom he was accused and how he was banished. You need say no more." The Arians persisted. "Give us whomever you like as Patriarch," they said, "as long as it is not Athanasius. No one in the town will hold communion with him." "I have heard a very different story," said Jovian; "his teaching is greatly appreciated." "His teaching is well enough," they retorted, "but his heart is full of malice." "For his heart he must answer to God, who alone knows what is in it," replied the Emperor; "it is enough for me if his teaching is good." The Arians at last lost patience. "He calls us heretics!" they exclaimed indignantly. "That is his duty and the duty of all those who guard the flock of Christ" was the only reply they got. The Emperor received Athanasius with the deepest respect and listened eagerly to all he had to say on the subject of the true Faith. After a short stay in Antioch, the Patriarch returned to Alexandria, where he related to the people the success of his enterprise and spoke much in praise of the new Emperor. Their joy was not destined to be lasting. Jovian had been but a few months on the throne when he died suddenly on his way from Antioch to Constantinople. He was succeeded by Valentinian, who, unfortunately for the peace of the Church, chose his brother Valens to help him in the government, taking the West for his own share of the Empire and leaving the East to his brother. Valens, who was both weak and cruel, had an Arian wife and declared at once in favor of the Arians. The East was once more to be the scene of strife and persecution. The Emperor, who had not yet been baptized, received the Sacrament at the hands of Eudoxius, the Arian Bishop of Constantinople, a worthy successor of Eusebius, who, in the middle of the ceremony, made Valens take an oath that he would remain faithful to the Arians and pursue the Catholics with every rigor. The Emperor thus won over, the Arians began to persecute and slander those who were faithful to the Church; several were even put to death. The Catholics, in desperation, resolved at last to send an embassy to Valens to ask for justice, eighty priests and clerics being chosen to make the petition. The Emperor, who pretended to listen patiently to their complaints, had given secret orders to Modestus, the Prefect of the Pretorian Guard, to put them all to death. Modestus was as cruel as his master; but even in Nicomedia, where Arius and Eusebius had been so active in preaching heresy, the bulk of the people remained true to the Faith of Nicea. Such a wholesale slaughter of innocent ecclesiastics would be almost certain to cause a rising; the thing must be done secretly. Summoning the doomed men to appear before him, Modestus informed them that the Emperor had sentenced them to banishment. Glad to suffer something for the Faith, they received the news with joy and were promptly embarked on a ship which was supposedly to carry them to the country of their exile. The crew, however, had received their orders from Modestus. They set the ship on fire and escaped in the only boat, leaving the eighty martyrs to perish in the flames. After this, it was evidently useless to appeal to Valens for justice. The Governors of the different provinces soon received orders to drive out all the Bishops banished by Constantius who had returned during the reign of Julian. The people of Alexandria, however, protested that Athanasius had not returned in the reign of Julian but had been personally recalled by Jovian. The Governor of Egypt dared not insist, for the citizens had gathered in force, determined to defend their Bishop; but he warned the Emperor of the Catholic spirit of the Alexandrians. A few days later, Athanasius left the city to stay for a short time in a country house in the neighborhood. It was a providential thing that he did so. That very night the Governor, with a body of armed troops, broke into the church where the Patriarch was usually to be found at prayer. They searched everywhere and were much astonished to find that their prey had escaped them. Athanasius, in the meantime, warned by friends, had concealed himself in his father's tomb, a fairly large vault, where a man might remain for some time in hiding. The secret was well kept by the faithful, who brought food to the Patriarch during the night and kept him informed of all that was passing in the city. For four long months he remained in concealment: at the end of which time the Governor, fearing an outbreak among the people--for the whole of Egypt was in a ferment--persuaded Valens to let him return in peace to his see. Chapter 11 THE TRUCE OF GOD ATHANASIUS was back once more in the midst of his people. This time they were determined to keep him at any cost, as they gave the Arians to understand a year later when Lucius, the man who had been recommended to Jovian as a suitable Patriarch, ventured to make his appearance in Alexandria. No sooner did the people hear of his arrival than they surrounded the house where he was lodging, and it would have gone ill with him had not the Governor, with an armed troop, rescued him and hurried him out of Egypt. The roar against him that arose from the multitude as he was escorted by a strong guard out of the city completely cured him of any desire to return, and Athanasius was left in peace for the remaining years of his life. He had grown old, and his strength was failing, but his soul, still young and vigorous, was undaunted and heroic as ever. The seven last years of his rule at Alexandria were no more years of rest than those which had gone before. He was one of the few bishops still living who had been present at the Council of Nicea. The whole Catholic world, West as well as East, venerated him as a Confessor of the Faith and looked to him for advice and help. His pen was still busy. One of his first acts on his return to Alexandria was to write the life of St. Antony of the Desert, a last tribute of love and gratitude to the memory of his dear old friend. The book was eagerly read; we are told in the Confessions of St. Augustine how two young officers of the Imperial army, finding it on the table of a certain hermitage near Milan and reading it, were so inspired by enthusiasm for the religious life that they embraced it then and there. In the other parts of the Eastern empire Valens and the Arians were still at work, and persecution was raging as of old. Many of the persecuted Bishops looked to Athanasius for the comfort and encouragement which they never sought in vain. He was always ready to forget the past and to make advances even to those who had been his bitterest enemies. Let them only accept the Creed of Nicea, he said, and he would admit them to communion. There was a splendid chivalry about the man who could so generously hold out the right hand of fellowship to those who had never ceased to plot his ruin. The triumph of truth and the salvation of souls was his first, and indeed his only thought; everything else could be safely forgotten. Unfortunately, it was not so with the leaders of the Arians, and they refused to respond to his appeal. There were, however, among them good men who had been deceived into signing false creeds and who were beginning to see things in their true light. Many of these were received back into the Church and became true and firm friends of the Patriarch, who was always more ready to see the good in his fellowmen than the evil. God had not given to everyone the clear instinct and the wide learning of an Athanasius. It was sometimes really difficult to see where the truth lay, for the Arians always tried to conceal their real doctrines from those who would have shrunk from them in horror. Their old trick of declaring that they believed all that the Church believed had led many astray. For misled men such as these, honest and true of heart, Athanasius had the greatest compassion and sympathy; they could always count on his help. He carried the same large-mindedness into the affairs of his government. A certain Bishop of Libya having grown too old to carry out his duties to the people's satisfaction, they asked that he should be replaced by a younger and more capable prelate. But they had not the patience to wait till the affair was settled. Siderius, a young Christian officer stationed in the province, had won the hearts of all by his virtue and wisdom; he, and none other, they resolved, should take the place of the old man. A Bishop called Philo was accordingly persuaded to consecrate Siderius, a thing he had no right to do, as the Patriarch had not been consulted; neither were there two other Bishops present, as was required for a lawful consecration. The news of this irregular proceeding came in due time to the ears of Athanasius, who sent someone to inquire into the matter. Finding, however, that Siderius was worthy in every way of the position in which he had been placed, he ratified the choice of the people and showed much favor to the young Bishop. Yet a few years later he was ready to brave the Emperor's anger by excommunicating the Governor of Libya, a man whose cruelty and evil deeds had made him hateful to all. As the man was a native of Cappadocia, Athanasius wrote to St. Basil, the Archbishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia, to tell him what he had done. St. Basil replied that he had published the excommunication throughout his diocese and forbidden anyone to hold communion with the unhappy man. He asked Athanasius to pray for him and his people, for the Arians were hard at work among them. Valens, in the meantime, had decided that the whole empire must be Arian and was trying to obtain his end by force. Arian prelates arrived in Caesarea, and Modestus, Prefect of the Pretorian Guard, informed the Archbishop that he must admit them to communion under pain of banishment. St. Basil, having resisted the order, was brought up before the Prefect's tribunal. "Why will you not accept the Emperor's religion?" asked the latter. "Do you think it is a small thing to be of our communion?" "Although you are Prefects and powerful people," answered the Archbishop, "you are not to be more respected than God." "Do you not know that I have power to drive you into exile, even to take your life?" cried Modestus in a rage. "I am God's pilgrim," was the answer; "all countries are the same to me, and death is a good gift when it brings me to Him for whom I live and work." "No one has ever spoken so boldly to me before," replied Modestus, astonished. "You have probably never met a Christian Bishop before," said Basil, "or he would certainly have answered you as I have done. In all other things we are meek and obedient, but when it is a question of God's worship, we look to Him alone. Threats are of no use, for suffering in His service is our greatest delight." "Would you not like to have the Emperor in your congregation?" asked Modestus. "It would be so easy. You have only to strike that word 'consubstantial' out of your creed." "Gladly would I see the Emperor in my church," said Basil; "it is a great thing to save a soul; but as for changing my creed, I would not alter a letter for the whole world." The persecution continued, and Basil addressed himself once more to Athanasius, asking for prayers and guidance. "We are persuaded," he wrote, "that your leadership is our sole remaining comfort in our distress. By the power of our prayers, by the wisdom of your counsels, you are able to carry us through this fearful storm, as all are sure who have in any way made trial of your goodness. Wherefore cease not to pray for our souls and to stir us up by letters; if you only knew how these benefit us, you would never let pass an opportunity of writing. If it were given to me, through your prayers, once to see you, to profit by your gifts and to add to the history of my life a meeting with such a great and apostolic soul, surely I should consider that the loving mercy of God has given me a compensation for all the ills with which my life has been afflicted." In 366 Pope Liberius died and was succeeded by Pope St. Damasus, a man of strong character and holy life. Two years later, in a council of the Church, it was decreed that no Bishop should be consecrated unless he held the Creed of Nicea. Athanasius was overwhelmed with joy on hearing this decision. The triumph of the cause for which he had fought so valiantly was now assured. Athanasius' life was drawing to an end. Five years later, after having governed his diocese for forty-eight years--years of labor, endurance and suffering--he passed peacefully into the presence of that Lord for whose sake he had counted all his tribulations as joy. From his earliest youth Athanasius had stood forth as the champion of Truth and defender of the Faith--a gallant warrior who had not laid down his arms until the day of his death. Where a weaker man would have lost courage, he had stood firm; suffering had only served to temper his spirit, as steel is tempered by the fire. Among men who were capable of every compromise he had remained loyal and true, and few have been more loved or hated than he. To his own people he was not only their Bishop, but a Saint, an ascetic, a martyr in all but deed; above all, he was an intensely lovable personality, whose very greatness of soul only made him more compassionate. To the outside world he was a guiding light, a beacon pointing straight to God and Heaven. He was a living example of the truth that a man may be large-minded and yet strong; that he may hate error, yet love the erring--stand like a rock against heresy, yet be full of compassion for heretics. Scarcely was Athanasius dead when he was honored as a Saint. Six years after his death, St. Gregory Nazianzen speaks of him in one breath with the patriarchs, prophets and martyrs who had fought for the Faith and won the crown of glory. His influence is with us to this day, his memory lingers in the words of that Nicene Creed which was his war cry; for it is largely owing to his valor that we possess it still. And through all his works breathes the same spirit--the spirit that nerved him to fight and suffer--an intense love and devotion to Him who was the Lord and Master of his life--Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, today and forever. 
22112	----	A Child's Book of Saints by William Canton With illustrations by T. H. Robinson This is fairy gold, boy; And I will prove it so. --Shakespeare Every man I will go with thee, be thy guide in thy most need to go by thy side. London Published by J. M. Dent & Co. and in New York by E. P. Dutton & Co. First Edition, March 1906. Reprinted May 1906. EDITOR'S NOTE. "A Child's Book of Saints" was first published in 1898, when Mr. Canton had already found his audience. The book is a near successor indeed to his "W. V.: Her Book," and to "The Invisible Playmate"; and W. V. again acts as guardian elf and guide to this new region of the child's earthly paradise. The Saints are here treated with a simplicity that is almost or altogether childlike, and with an unforced imagination which is only to be learnt by becoming as a child. And this is perhaps why, although comparatively a new book, it has the air of something pleasantly old, and written long ago; and thus wins its way into the children's library of old favourite authors. Mr. Canton's published works, up to January 1906, comprise:--"A Lost Epic, and other Poems," 1887. "The Invisible Playmate: a Story of the Unseen," 1894, 1897. "W. V., Her Book and Various Verses," 1896. "A Child's Book of Saints," 1898, 1902. "Children's Sayings, Edited, with a Digression on the Small People," 1900. "The True Annals of Fairyland" (The Reign of King Herla), 1900, &c. "In Memory of W. V." (Winifred Vida Canton), 1901. "The Comrades: Poems, Old and New," 1902. "What is the Bible Society?" 1903. "The Story of the Bible Society," 1904. "A History of the British and Foreign Bible Society," 1904. "Little Hands and God's Book: a Sketch of the Bible Society," 1804-1904, 1905. Contents IN THE FOREST OF STONE THE SONG OF THE MINSTER THE PILGRIM OF A NIGHT THE ANCIENT GODS PURSUING THE DREAM OF THE WHITE LARK THE HERMIT OF THE PILLAR KENACH'S LITTLE WOMAN GOLDEN APPLES AND ROSES RED THE SEVEN YEARS OF SEEKING THE GUARDIANS OF THE DOOR ON THE SHORES OF LONGING THE CHILDREN OF SPINALUNGA THE SIN OF THE PRINCE BISHOP THE LITTLE BEDESMAN OF CHRIST THE BURNING OF ABBOT SPIRIDION THE COUNTESS ITHA THE STORY OF THE LOST BROTHER THE KING ORGULOUS THE JOURNEY OF RHEINFRID LIGHTING THE LAMPS List of Illustrations Women lived the life of prayer and praise and austerity and miracle "These are the fields in which the Shepherds watched" Hilary wondered and mused A gaunt, dark figure, far up in the blue Asian sky "Come not any nearer, turn thy face to the forest, and go down" "I am not mad, most noble Sapricius" They won their long sea-way home "And four good Angels watch my bed, two at the foot and two the head" And again in the keen November The eight hundred horsemen turned in dismay "Surely in all the world God has no more beautiful house than this" St. Francis of Assisi Itha rode away with her lord King Orgulous _A saint, whose very name I have forgotten, had a vision, in which he saw Satan standing before the throne of God; and, listening, he heard the evil spirit say, "Why hast Thou condemned me, who have offended Thee but once, whilst Thou savest thousands of men who have offended Thee many times?" God answered him, "Hast thou_ once _asked pardon of me?"_ _Behold the Christian mythology! It is the dramatic truth, which has its worth and effect independently of the literal truth, and which even gains nothing by being fact. What matter whether the saint had or had not heard the sublime words which I have just quoted! The great point is to know that pardon is refused only to him who does not ask it._ COUNT DE MAISTRE. A Child's Book of Saints In the Forest of Stone Looking down the vista of trees and houses from the slope of our garden, W. V. saw the roof and spire of the church of the Oak-men showing well above the green huddle of the Forest. "It is a pretty big church, isn't it, father?" she asked, as she pointed it out to me. It was a most picturesque old-fashioned church, though in my thoughtlessness I had mistaken it for a beech and a tall poplar growing apparently side by side; but the moment she spoke I perceived my illusion. "I expect, if we were anywhere about on a Sunday morning," she surmised, with a laugh, "we should see hundreds and hundreds of Oak-girls and Oak-boys going in schools to service." "Dressed in green silk, with bronze boots and pink feathers--the colours of the new oak-leaves, eh?" "Oh, father, it would be lovely!" in a burst of ecstasy. "Oughtn't we to go and find the way to their church?" We might do something much less amusing. Accordingly we took the bearings of the green spire with the skill of veteran explorers. It lay due north, so that if we travelled by the way of the North Star we should be certain to find it. Wheeling the Man before us, we made a North Star track for ourselves through the underwood and over last year's rustling beech-leaves, till Guy ceased babbling and crooning, and dropped into a slumber, as he soon does in the fresh of the morning. Then we had to go slowly for fear he should be wakened by the noise of the dead wood underfoot, for, as we passed over it with wheels and boots, it snapped and crackled like a freshly-kindled fire. It was a relief to get at last to the soft matting of brown needles and cones under the Needle-trees, for there we could go pretty quickly without either jolting him or making a racket. We went as far as we were able that day, and we searched in glade and lawn, in coppice and dingle, but never a trace could we find of the sylvan minster where the Oak-people worship. As we wandered through the Forest we came upon a number of notice boards nailed high up on the trunks of various trees, but when W. V. discovered that these only repeated the same stern legend: "Caution. Persons breaking, climbing upon, or otherwise damaging," she indignantly resented this incessant intrusion on the innocent enjoyment of free foresters. How much nicer it would have been if there had been a hand on one of these repressive boards, with the inscription: "This way to the North Star Church;" or, if a caution was really necessary for some of the people who entered the Forest, to say: "The public are requested not to disturb the Elves, Birch-ladies, and Oak-men;" but of course the most delightful thing would be to have a different fairy-tale written up in clear letters on each of the boards, and a seat close by where one could rest and read it comfortably. I told her there were several forests I had explored, in which something like that was really done; only the stories were not fairy-tales, but legends of holy men and women; and among the branches of the trees were fixed most beautifully coloured glass pictures of those holy people, who had all lived and died, and some of whom had been buried, in those forests, hundreds of years ago. Most of the forests were very ancient--older than the thrones of many kingdoms; and men lived and delighted in them long before Columbus sailed into unknown seas to discover America. Many, indeed, had been blown down and destroyed by a terrible storm which swept over the world when Henry VIII. ruled in England, and only wrecks of them now remained for any one to see, but others, which had survived the wild weather of those days, were as wonderful and as lovely as a dream. The tall trees in them sent out curving branches which interlaced high overhead, shutting out the blue sky and making a sweet and solemn dimness, and nearly all the light that streamed in between the fair round trunks and the arching boughs was like that of a splendid sunset, only it was there all day long and never faded out till night fell. And in some of the forests there were great magical roses, of a hundred brilliant colours crowded together, and as big as the biggest cart-wheel, or bigger. These woods were places of happy quietude and comfort and gladness of heart; but, instead of Oak-men, there were many Angels. Here and there, too, in the silent avenues, mighty warriors and saintly abbots, and statesmen bishops, and it might be even a king or a queen, had been buried; and over their graves there were sometimes images of them lying carved in marble or alabaster, and sometimes there had been built the loveliest little chapels all sculptured over with tracery of flowers and foliage. "True, father?" "True as true, dear. Some day I shall take you to see for yourself." We know a dip in a dingle where the woodcutters have left a log among the hazels, and here, having wheeled Guy into a dappling of sunny discs and leaf-shadows in a grassy bay, we sat down on the log, and talked in an undertone. Our failure to find the Oak-men's church reminded me of the old legends of lost and invisible churches, the bells of which are heard ringing under the snow, or in the depths of the woods, or far away in burning deserts, or fathom-deep beneath the blue sea; but the pilgrim or the chance wayfarer who has heard the music of the bells has never succeeded in discovering the way that leads to the lost church. It is on the clear night of St. John's Day, the longest day of the year, or on the last hour of Christmas Eve, that these bells are heard pealing most sweet and clear. It was in this way that we came to tell Christian legends and to talk of saints and hermits, of old abbeys and minsters, of visions and miracles and the ministry of Angels. Guy, W. V. thought, might be able, if only he could speak, to tell us much about heaven and the Angels; it was so short a time since he left them. She herself had quite forgotten, but, then--deprecatingly--it was so long and long and long ago; "eight years, a long time for me." The faith and the strange vivid daydreams of the Middle Ages were a new world into which she was being led along enchanted footpaths; quite different from the worldly world of the "Old Romans," and of English history; more real it seemed and more credible, for all its wonders, than the world of elves and water-maidens. Delightful as it was, it was scarce believable that fairies ever carried a little girl up above the tree-tops and swung her in the air from one to another; but when St. Catherine of Siena was a little child, and went to be a hermit in the woods, and got terribly frightened, and lost her way, and sat down to cry, the Angels, you know, did really and truly waft her up on their wings and carried her to the valley of Fontebranda, which was very near home. And when she was quite a little thing and used to say her prayers going up to bed, the Angels would come to her and just "whip" her right up the stairs in an instant! Occasionally these legends brought us to the awful brink of religious controversies and insoluble mysteries, but, like those gentle savages who honour the water-spirits by hanging garlands from tree to tree across the river, W. V. could always fling a bridge of flowers over our abysses. "Our sense," she would declare, "is nothing to God's; and though big people have more sense than children, the sense of all the big people in the world put together would be no sense to His." "We are only little babies to Him; we do not understand Him at all." Nothing seemed clearer to her than the reasonableness of one legend which taught that though God always answers our prayers, He does not always answer in the way we would like, but in some better way than we know. "Yes," she observed, "He is just a dear old Father." Anything about our Lord engrossed her imagination; and it was a frequent wish of hers that He would come again. "Then,"--poor perplexed little mortal! whose difficulties one could not even guess at--"we should be quite sure of things. Miss Catherine tells us from books: He would tell us from His memory. People would not be so cruel to Him now. Queen Victoria would not allow any one to crucify Him." I don't think that W. V., in spite of her confidence in my good faith, was quite convinced of the existence of those old forests of which I had told her, until I explained that they were forests of stone, which, if men did not mar them, would blossom for centuries unchanged, though the hands that planted them had long been blown in dust about the world. She understood all that I meant when we visited York and Westminster, and walked through the long avenues of stone palms and pines, with their overarching boughs, and gazed at the marvellous rose-windows in which all the jewels of the world seemed to have been set, and saw the colours streaming through the gorgeous lancets and high many-lighted casements. After that it was delightful to turn over engravings and photographs of ruined abbeys and famous old churches at home and abroad, and to anticipate the good time when we should visit them together, and perhaps not only descend into the crypts but go through the curious galleries which extend over the pillars of the nave, and even climb up to the leaded roof of the tower, or dare the long windy staircases and ladders which mount into the spire, and so look down on the quaint map of streets, and houses, and gardens, and squares, hundreds of feet below. She liked to hear how some of those miracles of stone had been fashioned and completed--how monks in the days of old had travelled over the land with the relics of saints, collecting treasure of all sorts for the expense of the work; how sometimes the people came in hundreds dragging great oaks and loads of quarried stone, and bringing fat hogs, beans, corn, and beer for the builders and their workmen; how even queens carried block or beam to the masons, so that with their own hands they might help in the glorious labour; and poor old women gave assistance by cooking food and washing and spinning and weaving and making and mending; how when the foundations were blessed kings and princes and powerful barons laid each a stone, and when the choir sang the antiphon, "And the foundations of the wall were garnished with all manner of precious stones," they threw costly rings and jewels and chains of gold into the trench; and how years and generations passed away, and abbots and bishops and architects and masons and sculptors and labourers died, but new men took their places, and still the vast work went on, and the beautiful pile rose higher and higher into the everlasting heavens. Then, too, we looked back at the vanished times when the world was all so different from our world of to-day; and in green and fruitful spots among the hills and on warm river-lawns and in olden cities of narrow streets and overhanging roofs, there were countless abbeys and priories and convents; and thousands of men and women lived the life of prayer and praise and austerity and miracle and vision which is described in the legends of the Saints. We lingered in the pillared cloisters where the black-letter chronicles were written in Latin, and music was scored and hymns were composed, and many a rare manuscript was illuminated in crimson and blue and emerald and gold; and we looked through the fair arches into the cloister-garth where in the green sward a grave lay ever ready to receive the remains of the next brother who should pass away from this little earth to the glory of Paradise. What struck W. V. perhaps most of all was, that in some leafy places these holy houses were so ancient that even the blackbirds and throstles had learned to repeat some of the cadences of the church music, and in those places the birds still continue to pipe them, though nothing now remains of church or monastery except the name of some field or street or well, which people continue to use out of old habit and custom. [Illustration: _Women lived the life of prayer and praise_] It was with the thought of helping the busy little brain to realise something of that bygone existence, with its strange modes of thought, its unquestioning faith in the unseen and eternal, its vivid consciousness of the veiled but constant presence of the holy and omnipotent God, its stern self-repression and its tender charity, its lovely ideals and haunting legends, that I told W. V. the stories in this little book. It mattered little to her or to me that that existence had its dark shadows contrasting with its celestial light: it was the light that concerned us, not the shadows. Some of the stories were told on the log, while Guy slept in his mail-cart in the dappled shelter of the dingle; others by a winter fire when the days were short, and the cry of the wind in the dark made it easy for one to believe in wolves; others in the Surrey hills, a year ago, in a sandy hollow crowned with bloom of the ling, and famous for a little pool where the martins alight to drink and star the mud with a maze of claw-tracks; and yet again, others, this year,[1] under the dry roof of the pines of Anstiebury, when the fosse of the old Briton settlement was dripping with wet, and the woods were dim with the smoke of rain, and the paths were red with the fallen bloom of the red chestnuts and white with the flourish of May and brown with the catkins of the oak, and the cuckoo, calling in Mosses Wood, was answered from Redlands and the Warren, and the pines where we sat (snug and dry) looked so solemn and dark that, with a little fancy, it was easy to change the living greenwood into the forest of stone. As they were told, under the pressure of an insatiable listener, so have they been written, save for such a phrase, here and there, as slips more readily from the pen than from the tongue. Of the stories which were told, but which have not been written for this book, if W. V. should question me, I shall answer in the wise words of the Greybeard of Broce-Liande: "However hot thy thirst, and however pleasant to assuage it, leave clear water in the well." [1] The year of the happy hills, 1898. The Song of the Minster When John of Fulda became Prior of Hethholme, says the old chronicle, he brought with him to the Abbey many rare and costly books--beautiful illuminated missals and psalters and portions of the Old and New Testament. And he presented rich vestments to the Minster; albs of fine linen, and copes embroidered with flowers of gold. In the west front he built two great arched windows filled with marvellous storied glass. The shrine of St. Egwin he repaired at vast outlay, adorning it with garlands in gold and silver, but the colour of the flowers was in coloured gems, and in like fashion the little birds in the nooks of the foliage. Stalls and benches of carved oak he placed in the choir; and many other noble works he had wrought in his zeal for the glory of God's house. In all the western land was there no more fair or stately Minster than this of the Black Monks, with the peaceful township on one side, and on the other the sweet meadows and the acres of wheat and barley sloping down to the slow river, and beyond the river the clearings in the ancient forest. But Thomas the Sub-prior was grieved and troubled in his mind by the richness and the beauty of all he saw about him, and by the Prior's eagerness to be ever adding some new work in stone, or oak, or metal, or jewels. "Surely," he said to himself, "these things are unprofitable--less to the honour of God than to the pleasure of the eye and the pride of life and the luxury of our house! Had so much treasure not been wasted on these vanities of bright colour and carved stone, our dole to the poor of Christ might have been fourfold, and they filled with good things. But now let our almoner do what best he may, I doubt not many a leper sleeps cold, and many a poor man goes lean with hunger." This the Sub-prior said, not because his heart was quick with fellowship for the poor, but because he was of a narrow and gloomy and grudging nature, and he could conceive of no true service of God which was not one of fasting and praying, of fear and trembling, of joylessness and mortification. Now you must know that the greatest of the monks and the hermits and the holy men were not of this kind. In their love of God they were blithe of heart, and filled with a rare sweetness and tranquillity of soul, and they looked on the goodly earth with deep joy, and they had a tender care for the wild creatures of wood and water. But Thomas had yet much to learn of the beauty of holiness. Often in the bleak dark hours of the night he would leave his cell and steal into the Minster, to fling himself on the cold stones before the high altar; and there he would remain, shivering and praying, till his strength failed him. It happened one winter night, when the thoughts I have spoken of had grown very bitter in his mind, Thomas guided his steps by the glimmer of the sanctuary lamp to his accustomed place in the choir. Falling on his knees, he laid himself on his face with the palms of his outstretched hands flat on the icy pavement. And as he lay there, taking a cruel joy in the freezing cold and the torture of his body, he became gradually aware of a sound of far-away yet most heavenly music. He raised himself to his knees to listen, and to his amazement he perceived that the whole Minster was pervaded by a faint mysterious light, which was every instant growing brighter and clearer. And as the light increased the music grew louder and sweeter, and he knew that it was within the sacred walls. But it was no mortal minstrelsy. The strains he heard were the minglings of angelic instruments, and the cadences of voices of unearthly loveliness. They seemed to proceed from the choir about him, and from the nave and transept and aisles; from the pictured windows and from the clerestory and from the vaulted roofs. Under his knees he felt that the crypt was throbbing and droning like a huge organ. Sometimes the song came from one part of the Minster, and then all the rest of the vast building was silent; then the music was taken up, as it were in response, in another part; and yet again voices and instruments would blend in one indescribable volume of harmony, which made the huge pile thrill and vibrate from roof to pavement. As Thomas listened, his eyes became accustomed to the celestial light which encompassed him, and he saw--he could scarce credit his senses that he saw--the little carved angels of the oak stalls in the choir clashing their cymbals and playing their psalteries. He rose to his feet, bewildered and half terrified. At that moment the mighty roll of unison ceased, and from many parts of the church there came a concord of clear high voices, like a warbling of silver trumpets, and Thomas heard the words they sang. And the words were these-- _Tibi omnes Angeli._ _To Thee all Angels cry aloud._ So close to him were two of these voices that Thomas looked up to the spandrels in the choir, and he saw that it was the carved angels leaning out of the spandrels that were singing. And as they sang the breath came from their stone lips white and vaporous into the frosty air. He trembled with awe and astonishment, but the wonder of what was happening drew him towards the altar. The beautiful tabernacle work of the altar screen contained a double range of niches filled with the statues of saints and kings; and these, he saw, were singing. He passed slowly onward with his arms outstretched, like a blind man who does not know the way he is treading. The figures on the painted glass of the lancets were singing. The winged heads of the baby angels over the marble memorial slabs were singing. The lions and griffons and mythical beasts of the finials were singing. The effigies of dead abbots and priors were singing on their tombs in bay and chantry. The figures in the frescoes on the walls were singing. On the painted ceiling westward of the tower the verses of the Te Deum, inscribed in letters of gold above the shields of kings and princes and barons, were visible in the divine light, and the very words of these verses were singing, like living things. And the breath of all these as they sang turned to a smoke as of incense in the wintry air, and floated about the high pillars of the Minster. Suddenly the music ceased, all save the deep organ-drone. Then Thomas heard the marvellous antiphon repeated in the bitter darkness outside; and that music, he knew, must be the response of the galleries of stone kings and queens, of abbots and virgin martyrs, over the western portals, and of the monstrous gargoyles along the eaves. When the music ceased in the outer darkness, it was taken up again in the interior of the Minster. At last there came one stupendous united cry of all the singers, and in that cry even the organ-drone of the crypt, and the clamour of the brute stones of pavement and pillar, of wall and roof, broke into words articulate. And the words were these: _Per singulos dies, benedicimus Te._ _Day by day: we magnify Thee,_ _And we worship Thy name: ever world without end._ As the wind of the summer changes into the sorrowful wail of the yellowing woods, so the strains of joyous worship changed into a wail of supplication; and as he caught the words, Thomas too raised his voice in wild entreaty: _Miserere nostri, Domine, miserere nostri._ _O Lord, have mercy upon us: have mercy upon us._ And then his senses failed him, and he sank to the ground in a long swoon. When he came to himself all was still, and all was dark save for the little yellow flower of light in the sanctuary lamp. As he crept back to his cell he saw with unsealed eyes how churlishly he had grudged God the glory of man's genius and the service of His dumb creatures, the metal of the hills, and the stone of the quarry, and the timber of the forest; for now he knew that at all seasons, and whether men heard the music or not, the ear of God was filled by day and by night with an everlasting song from each stone of the vast Minster: _We magnify Thee,_ _And we worship Thy name: ever world without end._ The Pilgrim of a Night In the ancient days of faith the doors of the churches used to be opened with the first glimmer of the dawn in summer, and long before the moon had set in winter; and many a ditcher and woodcutter and ploughman on his way to work used to enter and say a short prayer before beginning the labour of the long day. Now it happened that in Spain there was a farm-labourer named Isidore, who went daily to his early prayer, whatever the weather might be. His fellow-workmen were slothful and careless, and they gibed and jeered at his piety, but when they found that their mockery had no effect upon him, they spoke spitefully of him in the hearing of the master, and accused him of wasting in prayer the time which he should have given to his work. When the farmer heard of this he was displeased, and he spoke to Isidore and bade him remember that true and faithful service was better than any prayer that could be uttered in words. "Master," replied Isidore, "what you say is true, but it is also true that no time is ever lost in prayer. Those who pray have God to work with them, and the ploughshare which He guides draws as goodly and fruitful a furrow as another." This the master could not deny, but he resolved to keep a watch on Isidore's comings and goings, and early on the morrow he went to the fields. In the sharp air of the autumn morning he saw this one and that one of his men sullenly following the plough behind the oxen, and taking little joy in the work. Then, as he passed on to the rising ground, he heard a lark carolling gaily in the grey sky, and in the hundred-acre where Isidore was engaged he saw to his amazement not one plough but three turning the hoary stubble into ruddy furrows. And one plough was drawn by oxen and guided by Isidore, but the two others were drawn and guided by Angels of heaven. When next the master spoke to Isidore it was not to reproach him, but to beg that he might be remembered in his prayers. Now the one great longing of Isidore's life was to visit that hallowed and happy country beyond the sea in which our Lord lived and died for us. He longed to gaze on the fields in which the Shepherds heard the song of the Angels, and to know each spot named in the Gospels. All that he could save from his earnings Isidore hoarded up, so that one day, before he was old, he might set out on pilgrimage to the Holy Land. It took many years to swell the leather bag in which he kept his treasure; and each coin told of some pleasure, or comfort, or necessary which he had denied himself. Now, when at length the bag was grown heavy, and it began to appear not impossible that he might yet have his heart's desire, there came to his door an aged pilgrim with staff and scallop-shell, who craved food and shelter for the night. Isidore bade him welcome, and gave him such homely fare as he might--bread and apples and cheese and thin wine, and satisfied his hunger and thirst. Long they talked together of the holy places and of the joy of treading the sacred dust that had borne the marks of the feet of Christ. Then the pilgrim spoke of the long and weary journey he had yet to go, begging his way from village to village (for his scrip was empty) till he could prevail on some good mariner to give him ship-room and carry him to the green isle of home, far away on the edge of sunset. Thinking of those whom he had left and who might be dead before he could return, the pilgrim wept, and his tears so moved the heart of Isidore that he brought forth his treasure and said: "This have I saved in the great hope that one day I might set eyes on what thou hast beheld, and sit on the shores of the Lake of Galilee, and gaze on the hill of Calvary. But thy need is very great. Take it, and hasten home (ere they be dead) to those who love thee and look for thy coming; and if thou findest them alive bid them pray for me." And when they had prayed together Isidore and the pilgrim lay down to sleep. In the first sweet hours of the restful night Isidore became aware that he was walking among strange fields on a hillside, and on the top of a hill some distance away there were the white walls and low flat-roofed houses of a little town; and some one was speaking to him and saying, "These are the fields in which the Shepherds watched, and that rocky pathway leads up the slope to Bethlehem." [Illustration: "_These are the fields in which the Shepherds watched_"] At the sound of the voice Isidore hastily looked round, and behind him was the pilgrim, and yet he knew that it was not truly the pilgrim, but an Angel disguised in pilgrim's weeds. And when he would have fallen at the Angel's feet, the Angel stopped him and said, "Be not afraid; I have been sent to show thee all the holy places that thy heart has longed to see." On valley and hill and field and stream there now shone so clear and wonderful a light that even a long way off the very flowers by the roadside were distinctly visible. Without effort and without weariness Isidore glided from place to place as though it were a dream. And I cannot tell the half of what he saw, for the Angel took him to the village where Jesus was a little child, which is called Nazareth, "the flower-village;" and he showed him the River Jordan flowing through dark green woods, and Hermon the high mountain, glittering with snow (and the snow of that mountain is exceeding old), and the blue Lake of Gennesareth, with its fishing-craft, and the busy town of Capernaum on the great road to Damascus, and Nain where Jesus watched the little children playing at funerals and marriages in the market-place, and the wilderness where He was with the wild beasts, and Bethany where Lazarus lived and died and was brought to life again (and in the fields of Bethany Isidore gathered a bunch of wild flowers), and Jerusalem the holy city, and Gethsemane with its aged silver-grey olive-trees, and the hill of Calvary, where in the darkness a great cry went up to heaven: "Why hast Thou forsaken me?" and the new tomb in the white rock among the myrtles and rose-trees in the garden. There was no place that Isidore had desired to see that was denied to him. And in all these places he saw the children's children of the children of those who had looked on the face of the Saviour--men and women and little ones--going to and fro in strangely coloured clothing, in the manner of those who had sat down on the green grass and been fed with bread and fishes. And at the thought of this Isidore wept. "Why dost thou weep?" the Angel asked. "I weep that I was not alive to look on the face of the Lord." Then suddenly, as though it were a dream, they were on the sea-shore, and it was morning. And Isidore saw on the sparkling sea a fisher-ship drifting a little way from the shore, but there was no one in it; and on the shore a boat was aground; and half on the sand and half in the wash of the sea there were swathes of brown nets filled with a hundred great fish which flounced and glittered in the sun; and on the sand there was a coal fire with fish broiling on it, and on one side of the fire seven men--one of them kneeling and shivering in his drenched fisher's coat--and on the other side of the fire a benign and majestic figure, on whom the men were gazing in great joy and awe. And Isidore, knowing that this was the Lord, gazed too at Christ standing there in the sun. And this was what he beheld: a man of lofty stature and most grave and beautiful countenance. His eyes were blue and very brilliant, his cheeks were slightly tinged with red, and his hair was of the ruddy golden colour of wine. From the top of his head to his ears it was straight and without radiance; but from his ears to his shoulders and down his back it fell in shining curls and clusters. Again all was suddenly changed, and Isidore and the Angel were alone. "Thou hast seen," said the Angel; "give me thy hand so that thou shalt not forget." Isidore stretched out his hand, and the Angel opened it, and turning the palm upward, struck it. Isidore groaned with the sharp pain of the stroke, and sank into unconsciousness. When he awoke in the morning the sun was high in the heavens, and the pilgrim had departed on his way. But the hut was filled with a heavenly fragrance, and on his bed Isidore perceived the wild flowers that he had plucked in the fields of Bethany--red anemones and blue lupins and yellow marigolds, with many others more sweet and lovely than the flowers that grew in the fields or Spain. "Then surely," he cried, "it was not merely a dream." And looking at his hand, he saw that the palm bore blue tracings such as one sees on the arms of wanderers and seafaring men. These marks, Isidore learned afterwards, were the Hebrew letters that spelt the name "JERUSALEM." As long as he lived those letters recalled to his mind all the marvels that had been shown him. And they did more than this, for whenever his eyes fell on them he said, "Blessed be the promise of the Lord the Redeemer of Israel, who hath us in His care for evermore!" Now these are the words of that promise: "_Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? Yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee. Behold, I have engraven thee upon the palms of my hands._" The Ancient Gods Pursuing I will now tell of Hilary and his companions, who came over the snowy passes of the Alps, and carried the lamp of faith into the north; and this was in the days of the ancient gods. Many of their shrines had Hilary overturned, and broken their images, and cut down their sacred trees, and denied their wells of healing. Wherefore terrible phantoms pursued him in his dreams, and in the darkness, and in the haunted ways of the woods and mountains. At one time it was the brute-god Pan, who sought to madden him with the terror of his piping in desolate places; at another it was the sun-god Apollo, who threatened him with fiery arrows in the parching heat of noon; or it was Pallas Athene, who appeared to him in visions, and shook in his face the Gorgon's head, which turns to stone all living creatures who look on it. But the holy Bishop made the sign of the cross of the Lord, and the right arm of their power was broken, and their malice could not harm him. The holy men traversed the mountains by that Roman road which climbed up the icy rocks and among the snowy peaks of the Mountain of Jove, and at sundown they came to that high temple of Jove which had crowned the pass for many centuries. The statue of the great father-god of Rome had been hurled down the ravine into the snow-drift, and his altar had been flung into the little wintry mere which shivers in the pass, and his last priest had died of old age a lifetime ago; and the temple was now but a cold harbour for merchants and soldiers and wandering men. Here in the freezing air the apostles rested from their journey, but in the dead of the night Hilary was awakened by a clamour of forlorn voices, and opening his eyes he saw the mighty father-god of Olympus looking down upon him with angry brows, and brandishing in his hand red flashes of lightning. In no way daunted, the Bishop sprang to his feet, and cried in a loud voice, "In the name of Him who was crucified, depart to your torments!" And at the sound of that cry the colossal figure of the god wavered and broke like a mountain cloud when it crumbles in the wind, and glimmering shapes of goddesses and nymphs flitted past, sighing and lamenting; and the Bishop saw no longer anything but the sharp cold stars, and the white peaks and the ridges of the mountains. When they had descended and reached the green valleys, they came at length to a great lake, blue and beautiful to look upon, and here they sojourned for a while. It was a fair and pleasant land, but the people were rude and barbarous, and drove them away with stones when they would enter their hamlets. So, as they needed food, Hilary bade his companions gather berries and wild herbs, and he himself set snares for birds, and wove a net to cast into the lake, and made himself a raft of pine-trees, from which he might cast it the more easily. One night as he floated on this raft in the starlight, he heard the voice of the Spirit of the Peak calling to the Spirit of the Mere. And the Spirit of the Mere answered, "Speak, I am listening." Then the Mountain Spirit cried, "Arise, then, and come to my aid; alone I cannot chase away these men who are driving out all the ancient gods from their shrines in the land." The Water Spirit answered, "Of what avail is our strength against theirs? Here on the starry waters is one whose nets I cannot break, and whose boat I cannot overturn. Without ceasing he prays, and never are his eyes closed in slumber." Then Hilary arose on his raft, and raising his hand to heaven cried against the Spirit of the Peak and the Spirit of the Mere: "In the name of Him crucified, be silent for evermore, and leave these hills and waters to the servants of God." And these creatures of evil were stricken dumb, and they fled in dismay, making a great moaning and sobbing, and the dolorous sound was as that of the wind in the pines and the water on the rocks. Then Hilary and his companions fared away into the north, through the Grey Waste, which is a wild and deserted country where in the olden time vast armies had passed with fire and sword; and now the field had turned into wildwood and morass, and the rich townsteads were barrows of ruins and ashes overgrown with brambles, and had been given for a lodging to the savage beasts. The name of this waste was more terrible than the place, for the season was sweet and gracious, and of birds and fish and herbs and wild honey there was no dearth. They were now no longer harassed by the phantoms of the ancient gods, or by the evil spirits of the unblessed earth. Thus for many long leagues was their journey made easy for them. Now it chanced, when they had reached the further edge of this region, that as they went one night belated along a green riding, which in the old time had been a spacious paved causeway between rich cities, they heard the music of a harp, more marvellously sweet and solacing than any mortal minstrel may make; and sweet dream-voices sighed to them "Follow, follow!" and they felt their feet drawn as by enchantment; and as they yielded to the magical power, a soft shining filled the dusky air, and they saw that the ground was covered with soft deep grass and brilliant flowers, and the trees were of the colour of gold and silver. So in strange gladness, and feeling neither hunger nor fatigue, they went forward through the hours of the night till the dawn, wondering what angelic ministry was thus beguiling them of hardship and pain. But with the first gleam of the dawn the music ceased amid mocking laughter, the vision of lovely woodland vanished away, and in the grey light they found themselves on the quaking green edges of a deep and dangerous marsh. Hilary, when he saw this, groaned in spirit and said: "O dear sons, we have deserved this befooling and misguidance, for have we not forgotten the behest of our Master, 'Watch and pray lest ye enter into temptation'?" Now when after much toilsomeness they had won clear of that foul tract of morass and quagmire, they came upon vast herds of swine grubbing beneath the oaks, and with them savage-looking swineherds scantily clad in skins. Still further north they caught sight of the squalid hovels and wood piles of charcoal burners; and still they pursued their way till they cleared the dense forest and beheld before them a long range of hills blue in the distant air. Towards sundown they came on a stony moorland, rough with heather and bracken and tufts of bent; and when there was but one long band of red light parting the distant land from the low sky, they descried a range of thick posts standing high and black against the red in the heavens. As they drew near, these, they discovered, were the huge granite pillars of a great ring of stone and of an avenue which led up to it; and in the midst of the ring was a mighty flat stone borne up on three stout pillars, so that it looked like a wondrous stone house of some strong folk of the beginning of days. "This, too, companions," said Hilary, "is a temple of false gods. Very ancient gods of a world gone by are these, and it may be they have been long dead like their worshippers, and their names are no more spoken in the world. Further we may not go this night; but on these stones we shall put the sign of the blessed tree of our redemption, and in its shelter shall we sleep." As they slept that night in the lee of the stones Hilary saw in a dream the place wherein they lay; and the great stones, he was aware, were not true stones of the rock, but petrified trees, and in his spirit he knew that these trees of stone were growths of that Forbidden Tree with the fruit of which the Serpent tempted our first mother in Paradise. On the morrow when they rose, he strove to overthrow the huge pillars, but to this labour their strength was not equal. This same day was the day of St. John, the longest in all the year, and they travelled far, till at last in the long afternoon they arrived in sight of a cluster of little homesteads, clay huts thatched with bracken and fenced about with bushes of poison-thorn, and of tilled crofts sloping down the hillside to a clear river wending through the valley. As Hilary and his companions approached they saw that it was a day of rejoicing and merry-making among the people, for they were all abroad, feasting and drinking from great mead horns in the open air, and shouting barbarous songs to the noise of rude instruments. When it grew to such duskiness as there may be in a midsummer night countless fires were lit, near at hand and far away, on the hills around; and on the ridges above the river children ran about with blazing brands of pine-wood, and young men and maidens gathered at the flaming beacon. Wheels, too, wrapped round tire and spoke with straw and flax smeared with pine-tree gum, were set alight and sent rolling down the hill to the river, amid wild cries and clapping of hands. Some of the wheels went awry and were stayed among the boulders; on some the flames died out; but there were those which reached the river and plunged into the water and were extinguished; and the owners of these last deemed themselves fortunate in their omens, for these fiery wheels were images of the sun in heaven, and their course to the river was the forecasting of his prosperous journey through the year to come. Thus these outland people held their festival, and Hilary marvelled to see the many fires, for he had not known that the land held so many folk. But now when it was time for the wayfarers to cast about in their minds how and where they should pass the night, there came to them a stranger, a grave and seemly man clad in the manner of the Romans, and he bowed low to them, and said: "O saintly men, the Lady Pelagia hath heard of your coming into this land, and she knows that you have come to teach men the new faith, for she is a great lady, mistress of vast demesnes, and many messengers bring her tidings of all that happens. She bids me greet you humbly and prevail on you to come and abide this night in her house, which is but a little way from here." "Is your lady of Rome?" asked Hilary. "From Rome she came hither," said the messenger, "but aforetime she was of Greece, and she hath great friendship for all wise and holy men." The wayfarers were surprised to hear of this lady, but they were rejoiced that, after such long wandering, there was some one to welcome them where least they had expected word of welcome, and they followed the messenger. Horn lantern in hand he led them through the warm June darkness, and on the way answered many questions as to the folk of these parts, and their strange worship of sun and moon and wandering light of heaven; "but in a brief while," he said, "all these heathen matters will be put by, when you have taught them the new faith." Up a gloomily wooded rise he guided them, till they passed into the radiance of a house lit with many lamps and cressets, and the house, they saw, was of fair marble such as are the houses of the patricians of Rome; and many beautiful slaves, lightly clad and garlanded with roses, brought them water in silver bowls and white linen wherewith they might cleanse themselves from the dust of their travel. In a little the Lady Pelagia received them and bade them welcome, and prayed them to make her poor house their dwelling-place while they sojourned in that waste of heathendom. Then she led them to a repast which had been made ready for them. Of all the gracious and lovely women in the round of the kingdoms of the earth none is, or hath been, or will be, more marvellous in beauty or in sweetness of approach than this lady; and she made Hilary sit beside her, and questioned him of the Saints in the Queen City of the world, and of his labours and his long wanderings, and the perils through which he and his companions had come. All the while she spoke her starry eyes shed soft light on his face, and she leaned towards him her lovely head and fragrant bosom, drinking in his words with a look of longing. The companions whispered among themselves that assuredly this was rather an Angel of Paradise than a mortal creature of the dust of the earth, which to-day is as a flower in its desirableness and to-morrow is blown about all the ways of men's feet. Even the good Bishop felt his heart moved towards her with a strange tenderness, so sweet was the thought of her youth and her beauty and her goodness and humility. Sitting in this fashion at table and conversing, and the talk now veering to this and now to that, the Lady Pelagia said: "This longest of the days has been to me the most happy, holy fathers, for it has brought you to the roof of a sinful woman, and you have not disdained the service she has offered you in all lowliness of heart. A long and, it may be, a dangerous labour lies before you, for the folk of this land are fierce and quick to violence; but here you may ever refresh yourselves from toil and take your rest, free from danger. No loving offices or lowly observance, no, nor ought you desire is there that you may not have for the asking--or without the asking, if it be given me to know your wish unspoken." Hilary and the brethren bowed low at these gracious words, and thought within themselves: Of a truth this may be a woman, but she is no less an Angel for our strength and solacement. "In the days to come," said the lady, "there will be many things to ask and learn from you, but now ere this summer night draws to end let me have knowledge of divine things from thee, most holy father, for thou art wise and canst answer all my questionings." And Hilary smiled gravely, not ill pleased at her words of praise, and said: "Ask, daughter." "First tell me," she said, "which of all the small things God has made in the world is the most excellent?" Hilary wondered and mused, but could find no answer; and when he would have said so, the voice which came from his lips spoke other words than those he intended to speak, so that instead of saying "This is a question I cannot answer," his voice said: "Of all small things made by God, most excellent is the face of man and woman; for among all the faces of the children of Adam not any one hath ever been wholly like any other; and there in smallest space God has placed all the senses of the body; and it is in the face that we see, as in a glass, darkly, all that can be seen of the invisible soul within." [Illustration: _Hilary wondered and mused_] The companions listened marvelling, but Hilary marvelled no less than they. "It is well answered," said the lady, "and yet it seemed to me there was one thing more excellent. But let me ask again: What earth is nearest to heaven?" Again Hilary mused and was silent. Then, once more, the voice which was his voice and yet spoke words which he did not think to speak, gave the answer: "The body of Him who died on the tree to save us, for He was of our flesh, and our flesh is earth of the earth." "That too is well answered," said the lady, who had grown pale and gazed on the Bishop with great gloomy eyes; "and yet I had thought of another answer. Once more let me question you: What is the distance between heaven and earth?" Then for the third time was Hilary unable to reply, but the voice answered for him, in stern and menaceful tones: "Who can tell us that more certainly than Lucifer who fell from heaven?" With a bitter cry the Lady Pelagia rose from her seat, and raised her beautiful white arms above her head; but the voice continued: "Breathe on her, Hilary--breathe the breath of the name of Christ!" And the Bishop, rising, breathed on the white lovely face the breath of the holy name; and in an instant the starry eyes were darkened, and the spirit and flower of life perished in her sweet body; and the companions saw no longer the Lady Pelagia, but in her stead a statue of white marble. At a glance Hilary knew it for a statue of the goddess whom men in Rome called Venus and in Greece Aphrodite, and with a shudder he remembered that another of her names was Pelagia, the Lady of the Sea. But, swifter even than that thought, it seemed to them as though the statue were smitten by an invisible hand, for it reeled and fell, shattered to fragments; and the lights were extinguished, and the air of the summer night blew upon their faces, and in the east, whence cometh our hope, there was a glimmer of dawn. Praying fervently, and bewailing the brief joy they had taken in the beauty of that dreadful goddess, they waited for light to guide them from that evil place. When the day broadened they perceived that they were in the midst of the ruins of an ancient Roman city, overgrown with bush and tree. Around them lay, amid beds of nettles and great dock leaves, and darnel and tangles of briars, and tall foxgloves and deadly nightshade, the broken pillars of a marble temple. This had been the fair house, lit with lamps, wherein they had sat at feast. Close beside them were scattered the white fragments of the image of the beautiful Temptress. As they turned to depart three grey wolves snarled at them from the ruins, but an unseen hand held these in leash, and Hilary and his companions went on their way unharmed. The Dream of the White Lark This was a thing that happened long and long ago, in the glimmering morning of the Christian time in Erinn. And it may have happened to the holy Maedog of Ferns, or to Enan the Angelic, or it may have been Molasius of Devenish--I cannot say. But over the windy sea in his small curragh of bull's hide the Saint sailed far away to the southern land; and for many a month he travelled afoot through the dark forests, and the sunny corn-lands, and over the snowy mountain horns, and along the low shores between the olive-grey hills and the blue sea, till at last he came in sight of a great and beautiful city glittering on the slopes and ridges of seven hills. "What golden city may this be?" he asked of the dark-eyed market folk whom he met on the long straight road which led across the open country. "It is the city of Rome," they answered him, wondering at his ignorance. But the Saint, when he heard those words, fell on his knees and kissed the ground. "Hail to thee, most holy city!" he cried; "hail, thou queen of the world, red with the roses of the martyrs and white with the lilies of the virgins; hail, blessed goal of my long wandering!" And as he entered the city his eyes were bright with joy, and his heart seemed to lift his weary feet on wings of gladness. There he sojourned through the autumn and the winter, visiting all the great churches and the burial-places of the early Christians in the Catacombs, and communing with the good and wise men in many houses of religion. Once he conversed with the great Pope whose name was Gregory, and told him of his brethren in the beloved isle in the western waters. When once more the leaf of the fig-tree opened its five fingers, and the silvery bud of the vine began to unfurl, the Saint prepared to return home. And once more he went to the mighty Pope, to take his leave and to ask a blessing for himself and his brethren, and to beg that he might bear away with him to the brotherhood some precious relic of those who had shed their blood for the Cross. As he made that request in the green shadowy garden on the Hill Caelian, the Pope smiled, and, taking a clod of common earth from the soil, gave it to the Saint, saying, "Then take this with thee," and when the Saint expressed his surprise at so strange a relic, the Servant of the Servants of God took back the earth and crushed it in his hand, and with amazement the Saint saw that blood began to trickle from it between the fingers of the Pope. Marvelling greatly, the Saint kissed the holy pontiff's hand, and bade him farewell; and going to and fro among those he knew, he collected money, and, hiring a ship, he filled it with the earth of Rome, and sailed westward through the Midland Sea, and bent his course towards the steadfast star in the north, and so at last reached the beloved green island of his home. In the little graveyard about the fair church of his brotherhood he spread the earth which had drunk the blood of the martyrs, so that the bodies of those who died in the Lord might await His coming in a blessed peace. Now it happened that but a few days after his return the friend of his boyhood, a holy brother who had long shared with him the companionship of the cloister, migrated from this light, and when the last requiem had been sung and the sacred earth had covered in the dead, the Saint wept bitterly for the sake of the lost love and the unforgotten years. And at night he fell asleep, still weeping for sorrow. And in his sleep he saw, as in a dream, the grey stone church with its round tower and the graveyard sheltered by the woody hills; but behold! in the graveyard tall trees sprang in lofty spires from the earth of Rome, and reached into the highest heavens; and these trees were like trees of green and golden and ruddy fire, for they were red with the blossoms of life, and every green leaf quivered with bliss, like a green flame; and among the trees, on a grassy sod at their feet, sat a white lark, singing clear and loud, and he knew that the lark was the soul of the friend of his boyhood. As he listened to its song, he understood its unearthly music; and these were the words of its singing: "Do not weep any more for me; it is pity for thy sorrow which keeps me here on the grass. If thou wert not so unhappy I should fly." And when the Saint awoke his grief had fallen from him, and he wept no more for the dead man whom he loved. The Hermit of the Pillar On one of the hills near the city of Ancyra Basil the hermit stood day and night on a pillar of stone forty feet high, praying and weeping for his own sins and for the sins of the world. A gaunt, dark figure, far up in the blue Asian sky, he stood there for a sign and a warning to all men that our earthly life is short, whether for wickedness or repentance; that the gladness and the splendour of the world are but a fleeting pageant; that in but a little while the nations should tremble before the coming of the Lord in His power and majesty. Little heed did the rich and dissolute people of that city give to his cry of doom; and of the vast crowds who came about the foot of his pillar, the greater number thought but to gaze on the wonder of a day, though some few did pitch their tents hard by, and spent the time of their sojourn in prayer and the lamentation of hearts humbled and contrite. [Illustration: _A gaunt, dark figure, far up in the blue Asian sky_] Now, in the third year of his testimony, as Basil was rapt in devotion, with hands and face uplifted to the great silent stars, an Angel, clothed in silver and the blue-green of the night, stood in front of him in the air, and said: "Descend from thy pillar, and get thee away far westward; and there thou shalt learn what is for thy good." Without delay or doubt Basil descended, and stole away alone in the hush before the new day, and took the winding ways of the hills, and thereafter went down into the low country of the plain to seaward. After long journeying among places and people unknown, he crossed the running seas which part the eastern world from the world of the west, and reached the City of the Golden Horn, Byzantium; and there for four months he lived on a pillar overlooking the city and the narrow seas, and cried his cry of doom and torment. At the end of the fourth month the Angel once more came to him and bade him descend and go further. So with patience and constancy of soul he departed between night and light, and pursued his way for many months till he had got to the ancient city of Treves. There, among the ruins of a temple of the heathen goddess Diana, he found a vast pillar of marble still erect, and the top of this he thought to make his home and holy watch-tower. Wherefore he sought out the Bishop of the city and asked his leave and blessing, and the Bishop, marvelling greatly at his zeal and austerity, gave his consent. The people of Treves were amazed at what they considered his madness; but they gave him no hindrance, nor did they molest him in any way. Indeed, in no long time the fame of his penance was noised abroad, and multitudes came, as they had come at Ancyra, to see with their own eyes what there was of truth in the strange story they had heard. Afterwards, too, many came out of sorrow for sin and an ardent desire of holiness; and others brought their sick and maimed and afflicted, in the hope that the Hermit might be able to cure their ailments, or give them assuagement of their sufferings. Many of these, in truth, Basil sent away cleansed and made whole by the virtue of his touch or of the blessing he bestowed upon them. Now, though there were many pillar-hermits in the far eastern land, this was the first that had ever been seen in the west, and after him there were but few others. A strange and well-nigh incredible thing it seemed, to look upon this man on the height of his pillar, preaching and praying constantly, and enduring night and day the inclemency of the seasons and the weariness and discomfort of his narrow standing place. For the pillar, massive as it was, was so narrow where the marble curved over in big acanthus leaves at the four corners that he had not room to lie down at length to sleep; and indeed he slept but little, considering slumber a waste of the time of prayer, and the dreams of sleep so many temptations to beguile the soul into false and fugitive pleasures. No shelter was there from the wind, but he was bare as a stone in the field to the driving rain and the blaze of the sun at noon; and in winter the frost was bitter to flesh and blood, and the snow fell like flakes or white fire. His only clothing was a coat of sheepskin; about his neck hung a heavy chain of iron, in token that he was a thrall and bondsman of the Lord Christ, and each Friday he wore an iron crown of thorns, in painful memory of Christ's passion and His sorrowful death upon the tree. Once a day he ate a little rye bread, and once he drank a little water. No man could say whether he was young or aged; and the mother who had borne him a little babe at her bosom, and had watched him grow to boyhood, could not have recognised him, for he had been burnt black by the sun and the frost, and the weather had bleached his hair and beard till they looked like lichens on an ancient forest-tree, and the crown of thorns had scarred his brow, and the links of the chain had galled his neck and shoulders. For three summers and three winters he endured this stricken life with cheerful fortitude, counting his sufferings as great gain if through them he might secure the crown of celestial glory which God has woven for His elect. Remembering all his prayers and supplications, and the long martyrdom of his body, it was hard for him, at times, to resist the assurance that he must have won a golden seat among the blessed. "For who, O Lord Christ!" he cried, with trembling hands outstretched, and dim eyes weeping, "who hath taken up Thy cross as I have done, and the anguish of the thorns and the nails, and the parched sorrow of Thy thirst, and the wounding of Thy blessed body, and borne them for years twenty and three, and shown them as I have shown them to the sun and stars and the four winds, high up between heaven and earth, that men might be drawn to Thee, and carried them across the world from the outmost East to the outmost West? Surely, Lord God! Thou hast written my name in Thy Book of Life, and hast set for me a happy place in the heavens. Surely, all I have and am I have given Thee; and all that a worm of the earth may do have I done! If in anything I have failed, show me, Lord, I beseech Thee, wherein I have come short. If any man there be more worthy in Thine eyes, let me, too, set eyes upon him, that I may learn of him how I may the better please Thee. Teach me, Lord, that which I know not, for Thou alone knowest and art wise!" As Basil was praying thus in the hour before dawn, once more the Angel, clothed in silver and blue-green, as though it had been a semblance of the starry night, came to him, and said: "Give me thy hand;" and Basil touched the hand celestial, and the Angel drew him from his pillar, and placed him on the ground, and said: "This is that land of the west in which thou art to learn what is for thy good. Take for staff this piece of tree, and follow this road till thou reachest the third milestone; and there, in the early light, thou shalt meet him who can instruct thee. For a sign, thou shalt know the man by the little maid of seven years who helpeth him to drive the geese. But the man, though young, may teach one who is older than he, and he is one who is greatly pleasing in God's eyes." The clear light was glittering on the dewy grass and the wet bushes when Basil reached the third milestone. He heard the distant sound as of a shepherd piping, and he saw that the road in front of him was crowded for near upon a quarter of a mile with a great gathering of geese--fully two thousand they numbered--feeding in the grass and rushes, and cackling, and hustling each other aside, and clacking their big orange-coloured bills, as they waddled slowly onward towards the city. Among them walked a nut-brown little maiden of seven, clad in a green woollen tunic, with bright flaxen hair and innocent blue eyes, and bare brown legs, and feet shod in shoes of hide. In her hand she carried a long hazel wand, with which she kept in rule the large grey and white geese. As the flock came up to the Hermit, she gazed at him with her sweet wondering eyes, for never had she seen so strange and awful a man as this, with his sheepskin dress and iron chain and crown of thorns, and skin burnt black, and bleached hair and dark brows stained with blood. For a moment she stood still in awe and fear, but the Hermit raised his hand, and blessed her, and smiled upon her; and even in that worn and disfigured face the light in the Hermit's eyes as he smiled was tender and beautiful; and the child ceased to fear, and passed slowly along, still gazing at him and smiling in return. In the rear of the great multitude of geese came a churl, tall and young, and comely enough for all his embrowning in the sun and wind, and his unkempt hair and rude dress. It was he who made the music, playing on pan's-pipes to lighten the way, and quickening with his staff the loiterers of his flock. When he perceived the Hermit he stayed his playing, for he bethought him, Is not this the saintly man of whose strange penance and miracles of healing the folk talk in rustic huts and hamlets far scattered? But when they drew nigh to each other, the Hermit bowed low to the Gooseherd, and addressed him: "Give me leave to speak a little with thee, good brother; for an Angel of heaven hath told me of thee, and fain would I converse with thee. Twenty years and three have I served the King of Glory in supplication and fasting and tribulation of spirit, and yet I lack that which thou canst teach me. Now tell me, I beseech thee, what works, what austerities, what prayers have made thee so acceptable to God." A dark flush rose on the Goose-herd's cheeks as he listened, but when he answered it was in a grave and quiet voice: "It ill becomes an aged man to mock and jeer at the young, nor is it more seemly that the holy should gibe at the poor." "Dear son in Christ," said the Hermit, "I do not gibe or mock at thee. By the truth of the blessed tree, I was told of thee by an Angel in the very night which is now over and gone, and was bidden to question thee. Wherefore be not wrathful, but answer me truly, I beg of thy charity." The Goose-herd shook his head. "This is a matter beyond me," he replied. "All my work, since thou askest of my work, hath been the tending and rearing of geese and driving them to market. From the good marsh lands at the foot of the hills out west I drive them, and the distance is not small, for, sleeping and resting by boulder and tree, for five days are we on the way. Slow of foot goeth your goose when he goeth not by water, and it profits neither master nor herd to stint them of their green food. And all my prayer hath been that I might get them safe to market, none missing or fallen dead by the way, and that I might sell them speedily and at good price, and so back to the fens again. What more is there to say?" "In thy humility thou hidest something from me," said the Hermit, and he fixed his eyes thoughtfully on the young man's face. "Nay, I have told thee all that is worth the telling." "Then hast thou always lived this life?" the Hermit asked. "Ever since I was a small lad--such a one as the little maid in front, and she will be in her seventh year, or it may be a little older. Before me was my father goose-herd; and he taught me the windings of the journey to the city, and the best resting-places, and the ways of geese, and the meaning of their cries, and what pleaseth them and serveth flesh and feather, and how they should be driven. And now, in turn, I teach the child, for there be goose-girls as well as men." "Is she then thy young sister, or may it be that she is thy daughter?" "Neither young sister nor daughter is she," replied the Herd, "and yet in truth she is both sister and daughter." "Wilt thou tell me how that may be?" asked the Hermit. "It is shortly told," said the Herd. "Robbers broke into their poor and lonely house by the roadside and slew father and mother and left them dead, but the babe at the breast they had not slain, and this was she." "Didst thou find her?" asked the Hermit. "Ay, on a happy day I found her; a feeble little thing bleating like a lambkin forlorn beside its dead dam." "And thy wife, belike, or thy mother, reared her?" "Nay," said the Herd, "for my mother was dead, and no wife have I. I reared her myself--my little white gooseling; and she throve and waxed strong of heart and limb, and merry and brown of favour, as thou hast seen." "Thou must have been thyself scantly a man in those days," said the Hermit. "Younger than to-day," replied the Herd; "but I was ever big of limb and plentiful of my inches." "And hath she not been often since a burthen to thee, and a weariness in the years?" "She hath been a care in the cold winter, and a sorrow in her sickness with her teeth--for no man, I wot, can help a small child when the teeth come through the gum, and she can but cry ah! ah! and hath no words to tell what she aileth." "Why didst thou do all this?" asked the Hermit. "What hath been thy reward? Or for what reward dost thou look?" The Goose-herd looked at him blankly for a moment; then his face brightened. "Surely," he said, "to see her as she goes on her way, a bright, brown little living thing, with her clear hair and glad eyes, is a goodly reward. And a goodly reward is it to think of her growth, and to mind me of the days when she could not walk and I bore her whithersoever I went; and of the days when she could but take faltering steps and was soon fain to climb into my arms and sit upon my neck; and of the days when we first fared together with the geese to market and I cut her her first hazel stick; and in truth of all the days that she hath been with me since I found her." As the Goose-herd spoke the tears rose in the Hermit's eyes and rolled slowly down his cheeks; and when the young man ceased, he said: "O son, now I know why thou art so pleasing in the eyes of God. Early hast thou learned the love which gives all and asks nothing, which suffereth long and is ever kind, and this I have not learned. A small thing and too common it seemed to me, but now I see that it is holier than austerities, and availeth more than fasting, and is the prayer of prayers. Late have I sought thee, thou ancient truth, late have I found thee, thou ancient beauty; yet even in the gloaming of my days may there still be light enough to win my way home. Farewell, good brother; and be God tender and pitiful to thee as thou hast been tender and pitiful to the little child." "Farewell, holy man!" replied the Herd, regarding him with a perplexed look, for the life and austerities of the Hermit were a mystery he could not understand. Then going on his way, he laid the pan's-pipes to his lips and whistled a pleasant music as he strode after his geese. Kenach's Little Woman As the holy season of Lent drew nigh, the Abbot Kenach felt a longing such as a bird of passage feels in the south when the first little silvery buds on the willow begin here to break their ruddy sheaths, and the bird thinks to-morrow it will be time to fly over-seas to the land where it builds its nest in pleasant croft or under the shelter of homely eaves. And Kenach said, "Levabo oculos--I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills from whence cometh my help;" for every year it was his custom to leave his abbey and fare through the woods to the hermitage on the mountain-side, so that he might spend the forty days of fasting and prayer in the heart of solitude. Now on the day which is called the Wednesday or Ashes he set out, but first he heard the mass of remembrance and led his monks to the altar steps, and knelt there in great humility to let the priest sign his forehead with a cross of ashes. And on the forehead of each of the monks the ashes were smeared in the form of a cross, and each time the priest made the sign he repeated the words, "Remember, man, that thou art dust, and unto dust thou shalt return." So with the ashes still on his brow and with the remembrance of the end of earthly days in his soul, he bent his steps towards the hermitage; and as he was now an aged man and nowise strong, Diarmait, one of the younger brethren, accompanied him in case any mischance should befall. They passed through the cold forest, where green there was none, unless it were the patches of moss and the lichens on the rugged tree-trunks and tufts of last year's grass, but here and there the white blossoms of the snowdrops peered out. The dead grey leaves and dry twigs crackled and snapped under their feet with such a noise as a wood fire makes when it is newly lighted; and that was all the warmth they had on their wayfaring. The short February day was closing in as they climbed among the boulders and withered bracken on the mountainside, and at last reached the entrance of a cavern hollowed in the rock and fringed with ivy. This was the hermitage. The Abbot hung his bell on a thick ivy-bough in the mouth of the cave; and they knelt and recited vespers and compline; and thrice the Abbot struck the bell to scare away the evil spirits of the night; and they entered and lay down to rest. Hard was the way of their sleeping; for they lay not on wool or on down, neither on heather or bracken, nor yet on dry leaves, but their sides came against the cold stone, and under the head of each there was a stone for pillow. But being weary with the long journey they slept sound, and felt nothing of the icy mouth of the wind blowing down the mountain-side. Within an hour of daybreak, when the moon was setting, they were awakened by the wonderful singing of a bird, and they rose for matins and strove not to listen, but so strangely sweet was the sound in the keen moonlight morning that they could not forbear. The moon set, and still in the dark sang the bird, and the grey light came, and the bird ceased; and when it was white day they saw that all the ground and every stalk of bracken was hoary with frost, and every ivy-leaf was crusted white round the edge, but within the edge it was all glossy green. "What bird is this that sings so sweet before day in the bitter cold?" said the Abbot. "Surely no bird at all, but an Angel from heaven waking us from the death of sleep." "It is the blackbird, Domine Abbas," said the young monk; "often they sing thus in February, however cold it may be." "O soul, O Diarmait, is it not wonderful that the senseless small creatures should praise God so sweetly in the dark, and in the light before the dark, while we are fain to lie warm and forget His praise?" And afterwards he said, "Gladly could I have listened to that singing, even till to-morrow was a day; and yet it was but the singing of a little earth wrapped in a handful of feathers. O soul, tell me what it must be to listen to the singing of an Angel, a portion of heaven wrapped in the glory of God's love!" Of the forty days thirty went by, and oftentimes now, when no wind blew, it was bright and delightsome among the rocks, for the sun was gaining strength, and the days were growing longer, and the brown trees were being speckled with numberless tiny buds of white and pale green, and wild flowers were springing between the boulders and through the mountain turf. Hard by the cave there was a low wall of rock covered with ivy, and as Diarmait chanced to walk near it, a brown bird darted out from among the leaves. The young monk looked at the place from which it had flown, and behold! among the leaves and the hairy sinews of the ivy there was a nest lined with grass, and in the nest there were three eggs--pale-green with reddish spots. And Diarmait knew the bird and knew the eggs, and he told the Abbot, who came noiselessly, and looked with a great love at the open house and the three eggs of the mother blackbird. "Let us not walk too near, my son," he said, "lest we scare the mother from her brood, and so silence beforehand some of the music of the cold hours before the day." And he lifted his hand and blessed the nest and the bird, saying, "And He shall bless thy bread and thy water." After that it was very seldom they went near the ivy. Now after days of clear and benign weather a shrill wind broke out from beneath the North Star, and brought with it snow and sleet and piercing cold. And the woods howled for distress of the storm, and the grey stones of the mountain chattered with discomfort. Harsh cold and sleeplessness were their lot in the cave, and as he shivered, the Abbot bethought him of the blackbird in her nest, and of the wet flakes driving in between the leaves of the ivy and stinging her brown wings and patient bosom. And lifting his head from his pillow of stone he prayed the Lord of the elements to have the bird in His gentle care, saying, "How excellent is Thy loving-kindness, O God! therefore the children of men put their trust under the shadow of Thy wings." Then after a little while he said, "Look out into the night, O son, and tell me if yet the storm be abated." And Diarmait, shuddering, went to the mouth of the cavern, and stood there gazing and calling in a low voice, "Domine Abbas! My Lord Abbot! My Lord Abbot!" Kenach rose quickly and went to him, and as they looked out the sleet beat on their faces, but in the midst of the storm there was a space of light, as though it were moonshine, and the light streamed from an Angel, who stood near the wall of rock with outspread wings, and sheltered the blackbird's nest from the wintry blast. And the monks gazed at the shining loveliness of the Angel, till the wind fell and the snow ceased and the light faded away and the sharp stars came out and the night was still. Now at sundown of the day that followed, when the Abbot was in the cave, the young monk, standing among the rocks, saw approaching a woman who carried a child in her arms; and crossing himself he cried aloud to her, "Come not any nearer; turn thy face to the forest, and go down." [Illustration: _Come not any nearer; turn thy face to the forest, and go down_] "Nay," replied the woman, "for we seek shelter for the night, and food and the solace of fire for the little one." "Go down, go down," cried Diarmait; "no woman may come to this hermitage." "How canst thou say that, O monk?" said the woman. "Was the Lord Christ any worse than thou? Christ came to redeem woman no less than to redeem man. Not less did He suffer for the sake of woman than for the sake of man. Women gave service and tendance to Him and His Apostles. A woman it was who bore Him, else had men been left forlorn. It was a man who betrayed Him with a kiss; a woman it was who washed His feet with tears. It was a man who smote Him with a reed, but a woman who broke the alabaster box of precious ointment. It was a man who thrice denied Him; a woman stood by His cross. It was a woman to whom He first spoke on Easter morn, but a man thrust his hand into His side and put his finger in the prints of the nails before he would believe. And not less than men do women enter the heavenly kingdom. Why then shouldst thou drive my little child and me from thy hermitage?" Then Kenach, who had heard all that was said, came forth from the cave, and blessed the woman. "Well hast thou spoken, O daughter; come, and bring the small child with thee." And, turning to the young monk, he said, "O soul, O son, O Diarmait, did not God send His Angel out of high heaven to shelter the mother bird? And was not that, too, a little woman in feathers? But now hasten, and gather wood and leaves, and strike fire from the flint, and make a hearth before the cave, that the woman may rest and the boy have the comfort of the bright flame." This was soon done, and by the fire sat the woman eating a little barley bread; but the child, who had no will to eat came round to the old man, and held out two soft hands to him. And the Abbot caught him up from the ground to his breast, and kissed his golden head, saying, "God bless thee sweet little son, and give thee a good life and a happy, and strength of thy small body, and, if it be His holy will, length of glad days; and ever mayest thou be a gladness and deep joy to thy mother." Then, seeing that the woman was strangely clad in an outland garb of red and blue, and that she was tall, with a golden-hued skin and olive eyes, arched eyebrows very black, aquiline nose, and a rosy mouth, he said, "Surely, O daughter, thou art not of this land of Erinn in the sea, but art come out of the great world beyond?" "Indeed, then, we have travelled far," replied the woman; "as thou sayest, out of the great world beyond. And now the twilight deepens upon us." "Thou shalt sleep safe in the cave, O daughter, but we will rest here by the embers. My cloak of goats' hair shalt thou have, and such dry bracken and soft bushes as may be found." "There is no need," said the woman, "mere shelter is enough;" and she added in a low voice, "Often has my little son had no bed wherein he might lie." Then she stretched out her arms to the boy, and once more the little one kissed the Abbot, and as he passed by Diarmait he put the palms of his hands against the face of the young monk, and said laughingly, "I do not think thou hadst any ill-will to us, though thou wert rough and didst threaten to drive us away into the woods." And the woman lifted the boy on her arm, and rose and went towards the cavern; and when she was in the shadow of the rocks she turned towards the monks beside the fire, and said, "My son bids me thank you." They looked up, and what was their astonishment to see a heavenly glory shining about the woman and her child in the gloom of the cave. And in his left hand the child carried a little golden image of the world, and round his head was a starry radiance, and his right hand was raised in blessing. For such a while as it takes the shadow of a cloud to run across a rippling field of corn, for so long the vision remained; and then it melted into the darkness, even as a rainbow melts away into the rain. On his face fell the Abbot, weeping for joy beyond words; but Diarmait was seized with fear and trembling till he remembered the way in which the child had pressed warm palms against his face and forgiven him. The story of these things was whispered abroad, and ever since, in that part of Erinn in the sea, the mother blackbird is called Kenach's Little Woman. And as for the stone on which the fire was lighted in front of the cave, rain rises quickly from it in mist and leaves it dry, and snow may not lie upon it, and even in the dead of winter it is warm to touch. And to this day it is called the Stone of Holy Companionship. Golden Apples and Roses Red In the cruel days of old, when Diocletian was the Master of the World, and the believers in the Cross were maimed, and tortured with fire, and torn with iron hooks, and cast to the lions, and beheaded with the sword, Dorothea, a beautiful maiden of Caesarea, was brought before Sapricius, the Governor of Cappadocia, and commanded to forsake the Lord Christ and offer incense to the images of the false gods. Though she was so young and so fair and tender, she stood unmoved by threats and entreaties, and when, with little pity on her youth and loveliness, Sapricius menaced her with the torment of the iron bed over a slow fire, she replied: "Do with me as you will. No pain shall I fear, so firm is my trust in Him for whom I am ready to die." "Who, then, is this that has won thy love?" asked the Governor. "It is Christ Jesus, the Son of God. Slay me, and I shall but the sooner be with Him in His Paradise, where there is no more pain, neither sorrow, but the tears are wiped from all eyes, and the roses are in bloom alway, and for ever the fruit of joy is on the trees." "Thy words are but the babbling of madness," said the Governor angrily. "I am not mad, most noble Sapricius." [Illustration: "_I am not mad, most noble Sapricius_"] "Here, then, is the incense, sacrifice, and save thy life." "I will not sacrifice," replied Dorothea. "Then shalt thou die," said Sapricius; and he bade the doomsman take her to the place of execution and strike off her head. Now as she was being led away from the judgment-seat, a gay young advocate named Theophilus said to her jestingly: "Farewell, sweet Dorothea: when thou hast joined thy lover, wilt thou not send me some of the fruit and roses of his Paradise?" Looking gravely and gently at him, Dorothea answered: "I will send some." Whereupon Theophilus laughed merrily, and went his way homeward. At the place of execution, Dorothea begged the doomsman to tarry a little, and kneeling by the block, she raised her hands to heaven and prayed earnestly. At that moment a fair child stood beside her, holding in his hand a basket containing three golden apples and three red roses. "Take these to Theophilus, I pray thee," she said to the child, "and tell him Dorothea awaits him in the Paradise whence they came." Then she bowed her head, and the sword of the doomsman fell. Mark now what follows. Theophilus, who had reached home, was still telling of what had happened and merrily repeating his jest about the fruit and flowers of Paradise, when suddenly, while he was speaking, the child appeared before him with the apples and the roses. "Dorothea," he said, "has sent me to thee with these, and she awaits thee in the garden." And straightway the child vanished. The fragrance of those heavenly roses filled Theophilus with a strange pity and gladness; and, eating of the fruit of the Angels, he felt his heart made new within him, so that he, also, became a servant of the Lord Jesus, and suffered death for His name, and thus attained to the celestial garden. Centuries after her martyrdom, the body of Dorothea was laid in a bronze shrine richly inlaid with gold and jewels in the church built in her honour beyond Tiber, in the seven-hilled city of Rome. There it lay in the days when Waldo was a brother at the Priory of Three Fountains, among the wooded folds of the Taunus Hills; and every seven years the shrine was opened that the faithful might gaze on the maiden martyr of Caesarea. An exceeding great love and devotion did Waldo bear this holy virgin, whom he had chosen for his patroness, and one of his most ardent wishes was that he might some day visit the church beyond Tiber, and kneel by the shrine which contained her precious relics. In summer the red roses, in autumn the bright apples on the tree, reminded him of her; in the spring he thought of her youth and beauty joyously surrendered to Christ, and the snow in winter spoke to him of her spotless innocence. Thus through the round of the year the remembrance of her was present about him in fair suggestions; and indeed had there been any lack of these every gift of God would have recalled her to his mind, for was not that--"the gift of God"--her name? Notwithstanding his youth, Waldo was ripe in learning, well skilled in Latin and Greek, and so gifted beyond measure in poetry and music that people said he had heard the singing of Angels and had brought the echo of it to the earth. His hymns and sacred songs were known and loved all through the German land, and far beyond. The children sang them in the processions on the high feast days, the peasants sang them at their work in house or field, travellers sang them as they journeyed over the long heaths and through the mountain-forests, fishers and raftsmen sang them on the rivers. He composed the Song of the Sickle which cuts at a stroke the corn in its ripeness and the wild flower in its bloom, and the Song of the Mill-wheel, with its long creak and quick clap, and the melodious rush of water from the buckets of the wheel, and many another which it would take long to tell of; but that which to himself was sweetest and dearest was Golden Apples and Roses Red, the song in which he told the legend of St. Dorothea his patroness. Now when Waldo was in the six-and-thirtieth year of his age he was smitten with leprosy; and when it was found that neither the relics of the saints, nor the prayers of holy men, nor the skill of the physician availed to cure him, but that it was God's will he should endure to the end, the Prior entreated him to surrender himself to that blessed will, and to go forth courageously to the new life of isolation which awaited him. For in those days it was not lawful that a leper should abide in the companionship of men, and he was set apart lest his malady should bring others to a misery like his own. Deep was the grief of the brethren of Three Fountains when they were summoned to attend the sacred office of demission which was to shut out Waldo for ever from intercourse with his fellows. And well might any good heart sorrow, for this was the order of that office. The altar was draped in black, and Mass for the Dead was sung; and all the things that Waldo would need in the house of his exile, from the flint and iron which gave fire to the harp which should give solace, were solemnly blessed and delivered to him. Next he was warned not to approach the dwellings of men, or to wash in running streams, or to handle the ropes of draw-wells, or to drink from the cups of wayside springs. He was forbidden the highways, and when he went abroad a clapper must give token of his coming and going. Nothing that might be used by others should he touch except with covered hands. When after these warnings he had been exhorted to patience and trust in God's mercy and love, the brethren formed a procession, with the cross going before, and led him away to his hermitage among the wooded hills. On a little wood-lawn, beyond a brook crossed by stepping-stones, a hut of boughs had been prepared for him, and the Prior bade him mark the grey boulder on the further side of the brook, for there he would find left for him, week by week, such provisions as he needed. Last rite of all, the Prior entering the hut strewed over his bed of bracken a handful of mould from the churchyard saying, "Sis mortuus mundo--Dead be thou to the world, but living anew to God," and turfs from the churchyard were laid on the roof of the hut. Thus in his grey gown and hood was Waldo committed alive to his grave, and the brethren, chanting a requiem, returned to the Priory. The tidings of Waldo's grievous lot travelled far and wide through the German land, and thenceforth when his songs were sung many a true man's heart was heavy and many a good woman's eyes were filled with tears as they bethought them of the poor singer in his hut among the hills. Kindly souls brought alms and provisions and laid them on his boulder by the brook, and oftentimes as they came and went they sang some hymn or song he had composed, for they said, "So best can we let him know that we remember him and love him." Indeed, to his gentle heart the sound of their human voices in that solitude was as the warm clasp of a beloved hand. When Waldo had lived there alone among the hills for the space of two years and more, and his malady had grown exceeding hard to bear, he was seized with a woeful longing--such a longing as comes upon a little child for its mother when it has been left all alone in the house, and has gone seeking her in all the chambers, and finds she is not there. And as on a day he went slowly down to the boulder by the stream in the failing light, thinking of her who had cherished his childhood--how he had clung to her gown, how with his little hand in hers he had run by her side, how she had taken him on her lap and made his hurts all well with kisses, his heart failed him, and crying aloud "Mother, O mother!" he knelt by the boulder, and laid his head on his arms, weeping. Then from among the trees on the further side of the brook came a maiden running, but she paused at the stepping-stones when she saw Waldo, and said, "Was it thy voice I heard calling 'Mother'?" The monk did not answer or move. "Art thou Brother Waldo?" she asked. Raising his head, he looked at her and replied, "I am Brother Waldo." "Poor brother, I pity thee," said the maiden; "there is no man or maid but pities thee. If thou wilt tell me of thy mother, I will find her, even were I to travel far, and bid her come to thee. Well I wot she will come to thee if she may." For all his manhood and learning and holiness, Waldo could not still the crying of the little child within him, and he told the maiden of his mother, and blessed her, and asked her name. When she answered that it was Dorothy, "Truly," said he, "it is a fair name and gracious, and in thy coming thou hast been a gift of God to me." Thereupon the maiden left him, and Waldo returned to his hut, comforted and full of hope. After a month had gone Dorothy returned. Crossing the stepping-stones in the clear light of the early morning, she found Waldo meditating by the door of his hut. "I have done thy bidding, brother," she said in a gentle voice, "but alas! thy mother cannot come to thee. Grieve not too much at this, for she is with God. She must have died about the time thou didst call for her; and well may I believe that it was she who sent me to thee in her stead." "The will of God be done," said Waldo, and he bowed his head, and spoke no more for a long while; but the maiden stood patiently awaiting till he had mastered his grief. At length he raised his head and saw her. "Art thou not gone?" he asked. "I thought thou hadst gone. Thou art good and gentle, and I thank thee. Go now, for here thou mayst not stay." "Nay, brother," replied Dorothy, "thou hast no mother to come to thee now, no companion or friend to minister to thee. This is my place. Do not fear that I shall annoy or weary thee. I shall but serve and obey thee, coming and going at thy bidding. Truly thou art too weak and afflicted to be left any more alone." "It may not be, dear child. Thy father and mother or others of thy kinsfolk need thee at home." "All these have been long dead," said Dorothy, "and I am alone. Here in the wood I will find me a hollow tree, and thou shalt but call to have me by thee, and but lift a finger to see me no more." "Why wouldst thou do this for me?" asked Waldo, wondering at her persistency. "Ah, brother, I know thy suffering and I love thy songs." "And dost thou not shudder at this horror that is upon me, and dread lest the like befall thee too?" Then Dorothy laughed low and softly to herself, and answered only so. In this wise the maiden came to minister to the poor recluse, and so gracious was she and humble, so prudent and yet so tender, that in his suffering she was great solace to him, bringing his food from the boulder and his drink from the brook, cleaning his cell and freshening it with fragrant herbs; and about the cell she made a garden of wholesome plants and wild flowers, and all kindly service that was within her power she did for him. So beautiful was she and of such exceeding sweetness, that when his eyes rested upon her, he questioned in his mind whether she was a true woman and not an Angel sent down to console him in his dereliction. And that doubt perplexed and troubled him, for so little are we Angels yet that in our aches and sorrows of the flesh it is not the comfort of Angels but the poor human pitiful touch of the fellow-creature that we most yearn for. Once, indeed, he asked her fretfully, "Tell me truly in the name of God, art thou a very woman of flesh and blood?" "Truly then, brother," she answered, smiling, "I am of mortal flesh and blood even as thou art, and time shall be when this body that thou seest will be mingled with the dust of the earth." "Is it then the way of women to sacrifice so much for men as thou hast done for me?" "It is the way of women who love well," said Dorothy. "Then needs must I thank thy namesake and my patroness in heaven," rejoined Waldo. "Yea, and is St. Dorothea thy patroness?" asked the maiden. Waldo told her that so it was, and rapturously he spoke of the young and beautiful saint done to death in Caesarea, and of the fruit and flowers of Paradise which she sent to Theophilus. "And I would," he sighed under his breath, "that she would send such a gift to me." "All this I know," said Dorothy, "for I have learnt thy song of Golden Apples and Roses Red, and I love it most of all thy songs, though these be many and sung all about the world, I think. And this I will tell thee of thy songs, that I saw in a dream once how they were not mere words and melody, but living things. Like the bright heads of baby Angels were they, and they were carried on wings as it were of rose-leaves, and they fluttered about the people who loved them and sang them, leading them into blessed paths and whispering to them holy and happy thoughts." "God be blessed and praised for ever, if it be so," said Waldo; "but this was no more than a maiden's dream." For two winters Dorothy ministered to the poor leper, and during this while no one save Waldo knew of her being in the woods, and no other man set eyes on her. The fourth year of his exile was now drawing to a close, and Waldo had fallen into extreme weakness by reason of his malady, and over his face he wore a mask of grey cloth, with two holes for his great piteous eyes. It was in the springtide, and one night as he lay sleepless in the dark, listening to the long murmur of the wind in the swaying pines, he heard overhead sharp cries and trumpetings, and the creaking and winnowing of wings innumerable. Rising from his bed, he went out of doors, and looked up into the dark heavens; and high and spectral among the clouded stars he saw the home-coming of the cranes. He sat on the bench beside his door, and watched them sail past in thousands, filling the night with a fleeting clamour and eerie sounds. As he sat he mused on the strange longing which brought these birds over land and sea back home, year by year, with the returning spring, and he marvelled that the souls of men, which are but birds of passage in these earthly fields, should be so slow to feel that longing for their true home-land. That day when Dorothy came to the hut, he said to her: "It is well to be glad, for, though the air is still keen, the spring is here. I heard the cranes returning in the night." "And I too heard them; and I heard thee rejoicing, playing on thy harp and singing." "That could not be, sister," said Waldo, "unless in a dream. No longer can I touch harp-string, as thou knowest." "In truth I was awake and heard," said Dorothy; "and the song thou wast singing was of birds of passage, and of the longing of exiles to go home, and of the dark wherethrough we must pass, with cries and beating wings, ere we can find our way back to our true home-land.'" "Nay, it must have been a dream," said Waldo, "for as I sat with my hands hidden in my gown I did but play an imaginary harp, making still music in my heart, and no song came from my lips." "The more strange that I should hear!" replied Dorothy, smiling as she went her way. In a little while from this the poor brother felt that the end of his martyrdom drew nigh; and as he lay feeble and faint in the shadow of the hut (for the day was clement), sighing for the hour of his deliverance, Dorothy came from the woods. In her hand she carried a basket, and as she stood over him she said, "See what I have brought for thee." Lifting his head weakly, and looking through the eyelets of his grey mask, Waldo saw that the basket contained three golden apples and three red roses, though still it was but early days in spring. At sight of them he uttered a cry of gladness (for all it was a cry hollow and hoarse), and strove to rise and throw himself at her feet. "Nay, brother," she said, "refrain; lie still and breathe the sweetness of the roses and taste of the fruit." She gave him one of the apples, and putting it to his mouth he tasted it and sighed deeply. In a moment all pain and suffering had left him, and his spirit was light and gladsome. His eyes too were opened, so that he knew that Dorothy had no way deceived him, but was truly a living woman of flesh and blood like himself. Then a heavenly peace descended upon him like a refreshing dew, and he closed his eyes for the great ease he felt. While these things were happening, came from Three Fountains the lay-brother who brought Waldo his provisions. Crossing the brook to set his budget on the boulder, he saw the poor recluse lying in the lee of the hut, and Dorothy leaning over him. Wherefore he hastened across the wood-lawn, but in an instant the fair woman vanished before his eyes, and when he came to the hut he saw that Waldo was dead. He carried the basket of flowers and fruit to the Priory, and told what he had seen; and the Prior, marvelling greatly, came to the place and gave the poor leper brother a blessed burial. Now at this time a wondrous strange occurrence was the talk of Rome. The year wherein Waldo died was that seventh year in which the shrine of St. Dorothea is opened in her church beyond Tiber; and the day on which it is opened fell a little while before the death of Waldo. Behold, then, when on the vigil of that feast the priests unlocked the shrine, the place where aforetime the holy body of the martyr had lain was empty. Great was the dismay, loud the lamentation, grievous the suspicion. The custodians of the church and the shrine were seized and cast into prison, where they lay till the day of their trial. On the morning of that day the church of St. Dorothea was filled with a divine fragrance, which seemed to transpire from the empty shrine as from a celestial flower. Wherefore once again the shrine was opened, and there, even such as they had been seen by many of the faithful seven years before, lay the relics of the Saint in their old resting-place. Now to all poor souls God grant a no less happy end of days than this which He vouchsafed to the poor leper-singer Waldo of the Priory of Three Fountains. The Seven Years of Seeking Here begins the chapter of the Seven Years of Seeking. For, trying greatly to win sight of that blessed isle, the Earthly Paradise, the monk Serapion and his eleven companions hoisted sail; and for seven years they continued in that seeking, wandering with little respite under cloud and star, in all the ways of the sea of ocean which goeth round the world. [Now this chapter was read of evenings in the refectory at supper, in the winter of the Great Snow. While the drifts without lay fathom-deep in sheltered places, and the snow was settling on the weather-side of things in long slopes like white pent-houses, the community listened with rapt attention, picturing to themselves the slanting ship, and the red sail of skins with its yellow cross in the midst, and the marvellous vision of vast waters, and the strange islands. Then suddenly the Prior would strike the table, and according to the custom the reader would close his book with the words, "Tu autem, Domine--But do Thou, O Lord, have mercy upon us!" and the monks would rise, with interest still keen in the wanderings of the Sea-farers. Seeing that it would be of little profit to break up the reading as the Prior was wont to break it up, I will give the story here without pause or hindrance, as though it had all been read in a single evening at supper, and keep my "Tu autem" for the end of all. And truly it is at the end of all that most there is need of that prayer. So without more ado.] Serapion and his companions were, all save one, monks of the Abbey of the Holy Face. Not the first Abbey of that name, in the warm green woods in the western creek of Broce-Liande, but the second, which is nearer to the sunrise. For the site of the first Abbey was most delightful, and so sheltered from the weary wind of the west, and so open to the radiance of the morning, that, save it were Paradise, no man could come at a place so gracious and delectable. There earliest broke the land into leaf and blossom; and there the leaf was last to fall; and there one could not die, not even the very aged. Wherefore, in order that the long years of their pilgrimage might be shortened, the brethren prevailed on the Abbot to remove to another site, nearer the spring of the day; and in this new house, one by one in due season, they were caught up to the repose of the heavens, the aged fathers dying first, as is seemly. This then was the second Abbey of the Holy Face, and its pleasant woods ran down to the shore of the sea. And going east or going west, where the green billow shades into blue water, the ships of the mariners kept passing and repassing day after day; and their sails seemed to cast an enchanted shadow across the cloister; and the monks, as they watched them leaning over to the breeze, dreamed of the wondrous Garden of Eden, which had not been swallowed up by the Deluge, but had been saved as an isle inviolate amid the fountains of the great deep; and they asked each other whether not one of all these sea-farers would ever bring back a fruit or a flower or a leaf from the arbours of delight in which our first parents had dwelt. They spoke of the voyage of Brendan the Saint, and of the exceeding loveliness of the Earthly Paradise, and of the deep bliss of breathing its air celestial, till it needed little to set many of them off on a like perilous adventure. Of all the brethren Serapion was the most eager to begin that seeking. And this was what brought him to it at last. There came to the Abbey on a day in spring that youthful Bishop of Arimathea who in after time made such great fame in the world. Tall and stately was he, and black-bearded; a guest pleasant and wise, and ripe with the experience of distant travel and converse with many chief men. Now he was on his way to the great house of Glastonbury oversea, to bring back with him, if he might be so fortunate, the body of the saint of his city who had helped our Lord to bear His cross on the Way Dolorous; or, if that were an issue beyond his skill, at least some precious memorial of that saint. Many things worthy of remembrance he told of what he had seen and heard; and no small marvel did it seem to speak with one who had stood on Mount Sinai in the wilderness. From the top of that mountain, he said, one looked down on a region stretching to the Red Sea, and in the midst of the plain there is a monastery of saintly recluses, but no man can discover any track that leads to it. Faint and far away the bells are heard tolling for prime, it may be, or vespers, and it is believed that now and again some weary traveller has reached it, but no one has ever returned. The Ishmaelites, who dwell in the wilderness, have ridden long in search of it, guided by the sound of the bells, but never have they succeeded in catching a gleam of its white walls among the palm-trees, nor yet of the green palms. The Abbot of that house, it is said, is none other than the little child whom our Lord set in the midst of His Disciples, saying, "Except ye become as little children," and he will abide on the earth till our Lord's return, and then shall he enter into the kingdom with Him, without tasting death. Speaking of the holy places, Calvary, it might be, or the Garden of Olives and the sepulchre of the Lord, and of the pilgrims who visited these, he repeated to us the saying of the saintly Father Hieronymus: "To live in Jerusalem is not a very holy thing, but to live a holy life in Jerusalem." And walking with many of our brethren on the shore of the sea and seeing the sails of the ships as they went by, he questioned us of the wonders of the great waters, and of sea-faring, and of the last edge of the living earth, and he said: "Tell me, you who abide within sight of so many ships, and who hear continually the song of the great creature Sea, how would it fare with one who should sail westward and keep that one course constantly?" We said that we knew not; it were like he would perish of famine or thirst, or be whelmed in the deep. "Ay," he said, "but if he were well provisioned, with no lack of food and water, and the weather held fair?" That we could not answer, for it seemed to us that such a one would lose heart and hope in the roofless waste, with never a stone or tree, nor any shadow save a cloud's, and turn back dismayed; but Serapion replied: "To me it appears, your Discretion, that so bold a mariner, if years failed him not, might win to the Earthly Paradise." "So have I heard," said the Bishop. "Yet here would you be sailing into the west, and for a certainty the Paradise of God was in the east. How would you give a reasonable account of this?" But we could make no reply, for we knew not; nor Serapion more than we. "Now, watching the sea," said the Bishop, "you have marked the ships, how they go. When they come to you, they first show the mast-top, then the sail, and last the body of the ship, and perchance the sweep of the oars, reverse-wise when they depart from you, you first fail to see the body of the ship, and then the sail, but longest you hold in sight the mast-top, or it may be a bright streamer flying therefrom, or a cross glittering in the light--though these be but small things compared with the body of the ship. Is it not so?" We answered, readily enough, that so it was. "Is it not then even as though one were to watch a wayfarer on horse-back, going or coming over the green bulge of a low hill? Were he coming to you, you would first see the head of the rider, and last the legs of the horse, and were he riding away the horse would first go down over the hill, but still, for a little, you would see the man waving his hand in farewell as he sank lower and lower." Such indeed, we said, was the fashion of a ship's coming and going. "Does it not then seem a likely thing," said his Discretion, "that the sea is in the nature of a long low hill, down which the ships go? So have I heard it surmised by wise men, sages and scholars of the lights of heaven, in the cities of Greece and Egypt. For the earth and the ocean-sea, they teach, is fashioned as a vast globe in the heights of heaven. And truly, if indeed it be the shadow of the world which darkens the face of the moon in time of eclipse, the earth may well be round, for that shadow is round. Thus, then, one holding ever a westward course might sail down the bulge of the sea, and under the world, and round about even unto the east, if there be sea-way all along that course." Silently we listened to so strange a matter, but the Bishop traced for us on the sand a figure of the earth. "And here," said he, "is this land of ours, and here the sea, and here the bulge of ocean, and here a ship sailing westward; and here in the east is the Earthly Paradise; and mark now how the ship fareth onward ever on the one course unchanged, till it cometh to that blessed place." Truly this was a wondrous teaching; and when we questioned how they who sailed could escape falling out and perishing, they and indeed their ship, when they came so far down the round sea that they hung heads nethermost, his Discretion laughed: "Nay, if the sea, which the wind breaketh and lifteth and bloweth about in grey showers, fall not out, neither will the ship, nor yet the mariners; for the Lord God hath so ordered it that wheresoever mariners be, there the sea shall seem to them no less flat than a great grass-meadow when the wind swings the grass; and if they hang head downward they know not of it; but rather, seeing over them the sun and the clouds, they might well pity our evil case, deeming it was we who were hanging heads nethermost." Now this and suchlike converse with the Bishop so moved Serapion that he lost the quietude of soul and the deep gladness of heart which are the portion of the cloister. Day and night his thought was flying under sail across the sea towards the Earthly Paradise, and others there were who were of one longing with him. Wherefore at last they prayed leave of the Abbot to build a ship and to try the venture. The Abbot consented, but when they besought him to go with them and to lead them, he shook his head smiling, and answered: "Nay, children, I am an aged man, little fitted for such a labour. Wiser is it for me to lean my staff against my fig-tree, and have in mind the eternal years. Moreover, as you know, many are the sons in this house who look to me for fatherly care. But if it be your wish, one shall go with you to be the twelfth of your company. In hours of peril and perplexity and need, if such should befall you, you shall bid him pray earnestly, and after he has prayed, heed what he shall say, even as you would heed the words of your Abbot. No better Abbot and counsellor could you have, for he hath still preserved his baptismal innocence. It is Ambrose, the little chorister." Serapion and the others wondered at this, but readily they accepted the Abbot's choice of a companion. Think now of the ship as built--a goodly ship of stout timber frame covered two-ply with hides seasoned and sea-worthy, well found in provisions against a long voyage, fitted with sturdy mast of pine and broad sail. And think of the Mass as sung, with special prayer to Him who is the confidence of them that are afar off upon the sea. And think of the leave-taking and blessing as over and done, and of the Sea-farers as all aboard, eleven brethren and Ambrose the chorister, a little lad of nine summers. Now all is cast loose, and the red sail is drawn up the mast and set puffing, and the ship goes out, dipping and springing, into the deep. On the shore the religious stand watching; and Serapion is at the rudder, steering and glancing back; and the others aboard are waving hands landward; and on a thwart beside the mast stands the little lad, and at a sign from Serapion he lifts up his clear sweet voice, singing joyfully the _Kyrie eleison_ of the Litany. The eleven join in the glad song, and it is caught up by the voices of those on shore, as though it were by an organ; and as he sings the lad Ambrose watches the white ruffled wake-water of the ship, how it streams between the unbroken green sea on either hand, and it seems to him most like the running of a shallow brook when it goes ruffling over the pebbles in the greenwood. To those on ship and to those on shore the song of each grew a fainter hearing as the distance widened; and the magnitude of the ship lessened; and first the hull went down the bulge of the ocean, and next the sail; and long ere it was sunset all trace of the Sea-farers had vanished away. Now is this company of twelve gone forth into the great waters; far from the beloved house of the Holy Face are they gone, and far from the blithesome green aspect of the good earth; and no man of them knoweth what bane or blessing is in store for him, or whether he shall ever again tread on grass or ground. A little tearfully they think of their dear cloister-mates, but they are high of heart nothing the less. Their ship is their garth, and cloister, and choir, wherein they praise God with full voices through all the hours from matins to compline. Of the bright weather and fresh wind which carried them westward many days it would be tedious to tell, and indeed little that was strange did they see at that time, save it were a small bird flying high athwart their course, and a tree, with its branches and green leaves unlopped, which lay in the swing of the wave; but whither and whence the bird was flying, or where that tree grew in soil, they could not guess. Of what happened to them in the course of their seeking, even of that the telling must be brief, flitting from one event to another, even as the small Peter-bird flits from the top of one wave to the top of another, nor wets foot or feather in the marbled sea between; else would the story of the seeking linger out the full seven years of the seeking. The first trial that befell them was dense wintry fog, in the dusk of which they lay with lowered sail on a sullen sea for a day and a night. When the change came, it brought with it the blowing of a fierce gale with a plague of sleet and hail-stones, and they were chased out of the fog, and driven far into the south. Great billows followed them as they ran, and broke about the stern of the ship in fountains of freezing spray which drenched them to the skin. Little ease had they in their sea-faring in that long race with the north wind, for every moment they looked to have the mast torn up by the root and the frame-work of the ship broken asunder. The salt surf quenched their fire and mingled their bread with bitterness. Aching they were and weary, and sorrowful enough to sleep, when the tempest abated, and the sun returned, and the sea rolled in long glassy swells. As the sun blazed out, and the sea glittered over all his trackless ways, Serapion said to the chorister: "Ha, little brother, 'tis good, is it not? to see the bright sun once more. His face is as the face of an Angel to us." The lad looked at him curiously, but made no answer. "Art thou ailing, or sad, or home-sick, little one, that thou hast nought to say?" asked Serapion. "Nay, father, I was but thinking of thy words, that the face of the sun is as the face of an Angel." "Ay! And is it not so?" "Nay, father. When I have seen the sun at sunrise and at sunset I have ever seen a ring of splendid Angels, and in the midst of the ring the snow-white Lamb with his red cross, and the Angels were moving constantly around the Lamb, joyfully glittering; and that was the sun. But as it rose into the heavens the Angels dazzled mine eyes so that I could see them no more, nor yet the Lamb, for very brightness. Is the sun then otherwise than what I see?" Then was it Serapion's turn to muse, and he answered: "To thy young eyes which be clear and strong--yet try them not overmuch--it is doubtless as thou sayest; but we who are older have lost the piercing sight, and to us the sun is but a great and wonderful splendour which dazzles us before we can descry either the Angels or the Lamb." Meanwhile the Sea-farers ate and drank and spread their raiment to dry, and some were oppressed by the memory of the hardships they had endured; but Serapion, going among them, cheered them with talk of the Earthly Paradise, and of the joy it would be, when they had won thither, to think of the evil chances through which they had passed. In a low tone he also spoke to them of their small companion and his vision of the sun. "Truly," he said, "it is as our Father Abbot told us--he has not lost his baptismal innocence, nor hath he lost all knowledge of the heaven from which he came." As he was speaking thus, one of the brethren rose up with a cry, and, shading his eyes with his hand, pointed into the west. Far away in the shimmer of the sea and the clouds they perceived an outline of land, and they changed their course a little to come to it. The wind carried them bravely on, and they began to distinguish blue rounded hills and ridges, and a little later green woodland, and still later, on the edge of twilight, the white gleam of waters, and glimpses of open lawns tinged with the colour of grasses in flower. With beating hearts they leaned on the low bulwark of the ship, drinking in the beauty of the island. Then out of a leafy creek shot a boat of white and gold; and though it was far off, the air was so crystalline that they saw it was garlanded with fresh leaves, and red and yellow and blue blossoms; and in it there were many lovely forms, clothed in white and crowned with wreaths rose-coloured and golden. When the Sea-farers perceived that the boat glided towards them without sail or oar, they said among themselves, "These are assuredly the spirits of the Blessed;" and when suddenly the boat paused in its course, and the islanders began a sweet song, and the brethren caught the words and knew them for Latin, they were fain to believe that they had, by special grace and after brief tribulations, got within sight of the shore they sought. The song was one of a longing for peace and deep sleep and dreamful joy and love in the valleys of the isle; and it bade the Sea-farers come to them, and take repose after cold and hunger and toil on the sea. Tears of gladness ran down the cheeks of several of the Seekers as they listened, and one of them cried aloud: "O brothers, we have come far, but it is worth the danger and the suffering to hear this welcome of the Blessed." Now the small chorister, who was standing by Serapion at the helm, touched the father's sleeve, and asked in a low voice: "Have I leave to sing in answer?" "Sing, little son," Serapion replied. Then, ringing the blessed bell of the Sea-farers, the child intoned the evening hymn: _Te lucis ante terminum--_ _Before the waning of the light._ The instant his fresh young voice was heard singing that holy hymn, the flower-garlands about the boat broke into ghastly flames, and wreathed it with a dreadful burning; and the radiant figures were changed into dark shapes crowned with fire; and the song of longing and love became a wailing and gnashing of teeth. The island vanished away in rolling smoke; and the boat burned down like a darkening ember; and the Sea-farers in their ship were once more alone in the wilderness of waters. Long they prayed that night, praising God that they had escaped the snares and enchantments of the fiends. And Serapion, drawing the lad to him, kissed him, saying: "God be with thee, little brother, in thy uprising and thy down-lying! God be with thee, little son!" After this they were again driven into the south for many a day, and saw no earthly shore, but everywhere unending waters. A great wonderment to them was this immensity of the sea of ocean, wherein the land seemed a little thing lost for ever. And ever as they drove onward, the pilot star of the north was steadfast no longer, but sank lower and still lower in the heavens, and many of the everlasting lights, which at home they had seen swing round it through the livelong night, were now sunken, as it were, in the billows. "Truly," said Serapion, "it is even as his Discretion the Bishop told us; whether east we sail or west, or cross-wise north and south, the earth is of the figure of a ball. In a little while it may be that we shall see the pilot star no more;" and he was sorely troubled in his mind as to how they should steer thereafter with no beacon in heaven to guide them, and how they would make their way back to the Abbey of the Holy Face. In their wandering they set eyes on a thing well-nigh incredible--nothing less than fishes rising from the depths of the sea, and flying like birds over the ship, and diving into the sea again, and yet again rising into the air and disporting themselves in the sun. At night, too, they beheld about the ship trails of fire in the sea, crossing and re-crossing each other, and the fire marked the ways of huge blue fishes, swift and terrible; and the Sea-farers prayed that these malignant searchers of the deep might not rise into the air and fall ravening upon them while they slept. In the darkness strange patches and tangles of light, blue and golden and emerald, floated past them, and these they discovered were living creatures to which they could give no names. Often also the sea was alive with fire, which flashed and ran along the ridges of the waves when they curled and broke, and many a night the sides of the ship were washed with flame, but this fire was wet and cold, and nowise hurt a hand of those who touched it. At last on a clear morning the little chorister came hastily to Serapion and said: "Look, father, is not yon a glimmer of the heavenly land we seek?" "Nay, little son, it is but grey cloud that has not yet caught the sun," replied Serapion. "That, indeed, is cloud; but look higher, father. See how white and sharp it shines!" Then Serapion lifted up his eyes above the cloud, and in mid heaven there floated as it were a great rock of pointed crystal, white and unearthly. Serapion's eyes brightened with eagerness, and the Sea-farers gazed long at the peak, which rather seemed a star, or a headland on some celestial shore, so bright and dreamlike was it and so magically poised in the high air. All day they sailed towards it, and sometimes it vanished from their view, but it returned constantly. On the third day they came to that land. Bright and beautiful it was to their sea-wearied eyes; and of a surety no land is there that goes so nearly to heaven. For it rose in green and flowery heights till it was lost in a ring of dusky sea-cloud; and through this vast ring of cloud it pierced its way, and the Sea-farers saw it emerge and stand clear above the cloud, bluish with the distance. And higher still it rose, and entered a second great cloud-ring, but this ring was white; and once more it emerged from the cloud-ring, and high over all towered the pyramid of shining stone. "Well might it be that Angels often alight on this soaring mountain," said Serapion, "and leave it glittering with their footprints. If life and strength be given us, thither we also shall climb, and praise God in the lofty places of the earth which He has made." They steered the ship into a sunny bay, and Serapion having blessed the sea and the shore, they landed right joyfully. Drawing the ship high on the beach, they chose a little grove of palm-trees beside a shallow stream for their church and cloister; but they had not been long in that spot before they saw the islanders gliding through the wood and peering out at them in great amaze. Serapion went forth to them, smiling and beckoning them to approach, but they fled and would not abide his coming. So Serapion returned, and the Sea-farers made themselves such a home as they might, and rested a little from their toiling. When the day had come to evening, and the brethren were chanting vespers, the islanders returned, many hundreds of them, men and women, dusky of skin but comely and bright-eyed, and for all their raiment they wore garlands of blossoms and girdles of woven leaves. Close they came to the Sea-farers, and gazed at them, and the boldest touched them, as though to assure themselves that these were living mortals like unto themselves. But when they saw the little chorister, with his fair white face and childish blue eyes and sunny hair, they turned to each other with exclamations and uncouth gestures of pleasure and wonderment. Then they hurried away and brought strange and delightful fruit--berries, and fruit in a skin yellow and curved like a sickle moon, and big nuts full of water sweet and cool, and these they laid before the lad. Wreaths of flowers, too, they wove for him, and put them on his head and about his neck, as though they were rejoiced to see him and could not make too much of him. The brethren were light of heart that they had come to an isle so gracious and a folk so simple and loving. Sleep, sweet as dews of Paradise, fell upon their weariness that night, and they rose refreshed and glad for matins, which they chanted by the light of large and radiant stars flashing down through the palms. What happened that day, however, the Sea-farers did not wholly understand till long afterwards, when they had learned the speech of the people; but out of their later knowledge I shall here make it plain. Now in the olden time the mighty mountain of this island had been a burning mountain, and even now, in a huge craggy cup beneath the glittering peak, there was a vast well of fire and molten rock; and the peak and well were the lair of an evil spirit so strong and terrible that each year the island folk gave him a child to appease him, lest in his malignant mood he should let the well overflow and consume them with its waters of fire. Wherefore, as this was the season of the sacrifice, the islanders seeing the little chorister, how fair and beautiful he was, deemed he would be a more acceptable offering to the spirit of evil than one of their children, whom they were heart-sick of slaying. On this day, therefore, they came at dawn, and with many gestures and much strange speech led away the lad, and with gentle force kept the brethren apart from him, though they suffered them to follow. In a little while the child was clothed with flowers and leaves like one of themselves, and in the midst of a great crowd singing a barbarous strain, he was borne on a litter of boughs up the ascent of the mountain. Many times they paused and rested in the heat, and the day was far spent when they reached the foot of the lofty peak. There they passed the night, but though the brethren strove to force their way to the lad, they were restrained by the strength of the multitude, and they knew that violence was useless. Again in the twilight before dawn the islanders resumed the journey and came to the edge of the craggy cup, in the depths of which bubbled the well of fire. Silently they stood on the brink, looking towards the east; but the Sea-farers, who now deemed only too well that their little brother was about to be sacrificed to Moloch, cast themselves on their knees, and with tears running down their faces, raised their hands in supplication to heaven. But with a loud voice Serapion cried: "Fear not, dear son; for the Lord can save thee from the mouth of the lion, and hear thee from the horns of the unicorns." The little chorister answered: "Pray for my soul, Father Serapion; for my body I have no fear, even though they cast me into the pit." In the streaming east the rays of light were springing ever more brilliantly over the clear sea; two strong men held the lad and lifted him from the ground; an aged islander--a priest, it seemed, of that evil spirit--white-haired and crowned with flowers, watched the sky with dull eyes; and as the sun came up with a rush of splendour, he called aloud: "God of the mountain-fire, take this life we give thee, and be good and friendly to us." Then was little Ambrose the chorister swung twice to and fro, and hurled far out into the rocky cup of the well of fire. And a wild cry arose from the crowd: "Take this life, take this life!"--but even as that cry was being uttered the lad was stayed in his fall, and he stood on the air over the fiery well, as though the air had been turned to solid crystal, and he ran on the air across the abyss to the brethren, and Serapion caught him in his arms and folded him to his breast. Then fell a deep stillness and dread upon the people, and what to do they knew not; but the aged priest and the strong men who had flung the boy into the gulf came to the brethren, and casting themselves on their faces before the chorister, placed his foot on their heads. Wherefore Serapion surmised that they now took him for a youthful god or spirit more powerful than the evil spirit of the fire. Touching them, he signed to them to arise, and when they stood erect he pointed to the abyss, and gathering a handful of dust he threw it despitefully into the well of fire, and afterwards spat into the depths. This show of scorn and contumely greatly overawed the people, and (as was made known afterwards) they looked on the Sea-farers as strong gods, merciful and much to be loved. Thrice did the Sea-farers hold Easter in that island, for there they resolved to stay till they had learned the island speech, and freed the people from the bondage of demons, and taught them the worship of the one God who is in the heavens. Now though the wind blew with an icy mouth on that high peak, in the rocks of the crater it was sheltered, and warm because of the inner fires of the mountain. So it was ordered that in turn one brother should abide on the peak, and one in a cave midway down the mountain, and one on the slopes where the palms and orange-trees are rooted among the white-flowered sweet-scented broom. And each of these had a great trumpet of bark, and when the first ray of light streamed out of the east in the new day, the brother of the peak cried through his trumpet with a mighty voice: _Laudetur Jesus Christus,_ _May Christ Jesus be praised,_ and the brother of the cave, having responded, _In saecula saeculorum,_ _World without end,_ cried mightily to the brother of the palms, "May Christ Jesus be praised!"--and thus from the heights in the heavens to the shore of the sea. So, too, when the last light of the setting sun burned out on the western billows. Thus was the reign of the spirit of evil abolished, and the mountain consecrated to the praise of Him who made the hills and the isles of the sea. In the strong light of the morning sun the shadow of that mountain is cast over the great sea of ocean further than a swift ship may sail with a fair wind in two days and two nights; and a man placed on the peak shall see that shadow suddenly rise up from the sea and stand over against the mountain, dark and menaceful, like the lost soul of a mountain bearing testimony against its body before the judgment-seat of God; and this is a very awful sight. Now, having preached the Gospel, the Sea-farers strengthened their ship and launched into the deep after the third Eastertide, and having comforted the people, because they were grieved and mournful at their departure, they left them in the keeping of the risen Lord, and continued their seeking. After this Brother Benedict, the oldest monk of their company, fell ill with grievous sickness, and sorely the Sea-farers longed for some shore where he might feel the good earth solid and at rest beneath him, and see the green of growing things, and have the comfort of stillness and silence. With astonishing patience he bore his malady, at no time repining, and speaking never a word of complaint. When he was asked if he repented him of the adventure, he smiled gently. "Fain, indeed," he said, "would I be laid to rest beneath the grass of our own garth, where the dear brethren, passing and repassing in the cloister, might look where I lay and say an 'Our Father' for my soul. Yet in no way do I repent of our sailing, for we have seen the marvellous works of God; and if the Lord vouchsafe to be merciful to me, it may be that I shall see the Heavenly Paradise before you find the Earthly." "God grant it, dear brother," said Serapion. On an afternoon they came to a small island walled about with high cliffs, red and brown, and at the foot of the cliffs a narrow beach of ruddy sand; but on the rocks grew no green thing, lichen or moss or grass or shrub, and no sweet water came bickering down into the sea. On landing they discovered a gully in the cliffs which led inland, and straightway explorers were sent to spy what manner of land it was whereon they had fallen. Within the very mouth of the narrow pass they came upon a small ship hollowed out of a tree gigantic, but it was rotten and dry as touchwood, and wasting into dust. Within the ship lay the bones of a man, stretched out as though he had died in sleep. Outside the ship lay the bones of two others. The faces of these were turned downward to the stones whereon they lay, but the man in the ship had perished with his eyes fixed on the heavens. The oars and sails and ropes were all dry and crumbling, and the raiment of the men had mouldered away. In the length of that narrow pass between the lofty cliff-walls the Sea-farers found no vestige of grass or weed, either on the cliff-sides or on the stones and shingle. Neither was there any water, save where in the hollows of some of the boulders rain had lodged and had not yet been drunk up by the sun. No living creature, great or small, lived in that ghyll. Within the round of the sea-walls the island lay flat and low, and it was one bleak waste of boulder and shingle, lifeless and waterless save for the rain in the pitted surfaces of the stones; but in the midst of the waste there stood, dead and leafless, a vast gaunt tree, which at one time must have been a goodly show. When the Sea-farers reached it, they found lying on the dead turf about its roots the white bones of yet four other men. Much they questioned and conjectured whence these ill-starred wanderers had come to lay their bones on so uncharitable a soil, and whether they had perished in seeking, like themselves, for the Earthly Paradise. "What," sighed one, "if this were the Earthly Paradise, and yon the Tree of Life!" But the others murmured and would not have it so. Yet to the sick man even this Isle of the Stones of Emptiness was a place of rest and respite from the sea,--"It is still mother-earth," he said, "though the mother be grown very old and there be no flesh left on her bones"--and at first it seemed as though he was recovering in the motionless stillness and in the great shadow of the cliffs. Something of this Serapion said to the little chorister, but the lad answered: "Nay, father, do you not see how the man that used to look out of his eyes has become a very little child--and of such is the kingdom of heaven?" "Explain, little brother," said Serapion. "Why," said the lad, "is it not thus with men when they grow so old or sick that they be like to die--does one not see that the real selves within them look out of window with faces grown younger and smaller and more joyous, till it may be that what was once a strong man, wise and great, is but a babbling babe which can scarce walk at all?" "Who told thee these things?" asked Serapion. "No one has told me," replied the lad, "but seeing the little children thus gazing out, and knowing that all who would enter into heaven must become as they are, I thought it must needs be in this manner that people change and pass away to God when the ending of life is come." On this isle the Sea-farers kept a Christmas, and they made such cheer as they might at that blessed time, speaking of the stony fields wherein the Shepherds lay about their flocks, but no fields were ever so stony as these which were littered with stones fathom-deep, with never a grain of earth or blade of grass between. And in this isle it was that Brother Benedict died, very peaceful, and without pain at the close. On the feast of the Three Kings that poor monk was privileged even more than those Kings had been, for not only was the Babe of Heaven made manifest to him, but his soul, a little child, went forth from him to be with that benign Babe for evermore. Under the dead tree the Sea-farers buried him, and on the trunk of the tree they fastened a crucifix on the side on which he reposed. The bones, too, of the dead men they gathered together and covered with stones in a hollow which they made. So they left the island, marvelling whence all those stones had come, and how they had been rained many and deep on that one place. Said one, "It may be that these are the stones wherewith our Lord and the prophets and the blessed martyrs were stoned, laid up as in a treasury to bear witness on the day of doom." "It may be," said another, "that these are the stones which Satan, tempting the Lord, bade Him turn into bread, and therefore are they kept for an evidence against the tempter." "Peradventure these be the stony places," said another, "whereon the good seed fell and perished in its first upspringing, and so they be kept for the admonishment of rash Sea-farers and such as have no long-continuance in well-doing." But no man among them was satisfied as to the mystery of that strange isle. On many other shores they set foot. Most were fruitful and friendly; and they rested from their seeking, and repaired the ship, and took in such stores as they might gather during their sojourn. Though often it befell that while they were still afar the wind wafted them the fragrance of rare spices so that their eyes brightened and their faces reddened with joyful anticipation, yet ever when they landed they found that not yet, not yet had they reached the island garden of their quest. Men, too, of the same fashion as themselves they met with on shores far apart, but strange were these of aspect and speech and manner of life. With them they tarried as long as they might, gaining some knowledge of their tongue, and revealing to them the true God and the Lord crucified. In the latter time of their sea-faring they were blown far over the northern side of the great sea, in such wise that the pilot star burned well-nigh overhead in the heavens. Here they descried tall islands of glittering rock, white and blue, crowned with minsters and castles and abbeys of glass, but they heard no sound of bells or of men's voices or of the stir of life. Once as they were swept along in near peril of wreck, through flying sea-smoke and plagues of hail, they heard a strange unearthly music rising and falling in the blast. Some said it was Angels sent to strengthen them; others said it was wild birds which they had seen flying past in flocks; but Serapion said, "If it be Angels, blessed be God; if it be birds, yet even they are God's Angels, lessoning us how we shall praise Him, and sing Him a new song from the ends of the earth." Then he raised his voice, singing the psalm _Laudate Dominum de caelis,_ _Praise ye the Lord from the heavens: praise Him in the heights,_ and the Sea-farers sang it with earnest voices and with hearts lifted up, and they were greatly encouraged. It was in these latitudes stormy and cold that, to their thinking, the Sea-farers won nearest to the Earthly Paradise. For, far in the sides of the north as, in the red sunlight, they coasted a lofty land white with snow-fields and blue with glacier ice, they entered a winding fjord, and found themselves in glassy water slumbering between green slopes of summer. Down to the water's edge the shores were wooded with copses of dwarf birch and willow, and the slopes were radiant with wild flowers--harebell and yellow crowfoot, purple heath and pink azalea and starry saxifrage. A rosy light tinged the snow on the wintry heights; and over the edge of a cliff, far up the fjord, a glacier hung, and from beneath the ice a jet of water burst forth and fell foaming down the precipice to the shore. When they landed they found the ground covered thick with berries dark and luscious, and while they gathered these, a black and white snow-bunting flitted about them on its long wings. A miraculous thing was this garden of summer in the icy bosom of winter, but a greater marvel still was the undying sunshine on sea and shore. "In very truth," said Serapion, "of all places we have yet seen is not this most like to have been the blessed land, for is not even 'the night light about us,' and is it not with us as it is written of the Heavenly Jerusalem, 'there shall be no night there'?" The Sea-farers took away with them many of the leaves and flowers of this country, and afterwards the scribes in the Scriptorium copied them in beautiful colours in the Golden Missal of the Abbey. This was the last of the unknown shores visited by the Sea-farers. Seven years had they pursued their seeking, and there now grew on them so strong a craving for home that they could gainsay it no longer. Wherefore it fell out that in the autumn-tide, when the stubble is brown in the fields and the apple red on the bough; on the last day of the week, when toil comes to end; in the last light of the day, when the smoke curls up from the roof, they won their long sea-way home. [Illustration: _They won their long sea-way home_] O beloved Abbey of the Holy Face, through tears they beheld thy walls, with rapture they kissed thy threshold! "In all the great sea of ocean," said Serapion, when he had told the story of their wandering, "no such Earthly Paradise have we seen as this dear Abbey of our own!" "Dear brethren," said the Abbot, "the seven years of your seeking have not been wasted if you have truly learned so much. Far from home have I never gone, but many things have come to me. To be ever, and to be tranquilly, and to be joyously, and to be strenuously, and to be thankfully and humbly at one with the blessed will of God--that is the Heavenly Paradise; and each of us, by God's grace, may have that within him. And whoso hath within him the Heavenly Paradise, hath here and now, and at all times and in every place, the true Earthly Paradise round about him." Here ends the chapter of the Seven Years of Seeking. ["But do Thou, O Lord, have mercy upon us," chanted the Lector, as he closed the book. And the Prior struck the board, and the brethren arose and returned God thanks for the creatures of food and drink, and for that Earthly Paradise, ever at their door, of tranquil and joyous and strenuous and thankful and humble acceptance of God's will.] The Guardians of the Door There was once an orphan girl, far away in a little village on the edge of the moors. She lived in a hovel thatched with reeds, and this was the poorest and the last of all the houses, and stood quite by itself among broom and whins by the wayside. From the doorway the girl could look across the wild stretches of the moorland; and that was pleasant enough on a summer day, for then the air is clear and golden, and the moor is purple with the bloom of the ling, and there are red and yellow patches of bracken, and here and there a rowan tree grows among the big grey boulders with clusters of reddening berries. But at night, and especially on a winter night, the darkness was so wide and so lonely that it was hard not to feel afraid sometimes. The wind, when it blew in the dark, was full of strange and mournful voices; and when there was no wind, Mary could hear the cries and calls of the wild creatures on the moor. Mary was fourteen when she lost her father. He was a rough idle good-for-nothing, and one stormy night on his way home from the tavern he went astray and was found dead in the snow. Her mother had died when she was so small a child that Mary could scarcely remember her face. So it happened that she was left alone in the world, and all she possessed was a dog, some fowls, and her mother's spinning wheel. But she was a bright, cheerful, courageous child, and soon she got from the people of the village sufficient work to keep her wheel always busy, for no one could look into her face without liking her. People often wondered how so rude and worthless a fellow could have had such a child; she was as sweet and unexpected as the white flowers on the bare and rugged branches of the blackthorn. Her hens laid well, and she sold all the eggs she could spare; and her dog, which had been trained in all sorts of cunning by her father, often brought her from the moors some wild thing in fur or feathers which Mary thought there was no harm in cooking. Her father had been too idle and careless to teach her anything, and all that she could recollect of her mother's instruction was a little rhyme which she used to repeat on her knees beside the bed every night before she went to sleep. And this was the rhyme: _God bless this house from thatch to floor,_ _The twelve Apostles guard the door,_ _And four good Angels watch my bed,_ _Two at the foot and two the head._ _Amen._ [Illustration: "_And four good Angels watch my bed_"] Though she was all alone in the world, and had no girl of her own age to make friends with, she was happy and contented, for she was busy from morning till night. And yet in spite of all this, strange stories began to be whispered about the village. People who happened to pass by the old hut late at night declared that they had seen light shining through the chinks in the window-shutter when all honest people should have been asleep. There were others who said they had noticed strange men standing in the shadows of the eaves; they might have been highwaymen, they might have been smugglers--they could not tell, for no one had cared to run the risk of going too near--but it was quite certain that there were strange things going on at the hut, and that the girl who seemed so simple and innocent was not quite so good as the neighbours had imagined. When the village gossip had reached the ears of the white-headed old Vicar, he sent for the girl and questioned her closely. Mary was grieved to learn that such untrue and unkind stories were told about her. She knew nothing, she said, of any lights or of any men. As soon as it was too dusky to see to work she always fastened her door, and after she had had her supper, she covered the fire and blew out the rushlight and went to bed. "And you say your prayers, my daughter, I hope?" said the Vicar kindly. Mary hung down her head and answered in a low voice, "I do not know any proper prayers, but I always say the words my mother taught me." And Mary repeated the rhyme: _God bless this house from thatch to floor,_ _The twelve Apostles guard the door,_ _And four good Angels watch my bed,_ _Two at the foot and two the head._ _Amen._ "There could not be a better prayer, dear child!" rejoined the Vicar, with a smile. "Go home now, and do not be troubled by what idle tongues may say. Every night repeat your little prayer, and God will take care of you." Late that night, however, the Vicar lit his lantern and went out of doors, without a word to any one. All the village was still and dark as he walked slowly up the road towards the moor. "She is a good girl," he said to himself, "but people may have observed something which has given rise to these stories. I will go and see with my own eyes." The stars were shining far away in the dark sky, and the green plovers were crying mournfully on the dark moor. As he passed along the lantern swung out a dim light across the road, which had neither walls nor hedges. "It is a lonely place for a child to live in by herself," he thought. At last he perceived the outline of the old hovel, among the gorse and broom, and the next moment he stopped suddenly, for there, as he had been told, a thread of bright light came streaming through the shutters of the small window. He drew his lantern under his cloak, and approached cautiously. The road where he stood was now dim, but by the faint glimmer of the stars he was able to make out that there were several persons standing under the eaves, and apparently whispering together. The Vicar's good old heart was filled with surprise and sorrow. Then it suddenly grew hot with anger, and throwing aside his cloak and lifting up the lantern he advanced boldly to confront the intruders. But they were not at all alarmed, and they did not make any attempt to escape him. Then, as the light fell upon their forms and faces, who but the Vicar was struck with awe and amazement, and stood gazing as still as a stone! The people under the eaves were men of another age and another world, strangely clothed in long garments, and majestic in appearance. One carried a lance, and another a pilgrim's staff, and a third a battle-axe; but the most imposing stood near the door of the hut, and in his hand he held two large keys. In an instant the Vicar had guessed who they were, and had uncovered his head and fallen on his knees; but the strangers melted slowly away into the darkness, as if they had been no more than the images of a dream. And indeed the Vicar might have thought that he really had been dreaming but for the light which continued to stream through the chink in the shutter. He arose from his knees and moved towards the window to peep into the hut. Instantly an invisible hand stretched a naked sword across his path, and a low deep voice spoke to him in solemn warning: "It is the light of Angels. Do not look, or blindness will fall upon you, even as it fell upon me on the Damascus road." But the aged Vicar laid his hand on the sword, and tried to move it away. "Let me look, let me look!" he said; "better one glimpse of the Angels than a thousand years of earthly sight." Then the sword yielded to his touch and vanished into air, and the old priest leaned forward on the window-sill and gazed through the chink. And with a cry of joy he saw a corner of the rude bed, and beside the corner, one above the other, three great dazzling wings; they were the left-hand side wings of one of the Angels at the foot of the bed. Then all was deep darkness. The Vicar thought that it was the blindness that had fallen upon him, but the only regret he felt was that the vision had vanished so quickly. Then, as he turned away, he found that not only had he not lost his sight, but that he could now see with a marvellous clearness. He saw the road, and even the foot-prints and grains of sand on the road; the hut, and the reeds on the hut; the moor, and the boulders and the rowan-trees on the moor. Everything was as distinct as if it had been--not daylight, but as if the air were of the clear colour of a nut-brown brook in summer. Praising God for all His goodness he returned home, and as he went he looked back once and again and yet again, and each time he saw the twelve awful figures in strange clothing, guarding the lonely thatched hovel on the edge of the moor. After this there were no more stories told of Mary, and no one even dared speak to her of the wonderful manner in which her prayer was answered, so that she never knew what the old Vicar had seen. But late at night people would rather go a great way round than take the road which passed by her poor hut. On the Shores of Longing It was in the old forgotten days when all the western coast of Spain was sprinkled with lonely hermitages among the rocks, and with holy houses and towers of prayer; and this west coast was thought to be the last and outermost edge of all land, for beyond there lay nothing but the vast ocean stream and the sunset. There, in the west of the world, on the brink of the sea and the lights of the day that is done, lived the men of God, looking for ever towards the east for the coming of the Lord. Even the dead were laid in the place of their resurrection with their feet pointing to the morning, so that when they should arise their faces would be turned towards His coming. Thus it came to pass that the keen white wind out of the east was named the wind of the dead men's feet. Now in one or these holy houses lived the monk Bresal of the Songs, who had followed Sedulius the Bishop into Spain. Bresal had been sent thither to teach the brethren the music of the choirs of the Isle of the Gael and to train the novices in chant and psalmody, for of all singers the sweetest was he, and he could play on every instrument of wind or string, and was skilled in all the modes of minstrelsy. Thereto he knew by heart numberless hymns and songs and poems, and God had given him the gift to make songs and hymns, and beautiful airs for the singing of them. And for these things, so sweet and gentle was the nature of the man, he was greatly beloved whithersoever he fared. A happy and holy life had he lived, but now he was growing old; and as he looked from the convent on the cliffs far over the western waters, he thought daily more and more of Erinn, and a great longing grew upon him to see once more that green isle in which he had been born. And when he saw, far below, the ships of the sea-farers dragging slowly away into the north in the breezy sunshine or in the blue twilight, his eyes became dim with the thought that perchance these wind-reddened mariners might be steering for the shores of his longing. The Prior of the convent noticed his sadness and questioned him of the cause, and when Bresal told him, "Why should you go?" he asked. "Do you not love us any longer?" "Dearly do I love you, father," replied Bresal, "and dearly this house, and every rock and tree and flower; but no son of the Isle of the Gael forgets the little mother-lap of earth whereon he was nursed, or the smell of the burning peat, or the song of the robin, or the drone of the big mottled wild bee, or the cry of the wild geese when the winter is nigh. Even Columba the holy pined for the lack of these things. This is what he says in one of the songs which he has left us: _There's an eye of grey_ _Looks back to Erinn far away;_ _Big tears wet that eye of grey_ _Seeking Erinn far away."_ Now the Prior loved Bresal as Jonathan loved David; and though it grieved him to part with him, he resolved that if it could be compassed Bresal should go back to his own country. "But you must never forget us, and when you are happy, far away from us, you must think of us and give us your heart in prayer." "Never shall I forget you, father," the Singer replied. "Indeed, it will not be a strange thing if I shall long for you then even as I am longing for my home now; for in truth, next to my home, most do I love the brethren of this house, and the very house itself, and the hills and the sea and the dying lights of the evening. But I know that it will not be permitted me ever to return. The place of my birth will be the place of my resurrection." The Prior smiled, and laid his hand gently on the monk's shoulder: "O Bresal, if it be within my power you shall have your will." So he sent messengers to Sedulius the Bishop; and Sedulius, who also had the Irish heart with its tears of longing, consented; and not many days after the swallows and martins had gone flashing by into the north, Bresal of the Songs was free to follow as speedily as he might. Long was the way and weary the pilgrimage, but at last he reached the beloved green Isle of the Gael, and fared into the south-west--and this is the land in which it is told that Patrick the Saint celebrated Mass on every seventh ridge he passed over. He came at sunset on the last day of the week to the place of bells and cells among the rocks of the coast of Kerry. In that blessed spot there is ever a service of Angels ascending and descending. And when he saw once more the turf dyke and the wattled cells and the rude stone church of the brotherhood where he had been a son of reading in his boyhood, and the land all quiet with the labour of the week done, and the woods red with the last light of the finished day, the tears ran down his face, and he fell on the earth and kissed it for joy at his return. It was a glad thing for him to be there once more; to recognise each spot he had loved, to look on the old stones and trees, the hills and sparkling sea, the rocky isle and the curraghs of the fisher-folk; to smell the reek of the peat curling up blue in the sweet air; for all these things had haunted him in dreams when he was in a distant land. Now when the first hunger of longing had been appeased, and the year wore round, and the swallows gathered in the autumn, and every bush and tree was crowded with them while they waited restlessly for a moonlight night and a fair wind to take their flight over sea, Bresal began to think tenderly of the home on the Spanish cliffs overhanging the brink of the sunset. Then in the brown days of the autumn rains; and again in the keen November when the leaves were falling in sudden showers--but the highest leaves clung the longest--and puffs of whirling wind set the fallen leaves flying, and these were full of sharp sounds and pattering voices; and sixes of sparrows went flying with the leaves so that one could not well say which were leaves and which were birds; and yet again through the bitter time when the eaves were hung with icicles and the peaks of the blue slieves were white with snow, and the low hills and fields were hoary--the memory of the Prior and of the beloved house prevailed with him and he felt the dull ache of separation. [Illustration: _And again in the keen November_] As the days passed by his trouble grew the greater, for he began to fear that his love of the creature was attaching him too closely to the earth and to the things of this fleeting life of our exile. In vain he fasted and prayed and strove to subdue his affections; the human heart within him would not suffer him to rest. Now it happened on a day when the year had turned, and a soft wind was tossing the little new leaves and the shadows of the leaves and the new grass and the shadows of the grass, Bresal was sitting on a rock in the sun on the hillside. Suddenly there flashed by him, in a long swift joyous swing of flight, two beautiful birds with long wings and forked tails and a sheen of red and green. It was the swallows that had returned. For a moment he felt an ascension of the heart, and then he recollected that nearly a year had elapsed since he had seen the face of his friend the Prior for the last time in this world. And he wondered to himself how they all fared, whether any one had died, what this one or that was now doing, whether they still spoke at times of him, but chiefly he thought of the Prior, and he prayed for him with a great love. And thinking thus as he sat on the rock, Bresal seemed to see once more the dear house in Spain and the cliffs overlooking the vast ocean stream, and it appeared to him as though he were once again in a favourite nook among the rocks beside the priory. In that nook a thread of water trickled down into a hollow stone and made a little pool, and around the pool grew an ice-plant with thick round green leaves set close and notched on the edge, and a thin russet stalk, and little stars of white flowers sprinkled with red. And hard by the pool stood a small rounded evergreen tree from which he had often gathered the orange-scarlet berries. At the sight of these simple and familiar things the tears ran down Bresal's cheeks, half for joy and half for sorrow. Now at this selfsame moment the Prior was taking the air and saying his office near that very spot, and when he had closed his breviary, he remembered his friend in Erinn far away, and murmured, "How is it, Lord, with Bresal my brother? Have him, I pray Thee, ever in Thy holy keeping." As he spoke the gift of heavenly vision descended on the Prior, and he saw where Bresal sat on a rock in the sun gazing at the evergreen tree and the ice-plant about the little pool, and he perceived that Bresal fancied he was looking at these things. A great tenderness for Bresal filled the Prior's heart, and he prayed: "Lord, if it be Thy holy will, let Bresal my brother have near him these things of which he is dreaming, as a remembrance of what his soul loveth." Then, turning to the tree and the plant and the pool, he blessed them and said: "O little tree and starry plant and cool well and transparent fern, and whatsoever else Bresal now sees, arise in the name of the Lord of the four winds and of earth and water and fire, arise and go and make real the dream that he is dreaming." As he spoke the trickling water and the tree and the saxifrage, and with them parcels of soil and rock, and with the pool the blue light of the sky reflected in it, rose like a cloud and vanished, and the Prior beheld them no more. At last Bresal brushed away his tears, blaming his weakness and his enslavement to earthly affections, but the things he had seen in his happy day-dream did not vanish. To his great amazement, there at his feet were the little pool and the ice-plant, and hard by grew the evergreen tree. He rose with a cry of joy, "O Father Prior, 'tis thy prayer hath done this!" And care was lifted from him, for now he knew that in his human love he had in nowise sinned against the love of God, but contrariwise the love of his friend had drawn him closer to the love of his Maker. During all the days of the years of his exile this little parcel of Spain was a solace and a strength to him. Many a hundred years has gone by since this happened, but still if you travel in that land you may see the ice-plant and the evergreen tree. And the name of the evergreen is the Strawberry Tree. The ice-plant, which is also called a saxifrage, may now be seen in many a garden to which it has been brought from the Kerry mountains, and it is known as London Pride. Botanists who do not know the story of Bresal of the Songs have been puzzled to explain how a Spanish tree and a Spanish flower happen to grow in one little nook of Erinn. The Children of Spinalunga The piazza or square in front of the Cathedral was the only open space in which the children of Spinalunga had room to play. Spinalunga means a Long Spine or Ridge of rock, and the castello or little walled town which bore that name was built on the highest peak of the ridge, inside strong brown stone walls with square towers. So rough and steep was this portion of the ridge that the crowded houses, with their red roofs and white gables, were piled up one behind another, and many of the streets were narrow staircases, climbing up between the houses to the blue sky. On the top the hill was flat, and there the Cathedral stood, and from her niche above the great west entrance the beautiful statue of the Madonna with the Babe in her arms looked across the square, and over the huddled red roofs, and far away out to the hills and valleys with their evergreen oaks and plantations of grey olives, and bright cornfields and vineyards. On three sides the town was sheltered by hills, but a very deep ravine separated them from the ridge, so that on those three sides it was impossible for an enemy to attack the town. On the nearest hills great pine woods grew far up the slopes, and sheltered it from the east winds which blew over the snowy peaks. Now on the southern side of the square stood the houses of the Syndic and other wealthy citizens, with open colonnades of carved yellow stone; and all about the piazza at intervals there were orange-trees and pomegranates, growing in huge jars of red earthenware. This had been the children's playground as long as any one could remember, but in the days of the blessed Frate Agnolo the Syndic was a grim, childless, irascible old man, terribly plagued with gout, which made him so choleric that he could not endure the joyous cries and clatter of the children at their play. So at last in his irritation he gave orders that, if the children must play at all, it would have to be in their own dull narrow alleys paved with hard rock, or outside beyond the walls of the castello. For their part the youngsters would have been glad enough to escape into the green country among the broom and cypress, the red snapdragon and golden asters and blue pimpernels, but these were wild and dangerous times, and at any moment a troop of Free-lances from Pisa or a band of Lucchese raiders might have swept down and carried them off into captivity. They had therefore to sit about their own doors, and the piazza of the Cathedral became strangely silent in the summer evenings, and there was a feeling of dulness and discontent in the little town. Never a whit better off was the Syndic, for he was now angry with the stillness and the deserted look of the square. In the midst of this trouble the blessed Brother Agnolo came down from his hermitage among the pine woods, and when he heard of what had taken place, he went straightway to the Syndic and took him to task, with soft and gracious words. "Messer Gianni, pain I know will often take all sweetness out of the temper of a man, but in this you are not doing well. There is no child in Spinalunga but would readily forego all his happy play to give you ease and solace, but in this way they cannot help you. By sending them away you do but cloud their innocent lives, and you are yourself none the better for their absence. Were it not wiser for you to seek to distract yourself in their harmless merry-making? I may well think that you have never watched them at their sports; but if you will bid them come back to-day, and will but walk a little way with me, you shall see that which shall give you content and delight so great, that never again will you wish to banish them, but will rather pray to have their companionship at all times." Now the Frate so prevailed on the Syndic that he gave consent, and bade all the children, lass and lad, babe and prattler, come to the square for their games as they used to do. And leaning with one hand on his staff, and with the other on the shoulder of Brother Agnolo, he moved slowly through the fruit-trees in the great jars to the steps of the Cathedral. Suddenly the joy-bells began to ring, and the little people came laughing and singing and shouting from the steep streets and staircases and alleys, and they raced and danced into the piazza like Springtime let loose, and they chased each other, and caught hands and played in rings, and swarmed among the jars, as many and noisy as swallows when they gather for their flight over sea in the autumn-tide. "Look well, Messer Gianni," said the Frate, "and perceive who it is that shares their frolics." As the Brother spoke the eyes of the Syndic were opened; and there, with each little child, was his Angel, clothed in white, and white-winged; and as the little folk contended together, their Angels contended with each other; and as they ran and danced and sang, so ran and danced and sang their Angels. Which was the laughter of the children, and which that of the Angels, the Syndic could not tell; and when the plump two-year-olds tottered and tumbled, their Angels caught them and saved them from hurt; and even if they did weep and make a great outcry, it was because they were frightened, not because they were injured, and straightway they had forgotten what ailed them and were again merrily trudging about. In the midst of this wonderful vision of young Angels and bright-eyed children mingling so riotously together, the Syndic heard an inexpressibly joyous laugh behind him. Turning his head, he saw that it was the little marble Babe in the arms of the Madonna. He was clapping his hands, and had thrown back his head against his mother's bosom in sudden delight. Did the Syndic truly see this? He was certain he did--for a moment; and yet in that same moment he knew that the divine Babe was once more a babe of stone, with its sweet grave face and unconscious eyes; and when the Syndic turned again to watch the children, it was only the children he saw; the Angels were no longer visible. "It is not always given to our sinful eyes to see them," said Brother Agnolo, answering the Syndic's thought, "but whether we see them or see them not, always they are there." Now it was in the autumn of the same year that the fierce captain of Free-lances, the Condottiere Ghino, appeared one moonlight night before the gates of Spinalunga, and bade the guard open in the name of Pisa. As I have said, the little hill-town could only be attacked on the western side, on account of the precipitous ravine which divided it from the hills; but the ridge before the gate was crowded with eight hundred horsemen and two thousand men-at-arms clamouring to be admitted. Nothing daunted, the garrison on the square towers cried back a defiance; the war-bell was sounded; and the townspeople, men and women, hurried down to defend the walls. After the first flight of arrows and quarrels the Free-lances fell back out of bowshot, and encamped for the night, but the hill-men remained on the watch till daybreak. Early in the morning Ghino himself rode up the ascent with a white flag, and asked for a parley with the Syndic. "We are from Pisa," said the Condottiere; "Florence is against us; this castello we must hold for our safety. If with your good-will, well and good!" "We are bound by our loyalty to Florence," replied the Syndic briefly. "The sword cuts all bonds," said the Free-lance, with a laugh; "but we would gladly avoid strife. Throw in your lot with us. All we ask is a pledge that in the hour of need you will not join Florence against us." "What pledge do you ask?" inquired the Syndic. "Let twenty of your children ride back with us to Pisa," said the Free-lance. "These shall answer for your fidelity. They shall be cherished and well cared for during their sojourn." Who but Messer Gianni was the angry man on hearing this? "Our children!" he cried; "are we, then, slaves, that we must needs send you our little ones as hostages? Guards, here! Shoot me down this brigand who bids me surrender your children to him!" Bolts flew whizzing from the cross-bows; the Free-lance shook his iron gauntlet at the Syndic, and galloped down the ridge unharmed. The Syndic forgot his gout in his wrath, and bade the hill-men hold their own till their roofs crumbled about their ears. Then began a close siege of the castello; but on the fourth day Frate Agnolo passed boldly through the lines of the enemy, and was admitted through the massive stone gateway which was too narrow for the entrance of either cart or waggon. Great was the joy of the hill-men as the Brother appeared among them. He, they knew, would give them wise counsel and stout aid in the moment of danger. When they told him of the pledge for which the besiegers asked, he only smiled and shook his head. "Be of good cheer," he said, "God and His Angels have us in their keeping." Thoughtfully he ascended the steep streets to the piazza, and, entering the Cathedral, he remained there for a long while absorbed in prayer. And as he prayed his face brightened with the look of one who hears joyful news, and when he rose from his knees he went to the house of the Syndic, and spoke with him long and seriously. At sunset that day a man-at-arms went forth from the gates of the castello with a white flag to the beleaguering lines, and demanded to be taken into the presence of the captain. To him he delivered this message from the Syndic: "To-morrow in the morning the gate of Spinalunga will be thrown open, and all the children of our town who are not halt or blind or ailing shall be sent forth. Come and choose the twenty you would have as hostages." By the camp-fires that night the Free-lances caroused loud and long; but in the little hill-town the children slept sound while the men and women prayed with pale stern faces. An hour after midnight all the garrison from the towers and all the strong young men assembled in the square. They were divided into two bands, and were instructed to descend cautiously by rope-ladders into the ravine on the eastern side of the town. Thence without sound of tongue or foot they were to steal through the darkness till they had reached certain positions on the flanks of the besiegers, where they were to wait for the signal of onset. Frate Agnolo gave each of them his blessing, as one by one they slid over the wall on to the rope-ladders and disappeared in the blackness of the ravine. Noiselessly they marched under the walls of the town till they reached their appointed posts, and there they lay hidden in the woods till morning. The Free-lances were early astir. As the first ray of golden light streamed over the pine woods on to the ridge and the valley, the bells of the Cathedral began to ring; the heavy gate of the castello was flung open, and the children trooped out laughing and gay, just as they had burst into the square a few months ago, for this, they were told, was to be a great feast and holiday. As they issued through the deep stone archway they filed to right or left, and drew up in long lines across the width of the ridge. Then raising their childish voices in a simple hymn, they all moved together down the rough slope to the lines of the besiegers. Brother Agnolo, holding a plain wooden cross high above his head, led the way, singing joyously. It was a wonderful sight in the clear shining air of the hills, and hundreds of women weeping silently on the walls crowded together to watch it; and as they watched they held their breath, for suddenly in the golden light of the morning they saw that behind each child there was a great white-winged Angel with a fiery spear. Then, as that throng of singing children and shining spirits swept down upon the Free-lances, a wild cry of panic arose from the camp. The eight hundred horsemen turned in dismay, and plunged through the ranks of the men-at-arms, and the mercenaries fell back in terror and confusion, striking each other down and trampling the wounded underfoot in their frantic efforts to escape. At that moment the hill-men who were lying in ambush on each flank bore down on the bewildered multitude, and hacked and hewed right and left till the boldest and hardiest of the horsemen broke and fled, leaving their dead and dying on the field. [Illustration: _The eight hundred horsemen turned in dismay_] So the little hill-town of Spinalunga was saved by the children and their Angels, and even to this day the piazza of the Cathedral is their very own playground, in which no one can prevent them from playing all the year round. The Sin of the Prince Bishop The Prince Bishop Evrard stood gazing at his marvellous Cathedral; and as he let his eyes wander in delight over the three deep sculptured portals and the double gallery above them, and the great rose window, and the ringers' gallery, and so up to the massive western towers, he felt as though his heart were clapping hands for joy within him. And he thought to himself, "Surely in all the world God has no more beautiful house than this which I have built with such long labour and at so princely an outlay of my treasure." And thus the Prince Bishop fell into the sin of vainglory, and, though he was a holy man, he did not perceive that he had fallen, so filled with gladness was he at the sight of his completed work. [Illustration: "_Surely in all the world God has no more beautiful house than this_"] In the double gallery of the west front there were many great statues with crowns and sceptres, but a niche over the central portal was empty, and this the Prince Bishop intended to fill with a statue of himself. It was to be a very small simple statue, as became one who prized lowliness of heart, but as he looked up at the vacant place it gave him pleasure to think that hundreds of years after he was dead people would pause before his effigy and praise him and his work. And this, too, was vainglory. As the Prince Bishop lay asleep that night a mighty six-winged Angel stood beside him and bade him rise. "Come," he said, "and I will show thee some of those who have worked with thee in building the great church, and whose service in God's eyes has been more worthy than thine." And the Angel led him past the Cathedral and down the steep street of the ancient city, and though it was midday, the people going to and fro did not seem to see them. Beyond the gates they followed the shelving road till they came to green level fields, and there in the middle of the road, between grassy banks covered white with cherry blossom, two great white oxen, yoked to a huge block of stone, stood resting before they began the toilsome ascent. "Look!" said the Angel; and the Prince Bishop saw a little blue-winged bird which perched on the stout yoke beam fastened to the horns of the oxen, and sang such a heavenly song of rest and contentment that the big shaggy creatures ceased to blow stormily through their nostrils, and drew long tranquil breaths instead. "Look again!" said the Angel. And from a hut of wattles and clay a little peasant girl came with a bundle of hay in her arms, and gave first one of the oxen and then the other a wisp. Then she stroked their black muzzles, and laid her rosy face against their white cheeks. Then the Prince Bishop saw the rude teamster rise from his rest on the bank and cry to his cattle, and the oxen strained against the beam and the thick ropes tightened, and the huge block of stone was once more set in motion. And when the Prince Bishop saw that it was these fellow-workers whose service was more worthy in God's eyes than his own, he was abashed and sorrowful for his sin, and the tears of his own weeping awoke him. So he sent for the master of the sculptors and bade him fill the little niche over the middle portal, not with his own effigy but with an image of the child; and he bade him make two colossal figures of the white oxen; and to the great wonderment of the people these were set up high in the tower so that men could see them against the blue sky. "And as for me," he said, "let my body be buried, with my face downward, outside the great church, in front of the middle entrance, that men may trample on my vainglory and that I may serve them as a stepping-stone to the house of God; and the little child shall look on me when I lie in the dust." Now the little girl in the niche was carved with wisps of hay in her hands, but the child who had fed the oxen knew nothing of this, and as she grew up she forgot her childish service, so that when she had grown to womanhood and chanced to see this statue over the portal she did not know it was her own self in stone. But what she had done was not forgotten in heaven. And as for the oxen, one of them looked east and one looked west across the wide fruitful country about the foot of the hill-city. And one caught the first grey gleam, and the first rosy flush, and the first golden splendour of the sunrise; and the other was lit with the colour of the sunset long after the lowlands had faded away in the blue mist of the twilight. Weary men and worn women looking up at them felt that a gladness and a glory and a deep peace had fallen on the life of toil. And then, when people began to understand, they said it was well that these mighty labourers, who had helped to build the house, should still find a place of service and honour in the house; and they remembered that the Master of the house had once been a Babe warmed in a manger by the breath of kine. And at the thought of this men grew more pitiful to their cattle, and to the beasts in servitude, and to all dumb animals. And that was one good fruit which sprang from the Prince Bishop's repentance. Now over the colossal stone oxen hung the bells of the Cathedral. On Christmas Eve the ringers, according to the old custom, ascended to their gallery to ring in the birth of the Babe Divine. At the moment of midnight the master ringer gave the word, and the great bells began to swing in joyful sequence. Down below in the crowded church lay the image of the new-born Child on the cold straw, and at His haloed head stood the images of the ox and the ass. Far out across the snow-roofed city, far away over the white glistening country rang the glad music of the tower. People who went to their doors to listen cried in astonishment: "Hark! what strange music is that? It sounds as if the lowing of cattle were mingled with the chimes of the bells." In truth it was so. And in every byre the oxen and the kine answered the strange sweet cadences with their lowing, and the great stone oxen lowed back to their kin of the meadow through the deep notes of the joy-peal. In the fulness of time the Prince Bishop Evrard died and was buried as he had willed, with his face humbly turned to the earth; and to this day the weather-wasted figure of the little girl looks down on him from her niche, and the slab over his grave serves as a stepping-stone to pious feet. The Little Bedesman of Christ This is the legend of Francis, the Little Bedesman of Christ. Seven hundred years ago was he born in Assisi, the quaint Umbrian town among the rocks; and for twenty years and more he cherished but one thought, and one desire, and one hope; and these were that he might lead the beautiful and holy and sorrowful life which our Lord lived on the earth, and that in every way he might resemble our Lord in the purity and loveliness of His humanity. Home and wealth and honour he surrendered, and the love of a wife and of little prattlers on his knees; for none of these things were the portion of Christ. No care he took as to how he should be sheltered by night or wherewith he should be clothed by day; and for meat and drink he looked to the hand of God, for these were to be the daily gift of His giving. So that when he heard the words of the sacred Gospel read in the little church of St. Mary of the Angels--"Provide neither gold nor silver nor brass in your purses, nor scrip for your journey, neither two coats, neither shoes, nor yet staves"--he went out and girt his coarse brown dress with a piece of cord, and cast away his shoes and went barefoot thenceforth. Even to this day the brethren of the great Order of religious men which he founded are thus clothed, and girt with a cord, and shod with nakedness. And this Order is the Order of the Lesser Brethren, the Fratres Minores; and often they are called Franciscans, or the Friars of St. Francis. But as to the thought he bestowed on his eating and drinking: once when he and Brother Masseo sat down on a broad stone near a fresh fountain to eat the bread which they had begged in the town, St. Francis rejoiced in their prosperity, saying, "Not only are we filled with plenty, but our treasure is of God's own providing; for consider this bread which has come to us like manna, and this noble table of stone fit for the feasting of kings, and this well of bright water which is beverage from heaven;" and he besought God to fill their hearts with an ardent love of the affluence of holy poverty. [Illustration: _St. Francis of Assisi_] Even the quiet and blessed peace of the cloister and the hermitage he denied himself; for he remembered that though the Lord Christ withdrew into the hills and went into the wilderness to refresh His soul with prayer and communion with His Heavenly Father, it was among the sons of men that He had His dwelling all His days. So he, too, the Little Bedesman, often tasted great happiness among the rocks and trees of solitary places; and his spirit felt the spell of the lonely hills; and he loved to pray in the woods, and in their shadow he was consoled by the visits of Angels, and was lifted bodily from the earth in ecstasies of joy. But the work which he had set his hands to do was among men, and in villages and the busy streets of cities. It was not in the first place to save their own souls and to attain to holiness that he and his companions abandoned the common way of life. Long afterwards, when thousands of men had joined his Order of the Lesser Brethren, he said: "God has gathered us into this holy Order for the salvation of the world, and between us and the world He has made this compact, that we shall give the world a good example, and the world shall make provision for our necessities." Yet, though he preached repentance and sorrow for sin, never was it his wish that men and women who had other duties should abandon those duties and their calling to follow his example. Besides the Order of the Lesser Brethren, he had founded an Order of holy women who should pray and praise while the men went forth to teach; but well he knew that all could not do as these had done, that the work of the world must be carried on, the fields ploughed and reaped, and the vines dressed, and the nets cast and drawn, and ships manned at sea, and markets filled, and children reared, and aged people nourished, and the dead laid in their graves; and when people were deeply moved by his preaching and would fain have followed him, he would say: "Nay, be in no unwise haste to leave your homes; there, too, you may serve God and be devout and holy;" and, promising them a rule of life, he founded the Third Order, into which, whatever their age or calling, all who desired to be true followers of Christ Jesus might be admitted. Even among those who gave themselves up wholly to the life spiritual he discouraged excessive austerity, forbidding them to fast excessively or to wear shirts of mail and bands of iron on their flesh, for these not only injured their health and lessened their usefulness, but hindered them in prayer and meditation and delight in the love of God. Once, too, when it was revealed to him that a brother lay sleepless because of his weakness and the pinch of hunger, St. Francis rose, and, taking some bread with him, went to the brother's cell, and begged of him that they might eat that frugal fare together. God gave us these bodies of ours, not that we might torture them unwisely, but that we might use their strength and comeliness in His service. So, with little heed to his own comfort, but full of consideration and gentleness for the weakness of others, he and his companions with him went about, preaching and praising God; cheering and helping the reapers and vintagers in the harvest time, and working with the field-folk in the earlier season; supping and praying with them afterwards; sleeping, when day failed, in barns or church porches or leper-hospitals, or may be in an old Etruscan tomb or in the shelter of a jutting rock, if no better chance befell; till at last they came to be known and beloved in every village and feudal castle and walled town among the hills between Rome and Florence. At first, indeed, they were mocked and derided and rudely treated, but in a little while it was seen that they were no self-seekers crazed with vanity, but messengers of heaven, and pure and great-hearted champions of Christ and His poor. In those days of luxury and rapacity and of wild passions and ruthless bloodshed, it was strange to see these men stripping themselves of wealth and power--for many of the brethren had been rich and noble--and proclaiming the Gospel of the love and gentleness and purity and poverty of Christ. For not only were the brethren under vow to possess nothing whatever in the world, and not only were they forbidden to touch money on any account, but the Order itself was bound to poverty. It could not own great estates or noble abbeys and convents, but was as much dependent on charity and God's providing as the humblest of its friars. Was it a wonderful thing that a great affection grew up in the hearts of the people for these preachers of the Cross, and especially for the most sweet and tender of them all, the Little Bedesman of Christ, with the delicate and kindly face worn by fasting, the black eyes, and the soft and sonorous voice? Greatly the common people loved our Lord, and gladly they listened to Him; and of all men who have lived St. Francis was most like our Lord in the grace and virtue of His humanity. I do not think that ever at any time did he say or do anything till he had first asked himself, What would my Lord have done or said? And certain it seems to me that he must have thought of the Thief in Paradise and of the divine words Christ spoke to him on the cross, when Brother Angelo, the guardian of a hermitage among the mountains, told him how three notorious robbers had come begging; "but I," said the Brother, "quickly drove them away with harsh and bitter words." "Then sorely hast thou sinned against charity," replied the Saint in a stern voice, "and ill hast thou obeyed the holy Gospel of Christ, who wins back sinners by gentleness, and not by cruel reproofs. Go now, and take with thee this wallet of bread and this little flask of wine which I have begged, and get thee over hill and valley till thou hast found these men; and when thou comest up with them, give them the bread and the wine as my gift to them, and beg pardon on thy knees for thy fault, and tell them that I beseech them no longer to do wrong, but to fear and love God; and if this they will do, I will provide for them so that all their days they shall not lack food and drink." Then Brother Angelo did as he was bidden, and the robbers returned with him and became God's bedesmen and died in His service. Not to men alone but to all living things on earth and air and water was St. Francis most gracious and loving. They were all his little brothers and sisters, and he forgot them not, still less scorned or slighted them, but spoke to them often and blessed them, and in return they showed him great love and sought to be of his fellowship. He bade his companions keep plots of ground for their little sisters the flowers, and to these lovely and speechless creatures he spoke, with no great fear that they would not understand his words. And all this was a marvellous thing in a cruel time, when human life was accounted of slight worth by fierce barons and ruffling marauders. For the bees he set honey and wine in the winter, lest they should feel the nip of the cold too keenly; and bread for the birds, that they all, but especially "my brother Lark," should have joy of Christmastide, and at Rieti a brood of redbreasts were the guests of the house and raided the tables while the brethren were at meals; and when a youth gave St. Francis the turtle-doves he had snared, the Saint had nests made for them, and there they laid their eggs and hatched them, and fed from the hands of the brethren. Out of affection a fisherman once gave him a great tench, but he put it back into the clear water of the lake, bidding it love God; and the fish played about the boat till St. Francis blessed it and bade it go. "Why dost thou torment my little brothers the Lambs," he asked of a shepherd, "carrying them bound thus and hanging from a staff, so that they cry piteously?" And in exchange for the lambs he gave the shepherd his cloak. And at another time seeing amid a flock of goats one white lamb feeding, he was concerned that he had nothing but his brown robe to offer for it (for it reminded him of our Lord among the Pharisees); but a merchant came up and paid for it and gave it him, and he took it with him to the city and preached about it so that the hearts of those hearing him were melted. Afterwards the lamb was left in the care of a convent of holy women, and to the Saint's great delight, these wove him a gown of the lamb's innocent wool. Fain would I tell of the coneys that took refuge in the folds of his habit, and of the swifts which flew screaming in their glee while he was preaching; but now it is time to speak of the sermon which he preached to a great multitude of birds in a field by the roadside, when he was on his way to Bevagno. Down from the trees flew the birds to hear him, and they nestled in the grassy bosom of the field, and listened till he had done. And these were the words he spoke to them: "Little birds, little sisters mine, much are you holden to God your Creator; and at all times and in every place you ought to praise Him. Freedom he has given you to fly everywhere; and raiment He has given you, double and threefold. More than this, He preserved your kind in the Ark, so that your race might not come to an end. Still more do you owe him for the element of air, which he has made your portion. Over and above, you sow not, neither do you reap; but God feeds you, and gives you streams and springs for your thirst; the mountains He gives you, and the valleys for your refuge, and the tall trees wherein to build your nests. And because you cannot sew or spin, God takes thought to clothe you, you and your little ones. It must be, then, that your Creator loves you much, since He has granted you so many benefits. Be on your guard then against the sin of ingratitude, and strive always to give God praise." And when the Saint ceased speaking, the birds made such signs as they might, by spreading their wings and opening their beaks, to show their love and pleasure; and when he had blessed them with the sign of the cross, they sprang up, and singing songs of unspeakable sweetness, away they streamed in a great cross to the four quarters of heaven. One more story I must tell of the Saint and the wild creatures. On a time when St. Francis was dwelling in the town of Agobio, there appeared in that countryside a monstrous grey wolf, which was so savage a man-eater that the people were afraid to go abroad, even when well armed. A pity it was to see folk in such fear and danger; wherefore the Saint, putting his whole trust in God, went out with his companions so far as they dared go, and thence onward all alone to the place where the wolf lay. The wild beast rushed out at him from his lair with open mouth, but St. Francis waited and made over him the sign of the most holy cross, and called him to him, saying, "Come hither, Brother Wolf! In the name of Christ I bid you do no harm, neither to me nor to any one." And when the wolf closed his jaws and stopped running, and came at the Saint's bidding, as gentle as a lamb, and lay down at his feet, St. Francis rebuked him for the slaying of God's creatures, the beasts, and even men made in God's image. "But fain would I make peace," he said, "between you and these townsfolk; so that if you pledge them your faith that you will do no more scathe either to man or beast, they will forgive you all your offences in the past, and neither men nor dogs shall harry you any more. And I will look to it that you shall always have food as long as you abide with the folk of this countryside." Whereupon Brother Wolf, by movements of body and tail and bowing of head, gave token of his good will to abide by that bargain. And in sign that he plighted his troth to it he gave the Saint his paw, and followed to the market-place of Agobio, where St. Francis repeated all that he had said, and the people agreed to the bargain, and once more the wolf gave pledge of his faith by putting his paw in the Saint's hand. For two years thereafter Brother Wolf dwelt in Agobio, going tame and gentle from house to house and in and out at will, doing hurt to none, but much loved of the children and cared for in food and drink and kindness by the townsfolk, so that no one lifted stone or stick against him, neither did any dog bark at him. At the end of those years he died of old age, and the people were grieved that no more should they see his gentle coming and going. Such was the courtesy and sweet fellowship of St. Francis with the wild creatures. It remains yet to say of him that he was ever gay and joyous as became God's gleeman. Greatly he loved the song of bird and man, and all melody and minstrelsy. Nor was it ill-pleasing to God that he should rejoice in these good gifts, for once lying in his cell faint with fever, to him came the thought that the sound of music might ease his pain; but when the friar whom he asked to play for him was afraid of causing a scandal by his playing, St. Francis, left alone, heard such music that his suffering ceased and his fever left him. And as he lay listening he was aware that the sound kept coming and going; and how could it have been otherwise? for it was the lute-playing of an Angel, far away, walking in Paradise. Sweet new songs he made in the language of the common people, folk of field and mountain, muleteers and vine-dressers, woodmen and hunters, so that they in turn might be light of heart amid their toil and sorrow. One great hymn he composed, and of that I will speak later; but indeed all his sayings and sermons were a sort of divine song, and when he sent his companions from one village to another he bade them say: "We are God's gleemen. For song and sermon we ask largesse, and our largesse shall be that you persevere in sorrow for your sins." Seeing that ladies of the world, great and beautiful, took pleasure in the songs of the troubadours sung at twilight under their windows, he charged all the churches of his Order that at fall of day the bells should be rung to recall the greeting with which Gabriel the Angel saluted the Virgin Mother of the Lord: "Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with thee, blessed art thou among women." And from that day to this the bells have rung out the Angelus at sunset, and now there is no land under heaven wherein those bells are not heard and wherein devout men hearing them do not pause to repeat that greeting angelic. In like fashion it was great delight to him (the Pope having given him leave) to make in the churches of the Order a representation of the Crib of Bethlehem on the feast of the Nativity. Of these the first was made at the hermitage of Greccio. Thither the peasants flocked on Christmas Eve, with lanterns and torches, making the forest ring with their carols; and there in the church they found a stable with straw, and an ox and an ass tethered to the manger; and St. Francis spoke to the folk about Bethlehem and the Shepherds in the field, and the birth of the divine Babe, so that all who heard him wept happy tears of compassion and thankfulness. And as St. Francis stood sighing for joy and gazing at the empty manger, behold! a wondrous thing happened. For the knight Giovanni, who had given the ox and the ass and the stable, saw that on the straw in the manger there lay a beautiful child, which awoke from slumber, as it seemed, and stretched out its little hands to St. Francis as he leaned over it. Even to this day there is no land in which you may not see, on Christmas Eve, the Crib of Bethlehem; but in those old days of St. Francis many souls were saved by the sight of that lowly manger from the sin of those heretics who denied that the Word was made flesh and that the Son of God was born as a little child for our salvation. The joy and gaiety of St. Francis were of two kinds. There was the joy of love, and there was the joy of suffering for love. And of this last he spoke a wonderful rhapsody as he journeyed once with Brother Leo, in the grievous cold of the early spring, from Perugia to St. Mary of the Angels. For, as Brother Leo was walking on before, St. Francis called aloud to him:-- "O Brother Leo, although throughout the world the Lesser Brethren were mirrors of holiness and edification, nevertheless write it down, and give good heed to it, that not therein is perfect joy." And again, a little further on, he called aloud: "O Brother Leo, though the Lesser Brother should give the blind sight, and make the misshapen straight, and cast out devils, and give hearing to the deaf, and make the lame to walk and the dumb to speak; yea, should he even raise the four days' dead to life, write it down that not herein is perfect joy." And yet a little further on he cried out: "O Brother Leo, if the Lesser Brother should know all languages, and every science, and all the Scriptures, so that he could foretell not solely the hidden things of the future but also the secrets of the heart, write down that not therein is perfect joy." A little further yet, and once again he cried aloud: "O Brother Leo, God's little sheep, though the Lesser Brother were to speak with the tongue of the Angels, and know the courses of the stars and the virtues of herbs, and though the treasures of the earth were discovered to him, and he had craft and knowledge of birds and fishes and of all living creatures, and of men, and of trees and stones, and roots and waters, write it down that not therein is perfect joy." And once more, having gone a little further, St. Francis called aloud: "O Brother Leo, even though the Lesser Brother could by his preaching convert all the unbelievers to the faith of Christ, write down that not therein is perfect joy." And when, after St. Francis had spoken in this manner for the space of two miles, Brother Leo besought him to reveal wherein might perfect joy be found, St. Francis answered him: "When we are come, drenched with rain and benumbed with cold and bespattered with mud and aching with hunger, to St. Mary of the Angels, and knock at the door, and the porter asks wrathfully, 'Who are you?' and on our answering, 'Two of your brethren are we,' 'Two gangrel rogues,' says he, 'who go about cheating the world and sorning the alms of the poor; away with you!' and whips the door to, leaving us till nightfall, cold and famished, in the snow and rain; if with patience we bear this injury and harshness and rejection, nowise ruined in our mind and making no murmur of complaint, but considering within ourselves, humbly and in charity, that the porter knows well who we are, and that God sets him up to speak against us--O Brother Leo, write down that therein is perfect joy." And perfect joy, he added, if, knocking a second time, they brought the porter out upon them, fuming, and bidding them betake themselves to the alms-house, for knaves and thieves, and nevertheless they bore all with patience and with gladness and love. And yet again, he continued, if a third time they knocked and shouted to him, for pity of their hunger and cold and the misery of the night, to let them in, and he came, fierce with rage, crying, "Ah, bold and sturdy vagabonds, now I will pay you," and caught them by the hood, and hurled them into the snow, and belaboured them with a knotty cudgel; and if still, in despite of all pain and contumely, they endured with gladness, thinking of the pains of the blessed Lord Christ, which for love of Him they too should be willing to bear--then might it be truly written down that therein was perfect joy. This was the perfect joy of the Saint most like to Christ of all the Saints that the world has seen. And of all joys this was the most perfect, seeing that it was by the patient way of tears and tribulation, of bodily pain and anguish of spirit, of humiliation and rejection, that a man might come most nearly to a likeness of Christ. Through all his gaiety and gladness and benignity he carried in his heart one sorrow, and that was the memory of the Passion of our Lord. Once he was found weeping in the country, and when he was asked whether he was in grievous pain that he wept, "Ah!" he replied, "it is for the Passion of my Lord Jesus that I weep; and for that I should think little shame to go weeping through the whole world." Two years before his death there befell him that miraculous transfiguration, which, so far as it may be with a sinful son of Adam, made perfect the resemblance between him and the Saviour crucified. And it was after this manner. In the upper valley of the Arno stream there towers above the pines and giant beeches of the hills a great basalt rock, Alvernia, which looks over Italy, east and west, to the two seas. That rock is accessible by but a single foot-track, and it is gashed and riven by grim chasms, yet withal great oaks and beech-trees flourish atop among the boulders, and there are drifts of fragrant wild flowers, and legions of birds and other wild creatures dwell there; and the lights and colours of heaven play about the rock, and the winds of heaven visit it with wholesome air. Now a great and wealthy gentleman of Tuscany, Orlando of Chiusi, gave St. Francis that mountain for a hermitage where he could be remote from men, and thither, with three of the brethren most dear to him, the Saint went to spend the forty days of the Fast of St. Michael the Archangel. Two nights they slept on the way, but on the third day, so worn was St. Francis with fatigue and illness, that his companions were fain to beg a poor peasant to lend them his ass. As they proceeded on their journey the peasant, walking behind the ass, said to St. Francis, "Tell me now, art thou Brother Francis of Assisi?" and when St. Francis said he was, the peasant rejoined, "Look to it, then, that thou strive to be as good as folk take thee to be, so that those who have faith in thee be not disappointed in what they expect to find in thee." And instantly St. Francis got down from the ass, and, kneeling on the ground, kissed the peasant's feet, and thanked him for his brotherly admonition. So onward they journeyed up the mountain till they came to the foot of Alvernia, and there as St. Francis rested him under an oak, vast flights of birds came fluttering and blithely singing, and alighted on his shoulders and arms, and on his lap, and about his feet. "Not ill-pleased is our Lord, I think," said he, "that we have come to dwell on this mountain, seeing what glee our little brothers and sisters the Birds show at our coming." Under a fair beech on the top of the rock the brethren built him a cell of branches, and he lived alone in prayer, apart from the others, for the foreknowledge of his death had overshadowed him. Once as he stood by the cell, scanning the shape of the mountain and musing on the clefts and chasms in the huge rocks, it was borne in upon him that the mountain had been thus torn and cloven in the Ninth Hour when our Lord cried with a loud voice, and the rocks were rent. And beside this beech-tree St. Francis was many times uplifted into the air in rapture, and many times Angels came to him, and walked with him for his consolation. A while later, the brethren laid a tree across a chasm, and St. Francis hid himself in a more lonely place, where no one might hear him when he cried out; and a falcon, which had its nest hard by his cell, woke him for matins, and according as he was more weary or sickly at one time than another, that feathered brother, having compassion on him, woke him later or sooner, and all the long day was at hand to give him companionship. Here in this wild place, in September, on Holy Cross Day, early in the morning, before the dawn whitened, St. Francis knelt with his face turned to the dark east; and praying long and with great fervour, he besought the Lord Christ Jesus for two graces before he died. And the first was this, that, so far as mortal flesh might bear it, he might feel in his body the torture which our Lord suffered in His Passion; and the second, that he might feel in his heart the exceeding great love for which He was willing to bear such torture. Now even while he was praying in this wise a mighty six-winged Seraph, burning with light unspeakable, came flying towards him; and St. Francis saw that the Seraph bore within himself the figure of a cross, and thereon the image of a man crucified. Two of the six wings of the Seraph were lifted up over the head of the crucified; and two were spread for flying; and two veiled the whole of the body on the cross. Then as the Seraph drew nigh, the eyes of Christ the crucified looked into the eyes of St. Francis, piercing and sweet and terrible; and St. Francis could scarce endure the rapture and the agony with which that look consumed him, and transfigured him, and burned into his body the similitude of Christ's Passion. For straightway his hands and his feet were pierced through and through with nails; and the heads of the nails were round and black, and the points were bent backward and riveted on the further side of hand and foot; and his right side was opened with the deep thrust of the spear; and the gash was red and blood came dropping from it. Terrible to bear was the ache of those wounds; and for the nails in his feet St. Francis scarce could stand and could not walk at all. Such was the transfiguration of the Little Bedesman of Christ into His visible semblance on the holy rock Alvernia. For two years he sustained the ecstasy and anguish of that likeness, but of his sayings and of the wonders he wrought in that time I will not speak. In those days he composed the Song of the Sun, and oftentimes sang it, and in many a village and market-place was it sung by the brethren going two by two in their labour for souls. A mighty hymn of praise to the Lord God most high and omnipotent was this Song of the Sun; for in this manner it was that St. Francis sang: "Praised be Thou, my Lord; by all Thy creatures praised; and chiefly praised by Brother Sun who gives us light of day. "Through him Thou shinest; fair is he, brilliant with glittering fire; and he through heaven bears, Most High, symbol and sense of thee. "Praised by Sister Moon be Thou; and praised by all the Stars. These hast Thou made, and Thou hast made them precious and beautiful and bright. "Praised by Brother Wind be Thou; by Air, and Cloud that lives in air, and all the Weathers of the world, whereby their keep Thou dost provide for all the creatures Thou hast made. "Praised by Sister Water, Lord, be Thou; the lowly water, precious, pure, the gracious handmaiden. "Praised by Brother Fire, by whom Thou makest light for us i' the dark; and fair is he and jocund, sturdy and strong. "Praised by our Sister Mother-Earth, which keeps us and sustains, and gives forth plenteous fruit, and grass, and coloured flowers. "Praised be Thou, Lord my God, by those who for Thy love forgive, and for Thy love endure; blessed in their patience they; by Thee shall they be crowned." As he drew nigh to his end at St. Mary of the Angels, he cried out, "Welcome, Sister Death!" and when his brethren, as he had bidden them, sang once more the Song of the Sun, he added another verse: "Praised by our Sister Death be Thou--that bodily death which no man may escape. Alas for those who die in mortal sin, but happy they conforming to Thy will; for these the second death shall nowise hurt." In the tenth month, on the fourth day of the month, in the forty-and-fifth year of his age, having recited the Psalm, "I cried unto Thee, O Lord, and said: Thou art my hope and my portion in the land of the living," St. Francis died very joyfully. At the fall of the night he died, and while still the brethren were gazing upon his face there dropped down on the thatch of the cell in which he lay larks innumerable, and most sweetly they sang, as though they rejoiced at the release of their holy kinsman. He was buried at the great church at Assisi; but though it is thought he lies beneath the high altar, the spot is unknown to any man, and the hill-folk say that St. Francis is not dead at all, but that he lives hidden in a secret crypt far down below the roots of wall and pillar. Standing there, pale and upright, with the blood red in the five wounds of his crucifixion, he waits in a heavenly trance for the sound of the last trumpet, when the nations of the earth shall see in the clouds Him whom they have pierced. Long after his death it was the custom of the brethren of a certain house of his Order to go chanting in procession at midnight once in the year to his resting-place. But the way was long and dark; the weather often bleak and stormy. Little by little devotion cooled, and the friars fell away, till there remained but one old monk willing to go on this pilgrimage. As he went into the dark and the storm, the road among the woods and rocks grew luminous, and in place of the cross and torches and canticles of the former days, great flocks of birds escorted him on his way, singing and keeping him company. The little feathered brothers and sisters had not abated in their love of the Little Bedesman who had caressed and blessed them. The Burning of Abbot Spiridion Many wonderful things are told of the Abbot Spiridion, who lived a hundred years and four and yet grew never old; neither was the brightness of his eyes dimmed nor his hair silvered, nor was his frame bowed and palsied with the weakness of age. During the long years in which he ruled the abbey he had founded, he seemed to live less in this world than in the communion of the blessed souls of men redeemed. The whole earth was as clear to him as though it had been of crystal, and when he raised his eyes he saw not solely what other men saw, but the vision of all that is under the heavens. And this vision of life was at once his trial and his consolation. For it was an unspeakable sorrow and anguish to see on all sides the sin and suffering and misery of creation, and often he wept bitterly when no one dared ask him the reason of his affliction. Yet oftentimes, on the other hand, he laughed for lightness of spirit, and bade the brethren rejoice because of the salvation of some reprobate soul, or the relief of one oppressed, or the bestowal of some blessing on the servants of God. When it happened that a brother had been sent on a journey and was long absent, and the community was talking of him, wondering how he had fared and where he might now be, the Abbot would sometimes break silence and say: "I see our brother resting in such or such a cell," or "Our brother is even now singing a psalm as he drifts in his small boat of skins down this or that river," or, perchance, "Our brother is coming over the hill and in an hour he will be with us." In the abbey there was a certain lay-brother, dull and slow of wit, with a hindrance in his speech; and one of the monks despised him and scoffed at his defect of nature. This lay-brother had the care of the garden of pot-herbs and fruit-trees, and as he was toiling there one day the Abbot called the uncharitable monk to him, and said: "Come, let us see what our brother the Fool is doing." The monk trembled when he heard those words, for he knew that his scornfulness had been discovered, and he followed the Abbot in great confusion. In the garden they found the lay-brother planting cabbages. "Is our brother the Fool alone?" asked the Abbot. "Our brother is alone, father," replied the monk. Then the Abbot touched the monk's eyes, and straightway he saw that the lay-brother was not alone: beside him were two radiant child-angels, one of whom held for him a basket containing the young plants, and the second walked to and fro playing on a lute to lighten his labour. Then, overwhelmed with shame, the monk fell on his knees, confessing his sin and promising amendment. More strange than this is the story I have now to tell. It happened through mischance that fire broke out in the abbey, and the flames were spreading so fiercely from one wattled cell to another that there was great danger of the whole monastery being destroyed. With piteous cries the religious surrounded the Abbot, and besought him to intercede with God that their home might be spared. Spiridion gently shook his head. "The mercy of God," he replied, "has given it to another to intercede for us in our danger this day. The holy Pontiff, Gregory, has looked out of Rome and seen us in our trouble. At this moment he is kneeling in prayer for us, and his supplication on our behalf will avail." Even while Spiridion was speaking, the Pope, far away in the Golden City, beheld the flames rising from the abbey, and called his household to join him in entreating heaven; and at once it was seen that the flames were being beaten to the ground and extinguished as though invisible hands were beating them down with invisible branches of trees. Now when the brethren were made aware that the whole earth was being constantly shown thus in vision to the Abbot, they stood in sad dread of him; even the most pure and lowly-hearted were abashed at this thought that perchance every act and every vain fancy of theirs was laid bare to his knowledge. So it came to pass that out of shame and fear their hearts were little by little estranged from him. The Abbot was not slow to perceive the change, and he spoke of it when they met in chapter. "Truly it is a grievous and a terrible thing," he said, "that any man should see with the eyes of the soul more than it is given the eye of flesh to see; and I pray you, brethren, beseech the Lord, if it be His will, that the vision be withdrawn from me. But if His will it be not, beseech Him that I may not sin through seeing. So much for myself, but as for you, dear children, why are you grieved? Because it may be that I see you when you think no man sees you? Am I then the only one who sees you? Is there not at least one other--even the high God, from whom the hidden man of the heart is nowise hidden? If you fear His holy eyes, little need you fear the eyes of any sinful man." Such a one was the Abbot Spiridion. His spirit passed from among men in the hundred and fifth year of his exile, in the third month of the year, on the morning of the resurrection of the Lord Christ, between the white and the red of the morning, when the brethren were singing prime. As he listened to them singing, his cheeks suddenly became flushed with bright colour, and those who were about him, thinking he was in pain, asked if in any way they might relieve him; but he replied in a low voice, "When the heart is glad the face flowers." In a little after that he laughed softly to himself, and so they knew that his end was gladness. When he died there were three hundred religious in that monastery, and in his stead Samson was made Abbot of Gracedieu. The body of Spiridion was laid in a stone coffin hard by the abbey church, and to those who had known the holy man it seemed nothing strange that the sick and afflicted should come and kneel by his grave, in the hope that by his intercession they might obtain succour in their misery. Certain it is that the blind were restored to sight, and the sick to health, and the painful to great ease; and the fame of these miracles was noised abroad in the world till thousands came in pilgrimage to the spot, and costly gifts--gold and silver and jewels, sheep and cattle, wine and corn, and even charters of large demesnes, fruitful fields and woods and waters--were bestowed as thank-offerings to the saintly man. Then over his tomb rose a vast and beautiful minster, and the tomb itself was covered with a shrine, brilliant with blue and vermilion and gold and sculptured flowers, and guarded by angels with outspreading wings. At the beginning Abbot Samson was well pleased, for the great church rose like a dream of heaven, but when he perceived that the constant concourse of people was destroying the hushed contemplation and piety of the house, and that the brethren were distracted with eagerness for gain and luxury and the pride of life, he resolved to make an end. Wherefore after High Mass on the Feast of All Saints he bade the religious walk in procession to the splendid shrine, and there the Abbot, with the shepherd's staff of rule in his hand, struck thrice on the stone coffin, and three times he called aloud: "Spiridion! Spiridion! Spiridion!" and begged him, as he had been founder and first father of that monastery, to listen to the grievance which had befallen them in consequence of the miracles he had wrought from his grave. And after an indignant recital of their loss of humility, of their lukewarmness, of their desire for excitement and the pageants of the world, of their lust for buildings of stone and pillared walks and plentiful living, he concluded: "Make, then, we beseech thee, no sign from thy sepulchre. Let life and death, and joy and sorrow, and blindness and disease, and all the vicissitudes of this world follow their natural courses. Do not thou, out of compassion for thy fellow-man, interpose in the lawful succession of things. This is what we ask of thee, expecting it of thy love. But if it be that thou deny us, solemnly we declare unto thee, by the obedience which once we owed thee, we shall unearth thy bones and cast them forth from amongst us." Now whether it was that for some high purpose God delayed the answer to that prayer, or whether it was the folly and superstition of men which gave to things natural the likeness of the miraculous, and even peradventure the folk lied out of a mistaken zeal for the glory of the saints, there was no abatement of the wonders wrought at Spiridion's tomb; and when the Abbot would have forbidden access to the vast crowds of pilgrims, the people resisted with angry violence and threatened fire and bloodshed. So Samson summoned the wisest and holiest of the brotherhood, and took them into counsel. "This thing," said he, "cannot be of God, that one of His saints, the founder of this house, should lead into sloth and luxury the children of the house he has founded. Sooner could I believe that this is a malignant snare of the most Evil One, who heals the bodily ailments of a few that he may wreck the immortal souls of many." Then arose Dom Walaric, the most aged of the monks, and said: "Already, Father Abbot, hast thou spoken judgment. Grievously shall I lament what must be done; but in one way only can we root out this corruption. Let the bones of the holy man be unearthed and cast forth. He in the high heavens will know that we do not use him despitefully, but that of two evils this, indeed, is scarcely to be spoken of as an evil." Wherefore, in a grassy bay of the land by the river a great pile of faggots was reared, dry and quick for the touch of flame. And the Abbot broke down the shrine and opened the tomb. When the stone lid of the coffin had been lifted, the religious saw that, though it had been long buried, the body showed no sign of decay. Fresh and uncorrupted it lay in the sacred vestments; youthful and comely of face, despite a marvellous old age and years of sepulture. With many tears they raised what seemed rather a sleeping man than a dead, and bore him to the river; and when they had heaped the faggots about him, the Abbot blessed the body and the fuel, and with his own hand set fire to the funeral pile. The brethren restrained not their weeping and lamentation as they witnessed that hallowed burning; and the Abbot, with heavy eyes, tarried till the last ember had died out. Then were all the ashes of the fire swept together and cast into the fleeting river, which bore them through lands remote into the utmost sea that hath no outland limit save the blue sky and the low light of the shifting stars. The Countess Itha In the days of King Coeur-de-Lion the good Count Hartmann ruled in Kirchberg in the happy Swabian land. And never had that fair land been happier than it was in those days, for the Count was a devout Christian, a lover of peace in the midst of warlike and rapacious barons, and a ruler just and merciful to his vassals. Among the green and pleasant hills on his domain he had founded a monastery for the monks of St. Benedict, and thither he often rode with his daughter Itha, the delight of his heart and the light of the grim old castle of the Kirchberg; so that, seeing the piety of her father, she grew up in the love and fear of God, and from her gentle mother she learned to feel a deep compassion for the poor and afflicted. No sweeter maid than she, with her blue eyes and light brown hair, was there in all that land of sturdy men and nut-brown maidens. The people loved the very earth she stood on. In their days of trouble and sorrow she was their morning and their evening star, and they never wearied of praising her goodness and her beauty. When Itha was in the bloom of her girlhood it befell that the young Count Heinrich of the Toggenburg, journeying homeward from the famous tournament at Cologne, heard of this peerless flower of Swabia, and turned aside to the Castle of Kirchberg to see if perchance he might win a good and lovely wife. He was made welcome, and no sooner had he looked on Itha's fair and loving face, and marked with what modesty and courtesy she bore herself, than he heard joy-bells ringing in his heart, and said, "Now, by the blessed cross, here is the pearl of price for me!" Promptly he wooed her with tender words, and with eyes that spoke more than tongue could find words for, and passionate observance, and all that renders a man pleasing to a maid. And Itha was not loth to be won, for the Count was young and handsome, tall and strong, and famous for feats of arms, and a mighty lord--master of the rich straths and valleys of the Thur River, and of many a burgh and district in the mountains beyond; and yet, despite all this, he, so noble and beautiful, loved her, even her, the little Swabian maid who had never deemed herself likely to come to such honour and happiness. Nor were the kindly father and mother ill-pleased that so goodly a man and so mighty a lord should have their dear child. So in a little while the Count put on Itha's hand the ring of betrothal, and Itha, smiling and blushing, raised it to her lips and kissed it. "Blissful ring!" said the Count jestingly; "and yet, dearest heart, you do well to cherish it, for it is an enchanted ring, an old ring of which there are many strange stories." Even while he was speaking Itha's heart misgave her, and she was aware of a feeling of doubt and foreboding; but she looked at the ring and saw how massive was the gold and how curiously wrought and set with rare gems, and its brilliancy and beauty beguiled her of her foreboding, and she asked no questions of the stories told of it or of the nature of its enchantment. Quickly on the betrothal followed the marriage and the leave-taking. With tears in her eyes Itha rode away with her lord, looking back often to the old castle and gazing farewell on the pleasant land and the fields and villages she should not see again for, it might be, many long years. But by her side rode the Count, ever gay and tender, and he comforted her in her sadness, and lightened the way with loving converse, till she put from her all her regret and longing, and made herself happy in their love. [Illustration: _Itha rode away with her lord_] So they journeyed through the rocks and wildwood of the Schwartzwald, and came in view of the blue waters of the lake of Constance glittering in the sun, and saw the vast mountain region beyond with its pine forests, and above the forests the long blue mists on the high pastures, and far over all, hanging like silvery summer clouds in the blue heavens, the shining peaks of the snowy Alps. And here, at last, they were winding down the fruitful valley of the Thur, and yonder, perched on a rugged bluff, rose the stern walls of Castle Toggenburg, with banners flying from the turrets, and the rocky roadway strewn with flowers, and vassals and retainers crowding to welcome home the bride. Now, for all his tenderness and gaiety and sweetness in wooing, the Count Heinrich was a hasty and fiery man, quickly stirred to anger and blind rage, and in his storms of passion he was violent and cruel. Not long after their home-coming--woe worth the while!--he flashed out ever and anon in his hot blood at little things which ruffled his temper, and spoke harsh words which his gentle wife found hard to bear, and which in his better moments he sincerely repented. Very willingly she forgave him, but though at first he would kiss and caress her, afterwards her very forgiveness and her meekness chafed and galled his proud spirit, so that the first magical freshness of love faded from their life, even as the dew dries on the flower in the heat of the morning. Not far from the castle, in a clearing in the woods, nestled the little convent and chapel of Our Lady in the Meadow, and thither, attended by one of her pages, the Countess Itha went daily to pray for her husband, that he might conquer the violence of his wild heart, and for herself, that she might not grow to fear him more than she loved him. In these days of her trial, and in the worse days to come, a great consolation it was to her to kneel in the silent chapel and pour out her unhappiness to her whose heart had been pierced by seven swords of sorrow. Time went by, and when no little angel came from the knees of God to lighten her burden and to restrain with its small hands the headlong passion of her husband, the Count was filled with bitterness of spirit as he looked forward to a childless old age, and reflected that all the fruitful straths of the Toggenburg, and the valleys and townships, would pass away to some kinsman, and no son of his would there be to prolong the memory of his name and greatness. When this gloomy dread had taken possession of him, he would turn savagely on the Countess in his fits of fury, and cry aloud: "Out of my sight! For all thy meekness and thy praying and thy almsgiving, God knows it was an ill day when I set eyes on that fair face of thine!" Yet this was in no way his true thought, for in spite of his lower nature the Count loved her, but it is ever the curse of anger in a man that it shall wreak itself most despitefully on his nearest and best. And Itha, who had learned this in the school of long-suffering, answered never a word, but only prayed the more constantly and imploringly. In the train of the Countess there were two pages, Dominic, an Italian, whom she misliked for his vanity and boldness, and Cuno, a comely Swabian lad, who had followed her from her father's house. Most frequently when she went to Our Lady in the Meadow she dismissed Dominic and bade Cuno attend her, for in her distress it was some crumb of comfort to see the face of a fellow-countryman, and to speak to him of Kirchberg and the dear land she had left. But Dominic, seeing that the Swabian was preferred, hated Cuno, and bore the lady scant goodwill, and in a little set his brain to some device by which he might vent his malice on both. This was no difficult task, for the Count was as prone to jealousy as he was quick to wrath, and with crafty hint and wily jest and seemingly aimless chatter the Italian sowed the seeds of suspicion and watchfulness in his master's mind. Consider, then, if these were not days of heartbreak for this lady, still so young and so beautiful, so unlovingly entreated, and so far away from the home of her happy childhood. Yet she bore all patiently and without complaint or murmur, only at times when she looked from terrace or tower her gaze travelled beyond the deep pine-woods, and in a wistful day-dream she retraced, beyond the great lake and the Black Forest, all the long way she had ridden so joyfully with her dear husband by her side. One day in the springtime, when the birds of passage had flown northward, carrying her tears and kisses with them, she bethought her of the rich apparel in which she had been wed, and took it from the carved oaken coffer to sweeten in the sun. Among her jewels she came upon her betrothal ring, and the glitter of it reminded her of what her lord had said of its enchantment and the strange stories told of it. "Are any of them so sad and strange as mine?" she wondered with tears in her eyes; then kissing the ring in memory of that first kiss she had given it, she laid it on a table in the window-bay, and busied herself with the bridal finery; and while she was so busied she was called away to some cares of her household, and left the chamber. When she returned to put away her marriage treasures, the betrothal ring was missing. On the instant a cold fear came over her. In vain she searched the coffer and the chamber; in vain she endeavoured to persuade herself that she must have mislaid the jewel, or that perchance the Count had seen it, and partly in jest and partly in rebuke of her carelessness, had taken it. The ring had vanished, and in spite of herself she felt that its disappearance portended some terrible evil. Too fearful to arouse her husband's anger, she breathed no word of her loss, and trusted to time or oblivion for a remedy. No great while after this, as the Swabian page was rambling in the wood near the convent, he heard a great outcry of ravens around a nest in an ancient fir-tree, and prompted partly by curiosity to know the cause of the disquiet, and partly by the wish to have a young raven for sport in the winter evenings, he climbed up to the nest. Looking into the great matted pack of twigs, heather and lamb's wool, he caught sight of a gold ring curiously chased and set with sparkling gems; and slipping it gleefully on his finger he descended the tree and went his way homeward to the castle. A few days later when the Count by chance cast his eye on the jewel, he recognised it at a glance for the enchanted ring of many strange stories. The crafty lies of the Italian Dominic flashed upon him; and, never questioning that the Countess had given the ring to her favourite, he sprang upon Cuno as though he would strangle him. Then in a moment he flung him aside, and in a voice of thunder cried for the wildest steed in his stables to be brought forth. Paralysed with fright, the luckless page was seized and bound by the heels to the tail of the half-tame creature, which was led out beyond the drawbridge, and pricked with daggers till it flung off the men-at-arms and dashed screaming down the rocky ascent into the wildwood. Stung to madness by his jealousy, the Count rushed to the apartment of the Countess. "False and faithless, false and faithless!" he cried in hoarse rage, and clutching her in his iron grasp, lifted her in the air and hurled her through the casement into the horrible abyss below. As she fell Itha commended her soul to God. The world seemed to reel and swim around her; she felt as if that long lapse through space would never have an end, and then it appeared to her as though she were peacefully musing in her chair, and she saw the castle of Kirchberg and the pleasant fields lying serene in the sunlight, and the happy villages, each with its great crucifix beside its rustic church, and men and women at labour in the fields. How long that vision lasted she could not tell. Then as in her fall she was passing through the tops of the trees which climbed up the lower ledges of the castle rocks, green leafy hands caught her dress and held her a little, and strong arms closed about her, and yielded slowly till she touched the ground; and she knew that the touch of these was not the mere touch of senseless things, but a contact of sweetness and power which thrilled through her whole being. Falling on her knees, she thanked God for her escape, and rising again she went into the forest, wondering whither she should betake herself and what she should do; for now she had no husband and no home. She left the beaten track, and plunging through the bracken, walked on till she was tired. Then she sat down on a boulder. Among the pines it was already dusk, and the air seemed filled with a grey mist, but this was caused by the innumerable dry wiry twigs which fringed the lower branches of the trees with webs of fine cordage; and when a ray of the setting sun struck through the pine trunks, it lit up the bracken with emerald and brightened the ruddy scales of the pine bark to red gold. Here it was dry and sheltered, with the thick carpet of pine-needles underfoot and the thick roof of branches overhead: and but for dread of wild creatures she thought she might well pass the night in this place. To-morrow she would wander further and learn how life might be sustained in the forest. The last ray of sunshine died away; the deep woods began to blacken; a cool air sighed in the high tops of the trees. It was very homeless and lonely. She took heart, however, remembering God's goodness to her, and placing her confidence in His care. Suddenly she perceived a glimmering of lights among the pines. Torches they seemed, a long way off; and she thought it must be the retainers of the Count, who, finding she had not been killed by her fall, had sent them out to seek for her. The lights drew nearer, and she sat very still, resigned to her fate whatsoever it might be. And yet nearer they came, till at length by their shining she saw a great stag with lordly antlers, and on the tines of the antlers glittered tongues of flame. Slowly the beautiful creature came up to her and regarded her with his large soft brown eyes. Then he moved away a little and looked back, as though he were bidding her follow him. She rose and walked by his side, and he led her far through the forest, till they came to an overhanging rock beside a brook, and there he stopped. In this hidden nook of the mountain-forest she made her home. With branches and stones and turf she walled in the open hollow of the rock. In marshy places she gathered the thick spongy mosses, yellow and red, and dried them in the sun for warmth at night in the cold weather. She lived on roots and berries, acorns and nuts and wild fruit, and these in their time of plenty she stored against the winter. Birds' eggs she found in the spring; in due season the hinds, with their young, came to her and gave her milk for many days; the wild bees provided her with honey. With slow and painful toil she wove the cotton-grass and the fibres of the bark of the birch, so that she should not lack for clothing. In the warm summer months there was a great tranquillity and hushed joy in this hard life. A tender magic breathed in the colour and music of the forest, in its long pauses of windless day-dreaming, in its breezy frolic with the sunshine. The trees and boulders were kindly; and the turf reminded her of her mother's bosom. About her refuge the wild flowers grew in plenty--primrose and blue gentian, yellow cinquefoil and pink geranium, and forget-me-nots, and many more, and these looked up at her with the happy faces of little children who were innocent and knew no care; and over whole acres lay the bloom of the ling, and nothing more lovely grows on earthly hills. Through breaks in the woodland she saw afar the Alpine heights, and the bright visionary peaks of snow floating in the blue air like glimpses of heaven. But it was a bitter life in the winter-tide, when the forest fretted and moaned, and snow drifted about the shelter, and the rocks were jagged with icicles, and the stones of the brook were glazed with cold, and the dark came soon and lasted long. She had no fire, but, by God's good providence, in this cruel season the great stag came to her at dusk, and couched in the hollow of the rock beside her, and the lights on his antlers lit up the poor house, and the glow of his body and his pleasant breath gave her warmth. Here, then, dead to the world, dead to all she loved most dearly, Itha consecrated herself body and soul to God for the rest of her earthly years. If she suffered as the wild children of nature suffer, she was free at least from the cares and sorrows with which men embitter each other's existence. Here she would willingly live so long as God willed; here she would gladly surrender her soul when He was pleased to call it home. The days of her exile were many. For seventeen years she dwelt thus in her hermitage in the forest, alone and forgotten. Forgotten, did I say? Not wholly. The Count never forgot her. Stung by remorse (for in his heart of hearts he could not but believe her true and innocent), haunted by the recollection of the happiness he had flung from him, wifeless, childless, friendless, he could find no rest or forgetfulness except in the excitement and peril of the battle-field. But the slaughter of men and the glory of victory were as dust and ashes in his mouth. He had lost the joy of life, the pride of race, the exultation of power. For one look from those sweet eyes, over which, doubtless, the hands of some grateful peasant had laid the earth, he would have joyfully exchanged renown and lordship, and even life itself. At length in the fulness of God's good time, it chanced that the Count was hunting in a distant part of the forest, when he started from its covert a splendid stag. Away through the open the beautiful creature seemed to float before him, and Heinrich followed in hot chase. Across grassy clearings and through dim vistas of pines, over brooks and among boulders and through close underwood, the fleet quarry led him without stop or stay, till at last it reached the hanging rock which was Itha's cell, and there it stood at bay; and alarmed by the clatter of hoofs, a tall pale woman, rudely clad in her poor forest garb, came to the entrance. Surprised at so strange a sight, the Count drew rein and stared at the woman. Despite the lapse of time and her pallor and emaciation, in an instant he recognised the wife whom he believed dead, and she too recognised the husband she had loved. How shall I tell of all that was said between those two by that lonely hermitage in the depth of the forest? As in the old days, she was eager to forgive everything; but it was in vain that the Count besought her to return to the life which she had forgotten for so many years. Long had she been dead and buried, so far as earthly things were concerned. She would prefer, despite the hardness and the pain, to spend in this peaceful spot what time was yet allotted to her, but that she longed once more to hear the music of the holy bells, to kneel once more before the altar of God. What plea could Heinrich use to shake her resolution? His shame and remorse, even his love, held him tongue-tied. He saw that she was no longer the meek gentle Swabian maiden who had shrunk and wept at every hasty word and sharp glance of his. He had slain all human love in her; nothing survived save that large charity of the Saints which binds them to all suffering souls on the earth. Wofully he consented to her one wish. A simple cell was prepared for her in the wood beside the chapel of Our Lady in the Meadow, and there she dwelt until, in a little while, her gentle spirit was called home. The Story of the Lost Brother This is the story written in the chronicle of the Priory of Kilgrimol, which is in Amounderness. It tells of the ancient years before that great inroad of the sea which broke down the high firs of the western forest of Amounderness, and left behind it those tracts of sand and shingle that are now called the Blowing Sands. In those days Oswald the Gentle was Prior of Kilgrimol, and he beheld the inroad of the sea; and afterwards he lived through the suffering and sorrow of the great plague of which people now speak as the Black Death. Of all monks and men he was the sweetest and gentlest, and long before he was chosen Prior, when he had charge of the youths who wished to be monks, he never wearied of teaching them to feel and care for all God's creatures, from the greatest to the least, and to love all God's works, and to take a great joy even in stones and rocks, and water and earth, and the clouds and the blue air. "For," said he, "according to the flesh all these are in some degree our kinsfolk, and like us they come from the hands of God. Does not Mother Church teach us this, speaking in her prayers of God's creature of fire, and His creature of salt, and His creature of flowers?" When some of the brotherhood would smile at his gentle sayings, he would answer: "Are these things, then, so strange and childish? Rather, was not this the way of the Lord Jesus? You have read how He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted of Satan, and how He was with the wild beasts? All that those words may mean we have not been taught; but well I believe that the wild things came to Him, even as very little children will run to a good man without any doubt of his goodness; and that they recognised His pitifulness and His power to help them; and that He read in their dumb pleading eyes the pain and the travail under which the whole creation groaneth; and that He blessed them, and gave them solace, and told them in some mysterious way of the day of sacrifice and redemption which was drawing near." Once when the brethren spoke of clearing out the nests from the church tower, because of the clamour of the daws in the morning and evening twilight, the Novice-master--for this was Oswald's title--besought them to remember the words of the Psalmist, King David: "The sparrow hath found an house and the swallow a nest for herself, where she may lay her young, even thine altars, O Lord of Hosts." As for the novices, many a legend he told them of the Saints and holy hermits who had loved the wild creatures, and had made them companions or had been served by them in the lonely places of the hills and wildwood. And in this, he taught them, there was nothing strange, for in the book of Hosea, it was written that God would make, for those who served Him, a treaty of peace and a league of love with the beasts and the birds of heaven and the creeping things of the earth, and in the book of Job it was said that even the stones of the field should be in friendship with them. "And this we see," he would say, "in the life of the blessed Bishop Kieran of Saighir, who was the first Saint born in green Erinn. For he wandered away through the land seeking the little well where he was to found his monastery. That well was in the depths of a hoary wood, and when he drew near it the holy bell which he carried rang clear and bright, as it had been foretold him. So he sat down to rest under a tree, when suddenly a wild boar rushed out of its lair against him; but the breath of God tamed it, and the savage creature became his first disciple, and helped him to fell small trees and to cut reeds and willows so that he might build him a cell. After that there came from brake and copse and dingle and earth and burrow all manner of wild creatures; and a fox, a badger, a wolf, and a doe were among Kieran's first brotherhood. We read, too, that for all his vows the fox made but a crafty and gluttonous monk, and stole the Saint's leather shoes, and fled with them to his old earth. Wherefore Kieran called the religious together with his bell, and sent the badger to bring back the fugitive, and when this was done the Saint rebuked the fox for an unworthy and sinful monk, and laid penance upon him." When the novices laughed at this adventure, Father Oswald said: "These things are not matters of faith; you may believe them or not as you will. Perhaps they did not happen in the way in which they are now told, but if they are not altogether true, they are at least images and symbols of truth. But this I have no doubt is true--that when the blessed Columba was Abbot in Iona, he called one of the brethren to him and bade him go on the third day to the western side of the island, and sit on the sea-shore, and watch for a guest who would arrive, weary and hungry, in the afternoon. And the guest would be a crane, beaten by the stormy winds, and it would fall on the beach, unable to fly further. 'And do thou,' said Columba, 'take it up with gentle hands and carry it to the house of the guests, and tend it for three days and three nights, and when it is refreshed it will fly up into the air, and after scanning its path through the clouds it will return to its old sweet home in Erinn; and if I charge thee so earnestly with this service, it is because the guest comes from our dear land.' And the Brother obeyed; and on the third day the crane arrived, storm-beaten and weary, and three days later it departed. Have you not also heard or read how our own St. Godrich at Whitby protected the four-footed foresters, and how a great stag, which had been saved by him from the hunters, came year after year at a certain season to visit him?" Many legends too he told them of birds as well as beasts, and three of these I will mention here because they are very pleasant to listen to. One was of St. Malo and the wren. The wren, the smallest of all birds, laid an egg in the hood which St. Malo had hung up on a branch while he was working in the field, and the blessed man was so gentle and loving that he would not disturb the bird, but left his hood hanging on the tree till the wren's brood was hatched. Then there was the legend of St. Meinrad, who lived in a hut made of boughs on Mount Etzel, and had two ravens for his companions. Now it happened that two robbers wandered near the hermitage, and foolishly thinking that some treasure might be hidden there, they slew the Saint. After a long search, in which they found nothing, they went down the mountain to Zurich; but the holy man's ravens followed them with fierce cries, whirling about their heads and dashing at their faces, so that the people in the valley wondered at the sight. But one of the dalesmen who knew the ravens sent his son to the hermitage to see if all was well, and followed the fellows to the town. There they took refuge in a tavern, but the ravens flew round and round the house, screaming and pecking at the window near which the robbers had seated themselves. Speedily the lad came down with the news of the cruel murder; the robbers were seized, and, having confessed their crime, they suffered the torture of death on the wheel. And lastly there was the legend of St. Servan, who had a robin which perched on his shoulder, and fed from his hand, and joined in with joyful twittering when the Saint sang his hymns and psalms. Now the lads in the abbey-school were jealous of the Saint's favourite pupil, Kentigern, and out of malice they killed the robin and threw the blame on Kentigern. Bitterly the innocent child wept and prayed over the dead bird; and behold! when the Saint came from singing nones in the minster, the robin fluttered up and flew away to meet him, chirruping merrily. "A thoughtless thing of little blame," said the Novice-master, "was the wickedness of these boys compared with that of the monks of the Abbot Eutychus. The Abbot had a bear to tend his sheep while he was absent and to shut them in their fold at sunset, and when the monks saw that marvel, instead of praising God they were burned up with envy and ill-will, and they killed the bear. Ah, children, it is still possible for us, even in these days, to kill a Saint's robin and an abbot's bear. Let us beware of envy and jealousy and uncharitableness." In those years when Father Oswald was thus teaching his novices gentleness and compassion, he had but one trouble in his life, and that was the remembrance of a companion of his youth, who had fled from the Priory and disappeared in the noise and tumult of the world's life. As scholars they had been class-mates, and as novices they had been so closely drawn together that each had pledged to the other that whoever died first should, under God's permission, appear to the one still left alive, and reveal to his friend all that may be told of the state of the departed. Now hardly had they been professed monks more than a year when this brother broke his vows and deserted his habit, and fled away under cloud of night. Oswald had never forgotten his friend, and had never ceased to grieve and pray for him. It was the great hope and desire of his heart that, having at last proved the vanity of all that the world can give, this Lost Brother would one day return, like the Prodigal Son, to the house of his boyhood. As the years went by Prior Anselm grew old and sickened, and at length what was mortal of him fell as the leaf that falls and is trodden in the clay; and the Novice-master was elected Prior in his stead. Now one of the first great works which the new Prior set his hand to was the making of two large fish-ponds for the monastery. "And so," said he, "not only shall we have other than sea-fish for our table, but in case of fire we shall have store of water at hand. Then, too, it is a pleasant thing to look on sweet water among trees, and to watch the many sorts of silvery fish playing in their clear and silent world. And well it becomes our state of life that we should have this, for of our Lord's Disciples many were fishermen, and fish and bread were the last earthly food our dear Master ate. Now of these ponds let the larger be our Lake of Gennesaret, and surely it shall some time happen to us that we shall see the Lord when the bright morning has come, and that our hearts shall be as a fire of coals upon the shore." Of the earth dug out of the fish pools he piled up a high mound or barrow, and stocked it well with saplings of oak and beech, ash and pine, and flowering bushes; and about the mound a spiral way wound to the top, and from the top one saw to the four winds over the high woods of Amounderness, and on the west, beyond the forest, the white sands of the shore and the fresh sea. When the saplings grew tall and stout, the green leaves shut out all sight of the Priory; even the tower of the church; and above the trees in the bright air it was as though one had got half-way to heaven. Now after a little while the Prior reared on the high summit a vast cross of oak, rooted firmly amid huge boulders, and the face of our Lord crucified was turned to the west, and His arms were opened wide to the sea and to the passing ships. And beneath the flying sails, far away, the mariners and fisher-folk could see the cross in the sky, and they bared their heads to the calvary of Kilgrimol. So the name of our house and our Christ was known in strange waters and in distant havens. All that climbing greenwood of the mound was alive with wild creatures, winged and four-footed, and no one was suffered to disquiet or annoy them. To us it seemed that the Prior was as well known to all the wild things far and near as he was to us, for the little birds fluttered about him, and the squirrels leaped from tree to tree along the way he went, and the fawns ran from the covert to thrust their noses into his hand. And in the winter time, if the snow lay deep and there was any dearth, food was made ready for them and they came in flocks and troops to the Priory, knowing well, one would think, that the Prior would be their loving almoner. Bee-hives, too, he set up, and grew all manner of flowers, both for the use of the little brown toilers and for the joyance of the brethren; and of the flowers he spoke deep and beautiful parables too many to be told of in this book. Now in the third year of his rule the Prior heard tidings of the companion he had never forgotten, and he took into his confidence one of the religious named Bede, in whom he had great trust, and he told him the story of their friendship. "And now, Bede," he said, "I would have thee go on a long journey, even to the golden city of London, and seek out my friend. He will easily be found, for men know his name, and he hath grown to some repute, and the good things of this world have not been denied him. And in this I rejoice, for when he hath won all his heart may desire, he will the sooner discover how little is the joy and how fleeting the content. And tell him that so long as I am Prior of this house, so long shall this house be a home waiting for his home-coming. Bid him come to me--if but for a little while, then for a little while be it; but if he longs for rest, this shall be the place of his rest until the end. And if these things cannot be now, then let them be when they may be." And Bede went on his long wayfaring and found the Lost Brother, a man happy and of fair fame, and blessed with wife and child. And the monk sat with the little maid on his knee, and even while he prayed for her and her father, he understood how it might be that the man was well content, and how that neither to-day nor to-morrow could he return to that old life of the Priory in the forest. "Yet," said he, "tell the Prior that surely some day I shall see his face again, if it be but for mere love of him for well I know there be among the monks those who would more joyfully rend me or burn me at the stake than give the hand of fellowship to one who has cast aside the cowl." When he heard of these things the Prior only prayed the more earnestly for the home-coming of his friend. Now it was in the autumn of that year, at the season when the days and nights are of one length, that the great inroad of the sea befell. The day had been stormy, with a brackish wind clamouring out of the sea, and as the darkness closed in it was with us as it is with blind men who hear and feel the more keenly because of their blindness and all that we heard was the boom of billows breaking on the long shore and the crying and groaning of the old oaks and high firs in the forest. Then in the midmost of the night we were aroused by so terrible a noise, mingled with shrieking and wailing, that we crowded to the Prior's door. Speedily he rose, and we followed him out of doors, wondering what disaster had happened. The moon was shining brightly; shreds of cloud were flying across the cold sky; the air was full of the taste of salt. As we gazed about us we saw that the cloisters and the garth and all the space within the walls were crowded with wild birds--sea-fowl and crows, pheasant and blackcock, starlings and thrushes, stonechats and yellow-hammers, and hundreds of small winged creatures cowering for shelter. And when the Prior bade us throw open the monastery gates, out of the sombre gloom of the forest the scared woodlanders came crowding, tame and panting. No one had ever realised that so many strange creatures, in fur and pelt, housed in the green ways. Even the names of many of them we did not know, for we had never set eyes on them before; but among those that were within our knowledge were coneys and hares, stoats and weasels, foxes and badgers, many deer with their does and fawns, and one huge grey creature of savage aspect which we took to be an old wolf. The Prior ordered that the gates should be left open for any fugitives that might seek refuge, and he went among the wild beasts, calming them with a touch of his hand and blessing them. Then there came a woman, with a child at her bosom and a little lad clinging to her dress, but she was so distracted with fright that she was unable to say what had happened. When he had given directions for the care of all these strange guests, the Prior climbed up the mound through the tossing trees, and when he had reached the summit he saw to his amazement that the sea had risen in a mighty flood and poured for miles into the forest. The huge oaks and pines of centuries had gone down in thousands, and over their fallen trunks and broken branches the white billows were tumbling and leaping in clouds of spray in the moonlight. Happily the land sloped away to the north, so that unless the wind changed and blew against us the Priory seemed to be in no present danger. Overhead the great cross vibrated in the storm, and the face of the Christ gazed seaward, and the holy arms were opened wide. The sight of that divine figure filled the Prior's heart with peace and confidence. "Whether to live or to die," he murmured, "in Thee, O Lord, have we placed our trust." Such was the terrible inroad of the sea which broke the western forest of Amounderness. For many a day the land lay in salt swamp till the sands were blown over it and buried the fallen timber; and afterwards the very name of Forest was forgotten, and the people called all that part the Field-lands. Now it was in this same year that the grievous pestilence named the Black Death raged in England; but it was not till the winter had gone by that it reached Amounderness. Then were seen those terrible days when ships sailed the seas with crews of dead men, and when on land there was burying without sorrow and flight without safety, for though many fled they could not escape the evil, and so many died that the wells of sorrow ran dry. And because of the horror of so many deaths, it was forbidden to toll the bells any longer lest men should go mad. Often no hand could be got for love or for gold to touch the sick or to carry the departed to their graves. When the graveyards were filled, thousands were buried, without a prayer or a last look, in deep trenches salted with quicklime, on the commons or in an open field. Many a street in many a town fell suddenly silent and deserted, and grass grew between the stones of the causeway. Here and there fires were kept burning night and day to purify the air, but this availed little. In many a thorpe and village all the inhabitants were swept away and even robbers and desperate vagrants were too greatly in fear of infection to enter the ownerless houses. Sometimes in the fields one saw little children, and perchance an aged woman, trying to manage a plough or to lead a waggon. When this trouble fell upon the people the Prior sent out various of the brethren to aid the suffering and to comfort the bereaved; but when many of the monks themselves were stricken down and died within the hour, a great dread took hold of the others, so that they were unwilling to expose themselves to danger. The Prior rebuked them for their lack of faith and the coldness of their charity. "When the beasts and wild creatures suffered we had compassion on them," he said; "what folly is this that we shall have care for them and yet feel no pity for men and women in their misery! Do you fear that you too may be taken off by this pestilence? Who, then, has told you that you shall not die if only you can escape the pestilence? Daily you pray, 'Thy kingdom come,' and daily you seek that it shall not come to-day." He went abroad himself unweariedly with one or other of the brethren, doing such good as he was able, and when he had returned home and taken a little rest he set out once more. Now one night as he and Brother Bede returned belated through the forest, they were startled as they approached the gate to hear the weeping and moaning of one who lay forsaken on the cold earth; and when the Prior called out through the darkness, "Be of good cheer, Christian soul, we are coming to your aid," the sufferer replied by rattling the lid of his clap-dish, and at once they knew it was some poor leper who had fallen helpless by the way. "Patience, brother," said the Prior; and bidding his companion open the wicket, he lifted the wretched outcast from the ground and carried him in his arms into the great hall. "Rest here a little," he said, "till we can bring you light and fire and food." The Prior and Bede hastened to call the brethren who had charge of these matters, but when they returned with the other monks they found the great hall shining with a wonderful light and filled with a marvellous fragrance of flowers, and on the seat where the leper had been placed there lay a golden rose, but the leper himself had vanished. Then a great joy cast fear out of the hearts of the brotherhood, and they laboured without ceasing in the stricken villages. Many of them died, but it was without sorrow or repining, and the face of each was touched with the golden rose ere he was laid to his rest. Now the pestilence of that year was stayed by a bitter winter, and snow lay deep even in the forest, and great blocks of ice littered the shore of the bleak sea. And in the depth of the winter, when it drew near the Nativity, there came riding to the monastery a stranger, who asked to see the Prior. When the Prior looked into the man's face the tears started and ran down his own, and he opened his arms to him, and drew him to his breast and kissed him. For this was indeed the Lost Brother. And when he had thus given him welcome, the Prior said: "I ask no questions; what you can tell me you shall tell when the fitting time comes. But this is your home to have or to leave, for you are as free as the winds of heaven." And the Lost Brother replied: "Wise are you no less than good. The plague has bereft me of the child, and of the mother of the child. More I cannot tell you now." Thus to the Priori great happiness the companion of his youth returned from wandering the ways of the world. When the weeks passed, and still he remained a silent and solitary stranger, the religious spoke sharply among themselves of the presence of one who had broken vows and revelled in the joys of life, and had been received without censure or reproof. Then the Prior, wrathful now even on account of his gentleness, rebuked them once again: "O eyes of stone and hearts of water, are you so slow to learn? Have you who sheltered the wild creatures no thought for this man of much sorrow? Have you who buried the dead no prayer and no tenderness for this soul of the living?" More than once the Lost Brother seemed to awake from a dream, and spoke of going forth again from this home or quiet, saying: "Truly this is great peace and solace to me, but I am not of you; my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor is yours my way of life. Indeed, though I were to will it never so, I could not repent of what I have done. Let me go; why should I be an offence and a stone of stumbling to those who are righteous among you?" But the Prior silenced him, asking gently: "Do we distress you with any of these things? God has His times and seasons, and will not be hastened. At least so long as you find peace and rest here, remain with us." "You are strangely wise and gentle," the Lost Brother answered. "God, I doubt it not, has His times and seasons; but with me I know not at all what He will do." It was no long while after this that the Prior fell into a grievous illness; and when he knew that his hour was drawing nigh, he besought the monks to bear him up to the foot of the cross on the mound. There, as he looked far abroad into the earth over the tree-tops, he smiled with lightness of heart and said: "If the earth be so beautiful and so sweet, what must the delight of Paradise be?" And behold! a small brown squirrel came down a tree, and ran across and nestled in the holy man's bosom, and its eyes were full of tears. The Prior stroked and caressed it, and said: "God bless thee, little woodlander, and may the nuts never fail thee!" Then, gazing up into the blue sky and the deep spaces of air above, he murmured in a low voice, "It is a very awful and lonely way to go!" "Not so awful for you," replied the companion of his youth. "That blue way has been beaten plain by the Lord Christ, and the Apostles, and many holy men from the beginning." A long while the Prior lay musing before he spoke again, and then he said: "I remember me of an ancient saying which I had long forgotten. A year for the life of a--nay, I know not what any longer. But after that it runs, And three for the life of a field; and thrice the life of a field for the life of a hound; and thrice the life of a hound for the life of a horse; and thrice the life of a horse for the life of a man; and thrice the life of a man for the life of a stag; and thrice the life of a stag for the life of an ouzel; and thrice the life of an ouzel for the life of an eagle; and thrice the life of an eagle for the life of a salmon; and thrice the life of a salmon for the life of a yew; but the Lord God liveth for ever--the Lord God liveth for ever!" That same night the alabaster box was broken and the precious ointment poured out. And on the Prior's breast they placed the golden rose, and under the great red hawthorn in the midst of the cloister-garth they laid him, O Lord, beneath the earth which is Thy footstool. At the same hour in which he was taken from us there was a great crying and lamentation of the wild creatures in the forest, and the tall stags bellowed and clashed their antlers against the gates of the monastery. In the place of Prior Oswald, Father Bede was made Prior. Whether the spirit of Prior Oswald ever returned to earth the book does not tell, but the Lost Brother, the companion of his youth, lived in the house of Kilgrimol to old age, and in the days of Bede's rule he made a good end. The King Orgulous To and fro in the open cloister of Essalona walked the monk Desiderius, musing and musing. Every now and again he stayed in his paces to feed a tall white stork and two of her young, which stood on the parapet between the pillars of the cloister; and though for the most part his dole went to the storklings, the mother was well content with his stroking of her head and soft white backfeathers. Then he resumed his slow walk, turning over and over in his perplexed mind the questions of grace and nature, and praying for light in the obscure ways where reason groped darkling. Meanwhile the storks stood grave and patient, as if they too had matter for deep musing. As in this day, so in the ancient time the convent of Essalona was perched on a beetling crag on the northern side of the Sarras mountains. There the mighty ridge, with its belts of virgin pinewood and its stony knolls and pastoral glens, breaks off suddenly in a precipitous escarpment; and, a thousand feet below, the land is an immense green plain, sweeping away to the blue limits of the north. It is as though the sea had once on a time run up to the mountain wall and torn down the tawny rocks for sand and shingle, and had then drawn back into the north, leaving the good acres to grow green in the sun. Through the plain winds a river, bright and slow; in many places the fruitful level is ruffled with thicket and coppice; and among the far fields the white walls of farms and hamlets glitter amid their boskage. When the clear sunlight fell on that still expanse of quiet earth, one might see, in those days, the stone towers and sparkling pinnacles of the royal city of Sarras, with a soft blue feather of smoke floating over it. Often had Desiderius let his eyes rest on the smoulder and gleam of that busy city, which was all so hushed and dreamlike in the distance, little thinking the while that one day he should dwell within its walls, and play a strange part in the deeds that men remember. From the brink of the escarpment rises the rock of Essalona, and the convent is built on the edge of the rock, in such sort that, leaning over the parapet of the open cloister, Desiderius might have dropped a pebble sheer down to the plain below. A single path wound up the rock to the gate, so narrow and steep that one sturdy lay-brother might have held the way with a thresher's flail against a score of men-at-arms. [Illustration: _King Orgulous_] Here, then, in this solitary house, Desiderius dwelt with five other brethren, all good and faithful men; but he, the youngest and yet the most learned in philosophy and star-lore and the sacred Scriptures and the books of the wise, was the most meek and lowly of heart. No pains did he spare his body or his spirit to master the deep knowledge of divine things. Diligent by day, he eked out the light of the stars with the lamp of the firefly, or conned his page by the dim shining of the glow-worm along the lines. Now as he mused in the cloister he stopped short with a deep sigh, and stood before the storks, and said: "Away, happy birds; you have leave. Disport yourselves, soaring very high in the sunny heavens, or take your rest on our roofs. I have appeased you with food; but to the hunger of my soul who shall minister?" At his word the storks flapped their wings and rose from the parapet, and went sailing up into the sunshine; and Desiderius heard at his shoulder a most sweet and gracious voice saying: "What is thy hunger, and wherein wouldst thou have me minister to thee?" Turning about, Desiderius saw that it was an Angel which spoke, and he fell at the bright spirit's feet, abashed and in great dread. But the Angel raised him up, and gave him courage, saying: "O Desiderius, most dear to me (for I am thine Angel Guardian), do not tremble to tell me; but speak to me even as thou wouldst speak to a man of thy brethren." Then said Desiderius: "Show to me and make plain, I pray thee, the mystery of the grace of God in the heart of man." "Many are the mysteries of God," said the Angel, "whereof even the highest of the Archangels may not sustain the splendour, and this is one of them. Howbeit, if thou wilt be patient and prayerful, and wilt repose thy trust in the Lord Christ, I will strive to show thee two pictures of thy very self--one, to wit, of the natural Adam in Desiderius, and one of the man redeemed by the blood shed for thee. So in some wise shalt thou come to some dim light of this mystery of grace divine. Will that suffice thee?" "That, Lord Angel, will suffice," said the monk, bowing low before the Angel. "Wait, then, and watch; and even in thy body and before thou diest thou shalt behold as I have said." Therewith the Angel left him, and Desiderius was aware of but the walls and pillars of the cloister, and the bright vast plain, and, far away, the city of Sarras glittering, and the smoke sleeping like a small blue cloud above it. And the coming and going of the Angel was after this manner. Desiderius perceived him, bright in the brightness of the sunshine, as one perceives a morsel of clear ice floating in clear water; and when Desiderius saw him no more it was as though the clear ice had melted into the clear water. Now after the lapse of three short years, and when he was but in his thirtieth summer, Desiderius was summoned from his cell on the lonely mountain, and, despite his tears and supplications and his protestations of ignorance and inexperience and extreme youth, made Archbishop of Sarras. Only one answer was vouchsafed to him. "One of thy vows was entire obedience, and the grace of God is sufficient for thee." In that same year a horde of the fierce Avars poured out from the round green earth-walls of their mysterious stronghold, which lay beyond Danube, and, crossing the river, fell on Sarras; and clashing with that ravening horde, Astulf the King of Sarras was slain. Ill had it then fared with the folk of Sarras, city and plain alike, but for a certain Talisso, a free-rider, who from a green knoll had watched the onset. When he saw the slaying of the King, he plunged into the battle, cleaving his way through the ranks of squat and swarthy Avars; and heartening the men of Sarras with his ringing cheer and battle-laughter, shaped them into wedges of sharp iron and drove them home through the knotted wood of their foemen, till the Avars fled hot-foot to Danube water, and through the water, and beyond, and so reached the strait doorways of their earth-bound stronghold, the Hring. Now, seeing that the King of Sarras had left neither child nor brother to heirship, and that their deliverer was a stalwart champion, young and nobly statured, and handsome and gracious as he was valiant, frank too and open-handed, and that moreover he seemed a man skilled in the mastery of men and in affairs of rule, the fighting men of Sarras thought that no better fortune could befall them than they should choose this Talisso for their king. To Sarras therefore they carried him with them on their merry home-going, and having entered the free town, called the Council of Elders to say yea or nay. With few words the Elders confirmed the choice, and the joy-bells were rung, and great was the rejoicing of all men, gentle and simple, that God had sent them so goodly a man for their ruler and bulwark. In a week from that the city was dight and decked for the crowning of Talisso. Garlands were hung across the streets; windows and walls were graced with green branches and wreaths of flowers; many-coloured draperies, variegated carpets and webs of silk and velvet hung from parapet and balcony; once more the joy-bells were set aswing, and amid a proud array of nobles and elders and gaily harnessed warriors the new King walked under a canopy of cloth of gold to the High Church. There in solemn splendour the new Archbishop administered to him the kingly oath, and anointed him with the chrism of consecration, and set the gold of power on his head, and invested him with the mantle of St. Victor and girt about him the Saint's great iron sword set with many jewels on the apple and the cross. As the Archbishop was completing these ordinances, he chanced to look full into the King's face for the first time, and as the King's eyes met his each stood still as stone regarding the other for such a space as it would take one to count four, telling the numbers slowly. Neither spoke, and when they who were nearest looked to learn the cause of the stillness and the stoppage they saw with amazement that the new King and the new Archbishop were as like the one to the other as brothers who are twins. With a slow and audible drawing of the breath the Archbishop took up again the words of the ritual, and neither looked at the other any more at that time. Now, having been crowned and consecrated, Talisso ascended the steps in front of the altar, and, drawing the huge blade from its sheath, lunged with it four times into the air--once to the north, and once to the south, once to the east and once to the west. Sheathing the sword, he descended, and walking to the western portal mounted his war-horse, and paced slowly down the street, followed by a brilliant cavalcade, to the Mound of Coronation. Urging his steed up the ascent, he drew rein on the summit, and once more bared the holy brand, and, wheeling to the four quarters of heaven, thrust it into the air in token of lordship and power inalienable; and when he rode down the Mound to his people a great cry was raised in greeting, and four pigeons were loosed. High they flew in circles overhead, and, each choosing his own airt, darted out to the four regions of the world to bear the news of that crowning. The first years of the new reign seemed to be the dawn of a Golden Age in the land of Sarras, and in those years no man was more beloved and honoured by the King than was Archbishop Desiderius. As time passed by, however, and the evil leaven of unrestrained power began to ferment in the King's heart, and the Archbishop opposed and reproved him, gently and tenderly at first, but ever more gravely and steadfastly, coldness and estrangement divided them; and soon that strange resemblance which gave them the aspect of twin brothers, became a root of suspicion and dread in the King's mind, for he reasoned with himself, "What more likely than that this masterful prelate should dream of wearing the crown, he who so nearly resembles the King that the mother of either might well pause ere she should say which was her son? A foot of iron, and a sprinkling of earth, and farewell Talisso! None would guess it was Desiderius who took his ease in thy chair." Thus by degrees limitless power waxed into lawlessness, and suspicion and dread into moroseness and cruelty, and on this rank soil the red weeds of lust and hate and bitter pride sprang up and choked all that was sweet and gracious and lovable in the nature of the man. Then did the wise and gentle folk of Sarras come to perceive how woefully they had been deceived in the tyrant they had crowned, and speedily it came to pass that when they spoke of King Talisso they breathed not his name, but using an ancient word to signify such insane and evil pride as that of Lucifer and the Fallen Angels, they called him the King Orgulous. Yet if this was the mind of the better folk, there was no lack of base and venomous creatures--flatterers, time-servers, and sycophants--to minister to his wickedness and malignity. Dark were the days which now fell on Sarras, and few were those on which some violence or injustice, some deed of lust or rapacity was not flaunted in the face of heaven. The most noble and best men of the city were attainted and plundered and driven into exile. Of the meaner sort of folk many a poor citizen or rustic toiler went shaven and branded, or maimed of nose and eyelids, or with black stumps seared with pitch and an iron hook for hand. Once more the torture-chamber of the castle rang with the screams of poor wretches stretched on the rack; and the ancient instruments of pain, which had rusted through many a long year of clemency, were once more reddened with the sweat of human agony. An insatiable lust of cruelty drove the King to a sort of madness. With a fiendish malice he fashioned of wood and iron an engine of torment which bore the likeness of a beautiful woman, but which opened when a spring was pressed, and showed within a hideous array of knives; and these pierced the miserable wight about whom the Image closed her arms. In blasphemous merriment the King called this woman of his making Our Lady of Sorrow, and in mockery of holy things he kept a silver lamp burning constantly before her, and crowned her with flowers. Now in the hour in which the King was left wholly to his wickedness, he doomed to the Image the young wife of one of the chief men of Sarras. Little more than a girl was she in years; sweet and exceeding lovely; and she still suckled her first babe. When the tormentors would have haled her to the Image, "Forbear," she said, "there is no need; willingly I go and cheerfully." And with a fearless meekness she walked before them with her little babe in her arms into the chamber of agony. Coming before the Image with its garland of flowers she knelt down, and prayed to the Virgin Mother of our Lord, and commended her soul and the soul of her dear babe to our Lady and her divine Son; and the babe stretched out its little hands to the Image, cooing and babbling in its innocence. Then, as though this were a spectacle to make the very stones shriek and to move the timber of the rack and the iron of the axe to human tenderness, the Image stepped down from its pedestal, and lifted up mother and child, and a wondrous light and fragrance filled the stone vault, and the tormentors fled, stricken with a mad terror. Down from the castle and through the streets of the hushed and weeping city the Image led the mother and her babe to their own door, and when they had entered the house, and the people stood by sobbing and praying, the Image burst into flames, and on the spot where it stood there remained a little heap of ashes when that burning was done. Judge if the land of Sarras was silent after this day of divine interposition. Hastily summoning the Bishops of the realm, and gathering a body of men-at-arms, the Archbishop Desiderius proclaimed from the Jesus altar of the High Church the deposition of the King Orgulous. Talisso was seized and stripped of his royal robes; a width of sackcloth was wrapped about his body, and with a rope round his neck he was led to the Mound of Coronation. There, on the height whereon he had thrust his sword into the four regions of heaven, he received his sentence. Standing erect in a circle on the top of the Mound the nine Bishops of the realm held each a lighted torch in his hand. In the centre stood Desiderius beside the King deposed, and holding high his torch uttered the anathema which was to sever all bonds of plighted troth and loyalty and service, and to cast him forth from the pale of Holy Church, and to debar him from the common charity of all Christian people. At that moment the Bishops marked with awe the strange resemblance between Desiderius and the King, and the eyes of these two met, and each was aware how marvellously like to himself was the other. But with a clear unfaltering voice the Archbishop cried aloud the doom: "May he be outcast from the grace of heaven and the gladness of earth. May the stones betray him, and the trees of the forest be leagued against him. In want or in sickness may no hand help him. Accursed may he be in his house and in his fields, in the water of the streams and in the fruits of the earth. Accursed be all things that are his, from the cock that crows to awaken him to the dog that barks to welcome him. May his death be the death of Pilate and of Judas the betrayer. May no earth be laid on the earth that was he. May the light of his life be extinguished thus!" And the Archbishop cast down his torch and trampled it into blackness; and crying "Amen, amen, amen!" the Bishops threw down their torches and trod them under foot and crushed out every spark of fire. "Begone," said the Archbishop, "thou art banned and banished. If within three days thy feet be found on the earth of Sarras, thou shalt hang from the nearest tree." As he spoke the great bell of the High Church began to toll as for one whose spirit has passed away. At the sound Talisso started; then taking the rope from his neck and flinging it on the ground with a mocking laugh, he turned and fled down the Mound and into the green fields that lie to the north. Not far had he fled into the open country before the recklessness of the reiver and strong-thief fell on Talisso. Entering a homestead he smote down the master, and got himself clothing and food and weapons, and seizing a horse, pushed on apace till he came to the red field where he had routed the Avars, and thence onward to Danube water. Beyond Danube, some days' riding into the north, lay that mysterious stronghold, the Hring, the camp-city of the Avar robber-horde. And thither Talisso was now speeding, for he said to himself: "They are raiders and slayers, and this kind is quick to know a _man_. They will love me none the less that I have stricken and chased them. Rather will they follow me and avenge me, if not for my sake for the sake of the fat fields and rich towns of Sarras." Now the stronghold was a marvel in the manner of its contrivance, and in its size and strength; for it was bulwarked with seven rings, each twenty feet high and twenty feet wide, and the rings were made of stockades of oak and beech and pine trunks, filled in with stones and earth, and covered atop with turf and thick bushes. The distance across the outer ring was thirty miles, and between each ring and the one within it there were villages and farms in cry of each other, and each ring was pierced by narrow gateways well guarded. In the midst of the innermost ring were the tent of the Chagan or Great Chief, and the House of the Golden Hoard. Piled high were the chambers of that house with the enormous treasure of a century of raiding--silken tissues and royal apparel and gorgeous arms, great vases and heavy plate of gold and silver, spoil of jewels and precious stones, leather sacks of coined money, the bribes and tribute of Greece and Rome, and I know not what else of rare and costly. Long afterwards, when the Avars were broken and the Hring thrown down, that hoard filled fifteen great waggons drawn each by four oxen. In the very manner in which Talisso had forecast it, so it fell out with him at the Hring. The fierce, swart, broad-shouldered dwarfs with the almond eyes and woven pigtails gazed with glee and admiration on the tall and comely warrior who had swept them before his sword-edge; and when he spoke of the rich markets and goodly houses and fruitful land of Sarras their eyes glistened, and they swore by fire and water and the four winds to avenge his wrongs. Little need is there to linger in telling of a swift matter. Mounted on their nimble and hardy ponies, the Avars dashed into Sarras land two hundred strong, and tarried neither to slay nor spoil, but outsped the fleet feet or rumour, till in the grey glimmer of cock-crow they sighted the towers of Sarras city. Under cover of a wood they rested till the gates were flung wide for the early market folk. Who then but Talisso laughed his fierce and orgulous laugh as he rode at their head and they all hurled through the gates, and, clattering up the empty street, carried the castle out of hand? Not a blow was struck, no drop of blood reddened iron or stone; and such divinity doth hedge even a wicked king dethroned that when the guards saw the tyrant once more ascending the steps of power they lowered their points and stood at a loss how to act. But Talisso, with some touch of his pristine graciousness, bade no man flee or fear who was willing to return to his allegiance. "First, however, of all things, bring me hither the Archbishop; bring with ropes and horses if need be; but see that not a hair of his head be injured." Now on this same night that these Hunnish folk were pressing forward to Sarras city Desiderius saw in a dream Talisso standing before the throne of God. On his head he wore his crown, but otherwise he was but such as he stood for sentence on the Mound of Coronation, to wit, with a rope around his neck, and naked save for the fold of sackcloth about his loins. Beside him stood an Angel, and the Angel was speaking: "All the lusts of the flesh, and all the lusts of the eyes, and all the lusts of the will, and the pride of life this man hath gratified and glutted to surfeiting, yet is he as restless as the sea and as insatiable as the grave. Speak, man, is it not so?" And Talisso answered, with a peal of orgulous laughter: "Restless as the sea; insatiable as the grave." "How then, Lord," said the Angel, "shall this man's unrest and hunger be stayed?" God spoke and said: "Fill his mouth with dust." Then the Angel took a handful of dust and said to Talisso: "Open thy mouth and eat." Talisso cried aloud, "I will not eat." "Open thy mouth," said the Angel sternly. "My mouth I will not open," replied Talisso. Thereupon the Angel caught him by the hair, and plucked his head backward till his throat made a knotted white ridge above the neck, and as Talisso opened his mouth, shrieking blasphemies and laughing with frantic rage, the Angel filled it with dust. Talisso fell backwards, thrusting with his feet and thrashing the ground with his hands; his crown fell from his head and rolled away; his face grew set and white; and then he lay straight and rigid. "Hast thou filled his mouth?" "His mouth, Lord, is filled," the Angel answered. This was the dream of Desiderius. When citizens came running to the palace, and the Archbishop learned how the gates had been surprised and the castle taken, he lost no time in casting about what he should do. He sent messengers to summon the Council of the Elders, and bade his men-at-arms fall into array. Then he hastened to the High Church, and, after a brief prayer before the altar, girt on the great sword of St. Victor, threw over his purple cassock the white mantle of the Saint, and putting on his head a winged helm of iron, made his way to the castle where Talisso awaited his capture. "Stay you here," he said to his men-at-arms when they reached the portals, "and if by God's blessing work fall to your hands to do, do it doughtily and with right good will." Up the high hall of the castle, through the groups of lounging Avars he went, with great strides and eyes burning, to the dais where Talisso sat apart in the royal chair. "Ha! well met, Lord Archbishop," cried the dethroned King, springing to his feet at the sight of him. "Well met, Talisso," replied Desiderius in a loud voice. "With no more ado I now tell thee that for thee there is but one end. Thy mouth must be filled with dust." As he spoke, Desiderius flung back his mantle and drew the holy sword. Heaving it aloft he struck mightily at Talisso. From the King's helmet glanced the keen brand, and descending to the shoulder shore away the plates of iron, and bit the flesh. Once more the great sword was swung up, for Desiderius neither heard nor heeded the cry and rush of the Avars; but or ever the stroke could fall Desiderius saw the Angel of Essalona by his side and felt his hand restraining the blade; and at the same instant the figure before him, the figure of the King Orgulous, grew dim and hazy, and wavered, and broke like smur blown along a wooded hillside, and vanished from his gaze. "A little truer stroke," said the Angel, "and thou hadst slain thyself, for of a truth the man thou wast slaying was none other than thyself; as it is, thou art hurt more than need was"--for the shoulder of the Archbishop was bare, and the blood streamed from it. Bewildered at these words, Desiderius gazed about to see if the high hall and the Avars were but the imagery of a dream. But there in front of him stood the dwarfish tribe, with naked brands and battle-axes. These, when they looked on his face, raised a hoarse cry of terror, for they too had beheld Talisso, how at a blow of the magic sword he had fallen and perished even from the vision of men, and now they saw that he who had slain the King was himself the King. Howling and clamouring, they broke from the hall and fled into the street; and there the men-at-arms did right willingly and doughtily the work which thus came to their hands. Of that fierce and uncouth robber horde, which rode to Sarras two hundred strong, scarce two score saw Danube water again. When Desiderius knew for a surety that the natural man within him was verily that King wicked and orgulous, and understood that the sins of that evil King were the sins he himself would have committed but for the saving grace of God, a great awe fell upon him, and he was abashed with a grievous dread lest the King Orgulous were not really dead and done with, but were sleeping still, like the Kings of old legend, in some dusky cavern of his nature, ready to awake and break forth with sword and fire. Gladly would he have withdrawn to the solitude of the little convent on the beetling crag, far from the temptations of power and the splendour and tumult of life; but the same answer was given to him now as had been given to him of old: "One of thy vows was entire obedience, and the grace of God is sufficient for thee." The Journey of Rheinfrid On the green skirts of the Forest of Arden there was a spot which the windings of the Avon stream had almost made into an island, and here in the olden time the half-savage herdsmen of King Ethelred kept vast droves of the royal swine. The sunny loops of the river cut clearings on the east and south and west, but on the north the Forest lay dense and dark and perilous. For in those ancient days wolves still prowled about the wattled folds of the little settlement of Wolverhampton, and Birmingham was only the rude homestead of the Beormingas, a cluster of beehive huts fenced round with a stockade in the depths of the woods. Among the swineherds of the King there was one named Eoves, and one day, while wandering through the glades of great oaks on this edge of the Forest, he saw three beautiful women who came towards him singing a song more strange and sweet than he had ever heard. He told his fellows, and the story spread far and wide. Some said that the three beautiful women were three goddesses of the old pagan world, and thought Eoves had acted very foolishly in not speaking to them. Others said they might have been the Three Fates, in whose hands are the lives of men, and the joy of their lives, and the sorrow they must endure, and the death which is the end of their days; and they thought that perhaps Eoves had been wise to keep silence. But when the holy Bishop Egwin heard the tale, he visited the place alone, and in the first glimmer of the sunrise, when all wild creatures are tame and the earth is most lovely to look upon, he beheld the three beautiful women, and he saw in a moment that they were the Virgin Mother Mary and two heavenly handmaidens. "And our Lady," he used afterwards to say, "was more white-shining than lilies and more freshly sprung than roses, and the savage forest was filled with the fragrance of Paradise." Straightway the Bishop sent his woodmen and had the aged oaks felled and the underwood cleared away; and on the spot where the beautiful women had stood a fair church was built for the worship of the true God, and around it clustered the cells of an abbey of Black Monks. In a little while people no longer spoke of the place by its old name, but called it Eovesholme, because of the vision of Eoves. Now when more than three and a half centuries had gone by, and Agelwyn the Great-hearted was Abbot, there was a Saxon noble, young and dissolute, who had been stricken by the Yellow Plague, and, after three days' sickness, had been abandoned by his friends and followers in what seemed to be his last agony. For the Yellow Plague was a sickness so ghastly and dreadful that men called it the Yellow Death, and fled from it as swiftly as they might. But in the dead and dark of the third night a beautiful Child, crowned with roses and bearing in his hand a rose, had come to the dying thane and said: "Now mayest thou see that the best the world can give--call it by what name thou wilt and prize it at its utmost worth--is nothing more than these: wind and smoke and a dream and a flower. But though all have fled from thee and left thee to die alone in grievous plight, this night thou shalt not die." Then he was bidden to rise on the morrow--"for strength shall be given thee," said the Child--and travel with the sun westward till he came to the Abbey of Egwin, and there he must tell the Abbot all that had befallen him. "And the good Abbot will receive thee among his sons," said the Child; "and after that, in a little while, thou shalt go on a journey, and then again in a little while shalt come to me." On the morrow Rheinfrid the thane rose from his bed hale and strong, but his whole nature was changed; and he made no more account of life and of all that makes life sweet--as honour and wealth and joy and use and the love of man and woman--than one makes of wind and smoke and a dream and a flower; and all that he greatly desired was to undertake the journey which had been foretold, and to see once more the Child of the Roses. Westward he rode with the sun and came at nightfall to the Abbey of Eovesholme; and there he told Agelwyn the Abbot the story of his wild life and his sickness and the service that had been laid upon him. The Abbot embraced him, saying, "Son, welcome art thou to our house, and thy home shall it be till the time comes for thy journey." For a whole year Rheinfrid was a novice in the house, and when the year had gone by he took the vows. In the presence of the brotherhood he cast himself on the pavement before the high altar, and the pall of the dead was laid over him, and the monks sang the dirge of the dead, for now he was indeed dying to this world. And from his head they cut the long hair, and clothed him in the habit of a monk, and henceforth he was done with all earthly things and was one of themselves. "Surely, now," he thought, "the time of my journey draws near." But one year and a second and yet a third passed away, and there came to him no call, and he grew wearied with waiting, and weariness begot sullenness and discontent, and he questioned himself: "Was it not a dream of sickness which deceived me? An illusion of pain and darkness? Why should I waste my life within these walls?" But immediately afterwards he was filled with remorse, and confessed his thoughts to the Abbot. "Have faith and patience, my son," said Agelwyn. "Consider the many years God waited for thee, and grew not impatient with thy delay. When His good time comes thou shalt of a certainty set out on thy journey." So for a while Rheinfrid ceased to repine, and served faithfully in the Abbey. In the years which followed, William the Norman came into these parts and harried whole shires on account of the rebels and broken men who haunted the great roads which ran through the Forest. Cheshire and Shropshire, Stafford and Warwick were wasted with fire and sword. And crowds naked and starving--townsmen and churls, men young and old, maidens and aged crones, women with babes in their arms and little ones at their knees--came straggling into Eovesholme, fleeing most sorrowfully from the misery of want. In the little town they lay, indoors and out, and it was now that the Abbot got himself the name of the Great-hearted. For he gave his monks orders that all should be fed and cared for; and daily from his own table he sent food for thirty wanderers whom he named his guests, and daily in memory of the love of Christ he washed the feet of twelve others, and never shrank from the unhappy lepers among them. But for all his care the people died lamentably from grief and sickness--on no day fewer than five or six between prime and compline; and these poor souls were buried by the brethren. Of the little children that were left to the mothering of the east wind, some were adopted by the canons and priests of the Abbey church, and others by the monks. In his eagerness to help and solace, the Abbot even sent forth messengers to bring in the fugitives to refuge. Now on a day that Rheinfrid went out on this work of mercy, he met at a crossway a number of peasants fleeing before a dozen Norman men-at-arms. He raised his arm and called to them to make a stand, but they were too much terrified to heed him. Then he saw that one of the soldiers had seized by the hair a fair Saxon woman with a babe at her bosom, and with a great cry he bade him let her go, for his blood was hot within him as he thought of the Saxon woman who had carried him in her arms and suckled him when he was but such a little child. But the Norman only laughed and turned the point of his sword against the monk. Then awoke the long line of thanes slumbering in wild caves and dark ways of his soul, and with a mighty drive of his fist he struck the man-at-arms between the eyes, so that he fell like a stone. With savage curses the knave's comrades rushed in against the monk, but Rheinfrid caught up the Norman's sword, and with his grip on the hilt of it his old skill in war-craft came back to him, and he carried himself like a thane of the old Sea-wolves, and the joy of battle danced in his eyes. Ill was it then for those marauders. One of them he clove through the iron cap; the neck of another he severed with a sweep of the bitter blade. And now that he was fighting he remembered his calling, and with a clear voice he chanted the great psalm of the man who has sinned: "Miserere mei Deus--Have mercy on me, O God, according to Thy loving-kindness; according unto the multitude of Thy tender mercies blot out my transgressions." The strength of ten was in his body, and verse by verse he laid the Normans low, till of the troop no more than two were left. These were falling back before him as he pressed onward chanting his Miserere, when a body of horsemen rode up and drew rein to watch the issue. "By the Splendour of God!" cried the leader, as he glanced at the woman and scanned the number of the dead tumbled across the road, "it is a _Man_!" Rheinfrid looked up at the new comer, and saw a gigantic, ruddy-faced man of forty, clad in chain mail and wearing a circlet of gold about his massive head. At once he felt sure that he was face to face with the Master of England. Still he kept his sword's point raised for another attack, and with a quiet frankness met the Conqueror's imperious gaze. "Ha, monk! hast thou no fear of me?" cried William, frowning. "Lord King, hast thou no fear of God?" Rheinfrid retorted. For a moment the King's haughty eyes blazed with wrath, but William ever loved a strong man and dauntless, and he laughed gaily: "Nay, thou hast slain enough for one day; let us cry truce, and tell me of what house thou comest." So Rheinfrid spoke to the King about Eovesholme, and the Abbot, and the harbouring of the miserable fugitives, and told the tale of his own fighting that day. And the great Norman was well pleased, and afterwards he gave Agelwyn the custody of Winchcombe Abbey when the abbot of that house fell under his displeasure. As for Rheinfrid he took the woman and her babe into the town; and many others he rescued and succoured, but he neither slew nor smote any man thereafter. Now for eight long years Rheinfrid lived in the quiet of the cloister, striving to be patient and to await God's own time; and his daily prayer was that of the Psalmist: "How long wilt Thou forget me, O Lord? For ever? How long wilt Thou hide Thy face from me?" In the ninth year, after long sickness, the soul of Agelwyn passed out of the shadow of this flesh unto the clemency of God, and shortly after his death a weariness of well-doing and a loathing of the dull days of prayer beset Rheinfrid; and voices of the joy of life called to him to strip off his cowl and flee from his living tomb. As he knelt struggling with the temptation the little Child crowned with roses stood beside him, looking at him with sad reproachful eyes. "Couldst thou not be patient a little while?" he asked. "A little while!" exclaimed Rheinfrid; "see! twelve, thirteen, long years have gone by, and is that a little while?" But the Child answered gravely: "An evil thing is impatience with the delays of God, to whom one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day." And Rheinfrid knew not what reply to make, and as he hesitated the Child began to fade away. "Do not go, do not go yet," he cried; "grant me at least one prayer--that I shall see thee again at the time I shall have most need of thee." And the Child smiled and answered: "Thou shalt see me." And the vision disappeared, but the fragrance of the roses lingered long in the little cell. Then was Walter the Norman made Abbot, and forthwith he began to build a vast and beautiful minster, the fame of which should be rumoured through all the land. Speedily he emptied the five great chests filled with silver which Agelwyn had left, and then there set in a dearth of timber and stone and money, but the Abbot bethought him of a device for escaping from his difficulties. He took into his counsel the wise monks Hereman and Rheinfrid, because they had both travelled through many shires, and he entrusted to them the shrine containing the relics of St. Egwin, and bade them go on a pilgrimage from one rich city to another, making known their need, exhorting the people to charity, and gathering gifts of all kinds for the building of the minster. So with lay-brothers to serve them and a horse to carry the holy shrine, the monks began their journey, and, singing joyful canticles, the brotherhood accompanied them with cross and banners and burning tapers, and set them well on their way beyond the river. Now think of Rheinfrid and Hereman traversing the wild England of those olden times. One day they were wandering in the depths of the woods; on another they were moving along some neglected Roman road, through swamps and quagmires. Now they were passing hastily through the ruins of some Saxon thorpe which had been burned by the Normans, or lodging for the night as guests at some convent or priory, or crossing a dangerous river-ford, or making a brief stay in a busy town to preach and exhibit the shrine of the saint, so that the diseased and suffering might be touched by the miraculous relics. And all along their journey they gathered the offerings which the people brought them. "This, surely," thought Rheinfrid, "is the journey appointed me," and his spirit was at last peaceful and contented. Now in the third week of their pilgrimage they came to a wide moor which they had to cross. A heavy white mist lay on the lonely waste, and they had not gone far among the heath and grey boulders before Rheinfrid, absorbed in prayer, found himself separated from his companions. He called aloud to them by their names, but no one answered him. This way and that he wandered, still crying aloud, and hoping to discover some trace of the faint path which led over the moor. Suddenly he came to the brink of a vast chasm, the depth of which was hidden by the mist. It was a terrible place and he thanked God that he had not come thither in the darkness of the night. As he gazed anxiously on all sides, wondering what he should do next, he perceived through the vapour a tall dark figure. Approaching it, he saw that it was a high stone cross, and he murmured gratefully, "Here I am safe. The foot of Thy cross is an ever-lasting refuge." As he ascended the rough granite steps, he noticed how wonderfully the cross was sculptured, with a vine running up the shaft, and birds and small wild creatures among the vine-leaves, and he was able to read, in the centre, words from a famous old poem which he knew: _Rood is my name; long ago I bore a goodly King; trembling,_ _dripping with blood._ As he read them he became aware that some one had come out of the mist and was standing near him. "In the darkness the danger is great," said the stranger; "another step would have carried thee over the brink; and none who have fallen therein have ever returned. But the wind is rising, and this mist will speedily be lifted." While he was yet speaking a great draught of air drove the mist before it, and shifted and lifted it, and rolled it like carded wool, and in front all was clear, but the light was of an iron-grey transparency, and Rheinfrid saw into the depths of the chasm into which he had well-nigh fallen. Far down below lay the jagged ridges and ghastly abysses of a gigantic crater, the black walls of which were so steep that it was impossible to climb them. Smoke and steam rose in incessant puffs from the innermost pit of the crater and trailed along the floor and about the rocky spikes and jagged ridges. Then, as Rheinfrid gazed, his face grew pale, and he turned to the stranger. "What are these," he asked, "men, or little statues of men, or strangely shaped rocks?" "They are living men and women," said the stranger. "They seem as small as images," said Rheinfrid. "They are very far distant from us," replied the stranger, "although we see them so clearly." "There seem to be hundreds of them standing in crowds," said Rheinfrid. "There are thousands and hundreds of thousands," said the stranger. "And they do not move; they are motionless as stone; they do not even seem to breathe." "They are waiting," said the stranger. "Their faces are all turned upward; they are all staring in one way." "They are watching," said the stranger. "Why are they watching?" asked Rheinfrid; then looking up into the iron-grey air in the same direction as the faces of the people in the crater; "What huge ball is that hanging in the sky above them?" "It is a globe of polished stone--the stone adamant, which of all stones is the hardest." "Why do they gaze at it so steadfastly?" "Not hard to say," replied the stranger. "Every hundred years a little blue bird passes by, flying between them and the globe, and as it passes it touches the stone with the tip of its wing. On the last day of the hundredth year the people gather and watch with eager eyes all day for the passing of the bird, and while they watch they do not suffer. Now this is the last hour of the last day of the hundredth year, and you see how they gaze." "But why do they watch to see the bird?" "Each time the bird passes it touches the stone, and every hundred years it will thus touch it, till the stone be utterly worn away." "Ten thousand ages, and yet again ten thousand, and it will not have been worn away," said Rheinfrid. "But when it has been worn away, what then?" "Why, then," said the stranger, "Eternity will be no nearer to its end than it is now. But see! see!" Rheinfrid looked, and beheld a little blue bird flash across the huge ball of glimmering adamant, brush it with the tip of a single feather, and dart onward. And down in the crater all the faces were turned away again, and the crowd fell into such confusion as an autumn gale makes among the fallen leaves in a spinney; and out of the innermost pit the smoke and steam rose in clouds, till only the jagged ridges were visible; and a long cry of a myriad voices deadened by the deep distance rose like the terrible ghost of a cry from the abyss. And this was one of the Seven Cries of the World. For the Seven Cries of the World are these: the Cry of the Blood of Abel, and the Cry of the Deluge of Waters, and the Cry for the First-born of Egypt, and the Cry of the Cities of the Plain, and the Cry of Rachel in Ramah, and the Cry in the darkness of the ninth hour, and, more grievous than any of these, the Cry of the Doom of the Pit. "Truly," said Rheinfrid, shivering, "one day is as a thousand years in the sight of the Lord." "Come with me, and I will guide thee from this place," said the stranger. And he led the way along the brink of the gulf till they came to a bridge, high and narrow and fragile, glittering like glass; but when Rheinfrid touched it he perceived it was built of ice, and beneath it ran a fierce river of fire, and they felt the heat of the river on their faces, and the ice of the bridge was dissolving away. "How shall I pass this without falling?" asked Rheinfrid. "Follow in my steps," said the stranger, "and all will be well." He led the way on the slippery ice-work of the bridge, and in great fear and doubt Rheinfrid followed; but when they reached the crown of the arch the stranger threw aside his cloak and spread six mighty wings, and sprang from the bridge to the peak of a high mountain far beyond the burning river. The bridge cracked and swayed, and pieces broke away from the icy parapet. With a shriek of terror Rheinfrid sank down, and called upon God to help him. Then as he prayed he felt wings growing on his shoulders, and a terrible eager joy and dread possessed him, for he felt the ice of the bridge melting away, and the water of the melting ice was splashing like rain on the river of fire, and as each drop fell a little puff of white steam arose from the place where it fell. So, unable to wait till the wings had grown full, he rose to his feet, and attempted to follow the Angel. But his wings were too weak to bear him, and he fell clinging to the bridge, which shook beneath him. Once more he prayed; once more his impatience urged him to rise; and once more he fell. And the melted ice rained hissing into the river of fire, and the quick whiffs of white vapour came up from the surface. Then he committed himself to God's keeping, and waited in meekness and fortitude, saying, "Whether we live or we die we are in Thy charge," and it seemed to him that, so long as it was God's will, it mattered not at all what happened--whether the bridge crumbled away, dissolving like a rainbow in the clouds, or whether his body were engulfed in the torrent of burning. Then straightway, as he submitted himself thus, his wings grew large and strong, and he felt the power of them lifting him to his feet, and with what seemed no more than the effort of a wish he sprang from narrow way of ice and stood beside the Angel on the mountain. "Hadst thou not been twice impatient in the cloister," said the Angel, "thy wings would not have twice failed thee on the bridge. Now, look around and see!" Who shall tell the loveliness of the land on which Rheinfrid now gazed from the mountain? To breathe the clear shining air was in itself beatitude. He saw angelic figures and heard the singing of angels in the heavenly gardens glittering far below, and he longed to fly down to their blessed companionship. Suddenly over the tree-tops of a golden glade he descried a starry globe which shone like chrysoprase, and round and round it a little blue bird flew joyously. And so swiftly it flew that hardly had it gone before it had returned again. Rheinfrid turned to the Angel to question him, but the Angel, who was aware of his thoughts, said, "Yes, it is the same globe, only we see it now from the other side. Each circle that the bird makes is a hundred years; for five hundred already have you been here, but you must now return." Then the Angel touched the monk's head, and Rheinfrid closed his eyes, and in an instant it seemed to him as though he were awaking from a long sleep. Cold and rigid were his limbs, and as he tried to sit up each movement made them ache. He found that he had been lying under an aged oak. He rubbed his hands together for warmth, and a white lichen which had overgrown them peeled off in long threads. A heavy white beard, tangled with grey moss, covered his breast, and the hair of his head, white and matted with green tendrils, had grown about his body. Slowly and painfully he moved from tree to tree till he reached a broad road, and saw before him a bridge, and beyond the river a fair town clustered on the higher ground. So strange a town he had never beheld before--such a town as one sees in a foreign land, built with quaint roofs and gables and curiously coloured. As he crossed the bridge he met a woman who stared at him in amazement. He raised his head to speak, but he had lost the power of utterance. The woman waited; and at last with a feeble stammering speech he asked her the name of the place. She shook her head and said she did not understand his words, and with a look of pity she went on her way. Then down to the bridge came an urchin, and Rheinfrid repeated his question. "This is Eovesholme," said the lad. "That cannot be," said Rheinfrid, "for it is little more than twice seven days since I left Eovesholme, and this place is noway like the place you name." "Nay, but it is Eovesholme," replied the lad, "and you are one of the monks who used to be here before the King pulled down the Abbey." "Pulled down the Abbey! Hath King William pulled down the Abbey?" Rheinfrid asked in bewilderment. "Nay, it is bluff King Hal who has pulled the Abbey down. Come, and you shall see." The lad took Rheinfrid by the hand and led him through the streets till they came to the ruins. Only one beautiful sculptured arch was left standing, but Rheinfrid had never seen it before. They passed through and stood among a litter of stones, tumbled drums of pillars and fragments of carved mouldings and capitals. Rheinfrid recognised the spot. The land was the same, and the river, and the far hills, but nearly all the forest had been cleared, and the Abbey had vanished. What had happened to him and to them? "Hast thou where to pass the night, old father?" the lad asked. Rheinfrid shook his head sorrowfully. "Then I will show thee a place," he said. And again he took Rheinfrid by the hand, and let him among the ruins till they came to a flight of stone steps which led down into the crypt of the minster. These they descended, and there was a dim light in the place, and Rheinfrid's heart beat quickly, for he knew the pillars and vaulted roofs and walls of this undercroft. "Here you may rest peacefully and sleep well," said the urchin; "no one will venture here to disturb your slumber." "Sorrow be far from thee, little son," said Rheinfrid, speaking he perceived that it was the Child, and that the Child's head was crowned with roses and that he carried a rose in his hand. Then the aged monk sank on the cold stones of his old minster, faint and happy, for he knew now that he had finished his journey. But the Child touched Rheinfrid's brow with the rose he carried, and the old man fell asleep, and all the crypt was dark. Lighting the Lamps Now that it was the cool of the day (when God walked in Paradise), and the straggling leaves of the limes were swaying in the fresh stream of the breeze, and the book was finished--this very book--and at last, after many busy evenings I was free to do as I pleased, W. V. and I slipped away on a quiet stroll before bedtime. It was really very late for a little girl--nearly nine o'clock; but when one _is_ a little girl a walk between sunset and dark is like a ramble in fairyland; and after the heat of the day the air was sweet and pleasant, and in the west there still lingered a beautiful afterglow. We went a little way in the direction of the high trees of Caen Wood, where, you know, William the Conqueror had a hunting lodge; and as we passed under the green fringes of the rowans and the birches which overhung the pathway, it was delightful to think that perchance over this very ground on which we were walking the burly Master of England may have galloped in chase of the tall deer. "He loved them as if he were their father," said W. V., glancing up at me with a laugh. "My history book says that. But it wasn't very nice to kill them if he loved them, was it, father?" We turned down the new road they are making. It runs quite into the fields for some distance, and then goes sharp to the right. A pleasant smell of hay was blowing up the road, and when we reached the angle we saw two old stacks and the beginning of a new one; and the next field had been mown and was dotted with haycocks. On the half-finished road a steam roller stood, with its tarpaulin drawn over it for the night. In the field, along the wooden fence, some loads of dross had been shot between the haycocks; lengths of sod had been stripped off the soil and thrown in a heap, and planks had been laid down for the wheelbarrows. A rake, which some haymaker had left, stood planted in the ground, teeth uppermost; beside it a labourer's barrow lay overturned. A few yards away a thick elderberry bush was growing dim in the twilight, and its bunches of blossom looked curiously white and spectral. I think even W. V. felt it strange to see this new road so brusquely invading the ancient fields. I looked across the frank natural acres (as if they were a sort of wild creature), stretching away with their hedgerows and old trees to the blue outline of the hills on the horizon, and wondered how much longer one might see the rose-red of sunset showing through interlaced branches, or dark knots of coppice silhouetted against the grey-green breadths of tranquil twilight. When we went a little further we caught sight among the trees of some out-buildings of the farm. What a lost, pathetic look they had! Thinking of the stories in my book, it seemed to me that the scene before me was a figure of the change which took place when the life we know invaded and absorbed the strange mediaeval life which we know no longer, and which it is now so difficult to realise. Slowly the afterglow faded; when you looked carefully for a star, here and there a little speck of gold could be found in the heavens; the birds were all in their nests, head under wing; white and grey moths were beginning to flutter to and fro. Suddenly over the fields the sound of church-bells floated to us. "Is that the Angelus, father?" asked W. V. "No, dear; I think it must be the ringers practising." "If it had been the Angelus, would St. Francis have stood still to say the prayer?" "I think he would have knelt down to say it. That would be more like St. Francis." "And would William the Conqueror?" "Why, no; I fancy he would have taken it for the curfew bell." "They do still ring the curfew bell in some places, don't they, father?" "Oh yes; in several places; but, of course, they don't cover up their fires." "I like to hear of those old bells; don't you, father?" As we reached the end of the new road we saw the man lighting the lamp there; and we watched him going quickly from one post to another, leaving a little flower of fire wherever he stopped. All was very quiet, and, as he went down the street, we could hear the sound of his footsteps growing fainter and fainter in the distance. All our streets, you must know, are lined with trees, trees both in the gardens and on the side-walks, and the lamps glittered among the leaves and branches like so many stars. When we passed under them we noticed how the light tinged the foliage that was nearest with a greenish ash-colour, almost like the undersides of aspen-leaves. "Isn't it just like a fairy village?" asked W. V. On our way down our own street I pointed silently to the Forest. High over the billowy outline of the darkened tree-tops the church of the Oak-men was clear against the weather-gleam. W. V. nodded: "I expect all the Oak boys and girls have said, 'God bless this house from thatch to floor,' and gone to bed long ago." Since she heard the story of the Guardians of the Door, that has been her own favourite prayer at bed-time. Thinking of the lighting of the lamps after she had been safely tucked in, I tried to make her a little song about it. I don't think she will like it as much as she liked the actual lighting of the lamps, but in years to come it may remind her of that delightful spectacle. THE LAMPLIGHTER From lamp to lamp, from street to street, He speeds with faintlier echoing feet, A pause--a glint of light! And, lamp by lamp, with stars he marks his round. So Love, when least of Love we dream, Comes in the dusk with magic gleam. A pause--a touch--so slight! And life with clear celestial lights is crowned. 
28990	----	By Abbie Farwell Brown THE STAR JEWELS AND OTHER WONDERS. Illustrated. Square 12mo, $1.00. THE FLOWER PRINCESS. Illustrated. Sq. 12mo, $1.00. THE CURIOUS BOOK OF BIRDS. Illustrated. Square 12mo, $1.10, _net_. Postpaid, $1.21. A POCKETFUL OF POSIES. Illustrated. 12mo, $1.00, _net_. Postpaid, $1.09. IN THE DAYS OF GIANTS. Illustrated. 12mo, $1.10, _net_. Postpaid, $1.21. _School edition_, 50 cents, _net_, postpaid. THE BOOK OF SAINTS AND FRIENDLY BEASTS. Illustrated, 12mo, $1.25. THE LONESOMEST DOLL. Illustrated. Sq. 12mo, 85 cents, _net_. Postpaid, 95 cents. HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO. BOSTON AND NEW YORK THE BOOK OF SAINTS AND FRIENDLY BEASTS [Illustration: ST. BRIDGET & THE KING'S WOLF] THE BOOK OF SAINTS AND FRIENDLY BEASTS BY ABBIE FARWELL BROWN. ILLUSTRATED BY FANNY Y. CORY [Illustration] HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND CO. BOSTON AND NEW YORK COPYRIGHT 1900 BY ABBIE FARWELL BROWN, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED IN LOVING MEMORY OF A FRIENDLY BEAST BROTHER, HAST THOU NEVER LEARNED IN HOLY WRIT, THAT WITH HIM WHO HAS LED HIS LIFE AFTER GOD'S WILL THE WILD BEASTS AND WILD BIRDS ARE TAME? SAINT GUTHLAC OF CROWLAND _IN the old legends there may be things which some folk nowadays find it hard to believe. But surely the theme of each is true. It is not hard to see how gentle bodies who had no other friends should make comrades of the little folk in fur and fins and feathers. For, as St. Francis knew so well, all the creatures are our little brothers, ready to meet halfway those who will but try to understand. And this is a truth which every one to-day, even tho' he be no Saint, is waking up to learn. The happenings are set down quite as they read in the old books. Veritable histories, like those of St. Francis and St. Cuthbert, ask no addition of color to make them real. But sometimes, when a mere line of legend remained to hint of some dear Saint's relation with his friendly Beast, the story has been filled out in the way that seemed most likely to be true. For so alone could the old tale be made alive again. So all one's best is dressing old words new._ CONTENTS PAGE Saint Bridget and the King's Wolf 1 Saint Gerasimus and the Lion 11 Saint Keneth of the Gulls 30 Saint Launomar's Cow 42 Saint Werburgh and her Goose 53 The Ballad of Saint Athracta's Stags 69 Saint Kentigern and the Robin 77 Saint Blaise and his Beasts 88 Saint Cuthbert's Peace 95 The Ballad of Saint Felix 108 Saint Fronto's Camels 114 The Blind Singer, Saint Hervé 126 Saint Comgall and the Mice 148 The Wonders of Saint Berach 156 Saint Prisca, the Child Martyr 166 The Fish who helped Saint Gudwall 176 The Ballad of Saint Giles and the Deer 183 The Wolf-Mother of Saint Ailbe 190 Saint Rigobert's Dinner 199 Saint Francis of Assisi 211 A Calendar of Saints' Days 226 _The legend of Saint Fronto's Camels originally appeared in_ The Churchman. THE BOOK OF SAINTS AND FRIENDLY BEASTS SAINT BRIDGET AND THE KING'S WOLF EVERY one has heard of Bridget, the little girl saint of Ireland. Her name is almost as well known as that of Saint Patrick, who drove all the snakes from the Island. Saint Bridget had long golden hair; and she was very beautiful. Many wonderful things happened to her that are written in famous books. But I suspect that you never heard what she did about the King's Wolf. It is a queer story. This is how it happened. The King of Ireland had a tame wolf which some hunters had caught for him when it was a wee baby. And this wolf ran around as it pleased in the King's park near the palace, and had a very good time. But one morning he got over the high wall which surrounded the park, and strayed a long distance from home, which was a foolish thing to do. For in those days wild wolves were hated and feared by the people, whose cattle they often stole; and if a man could kill a wicked wolf he thought himself a very smart fellow indeed. Moreover, the King himself had offered a prize to any man who should bring him a dead wolf. For he wanted his kingdom to be a peaceful, happy one, where the children could play in the woods all day without fear of big eyes or big teeth. Of course you can guess what happened to the King's wolf? A big, silly country fellow was going along with his bow and arrows, when he saw a great brown beast leap over a hedge and dash into the meadow beyond. It was only the King's wolf running away from home and feeling very frisky because it was the first time that he had done such a thing. But the country fellow did not know all that. "Aha!" he said to himself. "I'll soon have you, my fine wolf; and the King will give me a gold piece that will buy me a hat and a new suit of clothes for the holidays." And without stopping to think about it or to look closely at the wolf, who had the King's mark upon his ear, the fellow shot his arrow straight as a string. The King's wolf gave one great leap into the air and then fell dead on the grass, poor fellow. The countryman was much pleased. He dragged his prize straight up to the King's palace and thumped on the gate. "Open!" he cried. "Open to the valiant hunter who has shot a wolf for the King. Open, that I may go in to receive the reward." So, very respectfully, they bade him enter; and the Lord Chamberlain escorted him before the King himself, who sat on a great red-velvet throne in the Hall. In came the fellow, dragging after him by the tail the limp body of the King's wolf. "What have we here?" growled the King, as the Lord Chamberlain made a low bow and pointed with his staff to the stranger. The King had a bad temper and did not like to receive callers in the morning. But the silly countryman was too vain of his great deed to notice the King's disagreeable frown. "You have here a wolf, Sire," he said proudly. "I have shot for you a wolf, and I come to claim the promised reward." But at this unlucky moment the King started up with an angry cry. He had noticed his mark on the wolf's right ear. "Ho! Seize the villain!" he shouted to his soldiers. "He has slain my tame wolf; he has shot my pet! Away with him to prison; and to-morrow he dies." It was useless for the poor man to scream and cry and try to explain that it was all a mistake. The King was furious. His wolf was killed, and the murderer must die. In those days this was the way kings punished men who displeased them in any way. There were no delays; things happened very quickly. So they dragged the poor fellow off to a dark, damp dungeon and left him there howling and tearing his hair, wishing that wolves had never been saved from the flood by Noah and his Ark. Now not far from this place little Saint Bridget lived. When she chose the beautiful spot for her home there were no houses near, only a great oak-tree, under which she built her little hut. It had but one room and the roof was covered with grass and straw. It seemed almost like a doll's playhouse, it was so small; and Bridget herself was like a big, golden-haired wax doll,--the prettiest doll you ever saw. She was so beautiful and so good that people wanted to live near her, where they could see her sweet face often and hear her voice. When they found where she had built her cell, men came flocking from all the country round about with their wives and children and their household goods, their cows and pigs and chickens; and camping on the green grass under the great oak-tree they said, "We will live here, too, where Saint Bridget is." So house after house was built, and a village grew up about her little cell; and for a name it had _Kildare_, which in Irish means "Cell of the Oak." Soon Kildare became so fashionable that even the King must have a palace and a park there. And it was in this park that the King's wolf had been killed. Now Bridget knew the man who had shot the wolf, and when she heard into what terrible trouble he had fallen she was very sorry, for she was a kind-hearted little girl. She knew he was a silly fellow to shoot the tame wolf; but still it was all a mistake, and she thought he ought not to be punished so severely. She wished that she could do something to help him, to save him if possible. But this seemed difficult, for she knew what a bad temper the King had; and she also knew how proud he had been of that wolf, who was the only tame one in all the land. Bridget called for her coachman with her chariot and pair of white horses, and started for the King's palace, wondering what she should do to satisfy the King and make him release the man who had meant to do no harm. But lo and behold! as the horses galloped along over the Irish bogs of peat, Saint Bridget saw a great white shape racing towards her. At first she thought it was a dog. But no: no dog was as large as that. She soon saw that it was a wolf, with big eyes and with a red tongue lolling out of his mouth. At last he overtook the frightened horses, and with a flying leap came plump into the chariot where Bridget sat, and crouched at her feet, quietly as a dog would. He was no tame wolf, but a wild one, who had never before felt a human being's hand upon him. Yet he let Bridget pat and stroke him, and say nice things into his great ear. And he kept perfectly still by her side until the chariot rumbled up to the gate of the palace. Then Bridget held out her hand and called to him; and the great white beast followed her quietly through the gate and up the stair and down the long hall, until they stood before the red-velvet throne, where the King sat looking stern and sulky. They must have been a strange-looking pair, the little maiden in her green gown with her golden hair falling like a shower down to her knees; and the huge white wolf standing up almost as tall as she, his yellow eyes glaring fiercely about, and his red tongue panting. Bridget laid her hand gently on the beast's head which was close to her shoulder, and bowed to the King. The King only sat and stared, he was so surprised at the sight; but Bridget took that as a permission to speak. "You have lost your tame wolf, O King," she said. "But I have brought you a better. There is no other tame wolf in all the land, now yours is dead. But look at this one! There is no white wolf to be found anywhere, and he is both tame and white. I have tamed him, my King. I, a little maiden, have tamed him so that he is gentle as you see. Look, I can pull his big ears and he will not snarl. Look, I can put my little hand into his great red mouth, and he will not bite. Sire, I give him to you. Spare me then the life of the poor, silly man who unwittingly killed your beast. Give his stupid life to me in exchange for this dear, amiable wolf," and she smiled pleadingly. The King sat staring first at the great white beast, wonderfully pleased with the look of him, then at the beautiful maiden whose blue eyes looked so wistfully at him. And he was wonderfully pleased with the look of them, too. Then he bade her tell him the whole story, how she had come by the creature, and when, and where. Now when she had finished he first whistled in surprise, then he laughed. That was a good sign,--he was wonderfully pleased with Saint Bridget's story, also. It was so strange a thing for the King to laugh in the morning that the Chamberlain nearly fainted from surprise; and Bridget felt sure that she had won her prayer. Never had the King been seen in such a good humor. For he was a vain man, and it pleased him mightily to think of owning all for himself this huge beast, whose like was not in all the land, and whose story was so marvelous. And when Bridget looked at him so beseechingly, he could not refuse those sweet blue eyes the request which they made, for fear of seeing them fill with tears. So, as Bridget begged, he pardoned the countryman, and gave his life to Bridget, ordering his soldiers to set him free from prison. Then when she had thanked the King very sweetly, she bade the wolf lie down beside the red-velvet throne, and thenceforth be faithful and kind to his new master. And with one last pat upon his shaggy head, she left the wolf and hurried out to take away the silly countryman in her chariot, before the King should have time to change his mind. The man was very happy and grateful. But she gave him a stern lecture on the way home, advising him not to be so hasty and so wasty next time. "Sirrah Stupid," she said as she set him down by his cottage gate, "better not kill at all than take the lives of poor tame creatures. I have saved your life this once, but next time you will have to suffer. Remember, it is better that two wicked wolves escape than that one kind beast be killed. We cannot afford to lose our friendly beasts, Master Stupid. We can better afford to lose a blundering fellow like you." And she drove away to her cell under the oak, leaving the silly man to think over what she had said, and to feel much ashamed. But the King's new wolf lived happily ever after in the palace park; and Bridget came often to see him, so that he had no time to grow homesick or lonesome. SAINT GERASIMUS AND THE LION I. ONE fine morning Saint Gerasimus was walking briskly along the bank of the River Jordan. By his side plodded a little donkey bearing on his back an earthen jar; for they had been down to the river together to get water, and were taking it back to the monastery on the hill for the monks to drink at their noonday meal. Gerasimus was singing merrily, touching the stupid little donkey now and then with a twig of olive leaves to keep him from going to sleep. This was in the far East, in the Holy Land, so the sky was very blue and the ground smelled hot. Birds were singing around them in the trees and overhead, all kinds of strange and beautiful birds. But suddenly Gerasimus heard a sound unlike any bird he had ever known; a sound which was not a bird's song at all, unless some newly invented kind had a bass voice which ended in a howl. The little donkey stopped suddenly, and bracing his fore legs and cocking forward his long, flappy ears, looked afraid and foolish. Gerasimus stopped too. But he was so wise a man that he could not look foolish. And he was too good a man to be afraid of anything. Still, he was a little surprised. "Dear me," he said aloud, "how very strange that sounded. What do you suppose it was?" Now there was no one else anywhere near, so he must have been talking to himself. For he could never have expected that donkey to know anything about it. But the donkey thought he was being spoken to, so he wagged his head, and said, "He-haw!" which was a very silly answer indeed, and did not help Gerasimus at all. He seized the donkey by the halter and waited to see what would happen. He peered up and down and around and about, but there was nothing to be seen except the shining river, the yellow sand, a clump of bushes beside the road, and the spire of the monastery peeping over the top of the hill beyond. He was about to start the donkey once more on his climb towards home, when that sound came again; and this time he noticed that it was a sad sound, a sort of whining growl ending in a sob. It sounded nearer than before, and seemed to come from the clump of bushes. Gerasimus and the donkey turned their heads quickly in that direction, and the donkey trembled all over, he was so frightened. But his master only said, "It must be a Lion!" And sure enough: he had hardly spoken the word when out of the bushes came poking the great head and yellow eyes of a lion. He was looking straight at Gerasimus. Then, giving that cry again, he bounded out and strode towards the good man, who was holding the donkey tight to keep him from running away. He was the biggest kind of a lion, much bigger than the donkey, and his mane was long and thick, and his tail had a yellow brush on the end as large as a window mop. But as he came Gerasimus noticed that he limped as if he were lame. At once the Saint was filled with pity, for he could not bear to see any creature suffer. And without any thought of fear, he went forward to meet the lion. Instead of pouncing upon him fiercely, or snarling, or making ready to eat him up, the lion crouched whining at his feet. "Poor fellow," said Gerasimus, "what hurts you and makes you lame, brother Lion?" The lion shook his yellow mane and roared. But his eyes were not fierce; they were only full of pain as they looked up into those of Gerasimus asking for help. And then he held up his right fore paw and shook it to show that this was where the trouble lay. Gerasimus looked at him kindly. "Lie down, sir," he said just as one would speak to a big yellow dog. And obediently the lion charged. Then the good man bent over him, and taking the great paw in his hand examined it carefully. In the soft cushion of the paw a long pointed thorn was piercing so deeply that he could hardly find the end. No wonder the poor lion had roared with pain! Gerasimus pulled out the thorn as gently as he could, and though it must have hurt the lion badly he did not make a sound, but lay still as he had been told. And when the thorn was taken out the lion licked Gerasimus' hand, and looked up in his face as if he would say, "Thank you, kind man. I shall not forget." Now when the Saint had finished this good deed he went back to his donkey and started on towards the monastery. But hearing the soft pad of steps behind him he turned and saw that the great yellow lion was following close at his heels. At first he was somewhat embarrassed, for he did not know how the other monks would receive this big stranger. But it did not seem polite or kind to drive him away, especially as he was still somewhat lame. So Gerasimus took up his switch of olive leaves and drove the donkey on without a word, thinking that perhaps the lion would grow tired and drop behind. But when he glanced over his shoulder he still saw the yellow head close at his elbow; and sometimes he felt the hot, rough tongue licking his hand that hung at his side. So they climbed the hill to the monastery. Some one had seen Gerasimus coming with this strange attendant at his heels, and the windows and doors were crowded with monks, their mouths and eyes wide open with astonishment, peering over one another's shoulders. From every corner of the monastery they had run to see the sight; but they were all on tiptoe to run back again twice as quickly if the lion should roar or lash his tail. Now although Gerasimus knew that the house was full of staring eyes expecting every minute to see him eaten up, he did not hurry or worry at all. Leisurely he unloaded the water-jar and put the donkey in his stable, the lion following him everywhere he went. When all was finished he turned to bid the beast good-by. But instead of taking the hint and departing as he was expected to, the lion crouched at Gerasimus' feet and licked his sandals; and then he looked up in the Saint's face and pawed at his coarse gown pleadingly, as if he said, "Good man, I love you because you took the thorn out of my foot. Let me stay with you always to be your watch-dog." And Gerasimus understood. "Well, if you wish to stay I am willing, so long as you are good," he said, and the lion leaped up and roared with joy so loudly that all the monks who were watching tumbled over one another and ran away to their cells in a terrible fright, locking the doors behind them. Gerasimus carried the water-jar into the empty kitchen, and the lion followed. After sniffing about the place to get acquainted, just as a kitten does in its new home, the lion lay down in front of the fire and curled his head up on his paws, like the great big cat he was. And so after a long sigh he went to sleep. Then Gerasimus had a chance to tell the other monks all about it. At first they were timid and would not hear of keeping such a dangerous pet. But when they had all tiptoed down to the kitchen behind Gerasimus and had seen the big kitten asleep there so peacefully they were not quite so much afraid. "I'll tell you what we will do," said the Abbot. "If Brother Gerasimus can make his friend eat porridge and herbs like the rest of us we will let him join our number. He might be very useful,--as well as ornamental,--in keeping away burglars and mice. But we cannot have any flesh-eating creature among us. Some of us are too fat and tempting, I fear," and he glanced at several of the roundest monks, who shuddered in their tight gowns. But the Abbot himself was the fattest of them all, and he spoke with feeling. So it was decided. Gerasimus let the lion sleep a good long nap, to put him in a fine humor. But when it came time for supper he mixed a bowl of porridge and milk and filled a big wooden platter with boiled greens. Then taking one dish in each hand he went up to the lion and set them in front of his nose. "Leo, Leo, Leo!" he called coaxingly, just as a little girl would call "Kitty, Kitty, Kitty!" to her pet. The lion lifted up his head and purred, like a small furnace, for he recognized his friend's voice. But when he smelled the dishes of food he sniffed and made a horrid face, wrinkling up his nose and saying "Ugh!" He did not like the stuff at all. But Gerasimus patted him on the head and said, "You had better eat it, Leo; it is all I have myself. Share and share alike, brother." The lion looked at him earnestly, and then dipped his nose into the porridge with a grunt. He ate it all, and found it not so very bad. So next he tried the greens. They were a poor dessert, he thought; but since he saw that Gerasimus wanted him to eat them he finished the dish, and then lay down on the hearth feeling very tired. Gerasimus was delighted, for he had grown fond of the lion and wanted to keep him. So he hurried back to the dining hall and showed the empty dishes to the Abbot. That settled the lion's fate. Thenceforth he became a member of the monastery. He ate with the other monks in the great hall, having his own private trencher and bowl beside Gerasimus. And he grew to like the mild fare of the good brothers,--at least he never sought for anything different. He slept outside the door of his master's cell and guarded the monastery like a faithful watch-dog. The monks grew fond of him and petted him so that he lived a happy life on the hill, with never a wish to go back to the desert with its thorns. II. WHEREVER Gerasimus went the lion went also. Best of all, Leo enjoyed their daily duty of drawing water from the river. For that meant a long walk in the open air, and a frolic on the bank of the Jordan. One day they had gone as usual, Gerasimus, the lion, and the stupid donkey who was carrying the filled jar on his back. They were jogging comfortably home, when a poor man came running out of a tiny hut near the river, who begged Gerasimus to come with him and try to cure his sick baby. Of course the good man willingly agreed; this was one of the errands which he loved best to do. "Stay, brother," he commanded Leo, who wanted to go with him, "stay and watch the foolish donkey." And he went with the man, feeling sure that the lion would be faithful. Now Leo meant to do his duty, but it was a hot and sleepy day, and he was very tired. He lay down beside the donkey and kept one eye upon him, closing the other one just for a minute. But this is a dangerous thing to do. Before he knew it, the other eye began to wink; and the next moment Leo was sound asleep, snoring with his head on his paws. Then it was that the silly donkey began to grow restless. He saw a patch of grass just beyond that looked tempting, and he moved over to it. Then he saw a greener spot beyond that, and then another still farther beyond that, till he had taken his silly self a long way off. And just then there came along on his way from Dan to Beersheba, a thief of a Camel Driver, with a band of horses and asses. He saw the donkey grazing there with no one near, and he said to himself,-- "Aha! A fine little donkey. I will add him to my caravan and no one will be the wiser." And seizing Silly by the halter, he first cut away the water-jar, and then rode off with him as fast as he could gallop. Now the sound of pattering feet wakened Leo. He jumped up with a roar just in time to see the Camel Driver's face as he glanced back from the top of the next hill. Leo ran wildly about sniffing for the donkey; but when he found that he had really disappeared, he knew the Camel Driver must have stolen him. He was terribly angry. He stood by the water-jar and roared and lashed his tail, gnashing his jaws as he remembered the thief's wicked face. Now in the midst of his rage out came Gerasimus. He found Leo roaring and foaming at the mouth, his red-rimmed eyes looking very fierce. And the donkey was gone--only the water-jar lay spilling on the ground. Then Gerasimus made a great mistake. He thought that poor Leo had grown tired of being a vegetarian, of living upon porridge and greens, and had tried fresh donkey-meat for a change. "Oh, you wicked lion!" he cried, "you have eaten poor Silly. What shall I do to punish you?" Then Leo roared louder than ever with shame and sorrow. But he could not speak to tell how it had happened. The Saint was very sad. Tears stood in his kind eyes. "You will have to be donkey now," he said; "you will have to do his part of the work since he is now a part of you. Come, stand up and let me fasten the water-jar upon your back." He spoke sternly and even switched Leo with his olive stick. Leo had never been treated like this. He was the King of Beasts, and it was shame for a King to do donkey's work. His eyes flashed, and he had half a mind to refuse and to run away. Then he looked at the good man and remembered how he had taken out that cruel thorn. So he hung his head and stood still to be harnessed in the donkey's place. Slowly and painfully Leo carried the water-jar up the hill. But worse than all it was to feel that his dear master was angry with him. Gerasimus told the story to the other monks, and they were even more angry than he had been, for they did not love Leo so well. They all agreed that Leo must be punished; so they treated him exactly as if he were a mean, silly donkey. They gave him only oats and water to eat, and made him do all Silly's work. They would no longer let him sleep outside his master's door, but they tied him in a lonesome stall in the stable. And now he could not go to walk with Gerasimus free and happy as the King of Beasts should be. For he went only in harness, with never a kind word from his master's lips. It was a sad time for Leo. He was growing thinner and thinner. His mane was rough and tangled because he had no heart to keep it smooth. And there were several white hairs in his beautiful whiskers. He was fast becoming melancholy; and the most pitiful beast in all the world is a melancholy lion. He had been hoping that something would happen to show that it was all a mistake; but it seemed as though the world was against him, and truth was dead. It was a sad time for Gerasimus, too; for he still loved Leo, though he knew the lion must be punished for the dreadful deed which he was believed to have done. One day he had to go some distance to a neighboring town to buy provisions. As usual, he took Leo with him to bring back the burden, but they did not speak all the way. Gerasimus had done the errands which he had come to do, and was fastening the baskets on each side of the lion's back. A group of children were standing around watching the queer sight,--a lion burdened like a donkey! And they laughed and pointed their fingers at him, making fun of poor Leo. But suddenly the lion growled and began to lash his tail, quivering like a cat ready to spring on a mouse. The children screamed and ran away, thinking that he was angry with them for teasing him. But it was not that. A train of camels was passing at the moment, and Leo had seen at their head a mean, wicked face which he remembered. And as the last of the caravan went by, Leo caught sight of Silly himself, the missing donkey of the monastery. At the sound of Leo's growl, Silly pricked up his ears and stood on his fore legs, which is not a graceful position for a donkey. Then the Camel Driver came running up to see what was the matter with his stolen donkey. But when he came face to face with Leo, whose yellow eyes were glaring terribly, the thief trembled and turned pale. For he remembered the dreadful roar which had followed him that day as he galloped away across the sand holding Silly's halter. The poor donkey was quivering with fear, thinking that this time he was surely going to be eaten piecemeal. But after all this trouble on Silly's account, the very idea of tasting donkey made Leo sick. He only wanted to show Gerasimus what a mistake had been made. All this time Gerasimus had been wondering what the lion's strange behavior meant. But when he saw Leo seize the donkey's bridle, he began to suspect the truth. He ran up and examined the donkey carefully. Then Leo looked up in his face and growled softly, as if to say:-- "Here is your old donkey, safe and sound. You see I didn't eat him after all. _That_ is the real thief," and turning to the Camel Driver, he showed his teeth and looked so fierce that the man hid behind a camel, crying, "Take away the lion! Kill the wicked lion!" But Gerasimus seized Silly by the bridle. "This is my beast," he said, "and I shall lead him home with me. You stole him, Thief, and my noble lion has found you out," and he laid his hand tenderly on Leo's head. "He is mine, you shall not have him!" cried the Camel Driver, dodging out from behind the camel, and trying to drag the donkey away from Gerasimus. But with a dreadful roar, Leo sprang upon him, and with his great paw knocked him down and sat upon his stomach. "Do not hurt him, Leo," said Gerasimus gently. But to the Camel Driver he was very stern. "Look out, Sir Thief," he said, "how you steal again the donkey of an honest man. Even the yellow beasts of the desert know better than that, and will make you ashamed. Be thankful that you escape so easily." Then he took the baskets from Leo's back and bound them upon Silly, who was glad to receive them once more from his own master's hands. For the Camel Driver had been cruel to him and had often beaten him. So he resolved never again to stray away as he had done that unlucky time. And when they were all ready to start, Gerasimus called Leo, and he got up from the chest of the Camel Driver, where he had been sitting all this time, washing his face with his paws and smiling. "My poor old Leo!" said Gerasimus, with tears in his eyes, "I have made you suffer cruelly for a crime of which you were not guilty. But I will make it up to you." Then happily the three set out for home, and all the way Gerasimus kept his arm about the neck of his lion, who was wild with joy because he and his dear master were friends once more, and the dreadful mistake was discovered. They had a joyful reception at the monastery on the hill. Of course every one was glad to see poor Silly again; but best of all it was to know that their dear old lion was not a wicked murderer. They petted him and gave him so many good things to eat that he almost burst with fatness. They made him a soft bed, and all the monks took turns in scratching his chin for ten minutes at a time, which was what Leo loved better than anything else in the world. And so he dwelt happily with the good monks, one of the most honored brothers of the monastery. Always together he and Gerasimus lived and slept and ate and took their walks. And at last after many, many years, they grew old together, and very tired and sleepy. So one night Gerasimus, who had become an Abbot, the head of the monastery, lay gently down to rest, and never woke up in the morning. But the great lion loved him so that when they laid Saint Gerasimus to sleep under a beautiful plane-tree in the garden, Leo lay down upon the mound moaning and grieving, and would not move. So his faithful heart broke that day, and he, too, slept forever by his dear master's side. But this was not a sad thing that happened. For think how dreadful the days would have been for Leo without Gerasimus. And think how sad a life Gerasimus would have spent if Leo had left him first. Oh, no; it was not sad, but very, very beautiful that the dear Saint and his friendly beast could be happy together all the day, and when the long night came they could sleep together side by side in the garden. SAINT KENETH OF THE GULLS ONCE upon a time, more than a thousand years ago, a great white sea-gull was circling above the waves which roll between South England and Wales. He was pretending that he was doing this just for fun; and he seemed very lazy and dozy as he poised and floated without much trouble to move his wings. But really he was looking for a dinner, though he did not want any one to suspect it. And he hoped that some unwary fish would swim up near the surface of the water within diving reach of his great claws. His keen gray eyes were open all the while unsleepily, and not much that was going on down below on the water escaped his notice. Suddenly his eye caught sight of a little black speck on the waves. "Aha!" he said to himself, "I think I see my dinner!" and with a great swoop down he pounced. You could hardly think how anything which looked so lazy and quiet could dart so like a flash of lightning. But a gull is an air-ship that can sink whenever it chooses. And when he gives a fish a sudden invitation to step in for dinner, the fish is hardly able to refuse. But this was no fish which the hungry gull had spied. Before he reached the water he saw his mistake, and wheeling swiftly as only a gull can, he flapped back again into the air, uttering a screech of surprise. "Cree-e-e!" he cried. "'Tis no scaly water-fish such as I like to eat. 'Tis one of those smooth land-fishes with yellow seaweed growing on its head. What is it doing here? I must see to this. Cree-e-e!" No wonder the great bird circled and swooped curiously over the wicker basket which was floating on the waves. For on a piece of purple cloth lay a tiny pink-and-white baby, sound asleep, his yellow hair curling about the dimpled face, and one thumb thrust into the round red mouth. "Well, well!" said the sea-gull to himself when he had examined the strange floating thing all he wished. "I must go and tell the others about this. Something must be done. There is a storm brewing, and this boat will not bear much rough weather. This little land-fish cannot swim. We must take care of him. Cree-e-e!" So off he flapped, and as he went he gave the family cry to call the gulls about him, wherever they might be. Soon they came, circling carelessly, swooping sulkily, floating happily, darting eagerly, according to their various dispositions; and as they came they gave the Gull cry. "Cree-e-e!" said they, "what is the matter?" "Follow me," said the White Gull to the great fleet of gray-winged air-ships. "Follow me, and you shall see" (which is Gull poetry). Then he led the flock over the spot where the wicker cradle tossed on the growing waves. "Lo," said he, "a land-fish in danger of being drowned among the Scaly Ones. Let us save it. See how pink it is. Its eyes are a piece of the sky, and its voice is not unlike ours--listen!" For by this time the baby had wakened, and feeling cold and hungry and wet with the dashing spray, opened his pink mouth, and began to cry lustily. "E-e-e-e-e!" wailed the baby; and as the White Gull had said, that sounds very like the chief word of the Gull tongue. [Illustration: SAINT KENETH OF THE GULLS] "Poor little thing!" said all the mother gulls in chorus. "He talks our language, he must be saved. Come, brothers and sisters, and use your beaks and talons before the clumsy nest in which he lies is sunk beneath the waves. Cree-e-e, little one, cree-e-e! We will save you." Now, I don't know what _cree-e-e_ means in Gull. But the baby must have understood. For he stopped crying instantly, and looked up laughing at the white wings which fanned his face and the kind gray eyes which peered into his own blue ones. So the strong gulls seized the corners of the purple cloth on which the baby lay, some with their claws, some with their hooked beaks. And at a signal from the White Gull they fluttered up and away, bearing the baby over the waves as if he were in a little hammock. The White Gull flew on before and guided them to land,--a high shelf which hung over the sea roaring on the rocks below, the nicest kind of a gull home. And here they laid the baby down, and sat about wondering what they must do next. But the baby cried. "We must build him a nest," said the White Gull. "These rocks are too hard and too sharp for a little land-fish. I know how they sleep in their home nests, for I have seen." Now the gulls lay their eggs on the bare rocks, and think these quite soft enough for the young gull babies. But they all agreed that this would never do for the little stranger. So they pulled the downy feathers from their breasts till they had a great pile; and of this they made the softest bed in which they laid the baby. And he slept. This is how little Saint Keneth was saved from the waves by the kind sea-gulls. And it goes to show that birds are sometimes kinder than human folk. For Keneth was the Welsh Prince's little son. But no one loved him, and his cruel mother had put him into the wicker basket and set him afloat on the waves, not caring what became of him nor hoping to see him again. But this in after years she did, when Keneth was become a great and famous Saint whom all, even the Prince and Princess, honored. She did not know him then because she believed that he was dead. How proud she would have been if she could have called him "Son!" But that was many years later. Now when the gulls had made Keneth this comfortable nest, they next wondered what they should do to get him food. But the White Gull had an idea. He flew away over the land and was gone for some time. When at last he returned he had with him a kind forest doe,--a yellow mother Deer who had left her little ones, at the White Gull's request, to come and feed the stranger baby. So Keneth found a new mother who loved him far better than his own had done,--a new mother who came every morning and every night and fed him with her milk. And he grew strong and fat and hearty, the happy baby in his nest upon the rocks, where his friends, the sea-gulls, watched over him, and the mother Deer fed and cared for him, and washed him clean with her warm crash-towel tongue. Now when Keneth had lived in the sea-gulls' home for some months, one day the flock of guardian gulls left him while they went upon a fishing trip. The mother Deer had not yet come with his breakfast, but was at home with her own little ones, so that for the first time Keneth was quite alone. He did not know this, but was sleeping peacefully on his purple quilt, when a strange face came peering over the edge of the rocks. It was a Shepherd from the nearest village who had clambered up to seek gulls' eggs for his breakfast. But his eyes bulged out of his head, and he nearly fell over backward into the sea with surprise when he saw Keneth lying in his nest of feathers. "The Saints preserve us!" he cried, "what is this?" But when he had climbed nearer and saw what it really was, he was delighted with the treasure which he had found. "A beautiful little baby!" he exclaimed. "I will take him home to my wife, who has no child of her own." And forthwith he took up Keneth, wrapped in the purple cloth, and started down over the rocks towards his home. But Keneth wakened at the stranger's touch and began to wail. He had no mind to go with the Shepherd; he wanted to stay where he was. So as they went he screamed at the top of his lungs, hoping some of his friends would come. And the mother Deer, who was on her way thither, heard his voice. She came running in a fright, but she could do nothing to protect him, being a gentle, weaponless creature. However, she followed anxiously to see what would happen to her darling. So they went down the rocks, Keneth and the Shepherd, with the Deer close behind. And all the way Keneth shrieked loudly, "E-e-e-e!" Now at last a messenger breeze carried the baby voice out over the water of the Bristol Channel where the gulls were fishing. "What is that?" they said, stopping their work to listen. "Is it not our little land-fish calling us in Gull? He is in trouble or danger. Brothers, to the rescue! Cre-e-e-e!" So the flock of gulls left their fishing and swooped back to the rock where they had left the baby. Dreadful! The nest was empty. They flapped their wide wings and screamed with fear, "What shall we do?" But just then up the rocky hill came panting the mother Deer. Her glossy hide was warm and wet, and her tongue lolled out with weariness, she had run so fast. "He is down there," she panted. "The Shepherd has carried him to his hut and laid him in a nest such as human-folk make. The Shepherd's wife loves him and would keep him there, but he is unhappy and cries for us. You must bring him back." "We will, we will!" screamed the gulls in chorus. "Guide us to the place, mother Deer." And without another word they rose on their great, strong wings, and followed where she led. Back down the hill she took the path, over the moor and up the lane to a little white cottage under the rosebushes. "Here is the place," said the Deer, and she paused. But the flock of gulls with a great whirring and rustling and screaming swooped in at the little low door, straight up to the cradle where Keneth lay crying "E-e-e-e!" as if his heart would break. The Shepherd's wife was sitting by the cradle saying, "Hush!" and "Bye-lo!" and other silly things that Keneth did not understand. But when she heard the rushing of the gulls' wings, she gave a scream and started for the door. "Cree-e-e!" cried the gulls fiercely. "Give us our little one." And they perched on the edge of the cradle and looked tenderly at Keneth. Then he stopped his crying and began to laugh, for these were the voices he knew and loved. And in another minute the gulls had fastened their beaks and claws into the purple cloth, and once more bore him away as they had done when they saved him from the sea. Out of the door they flew, right over the Shepherd's astonished head, while his wife stared wildly at the empty cradle. And soon Keneth was lying in his own nest on the ledge above the roaring billows. After this no one tried again to bring the gulls' adopted baby back among human folk. Little Keneth tarried and thrived with his feathered brothers, growing fat and strong. When he came to walk he was somewhat lame, to be sure; one of his legs was shorter than the other, and he limped like a poor gull who has hurt his foot. But this troubled Keneth very little, and the gulls were kind. He was always happy and contented, full of singing and laughter and kind words for all. And here in his wild, spray-sprinkled nest above the Atlantic breakers, Keneth dwelt all his life. The Welsh peasants of the Gower peninsula revered him as their Saint, knowing him to be a holy man beloved by the gulls and the deer and all the wild creatures of shore and forest, who did their kindly best to make him happy. SAINT LAUNOMAR'S COW SAINT LAUNOMAR had once been a shepherd boy in the meadows of sunny France, and had lived among the gentle creatures of the fold and byre. So he understood them and their ways very well, and they knew him for their friend. For this is a secret which one cannot keep from the animals whose speech is silent. Saint Launomar had a cow of whom he was fond, a sleek black and white beauty, who pastured in the green meadows of Chartres near the monastery and came home every evening to be milked and to rub her soft nose against her master's hand, telling him how much she loved him. Mignon was a very wise cow; you could tell that by the curve of her horns and by the wrinkles in her forehead between the eyes; and especially by the way she switched her tail. And indeed, a cow ought to be wise who has been brought up by a whole monastery of learned men, with Launomar, the wisest person in all the country, for her master and friend. It was a dark night after milking time; Launomar had put Mignon in her stall with a supper of hay before her, and had bade her good-night and a pleasant cud-time. Then he had shut the heavy barn door and had gone back to his cell to sleep soundly till morning. But no sooner had his lantern disappeared through the gate of the monastery, than out of the forest came five black figures, creeping, creeping along the wall and across the yard and up to the great oak door. They were all muffled in long black cloaks, and wore their caps pulled down over their faces, as if they were afraid of being recognized. They were wicked-looking men, and they had big knives stuck in their belts quite convenient to their hands. It was a band of robbers; and they had come to steal Launomar's cow, who was known to be the handsomest in all that part of the world. Very softly they forced open the great door, and very softly they stole across the floor to Mignon's stall and threw a strong halter about her neck to lead her away. But first they were careful to tie up her mouth in a piece of cloth so that she could not low and tell the whole monastery what danger she was in. Mignon was angry, for that was just what she had meant to do as soon as she saw that these were no friends, but wicked men who had come for no good to her or to the monastery. But now she had to go with them dumbly, although she struggled and kicked and made all the noise she could. But the monks were already sound asleep and snoring on their hard pallets, and never suspected what was going on so near to them. Even Launomar, who turned over in his sleep and murmured, "Ho, Mignon, stand still!" when he dimly recognized a sound of kicking,--even Launomar did not waken to rescue his dear Mignon from the hands of those villains who were taking her away. The robbers led her hurriedly down the lane, across the familiar meadows and into the dense woods, where they could hide from any one who happened to pass by. Now it was dark and they could see but dimly where they were going. The paths crossed and crisscrossed in so many directions that they soon began to quarrel about which was the right one to take. They did not know this part of the country very well, for they were strangers from a different province, who had come to Launomar's home because they had heard of his famous cow and were bound to have her for themselves. Very soon the robbers were lost in the tangle of trees and bushes and did not know where they were, or in which direction they ought to go. One said, "Go that way," pointing towards the north. And one said, "No, no! Go _that_ way," pointing directly south. The third grumbled and said, "Ho, fellows! Not so, but _this_ way," and he strode towards the east. While the fourth man cried, "You are all wrong, comrades. It is _there_ we must go," and he started to lead Mignon towards the west. But the fifth robber confessed that indeed he did not know. "Let us follow the cow," he cried; "she is the only one who can see in the dark. I have always heard that animals will lead you aright if you leave the matter to them." Now as the other robbers really did not have the least idea in the world as to which was the right direction, this seemed to them as sensible a plan as any. So they stripped the halter from Mignon's head and said, "Hi, there! Get along, Cow, and show us the way." Mignon looked at them through the dark with her big brown eyes, and laughed inside. It seemed too good to be true! They had left her free, and were bidding her to guide them on their way out of the forest back to their own country. Mignon chuckled again, so loudly that they thought she must be choking, and hastily untied the cloth from her mouth. This was just what she wanted, for she longed to chew her cud again. She tossed her head and gave a gentle "Moo!" as if to say, "Come on, simple men, and I will show you the way." But really she was thinking to herself, "Aha! my fine fellows. Now I will lead you a pretty chase. And you shall be repaid for this night's work, aha!" Mignon was a very wise cow. She had not pastured in the meadows about Chartres with blind eyes. She knew the paths north and south and east and west through the forest and the fern; and even in the dark of the tangled underbrush she could feel out the way quite plainly. But she said to herself, "I must not make the way too easy for these wicked men. I must punish them all I can now that it is my turn." So she led them roundabout and roundabout, through mud and brambles and swamps; over little brooks and through big miry ponds where they were nearly drowned,--roundabout and roundabout all night long. They wanted to rest, but she went so fast that they could not catch her to make her stand still. And they dared not lose sight of her big whiteness through the dark, for now they were completely lost and could never find their way out of the wilderness without her. So all night long she kept them panting and puffing and wading after her, till they were all worn out, cold and shivering with wet, scratched and bleeding from the briars, and cross as ten sticks. But when at last, an hour after sunrise, Mignon led them out into an open clearing, their faces brightened. "Oh, I think I remember this place," said the first man. "Yes, it has a familiar look. We must be near home," said the second. "We are at least twenty-five miles from the monks of Chartres by this time," said the third, "and I wish we had some breakfast." "By another hour we shall have the cow safe in our home den," said the fourth, "and then we will have some bread and milk." But the fifth interrupted them saying, "Look! Who is that man in gray?" They all looked up quickly and began to tremble; but Mignon gave a great "Moo!" and galloped forward to meet the figure who had stepped out from behind a bush. It was Saint Launomar himself! He had been up ever since dawn looking for his precious cow; for when he went to milk her he had found the barn empty, and her footprints with those of the five robbers in the moist earth had told the story and pointed which way the company had gone. But it was not his plan to scold or frighten the robbers. He walked up to them, for they were so surprised to see him that they stood still trembling, forgetting even to run away. "Good-morning, friends," said Launomar kindly. "You have brought back my cow, I see, who to-night for the first time has left her stall to wander far. I thank you, good friends, for bringing Mignon to me. For she is not only a treasure in herself, but she is my dearest friend and I should be most unhappy to lose her." The men stood staring at Launomar in astonishment. They could hardly believe their eyes and their ears. Where did he come from? What did he mean? But when they realized how kind his voice was, and that he was not accusing them nor threatening to have them punished, they were very much ashamed. They hung their heads guiltily; and then all of a sudden they fell at his feet, the five of them, confessing how it had all come about and begging his pardon. "We stole the cow, Master," said the first one. "And carried her these many miles away," said the second. "We are wicked robbers and deserve to be punished," said the third. "But we beg you to pardon us," cried the fourth. "Let us depart, kind Father, we pray you," begged the fifth. "And be so good as to direct us on our way, for we are sorely puzzled." "Nay, nay," answered Saint Launomar pleasantly, "the cow hath led you a long way, hath she not? You must be both tired and hungry. You cannot journey yet." And in truth they were miserable objects to see, so that the Saint's kind heart was filled with pity, robbers though they were. "Follow me," he said. By this time they were too weak and weary to think of disobeying. So meekly they formed into a procession of seven, Launomar and the cow going cheerfully at the head. For these two were very glad to be together again, and his arm was thrown lovingly about her glossy neck as they went. But what was the amazement of the five robbers when in a short minute or two they turned a corner, and there close beside them stood the monastery itself, with the very barn from which they had stolen Mignon the night before! All this time the clever cow had led them in great circles roundabout and roundabout her own home. And after all this scrambling and wading through the darkness, in the morning they were no farther on their journey than they had been at the start. What a wise cow that was! And what a good breakfast of bran porridge and hay and sweet turnips Launomar gave her to pay for her hard night's work. The five robbers had a good breakfast too; but perhaps they did not relish it as Mignon did hers. For their consciences were heavy; besides, they sat at the monastery table, and all the monks stood by in a row, saying nothing but pursing up their mouths and looking pious; which was trying. And when the robbers came to drink their porridge Launomar said mildly,-- "That is Mignon's milk which you drink, Sirs. It is the best milk in France, and you are welcome to it for your breakfast to-day, since we have such reason to be grateful to you for not putting it beyond our reach forever. Ah, my friends, we could ill spare so worthy a cow, so good a friend, so faithful a guide. But I trust that you will not need her services again. Perhaps by daylight you can find your way home without her if I direct you. The highroad is plain and straight for honest men. I commend it to you." So, when they were refreshed and rested, Launomar led them forth and pointed out the way as he had promised. He and Mignon stood on the crest of a little hill and watched them out of sight. Then they turned and looked at one another, the wise Saint and his wise cow. And they both chuckled inside. SAINT WERBURGH & HER GOOSE I. SAINT WERBURGH was a King's daughter, a real princess, and very beautiful. But unlike most princesses of the fairy tales, she cared nothing at all about princes or pretty clothes or jewels, or about having a good time. Her only longing was to do good and to make other people happy, and to grow good and wise herself, so that she could do this all the better. So she studied and studied, worked and worked; and she became a holy woman, an Abbess. And while she was still very young and beautiful, she was given charge of a whole convent of nuns and school-girls not much younger than herself, because she was so much wiser and better than any one else in all the countryside. But though Saint Werburgh had grown so famous and so powerful, she still remained a simple, sweet girl. All the country people loved her, for she was always eager to help them, to cure the little sick children and to advise their fathers and mothers. She never failed to answer the questions which puzzled them, and so she set their poor troubled minds at ease. She was so wise that she knew how to make people do what she knew to be right, even when they wanted to do wrong. And not only human folk but animals felt the power of this young Saint. For she loved and was kind to them also. She studied about them and grew to know their queer habits and their animal way of thinking. And she learned their language, too. Now when one loves a little creature very much and understands it well, one can almost always make it do what one wishes--that is, if one wishes right. For some time Saint Werburgh had been interested in a flock of wild geese which came every day to get their breakfast in the convent meadow, and to have a morning bath in the pond beneath the window of her cell. She grew to watch until the big, long-necked gray things with their short tails and clumsy feet settled with a harsh "Honk!" in the grass. Then she loved to see the big ones waddle clumsily about in search of dainties for the children, while the babies stood still, flapping their wings and crying greedily till they were fed. There was one goose which was her favorite. He was the biggest of them all, fat and happy looking. He was the leader and formed the point of the V in which a flock of wild geese always flies. He was the first to alight in the meadow, and it was he who chose the spot for their breakfast. Saint Werburgh named him Grayking, and she grew very fond of him, although they had never spoken to one another. Master Hugh was the convent Steward, a big, surly fellow who did not love birds nor animals except when they were served up for him to eat. Hugh also had seen the geese in the meadow. But, instead of thinking how nice and funny they were, and how amusing it was to watch them eat the worms and flop about in the water, he thought only, "What a fine goose pie they would make!" And especially he looked at Grayking, the plumpest and most tempting of them all, and smacked his lips. "Oh, how I wish I had you in my frying-pan!" he said to himself. Now it happened that worms were rather scarce in the convent meadow that spring. It had been dry, and the worms had crawled away to moister places. So Grayking and his followers found it hard to get breakfast enough. One morning, Saint Werburgh looked in vain for them in the usual spot. At first she was only surprised; but as she waited and waited, and still they did not come, she began to feel much alarmed. Just as she was going down to her own dinner, the Steward, Hugh, appeared before her cap in hand and bowing low. His fat face was puffed and red with hurrying up the convent hill, and he looked angry. "What is it, Master Hugh?" asked Saint Werburgh in her gentle voice. "Have you not money enough to buy to-morrow's breakfast?" for it was his duty to pay the convent bills. "Nay, Lady Abbess," he answered gruffly; "it is not lack of money that troubles me. It is abundance of geese." "Geese! How? Why?" exclaimed Saint Werburgh, startled. "What of geese, Master Hugh?" "This of geese, Lady Abbess," he replied. "A flock of long-necked thieves have been in my new-planted field of corn, and have stolen all that was to make my harvest." Saint Werburgh bit her lips. "What geese were they?" she faltered, though she guessed the truth. "Whence the rascals come, I know not," he answered, "but this I know. They are the same which gather every morning in the meadow yonder. I spied the leader, a fat, fine thief with a black ring about his neck. It should be a noose, indeed, for hanging. I would have them punished, Lady Abbess." "They shall be punished, Master Hugh," said Saint Werburgh firmly, and she went sadly up the stair to her cell without tasting so much as a bit of bread for her dinner. For she was sorry to find her friends such naughty birds, and she did not want to punish them, especially Grayking. But she knew that she must do her duty. When she had put on her cloak and hood she went out into the courtyard behind the convent where there were pens for keeping doves and chickens and little pigs. And standing beside the largest of these pens Saint Werburgh made a strange cry, like the voice of the geese themselves,--a cry which seemed to say, "Come here, Grayking's geese, with Grayking at the head!" And as she stood there waiting, the sky grew black above her head with the shadowing of wings, and the honking of the geese grew louder and nearer till they circled and lighted in a flock at her feet. She saw that they looked very plump and well-fed, and Grayking was the fattest of the flock. All she did was to look at them steadily and reproachfully; but they came waddling bashfully up to her and stood in a line before her with drooping heads. It seemed as if something made them stay and listen to what she had to say, although they would much rather fly away. Then she talked to them gently and told them how bad they were to steal corn and spoil the harvest. And as she talked they grew to love her tender voice, even though it scolded them. She cried bitterly as she took each one by the wings and shook him for his sins and whipped him--not too severely. Tears stood in the round eyes of the geese also, not because she hurt them, for she had hardly ruffled their thick feathers; but because they were sorry to have pained the beautiful Saint. For they saw that she loved them, and the more she punished them the better they loved her. Last of all she punished Grayking. But when she had finished she took him up in her arms and kissed him before putting him in the pen with the other geese, where she meant to keep them in prison for a day and a night. Then Grayking hung his head, and in his heart he promised that neither he nor his followers should ever again steal anything, no matter how hungry they were. Now Saint Werburgh read the thought in his heart and was glad, and she smiled as she turned away. She was sorry to keep them in the cage, but she hoped it might do them good. And she said to herself, "They shall have at least one good breakfast of convent porridge before they go." Saint Werburgh trusted Hugh, the Steward, for she did not yet know the wickedness of his heart. So she told him how she had punished the geese for robbing him, and how she was sure they would never do so any more. Then she bade him see that they had a breakfast of convent porridge the next morning; and after that they should be set free to go where they chose. Hugh was not satisfied. He thought the geese had not been punished enough. And he went away grumbling, but not daring to say anything cross to the Lady Abbess who was the King's daughter. II. SAINT WERBURGH was busy all the rest of that day and early the next morning too, so she could not get out again to see the prisoned geese. But when she went to her cell for the morning rest after her work was done, she sat down by the window and looked out smilingly, thinking to see her friend Grayking and the others taking their bath in the meadow. But there were no geese to be seen! Werburgh's face grew grave. And even as she sat there wondering what had happened, she heard a prodigious honking overhead, and a flock of geese came straggling down, not in the usual trim V, but all unevenly and without a leader. Grayking was gone! They fluttered about crying and asking advice of one another, till they heard Saint Werburgh's voice calling them anxiously. Then with a cry of joy they flew straight up to her window and began talking all together, trying to tell her what had happened. "Grayking is gone!" they said. "Grayking is stolen by the wicked Steward. Grayking was taken away when we were set free, and we shall never see him again. What shall we do, dear lady, without our leader?" Saint Werburgh was horrified to think that her dear Grayking might be in danger. Oh, how that wicked Steward had deceived her! She began to feel angry. Then she turned to the birds: "Dear geese," she said earnestly, "you have promised me never to steal again, have you not?" and they all honked "Yes!" "Then I will go and question the Steward," she continued, "and if he is guilty I will punish him and make him bring Grayking back to you." The geese flew away feeling somewhat comforted, and Saint Werburgh sent speedily for Master Hugh. He came, looking much surprised, for he could not imagine what she wanted of him. "Where is the gray goose with the black ring about his neck?" began Saint Werburgh without any preface, looking at him keenly. He stammered and grew confused. "I--I don't know, Lady Abbess," he faltered. He had not guessed that she cared especially about the geese. "Nay, you know well," said Saint Werburgh, "for I bade you feed them and set them free this morning. But one is gone." "A fox must have stolen it," said he guiltily. "Ay, a fox with black hair and a red, fat face," quoth Saint Werburgh sternly. "Do not tell me lies. You have taken him, Master Hugh. I can read it in your heart." Then he grew weak and confessed. "Ay, I have taken the great gray goose," he said faintly. "Was it so very wrong?" "He was a friend of mine and I love him dearly," said Saint Werburgh. At these words the Steward turned very pale indeed. "I did not know," he gasped. "Go and bring him to me, then," commanded the Saint, and pointed to the door. Master Hugh slunk out looking very sick and miserable and horribly frightened. For the truth was that he had been tempted by Grayking's fatness. He had carried the goose home and made him into a hot, juicy pie which he had eaten for that very morning's breakfast. So how could he bring the bird back to Saint Werburgh, no matter how sternly she commanded? All day long he hid in the woods, not daring to let himself be seen by any one. For Saint Werburgh was a King's daughter; and if the King should learn what he had done to the pet of the Lady Abbess, he might have Hugh himself punished by being baked into a pie for the King's hounds to eat. But at night he could bear it no longer. He heard the voice of Saint Werburgh calling his name very softly from the convent, "Master Hugh, Master Hugh, come, bring me my goose!" And just as the geese could not help coming when she called them, so he felt that he must go, whether he would or no. He went into his pantry and took down the remains of the great pie. He gathered up the bones of poor Grayking in a little basket, and with chattering teeth and shaking limbs stole up to the convent and knocked at the wicket gate. Saint Werburgh was waiting for him. "I knew you would come," she said. "Have you brought my goose?" Then silently and with trembling hands he took out the bones one by one and laid them on the ground before Saint Werburgh. So he stood with bowed head and knocking knees waiting to hear her pronounce his punishment. "Oh, you wicked man!" she said sadly. "You have killed my beautiful Grayking, who never did harm to any one except to steal a little corn." "I did not know you loved him, Lady," faltered the man in self-defense. "You ought to have known it," she returned; "you ought to have loved him yourself." "I did, Lady Abbess," confessed the man. "That was the trouble. I loved him too well--in a pie." "Oh, selfish, gluttonous man!" she exclaimed in disgust. "Can you not see the beauty of a dear little live creature till it is dead and fit only for your table? I shall have you taught better. Henceforth you shall be made to study the lives and ways of all things which live about the convent; and never again, for punishment, shall you eat flesh of any bird or beast. We will see if you cannot be taught to love them when they have ceased to mean Pie. Moreover, you shall be confined for two days and two nights in the pen where I kept the geese. And porridge shall be your only food the while. Go, Master Hugh." So the wicked Steward was punished. But he learned his lesson; and after a little while he grew to love the birds almost as well as Saint Werburgh herself. But she had not yet finished with Grayking. After Master Hugh had gone she bent over the pitiful little pile of bones which was all that was left of that unlucky pie. A tear fell upon them from her beautiful eyes; and kneeling down she touched them with her white fingers, speaking softly the name of the bird whom she had loved. [Illustration: SAINT WERBURGH & HER GOOSE] "Grayking, arise," she said. And hardly had the words left her mouth when a strange thing happened. The bones stirred, lifted themselves, and in a moment a glad "Honk!" sounded in the air, and Grayking himself, black ring and all, stood ruffling his feathers before her. She clasped him in her arms and kissed him again and again. Then calling the rest of the flock by her strange power, she showed them their lost leader restored as good as new. What a happy flock of geese flew honking away in an even V, with the handsomest, grayest, plumpest goose in all the world at their head! And what an exciting story he had to tell his mates! Surely, no other goose ever lived who could tell how it felt to be made into pie, to be eaten and to have his bones picked clean by a greedy Steward. This is how Saint Werburgh made lifelong friendship with a flock of big gray geese. And I dare say even now in England one of their descendants may be found with a black ring around his neck, the handsomest, grayest, plumpest goose in all the world. And when he hears the name of Saint Werburgh, which has been handed down to him from grandfather to grandson for twelve hundred years, he will give an especially loud "Honk!" of praise. Dear Saint Werburgh! One would almost be willing to make a goose of himself if so he might see her again, with all her feathered friends about her. THE BALLAD OF SAINT ATHRACTA'S STAGS ATHRACTA was a maiden fair, A Prince's daughter she; Down to her feet fell golden hair, A wondrous sight to see. And all amid this golden shower, The sweetest rosebud face Blossomed like a dew-fed flower Upon a stem of grace. Yet loved she not the court of kings, But in the wild would be, With but one maid her hair to braid And bear her company. So, near Lough Cara's silver sheen, They built of turf and bark A hut wherein from springtide green They dwelt through winter's dark. On seven cross-roads the hut was made, That they might offer rest To pilgrims by the night waylaid, And strangers hunger-pressed. To draw them water from the lake, To till their little soil, Two ancient horses did they take, Outworn for other toil. Once gallant chargers these had been, Keen-eyed and prancing gay, Who tourneys brave and wars had seen, All decked in bright array. But now their age in peace was spent By kind Athracta's side; No gallant wars, no tournament, And yet they served with pride. Their neighbors in the forest glades Were stately, antlered deer, Nor of the two most holy maids Had these, their brothers, fear. So dwelt the maidens there alone For many months and years, The doings of the world unknown, Its wars, its woes, its tears. But strife was stirring in the land, And kings must castles build, To guard them from the foeman's hand With fire and weapon filled. And so the King's most stern decree Went forth upon a day,-- "My serfs must build a fort for me, Each must his service pay. "Each man and maiden must fulfill In this great work his share; It is the King of Connaught's will, Let tardy hands beware!" Athracta sent unto the King: "We be but maidens twain, My Liege, we cannot do this thing, I beg we may refrain." But sternly sent he back the word,-- "Ye maids must do your part." He was a hard and cruel lord, No pity touched his heart. So forth they fared into the wood, Athracta with her maid, To fell the timber as they could, Without of men for aid. Heavy the axe and full of pain Each weak and skill-less stroke, Yet strove the maids again, again, With walnut, beech, and oak. Until upon the wagon cast By which the horses stood, Their bleeding hands had piled at last The goodly logs of wood. But when Athracta saw the steeds Straining with feeble will To draw the heavy load, it needs Must make her eyes to fill. Athracta spoke all piteously,-- "Alack! poor broken things, Must you, too, bear your painful share To save the pride of Kings? "How can I ease your burden, how, My faithful servants still? My little hands are bleeding now With toil beyond their skill." "O mistress dear," then spoke her maid, "These be but feeble nags; How would the King's pride be dismayed If you could harness _Stags_!" "Thou sayest well," Athracta vowed. "Come hither, Stags!" she cried, And lo! the thud of hoofs grew loud Ere yet the echo died. "Come hither, Stags!" O'er green and glade The silver summons thrilled, And soon the space about the maid With antlered kings was filled. Through moss and fern and tangled trees Twelve panting creatures broke, And bending low their stately knees They knelt beneath the yoke. Now harnessed in the horses' stead The great Stags strained their best, To please the Lady at their head And follow her behest. But lo! a vexing thing then happed; Scarce had they gained the road, The rusty chains of iron snapped Beneath the heavy load. Yet paused she not in weak despair, This noble-hearted maid, But loosed her heavy golden hair Out from its double braid. She loosed her locks so wonder-bright And shook them to the breeze;-- It seemed a beam of yellow light Had sifted through the trees. Then from amid this golden net She plucked some silken strands, And where the chains had first been set She bound them with her hands. She tied the ends against the strain, And knotted them with care, Then bade the Stags pull once again Upon the ropes of hair. And lo! the slender harness held, And lo! the antlered steeds Went forth to prove their generous love Lent to a maiden's needs. Straight to the King her gift they bore To fill his heart with shame; And her true maiden went before To show him whence they came. Now when the King this wonder saw He turned all pale and red, "She hath a greater power than law," He vowed, and bowed his head. "She hath a greater power than I, Whose slaves the wild stags be, And golden hair like this might snare E'en the wild heart of me. "No need to her of castles stout, No need of moat or tower, With antlered guardians about Her lonely wild-wood bower. "No need to her of watch or ward, With friends like these at hand; Bid her from me henceforth to be Queen of her little land. "Henceforth she is no serf of mine, Nor subject to my throne; Where'er her golden hair may shine That is her realm alone." So where the seven cross-roads met Still dwelt the holy maid, Her hut a place of refuge set For all who shelter prayed. Her realm a holy place of peace, Where, with the ancient nags, Lived out their days in pleasant ways Athracta's faithful Stags. SAINT KENTIGERN & THE ROBIN ONCE upon a time Saint Servan kept a school near Glasgow in Scotland, and many boys, big and little, came there to study. Now of all these boys there was one who surpassed the rest in everything that makes a good scholar. Kentigern was one of the smallest boys in the school, and yet he stood at the head of all his classes. It was Kentigern who found the answer to the knottiest problem, and who read off the hardest passages of Latin when no one else was able to make sense of them. It was Kentigern who learned his lessons first and who recited them best. It was Kentigern who sang the loudest and was never off the pitch; and good Saint Servan loved him best of all his pupils. For all these reasons, and for several more like them, the other boys were jealous of Kentigern and did everything they could to trouble him and make him unhappy. They tried to make him fail in his lessons by talking and laughing when it was his turn to recite. But this was a useless trick; his answers were always ready, so they had to give this up. They teased him and called him names, trying to make him lose his temper so that he would be punished. But he was too good-natured to be cross with them; so they had to give this up. They tried to coax him into mischief and lead him do something which would make Saint Servan angry with him. But Kentigern loved his master too well to do anything to trouble him. So the boys had finally to give this up also. There was only one way to bring Kentigern into disgrace. They must plan a trap, and make him fall into it. For weeks they racked their brains trying to think what they should do; but at last they thought they had hit upon a plan. It was all concerned with a fire. In those days there were no matches with which to strike a light in a second. Matches had not been invented in the year 600, nor indeed for many centuries afterwards. Their way of making a fire was by rubbing two dry sticks together until they grew hot and a spark fell out upon the wood which was to be kindled. And this was a very difficult and tiresome thing to do, especially in the winter when there were few dry sticks to be found. So the fire which was kept burning night and day in the great fireplace of Saint Servan's school was tended carefully, and it would be a very serious thing to let this go out. For how would the breakfast be cooked, and the rooms warmed, and the candles lighted for the morning service in the chapel if there were no fire on the great hearth? So for a week at a time the boys had to take turns in tending the fire; and the boy whose turn it was had to rise at midnight and put on wood enough to keep the blaze bright until morning. And oh! how angry Saint Servan would be with any boy who was so careless as to let the fire go out in the night. Now it was Kentigern's week to tend the fire; and for several days he did tend it faithfully. But the boys were waiting for a chance to play their mean trick. On the fourth night Kentigern rose as the chapel clock boomed "twelve!" and went down to the kitchen to give the hungry fire its midnight lunch of snappy wood. But as soon as he stepped into the great empty hall he knew something was wrong. Br-r-r! The air was damp and chilly, and there was no crimson glow on the hearthstones. Kentigern shivered and ran to the fireplace, peering into the black cavern. There was nothing but a heap of white ashes and half-burnt wood! Then Kentigern's heart sank, for he knew he should be blamed for carelessness, although he suspected that some one had thrown water on the fire and put it out. And he guessed that it was the other boys who had done this spiteful thing to bring him into trouble. He did not know what to do. But a sudden courage came to him. He took up a log of wood from the corner and laid it on the heap of ashes. Then bending down he blew gently on the pile. And oh, wonderful to say! It was as if he had scratched a dozen cards of matches and had touched them to a pile of paper. Hardly had his breath stirred the ashes and made the moss shiver on the great log, when the whole fireplace was filled with dancing flames, and the wood began to snap and crack in the best kind of a blaze. Kentigern laughed softly to himself as he stole back to bed, and said never a word to the sleeping boys who had tried to make mischief for him. When they woke in the morning they began to chuckle and nudge one another, expecting every moment to see Saint Servan come frowning in search of the careless Kentigern. And every boy was ready to declare that the fire was burning brightly when he went to bed, and that Kentigern had forgotten to go down and tend it at midnight. But they were prevented from telling this falsehood. For the bell rang as usual for breakfast, and down they all went to find a beautiful fire burning on the hearth, and Kentigern going with his taper to light the chapel candelabra. They did not know how it had happened till long, long afterwards when Kentigern had made many other wonders come to pass, and when he was known far and wide as a Saint even wiser than Servan his master. But meanwhile the boys hated him more than ever, when they saw how much better Saint Servan loved him every day. And once more they planned to bring him into disgrace. But this time it was an even more cruel thing which they meant to do. For if they succeeded it would not only cause Kentigern to be punished and make Saint Servan unhappy, but it would cost the life of an innocent little creature who never had done any harm to a single one of them. Saint Servan was a kind-hearted old man, and he had a Robin Redbreast of which he was very fond,--a black-eyed fellow who ate his breakfast out of the Saint's hand. And when the master chanted the Psalms the little chorister would perch on Servan's shoulder and flap his wings, twittering as if he were trying to join in the songs of praise. Now one morning when the coast was clear, the boys killed the little Redbreast and pulled off his head. And then the biggest boy of them all took the dead bird in his hand, and followed by all the rest ran screaming to Saint Servan himself, pretending to feel very sorry. "Oh Father!" cried the Big Boy, "just see what the wicked Kentigern has done! Look at your Robin whom Kentigern has killed!" Then they all began to cry out against Kentigern, and some even declared that they had seen him do the wicked deed; which was a horrid story, and their tongues must have smarted well as they spoke it. Of course Saint Servan was very sad and angry. He tenderly took the little limp body in his hand and went to seek Kentigern, the other boys tiptoeing after him to see the fun. And by and by they came upon him in a window bending over a big book which he was studying. Saint Servan strode up to him and laid a heavy hand upon his shoulder. "Look at this, boy," he cried with a sad voice, "look at this cruel deed, and tell me what shall be done to punish the slayer? Did I not love the Robin, even as I loved you, ungrateful boy!" Kentigern turned quite pale with surprise and sorrow, and the tears came into his eyes. "Oh, the dear little bird," he said. "Did I not love him too? Who has killed him, Father?" "You did, you did; we saw you!" cried all the boys in a chorus. Kentigern turned and looked at them in astonishment. He did not say a word, but his cheeks grew red and his eyes flashed. This was more than even his patience could stand. "Well, what have you to say for yourself?" queried Saint Servan sternly. Kentigern turned to him sadly. "Oh Father!" he said, "how can you believe that I would do such a cruel thing, to hurt the bird and to make you sad? I did not do it, Father." "Can you prove it?" asked Saint Servan still more sternly, for he thought the boy was telling a falsehood to hide his guilt. "Give me the Robin, Father," said Kentigern, holding out his hand. "I will prove that it was not this hand which cowardly used so small a thing as a tiny bird." Then holding the limp body in one hand and the downy head in the other, he stood before them all, looking up towards heaven, and made his little prayer. [Illustration: SAINT KENTIGERN & THE ROBIN] "O Father in heaven," he said, "prove to my dear Father on earth that I have not done this cruel thing. If I am innocent, give me power to undo the wrong and restore life to the little singer who loved to praise Thee with his sweet voice." Then gently he set the head in place where it should be and, as his tears fell upon the Robin's neck, it seemed to grow again to the body. The feathers ruffled and the limp wings fluttered feebly; the black eyes opened, and out of the bill came a little chirp. Then the Robin hopped out of Kentigern's hands and across the floor to Saint Servan's feet, and flew up on his master's shoulder. There he sat and sang such a carol of joy as made the great hall ring again. But all the guilty boys put their fingers in their ears and turned pale, as if they understood what he was saying, and as if it told the truth about their jealousy and their cruelty and their falsehood. So Saint Servan learned that Kentigern was innocent, and saw how it had all happened. The real culprits were severely punished. But Kentigern became even dearer than before to his master, who helped him in every way to become the great and famous Saint he afterwards was. And the Robin was another fond and faithful friend. For the bird seemed never to forget that Kentigern had restored his life, and always sang his sweetest song for the boy. You may be sure that after this the boys gave up trying to get the better of Kentigern. They had learned that lesson, and thenceforth they were more kind and respectful to a boy over whom some kind Power seemed to keep special charge. SAINT BLAISE AND HIS BEASTS THIS is the story of a Saint who loved all animals and whom the animals therefore loved in return. Saint Blaise was the son of wealthy people in Sebaste, a town of Armenia near Turkey, in the days when it was fashionable to be a heathen. He was not like the other boys, his playmates, for he was a Christian, full of sympathy for everything that lived. More than all things he longed to learn how to help the creatures that he loved,--men and women, the children, the dumb beasts, and everything that suffered and was sick. So he went to school and studied medicine; and by and by he grew up to be a wise man with a big, tender heart. Every one loved him, for he did great good among the people of his village, tending their children and healing their cattle and household pets. Nor did he neglect even the wild beasts. For Saint Blaise loved to go away into the woods and fields where he could learn about the untamed creatures and teach them to be his friends. The birds and beasts and fishes grew to love him because he never hurt them, but talked to them kindly and healed them when they were sick or wounded. The timid creatures were brave in his presence, and the fierce ones grew tame and gentle at the sound of his voice. The little birds brought him food, and the four-footed beasts ran errands and were his messengers. The legends say that they used to visit him in his forest home, which was a cave on Mount Argus near the city of Sebaste. Every morning they came to see how their master was faring, to receive his blessing and lick his hands in gratitude. If they found the Saint at his prayers they never disturbed him, but waited in a patient, wistful group at the door of his cave until he rose from his knees. One day a poor woman came to him in great distress because a wolf had carried away her pig. Saint Blaise was sorry to hear that one of his friends had done so wicked a thing. He bade the woman go home, and said he would see what could be done. He called the Wolf up to him and shook his head gravely at the culprit. "You bad Wolf!" he said. "Don't you know that the Pig was a friend of mine, too? He is not handsome, but he is nice and plump; and he is the only pig of a poor, lone woman. How could you be so selfish? Go straight home and get my friend Pig, and drive him down to the woman's house." Then the Wolf went sheepishly away, and did what the good Saint had told him to do; for the Pig had not yet been made into pork. And when the poor woman saw the Pig run grunting into her yard, chased by the repentant Wolf, she fell upon his fat neck and wept tears of joy. Then the Wolf went back to Saint Blaise, who told him he was a good wolf, and gave him a dish of fresh milk to cool his throat. Saint Blaise was chosen Bishop by the Christians who loved him for his piety and his charity. And the wood-beasts were glad of this honor done to their dear master. But the poor creatures did not know how dangerous it was to be a Christian in those days, and especially to be a Bishop who had much power over the people. For the heathen were jealous of him, and feared that he would make all the people Christians too, when they saw the wonderful cures which his medicines made. But they could not find him, for he was living in his forest cave. This was 316 years after Christ's birth, and the cruel Emperor Licinius was causing many Christians to be killed. Agricola was the governor whom Licinius had appointed in Sebaste, and he sent his soldiers into the mountains to get some wild beasts for the games in the arena, where the Christians were to be put to death. But they could not find any beasts at all in the mountains, or in the fields, or valleys, or woods. They thought this very strange. But by and by they came by accident to the cave where Saint Blaise lived. And there were the animals, all the fierce beasts whom they feared; lions, tigers, leopards, bears, and wolves, making their morning call upon Saint Blaise and sitting quietly about. In the midst was Blaise himself, praying so earnestly that he never noticed the men with nets and spears who had come to entrap the beasts. Although the creatures were frightened they did not move nor growl for fear of disturbing their master, but kept quite still, glaring at the soldiers with big yellow eyes. The men were so astonished at the sight that they stole away without capturing an animal or saying a word to Saint Blaise, for they thought he must be Orpheus or some heathen god who charmed wild beasts. They went to the Governor and told him what they had seen, and he said,-- "Ho! I know he is a Christian. The Christians and the beasts are great friends. Go and bring him to me straightway." And this time the soldiers went in the afternoon when the animals were taking their after-dinner nap. So they found Saint Blaise quite alone, again at his devotions. They told him he must come with them; but instead of being frightened he said joyfully, "I am ready, I have long expected you." For he was a holy man willing to die for his faith, and holy men often knew what was going to happen to them. It was on his way to prison that Saint Blaise cured his last patient,--a sick child whose mother brought him to the holy man's feet begging help. The child had swallowed a bone and was choking to death, poor little thing. But Saint Blaise touched the baby's throat and the trouble was gone. This is why in olden times people with sore throats always prayed to Saint Blaise to make them well. The good Bishop was put in prison. And after that they tortured him, trying to make him promise not to be a Christian any longer. But Saint Blaise refused to become a heathen and to sacrifice to the gods. And so they determined that he must die. They would have put him in the arena with the wild beasts, but they knew that these faithful creatures would not harm their friend. The beasts could not save him from the cruel men, but at least they would not do anything to hurt him. Those which were still left in the forest howled and moaned about his deserted cave, and went sniffing and searching for him everywhere, like stray dogs who have lost their master. It was a sad day for the wood-creatures when Saint Blaise was taken from them forever. The soldiers were told to drown Saint Blaise in the neighboring lake. But he made the sign of the Cross as they cast him from the boat, and the water bore him up, so that he walked upon it as if it were a floor, just as Christ did once upon the sea of Galilee. When the soldiers tried to do the same, however, thinking to follow and recapture him, they sank and were drowned. At last of his own free will Saint Blaise walked back to the shore, clothed in light and very beautiful to look upon; for he was ready and eager to die. He let the heathen seize him, and soon after this was beheaded. In very old times it used to be the custom in England on the third of February to light great bonfires on all the hills,--_blazes_ in honor of his name. And we can well believe that all the little animals came out of their dens and burrows and nests at the sight of these fires, and thought with loving hearts of the dear old Saint who so many years ago used to be kind to their ancestors, the beasts in the forests of Armenia. SAINT CUTHBERT'S PEACE SAINT CUTHBERT was a Scotch shepherd boy who tended his flocks along the river Tweed near Melrose. Night and day he lived in the open air, drinking in the sunshine and sleeping on the heather. And he grew up big and strong and handsome,--the finest lad in all that part of the country. He could run faster than any one, and was always the champion in the wrestling matches to which he challenged the village boys for miles around. And you should have seen him turn somersaults and walk on his hands! No one in all the world could beat him at that. Saint Cuthbert lived more than a thousand years ago, and yet the people of Scotland still tell tales of his strength and agility and grace in games with the other boys. He was their leader and chief, and every one was sure that he would grow up to be a famous man. But he tended his sheep faithfully until the time came. For he was growing and learning all the while. In his happy outdoor life he became wise in many things which other people never know. He found the secret of the whispering wind, and the song of the brook. He knew what the chatter of the squirrels meant, and the caw of the crows. He learned the ways of all the little bright-eyed animals whom he met in his walks over the hills of heather; and he grew to love every creature which has fur or feathers and goes upon four legs or on two. Especially he loved the birds. He used to watch them for hours together, the little larks gurgling up and trilling down again; the great gulls swooping and curling and sailing like white ships in the blue sea of sky. And he longed, oh! how he longed to have wings and to flutter and float away like the birds. One night while he lay watching his sheep upon the pink heather which bears you up like a springy cushion, he saw a strange thing in the sky. There seemed a great pathway of light, and down it a band of angels came from heaven, clothed all in rainbow glory. And in a little while he saw them mounting back again, bearing a beautiful blossom among them. And he guessed that it was the soul of some holy man, being carried to Paradise. [Illustration: SAINT CUTHBERT'S VISION] Sure enough, the next day the news went abroad that Aidan, the holy Bishop of Lindisfarne, had died that very night. Then Cuthbert knew that he, a little shepherd boy, had been blessed to see a holy vision. He wondered why; but he felt sure that it meant some special grace to him. Day after day, night after night, he thought about it, wondering and wondering. And at last he made up his mind that he, too, would become a holy man, and then perhaps he should find out all about it. He was fifteen years old when he came to Melrose Abbey to be made a monk. And there he lived and grew rich with the wisdom of books; which, added to the wisdom of the woods and hills and streams which he already possessed, made him a very wise man indeed. He had not been there long before every one, even the Abbot himself, saw that this glorious young monk was the most powerful of them all. Every one obeyed and reverenced him. Every one came to ask his advice and help. Every one sent for him in time of trouble. With his beautiful face and strong body, his kind eyes and great hands tender as a woman's to touch a little sick child, he was loved by the people in all the country around. For he had the great gift of sympathy. In those years while he had lived under the kind, hot sun his heart had grown mellow and soft like a ripe apple. Many of the people in the far-off hills and lonely Scotch moorlands were like savages, wild and timid, hating every stranger. But the hearts of these poor children of the heather warmed to the big brother who came among them with love shining in his eyes and a desire to help them. He used to trudge into the wildest, most distant places to reach them, to teach and comfort them. He was always carrying food and clothing to the poor and medicine to the sick, for he could not bear to see others suffer. But he was not afraid of suffering himself. One thing Cuthbert used to do which showed how strong and healthy he was. Even until he grew to be quite an old man he used to take a bath in the sea every day of his life. No matter how cold it was he would plunge into the waves and come out all dripping upon the frozen beach, where he would always kneel and say a little prayer before going home. One bitter night in winter as Cuthbert knelt thus in the snow after his plunge, blue with cold, two brown otters came up out of the sea and stole to Cuthbert's side. And as he prayed, not noticing them at all, they licked his poor frozen feet, trying to warm them, and rubbed against him with their thick, soft fur till he was dry again. Thus the water-creatures did their little best for him who loved them and who had done so much for others. When the Abbot Boswell died Cuthbert became head of the Abbey in his place. But after twelve years of living indoors with the other monks he could bear it no longer. For he longed to get out into the fresh air and under the sky once more. He resolved to become a hermit, and to live a wild outdoor life with the birds whom he loved. He built his nest on a wild little island named Farne, a steep, rocky sea-mountain where ten or fifteen years before had lived that same holy Aidan whose passage to heaven he had witnessed when he was a shepherd boy at Melrose. The nest was really a hole in the ground--you know some birds build so. He dug himself a round cell in the rock, the roof having a window open to his dear sky. The walls were of turf and stone and it was thatched with straw. There were two rooms, one where he lived and slept and cooked; the other for his little chapel, where he sang praises like any bird and sat for hours thinking holy thoughts. Before the door he hung an ox-hide, and this was his only protection from the winds of the sea. He found a spring in the rock and this supplied him with water; and he planted a plot of barley which yielded him food. Thus he lived, alone with the birds which swarmed about the rock. The winds swept over him and the waves curled and broke almost at the door of his hut, but he did not care. Indeed, the sea was a rough friend to him. Once when by mistake it came too near and washed away part of the cottage, Cuthbert sent to his brother monks on the mainland, asking them to bring him a beam to prop up the roof, for there was no wood on his rocky isle. But this the brothers forgot to do. The sea, however, seemed sorry for having been so careless, and at the next high tide it washed up at the Saint's feet the beam he wished. He did not lack for friends. For, as soon as he made this island rock his home, it became the haunt of every kind of bird. The other animals could not reach him from the shore, poor things. But the blessed wings of the gulls and curlews, the eider-ducks and the ravens, bore them to their Master in his retreat. "Hi!" they said to one another, "we have got him to ourselves now. Those poor, featherless creatures can't come here, neither can he get away, without wings. He is all our own now!" This was not quite true, for they forgot that though men cannot fly they make boats with wings, and so can cross the sea. Cuthbert often went ashore to do errands of mercy, in peasants' huts and in the Queen's palace. And many people came to see him also, because his fame had spread over the kingdom. He made them welcome to the house which he had built for his guests as far as possible from his own solitary cell. He loved them, and helped them when he could. But after all, the birds were his dearest friends, and he liked best to be alone with them. They would come and sit upon his shoulders and knees and let him take them up and caress them. They followed him in flocks when he went to walk. They watched at the door of his hut and ate breakfast, dinner, and supper with him. Many people believed that every day the birds brought him food from Paradise, but this story arose, as so many false stories do, from another thing that really happened. For once when some blackbirds thoughtlessly stole his barley and some of the straw from his roof, Cuthbert scolded them, and bade them never to do so again. It made the birds ashamed, and to show that they were sorry they brought him a great lump of suet. He did not eat it, however, as they expected he would, but used it to grease his shoes with, and it lasted a long time. Now Cuthbert loved all these birds dearly, especially the unselfish eider-duck who picks the down from her own breast to make a softer bed for her little ones. He was kind to them and they had no fear of him. But he dreaded lest after he was gone others should be less kind to his pets. So to protect them he made a promise, and he bequeathed them a legacy, the gift of _Saint Cuthbert's Peace_. He promised that no one should harm or kill them on that island without being dreadfully punished. And he gave them this Peace for ever and ever. So that thenceforth ill befell whoever injured one of Saint Cuthbert's birds. There are two stories to prove this, and they both happened long after Cuthbert was gone from Farne. Now Liveing was the servant of Ælric, the hermit who next dwelt in Cuthbert's cell. And one day while Ælric was gone away to the mainland, Liveing killed and ate one of the eider-ducks who still lived and built their nests near the hut where the Saint had lived. Liveing knew the promise of Saint Cuthbert's Peace, but he thought that no one would find out his crime. For he scattered the bones and feathers over the cliff, and saw them washed away by the waves. But after Ælric, his master, came back, he found a lump of bones and feathers rolled together and cast by the tide upon the very steps of his chapel. For even the sea was promised to Saint Cuthbert's Peace, and had to betray the guilty man. So Liveing was discovered and punished. And this is the second story. The birds themselves were bound by the Peace to be kind to one another. The big birds were forbidden to hurt or kill a little one. And this is what happened to a great hawk who flapped over from the neighboring island of Lindisfarne and ate up the tame sparrow which belonged to Bartholomew, another hermit who lived after Ælric at Farne. For Saint Cuthbert's power made the hawk fly for days around and around the island, never able to get away, never able to stop, though he was ready to drop with weariness and hunger. He would have kept on flying until now, or until he fell into the sea and was drowned, if at last the hermit had not taken pity upon him. Bartholomew caught the tired hawk by his wings and carried him to the seashore, and there in Saint Cuthbert's name he bade him fly away, and never come back to Farne to bother him and his peaceful birds. So Saint Cuthbert lived on his island surrounded by his feathered friends. He never grew proud, though every one loved and reverenced him and called him a Saint. He was always poor, although royal ladies, even the Queen herself, made him presents of gold and jewels,--which he gave away to the needy. He was always meek, though Egfried the King himself came all the way to Farne to make him a grand Bishop, kneeling on the ground before Cuthbert and begging him to accept the gift. His life was like a beacon to men, burning bright and clear. And after he died a lighthouse was built on his rock to be a spark of hope for the sailors at sea. As for Saint Cuthbert's Peace, it still blesses the lonely rock of Farne. Flocks of sea-birds swarm about it, descendants of those who knew the Saint himself. They are tame and gentle and suspect no harm from any one, for have they not the promise of their Saint? Alas! Men less kindly than he have forgotten the promise and have broken the Peace. They have killed many of the trusting birds who let them come up close and take them in their hands, expecting to be petted. For the birds never even thought to run away, poor, innocent, soft-eyed creatures. And how cruelly they were deceived! But I am sure that Saint Cuthbert's dreadful charm still binds the murderers. He will not forget his promise; and though they may not be punished immediately, as Liveing was, nor suffer like the wicked hawk, Saint Cuthbert will bring sorrow upon their heads at last and misfortune to the cruel hands which dare to hurt his birds. THE BALLAD OF SAINT FELIX IT was in sunny Italy Where skies are blue and fair, Where little birds sing all the day, And flowers scent the air. But sorrow was through all the land, And bloody deeds, and strife, For the cruel heathen Emperor Was slaying Christian life. And Nola of Campania Was full of soldiers grim, Who sought where good Saint Felix dwelt, To be the death of him. For he, the Bishop, old and wise, Was famous far and near, And to the troubled Christian folk His name was passing dear. Saint Felix would not run away, But thought no shame to hide Until the bloody storm passed o'er, And he might safely bide. And so he doffed his Bishop's robe, And donned a Pilgrim's dress, With hat and staff and sandal-shoon, So none his name would guess. Now as Saint Felix, bent and gray, Was tottering down the street, A band of soldiers, fierce and wild, The old man chanced to meet. "Ho! Pilgrim," cried the Captain stern, Who stopped him with his sword, "Answer me truly, or thy life Shall pay the lying word. "We sought for Felix at his home, We find him not, alas! Say, hast thou met him, for within The hour he did pass? "Say, hast thou met him? Tell us true, Or thou shalt lose thy head." Saint Felix looked him in the eyes, "I _met_ him not," he said. So then the soldiers let him pass,-- But he had spoken truth,-- And hurried forward on their search, A fruitless quest, in sooth! And good Saint Felix hastened too, As quickly as he might, For they would guess full soon, he knew, How he had tricked their sight. And truly, ere his oaken staff Had helped his feeble feet To win a mile, he heard their shouts A-nearing down the street. He heard the clashing of their swords, Their voices' cruel roar, Alack! the chase was almost done, For he could speed no more. All breathless, worn, and clean forspent He looked about him there; He spied a tiny ray of hope, And made a little prayer. There was a broken, ruined wall That crumbled by the road, And through a cleft Saint Felix crept, And in a corner bode. It was a sorry hiding-place, That scarce could hope to 'scape The keen sight of those bloody men, For murder all agape. But lo! in answer to his prayer Made in the Holy Name, To help Saint Felix in his need A little spider came. And there across the narrow hole Through which Saint Felix fled, The spider spun a heavy web Out of her silken thread. So fast she spun, so faithfully, That when the soldiers came To pause beside the ruined wall And shout the Bishop's name. They found a silken curtain there Wherethrough they could not see; And "Ho!" they said, "he is not here, Look, look! it cannot be; "No one has passed this spider's web For many and many a day, See, men, how it is thick and strong;" And so they went away. And this is how Saint Felix fared To 'scape the threatened doom, Saved by a little spider's web, Spun from her wondrous loom. For when the soldiers all had passed It luckily befell, Among the ruins of the walls He found a half-dug well. And there he hid for many months, Safe from the eager eyes Of all those cruel soldier-men And money-seeking spies. And on the eve when this thing happed, It chanced a Christian dame Was passing by the ruined wall Calling her Bishop's name. For well she knew he must be hid, And came to bring him food; And so he answered from the well, Saint Felix, old and good. And for the many weary months She came there, day by day, All stealthily to bring him bread, So no one guessed the way. And when at last the peace was made, Saint Felix left his well. What welcome of his folk he had There are no words to tell! SAINT FRONTO'S CAMELS THIS is a story of Egypt. In the midst of a great yellow sea of sand was a tiny green island of an oasis. Everywhere else the sunlight burned on sand and rocks and low, bare hills to the west. But here there was shade under the palm-trees, and a spring of cool, clear water. It seemed a pleasant place, but the men who were living here were far from happy. There was grumbling and discontent; there were sulky looks and frowns. Yet these men were trying to be holy hermits, to live beautiful lives and forget how to be selfish. But it is hard to be good when one is starving. There were seventy of them in this lonely camp in the desert,--seventy hungry monks, who for many days had had only a few olives to eat. And they blamed one man for all their suffering. It was Fronto who had induced them to leave the pleasant monastery at Nitria, where the rest of their brethren were living in peace and plenty. It was Fronto who had led them into this miserable desert to serve God in solitude, as holy men loved to do in the early days of Christendom. Fronto was a holy man, full of faith and courage. He had promised that they should be fed and cared for in the desert even though they took no care for themselves, and they had believed him. So each monk took a few olives in his pouch and a double-pronged hoe to dig and plant corn with, and followed Fronto into the desert. After trudging many days they found this spot, far to the east, where no caravans would come to interrupt them, for it was out of the way of travel. But soon also they found their provisions gone and no others forthcoming. What were they to do? They asked Fronto, but he only bade them be patient. It was when they had borne the pangs of hunger for several days that they began to grumble and talk of returning home. But Fronto was indignant. "The Lord will provide," he said, "O ye of little faith!" And he bade them go to work and try to forget their hunger. The monks drew the cords tighter about their waists. But that did little good. They had never fasted like this before! Day by day they grew more pale and thin, and their long robes flapped about their lean limbs. The few dates which grew on the palm-trees of their oasis were long since eaten, and the poor monks went about chewing the knotted ends of their rope girdles, trying to pretend that it was bread. Oh, how they longed for even a bit of the hard black bread which was Lenten fare at the monastery beyond the hills! Day by day they grew more hollow-cheeked and despairing. At last one evening they came to Fronto in a body--such a weak, pale body. "Take us back to Nitria, or we starve!" they cried. "We can endure this no longer!" Fronto stood before them even more pale and worn than the rest, but with the light of beautiful trust in his eyes. "Wait yet a little longer, brothers," he begged. "We are bidden to take no thought to the morrow, what we shall eat and drink"-- "Nay, 'tis to-day we think of," interrupted the monks. "If we could eat to-day we would indeed take no thought of the morrow. But we starve!" "Patience, brothers," continued the Saint wearily. "If we return now we shall show that we distrust God's promise. Wait till to-morrow. If help come not then, I give ye leave to go, without me. I shall not return." The monks withdrew, still grumbling and unhappy. But the words of the Saint had made some impression, and they agreed to wait until morning. Each monk stretched himself on his goatskin mat on the floor of the little cell which he had dug in the sand. And with groans of hunger mingled in their prayers they tried to go to sleep and forget how long it was since their last breakfast. But Fronto could not sleep. He was sad and disappointed because his brothers had lost their faith, and because he felt alone, deserted in this desert by the friends who should have helped him with their sympathy and trust. All night he knelt on his goatskin mat praying that the Lord would fulfill His promise now, and prove to the doubting monks how mistaken their lack of faith had been. The other monks slept a hungry sleep about him, dreaming of delicious things to eat. Now and then one of them would cry out: "Another help of pudding, please;" or "Brother, will you pass the toast?" or "Thank you, I will have an egg, brother." And Fronto wept as he heard how faint their voices were. At last the pink fingers of morning began to spread themselves over the face of the sky, pinching its cheeks into a rosy red. Suddenly Fronto, who was on his knees with his back to the door of his cell, started. Hark! what sound was that which came floating on the fresh morning air? Surely, the tinkle of a bell. The good Saint rose from his mat and went hastily to the door, his sure hope sending a smile to his pale lips and color to his hollow cheek. He knew that his prayer was answered. And lo! away in the northwest he saw a thread of black, crawling like a caterpillar over the sand toward his oasis. Nearer and nearer it came; and now he could see plainly what it was,--a line of great rocking camels, the little tinkling bells on whose harness gave the signal that hope was at hand. But the sound had waked the other monks. With a cry of joy they came tumbling out of their cells and rushed toward the camels, which were now close to the camp. How the poor monks ran, to be sure, many of them tripping over the skirts of their long robes and falling flat in the sand from their weakness and excitement. They were like men on a sinking ship who had just caught sight of a rescuing sail. Some of them jumped up and down and clapped their hands like children, they were so glad. And tears stood in the eyes of nearly all. There were seventy camels, soft-eyed gentle creatures, whose flat feet held them up on the soft sand like snowshoes. They bore packs upon their backs which promised good things, and they came straight to the cell of Fronto, where they stopped. And what a welcome they received! The monks threw their arms about the beasts' necks, as they knelt on the sand, and kissed the soft noses as though they were greeting long-lost brothers. They were so glad to see the camels themselves that they almost forgot to wonder whence they came, or what they were bringing. But Fronto was looking for their owner, for the man who drove them. There was no one to be found. They had come all alone across the desert, without any one to guide them. Fronto's face was full of joy. "The Lord has sent them!" he said. And the other monks bowed their heads, and were ashamed because they had doubted. Hungry though they were, first of all the good monks tended the tired beasts who had come so far to save them. They relieved them from their heavy loads, and tenderly washed their hot, weary feet, and gave them draughts of the spring water. Some of the starving monks skurried away to gather the green grass of the oasis for their hungry friends, and others unfastened the bales of hay which some of the camels had brought, and made beds for the animals to lie on. Then they all fell to and built a fold for the seventy camels in the shade of the palm-trees. And here they left the patient creatures to rest and chew their cud with a sigh of relief that the long, hot journey was over. Then the monks hurried back to Fronto, wondering if it were not now almost time for their breakfast. They came upon him reading a letter which he had found on the harness of the foremost camel. It was written from the city of Alexandria, and it explained how the camels had been sent. Four nights before this, Glaucus, the rich merchant, had been resting on a couch in his summer house. He had just finished an excellent dinner, with all his favorite fishes and meats and fruits and sweets, and he was feeling very happy. When suddenly he thought of the seventy monks who had gone out from Nitria many days before to live in the desert with the help which the Lord should send. And a pang smote him. Perhaps they were starving now, while he was feasting. And he wished he could help them to a dinner as good as his. Ha! an idea came to him. Why should he not indeed send them a dinner--many dinners? It should be done. So the next morning he had loaded seventy camels with provisions, five of them with bales of hay for the camels themselves. And taking them to the border of the desert, without driver or any one to guide them, he had sent them out into the sea of sand, the great ships of the desert, to find the right harbor by themselves. For somehow he felt sure that the Lord would guide them safely to the monks. Here the letter of Glaucus ended. Oh, how good that breakfast tasted to the poor, famished monks! There were all kinds of fruit,--fresh figs and olives and dates, citrons and juicy grapes and yellow pomegranates. There were bread and oil which the monks loved, and nuts and combs of the most delicious golden honey such as it makes one's mouth water to think of. Glaucus had sent them a breakfast fit for a king. And they all sat down on the sand in a happy circle and had the finest picnic that was ever seen in that desert. When they had eaten they went out once more to visit the camels who had saved their lives, and to thank them with caressing words. The camels seemed to understand, and looked at them with gentle eyes, chewing their cud earnestly as if thinking: "You see, the Lord was looking out for you all the time. We are only poor, dumb beasts; but we came straight to you across the desert without any fear or wandering, because we trusted. Why were you not trustful, too?" And again the monks were very much ashamed, and went back to Fronto to beg his forgiveness, promising never again to be faint-hearted nor to lose faith. The next morning they made ready to send back the camels to Alexandria. For they knew Glaucus would be anxious to hear how his ships of the desert had fared on their errand. And half the provisions they returned, for they had more than enough to last them a year, according to their simple meals. Then, with tears in their eyes, the monks sent the great beasts forth again into the desert, confident that as they had come so they would find their way back to Alexandria, safe and sound. Each in his cell door the monks stood and watched them slowly winding away over the yellow sand, disappearing at last behind the hills which rose like great waves between them and the world of cities. Now it was eight days since Glaucus had sent out the camels, and he was growing uneasy. Seventy camels are a valuable property, which even a rich man could not afford to lose. Glaucus feared that he had been foolish; the desert was full of robbers, and there was no one to protect this leaderless caravan. Would the Lord take care of affairs which were left wholly to His direction? Glaucus was sitting with his family in the garden, silent and gloomy. His family felt that he had been rash, and they did not hesitate to tell him so, which made him still more unhappy. The leader-camel was the favorite of Glaucus's daughter, Æmilia. She was crying in a corner of the garden, thinking about her dear Humpo, whom she never expected to see again. When, just as Fronto had done, she heard a far-away tinkle. She jumped up and ran out to the road. "What is it, Æmilia, my child?" called out her father, startled by her sudden movement. "Oh, Father, Father!" she cried. "I think I hear the tinkle of a camel bell among the mountains!" And sure enough. As they all hurried down to the garden gate the sound of little bells drew nearer and nearer. And presently came in sight the line of seventy camels, Humpo at the head, half of them loaded with the provisions which the monks were too unselfish to keep. And soon Æmilia had her arms about the neck of her dear Humpo, and was whispering nice things into his floppy ears as he knelt before her, looking lovingly at her with his big brown eyes. Thus it was that Glaucus, the good rich man, knew that the Lord was pleased with him for his kindness, and had helped him to do his duty. And every year after that he sent the seventy camels forth into the desert on their unguided errand to the far-off oasis. So they grew to be dear friends of Saint Fronto and his monks, looked for as eagerly as Santa Claus is at Christmas time. THE BLIND SINGER, SAINT HERVÉ I. ONCE upon a time when Childebert was King of France, a thousand years ago, there lived a young man named Hyvarnion who was very handsome and had the sweetest voice. Hyvarnion was the King's minstrel; he lived at the palace and it was his business to make music for the King to keep him in a good temper. For he wrote the most beautiful songs and sang them to the accompaniment of a golden harp which he carried with him everywhere he went. And besides all this Hyvarnion was very wise; so wise that when he was a boy at school he was called the Little Sage, for Saint Cadoc had been his master and had taught him many things that even the King, who was a heathen, did not know. Now Hyvarnion had lived four years with the King when one night he had a wonderful dream. He dreamed that he saw a beautiful maiden picking flowers in a meadow, and that she smiled at him and gave him a blossom, saying, "This is for my King." And Hyvarnion woke up longing to see the maiden more than anything else in the world. For three nights he dreamed the same dream, of the singing maiden and the meadow and the flowers; and each time she seemed more beautiful than on the last. So on the fourth day he woke up and said, "I must find that maiden. I _must_ find her and hear her call me her King." So, taking his golden harp on his back, he went out from the palace and struck into the deep black forest. By and by he came to an open place, like a meadow, where the grass grew tall and thick, and where in the midst was a spring like a bit of mirror set in a green frame. And Hyvarnion's heart beat fast with joy when he saw on the border of the spring the very maiden about whom he had dreamed, but much more beautiful than any dream. She was bending over, picking something from the grass, and she seemed like a wonderful pink-and-white flower set among the other flowers of yellow and red and blue. For a moment Hyvarnion stood and gazed with open mouth and happy eyes. Then he took his harp and began to sing a song which he had just that minute made. For because he was a minstrel it was easier for him to sing than to talk. And in the song he called her Queen Iris gathering flowers for her crown. Then the maiden raised her head and she turned pinker and whiter, and looked even more like a fair flower than before. For she too had had a dream, three times. And it was of golden-haired Hyvarnion that she had dreamed, whom she now saw looking at her and singing so sweetly with his silver voice. But she also answered him in a song, for she was a singer, too. "I am no Queen Iris," she sang, "I am only the little maiden Rivanone, though they call me Queen of this Fountain. And I am not gathering flowers as you say, fair Sir, but I am seeking simple herbs such as wise men use to cure pain and trouble." [Illustration: HYVARNION AND RIVANONE] "What are the herbs you seek, Rivanone?" asked Hyvarnion, coming nearer. She held up a sprig of green in her white hand. "See, this is the vervain," she answered in song; "this brings happiness and heart's ease. But I seek two others which I have not found. The second opens the eyes of the blind. And the third,--few may ever find that precious herb,--the third is the root of life, and at its touch death flees away. Alas! Fair Sir, I cannot find those two, though some day I feel that I shall need them both most sorely." Rivanone sighed and two tears stood like dewdrops in her flower eyes. But Hyvarnion had now come very close. "Still, you have found the first, which gives happiness, little Queen," he sang tenderly. "Have you not happiness to share with me, Rivanone?" Then the maiden looked up in his eyes and smiled, and held out to him a sprig of the green vervain. "For my King," she sang, just as he had dreamed. And then he did just what she had dreamed he would do; but that is a secret which I cannot tell. For no one knows all that a maiden dreams. And after this and that they came back to the King's palace hand in hand, singing a beautiful song which together they had made about Happiness. So they were married at the court, and the King did them great honor and made them King and Queen of music and of song. So, happily they lived and happily they sang in their little Kingdom of Poesie,--for did they not possess the herb of joy which Rivanone had found and shared with Hyvarnion, her King? II. BUT it was a pity that Rivanone had not also found those other plants for which she had been seeking, the root which brings light to the blind, and the root which gives life to the dying. Because Rivanone had foreseen only too well the need of them which would come to her. For when, after a year or two, their little son was born, his blue eyes were sightless and all the colored wonders of the world were secrets which he could never know. So they named him Hervé, which means Bitterness,--the first bitterness which had come into their lives of joy. But it was not the last. Not long after the little Hervé came, golden-haired Hyvarnion lay ill and dying. And because on that spring morning, Rivanone had not found the herb of life, she could not keep him from going away to find it for himself in that fair country where it is the only plant that grows, with wonderful blossoms which no living man has ever seen. So Hyvarnion passed away from his kingdom of music and song, which he left to be shared by dear Rivanone and Hervé his little son. Thus Hervé became a Prince, heir to all the gifts of that royal pair. And of these there were in particular four of the best: a beautiful face, the sweetest voice that ever thrilled in Brittany, the golden harp of Hyvarnion his father, and many a lovely song made by those two, which Rivanone taught him. What a wonderful Kingdom that was to be his! What beautiful gifts for a little boy to own! But even in a kingdom of this sort one has to bear sorrows and discomforts, just as folk do in other kingdoms which are less fair. Hervé's name meant bitterness, and there was much bitterness in his little life before he learned what a Prince he really was. For he was blind and could not play with the other children. Rivanone was a poor widow and there was no one to earn bread for the two. Sometimes the carols which they sang together were the only breakfast to begin the day. Sometimes the songs Rivanone made beside his bed at night were the only food Hervé had tasted since sunrise. Sometimes they were both so hungry that they could not sing at all; and those were sad times indeed. But when Hervé was seven years old a great idea came to him. Rivanone lay ill and miserable, and there was nothing to eat in the house. Hervé sat by her side holding her hand, and wishing there was something he could do about it. Blind as he was he had never been out of the house alone. But suddenly courage came to him and hope, through his great idea. "I will save you, dear mother!" he cried, throwing his arms about her neck. "I will take father's golden harp and go out upon the highway and sing your beautiful songs. People will give me pennies, and I shall buy you food." So, carrying the golden harp on his back, in his ragged clothes and bare feet the little fellow went out stumbling and feeling his way along the hard road. Now almost at the first corner he met a white dog, who seemed to have no master. This creature came sniffing and whining up to Hervé and licked his hand. And when the boy went on the dog followed close at his side as if to guide and protect him. Hervé asked every one he met whose dog it was; but they all said it was a strange dog come from No-where, and belonged to No-one. It seemed almost as if the beast had been sent especially for Hervé. So at last he said, "You shall be my dog," and at that the great white beast jumped up and barked for joy. Hervé fastened a rope about the dog's neck and kept one end in his hand. So now he had some one to guide and guard him, for the dog was very careful and kind and took care that Hervé never stumbled nor went astray into the ditch by the side of the road. It must have been a hard-hearted man indeed who had no pennies to spare for the blind boy led by the big white dog. With his bare feet blue with cold, his teeth chattering, and his eyes turned wistfully up to the sky which he could not see, he was a sad little figure to meet on the lonely Brittany roads. And he sang so sweetly, too! No one had ever heard such a voice as that, nor such beautiful songs. Every one who heard gave him money. So he was helping his mother, getting her food and medicine and clothes to keep her warm. And this thought comforted him when he was shivering with cold, his rags blown about by the wind and soaked in the rain. Day after day, week after week, Hervé trudged along the flinty roads. Often he limped with cold, bleeding feet which the faithful dog would try to lick warm again. Often he was very tired, and sometimes he was sad, when people were not kind. But this seldom happened. Once Hervé was passing through a strange village where all the folk were heathen. And a band of naughty children began to dance about him and tease him, pulling his hair and twitching his cloak. And they mocked his music, singing, "Blind boy, blind boy! Where are you going, blind boy!" Then it is said that a wonderful thing happened. Hervé was sorry because they were so cruel and unkind, and he struck a strange chord of music on his harp and sang in a low, clear voice,-- "Dance on, bright eyes who can see. Dance on, children who mock a poor blind boy. Dance on,--and never stop so long as the world wags." And it is said that the wicked children are still dancing, over the world and back, around and around, tired though they must be. And they will be still more tired before all is done. For they must whirl and pirouette until the end of the world; and that is a long time even for children who love to dance. At a different time another unkind thing happened to Saint Hervé. But this time it was a beast who hurt his feelings. And this was strange; for usually the beasts loved him and tried to help him as the white dog had done. But after all this was only a mistake; yet it was a sad mistake, for it cost Hervé the life of his faithful guide. This is how it happened. As Hervé and his dog were passing along a lonely road, a black wolf sprang out upon them. He mistook the dog for an ancient enemy of his, another wolf. For indeed Blanco looked like a white wolf,--a wolf such as Saint Bridget gave the King of Ireland. And without stopping to find out who he really was, which would have saved all the trouble, they had a terrible fight, and poor Blanco was killed by the huge black wolf. Then Hervé was sad indeed. He cried and sobbed and was so wretched that the wolf was sorry. Besides, as soon as the fight was over the wolf had found out his mistake, and saw that it was a strange dog whom he had killed, no wolf-enemy at all. He was very much ashamed. He came up to Hervé and fawned at his feet, trying to tell that he was sorry, and asking what he should do about it. So Hervé told him that if he would be his dog now instead of Blanco he would try to forgive the wolf; though he was, oh, so sorry to lose his faithful dog. After that Hervé went on his wanderings led by a big black wolf whom he held in a strong leather leash. And the wolf became as dear to him as Blanco had been. He slept in the barn with the oxen when he was at home, and never snapped nor bit at them as most wolves would do. But he kept sharp watch over his little master, and saw that no one hurt or cheated him. I should be sorry to think what would have happened to any one who had dared to touch Hervé while the wolf was near. And he was always near, with his sharp teeth and watchful eyes. So they wandered and wandered together, Hervé and the wolf, carrying music from town to town, the songs of Hyvarnion and Rivanone. But Hervé had not yet learned to make songs of his own. III. NOW after seven years of wandering, Hervé had earned money enough to keep his mother in comfort. He longed to go to school and be taught things, to grow wise like his father, who had been called the Little Sage, and to learn how to make songs for himself. For he felt that it was time for him to come into the kingdom of Hyvarnion and Rivanone; and the songs shut in his heart were bursting to come out. Gourvoyed, the brother of Rivanone, was a holy hermit who lived alone in the forest, and he would teach Hervé, his nephew, for love of him. For Gourvoyed was a wise man, skilled in all things, but especially in the making of songs. It was a blessed morning when Hervé started for his school in the woods; he was going to his kingdom! The sunlight framed his fair curls in a halo of light, as if giving him a blessing. Birds sang all along the way as if telling him that with Gourvoyed he would learn to make music even sweeter than theirs. The wolf led him eagerly, bounding with joy; for he shared in all the hopes of Hervé's life. And all the creatures knew that he would become a great poet. And so indeed it was. For Hervé soon learned all that Gourvoyed could teach, and in his turn he became a master. Many pupils came to the hut in the forest which the hermit gave up to him, and begged Hervé to make them singer-poets like himself. But he could not do that. He could teach them to sing and to play the harp; but no one could sing as well as he sang, or play as well as he played. And no one can ever be taught to make poetry unless he has it in his soul, as Hervé had. For that is a royal gift, and it came to Hervé from Hyvarnion and Rivanone, the King and Queen of music and of song. It was Hervé's kingdom, and it was given him to take away the bitterness from his name, to make it remembered as sweet, sweet, sweet. And now on his wanderings from town to town Hervé was received like a prince. He sat at great lords' tables, and sang in ladies' bowers. He had golden goblets as his gifts, and shining gems to wear if he chose. But he was so generous that he gave them all away. Never was there heard music so sweet as his; never were there songs so beautiful as he sang to the rippling of his father's golden harp. For Hervé was even a greater minstrel than Hyvarnion or Rivanone had been. In his wanderings all about the country Hervé came to many strange places and met with many strange adventures. Once he spent the night at the castle of a great lord who made Hervé sit on his right hand at table and honored him above all his guests. When the banquet was over, at the Count's request a page brought to Hervé his golden harp, and they all shouted for "A song! a song!" Every one pushed back his stool to listen, and Hervé took the harp and ran his finger over the golden strings with a sound like drops of rain upon the flowers. Now outside the castle, beyond the moat, was a pond. And in the pond lived a whole colony of great green bullfrogs, whose voices were gruffer and grummer than the lowest twanging note on Hervé's harp. And as soon as Hervé began to sing these rude frogs began to bellow and growl as if trying to drown his music. Perhaps they were jealous; for Hervé's voice was sweeter than a silver bell. But all they could sing was "Ker-_chog_! Ker-r-kity-chog, Ker-_chog_!" which is neither very musical nor very original, being the same tune which all the frog-people have sung from the earliest days. Now Hervé was displeased by their disagreeable noise. He could not sing nor play, nor think of the words which belonged with his music: only the "Ker-_chog_! Ker-r-kity-chog! Ker-_chog_!" sounded in his ears. And it grew louder and louder every moment as one by one all the frogs joined in the chorus. Hervé waited for them to stop. But when he found that they did not mean to do this, but were really trying to drown his voice, he was very angry. He strode to the window holding his harp in his hand. And leaning far out he struck another of his wonderful chords of music, such as had charmed the mocking children once before, as you remember. "Sing your last song, O Frogs," he said. "Sing your last Ker-_chog_, for henceforth you will be silent. I command you from this night never to open your mouths again. All save one, the littlest of you all. And he shall sing forever, without cease, to remind you of your rudeness to me." And no sooner had he ceased speaking when there came a great silence outside the window, broken only by one wee piping tadpole voice. "Ker-_chog_! Ker-r-kity-chog! Ker-_chog_!" he chanted his sad little solo. And all alone he had to sing and sing this same tune forever. I dare say one can hear him yet in the greeny pond outside that old French castle. IV. NOW after many years of wandering, of singing, of making beautiful songs, of teaching and wandering again, Hervé's dear mother Rivanone died. But he still had some one to love and look for him and the wolf when he came home from his travels. For Rivanone had adopted a dear little girl named Christine, beautiful as sunshine and sweet as a flower. She called Hervé "Uncle" and loved him dearly, and the wolf was a great friend of hers. So at last he thought to settle down and make music about him in his own home, letting people come there to hear it, instead of carrying it to them by road and river. For he was growing an old man, and it was not so easy to travel in his blindness as it used to be. Besides, the black wolf was also growing gray, and needed rest after these long years of faithful work. Hervé resolved to build a church, and to live there with Christine near him in a little house of her own. He had grown to be an important personage in the world, and had many friends, pupils, and followers who wanted to live near him. So forth they set to find a place for their church, Hervé and his troop of black-robed monks. And before them, like a little white dove among the ravens, ran Christine holding her uncle's hand in one of hers, and in the other grasping the leash at which tugged the grizzled old wolf, who was guiding them. Over many a hill and dale and bloomy meadow he had led Hervé before now, down many a lane and village street, but never upon so important a journey as this. For this was to be the old wolf's last long tramp with his master. And the wolf was to choose the spot where the church should stand. Where he stopped to rest, there would they lay the first stone. So he led them on and on. And at last he lay down in a green spot by a river, just the place for a beautiful church to grow up. And thenceforth Hervé the minstrel would wander no more, but bide and rest and be happy with the wolf and Christine. They built her an arbor near the church, in a clump of willows on the border of a spring. It was cone-shaped and covered with straw like a huge beehive. And Christine herself seemed like a busy bee gathering honey as she buzzed in and out among the roses, humming little tunes below her breath. For she was always among the flowers, as Rivanone had been. Every Saturday morning she would rise early, and with her little basket on her arm would go out to pick the blossoms with the dew still on them. And every Saturday evening she came to the church with her arms full of flowers till she looked like a bouquet of sweetness. And going into the empty church she would busy herself with arranging the flowers for the next morning's service. For it was her duty to see that Uncle Hervé's church was kept clean and sweet and beautiful. And while Christine stood there putting the flowers into tall golden vases, singing softly the songs which Rivanone had taught her, her Uncle Hervé would come creeping up the steps of the church, his hand on the head of the wolf, who always led him to the place where he heard her voice. Softly, very softly, as if he were doing something naughty, Hervé would pull open the heavy door, just a crack, the better to hear her sing. Then he would put his ear to the opening; while the wolf would thrust his nose in below, and wag his tail eagerly. But Christine's keen ears always heard them, no matter how slyly the good blind man crept up to that door. And it became part of the game that she should cry out suddenly,-- "I see you, Uncle! I see you!" And though he could not see her at all, he would start and pop back, pulling the wolf with him as though he had done something wrong. Then without making any noise they would tiptoe away to Hervé's house, their hearts beating with love for the dear little maiden who would soon come to bid them good-night on her way home to her bower. So they lived happily all the rest of their days, these three among the flowers. And in spite of his name Hervé's life was not one of bitterness, but of joy. The kingdom which had come to him from Hyvarnion and Rivanone was his all his life long; and though he no longer wandered painfully from town to town, the songs which he made wandered still from heart to heart. And long, long afterwards their echo made music through the land of Brittany, as the fragrance of a flower lasts long after the flower has passed on its way elsewhere. Dear Saint Hervé! SAINT COMGALL AND THE MICE AT the place where the Irish Sea is narrowest is the town of Bangor. There the green hills of Saint Patrick's island smile over at the purple cliffs of Scotland across the lane of water where the ships pass to and fro, just as neighbors nod across a narrow street above the heads of the passers-by. And here at Bangor Saint Comgall built a monastery, thirteen hundred long years ago. This does not sound very interesting, but it was interesting to many people in those days, and I think it will be interesting to you. For Comgall is an Irish word which means "the goodly pledge." And the man who bore this name was a goodly pledge of friendship between man and beast. Comgall had many pupils in his monastery, and many friends living near who loved and honored him. They did splendid things together, and tales of their doings were put into great books. But the most interesting stories of all are about certain friends of Saint Comgall who could not speak Irish and who did not wear clothes. Some of these friends wore feathers and some wore fur; the strangest story of all is about his friends with long tails and very sharp teeth. But you must wait for that till I have told about the swans. One day Comgall was walking with some friends on the bank of a pond. All of a sudden, through the rushes and the tall grass some one spied six beautiful white swans floating on the water, preening their fine feathers and arching their necks proudly. For they could see in the water, just as if it were a mirror, how handsome they were, and it made them vain. "Oh, Father," cried Comgall's pupils (they always called their teacher "Father" in those days), "see the lovely swans! May we not coax them ashore? We want to play with them." Comgall chuckled inside, for he felt sure that the swans would not come to them, because they were strangers. But he said with a twinkle in his eye,-- "Oh, yes, boys. Call them here if you can. But you must give them something to tempt them, or I fear they will hardly come." Then the boys tried to find a crust of bread or some crumbs in their pockets, to throw to the swans. But no one had anything, not even a peanut; for peanuts were not invented in those days. They stood on the bank whistling and calling, trying in every way to make the swans swim ashore. But the birds only cocked their red-rimmed eyes at the boys and fluttered their wings timidly. "We don't know you," they squawked with their harsh voices. "The like of you are no friends of ours. Hurrooh! Go away and leave our pond in peace." All this time Comgall had been standing behind them on the bank laughing at the vain attempts of his pupils. But now he walked quietly down to the pond. Making a little croony sound in his throat, he put out his hand towards the swans, but with no crumbs to tempt them. The swans had never before seen him. But as soon as they heard his voice you should have seen the commotion! How the water did wrinkle and spatter as those dignified birds scurried headlong towards Comgall! Each one seemed trying to be the first to reach his side; and each one flapped his wings and went almost into a fit for fear another should get ahead of him. So finally they reached the bank and gathered around Comgall, talking to him all at once and telling him how much they liked the look of him. And one great white swan fluttered into the old man's lap and sat there letting himself be stroked and patted, stretching his long neck up to Comgall's face and trying to kiss him with beaky lips. You can imagine how the pupils stared at this strange sight. For they knew that the swans were as truly strangers to Saint Comgall as to the rest of them. But the swans had guessed in some way that this was a man who loved all animals, and that is why they were not afraid, but loved him as soon as they saw him. But this next is the stranger story. Mice are harder even than swans for most people to get acquainted with. But Comgall had also made the mice his friends, as you shall see. There came a time of famine in Ireland, and there was not food enough to go around, as has often happened there from the earliest days until even now. Comgall and his household at Bangor were very hungry. But what made it hardest to bear was that they knew where there was plenty of food close by, if only they could get it. For Croadh was a great Prince who lived in the neighborhood, and Croadh had barns and storehouses full of grain which could be made into bread. But he was a selfish, stingy man and would not give away or even sell his stores, for he would rather see the people starve. Now Croadh had a wicked old mother living in his palace, who was even more cruel than himself. Her name was Luch, and Luch means in Irish "the Mouse." And it was her name which put an idea into Comgall's head. After sending all sorts of messengers to beg Croadh to give them some of his grain; after trying all sorts of ways to make him sell it, Comgall went himself to the Prince's palace to see what he could do. He carried with him a beautiful silver goblet which had been given him by some one as a present, and it was worth many bushels of grain. Comgall strode into the Prince's hall and stood before Croadh holding out the goblet in his hand. And he said,-- "Here, O Prince, is a valuable thing. We are starving in the monastery, and silver we cannot eat. Give me and my monks some of your golden grain and I will exchange for it the silver cup. Be merciful, O Croadh, and hear me." But the Chief only laughed and said mockingly, "Not so. You keep your silver goblet and I will keep my golden grain. Your beggarly pupils shall not eat of my stores. I want all, every grain, for my old Mouse." And by that word he meant his mother, the black-eyed, wrinkled, gray old Luch, whose name meant "the Mouse." For she was the most miserly, wicked, old woman in the world, and she had made him promise not to give up any of the grain. Then Comgall was angry, because he saw that the Prince meant to see the people starve. "Very well," he said, fixing his eyes sternly upon Croadh, "as you have said, so shall it be. The mouse shall have your grain." And drawing his robe about him he strode home with the useless silver goblet. As I have said, the mice were Comgall's friends. He had only to call them and explain what the hard-hearted Prince had done; he had only to tell the mice what he wished them to do, and the matter was settled. The word spread through the kingdom of the mice, carried by the quickest messenger with the shortest tail. All the mice became enemies of Croadh. And there were many mice in Bangor in those days. That very night when every one was asleep, out of every hole and corner came peeping little pointed noses and quivering whiskers. And a great procession of long-tailed tiny things formed into line and crept along, and along, up the hill, and up the walls, and into the barns of Croadh. A legion of mice, thousands upon thousands of them in a gray-uniformed army, pounced upon the Prince's precious grain and ate up every kernel. So the next morning when Croadh went to his barns he found them empty. There was not so much as a single yellow dot of grain left anywhere. But out of every crack and crevice peeped a pair of twinkling black eyes which watched him saucily. Then Croadh began to bellow and roar with anger, and the wicked old woman Luch, his mother, came hobbling in to see what was the matter. But when the mice saw her they gave a chorus of fierce squeaks as if crying "Mouse! Mouse! Mouse!" Then Croadh remembered what Comgall had said, that the mouse should have his grain after all. And he guessed what the Saint had meant, and knew that Comgall had taken this way to punish a selfish and cruel man. THE WONDERS OF SAINT BERACH THE life of Saint Berach was full of wonders from the very first. For when he was a boy at home in the house of his father, Nemnald, he had a vision. An angel appeared to him and beckoned him to follow. So he went, and the angel led him straight to the monastery at Glendalough where holy Saint Coemgen lived with his friend the white doe, and taught boys to be wise. And Berach joined the other boys to be taught all that Saint Coemgen knew, and to learn other things beside. Ireland was a wild country in those days, for this was only six hundred years after Christ's birth and the little towns had hardly begun to grow. The huts which men had made in the wilderness--calling them houses and schools and churches--were not close together but far, far apart. Wild beasts prowled everywhere, and there were no policemen. Close by the monastery were the broad green meadows where the monks pastured the herds of cows which gave them milk. From the windows of his cell the young monk loved to watch the cows and their calves browsing the juicy grass and wading in the brooks which ran under the rows of willows. He especially loved Bel, the sleekest, most beautiful of them all, a proud mother cow who had a new little red calf. One day as he was watching Bel and her baby who had strayed a little distance from the rest of the herd, he saw something which frightened him. A great gray wolf was hiding in the shadow of a hedge, creeping nearer and nearer to the peaceful pair. But Bel did not guess that an enemy was so near. Berach hurried down the turret stair and out of the gate, hardly pausing to tell the brother porter whither he was going. For he knew there was no time to lose. He ran to the meadow, and pushed through the blooming hedge of hawthorne. But alas! he had come too late. The great gaunt wolf, who was very hungry, had pounced upon the little red calf, and had eaten it up. Poor Bel, wild with grief, ran lowing about the pasture as if seeking for her little one. But the wolf was slinking out of sight. When Berach saw what had been done, at first he was very angry with the wolf, for he loved Bel dearly, and it troubled him to see her sad. He thought how lonely the poor cow would be without her calf, and when she came pitifully lowing up to him as if asking him to help her, the tears stood in his kind eyes. But then he thought how hungry the wolf must have been. Poor thing, how thin and hollow he had looked,--perhaps he was not so much to blame after all. Probably he had never been taught any better. And then a strange idea came to Berach. He was a wonderful man, and he must have had great power over animals. For he called to the wolf, who was already some distance away; he called loudly and in a stern voice. You will hardly believe it, but the wolf came slinking back, frightened and whining like a naughty puppy, and crouched at Berach's feet. Then the Saint spoke kindly to the wolf, no longer treating him like a murderer and a thief. He called the cow also, and taking her by the horns led her gently to the wolf, soothing her so that she was not afraid of the great gray beast. And Berach said to the cow, "See, Mother Bel, this shall be your child now, in place of the little one which is gone. He will be a kind and gentle son to you, I promise." And to the wolf he said, "Here, Wolf, is the mother whom you need to make you gentle and good. You shall be kind to her, and make her forget the wrong you have done by being a loving and dutiful son, ever doing her bidding." So after that the cow and the meek wolf dwelt peacefully together in the meadows of the monastery, and he shielded her from danger, and like a huge watchdog kept away the other wild beasts from the herd. After that came a winter when for weeks the ground was white with snow, and the laughing mouths of the brooks were sealed with ice. Duke Colman's little son had been sent to school at the monastery, and the boy was very ill. He was hot and thirsty, and his throat was parched with fever. So little Edward begged for juicy apples, and for salad of fresh sorrel leaves,--things which were not to be found in all the land in the dead of winter. But Coemgen the Abbot trusted in the power of his young friend who could tame wolves. "Go forth, my son," he said to Berach, "take my staff and bring what the boy needs." Then Berach retired to his cell and prayed that he might be blessed to save the dear child's life. After that with faith and courage he went out into the white meadows, using the Abbot's staff to help him over the great drifts of snow. He came to the row of willows by the frozen brook where the cows had loved to wade. And here he paused. Lifting the staff, he touched the bare brown branches of the willow on which the snow clung like shreds of cotton wool, and he pronounced a blessing. Instantly the snow began to melt as it does before the sun in April. The stiff brown twigs turned green and became tender and full of life. Then gray willow buds put forth woolly little pussy-willows, which seemed fairly bursting, like fat round kittens. They grew bigger and bigger, rounder and rounder, till at last they really did burst, and plumped great rosy-cheeked apples into the lap of the Saint, who held up the skirt of his gray gown to catch them as they fell. Lo, under the trees meanwhile the snowdrifts had melted, and little green leaves were poking up through the frozen ground. And Berach gathered there a great bunch of juicy, tart sorrel which makes such good salad. Then with his arms full,--what with this and his apples and the blessed staff,--he floundered back through the snowdrifts to the monastery. They received him eagerly and there was great rejoicing. Little Edward was revived by the out-of-season dainties thus miraculously provided for him, and soon became quite well again. It was many years after this, again a hard and cruel winter, when Saint Berach made another wonder come to pass. Meantime he had grown older and even wiser. He had himself been made Abbot and had built a monastery of his own in a lonely place far away from Glendalough. But he had an enemy. There was a rich man who wanted the land which Berach had chosen, and who was so envious that he tried to do him spite in every way he could. He even sought to destroy the monastery. Then Berach appealed to the King for protection, and both men were summoned to the court. The rich man went in a chariot, splendid in his fine robes of fur, with a gold chain about his neck. And the guards hurried to let down the portcullis for him, and with low bows bade him enter. But when Saint Berach came he wore only his gray monk's robe, all torn and tattered. He was shivering with cold, and weak from having walked so far. So they thought him a mere beggar and would not let him in. As he stood outside the gate, friendless and alone, some rude boys who had gathered there began to laugh and jeer at his bare sandaled feet and the rents in his robe through which the cold winds blew. They made snowballs and rushed upon him in a crowd, like the cowards they were, pelting the poor man most cruelly. But suddenly, what do you think? Their arms stiffened as they raised them to throw the balls; their legs stuck fast in the snow; the grins froze on their faces; and they were almost choked by the shouts which turned to ice in their throats. What had happened? Well, Saint Berach had merely breathed upon them, and they were as if turned into ice, so that they could not stir. Br-r-r! How cold they were! Then the Saint made ready to warm himself. A drift of snow had fallen from the palace gate when it opened to let in the rich man. And going up to this he blew upon it. He blew a warm breath this time. Instantly the whole heap burst into flame, and snapped and crackled like the fire in the chimney-place of the dining-hall at home. In front of this merry blaze the good Saint stood, warming his hands and thawing out his poor frozen feet. But the group of boys stood like statues of snow; so cold, so cold, but unable to come nearer to the fire; so frightened, so frightened, but unable to run away. This is what the King's guards saw when, terrified by the crackling of the fire and the great light which shone through the chinks of the gate, they came to see what it all meant. They ran to the King and told him of the strange sight. And he himself with a crowd of courtiers came out to look. When he saw the ragged beggar who had done all this he was filled with amazement. He immediately suspected that this must be a holy man and powerful. So he invited Berach into the palace hall, and there listened to his story. Now when all was done the rich man was bundled away in disgrace, for daring to meddle with the good works of so wonderful a Saint. But Berach was honored and admired. Before he went back to his monastery they begged him to restore the naughty boys to life and motion. Now Berach had wanted only to teach them a lesson, not to punish them too severely; for he was too kind-hearted to injure any living creature. So going out into the courtyard he blew upon the snow figures, and once more they became live boys. You can imagine how glad they were when they found they were able to move their legs and arms again. Now Berach went back to his monastery in one of the King's chariots, with a robe of fur and a gold chain about his neck. And you may be sure he carried with him many other gifts and precious things from the King, who never thereafter suffered him to be troubled in his far-off retreat. SAINT PRISCA, THE CHILD MARTYR SAINT PRISCA'S name has always been dearly loved, especially in England. January eighteenth is the day which is sacred to her, and she lived over seventeen hundred years ago. She is one of the few child-martyrs whose names have come down to us from those early days, although there were many other brave children who suffered and were strong, and who, at last, gave their lives to prove their faith. Saint Prisca was a little Roman girl whose parents were Christians of a noble family. Claudius was the Emperor at that time, and though during his reign the Christians were not persecuted in such numbers as they had been before that, still many cruel things were done here and there, and it was a dangerous thing to be a Christian. It was in the evil times when one did not always dare to say what he really thought, nor publicly to worship as he believed was right. Many of the Christians were not ashamed to conceal their real belief from the heathen Romans, who were everywhere seeking with hatred for the followers of Christ, to torture and slay them. Prisca's father and mother had managed to keep their secret, and were not suspected of being Christians. They probably went to church in the secret chapels which the Christians had dug deep in the ground under the city. In these dark, gloomy catacombs, as they were called, the Christians held services directly under the feet of the cruel Romans, who were passing overhead without suspecting what was going on so near to them. But Prisca scorned to use any precaution. Small and defenseless though she was, she did not fear to tell every one what she believed and Whose Cross she followed. So she soon became known as a firm little Christian maiden. And there were people in the city cruel enough and wicked enough to hate even a little child-Christian and to wish her evil. These persons reported to the Emperor's officers her brave words of faith, and told them how she would not sacrifice to the Roman gods as the other children did. So very soon she was seized by the guards and brought before the Emperor. Claudius looked at the little maid in surprise to find her so young. And he thought: "Ho! I shall easily make this small Christian change her mind and obey me." And he bade his men take her to the temple of Apollo and make her offer incense to the beautiful god of the silver bow. So they carried her to the top of the Palatine, one of the seven hills on which Rome was built. [Illustration: SAINT PRISCA] They first passed under a great marble arch and came into a fair courtyard surrounded by fifty-two marble pillars. In the centre of this space stood the temple of Apollo, the most magnificent building in all Rome. With its ivory gates and wonderful groups of statues, its inlaid marble floors and altars wreathed with flowers, its golden tripods breathing incense, its lamps and beautiful silver vases, it was a very different place from the bare, dark caverns in which the Christians worshiped. In front of the temple was a group of four oxen made of bronze, and in the centre of this group burned a fire upon a golden tripod. This was the altar to Apollo, the sun-god, whose enormous golden statue, in his four-horse chariot, stood over the door of the temple just above. He was the likeness of a beautiful youth with a wreath of bay about his head, carrying a bow in his hand, with which Apollo was believed to shoot the sunbeams down upon the earth. They thrust incense into Prisca's hand and bade her throw a few grains into the fire in honor of the beautiful god of the sun. It seemed a very simple thing to do, to save her life,--just to scatter a handful of dark powder on the flames. Prisca loved the dear sun as well as any one, but she knew it was foolish to believe that he was a god, and wicked to worship his statue in place of the great God who made the sun and everything else. So Prisca refused to burn the incense. Then the Emperor was very angry, and bade the soldiers whip her until she obeyed his command. But they could not make her yield by cruelty. Even the hard-hearted Romans who had come to look on admired her bravery and pitied her suffering. The women wept to see her so cruelly treated, and the men cried, "Shame! shame! To torture a little child." And then a beautiful thing happened; for Prisca appeared dressed in a robe of yellow sunshine. A wonderful light shone all about her, and she seemed herself a little star giving out light, so brightly did her brave spirit shine among those cruel men. It seemed as if no child could bear all this suffering without yielding, and the Emperor hoped she would give in, for he did not want to have her killed. But Prisca was firm, and would not make the sacrifice. The Emperor was surprised to find a child so brave. He ordered them to drag her away to prison and to keep her there for many days. Here she was most unhappy,--lonely and cold and hungry often, wondering what dreadful thing was to happen next. But her heart was always brave, and she was not afraid. After a long time, one morning the guard came for little Prisca. They led her forth into the dear sunshine, and glad she was to see it and the blue sky once more. But it was only for a short time that they let her enjoy even this little pleasure; for they brought her to the amphitheatre, a great open place like the circus, with tiers upon tiers of seats all about, and crowds of faces looking down into the centre where she was. Prisca knew what this meant, for she had often heard how the Christians were put into the arena to be torn in pieces by wild beasts. And kneeling down on the sand she made a little prayer, not that she might be saved from the fierce beasts, but that she might have courage to show her Christian bravery and teach a lesson to these fiercer men and women who were looking on. Then the keeper opened the grated door of a den at the end of the arena, and out stalked a great yellow lion. With a dreadful roar he rushed into the centre of the circle, and stood there lashing his tail and flashing his big yellow eyes all about the place. Then suddenly he spied the little girl standing quietly at one side with her hands clasped in front of her, looking at him without fear. And the great beast strode gently up to her on his padded paws. He bent his head and licked her little bare feet, and then he crouched down by her side, as a Saint Bernard dog might place himself to guard his little mistress. And this is why the old pictures of Saint Prisca represent her with a lion by her side. There fell a great silence on the tented place. The Emperor and all the people sat perfectly still, wondering at the strange sight and admiring the courage of the child; for she had reached out her hand and was stroking the yellow head of the lion, playing with his mane. She bent her head and no one heard her whisper into his ear:-- "My good friend! you will not hurt me, I know, for the Lord has closed your mouth, just as he did the mouths of the lions into whose den Daniel was thrown by wicked men. These cruel men will put me to death, but you are kinder than they." And the lion looked up in her face as though he understood, and growled softly. He was quite gentle with her, but when the keeper came towards them he roared and bristled and showed his great teeth, so that for a long time no one dared to come near. But even the lion could not save her from the death which she had no wish to shun. At last they captured him and took him away. The Emperor's heart was softened by Prisca's bravery, and he wished to give her one more chance to save her life. They shut her up for many days in the heathen temple, and tried in every way to make her sacrifice to the gods and give up Christianity. They coaxed her and made her fine promises; they threatened and punished her. But still Prisca stood firm, although she was now very worn and tired and ill because she had suffered so much. So when she had borne it all patiently and bravely, and they saw it was impossible to make a little Christian turn back again into a little heathen, they led her away down the road which leads south from the Palatine hill, to the place of execution. This was just outside the Ostian gate, an archway in the great wall which surrounded Rome, through which the road led to the town of Ostium and to the sea. Just outside this gate, to show that they were no longer worthy of being Romans and living within its walls, criminals were executed. And here many Christian martyrs lost their lives. Prisca was one of these, for here she was beheaded. And till the very end she neither cried nor screamed nor was in any way afraid. And so she became Saint Prisca, a little martyr. Then another strange thing befell. When she died a great eagle appeared in the sky, hovering over Saint Prisca's body far up in the air. And when any of the Romans ventured near her the eagle swooped down upon them with dreadful cries and flapping of his wings. And his round gray eyes looked so fierce and his claws so long and sharp, that no one dared to touch her for fear of the bird. Saint Prisca had found another protector in cruel Rome. And this is why many of the old pictures of Saint Prisca's martyrdom show a great eagle hovering over her. The creature guarded her body night and day, driving every one away, until the Christians, who had been waiting for the chance to venture out, came secretly one night and carried her away. They buried her where the Romans could not find her, in their little secret cemetery in the catacombs. This is how Saint Prisca lived and died two hundred and seventy years after Christ's birth. But I wish we knew what became of the noble lion and the devoted eagle. THE FISH WHO HELPED SAINT GUDWALL THE Welsh coast is famous for its beautiful scenery and its terrible storms. People who see it in the summer time think only of the beautiful scenery. But if they should happen to pass that way in midwinter they would be very apt to meet an unpleasant reminder of the terrible storms. Saint Gudwall was born a Welshman, and he should have known all this. Perhaps he did know, but chose to run into danger just because it was dangerous, as so many saints loved to do in those years when it was thought no virtue to take care of one's life. At all events, it was summer when with one friend Gudwall moved to his new home, a tiny island off the coast of Wales, which at that time was very beautiful. The first thing they did was to set about finding a place to live in. The island was one of those high mountains poking up out of the sea, with green grass on top, like colored frosting to a cake; and gray rocks below, all hollowed out into deep caves and crannies, as if mice had been nibbling at the cake. These caves are just the sort of places which smugglers and pirates choose to hide in with their treasures, for no one would think of hunting for any one there. And Gudwall wanted to be left alone with his pupil; so he thought there was no reason why a bad man's hiding-place should not make a good saint's retreat. So they chose the largest and deepest of all the caves, and there they put their books and their beds and their little furniture, and set up house-keeping. Their home was one of those caves into which the sea rushes a little way and then suddenly backs out again as if it had changed its mind this time but would call again. Gudwall and his pupil loved to lie in their cave just beyond the reach of the waves and watch them dash laughingly up on the rocks, then roar and gurgle in pretended anger and creep away out into the blue basin beyond. In summer their daily games with the sea were great fun, and Gudwall was very happy. They spent some lovely months alone with the waves and the rocks and the sea-birds which now and then fluttered screaming into the dark cave, and then again dashed bashfully out when they found they had come uninvited into a stranger's home. It was all very nice and peaceful and pretty in the summer time, just as tourists find it to this day. But oh! what a change when old Winter came roaring down over the waves from the North in his chariot of ice, drawn by fierce winds and angry storm-clouds. Then the temper of the sea was changed. It grew cruel and hungry. It left off its kindly game with the lonely dwellers on the island, and seemed instead to have become their enemy. It tried to seize and swallow them in its cruel jaws. One morning there came a terrible storm. In the far end of the cave Gudwall and the other were nearly swept away by a huge wave which rushed in to devour them. No longer content with pausing on the threshold, the sea swept through their whole house, dashing away their little store of books and furniture, a most unneighborly thing to do. It tried to drag the two men from the corner where they clung to the rough rock. Choked and gasping they escaped this time, while the sea drew back for another plunge. But they did not wait for this, for they knew it would mean their death. Drenched as they were and blinded by the salt spray, they scrambled out of the cave and began to climb the slippery seaweed to the rocks above. It was a hard and dangerous ascent, for the sea leaped after them to pull them back, snarling angrily at their heels like a fierce beast maddened by their escape. But it could not quite seize them, and at last they reached the top of the cliff where they were safe for the time. But what were they to do now? There were no houses on the island, no place to go to keep warm; yet they could not live out in the open air to freeze in the snow and cold. It was no longer possible to live in the cave if the sea was to wash through it like this. But if only there were some barrier to keep out the stormy waves they could still live in their beloved cave. Saint Gudwall fell upon his knees and prayed for help,--prayed for some defense against the winter waves. And what do you think happened? The dwellers in the sea were kinder than the sea itself. The little fish who live safely in the angriest waves were sorry for the big men who were so powerless in the face of this danger. From the sea caves far under the island's foot, from the beds of seaweed and the groves of coral, from the sandy bottom of the ocean fathoms deep below, the fish came swimming in great shoals about Gudwall's island. And each one bore in his mouth a grain of sand. They swam into the shallow water just outside the cave where Gudwall had lived, and one by one they placed their burdens on the sandy bottom. One by one they paused to see that it was well done, then swiftly swam away, to return as soon as might be with another grain of sand. All day long a procession of fish, like people in line at a ticket office, moved steadily up to the shallows and back again. So by night a little bar of sand had begun to grow gradually before the entrance to the cave. Now Saint Gudwall and his pupil were shivering on the top of the cliff, and looking off to sea, when the pupil caught his master's arm. "What is that down there in the water?" he said, pointing to a little brown spot peering above the waves. "I know not," answered the Saint; "what seems it to be, brother?" "I have been watching it," said the other, "and I think it grows. Look! it is even now higher than when first you looked; is it not so?" And sure enough, Gudwall saw that ever so little at a time the brown patch was growing and spreading from right to left. Grain by grain the sand bar rose higher and higher till it thrust bravely above the blueness a solid wall extending for some distance through the water in front of the cave. Against this new breakwater the surf roared and foamed in terrible rage, but it could not pass, it could no longer swoop down into the cavern as it had done before. "The Lord has given us a defense," said Gudwall with a thankful heart. And then his eye caught sight of a great bluefish swimming back into the deep sea. "It is the fish who have built us the wall," he cried. "Blessed be the fish who have this day helped us in our need." For the fish had piled up a stout and lasting barrier between Saint Gudwall and the angry sea, and thenceforth he could live in his cave safely during both summer and winter. THE BALLAD OF SAINT GILES AND THE DEER ALL in the forest far away Where no one ever came, There dwelt a good man, old and gray,-- Saint Giles the hermit's name. His forest home a rocky cave Beneath an aspen tree; And for his friend Saint Giles did have A Deer, who wandered free. A gentle red and mottled Deer Who made her home close by, Who at his call came without fear, Forgetting to be shy. Sure never all in lovely France Was there a Deer so tame; Ah, but to see her start and prance When he would call her name! She gave him milk, his simple fare, And browsed upon the green, Ah, such a gentle, loving pair I wis was never seen. And he was happy in his cell, And joyous 'neath his trees, Content with woodland beasts to dwell, His only neighbors these. The wood was dark, the wood was grim, And never till one day Had human voices troubled him, Or world-folk passed that way. But on a dewy springtime morn When April climbed the hill, There came the wind of silver horn, Halloos and whistles shrill; The galloping of horses' feet, The bloody bay of hounds, Broke through the forest silence sweet And echoed deadly sounds. Saint Giles sat in his lonely cell, Whenas the rout drew nigh; But at the noise his kind heart fell And sorrow dimmed his eye. He loved not men who hunt to kill, Loved not the rich and grand, For in those days the Pagans still Held lordship in the land. But scarcely had he reached the door And seized his staff of oak, When like a billow with a roar The chase upon him broke. With one last hope of dear escape, Into the open space Bounded a light and graceful shape, The quarry of the chase. All flecked with foam, all quivering With weariness and fear, Crouched at his feet the hunted thing, His gentle friend, the Deer. Behind her bayed the pack of hounds, Their cruel teeth gleamed white, Nearing with eager leaps and bounds; He turned sick at the sight. Saint Giles looked down upon the Deer, Saint Giles looked up again, He saw the danger drawing near, The death, with all its pain. He laid his hand upon her head, The soft head of his friend,-- "And shall I let thee die?" he said, "And watch thy hapless end?" He stooped and gently murmured, "Nay!" Stroking her mottled side, He stepped before her where she lay; "They slay me first!" he cried. Her frightened eyes looked up at him, Her little heart beat high, She trembled sore in every limb,-- The bushes parted nigh. "Halloo! Halloo!" the huntsmen cried As through the hedge they burst; An archer all in green espied The crouching quarry first. Swift as a thought his arrow flew, Saint Giles threw out his arm, Alack! the aim was all too true, Saint Giles must bear the harm. The arrow pierced too well, too well; All in that mournful wood Saint Giles upon the greensward fell, And dyed it with his blood. He fell, but falling laid his hand Upon the trembling Deer,-- "My life for hers, dost understand?" He cried so all could hear. Now as upon the green he lay All in a deathly swound, The King dashed up with courtiers gay And looked upon his wound; The King rode up, and "Ho!" he cried, "Whom find we in our wood? Who spares the deer with mottled hide? Who sheds an old man's blood?" The King looked down with ruthful eye When all the thing was told, "Alack!" he cried, "he must not die, So kind a man and bold. "Bear me the Saint into his cave; Who falls to save his friend Deserves for leech his King to have; I will his pallet tend." They spared to him the sore-bought Deer; And in that lowly cell For many weary days and drear The King came there to dwell. The King, who was a godless man, A pagan, heart and soul, Played nurse until the wound began To heal, and Giles was whole. But in the little forest cave The King learned many things Known to the meanest Christian slave, But secrets from the kings. For good Saint Giles had won his heart By his brave deed and bold, And ere the great King did depart His Christian faith he told. And while the red Deer stood beside, The King gave Giles his word That e'er a Christian he would bide, And keep what he had heard. And so the monarch rode away And left the two alone, Saint Giles a happy man that day, The good Deer still his own. Safe from the eager hunting horde The Saint would keep his friend, Protected by the King's own word Thenceforth unto the end. For unmolested in his cell, Careless of everything Giles with his friendly Deer could dwell Liege to a Christian King. THE WOLF-MOTHER OF SAINT AILBE THIS is the story of a poor little Irish baby whose cruel father and mother did not care anything about him. But because they could not sell him nor give him away they tried to lose him. They wrapped him in a piece of cloth and took him up on the mountain side, and there they left him lying all alone on a bush of heather. Now an old mother wolf was out taking her evening walk on the mountain after tending her babies in the den all day. And just as she was passing the heather bush she heard a faint, funny little cry. She pricked up her pointed ears and said, "What's that!" And lo and behold, when she came to sniff out the mystery with her keen nose, it led her straight to the spot where the little pink baby lay, crying with cold and hunger. The heart of the kind mother wolf was touched, for she thought of her own little ones at home, and how sad it would be to see them so helpless and lonely and forgotten. So she picked the baby up in her mouth carefully and ran home with him to her den in the rocks at the foot of the mountain. Here the little one, whose name was Ailbe, lived with the baby wolves, sharing their breakfast and dinner and supper, playing and quarreling and growing up with them. The wolf-mother took good care of him and saw that he had the best of everything, for she loved him dearly indeed. And Ailbe grew stronger and stronger, taller and taller, handsomer and handsomer every day, living his happy life in the wild woods of green Ireland. Now one day, a year or two after this, a hunter came riding over the mountain on his way home from the chase, and he happened to pass near the cave where Ailbe and the wolves lived. As he was riding along under the trees he saw a little white creature run across the path in front of him. At first he thought it was a rabbit; but it was too big for a rabbit, and besides it did not hop. The hunter jumped down from his horse and ran after the funny animal to find out what it was. His long legs soon overtook it in a clump of bushes where it was hiding, and imagine the hunter's surprise when he found that it had neither fur nor horns nor four feet nor a tail, but that it was a beautiful child who could not stand upright, and whose little bare body ran on all-fours like a baby wolf! It was little Ailbe, the wolf-mother's pet, who had grown so fast that he was almost able to take care of himself. But he was not quite able, the hunter thought; and he said to himself that he would carry the poor little thing home to his kind wife, that she might take care of him. So he caught Ailbe up in his arms, kicking and squealing and biting like the wild little animal he was, and wrapped him in a corner of his great cloak. Then he jumped on his horse with a chirrup and galloped away out of the woods towards his village. But Ailbe did not want to leave his forest home, the wolf-den, and his little wolf brothers. Especially he did not want to leave his dear foster mother. So he screamed and struggled to get away from the big hunter, and he called to the wolves in their own language to come and help him. Then out of the forest came bounding the great mother wolf with her four children, now grown to be nearly as big as herself. She chased after the fleeting horse and snapped at the loose end of the huntsman's cloak, howling with grief and anger. But she could not catch the thief, nor get back her adopted son, the little smooth-skinned foundling. So after following them for miles, the five wolves gradually dropped further and further behind. And at last, as he stretched out his little arms to them over the hunter's velvet shoulder, Ailbe saw them stop in the road panting, with one last howl of farewell. They had given up the hopeless chase. And with their tails between their legs and their heads drooping low they slunk back to their lonely den where they would never see their little boy playmate any more. It was a sad day for good wolf-mother. But the hunter carried little Ailbe home with him on the horse's back. And he found a new mother there to receive him. Ailbe never knew who his first mother was, but she must have been a bad, cruel woman. His second mother was the kind wolf. And this one, the third, was a beautiful Princess. For the hunter who had found the child was a Prince, and he lived in a grand castle by a lake near Tipperary, with hundreds of servants and horses and dogs and little pages for Ailbe to play with. And here he lived and was very happy; and here he learned all the things which in those days made a little boy grow up into a wise and great man. He grew up so wise and great that he was made a Bishop and had a palace of his own in the town of Emly. People came to see him from far and near, who made him presents, and asked him questions, and ate his dinners. But though he had grown so great and famous Ailbe had never forgotten his second mother, the good wolf, nor his four-footed brothers, in their coats of gray fur. And sometimes when his visitors were stupid and stayed a long time, or when they asked too many questions, or when they made him presents which he did not like, Ailbe longed to be back in the forest with the good beasts. For they had much more sense, though they had never kissed the Blarney Stone, which makes one talk good Irish. A great many years afterwards there was one day a huge hunt in Emly. All the lords for miles around were out chasing the wild beasts, and among them was the Prince, Ailbe's foster-father. But the Bishop himself was not with them. He did not see any sport in killing poor creatures. It was almost night, and the people of Emly were out watching for the hunters to return. The Bishop was coming down the village street on his way from church, when the sound of horns came over the hills close by, and he knew the chase was nearing home. Louder and louder came the "tantaratara!" of the horns, and then he could hear the gallopy thud of the horses' hoofs and the yelp of the hounds. But suddenly the Bishop's heart stood still. Among all the other noises of the chase he heard a sound which made him think--think--think. It was the long-drawn howl of a wolf, a sad howl of fear and weariness and pain. It spoke a language which he had almost forgotten. But hardly had he time to think again and to remember, before down the village street came a great gaunt figure, flying in long leaps from the foremost dogs who were snapping at her heels. It was Ailbe's wolf-mother. He recognized her as soon as he saw her green eyes and the patch of white on her right foreleg. And she recognized him, too,--how I cannot say, for he had changed greatly since she last saw him, a naked little sunbrowned boy. But at any rate, in his fine robes of purple and linen and rich lace, with the mitre on his head and the crozier in his hand, the wolf-mother knew her dear son. With a cry of joy she bounded up to him and laid her head on his breast, as if she knew he would protect her from the growling dogs and the fierce-eyed hunters. And the good Bishop was true to her. For he drew his beautiful velvet cloak about her tired, panting body, and laid his hand lovingly on her head. Then in the other he held up his crook warningly to keep back the ferocious dogs. "I will protect thee, old mother," he said tenderly. "When I was little and young and feeble, thou didst nourish and cherish and protect me; and now that thou art old and gray and weak, shall I not render the same love and care to thee? None shall injure thee." Then the hunters came tearing up on their foaming horses and stopped short to find what the matter was. Some of them were angry and wanted even now to kill the poor wolf, just as the dogs did who were prowling about snarling with disappointment. But Ailbe would have none of it. He forbade them to touch the wolf. And he was so powerful and wise and holy that they dared not disobey him, but had to be content with seeing their hunt spoiled and their prey taken out of their clutches. But before the hunters and their dogs rode away, Saint Ailbe had something more to say to them. And he bade all the curious townsfolk who had gathered about him and the wolf to listen also. He repeated the promise which he had made to the wolf, and warned every one thenceforth not to hurt her or her children, either in the village, or in the woods, or on the mountain. And turning to her once more he said:-- "See, mother, you need not fear. They dare not hurt you now you have found your son to protect you. Come every day with my brothers to my table, and you and yours shall share my food, as once I so often shared yours." And so it was. Every day after that so long as she lived the old wolf-mother brought her four children to the Bishop's palace and howled at the gate for the porter to let them in. And every day he opened to them, and the steward showed the five into the great dining hall where Ailbe sat at the head of the table, with five places set for the rest of the family. And there with her five dear children about her in a happy circle the kind wolf-mother sat and ate the good things which the Bishop's friends had sent him. But the child she loved best was none of those in furry coats and fine whiskers who looked like her; it was the blue-eyed Saint at the top of the table in his robes of purple and white. But Saint Ailbe would look about him at his mother and his brothers and would laugh contentedly. "What a handsome family we are!" he would say. And it was true. SAINT RIGOBERT'S DINNER SAINT RIGOBERT was hungry. He had eaten nothing that morning, neither had little Pierre, his serving lad, who trotted along before him on the road to Rheims. They were going to visit Wibert, the Deputy-Governor of Rheims, to pay him some money which the Bishop owed,--all the money which he had in the world. And that is why they had nothing left to buy them a breakfast, and why little Pierre gazed into the bakers' shops so hungrily and licked his lips as they passed. Good Saint Rigobert did not see the windows of buns and tarts and pasties as they went along, for his eyes were bent upon the ground and he was singing hymns over to himself under his breath. Still, he too was very faint. Saint Rigobert was poor. He was a good old Bishop; but the King of France did not love him, and had sent him away from the court and the big, rich city to live among the poor folk in the country. Saint Rigobert did not mind this very much, for he loved the pretty little village of Gernicour where he lived. He loved the people who dwelled there, too; and especially he loved Pierre, who had come to his home to be his little page and helper. The people of the village meant to be kind and generous; but they were mostly stupid folk who saw only what was in front of their noses. And they did not guess how very poor their dear Bishop was. They were poor, too, and had to be careful of their little bits of money. But they all had vegetables and milk and eggs and butter, and if every one had helped a little, as they ought,--for he was always doing kind things for them,--Saint Rigobert would not have gone hungry so often. It made the Bishop sorry to find them so careless, but he never complained. He would not tell them, nor beg them to help him, and often even little Pierre did not know how long he fasted. For he would give the boy all the supper and keep none himself. But he was always cheery and contented. He always had a kind word for the people as he passed them on the street. And when he went to the big town of Rheims near by he never complained to the Governor there about what a poor, miserable parish he lived in, or how little the people of Gernicour did for their Bishop. For he liked to believe that they did the best they could. And that is why, when the two came into Wibert's hall, Saint Rigobert paid the money to the Governor without a word of his hunger or his faintness. And even when he saw the great table laid for dinner and the smoking dishes brought in by a procession of serving men, he turned away resolutely and tried not to show how tempting the good things looked and smelled. He gathered up the folds of his robe, and taking his Bishop's staff in his hand, rose to go back to Gernicour and his dinnerless house. But as they were leaving the hall, Pierre trailing out very reluctantly with many a backward look, Wibert the governor called them back. Perhaps he had seen the longing in the eyes of little Pierre as the great haunch of venison was set on the board. Perhaps he had noticed how pale and hollow Saint Rigobert's cheeks were, and half guessed the cause. At all events he said kindly:-- "I pray thee, stay and dine with us, thou and the boy yonder. See, the meat is ready, and there is room for many more at table." But Saint Rigobert had a service to hold in the church at Gernicour, and knew they had barely time to reach home if they walked briskly. Besides, he was too proud to accept charity, and for the sake of his people he feared to let the Governor see how very hungry he was. "Nay," he answered gently, "I thank thee for thy courtesy, friend Wibert. But we may not tarry. The time scants us for a dinner before the service in the church at Gernicour, and we must hasten or we be late. Come, lad, we must be stirring anon." Tears of disappointment were standing in Pierre's eyes, he wanted so much to stay and have some of that good dinner. But he never thought of questioning his master's commands. The Governor pressed them to stay, but Rigobert was firm, and passed on to the door, Pierre following sulkily behind. But just as they reached the door there was a commotion outside, and the sound of quacking and men's laughter. And there came in a serving man bearing in his arms a great white goose, which was flapping his wings and cackling hoarsely in fright. "Ho, what have we here?" said the Governor crossly. "Why do you let such a commotion into my hall, you fellow?" "Please you, sir," answered the serving man as well as he could with the goose struggling in his arms, "this goose is a tribute from the widow Réné, and she begs your Honor to accept him as a poor present." "A poor present indeed," said the Governor testily. "What do I want of the creature? We have more fowls now than we know what to do with. I wish him not." Then an idea came into his head, and he turned to Saint Rigobert. "Why, reverend sir," he said laughing, "since you will not stay to dine with me, I prithee take this fat fellow home with you, for dinner in Gernicour. 'T will be a good riddance for us, in sooth." Saint Rigobert hesitated. But seeing the look of eagerness in Pierre's face he concluded to accept the gift, which was a common one enough in those days. "Grammercy for your courtesy, Master Wibert," he answered. "We take your bounty of the fine goose, since it seemeth that your tables have space for little more. Now then, Pierre lad, take up thy prey. And look he bite thee not," he added as the boy made haste to seize the great struggling bird. The goose pecked and squawked and flapped horribly while Pierre was getting his arms about him. But finally they were ready to start, Pierre going first with the goose who was nearly as big as himself, and the Bishop following grasping his staff, his eyes bent upon the ground. Pierre's heart was full of joy. He chuckled and laughed and could hardly wait till they should reach home, for thinking of the fine dinner at the end of the road. But Saint Rigobert had already forgotten the goose, he had so many other things to think about. That is the way he had taught himself to forget how hungry he was--he just thought about something else. But all on a sudden Rigobert was startled by a great cackle and a scream in front of him down the road. He looked up just in time to see a big white thing sailing away into the sky, and Pierre hopping up and down in the road screaming and crying. The Bishop overtook the little fellow quickly. "Lad, lad, hast thou lost thy goose?" he asked gently. "Oh Father," sobbed the boy, "our nice dinner! Your dinner, master! The wicked goose has flown away. Oh, what a careless boy I am to let him 'scape me so!" And he sat down on a stone and cried as if his heart would break. "Nay, nay," the good Bishop said, patting him on the head soothingly, "perhaps the poor goose did not want to be roasted, Pierre. Can you blame him for seeking his liberty instead? I find no fault with him; but I am sorry for thy dinner, lad. We must try to get something else. Cheer up, Pierre, let the white goose go. All will yet be well, lad." He made Pierre get up, still crying bitterly, and on they trudged again along the dusty road. But this time there was no dinner for them to look forward to, and the way seemed very long. Pierre dragged his feet heavily, and it seemed as if he could not go another step with that emptiness in his stomach and the ache in his head. But again Saint Rigobert began to hum his hymns softly under his breath, keeping time to the beat of his aged feet on the dusty road. The loss of his dinner seemed to trouble him little. Perhaps he was secretly glad that the poor goose had escaped; for he was very tender-hearted and loved not to have creatures killed, even for food. They had gone quite a little distance, and Rigobert began to sing louder and louder as they neared his church. When suddenly there came a strange sound in the air over his head. And then with a great fluttering a big white goose came circling down right before Saint Rigobert's feet. The good Saint stopped short in surprise, and Pierre, turning about, could hardly believe his eyes. But sure enough, there was the very same goose, looking up into Saint Rigobert's face and cackling as if trying to tell him something. "I didn't mean to run away," he seemed to say. "I didn't know you were hungry, holy man, and that I was taking away your dinner. Sing on and I will follow you home." Pierre turned and ran back to the goose and would have seized him by the neck so he could not get away again. But Saint Rigobert held up his finger warningly, and the boy stood still. "Do not touch him, Pierre," said the Bishop earnestly. "I do not think he will run away. Let us see." And sure enough, when they started on once more, Saint Rigobert still singing softly, Pierre, who kept glancing back, saw the goose waddling slowly at his master's heels. So the queer little procession came into Gernicour; and every one stopped along the streets with open mouths, wondering to see them pass. At last they reached the Bishop's house. And there Rigobert ceased his singing, and turning to the goose stroked his feathers gently and said:-- "Good friend, thou hast been faithful. Thou shalt be rewarded. Aye, ruffle up thy feathers, good goose, for they shall never be plucked from thee, nor shalt thou be cooked for food. Thou art my friend from to-day. No pen shall hold thee, but thou shalt follow me as thou wilt." And the Saint kept his promise. For after that the goose lived with him in happiness and peace. They would take long walks together in the fields about Gernicour. They made visits to the sick and the sorrowful. Indeed, wherever Saint Rigobert went the goose followed close at his heels like a dog. Even when Rigobert went again to see the Governor of Rheims, the goose waddled all the way there and back along the crooked road over part of which he had gone that first time in little Pierre's arms. And how the Governor did laugh as he stood in his door and watched the strange pair disappear down the road. "He could not have been very hungry after all," the Governor thought, "or I should never have seen that goose again." Which shows how little even a Governor knows about some things. More than this, whenever Rigobert went to hold service in his little church the goose escorted him there also. But he knew better than to go inside. He would wait by the porch, preening his feathers in the sunshine and snapping bugs in the grass of the churchyard until his dear master came out. And then he would escort him back home again. He was a very well-mannered goose. But dear me! All this time I have left poor little Pierre standing with a quivering chin outside the Bishop's door, hopeless of a dinner. But it all came right, just as the Bishop had said it would. I must tell you about that. For when Rigobert returned from church that same day feeling very faint and hungry indeed, after the long walk and the excitement of the goose-hap, Pierre came running out to meet him with a smiling face. "Oh Father, Father!" he cried. "We are to have a dinner, after all. Come quick, I am so hungry I cannot wait! The village folk have heard about the pious goose who came back to be your dinner, and how you would not eat him. And so they have sent us a basket of good things instead. And they promise that never again so long as they have anything to eat themselves shall we be hungry any more. Oh Father! I am so glad we did not eat the goose." And good Saint Rigobert laid his hand on Pierre's head and said, "Dear lad, you will never be sorry for showing kindness to a friendly bird or beast." Then the goose came quacking up to them and they all three went into the house together to eat their good, good dinner. SAINT FRANCIS OF ASSISI BAREFOOTED in the snow, bareheaded in the rain, Saint Francis wandered up and down the world smiling for the great love that was in his heart. And because it grew from love the smile of Saint Francis was a wonderful thing. It opened the hearts of men and coaxed the secrets of their thoughts. It led human folk whithersoever Saint Francis willed. It drew the beasts to his side and the birds to nestle in his bosom. It was like a magic charm. Great princes knew his smile and they obeyed its command to be generous and good. The sick and sorrowful knew his smile. It meant healing and comfort. Then they rose and blessed God in the name of Saint Francis. The wretched beggars in the streets of Assisi knew it. To them the smile of "the Lord's own beggar" meant help and sympathy. Like them he was poor and homeless, often ill and hungry. They wondered that he could smile. But he said, "It does not become a servant of God to have an air of melancholy and a face full of trouble." So they also tried to smile, poor fellows. But how different it was! The little lambs to whom he gave his special protection and care knew the smile of Saint Francis. Once he met two woolly lambkins who were being carried to market. He never had any money, but taking off his cloak, which was all he had to part with, he gave it to buy their lives. And he carried the lambs home in his bosom. The wilder beasts beyond the mountains, the fierce wolves and shy foxes of Syria and Spain whom he met in his wanderings knew Saint Francis. Here was a brother who was not afraid of them and whom they could trust in return, a brother who understood and sympathized. The birds in the trees knew also, and his coming was the signal of peace. Then they sang with Francis, but he was the sweetest singer of them all. Besides these living things the green fields of Italy, the trees, the meadows, the brooks, the flowers all knew the smile of Saint Francis. It meant to them many things which only a poet can tell. But Francis understood, for he was a poet. Upon all alike his face of love beamed tenderly. For Saint Francis of Assisi was a little brother of the whole great world and of all created things. Not only did his heart warm to Brother Sheep and Sister Bees, to his Brother Fish and his little Sisters the Doves, but he called the Sun and Wind his brothers and the Moon and Water his sisters. Of all the saints about whom the legends tell, Francis was the gentlest and most loving. And if "He prayeth best who loveth best All things both great and small," the prayers of Saint Francis must have been very dear to Him who "made and loveth all." * * * * * There was none so poor as Francis. Not a penny did he have, not a penny would he touch. Let them be given to those who could not smile, he said. His food he begged from door to door, broken crusts for a single poor meal; more he would not take. His sleeping place was the floor or the haymow, the ruined church, whatever lodging chance gave him. Oftenest he slept upon the bare ground with a stone for his pillow. He wanted to be poor because Christ was poor, and he was trying to live like his Master. In his coarse brown gown, tied about the waist with a rope, without hat or shoes he wandered singing, smiling. The love which beamed from him like radiance from a star shone back from every pair of eyes which looked into his own. For all the world loved Francis in the time of the Crusades. And even to-day, seven hundred years since that dear beggar passed cheerily up and down the rough Italian roads,--even to-day there are many who love him like a lost elder brother. Saint Francis preached to all lessons of charity and peace. His were simple words, for he had not the wisdom of many books. But he knew the book of the human heart from cover to cover. His words were like fire, they warmed and wakened. No one could resist the entreaty and the love that was in them. So thousands joined the Society of Little Brothers of which he was the founder, and became his helpers in works of charity and holiness. His church was out of doors in the beautiful world that he loved, in mountain, field, or forest, wherever he happened to be wandering. Sometimes he preached by the candle-light of stars. Often the cloistering trees along the roadside made his chapel, and the blue sky was the only roof between him and heaven. Often his choir was of the brother birds in the branches and his congregation a group of brother beasts. For he preached to them also who, though they spoke a different language, were yet children of his Father. And in his little talks to them he always showed the courtesy which one brother owes another. Once, on returning from a journey beyond the sea, he was traveling through the Venetian country, when he heard a great congregation of birds singing among the bushes. And he said to his companion, "Our sisters, the birds, are praising their Maker. Let us then go into their midst and sing." So they did this, and the birds did not fly away but continued to sing so loudly that the brothers could not hear each other. Then Saint Francis turned to the birds and said politely, "Sisters, cease your song until we have rendered our bounden praise to God." So the birds were still until the brothers had finished their psalm. But after that when it was again their turn the birds went on with their song. * * * * * At another time when he was preaching in the town of Alvia among the hills, the swallows flew about and twittered so loudly that the people could not hear Saint Francis' voice. The birds did not mean to be rude, however. So he turned to the swallows and saluted them courteously. "My sisters," he said, "it is now time that I should speak. Since you have had your say, listen now in your turn to the word of God and be silent till the sermon is finished." And again the birds obeyed the smile and the voice of him who loved them. Though whether they understood the grown-up sermon that followed, I cannot tell. But this is the little sermon which he made one day for a congregation of birds who sat around him in the bushes listening. "Brother Birds, greatly are ye bound to praise the Creator who clotheth you with feathers and giveth you wings to fly with and a purer air to breathe; and who careth for you who have so little care for yourselves." It was not a long sermon, so the birds could not have grown tired or sleepy, and I am sure they understood every word. So after he had given them his blessing he let them go, and they went singing as he had bidden them. * * * * * Saint Francis preached the lessons of peace; he would not have cruelty or bloodshed among his human friends. And he also taught his beasts to be kind. He loved best the gentle lambs, one of which was almost always with him, and in his sermons he would point to them to show men what their lives should be. But there is a story told of the lesson he taught a wolf that shows what power the Saint had over the fiercer animals. There are many stories of wolves whom the saints made tame. But this wolf of Saint Francis was the most terrible of them all. This huge and savage wolf had been causing great horror to the people of Gubbio. For in the night he not only stole sheep and cows from the farms, but he came and carried off men also for his dinner. So that people were afraid to go out of the town for fear of being gobbled up. Now Saint Francis came. And he said, "I will go out and seek this wolf." But the townsfolk begged him not to go, for the good man was dear to them and they feared never to see him again. However, he was resolved and went forth from the gate. He had gone but a little way when out rushed the wolf to meet him, with his mouth wide open, roaring horribly. Then Saint Francis made the sign of the cross and said gently:-- "Come hither, Brother Wolf. I command thee in Christ's behalf that thou do no evil to me nor to any one." And wonderful to say! The wolf grew tame and came like a lamb to lie at Saint Francis' feet. Then Francis went on to rebuke him, saying that he deserved to be hung for his many sins, being a robber and a wicked murderer of men and beasts. "But I wish, Brother Wolf," he said, "to make peace between thee and men; therefore vex them no more and they will pardon thee all thy past offenses, and neither dogs nor men will chase thee any more." At this the wolf wagged his tail and bowed his head to show he understood. And putting his right paw in the hand of Saint Francis he promised never again to steal nor slay. Then like a gentle dog he followed the holy man to the market-place of the town, where great crowds of people had gathered to see what Saint Francis would do with the great beast, their enemy, for they thought he was to be punished. But Francis rose and said to them:-- "Hearken, dear brethren: Brother Wolf who is here before you has promised me that he will make peace with you and will never injure you in any way, if ye promise to give him day by day what is needful for his dinner. And I will be surety for him." Thereupon with a great shout all the people promised to give him his daily food. Again the wolf wagged his tail, flapped his long ears, bowed his head, and gave his paw to Saint Francis to show that he would keep his word. All the people saw him do this. And then there were shouts of wonder you may be sure, and great rejoicing because Saint Francis had saved them from this cruel beast, and had made a gentle friend of their dreaded enemy. So after this the wolf lived two years at Gubbio and went about from door to door humbly begging his food like Saint Francis himself. He never harmed any one, not even the little children who teased and pulled him about. But all the people loved him and gave him what he liked to eat; and not even a dog would bark at his heels or growl at the friend of Saint Francis. So he lived to a good old age. And when after two years Brother Wolf died because he was so old, the citizens were very sorrowful. For not only did they miss the soft pat-pat of his steps passing through the city, but they grieved for the sorrow of Saint Francis in losing a kindly friend,--Saint Francis of whose saintliness and power the humble beast had been a daily reminder. * * * * * Francis could not bear to see a little brother in trouble or pain, and this the beasts knew very well. He would not willingly tread upon an insect, but would step aside and gently bid the Brother Worm depart in peace. The fish which a fisherman gave him he restored to the water, where it played about his boat and would not leave him till he bade it go. Once again in the village of Gubbio a live baby hare was brought him as a present, for his breakfast. But when Francis saw the frightened look of the little creature held in the arms of one of the brothers, his heart ached with sympathy. "Little Brother Leveret, come to me," he said. "Why hast thou let thyself be taken?" And the little fellow as if understanding the invitation jumped out of the friar's arms and ran to Francis, hiding in the folds of his gown. But when Francis took it out and set it free, very politely giving it permission to depart instead of staying to make a breakfast, it would not go. Again and again it returned nestling to its new-found friend, as if guessing that here at least it would be safe forever. But at last tenderly Saint Francis sent the good brother away with it into the wood, where it was safe once more among its little bob-tailed brothers and sisters. * * * * * Now after a life spent like Christ's in works of poverty, charity, and love, Saint Francis came at last to have one spot in the world which he could call his own. It was neither a church nor a convent, a cottage nor even a cell. It was only a bare and lonely mountain top where wild beasts lived and wild birds had a home. This retreat in the wilderness was the gift which Orlando, a rich nobleman, chose to make Saint Francis. And it was a precious gift indeed, sorely needed by the Lord's weary beggar. For he was worn with wandering; he was ill and weak, and his gentle eyes were growing dim so that he could not go along the winding ways. But he was happy still. [Illustration: SAINT FRANCIS OF ASSISI] So one warm September day he went with some of his chosen brethren to take possession of their new home. They left the villages, the farms, and at last even the scattered shepherds' huts far below and behind them, and came into the quiet of the Italian hills. They climbed and climbed over the rocks and along the ravines, till they came in sight of the bald summit where Francis was to dwell. And here in happy weariness he paused to rest under an oak-tree and look about upon the beautiful scene. But suddenly the air was filled with music, a chorus of trills and quavers and carols of the wildest joy. Then the air grew dark with whirring wings. The birds of the mountain were coming from everywhere to welcome home their brother. They flew to him by hundreds, perching on his head and shoulders; and when every other spot was covered they twittered into the hood of his brown mantle. The brothers stood about, wondering greatly, although they had seen Saint Francis in some such plight before. But the peasant who led the ass which had brought Saint Francis so far stood like one turned to stone, unable to believe his eyes. Here was a miracle the like of which he had never dreamed. But Saint Francis was filled with gladness. "Dearest brethren," he said, "I think it must be pleasant to our Lord that we should dwell in this solitary place, since our brothers and sisters the birds are so glad of our coming." And indeed, how could they help being glad of his coming, the dear, kind Saint? And how they hovered around the shelter of branches which the brethren built for him under a beech-tree on the very mountain top! One can picture them at morning, noon, and night joining in his songs of praise, or keeping polite silence while the holy man talked with God. Many wonderful things happened upon the Monte Alverno while Saint Francis dwelt there. But none were more wonderful than the great love of Francis himself; his love which was so big and so wide that it wrapped the whole round world, binding all creatures more closely in a common brotherhood. So that every man and every bird and every beast that lives ought to love the name of that dear Saint, their childlike, simple, happy little brother, Saint Francis of Assisi. HERE THE BOOK OF SAINTS & FRIENDLY BEASTS ENDS A CALENDAR Here follow the Days of the Saints and their Beasts Jan. 4. Saint Rigobert. Jan. 13. Saint Kentigern. Jan. 14. Saint Felix. Jan. 18. Saint Prisca. Jan. 19. Saint Launomar. Feb. 1. Saint Bridget. Feb. 3. {Saint Werburgh {Saint Blaise. Feb. 9. Saint Athracta. Feb. 14. Saint Berach. March 5. Saint Gerasimus. March 20. Saint Cuthbert. April 14. Saint Fronto. May 10. Saint Comgall. June 6. Saint Gudwall. June 17. Saint Hervé. August 1. Saint Keneth. Sept. 1. Saint Giles. Sept. 12. Saint Ailbe. Oct. 4. Saint Francis. [Illustration] =The Riverside Press= ELECTROTYPED AND PRINTED BY H.O. HOUGHTON & CO. CAMBRIDGE, MASS. U. S. A. * * * * * Transcriber's Notes: Obvious punctuation errors repaired. Page 60-61, word split across pages had a dittograph. Extra "pro" was removed (she heard a prodigious) Original read: (she heard a pro-{page break}prodigious) Page 62, a paragraph break was inserted in the text before the line beginning: "A fox must have stolen it," he said guiltily. 
3296	----	THE CONFESSIONS OF SAINT AUGUSTINE By Saint Augustine Bishop of Hippo Translated by E. B. Pusey (Edward Bouverie) AD 401 BOOK I Great art Thou, O Lord, and greatly to be praised; great is Thy power, and Thy wisdom infinite. And Thee would man praise; man, but a particle of Thy creation; man, that bears about him his mortality, the witness of his sin, the witness that Thou resistest the proud: yet would man praise Thee; he, but a particle of Thy creation. Thou awakest us to delight in Thy praise; for Thou madest us for Thyself, and our heart is restless, until it repose in Thee. Grant me, Lord, to know and understand which is first, to call on Thee or to praise Thee? and, again, to know Thee or to call on Thee? for who can call on Thee, not knowing Thee? for he that knoweth Thee not, may call on Thee as other than Thou art. Or, is it rather, that we call on Thee that we may know Thee? but how shall they call on Him in whom they have not believed? or how shall they believe without a preacher? and they that seek the Lord shall praise Him: for they that seek shall find Him, and they that find shall praise Him. I will seek Thee, Lord, by calling on Thee; and will call on Thee, believing in Thee; for to us hast Thou been preached. My faith, Lord, shall call on Thee, which Thou hast given me, wherewith Thou hast inspired me, through the Incarnation of Thy Son, through the ministry of the Preacher. And how shall I call upon my God, my God and Lord, since, when I call for Him, I shall be calling Him to myself? and what room is there within me, whither my God can come into me? whither can God come into me, God who made heaven and earth? is there, indeed, O Lord my God, aught in me that can contain Thee? do then heaven and earth, which Thou hast made, and wherein Thou hast made me, contain Thee? or, because nothing which exists could exist without Thee, doth therefore whatever exists contain Thee? Since, then, I too exist, why do I seek that Thou shouldest enter into me, who were not, wert Thou not in me? Why? because I am not gone down in hell, and yet Thou art there also. For if I go down into hell, Thou art there. I could not be then, O my God, could not be at all, wert Thou not in me; or, rather, unless I were in Thee, of whom are all things, by whom are all things, in whom are all things? Even so, Lord, even so. Whither do I call Thee, since I am in Thee? or whence canst Thou enter into me? for whither can I go beyond heaven and earth, that thence my God should come into me, who hath said, I fill the heaven and the earth. Do the heaven and earth then contain Thee, since Thou fillest them? or dost Thou fill them and yet overflow, since they do not contain Thee? And whither, when the heaven and the earth are filled, pourest Thou forth the remainder of Thyself? or hast Thou no need that aught contain Thee, who containest all things, since what Thou fillest Thou fillest by containing it? for the vessels which Thou fillest uphold Thee not, since, though they were broken, Thou wert not poured out. And when Thou art poured out on us, Thou art not cast down, but Thou upliftest us; Thou art not dissipated, but Thou gatherest us. But Thou who fillest all things, fillest Thou them with Thy whole self? or, since all things cannot contain Thee wholly, do they contain part of Thee? and all at once the same part? or each its own part, the greater more, the smaller less? And is, then one part of Thee greater, another less? or, art Thou wholly every where, while nothing contains Thee wholly? What art Thou then, my God? what, but the Lord God? For who is Lord but the Lord? or who is God save our God? Most highest, most good, most potent, most omnipotent; most merciful, yet most just; most hidden, yet most present; most beautiful, yet most strong, stable, yet incomprehensible; unchangeable, yet all-changing; never new, never old; all-renewing, and bringing age upon the proud, and they know it not; ever working, ever at rest; still gathering, yet nothing lacking; supporting, filling, and overspreading; creating, nourishing, and maturing; seeking, yet having all things. Thou lovest, without passion; art jealous, without anxiety; repentest, yet grievest not; art angry, yet serene; changest Thy works, Thy purpose unchanged; receivest again what Thou findest, yet didst never lose; never in need, yet rejoicing in gains; never covetous, yet exacting usury. Thou receivest over and above, that Thou mayest owe; and who hath aught that is not Thine? Thou payest debts, owing nothing; remittest debts, losing nothing. And what had I now said, my God, my life, my holy joy? or what saith any man when he speaks of Thee? Yet woe to him that speaketh not, since mute are even the most eloquent. Oh! that I might repose on Thee! Oh! that Thou wouldest enter into my heart, and inebriate it, that I may forget my ills, and embrace Thee, my sole good! What art Thou to me? In Thy pity, teach me to utter it. Or what am I to Thee that Thou demandest my love, and, if I give it not, art wroth with me, and threatenest me with grievous woes? Is it then a slight woe to love Thee not? Oh! for Thy mercies' sake, tell me, O Lord my God, what Thou art unto me. Say unto my soul, I am thy salvation. So speak, that I may hear. Behold, Lord, my heart is before Thee; open Thou the ears thereof, and say unto my soul, I am thy salvation. After this voice let me haste, and take hold on Thee. Hide not Thy face from me. Let me die--lest I die--only let me see Thy face. Narrow is the mansion of my soul; enlarge Thou it, that Thou mayest enter in. It is ruinous; repair Thou it. It has that within which must offend Thine eyes; I confess and know it. But who shall cleanse it? or to whom should I cry, save Thee? Lord, cleanse me from my secret faults, and spare Thy servant from the power of the enemy. I believe, and therefore do I speak. Lord, Thou knowest. Have I not confessed against myself my transgressions unto Thee, and Thou, my God, hast forgiven the iniquity of my heart? I contend not in judgment with Thee, who art the truth; I fear to deceive myself; lest mine iniquity lie unto itself. Therefore I contend not in judgment with Thee; for if Thou, Lord, shouldest mark iniquities, O Lord, who shall abide it? Yet suffer me to speak unto Thy mercy, me, dust and ashes. Yet suffer me to speak, since I speak to Thy mercy, and not to scornful man. Thou too, perhaps, despisest me, yet wilt Thou return and have compassion upon me. For what would I say, O Lord my God, but that I know not whence I came into this dying life (shall I call it?) or living death. Then immediately did the comforts of Thy compassion take me up, as I heard (for I remember it not) from the parents of my flesh, out of whose substance Thou didst sometime fashion me. Thus there received me the comforts of woman's milk. For neither my mother nor my nurses stored their own breasts for me; but Thou didst bestow the food of my infancy through them, according to Thine ordinance, whereby Thou distributest Thy riches through the hidden springs of all things. Thou also gavest me to desire no more than Thou gavest; and to my nurses willingly to give me what Thou gavest them. For they, with a heaven-taught affection, willingly gave me what they abounded with from Thee. For this my good from them, was good for them. Nor, indeed, from them was it, but through them; for from Thee, O God, are all good things, and from my God is all my health. This I since learned, Thou, through these Thy gifts, within me and without, proclaiming Thyself unto me. For then I knew but to suck; to repose in what pleased, and cry at what offended my flesh; nothing more. Afterwards I began to smile; first in sleep, then waking: for so it was told me of myself, and I believed it; for we see the like in other infants, though of myself I remember it not. Thus, little by little, I became conscious where I was; and to have a wish to express my wishes to those who could content them, and I could not; for the wishes were within me, and they without; nor could they by any sense of theirs enter within my spirit. So I flung about at random limbs and voice, making the few signs I could, and such as I could, like, though in truth very little like, what I wished. And when I was not presently obeyed (my wishes being hurtful or unintelligible), then I was indignant with my elders for not submitting to me, with those owing me no service, for not serving me; and avenged myself on them by tears. Such have I learnt infants to be from observing them; and that I was myself such, they, all unconscious, have shown me better than my nurses who knew it. And, lo! my infancy died long since, and I live. But Thou, Lord, who for ever livest, and in whom nothing dies: for before the foundation of the worlds, and before all that can be called "before," Thou art, and art God and Lord of all which Thou hast created: in Thee abide, fixed for ever, the first causes of all things unabiding; and of all things changeable, the springs abide in Thee unchangeable: and in Thee live the eternal reasons of all things unreasoning and temporal. Say, Lord, to me, Thy suppliant; say, all-pitying, to me, Thy pitiable one; say, did my infancy succeed another age of mine that died before it? was it that which I spent within my mother's womb? for of that I have heard somewhat, and have myself seen women with child? and what before that life again, O God my joy, was I any where or any body? For this have I none to tell me, neither father nor mother, nor experience of others, nor mine own memory. Dost Thou mock me for asking this, and bid me praise Thee and acknowledge Thee, for that I do know? I acknowledge Thee, Lord of heaven and earth, and praise Thee for my first rudiments of being, and my infancy, whereof I remember nothing; for Thou hast appointed that man should from others guess much as to himself; and believe much on the strength of weak females. Even then I had being and life, and (at my infancy's close) I could seek for signs whereby to make known to others my sensations. Whence could such a being be, save from Thee, Lord? Shall any be his own artificer? or can there elsewhere be derived any vein, which may stream essence and life into us, save from thee, O Lord, in whom essence and life are one? for Thou Thyself art supremely Essence and Life. For Thou art most high, and art not changed, neither in Thee doth to-day come to a close; yet in Thee doth it come to a close; because all such things also are in Thee. For they had no way to pass away, unless Thou upheldest them. And since Thy years fail not, Thy years are one to-day. How many of ours and our fathers' years have flowed away through Thy "to-day," and from it received the measure and the mould of such being as they had; and still others shall flow away, and so receive the mould of their degree of being. But Thou art still the same, and all things of tomorrow, and all beyond, and all of yesterday, and all behind it, Thou hast done to-day. What is it to me, though any comprehend not this? Let him also rejoice and say, What thing is this? Let him rejoice even thus! and be content rather by not discovering to discover Thee, than by discovering not to discover Thee. Hear, O God. Alas, for man's sin! So saith man, and Thou pitiest him; for Thou madest him, but sin in him Thou madest not. Who remindeth me of the sins of my infancy? for in Thy sight none is pure from sin, not even the infant whose life is but a day upon the earth. Who remindeth me? doth not each little infant, in whom I see what of myself I remember not? What then was my sin? was it that I hung upon the breast and cried? for should I now so do for food suitable to my age, justly should I be laughed at and reproved. What I then did was worthy reproof; but since I could not understand reproof, custom and reason forbade me to be reproved. For those habits, when grown, we root out and cast away. Now no man, though he prunes, wittingly casts away what is good. Or was it then good, even for a while, to cry for what, if given, would hurt? bitterly to resent, that persons free, and its own elders, yea, the very authors of its birth, served it not? that many besides, wiser than it, obeyed not the nod of its good pleasure? to do its best to strike and hurt, because commands were not obeyed, which had been obeyed to its hurt? The weakness then of infant limbs, not its will, is its innocence. Myself have seen and known even a baby envious; it could not speak, yet it turned pale and looked bitterly on its foster-brother. Who knows not this? Mothers and nurses tell you that they allay these things by I know not what remedies. Is that too innocence, when the fountain of milk is flowing in rich abundance, not to endure one to share it, though in extremest need, and whose very life as yet depends thereon? We bear gently with all this, not as being no or slight evils, but because they will disappear as years increase; for, though tolerated now, the very same tempers are utterly intolerable when found in riper years. Thou, then, O Lord my God, who gavest life to this my infancy, furnishing thus with senses (as we see) the frame Thou gavest, compacting its limbs, ornamenting its proportions, and, for its general good and safety, implanting in it all vital functions, Thou commandest me to praise Thee in these things, to confess unto Thee, and sing unto Thy name, Thou most Highest. For Thou art God, Almighty and Good, even hadst Thou done nought but only this, which none could do but Thou: whose Unity is the mould of all things; who out of Thy own fairness makest all things fair; and orderest all things by Thy law. This age then, Lord, whereof I have no remembrance, which I take on others' word, and guess from other infants that I have passed, true though the guess be, I am yet loth to count in this life of mine which I live in this world. For no less than that which I spent in my mother's womb, is it hid from me in the shadows of forgetfulness. But if I was shapen in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me, where, I beseech Thee, O my God, where, Lord, or when, was I Thy servant guiltless? But, lo! that period I pass by; and what have I now to do with that, of which I can recall no vestige? Passing hence from infancy, I came to boyhood, or rather it came to me, displacing infancy. Nor did that depart,--(for whither went it?)--and yet it was no more. For I was no longer a speechless infant, but a speaking boy. This I remember; and have since observed how I learned to speak. It was not that my elders taught me words (as, soon after, other learning) in any set method; but I, longing by cries and broken accents and various motions of my limbs to express my thoughts, that so I might have my will, and yet unable to express all I willed, or to whom I willed, did myself, by the understanding which Thou, my God, gavest me, practise the sounds in my memory. When they named any thing, and as they spoke turned towards it, I saw and remembered that they called what they would point out by the name they uttered. And that they meant this thing and no other was plain from the motion of their body, the natural language, as it were, of all nations, expressed by the countenance, glances of the eye, gestures of the limbs, and tones of the voice, indicating the affections of the mind, as it pursues, possesses, rejects, or shuns. And thus by constantly hearing words, as they occurred in various sentences, I collected gradually for what they stood; and having broken in my mouth to these signs, I thereby gave utterance to my will. Thus I exchanged with those about me these current signs of our wills, and so launched deeper into the stormy intercourse of human life, yet depending on parental authority and the beck of elders. O God my God, what miseries and mockeries did I now experience, when obedience to my teachers was proposed to me, as proper in a boy, in order that in this world I might prosper, and excel in tongue-science, which should serve to the "praise of men," and to deceitful riches. Next I was put to school to get learning, in which I (poor wretch) knew not what use there was; and yet, if idle in learning, I was beaten. For this was judged right by our forefathers; and many, passing the same course before us, framed for us weary paths, through which we were fain to pass; multiplying toil and grief upon the sons of Adam. But, Lord, we found that men called upon Thee, and we learnt from them to think of Thee (according to our powers) as of some great One, who, though hidden from our senses, couldest hear and help us. For so I began, as a boy, to pray to Thee, my aid and refuge; and broke the fetters of my tongue to call on Thee, praying Thee, though small, yet with no small earnestness, that I might not be beaten at school. And when Thou heardest me not (not thereby giving me over to folly), my elders, yea my very parents, who yet wished me no ill, mocked my stripes, my then great and grievous ill. Is there, Lord, any of soul so great, and cleaving to Thee with so intense affection (for a sort of stupidity will in a way do it); but is there any one who, from cleaving devoutly to Thee, is endued with so great a spirit, that he can think as lightly of the racks and hooks and other torments (against which, throughout all lands, men call on Thee with extreme dread), mocking at those by whom they are feared most bitterly, as our parents mocked the torments which we suffered in boyhood from our masters? For we feared not our torments less; nor prayed we less to Thee to escape them. And yet we sinned, in writing or reading or studying less than was exacted of us. For we wanted not, O Lord, memory or capacity, whereof Thy will gave enough for our age; but our sole delight was play; and for this we were punished by those who yet themselves were doing the like. But elder folks' idleness is called "business"; that of boys, being really the same, is punished by those elders; and none commiserates either boys or men. For will any of sound discretion approve of my being beaten as a boy, because, by playing a ball, I made less progress in studies which I was to learn, only that, as a man, I might play more unbeseemingly? and what else did he who beat me? who, if worsted in some trifling discussion with his fellow-tutor, was more embittered and jealous than I when beaten at ball by a play-fellow? And yet, I sinned herein, O Lord God, the Creator and Disposer of all things in nature, of sin the Disposer only, O Lord my God, I sinned in transgressing the commands of my parents and those of my masters. For what they, with whatever motive, would have me learn, I might afterwards have put to good use. For I disobeyed, not from a better choice, but from love of play, loving the pride of victory in my contests, and to have my ears tickled with lying fables, that they might itch the more; the same curiosity flashing from my eyes more and more, for the shows and games of my elders. Yet those who give these shows are in such esteem, that almost all wish the same for their children, and yet are very willing that they should be beaten, if those very games detain them from the studies, whereby they would have them attain to be the givers of them. Look with pity, Lord, on these things, and deliver us who call upon Thee now; deliver those too who call not on Thee yet, that they may call on Thee, and Thou mayest deliver them. As a boy, then, I had already heard of an eternal life, promised us through the humility of the Lord our God stooping to our pride; and even from the womb of my mother, who greatly hoped in Thee, I was sealed with the mark of His cross and salted with His salt. Thou sawest, Lord, how while yet a boy, being seized on a time with sudden oppression of the stomach, and like near to death--Thou sawest, my God (for Thou wert my keeper), with what eagerness and what faith I sought, from the pious care of my mother and Thy Church, the mother of us all, the baptism of Thy Christ, my God and Lord. Whereupon the mother of my flesh, being much troubled (since, with a heart pure in Thy faith, she even more lovingly travailed in birth of my salvation), would in eager haste have provided for my consecration and cleansing by the health-giving sacraments, confessing Thee, Lord Jesus, for the remission of sins, unless I had suddenly recovered. And so, as if I must needs be again polluted should I live, my cleansing was deferred, because the defilements of sin would, after that washing, bring greater and more perilous guilt. I then already believed: and my mother, and the whole household, except my father: yet did not he prevail over the power of my mother's piety in me, that as he did not yet believe, so neither should I. For it was her earnest care that Thou my God, rather than he, shouldest be my father; and in this Thou didst aid her to prevail over her husband, whom she, the better, obeyed, therein also obeying Thee, who hast so commanded. I beseech Thee, my God, I would fain know, if so Thou willest, for what purpose my baptism was then deferred? was it for my good that the rein was laid loose, as it were, upon me, for me to sin? or was it not laid loose? If not, why does it still echo in our ears on all sides, "Let him alone, let him do as he will, for he is not yet baptised?" but as to bodily health, no one says, "Let him be worse wounded, for he is not yet healed." How much better then, had I been at once healed; and then, by my friends' and my own, my soul's recovered health had been kept safe in Thy keeping who gavest it. Better truly. But how many and great waves of temptation seemed to hang over me after my boyhood! These my mother foresaw; and preferred to expose to them the clay whence I might afterwards be moulded, than the very cast, when made. In boyhood itself, however (so much less dreaded for me than youth), I loved not study, and hated to be forced to it. Yet I was forced; and this was well done towards me, but I did not well; for, unless forced, I had not learnt. But no one doth well against his will, even though what he doth, be well. Yet neither did they well who forced me, but what was well came to me from Thee, my God. For they were regardless how I should employ what they forced me to learn, except to satiate the insatiate desires of a wealthy beggary, and a shameful glory. But Thou, by whom the very hairs of our head are numbered, didst use for my good the error of all who urged me to learn; and my own, who would not learn, Thou didst use for my punishment--a fit penalty for one, so small a boy and so great a sinner. So by those who did not well, Thou didst well for me; and by my own sin Thou didst justly punish me. For Thou hast commanded, and so it is, that every inordinate affection should be its own punishment. But why did I so much hate the Greek, which I studied as a boy? I do not yet fully know. For the Latin I loved; not what my first masters, but what the so-called grammarians taught me. For those first lessons, reading, writing and arithmetic, I thought as great a burden and penalty as any Greek. And yet whence was this too, but from the sin and vanity of this life, because I was flesh, and a breath that passeth away and cometh not again? For those first lessons were better certainly, because more certain; by them I obtained, and still retain, the power of reading what I find written, and myself writing what I will; whereas in the others, I was forced to learn the wanderings of one Aeneas, forgetful of my own, and to weep for dead Dido, because she killed herself for love; the while, with dry eyes, I endured my miserable self dying among these things, far from Thee, O God my life. For what more miserable than a miserable being who commiserates not himself; weeping the death of Dido for love to Aeneas, but weeping not his own death for want of love to Thee, O God. Thou light of my heart, Thou bread of my inmost soul, Thou Power who givest vigour to my mind, who quickenest my thoughts, I loved Thee not. I committed fornication against Thee, and all around me thus fornicating there echoed "Well done! well done!" for the friendship of this world is fornication against Thee; and "Well done! well done!" echoes on till one is ashamed not to be thus a man. And for all this I wept not, I who wept for Dido slain, and "seeking by the sword a stroke and wound extreme," myself seeking the while a worse extreme, the extremest and lowest of Thy creatures, having forsaken Thee, earth passing into the earth. And if forbid to read all this, I was grieved that I might not read what grieved me. Madness like this is thought a higher and a richer learning, than that by which I learned to read and write. But now, my God, cry Thou aloud in my soul; and let Thy truth tell me, "Not so, not so. Far better was that first study." For, lo, I would readily forget the wanderings of Aeneas and all the rest, rather than how to read and write. But over the entrance of the Grammar School is a vail drawn! true; yet is this not so much an emblem of aught recondite, as a cloak of error. Let not those, whom I no longer fear, cry out against me, while I confess to Thee, my God, whatever my soul will, and acquiesce in the condemnation of my evil ways, that I may love Thy good ways. Let not either buyers or sellers of grammar-learning cry out against me. For if I question them whether it be true that Aeneas came on a time to Carthage, as the poet tells, the less learned will reply that they know not, the more learned that he never did. But should I ask with what letters the name "Aeneas" is written, every one who has learnt this will answer me aright, as to the signs which men have conventionally settled. If, again, I should ask which might be forgotten with least detriment to the concerns of life, reading and writing or these poetic fictions? who does not foresee what all must answer who have not wholly forgotten themselves? I sinned, then, when as a boy I preferred those empty to those more profitable studies, or rather loved the one and hated the other. "One and one, two"; "two and two, four"; this was to me a hateful singsong: "the wooden horse lined with armed men," and "the burning of Troy," and "Creusa's shade and sad similitude," were the choice spectacle of my vanity. Why then did I hate the Greek classics, which have the like tales? For Homer also curiously wove the like fictions, and is most sweetly vain, yet was he bitter to my boyish taste. And so I suppose would Virgil be to Grecian children, when forced to learn him as I was Homer. Difficulty, in truth, the difficulty of a foreign tongue, dashed, as it were, with gall all the sweetness of Grecian fable. For not one word of it did I understand, and to make me understand I was urged vehemently with cruel threats and punishments. Time was also (as an infant) I knew no Latin; but this I learned without fear or suffering, by mere observation, amid the caresses of my nursery and jests of friends, smiling and sportively encouraging me. This I learned without any pressure of punishment to urge me on, for my heart urged me to give birth to its conceptions, which I could only do by learning words not of those who taught, but of those who talked with me; in whose ears also I gave birth to the thoughts, whatever I conceived. No doubt, then, that a free curiosity has more force in our learning these things, than a frightful enforcement. Only this enforcement restrains the rovings of that freedom, through Thy laws, O my God, Thy laws, from the master's cane to the martyr's trials, being able to temper for us a wholesome bitter, recalling us to Thyself from that deadly pleasure which lures us from Thee. Hear, Lord, my prayer; let not my soul faint under Thy discipline, nor let me faint in confessing unto Thee all Thy mercies, whereby Thou hast drawn me out of all my most evil ways, that Thou mightest become a delight to me above all the allurements which I once pursued; that I may most entirely love Thee, and clasp Thy hand with all my affections, and Thou mayest yet rescue me from every temptation, even unto the end. For lo, O Lord, my King and my God, for Thy service be whatever useful thing my childhood learned; for Thy service, that I speak, write, read, reckon. For Thou didst grant me Thy discipline, while I was learning vanities; and my sin of delighting in those vanities Thou hast forgiven. In them, indeed, I learnt many a useful word, but these may as well be learned in things not vain; and that is the safe path for the steps of youth. But woe is thee, thou torrent of human custom! Who shall stand against thee? how long shalt thou not be dried up? how long roll the sons of Eve into that huge and hideous ocean, which even they scarcely overpass who climb the cross? Did not I read in thee of Jove the thunderer and the adulterer? both, doubtless, he could not be; but so the feigned thunder might countenance and pander to real adultery. And now which of our gowned masters lends a sober ear to one who from their own school cries out, "These were Homer's fictions, transferring things human to the gods; would he had brought down things divine to us!" Yet more truly had he said, "These are indeed his fictions; but attributing a divine nature to wicked men, that crimes might be no longer crimes, and whoso commits them might seem to imitate not abandoned men, but the celestial gods." And yet, thou hellish torrent, into thee are cast the sons of men with rich rewards, for compassing such learning; and a great solemnity is made of it, when this is going on in the forum, within sight of laws appointing a salary beside the scholar's payments; and thou lashest thy rocks and roarest, "Hence words are learnt; hence eloquence; most necessary to gain your ends, or maintain opinions." As if we should have never known such words as "golden shower," "lap," "beguile," "temples of the heavens," or others in that passage, unless Terence had brought a lewd youth upon the stage, setting up Jupiter as his example of seduction. "Viewing a picture, where the tale was drawn, Of Jove's descending in a golden shower To Danae's lap a woman to beguile." And then mark how he excites himself to lust as by celestial authority: "And what God? Great Jove, Who shakes heaven's highest temples with his thunder, And I, poor mortal man, not do the same! I did it, and with all my heart I did it." Not one whit more easily are the words learnt for all this vileness; but by their means the vileness is committed with less shame. Not that I blame the words, being, as it were, choice and precious vessels; but that wine of error which is drunk to us in them by intoxicated teachers; and if we, too, drink not, we are beaten, and have no sober judge to whom we may appeal. Yet, O my God (in whose presence I now without hurt may remember this), all this unhappily I learnt willingly with great delight, and for this was pronounced a hopeful boy. Bear with me, my God, while I say somewhat of my wit, Thy gift, and on what dotages I wasted it. For a task was set me, troublesome enough to my soul, upon terms of praise or shame, and fear of stripes, to speak the words of Juno, as she raged and mourned that she could not "This Trojan prince from Latinum turn." Which words I had heard that Juno never uttered; but we were forced to go astray in the footsteps of these poetic fictions, and to say in prose much what he expressed in verse. And his speaking was most applauded, in whom the passions of rage and grief were most preeminent, and clothed in the most fitting language, maintaining the dignity of the character. What is it to me, O my true life, my God, that my declamation was applauded above so many of my own age and class? is not all this smoke and wind? and was there nothing else whereon to exercise my wit and tongue? Thy praises, Lord, Thy praises might have stayed the yet tender shoot of my heart by the prop of Thy Scriptures; so had it not trailed away amid these empty trifles, a defiled prey for the fowls of the air. For in more ways than one do men sacrifice to the rebellious angels. But what marvel that I was thus carried away to vanities, and went out from Thy presence, O my God, when men were set before me as models, who, if in relating some action of theirs, in itself not ill, they committed some barbarism or solecism, being censured, were abashed; but when in rich and adorned and well-ordered discourse they related their own disordered life, being bepraised, they gloried? These things Thou seest, Lord, and holdest Thy peace; long-suffering, and plenteous in mercy and truth. Wilt Thou hold Thy peace for ever? and even now Thou drawest out of this horrible gulf the soul that seeketh Thee, that thirsteth for Thy pleasures, whose heart saith unto Thee, I have sought Thy face; Thy face, Lord, will I seek. For darkened affections is removal from Thee. For it is not by our feet, or change of place, that men leave Thee, or return unto Thee. Or did that Thy younger son look out for horses or chariots, or ships, fly with visible wings, or journey by the motion of his limbs, that he might in a far country waste in riotous living all Thou gavest at his departure? a loving Father, when Thou gavest, and more loving unto him, when he returned empty. So then in lustful, that is, in darkened affections, is the true distance from Thy face. Behold, O Lord God, yea, behold patiently as Thou art wont how carefully the sons of men observe the covenanted rules of letters and syllables received from those who spake before them, neglecting the eternal covenant of everlasting salvation received from Thee. Insomuch, that a teacher or learner of the hereditary laws of pronunciation will more offend men by speaking without the aspirate, of a "uman being," in despite of the laws of grammar, than if he, a "human being," hate a "human being" in despite of Thine. As if any enemy could be more hurtful than the hatred with which he is incensed against him; or could wound more deeply him whom he persecutes, than he wounds his own soul by his enmity. Assuredly no science of letters can be so innate as the record of conscience, "that he is doing to another what from another he would be loth to suffer." How deep are Thy ways, O God, Thou only great, that sittest silent on high and by an unwearied law dispensing penal blindness to lawless desires. In quest of the fame of eloquence, a man standing before a human judge, surrounded by a human throng, declaiming against his enemy with fiercest hatred, will take heed most watchfully, lest, by an error of the tongue, he murder the word "human being"; but takes no heed, lest, through the fury of his spirit, he murder the real human being. This was the world at whose gate unhappy I lay in my boyhood; this the stage where I had feared more to commit a barbarism, than having committed one, to envy those who had not. These things I speak and confess to Thee, my God; for which I had praise from them, whom I then thought it all virtue to please. For I saw not the abyss of vileness, wherein I was cast away from Thine eyes. Before them what more foul than I was already, displeasing even such as myself? with innumerable lies deceiving my tutor, my masters, my parents, from love of play, eagerness to see vain shows and restlessness to imitate them! Thefts also I committed, from my parents' cellar and table, enslaved by greediness, or that I might have to give to boys, who sold me their play, which all the while they liked no less than I. In this play, too, I often sought unfair conquests, conquered myself meanwhile by vain desire of preeminence. And what could I so ill endure, or, when I detected it, upbraided I so fiercely, as that I was doing to others? and for which if, detected, I was upbraided, I chose rather to quarrel than to yield. And is this the innocence of boyhood? Not so, Lord, not so; I cry Thy mercy, my God. For these very sins, as riper years succeed, these very sins are transferred from tutors and masters, from nuts and balls and sparrows, to magistrates and kings, to gold and manors and slaves, just as severer punishments displace the cane. It was the low stature then of childhood which Thou our King didst commend as an emblem of lowliness, when Thou saidst, Of such is the kingdom of heaven. Yet, Lord, to Thee, the Creator and Governor of the universe, most excellent and most good, thanks were due to Thee our God, even hadst Thou destined for me boyhood only. For even then I was, I lived, and felt; and had an implanted providence over my well-being--a trace of that mysterious Unity whence I was derived; I guarded by the inward sense the entireness of my senses, and in these minute pursuits, and in my thoughts on things minute, I learnt to delight in truth, I hated to be deceived, had a vigorous memory, was gifted with speech, was soothed by friendship, avoided pain, baseness, ignorance. In so small a creature, what was not wonderful, not admirable? But all are gifts of my God: it was not I who gave them me; and good these are, and these together are myself. Good, then, is He that made me, and He is my good; and before Him will I exult for every good which of a boy I had. For it was my sin, that not in Him, but in His creatures-myself and others--I sought for pleasures, sublimities, truths, and so fell headlong into sorrows, confusions, errors. Thanks be to Thee, my joy and my glory and my confidence, my God, thanks be to Thee for Thy gifts; but do Thou preserve them to me. For so wilt Thou preserve me, and those things shall be enlarged and perfected which Thou hast given me, and I myself shall be with Thee, since even to be Thou hast given me. BOOK II I will now call to mind my past foulness, and the carnal corruptions of my soul; not because I love them, but that I may love Thee, O my God. For love of Thy love I do it; reviewing my most wicked ways in the very bitterness of my remembrance, that Thou mayest grow sweet unto me (Thou sweetness never failing, Thou blissful and assured sweetness); and gathering me again out of that my dissipation, wherein I was torn piecemeal, while turned from Thee, the One Good, I lost myself among a multiplicity of things. For I even burnt in my youth heretofore, to be satiated in things below; and I dared to grow wild again, with these various and shadowy loves: my beauty consumed away, and I stank in Thine eyes; pleasing myself, and desirous to please in the eyes of men. And what was it that I delighted in, but to love, and be loved? but I kept not the measure of love, of mind to mind, friendship's bright boundary: but out of the muddy concupiscence of the flesh, and the bubblings of youth, mists fumed up which beclouded and overcast my heart, that I could not discern the clear brightness of love from the fog of lustfulness. Both did confusedly boil in me, and hurried my unstayed youth over the precipice of unholy desires, and sunk me in a gulf of flagitiousnesses. Thy wrath had gathered over me, and I knew it not. I was grown deaf by the clanking of the chain of my mortality, the punishment of the pride of my soul, and I strayed further from Thee, and Thou lettest me alone, and I was tossed about, and wasted, and dissipated, and I boiled over in my fornications, and Thou heldest Thy peace, O Thou my tardy joy! Thou then heldest Thy peace, and I wandered further and further from Thee, into more and more fruitless seed-plots of sorrows, with a proud dejectedness, and a restless weariness. Oh! that some one had then attempered my disorder, and turned to account the fleeting beauties of these, the extreme points of Thy creation! had put a bound to their pleasureableness, that so the tides of my youth might have cast themselves upon the marriage shore, if they could not be calmed, and kept within the object of a family, as Thy law prescribes, O Lord: who this way formest the offspring of this our death, being able with a gentle hand to blunt the thorns which were excluded from Thy paradise? For Thy omnipotency is not far from us, even when we be far from Thee. Else ought I more watchfully to have heeded the voice from the clouds: Nevertheless such shall have trouble in the flesh, but I spare you. And it is good for a man not to touch a woman. And, he that is unmarried thinketh of the things of the Lord, how he may please the Lord; but he that is married careth for the things of this world, how he may please his wife. To these words I should have listened more attentively, and being severed for the kingdom of heaven's sake, had more happily awaited Thy embraces; but I, poor wretch, foamed like a troubled sea, following the rushing of my own tide, forsaking Thee, and exceeded all Thy limits; yet I escaped not Thy scourges. For what mortal can? For Thou wert ever with me mercifully rigorous, and besprinkling with most bitter alloy all my unlawful pleasures: that I might seek pleasures without alloy. But where to find such, I could not discover, save in Thee, O Lord, who teachest by sorrow, and woundest us, to heal; and killest us, lest we die from Thee. Where was I, and how far was I exiled from the delights of Thy house, in that sixteenth year of the age of my flesh, when the madness of lust (to which human shamelessness giveth free licence, though unlicensed by Thy laws) took the rule over me, and I resigned myself wholly to it? My friends meanwhile took no care by marriage to save my fall; their only care was that I should learn to speak excellently, and be a persuasive orator. For that year were my studies intermitted: whilst after my return from Madaura (a neighbour city, whither I had journeyed to learn grammar and rhetoric), the expenses for a further journey to Carthage were being provided for me; and that rather by the resolution than the means of my father, who was but a poor freeman of Thagaste. To whom tell I this? not to Thee, my God; but before Thee to mine own kind, even to that small portion of mankind as may light upon these writings of mine. And to what purpose? that whosoever reads this, may think out of what depths we are to cry unto Thee. For what is nearer to Thine ears than a confessing heart, and a life of faith? Who did not extol my father, for that beyond the ability of his means, he would furnish his son with all necessaries for a far journey for his studies' sake? For many far abler citizens did no such thing for their children. But yet this same father had no concern how I grew towards Thee, or how chaste I were; so that I were but copious in speech, however barren I were to Thy culture, O God, who art the only true and good Lord of Thy field, my heart. But while in that my sixteenth year I lived with my parents, leaving all school for a while (a season of idleness being interposed through the narrowness of my parents' fortunes), the briers of unclean desires grew rank over my head, and there was no hand to root them out. When that my father saw me at the baths, now growing towards manhood, and endued with a restless youthfulness, he, as already hence anticipating his descendants, gladly told it to my mother; rejoicing in that tumult of the senses wherein the world forgetteth Thee its Creator, and becometh enamoured of Thy creature, instead of Thyself, through the fumes of that invisible wine of its self-will, turning aside and bowing down to the very basest things. But in my mother's breast Thou hadst already begun Thy temple, and the foundation of Thy holy habitation, whereas my father was as yet but a Catechumen, and that but recently. She then was startled with a holy fear and trembling; and though I was not as yet baptised, feared for me those crooked ways in which they walk who turn their back to Thee, and not their face. Woe is me! and dare I say that Thou heldest Thy peace, O my God, while I wandered further from Thee? Didst Thou then indeed hold Thy peace to me? And whose but Thine were these words which by my mother, Thy faithful one, Thou sangest in my ears? Nothing whereof sunk into my heart, so as to do it. For she wished, and I remember in private with great anxiety warned me, "not to commit fornication; but especially never to defile another man's wife." These seemed to me womanish advices, which I should blush to obey. But they were Thine, and I knew it not: and I thought Thou wert silent and that it was she who spake; by whom Thou wert not silent unto me; and in her wast despised by me, her son, the son of Thy handmaid, Thy servant. But I knew it not; and ran headlong with such blindness, that amongst my equals I was ashamed of a less shamelessness, when I heard them boast of their flagitiousness, yea, and the more boasting, the more they were degraded: and I took pleasure, not only in the pleasure of the deed, but in the praise. What is worthy of dispraise but vice? But I made myself worse than I was, that I might not be dispraised; and when in any thing I had not sinned as the abandoned ones, I would say that I had done what I had not done, that I might not seem contemptible in proportion as I was innocent; or of less account, the more chaste. Behold with what companions I walked the streets of Babylon, and wallowed in the mire thereof, as if in a bed of spices and precious ointments. And that I might cleave the faster to its very centre, the invisible enemy trod me down, and seduced me, for that I was easy to be seduced. Neither did the mother of my flesh (who had now fled out of the centre of Babylon, yet went more slowly in the skirts thereof as she advised me to chastity, so heed what she had heard of me from her husband, as to restrain within the bounds of conjugal affection, if it could not be pared away to the quick) what she felt to be pestilent at present and for the future dangerous. She heeded not this, for she feared lest a wife should prove a clog and hindrance to my hopes. Not those hopes of the world to come, which my mother reposed in Thee; but the hope of learning, which both my parents were too desirous I should attain; my father, because he had next to no thought of Thee, and of me but vain conceits; my mother, because she accounted that those usual courses of learning would not only be no hindrance, but even some furtherance towards attaining Thee. For thus I conjecture, recalling, as well as I may, the disposition of my parents. The reins, meantime, were slackened to me, beyond all temper of due severity, to spend my time in sport, yea, even unto dissoluteness in whatsoever I affected. And in all was a mist, intercepting from me, O my God, the brightness of Thy truth; and mine iniquity burst out as from very fatness. Theft is punished by Thy law, O Lord, and the law written in the hearts of men, which iniquity itself effaces not. For what thief will abide a thief? not even a rich thief, one stealing through want. Yet I lusted to thieve, and did it, compelled by no hunger, nor poverty, but through a cloyedness of well-doing, and a pamperedness of iniquity. For I stole that, of which I had enough, and much better. Nor cared I to enjoy what I stole, but joyed in the theft and sin itself. A pear tree there was near our vineyard, laden with fruit, tempting neither for colour nor taste. To shake and rob this, some lewd young fellows of us went, late one night (having according to our pestilent custom prolonged our sports in the streets till then), and took huge loads, not for our eating, but to fling to the very hogs, having only tasted them. And this, but to do what we liked only, because it was misliked. Behold my heart, O God, behold my heart, which Thou hadst pity upon in the bottom of the bottomless pit. Now, behold, let my heart tell Thee what it sought there, that I should be gratuitously evil, having no temptation to ill, but the ill itself. It was foul, and I loved it; I loved to perish, I loved mine own fault, not that for which I was faulty, but my fault itself. Foul soul, falling from Thy firmament to utter destruction; not seeking aught through the shame, but the shame itself! For there is an attractiveness in beautiful bodies, in gold and silver, and all things; and in bodily touch, sympathy hath much influence, and each other sense hath his proper object answerably tempered. Worldy honour hath also its grace, and the power of overcoming, and of mastery; whence springs also the thirst of revenge. But yet, to obtain all these, we may not depart from Thee, O Lord, nor decline from Thy law. The life also which here we live hath its own enchantment, through a certain proportion of its own, and a correspondence with all things beautiful here below. Human friendship also is endeared with a sweet tie, by reason of the unity formed of many souls. Upon occasion of all these, and the like, is sin committed, while through an immoderate inclination towards these goods of the lowest order, the better and higher are forsaken,--Thou, our Lord God, Thy truth, and Thy law. For these lower things have their delights, but not like my God, who made all things; for in Him doth the righteous delight, and He is the joy of the upright in heart. When, then, we ask why a crime was done, we believe it not, unless it appear that there might have been some desire of obtaining some of those which we called lower goods, or a fear of losing them. For they are beautiful and comely; although compared with those higher and beatific goods, they be abject and low. A man hath murdered another; why? he loved his wife or his estate; or would rob for his own livelihood; or feared to lose some such things by him; or, wronged, was on fire to be revenged. Would any commit murder upon no cause, delighted simply in murdering? who would believe it? for as for that furious and savage man, of whom it is said that he was gratuitously evil and cruel, yet is the cause assigned; "lest" (saith he) "through idleness hand or heart should grow inactive." And to what end? that, through that practice of guilt, he might, having taken the city, attain to honours, empire, riches, and be freed from fear of the laws, and his embarrassments from domestic needs, and consciousness of villainies. So then, not even Catiline himself loved his own villainies, but something else, for whose sake he did them. What then did wretched I so love in thee, thou theft of mine, thou deed of darkness, in that sixteenth year of my age? Lovely thou wert not, because thou wert theft. But art thou any thing, that thus I speak to thee? Fair were the pears we stole, because they were Thy creation, Thou fairest of all, Creator of all, Thou good God; God, the sovereign good and my true good. Fair were those pears, but not them did my wretched soul desire; for I had store of better, and those I gathered, only that I might steal. For, when gathered, I flung them away, my only feast therein being my own sin, which I was pleased to enjoy. For if aught of those pears came within my mouth, what sweetened it was the sin. And now, O Lord my God, I enquire what in that theft delighted me; and behold it hath no loveliness; I mean not such loveliness as in justice and wisdom; nor such as is in the mind and memory, and senses, and animal life of man; nor yet as the stars are glorious and beautiful in their orbs; or the earth, or sea, full of embryo-life, replacing by its birth that which decayeth; nay, nor even that false and shadowy beauty which belongeth to deceiving vices. For so doth pride imitate exaltedness; whereas Thou alone art God exalted over all. Ambition, what seeks it, but honours and glory? whereas Thou alone art to be honoured above all, and glorious for evermore. The cruelty of the great would fain be feared; but who is to be feared but God alone, out of whose power what can be wrested or withdrawn? when, or where, or whither, or by whom? The tendernesses of the wanton would fain be counted love: yet is nothing more tender than Thy charity; nor is aught loved more healthfully than that Thy truth, bright and beautiful above all. Curiosity makes semblance of a desire of knowledge; whereas Thou supremely knowest all. Yea, ignorance and foolishness itself is cloaked under the name of simplicity and uninjuriousness; because nothing is found more single than Thee: and what less injurious, since they are his own works which injure the sinner? Yea, sloth would fain be at rest; but what stable rest besides the Lord? Luxury affects to be called plenty and abundance; but Thou art the fulness and never-failing plenteousness of incorruptible pleasures. Prodigality presents a shadow of liberality: but Thou art the most overflowing Giver of all good. Covetousness would possess many things; and Thou possessest all things. Envy disputes for excellency: what more excellent than Thou? Anger seeks revenge: who revenges more justly than Thou? Fear startles at things unwonted and sudden, which endangers things beloved, and takes forethought for their safety; but to Thee what unwonted or sudden, or who separateth from Thee what Thou lovest? Or where but with Thee is unshaken safety? Grief pines away for things lost, the delight of its desires; because it would have nothing taken from it, as nothing can from Thee. Thus doth the soul commit fornication, when she turns from Thee, seeking without Thee, what she findeth not pure and untainted, till she returns to Thee. Thus all pervertedly imitate Thee, who remove far from Thee, and lift themselves up against Thee. But even by thus imitating Thee, they imply Thee to be the Creator of all nature; whence there is no place whither altogether to retire from Thee. What then did I love in that theft? and wherein did I even corruptly and pervertedly imitate my Lord? Did I wish even by stealth to do contrary to Thy law, because by power I could not, so that being a prisoner, I might mimic a maimed liberty by doing with impunity things unpermitted me, a darkened likeness of Thy Omnipotency? Behold, Thy servant, fleeing from his Lord, and obtaining a shadow. O rottenness, O monstrousness of life, and depth of death! could I like what I might not, only because I might not? What shall I render unto the Lord, that, whilst my memory recalls these things, my soul is not affrighted at them? I will love Thee, O Lord, and thank Thee, and confess unto Thy name; because Thou hast forgiven me these so great and heinous deeds of mine. To Thy grace I ascribe it, and to Thy mercy, that Thou hast melted away my sins as it were ice. To Thy grace I ascribe also whatsoever I have not done of evil; for what might I not have done, who even loved a sin for its own sake? Yea, all I confess to have been forgiven me; both what evils I committed by my own wilfulness, and what by Thy guidance I committed not. What man is he, who, weighing his own infirmity, dares to ascribe his purity and innocency to his own strength; that so he should love Thee the less, as if he had less needed Thy mercy, whereby Thou remittest sins to those that turn to Thee? For whosoever, called by Thee, followed Thy voice, and avoided those things which he reads me recalling and confessing of myself, let him not scorn me, who being sick, was cured by that Physician, through whose aid it was that he was not, or rather was less, sick: and for this let him love Thee as much, yea and more; since by whom he sees me to have been recovered from such deep consumption of sin, by Him he sees himself to have been from the like consumption of sin preserved. What fruit had I then (wretched man!) in those things, of the remembrance whereof I am now ashamed? Especially, in that theft which I loved for the theft's sake; and it too was nothing, and therefore the more miserable I, who loved it. Yet alone I had not done it: such was I then, I remember, alone I had never done it. I loved then in it also the company of the accomplices, with whom I did it? I did not then love nothing else but the theft, yea rather I did love nothing else; for that circumstance of the company was also nothing. What is, in truth? who can teach me, save He that enlighteneth my heart, and discovereth its dark corners? What is it which hath come into my mind to enquire, and discuss, and consider? For had I then loved the pears I stole, and wished to enjoy them, I might have done it alone, had the bare commission of the theft sufficed to attain my pleasure; nor needed I have inflamed the itching of my desires by the excitement of accomplices. But since my pleasure was not in those pears, it was in the offence itself, which the company of fellow-sinners occasioned. What then was this feeling? For of a truth it was too foul: and woe was me, who had it. But yet what was it? Who can understand his errors? It was the sport, which as it were tickled our hearts, that we beguiled those who little thought what we were doing, and much disliked it. Why then was my delight of such sort that I did it not alone? Because none doth ordinarily laugh alone? ordinarily no one; yet laughter sometimes masters men alone and singly when no one whatever is with them, if anything very ludicrous presents itself to their senses or mind. Yet I had not done this alone; alone I had never done it. Behold my God, before Thee, the vivid remembrance of my soul; alone, I had never committed that theft wherein what I stole pleased me not, but that I stole; nor had it alone liked me to do it, nor had I done it. O friendship too unfriendly! thou incomprehensible inveigler of the soul, thou greediness to do mischief out of mirth and wantonness, thou thirst of others' loss, without lust of my own gain or revenge: but when it is said, "Let's go, let's do it," we are ashamed not to be shameless. Who can disentangle that twisted and intricate knottiness? Foul is it: I hate to think on it, to look on it. But Thee I long for, O Righteousness and Innocency, beautiful and comely to all pure eyes, and of a satisfaction unsating. With Thee is rest entire, and life imperturbable. Whoso enters into Thee, enters into the joy of his Lord: and shall not fear, and shall do excellently in the All-Excellent. I sank away from Thee, and I wandered, O my God, too much astray from Thee my stay, in these days of my youth, and I became to myself a barren land. BOOK III To Carthage I came, where there sang all around me in my ears a cauldron of unholy loves. I loved not yet, yet I loved to love, and out of a deep-seated want, I hated myself for wanting not. I sought what I might love, in love with loving, and safety I hated, and a way without snares. For within me was a famine of that inward food, Thyself, my God; yet, through that famine I was not hungered; but was without all longing for incorruptible sustenance, not because filled therewith, but the more empty, the more I loathed it. For this cause my soul was sickly and full of sores, it miserably cast itself forth, desiring to be scraped by the touch of objects of sense. Yet if these had not a soul, they would not be objects of love. To love then, and to be beloved, was sweet to me; but more, when I obtained to enjoy the person I loved, I defiled, therefore, the spring of friendship with the filth of concupiscence, and I beclouded its brightness with the hell of lustfulness; and thus foul and unseemly, I would fain, through exceeding vanity, be fine and courtly. I fell headlong then into the love wherein I longed to be ensnared. My God, my Mercy, with how much gall didst Thou out of Thy great goodness besprinkle for me that sweetness? For I was both beloved, and secretly arrived at the bond of enjoying; and was with joy fettered with sorrow-bringing bonds, that I might be scourged with the iron burning rods of jealousy, and suspicions, and fears, and angers, and quarrels. Stage-plays also carried me away, full of images of my miseries, and of fuel to my fire. Why is it, that man desires to be made sad, beholding doleful and tragical things, which yet himself would no means suffer? yet he desires as a spectator to feel sorrow at them, and this very sorrow is his pleasure. What is this but a miserable madness? for a man is the more affected with these actions, the less free he is from such affections. Howsoever, when he suffers in his own person, it uses to be styled misery: when he compassionates others, then it is mercy. But what sort of compassion is this for feigned and scenical passions? for the auditor is not called on to relieve, but only to grieve: and he applauds the actor of these fictions the more, the more he grieves. And if the calamities of those persons (whether of old times, or mere fiction) be so acted, that the spectator is not moved to tears, he goes away disgusted and criticising; but if he be moved to passion, he stays intent, and weeps for joy. Are griefs then too loved? Verily all desire joy. Or whereas no man likes to be miserable, is he yet pleased to be merciful? which because it cannot be without passion, for this reason alone are passions loved? This also springs from that vein of friendship. But whither goes that vein? whither flows it? wherefore runs it into that torrent of pitch bubbling forth those monstrous tides of foul lustfulness, into which it is wilfully changed and transformed, being of its own will precipitated and corrupted from its heavenly clearness? Shall compassion then be put away? by no means. Be griefs then sometimes loved. But beware of uncleanness, O my soul, under the guardianship of my God, the God of our fathers, who is to be praised and exalted above all for ever, beware of uncleanness. For I have not now ceased to pity; but then in the theatres I rejoiced with lovers when they wickedly enjoyed one another, although this was imaginary only in the play. And when they lost one another, as if very compassionate, I sorrowed with them, yet had my delight in both. But now I much more pity him that rejoiceth in his wickedness, than him who is thought to suffer hardship, by missing some pernicious pleasure, and the loss of some miserable felicity. This certainly is the truer mercy, but in it grief delights not. For though he that grieves for the miserable, be commended for his office of charity; yet had he, who is genuinely compassionate, rather there were nothing for him to grieve for. For if good will be ill willed (which can never be), then may he, who truly and sincerely commiserates, wish there might be some miserable, that he might commiserate. Some sorrow may then be allowed, none loved. For thus dost Thou, O Lord God, who lovest souls far more purely than we, and hast more incorruptibly pity on them, yet are wounded with no sorrowfulness. And who is sufficient for these things? But I, miserable, then loved to grieve, and sought out what to grieve at, when in another's and that feigned and personated misery, that acting best pleased me, and attracted me the most vehemently, which drew tears from me. What marvel that an unhappy sheep, straying from Thy flock, and impatient of Thy keeping, I became infected with a foul disease? And hence the love of griefs; not such as should sink deep into me; for I loved not to suffer, what I loved to look on; but such as upon hearing their fictions should lightly scratch the surface; upon which, as on envenomed nails, followed inflamed swelling, impostumes, and a putrefied sore. My life being such, was it life, O my God? And Thy faithful mercy hovered over me afar. Upon how grievous iniquities consumed I myself, pursuing a sacrilegious curiosity, that having forsaken Thee, it might bring me to the treacherous abyss, and the beguiling service of devils, to whom I sacrificed my evil actions, and in all these things Thou didst scourge me! I dared even, while Thy solemnities were celebrated within the walls of Thy Church, to desire, and to compass a business deserving death for its fruits, for which Thou scourgedst me with grievous punishments, though nothing to my fault, O Thou my exceeding mercy, my God, my refuge from those terrible destroyers, among whom I wandered with a stiff neck, withdrawing further from Thee, loving mine own ways, and not Thine; loving a vagrant liberty. Those studies also, which were accounted commendable, had a view to excelling in the courts of litigation; the more bepraised, the craftier. Such is men's blindness, glorying even in their blindness. And now I was chief in the rhetoric school, whereat I joyed proudly, and I swelled with arrogancy, though (Lord, Thou knowest) far quieter and altogether removed from the subvertings of those "Subverters" (for this ill-omened and devilish name was the very badge of gallantry) among whom I lived, with a shameless shame that I was not even as they. With them I lived, and was sometimes delighted with their friendship, whose doings I ever did abhor--i.e., their "subvertings," wherewith they wantonly persecuted the modesty of strangers, which they disturbed by a gratuitous jeering, feeding thereon their malicious birth. Nothing can be liker the very actions of devils than these. What then could they be more truly called than "Subverters"? themselves subverted and altogether perverted first, the deceiving spirits secretly deriding and seducing them, wherein themselves delight to jeer at and deceive others. Among such as these, in that unsettled age of mine, learned I books of eloquence, wherein I desired to be eminent, out of a damnable and vainglorious end, a joy in human vanity. In the ordinary course of study, I fell upon a certain book of Cicero, whose speech almost all admire, not so his heart. This book of his contains an exhortation to philosophy, and is called "Hortensius." But this book altered my affections, and turned my prayers to Thyself O Lord; and made me have other purposes and desires. Every vain hope at once became worthless to me; and I longed with an incredibly burning desire for an immortality of wisdom, and began now to arise, that I might return to Thee. For not to sharpen my tongue (which thing I seemed to be purchasing with my mother's allowances, in that my nineteenth year, my father being dead two years before), not to sharpen my tongue did I employ that book; nor did it infuse into me its style, but its matter. How did I burn then, my God, how did I burn to re-mount from earthly things to Thee, nor knew I what Thou wouldest do with me? For with Thee is wisdom. But the love of wisdom is in Greek called "philosophy," with which that book inflamed me. Some there be that seduce through philosophy, under a great, and smooth, and honourable name colouring and disguising their own errors: and almost all who in that and former ages were such, are in that book censured and set forth: there also is made plain that wholesome advice of Thy Spirit, by Thy good and devout servant: Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ. For in Him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily. And since at that time (Thou, O light of my heart, knowest) Apostolic Scripture was not known to me, I was delighted with that exhortation, so far only, that I was thereby strongly roused, and kindled, and inflamed to love, and seek, and obtain, and hold, and embrace not this or that sect, but wisdom itself whatever it were; and this alone checked me thus unkindled, that the name of Christ was not in it. For this name, according to Thy mercy, O Lord, this name of my Saviour Thy Son, had my tender heart, even with my mother's milk, devoutly drunk in and deeply treasured; and whatsoever was without that name, though never so learned, polished, or true, took not entire hold of me. I resolved then to bend my mind to the holy Scriptures, that I might see what they were. But behold, I see a thing not understood by the proud, nor laid open to children, lowly in access, in its recesses lofty, and veiled with mysteries; and I was not such as could enter into it, or stoop my neck to follow its steps. For not as I now speak, did I feel when I turned to those Scriptures; but they seemed to me unworthy to be compared to the stateliness of Tully: for my swelling pride shrunk from their lowliness, nor could my sharp wit pierce the interior thereof. Yet were they such as would grow up in a little one. But I disdained to be a little one; and, swollen with pride, took myself to be a great one. Therefore I fell among men proudly doting, exceeding carnal and prating, in whose mouths were the snares of the Devil, limed with the mixture of the syllables of Thy name, and of our Lord Jesus Christ, and of the Holy Ghost, the Paraclete, our Comforter. These names departed not out of their mouth, but so far forth as the sound only and the noise of the tongue, for the heart was void of truth. Yet they cried out "Truth, Truth," and spake much thereof to me, yet it was not in them: but they spake falsehood, not of Thee only (who truly art Truth), but even of those elements of this world, Thy creatures. And I indeed ought to have passed by even philosophers who spake truth concerning them, for love of Thee, my Father, supremely good, Beauty of all things beautiful. O Truth, Truth, how inwardly did even then the marrow of my soul pant after Thee, when they often and diversely, and in many and huge books, echoed of Thee to me, though it was but an echo? And these were the dishes wherein to me, hungering after Thee, they, instead of Thee, served up the Sun and Moon, beautiful works of Thine, but yet Thy works, not Thyself, no nor Thy first works. For Thy spiritual works are before these corporeal works, celestial though they be, and shining. But I hungered and thirsted not even after those first works of Thine, but after Thee Thyself, the Truth, in whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning: yet they still set before me in those dishes, glittering fantasies, than which better were it to love this very sun (which is real to our sight at least), than those fantasies which by our eyes deceive our mind. Yet because I thought them to be Thee, I fed thereon; not eagerly, for Thou didst not in them taste to me as Thou art; for Thou wast not these emptinesses, nor was I nourished by them, but exhausted rather. Food in sleep shows very like our food awake; yet are not those asleep nourished by it, for they are asleep. But those were not even any way like to Thee, as Thou hast now spoken to me; for those were corporeal fantasies, false bodies, than which these true bodies, celestial or terrestrial, which with our fleshly sight we behold, are far more certain: these things the beasts and birds discern as well as we, and they are more certain than when we fancy them. And again, we do with more certainty fancy them, than by them conjecture other vaster and infinite bodies which have no being. Such empty husks was I then fed on; and was not fed. But Thou, my soul's Love, in looking for whom I fail, that I may become strong, art neither those bodies which we see, though in heaven; nor those which we see not there; for Thou hast created them, nor dost Thou account them among the chiefest of Thy works. How far then art Thou from those fantasies of mine, fantasies of bodies which altogether are not, than which the images of those bodies, which are, are far more certain, and more certain still the bodies themselves, which yet Thou art not; no, nor yet the soul, which is the life of the bodies. So then, better and more certain is the life of the bodies than the bodies. But Thou art the life of souls, the life of lives, having life in Thyself; and changest not, life of my soul. Where then wert Thou then to me, and how far from me? Far verily was I straying from Thee, barred from the very husks of the swine, whom with husks I fed. For how much better are the fables of poets and grammarians than these snares? For verses, and poems, and "Medea flying," are more profitable truly than these men's five elements, variously disguised, answering to five dens of darkness, which have no being, yet slay the believer. For verses and poems I can turn to true food, and "Medea flying," though I did sing, I maintained not; though I heard it sung, I believed not: but those things I did believe. Woe, woe, by what steps was I brought down to the depths of hell! toiling and turmoiling through want of Truth, since I sought after Thee, my God (to Thee I confess it, who hadst mercy on me, not as yet confessing), not according to the understanding of the mind, wherein Thou willedst that I should excel the beasts, but according to the sense of the flesh. But Thou wert more inward to me than my most inward part; and higher than my highest. I lighted upon that bold woman, simple and knoweth nothing, shadowed out in Solomon, sitting at the door, and saying, Eat ye bread of secrecies willingly, and drink ye stolen waters which are sweet: she seduced me, because she found my soul dwelling abroad in the eye of my flesh, and ruminating on such food as through it I had devoured. For other than this, that which really is I knew not; and was, as it were through sharpness of wit, persuaded to assent to foolish deceivers, when they asked me, "whence is evil?" "is God bounded by a bodily shape, and has hairs and nails?" "are they to be esteemed righteous who had many wives at once, and did kill men, and sacrifice living creatures?" At which I, in my ignorance, was much troubled, and departing from the truth, seemed to myself to be making towards it; because as yet I knew not that evil was nothing but a privation of good, until at last a thing ceases altogether to be; which how should I see, the sight of whose eyes reached only to bodies, and of my mind to a phantasm? And I knew not God to be a Spirit, not one who hath parts extended in length and breadth, or whose being was bulk; for every bulk is less in a part than in the whole: and if it be infinite, it must be less in such part as is defined by a certain space, than in its infinitude; and so is not wholly every where, as Spirit, as God. And what that should be in us, by which we were like to God, and might be rightly said to be after the image of God, I was altogether ignorant. Nor knew I that true inward righteousness which judgeth not according to custom, but out of the most rightful law of God Almighty, whereby the ways of places and times were disposed according to those times and places; itself meantime being the same always and every where, not one thing in one place, and another in another; according to which Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, and Moses, and David, were righteous, and all those commended by the mouth of God; but were judged unrighteous by silly men, judging out of man's judgment, and measuring by their own petty habits, the moral habits of the whole human race. As if in an armory, one ignorant what were adapted to each part should cover his head with greaves, or seek to be shod with a helmet, and complain that they fitted not: or as if on a day when business is publicly stopped in the afternoon, one were angered at not being allowed to keep open shop, because he had been in the forenoon; or when in one house he observeth some servant take a thing in his hand, which the butler is not suffered to meddle with; or something permitted out of doors, which is forbidden in the dining-room; and should be angry, that in one house, and one family, the same thing is not allotted every where, and to all. Even such are they who are fretted to hear something to have been lawful for righteous men formerly, which now is not; or that God, for certain temporal respects, commanded them one thing, and these another, obeying both the same righteousness: whereas they see, in one man, and one day, and one house, different things to be fit for different members, and a thing formerly lawful, after a certain time not so; in one corner permitted or commanded, but in another rightly forbidden and punished. Is justice therefore various or mutable? No, but the times, over which it presides, flow not evenly, because they are times. But men whose days are few upon the earth, for that by their senses they cannot harmonise the causes of things in former ages and other nations, which they had not experience of, with these which they have experience of, whereas in one and the same body, day, or family, they easily see what is fitting for each member, and season, part, and person; to the one they take exceptions, to the other they submit. These things I then knew not, nor observed; they struck my sight on all sides, and I saw them not. I indited verses, in which I might not place every foot every where, but differently in different metres; nor even in any one metre the self-same foot in all places. Yet the art itself, by which I indited, had not different principles for these different cases, but comprised all in one. Still I saw not how that righteousness, which good and holy men obeyed, did far more excellently and sublimely contain in one all those things which God commanded, and in no part varied; although in varying times it prescribed not every thing at once, but apportioned and enjoined what was fit for each. And I in my blindness, censured the holy Fathers, not only wherein they made use of things present as God commanded and inspired them, but also wherein they were foretelling things to come, as God was revealing in them. Can it at any time or place be unjust to love God with all his heart, with all his soul, and with all his mind; and his neighbour as himself? Therefore are those foul offences which be against nature, to be every where and at all times detested and punished; such as were those of the men of Sodom: which should all nations commit, they should all stand guilty of the same crime, by the law of God, which hath not so made men that they should so abuse one another. For even that intercourse which should be between God and us is violated, when that same nature, of which He is Author, is polluted by perversity of lust. But those actions which are offences against the customs of men, are to be avoided according to the customs severally prevailing; so that a thing agreed upon, and confirmed, by custom or law of any city or nation, may not be violated at the lawless pleasure of any, whether native or foreigner. For any part which harmoniseth not with its whole, is offensive. But when God commands a thing to be done, against the customs or compact of any people, though it were never by them done heretofore, it is to be done; and if intermitted, it is to be restored; and if never ordained, is now to be ordained. For lawful if it be for a king, in the state which he reigns over, to command that which no one before him, nor he himself heretofore, had commanded, and to obey him cannot be against the common weal of the state (nay, it were against it if he were not obeyed, for to obey princes is a general compact of human society); how much more unhesitatingly ought we to obey God, in all which He commands, the Ruler of all His creatures! For as among the powers in man's society, the greater authority is obeyed in preference to the lesser, so must God above all. So in acts of violence, where there is a wish to hurt, whether by reproach or injury; and these either for revenge, as one enemy against another; or for some profit belonging to another, as the robber to the traveller; or to avoid some evil, as towards one who is feared; or through envy, as one less fortunate to one more so, or one well thriven in any thing, to him whose being on a par with himself he fears, or grieves at, or for the mere pleasure at another's pain, as spectators of gladiators, or deriders and mockers of others. These be the heads of iniquity which spring from the lust of the flesh, of the eye, or of rule, either singly, or two combined, or all together; and so do men live ill against the three, and seven, that psaltery of of ten strings, Thy Ten Commandments, O God, most high, and most sweet. But what foul offences can there be against Thee, who canst not be defiled? or what acts of violence against Thee, who canst not be harmed? But Thou avengest what men commit against themselves, seeing also when they sin against Thee, they do wickedly against their own souls, and iniquity gives itself the lie, by corrupting and perverting their nature, which Thou hast created and ordained, or by an immoderate use of things allowed, or in burning in things unallowed, to that use which is against nature; or are found guilty, raging with heart and tongue against Thee, kicking against the pricks; or when, bursting the pale of human society, they boldly joy in self-willed combinations or divisions, according as they have any object to gain or subject of offence. And these things are done when Thou art forsaken, O Fountain of Life, who art the only and true Creator and Governor of the Universe, and by a self-willed pride, any one false thing is selected therefrom and loved. So then by a humble devoutness we return to Thee; and Thou cleansest us from our evil habits, and art merciful to their sins who confess, and hearest the groaning of the prisoner, and loosest us from the chains which we made for ourselves, if we lift not up against Thee the horns of an unreal liberty, suffering the loss of all, through covetousness of more, by loving more our own private good than Thee, the Good of all. Amidst these offences of foulness and violence, and so many iniquities, are sins of men, who are on the whole making proficiency; which by those that judge rightly, are, after the rule of perfection, discommended, yet the persons commended, upon hope of future fruit, as in the green blade of growing corn. And there are some, resembling offences of foulness or violence, which yet are no sins; because they offend neither Thee, our Lord God, nor human society; when, namely, things fitting for a given period are obtained for the service of life, and we know not whether out of a lust of having; or when things are, for the sake of correction, by constituted authority punished, and we know not whether out of a lust of hurting. Many an action then which in men's sight is disapproved, is by Thy testimony approved; and many, by men praised, are (Thou being witness) condemned: because the show of the action, and the mind of the doer, and the unknown exigency of the period, severally vary. But when Thou on a sudden commandest an unwonted and unthought of thing, yea, although Thou hast sometime forbidden it, and still for the time hidest the reason of Thy command, and it be against the ordinance of some society of men, who doubts but it is to be done, seeing that society of men is just which serves Thee? But blessed are they who know Thy commands! For all things were done by Thy servants; either to show forth something needful for the present, or to foreshow things to come. These things I being ignorant of, scoffed at those Thy holy servants and prophets. And what gained I by scoffing at them, but to be scoffed at by Thee, being insensibly and step by step drawn on to those follies, as to believe that a fig-tree wept when it was plucked, and the tree, its mother, shed milky tears? Which fig notwithstanding (plucked by some other's, not his own, guilt) had some Manichaean saint eaten, and mingled with his bowels, he should breathe out of it angels, yea, there shall burst forth particles of divinity, at every moan or groan in his prayer, which particles of the most high and true God had remained bound in that fig, unless they had been set at liberty by the teeth or belly of some "Elect" saint! And I, miserable, believed that more mercy was to be shown to the fruits of the earth than men, for whom they were created. For if any one an hungered, not a Manichaean, should ask for any, that morsel would seem as it were condemned to capital punishment, which should be given him. And Thou sentest Thine hand from above, and drewest my soul out of that profound darkness, my mother, Thy faithful one, weeping to Thee for me, more than mothers weep the bodily deaths of their children. For she, by that faith and spirit which she had from Thee, discerned the death wherein I lay, and Thou heardest her, O Lord; Thou heardest her, and despisedst not her tears, when streaming down, they watered the ground under her eyes in every place where she prayed; yea Thou heardest her. For whence was that dream whereby Thou comfortedst her; so that she allowed me to live with her, and to eat at the same table in the house, which she had begun to shrink from, abhorring and detesting the blasphemies of my error? For she saw herself standing on a certain wooden rule, and a shining youth coming towards her, cheerful and smiling upon her, herself grieving, and overwhelmed with grief. But he having (in order to instruct, as is their wont not to be instructed) enquired of her the causes of her grief and daily tears, and she answering that she was bewailing my perdition, he bade her rest contented, and told her to look and observe, "That where she was, there was I also." And when she looked, she saw me standing by her in the same rule. Whence was this, but that Thine ears were towards her heart? O Thou Good omnipotent, who so carest for every one of us, as if Thou caredst for him only; and so for all, as if they were but one! Whence was this also, that when she had told me this vision, and I would fain bend it to mean, "That she rather should not despair of being one day what I was"; she presently, without any hesitation, replies: "No; for it was not told me that, 'where he, there thou also'; but 'where thou, there he also'?" I confess to Thee, O Lord, that to the best of my remembrance (and I have oft spoken of this), that Thy answer, through my waking mother,--that she was not perplexed by the plausibility of my false interpretation, and so quickly saw what was to be seen, and which I certainly had not perceived before she spake,--even then moved me more than the dream itself, by which a joy to the holy woman, to be fulfilled so long after, was, for the consolation of her present anguish, so long before foresignified. For almost nine years passed, in which I wallowed in the mire of that deep pit, and the darkness of falsehood, often assaying to rise, but dashed down the more grievously. All which time that chaste, godly, and sober widow (such as Thou lovest), now more cheered with hope, yet no whit relaxing in her weeping and mourning, ceased not at all hours of her devotions to bewail my case unto Thee. And her prayers entered into Thy presence; and yet Thou sufferedst me to be yet involved and reinvolved in that darkness. Thou gavest her meantime another answer, which I call to mind; for much I pass by, hasting to those things which more press me to confess unto Thee, and much I do not remember. Thou gavest her then another answer, by a Priest of Thine, a certain Bishop brought up in Thy Church, and well studied in Thy books. Whom when this woman had entreated to vouchsafe to converse with me, refute my errors, unteach me ill things, and teach me good things (for this he was wont to do, when he found persons fitted to receive it), he refused, wisely, as I afterwards perceived. For he answered, that I was yet unteachable, being puffed up with the novelty of that heresy, and had already perplexed divers unskilful persons with captious questions, as she had told him: "but let him alone a while" (saith he), "only pray God for him, he will of himself by reading find what that error is, and how great its impiety." At the same time he told her, how himself, when a little one, had by his seduced mother been consigned over to the Manichees, and had not only read, but frequently copied out almost all, their books, and had (without any argument or proof from any one) seen how much that sect was to be avoided; and had avoided it. Which when he had said, and she would not be satisfied, but urged him more, with entreaties and many tears, that he would see me and discourse with me; he, a little displeased at her importunity, saith, "Go thy ways and God bless thee, for it is not possible that the son of these tears should perish." Which answer she took (as she often mentioned in her conversations with me) as if it had sounded from heaven. BOOK IV For this space of nine years (from my nineteenth year to my eight-and-twentieth) we lived seduced and seducing, deceived and deceiving, in divers lusts; openly, by sciences which they call liberal; secretly, with a false-named religion; here proud, there superstitious, every where vain. Here, hunting after the emptiness of popular praise, down even to theatrical applauses, and poetic prizes, and strifes for grassy garlands, and the follies of shows, and the intemperance of desires. There, desiring to be cleansed from these defilements, by carrying food to those who were called "elect" and "holy," out of which, in the workhouse of their stomachs, they should forge for us Angels and Gods, by whom we might be cleansed. These things did I follow, and practise with my friends, deceived by me, and with me. Let the arrogant mock me, and such as have not been, to their soul's health, stricken and cast down by Thee, O my God; but I would still confess to Thee mine own shame in Thy praise. Suffer me, I beseech Thee, and give me grace to go over in my present remembrance the wanderings of my forepassed time, and to offer unto Thee the sacrifice of thanksgiving. For what am I to myself without Thee, but a guide to mine own downfall? or what am I even at the best, but an infant sucking the milk Thou givest, and feeding upon Thee, the food that perisheth not? But what sort of man is any man, seeing he is but a man? Let now the strong and the mighty laugh at us, but let us poor and needy confess unto Thee. In those years I taught rhetoric, and, overcome by cupidity, made sale of a loquacity to overcome by. Yet I preferred (Lord, Thou knowest) honest scholars (as they are accounted), and these I, without artifice, taught artifices, not to be practised against the life of the guiltless, though sometimes for the life of the guilty. And Thou, O God, from afar perceivedst me stumbling in that slippery course, and amid much smoke sending out some sparks of faithfulness, which I showed in that my guidance of such as loved vanity, and sought after leasing, myself their companion. In those years I had one,--not in that which is called lawful marriage, but whom I had found out in a wayward passion, void of understanding; yet but one, remaining faithful even to her; in whom I in my own case experienced what difference there is betwixt the self-restraint of the marriage-covenant, for the sake of issue, and the bargain of a lustful love, where children are born against their parents' will, although, once born, they constrain love. I remember also, that when I had settled to enter the lists for a theatrical prize, some wizard asked me what I would give him to win; but I, detesting and abhorring such foul mysteries, answered, "Though the garland were of imperishable gold, I would not suffer a fly to be killed to gain me it." For he was to kill some living creatures in his sacrifices, and by those honours to invite the devils to favour me. But this ill also I rejected, not out of a pure love for Thee, O God of my heart; for I knew not how to love Thee, who knew not how to conceive aught beyond a material brightness. And doth not a soul, sighing after such fictions, commit fornication against Thee, trust in things unreal, and feed the wind? Still I would not forsooth have sacrifices offered to devils for me, to whom I was sacrificing myself by that superstition. For what else is it to feed the wind, but to feed them, that is by going astray to become their pleasure and derision? Those impostors then, whom they style Mathematicians, I consulted without scruple; because they seemed to use no sacrifice, nor to pray to any spirit for their divinations: which art, however, Christian and true piety consistently rejects and condemns. For, it is a good thing to confess unto Thee, and to say, Have mercy upon me, heal my soul, for I have sinned against Thee; and not to abuse Thy mercy for a licence to sin, but to remember the Lord's words, Behold, thou art made whole, sin no more, lest a worse thing come unto thee. All which wholesome advice they labour to destroy, saying, "The cause of thy sin is inevitably determined in heaven"; and "This did Venus, or Saturn, or Mars": that man, forsooth, flesh and blood, and proud corruption, might be blameless; while the Creator and Ordainer of heaven and the stars is to bear the blame. And who is He but our God? the very sweetness and well-spring of righteousness, who renderest to every man according to his works: and a broken and contrite heart wilt Thou not despise. There was in those days a wise man, very skilful in physic, and renowned therein, who had with his own proconsular hand put the Agonistic garland upon my distempered head, but not as a physician: for this disease Thou only curest, who resistest the proud, and givest grace to the humble. But didst Thou fail me even by that old man, or forbear to heal my soul? For having become more acquainted with him, and hanging assiduously and fixedly on his speech (for though in simple terms, it was vivid, lively, and earnest), when he had gathered by my discourse that I was given to the books of nativity-casters, he kindly and fatherly advised me to cast them away, and not fruitlessly bestow a care and diligence, necessary for useful things, upon these vanities; saying, that he had in his earliest years studied that art, so as to make it the profession whereby he should live, and that, understanding Hippocrates, he could soon have understood such a study as this; and yet he had given it over, and taken to physic, for no other reason but that he found it utterly false; and he, a grave man, would not get his living by deluding people. "But thou," saith he, "hast rhetoric to maintain thyself by, so that thou followest this of free choice, not of necessity: the more then oughtest thou to give me credit herein, who laboured to acquire it so perfectly as to get my living by it alone." Of whom when I had demanded, how then could many true things be foretold by it, he answered me (as he could) "that the force of chance, diffused throughout the whole order of things, brought this about. For if when a man by haphazard opens the pages of some poet, who sang and thought of something wholly different, a verse oftentimes fell out, wondrously agreeable to the present business: it were not to be wondered at, if out of the soul of man, unconscious what takes place in it, by some higher instinct an answer should be given, by hap, not by art, corresponding to the business and actions of the demander." And thus much, either from or through him, Thou conveyedst to me, and tracedst in my memory, what I might hereafter examine for myself. But at that time neither he, nor my dearest Nebridius, a youth singularly good and of a holy fear, who derided the whole body of divination, could persuade me to cast it aside, the authority of the authors swaying me yet more, and as yet I had found no certain proof (such as I sought) whereby it might without all doubt appear, that what had been truly foretold by those consulted was the result of haphazard, not of the art of the star-gazers. In those years when I first began to teach rhetoric in my native town, I had made one my friend, but too dear to me, from a community of pursuits, of mine own age, and, as myself, in the first opening flower of youth. He had grown up of a child with me, and we had been both school-fellows and play-fellows. But he was not yet my friend as afterwards, nor even then, as true friendship is; for true it cannot be, unless in such as Thou cementest together, cleaving unto Thee, by that love which is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost, which is given unto us. Yet was it but too sweet, ripened by the warmth of kindred studies: for, from the true faith (which he as a youth had not soundly and thoroughly imbibed), I had warped him also to those superstitious and pernicious fables, for which my mother bewailed me. With me he now erred in mind, nor could my soul be without him. But behold Thou wert close on the steps of Thy fugitives, at once God of vengeance, and Fountain of mercies, turning us to Thyself by wonderful means; Thou tookest that man out of this life, when he had scarce filled up one whole year of my friendship, sweet to me above all sweetness of that my life. Who can recount all Thy praises, which he hath felt in his one self? What diddest Thou then, my God, and how unsearchable is the abyss of Thy judgments? For long, sore sick of a fever, he lay senseless in a death-sweat; and his recovery being despaired of, he was baptised, unknowing; myself meanwhile little regarding, and presuming that his soul would retain rather what it had received of me, not what was wrought on his unconscious body. But it proved far otherwise: for he was refreshed, and restored. Forthwith, as soon as I could speak with him (and I could, so soon as he was able, for I never left him, and we hung but too much upon each other), I essayed to jest with him, as though he would jest with me at that baptism which he had received, when utterly absent in mind and feeling, but had now understood that he had received. But he so shrunk from me, as from an enemy; and with a wonderful and sudden freedom bade me, as I would continue his friend, forbear such language to him. I, all astonished and amazed, suppressed all my emotions till he should grow well, and his health were strong enough for me to deal with him as I would. But he was taken away from my frenzy, that with Thee he might be preserved for my comfort; a few days after in my absence, he was attacked again by the fever, and so departed. At this grief my heart was utterly darkened; and whatever I beheld was death. My native country was a torment to me, and my father's house a strange unhappiness; and whatever I had shared with him, wanting him, became a distracting torture. Mine eyes sought him every where, but he was not granted them; and I hated all places, for that they had not him; nor could they now tell me, "he is coming," as when he was alive and absent. I became a great riddle to myself, and I asked my soul, why she was so sad, and why she disquieted me sorely: but she knew not what to answer me. And if I said, Trust in God, she very rightly obeyed me not; because that most dear friend, whom she had lost, was, being man, both truer and better than that phantasm she was bid to trust in. Only tears were sweet to me, for they succeeded my friend, in the dearest of my affections. And now, Lord, these things are passed by, and time hath assuaged my wound. May I learn from Thee, who art Truth, and approach the ear of my heart unto Thy mouth, that Thou mayest tell me why weeping is sweet to the miserable? Hast Thou, although present every where, cast away our misery far from Thee? And Thou abidest in Thyself, but we are tossed about in divers trials. And yet unless we mourned in Thine ears, we should have no hope left. Whence then is sweet fruit gathered from the bitterness of life, from groaning, tears, sighs, and complaints? Doth this sweeten it, that we hope Thou hearest? This is true of prayer, for therein is a longing to approach unto Thee. But is it also in grief for a thing lost, and the sorrow wherewith I was then overwhelmed? For I neither hoped he should return to life nor did I desire this with my tears; but I wept only and grieved. For I was miserable, and had lost my joy. Or is weeping indeed a bitter thing, and for very loathing of the things which we before enjoyed, does it then, when we shrink from them, please us? But what speak I of these things? for now is no time to question, but to confess unto Thee. Wretched I was; and wretched is every soul bound by the friendship of perishable things; he is torn asunder when he loses them, and then he feels the wretchedness which he had ere yet he lost them. So was it then with me; I wept most bitterly, and found my repose in bitterness. Thus was I wretched, and that wretched life I held dearer than my friend. For though I would willingly have changed it, yet was I more unwilling to part with it than with him; yea, I know not whether I would have parted with it even for him, as is related (if not feigned) of Pylades and Orestes, that they would gladly have died for each other or together, not to live together being to them worse than death. But in me there had arisen some unexplained feeling, too contrary to this, for at once I loathed exceedingly to live and feared to die. I suppose, the more I loved him, the more did I hate, and fear (as a most cruel enemy) death, which had bereaved me of him: and I imagined it would speedily make an end of all men, since it had power over him. Thus was it with me, I remember. Behold my heart, O my God, behold and see into me; for well I remember it, O my Hope, who cleansest me from the impurity of such affections, directing mine eyes towards Thee, and plucking my feet out of the snare. For I wondered that others, subject to death, did live, since he whom I loved, as if he should never die, was dead; and I wondered yet more that myself, who was to him a second self, could live, he being dead. Well said one of his friend, "Thou half of my soul"; for I felt that my soul and his soul were "one soul in two bodies": and therefore was my life a horror to me, because I would not live halved. And therefore perchance I feared to die, lest he whom I had much loved should die wholly. O madness, which knowest not how to love men, like men! O foolish man that I then was, enduring impatiently the lot of man! I fretted then, sighed, wept, was distracted; had neither rest nor counsel. For I bore about a shattered and bleeding soul, impatient of being borne by me, yet where to repose it, I found not. Not in calm groves, not in games and music, nor in fragrant spots, nor in curious banquetings, nor in the pleasures of the bed and the couch; nor (finally) in books or poesy, found it repose. All things looked ghastly, yea, the very light; whatsoever was not what he was, was revolting and hateful, except groaning and tears. For in those alone found I a little refreshment. But when my soul was withdrawn from them a huge load of misery weighed me down. To Thee, O Lord, it ought to have been raised, for Thee to lighten; I knew it; but neither could nor would; the more, since, when I thought of Thee, Thou wert not to me any solid or substantial thing. For Thou wert not Thyself, but a mere phantom, and my error was my God. If I offered to discharge my load thereon, that it might rest, it glided through the void, and came rushing down again on me; and I had remained to myself a hapless spot, where I could neither be, nor be from thence. For whither should my heart flee from my heart? Whither should I flee from myself? Whither not follow myself? And yet I fled out of my country; for so should mine eyes less look for him, where they were not wont to see him. And thus from Thagaste, I came to Carthage. Times lose no time; nor do they roll idly by; through our senses they work strange operations on the mind. Behold, they went and came day by day, and by coming and going, introduced into my mind other imaginations and other remembrances; and little by little patched me up again with my old kind of delights, unto which that my sorrow gave way. And yet there succeeded, not indeed other griefs, yet the causes of other griefs. For whence had that former grief so easily reached my very inmost soul, but that I had poured out my soul upon the dust, in loving one that must die, as if he would never die? For what restored and refreshed me chiefly was the solaces of other friends, with whom I did love, what instead of Thee I loved; and this was a great fable, and protracted lie, by whose adulterous stimulus, our soul, which lay itching in our ears, was being defiled. But that fable would not die to me, so oft as any of my friends died. There were other things which in them did more take my mind; to talk and jest together, to do kind offices by turns; to read together honied books; to play the fool or be earnest together; to dissent at times without discontent, as a man might with his own self; and even with the seldomness of these dissentings, to season our more frequent consentings; sometimes to teach, and sometimes learn; long for the absent with impatience; and welcome the coming with joy. These and the like expressions, proceeding out of the hearts of those that loved and were loved again, by the countenance, the tongue, the eyes, and a thousand pleasing gestures, were so much fuel to melt our souls together, and out of many make but one. This is it that is loved in friends; and so loved, that a man's conscience condemns itself, if he love not him that loves him again, or love not again him that loves him, looking for nothing from his person but indications of his love. Hence that mourning, if one die, and darkenings of sorrows, that steeping of the heart in tears, all sweetness turned to bitterness; and upon the loss of life of the dying, the death of the living. Blessed whoso loveth Thee, and his friend in Thee, and his enemy for Thee. For he alone loses none dear to him, to whom all are dear in Him who cannot be lost. And who is this but our God, the God that made heaven and earth, and filleth them, because by filling them He created them? Thee none loseth, but who leaveth. And who leaveth Thee, whither goeth or whither fleeth he, but from Thee well-pleased, to Thee displeased? For where doth he not find Thy law in his own punishment? And Thy law is truth, and truth Thou. Turn us, O God of Hosts, show us Thy countenance, and we shall be whole. For whithersoever the soul of man turns itself, unless toward Thee, it is riveted upon sorrows, yea though it is riveted on things beautiful. And yet they, out of Thee, and out of the soul, were not, unless they were from Thee. They rise, and set; and by rising, they begin as it were to be; they grow, that they may be perfected; and perfected, they wax old and wither; and all grow not old, but all wither. So then when they rise and tend to be, the more quickly they grow that they may be, so much the more they haste not to be. This is the law of them. Thus much has Thou allotted them, because they are portions of things, which exist not all at once, but by passing away and succeeding, they together complete that universe, whereof they are portions. And even thus is our speech completed by signs giving forth a sound: but this again is not perfected unless one word pass away when it hath sounded its part, that another may succeed. Out of all these things let my soul praise Thee, O God, Creator of all; yet let not my soul be riveted unto these things with the glue of love, through the senses of the body. For they go whither they were to go, that they might not be; and they rend her with pestilent longings, because she longs to be, yet loves to repose in what she loves. But in these things is no place of repose; they abide not, they flee; and who can follow them with the senses of the flesh? yea, who can grasp them, when they are hard by? For the sense of the flesh is slow, because it is the sense of the flesh; and thereby is it bounded. It sufficeth for that it was made for; but it sufficeth not to stay things running their course from their appointed starting-place to the end appointed. For in Thy Word, by which they are created, they hear their decree, "hence and hitherto." Be not foolish, O my soul, nor become deaf in the ear of thine heart with the tumult of thy folly. Hearken thou too. The Word itself calleth thee to return: and there is the place of rest imperturbable, where love is not forsaken, if itself forsaketh not. Behold, these things pass away, that others may replace them, and so this lower universe be completed by all his parts. But do I depart any whither? saith the Word of God. There fix thy dwelling, trust there whatsoever thou hast thence, O my soul, at least now thou art tired out with vanities. Entrust Truth, whatsoever thou hast from the Truth, and thou shalt lose nothing; and thy decay shall bloom again, and all thy diseases be healed, and thy mortal parts be reformed and renewed, and bound around thee: nor shall they lay thee whither themselves descend; but they shall stand fast with thee, and abide for ever before God, Who abideth and standeth fast for ever. Why then be perverted and follow thy flesh? Be it converted and follow thee. Whatever by her thou hast sense of, is in part; and the whole, whereof these are parts, thou knowest not; and yet they delight thee. But had the sense of thy flesh a capacity for comprehending the whole, and not itself also, for thy punishment, been justly restricted to a part of the whole, thou wouldest, that whatsoever existeth at this present, should pass away, that so the whole might better please thee. For what we speak also, by the same sense of the flesh thou hearest; yet wouldest not thou have the syllables stay, but fly away, that others may come, and thou hear the whole. And so ever, when any one thing is made up of many, all of which do not exist together, all collectively would please more than they do severally, could all be perceived collectively. But far better than these is He who made all; and He is our God, nor doth He pass away, for neither doth aught succeed Him. If bodies please thee, praise God on occasion of them, and turn back thy love upon their Maker; lest in these things which please thee, thou displease. If souls please thee, be they loved in God: for they too are mutable, but in Him are they firmly stablished; else would they pass, and pass away. In Him then be they beloved; and carry unto Him along with thee what souls thou canst, and say to them, "Him let us love, Him let us love: He made these, nor is He far off. For He did not make them, and so depart, but they are of Him, and in Him. See there He is, where truth is loved. He is within the very heart, yet hath the heart strayed from Him. Go back into your heart, ye transgressors, and cleave fast to Him that made you. Stand with Him, and ye shall stand fast. Rest in Him, and ye shall be at rest. Whither go ye in rough ways? Whither go ye? The good that you love is from Him; but it is good and pleasant through reference to Him, and justly shall it be embittered, because unjustly is any thing loved which is from Him, if He be forsaken for it. To what end then would ye still and still walk these difficult and toilsome ways? There is no rest, where ye seek it. Seek what ye seek; but it is not there where ye seek. Ye seek a blessed life in the land of death; it is not there. For how should there be a blessed life where life itself is not? "But our true Life came down hither, and bore our death, and slew him, out of the abundance of His own life: and He thundered, calling aloud to us to return hence to Him into that secret place, whence He came forth to us, first into the Virgin's womb, wherein He espoused the human creation, our mortal flesh, that it might not be for ever mortal, and thence like a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, rejoicing as a giant to run his course. For He lingered not, but ran, calling aloud by words, deeds, death, life, descent, ascension; crying aloud to us to return unto Him. And He departed from our eyes, that we might return into our heart, and there find Him. For He departed, and lo, He is here. He would not be long with us, yet left us not; for He departed thither, whence He never parted, because the world was made by Him. And in this world He was, and into this world He came to save sinners, unto whom my soul confesseth, and He healeth it, for it hath sinned against Him. O ye sons of men, how long so slow of heart? Even now, after the descent of Life to you, will ye not ascend and live? But whither ascend ye, when ye are on high, and set your mouth against the heavens? Descend, that ye may ascend, and ascend to God. For ye have fallen, by ascending against Him." Tell them this, that they may weep in the valley of tears, and so carry them up with thee unto God; because out of His spirit thou speakest thus unto them, if thou speakest, burning with the fire of charity. These things I then knew not, and I loved these lower beauties, and I was sinking to the very depths, and to my friends I said, "Do we love any thing but the beautiful? What then is the beautiful? and what is beauty? What is it that attracts and wins us to the things we love? for unless there were in them a grace and beauty, they could by no means draw us unto them." And I marked and perceived that in bodies themselves, there was a beauty, from their forming a sort of whole, and again, another from apt and mutual correspondence, as of a part of the body with its whole, or a shoe with a foot, and the like. And this consideration sprang up in my mind, out of my inmost heart, and I wrote "on the fair and fit," I think, two or three books. Thou knowest, O Lord, for it is gone from me; for I have them not, but they are strayed from me, I know not how. But what moved me, O Lord my God, to dedicate these books unto Hierius, an orator of Rome, whom I knew not by face, but loved for the fame of his learning which was eminent in him, and some words of his I had heard, which pleased me? But more did he please me, for that he pleased others, who highly extolled him, amazed that out of a Syrian, first instructed in Greek eloquence, should afterwards be formed a wonderful Latin orator, and one most learned in things pertaining unto philosophy. One is commended, and, unseen, he is loved: doth this love enter the heart of the hearer from the mouth of the commender? Not so. But by one who loveth is another kindled. For hence he is loved who is commended, when the commender is believed to extol him with an unfeigned heart; that is, when one that loves him, praises him. For so did I then love men, upon the judgment of men, not Thine, O my God, in Whom no man is deceived. But yet why not for qualities, like those of a famous charioteer, or fighter with beasts in the theatre, known far and wide by a vulgar popularity, but far otherwise, and earnestly, and so as I would be myself commended? For I would not be commended or loved, as actors are (though I myself did commend and love them), but had rather be unknown, than so known; and even hated, than so loved. Where now are the impulses to such various and divers kinds of loves laid up in one soul? Why, since we are equally men, do I love in another what, if I did not hate, I should not spurn and cast from myself? For it holds not, that as a good horse is loved by him, who would not, though he might, be that horse, therefore the same may be said of an actor, who shares our nature. Do I then love in a man, what I hate to be, who am a man? Man himself is a great deep, whose very hairs Thou numberest, O Lord, and they fall not to the ground without Thee. And yet are the hairs of his head easier to be numbered than his feelings, and the beatings of his heart. But that orator was of that sort whom I loved, as wishing to be myself such; and I erred through a swelling pride, and was tossed about with every wind, but yet was steered by Thee, though very secretly. And whence do I know, and whence do I confidently confess unto Thee, that I had loved him more for the love of his commenders, than for the very things for which he was commended? Because, had he been unpraised, and these self-same men had dispraised him, and with dispraise and contempt told the very same things of him, I had never been so kindled and excited to love him. And yet the things had not been other, nor he himself other; but only the feelings of the relators. See where the impotent soul lies along, that is not yet stayed up by the solidity of truth! Just as the gales of tongues blow from the breast of the opinionative, so is it carried this way and that, driven forward and backward, and the light is overclouded to it, and the truth unseen. And lo, it is before us. And it was to me a great matter, that my discourse and labours should be known to that man: which should he approve, I were the more kindled; but if he disapproved, my empty heart, void of Thy solidity, had been wounded. And yet the "fair and fit," whereon I wrote to him, I dwelt on with pleasure, and surveyed it, and admired it, though none joined therein. But I saw not yet, whereon this weighty matter turned in Thy wisdom, O Thou Omnipotent, who only doest wonders; and my mind ranged through corporeal forms; and "fair," I defined and distinguished what is so in itself, and "fit," whose beauty is in correspondence to some other thing: and this I supported by corporeal examples. And I turned to the nature of the mind, but the false notion which I had of spiritual things, let me not see the truth. Yet the force of truth did of itself flash into mine eyes, and I turned away my panting soul from incorporeal substance to lineaments, and colours, and bulky magnitudes. And not being able to see these in the mind, I thought I could not see my mind. And whereas in virtue I loved peace, and in viciousness I abhorred discord; in the first I observed a unity, but in the other, a sort of division. And in that unity I conceived the rational soul, and the nature of truth and of the chief good to consist; but in this division I miserably imagined there to be some unknown substance of irrational life, and the nature of the chief evil, which should not only be a substance, but real life also, and yet not derived from Thee, O my God, of whom are all things. And yet that first I called a Monad, as it had been a soul without sex; but the latter a Duad;--anger, in deeds of violence, and in flagitiousness, lust; not knowing whereof I spake. For I had not known or learned that neither was evil a substance, nor our soul that chief and unchangeable good. For as deeds of violence arise, if that emotion of the soul be corrupted, whence vehement action springs, stirring itself insolently and unrulily; and lusts, when that affection of the soul is ungoverned, whereby carnal pleasures are drunk in, so do errors and false opinions defile the conversation, if the reasonable soul itself be corrupted; as it was then in me, who knew not that it must be enlightened by another light, that it may be partaker of truth, seeing itself is not that nature of truth. For Thou shalt light my candle, O Lord my God, Thou shalt enlighten my darkness: and of Thy fulness have we all received, for Thou art the true light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world; for in Thee there is no variableness, neither shadow of change. But I pressed towards Thee, and was thrust from Thee, that I might taste of death: for thou resistest the proud. But what prouder, than for me with a strange madness to maintain myself to be that by nature which Thou art? For whereas I was subject to change (so much being manifest to me, my very desire to become wise, being the wish, of worse to become better), yet chose I rather to imagine Thee subject to change, and myself not to be that which Thou art. Therefore I was repelled by Thee, and Thou resistedst my vain stiffneckedness, and I imagined corporeal forms, and, myself flesh, I accused flesh; and, a wind that passeth away, I returned not to Thee, but I passed on and on to things which have no being, neither in Thee, nor in me, nor in the body. Neither were they created for me by Thy truth, but by my vanity devised out of things corporeal. And I was wont to ask Thy faithful little ones, my fellow-citizens (from whom, unknown to myself, I stood exiled), I was wont, prating and foolishly, to ask them, "Why then doth the soul err which God created?" But I would not be asked, "Why then doth God err?" And I maintained that Thy unchangeable substance did err upon constraint, rather than confess that my changeable substance had gone astray voluntarily, and now, in punishment, lay in error. I was then some six or seven and twenty years old when I wrote those volumes; revolving within me corporeal fictions, buzzing in the ears of my heart, which I turned, O sweet truth, to thy inward melody, meditating on the "fair and fit," and longing to stand and hearken to Thee, and to rejoice greatly at the Bridegroom's voice, but could not; for by the voices of mine own errors, I was hurried abroad, and through the weight of my own pride, I was sinking into the lowest pit. For Thou didst not make me to hear joy and gladness, nor did the bones exult which were not yet humbled. And what did it profit me, that scarce twenty years old, a book of Aristotle, which they call the ten Predicaments, falling into my hands (on whose very name I hung, as on something great and divine, so often as my rhetoric master of Carthage, and others, accounted learned, mouthed it with cheeks bursting with pride), I read and understood it unaided? And on my conferring with others, who said that they scarcely understood it with very able tutors, not only orally explaining it, but drawing many things in sand, they could tell me no more of it than I had learned, reading it by myself. And the book appeared to me to speak very clearly of substances, such as "man," and of their qualities, as the figure of a man, of what sort it is; and stature, how many feet high; and his relationship, whose brother he is; or where placed; or when born; or whether he stands or sits; or be shod or armed; or does, or suffers anything; and all the innumerable things which might be ranged under these nine Predicaments, of which I have given some specimens, or under that chief Predicament of Substance. What did all this further me, seeing it even hindered me? when, imagining whatever was, was comprehended under those ten Predicaments, I essayed in such wise to understand, O my God, Thy wonderful and unchangeable Unity also, as if Thou also hadst been subjected to Thine own greatness or beauty; so that (as in bodies) they should exist in Thee, as their subject: whereas Thou Thyself art Thy greatness and beauty; but a body is not great or fair in that it is a body, seeing that, though it were less great or fair, it should notwithstanding be a body. But it was falsehood which of Thee I conceived, not truth, fictions of my misery, not the realities of Thy blessedness. For Thou hadst commanded, and it was done in me, that the earth should bring forth briars and thorns to me, and that in the sweat of my brows I should eat my bread. And what did it profit me, that all the books I could procure of the so-called liberal arts, I, the vile slave of vile affections, read by myself, and understood? And I delighted in them, but knew not whence came all, that therein was true or certain. For I had my back to the light, and my face to the things enlightened; whence my face, with which I discerned the things enlightened, itself was not enlightened. Whatever was written, either on rhetoric, or logic, geometry, music, and arithmetic, by myself without much difficulty or any instructor, I understood, Thou knowest, O Lord my God; because both quickness of understanding, and acuteness in discerning, is Thy gift: yet did I not thence sacrifice to Thee. So then it served not to my use, but rather to my perdition, since I went about to get so good a portion of my substance into my own keeping; and I kept not my strength for Thee, but wandered from Thee into a far country, to spend it upon harlotries. For what profited me good abilities, not employed to good uses? For I felt not that those arts were attained with great difficulty, even by the studious and talented, until I attempted to explain them to such; when he most excelled in them who followed me not altogether slowly. But what did this further me, imagining that Thou, O Lord God, the Truth, wert a vast and bright body, and I a fragment of that body? Perverseness too great! But such was I. Nor do I blush, O my God, to confess to Thee Thy mercies towards me, and to call upon Thee, who blushed not then to profess to men my blasphemies, and to bark against Thee. What profited me then my nimble wit in those sciences and all those most knotty volumes, unravelled by me, without aid from human instruction; seeing I erred so foully, and with such sacrilegious shamefulness, in the doctrine of piety? Or what hindrance was a far slower wit to Thy little ones, since they departed not far from Thee, that in the nest of Thy Church they might securely be fledged, and nourish the wings of charity, by the food of a sound faith. O Lord our God, under the shadow of Thy wings let us hope; protect us, and carry us. Thou wilt carry us both when little, and even to hoar hairs wilt Thou carry us; for our firmness, when it is Thou, then is it firmness; but when our own, it is infirmity. Our good ever lives with Thee; from which when we turn away, we are turned aside. Let us now, O Lord, return, that we may not be overturned, because with Thee our good lives without any decay, which good art Thou; nor need we fear, lest there be no place whither to return, because we fell from it: for through our absence, our mansion fell not--Thy eternity. BOOK V Accept the sacrifice of my confessions from the ministry of my tongue, which Thou hast formed and stirred up to confess unto Thy name. Heal Thou all my bones, and let them say, O Lord, who is like unto Thee? For he who confesses to Thee doth not teach Thee what takes place within him; seeing a closed heart closes not out Thy eye, nor can man's hard-heartedness thrust back Thy hand: for Thou dissolvest it at Thy will in pity or in vengeance, and nothing can hide itself from Thy heat. But let my soul praise Thee, that it may love Thee; and let it confess Thy own mercies to Thee, that it may praise Thee. Thy whole creation ceaseth not, nor is silent in Thy praises; neither the spirit of man with voice directed unto Thee, nor creation animate or inanimate, by the voice of those who meditate thereon: that so our souls may from their weariness arise towards Thee, leaning on those things which Thou hast created, and passing on to Thyself, who madest them wonderfully; and there is refreshment and true strength. Let the restless, the godless, depart and flee from Thee; yet Thou seest them, and dividest the darkness. And behold, the universe with them is fair, though they are foul. And how have they injured Thee? or how have they disgraced Thy government, which, from the heaven to this lowest earth, is just and perfect? For whither fled they, when they fled from Thy presence? or where dost not Thou find them? But they fled, that they might not see Thee seeing them, and, blinded, might stumble against Thee (because Thou forsakest nothing Thou hast made); that the unjust, I say, might stumble upon Thee, and justly be hurt; withdrawing themselves from thy gentleness, and stumbling at Thy uprightness, and falling upon their own ruggedness. Ignorant, in truth, that Thou art every where, Whom no place encompasseth! and Thou alone art near, even to those that remove far from Thee. Let them then be turned, and seek Thee; because not as they have forsaken their Creator, hast Thou forsaken Thy creation. Let them be turned and seek Thee; and behold, Thou art there in their heart, in the heart of those that confess to Thee, and cast themselves upon Thee, and weep in Thy bosom, after all their rugged ways. Then dost Thou gently wipe away their tears, and they weep the more, and joy in weeping; even for that Thou, Lord,--not man of flesh and blood, but--Thou, Lord, who madest them, re-makest and comfortest them. But where was I, when I was seeking Thee? And Thou wert before me, but I had gone away from Thee; nor did I find myself, how much less Thee! I would lay open before my God that nine-and-twentieth year of mine age. There had then come to Carthage a certain Bishop of the Manichees, Faustus by name, a great snare of the Devil, and many were entangled by him through that lure of his smooth language: which though I did commend, yet could I separate from the truth of the things which I was earnest to learn: nor did I so much regard the service of oratory as the science which this Faustus, so praised among them, set before me to feed upon. Fame had before bespoken him most knowing in all valuable learning, and exquisitely skilled in the liberal sciences. And since I had read and well remembered much of the philosophers, I compared some things of theirs with those long fables of the Manichees, and found the former the more probable; even although they could only prevail so far as to make judgment of this lower world, the Lord of it they could by no means find out. For Thou art great, O Lord, and hast respect unto the humble, but the proud Thou beholdest afar off. Nor dost Thou draw near, but to the contrite in heart, nor art found by the proud, no, not though by curious skill they could number the stars and the sand, and measure the starry heavens, and track the courses of the planets. For with their understanding and wit, which Thou bestowedst on them, they search out these things; and much have they found out; and foretold, many years before, eclipses of those luminaries, the sun and moon,--what day and hour, and how many digits,--nor did their calculation fail; and it came to pass as they foretold; and they wrote down the rules they had found out, and these are read at this day, and out of them do others foretell in what year and month of the year, and what day of the month, and what hour of the day, and what part of its light, moon or sun is to be eclipsed, and so it shall be, as it is foreshowed. At these things men, that know not this art, marvel and are astonished, and they that know it, exult, and are puffed up; and by an ungodly pride departing from Thee, and failing of Thy light, they foresee a failure of the sun's light, which shall be, so long before, but see not their own, which is. For they search not religiously whence they have the wit, wherewith they search out this. And finding that Thou madest them, they give not themselves up to Thee, to preserve what Thou madest, nor sacrifice to Thee what they have made themselves; nor slay their own soaring imaginations, as fowls of the air, nor their own diving curiosities (wherewith, like the fishes of the sea, they wander over the unknown paths of the abyss), nor their own luxuriousness, as beasts of the field, that Thou, Lord, a consuming fire, mayest burn up those dead cares of theirs, and re-create themselves immortally. But they knew not the way, Thy Word, by Whom Thou madest these things which they number, and themselves who number, and the sense whereby they perceive what they number, and the understanding, out of which they number; or that of Thy wisdom there is no number. But the Only Begotten is Himself made unto us wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and was numbered among us, and paid tribute unto Caesar. They knew not this way whereby to descend to Him from themselves, and by Him ascend unto Him. They knew not this way, and deemed themselves exalted amongst the stars and shining; and behold, they fell upon the earth, and their foolish heart was darkened. They discourse many things truly concerning the creature; but Truth, Artificer of the creature, they seek not piously, and therefore find Him not; or if they find Him, knowing Him to be God, they glorify Him not as God, neither are thankful, but become vain in their imaginations, and profess themselves to be wise, attributing to themselves what is Thine; and thereby with most perverse blindness, study to impute to Thee what is their own, forging lies of Thee who art the Truth, and changing the glory of uncorruptible God into an image made like corruptible man, and to birds, and four-footed beasts, and creeping things, changing Thy truth into a lie, and worshipping and serving the creature more than the Creator. Yet many truths concerning the creature retained I from these men, and saw the reason thereof from calculations, the succession of times, and the visible testimonies of the stars; and compared them with the saying of Manichaeus, which in his frenzy he had written most largely on these subjects; but discovered not any account of the solstices, or equinoxes, or the eclipses of the greater lights, nor whatever of this sort I had learned in the books of secular philosophy. But I was commanded to believe; and yet it corresponded not with what had been established by calculations and my own sight, but was quite contrary. Doth then, O Lord God of truth, whoso knoweth these things, therefore please Thee? Surely unhappy is he who knoweth all these, and knoweth not Thee: but happy whoso knoweth Thee, though he know not these. And whoso knoweth both Thee and them is not the happier for them, but for Thee only, if, knowing Thee, he glorifies Thee as God, and is thankful, and becomes not vain in his imaginations. For as he is better off who knows how to possess a tree, and return thanks to Thee for the use thereof, although he know not how many cubits high it is, or how wide it spreads, than he that can measure it, and count all its boughs, and neither owns it, nor knows or loves its Creator: so a believer, whose all this world of wealth is, and who having nothing, yet possesseth all things, by cleaving unto Thee, whom all things serve, though he know not even the circles of the Great Bear, yet is it folly to doubt but he is in a better state than one who can measure the heavens, and number the stars, and poise the elements, yet neglecteth Thee who hast made all things in number, weight, and measure. But yet who bade that Manichaeus write on these things also, skill in which was no element of piety? For Thou hast said to man, Behold piety and wisdom; of which he might be ignorant, though he had perfect knowledge of these things; but these things, since, knowing not, he most impudently dared to teach, he plainly could have no knowledge of piety. For it is vanity to make profession of these worldly things even when known; but confession to Thee is piety. Wherefore this wanderer to this end spake much of these things, that convicted by those who had truly learned them, it might be manifest what understanding he had in the other abstruser things. For he would not have himself meanly thought of, but went about to persuade men, "That the Holy Ghost, the Comforter and Enricher of Thy faithful ones, was with plenary authority personally within him." When then he was found out to have taught falsely of the heaven and stars, and of the motions of the sun and moon (although these things pertain not to the doctrine of religion), yet his sacrilegious presumption would become evident enough, seeing he delivered things which not only he knew not, but which were falsified, with so mad a vanity of pride, that he sought to ascribe them to himself, as to a divine person. For when I hear any Christian brother ignorant of these things, and mistaken on them, I can patiently behold such a man holding his opinion; nor do I see that any ignorance as to the position or character of the corporeal creation can injure him, so long as he doth not believe any thing unworthy of Thee, O Lord, the Creator of all. But it doth injure him, if he imagine it to pertain to the form of the doctrine of piety, and will yet affirm that too stiffly whereof he is ignorant. And yet is even such an infirmity, in the infancy of faith, borne by our mother Charity, till the new-born may grow up unto a perfect man, so as not to be carried about with every wind of doctrine. But in him who in such wise presumed to be the teacher, source, guide, chief of all whom he could so persuade, that whoso followed him thought that he followed, not a mere man, but Thy Holy Spirit; who would not judge that so great madness, when once convicted of having taught any thing false, were to be detested and utterly rejected? But I had not as yet clearly ascertained whether the vicissitudes of longer and shorter days and nights, and of day and night itself, with the eclipses of the greater lights, and whatever else of the kind I had read of in other books, might be explained consistently with his sayings; so that, if they by any means might, it should still remain a question to me whether it were so or no; but I might, on account of his reputed sanctity, rest my credence upon his authority. And for almost all those nine years, wherein with unsettled mind I had been their disciple, I had longed but too intensely for the coming of this Faustus. For the rest of the sect, whom by chance I had lighted upon, when unable to solve my objections about these things, still held out to me the coming of this Faustus, by conference with whom these and greater difficulties, if I had them, were to be most readily and abundantly cleared. When then he came, I found him a man of pleasing discourse, and who could speak fluently and in better terms, yet still but the self-same things which they were wont to say. But what availed the utmost neatness of the cup-bearer to my thirst for a more precious draught? Mine ears were already cloyed with the like, nor did they seem to me therefore better, because better said; nor therefore true, because eloquent; nor the soul therefore wise, because the face was comely, and the language graceful. But they who held him out to me were no good judges of things; and therefore to them he appeared understanding and wise, because in words pleasing. I felt however that another sort of people were suspicious even of truth, and refused to assent to it, if delivered in a smooth and copious discourse. But Thou, O my God, hadst already taught me by wonderful and secret ways, and therefore I believe that Thou taughtest me, because it is truth, nor is there besides Thee any teacher of truth, where or whencesoever it may shine upon us. Of Thyself therefore had I now learned, that neither ought any thing to seem to be spoken truly, because eloquently; nor therefore falsely, because the utterance of the lips is inharmonious; nor, again, therefore true, because rudely delivered; nor therefore false, because the language is rich; but that wisdom and folly are as wholesome and unwholesome food; and adorned or unadorned phrases as courtly or country vessels; either kind of meats may be served up in either kind of dishes. That greediness then, wherewith I had of so long time expected that man, was delighted verily with his action and feeling when disputing, and his choice and readiness of words to clothe his ideas. I was then delighted, and, with many others and more than they, did I praise and extol him. It troubled me, however, that in the assembly of his auditors, I was not allowed to put in and communicate those questions that troubled me, in familiar converse with him. Which when I might, and with my friends began to engage his ears at such times as it was not unbecoming for him to discuss with me, and had brought forward such things as moved me; I found him first utterly ignorant of liberal sciences, save grammar, and that but in an ordinary way. But because he had read some of Tully's Orations, a very few books of Seneca, some things of the poets, and such few volumes of his own sect as were written in Latin and neatly, and was daily practised in speaking, he acquired a certain eloquence, which proved the more pleasing and seductive because under the guidance of a good wit, and with a kind of natural gracefulness. Is it not thus, as I recall it, O Lord my God, Thou judge of my conscience? before Thee is my heart, and my remembrance, Who didst at that time direct me by the hidden mystery of Thy providence, and didst set those shameful errors of mine before my face, that I might see and hate them. For after it was clear that he was ignorant of those arts in which I thought he excelled, I began to despair of his opening and solving the difficulties which perplexed me (of which indeed however ignorant, he might have held the truths of piety, had he not been a Manichee). For their books are fraught with prolix fables, of the heaven, and stars, sun, and moon, and I now no longer thought him able satisfactorily to decide what I much desired, whether, on comparison of these things with the calculations I had elsewhere read, the account given in the books of Manichaeus were preferable, or at least as good. Which when I proposed to be considered and discussed, he, so far modestly, shrunk from the burthen. For he knew that he knew not these things, and was not ashamed to confess it. For he was not one of those talking persons, many of whom I had endured, who undertook to teach me these things, and said nothing. But this man had a heart, though not right towards Thee, yet neither altogether treacherous to himself. For he was not altogether ignorant of his own ignorance, nor would he rashly be entangled in a dispute, whence he could neither retreat nor extricate himself fairly. Even for this I liked him the better. For fairer is the modesty of a candid mind, than the knowledge of those things which I desired; and such I found him, in all the more difficult and subtile questions. My zeal for the writings of Manichaeus being thus blunted, and despairing yet more of their other teachers, seeing that in divers things which perplexed me, he, so renowned among them, had so turned out; I began to engage with him in the study of that literature, on which he also was much set (and which as rhetoric-reader I was at that time teaching young students at Carthage), and to read with him, either what himself desired to hear, or such as I judged fit for his genius. But all my efforts whereby I had purposed to advance in that sect, upon knowledge of that man, came utterly to an end; not that I detached myself from them altogether, but as one finding nothing better, I had settled to be content meanwhile with what I had in whatever way fallen upon, unless by chance something more eligible should dawn upon me. Thus, that Faustus, to so many a snare of death, had now neither willing nor witting it, begun to loosen that wherein I was taken. For Thy hands, O my God, in the secret purpose of Thy providence, did not forsake my soul; and out of my mother's heart's blood, through her tears night and day poured out, was a sacrifice offered for me unto Thee; and Thou didst deal with me by wondrous ways. Thou didst it, O my God: for the steps of a man are ordered by the Lord, and He shall dispose his way. Or how shall we obtain salvation, but from Thy hand, re-making what it made? Thou didst deal with me, that I should be persuaded to go to Rome, and to teach there rather, what I was teaching at Carthage. And how I was persuaded to this, I will not neglect to confess to Thee; because herein also the deepest recesses of Thy wisdom, and Thy most present mercy to us, must be considered and confessed. I did not wish therefore to go to Rome, because higher gains and higher dignities were warranted me by my friends who persuaded me to this (though even these things had at that time an influence over my mind), but my chief and almost only reason was, that I heard that young men studied there more peacefully, and were kept quiet under a restraint of more regular discipline; so that they did not, at their pleasures, petulantly rush into the school of one whose pupils they were not, nor were even admitted without his permission. Whereas at Carthage there reigns among the scholars a most disgraceful and unruly licence. They burst in audaciously, and with gestures almost frantic, disturb all order which any one hath established for the good of his scholars. Divers outrages they commit, with a wonderful stolidity, punishable by law, did not custom uphold them; that custom evincing them to be the more miserable, in that they now do as lawful what by Thy eternal law shall never be lawful; and they think they do it unpunished, whereas they are punished with the very blindness whereby they do it, and suffer incomparably worse than what they do. The manners then which, when a student, I would not make my own, I was fain as a teacher to endure in others: and so I was well pleased to go where, all that knew it, assured me that the like was not done. But Thou, my refuge and my portion in the land of the living; that I might change my earthly dwelling for the salvation of my soul, at Carthage didst goad me, that I might thereby be torn from it; and at Rome didst proffer me allurements, whereby I might be drawn thither, by men in love with a dying life, the one doing frantic, the other promising vain, things; and, to correct my steps, didst secretly use their and my own perverseness. For both they who disturbed my quiet were blinded with a disgraceful frenzy, and they who invited me elsewhere savoured of earth. And I, who here detested real misery, was there seeking unreal happiness. But why I went hence, and went thither, Thou knewest, O God, yet showedst it neither to me, nor to my mother, who grievously bewailed my journey, and followed me as far as the sea. But I deceived her, holding me by force, that either she might keep me back or go with me, and I feigned that I had a friend whom I could not leave, till he had a fair wind to sail. And I lied to my mother, and such a mother, and escaped: for this also hast Thou mercifully forgiven me, preserving me, thus full of execrable defilements, from the waters of the sea, for the water of Thy Grace; whereby when I was cleansed, the streams of my mother's eyes should be dried, with which for me she daily watered the ground under her face. And yet refusing to return without me, I scarcely persuaded her to stay that night in a place hard by our ship, where was an Oratory in memory of the blessed Cyprian. That night I privily departed, but she was not behind in weeping and prayer. And what, O Lord, was she with so many tears asking of Thee, but that Thou wouldest not suffer me to sail? But Thou, in the depth of Thy counsels and hearing the main point of her desire, regardest not what she then asked, that Thou mightest make me what she ever asked. The wind blew and swelled our sails, and withdrew the shore from our sight; and she on the morrow was there, frantic with sorrow, and with complaints and groans filled Thine ears, Who didst then disregard them; whilst through my desires, Thou wert hurrying me to end all desire, and the earthly part of her affection to me was chastened by the allotted scourge of sorrows. For she loved my being with her, as mothers do, but much more than many; and she knew not how great joy Thou wert about to work for her out of my absence. She knew not; therefore did she weep and wail, and by this agony there appeared in her the inheritance of Eve, with sorrow seeking what in sorrow she had brought forth. And yet, after accusing my treachery and hardheartedness, she betook herself again to intercede to Thee for me, went to her wonted place, and I to Rome. And lo, there was I received by the scourge of bodily sickness, and I was going down to hell, carrying all the sins which I had committed, both against Thee, and myself, and others, many and grievous, over and above that bond of original sin, whereby we all die in Adam. For Thou hadst not forgiven me any of these things in Christ, nor had He abolished by His Cross the enmity which by my sins I had incurred with Thee. For how should He, by the crucifixion of a phantasm, which I believed Him to be? So true, then, was the death of my soul, as that of His flesh seemed to me false; and how true the death of His body, so false was the life of my soul, which did not believe it. And now the fever heightening, I was parting and departing for ever. For had I then parted hence, whither had I departed, but into fire and torments, such as my misdeeds deserved in the truth of Thy appointment? And this she knew not, yet in absence prayed for me. But Thou, everywhere present, heardest her where she was, and, where I was, hadst compassion upon me; that I should recover the health of my body, though frenzied as yet in my sacrilegious heart. For I did not in all that danger desire Thy baptism; and I was better as a boy, when I begged it of my mother's piety, as I have before recited and confessed. But I had grown up to my own shame, and I madly scoffed at the prescripts of Thy medicine, who wouldest not suffer me, being such, to die a double death. With which wound had my mother's heart been pierced, it could never be healed. For I cannot express the affection she bore to me, and with how much more vehement anguish she was now in labour of me in the spirit, than at her childbearing in the flesh. I see not then how she should have been healed, had such a death of mine stricken through the bowels of her love. And where would have been those her so strong and unceasing prayers, unintermitting to Thee alone? But wouldest Thou, God of mercies, despise the contrite and humbled heart of that chaste and sober widow, so frequent in almsdeeds, so full of duty and service to Thy saints, no day intermitting the oblation at Thine altar, twice a day, morning and evening, without any intermission, coming to Thy church, not for idle tattlings and old wives' fables; but that she might hear Thee in Thy discourses, and Thou her in her prayers. Couldest Thou despise and reject from Thy aid the tears of such an one, wherewith she begged of Thee not gold or silver, nor any mutable or passing good, but the salvation of her son's soul? Thou, by whose gift she was such? Never, Lord. Yea, Thou wert at hand, and wert hearing and doing, in that order wherein Thou hadst determined before that it should be done. Far be it that Thou shouldest deceive her in Thy visions and answers, some whereof I have, some I have not mentioned, which she laid up in her faithful heart, and ever praying, urged upon Thee, as Thine own handwriting. For Thou, because Thy mercy endureth for ever, vouchsafest to those to whom Thou forgivest all of their debts, to become also a debtor by Thy promises. Thou recoveredst me then of that sickness, and healedst the son of Thy handmaid, for the time in body, that he might live, for Thee to bestow upon him a better and more abiding health. And even then, at Rome, I joined myself to those deceiving and deceived "holy ones"; not with their disciples only (of which number was he, in whose house I had fallen sick and recovered); but also with those whom they call "The Elect." For I still thought "that it was not we that sin, but that I know not what other nature sinned in us"; and it delighted my pride, to be free from blame; and when I had done any evil, not to confess I had done any, that Thou mightest heal my soul because it had sinned against Thee: but I loved to excuse it, and to accuse I know not what other thing, which was with me, but which I was not. But in truth it was wholly I, and mine impiety had divided me against myself: and that sin was the more incurable, whereby I did not judge myself a sinner; and execrable iniquity it was, that I had rather have Thee, Thee, O God Almighty, to be overcome in me to my destruction, than myself of Thee to salvation. Not as yet then hadst Thou set a watch before my mouth, and a door of safe keeping around my lips, that my heart might not turn aside to wicked speeches, to make excuses of sins, with men that work iniquity; and, therefore, was I still united with their Elect. But now despairing to make proficiency in that false doctrine, even those things (with which if I should find no better, I had resolved to rest contented) I now held more laxly and carelessly. For there half arose a thought in me that those philosophers, whom they call Academics, were wiser than the rest, for that they held men ought to doubt everything, and laid down that no truth can be comprehended by man: for so, not then understanding even their meaning, I also was clearly convinced that they thought, as they are commonly reported. Yet did I freely and openly discourage that host of mine from that over-confidence which I perceived him to have in those fables, which the books of Manichaeus are full of. Yet I lived in more familiar friendship with them, than with others who were not of this heresy. Nor did I maintain it with my ancient eagerness; still my intimacy with that sect (Rome secretly harbouring many of them) made me slower to seek any other way: especially since I despaired of finding the truth, from which they had turned me aside, in Thy Church, O Lord of heaven and earth, Creator of all things visible and invisible: and it seemed to me very unseemly to believe Thee to have the shape of human flesh, and to be bounded by the bodily lineaments of our members. And because, when I wished to think on my God, I knew not what to think of, but a mass of bodies (for what was not such did not seem to me to be anything), this was the greatest, and almost only cause of my inevitable error. For hence I believed Evil also to be some such kind of substance, and to have its own foul and hideous bulk; whether gross, which they called earth, or thin and subtile (like the body of the air), which they imagine to be some malignant mind, creeping through that earth. And because a piety, such as it was, constrained me to believe that the good God never created any evil nature, I conceived two masses, contrary to one another, both unbounded, but the evil narrower, the good more expansive. And from this pestilent beginning, the other sacrilegious conceits followed on me. For when my mind endeavoured to recur to the Catholic faith, I was driven back, since that was not the Catholic faith which I thought to be so. And I seemed to myself more reverential, if I believed of Thee, my God (to whom Thy mercies confess out of my mouth), as unbounded, at least on other sides, although on that one where the mass of evil was opposed to Thee, I was constrained to confess Thee bounded; than if on all sides I should imagine Thee to be bounded by the form of a human body. And it seemed to me better to believe Thee to have created no evil (which to me ignorant seemed not some only, but a bodily substance, because I could not conceive of mind unless as a subtile body, and that diffused in definite spaces), than to believe the nature of evil, such as I conceived it, could come from Thee. Yea, and our Saviour Himself, Thy Only Begotten, I believed to have been reached forth (as it were) for our salvation, out of the mass of Thy most lucid substance, so as to believe nothing of Him, but what I could imagine in my vanity. His Nature then, being such, I thought could not be born of the Virgin Mary, without being mingled with the flesh: and how that which I had so figured to myself could be mingled, and not defiled, I saw not. I feared therefore to believe Him born in the flesh, lest I should be forced to believe Him defiled by the flesh. Now will Thy spiritual ones mildly and lovingly smile upon me, if they shall read these my confessions. Yet such was I. Furthermore, what the Manichees had criticised in Thy Scriptures, I thought could not be defended; yet at times verily I had a wish to confer upon these several points with some one very well skilled in those books, and to make trial what he thought thereon; for the words of one Helpidius, as he spoke and disputed face to face against the said Manichees, had begun to stir me even at Carthage: in that he had produced things out of the Scriptures, not easily withstood, the Manichees' answer whereto seemed to me weak. And this answer they liked not to give publicly, but only to us in private. It was, that the Scriptures of the New Testament had been corrupted by I know not whom, who wished to engraff the law of the Jews upon the Christian faith: yet themselves produced not any uncorrupted copies. But I, conceiving of things corporeal only, was mainly held down, vehemently oppressed and in a manner suffocated by those "masses"; panting under which after the breath of Thy truth, I could not breathe it pure and untainted. I began then diligently to practise that for which I came to Rome, to teach rhetoric; and first, to gather some to my house, to whom, and through whom, I had begun to be known; when lo, I found other offences committed in Rome, to which I was not exposed in Africa. True, those "subvertings" by profligate young men were not here practised, as was told me: but on a sudden, said they, to avoid paying their master's stipend, a number of youths plot together, and remove to another;--breakers of faith, who for love of money hold justice cheap. These also my heart hated, though not with a perfect hatred: for perchance I hated them more because I was to suffer by them, than because they did things utterly unlawful. Of a truth such are base persons, and they go a whoring from Thee, loving these fleeting mockeries of things temporal, and filthy lucre, which fouls the hand that grasps it; hugging the fleeting world, and despising Thee, Who abidest, and recallest, and forgivest the adulteress soul of man, when she returns to Thee. And now I hate such depraved and crooked persons, though I love them if corrigible, so as to prefer to money the learning which they acquire, and to learning, Thee, O God, the truth and fulness of assured good, and most pure peace. But then I rather for my own sake misliked them evil, than liked and wished them good for Thine. When therefore they of Milan had sent to Rome to the prefect of the city, to furnish them with a rhetoric reader for their city, and sent him at the public expense, I made application (through those very persons, intoxicated with Manichaean vanities, to be freed wherefrom I was to go, neither of us however knowing it) that Symmachus, then prefect of the city, would try me by setting me some subject, and so send me. To Milan I came, to Ambrose the Bishop, known to the whole world as among the best of men, Thy devout servant; whose eloquent discourse did then plentifully dispense unto Thy people the flour of Thy wheat, the gladness of Thy oil, and the sober inebriation of Thy wine. To him was I unknowing led by Thee, that by him I might knowingly be led to Thee. That man of God received me as a father, and showed me an Episcopal kindness on my coming. Thenceforth I began to love him, at first indeed not as a teacher of the truth (which I utterly despaired of in Thy Church), but as a person kind towards myself. And I listened diligently to him preaching to the people, not with that intent I ought, but, as it were, trying his eloquence, whether it answered the fame thereof, or flowed fuller or lower than was reported; and I hung on his words attentively; but of the matter I was as a careless and scornful looker-on; and I was delighted with the sweetness of his discourse, more recondite, yet in manner less winning and harmonious, than that of Faustus. Of the matter, however, there was no comparison; for the one was wandering amid Manichaean delusions, the other teaching salvation most soundly. But salvation is far from sinners, such as I then stood before him; and yet was I drawing nearer by little and little, and unconsciously. For though I took no pains to learn what he spake, but only to hear how he spake (for that empty care alone was left me, despairing of a way, open for man, to Thee), yet together with the words which I would choose, came also into my mind the things which I would refuse; for I could not separate them. And while I opened my heart to admit "how eloquently he spake," there also entered "how truly he spake"; but this by degrees. For first, these things also had now begun to appear to me capable of defence; and the Catholic faith, for which I had thought nothing could be said against the Manichees' objections, I now thought might be maintained without shamelessness; especially after I had heard one or two places of the Old Testament resolved, and ofttimes "in a figure," which when I understood literally, I was slain spiritually. Very many places then of those books having been explained, I now blamed my despair, in believing that no answer could be given to such as hated and scoffed at the Law and the Prophets. Yet did I not therefore then see that the Catholic way was to be held, because it also could find learned maintainers, who could at large and with some show of reason answer objections; nor that what I held was therefore to be condemned, because both sides could be maintained. For the Catholic cause seemed to me in such sort not vanquished, as still not as yet to be victorious. Hereupon I earnestly bent my mind, to see if in any way I could by any certain proof convict the Manichees of falsehood. Could I once have conceived a spiritual substance, all their strongholds had been beaten down, and cast utterly out of my mind; but I could not. Notwithstanding, concerning the frame of this world, and the whole of nature, which the senses of the flesh can reach to, as I more and more considered and compared things, I judged the tenets of most of the philosophers to have been much more probable. So then after the manner of the Academics (as they are supposed) doubting of every thing, and wavering between all, I settled so far, that the Manichees were to be abandoned; judging that, even while doubting, I might not continue in that sect, to which I already preferred some of the philosophers; to which philosophers notwithstanding, for that they were without the saving Name of Christ, I utterly refused to commit the cure of my sick soul. I determined therefore so long to be a Catechumen in the Catholic Church, to which I had been commended by my parents, till something certain should dawn upon me, whither I might steer my course. BOOK VI O Thou, my hope from my youth, where wert Thou to me, and whither wert Thou gone? Hadst not Thou created me, and separated me from the beasts of the field, and fowls of the air? Thou hadst made me wiser, yet did I walk in darkness, and in slippery places, and sought Thee abroad out of myself, and found not the God of my heart; and had come into the depths of the sea, and distrusted and despaired of ever finding truth. My mother had now come to me, resolute through piety, following me over sea and land, in all perils confiding in Thee. For in perils of the sea, she comforted the very mariners (by whom passengers unacquainted with the deep, use rather to be comforted when troubled), assuring them of a safe arrival, because Thou hadst by a vision assured her thereof. She found me in grievous peril, through despair of ever finding truth. But when I had discovered to her that I was now no longer a Manichee, though not yet a Catholic Christian, she was not overjoyed, as at something unexpected; although she was now assured concerning that part of my misery, for which she bewailed me as one dead, though to be reawakened by Thee, carrying me forth upon the bier of her thoughts, that Thou mightest say to the son of the widow, Young man, I say unto thee, Arise; and he should revive, and begin to speak, and Thou shouldest deliver him to his mother. Her heart then was shaken with no tumultuous exultation, when she heard that what she daily with tears desired of Thee was already in so great part realised; in that, though I had not yet attained the truth, I was rescued from falsehood; but, as being assured, that Thou, Who hadst promised the whole, wouldest one day give the rest, most calmly, and with a heart full of confidence, she replied to me, "She believed in Christ, that before she departed this life, she should see me a Catholic believer." Thus much to me. But to Thee, Fountain of mercies, poured she forth more copious prayers and tears, that Thou wouldest hasten Thy help, and enlighten my darkness; and she hastened the more eagerly to the Church, and hung upon the lips of Ambrose, praying for the fountain of that water, which springeth up unto life everlasting. But that man she loved as an angel of God, because she knew that by him I had been brought for the present to that doubtful state of faith I now was in, through which she anticipated most confidently that I should pass from sickness unto health, after the access, as it were, of a sharper fit, which physicians call "the crisis." When then my mother had once, as she was wont in Afric, brought to the Churches built in memory of the Saints, certain cakes, and bread and wine, and was forbidden by the door-keeper; so soon as she knew that the Bishop had forbidden this, she so piously and obediently embraced his wishes, that I myself wondered how readily she censured her own practice, rather than discuss his prohibition. For wine-bibbing did not lay siege to her spirit, nor did love of wine provoke her to hatred of the truth, as it doth too many (both men and women), who revolt at a lesson of sobriety, as men well-drunk at a draught mingled with water. But she, when she had brought her basket with the accustomed festival-food, to be but tasted by herself, and then given away, never joined therewith more than one small cup of wine, diluted according to her own abstemious habits, which for courtesy she would taste. And if there were many churches of the departed saints that were to be honoured in that manner, she still carried round that same one cup, to be used every where; and this, though not only made very watery, but unpleasantly heated with carrying about, she would distribute to those about her by small sips; for she sought there devotion, not pleasure. So soon, then, as she found this custom to be forbidden by that famous preacher and most pious prelate, even to those that would use it soberly, lest so an occasion of excess might be given to the drunken; and for these, as it were, anniversary funeral solemnities did much resemble the superstition of the Gentiles, she most willingly forbare it: and for a basket filled with fruits of the earth, she had learned to bring to the Churches of the martyrs a breast filled with more purified petitions, and to give what she could to the poor; that so the communication of the Lord's Body might be there rightly celebrated, where, after the example of His Passion, the martyrs had been sacrificed and crowned. But yet it seems to me, O Lord my God, and thus thinks my heart of it in Thy sight, that perhaps she would not so readily have yielded to the cutting off of this custom, had it been forbidden by another, whom she loved not as Ambrose, whom, for my salvation, she loved most entirely; and he her again, for her most religious conversation, whereby in good works, so fervent in spirit, she was constant at church; so that, when he saw me, he often burst forth into her praises; congratulating me that I had such a mother; not knowing what a son she had in me, who doubted of all these things, and imagined the way to life could not be found out. Nor did I yet groan in my prayers, that Thou wouldest help me; but my spirit was wholly intent on learning, and restless to dispute. And Ambrose himself, as the world counts happy, I esteemed a happy man, whom personages so great held in such honour; only his celibacy seemed to me a painful course. But what hope he bore within him, what struggles he had against the temptations which beset his very excellencies, or what comfort in adversities, and what sweet joys Thy Bread had for the hidden mouth of his spirit, when chewing the cud thereof, I neither could conjecture, nor had experienced. Nor did he know the tides of my feelings, or the abyss of my danger. For I could not ask of him, what I would as I would, being shut out both from his ear and speech by multitudes of busy people, whose weaknesses he served. With whom when he was not taken up (which was but a little time), he was either refreshing his body with the sustenance absolutely necessary, or his mind with reading. But when he was reading, his eye glided over the pages, and his heart searched out the sense, but his voice and tongue were at rest. Ofttimes when we had come (for no man was forbidden to enter, nor was it his wont that any who came should be announced to him), we saw him thus reading to himself, and never otherwise; and having long sat silent (for who durst intrude on one so intent?) we were fain to depart, conjecturing that in the small interval which he obtained, free from the din of others' business, for the recruiting of his mind, he was loth to be taken off; and perchance he dreaded lest if the author he read should deliver any thing obscurely, some attentive or perplexed hearer should desire him to expound it, or to discuss some of the harder questions; so that his time being thus spent, he could not turn over so many volumes as he desired; although the preserving of his voice (which a very little speaking would weaken) might be the truer reason for his reading to himself. But with what intent soever he did it, certainly in such a man it was good. I however certainly had no opportunity of enquiring what I wished of that so holy oracle of Thine, his breast, unless the thing might be answered briefly. But those tides in me, to be poured out to him, required his full leisure, and never found it. I heard him indeed every Lord's day, rightly expounding the Word of truth among the people; and I was more and more convinced that all the knots of those crafty calumnies, which those our deceivers had knit against the Divine Books, could be unravelled. But when I understood withal, that "man created by Thee, after Thine own image," was not so understood by Thy spiritual sons, whom of the Catholic Mother Thou hast born again through grace, as though they believed and conceived of Thee as bounded by human shape (although what a spiritual substance should be I had not even a faint or shadowy notion); yet, with joy I blushed at having so many years barked not against the Catholic faith, but against the fictions of carnal imaginations. For so rash and impious had I been, that what I ought by enquiring to have learned, I had pronounced on, condemning. For Thou, Most High, and most near; most secret, and most present; Who hast not limbs some larger, some smaller, but art wholly every where, and no where in space, art not of such corporeal shape, yet hast Thou made man after Thine own image; and behold, from head to foot is he contained in space. Ignorant then how this Thy image should subsist, I should have knocked and proposed the doubt, how it was to be believed, not insultingly opposed it, as if believed. Doubt, then, what to hold for certain, the more sharply gnawed my heart, the more ashamed I was, that so long deluded and deceived by the promise of certainties, I had with childish error and vehemence, prated of so many uncertainties. For that they were falsehoods became clear to me later. However I was certain that they were uncertain, and that I had formerly accounted them certain, when with a blind contentiousness, I accused Thy Catholic Church, whom I now discovered, not indeed as yet to teach truly, but at least not to teach that for which I had grievously censured her. So I was confounded, and converted: and I joyed, O my God, that the One Only Church, the body of Thine Only Son (wherein the name of Christ had been put upon me as an infant), had no taste for infantine conceits; nor in her sound doctrine maintained any tenet which should confine Thee, the Creator of all, in space, however great and large, yet bounded every where by the limits of a human form. I joyed also that the old Scriptures of the law and the Prophets were laid before me, not now to be perused with that eye to which before they seemed absurd, when I reviled Thy holy ones for so thinking, whereas indeed they thought not so: and with joy I heard Ambrose in his sermons to the people, oftentimes most diligently recommend this text for a rule, The letter killeth, but the Spirit giveth life; whilst he drew aside the mystic veil, laying open spiritually what, according to the letter, seemed to teach something unsound; teaching herein nothing that offended me, though he taught what I knew not as yet, whether it were true. For I kept my heart from assenting to any thing, fearing to fall headlong; but by hanging in suspense I was the worse killed. For I wished to be as assured of the things I saw not, as I was that seven and three are ten. For I was not so mad as to think that even this could not be comprehended; but I desired to have other things as clear as this, whether things corporeal, which were not present to my senses, or spiritual, whereof I knew not how to conceive, except corporeally. And by believing might I have been cured, that so the eyesight of my soul being cleared, might in some way be directed to Thy truth, which abideth always, and in no part faileth. But as it happens that one who has tried a bad physician, fears to trust himself with a good one, so was it with the health of my soul, which could not be healed but by believing, and lest it should believe falsehoods, refused to be cured; resisting Thy hands, Who hast prepared the medicines of faith, and hast applied them to the diseases of the whole world, and given unto them so great authority. Being led, however, from this to prefer the Catholic doctrine, I felt that her proceeding was more unassuming and honest, in that she required to be believed things not demonstrated (whether it was that they could in themselves be demonstrated but not to certain persons, or could not at all be), whereas among the Manichees our credulity was mocked by a promise of certain knowledge, and then so many most fabulous and absurd things were imposed to be believed, because they could not be demonstrated. Then Thou, O Lord, little by little with most tender and most merciful hand, touching and composing my heart, didst persuade me--considering what innumerable things I believed, which I saw not, nor was present while they were done, as so many things in secular history, so many reports of places and of cities, which I had not seen; so many of friends, so many of physicians, so many continually of other men, which unless we should believe, we should do nothing at all in this life; lastly, with how unshaken an assurance I believed of what parents I was born, which I could not know, had I not believed upon hearsay--considering all this, Thou didst persuade me, that not they who believed Thy Books (which Thou hast established in so great authority among almost all nations), but they who believed them not, were to be blamed; and that they were not to be heard, who should say to me, "How knowest thou those Scriptures to have been imparted unto mankind by the Spirit of the one true and most true God?" For this very thing was of all most to be believed, since no contentiousness of blasphemous questionings, of all that multitude which I had read in the self-contradicting philosophers, could wring this belief from me, "That Thou art" whatsoever Thou wert (what I knew not), and "That the government of human things belongs to Thee." This I believed, sometimes more strongly, more weakly otherwhiles; yet I ever believed both that Thou wert, and hadst a care of us; though I was ignorant, both what was to be thought of Thy substance, and what way led or led back to Thee. Since then we were too weak by abstract reasonings to find out truth: and for this very cause needed the authority of Holy Writ; I had now begun to believe that Thou wouldest never have given such excellency of authority to that Writ in all lands, hadst Thou not willed thereby to be believed in, thereby sought. For now what things, sounding strangely in the Scripture, were wont to offend me, having heard divers of them expounded satisfactorily, I referred to the depth of the mysteries, and its authority appeared to me the more venerable, and more worthy of religious credence, in that, while it lay open to all to read, it reserved the majesty of its mysteries within its profounder meaning, stooping to all in the great plainness of its words and lowliness of its style, yet calling forth the intensest application of such as are not light of heart; that so it might receive all in its open bosom, and through narrow passages waft over towards Thee some few, yet many more than if it stood not aloft on such a height of authority, nor drew multitudes within its bosom by its holy lowliness. These things I thought on, and Thou wert with me; I sighed, and Thou heardest me; I wavered, and Thou didst guide me; I wandered through the broad way of the world, and Thou didst not forsake me. I panted after honours, gains, marriage; and thou deridedst me. In these desires I underwent most bitter crosses, Thou being the more gracious, the less Thou sufferedst aught to grow sweet to me, which was not Thou. Behold my heart, O Lord, who wouldest I should remember all this, and confess to Thee. Let my soul cleave unto Thee, now that Thou hast freed it from that fast-holding birdlime of death. How wretched was it! and Thou didst irritate the feeling of its wound, that forsaking all else, it might be converted unto Thee, who art above all, and without whom all things would be nothing; be converted, and be healed. How miserable was I then, and how didst Thou deal with me, to make me feel my misery on that day, when I was preparing to recite a panegyric of the Emperor, wherein I was to utter many a lie, and lying, was to be applauded by those who knew I lied, and my heart was panting with these anxieties, and boiling with the feverishness of consuming thoughts. For, passing through one of the streets of Milan, I observed a poor beggar, then, I suppose, with a full belly, joking and joyous: and I sighed, and spoke to the friends around me, of the many sorrows of our frenzies; for that by all such efforts of ours, as those wherein I then toiled dragging along, under the goading of desire, the burthen of my own wretchedness, and, by dragging, augmenting it, we yet looked to arrive only at that very joyousness whither that beggar-man had arrived before us, who should never perchance attain it. For what he had obtained by means of a few begged pence, the same was I plotting for by many a toilsome turning and winding; the joy of a temporary felicity. For he verily had not the true joy; but yet I with those my ambitious designs was seeking one much less true. And certainly he was joyous, I anxious; he void of care, I full of fears. But should any ask me, had I rather be merry or fearful? I would answer merry. Again, if he asked had I rather be such as he was, or what I then was? I should choose to be myself, though worn with cares and fears; but out of wrong judgment; for, was it the truth? For I ought not to prefer myself to him, because more learned than he, seeing I had no joy therein, but sought to please men by it; and that not to instruct, but simply to please. Wherefore also Thou didst break my bones with the staff of Thy correction. Away with those then from my soul who say to her, "It makes a difference whence a man's joy is. That beggar-man joyed in drunkenness; Thou desiredst to joy in glory." What glory, Lord? That which is not in Thee. For even as his was no true joy, so was that no true glory: and it overthrew my soul more. He that very night should digest his drunkenness; but I had slept and risen again with mine, and was to sleep again, and again to rise with it, how many days, Thou, God, knowest. But "it doth make a difference whence a man's joy is." I know it, and the joy of a faithful hope lieth incomparably beyond such vanity. Yea, and so was he then beyond me: for he verily was the happier; not only for that he was thoroughly drenched in mirth, I disembowelled with cares: but he, by fair wishes, had gotten wine; I, by lying, was seeking for empty, swelling praise. Much to this purpose said I then to my friends: and I often marked in them how it fared with me; and I found it went ill with me, and grieved, and doubled that very ill; and if any prosperity smiled on me, I was loth to catch at it, for almost before I could grasp it, it flew away. These things we, who were living as friends together, bemoaned together, but chiefly and most familiarly did I speak thereof with Alypius and Nebridius, of whom Alypius was born in the same town with me, of persons of chief rank there, but younger than I. For he had studied under me, both when I first lectured in our town, and afterwards at Carthage, and he loved me much, because I seemed to him kind, and learned; and I him, for his great towardliness to virtue, which was eminent enough in one of no greater years. Yet the whirlpool of Carthaginian habits (amongst whom those idle spectacles are hotly followed) had drawn him into the madness of the Circus. But while he was miserably tossed therein, and I, professing rhetoric there, had a public school, as yet he used not my teaching, by reason of some unkindness risen betwixt his father and me. I had found then how deadly he doted upon the Circus, and was deeply grieved that he seemed likely, nay, or had thrown away so great promise: yet had I no means of advising or with a sort of constraint reclaiming him, either by the kindness of a friend, or the authority of a master. For I supposed that he thought of me as did his father; but he was not such; laying aside then his father's mind in that matter, he began to greet me, come sometimes into my lecture room, hear a little, and be gone. I however had forgotten to deal with him, that he should not, through a blind and headlong desire of vain pastimes, undo so good a wit. But Thou, O Lord, who guidest the course of all Thou hast created, hadst not forgotten him, who was one day to be among Thy children, Priest and Dispenser of Thy Sacrament; and that his amendment might plainly be attributed to Thyself, Thou effectedst it through me, unknowingly. For as one day I sat in my accustomed place, with my scholars before me, he entered, greeted me, sat down, and applied his mind to what I then handled. I had by chance a passage in hand, which while I was explaining, a likeness from the Circensian races occurred to me, as likely to make what I would convey pleasanter and plainer, seasoned with biting mockery of those whom that madness had enthralled; God, Thou knowest that I then thought not of curing Alypius of that infection. But he took it wholly to himself, and thought that I said it simply for his sake. And whence another would have taken occasion of offence with me, that right-minded youth took as a ground of being offended at himself, and loving me more fervently. For Thou hadst said it long ago, and put it into Thy book, Rebuke a wise man and he will love Thee. But I had not rebuked him, but Thou, who employest all, knowing or not knowing, in that order which Thyself knowest (and that order is just), didst of my heart and tongue make burning coals, by which to set on fire the hopeful mind, thus languishing, and so cure it. Let him be silent in Thy praises, who considers not Thy mercies, which confess unto Thee out of my inmost soul. For he upon that speech burst out of that pit so deep, wherein he was wilfully plunged, and was blinded with its wretched pastimes; and he shook his mind with a strong self-command; whereupon all the filths of the Circensian pastimes flew off from him, nor came he again thither. Upon this, he prevailed with his unwilling father that he might be my scholar. He gave way, and gave in. And Alypius beginning to be my hearer again, was involved in the same superstition with me, loving in the Manichees that show of continency which he supposed true and unfeigned. Whereas it was a senseless and seducing continency, ensnaring precious souls, unable as yet to reach the depth of virtue, yet readily beguiled with the surface of what was but a shadowy and counterfeit virtue. He, not forsaking that secular course which his parents had charmed him to pursue, had gone before me to Rome, to study law, and there he was carried away incredibly with an incredible eagerness after the shows of gladiators. For being utterly averse to and detesting spectacles, he was one day by chance met by divers of his acquaintance and fellow-students coming from dinner, and they with a familiar violence haled him, vehemently refusing and resisting, into the Amphitheatre, during these cruel and deadly shows, he thus protesting: "Though you hale my body to that place, and there set me, can you force me also to turn my mind or my eyes to those shows? I shall then be absent while present, and so shall overcome both you and them." They, hearing this, led him on nevertheless, desirous perchance to try that very thing, whether he could do as he said. When they were come thither, and had taken their places as they could, the whole place kindled with that savage pastime. But he, closing the passage of his eyes, forbade his mind to range abroad after such evil; and would he had stopped his ears also! For in the fight, when one fell, a mighty cry of the whole people striking him strongly, overcome by curiosity, and as if prepared to despise and be superior to it whatsoever it were, even when seen, he opened his eyes, and was stricken with a deeper wound in his soul than the other, whom he desired to behold, was in his body; and he fell more miserably than he upon whose fall that mighty noise was raised, which entered through his ears, and unlocked his eyes, to make way for the striking and beating down of a soul, bold rather than resolute, and the weaker, in that it had presumed on itself, which ought to have relied on Thee. For so soon as he saw that blood, he therewith drunk down savageness; nor turned away, but fixed his eye, drinking in frenzy, unawares, and was delighted with that guilty fight, and intoxicated with the bloody pastime. Nor was he now the man he came, but one of the throng he came unto, yea, a true associate of theirs that brought him thither. Why say more? He beheld, shouted, kindled, carried thence with him the madness which should goad him to return not only with them who first drew him thither, but also before them, yea and to draw in others. Yet thence didst Thou with a most strong and most merciful hand pluck him, and taughtest him to have confidence not in himself, but in Thee. But this was after. But this was already being laid up in his memory to be a medicine hereafter. So was that also, that when he was yet studying under me at Carthage, and was thinking over at mid-day in the market-place what he was to say by heart (as scholars use to practise), Thou sufferedst him to be apprehended by the officers of the market-place for a thief. For no other cause, I deem, didst Thou, our God, suffer it, but that he who was hereafter to prove so great a man, should already begin to learn that in judging of causes, man was not readily to be condemned by man out of a rash credulity. For as he was walking up and down by himself before the judgment-seat, with his note-book and pen, lo, a young man, a lawyer, the real thief, privily bringing a hatchet, got in, unperceived by Alypius, as far as the leaden gratings which fence in the silversmiths' shops, and began to cut away the lead. But the noise of the hatchet being heard, the silversmiths beneath began to make a stir, and sent to apprehend whomever they should find. But he, hearing their voices, ran away, leaving his hatchet, fearing to be taken with it. Alypius now, who had not seen him enter, was aware of his going, and saw with what speed he made away. And being desirous to know the matter, entered the place; where finding the hatchet, he was standing, wondering and considering it, when behold, those that had been sent, find him alone with the hatchet in his hand, the noise whereof had startled and brought them thither. They seize him, hale him away, and gathering the dwellers in the market-place together, boast of having taken a notorious thief, and so he was being led away to be taken before the judge. But thus far was Alypius to be instructed. For forthwith, O Lord, Thou succouredst his innocency, whereof Thou alone wert witness. For as he was being led either to prison or to punishment, a certain architect met them, who had the chief charge of the public buildings. Glad they were to meet him especially, by whom they were wont to be suspected of stealing the goods lost out of the marketplace, as though to show him at last by whom these thefts were committed. He, however, had divers times seen Alypius at a certain senator's house, to whom he often went to pay his respects; and recognising him immediately, took him aside by the hand, and enquiring the occasion of so great a calamity, heard the whole matter, and bade all present, amid much uproar and threats, to go with him. So they came to the house of the young man who had done the deed. There, before the door, was a boy so young as to be likely, not apprehending any harm to his master, to disclose the whole. For he had attended his master to the market-place. Whom so soon as Alypius remembered, he told the architect: and he showing the hatchet to the boy, asked him "Whose that was?" "Ours," quoth he presently: and being further questioned, he discovered every thing. Thus the crime being transferred to that house, and the multitude ashamed, which had begun to insult over Alypius, he who was to be a dispenser of Thy Word, and an examiner of many causes in Thy Church, went away better experienced and instructed. Him then I had found at Rome, and he clave to me by a most strong tie, and went with me to Milan, both that he might not leave me, and might practise something of the law he had studied, more to please his parents than himself. There he had thrice sat as Assessor, with an uncorruptness much wondered at by others, he wondering at others rather who could prefer gold to honesty. His character was tried besides, not only with the bait of covetousness, but with the goad of fear. At Rome he was Assessor to the count of the Italian Treasury. There was at that time a very powerful senator, to whose favours many stood indebted, many much feared. He would needs, by his usual power, have a thing allowed him which by the laws was unallowed. Alypius resisted it: a bribe was promised; with all his heart he scorned it: threats were held out; he trampled upon them: all wondering at so unwonted a spirit, which neither desired the friendship, nor feared the enmity of one so great and so mightily renowned for innumerable means of doing good or evil. And the very judge, whose councillor Alypius was, although also unwilling it should be, yet did not openly refuse, but put the matter off upon Alypius, alleging that he would not allow him to do it: for in truth had the judge done it, Alypius would have decided otherwise. With this one thing in the way of learning was he well-nigh seduced, that he might have books copied for him at Praetorian prices, but consulting justice, he altered his deliberation for the better; esteeming equity whereby he was hindered more gainful than the power whereby he were allowed. These are slight things, but he that is faithful in little, is faithful also in much. Nor can that any how be void, which proceeded out of the mouth of Thy Truth: If ye have not been faithful in the unrighteous Mammon, who will commit to your trust true riches? And if ye have not been faithful in that which is another man's, who shall give you that which is your own? He being such, did at that time cleave to me, and with me wavered in purpose, what course of life was to be taken. Nebridius also, who having left his native country near Carthage, yea and Carthage itself, where he had much lived, leaving his excellent family-estate and house, and a mother behind, who was not to follow him, had come to Milan, for no other reason but that with me he might live in a most ardent search after truth and wisdom. Like me he sighed, like me he wavered, an ardent searcher after true life, and a most acute examiner of the most difficult questions. Thus were there the mouths of three indigent persons, sighing out their wants one to another, and waiting upon Thee that Thou mightest give them their meat in due season. And in all the bitterness which by Thy mercy followed our worldly affairs, as we looked towards the end, why we should suffer all this, darkness met us; and we turned away groaning, and saying, How long shall these things be? This too we often said; and so saying forsook them not, for as yet there dawned nothing certain, which these forsaken, we might embrace. And I, viewing and reviewing things, most wondered at the length of time from that my nineteenth year, wherein I had begun to kindle with the desire of wisdom, settling when I had found her, to abandon all the empty hopes and lying frenzies of vain desires. And lo, I was now in my thirtieth year, sticking in the same mire, greedy of enjoying things present, which passed away and wasted my soul; while I said to myself, "Tomorrow I shall find it; it will appear manifestly and I shall grasp it; lo, Faustus the Manichee will come, and clear every thing! O you great men, ye Academicians, it is true then, that no certainty can be attained for the ordering of life! Nay, let us search the more diligently, and despair not. Lo, things in the ecclesiastical books are not absurd to us now, which sometimes seemed absurd, and may be otherwise taken, and in a good sense. I will take my stand, where, as a child, my parents placed me, until the clear truth be found out. But where shall it be sought or when? Ambrose has no leisure; we have no leisure to read; where shall we find even the books? Whence, or when procure them? from whom borrow them? Let set times be appointed, and certain hours be ordered for the health of our soul. Great hope has dawned; the Catholic Faith teaches not what we thought, and vainly accused it of; her instructed members hold it profane to believe God to be bounded by the figure of a human body: and do we doubt to 'knock,' that the rest 'may be opened'? The forenoons our scholars take up; what do we during the rest? Why not this? But when then pay we court to our great friends, whose favour we need? When compose what we may sell to scholars? When refresh ourselves, unbending our minds from this intenseness of care? "Perish every thing, dismiss we these empty vanities, and betake ourselves to the one search for truth! Life is vain, death uncertain; if it steals upon us on a sudden, in what state shall we depart hence? and where shall we learn what here we have neglected? and shall we not rather suffer the punishment of this negligence? What, if death itself cut off and end all care and feeling? Then must this be ascertained. But God forbid this! It is no vain and empty thing, that the excellent dignity of the authority of the Christian Faith hath overspread the whole world. Never would such and so great things be by God wrought for us, if with the death of the body the life of the soul came to an end. Wherefore delay then to abandon worldly hopes, and give ourselves wholly to seek after God and the blessed life? But wait! Even those things are pleasant; they have some, and no small sweetness. We must not lightly abandon them, for it were a shame to return again to them. See, it is no great matter now to obtain some station, and then what should we more wish for? We have store of powerful friends; if nothing else offer, and we be in much haste, at least a presidentship may be given us: and a wife with some money, that she increase not our charges: and this shall be the bound of desire. Many great men, and most worthy of imitation, have given themselves to the study of wisdom in the state of marriage." While I went over these things, and these winds shifted and drove my heart this way and that, time passed on, but I delayed to turn to the Lord; and from day to day deferred to live in Thee, and deferred not daily to die in myself. Loving a happy life, I feared it in its own abode, and sought it, by fleeing from it. I thought I should be too miserable, unless folded in female arms; and of the medicine of Thy mercy to cure that infirmity I thought not, not having tried it. As for continency, I supposed it to be in our own power (though in myself I did not find that power), being so foolish as not to know what is written, None can be continent unless Thou give it; and that Thou wouldest give it, if with inward groanings I did knock at Thine ears, and with a settled faith did cast my care on Thee. Alypius indeed kept me from marrying; alleging that so could we by no means with undistracted leisure live together in the love of wisdom, as we had long desired. For himself was even then most pure in this point, so that it was wonderful; and that the more, since in the outset of his youth he had entered into that course, but had not stuck fast therein; rather had he felt remorse and revolting at it, living thenceforth until now most continently. But I opposed him with the examples of those who as married men had cherished wisdom, and served God acceptably, and retained their friends, and loved them faithfully. Of whose greatness of spirit I was far short; and bound with the disease of the flesh, and its deadly sweetness, drew along my chain, dreading to be loosed, and as if my wound had been fretted, put back his good persuasions, as it were the hand of one that would unchain me. Moreover, by me did the serpent speak unto Alypius himself, by my tongue weaving and laying in his path pleasurable snares, wherein his virtuous and free feet might be entangled. For when he wondered that I, whom he esteemed not slightly, should stick so fast in the birdlime of that pleasure, as to protest (so oft as we discussed it) that I could never lead a single life; and urged in my defence when I saw him wonder, that there was great difference between his momentary and scarce-remembered knowledge of that life, which so he might easily despise, and my continued acquaintance whereto if the honourable name of marriage were added, he ought not to wonder why I could not contemn that course; he began also to desire to be married; not as overcome with desire of such pleasure, but out of curiosity. For he would fain know, he said, what that should be, without which my life, to him so pleasing, would to me seem not life but a punishment. For his mind, free from that chain, was amazed at my thraldom; and through that amazement was going on to a desire of trying it, thence to the trial itself, and thence perhaps to sink into that bondage whereat he wondered, seeing he was willing to make a covenant with death; and he that loves danger, shall fall into it. For whatever honour there be in the office of well-ordering a married life, and a family, moved us but slightly. But me for the most part the habit of satisfying an insatiable appetite tormented, while it held me captive; him, an admiring wonder was leading captive. So were we, until Thou, O Most High, not forsaking our dust, commiserating us miserable, didst come to our help, by wondrous and secret ways. Continual effort was made to have me married. I wooed, I was promised, chiefly through my mother's pains, that so once married, the health-giving baptism might cleanse me, towards which she rejoiced that I was being daily fitted, and observed that her prayers, and Thy promises, were being fulfilled in my faith. At which time verily, both at my request and her own longing, with strong cries of heart she daily begged of Thee, that Thou wouldest by a vision discover unto her something concerning my future marriage; Thou never wouldest. She saw indeed certain vain and fantastic things, such as the energy of the human spirit, busied thereon, brought together; and these she told me of, not with that confidence she was wont, when Thou showedst her any thing, but slighting them. For she could, she said, through a certain feeling, which in words she could not express, discern betwixt Thy revelations, and the dreams of her own soul. Yet the matter was pressed on, and a maiden asked in marriage, two years under the fit age; and, as pleasing, was waited for. And many of us friends conferring about, and detesting the turbulent turmoils of human life, had debated and now almost resolved on living apart from business and the bustle of men; and this was to be thus obtained; we were to bring whatever we might severally procure, and make one household of all; so that through the truth of our friendship nothing should belong especially to any; but the whole thus derived from all, should as a whole belong to each, and all to all. We thought there might be some often persons in this society; some of whom were very rich, especially Romanianus our townsman, from childhood a very familiar friend of mine, whom the grievous perplexities of his affairs had brought up to court; who was the most earnest for this project; and therein was his voice of great weight, because his ample estate far exceeded any of the rest. We had settled also that two annual officers, as it were, should provide all things necessary, the rest being undisturbed. But when we began to consider whether the wives, which some of us already had, others hoped to have, would allow this, all that plan, which was being so well moulded, fell to pieces in our hands, was utterly dashed and cast aside. Thence we betook us to sighs, and groans, and our steps to follow the broad and beaten ways of the world; for many thoughts were in our heart, but Thy counsel standeth for ever. Out of which counsel Thou didst deride ours, and preparedst Thine own; purposing to give us meat in due season, and to fill our souls with blessing. Meanwhile my sins were being multiplied, and my concubine being torn from my side as a hindrance to my marriage, my heart which clave unto her was torn and wounded and bleeding. And she returned to Afric, vowing unto Thee never to know any other man, leaving with me my son by her. But unhappy I, who could not imitate a very woman, impatient of delay, inasmuch as not till after two years was I to obtain her I sought not being so much a lover of marriage as a slave to lust, procured another, though no wife, that so by the servitude of an enduring custom, the disease of my soul might be kept up and carried on in its vigour, or even augmented, into the dominion of marriage. Nor was that my wound cured, which had been made by the cutting away of the former, but after inflammation and most acute pain, it mortified, and my pains became less acute, but more desperate. To Thee be praise, glory to Thee, Fountain of mercies. I was becoming more miserable, and Thou nearer. Thy right hand was continually ready to pluck me out of the mire, and to wash me thoroughly, and I knew it not; nor did anything call me back from a yet deeper gulf of carnal pleasures, but the fear of death, and of Thy judgment to come; which amid all my changes, never departed from my breast. And in my disputes with my friends Alypius and Nebridius of the nature of good and evil, I held that Epicurus had in my mind won the palm, had I not believed that after death there remained a life for the soul, and places of requital according to men's deserts, which Epicurus would not believe. And I asked, "were we immortal, and to live in perpetual bodily pleasure, without fear of losing it, why should we not be happy, or what else should we seek?" not knowing that great misery was involved in this very thing, that, being thus sunk and blinded, I could not discern that light of excellence and beauty, to be embraced for its own sake, which the eye of flesh cannot see, and is seen by the inner man. Nor did I, unhappy, consider from what source it sprung, that even on these things, foul as they were, I with pleasure discoursed with my friends, nor could I, even according to the notions I then had of happiness, be happy without friends, amid what abundance soever of carnal pleasures. And yet these friends I loved for themselves only, and I felt that I was beloved of them again for myself only. O crooked paths! Woe to the audacious soul, which hoped, by forsaking Thee, to gain some better thing! Turned it hath, and turned again, upon back, sides, and belly, yet all was painful; and Thou alone rest. And behold, Thou art at hand, and deliverest us from our wretched wanderings, and placest us in Thy way, and dost comfort us, and say, "Run; I will carry you; yea I will bring you through; there also will I carry you." BOOK VII Deceased was now that my evil and abominable youth, and I was passing into early manhood; the more defiled by vain things as I grew in years, who could not imagine any substance, but such as is wont to be seen with these eyes. I thought not of Thee, O God, under the figure of a human body; since I began to hear aught of wisdom, I always avoided this; and rejoiced to have found the same in the faith of our spiritual mother, Thy Catholic Church. But what else to conceive of Thee I knew not. And I, a man, and such a man, sought to conceive of Thee the sovereign, only, true God; and I did in my inmost soul believe that Thou wert incorruptible, and uninjurable, and unchangeable; because though not knowing whence or how, yet I saw plainly, and was sure, that that which may be corrupted must be inferior to that which cannot; what could not be injured I preferred unhesitatingly to what could receive injury; the unchangeable to things subject to change. My heart passionately cried out against all my phantoms, and with this one blow I sought to beat away from the eye of my mind all that unclean troop which buzzed around it. And lo, being scarce put off, in the twinkling of an eye they gathered again thick about me, flew against my face, and beclouded it; so that though not under the form of the human body, yet was I constrained to conceive of Thee (that incorruptible, uninjurable, and unchangeable, which I preferred before the corruptible, and injurable, and changeable) as being in space, whether infused into the world, or diffused infinitely without it. Because whatsoever I conceived, deprived of this space, seemed to me nothing, yea altogether nothing, not even a void, as if a body were taken out of its place, and the place should remain empty of any body at all, of earth and water, air and heaven, yet would it remain a void place, as it were a spacious nothing. I then being thus gross-hearted, nor clear even to myself, whatsoever was not extended over certain spaces, nor diffused, nor condensed, nor swelled out, or did not or could not receive some of these dimensions, I thought to be altogether nothing. For over such forms as my eyes are wont to range, did my heart then range: nor yet did I see that this same notion of the mind, whereby I formed those very images, was not of this sort, and yet it could not have formed them, had not itself been some great thing. So also did I endeavour to conceive of Thee, Life of my life, as vast, through infinite spaces on every side penetrating the whole mass of the universe, and beyond it, every way, through unmeasurable boundless spaces; so that the earth should have Thee, the heaven have Thee, all things have Thee, and they be bounded in Thee, and Thou bounded nowhere. For that as the body of this air which is above the earth, hindereth not the light of the sun from passing through it, penetrating it, not by bursting or by cutting, but by filling it wholly: so I thought the body not of heaven, air, and sea only, but of the earth too, pervious to Thee, so that in all its parts, the greatest as the smallest, it should admit Thy presence, by a secret inspiration, within and without, directing all things which Thou hast created. So I guessed, only as unable to conceive aught else, for it was false. For thus should a greater part of the earth contain a greater portion of Thee, and a less, a lesser: and all things should in such sort be full of Thee, that the body of an elephant should contain more of Thee, than that of a sparrow, by how much larger it is, and takes up more room; and thus shouldest Thou make the several portions of Thyself present unto the several portions of the world, in fragments, large to the large, petty to the petty. But such art not Thou. But not as yet hadst Thou enlightened my darkness. It was enough for me, Lord, to oppose to those deceived deceivers, and dumb praters, since Thy word sounded not out of them;--that was enough which long ago, while we were yet at Carthage, Nebridius used to propound, at which all we that heard it were staggered: "That said nation of darkness, which the Manichees are wont to set as an opposing mass over against Thee, what could it have done unto Thee, hadst Thou refused to fight with it? For, if they answered, 'it would have done Thee some hurt,' then shouldest Thou be subject to injury and corruption: but it could do Thee no hurt,' then was no reason brought for Thy fighting with it; and fighting in such wise, as that a certain portion or member of Thee, or offspring of Thy very Substance, should be mingled with opposed powers, and natures not created by Thee, and be by them so far corrupted and changed to the worse, as to be turned from happiness into misery, and need assistance, whereby it might be extricated and purified; and that this offspring of Thy Substance was the soul, which being enthralled, defiled, corrupted, Thy Word, free, pure, and whole, might relieve; that Word itself being still corruptible because it was of one and the same Substance. So then, should they affirm Thee, whatsoever Thou art, that is, Thy Substance whereby Thou art, to be incorruptible, then were all these sayings false and execrable; but if corruptible, the very statement showed it to be false and revolting." This argument then of Nebridius sufficed against those who deserved wholly to be vomited out of the overcharged stomach; for they had no escape, without horrible blasphemy of heart and tongue, thus thinking and speaking of Thee. But I also as yet, although I held and was firmly persuaded that Thou our Lord the true God, who madest not only our souls, but our bodies, and not only our souls and bodies, but all beings, and all things, wert undefilable and unalterable, and in no degree mutable; yet understood I not, clearly and without difficulty, the cause of evil. And yet whatever it were, I perceived it was in such wise to be sought out, as should not constrain me to believe the immutable God to be mutable, lest I should become that evil I was seeking out. I sought it out then, thus far free from anxiety, certain of the untruth of what these held, from whom I shrunk with my whole heart: for I saw, that through enquiring the origin of evil, they were filled with evil, in that they preferred to think that Thy substance did suffer ill than their own did commit it. And I strained to perceive what I now heard, that free-will was the cause of our doing ill, and Thy just judgment of our suffering ill. But I was not able clearly to discern it. So then endeavouring to draw my soul's vision out of that deep pit, I was again plunged therein, and endeavouring often, I was plunged back as often. But this raised me a little into Thy light, that I knew as well that I had a will, as that I lived: when then I did will or nill any thing, I was most sure that no other than myself did will and nill: and I all but saw that there was the cause of my sin. But what I did against my will, I saw that I suffered rather than did, and I judged not to be my fault, but my punishment; whereby, however, holding Thee to be just, I speedily confessed myself to be not unjustly punished. But again I said, Who made me? Did not my God, Who is not only good, but goodness itself? Whence then came I to will evil and nill good, so that I am thus justly punished? who set this in me, and ingrafted into me this plant of bitterness, seeing I was wholly formed by my most sweet God? If the devil were the author, whence is that same devil? And if he also by his own perverse will, of a good angel became a devil, whence, again, came in him that evil will whereby he became a devil, seeing the whole nature of angels was made by that most good Creator? By these thoughts I was again sunk down and choked; yet not brought down to that hell of error (where no man confesseth unto Thee), to think rather that Thou dost suffer ill, than that man doth it. For I was in such wise striving to find out the rest, as one who had already found that the incorruptible must needs be better than the corruptible: and Thee therefore, whatsoever Thou wert, I confessed to be incorruptible. For never soul was, nor shall be, able to conceive any thing which may be better than Thou, who art the sovereign and the best good. But since most truly and certainly, the incorruptible is preferable to the corruptible (as I did now prefer it), then, wert Thou not incorruptible, I could in thought have arrived at something better than my God. Where then I saw the incorruptible to be preferable to the corruptible, there ought I to seek for Thee, and there observe "wherein evil itself was"; that is, whence corruption comes, by which Thy substance can by no means be impaired. For corruption does no ways impair our God; by no will, by no necessity, by no unlooked-for chance: because He is God, and what He wills is good, and Himself is that good; but to be corrupted is not good. Nor art Thou against Thy will constrained to any thing, since Thy will is not greater than Thy power. But greater should it be, were Thyself greater than Thyself. For the will and power of God is God Himself. And what can be unlooked-for by Thee, Who knowest all things? Nor is there any nature in things, but Thou knowest it. And what should we more say, "why that substance which God is should not be corruptible," seeing if it were so, it should not be God? And I sought "whence is evil," and sought in an evil way; and saw not the evil in my very search. I set now before the sight of my spirit the whole creation, whatsoever we can see therein (as sea, earth, air, stars, trees, mortal creatures); yea, and whatever in it we do not see, as the firmament of heaven, all angels moreover, and all the spiritual inhabitants thereof. But these very beings, as though they were bodies, did my fancy dispose in place, and I made one great mass of Thy creation, distinguished as to the kinds of bodies; some, real bodies, some, what myself had feigned for spirits. And this mass I made huge, not as it was (which I could not know), but as I thought convenient, yet every way finite. But Thee, O Lord, I imagined on every part environing and penetrating it, though every way infinite: as if there were a sea, every where, and on every side, through unmeasured space, one only boundless sea, and it contained within it some sponge, huge, but bounded; that sponge must needs, in all its parts, be filled from that unmeasurable sea: so conceived I Thy creation, itself finite, full of Thee, the Infinite; and I said, Behold God, and behold what God hath created; and God is good, yea, most mightily and incomparably better than all these: but yet He, the Good, created them good; and see how He environeth and fulfils them. Where is evil then, and whence, and how crept it in hither? What is its root, and what its seed? Or hath it no being? Why then fear we and avoid what is not? Or if we fear it idly, then is that very fear evil, whereby the soul is thus idly goaded and racked. Yea, and so much a greater evil, as we have nothing to fear, and yet do fear. Therefore either is that evil which we fear, or else evil is, that we fear. Whence is it then? seeing God, the Good, hath created all these things good. He indeed, the greater and chiefest Good, hath created these lesser goods; still both Creator and created, all are good. Whence is evil? Or, was there some evil matter of which He made, and formed, and ordered it, yet left something in it which He did not convert into good? Why so then? Had He no might to turn and change the whole, so that no evil should remain in it, seeing He is All-mighty? Lastly, why would He make any thing at all of it, and not rather by the same All-mightiness cause it not to be at all? Or, could it then be against His will? Or if it were from eternity, why suffered He it so to be for infinite spaces of times past, and was pleased so long after to make something out of it? Or if He were suddenly pleased now to effect somewhat, this rather should the All-mighty have effected, that this evil matter should not be, and He alone be, the whole, true, sovereign, and infinite Good. Or if it was not good that He who was good should not also frame and create something that were good, then, that evil matter being taken away and brought to nothing, He might form good matter, whereof to create all things. For He should not be All-mighty, if He might not create something good without the aid of that matter which Himself had not created. These thoughts I revolved in my miserable heart, overcharged with most gnawing cares, lest I should die ere I had found the truth; yet was the faith of Thy Christ, our Lord and Saviour, professed in the Church Catholic, firmly fixed in my heart, in many points, indeed, as yet unformed, and fluctuating from the rule of doctrine; yet did not my mind utterly leave it, but rather daily took in more and more of it. By this time also had I rejected the lying divinations and impious dotages of the astrologers. Let Thine own mercies, out of my very inmost soul, confess unto Thee for this also, O my God. For Thou, Thou altogether (for who else calls us back from the death of all errors, save the Life which cannot die, and the Wisdom which needing no light enlightens the minds that need it, whereby the universe is directed, down to the whirling leaves of trees?)--Thou madest provision for my obstinacy wherewith I struggled against Vindicianus, an acute old man, and Nebridius, a young man of admirable talents; the first vehemently affirming, and the latter often (though with some doubtfulness) saying, "That there was no such art whereby to foresee things to come, but that men's conjectures were a sort of lottery, and that out of many things which they said should come to pass, some actually did, unawares to them who spake it, who stumbled upon it, through their oft speaking." Thou providedst then a friend for me, no negligent consulter of the astrologers; nor yet well skilled in those arts, but (as I said) a curious consulter with them, and yet knowing something, which he said he had heard of his father, which how far it went to overthrow the estimation of that art, he knew not. This man then, Firminus by name, having had a liberal education, and well taught in Rhetoric, consulted me, as one very dear to him, what, according to his so-called constellations, I thought on certain affairs of his, wherein his worldly hopes had risen, and I, who had herein now begun to incline towards Nebridius' opinion, did not altogether refuse to conjecture, and tell him what came into my unresolved mind; but added, that I was now almost persuaded that these were but empty and ridiculous follies. Thereupon he told me that his father had been very curious in such books, and had a friend as earnest in them as himself, who with joint study and conference fanned the flame of their affections to these toys, so that they would observe the moments whereat the very dumb animals, which bred about their houses, gave birth, and then observed the relative position of the heavens, thereby to make fresh experiments in this so-called art. He said then that he had heard of his father, that what time his mother was about to give birth to him, Firminus, a woman-servant of that friend of his father's was also with child, which could not escape her master, who took care with most exact diligence to know the births of his very puppies. And so it was that (the one for his wife, and the other for his servant, with the most careful observation, reckoning days, hours, nay, the lesser divisions of the hours) both were delivered at the same instant; so that both were constrained to allow the same constellations, even to the minutest points, the one for his son, the other for his new-born slave. For so soon as the women began to be in labour, they each gave notice to the other what was fallen out in their houses, and had messengers ready to send to one another so soon as they had notice of the actual birth, of which they had easily provided, each in his own province, to give instant intelligence. Thus then the messengers of the respective parties met, he averred, at such an equal distance from either house that neither of them could make out any difference in the position of the stars, or any other minutest points; and yet Firminus, born in a high estate in his parents' house, ran his course through the gilded paths of life, was increased in riches, raised to honours; whereas that slave continued to serve his masters, without any relaxation of his yoke, as Firminus, who knew him, told me. Upon hearing and believing these things, told by one of such credibility, all that my resistance gave way; and first I endeavoured to reclaim Firminus himself from that curiosity, by telling him that upon inspecting his constellations, I ought if I were to predict truly, to have seen in them parents eminent among their neighbours, a noble family in its own city, high birth, good education, liberal learning. But if that servant had consulted me upon the same constellations, since they were his also, I ought again (to tell him too truly) to see in them a lineage the most abject, a slavish condition, and every thing else utterly at variance with the former. Whence then, if I spake the truth, I should, from the same constellations, speak diversely, or if I spake the same, speak falsely: thence it followed most certainly that whatever, upon consideration of the constellations, was spoken truly, was spoken not out of art, but chance; and whatever spoken falsely, was not out of ignorance in the art, but the failure of the chance. An opening thus made, ruminating with myself on the like things, that no one of those dotards (who lived by such a trade, and whom I longed to attack, and with derision to confute) might urge against me that Firminus had informed me falsely, or his father him; I bent my thoughts on those that are born twins, who for the most part come out of the womb so near one to other, that the small interval (how much force soever in the nature of things folk may pretend it to have) cannot be noted by human observation, or be at all expressed in those figures which the astrologer is to inspect, that he may pronounce truly. Yet they cannot be true: for looking into the same figures, he must have predicted the same of Esau and Jacob, whereas the same happened not to them. Therefore he must speak falsely; or if truly, then, looking into the same figures, he must not give the same answer. Not by art, then, but by chance, would he speak truly. For Thou, O Lord, most righteous Ruler of the Universe, while consulters and consulted know it not, dost by Thy hidden inspiration effect that the consulter should hear what, according to the hidden deservings of souls, he ought to hear, out of the unsearchable depth of Thy just judgment, to Whom let no man say, What is this? Why that? Let him not so say, for he is man. Now then, O my Helper, hadst Thou loosed me from those fetters: and I sought "whence is evil," and found no way. But Thou sufferedst me not by any fluctuations of thought to be carried away from the Faith whereby I believed Thee both to be, and Thy substance to be unchangeable, and that Thou hast a care of, and wouldest judge men, and that in Christ, Thy Son, Our Lord, and the holy Scriptures, which the authority of Thy Catholic Church pressed upon me, Thou hadst set the way of man's salvation, to that life which is to be after this death. These things being safe and immovably settled in my mind, I sought anxiously "whence was evil?" What were the pangs of my teeming heart, what groans, O my God! yet even there were Thine ears open, and I knew it not; and when in silence I vehemently sought, those silent contritions of my soul were strong cries unto Thy mercy. Thou knewest what I suffered, and no man. For, what was that which was thence through my tongue distilled into the ears of my most familiar friends? Did the whole tumult of my soul, for which neither time nor utterance sufficed, reach them? Yet went up the whole to Thy hearing, all which I roared out from the groanings of my heart; and my desire was before Thee, and the light of mine eyes was not with me: for that was within, I without: nor was that confined to place, but I was intent on things contained in place, but there found I no resting-place, nor did they so receive me, that I could say, "It is enough," "it is well": nor did they yet suffer me to turn back, where it might be well enough with me. For to these things was I superior, but inferior to Thee; and Thou art my true joy when subjected to Thee, and Thou hadst subjected to me what Thou createdst below me. And this was the true temperament, and middle region of my safety, to remain in Thy Image, and by serving Thee, rule the body. But when I rose proudly against Thee, and ran against the Lord with my neck, with the thick bosses of my buckler, even these inferior things were set above me, and pressed me down, and no where was there respite or space of breathing. They met my sight on all sides by heaps and troops, and in thought the images thereof presented themselves unsought, as I would return to Thee, as if they would say unto me, "Whither goest thou, unworthy and defiled?" And these things had grown out of my wound; for Thou "humbledst the proud like one that is wounded," and through my own swelling was I separated from Thee; yea, my pride-swollen face closed up mine eyes. But Thou, Lord, abidest for ever, yet not for ever art Thou angry with us; because Thou pitiest our dust and ashes, and it was pleasing in Thy sight to reform my deformities; and by inward goads didst Thou rouse me, that I should be ill at ease, until Thou wert manifested to my inward sight. Thus, by the secret hand of Thy medicining was my swelling abated, and the troubled and bedimmed eyesight of my mind, by the smarting anointings of healthful sorrows, was from day to day healed. And Thou, willing first to show me how Thou resistest the proud, but givest grace unto the humble, and by how great an act of Thy mercy Thou hadst traced out to men the way of humility, in that Thy Word was made flesh, and dwelt among men:--Thou procuredst for me, by means of one puffed up with most unnatural pride, certain books of the Platonists, translated from Greek into Latin. And therein I read, not indeed in the very words, but to the very same purpose, enforced by many and divers reasons, that In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God: the Same was in the beginning with God: all things were made by Him, and without Him was nothing made: that which was made by Him is life, and the life was the light of men, and the light shineth in the darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not. And that the soul of man, though it bears witness to the light, yet itself is not that light; but the Word of God, being God, is that true light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world. And that He was in the world, and the world was made by Him, and the world knew Him not. But, that He came unto His own, and His own received Him not; but as many as received Him, to them gave He power to become the sons of God, as many as believed in His name; this I read not there. Again I read there, that God the Word was born not of flesh nor of blood, nor of the will of man, nor of the will of the flesh, but of God. But that the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, I read not there. For I traced in those books that it was many and divers ways said, that the Son was in the form of the Father, and thought it not robbery to be equal with God, for that naturally He was the Same Substance. But that He emptied Himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men, and found in fashion as a man, humbled Himself, and became obedient unto death, and that the death of the cross: wherefore God exalted Him from the dead, and gave Him a name above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should how, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth; and that every tongue should confess that the Lord Jesus Christ is in the glory of God the Father; those books have not. For that before all times and above all times Thy Only-Begotten Son remaineth unchangeable, co-eternal with Thee, and that of His fulness souls receive, that they may be blessed; and that by participation of wisdom abiding in them, they are renewed, so as to be wise, is there. But that in due time He died for the ungodly; and that Thou sparedst not Thine Only Son, but deliveredst Him for us all, is not there. For Thou hiddest these things from the wise, and revealedst them to babes; that they that labour and are heavy laden might come unto Him, and He refresh them, because He is meek and lowly in heart; and the meek He directeth in judgment, and the gentle He teacheth His ways, beholding our lowliness and trouble, and forgiving all our sins. But such as are lifted up in the lofty walk of some would-be sublimer learning, hear not Him, saying, Learn of Me, for I am meek and lowly in heart, and ye shall find rest to your souls. Although they knew God, yet they glorify Him not as God, nor are thankful, but wax vain in their thoughts; and their foolish heart is darkened; professing that they were wise, they became fools. And therefore did I read there also, that they had changed the glory of Thy incorruptible nature into idols and divers shapes, into the likeness of the image of corruptible man, and birds, and beasts, and creeping things; namely, into that Egyptian food for which Esau lost his birthright, for that Thy first-born people worshipped the head of a four-footed beast instead of Thee; turning in heart back towards Egypt; and bowing Thy image, their own soul, before the image of a calf that eateth hay. These things found I here, but I fed not on them. For it pleased Thee, O Lord, to take away the reproach of diminution from Jacob, that the elder should serve the younger: and Thou calledst the Gentiles into Thine inheritance. And I had come to Thee from among the Gentiles; and I set my mind upon the gold which Thou willedst Thy people to take from Egypt, seeing Thine it was, wheresoever it were. And to the Athenians Thou saidst by Thy Apostle, that in Thee we live, move, and have our being, as one of their own poets had said. And verily these books came from thence. But I set not my mind on the idols of Egypt, whom they served with Thy gold, who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator. And being thence admonished to return to myself, I entered even into my inward self, Thou being my Guide: and able I was, for Thou wert become my Helper. And I entered and beheld with the eye of my soul (such as it was), above the same eye of my soul, above my mind, the Light Unchangeable. Not this ordinary light, which all flesh may look upon, nor as it were a greater of the same kind, as though the brightness of this should be manifold brighter, and with its greatness take up all space. Not such was this light, but other, yea, far other from these. Nor was it above my soul, as oil is above water, nor yet as heaven above earth: but above to my soul, because It made me; and I below It, because I was made by It. He that knows the Truth, knows what that Light is; and he that knows It, knows eternity. Love knoweth it. O Truth Who art Eternity! and Love Who art Truth! and Eternity Who art Love! Thou art my God, to Thee do I sigh night and day. Thee when I first knew, Thou liftedst me up, that I might see there was what I might see, and that I was not yet such as to see. And Thou didst beat back the weakness of my sight, streaming forth Thy beams of light upon me most strongly, and I trembled with love and awe: and I perceived myself to be far off from Thee, in the region of unlikeness, as if I heard this Thy voice from on high: "I am the food of grown men, grow, and thou shalt feed upon Me; nor shalt thou convert Me, like the food of thy flesh into thee, but thou shalt be converted into Me." And I learned, that Thou for iniquity chastenest man, and Thou madest my soul to consume away like a spider. And I said, "Is Truth therefore nothing because it is not diffused through space finite or infinite?" And Thou criedst to me from afar: "Yet verily, I AM that I AM." And I heard, as the heart heareth, nor had I room to doubt, and I should sooner doubt that I live than that Truth is not, which is clearly seen, being understood by those things which are made. And I beheld the other things below Thee, and I perceived that they neither altogether are, nor altogether are not, for they are, since they are from Thee, but are not, because they are not what Thou art. For that truly is which remains unchangeably. It is good then for me to hold fast unto God; for if I remain not in Him, I cannot in myself; but He remaining in Himself, reneweth all things. And Thou art the Lord my God, since Thou standest not in need of my goodness. And it was manifested unto me, that those things be good which yet are corrupted; which neither were they sovereignly good, nor unless they were good could be corrupted: for if sovereignly good, they were incorruptible, if not good at all, there were nothing in them to be corrupted. For corruption injures, but unless it diminished goodness, it could not injure. Either then corruption injures not, which cannot be; or which is most certain, all which is corrupted is deprived of good. But if they be deprived of all good, they shall cease to be. For if they shall be, and can now no longer be corrupted, they shall be better than before, because they shall abide incorruptibly. And what more monstrous than to affirm things to become better by losing all their good? Therefore, if they shall be deprived of all good, they shall no longer be. So long therefore as they are, they are good: therefore whatsoever is, is good. That evil then which I sought, whence it is, is not any substance: for were it a substance, it should be good. For either it should be an incorruptible substance, and so a chief good: or a corruptible substance; which unless it were good, could not be corrupted. I perceived therefore, and it was manifested to me that Thou madest all things good, nor is there any substance at all, which Thou madest not; and for that Thou madest not all things equal, therefore are all things; because each is good, and altogether very good, because our God made all things very good. And to Thee is nothing whatsoever evil: yea, not only to Thee, but also to Thy creation as a whole, because there is nothing without, which may break in, and corrupt that order which Thou hast appointed it. But in the parts thereof some things, because unharmonising with other some, are accounted evil: whereas those very things harmonise with others, and are good; and in themselves are good. And all these things which harmonise not together, do yet with the inferior part, which we call Earth, having its own cloudy and windy sky harmonising with it. Far be it then that I should say, "These things should not be": for should I see nought but these, I should indeed long for the better; but still must even for these alone praise Thee; for that Thou art to be praised, do show from the earth, dragons, and all deeps, fire, hail, snow, ice, and stormy wind, which fulfil Thy word; mountains, and all hills, fruitful trees, and all cedars; beasts, and all cattle, creeping things, and flying fowls; kings of the earth, and all people, princes, and all judges of the earth; young men and maidens, old men and young, praise Thy Name. But when, from heaven, these praise Thee, praise Thee, our God, in the heights all Thy angels, all Thy hosts, sun and moon, all the stars and light, the Heaven of heavens, and the waters that be above the heavens, praise Thy Name; I did not now long for things better, because I conceived of all: and with a sounder judgment I apprehended that the things above were better than these below, but altogether better than those above by themselves. There is no soundness in them, whom aught of Thy creation displeaseth: as neither in me, when much which Thou hast made, displeased me. And because my soul durst not be displeased at my God, it would fain not account that Thine, which displeased it. Hence it had gone into the opinion of two substances, and had no rest, but talked idly. And returning thence, it had made to itself a God, through infinite measures of all space; and thought it to be Thee, and placed it in its heart; and had again become the temple of its own idol, to Thee abominable. But after Thou hadst soothed my head, unknown to me, and closed mine eyes that they should not behold vanity, I ceased somewhat of my former self, and my frenzy was lulled to sleep; and I awoke in Thee, and saw Thee infinite, but in another way, and this sight was not derived from the flesh. And I looked back on other things; and I saw that they owed their being to Thee; and were all bounded in Thee: but in a different way; not as being in space; but because Thou containest all things in Thine hand in Thy Truth; and all things are true so far as they nor is there any falsehood, unless when that is thought to be, which is not. And I saw that all things did harmonise, not with their places only, but with their seasons. And that Thou, who only art Eternal, didst not begin to work after innumerable spaces of times spent; for that all spaces of times, both which have passed, and which shall pass, neither go nor come, but through Thee, working and abiding. And I perceived and found it nothing strange, that bread which is pleasant to a healthy palate is loathsome to one distempered: and to sore eyes light is offensive, which to the sound is delightful. And Thy righteousness displeaseth the wicked; much more the viper and reptiles, which Thou hast created good, fitting in with the inferior portions of Thy Creation, with which the very wicked also fit in; and that the more, by how much they be unlike Thee; but with the superior creatures, by how much they become more like to Thee. And I enquired what iniquity was, and found it to be no substance, but the perversion of the will, turned aside from Thee, O God, the Supreme, towards these lower things, and casting out its bowels, and puffed up outwardly. And I wondered that I now loved Thee, and no phantasm for Thee. And yet did I not press on to enjoy my God; but was borne up to Thee by Thy beauty, and soon borne down from Thee by mine own weight, sinking with sorrow into these inferior things. This weight was carnal custom. Yet dwelt there with me a remembrance of Thee; nor did I any way doubt that there was One to whom I might cleave, but that I was not yet such as to cleave to Thee: for that the body which is corrupted presseth down the soul, and the earthly tabernacle weigheth down the mind that museth upon many things. And most certain I was, that Thy invisible works from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even Thy eternal power and Godhead. For examining whence it was that I admired the beauty of bodies celestial or terrestrial; and what aided me in judging soundly on things mutable, and pronouncing, "This ought to be thus, this not"; examining, I say, whence it was that I so judged, seeing I did so judge, I had found the unchangeable and true Eternity of Truth above my changeable mind. And thus by degrees I passed from bodies to the soul, which through the bodily senses perceives; and thence to its inward faculty, to which the bodily senses represent things external, whitherto reach the faculties of beasts; and thence again to the reasoning faculty, to which what is received from the senses of the body, is referred to be judged. Which finding itself also to be in me a thing variable, raised itself up to its own understanding, and drew away my thoughts from the power of habit, withdrawing itself from those troops of contradictory phantasms; that so it might find what that light was whereby it was bedewed, when, without all doubting, it cried out, "That the unchangeable was to be preferred to the changeable"; whence also it knew That Unchangeable, which, unless it had in some way known, it had had no sure ground to prefer it to the changeable. And thus with the flash of one trembling glance it arrived at THAT WHICH IS. And then I saw Thy invisible things understood by the things which are made. But I could not fix my gaze thereon; and my infirmity being struck back, I was thrown again on my wonted habits, carrying along with me only a loving memory thereof, and a longing for what I had, as it were, perceived the odour of, but was not yet able to feed on. Then I sought a way of obtaining strength sufficient to enjoy Thee; and found it not, until I embraced that Mediator betwixt God and men, the Man Christ Jesus, who is over all, God blessed for evermore, calling unto me, and saying, I am the way, the truth, and the life, and mingling that food which I was unable to receive, with our flesh. For, the Word was made flesh, that Thy wisdom, whereby Thou createdst all things, might provide milk for our infant state. For I did not hold to my Lord Jesus Christ, I, humbled, to the Humble; nor knew I yet whereto His infirmity would guide us. For Thy Word, the Eternal Truth, far above the higher parts of Thy Creation, raises up the subdued unto Itself: but in this lower world built for Itself a lowly habitation of our clay, whereby to abase from themselves such as would be subdued, and bring them over to Himself; allaying their swelling, and fomenting their love; to the end they might go on no further in self-confidence, but rather consent to become weak, seeing before their feet the Divinity weak by taking our coats of skin; and wearied, might cast themselves down upon It, and It rising, might lift them up. But I thought otherwise; conceiving only of my Lord Christ as of a man of excellent wisdom, whom no one could be equalled unto; especially, for that being wonderfully born of a Virgin, He seemed, in conformity therewith, through the Divine care for us, to have attained that great eminence of authority, for an ensample of despising things temporal for the obtaining of immortality. But what mystery there lay in "The Word was made flesh," I could not even imagine. Only I had learnt out of what is delivered to us in writing of Him that He did eat, and drink, sleep, walk, rejoiced in spirit, was sorrowful, discoursed; that flesh did not cleave by itself unto Thy Word, but with the human soul and mind. All know this who know the unchangeableness of Thy Word, which I now knew, as far as I could, nor did I at all doubt thereof. For, now to move the limbs of the body by will, now not, now to be moved by some affection, now not, now to deliver wise sayings through human signs, now to keep silence, belong to soul and mind subject to variation. And should these things be falsely written of Him, all the rest also would risk the charge, nor would there remain in those books any saving faith for mankind. Since then they were written truly, I acknowledged a perfect man to be in Christ; not the body of a man only, nor, with the body, a sensitive soul without a rational, but very man; whom, not only as being a form of Truth, but for a certain great excellence of human nature and a more perfect participation of wisdom, I judged to be preferred before others. But Alypius imagined the Catholics to believe God to be so clothed with flesh, that besides God and flesh, there was no soul at all in Christ, and did not think that a human mind was ascribed to Him. And because he was well persuaded that the actions recorded of Him could only be performed by a vital and a rational creature, he moved the more slowly towards the Christian Faith. But understanding afterwards that this was the error of the Apollinarian heretics, he joyed in and was conformed to the Catholic Faith. But somewhat later, I confess, did I learn how in that saying, The Word was made flesh, the Catholic truth is distinguished from the falsehood of Photinus. For the rejection of heretics makes the tenets of Thy Church and sound doctrine to stand out more clearly. For there must also be heresies, that the approved may be made manifest among the weak. But having then read those books of the Platonists, and thence been taught to search for incorporeal truth, I saw Thy invisible things, understood by those things which are made; and though cast back, I perceived what that was which through the darkness of my mind I was hindered from contemplating, being assured "That Thou wert, and wert infinite, and yet not diffused in space, finite or infinite; and that Thou truly art Who art the same ever, in no part nor motion varying; and that all other things are from Thee, on this most sure ground alone, that they are." Of these things I was assured, yet too unsure to enjoy Thee. I prated as one well skilled; but had I not sought Thy way in Christ our Saviour, I had proved to be, not skilled, but killed. For now I had begun to wish to seem wise, being filled with mine own punishment, yet I did not mourn, but rather scorn, puffed up with knowledge. For where was that charity building upon the foundation of humility, which is Christ Jesus? or when should these books teach me it? Upon these, I believe, Thou therefore willedst that I should fall, before I studied Thy Scriptures, that it might be imprinted on my memory how I was affected by them; and that afterwards when my spirits were tamed through Thy books, and my wounds touched by Thy healing fingers, I might discern and distinguish between presumption and confession; between those who saw whither they were to go, yet saw not the way, and the way that leadeth not to behold only but to dwell in the beatific country. For had I first been formed in Thy Holy Scriptures, and hadst Thou in the familiar use of them grown sweet unto me, and had I then fallen upon those other volumes, they might perhaps have withdrawn me from the solid ground of piety, or, had I continued in that healthful frame which I had thence imbibed, I might have thought that it might have been obtained by the study of those books alone. Most eagerly then did I seize that venerable writing of Thy Spirit; and chiefly the Apostle Paul. Whereupon those difficulties vanished away, wherein he once seemed to me to contradict himself, and the text of his discourse not to agree with the testimonies of the Law and the Prophets. And the face of that pure word appeared to me one and the same; and I learned to rejoice with trembling. So I began; and whatsoever truth I had read in those other books, I found here amid the praise of Thy Grace; that whoso sees, may not so glory as if he had not received, not only what he sees, but also that he sees (for what hath he, which he hath not received?), and that he may be not only admonished to behold Thee, who art ever the same, but also healed, to hold Thee; and that he who cannot see afar off, may yet walk on the way, whereby he may arrive, and behold, and hold Thee. For, though a man be delighted with the law of God after the inner man, what shall he do with that other law in his members which warreth against the law of his mind, and bringeth him into captivity to the law of sin which is in his members? For, Thou art righteous, O Lord, but we have sinned and committed iniquity, and have done wickedly, and Thy hand is grown heavy upon us, and we are justly delivered over unto that ancient sinner, the king of death; because he persuaded our will to be like his will whereby he abode not in Thy truth. What shall wretched man do? who shall deliver him from the body of his death, but only Thy Grace, through Jesus Christ our Lord, whom Thou hast begotten co-eternal, and formedst in the beginning of Thy ways, in whom the prince of this world found nothing worthy of death, yet killed he Him; and the handwriting, which was contrary to us, was blotted out? This those writings contain not. Those pages present not the image of this piety, the tears of confession, Thy sacrifice, a troubled spirit, a broken and a contrite heart, the salvation of the people, the Bridal City, the earnest of the Holy Ghost, the Cup of our Redemption. No man sings there, Shall not my soul be submitted unto God? for of Him cometh my salvation. For He is my God and my salvation, my guardian, I shall no more be moved. No one there hears Him call, Come unto Me, all ye that labour. They scorn to learn of Him, because He is meek and lowly in heart; for these things hast Thou hid from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes. For it is one thing, from the mountain's shaggy top to see the land of peace, and to find no way thither; and in vain to essay through ways unpassable, opposed and beset by fugitives and deserters, under their captain the lion and the dragon: and another to keep on the way that leads thither, guarded by the host of the heavenly General; where they spoil not who have deserted the heavenly army; for they avoid it, as very torment. These things did wonderfully sink into my bowels, when I read that least of Thy Apostles, and had meditated upon Thy works, and trembled exceedingly. BOOK VIII O my God, let me, with thanksgiving, remember, and confess unto Thee Thy mercies on me. Let my bones be bedewed with Thy love, and let them say unto Thee, Who is like unto Thee, O Lord? Thou hast broken my bonds in sunder, I will offer unto Thee the sacrifice of thanksgiving. And how Thou hast broken them, I will declare; and all who worship Thee, when they hear this, shall say, "Blessed be the Lord, in heaven and in earth, great and wonderful is his name." Thy words had stuck fast in my heart, and I was hedged round about on all sides by Thee. Of Thy eternal life I was now certain, though I saw it in a figure and as through a glass. Yet I had ceased to doubt that there was an incorruptible substance, whence was all other substance; nor did I now desire to be more certain of Thee, but more steadfast in Thee. But for my temporal life, all was wavering, and my heart had to be purged from the old leaven. The Way, the Saviour Himself, well pleased me, but as yet I shrunk from going through its straitness. And Thou didst put into my mind, and it seemed good in my eyes, to go to Simplicianus, who seemed to me a good servant of Thine; and Thy grace shone in him. I had heard also that from his very youth he had lived most devoted unto Thee. Now he was grown into years; and by reason of so great age spent in such zealous following of Thy ways, he seemed to me likely to have learned much experience; and so he had. Out of which store I wished that he would tell me (setting before him my anxieties) which were the fittest way for one in my case to walk in Thy paths. For, I saw the church full; and one went this way, and another that way. But I was displeased that I led a secular life; yea now that my desires no longer inflamed me, as of old, with hopes of honour and profit, a very grievous burden it was to undergo so heavy a bondage. For, in comparison of Thy sweetness, and the beauty of Thy house which I loved, those things delighted me no longer. But still I was enthralled with the love of woman; nor did the Apostle forbid me to marry, although he advised me to something better, chiefly wishing that all men were as himself was. But I being weak, chose the more indulgent place; and because of this alone, was tossed up and down in all beside, faint and wasted with withering cares, because in other matters I was constrained against my will to conform myself to a married life, to which I was given up and enthralled. I had heard from the mouth of the Truth, that there were some eunuchs which had made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake: but, saith He, let him who can receive it, receive it. Surely vain are all men who are ignorant of God, and could not out of the good things which are seen, find out Him who is good. But I was no longer in that vanity; I had surmounted it; and by the common witness of all Thy creatures had found Thee our Creator, and Thy Word, God with Thee, and together with Thee one God, by whom Thou createdst all things. There is yet another kind of ungodly, who knowing God, glorified Him not as God, neither were thankful. Into this also had I fallen, but Thy right hand upheld me, and took me thence, and Thou placedst me where I might recover. For Thou hast said unto man, Behold, the fear of the Lord is wisdom, and, Desire not to seem wise; because they who affirmed themselves to be wise, became fools. But I had now found the goodly pearl, which, selling all that I had, I ought to have bought, and I hesitated. To Simplicianus then I went, the father of Ambrose (a Bishop now) in receiving Thy grace, and whom Ambrose truly loved as a father. To him I related the mazes of my wanderings. But when I mentioned that I had read certain books of the Platonists, which Victorinus, sometime Rhetoric Professor of Rome (who had died a Christian, as I had heard), had translated into Latin, he testified his joy that I had not fallen upon the writings of other philosophers, full of fallacies and deceits, after the rudiments of this world, whereas the Platonists many ways led to the belief in God and His Word. Then to exhort me to the humility of Christ, hidden from the wise, and revealed to little ones, he spoke of Victorinus himself, whom while at Rome he had most intimately known: and of him he related what I will not conceal. For it contains great praise of Thy grace, to be confessed unto Thee, how that aged man, most learned and skilled in the liberal sciences, and who had read, and weighed so many works of the philosophers; the instructor of so many noble Senators, who also, as a monument of his excellent discharge of his office, had (which men of this world esteem a high honour) both deserved and obtained a statue in the Roman Forum; he, to that age a worshipper of idols, and a partaker of the sacrilegious rites, to which almost all the nobility of Rome were given up, and had inspired the people with the love of Anubis, barking Deity, and all The monster Gods of every kind, who fought 'Gainst Neptune, Venus, and Minerva: whom Rome once conquered, now adored, all which the aged Victorinus had with thundering eloquence so many years defended;--he now blushed not to be the child of Thy Christ, and the new-born babe of Thy fountain; submitting his neck to the yoke of humility, and subduing his forehead to the reproach of the Cross. O Lord, Lord, Which hast bowed the heavens and come down, touched the mountains and they did smoke, by what means didst Thou convey Thyself into that breast? He used to read (as Simplicianus said) the holy Scripture, most studiously sought and searched into all the Christian writings, and said to Simplicianus (not openly, but privately and as a friend), "Understand that I am already a Christian." Whereto he answered, "I will not believe it, nor will I rank you among Christians, unless I see you in the Church of Christ." The other, in banter, replied, "Do walls then make Christians?" And this he often said, that he was already a Christian; and Simplicianus as often made the same answer, and the conceit of the "walls" was by the other as often renewed. For he feared to offend his friends, proud daemon-worshippers, from the height of whose Babylonian dignity, as from cedars of Libanus, which the Lord had not yet broken down, he supposed the weight of enmity would fall upon him. But after that by reading and earnest thought he had gathered firmness, and feared to be denied by Christ before the holy angels, should he now be afraid to confess Him before men, and appeared to himself guilty of a heavy offence, in being ashamed of the Sacraments of the humility of Thy Word, and not being ashamed of the sacrilegious rites of those proud daemons, whose pride he had imitated and their rites adopted, he became bold-faced against vanity, and shame-faced towards the truth, and suddenly and unexpectedly said to Simplicianus (as himself told me), "Go we to the Church; I wish to be made a Christian." But he, not containing himself for joy, went with him. And having been admitted to the first Sacrament and become a Catechumen, not long after he further gave in his name, that he might be regenerated by baptism, Rome wondering, the Church rejoicing. The proud saw, and were wroth; they gnashed with their teeth, and melted away. But the Lord God was the hope of Thy servant, and he regarded not vanities and lying madness. To conclude, when the hour was come for making profession of his faith (which at Rome they, who are about to approach to Thy grace, deliver, from an elevated place, in the sight of all the faithful, in a set form of words committed to memory), the presbyters, he said, offered Victorinus (as was done to such as seemed likely through bashfulness to be alarmed) to make his profession more privately: but he chose rather to profess his salvation in the presence of the holy multitude. "For it was not salvation that he taught in rhetoric, and yet that he had publicly professed: how much less then ought he, when pronouncing Thy word, to dread Thy meek flock, who, when delivering his own words, had not feared a mad multitude!" When, then, he went up to make his profession, all, as they knew him, whispered his name one to another with the voice of congratulation. And who there knew him not? and there ran a low murmur through all the mouths of the rejoicing multitude, Victorinus! Victorinus! Sudden was the burst of rapture, that they saw him; suddenly were they hushed that they might hear him. He pronounced the true faith with an excellent boldness, and all wished to draw him into their very heart; yea by their love and joy they drew him thither, such were the hands wherewith they drew him. Good God! what takes place in man, that he should more rejoice at the salvation of a soul despaired of, and freed from greater peril, than if there had always been hope of him, or the danger had been less? For so Thou also, merciful Father, dost more rejoice over one penitent than over ninety-nine just persons that need no repentance. And with much joyfulness do we hear, so often as we hear with what joy the sheep which had strayed is brought back upon the shepherd's shoulder, and the groat is restored to Thy treasury, the neighbours rejoicing with the woman who found it; and the joy of the solemn service of Thy house forceth to tears, when in Thy house it is read of Thy younger son, that he was dead, and liveth again; had been lost, and is found. For Thou rejoicest in us, and in Thy holy angels, holy through holy charity. For Thou art ever the same; for all things which abide not the same nor for ever, Thou for ever knowest in the same way. What then takes place in the soul, when it is more delighted at finding or recovering the things it loves, than if it had ever had them? yea, and other things witness hereunto; and all things are full of witnesses, crying out, "So is it." The conquering commander triumpheth; yet had he not conquered unless he had fought; and the more peril there was in the battle, so much the more joy is there in the triumph. The storm tosses the sailors, threatens shipwreck; all wax pale at approaching death; sky and sea are calmed, and they are exceeding joyed, as having been exceeding afraid. A friend is sick, and his pulse threatens danger; all who long for his recovery are sick in mind with him. He is restored, though as yet he walks not with his former strength; yet there is such joy, as was not, when before he walked sound and strong. Yea, the very pleasures of human life men acquire by difficulties, not those only which fall upon us unlooked for, and against our wills, but even by self-chosen, and pleasure-seeking trouble. Eating and drinking have no pleasure, unless there precede the pinching of hunger and thirst. Men, given to drink, eat certain salt meats, to procure a troublesome heat, which the drink allaying, causes pleasure. It is also ordered that the affianced bride should not at once be given, lest as a husband he should hold cheap whom, as betrothed, he sighed not after. This law holds in foul and accursed joy; this in permitted and lawful joy; this in the very purest perfection of friendship; this, in him who was dead, and lived again; had been lost and was found. Every where the greater joy is ushered in by the greater pain. What means this, O Lord my God, whereas Thou art everlastingly joy to Thyself, and some things around Thee evermore rejoice in Thee? What means this, that this portion of things thus ebbs and flows alternately displeased and reconciled? Is this their allotted measure? Is this all Thou hast assigned to them, whereas from the highest heavens to the lowest earth, from the beginning of the world to the end of ages, from the angel to the worm, from the first motion to the last, Thou settest each in its place, and realisest each in their season, every thing good after its kind? Woe is me! how high art Thou in the highest, and how deep in the deepest! and Thou never departest, and we scarcely return to Thee. Up, Lord, and do; stir us up, and recall us; kindle and draw us; inflame, grow sweet unto us, let us now love, let us run. Do not many, out of a deeper hell of blindness than Victorinus, return to Thee, approach, and are enlightened, receiving that Light, which they who receive, receive power from Thee to become Thy sons? But if they be less known to the nations, even they that know them, joy less for them. For when many joy together, each also has more exuberant joy for that they are kindled and inflamed one by the other. Again, because those known to many, influence the more towards salvation, and lead the way with many to follow. And therefore do they also who preceded them much rejoice in them, because they rejoice not in them alone. For far be it, that in Thy tabernacle the persons of the rich should be accepted before the poor, or the noble before the ignoble; seeing rather Thou hast chosen the weak things of the world to confound the strong; and the base things of this world, and the things despised hast Thou chosen, and those things which are not, that Thou mightest bring to nought things that are. And yet even that least of Thy apostles, by whose tongue Thou soundedst forth these words, when through his warfare, Paulus the Proconsul, his pride conquered, was made to pass under the easy yoke of Thy Christ, and became a provincial of the great King; he also for his former name Saul, was pleased to be called Paul, in testimony of so great a victory. For the enemy is more overcome in one, of whom he hath more hold; by whom he hath hold of more. But the proud he hath more hold of, through their nobility; and by them, of more through their authority. By how much the more welcome then the heart of Victorinus was esteemed, which the devil had held as an impregnable possession, the tongue of Victorinus, with which mighty and keen weapon he had slain many; so much the more abundantly ought Thy sons to rejoice, for that our King hath bound the strong man, and they saw his vessels taken from him and cleansed, and made meet for Thy honour; and become serviceable for the Lord, unto every good work. But when that man of Thine, Simplicianus, related to me this of Victorinus, I was on fire to imitate him; for for this very end had he related it. But when he had subjoined also, how in the days of the Emperor Julian a law was made, whereby Christians were forbidden to teach the liberal sciences or oratory; and how he, obeying this law, chose rather to give over the wordy school than Thy Word, by which Thou makest eloquent the tongues of the dumb; he seemed to me not more resolute than blessed, in having thus found opportunity to wait on Thee only. Which thing I was sighing for, bound as I was, not with another's irons, but by my own iron will. My will the enemy held, and thence had made a chain for me, and bound me. For of a forward will, was a lust made; and a lust served, became custom; and custom not resisted, became necessity. By which links, as it were, joined together (whence I called it a chain) a hard bondage held me enthralled. But that new will which had begun to be in me, freely to serve Thee, and to wish to enjoy Thee, O God, the only assured pleasantness, was not yet able to overcome my former wilfulness, strengthened by age. Thus did my two wills, one new, and the other old, one carnal, the other spiritual, struggle within me; and by their discord, undid my soul. Thus, I understood, by my own experience, what I had read, how the flesh lusteth against the spirit and the spirit against the flesh. Myself verily either way; yet more myself, in that which I approved in myself, than in that which in myself I disapproved. For in this last, it was now for the more part not myself, because in much I rather endured against my will, than acted willingly. And yet it was through me that custom had obtained this power of warring against me, because I had come willingly, whither I willed not. And who has any right to speak against it, if just punishment follow the sinner? Nor had I now any longer my former plea, that I therefore as yet hesitated to be above the world and serve Thee, for that the truth was not altogether ascertained to me; for now it too was. But I still under service to the earth, refused to fight under Thy banner, and feared as much to be freed of all incumbrances, as we should fear to be encumbered with it. Thus with the baggage of this present world was I held down pleasantly, as in sleep: and the thoughts wherein I meditated on Thee were like the efforts of such as would awake, who yet overcome with a heavy drowsiness, are again drenched therein. And as no one would sleep for ever, and in all men's sober judgment waking is better, yet a man for the most part, feeling a heavy lethargy in all his limbs, defers to shake off sleep, and though half displeased, yet, even after it is time to rise, with pleasure yields to it, so was I assured that much better were it for me to give myself up to Thy charity, than to give myself over to mine own cupidity; but though the former course satisfied me and gained the mastery, the latter pleased me and held me mastered. Nor had I any thing to answer Thee calling to me, Awake, thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light. And when Thou didst on all sides show me that what Thou saidst was true, I, convicted by the truth, had nothing at all to answer, but only those dull and drowsy words, "Anon, anon," "presently," "leave me but a little." But "presently, presently," had no present, and my "little while" went on for a long while; in vain I delighted in Thy law according to the inner man, when another law in my members rebelled against the law of my mind, and led me captive under the law of sin which was in my members. For the law of sin is the violence of custom, whereby the mind is drawn and holden, even against its will; but deservedly, for that it willingly fell into it. Who then should deliver me thus wretched from the body of this death, but Thy grace only, through Jesus Christ our Lord? And how Thou didst deliver me out of the bonds of desire, wherewith I was bound most straitly to carnal concupiscence, and out of the drudgery of worldly things, I will now declare, and confess unto Thy name, O Lord, my helper and my redeemer. Amid increasing anxiety, I was doing my wonted business, and daily sighing unto Thee. I attended Thy Church, whenever free from the business under the burden of which I groaned. Alypius was with me, now after the third sitting released from his law business, and awaiting to whom to sell his counsel, as I sold the skill of speaking, if indeed teaching can impart it. Nebridius had now, in consideration of our friendship, consented to teach under Verecundus, a citizen and a grammarian of Milan, and a very intimate friend of us all; who urgently desired, and by the right of friendship challenged from our company, such faithful aid as he greatly needed. Nebridius then was not drawn to this by any desire of advantage (for he might have made much more of his learning had he so willed), but as a most kind and gentle friend, he would not be wanting to a good office, and slight our request. But he acted herein very discreetly, shunning to become known to personages great according to this world, avoiding the distraction of mind thence ensuing, and desiring to have it free and at leisure, as many hours as might be, to seek, or read, or hear something concerning wisdom. Upon a day then, Nebridius being absent (I recollect not why), lo, there came to see me and Alypius, one Pontitianus, our countryman so far as being an African, in high office in the Emperor's court. What he would with us, I know not, but we sat down to converse, and it happened that upon a table for some game, before us, he observed a book, took, opened it, and contrary to his expectation, found it the Apostle Paul; for he thought it some of those books which I was wearing myself in teaching. Whereat smiling, and looking at me, he expressed his joy and wonder that he had on a sudden found this book, and this only before my eyes. For he was a Christian, and baptised, and often bowed himself before Thee our God in the Church, in frequent and continued prayers. When then I had told him that I bestowed very great pains upon those Scriptures, a conversation arose (suggested by his account) on Antony the Egyptian monk: whose name was in high reputation among Thy servants, though to that hour unknown to us. Which when he discovered, he dwelt the more upon that subject, informing and wondering at our ignorance of one so eminent. But we stood amazed, hearing Thy wonderful works most fully attested, in times so recent, and almost in our own, wrought in the true Faith and Church Catholic. We all wondered; we, that they were so great, and he, that they had not reached us. Thence his discourse turned to the flocks in the monasteries, and their holy ways, a sweet-smelling savour unto Thee, and the fruitful deserts of the wilderness, whereof we knew nothing. And there was a monastery at Milan, full of good brethren, without the city walls, under the fostering care of Ambrose, and we knew it not. He went on with his discourse, and we listened in intent silence. He told us then how one afternoon at Triers, when the Emperor was taken up with the Circensian games, he and three others, his companions, went out to walk in gardens near the city walls, and there as they happened to walk in pairs, one went apart with him, and the other two wandered by themselves; and these, in their wanderings, lighted upon a certain cottage, inhabited by certain of Thy servants, poor in spirit, of whom is the kingdom of heaven, and there they found a little book containing the life of Antony. This one of them began to read, admire, and kindle at it; and as he read, to meditate on taking up such a life, and giving over his secular service to serve Thee. And these two were of those whom they style agents for the public affairs. Then suddenly, filled with a holy love, and a sober shame, in anger with himself cast his eyes upon his friend, saying, "Tell me, I pray thee, what would we attain by all these labours of ours? what aim we at? what serve we for? Can our hopes in court rise higher than to be the Emperor's favourites? and in this, what is there not brittle, and full of perils? and by how many perils arrive we at a greater peril? and when arrive we thither? But a friend of God, if I wish it, I become now at once." So spake he. And in pain with the travail of a new life, he turned his eyes again upon the book, and read on, and was changed inwardly, where Thou sawest, and his mind was stripped of the world, as soon appeared. For as he read, and rolled up and down the waves of his heart, he stormed at himself a while, then discerned, and determined on a better course; and now being Thine, said to his friend, "Now have I broken loose from those our hopes, and am resolved to serve God; and this, from this hour, in this place, I begin upon. If thou likest not to imitate me, oppose not." The other answered, he would cleave to him, to partake so glorious a reward, so glorious a service. Thus both being now Thine, were building the tower at the necessary cost, the forsaking all that they had, and following Thee. Then Pontitianus and the other with him, that had walked in other parts of the garden, came in search of them to the same place; and finding them, reminded them to return, for the day was now far spent. But they relating their resolution and purpose, and how that will was begun and settled in them, begged them, if they would not join, not to molest them. But the others, though nothing altered from their former selves, did yet bewail themselves (as he affirmed), and piously congratulated them, recommending themselves to their prayers; and so, with hearts lingering on the earth, went away to the palace. But the other two, fixing their heart on heaven, remained in the cottage. And both had affianced brides, who when they heard hereof, also dedicated their virginity unto God. Such was the story of Pontitianus; but Thou, O Lord, while he was speaking, didst turn me round towards myself, taking me from behind my back where I had placed me, unwilling to observe myself; and setting me before my face, that I might see how foul I was, how crooked and defiled, bespotted and ulcerous. And I beheld and stood aghast; and whither to flee from myself I found not. And if I sought to turn mine eye from off myself, he went on with his relation, and Thou again didst set me over against myself, and thrustedst me before my eyes, that I might find out mine iniquity, and hate it. I had known it, but made as though I saw it not, winked at it, and forgot it. But now, the more ardently I loved those whose healthful affections I heard of, that they had resigned themselves wholly to Thee to be cured, the more did I abhor myself, when compared with them. For many of my years (some twelve) had now run out with me since my nineteenth, when, upon the reading of Cicero's Hortensius, I was stirred to an earnest love of wisdom; and still I was deferring to reject mere earthly felicity, and give myself to search out that, whereof not the finding only, but the very search, was to be preferred to the treasures and kingdoms of the world, though already found, and to the pleasures of the body, though spread around me at my will. But I wretched, most wretched, in the very commencement of my early youth, had begged chastity of Thee, and said, "Give me chastity and continency, only not yet." For I feared lest Thou shouldest hear me soon, and soon cure me of the disease of concupiscence, which I wished to have satisfied, rather than extinguished. And I had wandered through crooked ways in a sacrilegious superstition, not indeed assured thereof, but as preferring it to the others which I did not seek religiously, but opposed maliciously. And I had thought that I therefore deferred from day to day to reject the hopes of this world, and follow Thee only, because there did not appear aught certain, whither to direct my course. And now was the day come wherein I was to be laid bare to myself, and my conscience was to upbraid me. "Where art thou now, my tongue? Thou saidst that for an uncertain truth thou likedst not to cast off the baggage of vanity; now, it is certain, and yet that burden still oppresseth thee, while they who neither have so worn themselves out with seeking it, nor for often years and more have been thinking thereon, have had their shoulders lightened, and received wings to fly away." Thus was I gnawed within, and exceedingly confounded with a horrible shame, while Pontitianus was so speaking. And he having brought to a close his tale and the business he came for, went his way; and I into myself. What said I not against myself? with what scourges of condemnation lashed I not my soul, that it might follow me, striving to go after Thee! Yet it drew back; refused, but excused not itself. All arguments were spent and confuted; there remained a mute shrinking; and she feared, as she would death, to be restrained from the flux of that custom, whereby she was wasting to death. Then in this great contention of my inward dwelling, which I had strongly raised against my soul, in the chamber of my heart, troubled in mind and countenance, I turned upon Alypius. "What ails us?" I exclaim: "what is it? what heardest thou? The unlearned start up and take heaven by force, and we with our learning, and without heart, lo, where we wallow in flesh and blood! Are we ashamed to follow, because others are gone before, and not ashamed not even to follow?" Some such words I uttered, and my fever of mind tore me away from him, while he, gazing on me in astonishment, kept silence. For it was not my wonted tone; and my forehead, cheeks, eyes, colour, tone of voice, spake my mind more than the words I uttered. A little garden there was to our lodging, which we had the use of, as of the whole house; for the master of the house, our host, was not living there. Thither had the tumult of my breast hurried me, where no man might hinder the hot contention wherein I had engaged with myself, until it should end as Thou knewest, I knew not. Only I was healthfully distracted and dying, to live; knowing what evil thing I was, and not knowing what good thing I was shortly to become. I retired then into the garden, and Alypius, on my steps. For his presence did not lessen my privacy; or how could he forsake me so disturbed? We sate down as far removed as might be from the house. I was troubled in spirit, most vehemently indignant that I entered not into Thy will and covenant, O my God, which all my bones cried out unto me to enter, and praised it to the skies. And therein we enter not by ships, or chariots, or feet, no, move not so far as I had come from the house to that place where we were sitting. For, not to go only, but to go in thither was nothing else but to will to go, but to will resolutely and thoroughly; not to turn and toss, this way and that, a maimed and half-divided will, struggling, with one part sinking as another rose. Lastly, in the very fever of my irresoluteness, I made with my body many such motions as men sometimes would, but cannot, if either they have not the limbs, or these be bound with bands, weakened with infirmity, or any other way hindered. Thus, if I tore my hair, beat my forehead, if locking my fingers I clasped my knee; I willed, I did it. But I might have willed, and not done it; if the power of motion in my limbs had not obeyed. So many things then I did, when "to will" was not in itself "to be able"; and I did not what both I longed incomparably more to do, and which soon after, when I should will, I should be able to do; because soon after, when I should will, I should will thoroughly. For in these things the ability was one with the will, and to will was to do; and yet was it not done: and more easily did my body obey the weakest willing of my soul, in moving its limbs at its nod, than the soul obeyed itself to accomplish in the will alone this its momentous will. Whence is this monstrousness? and to what end? Let Thy mercy gleam that I may ask, if so be the secret penalties of men, and those darkest pangs of the sons of Adam, may perhaps answer me. Whence is this monstrousness? and to what end? The mind commands the body, and it obeys instantly; the mind commands itself, and is resisted. The mind commands the hand to be moved; and such readiness is there, that command is scarce distinct from obedience. Yet the mind is mind, the hand is body. The mind commands the mind, its own self, to will, and yet it doth not. Whence this monstrousness? and to what end? It commands itself, I say, to will, and would not command, unless it willed, and what it commands is not done. But it willeth not entirely: therefore doth it not command entirely. For so far forth it commandeth, as it willeth: and, so far forth is the thing commanded, not done, as it willeth not. For the will commandeth that there be a will; not another, but itself. But it doth not command entirely, therefore what it commandeth, is not. For were the will entire, it would not even command it to be, because it would already be. It is therefore no monstrousness partly to will, partly to nill, but a disease of the mind, that it doth not wholly rise, by truth upborne, borne down by custom. And therefore are there two wills, for that one of them is not entire: and what the one lacketh, the other hath. Let them perish from Thy presence, O God, as perish vain talkers and seducers of the soul: who observing that in deliberating there were two wills, affirm that there are two minds in us of two kinds, one good, the other evil. Themselves are truly evil, when they hold these evil things; and themselves shall become good when they hold the truth and assent unto the truth, that Thy Apostle may say to them, Ye were sometimes darkness, but now light in the Lord. But they, wishing to be light, not in the Lord, but in themselves, imagining the nature of the soul to be that which God is, are made more gross darkness through a dreadful arrogancy; for that they went back farther from Thee, the true Light that enlightened every man that cometh into the world. Take heed what you say, and blush for shame: draw near unto Him and be enlightened, and your faces shall not be ashamed. Myself when I was deliberating upon serving the Lord my God now, as I had long purposed, it was I who willed, I who nilled, I, I myself. I neither willed entirely, nor nilled entirely. Therefore was I at strife with myself, and rent asunder by myself. And this rent befell me against my will, and yet indicated, not the presence of another mind, but the punishment of my own. Therefore it was no more I that wrought it, but sin that dwelt in me; the punishment of a sin more freely committed, in that I was a son of Adam. For if there be so many contrary natures as there be conflicting wills, there shall now be not two only, but many. If a man deliberate whether he should go to their conventicle or to the theatre, these Manichees cry out, Behold, here are two natures: one good, draws this way; another bad, draws back that way. For whence else is this hesitation between conflicting wills? But I say that both be bad: that which draws to them, as that which draws back to the theatre. But they believe not that will to be other than good, which draws to them. What then if one of us should deliberate, and amid the strife of his two wills be in a strait, whether he should go to the theatre or to our church? would not these Manichees also be in a strait what to answer? For either they must confess (which they fain would not) that the will which leads to our church is good, as well as theirs, who have received and are held by the mysteries of theirs: or they must suppose two evil natures, and two evil souls conflicting in one man, and it will not be true, which they say, that there is one good and another bad; or they must be converted to the truth, and no more deny that where one deliberates, one soul fluctuates between contrary wills. Let them no more say then, when they perceive two conflicting wills in one man, that the conflict is between two contrary souls, of two contrary substances, from two contrary principles, one good, and the other bad. For Thou, O true God, dost disprove, check, and convict them; as when, both wills being bad, one deliberates whether he should kill a man by poison or by the sword; whether he should seize this or that estate of another's, when he cannot both; whether he should purchase pleasure by luxury, or keep his money by covetousness; whether he go to the circus or the theatre, if both be open on one day; or thirdly, to rob another's house, if he have the opportunity; or, fourthly, to commit adultery, if at the same time he have the means thereof also; all these meeting together in the same juncture of time, and all being equally desired, which cannot at one time be acted: for they rend the mind amid four, or even (amid the vast variety of things desired) more, conflicting wills, nor do they yet allege that there are so many divers substances. So also in wills which are good. For I ask them, is it good to take pleasure in reading the Apostle? or good to take pleasure in a sober Psalm? or good to discourse on the Gospel? They will answer to each, "it is good." What then if all give equal pleasure, and all at once? Do not divers wills distract the mind, while he deliberates which he should rather choose? yet are they all good, and are at variance till one be chosen, whither the one entire will may be borne, which before was divided into many. Thus also, when, above, eternity delights us, and the pleasure of temporal good holds us down below, it is the same soul which willeth not this or that with an entire will; and therefore is rent asunder with grievous perplexities, while out of truth it sets this first, but out of habit sets not that aside. Thus soul-sick was I, and tormented, accusing myself much more severely than my wont, rolling and turning me in my chain, till that were wholly broken, whereby I now was but just, but still was, held. And Thou, O Lord, pressedst upon me in my inward parts by a severe mercy, redoubling the lashes of fear and shame, lest I should again give way, and not bursting that same slight remaining tie, it should recover strength, and bind me the faster. For I said with myself, "Be it done now, be it done now." And as I spake, I all but enacted it: I all but did it, and did it not: yet sunk not back to my former state, but kept my stand hard by, and took breath. And I essayed again, and wanted somewhat less of it, and somewhat less, and all but touched, and laid hold of it; and yet came not at it, nor touched nor laid hold of it; hesitating to die to death and to live to life: and the worse whereto I was inured, prevailed more with me than the better whereto I was unused: and the very moment wherein I was to become other than I was, the nearer it approached me, the greater horror did it strike into me; yet did it not strike me back, nor turned me away, but held me in suspense. The very toys of toys, and vanities of vanities, my ancient mistresses, still held me; they plucked my fleshy garment, and whispered softly, "Dost thou cast us off? and from that moment shall we no more be with thee for ever? and from that moment shall not this or that be lawful for thee for ever?" And what was it which they suggested in that I said, "this or that," what did they suggest, O my God? Let Thy mercy turn it away from the soul of Thy servant. What defilements did they suggest! what shame! And now I much less than half heard them, and not openly showing themselves and contradicting me, but muttering as it were behind my back, and privily plucking me, as I was departing, but to look back on them. Yet they did retard me, so that I hesitated to burst and shake myself free from them, and to spring over whither I was called; a violent habit saying to me, "Thinkest thou, thou canst live without them?" But now it spake very faintly. For on that side whither I had set my face, and whither I trembled to go, there appeared unto me the chaste dignity of Continency, serene, yet not relaxedly, gay, honestly alluring me to come and doubt not; and stretching forth to receive and embrace me, her holy hands full of multitudes of good examples: there were so many young men and maidens here, a multitude of youth and every age, grave widows and aged virgins; and Continence herself in all, not barren, but a fruitful mother of children of joys, by Thee her Husband, O Lord. And she smiled on me with a persuasive mockery, as would she say, "Canst not thou what these youths, what these maidens can? or can they either in themselves, and not rather in the Lord their God? The Lord their God gave me unto them. Why standest thou in thyself, and so standest not? cast thyself upon Him, fear not He will not withdraw Himself that thou shouldest fall; cast thyself fearlessly upon Him, He will receive, and will heal thee." And I blushed exceedingly, for that I yet heard the muttering of those toys, and hung in suspense. And she again seemed to say, "Stop thine ears against those thy unclean members on the earth, that they may be mortified. They tell thee of delights, but not as doth the law of the Lord thy God." This controversy in my heart was self against self only. But Alypius sitting close by my side, in silence waited the issue of my unwonted emotion. But when a deep consideration had from the secret bottom of my soul drawn together and heaped up all my misery in the sight of my heart; there arose a mighty storm, bringing a mighty shower of tears. Which that I might pour forth wholly, in its natural expressions, I rose from Alypius: solitude was suggested to me as fitter for the business of weeping; so I retired so far that even his presence could not be a burden to me. Thus was it then with me, and he perceived something of it; for something I suppose I had spoken, wherein the tones of my voice appeared choked with weeping, and so had risen up. He then remained where we were sitting, most extremely astonished. I cast myself down I know not how, under a certain fig-tree, giving full vent to my tears; and the floods of mine eyes gushed out an acceptable sacrifice to Thee. And, not indeed in these words, yet to this purpose, spake I much unto Thee: and Thou, O Lord, how long? how long, Lord, wilt Thou be angry for ever? Remember not our former iniquities, for I felt that I was held by them. I sent up these sorrowful words: How long, how long, "to-morrow, and tomorrow?" Why not now? why not is there this hour an end to my uncleanness? So was I speaking and weeping in the most bitter contrition of my heart, when, lo! I heard from a neighbouring house a voice, as of boy or girl, I know not, chanting, and oft repeating, "Take up and read; Take up and read." Instantly, my countenance altered, I began to think most intently whether children were wont in any kind of play to sing such words: nor could I remember ever to have heard the like. So checking the torrent of my tears, I arose; interpreting it to be no other than a command from God to open the book, and read the first chapter I should find. For I had heard of Antony, that coming in during the reading of the Gospel, he received the admonition, as if what was being read was spoken to him: Go, sell all that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven, and come and follow me: and by such oracle he was forthwith converted unto Thee. Eagerly then I returned to the place where Alypius was sitting; for there had I laid the volume of the Apostle when I arose thence. I seized, opened, and in silence read that section on which my eyes first fell: Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying; but put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, in concupiscence. No further would I read; nor needed I: for instantly at the end of this sentence, by a light as it were of serenity infused into my heart, all the darkness of doubt vanished away. Then putting my finger between, or some other mark, I shut the volume, and with a calmed countenance made it known to Alypius. And what was wrought in him, which I knew not, he thus showed me. He asked to see what I had read: I showed him; and he looked even further than I had read, and I knew not what followed. This followed, him that is weak in the faith, receive; which he applied to himself, and disclosed to me. And by this admonition was he strengthened; and by a good resolution and purpose, and most corresponding to his character, wherein he did always very far differ from me, for the better, without any turbulent delay he joined me. Thence we go in to my mother; we tell her; she rejoiceth: we relate in order how it took place; she leaps for joy, and triumpheth, and blesseth Thee, Who are able to do above that which we ask or think; for she perceived that Thou hadst given her more for me, than she was wont to beg by her pitiful and most sorrowful groanings. For thou convertedst me unto Thyself, so that I sought neither wife, nor any hope of this world, standing in that rule of faith, where Thou hadst showed me unto her in a vision, so many years before. And Thou didst convert her mourning into joy, much more plentiful than she had desired, and in a much more precious and purer way than she erst required, by having grandchildren of my body. BOOK IX O Lord, I am Thy servant; I am Thy servant, and the son of Thy handmaid: Thou hast broken my bonds in sunder. I will offer to Thee the sacrifice of praise. Let my heart and my tongue praise Thee; yea, let all my bones say, O Lord, who is like unto Thee? Let them say, and answer Thou me, and say unto my soul, I am thy salvation. Who am I, and what am I? What evil have not been either my deeds, or if not my deeds, my words, or if not my words, my will? But Thou, O Lord, are good and merciful, and Thy right hand had respect unto the depth of my death, and from the bottom of my heart emptied that abyss of corruption. And this Thy whole gift was, to nill what I willed, and to will what Thou willedst. But where through all those years, and out of what low and deep recess was my free-will called forth in a moment, whereby to submit my neck to Thy easy yoke, and my shoulders unto Thy light burden, O Christ Jesus, my Helper and my Redeemer? How sweet did it at once become to me, to want the sweetnesses of those toys! and what I feared to be parted from, was now a joy to part with. For Thou didst cast them forth from me, Thou true and highest sweetness. Thou castest them forth, and for them enteredst in Thyself, sweeter than all pleasure, though not to flesh and blood; brighter than all light, but more hidden than all depths, higher than all honour, but not to the high in their own conceits. Now was my soul free from the biting cares of canvassing and getting, and weltering in filth, and scratching off the itch of lust. And my infant tongue spake freely to Thee, my brightness, and my riches, and my health, the Lord my God. And I resolved in Thy sight, not tumultuously to tear, but gently to withdraw, the service of my tongue from the marts of lip-labour: that the young, no students in Thy law, nor in Thy peace, but in lying dotages and law-skirmishes, should no longer buy at my mouth arms for their madness. And very seasonably, it now wanted but very few days unto the Vacation of the Vintage, and I resolved to endure them, then in a regular way to take my leave, and having been purchased by Thee, no more to return for sale. Our purpose then was known to Thee; but to men, other than our own friends, was it not known. For we had agreed among ourselves not to let it out abroad to any: although to us, now ascending from the valley of tears, and singing that song of degrees, Thou hadst given sharp arrows, and destroying coals against the subtle tongue, which as though advising for us, would thwart, and would out of love devour us, as it doth its meat. Thou hadst pierced our hearts with Thy charity, and we carried Thy words as it were fixed in our entrails: and the examples of Thy servants, whom for black Thou hadst made bright, and for dead, alive, being piled together in the receptacle of our thoughts, kindled and burned up that our heavy torpor, that we should not sink down to the abyss; and they fired us so vehemently, that all the blasts of subtle tongues from gainsayers might only inflame us the more fiercely, not extinguish us. Nevertheless, because for Thy Name's sake which Thou hast hallowed throughout the earth, this our vow and purpose might also find some to commend it, it seemed like ostentation not to wait for the vacation now so near, but to quit beforehand a public profession, which was before the eyes of all; so that all looking on this act of mine, and observing how near was the time of vintage which I wished to anticipate, would talk much of me, as if I had desired to appear some great one. And what end had it served me, that people should repute and dispute upon my purpose, and that our good should be evil spoken of. Moreover, it had at first troubled me that in this very summer my lungs began to give way, amid too great literary labour, and to breathe deeply with difficulty, and by the pain in my chest to show that they were injured, and to refuse any full or lengthened speaking; this had troubled me, for it almost constrained me of necessity to lay down that burden of teaching, or, if I could be cured and recover, at least to intermit it. But when the full wish for leisure, that I might see how that Thou art the Lord, arose, and was fixed, in me; my God, Thou knowest, I began even to rejoice that I had this secondary, and that no feigned, excuse, which might something moderate the offence taken by those who, for their sons' sake, wished me never to have the freedom of Thy sons. Full then of such joy, I endured till that interval of time were run; it may have been some twenty days, yet they were endured manfully; endured, for the covetousness which aforetime bore a part of this heavy business, had left me, and I remained alone, and had been overwhelmed, had not patience taken its place. Perchance, some of Thy servants, my brethren, may say that I sinned in this, that with a heart fully set on Thy service, I suffered myself to sit even one hour in the chair of lies. Nor would I be contentious. But hast not Thou, O most merciful Lord, pardoned and remitted this sin also, with my other most horrible and deadly sins, in the holy water? Verecundus was worn down with care about this our blessedness, for that being held back by bonds, whereby he was most straitly bound, he saw that he should be severed from us. For himself was not yet a Christian, his wife one of the faithful; and yet hereby, more rigidly than by any other chain, was he let and hindered from the journey which we had now essayed. For he would not, he said, be a Christian on any other terms than on those he could not. However, he offered us courteously to remain at his country-house so long as we should stay there. Thou, O Lord, shalt reward him in the resurrection of the just, seeing Thou hast already given him the lot of the righteous. For although, in our absence, being now at Rome, he was seized with bodily sickness, and therein being made a Christian, and one of the faithful, he departed this life; yet hadst Thou mercy not on him only, but on us also: lest remembering the exceeding kindness of our friend towards us, yet unable to number him among Thy flock, we should be agonised with intolerable sorrow. Thanks unto Thee, our God, we are Thine: Thy suggestions and consolations tell us, Faithful in promises, Thou now requitest Verecundus for his country-house of Cassiacum, where from the fever of the world we reposed in Thee, with the eternal freshness of Thy Paradise: for that Thou hast forgiven him his sins upon earth, in that rich mountain, that mountain which yieldeth milk, Thine own mountain. He then had at that time sorrow, but Nebridius joy. For although he also, not being yet a Christian, had fallen into the pit of that most pernicious error, believing the flesh of Thy Son to be a phantom: yet emerging thence, he believed as we did; not as yet endued with any Sacraments of Thy Church, but a most ardent searcher out of truth. Whom, not long after our conversion and regeneration by Thy Baptism, being also a faithful member of the Church Catholic, and serving Thee in perfect chastity and continence amongst his people in Africa, his whole house having through him first been made Christian, didst Thou release from the flesh; and now he lives in Abraham's bosom. Whatever that be, which is signified by that bosom, there lives my Nebridius, my sweet friend, and Thy child, O Lord, adopted of a freed man: there he liveth. For what other place is there for such a soul? There he liveth, whereof he asked much of me, a poor inexperienced man. Now lays he not his ear to my mouth, but his spiritual mouth unto Thy fountain, and drinketh as much as he can receive, wisdom in proportion to his thirst, endlessly happy. Nor do I think that he is so inebriated therewith, as to forget me; seeing Thou, Lord, Whom he drinketh, art mindful of us. So were we then, comforting Verecundus, who sorrowed, as far as friendship permitted, that our conversion was of such sort; and exhorting him to become faithful, according to his measure, namely, of a married estate; and awaiting Nebridius to follow us, which, being so near, he was all but doing: and so, lo! those days rolled by at length; for long and many they seemed, for the love I bare to the easeful liberty, that I might sing to Thee, from my inmost marrow, My heart hath said unto Thee, I have sought Thy face: Thy face, Lord, will I seek. Now was the day come wherein I was in deed to be freed of my Rhetoric Professorship, whereof in thought I was already freed. And it was done. Thou didst rescue my tongue, whence Thou hadst before rescued my heart. And I blessed Thee, rejoicing; retiring with all mine to the villa. What I there did in writing, which was now enlisted in Thy service, though still, in this breathing-time as it were, panting from the school of pride, my books may witness, as well what I debated with others, as what with myself alone, before Thee: what with Nebridius, who was absent, my Epistles bear witness. And when shall I have time to rehearse all Thy great benefits towards us at that time, especially when hasting on to yet greater mercies? For my remembrance recalls me, and pleasant is it to me, O Lord, to confess to Thee, by what inward goads Thou tamedst me; and how Thou hast evened me, lowering the mountains and hills of my high imaginations, straightening my crookedness, and smoothing my rough ways; and how Thou also subduedst the brother of my heart, Alypius, unto the name of Thy Only Begotten, our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, which he would not at first vouchsafe to have inserted in our writings. For rather would he have them savour of the lofty cedars of the Schools, which the Lord hath now broken down, than of the wholesome herbs of the Church, the antidote against serpents. Oh, in what accents spake I unto Thee, my God, when I read the Psalms of David, those faithful songs, and sounds of devotion, which allow of no swelling spirit, as yet a Catechumen, and a novice in Thy real love, resting in that villa, with Alypius a Catechumen, my mother cleaving to us, in female garb with masculine faith, with the tranquillity of age, motherly love, Christian piety! Oh, what accents did I utter unto Thee in those Psalms, and how was I by them kindled towards Thee, and on fire to rehearse them, if possible, through the whole world, against the pride of mankind! And yet they are sung through the whole world, nor can any hide himself from Thy heat. With what vehement and bitter sorrow was I angered at the Manichees! and again I pitied them, for they knew not those Sacraments, those medicines, and were mad against the antidote which might have recovered them of their madness. How I would they had then been somewhere near me, and without my knowing that they were there, could have beheld my countenance, and heard my words, when I read the fourth Psalm in that time of my rest, and how that Psalm wrought upon me: When I called, the God of my righteousness heard me; in tribulation Thou enlargedst me. Have mercy upon me, O Lord, and hear my prayer. Would that what I uttered on these words, they could hear, without my knowing whether they heard, lest they should think I spake it for their sakes! Because in truth neither should I speak the same things, nor in the same way, if I perceived that they heard and saw me; nor if I spake them would they so receive them, as when I spake by and for myself before Thee, out of the natural feelings of my soul. I trembled for fear, and again kindled with hope, and with rejoicing in Thy mercy, O Father; and all issued forth both by mine eyes and voice, when Thy good Spirit turning unto us, said, O ye sons of men, how long slow of heart? why do ye love vanity, and seek after leasing? For I had loved vanity, and sought after leasing. And Thou, O Lord, hadst already magnified Thy Holy One, raising Him from the dead, and setting Him at Thy right hand, whence from on high He should send His promise, the Comforter, the Spirit of truth. And He had already sent Him, but I knew it not; He had sent Him, because He was now magnified, rising again from the dead, and ascending into heaven. For till then, the Spirit was not yet given, because Jesus was not yet glorified. And the prophet cries out, How long, slow of heart? why do ye love vanity, and seek after leasing? Know this, that the Lord hath magnified His Holy One. He cries out, How long? He cries out, Know this: and I so long, not knowing, loved vanity, and sought after leasing: and therefore I heard and trembled, because it was spoken unto such as I remembered myself to have been. For in those phantoms which I had held for truths, was there vanity and leasing; and I spake aloud many things earnestly and forcibly, in the bitterness of my remembrance. Which would they had heard, who yet love vanity and seek after leasing! They would perchance have been troubled, and have vomited it up; and Thou wouldest hear them when they cried unto Thee; for by a true death in the flesh did He die for us, who now intercedeth unto Thee for us. I further read, Be angry, and sin not. And how was I moved, O my God, who had now learned to be angry at myself for things past, that I might not sin in time to come! Yea, to be justly angry; for that it was not another nature of a people of darkness which sinned for me, as they say who are not angry at themselves, and treasure up wrath against the day of wrath, and of the revelation of Thy just judgment. Nor were my good things now without, nor sought with the eyes of flesh in that earthly sun; for they that would have joy from without soon become vain, and waste themselves on the things seen and temporal, and in their famished thoughts do lick their very shadows. Oh that they were wearied out with their famine, and said, Who will show us good things? And we would say, and they hear, The light of Thy countenance is sealed upon us. For we are not that light which enlighteneth every man, but we are enlightened by Thee; that having been sometimes darkness, we may be light in Thee. Oh that they could see the eternal Internal, which having tasted, I was grieved that I could not show It them, so long as they brought me their heart in their eyes roving abroad from Thee, while they said, Who will show us good things? For there, where I was angry within myself in my chamber, where I was inwardly pricked, where I had sacrificed, slaying my old man and commencing the purpose of a new life, putting my trust in Thee,--there hadst Thou begun to grow sweet unto me, and hadst put gladness in my heart. And I cried out, as I read this outwardly, finding it inwardly. Nor would I be multiplied with worldly goods; wasting away time, and wasted by time; whereas I had in Thy eternal Simple Essence other corn, and wine, and oil. And with a loud cry of my heart I cried out in the next verse, O in peace, O for The Self-same! O what said he, I will lay me down and sleep, for who shall hinder us, when cometh to pass that saying which is written, Death is swallowed up in victory? And Thou surpassingly art the Self-same, Who art not changed; and in Thee is rest which forgetteth all toil, for there is none other with Thee, nor are we to seek those many other things, which are not what Thou art: but Thou, Lord, alone hast made me dwell in hope. I read, and kindled; nor found I what to do to those deaf and dead, of whom myself had been, a pestilent person, a bitter and a blind bawler against those writings, which are honied with the honey of heaven, and lightsome with Thine own light: and I was consumed with zeal at the enemies of this Scripture. When shall I recall all which passed in those holy-days? Yet neither have I forgotten, nor will I pass over the severity of Thy scourge, and the wonderful swiftness of Thy mercy. Thou didst then torment me with pain in my teeth; which when it had come to such height that I could not speak, it came into my heart to desire all my friends present to pray for me to Thee, the God of all manner of health. And this I wrote on wax, and gave it them to read. Presently so soon as with humble devotion we had bowed our knees, that pain went away. But what pain? or how went it away? I was affrighted, O my Lord, my God; for from infancy I had never experienced the like. And the power of Thy Nod was deeply conveyed to me, and rejoicing in faith, I praised Thy Name. And that faith suffered me not to be at ease about my past sins, which were not yet forgiven me by Thy baptism. The vintage-vacation ended, I gave notice to the Milanese to provide their scholars with another master to sell words to them; for that I had both made choice to serve Thee, and through my difficulty of breathing and pain in my chest was not equal to the Professorship. And by letters I signified to Thy Prelate, the holy man Ambrose, my former errors and present desires, begging his advice what of Thy Scriptures I had best read, to become readier and fitter for receiving so great grace. He recommended Isaiah the Prophet: I believe, because he above the rest is a more clear foreshower of the Gospel and of the calling of the Gentiles. But I, not understanding the first lesson in him, and imagining the whole to be like it, laid it by, to be resumed when better practised in our Lord's own words. Thence, when the time was come wherein I was to give in my name, we left the country and returned to Milan. It pleased Alypius also to be with me born again in Thee, being already clothed with the humility befitting Thy Sacraments; and a most valiant tamer of the body, so as, with unwonted venture, to wear the frozen ground of Italy with his bare feet. We joined with us the boy Adeodatus, born after the flesh, of my sin. Excellently hadst Thou made him. He was not quite fifteen, and in wit surpassed many grave and learned men. I confess unto Thee Thy gifts, O Lord my God, Creator of all, and abundantly able to reform our deformities: for I had no part in that boy, but the sin. For that we brought him up in Thy discipline, it was Thou, none else, had inspired us with it. I confess unto Thee Thy gifts. There is a book of ours entitled The Master; it is a dialogue between him and me. Thou knowest that all there ascribed to the person conversing with me were his ideas, in his sixteenth year. Much besides, and yet more admirable, I found in him. That talent struck awe into me. And who but Thou could be the workmaster of such wonders? Soon didst Thou take his life from the earth: and I now remember him without anxiety, fearing nothing for his childhood or youth, or his whole self. Him we joined with us, our contemporary in grace, to be brought up in Thy discipline: and we were baptised, and anxiety for our past life vanished from us. Nor was I sated in those days with the wondrous sweetness of considering the depth of Thy counsels concerning the salvation of mankind. How did I weep, in Thy Hymns and Canticles, touched to the quick by the voices of Thy sweet-attuned Church! The voices flowed into mine ears, and the Truth distilled into my heart, whence the affections of my devotion overflowed, and tears ran down, and happy was I therein. Not long had the Church of Milan begun to use this kind of consolation and exhortation, the brethren zealously joining with harmony of voice and hearts. For it was a year, or not much more, that Justina, mother to the Emperor Valentinian, a child, persecuted Thy servant Ambrose, in favour of her heresy, to which she was seduced by the Arians. The devout people kept watch in the Church, ready to die with their Bishop Thy servant. There my mother Thy handmaid, bearing a chief part of those anxieties and watchings, lived for prayer. We, yet unwarmed by the heat of Thy Spirit, still were stirred up by the sight of the amazed and disquieted city. Then it was first instituted that after the manner of the Eastern Churches, Hymns and Psalms should be sung, lest the people should wax faint through the tediousness of sorrow: and from that day to this the custom is retained, divers (yea, almost all) Thy congregations, throughout other parts of the world following herein. Then didst Thou by a vision discover to Thy forenamed Bishop where the bodies of Gervasius and Protasius the martyrs lay hid (whom Thou hadst in Thy secret treasury stored uncorrupted so many years), whence Thou mightest seasonably produce them to repress the fury of a woman, but an Empress. For when they were discovered and dug up, and with due honour translated to the Ambrosian Basilica, not only they who were vexed with unclean spirits (the devils confessing themselves) were cured, but a certain man who had for many years been blind, a citizen, and well known to the city, asking and hearing the reason of the people's confused joy, sprang forth desiring his guide to lead him thither. Led thither, he begged to be allowed to touch with his handkerchief the bier of Thy saints, whose death is precious in Thy sight. Which when he had done, and put to his eyes, they were forthwith opened. Thence did the fame spread, thence Thy praises glowed, shone; thence the mind of that enemy, though not turned to the soundness of believing, was yet turned back from her fury of persecuting. Thanks to Thee, O my God. Whence and whither hast Thou thus led my remembrance, that I should confess these things also unto Thee? which great though they be, I had passed by in forgetfulness. And yet then, when the odour of Thy ointments was so fragrant, did we not run after Thee. Therefore did I more weep among the singing of Thy Hymns, formerly sighing after Thee, and at length breathing in Thee, as far as the breath may enter into this our house of grass. Thou that makest men to dwell of one mind in one house, didst join with us Euodius also, a young man of our own city. Who being an officer of Court, was before us converted to Thee and baptised: and quitting his secular warfare, girded himself to Thine. We were together, about to dwell together in our devout purpose. We sought where we might serve Thee most usefully, and were together returning to Africa: whitherward being as far as Ostia, my mother departed this life. Much I omit, as hastening much. Receive my confessions and thanksgivings, O my God, for innumerable things whereof I am silent. But I will not omit whatsoever my soul would bring forth concerning that Thy handmaid, who brought me forth, both in the flesh, that I might be born to this temporal light, and in heart, that I might be born to Light eternal. Not her gifts, but Thine in her, would I speak of; for neither did she make nor educate herself. Thou createdst her; nor did her father and mother know what a one should come from them. And the sceptre of Thy Christ, the discipline of Thine only Son, in a Christian house, a good member of Thy Church, educated her in Thy fear. Yet for her good discipline was she wont to commend not so much her mother's diligence, as that of a certain decrepit maid-servant, who had carried her father when a child, as little ones used to be carried at the backs of elder girls. For which reason, and for her great age, and excellent conversation, was she, in that Christian family, well respected by its heads. Whence also the charge of her master's daughters was entrusted to her, to which she gave diligent heed, restraining them earnestly, when necessary, with a holy severity, and teaching them with a grave discretion. For, except at those hours wherein they were most temporately fed at their parents' table, she would not suffer them, though parched with thirst, to drink even water; preventing an evil custom, and adding this wholesome advice: "Ye drink water now, because you have not wine in your power; but when you come to be married, and be made mistresses of cellars and cupboards, you will scorn water, but the custom of drinking will abide." By this method of instruction, and the authority she had, she refrained the greediness of childhood, and moulded their very thirst to such an excellent moderation that what they should not, that they would not. And yet (as Thy handmaid told me her son) there had crept upon her a love of wine. For when (as the manner was) she, as though a sober maiden, was bidden by her parents to draw wine out of the hogshed, holding the vessel under the opening, before she poured the wine into the flagon, she sipped a little with the tip of her lips; for more her instinctive feelings refused. For this she did, not out of any desire of drink, but out of the exuberance of youth, whereby it boils over in mirthful freaks, which in youthful spirits are wont to be kept under by the gravity of their elders. And thus by adding to that little, daily littles (for whoso despiseth little things shall fall by little and little), she had fallen into such a habit as greedily to drink off her little cup brim-full almost of wine. Where was then that discreet old woman, and that her earnest countermanding? Would aught avail against a secret disease, if Thy healing hand, O Lord, watched not over us? Father, mother, and governors absent, Thou present, who createdst, who callest, who also by those set over us, workest something towards the salvation of our souls, what didst Thou then, O my God? how didst Thou cure her? how heal her? didst Thou not out of another soul bring forth a hard and a sharp taunt, like a lancet out of Thy secret store, and with one touch remove all that foul stuff? For a maid-servant with whom she used to go to the cellar, falling to words (as it happens) with her little mistress, when alone with her, taunted her with this fault, with most bitter insult, calling her wine-bibber. With which taunt she, stung to the quick, saw the foulness of her fault, and instantly condemned and forsook it. As flattering friends pervert, so reproachful enemies mostly correct. Yet not what by them Thou doest, but what themselves purposed, dost Thou repay them. For she in her anger sought to vex her young mistress, not to amend her; and did it in private, either for that the time and place of the quarrel so found them; or lest herself also should have anger, for discovering it thus late. But Thou, Lord, Governor of all in heaven and earth, who turnest to Thy purposes the deepest currents, and the ruled turbulence of the tide of times, didst by the very unhealthiness of one soul heal another; lest any, when he observes this, should ascribe it to his own power, even when another, whom he wished to be reformed, is reformed through words of his. Brought up thus modestly and soberly, and made subject rather by Thee to her parents, than by her parents to Thee, so soon as she was of marriageable age, being bestowed upon a husband, she served him as her lord; and did her diligence to win him unto Thee, preaching Thee unto him by her conversation; by which Thou ornamentedst her, making her reverently amiable, and admirable unto her husband. And she so endured the wronging of her bed as never to have any quarrel with her husband thereon. For she looked for Thy mercy upon him, that believing in Thee, he might be made chaste. But besides this, he was fervid, as in his affections, so in anger: but she had learnt not to resist an angry husband, not in deed only, but not even in word. Only when he was smoothed and tranquil, and in a temper to receive it, she would give an account of her actions, if haply he had overhastily taken offence. In a word, while many matrons, who had milder husbands, yet bore even in their faces marks of shame, would in familiar talk blame their husbands' lives, she would blame their tongues, giving them, as in jest, earnest advice: "That from the time they heard the marriage writings read to them, they should account them as indentures, whereby they were made servants; and so, remembering their condition, ought not to set themselves up against their lords." And when they, knowing what a choleric husband she endured, marvelled that it had never been heard, nor by any token perceived, that Patricius had beaten his wife, or that there had been any domestic difference between them, even for one day, and confidentially asking the reason, she taught them her practice above mentioned. Those wives who observed it found the good, and returned thanks; those who observed it not, found no relief, and suffered. Her mother-in-law also, at first by whisperings of evil servants incensed against her, she so overcame by observance and persevering endurance and meekness, that she of her own accord discovered to her son the meddling tongues whereby the domestic peace betwixt her and her daughter-in-law had been disturbed, asking him to correct them. Then, when in compliance with his mother, and for the well-ordering of the family, he had with stripes corrected those discovered, at her will who had discovered them, she promised the like reward to any who, to please her, should speak ill of her daughter-in-law to her: and none now venturing, they lived together with a remarkable sweetness of mutual kindness. This great gift also thou bestowedst, O my God, my mercy, upon that good handmaid of Thine, in whose womb Thou createdst me, that between any disagreeing and discordant parties where she was able, she showed herself such a peacemaker, that hearing on both sides most bitter things, such as swelling and indigested choler uses to break out into, when the crudities of enmities are breathed out in sour discourses to a present friend against an absent enemy, she never would disclose aught of the one unto the other, but what might tend to their reconcilement. A small good this might appear to me, did I not to my grief know numberless persons, who through some horrible and wide-spreading contagion of sin, not only disclose to persons mutually angered things said in anger, but add withal things never spoken, whereas to humane humanity, it ought to seem a light thing not to torment or increase ill will by ill words, unless one study withal by good words to quench it. Such was she, Thyself, her most inward Instructor, teaching her in the school of the heart. Finally, her own husband, towards the very end of his earthly life, did she gain unto Thee; nor had she to complain of that in him as a believer, which before he was a believer she had borne from him. She was also the servant of Thy servants; whosoever of them knew her, did in her much praise and honour and love Thee; for that through the witness of the fruits of a holy conversation they perceived Thy presence in her heart. For she had been the wife of one man, had requited her parents, had governed her house piously, was well reported of for good works, had brought up children, so often travailing in birth of them, as she saw them swerving from Thee. Lastly, of all of us Thy servants, O Lord (whom on occasion of Thy own gift Thou sufferest to speak), us, who before her sleeping in Thee lived united together, having received the grace of Thy baptism, did she so take care of, as though she had been mother of us all; so served us, as though she had been child to us all. The day now approaching whereon she was to depart this life (which day Thou well knewest, we knew not), it came to pass, Thyself, as I believe, by Thy secret ways so ordering it, that she and I stood alone, leaning in a certain window, which looked into the garden of the house where we now lay, at Ostia; where removed from the din of men, we were recruiting from the fatigues of a long journey, for the voyage. We were discoursing then together, alone, very sweetly; and forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, we were enquiring between ourselves in the presence of the Truth, which Thou art, of what sort the eternal life of the saints was to be, which eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor hath it entered into the heart of man. But yet we gasped with the mouth of our heart, after those heavenly streams of Thy fountain, the fountain of life, which is with Thee; that being bedewed thence according to our capacity, we might in some sort meditate upon so high a mystery. And when our discourse was brought to that point, that the very highest delight of the earthly senses, in the very purest material light, was, in respect of the sweetness of that life, not only not worthy of comparison, but not even of mention; we raising up ourselves with a more glowing affection towards the "Self-same," did by degrees pass through all things bodily, even the very heaven whence sun and moon and stars shine upon the earth; yea, we were soaring higher yet, by inward musing, and discourse, and admiring of Thy works; and we came to our own minds, and went beyond them, that we might arrive at that region of never-failing plenty, where Thou feedest Israel for ever with the food of truth, and where life is the Wisdom by whom all these things are made, and what have been, and what shall be, and she is not made, but is, as she hath been, and so shall she be ever; yea rather, to "have been," and "hereafter to be," are not in her, but only "to be," seeing she is eternal. For to "have been," and to "be hereafter," are not eternal. And while we were discoursing and panting after her, we slightly touched on her with the whole effort of our heart; and we sighed, and there we leave bound the first fruits of the Spirit; and returned to vocal expressions of our mouth, where the word spoken has beginning and end. And what is like unto Thy Word, our Lord, who endureth in Himself without becoming old, and maketh all things new? We were saying then: If to any the tumult of the flesh were hushed, hushed the images of earth, and waters, and air, hushed also the pole of heaven, yea the very soul be hushed to herself, and by not thinking on self surmount self, hushed all dreams and imaginary revelations, every tongue and every sign, and whatsoever exists only in transition, since if any could hear, all these say, We made not ourselves, but He made us that abideth for ever--If then having uttered this, they too should be hushed, having roused only our ears to Him who made them, and He alone speak, not by them but by Himself, that we may hear His Word, not through any tongue of flesh, nor Angel's voice, nor sound of thunder, nor in the dark riddle of a similitude, but might hear Whom in these things we love, might hear His Very Self without these (as we two now strained ourselves, and in swift thought touched on that Eternal Wisdom which abideth over all);--could this be continued on, and other visions of kind far unlike be withdrawn, and this one ravish, and absorb, and wrap up its beholder amid these inward joys, so that life might be for ever like that one moment of understanding which now we sighed after; were not this, Enter into thy Master's joy? And when shall that be? When we shall all rise again, though we shall not all be changed? Such things was I speaking, and even if not in this very manner, and these same words, yet, Lord, Thou knowest that in that day when we were speaking of these things, and this world with all its delights became, as we spake, contemptible to us, my mother said, "Son, for mine own part I have no further delight in any thing in this life. What I do here any longer, and to what I am here, I know not, now that my hopes in this world are accomplished. One thing there was for which I desired to linger for a while in this life, that I might see thee a Catholic Christian before I died. My God hath done this for me more abundantly, that I should now see thee withal, despising earthly happiness, become His servant: what do I here?" What answer I made her unto these things, I remember not. For scarce five days after, or not much more, she fell sick of a fever; and in that sickness one day she fell into a swoon, and was for a while withdrawn from these visible things. We hastened round her; but she was soon brought back to her senses; and looking on me and my brother standing by her, said to us enquiringly, "Where was I?" And then looking fixedly on us, with grief amazed: "Here," saith she, "shall you bury your mother." I held my peace and refrained weeping; but my brother spake something, wishing for her, as the happier lot, that she might die, not in a strange place, but in her own land. Whereat, she with anxious look, checking him with her eyes, for that he still savoured such things, and then looking upon me: "Behold," saith she, "what he saith": and soon after to us both, "Lay," she saith, "this body any where; let not the care for that any way disquiet you: this only I request, that you would remember me at the Lord's altar, wherever you be." And having delivered this sentiment in what words she could, she held her peace, being exercised by her growing sickness. But I, considering Thy gifts, Thou unseen God, which Thou instillest into the hearts of Thy faithful ones, whence wondrous fruits do spring, did rejoice and give thanks to Thee, recalling what I before knew, how careful and anxious she had ever been as to her place of burial, which she had provided and prepared for herself by the body of her husband. For because they had lived in great harmony together, she also wished (so little can the human mind embrace things divine) to have this addition to that happiness, and to have it remembered among men, that after her pilgrimage beyond the seas, what was earthly of this united pair had been permitted to be united beneath the same earth. But when this emptiness had through the fulness of Thy goodness begun to cease in her heart, I knew not, and rejoiced admiring what she had so disclosed to me; though indeed in that our discourse also in the window, when she said, "What do I here any longer?" there appeared no desire of dying in her own country. I heard afterwards also, that when we were now at Ostia, she with a mother's confidence, when I was absent, one day discoursed with certain of my friends about the contempt of this life, and the blessing of death: and when they were amazed at such courage which Thou hadst given to a woman, and asked, "Whether she were not afraid to leave her body so far from her own city?" she replied, "Nothing is far to God; nor was it to be feared lest at the end of the world, He should not recognise whence He were to raise me up." On the ninth day then of her sickness, and the fifty-sixth year of her age, and the three-and-thirtieth of mine, was that religious and holy soul freed from the body. I closed her eyes; and there flowed withal a mighty sorrow into my heart, which was overflowing into tears; mine eyes at the same time, by the violent command of my mind, drank up their fountain wholly dry; and woe was me in such a strife! But when she breathed her last, the boy Adeodatus burst out into a loud lament; then, checked by us all, held his peace. In like manner also a childish feeling in me, which was, through my heart's youthful voice, finding its vent in weeping, was checked and silenced. For we thought it not fitting to solemnise that funeral with tearful lament, and groanings; for thereby do they for the most part express grief for the departed, as though unhappy, or altogether dead; whereas she was neither unhappy in her death, nor altogether dead. Of this we were assured on good grounds, the testimony of her good conversation and her faith unfeigned. What then was it which did grievously pain me within, but a fresh wound wrought through the sudden wrench of that most sweet and dear custom of living together? I joyed indeed in her testimony, when, in that her last sickness, mingling her endearments with my acts of duty, she called me "dutiful," and mentioned, with great affection of love, that she never had heard any harsh or reproachful sound uttered by my mouth against her. But yet, O my God, Who madest us, what comparison is there betwixt that honour that I paid to her, and her slavery for me? Being then forsaken of so great comfort in her, my soul was wounded, and that life rent asunder as it were, which, of hers and mine together, had been made but one. The boy then being stilled from weeping, Euodius took up the Psalter, and began to sing, our whole house answering him, the Psalm, I will sing of mercy and judgments to Thee, O Lord. But hearing what we were doing, many brethren and religious women came together; and whilst they (whose office it was) made ready for the burial, as the manner is, I, in a part of the house, where I might properly, together with those who thought not fit to leave me, discoursed upon something fitting the time; and by this balm of truth assuaged that torment, known to Thee, they unknowing and listening intently, and conceiving me to be without all sense of sorrow. But in Thy ears, where none of them heard, I blamed the weakness of my feelings, and refrained my flood of grief, which gave way a little unto me; but again came, as with a tide, yet not so as to burst out into tears, nor to change of countenance; still I knew what I was keeping down in my heart. And being very much displeased that these human things had such power over me, which in the due order and appointment of our natural condition must needs come to pass, with a new grief I grieved for my grief, and was thus worn by a double sorrow. And behold, the corpse was carried to the burial; we went and returned without tears. For neither in those prayers which we poured forth unto Thee, when the Sacrifice of our ransom was offered for her, when now the corpse was by the grave's side, as the manner there is, previous to its being laid therein, did I weep even during those prayers; yet was I the whole day in secret heavily sad, and with troubled mind prayed Thee, as I could, to heal my sorrow, yet Thou didst not; impressing, I believe, upon my memory by this one instance, how strong is the bond of all habit, even upon a soul, which now feeds upon no deceiving Word. It seemed also good to me to go and bathe, having heard that the bath had its name (balneum) from the Greek Balaneion for that it drives sadness from the mind. And this also I confess unto Thy mercy, Father of the fatherless, that I bathed, and was the same as before I bathed. For the bitterness of sorrow could not exude out of my heart. Then I slept, and woke up again, and found my grief not a little softened; and as I was alone in my bed, I remembered those true verses of Thy Ambrose. For Thou art the "Maker of all, the Lord, And Ruler of the height, Who, robing day in light, hast poured Soft slumbers o'er the night, That to our limbs the power Of toil may be renew'd, And hearts be rais'd that sink and cower, And sorrows be subdu'd." And then by little and little I recovered my former thoughts of Thy handmaid, her holy conversation towards Thee, her holy tenderness and observance towards us, whereof I was suddenly deprived: and I was minded to weep in Thy sight, for her and for myself, in her behalf and in my own. And I gave way to the tears which I before restrained, to overflow as much as they desired; reposing my heart upon them; and it found rest in them, for it was in Thy ears, not in those of man, who would have scornfully interpreted my weeping. And now, Lord, in writing I confess it unto Thee. Read it, who will, and interpret it, how he will: and if he finds sin therein, that I wept my mother for a small portion of an hour (the mother who for the time was dead to mine eyes, who had for many years wept for me that I might live in Thine eyes), let him not deride me; but rather, if he be one of large charity, let him weep himself for my sins unto Thee, the Father of all the brethren of Thy Christ. But now, with a heart cured of that wound, wherein it might seem blameworthy for an earthly feeling, I pour out unto Thee, our God, in behalf of that Thy handmaid, a far different kind of tears, flowing from a spirit shaken by the thoughts of the dangers of every soul that dieth in Adam. And although she having been quickened in Christ, even before her release from the flesh, had lived to the praise of Thy name for her faith and conversation; yet dare I not say that from what time Thou regeneratedst her by baptism, no word issued from her mouth against Thy Commandment. Thy Son, the Truth, hath said, Whosoever shall say unto his brother, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire. And woe be even unto the commendable life of men, if, laying aside mercy, Thou shouldest examine it. But because Thou art not extreme in enquiring after sins, we confidently hope to find some place with Thee. But whosoever reckons up his real merits to Thee, what reckons he up to Thee but Thine own gifts? O that men would know themselves to be men; and that he that glorieth would glory in the Lord. I therefore, O my Praise and my Life, God of my heart, laying aside for a while her good deeds, for which I give thanks to Thee with joy, do now beseech Thee for the sins of my mother. Hearken unto me, I entreat Thee, by the Medicine of our wounds, Who hung upon the tree, and now sitting at Thy right hand maketh intercession to Thee for us. I know that she dealt mercifully, and from her heart forgave her debtors their debts; do Thou also forgive her debts, whatever she may have contracted in so many years, since the water of salvation. Forgive her, Lord, forgive, I beseech Thee; enter not into judgment with her. Let Thy mercy be exalted above Thy justice, since Thy words are true, and Thou hast promised mercy unto the merciful; which Thou gavest them to be, who wilt have mercy on whom Thou wilt have mercy; and wilt have compassion on whom Thou hast had compassion. And, I believe, Thou hast already done what I ask; but accept, O Lord, the free-will offerings of my mouth. For she, the day of her dissolution now at hand, took no thought to have her body sumptuously wound up, or embalmed with spices; nor desired she a choice monument, or to be buried in her own land. These things she enjoined us not; but desired only to have her name commemorated at Thy Altar, which she had served without intermission of one day: whence she knew the holy Sacrifice to be dispensed, by which the hand-writing that was against us is blotted out; through which the enemy was triumphed over, who summing up our offences, and seeking what to lay to our charge, found nothing in Him, in Whom we conquer. Who shall restore to Him the innocent blood? Who repay Him the price wherewith He bought us, and so take us from Him? Unto the Sacrament of which our ransom, Thy handmaid bound her soul by the bond of faith. Let none sever her from Thy protection: let neither the lion nor the dragon interpose himself by force or fraud. For she will not answer that she owes nothing, lest she be convicted and seized by the crafty accuser: but she will answer that her sins are forgiven her by Him, to Whom none can repay that price which He, Who owed nothing, paid for us. May she rest then in peace with the husband before and after whom she had never any; whom she obeyed, with patience bringing forth fruit unto Thee, that she might win him also unto Thee. And inspire, O Lord my God, inspire Thy servants my brethren, Thy sons my masters, whom with voice, and heart, and pen I serve, that so many as shall read these Confessions, may at Thy Altar remember Monnica Thy handmaid, with Patricius, her sometimes husband, by whose bodies Thou broughtest me into this life, how I know not. May they with devout affection remember my parents in this transitory light, my brethren under Thee our Father in our Catholic Mother, and my fellow-citizens in that eternal Jerusalem which Thy pilgrim people sigheth after from their Exodus, even unto their return thither. That so my mother's last request of me, may through my confessions, more than through my prayers, be, through the prayers of many, more abundantly fulfilled to her. BOOK X Let me know Thee, O Lord, who knowest me: let me know Thee, as I am known. Power of my soul, enter into it, and fit it for Thee, that Thou mayest have and hold it without spot or wrinkle. This is my hope, therefore do I speak; and in this hope do I rejoice, when I rejoice healthfully. Other things of this life are the less to be sorrowed for, the more they are sorrowed for; and the more to be sorrowed for, the less men sorrow for them. For behold, Thou lovest the truth, and he that doth it, cometh to the light. This would I do in my heart before Thee in confession: and in my writing, before many witnesses. And from Thee, O Lord, unto whose eyes the abyss of man's conscience is naked, what could be hidden in me though I would not confess it? For I should hide Thee from me, not me from Thee. But now, for that my groaning is witness, that I am displeased with myself, Thou shinest out, and art pleasing, and beloved, and longed for; that I may be ashamed of myself, and renounce myself, and choose Thee, and neither please Thee nor myself, but in Thee. To Thee therefore, O Lord, am I open, whatever I am; and with what fruit I confess unto Thee, I have said. Nor do I it with words and sounds of the flesh, but with the words of my soul, and the cry of the thought which Thy ear knoweth. For when I am evil, then to confess to Thee is nothing else than to be displeased with myself; but when holy, nothing else than not to ascribe it to myself: because Thou, O Lord, blessest the godly, but first Thou justifieth him when ungodly. My confession then, O my God, in Thy sight, is made silently, and not silently. For in sound, it is silent; in affection, it cries aloud. For neither do I utter any thing right unto men, which Thou hast not before heard from me; nor dost Thou hear any such thing from me, which Thou hast not first said unto me. What then have I to do with men, that they should hear my confessions--as if they could heal all my infirmities--a race, curious to know the lives of others, slothful to amend their own? Why seek they to hear from me what I am; who will not hear from Thee what themselves are? And how know they, when from myself they hear of myself, whether I say true; seeing no man knows what is in man, but the spirit of man which is in him? But if they hear from Thee of themselves, they cannot say, "The Lord lieth." For what is it to hear from Thee of themselves, but to know themselves? and who knoweth and saith, "It is false," unless himself lieth? But because charity believeth all things (that is, among those whom knitting unto itself it maketh one), I also, O Lord, will in such wise confess unto Thee, that men may hear, to whom I cannot demonstrate whether I confess truly; yet they believe me, whose ears charity openeth unto me. But do Thou, my inmost Physician, make plain unto me what fruit I may reap by doing it. For the confessions of my past sins, which Thou hast forgiven and covered, that Thou mightest bless me in Thee, changing my soul by Faith and Thy Sacrament, when read and heard, stir up the heart, that it sleep not in despair and say "I cannot," but awake in the love of Thy mercy and the sweetness of Thy grace, whereby whoso is weak, is strong, when by it he became conscious of his own weakness. And the good delight to hear of the past evils of such as are now freed from them, not because they are evils, but because they have been and are not. With what fruit then, O Lord my God, to Whom my conscience daily confesseth, trusting more in the hope of Thy mercy than in her own innocency, with what fruit, I pray, do I by this book confess to men also in Thy presence what I now am, not what I have been? For that other fruit I have seen and spoken of. But what I now am, at the very time of making these confessions, divers desire to know, who have or have not known me, who have heard from me or of me; but their ear is not at my heart where I am, whatever I am. They wish then to hear me confess what I am within; whither neither their eye, nor ear, nor understanding can reach; they wish it, as ready to believe--but will they know? For charity, whereby they are good, telleth them that in my confessions I lie not; and she in them, believeth me. But for what fruit would they hear this? Do they desire to joy with me, when they hear how near, by Thy gift, I approach unto Thee? and to pray for me, when they shall hear how much I am held back by my own weight? To such will I discover myself. For it is no mean fruit, O Lord my God, that by many thanks should be given to Thee on our behalf, and Thou be by many entreated for us. Let the brotherly mind love in me what Thou teachest is to be loved, and lament in me what Thou teachest is to be lamented. Let a brotherly, not a stranger, mind, not that of the strange children, whose mouth talketh of vanity, and their right hand is a right hand of iniquity, but that brotherly mind which when it approveth, rejoiceth for me, and when it disapproveth me, is sorry for me; because whether it approveth or disapproveth, it loveth me. To such will I discover myself: they will breathe freely at my good deeds, sigh for my ill. My good deeds are Thine appointments, and Thy gifts; my evil ones are my offences, and Thy judgments. Let them breathe freely at the one, sigh at the other; and let hymns and weeping go up into Thy sight, out of the hearts of my brethren, Thy censers. And do Thou, O Lord, be pleased with the incense of Thy holy temple, have mercy upon me according to Thy great mercy for Thine own name's sake; and no ways forsaking what Thou hast begun, perfect my imperfections. This is the fruit of my confessions of what I am, not of what I have been, to confess this, not before Thee only, in a secret exultation with trembling, and a secret sorrow with hope; but in the ears also of the believing sons of men, sharers of my joy, and partners in my mortality, my fellow-citizens, and fellow-pilgrims, who are gone before, or are to follow on, companions of my way. These are Thy servants, my brethren, whom Thou willest to be Thy sons; my masters, whom Thou commandest me to serve, if I would live with Thee, of Thee. But this Thy Word were little did it only command by speaking, and not go before in performing. This then I do in deed and word, this I do under Thy wings; in over great peril, were not my soul subdued unto Thee under Thy wings, and my infirmity known unto Thee. I am a little one, but my Father ever liveth, and my Guardian is sufficient for me. For He is the same who begat me, and defends me: and Thou Thyself art all my good; Thou, Almighty, Who are with me, yea, before I am with Thee. To such then whom Thou commandest me to serve will I discover, not what I have been, but what I now am and what I yet am. But neither do I judge myself. Thus therefore I would be heard. For Thou, Lord, dost judge me: because, although no man knoweth the things of a man, but the spirit of a man which is in him, yet is there something of man, which neither the spirit of man that is in him, itself knoweth. But Thou, Lord, knowest all of him, Who hast made him. Yet I, though in Thy sight I despise myself, and account myself dust and ashes; yet know I something of Thee, which I know not of myself. And truly, now we see through a glass darkly, not face to face as yet. So long therefore as I be absent from Thee, I am more present with myself than with Thee; and yet know I Thee that Thou art in no ways passible; but I, what temptations I can resist, what I cannot, I know not. And there is hope, because Thou art faithful, Who wilt not suffer us to be tempted above that we are able; but wilt with the temptation also make a way to escape, that we may be able to bear it. I will confess then what I know of myself, I will confess also what I know not of myself. And that because what I do know of myself, I know by Thy shining upon me; and what I know not of myself, so long know I not it, until my darkness be made as the noon-day in Thy countenance. Not with doubting, but with assured consciousness, do I love Thee, Lord. Thou hast stricken my heart with Thy word, and I loved Thee. Yea also heaven, and earth, and all that therein is, behold, on every side they bid me love Thee; nor cease to say so unto all, that they may be without excuse. But more deeply wilt Thou have mercy on whom Thou wilt have mercy, and wilt have compassion on whom Thou hast had compassion: else in deaf ears do the heaven and the earth speak Thy praises. But what do I love, when I love Thee? not beauty of bodies, nor the fair harmony of time, nor the brightness of the light, so gladsome to our eyes, nor sweet melodies of varied songs, nor the fragrant smell of flowers, and ointments, and spices, not manna and honey, not limbs acceptable to embracements of flesh. None of these I love, when I love my God; and yet I love a kind of light, and melody, and fragrance, and meat, and embracement when I love my God, the light, melody, fragrance, meat, embracement of my inner man: where there shineth unto my soul what space cannot contain, and there soundeth what time beareth not away, and there smelleth what breathing disperseth not, and there tasteth what eating diminisheth not, and there clingeth what satiety divorceth not. This is it which I love when I love my God. And what is this? I asked the earth, and it answered me, "I am not He"; and whatsoever are in it confessed the same. I asked the sea and the deeps, and the living creeping things, and they answered, "We are not thy God, seek above us." I asked the moving air; and the whole air with his inhabitants answered, "Anaximenes was deceived, I am not God." I asked the heavens, sun, moon, stars, "Nor (say they) are we the God whom thou seekest." And I replied unto all the things which encompass the door of my flesh: "Ye have told me of my God, that ye are not He; tell me something of Him." And they cried out with a loud voice, "He made us." My questioning them, was my thoughts on them: and their form of beauty gave the answer. And I turned myself unto myself, and said to myself, "Who art thou?" And I answered, "A man." And behold, in me there present themselves to me soul, and body, one without, the other within. By which of these ought I to seek my God? I had sought Him in the body from earth to heaven, so far as I could send messengers, the beams of mine eyes. But the better is the inner, for to it as presiding and judging, all the bodily messengers reported the answers of heaven and earth, and all things therein, who said, "We are not God, but He made us." These things did my inner man know by the ministry of the outer: I the inner knew them; I, the mind, through the senses of my body. I asked the whole frame of the world about my God; and it answered me, "I am not He, but He made me." Is not this corporeal figure apparent to all whose senses are perfect? why then speaks it not the same to all? Animals small and great see it, but they cannot ask it: because no reason is set over their senses to judge on what they report. But men can ask, so that the invisible things of God are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made; but by love of them, they are made subject unto them: and subjects cannot judge. Nor yet do the creatures answer such as ask, unless they can judge; nor yet do they change their voice (i.e., their appearance), if one man only sees, another seeing asks, so as to appear one way to this man, another way to that, but appearing the same way to both, it is dumb to this, speaks to that; yea rather it speaks to all; but they only understand, who compare its voice received from without, with the truth within. For truth saith unto me, "Neither heaven, nor earth, nor any other body is thy God." This, their very nature saith to him that seeth them: "They are a mass; a mass is less in a part thereof than in the whole." Now to thee I speak, O my soul, thou art my better part: for thou quickenest the mass of my body, giving it life, which no body can give to a body: but thy God is even unto thee the Life of thy life. What then do I love, when I love my God? who is He above the head of my soul? By my very soul will I ascend to Him. I will pass beyond that power whereby I am united to my body, and fill its whole frame with life. Nor can I by that power find my God; for so horse and mule that have no understanding might find Him; seeing it is the same power, whereby even their bodies live. But another power there is, not that only whereby I animate, but that too whereby I imbue with sense my flesh, which the Lord hath framed for me: commanding the eye not to hear, and the ear not to see; but the eye, that through it I should see, and the ear, that through it I should hear; and to the other senses severally, what is to each their own peculiar seats and offices; which, being divers, I the one mind, do through them enact. I will pass beyond this power of mine also; for this also have the horse, and mule, for they also perceive through the body. I will pass then beyond this power of my nature also, rising by degrees unto Him Who made me. And I come to the fields and spacious palaces of my memory, where are the treasures of innumerable images, brought into it from things of all sorts perceived by the senses. There is stored up, whatsoever besides we think, either by enlarging or diminishing, or any other way varying those things which the sense hath come to; and whatever else hath been committed and laid up, which forgetfulness hath not yet swallowed up and buried. When I enter there, I require what I will to be brought forth, and something instantly comes; others must be longer sought after, which are fetched, as it were, out of some inner receptacle; others rush out in troops, and while one thing is desired and required, they start forth, as who should say, "Is it perchance I?" These I drive away with the hand of my heart, from the face of my remembrance; until what I wish for be unveiled, and appear in sight, out of its secret place. Other things come up readily, in unbroken order, as they are called for; those in front making way for the following; and as they make way, they are hidden from sight, ready to come when I will. All which takes place when I repeat a thing by heart. There are all things preserved distinctly and under general heads, each having entered by its own avenue: as light, and all colours and forms of bodies by the eyes; by the ears all sorts of sounds; all smells by the avenue of the nostrils; all tastes by the mouth; and by the sensation of the whole body, what is hard or soft; hot or cold; or rugged; heavy or light; either outwardly or inwardly to the body. All these doth that great harbour of the memory receive in her numberless secret and inexpressible windings, to be forthcoming, and brought out at need; each entering in by his own gate, and there laid up. Nor yet do the things themselves enter in; only the images of the things perceived are there in readiness, for thought to recall. Which images, how they are formed, who can tell, though it doth plainly appear by which sense each hath been brought in and stored up? For even while I dwell in darkness and silence, in my memory I can produce colours, if I will, and discern betwixt black and white, and what others I will: nor yet do sounds break in and disturb the image drawn in by my eyes, which I am reviewing, though they also are there, lying dormant, and laid up, as it were, apart. For these too I call for, and forthwith they appear. And though my tongue be still, and my throat mute, so can I sing as much as I will; nor do those images of colours, which notwithstanding be there, intrude themselves and interrupt, when another store is called for, which flowed in by the ears. So the other things, piled in and up by the other senses, I recall at my pleasure. Yea, I discern the breath of lilies from violets, though smelling nothing; and I prefer honey to sweet wine, smooth before rugged, at the time neither tasting nor handling, but remembering only. These things do I within, in that vast court of my memory. For there are present with me, heaven, earth, sea, and whatever I could think on therein, besides what I have forgotten. There also meet I with myself, and recall myself, and when, where, and what I have done, and under what feelings. There be all which I remember, either on my own experience, or other's credit. Out of the same store do I myself with the past continually combine fresh and fresh likenesses of things which I have experienced, or, from what I have experienced, have believed: and thence again infer future actions, events and hopes, and all these again I reflect on, as present. "I will do this or that," say I to myself, in that great receptacle of my mind, stored with the images of things so many and so great, "and this or that will follow." "O that this or that might be!" "God avert this or that!" So speak I to myself: and when I speak, the images of all I speak of are present, out of the same treasury of memory; nor would I speak of any thereof, were the images wanting. Great is this force of memory, excessive great, O my God; a large and boundless chamber! who ever sounded the bottom thereof? yet is this a power of mine, and belongs unto my nature; nor do I myself comprehend all that I am. Therefore is the mind too strait to contain itself. And where should that be, which it containeth not of itself? Is it without it, and not within? how then doth it not comprehend itself? A wonderful admiration surprises me, amazement seizes me upon this. And men go abroad to admire the heights of mountains, the mighty billows of the sea, the broad tides of rivers, the compass of the ocean, and the circuits of the stars, and pass themselves by; nor wonder that when I spake of all these things, I did not see them with mine eyes, yet could not have spoken of them, unless I then actually saw the mountains, billows, rivers, stars which I had seen, and that ocean which I believe to be, inwardly in my memory, and that, with the same vast spaces between, as if I saw them abroad. Yet did not I by seeing draw them into myself, when with mine eyes I beheld them; nor are they themselves with me, but their images only. And I know by what sense of the body each was impressed upon me. Yet not these alone does the unmeasurable capacity of my memory retain. Here also is all, learnt of the liberal sciences and as yet unforgotten; removed as it were to some inner place, which is yet no place: nor are they the images thereof, but the things themselves. For, what is literature, what the art of disputing, how many kinds of questions there be, whatsoever of these I know, in such manner exists in my memory, as that I have not taken in the image, and left out the thing, or that it should have sounded and passed away like a voice fixed on the ear by that impress, whereby it might be recalled, as if it sounded, when it no longer sounded; or as a smell while it passes and evaporates into air affects the sense of smell, whence it conveys into the memory an image of itself, which remembering, we renew, or as meat, which verily in the belly hath now no taste, and yet in the memory still in a manner tasteth; or as any thing which the body by touch perceiveth, and which when removed from us, the memory still conceives. For those things are not transmitted into the memory, but their images only are with an admirable swiftness caught up, and stored as it were in wondrous cabinets, and thence wonderfully by the act of remembering, brought forth. But now when I hear that there be three kinds of questions, "Whether the thing be? what it is? of what kind it is?" I do indeed hold the images of the sounds of which those words be composed, and that those sounds, with a noise passed through the air, and now are not. But the things themselves which are signified by those sounds, I never reached with any sense of my body, nor ever discerned them otherwise than in my mind; yet in my memory have I laid up not their images, but themselves. Which how they entered into me, let them say if they can; for I have gone over all the avenues of my flesh, but cannot find by which they entered. For the eyes say, "If those images were coloured, we reported of them." The ears say, "If they sound, we gave knowledge of them." The nostrils say, "If they smell, they passed by us." The taste says, "Unless they have a savour, ask me not." The touch says, "If it have not size, I handled it not; if I handled it not, I gave no notice of it." Whence and how entered these things into my memory? I know not how. For when I learned them, I gave not credit to another man's mind, but recognised them in mine; and approving them for true, I commended them to it, laying them up as it were, whence I might bring them forth when I willed. In my heart then they were, even before I learned them, but in my memory they were not. Where then? or wherefore, when they were spoken, did I acknowledge them, and said, "So is it, it is true," unless that they were already in the memory, but so thrown back and buried as it were in deeper recesses, that had not the suggestion of another drawn them forth I had perchance been unable to conceive of them? Wherefore we find, that to learn these things whereof we imbibe not the images by our senses, but perceive within by themselves, without images, as they are, is nothing else, but by conception, to receive, and by marking to take heed that those things which the memory did before contain at random and unarranged, be laid up at hand as it were in that same memory where before they lay unknown, scattered and neglected, and so readily occur to the mind familiarised to them. And how many things of this kind does my memory bear which have been already found out, and as I said, placed as it were at hand, which we are said to have learned and come to know which were I for some short space of time to cease to call to mind, they are again so buried, and glide back, as it were, into the deeper recesses, that they must again, as if new, be thought out thence, for other abode they have none: but they must be drawn together again, that they may be known; that is to say, they must as it were be collected together from their dispersion: whence the word "cogitation" is derived. For cogo (collect) and cogito (re-collect) have the same relation to each other as ago and agito, facio and factito. But the mind hath appropriated to itself this word (cogitation), so that, not what is "collected" any how, but what is "recollected," i.e., brought together, in the mind, is properly said to be cogitated, or thought upon. The memory containeth also reasons and laws innumerable of numbers and dimensions, none of which hath any bodily sense impressed; seeing they have neither colour, nor sound, nor taste, nor smell, nor touch. I have heard the sound of the words whereby when discussed they are denoted: but the sounds are other than the things. For the sounds are other in Greek than in Latin; but the things are neither Greek, nor Latin, nor any other language. I have seen the lines of architects, the very finest, like a spider's thread; but those are still different, they are not the images of those lines which the eye of flesh showed me: he knoweth them, whosoever without any conception whatsoever of a body, recognises them within himself. I have perceived also the numbers of the things with which we number all the senses of my body; but those numbers wherewith we number are different, nor are they the images of these, and therefore they indeed are. Let him who seeth them not, deride me for saying these things, and I will pity him, while he derides me. All these things I remember, and how I learnt them I remember. Many things also most falsely objected against them have I heard, and remember; which though they be false, yet is it not false that I remember them; and I remember also that I have discerned betwixt those truths and these falsehoods objected to them. And I perceive that the present discerning of these things is different from remembering that I oftentimes discerned them, when I often thought upon them. I both remember then to have often understood these things; and what I now discern and understand, I lay up in my memory, that hereafter I may remember that I understand it now. So then I remember also to have remembered; as if hereafter I shall call to remembrance, that I have now been able to remember these things, by the force of memory shall I call it to remembrance. The same memory contains also the affections of my mind, not in the same manner that my mind itself contains them, when it feels them; but far otherwise, according to a power of its own. For without rejoicing I remember myself to have joyed; and without sorrow do I recollect my past sorrow. And that I once feared, I review without fear; and without desire call to mind a past desire. Sometimes, on the contrary, with joy do I remember my fore-past sorrow, and with sorrow, joy. Which is not wonderful, as to the body; for mind is one thing, body another. If I therefore with joy remember some past pain of body, it is not so wonderful. But now seeing this very memory itself is mind (for when we give a thing in charge, to be kept in memory, we say, "See that you keep it in mind"; and when we forget, we say, "It did not come to my mind," and, "It slipped out of my mind," calling the memory itself the mind); this being so, how is it that when with joy I remember my past sorrow, the mind hath joy, the memory hath sorrow; the mind upon the joyfulness which is in it, is joyful, yet the memory upon the sadness which is in it, is not sad? Does the memory perchance not belong to the mind? Who will say so? The memory then is, as it were, the belly of the mind, and joy and sadness, like sweet and bitter food; which, when committed to the memory, are as it were passed into the belly, where they may be stowed, but cannot taste. Ridiculous it is to imagine these to be alike; and yet are they not utterly unlike. But, behold, out of my memory I bring it, when I say there be four perturbations of the mind, desire, joy, fear, sorrow; and whatsoever I can dispute thereon, by dividing each into its subordinate species, and by defining it, in my memory find I what to say, and thence do I bring it: yet am I not disturbed by any of these perturbations, when by calling them to mind, I remember them; yea, and before I recalled and brought them back, they were there; and therefore could they, by recollection, thence be brought. Perchance, then, as meat is by chewing the cud brought up out of the belly, so by recollection these out of the memory. Why then does not the disputer, thus recollecting, taste in the mouth of his musing the sweetness of joy, or the bitterness of sorrow? Is the comparison unlike in this, because not in all respects like? For who would willingly speak thereof, if so oft as we name grief or fear, we should be compelled to be sad or fearful? And yet could we not speak of them, did we not find in our memory, not only the sounds of the names according to the images impressed by the senses of the body, but notions of the very things themselves which we never received by any avenue of the body, but which the mind itself perceiving by the experience of its own passions, committed to the memory, or the memory of itself retained, without being committed unto it. But whether by images or no, who can readily say? Thus, I name a stone, I name the sun, the things themselves not being present to my senses, but their images to my memory. I name a bodily pain, yet it is not present with me, when nothing aches: yet unless its image were present to my memory, I should not know what to say thereof, nor in discoursing discern pain from pleasure. I name bodily health; being sound in body, the thing itself is present with me; yet, unless its image also were present in my memory, I could by no means recall what the sound of this name should signify. Nor would the sick, when health were named, recognise what were spoken, unless the same image were by the force of memory retained, although the thing itself were absent from the body. I name numbers whereby we number; and not their images, but themselves are present in my memory. I name the image of the sun, and that image is present in my memory. For I recall not the image of its image, but the image itself is present to me, calling it to mind. I name memory, and I recognise what I name. And where do I recognise it, but in the memory itself? Is it also present to itself by its image, and not by itself? What, when I name forgetfulness, and withal recognise what I name? whence should I recognise it, did I not remember it? I speak not of the sound of the name, but of the thing which it signifies: which if I had forgotten, I could not recognise what that sound signifies. When then I remember memory, memory itself is, through itself, present with itself: but when I remember forgetfulness, there are present both memory and forgetfulness; memory whereby I remember, forgetfulness which I remember. But what is forgetfulness, but the privation of memory? How then is it present that I remember it, since when present I cannot remember? But if what we remember we hold it in memory, yet, unless we did remember forgetfulness, we could never at the hearing of the name recognise the thing thereby signified, then forgetfulness is retained by memory. Present then it is, that we forget not, and being so, we forget. It is to be understood from this that forgetfulness when we remember it, is not present to the memory by itself but by its image: because if it were present by itself, it would not cause us to remember, but to forget. Who now shall search out this? who shall comprehend how it is? Lord, I, truly, toil therein, yea and toil in myself; I am become a heavy soil requiring over much sweat of the brow. For we are not now searching out the regions of heaven, or measuring the distances of the stars, or enquiring the balancings of the earth. It is I myself who remember, I the mind. It is not so wonderful, if what I myself am not, be far from me. But what is nearer to me than myself? And lo, the force of mine own memory is not understood by me; though I cannot so much as name myself without it. For what shall I say, when it is clear to me that I remember forgetfulness? Shall I say that that is not in my memory, which I remember? or shall I say that forgetfulness is for this purpose in my memory, that I might not forget? Both were most absurd. What third way is there? How can I say that the image of forgetfulness is retained by my memory, not forgetfulness itself, when I remember it? How could I say this either, seeing that when the image of any thing is impressed on the memory, the thing itself must needs be first present, whence that image may be impressed? For thus do I remember Carthage, thus all places where I have been, thus men's faces whom I have seen, and things reported by the other senses; thus the health or sickness of the body. For when these things were present, my memory received from them images, which being present with me, I might look on and bring back in my mind, when I remembered them in their absence. If then this forgetfulness is retained in the memory through its image, not through itself, then plainly itself was once present, that its image might be taken. But when it was present, how did it write its image in the memory, seeing that forgetfulness by its presence effaces even what it finds already noted? And yet, in whatever way, although that way be past conceiving and explaining, yet certain am I that I remember forgetfulness itself also, whereby what we remember is effaced. Great is the power of memory, a fearful thing, O my God, a deep and boundless manifoldness; and this thing is the mind, and this am I myself. What am I then, O my God? What nature am I? A life various and manifold, and exceeding immense. Behold in the plains, and caves, and caverns of my memory, innumerable and innumerably full of innumerable kinds of things, either through images, as all bodies; or by actual presence, as the arts; or by certain notions or impressions, as the affections of the mind, which, even when the mind doth not feel, the memory retaineth, while yet whatsoever is in the memory is also in the mind--over all these do I run, I fly; I dive on this side and on that, as far as I can, and there is no end. So great is the force of memory, so great the force of life, even in the mortal life of man. What shall I do then, O Thou my true life, my God? I will pass even beyond this power of mine which is called memory: yea, I will pass beyond it, that I may approach unto Thee, O sweet Light. What sayest Thou to me? See, I am mounting up through my mind towards Thee who abidest above me. Yea, I now will pass beyond this power of mine which is called memory, desirous to arrive at Thee, whence Thou mayest be arrived at; and to cleave unto Thee, whence one may cleave unto Thee. For even beasts and birds have memory; else could they not return to their dens and nests, nor many other things they are used unto: nor indeed could they be used to any thing, but by memory. I will pass then beyond memory also, that I may arrive at Him who hath separated me from the four-footed beasts and made me wiser than the fowls of the air, I will pass beyond memory also, and where shall I find Thee, Thou truly good and certain sweetness? And where shall I find Thee? If I find Thee without my memory, then do I not retain Thee in my memory. And how shall I find Thee, if I remember Thee not? For the woman that had lost her groat, and sought it with a light; unless she had remembered it, she had never found it. For when it was found, whence should she know whether it were the same, unless she remembered it? I remember to have sought and found many a thing; and this I thereby know, that when I was seeking any of them, and was asked, "Is this it?" "Is that it?" so long said I "No," until that were offered me which I sought. Which had I not remembered (whatever it were) though it were offered me, yet should I not find it, because I could not recognise it. And so it ever is, when we seek and find any lost thing. Notwithstanding, when any thing is by chance lost from the sight, not from the memory (as any visible body), yet its image is still retained within, and it is sought until it be restored to sight; and when it is found, it is recognised by the image which is within: nor do we say that we have found what was lost, unless we recognise it; nor can we recognise it, unless we remember it. But this was lost to the eyes, but retained in the memory. But what when the memory itself loses any thing, as falls out when we forget and seek that we may recollect? Where in the end do we search, but in the memory itself? and there, if one thing be perchance offered instead of another, we reject it, until what we seek meets us; and when it doth, we say, "This is it"; which we should not unless we recognised it, nor recognise it unless we remembered it. Certainly then we had forgotten it. Or, had not the whole escaped us, but by the part whereof we had hold, was the lost part sought for; in that the memory felt that it did not carry on together all which it was wont, and maimed, as it were, by the curtailment of its ancient habit, demanded the restoration of what it missed? For instance, if we see or think of some one known to us, and having forgotten his name, try to recover it; whatever else occurs, connects itself not therewith; because it was not wont to be thought upon together with him, and therefore is rejected, until that present itself, whereon the knowledge reposes equably as its wonted object. And whence does that present itself, but out of the memory itself? for even when we recognise it, on being reminded by another, it is thence it comes. For we do not believe it as something new, but, upon recollection, allow what was named to be right. But were it utterly blotted out of the mind, we should not remember it, even when reminded. For we have not as yet utterly forgotten that, which we remember ourselves to have forgotten. What then we have utterly forgotten, though lost, we cannot even seek after. How then do I seek Thee, O Lord? For when I seek Thee, my God, I seek a happy life. I will seek Thee, that my soul may live. For my body liveth by my soul; and my soul by Thee. How then do I seek a happy life, seeing I have it not, until I can say, where I ought to say it, "It is enough"? How seek I it? By remembrance, as though I had forgotten it, remembering that I had forgotten it? Or, desiring to learn it as a thing unknown, either never having known, or so forgotten it, as not even to remember that I had forgotten it? is not a happy life what all will, and no one altogether wills it not? where have they known it, that they so will it? where seen it, that they so love it? Truly we have it, how, I know not. Yea, there is another way, wherein when one hath it, then is he happy; and there are, who are blessed, in hope. These have it in a lower kind, than they who have it in very deed; yet are they better off than such as are happy neither in deed nor in hope. Yet even these, had they it not in some sort, would not so will to be happy, which that they do will, is most certain. They have known it then, I know not how, and so have it by some sort of knowledge, what, I know not, and am perplexed whether it be in the memory, which if it be, then we have been happy once; whether all severally, or in that man who first sinned, in whom also we all died, and from whom we are all born with misery, I now enquire not; but only, whether the happy life be in the memory? For neither should we love it, did we not know it. We hear the name, and we all confess that we desire the thing; for we are not delighted with the mere sound. For when a Greek hears it in Latin, he is not delighted, not knowing what is spoken; but we Latins are delighted, as would he too, if he heard it in Greek; because the thing itself is neither Greek nor Latin, which Greeks and Latins, and men of all other tongues, long for so earnestly. Known therefore it is to all, for they with one voice be asked, "would they be happy?" they would answer without doubt, "they would." And this could not be, unless the thing itself whereof it is the name were retained in their memory. But is it so, as one remembers Carthage who hath seen it? No. For a happy life is not seen with the eye, because it is not a body. As we remember numbers then? No. For these, he that hath in his knowledge, seeks not further to attain unto; but a happy life we have in our knowledge, and therefore love it, and yet still desire to attain it, that we may be happy. As we remember eloquence then? No. For although upon hearing this name also, some call to mind the thing, who still are not yet eloquent, and many who desire to be so, whence it appears that it is in their knowledge; yet these have by their bodily senses observed others to be eloquent, and been delighted, and desire to be the like (though indeed they would not be delighted but for some inward knowledge thereof, nor wish to be the like, unless they were thus delighted); whereas a happy life, we do by no bodily sense experience in others. As then we remember joy? Perchance; for my joy I remember, even when sad, as a happy life, when unhappy; nor did I ever with bodily sense see, hear, smell, taste, or touch my joy; but I experienced it in my mind, when I rejoiced; and the knowledge of it clave to my memory, so that I can recall it with disgust sometimes, at others with longing, according to the nature of the things, wherein I remember myself to have joyed. For even from foul things have I been immersed in a sort of joy; which now recalling, I detest and execrate; otherwhiles in good and honest things, which I recall with longing, although perchance no longer present; and therefore with sadness I recall former joy. Where then and when did I experience my happy life, that I should remember, and love, and long for it? Nor is it I alone, or some few besides, but we all would fain be happy; which, unless by some certain knowledge we knew, we should not with so certain a will desire. But how is this, that if two men be asked whether they would go to the wars, one, perchance, would answer that he would, the other, that he would not; but if they were asked whether they would be happy, both would instantly without any doubting say they would; and for no other reason would the one go to the wars, and the other not, but to be happy. Is it perchance that as one looks for his joy in this thing, another in that, all agree in their desire of being happy, as they would (if they were asked) that they wished to have joy, and this joy they call a happy life? Although then one obtains this joy by one means, another by another, all have one end, which they strive to attain, namely, joy. Which being a thing which all must say they have experienced, it is therefore found in the memory, and recognised whenever the name of a happy life is mentioned. Far be it, Lord, far be it from the heart of Thy servant who here confesseth unto Thee, far be it, that, be the joy what it may, I should therefore think myself happy. For there is a joy which is not given to the ungodly, but to those who love Thee for Thine own sake, whose joy Thou Thyself art. And this is the happy life, to rejoice to Thee, of Thee, for Thee; this is it, and there is no other. For they who think there is another, pursue some other and not the true joy. Yet is not their will turned away from some semblance of joy. It is not certain then that all wish to be happy, inasmuch as they who wish not to joy in Thee, which is the only happy life, do not truly desire the happy life. Or do all men desire this, but because the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh, that they cannot do what they would, they fall upon that which they can, and are content therewith; because, what they are not able to do, they do not will so strongly as would suffice to make them able? For I ask any one, had he rather joy in truth, or in falsehood? They will as little hesitate to say "in the truth," as to say "that they desire to be happy," for a happy life is joy in the truth: for this is a joying in Thee, Who art the Truth, O God my light, health of my countenance, my God. This is the happy life which all desire; this life which alone is happy, all desire; to joy in the truth all desire. I have met with many that would deceive; who would be deceived, no one. Where then did they know this happy life, save where they know the truth also? For they love it also, since they would not be deceived. And when they love a happy life, which is no other than joying in the truth, then also do they love the truth; which yet they would not love, were there not some notice of it in their memory. Why then joy they not in it? why are they not happy? because they are more strongly taken up with other things which have more power to make them miserable, than that which they so faintly remember to make them happy. For there is yet a little light in men; let them walk, let them walk, that the darkness overtake them not. But why doth "truth generate hatred," and the man of Thine, preaching the truth, become an enemy to them? whereas a happy life is loved, which is nothing else but joying in the truth; unless that truth is in that kind loved, that they who love anything else would gladly have that which they love to be the truth: and because they would not be deceived, would not be convinced that they are so? Therefore do they hate the truth for that thing's sake which they loved instead of the truth. They love truth when she enlightens, they hate her when she reproves. For since they would not be deceived, and would deceive, they love her when she discovers herself unto them, and hate her when she discovers them. Whence she shall so repay them, that they who would not be made manifest by her, she both against their will makes manifest, and herself becometh not manifest unto them. Thus, thus, yea thus doth the mind of man, thus blind and sick, foul and ill-favoured, wish to be hidden, but that aught should be hidden from it, it wills not. But the contrary is requited it, that itself should not be hidden from the Truth; but the Truth is hid from it. Yet even thus miserable, it had rather joy in truths than in falsehoods. Happy then will it be, when, no distraction interposing, it shall joy in that only Truth, by Whom all things are true. See what a space I have gone over in my memory seeking Thee, O Lord; and I have not found Thee, without it. Nor have I found any thing concerning Thee, but what I have kept in memory, ever since I learnt Thee. For since I learnt Thee, I have not forgotten Thee. For where I found Truth, there found I my God, the Truth itself; which since I learnt, I have not forgotten. Since then I learnt Thee, Thou residest in my memory; and there do I find Thee, when I call Thee to remembrance, and delight in Thee. These be my holy delights, which Thou hast given me in Thy mercy, having regard to my poverty. But where in my memory residest Thou, O Lord, where residest Thou there? what manner of lodging hast Thou framed for Thee? what manner of sanctuary hast Thou builded for Thee? Thou hast given this honour to my memory, to reside in it; but in what quarter of it Thou residest, that am I considering. For in thinking on Thee, I passed beyond such parts of it as the beasts also have, for I found Thee not there among the images of corporeal things: and I came to those parts to which I committed the affections of my mind, nor found Thee there. And I entered into the very seat of my mind (which it hath in my memory, inasmuch as the mind remembers itself also), neither wert Thou there: for as Thou art not a corporeal image, nor the affection of a living being (as when we rejoice, condole, desire, fear, remember, forget, or the like); so neither art Thou the mind itself; because Thou art the Lord God of the mind; and all these are changed, but Thou remainest unchangeable over all, and yet hast vouchsafed to dwell in my memory, since I learnt Thee. And why seek I now in what place thereof Thou dwellest, as if there were places therein? Sure I am, that in it Thou dwellest, since I have remembered Thee ever since I learnt Thee, and there I find Thee, when I call Thee to remembrance. Where then did I find Thee, that I might learn Thee? For in my memory Thou wert not, before I learned Thee. Where then did I find Thee, that I might learn Thee, but in Thee above me? Place there is none; we go backward and forward, and there is no place. Every where, O Truth, dost Thou give audience to all who ask counsel of Thee, and at once answerest all, though on manifold matters they ask Thy counsel. Clearly dost Thou answer, though all do not clearly hear. All consult Thee on what they will, though they hear not always what they will. He is Thy best servant who looks not so much to hear that from Thee which himself willeth, as rather to will that, which from Thee he heareth. Too late loved I Thee, O Thou Beauty of ancient days, yet ever new! too late I loved Thee! And behold, Thou wert within, and I abroad, and there I searched for Thee; deformed I, plunging amid those fair forms which Thou hadst made. Thou wert with me, but I was not with Thee. Things held me far from Thee, which, unless they were in Thee, were not at all. Thou calledst, and shoutedst, and burstest my deafness. Thou flashedst, shonest, and scatteredst my blindness. Thou breathedst odours, and I drew in breath and panted for Thee. I tasted, and hunger and thirst. Thou touchedst me, and I burned for Thy peace. When I shall with my whole self cleave to Thee, I shall no where have sorrow or labour; and my life shall wholly live, as wholly full of Thee. But now since whom Thou fillest, Thou liftest up, because I am not full of Thee I am a burden to myself. Lamentable joys strive with joyous sorrows: and on which side is the victory, I know not. Woe is me! Lord, have pity on me. My evil sorrows strive with my good joys; and on which side is the victory, I know not. Woe is me! Lord, have pity on me. Woe is me! lo! I hide not my wounds; Thou art the Physician, I the sick; Thou merciful, I miserable. Is not the life of man upon earth all trial? Who wishes for troubles and difficulties? Thou commandest them to be endured, not to be loved. No man loves what he endures, though he love to endure. For though he rejoices that he endures, he had rather there were nothing for him to endure. In adversity I long for prosperity, in prosperity I fear adversity. What middle place is there betwixt these two, where the life of man is not all trial? Woe to the prosperities of the world, once and again, through fear of adversity, and corruption of joy! Woe to the adversities of the world, once and again, and the third time, from the longing for prosperity, and because adversity itself is a hard thing, and lest it shatter endurance. Is not the life of man upon earth all trial: without any interval? And all my hope is no where but in Thy exceeding great mercy. Give what Thou enjoinest, and enjoin what Thou wilt. Thou enjoinest us continency; and when I knew, saith one, that no man can be continent, unless God give it, this also was a part of wisdom to know whose gift she is. By continency verily are we bound up and brought back into One, whence we were dissipated into many. For too little doth he love Thee, who loves any thing with Thee, which he loveth not for Thee. O love, who ever burnest and never consumest! O charity, my God, kindle me. Thou enjoinest continency: give me what Thou enjoinest, and enjoin what Thou wilt. Verily Thou enjoinest me continency from the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the ambition of the world. Thou enjoinest continency from concubinage; and for wedlock itself, Thou hast counselled something better than what Thou hast permitted. And since Thou gavest it, it was done, even before I became a dispenser of Thy Sacrament. But there yet live in my memory (whereof I have much spoken) the images of such things as my ill custom there fixed; which haunt me, strengthless when I am awake: but in sleep, not only so as to give pleasure, but even to obtain assent, and what is very like reality. Yea, so far prevails the illusion of the image, in my soul and in my flesh, that, when asleep, false visions persuade to that which when waking, the true cannot. Am I not then myself, O Lord my God? And yet there is so much difference betwixt myself and myself, within that moment wherein I pass from waking to sleeping, or return from sleeping to waking! Where is reason then, which, awake, resisteth such suggestions? And should the things themselves be urged on it, it remaineth unshaken. Is it clasped up with the eyes? is it lulled asleep with the senses of the body? And whence is it that often even in sleep we resist, and mindful of our purpose, and abiding most chastely in it, yield no assent to such enticements? And yet so much difference there is, that when it happeneth otherwise, upon waking we return to peace of conscience: and by this very difference discover that we did not, what yet we be sorry that in some way it was done in us. Art Thou not mighty, God Almighty, so as to heal all the diseases of my soul, and by Thy more abundant grace to quench even the impure motions of my sleep! Thou wilt increase, Lord, Thy gifts more and more in me, that my soul may follow me to Thee, disentangled from the birdlime of concupiscence; that it rebel not against itself, and even in dreams not only not, through images of sense, commit those debasing corruptions, even to pollution of the flesh, but not even to consent unto them. For that nothing of this sort should have, over the pure affections even of a sleeper, the very least influence, not even such as a thought would restrain,--to work this, not only during life, but even at my present age, is not hard for the Almighty, Who art able to do above all that we ask or think. But what I yet am in this kind of my evil, have I confessed unto my good Lord; rejoicing with trembling, in that which Thou hast given me, and bemoaning that wherein I am still imperfect; hoping that Thou wilt perfect Thy mercies in me, even to perfect peace, which my outward and inward man shall have with Thee, when death shall be swallowed up in victory. There is another evil of the day, which I would were sufficient for it. For by eating and drinking we repair the evil decays of our body, until Thou destroy both belly and meat, when Thou shalt slay my emptiness with a wonderful fulness, and clothe this incorruptible with an eternal incorruption. But now the necessity is sweet unto me, against which sweetness I fight, that I be not taken captive; and carry on a daily war by fastings; often bringing my body into subjection; and my pains are removed by pleasure. For hunger and thirst are in a manner pains; they burn and kill like a fever, unless the medicine of nourishments come to our aid. Which since it is at hand through the consolations of Thy gifts, with which land, and water, and air serve our weakness, our calamity is termed gratification. This hast Thou taught me, that I should set myself to take food as physic. But while I am passing from the discomfort of emptiness to the content of replenishing, in the very passage the snare of concupiscence besets me. For that passing, is pleasure, nor is there any other way to pass thither, whither we needs must pass. And health being the cause of eating and drinking, there joineth itself as an attendant a dangerous pleasure, which mostly endeavours to go before it, so that I may for her sake do what I say I do, or wish to do, for health's sake. Nor have each the same measure; for what is enough for health, is too little for pleasure. And oft it is uncertain, whether it be the necessary care of the body which is yet asking for sustenance, or whether a voluptuous deceivableness of greediness is proffering its services. In this uncertainty the unhappy soul rejoiceth, and therein prepares an excuse to shield itself, glad that it appeareth not what sufficeth for the moderation of health, that under the cloak of health, it may disguise the matter of gratification. These temptations I daily endeavour to resist, and I call on Thy right hand, and to Thee do I refer my perplexities; because I have as yet no settled counsel herein. I hear the voice of my God commanding, Let not your hearts be overcharged with surfeiting and drunkenness. Drunkenness is far from me; Thou wilt have mercy, that it come not near me. But full feeding sometimes creepeth upon Thy servant; Thou wilt have mercy, that it may be far from me. For no one can be continent unless Thou give it. Many things Thou givest us, praying for them; and what good soever we have received before we prayed, from Thee we received it; yea to the end we might afterwards know this, did we before receive it. Drunkard was I never, but drunkards have I known made sober by Thee. From Thee then it was, that they who never were such, should not so be, as from Thee it was, that they who have been, should not ever so be; and from Thee it was, that both might know from Whom it was. I heard another voice of Thine, Go not after thy lusts, and from thy pleasure turn away. Yea by Thy favour have I heard that which I have much loved; neither if we eat, shall we abound; neither if we eat not, shall we lack; which is to say, neither shall the one make me plenteous, nor the other miserable. I heard also another, for I have learned in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content; I know how to abound, and how to suffer need. I can do all things through Christ that strengtheneth me. Behold a soldier of the heavenly camp, not the dust which we are. But remember, Lord, that we are dust, and that of dust Thou hast made man; and he was lost and is found. Nor could he of himself do this, because he whom I so loved, saying this through the in-breathing of Thy inspiration, was of the same dust. I can do all things (saith he) through Him that strengtheneth me. Strengthen me, that I can. Give what Thou enjoinest, and enjoin what Thou wilt. He confesses to have received, and when he glorieth, in the Lord he glorieth. Another have I heard begging that he might receive. Take from me (saith he) the desires of the belly; whence it appeareth, O my holy God, that Thou givest, when that is done which Thou commandest to be done. Thou hast taught me, good Father, that to the pure, all things are pure; but that it is evil unto the man that eateth with offence; and, that every creature of Thine is good, and nothing to be refused, which is received with thanksgiving; and that meat commendeth us not to God; and, that no man should judge us in meat or drink; and, that he which eateth, let him not despise him that eateth not; and let not him that eateth not, judge him that eateth. These things have I learned, thanks be to Thee, praise to Thee, my God, my Master, knocking at my ears, enlightening my heart; deliver me out of all temptation. I fear not uncleanness of meat, but the uncleanness of lusting. I know; that Noah was permitted to eat all kind of flesh that was good for food; that Elijah was fed with flesh; that endued with an admirable abstinence, was not polluted by feeding on living creatures, locusts. I know also that Esau was deceived by lusting for lentiles; and that David blamed himself for desiring a draught of water; and that our King was tempted, not concerning flesh, but bread. And therefore the people in the wilderness also deserved to be reproved, not for desiring flesh, but because, in the desire of food, they murmured against the Lord. Placed then amid these temptations, I strive daily against concupiscence in eating and drinking. For it is not of such nature that I can settle on cutting it off once for all, and never touching it afterward, as I could of concubinage. The bridle of the throat then is to be held attempered between slackness and stiffness. And who is he, O Lord, who is not some whit transported beyond the limits of necessity? whoever he is, he is a great one; let him make Thy Name great. But I am not such, for I am a sinful man. Yet do I too magnify Thy name; and He maketh intercession to Thee for my sins who hath overcome the world; numbering me among the weak members of His body; because Thine eyes have seen that of Him which is imperfect, and in Thy book shall all be written. With the allurements of smells, I am not much concerned. When absent, I do not miss them; when present, I do not refuse them; yet ever ready to be without them. So I seem to myself; perchance I am deceived. For that also is a mournful darkness whereby my abilities within me are hidden from me; so that my mind making enquiry into herself of her own powers, ventures not readily to believe herself; because even what is in it is mostly hidden, unless experience reveal it. And no one ought to be secure in that life, the whole whereof is called a trial, that he who hath been capable of worse to be made better, may not likewise of better be made worse. Our only hope, only confidence, only assured promise is Thy mercy. The delights of the ear had more firmly entangled and subdued me; but Thou didst loosen and free me. Now, in those melodies which Thy words breathe soul into, when sung with a sweet and attuned voice, I do a little repose; yet not so as to be held thereby, but that I can disengage myself when I will. But with the words which are their life and whereby they find admission into me, themselves seek in my affections a place of some estimation, and I can scarcely assign them one suitable. For at one time I seem to myself to give them more honour than is seemly, feeling our minds to be more holily and fervently raised unto a flame of devotion, by the holy words themselves when thus sung, than when not; and that the several affections of our spirit, by a sweet variety, have their own proper measures in the voice and singing, by some hidden correspondence wherewith they are stirred up. But this contentment of the flesh, to which the soul must not be given over to be enervated, doth oft beguile me, the sense not so waiting upon reason as patiently to follow her; but having been admitted merely for her sake, it strives even to run before her, and lead her. Thus in these things I unawares sin, but afterwards am aware of it. At other times, shunning over-anxiously this very deception, I err in too great strictness; and sometimes to that degree, as to wish the whole melody of sweet music which is used to David's Psalter, banished from my ears, and the Church's too; and that mode seems to me safer, which I remember to have been often told me of Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, who made the reader of the psalm utter it with so slight inflection of voice, that it was nearer speaking than singing. Yet again, when I remember the tears I shed at the Psalmody of Thy Church, in the beginning of my recovered faith; and how at this time I am moved, not with the singing, but with the things sung, when they are sung with a clear voice and modulation most suitable, I acknowledge the great use of this institution. Thus I fluctuate between peril of pleasure and approved wholesomeness; inclined the rather (though not as pronouncing an irrevocable opinion) to approve of the usage of singing in the church; that so by the delight of the ears the weaker minds may rise to the feeling of devotion. Yet when it befalls me to be more moved with the voice than the words sung, I confess to have sinned penally, and then had rather not hear music. See now my state; weep with me, and weep for me, ye, whoso regulate your feelings within, as that good action ensues. For you who do not act, these things touch not you. But Thou, O Lord my God, hearken; behold, and see, and have mercy and heal me, Thou, in whose presence I have become a problem to myself; and that is my infirmity. There remains the pleasure of these eyes of my flesh, on which to make my confessions in the hearing of the ears of Thy temple, those brotherly and devout ears; and so to conclude the temptations of the lust of the flesh, which yet assail me, groaning earnestly, and desiring to be clothed upon with my house from heaven. The eyes love fair and varied forms, and bright and soft colours. Let not these occupy my soul; let God rather occupy it, who made these things, very good indeed, yet is He my good, not they. And these affect me, waking, the whole day, nor is any rest given me from them, as there is from musical, sometimes in silence, from all voices. For this queen of colours, the light, bathing all which we behold, wherever I am through the day, gliding by me in varied forms, soothes me when engaged on other things, and not observing it. And so strongly doth it entwine itself, that if it be suddenly withdrawn, it is with longing sought for, and if absent long, saddeneth the mind. O Thou Light, which Tobias saw, when, these eyes closed, he taught his son the way of life; and himself went before with the feet of charity, never swerving. Or which Isaac saw, when his fleshly eyes being heavy and closed by old age, it was vouchsafed him, not knowingly, to bless his sons, but by blessing to know them. Or which Jacob saw, when he also, blind through great age, with illumined heart, in the persons of his sons shed light on the different races of the future people, in them foresignified; and laid his hands, mystically crossed, upon his grandchildren by Joseph, not as their father by his outward eye corrected them, but as himself inwardly discerned. This is the light, it is one, and all are one, who see and love it. But that corporeal light whereof I spake, it seasoneth the life of this world for her blind lovers, with an enticing and dangerous sweetness. But they who know how to praise Thee for it, "O all-creating Lord," take it up in Thy hymns, and are not taken up with it in their sleep. Such would I be. These seductions of the eyes I resist, lest my feet wherewith I walk upon Thy way be ensnared; and I lift up mine invisible eyes to Thee, that Thou wouldest pluck my feet out of the snare. Thou dost ever and anon pluck them out, for they are ensnared. Thou ceasest not to pluck them out, while I often entangle myself in the snares on all sides laid; because Thou that keepest Israel shalt neither slumber nor sleep. What innumerable toys, made by divers arts and manufactures, in our apparel, shoes, utensils and all sorts of works, in pictures also and divers images, and these far exceeding all necessary and moderate use and all pious meaning, have men added to tempt their own eyes withal; outwardly following what themselves make, inwardly forsaking Him by whom themselves were made, and destroying that which themselves have been made! But I, my God and my Glory, do hence also sing a hymn to Thee, and do consecrate praise to Him who consecrateth me, because those beautiful patterns which through men's souls are conveyed into their cunning hands, come from that Beauty, which is above our souls, which my soul day and night sigheth after. But the framers and followers of the outward beauties derive thence the rule of judging of them, but not of using them. And He is there, though they perceive Him not, that so they might not wander, but keep their strength for Thee, and not scatter it abroad upon pleasurable weariness. And I, though I speak and see this, entangle my steps with these outward beauties; but Thou pluckest me out, O Lord, Thou pluckest me out; because Thy loving-kindness is before my eyes. For I am taken miserably, and Thou pluckest me out mercifully; sometimes not perceiving it, when I had but lightly lighted upon them; otherwhiles with pain, because I had stuck fast in them. To this is added another form of temptation more manifoldly dangerous. For besides that concupiscence of the flesh which consisteth in the delight of all senses and pleasures, wherein its slaves, who go far from Thee, waste and perish, the soul hath, through the same senses of the body, a certain vain and curious desire, veiled under the title of knowledge and learning, not of delighting in the flesh, but of making experiments through the flesh. The seat whereof being in the appetite of knowledge, and sight being the sense chiefly used for attaining knowledge, it is in Divine language called The lust of the eyes. For, to see, belongeth properly to the eyes; yet we use this word of the other senses also, when we employ them in seeking knowledge. For we do not say, hark how it flashes, or smell how it glows, or taste how it shines, or feel how it gleams; for all these are said to be seen. And yet we say not only, see how it shineth, which the eyes alone can perceive; but also, see how it soundeth, see how it smelleth, see how it tasteth, see how hard it is. And so the general experience of the senses, as was said, is called The lust of the eyes, because the office of seeing, wherein the eyes hold the prerogative, the other senses by way of similitude take to themselves, when they make search after any knowledge. But by this may more evidently be discerned, wherein pleasure and wherein curiosity is the object of the senses; for pleasure seeketh objects beautiful, melodious, fragrant, savoury, soft; but curiosity, for trial's sake, the contrary as well, not for the sake of suffering annoyance, but out of the lust of making trial and knowing them. For what pleasure hath it, to see in a mangled carcase what will make you shudder? and yet if it be lying near, they flock thither, to be made sad, and to turn pale. Even in sleep they are afraid to see it. As if when awake, any one forced them to see it, or any report of its beauty drew them thither! Thus also in the other senses, which it were long to go through. From this disease of curiosity are all those strange sights exhibited in the theatre. Hence men go on to search out the hidden powers of nature (which is besides our end), which to know profits not, and wherein men desire nothing but to know. Hence also, if with that same end of perverted knowledge magical arts be enquired by. Hence also in religion itself, is God tempted, when signs and wonders are demanded of Him, not desired for any good end, but merely to make trial of. In this so vast wilderness, full of snares and dangers, behold many of them I have cut off, and thrust out of my heart, as Thou hast given me, O God of my salvation. And yet when dare I say, since so many things of this kind buzz on all sides about our daily life-when dare I say that nothing of this sort engages my attention, or causes in me an idle interest? True, the theatres do not now carry me away, nor care I to know the courses of the stars, nor did my soul ever consult ghosts departed; all sacrilegious mysteries I detest. From Thee, O Lord my God, to whom I owe humble and single-hearted service, by what artifices and suggestions doth the enemy deal with me to desire some sign! But I beseech Thee by our King, and by our pure and holy country, Jerusalem, that as any consenting thereto is far from me, so may it ever be further and further. But when I pray Thee for the salvation of any, my end and intention is far different. Thou givest and wilt give me to follow Thee willingly, doing what Thou wilt. Notwithstanding, in how many most petty and contemptible things is our curiosity daily tempted, and how often we give way, who can recount? How often do we begin as if we were tolerating people telling vain stories, lest we offend the weak; then by degrees we take interest therein! I go not now to the circus to see a dog coursing a hare; but in the field, if passing, that coursing peradventure will distract me even from some weighty thought, and draw me after it: not that I turn aside the body of my beast, yet still incline my mind thither. And unless Thou, having made me see my infirmity didst speedily admonish me either through the sight itself by some contemplation to rise towards Thee, or altogether to despise and pass it by, I dully stand fixed therein. What, when sitting at home, a lizard catching flies, or a spider entangling them rushing into her nets, oft-times takes my attention? Is the thing different, because they are but small creatures? I go on from them to praise Thee the wonderful Creator and Orderer of all, but this does not first draw my attention. It is one thing to rise quickly, another not to fall. And of such things is my life full; and my one hope is Thy wonderful great mercy. For when our heart becomes the receptacle of such things, and is overcharged with throngs of this abundant vanity, then are our prayers also thereby often interrupted and distracted, and whilst in Thy presence we direct the voice of our heart to Thine ears, this so great concern is broken off by the rushing in of I know not what idle thoughts. Shall we then account this also among things of slight concernment, or shall aught bring us back to hope, save Thy complete mercy, since Thou hast begun to change us? And Thou knowest how far Thou hast already changed me, who first healedst me of the lust of vindicating myself, that so Thou mightest forgive all the rest of my iniquities, and heal all my infirmities, and redeem life from corruption, and crown me with mercy and pity, and satisfy my desire with good things: who didst curb my pride with Thy fear, and tame my neck to Thy yoke. And now I bear it and it is light unto me, because so hast Thou promised, and hast made it; and verily so it was, and I knew it not, when I feared to take it. But, O Lord, Thou alone Lord without pride, because Thou art the only true Lord, who hast no lord; hath this third kind of temptation also ceased from me, or can it cease through this whole life? To wish, namely, to be feared and loved of men, for no other end, but that we may have a joy therein which is no joy? A miserable life this and a foul boastfulness! Hence especially it comes that men do neither purely love nor fear Thee. And therefore dost Thou resist the proud, and givest grace to the humble: yea, Thou thunderest down upon the ambitions of the world, and the foundations of the mountains tremble. Because now certain offices of human society make it necessary to be loved and feared of men, the adversary of our true blessedness layeth hard at us, every where spreading his snares of "well-done, well-done"; that greedily catching at them, we may be taken unawares, and sever our joy from Thy truth, and set it in the deceivingness of men; and be pleased at being loved and feared, not for Thy sake, but in Thy stead: and thus having been made like him, he may have them for his own, not in the bands of charity, but in the bonds of punishment: who purposed to set his throne in the north, that dark and chilled they might serve him, pervertedly and crookedly imitating Thee. But we, O Lord, behold we are Thy little flock; possess us as Thine, stretch Thy wings over us, and let us fly under them. Be Thou our glory; let us be loved for Thee, and Thy word feared in us. Who would be praised of men when Thou blamest, will not be defended of men when Thou judgest; nor delivered when Thou condemnest. But when--not the sinner is praised in the desires of his soul, nor he blessed who doth ungodlily, but--a man is praised for some gift which Thou hast given him, and he rejoices more at the praise for himself than that he hath the gift for which he is praised, he also is praised, while Thou dispraisest; better is he who praised than he who is praised. For the one took pleasure in the gift of God in man; the other was better pleased with the gift of man, than of God. By these temptations we are assailed daily, O Lord; without ceasing are we assailed. Our daily furnace is the tongue of men. And in this way also Thou commandest us continence. Give what Thou enjoinest, and enjoin what Thou wilt. Thou knowest on this matter the groans of my heart, and the floods of mine eyes. For I cannot learn how far I am more cleansed from this plague, and I much fear my secret sins, which Thine eyes know, mine do not. For in other kinds of temptations I have some sort of means of examining myself; in this, scarce any. For, in refraining my mind from the pleasures of the flesh and idle curiosity, I see how much I have attained lo, when I do without them; foregoing, or not having them. For then I ask myself how much more or less troublesome it is to me not to have them? Then, riches, which are desired, that they may serve to some one or two or all of the three concupiscences, if the soul cannot discern whether, when it hath them, it despiseth them, they may be cast aside, that so it may prove itself. But to be without praise, and therein essay our powers, must we live ill, yea so abandonedly and atrociously, that no one should know without detesting us? What greater madness can be said or thought of? But if praise useth and ought to accompany a good life and good works, we ought as little to forego its company, as good life itself. Yet I know not whether I can well or ill be without anything, unless it be absent. What then do I confess unto Thee in this kind of temptation, O Lord? What, but that I am delighted with praise, but with truth itself, more than with praise? For were it proposed to me, whether I would, being frenzied in error on all things, be praised by all men, or being consistent and most settled in the truth be blamed by all, I see which I should choose. Yet fain would I that the approbation of another should not even increase my joy for any good in me. Yet I own, it doth increase it, and not so only, but dispraise doth diminish it. And when I am troubled at this my misery, an excuse occurs to me, which of what value it is, Thou God knowest, for it leaves me uncertain. For since Thou hast commanded us not continency alone, that is, from what things to refrain our love, but righteousness also, that is, whereon to bestow it, and hast willed us to love not Thee only, but our neighbour also; often, when pleased with intelligent praise, I seem to myself to be pleased with the proficiency or towardliness of my neighbour, or to be grieved for evil in him, when I hear him dispraise either what he understands not, or is good. For sometimes I am grieved at my own praise, either when those things be praised in me, in which I mislike myself, or even lesser and slight goods are more esteemed than they ought. But again how know I whether I am therefore thus affected, because I would not have him who praiseth me differ from me about myself; not as being influenced by concern for him, but because those same good things which please me in myself, please me more when they please another also? For some how I am not praised when my judgment of myself is not praised; forasmuch as either those things are praised, which displease me; or those more, which please me less. Am I then doubtful of myself in this matter? Behold, in Thee, O Truth, I see that I ought not to be moved at my own praises, for my own sake, but for the good of my neighbour. And whether it be so with me, I know not. For herein I know less of myself than of Thee. I beseech now, O my God, discover to me myself also, that I may confess unto my brethren, who are to pray for me, wherein I find myself maimed. Let me examine myself again more diligently. If in my praise I am moved with the good of my neighbour, why am I less moved if another be unjustly dispraised than if it be myself? Why am I more stung by reproach cast upon myself, than at that cast upon another, with the same injustice, before me? Know I not this also? or is it at last that I deceive myself, and do not the truth before Thee in my heart and tongue? This madness put far from me, O Lord, lest mine own mouth be to me the sinner's oil to make fat my head. I am poor and needy; yet best, while in hidden groanings I displease myself, and seek Thy mercy, until what is lacking in my defective state be renewed and perfected, on to that peace which the eye of the proud knoweth not. Yet the word which cometh out of the mouth, and deeds known to men, bring with them a most dangerous temptation through the love of praise: which, to establish a certain excellency of our own, solicits and collects men's suffrages. It tempts, even when it is reproved by myself in myself, on the very ground that it is reproved; and often glories more vainly of the very contempt of vain-glory; and so it is no longer contempt of vain-glory, whereof it glories; for it doth not contemn when it glorieth. Within also, within is another evil, arising out of a like temptation; whereby men become vain, pleasing themselves in themselves, though they please not, or displease or care not to please others. But pleasing themselves, they much displease Thee, not only taking pleasure in things not good, as if good, but in Thy good things, as though their own; or even if as Thine, yet as though for their own merits; or even if as though from Thy grace, yet not with brotherly rejoicing, but envying that grace to others. In all these and the like perils and travails, Thou seest the trembling of my heart; and I rather feel my wounds to be cured by Thee, than not inflicted by me. Where hast Thou not walked with me, O Truth, teaching me what to beware, and what to desire; when I referred to Thee what I could discover here below, and consulted Thee? With my outward senses, as I might, I surveyed the world, and observed the life, which my body hath from me, and these my senses. Thence entered I the recesses of my memory, those manifold and spacious chambers, wonderfully furnished with innumerable stores; and I considered, and stood aghast; being able to discern nothing of these things without Thee, and finding none of them to be Thee. Nor was I myself, who found out these things, who went over them all, and laboured to distinguish and to value every thing according to its dignity, taking some things upon the report of my senses, questioning about others which I felt to be mingled with myself, numbering and distinguishing the reporters themselves, and in the large treasure-house of my memory revolving some things, storing up others, drawing out others. Nor yet was I myself when I did this, i.e., that my power whereby I did it, neither was it Thou, for Thou art the abiding light, which I consulted concerning all these, whether they were, what they were, and how to be valued; and I heard Thee directing and commanding me; and this I often do, this delights me, and as far as I may be freed from necessary duties, unto this pleasure have I recourse. Nor in all these which I run over consulting Thee can I find any safe place for my soul, but in Thee; whither my scattered members may be gathered, and nothing of me depart from Thee. And sometimes Thou admittest me to an affection, very unusual, in my inmost soul; rising to a strange sweetness, which if it were perfected in me, I know not what in it would not belong to the life to come. But through my miserable encumbrances I sink down again into these lower things, and am swept back by former custom, and am held, and greatly weep, but am greatly held. So much doth the burden of a bad custom weigh us down. Here I can stay, but would not; there I would, but cannot; both ways, miserable. Thus then have I considered the sicknesses of my sins in that threefold concupiscence, and have called Thy right hand to my help. For with a wounded heart have I beheld Thy brightness, and stricken back I said, "Who can attain thither? I am cast away from the sight of Thine eyes." Thou art the Truth who presidest over all, but I through my covetousness would not indeed forego Thee, but would with Thee possess a lie; as no man would in such wise speak falsely, as himself to be ignorant of the truth. So then I lost Thee, because Thou vouchsafest not to be possessed with a lie. Whom could I find to reconcile me to Thee? was I to have recourse to Angels? by what prayers? by what sacraments? Many endeavouring to return unto Thee, and of themselves unable, have, as I hear, tried this, and fallen into the desire of curious visions, and been accounted worthy to be deluded. For they, being high minded, sought Thee by the pride of learning, swelling out rather than smiting upon their breasts, and so by the agreement of their heart, drew unto themselves the princes of the air, the fellow-conspirators of their pride, by whom, through magical influences, they were deceived, seeking a mediator, by whom they might be purged, and there was none. For the devil it was, transforming himself into an Angel of light. And it much enticed proud flesh, that he had no body of flesh. For they were mortal, and sinners; but thou, Lord, to whom they proudly sought to be reconciled, art immortal, and without sin. But a mediator between God and man must have something like to God, something like to men; lest being in both like to man, he should be far from God: or if in both like God, too unlike man: and so not be a mediator. That deceitful mediator then, by whom in Thy secret judgments pride deserved to be deluded, hath one thing in common with man, that is sin; another he would seem to have in common with God; and not being clothed with the mortality of flesh, would vaunt himself to be immortal. But since the wages of sin is death, this hath he in common with men, that with them he should be condemned to death. But the true Mediator, Whom in Thy secret mercy Thou hast showed to the humble, and sentest, that by His example also they might learn that same humility, that Mediator between God and man, the Man Christ Jesus, appeared betwixt mortal sinners and the immortal just One; mortal with men, just with God: that because the wages of righteousness is life and peace, He might by a righteousness conjoined with God make void that death of sinners, now made righteous, which He willed to have in common with them. Hence He was showed forth to holy men of old; that so they, through faith in His Passion to come, as we through faith of it passed, might be saved. For as Man, He was a Mediator; but as the Word, not in the middle between God and man, because equal to God, and God with God, and together one God. How hast Thou loved us, good Father, who sparedst not Thine only Son, but deliveredst Him up for us ungodly! How hast Thou loved us, for whom He that thought it no robbery to be equal with Thee, was made subject even to the death of the cross, He alone, free among the dead, having power to lay down His life, and power to take it again: for us to Thee both Victor and Victim, and therefore Victor, because the Victim; for us to Thee Priest and Sacrifice, and therefore Priest because the Sacrifice; making us to Thee, of servants, sons by being born of Thee, and serving us. Well then is my hope strong in Him, that Thou wilt heal all my infirmities, by Him Who sitteth at Thy right hand and maketh intercession for us; else should I despair. For many and great are my infirmities, many they are, and great; but Thy medicine is mightier. We might imagine that Thy Word was far from any union with man, and despair of ourselves, unless He had been made flesh and dwelt among us. Affrighted with my sins and the burden of my misery, I had cast in my heart, and had purposed to flee to the wilderness: but Thou forbadest me, and strengthenedst me, saying, Therefore Christ died for all, that they which live may now no longer live unto themselves, but unto Him that died for them. See, Lord, I cast my care upon Thee, that I may live, and consider wondrous things out of Thy law. Thou knowest my unskilfulness, and my infirmities; teach me, and heal me. He, Thine only Son, in Whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge, hath redeemed me with His blood. Let not the proud speak evil of me; because I meditate on my ransom, and eat and drink, and communicate it; and poor, desired to be satisfied from Him, amongst those that eat and are satisfied, and they shall praise the Lord who seek Him. BOOK XI Lord, since eternity is Thine, art Thou ignorant of what I say to Thee? or dost Thou see in time, what passeth in time? Why then do I lay in order before Thee so many relations? Not, of a truth, that Thou mightest learn them through me, but to stir up mine own and my readers' devotions towards Thee, that we may all say, Great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised. I have said already; and again will say, for love of Thy love do I this. For we pray also, and yet Truth hath said, Your Father knoweth what you have need of, before you ask. It is then our affections which we lay open unto Thee, confessing our own miseries, and Thy mercies upon us, that Thou mayest free us wholly, since Thou hast begun, that we may cease to be wretched in ourselves, and be blessed in Thee; seeing Thou hast called us, to become poor in spirit, and meek, and mourners, and hungering and athirst after righteousness, and merciful, and pure in heart, and peace-makers. See, I have told Thee many things, as I could and as I would, because Thou first wouldest that I should confess unto Thee, my Lord God. For Thou art good, for Thy mercy endureth for ever. But how shall I suffice with the tongue of my pen to utter all Thy exhortations, and all Thy terrors, and comforts, and guidances, whereby Thou broughtest me to preach Thy Word, and dispense Thy Sacrament to Thy people? And if I suffice to utter them in order, the drops of time are precious with me; and long have I burned to meditate in Thy law, and therein to confess to Thee my skill and unskilfulness, the daybreak of Thy enlightening, and the remnants of my darkness, until infirmity be swallowed up by strength. And I would not have aught besides steal away those hours which I find free from the necessities of refreshing my body and the powers of my mind, and of the service which we owe to men, or which though we owe not, we yet pay. O Lord my god, give ear unto my prayer, and let Thy mercy hearken unto my desire: because it is anxious not for myself alone, but would serve brotherly charity; and Thou seest my heart, that so it is. I would sacrifice to Thee the service of my thought and tongue; do Thou give me, what I may offer Thee. For I am poor and needy, Thou rich to all that call upon Thee; Who, inaccessible to care, carest for us. Circumcise from all rashness and all lying both my inward and outward lips: let Thy Scriptures be my pure delights: let me not be deceived in them, nor deceive out of them. Lord, hearken and pity, O Lord my God, Light of the blind, and Strength of the weak; yea also Light of those that see, and Strength of the strong; hearken unto my soul, and hear it crying out of the depths. For if Thine ears be not with us in the depths also, whither shall we go? whither cry? The day is Thine, and the night is Thine; at Thy beck the moments flee by. Grant thereof a space for our meditations in the hidden things of Thy law, and close it not against us who knock. For not in vain wouldest Thou have the darksome secrets of so many pages written; nor are those forests without their harts which retire therein and range and walk; feed, lie down, and ruminate. Perfect me, O Lord, and reveal them unto me. Behold, Thy voice is my joy; Thy voice exceedeth the abundance of pleasures. Give what I love: for I do love; and this hast Thou given: forsake not Thy own gifts, nor despise Thy green herb that thirsteth. Let me confess unto Thee whatsoever I shall find in Thy books, and hear the voice of praise, and drink in Thee, and meditate on the wonderful things out of Thy law; even from the beginning, wherein Thou madest the heaven and the earth, unto the everlasting reigning of Thy holy city with Thee. Lord, have mercy on me, and hear my desire. For it is not, I deem, of the earth, not of gold and silver, and precious stones, or gorgeous apparel, or honours and offices, or the pleasures of the flesh, or necessaries for the body and for this life of our pilgrimage: all which shall be added unto those that seek Thy kingdom and Thy righteousness. Behold, O Lord my God, wherein is my desire. The wicked have told me of delights, but not such as Thy law, O Lord. Behold, wherein is my desire. Behold, Father, behold, and see and approve; and be it pleasing in the sight of Thy mercy, that I may find grace before Thee, that the inward parts of Thy words be opened to me knocking. I beseech by our Lord Jesus Christ Thy Son, the Man of Thy right hand, the Son of man, whom Thou hast established for Thyself, as Thy Mediator and ours, through Whom Thou soughtest us, not seeking Thee, but soughtest us, that we might seek Thee,--Thy Word, through Whom Thou madest all things, and among them, me also;--Thy Only-Begotten, through Whom Thou calledst to adoption the believing people, and therein me also;--I beseech Thee by Him, who sitteth at Thy right hand, and intercedeth with Thee for us, in Whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. These do I seek in Thy books. Of Him did Moses write; this saith Himself; this saith the Truth. I would hear and understand, how "In the Beginning Thou madest the heaven and earth." Moses wrote this, wrote and departed, passed hence from Thee to Thee; nor is he now before me. For if he were, I would hold him and ask him, and beseech him by Thee to open these things unto me, and would lay the ears of my body to the sounds bursting out of his mouth. And should he speak Hebrew, in vain will it strike on my senses, nor would aught of it touch my mind; but if Latin, I should know what he said. But whence should I know, whether he spake truth? Yea, and if I knew this also, should I know it from him? Truly within me, within, in the chamber of my thoughts, Truth, neither Hebrew, nor Greek, nor Latin, nor barbarian, without organs of voice or tongue, or sound of syllables, would say, "It is truth," and I forthwith should say confidently to that man of Thine, "thou sayest truly." Whereas then I cannot enquire of him, Thee, Thee I beseech, O Truth, full of Whom he spake truth, Thee, my God, I beseech, forgive my sins; and Thou, who gavest him Thy servant to speak these things, give to me also to understand them. Behold, the heavens and the earth are; they proclaim that they were created; for they change and vary. Whereas whatsoever hath not been made, and yet is, hath nothing in it, which before it had not; and this it is, to change and vary. They proclaim also, that they made not themselves; "therefore we are, because we have been made; we were not therefore, before we were, so as to make ourselves." Now the evidence of the thing, is the voice of the speakers. Thou therefore, Lord, madest them; who art beautiful, for they are beautiful; who art good, for they are good; who art, for they are; yet are they not beautiful nor good, nor are they, as Thou their Creator art; compared with Whom, they are neither beautiful, nor good, nor are. This we know, thanks be to Thee. And our knowledge, compared with Thy knowledge, is ignorance. But how didst Thou make the heaven and the earth? and what the engine of Thy so mighty fabric? For it was not as a human artificer, forming one body from another, according to the discretion of his mind, which can in some way invest with such a form, as it seeth in itself by its inward eye. And whence should he be able to do this, unless Thou hadst made that mind? and he invests with a form what already existeth, and hath a being, as clay, or stone, or wood, or gold, or the like. And whence should they be, hadst not Thou appointed them? Thou madest the artificer his body, Thou the mind commanding the limbs, Thou the matter whereof he makes any thing; Thou the apprehension whereby to take in his art, and see within what he doth without; Thou the sense of his body, whereby, as by an interpreter, he may from mind to matter, convey that which he doth, and report to his mind what is done; that it within may consult the truth, which presideth over itself, whether it be well done or no. All these praise Thee, the Creator of all. But how dost Thou make them? how, O God, didst Thou make heaven and earth? Verily, neither in the heaven, nor in the earth, didst Thou make heaven and earth; nor in the air, or waters, seeing these also belong to the heaven and the earth; nor in the whole world didst Thou make the whole world; because there was no place where to make it, before it was made, that it might be. Nor didst Thou hold any thing in Thy hand, whereof to make heaven and earth. For whence shouldest Thou have this, which Thou hadst not made, thereof to make any thing? For what is, but because Thou art? Therefore Thou spokest, and they were made, and in Thy Word Thou madest them. But how didst Thou speak? In the way that the voice came out of the cloud, saying, This is my beloved Son? For that voice passed by and passed away, began and ended; the syllables sounded and passed away, the second after the first, the third after the second, and so forth in order, until the last after the rest, and silence after the last. Whence it is abundantly clear and plain that the motion of a creature expressed it, itself temporal, serving Thy eternal will. And these Thy words, created for a time, the outward ear reported to the intelligent soul, whose inward ear lay listening to Thy Eternal Word. But she compared these words sounding in time, with that Thy Eternal Word in silence, and said "It is different, far different. These words are far beneath me, nor are they, because they flee and pass away; but the Word of my Lord abideth above me for ever." If then in sounding and passing words Thou saidst that heaven and earth should be made, and so madest heaven and earth, there was a corporeal creature before heaven and earth, by whose motions in time that voice might take his course in time. But there was nought corporeal before heaven and earth; or if there were, surely Thou hadst, without such a passing voice, created that, whereof to make this passing voice, by which to say, Let the heaven and the earth be made. For whatsoever that were, whereof such a voice were made, unless by Thee it were made, it could not be at all. By what Word then didst Thou speak, that a body might be made, whereby these words again might be made? Thou callest us then to understand the Word, God, with Thee God, Which is spoken eternally, and by It are all things spoken eternally. For what was spoken was not spoken successively, one thing concluded that the next might be spoken, but all things together and eternally. Else have we time and change; and not a true eternity nor true immortality. This I know, O my God, and give thanks. I know, I confess to Thee, O Lord, and with me there knows and blesses Thee, whoso is not unthankful to assure Truth. We know, Lord, we know; since inasmuch as anything is not which was, and is, which was not, so far forth it dieth and ariseth. Nothing then of Thy Word doth give place or replace, because It is truly immortal and eternal. And therefore unto the Word coeternal with Thee Thou dost at once and eternally say all that Thou dost say; and whatever Thou sayest shall be made is made; nor dost Thou make, otherwise than by saying; and yet are not all things made together, or everlasting, which Thou makest by saying. Why, I beseech Thee, O Lord my God? I see it in a way; but how to express it, I know not, unless it be, that whatsoever begins to be, and leaves off to be, begins then, and leaves off then, when in Thy eternal Reason it is known, that it ought to begin or leave off; in which Reason nothing beginneth or leaveth off. This is Thy Word, which is also "the Beginning, because also It speaketh unto us." Thus in the Gospel He speaketh through the flesh; and this sounded outwardly in the ears of men; that it might be believed and sought inwardly, and found in the eternal Verity; where the good and only Master teacheth all His disciples. There, Lord, hear I Thy voice speaking unto me; because He speaketh us, who teacheth us; but He that teacheth us not, though He speaketh, to us He speaketh not. Who now teacheth us, but the unchangeable Truth? for even when we are admonished through a changeable creature; we are but led to the unchangeable Truth; where we learn truly, while we stand and hear Him, and rejoice greatly because of the Bridegroom's voice, restoring us to Him, from Whom we are. And therefore the Beginning, because unless It abided, there should not, when we went astray, be whither to return. But when we return from error, it is through knowing; and that we may know, He teacheth us, because He is the Beginning, and speaking unto us. In this Beginning, O God, hast Thou made heaven and earth, in Thy Word, in Thy Son, in Thy Power, in Thy Wisdom, in Thy Truth; wondrously speaking, and wondrously making. Who shall comprehend? Who declare it? What is that which gleams through me, and strikes my heart without hurting it; and I shudder and kindle? I shudder, inasmuch as I am unlike it; I kindle, inasmuch as I am like it. It is Wisdom, Wisdom's self which gleameth through me; severing my cloudiness which yet again mantles over me, fainting from it, through the darkness which for my punishment gathers upon me. For my strength is brought down in need, so that I cannot support my blessings, till Thou, Lord, Who hast been gracious to all mine iniquities, shalt heal all my infirmities. For Thou shalt also redeem my life from corruption, and crown me with loving kindness and tender mercies, and shalt satisfy my desire with good things, because my youth shall be renewed like an eagle's. For in hope we are saved, wherefore we through patience wait for Thy promises. Let him that is able, hear Thee inwardly discoursing out of Thy oracle: I will boldly cry out, How wonderful are Thy works, O Lord, in Wisdom hast Thou made them all; and this Wisdom is the Beginning, and in that Beginning didst Thou make heaven and earth. Lo, are they not full of their old leaven, who say to us, "What was God doing before He made heaven and earth? For if (say they) He were unemployed and wrought not, why does He not also henceforth, and for ever, as He did heretofore? For did any new motion arise in God, and a new will to make a creature, which He had never before made, how then would that be a true eternity, where there ariseth a will, which was not? For the will of God is not a creature, but before the creature; seeing nothing could be created, unless the will of the Creator had preceded. The will of God then belongeth to His very Substance. And if aught have arisen in God's Substance, which before was not, that Substance cannot be truly called eternal. But if the will of God has been from eternity that the creature should be, why was not the creature also from eternity?" Who speak thus, do not yet understand Thee, O Wisdom of God, Light of souls, understand not yet how the things be made, which by Thee, and in Thee are made: yet they strive to comprehend things eternal, whilst their heart fluttereth between the motions of things past and to come, and is still unstable. Who shall hold it, and fix it, that it be settled awhile, and awhile catch the glory of that ever-fixed Eternity, and compare it with the times which are never fixed, and see that it cannot be compared; and that a long time cannot become long, but out of many motions passing by, which cannot be prolonged altogether; but that in the Eternal nothing passeth, but the whole is present; whereas no time is all at once present: and that all time past, is driven on by time to come, and all to come followeth upon the past; and all past and to come, is created, and flows out of that which is ever present? Who shall hold the heart of man, that it may stand still, and see how eternity ever still-standing, neither past nor to come, uttereth the times past and to come? Can my hand do this, or the hand of my mouth by speech bring about a thing so great? See, I answer him that asketh, "What did God before He made heaven and earth?" I answer not as one is said to have done merrily (eluding the pressure of the question), "He was preparing hell (saith he) for pryers into mysteries." It is one thing to answer enquiries, another to make sport of enquirers. So I answer not; for rather had I answer, "I know not," what I know not, than so as to raise a laugh at him who asketh deep things and gain praise for one who answereth false things. But I say that Thou, our God, art the Creator of every creature: and if by the name "heaven and earth," every creature be understood; I boldly say, "that before God made heaven and earth, He did not make any thing." For if He made, what did He make but a creature? And would I knew whatsoever I desire to know to my profit, as I know, that no creature was made, before there was made any creature. But if any excursive brain rove over the images of forepassed times, and wonder that Thou the God Almighty and All-creating and All-supporting, Maker of heaven and earth, didst for innumerable ages forbear from so great a work, before Thou wouldest make it; let him awake and consider, that he wonders at false conceits. For whence could innumerable ages pass by, which Thou madest not, Thou the Author and Creator of all ages? or what times should there be, which were not made by Thee? or how should they pass by, if they never were? Seeing then Thou art the Creator of all times, if any time was before Thou madest heaven and earth, why say they that Thou didst forego working? For that very time didst Thou make, nor could times pass by, before Thou madest those times. But if before heaven and earth there was no time, why is it demanded, what Thou then didst? For there was no "then," when there was no time. Nor dost Thou by time, precede time: else shouldest Thou not precede all times. But Thou precedest all things past, by the sublimity of an ever-present eternity; and surpassest all future because they are future, and when they come, they shall be past; but Thou art the Same, and Thy years fail not. Thy years neither come nor go; whereas ours both come and go, that they all may come. Thy years stand together, because they do stand; nor are departing thrust out by coming years, for they pass not away; but ours shall all be, when they shall no more be. Thy years are one day; and Thy day is not daily, but To-day, seeing Thy To-day gives not place unto to-morrow, for neither doth it replace yesterday. Thy To-day, is Eternity; therefore didst Thou beget The Coeternal, to whom Thou saidst, This day have I begotten Thee. Thou hast made all things; and before all times Thou art: neither in any time was time not. At no time then hadst Thou not made any thing, because time itself Thou madest. And no times are coeternal with Thee, because Thou abidest; but if they abode, they should not be times. For what is time? Who can readily and briefly explain this? Who can even in thought comprehend it, so as to utter a word about it? But what in discourse do we mention more familiarly and knowingly, than time? And, we understand, when we speak of it; we understand also, when we hear it spoken of by another. What then is time? If no one asks me, I know: if I wish to explain it to one that asketh, I know not: yet I say boldly that I know, that if nothing passed away, time past were not; and if nothing were coming, a time to come were not; and if nothing were, time present were not. Those two times then, past and to come, how are they, seeing the past now is not, and that to come is not yet? But the present, should it always be present, and never pass into time past, verily it should not be time, but eternity. If time present (if it is to be time) only cometh into existence, because it passeth into time past, how can we say that either this is, whose cause of being is, that it shall not be; so, namely, that we cannot truly say that time is, but because it is tending not to be? And yet we say, "a long time" and "a short time"; still, only of time past or to come. A long time past (for example) we call an hundred years since; and a long time to come, an hundred years hence. But a short time past, we call (suppose) often days since; and a short time to come, often days hence. But in what sense is that long or short, which is not? For the past, is not now; and the future, is not yet. Let us not then say, "it is long"; but of the past, "it hath been long"; and of the future, "it will be long." O my Lord, my Light, shall not here also Thy Truth mock at man? For that past time which was long, was it long when it was now past, or when it was yet present? For then might it be long, when there was, what could be long; but when past, it was no longer; wherefore neither could that be long, which was not at all. Let us not then say, "time past hath been long": for we shall not find, what hath been long, seeing that since it was past, it is no more, but let us say, "that present time was long"; because, when it was present, it was long. For it had not yet passed away, so as not to be; and therefore there was, what could be long; but after it was past, that ceased also to be long, which ceased to be. Let us see then, thou soul of man, whether present time can be long: for to thee it is given to feel and to measure length of time. What wilt thou answer me? Are an hundred years, when present, a long time? See first, whether an hundred years can be present. For if the first of these years be now current, it is present, but the other ninety and nine are to come, and therefore are not yet, but if the second year be current, one is now past, another present, the rest to come. And so if we assume any middle year of this hundred to be present, all before it, are past; all after it, to come; wherefore an hundred years cannot be present. But see at least whether that one which is now current, itself is present; for if the current month be its first, the rest are to come; if the second, the first is already past, and the rest are not yet. Therefore, neither is the year now current present; and if not present as a whole, then is not the year present. For twelve months are a year; of which whatever by the current month is present; the rest past, or to come. Although neither is that current month present; but one day only; the rest being to come, if it be the first; past, if the last; if any of the middle, then amid past and to come. See how the present time, which alone we found could be called long, is abridged to the length scarce of one day. But let us examine that also; because neither is one day present as a whole. For it is made up of four and twenty hours of night and day: of which, the first hath the rest to come; the last hath them past; and any of the middle hath those before it past, those behind it to come. Yea, that one hour passeth away in flying particles. Whatsoever of it hath flown away, is past; whatsoever remaineth, is to come. If an instant of time be conceived, which cannot be divided into the smallest particles of moments, that alone is it, which may be called present. Which yet flies with such speed from future to past, as not to be lengthened out with the least stay. For if it be, it is divided into past and future. The present hath no space. Where then is the time, which we may call long? Is it to come? Of it we do not say, "it is long"; because it is not yet, so as to be long; but we say, "it will be long." When therefore will it be? For if even then, when it is yet to come, it shall not be long (because what can be long, as yet is not), and so it shall then be long, when from future which as yet is not, it shall begin now to be, and have become present, that so there should exist what may be long; then does time present cry out in the words above, that it cannot be long. And yet, Lord, we perceive intervals of times, and compare them, and say, some are shorter, and others longer. We measure also, how much longer or shorter this time is than that; and we answer, "This is double, or treble; and that, but once, or only just so much as that." But we measure times as they are passing, by perceiving them; but past, which now are not, or the future, which are not yet, who can measure? unless a man shall presume to say, that can be measured, which is not. When then time is passing, it may be perceived and measured; but when it is past, it cannot, because it is not. I ask, Father, I affirm not: O my God, rule and guide me. "Who will tell me that there are not three times (as we learned when boys, and taught boys), past, present, and future; but present only, because those two are not? Or are they also; and when from future it becometh present, doth it come out of some secret place; and so, when retiring, from present it becometh past? For where did they, who foretold things to come, see them, if as yet they be not? For that which is not, cannot be seen. And they who relate things past, could not relate them, if in mind they did not discern them, and if they were not, they could no way be discerned. Things then past and to come, are." Permit me, Lord, to seek further. O my hope, let not my purpose be confounded. For if times past and to come be, I would know where they be. Which yet if I cannot, yet I know, wherever they be, they are not there as future, or past, but present. For if there also they be future, they are not yet there; if there also they be past, they are no longer there. Wheresoever then is whatsoever is, it is only as present. Although when past facts are related, there are drawn out of the memory, not the things themselves which are past, but words which, conceived by the images of the things, they, in passing, have through the senses left as traces in the mind. Thus my childhood, which now is not, is in time past, which now is not: but now when I recall its image, and tell of it, I behold it in the present, because it is still in my memory. Whether there be a like cause of foretelling things to come also; that of things which as yet are not, the images may be perceived before, already existing, I confess, O my God, I know not. This indeed I know, that we generally think before on our future actions, and that that forethinking is present, but the action whereof we forethink is not yet, because it is to come. Which, when we have set upon, and have begun to do what we were forethinking, then shall that action be; because then it is no longer future, but present. Which way soever then this secret fore-perceiving of things to come be; that only can be seen, which is. But what now is, is not future, but present. When then things to come are said to be seen, it is not themselves which as yet are not (that is, which are to be), but their causes perchance or signs are seen, which already are. Therefore they are not future but present to those who now see that, from which the future, being foreconceived in the mind, is foretold. Which fore-conceptions again now are; and those who foretell those things, do behold the conceptions present before them. Let now the numerous variety of things furnish me some example. I behold the day-break, I foreshow, that the sun, is about to rise. What I behold, is present; what I foresignify, to come; not the sun, which already is; but the sun-rising, which is not yet. And yet did I not in my mind imagine the sun-rising itself (as now while I speak of it), I could not foretell it. But neither is that day-break which I discern in the sky, the sun-rising, although it goes before it; nor that imagination of my mind; which two are seen now present, that the other which is to be may be foretold. Future things then are not yet: and if they be not yet, they are not: and if they are not, they cannot be seen; yet foretold they may be from things present, which are already, and are seen. Thou then, Ruler of Thy creation, by what way dost Thou teach souls things to come? For Thou didst teach Thy Prophets. By what way dost Thou, to whom nothing is to come, teach things to come; or rather of the future, dost teach things present? For, what is not, neither can it be taught. Too far is this way of my ken: it is too mighty for me, I cannot attain unto it; but from Thee I can, when Thou shalt vouchsafe it, O sweet light of my hidden eyes. What now is clear and plain is, that neither things to come nor past are. Nor is it properly said, "there be three times, past, present, and to come": yet perchance it might be properly said, "there be three times; a present of things past, a present of things present, and a present of things future." For these three do exist in some sort, in the soul, but otherwhere do I not see them; present of things past, memory; present of things present, sight; present of things future, expectation. If thus we be permitted to speak, I see three times, and I confess there are three. Let it be said too, "there be three times, past, present, and to come": in our incorrect way. See, I object not, nor gainsay, nor find fault, if what is so said be but understood, that neither what is to be, now is, nor what is past. For but few things are there, which we speak properly, most things improperly; still the things intended are understood. I said then even now, we measure times as they pass, in order to be able to say, this time is twice so much as that one; or, this is just so much as that; and so of any other parts of time, which be measurable. Wherefore, as I said, we measure times as they pass. And if any should ask me, "How knowest thou?" I might answer, "I know, that we do measure, nor can we measure things that are not; and things past and to come, are not." But time present how do we measure, seeing it hath no space? It is measured while passing, but when it shall have passed, it is not measured; for there will be nothing to be measured. But whence, by what way, and whither passes it while it is a measuring? whence, but from the future? Which way, but through the present? whither, but into the past? From that therefore, which is not yet, through that, which hath no space, into that, which now is not. Yet what do we measure, if not time in some space? For we do not say, single, and double, and triple, and equal, or any other like way that we speak of time, except of spaces of times. In what space then do we measure time passing? In the future, whence it passeth through? But what is not yet, we measure not. Or in the present, by which it passes? but no space, we do not measure: or in the past, to which it passes? But neither do we measure that, which now is not. My soul is on fire to know this most intricate enigma. Shut it not up, O Lord my God, good Father; through Christ I beseech Thee, do not shut up these usual, yet hidden things, from my desire, that it be hindered from piercing into them; but let them dawn through Thy enlightening mercy, O Lord. Whom shall I enquire of concerning these things? and to whom shall I more fruitfully confess my ignorance, than to Thee, to Whom these my studies, so vehemently kindled toward Thy Scriptures, are not troublesome? Give what I love; for I do love, and this hast Thou given me. Give, Father, Who truly knowest to give good gifts unto Thy children. Give, because I have taken upon me to know, and trouble is before me until Thou openest it. By Christ I beseech Thee, in His Name, Holy of holies, let no man disturb me. For I believed, and therefore do I speak. This is my hope, for this do I live, that I may contemplate the delights of the Lord. Behold, Thou hast made my days old, and they pass away, and how, I know not. And we talk of time, and time, and times, and times, "How long time is it since he said this"; "how long time since he did this"; and "how long time since I saw that"; and "this syllable hath double time to that single short syllable." These words we speak, and these we hear, and are understood, and understand. Most manifest and ordinary they are, and the self-same things again are but too deeply hidden, and the discovery of them were new. I heard once from a learned man, that the motions of the sun, moon, and stars, constituted time, and I assented not. For why should not the motions of all bodies rather be times? Or, if the lights of heaven should cease, and a potter's wheel run round, should there be no time by which we might measure those whirlings, and say, that either it moved with equal pauses, or if it turned sometimes slower, otherwhiles quicker, that some rounds were longer, other shorter? Or, while we were saying this, should we not also be speaking in time? Or, should there in our words be some syllables short, others long, but because those sounded in a shorter time, these in a longer? God, grant to men to see in a small thing notices common to things great and small. The stars and lights of heaven, are also for signs, and for seasons, and for years, and for days; they are; yet neither should I say, that the going round of that wooden wheel was a day, nor yet he, that it was therefore no time. I desire to know the force and nature of time, by which we measure the motions of bodies, and say (for example) this motion is twice as long as that. For I ask, Seeing "day" denotes not the stay only of the sun upon the earth (according to which day is one thing, night another); but also its whole circuit from east to east again; according to which we say, "there passed so many days," the night being included when we say, "so many days," and the nights not reckoned apart;--seeing then a day is completed by the motion of the sun and by his circuit from east to east again, I ask, does the motion alone make the day, or the stay in which that motion is completed, or both? For if the first be the day; then should we have a day, although the sun should finish that course in so small a space of time, as one hour comes to. If the second, then should not that make a day, if between one sun-rise and another there were but so short a stay, as one hour comes to; but the sun must go four and twenty times about, to complete one day. If both, then neither could that be called a day; if the sun should run his whole round in the space of one hour; nor that, if, while the sun stood still, so much time should overpass, as the sun usually makes his whole course in, from morning to morning. I will not therefore now ask, what that is which is called day; but, what time is, whereby we, measuring the circuit of the sun, should say that it was finished in half the time it was wont, if so be it was finished in so small a space as twelve hours; and comparing both times, should call this a single time, that a double time; even supposing the sun to run his round from east to east, sometimes in that single, sometimes in that double time. Let no man then tell me, that the motions of the heavenly bodies constitute times, because, when at the prayer of one, the sun had stood still, till he could achieve his victorious battle, the sun stood still, but time went on. For in its own allotted space of time was that battle waged and ended. I perceive time then to be a certain extension. But do I perceive it, or seem to perceive it? Thou, Light and Truth, wilt show me. Dost Thou bid me assent, if any define time to be "motion of a body?" Thou dost not bid me. For that no body is moved, but in time, I hear; this Thou sayest; but that the motion of a body is time, I hear not; Thou sayest it not. For when a body is moved, I by time measure, how long it moveth, from the time it began to move until it left off? And if I did not see whence it began; and it continue to move so that I see not when it ends, I cannot measure, save perchance from the time I began, until I cease to see. And if I look long, I can only pronounce it to be a long time, but not how long; because when we say "how long," we do it by comparison; as, "this is as long as that," or "twice so long as that," or the like. But when we can mark the distances of the places, whence and whither goeth the body moved, or his parts, if it moved as in a lathe, then can we say precisely, in how much time the motion of that body or his part, from this place unto that, was finished. Seeing therefore the motion of a body is one thing, that by which we measure how long it is, another; who sees not, which of the two is rather to be called time? For and if a body be sometimes moved, sometimes stands still, then we measure, not his motion only, but his standing still too by time; and we say, "it stood still, as much as it moved"; or "it stood still twice or thrice so long as it moved"; or any other space which our measuring hath either ascertained, or guessed; more or less, as we use to say. Time then is not the motion of a body. And I confess to Thee, O Lord, that I yet know not what time is, and again I confess unto Thee, O Lord, that I know that I speak this in time, and that having long spoken of time, that very "long" is not long, but by the pause of time. How then know I this, seeing I know not what time is? or is it perchance that I know not how to express what I know? Woe is me, that do not even know, what I know not. Behold, O my God, before Thee I lie not; but as I speak, so is my heart. Thou shalt light my candle; Thou, O Lord my God, wilt enlighten my darkness. Does not my soul most truly confess unto Thee, that I do measure times? Do I then measure, O my God, and know not what I measure? I measure the motion of a body in time; and the time itself do I not measure? Or could I indeed measure the motion of a body how long it were, and in how long space it could come from this place to that, without measuring the time in which it is moved? This same time then, how do I measure? do we by a shorter time measure a longer, as by the space of a cubit, the space of a rood? for so indeed we seem by the space of a short syllable, to measure the space of a long syllable, and to say that this is double the other. Thus measure we the spaces of stanzas, by the spaces of the verses, and the spaces of the verses, by the spaces of the feet, and the spaces of the feet, by the spaces of the syllables, and the spaces of long, by the space of short syllables; not measuring by pages (for then we measure spaces, not times); but when we utter the words and they pass by, and we say "it is a long stanza," because composed of so many verses; long verses, because consisting of so many feet; long feet, because prolonged by so many syllables; a long syllable because double to a short one. But neither do we this way obtain any certain measure of time; because it may be, that a shorter verse, pronounced more fully, may take up more time than a longer, pronounced hurriedly. And so for a verse, a foot, a syllable. Whence it seemed to me, that time is nothing else than protraction; but of what, I know not; and I marvel, if it be not of the mind itself? For what, I beseech Thee, O my God, do I measure, when I say, either indefinitely "this is a longer time than that," or definitely "this is double that"? That I measure time, I know; and yet I measure not time to come, for it is not yet; nor present, because it is not protracted by any space; nor past, because it now is not. What then do I measure? Times passing, not past? for so I said. Courage, my mind, and press on mightily. God is our helper, He made us, and not we ourselves. Press on where truth begins to dawn. Suppose, now, the voice of a body begins to sound, and does sound, and sounds on, and list, it ceases; it is silence now, and that voice is past, and is no more a voice. Before it sounded, it was to come, and could not be measured, because as yet it was not, and now it cannot, because it is no longer. Then therefore while it sounded, it might; because there then was what might be measured. But yet even then it was not at a stay; for it was passing on, and passing away. Could it be measured the rather, for that? For while passing, it was being extended into some space of time, so that it might be measured, since the present hath no space. If therefore then it might, then, lo, suppose another voice hath begun to sound, and still soundeth in one continued tenor without any interruption; let us measure it while it sounds; seeing when it hath left sounding, it will then be past, and nothing left to be measured; let us measure it verily, and tell how much it is. But it sounds still, nor can it be measured but from the instant it began in, unto the end it left in. For the very space between is the thing we measure, namely, from some beginning unto some end. Wherefore, a voice that is not yet ended, cannot be measured, so that it may be said how long, or short it is; nor can it be called equal to another, or double to a single, or the like. But when ended, it no longer is. How may it then be measured? And yet we measure times; but yet neither those which are not yet, nor those which no longer are, nor those which are not lengthened out by some pause, nor those which have no bounds. We measure neither times to come, nor past, nor present, nor passing; and yet we do measure times. "Deus Creator omnium," this verse of eight syllables alternates between short and long syllables. The four short then, the first, third, fifth, and seventh, are but single, in respect of the four long, the second, fourth, sixth, and eighth. Every one of these to every one of those, hath a double time: I pronounce them, report on them, and find it so, as one's plain sense perceives. By plain sense then, I measure a long syllable by a short, and I sensibly find it to have twice so much; but when one sounds after the other, if the former be short, the latter long, how shall I detain the short one, and how, measuring, shall I apply it to the long, that I may find this to have twice so much; seeing the long does not begin to sound, unless the short leaves sounding? And that very long one do I measure as present, seeing I measure it not till it be ended? Now his ending is his passing away. What then is it I measure? where is the short syllable by which I measure? where the long which I measure? Both have sounded, have flown, passed away, are no more; and yet I measure, and confidently answer (so far as is presumed on a practised sense) that as to space of time this syllable is but single, that double. And yet I could not do this, unless they were already past and ended. It is not then themselves, which now are not, that I measure, but something in my memory, which there remains fixed. It is in thee, my mind, that I measure times. Interrupt me not, that is, interrupt not thyself with the tumults of thy impressions. In thee I measure times; the impression, which things as they pass by cause in thee, remains even when they are gone; this it is which still present, I measure, not the things which pass by to make this impression. This I measure, when I measure times. Either then this is time, or I do not measure times. What when we measure silence, and say that this silence hath held as long time as did that voice? do we not stretch out our thought to the measure of a voice, as if it sounded, that so we may be able to report of the intervals of silence in a given space of time? For though both voice and tongue be still, yet in thought we go over poems, and verses, and any other discourse, or dimensions of motions, and report as to the spaces of times, how much this is in respect of that, no otherwise than if vocally we did pronounce them. If a man would utter a lengthened sound, and had settled in thought how long it should be, he hath in silence already gone through a space of time, and committing it to memory, begins to utter that speech, which sounds on, until it be brought unto the end proposed. Yea it hath sounded, and will sound; for so much of it as is finished, hath sounded already, and the rest will sound. And thus passeth it on, until the present intent conveys over the future into the past; the past increasing by the diminution of the future, until by the consumption of the future, all is past. But how is that future diminished or consumed, which as yet is not? or how that past increased, which is now no longer, save that in the mind which enacteth this, there be three things done? For it expects, it considers, it remembers; that so that which it expecteth, through that which it considereth, passeth into that which it remembereth. Who therefore denieth, that things to come are not as yet? and yet, there is in the mind an expectation of things to come. And who denies past things to be now no longer? and yet is there still in the mind a memory of things past. And who denieth the present time hath no space, because it passeth away in a moment? and yet our consideration continueth, through which that which shall be present proceedeth to become absent. It is not then future time, that is long, for as yet it is not: but a long future, is "a long expectation of the future," nor is it time past, which now is not, that is long; but a long past, is "a long memory of the past." I am about to repeat a Psalm that I know. Before I begin, my expectation is extended over the whole; but when I have begun, how much soever of it I shall separate off into the past, is extended along my memory; thus the life of this action of mine is divided between my memory as to what I have repeated, and expectation as to what I am about to repeat; but "consideration" is present with me, that through it what was future, may be conveyed over, so as to become past. Which the more it is done again and again, so much the more the expectation being shortened, is the memory enlarged: till the whole expectation be at length exhausted, when that whole action being ended, shall have passed into memory. And this which takes place in the whole Psalm, the same takes place in each several portion of it, and each several syllable; the same holds in that longer action, whereof this Psalm may be part; the same holds in the whole life of man, whereof all the actions of man are parts; the same holds through the whole age of the sons of men, whereof all the lives of men are parts. But because Thy loving-kindness is better than all lives, behold, my life is but a distraction, and Thy right hand upheld me, in my Lord the Son of man, the Mediator betwixt Thee, The One, and us many, many also through our manifold distractions amid many things, that by Him I may apprehend in Whom I have been apprehended, and may be re-collected from my old conversation, to follow The One, forgetting what is behind, and not distended but extended, not to things which shall be and shall pass away, but to those things which are before, not distractedly but intently, I follow on for the prize of my heavenly calling, where I may hear the voice of Thy praise, and contemplate Thy delights, neither to come, nor to pass away. But now are my years spent in mourning. And Thou, O Lord, art my comfort, my Father everlasting, but I have been severed amid times, whose order I know not; and my thoughts, even the inmost bowels of my soul, are rent and mangled with tumultuous varieties, until I flow together into Thee, purified and molten by the fire of Thy love. And now will I stand, and become firm in Thee, in my mould, Thy truth; nor will I endure the questions of men, who by a penal disease thirst for more than they can contain, and say, "what did God before He made heaven and earth?" Or, "How came it into His mind to make any thing, having never before made any thing?" Give them, O Lord, well to bethink themselves what they say, and to find, that "never" cannot be predicated, when "time" is not. This then that He is said "never to have made"; what else is it to say, than "in 'no time' to have made?" Let them see therefore, that time cannot be without created being, and cease to speak that vanity. May they also be extended towards those things which are before; and understand Thee before all times, the eternal Creator of all times, and that no times be coeternal with Thee, nor any creature, even if there be any creature before all times. O Lord my God, what a depth is that recess of Thy mysteries, and how far from it have the consequences of my transgressions cast me! Heal mine eyes, that I may share the joy of Thy light. Certainly, if there be mind gifted with such vast knowledge and foreknowledge, as to know all things past and to come, as I know one well-known Psalm, truly that mind is passing wonderful, and fearfully amazing; in that nothing past, nothing to come in after-ages, is any more hidden from him, than when I sung that Psalm, was hidden from me what, and how much of it had passed away from the beginning, what, and how much there remained unto the end. But far be it that Thou the Creator of the Universe, the Creator of souls and bodies, far be it, that Thou shouldest in such wise know all things past and to come. Far, far more wonderfully, and far more mysteriously, dost Thou know them. For not, as the feelings of one who singeth what he knoweth, or heareth some well-known song, are through expectation of the words to come, and the remembering of those that are past, varied, and his senses divided,--not so doth any thing happen unto Thee, unchangeably eternal, that is, the eternal Creator of minds. Like then as Thou in the Beginning knewest the heaven and the earth, without any variety of Thy knowledge, so madest Thou in the Beginning heaven and earth, without any distraction of Thy action. Whoso understandeth, let him confess unto Thee; and whoso understandeth not, let him confess unto Thee. Oh how high art Thou, and yet the humble in heart are Thy dwelling-place; for Thou raisest up those that are bowed down, and they fall not, whose elevation Thou art. BOOK XII My heart, O Lord, touched with the words of Thy Holy Scripture, is much busied, amid this poverty of my life. And therefore most times, is the poverty of human understanding copious in words, because enquiring hath more to say than discovering, and demanding is longer than obtaining, and our hand that knocks, hath more work to do, than our hand that receives. We hold the promise, who shall make it null? If God be for us, who can be against us? Ask, and ye shall have; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you. For every one that asketh, receiveth; and he that seeketh, findeth; and to him that knocketh, shall it be opened. These be Thine own promises: and who need fear to be deceived, when the Truth promiseth? The lowliness of my tongue confesseth unto Thy Highness, that Thou madest heaven and earth; this heaven which I see, and this earth that I tread upon, whence is this earth that I bear about me; Thou madest it. But where is that heaven of heavens, O Lord, which we hear of in the words of the Psalm. The heaven of heavens are the Lord's; but the earth hath He given to the children of men? Where is that heaven which we see not, to which all this which we see is earth? For this corporeal whole, not being wholly every where, hath in such wise received its portion of beauty in these lower parts, whereof the lowest is this our earth; but to that heaven of heavens, even the heaven of our earth, is but earth: yea both these great bodies, may not absurdly be called earth, to that unknown heaven, which is the Lord's, not the sons' of men. And now this earth was invisible and without form, and there was I know not what depth of abyss, upon which there was no light, because it had no shape. Therefore didst Thou command it to be written, that darkness was upon the face of the deep; what else than the absence of light? For had there been light, where should it have been but by being over all, aloft, and enlightening? Where then light was not, what was the presence of darkness, but the absence of light? Darkness therefore was upon it, because light was not upon it; as where sound is not, there is silence. And what is it to have silence there, but to have no sound there? Hast not Thou, O Lord, taught his soul, which confesseth unto Thee? Hast not Thou taught me, Lord, that before Thou formedst and diversifiedst this formless matter, there was nothing, neither colour, nor figure, nor body, nor spirit? and yet not altogether nothing; for there was a certain formlessness, without any beauty. How then should it be called, that it might be in some measure conveyed to those of duller mind, but by some ordinary word? And what, among all parts of the world can be found nearer to an absolute formlessness, than earth and deep? For, occupying the lowest stage, they are less beautiful than the other higher parts are, transparent all and shining. Wherefore then may I not conceive the formlessness of matter (which Thou hadst created without beauty, whereof to make this beautiful world) to be suitably intimated unto men, by the name of earth invisible and without form. So that when thought seeketh what the sense may conceive under this, and saith to itself, "It is no intellectual form, as life, or justice; because it is the matter of bodies; nor object of sense, because being invisible, and without form, there was in it no object of sight or sense";--while man's thought thus saith to itself, it may endeavour either to know it, by being ignorant of it; or to be ignorant, by knowing it. But I, Lord, if I would, by my tongue and my pen, confess unto Thee the whole, whatever Thyself hath taught me of that matter,--the name whereof hearing before, and not understanding, when they who understood it not, told me of it, so I conceived of it as having innumerable forms and diverse, and therefore did not conceive it at all, my mind tossed up and down foul and horrible "forms" out of all order, but yet "forms" and I called it without form not that it wanted all form, but because it had such as my mind would, if presented to it, turn from, as unwonted and jarring, and human frailness would be troubled at. And still that which I conceived, was without form, not as being deprived of all form, but in comparison of more beautiful forms; and true reason did persuade me, that I must utterly uncase it of all remnants of form whatsoever, if I would conceive matter absolutely without form; and I could not; for sooner could I imagine that not to be at all, which should be deprived of all form, than conceive a thing betwixt form and nothing, neither formed, nor nothing, a formless almost nothing. So my mind gave over to question thereupon with my spirit, it being filled with the images of formed bodies, and changing and varying them, as it willed; and I bent myself to the bodies themselves, and looked more deeply into their changeableness, by which they cease to be what they have been, and begin to be what they were not; and this same shifting from form to form, I suspected to be through a certain formless state, not through a mere nothing; yet this I longed to know, not to suspect only.-If then my voice and pen would confess unto Thee the whole, whatsoever knots Thou didst open for me in this question, what reader would hold out to take in the whole? Nor shall my heart for all this cease to give Thee honour, and a song of praise, for those things which it is not able to express. For the changeableness of changeable things, is itself capable of all those forms, into which these changeable things are changed. And this changeableness, what is it? Is it soul? Is it body? Is it that which constituteth soul or body? Might one say, "a nothing something", an "is, is not," I would say, this were it: and yet in some way was it even then, as being capable of receiving these visible and compound figures. But whence had it this degree of being, but from Thee, from Whom are all things, so far forth as they are? But so much the further from Thee, as the unliker Thee; for it is not farness of place. Thou therefore, Lord, Who art not one in one place, and otherwise in another, but the Self-same, and the Self-same, and the Self-same, Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God Almighty, didst in the Beginning, which is of Thee, in Thy Wisdom, which was born of Thine own Substance, create something, and that out of nothing. For Thou createdst heaven and earth; not out of Thyself, for so should they have been equal to Thine Only Begotten Son, and thereby to Thee also; whereas no way were it right that aught should be equal to Thee, which was not of Thee. And aught else besides Thee was there not, whereof Thou mightest create them, O God, One Trinity, and Trine Unity; and therefore out of nothing didst Thou create heaven and earth; a great thing, and a small thing; for Thou art Almighty and Good, to make all things good, even the great heaven, and the petty earth. Thou wert, and nothing was there besides, out of which Thou createdst heaven and earth; things of two sorts; one near Thee, the other near to nothing; one to which Thou alone shouldest be superior; the other, to which nothing should be inferior. But that heaven of heavens was for Thyself, O Lord; but the earth which Thou gavest to the sons of men, to be seen and felt, was not such as we now see and feel. For it was invisible, without form, and there was a deep, upon which there was no light; or, darkness was above the deep, that is, more than in the deep. Because this deep of waters, visible now, hath even in his depths, a light proper for its nature; perceivable in whatever degree unto the fishes, and creeping things in the bottom of it. But that whole deep was almost nothing, because hitherto it was altogether without form; yet there was already that which could be formed. For Thou, Lord, madest the world of a matter without form, which out of nothing, Thou madest next to nothing, thereof to make those great things, which we sons of men wonder at. For very wonderful is this corporeal heaven; of which firmament between water and water, the second day, after the creation of light, Thou saidst, Let it be made, and it was made. Which firmament Thou calledst heaven; the heaven, that is, to this earth and sea, which Thou madest the third day, by giving a visible figure to the formless matter, which Thou madest before all days. For already hadst Thou made both an heaven, before all days; but that was the heaven of this heaven; because In the beginning Thou hadst made heaven and earth. But this same earth which Thou madest was formless matter, because it was invisible and without form, and darkness was upon the deep, of which invisible earth and without form, of which formlessness, of which almost nothing, Thou mightest make all these things of which this changeable world consists, but subsists not; whose very changeableness appears therein, that times can be observed and numbered in it. For times are made by the alterations of things, while the figures, the matter whereof is the invisible earth aforesaid, are varied and turned. And therefore the Spirit, the Teacher of Thy servant, when It recounts Thee to have In the Beginning created heaven and earth, speaks nothing of times, nothing of days. For verily that heaven of heavens which Thou createdst in the Beginning, is some intellectual creature, which, although no ways coeternal unto Thee, the Trinity, yet partaketh of Thy eternity, and doth through the sweetness of that most happy contemplation of Thyself, strongly restrain its own changeableness; and without any fall since its first creation, cleaving close unto Thee, is placed beyond all the rolling vicissitude of times. Yea, neither is this very formlessness of the earth, invisible, and without form, numbered among the days. For where no figure nor order is, there does nothing come, or go; and where this is not, there plainly are no days, nor any vicissitude of spaces of times. O let the Light, the Truth, the Light of my heart, not mine own darkness, speak unto me. I fell off into that, and became darkened; but even thence, even thence I loved Thee. I went astray, and remembered Thee. I heard Thy voice behind me, calling to me to return, and scarcely heard it, through the tumultuousness of the enemies of peace. And now, behold, I return in distress and panting after Thy fountain. Let no man forbid me! of this will I drink, and so live. Let me not be mine own life; from myself I lived ill, death was I to myself; and I revive in Thee. Do Thou speak unto me, do Thou discourse unto me. I have believed Thy Books, and their words be most full of mystery. Already Thou hast told me with a strong voice, O Lord, in my inner ear, that Thou art eternal, Who only hast immortality; since Thou canst not be changed as to figure or motion, nor is Thy will altered by times: seeing no will which varies is immortal. This is in Thy sight clear to me, and let it be more and more cleared to me, I beseech Thee; and in the manifestation thereof, let me with sobriety abide under Thy wings. Thou hast told me also with a strong voice, O Lord, in my inner ear, that Thou hast made all natures and substances, which are not what Thyself is, and yet are; and that only is not from Thee, which is not, and the motion of the will from Thee who art, unto that which in a less degree is, because such motion is transgression and sin; and that no man's sin doth either hurt Thee, or disturb the order of Thy government, first or last. This is in Thy sight clear unto me, and let it be more and more cleared to me, I beseech Thee: and in the manifestation thereof, let me with sobriety abide under Thy wings. Thou hast told me also with a strong voice, in my inner ear, that neither is that creature coeternal unto Thyself, whose happiness Thou only art, and which with a most persevering purity, drawing its nourishment from Thee, doth in no place and at no time put forth its natural mutability; and, Thyself being ever present with it, unto Whom with its whole affection it keeps itself, having neither future to expect, nor conveying into the past what it remembereth, is neither altered by any change, nor distracted into any times. O blessed creature, if such there be, for cleaving unto Thy Blessedness; blest in Thee, its eternal Inhabitant and its Enlightener! Nor do I find by what name I may the rather call the heaven of heavens which is the Lord's, than Thine house, which contemplateth Thy delights without any defection of going forth to another; one pure mind, most harmoniously one, by that settled estate of peace of holy spirits, the citizens of Thy city in heavenly places; far above those heavenly places that we see. By this may the soul, whose pilgrimage is made long and far away, by this may she understand, if she now thirsts for Thee, if her tears be now become her bread, while they daily say unto her, Where is Thy God? if she now seeks of Thee one thing, and desireth it, that she may dwell in Thy house all the days of her life (and what is her life, but Thou? and what Thy days, but Thy eternity, as Thy years which fail not, because Thou art ever the same?); by this then may the soul that is able, understand how far Thou art, above all times, eternal; seeing Thy house which at no time went into a far country, although it be not coeternal with Thee, yet by continually and unfailingly cleaving unto Thee, suffers no changeableness of times. This is in Thy sight clear unto me, and let it be more and more cleared unto me, I beseech Thee, and in the manifestation thereof, let me with sobriety abide under Thy wings. There is, behold, I know not what formlessness in those changes of these last and lowest creatures; and who shall tell me (unless such a one as through the emptiness of his own heart, wonders and tosses himself up and down amid his own fancies?), who but such a one would tell me, that if all figure be so wasted and consumed away, that there should only remain that formlessness, through which the thing was changed and turned from one figure to another, that that could exhibit the vicissitudes of times? For plainly it could not, because, without the variety of motions, there are no times: and no variety, where there is no figure. These things considered, as much as Thou givest, O my God, as much as Thou stirrest me up to knock, and as much as Thou openest to me knocking, two things I find that Thou hast made, not within the compass of time, neither of which is coeternal with Thee. One, which is so formed, that without any ceasing of contemplation, without any interval of change, though changeable, yet not changed, it may thoroughly enjoy Thy eternity and unchangeableness; the other which was so formless, that it had not that, which could be changed from one form into another, whether of motion, or of repose, so as to become subject unto time. But this Thou didst not leave thus formless, because before all days, Thou in the Beginning didst create Heaven and Earth; the two things that I spake of. But the Earth was invisible and without form, and darkness was upon the deep. In which words, is the formlessness conveyed unto us (that such capacities may hereby be drawn on by degrees, as are not able to conceive an utter privation of all form, without yet coming to nothing), out of which another Heaven might be created, together with a visible and well-formed earth: and the waters diversly ordered, and whatsoever further is in the formation of the world, recorded to have been, not without days, created; and that, as being of such nature, that the successive changes of times may take place in them, as being subject to appointed alterations of motions and of forms. This then is what I conceive, O my God, when I hear Thy Scripture saying, In the beginning God made Heaven and Earth: and the Earth was invisible and without form, and darkness was upon the deep, and not mentioning what day Thou createdst them; this is what I conceive, that because of the Heaven of heavens,--that intellectual Heaven, whose Intelligences know all at once, not in part, not darkly, not through a glass, but as a whole, in manifestation, face to face; not, this thing now, and that thing anon; but (as I said) know all at once, without any succession of times;--and because of the earth invisible and without form, without any succession of times, which succession presents "this thing now, that thing anon"; because where is no form, there is no distinction of things:--it is, then, on account of these two, a primitive formed, and a primitive formless; the one, heaven but the Heaven of heaven, the other earth but the earth invisible and without form; because of these two do I conceive, did Thy Scripture say without mention of days, In the Beginning God created Heaven and Earth. For forthwith it subjoined what earth it spake of; and also, in that the Firmament is recorded to be created the second day, and called Heaven, it conveys to us of which Heaven He before spake, without mention of days. Wondrous depth of Thy words! whose surface, behold! is before us, inviting to little ones; yet are they a wondrous depth. O my God, a wondrous depth! It is awful to look therein; an awfulness of honour, and a trembling of love. The enemies thereof I hate vehemently; oh that Thou wouldest slay them with Thy two-edged sword, that they might no longer be enemies unto it: for so do I love to have them slain unto themselves, that they may live unto Thee. But behold others not faultfinders, but extollers of the book of Genesis; "The Spirit of God," say they, "Who by His servant Moses wrote these things, would not have those words thus understood; He would not have it understood, as thou sayest, but otherwise, as we say." Unto Whom Thyself, O Thou God all, being judge, do I thus answer. "Will you affirm that to be false, which with a strong voice Truth tells me in my inner ear, concerning the Eternity of the Creator, that His substance is no ways changed by time, nor His will separate from His substance? Wherefore He willeth not one thing now, another anon, but once, and at once, and always, He willeth all things that He willeth; not again and again, nor now this, now that; nor willeth afterwards, what before He willed not, nor willeth not, what before He willed; because such a will is and no mutable thing is eternal: but our God is eternal. Again, what He tells me in my inner ear, the expectation of things to come becomes sight, when they are come, and this same sight becomes memory, when they be past. Now all thought which thus varies is mutable; and no mutable thing is eternal: but our God is eternal." These things I infer, and put together, and find that my God, the eternal God, hath not upon any new will made any creature, nor doth His knowledge admit of any thing transitory. "What will ye say then, O ye gainsayers? Are these things false?" "No," they say; "What then? Is it false, that every nature already formed, or matter capable of form, is not, but from Him Who is supremely good, because He is supremely?" "Neither do we deny this," say they. "What then? do you deny this, that there is a certain sublime creature, with so chaste a love cleaving unto the true and truly eternal God, that although not coeternal with Him, yet is it not detached from Him, nor dissolved into the variety and vicissitude of times, but reposeth in the most true contemplation of Him only?" Because Thou, O God, unto him that loveth Thee so much as Thou commandest, dost show Thyself, and sufficest him; and therefore doth he not decline from Thee, nor toward himself. This is the house of God, not of earthly mould, nor of celestial bulk corporeal but spiritual, and partaker of Thy eternity, because without defection for ever. For Thou hast made it fast for ever and ever, Thou hast given it a law which it shall not pass. Nor yet is it coeternal with Thee, O God, because not without beginning; for it was made. For although we find no time before it, for wisdom was created before all things; not that Wisdom which is altogether equal and coeternal unto Thee, our God, His Father, and by Whom all things were created, and in Whom, as the Beginning, Thou createdst heaven and earth; but that wisdom which is created, that is, the intellectual nature, which by contemplating the light, is light. For this, though created, is also called wisdom. But what difference there is betwixt the Light which enlighteneth, and which is enlightened, so much is there betwixt the Wisdom that createth, and that created; as betwixt the Righteousness which justifieth, and the righteousness which is made by justification. For we also are called Thy righteousness; for so saith a certain servant of Thine, That we might be made the righteousness of God in Him. Therefore since a certain created wisdom was created before all things, the rational and intellectual mind of that chaste city of Thine, our mother which is above, and is free and eternal in the heavens (in what heavens, if not in those that praise Thee, the Heaven of heavens? Because this is also the Heaven of heavens for the Lord);--though we find no time before it (because that which hath been created before all things, precedeth also the creature of time), yet is the Eternity of the Creator Himself before it, from Whom, being created, it took the beginning, not indeed of time (for time itself was not yet), but of its creation. Hence it is so of Thee, our God, as to be altogether other than Thou, and not the Self-same: because though we find time neither before it, nor even in it (it being meet ever to behold Thy face, nor is ever drawn away from it, wherefore it is not varied by any change), yet is there in it a liability to change, whence it would wax dark, and chill, but that by a strong affection cleaving unto Thee, like perpetual noon, it shineth and gloweth from Thee. O house most lightsome and delightsome! I have loved thy beauty, and the place of the habitation of the glory of my Lord, thy builder and possessor. Let my wayfaring sigh after thee, and I say to Him that made thee, let Him take possession of me also in thee, seeing He hath made me likewise. I have gone astray like a lost sheep: yet upon the shoulders of my Shepherd, thy builder, hope I to be brought back to thee. "What say ye to me, O ye gainsayers that I was speaking unto, who yet believe Moses to have been the holy servant of God, and his books the oracles of the Holy Ghost? Is not this house of God, not coeternal indeed with God, yet after its measure, eternal in the heavens, when you seek for changes of times in vain, because you will not find them? For that, to which it is ever good to cleave fast to God, surpasses all extension, and all revolving periods of time." "It is," say they. "What then of all that which my heart loudly uttered unto my God, when inwardly it heard the voice of His praise, what part thereof do you affirm to be false? Is it that the matter was without form, in which because there was no form, there was no order? But where no order was, there could be no vicissitude of times: and yet this almost nothing, inasmuch as it was not altogether nothing, was from Him certainly, from Whom is whatsoever is, in what degree soever it is." "This also," say they, "do we not deny." With these I now parley a little in Thy presence, O my God, who grant all these things to be true, which Thy Truth whispers unto my soul. For those who deny these things, let them bark and deafen themselves as much as they please; I will essay to persuade them to quiet, and to open in them a way for Thy word. But if they refuse, and repel me; I beseech, O my God, be not Thou silent to me. Speak Thou truly in my heart; for only Thou so speakest: and I will let them alone blowing upon the dust without, and raising it up into their own eyes: and myself will enter my chamber, and sing there a song of loves unto Thee; groaning with groanings unutterable, in my wayfaring, and remembering Jerusalem, with heart lifted up towards it, Jerusalem my country, Jerusalem my mother, and Thyself that rulest over it, the Enlightener, Father, Guardian, Husband, the pure and strong delight, and solid joy, and all good things unspeakable, yea all at once, because the One Sovereign and true Good. Nor will I be turned away, until Thou gather all that I am, from this dispersed and disordered estate, into the peace of that our most dear mother, where the first-fruits of my spirit be already (whence I am ascertained of these things), and Thou conform and confirm it for ever, O my God, my Mercy. But those who do not affirm all these truths to be false, who honour Thy holy Scripture, set forth by holy Moses, placing it, as we, on the summit of authority to be followed, and do yet contradict me in some thing, I answer thus; By Thyself judge, O our God, between my Confessions and these men's contradictions. For they say, "Though these things be true, yet did not Moses intend those two, when, by revelation of the Spirit, he said, In the beginning God created heaven and earth. He did not under the name of heaven, signify that spiritual or intellectual creature which always beholds the face of God; nor under the name of earth, that formless matter." "What then?" "That man of God," say they, "meant as we say, this declared he by those words." "What?" "By the name of heaven and earth would he first signify," say they, "universally and compendiously, all this visible world; so as afterwards by the enumeration of the several days, to arrange in detail, and, as it were, piece by piece, all those things, which it pleased the Holy Ghost thus to enounce. For such were that rude and carnal people to which he spake, that he thought them fit to be entrusted with the knowledge of such works of God only as were visible." They agree, however, that under the words earth invisible and without form, and that darksome deep (out of which it is subsequently shown, that all these visible things which we all know, were made and arranged during those "days") may, not incongruously, be understood of this formless first matter. What now if another should say that "this same formlessness and confusedness of matter, was for this reason first conveyed under the name of heaven and earth, because out of it was this visible world with all those natures which most manifestly appear in it, which is ofttimes called by the name of heaven and earth, created and perfected?" What again if another say that "invisible and visible nature is not indeed inappropriately called heaven and earth; and so, that the universal creation, which God made in His Wisdom, that is, in the Beginning, was comprehended under those two words? Notwithstanding, since all things be made not of the substance of God, but out of nothing (because they are not the same that God is, and there is a mutable nature in them all, whether they abide, as doth the eternal house of God, or be changed, as the soul and body of man are): therefore the common matter of all things visible and invisible (as yet unformed though capable of form), out of which was to be created both heaven and earth (i.e., the invisible and visible creature when formed), was entitled by the same names given to the earth invisible and without form and the darkness upon the deep, but with this distinction, that by the earth invisible and without form is understood corporeal matter, antecedent to its being qualified by any form; and by the darkness upon the deep, spiritual matter, before it underwent any restraint of its unlimited fluidness, or received any light from Wisdom?" It yet remains for a man to say, if he will, that "the already perfected and formed natures, visible and invisible, are not signified under the name of heaven and earth, when we read, In the beginning God made heaven and earth, but that the yet unformed commencement of things, the stuff apt to receive form and making, was called by these names, because therein were confusedly contained, not as yet distinguished by their qualities and forms, all those things which being now digested into order, are called Heaven and Earth, the one being the spiritual, the other the corporeal, creation." All which things being heard and well considered, I will not strive about words: for that is profitable to nothing, but the subversion of the hearers. But the law is good to edify, if a man use it lawfully: for that the end of it is charity, out of a pure heart and good conscience, and faith unfeigned. And well did our Master know, upon which two commandments He hung all the Law and the Prophets. And what doth it prejudice me, O my God, Thou light of my eyes in secret, zealously confessing these things, since divers things may be understood under these words which yet are all true,--what, I say, doth it prejudice me, if I think otherwise than another thinketh the writer thought? All we readers verily strive to trace out and to understand his meaning whom we read; and seeing we believe him to speak truly, we dare not imagine him to have said any thing, which ourselves either know or think to be false. While every man endeavours then to understand in the Holy Scriptures, the same as the writer understood, what hurt is it, if a man understand what Thou, the light of all true-speaking minds, dost show him to be true, although he whom he reads, understood not this, seeing he also understood a Truth, though not this truth? For true it is, O Lord, that Thou madest heaven and earth; and it is true too, that the Beginning is Thy Wisdom, in Which Thou createst all: and true again, that this visible world hath for its greater part the heaven and the earth, which briefly comprise all made and created natures. And true too, that whatsoever is mutable, gives us to understand a certain want of form, whereby it receiveth a form, or is changed, or turned. It is true, that that is subject to no times, which so cleaveth to the unchangeable Form, as though subject to change, never to be changed. It is true, that that formlessness which is almost nothing, cannot be subject to the alteration of times. It is true, that that whereof a thing is made, may by a certain mode of speech, be called by the name of the thing made of it; whence that formlessness, whereof heaven and earth were made, might be called heaven and earth. It is true, that of things having form, there is not any nearer to having no form, than the earth and the deep. It is true, that not only every created and formed thing, but whatsoever is capable of being created and formed, Thou madest, of Whom are all things. It is true, that whatsoever is formed out of that which had no form, was unformed before it was formed. Out of these truths, of which they doubt not whose inward eye Thou hast enabled to see such things, and who unshakenly believe Thy servant Moses to have spoken in the Spirit of truth;--of all these then, he taketh one, who saith, In the Beginning God made the heaven and the earth; that is, "in His Word coeternal with Himself, God made the intelligible and the sensible, or the spiritual and the corporeal creature." He another, that saith, In the Beginning God made heaven and earth; that is, "in His Word coeternal with Himself, did God make the universal bulk of this corporeal world, together with all those apparent and known creatures, which it containeth." He another, that saith, In the Beginning God made heaven and earth; that is, "in His Word coeternal with Himself, did God make the formless matter of creatures spiritual and corporeal." He another, that saith, In the Beginning God created heaven and earth; that is, "in His Word coeternal with Himself, did God create the formless matter of the creature corporeal, wherein heaven and earth lay as yet confused, which, being now distinguished and formed, we at this day see in the bulk of this world." He another, who saith, In the Beginning God made heaven and earth; that is, "in the very beginning of creating and working, did God make that formless matter, confusedly containing in itself both heaven and earth; out of which, being formed, do they now stand out, and are apparent, with all that is in them." And with regard to the understanding of the words following, out of all those truths, he chooses one to himself, who saith, But the earth was invisible, and without form, and darkness was upon the deep; that is, "that corporeal thing that God made, was as yet a formless matter of corporeal things, without order, without light." Another he who says, The earth was invisible and without form, and darkness was upon the deep; that is, "this all, which is called heaven and earth, was still a formless and darksome matter, of which the corporeal heaven and the corporeal earth were to be made, with all things in them, which are known to our corporeal senses." Another he who says, The earth was invisible and without form, and darkness was upon the deep; that is, "this all, which is called heaven and earth, was still a formless and a darksome matter; out of which was to be made, both that intelligible heaven, otherwhere called the Heaven of heavens, and the earth, that is, the whole corporeal nature, under which name is comprised this corporeal heaven also; in a word, out of which every visible and invisible creature was to be created." Another he who says, The earth was invisible and without form, and darkness was upon the deep, "the Scripture did not call that formlessness by the name of heaven and earth; but that formlessness, saith he, already was, which he called the earth invisible without form, and darkness upon the deep; of which he had before said, that God had made heaven and earth, namely, the spiritual and corporeal creature." Another he who says, The earth was invisible and without form, and darkness was upon the deep; that is, "there already was a certain formless matter, of which the Scripture said before, that God made heaven and earth; namely, the whole corporeal bulk of the world, divided into two great parts, upper and lower, with all the common and known creatures in them." For should any attempt to dispute against these two last opinions, thus, "If you will not allow, that this formlessness of matter seems to be called by the name of heaven and earth; Ergo, there was something which God had not made, out of which to make heaven and earth; for neither hath Scripture told us, that God made this matter, unless we understand it to be signified by the name of heaven and earth, or of earth alone, when it is said, In the Beginning God made the heaven and earth; that so in what follows, and the earth was invisible and without form (although it pleased Him so to call the formless matter), we are to understand no other matter, but that which God made, whereof is written above, God made heaven and earth." The maintainers of either of those two latter opinions will, upon hearing this, return for answer, "we do not deny this formless matter to be indeed created by God, that God of Whom are all things, very good; for as we affirm that to be a greater good, which is created and formed, so we confess that to be a lesser good which is made capable of creation and form, yet still good. We say however that Scripture hath not set down, that God made this formlessness, as also it hath not many others; as the Cherubim, and Seraphim, and those which the Apostle distinctly speaks of, Thrones, Dominions, Principalities, Powers. All which that God made, is most apparent. Or if in that which is said, He made heaven and earth, all things be comprehended, what shall we say of the waters, upon which the Spirit of God moved? For if they be comprised in this word earth; how then can formless matter be meant in that name of earth, when we see the waters so beautiful? Or if it be so taken; why then is it written, that out of the same formlessness, the firmament was made, and called heaven; and that the waters were made, is not written? For the waters remain not formless and invisible, seeing we behold them flowing in so comely a manner. But if they then received that beauty, when God said, Let the waters under the firmament be gathered together, that so the gathering together be itself the forming of them; what will be said as to those waters above the firmament? Seeing neither if formless would they have been worthy of so honourable a seat, nor is it written, by what word they were formed. If then Genesis is silent as to God's making of any thing, which yet that God did make neither sound faith nor well-grounded understanding doubteth, nor again will any sober teaching dare to affirm these waters to be coeternal with God, on the ground that we find them to be mentioned in the hook of Genesis, but when they were created, we do not find; why (seeing truth teaches us) should we not understand that formless matter (which this Scripture calls the earth invisible and without form, and darksome deep) to have been created of God out of nothing, and therefore not to be coeternal to Him; notwithstanding this history hath omitted to show when it was created?" These things then being heard and perceived, according to the weakness of my capacity (which I confess unto Thee, O Lord, that knowest it), two sorts of disagreements I see may arise, when a thing is in words related by true reporters; one, concerning the truth of the things, the other, concerning the meaning of the relater. For we enquire one way about the making of the creature, what is true; another way, what Moses, that excellent minister of Thy Faith, would have his reader and hearer understand by those words. For the first sort, away with all those who imagine themselves to know as a truth, what is false; and for this other, away with all them too, which imagine Moses to have written things that be false. But let me be united in Thee, O Lord, with those and delight myself in Thee, with them that feed on Thy truth, in the largeness of charity, and let us approach together unto the words of Thy book, and seek in them for Thy meaning, through the meaning of Thy servant, by whose pen Thou hast dispensed them. But which of us shall, among those so many truths, which occur to enquirers in those words, as they are differently understood, so discover that one meaning, as to affirm, "this Moses thought," and "this would he have understood in that history"; with the same confidence as he would, "this is true," whether Moses thought this or that? For behold, O my God, I Thy servant, who have in this book vowed a sacrifice of confession unto Thee, and pray, that by Thy mercy I may pay my vows unto Thee, can I, with the same confidence wherewith I affirm, that in Thy incommutable world Thou createdst all things visible and invisible, affirm also, that Moses meant no other than this, when he wrote, In the Beginning God made heaven and earth? No. Because I see not in his mind, that he thought of this when he wrote these things, as I do see it in Thy truth to be certain. For he might have his thoughts upon God's commencement of creating, when he said In the beginning; and by heaven and earth, in this place he might intend no formed and perfected nature whether spiritual or corporeal, but both of them inchoate and as yet formless. For I perceive, that whichsoever of the two had been said, it might have been truly said; but which of the two he thought of in these words, I do not so perceive. Although, whether it were either of these, or any sense beside (that I have not here mentioned), which this so great man saw in his mind, when he uttered these words, I doubt not but that he saw it truly, and expressed it aptly. Let no man harass me then, by saying, Moses thought not as you say, but as I say: for if he should ask me, "How know you that Moses thought that which you infer out of his words?" I ought to take it in good part, and would answer perchance as I have above, or something more at large, if he were unyielding. But when he saith, "Moses meant not what you say, but what I say," yet denieth not that what each of us say, may both be true, O my God, life of the poor, in Whose bosom is no contradiction, pour down a softening dew into my heart, that I may patiently bear with such as say this to me, not because they have a divine Spirit, and have seen in the heart of Thy servant what they speak, but because they be proud; not knowing Moses' opinion, but loving their own, not because it is truth, but because it is theirs. Otherwise they would equally love another true opinion, as I love what they say, when they say true: not because it is theirs, but because it is true; and on that very ground not theirs because it is true. But if they therefore love it, because it is true, then is it both theirs, and mine; as being in common to all lovers of truth. But whereas they contend that Moses did not mean what I say, but what they say, this I like not, love not: for though it were so, yet that their rashness belongs not to knowledge, but to overboldness, and not insight but vanity was its parent. And therefore, O Lord, are Thy judgements terrible; seeing Thy truth is neither mine, nor his, nor another's; but belonging to us all, whom Thou callest publicly to partake of it, warning us terribly, not to account it private to ourselves, lest we be deprived of it. For whosoever challenges that as proper to himself, which Thou propoundest to all to enjoy, and would have that his own which belongs to all, is driven from what is in common to his own; that is, from truth, to a lie. For he that speaketh a lie, speaketh it of his own. Hearken, O God, Thou best judge; Truth Itself, hearken to what I shall say to this gainsayer, hearken, for before Thee do I speak, and before my brethren, who employ Thy law lawfully, to the end of charity: hearken and behold, if it please Thee, what I shall say to him. For this brotherly and peaceful word do I return unto Him: "If we both see that to be true that Thou sayest, and both see that to be true that I say, where, I pray Thee, do we see it? Neither I in thee, nor thou in me; but both in the unchangeable Truth itself, which is above our souls." Seeing then we strive not about the very light of the Lord God, why strive we about the thoughts of our neighbour which we cannot so see, as the unchangeable Truth is seen: for that, if Moses himself had appeared to us and said, "This I meant"; neither so should we see it, but should believe it. Let us not then be puffed up for one against another, above that which is written: let us love the Lord our God with all our heart, with all our soul, and with all our mind: and our neighbour as ourself. With a view to which two precepts of charity, unless we believe that Moses meant, whatsoever in those books he did mean, we shall make God a liar, imagining otherwise of our fellow servant's mind, than he hath taught us. Behold now, how foolish it is, in such abundance of most true meanings, as may be extracted out of those words, rashly to affirm, which of them Moses principally meant; and with pernicious contentions to offend charity itself, for whose sake he spake every thing, whose words we go about to expound. And yet I, O my God, Thou lifter up of my humility, and rest of my labour, Who hearest my confessions, and forgivest my sins: seeing Thou commandest me to love my neighbour as myself, I cannot believe that Thou gavest a less gift unto Moses Thy faithful servant, than I would wish or desire Thee to have given me, had I been born in the time he was, and hadst Thou set me in that office, that by the service of my heart and tongue those books might be dispensed, which for so long after were to profit all nations, and through the whole world from such an eminence of authority, were to surmount all sayings of false and proud teachings. I should have desired verily, had I then been Moses (for we all come from the same lump, and what is man, saving that Thou art mindful of him?), I would then, had I been then what he was, and been enjoined by Thee to write the book of Genesis, have desired such a power of expression and such a style to be given me, that neither they who cannot yet understand how God created, might reject the sayings, as beyond their capacity; and they who had attained thereto, might find what true opinion soever they had by thought arrived at, not passed over in those few words of that Thy servant: and should another man by the light of truth have discovered another, neither should that fail of being discoverable in those same words. For as a fountain within a narrow compass, is more plentiful, and supplies a tide for more streams over larger spaces, than any one of those streams, which, after a wide interval, is derived from the same fountain; so the relation of that dispenser of Thine, which was to benefit many who were to discourse thereon, does out of a narrow scantling of language, overflow into streams of clearest truth, whence every man may draw out for himself such truth as he can upon these subjects, one, one truth, another, another, by larger circumlocutions of discourse. For some, when they read, or hear these words, conceive that God like a man or some mass endued with unbounded power, by some new and sudden resolution, did, exterior to itself, as it were at a certain distance, create heaven and earth, two great bodies above and below, wherein all things were to be contained. And when they hear, God said, Let it be made, and it was made; they conceive of words begun and ended, sounding in time, and passing away; after whose departure, that came into being, which was commanded so to do; and whatever of the like sort, men's acquaintance with the material world would suggest. In whom, being yet little ones and carnal, while their weakness is by this humble kind of speech, carried on, as in a mother's bosom, their faith is wholesomely built up, whereby they hold assured, that God made all natures, which in admirable variety their eye beholdeth around. Which words, if any despising, as too simple, with a proud weakness, shall stretch himself beyond the guardian nest; he will, alas, fall miserably. Have pity, O Lord God, lest they who go by the way trample on the unfledged bird, and send Thine angel to replace it into the nest, that it may live, till it can fly. But others, unto whom these words are no longer a nest, but deep shady fruit-bowers, see the fruits concealed therein, fly joyously around, and with cheerful notes seek out, and pluck them. For reading or hearing these words, they see that all times past and to come, are surpassed by Thy eternal and stable abiding; and yet that there is no creature formed in time, not of Thy making. Whose will, because it is the same that Thou art, Thou madest all things, not by any change of will, nor by a will, which before was not, and that these things were not out of Thyself, in Thine own likeness, which is the form of all things; but out of nothing, a formless unlikeness, which should be formed by Thy likeness (recurring to Thy Unity, according to their appointed capacity, so far as is given to each thing in his kind), and might all be made very good; whether they abide around Thee, or being in gradation removed in time and place, made or undergo the beautiful variations of the Universe. These things they see, and rejoice, in the little degree they here may, in the light of Thy truth. Another bends his mind on that which is said, In the Beginning God made heaven and earth; and beholdeth therein Wisdom, the Beginning because It also speaketh unto us. Another likewise bends his mind on the same words, and by Beginning understands the commencement of things created; In the beginning He made, as if it were said, He at first made. And among them that understand In the Beginning to mean, "In Thy Wisdom Thou createdst heaven and earth," one believes the matter out of which the heaven and earth were to be created, to be there called heaven and earth; another, natures already formed and distinguished; another, one formed nature, and that a spiritual, under the name Heaven, the other formless, a corporeal matter, under the name Earth. They again who by the names heaven and earth, understand matter as yet formless, out of which heaven and earth were to be formed, neither do they understand it in one way; but the one, that matter out of which both the intelligible and the sensible creature were to be perfected; another, that only, out of which this sensible corporeal mass was to be made, containing in its vast bosom these visible and ordinary natures. Neither do they, who believe the creatures already ordered and arranged, to be in this place called heaven and earth, understand the same; but the one, both the invisible and visible, the other, the visible only, in which we behold this lightsome heaven, and darksome earth, with the things in them contained. But he that no otherwise understands In the Beginning He made, than if it were said, At first He made, can only truly understand heaven and earth of the matter of heaven and earth, that is, of the universal intelligible and corporeal creation. For if he would understand thereby the universe, as already formed, it may be rightly demanded of him, "If God made this first, what made He afterwards?" and after the universe, he will find nothing; whereupon must he against his will hear another question; "How did God make this first, if nothing after?" But when he says, God made matter first formless, then formed, there is no absurdity, if he be but qualified to discern, what precedes by eternity, what by time, what by choice, and what in original. By eternity, as God is before all things; by time, as the flower before the fruit; by choice, as the fruit before the flower; by original, as the sound before the tune. Of these four, the first and last mentioned, are with extreme difficulty understood, the two middle, easily. For a rare and too lofty a vision is it, to behold Thy Eternity, O Lord, unchangeably making things changeable; and thereby before them. And who, again, is of so sharp-sighted understanding, as to be able without great pains to discern, how the sound is therefore before the tune; because a tune is a formed sound; and a thing not formed, may exist; whereas that which existeth not, cannot be formed. Thus is the matter before the thing made; not because it maketh it, seeing itself is rather made; nor is it before by interval of time; for we do not first in time utter formless sounds without singing, and subsequently adapt or fashion them into the form of a chant, as wood or silver, whereof a chest or vessel is fashioned. For such materials do by time also precede the forms of the things made of them, but in singing it is not so; for when it is sung, its sound is heard; for there is not first a formless sound, which is afterwards formed into a chant. For each sound, so soon as made, passeth away, nor canst thou find ought to recall and by art to compose. So then the chant is concentrated in its sound, which sound of his is his matter. And this indeed is formed, that it may be a tune; and therefore (as I said) the matter of the sound is before the form of the tune; not before, through any power it hath to make it a tune; for a sound is no way the workmaster of the tune; but is something corporeal, subjected to the soul which singeth, whereof to make a tune. Nor is it first in time; for it is given forth together with the tune; nor first in choice, for a sound is not better than a tune, a tune being not only a sound, but a beautiful sound. But it is first in original, because a tune receives not form to become a sound, but a sound receives a form to become a tune. By this example, let him that is able, understand how the matter of things was first made, and called heaven and earth, because heaven and earth were made out of it. Yet was it not made first in time; because the forms of things give rise to time; but that was without form, but now is, in time, an object of sense together with its form. And yet nothing can be related of that matter, but as though prior in time, whereas in value it is last (because things formed are superior to things without form) and is preceded by the Eternity of the Creator: that so there might be out of nothing, whereof somewhat might be created. In this diversity of the true opinions, let Truth herself produce concord. And our God have mercy upon us, that we may use the law lawfully, the end of the commandment, pure charity. By this if man demands of me, "which of these was the meaning of Thy servant Moses"; this were not the language of my Confessions, should I not confess unto Thee, "I know not"; and yet I know that those senses are true, those carnal ones excepted, of which I have spoken what seemed necessary. And even those hopeful little ones who so think, have this benefit, that the words of Thy Book affright them not, delivering high things lowlily, and with few words a copious meaning. And all we who, I confess, see and express the truth delivered in those words, let us love one another, and jointly love Thee our God, the fountain of truth, if we are athirst for it, and not for vanities; yea, let us so honour this Thy servant, the dispenser of this Scripture, full of Thy Spirit, as to believe that, when by Thy revelation he wrote these things, he intended that, which among them chiefly excels both for light of truth, and fruitfulness of profit. So when one says, "Moses meant as I do"; and another, "Nay, but as I do," I suppose that I speak more reverently, "Why not rather as both, if both be true?" And if there be a third, or a fourth, yea if any other seeth any other truth in those words, why may not he be believed to have seen all these, through whom the One God hath tempered the holy Scriptures to the senses of many, who should see therein things true but divers? For I certainly (and fearlessly I speak it from my heart), that were I to indite any thing to have supreme authority, I should prefer so to write, that whatever truth any could apprehend on those matters, might be conveyed in my words, rather than set down my own meaning so clearly as to exclude the rest, which not being false, could not offend me. I will not therefore, O my God, be so rash, as not to believe, that Thou vouchsafedst as much to that great man. He without doubt, when he wrote those words, perceived and thought on what truth soever we have been able to find, yea and whatsoever we have not been able, nor yet are, but which may be found in them. Lastly, O Lord, who art God and not flesh and blood, if man did see less, could any thing be concealed from Thy good Spirit (who shall lead me into the land of uprightness), which Thou Thyself by those words wert about to reveal to readers in times to come, though he through whom they were spoken, perhaps among many true meanings, thought on some one? which if so it be, let that which he thought on be of all the highest. But to us, O Lord, do Thou, either reveal that same, or any other true one which Thou pleasest; that so, whether Thou discoverest the same to us, as to that Thy servant, or some other by occasion of those words, yet Thou mayest feed us, not error deceive us. Behold, O Lord my God, how much we have written upon a few words, how much I beseech Thee! What strength of ours, yea what ages would suffice for all Thy books in this manner? Permit me then in these more briefly to confess unto Thee, and to choose some one true, certain, and good sense that Thou shalt inspire me, although many should occur, where many may occur; this being the law my confession, that if I should say that which Thy minister intended, that is right and best; for this should I endeavour, which if I should not attain, yet I should say that, which Thy Truth willed by his words to tell me, which revealed also unto him, what It willed. BOOK XIII I call upon Thee, O my God, my mercy, Who createdst me, and forgottest not me, forgetting Thee. I call Thee into my soul which, by the longing Thyself inspirest into her, Thou preparest for Thee. Forsake me not now calling upon Thee, whom Thou preventedst before I called, and urgedst me with much variety of repeated calls, that I would hear Thee from afar, and be converted, and call upon Thee, that calledst after me; for Thou, Lord, blottedst out all my evil deservings, so as not to repay into my hands, wherewith I fell from Thee; and Thou hast prevented all my well deservings, so as to repay the work of Thy hands wherewith Thou madest me; because before I was, Thou wert; nor was I any thing, to which Thou mightest grant to be; and yet behold, I am, out of Thy goodness, preventing all this which Thou hast made me, and whereof Thou hast made me. For neither hadst Thou need of me, nor am I any such good, as to be helpful unto Thee, my Lord and God; not in serving Thee, as though Thou wouldest tire in working; or lest Thy power might be less, if lacking my service: nor cultivating Thy service, as a land, that must remain uncultivated, unless I cultivated Thee: but serving and worshipping Thee, that I might receive a well-being from Thee, from whom it comes, that I have a being capable of well-being. For of the fulness of Thy goodness, doth Thy creature subsist, that so a good, which could no ways profit Thee, nor was of Thee (lest so it should be equal to Thee), might yet be since it could be made of Thee. For what did heaven and earth, which Thou madest in the Beginning, deserve of Thee? Let those spiritual and corporeal natures which Thou madest in Thy Wisdom, say wherein they deserved of Thee, to depend thereon (even in that their several inchoate and formless state, whether spiritual or corporeal, ready to fall away into an immoderate liberty and far-distant unlikeliness unto Thee;--the spiritual, though without form, superior to the corporeal though formed, and the corporeal though without form, better than were it altogether nothing), and so to depend upon Thy Word, as formless, unless by the same Word they were brought back to Thy Unity, indued with form and from Thee the One Sovereign Good were made all very good. How did they deserve of Thee, to be even without form, since they had not been even this, but from Thee? How did corporeal matter deserve of Thee, to be even invisible and without form? seeing it were not even this, but that Thou madest it, and therefore because it was not, could not deserve of Thee to be made. Or how could the inchoate spiritual creature deserve of Thee, even to ebb and flow darksomely like the deep,--unlike Thee, unless it had been by the same Word turned to that, by Whom it was created, and by Him so enlightened, become light; though not equally, yet conformably to that Form which is equal unto Thee? For as in a body, to be, is not one with being beautiful, else could it not be deformed; so likewise to a created spirit to live, is not one with living wisely; else should it be wise unchangeably. But good it is for it always to hold fast to Thee; lest what light it hath obtained by turning to Thee, it lose by turning from Thee, and relapse into life resembling the darksome deep. For we ourselves also, who as to the soul are a spiritual creature, turned away from Thee our light, were in that life sometimes darkness; and still labour amidst the relics of our darkness, until in Thy Only One we become Thy righteousness, like the mountains of God. For we have been Thy judgments, which are like the great deep. That which Thou saidst in the beginning of the creation, Let there be light, and there was light; I do, not unsuitably, understand of the spiritual creature: because there was already a sort of life, which Thou mightest illuminate. But as it had no claim on Thee for a life, which could be enlightened, so neither now that it was, had it any, to be enlightened. For neither could its formless estate be pleasing unto Thee, unless it became light, and that not by existing simply, but by beholding the illuminating light, and cleaving to it; so that, that it lived, and lived happily, it owes to nothing but Thy grace, being turned by a better change unto That which cannot be changed into worse or better; which Thou alone art, because Thou alone simply art; unto Thee it being not one thing to live, another to live blessedly, seeing Thyself art Thine own Blessedness. What then could be wanting unto Thy good, which Thou Thyself art, although these things had either never been, or remained without form; which thou madest, not out of any want, but out of the fulness of Thy goodness, restraining them and converting them to form, not as though Thy joy were fulfilled by them? For to Thee being perfect, is their imperfection displeasing, and hence were they perfected by Thee, and please Thee; not as wert Thou imperfect, and by their perfecting wert also to be perfected. For Thy good Spirit indeed was borne over the waters, not borne up by them, as if He rested upon them. For those, on whom Thy good Spirit is said to rest, He causes to rest in Himself. But Thy incorruptible and unchangeable will, in itself all-sufficient for itself, was borne upon that life which Thou hadst created; to which, living is not one with happy living, seeing it liveth also, ebbing and flowing in its own darkness: for which it remaineth to be converted unto Him, by Whom it was made, and to live more and more by the fountain of life, and in His light to see light, and to be perfected, and enlightened, and beautified. Lo, now the Trinity appears unto me in a glass darkly, which is Thou my God, because Thou, O Father, in Him Who is the Beginning of our wisdom, Which is Thy Wisdom, born of Thyself, equal unto Thee and coeternal, that is, in Thy Son, createdst heaven and earth. Much now have we said of the Heaven of heavens, and of the earth invisible and without form, and of the darksome deep, in reference to the wandering instability of its spiritual deformity, unless it had been converted unto Him, from Whom it had its then degree of life, and by His enlightening became a beauteous life, and the heaven of that heaven, which was afterwards set between water and water. And under the name of God, I now held the Father, who made these things, and under the name of Beginning, the Son, in whom He made these things; and believing, as I did, my God as the Trinity, I searched further in His holy words, and lo, Thy Spirit moved upon the waters. Behold the Trinity, my God, Father, and Son, and Holy Ghost, Creator of all creation. But what was the cause, O true-speaking Light?--unto Thee lift I up my heart, let it not teach me vanities, dispel its darkness; and tell me, I beseech Thee, by our mother charity, tell me the reason, I beseech Thee, why after the mention of heaven, and of the earth invisible and without form, and darkness upon the deep, Thy Scripture should then at length mention Thy Spirit? Was it because it was meet that the knowledge of Him should be conveyed, as being "borne above"; and this could not be said, unless that were first mentioned, over which Thy Spirit may be understood to have been borne. For neither was He borne above the Father, nor the Son, nor could He rightly be said to be borne above, if He were borne over nothing. First then was that to be spoken of, over which He might be borne; and then He, whom it was meet not otherwise to be spoken of than as being borne. But wherefore was it not meet that the knowledge of Him should be conveyed otherwise, than as being borne above? Hence let him that is able, follow with his understanding Thy Apostle, where he thus speaks, Because Thy love is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us: and where concerning spiritual gifts, he teacheth and showeth unto us a more excellent way of charity; and where he bows his knee unto Thee for us, that we may know the supereminent knowledge of the love of Christ. And therefore from the beginning, was He borne supereminent above the waters. To whom shall I speak this? how speak of the weight of evil desires, downwards to the steep abyss; and how charity raises up again by Thy Spirit which was borne above the waters? to whom shall I speak it? how speak it? For it is not in space that we are merged and emerge. What can be more, and yet what less like? They be affections, they be loves; the uncleanness of our spirit flowing away downwards with the love of cares, and the holiness of Thine raising us upward by love of unanxious repose; that we may lift our hearts unto Thee, where Thy Spirit is borne above the waters; and come to that supereminent repose, when our soul shall have passed through the waters which yield no support. Angels fell away, man's soul fell away, and thereby pointed the abyss in that dark depth, ready for the whole spiritual creation, hadst not Thou said from the beginning, Let there be light, and there had been light, and every obedient intelligence of Thy heavenly City had cleaved to Thee, and rested in Thy Spirit, Which is borne unchangeably over every thing changeable. Otherwise, had even the heaven of heavens been in itself a darksome deep; but now it is light in the Lord. For even in that miserable restlessness of the spirits, who fell away and discovered their own darkness, when bared of the clothing of Thy light, dost Thou sufficiently reveal how noble Thou madest the reasonable creature; to which nothing will suffice to yield a happy rest, less than Thee; and so not even herself. For Thou, O our God, shalt lighten our darkness: from Thee riseth our garment of light; and then shall our darkness be as the noon day. Give Thyself unto me, O my God, restore Thyself unto me: behold I love, and if it be too little, I would love more strongly. I cannot measure so as to know, how much love there yet lacketh to me, ere my life may run into Thy embracements, nor turn away, until it be hidden in the hidden place of Thy Presence. This only I know, that woe is me except in Thee: not only without but within myself also; and all abundance, which is not my God, is emptiness to me. But was not either the Father, or the Son, borne above the waters? if this means, in space, like a body, then neither was the Holy Spirit; but if the unchangeable supereminence of Divinity above all things changeable, then were both Father, and Son, and Holy Ghost borne upon the waters. Why then is this said of Thy Spirit only, why is it said only of Him? As if He had been in place, Who is not in place, of Whom only it is written, that He is Thy gift? In Thy Gift we rest; there we enjoy Thee. Our rest is our place. Love lifts us up thither, and Thy good Spirit lifts up our lowliness from the gates of death. In Thy good pleasure is our peace. The body by its own weight strives towards its own place. Weight makes not downward only, but to his own place. Fire tends upward, a stone downward. They are urged by their own weight, they seek their own places. Oil poured below water, is raised above the water; water poured upon oil, sinks below the oil. They are urged by their own weights to seek their own places. When out of their order, they are restless; restored to order, they are at rest. My weight, is my love; thereby am I borne, whithersoever I am borne. We are inflamed, by Thy Gift we are kindled; and are carried upwards; we glow inwardly, and go forwards. We ascend Thy ways that be in our heart, and sing a song of degrees; we glow inwardly with Thy fire, with Thy good fire, and we go; because we go upwards to the peace of Jerusalem: for gladdened was I in those who said unto me, We will go up to the house of the Lord. There hath Thy good pleasure placed us, that we may desire nothing else, but to abide there for ever. Blessed creature, which being itself other than Thou, has known no other condition, than that, so soon as it was made, it was, without any interval, by Thy Gift, Which is borne above every thing changeable, borne aloft by that calling whereby Thou saidst, Let there be light, and there was light. Whereas in us this took place at different times, in that we were darkness, and are made light: but of that is only said, what it would have been, had it not been enlightened. And, this is so spoken, as if it had been unsettled and darksome before; that so the cause whereby it was made otherwise, might appear, namely, that being turned to the Light unfailing it became light. Whoso can, let him understand this; let him ask of Thee. Why should he trouble me, as if I could enlighten any man that cometh into this world? Which of us comprehendeth the Almighty Trinity? and yet which speaks not of It, if indeed it be It? Rare is the soul, which while it speaks of It, knows what it speaks of. And they contend and strive, yet, without peace, no man sees that vision. I would that men would consider these three, that are in themselves. These three be indeed far other than the Trinity: I do but tell, where they may practise themselves, and there prove and feel how far they be. Now the three I spake of are, To Be, to Know, and to Will. For I Am, and Know, and Will: I Am Knowing and Willing: and I Know myself to Be, and to Will: and I Will to Be, and to Know. In these three then, let him discern that can, how inseparable a life there is, yea one life, mind, and one essence, yea lastly how inseparable a distinction there is, and yet a distinction. Surely a man hath it before him; let him look into himself, and see, and tell me. But when he discovers and can say any thing of these, let him not therefore think that he has found that which is above these Unchangeable, which Is unchangeably, and Knows unchangeably, and Wills unchangeably; and whether because of these three, there is in God also a Trinity, or whether all three be in Each, so that the three belong to Each; or whether both ways at once, wondrously, simply and yet manifoldly, Itself a bound unto Itself within Itself, yet unbounded; whereby It is, and is Known unto Itself and sufficeth to itself, unchangeably the Self-same, by the abundant greatness of its Unity,--who can readily conceive this? who could any ways express it? who would, any way, pronounce thereon rashly? Proceed in thy confession, say to the Lord thy God, O my faith, Holy, Holy, Holy, O Lord my God, in Thy Name have we been baptised, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost; in Thy Name do we baptise, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, because among us also, in His Christ did God make heaven and earth, namely, the spiritual and carnal people of His Church. Yea and our earth, before it received the form of doctrine, was invisible and without form; and we were covered with the darkness of ignorance. For Thou chastenedst man for iniquity, and Thy judgments were like the great deep unto him. But because Thy Spirit was borne above the waters, Thy mercy forsook not our misery, and Thou saidst, Let there be light, Repent ye, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. Repent ye, let there be light. And because our soul was troubled within us, we remembered Thee, O Lord, from the land of Jordan, and that mountain equal unto Thyself, but little for our sakes: and our darkness displeased us, we turned unto Thee and there was light. And, behold, we were sometimes darkness, but now light in the Lord. But as yet by faith and not by sight, for by hope we are saved; but hope that is seen, is not hope. As yet doth deep call unto deep, but now in the voice of Thy water-spouts. As yet doth he that saith, I could not speak unto you as unto spiritual, but as unto carnal, even he as yet, doth not think himself to have apprehended, and forgetteth those things which are behind, and reacheth forth to those which are before, and groaneth being burthened, and his soul thirsteth after the Living God, as the hart after the water-brooks, and saith, When shall I come? desiring to be clothed upon with his house which is from heaven, and calleth upon this lower deep, saying, Be not conformed to this world, but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind. And, be not children in understanding, but in malice, be ye children, that in understanding ye may be perfect; and O foolish Galatians, who hath bewitched you? But now no longer in his own voice; but in Thine who sentest Thy Spirit from above; through Him who ascended up on high, and set open the flood-gates of His gifts, that the force of His streams might make glad the city of God. Him doth this friend of the Bridegroom sigh after, having now the first-fruits of the Spirit laid up with Him, yet still groaning within himself, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of his body; to Him he sighs, a member of the Bride; for Him he is jealous, as being a friend of the Bridegroom; for Him he is jealous, not for himself; because in the voice of Thy water-spouts, not in his own voice, doth he call to that other depth, over whom being jealous he feareth, lest as the serpent beguiled Eve through his subtilty, so their minds should be corrupted from the purity that is in our Bridegroom Thy only Son. O what a light of beauty will that be, when we shall see Him as He is, and those tears be passed away, which have been my meat day and night, whilst they daily say unto me, Where is now Thy God? Behold, I too say, O my God, Where art Thou? see, where Thou art! in Thee I breathe a little, when I pour out my soul by myself in the voice of joy and praise, the sound of him that keeps holy-day. And yet again it is sad, because it relapseth, and becomes a deep, or rather perceives itself still to be a deep. Unto it speaks my faith which Thou hast kindled to enlighten my feet in the night, Why art thou sad, O my soul, and why dost thou trouble me? Hope in the Lord; His word is a lanthorn unto thy feet: hope and endure, until the night, the mother of the wicked, until the wrath of the Lord, be overpast, whereof we also were once children, who were sometimes darkness, relics whereof we bear about us in our body, dead because of sin; until the day break, and the shadows fly away. Hope thou in the Lord; in the morning I shall stand in Thy presence, and contemplate Thee: I shall for ever confess unto Thee. In the morning I shall stand in Thy presence, and shall see the health of my countenance, my God, who also shall quicken our mortal bodies, by the Spirit that dwelleth in us, because He hath in mercy been borne over our inner darksome and floating deep: from Whom we have in this pilgrimage received an earnest, that we should now be light: whilst we are saved by hope, and are the children of light, and the children of the day, not the children of the night, nor of the darkness, which yet sometimes we were. Betwixt whom and us, in this uncertainty of human knowledge, Thou only dividest; Thou, who provest our hearts, and callest the light, day, and the darkness, night. For who discerneth us, but Thou? And what have we, that we have not received of Thee? out of the same lump vessels are made unto honour, whereof others also are made unto dishonour. Or who, except Thou, our God, made for us that firmament of authority over us in Thy Divine Scripture? as it is said, For heaven shall be folded up like a scroll; and now is it stretched over us like a skin. For Thy Divine Scripture is of more eminent authority, since those mortals by whom Thou dispensest it unto us, underwent mortality. And Thou knowest, Lord, Thou knowest, how Thou with skins didst clothe men, when they by sin became mortal. Whence Thou hast like a skin stretched out the firmament of Thy book, that is, Thy harmonizing words, which by the ministry of mortal men Thou spreadest over us. For by their very death was that solid firmament of authority, in Thy discourses set forth by them, more eminently extended over all that be under it; which whilst they lived here, was not so eminently extended. Thou hadst not as yet spread abroad the heaven like a skin; Thou hadst not as yet enlarged in all directions the glory of their deaths. Let us look, O Lord, upon the heavens, the work of Thy fingers; clear from our eyes that cloud, which Thou hast spread under them. There is Thy testimony, which giveth wisdom unto the little ones: perfect, O my God, Thy praise out of the mouth of babes and sucklings. For we know no other books, which so destroy pride, which so destroy the enemy and the defender, who resisteth Thy reconciliation by defending his own sins. I know not, Lord, I know not any other such pure words, which so persuade me to confess, and make my neck pliant to Thy yoke, and invite me to serve Thee for nought. Let me understand them, good Father: grant this to me, who am placed under them: because for those placed under them, hast Thou established them. Other waters there be above this firmament, I believe immortal, and separated from earthly corruption. Let them praise Thy Name, let them praise Thee, the supercelestial people, Thine angels, who have no need to gaze up at this firmament, or by reading to know of Thy Word. For they always behold Thy face, and there read without any syllables in time, what willeth Thy eternal will; they read, they choose, they love. They are ever reading; and that never passes away which they read; for by choosing, and by loving, they read the very unchangeableness of Thy counsel. Their book is never closed, nor their scroll folded up; seeing Thou Thyself art this to them, and art eternally; because Thou hast ordained them above this firmament, which Thou hast firmly settled over the infirmity of the lower people, where they might gaze up and learn Thy mercy, announcing in time Thee Who madest times. For Thy mercy, O Lord, is in the heavens, and Thy truth reacheth unto the clouds. The clouds pass away, but the heaven abideth. The preachers of Thy word pass out of this life into another; but Thy Scripture is spread abroad over the people, even unto the end of the world. Yet heaven and earth also shall pass away, but Thy words shall not pass away. Because the scroll shall be rolled together: and the grass over which it was spread, shall with the goodliness of it pass away; but Thy Word remaineth for ever, which now appeareth unto us under the dark image of the clouds, and through the glass of the heavens, not as it is: because we also, though the well-beloved of Thy Son, yet it hath not yet appeared what we shall be. He looketh through the lattice of our flesh, and He spake us tenderly, and kindled us, and we ran after His odours. But when He shall appear, then shall we be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is. As He is, Lord, will our sight be. For altogether, as Thou art, Thou only knowest; Who art unchangeably, and knowest unchangeably, and willest unchangeably. And Thy Essence Knoweth, and Willeth unchangeably; and Thy Knowledge Is, and Willeth unchangeably; and Thy Will Is, and Knoweth unchangeably. Nor seemeth it right in Thine eyes, that as the Unchangeable Light knoweth Itself, so should it be known by the thing enlightened, and changeable. Therefore is my soul like a land where no water is, because as it cannot of itself enlighten itself, so can it not of itself satisfy itself. For so is the fountain of life with Thee, like as in Thy light we shall see light. Who gathered the embittered together into one society? For they have all one end, a temporal and earthly felicity, for attaining whereof they do all things, though they waver up and down with an innumerable variety of cares. Who, Lord, but Thou, saidst, Let the waters be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear, which thirsteth after Thee? For the sea also is Thine, and Thou hast made it, and Thy hands prepared the dry land. Nor is the bitterness of men's wills, but the gathering together of the waters, called sea; for Thou restrainest the wicked desires of men's souls, and settest them their bounds, how far they may be allowed to pass, that their waves may break one against another: and thus makest Thou it a sea, by the order of Thy dominion over all things. But the souls that thirst after Thee, and that appear before Thee (being by other bounds divided from the society of the sea), Thou waterest by a sweet spring, that the earth may bring forth her fruit, and Thou, Lord God, so commanding, our soul may bud forth works of mercy according to their kind, loving our neighbour in the relief of his bodily necessities, having seed in itself according to its likeness, when from feeling of our infirmity, we compassionate so as to relieve the needy; helping them, as we would be helped; if we were in like need; not only in things easy, as in herb yielding seed, but also in the protection of our assistance, with our best strength, like the tree yielding fruit: that is, well-doing in rescuing him that suffers wrong, from the hand of the powerful, and giving him the shelter of protection, by the mighty strength of just judgment. So, Lord, so, I beseech Thee, let there spring up, as Thou doest, as Thou givest cheerfulness and ability, let truth spring out of the earth, and righteousness look down from heaven, and let there be lights in the firmament. Let us break our bread to the hungry, and bring the houseless poor to our house. Let us clothe the naked, and despise not those of our own flesh. Which fruits having sprung out of the earth, see it is good: and let our temporary light break forth; and ourselves, from this lower fruitfulness of action, arriving at the delightfulness of contemplation, obtaining the Word of Life above, appear like lights in the world, cleaving to the firmament of Thy Scripture. For there Thou instructest us, to divide between the things intellectual, and things of sense, as betwixt the day and the night; or between souls, given either to things intellectual, or things of sense, so that now not Thou only in the secret of Thy judgment, as before the firmament was made, dividest between the light and the darkness, but Thy spiritual children also set and ranked in the same firmament (now that Thy grace is laid open throughout the world), may give light upon the earth, and divide betwixt the day and the night, and be for signs of times, that old things are passed away, and, behold, all things are become new; and that our salvation is nearer than when we believed: and that the night is far spent, and the day is at hand: and that Thou wilt crown Thy year with blessing, sending the labourers of Thy goodness into Thy harvest, in sowing whereof, others have laboured, sending also into another field, whose harvest shall be in the end. Thus grantest Thou the prayers of him that asketh, and blessest the years of the just; but Thou art the same, and in Thy years which fail not, Thou preparest a garner for our passing years. For Thou by an eternal counsel dost in their proper seasons bestow heavenly blessings upon the earth. For to one is given by the Spirit the word of wisdom, as it were the lesser light: to another faith; to another the gift with the light of perspicuous truth, as it were for the rule of the day. To another the word of knowledge by the same Spirit, as it were the lesser light: to another faith; to another the gift of healing; to another the working of miracles; to another prophecy; to another discerning of spirits; to another divers kinds of tongues. And all these as it were stars. For all these worketh the one and self-same spirit, dividing to every man his own as He will; and causing stars to appear manifestly, to profit withal. But the word of knowledge, wherein are contained all Sacraments, which are varied in their seasons as it were the moon, and those other notices of gifts, which are reckoned up in order, as it were stars, inasmuch as they come short of that brightness of wisdom, which gladdens the forementioned day, are only for the rule of the night. For they are necessary to such, as that Thy most prudent servant could not speak unto as unto spiritual, but as unto carnal; even he, who speaketh wisdom among those that are perfect. But the natural man, as it were a babe in Christ and fed on milk, until he be strengthened for solid meat and his eye be enabled to behold the Sun, let him not dwell in a night forsaken of all light, but be content with the light of the moon and the stars. So dost Thou speak to us, our All-wise God, in Thy Book, Thy firmament; that we may discern all things, in an admirable contemplation; though as yet in signs and in times, and in days, and in years. But first, wash you, be clean; put away evil from your souls, and from before mine eyes, that the dry land may appear. Learn to do good, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow, that the earth may bring forth the green herb for meat, and the tree bearing fruit; and come, let us reason together, saith the Lord, that there may be lights in the firmament of the heaven, and they may shine upon the earth. That rich man asked of the good Master, what he should do to attain eternal life. Let the good Master tell him (whom he thought no more than man; but He is good because He is God), let Him tell him, if he would enter into life, he must keep the commandments: let him put away from him the bitterness of malice and wickedness; not kill, not commit adultery, not steal, not bear false witness; that the dry land may appear, and bring forth the honouring of father and mother, and the love of our neighbour. All these (saith he) have I kept. Whence then so many thorns, if the earth be fruitful? Go, root up the spreading thickets of covetousness; sell that thou hast, and be filled with fruit, by giving to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven; and follow the Lord if thou wilt be perfect, associated with them, among whom He speaketh wisdom, Who knoweth what to distribute to the day, and to the night, that thou also mayest know it, and for thee there may be lights in the firmament of heaven; which will not be, unless thy heart be there: nor will that either be, unless there thy treasure be; as thou hast heard of the good Master. But that barren earth was grieved; and the thorns choked the word. But you, chosen generation, you weak things of the world, who have forsaken all, that ye may follow the Lord; go after Him, and confound the mighty; go after Him, ye beautiful feet, and shine ye in the firmament, that the heavens may declare His glory, dividing between the light of the perfect, though not as the angels, and the darkness of the little ones, though not despised. Shine over the earth; and let the day, lightened by the sun, utter unto day, speech of wisdom; and night, shining with the moon, show unto night, the word of knowledge. The moon and stars shine for the night; yet doth not the night obscure them, seeing they give it light in its degree. For behold God saying, as it were, Let there be lights in the firmament of heaven; there came suddenly a sound from heaven, as it had been the rushing of a mighty wind, and there appeared cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them. And there were made lights in the firmament of heaven, having the word of life. Run ye to and fro every where, ye holy fires, ye beauteous fires; for ye are the light of the world, nor are ye put under a bushel; He whom you cleave unto, is exalted, and hath exalted you. Run ye to and fro, and be known unto all nations. Let the sea also conceive and bring forth your works; and let the waters bring forth the moving creature that hath life. For ye, separating the precious from the vile, are made the mouth of God, by whom He saith, Let the waters bring forth, not the living creature which the earth brings forth, but the moving creature having life, and the fowls that fly above the earth. For Thy Sacraments, O God, by the ministry of Thy holy ones, have moved amid the waves of temptations of the world, to hallow the Gentiles in Thy Name, in Thy Baptism. And amid these things, many great wonders were wrought, as it were great whales: and the voices of Thy messengers flying above the earth, in the open firmament of Thy Book; that being set over them, as their authority under which they were to fly, whithersoever they went. For there is no speech nor language, where their voice is not heard: seeing their sound is gone through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world, because Thou, Lord, multipliedst them by blessing. Speak I untruly, or do I mingle and confound, and not distinguish between the lucid knowledge of these things in the firmament of heaven, and the material works in the wavy sea, and under the firmament of heaven? For of those things whereof the knowledge is substantial and defined, without any increase by generation, as it were lights of wisdom and knowledge, yet even of them, the material operations are many and divers; and one thing growing out of another, they are multiplied by Thy blessing, O God, who hast refreshed the fastidiousness of mortal senses; that so one thing in the understanding of our mind, may, by the motions of the body, be many ways set out, and expressed. These Sacraments have the waters brought forth; but in Thy word. The necessities of the people estranged from the eternity of Thy truth, have brought them forth, but in Thy Gospel; because the waters themselves cast them forth, the diseased bitterness whereof was the cause, why they were sent forth in Thy Word. Now are all things fair that Thou hast made; but behold, Thyself art unutterably fairer, that madest all; from whom had not Adam fallen, the brackishness of the sea had never flowed out of him, that is, the human race so profoundly curious, and tempestuously swelling, and restlessly tumbling up and down; and then had there been no need of Thy dispensers to work in many waters, after a corporeal and sensible manner, mysterious doings and sayings. For such those moving and flying creatures now seem to me to mean, whereby people being initiated and consecrated by corporeal Sacraments, should not further profit, unless their soul had a spiritual life, and unless after the word of admission, it looked forwards to perfection. And hereby, in Thy Word, not the deepness of the sea, but the earth separated from the bitterness of the waters, brings forth, not the moving creature that hath life, but the living soul. For now hath it no more need of baptism, as the heathen have, and as itself had, when it was covered with the waters; (for no other entrance is there into the kingdom of heaven, since Thou hast appointed that this should be the entrance): nor does it seek after wonderfulness of miracles to work belief; for it is not such, that unless it sees signs and wonders, it will not believe, now that the faithful earth is separated from the waters that were bitter with infidelity; and tongues are for a sign, not to them that believe, but to them that believe not. Neither then does that earth which Thou hast founded upon the waters, need that flying kind, which at Thy word the waters brought forth. Send Thou Thy word into it by Thy messengers: for we speak of their working, yet it is Thou that workest in them that they may work out a living soul in it. The earth brings it forth, because the earth is the cause that they work this in the soul; as the sea was the cause that they wrought upon the moving creatures that have life, and the fowls that fly under the firmament of heaven, of whom the earth hath no need; although it feeds upon that fish which was taken out of the deep, upon that table which Thou hast prepared in the presence of them that believe. For therefore was He taken out of the deep, that He might feed the dry land; and the fowl, though bred in the sea, is yet multiplied upon the earth. For of the first preachings of the Evangelists, man's infidelity was the cause; yet are the faithful also exhorted and blessed by them manifoldly, from day to day. But the living soul takes his beginning from the earth: for it profits only those already among the Faithful, to contain themselves from the love of this world, that so their soul may live unto Thee, which was dead while it lived in pleasures; in death-bringing pleasures, Lord, for Thou, Lord, art the life-giving delight of the pure heart. Now then let Thy ministers work upon the earth,--not as upon the waters of infidelity, by preaching and speaking by miracles, and Sacraments, and mystic words; wherein ignorance, the mother of admiration, might be intent upon them, out of a reverence towards those secret signs. For such is the entrance unto the Faith for the sons of Adam forgetful of Thee, while they hide themselves from Thy face, and become a darksome deep. But--let Thy ministers work now as on the dry land, separated from the whirlpools of the great deep: and let them be a pattern unto the Faithful, by living before them, and stirring them up to imitation. For thus do men hear, so as not to hear only, but to do also. Seek the Lord, and your soul shall live, that the earth may bring forth the living soul. Be not conformed to the world. Contain yourselves from it: the soul lives by avoiding what it dies by affecting. Contain yourselves from the ungoverned wildness of pride, the sluggish voluptuousness of luxury, and the false name of knowledge: that so the wild beasts may be tamed, the cattle broken to the yoke, the serpents, harmless. For these be the motions of our mind under an allegory; that is to say, the haughtiness of pride, the delight of lust, and the poison of curiosity, are the motions of a dead soul; for the soul dies not so as to lose all motion; because it dies by forsaking the fountain of life, and so is taken up by this transitory world, and is conformed unto it. But Thy word, O God, is the fountain of life eternal; and passeth not away: wherefore this departure of the soul is restrained by Thy word, when it is said unto us, Be not conformed unto this world; that so the earth may in the fountain of life bring forth a living soul; that is, a soul made continent in Thy Word, by Thy Evangelists, by following the followers of Thy Christ. For this is after his kind; because a man is wont to imitate his friend. Be ye (saith he) as I am, for I also am as you are. Thus in this living soul shall there be good beasts, in meekness of action (for Thou hast commanded, Go on with thy business in meekness, so shalt thou be beloved by all men); and good cattle, which neither if they eat, shall they over-abound, nor, if they eat not, have any lack; and good serpents, not dangerous, to do hurt, but wise to take heed; and only making so much search into this temporal nature, as may suffice that eternity be clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made. For these creatures are obedient unto reason, when being restrained from deadly prevailing upon us, they live, and are good. For behold, O Lord, our God, our Creator, when our affections have been restrained from the love of the world, by which we died through evil-living; and begun to be a living soul, through good living; and Thy word which Thou spokest by Thy apostle, is made good in us, Be not conformed to this world: there follows that also, which Thou presently subjoinedst, saying, But be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind; not now after your kind, as though following your neighbour who went before you, nor as living after the example of some better man (for Thou saidst not, "Let man be made after his kind," but, Let us make man after our own image and similitude), that we might prove what Thy will is. For to this purpose said that dispenser of Thine (who begat children by the Gospel), that he might not for ever have them babes, whom he must be fain to feed with milk, and cherish as a nurse; be ye transformed (saith he) by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God. Wherefore Thou sayest not, "Let man be made," but Let us make man. Nor saidst Thou, "according to his kind"; but, after our image and likeness. For man being renewed in his mind, and beholding and understanding Thy truth, needs not man as his director, so as to follow after his kind; but by Thy direction proveth what is that good, that acceptable, and perfect will of Thine: yea, Thou teachest him, now made capable, to discern the Trinity of the Unity, and the Unity of the Trinity. Wherefore to that said in the plural, Let us make man, is yet subjoined in the singular, And God made man: and to that said in the plural, After our likeness, is subjoined in the singular, After the image of God. Thus is man renewed in the knowledge of God, after the image of Him that created him: and being made spiritual, he judgeth all things (all things which are to be judged), yet himself is judged of no man. But that he judgeth all things, this answers to his having dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowls of the air, and over all cattle and wild beasts, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. For this he doth by the understanding of his mind, whereby he perceiveth the things of the Spirit of God; whereas otherwise, man being placed in honour, had no understanding, and is compared unto the brute beasts, and is become like unto them. In Thy Church therefore, O our God, according to Thy grace which Thou hast bestowed upon it (for we are Thy workmanship created unto good works), not those only who are spiritually set over, but they also who spiritually are subject to those that are set over them,--for in this way didst Thou make man male and female, in Thy grace spiritual, where, according to the sex of body, there is neither male nor female, because neither Jew nor Grecian, neither bond nor free.--Spiritual persons (whether such as are set over, or such as obey); do judge spiritually; not of that spiritual knowledge which shines in the firmament (for they ought not to judge as to so supreme authority), nor may they judge of Thy Book itself, even though something there shineth not clearly; for we submit our understanding unto it, and hold for certain, that even what is closed to our sight, is yet rightly and truly spoken. For so man, though now spiritual and renewed in the knowledge of God after His image that created him, ought to be a doer of the law, not a judge. Neither doth he judge of that distinction of spiritual and carnal men, who are known unto Thine eyes, O our God, and have not as yet discovered themselves unto us by works, that by their fruits we might know them: but Thou, Lord, dost even now know them, and hast divided and called them in secret, or ever the firmament was made. Nor doth he, though spiritual, judge the unquiet people of this world; for what hath he to do, to judge them that are without, knowing not which of them shall hereafter come into the sweetness of Thy grace; and which continue in the perpetual bitterness of ungodliness? Man therefore, whom Thou hast made after Thine own image, received not dominion over the lights of heaven, nor over that hidden heaven itself, nor over the day and the night, which Thou calledst before the foundation of the heaven, nor over the gathering together of the waters, which is the sea; but He received dominion over the fishes of the sea, and the fowls of the air, and over all cattle, and over all the earth, and over all creeping things which creep upon the earth. For He judgeth and approveth what He findeth right, and He disalloweth what He findeth amiss, whether in the celebration of those Sacraments by which such are initiated, as Thy mercy searches out in many waters: or in that, in which that Fish is set forth, which, taken out of the deep, the devout earth feedeth upon: or in the expressions and signs of words, subject to the authority of Thy Book,--such signs, as proceed out of the mouth, and sound forth, flying as it were under the firmament, by interpreting, expounding, discoursing disputing, consecrating, or praying unto Thee, so that the people may answer, Amen. The vocal pronouncing of all which words, is occasioned by the deep of this world, and the blindness of the flesh, which cannot see thoughts; So that there is need to speak aloud into the ears; so that, although flying fowls be multiplied upon the earth, yet they derive their beginning from the waters. The spiritual man judgeth also by allowing of what is right, and disallowing what he finds amiss, in the works and lives of the faithful; their alms, as it were the earth bringing forth fruit, and of the living soul, living by the taming of the affections, in chastity, in fasting, in holy meditations; and of those things, which are perceived by the senses of the body. Upon all these is he now said to judge, wherein he hath also power of correction. But what is this, and what kind of mystery? Behold, Thou blessest mankind, O Lord, that they may increase and multiply, and replenish the earth; dost Thou not thereby give us a hint to understand something? why didst Thou not as well bless the light, which Thou calledst day; nor the firmament of heaven, nor the lights, nor the stars, nor the earth, nor the sea? I might say that Thou, O God, who created created us after Thine Image, I might say, that it had been Thy good pleasure to bestow this blessing peculiarly upon man; hadst Thou not in like manner blessed the fishes and the whales, that they should increase and multiply, and replenish the waters of the sea, and that the fowls should be multiplied upon the earth. I might say likewise, that this blessing pertained properly unto such creatures, as are bred of their own kind, had I found it given to the fruit-trees, and plants, and beasts of the earth. But now neither unto the herbs, nor the trees, nor the beasts, nor serpents is it said, Increase and multiply; notwithstanding all these as well as the fishes, fowls, or men, do by generation increase and continue their kind. What then shall I say, O Truth my Light? "that it was idly said, and without meaning?" Not so, O Father of piety, far be it from a minister of Thy word to say so. And if I understand not what Thou meanest by that phrase, let my betters, that is, those of more understanding than myself, make better use of it, according as Thou, my God, hast given to each man to understand. But let my confession also be pleasing in Thine eyes, wherein I confess unto Thee, that I believe, O Lord, that Thou spokest not so in vain; nor will I suppress, what this lesson suggests to me. For it is true, nor do I see what should hinder me from thus understanding the figurative sayings of Thy Bible. For I know a thing to be manifoldly signified by corporeal expressions, which is understood one way by the mind; and that understood many ways in the mind, which is signified one way by corporeal expression. Behold, the single love of God and our neighbour, by what manifold sacraments, and innumerable languages, and in each several language, in how innumerable modes of speaking, it is corporeally expressed. Thus do the offspring of the waters increase and multiply. Observe again, whosoever readest this; behold, what Scripture delivers, and the voice pronounces one only way, In the Beginning God created heaven and earth; is it not understood manifoldly, not through any deceit of error, but by various kinds of true senses? Thus do man's offspring increase and multiply. If therefore we conceive of the natures of the things themselves, not allegorically, but properly, then does the phrase increase and multiply, agree unto all things, that come of seed. But if we treat of the words as figuratively spoken (which I rather suppose to be the purpose of the Scripture, which doth not, surely, superfluously ascribe this benediction to the offspring of aquatic animals and man only); then do we find "multitude" to belong to creatures spiritual as well as corporeal, as in heaven and earth, and to righteous and unrighteous, as in light and darkness; and to holy authors who have been the ministers of the Law unto us, as in the firmament which is settled betwixt the waters and the waters; and to the society of people yet in the bitterness of infidelity, as in the sea; and to the zeal of holy souls, as in the dry land; and to works of mercy belonging to this present life, as in the herbs bearing seed, and in trees bearing fruit; and to spiritual gifts set forth for edification, as in the lights of heaven; and to affections formed unto temperance, as in the living soul. In all these instances we meet with multitudes, abundance, and increase; but what shall in such wise increase and multiply that one thing may be expressed many ways, and one expression understood many ways; we find not, except in signs corporeally expressed, and in things mentally conceived. By signs corporeally pronounced we understand the generations of the waters, necessarily occasioned by the depth of the flesh; by things mentally conceived, human generations, on account of the fruitfulness of reason. And for this end do we believe Thee, Lord, to have said to these kinds, Increase and multiply. For in this blessing, I conceive Thee to have granted us a power and a faculty, both to express several ways what we understand but one; and to understand several ways, what we read to be obscurely delivered but in one. Thus are the waters of the sea replenished, which are not moved but by several significations: thus with human increase is the earth also replenished, whose dryness appeareth in its longing, and reason ruleth over it. I would also say, O Lord my God, what the following Scripture minds me of; yea, I will say, and not fear. For I will say the truth, Thyself inspiring me with what Thou willedst me to deliver out of those words. But by no other inspiration than Thine, do I believe myself to speak truth, seeing Thou art the Truth, and every man a liar. He therefore that speaketh a lie, speaketh of his own; that therefore I may speak truth, I will speak of Thine. Behold, Thou hast given unto us for food every herb bearing seed which is upon all the earth; and every tree, in which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed. And not to us alone, but also to all the fowls of the air, and to the beasts of the earth, and to all creeping things; but unto the fishes and to the great whales, hast Thou not given them. Now we said that by these fruits of the earth were signified, and figured in an allegory, the works of mercy which are provided for the necessities of this life out of the fruitful earth. Such an earth was the devout Onesiphorus, unto whose house Thou gavest mercy, because he often refreshed Thy Paul, and was not ashamed of his chain. Thus did also the brethren, and such fruit did they bear, who out of Macedonia supplied what was lacking to him. But how grieved he for some trees, which did not afford him the fruit due unto him, where he saith, At my first answer no man stood by me, but all men forsook me. I pray God that it may not be laid to their charge. For these fruits are due to such as minister the spiritual doctrine unto us out of their understanding of the divine mysteries; and they are due to them, as men; yea and due to them also, as the living soul, which giveth itself as an example, in all continency; and due unto them also, as flying creatures, for their blessings which are multiplied upon the earth, because their sound went out into all lands. But they are fed by these fruits, that are delighted with them; nor are they delighted with them, whose God is their belly. For neither in them that yield them, are the things yielded the fruit, but with what mind they yield them. He therefore that served God, and not his own belly, I plainly see why he rejoiced; I see it, and I rejoice with him. For he had received from the Philippians, what they had sent by Epaphroditus unto him: and yet I perceive why he rejoiced. For whereat he rejoiced upon that he fed; for, speaking in truth, I rejoiced (saith he) greatly in the Lord, that now at the last your care of me hath flourished again, wherein ye were also careful, but it had become wearisome unto you. These Philippians then had now dried up, with a long weariness, and withered as it were as to bearing this fruit of a good work; and he rejoiceth for them, that they flourished again, not for himself, that they supplied his wants. Therefore subjoins he, not that I speak in respect of want, for I have learned in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content. I know both how to be abased, and I know how to abound; every where and in all things I am instructed both to be full, and to be hungry; both to abound, and to suffer need. I can do all things through Him which strengtheneth me. Whereat then rejoicest thou, O great Paul? whereat rejoicest thou? whereon feedest thou, O man, renewed in the knowledge of God, after the image of Him that created thee, thou living soul, of so much continency, thou tongue like flying fowls, speaking mysteries? (for to such creatures, is this food due;) what is it that feeds thee? joy. Hear we what follows: notwithstanding, ye have well done, that ye did communicate with my affliction. Hereat he rejoiceth, hereon feedeth; because they had well done, not because his strait was eased, who saith unto Thee, Thou hast enlarged me when I was in distress; for that he knew to abound, and to suffer want, in Thee Who strengthenest him. For ye Philippians also know (saith he), that in the beginning of the Gospel, when I departed from Macedonia, no Church communicated with me as concerning giving and receiving, but ye only. For even in Thessalonica ye sent once and again unto my necessity. Unto these good works, he now rejoiceth that they are returned; and is gladdened that they flourished again, as when a fruitful field resumes its green. Was it for his own necessities, because he said, Ye sent unto my necessity? Rejoiceth he for that? Verily not for that. But how know we this? Because himself says immediately, not because I desire a gift, but I desire fruit. I have learned of Thee, my God, to distinguish betwixt a gift, and fruit. A gift, is the thing itself which he gives, that imparts these necessaries unto us; as money, meat, drink, clothing, shelter, help: but the fruit, is the good and right will of the giver. For the Good Master said not only, He that receiveth a prophet, but added, in the name of a prophet: nor did He only say, He that receiveth a righteous man, but added, in the name of a righteous man. So verily shall the one receive the reward of a prophet, the other, the reward of a righteous man: nor saith He only, He that shall give to drink a cup of cold water to one of my little ones; but added, in the name of a disciple: and so concludeth, Verily I say unto you, he shall not lose his reward. The gift is, to receive a prophet, to receive a righteous man, to give a cup of cold water to a disciple: but the fruit, to do this in the name of a prophet, in the name of a righteous man, in the name of a disciple. With fruit was Elijah fed by the widow that knew she fed a man of God, and therefore fed him: but by the raven was he fed with a gift. Nor was the inner man of Elijah so fed, but the outer only; which might also for want of that food have perished. I will then speak what is true in Thy sight, O Lord, that when carnal men and infidels (for the gaining and initiating whom, the initiatory Sacraments and the mighty workings of miracles are necessary, which we suppose to be signified by the name of fishes and whales) undertake the bodily refreshment, or otherwise succour Thy servant with something useful for this present life; whereas they be ignorant, why this is to be done, and to what end; neither do they feed these, nor are these fed by them; because neither do the one do it out of an holy and right intent; nor do the other rejoice at their gifts, whose fruit they as yet behold not. For upon that is the mind fed, of which it is glad. And therefore do not the fishes and whales feed upon such meats, as the earth brings not forth until after it was separated and divided from the bitterness of the waves of the sea. And Thou, O God, sawest every thing that Thou hadst made, and, behold, it was very good. Yea we also see the same, and behold, all things are very good. Of the several kinds of Thy works, when Thou hadst said "let them be," and they were, Thou sawest each that it was good. Seven times have I counted it to be written, that Thou sawest that that which Thou madest was good: and this is the eighth, that Thou sawest every thing that Thou hadst made, and, behold, it was not only good, but also very good, as being now altogether. For severally, they were only good; but altogether, both good, and very good. All beautiful bodies express the same; by reason that a body consisting of members all beautiful, is far more beautiful than the same members by themselves are, by whose well-ordered blending the whole is perfected; notwithstanding that the members severally be also beautiful. And I looked narrowly to find, whether seven, or eight times Thou sawest that Thy works were good, when they pleased Thee; but in Thy seeing I found no times, whereby I might understand that Thou sawest so often, what Thou madest. And I said, "Lord, is not this Thy Scripture true, since Thou art true, and being Truth, hast set it forth? why then dost Thou say unto me, 'that in Thy seeing there be no times'; whereas this Thy Scripture tells me, that what Thou madest each day, Thou sawest that it was good: and when I counted them, I found how often." Unto this Thou answerest me, for Thou art my God, and with a strong voice tellest Thy servant in his inner ear, breaking through my deafness and crying, "O man, that which My Scripture saith, I say: and yet doth that speak in time; but time has no relation to My Word; because My Word exists in equal eternity with Myself. So the things which ye see through My Spirit, I see; like as what ye speak by My Spirit, I speak. And so when ye see those things in time, I see them not in time; as when ye speak in time, I speak them not in time." And I heard, O Lord my God, and drank up a drop of sweetness out of Thy truth, and understood, that certain men there be who mislike Thy works; and say, that many of them Thou madest, compelled by necessity; such as the fabric of the heavens, and harmony of the stars; and that Thou madest them not of what was Thine, but that they were otherwhere and from other sources created, for Thee to bring together and compact and combine, when out of Thy conquered enemies Thou raisedst up the walls of the universe; that they, bound down by the structure, might not again be able to rebel against Thee. For other things, they say Thou neither madest them, nor even compactedst them, such as all flesh and all very minute creatures, and whatsoever hath its root in the earth; but that a mind at enmity with Thee, and another nature not created by Thee, and contrary unto Thee, did, in these lower stages of the world, beget and frame these things. Frenzied are they who say thus, because they see not Thy works by Thy Spirit, nor recognise Thee in them. But they who by Thy Spirit see these things, Thou seest in them. Therefore when they see that these things are good, Thou seest that they are good; and whatsoever things for Thy sake please, Thou pleasest in them, and what through Thy Spirit please us, they please Thee in us. For what man knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of a man, which is in him? even so the things of God knoweth no one, but the Spirit of God. Now we (saith he) have received, not the spirit of this world, but the Spirit which is of God, that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God. And I am admonished, "Truly the things of God knoweth no one, but the Spirit of God: how then do we also know, what things are given us of God?" Answer is made me; "because the things which we know by His Spirit, even these no one knoweth, but the Spirit of God. For as it is rightly said unto those that were to speak by the Spirit of God, it is not ye that speak: so is it rightly said to them that know through the Spirit of God, 'It is not ye that know.' And no less then is it rightly said to those that see through the Spirit of God, 'It is not ye that see'; so whatsoever through the Spirit of God they see to be good, it is not they, but God that sees that it is good." It is one thing then for a man to think that to be ill which is good, as the forenamed do; another, that that which is good, a man should see that it is good (as Thy creatures be pleasing unto many, because they be good, whom yet Thou pleasest not in them, when they prefer to enjoy them, to Thee); and another, that when a man sees a thing that it is good, God should in him see that it is good, so, namely, that He should be loved in that which He made, Who cannot be loved, but by the Holy Ghost which He hath given. Because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost, Which is given unto us: by Whom we see that whatsoever in any degree is, is good. For from Him it is, who Himself Is not in degree, but what He Is, Is. Thanks to Thee, O Lord. We behold the heaven and earth, whether the corporeal part, superior and inferior, or the spiritual and corporeal creature; and in the adorning of these parts, whereof the universal pile of the world, or rather the universal creation, doth consist, we see light made, and divided from the darkness. We see the firmament of heaven, whether that primary body of the world, between the spiritual upper waters and the inferior corporeal waters, or (since this also is called heaven) this space of air through which wander the fowls of heaven, betwixt those waters which are in vapours borne above them, and in clear nights distill down in dew; and those heavier waters which flow along the earth. We behold a face of waters gathered together in the fields of the sea; and the dry land both void, and formed so as to be visible and harmonized, yea and the matter of herbs and trees. We behold the lights shining from above, the sun to suffice for the day, the moon and the stars to cheer the night; and that by all these, times should be marked and signified. We behold on all sides a moist element, replenished with fishes, beasts, and birds; because the grossness of the air, which bears up the flights of birds, thickeneth itself by the exhalation of the waters. We behold the face of the earth decked out with earthly creatures, and man, created after Thy image and likeness, even through that Thy very image and likeness (that is the power of reason and understanding), set over all irrational creatures. And as in his soul there is one power which has dominion by directing, another made subject, that it might obey; so was there for the man, corporeally also, made a woman, who in the mind of her reasonable understanding should have a parity of nature, but in the sex of her body, should be in like manner subject to the sex of her husband, as the appetite of doing is fain to conceive the skill of right-doing from the reason of the mind. These things we behold, and they are severally good, and altogether very good. Let Thy works praise Thee, that we may love Thee; and let us love Thee, that Thy works may praise Thee, which from time have beginning and ending, rising and setting, growth and decay, form and privation. They have then their succession of morning and evening, part secretly, part apparently; for they were made of nothing, by Thee, not of Thee; not of any matter not Thine, or that was before, but of matter concreated (that is, at the same time created by Thee), because to its state without form, Thou without any interval of time didst give form. For seeing the matter of heaven and earth is one thing, and the form another, Thou madest the matter of merely nothing, but the form of the world out of the matter without form: yet both together, so that the form should follow the matter, without any interval of delay. We have also examined what Thou willedst to be shadowed forth, whether by the creation, or the relation of things in such an order. And we have seen, that things singly are good, and together very good, in Thy Word, in Thy Only-Begotten, both heaven and earth, the Head and the body of the Church, in Thy predestination before all times, without morning and evening. But when Thou begannest to execute in time the things predestinated, to the end Thou mightest reveal hidden things, and rectify our disorders; for our sins hung over us, and we had sunk into the dark deep; and Thy good Spirit was borne over us, to help us in due season; and Thou didst justify the ungodly, and dividest them from the wicked; and Thou madest the firmament of authority of Thy Book between those placed above, who were to be docile unto Thee, and those under, who were to be subject to them: and Thou gatheredst together the society of unbelievers into one conspiracy, that the zeal of the faithful might appear, and they might bring forth works of mercy, even distributing to the poor their earthly riches, to obtain heavenly. And after this didst Thou kindle certain lights in the firmament, Thy Holy ones, having the word of life; and shining with an eminent authority set on high through spiritual gifts; after that again, for the initiation of the unbelieving Gentiles, didst Thou out of corporeal matter produce the Sacraments, and visible miracles, and forms of words according to the firmament of Thy Book, by which the faithful should be blessed and multiplied. Next didst Thou form the living soul of the faithful, through affections well ordered by the vigour of continency: and after that, the mind subjected to Thee alone and needing to imitate no human authority, hast Thou renewed after Thy image and likeness; and didst subject its rational actions to the excellency of the understanding, as the woman to the man; and to all Offices of Thy Ministry, necessary for the perfecting of the faithful in this life, Thou willedst, that for their temporal uses, good things, fruitful to themselves in time to come, be given by the same faithful. All these we see, and they are very good, because Thou seest them in us, Who hast given unto us Thy Spirit, by which we might see them, and in them love Thee. O Lord God, give peace unto us: (for Thou hast given us all things;) the peace of rest, the peace of the Sabbath, which hath no evening. For all this most goodly array of things very good, having finished their courses, is to pass away, for in them there was morning and evening. But the seventh day hath no evening, nor hath it setting; because Thou hast sanctified it to an everlasting continuance; that that which Thou didst after Thy works which were very good, resting the seventh day, although Thou madest them in unbroken rest, that may the voice of Thy Book announce beforehand unto us, that we also after our works (therefore very good, because Thou hast given them us), shall rest in Thee also in the Sabbath of eternal life. For then shalt Thou rest in us, as now Thou workest in us; and so shall that be Thy rest through us, as these are Thy works through us. But Thou, Lord, ever workest, and art ever at rest. Nor dost Thou see in time, nor art moved in time, nor restest in a time; and yet Thou makest things seen in time, yea the times themselves, and the rest which results from time. We therefore see these things which Thou madest, because they are: but they are, because Thou seest them. And we see without, that they are, and within, that they are good, but Thou sawest them there, when made, where Thou sawest them, yet to be made. And we were at a later time moved to do well, after our hearts had conceived of Thy Spirit; but in the former time we were moved to do evil, forsaking Thee; but Thou, the One, the Good God, didst never cease doing good. And we also have some good works, of Thy gift, but not eternal; after them we trust to rest in Thy great hallowing. But Thou, being the Good which needeth no good, art ever at rest, because Thy rest is Thou Thyself. And what man can teach man to understand this? or what Angel, an Angel? or what Angel, a man? Let it be asked of Thee, sought in Thee, knocked for at Thee; so, so shall it be received, so shall it be found, so shall it be opened. Amen. GRATIAS TIBI DOMINE 
33649	----	Thoughts and Counsels of the Saints for Every Day of the Year Being a Collection of Quotations From ST. ALPHONSUS ST. ANSELM ST. ANTONINUS ST. BENEDICT ST. BERNARD ST. CATHERINE OF SIENA ST. GREGORY THE GREAT ST. IGNATIUS ST. MECHTILDIS ST. TERESA ST. THOMAS AQUINAS ST. VINCENT DE PAUL ST. VINCENT FERRER BL. ALBERT THE GREAT BL. HENRY SUSO BL. JORDAN OF SAXONY VEN. BARTHOLOMEW OF MARTYRS VEN. JOHN TAULER VEN. JULIENNE MOREL VEN. LOUIS DE BLOIS VEN. LOUIS DE GRANADA Collected by Rev. Bonaventure Hammer, O.F.M. JANUARY FEBRUARY MARCH APRIL MAY JUNE JULY AUGUST SEPTEMBER OCTOBER NOVEMBER DECEMBER Thoughts and Counsels of the Saints for Every Day of the Year "Every day will I bless Thee, and I will praise Thy name forever" (_Ps._ cxliv. 2). January 1 THERE are two guarantees of a wise rule of conduct: the thought before action, and self-command afterward.--ST. IGNATIUS. 2 When we receive with an entire and perfect resignation the afflictions which God sends us they become for us favors and benefits; because conformity to the will of God is a gain far superior to all temporal advantages.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 3 All perfection consists in the love of God; and the perfection of divine love consists in the union of our will with that of God.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 4 Leave to every one the care of what belongs to him, and disturb not thyself with what is said or done in the world.--ST. THOMAS AQUINAS. 5 Place before your eyes as models for imitation, not the weak and cowardly, but the fervent and courageous.--ST. IGNATIUS. 6 Prayer is a pasturage, a field, wherein all the virtues find their nourishment, growth, and strength.--ST. CATHERINE OF SIENA. 7 A single act of resignation to the divine will in what it ordains contrary to our desires, is of more value than a hundred thousand successes conformable to our will and taste.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 8 The shortest, yea, the only way to reach sanctity, is to conceive a horror for all that the world loves and values.--ST. IGNATIUS. 9 As long as we are in this mortal life, nothing is more necessary for us than humility.--ST. TERESA. 10 Learning without humility has always been pernicious to the Church; and as pride precipitated the rebellious angels from heaven, it frequently causes the loss of learned men.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 11 Why remain sad and idle? Why exhaust thyself in the anguish of melancholy? Have courage, do violence to thyself; meditate on the passion of Jesus Christ, and thou shalt overcome thy sorrow.--BL. HENRY SUSO. 12 Here is the difference between the joys of the world and the cross of Jesus Christ: after having tasted the first, one is disgusted with them; and on the contrary, the more one partakes of the cross, the greater the thirst for it.--ST. IGNATIUS. 13 When the sky is free from clouds we can see more clearly the brightness of the sun. In like manner, when the soul is free from sin and the gloom of passion, it participates in the divine light.--VEN. LOUIS DE GRANADA. 14 Our works are of no value if they be not united to the merits of Jesus Christ.--ST. TERESA. 15 If we are very determined to mortify ourselves and not to be too much occupied with our corporal health, we will soon, by the grace of God, become masters of our bodies.--ST. TERESA. 16 In every creature, however small it be, we may see a striking image of divine wisdom, power, and goodness.--VEN. BARTHOLOMEW OF MARTYRS. 17 Time is but a period. It passes like the lightning flash. Suffering passes with time; suffering, then, is very short.--BL. HENRY SUSO. 18 In order to bear our afflictions with patience, it is very useful to read the lives and legends of the saints who endured great torments for Jesus Christ.--ST. TERESA. 19 Open thine ears to the voices of nature, and thou shalt hear them in concert inviting thee to the love of God.--VEN. LOUIS OF GRANADA. 20 On the feasts of the saints consider their virtues, and beseech God to deign to adorn you with them.--ST. TERESA. 21 When faith grows weak, all virtues are weakened. When faith is lost, all virtues are lost--ST. ALPHONSUS. 22 A precious crown is reserved in heaven for those who perform all their actions with all the diligence of which they are capable; for it is not sufficient to do our part well; it must be done more than well.--ST. IGNATIUS. 23 Nothing created has ever been able to fill the heart of man. God alone can fill it infinitely.--ST. THOMAS AQUINAS. 24 We should only make use of life to grow in the love of God.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 25 In vain men try. They can never find in creatures sincere affection, perfect joy, or true peace.--BL. HENRY SUSO. 26 God is supreme strength, fortifying those who place their trust and confidence in Him.--ST. CATHERINE OF SIENA. 27 God gives each one of us sufficient grace ever to know His holy will, and to do it fully.--ST. IGNATIUS. 28 Shun useless conversation. We lose by it both time and the spirit of devotion.--ST. THOMAS AQUINAS. 29 The upright intention is the soul of our actions. It gives them life and makes them good.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 30 The truth of faith alone, deeply graven in the soul, is sufficient to encourage us to very perfect works; for it strengthens man and increases his charity.--ST. TERESA. 31 It is folly not to think of death. It is greater folly to think of it, and not prepare for it.--ST. ALPHONSUS. February 1 THE most perfect and meritorious intention is that by which, in all our actions, we have in view only the good pleasure of God and the accomplishment of His holy will.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 2 Mary's sorrow was less when she saw her only Son crucified, than it is now at the sight of men offending Him by sin.--ST. IGNATIUS. 3 There is nothing more unreasonable than to estimate our worth by the opinion of others. Today they laud us to the skies, to-morrow they will cover us with ignominy.--VEN. LOUIS OF GRANADA. 4 Act as if every day were the last of your life, and each action the last you perform.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 5 Perfection consists in renouncing ourselves, in carrying our cross, and in following Jesus Christ. Now, he who renounces himself most perfectly carries his cross the best and follows nearest to Jesus Christ is he who never does his own will, but always that of God.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 6 That which would have easily been remedied at first, becomes incurable by time and habit--ST. IGNATIUS. 7 Among the gifts of grace which the soul receives in holy communion there is one that must be numbered among the highest. It is, that holy communion does not permit the soul to remain long in sin, nor to obstinately persevere in it.--ST. IGNATIUS. 8 Be assured that one great means to find favor when we appear before God is to have pardoned the injuries we have received here below.--VEN. LOUIS OF GRANADA. 9 Woe to him who neglects to recommend himself to Mary, and thus closes the channel of grace!--ST. ALPHONSUS. 10 It is folly to leave your goods where you can never return, and to send nothing to that place where you must remain for ever.--VEN. LOUIS OF GRANADA. 11 Discretion is necessary in spiritual life. It is its part to restrain the exercises in the way of perfection, so as to keep us between the two extremes.--ST. IGNATIUS. 12 By denying our self-love and our inclinations in little things, we gradually acquire mortification and victory over ourselves.--ST. TERESA. 13 Should we fall a thousand times in a day, a thousand times we must rise again, always animated with unbounded confidence in the infinite goodness of God.--VEN. LOUIS OF GRANADA. 14 God's way in dealing with those whom He intends to admit soonest after this life into the possession of His everlasting glory, is to purify them in this world by the greatest afflictions and trials.--ST. IGNATIUS. 15 After the flower comes the fruit: we receive, as the reward of our fatigues, an increase of grace in this world, and in the next the eternal vision of God.--BL. HENRY SUSO. 16 God refuses no one the gift of prayer. By it we obtain the help that we need to overcome disorderly desires and temptations of all kinds.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 17 To establish ourselves in a virtue it is necessary to form good and practical resolutions to perform certain and determined acts of that virtue, and we must, moreover, be faithful in executing them.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 18 Love ought to consist of deeds more than of words.--ST. IGNATIUS. 19 There are many things which seem to us misfortunes and which we call such; but if we understood the designs of God we would call them graces.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 20 Let us abandon everything to the merciful providence of God.--BL. ALBERT THE GREAT. 21 Jesus Christ, our great Model, suffered much for us; let us bear our afflictions cheerfully, seeing that through them we have the happiness of resembling Him.--BL. HENRY SUSO. 22 Remember that virtue is a very high and rugged mountain, difficult to ascend, and requiring much fatigue and exertion before we arrive at the summit to rest.--BL. HENRY SUSO. 23 Labor to conquer yourself. This victory will assure you a brighter crown in heaven than they gain whose disposition is more amiable.--ST. IGNATIUS. 24 We should not examine articles of faith with a curious and subtle spirit. It is sufficient for us to know that the Church proposes them. We can never be deceived in believing them.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 25 We should guard against jealousy, and even the slightest sentiment thereof. This vice is absolutely opposed to a pure and sincere zeal for the glory of God, and is a certain proof of secret and subtle pride.-- ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 26 Charity requires us always to have compassion on human infirmity.--ST. CATHERINE OF SIENA. 27 When one does not love prayer, it is morally impossible for him to resist his passions.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 28 Docility and easy acquiescence with good advice are the signs of a humble heart.--VEN. JULIENNE MOREL. 29 There is nothing richer, nothing surer, nothing more agreeable than a good conscience.--BL. BARTHOLOMEW OF MARTYRS. March 1 IT SEEMS as if God granted to other saints to free us from some particular needfulness; but I know by experience that the glorious St. Joseph assists us generally in all our necessities.--ST. TERESA. 2 A most powerful and efficacious remedy for all evils, a means of correcting all imperfections, of triumphing over temptation, and preserving our hearts in an undisturbed peace, is conformity with the will of God.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 3 It often happens that when we take less care of our body, we have better health than when we bestow upon it too much care.--ST. TERESA. 4 Do nothing, say nothing before considering if that which you are about to say or do is pleasing to God, profitable to yourself, and edifying to your neighbor.--ST. IGNATIUS. 5 Sometimes God leaves us for a long time unable to effect any good, that we may learn to humble ourselves, and never to glory in our efforts.-- ST. VINCENT FERRER. 6 We easily lose peace of mind, because we make it depend, not on the testimony of a good conscience, but on the judgment of men.--BL. BARTHOLOMEW OF MARTYRS. 7 You may fast regularly, give alms, and pray without ceasing, but as long as you hate your brother, you will not be numbered among the children of God.--VEN. LOUIS DE BLOIS. 8 He who at the hour of death finds himself protected by St. Joseph, will certainly experience great consolation.--ST. TERESA. 9 Take care that the worldling does not pursue with greater zeal and anxiety the perishable goods of this world than you do the eternal.--ST. IGNATIUS. 10 We should consider our departed brethren as living members of Jesus Christ, animated by His grace, and certain of participating one day of His glory. We should therefore love, serve, and assist them as far as is in our power.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 11 Control thy senses, guard thy mouth, bridle thy tongue, subjugate thy heart, bear all provocation with charity, and thou shalt perfectly fulfil the will of God.--BL. HENRY SUSO. 12 Our perfection consists in uniting our will so intimately with God's will, that we will only desire what He wills. He who conforms most perfectly to the will of God will be the most perfect Christian.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 13 Humility, modesty, sobriety, purity, piety, and prudence, with meekness, ornament the soul, and make us live on earth a truly angelic life.--BL. JORDAN OF SAXONY. 14 In recalling to mind the life and actions of the saints, walk in their footsteps as much as possible, and humble thyself if thou canst not attain to their perfection.--ST. THOMAS AQUINAS. 15 When the devil again tempts you to sin, telling you that God is merciful, remember that the Lord showeth mercy to them that fear Him, but not to them who despise Him.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 16 In prayer we should particularly combat our predominant passion or evil inclination. We should devote continual attention to it, because when it is once conquered we will easily obtain the victory over all our other faults.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 17 I will carefully consider how, on the day of judgment, I would wish to have discharged my office or my duty; and the way I would wish to have done it then I shall do now.--ST. IGNATIUS. 18 It is well to deny ourselves that which is permitted, in order to avoid more easily that which is not.--ST. BENEDICT. 19 I have noticed that all persons who have true devotion to St. Joseph and tender him special honor, are very much advanced in virtue, for he takes great care of souls who recommend themselves to him; and I have never asked of him anything which he did not obtain for me.--ST. TERESA. 20 He who forgets himself in the service of God may be assured that God will not forget Him.--ST. IGNATIUS. 21 Let all our actions be directed to the end that God may be glorified in all things.--ST. BENEDICT. 22 He who suffers in patience, suffers less and saves his soul. He who suffers impatiently, suffers more and loses his soul.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 23 When we remember or hear that the enemies of the Church burn and destroy God's temples, we should grieve therefor; but we should also rejoice much when we see new ones built, and we should co-operate in their erection as much as we possibly can.--ST. TERESA. 24 We should carefully beware of giving ourselves so completely to any employment as to forget to have recourse to God from time to time.--ST. TERESA. 25 Our Lady, deign to intercede for us sinners with thy divine Son, our Lord, and obtain of Him a blessing for us in our trials and tribulations!--ST. IGNATIUS. 26 Whoever would follow Jesus Christ, must walk in His footsteps, if he would not go astray.--ST. TERESA. 27 Let us thank God for having called us to His holy faith. It is a great gift, and the number of those who thank God for it is small.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 28 The trials of life cease to oppress us if we accept them for the love of God.--VEN. LOUIS DE GRANADA. 29 If you wish to take up your abode in the tabernacle of the heavenly kingdom, you must reach there through your good works, without which you can not hope to enter.--ST. BENEDICT. 30 It is a great folly to be willing to violate the friendship of God, rather than the law of human friendship.--ST. TERESA. 31 When the afflictions of this life overcome us, let us encourage ourselves to bear them patiently by the hope of heaven.--ST. ALPHONSUS. April 1 TO PUT into practice the teachings of our holy faith, it is not enough to convince ourselves that they are true; we must love them. Love united to faith makes us practise our religion.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 2 Unite all your works to the merits of Jesus Christ, and then offer them up to the eternal Father if you desire to make them pleasing to Him.-- ST. TERESA. 3 God pardons sin; but He will not pardon the will to sin.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 4 It is a fault, not a virtue, to wish your humility recognized and applauded.--ST. BERNARD. 5 Before engaging in your private devotions, perform those which obedience and your duty toward your neighbor impose upon you in such a manner as to make an abnegation of self.--VEN. LOUIS DE BLOIS. 6 The world is full of inconstancy; its friendship ceases the moment there is no advantage to be expected from us.--BL. JOHN TAULER. 7 There is nothing better to display the truth in an excellent light, than a clear and simple statement of facts.--ST. BENEDICT. 8 Be careful and do not lightly condemn the actions of others. We must consider the intention of our neighbor, which is often good and pure, although the act itself seems blameworthy.--ST. IGNATIUS. 9 He who does not overcome his predominant passion is in great danger of being lost. He who does overcome it will easily conquer all the rest.-- ST. ALPHONSUS. 10 To conquer himself is the greatest victory that man can gain.--ST. IGNATIUS. 11 A soul which does not practise the exercise of prayer is very like a paralyzed body which, though possessing feet and hands, makes no use of them.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 12 When you do a good action, have the intention of first pleasing God, and then of giving good example to your neighbor.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 13 The grace of perseverance is the most important of all; it crowns all other graces.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 14 Prayer is the only channel through which God's great graces and favors may flow into the soul; and if this be once closed, I know no other way He can communicate them.--ST. TERESA. 15 To acquire courage it is very useful to read the lives of the saints, especially of those who, after living in sin, attained great sanctity.-- ST. ALPHONSUS. 16 The truly humble reject all praise for themselves, and refer it all to God.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 17 Prayer should be effective and practical, since it has for its end the acquisition of solid virtue and the mortification of the passions.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 18 We do not keep an account of the graces which God has given us, but God our Lord keeps an account of them. He has fixed the measure thereof.-- ST. ALPHONSUS. 19 The more guilty we are, the greater must be our confidence in Mary. Therefore, courage, timid soul; let Mary know all thy misery, and hasten with joy to the throne of mercy.--BL. HENRY SUSO. 20 Evil is often more hurtful to the doer than to the one against whom it is done.--ST. CATHERINE OF SIENA. 21 During life despise that which will avail you nothing at the hour of death.--ST. ANSELM. 22 He who fails to reflect before acting, walks with his eyes shut and advances with danger. He also falls very often, because the eye of reflection does not enable him to see whither his footsteps lead.--ST. GREGORY THE GREAT. 23 Sanctity and perfection consist not in fine words, but in good actions.--BL. HENRY SUSO. 24 As patience leads to peace, and study to science, so are humiliations the path that leads to humility.--ST. BERNARD. 25 Do not disturb yourself with vain curiosity concerning the affairs of others, nor how they conduct themselves, unless your position makes it your duty to do so.--VEN. LOUIS DE BLOIS. 26 The deceitful charms of prosperity destroy more souls than all the scourges of adversity.--ST. BERNARD. 27 The first degree of humility is the fear of God, which we should constantly have before our eyes.--VEN. LOUIS DE BLOIS. 28 He who cheerfully endures contempt and is happy under crosses and affliction, partakes of the humility and sufferings of Our Lord.--ST. MECHTILDIS. 29 He who is resigned to the divine will shall always surmount the difficulties he meets with in the service of God. The Lord will accomplish His designs concerning him.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 30 Consent to suffer a slight temporary pain, that so thou mayst avoid the eternal pains which sin deserves.--ST. CATHERINE OF SIENA. May 1 MARY was the most perfect among the saints only because she was always perfectly united to the will of God.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 2 After the love which we owe Jesus Christ, we must give the chief place in our heart to the love of His Mother Mary.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 3 When we feel our cross weighing upon us, let us have recourse to Mary, whom the Church calls the "Consoler of the Afflicted."--ST. ALPHONSUS. 4 The devotions we practise in honor of the glorious Virgin Mary, however trifling they be, are very pleasing to her divine Son, and He rewards them with eternal glory.--ST. TERESA. 5 There is nothing which is more profitable and more consoling to the mind than to frequently remember the Blessed Virgin.--ST. TERESA. 6 Blessed are the actions enclosed between two Hail Marys.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 7 Let us consider what the glorious Virgin endured, and what the holy apostles suffered, and we shall find that they who were nearest to Jesus Christ were the most afflicted.--ST. TERESA. 8 The servants of Mary who are in purgatory receive visits and consolations from her.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 9 If you persevere until death in true devotion to Mary, your salvation is certain.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 10 He who remembers having invoked the name of Mary in an impure temptation, may be sure that he did not yield to it.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 11 Mary being destined to negotiate peace between God and man, it was not proper that she should be an accomplice in the disobedience of Adam.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 12 Mary having co-operated in our redemption with so much glory to God and so much love for us, Our Lord ordained that no one shall obtain salvation except through her intercession.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 13 He who wishes to find Jesus will do so only by having recourse to Mary.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 14 Mary having always lived wholly detached from earthly things and united with God, death, which united her more closely to Him, was extremely sweet and agreeable to her.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 15 Mary being in heaven nearer to God and more united to Him, knows our miseries better, compassionates them more, and can more efficaciously assist us.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 16 The Virgin Mother, all pure and all white, will make her servants pure and white.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 17 To assure our salvation it does not suffice to call ourselves children of Mary, therefore let us always have the fear of God.--ST. TERESA. 18 Let us offer ourselves without delay and without reserve to Mary, and beg her to offer us herself to God.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 19 Such is the compassion, such the love which Mary bears us, that she is never tired of praying for us.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 20 O Queen of heaven and earth! The universe would perish before thou couldst refuse aid to one who invokes thee from the depth of his heart.--BL. HENRY SUSO. 21 O most blessed Virgin, who declarest in thy Canticle that it is owing to thy humility that God hath done great things in thee, obtain for me the grace to imitate thee, that is, to be obedient; because to obey is to practise humility.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 22 May the two names so sweet and so powerful, of Jesus and Mary, be always in our hearts and on our lips!--ST. ALPHONSUS. 23 Whatsoever we do, we can never be true children of Mary, unless we are humble.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 24 Let us highly esteem devotion to the Blessed Virgin, and let us lose no opportunity of inspiring others with it.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 25 As a mother feels no disgust in dressing the sores of her child, so Mary, the heavenly infirmarian, never refuses to care for sinners who have recourse to her.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 26 Each of our days is marked with the protection of Mary, who is exceedingly anxious to be our Mother, when we desire to be her children.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 27 When the devil wishes to make himself master of a soul, he seeks to make it give up devotion to Mary.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 28 Let us have recourse to Mary; for of all creatures she is the highest, the purest, the most beautiful, and the most loving.--BL. HENRY SUSO. 29 Let the name of Mary be ever on your lips, let it be indelibly engraven on your heart. If you are under her protection, you have nothing to fear; if she is propitious, you will arrive at the port of salvation.-- ST. BERNARD. 30 Know that of all devotions the most pleasing to Mary is to have frequent recourse to her, asking for favors.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 31 Let the servants of Mary perform every day, and especially on Saturday, some work of charity for her sake.--ST. ALPHONSUS. June 1 CAN WE, amongst all hearts, find one more amiable than that of Jesus? It is on His Heart that God looks with special complacency--ST. ALPHONSUS. 2 One must wage war against his predominant passion, and not retreat, until, with God's help, he has been victorious.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 3 An act of perfect conformity to the will of God unites us more to Him than a hundred other acts of virtue.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 4 The love of God inspires the love of our neighbor, and the love of our neighbor serves to keep alive the love of God.--ST. GREGORY THE GREAT. 5 Live always in the certainty that whatever happens to you is the result of divine Providence; because nothing hard or laborious falls to your lot without the Lord permitting it.--VEN. LOUIS DE BLOIS. 6 Whatsoever good work you undertake, pray earnestly to God that He will enable you to bring it to a successful termination.--ST. BENEDICT. 7 What is a fruitless repentance, defiled almost immediately by new faults?--ST. BERNARD. 8 You propose to give up everything to God; be sure, then, to include yourself among the things to be given up.--ST. BENEDICT. 9 If you can find a place where God is not, go there and sin with impunity.--ST. ANSELM. 10 He can not err who is constantly with the visible Head which Jesus Christ has left to His Church, as its foundation, rule, teacher, and defender of the Faith.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 11 The more numerous the gifts we have received from God, the greater the account we must render to Him.--ST. GREGORY THE GREAT. 12 True penance consists in regretting without ceasing the faults of the past, and in firmly resolving to never again commit that which is so deplorable.--ST. BERNARD. [Illustration: The Sacred Heart of Mary.] 13 We are not raised the first day to the summit of perfection. It is by climbing, not by flying, that we arrive there.--ST. BERNARD. 14 What we do for ourselves during life is more certain than all the good we expect others to do for us after death.--ST. GREGORY THE GREAT. 15 Idleness begets a discontented life. It develops self-love, which is the cause of all our misery, and renders us unworthy to receive the favors of divine love.--ST. IGNATIUS. 16 Have death always before your eyes as a salutary means of returning to God.--ST. BERNARD. 17 If the devil tempts me by the thought of divine justice, I think of God's mercy; if he tries to fill me with presumption by the thought of His mercy, I think of His justice.--ST. IGNATIUS. 18 In time of temptation continue the good thou hast begun before temptation.--ST. VINCENT FERRER. 19 In the eyes of the sovereign Judge the merit of our actions depends on the motives which prompted them.--ST. GREGORY THE GREAT. 20 The benefits to be derived from spiritual reading do not merely consist in impressing on the memory the precepts set forth, but in opening the heart to them, that they may bear fruit.--VEN. LOUIS DE BLOIS. 21 As clouds obscure the sun, so bad thoughts darken and destroy the brightness of the soul.--VEN. LOUIS OF GRANADA. 22 To judge rightly of the goodness and perfection of any one's prayer, it is sufficient to know the disposition he takes to it, and the fruits he reaps from it.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 23 To commence many things and not to finish them is no small fault; we must persevere in whatever we undertake with upright intention and according to God's will.--BL. HENRY SUSO. 24 The perfect champion is he who establishes complete control over his mind by overcoming temptations and the inclination of his nature to sin.--VEN. JOHN TAULER. 25 If the love of God is in your heart, you will understand that to suffer for God is a joy to which all earthly pleasures are not to be compared.--ST. IGNATIUS. 26 The world around us is, as it were, a book written by the finger of God; every creature is a word on the page. We should apply ourselves well to understand the signification of the volume.--VEN. BARTHOLOMEW OF MARTYRS. 27 A man of prayer is capable of everything. He can say with St. Paul, "I can do all things in Him who strengthened me."--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 28 Whilst here below our actions can never be entirely free from negligence, frailty, or defect; but we must not throw away the wheat because of the chaff.--VEN. JOHN TAULER. 29 Strive always to preserve freedom of spirit, so that you need do nothing with the view of pleasing the world, and that no fear of displeasing it will have power to shake your good resolutions.--VEN. LOUIS DE BLOIS. 30 Wo to us poor sinners if we had not the Divine Sacrifice to appease the Lord!--ST. ALPHONSUS. July 1 HOW few there are who avail themselves of the precious blood of Jesus to purchase their salvation!--ST. IGNATIUS. 2 O Queen of heaven and earth! Thou art the gate of mercy ever open, never closed. The universe must perish before he who invokes thee from his heart is refused assistance.--BL. HENRY SUSO. 3 Our Faith will never be true unless it is united to that of St. Peter and the Pontiff, his successors.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 4 Short pleasures and long sufferings are all the world can give.--VEN. JOHN TAULER. 5 Learn to be silent sometimes for the edification of others, that you may learn how to speak sometimes.--ST. VINCENT FERRER. 6 Gratitude for graces received is a most efficacious means of obtaining new ones.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 7 To a useless question we should answer only by silence.--ST. VINCENT FERRER. 8 We should not judge things by their exterior or appearance, but consider what they are in the sight of God, and whether they be according to His good pleasure.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 9 Preserve purity of conscience with care, and never do anything to sully it or render it less agreeable to God.--ST. THOMAS AQUINAS. 10 Give not thyself too much to any one. He who gives himself too freely is generally the least acceptable.--BL. HENRY SUSO. 11 Affliction strengthens the vigor of our soul, whereas happiness weakens it.--ST. GREGORY THE GREAT. 12 To acquire purity of the soul, it is necessary to guard against passing judgment on our neighbor, or useless remarks on his conduct.--ST. CATHERINE OF SIENA. 13 Turn away the eyes of thy body and those of thy mind from seeing others, that thou mayest be able to contemplate thyself.--ST. VINCENT FERRER. 14 The brightest ornaments in the crown of the blessed in heaven are the sufferings which they have borne patiently on earth.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 15 We are not innocent before God if we punish that which we should pardon, or pardon that which we should punish.--ST. BERNARD. 16 Is there any one in the world who has invoked thee, O Mary, without having felt the benefit of thy protection, which is promised to those who invoke thy mercy?--ST. BERNARD. 17 It is the key of obedience that opens the door of paradise. Jesus Christ has confided that key to His vicar, the Pope, Christ on earth, whom all are obliged to obey even unto death.--ST. CATHERINE OF SIENA. 18 It is true that God promises forgiveness if we repent, but what assurance have we of obtaining it to-morrow?--VEN. LOUIS DE BLOIS. 19 We should offer ourselves and all we have to God, that He may dispose of us according to His holy will, so that we may be ever ready to leave all and embrace the afflictions that come upon us.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 20 No one has a right to mercy who can not himself show mercy.--VEN. LOUIS DE GRANADA. 21 We should reflect on all our actions, exterior and interior, and before we commence, examine well if we are able to finish them.--VEN. JOHN TAULER. 22 The reason why the lukewarm run so great a risk of being lost is because tepidity conceals from the soul the immense evil which it causes.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 23 We should learn of Jesus Christ to be meek and humble of heart, and ask Him unceasingly for these two virtues. We ought, particularly, to avoid the two contrary vices which would cause us to destroy with one hand what we seek to raise with the other.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 24 The sufferings endured for God are the greatest proof of our love for Him.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 25 It is in vain that we cut off the branches of evil, if we leave intact the root, which continually produces new ones.--ST. GREGORY THE GREAT. 26 How little is required to be a saint! It suffices to do in all things the will of God.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 27 Wouldst thou know what thou art? Thou art that to which thy heart turns the most frequently.--VEN. BARTHOLOMEW OF MARTYRS. 28 When you covet that which delights you, think not only of the sweet moments of enjoyment, but of the long season of regret which must follow.--ST. BERNARD. 29 They who voluntarily commit sin show a contempt for life eternal, since they willingly risk the loss of their soul.--ST. GREGORY THE GREAT. 30 It suffices not to perform good works; we must do them well, in imitation of Our Lord Jesus Christ, of whom it is written, "He doeth all things well."--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 31 Put not off till to-morrow what you can do today.--ST. IGNATIUS. August 1 CHRIST Himself guides the bark of Peter. For this reason it can not perish, although He sometimes seems to sleep.--ST. ANTONINUS. 2 Prayer teaches us the need of laying before God all our necessities, of corresponding with His grace, of banishing vice from our heart and of establishing virtue in it.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 3 Take this to heart: Owe no man anything. So shalt thou secure a peaceful sleep, an easy conscience, a life without inquietude, and a death without alarm.--VEN. LOUIS DE GRANADA. 4 If you would know whether you have made a good confession, ask yourself if you have resolved to abandon your sins.--ST. BERNARD. 5 He who does that which is displeasing to himself has discovered the secret of pleasing God.--ST. ANSELM. 6 An ordinary action, performed through obedience and love of God, is more meritorious than extraordinary works done on your own authority--VEN. LOUIS DE BLOIS. 7 Vigilance is rendered necessary and indispensable, not only by the dangers that surround us, but by the delicacy, the extreme difficulty of the work we all have to engage in the work of our salvation.--VEN. LOUIS DE GRANADA. 8 Among the different means that we have of pleasing God in all that we do, one of the most efficacious is to perform each of our actions as though it were to be the last of our life.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 9 I have to seek only the glory of God, my own sanctification, and the salvation of my neighbor. I should therefore devote myself to these things, if necessary, at the peril of my life.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 10 Idleness is hell's fishhook for catching souls.--ST. IGNATIUS. 11 Whoever imagines himself without defect has an excess of pride. God alone is perfect.--ST. ANTONINUS. 12 As we take the bitterest medicine to recover or preserve the health of the body, we should cheerfully endure sufferings, however repugnant to nature, and consider them efficacious remedies which God employs to purify the soul and conduct it to the perfection to which He called it.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 13 To give up prayer because we are often distracted at it is to allow the devil to gain his cause.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 14 Curb the desire of display, and do nothing from human respect.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 15 O Mary, vessel of purest gold, ornamented with pearls and sapphires, filled with grace and virtue, thou art the dearest of all creatures to the eyes of eternal Wisdom.--BL. HENRY SUSO. 16 We must be careful not to omit our prayers, confession, communion, and other exercises of piety, even when we find no consolation in them.--ST. VINCENT FERRER. 17 Let us leave to God and to truth the care of our justification, without trying to excuse ourselves, and peace will truly spring up within us.-- VEN. JOHN TAULER. 18 Read good and useful books, and abstain from reading those that only gratify curiosity.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 19 So great is the goodness of God in your regard, that when you ask through ignorance for that which is not beneficial, He does not grant your prayer in this matter, but gives you something better instead.--ST. BERNARD. 20 Men can use no better arms to drive away the devil, than prayer and the sign of the cross.--ST. TERESA. 21 He who knows well how to practise the exercise of the presence of God, and who is faithful in following the attraction of this divine virtue, will soon attain a very high degree of perfection.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 22 One of the most admirable effects of holy communion is to preserve the soul from sin, and to help those who fall through weakness to rise again. It is much more profitable, then, to approach this divine Sacrament with love, respect, and confidence, than to remain away through an excess of fear and scrupulosity.--ST. IGNATIUS. 23 Let us remember that every act of mortification is a work for heaven. This thought will make all suffering and weariness sweet.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 24 Correction should be given calmly and with discernment, at seasonable times, according to the dictates of reason, and not at the impulse of anger.--VEN. LOUIS DE GRANADA. 25 There is nothing more certain, nothing more agreeable, nothing richer than a good conscience.--VEN. BARTHOLOMEW OF MARTYRS. 26 God, to procure His glory, sometimes permits that we should be dishonored and persecuted without reason. He wishes thereby to render us conformable to His Son, who was calumniated and treated as a seducer, as an ambitious man, and as one possessed.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 27 All that God gives us and all that He permits in this world have no other end than to sanctify us in Him.--ST. CATHERINE OF SIENA. 28 If you can not mortify your body by actual penance, abstain at least from some lawful pleasure.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 29 One whose heart is embittered can do nothing but contend and contradict, finding something to oppose in every remark.--VEN. JULIENNE MOREL. 30 Without prayer we have neither light nor strength to advance in the way which leads to God.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 31 I have never gone out to mingle with the world without losing something of myself.--BL. ALBERT THE GREAT. September 1 HE who perseveres with constancy and fervor will, without fail, raise himself to a high degree of perfection.--BL. HENRY SUSO. 2 An upright intention is the soul of our actions. It gives them life, and makes them good.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 3 You wish to reform the world: reform yourself, otherwise your efforts will be in vain.--ST. IGNATIUS. 4 Let all thy care be to possess thy soul in peace and tranquillity. Let no accident be to thee a cause of ill-humor.--ST. VINCENT FERRER. 5 Humility is a fortified town; it repels all attacks. The sight of it obliges the enemy to turn and flee.--VEN. LOUIS OF GRANADA. 6 The world is deceitful and inconstant. When fortune forsakes us, friendship takes flight.--BL. HENRY SUSO. 7 Perform all your actions in union with the pure intention and perfect love with which Our Lord did all things for the glory of God and the salvation of the world.--ST. MECHTILDIS. 8 An air of meekness and a modest speech are pleasing alike to God and men.--VEN. JOHN TAULER. 9 The saints owed to their confidence in God that unalterable tranquillity of soul, which procured their perpetual joy and peace, even in the midst of adversities.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 10 Look not to the qualities thou mayest possess, which are wanting to others; but look to those which others possess and which are wanting to thee, that thou mayest acquire them.--VEN. LOUIS DE GRANADA. 11 Your heart is not so narrow that the world can satisfy it entirely; nothing but God can fill it.--ST. IGNATIUS. 12 If you wish to raise a lofty edifice of perfection, take humility for a foundation.--ST. THOMAS AQUINAS. 13 It ordinarily happens that God permits those who judge others, to fall into the same or even greater faults.--ST. VINCENT FERRER. 14 Raise thy heart and thy love toward the sweet and most holy cross, which soothes every pain!--ST. CATHERINE OF SIENA. 15 Often read spiritual books; then, like a sheep, ruminate the food thou hast taken, by meditation and a desire to practise the holy doctrine found therein.--ST. ANTONINUS. 16 Love others much, but visit them seldom.--ST. CATHERINE OF SIENA. 17 God sends us trials and afflictions to exercise us in patience and teach us sympathy with the sorrows of others.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 18 Armed with prayer, the saints sustained a glorious warfare and vanquished all their enemies. By prayer, also, they appeased the wrath of God, and obtained from Him all they desired.--VEN. LOUIS DE GRANADA. 19 All souls in hell are there because they did not pray. All the saints sanctified themselves by prayer.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 20 The thought of the presence of God renders us familiar with the practice of doing in all things His holy will.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 21 If we consider the number and excellence of the virtues practised by the saints, we must feel the inefficiency and imperfection of our actions.-- ST. VINCENT FERRER. 22 Prayer without fervor has not sufficient strength to rise to heaven.-- ST. BERNARD. 23 The path of virtue is painful to nature when left to itself; but nature, assisted by grace, finds it easy and agreeable.--VEN. LOUIS OF GRANADA. 24 Always give the preference to actions which appear to you the most agreeable to God, and most contrary to self-love.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 25 As the branch separated from the roots soon loses all life and verdure, so it is with good works which are not united with charity.--ST. GREGORY THE GREAT. 26 We should constantly thank the Lord for having granted us the gift of the true faith, by associating us with the children of the holy Catholic Church.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 27 We should not spare expense, fatigue, nor even our life, when there is a question of accomplishing the holy will of God.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 28 Some are unable to fast or give alms; there are none who can not pray.-- ST. ALPHONSUS. 29 We meet with contradictions everywhere. If only two persons are together they mutually afford each other opportunities of exercising patience, and even when one is alone there will still be a necessity for this virtue, so true it is that our miserable life is full of crosses.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 30 We should bear our sufferings in expiation for our sins, to merit heaven, and to please God.--ST. ALPHONSUS. October 1 ALWAYS give good example: teach virtue by word and deed. Example is more powerful than discourse.--BL. HENRY SUSO. 2 If thou wouldst glory, let it be in the Lord, by referring everything to Him, and giving to Him all the honor and glory.--VEN. LOUIS DE GRANADA. 3 There is nothing more holy, more eminently perfect, than resignation to the will of God, which confirms us in an entire detachment from ourselves, and a perfect indifference for every condition in which we may be placed.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 4 Prayer consists not in many words, but in the fervor of desire, which raises the soul to God by the knowledge of its own nothingness and the divine goodness.--BL. HENRY SUSO. 5 Let us make up for lost time. Let us give to God the time that remains to us.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 6 When thou feelest thyself excited, shut thy mouth and chain thy tongue.--BL. HENRY SUSO. 7 If it was necessary that Christ should suffer and so enter by the cross into the kingdom of His Father, no friend of God should shrink from suffering.--VEN. JOHN TAULER. 8 We should grieve to see no account made of time, which is so precious; to see it employed so badly, so uselessly, for it can never be recalled.--BL. HENRY SUSO. 9 Every time that some unexpected event befalls us, be it affliction, or be it spiritual or corporal consolation, we should endeavor to receive it with equanimity of spirit, since all comes from the hand of God.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 10 There are some who sin through frailty, or through the force of some violent passion. They desire to break these chains of death; if their prayer is constant they will be heard.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 11 "Thy will be done!" This is what the saints had continually on their lips and in their hearts.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 12 He who would be a disciple of Jesus Christ must live in sufferings; for "The servant is not greater than the Master."--VEN. JOHN TAULER. 13 He who submits himself to God in all things is certain that whatever men say or do against him will always turn to his advantage.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 14 If he be blind who refuses to believe in the truths of the Catholic faith, how much blinder is he who believes, and yet lives as if he did not believe!--ST. ALPHONSUS. 15 There is no affliction, trial, or labor difficult to endure, when we consider the torments and sufferings which Our Lord Jesus Christ endured for us.--ST. TERESA. 16 Outside of God nothing is durable. We exchange life for death, health for sickness, honor for shame, riches for poverty. All things change and pass away.--ST. CATHERINE OF SIENA. 17 If you would keep yourself pure, shun dangerous occasions. Do not trust your own strength. In this matter we can not take too much precaution.-- ST. ALPHONSUS. 18 After knowing the will of God in regard to a work which we undertake, we should continue courageously, however difficult it may be. We should follow it to the end with as much constancy as the obstacles we encounter are great.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 19 In your prayers, if you would quickly and surely draw upon you the grace of God, pray in a special manner for our Holy Church and all those connected with it.--VEN. LOUIS DE BLOIS. 20 Prayer is our principal weapon. By it we obtain of God the victory over our evil inclinations, and over all temptations of hell.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 21 We should never abandon, on account of the difficulties we encounter, an enterprise undertaken with due reflection.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 22 Being all members of the same body, with the same head, who is Christ, it is proper that we should have in common the same joys and sorrows.-- VEN. LOUIS DE GRANADA. 23 We should be cordial and affable with the poor, and with persons in humble circumstances. We should not treat them in a supercilious manner. Haughtiness makes them revolt. On the contrary, when we are affable with them, they become more docile and derive more benefit from the advice they receive.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 24 Let not confusion for thy fault overwhelm thee with despair, as if there were no longer a remedy.--ST. CATHERINE OF SIENA. 25 As all our wickedness consists in turning away from our Creator, so all our goodness consists in uniting ourselves with Him.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 26 That which we suffer in the accomplishment of a good work, merits for us the necessary graces to insure its success.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 27 We ought to have a special devotion to those saints who excelled in humility, particularly to the Blessed Virgin Mary, who declares that the Lord regarded her on account of her humility.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 28 He who wishes to find Jesus should seek Him, not in the delights and pleasures of the world, but in mortification of the senses.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 29 Let us not despise, judge, or condemn any one but ourselves; then our cross will bloom and bear fruit.--VEN. JOHN TAULER. 30 It is rarely that we fall into error if we are humble and trust to the wisdom of others, in preference to our own judgment.--VEN. LOUIS DE BLOIS. 31 The best of all prayers is that in which we ask that God's holy will be accomplished, both in ourselves and in others.--VEN. LOUIS DE BLOIS. November 1 WE SHOULD honor God in His saints, and beseech Him to make us partakers of the graces He poured so abundantly upon them.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 2 We may have a confident hope of our salvation when we apply ourselves to relieve the souls in purgatory, so afflicted and so dear to God.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 3 The example of the saints is proposed to every one, so that the great actions shown us may encourage us to undertake smaller things.--VEN. LOUIS DE GRANADA. 4 Let us read the lives of the saints; let us consider the penances which they performed, and blush to be so effeminate and so fearful of mortifying our flesh.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 5 The greatest pain which the holy souls suffer in purgatory proceeds from their desire to possess God. This suffering especially afflicts those who in life had but a feeble desire of heaven.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 6 Death is welcome to one who has always feared God and faithfully served Him.--ST. TERESA. 7 True humility consists in being content with all that God is pleased to ordain for us, believing ourselves unworthy to be called His servants.-- ST. TERESA. 8 The best preparation for death is a perfect resignation to the will of God, after the example of Jesus Christ, who, in His prayer in Gethsemani prepared Himself with these words, "Father, not as I will, but as Thou wilt."--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 9 The errors of others should serve to keep us from adding any of our own to them.--ST. IGNATIUS. 10 There is more security in self-denial, mortification, and other like virtues, than in an abundance of tears.--ST. TERESA. 11 A resolute will triumphs over everything with the help of God, which is never wanting.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 12 If humble souls are contradicted, they remain calm; if they are calumniated, they suffer with patience; if they are little esteemed, neglected, or forgotten, they consider that their due; if they are weighed down with occupations, they perform them cheerfully.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 13 When we have to reply to some one who speaks harshly to us, we must always do it with gentleness. If we are angry, it is better to keep silence.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 14 The two principal dispositions which we should bring to holy communion are detachment from creatures, and the desire to receive Our Lord with a view to loving Him more in the future.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 15 In doing penance it is necessary to deprive oneself of as many lawful pleasures as we had the misfortune to indulge in unlawful ones.--ST. GREGORY THE GREAT. 16 In raising human nature to heaven by His ascension, Christ has given us the hope of arriving thither ourselves.--ST. THOMAS AQUINAS. 17 It is useless to subdue the flesh by abstinence, unless one gives up his irregular life, and abandons vices which defile his soul.--ST. BENEDICT. 18 No prayers are so acceptable to God as those which we offer Him after communion.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 19 It avails nothing to subdue the body, if the mind allows itself to be controlled by anger.--ST. GREGORY THE GREAT. 20 What is it that renders death terrible? Sin. We must therefore fear sin, not death.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 21 The Blessed Virgin is of all the works of the Creator the most excellent, and to find anything in nature more grand one must go to the Author of nature Himself.--ST. PETER DAMIAN. 22 If we would advance in virtue, we must not neglect little things, for they pave the way to greater.--ST. TERESA. 23 When one has fallen into some fault, what better remedy can there be than to have immediate recourse to the Most Blessed Sacrament?--ST. ALPHONSUS. 24 Afflictions are the most certain proofs that God can give us of His love for us.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 25 Is it not a great cruelty for us Christians, members of the body of the Holy Church, to attack one another?--ST. CATHERINE OF SIENA. 26 The Church is the pillar and ground of truth, and her infallibility admits of no doubt.--VEN. LOUIS DE GRANADA. 27 He who truly loves his neighbor and can not efficaciously assist him, should strive at least to relieve and help him by his prayers.--ST. TERESA. 28 We should blush for shame to show so much resentment at what is done or said against us, knowing that so many injuries and affronts have been offered to our Redeemer and the saints.--ST. TERESA. 29 The reason why so many souls who apply themselves to prayer are not inflamed with God's love is, that they neglect to carefully prepare themselves for it.--ST. TERESA. 30 It is absolutely necessary, both for our advancement and the salvation of others, to follow always and in all things the beautiful light of faith.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. December 1 IF WE consider all that is imperfect and worldly in us, we shall find ample reason for abasing ourselves before God and man, before ourselves and our inferiors.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 2 No one should think or say anything of another which he would not wish thought or said of himself.--ST. TERESA. 3 We should study the interests of others as our own, and be careful to act on all occasions with uprightness and loyalty.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 4 It is God Himself who receives what we give in charity, and is it not an incomparable happiness to give Him what belongs to Him, and what we have received from His goodness alone?--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 5 Let your constant practice be to offer yourself to God, that He may do with you what He pleases.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 6 It is not enough to forbid our own tongue to murmur; we must also refuse to listen to murmurers.--VEN. LOUIS DE GRANADA. 7 We can obtain no reward without merit, and no merit without patience.-- ST. ALPHONSUS. 8 No harp sends forth such sweet harmonies as are produced in the afflicted heart by the holy name of Mary. Let us kneel to reverence this holy, this sublime name of Mary!--BL. HENRY SUSO. 9 The life of a true Christian should be such that he fears neither death nor any event of his life, but endures and submits to all things with a good heart.--ST. TERESA. 10 We should abandon ourselves entirely into the hands of God, and believe that His providence disposes everything that He wishes or permits to happen to us for our greater good.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 11 Regulate and direct all your actions to God, offering them to Him and beseeching Him to grant that they be for His honor and glory.--ST. TERESA. [Illustration: Hail, Virgin Most Pure!] 12 Conformity to the will of God is an easy and certain means of acquiring a great treasure of graces in this life.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 13 Do not consider what others do, or how they do it; for there are but few who really work for their own sanctification.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 14 To-day God invites you to do good; do it therefore to-day. To-morrow you may not have time, or God may no longer call you to do it.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 15 To advance in the way of perfection it does not suffice to say a number of weak prayers; our principal care should be to acquire solid virtues.--ST. TERESA. 16 Humility is the virtue of Our Lord Jesus Christ, of His blessed Mother, and of the greatest saints. It embraces all virtues and, where it is sincere, introduces them into the soul.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 17 It will be a great consolation for us at the hour of death to know that we are to be judged by Him whom we have loved above all things during life.--ST. TERESA. 18 Humble submission and obedience to the decrees of the Sovereign Pontiffs are good means for distinguishing the loyal from the rebellious children of the Church.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 19 The devil attacks us at the time of prayer more frequently than at other times. His object is to make us weary of prayer.--BL. HENRY SUSO. 20 It is an act as rare as it is precious, to transact business with many people, without ever forgetting God or oneself.--ST. IGNATIUS. 21 God is our light. The farther the soul strays away from God, the deeper it goes into darkness.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 22 True Christian prudence makes us submit our intellect to the maxims of the Gospel without fear of being deceived. It teaches us to judge things as Jesus Christ judged them, and to speak and act as He did.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 23 Remember that men change easily, and that you can not place your trust in them; therefore attach yourself to God alone.--ST. TERESA. 24 If we secretly feel a desire to appear greater or better than others, we must repress it at once.--ST. TERESA. 25 The King of heaven deigned to be born in a stable, because He came to destroy pride, the cause of man's ruin.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 26 To save our souls we must live according to the maxims of the Gospel, and not according to those of the world.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 27 Be gentle and kind with every one, and severe with yourself.--ST. TERESA. 28 If you wish to be pleasing to God and happy here below, be in all things united to His will.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 29 In proportion as the love of God increases in our soul, so does also the love of suffering.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 30 He who keeps steadily on without pausing, will reach the end of his path and the summit of perfection.--ST. TERESA. 31 The past is no longer yours; the future is not yet in your power. You have only the present wherein to do good.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 
33671	----	MARY, THE HELP OF CHRISTIANS Novenas in Preparation for the Principal Feasts of the Blessed Virgin [Illustration: The Sacred Heart of Mary] COMPILED BY REV. BONAVENTURE HAMMER, O.F.M. --- NEW YORK, CINCINNATI, CHICAGO BENZIGER BROTHERS PRINTERS TO THE HOLY APOSTOLIC SEE PUBLISHERS OF BENZINGER'S MAGAZINE Imprimi Permittitur. FR. CHRYSOSTOMUS THEOBALD, O.F.M., _Minister Provincialis._ Cincinnati, Ohio, die 30, Martii, 1908. Nihil Obstat. REMY LAPORT, S.T.L., _Censor Librorum._ Imprimatur. JOHN M. FARLEY, Archbishop of New York. NEW YORK, March 4, 1909. COPYRIGHT, 1909, BY BENZIGER BROTHERS. Contents RULES FOR THE PROPER OBSERVANCE OF NOVENAS ON THE MANNER OF READING THE MEDITATIONS AND OBSERVING THE PRACTICES INTRODUCTION: MARY, THE HELP OF CHRISTIANS I. NOVENA IN HONOR OF THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN MARY FIRST DAY.--THE PREDESTINATION OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN MARY SECOND DAY.--MARY'S IMMACULATE CONCEPTION THIRD DAY.--MARY, THE VICTRIX OF SATAN FOURTH DAY.--MARY WITHOUT ACTUAL SIN FIFTH DAY.--MARY, FULL OF GRACE SIXTH DAY.--MARY, OUR REFUGE SEVENTH DAY.--MARY, THE MOTHER OF CHASTITY EIGHTH DAY.--THE IMAGE OF THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION NINTH DAY.--THE FEAST OF THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION II. NOVENA IN HONOR OF THE NATIVITY OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN MARY FIRST DAY.--THE BIRTH OF MARY SECOND DAY.--MARY, THE ELECT OF GOD THIRD DAY.--MARY, THE CHILD OF ROYALTY FOURTH DAY.--MARY, THE CHILD OF PIOUS PARENTS FIFTH DAY.--MARY'S SUPERNATURAL PREROGATIVES SIXTH DAY.--MARY, THE JOY OF THE MOST HOLY TRINITY SEVENTH DAY.--THE ANGELS REJOICE AT MARY'S BIRTH EIGHTH DAY.--THE JOY OF THE JUST IN LIMBO AT MARY'S BIRTH NINTH DAY.--THE HOLY NAME OF MARY III. NOVENA FOR THE FEAST OF THE ANNUNCIATION OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN MARY FIRST DAY.--THE ANNUNCIATION SECOND DAY.--THE IMPORT OF THE ANGEL'S SALUTATION THIRD DAY.--THE EFFECT OF THE ANGEL'S SALUTATION FOURTH DAY.--MARY'S QUESTION FIFTH DAY.--THE SOLUTION SIXTH DAY.--MARY'S CONSENT SEVENTH DAY.--MARY'S FORTITUDE IN SUFFERING EIGHTH DAY.--MARY, THE MOTHER OF GOD NINTH DAY.--MARY OUR MOTHER IV. NOVENA IN HONOR OF THE SEVEN SORROWS OF MARY FIRST DAY.--DEVOTION TO THE SEVEN SORROWS OF MARY SECOND DAY.--MARY'S FIRST SORROW: SIMEON'S PROPHECY IN THE TEMPLE THIRD DAY.--MARY'S SECOND SORROW: THE FLIGHT INTO EGYPT FOURTH DAY.--MARY'S THIRD SORROW: JESUS LOST IN JERUSALEM FIFTH DAY.--MARY'S FOURTH SORROW: SHE MEETS JESUS CARRYING HIS CROSS SIXTH DAY.--MARY'S FIFTH SORROW: BENEATH THE CROSS SEVENTH DAY.--MARY'S SIXTH SORROW: THE TAKING DOWN OF JESUS' BODY FROM THE CROSS EIGHTH DAY.--MARY'S SEVENTH SORROW: JESUS IS BURIED NINTH DAY.--WHY MARY HAD TO SUFFER V. NOVENA FOR THE FEAST OF THE ASSUMPTION OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN MARY FIRST DAY.--MARY'S DEATH WAS WITHOUT PAIN SECOND DAY.--AT MARY'S TOMB THIRD DAY.--THE EMPTY TOMB FOURTH DAY.--REASONS FOR THE BODILY ASSUMPTION OF MARY INTO HEAVEN FIFTH DAY.--MARY'S GLORIOUS ENTRANCE INTO HEAVEN SIXTH DAY.--MARY CROWNED IN HEAVEN SEVENTH DAY.--MARY'S BLISS IN HEAVEN EIGHTH DAY.--MARY, THE QUEEN OF MERCY NINTH DAY.--MARY IN HEAVEN THE HELP OF CHRISTIANS ON EARTH LITANY OF LORETO, IN HONOR OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN MARY List of Illustrations The Sacred Heart of Mary Virgin Most Pure The Immaculate Conception The Presentation of Mary in the Temple The Annunciation Mary, the Mother of Sorrows Simeon's Prophecy in the Temple The Flight into Egypt The Finding of Jesus in the Temple Jesus' Body, Taken Down from the Cross The Assumption Mary's Death Mary Crowned in Heaven Mary, the Help of Christians on Earth Mary, the Help of Christians Novenas in Preparation for the Principal Feasts of the Blessed Virgin [Illustration: Virgin Most Pure] "Holy Mary, aid the miserable, assist the desponding, strengthen the weak, pray for the people, plead for the clergy, intercede for the devout female sex. Let all who have recourse to thee experience the efficacy of thy help!"--HOLY CHURCH. Rules for the Proper Observance of Novenas _By St. Alphonsus Liguori_ 1. THE soul must be in the state of grace; for the devotion of a sinful heart pleases neither God nor the saints. 2. We must persevere, that is, the prayers for each day of the novena must never be omitted. 3. If possible, we should visit a church every day, and there implore the favor we desire. 4. Every day we ought to perform certain specified acts of exterior self-denial and interior mortification, in order to prepare us thereby for the reception of grace. 5. It is most important that we receive holy communion when making a novena. Therefore prepare yourself well for it. 6. After obtaining the desired grace for which the novena was made, do not omit to return thanks to God and to the saint through whose intercession your prayers were heard. On the Manner of Reading the Meditations and Observing the Practices HOLY SCRIPTURE says, "Before prayer prepare thy soul; and be not as a man that tempteth God" (_Eccles._ xviii. 23). Therefore place yourself in the presence of God, invoke the assistance of the Holy Ghost, and make a most sincere act of contrition for your sins. Offer up to God your will, your intellect, and your memory, so that your prayer may be pleasing to God and serve to promote your spiritual welfare. Then read the meditation slowly, reflecting on each point of the thought or mystery treated, and consider what you can learn from it, and for what grace you ought to implore God. This is the principal object to be attained by mental prayer. Never rise from your prayer without having formed some special resolution for practical observance. The practices at the end of each consideration in the following novenas will aid you to do so. Finally, ask for grace to carry out effectively your good purposes, and thank God for enlightening your mind during the meditation. Introduction Mary, the Help of Christians NO CATHOLIC denies that Our Lord Jesus Christ is the only mediator through whose merits we became reconciled to God. Nevertheless, it is a doctrine of our faith that God willingly grants us grace if the saints, and especially the Blessed Virgin Mary, the queen of saints, intercede for us. If the saints, during their life on earth, were so potent with God that through their prayers the blind obtained sight, the deaf hearing, and the dumb speech, that the sick of all conditions were healed, the dead restored to life, and the most obstinate sinners converted; if thousands of other miracles in the order of nature and of grace were performed through their intercession; what, then, will not she obtain for us from God, whose virtue and merits transcend those of all the saints, and who did more for the greater honor and glory of God than they all? Mary is the queen of saints not only because she is the Mother of the Most High, but also because her sanctity is more perfect than theirs, and she therefore thrones above them all in heaven. Hence the favor with which God regards her, and consequently the power of her intercession with Him is so much the greater. If Mary's sanctity thus impressively illustrates the potency of her intercession, the contemplation of her dignity as the Mother of God does still more so. Mary brought forth Him who is the Almighty. She calls Him her Son, who by the word of His omnipotence created from out of nothing the whole world with all its beauties, and who can call into being countless millions of other worlds. She calls Him her Son, whose throne is heaven and whose footstool is the earth, who governs all nature with almighty power and reveals His name to mankind through the most astounding miracles. In a word, Mary calls Him her Son, whose omnipotence fills heaven and earth; and this great, almighty God, who honors her as His Mother and has wrought in her such great things, will He not heed her word of intercession, and hear her pleading for those who have recourse to her? On earth He was subject to her. Her intercession moved Him to exercise His omnipotent power at the wedding feast at Cana; and now, when He has glorified and raised her up so high He would let her invoke Him in vain? No, it is inconceivable that God should not hear the prayers of His Mother! The holy Fathers and Doctors of the Church vie with each other in proclaiming the power of Mary's intercession with the Heart of her divine Son. Some say that having been subject to her on earth, He desires to be so in heaven, inasmuch as to refuse her nothing she asks. Hence St. Bernard calls her the "Intercessory Omnipotence." Indeed, when all the angels and saints in heaven join in supplication to God, their prayers are but those of servants; but when Mary prays her intercession is that of His Mother. Therefore we can not sufficiently thank God for having given us in Mary so powerful an advocate. St. Bernard aptly says: "The angel announces, 'thou hast found grace before God.' O supreme happiness! Mary shall always find grace. And what else could we wish? If we seek grace, let us seek it through Mary; for what she seeks, she finds. Never can she plead ineffectually." God, then, who in His infinite mercy has been pleased to provide for all our needs, desires through Mary to console us, to comfort us, to remove all distrust, to strengthen our hope. How consoling to him who calls upon God in sore distress, or implores His pardon for sins committed, is the thought that at the throne of divine Mercy he has in Mary an advocate as mighty as she is gracious, who supplements his great unworthiness by her sublime dignity, and who makes good the defects of his prayer by her intercession! Therefore St. Bonaventure exclaims: "Verily, great is Our Lord's mercy! That we, through fear of our divine Judge, depart not forever from Him, He gave us His own Mother for our advocate and mediatrix of grace." I. Novena in Honor of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary [Illustration: The Immaculate Conception] INDULGENCES TO ALL the faithful who by themselves or with others, in church or at home, with at least contrite heart and devotion, shall make this novena: (1) 300 days indulgence for each of the nine days; (2) a plenary indulgence on one day of the novena or of the eight days following it. (Pius IX, January 5, 1849.) Conditions: Confession, communion, and prayer, according to the intentions of the Holy Father. _Remark._--Whenever, in the following pages, an indulgence is said to be granted "under the usual conditions," these conditions are the same as above. _Note._--The above indulgences may also be gained for making the novena at any other time of the year, and are not attached to any prescribed formula of prayer. The same applies to all other novenas in honor of the Blessed Virgin. FIRST DAY Predestination of the Blessed Virgin Mary PREPARATORY PRAYER IN THY conception, O Virgin Mary, thou wast immaculate; pray for us to the Father, whose Son Jesus, conceived in thy womb by the Holy Ghost, thou didst bring forth. Indulgence. 200 days, every time. (Pius VI, November 21, 1793.) MEDITATION HOLY Church, our Mother, purposely gathered into the season of Advent everything which might contribute to assist us in preparing for the coming of the Redeemer. Purity of heart is the most necessary and helpful requirement for receiving God worthily, and for participating in the fruits of our Redemption through Christ. To remind us of this, Holy Church celebrates the feast of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary, this primary feast of purity, in Advent. The Church, moreover, intends to remind us that the coming of Christ, our promised Redeemer, depended on the consent of the Blessed Virgin. The Redeemer could not appear before she was born of whom He was to be born. The aurora must precede the rising sun. Thus also Mary, the spiritual aurora, had to be conceived and born before the appearance of the Sun of Justice in this world. PRACTICE IN MARY appeared the woman who was to crush the serpent's head, who was to repair by her willing co-operation with God's designs the damage wrought by the disobedience of our first parents, and who was to become our mother and mighty advocate with God. The designs of God concerning Mary were fully accomplished. God also has designs concerning us. Our life was planned by Him from all eternity, and we were destined to co-operate with Him harmoniously and conscientiously in working out our salvation. Have we corresponded with God's designs? Did we not oppose them by yielding to our evil inclinations and passions? What a disparity between God's intentions concerning us and our own co-operation, between His merciful designs and our cowardly resistance to them! PRAYER OF THE CHURCH O GOD, who through the immaculate conception of the Virgin didst prepare a worthy dwelling-place for Thy divine Son; grant that, as in view of Thy Son Thou didst preserve her from all taint, so Thou wouldst vouchsafe unto us that cleansed from all sin by her intercession we too may arrive at Thine eternal glory. Through the same Christ our Lord. Amen. Litany of Loreto (located in the final section of the book). _Prayer_ BEHOLD, Virgin immaculate, at thy sacred feet I bow, while my heart overflows with joy in union with thine own, because from eternity thou wast the Mother-elect of the eternal Word, and was preserved stainless from the taint of Adam's sin. Forever praised, forever blessed be the Most Holy Trinity, who in thy conception poured out upon thy soul the riches of that matchless privilege. I humbly pray thee, most gracious Mother, obtain for me the grace to overcome the bitter results of original sin. Make me victorious over them, that I may never cease to love my God. Hail Mary, etc. _Ejaculation_ O Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee! Indulgence. 100 days, once a day. (Leo XIII, March 25, 1884.) SECOND DAY Mary's Immaculate Conception Preparatory Prayer (located on the first day of the Novena). MEDITATION ACCORDING to the definition of Pope Pius IX, the immaculate conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary is that privilege by which she was preserved, in view of the merits of our Saviour Jesus Christ, from original sin in the first moment of her conception. By solemnly proclaiming the dogma of Mary's immaculate conception, the Church confirmed anew the fundamental principles of Christianity which in our times are so frequently attacked, derided, or forgotten. God reserved the solemn proclamation of this dogma, which seemingly has no practical bearing on the Christian life, for our age, to recall to our mind the doctrines resulting from it. PRACTICE THE most important of these doctrines is that of original sin, which to-day is rejected by many as a debasement of human nature, and is forgotten by others as having no practical influence on our moral state. By the promulgation of the doctrine of the immaculate conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Church solemnly declares and defines as an article of faith, that the Blessed Virgin Mary is conceived without the stain of original sin by a special privilege and grace of God. If, then, Mary's sinlessness is an exception, the general rule remains in force, and all other human beings enter this world in the state of original sin. Thus, by the proclamation of the dogma of the immaculate conception, the Church combats human pride and sensuality, the foremost vices of the age. Prayer of the Church (located on the first day of the Novena). Litany of Loreto (located in the final section of the book). _Prayer_ MARY, unsullied lily of heavenly purity, I rejoice with thee, because at thy conception's earliest dawn thou wast full of grace and endowed with the perfect use of reason. I thank and adore the ever-blessed Trinity, who gave thee such high gifts. I am overwhelmed with shame in thy presence, to see myself so poor in grace. O thou who wast filled with heavenly grace, impart some portion of it to my soul, and make me share the treasures of thy immaculate conception. Hail Mary, etc. Ejaculation (located on the first day of the Novena). THIRD DAY Mary, the Victrix of Satan Preparatory Prayer (located on the first day of the Novena). MEDITATION THE immaculate conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary inaugurated the fulfilment of the divine promise made to our first parents in paradise in the words addressed to the serpent: "I shall put enmities between thee and the woman, and thy seed and her seed; she shall crush thy head" (_Gen._ iii. 15). Mary is the woman in whom Satan never had a part. Her intimate connection with God was announced by the angel: "Hail, full of grace; the Lord is with thee." Now was fulfilled the saying of the Psalmist, "The Most High hath sanctified His own tabernacle. God is in the midst thereof, it shall not be moved: God will help it in the morning early" (_Ps._ xlv. 5-6). Mary was chosen to be the glorious tabernacle of the Son of God "in the morning early," that is, in the first moment of her existence. God called her into being that she might assume the exalted dignity of the Mother of His Son, and therefore granted her the singular privilege of exemption from original sin. In her were fulfilled Solomon's prophetic words of praise, "Thou art all fair, O my love, and there is not a spot in thee" (_Cant._ iv. 7). It was in view of her Son's merits applied to her beforehand that God thus produced in her the image of the new man regenerated in the Holy Ghost. PRACTICE THE spirit of darkness holds mankind enslaved, but one human being escapes him. A destructive fire lays waste the whole earth, but one tree remains unscathed. A terrible tyrant conquers the whole world, but one fortified city repels his assaults. This human being retaining liberty, this tree escaping destruction, this city repelling the enemy's attack is the Blessed Virgin Mary. Will the almighty and merciful God, who has accomplished such great things in Mary, who has selected her for His Mother, not listen to her prayers when she intercedes for us? St. William of Paris exclaims: "No other created being can obtain for us so many and so great graces from God as His Mother. By the all-powerful might of her intercession He honors her not only as His handmaid, but also as His Mother." Therefore we ought not be surprised when the holy Fathers maintain that a single sigh of Mary is more effective with God than the combined intercession of all the angels and saints. If, then, Mary's power is so great, she will surely hear us when we invoke her help in our combat with Satan. Having conquered him herself, she will also help us to conquer him. Prayer of the Church (located on the first day of the Novena). Litany of Loreto (located in the final section of the book). _Prayer_ MARY, thou mystical rose of purity, my heart rejoices with thine at the glorious triumph which thou didst gain over the infernal serpent by thy immaculate conception, and because thou wast conceived without stain of original sin. I thank and praise with my whole heart the ever-blessed Trinity, who granted thee this glorious privilege; and I pray thee to obtain for me strength to overcome all the wiles of the infernal foe, and never to stain my soul with sin. Be thou mine aid; make me, by thy protection, victorious over the common foe of our eternal welfare. Hail Mary, etc. Ejaculation (located on the first day of the Novena). FOURTH DAY Mary without Actual Sin Preparatory Prayer (located on the first day of the Novena). MEDITATION MARY conceived without sin is the most blessed daughter of the eternal Father, the real and true Mother of the divine Son, the elect spouse of the Holy Ghost. But in the world, in what condition do we behold her? She dwells not in a splendid palace; she is not surrounded by a retinue of servants ready at every moment to do her bidding; she is not exempt from trials and suffering. On the contrary, she is poor; she lives in obscurity, and suffered so much on earth that, without shedding her blood, she merits to be styled the queen of martyrs. Her heart was transfixed with the sword of sorrow. Mary is not exempt from tribulations and adversity; but one thing God does not permit to touch her, _i.e.,_ sin. Hence Holy Church applies to her the words, "Thou art all fair, O my love, and there is not a spot in thee" (_Cant._ iv. 7). PRACTICE THOUGH we were not preserved from sin like Mary, yet God in His ineffable goodness and mercy granted us the grace to be cleansed from sin and to be clothed with the garment of sanctifying grace in Baptism. No treasure of the world can be compared with this prerogative. But as we bear this grace in a fragile vase, we must be most careful to protect and preserve it in ourselves and others from all danger. Let the Blessed Virgin Mary be our example. Well knowing the inestimable value of the grace conferred upon her, she guarded it with the greatest care. Although exempt from concupiscence and "full of grace," she was so distrustful of herself as if she were in continual danger. How much more, then, must we use precaution to preserve in ourselves and in others this treasure of grace, since we feel in ourselves constantly the law of the flesh, which resists the law of the spirit, and urges us on to evil, whilst the world and the devil never weary in placing snares for us in order to accomplish our ruin. Therefore let us have recourse to Mary, and invoking her aid bravely resist all temptations. Prayer of the Church (located on the first day of the Novena). Litany of Loreto (located in the final section of the book). _Prayer_ MIRROR of holy purity, Mary, Virgin immaculate, great is my joy while I consider that, from thy immaculate conception, the most sublime and perfect virtues were infused into thy soul, and with them all the gifts of the Holy Ghost. I thank and praise the Most Holy Trinity, who bestowed on thee these high privileges. I pray thee, gentle Mother, obtain for me grace to practise virtue, and to make me worthy to become partaker of the gifts and graces of the Holy Ghost. Hail Mary, etc. Ejaculation (located on the first day of the Novena). FIFTH DAY Mary, Full of Grace Preparatory Prayer (located on the first day of the Novena). MEDITATION SATAN'S relation to God as His child was severed by sin. The beautiful image of God imprinted on man's soul was disfigured by it. But with the immaculate conception of Mary, a being full of grace, an object of God's supreme complacency entered this world. After the lapse of four thousand years God, in His wisdom, power, and love, for the first time again created a human being in that state in which He had originally created our first parents. Mary, from the first moment of her existence was, in virtue of the sanctifying grace infused into her soul, most intimately united with God, and endowed with the most precious gifts of heaven. Because she was predestined to become the Mother of the Redeemer of mankind, it was befitting that she should unite in herself all the gifts becoming to such an ineffable dignity. Hence she surpassed in grace and holiness all other created beings, and was consecrated a worthy temple of the incarnate Word. Therefore she was saluted by the angel as "full of grace," and the Church, in our behalf, addresses the Almighty: "O God, who through the immaculate conception of the Virgin didst prepare a worthy dwelling-place for Thy divine Son; grant, that, as in view of the death of that Son Thou didst preserve her from all taint, so Thou wouldst vouchsafe unto us that, cleansed from all sin by her intercession, we too may arrive at Thine eternal glory." PRACTICE THE world considers men according to their rank and station, their wealth and knowledge. God recognizes in them but one difference, that caused by the presence or absence of sanctifying grace in their soul. A soul in the state of sanctifying grace is God's friend; without it, His enemy. A man dying in the state of sanctifying grace is sure of eternal bliss. Therefore we ought to prize this grace above all else, and do everything in our power to preserve it. St. Leo exhorts us, "Recognize, O man, thy dignity! As thou hast received divine grace, beware of returning to your former sinful condition by a wicked life." Prayer of the Church (located on the first day of the Novena). Litany of Loreto (located in the final section of the book). _Prayer_ MARY, bright moon of purity, I rejoice with thee, because the mystery of thy immaculate conception was the beginning of salvation for the race of man and the joy of the whole world. I thank and bless the ever-blessed Trinity, who thus did magnify and glorify thee; and I beg of thee to obtain for me the grace so to profit by thy dear Son's death and passion, that His precious blood may not have been shed in vain for me upon the cross, but that, after a holy life, I may reach heaven in safety. Hail Mary, etc. Ejaculation (located on the first day of the Novena). SIXTH DAY Mary, Our Refuge Preparatory Prayer (located on the first day of the Novena). MEDITATION WE CARRY the precious treasure of sanctifying grace in a frail vessel. Our inclination to evil remains with us, and continues to impel us to that which is forbidden. On whom shall we call for aid? Call on Mary! She is conceived without sin. She, the lily among thorns, who never lost God's friendship, is our advocate. Let her, who was found worthy to become the Mother of our Redeemer, inspire you with trust and confidence. The Church invokes her as the refuge of sinners, and under no other title does she show her love for us more convincingly and her power with God more efficiently. PRACTICE WE MAY trust confidently in Mary's intercession and aid in all temptations and trials, if we but have recourse to her. Therefore St. John Damascene writes: "Come to my aid, O Mother of my Redeemer! Thou art my help, my consolation in life. Come to my aid, and I shall escape unscorched from the fire of temptation; amongst a thousand I shall remain unharmed; I shall brave the storms of assault unwrecked. Thy name is my shield, thy help my armor, thy protection my defense. With thee I boldly attack the enemy and drive him off in confusion; through thee I shall achieve a triumphant victory." In all temptations, therefore, let us have recourse to Mary and through her intercession we shall overcome them. Prayer of the Church (located on the first day of the Novena). Litany of Loreto (located in the final section of the book). _Prayer_ MARY immaculate, most brilliant star of purity, I rejoice with thee because thy immaculate conception has bestowed upon the angels in paradise the greatest joy. I thank and bless the ever-blessed Trinity, who enriched thee with this high privilege. O let me, too, one day enter into this heavenly joy, in the company of angels, that I may praise and bless thee, world without end. Hail Mary, etc. Ejaculation (located on the first day of the Novena). SEVENTH DAY Mary, the Mother of Chastity Preparatory Prayer (located on the first day of the Novena). MEDITATION HOLY Scripture and the Fathers agree in the statement that the Blessed Virgin Mary made the vow of perpetual virginity. For when the Archangel Gabriel brought God's message to the immaculate spouse of St. Joseph, that she was to become the Mother of the Most High, she asked, "How shall this be done, because I know not man?" (_Luke_ i. 34.) Indeed, Mary would not have been, in the full and most excellent sense of the word, the "Virgin of virgins," had she not from her own free choice vowed her virginity to God. During the whole Christian era there have been heroic souls who made the vow of perpetual chastity, consecrating themselves to God. Trusting in the powerful protection of the immaculate Virgin, they persevered in their resolve to bear this priceless treasure before God's throne despite the dangers of the world, the temptations of concupiscence, and the assaults of hell, and with the help of the queen of virgins they achieved a triumphant victory. PRACTICE SINCE the fall of Adam our senses are in rebellion against the law of God. "I see another law in my members, fighting against the law of my mind, and captivating me in the law of sin" (_Rom._ vii. 23). Chastity is the virtue which causes us the greatest struggles. St. Augustine says: "The fiercest of all combats is the one for the preservation of chastity, and we must engage in it every day." Fierce as this combat is, the aid which Mary gives her children to achieve victory is all-powerful. She sustains them by her maternal love and protection. Those who lead a chaste life receive the Divine Spirit, are happy in this life, and will receive a special crown in heaven. Among the means for the preservation of chastity, the following are specially recommended: The assiduous and constant practice of self-denial; the frequentation of the sacraments; the daily invocation of Mary for her aid and protection; scrupulous avoidance of the occasions of sin. St. Chrysostom writes: "He errs who believes that he can overcome his sensual propensities and preserve chastity by his own efforts. God's mercy must extinguish nature's ardor." Have recourse to the intercession of the immaculate Virgin and rest assured that you will obtain this mercy. Prayer of the Church (located on the first day of the Novena). Litany of Loreto (located in the final section of the book). _Prayer_ MARY immaculate, rising morn of purity, I rejoice with thee, gazing in wonder upon thy soul confirmed in grace from the very first moment of thy conception, and rendered inaccessible to sin. I thank and magnify the ever-blessed Trinity, who chose thee from all our race for this special privilege. Holy Virgin, obtain for me utter and constant hatred of all sin above every other evil, and let me rather die than ever again fall into sin. Hail Mary, etc. Ejaculation (located on the first day of the Novena). EIGHTH DAY The Image of the Immaculate Conception Preparatory Prayer (located on the first day of the Novena). MEDITATION CHRISTIAN art represents the Immaculate Conception as follows: The Blessed Virgin appears standing on a globe, about which is coiled a serpent holding an apple in its mouth. One of Mary's feet rests upon the serpent, the other is placed on the moon. Her eyes are raised toward heaven; her hands are either joined in prayer, or she holds a lily in her right, and places the left on her breast. Her dress is white; her ample mantle is of blue color. A crown of twelve stars encircles her head. These emblems typify in a most striking manner Mary's power and glory. "And a great sign appeared in heaven. A woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars" (_Apoc._ xii. 1). PRACTICE THE representation of the Immaculate Conception is very instructive. (1) Mary appears standing on the globe. This signifies that being human, she belongs to the earth, and yet is exalted above the world and sin; also, that she trampled under foot earthly possessions, vanities, and joys. (2) A serpent is coiled about the globe, bearing an apple in its mouth. This reminds us of the fall of our first parents, and of the consequences of their sin. (3) Mary's foot rests on the serpent, indicating that she never was under Satan's dominion, but was preserved from sin in the first moment of her existence. (4) Mary stands on the moon. The moon, on account of its changes, is an emblem of inconstancy. We see it at Mary's feet, to be reminded that we ought to be constant in faith and virtue. (5) Mary wears a crown, to indicate that she is a queen. The crown is composed of twelve stars: she is the queen of heaven. (6) Mary's dress is white, to denote her spotless purity and innocence. (7) She folds her hands in prayer, reminding us to imitate her example. (8) Or she holds a lily in her right hand, to indicate her virginity and chastity, and the sweet odor of her virtues. (9) Mary's mantle is blue, which color is emblematic of humility. Its folds are ample, to remind us that all who have recourse to her find a secure refuge in all dangers and necessities. Therefore let us invoke her intercession in the words of Holy Church: "We fly to thy patronage, O holy Mother of God. Despise not our petitions, and deliver us from all danger, O ever glorious and blessed Virgin!" Prayer of the Church (located on the first day of the Novena). Litany of Loreto (located in the final section of the book). _Prayer_ O SPOTLESS sun! O Virgin Mary! I congratulate thee. I rejoice with thee because in thy conception God gave thee grace greater and more boundless than He ever shed on all His angels and all the saints, together with all their merits. I am thankful and I marvel at the surpassing beneficence of the ever-blessed Trinity, who conferred on thee this privilege. O make me correspond with the grace of God and never abuse it. Change this heart of mine; make me now begin to amend my life. Hail Mary, etc. Ejaculation (located on the first day of the Novena). NINTH DAY The Feast of the Immaculate Conception Preparatory Prayer (located on the first day of the Novena). MEDITATION EARLY in the Christian era the feast of Mary's immaculate conception was observed in several countries. St. Anselm, Bishop of Canterbury, introduced it in England. A great number of Popes favored the doctrine of Mary's absolute sinlessness, and the adversaries of the Immaculate Conception were bidden to be silent and not publicly assert or defend their view. In 1477, Pope Sixtus IV prescribed the feast of the Immaculate Conception to be observed in the whole Church, and made it obligatory on priests to recite the special canonical office and to use the Mass formula published for the purpose. In 1846, the bishops of the United States assembled in plenary council in Baltimore elected the Blessed Virgin under the title of her immaculate conception Patroness of the Church in their country. Finally, Pope Pius IX, after consulting with the bishops throughout the world, and having implored the Holy Ghost for His guidance in prayer and fasting, promulgated, on December 8, 1854, the dogma which teaches that the Blessed Virgin Mary was in her conception, by a special grace and through the merits of her divine Son, preserved from the stain of original sin. This doctrine was received throughout the world with ineffable joy; and, indeed, no one who loves the Blessed Virgin can help rejoicing at this her most glorious privilege. The invocation, "Queen conceived without the stain of original sin," was added to the Litany of Loreto. In 1866, at the Second Plenary Council in Baltimore, the feast of the Immaculate Conception was raised to the rank of a holyday of obligation for the Church of the United States. PRACTICE IN THE inscrutable designs of His providence God ordained that the mystery of the immaculate conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary should be proclaimed an article of faith as late as the middle of the nineteenth century. But, then, its proclamation was attended by circumstances that undeniably proved that the Holy Father in pronouncing the dogma had been inspired and guided by the Holy Ghost. Let us praise God and thank Him for bestowing this glorious privilege on our beloved Mother, and let us often invoke her under her favorite title, the Immaculate Conception. St. Alphonsus Liguori tells us that the devotion to this mystery is especially efficacious in overcoming the temptations of impurity. Therefore he was accustomed to recommend to his penitents thus tempted to recite three times every day the Hail Mary in honor of Mary immaculate. And the Venerable John of Avila assures us that he never found any one who practised a true devotion to the Immaculate Conception of Mary, who did not in a short time obtain the gift of that virtue which renders us so dear to her immaculate heart. Prayer of the Church (located on the first day of the Novena). Litany of Loreto (located in the final section of the book). _Prayer_ O LIVING light of holiness, model of purity, Mary immaculate, virgin and mother! As soon as thou wast conceived thou didst profoundly adore thy God, giving Him thanks that in thee the ancient curse was revoked, and blessing came again upon the sinful sons of Adam. O make this blessing kindle in my heart love for God; and do thou fan this flame of love within me, that I may love Him constantly and one day in heaven eternally enjoy Him, there to thank Him more and more fervently for all the wondrous privileges conferred on thee, and to rejoice with thee for thy high crown of glory. Hail Mary, etc. Ejaculation (located on the first day of the Novena). II Novena in Honor of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary [Illustration: The Presentation of Mary in the Temple] FIRST DAY The Birth of Mary PREPARATORY PRAYER WE FLY to thy patronage, O holy Mother of God. Despise not our petitions in our necessities, and deliver us from all dangers, O ever glorious and blessed Virgin! MEDITATION MARY is born! The dawn announcing the coming salvation of mankind is at hand. The deep significance of Mary's birth is expressed in the words of the Church: "Thy birth, O virgin Mother of God, has brought joy to the world; for from thee is to come forth the Sun of Justice, Christ our Lord, to dispel the curse and bring the blessing, to conquer death and bring us everlasting life. On this day a light broke forth to brighten the paths of men through all time. Let us, then, rejoice in Mary's coming." Equally expressive and touching are the reflections of that great Doctor of the Church, St. Augustine: "The day has dawned, the long-wished-for day of the blessed and venerable Virgin Mary. Well may this earth of ours rejoice and be glad for having been honored and sanctified by the birth of such a virgin." PRACTICE LET us, then, rejoice in Mary's coming. Let us hail the birth of her who attained the dignity of mother without losing the high privilege of a virgin. Let us imitate her holy life, that she may become our intercessor before the throne of her Son, our judge and redeemer. By becoming the Mother of God she became also our Mother. As Mother of the Redeemer she is also the Mother of the redeemed. Richard of St. Lawrence writes: "If we desire grace and help, let us have recourse to Mary and we shall obtain what we desire." For, as St. Alphonsus remarks: "All graces and gifts which God has resolved to bestow upon us He gives us through the hands of Mary." PRAYER OF THE CHURCH GRANT to us, Thy servants, we beseech Thee, O Lord, the gift of heavenly grace; that to those for whom the delivery of the Blessed Virgin was the commencement of salvation, the commemoration of her nativity may give increasing peace. Through Christ our Lord. Amen. Litany of Loreto (located in the final section of the book). _Prayer_ MOST lovely child, who by thy birth hast comforted the world, made glad the heavens, struck terror into hell, brought help to the fallen, consolation to the sad, health to the sick, joy to all; we pray thee with all fervent love, be thou born again in spirit in our souls through thy most holy love. Renew our fervor in thy service, rekindle in our hearts the fire of thy love, and bid all virtues blossom there, which may cause us to find more and more fervor in thy gracious eyes. O Mary, may we feel the saving power of thy sweetest name! Let it ever be our comfort to call on that great name in all our troubles; let it be our hope in dangers, our shield in temptation, and in death our last aspiration. _Ejaculation_ O Mary, who didst come into the world free from stain: obtain of God for me that I may leave it without sin! Indulgence. 100 days, once a day. (Pius IX, March 27, 1863.) SECOND DAY Mary, the Elect of God Preparatory Prayer (located on the first day of the Novena). MEDITATION WE FIND the explanation of the great prerogatives and privileges which God bestowed upon the Blessed Virgin Mary by reflecting on her singular and glorious predestination. From all eternity she was predestined to become the Mother of His divine Son; therefore, says Pope Pius IX, God loved her above all created beings, and in His special predilection made her the object of His divine complacency. With singular appropriateness we may apply to her the words of Holy Scripture, "I have loved thee with an everlasting love" (_Jer._ xxxi. 3). The eternal Father regarded Mary as His beloved Daughter; the divine Son honored her as His dearest Mother; the Holy Ghost loved her as His spotless Spouse. "And," says St. Anselm, "they loved each other with an affection unsurpassed by any other." PRACTICE INSPIRED by the contemplation of Mary's extraordinary privileges, St. Anselm exclaims: "Thou, O Mary, art more exalted than the patriarchs, greater than the martyrs, more glorious than the confessors, purer than the virgins, and therefore thou, alone, canst achieve more than they can without thee." Let us, then, rejoice that we possess such a powerful advocate in heaven, and let us place implicit trust in her. But let us also co-operate with the graces and favors which she obtains for us. Moreover, let us remember that we grievously offend God and Mary if we abuse what we obtain through her intercession to gratify our evil inclinations, and that the graces she obtains for us for our salvation will redound to our ruin if we do not use them for the glory of God and the promotion of our soul's welfare. Prayer of the Church (located on the first day of the Novena). Litany of Loreto (located in the final section of the book). _Prayer_ WE HAIL thee, Mary, who, sprung from the royal line of David, didst come forth to the light of heaven with high honor from the womb of holy Anna, thy most happy mother. Hail Mary, etc. Ejaculation (located on the first day of the Novena). THIRD DAY Mary, the Child of Royalty Preparatory Prayer (located on the first day of the Novena). MEDITATION ACCORDING to her lineage, as traced in two Gospels, Mary numbers among her paternal and maternal ancestors the holiest and most renowned personages of the Old Testament. We find amongst them Abraham, the friend of God, the father of Israel and of all the faithful; then David, the man after God's own heart, the inspired Royal Prophet; and Solomon, the wise and mighty king, and the whole line of the kings of Juda. On her mother's side she belonged to the tribe of Levi, and was descended from its noblest and most prominent family, that of Aaron the High Priest, and was therefore a relative of the High Priests of the Old Testament. Thus royal and sacerdotal prestige distinguished Mary's lineage. PRACTICE THE Blessed Virgin was not proud of her illustrious ancestry, and not depressed because of the downfall of her family, but applied herself diligently to adhere to the faith and follow the example of her ancestors. Remembering the wicked members of her family, she learned from them that temporal greatness, success, wealth, and glory are more dangerous to virtue than poverty, retirement, and work. Let us imitate Mary's example. Even possessed of the most excellent prestiges of the natural order, of ourselves we are nothing. "What hast thou that thou hast not received? And if thou hast received, why dost thou glory as if thou hadst not received?" (1 _Cor._ iv. 7.) Therefore do not overestimate yourself; do not be conceited; do not strive for praise, honors, and high station; be not boastful or arrogant; do not presume on your merits; rather be distrustful of yourself and patiently bear affronts, neglect, and humiliations. However poor you may be, be content with your lot, remembering the words of the Apostle: "They that will become rich fall into temptation, and into the snare of the devil, and into many unprofitable and hurtful desires which draw men into destruction and perdition. For the desire of money is the root of all evils: which some coveting have erred from the faith, and have entangled themselves in many sorrows" (1 _Tim._ vi. 9, 10). Prayer of the Church (located on the first day of the Novena). Litany of Loreto (located in the final section of the book). _Prayer_ WE HAIL thee, O Mary, heavenly babe, white dove of purity, who, despite the infernal serpent, was conceived free from the taint of Adam's sin. With all our hearts we pray thee to vouchsafe in thy goodness to come down again and be born in spirit in our souls, that, led captive by thy loveliness and sweetness, they may ever live united to thy most sweet and loving heart. Hail Mary, etc. Ejaculation (located on the first day of the Novena). FOURTH DAY Mary, the Child of Pious Parents Preparatory Prayer (located on the first day of the Novena). MEDITATION TRADITION tells us that Mary's parents were called Joachim and Anna. The holy Fathers rival each other in praising the virtue of this holy couple. St. Epiphanius writes: "Joachim and Anna were pleasing in the sight of God because of the holiness of their lives." St. Andrew of Crete remarks: "Joachim was eminent for the mildness and fortitude of his character. The law of God was his rule of life. He was just, and never relaxed in the fervor of his love of God. Anna was no less noted for her meekness, continence, and chastity." St. Jerome relates: "The life of this holy couple was simple and just before the Lord, edifying and virtuous before men." St. John Damascene exclaims: "O happy, chaste, and immaculate couple, Joachim and Ann! You are known, according to the Lord's word, by your fruit. Your life was pleasing in the sight of God, and worthy of her who was born of you." PRACTICE IT is a great blessing, and one to be esteemed more highly than wealth and high station, to have God-fearing, pious parents. For their sake God is gracious to the children and lavishes His gifts on them. It is certainly a great privilege to be offered up to God immediately after birth by the hands of a pious mother. To have, from childhood up, the example and guidance of virtuous parents is certainly of the greatest importance. St. Chrysostom writes: "The parents' example is the book from which the child learns." A pious bishop was wont to say: "The good example of the parents is the best catechism and the truest mirror that a family can have." If Christian parents imitate the example of Joachim and Ann the blessing of God will rest on them and on their children; for because her parents were so dear to Mary, she will not refuse to join them in their prayers for us. Prayer of the Church (located on the first day of the Novena). Litany of Loreto (located in the final section of the book). _Prayer_ WE HAIL thee, brightest morn, forerunner of the heavenly Sun of Justice, who didst first bring light to earth. Humbly prostrate, with all our hearts we pray thee to vouchsafe in thy goodness to be born again in spirit in our souls, that, led captive by thy loveliness and sweetness, they may ever live united to thy most sweet and loving heart. Hail Mary, etc. Ejaculation (located on the first day of the Novena). FIFTH DAY Mary's Supernatural Prerogatives Preparatory Prayer (located on the first day of the Novena). MEDITATION MARY was the masterpiece of God's creation; her soul was the most perfect ever dwelling in a human body. A pious tradition tells us that she possessed the use of reason much earlier than other children. Her intellect was illuminated by supernatural light; her will was exempt from concupiscence. Being preserved from original sin, she surpassed in holiness, from the first moment of her existence, all angels and men. She possessed all virtues in the highest degree, because of her faithful co-operation with sanctifying grace and with the countless actual graces granted to her. She lived in constant communion with God, undisturbed by evil inclinations from within or temptations from without. PRACTICE THROUGH the effects of original sin we have lost the supernatural prerogative of original justice, and even after receiving sanctifying grace in holy Baptism we are exposed to many temptations. Our life is a constant warfare. We must, however, not despair in this struggle, for if we are true children of Mary she will come to our aid. In all temptations Mary is the "Help of Christians" if we have recourse to her. But if we wish her to help us, we must not expose ourselves unnecessarily to temptation. "He that loveth danger shall perish in it" (_Ecclus._ iii. 27). This sad experience has come to many. Let us, therefore, avoid the danger and occasion of sin; and whenever evil approaches us in any shape, let us call upon Mary, and we may rest assured that she will assist us. "I shall certainly triumph over my enemies," exclaims St. Alphonsus, "if I place my trust in thee, O Mary, and if thou art my shield and protection against them." Prayer of the Church (located on the first day of the Novena). Litany of Loreto (located in the final section of the book). _Prayer_ WE HAIL thee, O chosen one! who like the untarnished sun didst burst forth into being in the dark night of sin. Humbly prostrate at thy feet, O Mary, we give thee our homage, and with all our hearts we pray thee to vouchsafe in thy goodness to be born again in our souls, that, led captive by thy loveliness and sweetness, they may ever live united to thy most sweet and loving heart. Hail Mary, etc. Ejaculation (located on the first day of the Novena). SIXTH DAY Mary, the Joy of the Most Holy Trinity Preparatory Prayer (located on the first day of the Novena). MEDITATION IN THE child Mary the eternal Father beheld His unsullied glorious image, which image had been defaced in all other human beings by original and actual sin. What a joy to Him to behold this stainless, immaculate child! And how great must have been the joy of the Son of God at the birth of her who was to be His Mother! From her He was to take that sacred body in which He was to dwell on earth, the blood of which He was to shed on the cross for our redemption, and in which He was to return to heaven to sit at the right hand of the Father. He will call her Mother, and regard her with all the filial tenderness of a child for his mother. She will love Him in return with a true mother's affection and devotion. As the Mother of Sorrows she will weep over His inanimate body taken down from the cross. But like Himself, she will leave the tomb, and reign at His side as the queen of heaven. How great, then, must have been His joy at the birth of this child! The Holy Ghost, too, rejoiced at Mary's birth. He infused into her the plenitude of His holy love, for she was destined to become the Mother of God. And how Mary will love God, from whom she received so many and so great graces, and whom she is to bear in her arms as her real and true Son! This, her divine Son's love for mankind, will be imparted also to her. Therefore the Holy Ghost rejoices at this child, who received into her heart the fulness of His grace, and shall be the helper of those who have recourse to her. PRACTICE RAISE your spirit above time and space; try to contemplate well the mystery of Mary's predestination. To make us realize the great privileges conferred upon her, the Church applies to her the words of Holy Scripture, "He that shall find me, shall find life, and have salvation from the Lord" (_Prov._ viii. 35). Only when we consider Mary as the Mother of God, do we arrive at a right conception of her great dignity. Hence St. Bonaventure exclaims, "God might have created a more beautiful world; He might have made heaven more glorious; but it was impossible for Him to exalt a creature higher than Mary in making her His Mother." Prayer of the Church (located on the first day of the Novena). Litany of Loreto (located in the final section of the book). _Prayer_ WE HAIL thee, beauteous moon, O Mary most holy, who didst shed light upon a world wrapped in the densest darkness of sin. Humbly prostrate at thy feet, we give thee our homage, and with all our hearts we pray thee to vouchsafe in thy goodness to be born again in spirit in our souls, that led captive by thy loveliness and sweetness they may ever live united to thy most sweet and loving heart. Hail Mary, etc. Ejaculation (located on the first day of the Novena). SEVENTH DAY The Angels Rejoice at Mary's Birth Preparatory Prayer (located on the first day of the Novena). MEDITATION DESCRIBING God's power and wisdom as shown in creation, Holy Scripture, according to the explanation of the Fathers, introduces Him as saying, "When the morning stars praised me together, and all the sons of God made a joyful melody" (_Job_ xxxviii. 7), and by these words intends to convey with what joy the angels praised God's omnipotence on beholding the wonders of creation. What, then, must have been their joy on beholding this new wonder of divine power and wisdom, the child Mary, destined to be their queen. Filled with admiration they exclaimed, "Who is she that cometh forth as the morning rising, fair as the moon, bright as the sun, terrible as an army set in array?" (_Cant._ vi. 9.) And moreover, if, as Our Lord declares, the angels rejoice at the conversion of a sinner, how great must have been their joy at the birth of her who was to be the refuge of sinners and the mother of Him who was to be the Redeemer of sinners? Again, the angels rejoiced at Mary's birth, because she would fill, through the salvation of mankind by her divine Son, the places made vacant in heaven by the apostate angels. PRACTICE GOOD children rejoice on the birthday of their parents and gratefully remember all the benefits they have received from them. Thus should we, also, celebrate the nativity of the Blessed Virgin by a grateful remembrance of the innumerable graces, individual and general, we received through her intercession. In acknowledging Mary's co-operation with our salvation, Holy Church calls her our mediatrix, and greets her as the "Cause of our joy," because, though we receive grace from Christ, it comes to us through her mediation. What cause, then, have we not for rejoicing at her birth! Again, greeting Mary as the cause of our joy, let us remember the protection she extended to the Church in times of adversity and persecution; let us, furthermore, remember all the graces which, according to the holy Fathers, are dispensed to us by Mary's hands. "Of her plenitude," says St. Bonaventure, "we have all received; the captive liberty, the sick health, the sad consolation, the sinner pardon, the just grace." Therefore the Church invokes Mary as the mother of mercy, the health of the sick, the comforter of the afflicted, the refuge of sinners, the help of Christians, in a word, as the cause of our joy. Prayer of the Church (located on the first day of the Novena). Litany of Loreto (located in the final section of the book). _Prayer_ WE HAIL thee, fair soul of Mary, who from all eternity wast God's, and God's alone; sanctuary and living temple of the Holy Ghost; sun without blemish, because free from original sin. With all our hearts we pray to thee, O Mary, to vouchsafe in thy goodness to be born again in spirit in our souls, that, led captive by thy loveliness and sweetness, they may ever live united to thy most sweet and loving heart. Hail Mary, etc. Ejaculation (located on the first day of the Novena). EIGHTH DAY The Joy of the Just in Limbo at Mary's Birth Preparatory Prayer (located on the first day of the Novena). MEDITATION FOR four thousand years the just in limbo sighed for redemption, and sent up to Heaven the plaintive cry, "O that Thou wouldst rend the heavens, and wouldst come down!" (_Is._ xiv. 1.) "Drop down dew, ye heavens, from above, and let the clouds rain the just; let the earth be opened and bud forth a Saviour" (_Is._ xlv. 8). What joy must have filled the souls of the just when they heard the welcome tidings of the birth of Mary, the virgin Mother of the promised Messias; how great their consolation at the rising of that dawn which preceded the Sun of Justice, whose splendor was to illuminate the darkness of them that sat in the shadow of death! PRACTICE A JOY similar to that which filled the captive souls in limbo at Mary's birth now fills the souls in purgatory when we implore her to come to their relief. Contemplating the immense love of the Most Holy Trinity for Mary, we may not doubt but that, by her intercession, she might at once deliver all the suffering souls from their prison, if such were in accordance with God's will. But God's wisdom and providence have decreed otherwise. Therefore Mary does not pray for the release of all souls in purgatory, but recommends them, in conformity with God's will, to His mercy. St. Bernardine of Sienna applies to Mary the words of Holy Scripture, "I have penetrated into the bottom of the deep and have walked in the waves of the sea" (_Ecclus._ xxiv. 8), and says: "She descends into that sea of suffering and soothes the pains of the poor souls." St. Denis the Carthusian remarks, that when the name of Mary is mentioned in purgatory, the souls there imprisoned experience the same relief as when a sick person hears words of consolation on his bed of pain. Therefore let us entrust our prayers for the souls in purgatory to Mary. She will present our petitions to God, and thus presented, He will speedily hear and graciously grant them. Prayer of the Church (located on the first day of the Novena). Litany of Loreto (located in the final section of the book). _Prayer_ WE HAIL thee, strong child, who didst put to flight all hell and the powers of darkness. We give thee our homage, and with all our hearts we pray thee to vouchsafe in thy goodness to be born again in spirit in our souls, that, led captive by thy loveliness and sweetness, they may ever live united to thy most sweet and loving heart. Hail Mary, etc. Ejaculation (located on the first day of the Novena). NINTH DAY The Holy Name of Mary Preparatory Prayer (located on the first day of the Novena). MEDITATION ST. ALPHONSUS writes of the name of Mary: "This name was neither invented on earth, nor imposed by human agency. It came from heaven and was given to the Mother of God by divine command." Just as it is a peculiar glory of our Saviour's name, that "God hath given Him a name which is above all names, that in the name of Jesus every knee should bow of those that are in heaven, on earth, and under the earth" (_Philipp._ ii. 9), thus it also behooves that Mary, the most perfect, the most pure, and most exalted of all created beings, should receive a most holy, lovely, and powerful name. St. Methodius declares that the name of Mary is so rich in grace and blessing, that no one can pronounce it devoutly without at the same time receiving a spiritual favor. Bl. Jordan exclaims: "Let a heart be ever so obdurate, let a man even despair of God's mercy, if he have recourse to thee, O Mary, virgin most clement, he can not fail to be softened and filled with confidence if he invokes thy name; for thou wilt inspire him with hope in God's mercy, pardon, and grace." PRACTICE IT IS, then, meet and just that we should devoutly honor and praise the name of Mary. Let us never mention it except in reverence and devotion. Let us invoke Mary by it in all dangers of body and soul, mindful of the words of St. Bernard: "O sinner, when the floods and tempests of this earthly life overwhelm thee so that thou canst not firmly set thy foot, turn not away thy gaze from the light of this guiding star. When the storms of temptation assail thee, and the rocks and quicksands of vexation and trial threaten to shatter thy bark of hope, look up to that bright star in the heavens, and call on the name of Mary. When the billows of pride and of ambition, when the floods of calumny are about to submerge thee, look up to this star and call on the name of Mary. When anger, avarice, and concupiscence convulse the peace of thy soul, look up to this star and call on Mary. When thy sins rise up like hideous monsters before thy troubled vision, when thy conscience stings thee, when the terrors of future judgment fill thee with deadly anguish, when gloom and sadness overpower thee, when thou findest thyself on the brink of hellish despair, take courage; think of Mary, and thou wilt find from thy own inward experience how true are the sayings of those who tell thee that the name of the Blessed Virgin is 'Star of the Sea,' the name of the Virgin is Mary." Prayer of the Church (located on the first day of the Novena). Litany of Loreto (located in the final section of the book). _Prayer_ WE HAIL thee, beloved child Mary, adorned with every virtue, immeasurably above all the saints, and therefore worthy Mother of the Saviour of the world, who by the operation of the Holy Ghost didst bring forth the incarnate Word. We give thee our homage, and with all our hearts we pray thee to vouchsafe in thy goodness to be born again in our souls, that, led captive by thy loveliness and sweetness, they may ever live united to thy most sweet and loving heart. Hail Mary, etc. Ejaculation (located on the first day of the Novena). III Novena for the Feast of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary [Illustration: The Annunciation] FIRST DAY The Annunciation PREPARATORY PRAYER MY QUEEN, my Mother, remember I am thine own. Keep me, guard me, as thy property and possession! Indulgence. 40 days, every time. (Pius IX, August 5, 1851.) MEDITATION AT NAZARETH, a mountain village in Judea, lived poor and in obscurity Mary, the virgin selected by God to become the Mother of His Son. On March 25th she was in prayer in her chamber, and perhaps sent up to heaven the yearning petition, "Drop down dew, ye heavens, from above, and let the clouds rain the just; let the earth be opened and bud a Saviour" (_Is._ xlv. 8). Behold, suddenly the chamber is suffused by a heavenly light. The archangel Gabriel stands reverently before her and says, "Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women. And when Mary heard the angel's words, she was troubled at his saying, and thought with herself what manner of salutation this should be" (_Luke_ i. 28, 29). PRACTICE THE angel's salutation comprises two titles of ineffable greatness. Mary is called "full of grace," because of her innocence and purity; she is called "blessed among women," because she is the elect Mother of God. Never before was a human being thus greeted. It was God Himself who sent the message to Mary. A good angel now repaired the harm once done by a bad angel. For Lucifer, the fallen angel, seduced Eve to sin and thereby caused the ruin of the whole human race; now another angel, Gabriel, was sent to announce the glad tidings to Mary, that she was to conceive the Redeemer from sin, who was to accomplish the salvation of mankind. Mary was troubled at the angel's words, and reflected on the meaning of the message. St. Ambrose writes: "Mary was troubled, not because the angel was a heavenly spirit, but because he appeared to her in the form of a youth. Still more was she troubled at the praises spoken to her. She was innocent and humble, and therefore reflected on the meaning of the message. She had always considered herself as a poor and unknown virgin; she deemed herself unworthy of God's grace; therefore she was troubled at the salutation. In that decisive moment she was and remained our model." PRAYER OF THE CHURCH POUR forth, we beseech Thee, O Lord, Thy grace into our hearts, that we unto whom the Incarnation of Christ Thy Son was made known by the message of an angel, may, by His passion and cross, be brought to the glory of the resurrection. Through the same Christ our Lord. Amen. Litany of Loreto (located in the final section of the book). _Prayer_ WITH wonder I revere thee, holiest Virgin Mary; for of all God's creatures thou wast the humblest on the very day of thy annunciation, when God Himself exalted Thee to the sublime dignity of His own Mother. O mightiest Virgin, make me, wretched sinner that I am, know the depths of my own nothingness, and make me humble myself at last with all my heart, beneath the feet of all men. Hail Mary, etc. _Ejaculation_ Virgin Mary, Mother of God, pray to Jesus for me! Indulgence. 50 days, once a day. (Leo XIII, March 20, 1894.) SECOND DAY The Import of the Angel's Salutation Preparatory Prayer (located on the first day of the novena). MEDITATION "HAIL, full of grace!" Mary was greeted as full of grace by the Giver of grace Himself. The angel's salutation meant: "The grace of God has preserved thee from all sin. Neither the stain of original sin, nor the guilt of actual sin, ever obscured the mirror of thy soul. By the special favor of God the most sublime virtues were infused into thy soul." "The Lord is with thee." From all eternity the Lord was with Mary. He was with her not only as He is with His whole creation, but He was with her in a special manner. The eternal Father was with her from all eternity as with His beloved Daughter. The divine Son was with her from all eternity as with His chosen Mother. The Holy Ghost was with her from all eternity as with His beloved Spouse. This intimate union never was disrupted. Therefore Mary is "Blessed among women," and ever was, and ever shall be the beloved of the Lord. PRACTICE CONSIDER how Mary receives the angel's message. She is troubled, she is disturbed at the praise, at the reverence of the angel. What an example of humility! Let us imitate her in this virtue by the acknowledgment before God of our weakness, our unworthiness, our nothingness, and by ordering our whole being accordingly. Humility renders us pleasing in the sight of God and makes us susceptible of His grace. Hence St. Augustine writes: "God resists the proud and gives His grace to the humble. What a terrible punishment for the proud, what a splendid reward for the humble! The proud man resembles a rock, the humble man a beautiful valley. The grace of God descends from heaven like a gentle rain. It can not penetrate the rock of pride, and hence the proud man loses God's grace and love. But in the valley of humility the waters of divine grace can diffuse themselves and fructify the soul of the humble man, so that it may bring forth fruit unto eternal life." Prayer of the Church (located on the first day of the novena). Litany of Loreto (located in the final section of the book). _Prayer_ O MARY, holiest Virgin, who, when the archangel Gabriel hailed thee in thy annunciation, and thou wast raised by God above all choirs of the angels, didst confess thyself "the handmaid of the Lord"; do thou obtain for me true humility and a truly angelic purity, and so to live on earth as ever to be worthy of the blessings of God. Hail Mary, etc. Ejaculation (located on the first day of the novena). THIRD DAY The Effect of the Angel's Salutation Preparatory Prayer (located on the first day of the novena). MEDITATION THE effect of the angel's salutation on Mary was striking. Imbued with sentiments quite different from ours, she was troubled at the praise addressed to her. Meanwhile she is silent and considers within herself what might be the meaning of these words. And now the angel calls her by name, saying, "Fear not, Mary, for thou hast found grace with God. Behold thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and shalt bring forth a son, and thou shalt call His name Jesus. He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God shall give unto Him the throne of David His father: and He shall reign in the house of Jacob for ever, and of His kingdom there shall be no end" (_Luke_ i. 30-33). PRACTICE LET us admire the prudence shining forth in Mary. After hearing the angel's words of praise she was silent and thought within herself what kind of a salutation this was. She is very careful and prudent. On this her conduct St. Thomas Aquinas remarks: "Mary did not refuse to believe, nor did she receive the message with credulity. She avoided Eve's gullibility and the distrust of Zachary the high priest." And St. Bernard writes: "Mary preferred to remain silent in humility, rather than to speak inconsiderately." Let us strive always to speak and act with deliberation. Our conversation ought always to be judicious; for often a word spoken inconsiderately causes bitter regret. St. Thomas Aquinas observes: "Song was given to a number of creatures, but human beings alone were endowed with the faculty of speech, to indicate that in speaking we should use our reason." And St. Chrysostom says: "Let us always guard our tongue; not that it should always be silent, but that it should speak at the proper time." Prayer of the Church (located on the first day of the novena). Litany of Loreto (located in the final section of the book). _Prayer_ I REJOICE with thee, O Virgin ever blessed, because by thy humble word of consent thou didst draw down from the bosom of the eternal Father the divine Word into thy own pure bosom. O draw, then, ever my heart to God; and with God bring grace into my heart that I may ever sincerely bless thy word of consent, so mighty and so efficacious. Hail Mary, etc. Ejaculation (located on the first day of the novena). FOURTH DAY Mary's Question Preparatory Prayer (located on the first day of the novena). MEDITATION WELL versed as Mary was in Holy Scripture, she fully understood the words she had heard and knew their great import. She was destined to become the Mother of the Most High, the Son of God. But there is an obstacle which prevents her from giving immediate assent. She has solemnly vowed her virginity to God. Not knowing how the mystery announced to her was to be accomplished, and intent above all on keeping inviolate her vow, she interrupts her silence by the short but comprehensive question, "How shall this be done, because I know not man?" (_Luke_ i. 34.) This is the first word of Mary recorded in the Gospel. PRACTICE "HOW shall this be done, because I know not man?" Truly a momentous question, proceeding from her knowledge of the great excellence and value before God of virginity, which, before Mary, was unknown to the world. Let us follow Mary's example and esteem holy purity and chastity above all things. Let us remember how highly Holy Scripture extols this virtue. "O how beautiful is the chaste generation with glory; for the memory thereof is immortal, because it is known both with God and with men" (_Wis._ iv. 1). St. Athanasius writes: "O chastity, thou precious pearl, found by few, even hated by some, and sought only by those who are worthy of thee! Thou art the joy of the prophets, the ornament of the apostles, the life of the angels, the crown of the saints." Let us therefore carefully guard this inestimable treasure. Prayer of the Church (located on the first day of the novena). Litany of Loreto (located in the final section of the book). _Prayer_ MARY, mighty Virgin, thou who on the day of thy annunciation wast found by the archangel so prompt and ready to do God's will, and to correspond with the desires of the august Trinity, who wished for thy consent in order to redeem the world; obtain for me that, whatever happens, good or ill, I may turn to my God, and with resignation say, "Be it done unto me according to thy word." Hail Mary, etc. Ejaculation (located on the first day of the novena). FIFTH DAY The Solution Preparatory Prayer (located on the first day of the novena). MEDITATION THE angel explains to Mary how, without detriment to her virginity, she will become a mother. He says, "The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Most High shall overshadow thee. And therefore also the Holy which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God" (_Luke_ i. 35). St. Bernard remarks: "Let him who can, comprehend it. Who, but that most happy Virgin who was worthy to experience the influence and effect of the power of the Most High and to penetrate this sublime mystery, can understand how the divine Light was poured into the Virgin's womb? The Most Holy Trinity alone co-operated in the sacred act, and it remains an impenetrable mystery to all, except to her who was called to so sublime a destiny." PRACTICE MARY did not entertain a single doubt concerning the wonders which the angel announced to her about the coming Messias and His kingdom. She believed with simple faith the words of the heavenly messenger. Only about that which concerned her personally she asked a question. When the wonderful mystery was explained to her, she did not ask how this _can_ be done, but only how it _shall_ be done. And after the angel had declared to her that she shall conceive by the Holy Ghost, she was fully resigned and announced her implicit belief in these humble words: "Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it done to me according to thy word" (_Luke_ i. 38). Therefore the Holy Ghost Himself praised her by the mouth of Elizabeth: "Blessed art thou that hast believed" (_Luke_ i. 45). Let us remain steadfast in the profession of all articles of faith, and let us oppose, like a strong shield, the words, "Nothing is impossible with God," to all attacks of unbelievers, and to all doubts that may arise in our own minds. Prayer of the Church (located on the first day of the novena). Litany of Loreto (located in the final section of the book). _Prayer_ MARY most holy, I see that thy obedience united thee so closely to God, that all creation never shall know again union so fair and so perfect. I am overwhelmed with confusion in seeing how my sins have separated me from God. Help me, then, gentle Mother, to repent sincerely of my sins, that I may be reunited to thy loving Jesus. Hail Mary, etc. Ejaculation (located on the first day of the novena). SIXTH DAY Mary's Consent Preparatory Prayer (located on the first day of the novena). MEDITATION WE ADMIRE the creative word of God, by which heaven and earth were called into existence. But Mary's word, "Be it done to me according to thy word," is even mightier and more efficacious; for it commands the obedience even of the almighty Creator. Without this word of humility and obedience the incarnation of our divine Saviour would not have been accomplished. Mary does not say, "I accept the proposal, I agree to the proposition," nor does she use other words of similar import. She simply says, "Be it done to me according to thy word." It was not her own choice, nor her own decision, but a voluntary, full, and complete surrender to the will of God that the message found in Mary's soul, which was expressed in these words. What a source of consolation to her in the subsequent sorrowful and afflicted stages of her life was this complete surrender to God's will! It comprised the tranquilizing assurance that He to whose designs she submitted, would endow her with the fortitude and strength necessary to co-operate with them. PRACTICE JUST as our divine Lord Himself became obedient unto death, thus also His incarnation and the motherhood of Mary were the result of obedience. Again, in contemplating the works that in the course of time were undertaken in the Church for the glory of God and the salvation of man, we find that only those were really great, effective, and enduring, which had their beginning, continuation, and consummation in obedience. Rejoice, then, if it is your happy lot to walk in the safe path of obedience. Avail yourself of every opportunity to submit your will to the will of your Superiors. They are the representatives of God. By obeying them we fulfil His will, not the will of men. St. Bonaventure calls obedience the key of heaven. Prayer of the Church (located on the first day of the novena). Litany of Loreto (located in the final section of the book). _Prayer_ HOLIEST Mary, if through thy modesty thou wert troubled at the appearance of the archangel Gabriel in thy dwelling, I am terrified at the sight of my monstrous pride. By thy incomparable humility, which brought forth God for men, reopened paradise and let the captive souls go free from their prison, draw me, I pray thee, out of the deep pit into which my sins have cast me, and make me save my soul. Hail Mary, etc. Ejaculation (located on the first day of the novena). SEVENTH DAY Mary's Fortitude in Suffering Preparatory Prayer (located on the first day of the novena). MEDITATION ALTHOUGH Mary's consent was free, and freely given, she was clearly convinced and perfectly conscious of the responsibility, the obligations, and the duties involved by that consent, and which she now assumed. Great are the duties and tearful the days of a mother who has to raise her Son, who is also God, to be sacrificed on the cross. Mary assumes with the dignity this responsibility. She consents to conceive the Son of God, to give birth to Him, to nourish Him, to educate Him for the ignominious death of the cross. When she pronounced the words, "Be it done," her eyes were fixed on the distant tragedy of Golgotha, on the cross towering upon its height. Yet she accepts it, together with the dignity of Mother of God. PRACTICE MARY, in consenting to become the Mother of Jesus, became not only His Mother, but the Mother of all mankind. She became, for all time, the refuge of sinners, the health of the sick, the intercessor with God for man; she consented to exercise a mother's love for suffering and sinful humanity. But alas, how many of those adopted by Mary as her children under the cross of her dying Son are unworthy of her mother love! How many are rebellious children, who fill her heart with sorrow and anguish! Others, faithless and obdurate, become a reproach to her. Have you, during your past life, always been a good child of this loving Mother? Are you to her an honor or a disgrace, a joy or a sorrow? Prayer of the Church (located on the first day of the novena). Litany of Loreto (located in the final section of the book). _Prayer_ THOUGH my tongue is unhallowed, yet, purest Virgin, I presume to hail thee every day with the angel's salutation, "Hail Mary, full of grace!" From my heart, I pray thee, pour into my soul a little of that mighty grace wherewith the Holy Spirit, overshadowing thee, filled thee to the full. Hail Mary, etc. Ejaculation (located on the first day of the novena). EIGHTH DAY Mary, the Mother of God Preparatory Prayer (located on the first day of the novena). MEDITATION MARY'S true greatness consists in her having been chosen the Mother of God. This sublime dignity, pre-eminently her own and shared by no other creature, elevates her to a station inconceivably exalted. Mother of God! St. Peter Damian thus gives expression to his conception of this dignity: "In what words may mortal man be permitted to pronounce the praises of her who brought forth that divine Word who lives for all eternity? Where can a tongue be found holy and pure enough to eulogize her who bore the author of all created things, whom the elements praise and obey in fear and trembling? When we essay to extol a martyr's constancy, to recount his heroic acts of virtue, to describe his devotion to his Saviour's cause and honor, we are supplied with words by facts and occurrences that belong to the province of human experience. But when we undertake to describe the glories of the Blessed Virgin, we are on unknown ground, on a subject transcending all human effort. We fail to find words suitable to portray her sublime prerogatives, privileges, and mysteries." PRACTICE ST. ANSELM, writing on the motherhood of Mary, says: "It was eminently just and proper that the creature chosen to be the Mother of God should shine with a luster of purity far beyond anything conceivable in any other creature under heaven. For it was to her that the eternal Father decreed to give His only-begotten Son, whom He loves as Himself; and to give Him in such a mysterious manner that He should be at the same time the Son of God and the Son of the Virgin Mary. She must indeed be purity itself, whom the Son of God elected as His Mother, and who was the chosen Spouse of the Holy Ghost, to be overshadowed by Him to bring forth the Second Person of that Most Blessed Trinity from whom He Himself proceeds." Let us honor the virgin Mother with filial devotion, gratefully greeting her often in the words of the angel, "Hail Mary, full of grace!" Let us remember that God alone is above Mary, and beneath her is all that is not God. Prayer of the Church (located on the first day of the novena). Litany of Loreto (located in the final section of the book). _Prayer_ I BELIEVE, holiest Mary, that almighty God was ever with thee from thy conception, and is, by His incarnation, still more closely united to thee. Make it thy care, I pray thee, that I may be with that same Lord Jesus ever one heart and soul by means of sanctifying grace. Hail Mary, etc. Ejaculation (located on the first day of the novena). NINTH DAY Mary, Our Mother Preparatory Prayer (located on the first day of the novena). MEDITATION MARY could not consent to become the Mother of the Redeemer without including in her consent those to be redeemed. "She bore one man," says St. Antonine, "and thereby has borne all men again. Beneath the cross of her divine Son she has reborne us to life with great pain, just as Eve our first mother, has borne us under the tree of forbidden fruit unto death. That there be no doubt concerning it, her divine Son made this declaration in His last will." "When therefore Jesus had seen His Mother and the disciple standing whom He loved, He saith to His Mother, Woman, behold thy son. After that He saith to the disciple, Behold thy Mother" (_John_ xix. 26 27). She gave up her Son for the redemption of mankind, and He gave us, in the person of His beloved disciple St. John, to her as her children, declaring her our Mother. From that moment we belong to Mary, and Mary belongs to us: "Behold thy Mother!" PRACTICE MARY loves us because she loves God, and because God loves us. She loves us as her brethren who share human nature with her. She loves us as her children, whom she has borne to eternal life. She loves us because we are miserable and helpless. True, we offended her divine Son, but she knows our frailty, our blindness, the assaults of the flesh and the devil to which we are exposed; and by all this she is moved to come to our aid. Do not, however, imagine that this good and amiable Mother will hear your call for assistance if you continue to offend her divine Son with malice prepense. To obtain her aid you must make yourself in a manner worthy of it. This you do by striving to imitate her virtues. Or is there anything in her example that we are unable to imitate? True, we can not attain to her perfection in virtue, but we can copy it to a certain degree. To follow Mary's example there is no need of performing miracles, of having ecstasies, or of doing any other extraordinary deeds. All that is necessary is to persevere faithfully in the ordinary duties of life, and to perform them to the best of our ability. "Behold thy Mother!" These words of our dying Lord were addressed to the beloved disciple St. John, but were intended for all mankind. Even as Mary never ceases to be the Mother of God, she never will cease to be our Mother. Prayer of the Church (located on the first day of the novena). Litany of Loreto (located in the final section of the book). _Prayer_ O HOLIEST Mary, bless me, my heart and my soul, as thou thyself wast ever blessed of God among all women; for I have this sure hope, dear Mother, that if thou bless me while I live, then, when I die, I shall be blessed of God in the everlasting glory of heaven. Hail Mary, etc. Ejaculation (located on the first day of the novena). IV Novena in Honor of the Seven Sorrows of Mary [Illustration: Mary, the Mother of Sorrows] NOTE.--Besides the indulgences granted for every novena in honor of the Blessed Virgin Mary by Pius IX, Pope Leo XIII, January 27, 1888, granted that all the faithful may gain, on the _third Sunday in September_, being the second feast of the Seven Sorrows of Mary (the other is observed on the Friday before Palm Sunday), a plenary indulgence _as often_ as they visit, after confession and communion, a church where the Archconfraternity of the Seven Sorrows is canonically established, and pray there for the intentions of the Holy Father. This indulgence is applicable to the souls in purgatory. FIRST DAY Devotion to the Seven Sorrows of Mary PREPARATORY PRAYER BID me bear, O Mother blessed, On my heart the wounds impressed Suffered by the Crucified! Indulgence. 300 days, once a day. A plenary indulgence, on any one day, in each month, to those who shall have practised this devotion for a month, saying besides seven Hail Marys, followed each time by the above invocation. Conditions: Confession, communion, and prayer for the intentions of the Pope. (Pius IX, June 18, 1876.) MEDITATION FROM the dolorous way of Our Lord's passion Holy Church selected fourteen incidents to place before us for consideration, which are called the Stations of the Cross. In the same manner the pious devotion of the faithful selected seven events in the life of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and gives itself to their religious contemplation. They are: (1) Simeon's prophecy in the Temple; (2) the flight into Egypt with the divine Child; (3) the loss of the divine Child at Jerusalem; (4) Mary's meeting with her Son bearing the cross; (5) Mary beneath the cross; (6) Mary receives the body of her Son from the cross; (7) the placing of Jesus' body in the tomb. PRACTICE "FORGET not the sorrows of thy mother" (_Ecclus._ vii. 29). According to this exhortation of Holy Scripture it is our duty to remember and meditate often on the sorrows of the Blessed Virgin Mary. We ought never to forget that our sins were the cause of the sufferings and death of Jesus, and therefore also of the sorrows of Mary. Holy Church celebrates two feasts in honor of the sorrows of Mary; she approved of the Rosary and of many other devotions in honor of the Seven Dolors, and enriched them with numerous indulgences. Let us practise these devotions to enkindle in our hearts a true and ardent love for our sorrowful Mother. PRAYER OF THE CHURCH GRANT, we beseech Thee, O Lord Jesus Christ, that the most blessed Virgin Mary, Thy Mother, may intercede for us before the throne of Thy mercy, now and at the hour of our death, through whose most holy soul, in the hour of Thine own passion, the sword of sorrow passed. Through Thee, Jesus Christ, Saviour of the world, who livest and reignest with the Father and the Holy Ghost, for ever and ever. Amen. Litany of Loreto (located in the final section of the book). _Prayer_ EVER glorious Blessed Virgin Mary, queen of martyrs, mother of mercy, hope, and comfort of dejected and desolate souls, through the sorrows that pierced thy tender heart I beseech thee take pity on my poverty and necessities, have compassion on my anxieties and miseries. I ask it through the mercy of thy divine Son; I ask it through His immaculate life, bitter passion, and ignominious death on the cross. As I am persuaded that He honors thee as His beloved Mother, to whom He refuses nothing, let me experience the efficacy of thy powerful intercession, according to the tenderness of thy maternal affection, now and at the hour of my death. Amen. Hail Mary, etc. _Ejaculation_ Mother of Sorrows, queen of martyrs, pray for us! SECOND DAY Mary's First Sorrow: Simeon's Prophecy in the Temple [Illustration: Simeon's Prophecy in the Temple] Preparatory Prayer (located on the first day of the novena). MEDITATION FORTY days after the birth of our divine Saviour, Mary His Mother fulfilled the law of Moses by offering Him to His divine Father in the Temple. "And behold there was a man in Jerusalem named Simeon, and this man was just and devout, waiting for the consolation of Israel, and the Holy Ghost was in Him. And he received an answer from the Holy Ghost, that he should not see death before he had seen the Christ of the Lord. And he came by the Spirit into the temple. And when His parents brought in the child Jesus, to do for Him according to the custom of the law, he also took Him into his arms, and blessed God, and said: Now dost Thou dismiss Thy servant, O Lord, according to Thy word, in peace; because my eyes have seen Thy salvation, which Thou hast prepared before the face of all peoples. A light to the revelation of the gentiles and the glory of Thy people Israel. And His father and mother were wondering at these things which were spoken concerning Him. And Simeon blessed them, and said to Mary His Mother: Behold this child is set for the fall and for the resurrection of many in Israel, and for a sign which shall be contradicted; and thy own soul a sword shall pierce, that out of many hearts thoughts may be revealed" (_Luke_ ii. 25-35). PRACTICE MARY was familiar with the predictions of the prophets and knew that ignominy, sorrow, and suffering would be her divine Son's portion throughout His earthly career. But to have this secret of her anxious soul thus publicly and solemnly declared by Simeon, was a sharp thrust of that seven-edged sword which was to pierce her loving heart. In spirit she viewed that boundless, surging sea of trials, pain, and death on which her Son was to be tossed about, and was willing to be engulfed in its bitter waters. Her affliction would have scarcely been greater had the death sentence of her divine Son been pronounced then and there and put into execution. What a sorrow, what an affliction, what a trial for such a tender Mother! Well might she exclaim with the Royal Prophet: "My life is wasted with grief, and my years in sighs" (_Ps._ xxx. 11). Let us often contemplate this sorrow, and excite our hearts to a tender compassion with the Mother of Sorrows. Prayer of the Church (located on the first day of the novena). Litany of Loreto (located in the final section of the book). _Prayer_ I COMPASSIONATE thee, sorrowing Mary, in the grief thy tender heart underwent when the holy old man Simeon prophesied to thee. Dear Mother, by thy heart then so afflicted, obtain for me the virtue of humility and the gift of the holy fear of God. Hail Mary, etc. Ejaculation (located on the first day of the novena). THIRD DAY Mary's Second Sorrow: The Flight into Egypt [Illustration: The Flight into Egypt] Preparatory Prayer (located on the first day of the novena). MEDITATION FOR the second time the sword of sorrow pierced Mary's heart when she was commanded to fly into Egypt with her divine Child. Without manifesting undue perplexity or discontent, she hastily gathered a few necessaries for the journey, while St. Joseph saddled the beast of burden. Then taking the infant Jesus into her arms and pressing Him to her throbbing heart, the holy pilgrims set forth into the cold, starry night, away to a foreign land, through the trackless desert, and into a heathen country. Arrived in Egypt, the experience of Bethlehem was renewed; no one gave them shelter. PRACTICE DURING this second great sorrow, what was Mary's behavior? She was content to fulfil the will of God; she did not ask for reasons, or complain of the fatigues of the journey, but preserved her peace of heart amid all the trials of this severe probation. She is poor, but her poverty does not render her unhappy or querulous. If God sends us trials, we ought not murmur or complain. Following the example of Mary, let us bear them submissively. If we suffer patiently with Mary on earth, we shall enjoy eternal bliss with her in heaven. Prayer of the Church (located on the first day of the novena). Litany of Loreto (located in the final section of the book). _Prayer_ I COMPASSIONATE thee, sorrowing Mary, for the anxiety which thy most tender heart underwent during thy flight into Egypt and thy sojourn there. Dear Mother, by thy heart then so sorrowful, obtain for me the virtue of liberality, especially toward the poor, and the gift of piety. Hail Mary, etc. Ejaculation (located on the first day of the novena). FOURTH DAY Mary's Third Sorrow: Jesus Lost in Jerusalem [Illustration: The Finding of Jesus in the Temple] Preparatory Prayer (located on the first day of the novena). MEDITATION WHO can describe Mary's sorrow when, returning from Jerusalem, she missed her divine Son? With St. Joseph she retraced her steps in anxious search of Him whom her soul loved. She went to all her relatives and acquaintances in Jerusalem, but heard no tidings of her lost Child. She passed three long days of anxiety in her search, and this constitutes her third sorrow. Of it, Origen writes: "On account of the ineffable love of Mary for her divine Son, she suffered more by His loss than the martyrs suffered amid the most cruel tortures." PRACTICE IN MEDITATING on this sorrow of Mary, we ought to remember how indifferent so many Christians are after having lost God by sin. They feel no compunction, no sorrow at having offended Him, and yet they can weep at the loss of a trifle; they shed copious tears when their will is crossed, or when they receive a deserved reprimand; but for the loss of their God they have not a tear. They have lost Him, perhaps years ago, and never make the least effort to find Him. Pray to the sorrowful Mother that she preserve you from such a deplorable fate! Prayer of the Church (located on the first day of the novena). Litany of Loreto (located in the final section of the book). _Prayer_ I COMPASSIONATE thee, sorrowing Mary, for the terrors felt by thy anxious heart when thou didst lose thy dear Son, Jesus. Dear Mother, by thy heart, then so agitated, obtain for me the virtue of chastity, and with it the gift of knowledge. Hail Mary, etc. Ejaculation (located on the first day of the novena). FIFTH DAY Mary's Fourth Sorrow: She Meets Jesus Carrying His Cross Preparatory Prayer (located on the first day of the novena). MEDITATION THE time was at hand when mankind's redemption was to be accomplished. Already the divine Victim of our sins is bearing the instrument of our salvation. Torn by the cruel scourging, crowned with thorns, and covered with blood He proceeds on His way to Calvary, and in this pitiful condition meets His blessed Mother. What a spectacle, what a sight for a Mother such as Mary! Anxious to look upon her, and with one fond glance to thank her for her heroic, unselfish love, He made an effort to change His bowed position beneath the cross, feebly raised His head, and directed toward her one loving glance of ineffable anguish, mingled with grateful recognition and humble resignation. Then the sad procession moves on, Mary following her divine Son on His way to death. PRACTICE WE, BY our sins, placed into the hands of the Jews and executioners the weapons by which Jesus suffered, and thus we thrust the sword of sorrow into Mary's heart. We repeat this, in a certain sense, as often as we commit a grievous sin, because we thereby number ourselves among those whom the Apostle describes as "crucifying again to themselves the Son of God, and making Him a mockery" (_Heb._ vi. 6). Cardinal Hugo writes: "Sinners crucify, as far as is in them, Christ our Lord, because they repeat the cause of His crucifixion." Doing this, we thrust anew the sword of sorrow into Mary's heart. Let this consideration fill us with hatred for and fear of sin. Prayer of the Church (located on the first day of the novena). Litany of Loreto (located in the final section of the book). _Prayer_ I COMPASSIONATE thee, sorrowing Mary, for the shock thy mother heart experienced when Jesus met thee as He carried His cross. Dear Mother, by that heart of thine, then so afflicted, obtain for me the virtue of patience and the gift of fortitude. Hail Mary, etc. Ejaculation (located on the first day of the novena). SIXTH DAY Mary's Fifth Sorrow: Beneath the Cross Preparatory Prayer (located on the first day of the novena). MEDITATION AT THE crucifixion of Jesus the soul of Mary was plunged into a sea of sorrow when she stood three hours under the cross. Writhing in excruciating pain, the Son of God hung upon the tree of disgrace and infamy, yet Mary continued to stand at its foot, tearful, grieving, yet persevering, filled with anguish because she could do nothing to help Him. Another great sorrow befell the heart of Mary when she slowly withdrew her tearful gaze from the face of Jesus, and cast her weeping eyes upon the cold and indifferent world that lay in darkness around and about Calvary. And yet, "When Jesus therefore had seen His Mother and the disciple standing whom He loved, He saith to His Mother, Woman, behold Thy son. After that He saith to the disciple, Behold thy Mother" (_John_ xix. 26, 27). PRACTICE THESE words, "Behold thy son, behold thy Mother," contain and express the mystery of unbounded love, which Jesus has for all mankind, but more especially for the Church which is appointed and authorized to lead men to salvation. O blessed, O happy bequest! It was not enough for the love of Jesus to have restored heaven to us by His atoning death; He wished also to give us His dearest Mother. And she has always shown herself as such. To each of us individually she was and is a kind and loving Mother. Give thanks to her, bless and praise her for having adopted you as her child, and strive to become worthy of so great a privilege. Prayer of the Church (located on the first day of the novena). Litany of Loreto (located in the final section of the book). _Prayer_ I COMPASSIONATE thee, sorrowing Mary, for the martyrdom thy generous heart bore so nobly whilst thou didst stand by Jesus agonizing. Dear Mother, by thy heart then so cruelly martyred, obtain for me the virtue of temperance and the gift of counsel. Hail Mary, etc. Ejaculation (located on the first day of the novena). SEVENTH DAY Mary's Sixth Sorrow: The Taking Down of Jesus' Body from the Cross [Illustration: Jesus' Body, Taken Down from the Cross] Preparatory Prayer (located on the first day of the novena). MEDITATION WHO can describe the sorrow and anguish of Mary's heart when the body of Jesus was taken from the cross, when her tearful eyes fell upon His disfigured features! The pure and holy and beauteous form of her Son was a mass of clotted blood and unsightly wounds; and yet, disfigured as it was, there shone in His countenance a clear, calm expression of divine majesty. Now Mary views the wounds of that sacred body; she looks at the gap made in His side by the cruel spear, and can almost see the Sacred Heart of Jesus, all bruised and broken for love of man. Before her vision passes in detail His life and her own. Memory presents to her mind every day and hour of their quiet, happy life at Nazareth. Is it to be wondered, then, that at this bitter moment her sorrow was so great that, as St. Anselm observes, she should have died had she not been sustained by a miracle of divine omnipotence? PRACTICE OUGHT not the contemplation of the sorrows of our blessed Mother confirm us in patience, in resignation to the will of God in our trials and sufferings? If the Son of God said of Himself: "Ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and so to enter into His glory?" (_Luke_ xxiv. 26); if the most pure and holy Mother of God, despite her great prerogatives and merits, had to suffer a sorrow so ineffable, do not murmur if the word of Christ is addressed also to you: "And he that taketh not up his cross and followeth Me, is not worthy of Me" (_Matt._ x. 38). Prayer of the Church (located on the first day of the novena). Litany of Loreto (located in the final section of the book). _Prayer_ I COMPASSIONATE thee, sorrowing Mary, for the pain thou didst suffer when the body of thy divine Son, taken down all torn and bloody from the cross, was placed in thy arms. Dear Mother, by thy heart pierced through, obtain for me the virtue of fraternal charity and the gift of understanding. Hail Mary, etc. Ejaculation (located on the first day of the novena). EIGHTH DAY Mary's Seventh Sorrow: Jesus is Buried Preparatory Prayer (located on the first day of the novena). MEDITATION THE sacrifice for the redemption of the world was accomplished. "And Joseph, taking the body, wrapt it up in a clean linen cloth, and laid it in his own new monument, which he had hewed out in a rock. And he rolled a great stone to the door of the monument, and went his way" (_Matt._ xxvii. 59). Mary also took part in the burial of her beloved Son, though the evangelists do not mention her name amongst those who were present on that mournful occasion. Never, most assuredly, was human soul visited by such woe and desolation, as that which overwhelmed hers as she cast a last glance on the precious remains of her dead Son. PRACTICE LET us learn of the sorrowful Mother at the tomb of her divine Son submission to God's holy will in all things, but especially when He takes from us one of our dear ones. Again, the contemplation of the sufferings of Mary should fortify us in patience, whenever God is pleased to visit us with a light and small cross of affliction, or even with a sorrow that causes our heart to bleed. It should inspire us with a filial confidence in Mary, who thus suffered for us and gave her divine Son for our salvation. We can and ought to prove our love for her, not by sentimental feelings of affection, but by a sincere hatred of sin and great fervor in the service of her divine Son. Prayer of the Church (located on the first day of the novena). Litany of Loreto (located in the final section of the book). _Prayer_ I COMPASSIONATE thee, sorrowing Mary, for the anguish felt by thy loving heart when Jesus' body was laid in the sepulcher. Dear Mother, by all the bitterness of desolation thou didst know, obtain for me the virtue of diligence and the gift of wisdom. Hail Mary, etc. Ejaculation (located on the first day of the novena). NINTH DAY Reasons Why Mary Had to Suffer Preparatory Prayer (located on the first day of the novena). MEDITATION THE reasons why God permitted Mary to suffer so much may be briefly stated as follows: He did so from His love for Mary and from His love for us. He did so from His love for Mary, because by suffering she merited greater glory in heaven. As Mother of the Crucified she persevered beneath the cross, and now she thrones in heaven as the glorious Mother of the risen Redeemer. Because she shared in His suffering, she now shares His glory. Again, God permitted Mary to suffer because He loved us. If she had not experienced such bitter sorrow, we would not have recourse to her, for whosoever has not suffered himself can not have sympathy with the sufferings of others. Mary knows the pangs of sorrow by experience, and therefore knows also how to console and help us. PRACTICE BECAUSE she herself drained the most bitter cup of sorrow, Mary is always willing to help those who invoke her aid. But above all she is inclined to help repentant sinners, because she knows how great the price of their redemption was, paid by the blood of her divine Son. She is able to help us, because, after God, she is most powerful; she is most willing to help us, because she loves us, whom God so has loved "as to give His only-begotten Son" (_John_ iii. 16). Let us, therefore, have recourse to her in all our needs, and we shall experience the power of her help in life and death. Prayer of the Church (located on the first day of the novena). Litany of Loreto (located in the final section of the book). _Prayer_ I COMPASSIONATE thee, sorrowing Mary, for all thy sorrows. I beseech thee, dear Mother, by thy heart pierced through by them, obtain for me full abandonment to the will of God in everything and perseverance to the end. Hail Mary, etc. Ejaculation (located on the first day of the novena). V Novena for the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary [Illustration: The Assumption] FIRST DAY Mary's Death was without Pain [Illustration: Mary's Death] PREPARATORY PRAYER O MARY, Virgin most blessed and Mother of Our Lord and Redeemer Jesus Christ, through thy mercy I beseech thee to come to my aid, and to inspire me with such confidence in thy power, that I may have recourse to thee, pray to thee, and implore thy aid in all needs of soul and body. MEDITATION MARY, the virgin Mother of God, was conceived without original sin. She never dimmed the luster of sanctifying grace which beautified her soul by actual sin. Nevertheless she had to pass through the dark portal of death before she was assumed, body and soul, into heaven. She had not been endowed with the privilege of immortality with which God had invested our first parents in paradise. It was meet that she should be like unto her divine Son in everything, even in death. But as she had drained the bitter cup of suffering during her whole life, and especially when standing beneath the cross, her death was to be free from pain and suffering. She quietly passed away yielding up her spirit in a yearning desire to be united forever with her divine Son in heaven. PRACTICE IF YOU have dispossessed your heart of all unruly attachment to the goods and enjoyments of this earth, you, too, may hope for a happy and tranquil transition from this land of exile to your home in heaven. Therefore, if you are still attached to the transitory things of this life, disengage your heart from them now. The voluntary renouncement of earthly goods alone is meritorious before God. The separation from them enforced by the strong hand of death is of no supernatural value. PRAYER OF THE CHURCH WE BESEECH Thee, O Lord, pardon the shortcomings of Thy servants; that we who, by our own works, are not able to please Thee, may be saved by the intercession of the Mother of Thy Son, Our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen. Litany of Loreto (located in the final section of the book). _Prayer_ O MOST benign Mother Mary! I rejoice that by thy happy and tranquil death the yearning of thy heart was appeased, and thy life, so rich in merit and sacrifice, received its crown. I rejoice that after passing from this life, thou, O most loving Mother, wast made the glorious and powerful queen of heaven and dost exercise thy influence as such for the benefit of thy frail, exiled children on earth. Obtain for me, I beseech thee, a happy death, that I may praise and glorify thy might and kindness forever in heaven. Hail Mary, etc. _Ejaculation_ Sweet heart of Mary be my salvation! Indulgence. (1) 100 days, every time. (2) A plenary indulgence, once a month, on any day, to all who shall have said it every day for a month, under the usual conditions. SECOND DAY At Mary's Tomb Preparatory Prayer (located on the first day of the novena). MEDITATION AN ANCIENT legend relates that, led by Heaven, all the Apostles, except St. Thomas, assembled at the Blessed Virgin's death-bed. After she had breathed forth her pure spirit, her sacred remains were prepared for the grave by wrapping the body in new white linen and decking it with flowers. Meanwhile the apostles, assembled in another room, sang psalms and hymns in praise of their departed Mother. The apostles, all the disciples, and the faithful dwelling in Jerusalem followed the blessed remains to the grave chanting psalms and hymns. Arrived in the valley of Josaphat, the body was gently placed in a sepulcher of stone not far from the Garden of Olives. After the entombment the apostles and crowds of the faithful lingered near the sacred spot in prayer, meditation, and chanting of psalms in which angels' voices were heard to mingle. PRACTICE JOIN in spirit with the apostles and faithful in their prayer and meditation at the grave of our blessed Mother. Contemplate and review her whole life. Could a course like hers have terminated more appropriately than with so beautiful, painless, and tranquil a passing away? Prepare yourself even now for your departure from this life. Do not postpone the settlement of your affairs, spiritual and temporal, until the last uncertain hours. Above all, remove now, or as soon as possible, all doubts, anxieties, and irregularities of conscience, because delay is dangerous and leads to impenitence, and because in the last hours the powers of hell usually assail the departing soul with all their might. Prayer of the Church (located on the first day of the novena). Litany of Loreto (located in the final section of the book). _Prayer_ GLORIOUS Virgin, who for thy consolation didst deserve to die comforted by the sight of thy dear Son Jesus, and in the company of the apostles and angels; pray for us, that at that awful moment we, too, may be comforted by receiving Jesus in the most holy Eucharist, and may feel thee nigh when we breathe forth our soul. Hail Mary, etc. Ejaculation (located on the first day of the novena). THIRD DAY The Empty Tomb Preparatory Prayer (located on the first day of the novena). MEDITATION ST. JOHN DAMASCENE writes: "St. Thomas was not with the other apostles when the Blessed Virgin died, but arrived in Jerusalem on the third day after that event. Ardently desiring to see once more and to venerate the sacred body which had given flesh and blood to his beloved Master, the grave was opened for this purpose. The body could nowhere be seen, and a delicious perfume filled the empty tomb. The apostles then became convinced that as God had preserved the body of Mary free from sin before, in, and after the birth of His Son, He was pleased likewise, after her death, to preserve that same body from corruption, and to glorify it in heaven." A council held in Jerusalem in the year 1672 declared: "It is beyond all doubt that the Blessed Virgin is not only a great and miraculous sign on earth, because she bore God in the flesh and yet remained a virgin, but she is also a great and miraculous sign in heaven, because she was taken up thither with soul and body. For although her sinless body was enclosed in the tomb, yet, like the body of Our Lord, it arose on the third day and was carried up to heaven." Although the doctrine of the bodily assumption of Mary into heaven was not defined by the Church as an article of faith in the strict sense, yet the learned Pope Benedict XIV remarks, "It would be presumptuous and blameworthy in any one to call into doubt or to question this beautiful and consoling belief of ages." PRACTICE LET us rejoice at the thought of the glorious resurrection of our dear Mother. Let us unite ourselves in spirit with the apostles in heaven and with Holy Church to congratulate her on this extraordinary privilege. But let us also rejoice at the thought of our own resurrection. True, it shall not take place immediately after death, but it is therefore not the less certain, and it depends on us to make it glorious and blessed. Prayer of the Church (located on the first day of the novena). Litany of Loreto (located in the final section of the book). _Prayer_ O GLORIOUS Virgin and Mother of God, Mary! As thy sacred body after death was preserved from corruption, and united with thy sinless soul was borne to heaven by the angels; obtain for me the grace that my life and death be holy, so that on the Day of Judgment I may arise to glory everlasting. Hail Mary, etc. Ejaculation (located on the first day of the novena). FOURTH DAY Reasons for the Bodily Assumption of Mary into Heaven Preparatory Prayer (located on the first day of the novena). MEDITATION 1. THE wages of sin is death. Now, as the Blessed Virgin from the first moment of her existence was preserved from all sin, and even from original sin, it necessarily follows that death could have no permanent dominion over her, and that her body would not be permitted to see corruption. 2. This sinless body had been the medium by which the body of Our Lord Jesus Christ, who was the conqueror of death, had been formed. How, then, could such a highly privileged body, a pure and virginal body, be permitted to pass through corruption and decay? 3. As Mary had yielded up her sacred person to be a dwelling-place for the Lord of heaven, it seems fitting that this same Lord, in His turn, should give the kingdom of heaven to her as her resting-place. St. Bernard expresses this sentiment as follows: "When Our Lord came into this world, Mary furnished Him with the noblest dwelling on earth, the temple of her virginal womb. In return, the Lord on this day raises her up to the highest throne in heaven." PRACTICE IF YOU desire to look forward to death without fear, and to expect your dissolution with confidence, follow the Apostle's injunction, "Therefore, whilst we have time, let us work good" (_Gal._ vi. 10). Avoid sin, perform good works, be patient in affliction, and strive to expiate the punishment due to your sins by voluntary acts of penance, thus reducing your inclination to sin. Therefore offer up to God every morning, in a spirit of penitence, all your labors, trials, and sufferings. Prayer of the Church (located on the first day of the novena). Litany of Loreto (located in the final section of the book). _Prayer_ O GLORIOUS Virgin and Mother of God, Mary! I beseech thee through the ineffable glory thou didst make for thy departure from this world by a life of retirement, full of merits and virtue, dedicated to God alone; obtain for me the grace that, following thy example, I may detach my heart from this world, and patiently bear affliction and adversity, carefully avoid sin, and always strive to advance in the love of God. Hail Mary, etc. Ejaculation (located on the first day of the novena). FIFTH DAY Mary's Glorious Entrance into Heaven Preparatory Prayer (located on the first day of the novena). MEDITATION A JOY greater than human heart can conceive fills the heavenly spirits when a soul enters heaven to receive her reward. What jubilant transports, then, must those have been with which they hailed the entrance into heavenly bliss of the most pure and holy Virgin, the Mother of the Son of God, body and soul, transfigured in glory! And she is, and shall be, for all eternity, their mistress and queen! What an ineffable joy, too, for the Blessed Virgin, to behold the countless numbers of angels, to admire their beauty, their purity, their intense love of God! But as the feeble light of a candle disappears before the splendor of the sun's rays, thus are these choirs of angels obscured by the ineffable glory of her divine Son coming to welcome His Mother. Who can describe this affecting meeting? What a superabundant reward for affliction and suffering! What an ocean of joy and bliss, when the Son of God presented His Mother before the throne of His heavenly Father, who greeted her as His beloved Daughter! What a joy to behold the Holy Ghost, whose pure Spouse she had been even on earth! These transports of bliss baffle all attempts at description. PRACTICE THOUGH we are unable to have an adequate perception of Mary's glory in heaven, by which she is raised above all angels and saints, yet it is in our power to do one thing; we can rejoice at the glory of our blessed Mother, and join the heavenly spirits and the saints in paying homage to her. Let us resolve to do this, and never to forget that Mary attained to the largest share of her divine Son's glory because she was foremost in sharing His sufferings. Let this encourage us to bear our cross, to bear it with our Saviour even to the height of Calvary, there to die with Him. Prayer of the Church (located on the first day of the novena). Litany of Loreto (located in the final section of the book). _Prayer_ O GLORIOUS Virgin and Mother of God, Mary! I beseech thee through the preparation with which thou wast glorified by God--by the Father as His most beloved Daughter, by the Son as His immaculate Mother, and by the Holy Ghost as His most pure Spouse--in heaven; obtain for me the grace to share to some extent this thy glory, and therefore to live so that I may deserve it. Hail Mary, etc. Ejaculation (located on the first day of the novena). SIXTH DAY Mary Crowned in Heaven [Illustration: Mary Crowned in Heaven] Preparatory Prayer (located on the first day of the novena). MEDITATION MARY'S glory received its culmination by her coronation as queen of heaven and earth. It was meet that in her should be fulfilled the words of Holy Scripture: "Come from Libanus, my Spouse, come, thou shalt be crowned" (_Cant._ iv. 8), and that her own prophetic words, "He hath put down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted the humble" (_Luke_ i. 52), should be exemplified in her. For it was reasonable and becoming that she, who once with Jesus wore the crown of shame and contempt, should now share with Him the crown of immortal glory. It was but fair and just that the immaculate being who was chosen, above all inhabitants of heaven and earth, to be the true and worthy Mother of God, should now be solemnly installed over all creatures in heaven and on earth as the queen of angels and men, and that to her should be offered homage, praise, and honor by the blessed spirits and by the souls of the saints. But the crown which she received is not one made of gold and precious stones; it is composed of the virtues with which Mary, in faithful co-operation with divine grace, embellished herself; it consists, too, of all the homage and glory which she receives as queen of heaven. The most precious gem in this crown is the filial love and gratitude Jesus shows toward His Mother in heaven. PRACTICE INDEED, "eye hath not seen, ear hath not heard, neither has it entered into the heart of man," what the heavenly Father has prepared in the mansions of eternal bliss for His beloved Daughter, the Son for His Blessed Mother, and the Holy Ghost for His chosen Spouse. She is now queen of heaven and earth; of heaven, for she is the queen of all angels and saints; of earth, for as Mother of God she is the Mother of all mankind, the mediatrix between the Redeemer and the redeemed. You, too, may contribute a gem toward the crown of your heavenly Mother by paying her filial homage, imitating her virtues, and preserving, for the love of her, your innocence and purity of heart. Prayer of the Church (located on the first day of the novena). Litany of Loreto (located in the final section of the book). _Prayer_ O GLORIOUS Virgin and Mother of God, Mary! I beseech thee through the everlasting crown of glory with which God has crowned thee queen of heaven and earth; obtain for me through thy mighty intercession the grace to persevere in virtue to the end, so that finally I may attain the crown of bliss prepared by God for those that love Him. Hail Mary, etc. Ejaculation (located on the first day of the novena). SEVENTH DAY Mary's Bliss in Heaven Preparatory Prayer (located on the first day of the novena). MEDITATION ACCORDING to Holy Scripture and the doctrine of the Church, there are in heaven various grades of glory and bliss, according to the rank and merit of the saints. They probably attain this higher grade of glory and bliss by the increase of their ability to enjoy the happiness of heaven. Their intellect is enabled to contemplate more profoundly the incomprehensible essence of God; their power of perception is augmented so that they may more readily recognize and admire the splendor of the angels, saints, and heavenly mansions; their will is enabled to be united, in a higher degree, with God. From this we may conclude that Mary's bliss in heaven transcends all human conception. Her heavenly glory and reward consists in the perfect adaptation of her whole being to the enjoyment of God and of eternal bliss. PRACTICE LOOK up, Christian soul, to this great and brilliant queen of heaven. She is your gentle Mother and assures you of her help, and the diadem she wears upon her brow is a proof that she has the power to help you. Do not, therefore, refuse the hand of this mighty friend in heaven, for she will lift you from the depths of your misery, from the rocky shoals of temptation, and lead you strong and victorious into the presence of her divine Son. Thus you will enter into a new and supernatural life in Christ, to share in the grace-laden mysteries of His life, passion, and triumph. Prayer of the Church (located on the first day of the novena). Litany of Loreto (located in the final section of the book). _Prayer_ O GREAT and glorious queen of heaven, Mary! I beseech thee by that exalted throne upon which God has raised thee above all angels and saints; let me one day appear amongst them to join them in their praise of thee. Obtain for me the grace that I may never cease to honor thee as thou dost deserve to be honored, and thereby to become worthy of thy mighty protection in life and death. Hail Mary, etc. Ejaculation (located on the first day of the novena). EIGHTH DAY Mary, the Queen of Mercy Preparatory Prayer (located on the first day of the novena). MEDITATION MARY is, then, a queen, but--what a consolation to know it!--a queen always mild and gentle, always willing to confer benefits upon us. Hence the Church teaches us to call her the Mother of mercy. The pious and learned author Gerson says: "God's dominion comprises justice and mercy. He divided it, retaining the administration of justice for Himself, and relinquishing, in a certain sense, the dispensation of mercy to Mary, by conferring through her hands all graces He grants to mankind." How consoling, then, the assurance that our merciful Mother is so mighty and so loving a queen! PRACTICE SO GREAT is the tenderness of Mary's maternal heart "that never was it heard that any one who fled to her protection, implored her help, and sought her intercession was left unaided." How many prayers, petitions, and thanksgivings ascend daily to the throne of this our exalted and merciful protectress! There is not a cry of an afflicted, struggling, and suffering soul that she does not graciously hear. Join, therefore, confidently in the prayer of Holy Church, "Hail, holy queen, Mother of mercy!" Approach her with filial trust. Neglect not to honor her yourself, and do all in your power to lead others to do her honor. Prayer of the Church (located on the first day of the novena). Litany of Loreto (located in the final section of the book). _Prayer_ O GLORIOUS Virgin and Mother of God, Mary! Holy Church teaches me that despite the glory to which thou wast exalted, thou didst not forget thy miserable clients, and that in heaven thy mercy is still greater than it was during thy life on earth. Therefore I come to thee and trustingly lay at thy feet all my needs, miseries, and petitions. My queen, my Mother, turn not thy gracious eyes from me. Remember me with thy divine Son; cease not to pray for me and take me under thy protection, so that I may finally have the happiness to see and praise thee in thy glory for ever and ever. Hail Mary, etc. Ejaculation (located on the first day of the novena). NINTH DAY Mary in Heaven, the Help of Christians on Earth Preparatory Prayer (located on the first day of the novena). MEDITATION MARY'S help as Mother of mercy is not confined to individuals. She is the protectress and helper of the whole Church. All over the earth, wherever we cast our glance, in the records of the history of times long past and those of recent occurrence, we find testimony of the graces and benefits obtained through her intercession. The feasts celebrated by the Church throughout the year, what are they but evidences of gratitude offered to the queen of heaven for the oftentimes miraculous delivery from war, pestilence, and other great afflictions? Hence she is rightly invoked as the "Help of Christians." PRACTICE IN OUR days, too, storms and dangers threaten the Church. Let us, therefore, by calling on Mary for help, do our part toward shortening the days of visitation and trial. Let us not confine our petitions to her within the narrow limits of our own personal needs, but let us join in the cry for help ascending to the Mother of mercy throughout all Christendom. Let us daily, for Holy Church, send up our petition to Mary's heavenly throne: "Help of Christians, pray for us!" Prayer of the Church (located on the first day of the novena). Litany of Loreto (located in the final section of the book). _Prayer_ O GLORIOUS Virgin and Mother of God, Mary, queen of heaven! Forget us not. Thou art the help of Christians; lighten our tribulations, and help us with motherly intercession at the throne of thy divine Son. With Holy Church I join in the petition to thee: "Holy Mary, aid the miserable, assist the desponding, strengthen the weak, pray for the people, plead for the clergy, intercede for the devout female sex. Let all who have recourse to thee experience the efficacy of thy help!" Hail Mary, etc. Ejaculation (located on the first day of the novena). The Litany of Loreto _In Honor of the Blessed Virgin Mary_ [Illustration: Mary, the Help of Christians on Earth] LORD, have mercy on us, Christ, have mercy on us. Lord, have mercy on us, Christ, hear us. Christ, graciously hear us. God the Father of heaven, have mercy on us. God the Son, Redeemer of the world, have mercy on us. God the Holy Ghost, have mercy on us. Holy Trinity, one God, have mercy on us. Holy Mary, pray for us. Holy Mother of God, pray for us. Holy Virgin of virgins, pray for us. Mother of Christ, pray for us. Mother of divine grace, pray for us. Mother most pure, pray for us. Mother most chaste, pray for us. Mother inviolate, pray for us. Mother undefiled, pray for us. Mother most amiable, pray for us. Mother most admirable, pray for us. Mother of good counsel, pray for us. Mother of our Creator, pray for us. Mother of our Redeemer, pray for us. Virgin most prudent, pray for us. Virgin most venerable, pray for us. Virgin most renowned, pray for us. Virgin most powerful, pray for us. Virgin most merciful, pray for us. Virgin most faithful, pray for us. Mirror of justice, pray for us. Seat of wisdom, pray for us. Cause of our joy, pray for us. Spiritual vessel, pray for us. Vessel of honor, pray for us. Singular vessel of devotion, pray for us. Mystical rose, pray for us. Tower of David, pray for us. Tower of ivory, pray for us. House of gold, pray for us. Ark of the covenant, pray for us. Gate of heaven, pray for us. Morning star, pray for us. Health of the sick, pray for us. Refuge of sinners, pray for us. Comforter of the afflicted, pray for us. Help of Christians, pray for us. Queen of angels, pray for us. Queen of patriarchs, pray for us. Queen of prophets, pray for us. Queen of apostles, pray for us. Queen of martyrs, pray for us. Queen of confessors, pray for us. Queen of virgins, pray for us. Queen of all saints, pray for us. Queen conceived without original sin, pray for us. Queen of the most holy rosary, pray for us. Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world: Spare us, O Lord. Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world: Graciously hear us, O Lord. Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world: Have mercy on us, O Lord. V. Pray for us, O holy Mother of God: R. That we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ. _Let us pray_ POUR forth, we beseech Thee, O Lord, Thy grace into our hearts, that we, to whom the incarnation of Christ Thy Son was made known by the message of an angel, may by His passion and cross be brought to the glory of His resurrection. Through the same Christ our Lord. Amen. V. Pray for us, O holy Mother of God. R. That we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ. _Let us pray_ VOUCHSAFE, O Lord, that we may be helped by the merits of Thy most holy Mother's spouse; that what of ourselves we can not obtain may be given us through his intercession. Who livest and reignest, world without end. Amen. Indulgence. (1) 300 days, every time. (2) A plenary indulgence on the following five feasts of the Blessed Virgin: Immaculate Conception, Nativity, Purification, Annunciation, and Assumption; under the usual conditions, to all who shall have said it daily during the year. (Pius VII, September 30, 1817.) These indulgences are granted for the litany alone; hence the prayers following it may be omitted. 
36674	----	[Illustration: (front cover)] [Illustration: SHE SLEPT CALMLY AND PEACEFULLY UNTIL SHE DREAMED A DREAM.] IN GOD'S GARDEN STORIES OF THE SAINTS FOR LITTLE CHILDREN BY AMY STEEDMAN WITH SIXTEEN REPRODUCTIONS FROM ITALIAN MASTERPIECES [Illustration] LONDON: T. C. & E. C. JACK, Ltd. 35 PATERNOSTER ROW, E.C., & EDINBURGH TO MY MOTHER ABOUT THIS BOOK There is a garden which God has planted for Himself, more beautiful than any earthly garden. The flowers that bloom there are the white souls of His saints, who have kept themselves pure and unspotted from the world. In God's garden there is every kind of flower, each differing from the other in beauty. Some are tall and stately like the lilies, growing where all may see them in their dress of white and gold; some are half concealed like the violets, and known only by the fragrance of kind deeds and gentle words which have helped to sweeten the lives of others; while some, again, are hidden from all earthly eyes, and only God knows their loveliness and beholds the secret places where they grow. But known or unknown, all have risen above the dark earth, looking ever upward; and, although often bent and beaten down by many a cruel storm of temptation and sin, they have ever raised their heads again, turning their faces towards God; until at last they have been crowned with the perfect flower of holiness, and now blossom for ever in the Heavenly Garden. In this book you will not find the stories of all God's saints. I have gathered a few together, just as one gathers a little posy from a garden full of roses. But the stories I have chosen to tell are those that I hope children will love best to hear. Let us remember that God has given to all of us, little children as well as grown-up people, a place in His garden here on earth, and He would have us take these white flowers, the lives of His saints, as a pattern for our own. We may not be set where all can see us; our place in God's garden may be a very humble and sheltered spot; but, like the saints, we may keep our faces ever turned upward, and learn to grow, as they grew, like their Master, pure and straight and strong--fit flowers to blossom in the Garden of God. 'Saints are like roses when they flush rarest, Saints are like lilies when they bloom fairest, Saints are like violets, sweetest of their kind.' LIST OF STORIES PAGE SAINT URSULA, 1 SAINT BENEDICT, 16 SAINT CHRISTOPHER, 29 SAINT CATHERINE OF SIENA, 41 SAINT AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO, 54 SAINT AUGUSTINE OF CANTERBURY, 62 SAINT CECILIA, 71 SAINT GILES, 79 SAINT NICHOLAS, 84 SAINT FAITH, 97 SAINT COSMO AND SAINT DAMIAN, 102 SAINT MARTIN, 110 SAINT GEORGE, 119 SAINT FRANCIS OF ASSISI, 128 LIST OF PICTURES AT PAGE SAINT URSULA, She slept calmly and peacefully until she dreamed a dream, _Frontispiece_ Ursula stood on the landing-place, the first to greet the Prince, 8 By Vittore Carpaccio at the Accademia, Venice. SAINT BENEDICT, A little demon seized the robe of the young monk, 22 A terrible storm began to rage, 28 By Lorenzo Monaco, Uffizi, Florence. SAINT CHRISTOPHER, The child upon his shoulder seemed to grow heavier, 38 By Titian, Doge's Palace, Venice. SAINT CATHERINE OF SIENA, The Holy Child placed a ring upon her finger, 46 By Benozzo Gozzali, Uffizi, Florence. SAINT AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO, The child had digged a hole in the sand, 60 By Sandro Botticelli, Accademia, Florence. SAINT CECILIA, A crown of lilies and roses in each hand, 74 She taught them about the Lord of Heaven, 78 By Spinello Aretino, S. Maria del Carmine, Florence. SAINT NICHOLAS, He showed his daughter the gold, 86 He went to the harbour where two ships lay, 90 By Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Accademia, Florence. SAINT COSMO AND SAINT DAMIAN, But Cosmo turned and walked away, 104 An angel guided them with loving care, 108 By Fra Angelico, Accademia, Florence. SAINT GEORGE, Saint George rode straight at the monster, 124 By Vittore Carpaccio, S. Georgio Maggiore, Venice. SAINT FRANCIS OF ASSISI, Then the Pope took the little poor brothers under his protection, 136 He chanted the Gospel at the first Christmas mass, 140 By Giotto, Accademia, Florence. SAINT URSULA Once upon a time in the land of Brittany there lived a good king, whose name was Theonotus. He had married a princess who was as good as she was beautiful, and they had one little daughter, whom they called Ursula. It was a very happy and prosperous country over which Theonotus ruled, for he was a Christian, and governed both wisely and well, and nowhere was happiness more certain to be found than in the royal palace where the king and queen and little Princess Ursula lived. All went merrily until Ursula was fifteen years old, and then a great trouble came, for the queen, her mother, died. The poor king was heart-broken, and for a long time even Ursula could not comfort him. But with patient tenderness she tried to do for him all that her mother had done, and gradually he began to feel that he still had something to live for. Her mother had taught Ursula with great care, and the little maid had loved her lessons, and so it came to pass that there was now no princess in all the world so learned as the Princess Ursula. It is said that she knew all that had happened since the beginning of the world, all about the stars and the winds, all the poetry that had ever been written, and every science that learned men had ever known. But what was far better than all this learning was that the princess was humble and good. She never thought herself wiser than other people, and her chief pleasure was in doing kind things and helping others. Her father called her the light of his eyes, and his one fear was that she would some day marry and leave him alone. And true it was that many princes wished to marry Ursula, for the fame of her beauty and of her learning had spread to far distant lands. Now on the other side of the sea, not very far from Brittany, there was a great country called England. The people there were strong and powerful, but they had not yet learned to be Christians. The king of that land had an only son called Conon, who was as handsome as he was brave. And when his father heard of the fame of the Princess Ursula he made up his mind that she should be his son's wife. So he sent a great company of nobles and ambassadors to the court of Brittany to ask King Theonotus for the hand of the Princess Ursula. That king received the messengers most courteously, but he was very much troubled and perplexed at the request. He did not want to part with Ursula, and he knew she did not wish to marry and leave him. And yet he scarcely dared offend the powerful King of England, who might be such a dangerous enemy. So to gain time he told the messengers he would give them their answer next day, and then he shut himself up in his room and sorrowfully leaned his head upon his hand as he tried to think what was best to be done. But as he sat there thinking the do or opened and Ursula came in. 'Why art thou so sad, my father?' she asked, 'and what is it that troubleth thee so greatly?' 'I have this day received an offer for thy hand,' answered her father sadly, 'and the messengers are even now here, and because they come from the King of England I dare not refuse their request, and yet I know not what answer to give them when they return in the morning.' 'If that is all, do not trouble thyself, dear father,' answered Ursula; 'I myself will answer the messengers and all will be well.' Then the princess left her father and went to her own room that she might consider what answer might be wisest to send. But the more she thought the more troubled she became, until at last she grew so weary that she took off her crown and placed it as usual at the foot of her bed and prepared to go to rest. Her little dog lay guarding her, and she slept calmly and peacefully until she dreamed a dream which seemed almost like a vision. For she thought she saw a bright light shining through the door and through the light an angel coming towards her, who spoke to her and said:-- 'Trouble not thyself, Ursula, for to-morrow thou shalt know what answer thou shalt give. God has need of thee to save many souls, and though this prince doth offer thee an earthly crown, God has an unfading crown of heavenly beauty laid up for thee, which thou shalt win through much suffering.' So next morning when the messengers came into the great hall to receive their answer, they saw the Princess Ursula herself sitting on the throne next to her father. She was so beautiful, and greeted them so graciously that they longed more than ever that their prince might win her for his bride. And as they listened for the king to speak, it was Ursula's voice that fell on their ears. She began by sending her greeting to the King of England and to Prince Conon, his son, and bade the messengers say that the honour offered her was more than she deserved, but since their choice had fallen upon her, she on her side was ready to accept the prince as her promised husband, if he would agree to three conditions. 'And first,' went on Ursula, leaning forward and speaking very clearly and slowly, so that the foreign ambassadors might understand every word, 'I would have the prince, your master, send to me ten of the noblest ladies of your land to be my companions and friends, and for each of these ladies and for myself a thousand maidens to wait upon us. Secondly, he must give me three years before the date of my marriage so that I and these noble ladies may have time to serve God by visiting the shrines of the saints in distant lands. And thirdly, I ask that the prince and all his court shall accept the true faith and be baptized Christians. For I cannot wed even so great and perfect a prince, if he be not as perfect a Christian.' Then Ursula stopped speaking, and the ambassadors bowed low before her beauty and wisdom and went to take her answer to their king. Now Ursula did not make these conditions without a purpose, for in her heart she thought that surely the prince would not agree to such demands, and she would still be free. But even if he did all that she had asked, it would surely fulfil the purpose of her dream, and she would save these eleven thousand maidens and teach them to serve and honour God. Ere long the ambassadors arrived safely in England, and went to report their mission to the king. They could not say enough about the perfections of this wonderful princess of Brittany. She was as fair and straight as a lily, her rippling hair was golden as the sunshine, and her eyes like shining stars. The pearls that decked her bodice were not as fair as the whiteness of her throat, and her walk and every gesture was so full of grace that it clearly showed she was born to be a queen. And if the outside was so fair, words failed them when they would describe her wisdom and learning, her good deeds and kind actions. The king, as he listened to his nobles, felt that no conditions could be too hard that would secure such a princess for his son, and as for the prince himself his only desire was to have her wishes fulfilled as quickly as possible, so that he might set sail for Brittany and see with his own eyes this beautiful princess who had promised to be his bride. So letters were sent north, south, east, and west, to France and Scotland and Cornwall, wherever there were vassals of England to be found, bidding all knights and nobles to send their daughters to court with their attendant maidens, the fairest and noblest of the land. All were to be arrayed in the finest and costliest raiment and most precious jewels, so that they might be deemed fit companions for the Princess Ursula, who was to wed Prince Conon, their liege lord. Then the knights and nobles sent all their fairest maidens, and so eager were they to do as the king desired, that very soon ten of the noblest maidens, each with a thousand attendants, and another thousand for the Princess Ursula, were ready to start for the court of Brittany. Never before was seen such a fair sight as when all these maidens went out to meet the Princess Ursula. But fairest of all was the princess herself as she stood to receive her guests. For the light of love shone in her eyes, and to each she gave a welcome as tender as if they had all been her own sisters. It seemed a glorious thing to think they were all to serve God together, and no longer to live the life of mere pleasure and vanity. As may well be believed the fame of these fair maidens spread far and near, and all the nobles and barons crowded to the court to see the sight that all the world talked about. But Ursula and her maidens paid no heed to the gay courtiers, having other matters to think upon. For when the soft spring weather was come, Ursula gathered all her companions together and led them to a green meadow outside the city, through which a clear stream flowed. The grass was starred with daisies and buttercups, and the sweet scent of the lime blossoms hung in the air, a fitting bower for those living flowers that gathered there that day. In the midst of the meadow there was a throne, and there the princess sat, and with words of wonderful power she told her companions the story of God's love and of the coming of our Blessed Lord, and showed them what the beauty of a life lived for Him might be. And the faces of the listening maidens shone with a glory that was more than earthly, as they with one accord promised to follow the Princess Ursula wherever she might lead, if only she would help them to live the blessed life so that they too might win the heavenly crown. Then Ursula descended from her throne and talked with each of the maidens, and those who had not yet been baptized she led through the flowery meadow to the banks of the stream, and there a priest baptized them while the birds joined in the hymn of praise sung by the whole company. But all this while the Prince Conon waited with no little impatience for news of Ursula. He had been baptized and joined the Christian faith, he had sent the companions she desired, and now he waited for her to fulfil her promise. And ere long a letter reached him, written round and fair in the princess's own handwriting, telling him that as he had so well fulfilled her conditions, and was now her own true knight, she gave him permission to come to her father's court, that they might meet and learn to know each other. It was but little time that Prince Conon lost before he set sail for Brittany. The great warships made a prosperous voyage over the sea that parted the two countries, and came sailing majestically into the harbour of Brittany, where the people had gathered in crowds to see the young prince who had come to woo their fair princess. From every window gay carpets were hung, and the town was all in holiday, as Ursula stood on the landing-place, the first to greet the prince as he stepped ashore, and all that Conon had heard of her seemed as nothing compared to the reality, as she stood before him in her great beauty and welcomed him with gentle courtesy. And he grew to love her so truly that he was willing to do in all things as she wished, though he longed for the three years to be over that he might carry her off to England and make her his queen. But Ursula told the prince of the vision that had come to her in her dream, when the angel had said she must first go through much suffering, and visit the shrines of saints in distant lands. And she told him she could not be happy unless he granted her these three years in which to serve God, and begged him meanwhile to stay with her father and comfort him while she was gone. [Illustration: URSULA STOOD ON THE LANDING PLACE, THE FIRST TO GREET THE PRINCE.] So Ursula set out with her eleven thousand maidens, and the city was left very desolate and forlorn. But the pilgrims were happy as they sailed away over the sea, for they were doing the angel's bidding, and they feared nothing, for they trusted that God would protect and help them. At first the winds were contrary and they were driven far out of their course, so that instead of arriving at Rome, which was the place they had meant to go to, they were obliged to land at a city called Cologne, where the barbarous Germans lived. Here, while they were resting for a little, another dream was sent to Ursula, and the angel told her that in this very place, on their return, she and all her maidens would suffer death and win their heavenly crowns. This did not affright the princess and her companions, but rather made them rejoice that they should be found worthy to die for their faith. So they sailed on up the River Rhine till they could go no further, and they landed at the town of Basle, determined to do the rest of their pilgrimage on foot. It was a long and tedious journey over the mountains to Italy, and the tender feet of these pilgrims might have found it impossible to climb the rough road had not God sent six angels to help them on their way, to smooth over the rough places, and to help them in all dangers so that no harm could befall them. First they journeyed past the great lakes where the snow-capped mountains towered in their white glory, then up the mountain-road, ever higher and higher, where the glaciers threatened to sweep down upon them, and the path was crossed by fierce mountain-torrents. But before long they began to descend the further side; and the snow melted in patches and the green grass appeared. Then followed stretches of flowery meadow-land, where the soft southern air whispered to them of the land of sunshine, fruit, and flowers. Lower down came the little sun-baked Italian villages, and the simple, kindly people who were eager to help the company of maidens in every way, and gazed upon them with reverence when they knew they were on a pilgrimage to Rome. Thus the pilgrims went onward until at length they came to the River Tiber and entered the city of Rome, where were the shrines of Saint Peter and Saint Paul. Now the Bishop of Rome, whom men call the Pope, was much troubled when it was told him that a company of eleven thousand fair women had entered his city. He could not understand what it might mean, and was inclined to fear it might be a temptation of the evil one. So he went out to meet them, taking with him all his clergy in a great procession, chanting their hymns as they went. And soon the two processions met, and what was the amazement and joy of the Pope when a beautiful maiden came and knelt before him and asked for his blessing, telling him why she and her companions had come to Rome. 'Most willingly do I give thee my blessing,' answered the old man, 'and bid thee and thy companions welcome to my city. My servants shall put up tents for you all in some quiet spot, and ye shall have the best that Rome can afford.' So the maidens rested there in quiet happiness, thankful to have come to the end of their pilgrimage and to have reached the shrines of God's great saints. But to Ursula an added joy was sent which made her happiness complete. For the prince, whom she had left behind, grew impatient of her long absence, and the longing for his princess grew so strong he felt that he could not stay quietly at home not knowing where she was nor what had befallen her. So he had set out, and, journeying by a different route, had arrived in Rome the same day as Ursula and her maidens were received by the good bishop. It is easy to picture the delight of Conon and Ursula when they met together again, and knelt land in hand to receive the Pope's blessing. And when Ursula told him all that had happened and of the angels whom God had sent to guide and protect them, the only desire the prince had was to share her pilgrimage and be near her when danger threatened. And his purpose only became stronger when she told him of the vision she had had in the city of Cologne. 'How can I leave thee, my princess,' he asked, 'when I have but now found thee? Life holds no pleasure when thou art absent. The days are grey and sunless without the sunshine of thy presence. Bid me come with thee and share thy dangers, and if it be, as thou sayest, that it is God's will that thou and all these maidens shall pass through suffering and death for His sake, then let me too win the heavenly crown that we may praise God together in that country where sorrow and separation can touch us no more.' And Ursula was glad to think that, through love of her, the prince should be led to love God, and so granted his request and bade her companions prepare to set out once more. The Pope would fain have persuaded them to stop longer in Rome, but Ursula told him of her vision, and how it was time to return as the dream had warned her. Then the Pope and his clergy made up their minds to join the pilgrimage also, that they too might honour God by a martyr's death. Now there were in Rome at that time two great Roman captains who were cruel heathens, and who looked upon this pilgrimage with alarm and anger. They commanded all the imperial troops in the northern country of Germany; and when they heard that Ursula and her maidens were bound for Cologne they were filled with dismay and wrath. For they said to each other: 'If so many good and beautiful women should reach that heathen land the men there will be captivated by their beauty and wish to marry them. Then, of course, they will all become Christians, and the whole nation will be won over to this new religion.' 'We cannot suffer this,' was the answer. 'Come, let us think of some way to prevent so great a misfortune that would destroy all our power in Germany.' So these two wicked heathen captains agreed to send a letter to the king of the Huns, a fierce savage, who was just then besieging Cologne. In it they told him that thousands of fair women in a great company were on their way to help the city, and if they were allowed to enter all chances of victory for his army would vanish. There was but one thing to be done and that was to kill the entire band of maidens the moment they arrived. Meanwhile Ursula and her companions had set sail for Cologne, and with them were now Prince Conon and his knights and the Pope with many bishops and cardinals. And after many days of danger and adventure the pilgrims arrived at the city of Cologne. The army of barbarians who were encamped before the city was amazed to see such a strange company landing from the ships. For first there came the eleven thousand maidens, then a company of young unarmed knights, then a procession of old men richly robed and bearing no weapons of any kind. For a moment the savage soldiers stood still in amazement, but then, remembering the orders they had received in the letter from the Roman captains, they rushed upon the defenceless strangers and began to slay them without mercy. Prince Conon was the first to fall, pierced by an arrow, at the feet of his princess. Then the knights were slain and the Pope with all his clergy. Again the savage soldiers paused, and then like a pack of wolves they fell upon the gentle maidens, and these spotless white lambs were slain by thousands. And in their midst, brave and fearless, was the Princess Ursula, speaking cheerful words of comfort to the dying and bidding one and all rejoice and look forward to the happy meeting in the heavenly country. So great was her beauty and courage that even those wicked soldiers dared not touch her, and at last, when their savage work was done, they took her before their prince that he might decide her fate. Never before had Ursula's beauty shone forth more wonderfully than it did that day when she stood among these savage men and gazed with steadfast eyes upon the prince, as one might look upon a wild beast. The prince was amazed and enchanted, for he had never seen so lovely a maid in his life before, and he motioned to the soldiers to bring Ursula nearer to him. 'Do not weep, fair maiden,' he said, trying to speak in his gentlest voice, 'for though you have lost all your companions you will not be alone. I will be your husband, and you shall be the greatest queen in Germany.' Then most proudly did Ursula draw herself up, and her clear eyes shone with scorn as she answered: 'Does it indeed seem to thee as though I wept? And canst thou believe that I would live when all my dear ones have been slain by thee, thou cruel coward, slayer of defenceless women and unarmed men?' And when the proud prince heard these scornful words he fell into a furious rage, and, bending the bow that was in his hand, he shot three arrows through the heart of Princess Ursula and killed her instantly. So the pure soul went to join the companions of her pilgrimage and to receive the crown of life which the angel of her dream had promised her, and for which she had laid down her earthly crown as gladly as when in her peaceful home she laid it aside before she went to rest. SAINT BENEDICT It was in the year of our Lord 540 that Saint Benedict was born at Spoleto in Italy, and he was only a boy of sixteen on the night when our story begins. Such a cold night it was. Piercing wind swept over the mountains, whistling through the pine-trees and hurrying on to the great city of Rome that lay in the plains below. It was cold enough in the city where the people could take shelter in their house and sit warming their hands over their little pots of fire, but out on the bare hillside it was even worse. For the icy breath of the winter wind, which had come far over the snow, swept into every nook and corner as if determined to search out any summer warmth that might be lingering in a sheltered corner. And there in a cave high up among the rocks, a boy sat listening to the wind, and thinking of many things, as he tried to wrap his worn old cloak closer round him. He was a tall thin lad, with sad dreaming eyes and a face already sharpened by want and suffering. The cave in which he sat had little in it, except a heap of dried leaves which served him for a bed, and it was difficult to imagine how any one could live in so dreary and comfortless a place, so far from any other human being. But he was thinking of a very different home, as he sat shivering in the cold that night. Only a year ago he had lived in a beautiful palace, where everything was pleasant and warm and bright. His father was the lord of the country around, and he, the only son of the house, had everything that he could want. They were all proud of him, he was so clever and brilliant, and as soon as he was old enough he was sent to study in Rome, that he might become a great lawyer. There the boy's eyes saw a different scene--the great city of Rome, where all was gaiety and pleasure, where all pleased the eye, the ear, and the taste, but where, alas, so much wickedness dwelt as well. He had tried to shut his eyes to things he did not wish to see, but day by day the sights and sounds around him, the talk of his companions, and the things they thought so pleasant had become hateful to him. And one day he had stolen secretly away from Rome, leaving everything behind, determined to go away into a desert place and live alone. This it seemed to him was the only way of truly serving God, to learn to deny himself in everything and to keep himself unspotted from the world. A tender smile came over the boy's face as the next picture rose before his eyes. True he had left all and gone into the wilderness, but love could not so easily be left behind, and his old nurse had found out a way of following him, and would not be denied the pleasure of serving him and caring for his wants; even begging food, from door to door, that she might prepare a dainty meal for him. It had been very pleasant, but its very pleasantness had warned him that he must deny himself still further. So he had once more stolen away, when his old nurse was asleep and had hidden himself in the cave among the rocks of Subiaco. Here he was indeed alone, and the only food he had was a little bread which a kind old hermit gave him daily, and his only drink the clear water of the mountain streams. And here he seemed to live with God alone, seeing no one but the kind old hermit who brought him his daily bread. He was happy and peaceful, never ceasing to pray for those who in the busy world might forget to pray for themselves. But this night the thoughts of past days were troubling him. And as he sat there listening to the wind he began to long for the things he had left behind. One beautiful face especially grew clearer than the rest, and smiling upon him beckoned him back to the pleasures and comforts and earthly joys he had put away from him. With a cry he sprang to his feet and rushed out of the cave. For a moment he felt as if his feet must carry him down the steep mountain-side, over the plain and back to the beautiful city; and then he stood still, and with a prayer for help to overcome this temptation of the Evil One, he threw himself into a thicket of thorny briars that grew by the side of the cave. There he rolled over and over until he was torn and bleeding; then slowly returning to the cave he lay down upon his bed of leaves, peaceful and contented. The evil thoughts had fled, the face that tempted him had vanished, and Satan was conquered. So Benedict began his life of self-denial and solitary prayer. Years passed by and in spite of the loneliness of the place and the few people who ever passed by that way, it began to be known that one of God's saints lived in the mountain cave. The shepherds who fed their flocks on the lower hills would bring him little offerings of milk or cheese and ask his blessing, or perhaps a prayer for one who was sick. And gradually people began to call him their saint of the mountain, and to come to him for help in all their troubles. Thus the fame of his goodness spread wider and wider, until a company of monks who lived some way off sent and besought him to come and live with them and be their head. Benedict was grieved to think of leaving his little cell which he had grown to love, and the simple mountain people, who so often came to him in their need. But he thought this was a call he ought to obey, so he sorrowfully set out and journeyed many miles till he came to the convent of the brothers. It was all very strange to him after the stillness of his mountain cell, and he could not accustom himself to hearing voices all day long and to seeing so many faces. Still he strove to do his duty and soon made many changes in the convent life. He told the brothers plainly that there were many comforts they must put away, and above all that they must eat less and work more. Now the brothers did not like this at all, and they began to repent that they had asked so great a saint to come and rule over them, for he made their rule so hard and strict, that few of them cared to keep it. Then one day a strange thing happened. The brothers were all dining together, and Benedict was silently eating his portion, his thoughts far away in the little mountain cell at Subiaco, when some one touched his arm and offered him a cup of wine. Benedict turned and looked searchingly into the brother's face, and then with upraised hand made the sign of the cross over the cup. Instantly it fell broken to the ground, and the wine was spilt upon the floor, for there had been poison in the cup, which the holy sign had destroyed. Then Benedict looked round at the company of brothers, who sat with downcast eyes, ashamed and silent, and, without a word, he rose and left them. He returned, alone as he had come, back to his mountain home, where instead of human voices there was the song of the birds, where the wild flowers looked at him with pure, friendly faces, and even the wild animals did not count him their enemy and would do him no harm. Here he hoped once more to live quite alone, but one by one men came and built huts close to his cave, that they might be near so great a saint, and before long there was a great company living around him. Benedict's fame had spread even to Rome, and two of the Roman nobles sent their sons to be taught by him. One was only five years old and the other twelve, and it seemed a hard life for such children. But Benedict cared for them and watched over them, and they loved him as if he had been their own father. And after all life was very pleasant on the mountain-side, when the sun shone and lessons and prayers were over. They could play among the pine-trees and chase the goats over the rocks, and when the sun grew too hot creep back into the cave to rest. In spring there were the first flowers to hunt for, and they would come back with eager hands filled with violets and mountain anemones. And in autumn there were nuts and berries to be gathered, which they laid up like young squirrels for their winter store. And among the daily duties there was nothing they liked so well as to go down to the lake to fetch water, when the mountain springs had run dry. One day it was the little one's turn to do this, and as he was leaning over, his foot slipped, and he fell into the lake, and before he could utter a cry the water closed over his head. At that very moment Benedict, who was kneeling in prayer on the hill above, saw a vision of the boy's danger, and hastily sent the elder lad down to the lake to help the child. He never stayed to question why he was sent, but sped down the mountain-side, and without a moment's delay threw himself into the lake, hoping to be able to reach the little dark head that had risen above the water for the last time. And lo! he found that the water grew firm beneath his feet, and he walked as if he was on dry land, and lifting the child, carried him safely ashore. When Benedict saw that so many other hermits had taken up their abode on the mountain, he determined to form them into a company of brothers, and give them a rule to live by, and by and by they built a little chapel where they could meet for daily service. Now, strangely enough, every evening at the hour of prayer, one young monk became restless and uneasy, and would steal silently out of the chapel and disappear down the hillside. None of the brothers could think what made him do this; but night after night the same thing happened just when prayers were about to begin. All were troubled and disturbed, till at last they went to Benedict, and asked him what it could mean. Then the saint promised to watch, and that very evening he saw what no other eyes had seen. Into the chapel came a little demon black as coal, and he seized the robe of the poor young monk, and dragged him out of the door. And though the demon was so tiny he was stronger than the monk, and easily led him swiftly away out of sound of the chapel bell. Then Benedict followed, and touching the monk with his rod, bade the demon begone and trouble him no longer. And after that the young monk stayed in the chapel with the rest, and the demon was seen no more. [Illustration: A LITTLE DEMON SEIZED THE ROBE OF THE YOUNG MONK.] It seemed as if Benedict must always suffer from the malice of evil brothers, who disliked his strict rule; and even in his own mountain home the danger followed him. This time the poison was put into a loaf of bread; but Benedict knew that it was there, and while the wicked monk who offered it to him watched with evil eye, hoping to see him eat it, he turned to a wood near by, where a young raven sat. 'Come hither,' said Benedict, holding out the loaf towards the raven, 'come hither, and take this bread and carry it where the poison that is hidden within can do no harm.' And the story tells us that the raven instantly obeyed, and carried off the loaf. And ere long Death, more powerful than the raven, carried off that wicked monk, so that the poison which lurked in his evil heart could no longer do harm to any one. It troubled Benedict greatly about this time to hear that not very far off on Monte Cassino there was a heathen temple where the people worshipped false gods, and were living in darkness and sin. It seemed terrible that such a thing should be suffered in a Christian land, so Benedict made up his mind to go himself and force the people to listen to him. It was a strange contrast to see him in his coarse, poor robe and thin wan face standing preaching among the crowd of gay pleasure-seekers, who cared for nothing but eating and drinking and making merry. They could not understand why any one should choose to be poor, and suffer pain and hunger for the sake of any god. But as Benedict taught them day by day, the majesty of his face and the solemn notes in his voice forced them to listen half unwillingly. Then, as they began to learn about the true God, they saw that the gods they had worshipped were false, and they pulled down their temple, and built two chapels on the place where it had stood. Here, too, Benedict built the first great monastery which was called after him; and after this the brothers began to be known by his name, and were called Benedictines. But the Evil One saw with great rage that Benedict was taking away his servants, and destroying his temples, and he tried in every way to hinder the work. Once when the workmen were trying to raise a stone they found it impossible to move it, though they worked hard all day. At last, in despair, they besought Benedict to come to help them. As soon as he came he saw at once what was the matter, for on the stone sat a little black demon laughing at the efforts of the workmen; knowing they could never move the stone while he chose to sit there. 'Get you gone, messenger of Satan,' cried Benedict. And with a howl of rage the imp fled, and the stone was lifted easily into its place. Upon a certain day, not long after the monastery was built, as Benedict was praying in the chapel of the convent, one of the brothers came to tell him that a great company of soldiers were coming up the hill, and at their head was Totila, king of the Goths, who had sent a messenger to ask the saint to receive him. Benedict, who cared little for earthly kings, was yet too courteous to refuse any such request, so he went out to where the company was gathered on the mountain-side. The rough soldiers stood with heads uncovered, and from their midst came one who wore a crown and sandals of gold and a kingly robe. He knelt before the saint, and said in a loud, clear voice: 'I, Totila, king of the Goths, have come to crave thy blessing, father, for thy fame hath spread even to the wild north country where I reign.' The brothers, crowding behind Benedict, eager to see these curious strangers, were surprised to hear no answering words of welcome fall from the lips of the saint. And still more surprised were they when Benedict pointed an accusing finger at the glittering crown that shone on the king's head, and said: 'Why dost thou bear upon thy head the sign of royalty which belongs not to thy station? And why have thy lips framed this deceit? Go to thy master, and bid him come to me in truth, and think not that I could mistake a servant for a king.' And to the amazement of all, the real king, who had disguised his armour-bearer to test the power of the saint, came quickly forward, and with no royal robe or golden crown, knelt low before the saint, confessing all, and praying to be forgiven. He was sure now that this was indeed a servant of God, and he listened humbly while Benedict reproved him for his many sins, and warned him of the fate that awaited him. And so the years passed on, bringing much honour and earthly renown to him who had once lived a lonely boy upon the wild mountain-side. Things had changed since those early days. He could no longer live quite alone as he had once loved to do, for the world had followed him even into the wilderness. But his heart was as pure and his purpose as strong as when he was a lonely boy seeking only to serve God. Perhaps the one great pleasure of his earthly life was the yearly visit he paid to his sister Scholastica, who had for many years come to live near him. She had formed a little company of nuns, who strove to live as the brothers were living, working and praying and denying themselves all earthly pleasures. And as it was a great delight to Benedict to visit his sister, so to Scholastica the day of his coming was the happiest day of all the year. The only thing that grieved her was that the golden hours of that bright day seemed to fly faster than any other, while she listened to his words of counsel and advice, and told him all her troubles. As it drew near the time for one of these yearly visits, Scholastica began to long for her brother as she had never longed before. Something told her that these bright summer days were to be the last she should spend on earth; and the longing to see and talk to her brother grew almost more than she could bear. And when he came the hours slipped past even faster than was their wont, and before she could realise it the time had come for him to go. There was so much still to say, and she needed his help so sorely, that she prayed him to wait a few hours longer. But Benedict was persuaded that it was his duty to set off, and duty to him ever came before all else. He gently told her it could not be; that he must return to the brothers that night. But while he spoke, Scholastica was not listening to his words, nor heeding what he said. With her whole heart she was praying God that He would grant her this one request, and prevent her brother from leaving her so soon. And as she prayed the light suddenly died out of the sky, great clouds arose and, before Benedict could set out, a terrible storm began to rage. The thunder pealed overhead, the hail came down in a blinding shower, and it was impossible for any one to leave the shelter of the house. Thus God answered the prayer of Scholastica, filling her heart with thankfulness. And afterwards the heart of Benedict was also filled with gratitude, for not many days later he saw in a vision the soul of his sister flying like a white dove up to heaven's gate, and he knew he should see her on earth no more. Benedict had lived a long, hard life, eating but little, suffering cold, and denying himself in all things. But though his spirit only grew stronger and brighter as time went on, his body was worn out, and at last he prepared to lay it aside, as men lay aside the worn-out robe which has grown thread-bare. And as he had longed to live alone, so, when death came, he prayed to be carried to the little chapel, and there to be left before the altar alone with God. Thus Benedict the Blessed went home at last, leaving his tired body in God's house, while his spirit returned to God who gave it. [Illustration: A TERRIBLE STORM BEGAN TO RAGE.] SAINT CHRISTOPHER Long ago in a far distant land there lived a boy called Offero. He was taller and stronger and braver than any of his companions, and he was called Offero, which means bearer, because he could carry the heaviest burdens on his broad shoulders, without stooping under their weight. His was the grandest kind of strength too, for it was not only strength of body, but strength of heart and soul besides. As Offero grew into manhood he began to tire of being first only in games and play, and he longed to use his strength for some real end, feeling sure there was work in the world waiting for his hand. Sometimes as he strode across the olive-clad hills, and felt the wind in his hair, and drew in great breaths of life and strength, he would see before him a dim vision of some great purpose, ever beckoning him on, and in his ear a voice would sound, that bade him use his strength only for the highest. Night and day Offero thought upon the vision, and it seemed to him that its meaning was that he should go out into the world and do a man's work. And, since for him the highest meant strength and fearlessness, he vowed that he would search until he found the bravest and strongest king and would take service only with him. So Offero set out and, after many weary wanderings, he came to the gates of a great city. Here, in a palace built of alabaster, lived one whom the people called the greatest king on earth. He had more soldiers and horsemen and chariots than any other monarch, and the banner of crimson and gold that floated over the palace roof, had never been lowered in the face of any foe. But Offero scarcely noticed all the glitter and splendour of the palace, or the crowd of waiting men. He was only eager to see the king, whom every one said was as brave and strong as a lion. No one stopped him as he strode on. Even the royal guards at the palace door stood back to let him pass. He was dusty and travel-stained, and his armour was dull and dinted by many a hard blow, but there was that in his walk and in his eyes, and the grasp of his great hand upon his sword, that made every one fall back to let him pass. The king was seated upon his throne making wise laws for his people, when Offero entered the audience hall. Straight to the steps of the throne he went, and kneeling there placed his sword at the king's feet and offered to be his true servant. For a moment the king looked in wonder and astonishment at this giant, and the great sword that stretched along the widest step of his ivory throne. Then with a look of pride at the strength of the man kneeling at his feet, he bade Offero rise and use his sword henceforth only in the king's service. So Offero became the king's servant, and not one of the king's enemies could stand against him. Wherever there was danger to be met or fighting to be done, there he was ever to be found, and he made his master's name more feared and honoured than that of any other monarch in the world. His work filled all his time and thoughts, and the vision he had seen grew so dim that it had nearly faded from his memory, when one night a minstrel came to the court. This minstrel had a harp of gold and his fingers woke the sweetest music from the golden strings, but sweeter than all was his voice as he sang of brave deeds and mighty battles, the wisdom of the wise and the courage of the strong. The heart of Offero was charmed by the music as he sat idly among the rest of the courtiers, listening in the great audience chamber. But as the minstrel sang, Offero noticed that the king looked disturbed and once or twice made a strange sign with his hand when a certain evil name was repeated in the song. It almost seemed to Offero as if at such times a look of fear came into his eyes. Waiting behind the rest when the minstrel was gone, Offero looked gravely into the king's eyes and said: 'My liege, wilt thou tell thy servant, why thou didst make that sign upon thy forehead and what the look that came into thine eyes may mean--thou who fearest no man?' Then the king answered Offero saying: 'That sign is the sign of the cross, and I make it upon my brow whenever I hear the name of Satan, the Evil Spirit, because I fear him, and because that sign alone can protect me from him.' And Offero bowed his head, and standing there before the king he answered sadly: 'Fare thee well, O my king, for I may not serve thee longer. I have promised only to serve the greatest and one who feared nothing, so I must e'en seek this Evil Spirit. If thou fearest him, must he not be more powerful than thou?' So Offero went sorrowfully out of the king's presence, and away from the splendid court and the fair city. And as he went the vision which of late had faded from him grew clearer, and seemed to beckon him on and on. And the voice that of old sounded in his ears spoke to him once more, so that his heart became light and his purpose grew strong. Now after many days of toilsome wanderings, Offero came at last to the skirt of a great dark wood. The pines were so thick that never a sunbeam could pierce through their tops, and the trunks of the trees could only just be seen ghostly grey in the everlasting twilight that reigned there. Deeper and darker grew the wood as Offero went on, until he came to the darkest part of all, and there he found the Evil Spirit and his court. Offero could see nothing clearly in the gloom, but one great shadow stood out, bigger and stronger than any of the other shadows that flitted about, and on its brow was the outline of a kingly crown. 'What seekest thou here?' asked the Evil One, in a deep strong voice, like the roar of distant thunder. 'I seek to serve the greatest and strongest king on earth, and one who knows no fear,' answered Offero. 'Then is thy quest ended,' said the shadowy king, with uplifted head and proud gesture, 'for I indeed am the greatest king of all, and I know not what that word fear meaneth.' So Offero became one of the servants of the King of Evil, and his work was heavy and his wages light. But that seemed but a small matter to him, if only he had indeed found the highest. Time passed on until there came a day when the Evil One rode out with all his servants and Offero at their head. And as they passed out of the wood they came to a cross set up by the wayside. It was only a rough cross of wood, standing out clear against the sky, the grass beneath worn by those who had knelt before it, and a bunch of wild flowers laid at its foot by some grateful hand. But when the eye of the Evil One fell upon it, he shuddered and, turning quickly round, plunged back into the wood, followed by all his servants. And Offero saw he was trembling from head to foot. 'Stop,' cried Offero, barring his way, for he was not afraid even of the great Shadow upon the fierce black horse. 'I would fain know what this meaneth, ere we go further. Didst thou not say thou wert stronger than all and feared nothing? and lo! thou tremblest like a child before a piece of crossed wood.' 'It is not the cross I fear,' answered the Evil One, 'but Him who once hung upon it.' 'And who is He that you should tremble at the very thought of Him?' asked Offero. 'Is He a greater and stronger king than thou?' 'He is greater, and He is stronger,' answered Satan, 'and He is the only one I fear.' Then Offero rode away from the dark wood and the evil company, out into the sunshine and light. And as he looked at the blue sky, and felt the warmth of the blessed sunshine once more, the vision seemed to rise again before his eyes, ever beckoning him onward, and in his ear the same voice sounded, bidding him seek on, until he should indeed find the highest. Far and near did Offero wander, asking all he met if they could tell him where he might find the Christ--this man who once hung upon a cross and who was greater and more powerful even than Satan, the King of Evil. And some said one thing and some another, but no one could aid him in his quest, until at last in his wanderings he came to a little hut in the midst of a desert. Here a holy man dwelt, with no living soul near him, serving God day and night. Most gladly did he welcome Offero, but gladder still was he when Offero eagerly asked him the question that had been upon his lips so long: 'Good hermit, canst thou tell me where I may find the King called Christ, He who once hung upon a cross, and who is stronger even than the King of Evil?' 'That can I,' answered the hermit, 'for He is the Master whom I serve, and in His name thou art welcome indeed.' And taking Offero into his hut, the hermit gave him food and made him rest. Then in the cool of the evening, when the red sun was sinking behind the belt of distant palm-trees, and a mellow glow turned the sands of the desert into grains of gold, the hermit sat without the hut and told the wonderful Christ story to the listening ears of the giant who lay upon the ground at his feet. Never had Offero heard words like these before. Even the vision had not prepared him for this. With all his soul in his eyes he listened. Filled with wonder was he at the thought that the King of all heaven should have deigned to come to earth in the form of a little helpless child. But as the hermit went on and told of His power and majesty, His infinite compassion for the weak and helpless, His courage and fearlessness in the face of His foes, ending with the great sacrifice of the cross, Offero sprang to his feet, and grasping his sword in his hand, he raised it to heaven and vowed he would be Christ's faithful soldier and servant unto his life's end, and would fight under no other banner but His, the King of Heaven and Earth. The hermit was startled as he looked at the gleaming sword, upheld by that strong arm, and in his calm, kind voice, he said: 'My son, the Lord Christ seeketh not to be served as an earthly king. His soldiers fight not with earthly swords, but with the weapons of prayer and fasting.' 'But, father,' said Offero, 'how can I fight with weapons I know nothing of? If He has given me this great strength, surely there must be a way that He would have me use it in His service.' Then the hermit was troubled, for he saw that Offero must needs serve Christ in some other way. All night he pondered, and in the morning he bade Offero come with him, and together they journeyed forth for many days until they came to the banks of a river. There the hermit stayed his steps. It was a very deep and dangerous river and, because there was no bridge across it and the current was strong, many travellers lost their lives in trying to ford it. This the hermit told Offero, and bade him stay and watch there, so that he might help those who wished to cross, and save the lives of those who might otherwise perish without his aid. 'And in helping others,' said the hermit, 'thou wilt be helping Christ, and it may be He will accept thy service, and will one day come unto thee and take thee for His servant.' So Offero built a hut on the river bank, and pulling up a palm-tree that was growing there, he used it as a staff to lean upon when he waded through the deep water. He was so tall and strong that no matter how high the river rose he could always wade across it. He was ever ready to help the weary footsore travellers, and often when they were too weak to stand against the current, even with the support of his strong arm, he would take them up upon his broad shoulders and carry them safely across. For a long time did Offero live in his little hut on the river-bank, doing his work well, in the hope that his Master might come to him as the hermit had promised. But weeks and months went by, and still the King did not come, and Offero began to fear that He never would pass that way. Then one night a terrible storm began to rage. The wind howled round the lonely little hut, and the waters roared as they rushed past in the darkness. 'I need not watch to-night,' thought Offero, 'for no one will seek to cross the river in such a storm as this.' But as he sat listening to the roll of the thunder and the clashing of the hail on the roof, he fancied he heard, above the noise of the storm, a little voice crying outside and a faint knocking at the door. It sounded like the cry of a child, and Offero hastily rose up and, unbarring the door, looked out. For a moment he could see nothing in the thick darkness and blinding rain, but presently he heard the cry again, sounding quite close to where he stood, and looking down he saw something small and white, and heard the little voice sounding clear above the storm: 'Kind Offero, wilt thou carry me across the river to-night?' Then Offero saw it was a little child who was standing out there upon the threshold--a child who looked up at him with pleading eyes, his golden curls lying wet against his cheek, and his little white robe drenched with the driving rain. Very tenderly Offero stooped down and lifted the little one in his kind, strong arms, and asked him how it came that he was out alone on such a stormy night. 'I must cross the river to-night,' said the child in his soft, clear voice, 'and the water is deep and I am afraid. I saw thy hut and thought perchance one might dwell here who would help me.' 'That will I gladly do,' said Offero, as he felt the little arms clinging round his neck. 'The night is dark, and the river runs high indeed, but thou art such a tiny child, I shall scarcely feel thy weight. I will place thee high upon my shoulder, so that the water may not reach even thy feet.' So Offero took his great staff in his hand, and placed the child upon his shoulder and stepped down into the roaring flood. Higher and higher rose the water, stronger and stronger grew the current, as Offero waded on. Never before had his strength been put to such a test. And not only did the torrent threaten to sweep him off his feet, but the child upon his shoulder seemed to grow heavier and heavier with every step, until he could scarcely stagger on under the tremendous weight. But on he went, fighting for each step. And now he was past the worst and into the shallower water beyond. Putting forth all his remaining strength, with one last great effort he struggled up the farther side and with a sigh of relief he climbed upon the bank, and gently set the little child upon the grass. [Illustration: THE CHILD UPON HIS SHOULDER SEEMED TO GROW HEAVIER.] Then Offero stood looking at him in great wonder and astonishment and said: 'How is it that thou, who seemest but a feather-weight, hast yet become heavier than any burden I ever bore in all my life before?' And as Offero spoke, the child looked up into his face, and lo! a strange light seemed to shine round the golden head, and his white robe became bright and glistening as the light. And the wonderful look of majesty in those eyes drew Offero down to his knees. And as he knelt there, scarce daring to lift his eyes before that wonderful gaze, he heard the sweet, clear voice of the little child again, and knew it for the same that had guided him since the vision of his boyhood. 'No wonder that I seemed to thee a heavy burden, for I bear upon my shoulders the sins and sorrows of the whole world. I am Christ, whom thou hast sought to serve. I came to thee in the form of a little helpless child, that I might prove thee, if thou wert indeed my faithful servant. And because thou hast been faithful in helping others, thou shalt be counted worthy to enter my service, and I will give thee the new name of Christopher, because thou hast borne Christ upon thy shoulders. Take now thy staff and strike it into the earth, and thou shalt know by a sign that I am indeed thy King.' Then the light faded away, and the child was gone. But where Christopher struck his staff, behold, it took root and budded out into leaves of tender green. And Christopher knelt on there in the darkness with a great joy in his heart, for he had seen the face of his King, and had found his Master at last. He knew that his search was ended, and that henceforth he would serve only the highest. And all the trouble and perplexity had vanished away, for he understood now that in ministering to others he would always be serving his King, even if the work seemed but small and mean. So Christopher learned to be Christ's true soldier and servant even unto death, and because he fought manfully under His banner unto his life's end, he is called a saint. His old name of Offero has been long forgotten, and we know him only by that new name which the Christ-child gave him that stormy night, and call him Saint Christopher. SAINT CATHERINE OF SIENA As the years pass by Father Time makes many changes in the busy town and quiet country, but there are some places he seems to have forgotten or passed over so lightly that they look very much the same to-day as they did hundreds of years ago. One of these places, which Time has dealt so gently with, is in the heart of Italy, built high upon a hill. It is a town whose towers and palaces and steep, narrow streets are little changed from what they were five hundred and more years ago, when Catherine, the saint of Siena, was born there. To-day if you climb the steep winding road that leads up to the city, and make your way through the gates and along the steepest of the narrow streets, you will come to a house with a motto written over the door in golden letters--'Sposæ Christi Katharinæ domus,' which means 'The house of Katherine, the bride of Christ.' And if you go in you will see the very room where Saint Catherine used to live, the bed of planks on which she slept, her little chapel, and the rooms which her brothers and sisters used. It all looks just as it did when Benincasa, the dyer of Siena, lived there with his wife Lapa. They had more than twenty children, but each one was welcome, and when at last Catherine and a twin sister were born, there still did not seem one too many. The little sister lived only a few days, and perhaps that made the parents love Catherine all the more, and it was not only her own family who loved her. She was the favourite of all the neighbours, and however busy they were they would always find time to stop and talk to her as they passed. It was not that she was very beautiful, or even very clever, but she had a way of making every one feel happy when she was near them, and she had the sunniest smile that ever dimpled a baby's face. It was like a sunbeam, lighting up everything near it, and it shone in her eyes as well, so that ere long the people found a new name for her, and called her 'Joy' instead of Catherine. As soon as she could walk alone, Catherine would wander away, sure of a welcome at every house, and though at first when the other children cried, 'The baby is lost again!' the mother would be anxious, she soon ceased to mind, and only said, 'She is sure to be safe somewhere.' And safe she always was, for every one would stop work to look after her as she toddled along, and wherever she went Joy carried the sunshine with her. It happened that one afternoon when Catherine was about six years old, her mother sent her and an elder brother, Stephen, to carry a message to a house some way off. It was a beautiful evening, and as the children went hand in hand down the steep street and up the hill towards the great church of Saint Dominic, Catherine stopped a moment to look at the sunset. She always loved beautiful colours, and to-night the little fleecy clouds were all touched with crimson and gold, like fairy islands in a pale green sea, more beautiful than anything she had ever seen. Stephen did not care for sunsets. He was much more anxious to be home in time for supper, so he ran on alone, calling to Catherine to follow quickly. Catherine did not seem to hear his voice or to notice that he was gone, but stood there with eyes fixed on the sunset, her face shining, and her hair like a halo of gold round her head. It was not the evening sky she was looking at, but a vision of heavenly beauty. For there among the rose-pink clouds she saw the Madonna seated upon a throne and holding in her arms the infant Christ. It was no longer the poor Madonna of the stable, but the Queen of Heaven, her dazzling robe blue as the summer sky, and a jewelled crown upon her head. Only the same sweet mother-look was there as when she bent over the manger-bed. There are no words to tell of the beauty of the Christ-child's face. Catherine only knew that as He looked at her He smiled and held up His little hand as if in blessing, and that smile drew her heart to His feet. Then suddenly Catherine's arm was roughly shaken and her brother asked her impatiently at what she was gazing. 'O Stephen,' she cried, 'did you not see it too? Look!' But the vision had faded, and the grey twilight closed in upon the two little figures as they went slowly home, the boy vexed with his loitering sister, and she sobbing with disappointment to think that the window in heaven was shut, and that she might never again look within. As Catherine grew older, she never forgot the vision she had seen, or how the hand of the Christ-child had been stretched out to bless her. And it made her think often how she could best please Him, so that some day He might smile on her again. Catherine had heard a great deal about the good men who went to live in deserts to be alone with God,--how they lived in caves and had scarcely anything to eat, and how God would sometimes send the ravens to bring them food. Now she was always fond of wandering, and the idea of living in a desert seemed a beautiful way of serving Christ. She had never gone beyond the walls of the town, and all outside was a new world to her; so she was sure if only she could pass through the city gates, she would soon find her way to the desert, where there would certainly be a cave ready for her to live in. So one day Catherine set out very early in the morning, carrying in her pocket a small loaf of bread, just in case the ravens should forget to come to a little girl-hermit. In those days it was not safe to live outside the city walls, and there were no farms nor houses to be seen as Catherine slipped through the gates and began to find her way down the hillside, among tangled briars and over rough stones. Soon her feet grew very tired, and everything looked so forlorn and wild that she was sure this must be the desert at last, and there, too, was a little cave in the rocks waiting all ready for her. It was very nice to creep in and out of the hot sunshine into the cool shade, and to rest until the sun went down. But as night came on and she knelt to say her evening prayer, she began to think of home, and the kind mother waiting there, and she knew she had done wrong to come away, even though she had meant to serve God. Very quickly she left her cave, and as she ran home her feet seemed to fly over the ground. The desert had not been so very far away after all, and she reached the house before her mother had begun to grow anxious, but she never again wandered away to live a hermit's life. As Catherine grew older she loved to listen to the stories of the saints, and there was one she was never tired of hearing. It was the life of Saint Catherine of Alexandria, the saint whose name she bore. This young queen was said to be the wisest and noblest of all the saints, and when her courtiers wished her to marry, she said she would only marry a prince who was perfect in every way. Such a prince was of course impossible to find, but one night a poor old hermit had a vision in which the Madonna came to him and told him that our Blessed Lord, the only perfect Man, would accept the love of the young queen's heart and the service of her hands. And when the queen knew this her joy was great, and that very night the Virgin mother came to her in a cloud of glory surrounded by angels bearing crowns of lilies, and in her arms was the Holy Child, who smiled on the queen and placed a ring upon her finger, as a sign that she belonged to Him. The more Catherine thought about this story the more she longed that Christ would accept her heart and service too. And one night in a dream He seemed to come to her, just as He had come to the other Catherine, placing a ring upon her finger and bidding her remember that now she had given her heart to Him. Thus it was a great trouble to Catherine when she was told by her parents soon after this that she was old enough to begin to think of marriage. She said she did not wish to marry at all. But this only made her parents angry with her, especially when one day they found she had cut off all her beautiful golden hair, thinking to make herself so ugly that no one would want her for his wife. 'Very well,' said her father, 'if thou wilt not marry as I bid thee, then shalt thou do the house-work and be our servant.' He expected this would be a great punishment, but Catherine was glad to have hard work to do, and did it so well and cheerfully that her father began to feel his anger melt away. Then it happened one day that in passing her room he looked in, and there he saw her kneeling with clasped hands and upturned face, and eyes in which the peace of heaven shone, while around her head was a bright light that took the form of a snow-white dove resting there. [Illustration: THE HOLY CHILD PLACED A RING UPON HER FINGER.] From that moment he ceased to be angry with Catherine, and said all should be as she wished, for surely the dove was a sign that God accepted her prayers and approved of what she did. So she was allowed to have a little room which She made into a chapel where she could be alone to think and to pray. She wanted to learn to conquer herself before she could serve Christ in the world, and for three years she lived almost entirely alone, praying in the little chapel, struggling to overcome her faults and to grow strong to resist temptation. But in spite of all her struggles evil thoughts would come into her heart, and it seemed impossible to keep them out. It was easy to do right things, but so terribly difficult to think only pure and good thoughts. She knew that Satan sent the wicked thoughts into her heart, but the hardest trial of all was that Christ seemed to have left her to fight alone--He seemed so very far away. At last one night, as she lay sobbing in despair, suddenly the evil thoughts left her, and instead she felt that Christ was near and that He bent tenderly over her. 'Why, oh why didst Thou leave me so long, dear Lord?' she cried. 'I never left thee,' His voice said quietly. 'But where wert Thou, Lord, when all was so dark and evil?' she humbly asked. 'I was in thy heart,' replied the voice; 'didst thou not hate the evil thoughts? If I had not been there thou wouldst not have felt how black they were, but because I was in the midst they seemed to thee most evil, and thus I gave thee strength to cast them out.' So Catherine's heart was filled with peace, and she learned to love Christ more and more, and to deny herself in every way, sleeping on bare planks with a log for her pillow, and eating the things she cared for least. It was not that she thought these things good in themselves, but she felt she must use every means to make her heart pure and fit to serve her Master. And before very long Christ spoke to her again in the stillness of the night, and told her she had lived long enough alone, that it was time now to go out into the world and help other people to grow good too. When Catherine thought of the busy, noisy life which other people led, compared to the quiet peacefulness of her little cell and chapel, she was very sad, and thought she had offended God that He was sending her away from Him to mix with the world again. But His voice sounded in her ears once more, and told her it was not to separate her from Himself that He sent her out, but that she should learn to help others. 'Thou knowest that love giveth two commandments--to love Me, and to love thy neighbour. I desire that thou shouldst walk not on one but two feet, and fly to heaven on two wings.' So Christ spoke to her, and Catherine with fearful heart prepared to obey, only praying that He would give her strength to do His will. And after that her life was spent in doing good to others. The smile that used to lighten her face when she was a little child had still the power of bringing peace and gladness to all, as she went amongst the poor, nursing the sick, helping every one in trouble, and teaching people more by her life than her words to love God. And as, when she was a baby, they called her Joy, so now again they found a new name for her, and she was known as 'the child of the people.' In every kind of trouble they came to her, even asking her to settle their quarrels, so that she was the peacemaker as well as the helper of the whole town. There was one special reason why people loved Catherine, and that was because she always saw the best that was in them. She knew there was good in every one, no matter how it was dimmed or hidden by the evil that wrapped it round. Where other eyes saw only evil temper or wicked spite, she looked beyond until she found some good that she could love. Every day she prayed to God that He would help her to see the beauty in each soul, so that she might help it to get rid of the sin that dimmed its beauty. And so, because she looked for good in every one, all showed her what was best in themselves, and for very shame would strive to be all that she thought them. Catherine had joined the Dominican sisterhood and wore the white robe and black veil, but she did not live in a convent as other sisters did. Every morning when the sun began to gild the towers and roofs of the city, passers-by would see her leave her home and walk up the steep street towards the church of Saint Dominic where she always went to early mass. Strangers must have wondered when they saw the men uncover their heads as she passed, as if she had been a queen instead of a poor sister clad in a coarse white robe and black veil. But if they had caught sight of her face perhaps they would have understood, for her eyes seemed as if they were looking into heaven, and the holy peace that shone in her smile made men feel that she lived in the very presence of God. One morning as she was going to church as usual in the first light of dawn, her thoughts far away and her lips moving in prayer, she was startled by the touch of a hand upon her robe and the sound of a voice asking for help. She turned to look and saw a poor man leaning against the wall, haggard and pale, and so weak that he could scarcely stand. 'What dost thou want of me?' asked Catherine pitifully. 'I only ask a little help for my journey,' the poor man said; 'my home is far from here, and the fever laid its hand upon me as I worked to provide bread for those I love. So I pray thee, lady, give me a little money that I may buy food to strengthen me before I start.' 'I would gladly help thee,' answered Catherine most sorrowfully, 'but I am not a lady, only a poor sister, and I have no money of my own to give.' She turned as if to go on, but the eager hand still held her cloak and the man begged once more. 'For Christ's sake help me, for indeed I need thy help most sorely.' Then Catherine stood still. She felt she could not leave him so. There was nothing at home she could part with, for that very morning she had given away all the food that was in the house. Her father and mother were good and kind, but she must not give away the things they needed. Sorrowful and perplexed, her hand felt for the rosary which hung at her side, for in every trouble she ever turned in prayer to her dear Lord. Then as her fingers touched the beads, she suddenly remembered that here was at least one thing which was her very own--a small silver crucifix which she had had since she was a child, and which she had touched so often as she prayed that it was worn smooth and thin. Still it was silver and would buy the sick man a meal, and she quickly unfastened it from the rosary and put it into his hand. The man's blessings followed her as she went, and though she had parted with the thing she loved best, she counted the blessings more precious than the gift. And as she knelt in the dim church, after the mass was over, God sent a heavenly vision to reward His servant. Catherine thought she stood in a great hall filled with things more beautiful than words can tell, and in the midst stood our Blessed Lord, holding in His hand the most beautiful thing of all--a cross of beaten gold, set with jewels of every hue sparkling so brightly that it almost dazzled Catherine's eyes as she looked. 'Dost thou see these shining gifts,' He asked, 'and wouldst thou know whence they came? They are the noble deeds which men have done for My sake.' And Catherine kneeling there with her empty hands could only bow her head and say: 'Lord, I am only a poor sister, as Thou knowest, and have nought to give Thee. The service I can offer could not find a place among these glorious gifts.' Then it seemed as if Christ smiled upon her, and holding out the golden cross He asked: 'Hast thou not seen this cross before, Catherine?' 'No, Lord,' she answered, wondering, 'never before have mine eyes beheld anything so lovely.' But as she gazed upon it, her heart was filled with a sudden gladness, for in the midst of the gold and jewels, in the heart of the glorious light, she saw the little worn silver crucifix which she had given to the poor man that morning for the love of Christ. And as the vision faded there rang in her ears the words she knew so well: 'Inasmuch as ye did it unto one of the least of these My brethren, ye did it unto Me.' As time went on the fame of Catherine spread to other towns, outside Siena, and when there were disputes between the great cities of Italy they would send for Catherine, and beg her to act as peacemaker, and she helped them all just as she did her own poor people of Siena. Even the Pope came to her for advice. In the midst of all this busy life Catherine fell ill. Her love for Christ was so real, and her sorrow for His sufferings so great, that she prayed that she might bear the pain that He had borne. We do not know how our Lord granted her request, but in her hands and feet and side appeared the marks of nails and spear. All her sufferings she bore most patiently, but her heart was glad when the end came. The same vision that had smiled on her that summer evening when she was a child, appeared in the sunset sky again, this time never to fade away, as Catherine, the bride of Christ, was led by the white-robed angels up to the throne of our Lord. SAINT AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO The story of the life of Saint Augustine is different from almost every other saint story, because it is taken from his own words and not from what has been said about him. He wrote a wonderful book called _The Confessions of Saint Augustine_, and in it we find all that he thought and did from the time he was a little child. Augustine was born in 354 in the northern part of Africa, which then belonged to Rome, and was one of the richest countries in the world. His mother, Monica, was a Christian, but all her prayers and loving care could not keep her son from evil ways. He is often called the prodigal saint, because he wandered very far astray for many years into that far country of the youngest son in the parable; living in the midst of the sins and evil pleasures of the world, until he learned to say, 'I will arise and go to my father.' And so Augustine's story comforts and helps us when we feel how easy it is to do wrong, and how we fail every day to do the good things we meant to do. There are so few days we can mark with a white stone because we have really tried to be good, and so many days we are glad to forget because of the black cross that stands against them. And yet, who knows but, if we fight on to the end, we too may be saints as Augustine was, for he won his crown through many failures. The story, in Augustine's own words, begins from the time when he was a very little baby, not from what he remembers, but from what he had learned as he watched other babies in whom he saw a picture of himself. First of all Augustine tells of the tiny baby, who does nothing but sleep and eat and cry. Then the baby begins to laugh a little when he is awake, and very soon shows clearly his likes and dislikes, and kicks and beats with his little hands when he does not get exactly what he wants. Then comes the time of learning to speak and walk. After that Augustine begins really to remember things about himself. For who could ever forget the trial of first going to school? Oh, how Augustine hated it, and how hard it seemed to him! The lessons were so difficult and the masters were so strict, and he loved play so much better than work, and when he went back to school with lessons unlearned and work undone, the result was of course that he was whipped. It did seem so unjust to him, for he could not see the use of lessons, and the whippings were so sore. And in his book he tells us how it made him say his first prayer to God--'I used to ask Thee, though a very little boy, yet with no little earnestness, that I might not be whipped at school.' Augustine could not see the reason why he should be forced to stay indoors and learn dull, wearisome lessons, when he might be playing in the sunshine and learning new games, which seemed so much more worth knowing. How those games delighted him! He was always eager to be first, to win the victory and to be ahead of every one else. But then followed the whipping at school, and the little sore body crept away and sobbed out the prayer from his little sore soul. He did not understand how it could all be meant for his good. We never quite understand that till we have left school far behind. I wonder if we all wrote down just exactly what we felt and did when we were little children, whether we would have as many things to confess as Augustine had? There are some faults which no one is very much ashamed to own because they don't seem small and mean and pitiful. But who would like to confess to being greedy and stealing sweet things from the table when no one was looking? Who would care to own that he cheated at games, caring only to come out first whether he had played fairly or not? Yet this great saint tells us he remembers doing all these mean things and looks back upon them with great sorrow. He warns other little children to kill these faults at the very beginning, for he knows how strong they grow and how difficult to conquer, when the mean child grows into a man whom no one can trust. As time went on and he grew to be a big boy he went further and further astray. When he was little he stole things to eat because he was greedy or because he wanted to bribe other little boys to sell him their toys, but now that he was older it was out of mere pride and boastfulness that he took what did not belong to him. He thought it grand and manly to show off to other boys how little he cared about doing wrong. Augustine tells us that in a garden near his house there was a pear-tree covered with pears neither sweet nor large. But just because it belonged to some one else, and he thought it fun to steal, he and his companions went out one dark night and robbed the tree of all its fruit. They did not care to eat the pears, and after tasting one or two threw all the rest to the pigs. There was no particular pleasure in this he allows, and he would never have done it alone, but he wanted the other boys to admire him and to think he was afraid of nothing. And so years went on and Augustine grew up into manhood, and it seemed as if his evil ways would break his mother's heart. Through all his sin and foolishness she loved him and prayed for him but he paid no heed to her, and wandered further away into that far country, wasting all he had in living wildly and forgetting the God he had prayed to when a child. One day when Monica was weeping over this wandering son of hers and praying for him with all her heart, God sent a comforting dream to her which she never forgot. She thought she saw herself standing on a narrow wooden plank, and towards her there came a shining angel who smiled upon her as she stood there worn out with sorrow and weeping. 'Why art thou so sad, and wherefore dost thou weep these daily tears?' asked the angel. 'I weep over the ruin of my son,' answered the poor mother. Then the angel bade her cease from grieving and be at rest, and told her to look and see that on the same narrow plank of salvation where she was standing Augustine stood beside her. His mother told Augustine of this dream, and though he only laughed at it, it seemed to sink into his heart and he remembered it many years after. And to Monica it came as a breath of hope, and comforted her through many dark days. For she was sure that God had sent this dream to tell her that in the end she and her son would stand together in His presence. But though Monica believed this she never ceased to do all that was in her power to help Augustine. And once she went to a learned bishop and begged him to talk to Augustine and try what he could do. But the bishop was a wise man and knew that by speaking he would do more harm than good, for Augustine was proud of his unbelief and had no longing in himself for better things. But Monica did not see this and could only implore the bishop to try, until the good man grew vexed with her and said at last, 'I cannot help thee in this matter, but go thy way in peace. It cannot be that a son of such tears should perish.' And these words comforted Monica, as the dream had done, and made her sure that in the end all would be right. The good bishop spoke truly, for after many years had passed Augustine began to be weary of his own way and to look for a higher, better life. He longed to turn his face homeward, but now he had lost the way, and for long he sought it with bitter tears. At last, one day, he felt he could bear the burden of his evil life no longer. His sins felt like a heavy chain dragging him down in the darkness, and there was no light to show him which way to turn. Taking a roll of the scriptures he wandered out into the garden and there, as he wept, he heard a voice close by chanting over and over again 'Take, read.' He thought it must be some game that children were playing, but he could remember none that had those words in it. And then he thought perhaps this was a voice from heaven in answer to his prayer, telling him what to do. Eagerly he took the holy writings in his hand and opened them to read, and there he found words telling him what sort of life he should lead. In a moment it all seemed clear to him. His Father was waiting to receive and pardon him; so he arose and left the far country and all his evil habits and turned his face to God. And then he tells how he went straight to his mother--the mother who had loved and believed in him through all those evil days, and he told her like a little child how sorry he was at last. Then, indeed, was Monica's mourning turned into joy, and so at her life's end she and her son sat hand in hand, both looking up towards the dawning heaven; he with eyes ashamed but full of hope, and she with tears all washed away, and eyes that shone with more than earthly joy. When his mother at last died and left him alone, Augustine did not grieve, for he knew the parting was not for long. All that was left for him to do now was to strive to make good those years he had wasted, and be more fit to meet her when God should call him home. And so it came to pass that this great sinner became one of God's saints and did a wonderful work for Him in the world. He was made Bishop of Hippo, and was one of the most famous bishops the world has ever known. There is one legend told of Augustine which has comforted many hearts when puzzling questions have arisen and it has seemed so difficult to understand all the Bible teaches us about our Father in heaven. They say that once when this great father of the Church was walking along by the seashore, troubled and perplexed because he could not understand many things about God, he came upon a little child playing there alone. The child had digged a hole in the sand and was carefully filling it with water which he brought from the sea in a spoon. The bishop stopped and watched him for a while and then he asked: 'What art thou doing, my child?' 'I mean to empty the sea into my hole,' answered the child, busily going backwards and forwards with his spoon. [Illustration: THE CHILD HAD DIGGED A HOLE IN THE SAND.] 'But that is impossible,' said the bishop. 'Not more impossible than that thy human mind should understand the mind of God,' said the child, gazing upwards at him with grave, sweet eyes. And before the bishop could answer the child had vanished, and the saint knew that God had sent him as an answer to his troubled thoughts, and as a rebuke for his trying to understand the things that only God could know. SAINT AUGUSTINE OF CANTERBURY It was market-day in the great city of Rome, and the people were busy buying and selling and shouting, just as they do to-day with us, when market-day comes round. But there was a great difference between this Roman market and ours, a difference which would have seemed to us strange and cruel. For instead of sheep and oxen, or green vegetables from the country, they were selling men and boys, and even little maidens. There in the great market-place, with the sun beating down on their bare heads, they stood, looking with dull, despairing eyes, or with frightened glances at the crowds of buyers and sellers who were bargaining around. Suddenly a hush fell on the crowd, and a stately figure was seen crossing the square. People stood aside and bent their heads in reverence as Gregory passed by, for he was Abbot of a great monastery in Rome, and was much beloved even by the rough Roman soldiers. He walked swiftly as if he did not care to linger in the market-place, for it grieved his gentle heart to see the suffering of the slaves when he could do nothing to help them. But suddenly the crowd seemed to divide in front of him, and he stopped in wonder at the sight which met his eyes. It was only a group of little fair-haired English boys who had been captured in the wars, and carried off to be sold as slaves in the Roman market. But Gregory had never seen anything like them before. All around were dark-eyed, swarthy-faced Italians, or darker-skinned slaves from Africa, and these boys with their sunny, golden hair, fair faces, and eyes blue as the sky overhead, seemed to him creatures from a different world. 'Whence come these children, and what name do they bear?' asked the bishop of a man who stood beside him. 'From a savage island far over the sea,' he answered, 'and men call them Angles.' Then the kind bishop looked with pitying eyes upon the beautiful children, and said to himself, as he turned to go: 'They should be called not Angles, but angels.' The sight of those boys, so strong and fearless and beautiful, made Gregory think a great deal about the little island of Britain, far away across the sea, from whence they had come. He knew the people who lived there were a fierce, warlike race, having a strange religion of their own, and that very few of them were Christians. But he knew, too, that though they were hard to conquer, and difficult to teach, still they were a people worth teaching, and he longed to win them to the side of Christ and to show them how to serve the true God. In those days people in Italy knew very little about that far-away island, and it seemed to them as difficult and dangerous to go to England as it would seem to us if we were asked to go to the wildest part of Africa. True there were no lions nor tigers in England, but the tall, fair-haired giants who lived there were as savage as they were brave, and might be even worse to deal with than the wild beasts of other lands. So it may well be believed that when Saint Gregory, who was now Pope of Rome, chose forty monks and sent them on a mission to this distant island, they were not very anxious to go, and set out in fear and trembling. But at their head was one who knew no fear and who was willing to face any dangers in the service of his Master. This man was Augustine, a monk of Rome, whom Gregory had chosen to lead the mission, knowing that his courage would strengthen the others, and his wisdom would guide them aright. It took many long days and nights of travel to reach the coast where they were to find a ship to carry them across to Britain, and before they had gone very far, the forty monks were inclined to turn back in despair. From every side they heard such terrible tales of the savage islanders they were going to meet, that their hearts, never very courageous, were filled with terror, and they refused to go further. Nothing that Augustine could say would persuade them to go on, and they would only agree that he should go back to Rome and bear their prayers to Saint Gregory, imploring him not to force them to face such horrible danger. If Augustine would do this they promised to wait his return and to do then whatever the Pope ordered. They had not to wait many days, for Augustine speedily brought back the Pope's answer to their request. His dark face glowed and his eyes shone with the light of victory, as he read to them the letter which Saint Gregory had sent. There was to be no thought of going back. Saint Gregory's words were few, but decisive. 'It is better not to begin a work than to turn back as soon as danger threatens; therefore, my beloved sons, go forward by the help of our Lord.' So they obeyed, and with Augustine at their head once more set out, hardly hoping to escape the perils of the journey, and expecting, if they did arrive, to be speedily put to death by the savage islanders. Perhaps the worst trial of all was when they set sail from France and saw the land fading away in the distance. In front there was nothing to be seen but angry waves and a cold, grey sky, and they seemed to be drifting away from the country of sunshine and safety into the dark region of uncertainty and danger. Nay, the island, whose very name was terrible to them, was nowhere to be seen, and seemed all the more horrible because it was wrapped in that mysterious grey mist. But though they did not know it, they had really nothing to fear from the island people, for the queen of that part of England where they landed was a Christian, and had taught the King Ethelbert to show mercy and kindness. So when the company of cold, shivering monks came ashore they were met with a kind and courteous welcome, and instead of enemies they found friends. The king himself came to meet them, and he ordered the little band of foreigners to be brought before him, that he might learn their errand. He did not receive them in any hall or palace, but out in the open air, for it seemed safer there, in case these strangers should be workers of magic or witchcraft. It must have been a strange scene when the forty monks, with Augustine at their head, walked in procession up from the beach to the broad green meadow where the king and his soldiers waited for them. The tall, fair-haired warriors who stood around, sword in hand, ready to defend their king, must have looked with surprise at these black-robed men with shaven heads and empty hands. They carried no weapons of any sort, and they seemed to bear no banner to tell men whence they came. Only the foremost monks carried on high a silver cross and the picture of a crucified Man, and instead of shouts and war-cries there was the sound of a melodious chant sung by many voices, yet seeming as if sung by one. Then Augustine stood out from among the company of monks and waited for the king to speak. 'Who art thou, and from whence have come these men who are with thee?' asked the king. Methinks thou comest in peace, else wouldst thou have carried more deadly weapons than a silver charm and a painted sign. I fain would know the reason of thy visit to this our island.' Slowly Augustine began to tell the story of their pilgrimage and the message they had brought. So long he spoke that the sun began to sink and the twilight fell over the silent sea that lay stretched out beyond the meadow where they sat before his story was done. The king bent forward, thoughtfully weighing the words he had heard, and looking into the faces of these strange messengers of peace. At length he spoke, and the weary monks and stalwart warriors listened eagerly to his words. 'Thou hast spoken well,' he said to Augustine, 'and it may be there is truth in what thou sayest. But a man does not change his religion in an hour. I will hear more of this. But meanwhile ye shall be well cared for, and all who choose may listen to your message.' Those were indeed welcome words to the company of poor tired monks, and when the kindly islanders, following their king's example, made them welcome and gave them food and shelter, they could well echo the words of Saint Gregory in the Roman market: 'These are not Angles but angels.' And soon King Ethelbert gave the little company a house of their own, and allowed them to build up the ancient church at Canterbury, which had fallen into ruins. There they lived as simply and quietly as they had done in their convent in Italy, praying day and night for the souls of these heathen people, and teaching them, as much by their lives as their words, that it was good to serve the Lord Christ. And before very long the people began to listen eagerly to their teaching, and the king himself was baptized with many others. The chant which the monks had sung that first day of their landing no longer sounded strange and mysterious in the ears of the islanders, for they too learnt to sing the 'Alleluia' and to praise God beneath the sign of the silver cross. Now Augustine was very anxious that the Ancient British Church should join his party and that they should work together under the direction of Pope Gregory. But the British Christians were not sure if they might trust these strangers, and it was arranged that they should meet first, before making any plans. The Ancient British Church had almost been driven out of the land, and there were but few of her priests left. They did not know whether they ought to join Augustine and his foreign monks, or strive to work on alone. In their perplexity they went to a holy hermit, and asked him what they should do. 'If this man comes from God, then follow him,' said the hermit. 'But how can we know if he is of God?' asked the people. The hermit thought a while and then said: 'The true servant of God is ever humble and lowly of heart. Go to meet this man. If he rises and bids you welcome, then will you know that he bears Christ's yoke, and will lead you aright. But if he be proud and haughty, and treat you with scorn, never rising to welcome you, then see to it that ye have nought to do with him.' So the priests and bishops of the British Church arranged to meet Augustine under a great oak-tree, which was called ever afterwards 'Augustine's oak.' They carefully planned that the foreign monks should arrive there first, in time to be seated, so that the hermit's test might be tried when they themselves should arrive. Unhappily, Augustine did not think of rising to greet the British bishops, and they were very angry and would agree to nothing that he proposed, though he warned them solemnly that if they would not join their forces with his, they would sooner or later fall by the hand of their enemies. Greatly disappointed Augustine returned to Canterbury and worked there for many years without help, until all who lived in that part of England learned to be Christians. And Pope Gregory hearing of his labours was pleased with the work his missionary had done, and thought it fit that the humble monk should be rewarded with a post of honour. So he made Augustine Archbishop of Canterbury, the first archbishop that England had known. It was a simple ceremony then, with only the few faithful monks kneeling around the chair on which the archbishop was enthroned, but Augustine's keen, dark face shone with the light of victory and humble thankfulness, for it seemed a seal upon his work, a pledge that the island should never again turn back from the faith of Christ. And could those dark eyes have looked forward and pierced the screen of many years, Augustine would have seen a goodly succession of archbishops following in his footsteps, each in his turn sitting in that same simple old chair, placed now in Westminster Abbey and guarded as one of England's treasures. And he would have seen, too, what would have cheered his heart more than all--a Christian England venerating the spot where his monastery once stood, and building upon it a college to his memory. And there he would have seen England's sons trained to become missionaries and to go out into all the world to preach the gospel, just as that little band of monks, with Augustine at their head, came to our island in those dark, far-off days. But though Augustine could not know all this, his heart was filled with a great hope and a great love for the islanders who now seemed like his own children, and he was more than content to spend his life amongst them. And when his work was ended, and the faithful soul gave up his charge, they buried him in the island which had once seemed to him a land of exile, but which at last had come to mean even more to him than his own sunny land of Italy. SAINT CECILIA It was in the days when cruel men killed and tortured those who loved our Blessed Lord that, in the city of Rome, a little maid was born. Her father and mother were amongst the richest and noblest of the Roman people, and their little daughter, whom they called Cecilia, had everything she could possibly want. She lived in a splendid palace, with everything most beautiful around her, and she had a garden to play in, where the loveliest flowers grew. Her little white dress was embroidered with the finest gold, and her face was as fair as the flowers she loved. But it was not only the outside that was beautiful, for the little maiden's heart was fairer than the fairest flowers, and whiter than her spotless robe. There were not many people who loved our Lord in those dark days. Any one who was known to be a Christian was made to suffer terrible tortures, and was even put to death. But though Cecilia's father and mother knew this they still taught their little daughter to be a servant of Christ and to love Him above all things. For they knew that the love of Christ was better than life, and worth all the suffering that might come. And as Cecilia grew into a stately maiden every one wondered at the grace and beauty that shone out of her face. And every one loved her because she loved every one. She was always ready and willing to help others, and she specially cared to be kind to the poor. In the folds of her gold embroidered dress she always carried a little book which she loved to read. It was the book of the Gospels, and the more she read and heard of Christ, the more she longed to grow like Him. She could not bear to think that she wore fine dresses, while He had been so poor and suffered so much. And so, underneath her soft, white robe she wore a harsh, coarse garment made of hair. And when it hurt and rubbed her sorely, the pain only made her glad, because she wore it for Christ's sake. Some say the meaning of her name Cecilia is 'Heaven's Lily.' And that name certainly suited this little Roman maiden. For as God plants the lilies in the dark earth, and presently they grow up and lift their pure white cups to heaven, so Cecilia seemed to lift her heart above the sins and sorrows of the world, where God had planted her, and to turn her face ever heavenwards. And the poor people whom she helped and cheered with her kind sympathy loved to look at her, for the peace of paradise shone in her eyes, and it seemed to bring heaven nearer to the poor souls. As soon as Cecilia was old enough, it was arranged that she should marry a young Roman noble called Valerian, and this made her very unhappy. She had so hoped to belong only to Christ, and this Valerian was a pagan who knew nothing of the Lord whom she served. But she knew that her guardian angel would watch over her and keep her from all harm, and so she obeyed her father's and mother's wishes, and was married to the young Roman noble. When Valerian had taken Cecilia home and all the guests had gone, and they were left alone together, she told him that, though she was married, she belonged first of all to Christ, and that her guardian angel, who never left her, would guard and protect her from all danger. 'Wilt thou not show me this angel, so that I may know that what thou sayest is true?' asked Valerian. 'Thou canst not see the heavenly messenger until thou hast learnt to know my Lord,' answered Cecilia. And as Valerian eagerly asked how he should learn to know this Christ, Cecilia told him to go along the great Appian Way, outside the walls of Rome, until he should meet some poor people who lived in the Campagna. And to them he should say: 'Cecilia bids you show me the way that I may find the old man, Urban the Good.' So Valerian started off and went the way Cecilia directed. And the people guided him as she had promised, until they came to a curious opening in the ground, down which they told him he must go if he wished to find Pope Urban. This opening was the entrance to a strange under-ground place called the Catacombs. There were miles and miles of dark passages cut out of the rock, with here and there a little dark room, and curious shelves hollowed out of the walls. It was here that many poor Christians lived, hiding themselves from those who would have put them to death. And the little shelves were where they buried the bodies of poor Christians who had died for Christ. It was here that the old Pope, Urban the Good, lived, and he welcomed Valerian most gladly, knowing why he had come. He began at once to teach him all that he should know--how God was our Father, and Jesus Christ His Son, our Saviour. And as Valerian listened to the strange, wonderful words, the love of God shone into his heart, so that when the old man asked: 'Believest thou this?' He answered with all his heart: 'All this I steadfastly believe.' Then Urban baptized Valerian, and by that sign the young Roman knew that he was indeed a Christian, a servant of Christ. All the world looked different to Valerian as he walked back along the Appian Way to Rome. The flat, low fields of the Campagna, fading away into the ridges of the purple Apennines, seemed almost like the fields of paradise, and the song of the birds was like the voice of angels. He scarcely thought of the dangers and difficulties that were before him, or if he did it was only to feel glad that he might have anything to bear for his new Master. [Illustration: A CROWN OF LILIES AND ROSES IN EACH HAND.] And when he reached home, and went back to the room where he had left Cecilia, he found her there waiting for him, with a glad welcome in her eyes. And as they knelt together they heard a rustle of wings, and looking up they saw an angel bending over them, with a crown of lilies and roses in each hand. These he placed upon their heads, and to Valerian he said: 'Thou hast done well in allowing Cecilia to serve her Master, therefore ask what thou wilt and thy request shall be granted.' Then Valerian asked that his brother, whom he dearly loved, might also learn to know Christ. And just then the door opened, and the brother whom Valerian loved so much came in. He, of course, only saw Valerian and Cecilia, and could not see the angel, or even the wreaths of heavenly roses. But he looked round in astonishment and said: 'I see no flowers here, and yet the fragrance of roses and lilies is so sweet and strange, that it makes my very heart glad.' Then Valerian answered: 'We have two crowns here, which thou canst not see, because thou knowest not the Lord who sent them to us. But if thou wilt listen, and learn to know Him, then shalt thou see the heavenly flowers, whose fragrance has filled thy heart.' So Valerian and Cecilia told their brother what it meant to be a Christian. And after the good Urban had taught him also, he was baptized and became God's knight. Then he, too, saw the heavenly crowns and the face of the angel who guarded Heaven's Lily. For a while the home of Valerian and Cecilia was like a paradise on earth. There was nothing but happiness there. Cecilia loved music above everything. Her voice was like a bird's, and she sang her hymns of praise and played so exquisitely, that it is said that even the angels came down to listen. But before long it began to be known that Valerian and his brother helped the poor Christians, and the wicked governor of the city ordered them both to be seized and brought before him. He told them that there were but two ways before them: either they must deny that they were Christians, or they must be put to death. But God's knights did not fear death, and they went out to meet it as if they were on their way to a great victory. And when the soldiers wondered, and asked them if it was not sad that they should lose their lives while they were still so young, they answered that what looked like loss on earth was gain in heaven--that they were but laying down their bodies as one puts off one's clothes to sleep at night. For the immortal soul could never die, but would live for ever. So they knelt down, and the cruel blows were struck. But, looking up, the soldiers saw a great pathway of light shining down from heaven. And the souls of Valerian and his brother were led up by angel hands to the throne of God, there to receive the crowns of everlasting glory which they had won on earth. And so Cecilia was left alone. But she did not spend her time grieving. Gathering the people and soldiers around her, she taught them about the Lord of Heaven, for whose sake Valerian and his brother had so gladly suffered death. And it was not long before she also trod the shining pathway up to heaven and met the ones she loved. For the governor was not satisfied with the death of Valerian and his brother, but ordered Cecilia to be brought before him. 'What sort of a woman art thou, and what is thy name?' he asked. 'I am a Roman lady,' she answered with grave dignity,' and among men I am known by the name of Cecilia. But'--and her voice rang out proudly as she looked fearlessly into those angry eyes--'my noblest name is Christian.' Then the enraged governor ordered that she should be taken to her house, and put to death in her bath. But the boiling water could not hurt her, and she was as cool as if she had bathed in a fresh spring. This made the governor more furious than ever, and he ordered that her head should be cut off. But even after she had received three strokes from the sword she did not die, but lived for three days. And these days she spent in quietly putting her house in order and dividing her money among the poor, ever singing in her sweet voice the praises of God. And so at the end of three days God's angel came and led Cecilia home, and all that was left of her on earth was her fair body, lying like a tired child asleep, with hands clasped, gently resting now that her work on earth was done. And in Rome to-day there is a splendid church built over the place where Cecilia's house stood. Some day if you go there, you will see her little room and the bath in which the boiling water could not hurt her. You will see too, a beautiful marble figure lying under the altar, and you will know exactly how Cecilia looked when she left her tired body lying there, and went up the shining path to God. [Illustration: SHE TAUGHT THEM ABOUT THE LORD OF HEAVEN.] SAINT GILES It was in the beautiful land of Greece that Saint Giles was born, very far away from the grey northern city, whose cathedral bears his name. His parents were of royal blood, and were, moreover, Christians; so the boy was brought up most carefully, and taught all that a prince should know. He was a dreamy, quiet boy, and what he loved best was to wander out in the green woods by himself, with no companions but the animals and birds and flowers. He would lie for hours watching the birds busily build their nests, or the rabbits as they timidly peeped at him out of their holes. And soon all the woodland creatures began to look upon him as their friend, and even the wildest would come gradually nearer and nearer, almost within reach of his hand; and they seemed to listen when he talked to them, as if they could understand what he said. One thing they certainly did understand, and that was that he loved them and would do them no harm. Saint Giles could not bear to see anything suffer, and his pity was great for all those in pain; and often he would mend a bird's broken wing, or bind up a little furry foot that had been torn in a trap; and the birds and beasts always lay quiet under his hand, and seemed to know that he would cure them, even though the touch might hurt. It happened that one day, when Saint Giles was kneeling in church, he saw a poor beggar lying there on the cold, stone floor. He had scarcely any clothes to keep him warm, and his face had a hungry, suffering look, which filled the heart of the saint with pity. He saw that the poor man was ill and trembling with cold, so without a moment's thought, he took off his own warm cloak and tenderly wrapped it round the beggar. The warmth of the cloak seemed to bring life back to the poor chilled body, and when Saint Giles had given him food and wine, he was able to lift himself up, and to bless the kind youth who had helped him. And when the people saw what had happened they thought Saint Giles had worked a miracle, and cured the man by his wonderful touch; for they did not realise that all kind deeds work miracles every day. It did not please Saint Giles that people should think he possessed this miraculous gift of healing, and he had no wish to be called a saint. He only longed to lead his own quiet life and to help all God's creatures who needed his care. But the people would not leave him alone, and they brought to him those who were sick and lame and blind, and expected that he would heal them. It is true that many needed only a little human aid, and the food and help which Saint Giles gave them would soon make them well again; but there were some he could not help, and it wrung his heart to see their pleading eyes, and to watch them bring out their little store of hard-earned money, eager to buy the aid which he so willingly would have given had he been able. So at last Saint Giles determined to leave his native city, for he had been all alone since his father and mother had died. He wished to escape from the anxious crowds that refused to leave him in peace; but first he sold all that he had and gave it to the poor of the city, an act which made them surer than ever that he was one of God's saints. Then he sailed away across the sea to a far-off country. There Saint Giles found a lonely cave in which an old hermit lived. 'Here at last I shall find peace and quietness,' said he to himself, 'and men will soon forget me.' But even here ere long his friends found him, for his fame had spread across the seas. So once more he set out and went further and further away, by paths that few had ever trod before, until in the depths of a green forest he found another shelter, a cave among grey rocks overgrown with lichens, and hidden by the sheltering boughs of the surrounding trees. Saint Giles had always loved the woods and this was just the home he had longed for. A clear stream flowed not far off, and his only companions would be the birds and beasts and flowers. Early in the morning the birds would wake him with their song, and the wild creatures would come stealing out of the wood to share his meal. And his silent friends, the flowers, would cheer and help him by their beauty, and remind him of God's garden whose gate would one day open for him, where he would wander in the green pastures beside the still waters of Life for evermore. But of all his companions the one Saint Giles loved best was a gentle white doe, who came to him as soon as he settled in the cave. She seemed to have no fear of him from the first, and stayed with him longer and longer each time, until at last she took up her abode with him, and would never leave him, lying close to him when he slept, and walking by his side wherever he went. This peaceful life went on for a long time and it seemed as if nothing could disturb its quiet happiness. But it happened that one day as Saint Giles was praying in the cave, and his companion, the white doe, was nibbling her morning meal of fresh grass by the banks of the stream, a curious noise was heard afar off. It came nearer and nearer, and then shouts of men's voices could be heard, the sound of horses galloping and the note of the hunter's horn. Then came the deep baying of dogs, and before the startled doe could hide, the whole hunt was upon her. With a wild halloo they chased her across the greensward and through the trees, and just as she disappeared into the cave, one of the huntsmen drew his bow and sent an arrow flying after her. Then they all dismounted and went to see what had become of the hunted doe, and soon found the opening into the cave. But what was their surprise, when they burst in, to find an old man kneeling there. He was sheltering the terrified doe who had fled to him for refuge, and an arrow had pierced the kind hand that had been raised to shield her. The huntsmen were ashamed of their cruel sport when they saw the wounded hand of the old man and the trembling form of the white doe as it crouched behind him, and they listened with reverence to the hermit's words as he spoke to them of man's duty towards God's dumb creatures. The King of France, who was one of the hunting party, came often after this to see Saint Giles, and at last offered to build him a monastery and give him all that he could want; but the old man begged to be left alone in his woodland cave, to serve God in peace and quietness. So there he lived quietly and happily for many years, until God took him, and he left his cave for the fairer fields of paradise. People loved the thought of this peaceful old saint who dwelt in the woods and was the protector of all sorrowful and suffering creatures, and so they often called their churches after Saint Giles, especially those churches which were built in the fields or near green woods. The surroundings of many of these churches are to-day changed. There are no fields now round his great cathedral church in the old town of Edinburgh; but the poor and sick and sorrowful crowd very near to its shelter, and the memory of the pitiful heart of the gentle old saint still hovers like a blessing round the grey old walls. SAINT NICHOLAS Of all the saints that little children love is there any to compare with Santa Claus? The very sound of his name has magic in it, and calls up visions of well-filled stockings, with the presents we particularly want peeping over the top, or hanging out at the side, too big to go into the largest sock. Besides, there is something so mysterious and exciting about Santa Claus, for no one seems to have ever seen him. But we picture him to ourselves as an old man with a white beard, whose favourite way of coming into our rooms is down the chimney, bringing gifts for the good children and punishments for the bad. Yet this Santa Claus, in whose name the presents come to us at Christmas time, is a very real saint, and we can learn a great deal about him, only we must remember that his true name is Saint Nicholas. Perhaps the little children, who used to talk of him long ago, found Saint Nicholas too difficult to say, and so called him their dear Santa Claus. But we learn, as we grow older, that Nicholas is his true name, and that he is a real person who lived long years ago, far away in the East. The father and mother of Nicholas were noble and very rich, but what they wanted most of all was to have a son. They were Christians, so they prayed to God for many years that he would give them their heart's desire; and when at last Nicholas was born, they were the happiest people in the world. They thought there was no one like their boy; and indeed he was wiser and better than most children, and never gave them a moment's trouble. But alas, while he was still a child, a terrible plague swept over the country, and his father and mother died, leaving him quite alone. All the great riches which his father had possessed were left to Nicholas, and among other things he inherited three bars of gold. These golden bars were his greatest treasure, and he thought more of them than all the other riches he possessed. Now in the town where Nicholas lived there dwelt a nobleman with three daughters. They had once been very rich, but great misfortunes had overtaken the father, and now they were all so poor they had scarcely enough to live upon. At last a day came when there was not even bread enough to eat, and the daughters said to their father: 'Let us go out into the streets and beg, or do anything to get a little money, that we may not starve.' But the father answered: 'Not to-night. I cannot bear to think of it. Wait at least until to-morrow. Something may happen to save my daughters from such disgrace.' Now, just as they were talking together, Nicholas happened to be passing, and as the window was open he heard all that the poor father said. It seemed terrible to think that a noble family should be so poor and actually in want of bread, and Nicholas tried to plan how it would be possible to help them. He knew they would be much too proud to take money from him, so he had to think of some other way. Then he remembered his golden bars, and that very night he took one of them and went secretly to the nobleman's house, hoping to give the treasure without letting the father or daughters know who brought it. To his joy Nicholas discovered that a little window had been left open, and by standing on tiptoe he could just reach it. So he lifted the golden bar and slipped it through the window, never waiting to hear what became of it, in case any one should see him. (And now do you see the reason why the visits of Santa Claus are so mysterious?) Inside the house the poor father sat sorrowfully watching, while his children slept. He wondered if there was any hope for them anywhere, and he prayed earnestly that heaven would send help. Suddenly something fell at his feet, and to his amazement and joy, he found it was a bar of pure gold. 'My child,' he cried, as he showed his eldest daughter the shining gold, 'God has heard my prayer and has sent this from heaven. Now we shall have enough and to spare. Call your sisters that we may rejoice together, and I will go instantly and change this treasure.' [Illustration: HE SHOWED HIS DAUGHTER THE GOLD.] The precious golden bar was soon sold to a money-changer, who gave so much for it that the family were able to live in comfort and have all that they needed. And not only was there enough to live upon, but so much was over that the father gave his eldest daughter a large dowry, and very soon she was happily married. When Nicholas saw how much happiness his golden bar had brought to the poor nobleman, he determined that the second daughter should have a dowry too. So he went as before and found the little window again open, and was able to throw in the second golden bar as he had done the first. This time the father was dreaming happily, and did not find the treasure until he awoke in the morning. Soon afterwards the second daughter had her dowry and was married too. The father now began to think that, after all, it was not usual for golden bars to fall from heaven, and he wondered if by any chance human hands had placed them in his room. The more he thought of it the stranger it seemed, and he made up his mind to keep watch every night, in case another golden bar should be sent as a portion for his youngest daughter. And so when Nicholas went the third time and dropped the last bar through the little window, the father came quickly out, and before Nicholas had time to hide, caught him by his cloak. 'O Nicholas,' he cried, 'is it thou who hast helped us in our need? Why didst thou hide thyself?' And then he fell on his knees and began to kiss the hands that had helped him so graciously. But Nicholas bade him stand up and give thanks to God instead; warning him to tell no one the story of the golden bars. This was only one of the many kind acts Nicholas loved to do, and it was no wonder that he was beloved by all who knew him. Soon afterwards Nicholas made up his mind to enter God's service as a priest. He longed above all things to leave the world and live as a hermit in the desert, but God came to him in a vision and told him he must stay in the crowded cities and do his work among the people. Still his desire to see the deserts and the hermits who lived there was so great that he went off on a journey to Egypt and the Holy Land. But remembering, what God had bade him do, he did not stay there, but returned to his own country. On the way home a terrific storm arose, and it seemed as if the ship he was in must be lost. The sailors could do nothing, and great waves dashed over the deck, filling the ship with water. But just as all had given up hope, Nicholas knelt and prayed to God to save them, and immediately a calm fell upon the angry sea. The winds sank to rest and the waves ceased to lash the sides of the ship so that they sailed smoothly on, and all danger was past. Thus Nicholas returned home in safety, and went to live in the city of Myra. His ways were so quiet and humble that no one knew much about him, until it came to pass one day that the Archbishop of Myra died. Then all the priests met to choose another archbishop, and it was made known to them by a sign from heaven that the first man who should enter the church next morning should be the bishop whom God had chosen. Now Nicholas used to spend most of his nights in prayer and always went very early to church, so next morning just as the sun was rising and the bells began to ring for the early mass, he was seen coming up to the church door and was the first to enter. As he knelt down quietly to say his prayers as usual, what was his surprise to meet a company of priests who hailed him as their new archbishop, chosen by God to be their leader and guide. So Nicholas was made Archbishop of Myra to the joy of all in the city who knew and loved him. Not long after this there was great trouble in the town of Myra, for the harvests of that country had failed and a terrible famine swept over the land. Nicholas, as a good bishop should, felt the suffering of his people as if it were his own, and did all he could to help them. He knew that they must have corn or they would die, so he went to the harbour where two ships lay filled with grain, and asked the captains if they would sell him their cargo. They told the bishop they would willingly do so, but it was already sold to merchants of another country and they dared not sell it over again. 'Take no thought of that,' said Nicholas, 'only sell me some of thy corn for my starving people, and I promise thee that there shall be nought wanting when thou shalt arrive at thy journey's end.' The captains believed in the bishop's promise and gave him as much corn as he asked. And behold! when they came to deliver their cargo to the owners, there was not a bag lacking. It is said, too, that at the time of this famine there was a cruel innkeeper in Myra who was wicked enough to catch little children and pickle them in a great tub, pretending they were pork. It happened one day as Nicholas was passing the inn-door that he heard the voices of children crying for help. He went in very quickly and made his way to the cellar whence the cries had come. There he found the poor children, and not only rescued those who were alive, but by his prayers he brought to life those who had already been killed and cast into the tub. Another time there were two men in Myra who had been unjustly condemned to death, and it was told the bishop how greatly they stood in need of his help. No one ever appealed to Nicholas in vain, and he went off at once to the place of execution. The executioner was just about to raise his sword, when Nicholas seized his arm and wrenched the sword away. Then he set the poor prisoners free and told the judge that, if he dared to deal so unjustly again, the wrath of heaven and of the Bishop of Myra would descend upon him. [Illustration: HE WENT TO THE HARBOUR WHERE TWO SHIPS LAY.] There are many other stories told about the good bishop. Like his Master, he ever went about doing good; and when he died, there were a great many legends told about him, for the people loved to believe that their bishop still cared for them and would come to their aid. We do not know if all these legends are true, but they show how much Saint Nicholas was loved and honoured even after his death, and how every one believed in his power to help them. Here is one of the stories which all children who love Saint Nicholas will like to hear. There was once a nobleman who had no children and who longed for a son above everything else in the world. Night and day he prayed to Saint Nicholas that he would grant him his request, and at last a son was born. He was a beautiful child, and the father was so delighted and so grateful to the saint who had listened to his prayers that, every year on the child's birthday, he made a great feast in honour of Saint Nicholas and a grand service was held in the church. Now the Evil One grew very angry each year when this happened, for it made many people go to church and honour the good saint, neither of which things pleased the Evil One at all. So each year he tried to think of some plan that would put an end to these rejoicings, and he decided at last that if only he could do some evil to the child, the parents would blame Saint Nicholas and all would be well. It happened just then to be the boy's sixth birthday, and a greater feast than ever was being held. It was late in the afternoon, and the gardener and porter and all the servants were away keeping holiday too. So no one noticed a curious-looking pilgrim who came and sat close to the great iron gates which led into the courtyard. He had on the ordinary robe of a poor pilgrim, but the hood was drawn so far over his face that nothing but a dark shadow could be seen inside. And indeed that was as well, for this pilgrim was a demon in disguise, and his wicked, black face would have frightened any one who saw it. He could not enter the courtyard for the great gates were always kept locked, and, as you know, the porter was away that day, feasting with all the other servants. But, before very long, the little boy grew weary of his birthday feast, and having had all he wanted, he begged to be allowed to go to play in the garden. His parents knew that the gardener always looked after him there, so they told him he might go. They forgot that the gardener was not there just then. The child played happily alone for some time and then wandered into the courtyard, and looking out of the gate saw a poor pilgrim resting there. 'What are you doing here?' asked the child, 'and why do you sit so still?' 'I am a poor pilgrim,' answered the demon, trying to make his harsh voice sound as gentle as possible, 'and I have come all the way from Rome. I am resting here because I am so weary and footsore and have had nothing to eat all day.' 'I will let you in, and take you to my father,' said the child; 'this is my birthday, and no one must go hungry to-day.' But the demon pretended he was too weak to walk, and begged the boy to bring some food out to him. Then the child ran back to the banquet hall in a great hurry and said to his father: 'O father, there is a poor pilgrim from Rome sitting outside our gate, and he is so hungry, may I take him some of my birthday feast?' The father was very pleased to think that his little son should care for the poor and wish to be kind, so he willingly gave his permission and told one of the servants to give the child all that he wanted. Then as the demon sat eating the good things, he began to question the boy and tried to find out all that he could about him. 'Do you often play in the garden?' he asked. 'Oh yes,' said the child, 'I play there whenever I may, for in the midst of the lawn there is a beautiful fountain, and the gardener makes me boats to sail on the water.' 'Will he make you one to-day?' asked the demon quickly. 'He is not here to-day,' answered the child, 'for this is a holiday for every one and I am quite alone.' Then the demon rose to his feet slowly and said he felt so much better after the good food, that he thought he could walk a little, and would like very much to come in and see the beautiful garden and the fountain he had heard about. So the child climbed up and with great difficulty drew back the bolts. The great gates swung open and the demon walked in. As they went along together towards the fountain, the child held out his little hand to lead the pilgrim, but even the demon shrunk from touching anything so pure and innocent, and folded his arms under his robe, so that the child could only hold by a fold of his cloak. 'What strange kind of feet you have,' said the child as they walked along; 'they look as if they belonged to an animal.' 'Yes, they are curious,' said the demon, 'but it is just the way they are made.' Then the child began to notice the demon's hands, which were even more curious than his feet, and just like the paws of a bear. But he was too courteous to say anything about them, when he had already mentioned the feet. Just then they came to the fountain, and with a sudden movement the demon threw back his hood and showed his dreadful face. And before the child could scream he was seized by those hairy hands and thrown into the water. But just at that moment the gardener was returning to his work and saw from a distance what had happened. He ran as fast as he could, but he only got to the fountain in time to see the demon vanish, while the child's body was floating on the water. Very quickly he drew him out, and carried him, all dripping wet, up to the castle, where they tried to bring him back to life. But alas! it all seemed of no use, he neither moved nor breathed; and the day that had begun with such rejoicing, ended in the bitterest woe. The poor parents were heart-broken, but they did not quite lose hope and prayed earnestly to Saint Nicholas who had given them the child, that he would restore their boy to them again. As they prayed by the side of the little bed where the body of the child lay, they thought something moved, and to their joy and surprise the boy opened his eyes and sat up, and in a short time was as well as ever. They asked him eagerly what had happened, and he told them all about the pilgrim with the queer feet and hands, who had gone with him to the fountain and had then thrown back his hood and shown his terrible face. After that he could remember nothing until he found himself in a beautiful garden, where the loveliest flowers grew. There were lilies like white stars, and roses far more beautiful than any he had ever seen in his own garden, and the leaves of the trees shone like silver and gold. It was all so beautiful that for a while he forgot about his home, and when he did remember and tried to find his way back, he grew bewildered and did not know in what direction to turn. As he was looking about, an old man came down the garden path and smiled so kindly upon him that he trusted him at once. This old man was dressed in the robes of a bishop, and had a long white beard and the sweetest old face the child had ever seen. 'Art thou searching for the way home?' the old man asked. 'Dost thou wish to leave this beautiful garden and go back to thy father and mother?' 'I want to go home,' said the child, with a sob in his voice, 'but I cannot find the way, and I am, oh, so tired of searching for it!' Then the old man stooped down and lifted him in his arms, and the child laid his head on the old man's shoulder, and, weary with his wandering, fell fast asleep and remembered nothing more till he woke up in his own little bed. Then the parents knew that Saint Nicholas had heard their prayers and had gone to fetch the child from the Heavenly Garden and brought him back to them. So they were more grateful to the good saint than ever, and they loved and honoured him even more than they had done before; which was all the reward the demon got for his wicked doings. That is one of the many stories told after the death of Saint Nicholas, and it ever helped and comforted his people to think that, though they could no longer see him, he would love and protect them still. Young maidens in need of help remembered the story of the golden bars and felt sure the good saint would not let them want. Sailors tossing on the stormy waves thought of that storm which had sunk to rest at the prayer of Saint Nicholas. Poor prisoners with no one to take their part were comforted by the thought of those other prisoners whom he had saved. And little children perhaps have remembered him most of all, for when the happy Christmas time draws near, who is so much in their thoughts as Saint Nicholas, or Santa Claus, as they call him? Perhaps they are a little inclined to think of him as some good magician who comes to fill their stockings with gifts, but they should never forget that he was the kind bishop who, in olden days, loved to make the little ones happy. There are some who think that even now he watches over and protects little children, and for that reason he is called their patron saint. SAINT FAITH Among the many martyrs who long ago gave up their lives, rather than deny their Master, we love to remember one little maid--a child-martyr and saint. We do not know a great deal about her, for she lived so very long ago, but what we know makes us love and honour her, and speak her name with reverence. Faith was the name of this little maiden, and her home was in France, in the pleasant country of Aquitaine. Her parents were rich and noble, and she was brought up carefully, and taught to be courteous and gentle to every one. But she did not need much teaching, for her nature was sweet and pure, and her face was fair, with the beauty that shines from within. The town in which little Faith lived was called Agen, and lay at the foot of a high rugged hill, which seemed to keep guard over it. It was a quiet little place, and most of the people who dwelt there were Christians, living happily together with the good bishop at their head. But one day a heavy cloud of dust was seen rolling along the highroad that led over the mountains to the city gates. And messengers came running breathlessly into the town, warning the people that a great company of soldiers was marching towards them. It was thought they had come from Spain, and the news spread like wildfire through the town that Dacian, the cruellest governor of all that country, was riding at their head. In fear and trembling the people waited. They stood in little knots, talking under their breath of all the evil this man had done; or shutting themselves into their houses, they scarcely dared to look out at the windows. And soon the great company came sweeping in, swords clattering and armour glittering in the sunshine, rough soldiers laughing carelessly as they rode past the frightened faces. And at their head a cruel, evil-looking man who glared from side to side, as if he were a wild beast seeking his prey. Doubtless it pleased him to see how every one trembled before him, and he smiled scornfully to think how easy a task it would be to teach these Christians to deny their God and drag their faith in the dust. And soon the reason of his coming was known to all, for he ordered it to be proclaimed in the market-place, that every Christian who refused to sacrifice to the heathen gods should be tortured and put to death. And to make his meaning quite plain, the soldiers spread out all the terrible instruments of torture, so that men might know exactly what lay before them if they refused to deny Christ. But in the night the terrified Christians stole silently out of the town, and climbing the high hill that overlooked the city, they hid themselves in the great caves among the rocks. Scarcely any one was left behind: even the good bishop was afraid to stay and face the danger, and it seemed as if Christ would have no one to fight on His side against the evil company. But when morning came, and the furious Dacian discovered that every one had fled, he sent his soldiers to search and bring any who might remain hidden in the city, that he might wreak his vengeance on them. And among the few that were left they brought to him the little maid Faith. She was only a little child, but she did not know what fear meant. 'You cannot hurt me,' she said, looking at the cruel, angry faces around her, 'because I am not yours, but God's.' And then she signed herself with the sign of the cross, and with bent head prayed: 'Lord Jesus, teach my lips to answer their questions aright, so that I may do Thee no dishonour.' Then Dacian looked in anger at the child standing there with clasped hands and steadfast eyes, and asked her roughly: 'What is thy name?' 'My name is Faith,' the little maid replied with gentle courtesy. 'And what God dost thou serve?' asked the cruel governor. 'I am a Christian, and I serve the Lord Christ,' replied the child. 'Deny Him, and sacrifice to our gods,' thundered the governor, 'else shalt thou endure every kind of torture, until there is no life left in thy young body.' But Faith stood with head erect and hands clasped tight together. Not even the ugly instruments of torture could frighten her. 'I serve the Lord Christ,' she said, 'and you cannot hurt me, because I am His.' Such a little maid she was, standing there among those rough, cruel men, offering her life gladly for the faith of her Master. Such a few years she had spent in this bright world, and so many stretched in front, holding pleasures and promises in store. And now she must give up all, must put aside the little white robe and golden sandals, and take instead the robe of suffering, and go barefoot to meet the pain and torture that awaited her. And though they scourged her, and made her suffer many cruel torments, they could not bend her will, nor break her faith. Indeed it seemed as if she did not feel the pain and anguish. And God stooped down, and gathered the little faithful soul into His bosom. And when the people looked, the child was dead. But in the cave among the mountains that very day the bishop sat, sad and troubled. He was gazing away across the plain to where the town lay half hidden in the mist, thinking of those faithful few who had chosen to stay behind. And suddenly the mist broke in front, and a vision stood out clear before him. He saw the child Faith being scourged and tortured; he saw the flames leaping around her, and then, as he looked again, lo! her head was encircled with a golden crown set with precious stones, each jewel sparkling with light. And from heaven a white dove came gently flying down, and rested on the child's head, while from its wings a soft dew fell that quenched the flames. And as the vision faded, the bishop bowed his head in his hands and wept. The thought of what this child had dared to endure for her Master, while he had shrunk from suffering aught for His sake, filled his heart with shame. He could not stay there in safety while any of his people might suffer as she had done. So that night he returned to the city to help and comfort the few remaining Christians. Before long he too was called upon to suffer death for his Lord, and many others gave themselves up, led by the example of little Faith. Some say that even the rough soldiers were touched by the child's death, and many became Christians. They began to think that such a religion was worth living for, if it could teach even a child to die so bravely. And so, though she lived such a short time on earth, she did a very wonderful work for God, and we call her now Saint Faith, thinking often of her as we read these words: 'A little child shall lead them.' SAINT COSMO AND SAINT DAMIAN It is difficult sometimes to learn a great deal about the saints who lived a very long time ago. So few people knew how to read or write in those old days, and the only way they had of remembering and handing on what was interesting was to tell it to their children; then these little ones, when they were grown up, would repeat it again to other little children, and so the stories were not forgotten. But sometimes one thing would be left out and sometimes another, or different people would add wonderful stories of their own, which would become part of the true story. And so, when at last these histories come to us, we find we have lost a great deal, and perhaps not gained very much. The two saints, to whose story we are going to listen to-day, are of this long-ago time, and the history of their lives has almost faded from men's memories. But whoever happens to go to Florence, that city of flowers, where the old Medici family has left its mark on every corner, will see the portraits of our two saints wherever they go. For the old painters loved to tell the saint-stories in their own beautiful way, and to-day the little dark-eyed Italian children can read them without books, for they are told more plainly and far more beautifully than in any written story. Cosmo and Damian were brothers, and were born in Arabia three hundred years after Christ. When they were quite little boys their father died, and they were left alone with their mother. She was a Christian, and taught her boys, as soon as they were old enough to understand, that though they had no earthly father, God was their Father in heaven. She told them that the great King of Heaven and Earth called them His children, and he who could do a mean or cruel act, or stain his honour by an untruthful word, was not worthy to be called a King's son. And because they were noble she taught them that they must do noble deeds, bravely defend and protect the weak, and help those who could not help themselves. So the boys grew up straight and strong in mind and body. Their bitterest punishment was to feel that they had done anything unworthy of their King, and although they often made mistakes and did wrong thoughtlessly, they never went far astray since God's honour was their own. Their mother was rich, for their father had had great possessions, but there were so many poor and suffering people around their home that it was almost impossible to help them all. So the boys learned early to deny themselves in many ways, and often gave up their own dinner to the starving poor. In that land there was a great deal of sickness and suffering, and this was a great trouble to Cosmo and Damian. They could not bear to see people in pain, and be unable to help them. They often thought about this, and at last determined to learn all about medicine, and become doctors, so that they might at least soften suffering when they could not cure it. After years of patient study they learned to be very clever doctors, and their kind hearts and gentle hands soothed and comforted those who were in pain, even when skill could do nothing for them. They visited rich and poor alike, and would take no money for their services, for they said it was payment enough to know they had been able to make the worlds suffering a little less. And it was not only people they cared for, but God's dumb creatures too. If any animal was in pain, they would treat it as gently and carefully as if it had been a human being. Indeed, they were perhaps even more pitiful towards animals, for they said: 'People who can speak and complain of their ills are greatly to be pitied, but these dumb creatures, made by our King, can only suffer in silence, and surely their suffering will be required at our hands.' It ever seemed strange to these great men that boys who would scorn to ill-treat a younger child, or take mean advantage of a weak one, would still think nothing of staining their honour by ill-treating an animal, infinitely weaker and smaller, and less able to protect itself. It was one of the few things that raised the wrath of these gentle doctor saints. [Illustration: BUT COSMO TURNED AND WALKED AWAY.] Now it happened that a poor woman who had been ill for many years heard of the fame of the two young doctors, and sent to implore them to come to help her. She believed that though her illness seemed incurable these good men might heal her. Cosmo and Damian were touched by her faith, and they went at once, and did for her all that their skill could devise, and, moreover, prayed that God would bless their efforts. To the wonder of all, the woman began to grow better, and very soon was completely cured. In her great gratitude she offered all that she had in payment to the two doctors, but they told her that they could take nothing. Then she humbly offered them a little bag in which were three eggs, praying them not to go away from her quite empty-handed. But Cosmo turned and walked away and would not so much as even look at what she offered, for it was a very strict rule with the brothers that they should accept no payment or reward of any kind. Then the woman caught at a fold of Damian's cloak as he also turned to go and begged him, for the love of Christ, to take her little gift. When Damian heard the name of his Master, he paused, and then took the present and courteously thanked the poor woman. But when Cosmo saw what Damian had done he was very wrathful, and that night he refused to sleep with him, and said that henceforth they would be no longer brothers. But in the stillness of the night God came to Cosmo and said: 'My son, wherefore art thou so wrathful with thy brother?' 'Because he hath taken reward for our services,' said Cosmo, 'and Thou knowest, Lord, that we receive no payment but from Thee.' 'But was it not in My name that he took the offering?' asked the voice. 'Because that poor woman gave it for love of Me, thy brother did well to accept it.' Then Cosmo awoke in great joy and hurried to the bedside of his brother, and there begged his forgiveness for having misjudged him so sorely. And so they were happy together once more, and ate the eggs right merrily. In those days there were many pilgrims passing through Arabia, and because the journey was hard and most of them were poor, they often fell ill and came under the care of Cosmo and Damian. One night a poor man was brought in, fainting and fever-stricken. He lay on the bed with his thin, grey face pinched and worn with suffering, and the kind doctors feared that he would die. All night they sat by his bedside doing everything that their skill could plan to ease his pain, and they only smiled when the poor man said in his faint, low voice: 'Why do you take all this trouble for a poor pilgrim, who has nothing wherewith to repay you?' 'We would not take thy payment if thou hadst all the riches in the world,' answered the doctors, 'for we receive payment only from our King.' Then when the first pale light of dawn began to steal through the little window, and the doctors anxiously watched the still form lying there, they started with surprise. For the face seemed to change in an instant, and instead of the bed of suffering they saw a cloud of glory; out of the midst of which Christ's face, infinitely tender, looked upon them; and His hands touched their heads in blessing as He said: 'All the riches of the world are indeed mine though I seemed but a poor pilgrim. I was sick and ye visited me, and surely shall ye receive payment from your King.' Then Cosmo and Damian knelt in worship and thanked their Lord that they had been counted worthy to minister to His need. But soon the fame of Cosmo and Damian began to be spread abroad, and the wicked Proconsul of Arabia heard about their good deeds. As soon as he knew they were Christians, and helped the poor and suffering, he was filled with rage, and sent and ordered that the two brothers should be cast alive into the sea. Immediately Cosmo and Damian were seized and led up to the steep cliffs, and the guards bound them hand and foot. Not a complaint escaped their lips, not a sign of fear, as the soldiers raised them on high and flung them over into the cruel sea, far below. But as the crowd above watched to see them sink, a great fear and amazement seized the soldiers, for from the calm blue sea they beheld the brothers rise slowly and walk towards the shore, led by an angel who guided them with loving care until they were safe on land. In a greater rage than ever, the Proconsul ordered that a great fire should be made and that the brothers should be cast into the midst of it and burnt to death. But though the fire roared and blazed before Cosmo and Damian were cast in; as soon as it touched them it died down and nothing could make it burn again. It seemed as if God's good gifts refused to injure His servants. After that they were bound to two crosses and the soldiers were ordered to stone them. But the stones did no harm to those two patient figures, but instead fell backwards and injured the men who threw them. Then every one cried out that they were enchanters, and it was ordered that to make sure of their death they should be beheaded. So the work of the two saint doctors was finished on earth, but for many years afterwards those who were ill would pray to these saints for their protection. There is a legend which tells how a poor man in Rome had a leg which the doctors feared would cause his death. So he prayed to Saint Cosmo and Saint Damian and asked them to help him in his need. And that night when he was asleep, he saw the doctor saints standing at his bedside in their red robes and caps trimmed with fur. One held a knife and the other a pot of ointment. 'What shall we do to replace this leg when we have cut it off?' asked Saint Cosmo. [Illustration: AN ANGEL GUIDED THEM WITH LOVING CARE.] 'A black man has just died and been buried near here,' answered Saint Damian. 'He no longer needs his legs, so let us take one of them and put it on instead.' So they cut off the bad leg and fetched the leg of the black man, and with the ointment joined it on to the living man. And when he awoke he believed he must have dreamt about the visit of the saints, but when he looked at his leg, behold! it was black and perfectly sound and well. Then they sent and searched for the black body, and on it they found a white leg. So the man knew that the doctor saints had heard his prayers, and had come to cure him. That is one of the wonderful stories which have grown up round the names of Saint Cosmo and Saint Damian. While we cannot tell if these things really happened, this we do surely know to be true, that these two brothers, who lived in an age when men were cruel and selfish, spent their whole lives in trying to help those who suffered pain, and then went bravely to death in the service of their King. And though we know but little about them, they have left us an example of patient kindliness and helpfulness; and they teach us that as servants of their King we also are bound in honour to protect the weak and help those who suffer, whether they are people like ourselves or God's dumb creatures. SAINT MARTIN It was a cold winter's day in the city of Amiens, and the wind swept along the great Roman road outside the city gates with such an icy blast that the few people who were out of doors wrapped themselves closer in their cloaks, and longed for their sheltering homes and warm firesides. But there was one poor old man who had no cloak to wrap around him, and no fireside of which to dream. He shivered as the searching wind came sweeping past him, and his half-blind eyes looked eagerly up and down the road to see if any one was coming who might help him in his need. One by one the people hurried past and paid no heed to the beggar's outstretched hand. It was much too cold to stop or to think of giving help, and not even a beggar could expect it on such a day as this. So they left the poor old man hungry and cold and homeless. Then a young soldier came riding past, but the beggar scarcely thought of asking alms of him, for the Roman soldiers were not the kind of men to trouble themselves about the poor and suffering. The old man closed his eyes, weary and hopeless, for it seemed as if there was none to help nor pity him. Then in a moment he felt a warm cloak thrown around his shoulders, and in his ears sounded a kind voice which bade him wrap it close around him to keep out the cold. Half bewildered the beggar looked up, and saw the young soldier bending over him. He had dismounted from his horse and held a sword in his hand, with which he had just cut his own cloak in half, that he might share it with the shivering old man. The passers-by laughed and hurried on, but the soldier did not care if they mocked him, for he was quite happy to think he had helped one who needed help so sorely. The name of this young soldier was Martin, and he served in the Roman army with his father, who was a famous general. Most of Martin's fellow-soldiers were pagans, but he was a Christian, and served the emperor well, because he served Christ first. The very night after Martin had divided his cloak with the beggar he had a dream, in which he saw his Master, Christ, among the holy angels, wearing the half cloak which Martin had given away that afternoon. And as he looked, he heard Christ's voice speaking to the angels, and saying: 'Know ye who hath clothed Me with this cloak? My servant Martin, who is yet unbaptized, hath done this.' Then Martin awoke, and he did not rest until Christ's seal of baptism was set upon his brow, and he felt that he had enlisted truly in God's service. Now Martin knew that to be God's servant meant doing everything day by day as well as it could be done, and serving his earthly master as faithfully and diligently as he tried to serve his heavenly commander. So it came to pass that for all the fourteen years he served in the emperor's army, he was known as the best and bravest soldier, and one who had never failed to do his duty. But as he began to grow old, he longed to serve God in other ways, and so he went to the emperor and asked for permission to leave the army. There was war going on just then, for Rome was ever fighting with the barbarians who came up against her, and the emperor was very angry when he heard Martin's request. 'You seek to leave the army because you fear to fight,' he said scornfully to Martin, who stood silently before him. 'A Roman soldier should scorn to be a coward.' 'I am no coward,' answered Martin and he met with unflinching look the angry gaze of the emperor. 'Place me alone in the front of the battle, with no weapon but the cross alone, and I shall not fear to meet the enemy single-handed and unarmed.' 'Well said,' answered the emperor quickly; 'we will take thee at thy word. To-morrow thou shalt stand defenceless before the enemy, and so shall we judge of thy boasted courage.' Then the emperor ordered his guards to watch Martin that night lest he should try to escape before the trial could be made. But Martin had no thought of escape, and was ready and eager to do as he had said. Meanwhile, however, the enemy began to fear that they had no chance against the Roman army; and very early in the morning, they sent messengers to ask for peace, offering to give themselves up to the mercy of the emperor. So Martin was set at liberty, and no one doubted his courage and faithfulness; since they believed that his faith in God had brought peace, and given them the victory over their enemies. Soon after this Martin was allowed to leave the army, and he journeyed from place to place telling those who had never heard it before the good news of Jesus Christ. In those days it was dangerous to go among the mountains unarmed, for robbers and brigands made their home there, and would swoop down on unsuspecting travellers and rob or murder them. But Martin took no companions with him, and with no weapon but the cross, he climbed the mountain roads defenceless and alone. One day, as he journeyed, a company of brigands appeared suddenly, as if they had started out of the rocks. They seized him roughly, and one of them aimed a blow at his head with an axe. But before the blow could fall, another robber turned the axe aside and claimed Martin as his prisoner. Then they tied his hands behind him and bound him fast, while they made up their minds which would be the best way to kill him. But Martin sat calm and untroubled, and seemed to have no fear of these terrible men. 'What is thy name, and who art thou?' asked the brigand who had claimed Martin as his prisoner. 'I am a Christian,' answered Martin simply. 'And art thou not afraid of the tortures which await thee, that thou dost seem so calm and fearless?' asked the robber, wondering at the peaceful look upon the prisoner's face. 'I fear nothing that thou canst do to me,' answered Martin, 'for I am a servant of the great King, and He will defend His own. But I do indeed grieve for thee, because thou livest by robbery and violence, and art therefore unworthy of the mercy of my Lord.' The astonished robber asked him what he meant, and who this great King was whom he served; so Martin told him the whole story of God's love, and of the coming of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. No words so wonderful had ever been spoken to this brigand before, and as he listened he believed that what Martin said was true. The first thing he did was to cut the rope which bound his prisoner's hands and to set him free; and after that he led him in safety through the mountain passes, until he reached a road that led to the plains below. Here they parted, and the brigand knelt and asked Martin to pray for him that he might lead a new life. So there was one less robber on that lonely road, and one more Christian fighting the battles of the Lord. Although Martin loved to dwell in lonely places, he was always ready to go where he was most needed, and so a great part of his life was spent in busy towns. When he was made Bishop of Tours and could no longer live in the solitude he loved, still he strove to be the best bishop it was possible to become, just as when he was a soldier he tried to be as good a soldier as he knew how to be. Now Martin was growing an old man, yet he was very little changed since that long ago day when he divided his cloak with the poor beggar outside the gates of Amiens. It is said that one day when he was serving at the altar, in all his beautiful bishop's robes, he saw a ragged beggar standing near shivering with cold. At first he bade his deacon give him clothing, but the deacon was too slow to please the kind heart of the bishop, and so he went himself and took off his gold-embroidered vestment and put it tenderly round the shoulders of the beggar. Then as the service went on, and the bishop held up the holy chalice, the kneeling crowd saw with wonder that angels were hovering round and were hanging chains of gold upon the upraised arms to cover them, because the robe Martin had given to the beggar had left them bare. Now the Evil One looked with great mistrust and disfavour upon Martin, for the good bishop won more souls by his love and gentleness than the Evil One cared to lose. All the preaching and sternness of other good men were not half so dangerous to the plans of the Evil One as the pity and kindness of Martin. So one day the Evil One met Martin and began to mock at him. 'Thy faith is beautiful indeed,' he said scornfully; 'but how long do thy sinners remain saints? They have but to pretend a little sorrow for their sins, and lo! in thy eyes they are immediately saved.' 'Oh, poor, miserable Spirit that thou art!' answered Martin. 'Dost thou not know that our Saviour refuses none who turn to Him? Even thou, if thou wouldst but repent, might find mercy with my Lord.' The Evil One did not stop to answer the bishop, but disappeared with great swiftness. Later on he returned, as we shall see. The fame of Martin's life spread far and near, and the rich as well as the poor did him honour. The emperor and empress invited him over and over again to come to their court, but Martin steadily refused, for he loved best to work among the poor. A time came, however, when he saw that he might do great good if he could persuade the emperor to cease from persecuting the Christians; and so at last he agreed to attend a banquet at the palace and to be the emperor's guest. Everything was as gorgeous and splendid as possible, for the emperor wished to do honour to the bishop, who was the one man who dared to speak truly to him and not to flatter him with mere words. But Martin scarcely seemed to notice all the grandeur and brilliance of the entertainment. And when, at the banquet, the emperor took the wine-cup and passed it to his guest, expecting him to bless it and respectfully hand it back, Martin turned quietly round instead, and passed the jewelled cup to a poor priest who stood behind. This he did to show the astonished emperor that in his eyes the poorest of God's servants was to be considered before the greatest ruler upon earth. It was not long after this that the Evil One again visited Martin. But this time he disguised himself that he might not be known. It was evening and Martin was praying in his cell, when a bright light filled the place, and in the midst of the light he saw a figure clad in royal robes and with a crown of gold and jewels upon his head. His face was shining and beautiful, so that no one could have guessed he was the Evil One. Martin could only gaze upon him in dazzled silence, for his shining beauty was beyond all words. Then the Evil One spoke, and the sound of his voice was like music. 'Martin,' he said, 'dost thou not see that I am Christ? I have come again upon earth, and it is to thee that I have first showed myself.' But Martin still gazed silently at him and answered nothing. 'Martin,' said the Evil One again, 'why dost thou not believe? Canst thou not see that I am Christ?' Then Martin answered slowly: 'It seemeth strange to me that my Lord should come in glittering clothing and a golden crown. Unless thou canst show the marks of the nails and spear, I cannot believe that thou art He.' At these words, with a horrible thunder-clap, the Evil One disappeared, and Martin saw him no more. Years passed, and Martin lived a long and useful life; but he was growing weary now, and when God's call came, he gladly prepared to enter into his rest, and to leave the world where he had laboured so long and faithfully. The night that Martin died he was seen in a vision by one of his friends who loved him more than all the rest. The saint's robe was shining white and his eyes were like stars and, as the friend knelt and worshipped, he felt a soft touch upon his head and heard a voice that blessed him ere the vision faded. And so Martin finished his earthly work, and went to hear from his Master's lips the gracious words: 'Well done, good and faithful servant.' SAINT GEORGE Every nation has its own patron saint whom the people love to honour, and who is looked upon not only as their protector in war and peace, but as a model of all that is best and highest and most worthy to be copied in their own lives. Ever since the days of the Crusades, when our lion-hearted King Richard went to fight the infidels in the Holy Land, the special saint whom England has delighted to honour has been Saint George. 'For Saint George and Merrie England' rang out the old battle-cry; and the greatest honour which our kings can bestow--the Order of the Garter--is really the Order of Saint George, and bears upon it the picture of his great adventure. And when you have heard the story of Saint George you will not wonder that England took him for her special saint, and as an example for all her sons to follow. Saint George was born far away in Cappadocia, in the year 303 A.D. His father and mother were nobles of that country and were also Christians, although they lived under the rule of the heathen Emperor Diocletian. Saint George's father, who was a soldier, was often away in the service of the emperor. So it was the mother who had most to do with the care and training of their only son. It must have been, then, from her that the boy learned that gentle reverence towards all women, which made him their protector and champion all his life. When he was seventeen, he too became a soldier like his father, and the shining sword, which he then buckled on, was kept all his life as stainless as his honour. He never drew it in a wrong cause, but held it as a trust given to him to defend the right and protect the weak and helpless. Now in the same country there was a city called Selem, whose people had once been as happy and prosperous as any in the land, but which was now the most miserable spot in all the world. The city itself was beautiful with splendid palaces and gay gardens, and the king who ruled there was wise and good. But outside the city wall stretched a grey, sullen-looking lake, half marsh and half stagnant water, and in this gloomy bog there lived a dreadful monster called a dragon. No one knew exactly what he was like, for those who were so unfortunate as to have been near enough to see him plainly had been killed by his fiery breath, which came rolling out from his great yawning throat. He did not seem to walk nor to fly, although he had what looked like wings and huge flat feet, but always moved along with a crawling motion most horribly swift. Nothing was safe from this terrible monster. One by one the sheep and oxen belonging to the city were devoured by him, and when the people had no more food to give him, he crawled towards the city, and his dreadful fiery breath warned them that he was coming closer and that they would soon be carried off, one by one, and devoured. In their despair and terror, the king and all the people agreed to cast lots each day; and it was settled that the one on whom the lot fell should be put outside the gates to feed the monster, so that the rest might live in safety. This was done for many days, and the grief and suffering in that city was terrible to behold. But the darkest day of all was when the lot fell upon Cleodolinda, the king's only daughter. She was very beautiful, and the king loved her more than all else beside, so in his anguish he called his people together, and in a trembling voice, his grey head bowed with grief, he spoke to them: 'She is my only child--I cannot give her up. Take rather all my gold and jewels, even the half of my kingdom; only spare my daughter, the one treasure of my heart.' But the people were very angry, and would not listen to the king, for they too had lost their children, and it made them savage and cruel. 'We will not spare the princess,' they growled in low threatening tones; 'we have given up our own children, and why shouldst thou withhold thine? Didst thou not agree with us to cast the lots? Why shouldst thou make one law for us and another for thyself?' And they threatened to burn down the palace and kill both the king and Cleodolinda if she was not given up to them at once. Then the king saw there was no hope of deliverance, and he promised that in eight days the princess should be ready for the sacrifice. Those were eight sad days at the palace, for all was dark and hopeless there, and the only person who did not give way to despair was the Princess Cleodolinda herself. She spent her time trying to comfort her father, and told him she had no fear, but rather that she was glad to think she was to die to save his people. So the fatal day arrived when the monster was to be fed, and the princess came out to meet the crowd stately and calm, dressed in her royal robes as befitted a king's daughter. And when she bade farewell to her father, she went forth alone, and the gates of the city were shut behind her. Now it happened that at the very time that Cleodolinda went out to meet the dragon, and just as she heard the city gates clang heavily behind her, Saint George came riding past on his way to join his soldiers. His shining armour and great spear were the only bright things in that gloomy place; but the princess did not see him, for her eyes were blinded with tears, and even when he galloped up close to her she did not hear him, for the ground was soft and marshy, and his horse's hoofs made scarcely a sound as he rode past. Slowly the princess walked along the desolate way towards the sullen grey lake, where the monster was waiting for his meal. The path was strewn with bones, and no grass grew for miles around, for the fiery blast of the dragon's breath withered everything it passed over. Cleodolinda never dreamed that help was near, and started in amazement when she heard a kind voice speaking to her, and looking up, saw through her tears a young knight on horseback, gazing at her with pitying eyes. She thought that he had the handsomest, kindest face she had ever seen, and the gentlest and most courteous manner, as he leaned towards her, and asked her why she wept, and wherefore she was wandering alone in this dismal place. Cleodolinda told him in a few words the whole sad story, and pointed with trembling hand towards the distant marsh, where already a dark form might be seen crawling slowly out of the grey water. 'See, there he comes!' she cried, in sudden terror. 'Ride fast, kind knight, and escape while there is time, for if the monster finds thee here, he will kill thee.' 'And dost thou think I would ride off in safety, and leave thee to perish?' asked Saint George. 'Thou canst do nothing,' answered the princess, wringing her hands; 'for nought can prevail against this terrible dragon. Thou wilt but perish needlessly in trying to save me, so, I pray thee, fly while there is time.' 'God forbid that I should act in so cowardly a manner,' answered Saint George. 'I will fight this hideous creature, and, by God's help and the strength of my good sword, I will conquer him and deliver thee.' And while he was still speaking, the air was filled with a horrible choking smoke, and the dragon came swiftly towards them, half-crawling and half-flying, his eyes gleaming, and his mouth opened wide to devour them. With a swift prayer for help, Saint George made the sign of the cross, and grasping his great spear firmly, spurred his horse and rode straight at the monster. The combat was a long and terrible one, and the princess, as she watched from behind a sheltering tree, trembled for the safety of the brave knight, and gave up all for lost. But at last Saint George made a swift forward rush, and drove his spear right down the great throat of the monster, and out at the back of his head, pinning him securely to the ground. Then he called to the princess to give him her girdle, and this he tied to each end of the spear, so that it seemed like a great bridle, and with it Cleodolinda led the vanquished dragon back towards the city. Inside the city gates all the people had been weeping and wailing over the fate of the princess, which they feared might any day be their own, and they dared not look out or open the gates until the monster had had time to carry off his victim. So their terror and dismay was great indeed when the news spread like wildfire that some one had seen the great monster come crawling towards the town, instead of returning to his home in the dismal swamp. [Illustration: S. GEORGE RODE STRAIGHT AT THE MONSTER.] They all crowded, trembling with fear, around the watch-tower upon the walls, to see if the dragon was really on his way to attack the city; and when they saw the great dark mass moving slowly towards them they thought that the end was come, for they could not see Saint George nor the princess, and did not know that she was leading the dragon a vanquished prisoner. So it was all in vain for a long time that Saint George thundered at the city gates, and demanded that they should be opened. Even when the people saw that the princess was safe and that a knight was with her, while the monster lay quiet at their feet as if half-dead, they still hesitated to open the gates, so great was their terror and astonishment. But when they were quite sure that the dragon was bound and could do them no harm, they threw open the gates, and every one crowded to see the wonderful sight, still half-doubting if it could be true, and looking with fear upon the great beast which the princess led by her girdle fastened to the spear of Saint George. Then the king came in haste from his palace to meet his daughter, and never was a morning of sorrow turned into such a day of joy. Saint George and the Princess Cleodolinda led the dragon into the market-place, followed by the wondering crowd; and there Saint George drew his sword and cut off the head of the hideous monster. Then were the people sure that they were indeed delivered from their great enemy for ever, and they burst forth into wild rejoicings. They would have given all they possessed to Saint George in their joy and gratitude; but he told them that the only reward he desired was that they should believe in the true God, and be baptized Christians. It was not difficult to believe in the God who had helped Saint George to do this great deed, and very soon the king and the princess and all the people were baptized as Saint George desired. Then the king presented the brave knight with great treasures of gold and jewels, but all these Saint George gave to the poor and went his way; keeping nought for himself but his own good sword and spear, ready to defend the right and protect the weak as he had served the princess in her need. But when he returned to his own city he found that the emperor had written a proclamation against the Christians, and it was put up in all the market-places and upon the doors of the temples, and all who were Christians were hiding in terror, and dared not show themselves openly. Then Saint George was filled with righteous anger, and tore down the proclamations in all the public places, and trampled them under foot. He was seized immediately by the guards and carried before the proconsul, who ordered him to be tortured and then put to death. But nothing could shake the courage of this brave knight, and through all the tortures he bore himself as a gallant Christian should, and met his death with such bravery and calm joy that even his enemies were amazed at his courage. And so through the many dark ages that followed, when the weak were oppressed and women needed a knight's strong arm to protect them, men remembered Saint George, and the very thought of him nerved their arms and made their courage firm. And boys learned from him that it was a knightly thing to protect the weak, and to guard all maidens from harm; and that a pure heart, a firm trust in good and true courage could meet and overcome any monster, however terrible and strong. And of all nations it befits us most that our men and boys should be brave and courteous; for Saint George is our own patron saint, the model of all that an English knight should be. SAINT FRANCIS OF ASSISI In the sunny land of Italy, high upon hills covered with olive-trees, nestles the little town of Assisi. Such a strange little town it is, with its tall city walls and great gateways, its narrow, steep streets, and houses with wide, overhanging eaves. The road that leads up from the plain below is so steep, as it winds upwards among the silver olive-trees, that even the big white oxen find it a toil to drag the carts up to the city gates, and the people think it quite a journey to go down to the level land below. Now, it was in this same little hill-town, many years ago, that Saint Francis was born. They did not know that he was going to be a great saint--this little, dark-eyed Italian baby, who came to gladden his mother's heart one autumn day in the long ago year of 1182, when his father, Pietro Bernardone, was away in France. He seemed just like any other baby, and only his mother, perhaps, thought him the most wonderful baby that ever was born. (But mothers always think that, even if their babies do not grow up to be real saints.) She called him Giovanni at first, but when his father came home he named the little son Francesco, which means 'the Frenchman,' because he was so pleased with all the money he had made in France. So the child from that day was always called Francesco, which is his real Italian name, although we in England call him Francis. Soon he grew into a happy, daring boy, the leader in all the games and every kind of fun. He was the pride of his father and mother, and the favourite of the whole town; for although he was never out of mischief, he never did a cruel or unkind thing, and was ever ready to give away all he had to those who needed help. And when he grew older he was still the gayest of all the young men of Assisi, and wore the costliest and most beautiful clothes, for his father had a great deal of money and grudged him nothing. Then came a sad day when Francis fell sick, and for a while they feared that he must die. But, although he grew slowly better, he was never quite the same Francis again. He did not care about his gay companions, or the old happy life. There was real work to be done in the world, he was sure. Perhaps some special work was waiting for his hand, and with wistful eyes he was ever looking for a sign that would show him what that work was to be. Walking one day along the winding road, dreaming dreams as he gazed far across the misty plains, catching glimpses of far-away blue mountains through the silver screen of the olive-trees, he was stopped by a poor old beggar, who asked him for the love of God to help him. Francis started from his day-dreams, and recognised the man as an old soldier who had fought for his country with courage and honour. Without stopping to think for a moment, Francis took off his gay cloak and tenderly wrapped it round the shoulders of the shivering old man. He never thought that any reward would be given him for his kind action, but that very night Christ came to him in a glorious vision, and, leading him by the hand, showed him a great palace full of shining weapons and flags of victory, each one marked with the sign of the cross. Then, as Francis stood gazing at these wonderful things, he heard the voice of Christ telling him that these were the rewards laid up for those who should be Christ's faithful soldiers, fighting manfully under His banner. With a great joy in his heart Francis awoke, and hurriedly left home to join the army, thinking only of earthly service, and longing to win the heavenly reward. But in the quiet night he heard again the voice of Christ telling him that the service he was seeking was not what Christ required of his soldiers. Troubled and sad, Francis went back to Assisi and, when he was once more inside the city walls, turned aside to pray in the little ruined church of Saint Damiano. And as he prayed once more he heard the voice speaking to him, and saying, 'Francis, repair my church.' Now, Francis thought this meant that he was to build up the ruined walls of the little church in which he prayed. He did not understand that the command was that he should teach the people, who make up Christ's Church on earth, to be pure and good and strong. Francis was only too glad to find that here at last was some real work to be done, and never stopping to think if he was doing right, he went joyfully home and took some of the richest stuffs which his father had for sale. These he carried off to the market, and sold them for quite a large sum of money. Then, returning to the little church, he gave the money to the old priest, telling him to rebuild the walls and to make the whole place beautiful. But the priest refused to accept the money, for he was afraid that Francis had done wrong in taking the stuffs, and that his father would be angry. This was a great disappointment to Francis, and made him think that perhaps he had been too hasty. He was afraid to go home and tell what he had done, so he hid himself for some days. But at last, tired and hungry, with his gay clothes stained with dust, he slowly walked back to his father's house. And very angry, indeed, was Pietro Bernardone when he found out what his son had done. He did not mind giving Francis money for fine clothes or pleasures of any kind, and he had allowed him to be as extravagant as he liked. But to want money to build up an old church, or to spend in doing good, that was not to be thought of for a moment. Out he came in a furious rage and drove Francis indoors, and there shut him up in a dark cellar, bound hand and foot, so that he could not escape. But though his father was so angry, his mother could not bear to see her son suffer, whether he deserved it or not. So she stole down when no one was there, and, unlocking the cellar door, she spoke gently to poor Francis, and listened to all his story. Then she took off his chains and set him free, telling him to go quickly before any one should see him. Francis had no place to shelter in but the little ruined church, and no friend who would receive him but the poor old priest, so back he went to Saint Damiano, leaving parents and home and comforts behind him. His father, of course, was terribly angry when he found that Francis had escaped, and he went at once to complain to the bishop, and demand that Francis should be punished and made to give back the money he had taken. The bishop spoke kindly to Francis, who promised gladly to give back the money which had brought him so much trouble. And there, in the market-place, with all the people looking on, he took off his costly clothes, now all stained and worn, and standing pale and thin, wearing only a hair shirt, he gave clothes and money back to his angry father, saying-- 'Listen, all of you. Until this time I have called Pietro Bernardone father, but from this moment I will say no more "my father Pietro Bernardone," but only "my Father which art in Heaven."' Then the good bishop came quickly up and wrapped his mantle round the poor shivering lad, and gave him his blessing, bidding him henceforth be a true servant of God. A poor labourer gave Francis his rough brown tunic, and the people were moved with pity and would have helped him, for they thought he had been treated very harshly. But Francis wandered away alone into the world, seeking to do all the things he had most disliked doing, even at one time nursing the poor lepers, and begging his bread from door to door. Soon, however, he made his way back to Assisi, and to the little ruined church; and began building up the walls with his own hands, carrying the stones on his shoulders, happy and contented to be doing work for God. And the more he thought of his past life and the wasteful splendour in which he had lived, the more he came to see that to be poor for Christ's sake was best of all. 'If Christ chose to become poor for our sakes,' thought he, 'surely it is but right that we should choose to become poor for His dear sake.' It seemed to Francis that no one had really loved poverty since the days when our blessed Lord had lived amongst the poor on earth. And he began to think of poverty as a beautiful lady who had been despised and ill-treated all these long years, with no one to take her part or see any charm in her fair face. For himself he made up his mind to love her with all his heart, to be as poor as his Master had been, and to possess nothing here on earth. Even his coarse brown habit had been given to him in charity, and instead of a belt he tied round his waist a piece of rope which he found by the wayside. He wore no shoes nor stockings, but went barefoot, and had no covering for his head. And being so truly poor was the greatest joy to him. He thought the Lady Poverty was a fairer bride than any on earth, though her clothes were ragged and her pathway lined with thorns. For along that thorny path she led him closer to his Master, and taught him to tread more nearly in His footsteps than most of His servants have ever trod. One day when Francis was reading the gospel, Christ's call seemed to sound in his ears just as it did to Saint Matthew of old. He had often read the words before, but that day they had a new message for him: 'As ye go, preach, saying the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand. Provide neither gold, nor silver, nor brass in your purses, neither two coats, neither shoes nor yet staves.' Then he knew that Christ did not want him only to be good, but to teach others how to be good, and to look after Christ's poor and sick, always remaining poor and lowly himself. And as soon as he heard the call he rose up, left all, and followed his Master to his life's end. Very soon other men joined Francis, eager to serve Christ as he did. They all dressed just as Francis dressed, and became quite as poor as he was. Their home was in the plain below Assisi, by the little chapel of Saint Mary of the Angels, which had been given to the brothers. But it was not often that they were there all together, for Francis sent them out to preach to all the world just as the gospel commanded. In spite of their poverty the 'Little Poor Brothers,' as they were called, were a happy, cheerful little company. Francis had just the same gay nature and ready smile as when he was a boy in Assisi, and though he might have to go long solitary journeys on foot, sleeping in caves or in woods, hungry and footsore, he was never sad nor lonely. He seemed to love everything that God had made, and all the animals and birds were his special friends. They were never frightened of him, and when he walked in the woods the birds would come and perch on his shoulder and sing their good-morning to him. And sometimes Francis would stand still and let them all come round him, and would preach a little sermon to them, telling them how they ought to praise God for His goodness. 'Little sisters' he always called them, and it is said they would listen quietly while he spoke, and then when he gave them his blessing, they would rise up to heaven singing their hymn of praise, just as if they had really understood their little service. Once when Francis and some of the brothers were returning home, they heard a great number of birds singing among the bushes. And when Francis saw them he said to his companions-- 'Our sisters, the birds, are praising their Maker. Let us go into their midst and sing our service too.' The birds were not in the least disturbed, but continued their chirping and twittering, so that the brothers could not hear their own voices. Then Francis turned to the birds and said-- 'Little sisters, cease your song until we have given God our praise.' And they at once were quiet, and did not begin to sing again until the service was over. And it was not only the birds that loved him, but every kind of creature came to him for comfort and shelter. Now this is a story which was told about Francis after he was dead, when people tried to remember all the wonderful things that he had done, and perhaps made them a little more wonderful, out of love of Saint Francis. Once when the saint was living in the city of Agolio a terribly fierce wolf began to prowl about the town. He carried off everything eatable he could find, and grew so bold that he even seized the children and made off to his mountain den with them. The whole town was terrified, and people scarcely dared go out of doors for fear of meeting the terrible wolf. And though the men hunted him, he always escaped and came prowling down at nightfall again. When Saint Francis heard this he said-- 'I will go out and meet this wolf, and ask him what he means.' 'He will kill you,' cried all the people, and they tried to persuade him not to go. But Saint Francis set out, taking some of the brothers with him. They went bravely along for a short way, and then the brothers turned back afraid and ran home, leaving Saint Francis alone. And presently he heard a deep growling and the sound of a terrible rush, and the great wolf, with blazing eyes and open mouth, came bounding towards him. But as he came nearer Saint Francis went forward to meet him, and making the sign of the cross, he said: 'Come hither, brother wolf. I command thee in the name of Christ that thou do no more harm to me nor to any one.' [Illustration: THEN THE POPE TOOK THE LITTLE POOR BROTHERS UNDER HIS PROTECTION.] And then a wonderful thing happened; for, as soon as the wolf heard the saint's voice, he stopped, and then came gently forward, and lay like a lamb at St. Francis's feet. Then Saint Francis talked quietly to him, and told him he deserved to be punished for all the evil he had done, but if he would promise to kill and plunder no more, the people of Agolio would promise on their side to give him food every day. And the wolf rubbed his head against Saint Francis's habit and gently laid his paw in the saint's hand. And always after that the good people of Agolio used to put out food for the wolf, and he grew so good and tame that he went quietly from door to door, and never did harm to any one again. Whether all this really happened we do not know; but one thing we are certain of, and that is, that Francis loved all living creatures, and they seemed to know it and to love him too. It was not long before the little band of brothers grew into quite a large company, and Francis went to Rome to ask the Pope, the head of the Church, to give them his blessing, and his permission to live together under their rule of poverty. All the world was astonished at this strange man, in his coarse brown robe, who preached to them that riches were not worth having, and that the greatest happiness was to be good and pure. At first the Pope would have nothing to do with him. But one night he had a dream, and in his dream he saw a church leaning on one side, and almost falling. And the only thing that kept it from falling quite over was a poor man, barefooted and dressed in a coarse brown robe, who had his shoulder against it and was holding it up. Then the Pope knew that God had sent the dream to him, and that Francis was going to be a great helper in the Church. So next day he called for Francis and granted him all that he asked, and took the Little Poor Brothers under his protection. Soon the company grew larger and larger, and Francis sent them all over the country, preaching and teaching men that they should deny themselves and love poverty rather than riches. Still they always kept the little home at Saint Mary of the Angels, and the brothers returned there after their preaching was ended. The convent was built close to a wood, and this wood was the place Francis loved best. For he could be quite alone there, to pray and meditate, with no one to disturb his thoughts. And often, when all the other brothers were asleep, he would steal quietly out and kneel for hours under the silent trees, alone with God. Now there was a little boy at the convent who loved Francis very much, and wanted to know all that he did, that he might learn to grow like him. Especially he wondered why Francis went alone into the dark wood, but he was too sleepy to keep awake to see. It was a very poor convent, and all the brothers slept on mats on the floor, for they had not separate cells. At last one night the boy crept close to the side of Francis, and spread his mat quite close to his master's, and in case he should not wake he tied his little cord to the cord which Francis wore round his waist. Then he lay down happily and went to sleep. By and by when every one was asleep, Francis got up as usual to pray. But he noticed the cord and gently untied it, so that the boy slept on undisturbed. Presently, however, the child awoke, and finding his cord loose and his master gone, he got up and followed him into the wood, treading very softly with his bare feet that he might disturb nobody. It was very dark, and he had to feel his way among the trees; but presently a bright light shone out, and as he stole nearer he saw a wonderful sight. His master was kneeling there, and with him was the Blessed Virgin, holding our dear Lord in her arms, and many saints were there as well. And over all was a great cloud of the holy angels. The vision and the glorious brightness almost blinded the child, and he fell down as if he were dead. Now when Francis was returning home he stumbled over the little body lying there, and guessing what had happened he stooped down and tenderly lifted him up, and carried him in his arms, as the Good Shepherd carries His lambs. Then the child felt his master's arms round him, and was comforted, and told him of the vision and how it had frightened him. In return Francis bade him tell no one what he had seen as long as his master was alive. So the old story tells us that the child grew up to be a good man and was one of the holiest of the Little Poor Brothers, because he always tried to grow like his master. Only after Francis died did he tell the story of the glorious vision which he had seen that night in the dark wood, at the time when no one knew what a great saint his master was. As time went on, Francis grew anxious to do more than preach at home; for Christ's message to him had been 'Go ye into all the world.' He had set out many times, but always something had prevented him from getting far, until at last he succeeded in reaching the land of the Saracens where the Crusaders were fighting. His great hope was that he might see the Sultan and teach him about Christ, so that all his people might become Christians. He had no fear at all, and when every one warned him that he would certainly be put to death, he said that would be a small matter if only he could teach the heathen about God. But although the Sultan received Francis, and listened to all he had to say, he only shook his head and refused to believe without a sign. Then Francis grew more and more eager to convince him, and asked that a great fire should be made, and that he and the heathen priests should pass through it, saying that whoever came out unharmed should be held to be the servant of the true God. But the heathen priests all refused to do this, and so poor Francis had to return home, having, he feared, done no good, but hoping the good might follow afterwards. These weary journeys and all the toil and hardship of his daily life began to make Francis weak and ill. Many things troubled him too; for the brothers did not love poverty as he did, and they began to make new rules and to forget what he had taught them. But in the midst of all trouble, he remained the same humble servant of Christ, always thinking of new ways to serve his Master. [Illustration: HE CHANTED THE GOSPEL AT THE FIRST CHRISTMAS MASS.] There was no time Francis loved so much as Christmas. He loved to feel that all living things were happy on that day. He used to say that he wished that all governors and lords of the town and country might be obliged to scatter corn over the roads and fields, so that 'our sisters the larks,' and all the birds might feast as well. And because the ox and the ass shared the stable with the Holy Child, he thought they should be provided with more than ordinary food each Christmas Eve. He wished every one to remember how poor and lowly our Lord was on that night when He came as a little child; and so on Christmas Eve he made a stable in the chapel, and brought in an ox and an ass and a tiny crib and manger. In the manger he placed the figure of a baby to represent the infant Christ, and there in the early hours of the Christmas morning, he chanted the gospel at the first Christmas Mass. It was in the spring of the year that Francis first went to the hermitage among the mountains, which he loved better than any other place. It was a small hut high among the Apennines, among crags and rocks far away from any other place. Here he could wander about the woods, which were carpeted with spring flowers, and hear his little sisters the birds singing all day long. And here one day, as he knelt thinking of all his dear Lord had suffered, a wonderful thing happened. The thought of all that trouble and pain seemed more than he could bear, and he prayed that he might be allowed to suffer as his Master had done. And as he prayed, seeing only before him the crucified Christ with nail-pierced hands and wounded side, God sent the answer to his prayer, and in his hands and feet deep marks appeared, as though there had been nails driven through them, and in his side a wound as if from the cruel thrust of a spear. And so Francis learned to suffer as his Master had suffered, and through all the pain he only gave God thanks that he had been thought worthy to bear the marks that Jesus bore. Francis did not live very long after this for he grew weaker and weaker, and they carried him back to the old house at Saint Mary of the Angels. There the Little Poor Brothers gathered round him, and he spoke his last words to them, bidding them live always as he had taught them to live, in poverty and lowliness. And when evening came, and the birds he loved so much were singing their vesper hymns, his voice joined in their praise until his soul passed away to the Lord whom he had tried to serve so humbly, and in whose footsteps he had sought to place his own. 
45187	----	Transcriber's Notes. Where no illustration caption appeared below the image, the corresponding wording from the list of illustrations has been included as a caption. Italics are surrounded with _ _. The oe ligature has been replaced in this version by the letters oe. Some words have been represented in the print version as the first three letters of the word followed by the last letter as a superscript and with a dot underneath. The superscripted letters have been represented in this version as ^[.x]. On p. 59 of the original book, a presumed printer's error has been corrected: "She seems 'em now!" (as printed in the original) has been changed to "She sees 'em now!" (in this version) On p. 201, the date 1543 has been changed to 1534. This can be fairly presumed to be the intended date based on historical occurrences referred to and based on the continuity of entries. THE HOUSEHOLD OF SIR THO^[.S] MORE By the same Author _In crown 8vo, cloth, gilt top, 6s._ Illustrated by JOHN JELLICOE and HERBERT RAILTON The Old Chelsea Bun-Shop: A Tale of the Last Century Cherry & Violet: A Tale of the Great Plague The Maiden and Married Life of Mary Powell, afterwards Mrs. Milton _The many other interesting works of this author will be published from time to time uniformly with the above._ [Illustration: The Household of SIR THO^[.S] MORE _Illvstrations by_ John Jellicoe & Herbert Railton _Introdvction by_ The Rev^[.d] W. H. Hutton LONDON John C. NIMMO MDCCCXCIX ] [Illustration: LIBELLUS A MARGARETA MORE QVINDECIM ANNOS NATA CHELSELÆ INCEPTVS _Nvlla dies sine linea_ ] [Illustration: "Anon we sit down to rest and talk"] THE HOUSEHOLD OF SIR THO^[.S] MORE WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY THE REV. W. H. HUTTON, B.D. FELLOW OF S. JOHN'S COLLEGE, OXFORD AND TWENTY-FIVE ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOHN JELLICOE AND HERBERT RAILTON LONDON JOHN C. NIMMO NEW YORK: CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS MDCCCXCIX Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO. At the Ballantyne Press LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS _From Drawings by_ JOHN JELLICOE _and_ HERBERT RAILTON. "ANON WE SIT DOWN TO REST AND TALK." _Drawn by_ JOHN JELLICOE _and_ HERBERT RAILTON _Frontispiece_ PAGE TITLE-PAGE. _Designed by_ HERBERT RAILTON iii MOTTO OF MARGARET MORE. _Designed by_ HERBERT RAILTON iv SIR THOMAS MORE'S HOUSE. _Drawn by_ HERBERT RAILTON 1 ERASMUS AND THE PEACOCKS. _Drawn by_ JOHN JELLICOE _To face_ 6 JACK AND CECY. _Drawn by_ JOHN JELLICOE 26 MORE IN THE BARROW. _Drawn by_ JOHN JELLICOE 38 MARGARET IN THE TREE. _Drawn by_ JOHN JELLICOE _To face_ 44 "I NOTICED ARGUS PEARCHT." _Drawn by_ HERBERT RAILTON _To face_ 52 GAMMER GURNEY. _Drawn by_ JOHN JELLICOE 58 MORE READING WYNKYN DE WORDE. _Drawn by_ JOHN JELLICOE _and_ HERBERT RAILTON _To face_ 70 THE JEW. _Drawn by_ JOHN JELLICOE 76 THE CARDINAL'S PROCESSION. _Drawn by_ JOHN JELLICOE 87 "I FELL INTO DISGRACE FOR HOLDING SPEECH WITH MERCY OVER THE PALES." _Drawn by_ JOHN JELLICOE _and_ HERBERT RAILTON _To face_ 110 "LORD SANDS SANG US A NEW BALLAD." _Drawn by_ JOHN JELLICOE 120 "THE KING WAS HERE YESTERDAY." _Drawn by_ JOHN JELLICOE _and_ HERBERT RAILTON _To face_ 142 "SHE COMETH HITHER FROM HEVER CASTLE." _Drawn by_ HERBERT RAILTON _To face_ 148 THE BEGGAR-WOMAN'S DOG. _Drawn by_ JOHN JELLICOE 161 IN THE GARDEN. _Drawn by_ HERBERT RAILTON 165 "AND SAYTH, LOW BOWING AS HE SPOKE, 'MADAM, MY LORD IS GONE.'" _Drawn by_ JOHN JELLICOE _and_ HERBERT RAILTON _To face_ 172 "IN COMETH A PURSUIVANT." _Drawn by_ JOHN JELLICOE 203 THE STAIRS. _Drawn by_ HERBERT RAILTON 210 "HIS FEARLESSE PASSAGE THROUGH THE TRAITOR'S GATE." _Drawn by_ JOHN JELLICOE _and_ HERBERT RAILTON _To face_ 220 GILLIAN AND THE FLOUR SACKS. _Drawn by_ JOHN JELLICOE 237 MORE RETURNING FROM HIS TRIAL. _Drawn by_ JOHN JELLICOE _To face_ 258 "NOR LOOKT I UP TILL ANEATH THE BRIDGE-GATE." _Drawn by_ HERBERT RAILTON _To face_ 262 Introduction It is not always from the closest and most accurate historian that we receive the truest picture of an age or of a character. The artist gives a more real picture than the photographer; and it needs imagination and sympathy, as well as labour and research, to make a hero of old time live again to-day. The minutest investigation will hardly better the vivid reality of Scott's James I. or Charles II., or portray more truly than Mr. Shorthouse has done the fragile yet fascinating personality of Charles I. Yet to say this is not to undervalue history or to contemn the labour of true students. Rather, without their aid we cannot rightly see the past at all: it comes to us only with the distortions of our own prejudice and our narrow modern outlook. We need both the work of the scholar and the imagination of the artist. Without the first we could not behold the past, without the second we could not understand it. In religion, in politics, in art, in all that makes life beautiful and men true, we must know the past if we would use the present or provide for the future. And our knowledge is barren indeed if it does not touch the intimacies of human existence. What we must know is how men lived and thought, not merely how they acted. We must see them in the home, and not only in the senate or the field. It is thus that the Letters of Erasmus, or Luther's Table Talk, are worth a ton of Sleidan's dreary commentaries or Calvin's systematic theology. And yet we cannot dispense with either. We must study past ages as a whole, and then bring the imagination of the artist and the poet to show us the truth and the passion that lies nearest to their heart. It is thus, then, in history that the imaginary portrait has its valued place. Saturated with contemporary literature, yet alive to the influences of a wider life, the student who is also an artist turns to a great movement, and with the touch of genius fixes the true impression of its soul in poetry, on canvas, or in prose. Such was the work of Walter Pater. He taught us, through the delicate study of a secondary but most alluring painter, to "understand to how great a place in human culture the art of Italy had been called." In his picture of a great scholar and a beautiful, pathetic, childlike soul, he showed the fascination of that priceless truth--that what men have thought and done, that what has interested and charmed them, can never wholly die--"no language they have spoken, nor oracle beside which they have hushed their voices, no dream which has once been entertained by actual human minds, nothing about which they have ever been passionate or expended time and zeal." And more. He taught us not only how to understand the past, but he showed us how it understood itself. "A Prince of Court Painters"--Watteau, as he was seen by one who loved him, by a sympathetic woman--like all such, the keenest of critics, yet the tenderest of hearts--is given to us as not even pictures or personal letters could give. Sebastian van Storck, Duke Carl of Rosenmold--they are portraits, though it is only imagination that makes them live. I remember Mr. Freeman once saying to me, as he took me his favourite walk at Somerleaze, that he had read a study of Mr. Pater's--a strange mediæval story of Denys l'Auxerrois--and could not be satisfied till he knew what it meant. Was it true? It was a question befitting one who had made the past to live again. Truth was the first, almost the only, thing the historian prized. Denys the organ-builder may never have watched the decoration of the Cathedral of Saint Étienne, or made, by the mere sight of him, the old feel young again. And yet Walter Pater had painted a true portrait, as so often did Robert Browning, though it were imaginary; and the artist as well as the historian had imaged for us the reality of a past age. Mr. Pater, though the most perfect artist of this school, was not the first. Humbler writers have long endeavoured to draw the great heroes as they thought their contemporaries saw them, by a fiction of memoir, or correspondence, or journal. And the "Prince of Court Painters" is a sketch in the same medium as "The Household of Sir Thomas More." This charming book has passed through many editions, but its author, of her own choice, remained almost unknown. The "Dictionary of National Biography" has strangely passed her by. Almost all that her wishes suffer us to know is that she was sister of Mr. William Oke Manning, to whom she affectionately dedicated the fourth edition of the book which is now reprinted; that she was never married; and that she was a genuine student and an indefatigable writer on historical and literary subjects. In "Mary Powell" she touched the heart of her generation, and few books of its day had a wider circulation. "The Household of Sir Thomas More" is a still more painstaking study, and a more complete and delightful portrait. Its perfect sympathy and its quaint charm of manner secured for it a welcome even among those who claimed for the hero and his opinions a sanctity which Miss Manning's historical judgment did not ratify. Cardinal Manning, writing on March 11, 1887, rejoiced at its republication, and said: "The book is a singularly beautiful one, and I regret that I had not the pleasure of knowing the writer, whose mental gifts were of a very high order." Miss Manning was a keen critic of the Romanism of the Reformation period, as her Appendices to the fourth edition of her book show; but she did not suffer her own opinions to destroy her sympathy for him whom Reginald Pole called "the best of all the English." "The Household of Sir Thomas More" is an imaginary portrait of a noble character. It professes to be the journal begun by Margaret, More's eldest daughter, most learned and best beloved, when she was but fifteen years old, and continued till she had taken her father's head from the pole whereon it was exposed, to treasure it till she should lay it on her breast as she too passed into the peace of God. Among "fair women" the heroic daughter is immortal:-- "Morn broaden'd on the borders of the dark Ere I saw her, who clasped in her last trance Her murder'd father's head." So Tennyson recorded the pathetic legend with which Miss Manning ended her beautiful book. When she wrote, it was not so hard as it is now to recall the London of Henry VIII. Miss Manning herself described very happily in 1859 what she remembered many years before. "When we say," she wrote, "that some of our happiest and earliest years were spent on the site of Sir Thomas More's country house in the 'village of palaces,' some of our readers will hardly believe we can mean Chelsea. But, in those days, the gin-palace and tea-garden were not; Cremorne was a quiet, aristocratic seclusion, where old Queen Charlotte 'Would sometimes counsel take, and sometimes tea.' "A few old, quiet streets and rows, with names and sites dear to the antiquary, ran down to the Thames, then a stranger to steamboats; a row of noble elms along its strand lent their deep shade to some quaint old houses with heavy architraves, picturesque flights of steps, and elaborate gates; while Queen Elizabeth's Walk, the Bishop's Walk, and the Bishop's Palace gave a kind of dignity to the more modern designations of the neighbourhood. "When the Thames was the great highway, and every nobleman had his six or eight oared barge, the banks of the river as high as Chelsea were studded with country houses. At the foot of Battersea Bridge, which in those days did not disfigure the beautiful reach, Sir Thomas More, then a private gentleman and eminent lawyer in full practice, built the capital family house which was afterwards successively occupied by the Marquis of Winchester, Lord Dacre, Lord Burleigh, Sir Robert Cecil, the Earl of Lincoln, Sir Arthur Gorges, Lord Middlesex, the first Duke of Buckingham, Sir Bulstrode Whitlock, the second Duke of Buckingham, the Earl of Bristol, and the Duke of Beaufort. It stood about a hundred yards from the river; its front exhibited a projecting porch in the centre, and four bay windows alternating with eight large casements; while its back presented a confused assemblage of jutting casements, pent-houses, and gables in picturesque intricacy of detail, affording 'coigns of vantage,' we doubt not, to many a tuft of golden moss and stone-crop. This dwelling, which for convenience and beauty of situation and interior comfort was so highly prized by its many and distinguished occupants, appears at length to have been pulled down when it became rickety and untenantable from sheer old age--in Ossian's words, 'gloomy, windy, and full of ghosts.'" Nor was Miss Manning obliged to rely only on her memory for a picture of More's house as it had been. The site, when she knew it, was like the New Place at Stratford-on-Avon, where only a few stones and foundations enable us to picture how stood the house where Shakespeare died. But while the household was still fresh in men's minds, and More was beginning to be reverenced as a martyr and a saint, Ellis Heywood published at Florence, in 1556, his sketch, "Il Moro," in which he set in a true description of the Chelsea garden an imaginary picture of the Chancellor and his friends talking on matters of high import to soul and spirit. "From one part of the garden," he tells us, "almost the whole of the noble city of London was visible, and from another the beautiful Thames, with green meadows and wooded hills all around." The garden had its own charm too. "It was crowned with an almost perpetual verdure, and the branches of the fruit-trees that grew near were interwoven in a manner so beautiful that it seemed like a living tapestry worked by Nature herself." So wrote Ellis Heywood of the external beauty of the scene. Of the inner harmony Erasmus had written years before to Ulrich von Hutten:--"More has built himself a house at Chelsea. There he lives with his wife, his son, his daughter-in-law, his three daughters and their husbands, with eleven grandchildren. There is not a man alive so loving as he: he loves his old wife as if she were indeed a young maiden." For Dame Alice, whom More had wedded very soon after the death of his first child-wife, was _nec bella nec puella_--neither a beauty nor a girl. And besides these, in the year when little Margaret, according to Miss Manning, began to write in her "fayr Libellus" which her tutor, Master Gunnel, gave her, there were dwelling in the house the aged father, Sir John More, good judge and humorous man, with his third wife. "And the household," said Erasmus, "was a very 'platonic academy'--were it not," he adds, "an injustice to compare it with an academy where disputations concerning numbers and figures were only occasionally mingled with discussion on the moral virtues. I should rather call his house a school of Christianity; for though there is no one in it who does not study the liberal sciences, the special care of all is piety and virtue. No quarrelling or ill-tempered words are ever heard, and idleness is never seen." In such a household it was that Margaret, More's dearest and most heroic child, was nurtured:-- "As it were An angel-watered lily, that near God Grows and is quiet." She was one of those fine souls to whom come alike learning and love, and in whom religion shows its fairest fruits. Holbein draws her with a Seneca in her hand, but not far away is her prayer-desk. All the children answered to their father's careful culture, for it is an idle tale that makes young John More but a silly fellow. Elizabeth, who married Mr. Dancey, Cecily, who became the wife of Giles Heron, a ward of her father's, the step-daughter Alice, who became Lady Alington, and the adopted child, Margaret Giggs, whom young Clement, sometime their fellow-scholar, wedded, were all instructed in humane letters. But Margaret was the flower of them all. To her her father wrote when she was still but a child:-- "I cannot tell you, dearest Margaret, how pleasant to me are your most delightful letters. Now, as I was reading them there chanced to be with me that noble youth, Reginald Pole--not so highly ennobled, indeed, by birth as by learning and every virtue. To him your letter seemed a miracle, even before he knew how you were beset by shortness of time and other hindrances. And hardly would he believe that you had no help from your master, till I told him seriously that you had not only no master in the house, but that also there was no man in it that had not more need of your help in writing than you of his." Indeed a good father and a good teacher made the household the wonder of learned Europe. See what More wrote to the tutor he had chosen, when he was himself abroad on an embassy:-- "I have received, my dear Gunnel, your letters, such as they are wont to be, full of elegance and affection. Your love for my children I gather from your letters; their diligence from their own. I rejoice that little Elizabeth has shown as much modesty of deportment in her mother's absence as she could have done in her presence. Tell her that this delights me above all things; for, much as I esteem learning, which, when joined with virtue, is worth all the treasures of kings, what doth the fame of great scholarship, apart from well-regulated conduct, bring us, except distinguished infamy? Especially in women, whom men are ready enough to assail for their knowledge, because it is uncommon and casts a reproach on their own sluggishness. Among other notable benefits which solid learning bestows, I reckon this among the first, that we acquire it not for the mere sake of praise or the esteem of learned men, but for its own true value and use. Thus have I spoken, my Gunnel, somewhat the more in respect of not coveting vainglory, because of those words in your letter wherein you deem that the high quality of Margaret's wit is not to be depressed, which, indeed, is mine own opinion; but I think that they the most truly depress and affront their wit who accustom themselves to practise it on vain and base objects, rather than raise their minds by the study and approval of what is good in itself. It mattereth not in harvest-time whether the corn were sown by a man or a woman, and I see not why learning in like manner may not equally agree with both sexes; for by it reason is cultivated, and, as a field, sown with wholesome precepts, which bring forth good fruit. Even if the soil of a woman's brain be of its own nature bad, and apter to bear fern than corn, by which saying men oft terrify women from learning, I am of opinion that a woman's mind is, for that very reason, all the more in need of manure and good husbandry, that the defect of nature may be redressed." In these letters, and in many like them, there is given the best, and the most authentic picture of the household of the great Chancellor. Of More himself it is difficult to speak without using language which seems extravagant. His character was so beautiful, his life so simple and so pure, his conscientiousness so complete, his end so heroic, that he stands out among the sordid meannesses of the sixteenth century like a single star in the darkness of the world. Sinful popes and wicked kings, greedy statesmen and timid clergy, who will accept the king's supremacy one day and then burn what once they adored--among these More has no place. His is a steadfast soul, happy in prosperity and triumphant in the furnace of affliction. "O ye holy and humble men of heart, O ye spirits and souls of the righteous, bless ye the Lord: praise Him and magnify Him for ever." And the position of More in the age of the Reformation is the more remarkable because he belonged so clearly to the new as well as to the old. He was, in the best sense, a Humanist. He was a scholar and a bitter foe of all obscurantism. He fought the battle of Greek, and so gave to England the scholarship of the succeeding generation to which true religion and sound learning owe so great a debt. He could take no part with those who could defend the old faith only with the rusty weapons of a philosophic system which had failed to meet the aspirations of the new age. No one laughed more readily than he at the sallies of Erasmus against ignorant monks and illiterate clergy. _Encomium Moriæ, Epistolæ Obscurorum Virorum_, spoke his sentiments as well as those of their authors. But while he loved the new learning and adopted the new methods, he saw that there remained something among the old things that was priceless and imperishable. It may be that he did not clearly distinguish between the essentials and the mere offshoots of a divine faith. It may be--we should say it must be--that if he had lived a hundred years later, or in our own day, he would have thought differently on some matters. The cause of intellectual freedom was presented to him in its worst aspect, and the command to cast away the childish things of mediævalism came in a revolting form from the lips of a coarse and brutal tyrant. Had Colet lived, or Erasmus been a stronger man, all might have been different. As it was, More saw but one side of the new world, and that the worst, and he said, "The old is better." But while, in his final choice, he seemed to belong rather to the old world than to the new, he had absorbed all the best spirit of the Italian Renaissance, and he belonged as a social reformer to an age in the far future. The _Utopia_, it is true, was the work of his youth, and it is doubtful if much of it was meant seriously, and certain that some was distinctly contrary to its author's mature convictions. But nevertheless it sets forth an exquisite ideal picture of equality in opportunity and of simplicity of life. Its whole tone speaks a protest against the selfishness and the competition of the age that degraded art and divided society. And this protest was enforced by the asceticism of the author's own life and the purity of his household. More's life was not a long one. He was born on February 7, 1478. His family was "honourable, not illustrious." His father came to be an eminent judge. As a boy he went to school in London, and then was taken into the household of the famous Cardinal Morton, Archbishop of Canterbury and Lord High Chancellor of England, the statesman who advised the best measures of Henry VII., who began to reform the monasteries, who heavily taxed the rich and took care for the poor. There the young More was known as a bright lad, who would often speak a piece in Christmas games for the guests' entertainment with a wit and readiness which made the Archbishop prophesy for him a great career. He went to Oxford; he studied at New Inn, and then at Lincoln's Inn. He became a lawyer; he went into Parliament; he lectured publicly in London on theology. When a young man he was widely known as a scholar and a wit. He was a friend of all the learned men of his day, a member of that little circle of students to which Colet and Grocyn and Linacre belonged. Though he plunged into practical life, politics, and law, and exchanged epigrams with the best wits of the time, his deepest thoughts were always with religion. He was near becoming a Carthusian; he had serious thoughts of refraining from marriage; he lived very strictly, and was with difficulty won from a solitary life. When he decided to marry and conform outwardly to the customs of the society of his day, he did not abandon the secret rules by which his personal life was restrained. He was outwardly of the world, but in spirit he was always a recluse. Gradually he came prominently before his contemporaries. His books made him known to scholars. Wolsey may have known him at Oxford, and now found him useful on embassies and at Court. The King sought him out and made a friend of him, would talk with him of theological matters, obtained his help for that book against Luther which won him the title of "Defender of the Faith," and often at night "would have him up to the leads, there to consider with him the courses, motions, and operations of the stars and planets." So, when Wolsey fell, More, who had already been Speaker of the House of Commons, and won great praise alike from King and Cardinal, became Lord Chancellor--the first great layman and lawyer who held that high office. As judge men spoke of him with admiration for centuries. He was a statesman, too, as well as a lawyer, and his aid was sought in all Henry's foreign negotiations. He might have been the greatest man in England after the King if he would have strained his conscience. But this he would not do. He never approved the Divorce; he was known to be a champion of the injured Queen Katherine, and a friend to her nephew, the Emperor Charles. As Church questions, too, came in dispute, he took more and more the conservative side. He would not repudiate the Pope's supremacy, or separate himself from the imposing unity of Christendom, which it seemed to him was threatened by the nationalism of Henry VIII., as well as by the heresy of Luther. And so at last it came that the lion felt his strength: it was More's own prophecy, and he was one of the first victims. On Monday, April 13, 1534, he was required to take oath to the succession of the issue of Anne Boleyn, and in repudiation of the validity of the first marriage of the King. He at once refused. He would not deny to swear to the succession, but the oath put before him he could not reconcile with his conscience. In this he persisted. Imprisonment, trial, death, came naturally and inevitably; and of these Miss Manning, with the letters and memoirs before her, has made the faithful Margaret write as from a full heart. On Tuesday, July 6, 1535, he was executed on Tower Hill. "He bore in his hands a red cross, and was often seen to cast his eyes towards heaven." He died as he had lived, with saintly calm, and still playing with a gentle humour. "That at least," he said, as he drew aside his beard from the block, "has committed no treason." The King's wrath did not cease with the execution of his faithful counsellor. Dame Alice More lost all, and had hard stress for the few years that remained to her of life. Happily his son and his daughters had all been married before the troubles came. Margaret's marriage was a happy one. Will Roper was soon weaned from his "Lutheran" fancies, and lived, thirty-four years after his wife, to write an exquisite and pathetic memoir of the great Chancellor. When the tyrant was dead More's family seemed almost sacred in the eyes of the nation. His memory was cherished, and memorials of all kinds poured forth during the years of Mary's reign; and when Elizabeth had been twenty years on the throne Roper died in peace, desiring to be buried with his "dear wife," where his father-in-law "did mind to be buried." Margaret Roper herself died in 1544, and was buried in Chelsea Church. Her monument is, with the Ropers', in S. Dunstan's, Canterbury. In that ancient city the family of her husband had long dwelt, and the house itself lasted till this century. Of it Miss Manning very prettily wrote:-- "My friend, Mrs. George Frederick Young, who was born in the Ropers' house at Canterbury, tells me that it was of singular antiquity, full of queer nooks, corners, and passages, with a sort of dungeon below, that went by the name of 'Dick's Hole,' the access to which was so dangerous that it at length was forbidden to descend the staircase. The coach-house and harness-room were curiously antique; the chapel had been converted into a laundry, but retained its Gothic windows. At length it became needful to rebuild the house, only the old gateway of which remains. While the workmen were busy, an old gentleman in Canterbury sent to beg Mrs. Young's father to dig in a particular part of the garden, for that he had dreamed there was a money-chest there. This request was not attended to, and he sent a more urgent message, saying his dream had been repeated. A third time he dreamed, and renewed his request, which at length was granted; and, curiously enough, a chest _was_ found, with a few coins in it, chiefly of antiquarian value, which, accordingly, were given to an archæologist of the place. Here my information ceases." More and his favourite daughter are those of whom we first think when we try to recall some memories of the "Christian academy;" but their famous guests must not be forgotten. I cannot speak now of the soldiers and diplomatists, the priests and scholars, who pass across the scene so rapidly as we read the letters of the Chancellor himself or the memoirs of his son-in-law and his great-grandson. But two names stand out as famous above the rest, and as both among the closest of those friends whom More delighted to honour,--Erasmus the scholar and Holbein the painter. Of Erasmus who shall speak in a few words? Are not the libraries of Europe full of his books, and are not his witticisms still repeated to-day as if they were but the new thoughts of the newest of moderns? The intellectual life of his age seems summed up in his person. It had no interest in which he did not mingle, nor any opinion which he did not weigh and test. If he held himself above its passions, it was simply because his was a keen critical nature, loving in its own fashion, but too cold to sympathise deeply with any combatant or to thrill with any passion. "He had no mind," said Miss Manning rather sharply, "to be a martyr, but only to suggest doubts which led braver men to be such." "This worthy man," says his eighteenth century biographer, Jortin, "spent a laborious life in an uniform pursuit of two points: in opposing barbarous ignorance and blind superstition, and in promoting useful literature and true piety. These objects he attempted in a mild, gentle manner, never attacking the persons of men, but only the faults of the age. He knew his own temper and talents, and was conscious he was not fitted for the rough work of a reformer." Jortin's, indeed, is the juster estimate. It was Erasmus's keen sight, not his want of moral courage, which prevented his being a martyr. He could not sympathise with the foreign reformers; he had no taste for antinomianism, still less for ignorance, and he saw that the Church abroad, with all its accretions,--which none ridiculed so wittily as he,--still preserved a treasure that the human mind could not afford to lose. Erasmus was a lifelong friend of More. They had met originally in England while Henry VII. was still on the throne. Erasmus stayed at More's house, and together they discussed the wrongs and follies of the time. _Encomium Moriæ_--"The Praise of Folly"--was written by Erasmus under More's roof, and the title had a punning reference to the author's host. Later books, especially the great edition of the New Testament which made the sacred text, said More, "shine with a new light," had all of them the sanction of the faithful English friend. He had to suffer rough handling from the obscurantists of his day. Greek seemed to savour of heresy, just as now to some it seems a relic of mediævalism unworthy of the study of a scientific age. Erasmus, indeed, was in a position which has its parallel to-day. He stood boldly forth to fight for a large and liberal education, and for wide and rational methods of instruction, against those who would narrow the teaching of the young to a merely technical and professional training. He fought against the effort to sacrifice sound learning to utilitarian ends; and he found the warmest sympathy, and the best expression of his educational ideal, in the household of his English friend. With More he bore reproach for a good cause. While the English lawyer pleaded for the study of Greek at the English universities, the Dutch scholar met the assaults of those who would check the publication of the New Testament in the original tongue. He was justly indignant at the treatment he received. "There are none," he said, "that bark at me more furiously than those who have never even seen the outside of my books. When you meet with one of these brawlers, let him rave on at my New Testament till he has made himself hoarse. Then ask him gently whether he has read it. If he has the impudence to say yes, urge him to produce one passage that deserves to be blamed. You will find that he cannot. Consider, now, whether this be the behaviour of a Christian, to blacken a man's reputation, which he cannot restore to him again if he would. Of all the vile ways of defaming him, none is more villainous than to accuse him of heresy; and yet to this they have recourse on the slightest provocation!" A Dominican friar at Strasburg, who had spitefully attacked Erasmus's Testament, was compelled to own that he had not read one word of it. "These men," exclaims Erasmus, "first hate, next condemn, and, lastly, seek for passages to justify their censures. And then, if any one opposes them, and calls them what they are, they say he is a disturber of the public peace; which is just as if you gave a man a blow in the face, and then bid him be quiet, and not make a noise about nothing." But all through the babel of contending voices Erasmus kept his own course. He could neither be coerced to give up his liberal scholarship nor lured to ally with Luther and the Protestant doctors. To him the way of sound learning seemed the path of the Catholic Church. And here too he was of one mind with More. The Englishman had to meet dangers which never beset the foreign scholar, and he met them, it may be, as Erasmus would not have dared to do. But it cannot be doubted that in their opinions, as in their hearts, they were never really divided. In Mistress Margaret's _Libellus_, Erasmus appears chiefly as a fellow of infinite jest, but wise withal, chatting at table as he chats in his letters, and saying, indeed, much that we have under the safe warrant of his own pen. If Erasmus was the typical scholar of that age which stood between the Renaissance and the Reformation, Hans Holbein was typical of its art. In his hand painting has come down from its high estate, its Madonnas and its great Doges, its classic pageants and its heroic legends, and treats of common life as men saw it every day. The German artist descended from the lofty themes which had inspired the great master of Italy, and took even the humbler work of illustrating books. Botticelli, it is true, had drawn studies of the _Divina Commedia_, but Holbein was ready to work for a printer, and to design letters and tail-pieces for the _Libelli_ of his friends. It was through Froben, the great Basle painter, no doubt, that More and Erasmus and Holbein first came together. Holbein illustrated the _Utopia_, and came to England with an introduction from the author of the _Encomium Moriæ_. He was thirty years younger than the Dutch scholar, and twenty years younger than More, but they became his chiefest friends. He tarried some while in More's house, and it was there that he drew some of those marvellous sketches now preserved at Windsor, that give us our truest knowledge of the Court of Henry VIII. Fisher and Warham, the Earl of Surrey and Sir Nicholas Poins, Colet and Godsalve, each in their way representative of a class, but keenly individual and vigorously characteristic, are preserved for us by those few sharp, bold strokes with a power and reality which no portrait-painter has ever surpassed. The luxury and the meanness, the treachery and the cold selfishness, that form the background of the great struggles of the sixteenth century are expressed for all time in those master-sketches which Holbein drew and Margaret Roper, it may be, often looked upon. And for More's own household we have, besides the letters and the memoirs, the very form and pressure from the great artist's own hand. The original design for the famous picture of the patriarchal family, the three generations living together in love and reverence in their "Platonic Academy," is at Basle; but in England, at Nostell and at Cokethorpe, we have very fair presentments of the great picture as it must have been. More sits by his shrewd old father in his habit as he lived. The gentle, delicate son stands by, book in hand, and near his affianced bride. The stepmother sits stately at one side of the group, and the daughters cluster around. The sorrowful eyes of the great Chancellor, and his pensive, meditative brow, speaking sound conscience and a firm resolve, are not lightly to be forgotten; and the plain, homely face of Margaret Roper, refined and thoughtful through all its solid strength, may well linger in the memories of those who know her beautiful life. To the number of these Miss Manning's book has added many. She teaches others to love her heroes because she loved them herself. Erasmus and More and Holbein, Gunnel and Clement, Will Roper and faithful Patteson, she knew as if she had lived among them. These, and such as these, are the characters of whom she so skilfully drew portraits which were much more than the fictions of imagination. She wrote from a considerable knowledge of the literature of the time, and with a genuine love of all things beautiful and good. In her style she imitated the quaintness of old English without any precise restriction to the period of Henry VIII.; and in the same way the vocabulary and the spelling which she adopted were not claimed by her as minutely accurate. Over her book and her characters I would gladly linger. But the first speaks for itself, and my office is only to direct readers to it; and for the characters, what I can say is said in my own Life of the great Chancellor and Saint himself, the father of the gentle Margaret whom Miss Manning so happily drew. But there is a special feature in this reprint of which I must needs say a word. Mr. Herbert Railton and Mr. John Jellicoe show that they too are skilled in the drawing of imaginary portraits--that they have seen More's house as indeed we think it must have been, and his family in their habits as they lived. As the barge brings us past old London Bridge to the Chelsea stairs, the mansion of the Chancellor stands before us in the warm sun as when Ellis Heywood saw it three centuries and a half ago. The children play in the garden, the Jew tells his story, the peacocks flaunt their gay colours, and More reads his old books and cracks his jests, as if the old time had come back again. Bright pictures indeed, and a worthy setting; and the old story is told anew as More himself and Holbein might have loved to think of it. But good wines need no bush, and good pictures no prologue. W. H. HUTTON. THE GREAT HOUSE, BURFORD, _July 9, 1895_. THE HOUSEHOLD OF SIR THO^[.S] MORE [Illustration: THE HOUSEHOLD OF SIR THO^[.S] MORE] _Chelsea, June 18th._ On asking Mr. _Gunnel_ to what Use I should put this fayr _Libellus_, he did suggest my making it a Kinde of family Register, wherein to note the more important of our domestick Passages, whether of Joy or Griefe--my Father's Journies and Absences--the Visits of learned Men, theire notable Sayings, etc. "You are ready at the Pen, Mistress _Margaret_," he was pleased to say; "and I woulde humblie advise your journalling in the same fearless Manner in the which you framed that Letter which soe well pleased the _Bishop of Exeter_, that he sent you a Portugal Piece. 'Twill be well to write it in English, which 'tis expedient for you not altogether to negleckt, even for the more honourable Latin." Methinks I am close upon Womanhood.... "Humblie advise," quotha! to me, that have so oft humblie sued for his Pardon, and sometimes in vayn! 'Tis well to make trial of _Gonellus_ his "humble" Advice: albeit, our daylie Course is so methodicall, that 'twill afford scant Subject for the Pen--_Vitam continet una Dies_. * * * * * ... As I traced the last Word, methoughte I heard the well-known Tones of _Erasmus_ his pleasant Voyce; and, looking forthe of my Lattice, did indeede beholde the deare little Man coming up from the River Side with my Father, who, because of the Heat, had given his Cloak to a tall Stripling behind him to bear. I flew up Stairs, to advertise Mother, who was half in and half out of her grogram Gown, and who stayed me to clasp her Owches; so that, by the Time I had followed her down Stairs, we founde 'em alreadie in the Hall. So soon as I had kissed their Hands, and obtayned their Blessings, the tall Lad stept forthe, and who should he be but _William Roper_, returned from my Father's Errand over-seas! He hath grown hugelie, and looks mannish; but his Manners are worsened insteade of bettered by forayn Travell; for, insteade of his old Franknesse, he hung upon Hand till _Father_ bade him come forward; and then, as he went his Rounds, kissing one after another, stopt short when he came to me, twice made as though he would have saluted me, and then held back, making me looke so stupid, that I could have boxed his Ears for his Payns. 'Speciallie as _Father_ burst out a-laughing, and cried, "The third Time's lucky!" After Supper, we took deare _Erasmus_ entirely over the House, in a Kind of family Procession, e'en from the Buttery and Scalding-house to our own deare _Academia_, with its cool green Curtain flapping in the Evening Breeze, and blowing aside, as though on Purpose to give a glimpse of the cleare-shining _Thames_! _Erasmus_ noted and admired the Stone Jar, placed by _Mercy Giggs_ on the Table, full of blue and yellow Irises, scarlet Tiger-Lilies, Dog-Roses, Honeysuckles, Moonwort, and Herb-Trinity; and alsoe our various Desks, eache in its own little Retirement,--mine own, in speciall, so pleasantly situate! He protested, with everie Semblance of Sincerity, he had never seene so pretty an Academy. I should think not, indeede! _Bess_, _Daisy_, and I, are of Opinion, that there is not likelie to be such another in the World. He glanced, too, at the Books on our Desks; _Bessy's_ being _Livy_; _Daisy's_, _Sallust_; and mine, St. _Augustine_, with _Father's_ Marks where I was to read, and where desist. He tolde _Erasmus_, laying his Hand fondlie on my Head, "Here is one who knows what is implied in the Word Trust." Dear _Father_, well I may! He added, "there was no Law against laughing in _his Academia_, for that his Girls knew how to be merry and wise." From the House to the new Building, the Chapel and Gallery, and thence to visitt all the dumb Kinde, from the great horned Owls to _Cecy's_ pet Dormice. _Erasmus_ was amused at some of theire Names, but doubted whether _Duns Scotus_ and the _Venerable Bede_ would have thoughte themselves complimented in being made Name-fathers to a couple of Owls; though he admitted that _Argus_ and _Juno_ were goode Cognomens for Peacocks. _Will Roper_ hath broughte Mother a pretty little forayn Animal called a Marmot, but she sayd she had noe Time for suchlike Playthings, and bade him give it to his little Wife. Methinks, I being neare sixteen and he close upon twenty, we are too old for those childish Names now, nor am I much flattered at a Present not intended for me; however, I shall be kind to the little Creature, and, perhaps, grow fond of it, as 'tis both harmlesse and diverting. [Illustration: Erasmus and the Peacocks.] To return, howbeit, to _Erasmus_; _Cecy_, who had hold of his Gown, and had alreadie, through his familiar Kindnesse and her own childish Heedlessness, somewhat transgrest Bounds, began now in her Mirthe to fabricate a Dialogue, she pretended to have overhearde, between _Argus_ and _Juno_ as they stoode pearcht on a stone Parapet. _Erasmus_ was entertayned with her Garrulitie for a while, but at length gentlie checkt her, with "Love the Truth, little Mayd, love the Truth, or, if thou liest, let it be with a Circumstance," a Qualification which made _Mother_ stare and _Father_ laugh. Sayth _Erasmus_, "There is no Harm in a Fabella, Apologus, or Parabola, so long as its Character be distinctlie recognised for such, but contrariwise, much Goode; and the same hath been sanctioned, not only by the wiser Heads of _Greece_ and _Rome_, but by our deare Lord Himself. Therefore, _Cecilie_, whom I love exceedinglie, be not abasht, Child, at my Reproof, for thy Dialogue between the two Peacocks was innocent no less than ingenious, till thou wouldst have insisted that they, in sooth, sayd Something like what thou didst invent. Therein thou didst Violence to the Truth, which St. _Paul_ hath typified by a Girdle, to be worn next the Heart, and that not only confineth within due Limits, but addeth Strength. So now be Friends; wert thou more than eleven and I no Priest, thou shouldst be my little Wife, and darn my Hose, and make me sweet Marchpane, such as thou and I love. But, oh! this pretty _Chelsea_! What Daisies! what Buttercups! what joviall Swarms of Gnats! The Country all about is as nice and flat as _Rotterdam_." Anon, we sit down to rest and talk in the Pavilion. Sayth _Erasmus_ to my _Father_, "I marvel you have never entered into the King's Service in some publick Capacitie, wherein your Learning and Knowledge, bothe of Men and Things, would not onlie serve your own Interest, but that of your Friends and the Publick." _Father_ smiled and made Answer, "I am better and happier as I am. As for my Friends, I alreadie do for them alle I can, soe as they can hardlie consider me in their Debt; and, for myself, the yielding to theire Solicitations that I would putt myself forward for the Benefit of the World in generall, would be like printing a Book at Request of Friends, that the Publick may be charmed with what, in Fact, it values at a Doit. The Cardinall offered me a Pension, as retaining Fee to the King a little while back, but I tolde him I did not care to be a mathematical Point, to have Position without Magnitude." _Erasmus_ laught and sayd, "I woulde not have you the Slave of anie King; howbeit, you mighte assist him and be useful to him." "The Change of the Word," sayth _Father_, "does not alter the Matter; I should _be_ a Slave, as completely as if I had a Collar rounde my Neck." "But would not increased Usefulnesse," says _Erasmus_, "make you happier?" "Happier?" says _Father_, somewhat heating; "how can that be compassed in a Way so abhorrent to my Genius? At present, I live as I will, to which very few Courtiers can pretend. Half-a-dozen blue-coated Serving-Men answer my Turn in the House, Garden, Field, and on the River: I have a few strong Horses for Work, none for Show, plenty of plain Food for a healthy Family, and enough, with a hearty Welcome, for a score of Guests that are not dainty. The lengthe of my Wife's Train infringeth not the Statute; and, for myself, I soe hate Bravery, that my Motto is, 'Of those whom you see in Scarlet, not one is happy.' I have a regular Profession, which supports my House, and enables me to promote Peace and Justice; I have Leisure to chat with my Wife, and sport with my Children; I have Hours for Devotion, and Hours for Philosophie and the liberall Arts, which are absolutelie medicinall to me, as Antidotes to the sharpe but contracted Habitts of Mind engendered by the Law. If there be aniething in a Court Life which can compensate for the Losse of anie of these Blessings, deare _Desiderius_, pray tell me what it is, for I confesse I know not." "You are a comicall Genius," says _Erasmus_. "As for you," retorted _Father_, "you are at your olde Trick of arguing on the wrong Side, as you did the firste Time we mett. Nay, don't we know you can declaime backward and forwarde on the same Argument, as you did on the _Venetian_ War?" _Erasmus_ smiled quietlie, and sayd, "What coulde I do? The _Pope_ changed his holy Mind." Whereat _Father_ smiled too. "What Nonsense you learned Men sometimes talk!" pursues _Father_. "I--wanted at Court, quotha! Fancy a dozen starving Men with one roasted Pig betweene them;--do you think they would be really glad to see a Thirteenth come up, with an eye to a small Piece of the Crackling? No; believe me, there is none that Courtiers are more sincerelie respectfull to than the Man who avows he hath no Intention of attempting to go Shares; and e'en him they care mighty little about, for they love none with true Tendernesse save themselves." "We shall see you at Court yet," says _Erasmus_. Sayth _Father_, "Then I will tell you in what Guise. With a Fool's Cap and Bells. Pish! I won't aggravate you, Churchman as you are, by alluding to the Blessings I have which you have not; and I trow there is as much Danger in taking you for serious when you are onlie playful and ironicall as if you were _Plato_ himself." Sayth _Erasmus_, after some Minutes' Silence, "I know full well that you holde _Plato_, in manie Instances, to be sporting when I accept him in very Deed and Truth. _Speculating_ he often was; as a brighte, pure Flame must needs be struggling up, and, if it findeth no direct Vent, come forthe of the Oven's Mouth. He was like a Man shut into a Vault, running hither and thither, with his poor, flickering Taper, agonizing to get forthe, and holding himself in readinesse to make a Spring forward the Moment a Door should open. But it never did. 'Not manie Wise are called.' He had clomb a Hill in the Darke, and stoode calling to his Companions below, 'Come on, come on! this Way lies the East; I am avised we shall see the Sun rise anon.' But they never did. What a Christian he woulde have made! Ah! he is one now. He and _Socrates_--the Veil long removed from their Eyes--are sitting at _Jesus'_ Feet. _Sancte Socrates, ora pro nobis!_" _Bessie_ and I exchanged Glances at this so strange Ejaculation; but the Subjeckt was of such Interest, that we listened with deep Attention to what followed. Sayth _Father_, "Whether _Socrates_ were what _Plato_ painted him in his Dialogues, is with me a great Matter of Doubte; but it is not of Moment. When so many Contemporaries coulde distinguishe the fancifulle from the fictitious, _Plato's_ Object could never have beene to _deceive_. There is something higher in Art than gross Imitation. He who attempteth it is always the leaste successfull; and his Failure hath the Odium of a discovered Lie; whereas, to give an avowedlie fabulous Narrative a Consistence within itselfe which permitts the Reader to be, for the Time, voluntarilie deceived, is as artfulle as it is allowable. Were I to construct a Tale, I woulde, as you sayd to _Cecy_, lie with a Circumstance, but shoulde consider it noe Compliment to have my Unicorns and Hippogriffs taken for live Animals. _Amicus Plato, amicus Socrates, magis tamen amica Veritas._ Now, _Plato_ had a much higher Aim than to give a very Pattern of _Socrates_ his snub Nose. He wanted a Peg to hang his Thoughts upon----" "A Peg? A Statue by _Phidias_," interrupts _Erasmus_. "A Statue by _Phidias_, to clothe in the most beautiful Drapery," sayth _Father_; "no Matter that the Drapery was his own, he wanted to show it to the best Advantage, and to the Honour rather than Prejudice of the Statue. And, having clothed the same, he got a Spark of _Prometheus_ his Fire, and made the aforesayd Statue walk and talk, to the Glory of Gods and Men, and sate himself quietlie down in a Corner. By the Way, _Desiderius_, why shouldst thou not submitt thy Subtletie to the Rules of a Colloquy? Set _Eckius_ and _Martin Luther_ by the Ears! Ha! Man, what Sport! Heavens! if I were to compound a Tale or a Dialogue, what Crotchets and Quips of mine own woulde I not putt into my Puppets' Mouths! and then have out my Laugh behind my Vizard, as when we used to act Burlesques before _Cardinall Morton_. What rare Sporte we had, one Christmas, with a Mummery we called the 'Triall of Feasting'! _Dinner_ and _Supper_ were broughte up before my _Lord Chief Justice_, charged with Murder. Theire Accomplices were _Plum-pudding_, _Mince-pye_, _Surfeit_, _Drunkenness_, and suchlike. Being condemned to hang by the Neck, I, who was _Supper_, stuft out with I cannot tell you how manie Pillows, began to call lustilie for a Confessor, and, on his stepping forthe, commenct a List of all the Fitts, Convulsions, Spasms, Payns in the Head, and so forthe, I had inflicted on this one and t'other. 'Alas! good Father,' says I, '_King John_ layd his Death at my Door;--indeede, there's scarce a royall or noble House that hath not a Charge agaynst me; and I'm sorelie afrayd' (giving a Poke at a fat Priest that sate at my _Lord Cardinall's_ Elbow) 'I shall have the Death of _that_ holy Man to answer for.'" _Erasmus_ laughed, and sayd, "Did I ever tell you of the retort of _Willibald Pirkheimer_? A Monk, hearing him praise me somewhat lavishly to another, could not avoid expressing by his Looks great Disgust and Dissatisfaction; and, on being askt whence they arose, confest he could not, with Patience, heare the Commendation of a Man soe notoriously fond of eating Fowls. 'Does he steal them?' says _Pirkheimer_. 'Surely no,' says the Monk. 'Why, then,' quoth _Willibald_, 'I know of a Fox who is ten times the greater Rogue; for, look you, he helps himself to many a fat Hen from my Roost without ever offering to pay me. But tell me now, dear Father, is it then a Sin to eat Fowls?' 'Most assuredlie it is,' says the Monk, 'if you indulge in them to Gluttony.' 'Ah! if, if!' quoth _Pirkheimer_. 'If stands stiff, as the _Lacedemonians_ told _Philip_ of _Macedon_; and 'tis not by eating Bread alone, my dear Father, you have acquired that huge Paunch of yours. I fancy, if all the fat Fowls that have gone into it could raise their Voices and cackle at once, they woulde make Noise enow to drown the Drums and Trumpets of an army.' Well may _Luther_ say," continued _Erasmus_, laughing, "that theire fasting is easier to them than our eating to us; seeing that every Man Jack of them hath to his Evening Meal two Quarts of Beer, a Quart of Wine, and as manie as he can eat of Spice Cakes, the better to relish his Drink. While I ... 'tis true my Stomach is Lutheran, but my Heart is Catholic; that's as Heaven made me, and I'll be judged by you alle, whether I am not as thin as a Weasel." 'Twas now growing dusk, and _Cecy's_ tame Hares were just beginning to be on the alert, skipping across our Path, as we returned towards the House, jumping over one another, and raysing 'emselves on theire hind Legs to solicitt our Notice. _Erasmus_ was amused at theire Gambols, and at our making them beg for Vine-tendrils; and _Father_ told him there was hardlie a Member of the Householde who had not a dumb Pet of some Sort. "I encourage the Taste in them," he sayd, "not onlie because it fosters Humanitie and affords harmlesse Recreation, but because it promotes Habitts of Forethoughte and Regularitie. No Child or Servant of mine hath Liberty to adopt a Pet which he is too lazy or nice to attend to himself. A little Management may enable even a young Gentlewoman to do this, without soyling her Hands; and to negleckt giving them proper Food at proper Times entayls a Disgrace of which everie one of 'em would be ashamed. But, hark! there is the Vesper-bell." As we passed under a Pear-tree, _Erasmus_ told us, with much Drollerie, of a Piece of boyish Mischief of his,--the Theft of some Pears off a particular Tree, the Fruit of which the Superior of his Convent had meant to reserve to himself. One Morning, _Erasmus_ had climbed the Tree, and was feasting to his great Content, when he was aware of the Superior approaching to catch him in the Fact; soe, quickly slid down to the Ground, and made off in the opposite Direction, limping as he went. The Malice of this Act consisted in its being the Counterfeit of the Gait of a poor lame Lay Brother, who was, in fact, smartlie punisht for _Erasmus_ his Misdeede. Our Friend mentioned this with a Kinde of Remorse, and observed to my _Father_,--"Men laugh at the Sins of young People and little Children, as if they were little Sins; albeit, the Robbery of an Apple or Cherry-orchard is as much a breaking of the Eighth Commandment as the stealing of a Leg of Mutton from a Butcher's Stall, and ofttimes with far less Excuse. Our Church tells us, indeede, of Venial Sins, such as the Theft of an Apple or a Pin; but, I think," (looking hard at _Cecilie_ and _Jack_,) "even the youngest among us could tell how much Sin and Sorrow was brought into the World by stealing an Apple." At Bedtime, _Bess_ and I did agree in wishing that alle learned Men were as apt to unite Pleasure with Profit in theire Talk as _Erasmus_. There be some that can write after the Fashion of Paul, and others preach like unto Apollos; but this, methinketh, is scattering Seed by the Wayside, like the Great Sower. _Tuesday._ 'Tis singular, the Love that _Jack_ and _Cecy_ have for one another; it resembleth that of Twins. _Jack_ is not forward at his Booke; on the other Hand, he hath a Resolution of Character which _Cecy_ altogether wants. Last Night, when _Erasmus_ spake of Children's Sins, I observed her squeeze _Jack's_ Hand with alle her Mighte. I know what she was thinking of. Having bothe beene forbidden to approach a favourite Part of the River Bank which had given way from too much Use, one or the other of 'em transgressed, as was proven by the smalle Footprints in the Mud, as well as by a Nosegay of Flowers, that grow not, save by the River; to wit, Purple Loosestrife, Cream-and-codlins, Scorpion-grass, Water Plantain, and the like. Neither of 'em woulde confesse, and _Jack_ was, therefore, sentenced to be whipt. As he walked off with Mr. _Drew_, I observed _Cecy_ turn soe pale, that I whispered _Father_ I was certayn she was guilty. He made Answer, "Never mind, we cannot beat a Girl, and 'twill answer the same Purpose; in flogging him, we flog both." _Jack_ bore the firste Stripe or two, I suppose, well enow, but at lengthe we hearde him cry out, on which _Cecy_ coulde not forbeare to doe the same, and then stopt bothe her Ears. I expected everie Moment to heare her say, "_Father_, 'twas I;" but no, she had not Courage for that; onlie, when _Jack_ came forthe all smirched with Tears, she put her Arm about his Neck, and they walked off together into the Nuttery. Since that Hour, she hath beene more devoted to him than ever, if possible; and he, Boy-like, finds Satisfaction in making her his little Slave. But the Beauty lay in my _Father's_ Improvement of the Circumstance. Taking _Cecy_ on his Knee that Evening, (for she was not ostensiblie in Disgrace,) he beganne to talk of Atonement and Mediation for Sin, and who it was that bare our Sins for us on the Tree. 'Tis thus he turns the daylie Accidents of our quiet Lives into Lessons of deepe Import, not pedanticallie delivered, _ex cathedrâ_, but welling forthe from a full and fresh Mind. [Illustration: Jack and Cecy.] This Morn I had risen before Dawn, being minded to meditate on sundrie Matters before _Bess_ was up and doing, she being given to much Talk during her dressing, and made my Way to the Pavilion, where, methought, I should be quiet enow; but beholde! _Father_ and _Erasmus_ were there before me, in fluent and earneste Discourse. I would have withdrawne, but _Father_, without interrupting his Sentence, puts his Arm rounde me and draweth me to him; soe there I sit, my Head on 's Shoulder, and mine Eyes on _Erasmus_ his Face. From much they spake, and othermuch I guessed, they had beene conversing on the present State of the Church, and how much it needed Renovation. _Erasmus_ sayd, the Vices of the Clergy and Ignorance of the Vulgar had now come to a Poynt, at the which, a Remedie must be founde, or the whole Fabric would falle to Pieces. --Sayd, the Revival of Learning seemed appoynted by Heaven for some greate Purpose, 'twas difficulte to say how greate. --Spake of the new Art of Printing, and its possible Consequents. --Of the active and fertile Minds at present turning up new Ground and ferreting out old Abuses. --Of the Abuse of Monachism, and of the evil Lives of Conventualls. In special, of the Fanaticism and Hypocrisie of the Dominicans. Considered the Evills of the Times such, as that Societie must shortlie, by a vigorous Effort, shake 'em off. Wondered at the Patience of the Laitie for soe many Generations, but thoughte 'em now waking from theire Sleepe. The People had of late begunne to know theire physickall Power, and to chafe at the Weighte of theire Yoke. Thoughte the Doctrine of Indulgences altogether bad and false. _Father_ sayd, that the graduallie increast Severitie of Church Discipline concerning minor Offences had become such as to render Indulgences the needfulle Remedie for Burthens too heavie to be borne.--Condemned a Draconic Code, that visitted even Sins of Discipline with the extream Penaltie. Quoted how ill such excessive Severitie answered in our owne Land, with regard to the Civill Law; twenty Thieves oft hanging together on the same Gibbet, yet Robberie noe Whit abated. Othermuch to same Purport, the which, if alle set downe, woulde too soon fill my Libellus. At length, unwillinglie brake off, when the Bell rang us to Matins. At Breakfaste, _William_ and _Rupert_ were earneste with my _Father_ to let 'em row him to _Westminster_, which he was disinclined to, as he was for more Speede, and had promised _Erasmus_ an earlie Caste to _Lambeth_; howbeit, he consented that they should pull us up to _Putney_ in the Evening, and _William_ should have the Stroke-oar. _Erasmus_ sayd, he must thank the _Archbishop_ for his Present of a Horse; "tho' I'm full faine," he observed, "to believe it a Changeling. He is idle and gluttonish, as thin as a Wasp, and as ugly as Sin. Such a Horse, and such a Rider!" In the Evening _Will_ and _Rupert_ had made 'emselves spruce enow, with Nosegays and Ribbons, and we tooke Water bravelie;--_John Harris_ in the Stern, playing the Recorder. We had the six-oared Barge; and when _Rupert Allington_ was tired of pulling, Mr. _Clement_ tooke his Oar; and when _he_ wearied, _John Harris_ gave over playing the Pipe; but _William_ and Mr. _Gunnel_ never flagged. _Erasmus_ was full of his Visitt to the _Archbishop_, who, as usuall, I think, had given him some Money. "We sate down two hundred to Table," sayth he; "there was Fish, Flesh, and Fowl; but _Wareham_ onlie played with his Knife, and drank noe Wine. He was very cheerfulle and accessible; he knows not what Pride is; and yet, of how much mighte he be proude! What Genius! What Erudition! what Kindnesse and Modesty! From _Wareham_, who ever departed in Sorrow?" Landing at _Fulham_, we had a brave Ramble thro' the Meadows. _Erasmus_, noting the poor Children a gathering the Dandelion and Milk-thistle for the Herb-market, was avised to speak of forayn Herbes and theire Uses, bothe for Food and Medicine. "For me," says _Father_, "there is manie a Plant I entertayn in my Garden and Paddock which the Fastidious woulde caste forthe. I like to teache my Children the Uses of common Things--to know, for Instance, the Uses of the Flowers and Weeds that grow in our Fields and Hedges. Manie a poor Knave's Pottage woulde be improved, if he were skilled in the Properties of the Burdock and Purple Orchis, Lady's-smock, Brook-lime, and Old Man's Pepper. The Roots of Wild Succory and Water Arrow-head mighte agreeablie change his Lenten Diet; and Glasswort afford him a Pickle for his Mouthfulle of Salt-meat. Then, there are Cresses and Wood-sorrel to his Breakfast, and Salep for his hot evening Mess. For his Medicine, there is Herb-twopence, that will cure a hundred Ills; Camomile, to lull a raging Tooth; and the Juice of Buttercup to cleare his Head by sneezing. Vervain cureth Ague; and Crowfoot affords the leaste painfulle of Blisters. St. _Anthony's_ Turnip is an Emetic; Goose-grass sweetens the Blood; Woodruffe is good for the Liver; and Bindweed hath nigh as much Virtue as the forayn Scammony. Pimpernel promoteth Laughter; and Poppy, Sleep: Thyme giveth pleasant Dreams; and an Ashen Branch drives evil Spirits from the Pillow. As for Rosemarie, I lett it run alle over my Garden Walls, not onlie because my Bees love it, but because 'tis the Herb sacred to Remembrance, and, therefore, to Friendship, whence a Sprig of it hath a dumb Language that maketh it the chosen Emblem at our Funeral Wakes, and in our Buriall Grounds. Howbeit, I am a Schoolboy prating in Presence of his Master, for here is _John Clement_ at my Elbow, who is the best Botanist and Herbalist of us all." --Returning Home, the Youths being warmed with rowing, and in high Spiritts, did entertayn themselves and us with manie Jests and Playings upon Words, some of 'em forced enow, yet provocative of Laughing. Afterwards, Mr. _Gunnel_ proposed Enigmas and curious Questions. Among others, he woulde know which of the famous Women of Greece or Rome we Maidens would resemble. _Bess_ was for _Cornelia_, _Daisy_ for _Clelia_, but I for _Damo_, Daughter of _Pythagoras_, which _William Roper_ deemed stupid enow, and thoughte I mighte have found as good a Daughter, that had not died a Maid. Sayth _Erasmus_, with his sweet, inexpressible Smile, "Now I will tell you, Lads and Lasses, what manner of Man _I_ would be, if I were not _Erasmus_. I woulde step back some few Years of my Life, and be half-way 'twixt thirty and forty; I would be pious and profounde enow for the Church, albeit noe Churchman; I woulde have a blythe, stirring, English Wife, and half-a-dozen merrie Girls and Boys, an English Homestead, neither Hall nor Farm, but betweene both; neare enow to the Citie for Convenience, but away from its Noise. I woulde have a Profession, that gave me some Hours daylie of regular Businesse, that should let Men know my Parts, and court me into Publick Station, for which my Taste made me rather withdrawe. I woulde have such a private Independence, as should enable me to give and lend, rather than beg and borrow. I woulde encourage Mirthe without Buffoonerie, Ease without Negligence; my Habitt and Table shoulde be simple, and for my Looks I woulde be neither tall nor short, fat nor lean, rubicund nor sallow, but of a fayr Skin with blue Eyes, brownish Beard, and a Countenance engaging and attractive, soe that alle of my Companie coulde not choose but love me." "Why, then, you woulde be _Father_ himselfe," cries _Cecy_, clasping his Arm in bothe her Hands with a Kind of Rapture; and, indeede, the Portraiture was soe like, we coulde not but smile at the Resemblance. Arrived at the Landing, _Father_ protested he was wearie with his Ramble; and, his Foot slipping, he wrenched his Ankle, and sate for an Instante on a Barrow, the which one of the Men had left with his Garden-tools, and before he could rise or cry out, _William_, laughing, rolled him up to the House-door; which, considering _Father's_ Weight, was much for a Stripling to doe. _Father_ sayd the same, and, laying his Hand on _Will's_ Shoulder with Kindnesse, cried, "Bless thee, my Boy, but I woulde not have thee overstrayned like _Biton_ and _Cleobis_." [Illustration: More in the Barrow.] _June 20._ This Morn, hinting to _Bess_ that she was lacing herselfe too straitlie, she brisklie replyed, "One would think 'twere as great Meritt to have a thick Waiste as to be one of the earlie Christians!" These humourous Retorts are ever at her Tongue's end; and albeit, as _Jacky_ one Day angrilie remarked when she had beene teazing him, "_Bess_, thy Witt is Stupidnesse;" yet, for one who talks soe much at Random, no one can be more keene when she chooseth. _Father_ sayd of her, half fondly, half apologeticallie, to _Erasmus_, "Her Wit hath a fine Subtletie that eludes you almoste before you have Time to recognize it for what it really is." To which _Erasmus_ readilie assented, adding, that it had the rare Meritt of playing less on Persons than Things, and never on bodilie Defects. Hum!--I wonder if they ever sayd as much in Favour of me. I know, indeede, _Erasmus_ calls me a forward Girl. Alas! that may be taken in two Senses. Grievous Work, overnighte, with the churning. Nought would persuade _Gillian_ but that the Creame was bewitched by _Gammer Gurney_, who was dissatisfyde last Friday with her Dole, and hobbled away mumping and cursing. At alle Events, the Butter would not come; but _Mother_ was resolute not to have soe much good Creame wasted; soe sent for _Bess_ and me, _Daisy_ and _Mercy Giggs_; and insisted on our churning in turn till the Butter came, if we sate up alle Night for 't. 'Twas a hard Saying; and mighte have hampered her like as _Jephtha_ his rash Vow: howbeit, soe soone as she had left us, we turned it into a Frolick, and sang _Chevy Chase_ from end to end, to beguile Time; ne'erthelesse, the Butter would not come; soe then we grew sober, and, at the Instance of sweete _Mercy_, chaunted the 119th Psalme; and, by the Time we had attained to "_Lucerna Pedibus_," I hearde the Buttermilk separating and splashing in righte earneste. 'Twas neare Midnighte, however; and _Daisy_ had fallen asleep on the Dresser. _Gillian_ will ne'er be convinced but that our Latin brake the Spell. _21st._ _Erasmus_ went to _Richmond_ this Morning with _Polus_, (for soe he Latinizes _Reginald Pole_, after his usual Fashion,) and some other of his Friends. On his Return, he made us laugh at the following. They had clomb the Hill, and were admiring the Prospect, when _Pole_, casting his Eyes aloft, and beginning to make sundrie Gesticulations, exclaimed, "What is it I beholde? May Heaven avert the Omen!" with suchlike Exclamations, which raised the Curiositie of alle. "Don't you beholde," cries he, "that enormous Dragon flying through the Sky? his Horns of Fire? his curly Tail?" "No," says _Erasmus_, "nothing like it. The Sky is as cleare as unwritten Paper." Howbeit, he continued to affirme and to stare, untill at lengthe, one after another, by dint of strayning theire Eyes and theire Imaginations, did admitt, first, that they saw Something; next, that it mighte be a Dragon; and last, that it was. Of course, on theire Passage homeward, they could talk of little else--some made serious Reflections; others, philosophicall Speculations; and _Pole_ waggishly triumphed in having beene the Firste to discerne the Spectacle. "And you trulie believe there was a Signe in the Heavens?" we inquired of _Erasmus_. "What know I?" returned he smiling; "you know, _Constantine_ saw a Cross. Why shoulde _Polus_ not see a Dragon? We must judge by the Event. Perhaps its Mission may be to fly away with _him_. He swore to the curly Tail." How difficulte it is to discerne the supernatural from the incredible! We laughe at _Gillian's_ Faith in our Latin; _Erasmus_ laughs at _Polus_ his Dragon. Have we a righte to believe noughte but what we can see or prove? Nay, that will never doe. _Father_ says a Capacitie for reasoning increaseth a Capacitie for believing. He believes there is such a Thing as Witchcraft, though not that poore olde _Gammer Gurney_ is a Witch; he believes that Saints can work Miracles, though not in alle the Marvels reported of the _Canterbury_ Shrine. Had I beene Justice of the Peace, like the King's Grandmother, I would have beene very jealous of Accusations of Witchcraft; and have taken infinite Payns to sift out the Causes of Malice, Jealousie, &c., which mighte have wroughte with the poore olde Women's Enemies. _Holie Writ_ sayth, "Thou shalt not suffer a Witch to live;" but, questionlesse, manie have suffered Hurte that were noe Witches; and for my Part, I have alwaies helde ducking to be a very uncertayn as well as very cruel Teste. [Illustration: Margaret in the Tree.] I cannot helpe smiling, whenever I think of my Rencounter with _William_ this Morning. Mr. _Gunnell_ had set me _Homer's_ tiresome List of Ships; and, because of the excessive Heate within Doors, I took my Book into the Nuttery, to be beyonde the Wrath of far-darting _Phoebus Apollo_, where I clomb into my favourite Filbert Seat. Anon comes _William_ through the Trees without seeing me; and seats him at the Foot of my Filbert; then, out with his Tablets, and, in a Posture I should have called studdied, had he known anie one within Sighte, falls a poetizing, I question not. Having noe Mind to be interrupted, I lett him be, thinking he would soone exhaust the Vein; but a Caterpillar dropping from the Leaves on to my Page, I was fayn, for Mirthe sake, to shake it down on his Tablets. As ill Luck would have it, however, the little Reptile onlie fell among his Curls; which soe took me at Vantage that I coulde not helpe hastilie crying, "I beg your Pardon." 'Twas worth a World to see his Start! "Why!" cries he, looking up, "are there indeede _Hamadryads_?" and would have gallanted a little, but I bade him hold down his Head, while that with a Twig I switched off the Caterpillar. Neither coulde forbeare laughing; and then he sued me to step downe, but I was minded to abide where I was. Howbeit, after a Minute's Pause, he sayd, in a grave, kind Tone, "Come, little Wife;" and taking mine Arm steadilie in his Hand, I lost my Balance and was faine to come down whether or noe. We walked for some Time _juxta Fluvium_; and he talked not badlie of his Travels, insomuch as I founde there was really more in him than one would think. --Was there ever Aniething soe perverse, unluckie, and downrighte disagreeable? We hurried our Afternoone Tasks, to goe on the Water with my _Father_; and, meaning to give Mr. _Gunnel_ my _Latin_ Traduction, which is in a Booke like unto this, I never knew he had my Journalle insteade, untill that he burst out a laughing. "Soe this is the famous _Libellus_," quoth he.... I never waited for another Word, but snatcht it out of his Hand; which he, for soe strict a Man, bore well enow. I do not believe he could have read a Dozen Lines, and they were towards the Beginning; but I should hugelie like to know which Dozen Lines they were. Hum! I have a Mind never to write another Word. That will be punishing myselfe, though, insteade of _Gunnel_. And he bade me not take it to Heart like the late _Bishop of Durham_, to whom a like Accident befel, which soe annoyed him that he died of Chagrin. I will never again, howbeit, write Aniething savouring ever soe little of Levitie or Absurditie. The Saints keepe me to it! And, to know it from my Exercise Book, I will henceforthe bind a blue Ribbon round it. Furthermore, I will knit the sayd Ribbon in soe close a Knot, that it shall be worth no one else's Payns to pick it out. Lastlie, and for entire Securitie, I will carry the Same in my Pouch, which will hold bigger Matters than this. _22nd._ This Daye, at Dinner, Mr. _Clement_ tooke the Pistoller's Place at the Reading-desk; and, insteade of continuing the Subject in Hand, read a Paraphrase of the 103rde Psalm; the Faithfulnesse and elegant Turne of which, _Erasmus_ highlie commended, though he took Exceptions to the Phrase "renewing thy Youth like that of the Phoenix," whose fabulous Story he believed to have beene unknowne to the Psalmist, and, therefore, however poeticall, unfitt to be introduced. A deepe Blush on sweet _Mercy's_ Face ledd to the Detection of the Paraphrast, and drew on her some deserved Commendations. _Erasmus_, turning to my _Father_, exclaymed with Animation, "I woulde call this House the Academy of _Plato_, were it not Injustice to compare it to a Place where the usuall Disputations concerning Figures and Numbers were onlie occasionallie intersperst with Disquisitions concerning the moral Virtues." Then, in a graver Mood, he added, "One mighte envie you, but that your precious Privileges are bound up with soe paynfulle Anxieties. How manie Pledges have you given to Fortune!" "If my Children are to die out of the Course of Nature, before theire Parents," _Father_ firmly replyed, "I would rather they died well-instructed than ignorant." "You remind me," rejoyns _Erasmus_, "of _Phocion_; whose Wife, when he was aboute to drink the fatal Cup, exclaimed, 'Ah, my Husband! you die innocent.' 'And woulde you, my Wife,' he returned, 'have me die guilty?'" Awhile after, _Gonellus_ askt leave to see _Erasmus_ his Signet-ring, which he handed down to him. In passing it back, _William_, who was occupyde in carving a Crane, handed it so negligentlie that it felle to the Ground. I never saw such a Face as _Erasmus_ made, when 'twas picked out from the Rushes! And yet, ours are renewed almost daylie, which manie think over nice. He took it gingerlie in his faire, Woman-like Hands, and washed and wiped it before he put it on; which escaped not my Step-mother's displeased notice. Indeede, these _Dutchmen_ are scrupulouslie cleane, though _Mother_ calls 'em swinish, because they will eat raw Sallets; though, for that Matter, _Father_ loves Cresses and Ramps. She alsoe mislikes _Erasmus_ for eating Cheese and Butter together with his Manchet; or what he calls _Boetram_; and for being, generallie, daintie at his Sizes, which she sayth is an ill Example to soe manie young People, and becometh not one with soe little Money in 's Purse: howbeit, I think 'tis not Nicetie, but a weak Stomach, which makes him loathe our Salt-meat Commons from Michaelmasse to Easter, and eschew Fish of the coarser Sort. He cannot breakfaste on colde Milk, like _Father_, but liketh Furmity a little spiced. At Dinner, he pecks at, rather than eats, Ruffs and Reeves, Lapwings, or anie smalle Birds it may chance; but affects Sweets and Subtilties, and loves a Cup of Wine or Ale, stirred with Rosemary. _Father_ never toucheth the Wine-cup but to grace a Guest, and loves Water from the Spring. We growing Girls eat more than either; and _Father_ says he loves to see us slice away at the Cob-loaf; it does him goode. What a kind Father he is! I wish my _Step-mother_ were as kind. I hate all sneaping and snubbing, flowting, fleering, pinching, nipping, and such-like; it onlie creates Resentment insteade of Penitence, and lowers the Minde of either Partie. _Gillian_ throws a Rolling-pin at the Turnspit's Head, and we call it Low-life; but we looke for such Unmannerlinesse in the Kitchen. A Whip is onlie fit for _Tisiphone_. [Illustration: "I Noticed Argus Pearcht."] As we rose from Table, I noted _Argus_ pearcht on the Window-sill, eagerlie watching for his Dinner, which he looketh for as punctuallie as if he could tell the Diall; and to please the good, patient Bird, till the Scullion broughte him his Mess of Garden-stuff, I fetched him some Pulse, which he took from mine Hand, taking good Heede not to hurt me with his sharp Beak. While I was feeding him, _Erasmus_ came up, and asked me concerning _Mercy Giggs_; and I tolde him how that she was a friendlesse Orphan, to whom deare _Father_ afforded Protection and the run of the House; and tolde him of her Gratitude, her Meekness, her Patience, her Docilitie, her Aptitude for alle goode Works and Alms-deeds; and how, in her little Chamber, she improved eache spare Moment in the Way of Studdy and Prayer. He repeated "Friendlesse? she cannot be called Friendlesse, who hath _More_ for her Protector, and his Children for Companions;" and then woulde heare more of her Parents' sad Story. Alsoe, would hear somewhat of _Rupert Allington_, and how _Father_ gained his Lawsuit. Alsoe, of _Daisy_, whose Name he tooke to be the true Abbreviation for _Margaret_, but I tolde him how that my Step-sister, and _Mercy_, and I, being all three of a Name, and I being alwaies called _Meg_, we had in Sport given one the Significative of her characteristic Virtue, and the other that of the French _Marguerite_, which may indeed be rendered either Pearl or Daisy. And _Chaucer_, speaking of our English Daisy, saith "_Si douce est la Marguerite._" _23rd._ Since the little Wisdom I have Capacitie to acquire, soe oft gives me the Headache to Distraction, I marvel not at _Jupiter's_ Payn in his Head, when the Goddess of Wisdom sprang therefrom full growne. * * * * * This Morn, to quiet the Payn brought on by too busie Application, Mr. _Gunnel_ would have me close my Book and ramble forth with _Cecy_ into the Fields. We strolled towards _Walham Greene_; and she was seeking for Shepherd's Purses and Shepherd's Needles, when she came running back to me, looking rather pale. I askt what had scared her, and she made answer that _Gammer Gurney_ was coming along the Hedge. I bade her set aside her Feares; and anon we came up with _Gammer_, who was pulling at the purple Blossoms of the Deadly Nightshade. I sayd, "_Gammer_, to what Purpose gather that Weed? knowest not 'tis Evill?" She sayth, mumbling, "What GOD hath created, that call not thou evill." "Well, but," quo' I, "'tis Poison." "Aye, and Medicine too," returns _Gammer_. "I wonder what we poor Souls might come to, if we tooke Nowt for our Ails and Aches but what we could buy o' the Potticary. We've got noe Dr. _Clement_, we poor Folks, to be our Leech o' the Household." "But hast no Feare," quo' I, "of an Over-dose?" "There's manie a Doctor," sayth she, with an unpleasant Leer, "that hath given that at first. In Time he gets his Hand in; and I've had a Plenty o' Practice--Thanks to Self and Sister." "I knew not," quoth I, "that thou hadst a Sister." "How should ye, Mistress," returns she shortlie, "when ye never comes nigh us? We've grubbed on together this many a Year." "'Tis soe far," I returned, half ashamed. "Why, soe it be," answers _Gammer_; "far from Neighbours, far from Church, and far from Priest; howbeit, my old Legs carries me to _your_ House o' Fridays; but I know not whether I shall e'er come agayn--the Rye Bread was soe hard last Time; it may serve for young Teeth, and for them as has got none; but mine, you see, are onlie on the _goe_;" and she opened her Mouth with a ghastly Smile. "'Tis not," she added, "that I'm ungratefulle; but thou sees, Mistress, I really _can't_ eat Crusts." After a Moment, I asked, "Where lies your Dwelling?" [Illustration: Gammer Gurney.] "Out by yonder," quoth she, pointing to a shapeless Mass like a huge Bird's Nest in the Corner of the Field. "There bides poor _Joan_ and I. Wilt come and looke within, Mistress, and see how a Christian can die?" I mutelie complyed, in spite of _Cecy's_ pulling at my Skirts. Arrived at the wretched Abode, which had a Hole for its Chimney, and another for Door at once and Window, I found, sitting in a Corner, propped on a Heap of Rushes, dried Leaves, and olde Rags, an aged sick Woman, who seemed to have but a little While to live. A Mug of Water stoode within her Reach; I saw none other Sustenance; but, in her Visage, oh, such Peace!... Whispers _Gammer_ with an awfulle Look, "She sees 'em now!" "Sees who?" quoth I. "Why, Angels in two long Rows, afore the Throne of GOD, a bending of themselves, this Way, with theire Faces to th' Earth, and Arms stretched out afore 'em." "Hath she seen a Priest?" quoth I. "LORD love ye," returns _Gammer_, "what coulde a Priest doe for her? She's in Heaven alreadie. I doubte if she can heare me." And then, in a loud, distinct Voyce, quite free from her usuall Mumping, she beganne to recite in _English_, "Blessed is every one that feareth the LORD, and walketh in his Ways," etc.; which the dying Woman hearde, although alreadie speechlesse; and reaching out her feeble Arm unto her Sister's Neck, she dragged it down till their Faces touched; and then, looking up, pointed at Somewhat she aimed to make her see ... and we alle looked up, but saw Noughte. Howbeit, she pointed up three severall Times, and lay, as it were, transfigured before us, a gazing at some transporting Sighte, and ever and anon turning on her Sister Looks of Love; and, the While we stoode thus agaze, her Spiritt passed away without even a Thrill or a Shudder. _Cecy_ and I beganne to weepe; and, after a While, soe did _Gammer_; then, putting us forthe, she sayd, "Goe, Children, goe; 'tis noe goode crying; and yet I'm thankfulle to ye for your Teares." I sayd, "Is there Aught we can doe for thee?" She made Answer, "Perhaps you can give me Tuppence, Mistress, to lay on her poor Eyelids and keep 'em down. Bless 'ee, bless 'ee! You're like the good Samaritan--he pulled out Twopence. And maybe, if I come to 'ee To-morrow, you'll give me a Lapfulle of Rosemarie, to lay on her poor Corpse.... I know you've Plenty. GOD be with 'ee, Children; and be sure ye mind how a Christian can die." Soe we left, and came Home sober enow. _Cecy_ sayth, "To die is not soe fearfulle, _Meg_, as I thoughte, but shoulde _you_ fancy dying without a Priest? I shoulde not; and yet _Gammer_ sayd she wanted not one. Howbeit, for certayn, _Gammer Gurney_ is noe Witch, or she would not soe prayse GOD." To conclude, _Father_, on hearing Alle, hath given _Gammer_ more than enow for her present Needes; and _Cecy_ and I are the Almoners of his Mercy. _June 24th._ Yesternighte, being _St. John's Eve_, we went into Town to see the mustering of the Watch. Mr. _Rastall_ had secured us a Window opposite the _King's Head_, in _Chepe_, where theire Majestys went in State to see the Show. The Streets were a Marvell to see, being like unto a Continuation of fayr Bowres or Arbours, garlanded acrosse and over the Doors with greene Birch, long Fennel, Orpin, St. _John's_ Wort, white Lilies, and such like; with innumerable Candles intersperst, the which, being lit up as soon as 'twas Dusk, made the Whole look like enchanted Land; while, at the same Time, the leaping over Bon-fires commenced, and produced Shouts of Laughter. The Youths woulde have had _Father_ goe downe and joyn 'em; _Rupert_, speciallie, begged him hard, but he put him off with, "Sirrah, you Goose-cap, dost think 'twoulde befitt the Judge of the _Sheriffs' Court_?" At length, to the Sound of Trumpets, came marching up _Cheapside_ two Thousand of the Watch, in white Fustian, with the City Badge; and seven hundred Cressett Bearers, eache with his Fellow to supplie him with Oyl, and making, with theire flaring Lights, the Night as cleare as Daye. After 'em, the Morris-dancers and City Waites; the Lord Mayor on horseback, very fine, with his Giants and Pageants; and the Sheriff and his Watch, and _his_ Giants and Pageants. The Streets very uproarious on our way back to the Barge, but the homeward Passage delicious; the Nighte Ayre cool; and the Stars shining brightly. _Father_ and _Erasmus_ had some astronomick Talk; howbeit, methoughte _Erasmus_ less familiar with the heavenlie Bodies than _Father_ is. Afterwards they spake of the King, but not over-freelie, by reason of the Bargemen overhearing. Thence, to the ever-vext Question of _Martin Luther_, of whome _Erasmus_ spake in Terms of earneste, yet qualifyde Prayse. "If _Luther_ be innocent," quoth he, "I woulde not run him down by a wicked Faction; if he be in Error, I woulde rather have him reclaymed than destroyed; for this is most agreeable to the Doctrine of our deare Lord and Master, who woulde not bruise the broken Reede, nor quenche the smoking Flax." And much more to same Purpose. We younger Folks felle to choosing our favourite Mottoes and Devices, in which the Elders at length joyned us. _Mother's_ was loyal--"Cleave to the Crown though it hang on a Bush." _Erasmus's_ pithie--"_Festina lente._" _William_ sayd he was indebted for his to St. _Paul_--"I seeke not yours, but you." For me, I quoted one I had seene in an olde Countrie Church, "_Mieux être que paroître_," which pleased _Father_ and _Erasmus_ much. _June 25th._ Poor _Erasmus_ caughte colde on the Water last Nighte, and keeps House to-daye, taking warm Possets. 'Tis my Week of Housekeeping under Mother's Guidance, and I never had more Pleasure in it; delighting to suit his Taste in sweete Things, which, methinks, all Men like. I have enow of Time left for Studdy, when alle's done. He hathe beene the best Part of the Morning in our Academia, looking over Books and Manuscripts, taking Notes of some, discoursing with Mr. _Gunnel_ on others; and, in some Sorte, interrupting our Morning's Work; but how pleasantlie! Besides, as _Father_ sayth, "Varietie is not always Interruption. That which occasionallie lets and hinders our accustomed Studdies, may prove to the ingenious noe less profitable than theire Studdies themselves." They beganne with discussing the Pronunciation of Latin and Greek, on which _Erasmus_ differeth much from us, though he holds to our Pronunciation of the _Theta_. Thence, to the absurde Partie of the _Ciceronians_ now in _Italie_, who will admit noe Author save _Tully_ to be read nor quoted, nor any Word not in his Writings to be used. Thence to the Latinitie of the _Fathers_, of whose Style he spake slightlie enow, but rated _Jerome_ above _Augustine_. At length, to his _Greek_ and _Latin Testament_, of late issued from the Presse, and the incredible Labour it hath cost him to make it as perfect as possible: on this Subject he so warmed that _Bess_ and I listened with suspended Breath. "May it please GOD," sayth he, knitting ferventlie his Hands, "to make it a Blessing to all Christendom! I look for noe other Reward. Scholars and Believers yet unborn may have Reason to thank, and yet may forget _Erasmus_." He then went on to explain to _Gunnel_ what he had much felt in want of, and hoped some Scholar might yet undertake; to wit, a Sort of _Index Bibliorum_, showing in how manie Passages of Holy Writ occurreth anie given Word, etc.; and he e'en proposed it to _Gunnel_, saying 'twas onlie the Work of Patience and Industry, and mighte be layd aside, and resumed as Occasion offered, and completed at Leisure, to the great Thankfullenesse of Scholars. But _Gunnel_ onlie smiled and shooke his Head. Howbeit, _Erasmus_ set forth his Scheme soe playnlie, that I, having a Pen in Hand, did privilie note down alle the Heads of the same, thinking, if none else would undertake it, why should not I? since Leisure and Industrie were alone required, and since 'twoulde be soe acceptable to manie, 'speciallie to _Erasmus_. _June 29th._ Hearde _Mother_ say to _Barbara_, "Be sure the Sirloin is well basted for the King's Physician;" which avised me that Dr. _Linacre_ was expected. In Truth, he returned with _Father_ in the Barge; and they tooke a Turn on the River Bank before sitting down to Table. I noted them from my Lattice; and anon, _Father_, beckoning me, cries, "Child, bring out my favourite Treatyse on Fisshynge, printed by _Wynkyn de Worde_; I must give the Doctor my loved Passage." Joyning 'em with the Booke, I found _Father_ telling him of the Roach, Dace, Chub, Barbel, etc., we oft catch opposite the Church; and hastilie turning over the Leaves, he beginneth with Unction to read the Passage ensuing, which I love to the full as much as he:-- He observeth, if the Angler's Sport shoulde fail him, "he at the best hathe his holsom Walk and mery at his Ease, a swete Ayre of the swete Savour of the Meade of Flowers, that maketh him hungry; he heareth the melodious Harmonie of Fowles, he seeth the young Swans, Herons, Ducks, Cotes, and manie other Fowles, with theire Broods, which me seemeth better than alle the Noise of Hounds, Faukenors, and Fowlers can make. And if the Angler take Fysshe, then there is noe Man merrier than he is in his Spryte." And, "Ye shall not use this foresaid crafty Disporte for no covetysnesse in the encreasing and sparing of your Money onlie, but pryncipallie for your Solace, and to cause the Health of your Bodie, and speciallie of your Soule, for when ye purpose to goe on your Disportes of Fysshynge, ye will not desire greatlie manie Persons with you, which woulde lett you of your Game. And thenne ye may serve GOD devoutlie, in saying affectuouslie your customable Prayer; and thus doing, ye shall eschew and voyd manie Vices." [Illustration: More reading Wynkyn de Worde.] "Angling is itselfe a Vice," cries _Erasmus_, from the Thresholde; "for my Part I will fish none, save and except for pickled Oysters." "In the Regions below," answers _Father_; and then laughinglie tells _Linacre_ of his firste Dialogue with _Erasmus_, who had beene feasting in my Lord Mayor's Cellar:--"'Whence come you?' 'From below.' 'What were they about there?' 'Eating live Oysters, and drinking out of Leather Jacks.' 'Either you are _Erasmus_,' etc. 'Either you are _More_ or Nothing.'" "'Neither more nor less,' you should have rejoyned," sayth the Doctor. "How I wish I had!" says _Father_; "don't torment me with a Jest I might have made and did not make; 'speciallie to put downe _Erasmus_." "_Concedo nulli_," sayth _Erasmus_. "Why are you so lazy?" asks _Linacre_; "I am sure you can speak English if you will." "Soe far from it," sayth _Erasmus_, "that I made my Incapacitie an Excuse for declining an English Rectory. Albeit, you know how _Wareham_ requited me; saying, in his kind, generous Way, I served the Church more by my Pen than I coulde by preaching Sermons in a countrie Village." Sayth _Linacre_, "The Archbishop hath made another Remark, as much to the Purpose: to wit, that he has received from you the Immortalitie which Emperors and Kings cannot bestow." "They cannot even bid a smoking Sirloin retain its Heat an Hour after it hath left the Fire," sayth _Father_. "Tilly-vally! as my good _Alice_ says,--let us remember the universal Doom, '_Fruges consumere nati_,' and philosophize over our Ale and Bracket." "Not _Cambridge_ Ale, neither," sayth _Erasmus_. "Will you never forget that unlucky Beverage?" sayth _Father_. "Why, Man, think how manie poor Scholars there be, that content themselves, as I have hearde one of St. _John's_ declare, with a penny piece of Beef amongst four, stewed into Pottage with a little Salt and Oatmeal; and that after fasting from four o'clock in the Morning! Say Grace for us this Daye, _Erasmus_, with goode Heart." At Table, Discourse flowed soe thicke and faste that I mighte aim in vayn to chronicle it--and why should I? dwelling as I doe at the Fountayn Head? Onlie that I find Pleasure, alreadie, in glancing over the foregoing Pages whensoever they concern _Father_ and _Erasmus_, and wish they were more faithfullie recalled and better writ. One Thing sticks by me,--a funny Reply of _Father's_ to a Man who owed him Money and who put him off with "_Memento Morieris_." "I bid you," retorted _Father_, "_Memento Mori Æris_, and I wish you woulde take as goode Care to provide for the one as I do for the other." _Linacre_ laughed much at this, and sayd,--"That was real Wit; a Spark struck at the Moment; and with noe Ill-nature in it, for I am sure your Debtor coulde not help laughing." "Not he," quoth _Erasmus_. "_More's_ Drollerie is like that of a young Gentlewoman of his Name, which shines without burning," ... and, oddlie enow, he looked acrosse at _me_. I am sure he meant _Bess_. _July 1st._ _Father_ broughte home a strange Guest to-daye,--a converted _Jew_, with grizzlie Beard, furred Gown, and Eyes that shone like Lamps lit in dark Cavernes. He had beene to _Benmarine_ and _Tremeçen_, to the _Holie Citie_ and to _Damascus_, to _Urmia_ and _Assyria_, and I think alle over the knowne World; and tolde us manie strange Tales, one hardlie knew how to believe; as, for Example, of a Sea-coast Tribe, called the _Balouches_, who live on Fish and build theire Dwellings of the Bones. Alsoe, of a Race of his Countriemen beyond _Euphrates_ who believe in _Christ_, but know nothing of the Pope; and of whom were the Magians that followed the Star. This agreeth not with our Legend. He averred that, though soe far apart from theire Brethren, theire Speech was the same, and even theire Songs; and he sang or chaunted one which he sayd was common among the Jews alle over the World, and had beene soe ever since theire Citie was ruinated and the People captivated, and yet it was never sett down in Prick-song. _Erasmus_, who knows little or nought of Hebrew, listened to the Words with Curiositie, and made him repeate them twice or thrice: and though I know not the Character, it seemed to me they sounded thus:-- _Adir Hu yivne bethcha beccaro, El, b'ne; El, b'ne; El, b'ne; Bethcha beccaro._ [Illustration: The Jew.] Though Christianish, he woulde not eat Pig's Face; and sayd Swine's Flesh was forbidden by the Hebrew Law for its unwholesomenesse in hot Countries and hot Weather, rather than by way of arbitrarie Prohibition. _Daisy_ took a great Dislike to this Man, and woulde not sit next him. In the Hay-field alle the Evening. Swathed _Father_ in a Hay-rope, and made him pay the Fine, which he pretended to resist. _Cecy_ was just about to cast one round _Erasmus_, when her Heart failed and she ran away, colouring to the Eyes. He sayd, he never saw such pretty Shame. _Father_ reclining on the Hay, with his Head on my Lap and his Eyes shut, _Bess_ asked if he were asleep. He made answer, "Yes, and dreaming." I askt, "Of what?" "Of a far-off future Daye, _Meg_; when thou and I shall looke back on this Hour, and this Hay-field, and my Head on thy Lap." "Nay, but what a stupid Dream, Mr. _More_," says _Mother_. "Why, what woulde _you_ dreame of, Mrs. _Alice_?" "Forsooth, if I dreamed at alle, when I was wide awake, it shoulde be of being _Lord Chancellor_ at the leaste." "Well, Wife, I forgive thee for not saying at the _most_. Lord Chancellor, quotha! And you woulde be Dame _Alice_, I trow, and ride in a Whirlecote, and keep a Spanish Jennet, and a Couple of Greyhounds, and wear a Train before and behind, and carry a Jerfalcon on your Fist." "On my Wrist." "No, that's not such a pretty Word as t'other! Go to, go!" Straying from the others, to a remote Corner of the Meadow, or ever I was aware, I came close upon _Gammer Gurney_, holding Somewhat with much Care. "Give ye good den, Mistress _Meg_," quoth she, "I cannot abear to rob the Birds of theire Nests; but I knows you and yours be kind to dumb Creatures, soe here's a Nest o' young Owzels for ye--and I can't call 'em dumb nowther, for they'll sing bravelie some o' these Days." "How hast fared, of late, _Gammer_?" quoth I. "Why, well enow for such as I," she made Answer; "since I lost the Use o' my right Hand, I can nowther spin, nor nurse sick Folk, but I pulls Rushes, and that brings me a few Pence, and I be a good Herbalist; onlie, because I says one or two English Prayers, and hates the Priests, some Folks thinks me a Witch." "But why dost hate the Priests?" quoth I. "Never you mind," she gave Answer, "I've Reasons manie; and for my English Prayers, they were taught me by a Gentleman I nursed, that's now a Saint in Heaven, along with poor _Joan_." And soe she hobbled off, and I felt kindlie towards her, I scarce knew why--perhaps because she spake soe lovingly of her dead Sister, and because of that Sister's Name. _My_ Mother's Name was _Joan_. _July 2nd._ _Erasmus_ is gone. His last Saying to _Father_ was, "They will have you at Court yet;" and _Father's_ Answer, "When _Plato's_ Year comes round." To me he gave a Copy, how precious! of his Testament. "You are an elegant Latinist, _Margaret_," he was pleased to say, "but, if you woulde drink deeplie of the Well-springs of Wisdom, applie to Greek. The Latins have onlie shallow Rivulets; the Greeks, copious Rivers, running over Sands of Gold. Read _Plato_; he wrote on Marble, with a Diamond; but above alle, read the New Testament. 'Tis the Key to the Kingdom of Heaven." To Mr. _Gunnel_, he said smiling, "Have a Care of thyself, dear _Gonellus_, and take a little Wine for thy Stomach's Sake. The Wages of most Scholars now-a-days, are weak Eyes, Ill-health, an empty Purse, and shorte Commons. I neede only bid thee beware of the two first." To _Bess_, "Farewell, _Bessy_; thank you for mending my bad Latin. When I write to you, I will be sure to signe myselfe, '_Roterodamius_.' Farewell, sweete _Cecil_; let me always continue your 'desired Amiable.' And you, _Jacky_,--love your Book a little more." "_Jack's_ deare Mother, not content with her Girls," sayth _Father_, "was alwaies wishing for a Boy, and at last she had one that means to remain a Boy alle his Life." "The Dutch Schoolmasters thoughte _me_ dulle and heavie," sayth _Erasmus_, "soe there is some Hope of _Jacky_ yet." And soe, stepped into the Barge, which we watched to _Chelsea Reach_. How dulle the House has beene ever since! _Rupert_ and _William_ have had me into the Pavillion to hear the Plot of a Miracle-play they have alreadie begunne to talke over for _Christmasse_, but it seemed to me downrighte Rubbish. _Father_ sleepes in Town to-nighte, soe we shall be stupid enow. _Bessy_ hath undertaken to work _Father_ a Slipper for his tender Foot; and is happie, tracing for the Pattern our three Moorcocks and Colts; but I am idle and tiresome. If I had Paper, I woulde beginne my projected _Opus_; but I dare not ask _Gunnel_ for anie more just yet; nor have anie Money to buy Some. I wish I had a couple of Angels. I think I shall write to _Father_ for them to-morrow; he alwaies likes to heare from us if he is twenty-four Hours absent, providing we conclude not with "I have Nothing more to say." _July 4th._ I have writ my Letter to _Father_. I almoste wish, now, that I had not sent it. _Rupert_ and _Will_ still full of theire Moralitie, which reallie has some Fun in it. To ridicule the Extravagance of those who, as the Saying is, carry theire Farms and Fields on theire Backs, _William_ proposes to come in, all verdant, with a reall Model of a Farm on his Back, and a Windmill on his Head. _July 5th._ How sweete, how gracious an Answer from _Father_! _John Harris_ has broughte me with it the two Angels; less prized than this Epistle. _July 10th._ Sixteenth Birthdaye. _Father_ away, which made it sadde. _Mother_ gave me a payr of blue Hosen with Silk Clocks; Mr. _Gunnel_, an ivorie-handled Stylus; _Bess_, a Bodkin for my Hair; _Daisy_, a Book-mark; _Mercy_, a Saffron Cake; _Jack_, a Basket; and _Cecil_, a Nosegay. _William's_ Present was fayrest of alle, but I am hurte with him and myselfe; for he offered it soe queerlie and tagged it with such ... I refused it, and there's an End. 'Twas unmannerlie and unkinde of me, and I've cried aboute it since. _Father_ alwaies gives us a Birthdaye Treat; soe, contrived that _Mother_ shoulde take us to see my _Lord Cardinal_ of _York_ goe to _Westminster_ in State. We had a merrie Water-partie; got goode Places and saw the Show; Crosse-bearers, Pillar-bearers, Ushers and alle. Himselfe in crimson engrayned Sattin, and Tippet of Sables, with an Orange in his Hand helde to 's Nose, as though the common Ayr were too vile to breathe. What a pompous Priest it is! The Archbishop mighte well say, "That Man is drunk with too much Prosperitie." [Illustration: The Cardinal's Procession.] Betweene Dinner and Supper, we had a fine Skirmish in the Straits of Thermopylæ. Mr. _Gunnel_ headed the Persians, and _Will_ was _Leonidas_, with a swashing Buckler, and a Helmet a Yard high; but Mr. _Gunnel_ gave him such a Rap on the Crest that it went over the Wall; soe then _William_ thought there was Nothing left for him but to die. Howbeit, as he had beene layd low sooner than he had reckoned on, he prolonged his last Agonies a goode deal, and gave one of the Persians a tremendous Kick just as they were aboute to rifle his Pouch. They therefore thoughte there must be Somewhat in it they shoulde like to see; soe, helde him down in spite of his hitting righte and lefte, and pulled therefrom, among sundrie lesser Matters, a carnation Knot of mine. Poor Varlet, I wish he would not be so stupid. After Supper, _Mother_ proposed a Concert; and we were alle singing a Rounde, when, looking up, I saw _Father_ standing in the Door-way, with such a happy Smile on his Face! He was close behind _Rupert_ and _Daisy_, who were singing from the same Book, and advertised them of his Coming by gentlie knocking theire Heads together; but I had the firste Kiss, even before _Mother_, because of my Birthdaye. _July 11th._ It turns out that _Father's_ Lateness Yester-even was caused by Press of Businesse; a forayn Mission having beene proposed to him, which he resisted as long as he could, but was at length reluctantlie induced to accept. Lengthe of his Stay uncertayn, which casts a Gloom on alle; but there is soe much to doe as to leave little Time to think, and _Father_ is busiest of alle; yet hath founde Leisure to concert with Mother for us a Journey into the Country, which will occupy some of the Weeks of his Absence. I am fulle of carefulle Thoughts and Forebodings, being naturallie of too anxious a Disposition. Oh, let me caste alle my Cares on another! _Fecisti nos ad te, Domine; et inquietum est cor nostrum, donec requiescat in te._ [Illustration] _May 27th, 1523._ 'Tis soe manie Months agone since that I made an Entry in my _Libellus_, as that my Motto, "_Nulla Dies sine Linea_," hath somewhat of Sarcasm in it. How manie Things doe I beginne and leave unfinisht! and yet, less from Caprice than Lack of Strength; like him of whom the Scripture was writ,--"This Man beganne to build and was not able to finish." My _Opus_, for instance; the which my _Father's_ prolonged Absence in the Autumn, and my Winter Visitt to Aunt _Nan_ and Aunt _Fan_ gave me such Leisure to carrie forward. But alack! Leisure was less to seeke than Learninge; and when I came back to mine olde Taskes, Leisure was awanting too; and then, by reason of my sleeping in a separate Chamber, I was enabled to steale Hours from the earlie Morn and Hours from the Night, and, like unto _Solomon's_ virtuous Woman, my Candle went not out. But 'twas not to Purpose that I worked, like the virtuous Woman, for I was following a Jack-o-Lantern; having forsooke the straight Path laid downe by _Erasmus_ for a foolish Path of mine owne; and soe I toyled, and blundered, and puzzled, and was mazed; and then came on that Payn in my Head. _Father_ sayd, "What makes _Meg_ soe pale?" and I sayd not: and, at the last, I tolde _Mother_ there was somewhat throbbing and twisting in the Back of mine Head, like unto a little Worm that woulde not die; and she made Answer, "Ah, a Maggot," and soe by her Scoff I was shamed. Then I gave over mine _Opus_, but the Payn did not yet goe; soe then I was longing for the deare Pleasure, and fondlie turning over the Leaves, and wondering woulde _Father_ be surprised and pleased with it some Daye, when _Father_ himself came in or ever I was aware. He sayth, "What hast thou, _Meg_?" I faltered and woulde sett it aside. He sayth, "Nay, let me see;" and soe takes it from me; and after the firste Glance throws himself into a Seat, his Back to me, and firste runs it hastilie through, then beginnes with Methode and such Silence and Gravitie as that I trembled at his Side, and felt what it must be to stand a Prisoner at the Bar, and he the Judge. Sometimes I thought he must be pleased, at others not: at lengthe, alle my fond Hopes were ended by his crying, "This will never doe. Poor Wretch, hath this then beene thy Toyl? How couldst find Time for soe much Labour? for here hath beene Trouble enow and to spare. Thou must have stolen it, sweet _Meg_, from the Night, and prevented the Morning Watch. Most dear'st! thy _Father's_ owne loved Child;" and soe, caressing me till I gave over my Shame and Disappointment. "I neede not to tell thee, _Meg_," _Father_ sayth, "of the unprofitable Labour of _Sisyphus_, nor of drawing Water in a Sieve. There are some Things, most deare one, that a Woman, if she trieth, may doe as well as a Man; and some she cannot, and some she had better not. Now, I tell thee firmlie, since the firste Payn is the leaste sharpe, that, despite the Spiritt and Genius herein shewn, I am avised 'tis Work thou canst not and Work thou hadst better not doe. But judge for thyselfe; if thou wilt persist, thou shalt have Leisure and Quiet, and a Chamber in my new Building, and alle the Help my Gallery of Books may afford. But thy Father says, Forbear." Soe, what coulde I say, but "My Father shall never speak to me in vayn." Then he gathered the Papers up and sayd, "Then I shall take Temptation out of your Way;" and pressing 'em to his Heart as he did soe, sayth, "They are as deare to me as they can be to you;" and soe left me, looking out as though I noted (but I noted not) the cleare-shining _Thames_. 'Twas Twilighte, and I stoode there I know not how long, alone and lonely; with Tears coming, I knew not why, into mine Eyes. There was a Weight in the Ayr, as of coming Thunder; the Screaming, ever and anon, of _Juno_ and _Argus_, inclined me to Mellancholie, as it alwaies does: and at length I beganne to note the Moon rising, and the deepening Clearnesse of the Water, and the lazy Motion of the Barges, and the Flashes of Light whene'er the Rowers dipt theire Oars. And then I beganne to attend to the Cries and different Sounds from acrosse the Water, and the Tolling of a distant Bell; and I felle back on mine olde heart-sighinge, "_Fecisti nos ad te, Domine; et inquietum est cor nostrum, donec requiescat in te_." Or ever the Week was gone, my Father had contrived for me another Journey to _New Hall_, to abide with the Lay Nuns, as he calleth them, Aunt _Nan_ and Aunt _Fan_, whom my Step-mother loveth not, but whom I love and whom _Father_ loveth. Indeede, 'tis sayd in _Essex_ that at first he inclined to Aunt _Nan_ rather than to my Mother; but that, perceiving my Mother affected his Companie and Aunt _Nan_ affected it not, he diverted his hesitating Affections unto her and took her to wife. Howbeit, Aunt _Nan_ loveth him dearlie as a Sister ought: indeed, she loveth alle, except, methinketh, herself, to whom, alone, she is rigid and severe. How holie are my Aunts' Lives! Cloistered Nuns could not be more pure, and could scarce be as usefulle. Though wise, they can be gay; though noe longer young, they love the Young. And theire Reward is, the Young love them; and I am fulle sure in this World they seek noe better. Returned to _Chelsea_, I spake much in Prayse of mine Aunts, and of single Life. On a certayn Evening, we Maids were sett at our Needles and Samplers on the Pavilion Steps; and, as Follie will out, 'gan talk of what we would fayn have to our Lots, shoulde a good Fairie starte up and grant eache a Wish. _Daisy_ was for a Countess's Degree, with Hawks and Hounds. _Bess_ was for founding a College, _Mercy_ a Hospital, and she spake soe experimentallie of its Conditions that I was fayn to goe Partners with her in the same. _Cecy_ commenced, "Supposing I were married; if once that I were married"--on which, _Father_, who had come up unperceived, burst out laughing and sayth, "Well, Dame _Cecily_, and what State would you keep?" Howbeit, as he and I afterwards paced together, _juxta Fluvium_, he did say, "_Mercy_ hath well propounded the Conditions of an Hospital or Alms-house for aged and sick Folk, and 'tis a Fantasie of mine to sett even such an one afoot, and give you the Conduct of the same." From this careless Speech, dropped as 'twere by the Way, hath sprung mine House of Refuge! and oh, what Pleasure have I derived from it! How good is my Father! how the Poor bless him! and how kind is he, through them, to me! Laying his Hand kindly on my Shoulder, this Morning, he sayd, "_Meg_, how fares it with thee now? Have I cured the Payn in thy Head?" Then, putting the House-key into mine Hand, he laughingly added, "'Tis now yours, my Joy, by _Livery_ and _Seisin_." _Aug. 6th._ I wish _William_ would give me back my Testament. 'Tis one thing to steal a Knot or a Posie, and another to borrow the most valuable Book in the House, and keep it Week after Week. He soughte it with a kind of Mysterie, soe as that I forbeare to ask it of him in Companie, lest I should doe him an ill Turn; and yet I have none other Occasion. Alle Parties are striving which shall have _Erasmus_, and alle in vayn. E'en thus it was with him when he was here last,--the _Queen_ would have had him for her Preceptor, the _King_ and _Cardinall_ prest on him a royall Apartment and Salarie, _Oxford_ and _Cambridge_ contended for him, but his Saying was, "Alle these I value less than my Libertie, my Studdies, and my literarie Toyls." How much greater is he than those who woulde confer on him Greatnesse! Noe Man of Letters hath equall Reputation, or is soe much courted. _Aug. 7th._ Yester-even, after overlooking the Men playing at Loggats, _Father_ and I strayed away along _Thermopylæ_ into the Home-field; and as we sauntered together under the Elms, he sayth with a Sigh, "_Jack_ is _Jack_, and no _More_ ... he will never be anything. An' 'twere not for my beloved Wenches, I should be an unhappy Father. But what though!--My _Meg_ is better unto me than ten Sons; and it maketh no Difference at Harvest-time whether our Corn were put into the Ground by a Man or a Woman." While I was turning in my Mind what Excuse I might make for _John_, _Father_ taketh me at unawares by a sudden Change of Subject; saying, "Come, tell me, _Meg_, why canst not affect _Will Roper_?" I was a good while silent, at length made Answer, "He is so unlike alle I esteem and admire ... so unlike alle I have been taught to esteem and admire by you."-- "Have at you," he returned laughing, "I wist not I had been sharpening Weapons agaynst myself. True, he is neither _Achilles_ nor _Hector_, nor even _Paris_, but yet well enough, meseems, as Times go--smarter and comelier than either _Heron_ or _Dancey_." I, faltering, made Answer, "Good Looks affect me but little--'tis in his better Part I feel the Want. He cannot ... discourse, for instance, to one's Mind and Soul, like unto you, dear _Father_, or _Erasmus_." "I should marvel if he could," returned _Father_ gravelie, "thou art mad, my Daughter, to look, in a Youth of _Will's_ Years, for the Mind of a Man of fifty. What were _Erasmus_ and I, dost thou suppose, at _Will's_ age? Alas, _Meg_, I should not like you to know what I was! Men called me the Boy-sage, and I know not what, but in my Heart and Head was a World of Sin and Folly. Thou mightst as well expect _Will_ to have my Hair, Eyes, and Teeth, alle getting the worse for Wear, as to have the Fruits of my life-long Experience, in some Cases full dearly bought. Take him for what he is, match him by the young Minds of his owne standing: consider how long and closelie we have known him. His Parts are, surelie, not amiss: he hath more Book-lore than _Dancey_, more mother Wit than _Allington_." "But why need I to concern myself about him?" I exclaymed; "_Will_ is very well in his way: why should we cross each other's Paths? I am young, I have much to learn, I love my Studdies,--why interrupt them with other and less wise Thoughts?" "Because nothing can be wise that is not practical," returned _Father_, "and I teach my Children Philosophie to fitt them for living in the World, not above it. One may spend a Life in dreaming over _Plato_, and yet goe out of it without leaving the World a whit the better for our having made Part of it. 'Tis to little Purpose we studdy, if it onlie makes us exact Perfections in others which they may in vayn seek for in ourselves. It is not even necessary or goode for us to live entirelie with congeniall Spiritts. The vigourous tempers the inert, the passionate is evened by the cool-tempered, the prosaic balances the visionarie. Woulde thy Mother suit me better, dost thou suppose, if she coulde discuss Polemicks like _Luther_ or _Melancthon_? E'en thine owne sweet Mother, _Meg_, was less affected to Studdy than thou art,--she learnt to love it for my Sake, but I made her what she was." And, with a suddain Burste of fond Recollection, he hid his Eyes on my Shoulder, and for a Moment or soe, cried bitterlie. As for me, I shed, oh! such salt Teares!... _Aug. 17th._ Entering, o' the suddain, into _Mercy's_ Chamber, I founde her all be-wept and waped, poring over an old Kirtle of Mother's she had bidden her re-line with Buckram. Coulde not make out whether she were sick of her Task, had had Words with Mother, or had some secret Inquietation of her owne; but, as she is a Girl of few Words, I found I had best leave her alone after a Caress and kind Saying or two. We alle have our Troubles. _Wednesday, 19th._ Trulie may I say soe. Here have they ta'en a Fever of some low Sorte in my House of Refuge, and _Mother_, fearing it may be the Sicknesse, will not have me goe neare it, lest I should bring it home. _Mercy_, howbeit, hath besought her soe earnestlie to let her goe and nurse the Sick, that _Mother_ hath granted her Prayer, on Condition she returneth not till the Fever bates ... thus setting her Life at lower Value than our owne. Deare _Mercy_! I would fayn be her Mate. _21st._ We are alle mightie glad that _Rupert Allington_ hath at lengthe zealouslie embraced the Studdy of the Law. 'Twas much to be feared at the Firste there was noe Application in him, and though we alle pitied him when _Father_ first broughte him Home, a pillaged, portionlesse Client, with none other to espouse his Rightes, yet 'twas a Pitie soone allied with Contempt when we founde how emptie he was, caring for nought but Archerie and Skittles and the Popinjaye out o' the House, and Dicing and Tables within, which _Father_ would on noe Excuse permitt. Soe he had to conform, ruefullie enow, and hung piteouslie on Hand for awhile. I mind me of _Bess's_ saying, about _Christmasse_, "Heaven send us open Weather while _Allington_ is here; I don't believe he is one that will bear shutting up." Howbeit, he seemed to incline towards _Daisy_, who is handsome enow, and cannot be hindered of Two-hundred Pounds, and soe he kept within Bounds, and when _Father_ got him his Cause he was mightilie thankfulle, and woulde have left us out of Hand, but _Father_ persuaded him to let his Estate recover itself, and turn the mean Time to Profitt, and, in short, soe wrought on him, that he hath now become a Student in righte earneste. _22nd._ Soe we are going to lose not only Mr. _Clement_, but Mr. _Gunnel_! How sorrie we alle are! It seemeth he hath long been debating for and agaynst the Church, and at length finds his Mind soe stronglie set towards it, as he can keep out of it noe longer. Well! we shall lose a good Master, and the Church will gayn a good Servant. _Drew_ will supplie his Place, that is, according to his beste, but our worthy Welshman careth soe little for young People, and is soe abstract from the World about him, that we shall oft feel our Loss. _Father_ hath promised _Gonellus_ his Interest with the _Cardinall_. I fell into Disgrace for holding Speech with _Mercy_ over the Pales, but she is confident there is noe Danger; the Sick are doing well, and none of the Whole have fallen sick. She sayth _Gammer Gurney_ is as tender of her as if she were her Daughter, and will let her doe noe vile or paynfull Office, soe as she hath little to doe but read and pray for the poor Souls, and feed 'em with savourie Messes, and they are alle so harmonious and full of Cheer, as to be like Birds in a Nest. _Mercy_ deserves theire Blessings more than I. Were I a free Agent, she should not be alone now, and I hope ne'er to be withheld therefrom agayn. [Illustration: "I fell into disgrace for holding Speech with Mercy over the Pales."] _30th._ Busied with my Flowers the chief o' the Forenoon, I was fayn to rest in the Pavilion, when, entering therein, whom shoulde I stumble upon but _William_, layd at length on the Floor, with his Arms under his Head, and his Book on the Ground. I was withdrawing brisklie enow, when he called out, "Don't goe away, since you _are_ here," in a Tone soe rough, soe unlike his usuall Key, as that I paused in a Maze, and then saw that his Eyes were red. He sprung to his Feet and sayd, "_Meg_, come and talk to me;" and, taking my Hand in his, stepped quicklie forthe without another Word sayd, till we reached the Elm-tree Walk. I marvelled to see him soe moven, and expected to hear Somewhat that shoulde displease me, scarce knowing what; however, I might have guest at it from then till now, without ever nearing the Truth. His first Words were, "I wish _Erasmus_ had ne'er crost the Thresholde; he has made me very unhappie;" then, seeing me stare, "Be not his Council just now, deare _Meg_, but bind up, if thou canst, the Wounds he has made.... There be some Wounds, thou knowest, though but of a cut Finger or the like, that we cannot well bind up for ourselves." I made Answer, "I am a young and unskilled Leech." He replyed, "But you have a quick Wit, and Patience, and Kindnesse, and for a Woman, are not scant of Learning." "Nay," I sayd, "but Mr. _Gunnel_--" "_Gunnel_ would be the Last to help me," interrupts _Will_, "nor can I speak to your Father. He is alwaies too busie now ... besides,--" "Father _Francis_?" I put in. "Father _Francis_?" repeats _Will_, with a Shake o' the Head and a ruefulle Smile; "dost thou think, _Meg_, he coulde answer me if I put to him _Pilate's_ Question, 'What is Truth?'" "We know alreadie," quoth I. Sayth _Will_, "What do we know?" I paused, then made Answer reverentlie, "That _Jesus_ is the Way, the Truth, and the Life." "Yes," he exclaymed, clapping his Hands together in a strange Sort of Passion; "that we _doe_ know, blessed be GOD, and other Foundation can or ought noe Man to lay than that is layd, which is JESUS CHRIST. But, _Meg_, is this the Principle of our Church?" "Yea, verily," I steadfastlie replied. "Then, how has it beene overlayd," he hurriedlie went on, "with Men's Inventions! St. _Paul_ speaks of a Sacrifice once offered: we holde the Host to be a continuall Sacrifice. Holy Writ telleth us, where a Tree falls it must lie; we are taughte that our Prayers may free Souls from Purgatorie. The Word sayth, 'By Faith ye are saved;' the Church sayth, we may be saved by our Works. It is written, 'The Idols he shall utterly abolish;' we worship Figures of Gold and Silver...." "Hold, hold," I sayd, "I dare not listen to this.... You are wrong, you know you are wrong." "How and where?" he sayth; "onlie tell me. I long to be put righte." "Our Images are but Symbols of our Saints," I made Answer; "'tis onlie the Ignorant and Unlearned that worship the mere Wood and Stone." "But why worship Saints at alle?" persisted _Will_; "where's your Warrant for it?" I sayd, "Heaven has warranted it by sundrie and speciall Miracles at divers Times and Places. I may say to you, _Will_, as _Socrates_ to _Agathon_, 'You may easilie argue agaynst me, but you cannot argue agaynst the Truth.'" "Oh, put me not off with _Plato_," he impatientlie replyed, "refer me but to Holie Writ." "How can I," quoth I, "when you have ta'en away my Testament ere I had half gone through it? 'Tis this Book, I fear me, poor _Will_, hath unsettled thee. Our Church, indeed, sayth the Unlearned wrest it to theire Destruction." "And yet the Apostle sayth," rejoyned _Will_, "that it contayns alle Things necessarie to our Salvation." "Doubtlesse it doth, if we knew but where to find them," I replied. "And how find, unlesse we seeke?" he pursued, "and how know which Road to take, when we find the Scripture and the Church at Issue?" "Get some wiser Head to advise us," I rejoyned. "But an' if the Obstacle remains the same?" "I cannot suppose that," I somewhat impatientlie returned, "GOD'S Word and GOD'S Church must agree; 'tis only we that make them at Issue." "Ah, _Meg_, that is just such an Answer as Father _Francis_ mighte give--it solves noe Difficultie. If, to alle human Reason, they pull opposite Ways, by which shall we abide? I know; I am certain. '_Tu, Domine Jesu, es Justicia mea!_'" He looked soe rapt, with claspt Hands and upraysed Eyes, as that I coulde not but look on him and hear him with Solemnitie. At length I sayd, "If you know and are certayn, you have noe longer anie Doubts for me to lay, and with your Will, we will holde this Discourse noe longer, for however moving and however considerable its Subject Matter may be, it approaches forbidden Ground too nearlie for me to feel it safe, and I question whether it savoureth not of Heresie. However, _Will_, I most heartilie pitie you, and will pray for you." "Do, _Meg_, do," he replyed, "and say nought to any one of this Matter." "Indeede I shall not, for I think 'twoulde bring you if not me into Trouble; but, since thou haste soughte my Council, _Will_, receive it now and take it...." He sayth, "What is it?" "To read less, pray more, fast, and use such Discipline as our Church recommends, and I question not this Temptation will depart. Make a fayr Triall." And soe, away from him, though he woulde fain have sayd more; and I have kept mine own Worde of praying for him full earnestlie, for it pitieth me to see him in such Case. _Sept. 2nd._ Poor _Will_, I never see him look grave now, nor heare him sighe, without thinking I know the Cause of his secret Discontentation. He hath, I believe, followed my Council to the Letter, for though the Men's Quarter of the House is soe far aparte from ours, it hath come rounde to me through _Barbara_, who had it from her Brother, that Mr. _Roper_ hath of late lien on the Ground, and used a knotted Cord. As 'tis one of the Acts of Mercy to relieve others, when we can, from Satanic Doubts and Inquietations, I have been at some Payns to make an Abstracte of such Passages from the Fathers, and such Narratives of noted and undeniable Miracles as cannot, I think, but carry Conviction with them, and I hope they may minister to his Soul's Comfort. _Tuesday, 4th._ Supped with my Lord _Sands_. _Mother_ played Mumchance with my Lady, but _Father_, who saith he woulde rather feast a hundred poor Men than eat at one rich Man's Table, came not in till late, on Plea of Businesse. My Lord tolde him the King had visitted him not long agone, and was soe well content with his Manor as to wish it were his owne, for the singular fine Ayr and pleasant growth of Wood. In fine, wound up the Evening with Musick. My Lady hath a Pair of fine-toned Clavichords, and a Mandoline that stands five Feet high; the largest in _England_, except that of the Lady _Mary Dudley_. The Sound, indeed, is powerfull, but methinketh the Instrument ungaynlie for a Woman. Lord _Sands_ sang us a new Ballad, "_The King's Hunt's up_," which _Father_ affected hugelie. I lacked Spiritt to sue my Lord for the Words, he being soe free-spoken as alwaies to dash me; howbeit, I mind they ran somewhat thus.... "_The Hunt is up, the Hunt is up, And it is well nigh Daye, Harry our King has gone hunting To bring his Deere to baye. The East is bright with Morning Lighte, And Darkness it is fled, And the merrie Horn wakes up the Morn To leave his idle Bed. Beholde the Skies with golden Dyes, Are...._" --The Rest hath escaped me, albeit I know there was some Burden of Hey-tantara, where my Lord did stamp and snap his Fingers. He is a merry Heart. [Illustration: "Lord Sands sang us a New Ballad."] [Illustration] _1524, October._ Sayth Lord _Rutland_ to my Father, in his acute sneering Way, "Ah, ah, Sir _Thomas_, _Honores mutant Mores_." "Not so, in Faith, my Lord," returns _Father_, "but have a care lest we translate the Proverb, and say Honours change _Manners_." It served him right, and the Jest is worth preserving, because 'twas not premeditate, as my Lord's very likely was, but retorted at once and in Self-defence. I don't believe Honours _have_ changed the _Mores_. As _Father_ told _Mother_, there's the same Face under the Hood. 'Tis comique, too, the Fulfilment of _Erasmus_ his Prophecy. _Plato's_ Year has not come rounde, but they have got _Father_ to Court, and the King seems minded never to let him goe. For us, we have the same untamed Spiritts and unconstrayned Course of Life as ever, neither lett nor hindered in our daylie Studdies, though we dress somewhat braver, and see more Companie. _Mother's_ Head was a little turned, at first, by the Change and Enlargement of the Householde ... the Acquisition of Clerk of the Kitchen, Surveyor of the Dresser, Yeoman of the Pastrie, etc., but, as _Father_ laughinglie tolde her, the Increase of her Cares soon steddied her Witts, for she found she had twenty Unthrifts to look after insteade of half-a-dozen. And the same with himself. His Responsibilities are soe increast, that he grutches at everie Hour the Court steals from his Family, and vows, now and then, he will leave off joking, that the King may the sooner wearie of him. But this is onlie in Jest, for he feels it is a _Power_ given him over lighter Minds, which he may exert to usefull and high Purpose. Onlie it keepeth him from needing _Damocles_ his Sword; he trusts not in the Favour of Princes nor in the Voyce of the People, and keeps his Soul as a weaned Child. 'Tis much for us now to get an Hour's Leisure with him, and makes us feel what our olde Privilleges were when we knew 'em not. Still, I'm pleased without being over elated, at his having risen to his proper Level. The _King_ tooke us by Surprise this Morning: _Mother_ had scarce time to slip on her Scarlett Gown and Coif, ere he was in the House. His Grace was mighty pleasant to all, and, at going, saluted all round, which _Bessy_ took humourously, _Daisy_ immoveablie, _Mercy_ humblie, I distastefullie, and _Mother_ delightedlie. She calls him a fine Man; he is indeede big enough, and like to become too big; with long slits of Eyes that gaze freelie on all, as who shoulde say, "Who dare let or hinder us?" His Brow betokens Sense and Franknesse, his Eyebrows are supercilious, and his Cheeks puffy. A rolling, straddling Gait, and abrupt Speech. T'other Evening, as _Father_ and I were, unwontedly, strolling together down the Lane, there accosts us a shabby poor Fellow, with something unsettled in his Eye.... "Master, Sir Knight, and may it please your Judgeship, my name is _Patteson_." "Very likely," says Father, "and my Name is _More_, but what is that to the Purpose?" "And that is _more_ to the Purpose, you mighte have said," returned the other. "Why, soe I mighte," says _Father_, "but how shoulde I have proved it?" "You who are a Lawyer shoulde know best about that," rejoyned the poor Knave; "'tis too hard for poor _Patteson_." "Well, but who are you?" says _Father_, "and what do you want of me?" "Don't you mind me?" says _Patteson_; "I played Hold-your-tongue, last _Christmasse_ Revel was five Years, and they called me a smart Chap then, but last _Martinmasse_ I fell from the Church Steeple, and shook my Brain-pan, I think, for its Contents have seemed addled ever since; soe what I want now is to be made a Fool." "Then you are not one already?" says _Father_. "If I were," says _Patteson_, "I shoulde not have come to _you_." "Why, Like cleaves to Like, you know they say," says _Father_. "Aye," says t'other, "but I've Reason and Feeling enow, too, to know you are no Fool, though I thoughte you might want one. Great People like 'em at their Tables, I've hearde say, though I am sure I can't guesse why, for it makes me sad to see Fools laughed at; ne'erthelesse, as I get laughed at alreadie, methinketh I may as well get paid for the Job if I can, being unable, now, to doe a Stroke of Work in hot Weather. And I'm the onlie Son of my Mother, and she is a Widow. But perhaps I'm not bad enough." "I know not that, poor Knave," says _Father_, touched with quick Pity, "and, for those that laugh at Fools, my Opinion, _Patteson_, is that they are the greater Fools who laugh. To tell you the Truth, I had had noe Mind to take a Fool into mine Establishment, having alwaies had a Fancy to be prime Fooler in it myselfe; however, you incline me to change my Purpose, for as I said anon, Like cleaves to Like, soe, I'll tell you what we will doe--divide the Businesse and goe Halves--I continuing the Fooling, and thou receiving the Salary; that is, if I find, on Inquiry, thou art given to noe Vice, including that of Scurrillitie." "May it like your Goodness," says poor _Patteson_, "I've been the Subject, oft, of Scurrillitie, and affect it too little to offend that Way myself. I ever keep a civil Tongue in my Head, 'specially among young Ladies." "That minds me," says _Father_, "of a Butler who sayd he always was sober, especially when he only had Water to drink. Can you read and write?" "Well, and what if I cannot?" returns _Patteson_, "there ne'er was but one, I ever heard of, that knew Letters, never having learnt, and well he might, for he made them that made them." "_Meg_, there is Sense in this poor Fellow," says _Father_, "we will have him Home and be kind to him." And, sure enow, we have done so and been so ever since. _Tuesday, 25th._ A glance at the anteceding Pages of this _Libellus_ me-sheweth poor _Will Roper_ at the Season his Love-fitt for me was at its Height. He troubleth me with it noe longer, nor with his religious Disquietations. Hard Studdy of the Law hath filled his Head with other Matters, and made him infinitely more rationall, and by Consequents, more agreeable. 'Twas one of those Preferences young People sometimes manifest, themselves know neither why nor wherefore, and are shamed, afterwards, to be reminded of. I'm sure I shall ne'er remind him. There was nothing in me to fix a rational or passionate Regard. I have neither _Bess's_ Witt nor white Teeth, nor _Daisy's_ dark Eyes, nor _Mercy's_ Dimple. A plain-favoured Girl, with changefulle Spiritts,--that's alle. _26th._ _Patteson's_ latest Jest was taking Precedence of _Father_ yesterday with the Saying, "Give place, Brother; you are but Jester to King _Harry_, and I'm Jester to Sir _Thomas More_; I'll leave you to decide which is the greater Man of the two." "Why, Gossip," cries _Father_, "his Grace woulde make two of me." "Not a Bit of it," returns _Patteson_, "he's big enow for two such as you are, I grant ye, but the King can't make two of you. No! Lords and Commons may make a King, but a King can't make a Sir _Thomas More_." "Yes, he can," rejoyns _Father_, "he can make me Lord Chancellor, and then he will make me more than I am already; _ergo_, he will make Sir _Thomas_ more." "But what I mean is," persists the Fool, "that the King can't make such another as you are, any more than all the King's Horses and all the King's Men can put _Humpty-dumpty_ together again, which is an ancient Riddle, and full of Marrow. And soe he'll find, if ever he lifts thy Head off from thy Shoulders, which GOD forbid!" _Father_ delighteth in sparring with _Patteson_ far more than in jesting with the King, whom he alwaies looks on as a Lion that may, any Minute, fall on him and rend him. Whereas, with t'other, he ungirds his Mind. Their Banter commonly exceeds not Pleasantrie, but _Patteson_ is ne'er without an Answer; and although, maybe, each amuses himselfe now and then with thinking, "I'll put him up with such a Question," yet, once begun, the Skein runs off the Reel without a Knot, and shews the excellent Nature of both, soe free are they alike from Malice and Over-license. Sometimes theire Cuts are neater than common Listeners apprehend. I've seene _Rupert_ and _Will_, in fencing, make theire Swords flash in the Sun at every Parry and Thrust; agayn, owing to some Change in mine owne Position, or the Decline of the Sun, the Scintillations have escaped me, though I've known their Rays must have been emitted in some Quarter alle the same. _Patteson_, with one of _Argus's_ cast Feathers in his Hand, is at this Moment beneath my Lattice, astride on a Stone Balustrade; while _Bessy_, whom he much affects, is sitting on the Steps, feeding her Peacocks. Sayth _Patteson_, "Canst tell me, Mistress, why Peacocks have soe manie Eyes in theire Tails, and yet can onlie see with two in theire Heads?" "Because those two make them soe vain alreadie, Fool," says _Bess_, "that were they always beholding theire owne Glory, they woulde be intolerable." "And besides that," says _Patteson_, "the less we see or heare, either, of what passes behind our Backs, the better for us, since Knaves will make Mouths at us then, for as glorious as we may be. Canst tell me, Mistress, why the Peacock was the last Bird that went into the Ark?" "First tell me, Fool," returns _Bess_, "how thou knowest that it was soe?" "Nay, a Fool may ask a Question would puzzle a Wiseard to answer," rejoyns _Patteson_; "I mighte ask you, for example, where they got theire fresh Kitchen-stuff in the Ark, or whether the Birds ate other than Grains, or the wild Beasts other than Flesh. It needs must have been a Granary." "We ne'er shew ourselves such Fools," says _Bess_, "as in seeking to know more than is written. They had enough, if none to spare, and we scarce can tell how little is enough for bare Sustenance in a State of perfect Inaction. If the Creatures were kept low, they were all the less fierce." "Well answered, Mistress," says _Patteson_, "but tell me, why do you wear two Crosses?" "Nay, Fool," returns _Bess_, "I wear but one." "Oh, but I say you wear two," says _Patteson_, "one at your Girdle, and one that nobody sees. We alle wear the unseen one, you know. Some have theirs of Gold, alle carven and shaped, soe as you hardlie tell it for a Cross ... like my Lord Cardinall, for Instance ... but it is one, for alle that. And others, of Iron, that eateth into their Hearts ... methinketh Master _Roper's_ must be one of 'em. For me, I'm content with one of Wood, like that our deare LORD bore; what was goode enow for him is goode enow for me, and I've noe Temptation to shew it, as it isn't fine, nor yet to chafe at it for being rougher than my Neighbour's, nor yet to make myself a second because it is not hard enow. Doe you take me, Mistress?" "I take you for what you are," says _Bess_, "a poor Fool." "Nay, Niece," says _Patteson_, "my Brother your Father hath made me rich." "I mean," says _Bess_, "you have more Wisdom than Witt, and a real Fool has neither, therefore you are only a make-believe Fool." "Well, there are many make-believe Sages," says _Patteson_; "for mine owne Part, I never aim to be thoughte a _Hiccius Doccius_." "A _hic est doctus_, Fool, you mean," interrupts _Bess_. "Perhaps I do," rejoins _Patteson_, "since other Folks soe oft know better what we mean than we know ourselves. Alle I woulde say is, I ne'er set up for a Conjuror. One can see as far into a Millstone as other People, without being that. For Example, when a Man is overta'en with Qualms of Conscience for having married his Brother's Widow, when she is noe longer soe young and fair as she was a Score of Years ago, we know what that's a Sign of. And when an _Ipswich_ Butcher's Son takes on him the State of my Lord _Pope_, we know what that's a Sign of. Nay, if a young Gentlewoman become dainty at her Sizes, and sluttish in her Apparel, we ... as I live, here comes _Giles Heron_, with a Fish in's Mouth." Poor Bess involuntarilie turned her Head quicklie towards the Watergate; on which, _Patteson_, laughing as he lay on his Back, points upward with his Peacock's Feather, and cries, "Overhead, Mistress! see, there he goes. Sure, you lookt not to see Master _Heron_ making towards us between the Posts and Flower-pots, eating a dried Ling?" laughing as wildly as though he were verily a Natural. _Bess_, without a Word, shook the Crumbs from her Lap, and was turning into the House, when he withholds her a Minute in a perfectly altered Fashion, saying, "There be some Works, Mistress, our Confessors tell us be Works of Supererogation ... is not that the Word? I learn a long one now and then ... such as be setting Food before a full Man, or singing to a deaf one, or buying for one's Pigs a Silver Trough, or, for the Matter of that, casting Pearls before a Dunghill Cock, or fishing for a Heron, which is well able to fish for itself, and is an ill-natured Bird after all, that pecks the Hand of his Mistress, and, for all her Kindness to him, will not think of _Bessy More_." How apt alle are to abuse unlimited License! Yet 'twas good Counsel. _1525, July 2._ Soe my Fate is settled. Who knoweth at Sunrise what will chance before Sunsett? No; the Greeks and Romans mighte speake of Chance and of Fate, but we must not. _Ruth's Hap_ was to light on the Field of _Boaz_: but what she thought casual, the LORD had contrived. Firste, he gives me the Marmot. Then, the Marmot dies. Then, I, having kept the Creature soe long, and being naturallie tender, must cry a little over it. Then _Will_ must come in and find me drying mine Eyes. Then he must, most unreasonablie, suppose that I could not have loved the poor Animal for its owne Sake soe much as for his; and, thereupon, falle a love-making in such downrighte Earneste, that I, being alreadie somewhat upset, and knowing 'twoulde please _Father_ ... and hating to be perverse, ... and thinking much better of _Will_ since he hath studdied soe hard, and given soe largelie to the Poor, and left off broaching his heteroclite Opinions ... I say, I supposed it must be soe, some Time or another, soe 'twas noe Use hanging back for ever and ever, soe now there's an End, and I pray GOD give us a quiet Life. Noe one woulde suppose me reckoning on a quiet Life if they knew how I've cried alle this Forenoon, ever since I got quit of _Will_, by _Father's_ carrying him off to _Westminster_. He'll tell _Father_, I know, as they goe along in the Barge, or else coming back, which will be soone now, though I've ta'en no Heed of the Hour. I wish 'twere cold Weather, and that I had a sore Throat, or stiff Neck, or somewhat that might reasonablie send me a-bed, and keep me there till to-morrow Morning. But I'm quite well, and 'tis the Dog-days, and Cook is thumping the Rolling-pin on the Dresser, and Dinner is being served, and here comes _Father_. [Illustration: "The King was here yesterday."] _1528, Sept._ _Father_ hath had some Words with the Cardinall. 'Twas touching the Draught of some forayn Treaty which the Cardinall offered for his Criticism, or rather, for his Commendation, which _Father_ could not give. This nettled his Grace, who exclaimed,--"By the Mass, thou art the veriest Fool of all the Council." _Father_, smiling, rejoined, "GOD be thanked, that the King our Master hath but one Fool therein." The _Cardinall_ may rage, but he can't rob him of the royal Favour. The _King_ was here yesterday, and walked for an Hour or soe about the Garden, with his Arm round _Father's_ Neck. _Will_ coulde not help felicitating _Father_ upon it afterwards; to which _Father_ made Answer, "I thank GOD I find his Grace my very good Lord indeed, and I believe he doth as singularly favour me as any Subject within this Realm. Howbeit, son _Roper_, I may tell thee between ourselves, I feel no Cause to be proud thereof, for if my Head would win him a Castle in _France_, it shoulde not fail to fly off." --_Father_ is graver than he used to be. No Wonder. He hath much on his Mind; the Calls on his Time and Thoughts are beyond Belief; but GOD is very good to him. His Favour at home and abroad is immense: he hath good Health, soe have we alle; and his Family are established to his Mind, and settled alle about him, still under the same fostering Roof. Considering that I am the most ordinarie of his Daughters, 'tis singular I should have secured the best Husband. _Daisy_ lives peaceablie with _Rupert Allington_, and is as indifferent, me seemeth, to him as to alle the World beside. He, on his Part, loves her and theire Children with Devotion, and woulde pass half his Time in the Nurserie. _Dancey_ always had a hot Temper, and now and then plagues _Bess_; but she lets noe one know it but me. Sometimes she comes into my Chamber and cries a little, but the next kind Word brightens her up, and I verilie believe her Pleasures far exceed her Payns. _Giles Heron_ lost her through his own Fault, and might have regained her good Opinion after all, had he taken half the Pains for her Sake he now takes for her younger Sister: I cannot think how _Cecy_ can favour him; yet I suspect he will win her, sooner or later. As to mine own deare _Will_, 'tis the kindest, purest Nature, the finest Soul, the ... and yet how I was senselesse enow once to undervalue him! Yes, I am a happy Wife; a happy Daughter; a happy Mother. When my little _Bill_ stroaked dear _Father's_ Face just now, and murmured "Pretty!" he burst out a-laughing, and cried,-- "You are like the young _Cyrus_, who exclaimed,--'Oh! Mother, how pretty is my Grandfather!' And yet, according to _Xenophon_, the old Gentleman was soe rouged and made up, as that none but a Child woulde have admired him!" "That's not the Case," I observed, "with _Bill's_ Grandfather." "He's a _More_ all over," says _Father_, fondly. "Make a Pun, _Meg_, if thou canst, about _Amor_, _Amore_, or _Amores_. 'Twill onlie be the thousand and first on our Name. Here, little Knave, see these Cherries: tell me who thou art, and thou shalt have one. '_More! More!_' I knew it, sweet Villain. Take them all." I oft sitt for an Hour or more, watching _Hans Holbein_ at his Brush. He hath a rare Gift of limning; and has, besides, the Advantage of deare _Erasmus_ his Recommendation, for whom he hath alreddie painted our Likenesses, but I think he has made us very ugly. His Portraiture of my Grandfather is marvellous; ne'erthelesse, I look in vayn for the Spirituallitie which our _Lucchese_ Friend, _Antonio Bonvisi_, tells us is to be found in the Productions of the Italian Schools. _Holbein_ loves to paint with the Lighte coming in upon his Work from above. He says a Lighte from above puts Objects in theire proper Lighte, and shews theire just Proportions; a Lighte from beneath reverses alle the naturall Shadows. Surelie, this hath some Truth if we spirituallize it. _June 2d._ _Rupert's_ Cousin, _Rosamond Allington_, is our Guest. She is as beautiful as ... not as an Angel, for she lacks the Look of Goodness, but very beautiful indeed. She cometh hither from _Hever Castle_, her Account of the Affairs whereof I like not. Mistress _Anne_ is not there at present; indeed, she is now always hanging about Court, and followeth somewhat too literallie the scriptural Injunction to _Solomon's_ Spouse--to forget her Father's House. The _King_ likes well enow to be compared with _Solomon_, but Mistress _Anne_ is not his Spouse yet, nor ever will be, I hope. Flattery and Frenchified Habitts have spoilt her, I trow. [Illustration: "She cometh hither from Hever Castle."] _Rosamond_ says there is not a good Chamber in the Castle; even the Ball-room, which is on the upper Floor of alle, being narrow and low. On a rainy Day, long ago, she and Mistress _Anne_ were playing at Shuttlecock therein, when _Rosamond's_ Foot tripped at some Unevennesse in the Floor, and Mistress _Anne_, with a Laugh, cried out, "Mind you goe not down into the Dungeon"--then pulled up a Trap-door in the Ball-room Floor, by an iron Ring, and made _Rosamond_ look down into an unknown Depth; all in the blacknesse of Darkness. 'Tis an awfulle Thing to have onlie a Step from a Ball-room to a Dungeon! I'm glad we live in a modern House; we have noe such fearsome Sights here. _Sept. 26._ How many, many Tears have I shed! Poor, imprudent _Will_. To think of his Escape from the _Cardinall's_ Fangs, and yet that he will probablie repeat the Offence! This Morning _Father_ and he had a long, and, I fear me, fruitless Debate in the Garden; on returning from which, _Father_ took me aside and sayd,-- "_Meg_, I have borne a long Time with thine Husband; I have reasoned and argued with him, and still given him my poor, fatherly Counsel; but I perceive none of alle this can call him Home agayn. And therefore, _Meg_, I will no longer dispute with him." ... "Oh, _Father_!" ... "Nor yet will I give him over; but I will set another Way to work, and get me to GOD and pray for him." And have not I done so alreadie? _27th._ I feare me they parted unfriendlie; I hearde _Father_ say, "Thus much I have a Right to bind thee to, that thou indoctrinate not her in thine owne Heresies. Thou shalt not imperill the Salvation of my Child." Since this there has been an irresistible Gloom on our Spiritts, a Cloud between my Husband's Soul and mine, without a Word spoken. I pray, but my Prayers seem dead. _Thursday, 28th._ Last Night, after seeking unto this Saint and that, methought, "Why not applie unto the Fountain Head? Maybe these holie Spiritts may have Limitations sett to the Power of theire Intercessions--at anie Rate, the Ears of _Mary-mother_ are open to alle." Soe I beganne, "_Eia mater, fons amoris._" ... Then methoughte, "But I am onlie asking _her_ to intercede--I'll mount a Step higher still." ... Then I turned to the greate Intercessor of alle. But methought, "Still he intercedes with another, although the same. And his owne Saying was, 'In that Day ye shall ask _me nothing_. Whatsoever ye shall ask in my Name, _he_ will give it you.'" Soe I did. I fancy I fell asleep with the Tears on my Cheek. _Will_ had not come up Stairs. Then came a heavie, heavie Sleep, not such as giveth Rest; and a dark, wild Dream. Methought I was tired of waiting for _Will_, and became alarmed. The Night seemed a Month long, and at last I grew soe weary of it, that I arose, put on some Clothing, and went in search of him whom my Soul loveth. Soon I founde him, sitting in a Muse; and said, "_Will_, deare _Will_?" but he hearde me not; and, going up to touch him, I was amazed to be broughte short up or ever I reached him, by Something invisible betwixt us, hard, and cleare, and colde, ... in short, a Wall of Ice! Soe it seemed, in my strange Dreame. I pushed at it, but could not move it; called to him, but coulde not make him hear: and all the While my Breath, I suppose, raised a Vapour on the glassy Substance, that grew thicker and thicker, soe as slowlie to hide him from me. I coulde discerne his Head and Shoulders, but not see down to his Heart. Then I shut mine Eyes in Despair, and when I opened 'em, he was hidden altogether. Then I prayed. I put my hot Brow agaynst the Ice, and I kept a weeping hot Tears, and the warm Breath of Prayer kept issuing from my Lips; and still I was persisting, when, or ever I knew how, the Ice beganne to melt! I felt it giving Way! and, looking up, coulde in joyfulle Surprize just discerne the Lineaments of a Figure close at t'other Side; the Face turned away, but yet in the Guise of listening. And, Images being apt to seem magnified and distorted through Vapours, methought 'twas altogether bigger than _Will_, yet himself, nothingthelesse; and, the Barrier between us having sunk away to Breast-height, I layd mine Hand on's Shoulder, and he turned his Head, smiling, though in Silence; and ... oh, Heaven! 'twas not _Will_, but----. What coulde I doe, even in my Dreame, but fall at his Feet? What coulde I doe, waking, but the same? 'Twas Grey of Morn; I was feverish and unrefreshed, but I wanted noe more lying a-bed. _Will_ had arisen and gone forthe; and I, as quicklie as I coulde make myself readie, sped after him. I know not what I expected, nor what I meant to say. The Moment I opened the Door of his Closett, I stopt short. There he stoode, in the Centre of the Chamber; his Hand resting flat on an open Book, his Head raised somewhat up, his Eyes fixed on Something or some One, as though in speaking Communion with 'em; his whole Visage lightened up and glorifide with an unspeakable Calm and Grandeur that seemed to transfigure him before me; and, when he hearde my Step, he turned about, and 'steade of histing me away, helde out his Arms.... We parted without neede to utter a Word. _June, 1530._ Events have followed too quick and thick for me to note 'em. Firste, _Father's_ Embassade to _Cambray_, which I shoulde have grieved at more on our owne Accounts, had it not broken off alle further Collision with _Will_. Thoroughlie homesick, while abroad, poor _Father_ was; then, on his Return, he noe sooner sett his Foot a-land, than the King summoned him to _Woodstock_. 'Twas a Couple o' Nights after he left us, that _Will_ and I were roused by _Patteson's_ shouting beneath our Window, "Fire, Fire, quoth _Jeremiah_!" and the House was a-fire, sure enow. Greate Part of the Men's Quarter, together with alle the Out-houses and Barns, consumed without Remedie, and alle through the Carelessnesse of _John Holt_. Howbeit, noe Lives were lost, nor any one much hurt; and we thankfullie obeyed deare _Father's_ Behest, soe soone as we received the same, that we woulde get us to Church, and there, upon our Knees, return humble and harty Thanks to ALMIGHTY GOD for our late Deliverance from a fearfulle Death. Alsoe, at _Father's_ Desire, we made up to the poor People on our Premises theire various Losses, which he bade us doe, even if it left him without soe much as a Spoon. But then came an equallie unlookt-for, and more appalling Event: the Fall of my _Lord Cardinall_, whereby my Father was shortlie raised to the highest Pinnacle of professional Greatnesse; being made _Lord Chancellor_, to the Content, in some Sort, of _Wolsey_ himself, who sayd he was the onlie Man fit to be his Successor. The unheard-of Splendour of his Installation dazzled the Vulgar; while the Wisdom that marked the admirable Discharge of his daylie Duties, won the Respect of alle thinking Men, but surprized none who alreadie knew _Father_. On the Day succeeding his being sworn in, _Patteson_ marched hither, and thither, bearing a huge Placard, inscribed, "Partnership Dissolved;" and apparelled himself in an old Suit, on which he had bestowed a Coating of black Paint, with Weepers of white Paper; assigning for't that "his Brother was dead." "For now," quoth he, "that they've made him _Lord Chancellor_, we shall ne'er see Sir _Thomas_ more." Now, although the poor _Cardinall_ was commonlie helde to shew much Judgment in his Decisions, owing to the naturall Soundness of his Understanding, yet, being noe Lawyer, Abuses had multiplied during his Chancellorship, more especiallie in the Way of enormous Fees and Gratuities. _Father_, not content with shunning base Lucre in his proper Person, will not let anie one under him, to his Knowledge, touch a Bribe; whereat _Dancey_, after his funny Fashion, complains, saying,-- "The Fingers of my _Lord Cardinall's_ veriest Door-keepers were tipt with Gold, but I, since I married your Daughter, have got noe Pickings; which in your Case may be commendable, but in mine is nothing profitable." _Father_, laughing, makes Answer,-- "Your Case is hard, Son _Dancey_, but I can onlie say for your Comfort, that, soe far as Honesty and Justice are concerned, if mine owne Father, whom I reverence dearly, stoode before me on the one Hand, and the Devil, whom I hate extremely, on the other, yet, the Cause of the latter being just, I shoulde give the Devil his Due." _Giles Heron_ hath found this to his Cost. Presuming on his near Connexion with my Father, he refused an equitable Accommodation of a Suit, which, thereon, coming into Court, _Father's_ Decision was given flat agaynst him. [Illustration: The Beggar-Woman's Dog.] His Decision agaynst _Mother_ was equallie impartiall, and had Something comique in it. Thus it befelle.--A Beggar-woman's little Dog, which had beene stolen from her, was offered my _Mother_ for Sale, and she bought it for a Jewel of no greate Value. After a Week or soe, the Owner finds where her Dog is, and cometh to make Complaynt of the Theft to _Father_, then sitting in his Hall. Sayth _Father_, "Let's have a faire Hearing in open Court; thou, Mistress, stand there where you be, to have impartial Justice; and thou, Dame _Alice_, come up hither, because thou art of the higher Degree. Now then, call each of you the Puppy, and see which he will follow." Soe _Sweetheart_, in spite of _Mother_, springs off to the old Beggar-woman, who, unable to keep from laughing, and yet moved at Mother's Losse, sayth,-- "Tell 'ee what, Mistress ... thee shalt have 'un for a Groat." "Nay," sayth _Mother_, "I won't mind giving thee a Piece of Gold;" soe the Bargain was satisfactorily concluded. _Father's_ Despatch of Businesse is such, that, one Morning before the End of Term, he was tolde there was noe other Cause nor Petition to be sett before him; the which, being a Case unparalleled, he desired mighte be formally recorded. He ne'er commences Businesse in his owne Court without first stepping into the Court of King's Bench, and there kneeling down to receive my Grandfather's Blessing. _Will_ sayth 'tis worth a World to see the Unction with which the deare old Man bestows it on him. In Rogation-week, following the Rood as usuall round the Parish, _Heron_ counselled him to go a Horseback for the greater Seemlinesse, but he made Answer that 'twoulde be unseemlie indeede for the Servant to ride after his Master going afoot. His Grace of _Norfolk_, coming yesterday to dine with him, finds him in the Church-choir, singing, with a Surplice on. "What?" cries the _Duke_, as they walk Home together, "my _Lord Chancellor_ playing the Parish-clerk? Sure, you dishonour the King and his Office." "Nay," says _Father_, smiling, "your Grace must not deem that the King, your Master and mine, will be offended at my honouring _his_ Master." Sure, 'tis pleasant to heare _Father_ taking the upper Hand of these great Folks: and to have 'em coming and going, and waiting his Pleasure, because he is the Man whom the King delighteth to honour. True, indeed, with _Wolsey_ 'twas once the same; but _Father_ neede not feare the same Ruin; because he hath HIM for his Friend, whom _Wolsey_ said woulde not have forsaken him had he served HIM as he served his earthly Master. 'Twas a misproud Priest; and there's the Truth on't. And _Father_ is not misproud; and I don't believe we are; though proud of him we cannot fail to be. And I know not why we may not be pleased with Prosperitie, as well as patient under Adversitie; as long as we say, "Thou, LORD, hast made our Hill soe strong." 'Tis more difficult to bear with Comelinesse, doubtlesse; and envious Folks there will be; and we know alle Things have an End, and everie Sweet hath its Sour, and everie Fountain its Fall; but ... 'tis very pleasant for all that. [Illustration: In the Garden.] _Tuesday, 31st, 1532._ Who coulde have thoughte that those ripe Grapes whereof dear _Gaffer_ ate soe plentifullie, should have ended his Dayes? This Event hath filled the House with Mourning. He had us all about his Bed to receive his Blessing; and 'twas piteous to see _Father_ fall upon his Face, as _Joseph_ on the Face of _Jacob_, and weep upon him and kiss him. Like _Jacob_, my Grandsire lived to see his duteous Son attain to the Height of earthlie Glory, his Heart unspoyled and untouched. _July, 1532._ The Days of Mourning for my Grandsire are at an end; yet _Father_ still goeth heavilie. This Forenoon, looking forthe of my Lattice, I saw him walking along the River Side, his Arm cast about _Will's_ Neck; and 'twas a dearer Sight to my Soul than to see the _King_ walking there with his Arm around _Father's_ Neck. They seemed in such earnest Converse, that I was avised to ask _Will_, afterwards, what they had been saying. He told me that, after much friendly Chat together on this and that, _Father_ fell into a Muse, and presently, fetching a deep Sigh, says,-- "Would to GOD, Son _Roper_, on Condition three Things were well established in Christendom, I were put into a Sack, and cast presently into the _Thames_." _Will_ sayth,-- "What three soe great Things can they be, _Father_, as to move you to such a Wish?" "In Faith, _Will_," answers he, "they be these.--First, that whereas the most Part of Christian Princes be at War, they were at universal Peace. Next, that whereas the Church of CHRIST is at present sore afflicted with divers Errors and Heresies, it were well settled in a godly Uniformity. Last, that this Matter of the _King's_ Marriage were, to the Glory of GOD, and the Quietness of alle Parties, brought to a good Conclusion." Indeed, this last Matter preys on my Father's Soul. He hath even knelt to the King, to refrain from exacting Compliance with his Grace's Will concerning it; movingly reminding him, even with Tears, of his Grace's own Words to him on delivering the Great Seal, "First look unto GOD, and, after GOD, unto me." But the King is heady in this Matter; stubborn as a Mule or wild Ass's Colt, whose Mouths must be held with Bit and Bridle if they be to be governed at alle; and the King hath taken the Bit between his Teeth, and there is none dare ride him. Alle for Love of a brown Girl, with a Wen on her Throat, and an extra Finger. _July 18th._ How short a Time agone it seemeth, that in my Prosperity I sayd, "We shall never be moved; Thou, LORD, of Thy goodness hast made our Hill soe strong! ... Thou didst turn away thy Face, and I was troubled!" _28th._ Thus sayth _Plato_: of Him whom he soughte, but hardly found: "Truth is his Body, and Light his Shadow." A marvellous Saying for a Heathen. Hear also what St. _John_ sayth: "GOD is Light; and in him is no Darkness at all." "And the Light was the Life of Men: and the Light shineth in Darkness, and the Darkness comprehended it not." Hear also what St. _Augustine_ sayth: "They are the most uncharitable towards Error who have never experienced how hard a Matter it is to come at the Truth." Hard, indeed. Here's _Father_ agaynst _Will_, and agaynst _Erasmus_, of whom he once could not speak well enough; and now he says that if he upholds such and such Opinions his dear _Erasmus_ may be the Devil's _Erasmus_ for what he cares. And here's _Father_ at Issue with half the learned Heads in Christendom concerning the King's Marriage. And yet, for alle that, I think _Father_ is in the Right. He taketh Matters soe to Heart that e'en his Appetite fails. Yesterday he put aside his old favourite Dish of Brewis, saying, "I know not how 'tis, good _Alice_; I've lost my Stomach, I think, for my old Relishes" ... and this, e'en with a Tear in his Eye. But 'twas not the Brewis, I know, that made it start. _Aug._ He hath resigned the Great Seal! And none of us knew of his having done soe, nor e'en of his meditating it, till after Morning Prayers to-day, when, insteade of one of his Gentlemen stepping up to my Mother in her Pew with the Words, "Madam, my Lord is gone," he cometh up to her himself, with a Smile on's Face, and sayth, low bowing as he spoke, "Madam, my Lord is gone." She takes it for one of the manie Jests whereof she misses the Point; and 'tis not till we are out of Church, in the open Air, that she fully comprehends my _Lord Chancellor_ is indeed gone, and she hath onlie her Sir _Thomas More_. [Illustration: "and sayth, low bowing as he spoke, 'Madam, my Lord is gone.'"] A Burst of Tears was no more than was to be lookt for from poor Mother; and, in Sooth, we alle felt aggrieved and mortyfide enough; but 'twas a short Sorrow; for _Father_ declared that he had cast _Pelion_ and _Ossa_ off his Back into the bottomless Pit; and fell into such funny Antics that we were soon as merry as ever we were in our Lives. _Patteson_, so soon as he hears it, comes leaping and skipping across the Garden, crying, "A fatted Calf! let a fatted Calf be killed, Masters and Mistresses, for this my Brother who was dead is alive again!" and falls a kissing his Hand. But poor _Patteson's_ Note will soon change; for _Father's_ diminished State will necessitate the Dismissal of all extra Hands; and there is manie a Servant under his Roof whom he can worse spare than the poor Fool. In the Evening he gathers us alle about him in the Pavilion, where he throws himself into his old accustomed Seat, casts his Arm about _Mother_, and cries, "How glad must _Cincinnatus_ have been to spy out his Cottage again, with _Racilia_ standing at the Gate!" Then, called for Curds and Cream; sayd how sweet the soft Summer Air was coming over the River, and bade _Cecil_ sing "The King's Hunt's up." After this, one Ballad after another was called for, till alle had sung their Lay, ill or well, he listing the While with closed Eyes, and a composed Smile about his Mouth; the two Furrows between his Brows relaxing graduallie till at length they could no more be seene. At last he says,-- "Who was that old Prophet that could not or would not prophesy for a King of _Judah_ till a Minstrel came and played unto him? Sure, he must have loved, as I do, the very lovely Song of one that playeth well upon an Instrument, yclept the Human Heart; and have felt, as I do now, the Spirit given him to speak of Matters foreign to his Mind. 'Tis of _res angusta domi_, dear Brats, I must speak; soe, the sooner begun, the sooner over. Here am I, with a dear Wife and eight loved Children ... for my Daughters' Husbands and my Son's Wife are my Children as much as any; and _Mercy Giggs_ is a Daughter too ... nine Children, then, and eleven Grandchildren, and a Swarm of Servants to boot, all of whom have as yet eaten what it pleased them, and drunken what it suited them at my Board, without its being any one's Businesse to say them nay. 'Twas the dearest Privilege of my _Lord Chancellor_; but now he's dead and gone, how shall we contract the Charges of Sir _Thomas More_?" We looked from one to another, and were silent. "I'll tell ye, dear ones," he went on. "I have been brought up at _Oxford_, at an Inn of Chancery, at Lincoln's Inn, and at the King's Court; from the lowest Degree, that is, to the highest; and yet have I in yearly Revenues at this Present, little above one Hundred Pounds a-year; but then, as _Chilo_ sayth, 'honest Loss is preferable to dishonest Gain: by the first, a Man suffers once; by the second for ever;' and I may take up my Parable with _Samuel_, and say: 'Whose Ox have I taken? whose Ass have I taken? whom have I defrauded? whom have I oppressed? of whose Hand have I received any Bribe to blinde mine Eyes therewith?' No, my worst Enemies cannot lay to my Charge any of these Things; and my Trust in you is, that, rather than regret I should not have made a Purse by any such base Methods, you will all cheerfully contribute your Proportions to the common Fund, and share and share alike with me in this my diminished State." We all gat about him, and by our Words and Kisses gave Warrant that we would. "Well, then," quoth he, "my Mind is, that since we are all of a Will to walk down-hill together, we will do soe at a breathing Pace, and not drop down like a Plummet. Let all Things be done decently and in order: we won't descend to _Oxford_ Fare first, nor yet to the Fare of _New Inn_. We'll begin with _Lincoln's Inn_ Diet, whereon many good and wise Men thrive well; if we find this draw too heavily on the Common-Purse, we will, next Year, come down to _Oxford_ Fare, with which many great and learned Doctors have been conversant; and, if our Purse stretch not to cover e'en this, why, in Heaven's Name! we'll go begging together, with Staff and Wallet, and sing a _Salve Regina_ at every good Man's Door, whereby we shall still keep Company, and be merry together!" _Sept. 22d._ Now that the first Surprise and Grief, and the first Fervour of Fidelity and Self-devotion have passed off, we have subsided into how deep and holy a Quiet! We read of the Desertion of the World, as a Matter of Course; but, when our own Turn comes, it does seem strange, to find ourselves let fall down the Stream without a single Hand outstretched to help us; forgotten, in a Moment, as though we had never been, by those who lately ate and laughed at our Table. And this, without any Fault or Offence of ours, but merely from our having lost the Light of the _King's_ Countenance. I say, it does seem strange; but how fortunate, how blessed are those to whom such a Course of Events _only_ seems strange, unaccompanied by Self-reproach and Bitterness! I could not help feeling this, in reading an affectionate Letter deare _Father_ writ this Forenoon to _Erasmus_, wherein he sayd, "I have now obtained what, from a Child, I have continually wished! that, being entirely quit of Businesse and all publick Affairs, I might live for a Time only to GOD and myself." Having no Hankering after the old Round he soe long hath run, he now, in Fact, looks younger every Day; and yet, not with the same Kind of Youth he had before his Back was bowed under the Chancellorship. 'Tis a more composed, chastised Sort of Rejuvenescence: rather the soft Warmth of Autumn, which sometimes seems like May, than May itself: the enkindling, within this mortal Tabernacle, of a heavenly Light that never grows dim, because it is immortal; and burns the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever: a Youthfulness of Soul and Mind characterised by Growth; Something with which this World and its fleeting Fancies has nothing to do: Something that the _King_ can neither impart nor take away. ... We have had a tearfull Morning ... poor _Patteson_ has gone. My Father hath obtained good Quarters for him with my _Lord Mayor_, with a Stipulation that he shall retain his Office with the _Lord Mayor_ for the Time being, as long as he can fill it at all. This suits _Patteson_, who says he will sooner shift Masters year by year, than grow too fond of any Man again, as he hath of _Father_; but there has been sad blubbering and blowing of Noses. _Sept. 24th._ This Afternoon, coming upon _Mercy_ seated in the Alcove, like unto the Image of some Saint in a Niche, her Hands folded on her Lap, and her Eyes steadfastly agaze on the setting Sun, I could not but mark how Years were silentlie at work upon her, as doubtless upon us alle; the tender, fearfulle Girl having thus graduallie changed into the sober, high-minded Woman. She is so seldom seene in Repose, so constantly astir and afoot in this or that kind Office, mostly about the Children, that I had never thought upon it before; but now I was alle at once avised to marvel that she who had so long seemed fitter for Heaven than Earth, shoulde never literallie have vowed herself the Spouse of _Christ_; more in especiall as all Expectation of being the Spouse of anie else must long since have died within her. I sayd, "_Mercy_, thou lookst like a Nun: how is't thou hast ne'er become one in Earnest?" She started; then sayd, "Could I be more usefull? more harmless? less exposed to Temptation? or half so happy as I am now? In sooth, _Meg_, the Time has been when methought, how sweet the living Death of the Cloister! How good that must needs be which had the Suffrages of _Chrysostom_ the golden-mouthed, and holy _Ambrose_, and our own _Anselm_! How peacefull, to take Wing like the Dove, and fly away from a naughty World, and be at Rest! How brave, to live alone, like St. _Antony_, in the Desert! only I would have had some Books with me in my Cave, and 'tis uncertayn whether St. _Antony_ had Knowledge of Letters, beyond the heaven-taught Lesson, 'GOD is Love,' ... for methought so much Reflection and no Action would be too much for a Woman's Mind to bear--I might goe mad: and I remembered me how the Dove that gladly flew away from the Ark, gladly flew back, and abode in the Ark till such Time as a new Home was ready for her. And methought, cannot I live apart from Sin here, and now; and as to Sorrow, where can we live apart from that? Sure, we may live on the Skirts of the World in a Spiritt as truly unworldlie, as though we were altogether out of it: and here I may come and go, and range in the fresh Air, and love other Folks' Children, and read my Psalter, and pore over the Sayings of the wise Men of old, and look on the Faces I love, and sit at the Feet of Sir _Thomas More_. Soe there, _Meg_, are my poor Reasons for not caring to be a Nun. Our deare Lord is in himself all that our highest, holiest Affections can seek or comprehend; for he made these our Hearts; he gave us these our Affections; and through them the Spirit speaks. Aspiring to their Source, they rise up like the white Smoke and bright Flame; while, on Earth, if left unmastered, they burn, suffocate, and destroy. Yet they have their natural and innocent Outlets even here; and a Woman may warm herself by them without Scorching, and yet be neither a Wife nor a Nun." _Sept. 28th._ Ever since _Father's_ Speech to us in the Pavilion, we have beene of one Heart and one Soul; neither have any of us said that aught of the Things we possessed were our own, but we have had all Things in Common. And we have eaten our Meat with Gladness and Singleness of Heart. This Afternoon, expressing to _Father_ my gratefull Sense of our present Happiness ... "Yes, _Meg_," returns he, "I too, am deeply thankful for this breathing Space." "Do you look on it as no more, then?" I sayd. "As no more, _Meg_: we shall have a Thunder-clap by-and-by. Look out on the _Thames_. See how unwontedlie clear it is, and how low the Swallows fly.... How distinctlie we see the green Sedges on _Battersea_ Bank, and their reflected Images in the Water. We can almost discern the Features of those poor Knaves digging in the Cabbage Gardens, and hear 'em talk, so still is the Air. Have you ne'er before noted these Signs?" "A Storm is brewing," I sayd. "Aye, we shall have a Lightning-flash anon. So still, _Meg_, is also our moral Atmosphere just now. GOD is giving us a breathing Space, as he did to the Egyptians before the Plague of Hail, that they might gather their live Stock within Doors. Let us take for Example them that believed and obeyed him; and improve this holy Pause." Just at this Moment, a few heavie Drops fell agaynst the Window Pane, and were seene by both. Our Eyes met; and I felt a silent Pang. "Five Days before the _Passover_," resumed _Father_, "all seemed as still and quiet as we are now; but JESUS knew his Hour was at hand. E'en while he yet spake familiarly among the People, there came a Sound from Heaven, and they that stood by said it thundered; but _he_ knew it for the Voice of his dear Father. Let us, in like Manner, when the Clap cometh, recognise in it the Voice of GOD, and not be afraid with any Amazement." _Nov. 2d._ _Gammer Gurney_ is dead, and I must say I am glad of it. The Change, to her, must be blessed, and there seemed some Danger lest, after having escaped being ducked for a Witch, she shoulde have been burnt for a Heretic. _Father_ looked on her as an obstinate old Woman; _Will_ counted her little short of a Saint and Prophetess, and kept her well supplied with alle she could need. Latterly she was stone deaf; so 'tis a happy Release. The settled Purpose of _Father's_ Soul, just now, is to make up a Marriage between _Mercy_ and Dr. _Clement_. 'Tis high Advancement for her, and there seems to have been some old Liking between 'em we never knew of. _1533, April 1._ Though some Months have passed since my Father uttered his warning Voice, and all continues to go quiet, I cannot forbear, now and then, to call his Monition to Mind, and look about for the Cloud that is to bring the Thunder-clap; but the Expectation sobers rather than saddens me. This Morning, leaning over the River Wall, I was startled by the cold, damp Hand of some one from behind being laid on mine. At the same Time a familiar Voice exclaimed, "Canst tell us, Mistress, why Fools have hot Heads and Hands icy cold?" I made Answer, "Canst tell me, _Patteson_, why Fools should stray out of Bounds?" "Why, that's what Fools do every Day," he readily replied; "but this is _All Fools' Day_, mine own special Holiday; and I told my _Lord Mayor_ overnight, that if he lookt for a Fool this Morning, he must look in the Glass. In sooth, Mistress _Meg_, I should by Rights wear the Gold Chain and he the Motley; for a proper Fool he is, and I shall be glad when his Year's Service to me is out. The worst o' these Lord Mayors is, that we can't part with 'em till their Time's up. Why now, this present one hath not so much Understanding as would foot an old Stocking; 'twas but yesterday when, in Quality of my Taster, he civilly enough makes over to me a half-eaten Plate of Gurnet, which I wave aside, thus, saying, I eat no Fish of which I cannot affirm, '_rari sunt Boni_,' few are the Bones ... and I protest to you he knew it not for Fool's Latin. Thus I'm driven, from mere Discouragement, to leave prating for listening, which thou knowest, Mistress, is no Fool's Office; and among the sundrie Matters I hear at my Lord's Table ... for he minds not what he says before his Servants, thereby giving new Proof 'tis he shoulde wear the Motley ... I note his saying that the _King's_ private Marriage will assuredlie be made publick this coming Easter, and my Lady _Anne_ will be crowned ... more by token, he knows the Merchant that will supply the _Genoa_ Velvet and Cloth of Gold, and the Masquers that are to enact the Pageant. For the Love o' Safety, then, Mistress _Meg_, bid thy good _Father_ e'en take a Fool's Advice, and eat humble Pie betimes, for doubt not this proud Madam to be as vindictive as _Herodias_, and one that, unless he appease her full early, will have his Head set before her in a Charger. I've said my Say." _April 4th._ Three Bishops have been here this Forenoon, to bid _Father_ to the Coronation, and offer him twenty Pounds to provide his Dress; but _Father_ hath, with Courtesie, declined to be present. After much friendly pressing, they parted, seemingly on good Terms; but I have Misgivings of the Issue. _April 9th._ A ridiculous Charge hath beene got up 'gainst dear _Father_; no less than of Bribery and Corruption. One _Parnell_ complaineth of a Decree given agaynst him in favour of one _Vaughan_, whose Wife, he deponeth, gave _Father_ a gilt Flaggon. To the noe small Surprise of the Council, _Father_ admitted that she had done soe: "But, my Lords," proceeded he, when they had uttered a few Sentences of Reprehension somewhat too exultantlie, "will ye list the Conclusion of the Tale? I bade my Butler fill the Cup with Wine, and having drunk her Health, I made her pledge me, and then restored her Gift, and would not take it again." As innocent a Matter, touching the offering him a Pair of Gloves containing Forty Pounds, and his taking the first and returning the last, saying he preferred his Gloves without Lining, hath been made publick with like Triumph to his own good Fame; but alack! these Feathers show which way sets the Wind. _April 13th._ A heavier Charge than either of the above hath been got up, concerning the wicked Woman of _Kent_, with whom they accuse him of having tampered, that, in her pretended Revelations and Rhapsodies, she might utter Words against the _King's_ Divorce. His Name hath, indeed, been put in the Bill of Attainder; but, out of Favour, he hath been granted a private Hearing, his Judges being, the new Archbishop, the new Chancellor, his Grace of _Norfolk_, and Master _Cromwell_. He tells us that they stuck not to the Matter in Hand, but began cunningly enow to sound him on the _King's_ Matters; and finding they could not shake him, did proceed to Threats, which, he told 'em, might well enow scare Children, but not him; and as to his having provoked his Grace the _King_ to sett forth in his Book aught to dishonour and fetter a good Christian, his Grace himself well knew the Book was never shewn him save for verbal Criticism when the Subject-matter was completed _by the Makers of the same_, and that he had warned his Grace not to express soe much Submission to the Pope. Whereupon they with great Displeasure dismissed him, and he took Boat for _Chelsea_ with mine Husband in such gay Spiritts, that _Will_, not having been privy to what had passed, concluded his Name to have beene struck out of the Bill of Attainder, and congratulated him thereupon soe soone as they came aland, saying, "I guess, _Father_, all is well, seeing you thus merry." "It is, indeed, son _Roper_," returns _Father_ steadilie; repeating thereupon, once or twice, this Phrase, "All is well." _Will_, somehow mistrusting him, puts the Matter to him agayn. "You are then, _Father_, put out of the Bill?" "Out of the Bill, good Fellow?" repeats _Father_, stopping short in his Walk, and regarding him with a Smile that _Will_ sayth was like to break his Heart.... "Wouldst thou know, dear Son, why I am so joyful? In good Faith, I have given the Devil a foul Fall; for I have with those Lords gone so far, as that without great Shame I can ne'er go back. The first Step, _Will_, is the worst, and that's taken." And so, to the House, with never another Word, _Will_ being smote at the Heart. But, this Forenoon, deare _Will_ comes running in to me, with Joy all bright, and tells me he hath just heard from _Cromwell_ that _Father's_ Name is in sooth struck out. Thereupon, we go together to him with the News. He taketh it thankfully, yet composedly, saying, as he lays his Hand on my Shoulder, "In faith, _Meg_, _quod differtur non aufertur_." Seeing me somewhat stricken and overborne, he sayth, "Come, let's leave good _Will_ awhile to the Company of his own select and profitable Thoughts, and take a Turn together by the Water Side." Then closing his Book, which I marked was _Plato's Phædon_, he steps forthe with me into the Garden, leaning on my Shoulder, and pretty heavilie too. After a Turn or two in Silence, he lightens his Pressure, and in a bland, peaceifying Tone commences _Horace_ his tenth Ode, Book second, and goes through the first fourteen or fifteen Lines in a kind of lulling Monotone; then takes another Turn or two, ever looking at the _Thames_; and in a stronger Voice begins his favourite _"Justum, ac tenacem Propositi Virum Non Civium Ardor," etc._ on to "_Impavidum ferient Ruinæ_;" --and lets go his Hold on me to extend his Hand in fine, free Action. Then, drawing me to him agayn, presentlie murmurs, "I reckon that the Sufferings of this present Time are not worthy to be compared with the Glory which shall be revealed in us.... Oh no, not worthy to be compared. I have lived; I have laboured; I have loved. I have lived in them I loved; laboured for them I loved; loved them for whom I laboured; my Labour has not been in vayn. To love and to labour is the Sum of living, and yet how manie think they live who neither labour nor love! Agayn, how manie labour and love, and yet are not loved; but I have beene loved, and my Labour has not been in vayn. Now, the Daye is far spent, and the Night is at hand, and the Time draweth nigh when Man resteth from his Labours, even from his Labours of Love; but still he shall love and he shall live where the Spiritt sayth he shall rest from his Labours, and where his Works do follow him, for he entereth into Rest through and to Him who is Life, and Light, and Love." Then looking steadfastlie at the _Thames_, "How quietlie," sayth he, "it flows on! This River, _Meg_, hath its Origin from seven petty Springs somewhither amongst the _Gloucestershire_ Hills, where they bubble forthe unnoted save by the Herd and Hind. Belike, they murmur over the Pebbles prettily enough; but a great River, mark you, never murmurs. It murmured and babbled too, 'tis like, whilst only a Brook, and brawled away as it widened and deepened and chafed agaynst Obstacles, and here and there got a Fall, and splashed and made much Ado, but ever kept running on towards its End, still deepening and widening; and now towards the Close of its Course look you how swift and quiet it is, running mostly between Flats, and with the dear blue Heaven reflected in its Face." ... _1534, April 12._ 'Twas o' _Wednesdaye_ was a Week, we were quietly taking our Dinner, when, after a loud and violent Knocking at the outer Door, in cometh a Pursuivant, and summoneth _Father_ to appear next Daye before the Commissioners, to take the newly-coined Oath of Supremacy. _Mother_ utters a hasty Cry, _Bess_ turns white as Death, but I, urged by I know not what suddain Impulse to con the new Comer's Visage narrowly, did with Eagerness exclaim, "Here's some Jest of _Father's_; 'tis only _Dick Halliwell_!" Whereupon, _Father_ burst out a-laughing, hugged _Mother_, called _Bess_ a silly Puss, and gave _Halliwell_ a Groat for's Payns. Now, while some were laughing, and others taking _Father_ prettie sharplie to Task for soe rough a Crank, I fell a muzing, what could be the Drift of this, and coulde only surmize it mighte be to harden us beforehand, as 'twere, to what was sure to come at last. And the Pre-apprehension of this soe belaboured my alreadie o'erburthened Spiritts, as that I was fayn to betake myself to the Nurserie, and lose all Thought and Reflection in my little _Bess's_ prettie Ways. And, this not answering, was forct to have Recourse to Prayer; then, leaving my Closett, was able to return to the Nurserie, and forget myselfe awhile in the Mirth of the Infants. [Illustration: In cometh a Pursuivant.] Hearing Voyces beneathe the Lattice, I lookt forthe, and behelde his Grace of _Norfolk_ (of late a strange Guest) walking beneath the Window in earnest Converse with _Father_; and, as they turned about, I hearde him say, "By the Mass, Master _More_, 'tis perilous striving with Princes. I could wish you, as a Friend, to incline to the _King's_ Pleasure; for _Indignatio Principis Mors est_." "Is that all?" says _Father_; "why then there will be onlie this Difference between your Grace and me, that I shall die to-daye, and you to-morrow;"--which was the Sum of what I caught. Next Morning, we were breaking our Fast with Peacefullnesse of Heart, on the Principle that sufficient for the Daye is the Evill thereof, and there had beene a wordy War between our two Factions of the _Neri_ and _Bianchi_, _Bess_ having defalked from the Mancheteers on the Ground that black Bread sweetened the Breath and settled the Teeth, to the no small Triumph of the Cob Loaf Party; while _Daisy_, persevering at her Crusts, sayd, "No, I can cleave to the Rye Bread as steddilie as anie among you, but 'tis vayn of _Father_ to maintain that it is as toothsome as a Manchet, or that I eat it to whiten my Teeth, for thereby he robs Self-deniall of its Grace." _Father_, strange to say, seemed taken at Vantage, and was pausing for a Retort, when _Hobson_ coming in and whispering Somewhat in his Ear, he rose suddainlie and went forthe of the Hall with him, putting his Head back agayn to say, "Rest ye alle awhile where ye be," which we did, uneasilie enow. Anon he returns, brushing his Cap, and says calmlie, "Now, let's forthe to Church," and clips _Mother's_ Arm beneathe his owne and leads the Way. We follow as soon as we can; and I, listing to him more than to the Priest, did think I never hearde him make Response more composedlie, nor sing more lustilie, by the which I founde myself in stouter Heart. After Prayers, he is shriven, after which he saunters back with us to the House; then brisklie turning on his Heel, cries to my Husband, "Now, _Will_, let's toward, Lad," and claps the Wicket after him, leaving us at t'other Side without so much as casting back a parting Look. Though he evermore had beene avised to let us companie him to the Boat, and there kiss him once and agayn or ever he went, I know not that I should have thoughte much of this, had not _Daisy_, looking after him keenly, exclaymed somewhat shortlie as she turned in Doors, "I wish I had not uttered that Quip about the Cob-loaf." Oh, how heavilie sped the Day! The House, too big now for its Master's diminished Retinue, had yet never hitherto seemed lonesome; but now a Somewhat of drearie and dreadfull, inexpressible in Words, invisible to the Eye, but apprehended by the inner Sense, filled the blank Space alle about. For the first Time, everie one seemed idle; not only disinclined for Businesse, but as though there were Something unseemlie in addressing one's Self to it. There was nothing to cry about, nothing to talk over, and yet we alle stoode agaze at each other in Groups, like the Cattle under the Trees when a Storm is at hand. _Mercy_ was the first to start off. I held her back and said, "What is to do?" She whispered, "Pray." I let her Arm drop, but _Bess_ at that Instant comes up with Cheeks as colourless as Parchment. She sayth, "'Tis made out now. A Pursuivant _de Facto_ fetched him forthe this Morning." We gave one deep, universal Sigh; _Mercy_ broke away, and I after her, to seek the same Remedy, but alack, in vayn.... _15th._ How large a Debt we owe you, wise and holie Men of old! How ye counsel us to Patience, incite us to Self-mastery, cheer us on to high Emprize, temper in us the Heat of Youth, school our Inexperience, calm the o'erwrought Mind, allay the Anguish of Disappointment, cheat Suspense, and master Despair.... How much better and happier ye would make us, if we would but list your Teaching! _Bess_ hath fallen Sick; no marvell. Everie one goeth heavilie. Alle Joy is darkened; the Mirthe of the House is gone. _Will_ tells me, that as they pushed off from the Stairs, _Father_ took him about the Neck and whispered, "I thank our LORD, the Field is won!" Sure, _Regulus_ ne'er went forthe with higher Self-devotion. Having declared his Inabilitie to take the Oath as it stoode, they bade him, _Will_ tells me, take a Turn in the Garden while they administered it to sundrie others, thus affording him Leisure for Re-consideration. But they might as well have bidden the Neap-tide turn before its Hour. When called in agayn, he was as firm as ever, so was given in Ward to the _Abbot_ of _Westminster_ till the _King's_ Grace was informed of the Matter. And now, the Fool's wise Saying of vindictive _Herodias_ came true, for 'twas the _King's_ Mind to have Mercy on his old Servant, and tender him a qualifyed Oath; but Queen _Anne_, by her importunate Clamours, did overrule his proper Will, and at four Days' End, the full Oath being agayn tendered and rejected, _Father_ was committed to the Tower. Oh, wicked Woman, how could you?... Sure, you never loved a Father.... [Illustration: The Stairs.] _May 22d._ In Answer to our incessant Applications throughout this last Month past, _Mother_ hath at length obtayned Access to dear _Father_. She returned, her Eyes nigh swollen to closing with weeping.... We crowded round about, burning for her Report, but 'twas some Time ere she coulde fetch Breath or Heart to give it us. At length _Daisy_, kissing her Hand once and agayn, draws forthe a disjoynted Tale, somewhat after this Fashion. "Come, give over weeping, dearest _Mother_, 'twill do neither him, you, nor us anie Goode.... What was your first Speech of him?" "Oh, my first Speech, Sweetheart, was, 'What, my Goodness, Mr. _More_! I marvell how that you, who were always counted a wise Man, should now soe play the Fool as to lie here in this close, filthy Prison, shut up with Mice and Rats, when you mighte be abroade and at your Liberty, with the Favour of King and Council, and return to your righte fayr House, your Books and Gallery, and your Wife, Children, and Household, if soe be you onlie woulde but do what the Bishops and best learned of the Realm have, without Scruple, done alreadie.'" "And what sayd he, _Mother_, to that?" ... "Why, then, Sweetheart, he chucks me under the Chin and sayeth, 'I prithee, good Mistress _Alice_, to tell me one Thing.' ... Soe then I say, 'What Thing?' Soe then he sayeth, 'Is not this House, Sweetheart, as nigh Heaven as mine own?' Soe then I jerk my Head away and say, 'Tilly-valley! Tilly-valley!'" Sayth _Bess_, "Sure, _Mother_, that was cold Comfort.... And what next?" "Why, then I said, '_Bone Deus_, Man! _Bone Deus!_ will this Gear never be left?' So then he sayth, 'Well then, Mrs. _Alice_, if it be soe, 'tis mighty well, but, for my Part, I see no greate Reason why I shoulde much joy in my gay House, or in Aniething belonging thereunto, when, if I shoulde be but seven Years buried underground, and then arise and come thither agayn, I shoulde not fail to find Some therein that woulde bid me get out of Doors, and tell me 'twas none o' mine. What Cause have I, then, to care soe greatlie for a House that woulde soe soone forget its Master?'" "And then, _Mother_? and then?" "Soe then, Sweetheart, he sayth, 'Come tell me, Mrs. _Alice_, how long do you think we might reckon on living to enjoy it?' Soe I say, 'Some twenty Years, forsooth.' 'In faith,' says he, 'had you said some thousand Years, it had beene Somewhat; and yet he were a very bad Merchant that woulde put himselfe in Danger to lose Eternity for a thousand Years ... how much the rather if we are not sure to enjoy it one Day to an End?' Soe then he puts me off with Questions, How is _Will_? and _Daisy_? and _Rupert_? and this one? and t'other one? and the Peacocks? and Rabbits? and have we elected a new King of the Cob-loaf yet? and has _Tom_ found his Hoop? and is the Hasp of the Buttery-hatch mended yet? and how goes the Court? and what was the Text o' _Sunday_? and have I practised the Viol? and how are we off for Money? and why can't he see _Meg_? Then he asks for this Book and t'other Book, but I've forgot their Names, and he sayth he's kept mighty short of Meat, though 'tis little he eats, but his Man _John a Wood_ is gay an' hungry, and 'tis worth a World to see him at a salt Herring. Then he gives me Counsell of this and that, and puts his Arm about me and says, 'Come, let us pray;' but while he kept praying for one and t'other, I kept a-counting of his gray Hairs; he'd none a Month agone. And we're scarce off our Knees, when I'm fetched away; and I say, 'When will you change your Note, and act like a wise Man?' and he sayth, 'When? when?' looking very profound; 'why, ... when Gorse is out of Blossom and Kissing out of Fashion.' Soe puts me forthe by the Shoulders with a Laugh, calling after me, 'Remember me over and over agayn to them alle, and let me see _Meg_.'" ... I feel as if a String were tied tight about my Heart. Methinketh 'twill burst if we goe on long soe. _July 25th._ He hath writ us a few Lines with a Coal, ending with "_Sursum Corda_, dear Children! up with your Hearts." The Bearer was dear _Bonvisi_. _Aug. 16th._ The LORD begins to cut us short. We are now on very meagre Commons, dear _Mother_ being obliged to pay fifteen Shillings a week for the Board, poor as it is, of _Father_ and his Servant. She hath parted with her Velvet Gown, embroidered overthwart, to my Lady _Sands'_ Woman. Her Mantle edged with Coney went long ago. But we lose not Heart; I think mine is becoming annealed in the Furnace, and will not now break. I have writ somewhat after this Fashion to him.... "What do you think, most dear _Father_, doth comfort us at _Chelsea_, during this your Absence? Surelie, the Remembrance of your Manner of Life among us, your holy Conversation, your wholesome Counsells, your Examples of Virtue, of which there is Hope that they do not onlie persevere with you, but that, by GOD'S Grace, they are much increast." I weary to see him.... Yes, we shall meet in Heaven, but how long first, O LORD? how long? _Aug 20th._ Now that I've come back, let me seek to think, to remember.... Sure, my Head will clear by-and-by! Strange, that Feeling shoulde have the Masterdom of Thought and Memory, in Matters it is most concerned to retayn. ... I minded to put the Haircloth and Cord under my Farthingale, and one or two of the smaller Books in my Pouch, as alsoe some Sweets and Suckets such as he was used to love. _Will_ and _Bonvisi_ were a-waiting for me; and deare _Bess_, putting forthe her Head from her Chamber Door, cries piteously, "Tell him, dear _Meg_, tell him ... 'twas never soe sad to me to be sick ... and that I hope ... I pray ... the Time may come ..." then falls back swooning into _Dancey's_ Arms, whom I leave crying heartilie over her, and hasten below to receive the confused Medley of Messages sent by every other Member of the House. For mine owne Part, I was in such a tremulous Succussion as to be scarce fitt to stand or goe; but Time and the Tide will noe Man bide, and, once having taken Boat, the cool River Air allayed my fevered Spiritts; onlie I coulde not for awhile get ridd of the Impression of poor _Dancey_ crying over _Bess_ in her Deliquium. I think none o' the three opened our Lips before we reached _Lambeth_, save, in the _Reach_, _Will_ cried to the Steersman, "Look you run us not aground," in a sharper Voyce than I e'er heard from him. After passing the _Archbishop's_ Palace, whereon I gazed full ruefullie, good _Bonvisi_ beganne to mention some Rhymes he had founde writ with a Diamond on one of the Window-panes at _Crosby House_, and would know were they _Father's_? and was't the Chamber _Father_ had used to sleep in? I tolde him it was, but knew Nought of the Distich, though 'twas like enow to be his. And thence he went on to this and that, how that _Father's_ cheerfulle, funny Humour never forsook him, nor his brave Heart never quelled; instancing his fearlesse Passage through the Traitor's Gate, asking his Neighbours whether _his_ Gait were that of a Traditor; and, on being sued by the Porter for his upper Garment, giving him his _Cap_, which he sayd was uppermost. And other such Quips and Passages, which I scarce noted nor smiled at, soe sorry was I of Cheer. [Illustration: "his fearlesse passage through the Traitor's Gate"] At length we stayed rowing: _Will_ lifted me out, kissed me, heartened me up; and, indeede, I was in better Heart then, having been quietlie in Prayer a good While. After some few Forms, we were led through sundrie Turns and Passages; and, or ever I was aware, I founde myself quit of my Companions and in _Father's_ Arms. We both cried a little at first; I wonder I wept noe more, but Strength was given me in that Hour. As soone as I coulde, I lookt him in the Face, and he lookt at me, and I was beginning to note his hollow Cheeks, when he sayd, "Why, _Meg_, you are getting freckled;" soe that made us bothe laugh. He sayd, "You shoulde get some Freckle-water of the Lady that sent me here; depend on it, she hath Washes and Tinctures in Plenty; and after all, _Meg_, she'll come to the same End at last, and be as the Lady all Bone and Skin, whose ghastlie Legend used to scare thee soe when thou wert a Child. Don't tell that Story to thy Children; 'twill hamper 'em with unsavoury Images of Death. Tell them of heavenlie Hosts a-waiting to carry off good Men's Souls in fire-bright Chariots, with Horses of the Sun, to a Land where they shall never more be surbated and weary, but walk on cool, springy Turf and among Myrtle Trees, and eat Fruits that shall heal while they delight them, and drink the coldest of cold Water, fresh from the River of Life, and have Space to stretch themselves, and bathe, and leap, and run, and, whichever Way they look, meet _Christ's_ Eyes smiling on them. Sure, _Meg_, who would live, that coulde die? One mighte as lief be an Angel shut up in a Nutshell as bide here. Fancy how gladsome the sweet Spirit woulde be to have the Shell cracked! no matter by whom; the King, or King's Mistress.... Let her dainty Foot but set him free, he'd say, 'For this Release, much Thanks.' ... And how goes the Court, _Meg_?" "In Faith, _Father_, never better.... There is Nothing else there, I hear, but Dancing and Disporting." "Never better, Child, sayst thou? Alas, _Meg_, it pitieth me to consider what Misery, poor Soul, she will shortlie come to. These Dances of hers will prove such Dances that she will spurn our Heads off like Footballs; but 'twill not be long ere her Head will dance the like Dance. Mark you, _Meg_, a Man that restraineth not his Passions, hath always Something cruel in his Nature, and if there be a Woman toward, she is sure to suffer heaviest for it, first or last.... Seek Scripture Precedent for't ... you'll find it as I say. Stony as Death, cruel as the Grave. Those _Pharisees_ that were, to a Man, convicted of Sin, yet haled a sinning Woman before the LORD, and woulde fain have seene the Dogs lick up her Blood. When they lick up mine, deare _Meg_, let not your Heart be troubled, even though they shoulde hale thee to _London Bridge_, to see my Head stuck on a Pole. Think, most dear'st, I shall then have more Reason to weep for thee than thou for me. But there's noe weeping in Heaven; and bear in Mind, _Meg_, distinctlie, that if they send me thither, 'twill be for obeying the Law of GOD rather than of Men. And after alle, we live not in the bloody, barbarous old Times of Crucifyings and Flayings, and immersing in Cauldrons of boiling Oil. One Stroke, and the Affair's done. A clumsy Chirurgeon would be longer extracting a Tooth. We have oft agreed that the little Birds struck down by the Kite and Hawk suffer less than if they were reserved to a naturall Death. There is one sensible Difference, indeed, between us. In our Cases, Preparation is a-wanting." Hereon, I minded me to slip off the Haircloth and Rope, and give the same to him, along with the Books and Suckets, all which he hid away privatelie, making merry at the last. "'Twoulde tell well before the Council," quoth he, "that on searching the Prison-cell of Sir _Thomas More_, there was founde, flagitiouslie and mysteriouslie laid up ... a piece of Barley-sugar!" Then we talked over sundrie Home-matters; and anon, having now both of us attayned unto an equable and chastened Serenitie of Mind, which needed not any false Shows of Mirth to hide the naturall Complexion of, he sayth, "I believe, _Meg_, they that have put me here ween they have done me a high Displeasure; but I assure thee on my Faith, mine owne good Daughter, that if it had not beene for my Wife, and for you, my dear good Children, I woulde faine have beene closed up, long ere this, in as strait a Room, and straiter too." Thereon, he shewed me how illegal was his Imprisonment, there being noe Statute to authorize the Imposition of the Oath, and he delivered himself, with some Displeasure, agaynst the King's ill Counsellors. "And surelie, _Meg_," quoth he, "'tis pitie that anie Christian Prince shoulde, by a flexible Council readie to follow his Affections, and by a weak Clergy lacking Grace to stand constantly to the Truth as they have learned it, be with Flattery so constantly abused. The Lotus Fruit fabled by the Ancients, which made them that ate it lose all Relish for the daylie Bread of their own Homes, was Flattery, _Meg_, as I take it, and Nothing else. And what less was the Song of the Syrens, agaynst which _Ulysses_ made his Sailors stop their Ears, and which he, with all his Wisdom, coulde not listen to without struggling to be unbound from the Mast? Even Praise, _Meg_, which, moderately given, may animate and cheer forward the noblest Minds, yet too lavishly bestowed, will decrease and palsy their Strength, e'en as an Over-dose of the most generous and sprightlie Medicine may prove mortiferous. But Flattery is noe Medicine, but a rank Poison, which hath slayn Kings, yea, and mighty Kings; and they who love it, the LORD knoweth afar off; knoweth distantlie, has no care to know intimatelie, for they are none of his." Thus we went on, from one Theme to another, till methinketh a heavenlie Light seemed to shine alle about us, like as when the Angel entered the Prison of _Peter_. I hung upon everie Word and Thought that issued from his Lips, and drank them in as thirsty Land sucks up the tender Rain.... Had the Angel of Death at that Hour come in to fetch both of us away, I woulde not have sayd him nay, I was soe passively, soe intenselie happy. At length, as Time wore on, and I knew I shoulde soone be fetcht forthe, I coulde not but wish I had the Clew to some secret Passage or Subterraneal, of the which there were doubtless Plenty in the thick Walls, whereby we might steal off together. _Father_ made Answer, "Wishes never filled a Sack. I make it my Businesse, _Meg_, to wish as little as I can, except that I were better and wiser. You fancy these four Walls lonesome; how oft, dost thou suppose, I here receive _Plato_ and _Socrates_, and this and that holy Saint and Martyr? My Gaolers can noe more keep them out than they can exclude the Sunbeams. Thou knowest, JESUS stood among his Disciples when the Doors were shut. I am not more lonely than St. _Anthony_ in his Cave, and I have a divine Light e'en here, whereby to con the Lesson, 'GOD is Love.' The Futility of our Enemies' Efforts to make us miserable was never more stronglie proven to me than when I was a mere Boy in _Cardinall Morton's_ Service. Having unwittinglie angered one of his Chaplains, a choleric and even malignant-spirited Man, he did, of his owne Authoritie, shut me up for some Hours in a certayn damp Vault, which, to a Lad afeard of Ghosts and devilish Apparitions, would have beene fearsome enow. Howbeit, I there cast myself on the Ground with my Back sett agaynst the Wall, and mine Arm behind my Head, this Fashion ... and did then and there, by reason of a young Heart, quiet Conscience, and quick Phansy, conjure up such a lively Picture of the Queen o' the Fairies' Court, and alle the Sayings and Doings therein, that never was I more sorry than when my Gaoler let me goe free, and bade me rise up and be doing. In place, therefore, my Daughter, of thinking of me in thy Night Watches as beating my Wings agaynst my Cage Bars, trust that GOD comes to look in upon me without Knocking or Bell-ringing. Often in Spiritt I am with you alle; in the Chapel, in the Hall, in the Garden; now in the Hayfield, with my Head on thy Lap, now on the River, with _Will_ and _Rupert_ at the Oar. You see me not about your Path, you won't see my disembodied Spiritt beside you hereafter, but it may be close upon you once and agayn for alle that: maybe, at Times when you have prayed with most Passion, or suffered with most Patience, or performed my Hests with most Exactness, or remembered my Care of you with most Affection. And now, good Speed, good _Meg_, I hear the Key turn in the Door.... This Kiss for thy Mother, this for _Bess_, this for _Cecil_, ... this and this for my whole School. Keep dry Eyes and a hopefull Heart; and reflect that Nought but unpardoned Sin shoulde make us weep for ever." _September._ Seeing the Woodman fell a noble Tree, which, as it went to the Ground, did uptear severall small Plants by the Roots, methoughte such woulde be the Fall of dear _Father_, herein more sad than that of the Abbot of _Sion_ and the _Charterhouse_ Monks, inasmuch as, being celibate, they involve noe others in theire Ruin. Brave, holie Martyrs! how cheerfully they went to theire Death. I'm glad to have seene how pious Men may turn e'en an ignominious Sentence into a kind of Euthanasy. Dear _Father_ bade me note how they bore themselves as Bridegrooms going to theire Marriage, and converted what mighte have beene a Shock to my surcharged Spiritts, into a Lesson of deepe and high Comfort. One Thing hath grieved me sorelie. He mistooke Somewhat I sayd at parting for an Implication of my Wish that he shoulde yield up his Conscience. Oh no, dearest _Father_, that be far from me! It seems to have cut him to the Heart, for he hath writ that "none of the terrible Things that may befall him touch him soe nearlie as that his dearly beloved Child, whose Opinion he soe much values, shoulde desire him to overrule his Conscience." That be far from me, _Father_! I have writ to explayn the Matter, but his Reproach, undeserved though it be, hath troubled my Heart. _November._ Parliament will meet to-morrow. 'Tis expected _Father_ and the good Bishop of _Rochester_ will be attainted for Misprision of Treason by the slavish Members thereof; and though not given hithertoe unto much Heede of Omens and Bodements while our Hearts were light and our Courage high, yet now the coming Evill seemeth foreshadowed unto alle by I know not how many melancholick Presages, sent, for aught we know, in Mercy. Now that the days are dark and short, and the Nights stormy, we shun to linger much after Dusk in lone Chambers and Passages, and what was sayd of the Enemies of _Israel_ may be nigh sayd of us, "that a falling Leaf shall chase them." I'm sure "a going in the Tops of the Mulberry Trees" on a blusterous Evening, is enow to draw us alle, Men, Mothers, and Maids, together in an Heap.... We goe aboute the House in Twos and Threes, and care not much to leave the Fireside. Last _Sunday_ we had closed about the Hearth, and little _Bill_ was a reading by the Fire-light how _Herodias'_ Daughter danced off the Head of St. _John_ the _Baptist_, when down comes an emptie Swallow's Nest tumbling adown the Chimnie, bringing with it enow of Soot, Smoke, and Rubbish to half smother us alle; but the Dust was nothing to the Dismay thereby occasioned, and I noted one or two of our bravest turn as pale as Death. Then, the Rats have skirmished and gallopped behind the Wainscoat more like a Troop of Horse than a Herd of such small Deer, to the infinite Annoyance of _Mother_, who coulde not be more firmly persuaded they were about to leave a falling House, if, like the scared Priests in the Temple of _Jerusalem_, she had heard a Voyce utter, "Let us depart hence." The round upper Half of the Cob-loaf rolled off the Table this Morning; and _Rupert_, as he picked it up, gave a Kind of Shudder, and muttered somewhat about a Head rolling from the Scaffold. Worse than this was o' _Tuesday_ Night.... 'Twas Bed-time, and yet none were liking to goe, when, o' suddain, we hearde a Screech that made every Body's Heart thrill, followed by one or two hollow Groans. _Will_ snatches up the Lamp and runs forth, I close following, and alle the others at our Heels; and after looking into sundrie deserted Cup-boards and Corners, we descend the broad Stone Steps of the Cellars, half way down which _Will_, stumbling over something he sees not, takes a flying Leap to clear himself down to the Bottom, luckily without extinguishing the Lamp. We find _Gillian_ on the Steps in a Swoon; on bringing her to, she exclayms about a Ghost without a Head, wrapped in a Winding-sheet, that confronted her and then sank to the Ground as she entered the Vaults. We cast a fearfulle Look about, and descry a tall white Sack of Flour, recently overturned by the Rats, which clears up the Mystery, and procures _Gillian_ a little Jeering; but we alle return to the Hall with fluttered Spiritts. Another Time I, going up to the Nurserie in the Dark, on hearing Baby cry, am passed on the Stairs by I know not what, breathing heavilie. I reache forthe my Arm, but pass cleare through the spirituall Nature, whatever it is, yet distinctlie feel my Cheek and Neck fanned by its Breath. I turn very faint, and get Nurse to goe with me when I return, bearing a Light, yet think it as well to say nought to distress the rest. [Illustration: Gillian and the Flour Sacks.] But worst of alle was last Night.... After I had beene in Bed awhile, I minded me that deare _Will_ had not returned me _Father's_ Letter. I awoke him, and asked if he had broughte it up Stairs; he sleepily replied he had not, soe I hastily arose, threw on a Cloke, took a Light, and entered the Gallery; when, half-way along it, between me and the pale Moonshine, I was scared to behold a slender Figure alle in white, with naked Feet and Arms extended. I stoode agaze, speechlesse, and to my Terror made out the Features of _Bess_ ... her Eyes open, but vacant; then saw _John Dancey_ softly stealing after her, and signing to me with his Finger on his Lips. She passed without noting me, on to _Father's_ Door, there knelt as if in Prayer, making a low sort of Wail, while _Dancey_, with Tears running down his Cheeks, whispered, "'Tis the third Time of her thus sleep-walking ... the Token of how troubled a Mind!" We disturbed her not, dreading that a suddain Waking might bring on Madness; soe after making Moan awhile, she kisses the senseless Door, rises up, moves towards her own Chamber, followed by _Dancey_ and me, wrings her Hands a little, then lies down and graduallie falls into what seems a dreamlesse Sleep, we watching her in Silence till she's quiet, and then squeezing each other's Hands ere we part. ----_Will_ was wide awake when I got back; he sayd, "Why, _Meg_, how long you have beene! coulde you not lighte on the Letter?" ... When I tolde him what had hindered me by the Way, he turned his Face to the Wall and wept. _Midnight._ The wild Wind is abroad, and, methinketh, _nothing else_. Sure, how it rages through our empty Courts! In such a Season, Men, Beasts, and Fowls cower beneath the Shelter of their rocking Walls, yet almost fear to trust them. LORD, I know that thou canst give the Tempest double Force, but do not, I beseech thee! Oh! have Mercy on the frail Dwelling and the Ship at Sea. Dear little _Bill_ hath ta'en a feverish Attack. I watch beside him whilst his Nurse sleeps. Earlie in the Night his Mind wandered, and he told me of a pretty pyebald Poney, noe bigger than a Bee, that had golden Housings and Barley-sugar Eyes; then dozed, but ever and anon kept starting up, crying, "Mammy dear!" and softlie murmured, "Oh!" when he saw I was by. At length I gave him my Forefinger to hold, which kept him ware of my Presence without speaking; but presentlie he stares hard towards the Foot of the Bed, and says fearfullie, "_Mother_, why hangs yon Hatchet in the Air, with its sharp Edge turned towards us?" I rise, move the Lamp, and say, "Do you see it now?" He sayth, "No, not now," and closes his Eyes. After a good Space, during the which I hoped he slept, he says in quite an altered Tone, most like unto soft, sweet Music, "There's a pretty little Cherub there now, alle Head and noe Body, with two little Wings aneath his Chin; but, for alle he's soe pretty, he is just like dear _Gaffer_, and seems to know me ... and he'll have a Body agayn too, I believe, by and by.... _Mother_, _Mother_, tell _Hobbinol_ there's such a gentle Lamb in Heaven!" And soe, slept. _17th._ He's gone, my pretty...! slipt through my Fingers like a Bird! upfled to his own native Skies; and yet, whenas I think on him, I cannot choose but weepe.... Such a guilelesse little Lamb!... My Billy-bird! his Mother's owne Heart!--They are alle wondrous kind to me.... _27th._ How strange that a little Child shoulde be permitted to suffer soe much Payn, when of such is the Kingdom of Heaven! But 'tis onlie transient, whereas a Mother makes it permanent, by thinking it over and over agayn. One Lesson it taughte us betimes, that a naturall Death is not, necessarilie, the most easie. We must alle die.... As poor _Patteson_ was used to say, "The greatest King that ever was made, must bed at last with Shovel and Spade," ... and I'd sooner have my _Billy's_ Baby Deathbed than King _Harry's_, or _Nan Boleyn's_ either, however manie Years they may yet carry Matters with a high Hand. Oh, you Ministers of Evill, whoever ye be, visible or invisible, you shall not build a Wall between my GOD and me.... I've Something within me grows stronger and stronger, as Times grow more and more Evill; some woulde call it Resolution, but methinketh 'tis Faith. Meantime, _Father's_ Foes ... alack that anie can shew 'emselves such! are aiming, by fayr Seemings of friendlie Conference, to draw from him Admissions they can come at after noe other Fashion. The new _Solicitor Generall_ hath gone to the Tower to deprive him of the few Books I have taken him from Time to Time.... Ah, Master _Rich_, you must deprive him of his Brains afore you can rob him of their Contents!... and, while having 'em packt up, he falls into easie Dialogue with him, as thus, ... "Why now, sure, Mr. _More_, were there an Act of Parliament made that all the Realm shoulde take me for King, you woulde take me for such with the Rest." "Aye, that would I, Sir," returns _Father_. "Forsooth, then," pursues _Rich_, "we'll suppose another Act that should make me the Pope. Woulde you not take me for Pope?" "Or suppose another Case, Mr. _Rich_," returns _Father_, "that another Act shoulde pass, that GOD shoulde not be GOD, would you say well and good?" "No, truly," returns the other hastily, "for no Parliament coulde make such Act lawful." "True, as you say," repeats _Father_, "they coulde not," ... soe eluded the Net of the Fowler; but how miserable and unhandsome a Device to lay wait for him thus! ... I stole forthe, ere 'twas Lighte, this damp chill Morning, to pray beside the little Grave, but found dear _Daisy_ there before me. How Christians love one another! _Will's_ Loss is as heavie as mine, yet he bears with me tenderlie. Yesternighte, he sayth to me half reproachfullie, "Am not I better unto thee than ten Sons?" _March, 1535._ Spring comes, that brings Rejuvenescence to the Land, and Joy to the Heart, but it brings none to us, for where Hope dieth, Joy dieth. But Patience, Soul; GOD'S yet in the Aumry! _May 7._ _Father_ arraigned. _July 1._ By Reason of _Will's_ minding to be present at the Triall, which, for the Concourse of Spectators, demanded his earlie Attendance, he committed the Care of me, with _Bess_, to _Dancey_, who got us Places to see _Father_ on his Way from the _Tower_ to _Westminster Hall_. We coulde not come at him for the Crowd, but clambered on a Bench to gaze our very Hearts away after him as he went by, sallow, thin, grey-haired, yet in Mien not a Whit cast down. Wrapt in a coarse woollen Gown, and leaning on a Staff; which unwonted Support when _Bess_ markt, she hid her Eyes on my Shoulder and wept sore, but soon lookt up agayn, though her Eyes were soe blinded, I think she coulde not see him. His Face was calm, but grave, as he came up, but just as he passed he caughte the Eye of some one in the Crowd, and smiled in his old, frank Way; then glanced up towards the Windows with the bright Look he hath soe oft cast to me at my Casement, but saw us not. I coulde not help crying "_Father_," but he heard me not; perchance 'twas soe best.... I woulde not have had his Face cloud at the Sighte of poor _Bessy's_ Tears. ... _Will_ tells me the Indictment was the longest ever hearde; on four Counts. First, his Opinion on the King's Marriage. Second, his writing sundrie Letters to the _Bishop of Rochester_, counselling him to hold out. Third, refusing to acknowledge his Grace's Supremacy. Fourth, his positive Deniall of it, and thereby willing to deprive the King of his Dignity and Title. When the reading of this was over, the _Lord Chancellor_ sayth, "Ye see how grievouslie you have offended the King his Grace, but and yet he is soe mercifulle, as that if ye will lay aside your Obstinacie, and change your Opinion, we hope ye may yet obtayn Pardon." _Father_ makes Answer ... and at Sounde of his deare Voyce alle Men hold their Breaths; ... "Most noble Lords, I have great Cause to thank your Honours for this your Courtesie ... but I pray ALMIGHTY GOD I may continue in the Mind I'm in, through his Grace, until Death." They coulde not make goode their Accusation agaynst him. 'Twas onlie on the Last Count he could be made out a Traitor, and Proof of't had they none; how coulde they have? He shoulde have beene acquitted out of hand, 'steade of which, his bitter Enemy my _Lord Chancellor_ called on him for his Defence. _Will_ sayth there was a generall Murmur or Sigh ran through the Court. _Father_, however, answered the Bidding by beginning to expresse his Hope that the Effect of long Imprisonment mighte not have beene such upon his Mind and Body, as to impair his Power of rightlie meeting alle the Charges agaynst him ... when, turning faint with long standing, he staggered and loosed Hold of his Staff, whereon he was accorded a Seat. 'Twas but a Moment's Weakness of the Body, and he then proceeded frankly to avow his having always opposed the _King's_ Marriage to his Grace himself, which he was soe far from thinking High Treason, that he shoulde rather have deemed it Treachery to have withholden his Opinion from his Sovereign King when solicited by him for his Counsell. His Letters to the good _Bishop_ he proved to have been harmlesse. Touching his declining to give his Opinion, when askt, concerning the Supremacy, he alleged there coulde be noe Transgression in holding his Peace thereon, GOD only being cognizant of our Thoughts. "Nay," interposeth the _Attorney Generall_, "your Silence was the Token of a malicious Mind." "I had always understoode," answers _Father_, "that Silence stoode for Consent. _Qui tacet, consentire videtur_;" which made Sundrie smile. On the last Charge, he protested he had never spoken Word against the Law unto anie Man. The Jury are about to acquit him, when up starts the _Solicitor Generall_, offers himself as Witness for the Crown, is sworn, and gives Evidence of his Dialogue with _Father_ in the Tower, falselie adding, like a Liar as he is, that on his saying "No Parliament coulde make a Law that GOD shoulde not be GOD," _Father_ had rejoyned, "No more coulde they make the King supreme Head of the Church." I marvell the Ground opened not at his Feet. _Father_ brisklie made Answer, "If I were a Man, my Lords, who regarded not an Oath, ye know well I needed not stand now at this Bar. And if the Oath which you, Mr. _Rich_, have just taken, be true, then I pray I may never see GOD in the Face. In good Truth, Mr. _Rich_, I am more sorry for your Perjurie than my Perill. You and I once dwelt long together in one Parish; your manner of Life and Conversation from your Youth up were familiar to me, and it paineth me to tell ye were ever held very light of your Tongue, a great Dicer and Gamester, and not of anie commendable Fame either there or in the _Temple_, the Inn to which ye have belonged. Is it credible, therefore, to your Lordships, that the Secrets of my Conscience touching the Oath, which I never woulde reveal, after the Statute once made, either to the King's Grace himself, nor to anie of you, my honourable Lords, I should have thus lightly blurted out in private Parley with Mr. _Rich_?" In short, the Villain made not goode his Poynt: ne'erthelesse, the Issue of this black Day was aforehand fixed; my Lord _Audley_ was primed with a virulent and venomous Speech; the Jury retired, and presentlie returned with a Verdict of Guilty; for they knew what the King's Grace woulde have 'em doe in that Case. Up starts my Lord _Audley_;--commences pronouncing Judgment, when-- "My Lord," says _Father_, "in my Time, the Custom in these Cases was ever to ask the Prisoner before Sentence, whether he coulde give anie Reason why Judgment shoulde not proceed agaynst him." My Lord, in some Confusion, puts the Question. And then came the frightful Sentence. Yes, yes, my Soul, I know; there were Saints of old sawn asunder. Men of whom the World was not worthy. ... Then he spake unto 'em his Mind; and bade his Judges and Accusers farewell; hoping that like as St. _Paul_ was present and consenting unto St. _Stephen's_ Death, and yet both were now holy Saints in Heaven, so he and they might speedilie meet there, joint Heirs of e'erlasting Salvation. Meantime, poor _Bess_ and _Cecilie_, spent with Grief and long waiting, were forct to be carried Home by _Heron_, or ever _Father_ returned to his Prison. Was't less Feeling, or more Strength of Body, enabled me to bide at the Tower Wharf with _Dancey_? GOD knoweth. They brought him back by Water; my poor Sisters must have passed him.... The first Thing I saw was the Axe, _turned with its Edge towards him_--my first Note of his Sentence. I forct my Way through the Crowd ... some one laid a cold Hand on mine Arm; 'twas poor _Patteson_, soe changed I scarce knew him, with a Rosary of Gooseberries he kept running through his Fingers. He sayth, "Bide your Time, Mistress _Meg_; when he comes past, I'll make a Passage for ye; ... Oh, Brother, Brother! what ailed thee to refuse the Oath? _I've_ taken it!" In another Moment, "Now, Mistress, now!" and flinging his Arms right and left, made a Breach through which I darted, fearlesse of Bills and Halberds, and did cast mine Arms about _Father's_ Neck. He cries, "My _Meg_!" and hugs me to him as though our very Souls shoulde grow together. He sayth, "Bless thee, bless thee! Enough, enough, my Child; what mean ye, to weep and break mine Heart? Remember, though I die innocent, 'tis not without the Will of GOD, who coulde have turned mine Enemies' Hearts, if 'twere best; therefore possess your Soul in Patience. Kiss them alle for me, thus and thus ..." soe gave me back into _Dancey's_ Arms, the Guards about him alle weeping; but I coulde not thus lose Sight of him for ever; soe, after a Minute's Pause, did make a second Rush, brake away from _Dancey_, clave to _Father_ agayn, and agayn they had Pitie on me, and made Pause while I hung upon his Neck. This Time there were large Drops standing on his dear Brow; and the big Tears were swelling into his Eyes. He whispered, "_Meg_, for _Christ's_ Sake don't unman me; thou'lt not deny my last Request?" I sayd, "Oh! no;" and at once loosened mine Arms. "God's Blessing be with you," he sayth with a last Kiss. I coulde not help crying, "My _Father_, my _Father_!" "The Chariot of _Israel_, and the Horsemen thereof!" he vehementlie whispers, pointing upwards with soe passionate a Regard, that I look up, almost expecting a beatific Vision; and when I turn about agayn, he's gone, and I have noe more Sense nor Life till I find myself agayn in mine owne Chamber, my Sisters chafing my Hands. [Illustration: More returning from his Trial.] _July 5th._ Alle's over now ... they've done theire worst, and yet I live. There were Women coulde stande aneath the Cross. The _Maccabees'_ Mother-- ... yes, my Soul, yes; I know--Nought but unpardoned Sin.... The Chariot of _Israel_. _6th._ Dr. _Clement_ hath beene with us. Sayth he went up as blythe as a Bridegroom to be clothed upon with Immortality. _Rupert_ stoode it alle out. Perfect Love casteth out Feare. Soe did his. _17th._ My most precious Treasure is this deare Billet, writ with a Coal; the last Thing he sett his Hand to, wherein he sayth, "I never liked your Manner towards me better than when you kissed me last." _19th._ They have let us bury his poor mangled Trunk; but, as sure as there's a Sun in Heaven, I'll have his Head!--before another Sun hath risen, too. If wise Men won't speed me, I'll e'en content me with a Fool. I doe think Men, for the most Part, be Cowards in theire Hearts ... moral Cowards. Here and there, we find one like _Father_, and like _Socrates_, and like ... this and that one, I mind not theire Names just now; but in the Main, methinketh they lack the moral Courage of Women. Maybe, I'm unjust to 'em just now, being crost. _July 20th._ I lay down, but my Heart was waking. Soon after the first Cock crew, I hearde a Pebble cast agaynst my Lattice, knew the Signall, rose, dressed, stole softlie down and let myself out. I knew the Touch of the poor Fool's Fingers; his Teeth were chattering, 'twixt Cold and Fear, yet he laught aneath his Breath as he caught my Arm and dragged me after him, whispering, "Fool and fayr Lady will cheat 'em yet." At the Stairs lay a Wherry with a Couple of Boatmen, and one of 'em stepping up to me, cries, "Alas for ruth, Mistress _Meg_, what is't ye do? Art mad to go on this Errand?" I sayd, "I shall be mad if I goe not, and succeed too--put me in, and push off." [Illustration: Nor lookt I up till aneath the Bridge-gate] We went down the River quietlie enow--at length reach _London Bridge_ Stairs. _Patteson_, starting up, says, "Bide ye all as ye are," and springs aland and runneth up to the Bridge. Anon, returns, and sayth, "Now, Mistress, alle's readie ... readier than ye wist ... come up quickly, for the Coast's clear." _Hobson_ (for 'twas he) helps me forth, saying, "GOD speed ye, Mistress.... An' I dared, I woulde goe with ye." ... Thought I, there be others in that Case. Nor lookt I up till aneath the Bridge-gate, when casting upward a fearsome Look, I beheld the dark Outline of the ghastly yet precious Relic; and, falling into a Tremour, did wring my Hands and exclaym, "Alas, alas, that Head hath lain full manie a Time in my Lap, woulde GOD, woulde GOD it lay there now!" When, o' suddain, I saw the Pole tremble and sway towards me; and stretching forth my Apron, I did in an Extasy of Gladness, Pity, and Horror, catch its Burthen as it fell. _Patteson_, shuddering, yet grinning, cries under his Breath, "Managed I not well, Mistress? Let's speed away with our Theft, for Fools and their Treasures are soon parted; but I think not they'll follow hard after us, neither, for there are Well-wishers to us on the Bridge. I'll put ye into the Boat and then say, GOD speed ye, Lady, with your Burthen." _July 23rd._ _Rizpah_, Daughter of _Aiah_, did watch her Dead from the Beginning of Harvest until the latter Rain, and suffered neither the Birds of the Air to light on them by Day, nor the wild Beasts of the Field by Night. And it was told the King, but he intermeddled not with her. _Argia_ stole _Polynices'_ Body by Night and buried it, for the which, she with her Life did willingly pay Forfeit. _Antigone_, for aiding in the pious Theft, was adjudged to be buried alive. _Artemisia_ did make herself her loved one's Shrine, by drinking his Ashes. Such is the Love of Women; many Waters cannot quench it, neither can the Floods drown it. I've hearde _Bonvisi_ tell of a poor _Italian_ Girl, whose Brothers did slay her Lover; and in Spite of them she got his Heart, and buried it in a Pot of Basil, which she watered Day and Night with her Tears, just as I do my Coffer. _Will_ has promised it shall be buried with me; layd upon my Heart; and since then, I've beene easier. He thinks he shall write _Father's_ Life, when he gets more composed, and we are settled in a new Home. We are to be cleared out o' this in alle Haste; the King grutches at our lingering over _Father's_ Footsteps, and gazing on the dear familiar Scenes associate with his Image; and yet, when the News of the bloody Deed was taken to him, as he sate playing at Tables with Queen _Anne_, he started up and scowled at her, saying, "Thou art the Cause of this Man's Death!" _Father_ might well say, during our last precious Meeting in the Tower, "'Tis I, _Meg_, not the King, that love Women. They belie him; he onlie loves himself." Adding, with his own sweet Smile, "Your _Gaffer_ used to say that Women were a Bag of Snakes, and that the Man who put his Hand therein woulde be lucky if he founde one Eel among them alle; but 'twas onlie in Sport, _Meg_, and he owned that I had enough Eels to my Share to make a goodly Pie, and called my House the Eel-pie House to the Day of his Death. 'Twas our Lord _Jesus_ raised up Women, and shewed Kindnesse unto 'em; and they've kept theire Level, in the Main, ever since." I wish _Will_ may sett down everie Thing of _Father's_ saying he can remember; how precious will his Book then be to us! But I fear me, these Matters adhere not to a Man's Memory ... he'll be telling of his Doings as Speaker and Chancellor, and his saying this and that in Parliament. Those are the Matters Men like to write and to read; he won't write it after my Fashion. I had a Misgiving of _Will's_ Wrath, that Night, 'speciallie if I failed; but he called me his brave _Judith_. Indeed I was a Woman bearing a Head, but one that had oft lain on my Shoulder. My Thoughts beginne to have Connexion now; but till last Night, I slept not. 'Twas scarce Sunsett. _Mercy_ had been praying beside me, and I lay outside my Bed, inclining rather to Stupor than Sleep. O' suddain, I have an Impression that some one is leaning over me, though I hear 'em not, nor feel theire Breath. I start up, cry "_Mercy!_" but she's not there, nor anie one else. I turn on my Side and become heavie to Sleep; but or ere I drop quite off, agayn I'm sensible or apprehensive of some living Consciousness between my closed Eyelids and the setting Sunlight; agayn start up and stare about, but there's Nothing. Then I feel like ... like _Eli_, maybe, when the Child _Samuel_ came to him twice; and Tears well into mine Eyes, and I close 'em agayn, and say in mine Heart, "If he's at Hand, oh, let me see him next Time ... the third Time's lucky." But 'steade of this, I fall into quiet, balmy, dreamlesse Sleep. Since then, I've had an abiding, assuring Sense of Help, of a Hand upholding me, and smoothing and glibbing the Way before me. We must yield to the Powers that be. At this Present, we are weak, but they are strong; they are honourable, but we are despised. They have made us a Spectacle unto the World, and, I think, Europe will ring with it; but at this present Hour, they will have us forth of our Home, though we have as yet no certayn Dwelling-Place, and must flee as scared Pigeons from their Dove-cot. No Matter; our Men are willing to labour, and our Women to endure: being reviled, we bless; being persecuted, we suffer it. Onlie I marvell how anie honest Man, coming after us, will be able to eat a Mouthful of Bread with a Relish within these Walls. And, methinketh, a dishonest Man will have sundrie Frights from the _Lares_ and _Lemures_. There'll be Dearth o' black Beans in the Market. Flow on, bright shining _Thames_. A good brave Man hath walked aforetime on your Margent, himself as bright, and usefull, and delightsome as be you, sweet River. And like you, he never murmured; like you, he upbore the weary, and gave Drink to the Thirsty, and reflected Heaven in his Face. I'll not swell your full Current with any more fruitless Tears. There's a River, whose Streams make glad the City of our GOD. He now rests beside it. Good Christian Folks, as they hereafter pass this Spot, upborne on thy gentle Tide, will, maybe, point this Way, and say--"There dwelt Sir _Thomas More_;" but whether they doe or not, _Vox Populi_ is a very inconsiderable Matter. Who would live on theire Breath? They hailed St. _Paul_ as _Mercury_, and then stoned him, and cast him out of the City, supposing him to be dead. Theire Favourite of to-day may, for what they care, goe hang himself to-morrow in his Surcingle. Thus it must be while the World lasts; and the very Racks and Scrues wherewith they aim to overcome the nobler Spiritt, onlie test and reveal its Power of Exaltation above the heaviest Gloom of Circumstance. _Interfecistis, interfecistis Hominem omnium Anglorum optimum._ FINIS Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO. Edinburgh & London 
49450	----	PETRARCH'S SECRET OR THE SOUL'S CONFLICT WITH PASSION THREE DIALOGUES BETWEEN HIMSELF AND S. AUGUSTINE TRANSLATED FROM THE LATIN BY WILLIAM H. DRAPER WITH TWO ILLUSTRATIONS LONDON CHATTO & WINDUS MDCCCCXI FRANCIS PETRARCH EMILIAE AUGUSTAE PER ANNUS XXII COLLABORANTI MECUM, COMPATIENTI, COLLAETANTI PETRARCAE HOC COLLOQUIUM MEMORABILE AMORIS DULCEDINE LACRIMISQUE TINCTUM IAM DEMUM ANGLICE REDDITUM GRATUS DEDICO A. S. MDCCCCXI CONTENTS INTRODUCTION AUTHOR'S PREFACE DIALOGUE THE FIRST DIALOGUE THE SECOND DIALOGUE THE THIRD INTRODUCTION Most modern writers on Petrarch agree in stating that of all his works the Dialogues which he calls _Secretum meum_ are the one which throws most light upon the man himself. Yet no English translation has hitherto been published. A French version by M. Victor Develay was issued a few years ago, and received the recognition of the French Academy; and, considering the great importance of Petrarch in the history of the Renaissance, not merely in Italy but in Europe, it is time that a similar opportunity of knowing him more fully was offered to English readers; for there are signs on both sides of the Atlantic that the number of those interested in him is steadily growing. The reason for this is undoubtedly the fact that, as the whole work of Petrarch comes to be better known, interest in him as a man increases. Mr. Sidney Lee has lately reminded us of his wide range and predominating influence in the matter of the sonnet in France and in Elizabethan England, as well as in his own country; and yet that influence was very far indeed from revealing all that Petrarch was. It was largely an influence of style, a triumph of the perfection of form, and his imitators did not trouble much about the precise nature of the sentiment and spirit informing the style. When this came to be weighed in the balances of a later day, the tendency of English feeling was to regard his sentiment as a trifle too serious and weak. The love-making of the Cavaliers brought in a robuster tone. When once the question was raised, "Why so pale and wan, fond lover?" there was really no good answer to it on Petrarchan lines, and the consequence was that his name and fame suffered something of eclipse among us. But eclipses are transient events, and when literary England felt once more the attraction of Italy in the end of the eighteenth century it was not only Dante who began to resume his sway and to provoke translation, but Petrarch also. Then attention was turned chiefly to his Italian poetry, but also in some degree to the general body of his Latin works and to his Letters, of which it is reported that Fox was among the first to perceive the high value. In England the pioneers in this direction were Mrs. Susannah Dobson, who published first a Life of Petrarch in two volumes in 1775, which had by 1805 reached a sixth edition, and, soon after, another volume called _Petrarch's View of Life_, purporting to be a translation, but in fact a very loose and attenuated abstract of the treatise _De remediis utriusque Fortunæ,_ which nevertheless reached a new edition in 1797. Then came a volume of Essays on Petrarch (Murray 1823) by the Italian exile Ugo Foscolo, and a little later a second Life of the Poet by no less a person than Thomas Campbell, also in two volumes. Testifying to the re-awakened interest in Petrarch, numerous translations also of his poetry were published by Lady Dacre, Hugh Boyd, Leigh Hunt, Capel Lofft, and many others, who took up after a long interval the tradition begun by Chaucer and handed on by Surrey, Wyatt, Sir Philip Sidney, Spenser, Drummond of Hawthornden, and George Chapman. Then for a while there was a pause, and the main drift of such attention in England as could be spared for things Italian in mid-Victorian days was concentrated on the greater luminary of the _Divine Comedy_ and the exciting political events of the sixties; though some attention was drawn to things connected with Petrarch by Lytton's novel of _Rienzi_, which was first published in 1835 and had a considerable vogue. Meanwhile in Italy itself his fame was well served by the excellent collection and reprint of his Latin letters by Fracasetti in three vols. (1859-63), and since that time there have appeared several important works dealing with the larger aspects of his life and work, most notable among them being Koerting's _Petrarka's Leben und Werke_ (Leipsig 1878), and in France M. P. de Nolhac's _Pétrarque et l'Humanisme_ (two vols., 1907, new edition), with other subsidiary works, and four small volumes by M. Henri Cochin, elucidating what is known of Petrarch's brother Gherardo and some of his many friends. Amongst ourselves in late years, following the labours of J. A. Symonds in his history of the Renaissance, we have Henry Reeve's small but well-planned volume in the "Foreign Classics for English Readers," and, more recently still, Mr. Hollway Calthrop's _Petrarch: his Life, Work and Times_ (1907), and Mrs. Maud Jerrold's _Francesco Petrarca: Poet and Humanist_ (1909). It is significant that both the last writers single out the _Secretum_ for its psychological interest, the former stating that "to those who feel the charm of Petrarch's nature and the intense humanity of his character, these three Dialogues are the most fascinating of all his writings"; and the latter "that this conflict of the dual self is of quite peculiar interest." Mrs. Jerrold indeed goes so far as to say that Petrarch "plunges into the most scathing self-examination that any man ever made. Whether the book was intended for the public we may well doubt, both from the words of the preface and from the fact that it does not appear to have been published till after the author's death. But however this may be, it remains one of the world's great monuments of self-revelation and ranks with the _Confessions of S. Augustine_"--a verdict which to some critics will seem to have a touch of overstatement, though hardly beyond the opinion of Petrarch's French students, and not altogether unpardonable in so enthusiastic an admirer of her subject, and a verdict which at least would not have been displeasing to Petrarch himself. Among the many points of human interest to be found in the Dialogues not the least is the one connected with Accidie, a theme which has of itself attracted special study in the present day, particularly since attention was called to it by the late Bishop of Oxford in his well-known introduction to the _Spirit of Discipline._ Observers of mental life incline to the view that the form of depression denoted by the mediæval word was not confined to those times or met with only in monasteries, and it is curious that he who is sometimes called the "first of the moderns" should take us into his confidence as to his sufferings from this trouble, and exemplify the truth of the observation to which reference has been made. M. P. de Nolhac, in his interesting work entitled _Le Frère de Pétrarque,_ calls particular attention to this trait in Petrarch's character, and in an appendix on the subject writes, "Mais il faut surtout lire l'émouvante discussion que Pétrarque, dans le second dialogue du _Secretum_, suppose entre Saint Augustin et lui-meme, les aveux entrecoupés de sanglots qu'il laisse échapper. Cette torture, dit-il, où il passe des jours et des nuits, a pourtant en elle je ne sais quelle atroce volupté tellement que parfois il en conte de s'y arracher" (p. 220). It is the remarking on this note of self-will, this _voluptas dolendi,_ that M. de Nolhac considers is Petrarch's special contribution to the subject and furnishes a new point beyond what is in previous definitions. The fundamental question raised by these Dialogues is the question of what was the real nature and character of Petrarch, and wherein lay the secret of his extraordinary charm and influence among his contemporaries, and especially among contemporary men? It is difficult to convey in few words how great an impression the study of his Latin works makes in regard to this influence in his own lifetime. Of course, a reader is soon aware of the trait of personal vanity in Petrarch and of certain unconscious littlenesses, as in the matter of his appreciation of Dante; but the strange thing is how little this interfered with the regard and admiration extended to him by many sorts and conditions of men. In the ordinary intercourse of life one is apt to think such a trait fatal to anything like respect, and it must always detract somewhat from the full stature of any mind, but in the case of Petrarch it seems evident that he was one to whom much was forgiven, and that the reason is to be found in the presence in him of so rich an assemblage of other and better qualities that this one hardly counted at all, or was looked on with kindly amusement by friends large-hearted enough to think it nothing compared with what was good and admirable in his mind. We may take it for granted that, as he hints in his "Letter to Posterity," he started with the advantage of a good presence and a sufficient care of his own person and appearance in younger days; and it is evident that he had by nature a certain engaging frankness and impulsiveness, which nevertheless were not inconsistent with the contrasted qualities of gravity and dignity, learned at first from his father and mother and their friends, and cultivated by his study of the Law and afterwards by his attendance on the Papal court at Avignon. One can discern this in his Letters and see it reflected in those that were written to him or about him. But beyond these introductory qualities, as they may be called, there were other deeper traits, of rarer kind, that must be noted before one can understand the position he attained and has held so long. Studying his work from the cool distance of six centuries, one is inclined to judge that the most fundamental quality of his nature was his love of literature, and that every other trait took a subordinate place to this. It is perhaps doubtful whether this or the life of personal affection, or even of devotion in a monastery, would have gained the upper hand if the circumstances of his life had been different in the matter of his love for Laura; but taking into consideration that she was separated from him apparently by temperament and circumstance, the one course that remained open to him without let or hindrance was the life of literature in the sense of devotion to the great writers of the Past and the practice of the art of writing for himself. He loved this for its own sake, and at the same time he was quickened by the sense of a new learning, which, since his time and largely by the impetus he gave it, has taken form and outline in a wonderful way, but was then only like the first streak of dawn upon the sky. Petrarch was not the first man to find a certain contradiction between his desires and the possibilities of life around him, and to pass many years under the pain of contrary attractions that could not all be followed to fulfilment This conflict is what gives interest to the _Secretum._ Some have thought, and the idea was expressed by one of his correspondents, that his love for Laura was very much of a literary pose. Yet that such a view is an insufficient account of it seems pretty clearly established by the work here translated. It is, indeed, plain that his feelings ran a course, and not a smooth one, and did not continue in one stay; he came to see the whole matter in a changed light, and yet not wholly changed; his relation was transfigured, not abandoned, and after the death of Laura, which took place when he was forty-four, it continued as a memory from which the pain had faded away and only what was uplifting remained. That which persisted unchanged all through his life and seems most to have had the colour and substance of a passion was the love of Letters. To this his friendship, his very real patriotism, and (must we not add?) his religion also were in a sense second. But the mention of this last factor in the life of Petrarch leads one to express the opinion that this has not yet been quite sufficiently reckoned with. That it should not have been thought worthy of such reckoning has probably arisen from the one ugly fact in his life which he himself does not conceal, and indeed expressly refers to in his "Letter to Posterity," in the following words:-- "As for the looser indulgences of appetite, would indeed I could say I was a stranger to them altogether; but if I should so say, I should lie. This I can safely affirm that, although I was hurried away to them by the fervour of my age and temperament, their vileness I have always inwardly execrated. As soon as I approached my fortieth year I repelled these weaknesses entirely from _my_ thoughts and my remembrance, as if I had never known them. And this I count among my earliest happy recollections, thanking God, who has freed me, while yet my powers were unimpaired and strong, from this so vile and always hateful servitude."[1] Now, although Petrarch did not, as some other men have done, including his own brother, express his repentance by retiring to a monastery, yet there is evidence enough that the change of will here referred to, and professed in the _Secretum_, was real, and that the older he grew the more he lifted up his heart. Among other signs of this there is the curious little group of what he calls _Penitential Psalms,_ which were translated into English by George Chapman, into whose translation of Homer Keats looked and was inspired In his Will also there are not a few passages through which one hears a note of genuine penitence. Among other curious points in it is the mention of the exact spot in which he would wish to be laid to rest in some one of seven different places where he might happen to die, the last being the city of Parma, of which he says, "At si Parmæ, in ecclesiâ majori, ubi per multos annos archidiaconus fui inutilis et semper fere absens." Petrarch must have fully weighed in his own case the pros and cons for such retirement. His treatise _De Otio Religiosorum_ shows that he understood what good side that kind of life has, and his whole attitude towards his brother--generous, and attached, almost to the point of romance--reveals how he could admire it. But in his own case he felt that it would cramp his faculties too much to be endurable, and hinder more than it would help the kind of work to which he had put his hand. There was also another influence that told strongly on this father of Humanism. He whose nature was so full of unsatisfied natural affection had begun in his latter years to find some rest and blessing in the love and tendance of a daughter, the light of whose care and companionship for him shines through his declining days like the rays of the sun in the evening after a dark and troubled day. But if we are right in judging that the love of Letters was the dominant factor in the life of Petrarch, it was but the main thread in a singularly complex nature. Not much less in substance and strength was his genius for friendship. Indeed, his study of the writers of past ages partook of the nature of friendship, just as his friendship with living men had a deep literary tinge. He loved books and he loved men, and he loved them in the same way. This is by no means a frequent combination in the degree in which it was shown in Petrarch. More often the book-lover becomes a recluse, and the lover of his fellow-men loses his ardour for study. But not even the love of books and of men took up all the activities of this rich nature. He was also a keen traveller and among the first to write of natural scenery in the modern spirit. He had that in him which, in spite of his love for reading and writing, sent him forth into other lands and made him eager to see men and cities. Yet the love of the country in him prevailed over the love of cities. His many references to his life at Vaucluse, though to readers of to-day they may seem sometimes affected, yet show only a superficial affectation, a mere mode, which does not seriously lessen the impression of his simple taste and his genuine delight in his garden and his fishing, and his talk with the charming old farmer-man and that sun-burnt wife for whom he had such an unbounded respect. In the two recent lives of Petrarch in English a reader may make closer acquaintance with this side of his character, and will find much that falls in with modern feeling as to simplicity of living and the joys of escaping from "the man-stifled town." But what is still a desideratum is a good English translation of his Letters to his friends, which will add many glimpses of his daily interests and thoughts, and fill up the picture of his interior life as it is disclosed to us in the Dialogues here presented. What the _Secretum gives_ us is the picture of Petrarch as he was in the crisis of his middle years. It was written in or about the year 1342 when he was thirty-eight, and in these Dialogues we find him looking back over his youth and early life--the sap and vigour of his mind as strong as ever, the recollection of many sensations green and still powerful--but finding that the sheer march of time and experience of manhood are forcing him now to see things with more mature vision. Five years later he will be seen suddenly kindled into surprising excitement in that strange Rienzi episode, but in one of his letters to that unhappy politician there is a sentence which might have been penned by Bishop Butler, and has in it the accent of grave experience:[2] _"Ibunt res quâ sempiterna lex statuit: mutare ista non possum, fugere possum"_ (Things will go as the law eternal has decided: to alter their course is out of our power; what we can do is to get out of their way). The interest of the _Secretum_ is heightened by remembering the time of life in which it was composed.[3] Some will find most pleasure in reading what men have written _De Senectute_, and others prefer the charm that belongs to youth; but is there not much to be said for the interest of what men write from that high tableland that lies between the two, in the full strength of their mind when they have lived long enough to know what is hidden from the eyes of youth and not long enough to be wearied and broken with the greatness of the way? Such is the tone that seems to pervade the Dialogues between S. Augustine and Petrarch. In the preface he looks forward to cherishing the little book himself in future years, like some flower that keeps alive remembrance of past days and yet is not cherished for memory only, but to guard the resolution which has been taken to go forward and not back, and, as his French translator suggests, "Is it to be wondered at that these pages, written with such _abandon_, in which he has laid bare his whole soul, should have been his own favourite work? It was the book he kept at his bedside, his faithful counsellor and friend, and to which he turned ever and again with pleasure in the hours of remembering the time past." It is not necessary to tell over again the story of Petrarch's lifelong devotion to the study of S. Augustine's _Confessions,_ or to dwell on the obvious reasons for that devotion. Every man loves the book which tells the history of conflicts like his own, and which has helped to give him courage in his warfare and its sorrows and joys. "That loss is common would not make My own less bitter, rather more;" sings the poet, but if one reads the experience of those who have suffered and contended and conquered, and is sure that their load was as heavy as his own, then there is a spirit which is breathed over from one life to another, and which even though it tells us how great is the burden of sorrow in the world, yet also tells us that a man is not alone, but that there are companions in patience who a little strengthen each other and give the sense of fellowship from age to age, _donec aspiret dies et inclinentur umbrae._ Many of the letters of Petrarch's later years show how wistfully he waited for that day. But they also show how gallant a heart he kept, and how faithful to those friends that remained, including the one so lovable and generous and true, Giovanni Boccaccio, who survived him little more than a year. Petrarch passed the end of his life in a modest house which he built in one of the loveliest parts of Italy, that to English readers will be for ever dear because of the haunting music that Shelley wove around its name. It was in the Euganæan Hills at Arqua where Petrarch chose to wait for the dawn, and, till it came, to go on working among the books he loved as his own soul. "Many a green isle needs must be In the deep wide sea of misery," and to read the story of his last years there is to think of one of those green isles. These were days of calm, and the book of the Secret ends with the expression of hope for a deeper calm still. In due time it came, but, as the English Poet sang, after more than six centuries-- The love from Petrarch's urn Yet amid yon hills doth burn, [1] Translation by H. Reeve. [2] _De rebus fam.,_ vii. 7. [3] The profile portrait, reproduced by kind permission of Mr. T. Fisher Unwin, publisher of Mr. E. J. Mills' book on Petrarch, is from Lombardo's copy of the _De viris illustribus,_ finished about five years after the death of Petrarch, and is believed to be an authentic picture of him in later life. A QUENCHLESS LAMP. [Illustration] [Illustration: S. AUGUSTINE GREETING A FRIEND _From a picture by Benozzo Gozzoli at San Gimignano_] PETRARCH'S SECRET AUTHOR'S PREFACE Often have I wondered with much curiosity as to our coming into this world and what will follow our departure. When I was ruminating lately on this matter, not in any dream as one in sickness and slumber, but wide awake and with all my wits about me, I was greatly astonished to behold a very beautiful Lady, shining with an indescribable light about her. She seemed as one whose beauty is not known, as it might be, to mankind. I could not tell how she came there, but from her raiment and appearance I judged her a fair Virgin, and her eyes, like the sun, seemed to send forth rays of such light that they made me lower my own before her, so that I was afraid to look up. When she saw this she said, Fear not; and let not the strangeness of my presence affright you in any wise. I saw your steps had gone astray; and I had compassion on you and have come down from above to bring you timely succour. Hitherto your eyes have been darkened and you have looked too much, yes, far too much, upon the things of earth. If these so much delight you, what shall be your rapture when you lift your gaze to things eternal! When I heard her thus speak, though my fear still clung about me with trembling voice I made reply in Virgil's words-- "What name to call thee by, O Virgin fair, I know not, for thy looks are not of earth And more than mortal seems thy countenance."[1] I am that Lady, she answered, whom you have depicted in your poem _Africa_ with rare art and skill, and for whom, like another Amphion of Thebes, you have with poetic hands built a fair and glorious Palace in the far West on Atlas's lofty peak. Be not afraid, then, to listen and to look upon the face of her who, as your finely-wrought allegory proves, has been well-known to you from of old. Scarcely had she uttered these words when, as I pondered all these things in my mind, it occurred to me this could be none other than Truth herself who thus spoke. I remembered how I had described her abode on the heights of Atlas; yet was I ignorant from what region she had come, save only that I felt assured she could have come from none other place than Heaven. Therefore I turned my gaze towards her, eagerly desiring to look upon her face; but lo, the eye of man is unable to gaze on that ethereal Form, wherefore again was I forced to turn them towards the ground. When she took note of this, after a short silence, she spoke once more; and, questioning me many times, she led me to engage with her in long discourse. From this converse I was sensible of gaining a twofold benefit for I won knowledge, and the very act of talking with her gave me confidence. I found myself by degrees becoming able to look upon the face which at first dismayed me by its splendour, and as soon as I was able to bear it without dread, and gaze fixedly on her wondrous beauty, I looked to see if she were accompanied with any other, or had come upon the retirement of my solitude alone; and as I did so I discerned at her side the figure of an aged man, of aspect venerable and full of majesty. There was no need to inquire his name. His religious bearing, modest brow, his eyes full of dignity, his measured step, his African look, but Roman speech, plainly declared him to be that most illustrious Father, Augustine. Moreover, he had so gracious a mien, and withal so noble, that one could not possibly imagine it to belong to any other than to him. Even so I was on the point of opening my lips to ask, when at that moment I heard the name so dear to me uttered from the lips of Truth herself. Turning herself to him, as if to intervene upon his deep meditation, she addressed him in these words: "Augustine, dear to me above a thousand others, you know how devoted to yourself this man is, and you are aware also with how dangerous and long a malady he is stricken, and that he is so much nearer to Death as he knows not the gravity of his disease. It is needful, then, that one take thought for this man's life forthwith, and who so fit to undertake the pious work as yourself? He has ever been deeply attached to your name and person; and all good doctrine is wont more easily to enter the mind of the disciple when he already starts with loving the Master from whom he is to learn. Unless your present happiness has made you quite forget your former sorrow, you will remember that when you were shut in the prison of the mortal body you also were subject to like temptation as his. And if that were so, most excellent Physician of those passions yourself experienced, even though your silent meditation be full of sweetness to your mind, I beg that your sacred voice, which to me is ever a delight, shall break its silence, and try whether you are able by some means to bring calm to one so deeply distressed." Augustine answered her: "You are my guide, my Counsellor, my Sovereign, my Ruler; what is it, then, you would have me say in your presence?" "I would," she replied, "that some human voice speak to the ears of this mortal man. He will better bear to hear truth so. But seeing that whatever you shall say to him he will take as said by me, I also will be present in person during your discourse." Augustine answered her, "The love I bear to this sick man, as well as the authority of her who speaks, make it my duty to obey." Then, looking kindly at me and pressing me to his heart in fatherly embrace, he led me away to the most retired corner he could find, and Truth herself went on a few steps in front. There we all three sat down. Then while Truth listened as the silent Judge, none other beside her being present, we held long converse on one side and the other; and because of the greatness of the theme, the discourse between us lasted over three days. Though we talked of many things much against the manners of this age, and on faults and failings common to mankind, in such wise that the reproaches of the Master seemed in a sense more directed against men in general than against myself, yet those which to me came closest home I have graven with more especial vividness on the tablet of my memory. That this discourse, so intimate and deep, might not be lost, I have sot it down in writing and made this book; not that I wish to class it with my other works, or desire from it any credit. My thoughts aim higher. What I desire is that I may be able by reading to renew as often as I wish the pleasure I felt from the discourse itself. So, little Book, I bid you flee the haunts of men and be content to stay with me, true to the title I have given you of "My Secret": and when I would think upon deep matters, all that you keep in remembrance that was spoken in secret you in secret will tell to me over again. To avoid the too frequent iteration of the words "said I," "said he," and to bring the personages of the Dialogue, as it were, before one's very eyes, I have acted on Cicero's method and merely placed the name of each interlocutor before each paragraph.[2] My dear Master learned this mode himself from Plato. But to cut short all further digression, this is how Augustine opened the discourse. [1] _Æneid,_ i. 327-28. [2] _De Amicitiâ_, i. DIALOGUE THE FIRST S. AUGUSTINE--PETRARCH _S. Augustine._ What have you to say, O man of little strength? Of what are you dreaming? For what are you looking? Remember you not you are mortal? _Petrarch._ Yes, I remember it right well, and a shudder comes upon me every time that remembrance rises in my breast. _S. Augustine._ May you, indeed, remember as you say, and take heed for yourself. You will spare me much trouble by so doing. For there con be no doubt that to recollect one's misery and to practise frequent meditation on death is the surest aid in scorning the seductions of this world, and in ordering the soul amid its storms and tempests, if only such meditation be not superficial, but sink into the bones and marrow of the heart. Yet am I greatly afraid lest that happen in your case which I have seen in so many others, and you be found deceiving your own self. _Petrarch_. In what way do you mean? For I do not clearly understand the drift of your remarks. _S. Augustine._ O race of mortal men, this it is that above all makes me astonished and fearful for you, when I behold you, of your own will clinging to your miseries; pretending that you do not know the peril hanging over your heads and if one bring it under your very eyes, you try to thrust it from your sight and put it afar off. _Petrarch._ In what way are we so mad? _S. Augustine._ Do you suppose there is any living man so unreasonable that if he found himself stricken with a dangerous ailment he would not anxiously desire to regain the blessing of health? _Petrarch._ I do not suppose such a case has ever been heard of. _S. Augustine._ And do you think if one wished for a thing with all one's soul one would be so idle and careless as not to use all possible means to obtain what one desired? _Petrarch._ No one, I think, would be so foolish. _S. Augustine._ If we are agreed on these two points, so we ought also to agree on a third. _Petrarch._ What is this third point? _S. Augustine._ It is this: that just as he who by deep meditation has discovered he is miserable will ardently wish to be so no more; and as he who has formed this wish will seek to have it realised, so he who seeks will be able to reach what he wishes. It is clear that the third step depends on the second as the second on the first. And therefore the first should be, as it were, a root of salvation in man's heart. Now you mortal men, and you yourself with all your power of mind, keep doing your best by all the pleasures of the world to pull up this saving root out of your hearts, which, as I said, fills me with horror and wonder. With justice, therefore, you are punished by the loss of this root of salvation and the consequent loss of all the rest. _Petrarch_. I foresee this complaint you bring is likely to be lengthy, and take many words to develop it. Would you mind, therefore, postponing it to another occasion? And that I may travel more surely to your conclusion, may we send a little more time over the premisses? _S. Augustine_. I must concede something to, your slowness of mind; so please stop me at any point where you wish. _Petrarch_. Well, if I must speak for myself, I do not follow your chain of reasoning. _S. Augustine_. What possible obscurity is there in it? What are you in doubt about now? _Petrarch_. I believe there is a multitude of things for which we ardently long, which we seek for with all our energy, but which nevertheless, however diligent we are, we never have obtained and never shall. _S. Augustine_. That may be true of other desires, but in regard to that we have now under discussion the case is wholly different. _Petrarch._ What makes you say that? _S. Augustine._ Because every man who desires to be delivered from his misery, provided only he desires sincerely and with all his heart, cannot fail to obtain that which he desires. _Petrarch_. O father, what is this I hear? There are few men indeed who do not feel they lack many things and who would not confess they were so far unhappy. Every one who questions his own heart will acknowledge it is so. By natural consequence if the fulness of blessing makes man happy, all things he lacks will so far make him unhappy. This burden of unhappiness all men would fain lay down, as every one is aware; but every one is aware also that very few have been able. How many there are who have felt the crushing weight of grief, through bodily disease, or the loss of those they loved, or imprisonment, or exile, or hard poverty, or other misfortunes it would take too long to tell over; and yet they who suffer these things have only too often to lament that it is not permitted them, as you suggest, to be set free. To me, then, it seems quite beyond dispute that a multitude of men are unhappy by compulsion and in spite of themselves. _S. Augustine_. I must take you a long way back, and as one does with the very young whose wits are slight and slow, I must ask you to follow out the thread of my discourse from its very simplest elements. I thought your mind was more advanced, and I had no idea you still needed lessons so childish. Ah, if only you had kept in mind those true and saving maxims of the wise which you have so often read and re-read with me; if, I must take leave to say, you had but wrought for yourself instead of others; if you had but applied your study of so many volumes to the ruling of your own conduct, instead of to vanity and gaining the empty praise of men, you would not want to retail such low and absurd follies. _Petrarch._ I know not where you want to take me, but already I am aware of the blush mounting to my brow, and I feel like schoolboys in presence of an angry master. Before they know what they are accused of they think of many offences of which they are guilty, and at the very first word from the master's lips they are filled with confusion. In like case I too am conscious of my ignorance and of many other faults, and though I perceive not the drift of your admonition, yet as I know almost everything bad may be brought against me, I blush even before you have done speaking. So pray state more clearly what is this biting accusation that you have made. _S. Augustine_. I shall have many things to lay to your charge presently. Just now what makes me so indignant is to hear you suppose that any one can become or can be unhappy against his will. _Petrarch_. I might as well spare my blushes. For what more obvious truth than this can possibly be imagined? What man exists so ignorant or so far removed from all contact with the world as not to know that penury, grief, disgrace, illness, death, and other evils too that are reckoned among the greatest, often befall us in spite of ourselves, and never with our own consent? From which it follows that it is easy enough to know and to detest one's own misery, but not to remove it; so that if the two first steps depend on ourselves, the third is nevertheless in Fortune's hand. _S. Augustine._ When I saw you ashamed I was ready to give you pardon, but brazen impudence angers me more than error itself. How is it you have forgotten all those wise precepts of Philosophy, which declare that no man can be made unhappy by those things you rattle off by name? Now if it is Virtue only that makes the happiness of man, which is demonstrated by Cicero and a whole multitude of weighty reasons, it follows of necessity that nothing is opposed to true happiness except what is also opposed to Virtue. This truth you can yourself call to mind even without a word from me, at least unless your wits are very dull. _Petrarch._ I remember it quite well. You would have me bear in mind the precepts of the Stoics, which contradict the opinions of the crowd and are nearer truth than common custom is. _S. Augustine._ You would indeed be of all men the most miserable were you to try to arrive at the truth through the absurdities of the crowd, or to suppose that under the leadership of blind guides you would reach the light. You must avoid the common beaten track and set your aspirations higher; take the way marked by the steps of very few who have gone before, if you would be counted worthy to hear the Poet's word-- "On, brave lad, on! your courage leading you, So only Heaven is scaled."[1] _Petrarch._ Heaven grant I may hear it ere I die! But I pray you to proceed. For I assure you I have by no means become shameless. I do not doubt the Stoics' rules are wiser far than the blunders of the crowd. I await therefore your further counsel. _S. Augustine_. Since we are agreed on this, that no one can become or be unhappy except through his own fault, what need of more words is there? _Petrarch._ Just this need, that I think I have seen very many people, and I am one of them, to whom nothing is more distressful than the inability to break the yoke of their faults, though all their life long they make the greatest efforts so to do. Wherefore, even allowing that the maxim of the Stoics holds good, one may yet admit that many people are very unhappy in spite of themselves, yes, and although they lament it and wish they were not, with their whole heart. _S. Augustine_. We have wandered somewhat from our course, but we are slowly working back to our starting-point. Or have you quite forgotten whence we set out? _Petrarch._ I had begun to lose sight of it, but it is coming back to me now. _S. Augustine._ What I had set out to do with you was to make clear that the first step in avoiding the distresses of this mortal life and raising the soul to higher things is to practise meditation on death and on man's misery; and that the second is to have a vehement desire and purpose to rise. When these two things were present, I promised a comparatively easy ascent to the goal of our desire. Unless haply to you it seems otherwise? _Petrarch_. I should certainly never venture to affirm this, for from my youth upwards I have had the increasing conviction that if in any matter I was inclined to think differently from yourself I was certain to be wrong. _S. Augustine._ We will please waive all compliments. And as I observe you are inclined to admit the truth of my words more out of deference than conviction, pray feel at liberty to say whatever your real judgment suggests. _Petrarch._ I am still afraid to be found differing, but nevertheless I will make use of the liberty you grant. Not to speak of other men, I call to witness Her who has ever been the ruling spirit of my life; you yourself also I call to witness how many times I have pondered over my own misery and over the subject of Death; with what floods of tears I have sought to wash away my stains, so that I can scarce speak of it without weeping; yet hitherto, as you see, all is in vain. This alone leads me to doubt the truth of that proposition you seek to establish, that no man has ever fallen into misery but of his own free will, or remained, miserable except of his own accord; the exact opposite of which I have proved in my own sad experience. _S. Augustine_. That complaint is an old one and seems likely to prove unending. Though I have already several times stated the truth in vain, I shall not cease to maintain it yet. No man can become or can be unhappy unless he so chooses; but as I said at the beginning, there is in men a certain perverse and dangerous inclination to deceive themselves, which is the most deadly thing in life. For if it is true that we rightly fear being taken in by those with whom we live, because our natural habit of trusting them tends to make us unsuspicious, and the pleasantly familiar sound of their voice is apt to put us off our guard,--how much rather ought you to fear the deceptions you practise on yourself, where love, influence, familiarity play so large a part, a case wherein every one esteems himself more than he deserves, loves himself more than he ought, and where Deceiver and Deceived are one and the same person? _Petrarch._ You have said this kind of thing pretty often to-day already. But I do not recollect ever practising such deception on myself; and I hope other people have not deceived me either. _S. Augustine._ Now at this very moment you are notably deceiving yourself when you boast never to have done such a thing at all; and I have a good enough hope of your own wit and talent to make me think that if you pay close attention you will see for yourself that no man can fall into misery of his own will. For on this point our whole discussion rests. I pray you to think well before answering, and give your closest attention, and be jealous for truth more than for disputation, but then tell me what man in the world was ever forced to sin? For the Seers and Wise Men require that sin must be a voluntary action, and so rigid is their definition that if this voluntariness is absent then the sin also is not there. But without sin no man is made unhappy, as you agreed to admit a few minutes ago. _Petrarch._ I perceive that by degrees I am getting away from my proposition and am being compelled to acknowledge that the beginning of my misery did arise from my own will. I feel it is true in myself, and I conjecture the same to be true of others. Now I beg you on your part to acknowledge a certain truth also. _S. Augustine._ What is it you wish me to acknowledge? _Petrarch_. That as it is true no man ever fell involuntarily, so this also is true that countless numbers of those who thus are voluntarily fallen, nevertheless do not voluntarily remain so. I affirm this confidently of my own self. And I believe that I have received this for my punishment, as I would not stand when I might, so now I cannot rise when I would. _S. Augustine._ That is indeed a wise and true view to take. Still as you now confess you were wrong in your first proposition, so I think you should own you are wrong in your second. _Petrarch._ Then you would say there is no distinction between falling and remaining fallen? _S. Augustine._ No, they are indeed different things; that is to say, different in time, but in the nature of the action and in the mind of the person concerned they are one and the same. _Petrarch._ I see in what knots you entangle me. But the wrestler who wins his victory by a trick is not necessarily the stronger man, though he may be the more practised. _S. Augustine._ It is Truth herself in whose presence we are discoursing. To her, plain simplicity is ever dear, and cunning is hateful. That you may see this beyond all doubt I will go forward from this point with all the plainness you can desire. _Petrarch._ You could give me no more welcome news. Tell me, then, as it is a question concerning myself, by what line of reasoning you mean to prove I am unhappy. I do not deny that I am; but I deny that it is with my own consent I remain so. For, on the contrary, I feel this to be most hateful and the very opposite of what I wish. But yet I can do nothing except wish. _S. Augustine._ If only the conditions laid down are observed, I will prove to you that you are misusing words. _Petrarch._ What conditions do you mean, and how would you have me use words differently? _S. Augustine._ Our conditions were to lay aside all juggling with terms and to seek truth in all plain simplicity, and the words I would have you use are these: instead of saying you _can_not, you ought to say you _will_ not. _Petrarch._ There will be no end then to our discussion, for that is what I never shall confess. I tell you I know, and you yourself are witness, how often I have wished to and yet could not rise. What floods of tears have I shed, and all to no purpose? _S. Augustine._ O yes, I have witnessed many tears, but very little will. _Petrarch._ Heaven is witness (for indeed I think no man on this earth knows) what I have suffered, and how I have longed earnestly to rise, if only I might. _S. Augustine_. Hush, hush. Heaven and earth will crash in ruin, the stars themselves will fall to hell, and all harmonious Nature be divided against itself, sooner than Truth, who is our Judge, can be deceived. _Petrarch._ And what do you mean by that? _S. Augustine_. I mean that your tears have often stung your conscience but not changed your will. _Petrarch._ I wonder how many times I must tell you that it is just this impossibility of change which I bewail. _S. Augustine._ And I wonder how many times I must reply that it is want of will, not want of power, which is the trouble. And yet I wonder not that now you find yourself involved in these perplexities; in which in time past I too was tossed about, when I was beginning to contemplate entering upon a new way of life.[2] I tore my hair; I beat my brow; my fingers I twisted nervously; I bent double and held my knees; I filled the air of heaven with most bitter sighs; I poured out tears like water on every side: yet nevertheless I remained what I was and no other, until a deep meditation at last showed me the root of all my misery and made it plain before my eyes. And then my will after that became fully changed, and my weakness also was changed in that same moment to power, and by a marvellous and most blessed alteration I was transformed instantly and made another man, another Augustine altogether. The full history of that transformation is known, if I mistake not, to you already in my _Confessions._ _Petrarch._ Yes, in truth I know it well, and never can I forget the story of that health-bringing fig-tree, beneath whose shade the miracle took place.[3] _S. Augustine._ Well indeed may you remember it. And no tree to you should be more dear: no, not the myrtle, nor the ivy, nor the laurel beloved of Apollo and ever afterwards favoured by all the band of Poets, favoured too by you, above all, who alone in your age have been counted worthy to be crowned with its leaves; yet dearer than these should be to you the memory of that fig-tree, for it greets you like some mariner coming into haven after many storms; it holds out to you the path of righteousness, and a sure hope which fadeth not away, that presently the divine Forgiveness shall be yours. _Petrarch_. I would not say one word in contradiction. Go on, I beseech you, with what you have begun. _S. Augustine._ This is what I undertook and will go on with, to prove to you that so far you are like those many others of whom it may be said in the words of Virgil-- "Unchanged their mind while vainly flow their tears."[4] Though I might multiply examples, yet I will rather content myself with this alone, that we might almost reckon as belonging to ourselves, and so all the more likely to come home. _Petrarch_. How wisely you have made choice; for indeed it were useless to add more, and no other could be so deeply graven in my heart. Great as the gulf which parts us may be--I mean between you in your safe haven and me in peril of shipwreck, you in felicity, me in distress--still amid my winds and tempests I can recognise from time to time the traces of, your own storm-tossed passions. So that as often as I read the book of your _Confessions_, and am made partaker of your conflict between two contrary emotions, between hope and fear, (and weep as I read), I seem to be hearing the story of my own self, the story not of another's wandering, but of my own. Therefore, since now I have put away every inclination to mere dispute, go on, I beg, as you desire. For all my heart wishes now is not to hinder but only to follow where you lead. _S. Augustine_. I make no such demand on you as that. For though a certain very wise man[5] has laid it down that "Through overmuch contention truth is lost," yet often it happens that a well-ordered discussion leads to truth. It is not then expedient to accept everything advanced, which is the token of a slack and sleepy mind, any more than it is expedient to set oneself to oppose a plain and open truth, which indicates only the mind of one who likes fighting for fighting's sake. _Petrarch_. I understand and agree with you and will act on your advice. Now, pray go on. _S. Augustine_. You admit, therefore, that the argument is just and the chain of reasoning valid, when we say that a perfect knowledge of one's misery will beget a perfect desire to be rid of it, if only the power to be rid may follow the desire. _Petrarch_. I have professed that I will believe you in everything. _S. Augustine._ I feel there is still something you would like to urge, even now. Do, please, confess it, no matter what it may be. _Petrarch._ Nothing, only that I am much amazed I to think I should never yet have wished what I have believed I always wished. _S. Augustine._ You still stick at that point. O well, to put an end to this kind of talk I will agree that you have wished sometimes. _Petrarch._ What then? _S. Augustine._ Do you not remember the phrase of Ovid-- "To wish for what you want is not enough; With ardent longing you must strive for it."[6] _Petrarch._ I understand, but thought that was just what I had been doing. _S. Augustine._ You were mistaken. _Petrarch._ Well, I will believe so. _S. Augustine._ To make your belief certain, examine your own conscience. Conscience is the best judge of virtue. It is a guide, true and unerring, that weighs every thought and deed. It will tell you that you have never longed for spiritual health as you ought, but that, considering what great dangers beset you, your wishes were but feeble and ineffective. _Petrarch._ I have been examining my conscience, as you suggested. _S. Augustine._ What do you find? _Petrarch._ That what you say is true. _S. Augustine._ We have made a little progress, if you are beginning to be awake. It will soon be better with you now you acknowledge it was not well hitherto. _Petrarch._ If it is enough to acknowledge, I hope to be able to be not only well but quite well, for never have I understood more clearly that my wishes for liberty and for an end to my misery have been too lukewarm. But can it be enough to desire only? _S. Augustine._ Why do you ask? _Petrarch._ I mean, to desire without doing anything. _S. Augustine._ What you propose is an impossibility. No one desires ardently and goes to sleep. _Petrarch._ Of what use is desire, then? _S. Augustine._ Doubtless the path leads through many difficulties, but the desire of virtue is itself a great part of virtue. _Petrarch._ There you give me ground for good hope. _S. Augustine._ All my discourse is just to teach you how to hope and to fear. _Petrarch._ Why to fear? _S. Augustine._ Then tell me why to hope? _Petrarch._ Because whereas so far I have striven, and with much tribulation, merely not to become worse, you now open a way to me whereby I may become better and better, even to perfection. _S. Augustine._ But maybe you do not think how toilsome that way is. _Petrarch._ Have you some now terror in store for me? _S. Augustine._ To desire is but one word, but how many things go to make it up! _Petrarch._ Your words make me tremble. _S. Augustine._ Not to mention the positive elements in desire, it involves the destruction of many other objects. _Petrarch._ I do not quite take in your meaning. _S. Augustine._ The desire of all good cannot exist without thrusting out every lower wish. You know how many different objects one longs for in life. All these you must first learn to count as nothing before you can rise to the desire for the chief good; which a man loves less when along with it he loves something else that does not minister to it. _Petrarch_. I recognise the thought. _S. Augustine_. How many men are there who have extinguished all their passions, or, not to speak of extinguishing, tell me how many are there who have subdued their spirit to the control of Reason, and will dare to say, "I have no more in common with my body; all that once seemed so pleasing to me is become poor in my sight. I aspire now to joys of nobler nature"? _Petrarch_. Such men are rare indeed. And now I understand what those difficulties are with which you threatened me. _S. Augustine_. When all these passions are extinguished, then, and not till then, will desire be full and free. For when the soul is uplifted on one side to heaven by its own nobility, and on the other dragged down to earth by the weight of the flesh and the seductions of the world, so that it both desires to rise and also to sink at one and the same time, then, drawn contrary ways, you find you arrive nowhither. _Petrarch._ What, then, would you say a man must do for his soul to break the fetters of the world, and mount up perfect and entire to the realms above? _S. Augustine._ What leads to this goal is, as I said in the first instance, the practice of meditation on death and the perpetual recollection of our mortal nature. _Petrarch._ Unless I am deceived, there is no man alive who is more often revolving this thought in his heart than I. _S. Augustine._ Ah, here is another delusion, a fresh obstacle in your way! _Petrarch._ What! Do you mean to say I am once more lying? _Augustine._ I would sooner hear you use more civil language. _Petrarch._ But to say the same thing? _S. Augustine._ Yes, to say nothing else. _Petrarch._ So then you mean I care nothing at all about death? _S. Augustine._ To tell the truth you think very seldom of it, and in so feeble a way that your thought never touches the root of your trouble. _Petrarch._ I supposed just the opposite. _S. Augustine._ I am not concerned with what you suppose, but with what you ought to suppose. _Petrarch._ Well, I may tell you that in spite of that I will suppose it no more, if you prove to me that my supposition was a false one. _S. Augustine._ That I will do easily enough, provided you are willing to admit the truth in good faith. For this end I will call in a witness who is not far away. _Petrarch_. And who may that be, pray? _S. Augustine._ Your conscience. _Petrarch_. She testifies just the contrary. _S. Augustine._ When you make an obscure, confused demand no witness can give precise or clear answers. _Petrarch._ What has that to do with the subject, I would like to know? _S. Augustine._ Much, every way. To see dearly, listen well. No man is so senseless (unless he be altogether out of his mind) as never once to remember his own weak nature, or who, if asked the question whether he were mortal and dwelt in a frail body, would not answer that he was. The pains of the body, the onsets of fever, attest the fact; and whom has the favour of Heaven made exempt? Moreover, your friends are carried out to their burial before your eyes; and this fills the soul with dread. When one goes to the graveside of some friend of one's own age one is forced to tremble at another's fall and to begin feeling uneasy for oneself; just as when you see your neighbour's roof on fire, you cannot fool quite happy for your own, because, as Horace puts it-- "On your own head you see the stroke will fall."[7] The impression will be more strong in case you see some sudden death carry off one younger, more vigorous, finer looking than yourself. In such an event a man will say, "This one seemed to live secure, and yet he is snatched off. His youth, his beauty, his strength have brought him no help. What God or what magician has promised me any surer warrant of security? Verily, I too am mortal." When the like fate befalls kings and rulers of the earth, people of great might and such as are regarded with awe, those who see it are struck with more dread, are more shaken with alarm; they are amazed when they behold a sudden terror, or perchance hours of intense agony seize on one who was wont to strike terror into others. From what other cause proceed the doings of people who seem beside themselves upon the death of men in highest place, such as, to take an instance from history, the many things of this kind that, as you have related, were done at the funeral of Julius Cæsar? A public spectacle like this strikes the attention and touches the heart of mortal men; and what then they see in the case of another is brought home as pertaining also to themselves. Beside all these, are there not the rage of savage boasts, and of men, and the furious madness of war? Are there not the falls of those great buildings which, as some one neatly says, are first the safeguards, then the sepulchres of men? Are there not malignant motions of the air beneath some evil star and pestilential sky? And so many perils on sea and land that, look wheresoever you will, you cannot turn your gaze anywhither but you will meet the visible image and memento of your own mortality. _Petrarch_. I beg your pardon, but I cannot wait any longer, for, as for having my reason fortified, I do not think any more powerful aid can be brought than the many arguments you have adduced. As I listened I wondered what end you were aiming at, and when your discourse would finish. _S. Augustine._ As a matter of fact, you have interrupted me, and it has not yet reached its end. However, here is the conclusion--although a host of little pin-pricks play upon the surface of your mind, nothing yet has penetrated the centre. The miserable heart is hardened by long habit, and becomes like some indurated stone; impervious to warnings, however salutary, you will find few people considering with any seriousness the fact that they will die. _Petrarch_. Then few people are aware of the very definition of man, which nevertheless is so hackneyed in the schools, that it ought not merely to weary the ears of those who hear it, but is now long since scrawled upon the walls and pillars of every room. This prattling of the Dialecticians will never come to an end; it throws up summaries and definitions like bubbles, matter indeed for endless controversies, but for the most part they know nothing of the real truth of the things they talk about. So, if you ask one of this set of men for a definition of a man or of anything else, they have their answer quite pat, as the saying goes; if you press him further, he will lie low, or if by sheer practice in arguing he has acquired a certain boldness and power of speech, the very tone of the man will tell you he possesses no real knowledge of the thing he sets out to define. The best way of dealing with this brood, with their studied air of carelessness and empty curiosity, is to launch at their head some such invective as this, "You wretched creatures, why this everlasting labour for nothing; this expense of wit on silly subtleties? Why in total oblivion of the real basis of things will you grow old simply conversant with words, and with whitening hair and wrinkled brow, spend all your time in babyish babble? Heaven grant that your foolishness hurt no one but yourselves, and do as little harm as possible to the excellent minds and capacities of the young." _S. Augustine._ I agree that nothing half severe enough can be said of this monstrous perversion of learning. But let me remind you that your zeal of denunciation has so carried you away that you have omitted to finish your definition of man. _Petrarch_. I thought I had explained sufficiently, but I will be more explicit still. Man is an animal, or rather the chief of all animals. The veriest rustic knows that much. Every schoolboy could tell you also, if you asked him, that man is, moreover, a rational animal and that he is mortal. This definition, then, is a matter of common knowledge. _S. Augustine._ No, it is not. Those who are acquainted with it are very few in number. _Petrarch._ How so? _S. Augustine._ When you can find a man so governed by Reason that all his conduct is regulated by her, all his appetites subject to her alone, a man who has so mastered every motion of his spirit by Reason's curb that he knows it is she alone who distinguishes him from the savagery of the brute, and that it is only by submission to her guidance that he deserves the name of man at all; when you have found one so convinced of his own mortality as to have that always before his eyes, always to be ruling himself by it, and holding perishable things in such light esteem that he ever sighs after that life, which Reason always foresaw, wherein mortality shall be cast away; when you have found such a man, then you may say that he has some true and fruitful idea of what the definition of man is. This definition, of which we were speaking, I said it was given to few men to know, and to reflect upon as the nature of the truth requires. _Petrarch._ Hitherto I had believed I was of that number. _S. Augustine_. I have no doubt that when you turn over in your mind the many things you have learned, whether in the school of experience or in your reading of books, the thought of death has several times entered your head. But still it has not sunk down into your heart as deeply as it ought, nor is it lodged there as firmly as it should be. _Petrarch_. What do you call sinking down into my heart? Though I think I understand, I would like you to explain more clearly. _S. Augustine._ This is what I mean. Every one knows, and the greatest philosophers are of the same opinion, that of all tremendous realities Death is the most tremendous. So true is this, that from ever of old its very name is terrible and dreadful to hear. Yet though so it is, it will not do that we hear that name but lightly, or allow the remembrance of it to slip quickly from our mind. No, we must take time to realise it. We must meditate with attention thereon. We must picture to ourselves the effect of death on each several part of our bodily frame, the cold extremities, the breast in the sweat of fever, the side throbbing with pain, the vital spirits running slower and slower as death draws near, the eyes sunken and weeping, every look filled with tears, the forehead pale and drawn, the cheeks hanging and hollow, the teeth staring and discoloured, the nostrils shrunk and sharpened, the lips foaming, the tongue foul and motionless, the palate parched and dry, the languid head and panting breast, the hoarse murmur and sorrowful sigh, the evil smell of the whole body, the horror of seeing the face utterly unlike itself--all these things will come to mind and, so to speak, be ready to one's hand, if one recalls what one has seen in any close observation of some deathbed where it has fallen to our lot to attend. For things seen cling closer to our remembrance than things heard. And, moreover, it is not without a profound instinct of wisdom that in certain Religious Orders, of the stricter kind, the custom has survived, even down to our own time (though I do not think it makes for good character altogether), of allowing the members to watch the bodies of the dead being washed and put in shrouds for their burial; while the stern professors of the Rule stand by, in order that this sad and pitiful spectacle, thrust forsooth beneath their very eyes, may admonish their remembrance continually, and affright the minds of those who survive from every hope of this transitory world. This, then, is what I meant by sinking down deeply into the soul. Perchance you never name the name of Death, that so you may fall in with the custom of the time, although nothing is more certain than the fact or more uncertain than the hour. Yet in daily converse you must often speak of things connected with it, only they soon fly out of mind and leave no trace. _Petrarch._ I follow your counsel the more readily because now I recognise much in your words that I have myself revolved in my own breast. But please, if you think it well, will you impress some mark on my memory which will act as a warning to me and prevent me from this time henceforth from telling lies to myself and fondling my own mistakes. For this, it seems to me, is what turns men from the right way, that they dream they have already reached the goal, and make therefore no effort any more. _S. Augustine._ I like to hear you speak so. Your words are those of a man alert and watchful, who will not bear to be idle and trust to chance. So here is a test which will never play you false: every time you meditate on death without the least sign of motion, know that you have meditated in vain, as about any ordinary topic. But if in the act of meditation you find yourself suddenly grow stiff, if you tremble, turn pale, and feel as if already you endured its pains; if at the same time you seem to yourself as if you were leaving your body behind, and were forced to render up your account before the bar of eternal judgment, of all the words and deeds of your past life, nothing omitted or passed over; that nothing any more is to be hoped for from good looks or worldly position, nothing from eloquence, or riches, or power: if you realise that this Judge takes no bribe and that all things are naked and open in His sight; that death itself will not turn aside for any plea; that it is not the end of sufferings, but only a passage: if you picture to yourself a thousand forms of punishment and pain, the noise and wailing of Hell, the sulphurous rivers, the thick darkness, and avenging Furies,--in a word, the fierce malignity everywhere of that dark abode; and, what is the climax of its horror, that the misery knows no end, and despair thereof itself is everlasting, since the time of God's mercy is passed by; if, I say, all these things rise up before your eyes at once, not as fictions but as truth, not as being possible, but inevitable, and of a surety bound to come, yes, and even now at the door; and if you think on these things, not lightly, nor with desperation, but full of hope in God, and that His strong right hand is able and ready to pluck you out of so great calamities; if you but show yourself willing to be healed and wishful to be raised up; if you cleave to your purpose and persist in your endeavour, then you may be assured you have not meditated in vain. _Petrarch_. I will not deny you have terrified me greatly by putting so huge a mass of suffering before my eyes. But may God give me such plenteous mercy as that I may steep my thought in meditations like these; not only day by day, but more especially at night, when the mind, with all its daily interests laid aside, relaxes and is wont to return upon itself. When I lay my body down, as those who die, and my shrinking mind imagines the hour itself with all its horrors is at hand: so intently do I conceive it all, as though I were in the very agony of dying, that I shall seem to be already in the place of torment, beholding what you speak of and every kind of anguish. And so stricken shall I be at that sight, so terrified and affrighted, that I shall rise up (I know it) before my horrified household and cry aloud, "What am I doing? What suffering is this? For what miserable destruction is Fate keeping me alive? Jesu, by Thy mercy, "Thou whom none yet hath conquered, succour me,"[8] "Give Thy right hand to me in misery Through the dark waves, O bear me up with Thee, That dying I may rest and be in peace."[9] Many other things shall I say to myself, as one in a fever whose mind every chance impression carries hither and thither in his fear; and then I go talking strangely to my friends, weeping and making them weep, and then presently after this we shall return to what we were before. And since these things are so, what is it, I ask, which holds me back? What little hidden obstacle is there which makes it come to pass that hitherto all these meditations avail nothing but to bring me troubles and terrors: and I continue the same man that I have ever been; the same, it may be, as men to whom no reflections like these have ever come? Yet am I more miserable than they, for they, whatever may be their latter end, enjoy at least the pleasures of the present time; but as for me, I know not either what my end will be, and I taste no pleasure that is not poisoned with these embittering thoughts. _S. Augustine._ Vex not yourself, I pray you, when you ought rather to rejoice. The more the sinner feels pleasure in his sin, the more unhappy should we think him and the more in need of pity. _Petrarch._ I suppose you mean that a man whose pleasures are uninterrupted comes to forget himself, and is never led back into virtue's path; but that he who amid his carnal delights is sometime visited with adversity will come to the recollection of his true condition just in proportion as he finds fickle and wayward Pleasure desert him. If both kind of life had one and the same end, I do not see why he should not be counted the happier who enjoys the present time and puts off affliction to another day, rather than the man who neither enjoys the present nor looks for any joy hereafter; unless you are perhaps moved by this consideration that in the end the laughter of the former will be changed to more bitter tears? _S. Augustine._ Yes, much more bitter. For I have often noticed that if a man throws away the rein of reason altogether (and in the most excessive pleasure of all this is commonly the case), his fall is more dangerous than that of the man who may come rushing down from the same height, but keeps still some hold, though feebly, on the reins. But before all else I attach importance to what you said before, that in the case of the one there is some hope of his conversion, but in that of the other nothing remains but despair. _Petrarch._ Yes, that is my view also; in the meanwhile, however, have you not forgotten my first question? _S. Augustine._ What was it? _Petrarch_. Concerning what keeps me back. I asked you why I am the only one to whom the profound meditation on Death, that you said was so full of benefit, brings no good whatever. _S. Augustine._ In the first place it is perhaps because you look on death as something remote, whereas when one thinks how very short life is and how many divers kinds of accidents befall it, you ought not to think death is far away. "What deludes almost all of us," as Cicero says, "is that we regard death from afar off." Some correctors--I would prefer to call them corruptors--of the text have wished to change the reading by inserting a negative before the verb, and have maintained that he ought to have said, "We do NOT regard death from afar off." For the rest, there is no one in his senses who does not see death one way or another, and in reality Cicero's word _prospicere_ means to see from afar. The one thing that makes so many people suffer illusion in their ideas on death is that they are wont to forecast for their own life some limit, which is indeed possible according to nature, but at which, nevertheless, very few arrive. Hardly any one, in fact, dies of whom the poet's line might not be quoted-- "Grey hairs and length of years he for himself Expected."[10] The fault may touch you nearly, for your age, your vigorous constitution and temperate way of life perchance have fostered a like hope in your heart. _Petrarch._ Please do not suspect that of me. God keep me from such madness-- "As in that monster false to put my trust!"[11] If I may borrow the words Virgil puts in the mouth of his famous pilot Palinurus. For I too am cast upon a wide ocean, cruel and full of storms. I sail across its angry waves and struggle with the wind; and the little boat I steer shivers and seems to be letting in the water in every part. I know well she cannot hold out for long, and I see I have no hope at all of safety unless the Almighty Pity put forth His strong right hand and guide my vessel rightly ere it be too late, and bring me to shore-- "So that I who have lived upon the waters may die in port."[12] Of this I think I should have a good hope, because it has never been my lot to put any confidence in those riches and power on which I see so many of my contemporaries, yes, and older men as well, relying. For what folly would it be to pass all one's life in toil and poverty and care, heaping up riches, just to die at last and have no time to enjoy them? So, then, in truth, I regard this dark shadow of death, not as something afar off, but very nigh and ever at the doors. And I have not forgotten a certain little verse I wrote in my youth at the end of a letter to a friend-- "E'en while we speak, along a thousand ways With stealthy steps up to our very door Death creeps." If I could say words like these at that time of life, what shall I say now that I am more advanced in age and more experienced in what life is? For everything I see or hear or feel or think seems, unless I deceive myself, connected in my mind with that last end. And yet the question still remains, what is it that holds me back? _S. Augustine._ Give humble thanks to God who so regards you and guides you with his merciful rein, and so pricks you with his spur. It is not surely possible, that he who thus has the thought of death before him day by day should ever be doomed to death eternal. But since you feel, and rightly so, that something still is wanting, I will try and unfold to you what it is, and, if God so please, remove it also; to the end that you may arise and with free, uplifted mind shake off that old bondage that so long has kept you down. _Petrarch_. O would that indeed you may prove able so to help me, and I on my part be capable of receiving such a boon! _S. Augustine._ It shall be yours if you wish. The thing is not impossible. But in the nature of man's actions two things are required, and if either be wanting, the action will come to nought. There must be will, and that will must be so strong and earnest that it can deserve the name of purpose. _Petrarch._ So let it be. _S. Augustine_. Do you know what stands in the way of your purpose of heart? _Petrarch._ That is what I want to know; what for so long I have earnestly desired to understand. _S. Augustine_. Then listen. It was from Heaven your soul came forth: never will I assert a lower origin than that. But in its contact with the flesh, wherein it is imprisoned, it has lost much of its first splendour. Have no doubt of this in your mind. And not only is it so, but by reason of the length of time it has in a manner fallen asleep; and, if one may so express it, forgotten its own beginning and its heavenly Creator. And these passions that are born in the soul through its connection with the body, and that forgetfulness of its nobler nature, seem to me to have been touched by Virgil with pen almost inspired when he writes-- "The souls of men still shine with heavenly fire, That tells from whence they come, save that the flesh And limbs of earth breed dullness, hence spring fears, Desire, and grief and pleasures of the world, And so, in darkness prisoned, they no more Look upward to heaven's face."[13] Do you not in the poet's words discern that monster with four heads so deadly to the nature of man? _Petrarch_. I discern very clearly the fourfold passion of our nature, which, first of all, we divide in two as it has respect to past and future, and then subdivide again in respect of good and evil. And so, by these four winds distraught, the rest and quietness of man's soul is perished and gone. _S. Augustine._ You discern rightly, and the words of the Apostle are fulfilled in us, which say, "The corruptible body presseth down the soul, and the earthly tabernacle weigheth down the mind that museth upon many things."[14] Of a truth the countless forms and images of things visible, that one by one are brought into the soul by the senses of the body, gather there in the inner centre in a mass, and the soul, not being akin to these or capable of learning them, they weigh it down and overwhelm it with their contrariety. Hence that plague of too many impressions tears apart and wounds the thinking faculty of the soul, and with its fatal, distracting complexity bars the way of clear meditation, whereby it would mount up to the threshold of the One Chief Good. _Petrarch_. You have spoken admirably of that plague in many places, and especially in your book on _True Religion_ (with which it is, indeed, quite incompatible). It was but the other day that I lighted on that work of yours in one of my digressions from the study of philosophy and poetry, and it was with very great eagerness that I began to peruse it. Indeed, I was like a man setting out from his own country to see the world, and coming to the gate of some famous city quite new to him, where, charmed by the novelty of all around, he stops now here, now there, and looks intently on all that meets his gaze. _S. Augustine._ And yet in that book, allowing for a difference of phraseology such as becomes a teacher of catholic truth, you will find a large part of its doctrine is drawn from philosophers, more especially from those of the Platonist and Socratic school. And, to keep nothing from you, I may say that what especially moved me to undertake that work was a word of your favourite Cicero. God blessed that work of mine so that from a few seeds there came an abundant harvest. But let us come back to the matter in hand. _Petrarch._ As you wish; but, O best of Fathers, do not hide from me what that word was which gave you the starting-point of so excellent a work. _S. Augustine._ It was the passage where in a certain book Cicero says, by way of expressing his detestation of the errors of his time: "They could look at nothing with their mind, but judged everything by the sight of their eyes; yet a man of any greatness of understanding is known by his detaching his thought from objects of sense, and his meditations from the ordinary track in which others move."[15] This, then, I took as my foundation, and built upon it the work which you say has given you pleasure. _Petrarch._ I remember the place; it is in the _Tusculan Orations._ I have been delighted to notice what a habit it is of yours to quote those words here and elsewhere in your works; and they deserve it, for they are words that seem to blend in one phrase truth and dignity and grace. Now, since it seems good to you, pray return to our subject. _S. Augustine._ This, then, is that plague that has hurt you, this is what will quickly drive you to destruction, unless you take care. Overwhelmed with too many divers impressions made on it, and everlastingly fighting with its own cares, your weak spirit is crushed so that it has not strength to judge what it should first attack or to discern what to cherish, what to destroy, what to repel; all its strength and what time the niggard hand of Fate allows are not sufficient for so many demands. So it suffers that same evil which befalls those who sow too many seeds in one small space of ground. As they spring up they choke each other. So in your overcrowded mind what there is sown can make no root and bear no fruit. With no considered plan, you are tossed now here now there in strange fluctuation, and can never put your whole strength to anything. Hence it happens that whenever the generous mind approaches (if it is allowed) the contemplation of death, or some other meditation that might help it in the path of life, and penetrates by its own acumen to the depths of its own nature, it is unable to stand there, and, driven by hosts of various cares, it starts back. And then the work, that promised so well and seemed so good, flags and grows unsteady; and there comes to pass that inward discord of which we have said so much, and that worrying torment of a mind angry with itself; when it loathes its own defilements, yet cleanses them not away; sees the crooked paths, yet does not forsake them; dreads the impending danger, yet stirs not a step to avoid it. _Petrarch._ Ah, woe is me! Now you have probed my wound to the quick. There is the seat of my pain, from there I fear my death will come. _S. Augustine._ It is well. You are awakening to life. But as we have now prolonged our discussion enough for to-day, let us, if you will, defer the rest until to-morrow, and let us take a breathing space in silence. _Petrarch._ Yes, I am tired somewhat, and most gladly shall I welcome quiet and rest. [1] _Æneid,_ ix. 641. [2] _S. Augustine Confessions_, viii. 8. [3] _S. Augustine Confessions,_ viii. 12. [4] _Æneid_, iv. 449. [5] Publius Cyrus. [6] Ovid, _Pontic._, III i. 35. [7] Horace, _Epist.,_ I. 18, 83. [8] _Æneid,_ vi 365. [9] _Ibid.,_ vi 370. [10] _Æneid,_ x. 649. [11] _Ibid.,_ v. 849. [12] Seneca, _Letters,_ xix. [13] _Æneid,_ vi. 730-34. [14] Book of wisdom, ix. 15 [15] _Tusculan Orations,_ i. 16. DIALOGUE THE SECOND S. AUGUSTINE--PETRARCH _S. Augustine_. Well, have we rested long enough? _Petrarch._ Certainly, if it so please you. _S. Augustine._ Let me hear if you feel now in good heart and confidence. For when a man has been ill, a hopeful spirit in him is no small sign of returning health. _Petrarch._ What hope I have is no whit in myself: God is my hope. _S. Augustine._ It is wisely spoken. And now I return to our theme. Many things are against you, many temptations assail, but you yourself still seem ignorant both of their numbers and their strength. And what in warfare generally happens to one who, from a distance, sees some closely marshalled battalion, has happened to you. Such a man is often deceived into thinking his foes fewer in number than they are. But when they draw nearer, when they have deployed their serried ranks before his eyes in all their martial pomp, then his fears soon increase, and he repents him of his boldness. So likewise will it be with you when I shall display before your eyes, on this side and on that, all the evils that are pressing upon you and hemming you in from every quarter. You will be ashamed of your own boldness, you will be sorry you were so light-hearted, and begin to bewail that in its sore straits your soul has been unable to break through the wedged phalanx of your foes. You will discover presently how many foolish fancies of too easy victory you have let come into your mind, excluding that wholesome dread to which I am endeavouring to bring you. _Petrarch_. Indeed, you make me horribly afraid. That my danger was great I have always been aware; and now, in spite of this, you tell me I have very much under-estimated it, and indeed that, compared with what they should be, my fears have been nothing at all. What hope have I then left? _S. Augustine_. It is never time to despair. Be sure of that. Despair is the very last and worst of evils, and therefore I would have you make it a first principle to put it away wholly. _Petrarch_. I knew the truth of the maxim, but in my dread forgot it at the moment. _S. Augustine_. Now give me all your attention, look and listen while I recall words of your favourite seer. "Behold what foemen gather round your walls And at your gates make sharp their gleaming sword To murder you and yours."[1] Look what snares the world spreads for you; what vanities it dangles before your eyes; what vain cares it has to weigh you down. To begin at the beginning, consider what made those most noble spirits among all creatures fall into the abyss of ruin; and take heed lest in like manner you also fall after them. All your forethought, all your care will be needed to save you from this danger. Think how many temptations urge your mind to perilous and soaring flights. They make you dream of nobleness and forget your frailty; they choke your faculties with fumes of self-esteem, until you think of nothing else; they lead you to wax so proud and confident in your own strength that at length you hate your Creator. So you live for self-pleasing and imagine that great things are what you deserve. Whereas if you had a truer remembrance, great blessings ought to make you not proud but humble, when you realise that they came to you for no merit of your own. What need for me to speak of the Eternal Lord God when even to earthly lords men feel their minds more humbly bound if they experience any bounty of theirs which they are conscious of being undeserved. Do we not see them striving to merit afterwards what they feel they should have earned before? Now let your mind realise, as it easily can, on what paltry grounds your pride is set up. You trust in your intellect; you boast of what eloquence much reading has given you; you take pleasure in the beauty of your mortal body. Yet do you not feel that in many things your intellect fails you? Are there not many things in which you cannot rival the skill of the humblest of mankind? Nay, might I not go further and, without mentioning mankind, may I not say that with all your labour and study you will find yourself no match in skill for some of the meanest and smallest of God's creatures? Will you boast, then, of intellect after that? And as for reading, what has it profited you? Of the multitude of things you have perused how many have remained in your mind? How many have struck root and borne fruit in due season? Search well your heart and you will find that the whole of what you know is but like a little shrunken stream dried by the summer heat compared to the mighty ocean. And of what relevance is it to know a multitude of things? Suppose you shall have learned all the circuits of the heavens and the earth, the spaces of the sea, the courses of the stars, the virtues of herbs and stones, the secrets of nature, and then be ignorant of yourself? Of what profit is it? If by the help of Scripture you shall have discovered the right and upward path, what use is it if wrath and passion make you swerve aside into the crooked, downward way? Supposing you shall have learned by heart the deeds of illustrious men of all the ages, of what profit will it be if you yourself day by day care not what you do? What need for me to speak of eloquence? Will not you yourself readily confess how often the putting any confidence in this has proved vain? And, moreover, what boots it that others shall approve what you have said if in the court of your own conscience it stands condemned? For though the applause of those who hear you may seem to yield a certain fruit which is not to be despised, yet of what worth is it after all if in his heart the speaker himself is not able to applaud? How petty is the pleasure that comes from the plaudits of the multitude! And how can a man soothe and flatter others unless he first soothe and flatter himself? Therefore you will easily understand how often you are deluded by that glory you hope for from your eloquence, and how your pride therein rests but upon a foundation of wind. For what can be more childish, nay, might I not say more insane, than to waste time and trouble over matters where all the things themselves are worthless and the words about them vain? What worse folly than to go on blind to one's real defects, and be infatuated with words and the pleasure of hearing one's own voice, like those little birds they tell of who are so ravished with the sweetness of their own song that they sing themselves to death? And furthermore, in the common affairs of every-day life does it not often happen to you to find yourself put to the blush to discover that in the use of words you are no match even for some whom you think are very inferior men? Consider also how in Nature there are many things for which names are altogether wanting, and many more to which names have indeed been given, but to express the beauty of them--as you know by experience--words are altogether inadequate. How often have I heard you lament, how often seen you dumb and dissatisfied, because neither your tongue nor your pen could sufficiently utter ideas, which nevertheless to your reflecting mind were very clear and intelligible? What, then, is this Eloquence, so limited and so weak, which is neither able to compass and bring within its scope all the things that it would, nor yet to hold fast even those things that it has compassed? The Greeks reproach you, and you in turn the Greeks, with having a paucity of words. Seneca, it is true, accounts their vocabulary the richer, but Cicero at the beginning of his treatise _On the Distinctions of Good and Evil_ makes the following declaration, "I cannot enough marvel whence should arise that insolent scorn of our national literature. Though this is not the place to discuss it, yet I will express my conviction, which I have often maintained, not only that the Latin tongue is not poor, as it is the fashion to assert, but that it is, in fact, richer than the Greek;"[2] and as he frequently repeats elsewhere the same opinion, so, especially in the _Tusculan Orations_, he exclaims, "Thou Greek that countest thyself rich in words, how poor art thou in phrases."[3] This is the saying, mark you, of one who know quite well that he was the prince of Latin oratory, and had already shown that he was not afraid to challenge Greece for the palm of literary glory. Let me add that Seneca, so notable an admirer of the Greek tongue, says in his _Declamations_, "All that Roman eloquence can bring forward to rival or excel the pride of Greece is connected with the name of Cicero."[4] A magnificent tribute, but unquestionably true! There is, then, as you see, on the subject of the primacy in Eloquence a very great controversy, not only between you and the Greeks, but among our own most learned writers themselves. There are in our camp those who hold for the Greeks, and it may be among them there are some who hold for us, if at least we may judge from what is reported of the illustrious philosopher Plutarch. In a word, Seneca, who is ours, while doing all justice to Cicero, gives his final verdict for the Greeks, notwithstanding that Cicero is of the contrary opinion. As to my own opinion on the question in debate, I consider that both parties to the controversy have some truth on their side when they accuse both Latin and Greek of poverty of words: and if this judgment be correct in regard to two such famous languages, what hope is there for any other? Bethink you therefore what sort of confidence you can have in your own simple powers when the whole resources of that people of which you are but a little part are adjudged poor, and how ashamed you should be to have spent so much time in pursuing something which cannot be attained, and which, if it could be, would prove after all but vanity itself. I will pass on to other points. Are you perhaps inclined to plume yourself on your physical advantages? But think what a thread they hang upon! What is it you are most pleased with in this way? Is it your good health and strength? But truly nothing is more frail. It is proved by the fatigue you suffer from even little things. The various maladies to which the body is liable; the stings of insects; a slight draught of air, and a thousand other such small vexations all tell the same tale. Will you perchance be taken in by your own good-looking face, and when you behold in the glass your smooth complexion and comely features are you minded to be smitten, entranced, charmed? The story of Narcissus has no warning for you, and, content with gazing only at the outward envelope of the body, you consider not that the eyes of the mind tell you how vile and plain it is within. Moreover, if you had no other warning, the stormy course of life itself, which every day robs you of something, ought to show you how transient and perishing that flower of beauty is. And if, perhaps, which you will hardly dare affirm, you fancy yourself invincible by age, by illness, and whatever else may change the grace of bodily form, you have at least not forgotten that Last Enemy which destroys all, and you will do well to engrave in your inmost heart and mind this word of the satirist-- "'Tis death alone compels us all to see What little things we are."[5] Here, unless I am mistaken, are the causes that inflate your mind with pride, forbid you to recognise your low estate, and keep you from the recollection of death. But others there still are that I now propose to pass in review. _Petrarch._ Stop a little, I beg you, lest, overwhelmed by the weight of so many reproaches, I have no strength or spirit to reply. _S. Augustine._ By all means say on. Gladly will I hold my peace. _Petrarch._ You have astonished me not a little by casting in my teeth a multitude of things of which I am perfectly sure they have never entered my head at all. You allege that I trusted in my own intelligence. But surely the one sign I have given of possessing some little intelligence is that never have I counted on that faculty at all. Shall I pride myself on much reading of books, which with a little wisdom has brought me a thousand anxieties? How can you say I have sought the glory of eloquence, I, who, as you yourself acknowledged a moment ago, am wont above all things to complain that speech is inadequate to my thoughts? Unless you wish to try and prove the contrary, I may say that you know I am always conscious of my own littleness, and that if by chance I have ever thought myself to be anything, such a thought has come but rarely and then only from seeing the ignorance of other men; for, as I often remark, we are reduced to acknowledge, according to Cicero's celebrated phrase, that "what powers we may possess come rather from the feebleness of others than from any merit in ourselves." But even were I endowed as richly as you imagine with those advantages of which you speak, what is there so magnificent about them that I should be vain? I am surely not so forgetful of myself nor so feather-brained as to let myself trouble about cares of that sort. For what use in the world are intellect, knowledge, eloquence, if they can bring no healing to a soul diseased? I remember having given expression already in one of my letters to my sad sense of this truth. As to what you remarked with an air of quasi gravity about my physical advantages, I must confess it makes me smile. That I of all men should be thought to have plumed myself on my mortal and perishing body, when every day of my life I feel in it the ravages of time at work! Heaven save me from such folly! I will not deny that in the days of my youth I took some care to trim my head and to adorn my face; but the taste for that kind of thing has gone with my early years, and I recognise now the truth of that saying of the Emperor Domitian who, writing of himself in a letter to a lady friend, and complaining of the too swift decay of the goodliness of man, said, "Know you that nothing is so sweet, but nothing also is so fleeting, as the beauty of the body."[6] _S. Augustine._ It would be an easy task to refute all you have advanced, but I prefer that your own conscience should send the shaft of shame to your heart rather than words of mine. I will not labour the point or draw the truth from you by torture; but as those who take revenge magnanimously, I will merely prefer a simple request that you will continue to avoid what you profess you have hitherto avoided. If by any chance the fashion of your countenance should at any time have stirred the least motion of conceit, then I beg you to reflect what soon those bodily members must become, though now they please your eye: think how their destiny is to be foul and hideous, and what repulsion they would cause even in yourself were you able to see them then. Then call often to mind this maxim of the Philosopher: "I was born for some higher destiny than to be the slave of my body."[7] Assuredly it is the very climax of folly to see men neglect their real selves in order to cosset the body and limbs in which they dwell. If a man is imprisoned for a little while in some dungeon, dark, damp, and dirty, would he not seem to have lost his senses if he did not shield himself as far as he was able from any contact with the walls and soil? And with the expectation of freedom would he not eagerly listen for the footsteps of his deliverer? But if giving up that expectation, covered with filth and plunged in darkness, he dreads to leave his prison; if he turns all his attention to painting and adorning the walls which shut him in, in a vain endeavour to counteract the nature of his dripping prison-house, will he not rightly be counted a wretched fool? Well, you yourself know and love your prison-house, wretched that you are! And on the very eve of your issuing or being dragged therefrom you chain yourself more firmly in it, labouring to adorn what you ought to despise, if you would follow the advice you yourself had tendered to the father of the great Scipio in your poem called _Africa._ "The bonds and fetters known and suffered long, The clogs on liberty are hateful to us, And the new freedom now attained we love."[8] Wonderful is it if you made others give the counsel which you yourself refuse! But I cannot disguise from you one word in your discourse which to you may seem very humble, but to me seems full of pride and arrogance. _Petrarch._ I am sorry if I have in any way expressed myself arrogantly, but if the spirit is the true rule of one's deeds and words, then my own bears me witness that I intended nothing in that sense. _S. Augustine._ To depreciate others is a kind of pride more intolerable than to exalt oneself above one's due measure; I would much rather see you exalt others and then put yourself above them than degrade all the world in a heap at your feet, and by a refinement of pride fashion for yourself a shield of humanity out of scorn for your neighbour. _Petrarch._ Take it how you will, I profess but small esteem either for others or myself. I am ashamed to tell you what experience has made me think of the majority of mankind. _S. Augustine_. It is very prudent to despise oneself; but it is very dangerous and very useless to despise others. However, let us proceed. Are you aware of what still makes you turn from the right way? _Petrarch._ Pray say anything you like, only do not accuse me of envy. _S. Augustine_. Please God may pride have done you as little hurt as envy! So far as I judge, you have escaped this sin, but I have others whereof to accuse you. _Petrarch_. Still you will not vex me whatever reproaches you may bring. Tell me freely everything that leads me astray. _S. Augustine._ The desire of things temporal. _Petrarch._ Come, come! I truly have never heard anything so absurd. _S. Augustine._ There! you see everything vexes you. You have forgotten your promise. This is not, however, any question of envy. _Petrarch._ No, but of cupidity, and I do not believe there is a man in the world more free of this fault than myself. _S. Augustine._ You are great at self-justification, but, believe me, you are not so clear of this fault as you think you are. _Petrarch._ What? do you mean to say that I, I am not free from the reproach of cupidity? _S. Augustine._ I do, and that you are likewise guilty of ambition. _Petrarch._ Go on, ill-treat me more still, double your reproaches, make full proof of your work of an accuser. I wonder what fresh blow you have in store for me. _S. Augustine._ What is mere truth and right testimony you call accusation and ill-treatment. The satirist was quite right who wrote-- "To speak the truth to men is to accuse."[9] And the saying of the comic poet is equally true-- "'Tis flattery makes friends and candour foes."[10] But tell me, pray, what is the use of this irritation and anger that makes you so on edge? Was it necessary in a life so short to weave such long hopes? "Have no long hopes! life's shortness cries to man."[11] You read that often enough but take no count of it. You will reply, I suppose, that you do this from a tender solicitude for your friends, and so find a fair pretext for your error; but what madness it is, under pretext of friendship to others, to declare war on yourself and treat yourself as an enemy. _Petrarch._ I am neither covetous nor inhuman enough to be without solicitude for my friends, especially for those whose virtue or deserts attach me to them, for it is those whom I admire, revere, love, and compassionate; but, on the other hand, I do not pretend to be generous enough to court my own ruin for the sake of my friends. What I desire is so to manage my affairs as to have a decent subsistence while I live; and as you have delivered a shot at me from Horace, let me also from the same poet put up a shield in self-defence and profess my desire is the same as his,-- "Let me have books and stores for one year hence, Nor make my life one flutter of suspense!"[12] And further how I shape my course so that I may in the same poet's words-- "Pass my old age and not my honour lose, And, if I may, still serve the lyric Muse."[13] Let me own also that I dread very much the rocks ahead if life should be prolonged, and so would provide beforehand for this double wish of mine to blend with my work for the Muses some simpler occupation in household affairs. But this I do with such indifference that it is plain enough I only descend to such necessities because I am so obliged. _Augustine._ I see clearly how these pretexts texts which serve as an excuse for your folly have penetrated deeply into your very spirit. How is it, then, you have not engraved equally deeply in your heart the words of the satirist-- "Why keep such hoarded gold to vex the mind? Why should such madness still delude mankind? To scrape through life on water and dry bread That you may have a fortune when you're dead?"[14] Undoubtedly it is more because you think that it is a fine thing to die in a winding-sheet of purple, and rest in a marble tomb, and leave to your heirs the business of disputing over a great succession, than that you yourself care for the money which wins such advantages. It is a futile trouble, believe me, and quite devoid of good sense. If you will steadily observe human nature, you will discover that in a general way it is content with very little, and, in your case particularly, there is hardly a man who needs less for his satisfaction, unless you had been blinded by prejudices. Doubtless the poet was thinking of the average run of men, or possibly his own actual self, when he said-- "My sorry fare is dogwood fruit; I pluck Wild herbs and roots that in the fields do grow, And a few berries."[15] But, unlike him, you will acknowledge yourself that such a mode of life is far from sorry, and that in fact nothing would be pleasanter if you were to consult only your own taste and not the customs of a deluded world. Why, then, continue to torment yourself? If you order your life as your nature dictates, you were rich long ago, but you never will be able to be rich if you follow the standard of the world; you will always think something wanting, and in 'rushing after it you will find yourself swept away by your passion. Do you remember with what delight you used to wander in the depth of the country? Sometimes, laying yourself down on a bed of turf, you would listen to the water of a brook murmuring over the stones; at another time, seated on some open hill, you would let your eye wander freely over the plain stretched at your feet; at others, again, you enjoyed a sweet slumber beneath the shady trees of some valley in the noontide heat, and revelled in the delicious silence. Never idle, in your soul you would ponder over some high meditation, with only the Muses for your friends--you were never less alone than when in their company, and then, like the old man in Virgil who reckoned himself "As rich askings, when, at the close of day, Home to his cot he took his happy way, And on his table spread his simple fare, Fresh from the meadow without cost or care,"[16] you would come at sunset back to your humble roof; and, contented with your good things, did you not find yourself the richest and happiest of mortal men? _Petrarch._ Ah, well-a-day! I recall it all now, and the remembrance of that time makes me sigh with regret. _S. Augustine._ Why--why do you speak of sighing? And who, pray, is the author of your woes? It is, indeed, your own spirit and none other which too long has not dared to follow the true law of its nature, and has thought itself a prisoner only because it would not break its chain. Even now it is dragging you along like a runaway horse, and unless you tighten the rein it will rush you to destruction. Ever since you grew tired of your leafy trees, of your simple way of life, and society of country people, egged on by cupidity, you have plunged once more into the midst of the tumultuous life of cities. I read in your face and speech what a happy and peaceful life you lived; for what miseries have you not endured since then? Too rebellious against the teachings of experience, you still hesitate! It is without a doubt the bonds of your own sins that keep you back, and God allows that, as you passed your childhood under a harsh muster, so, though you once became free, you have again fallen into bondage, and there will end your miserable old age. Verily, I was at your side once, when, quite young, unstained by avarice or ambition, you gave promise of becoming a great man; now, alas, having quite changed your character, the nearer you get to the end of your journey the more you trouble yourself about provisions for the way. What remains then but that you will be found, when the day comes for you to die--and it may be even now at hand, and certainly cannot be any great way off--you will be found, I say, still hungering after gold, poring half-dead over the calendar? For those anxious cares, which increase day after day, must by necessity at last have grown to a huge figure and a prodigious amount. _Petrarch_. Well, after all, if I foresee the poverty of old age, and gather some provision against that time of weariness, what is there so much to find fault with? _S. Augustine._ Ah! ludicrous anxiety and tragic neglect, to worry and trouble yourself about a time at which you may never arrive and in which you assuredly will not have long to stay, and yet to be quite oblivious of that end at which you cannot help arriving, and of which there is no remedy when you once have reached it. But such is your execrable habit--to care for what's temporal, and be careless for all that's eternal. As for this delusion of providing a shield against old age, no doubt what put it into your head was the verse in Virgil which speaks of "The ant who dreads a destitute old age."[17] And so you have made an ant your mentor and you are as excusable as the satiric poet who wrote-- "Some people, like the ant, fear hunger and cold,"[18] but if you are going to put no limit to the following of ants, you will discover that there is nothing more melancholy and nothing more absurd than to ward off poverty one day by loading yourself with it all your days. _Petrarch._ What will you say next! Do you counsel me to court Poverty? I have no longing for it, but I will bear it with courage if Fortune, who delights to overturn human affairs, reduces me to it. _S. Augustine._ My opinion is that in every condition man should aim at the golden mean. I would not then restrict you to the rules of those who say, "All that is needed for man's life is bread and water; with these none is poor; whosoever desires no more than these will rival in felicity the Father of the Gods."[19] No, I do not tie man's life down to dry bread and water; such maxims are as extreme as they are troublesome and odious to listen to. Also, in regard to your infirmity, what I enjoin is not to over-indulge natural appetite, but to control it. What you already have would be sufficient for your wants if you had known how to be sufficient to yourself. But as it is you are yourself the cause of your own poverty. To heap up riches is to heap up cares and anxieties. This truth has been proved so continually that there is no need to bring more arguments. What a strange delusion, what a melancholy blindness of the soul of man, whose nature is so noble, whose birth is from above, that it will neglect all that is lofty and debase itself to care for the metals of the earth. Every time you have been drawn by these hooks of cupidity you come down from your high meditations to these grovelling thoughts, and do you not feel each time as if hurled from heaven to earth, from the bosom of the stars to a bottomless pit of blackness? _Petrarch_. Yes; in truth, I feel it, and one knows not how to express what I have suffered in my fall. _S. Augustine_. Why, then, are you not afraid of a danger you have so often experienced? And when you were raised up to the higher life, why did you not attach yourself to it more firmly? _Petrarch_. I make all the efforts I can to do so; but inasmuch as the various exigencies of our human lot shake and unsettle me, I am torn away in spite of myself. It is not without reason, I imagine, that the poets of antiquity dedicated the double peaks of Parnassus to two different divinities. They desired to beg from Apollo, whom they called the god of Genius, the interior resources of the mind, and from Bacchus a plentiful supply of external goods, way of regarding it is suggested to me not only by the teaching of experience, but by the frequent testimony of wise men whom I need not quote to you. Moreover, although the plurality of deities may be ridiculous, this opinion of the Poets is not devoid of common sense. And in referring a like twofold supplication to the one God from whom all good comes down, I do not think I can be called unreasonable, unless indeed you hold otherwise. _S. Augustine_. I deny not you are right in your view, but the poor way you divide your time stirs my indignation. You had already devoted your whole life to honourable work; if anything compelled you to spend any of your time on other occupations, you regarded it as lost. But I now you only concede to what is Good and Beautiful the moments you can spare from avarice. Any man in the world would desire to reach old age on such terms as that; but what limit or check would be to such a state of mind? Choose for yourself some defined goal, and when you have attained it, then stay there and breathe awhile. Doubtless you know that the saying I am about to quote is from lips of man, but has all the force of a divine oracle-- "The miser's voice for ever cries, Give, give; Then curb your lusts if you would wisely live."[20] _Petrarch._ Neither to want nor to abound, neither to command others or obey them--there you have my heart's wish. _S. Augustine_. Then you must drop your humanity and become God, if you would want nothing. Can you be ignorant that of all the creatures Man is the one that has most wants? _Petrarch_. Many a time have I heard that said, but I would still like to hear it afresh from your lips and lodge it in my remembrance. _S. Augustine._ Behold him naked and unformed, born in wailings and tears, comforted with a few drops of milk, trembling and crawling, needing the hand of another, fed and clothed from the beasts of the field, his body feeble, his spirit restless, subject to all kinds of sickness, the prey of passions innumerable, devoid of reason, joyful to-day, to-morrow sorrowful, in both full of agitation, incapable of mastering himself, unable to restrain his appetite, ignorant of what things are useful to him and in what proportion, knowing not how to control himself in meat or drink, forced with great labour to gain the food that other creatures find ready at their need, made dull with sleep, swollen with food, stupefied with drink, emaciated with watching, famished with hunger, parched with thirst, at once greedy and timid, disgusted with what he has, longing after what he has lost, discontented alike with past, present and future, full of pride in his misery, and aware of his frailty, baser than the vilest worms, his life is short, his days uncertain, his fate inevitable, since Death in a thousand forms is waiting for him at last. _Petrarch._ You have so piled up his miseries and beggary that I feel it were good if I had never been born. _S. Augustine._ Yet, in the midst of such wretchedness and such deep destitution of good in man's estate, you go on dreaming of riches and power such as neither emperors nor kings have ever fully enjoyed. _Petrarch_. Kindly tell me who ever made use of those words? Who spoke either of riches or of power? _S. Augustine._ You imply both, for what greater riches can there be than to lack nothing? What greater power than to be independent of every one else in the world? Certainly those kings and masters of the earth whom you think so rich have wanted a multitude of things. The generals of great armies depend on those whom they seem to command, and, kept in check by their armed legions, they find the very soldiers who render them invincible also render them in turn helpless. Give up, therefore, your dreams of the impossible, and be content to accept the lot of humanity; learn to live in want and in abundance, to command and to obey, without desiring, with those ideas of yours, to shake off the yoke of fortune that presses even on kings. You will only be free from this yoke when, caring not a straw for human passions, you bend your neck wholly to the rule of Virtue. Then you will be free, wanting nothing, then. you will be independent; in a word, then you will be a king, truly powerful and perfectly happy. _Petrarch_. Now I do indeed repent for all that is past, and I desire nothing. But I am still in bondage to one evil habit and am conscious always of a certain need at the bottom of my heart. _S. Augustine._ Well, to come back to our subject, there is the very thing which keeps you back from the contemplation of death. It is that which makes you harassed with earthly anxieties; you do not lift up your heart at all to higher things. If you will take my counsel you will utterly cast away these anxieties, which are as so many dead weights upon the spirit, and you will find that it is not so hard after all to order your life by your nature, and let that rule and govern you more than the foolish opinions of the crowd. _Petrarch_. I will do so very willingly, but may I ask you to finish what you were beginning to say about ambition, which I have long desired to hear? _S. Augustine_. Why ask me to do what you can quite well do for yourself? Examine your own heart; you will see that among its other faults it is not ambition which holds the least place there. _Petrarch._ It has profited me nothing then to have fled from towns whenever I could, to have thought scorn of the world and public affairs, to have gone into the recesses of the woods and silence of the fields, to have proved my aversion from empty honours, if still I am to be accused of ambition. _S. Augustine._ You renounce many things well,--all you mortal men; but not so much; because you despise them as because you despair of getting them. Hope and desire inflame each other by the mutual stings of those passions, so that when the one grows cold the other dies away, and when one gets warm the other boils over. _Petrarch._ Why, then, should I not hope? Was I quite destitute of any accomplishment? _S. Augustine._ I am not now speaking of your accomplishments, but certainly you had not those by help of which, especially in the present day, men mount to high places; I mean the art of ingratiating yourself in the palaces of the great, the trick of flattery, deceit, promising, lying, pretending, dissembling, and putting up with all kinds of slights and indignities. Devoid of these accomplishments and others of the kind, and seeing clearly that you could not overcome nature, you turned your steps elsewhere. And you acted wisely and with prudence, for, as Cicero expresses it, "to contend against the gods as did the giants, what is it but to make war with nature itself."[21] _Petrarch_. Farewell such honours as these, if they have to be sought by such means! _S. Augustine._ Your words are golden, but you have not convinced me of your innocence, for you do not assert your indifference to honours so much as to the vexations their pursuit involves, like the man who pretended he did not want to see Rome because he really would not endure the trouble of the journey thither. Observe, you have not yet desisted from the pursuit of honour, as you seem to believe and as you try to persuade me. But leave off trying to hide behind your finger, as the saying goes; all your thoughts, all your actions are plain before my eyes: and when you boast of having fled from cities and become enamoured of the woods, I see no real excuse, but only a shifting of your culpability. We travel many ways to the same end, and, believe me, though you have left the road worn by feet of the crowd, you still direct your feet by a side-path towards this same ambition that you say you have thought scorn of; it is repose, solitude, a total disregard of human affairs, yes, and your own activities also, which just at present take you along that chosen path, but the end and object is glory. _Petrarch_. You drive me into a corner whence I think, however, I could manage to escape; but, as the time is short and we must discriminate between many things, let us proceed, if you have no objection. _S. Augustine_. Follow me, then, as I go forward. We will say nothing of gourmandising, for which you have no more inclination than a harmless pleasure in an occasional meeting with a few friends at the hospitable board. But I have no fear for you on this score, for when the country has regained its denizen, now snatched away to the towns, these temptations will disappear in a moment; and I have noticed, and have pleasure in acknowledging, that when you are alone you live in such a simple way as to surpass your friends and neighbours in frugality and temperance. I leave on one side anger also, though you often get carried away by it more than is reasonable, yet at the same time, thanks to your sweet natural temperament, you commonly control the motions of your spirit, and recall the advice of Horace-- "Anger's a kind of madness, though not long; Master the passion, since it's very strong; And, if you rule it not, it will rule you, So put the curb on quickly."[22] _Petrarch._ That saying of the poet, and other words of philosophy like it, have helped me a little, I own; but what has helped me above all is the thought of the shortness of life. What insensate folly to spend in hating and hurting our fellow-men the few days we pass among them! Soon enough the last day of all will arrive, which will quite extinguish this flame in human breasts and put an end to all our hatred, and if we have desired for any of them nothing worse than death, our evil wish will soon be fulfilled. Why, then, seek to take one's life or that of others? Why let pass unused the better part of a time so short? When the days are hardly long enough for honest joys of this life, and for meditating on that which is to come, no matter what economy of time we practise, what good is there in robbing any of them of their right and needful use, and turning them to instruments of sorrow and death for ourselves and others? This reflection has helped me, when I found myself under any temptation to anger, not to fall utterly under its dominion, or if I fell has helped me quickly to recover; but hitherto I have not been able quite to arm myself at all points from some little gusts of irritation. _S. Augustine._ As I am not afraid that this wind of anger will cause you to make shipwreck of yourself or others, I agree willingly that without paying attention to the promises of the Stoics, who set out to extirpate root and branch all the maladies of the soul, you content yourself with the milder treatment of the Peripatetics. Leaving, then, on one side for the moment these particular failings, I hasten to treat of others more dangerous than these and against which you will need to be on guard with more care. _Petrarch_. Gracious Heaven, what is yet to come that is more dangerous still? _S. Augustine._ Well, has the sin of lust never touched you with its flames? _Petrarch_. Yes, indeed, at times so fiercely us to make me mourn sorely that I was not born without feelings. I would sooner have been a senseless stone than be tormented by so many stings of the flesh. _S. Augustine_. Ah, there is that which turns you most aside from the thought of things divine. For what does the doctrine of the heavenly Plato show but that the soul must separate itself far from the passion of the flesh and tread down its imaginings before it can rise pure and free to the contemplation of the mystery of the Divine; for otherwise the thought of its mortality will make it cling to those seducing charms. You know what I mean, and you have learned this truth in Plato's writings, to the study of which you said not long ago you had given yourself up with ardour. _Petrarch_. Yes, I own I had given myself to studying him with great hopefulness and desire, but the novelty of a strange language and the sudden departure of my teacher cut short my purpose.[23] For the rest this doctrine of which you speak is very well known to me from your own writings and those of the Platonists. _S. Augustine._ It matters little from whom you learned the truth, though it is a fact that the authority of a great master will often have a profound influence. _Petrarch._ Yes, in my own case I must confess I feel profoundly the influence of a man of whom Cicero in his _Tusculan Orations_ made this remark, which has remained graven in the bottom of my heart: "When Plato vouchsafes not to bring forward any proof (you see what deference I pay him), his mere authority would make me yield consent."[24] Often in reflecting on this heavenly genius it has appeared to me an injustice when the disciples of Pythagoras dispense their chief from submitting proofs, that Plato should be supposed to have less liberty than he. But, not to be carried away from our subject, authority, reason and experience alike have for a long time so much commended this axiom of Plato to me that I do not believe anything more true or more truly holy could be said by any man. Every time I have raised myself up, thanks to the hand of God stretched out to me, I have recognised with infinite joy, beyond belief, who it was that then preserved me and who had cast me down in times of old. Now that I am once more fallen into my old misery, I feel with a keen sense of bitterness that failing which again has undone me. And this I tell you, that you may see nothing strange in my saying I had put Plato's maxim to the proof. _S. Augustine._ Indeed, I think it not strange, for I have been witness of your conflicts; I have seen you fall and then once again rise up, and now that you are down once more I determined from pity to bring you my succour. _Petrarch._ I am grateful for your compassionate feeling, but of what avail is any human succour? _S. Augustine._ It avails nothing, but the succour of God is much every way. None can be chaste except God give him the grace of chastity.[25] You must therefore implore this grace from Him above all, with humbleness, and often it may be with tears. He is wont never to deny him who asks as he should. _Petrarch_. So often have I done it that I fear I am as one too importunate. _S. Augustine_. But you have not asked with due humbleness or singleness of heart. You have ever kept a corner for your passions to creep in; you have always asked that your prayers may be granted presently. I speak from experience, for I did likewise in my old life. I said, "Give me chastity, but not now. Put it off a little while; the time will soon come. My life is still in all its vigour; let it follow its own course, obey its natural laws; it will feel it more of a shame later, to return to its youthful folly. I will give up this failing when the course of time itself shall have rendered me less inclined that way, and when satiety will have delivered me from the fear of going back."[26] In talking thus do you not perceive that you prayed for one thing but wished another in your heart? _Petrarch_. How so? _S. Augustine._ Because to ask for a thing to-morrow is to put it aside for to-day. _Petrarch._ With tears have I often asked for it to-day. My hope was that after breaking the chain of my passions and casting away the misery of life, I should escape safe and sound, and after so many storms of vain anxieties, I might swim ashore in some haven of safety; but you see, alas, how many shipwrecks I have suffered among the same rocks and shoals, and how I shall still suffer more if I am left to myself. _S. Augustine._ Trust me, there has always been something wanting in your prayer; otherwise the Supreme Giver would have granted it or, as in the case of the Apostle, would have only denied you to make you more perfect in virtue and convince you entirely of your own frailty.[27] _Petrarch._ That is my conviction also; and I will go on praying constantly, unwearied, unashamed, undespairing. The Almighty, taking pity on my sorrows, will perchance lend an ear to my prayer, sent up daily to His throne, and even as He would not have denied His grace if my prayers had been pure, so He will also purify them. _S. Augustine._ You are quite right, but redouble your efforts; and, as men wounded and fallen in battle raise themselves on their elbow, so do you keep a look out on all sides for the dangers that beset you, for fear that some foe; unseen come near and do you hurt yet more, where you lie on the ground. In the mean time, pray instantly for the aid of Him who is able to raise you up again. He will perchance be nearer to you just then when you think Him furthest off. Keep ever in mind that saying of Plato we were speaking of just now, "Nothing so much hinders the knowledge of the Divine as lust and the burning desire of carnal passion." Ponder well, therefore, this doctrine; it is the very basis of our purpose that we have in hand. _Petrarch._ To let you see how much I welcome this teaching, I have treasured it with earnest care, not only when it dwells in the court of Plato's royal demesne, but also where it lurks hidden in the forests of other writers, and I have kept note in my memory of the very place where it was first perceived by my mind. _S. Augustine._ I wonder what is your meaning. Do you mind being more explicit? _Petrarch._ You know Virgil: you remember through what dangers he makes his hero pass in that last awful night of the sack of Troy? _S. Augustine._ Yes, it is a topic repeated over and over again in all the schools. He makes him recount his adventures thus-- "What tongue could tell the horrors of that night, Paint all the forms of death, or who have tears Enough to weep so many wretched wights? Hath the great city that so long was queen Fallen at last? Behold in all the streets The bodies of the dead by thousands strewn, And in their homes and on the temple's steps! Yet is there other blood than that of Troy, What time her vanquished heroes gathering up Their quenchless courage smite anon their foes, They, though triumphant, fall. Everywhere grief, Dread everywhere, and in all places Death!"[28] _Petrarch._ Now wherever he wandered accompanied by the goddess of Love, through crowding foes, through burning fire, he could not discern, though his eyes were open, the wrath of the angered gods, and so long as Venus was speaking to him he only had understanding for things of earth. But as soon as she left him you remember what happened; he immediately beheld the frowning faces of the deities, and recognised what dangers beset him round about. "Then I beheld the awe-inspiring form Of gods in anger for the fall of Troy."[29] From which my conclusion is that commerce with Venus takes away the vision of the Divine. _S. Augustine._ Among the clouds themselves you have clearly discerned the light of truth. It is in this way that truth abides in the fictions of the poets, and one perceives it shining out through the crevices of their thought. But, as we shall have to return to this question later on, let us reserve what we have to say for the end of our discourse. _Petrarch._ That I may not get lost in tracks unknown to me, may I ask when you propose to return to this point? _S. Augustine._ I have not yet probed the deepest wounds of your soul, and I have purposely deferred to do so, in order that, coming at the end, my counsels may be more deeply graven in your remembrance. In another dialogue we will treat more fully of the subject of the desires of the flesh, on which we have just now lightly touched. _Petrarch._ Go on, then, now as you proposed. _S. Augustine._ Yes, there need be nothing to hinder me, unless you are obstinately bent on stopping me. _Petrarch._ Indeed, nothing will please me better than to banish for ever every cause of dispute from the earth. I have never engaged in disputation, even on things perfectly familiar, without regretting it; for the contentions that arise, even between friends, have a certain character of sharpness and hostility contrary to the laws of friendship. But pass on to those matters in which you think I shall welcome your good counsel. _S. Augustine._ You are the victim of a terrible plague of the soul--melancholy; which the moderns call _accidie_, but which in old days used to be called _ægritudo._ _Petrarch._ The very name of this complaint makes me shudder. _S. Augustine._ Nor do I wonder, for you have endured its burden long enough. _Petrarch._ Yes, and though in almost all other diseases which torment me there is mingled a certain false delight, in this wretched state everything is harsh, gloomy, frightful. The way to despair is for ever open, and everything goads one's miserable soul to self-destruction. Moreover, while other passions attack me only in bouts, which, though frequent, are but short and for a moment, this one usually has invested me so closely that it clings to and tortures me for whole days and nights together. In such times I take no pleasure in the light of day, I see nothing, I am as one plunged in the darkness of hell itself, and seem to endure death in its most cruel form. But what one may call the climax of the misery is, that I so feed upon my tears and sufferings with a morbid attraction that I can only be rescued from it by main force and in despite of myself. _S. Augustine._ So well do you know your symptoms, so familiar are you become with their cause, that I beg you will tell me what is it that depresses you most at the present hour? Is it the general course of human affairs? Is it some physical trouble, or some disgrace of fortune in men's eyes? _Petrarch._ It is no one of these separately. Had I only been challenged to single combat, I would certainly have come off victorious; but now, as it is, I am besieged by a whole host of enemies. _S. Augustine_. I pray you will tell me fully all that torments you. _Petrarch._ Every time that fortune pushes me back one step, I stand firm and courageous, recalling to myself that often before I have been struck in the same way and yet have come off conqueror; if, after that, she presently deals me a sterner blow, I begin to stagger somewhat; if then she returns to the charge a third and fourth time, driven by force, I retreat, not hurriedly but step by step, to the citadel of Reason. If fortune still lays siege to me there with all her troops, and if, to reduce me to surrender, she piles up the sorrows of our human lot, the remembrance of my old miseries and the dread of evils yet to come, then, at lost, hemmed in on all sides, seized with terror at these heaped-up calamities, I bemoan my wretched fate, and feel rising in my very soul this bitter disdain of life. Picture to yourself some one beset with countless enemies, with no hope of escape or of pity, with no comfort anywhere, with every one and everything against him; his foes bring up their batteries, they mine the very ground beneath his feet, the towers are already falling, the ladders are at the gates, the grappling-hooks are fastened to the walls, the fire is seen crackling through the roofs, and, at sight of those gleaming swords on every side, those fierce faces of his foes, and that utter ruin that is upon him, how should he not be utterly dismayed and overwhelmed, since, even if life itself should be left, yet to men not quite bereft of every feeling the loss of liberty alone is a mortal stroke? _S. Augustine._ Although your confession is a little confused, I make out that your misfortunes all proceed from a single false conception which has in the past claimed and in futuro will still claim innumerable victims. You have a bad conceit of yourself. _Petrarch._ Yes, truly, a very bad one. _S. Augustine._ And why? _Petrarch._ Not for one, but a thousand reasons. _S. Augustine._ You are like people who on the slightest offence rake up all the old grounds of quarrel they ever had. _Petrarch._ In my case there is no wound old enough for it to have been effaced and forgotten: my sufferings are all quite fresh, and if anything by chance were made better through time, Fortune has so soon redoubled her strokes that the open wound has never been perfectly healed over. I cannot, moreover, rid myself of that hate and disdain of our life which I spoke of. Oppressed with that, I cannot but be grieved and sorrowful exceedingly. That you call this grief _accidie_ or _ægritudo_ makes no difference; in substance we mean one and the same thing. _S. Augustine._ As from what I can understand the evil is so deep-seated, it will do no good to heal it slightly, for it will soon throw out more shoots. It must be entirely rooted up. Yet I know not where to begin, so many complications alarm me. But to make the task of dividing the matter easier, I will examine each point in detail. Tell me, then, what is it that has hurt you most? _Petrarch_. Whatever I see, or hear, or feel. _S. Augustine._ Come, come, does nothing please you? _Petrarch_. Nothing, or almost nothing. _S. Augustine._ Would to God that at least the better things in your life might be dear, to you. But tell me what is it that is to you the most displeasing of all? I beg you give me an answer. _Petrarch._ I have already answered. _S. Augustine._ It is this melancholy I spoke of which is the true cause of all your displeasure with yourself. _Petrarch._ I am just as displeased with what I see in others as with what I see in myself. _S. Augustine._ That too comes from the same source. But to get a little order into our discourse, does what you see in yourself truly displease you as much as you say? _Petrarch._ Stop worrying me with your petty questions, that are more than I know how to reply to. _S. Augustine._ I see, then, that those things which make many other people envy you are nevertheless in your own eyes of no account at all? _Petrarch._ Any one who envies a wretch like me must indeed himself be wretched. _S. Augustine._ But now please tell me what is it that most displeases you? _Petrarch._ I am sure I do not know. _S. Augustine._ If I guess right will you acknowledge it? _Petrarch._ Yes, I will, quite freely. _S. Augustine._ You are vexed with Fortune. _Petrarch._ And am I not right to hate her? Proud, violent, blind, she makes a mock of mankind. _S. Augustine._ It is an idle complaint. Let us look now at your own troubles. If I prove you have complained unjustly, will you consent to retract? _Petrarch._ You will find it very hard to convince me. If, however, you prove me in the wrong, I will give in. _S. Augustine._ You find that Fortune is to you too unkind. _Petrarch_. Not too unkind; too unjust, too proud, too cruel. _S. Augustine_. The comic poets have more than one comedy called "The Grumbler." There are scores of them. And now you are making yourself one of the crowd. I should rather find you in more select company. But as this subject is so very threadbare that no one can add anything new on it, will you allow me to offer you an old remedy for an old complaint? _Petrarch_. As you wish. _S. Augustine_. Well then, has poverty yet made you endure hunger and thirst and cold? _Petrarch_. No, Fortune has not yet brought me to this pass. _S. Augustine._ Yet such is the hard lot of a great many people every day of their lives. Is it not? _Petrarch_. Use some other remedy than this if you can, for this brings me no relief. I am not one of those who in their own misfortunes rejoice to behold the crowd of other wretched ones who sob around them; and not seldom I mourn as much for the griefs of others as for my own. _S. Augustine_. I wish no man to rejoice in witnessing the misfortunes of others, but they ought at any rate to give him some consolation, and teach him not to complain of his own lot. All the world cannot possibly occupy the first and best place. How could there be any first unless there was also a second following after? Only be thankful, you mortal men, if you are not reduced to the last of all; and that of so many blows of outrageous Fortune you only bear her milder strokes. For the rest, to those who are doomed to endure the extremes of misery, one must offer more potent remedies than you have need of whom Fortune has wounded but a little. That which casts men down into these doleful moods is that each one, forgetting his own condition, dreams of the highest place, and, like every one else, as I just now pointed out, cannot possibly attain it; then when he fails he is discontented. If they only knew the sorrows that attend on greatness they would recoil from that which they now pursue. Let me call as witnesses those who by dint of toil have reached the pinnacle, and who no sooner have arrived than they forthwith bewail the too easy accomplishment of their wish. This truth should be familiar to every one, and especially to you, to whom long experience has shown that the summit of rank, surrounded as it is with trouble and anxieties, is only deserving of pity. It follows that no earthly lot of man is free from complaint, since those who have attained what they desire and those who have missed it alike show some reason for discontent. The first allege they have been cheated, and the second that they have suffered neglect. Take Seneca's advice then, "When you see how many people are in front of you, think also how many are behind. If you would be reconciled with Providence and your own lot in life, think of all those you have surpassed;" and as the same wise man says in the same place, "Set a goal to your desires such as you cannot overleap, even if you wish." _Petrarch._ I have long ago set such a goal to my desires, and, unless I am mistaken, a very modest one; but in the pushing and shameless manners of my time, what place is left for modesty, which men now call slackness or sloth? _S. Augustine._ Can your peace of mind be disturbed by the opinion of the crowd, whose judgment is never true, who never call anything by its right name? But unless my recollection is at fault, you used to look down on their opinion. _Petrarch._ Never, believe me, did I despise it more than I do now. I care as much for what the crowd thinks of me as I care what I am thought of by the beasts of the field. _S. Augustine._ Well, then? _Petrarch._ What raises my spleen is that having, of all my contemporaries whom I know, the least exalted ambitions, not one of them has encountered so many difficulties as I have in the accomplishment of my desires. Most assuredly I never aspired to the highest place; I call the spirit of Truth as witness who judges us, who sees all, and who has always read my most secret thoughts. She knows very well that whenever after the manner of men I have gone over in my mind all the degrees and conditions of our human lot. I have never found in the highest place that tranquillity and serenity of soul which I place above all other goods; and for that matter, having a horror of a life full of disquiet and care, I have ever chosen, in my modest judgment, some middle position, and given, not lip-service, but the homage of my heart to that truth expressed by Horace-- "Whoso with little wealth will live content, Easy and free his days shall all be spent; His well-built house keeps out the winter wind, Too modest to excite an envious mind."[30] And I admire the reasons he gives in the same Ode not less than the sentiment itself. "The tallest trees most fear the tempest's might, The highest towers come down with most affright, The loftiest hills feel first the thunder smite." Alas! it is just the middle place that it has never been my lot to enjoy. _S. Augustine._ And what if that which you think is a middle position is in truth below you? What if as a matter of fact you have for a long while enjoyed a really middle place, enjoyed it abundantly? Nay, what if you have in truth left the middle far behind, and are become to a great many people a man more to be envied than despised? _Petrarch._ Well, if they think my lot one to be envied, I think the contrary. _S. Augustine._ Yes, your false opinion is precisely the cause of all your miseries, and especially of this last. As Cicero puts it, "You must flee Charybdis, with all hands to the oars, and sails as well!"[31] _Petrarch._ Whither can I flee? where direct my ship? In a word, what am I to think except what I see before my eyes? _S. Augustine._ You only see from side to side where your view is limited. If you look behind you will discover a countless throng coming after, and that you are somewhat nearer to the front rank than to that in the rear, but pride and stubbornness suffer you not to turn your gaze behind you. _Petrarch._ Nevertheless from time to time I have done so, and have noticed many people coming along behind. I have no cause to blush at my condition, but I complain of having so many cares. I deplore, if I may yet again make use of a phrase of Horace, that I must live "only from day to day."[32] As to this restlessness of which I have suffered more than enough, I gladly subscribe to what the same poet says in the same place. "What prayers are mine? O may I yet possess The goods I have, or, if heaven pleases, less! Let the few years that Fate may grant me still Be all my own, not held at others' will."[33] Always in a state of suspense, always uncertain of the future, Fortune's favours have no attraction for me. Up to now, as you see, I have lived always in dependence on others; it is the bitterest cup of all. May heaven grant me some peace in what is left of my old age, and that the mariner who has lived so long amid the stormy waves may die in port! _S. Augustine._ So then in this great whirlpool of human affairs, amid so many vicissitudes, with the future all dark before you; in a word, placed as you are at the caprice of Fortune, you will be the only one of so many millions of mankind who shall live a life exempt from care! Look what you are asking for, O mortal man! look what you demand! As for that complaint you have brought forward of never having lived a life of your own, what it really amounts to is not that you have lived in poverty, but more or less in subservience. I admit, as you say, that it is a thing very troublesome. However, if you look around you will find very few men who have lived a life of their own. Those whom one counts most happy, and for whom numbers of others live their lives, bear witness by the constancy of their vigils and their toils that they themselves are living for others. To quote you a striking instance, Julius Cæsar, of whom some one has reported this true but arrogant saying, "The human race only lives for a small number,"[34] Julius Cæsar, after he had subdued the human race to live for himself alone, did himself live for other people. Perhaps you will ask me for whom did he live? and I reply, for those who slew him--for Brutus, Cimber, and other traitorous heads of that conspiracy, for whom his inexhaustible munificence proved too small to satisfy their rapacity. _Petrarch_. I must admit you have brought me to my senses, and I will never any more complain either of my obligations to others or of my poverty. _S. Augustine._ Complain rather of your want of wisdom, for it is this alone that can obtain for you liberty and true riches. For the rest, the man who quietly endures to go without the cause of those good effects, and then makes complaint of not having them, cannot truly be said to have any intelligent understanding of either the cause or the effects. But now tell me what is it that makes you suffer, apart from what we have been speaking of? Is it any weakness of health or any secret trouble? _Petrarch_. I confess that my body has always been a burden every time I think of myself; but when I cast my eyes on the unwieldiness of other people's bodies, I acknowledge that I have a fairly obedient slave. I would to Heaven I could say as much of my soul, but I am afraid that in it there is what is more than a match for me. _S. Augustine_. May it please God to bring that also under the rule of reason. But to come back to your body, of what do you complain? _Petrarch._ Of that of which most other people also complain. I charge it with being mortal, with implicating me in its sufferings, loading me with its burdens, asking me to sleep when my soul is awake, and subjecting me to other human necessities which it would be tedious to go through. _S. Augustine._ Calm yourself, I entreat you, and remember you are a man. Presently your agitation will cease. If any other thing troubles you, tell me. _Petrarch._ Have you never heard how cruelly Fortune used me? This stepdame, who in a single day with her ruthless hand laid low all my hopes, all my resources, my family and home?[35] _S. Augustine._ I see your tears are running down, and I pass on. The present is not the time for instruction, but only for giving warning; let, then, this simple one suffice. If you consider, in truth, not the disasters of private families only, but the ruins also of empires from the beginning of history, with which; you are so well acquainted; and if you call to mind the tragedies you have read, you will not perhaps be so sorely offended when you see your own humble roof brought to nought along with so many palaces of kings. Now pray go on, for these few warning words will open to you a field for long meditation. _Petrarch._ Who shall find words to utter my daily disgust for this place where I live, in the most melancholy and disorderly of towns,[36] the narrow and obscure sink of the earth, where all the filth of the world is collected? What brush could depict the nauseating spectacle --streets full of disease and infection, dirty pigs and snarling dogs, the noise of cart-wheels grinding against the walls, four-horse chariots coming dashing down at every cross-road, the motley crew of people, swarms of vile beggars side by side with the flaunting luxury of the wealthy, the one crushed down in sordid misery, the others debauched with pleasure and riot; and then the medley of characters--such diverse rôles in life--the endless clamour of their confused voices, as the passers-by jostle one another in the streets? All this destroys the soul accustomed to any better kind of life, banishes all serenity from a generous heart, and quite upsets the student's habit of mind. So my prayers to God are earnest as well as frequent that he would save my barque from imminent wreck, for whenever I look around I seem to myself to be going down alive into the pit. "Now," I say in mockery, "now betake yourself to noble thoughts "-- "Now go and meditate the tuneful lyre."[37] S. _Augustine._ That line of Horace makes me realise what most afflicts you. You lament having lighted on a place so unfavourable for study, for as the same poet says-- "Bards fly from town, and haunt the wood and glade."[38] And you yourself have expressed the same truth in other words-- "The leafy forests charm the sacred Muse, And bards the noisy life of towns refuse."[39] If, however, the tumult of your mind within should once learn to calm itself down, believe me this din and bustle around you, though it will strike upon your senses, will not touch your soul. Not to repeat what you have been long well aware of, you have Seneca's letter[40] on this subject, and it is very much to the point. You have your own work also on "Tranquillity of Soul"; you have beside, for combating this mental malady, an excellent book of Cicero's which sums up the discussions of the third day in his _Tusculan Orations_, and is dedicated to Brutus.[41] _Petrarch._ You know I have read all that work and with great attention. _S. Augustine_. And have you got no help from it? _Petrarch._ Well, yes, at the time of reading, much help; but no sooner is the book from my hands than all my feeling for it vanishes. _S. Augustine._ This way of reading is become common now; there is such a mob of lettered men, a detestable herd, who have spread themselves everywhere and make long discussions in the schools on the art of life, which they put in practice little enough. But if you would only make notes of the chief points in what you read you would then gather the fruit of your reading. _Petrarch._ What kind of notes? _S. Augustine._ Whenever you read a book and meet with any wholesome maxims by which you feel your spirit stirred or enthralled, do not trust merely to the resources of your wits, but make a point of learning them by heart and making them quite familiar by meditating on them, as the doctors do with their experiments, so that no matter when or where some urgent case of illness arises, you have the remedy written, so to speak, in your head. For in the maladies of the soul, as in those of the body, there are some in which delay is fatal, so that if you defer the remedy you take away all hope of a cure. Who is not aware, for instance, that certain impulses of the soul are so swift and strong that, unless reason checks the passion from which they arise, they whelm in destruction the soul and body and the whole man, so that a tardy remedy is a useless one? Anger, in my judgment, is a case in point. It is not for nothing that, by those who have divided the soul into three parts, anger has been placed below the seat of reason, and reason set in the head of man as in a citadel, anger in the heart, and desire lower still in the loins. They wished to show that reason was ever ready to repress instantly the violent outbreaks of the passions beneath her, and was empowered in some way from her lofty estate to sound the retreat. As this check was more necessary in the case of anger, it has been placed directly under reason's control. _Petrarch._ Yes, and rightly; and to show you I have found this truth not only in the works of Philosophers but also in the Poets, by that fury of winds that Virgil describes hidden in deep caves, by his mountains piled up, and by his King Æolus sitting above, who rules them with his power, I have often thought he may have meant to denote anger and the other passions of the soul which seethe at the bottom of our heart, and which, unless controlled by the curb of reason, would in their furious haste, as he says, drag us in their train and sweep us over sea and land and the very sky itself.[42] In effect, he has given us to understand he means by the earth our bodily frame; by the sea, the water through which it lives; and by the depths of the sky, the soul that has its dwelling in a place remote, and of which elsewhere he says that its essence is formed out of a divine fire.[43] It is as though he said that these passions will hurl body, soul, and man himself into the abyss. On the other side, these mountains and this King sitting on high--what can they mean but the head placed on high where reason is enthroned? These are Virgil's words-- "There, in a cave profound, King Æolus Holds in the tempests and the noisy wind, Which there he prisons fast. Those angry thralls Rage at their barrier, and the mountain side Roars with their dreadful noise, but he on top Sits high enthroned, his sceptre in his hand."[44] So writes the Poet. As I carefully study every word, I have heard with my ears the fury, the rage, the roar of the winds; I have heard the trembling of the mountain and the din. Notice how well it all applies to the tempest of anger. And, on the other hand, I have heard the King, sitting on his high place, his sceptre grasped in his hand, subduing, binding in chains, and imprisoning those rebel blasts,--who can doubt that with equal appropriateness this applies to the Reason? However, lest any one should miss the truth that all this refers to the soul and the wrath that vexes it, you see he adds the line-- "And calms their passion and allays their wrath."[45] _S. Augustine_. I cannot but applaud that meaning which I understand you find hidden in the poet's story, familiar as it is to you; for whether Virgil had this in mind when writing, or whether without any such idea he only meant to depict a storm at sea and nothing else, what you have said about the rush of anger and the authority of reason seems to me expressed with equal wit and truth. But to resume the thread of our discourse, take notice in your reading if you find anything dealing with anger or other passions of the soul, and especially with this plague of melancholy, of which we have been speaking at some length. When you come to any passages that seem to you useful, put marks against them, which may serve as hooks to hold them fast in your remembrance, lest otherwise they might be taking wings to flee away. By this contrivance you will be able to stand firm against all the passions, and not least against sorrow of heart, which, like some pestilential cloud utterly destroys the seeds of virtue and all the fruits of understanding, and is, in the elegant phrase of Cicero-- "The fount and head of all miseries."[46] Assuredly if you look carefully at the lives of others as well as your own, and reflect that there is hardly a man without many causes of grief in his life, and if you except that one just and salutary ground, the recollection of your own sins--always supposing it is not suffered to drive you to despair--then you will come to acknowledge that Heaven has assigned to you many gifts that are for you a ground of consolation and joy, side by side with that multitude of things of which you murmur and complain. As for your complaint that you have not had any life of your own and the vexation you feel in the tumultuous life of cities, you will find no small consolation in reflecting that the same complaint has been made by greater men than yourself, and that if you have of your own free will fallen into this labyrinth, so you can of your own free will make your escape. If not, yet in time your ears will grow so used to the noise of the crowd that it will seem to you as pleasant as the murmur of a falling stream. Or, as I have already hinted, you will find the same result easily if you will but first calm down the tumult of your imagination, for a soul serene and tranquil in itself fears not the coming of any shadow from without and is deaf to all the thunder of the world. And so, like a man on dry land and out of danger, you will look upon the shipwreck of others, and from your quiet haven hear the cries of those wrestling, with the waves, and though you will be moved with tender compassion by that sight, yet even that will be the measure also of your own thankfulness and joy at being in safety. And ere long I am sure you will banish and drive away all the melancholy that has oppressed your soul. _Petrarch_. Although not a few things rather give me a twinge, and especially your notion that it is quite easy and depends only on myself to get away from towns, yet, as you have on many points got the better of me in reasoning, I will here lay down my arms ere I am quite overthrown. _S. Augustine_. Do you feel able, then, now to cast off your sorrow and be more reconciled to your fortune? _Petrarch_. Yes, I am able, supposing always that there is any such thing as fortune at all. For I notice the two Greek and Latin Poets are so little of one mind on this point that the one has not deigned to mention the word even once in all his works, whereas the other mentions the name of fortune often and even reckons her Almighty.[47] And this opinion is shared by a celebrated historian and famous orator. Sallust has said of fortune that "all things are under her dominion."[48] And Cicero has not scrupled to affirm that "she is the mistress; of human affairs."[49] For myself, perhaps I will declare what I think on the subject at some other time and place. But so far as concerns the matter of our discussion, your admonitions have been of such service to me, that when I compare my lot with that of most other men it no longer seems so unhappy to me as once it did. _S. Augustine_. I am glad indeed to have been of any service to you, and my desire is to do everything I can. But as our converse to-day has lasted a long while, are you willing that we should defer the rest for a third day, when we will bring it to a conclusion? _Petrarch._ With my whole heart I adore the very number three itself, not so much because the three Graces are contained in it, as because it is held to be nearest of kin to the Deity; which is not only the persuasion of yourself and other professors of the true faith, who place all your faith in the Trinity, but also that of Gentile philosophers who have a traditional use of the same number in worshipping their own deities. And my beloved Virgil seems to have been conversant with this when he wrote-- "Uneven number to the gods is dear."[50] For what goes before makes it clear that three is the number to which he alludes. I will therefore presently await from your hands the third part of this your threefold gift. [1] _Æneid_, viii. 385-86. [2] _De bonis et malis_, i. 3. [3] _Tusculan Orations_, ii. 15. But Cicero's words are more guarded, "_inops interdum._" [4] _Declamations_, i. [5] Juvenal, _Sat._ x. 172-73. [6] Suetonius Domitian, xviii. [7] Seneca, _Epist.,_ 65. [8] Scipio is speaking of the souls admitted to heaven, freed from the body. _Africa,_ i. 329. [9] Juvenal, i. 161 (not correctly quoted). [10] Terence L'Audrienne, 68. [11] Horace, _Odes_, i. 4, 15. [12] Horace, _Epist._ i. 18, 109. Conington's translation. [13] Horace, _Odes_, I. xxxi. 19, 20. [14] Juvenal, _Sat.,_ xiv. 135. [15] _Æneid,_ iii. 629. [16] _Georgics,_ iv. 132. [17] _Georgics_, i. 106. [18] Juvenal, vi. 361. [19] Seneca, _Epist.,_ xxv. [20] Horace, _Epist.,_ i. 2, 56. [21] _De Senectute,_ xi. [22] Horace, _Epist._ i. 2, 62-3. [23] Petrarch refers to a Calabrian monk who had begun giving him lessons in Greek, but left him on being appointed to a bishopric. [24] _Tusculan Orations,_ i. 21. [25] Wisdom, viii. 21. [26] _Cor_. xii. 9. [27] _Confessions_, viii. 7. [28] _Æneid_, ii. 361-9. [29] _Æneid_, ii. 622. [30] Horace, _Odes,_ xi. 10, 6-8. [31] _Tusculan Orations,_ iii. 11. [32] Horace, _Epist.,_ i. 18, 110. [33] Horace, _Epist.,_ i. 18, 106-8. [34] Lucian, 343. [35] He refers to the fact that his father was banished from Florence, and he himself was born in exile at Arezzo. [36] Avignon. [37] Horace, _Epist._, ii. 2, 76. [38] _Epist.,_ ii. 2, 77 (Conington). [39] Petrarch's _Epist.,_ ii. 2, 77. [40] Seneca's _Letters,_ lvi. [41] _Tusculan Orations,_ cxi. [42] _Æneid,_ i. 58. [43] _Ibid.,_ vi. 730. [44] _Ibid.,_ i. 52-57. [45] _Æneid_ i. 57. [46] _Tusculan Orations_, iv. 38. [47] _Æneid,_ viii. 334. [48] _Pro Marcello,_ ii. [49] _Catilina_, viii. [50] _Eclogue_, vii. 75. DIALOGUE THE THIRD PETRARCH--S. AUGUSTINE _S. Augustine_. Supposing that hitherto you have found some good from my words, I beg and implore you in what I have still to say to lend me a ready ear, and to put aside altogether the spirit of dispute and contradiction. _Petrarch._ You may be sure I will so do, for I feel that, owing to your good counsels, I have been set free from a large part of my distress, and am therefore the better disposed to listen to what you may still have to say. _S. Augustine._ I have not at all as yet touched upon the deep-seated wounds which are within, and I rather dread the task when I remember what debate and murmuring were caused by even the lightest allusion to them. But, on the other hand, I am not without hope that when you have rallied your strength, your spirit will more firmly bear without flinching a severer handling of the trouble. _Petrarch._ Have no fear on that score. By this time I am used to hearing the name of my maladies and to bearing the touch of the surgeon's hand. _S. Augustine_. Well, you are still held in bondage, on your right hand and on your left, by two strong chains which will not suffer you to turn your thoughts to meditate on life or on death. I have always dreaded these might bring you to destruction; and I am not yet at all reassured, and I shall only be so when I have seen you break and cast away your bonds and come forth perfectly free. And this I think possible but difficult enough to achieve, and that until it is accomplished I shall only be moving in a futile round. They say that to break a diamond one must use the blood of a goat, and in the same way to soften the hardness of these kinds of passions, this blood is of strange efficacy. No sooner has it touched even the hardest heart but it breaks and penetrates it. But I will tell you what my fear is. In this matter I must have your own full assent as we proceed, and I am haunted by the fear you will not be able, or perhaps I should say will prove unwilling, to give it. I greatly dread lest the glittering brilliance of your chains may dazzle your eyes and hinder you, and make you like the miser bound in prison with fetters of gold, who wished greatly to be set free but was not willing to break his chains. Now such are the conditions of your own bondage that you can only gain your freedom by breaking your chains. _Petrarch_. Alas, alas, I am more wretched than I thought. Do you mean to tell me my soul is still bound by two chains of which I am unconscious? _S. Augustine_. All the same they are plain enough to see; but, dazzled by their beauty, you think they are not fetters but treasures; and, to keep to the same figure, you are like some one who, with hands and feet fast bound in shackles of gold, should look at them with delight and not see at all that they are shackles. Yes, you yourself with blinded eyes keep looking at your bonds; but, oh strange delusion! you are charmed with the very chains that are dragging you to your death, and, what is most sad of all, you glory in them! _Petrarch._ What may these chains be of which you speak? _S. Augustine._ Love and glory. _Petrarch._ Great Heavens! what is this I hear? You call these things chains? And you would break them from me, if I would let you? _S. Augustine._ Yes, I mean to try, but I doubt if I shall succeed. All the other things that held you back were less strong and also less pleasant to you, so you helped me to break them. These, on the contrary, are pleasant though they injure, and they deceive you by a false show of beauty; so they will demand greater efforts, for you will make resistance as if I were wishing to rob you of some great good. Nevertheless I mean to try. _Petrarch._ Pray what have I done that you should desire to relieve me of the finest passions of my nature, and condemn to everlasting darkness the clearest faculties of my soul? _S. Augustine._ Ah, unhappy man, have you forgotten quite this axiom of philosophy, that the climax of all evils is when a man, rooted in some false opinion, by degrees grows fatally persuaded that such and such a course is right? _Petrarch._ I have by no means forgotten that axiom, but it has nothing to do with the subject, for why in the world should I not think that the course which I indicated is right? No, I never have thought and I never shall think any truth more indisputable than that these two passions, which you cast at me as a reproach, are the very noblest of all. _Augustine._ Let us take them separately for the present, while I endeavour to find the remedies, so that I may not blunt the edge of my weapon by striking first at one and then the other indiscriminately. Tell me then, since we have first mentioned love, do you or do you not hold it to be the height of all madness? _Petrarch._ To tell you the whole truth as I conceive it, I judge that love may be either described as the vilest passion or the noblest action of the soul. _S. Augustine._ Do you mind giving me some example to confirm the view you have put forward? _Petrarch._ If my passion is for some low woman of ill fame, my love is the height of folly. But if, fascinated by one who is the image of virtue, I devote myself to love and honour her, what have you to say to that? Do you put no difference between things so entirely opposed? Do you wish to banish all remains of honour from the case? To tell you my real feeling, just as I regard the first kind of love as a heavy and ill-starred burden on the soul, so of the second I think there is hardly any greater blessing to it; if it so happen that you hold an opposite view, let each one follow his own feeling, for, as you are well aware, truth is a large field and every man should have freedom to judge for himself. _S. Augustine_. In matters directly contradictory opinions also may be diverse. But truth itself is one and always the same. _Petrarch_. I admit that is so. But what makes us go wrong is that we bind ourselves obstinately to old opinions, and will not easily part from them. _S. Augustine._ Heaven grant you may think as wisely on the whole matter of love as you do on this point. _Petrarch_. To speak briefly, I think I am so certainly right that those who think the opposite I believe to be quite out of their senses. _S. Augustine_. I should certainly maintain that to take for truth some ancient falsehood, and to take as falsehood some newly-discovered truth, as though all authority for truth were a matter of time, is the very climax of madness. _Petrarch._ You are wasting your labour. Whoever asserts that view of love I shall never believe him. And I will rest on Cicero's saying, "If I err here I err willingly, and I shall never consent to part with this error as long as I live."[1] _S. Augustine._ When Cicero uses those words he is speaking of the immortality of the soul, and referring to it as the noblest of conceptions, and declaring his own belief in it to be so firm that he would not endure to listen to any one who maintained the contrary. You, however, to urge the ignoblest and most false of all opinions, make use of those same terms. Unquestionably, even if the soul were mortal, it would be better to think it immortal. For error though it were, yet would it inspire the love of virtue, and that is a thing to be desired for its own sake alone, even if all hope of future reward were taken away from us; and as to which the desire for it will certainly become weaker, as men come to think the soul a mortal thing; and, on the other hand, the promise of a life to come, even if it were to turn out a delusion, is none the less a powerful incentive to the soul, human nature being what it is. But you see what will be the consequences of that error in which you stand; it will precipitate your soul into all manner of folly, when shame, and fear, even reason, that now acts as some check on passion, and the knowledge of truth itself shall all have disappeared. _Petrarch._ I have already told you you were wasting your time. My own remembrance tells mo that I have never loved anything to be ashamed of, and, on the contrary, have ever loved what is most noble. _S. Augustine._ Even noble things may be loved in a shameful way; it is beyond doubt. _Petrarch._ Neither in the object of love nor in the manner of loving am I guilty. So you may as well give up tormenting me. _S. Augustine._ Well, well! Do you wish, like those with fever on the brain, to die laughing and joking? Or will you rather take some remedy for your mind so pitiable and so far from its true health? _Petrarch._ I will not refuse a remedy if you will prove to me that I am ill, but, when a man is quite well, to begin taking remedies is often fatal. _S. Augustine._ As soon as you have reached the stage of convalescence you will perceive quickly enough, as men generally do, that you have been seriously ill. _Petrarch._ After all, I cannot but show deference to one who often in the past, and especially in these last two days, has given me proof how good were his counsels. So please go on. _S. Augustine._ In the first place I ask you to forgive me if, compelled by the subject, I have to deal severely with what has been so delightful to you. For I cannot but foresee that the truth will sound bitterly in your ears. _Petrarch_. Just one word before you begin. Do you thoroughly know the matter you are to touch upon? _S. Augustine._ I have gone into it all carefully beforehand. It is about a mortal woman, in admiring and celebrating whom you have, alas! spent a large part of your life. That a mind like yours should have felt such an insensate passion and for so long a time does greatly astonish me. _Petrarch_. Spare your reproaches, I pray. Thais and Livia were both mortal women; but you should be aware that she of whom you have set out to speak is a mind that has no care for things of earth, and burns only with the love of what is heavenly. In whose face, unless truth is an empty word, a certain divine loveliness shines out; whose character is the image and picture of perfect honour; whose voice and the living expression of whose eyes has nothing mortal in it; whose very form and motion is not as that of others. Consider this again and again, I entreat you, and I trust you may have understanding in what words to speak. _S. Augustine._ Ah! out of all reason have you grown! Have you then for sixteen long years been feeding: with false joys this flame of your heart? Of a truth not longer did Italy once suffer the assaults of her most famous enemy, the great Hannibal; nor did she then endure more frequent onsets of her would-be lover, nor was consumed with more furious fires. You to-day carry within you as hot a flame of passion, you endure as fierce stings. Yet was there found one who forced him to retreat and, though late, to take his leave! But who shall expel this invader from your soul if you yourself forbid him to depart; if you of your own will invite him to stay long with you; if you, unhappy as you are, delight in your own calamity? Far other will be your thoughts when the fatal day shall come that will close for ever those eyes that are now so pleasing to you to look upon; when you shall see that face and those pale limbs changed by death; then you will be filled with shame to have so knit your mortal affections to a perishing body such as this, and what now you so obstinately maintain you will then blush to remember. _Petrarch_. Heaven forbid any such misery. I shall not see your threats fulfilled. _S. Augustine_. They will inevitably come to pass. _Petrarch_. I know it. But the stars in their courses will not so fight against me as to prevent the order of Nature by hastening her death like that. First came I into this world and I shall be first to depart. _S. Augustine._ I think you will not have forgotten that time when you feared the contrary event, and made a song of your beloved as if she were presently to die, a song full of moving sorrow. _Petrarch._ Certainly I remember very well, but the thought that filled me then with grief, and the memory of which makes me shiver, was a jealous indignation at the bare possibility of my outliving her who is the best part of my life and whose presence makes all its sweetness. For that is the motive of that song; I remember it well, and how I was overcome with tears. Its spirit is still with me, if with you perchance are the words. _S. Augustine._ I was not complaining how many tears the fear of her death made you shed, nor of how much grief you felt. I was only concerned that you should realise how this fear of yours in the past may certainly return; and more easily, in that every day is a step nearer to death, and that that fair form, worn by sicknesses and the bearing of many children, has already lost much of its first strength. _Petrarch._ I also am borne down with cares and am worn with age, and in that onward path towards death I have outrun her whom I love. _S. Augustine._ What folly it is to calculate the order of death by that of birth! For what are those sad lamentations of the old but because of the early deaths of their young children? What is it that yonder aged nurse is grieving over but that she sees the loss of her little nursling-- "Whom some dark day Has stripped of his sweet life; and cruel fate Snatched from his mother's breast and covered him In a too early grave."[2] In your own case the small number of years by which you have preceded her gives you a very uncertain hope that you will be gone before the fire of your passion shall be extinguished; and yet you indulge the fiction that this order of Nature is unchangeable. _Petrarch_. Not exactly unchangeable, but I pray without ceasing that it may not be changed, and whenever I think of death I remember Ovid's line-- "Late may her time arrive, and after mine."[3] _S. Augustine._ I can listen to these trifles no more; but since you now admit that she may possibly die before you, I ask what should you say if she really were dead? _Petrarch_. What should I say but that such a calamity would be the climax of all my miseries? Yet I should try and comfort myself with what was past. But may the winds bear away the words from our lips and the hurricane scatter such an omen to the ends of the earth! _S. Augustine._ Ah, blindfold one! you see not yet what foolishness it is so to subject your soul to things of earth, that kindle in it the flames of desire, that have no power to give it rest, that cannot endure; and, while promising to charm you with their sweetness, torment you with perpetual agitations. _Petrarch_. If you have any more effectual remedy, I beg you will point it out. You will never frighten me with talk like this; for I am not, as you suppose, infatuated with any creature that is mortal. You might have known that I have loved her physical charm loss than her soul, that what has captivated me has been a life above that of ordinary lives, the witnessing of which has shown me how the blessed live above. Therefore, since you inquire of me (and the mere question is a torture to listen to) what I should do supposing she were to leave me and be the first to die--well, I should try and console myself in sorrow with Lælius, the wisest of the Romans. With him I should say, "It is her goodness that I loved and that is not dead;" and I would say to myself those other words that he pronounced after the death of him for whom he had conceived an affection surpassing all common affection.[4] _S. Augustine._ You retire to Error's inaccessible fastness, and it will not be easy to dislodge you. But as I notice you are inclined to listen much more patiently to the truth about yourself and her, sing the praises of your darling lady as much as you will, and I will gainsay nothing. Were she a queen, a saint-- "A very goddess, or to Apollo's self Own sister, or a mother of the nymphs,"[5] yet all her excellence will in nowise excuse your error. _Petrarch_. Let us see what fresh quarrel you seek with me? _S. Augustine._ It is unquestionably true that oftentimes the loveliest things are loved in a shameful way. _Petrarch._ I have already met that insinuation on a previous occasion. If any one could see the image of the love that reigns in my heart, he would recognise that there is no difference between it and that face that I have praised indeed much, but less by far than it deserves to be praised. I call to witness the spirit of Truth in whose presence we are speaking when I assert that in my love there has never been anything dishonourable, never anything of the flesh, never anything that any man could blame unless it were its mere intensity. And if you add that even so it never passed the line of right, I think a fairer thing could never be conceived. _S. Augustine._ I might reply to you with a word of Cicero and tell you, "You are talking of putting boundary lines in vice itself."[6] _Petrarch_. Not in vice, but in love. _S. Augustine_. But in that very passage he was speaking of love. Do you remember where it occurs? _Petrarch._ Do I remember indeed? Of course I have read it in the _Tusculans_. But he was speaking of men's common love; mine is one by itself. _S. Augustine._ Other people, I fancy, might say the same of theirs; for true it is that in all the passions, and most of all in this, every man interprets his own case favourably, and there is point in the verse though from a common poet-- "To every man his lady, Then one to me assign; To every man his love affairs, And so let me have mine!"[7] _Petrarch._ Would you like, if you have time, to hear me tell you a few of those many charms of hers that would strike you with astonishment and admiration? _S. Augustine._ Do you think I am ignorant of all "Those pleasant dreams that lovers use to weave"? Every schoolboy knows the line, but I confess I am ashamed to hear such silliness from the lips of one whose words and thoughts should seek a higher range. _Petrarch._ One thing I will not keep silence on,--call it silliness, call it gratitude, as you please,--namely, that to her I owe whatever I am, and I should never have attained such little renown and glory as I have unless she by the power of this love had quickened into life the feeble germ of virtue that Nature had sown in my heart. It was she who turned my youthful soul away from all that was base, who drew me as it were by a grappling chain, and forced me to look upwards. Why should you not believe it? It is a sure truth that by love we grow like what we love. Now there is no backbiter alive, let his tongue be as sharp as it may, that has ventured to touch her good name, or dared to say he had seen a single fault, I will not say in her conduct, but even in any one of her gestures or words. Moreover, those whisperers who leave no one's reputation untouched if they can help it, have been obliged in her, case to utter only reverence and respect. It is no wonder, then, if such a glory as hers should have fostered in my heart the longing for more conspicuous glory, and should have sweetened those hard toils which I had to endure if I would attain that which I desired. What were all the wishes of my youth but solely to please her who above all others had pleased me? And you are not ignorant that to gain my end I scorned delights a thousand times, I gave myself before my time to labour and to cares without number; and now you bid me forget or diminish somewhat of my love for her who first taught me how to escape the vulgar crowd, who guided all my steps, spurred on my lagging mind, and wakened into life my drowsy spirit. _S. Augustine._ Poor man! you would have done better to be silent than to speak, although even if you had been silent I should have discerned what you are within. But such stout words as these stir my indignation and anger. _Petrarch._ I wonder why? _S. Augustine._ To have a false opinion shows ignorance, but to keep on boldly proclaiming it shows pride as well as ignorance. _Petrarch_. Suppose you try and prove that what I think and say is false. _S. Augustine._ It is all false; and, first, what you say as to owing all you are to her. If you mean that she has made you what you are, there you certainly lie; but if you were to say that it is she. who has prevented you being any more than you are, you would speak the truth. O what long contention would you have been spared if by the charm of her beauty she had not held you back. What you are you owe to the bounty of Nature; what you might have been she has quite cut off, or rather let me say you yourself have cut it off, for she indeed is innocent. That beauty which seemed so charming and so sweet, through the burning flame of your desire, through the continual rain of your tears, has done away all that harvest that should have grown from the seeds of virtue in your soul. It is a false boast of yours that she has held you back from base things; from some perhaps she may, but only to plunge you into evils worse still. For if one leads you from some miry path to bring you to a precipice, or in lancing some small abscess cuts your throat, he deserves not the name of deliverer but assassin. Likewise she whom you hold up as your guide, though she drew you away from some base courses, has none the less overwhelmed you in a deep gulf of splendid ruin. As for her having taught you to look upwards and separate yourself from the vulgar crowd, what else is it than to say by sitting at her feet you became so infatuated with the charm of her above as to studiously neglect everything else? And in the common intercourse of human life what can be more injurious than that? when you say she has involved you in toils without number, there indeed you speak truth. But what great gain is there in that? When there are such varied labours that a man is perforce obliged to engage in, what madness is it of one's own accord to go after fresh ones! As for your boasting that it is she who has made you thirst for glory, I pity your delusion, for I will prove to you that of all the burdens of your soul there is none more fatal than this. But the time for this is not yet come. _Petrarch_. I believe the readiest of warriors first threatens and then strikes. I seem, however, to find threat and wound together. And already I begin to stagger. _S. Augustine_. How much more will you stagger when I deliver my sharpest thrust of all? Forsooth that woman to whom you profess you owe everything, she, even she, has been your ruin. _Petrarch._ Good Heavens! How do you think you will persuade me of that? _S. Augustine._ She has detached your mind from the love of heavenly things and has inclined your heart to love the creature more than the Creator: and that one path alone leads, sooner than any other, to death. _Petrarch._ I pray you make no rash judgment. The love which I feel for her has most certainly led me to love God. _S. Augustine._ But it has inverted the true order. _Petrarch._ How so? _S. Augustine._ Because 'every creature' should be dear to us because of our love for the Creator. But in your case, on the contrary, held captive by the charm of the creature, you have not loved the Creator as you ought. You have admired the Divine Artificer as though in all His works He had made nothing fairer than the object of your love, although in truth the beauty of the body should be reckoned last of all. _Petrarch._ I call Truth to witness as she stands here between us, and I take my conscience to witness also, as I said before, that the body. of my lady has been less dear to me than her soul. The proof of it is here, that the further she has advanced in age (which for the beauty of the body is a fatal thunderstroke) the more firm has been my admiration; for albeit the flower of her youth has withered visibly with time, the beauty of her soul has grown with the years, and as it was the beginning of my love for her, even so has it been its sustainer. Otherwise if it had been her bodily form which attracted me, it was, ere this, time to make a change. _S. Augustine._ Are you mocking me? Do you mean to assert that if the same soul had been lodged in a body ill-formed and poor to look upon, you would have taken equal delight therein? _Petrarch._ I dare not say that. For the soul itself cannot be discerned, and the image of a body like that would have given no indication of such a soul. But were it possible for the soul to be visible to my gaze, I should most certainly have loved its beauty even though its dwelling-place were poor. _S. Augustine._ You are relying on mere words; for if you are only able to love that which is visible to your gaze, then what you love is the bodily form. However, I deny not that her soul and her character have helped to feed your flame, for (as I will show you before long) her name alone has both little and much kindled your mad passion; for, as in all the affections of the soul, it happens most of all in this one that oftentimes a very little spark will light a great fire. _Petrarch._ I see where you would drive me. You want to make me say with Ovid-- "I love at once her body and her soul."[8] _S. Augustine._ Yes, and you ought to confess this also, that neither in one or the other case has your love been temperate or what it should be. _Petrarch._ You will have to put me to the torture ere I will make any such confession. _S. Augustine._ And you will allow that this love has also cast you into great miseries. _Petrarch._ Though you place me on the block itself, I will not acknowledge any such thing. _S. Augustine._ If you do not ignore my questions and conclusions, you will soon make both those confessions. Tell me, then, can you recall the years when you were a little child, or have the crowding cares of your present life blotted all that time out? _Petrarch._ My childhood and youth are as vividly before my eyes as if they were yesterday. _S. Augustine._ Do you remember, then, how in those times you had the fear of God, how you thought about Death, what love you had for Religion, how dear goodness and virtue were to you? _Petrarch._ Yes, I remember it all, and I am sorry when I see that as my years increased these virtues grew less and less in me. _S. Augustine._ For my part I have ever been afraid lest the wind of Spring should cut that early blossom off, which, if only it might be left whole and unhurt, would have produced a wondrous fruitage. _Petrarch._ Pray do not wander from the subject; for what has this to do with the question we were discussing? _S. Augustine._ I will tell you. Recall each step in your life, since your remembrance is so complete and fresh; recall all the course of your life, and recollect at what period this great change you speak of began. _Petrarch._ I have run over in my mind all the course and number of my years. _S. Augustine._ And what do you find? _Petrarch._ I see that the doctrine in the treatise of Pythagoras, of which I have heard tell and have read, is by no means void of truth. For when travelling the right road, still temperate and modest, I had reached the parting of the ways and had been bidden to turn to the right hand, whether from carelessness or perversity I know not, behold I turned to the left; and what I had read in my boyhood was of no profit to me-- "Here the ways part: the right will thee conduct To the walled palace of the mighty King And to Elysium, but the left will lead Where sin is punished and the malefactor Goes to his dreaded doom."[9] Although I had read of all this before, yet I understood it not until I found it by experience. Afterwards I went wrong, in this foul and crooked pathway, and often in mind went back with tears and sorrow, yet could not keep the right way; and it was when I left that way, yes, that was certainly the time when all this confusion in my life began. _S. Augustine_. And in what period of your age did this take place? _Petrarch._ About the middle of my growing youth. But if you give me a minute or two, I think I can recall the exact year when it took place. _S. Augustine_. I do not ask for the precise date, but tell me about when was it that you saw the form and feature of this woman for the first time? _Petrarch._ Never assuredly shall I forget that day. _S. Augustine._ Well now, put two and two together; compare the two dates. _Petrarch._ I must confess in truth they coincide. I first saw her and I turned from my right course at one and the same time. _S. Augustine._ That is all I wanted. You became infatuated. The unwonted dazzle blinded your eyes, so I believe. For they say the first effect of love is blindness. So one reads in the poet most conversant with Nature-- "At the first sight was that Sidonian dame Blinded," and then he adds presently-- "With love was Dido burning."[10] And though, as you well know, the story is but on ancient fable, yet did the Poet in making it follow the order of Nature. And when you had been struck blind by this meeting, if you chose the left-hand path it was because to you it seemed more broad and easy; for that to the right is steep and narrow, and of its hardship you were afraid. But that woman so renowned, whom you imagine as your most safe guide, wherefore did not she direct you upward, hesitating and trembling as you were? Why did she not take you by the hand as one does the blind, and set you in the way where you should walk? _Petrarch_. She certainly did so, as far as it was in her power. What but this was in her heart when, unmoved by my entreaties, unyielding to my caress, she safeguarded her woman's honour, and in spite of her youth and mine, in spite of a thousand circumstances that would have bent a heart of adamant, she stood her ground, resolute and unsubdued? Yes, this womanly soul taught me what should be the honour and duty of a man; and to preserve her chastity she did, as Seneca expresses it-- "What was to me at once an example and a reproach."[11] And at last, when she saw the reins of my chariot were broken and that I was rushing to the abyss, she chose rather to part from me than follow where I went. _S. Augustine_. Base desires, then, sometimes you felt, though not long since you denied it? But it is the common folly of lovers, let me say of mad folk. One may say of them all alike-- "I would not, yet I would; I would, yet would not."[12] You know not, any of you, what you want or what you want not. _Petrarch_. Without seeing, I fell into the snare. But if in past days my feelings were other than they are now, love and youth were the cause. Now I know what I wish and what I desire, and I have at last made firm my staggering soul. She for her part has ever been firm in her mind and always the same. The more I understand this woman's constancy, the more I admire it; and if sometimes I regretted her resolution, now I rejoice in it and give her thanks. _S. Augustine._ It is not easy to believe a man who has once taken you in. You may have changed the outside fashion of your life, but have not yet persuaded me that your soul is also changed. If your flame is calmed and softened somewhat, yet it is not for certain quite put out. But you who set such price on her you love, do you not see how deeply by absolving her you condemn yourself? You delight in seeing in her the model of purity, and you avow yourself to be without any feeling and a criminal; and you protest that she is the most happy of women, while her love has made you the most unhappy of men. If you remember, it is just what I said at the beginning. _Petrarch._ Yes, I remember. I cannot deny that what you say is true, and I see whither you are gradually leading me. _S. Augustine._ To see it better still, lend me all your attention. Nothing so much leads a man to forget or despise God as the love of things temporal, and most of all this passion that we call love; and to which, by the greatest of all desecrations, we even gave the name of God, without doubt only that we may throw a heavenly veil over our human follies and make a pretext of divine inspiration when we want to commit an enormous transgression. In the case of the other passions, the sight of the object, the hope of enjoying it, and the ardour of the will take us captive. Love also demands all that, but in addition it asks also a reciprocal passion, without which it will be forced to die away. So, whereas in the other cases one loves singly and alone, in this case we must give love for love, and thus man's heart is stung and stung again. Therefore, Cicero was right when he wrote that "Of all the passions of the soul, assuredly the most violent is love,"[13] and he must have been very certain of his ground when he added that "assuredly"--he who in four books shows he was aware how Plato's Academy doubted everything.[14] _Petrarch_. I have often noticed that reference, and wondered that of the passions he should call this the most violent of all. _S. Augustine._ Your surprise would have vanished if you had not lost your powers of memory. But I must recall you by a short admonition to a recollection of its many evils. Think what you were when that plague seized upon your soul; how suddenly you fell to bemoaning, and came to such a pitch of wretchedness that you felt a morbid pleasure in feeding on tears and sighs. Passing sleepless nights, and murmuring ever the name of your beloved, scorning everything, hating life, desiring death, with a melancholy love for being alone, avoiding all your fellow-men, one might well apply to you, for they exactly fit your case, the lines in which Homer describes Bellerophon-- "There in the pleasant fields he wandered sad, Eating his heart, far from the ways of men."[15] What meant that pale face and wasted figure? that flower of your age withering before its time, those heavy eyes, ever bathed in tears, your mind in a state of agitation, your broken rest and troubled moans, even when you were asleep? Why was your voice weak and altered through your sorrow of heart, and the very sound of your words, indistinct and broken, with whatever other token can be imagined, of a heart distressed and in disorder? Do you call these the signs of one in good health? Was it not this lady with whom for you every day, whether feast or fast, began and ended? Was it not at her coming the sun shone forth, and when she left you, night returned? Every change of her countenance brought a change in your heart; and if she were sad, you forthwith were filled with sadness. In a word, your life became wholly dependent upon hers. You know that I say but what is true and what is in every one's mouth. And what could be more senseless than that, not content with the presence of her living face, the cause of all your woes, you must needs obtain a painted picture by an artist[16] of high repute, that you might carry it everywhere with you, to have an everlasting spring of tears, fearing, I suppose, lest otherwise their fountain might dry up? Of all such things you were only too vigilant, and you neglected everything else. But to come to that which is the very crowning instance of your folly, and of which I gave you warning a little while ago, who could sufficiently utter his indignation and amazement at this sign of a distempered mind, that, infatuated as much by the beauty of her name as of her person, you have with perfectly incredible silliness paid honour to anything that has the remotest connection with that name itself? Had you any liking for the laurel of empire or of poetry, it was forsooth because the name they bore was hers; and from this time onwards there is hardly a verse from your pen but in it you have made mention of the laurel, as if indeed you were a denizen of Peneus' stream,[17] or some priest on Cirrha's[18] Mount. And finally, discovering that the laurel of empire was beyond your reach, you have, with as little self-restraint as you showed in the case of your beloved herself, now coveted the laurel of Poetry of which the merit of your works seemed to give more promise. Although to gain your reward you were borne up on the wings of genius, yet will you shudder to remember with what trouble you attained it. I clearly divine what excuse you will make, and I see your thought the moment you open your lips. You will allege that you were devoted to these studies some time before you became a lover at all, and that desire for the glory of the poet's crown had kindled your heart from childhood. I neither deny it or forget it; but the fact of the usage being obsolete for centuries, and this being an epoch very unfavourable for studies like yours, the dangers also of long voyages, which would have brought you to the threshold of prison and of death itself, not to mention other obstacles of fortune no less violent than those--all these difficulties, I say, would perhaps have broken your resolve entirely, if the remembrance of a name so sweet, always entwining itself with your inmost soul, had not banished every other care, and drawn you over sea, over land, across mountains of difficulty, to Rome and to Naples, where at length you attained what you had longed for with such ardour. If all this seems to you the token of but a moderate passion, then at least shall be quite certain you are the victim of the moderate delusion. I purposely leave out what Cicero was not ashamed to imitate from Terence when he wrote, "Wrongs, suspicions, fierce quarrels, jealousies, war, and then again peace--behold the miseries of love." Do you not recognise at once in his words the madness and, above all, the madness of jealousy which, as one knows too well, is the ruling power in love as love is the ruling passion among all others? Perhaps you may reply: "I admit it is so, but reason will be there to temper such excess." Terence himself had anticipated your answer when he added-- "Such fickle things to settle by sane rule Is to be sanely insane."[19] The phrase, the truth of which you will scarcely question, puts an end, unless I am mistaken, to all those subterfuges of yours. Such, then, are the miseries of love, the particulars of which it is needless to mention to those who have proved them, and which would not be believed by those who never tried. But the worst of them all, to come back to our subject, is that it engenders a forgetfulness of God and of man's real state. For how should the soul thus crushed beneath these weights ever arise to that one and only most pure fountain of true Good? And since it is so, you may lay aside your wonder that Cicero should tell us no passion of man's soul seemed to him more violent than love. _Petrarch_. I must own myself beaten; for it appears all you have said is taken from the very heart of the book of experience. And as you have quoted from the play of Terence, let me please myself by bringing from there also this sad complaint-- "O deed of shame! now am I foil of woe. Weary I burn with love; with open eyes, Brain clear, I am undone; and what to do I know not."[20] I would also call to mind this counsel from the same poet's words-- "Think, while there's time, again and yet again."[21] _S. Augustine._ And I likewise from the lips of Terence will give you my reply-- "What in itself contains no rule or reason, By rule or reason you can never hold."[22] _Petrarch._ What is to be done, then? Am I to despair? _S. Augustine._ That is the last thing in the world to do. However, let me briefly tell you the remedy I propose. You know that on this subject there are not only special treatises compiled by philosophers of eminence, but that some of the most famous poets have written on it whole books. It would be almost an insult to point out which they are, above all, to you who are a past-master in the whole field, or to offer any advice as to reading them; but perhaps I might say a word without offence to suggest in what way their study might be applied for your own welfare. First, then, notice what is said by Cicero-- "Some think that an old love can best be driven out by a new, as one nail is by another."[23] And Ovid agrees, giving this general rule-- "Old love affairs must always yield to new."[24] And without a doubt it is the truth, for the mind thus divided and parcelled out between different objects feels itself moved with less force towards each one. So the river Ganges, they tell us, was divided up by the Persian king into countless channels, and this river, that was so deep and formidable, was cut up into a thousand inconsiderable streamlets. And so an army, broken up and scattered, becomes vulnerable by the enemy; so Fire dispersed dies down; in a word, every power in the world, if concentrated, increases, but by dispersion is reduced. On the other hand, I think this is not to be overlooked, that there may be great danger when you lay aside a passion and, if one may say so, a passion of the nobler kind; you may, if you are not watchful, fall into dissipation of another sort, run after women and become a loose libertine. In my judgment, then, if one must die for certain, there is some consolation in dying of a nobler rather than a less noble wound. So if you ask my advice, it is this: Take your courage in both hands. Fly, if you possibly can; and I would even say, go from one prison to another; perchance you might escape by the way or else find a milder discipline to be under. Only beware, when your neck is freed from one such yoke as this, that you place it not under the weight of a crowd of more base and vile oppressions. _S. Petrarch._ While the doctor is finishing his advice, will he allow the patient, in the throes of his malady, to interrupt him for a minute? _Augustine._ Of course. Why not? Many a doctor, guided by the symptoms of his patient thus declared, has been able to find the very remedy he needed. _Petrarch._ Then what I want to say is just this: For me to love another is impossible. My mind has grown only to love her; my eyes to look only for her; excepting her, all to them is nothing, or is mere darkness. And so if your remedy is that in order to be healed of this love I should love another, your condition is an impossible one. In that case all is over, and I am lost. _S. Augustine._ Your senses are dulled, your appetite is lost; since then you can take no internal remedy, one must have recourse to other treatment and see what can be done by change of scene. Can you bring your mind to think of flight or exile and going right away from the places that you know? _Petrarch_. Though I feel that her attraction draws me to her with hooks of steel, nevertheless if I have to go, I can. _S. Augustine_. If you can, you will be safe. What else can I say, then, but this advice of Virgil's, changing only two little words-- "Ah! flee this land beloved, and leave behind shore to thee so dear."[25] For how can you continue in safety in these scenes where there are so many memories of your wounds, where things present and the memory of things past cling always to you? So that I say, as Cicero also advises, "Seek change of scene; take care to do as one does who is recovering from some illness."[26] _Petrarch_. Think of what you are prescribing. For how often and often, longing to get well, and familiar with advice like this, have I tried this remedy of flight; and though I have feigned various other reasons for it, yet the end and aim of all my peregrinations and all my retirement to the country was this one thing--to become free! For that I have wandered far away to the West, to the North, to the very confines of the ocean. Far and wide have I roamed. You see what good it has done me. And so Virgil's simile has many a time come home to my heart,-- "E'en as the stricken deer, that unaware Rooming afar in pleasant groves of Crete, The hunter pierces with his weapon keen. And she unknowing o'er Mount Dicte's side Flees wounded, and the fatal arrow cleaves To her poor side."[27] I am even as that deer. I have fled, but I bear everywhere my wound with me. _S. Augustine._ Yourself have given me the answer for which you look. _Petrarch._ How so? _S. Augustine_. Why, do you not see that if a man bears his wound with him, change of scone is but an aggravation of his pain and not a means of healing it? One might say your case is just that of the young man who complained to Socrates that he had been a tour and it had done him no good whatever. "You went touring with yourself,"[28] said the Sage. You must first break off the old load of your passions; you must make your soul ready. _Then_ you must fly. For it is proved to demonstration, not only in things physical but in moral also, that unless the patient is well disposed, the doctor's help is in vain. Otherwise were you to go to the far-off Indies, you will find that Horace only spoke truth when he said-- "Who cross the ocean making peace their goal, Change but their sky and cannot change their soul." Or thus-- "We come to this; when o'er the world we range, 'Tis but our climate, not our mind, we change."[29] _Petrarch_. I must say I cannot follow you. You give me a prescription to cure and heal my soul and tell me I must first heal it and then flee. Now, my difficulty is I do not know how to heal it. If it is cured, what more do I need? But if, again, it is not cured, what good will change of scene bring me? The help you offer me is useless. Tell me briefly what are the remedies I must use? _S. Augustine._ I did not say that you must cure and heal your soul. What I said was you must make it ready. As for the rest, either you will be cured, and the change of scene will then establish your health on a firm footing; or you will not yet be cured, but only made ready, and then the change of scene will have the same ultimate result. But, if your soul is neither cured nor made ready, this change and frequent moving from place to place will only stir up its grief. I will still advise you to take a leaf out of Horace's book-- "For if the cure of mental ills is due To sense and wisdom, not a fine sea view,"[30] --what he says is true. You will set out full of the hope and the wish to return, carrying along with you all that has ensnared your soul. In whatever place you are, to whatever side you turn, you will behold the face, you will hear the voice of her whom you have left. By that sad enchantment that belongs to lovers, you will have power to see her though you are absent, and to hear her though she is far away; and do you imagine that love is to be extinguished by subterfuges like this? Believe me, it will rather burn more fiercely. Those who call themselves masters in the art of love enjoin among their other maxims short absences one from another on the part of lovers, for fear they should become tired of seeing each other face to face or from their importunity. Therefore I advise, I recommend, I enjoin upon you that you learn to wholly sever your soul from that which weighs it down and go away without hope of return. You will discover then, but not before, what absence is able to do for the soul's healing. If fate had placed your lot in some unhealthy plague-stricken region where you were liable to constant illness, should you not flee from it never to return? And so I counsel you to do now, unless, as I much fear, men care more for their body than their soul. _Petrarch_. That is their affair. But undoubtedly if I found myself ill on account of the unhealthiness of the place I was in, I should choose for my recovery some place with a healthier climate, and I should act in the same way, and with stronger reasons still, in case of maladies of the soul. Yet, as far as I can see, the cure of these is a more difficult matter. _S. Augustine_. The united testimony of the greatest philosophers proves the falsity of that assertion. It is evident that all the maladies of the soul can be healed if only the patient puts no obstacle in the way, although many diseases of the body are incurable by any known means. For the rest, and not to go too far from our subject, I stick to my judgment. You must, as I said, make your soul ready, and teach it to renounce the object of its love, never once to turn back, never to see that which it was wont to look for. This is the only sure road for a lover; and if you wish to preserve your soul from ruin, this is what you must do. _Petrarch._ That you may see how perfectly I have learned all you have said, let me recapitulate that to go for change of scene is useless, unless the soul is first made ready; such journeys will cure it when made ready, and will establish it when once cured. Is not that the conclusion of your threefold precept? _S. Augustine._ Yes, it is precisely that, and you sum up very well what I have unfolded. _Petrarch._ I could have divined your two first truths by myself, without you pointing them out; but as for the third, that the soul, when it is cured and established in health, still needs absence, I do not understand it, unless it is the fear of a relapse that is the motive of what you say. _S. Augustine._ But you surely do not suppose that to be a slight point even in bodily health? And how much more grave a matter ought one to think it in regard to the soul, where a relapse is so much more rapid and dangerous. So I would say, let us refer once more to what seems one of the soundest remarks of Seneca, where in a letter he writes, "If any man wishes to have done with love he must avoid all recollection of the beloved form," and adds as his reason, "For nothing is so easily rekindled to life again as love."[31] O how true a saying is that, and from what profound experience of life is he speaking! But it is needless to call any other witness of this than your own knowledge will supply. _Petrarch._ Yes, I agree he speaks truth, but if you notice he is speaking not of one who already has done with love, but of one who wishes to have done with it. _S. Augustine_. He speaks of any man who is in danger. Any kind of blow is more dangerous if there is some wound before unhealed, or some disease not yet cured; and even afterwards it is not safe. And since we remember most, instances that have come home to us in our own experience, let me ask how often have you who speak to me not found yourself, as you went about these well-known spots, by their mere look, though no person met you, reminded of your former vanities; standing speechless, full of sighs, as you pace this town that has been, I will not say the cause, but at any rate the scene of all your evils; though before you came back to it you thought you were cured, and would have been to a very great extent if only you had remained away? And then with difficulty restraining your tears, half-wounded to death, you have fled, and cried to your own heart, "Here in these places I see at every turn the ambush of my ancient foe. The signs of death are ever about me!" So, then, were you healed already, if you would take counsel of me, I should say, "Do not stay long in this place. It is not wise for the prisoner who has broken his chains to go wandering round the prison gates, ever ready to take him in again, before which the jailer is ever on guard, laying his traps with special care to recapture those whose escape he regrets. "The downward path to hell is ever smooth, Its dismal gate is open night and day."[32] If precautions like these are needful for men in health, how much more are they in the case of those who have not yet shaken off their sickness. It is of the latter that Seneca was thinking when he wrote that maxim. He was giving counsel to those who were most in danger, for it was no use to speak of those whom the flame had already devoured and who were past all care for their safety. He addressed himself to those in another stage, who still felt the heat but tried to come forth of the flame. Many a sick man on the way to recovery has been thrown back by a draught of water which before his illness would have done him no harm; and often has one wearied out, with a long day's work, been knocked down by some trifling shake which when he was in his full strength would not have moved him at all. It needs but a trifle sometimes, when the soul is emerging from its miseries, to plunge it quite back once more into the abyss. To see the purple on the shoulders of another will rouse again all our sleeping ambition; the sight of a little pile of money sets up our thirst for gold; one look at some fair lady will stir again our desire; the light glance of an eye will awaken sleeping love. It is no wonder plagues like these take possession of your minds, when you see the madness of the world; and when once they have found their way back to the soul, they come with fatal ease. And since it is so, it is not enough merely to leave a plague-stricken spot, but you, O man, must keep on in your flight for life, till you have escaped everything that might drag the soul back to its old passions; for fear lest, when you return from the pit with Orpheus and look back, you lose your Eurydice once more. Such is the sum of my counsel. _Petrarch_. I accept it heartily and with thankfulness, for I feel that the remedy is suited to my wound. My intention is to fly, but I know not yet where lies the direction I should choose. _S. Augustine._ A thousand ways are open to you to make choice of on every side; a thousand ports are ready to receive you. I know that, more than to other lands, your heart turns to Italy, and that a love of your native soil is inborn in you; and you are right, for-- "Not Media's forests rich, nor Ganges' stream, Though fair it be, nor Hermus rolling gold, May vie with Italy; Bactria and Ind, And all Pachaia with its odours rare Shall not be mentioned."[33] I think you have yourself not long ago, in a letter to one of your friends,[34] treated this theme of the famous Poet at fuller length in a Latin poem. Italy then would be my choice for you; because the ways of its people, its climate, the sea washing its shores, the Apennine range coming between them, all promise that a sojourn there would be better suited to extirpate your troubles than going anywhere else in the world. I would not, however, wish to confine you only to one corner of the land. Go under good auspices wherever inclination may lead; go without fear and with a free mind; take no backward glances, forget the past and step forward to the future. See how long you have been a stranger to your own country and your own self. It is time to return, for-- "O now 'tis evening, and the night Is chiefly friend to thieves."[35] I warn you in words of your own. One further counsel I must urge which I had nearly forgotten. You must avoid solitude, until you are quite sure that you have not a trace of your old ailment left. You told me that a country life had done you no good. There is nothing surprising in that. What remedy were you likely to find in a place all lonely and remote? Let me confess that often when you were retreating thither all by yourself, sighing, and turning longing eyes back to the town, I have laughed heartily and said to myself: "What a blindfold fool love has made of this unhappy wight! and led him to quite forget the verse that every schoolboy knows, about flying from his trouble and finding his death." _Petrarch_. I am afraid you are right, but what are the lines to which you allude? _S. Augustine._ Ovid, of course. "Lover! whoe'er you be, dwell not alone; In solitude you're sure to be undone. You're safer in a crowd; the word is true, Lone woods are not the place for such as you."[36] _Petrarch_. Yes, I remember them perfectly, and knew them almost by heart from my childhood. _S. Augustine._ Much good has it done you to know so many things yet not know how to suit them to your need. When you not only know all the testimony of the ancients, but have yourself proved the evils of solitude, it astonishes me that you should commit such a blunder as to seek it. You have, in fact, often complained that there was no good in being alone. You have expressed it in a thousand places, and especially in the fine poem you composed on your own misfortune. The sweet accents of it charmed me while you were writing.[37] It surprised me to hear a song so harmonious arise from a soul so full of agitation, and come from the lips of a man so far out of his senses and I asked myself what power of love can stay the offended Muses from abandoning so dire a nest of troubles, and, scared by such aberration of mind in their host, forsaking utterly their wonted dwelling? I thought of words of Plato, "Let no man wholly sane knock at Poe try'd door," and then of Aristotle, who followed him and said, "All great genius has a touch of madness in it,"[38] but I remembered that in these sayings of theirs they were thinking of a frenzy far indeed removed from yours. However, we will return to this subject at some other time. _Petrarch_. I must fain own what you say is the truth; but I never thought to have made verses so harmonious as to be worth your praise and commendation. They will be all the dearer to me now that I know it. If you have other remedy to offer me, I beg you withhold it not from him who is in need. _S. Augustine_. To unfold all one knows is the act of a braggart more than of a wise friend. And remember that men did not invent all the sundry kinds of remedies, internal and external, for diverse kinds of sickness, on purpose that each and every one should be tried on every occasion; but that, as Seneca remarks to Lucilius, "Nothing is so contrary to the work of healing as a frequent change of remedy; and no wound will ever be healed perfectly, to which first one and then another medicine is continually applied. The true way is only to try the new when the old remedy has failed."[39] So, then, although the remedies for this kind of ailment are many and varied, I will content myself with only pointing out a few, and I will choose those which in my judgment will best suit your need. For indeed, I have no wish merely to show you what is new, but only to tell you, of all those which are known, what remedies, so far as I can judge, are most likely in your case to be efficacious. There are three things, as Cicero says, that will avert the mind of man from Love,--Satiety, Shamefastness, Reflection.[40] There may indeed be more; there may be less. But, to follow the steps of so great an authority, let us suppose there are three. It will be useless for me to speak of the first in your case, because you will judge it is impossible you should ever come to satiety of your love. But still if your passion will hear the voice of reason and judge the future from the past, you will readily agree that an object, even the most beloved, can produce, I do not say satiety only, but even weariness and disgust. Now, as I am quite sure I should be entering on a vain quest if I embark on this track, because, even if it were granted that satiety is a possible thing, and that it kills love, you will pretend that by the ardour of your passion you are a thousand leagues removed from any such possibility, and, as I am not at all disposed to deny it, what remains is for me to touch only upon the other two remedies that are left. You will not wish to dispute my assertion that Nature has endowed you with a certain power of reason, and also with some talent for forming a weighty judgment. _Petrarch._ Unless I am deceived by acting as judge in my own cause, what you say is so true that I am often inclined to fear I am too wanting in what is due both to my sex and this age; wherein, as you doubtless observe, everything goes to the shameless. Honours, prosperity, wealth--all these hold the field; and to these, virtue itself, nay even fortune, must give way.[41] _S. Augustine._ Do you not see what conflict there is between Love and Shamefastness? While the one urges the soul forward, the other holds it back; the one drives in the spur, the other pulls hard at the bridle; the one looks at nothing, the other watches carefully on every side. _Petrarch_. This is only too familiar to me, and I feel to my cost how distracted is my life by passions so contrary. They come upon me by turn, so that my poor spirit, tossed hither and thither, knows not which impulse to obey. _S. Augustine._ Do you mind telling me if you have looked in your glass lately? _Petrarch._ And, pray, what do you ask that question for? I have only done as usual. _S. Augustine._ Heaven grant you do it no oftener, neither with more self-complacency, than you should! Well, and have you not noticed that your face is changing from day to day, and that from time to time grey hairs begin to show themselves around your temples? _Petrarch._ Is that all? I thought you were about to ask me something out of the common; but to grow up, to grow old, to die is the common lot of all that are born. I have observed what befalls almost all my contemporaries; for nowadays men seem to age more quickly than they used to, though I know not why or wherefore. _S. Augustine._ The growing old of others will not give you back your youth, neither will their dying bring you immortality. So let us leave on one side everything else and return to your own case. Tell me; when you have noticed these signs of change in your body, has it not brought some change also in your soul? _Petrarch._ It has certainly made some impression on me, but not exactly a change. _S. Augustine._ What, then, were your thoughts, and what did you say to yourself? _Petrarch._ What would you have me say, except what was said by Domitian the Emperor, "With even mind I brook the sight of watching, though still young, my hairs grow grey."[42] So illustrious an example has consoled me for what grey hairs I too behold. And if I needed more, I brought to mind a king beside that emperor; I mean Numa Pompilius the Second, who, as the historian relates, had grey hair even from his youth. And Poetry as well as History comes to my aid, since in his Bucolics our own Virgil, writing when he was but five-and-twenty, speaking of himself in the person of a shepherd, exclaims-- "When now my whitening beard the razor knew."[43] _S. Augustine._ What vast abundance of examples you can command! Pray heaven you have as many recollections of your own death. For I praise not those exemplars that lead one to dissemble grey hairs which are the heralds of old age, and the _avant-couriers_ of Death. And good those examples are not, if their effect is to take you off the trouble of remembering how time flies, and to lead you to forget your own last hour; to the recollection of which the whole of my discourse is entirely and without ceasing directed. When I bid you think on your own whitening forehead, do you quote me a crowd of famous men whose locks were white also? What does it prove? Ah, if you were able to say these were immortal, then you might from their example put away the dread of your changing brow. If instead of mentioning greyness I had ventured to hint that you were getting bald, you would, I suppose, have thrown Julius Cæsar in my teeth! _Petrarch_. Certainly. What more illustrious example could I need? Now, unless I am mistaken, it is in fact a great comfort to find oneself surrounded by companions so famous. Yes, I will freely admit that I am not disposed for a moment to reject such examples, which are, for me, part of the luggage I carry daily in my mind; for it is a pleasure to me not only in such misfortunes as Nature or chance have already allotted me, but also in those which they may still have in store; it is a pleasure, I say, to have ever at hand such matter of comfort and consolation as I can obtain only from some truly cogent reason or outstanding example. If, then, you meant to reproach me for being afraid of thunder--a charge I could not deny (and one of the chief reasons why I love the laurel is because it is said that thunder will not strike this tree), then I shall reply to you that this was a weakness Cæsar Augustus shared; if you allege that I am getting blind (and there also you would be right), I should quote you Appius Cæcus and also Homer, the Prince of Poets; if you call me one-eyed, I will, shield myself behind Hannibal, the Punic leader, or Philip, King of Macedon; call me deaf, and Marcus Crassus shall be my defence; say I cannot stand the heat, and I will say I am but like Alexander, Prince of Macedonia. It were tedious to go through all the list; but after these you can judge who they would be. _S. Augustine._ Yes, perfectly. I am nowise displeased with your wealth of instances, provided it does not make you self-negligent and only serves to disperse the clouds of fear and sadness. I applaud anything that helps a man to face with courage the coming of old age, and keeps him from bewailing its presence when it has arrived. But I loathe and abominate profoundly everything that conceals from him the truth that old age is the port of departure from this life, and blinds him to the need of reflecting on death. To take with equanimity the going grey before one's time is the sign of a good natural disposition; but to try and interpose artificial checks, to cheat time of his years, to raise an outcry and declare grey hairs are come too soon, to begin dyeing or plucking them out, is a piece of folly, which, common as it may be, is none the less egregious for all that. You perceive not, O blind that you are, how swiftly the stars roll in their course, and how soon the flight of time consumes the space of your short life, and you marvel when you see old age coming on, hastening quickly the despatch of all your days. Two causes seem to foster this delusion. The first is that even the shortest life is partitioned out by some people into four, by others into six, and by others again into a still larger number of periods; that is to say, the reality is so small, and as you cannot make it longer, you think you will enlarge it by division. But of what profit tis all this dividing? Make as many particles as you like, and they are all gone in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye. "Yesterday was born the baby, See to-day the lovely boy, Then the young man quick as may be, Then an end of life and joy." You observe with what quick hurrying words the subtle poet has sketched out the swift course of our life. So it is in vain you strive to lengthen out what Nature, the mother of us all, has made so short. The second cause is that you will persist in letting old age find you still in the midst of games and empty pleasures; like the old Trojans who in their customary ways passed the last night without perceiving. "The cunning, fatal horse, who bore within Those armed bands, had overleapt the wall Of Pergamos."[44] Yes, even so you perceive not that old age, bringing in his train the armed warrior Death, unpitying and stem, has over-leapt the weakly-guarded rampart of your body; and then you find your foe has already glided by stealth along his rope-- "And now the invader climbs within the gate And takes the city in its drunken sleep."[45] For in the gross body and the pleasure of things temporal, not less drunk are you than those old Trojans were, as Virgil saw them, in their slumber and their wine. Or, looking to another quarter, no less truth is to be found in the neat lines of the Satirist-- "Our lives unfold in morning air As lilies of a day, 'Come bring us wine,' we shout. 'Ho, there, Fetch garlands, odours, damsels fair.' But ah! before we are aware, Old Age sweeps all away."[46] Now, to come back to our subject and to yourself, when this old age comes stealing on and knocks at your door, you make an effort to bar him out. You pretend that by some infraction of the order of Nature he has come too soon. You are delighted when you come across some rather elderly person who declares he knew you when you were a child, especially if, as people generally do, he makes out it was but yesterday or the day before. You find it convenient to forget that one can say as much about any old dotard however decrepit. Who was not a child yesterday, or to-day, as far as that goes? We can look here and there and find infants of ninety quarrelling about trifles and even now occupied with infantine toys. The days flee away, the body decays, the soul is where it was. Though everything is rotten with age, the soul has never grown up, never come to maturity, and it is a truth, as the proverb says, "One soul uses up many bodies." Infancy passes, but, as Seneca remarks, "childishness remains."[47] And, believe me, perhaps you are not so young as you imagine, for the greater part of mankind have not yet reached the age which you have. Blush, therefore, to pass for an aged lover; blush to be so long the Public's jest; and if true glory has no charm for you and ridicule no terror, at least let change of heart come to the rescue and save you from disgrace. For, if I see things at all truly, a man should guard his reputation, if only to spare his own friends the shameful necessity of telling lies. All the world owes this to itself, but especially such a man as yourself, who have so great a public to justify, and one which is always talking of you. "Great is the task to guard a great man's name."[48] If in your poem of _Africa_ you make a truculent enemy tender such good counsel to your beloved Scipio, you may well allow, for your own profit, a father, who loves you tenderly, to utter with his lips the very same monition. Put away the childish things of infancy; quench the burning desires of youth; think not all the time of what you are going to be and do next; look carefully what you are now; do not imagine that the mirror has been put before your eyes for nothing, but remember that which is written in the Book of Questions on Nature:-- "Mirrors were invented that men might know themselves. Much profit comes thereby. First, knowledge of self; second, wise counsel. You are handsome, then beware of what disfigures: plain, then make up by virtue what is wanting in good looks. You are young, then remember youth's springtime is the time for study and for manly work: old, then lay aside the ugly vices off the flesh and turn your thoughts to what will be the latter end."[49] _Petrarch_. It has dwelt in my remembrance always, from the first day that ever I read it; for the thing itself is worth remembering and its warning is wise. _S. Augustine._ Of what profit has it been to you to read and remember? You had better excused yourself had you pleaded ignorance for your shield. Knowing what you do, are you not ashamed to see that your grey hairs have brought no change in you? _Petrarch._ I am ashamed, I regret it, I repent of it, but as for doing more, I cannot. Moreover, you know I have this much of consolation, that she too is growing old with me. _S. Augustine._ The very word of Julia, Cæsar Augustus' daughter! Doubtless it has lain fixed in your mind, has it not? When her father found fault because she would not have older people round her, as did Livia, she parried the paternal reproof by the neat rejoinder--"They will be older as soon as I am."[50] But pray, tell me, do you suppose that at your age it will be more becoming to doat upon an old woman than to love a young one? On the contrary, it is the more unbecoming, as the reason for loving is less. Well may you take shame to yourself never to grow any wiser though you see your body daily growing older. That is all I can say on the subject of shame. But, as Cicero tells us, it is but a poor thing to make shame do the work of reason; and so to reason, the true source of all remedies, let us now turn for help. You will assuredly find it through using deep Reflection--the third of the things that turn the soul away from love. Remember what you are now called to is that citadel wherein alone you can be quite safe against the incursions of passion and by which alone you will deserve the name of Man. Consider, then, first how noble a thing is the soul, and that so great is it that were I to discourse as I should wish, I must needs make a whole book thereon. Consider, again, the frailty and vileness of the body, which would demand no less full treatment than the other. Think also of the shortness of our life, concerning which many great men have left their books. Think of the flight of time, that no one yet has been able to express in words. Think of Death, the fact so certain, the hour so uncertain, but everywhere and at all times imminent. Think how men are deceived just in this one point, that they believe they can put off what in fact never can be put off: for no one is really such a fool as, supposing the question is asked him, not to answer that of course some day he will die. And so let not the hope of longer life mock you, as it mocks so many others, but rather lay up in your heart the verse that seems as it were an oracle of heaven-- "Count every day that dawns to be your last,"[51] For is it not so that to mortal men every day is in truth the last, or all but the last? Consider, moreover, how shameful it is to have men point the finger at you, and to become a public laughing-stock; remember, too, how ill your profession accords with a life like this. Think how this woman has injured your soul, your body, your fortune. Remember what you have borne for her, all to no purpose: how many times you have been mocked, despised, scorned; think what flatteries, what lamentations, and of all the tears you have cast upon the wind; think how again and again she has heaped all this on you with an air of haughty disdain, and how if for a moment she showed herself more kind, it was but for the passing of a breath and then was gone. Think, moreover, how much you have added to her fame, and of what she has subtracted from your life: how you have ever been jealous for her good name, but she has been always regardless of your very self and condition. Remember how she has turned you aside from loving God, and into how great miseries you have fallen, known to me, but which I pass in silence lest the birds of the air carry the matter abroad. Think, moreover, what tasks on all sides are claiming your attention, and by which you may do far more good and deserve far more honour: how many things you have on hand, as yet uncompleted, to which it would be far better for you to return, and devote more time, instead of attempting them so perfunctorily as you have en doing lately. Finally, ponder well what that thing is for which you have such consuming desire. But think like a man and with your wits about you; for fear lest while you are in the act of flying you be cunningly entangled, as not a few have been when Beauty's fascinating charm steals upon them by some little, unlooked-for channel, and then is fed and strengthened by evil remedies. For how be there that have once tasted this seductive pleasure and can retain enough manliness, not to say courage, to rate at its true value that poor form of woman of which I speak. Only too easily Man's strength of mind gives way, and with nature pressing on, he falls soonest on that side to which he has long leaned. Take most earnest heed that this happen not to you. Banish every recollection of those old cares of yours: put far away from you every vision of the past, and, as one has said in a certain place, "dash the little children against the stones,"[52] lest if they grow up you yourself be cast into the mire. And defer not to knock at Heaven's door with prayers; let your supplications weary the ears of the heavenly King; day and night lift up your petition with tears and crying, if perchance the Almighty will take compassion upon you and give an end to your sore trouble and distress. These are the things that you must do, these the safeguards you must employ; if you will observe them faithfully the Divine Help will be at hand, as I trust; and the right hand of the Deliverer whom none can resist will succour you. But albeit I have spoken on this one malady what is too short for your needs but too long for the briefness of our time, let us pass now to another matter. One evil still is left, to heal you of which I now will make a last endeavour. _Petrarch._ Even so do, most gentle Father. For though I be not yet wholly set free from my burdens, yet, nevertheless, from great part of them I do feel in truth a blessed release. _S. Augustine._ Ambition still has too much hold on you. You seek too eagerly the praise of men, and to leave behind you an undying name. _Petrarch._ I freely confess it. I cannot beat down that passion in my soul. For it, as yet, I have found no cure. _S. Augustine_. But I greatly fear lest this pursuit of a false immortality of fame may shut for you the way that leads to the true immortality of life. _Petrarch._ That is one of my fears also, but I await your discovering to me the means to save my life; you, of a truth, will do it, who have furnished me with means for the healing of evils greater still. _S. Augustine_. Think not that any of your ills is greater than this one, though I deny not that some may be more vile. But tell me, I pray you, what in your opinion is this thing called glory, that you so ardently covet? _Petrarch._ I know not if you ask me for a definition. But if so, who so capable to give one as yourself? _S. Augustine._ The name of glory is well enough known to you; but to the real thing, if one may judge by your actions, you are a stranger. If you had known what it is you would not long for it so eagerly. Suppose you define glory, with Cicero, as being "the illustrious and world-wide renown of good services rendered to one's fellow citizens, to one's country, or to all mankind"; or as he expresses it elsewhere, "Public opinion uttering its voice about a man in words of praise."[53] You will notice that in both these cases glory is said to be reputation. Now, do you know what this reputation is? _Petrarch._ I cannot say any good description of it occurs to me at the moment; and I shrink from putting forward things I do not understand. I think, therefore, the truer and better course is for me to keep silence. _S. Augustine_. You act like a wise and modest man. In every serious question, and especially when the matter is ambiguous, one should pay much less attention to what one will say than to what one will not say, for the credit of having said well is something much less than the discredit of having said ill. Now I submit to you that reputation is nothing but talk about some one, passing from mouth to mouth of many people. _Petrarch._ I think your definition, or, if you prefer the word, your description, is a good one. _S. Augustine_. It is, then, but a breath, a changing wind; and, what will disgust you more, it is the breath of a crowd. I know to whom I am speaking. I have observed that no man more than you abhors the manners and behaviour of the common herd. Now see what perversity is this! You let yourself be charmed with the applause of those whose conduct you abominate; and may Heaven grant you are only charmed, and that you put not in their power your own everlasting welfare! Why and wherefore, I ask, this perpetual toil, these ceaseless vigils, and this intense application to study? You will answer, perhaps, that you seek to find out what is profitable for life. But you have long since learned what is needful for life and for death. What was now required of you was to try and put in practice what you know, instead of plunging deeper and deeper into laborious inquiries, where new problems are always meeting you, and insoluble mysteries, in which you never reach the end. Add to which the fact that you keep toiling and toiling to satisfy the public; wearying yourself to please the very people who, to you, are the most displeasing; gathering now a flower of poesy, now of history--in a word, employing all your genius of words to tickle the ears of the listening throng. _Petrarch_. I beg your pardon, but I cannot let that pass without saying a word. Never since I was a boy have I pleased myself with elegant extracts and flowerets of literature. For often have I noted what neat and excellent things Cicero has uttered against butchers of books, and especially, also, the phrase of Seneca in which he declares, "It is a disgrace for a man to keep hunting for flowers and prop himself up on familiar quotations, and only stand on what he knows by heart."[54] _S. Augustine._ In saying what I did, I neither accuse you of idleness nor scant memory. What I blame you for is that in your reading you have picked out the more flowery passages for the amusement of your cronies, and, as it were, packed up boxes of pretty things out of a great heap, for the benefit of your friends--which is nothing but pandering to a desire of vainglory; and, moreover, I say that, not being contented with your duty of every day (which, in spite of great expense of time, only promised you some celebrity among your contemporaries), you have let your thoughts run on ages of time and given yourself up to dreams of fame among those who come after. And in pursuit of this end, putting your hand to yet greater tasks, you entered on writing a history from the time of King Romulus to that of the Emperor Titus, an enormous undertaking that would swallow up an immensity of time and labour. Then, without waiting till this was finished, goaded by the pricks of your ambition for glory, you sailed off in your poetical barque towards Africa; and now on the aforesaid books of your _Africa_ you are hard at work, without relinquishing the other. And in this way you devote your whole life to those two absorbing occupations--for I will not stop to mention the countless others that come in also--and throw utterly away what is of most concern and which, when lost, cannot be recovered. You write books on others, but yourself you quite forget. And who knows but what, before either of your works be finished, Death may snatch the pen from your tired hand, and while in your insatiable hunt for glory you hurry on first by one path, then the other, you may find at last that by neither of them have you reached your goal? _Petrarch._ Fears of that kind have sometimes come over me, I confess. And knowing I suffered from grave illness, I was afraid death might not be far off. Nothing then was more bitter to me than the thought of leaving my _Africa_ half finished. Unwilling that another hand should put the finishing touch, I had determined that with my own I would cast it to the flames, for there was none of my friends whom I could trust to do me this service after I was gone. I knew that a request like that was the only one of our Virgil's which the Emperor Cæsar Augustus declined to grant. To make a long story short, this land of Africa, burnt already by that fierce sun to which it is for ever exposed, already three times by the Roman torches devastated far and wide, had all but yet again, by my hands, been made a prey to the flames. But of that we will say no more now, for too painful are the recollections that it brings. _S. Augustine._ What you have said confirms my opinion. The day of reckoning is put off for a short time, but the account remains still to be paid. And what can be more foolish than thus to waste such enormous labour over a thing of uncertain issue? I know what prevents you abandoning the work is simply that you still hope you may complete it. As I see that there will be some difficulty (unless I am mistaken) in getting you to diminish this hope, I propose we try to magnify it and so set it out in words that you will see how disproportionate it is to toils like yours. Suppose, therefore, that you have full abundance of time, leisure, and freedom of mind; let there be no failure of intellect, no languor of body, none of those mischances of fortune which, by checking the first onrush of expression, so often stop the ready writer's pen; let all things go better even than you had dared to wish--still, what considerable work do you expect to achieve? _Petrarch._ Oh, certainly, one of great excellence, quite out of the common and likely to attract attention. _S. Augustine._ I have no wish to seem contradictory: let us suppose it may be a work of great excellence. But if you knew of what greater excellence still is the work which this will hinder, you would abhor what you now desire. For I will go so far as to assert that this work of yours is, to begin with, taking off your attention from cares of a nobler kind; and, greatly excellent as you think it, has no wide scope nor long future before it, circumscribed as it must be by time and space. _Petrarch._ Well do I know that old story bandied about by the philosophers, how they declare that all the earth is but a tiny point, how the soul alone endures for infinite millions of years, how fame cannot fill either the earth or the soul, and other paltry pleas of this sort, by which they try to turn minds aside from the love of glory. But I beg you will produce some more solid arguments than these, if you know any; for experience has shown me that all this is more specious than convincing. I do not think to become as God, or to inhabit eternity, or embrace, heaven and earth. Such glory as belongs to man is enough for me. That is all I sigh after. Mortal myself, it is but mortal blessings I desire. _S. Augustine._ Oh, if that is what you truly mean, how wretched are you! If you have no desire for things immortal, if no regard for what is eternal, then you are indeed wholly of the earth earthy: then all is over for you; no hope at all is left. _Petrarch._ Heaven defend me from such folly! But my conscience is witness, and knows what have been my desires, that never have I ceased to love with burning zeal the things eternal. I said--or if, perchance, I am mistaken, I intended to say--that my wish was to use mortal things for what they were worth, to do no violence to nature by bringing to its good things a limitless and immoderate desire, and so to follow after human fame as knowing that both myself and it will perish. _S. Augustine._ There you speak as a wise man. But when you declare you are willing to rob yourself of the riches that will endure merely for the sake of what you own is a perishing breath of applause--then you are a fool indeed. _Petrarch_. True, I may be postponing those riches, but not relinquishing them altogether. _S. Augustine._ But how dangerous is such delay, remembering that time flies fast and how uncertain our short life is. Let me ask you a question, and I beg you to answer it. Suppose that He who alone can fix our time of life and death were this day to assign you one whole year, and you had the definite certainty of how would you propose to use that year? _Petrarch_. Assuredly I should use great economy of time, and be extremely, careful to employ it on serious things; and I suppose no man alive would be so insolent or foolish as to answer your question in any other way. _S. Augustine._ You have answered rightly. And yet the folly men display in this case is matter of astonishment, not to me only but to all those who have ever written on this subject. To set forth what they feel, they have combined every faculty they possess and employed all their eloquence, and even then the truth itself will leave their utmost efforts far behind. _Petrarch._ I fear I do not understand the motive of so great astonishment. _S. Augustine._ It is because you are covetous of uncertain riches and altogether wasteful of those which are eternal, doing the very contrary of what you ought to do, if you were not quite devoid of wisdom. So this space of a year, though short enough indeed, being promised you by Him who deceives not, neither is deceived, you would partition out and dissipate on any kind of folly, provided you could keep the last hour for the care of your salvation! The horrible and hateful madness of you all is just this, that you waste your time on ridiculous vanities, as if there were enough and to spare, and though you do not in the least know if what you have will be long enough for the supreme necessities of the soul in face of death. The man who has one year of life possesses something certain though short; whereas he who has no such promise and lies under the power of death (whose stroke may fall at any moment), which is the common lot of all men--this man, I say, is not sure of a year, a day; no, not even of one hour. He who has a year to live, if six months shall have slipped away, will still have another half-year left to run; but for you, if you lose the day that now is, who will promise you to-morrow?[55] It is Cicero who says: "It is certain that we must die: what is uncertain is whether it will be to-day; and there is none so young that-he can be sure he will live until the evening."[56] I ask, then, of you, and I ask it likewise of all those who stand gaping after the future and pay no heed to the present, "Who knows if the high gods will add even one morrow to this your little day of life?"[57] _Petrarch_. If I am to answer for myself and for all: No one knows, of a truth. But let us hope for a year at least; on which, if we are still to follow Cicero, even the most aged reckons! _S. Augustine._ Yes; and, as he also adds, not old men only but young ones too are fools in that they cherish false hope, and promise themselves uncertain goods as though they were certain.[58] But let us take for granted (what is quite impossible) that the duration of life will be long and assured: still, do you not find it is the height of madness to squander the best years and the best parts of your existence on pleading only the eyes of others and tickling other men's ears, and to keep the last and worst--the years that are almost good for nothing--that bring nothing but distaste for life and then its end--to keep these, I say, for God and yourself, as though the welfare of your soul were the last thing you cared for? Even supposing the time were certain, is it not reversing the true order to put off the best to the last? _Petrarch._ I do not think my way of looking at it is so unreasonable as you imagine. My principle in that, as concerning the glory which we may hope for here below, it is right for us to seek while we are here below. One may expect to enjoy that other more radiant glory in heaven, when we shall have there arrived, and when one will have no more care or wish for the glory of earth. Therefore, as I think, it is in the true order that mortal men should first care for mortal things; and that to things transitory things eternal should succeed; because to pass from those to these is to go forward in most certain accordance with what is ordained for us, although no way is open for us to pass back again from eternity to time. _S. Augustine._ O man, little in yourself, and of little wisdom! Do you, then, dream that you shall enjoy every pleasure in heaven and earth, and everything will turn out fortunate and prosperous for you always and everywhere? But that delusion has betrayed thousands of men thousands of times, and has sunk into hell a countless host of souls. Thinking to have one foot on earth and one in heaven, they could neither stand here below nor mount on high. Therefore they fell miserably, and the moving breeze swept them suddenly away, some in the flower of their age, and some when they were in midst of their years and all their business. And do you suppose what has befallen so many others may not befall you? Alas! if (which may God forefend!) in the midst of all your plans and projects you should be cut off--what grief, what shame, what remorse (then too late!) that you should have grasped at all and lost all! _Petrarch._ May the Most High in His mercy save me from that misery! _S. Augustine._ Though Divine Mercy may deliver a man from his folly, yet it will not excuse it. Presume not upon this mercy overmuch. For if God abhors those who lose hope, He also laughs at those who in false hope put their trust. I was sorry when I heard fall from your lips that phrase about despising what you called the old story of the philosophers on this matter. Is it, then, an old story, pray, by figures of geometry, to show how small is all the earth, and to prove it but an island of little length and width? Is it an old story to divide the earth into five zones, the largest of which, lying in the centre, is burned by the heat of the sun, and the two utmost, to right and left, are a prey to binding frost and eternal snow, which leave not a corner where man can dwell; but those other two, between the middle and two utmost zones, are inhabited by man? Is it an old story that this habitable part is divided again into two parts, whereof one is placed under your feet, guarded by a vast sea, and the other is left you to inhabit everywhere, or, according to some authorities, is again in two parts subdivided, with but one part habitable and the other surrounded by the winding intricacies of the Northern Ocean, preventing all access to it? As to that part under your feet, called the antipodes, you are aware that for a long time the most learned men have been of two opinions whether it is inhabited or not: for myself, I have set forth my opinion in the book called _The City of God_, which you have doubtless read. Is it also an old story that your habitable part, already so restricted, is yet further diminished to such an extent by seas, marshes, forests, sand and deserts, that the little corner left you, of which you are so proud, is brought down to almost nothing? And, finally, is it an old story to point out to you that on this narrow strip, where you dwell, there are divers kinds of life, different religions which oppose one another, different languages and customs, which render it impossible to make the fame of your name go far? But if these things are to you nought but fables, so, to me, all I had promised myself of your future greatness must be a fable also; for I had thought, hitherto, that no man had more knowledge of these things than you yourself To say nothing of the conceptions of Cicero and Virgil and other systems of knowledge, physical or poetic, of which you seemed to have a competent knowledge, I knew that not long since, in your _Africa,_ you had expressed the very same opinions in these pretty lines-- "The Universe itself is but an isle Confined in narrow bounds, small, and begirt By Ocean's flowing waves."[59] You have added other developments later on, and now that I know you think them all fables, I am astonished you have put them forth with such hardihood. What shall I say now of the brief existence of human fame, the short, short span of time, when you know too well how small and recent even the oldest memory of man is if compared to eternity? I spare to call to your mind those opinions of the men of old, laid up in Plato's _Timæus_ and in the sixth book of Cicero's _Republic,_ where it is foretold what floods and conflagrations shall be coming not seldom on the earth. To many men such things have seemed probable; but they wear a different aspect to those who, like yourself, have come to know the true religion. And besides these, how many other things there are that militate against, I do not say the eternity, but even the survival of one's name. First there is the death of those with whom one has passed one's life; and that forgetfulness which is the common bane of old age: then there is the rising fame, ever growing greater, of new men; which always, by its freshness, is somewhat derogatory to that of those who went before, and seems to mount up higher just in so far as it can depress this other down. Then you must add, also, that persistent envy which ever dogs the steps of those who embark on any glorious enterprise; and the hatred of Truth itself, and the fact that the very life of men of genius is odious to the crowd. Think, too, how fickle is the judgment of the multitude. And alas for the sepulchres of the dead! to shatter which-- "The wild fig's barren branch is strong enough,"[60] as Juvenal has told us. In your own _Africa_ you call this, elegantly enough, "a second death"; and if I may here address to you the same words you have put in the mouth of another-- "The animated bust and storied urn Shall fall, and with them fall thy memory, And thou, my son, thus taste a second death."[61] Lo, then, how excellent, how undying that glory must be which the fall of one poor stone can bring to nought! And, then, consider the perishing of books wherein your name has been written, either by your own hand or another's. Even though that perishing may appear so much more delayed as books outlast monuments, nevertheless it is sooner or later inevitable; for, as is the case with everything else, there are countless natural or fortuitous calamities to which books are ever exposed. And even if they escape all these, they, like us, grow old and die-- "For whatsoever mortal hand has made, With its vain labour, shall be mortal too,"[62] if one may be allowed, for choice, to refute your childish error by your own words. What need to say more? I shall never cease to bring to your recollection lines of your own making which only too truly fit the case. "When your books perish you shall perish too; This is the third death, still to be endured."[63] And now you know what I think about glory. Perhaps I have used more words in expressing it than was needful for you or me; and yet fewer, I believe, than the importance of the subject demands--unless perchance you still think all these things only an old story? _Petrarch_. No indeed. What you have been saying--so far from seeming to me like old stories--has stirred in me a new desire to get rid of my old delusions. For albeit that these things were known to me long ago, and that I have heard them oftentimes repeated, since, as Terence puts it-- "Everything that one can say Has all been said before,"[64] nevertheless the stateliness of phrase, the orderly narration, the authority of him who speaks, cannot but move me deeply. But I have yet a last request to make, which is that you will give me your definite judgment on this point. Is it your wish that I should put all my studies on one side and renounce every ambition, or would you advise some middle course? _S. Augustine._ I will never advise you to live without ambition; but I would always urge you to put virtue before glory. You know that glory is in a sense the shadow of virtue. And therefore, just as it is impossible that your body should not cast a shadow if the sun is shining, so it is impossible also in the light of God Himself that virtues should exist and not make their glory to appear. Whoever, then, would take true glory away must of necessity take away virtue also; and when that is gone man's life is left bare, and only resembles that of the brute beasts that follow headlong their appetite, which to them is their only law. Here, therefore, is the rule for you to live by--follow after virtue and let glory take care of itself; and as for this, as some one said of Cato, the less you seek it the more you will find it. I must once more allow myself to invoke your own witness-- "Thou shalt do well from Honour's self to flee, For then shell Honour follow after thee."[65] Do you not recognise the verse? It is your own. One would surely think that man a fool who at midday should run here and there in the blaze of the sun, wearing himself out to see his shadow and point it out to others; now the man shows no more sense or reason who, amid the anxieties of life, takes huge trouble, first one way, then another, to spread his own glory abroad. What then? Let a man march steadily to the goal set before him, his shadow will follow him step by step: let him so act that he shall make virtue his prize, and lo! glory also shall be found at his side. I speak of that glory which is virtue's true companion; as for that which comes by other means, whether from bodily grace or mere cleverness, in the countless ways men have invented, it does not seem to me worthy of the name. And so, in regard to yourself, while you are wearing your strength out by such great labours in writing books, if you will allow me to say so, you are shooting wide of the mark. For you are spending all your efforts on things that concern others, and neglecting those that are your own; and so, through this vain hope of glory, the time, so precious, though you know it not, is passing away. _Petrarch._ What must I do, then? Abandon my unfinished works? Or would it be better to hasten them on, and, if God gives me grace, put the finishing touch to them? If I were once rid of these cares I would go forward, with a mind more free, to greater things; for hardly could I bear the thought of leaving half completed a work so fine and rich in promise of success. _S. Augustine._ Which foot you mean to hobble on, I do not know. You seem inclined to leave yourself derelict, rather than your books. As for me, I shall do my duty, with what success depends on you; but at least I shall have satisfied my conscience. Throw to the winds those great loads of histories; the deeds of the Romans have been celebrated quite enough by others, and are known by their own fame. Get out of Africa and leave it to its possessors. You will add nothing to the glory of your Scipio or to your own. He can be exalted to no higher pinnacle, but you may bring down his reputation, and with it your own. Therefore leave all this on one side, and now at length take possession of yourself; and to come back to our starting-point, let me urge you to enter upon the meditation of your last end, which comes on step by step without your being aware. Tear off the veil; disperse the shadows; look only on that which is coming; with eyes and mind give all your attention there: let nought else distract you. Heaven, Earth, the Sea--these all suffer change. What can man, the frailest of all creatures, hope for? The seasons fulfil their courses and change; nothing remains as it was. If you think you shall remain, you are deceived. For, Horace beautifully says-- "The losses of the changing Heaven, The changing moons repair; But we, when we have gone below, And our rich land no longer know, And hear no more its rivers flow, Are nought but dust and air."[66] Therefore, as often as you watch the fruits of summer follow the flowers of spring, and the pleasant cool of autumn succeed the summer heat, and winter's snow come after autumn's vintage, say to yourself: "The seasons pass, yet they will come again; but I am going, never again to return." As often as you behold at sunset the shadows of the mountains lengthening on the plain, say to yourself: "Now life is sinking fast; the shadow of death begins to overspread the scene; yonder sun to-morrow will again be rising the same, but this day of mine will never come back." Who shall count the glories of the midnight sky, which, though it be the time that men of evil heart choose for their misdoing, yet is it to men of good heart the holiest of all times? Well, take care you be not less watchful than that admiral of the Trojan fleet;[67] for the seas you sail upon are no more safe than his; rise up at the mid hour of night, and "All the stars, that in the silent sky Roll on their way, observe with careful heed."[68] As you see them hasten to their setting in the west, think how you also are moving with them; and that as for your abiding you have no hope, saving only in Him who knows no change and suffers no decline. Moreover, when you meet with those whom you knew but yesterday as children, and see them now growing up in stature to their manhood, stage by stage, remember how you in like manner, in the same lapse of time, are going down the hill, and at greater speed, by that law in nature under which things that are heavy tend to fall. When your eyes behold some ancient building, let your first thought be, Where are those who wrought it with their hands? and when you see new ones, ask, Where, soon, the builders of them will be also? If you chance to see the trees of some orchard, remember how often it falls out that one plants it and another plucks the fruit; for many a time the saying in the _Georgics_ comes to pass-- "One plants the tree, but eh, the slow-grown shade His grandchild will enjoy."[69] And when you look with pleased wonder at some swiftly flowing stream, then, that I bring no other poet's thought, keep ever in mind this one of your own-- "No river harries with more rapid flight Than Life's swift current."[70] Neither let multitude of days or the artificial divisions of time deceive your judgment; for man's whole existence, let it be never so prolonged, Is but as one day, and that not a day entire. Have oftentimes before your eyes one similitude of Aristotle's, whom I know to be a favourite of yours; and his words I am sure you never read or hear without feeling them deeply. You will find it reported by Cicero in the _Tusculan Orations_, and in words possibly even more clear and impressive than the original. Here is what he says, or very nearly so, for at the moment I have not his book at hand:-- "Aristotle tells us that on the banks of the river Hypanis, which on one side of Europe empties itself into the Euxine Sea, there exists a race of little animals who only live one day. Any one of them that dies at sunrise dies young; he that dies at noon is middle-aged; and should one live till sunset, he dies in old age: and especially is this so about the time of the solstice. If you compare the time of man's life with eternity, it will seem no longer than theirs."[71] So far I give you Cicero; but what he says seems to me so beyond all cavil that now for a long time the saying has passed from the tongue of philosophers into common speech. Every day you hear even ignorant and unlearned men, if they chance to see a little child, make use of some expression like this--"Well, well, it's early morning with him yet"; if they see a man they will say, "Oh, it's high noon with him now," or "He's well in the middle of his day"; if they see one old and broken down they will remark, "Ah! he's getting toward evening and the going down of the sun." Ponder well on these things, my very dear son, and on others akin to them, which will, I doubt not, flock into your thoughts, as these on the spur of the moment have come into mine. And one more thing I beseech you to have in mind: look at the graves of those older, perhaps, than you, but whom nevertheless you have known; look diligently, and then rest assured that the same dwelling-place, the same house, is for you also made ready. Thither are all of us travelling on; that is our last home. You who now, perchance, are proud and think that your springtime has not quite departed, and are for trampling others underfoot, you in turn shall underfoot be trampled. Think over all this; consider it by day and by night; not merely as a man of sober mind and remembering what nature he is of, but as becomes a man of wisdom, and so holding it all fast, as one who remembers it is written "A wise man's life is all one preparation for death."[72] This saying will teach you to think little of what concerns earthly things, and set before your eyes a better path of life on which to enter. You will be asking me what is that kind of life, and by what ways you can approach it? And I shall reply that now you have no need of long advice or counsel. Listen only to that Holy Spirit who is ever calling, and in urgent words saying, "Here is the way to your native country, your true home." You know what He would bring to mind; what paths for your feet, what dangers to avoid. If you would be safe and free obey His voice. There is no need for long deliberations. The nature of your danger calls for action, not words. The enemy is pressing you from behind, and hastening to the charge in front; the walls of the citadel, where you are besieged, already tremble. There is no time for hesitation. Of what use is it to make sweet songs for the ears of others, if you listen not to them yourself? I must draw to an end. Shun the rocks ahead, at all costs; drop anchor in a place of safety; follow the lead which the inspirations of your own soul give you. They may, on the side of what is evil, be evil; but towards that which is good they are themselves of the very best. _Petrarch_. Ah! would that you had told me all this before I had surrendered myself over to these studies! _S. Augustine._ I have told you, many a time and oft. From the moment when I saw you first take up your pen, I foresaw how short life would be, and how uncertain: how certain, too, and how long the toil. I saw the work would be great and the fruit little, and I warned you of all these things. But your ears were filled with the plaudits of the public, which, to my astonishment, took you captive, although you talked as if you despised them. But as we have now been conferring together long enough, I beg that if any of my counsels have seemed good to you, you will not allow them to come to nothing for want of energy or recollection; and if, on the other hand, I have sometimes been too rough, I pray you take it not amiss. _Petrarch_. Indeed I owe you a deep debt of gratitude, as for many other things, so, especially, for this three days' colloquy; for you have cleansed my darkened sight and scattered the thick clouds of error in which I was involved. And how shall I express my thankfulness to Her also, the Spirit of Truth, who, unwearied by our much talking, has waited upon us to the end? Had She turned away her face from us we should have wandered in darkness: your discourse had then contained no sure truth, neither would my understanding have embraced it. And now, as She and you have your dwelling-place in heaven, and I must still abide on earth, and, as you see, am greatly perplexed and troubled, not knowing for how long this must be, I implore you, of your goodness, not to forsake me, in spite of that great distance which separates me from such as you; for without you, O best of fathers, my life would be but one long sadness, and without Her I could not live at all. _S. Augustine._ You may count your prayer already granted, if you will only to yourself be true: for how shall any one be constant to him who is inconstant to himself? _Petrarch._ I will be true to myself, so far as in me lies. I will pull myself together and collect my scattered wits, and make a great endeavour to possess my soul in patience. But even while we speak, a crowd of important affairs, though only of the world, is waiting my attention. _S. Augustine._ For the common herd of men these may be what to them seem more important; but in reality there is nothing of more importance, and nothing ought to be esteemed of so much worth. For, of other trains of thought, you may reckon them to be not essential for the soul, but the end of life will prove that these we have been engaged in are of eternal necessity. _Petrarch._ I confess they are so. And I now return to attend to those other concerns only in order that, when they are discharged, I may come back to these. I am not ignorant that, as you said a few minutes before, it would be much safer for me to attend only to the care of my soul, to relinquish altogether every bypath and follow the straight path of the way of salvation. But I have not strength to resist that old bent for study altogether. _S. Augustine_. We are falling into our old controversy. Want of will you call want of power. Well, so it must be, if it cannot be otherwise. I pray God that He will go with you where you go, and that He will order your steps, even though they wander, into the way of truth. _Petrarch._ O may it indeed be as you have prayed! May God lead me safe and whole out of so many crooked ways; that I may follow the Voice that calls me; that I may raise up no cloud of dust before my eyes; and, with my mind calmed down and at peace, I may hear the world grow still and silent, and the winds of adversity die away. _Francis Petrarch, Poet, Most illustrious Orator; his Book, which he entitled Secretum; in which a Three days' Discussion concerning Contempt of the World is carried on._ Finis. [1] _De Senectute_, xxiii. [2] _Æneid_, vi. 428-29. [3] "Tarda sit illa dies et nostro serior ævo."--_Met._ xv. 868. [4] This refers to the second Scipio Africanus, and the words alluded to are these: "It is his goodness that I loved, and that is not dead; it lives not alone for me, who have had it ever before my eyes, but it will go down in all its beauty to those who come after. Whenever a man is meditating some great undertaking, or shall be nourishing in his breast great hopes, his shall be the memory, and his the image that such a man shall take for a pattern."--Cicero, _De Amicitiâ_, xxvii. [5] _Æneid,_ i. 328-29. [6] Cicero, _Tusculan Orations,_ iv. 18. [7] Quoted from Attilius in Cicero's _Letters to Atticus,_ xiv. [8] Ovid, _Amores_, I. x. 13. [9] _Æneid_, vi. 540-43. [10] _Æneid_, i. 613 [11] Seneca, _De Beneficiis,_ vii. 8. [12] Terence, _Phormio_, 949. [13] _Tusculan Orations_, iv. 35 [14] Academica. [15] Quoted from Tusculan Orations, iii. 26. [16] Simone Martini, of Siena. [17] A river in Thessaly. [18] A town in Phocis, near Delphi. [19] Terence, _Eunuch,_ 59-63. [20] Terence, _Eunuch,_ 70-73. [21] _Ibid.,_ 56. [22] _Ibid._ 57, 58. [23] _Tusculan Orations_, iv. 35. [24] _De Remediis Amoris,_ I. 162. [25] _Æneid,_ iii. 44. [26] _Tusculan Orations,_ iv. 35. [27] _Æneid_, iv. 69-73. [28] Seneca, _Epist._, xxviii. [29] Horace, _Epistles_, Book I., _Epist._, xi. 27 (Conington). [30] Horace, _Epist.,_ Book I., xi. 25-26 (Conington). [31] Seneca's _Epist.,_ lxiv. [32] _Æneid,_ vi. 126-27. [33] _Georgics,_ ii. 136-39. [34] Ildebrandino di Conte, Bishop of Padua, _Epist._ cxi. 25. [35] Petrarch's _Penitential Psalms,_ iii. (translated by George Chapman). [36] Ovid's _De Remediis Amoris_, 579-80. [37] Petrarch's _Epistles,_ i. 7. [38] Quoted in Seneca's treatise, _De Animæ tranquillitate_, xv. [39] Seneca's _Epistles,_ ii. [40] _Tusculan Orations,_ iv. 35. [41] The text here is obscure. [42] Suetonius Domitian, xviii. [43] Virgil, _Eclogues,_ i. 29. [44] _Æneid,_ vi. 615-16. [45] _Ibid.,_ ii. 265. [47] Seneca, _Epistles,_ iv. [48] Petrarch's _Africa_, vii. 292. [49] Seneca, _De Natura Quæstiones,_ i. 17. [50] Macrobius _Saturnalia,_ ii 5. [51] Horace, _Epistles_, i 4, 13. [52] PS. cxxxi. 9. [53] Cicero, _Pro Marcello_, viii. [54] Seneca, _Letters_. [55] _De Senectute_, xx. [56] _Ibid.,_ xix. [57] Horace, _Odes,_ iv. 7,17. [58] _De Senectute_, xix. [59] _Africa_, ii. 361, 363. [60] _Satira,_ x. 145. [61] _Africa,_ ii. 481, &c. [62] _Africa_, ii. 455-6. [63] _Ibid._, ii. 464-5. [64] Terence's _Eunuch,_ 41. [65] _Africa_, ii 486. [66] Horace, _Odes_, iv. 7, 13-16. [67] Palinurus. [68] <b>Æneid</b>, iii. 515. [69] _Georgics_, ii. 58. [70] Petrarch's Epist., I. iv. 91-2. [71] _Tusculan Orations_, i. 39. [72] _Tusculan Orations_, i. 30. 
18787	----	LIFE OF ST. FRANCIS OF ASSISI BY PAUL SABATIER _Quivere monachus est nihil reputat esse suum nisi citharam_ GIOACCHINO DI FIORE _in Apoc. 182 a 2_ TRANSLATED BY LOUISE SEYMOUR HOUGHTON LONDON HODDER & STOUGHTON 1919 Copyright, 1894, by Charles Scribner's Sons, for the United States of America. Printed by the Scribner Press New York, U.S.A. * * * * * _TO THE STRASBURGHERS_ _Friends!_ _At last here is this book which I told you about so long ago. The result is small indeed in relation to the endeavor, as I, alas! see better than anyone. The widow of the Gospel put only one mite into the alms-box of the temple, but this mite, they tell us, won her Paradise. Accept the mite that I offer you to-day as God accepted that of the poor woman, looking not at her offering, but at her love_, Feci quod potui, omnia dedi. _Do not chide me too severely for this long delay, for you are somewhat its cause. Many times a day at Florence, at Assisi, at Rome, I have forgotten the document I had to study. Something in me seemed to have gone to flutter at your windows, and sometimes they opened.... One evening at St. Damian I forgot myself and remained long after sunset. An old monk came to warn me that the sanctuary was closed._ "Per Bacco!" _he gently murmured as he led me away, all ready to receive my confidence_, "sognava d'amore o di tristitia?" _Well, yes. I was dreaming of love and of sadness, for I was dreaming of Strasbourg._ * * * * * TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE INTRODUCTION, xi CHAPTER I. YOUTH, 1 CHAPTER II. STAGES OF CONVERSION, 15 CHAPTER III. THE CHURCH ABOUT 1209, 28 CHAPTER IV. STRUGGLES AND TRIUMPHS, 53 CHAPTER V. FIRST YEAR OF APOSTOLATE, 71 CHAPTER VI. ST. FRANCIS AND INNOCENT III., 88 CHAPTER VII. RIVO-TORTO, 103 CHAPTER VIII. PORTIUNCULA, 120 CHAPTER IX. SANTA CLARA, 147 CHAPTER X. FIRST ATTEMPTS TO REACH THE INFIDELS, 168 CHAPTER XI. THE INNER MAN AND WONDER-WORKING, 183 CHAPTER XII. THE CHAPTER-GENERAL OF 1217, 198 CHAPTER XIII. ST. DOMINIC AND ST. FRANCIS, 217 CHAPTER XIV. THE CRISIS OF THE ORDER, 239 CHAPTER XV. THE RULE OF 1221, 252 CHAPTER XVI. THE BROTHERS MINOR AND LEARNING, 271 CHAPTER XVII. THE STIGMATA, 287 CHAPTER XVIII. THE CANTICLE OF THE SUN, 297 CHAPTER XIX. THE LAST YEAR, 308 CHAPTER XX. FRANCIS'S WILL AND DEATH, 333 CRITICAL STUDY OF THE SOURCES, 347 APPENDIX. CRITICAL STUDY OF THE STIGMATA AND OF THE INDULGENCE OF AUGUST 2, 433 * * * * * INTRODUCTION In the renascence of history which is in a manner the characteristic of our time, the Middle Ages have been the object of peculiar fondness with both criticism and erudition. We rummage all the dark corners of the libraries, we bring old parchments to light, and in the zeal and ardor we put into our search there is an indefinable touch of piety. These efforts to make the past live again reveal not merely our curiosity, or the lack of power to grapple with great philosophic problems, they are a token of wisdom and modesty; we are beginning to feel that the present has its roots in the past, and that in the fields of politics and religion, as in others, slow, modest, persevering toil is that which has the best results. There is also a token of love in this. We love our ancestors of five or six centuries ago, and we mingle not a little emotion and gratitude with this love. So, if one may hope everything of a son who loves his parents, we must not despair of an age that loves history. The Middle Ages form an organic period in the life of humanity. Like all powerful organisms the period began with a long and mysterious gestation; it had its youth, its manhood, its decrepitude. The end of the twelfth century and the beginning of the thirteenth mark its full expansion; it is the twentieth year of life, with its poetry, its dreams, its enthusiasm, its generosity, its daring. Love overflowed with vigor; men everywhere had but one desire--to devote themselves to some great and holy cause. Curiously enough, though Europe was more parcelled out than ever, it felt a new thrill run through its entire extent. There was what we might call a state of European consciousness. In ordinary periods each people has its own interests, its tendencies, its tears, and its joys; but let a time of crisis come, and the true unity of the human family will suddenly make itself felt with a strength never before suspected. Each body of water has its own currents, but when the hurricane is abroad they mysteriously intermingle, and from the ocean to the remotest mountain lake the same tremor will upheave them all. It was thus in '89, it was thus also in the thirteenth century. Never was there less of frontier, never, either before or since, such a mingling of nationalities; and at the present day, with all our highways and railroads, the people live more apart.[1] The great movement of thought of the thirteenth century is above all a religious movement, presenting a double character--it is popular and it is laic. It comes out from the heart of the people, and it looks athwart many uncertainties at nothing less than wresting the sacred things from the hands of the clergy. The conservatives of our time who turn to the thirteenth century as to the golden age of authoritative faith make a strange mistake. If it is especially the century of saints, it is also that of heretics. We shall soon see that the two words are not so contradictory as might appear; it is enough for the moment to point out that the Church had never been more powerful nor more threatened. There was a genuine attempt at a religious revolution, which, if it had succeeded, would have ended in a universal priesthood, in the proclamation of the rights of the individual conscience. The effort failed, and though later on the Revolution made us all kings, neither the thirteenth century nor the Reformation was able to make us all priests. Herein, no doubt, lies the essential contradiction of our lives and that which periodically puts our national institutions in peril. Politically emancipated, we are not morally or religiously free.[2] The thirteenth century with juvenile ardor undertook this revolution, which has not yet reached its end. In the north of Europe it became incarnate in cathedrals, in the south, in saints. The cathedrals were the lay churches of the thirteenth century. Built by the people for the people, they were originally the true common house of our old cities. Museums, granaries, chambers of commerce, halls of justice, depositories of archives, and even labor exchanges, they were all these at once. That art of the Middle Ages which Victor Hugo and Viollet-le-Duc have taught us to understand and love was the visible expression of the enthusiasm of a people who were achieving communal liberty. Very far from being the gift of the Church, it was in its beginning an unconscious protest against the hieratic, impassive, esoteric art of the religious orders. We find only laymen in the long list of master-workmen and painters who have left us the innumerable Gothic monuments which stud the soil of Europe. Those artists of genius who, like those of Greece, knew how to speak to the populace without being common, were for the most part humble workmen; they found their inspiration not in the formulas of the masters of monastic art, but in constant communion with the very soul of the nation. Therefore this renascence, in its most profound features, concerns less the archæology or the architecture than the history of a country. While in the northern countries the people were building their own churches, and finding in their enthusiasm an art which was new, original, complete, in the south, above the official, clerical priesthood of divine right they were greeting and consecrating a new priesthood, that of the saints. The priest of the thirteenth century is the antithesis of the saint, he is almost always his enemy. Separated by the holy unction from the rest of mankind, inspiring awe as the representative of an all-powerful God, able by a few signs to perform unheard-of mysteries, with a word to change bread into flesh and wine into blood, he appeared as a sort of idol which can do all things for or against you and before which you have only to adore and tremble. The saint, on the contrary, was one whose mission was proclaimed by nothing in his apparel, but whose life and words made themselves felt in all hearts and consciences; he was one who, with no cure of souls in the Church, felt himself suddenly impelled to lift up his voice. The child of the people, he knew all their material and moral woes, and their mysterious echo sounded in his own heart. Like the ancient prophet of Israel, he heard an imperious voice saying to him: "Go and speak to the children of my people." "Ah, Lord God, I am but a child, I know not how to speak." "Say not, I am but a child, for thou shalt go to all those to whom I shall send thee. Behold I have set thee to-day as a strong city, a pillar of iron and a wall of brass against the kings of Judah, against its princes and against its priests." These thirteenth-century saints were in fact true prophets. Apostles like St. Paul, not as the result of a canonical consecration, but by the interior order of the Spirit, they were the witnesses of liberty against authority. The Calabrian seer, Gioacchino di Fiore, hailed the new-born revolution; he believed in its success and proclaimed to the wondering world the advent of a new ministry. He was mistaken. When the priest sees himself vanquished by the prophet he suddenly changes his method. He takes him under his protection, he introduces his harangues into the sacred canon, he throws over his shoulders the priestly chasuble. The days pass on, the years roll by, and the moment comes when the heedless crowd no longer distinguishes between them, and it ends by believing the prophet to be an emanation of the clergy. This is one of the bitterest ironies of history. Francis of Assisi is pre-eminently the saint of the Middle Ages. Owing nothing to church or school he was truly _theodidact_,[3] and if he perhaps did not perceive the revolutionary bearing of his preaching, he at least always refused to be ordained priest. He divined the superiority of the spiritual priesthood. The charm of his life is that, thanks to reliable documents, we find the man behind the wonder worker. We find in him not merely noble actions, we find in him a life in the true meaning of the word; I mean, we feel in him both development and struggle. How mistaken are the annals of the Saints in representing him as from the very cradle surrounded with aureole and nimbus! As if the finest and most manly of spectacles were not that of the man who conquers his soul hour after hour, fighting first against himself, against the suggestions of egoism, idleness, discouragement, then at the moment when he might believe himself victorious, finding in the champions attracted by his ideal those who are destined if not to bring about its complete ruin, at least to give it its most terrible blows. Poor Francis! The last years of his life were indeed a _via dolorosa_ as painful as that where his master sank down under the weight of the cross; for it is still a joy to die for one's ideal, but what bitter pain to look on in advance at the apotheosis of one's body, while seeing one's soul--I would say his thought--misunderstood and frustrated. If we ask for the origins of his idea we find them exclusively among the common people of his time; he is the incarnation of the Italian soul at the beginning of the thirteenth century, as Dante was to be its incarnation a hundred years later. He was of the people and the people recognized themselves in him. He had their poetry and their aspirations, he espoused their claims, and the very name of his institute had at first a political signification: in Assisi as in most other Italian towns there were _majores_ and _minores_, the _popolo grasso_ and the _popolo minuto_; he resolutely placed himself among the latter. This political side of his apostolate needs to be clearly apprehended if we would understand its amazing success and the wholly unique character of the Franciscan movement in its beginning. As to its attitude toward the Church, it was that of filial obedience. This may perhaps appear strange at first as regards an unauthorized preacher who comes speaking to the world in the name of his own immediate personal inspiration. But did not most of the men of '89 believe themselves good and loyal subjects of Louis XVI.? The Church was to our ancestors what the fatherland is to us; we may wish to remodel its government, overturn its administration, change its constitution, but we do not think ourselves less good patriots for that. In the same way, in an age of simple faith when religious beliefs seemed to be in the very fibre and flesh of humanity, Dante, without ceasing to be a good Catholic, could attack the clergy and the court of Rome with a violence that has never been surpassed. St. Francis so surely believed that the Church had become unfaithful to her mission that he could speak in his symbolic language of the widowhood of his Lady Poverty, who from Christ's time to his own had found no husband. How could he better have declared his purposes or revealed his dreams? What he purposed was far more than the foundation of an order, and it is to do him great wrong thus to restrict his endeavor. He longed for a true awakening of the Church in the name of the evangelical ideal which he had regained. All Europe awoke with a start when it heard of these penitents from a little Umbrian town. It was reported that they had craved a strange privilege from the court of Rome: that of possessing nothing. Men saw them pass by, earning their bread by the labor of their hands, accepting only the bare necessities of bodily sustenance from them to whom they had given with lavish hands the bread of life. The people lifted up their heads, breathing in with deep inspirations the airs of a springtime upon which was already floating the perfume of new flowers. Here and there in the world there are many souls capable of all heroism, if only they can see before them a true leader. St. Francis became for these the guide they had longed for, and whatever was best in humanity at that time leaped to follow in his footsteps. This movement, which was destined to result in the constitution of a new family of monks, was in the beginning anti-monastic. It is not rare for history to have similar contradictions to record. The meek Galilean who preached the religion of a personal revelation, without ceremonial or dogmatic law, triumphed only on condition of being conquered, and of permitting his words of spirit and life to be confiscated by a church essentially dogmatic and sacerdotal. In the same way the Franciscan movement was originally, if not the protest of the Christian consciousness against monachism, at least the recognition of an ideal singularly higher than that of the clergy of that time. Let us picture to ourselves the Italy of the beginning of the thirteenth century with its divisions, its perpetual warfare, its depopulated country districts, the impossibility of tilling the fields except in the narrow circle which the garrisons of the towns might protect; all these cities from the greatest to the least occupied in watching for the most favorable moment for falling upon and pillaging their neighbors; sieges terminated by unspeakable atrocities, and after all this, famine, speedily followed by pestilence to complete the devastation. Then let us picture to ourselves the rich Benedictine abbeys, veritable fortresses set upon the hill-tops, whence they seemed to command all the surrounding plains. There was nothing surprising in their prosperity. Shielded by their inviolability, they were in these disordered times the only refuge of peaceful souls and timid hearts.[4] The monks were in great majority deserters from life, who for motives entirely aside from religion had taken refuge behind the only walls which at this period were secure. Overlook this as we may, forget as we may the demoralization and ignorance of the inferior clergy, the simony and the vices of the prelates, the coarseness and avarice of the monks, judging the Church of the thirteenth century only by those of her sons who do her the most honor; none the less are these the anchorites who flee into the desert to escape from wars and vices, pausing only when they are very sure that none of the world's noises will interrupt their meditations. Sometimes they will draw away with them hundreds of imitators, to the solitudes of Clairvaux, of the Chartreuse, of Vallombrosa, of the Camaldoli; but even when they are a multitude they are alone; for they are dead to the world and to their brethren. Each cell is a desert, on whose threshold they cry O beata solitudo. O sola beatitudo. The book of the Imitation is the picture of all that is purest in this cloistered life. But is this abstinence from action truly Christian? No, replied St. Francis. He for his part would do like Jesus, and we may say that his life is an imitation of Christ singularly more real than that of Thomas à Kempis. Jesus went indeed into the desert, but only that he might find in prayer and communion with the heavenly Father the inspiration and strength necessary for keeping up the struggle against evil. Far from avoiding the multitude, he sought them out to enlighten, console, and convert them. This is what St. Francis desired to imitate. More than once he felt the seduction of the purely contemplative life, but each time his own spirit warned him that this was only a disguised selfishness; that one saves oneself only in saving others. When he saw suffering, wretchedness, corruption, instead of fleeing he stopped to bind up, to heal, feeling in his heart the surging of waves of compassion. He not only preached love to others; he himself was ravished with it; he sang it, and what was of greater value, he lived it. There had indeed been preachers of love before his day, but most generally they had appealed to the lowest selfishness. They had thought to triumph by proving that in fact to give to others is to put one's money out at a usurious interest. "Give to the poor," said St. Peter Chrysologus,[5] "that you may give to yourself; give him a crumb in order to receive a loaf; give him a shelter to receive heaven." There was nothing like this in Francis; his charity is not selfishness, it is love. He went, not to the whole, who need no physician, but to the sick, the forgotten, the disdained. He dispensed the treasures of his heart according to the need and reserved the best of himself for the poorest and the most lost, for lepers and thieves. The gaps in his education were of marvellous service to him. More learned, the formal logic of the schools would have robbed him of that flower of simplicity which is the great charm of his life; he would have seen the whole extent of the sore of the Church, and would no doubt have despaired of healing it. If he had known the ecclesiastical discipline he would have felt obliged to observe it; but thanks to his ignorance he could often violate it without knowing it,[6] and be a heretic quite unawares. We can now determine to what religious family St. Francis belongs. Looking at the question from a somewhat high standpoint we see that in the last analysis minds, like religious systems, are to be found in two great families, standing, so to say, at the two poles of thought. These two poles are only mathematical points, they do not exist in concrete reality; but for all that we can set them down on the chart of philosophic and moral ideas. There are religions which look toward divinity and religions which look toward man. Here again the line of demarcation between the two families is purely ideal and artificial; they often so mingle and blend with one another that we have much difficulty in distinguishing them, especially in the intermediate zone in which our civilization finds its place; but if we go toward the poles we shall find their characteristics growing gradually distinct. In the religions which look toward divinity all effort is concentrated on worship, and especially on sacrifice. The end aimed at is a change in the disposition of the gods. They are mighty kings whose support or favor one must purchase by gifts. Most pagan religions belong to this category and pharisaic Judaism as well. This is also the tendency of certain Catholics of the old school for whom the great thing is to appease God or to buy the protection of the Virgin and the saints by means of prayers, candles, and masses. The other religions look toward man; their effort is directed to the heart and conscience with the purpose of transforming them. Sacrifice disappears, or rather it changes from the exterior to the interior. God is conceived of as a father, always ready to welcome him who comes to him. Conversion, perfection, sanctification become the pre-eminent religious acts. Worship and prayer cease to be incantations and become reflection, meditation, virile effort; while in religions of the first class the clergy have an essential part, as intermediaries between heaven and earth, in those of the second they have none, each conscience entering into direct relations with God. It was reserved to the prophets of Israel to formulate, with a precision before unknown, the starting-point of spiritual worship. Bring no more vain offerings; I have a horror of incense, Your new moons, your Sabbaths, and your assemblies; When you multiply prayers I will not hearken. Your hands are full of blood, Wash you, make you clean, Put away from before my eyes the evil of your ways, Cease to do evil, Learn to do well.[7] With Isaiah these vehement apostrophes are but flashes of genius, but with Jesus the interior change becomes at once the principle and the end of the religious life. His promises were not for those who were right with the ceremonial law, or who offered the greatest number of sacrifices, but for the pure in heart, for men of good will. These considerations are not perhaps without their use in showing the spiritual ancestry of the Saint of Assisi. For him, as for St. Paul and St. Augustine, conversion was a radical and complete change, the act of will by which man wrests himself from the slavery of sin and places himself under the yoke of divine authority. Thenceforth prayer, become a necessary act of life, ceases to be a magic formula; it is an impulse of the heart, it is reflection and meditation rising above the commonplaces of this mortal life, to enter into the mystery of the divine will and conform itself to it; it is the act of the atom which understands its littleness, but which desires, though only by a single note, to be in harmony with the divine symphony. _Ecce adsum Domine, ut faciam voluntatem tuam._ When we reach these heights we belong not to a sect, but to humanity; we are like those wonders of nature which the accident of circumstances has placed upon the territory of this or that people, but which belong to all the world, because in fact they belong to no one, or rather they are the common and inalienable property of the entire human race. Homer, Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe, Michael Angelo, Rembrandt belong to us all as much as the ruins of Athens or Rome, or, rather, they belong to those who love them most and understand them best. But that which is a truism, so far as men of genius in the domain of imagination or thought are concerned, still appears like a paradox when we speak of men of religious genius. The Church has laid such absolute claim to them that she has created in her own favor a sort of right. It cannot be that this arbitrary confiscation shall endure forever. To prevent it we have not to perform an act of negation or demolition: let us leave to the chapels their statues and their relics, and far from belittling the saints, let us make their true grandeur shine forth. * * * * * It is time to say a few words concerning the difficulties of the work here presented to the public. History always embraces but a very feeble part of the reality: ignorant, she is like the stories children tell of the events that have occurred before their eyes; learned, she reminds us of a museum organized with all the modern improvements. Instead of making you see nature with its external covering, its diffuse life, its mysterious echoes in your own heart, they offer you a herbarium. If it is difficult to narrate an ordinary event of our own time, it is far more so to describe the great crises where restless humanity is seeking its true path. The first duty of the historian is to forget his own time and country and become the sympathetic and interested contemporary of what he relates; but if it is difficult to give oneself the heart of a Greek or a Roman, it is infinitely more so to give oneself a heart of the thirteenth century. I have said that at that period the Middle Age was twenty years old, and the feelings of the twentieth year are, if not the most fugitive, at least the most difficult to note down. Everyone knows that it is impossible to recall the feelings of youth with the same clearness as those of childhood or mature age. Doubtless we may have external facts in the memory, but we cannot recall the sensations and the sentiments; the confused forces which seek to move us are then all at work at once, and to speak the language of beyond the Rhine, it is _the essentially phenomenal hour of the phenomena that we are;_ everything in us crosses, intermingles, collides, in desperate conflict: it is a time of diabolic or divine excitement. Let a few years pass, and nothing in the world can make us live those hours over again. Where was once a volcano, we perceive only a heap of blackened ashes, and scarcely, at long intervals, will a chance meeting, a sound, a word, awaken memory and unseal the fountain of recollection; and even then it is only a flash; we have had but a glimpse and all has sunk back into shadow and silence. We find the same difficulty when we try to take note of the fiery enthusiasms of the thirteenth century, its poetic inspirations, its amorous and chaste visions--all this is thrown up against a background of coarseness, wretchedness, corruption, and folly. The men of that time had all the vices except triviality, all the virtues except moderation; they were either ruffians or saints. Life was rude enough to kill feeble organisms; and thus characters had an energy unknown to-day. It was forever necessary to provide beforehand against a thousand dangers, to take those sudden resolutions in which one risks his life. Open the chronicle of Fra Salimbeni and you will be shocked to find that the largest place is taken up with the account of the annual expeditions of Parma against the neighboring cities, or of the neighboring cities against Parma. What would it have been if this chronicle, instead of being written by a monk of uncommonly open mind, a lover of music, at certain times an ardent Joachimite, an indefatigable traveller, had been written by a warrior? And this is not all; these wars between city and city were complicated with civil dissensions, plots were hatched periodically, conspirators were massacred if they were discovered, or massacred and exiled others in their turn if they were triumphant.[8] When we picture to ourselves this state of things dominated by the grand struggles of the papacy against the empire, heretics, and infidels, we may understand how difficult it is to describe such a time. The imagination being haunted by horrible or entrancing pictures like those of the frescos in the _Campo Santo_ of Pisa, men were always thinking of heaven and hell; they informed themselves about them with the feverish curiosity of emigrants, who pass their days on shipboard in trying to picture that spot in America where in a few days they will pitch their tent. Every monk of any notoriety must have gone through this. Dante's poem is not an isolated work; it is the noblest result of a condition which had given birth to hundreds of compositions, and Alighieri had little more to do than to co-ordinate the works of his predecessors and vivify them with the breath of his own genius. The unsettled state of men's minds was unimaginable. That unhealthy curiosity which lies at the bottom of the human heart, and which at the present day impels men to seek for refined and even perverse enjoyments, impelled men of that time to devotions which seem like a defiance to common sense. Never had hearts been shaken with such terrors, nor ever thrilled with such radiant hopes. The noblest hymns of the liturgy, the _Stabat_ and the _Dies Iræ_, come to us from the thirteenth century, and we may well say that never has the human plaint been more agonized. When we look through history, not to find accounts of battles or of the succession of dynasties, but to try to grasp the evolution of ideas and feelings, when we seek above all to discover the heart of man and of epochs, we perceive, on arriving at the thirteenth century, that a fresh wind has blown over the world, the human lyre has a new string, the lowest, the most profound; one which sings of woes and hopes to which the ancient world had not vibrated. In the breast of the men of that time we think sometimes we feel the beating of a woman's heart; they have exquisite sentiments, delightful inspirations, with absurd terrors, fantastic angers, infernal cruelties. Weakness and fear often make them insincere; they have the idea of the grand, the beautiful, the ugly, but that of order is wanting; they fast or feast; the notion of the laws of nature, so deeply graven in our own minds, is to them entirely a stranger; the words possible and impossible have for them no meaning. Some give themselves to God, others sell themselves to the devil, but not one feels himself strong enough to walk alone, strong enough to have no need to hold on by some one's skirt. Peopled with spirits and demons nature appeared to them singularly animated; in her presence they have all the emotions which a child experiences at night before the trees on the roadside and the vague forms of the rocks. Unfortunately, our language is a very imperfect instrument for rendering all this; it is neither musical nor flexible; since the seventeenth century it has been deemed seemly to keep one's emotions to oneself, and the old words which served to note states of the soul have fallen into neglect; the Imitation and the Fioretti have become untranslatable. More than this, in a history like the present one, we must give a large place to the Italian spirit; it is evident that in a country where they call a chapel _basilica_ and a tiny house _palazzo_, or in speaking to a seminarist say "Your Reverence," words have not the same value as on this side of the Alps. The Italians have an imagination which enlarges and simplifies. They see the forms and outlines of men and things more than they grasp their spirit. What they most admire in Michael Angelo is gigantic forms, noble and proud attitudes, while we better understand his secret thoughts, hidden sorrows, groans, and sighs. Place before their eyes a picture by Rembrandt, and more often than not it will appear to them ugly; its charm cannot be caught at a glance as in those of their artists; to see it you must examine it, make an effort, and with them effort is the beginning of pain. Do not ask them, then, to understand the pathos of things, to be touched by the mysterious and almost fanciful emotion which northern hearts discover and enjoy in the works of the Amsterdam master. No, instead of a forest they want a few trees, standing out clearly against the horizon; instead of a multitude swarming in the penumbra of reality, a few personages, larger than nature, forming harmonious groups in an ideal temple. The genius of a people[9] is all of a piece: they apply to history the same processes that they apply to the arts. While the Germanic spirit considers events rather in their evolution, in their complex becoming, the Italian spirit takes them at a given moment, overlooks the shadows, the clouds, the mists, everything that makes the line indistinct, brings out the contour sharply, and thus constructs a very lucid story, which is a delight to the eyes, but which is little more than a symbol of the reality. At other times it takes a man, separates him from the unnamed crowd, and by a labor often unconscious, makes him the ideal type of a whole epoch.[10] Certainly there is in every people a tendency to give themselves a circle of divinities and heroes who are, so to say, the incarnation of its instincts; but generally that requires the long labor of centuries. The Italian character will not suffer this slow action; as soon as it recognizes a man it says so, it even shouts it aloud if that is necessary, and makes him enter upon immortality while still alive. Thus legend almost confounds itself with history, and it becomes very difficult to reduce men to their true proportions. We must not, then, ask too much of history. The more beautiful is the dawn, the less one can describe it. The most beautiful things in nature, the flower and the butterfly, should be touched only by delicate hands. The effort here made to indicate the variegated, wavering tints which form the atmosphere in which St. Francis lived is therefore of very uncertain success. It was perhaps presumptuous to undertake it. Happily we are no longer in the time when historians thought they had done the right thing when they had reduced everything to its proper size, contenting themselves with denying or omitting everything in the life of the heroes of humanity which rises above the level of our every-day experience. No doubt Francis did not meet on the road to Sienna three pure and gentle virgins come from heaven to greet him; the devil did not overturn rocks for the sake of terrifying him; but when we deny these visions and apparitions, we are victims of an error graver, perhaps, than that of those who affirm them. The first time that I was at Assisi I arrived in the middle of the night. When the sun rose, flooding everything with warmth and light, the old basilica[11] seemed suddenly to quiver; one might have said that it wished to speak and sing. Giotto's frescos, but now invisible, awoke to a strange life, you might have thought them painted the evening before so much alive they were; everything was moving without awkwardness or jar. I returned six months later. A scaffold had been put up in the middle of the nave; upon it an art critic was examining the paintings, and as the day was overcast he threw upon the walls the beams of a lamp with a reflector. Then you saw arms thrown out, faces grimacing, without unity, without harmony; the most exquisite figures took on something fantastic and grotesque. He came down triumphant, with a portfolio stuffed with sketches; here a foot, there a muscle, farther on a bit of face, and I could not refrain from musing on the frescos as I had seen them bathed in sunlight. The sun and the lamp are both deceivers; they transform what they show; but if the truth must be told I own to my preference for the falsehoods of the sun. History is a landscape, and like those of nature it is continually changing. Two persons who look at it at the same time do not find in it the same charm, and you yourself, if you had it continually before your eyes, would never see it twice alike. The general lines are permanent, but it needs only a cloud to hide the most important ones, as it needs only a jet of light to bring out such or such a detail and give it a false value. When I began this page the sun was disappearing behind the rains of the Castle of Crussol and the splendors of the sunset gave it a shining aureola; the light flooded everything, and you no longer saw anywhere the damage which wars have inflicted upon the old feudal manor. I looked, almost thinking I could perceive at the window the figure of the chatelaine ... Twilight has come, and now there is nothing up there but crumbling walls, a discrowned tower, nothing but ruins and rubbish, which seem to beg for pity. It is the same with the landscapes of history. Narrow minds cannot accommodate themselves to these perpetual transformations: they want an objective history in which the author will study the people as a chemist studies a body. It is very possible that there may be laws for historic evolution and social transformations as exact as those of chemical combinations, and we must hope that in the end they will be discovered; but for the present there is no purely objective truth of history. To write history we must think it, and to think it is to transform it. Within a few years, it is true, men have believed they had found the secret of objectivity, in the publication of original documents. This is a true progress which renders inestimable service, but here again we must not deceive ourselves as to its significance. All the documents on an epoch or an event cannot usually be published, a selection must be made, and in it will necessarily appear the turn of mind of him who makes it. Let us admit that all that can be found is published; but alas, the most unusual movements have generally the fewest documents. Take, for instance, the religious history of the Middle Ages: it is already a pretty delicate task to collect official documents, such as bulls, briefs, conciliary canons, monastic constitutions, etc., but do these documents contain all the life of the Church? Much is still wanting, and to my mind the movements which secretly agitated the masses are much more important, although to testify to them we have only a few fragments. Poor heretics, they were not only imprisoned and burned, but their books were destroyed and everything that spoke of them; and more than one historian, finding scarcely a trace of them in his heaps of documents, forgets these prophets with their strange visions, these poet-monks who from the depths of their cells made the world to thrill and the papacy to tremble. Objective history is then a utopia. We create God in our own image, and we impress the mark of our personality in places where we least expect to find it again. But by dint of talking about the tribunal of history we have made most authors think that they owe to themselves and their readers definitive and irrevocable judgments. It is always easier to pronounce a sentence than to wait, to reserve one's opinion, to re-examine. The crowd which has put itself out to be present at a trial is almost always furious with the judges when they reserve the case for further information; its mind is so made that it requires precision in things which will bear it the least; it puts questions right and left, as children do; if you appear to hesitate or to be embarrassed you are lost in its estimation, you are evidently only an ignoramus. But perhaps below the Areopagites, obliged by their functions to pronounce sentence, there is place at the famous tribunal for a simple spectator who has come in by accident. He has made out a brief and would like very simply to tell his neighbors his opinion. This, then, is not a history _ad probandum_, to use the ancient formula. Is this to say that I have only desired to give the reader a moment of diversion? That would be to understand my thought very ill. In the grand spectacles of history as in those of nature there is something divine; from it our minds and hearts gain a virtue at once pacifying and encouraging, we experience the salutary sensation of littleness, and seeing the beauties and the sadnesses of the past we learn better how to judge the present hour. In one of the frescos of the Upper Church of Assisi, Giotto has represented St. Clara and her companions coming out from St. Damian all in tears, to kiss their spiritual father's corpse as it is being carried to its last home. With an artist's liberty he has made the chapel a rich church built of precious marbles. Happily the real St. Damian is still there, nestled under some olive-trees like a lark under the heather; it still has its ill-made walls of irregular stones, like those which bound the neighboring fields. Which is the more beautiful, the ideal temple of the artist's fancy, or the poor chapel of reality? No heart will be in doubt. Francis's official historians have done for his biography what Giotto did for his little sanctuary. In general they have done him ill-service. Their embellishments have hidden the real St. Francis, who was, in fact, infinitely nobler than they have made him to be. Ecclesiastical writers appear to make a great mistake in thus adorning the lives of their heroes, and only mentioning their edifying features. They thus give occasion, even to the most devout, to suspect their testimony. Besides, by thus surrounding their saints with light they make them superhuman creatures, having nothing in common with us; they are privileged characters, marked with the divine seal; they are, as the litanies say, vials of election, into which God has poured the sweetest perfumes; their sanctity is revealed almost in spite of themselves; they are born saints as others are born kings or slaves, their life is set out against the golden background of a tryptich, and not against the sombre background of reality. By such means the saints, perhaps, gain something in the respect of the superstitious; but their lives lose something of virtue and of communicable strength. Forgetting that they were men like ourselves, we no longer hear in our conscience the command, "Go and do likewise." It is, then, a work of piety to seek behind the legend for the history. Is it presumptuous to ask our readers to try to understand the thirteenth century and love St. Francis? They will be amply rewarded for the effort, and will soon find an unexpected charm in these too meagre landscapes, these incorporate souls, these sickly imaginations which will pass before their eyes. Love is the true key of history. A book has always a great number of authors, and the following pages owe much to the researches of others; I have tried in the notes to show the whole value of these debts. I have also had colaborers to whom it will be more difficult for me to express my gratitude. I refer to the librarians of the libraries of Italy and their assistants; it is impossible to name them all, their faces are better known to me than their names, but I would here say that during long months passed in the various collections of the Peninsula, all, even to the most humble employees, have shown a tireless helpfulness even at those periods of the year when the number of attendants was the smallest. Professor Alessandro Leto, who, barely recovered from a grave attack of influenza, kindly served as my guide among the archives of Assisi, deserves a very particular mention. To the Syndic and municipality of that city I desire also to express my gratitude. I cannot close without a warm remembrance to the spiritual sons of St. Francis dispersed in the mountains of Umbria and Tuscany. Dear dwellers in St. Damian, Portiuncula, the Carceri, the Verna, Monte Colombo, you perhaps remember the strange pilgrim who, though he wore neither the frock nor the cord, used to talk with you of the Seraphic Father with as much love as the most pious Franciscan; you used to be surprised at his eagerness to see everything, to look at everything, to thread all the unexplored paths. You often tried to restrain him by telling him that there was not the smallest relic, the most meagre indulgence in the far-away grottos to which he was dragging you, but you always ended by going with him, thinking that none but a Frenchman could be possessed by a devotion so fervent and so imprudent. Thank you, pious anchorites of Greccio, thank you for the bread that you went out and begged when I arrived at your hermitage benumbed with cold and hunger. If you read these lines, read here my gratitude and also a little admiration. You are not all saints, but nearly all of you have hours of saintliness, flights of pure love. If some pages of this book give you pain, turn them over quickly; let me think that others of them will give you pleasure, and will make the name you bear, if possible, still more precious to you than it now is. FOOTNOTES: [1] The mendicant orders were in their origin a true _International_. When in the spring of 1216 St. Dominic assembled his friars at Notre Dame de la Prouille, they were found to be sixteen in number, and among them Castilians, Navarese, Normans, French, Languedocians, and even English and Germans. Heretics travelled all over Europe, and nowhere do we find them checked by the diversity of languages. Arnold of Brescia, for example, the famous Tribune of Rome, appeared in France and Switzerland and in the heart of Germany. [2] The Reformation only substituted the authority of the book for that of the priest; it is a change of dynasty and nothing more. As to the majority of those who to-day call themselves free-thinkers, they confuse religious freedom with irreligion; they choose not to see that in religion as in politics, between a royalty based on divine right and anarchy there is room for a government which may be as strong as the first and a better guarantee of freedom than the second. The spirit of the older time put God outside of the world; the sovereignty outside of the people; authority outside of the conscience. The spirit of the new times has the contrary tendency: it denies neither God nor sovereignty nor authority, but it sees them where they really are. [3] _Nemo ostendebat mihi quod deberem facere, sed ipse Altissimus revelavit mihi quod deberem vivere secundem formam sancti Evangelii._ Testamentum Fr. [4] The wealthiest monasteries of France are of the twelfth century or were enlarged at that time: Arles, S. Gilles, S. Sernin, Cluny, Vézelay, Brioude, Issoire, Paray-le-Monial. The same was the case in Italy. Down to the year 1000, 1,108 monasteries had been founded in France. The eleventh century saw the birth of 326 and the twelfth of 702. The convents of Mount Athos in their present state give us a very accurate notion of the great monasteries of Europe at the close of the twelfth century. [5] St. Petrus Chrysologus, sermo viii., de jejunio et eleemosyna. _Da pauperi ut des tibi: da micam ut accipias totum panem; da tectum, accipe coelum._ [6] By what right did he begin to preach? By what right did he, a mere deacon, admit to profession and cut off the hair of a young girl of eighteen? That is an episcopal function, one which can only devolve even upon priests by an express commission. [7] Isaiah i. 10-17. Cf. Joel 2, Psalm 50. [8] The chronicles of Orvieto (_Archivio, storico italiano_, t. i., of 1889, pp. 7 and following) are nothing more than a list, as melancholy as they are tedious of wars, which, during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, all the places of that region carried on, from the greatest to the smallest. [9] Do not forget that in the thirteenth century Italy was not a mere geographical expression. It was of all the countries of Europe the one which, notwithstanding its partitions, had the clearest consciousness of its unity. The expression _profectus et honor Italiæ_ often appeared from the pen of Innocent III. See, for instance, the bull of April 16, 1198, _Mirari cogimur_, addressed particularly to the Assisans. [10] Note what the Fioretti say of Brother Bernard: "_Stava solo sulle cime dei monti altissimi contemplando le cose celesti._" Fior., 28. The learned historian of Assisi, Mr. Cristofani, has used similar expressions; speaking of St. Francis, he says: "_Nuovo Christo in somma e pero degno d'essere riguardoto come la piu gigantesca, la piu splendida, la piu cara tra le grandi figure campeggianti nell' aere del medio evo_" (_Storia d'Assisi_, t. i., p. 70, ed. of 1885). [11] It remains open all night. * * * * * LIFE OF ST. FRANCIS * * * * * CHAPTER I YOUTH Assisi is to-day very much what it was six or seven hundred years ago. The feudal castle is in ruins, but the aspect of the city is just the same. Its long-deserted streets, bordered by ancient houses, lie in terraces half-way up the steep hill-side. Above it Mount Subasio[1] proudly towers, at its feet lies outspread all the Umbrian plain from Perugia to Spoleto. The crowded houses clamber up the rocks like children a-tiptoe to see all that is to be seen; they succeed so well that every window gives the whole panorama set in its frame of rounded hills, from whose summits castles and villages stand sharply out against a sky of incomparable purity. These simple dwellings contain no more than five or six little rooms,[2] but the rosy hues of the stone of which they are built give them a wonderfully cheerful air. The one in which, according to the story, St. Francis was born has almost entirely disappeared, to make room for a church; but the street is so modest, and all that remains of the _palazzo dei genitori di San Francesco_ is so precisely like the neighboring houses that the tradition must be correct. Francis entered into glory in his lifetime; it would be surprising if a sort of worship had not from the first been centred around the house in which he saw the light and where he passed the first twenty-five years of his life. He was born about 1182.[3] The biographies have preserved to us few details about his parents.[4] His father, Pietro Bernardone, was a wealthy cloth-merchant. We know how different was the life of the merchants of that period from what it is to-day. A great portion of their time was spent in extensive journeys for the purchase of goods. Such tours were little short of expeditions. The roads being insecure, a strong escort was needed for the journey to those famous fairs where, for long weeks at a time, merchants from the most remote parts of Europe were gathered together. In certain cities, Montpellier for example, the fair was perpetual. Benjamin of Tudela shows us that city frequented by all nations, Christian and Mohammedan. "One meets there merchants from Africa, from Italy, Egypt, Palestine, Greece, Gaul, Spain, and England, so that one sees men of all languages, with the Genoese and the Pisans." Among all these merchants the richest were those who dealt in textile stuffs. They were literally the bankers of the time, and their heavy wagons were often laden with the sums levied by the popes in England or France. Their arrival at a castle was one of the great events. They were kept as long as possible, everyone being eager for the news they brought. It is easy to understand how close must have been their relations with the nobility; in certain countries, Provence for example, the merchants were considered as nobles of a second order.[5] Bernardone often made these long journeys; he went even as far as France, and by this we must surely understand Northern France, and particularly Champagne, which was the seat of commercial exchange between Northern and Southern Europe. He was there at the very time of his son's birth. The mother, presenting the child at the font of San Rufino,[6] had him baptized by the name of John, but the father on his return chose to call him Francis.[7] Had he already determined on the education he was to give the child; did he name him thus because he even then intended to bring him up after the French fashion, to make a little Frenchman of him? It is by no means improbable. Perhaps, indeed, the name was only a sort of grateful homage tendered by the Assisan burgher to his noble clients beyond the Alps. However this may be, the child was taught to speak French, and always had a special fondness for both the language and the country.[8] These facts about Bernardone are of real importance; they reveal the influences in the midst of which Francis grew up. Merchants, indeed, play a considerable part in the religious movements of the thirteenth century. Their calling in some sense forced them to become colporters of ideas. What else could they do, on arriving in a country, but answer those who asked for news? And the news most eagerly looked for was religious news, for men's minds were turned upon very different subjects then from now. They accommodated themselves to the popular wish, observing, hearkening everywhere, keeping eyes and ears open, glad to find anything to tell; and little by little many of them became active propagandists of ideas concerning which at first they had been simply curious. The importance of the part thus played by the merchants as they came and went, everywhere sowing the new ideas which they had gathered up in their travels, has not been put in a clear enough light; they were often, unconsciously and quite involuntarily, the carriers of ideas of all kinds, especially of heresy and rebellion. It was they who made the success of the Waldenses, the Albigenses, the Humiliati, and many other sects. Thus Bernardone, without dreaming of such a thing, became the artisan of his son's religious vocation. The tales which he brought home from his travels seemed at first, perhaps, not to have aroused the child's attention, but they were like germs a long time buried, which suddenly, under a warm ray of sunlight, bring forth unlooked-for fruit. The boy's education was not carried very far;[9] the school was in those days overshadowed by the church. The priests of San Giorgio were his teachers,[10] and taught him a little Latin. This language was spoken in Umbria until toward the middle of the thirteenth century; every one understood it and spoke it a little; it was still the language of sermons and of political deliberations.[11] He learned also to write, but with less success; all through his life we see him take up the pen only on rare occasions, and for but a few words.[12] The autograph of Sacro-Convento, which appears to be entirely authentic, shows extreme awkwardness; in general he dictated, signing his letters by a simple [Greek: tau], the symbol of the cross of Jesus.[13] That part of his education which was destined to have most influence upon his life was the French language,[14] which he perhaps spoke in his own family. It has been rightly said that to know two languages is to have two souls; in learning that of France the boy felt his heart thrill to the melody of its youthful poetry, and his imagination was mysteriously stirred with dreams of imitating the exploits of the French cavaliers. But let us not anticipate. His early life was that of other children of his age. In the quarter of the town where his house is still shown no vehicles are ever seen; from morning till night the narrow streets are given over to the children. They play there in many groups, frolicking with an exquisite charm, very different from the little Romans, who, from the time they are six or seven years old, spend hours at a time squatting behind a pillar, or in a corner of a wall or a ruin, to play dice or "morra," putting a passionate ferocity even into their play. In Umbria, as in Tuscany, children love above all things games in which they can make a parade; to play at soldiers or procession is the supreme delight of Assisan children. Through the day they keep to the narrow streets, but toward evening they go, singing and dancing, to one of the open squares of the city. These squares are one of the charms of Assisi. Every few paces an interval occurs between the houses looking toward the plain, and you find a delightful terrace, shaded by a few trees, the very place for enjoying the sunset without losing one of its splendors. Hither no doubt came often the son of Bernardone, leading one of those _farandoles_ which you may see there to this day: from his very babyhood he was a prince among the children. Thomas of Celano draws an appalling picture of the education of that day. He describes parents inciting their children to vice, and driving them by main force to wrong-doing. Francis responded only too quickly to these unhappy lessons.[15] His father's profession and the possibly noble origin of his mother raised him almost to the level of the titled families of the country; money, which he spent with both hands, made him welcome among them. Well pleased to enjoy themselves at his expense, the young nobles paid him a sort of court. As to Bernardone, he was too happy to see his son associating with them to be niggardly as to the means. He was miserly, as the course of this history will show, but his pride and self-conceit exceeded his avarice. Pica, his wife, gentle and modest creature,[16] concerning whom the biographers have been only too laconic, saw all this, and mourned over it in silence, but though weak as mothers are, she would not despair of her son, and when the neighbors told her of Francis's escapades, she would calmly reply, "What are you thinking about? I am very sure that, if it pleases God, he will become a good Christian."[17] The words were natural enough from a mother's lips, but later on they were held to have been truly prophetic. How far did the young man permit himself to be led on? It would be difficult to say. The question which, as we are told, tormented Brother Leo, could only have suggested itself to a diseased imagination.[18] Thomas of Celano and the Three Companions agree in picturing him as going to the worst excesses. Later biographers speak with more circumspection of his worldly career. A too widely credited story gathered from Celano's narrative was modified by the chapter-general of 1260,[19] and the frankness of the early biographers was, no doubt, one of the causes which most effectively contributed to their definitive condemnation three years later.[20] Their statements are in no sense obscure; according to them the son of Bernardone not only patterned himself after the young men of his age, he made it a point of honor to exceed them. What with eccentricities, buffooneries, pranks, prodigalities, he ended by achieving a sort of celebrity. He was forever in the streets with his companions, compelling attention by his extravagant or fantastic attire. Even at night the joyous company kept up their merrymakings, causing the town to ring with their noisy songs.[21] At this very time the troubadours were roaming over the towns of Northern Italy[22] and bringing brilliant festivities and especially Courts of Love into vogue. If they worked upon the passions, they also made appeal to feelings of courtesy and delicacy; it was this that saved Francis. In the midst of his excesses he was always refined and considerate, carefully abstaining from every base or indecent utterance.[23] Already his chief aspiration was to rise above the commonplace. Tortured with the desire for that which is far off and high,[24] he had conceived a sort of passion for chivalry, and fancying that dissipation was one of the distinguishing features of nobility, he had thrown himself into it with all his soul. But he who, at twenty, goes from pleasure to pleasure with the heart not absolutely closed to good, must now and then, at some turning of the road, become aware that there are hungry folk, who could live a month on what he spends in a few hours on frivolity. Francis saw them, and with his impressionable nature for the moment forgot everything else. In thought he put himself in their place, and it sometimes happened that he gave them all the money he had about him and even his clothes. One day he was busy with some customers in his father's shop, when a man came in, begging for charity in the name of God. Losing his patience Francis sharply turned him away; but quickly reproaching himself for his harshness he thought, "What would I not have done if this man had asked something of me in the name of a count or a baron? What ought I not to have done when he came in the name of God? I am no better than a clown!" Leaving his customers he ran after the beggar.[25] Bernardone had been well pleased with his son's commercial aptitude in the early days when the young man was first in his father's employ. Francis was only too proficient in spending money; he at least knew well how to make it.[26] But this satisfaction did not last long. Francis's bad companions were exercising over him a most pernicious influence. The time came when he could no longer endure to be separated from them; if he heard their call, nothing could keep him, he would leave everything and go after them.[27] All this time political events were hurrying on in Umbria and Italy; after a formidable struggle the allied republics had forced the empire to recognize them. By the immortal victory of Legnano (May 29, 1176) and the Peace of Constance (June 25, 1183) the Lombard League had wrested from Frederick Barbarossa almost all the prerogatives of power; little was left to the emperor but insignia and outward show. From one end of the Peninsula to the other visions of liberty were making hearts beat high. For an instant it seemed as if all Italy was about to regain consciousness of its unity, was about to rise up as one man and hurl the foreigner from its borders; but the rivalries of the cities were too strong for them to see that local liberty without a common independence is precarious and illusory. Henry VI., the successor of Barbarossa (1183-1196), laid Italy under a yoke of iron; he might perhaps in the end have assured the domination of the empire, if his career had not been suddenly cut short by a premature death. Yet he had not been able to put fetters upon ideas. The communal movement which was shaking the north of France reverberated beyond the Alps. Although a city of second rank, Assisi had not been behind in the great struggles for independence.[28] She had been severely chastised, had lost her franchise, and was obliged to submit to Conrad of Suabia, Duke of Spoleto, who from the heights of his fortress kept her in subjection. But when Innocent III. ascended the pontifical throne (January 8, 1199) the old duke knew himself to be lost. He made a tender to him of money, men, his faith even, but the pontiff refused them all. He had no desire to appear to favor the Tedeschi, who had so odiously oppressed the country. Conrad of Suabia was forced to yield at mercy, and to go to Narni to put his submission into the hands of two cardinals. Like the practical folk that they were, the Assisans did not hesitate an instant. No sooner was the count on the road to Narni than they rushed to the assault of the castle. The arrival of envoys charged to take possession of it as a pontifical domain by no means gave them pause. Not one stone of it was left upon another.[29] Then, with incredible rapidity they enclosed their city with walls, parts of which are still standing, their formidable ruins a witness to the zeal with which the whole population labored on them. It is natural to think that Francis, then seventeen years old, was one of the most gallant laborers of those glorious days, and it was perhaps there that he gained the habit of carrying stones and wielding the trowel which was destined to serve him so well a few years later. Unhappily his fellow-citizens had not the sense to profit by their hard-won liberty. The lower classes, who in this revolution had become aware of their strength, determined to follow out the victory by taking possession of the property of the nobles. The latter took refuge in their fortified houses in the interior of the city, or in their castles in the suburbs. The townspeople burned down several of the latter, whereupon counts and barons made request of aid and succor from the neighboring cities. Perugia was at this time at the apogee of its power,[30] and had already made many efforts to reduce Assisi to submission. It therefore received the fugitives with alacrity, and making their cause its own, declared war upon Assisi. This was in 1202. An encounter took place in the plain about half way between the two cities, not far from _Ponte San Giovanni_. Assisi was defeated, and Francis, who was in the ranks, was made prisoner.[31] The treachery of the nobles had not been universal; a few had fought with the people. It was with them and not with the _popolani_ that Francis, in consideration of the nobility of his manners,[32] passed the time of his captivity, which lasted an entire year. He greatly astonished his companions by his lightness of heart. Very often they thought him almost crazy. Instead of passing his time in wailing and cursing he made plans for the future, about which he was glad to talk to any one who came along. To his fancy life was what the songs of the troubadours had painted it; he dreamed of glorious adventures, and always ended by saying: "You will see that one day I shall be adored by the whole world."[33] During these long months Francis must have been pretty rudely undeceived with respect to those nobles whom from afar he had so heartily admired. However that may be, he retained with them not only his frankness of speech, but also his full freedom of action. One of them, a knight, had always held aloof from the others, out of vanity and bad temper. Francis, far from leaving him to himself, always showed him affection, and finally had the joy of reconciling him with his fellow-captives. A compromise was finally arrived at between the counts and the people of Assisi. In November, 1203, the arbitrators designated by the two parties announced their decision. The commons of Assisi were to repair in a certain measure the damage done to the lords, and the latter agreed, on their part, to make no further alliances without authorization of the commons.[34] Rural serfage was maintained, which proves that the revolution had been directed by the burghers, and for their own profit. Ten years more were not, however, to elapse before the common people also would succeed in achieving liberty. In this cause we shall again see Francis fighting on the side of the oppressed, earning the title of _Patriarch of religious democracy_ which has been accorded him by one of his compatriots.[35] The agreement being made the prisoners detained at Perugia were released, and Francis returned to Assisi. He was twenty-two years old. FOOTNOTES: [1] Eleven hundred and one metres above the level of the sea; the plain around Assisi has an average of two hundred, and the town of two hundred and fifty, metres above. [2] As in the majority of Tuscan cities the dimensions of the houses were formerly fixed by law. [3] The biographies say that he died (October 3, 1226) in his forty-fifth year. But the terms are not precise enough to make the date 1181 improbable. For that matter the question is of small importance. A Franciscan of Erfurt, about the middle of the thirteenth century, fixes the date at 1182. Pertz, vol. xxiv., p. 193. [4] A number of different genealogies have been fabricated for Francis; they prove only one thing, the wreck of the Franciscan idea. How little they understood their hero, who thought to magnify and glorify him by making him spring from a noble family! "_Quæ rero_," says Father Suysken, S. J., "_de ejus gentilitio insigni disserit Waddingus, non lubet mihi attingere. Factis et virtutibus eluxit S. Franciscus non proavorum insignibus aut titulis, quos nec desideravit_." (A. SS. p. 557a.) It could not be better said. In the fourteenth century a whole cycle of legends had gathered about his birth. It could not have been otherwise. They all grow out of the story that tells of an old man who comes knocking at the parents' door, begging them to let him take the infant in his arms, when he announces that it will do great things. Under this form the episode certainly presents nothing impossible, but very soon marvellous incidents begin to gather around this nucleus until it becomes unrecognizable. Bartholomew of Pisa has preserved it in almost its primitive form. _Conform_., 28a 2. Francis certainly had several brothers [3 Soc., 9. _Mater_ ... _quæ cum præ ceteris filiis diligebat_], but they have left no trace in history except the incident related farther on. Vide p. 44. Christofani publishes several official pieces concerning _Angelo_, St. Francis's brother, and his descendants: _Storie d'Assisi_, vol. i., p. 78 ff. In these documents Angelo is called _Angelus Pice_, and his son _Johannectus olim Angeli domine Pice_, appellations which might be cited in favor of the noble origin of Pica. [5] Documentary History of Languedoc, iii., p. 607. [6] The Cathedral of Assisi. To this day all the children of the town are baptized there; the other churches are without fonts. [7] 3 Soc., 1; 2 Cel., 1, 1. Vide also 3 Soc., edition of Pesaro, 1831. [8] The _langue d'oïl_ was at this epoch the international language of Europe; in Italy it was the language of games and tourneys, and was spoken in the petty princely courts of Northern Italy. Vide Dante, _De vulgari eloquio_, lib. I., cap. x. Brunetto Latini wrote in French because "the speech of France is more delectable and more common to all people." At the other end of Europe the Abbot of Stade, in Westphalia, spoke of the _nobility of the Gallic dialect_. _Ann._ 1224 _apud_ Pertz, Script. xvi. We shall find St. Francis often making allusions to the tales of the Round Table and the _Chanson de Roland_. [9] We must not be led astray by certain remarks upon his ignorance, from which one might at first conclude that he knew absolutely nothing; for example, 2 Cel., 3, 45: _Quamvis homo iste beatus nullis fuerit scientiæ studiis innutritus_. This evidently refers to science such as the Franciscans soon came to apprehend it, and to theology in particular. The close of the passage in Celano is itself an evident proof of this. [10] Bon., 219; Cf. A. SS., p. 560a. 1 Cel., 23. [11] Ozanam, _Documents inédits pour servir à l'histoire littéraire d'Italie du VIIIe au XIIIe siècle_. Paris, 1851, 8vo, pp. 65, 68, 71, 73. Fauriel, _Dante et les origines de la littérature italienne_. Paris, 1854, 2 vols., 8vo, ii., p. 332, 379, 429. [12] V. 3 Soc., 51 and 67; 2 Cel., 3, 110; Bon., 55; 2 Cel., 3, 99; Eccl., 6. Bernard de Besse, Turin MS., fo. 96a, calls Brother Leo the secretary of St. Francis. [13] See page 357, n. 8. Bon., 51 and 308. [14] 1 Cel., 16; 3 Soc., 10; 23; 24; 33; 2 Cel., 1, 8; 3, 67. See also the Testament of St. Clara and the Speculum, 119a. [15] _Primum namque cum fari vel balbutire incipiunt, turpia quædam et execrabilia valde signis et vocibus edocentur pueri ii nondum nati: et cum tempus ablactationis advenerit quædam luxu et lascivia plena non solum fari sed et operari coguntur.... Sed et cum paulo plusculum ætate profecerint, se ipsis impellentibus, semper ad deteriora opera dilabuntur._ 1 Cel., 1. [16] 2 Cel., 1. Cf. _Conform._, 14a, 1. There is nothing impossible in her having been of Provençal origin, but there is nothing to indicate it in any document worthy of credence. She was no doubt of noble stock, for official documents always give her the title _Domina_. Cristofani I., p. 78 ff. Cf. _Matrem honestissimam habuit_. 3 Soc., Edition of Pesaro, 1831, p. 17. [17] The reading given by the _Conform_., 14a, 1, _Meritorum gratia dei filium ipsum noveritis affuturum_, seems better than that of 2 Cel., 1, 1, _Multorum gratia Dei filiorum patrem ipsum noveritis affuturum_. Cf. 3 Soc., 2. [18] Bernardo of Besse, Turin MS., 102 b.: _An integer carne desiderans ... quod non extorsisset a Sancto ... meruit obtinere a Deo quod virgo esset_. Cf. _Conform_., 211a, 1, and A. SS., p. 560f. [19] "_In illa antiphona quæ incipit: Hic vir in vanitatibus nutritus insolenter, fiat talis mutatis: Divinis karismatibus preventus est clementer." Archiv._, vi., p. 35. [20] Vide p. 395, the decision of the chapter of 1263 ordaining the destruction of legends earlier than that of Bonaventura. [21] 1 Cel., 1 and 2; 89; 3 Soc., 2. Cf. A. SS., 560c. Vincent of Beauvais, _Spec. hist. lib._, 29, cap. 97. [22] Pierre Vidal was at the court of Boniface, Marquis of Montferrat, about 1195, and liked his surroundings so well that he desired to establish himself there. K. Bartsch, _Piere Vidal's Lieder_, Berlin, 1857, n. 41. Ern. Monaci, _Testi antichi provenzali_, Rome, 1889, col. 67. One should read this piece to have an idea of the fervor with which this poet shared the hopes of Italy and desired its independence. This political note is found again in a _tenzon_ of Manfred II. Lancia, addressed to Pierre Vidal. (V. Monaci, _loc. cit._, col. 68.)--Gaucelme Faidit was also at this court as well as Raimbaud of Vacqueyras (1180-1207).--Folquet de Romans passed nearly all his life in Italy. Bernard of Ventadour (1145-1195), Peirol of Auvergne (1180-1220), and many others abode there a longer or shorter time. Very soon the Italians began to sing in Provençal, among others this Manfred Lancia, and Albert Marquis of Malaspina (1162-1210), Pietro della Caravana, who in 1196 stirred up the Lombard towns against Henry VI., Pietro della Mula, who about 1200 was at the court of Cortemiglia. Fragments from these poets may be found in Monaci, _op. cit._, col. 69 ff. [23] Soc., 3; 2 Cel., 1, 1. [24] _Cum esset gloriosus animo et nollet aliquem se præcellere_, Giord. 20. [25] 1 Cel., 17; 3 Soc., 3; Bon., 7. Cf. A. SS., p. 562. [26] 1 Cel., 2; Bon., 6; _Vit. sec. apud_, A. SS., p. 560. [27] 3 Soc., 9. [28] In 1174 Assisi was taken by the chancellor of the empire, Christian, Archbishop of Mayence. A. Cristofani, i., p. 69. [29] All these events are related in the _Gesta Innocentii III. ab auctore coætaneo_, edited by Baluze: Migne, _Inn. op._, vol. i., col. xxiv. See especially the letter of Innocent, _Rectoribus Tusciæ: Mirari cogimur_, of April 16, 1198. Migne, vol. i., col. 75-77. Potthast, No. 82. [30] See Luigi Bonazzi, _Storia di Perugia_, 2 vols., 8vo. Perugia, 1875-1879 vol. i., cap. v., pp. 257-322. [31] 3 Soc., 4; 2 Cel., 1, 1. Cristofani, _op. cit._, i., p. 88 ff.; Bonazzi, _op. cit._, p. 257. [32] 3 Soc., 4. [33] 3 Soc., 4; 2 Cel., 1, 1. [34] See this arbitration in Cristofani, _op. cit._, p. 93 ff. [35] Cristofani, _loc. cit._, p. 70. * * * * * CHAPTER II STAGES OF CONVERSION Spring 1204-Spring 1206 On his return to Assisi Francis at once resumed his former mode of life; perhaps he even tried in some degree to make up for lost time. Fêtes, games, festivals, and dissipations began again. He did his part in them so well that he soon fell gravely ill.[1] For long weeks he looked death so closely in the face that the physical crisis brought about a moral one. Thomas of Celano has preserved for us an incident of Francis's convalescence. He was regaining strength little by little and had begun to go about the house, when one day he felt a desire to walk abroad, to contemplate nature quietly, and so take hold again of life. Leaning on a stick he bent his steps toward the city gate. The nearest one, called _Porta Nuova_, is the very one which opens upon the finest scenery. Immediately on passing through it one finds one's self in the open country; a fold of the hill hides the city, and cuts off every sound that might come from it. Before you lies the winding road to Foligno; at the left the imposing mass of Mount Subasio; at the right the Umbrian plain with its farms, its villages, its cloud-like hills, on whose slopes pines, cedars, oaks, the vine, and the olive-tree shed abroad an incomparable brightness and animation. The whole country sparkles with beauty, a beauty harmonious and thoroughly human, that is, made to the measure of man. Francis had hoped by this sight to recover the delicious sensations of his youth. With the sharpened sensibility of the convalescent he breathed in the odors of the spring-time, but spring-time did not come, as he had expected, to his heart. This smiling nature had for him only a message of sadness. He had believed that the breezes of this beloved country-side would carry away the last shudders of the fever, and instead he felt in his heart a discouragement a thousand-fold more painful than any physical ill. The miserable emptiness of his life suddenly appeared before him; he was terrified at his solitude, the solitude of a great soul in which there is no altar. Memories of the past assailed him with intolerable bitterness; he was seized with a disgust of himself, his former ambitions seemed to him ridiculous or despicable. He went home overwhelmed with the weight of a new suffering. In such hours of moral anguish man seeks a refuge either in love or in faith. Unhappily the family and friends of Francis were incapable of understanding him. As to religion, it was for him, as for the greater number of his contemporaries, that crass fetichism with Christian terminology which is far from having entirely disappeared. With certain men, in fact, piety consists in making one's self right with a king more powerful than any other, but also more severe and capricious, who is called God. One proves one's loyalty to him as to other sovereigns, by putting his image more or less everywhere, and punctually paying the imposts levied by his ministers. If you are stingy, if you cheat, you run the risk of being severely chastised, but there are courtiers around the king who willingly render services. For a reasonable recompense they will seize a favorable moment to adroitly make away with the sentence of your condemnation or to slip before the prince a form of plenary absolution which in a moment of good humor he will sign without looking at it.[2] Such was the religious basis upon which Francis had lived up to this time. He did not so much as dream of seeking the spiritual balm which he needed for the healing of his wounds. By a holy violence he was to arrive at last at a pure and virile faith; but the road to this point is long, and sown thick with obstacles, and at the moment at which we have arrived he had not yet entered upon it, he did not even suspect its existence; all he knew was that pleasure leads to nothingness, to satiety and self-contempt. He knew this, and yet he was about to throw himself once more into a life of pleasure. The body is so weak, so prone to return to the old paths, that it seeks them of itself, the moment an energetic will does not stop it. Though no longer under any illusion with respect to it, Francis returned to his former life. Was he trying to divert his mind, to forget that day of bitter thought? We might suppose so, seeing the ardor with which he threw himself into his new projects.[3] An opportunity offered itself for him to realize his dreams of glory. A knight of Assisi, perhaps one of those who had been in captivity with him at Perugia, was preparing to go to Apulia under orders from Count Gentile.[4] The latter was to join Gaultier de Brienne, who was in the south of Italy fighting on the side of Innocent III. Gaultier's renown was immense all through the Peninsula; he was held to be one of the most gallant knights of the time. Francis's heart bounded with joy; it seemed to him that at the side of such a hero he should soon cover himself with glory. His departure was decided upon, and he gave himself up, without reserve, to his joy. He made his preparations with ostentatious prodigality. His equipment, of a princely luxury, soon became the universal subject of conversation. It was all the more talked about because the chief of the expedition, ruined perhaps by the revolution of 1202 or by the expenses of a long captivity, was constrained to order things much more modestly.[5] But with Francis kindliness was much stronger than love of display. He gave his sumptuous clothing to a poor knight. The biographies do not say whether or not it was to the very one whom he was to accompany.[6] To see him running hither and thither in all the bustle of preparation one would have thought him the son of a great lord. His companions were doubtless not slow to feel chafed by his ways and to promise themselves to make him cruelly expiate them. As for him, he perceived nothing of the jealousies which he was exciting, and night and day he thought only of his future glory. In his dreams he seemed to see his parents' house completely transformed. Instead of bales of cloth he saw there only gleaming bucklers hanging on the walls, and arms of all kinds as in a seignorial castle. He saw himself there, beside a noble and beautiful bride, and he never suspected that in this vision there was any presage of the future which was reserved for him. Never had any one seen him so communicative, so radiant; and when he was asked for the hundredth time whence came all this joy, he would reply with surprising assurance: "I know that I shall become a great prince."[7] The day of departure arrived at last. Francis on horseback, the little buckler of a page on his arm, bade adieu to his natal city with joy, and with the little troop took the road to Spoleto which winds around the base of Mount Subasio. What happened next? The documents do not say. They confine themselves to reporting that that very evening Francis had a vision which decided him to return to Assisi.[8] Perhaps it would not be far from the truth to conjecture that once fairly on the way the young nobles took their revenge on the son of Bernardone for his airs as of a future prince. At twenty years one hardly pardons things like these. If, as we are often assured, there is a pleasure unsuspected by the profane in getting even with a stranger, it must be an almost divine delight to get even with a young coxcomb upon whom one has to exercise so righteous a vengeance. Arriving at Spoleto, Francis took to his bed. A fever was consuming him; in a few hours he had seen all his dreams crumble away. The very next day he took the road back to Assisi.[9] So unexpected a return made a great stir in the little city, and was a cruel blow to his parents. As for him, he doubled his charities to the poor, and sought to keep aloof from society, but his old companions came flocking about him from all quarters, hoping to find in him once more the tireless purveyor of their idle wants. He let them have their way. Nevertheless a great change had taken place in him. Neither pleasures nor work could long hold him; he spent a portion of his days in long country rambles, often accompanied by a friend most different from those whom until now we have seen about him. The name of this friend is not known, but from certain indications one is inclined to believe that he was Bombarone da Beviglia, the future Brother Elias.[10] Francis now went back to his reflections at the time of his recovery, but with less of bitterness. His own heart and his friend agreed in saying to him that it is possible no longer to trust either in pleasure or in glory and yet to find worthy causes to which to consecrate one's life. It is at this moment that religious thought seems to have awaked in him. From the moment that he saw this new way of life his desire to run in it had all the fiery impetuosity which he put into all his actions. He was continually calling upon his friend and leading him apart into the most sequestered paths. But intense conflicts are indescribable. We struggle, we suffer alone. It is the nocturnal wrestling of Bethel, mysterious and solitary. The soul of Francis was great enough to endure this tragic duel. His friend had marvellously understood his part in this contest. He gave a few rare counsels, but much of the time he contented himself with manifesting his solicitude by following Francis everywhere and never asking to know more than he could tell him. Often Francis directed his steps to a grotto in the country near Assisi, which he entered alone. This rocky cave concealed in the midst of the olive trees became for faithful Franciscans that which Gethsemane is for Christians. Here Francis relieved his overcharged heart by heavy groans. Sometimes, seized with a real horror for the disorders of his youth, he would implore mercy, but the greater part of the time his face was turned toward the future; feverishly he sought for that higher truth to which he longed to dedicate himself, that pearl of great price of which the gospel speaks: "Whosoever seeks, finds; he who asks, receives; and to him who knocks, it shall be opened." When he came out after long hours of seclusion the pallor of his countenance, the painful tension of his features told plainly enough of the intensity of his asking and the violence of his knocks.[11] The inward man, to borrow the language of the mystics, was not yet formed in him, but it needed only the occasion to bring about the final break with the past. The occasion soon presented itself. His friends were making continual efforts to induce him to take up his old habits again. One day he invited them all to a sumptuous banquet. They thought they had conquered, and as in old times they proclaimed him king of the revels. The feast was prolonged far into the night, and at its close the guests rushed out into the streets, which they filled with song and uproar. Suddenly they perceived that Francis was no longer with them. After long searching they at last discovered him far behind them, still holding in his hand his sceptre of king of misrule, but plunged in so profound a revery that he seemed to be riveted to the ground and unconscious of all that was going on. "What is the matter with you?" they cried, bustling about him as if to awaken him. "Don't you see that he is thinking of taking a wife?" said one. "Yes," answered Francis, arousing himself and looking at them with a smile which they did not recognize. "I am thinking of taking a wife more beautiful, more rich, more pure than you could ever imagine."[12] This reply marks a decisive stage in his inner life. By it he cut the last links which bound him to trivial pleasures. It remains for us to see through what struggles he was to give himself to God, after having torn himself free from the world. His friends probably understood nothing of all that had taken place, but he had become aware of the abyss that was opening between them and him. They soon accepted the situation. As for himself, no longer having any reason for caution, he gave himself up more than ever to his passion for solitude. If he often wept over his past dissipations and wondered how he could have lived so long without tasting the bitterness of the dregs of the enchanted cup, he never allowed himself to be overwhelmed with vain regrets. The poor had remained faithful to him. They gave him an admiration of which he knew himself to be unworthy, yet which had for him an infinite sweetness. The future grew bright to him in the light of their gratitude, of the timid, trembling affection which they dared not utter but which his heart revealed to him; this worship which he does not deserve to-day he will deserve to-morrow, at least he promises himself to do all he can to deserve it. To understand these feelings one must understand the condition of the poor of a place like Assisi. In an agricultural country poverty does not, as elsewhere, almost inevitably involve moral destitution, that degeneration of the entire human being which renders charity so difficult. Most of the poor persons whom Francis knew were in straits because of war, of bad harvests, or of illness. In such cases material succor is but a small part. Sympathy is the thing needed above all. Francis had treasures of it to lavish upon them. He was well requited. All sorrows are sisters; a secret intelligence establishes itself between troubled hearts, however diverse their griefs. The poor people felt that their friend also suffered; they did not precisely know with what, but they forgot their own sorrows in pitying their benefactor. Suffering is the true cement of love. For men to love each other truly, they must have shed tears together. As yet no influence strictly ecclesiastic had been felt by Francis. Doubtless there was in his heart that leaven of Christian faith which enters one's being without his being aware; but the interior transformation which was going on in him was as yet the fruit of his own intuition. This period was drawing to a close. His thought was soon to find expression, and by that very act to receive the stamp of external circumstances. Christian instruction will give a precise form to ideas of which as yet he has but vague glimpses, but he will find in this form a frame in which his thought will perhaps lose something of its originality and vigor; the new wine will be put into old wine-skins. By degrees he was becoming calm, was finding in the contemplation of nature joys which up to this time he had sipped but hastily, almost unconsciously, and of which he was now learning to relish the flavor. He drew from them not simply soothing; in his heart he felt new compassions springing into life, and with these the desire to act, to give himself, to cry aloud to these cities perched upon the hill-tops, threatening as warriors who eye one another before the fray, that they should be reconciled and love one another. Certainly, at this time Francis had no glimpse of what he was some time to become; but these hours are perhaps the most important in the evolution of his thought; it is to them that his life owes that air of liberty, that perfume of the fields which make it as different from the piety of the sacristy as from that of the drawing-room. About this time he made a pilgrimage to Rome, whether to ask counsel of his friends, whether as a penance imposed by his confessor, or from a mere impulse, no one knows. Perhaps he thought that in a visit to the _Holy Apostles_, as people said then, he should find the answers to all the questions which he was asking himself. At any rate he went. It is hardly probable that he received from the visit any religious influence, for his biographers relate the pained surprise which he experienced when he saw in Saint Peter's how meagre were the offerings of pilgrims. He wanted to give everything to the prince of the apostles, and emptying his purse he threw its entire contents upon the tomb. This journey was marked by a more important incident. Many a time when succoring the poor he had asked himself if he himself was able to endure poverty; no one knows the weight of a burden until he has carried it, at least for a moment, upon his own shoulders. He desired to know what it is like to have nothing, and to depend for bread upon the charity or the caprice of the passer by.[13] There were swarms of beggars crowding the Piazza before the great basilica. He borrowed the rags of one of them, lending him his garment in exchange, and a whole day he stood there, fasting, with outstretched hand. The act was a great victory, the triumph of compassion over natural pride. Returning to Assisi, he doubled his kindnesses to those of whom he had truly the right to call himself the brother. With such sentiments he could not long escape the influence of the Church. On all the roadsides in the environs of the city there were then, as now, numerous chapels. Very often he must have heard mass in these rustic sanctuaries, alone with the celebrant. Recognizing the tendency of simple natures to bring home to themselves everything that they hear, it is easy to understand his emotion and agitation when the priest, turning toward him, would read the gospel for the day. The Christian ideal was revealed to him, bringing an answer to his secret anxieties. And when, a few moments later, he would plunge into the forest, all his thoughts would be with the poor carpenter of Nazareth, who placed himself in his path, saying to him, even to him, "Follow thou me." Nearly two years had passed since the day when he felt the first shock; a life of renunciation appeared to him as the goal of his efforts, but he felt that his spiritual novitiate was not yet ended. He suddenly experienced a bitter assurance of the fact. He was riding on horseback one day, his mind more than ever possessed with the desire to lead a life of absolute devotion, when at a turn of the road he found himself face to face with a leper. The frightful malady had always inspired in him an invincible repulsion. He could not control a movement of horror, and by instinct he turned his horse in another direction. If the shock had been severe, the defeat was complete. He reproached himself bitterly. To cherish such fine projects and show himself so cowardly! Was the knight of Christ then going to give up his arms? He retraced his steps and springing from his horse he gave to the astounded sufferer all the money that he had; then kissed his hand as he would have done to a priest.[14] This new victory, as he himself saw, marked an era in his spiritual life.[15] It is far indeed from hatred of evil to love of good. Those are more numerous than we think who, after severe experience, have renounced what the ancient liturgies call the world, with its pomps and lusts; but the greater number of them have not at the bottom of their hearts the smallest grain of pure love. In vulgar souls disillusion leaves only a frightful egoism. This victory of Francis had been so sudden that he desired to complete it; a few days later he went to the lazaretto.[16] One can imagine the stupefaction of these wretches at the entrance of the brilliant cavalier. If in our days a visit to the sick in our hospitals is a real event awaited with feverish impatience, what must not have been the appearance of Francis among these poor recluses? One must have seen sufferers thus abandoned, to understand what joy may be given by an affectionate word, sometimes even a simple glance. Moved and transported, Francis felt his whole being vibrate with unfamiliar sensations. For the first time he heard the unspeakable accents of a gratitude which cannot find words burning enough to express itself, which admires and adores the benefactor almost like an angel from heaven. FOOTNOTES: [1] 1 Cel., 3; cf. Bon., 8, and A. SS., p. 563c. [2] It is enough to have lived in the country of Naples to know that there is nothing exaggerated in this picture. I am much surprised that intelligent and good men fancy that to change the religious formula of these people would suffice to transform them. What a mistake! To-day, as in the time of Jesus, the important matter is not to adore on Mount Moriah or Mount Zion, but to adore in spirit and in truth. [3] 1 Cel., 3 and 4. [4] 3 Soc., 5. In the existing state of the documents it is impossible to know whom this name designates, for at that time it was borne by a number of counts who are only to be distinguished by the names of their castles. The three following are possible: 1. _Gentile comes de Campilio_, who in 1215 paid homage for his property to the commune of Orvieto: _Le antiche cronache di Orvieto, Arch. stor. ital._, 5th series., 1889, iii., p. 47. 2. _Gentilis comes filius Alberici_, who with others had made donation of a monastery to the Bishop of Foligno: Confirmatory Bull _In eminenti_ of April 10, 1210: Ughelli, _Italia Sacra_, 1, p. 697; Potthast, 3974. 3. _Gentilis comes Manupelli_; whom we find in July, 1200, assuring to Palermo the victory over the troops sent by Innocent III. against Marckwald; Huillard-Bréholles, _Hist. dipl._, i. p., 46 ff. Cf. Potthast, 1126. _Gesta Innocenti_, Migne, vol. i., xxxii, ff. Cf. Huillard-Bréholles, _loc. cit._, pages 60, 84, 89, 101. It is wrong to consider that Gentile could here be a mere adjective; the 3 Soc. say _Gentile nomine_. [5] 1 Cel., 4; 3 Soc., 5. [6] 3 Soc., 6; 2 Cel., 1, 2; Bon., 8. [7] 1 Cel., 5; 3 Soc., 5; 2 Cel., 1, 2; Bon., 9. [8] 3 Soc., 6; Bon., 9; 2 Cel., 1, 2. [9] 3 Soc., 6; 2 Cel., 1, 2. [10] These days are recalled by Celano with a very particular precision. It is very improbable that Francis, usually so reserved as to his personal experience, should have told him about them (2 Cel., 3, 68 and 42, cf. Bon., 144). On the other hand, nothing forbids his having been informed on this matter by Brother Elias. (I strongly suspect the legend which tells of an old man appearing on the day Francis was born and begging permission to take the child in his arms, saying, "To-day, two infants were born--this one, who will be among the best of men, and another, who will be among the worst"--of having been invented by the _zelanti_ against Brother Elias. It is evident that such a story is aimed at some one. Whom, if not him who was afterward to appear as the Anti-Francis?) We have sufficient details about the eleven first disciples to know that none of them is here in question. There is nothing surprising in the fact that Elias does not appear in the earliest years of the Order (1209-1212), because after having practised at Assisi his double calling of schoolmaster and carriage-trimmer (_suebat cultras et docebat puerulos psalterium legere_, Salimbene, p. 402) he was _scriptor_ at Bologna (Eccl., 13). And from the psychological point of view this hypothesis would admirably explain the ascendency which Elias was destined always to exercise over his master. Still it remains difficult to understand why Celano did not name Elias here, but the passage, 1 Cel., 6, differs in the different manuscripts (cf. A. SS. and Amoni's edition, p. 14) and may have been retouched after the latter's fall. Beviglia is a simple farm three-quarters of an hour northwest of Assisi, almost half way to Petrignano. Half an hour from Assisi in the direction of Beviglia is a grotto, which may very well be that of which we are about to speak. [11] 1 Cel., 6; 2 Cel., 1, 5; 3 Soc., 8, 12; Bon., 10, 11, 12. [12] 3 Soc., 7; 1 Cel., 7; 2 Cel., 1, 3; 3 Soc., 13. [13] 3 Soc., 8-10; Bon., 13, 14; 2 Cel., 1, 4. [14] To this day in the centre and south of Italy they kiss the hand of priests and monks. [15] See the Will. Cf. 3 Soc., 11; 1 Cel., 17; Bon., 11; A. SS., p. 566. [16] 3 Soc., 11; Bon., 13. * * * * * CHAPTER III THE CHURCH ABOUT 1209 St. Francis was inspired as much as any man may be, but it would be a palpable error to study him apart from his age and from the conditions in which he lived. We know that he desired and believed his life to be an imitation of Jesus, but what we know about the Christ is in fact so little, that St. Francis's life loses none of its strangeness for that. His conviction that he was but an imitator preserved him from all temptation to pride, and enabled him to proclaim his views with incomparable vigor, without seeming in the least to be preaching himself. We must therefore neither isolate him from external influences nor show him too dependent on them. During the period of his life at which we are now arrived, 1205-1206, the religious situation of Italy must more than at any other time have influenced his thought and urged him into the path which he finally entered. The morals of the clergy were as corrupt as ever, rendering any serious reform impossible. If some among the heresies of the time were pure and without reproach, many were trivial and impure. Here and there a few voices were raised in protest, but the prophesyings of Gioacchino di Fiore had no more power than those of St. Hildegarde to put a stop to wickedness. Luke Wadding, the pious Franciscan annalist, begins his chronicle with this appalling picture. The advance in historic research permits us to retouch it somewhat more in detail, but the conclusion remains the same; without Francis of Assisi the Church would perhaps have foundered and the Cathari would have won the day. The _little poor man_, driven away, cast out of doors by the creatures of Innocent III., saved Christianity. We cannot here make a thorough study of the state of the Church at the beginning of the thirteenth century; it will suffice to trace some of its most prominent features. The first glance at the secular clergy brings out into startling prominence the ravages of simony; the traffic in ecclesiastical places was carried on with boundless audacity; benefices were put up to the highest bidder, and Innocent III. admitted that fire and sword alone could heal this plague.[1] Prelates who declined to be bought by _propinæ_, fees, were held up as astounding exceptions![2] "They are stones for understanding," it was said of the officers of the Roman _curia_, "wood for justice, fire for wrath, iron for forgiveness; deceitful as foxes, proud as bulls, greedy and insatiate as the minotaur."[3] The praises showered upon Pope Eugenius III. for rebuffing a priest who, at the beginning of a lawsuit, offered him a golden mark, speak only too plainly as to the morals of Rome in this respect.[4] The bishops, on their part, found a thousand methods, often most out of keeping with their calling, for extorting money from the simple priests.[5] Violent, quarrelsome, contentious, they were held up to ridicule in popular ballads from one end of Europe to the other.[6] As to the priests, they bent all their powers to accumulate benefices, and secure inheritances from the dying, stooping to the most despicable measures for providing for their bastards.[7] The monastic orders were hardly more reputable. A great number of these had sprung up in the eleventh and twelfth centuries; their reputation for sanctity soon stimulated the liberality of the faithful, and thus fatally brought about their own decadence. Few communities had shown the discretion of the first monks of the Order of Grammont in the diocese of Limoges. When Stephen de Muret, its founder, began to manifest his sanctity by giving sight to a blind man, his disciples took alarm at the thought of the wealth and notoriety which was likely to come to them from this cause. Pierre of Limoges, who had succeeded Stephen as prior, went at once to his tomb, praying: "O servant of God, thou hast shown us the way of poverty, and behold, thou wouldst make us leave the strait and difficult path of salvation, and wouldst set us in the broad road of eternal death. Thou hast preached to us (the virtues of) solitude, and thou art about to change this place into a fair and a market-place. We know well that thou art a saint! Thou hast no need to prove it to us by performing miracles which will destroy our humility. Be not so zealous for thy reputation as to augment it to the injury of our salvation. This is what we ask of thee, expecting it of thy love. If not, we declare unto thee by the obedience which we once owed to thee, we will unearth thy bones and throw them into the river." Stephen obeyed up to the time of his canonization (1189), but from that time forward ambition, avarice, and luxury made such inroads upon the solitude of Grammont that its monks became the byword and scoff of the Christian world.[8] Pierre of Limoges was not entirely without reason in fearing that his monastery would be transformed into a fair-ground; members of the chapters of most of the cathedrals kept wine-shops literally under their shadows, and certain monasteries did not hesitate to attract custom by jugglers of all kinds and even by courtesans.[9] To form an idea of the degradation of the greater number of the monks it is not enough to read the oratorical and often exaggerated reproofs of preachers obliged to strike hard in order to produce an effect. We must run through the collection of bulls, where appeals to the court of Rome against assassinations, violations, incests, adulteries, recur on almost every page. It is easy to see that even an Innocent III. might feel himself helpless and tempted to yield to discouragement, in the face of so many ills.[10] The best spirits were turning toward the Orient, asking themselves if perchance the Greek Church might not suddenly come forward to purify all these abuses, and receive for herself the inheritance of her sister.[11] The clergy, though no longer respected, still overawed the people through their superstitious terror of their power. Here and there might have been perceived many a forewarning of direful revolts; the roads to Rome were crowded with monks hastening to claim the protection of the Holy See against the people among whom they lived. The Pope would promptly declare an interdict, but it was not to be expected that such a resource would avail forever.[12] To maintain the privileges of the Church the papacy was often obliged to spread the mantle of its protection over those who deserved it least. Its clients were not always as interesting as the unfortunate Ingelburge. It would be easier to give unreserved admiration to the conduct of Innocent III. if in this matter one could feel certain that his only interest was to maintain the cause of a poor abandoned woman. But it is only too evident that he desired above all to keep up the ecclesiastical immunities. This is very evident in his intervention in favor of Waldemar, Bishop of Schleswig. Yet we must not assume that all was corrupt in the bosom of the Church; then, as always, the evil made more noise than the good, and the voices of those who desired a reformation aroused only passing interest. Among the populace there was superstition unimaginable; the pulpit, which ought to have shed abroad some little light, was as yet open only to the bishops, and the few pastors who did not neglect their duty in this regard accomplished very little, being too much absorbed in other duties. It was the birth of the mendicant orders which obliged the entire body of secular clergy to take up the practice of preaching. Public worship, reduced to liturgical ceremonies, no longer preserved anything which appealed to the intelligence; it was more and more becoming a sort of self-acting magic formula. Once upon this road, the absurd was not far distant. Those who deemed themselves pious told of miracles performed by relics with no need of aid from the moral act of faith. In one case a parrot, being carried away by a kite, uttered the invocation dear to his mistress, "_Sancte Thoma adjuva me_," and was miraculously rescued. In another, a merchant of Groningen, having purloined an arm of St. John the Baptist, grew rich as if by enchantment so long as he kept it concealed in his house, but was reduced to beggary so soon as, his secret being discovered, the relic was taken away from him and placed in a church.[13] These stories, we must observe, do not come from ignorant enthusiasts, hidden away in obscure country places; they are given us by one of the most learned monks of his time, who relates them to a novice by way of forming his mind! Relics, then, were held to be neither more nor less than talismans. Not alone did they perform miracles upon those who were in no special state of faith or devotion, the more potent among them healed the sick in spite of themselves. A chronicler relates that the body of Saint Martin of Tours had in 887 been secretly transported to some remote hiding place for fear of the Danish invasion. When the time came for bringing it home again, there were in Touraine two impotent men who, thanks to their infirmity, gained large sums by begging. They were thrown into great terror by the tidings that the relics were being brought back: Saint Martin would certainly heal them and take away their means of livelihood. Their fears were only too well founded. They had taken to flight, but being too lame to walk fast they had not yet crossed the frontier of Touraine when the saint arrived and healed them! Hundreds of similar stories might be collected, statistics might be made up to show, at the accession of Innocent III., the greater number of episcopal thrones occupied by unworthy bishops, the religious houses peopled with idle and debauched monks; but would this give a truly accurate picture of the Church at this epoch? I do not think so. In the first place, we must reckon with the choice spirits, who were without doubt more numerous than is generally supposed. Five righteous men would have saved Sodom; the Almighty did not find them there, but he perhaps might have found them had He Himself made search for them instead of trusting to Lot. The Church of the thirteenth century had them, and it was for their sakes that the whirlwind of heresy did not sweep it away. But this is not all: the Church of that time offered a noble spectacle of moral grandeur. We must learn to lift our eyes from the wretched state of things which has just been pointed out and fix them on the pontifical throne and recognize the beauty of the struggle there going on: a power wholly spiritual undertaking to command the rulers of the world, as the soul masters the body, and triumphing in the end. It is true that both soldiers and generals of this army were often little better than ruffians, but here again, in order to be just, we must understand the end they aimed at. In that iron age, when brute force was the only force, the Church, notwithstanding its wounds, offered to the world the spectacle of peasants and laboring men receiving the humble homage of the highest potentates of earth, simply because, seated on the throne of Saint Peter, they represented the moral law. This is why Alighieri and many others before and after him, though they might heap curses on wicked ministers, yet in the depths of their heart were never without an immense compassion and an ardent love for the Church which they never ceased to call their mother. Still, everybody was not like them, and the vices of the clergy explain the innumerable heresies of that day. All of them had a certain success, from those which were simply the outcry of an outraged conscience, like that of the Waldenses, to the most absurd of them all, like that of Eon de l'Étoile. Some of these movements were for great and sacred causes; but we must not let our sympathies be so moved by the persecutions suffered by heretics as to cloud our judgment. It would have been better had Rome triumphed by gentleness, by education and holiness, but unhappily a soldier may not always choose his weapons, and when life is at stake he seizes the first he finds within his reach. The papacy has not always been reactionary and obscurantist; when it overthrew the Cathari, for example, its victory was that of reason and good sense. The list of the heresies of the thirteenth century is already long, but it is increasing every day, to the great joy of those erudite ones who are making strenuous efforts to classify everything in that tohu-bohu of mysticism and folly. In that day heresy was very much alive; it was consequently very complex and its powers of transformation infinite. One may indicate its currents, mark its direction, but to go farther is to condemn oneself to utter confusion in this medley of impulsive, passionate, fantastic movements which were born, shot upward, and fell to earth again, at the caprice of a thousand incomprehensible circumstances. In certain counties of England there are at the present day villages having as many as eight and ten places of worship for a few hundreds of inhabitants. Many of these people change their denomination every three or four years, returning to that they first quitted, leaving it again only to enter it anew, and so on as long as they live. Their leaders set the example, throwing themselves enthusiastically into each new movement only to leave it before long. They would all alike find it difficult to give an intelligible reason for these changes. They say that the Spirit guides them, and it would be unfair to disbelieve them, but the historian who should investigate conditions like these would lose his head in the labyrinth unless he made a separate study of each of these Protean movements. They are surely not worth the trouble. In a somewhat similar condition was a great part of Christendom under Innocent III.; but while the sects of which I have just spoken move in a very narrow circle of dogmas and ideas, in the thirteenth century every sort of excess followed in rapid succession. Without the slightest pause of transition men passed through the most contradictory systems of belief. Still, a few general characteristics may be observed; in the first place, heresies are no longer metaphysical subtleties as in earlier days; Arius and Priscillian, Nestorius and Eutychus are dead indeed. In the second place, they no longer arise in the upper and governing class, but proceed especially from the inferior clergy and the common people. The blows which actually threatened the Church of the Middle Ages were struck by obscure laboring men, by the poor and the oppressed, who in their wretchedness and degradation felt that she had failed in her mission. No sooner was a voice uplifted, preaching austerity and simplicity, than it drew together not the laity only, but members of the clergy as well. Toward the close of the twelfth century we find a certain Pons rousing all Perigord, preaching evangelical poverty before the coming of St. Francis.[14] Two great currents are apparent: on one side the Cathari, on the other, innumerable sects revolting from the Church by very fidelity to Christianity and the desire to return to the primitive Church. Among the sects of the second category the close of the twelfth century saw in Italy the rise of the _Poor Men_, who without doubt were a part of the movement of Arnold of Brescia; they denied the efficacy of sacraments administered by unworthy hands.[15] A true attempt at reform was made by the Waldenses. Their history, although better known, still remains obscure on certain sides; their name, _Poor Men of Lyons_, recalls the former movement, with which they were in close agreement, as also with the Humiliants. All these names involuntarily suggest that by which St. Francis afterward called his Order. The analogy between the inspiration of Peter Waldo and that of St. Francis was so close that one might be tempted to believe the latter a sort of imitation of the former. It would be a mistake: the same causes produced in all quarters the same effects; ideas of reform, of a return to gospel poverty, were in the air, and this helps us to understand how it was that before many years the Franciscan preaching reverberated through the entire world. If at the outset the careers of these two men were alike, their later lives were very different. Waldo, driven into heresy almost in spite of himself, was obliged to accept the consequences of the premises which he himself had laid down;[16] while Francis, remaining the obedient son of the Church, bent all his efforts to develop the inner life in himself and his disciples. It is indeed most likely that through his father Francis had become acquainted with the movement of the _Poor Men of Lyons_. Hence his oft-repeated counsels to his friars of the duty of submission to the clergy. When he went to seek the approbation of Innocent III., it is evident that the prelates with whom he had relations warned him, by the very example of Waldo, of the dangers inherent in his own movement.[17] The latter had gone to Rome in 1179, accompanied by a few followers, to ask at the same time the approbation of their translation of the Scriptures into the vulgar tongue and the permission to preach. They were granted both requests on condition of gaining for their preaching the authorization of their local clergy. Walter Map ([Cross] 1210), who was charged with their examination, was constrained, while ridiculing their simplicity, to admire their poverty and zeal for the apostolic life.[18] Two or three years later they met a very different reception at Rome, and in 1184 they were anathematized by the Council of Verona. From that day nothing could stop them, even to the forming of a new Church. They multiplied with a rapidity hardly exceeded afterward by the Franciscans. By the end of the twelfth century we find them spread abroad from Hungary to Spain; the first attempts to hunt them down were made in the latter country. Other countries were at first satisfied with treating them as excommunicated persons. Obliged to hide themselves, reduced to the impossibility of holding their chapters, which ought to have come together once or twice a year, and which, had they done so, might have maintained among them a certain unity of doctrine, the Waldenses rapidly underwent a change according to their environment; some obstinately insisting upon calling themselves good Catholics, others going so far as to preach the overthrow of the hierarchy and the uselessness of sacraments.[19] Hence that multiplicity of differing and even hostile branches which seemed to develop almost hourly. A common persecution brought them nearer to the Cathari and favored the fusion of their ideas. Their activity was inconceivable. Under pretext of pilgrimages to Rome they were always on the road, simple and insinuating. The methods of travel of that day were peculiarly favorable to the diffusion of ideas. While retailing news to those whose hospitality they received, they would speak of the unhappy state of the Church and the reforms that were needed. Such conversations were a means of apostleship much more efficacious than those of the present day, the book and the newspaper; there is nothing like the _viva vox_[20] for spreading thought. Many vile stories have been told of the Waldenses; calumny is far too facile a weapon not to tempt an adversary at bay. Thus they have been charged with the same indecent promiscuities of which the early Christians were accused. In reality their true strength was in their virtues, which strongly contrasted with the vices of the clergy. The most powerful and determined enemies of the Church were the Cathari. Sincere, audacious, often learned and keen in argument, having among them some choice spirits and men of great intellectual powers, they were pre-eminently the heretics of the thirteenth century. Their revolt did not bear upon points of detail and questions of discipline, like that of the early Waldenses; it had a definite doctrinal basis, taking issue with the whole body of Catholic dogma. But, although this heresy flourished in Italy and under the very eyes of St. Francis, there is need only to indicate it briefly. His work may have received many infiltrations from the Waldensian movement, but Catharism was wholly foreign to it. This is naturally explained by the fact that St. Francis never consented to occupy himself with questions of doctrine. For him faith was not of the intellectual but the moral domain; it is the consecration of the heart. Time spent in dogmatizing appeared to him time lost. An incident in the life of Brother Egidio well brings out the slight esteem in which theology was held by the early Brothers Minor. One day, in the presence of St. Bonaventura, he cried, perhaps not without a touch of irony, "Alas! what shall we ignorant and simple ones do to merit the favor of God?" "My brother," replied the famous divine, "you know very well that it suffices to love the Lord." "Are you very sure of that?" replied Egidio; "do you believe that a simple woman might please Him as well as a master in theology?" Upon the affirmative response of his interlocutor, he ran out into the street and calling to a beggar woman with all his might, "Poor old creature," he exclaimed, "rejoice, for if you love God, you may have a higher place in the kingdom of heaven than Brother Bonaventura!"[21] The Cathari, then, had no direct influence upon St. Francis,[22] but nothing could better prove the disturbance of thought at this epoch than that resurrection of Manicheism. To what a depth of lassitude and folly must religious Italy have fallen for this mixture of Buddhism, Mazdeism, and gnosticism to have taken such hold upon it! The Catharist doctrine rested upon the antagonism of two principles, one bad, the other good. The first had created matter; the second, the soul, which, for generation after generation passes from one body to another until it achieves salvation. Matter is the cause and the seat of evil; all contact with it constitutes a blemish,[23] consequently the Cathari renounced marriage and property and advocated suicide. All this was mixed up with most complicated cosmogonical myths. Their adherents were divided into two classes--the pure or perfect, and the believers, who were proselytes in the second degree, and whose obligations were very simple. The adepts, properly so called, were initiated by the ceremony of the _consolamentum_ or imposition of hands, which induced the descent upon them of the Consoling Spirit. Among them were enthusiasts who after this ceremony placed themselves in _endura_--that is to say, they starved themselves to death in order not to descend from this state of grace. In Languedoc, where this sect went by the name of Albigenses, they had an organization which embraced all Central Europe, and everywhere supported flourishing schools attended by the children of the nobles. In Italy they were hardly less powerful; Concorrezo, near Monza in Lombardy, and Bagnolo, gave their names to two congregations slightly different from those in Languedoc.[24] But it was especially from Milan[25] that they spread abroad over all the Peninsula, making proselytes even in the most remote districts of Calabria. The state of anarchy prevailing in the country was very favorable to them. The papacy was too much occupied in baffling the spasmodic efforts of the Hohenstaufen, to put the necessary perseverance and system into its struggles against heresy. Thus the new ideas were preached under the very shadow of the Lateran; in 1209, Otho IV., coming to Rome to be crowned, found there a school in which Manicheism was publicly taught.[26] With all his energy Innocent III. had not been able to check this evil in the States of the Church. The case of Viterbo tells much of the difficulty of repressing it; in March, 1199, the pope wrote to the clergy and people of this town to recall to their minds, and at the same time to increase, the penalties pronounced against heresy. For all that, the Patarini had the majority in 1205, and succeeded in naming one of themselves consul.[27] The wrath of the pontiff at this event was unbounded; he fulminated a bull menacing the city with fire and sword, and commanding the neighboring towns to throw themselves upon her if within a fortnight she had not given satisfaction.[28] It was all in vain: the Patarini were dealt with only as a matter of form; it needed the presence of the pope himself to assure the execution of his orders and obtain the demolition of the houses of the heretics and their abettors (autumn of 1207).[29] But stifled at one point the revolt burst out at a hundred others; at this moment it was triumphant on all sides; at Ferrara, Verona, Rimini, Florence, Prato, Faenza, Treviso, Piacenza. The clergy were expelled from this last town, which remained more than three years without a priest.[30] Viterbo is twenty leagues from Assisi, Orvieto only ten, and disturbances in this town were equally grave. A noble Roman, Pietro Parentio, the deputy of the Holy See in this place, endeavored to exterminate the Patarini. He was assassinated.[31] But Francis needed not to go even so far as Orvieto to become acquainted with heretics. In Assisi the same things were going on as in the neighboring cities. In 1203 this town had elected for podestà a heretic named Giraldo di Gilberto, and in spite of warnings from Rome had persisted in keeping him at the head of affairs until the expiration of his term of office (1204). Innocent III., who had not yet been obliged to use vigor with Viterbo, resorted to persuasion and despatched to Umbria the Cardinal Leo di Santa Croce, who will appear more than once in this history.[32] The successor of Giraldo and fifty of the principal citizens made the _amende honorable_ and swore fidelity to the Church. It is easy to perceive in what a state of ferment Italy was during these early years of the thirteenth century. The moral discredit of the clergy must have been deep indeed for souls to have turned toward Manicheism with such ardor. Italy may well be grateful to St. Francis; it was as much infected with Catharism as Languedoc, and it was he who wrought its purification. He did not pause to demonstrate by syllogisms or theological theses the vanity of the Catharist doctrines; but soaring as on wings to the religious life, he suddenly made a new ideal to shine out before the eyes of his contemporaries, an ideal before which all these fantastic sects vanished as birds of the night take flight at the first rays of the sun. A great part of St. Francis's power came to him thus through his systematic avoidance of polemics. The latter is always more or less a form of spiritual pride; it only deepens the chasm which it undertakes to fill up. Truth needs not to be proved; it is its own witness. The only weapon which he would use against the wicked was the holiness of a life so full of love as to enlighten and revive those about him, and compel them to love.[33] The disappearance of Catharism in Italy, without an upheaval, and above all without the Inquisition, is thus an indirect result of the Franciscan movement, and not the least important among them.[34] At the voice of the Umbrian reformer Italy roused herself, recovered her good sense and fine temper; she cast out those doctrines of pessimism and death, as a robust organism casts out morbid substances. I have already endeavored to show the strong analogy between the initial efforts of Francis and those of the Poor Men of Lyons. His thought ripened in an atmosphere thoroughly saturated with their ideas; unconsciously to himself they entered into his being. The prophecies of the Calabrian abbot exerted upon him an influence quite as difficult to appreciate, but no less profound. Standing on the confines of Italy and as it were at the threshold of Greece, Gioacchino di Fiore[35] was the last link in a chain of monastic prophets, who during nearly four hundred years succeeded one another in the monasteries and hermitages of Southern Italy. The most famous among them had been St. Nilo, a sort of untamed John the Baptist, living in desert places, but suddenly emerging from them when his duties of maintaining the right called him elsewhere. We see him on one occasion appearing in Rome itself, to announce to pope and emperor the unloosing of the divine wrath.[36] Scattered in the Alpine solitudes of Basilicata these Calabrian hermits were continually obliged to retreat higher and higher into the mountain fastnesses to escape the populace, who, pursued by pirates, were taking refuge in these mountains. They thus passed their lives between heaven and earth, with two seas for their horizon. Disquieted by fear of the corsairs, and by the war-cries whose echoes reached even to them, they turned their thoughts toward the future. The ages of great terror are also the ages of great hope; it is to the captivity of Babylon that we owe, with the second part of Isaiah, those pictures of the future which have not yet ceased to charm the soul of man; Nero's persecutions gave us the Apocalypse of St. John, and the paroxysms of the twelfth century the eternal Gospel. Converted after a life of dissipation, Gioacchino di Fiore travelled extensively in the Holy Land, Greece, and Constantinople. Returning to Italy he began, though a layman, to preach in the outskirts of Rende and Cosenza. Later on he joined the Cistercians of Cortale, near Catanzaro, and there took vows. Shortly after elected abbot of the monastery in spite of refusal and even flight, he was seized after a few years with the nostalgia of solitude, and sought from Pope Lucius III. a discharge from his functions (1181), that he might consecrate all his time to the works which he had in mind. The pope granted his request, and even permitted him to go wherever he might deem best in the interest of his work. Then began for Gioacchino a life of wandering from convent to convent, which carried him even as far as Lombardy, to Verona, where we find him with Pope Urban III. When he returned to the south, a group of disciples gathered around him to hear his explanations of the most obscure passages of the Bible. Whether he would or no he was obliged to receive them, to talk with them, to give them a rule, and, finally, to instal them in the very heart of the Sila, the Black Forest of Italy,[37] over against the highest peak, in gorges where the silence is interrupted only by the murmurs of the Arvo and the Neto, which have their source not far from there. The new Athos received the name of Fiore (flower), transparent symbol of the hopes of its founder.[38] It was there that he put the finishing touch to writings which, after fifty years of neglect, were to become the starting-point of all heresies, and the aliment of all souls burdened with the salvation of Christendom. The men of the first half of the thirteenth century, too much occupied with other things, did not perceive that the spiritual streams at which they were drinking descended from the snowy mountain-tops of Calabria. It is always thus with mystical influences. There is in them something vague, tenuous, and penetrating which escapes an exact estimation. Let two choice souls meet, and they will find it a difficult thing to analyze and name the impressions which each has received from the other. It is so with an epoch; it is not always those who speak to her the oftenest and loudest whom she best understands; nor even those at whose feet she sits, a faithful pupil, day after day. Sometimes, while on the way to her accustomed masters, she suddenly meets a stranger; she barely catches a few words of what he says; she knows not whence he comes nor whither he goes; she never sees him again, but those few words of his go on surging in the depths of her soul, agitating and disquieting her. Thus it was for a long while with Gioacchino di Fiore. His teachings, scattered here and there by enthusiastic disciples, were germinating silently in many hearts.[39] Giving back hope to men, they restored to them strength also. To think is already to act; alone under the shadow of the hoary pines which surrounded his cell, the cenobite of Fiore was laboring for the renovation of the Church with as much vigor as the reformers who came after him. He was, however, far from attaining the height of the prophets of Israel; instead of soaring like them to the very heavens, he always remained riveted to the text, upon which he commented in the allegorical method, and whence by this method he brought out the most fantastic improbabilities. A few pages of his books would wear out the most patient reader, but in these fields, burnt over by theological arguments more drying than the winds of the desert, fields where one at first perceives only stones and thistles, one comes at last to the charming oasis, with repose and dreams in its shade. The exegesis of Gioacchino di Fiore in fact led up to a sort of philosophy of history; its grand lines were calculated to make a striking appeal to the imagination. The life of humanity is divided into three periods: in the first, under the reign of the Father, men lived under the rigor of the law; in the second, reigned over by the Son, men live under the rule of grace; in the third, the Spirit shall reign and men shall live in the plenitude of love. The first is the period of servile obedience; the second, that of filial obedience; the third, that of liberty. In the first, men lived in fear; in the second, they rest in faith; in the third, they shall burn with love. The first saw the shining of the stars; the second sees the whitening of the dawn; the third will behold the glory of the day. The first produced nettles, the second gives roses, the third will be the age of lilies. If now we consider that in the thought of Gioacchino the third period, the Age of the Spirit, was about to open, we shall understand with what enthusiasm men hailed the words which restored joy to hearts still disturbed with millenarian fears. It is evident that St. Francis knew these radiant hopes. Who knows even that it was not the Calabrian Seer who awoke his heart to its transports of love? If this be so, Gioacchino was not merely his precursor; he was his true spiritual father. However this may be, St. Francis found in Gioacchino's thought many of the elements which, unconsciously to himself, were to become the foundation of his institute. The noble disdain which he shows for all men of learning, and which he sought to inculcate upon his Order, was for Gioacchino one of the characteristics of the new era. "The truth which remains hidden to the wise," he says, "is revealed to babes; dialectics closes that which is open, obscures that which is clear; it is the mother of useless talk, of rivalries and blasphemy. Learning does not edify, and it may destroy, as is proved by the scribes of the Church, swollen with pride and arrogance, who by dint of reasoning fall into heresy."[40] We have seen that the return to evangelical simplicity had become a necessity; all the heretical sects were on this point in accord with pious Catholics, but no one spoke in a manner so Franciscan as Gioacchino di Fiore. Not only did he make voluntary poverty one of the characteristics of the age of lilies, but he speaks of it in his pages with so profound, so living an emotion, that St. Francis could do little more than repeat his words. The ideal monk whom he describes,[41] whose only property is a lyre, is a true Franciscan before the letter, him of whom the _Poverello_ of Assisi always dreamed. The feeling for nature also bursts forth in him with incomparable vigor. One day he was preaching in a chapel which was plunged in almost total darkness, the sky being quite overcast with clouds. Suddenly the clouds broke away, the sun shone, the church was flooded with light. Gioacchino paused, saluted the sun, intoned the _Veni Creator_, and led his congregation out to gaze upon the landscape. It would be by no means surprising if toward 1205 Francis should have heard of this prophet, toward whom so many hearts were turning, this anchorite who, gazing up into heaven, spoke with Jesus as a friend talks with his friend, yet knew also how to come down to console men and warm the faces of the dying at his own breast. At the other end of Europe, in the heart of Germany, the same causes had produced the same effects. From the excess of the people's sufferings and the despair of religious souls was being born a movement of apocalyptic mysticism which seemed to have secret communication with that which was rousing the Peninsula. They had the same views of the future, the same anxious expectation of new cataclysms, joined with a prospect of a reviving of the Church. "Cry with a loud voice," said her guardian angel to St. Elizabeth of Schonau ([Cross] 1164), "cry to all nations: Woe! for the whole world has become darkness. The Lord's vine has withered, there is no one to tend it. The Lord has sent laborers, but they have all been found idle. The head of the Church is ill and her members are dead.... Shepherds of my Church, you are sleeping, but I shall awaken you! Kings of the earth, the cry of your iniquity has risen even to me."[42] "Divine justice," said St. Hildegarde ([Cross] 1178), "shall have its hour; the last of the seven epochs symbolized by the seven days of creation has arrived, the judgments of God are about to be accomplished; the empire and the papacy, sunk into impiety, shall crumble away together.... But upon their ruins shall appear a new nation of God, a nation of prophets illuminated from on high, living in poverty and solitude. Then the divine mysteries shall be revealed, and the saying of Joel shall be fulfilled; the Holy Spirit shall shed abroad upon the people the dew of his prophecies, of his wisdom and holiness; the heathen, the Jews, the worldly and the unbelieving shall be converted together, spring-time and peace shall reign over a regenerated world, and the angels will return with confidence to dwell among men." These hopes were not wholly confounded. In the evening of his days the prophet of Fiore was able, like a new Simeon, to utter his _Nunc dimittis_, and for a few years Christendom could turn in amazement to Assisi as to a new Bethlehem. FOOTNOTES: [1] Bull of June 8, 1198, _Quamvis_. Migne, i., col. 220; Potthast, 265. [2] For example, Pierre, Cardinal of St. Chryzogone and former Bishop of Meaux, who in a single election refused the dazzling offer of five hundred silver marks. Alexander III., Migne's edition, _epist._ 395. [3] _Fasciculus rerum expetend. et fugiend._, t. ii., 7, pp. 254, 255 (Brown, 1690). [4] John of Salisbury, _Policrat._ Migne, v. 15. [5] Among their sources of revenue we find the right of _collagium_, by payment of which clerics acquired the right to keep a concubine. Pierre le Chantre, _Verb. abbrev._, 24. [6] Vide _Carmina Burana_, Breslau, 8vo, 1883; Political Songs of England, published by Th. Wright, London, 8vo, 1893; _Poésies populaires latines du moyen âge_, du Méril, Paris, 1847. See also Raynouard, _Lexique roman_, i., 446, 451, 464, the fine poems of the troubadour Pierre Cardinal, contemporary of St. Francis, upon the woes of the Church, and Dante, _Inferno_, xix. If one would gain an idea of what the bishop of a small city in those days cost his flock, he has only to read the bull of February 12, 1219, _Justis petentium_, addressed by Honorius III. to the Bishop of Terni, and including the contract by which the inhabitants of that city settled the revenues of the episcopal see. Horoy, t. iii., col. 114, or the _Bullarium romanum_, t. iii., p. 348, Turin. [7] _Conosco sacerdoti che fanno gli usura per formare un patrimonio da lasciare ai loro spurii; altri che tengono osteria coll' insegna del collare e vendono vino_ ... Salimbene, Cantarelli, Parma, 1882, 2 vols., 8vo, ii., p. 307. [8] Vide _Brevis historia Prior._ _Grandimont.--Stephani Tornacensis._ Epist. 115, 152, 153, 156, 162; Honorius III., Horoy's edition, lib. i., 280, 284, 286-288; ii., 12, 130, 136, 383-387. [9] Guérard, _Cartulaire de N. D. de Paris_, t. i., p. cxi; t. ii., p. 406. Cf. Honorius III., Bull _Inter statuta_ of July 25, 1223, Horoy, t. iv., col. 401. See also canon 23 of the Council of Beziers, 1233; Guibert de Gemblours, _epist._ 5 and 6 (Migne); Honorius III., lib. ix., 32, 81; ii., 193; iv., 10; iii., 253 and 258; iv., 33, 27, 70, 144; v., 56, 291, 420, 430; vi., 214, 132, 139, 204; vii., 127; ix., 51. [10] Vide Bull _Postquam vocante Domino_ of July 11, 1206. Potthast 2840. [11] V. _Annales Stadenses_ [_Monumenta Germaniæ historica, Scriptorum_, t. 16], _ad ann. 1237_. Among the comprehensive pictures of the situation of the Church in the thirteenth century, there is none more interesting than that left us by the Cardinal Jacques de Vitry in his _Historia occidentalis: Libri duo quorum prior Orientalis, alter Occidentalis historiæ nomine inscribitur Duaci_, 1597, 16mo. pp. 259-480. [12] V. Honorius III., Horoy's edition, lib. i., ep. 109, 125, 135, 206, 273; ii., 128, 164; iv., 120, etc. [13] _Dialogus miraculorum_ of Cesar of Heisterbach [Strange's edition, Cologne, 1851, 2 vols., 8vo], t. ii., pp. 255 and 125. This book, with the Golden Legend of Giacomo di Varaggio, gives the best idea of the state of religious thought in the thirteenth century. [14] _Recueil des historiens de France._ Bouquet, t. xii., pp. 550, 551. [15] Bonacorsi: _Vitæ hæreticorum_ [d'Achery, _Spicilegium_, t. i., p. 215] Cf. Lucius III., epist. 171, Migne. [16] Vide Bernard Gui, _Practica inquisitionis_, Douai edition, 4to, Paris, 1886 p. 244 ff., and especially the Vatican MS., 2548, folio 71. [17] A chronicle of St. Francis's time makes this same comparison: Burchard, Abbot of Urspurg ([Cross] 1226) [_Burchardi et Cuonradi chronicon. Monum. Germ. hist. Script._, t. 23], has left us an account of the approbation of Francis by the Pope, all the more precious for being that of a contemporary. _Loc. cit._, p. 376. [18] _De nugis Curialium_, Dist. 1, cap. 31, p. 64, Wright's edition. Cf. _Chronique de Laon_, Bouquet xiii., p. 680. [19] See, for example, the letter of the Italian branch of the Poor Men of Lyons [_Pauperos Lombardi_] to their brethren of Germany, there called Leonistes. In it they show the points in which they are not in harmony with the French Waldenses. Published by Preger: _Abhandlungen der K. bayer. Akademie der Wiss. Hist. Cl._, t. xiii., 1875, p. 19 ff. [20] These continual journeyings sometimes gained for them the name of _Passagieni_, as in the south of France the preachers of certain sects are to-day called _Courriers_. The term, however, specially designates a Judaizing sect who returned to the literal observation of the Mosaic law: Döllinger, _Beiträge_, t. ii., pp. 327 and 375. They should therefore be identified with the _Circonsisi_ of the constitution of Frederic II. (Huillard-Bréholles, t. v., p. 280). See especially the fine monograph of M. C. Molinier: _Mémoires de l'Académie de Toulouse_, 1888. [21] A. SS., Aprilis, t. iii., p. 238d. [22] I would say that between the inspiration of Francis and the Catharian doctrines there is an irreconcilable opposition; but it would not be difficult to find acts and words of his which recall the contempt for matter of the Cathari; for example, his way of treating his body. Some of his counsels to the friars: _Unusquisque habet in potestate sua inimicum suum videlicit corpus, per quod peccat._ Assisi MS. 338, folio 20b. Conform. 138, b. 2.--_Cum majorem inimicum corpore non habeam._ 2 Cel., 3, 63. These are momentary but inevitable obscurations, moments of forgetfulness, of discouragement, when a man is not himself, and repeats mechanically what he hears said around him. The real St. Francis is, on the contrary, the lover of nature, he who sees in the whole creation the work of divine goodness, the radiance of the eternal beauty, he who, in the Canticle of the Creatures, sees in the body not the Enemy but a brother: _Cæpit hilariter loqui ad corpus; Gaude, frater corpus._ 2 Cel., 3, 137. [23] _Quodam die, dicta fabrissa dixit ipsi testi prægnanti, quod rogaret Deum, ut liberaret eam a Dæmone, quem habebat in ventre ... Gulielmus dixit quod ita magnum peccatum erat jacere cum uxore sua quam cum concubina._ Döllinger, _loc. cit._, pp. 24, 35. [24] Those of the _Concorrezenses_ and _Bajolenses_. In Italy _Cathari_ becomes _Gazzari_; for that matter, each country had its special appellatives; one of the most general in the north was that of the _Bulgari_, which marks the oriental origin of the sect, whence the slang term Boulgres and its derivatives (vide Matthew Paris, ann. 1238). Cf. Schmit, _Histoire des Cathares_, 8vo, 2 vols, Paris, 1849. [25] The most current name in Italy was that of the _Patarini_, given them no doubt from their inhabiting the quarter of second-hand dealers in Milan: _la contrada dei Patari_, found in many cities. _Patari!_ is still the cry of the ragpickers in the small towns of Provence. In the thirteenth century Patarino and Catharo were synonyms. But before that the term Patarini had an entirely different sense. See the very remarkable study of M. Felice Tocco on this subject in his _Eresia net medio evo_, 12mo, Florence, 1884. [26] Cesar von Heisterbach, _Dial. mirac._, t. i., p. 309, Strange's edition. [27] _Innocentii opera_, Migne, t. i., col. 537; t. ii., 654. [28] _Computruistis in peccatis sicut jumenta in stercore suo ut fumus ac fimus putrefactionis vestræ jam fere circumadjacentes regionis infecerit, ac ipsum Dominum ut credimus ad nauseam provocaverit._ _Loc. cit._, col. 654. Cf. 673; Potthast, 2532, 2539. [29] _Gesta Innocentii_, Migne, t. i., col. clxii. Cf. _epist._ viii., 85 and 105. [30] Campi, _Historia Ecclesiastica di Piacenza_, parte ii., p. 92 ff. Cf. _Innoc., epist._ ix., 131, 166-169; x., 54, 64, 222. [31] A. SS., Maii, t. v., p. 87. [32] Bull of June 6, 1205, Potthast, 2237; Migne, vii., 83. This Cardinal Leo (of the presbyterial title of Holy Cross of Jerusalem) was one most valued by Innocent III. To him and Ugolini, the future Gregory IX., he at this epoch confided the most delicate missions (for example, in 1209, they were named legates to Otho IV.). This embassy shows in what importance the pope held the affairs of Assisi, though it was a very small city. [33] Not once do we find him fighting heretics. The early Dominicans, on the contrary, are incessantly occupied with arguing. See 2 Cel., 3, 46. [34] It need not be said that I do not assert that no trace of it is to be found after the ministry of St. Francis, but it was no longer a force, and no longer endangered the very existence of the Church. [35] This strange personality will charm historians and philosophers for a long while to come. I know nothing more learned or more luminous than M. Felice Tocco's fine study in his _Eresia nel medio evo_, Florence, 1884, 1 vol., 12mo, pp. 261-409. [36] A. SS., Sept., t. vii., p. 283 ff. [37] A. SS., Maii, vii.; Vincent de Beauvais, _Speculum historiale_, _lib._ 29, _cap._ 40. La Sila is a wooded mountain, situated eastward from Cosenza, which the peasants call _Monte Nero_. The summits are nearly 2,000 metres above the sea. [38] Toward 1195. Gioacchino died there, March 30, 1202. [39] A whole apochryphal literature has blossomed out around Gioacchino; certain hypercritics have tried to prove that he never wrote anything. These are exaggerations. Three large works are certainly authentic: _The Agreement of the Old and New Testaments_, _The Commentary on the Apocalypse_, and _The Psaltery of Ten Strings_, published in Venice, the first in 1517, the two others in 1527. His prophecies were so well known, even in his lifetime, that an English Cistercian, Rudolph, Abbot of Coggeshall ([Cross] 1228), coming to Rome in 1195, sought a conference with him and has left us an interesting account of it. Martène, _Amplissima Collectio_, t. v., p. 839. [40] _Comm. in apoc._, folio 78, b. 2. [41] _Qui vere monachus est nihil reputat esse suum nisi citharam:_ Apoc., ib., folio 183. a. 2. [42] E. Roth, _Die Visionen der heiligen Elisabeth von Schönau_: Brünn, 1884, pp. 115-117. * * * * * CHAPTER IV STRUGGLES AND TRIUMPH Spring of 1206-February 24, 1209 The biographies of St. Francis have preserved to us an incident which shows how great was the religious ferment even in the little city of Assisi. A stranger was seen to go up and down the streets saying to every one he met, "Peace and welfare!" (_Pax et bonum._)[1] He thus expressed in his own way the disquietude of those hearts which could neither resign themselves to perpetual warfare nor to the disappearance of faith and love; artless echo, vibrating in response to the hopes and fears that were shaking all Europe! _"Vox clamantis in deserto!"_ it will be said. No, for every heart-cry leaves its trace even when it seems to be uttered in empty air, and that of the Unknown of Assisi may have contributed in some measure to Francis's definitive call. Since his abrupt return from Spoleto, life in his father's house had become daily more difficult. Bernardone's self-love had received from his son's discomfiture such a wound as with commonplace men is never healed. He might provide, without counting it, money to be swallowed up in dissipation, that so his son might stand on an equal footing with the young nobles; he could never resign himself to see him giving with lavish hands to every beggar in the streets. Francis, continually plunged in reverie and spending his days in lonely wanderings in the fields, was no longer of the least use to his father. Months passed, and the distance between the two men grew ever wider; and the gentle and loving Pica could do nothing to prevent a rupture which from this time appeared to be inevitable. Francis soon came to feel only one desire, to flee from the abode where, in the place of love, he found only reproaches, upbraidings, anguish. The faithful confidant of his earlier struggles had been obliged to leave him, and this absolute solitude weighed heavily upon his warm and loving heart. He did what he could to escape from it, but no one understood him. The ideas which he was beginning timidly to express evoked from those to whom he spoke only mocking smiles or the head-shakings which men sure that they are right bestow upon him who is marching straight to madness. He even went to open his mind to the bishop, but the latter understood no more than others his vague, incoherent plans, filled with ideas impossible to realize and possibly subversive.[2] It was thus that in spite of himself Francis was led to ask nothing of men, but to raise himself by prayer to intuitive knowledge of the divine will. The doors of houses and of hearts were alike closing upon him, but the interior voice was about to speak out with irresistible force and make itself forever obeyed. Among the numerous chapels in the suburbs of Assisi there was one which he particularly loved, that of St. Damian. It was reached by a few minutes' walk over a stony path, almost trackless, under olive trees, amid odors of lavender and rosemary. Standing on the top of a hillock, the entire plain is visible from it, through a curtain of cypresses and pines which seem to be trying to hide the humble hermitage and set up an ideal barrier between it and the world. Served by a poor priest who had scarcely the wherewithal for necessary food, the sanctuary was falling into ruin. There was nothing in the interior but a simple altar of masonry, and by way of reredos one of those byzantine crucifixes still so numerous in Italy, where through the work of the artists of the time has come down to us something of the terrors which agitated the twelfth century. In general the Crucified One, frightfully lacerated, with bleeding wounds, appears to seek to inspire only grief and compunction; that of St. Damian, on the contrary, has an expression of inexpressible calm and gentleness; instead of closing the eyelids in eternal surrender to the weight of suffering, it looks down in self-forgetfulness, and its pure, clear gaze says, not "_I suffer_," but, "_Come unto me_."[3] One day Francis was praying before the poor altar: "Great and glorious God, and thou, Lord Jesus, I pray ye, shed abroad your light in the darkness of my mind.... Be found of me, Lord, so that in all things I may act only in accordance with thy holy will."[4] Thus he prayed in his heart, and behold, little by little it seemed to him that his gaze could not detach itself from that of Jesus; he felt something marvellous taking place in and around him. The sacred victim took on life, and in the outward silence he was aware of a voice which softly stole into the very depths of his heart, speaking to him an ineffable language. Jesus accepted his oblation. Jesus desired his labor, his life, all his being, and the heart of the poor solitary was already bathed in light and strength.[5] This vision marks the final triumph of Francis. His union with Christ is consummated; from this time he can exclaim with the mystics of every age, "My beloved is mine, and I am his." But instead of giving himself up to transports of contemplation he at once asks himself how he may repay to Jesus love for love, in what action he shall employ this life which he has just offered to him. He had not long to seek. We have seen that the chapel where his spiritual espousals had just been celebrated was threatened with ruin. He believed that to repair it was the work assigned to him. From that day the remembrance of the Crucified One, the thought of the love which had triumphed in immolating itself, became the very centre of his religious life and as it were the soul of his soul. For the first time, no doubt, Francis had been brought into direct, personal, intimate contact with Jesus Christ; from belief he had passed to faith, to that living faith which a distinguished thinker has so well defined: "To believe is to look; it is a serious, attentive, and prolonged look; a look more simple than that of observation, a look which looks, and nothing more; artless, infantine, it has all the soul in it, it is a look of the soul and not the mind, a look which does not seek to analyze its object, but which receives it as a whole into the soul through the eyes." In these words Vinet unconsciously has marvellously characterized the religious temperament of St. Francis. This look of love cast upon the crucifix, this mysterious colloquy with the compassionate victim, was never more to cease. At St. Damian, St. Francis's piety took on its outward appearance and its originality. From this time his soul bears the stigmata, and as his biographers have said in words untranslatable, _Ab illa hora vulneratum et liquefactum est cor ejus ed memoriam Dominicæ passionis._[6] From that time his way was plain before him. Coming out from the sanctuary, he gave the priest all the money he had about him to keep a lamp always burning, and with ravished heart he returned to Assisi. He had decided to quit his father's house and undertake the restoration of the chapel, after having broken the last ties that bound him to the past. A horse and a few pieces of gayly colored stuffs were all that he possessed. Arrived at home he made a packet of the stuffs, and mounting his horse he set out for Foligno. This city was then as now the most important commercial town of all the region. Its fairs attracted the whole population of Umbria and the Sabines. Bernardone had often taken his son there,[7] and Francis speedily succeeded in selling all he had brought. He even parted with his horse, and full of joy set out upon the road to Assisi.[8] This act was to him most important; it marked his final rupture with the past; from this day on his life was to be in all points the opposite of what it had been; the Crucified had given himself to him; he on his side had given himself to the Crucified without reserve or return. To uncertainty, disquietude of soul, anguish, longing for an unknown good, bitter regrets, had succeeded a delicious calm, the ecstasy of the lost child who finds his mother, and forgets in a moment the torture of his heart. From Foligno he returned direct to St. Damian; it was not necessary to pass through the city, and he was in haste to put his projects into execution. The poor priest was surprised enough when Francis handed over to him the whole product of his sale. He doubtless thought that a passing quarrel had occurred between Bernardone and his son, and for greater prudence refused the gift; but Francis so insisted upon remaining with him that he finally gave him leave to do so. As to the money, now become useless, Francis cast it as a worthless object upon a window-seat in the chapel.[9] Meanwhile Bernardone, disturbed by his son's failure to return, sought for him in all quarters, and was not long in learning of his presence at St. Damian. In a moment he perceived that Francis was lost to him. Resolved to try every means, he collected a few neighbors, and furious with rage hastened to the hermitage to snatch him away, if need were, by main force. But Francis knew his father's violence. When he heard the shouts of those who were in pursuit of him he felt his courage fail and hurried to a hiding-place which he had prepared for himself for precisely such an emergency. Bernardone, no doubt ill seconded in the search, ransacked every corner, but was obliged at last to return to Assisi without his son. Francis remained hidden for long days, weeping and groaning, imploring God to show him the path he ought to follow. Notwithstanding his fears he had an infinite joy at heart, and at no price would he have turned back.[10] This seclusion could not last long. Francis perceived this, and told himself that for a newly made knight of the Christ he was cutting a very pitiful figure. Arming himself, therefore, with courage, he went one day to the city to present himself before his father and make known to him his resolution. It is easy to imagine the changes wrought in his appearance by these few weeks of seclusion, passed much of them in mental anguish. When he appeared, pale, cadaverous, his clothes in tatters, upon what is now the _Piazza Nuova_, where hundreds of children play all day long, he was greeted with a great shout, "_Pazzo, Pazzo_!" (A madman! a madman!) "_Un pazzo ne fa cento_" (One madman makes a hundred more), says the proverb, but one must have seen the delirious excitement of the street children of Italy at the sight of a madman to gain an idea how true it is. The moment the magic cry resounds they rush into the street with frightful din, and while their parents look on from the windows, they surround the unhappy sufferer with wild dances mingled with songs, shouts, and savage howls. They throw stones at him, fling mud upon him, blindfold him; if he flies into a rage, they double their insults; if he weeps or begs for pity, they repeat his cries and mimic his sobs and supplications without respite and without mercy.[11] Bernardone soon heard the clamor which filled the narrow streets, and went out to enjoy the show; suddenly he thought he heard his own name and that of his son, and bursting with shame and rage he perceived Francis. Throwing himself upon him, as if to throttle him, he dragged him into the house and cast him, half dead, into a dark closet. Threats, bad usage, everything was brought to bear to change the prisoner's resolves, but all in vain. At last, wearied out and desperate, he left him in peace, though not without having firmly bound him.[12] A few days after he was obliged to be absent for a short time. Pica, his wife, understood only too well his grievances against Francis, but feeling that violence would be of no avail she resolved to try gentleness. It was all in vain. Then, not being able longer to see him thus tortured, she set him at liberty. He returned straight to St. Damian.[13] Bernardone, on his return, went so far as to strike Pica in punishment for her weakness. Then, unable to tolerate the thought of seeing his son the jest of the whole city, he tried to procure his expulsion from the territory of Assisi. Going to St. Damian he summoned him to leave the country. This time Francis did not try to hide. Boldly presenting himself before his father, he declared to him that not only would nothing induce him to abandon his resolutions, but that, moreover, having become the servant of Christ, he had no longer to receive orders from him.[14] As Bernardone launched out into invective, reproaching him with the enormous sums which he had cost him, Francis showed him by a gesture the money which he had brought back from the sale at Foligno lying on the window-ledge. The father greedily seized it and went away, resolving to appeal to the magistrates. The consuls summoned Francis to appear before them, but he replied simply that as servant of the Church he did not come under their jurisdiction. Glad of this response, which relieved them of a delicate dilemma, they referred the complainant to the diocesan authorities.[15] The matter took on another aspect before the ecclesiastical tribunal; it was idle to dream of asking the bishop to pronounce a sentence of banishment, since it was his part to preserve the liberty of the clerics. Bernardone could do no more than disinherit his son, or at least induce him of his own accord to renounce all claim upon his inheritance. This was not difficult. When called upon to appear before the episcopal tribunal[16] Francis experienced a lively joy; his mystical espousals to the Crucified One were now to receive a sort of official consecration. To this Jesus, whom he had so often blasphemed and betrayed by word and conduct, he would now be able with equal publicity to promise obedience and fidelity. It is easy to imagine the sensation which all this caused in a small town like Assisi, and the crowd that on the appointed day pressed toward the Piazza of Santa Maria Maggiore, where the bishop pronounced sentence.[17] Every one held Francis to be assuredly mad, but they anticipated with relish the shame and rage of Bernardone, whom every one detested, and whose pride was so well punished by all this. The bishop first set forth the case, and advised Francis to simply give up all his property. To the great surprise of the crowd the latter, instead of replying, retired to a room in the bishop's palace, and immediately reappeared absolutely naked, holding in his hand the packet into which he had rolled his clothes; these he laid down before the bishop with the little money that he still had kept, saying: "Listen, all of you, and understand it well; until this time I have called Pietro Bernardone my father, but now I desire to serve God. This is why I return to him this money, for which he has given himself so much trouble, as well as my clothing, and all that I have had from him, for from henceforth I desire to say nothing else than '_Our Father, who art in heaven_.'" A long murmur arose from the crowd when Bernardone was seen to gather up and carry off the clothing without the least evidence of compassion, while the bishop was fain to take under his mantle the poor Francis, who was trembling with emotion and cold.[18] The scene of the judgment hall made an immense impression; the ardor, simplicity, and indignation of Francis had been so profound and sincere that scoffers were disconcerted. On that day he won for himself a secret sympathy in many souls. The populace loves such abrupt conversions, or those which it considers such. Francis once again forced himself upon the attention of his fellow-citizens with a power all the greater for the contrast between his former and his new life. There are pious folk whose modesty is shocked by the nudity of Francis; but Italy is not Germany nor England, and the thirteenth century would have been astonished indeed at the prudery of the Bollandists. The incident is simply a new manifestation of Francis's character, with its ingenuousness, its exaggerations, its longing to establish a complete harmony, a literal correspondence, between words and actions. After emotions such as he had just experienced he felt the need of being alone, of realizing his joy, of singing the liberty he had finally achieved along all the lines where once he had so deeply suffered, so ardently struggled. He would not, therefore, return immediately to St. Damian. Leaving the city by the nearest gate, he plunged into the deserted paths which climb the sides of Mount Subasio. It was the early spring. Here and there were still great drifts of snow, but under the ardor of the March sun winter seemed to own itself vanquished. In the midst of this mysterious and bewildering harmony the heart of Francis felt a delicious thrill, all his being was calmed and uplifted, the soul of things caressed him gently and shed upon him peace. An unwonted happiness swept over him; he made the forest to resound with his hymns of praise. Men utter in song emotions too sweet or too deep to be expressed in ordinary language, but unworded music is in this respect superior to song, it is above all things the language of the ineffable. Song gains almost the same value when the words are only there as a support for the voice. The great beauty of the psalms and hymns of the Church lies in the fact that being sung in an unknown tongue they make no appeal to the intelligence; they say nothing, but they express everything with marvellous modulations like a celestial accompaniment, which follows the believer's emotions from the most agonizing struggles to the most unspeakable ecstasies. So Francis went on his way, deeply inhaling the odors of spring, singing at the top of his voice one of those songs of French chivalry which he had learned in days gone by. The forest in which he was walking was the usual retreat of such people of Assisi and its environs as had any reason for hiding. Some ruffians, aroused by his voice, suddenly fell upon him. "Who are you?" they asked. "I am the herald of the great King," he answered "but what is that to you?" His only garment was an old mantle which the bishop's gardener had lent him at his master's request. They stripped it from him, and throwing him into a ditch full of snow, "There is your place, poor herald of God," they said. The robbers gone, he shook off the snow which covered him, and after may efforts succeeded in extricating himself from the ditch. Stiff with cold, with no other covering than a worn-out shirt, he none the less resumed his singing, happy to suffer and thus to accustom himself the better to understand the words of the Crucified One.[19] Not far away was a monastery. He entered and offered his services. In those solitudes, peopled often by such undesirable neighbors, people were suspicious. The monks permitted him to make himself useful in the kitchen, but they gave him nothing to cover himself with and hardly anything to eat. There was nothing for it but to go away; he directed his steps toward Gubbio, where he knew that he should find a friend. Perhaps this was he who had been his confidant on his return from Spoleto. However this may be, he received from him a tunic, and a few days after set out to return to his dear St. Damian.[20] He did not, however, go directly thither; before beginning to restore the little sanctuary, he desired to see again his friends, the lepers, to promise them that he would love them even better than in the past. Since his first visit to the leper-house the brilliant cavalier had become a poor beggar; he came with empty hands but with heart overflowing with tenderness and compassion. Taking up his abode in the midst of these afflicted ones he lavished upon them the most touching care, washing and wiping their sores, all the more gentle and radiant as their sores were more repulsive.[21] The neglected sufferer is as much blinded by love of him who comes to visit him as the child by its love for its mother. He believes him to be all powerful; at his approach the most painful sufferings are eased or disappear. This love inspired by the sympathy of an affectionate heart may become so deep as to appear at times supernatural; the dying have been known to recover consciousness in order to look for the last time into the face, not of some member of the family, but of the friend who has tried to be the sunshine of their last days. The ties of pure love are stronger than the bonds of flesh and blood. Francis had many a time sweet experience of this; from the time of his arrival at the leper-house he felt that if he had lost his life he was about to find it again. Encouraged by his sojourn among the lepers, he returned to St. Damian and went to work, filled with joy and ardor, his heart as much in the sunshine as the Umbrian plain in this beautiful month of May. After having fashioned for himself a hermit's dress, he began to go into the squares and open places of the city. There having sung a few hymns, he would announce to those who gathered around him his project of restoring the chapel. "Those who will give me one stone," he would add with a smile, "shall have a reward; those who give me two shall have two rewards, and those who give me three shall have three." Many deemed him mad, but others were deeply moved by the remembrance of the past. As for Francis, deaf to mockery, he spared himself no labor, carrying upon his shoulders, so ill-fitted for severe toil, the stones which were given him.[22] During this time the poor priest of St. Damian felt his heart swelling with love for this companion who had at first caused him such embarrassment, and he strove to prepare for him his favorite dishes. Francis soon perceived it. His delicacy took alarm at the expense which he caused his friend, and, thanking him, he resolved to beg his food from door to door. It was not an easy task. The first time, when at the end of his round he glanced at the broken food in his wallet, he felt his courage fail him. But the thought of being so soon unfaithful to the spouse to whom he had plighted his faith made his blood run cold with shame and gave him strength to eat ravenously.[23] Each hour, so to speak, brought to him a new struggle. One day he was going through the town begging for oil for the lamps of St. Damian, when he arrived at a house where a banquet was going on; the greater number of his former companions were there, singing and dancing. At the sound of those well-known voices he felt as if he could not enter; he even turned away, but very soon, filled with confusion by his own cowardice, he returned quickly upon his steps, made his way into the banquet-hall, and after confessing his shame, put so much earnestness and fire into his request that every one desired to co-operate in this pious work.[24] His bitterest trial however was his father's anger, which remained as violent as ever. Although he had renounced Francis, Bernardone's pride suffered none the less at seeing his mode of life, and whenever he met his son he overwhelmed him with reproaches and maledictions. The tender heart of Francis was so wrung with sorrow that he resorted to a sort of stratagem for charming away the spell of the paternal imprecations. "Come with me," he said to a beggar; "be to me as a father, and I will give you a part of the alms which I receive. When you see Bernardone curse me, if I say, 'Bless me, my father,' you must sign me with the cross and bless me in his stead."[25] His brother was prominent in the front rank of those who harassed him with their mockeries. One winter morning they met in a church; Angelo leaned over to a friend who was with him, saying: "Go, ask Francis to sell you a farthing's worth of his sweat." "No," replied the latter, who overheard. "I shall sell it much dearer to my God." In the spring of 1208 he finished the restoration of St. Damian; he had been aided by all people of good will, setting the example of work and above all of joy, cheering everybody by his songs and his projects for the future. He spoke with such enthusiasm and contagious warmth of the transformation of his dear chapel, of the grace which God would accord to those who should come there to pray, that later on it was believed that he had spoken of Clara and her holy maidens who were to retire to this place four years later.[26] This success soon inspired him with the idea of repairing the other sanctuaries in the suburbs of Assisi. Those which had struck him by their state of decay were St. Peter and Santa Maria, of the _Portiuncula_, called also Santa Maria degli Angeli. The former is not otherwise mentioned in his biographies.[27] As to the second, it was to become the true cradle of the Franciscan movement. This chapel, still standing at the present day after escaping revolutions and earthquakes, is a true Bethel, one of those rare spots in the world on which rests the mystic ladder which joins heaven to earth; there were dreamed some of the noblest dreams which have soothed the pains of humanity. It is not to Assisi in its marvellous basilica that one must go to divine and comprehend St. Francis; he must turn his steps to Santa Maria degli Angeli at the hours when the stated prayers cease, at the moment when the evening shadows lengthen, when all the fripperies of worship disappear in the obscurity, when all the nation seems to collect itself to listen to the chime of the distant church bells. Doubtless it was Francis's plan to settle there as a hermit. He dreamed of passing his life there in meditation and silence, keeping up the little church and from time to time inviting a priest there to say mass. Nothing as yet suggested to him that he was in the end to become a religious founder. One of the most interesting aspects of his life is in fact the continual development revealing itself in him; he is of the small number to whom to live is to be active, and to be active to make progress. There is hardly anyone, except St. Paul, in whom is found to the same degree the devouring need of being always something more, always something better, and it is so beautiful in both of them only because it is absolutely instinctive. When he began to restore the Portiuncula his projects hardly went beyond a very narrow horizon; he was preparing himself for a life of penitence rather than a life of activity. But these works once finished it was impossible that this somewhat selfish and passive manner of achieving his own salvation should satisfy him long. At the memory of the appearance of the Crucified One his heart would swell with overpowering emotions, and he would melt into tears without knowing whether they were of admiration, pity, or desire.[28] When the repairs were finished meditation occupied the greater part of his days. A Benedictine of the Abbey of Mont Subasio[29] came from time to time to say mass at Santa Maria; these were the bright hours of St. Francis's life. One can imagine with what pious care he prepared himself and with what faith he listened to the divine teachings. One day, it was probably February 24, 1209, the festival of St. Matthias, mass was being celebrated at the Portiuncula.[30] When the priest turned toward him to read the words of Jesus, Francis felt himself overpowered with a profound agitation. He no longer saw the priest; it was Jesus, the Crucified One of St. Damian, who was speaking: "Wherever ye go, preach, saying, 'The kingdom of heaven is at hand. Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, cast out devils. Freely ye have received, freely give. Provide neither silver nor gold nor brass in your purses, neither scrip nor two coats, nor shoes nor staff, for the laborer is worthy of his meat.'" These words burst upon him like a revelation, like the answer of Heaven to his sighs and anxieties. "This is what I want," he cried, "this is what I was seeking; from this day forth I shall set myself with all my strength to put it in practice." Immediately throwing aside his stick, his scrip, his purse, his shoes, he determined immediately to obey, observing to the letter the precepts of the apostolic life. It is quite possible that some allegorizing tendencies have had some influence upon this narrative.[31] The long struggle through which Francis passed before becoming the apostle of the new times assuredly came to a crisis in the scene at Portiuncula; but we have already seen how slow was the interior travail which prepared for it. The revelation of Francis was in his heart; the sacred fire which he was to communicate to the souls of others came from within his own, but the best causes need a standard. Before the shabby altar of the Portiuncula he had perceived the banner of poverty, sacrifice, and love, he would carry it to the assault of every fortress of sin; under its shadow, a true knight of Christ, he would marshal all the valiant warriors of a spiritual strife. FOOTNOTES: [1] 3 Soc., 26. [2] 3 Soc., 10. [3] This crucifix is preserved in the sacristy of Santa Chiara, whither the sisters carried it when they left St. Damian. [4] _Opuscula B. Francisci, Oratio I._ [5] 3 Soc., 13; 2 Cel., 1, 6; Bon., 12; 15; 16. [6] 3 Soc., 14. [7] This incident is found in the narrative of 1 Cel., 8: _Ibi ex more venditis_. [8] 1 Cel., 8; 3 Soc., 16; Bon. 16. Foligno is a three hours' walk from Assisi. [9] 1 Cel., 9; 3 Soc., 16; Bon., 6. Cf. A. SS., p. 567. [10] 1 Cel., 10; 3 Soc., 16; Bon., 17, A. SS.; p. 568. [11] 1 Cel., 11. [12] 1 Cel., 12; 3 Soc., 17; Bon., 18. [13] 1 Cel., 13; 3 Soc., 18. [14] 1 Cel., 13. It is possible that at this epoch he had received the lesser order, and that thus he might be subject to the jurisdiction of the Church. [15] 3 Soc., 18 and 19; 1 Cel., 14; Bon., 19. [16] From 1204 until after the death of St. Francis the episcopal throne of Assisi was occupied by Guido II. Vide Cristofano, 1, 169 ff. [17] _Piazza di Santa Maria Maggiore o del vescovado._ Everything has remained pretty nearly in the same state as in the thirteenth century. [18] 1 Cel., 15; 3 Soc., 20; Bon., 20. [19] 3 Soc., 16; Bon., 21. [20] 1 Cel., 16; Bon., 21. The curious will read with interest an article by M. Mezzatinti upon the journey to Gubbio entitled _S. Francesco e Frederico Spadalunga da Gubbio_. [Miscellanea, t. v., pp. 76-78.] This Spadalunga da Gubbio was well able to give a garment to Francis, but it is very possible that the gift was made much later and that this solemn date in the saint's life has been fixed by an optical illusion, almost inevitable because of the identity of the fact with the name of the locality. [21] 1 Cel., 17; Bon., 11; 13; 21; 22; 3 Soc., 11; A. SS., p. 575. [22] 1 Cel., 18; 3 Soc., 21; Bon., 23. [23] 3 Soc., 22; 2 Cel., 1, 9. [24] 3 Soc., 24; 2 Cel., 8; _Spec._, 24. [25] 3 Soc., 23; 2 Cel., 7. [26] 3 Soc., 24; _Testament de Claire_, Wadding, _ann. 1253_ v. [27] Cel., 21; Bon., 24. [28] 3 Soc., 14; 2 Cel., i., 6. [29] Portiuncula was a dependence of this abbey. [30] This is the date adopted by the Bollandists, because the ancient missals mark the pericope, Matt. x., for the gospel of this day. This entails no difficulty and in any case it cannot be very far distant from the truth. A. SS., p. 574. [31] See in particular Bon., 25 and 26. Cf. A. SS., p. 577d. * * * * * CHAPTER V FIRST YEAR OF APOSTOLATE Spring of 1209-Summer of 1210 The very next morning Francis went up to Assisi and began to preach. His words were simple, but they came so straight from the heart that all who heard him were touched. It is not easy to hear and apply to one's self the exhortations of preachers who, aloft in the pulpit, seem to be carrying out a mere formality; it is just as difficult to escape from the appeals of a layman who walks at our side. The amazing multitude of Protestant sects is due in a great degree to this superiority of lay preaching over clerical. The most brilliant orators of the Christian pulpit are bad converters; their eloquent appeals may captivate the imagination and lead a few men of the world to the foot of the altar, but these results are not more brilliant than ephemeral. But let a peasant or a workingman speak to those whom he meets a few simple words going directly to the conscience, and the man is always impressed, often won. Thus the words of Francis seemed to his hearers like a flaming sword penetrating to the very depths of their conscience. His first attempts were the simplest possible; in general they were merely a few words addressed to men whom he knew well enough to recognize their weak points and strike at them with the holy boldness of love. His person, his example, were themselves a sermon, and he spoke only of that which he had himself experienced, proclaiming repentance, the shortness of life, a future retribution, the necessity of arriving at gospel perfection.[1] It is not easy to realize how many waiting souls there are in this world. The greater number of men pass through life with souls asleep. They are like virgins of the sanctuary who sometimes feel a vague agitation; their hearts throb with an infinitely sweet and subtile thrill, but their eyelids droop; again they feel the damp cold of the cloister creeping over them; the delicious but baneful dream vanishes; and this is all they ever know of that love which is stronger than death. It is thus with many men for all that belongs to the higher life. Sometimes, alone in the wide plain at the hour of twilight, they fix their eyes on the fading lights of the horizon, and on the evening breeze comes to them another breath, more distant, fainter, and almost heavenly, awaking in them a nostalgia for the world beyond and for holiness. But the darkness falls, they must go back to their homes; they shake off their reverie; and it often happens that to the very end of life this is their only glimpse of the Divine; a few sighs, a few thrills, a few inarticulate murmurs--this sums up all our efforts to attain to the sovereign good. Yet the instinct for love and for the divine is only slumbering. At the sight of beauty love always awakes; at the appeal of holiness the divine witness within us at once responds; and so we see, streaming from all points of the horizon to gather around those who preach in the name of the inward voice, long processions of souls athirst for the ideal. The human heart so naturally yearns to offer itself up, that we have only to meet along our pathway some one who, doubting neither himself nor us, demands it without reserve, and we yield it to him at once. Reason may understand a partial gift, a transient devotion; the heart knows only the entire sacrifice, and like the lover to his beloved, it says to its vanquisher, "Thine alone and forever." That which has caused the miserable failure of all the efforts of natural religion is that its founders have not had the courage to lay hold upon the hearts of men, consenting to no partition. They have not understood the imperious desire for immolation which lies in the depths of every soul, and souls have taken their revenge in not heeding these too lukewarm lovers. Francis had given himself up too completely not to claim from others an absolute self-renunciation. In the two years and more since he had quitted the world, the reality and depth of his conversion had shone out in the sight of all; to the scoffings of the early days had gradually succeeded in the minds of many a feeling closely akin to admiration. This feeling inevitably provokes imitation. A man of Assisi, hardly mentioned by the biographers, had attached himself to Francis. He was one of those simple-hearted men who find life beautiful enough so long as they can be with him who has kindled the divine spark[2] in their hearts. His arrival at Portiuncula gave Francis a suggestion; from that time he dreamed of the possibility of bringing together a few companions with whom he could carry on his apostolic mission in the neighborhood. At Assisi he had often enjoyed the hospitality of a rich and prominent man named Bernardo di Quintavalle,[3] who took him to sleep in his own chamber; it is easy to see how such an intimacy would favor confidential outpourings. When in the silence of the early night an ardent and enthusiastic soul pours out to you its disappointments, wounds, dreams, hopes, faith, it is difficult indeed not to be carried along, especially when the apostle has a secret ally in your soul, and unconsciously meets your most secret aspirations. One day Bernardo begged Francis to pass the following night with him, at the same time giving him to understand that he was about to make a grave resolution upon which he desired to consult him. The joy of Francis was great indeed as he divined his intentions. They passed the night without thinking of sleep; it was a long communion of souls. Bernardo had decided to distribute his goods to the poor and cast in his lot with Francis. The latter desired his friend to pass through a sort of initiation, pointing out to him that what he himself practised, what he preached, was not his own invention, but that Jesus himself had expressly ordained it in his word. At early dawn they bent their steps to the St. Nicholas Church, accompanied by another neophyte named Pietro, and there, after praying and hearing mass, Francis opened the Gospels that lay on the altar and read to his companions the portion which had decided his own vocation: the words of Jesus sending forth his disciples on their mission. "Brethren," he added, "this is our life and our Rule, and that of all who may join us. Go then and do as you have heard."[4] The persistence with which the Three Companions relate that Francis consulted the book three times in honor of the Trinity, and that it opened of its own accord at the verses describing the apostolic life, leads to the belief that these passages became the Rule of the new association, if not that very day at least very soon afterward. If thou wilt be perfect, go, sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven, and come and follow me. Jesus having called to him the Twelve, gave them power and authority over all devils and to cure diseases. And he sent them to preach the kingdom of God and to heal the sick. And he said unto them, Take nothing for your journey, neither staves, nor scrip, neither bread, neither money; neither have two coats apiece. And whatsoever house ye enter into, there abide, and thence depart. And whosoever will not receive you, when ye go out of that city shake off the very dust from your feet for a testimony against them. And they departed and went through the towns, preaching the gospel and healing everywhere. Then said Jesus unto his disciples, If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross and follow me. For whosoever will save his life shall lose it, and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it. For what is a man profited if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul?[5] At first these verses were hardly more than the official Rule of the Order; the true Rule was Francis himself; but they had the great merit of being short, absolute, of promising perfection, and of being taken from the Gospel. Bernardo immediately set to work to distribute his fortune among the poor. Full of joy, his friend was looking on at this act, which had drawn together a crowd, when a priest named Sylvester, who had formerly sold him some stones for the repairs of St. Damian, seeing so much money given away to everyone who applied for it, drew near and said: "Brother, you did not pay me very well for the stones which you bought of me." Francis had too thoroughly killed every germ of avarice in himself not to be moved to indignation by hearing a priest speak thus. "Here," he said, holding out to him a double handful of coins which he took from Bernardo's robe, "here; are you sufficiently paid now?" "Quite so," replied Sylvester, somewhat abashed by the murmurs of the bystanders.[6] This picture, in which the characters stand out so strongly, must have taken strong hold upon the memory of the bystanders: the Italians only thoroughly understand things which they make a picture of. It taught them, better than all Francis's preachings, what manner of men these new friars would be. The distribution finished, they went at once to Portiuncula, where Bernardo and Pietro built for themselves cabins of boughs, and made themselves tunics like that of Francis. They did not differ much from the garment worn by the peasants, and were of that brown, with its infinite variety of shades, which the Italians call beast color. One finds similar garments to-day among the shepherds of the most remote parts of the Apennines. A week later, Thursday, April 23, 1209,[7] a new disciple of the name of Egidio presented himself before Francis. Of a gentle and submissive nature, he was of those who need to lean on someone, but who, the needed support having been found and tested, lift themselves sometimes even above it. The pure soul of brother Egidio, supported by that of Francis, came to enjoy the intoxicating delights of contemplation with an unheard-of ardor.[8] Here we must be on our guard against forcing the authorities, and asking of them more than they can give. Later, when the Order was definitely constituted and its convents organized, men fancied that the past had been like the present, and this error still weighs upon the picture of the origins of the Franciscan movement. The first brothers lived as did the poor people among whom they so willingly moved; Portiuncula was their favorite church, but it would be a mistake to suppose that they sojourned there for any long periods. It was their place of meeting, nothing more. When they set forth they simply knew that they should meet again in the neighborhood of the modest chapel. Their life was that of the Umbrian beggars of the present day, going here and there as fancy dictated, sleeping in hay-lofts, in leper hospitals, or under the porch of some church. So little had they any fixed domicile that Egidio, having decided to join them, was at considerable trouble to learn where to find Francis, and accidentally meeting him in the neighborhood of Rivo-Torto[9] he saw in the fact a providential leading. They went up and down the country, joyfully sowing their seed. It was the beginning of summer, the time when everybody in Umbria is out of doors mowing or turning the grass. The customs of the country have changed but little. Walking in the end of May in the fields about Florence, Perugia, or Rieti, one still sees, at nightfall, the bagpipers entering the fields as the mowers seat themselves upon the hay-cocks for their evening meal; they play a few pieces, and when the train of haymakers returns to the village, followed by the harvest-laden carts, it is they who lead the procession, rending the air with their sharpest strains. The joyous Penitents who loved to call themselves _Joculatores Domini_, God's _jongleurs_, no doubt often did the same.[10] They did even better, for not willing to be a charge to anyone, they passed a part of the day in aiding the peasants in their field work.[11] The inhabitants of these districts are for the most part kindly and sedate; the friars soon gained their confidence by relating to them first their history and then their hopes. They worked and ate together; field-hands and friars often slept in the same barn, and when with the morrow's dawn the friars went on their way, the hearts of those they left behind had been touched. They were not yet converted, but they knew that not far away, over toward Assisi, were living men who had renounced all worldly goods, and who, consumed with zeal, were going up and down preaching penitence and peace. Their reception was very different in the cities. If the peasant of Central Italy is mild and kindly the townsfolk are on a first acquaintance scoffing and ill disposed. We shall shortly see the friars who went to Florence the butt of all sorts of persecutions. Only a few weeks had passed since Francis began to preach, and already his words and acts were sounding an irresistible appeal in the depths of many a heart. We have arrived at the most unique and interesting period in the history of the Franciscans. These first months are for their institution what the first days of spring are for nature, days when the almond-tree blossoms, bearing witness to the mysterious labor going on in the womb of the earth, and heralding the flowers that will suddenly enamel the fields. At the sight of these men--bare footed, scantily clothed, without money, and yet so happy--men's minds were much divided. Some held them to be mad, others admired them, finding them widely different from the vagrant monks,[12] that plague of Christendom. Sometimes, however, the friars found success not responding to their efforts, the conversion of souls not taking form with enough rapidity and vigor. To encourage them, Francis would then confide to them his visions and his hopes. "I saw a multitude of men coming toward us, asking that they might receive the habit of our holy religion, and lo, the sound of their footsteps still echoes in my ears. I saw them coming from every direction, filling all the roads." Whatever the biographies may say, Francis was far from foreseeing the sorrows that were to follow this rapid increase of his Order. The maiden leaning with trembling rapture on her lover's arm no more dreams of the pangs of motherhood than he thought of the dregs he must drain after quaffing joyfully the generous wine of the chalice.[13] Every prosperous movement provokes opposition by the very fact of its prosperity. The herbs of the field have their own language for cursing the longer-lived plants that smother them out; one can hardly live without arousing jealousy; in vain the new fraternity showed itself humble, it could not escape this law. When the brethren went up to Assisi to beg from door to door, many refused to give to them, reproaching them with desiring to live on the goods of others after having squandered their own. Many a time they had barely enough not to starve to death. It would even seem that the clergy were not entirely without part in this opposition. The Bishop of Assisi said to Francis one day: "Your way of living without owning anything seems to me very harsh and difficult." "My lord," replied he, "if we possessed property we should have need of arms for its defence, for it is the source of quarrels and lawsuits, and the love of God and of one's neighbor usually finds many obstacles therein; this is why we do not desire temporal goods."[14] The argument was unanswerable, but Guido began to rue the encouragement which he had formerly offered the son of Bernardone. He was very nearly in the situation and consequently in the state of mind of the Anglican bishops when they saw the organizing of the Salvation Army. It was not exactly hostility, but a distrust which was all the deeper for hardly daring to show itself. The only counsel which the bishop could give Francis was to come into the ranks of the clergy, or, if asceticism attracted him, to join some already existing monastic order.[15] If the bishop's perplexities were great, those of Francis were hardly less so. He was too acute not to foresee the conflict that threatened to break out between the friars and the clergy. He saw that the enemies of the priests praised him and his companions beyond measure simply to set off their poverty against the avarice and wealth of the ecclesiastics, yet he felt himself urged on from within to continue his work, and could well have exclaimed with the apostle, _"Woe is me if I preach not the gospel!"_ On the other hand, the families of the Penitents could not forgive them for having distributed their goods among the poor, and attacks came from this direction with all the bitter language and the deep hatred natural to disappointed heirs. From this point of view the brotherhood appeared as a menace to families, and many parents trembled lest their sons should join it. Whether the friars would or no, they were an unending subject of interest to the whole city. Evil rumors, plentifully spread abroad against them, simply defeated themselves; flying from mouth to mouth they speedily found contradictors who had no difficulty in showing their absurdity. All this indirectly served their cause and gained to their side those hearts, more numerous than is generally believed, who find the defence of the persecuted a necessity. As to the clergy, they could not but feel a profound distrust of these lay converters, who, though they aroused the hatred of some interested persons, awakened in more pious souls first astonishment and then admiration. Suddenly to see men without title or diploma succeed brilliantly in the mission which has been officially confided to ourselves, and in which we have made pitiful shipwreck, is cruel torture. Have we not seen generals who preferred to lose a battle rather than gain it with the aid of guerrillas? This covert opposition has left no characteristic traces in the biographies of St. Francis. It is not to be wondered at; Thomas of Celano, even if he had had information of this matter, would have been wanting in tact to make use of it. The clergy, for that matter, possess a thousand means of working upon public opinion without ceasing to show a religious interest in those whom they detest. But the more St. Francis shall find himself in contradiction with the clergy of his time, the more he will believe himself the obedient son of the Church. Confounding the gospel with the teaching of the Church, he will for a good while border upon heresy, but without ever falling into it. Happy simplicity, thanks to which he had never to take the attitude of revolt! It was five years since, a convalescent leaning upon his staff, he had felt himself taken possession of by a loathing of material pleasures. From that time every one of his days had been marked by a step in advance. It was again the spring-time. Perfectly happy, he felt himself more and more impelled to bring others to share his happiness and to proclaim in the four corners of the world how he had attained it. He resolved, therefore, to undertake a new mission. A few days were spent in preparing for it. The Three Companions have preserved for us the directions which he gave to his disciples: "Let us consider that God in his goodness has not called us merely for our own salvation, but also for that of many men, that we may go through all the world exhorting men, more by our example than by our words, to repent of their sins and bear the commandments in mind. Be not fearful on the ground that we appear little and ignorant, but simply and without disquietude preach repentance. Have faith in God, who has overcome the world, that his Spirit will speak in you and by you, exhorting men to be converted and keep his commandments. "You will find men full of faith, gentleness, and goodness, who will receive you and your words with joy; but you will find others, and in greater numbers, faithless, proud, blasphemers, who will speak evil of you, resisting you and your words. Be resolute, then, to endure everything with patience and humility." Hearing this, the brethren began to be agitated. St. Francis said to them: "Have no fear, for very soon many nobles and learned men will come to you; they will be with you preaching to kings and princes and to a multitude of peoples. Many will be converted to the Lord, all over the world, who will multiply and increase his family." After he had thus spoken he blessed them, saying to each one the word which was in the future to be his supreme consolation: "My brother, commit yourself to God with all your cares, and he will care for you." Then the men of God departed, faithfully observing his instructions, and when they found a church or a cross they bowed in adoration, saying with devotion, "We adore thee, O Christ, and we bless thee here and in all churches in the whole world, for by thy holy cross thou hast ransomed the world." In fact they believed that they had found a holy place wherever they found a church or a cross. Some listened willingly, others scoffed, the greater number overwhelmed them with questions. "Whence come you?" "Of what order are you?" And they, though sometimes it was wearisome to answer, said simply, "We are penitents, natives of the city of Assisi."[16] This freshness and poetry will not be found in the later missions. Here the river is still itself, and if it knows toward what sea it is hastening, it knows nothing of the streams, more or less turbid, which shall disturb its limpidity, nor the dykes and the straightenings to which it will have to submit. A long account by the Three Companions gives us a picture from life of these first essays at preaching: Many men took the friars for knaves or madmen and refused to receive them into their houses for fear of being robbed. So in many places, after having undergone all sorts of bad usage, they could find no other refuge for the night than the porticos of churches or houses. There were at that time two brethren who went to Florence. They begged all through the city but could find no shelter. Coming to a house which had a portico and under the portico a bench, they said to one another, "We shall be very comfortable here for the night." As the mistress of the house refused to let them enter, they humbly asked her permission to sleep upon the bench. She was about to grant them permission when her husband appeared. "Why have you permitted these lewd fellows to stay under our portico?" he asked. The woman replied that she had refused to receive them into the house, but had given them permission to sleep under the portico where there was nothing for them to steal but the bench. The cold was very sharp; but taking them for thieves no one gave them any covering. As for them, after having enjoyed on their bench no more sleep than was necessary, warmed only by divine warmth, and having for covering only their Lady Poverty, in the early dawn they went to the church to hear mass. The lady went also on her part, and seeing the friars devoutly praying she said to herself: "If these men were rascals and thieves as my husband said, they would not remain thus in prayer." And while she was making these reflections behold a man of the name of Guido was giving alms to the poor in the church. Coming to the friars he would have given a piece of money to them as to the others, but they refused his money and would not receive it. "Why," he asked, "since you are poor, will you not accept like the others?" "It is true that we are poor," replied Brother Bernardo, "but poverty does not weigh upon us as upon other poor people; for by the grace of God, whose will we are accomplishing, we have voluntarily become poor." Much amazed, he asked them if they had ever had anything, and learned that they had possessed much, but that for the love of God they had given everything away.... The lady, seeing that the friars had refused the alms, drew near to them and said that she would gladly receive them into her house if they would be pleased to lodge there. "May the Lord recompense to you your good will," replied the friars, humbly. But Guido, learning that they had not been able to find a shelter, took them to his own house, saying, "Here is a refuge prepared for you by the Lord; remain in it as long as you desire." As for them, they gave thanks to God and spent several days with him, preaching the fear of the Lord by word and example, so that in the end he made large distributions to the poor. Well treated by him, they were despised by others. Many men, great and small, attacked and insulted them, sometimes going so far as to tear off their clothing; but though despoiled of their only tunic, they would not ask for its restitution. If, moved to pity, men gave back to them what they had taken away, they accepted it cheerfully. There were those who threw mud upon them, others who put dice into their hands and invited them to play, and others clutching them by the cowl made them drag them along thus. But seeing that the friars were always full of joy in the midst of their tribulations, that they neither received nor carried money, and that by their love for one another they made themselves known as true disciples of the Lord, many of them felt themselves reproved in their hearts and came asking pardon for the offences which they had committed. They, pardoning them with all their heart, said, "The Lord forgive you," and gave them pious counsels for the salvation of their souls. A translation can but imperfectly give all the repressed emotion, the candid simplicity, the modest joy, the fervent love which breathe in the faulty Latin of the Three Companions. Yet these scattered friars sighed after the home-coming and the long conversations with their spiritual father in the tranquil forests of the suburbs of Assisi. Friendship among men, when it overpasses a certain limit, has something deep, high, ideal, infinitely sweet, to which no other friendship attains. There was no woman in the Upper Chamber when, on the last evening of his life, Jesus communed with his disciples and invited the world to the eternal marriage supper. Francis, above all, was impatient to see his young family once more. They all arrived at Portiuncula almost at the same time, having already, before reaching it, forgotten the torments they had endured, thinking only of the joy of the meeting.[17] FOOTNOTES: [1] 1 Cel., 23; 3 Soc., 25 and 26; Bon., 27. Cf. _Auct. Vit. Sec. ap._, A. SS., p. 579. [2] 1 Cel., 24. We must correct the Bollandist text: _Inter quos quidam de Assisio puer ac simplicem animum gerens_, by: _quidam de Assisio pium ac simplicem_, etc. The period at which we have arrived is very clear as a whole: the picture which the Three Companions give us is true with a truth which forces conviction at first sight; but neither they nor Celano are giving an official report. Later on men desired to know precisely in what order the early disciples came, and they tortured the texts to find an answer. The same course was followed with regard to the first missionary journeys. But on both sides they came up against impossibilities and contradictions. What does it matter whether there were two, three, or four missions before the papal approbation? Of what consequence are the names of those early disciples who are entirely secondary in the history of the Franciscan movement? All these things took place with much more simplicity and spontaneity than is generally supposed. There is a wide difference between the plan of a house drawn up by an architect and a view of the same house painted by an artist. The second, though abounding in inexactitudes, gives a more just notion of the reality than the plan. The same is true of the Franciscan biographies. [3] 1 Cel., 24. Bernard de Besse is the first to call him B. di Quintavalle: _De laudibus_, fo. 95 h.; cf. upon him Mark of Lisbon, t. i., second part, pp. 68-70; _Conform._, 47; _Fior._, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 28; 3 Soc., 27, 30, 39; 2 Cel., 1, 10; 2, 19; Bon., 28; 1 Cel., 30; Salimbeni, ann. 1229, and _Tribul. Arch._, ii., p. 278, etc. [4] 1 Cel., 24; 3 Soc., 27, 28, 29; 2 Cel., 1, 10; 3, 52; Bon., 28; A. SS., p. 580. It is evident that the tradition has been worked over here: it soon came to be desired to find a miracle in the manner in which Francis found the passage for reading. The St. Nicholas Church is no longer in existence; it stood upon the piece of ground now occupied by the barracks of the _gendarmerie_ (_carabinieri reali_). [5] Matt., xix., 21; Luke, ix., 1-6; Matt., xvi., 24-26. The agreement of tradition upon these passages is complete. 3 Soc., 29; 2 Cel., 1, 10; Bon., 28; _Spec._, 5b.; _Conform._, 37b. 2, 47a. 2; _Fior._, 2; Glassberger and the Chronicle of the xxiv. generals reversing the order (Analecta, fr., t. ii., p. 5) as well as the Conformities in another place, 87b, 2. [6] 3 Soc., 30. Cf. _Anon. Perus._, A. SS., p. 581a. This scene is reported neither by Celano nor by St. Bonaventura. [7] This date is given in the life of Brother Egidio; A. SS., _Oct._, t. ii., p. 572; _Aprilis_, t. iii., p. 220. It fits well with the accounts. Through it we obtain the approximate date of the definitive conversion of Francis two full years earlier. [8] 1 Cel., 25; 3 Soc., 23; Bon. 29. Cf. _Anon. Perus._, A. SS., p. 582, and A. SS., _Aprilis_, t. iii., p. 220 ff. [9] _Spec._, 25a: _Qualiter dixit fratri Egidio priusquam esset receptus ut daret mantellum ciudam pauperi. In primordio religionis cum maneret apud Regum Tortum cum duobus fratribus quos tunc tantum habehat._ If we compare this passage with 3 Soc., 44, we shall doubtless arrive at the conclusion that the account in the Speculum is more satisfactory. It is in fact very easy to understand the optical illusion by which later on the Portiuncula was made the scene of the greater number of the events of St. Francis's life, while it would be difficult to see why there should have been any attempt to surround Rivo-Torto with an aureola. The Fioretti say: _Ando inverso lo spedale dei lebbrosi_, which confirms the indication of Rivo-Torto. _Vita d' Egidio_, § 1. [10] _An. Perus_, A. SS., p. 582. Cf. _Fior._, _Vita di Egidio_, 1; _Spec._, 124, 136; 2 Cel., 3, 68; A. SS., _Aprilis_, t. iii., p. 227. [11] _Spec._, 34a; _Conform._, 219b, 1; _Ant. fr._, p. 96. [12] The Gyrovagi. Tr. [13] 3 Soc. 32-34; 1 Cel., 27 and 28; Bon., 31. [14] 3 Soc., 35. Cf. _Anon. Perus._; A. SS., p. 584. [15] Later on, naturally, it was desired that Francis should have had no better supporter than Guido; some have even made him out to be his spiritual director (St. François, Plon, p. 24)! We have an indirect but unexceptionable proof of the reserve with which these pious traditions must be accepted; Francis did not even tell his bishop (_pater et dominus animarum_, 3 Soc., 29) of his design of having his Rule approved by the pope. This is the more striking because the bishop would have been his natural advocate at the court of Rome, and because in the absence of any other reason the most elementary politeness required that he should have been informed. Add to this that bishops in Italy are not, as elsewhere, _functionaries_ approached with difficulty by the common run of mortals. Almost every village in Umbria has its bishop, so that their importance is hardly greater than that of the curé of a French canton. Furthermore, several pontifical documents throw a sombre light on Guido's character. In a chapter of the decretals of Honorius III. (_Quinta compil._, lib. ii., tit. iii., cap. i.) is given a complaint against this bishop, brought before the curia by the Crucigeri of the hospital _San Salvatore delle Pareti_ (suburbs of Assisi), of having maltreated two of their number, and having stolen a part of the wine belonging to the convent: _pro eo quod Aegidium presbyterum, et fratrem eorem conversum violentas manus injecerat ... adjiciens quod idem hospitale quadam vini quantitate fuerat per eumdem episcopum spoliatum._ _Honorii opera_, Horoy's edition, t. i., col. 200 ff. Cf. Potthast, 7746. The mention of the hospital _de Pariete_ proves beyond question that the Bishop of Assisi is here concerned and not the Bishop of Osimo, as some critics have suggested. Another document shows him at strife with the Benedictines of Mount Subasio (the very ones who afterward gave Portiuncula to Francis), and Honorius III. found the bishop in the wrong: Bull _Conquerente oeconomo monasterii ap_. Richter, _Corpus juris canonici_. Leipzig, 1839, 4to, Horoy, _loc. cit._, t. i., col. 163; Potthast, 7728. [16] 3 Soc., 36 and 37. Cf. _Anon. Perus. ap._, A. SS., p. 585; _Test. B. Francisci_. [17] 3 Soc., 38-41. * * * * * CHAPTER VI ST. FRANCIS AND INNOCENT III Summer 1210[1] Seeing the number of his friars daily increasing, Francis decided to write the Rule of the Order and go to Rome to procure its approval by the Pope. This resolution was not lightly taken. It would be a mistake in fact to take Francis for one of those inspired ones who rush into action upon the strength of unexpected revelations, and, thanks to their faith in their own infallibility, overawe the multitude. On the contrary, he was filled with a real humility, and if he believed that God reveals himself in prayer, he never for that absolved himself from the duty of reflection nor even from reconsidering his decisions. St. Bonaventura does him great wrong in picturing the greater number of his important resolutions as taken in consequence of dreams; this is to rob his life of its profound originality, his sanctity of its choicest blossom. He was of those who struggle, and, to use one of the noblest expressions of the Bible, of those who _by their perseverance conquer their souls_. Thus we shall see him continually retouching the Rule of his institute, unceasingly revising it down to the last moment, according as the growth of the Order and experience of the human heart suggested to him modifications of it.[2] The first Rule which he submitted to Rome has not come down to us; we only know that it was extremely simple, and composed especially of passages from the Gospels. It was doubtless only the repetition of those verses which Francis had read to his first companions, with a few precepts about manual labor and the occupations of the new brethren.[3] It will be well to pause here and consider the brethren who are about to set out for Rome. The biographies are in agreement as to their number; they were twelve, including Francis; but the moment they undertake to give a name to each one of them difficulties begin to arise, and it is only by some exegetical sleight of hand that they can claim to have reconciled the various documents. The table given below[4] briefly shows these difficulties. The question took on some importance when in the fourteenth century men undertook to show an exact conformity between the life of St. Francis and that of Jesus. It is without interest to us. The profiles of two or three of these brethren stand out very clearly in the picture of the origins of the Order; others remind one of the pictures of primitive Umbrian masters, where the figures of the background have a modest and tender grace, but no shadow of personality. The first Franciscans had all the virtues, including the one which is nearly always wanting, willingness to remain unknown. In the Lower Church of Assisi there is an ancient fresco representing five of the companions of St. Francis. Above them is a Madonna by Cimabue, upon which they are gazing with all their soul. It would be more true if St. Francis were there in the place of the Madonna; one is always changed into the image of what one admires, and they resemble their master and one another.[5] To attempt to give them a name is to make a sort of psychological error and become guilty of infidelity to their memory; the only name they would have desired is that of their father. His love changed their hearts and shed over their whole persons a radiance of light and joy. These are the true personages of the _Fioretti_, the men who brought peace to cities, awakened consciences, changed hearts, conversed with birds, tamed wolves. Of them one may truly say: "Having nothing, yet possessing all things" (_Nihil habentes, omnia possidentes_). They quitted Portiuncula full of joy and confidence. Francis was too much absorbed in thought not to desire to place in other hands the direction of the little company. "Let us choose," he said, "one from among ourselves to guide us, and let him be to us as the vicar of Jesus Christ. Wherever it may please him to go we will go, and when he may wish to stop anywhere to sleep there we will stop." They chose Brother Bernardo and did as Francis had said. They went on full of joy, and all their conversations had for their object only the glory of God and the salvation of their souls. Their journey was happily accomplished. Everywhere they found kindly souls who sheltered them, and they felt beyond a doubt that God was taking care of them.[6] Francis's thoughts were all fixed upon the purpose of their journey; he thought of it day and night, and naturally interpreted his dreams with reference to it. One time, in his dream, he saw himself walking along a road beside which was a gigantic and wonderfully beautiful tree. And, behold, while he looked upon it, filled with wonder, he felt himself become so tall that he could touch the boughs, and at the same time the tree bent down its branches to him.[7] He awoke full of joy, sure of a gracious reception by the sovereign pontiff. His hopes were to be somewhat blighted. Innocent III. had now for twelve years occupied the throne of St. Peter. Still young, energetic, resolute, he enjoyed that superfluity of authority given by success. Coming after the feeble Celestine III., he had been able in a few years to reconquer the temporal domain of the Church, and so to improve the papal influence as almost to realize the theocratic dreams of Gregory VII. He had seen King Pedro of Aragon declaring himself his vassal and laying his crown upon the tomb of the apostles, that he might take it back at his hands. At the other end of Europe, John Lackland had been obliged to receive his crown from a legate after having sworn homage, fealty, and an annual tribute to the Holy See. Preaching union to the cities and republics of Italy, causing the cry ITALIA! ITALIA! to resound like the shout of a trumpet, he was the natural representative of the national awakening, and appeared to be in some sort the suzerain of the emperor, as he was already that of other kings. Finally, by his efforts to purify the Church, by his indomitable firmness in defending morality and law in the affair of Ingelburge and in many others, he was gaining a moral strength which in times so disquieted was all the more powerful for being so rare. But this incomparable power had its hidden dangers. Occupied with defending the prerogatives of the Holy See, Innocent came to forget that the Church does not exist for herself, that her supremacy is only a transitory means; and one part of his pontificate may be likened to wars, legitimate in the beginning, in which the conqueror keeps on with depredations and massacres for no reason, except that he is intoxicated with blood and success. And so Rome, which canonized the petty Celestine V., refused this supreme consecration to the glorious Innocent III. With exquisite tact she perceived that he was rather king than priest, rather pope than saint. When he suppressed ecclesiastical disorders it was less for love of good than for hatred of evil; it was the judge who condemns or threatens, himself always supported by the law, not the father who weeps his son's offence. This priest did not comprehend the great movement of his age--the awakening of love, of poetry, of liberty. I have already said that at the opening of the thirteenth century the Middle Age was twenty years old. Innocent III. undertook to treat it as if it were only fifteen. Possessed by his civil and religious dogmas as others are by their educational doctrines, he never suspected the unsatisfied longings, the dreams, unreasoning perhaps, but beneficent and divine, that were dumbly stirring in the depths of men's hearts. He was a believer, although certain sayings of the historians[8] open the door to some doubts on this point, but he drew his religion rather from the Old Testament than from the New, and if he often thought of Moses, the leader of his people, nothing reminded him of Jesus, the shepherd of souls. One cannot be everything; a choice intelligence, an iron will[9] are a sufficient portion even for a _priest-god_; he lacked love. The death of this pontiff, great among the great ones, was destined to be saluted with songs of joy.[10] His reception of Francis furnished to Giotto, the friend of Dante, one of his most striking frescos; the pope, seated on his throne, turns abruptly toward Francis. He frowns, for he does not understand, and yet he feels a strange power in this mean and despised man, _vilis et despectus_; he makes a real but futile effort to comprehend, and now I see in this pope, who lived upon lemons,[11] something that recalls another choice mind, theocratic like his own, sacrificed like him to his work: Calvin. One might think that the painter had touched his lips to the Calabrian Seer's cup, and that in the attitude of these two men he sought to symbolize a meeting of representatives of the two ages of humanity, that of Law and that of Love.[12] A surprise awaited the pilgrims on their arrival in Rome: they met the Bishop of Assisi,[13] quite as much to his astonishment as to their own. This detail is precious because it proves that Francis had not confided his plans to Guido. Notwithstanding this the bishop, it is said, offered to make interest for them with the princes of the Church. We may suspect that his commendations were not very warm. At all events they did not avail to save Francis and his company either from a searching inquiry or from the extended fatherly counsels of Cardinal Giovanni di San Paolo[14] upon the difficulties of the Rule, counsels which strongly resemble those of Guido himself.[15] What Francis asked for was simple enough; he claimed no privilege of any sort, but only that the pope would approve of his undertaking to lead a life of absolute conformity to the precepts of the gospel. There is a delicate point here which it is quite worth while to see clearly. The pope was not called upon to approve the Rule, since that came from Jesus himself; at the very worst all that he could do would be to lay an ecclesiastical censure upon Francis and his companions for having acted without authority, and to enjoin them to leave to the secular and regular clergy the task of reforming the Church. Cardinal Giovanni di San Paolo, to whom the Bishop of Assisi presented them, had informed himself of the whole history of the Penitents. He lavished upon them the most affectionate tokens of interest, even going so far as to beg for a mention in their prayers. But such assurances, which appear to have been always the small change of the court of Rome, did not prevent his examining them for several successive days,[16] and putting to them an infinite number of questions, of which the conclusion was always the advice to enter some Order already existing. To this the unlucky Francis would reply as best he could, often not without embarrassment, for he had no wish to appear to think lightly of the cardinal's counsels, and yet he felt in his heart the imperious desire to obey his vocation. The prelate would then return to the charge, insinuating that they would find it very hard to persevere, that the enthusiasm of the early days would pass away, and again pointing out a more easy course. He was obliged in the end to own himself vanquished. The persistence of Francis, who had never weakened for an instant nor doubted his mission, begat in him a sort of awe, while the perfect humility of the Penitents and their simple and striking fidelity to the Roman Church reassured him in the matter of heresy. He announced to them, therefore, that he would speak of them to the pope, and would act as their advocate with him. According to the Three Companions he said to the pope: "I have found a man of the highest perfection, who desires to live in conformity with the Holy Gospel and observe evangelical perfection in all things. I believe that by him the Lord intends to reform the faith of the Holy Church throughout the whole world."[17] On the morrow he presented Francis and his companions to Innocent III. Naturally, the pope was not sparing of expressions of sympathy, but he also repeated to them the remarks and counsels which they had already heard so often. "My dear children," he said, "your life appears to me too severe; I see indeed that your fervor is too great for any doubt of you to be possible, but I ought to consider those who shall come after you, lest your mode of life should be beyond their strength."[18] Adding a few kind words, he dismissed them without coming to any definite conclusion, promising to consult the cardinals, and advising Francis in particular to address himself to God, to the end that he might manifest his will. Francis's anxiety must have been great; he could not understand these dilatory measures, these expressions of affection which never led to a categorical approbation. It seemed to him that he had said all that he had to say. For new arguments he had only one resource--prayer. He felt his prayer answered when in his conversation with Jesus the parable of poverty came to him; he returned to lay it before the pope. There was in the desert a woman who was very poor, but beautiful. A great king, seeing her beauty, desired to take her for his wife, for he thought that by her he should have beautiful children. The marriage contracted and consummated, many sons were born to him. When they were grown up, their mother spoke to them thus: "My sons, you have no cause to blush, for you are the sons of the king; go, therefore, to his court, and he will give you everything you need." When they arrived at the court the king admired their beauty, and finding in them his own likeness he asked, "Whose sons are you?" And when they replied that they were the sons of a poor woman who lived in the desert, the king clasped them to his heart with joy saying, "Have no fear, for you are my sons; if strangers eat at my table, much more shall you who are my lawful sons." Then the king sent word to the woman to send to his court all the sons which she had borne, that they might be nourished there. "Very holy father," added Francis, "I am this poor woman whom God in his love has deigned to make beautiful, and of whom he has been pleased to have lawful sons. The King of Kings has told me that he will provide for all the sons which he may have of me, for if he sustains bastards, how much more his legitimate sons."[19] So much simplicity, joined with such pious obstinacy, at last conquered Innocent. In the humble mendicant he perceived an apostle and prophet whose mouth no power could close. Successor of St. Peter and vicar of Jesus Christ that he felt himself, he saw in the mean and despised man before him one who with the authority of absolute faith proclaimed himself the root of a new lineage of most legitimate Christians. The biographers have held that by this parable Francis sought above all things to tranquillize the pope as to the future of the brethren; they find in it a reply to the anxieties of the pontiff, who feared to see them starve to death. There can be no doubt that its original meaning was totally different. It shows that with all his humility Francis knew how to speak out boldly, and that all his respect for the Church could not hinder his seeing, and, when necessary, saying, that he and his brethren were the lawful sons of the gospel, of which the members of the clergy were only _extranei_. We shall find in the course of his life more than one example of this indomitable boldness, which disarmed Innocent III. as well as the future Gregory IX. In a consistory which doubtless was held between the two audiences some of the cardinals expressed the opinion that the initiative of the Penitents of Assisi was an innovation, and that their mode of life was entirely beyond human power. "But," replied Giovanni di San Paolo, "if we hold that to observe gospel perfection and make profession of it is an irrational and impossible innovation, are we not convicted of blasphemy against Christ, the author of the gospel?"[20] These words struck Innocent III. with great force; he knew better than any one that the possessions of the ecclesiastics were the great obstacles to the reform of the Church, and that the threatened success of the Albigensian heresy was especially due to the fact that it preached the doctrine of poverty. Two years before he had accorded his approbation to a group of Waldensians, who under the name _Poor Catholics_ had desired to remain faithful to the Church;[21] he therefore gave his approval to the Penitents of Assisi, but, as a contemporary chronicler has well observed, it was in the hope that they would wrest the banner from heresy.[22] Yet his doubts and hesitations were not entirely dissipated. He reserved his definitive approbation, therefore, while lavishing upon the brothers the most affectionate tokens of interest. He authorized them to continue their missions everywhere, after having gained the consent of their ordinaries. He required, however, that they should give themselves a responsible superior to whom the ecclesiastical authorities could always address themselves. Naturally, Francis was chosen.[23] This fact, so humble in appearance, definitively constituted the Franciscan family. The mystics whom we saw going from village to village transported with love and liberty accepted the yoke almost without thinking about it. This yoke will preserve them from the disintegration of the heretics, but it will make itself sharply felt by those pure souls; they will one day look back to the early days of the Order as the only time when their life was truly conformed to the gospel. When Francis heard the words of the supreme pontiff he prostrated himself at his feet, promising the most perfect obedience with all his heart. The pope blessed them, saying: "Go, my brethren, and may God be with you. Preach penitence to everyone according as the Lord may deign to inspire you. Then when the All-powerful shall have made you multiply and go forward, you will refer to us; we will concede what you ask, and we may then with greater security accord to you even more than you ask."[24] Francis and his companions were too little familiar with Roman phraseology to perceive that after all the Holy See had simply consented to suspend judgment in view of the uprightness of their intentions and the purity of their faith.[25] The flowers of clerical rhetoric hid from them the shackles which had been laid upon them. The curia, in fact, was not satisfied with Francis's vow of fidelity, it desired in addition to stamp the Penitents with the seal of the Church: the Cardinal of San Paolo was deputed to confer upon them the tonsure. From this time they were all under the spiritual authority of the Roman Church. The thoroughly lay creation of St. Francis had become, in spite of himself, an ecclesiastical institution: it must soon degenerate into a clerical institution. All unawares, the Franciscan movement had been unfaithful to its origin. The prophet had abdicated in favor of the priest, not indeed without possibility of return, for when a man has once reigned, I would say, thought, in liberty--what other kingdom is there on this earth?--he makes but an indifferent slave; in vain he tries to submit; in spite of himself it happens at times that he lifts his head proudly, he rattles his chains, he remembers the struggles, sadness, anguish of the days of liberty, and weeps their loss. Among the sons of St. Francis many were destined to weep their lost liberty, many to die to conquer it again. FOOTNOTES: [1] The date usually fixed for the approval of the Rule by Innocent III. is the month of August, 1209. The Bollandists had thought themselves able to infer it from the account where Thomas of Celano (1 Cel., 43) refers to the passage through Umbria of the Emperor Otho IV., on his way to be crowned at Rome (October 4, 1209). Upon this journey see Böhmer-Ficker, _Regesta Imperii. Dei Regesten des Kaiserreichs unter Philipp, Otto IV._, etc., Insbruck, 1879, 4to, pp. 96 and 97. As this account follows that of the approval, they conclude that the latter was earlier. But Thomas of Celano puts this account there because the context led up to it, and not in order to fix its date. Everything leads to the belief that the Brothers retired (_recolligebat_, 1 Cel., 42) to Rivo-Torto before and after their journey to Rome. Besides, the time between April 23d and the middle of August, 1209, is much too short for all that the biographers tell us about the life of the Brothers before their visit to Innocent III. The mission to Florence took place in winter, or at least in a very cold month. But the decisive argument is that Innocent III. quitted Rome toward the end of May, 1209, and went to Viterbo, returning only to crown Otho, October 4th (Potthast, 3727-3803). It is therefore absolutely necessary to postpone to the summer of 1210 the visit of the Penitents to the pope. This is also the date which Wadding arrives at. [2] 3 Soc., 35. [3] 1 Cel., 32; 3 Soc., 51; Bon., 34. Cf. _Test. B. Fr._ M. K. Müller of Halle, in his _Anfänge_, has made a very remarkable study of the Rule of 1221, whence he deduces an earlier Rule, which he believes to be that of 1209 (1210). For once I find myself entirely in accord with him, except that the Rule thus reconstructed (Vide _Anfänge_, pp. 14-25, 184-188) appears to me to be not that of 1210, which was very short, but another, drawn up between 1210 and 1221. The _plures regulas fecit_ of the 3 Soc., 35, authorizes us to believe that he made perhaps as many as four--1st, 1210, very short, containing little more than the three passages of the vocation; 2d, 1217 (?), substantially that proposed by M. Müller; 3d, 1221, that of which we shall speak at length farther on; 4th, 1226, the Will, which if not a Rule is at least an appendix to the Rule. If from 1221-1226 he had time to make two Rules and the Will, as is universally admitted, there is nothing surprising in his having made two from 1210-1221. Perhaps we have a fragment of that of 1217 in the regulation of hermitages. Vide below, p. 109. [4] Thomas of Celano's list. 1, _Quidam pium gerens animum_; 2, _Bernardus_; 3, _Vir alter_; 4, _Ægidius_; 5, _Unus alius appositus_; 6, _Philippus_; 7, _Alius bonus vir_; 8, 9, 10, 11, _Quatuor boni et idonei viri_. 1 Cel., 24, 25, 29, 31. The Rinaldi-Amoni text says nothing of the last four. Three Companions: 1, _Bernardus_; 2, _Petrus_; 3, _Ægidius_; 4, _Sabbatinus_; 5, _Moritus_; _Johannes Capella_; 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, Disciples received by the brethren in their missions. 3 Soc., 33, 35, 41, 46, 52. Bonaventura: 1, _Bernardus_; 2, ... 3, _Ægidius_; 4, 5, ... 6, _Silvestro_; 7, _Alius bonus viri_; 8, 9, 10, 11, _Quatuor viri honesti_. Bon., 28, 29, 30, 31, 33. The Fioretti, while insisting on the importance of the twelve Franciscan apostles, cite only six in their list: Giovanni di Capella, Egidio, Philip, Silvestro, Bernardo, and Rufino. _Fior._, 1. We must go to the Conformities to find the traditional list, f^o 46b 1: 1, _Bernardus de Quintavalle_; 2, _Petrus Chatanii_; 3, _Egidius_; 4, _Sabatinus_; 5, _Moricus_; 6, _Johannes de Capella_; 7, _Philippus Longus_; 8, _Johannes de Sancto Constantio_; 9, _Barbarus_; 10, _Bernardus de Cleviridante_ (sic); 11, _Angelus Tancredi_; 12, _Sylvester_. As will be seen, in the last two documents twelve disciples are in question, while in the preceding ones there are only eleven. This is enough to show a dogmatic purpose. This list reappears exactly in the _Speculum_, with the sole difference that Francis being there included Angelo di Tancrede is the twelfth brother and Silvestro disappears. _Spec._, 87a. [5] According to tradition, the five _compagni del Santo_ buried there beside their master are Bernardo, Silvestro, William (an Englishman), Eletto, and Valentino(?) [6] 3 Soc., 46; 1 Cel., 32; Bon., 34. [7] 1 Cel., 33; 3 Soc., 53; Bon., 35. [8] St. Ludgarde (1182-1246) sees him condemned to Purgatory till the Last Judgment. Life of this saint by Thomas of Catimpré in Surius: _Vitæ SS._ (1618), vi., 215-226. [9] _Vir clari ingenii, magnæ probitatis et sapientiæ, cui nullus secundus tempore suo:_ Rigordus, _de gestis Philippi Augusti_ in Duchesne. _Historiæ Francorum scriptores coætanei_, t. v., p. 60.--_Nec similem sui scientia, facundia, decretorum et legum perititia, strenuitate, judiciorum nec adhuc visus est habere sequentem._ Cf. Mencken, _Script. rer. Sax._, Leipzig, 1728, t. iii., p. 252. _Innocentius, qui vere stupor mundi erat et immutator sæculi._ Cotton, _Hist. Anglicana_, Luard, 1859, p. 107. [10] _Cujus finis lætitiem potius quam tristitiam generavit subjectis._ Alberic delle Tre Fontane. Leibnitz, _Accessiones historicæ_, t. ii., p. 492. [11] _Decidit in acutam (febrem) quam cum multis diebus fovisset nec a citris quibus in magna quantitatæ et ex consuetudine vescebatur ... minime abstineret ... ad ultimum in lethargia prolapsus vitam finivit._ Alberic delle Tre Fontane, _loc. cit._ [12] Fresco in the great nave of the Upper Church of Assisi. [13] 1 Cel., 32; 3 Soc., 47. [14] Of the Colonna family; he died in 1216. Cf. 3 Soc., 61. Vide Cardella, _Memorie storiche de' Cardinali_, 9 vols., 8vo, Rome, 1792 ff., t. i., p. 177. He was at Rome in the summer of 1210, for on the 11th of August he countersigned the bull _Religiosem vitam_. Potthast, 4061. Angelo Clareno relates the approbation with more precision in certain respects: _Cum vero Summo Pontifici ea quæ postulabat [Franciscus] ardua valde et quasi impossibilia viderentur infirmitate hominum sui temporis, exhortabatur eum, quod aliquem ordinem vel regulam de approbatis assumeret, at ipse se a Christo missum ad talem vitam et non aliam postulandam constanter affirmans, fixus in sua petitione permansit. Tunc dominus Johannes de Sancto Paulo episcopus Sabinensis et dominus Hugo episcopus Hostiensis Dei spiritu moti assisterunt Sancto Francisco et pro his quæ petebat coram summo Pontifice et Cardinalibus plura proposuerunt rationabilia et efficacia valde. Tribul._ Laurentinian MS., f^o 6a. This intervention of Ugolini is mentioned in no other document. It is, however, by no means impossible. He also was in Rome in the summer of 1210. (Vide Potthast, p. 462.) [15] 1 Cel., 32 and 33; 3 Soc., 47 and 48. Cf. _An. Per._, A. SS., p. 590. [16] 1 Cel., 33. [17] 3 Soc., 48. [18] 3 Soc., 49; 1 Cel., 33; Bon., 35 and 36. All this has been much worked over by tradition and gives us only an echo of the reality. It would certainly have needed very little for the Penitents to meet the same fate before Innocent III. as the Waldenses before Lucius III. Traces of this interview are found in two texts which appear to me to be too suspicious to warrant their insertion in the body of the narrative. The first is a fragment of Matthew Paris: _Papa itaque in fratre memorato habitum deformem, vultum despicabilem, barbam prolixam, capillos incultos, supercilia pendentia et nigra diligenter considerans; cum petitionem ejus tam arduam et executione impossibilem recitare fecisset, despexit cum et dixit: Vade frater, et quære porcus, quibus potius debes quam hominibus comparari, et involve te cum eis in volutabro, et regulam illis a te commentatam tradens, officium tuæ prædicationis impende. Quod audiens Franciscus inclinato capite exixit et porcis tandem inventis, in luto se cum eis tamdiu involvit quousque a planta pedis usque ad verticem, corpus suum totum cum ipso habitu polluisset. Sicque ad consistorium revertens Papæ se conspectibus præsentavit dicens: Domine feci sicut præcepisti exaudi nunc obsecro petitionem meam_. Ed. Wats, p. 340. The incident has a real Franciscan color, and should have some historic basis. Curiously, it in some sort meets a passage in the legend of Bonaventura which is an interpolation of the end of the thirteenth century. See A. SS., p. 591. [19] 3 Soc., 50 and 51; Bon., 37; 2 Cel., 1, 11; Bernard de Besse, Turin MS., f^o 101b. Ubertini di Casali (_Arbor vitæ crucifixæ_, Venice, 1485, lib. v., cap. iii.) tells a curious story in which he depicts the indignation of the prelates against Francis. _Quænam hæc est doctrina nova quam infers auribus nostris? Quis potest vivere sine temporalium possessione? Numquid tu melior es quam patres nostri qui dederunt nobis temporalia et in temporalibus abundantes ecclesias possiderunt?_ Then follows the fine prayer inserted by Wadding in Francis's works. The central idea is the same as in the parable of poverty. This story, though not referable to any source, has nevertheless its importance, since it shows how in the year 1300 a man who had all the documents before his eyes, represented to himself Francis's early steps. [20] Bon., 36. [21] The attempt of Durand of Huesca to create a mendicant order has not yet been studied with sufficient minuteness. Chief of the Waldenses of Aragon, he was present in 1207 at the conference of Pamiers, and decided to return to the Church. Received with kindness by the pope he at first had a great success, and by 1209 had established communities in Aragon, at Carcassonne, Narbonne, Béziers, Nimes, Uzès, Milan. We find in this movement all the lineaments of the institute of St. Dominic; it was an order of priests to whom theological studies were recommended. They disappeared almost completely in the storm of the Albigensian crusade. Innocent III., _epistolæ_, xi., 196, 197, 198; xii., 17, 66; xiii., 63, 77, 78, 94; xv., 82, 83, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 96, 137, 146. The first of these bulls contains the very curious Rule of this ephemeral order. Upon its disappearance vide Ripoli, _Bullarium Prædicatorum_, 8 vols., folio, Rome, 1729-1740, t. i., p. 96. Cf. Elie Berger, _Registres d'Innocent IV._, 2752. [22] Burchard, of the order of the Premostrari, who died in 1226. See below, p. 234. [23] 3 Soc., 52; Bon., 38. [24] 3 Soc., 52 and 49. [25] St. Antonino, Archbishop of Florence, saw very clearly that it was _quædam concessio simplex habitus et modi illius vivendi et quasi permissio_. A. SS., p. 839. The expression "approbation of the Rule" by which the act of Innocent III. is usually designated is therefore erroneous. * * * * * CHAPTER VII RIVO-TORTO 1210-1211 The Penitents of Assisi were overflowing with joy. After so many mortally long days spent in that Rome, so different from the other cities that they knew, exposed to the ill-disguised suspicions of the prelates and the jeers of pontifical lackeys, the day of departure seemed to them like a deliverance. At the thought of once more seeing their beloved mountains they were seized by that homesickness of the child for its native village which simple and kindly souls preserve till their latest breath. Immediately after the ceremony they prayed at the tomb of St. Peter, and then crossing the whole city they quitted Rome by the Porta Salara. Thomas of Celano, very brief as to all that concerns Francis's sojourn in the Eternal City, recounts at full length the light-heartedness of the little band on quitting it. Already it began to be transfigured in their memory; pains, fatigues, fears, disquietude, hesitations were all forgotten; they thought only of the fatherly assurances of the supreme pontiff--the vicar of Christ, the lord and father of the Christian universe--and promised themselves to make ever new efforts to follow the Rule with fidelity. Full of these thoughts they had set out, without provisions, to cross the Campagna of Rome, whose few inhabitants never venture out in the heat of the day. The road stretches away northward, keeping at some distance from the Tiber; on the left the jagged crest of Soracte, bathed in mists formed by the exhalations of the earth, looms up disproportionately as it fades in the distance; on the right, the everlasting undulations of the hillocks with their wide pastures separated by thickets so parched and ragged that they seemed to cry for mercy and pardon. Between them the dusty road which goes straight forward, implacable, showing, as far as the eye can reach, nothing but the quivering of the fiery air. Not a house, not a tree, not a passing breeze, nothing to sustain the traveller under the disquietude which creeps over him. Here and there are a few abandoned huts, their ruins looking like the corpses of departed civilizations, and on the edge of the horizon the hills rising up like gigantic and unsurmountable walls. There are no words to describe the physical and moral sufferings to which he is exposed who undertakes without proper preparation to cross this inhospitable district. To the weakness caused by lack of air soon succeeds an insurmountable lassitude. The feet sink in a soft, tenuous dust which every step sends up in clouds; it covers you, penetrates your skin, and parches your mouth even more than thirst. Little by little all energy ebbs away, a dumb dejection seizes you, sight and thought become alike confused, fever ensues, and you cast yourself down by the roadside, unable to take another step. In their haste to leave Rome Francis and his companions had forgotten all this, and had imprudently set forth. They would have succumbed if a chance traveller had not brought them succor. He was obliged to leave them before they had shaken off the last hallucinations of fever, leaving them amazed with the unexpected succor which Providence had sent them.[1] They were so severely shattered that on arriving at Orte they were obliged to stop awhile. In a desert spot not far from this city they found a shelter admirably adapted to serve them for refuge;[2] it was one of those Etruscan tombs so common in that country, whose chambers serve to this day as a shelter for beggars and gypsies. While some of the brethren hastened to the city to beg for food, the others remained in this solitude enjoying the happiness of being together, forming a thousand plans, and more than ever delighting in the charm of freedom from care and renunciation of material goods. This place had so strong an attraction for them that it required an effort of will to quit it at the end of a fortnight. The seduction of a life purely contemplative assailed Francis, and he asked himself if instead of preaching to the multitudes he would not do better to live in retreat, solely mindful of the inward dialogue between the soul and God.[3] This aspiration for the selfish repose of the cloister came back to him several times in his life; but love always won the victory. He was too much the child of his time not to be at times tempted by that happiness which the Middle Ages regarded as the supreme bliss of the elect in paradise--peace. _Beati mortui quia quiescunt!_ His distinguishing peculiarity is that he never gave way to it. The reflections of Francis and his companions during their stay at Orte only made their apostolic mission more clear and imperative to them. He, above all, seemed to be filled with a new ardor, and like a valiant knight he burned to throw himself into the thick of the fray. Their way now led through the valley of the Nera. The contrast between these cool glens, awake with a thousand voices, and the desolation of the Roman Campagna, must have struck them vividly; the stream is only a swollen torrent, but it runs so noisily over pebbles and rocks that it seems to be conversing with them and with the trees of the neighboring forest. In proportion as they had felt themselves alone on the road from Rome to Otricoli, they now felt themselves compassed about with the life, the fecundity, the gayety of the country. The account of Thomas of Celano becomes so animated as it describes the life of Francis at this epoch that one cannot help thinking that at this time he must have seen him, and that this first meeting remained always in his memory as the radiant dawn of his spiritual life.[4] The Brothers had taken to preaching in such places as they came upon along their route. Their words were always pretty much the same, they showed the blessedness of peace and exhorted to penitence. Emboldened by the welcome they had received at Rome, which in all innocence they might have taken to be more favorable than it really was, they told the story to everyone they met, and thus set all scruples at rest. These exhortations, in which Francis spared not his hearers, but in which the sternest reproaches were mingled with so much of love, produced an enormous effect. Man desires above all things to be loved, and when he meets one who loves him sincerely he very seldom refuses him either his love or his admiration. It is only a low understanding that confounds love with weakness and compliance. We sometimes see sick men feverishly kissing the hand of the surgeon who performs an operation upon them; we sometimes do the same for our spiritual surgeons, for we realize all that there is of vigor, pity, compassion in the tortures which they inflict, and the cries which they force from us are quite as much of gratitude as of pain. Men hastened from all parts to hear these preachers who were more severe upon themselves than on anyone else. Members of the secular clergy, monks, learned men, rich men even, often mingled in the impromptu audiences gathered in the streets and public places. All were not converted, but it would have been very difficult for any of them to forget this stranger whom they met one day upon their way, and who in a few words had moved them to the very bottom of their hearts with anxiety and fear. Francis was in truth, as Celano says, the bright morning star. His simple preaching took hold on consciences, snatched his hearers from the mire and blood in which they were painfully trudging, and in spite of themselves carried them to the very heavens, to those serene regions where all is silent save the voice of the heavenly Father. "The whole country trembled, the barren land was already covered with a rich harvest, the withered vine began again to blossom."[5] Only a profoundly religious and poetic soul (is not the one the other?) can understand the transports of joy which overflowed the souls of St. Francis's spiritual sons. The greatest crime of our industrial and commercial civilization is that it leaves us a taste only for that which may be bought with money, and makes us overlook the purest and truest joys which are all the time within our reach. The evil has roots far in the past. "Wherefore," said the God of old Isaiah, "do you weigh money for that which is not meat? why labor for that which satisfieth not? Hearken unto me, and ye shall eat that which is good, and your soul shall delight itself in fatness."[6] Joys bought with money--noisy, feverish pleasures--are nothing compared with those sweet, quiet, modest but profound, lasting, and peaceful joys, enlarging, not wearying the heart, which we too often pass by on one side, like those peasants whom we see going into ecstasies over the fireworks of a fair, while they have not so much as a glance for the glorious splendors of a summer night. In the plain of Assisi, at an hour's walk from the city and near the highway between Perugia and Rome, was a ruinous cottage called Rivo-Torto. A torrent, almost always dry, but capable of becoming terrible in a storm, descends from Mount Subasio and passes beside it. The ruin had no owner; it had served as a leper hospital before the construction by the Crucigeri[7] of their hospital San Salvatore delle Pareti; but since that time it had been abandoned. Now came Francis and his companions to seek shelter there.[8] It is one of the quietest spots in the suburbs of Assisi, and from thence they could easily go out into the neighborhood in all directions; it being about an equal distance from Portiuncula and St. Damian. But the principal motive for the choice of the place seems to have been the proximity of the _Carceri_, as those shallow natural grottos are called which are found in the forests, half way up the side of Mount Subasio. Following up the bed of the torrent of Rivo-Torto one reaches them in an hour by way of rugged and slippery paths where the very goats do not willingly venture. Once arrived, one might fancy oneself a thousand leagues from any human being, so numerous are the birds of prey which live here quite undisturbed.[9] Francis loved this solitude and often retired thither with a few companions. The brethren in that case shared between them all care of their material wants, after which, each one retiring into one of these caves, they were able for a few days to listen only to the inner voice. These little hermitages, sufficiently isolated to secure them from disturbance, but near enough to the cities to permit their going thither to preach, may be found wherever Francis went. They form, as it were, a series of documents about his life quite as important as the written witnesses. Something of his soul may still be found in these caverns in the Apennine forests. He never separated the contemplative from the active life. A precious witness to this fact is found in the regulations for the brethren during their sojourn in hermitage.[10] The return of the Brothers to Rivo-Torto was marked by a vast increase of popularity. The prejudiced attacks to which they had formerly been subjected were lost in a chorus of praises. Perhaps men suspected the ill-will of the bishop and were happy to see him checked. However this may be, a lively feeling of sympathy and admiration was awakened; the people recalled to mind the indifference manifested by the son of Bernardone a few months before with regard to Otho IV. going to be crowned at Rome. The emperor had made a progress through Italy with a numerous suite and a pomp designed to produce an effect on the minds of the populace; but not only had Francis not interrupted his work to go and see him, he had enjoined upon his friars also to abstain from going, and had merely selected one of them to carry to the monarch a reminder of the ephemeral nature of worldly glory. Later on it was held that he had predicted to the emperor his approaching excommunication. This spirited attitude made a vivid impression on the popular imagination.[11] Perhaps it was of more service in forming general opinion than anything he had done thus far. The masses, who are not often alive to delicate sentiments, respond quickly to those who, whether rightly or wrongly, do not bow down before power. This time they perceived that where other men would see the poor, the rich, the noble, the common, the learned, Francis saw only souls, which were to him the more precious as they were more neglected or despised. No biographer informs us how long the Penitents remained at Rivo-Torto. It seems probable, however, that they spent there the latter part of 1210 and the early months of 1211, evangelizing the towns and villages of the neighborhood. They suffered much; this part of the plain of Assisi is inundated by torrents nearly every autumn, and many times the poor friars, blockaded in the lazaretto, were forced to satisfy their hunger with a few roots from the neighboring fields. The barrack in which they lived was so narrow that, when they were all there at once, they had much difficulty not to crowd one another. To secure to each one his due quota of space, Francis wrote the name of each brother upon the column which supports the building. But these minor discomforts in no sense disturbed their happiness. No apprehension had as yet come to cloud Francis's hopes; he was overflowing with joy and kindliness; all the memories which Rivo-Torto has left with the Order are fresh and sweet pictures of him.[12] One night all the brethren seemed to be sleeping, when he heard a moaning. It was one of his sheep, to speak after the manner of the Franciscan biographer, who had denied himself too rigorously and was dying of hunger. Francis immediately rose, called the brother to him, brought forth the meagre reserve of food, and himself began to eat to inspire the other with courage, explaining to him that if penitence is good it is still necessary to temper it with discretion.[13] Francis had that tact of the heart which divines the secrets of others and anticipates their desires. At another time, still at Rivo-Torto, he took a sick brother by the hand, led him to a grape-vine, and, presenting him with a fine cluster, began himself to eat of it. It was nothing, but the simple act so bound to him the sick man's heart that many years after the brother could not speak of it without emotion.[14] But Francis was far from neglecting his mission. Ever growing more sure, not of himself but of his duty toward men, he took part in the political and social affairs of his province with the confidence of an upright and pure heart, never able to understand how stupidity, perverseness, pride, and indolence, by leaguing themselves together, may check the finest and most righteous impulses. He had the faith which removes mountains, and was wholly free from that touch of scepticism, so common in our day, which points out that it is of no more use to move mountains than to change the place of difficulties. When the people of Assisi learned that his Rule had been approved by the pope there was strong excitement; every one desired to hear him preach. The clergy were obliged to give way; they offered him the Church of St. George, but this church was manifestly insufficient for the crowds of hearers; it was necessary to open the cathedral to him. St. Francis never said anything especially new; to win hearts he had that which is worth more than any arts of oratory--an ardent conviction; he spoke as compelled by the imperious need of kindling others with the flame that burned within himself. When they heard him recall the horrors of war, the crimes of the populace, the laxity of the great, the rapacity which dishonored the Church, the age-long widowhood of Poverty, each one felt himself taken to task in his own conscience. An attentive or excited crowd is always very impressionable, but this peculiar sensitiveness was perhaps stronger in the Middle Ages than at any other time. Nervous disturbances were in the air, and upon men thus prepared the will of the preacher impressed itself in a manner almost magnetic. To understand what Francis's preaching must have been like we must forget the manners of to-day, and transport ourselves for a moment to the Cathedral of Assisi in the thirteenth century; it is still standing, but the centuries have given to its stones a fine rust of polished bronze, which recalls Venice and Titian's tones of ruddy gold. It was new then, and all sparkling with whiteness, with the fine rosy tinge of the stones of Mount Subasio. It had been built by the people of Assisi a few years before in one of those outbursts of faith and union which were almost everywhere the prelude of the communal movement. So, when the people thronged into it on their high days, they not merely had none of that vague respect for a holy place which, though it has passed into the customs of other countries, still continues to be unknown in Italy, but they felt themselves at home in a palace which they had built for themselves. More than in any other church they there felt themselves at liberty to criticise the preacher, and they had no hesitation in proving to him, either by murmurs of dissatisfaction or by applause, just what they thought of his words. We must remember also that the churches of Italy have neither pews nor chairs, that one must listen standing or kneeling, while the preacher walks about gesticulating on a platform; add to this the general curiosity, the clamorous sympathies of many, the disguised opposition of some, and we shall have a vague notion of the conditions under which Francis first entered the pulpit of San Rufino. His success was startling. The poor felt that they had found a friend, a brother, a champion, almost an avenger. The thoughts which they hardly dared murmur beneath their breath Francis proclaimed at the top of his voice, daring to bid all, without distinction, to repent and love one another. His words were a cry of the heart, an appeal to the consciences of all his fellow-citizens, almost recalling the passionate utterances of the prophets of Israel. Like those witnesses for Jehovah the "little poor man" of Assisi had put on sackcloth and ashes to denounce the iniquities of his people, like theirs was his courage and heroism, like theirs the divine tenderness in his heart. It seemed as if Assisi were about to recover again the feeling of Israel for sin. The effect of these appeals was prodigious; the entire population was thrilled, conquered, desiring in future to live only according to Francis's counsels; his very companions, who had remained behind at Rivo-Torto, hearing of these marvels, felt in themselves an answering thrill, and their vocation took on a new strength; during the night they seemed to see their master in a chariot of fire, soaring to heaven like a new Elijah.[15] This almost delirious enthusiasm of a whole people was not perhaps so difficult to arouse as might be supposed: the emotional power of the masses was at that time as great all over Europe as it was in Paris during certain days of the Revolution. We all know the tragic and touching story of those companies of children from the north of Europe who appeared in 1212 in troops of several thousands, boys and girls mingled together pell-mell. Nothing could stop them, a mania had overtaken them, in all good faith they believed that they were to deliver the Holy Land, that the sea would be dried up to let them pass. They perished, we hardly know how, perhaps being sold into slavery.[16] They were accounted martyrs, and rightly; popular devotion likened them to the Holy Innocents, dying for a God whom they knew not. Those children of the crusade also perished for an unknown ideal, false no doubt; but is it not better to die for an unknown and even a false ideal than to live for the vain realities of an utterly unpoetic existence? In the end of time we shall be judged neither by philosophers nor by theologians, and if we were, it is to be hoped that even in this case love would cover a multitude of sins and pass by many follies. Certainly if ever there was a time when religious affections of the nerves were to be dreaded, it was that which produced such movements as these. All Europe seemed to be beside itself; women appeared stark naked in the streets of towns and villages, slowly walking up and down, silent as phantoms.[17] We can understand now the accounts which have come down to us, so fantastic at the first glance, of certain popular orators of this time; of Berthold of Ratisbon, for example, who drew together crowds of sixteen thousand persons, or of that Fra Giovanni Schio di Vicenza, who for a time quieted all Northern Italy and brought Guelphs and Ghibellines into one another's arms.[18] That popular eloquence which was to accomplish so many marvels in 1233 comes down in a straight line from the Franciscan movement. It was St. Francis who set the example of those open-air sermons given in the vulgar tongue, at street corners, in public squares, in the fields. To feel the change which he brought about we must read the sermons of his contemporaries; declamatory, scholastic, subtile, they delighted in the minutiæ of exegesis or dogma, serving up refined dissertations on the most obscure texts of the Old Testament, to hearers starving for a simple and wholesome diet. With Francis, on the contrary, all is incisive, clear, practical. He pays no attention to the precepts of the rhetoricians, he forgets himself completely, thinking only of the end desired, the conversion of souls. And conversion was not in his view something vague and indistinct, which must take place only between God and the hearer. No, he will have immediate and practical proofs of conversion. Men must give up ill-gotten gains, renounce their enmities, be reconciled with their adversaries. At Assisi he threw himself valiantly into the thick of civil dissensions. The agreement of 1202 between the parties who divided the city had been wholly ephemeral. The common people were continually demanding new liberties, which the nobles and burghers would yield to them only under the pressure of fear. Francis took up the cause of the weak, the _minores_, and succeeded in reconciling them with the rich, the _majores_. His spiritual family had not as yet, properly speaking, a name, for, unlike those too hasty spirits who baptize their productions before they have come to light, he was waiting for the occasion that should reveal the true name which he ought to give it.[19] One day someone was reading the Rule in his presence. When he came to the passage, "Let the brethren, wherever they may find themselves called to labor or to serve, never take an office which shall put them over others, but on the contrary, let them be always under (_sint minores_) all those who may be in that house,"[20] these words _sint minores_ of the Rule, in the circumstances then existing in the city, suddenly appeared to him as a providential indication. His institution should be called the Order of the Brothers Minor. We may imagine the effect of this determination. The _Saint_, for already this magic word had burst forth where he appeared,[21] the Saint had spoken. It was he who was about to bring peace to the city, acting as arbiter between the two factions which rent it. We still possess the document of this _pace civile_, exhumed, so to speak, from the communal archives of Assisi by the learned and pious Antonio Cristofani.[22] The opening lines are as follows: "In the name of God! "May the supreme grace of the Holy Spirit assist us! To the honor of our Lord Jesus Christ, the blessed Virgin Mary, the Emperor Otho, and Duke Leopold. "This is the statute and perpetual agreement between the _Majori_ and _Minori_ of Assisi. "Without common consent there shall never be any sort of alliance either with the pope and his nuncios or legates, or with the emperor, or with the king, or with their nuncios or legates, or with any city or town, or with any important person, except with a common accord they shall do all which there may be to do for the honor, safety, and advantage of the commune of Assisi." What follows is worthy of the beginning. The lords, in consideration of a small periodical payment, should renounce all the feudal rights; the inhabitants of the villages subject to Assisi were put on a par with those of the city, foreigners were protected, the assessment of taxes was fixed. On Wednesday, November 9, 1210, this agreement was signed and sworn to in the public place of Assisi; it was made in such good faith that exiles were able to return in peace, and from this day we find in the city registers the names of those _émigrés_ who, in 1202, had betrayed their city and provoked the disastrous war with Perugia. Francis might well be happy. Love had triumphed, and for several years there were at Assisi neither victors nor vanquished. In the mystic marriages which here and there in history unite a man to a people, something takes place of which the transports of sense, the delirium of love, seem to be the only symbol; a moment comes in which saints, or men of genius, feel unknown powers striving mightily within them; they strive, they seek, they struggle until, triumphing over all obstacles, they have forced trembling, swooning humanity to conceive by them. This moment had come to St. Francis. FOOTNOTES: [1] 1 Cel., 34; 3 Soc., 53; Bon., 39. [2] Probably at Otricoli, which lies on the high-road between Rome and Spoleto. Orte is an hour and a half further on. It is the ancient _Otriculum_, where many antiquities have been found. [3] 1 Cel., 35; Bon., 40 and 41. [4] The only road connecting Celano with Rome, as well as with all Central and Northern Italy, passes by Aquila, Rieti, and Terni, where it joins the high-roads leading from the north toward Rome. [5] 1 Cel., 36 and 37; 3 Soc., 54; Bon., 45-48. [6] Isaiah, lv., 2. [7] This Order deserves to be better known; it was founded under Alexander III. and rapidly spread all over Central Italy and the East. In Francis's lifetime it had in Italy and the Holy Land about forty houses dedicated to the care of lepers. It is very probable that it was at _San Salvatore delle Pareti_ that Francis visited these unhappy sufferers. He there made the particular acquaintance of a Cruciger named _Morico_. The latter afterward falling ill, Francis sent him a remedy which would cure him, informing him at the same time that he was to become his disciple, which shortly afterward took place. The hospital _San Salvatore_ has disappeared; it stood in the place now called _Ospedaletto_, where a small chapel now stands half way between Assisi and Santa Maria degli Angeli. It was from there that the dying Francis blessed Assisi. For Morico vide 3 Soc., 35; Bon., 49; 2 Cel., 3, 128; _Conform._, 63b.--For the hospital vide Bon., 49; _Conform._, 135a, 1; _Honorii III. opera_, Horoy, t. i., col. 206. Cf. Potthast, 7746; L. Auvray, _Registres de Grégoire IX._, Paris, 1890, 4to, no. 209. For the Crucigeri in the time of St. Francis vide the interesting bull _Cum tu fili prior_, of July 8, 1203; Migne, _Inn. op._, t. ii., col. 125 ff. Cf. Potthast, 1959, and _Cum pastoris_, April 5, 1204; Migne, _loc. cit._, 319. Cf. Potthast, 2169 and 4474. [8] 3 Soc., 55. [9] All this yet remains in its primitive state. The road which went from Assisi to the now ruined Abbey of Mount Subasio (almost on the summit of the mountain) passed the Carceri, where there was a little chapel built by the Benedictines. [10] _Illi qui religiose volunt stare in eremis sint tres aut quatuor ad plus. Duo ex ipsis sint matres, et habeant duos filios, vel unum ad minus. Illi duo teneant vitam Marthæ et alii duo vitam Mariæ Magdalenæ._ Assisi MS., 338, 43a-b; text given also in _Conf._, 143a, 1, from which Wadding borrows it for his edition of the _Opuscules_ of St. Francis. Cf. 2 Cel., 3, 113. It is possible that we have here a fragment of the Rule, which must have been composed toward 1217. [11] 1 Cel., 42 and 43; 3 Soc., 55; Bon., 41. [12] 1 Cel., 42-44. [13] 2 Cel., 1, 15; Bon., 65. These two authors do not say where the event took place; but there appears to be no reason for suspecting the indication of Rivo-Torto given by the _Speculum_, fo. 21a. [14] 2 Cel., 3, 110. Cf. _Spec._, 22a. [15] 1 Cel., 47; Bon., 43. [16] There are few events of the thirteenth century that offer more documents or are more obscure than this one. The chroniclers of the most different countries speak of it at length. Here is one of the shortest but most exact of the notices, given by an eye-witness (Annals of Genoa of the years 1197-1219, _apud Mon. Germ. hist. Script_., t. 18): 1212 _in mense Augusti, die Sabbati, octava Kalendarum Septembris, intravit civitatem Janue quidam puer Teutonicus nomine Nicholaus peregrinationis causa, et cum eo multitudo maxima pelegrinorum defferentes cruces et bordonos atque scarsellas ultra septem millia arbitratu boni viri inter homines et feminas et puellos et puellas. Et die dominica sequenti de civitate exierunt_.--Cf. Giacomo di Viraggio: Muratori, t. ix., col. 46: _Dicebant quod mare debebat apud Januam siccari et sic ipsi debebant in Hierusalem proficisci. Multi autem inter eos erant filii Nobilium, quos ipsi etiam cum meretricibus destinarunt (!_) The most tragic account is that of Alberic, who relates the fate of the company that embarked at Marseilles. _Mon. Ger. hist. Script_., t. 23, p. 894. [17] The Benedictine chronicler, Albert von Stade (_Mon. Ger. hist. Script_., t. 16, pp. 271-379), thus closes his notice of the children's crusade: _Adhuc quo devenerint ignorantur sed plurimi redierunt, a quibus cum quæreretur causa cursus dixerunt se nescire. Nudæ etiam mulieres circa idem tempus nihil loquentes per villas et civitates cucurrerunt._ _Loc. cit._, p. 355. [18] _Chron. Veronese, ann. 1238_ (Muratori, _Scriptores Rer. Ital._, t. viii., p. 626). Cf. Barbarano de' Mironi: _Hist. Eccles. di Vicenza_, t. ii., pp. 79-84. [19] The Brothers were at first called _Viri pænitentiales de civitate Assisii_ (3 Soc., 37); it appears that they had a momentary thought of calling themselves _Pauperes de Assisio_, but they were doubtless dissuaded from this at Rome, as too closely resembling that of the _Pauperes de Lugduno_. Vide _Burchardi chronicon._, p. 376; vide Introd., cap. 5. [20] Vide Rule of 1221, _cap._ 7. Cf. 1 Cel., 38, and Bon., 78. [21] 1 Cel., 36. [22] _Storia d'Assisi_, t. i., pp. 123-129. * * * * * CHAPTER VIII PORTIUNCULA 1211 It was doubtless toward the spring of 1211 that the Brothers quitted Rivo-Torto. They were engaged in prayer one day, when a peasant appeared with an ass, which he noisily drove before him into the poor shelter. "Go in, go in!" he cried to his beast; "we shall be most comfortable here." It appeared that he was afraid that if the Brothers remained there much longer they would begin to think this deserted place was their own.[1] Such rudeness was very displeasing to Francis, who immediately arose and departed, followed by his companions. Now that they were so numerous the Brothers could no longer continue their wandering life in all respects as in the past; they had need of a permanent shelter and above all of a little chapel. They addressed themselves in vain first to the bishop and then to the canons of San Rufino for the loan of what they needed, but were more fortunate with the abbot of the Benedictines of Mount Subasio, who ceded to them in perpetuity the use of a chapel already very dear to their hearts, Santa Maria degli Angeli or the Portiuncula.[2] Francis was enchanted; he saw a mysterious harmony, ordained by God himself, between the name of the humble sanctuary and that of his Order. The brethren quickly built for themselves a few huts; a quickset hedge served as enclosing wall, and thus in three or four days was organized the first Franciscan convent. For ten years they were satisfied with this. These ten years are the heroic period of the Order. St. Francis, in full possession of his ideal, will seek to inculcate it upon his disciples and will succeed sometimes; but already the too rapid multiplication of the brotherhood will provoke some symptoms of relaxation. The remembrance of the beginning of this period has drawn from the lips of Thomas of Celano a sort of canticle in honor of the monastic life. It is the burning and untranslatable commentary of the Psalmist's cry: "_Behold how sweet and pleasant it is to be brethren and to dwell together._" Their cloister was the forest which then extended on all sides of Portiuncula, occupying a large part of the plain. There they gathered around their master to receive his spiritual counsels, and thither they retired to meditate and pray.[3] It would be a gross mistake, however, to suppose that contemplation absorbed them completely during the days which were not consecrated to missionary tours: a part of their time was spent in manual labor. The intentions of St. Francis have been more misapprehended on this point than on any other, but it may be said that nowhere is he more clear than when he ordains that his friars shall gain their livelihood by the work of their hands. He never dreamed of creating a _mendicant_ order, he created a _laboring_ order. It is true we shall often see him begging and urging his disciples to do as much, but these incidents ought not to mislead us; they are meant to teach that when a friar arrived in any locality and there spent his strength for long days in dispensing spiritual bread to famished souls, he ought not to blush to receive material bread in exchange. To work was the rule, to beg the exception; but this exception was in nowise dishonorable. Did not Jesus, the Virgin, the disciples live on bread bestowed? Was it not rendering a great service to those to whom they resorted to teach them charity? Francis in his poetic language gave the name of _mensa Domini_, the table of the Lord, to this table of love around which gathered the _little poor ones_. The bread of charity is the bread of angels; and it is also that of the birds, which reap not nor gather into barns. We are far enough, in this case, from that mendicity which is understood as a means of existence and the essential condition of a life of idleness. It is the opposite extreme, and we are true and just to St. Francis and to the origin of the mendicant orders only when we do not separate the obligation of labor from the praise of mendicity.[4] No doubt this zeal did not last long, and Thomas of Celano already entitles his chapters, "_Lament before God over the idleness and gluttony of the friars_;" but we must not permit this speedy and inevitable decadence to veil from our sight the holy and manly beauty of the origin. With all his gentleness Francis knew how to show an inflexible severity toward the idle; he even went so far as to dismiss a friar who refused to work.[5] Nothing in this matter better shows the intentions of the Poverello than the life of Brother Egidio, one of his dearest companions, him of whom he said with a smile: "He is one of the paladins of my Round Table." Brother Egidio had a taste for great adventures, and is a living example of a Franciscan of the earliest days; he survived his master twenty-five years, and never ceased to obey the letter and spirit of the Rule with freedom and simplicity. We find him one day setting out on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Arrived at Brindisi, he borrowed a water-jug that he might carry water while he was awaiting the departure of the ship, and passed a part of every day in crying through the streets of the city: "_Alla fresca! Alla fresca!_" like other water-carriers. But he would change his trade according to the country and the circumstances; on his way back, at Ancona, he procured willow for making baskets, which he afterward sold, not for money but for his food. It even happened to him to be employed in burying the dead. Sent to Rome, every morning after finishing his religious duties, he would take a walk of several leagues, to a certain forest, whence he brought a load of wood. Coming back one day he met a lady who wanted to buy it; they agreed on a price, and Egidio carried it to her house. But when he arrived at the house she perceived him to be a friar, and would have given him more than the price agreed upon. "My good lady," he replied, "I will not permit myself to be overcome by avarice," and he departed without accepting anything at all. In the olive season he helped in the gathering; in grape season he offered himself as vintager. One day on the Piazza di Roma, where men are hired for day's work, he saw a _padrone_ who could not find a man to thrash his walnut tree; it was so high that no one dared risk himself in it. "If you will give me part of the nuts," said Egidio, "I will do it willingly." The bargain struck and the tree thrashed, there proved to be so many nuts that he did not know where to put his share. Gathering up his tunic he made a bag of it and full of joy returned to Rome, where he distributed them among all the poor whom he met. Is not this a charming incident? Does it not by itself alone reveal the freshness, the youth, the kindness of heart of the first Franciscans? There is no end to the stories of the ingenuousness of Brother Egidio. All kinds of work seemed good to him provided he had time enough in the morning for his religious duties. Now he is in the service of the Cellarer of the Four Crowns at Rome, sifting flour and carrying water to the convent from the well of San Sisto. Now he is at Rieti, where he consents to remain with Cardinal Nicholas, bringing to every meal the bread which he had earned, notwithstanding the entreaties of the master of the house, who would gladly have provided for his wants. One day it rained so hard that Brother Egidio could not think of going out; the cardinal was already making merry over the thought that he would be forced to accept bread that he had not earned. But Egidio went to the kitchen, and finding that it needed cleaning he persuaded the cook to let him sweep it, and returned triumphant with the bread he had earned, which he ate at the cardinal's table.[6] From the very beginning Egidio's life commanded respect; it was at once so original, so gay, so spiritual,[7] and so mystical, that even in the least exact and most expanded accounts his legend has remained almost free from all addition. He is, after St. Francis, the finest incarnation of the Franciscan spirit. The incidents which are here cited are all, so to speak, illustrations of the Rule; in fact there is nothing more explicit than its commands with respect to work. The Brothers, after entering upon the Order, were to continue to exercise the calling which they had when in the world, and if they had none they were to learn one. For payment they were to accept only the food that was necessary for them, but in case that was insufficient they might beg. In addition they were naturally permitted to own the instruments of their calling.[8] Brother Ginepro, whose acquaintance we shall make further on, had an awl, and gained his bread wherever he went by mending shoes, and we see St. Clara working even on her death-bed. This obligation to work with the hands merits all the more to be brought into the light, because it was destined hardly to survive St. Francis, and because to it is due in part the original character of the first generation of the Order. Yet this was not the real reason for the being of the Brothers Minor. Their mission consisted above all in being the spouses of Poverty. Terrified by the ecclesiastical disorders of the time, haunted by painful memories of his past life, Francis saw in money the special instrument of the devil; in moments of excitement he went so far as to execrate it, as if there had been in the metal itself a sort of magical power and secret curse. Money was truly for him the sacrament of evil. This is not the place for asking if he was wrong; grave authors have demonstrated at length the economic troubles which would have been let loose upon the world if men had followed him. Alas! his madness, if madness it were, is a kind of which one need not fear the contagion. He felt that in this respect the Rule could not be too absolute, and that if unfortunately the door was opened to various interpretations of it, there would be no stopping-point. The course of events and the periodical convulsions which shook his Order show clearly enough how rightly he judged. I do not know nor desire to know if theologians have yet come to a scientific conclusion with regard to the poverty of Jesus, but it seems evident to me that poverty with the labor of the hands is the ideal held up by the Galilean to the efforts of his disciples. Still it is easy to see that Franciscan poverty is neither to be confounded with the unfeeling pride of the stoic, nor with the stupid horror of all joy felt by certain devotees; St. Francis renounced everything only that he might the better possess everything. The lives of the immense majority of our contemporaries are ruled by the fatal error that the more one possesses the more one enjoys. Our exterior, civil liberties continually increase, but at the same time our inward freedom is taking flight; how many are there among us who are literally possessed by what they possess?[9] Poverty not only permitted the Brothers to mingle with the poor and speak to them with authority, but, removing from them all material anxiety, it left them free to enjoy without hindrance those hidden treasures which nature reserves for pure idealists. The ever-thickening barriers which modern life, with its sickly search for useless comfort, has set up between us and nature did not exist for these men, so full of youth and life, eager for wide spaces and the outer air. This is what gave St. Francis and his companions that quick susceptibility to Nature which made them thrill in mysterious harmony with her. Their communion with Nature was so intimate, so ardent, that Umbria, with the harmonious poetry of its skies, the joyful outburst of its spring-time, is still the best document from which to study them. The tie between the two is so indissoluble, that after having lived a certain time in company with St. Francis, one can hardly, on reading certain passages of his biographers, help _seeing_ the spot where the incident took place, hearing the vague sounds of creatures and things, precisely as, when reading certain pages of a beloved author, one hears the sound of his voice. The worship of Poverty of the early Franciscans had in it, then, nothing ascetic or barbarous, nothing which recalls the Stylites or the Nazirs. She was their bride, and like true lovers they felt no fatigues which they might endure to find and remain near her. La lor concordia e lor lieti sembianti, Amor e maraviglia e dolce sguardo Facean esser cagion de' pensier santi.[10] To draw the portrait of an ideal knight at the beginning of the thirteenth century is to draw Francis's very portrait, with this difference, that what the knight did for his lady, he did for Poverty. This comparison is not a mere caprice; he himself profoundly felt it and expressed it with perfect clearness, and it is only by keeping it clearly present in the mind that we can see into the very depth of his heart.[11] To find any other souls of the same nature one must come down to Giovanni di Parma and Jacoponi di Todi. The life of St. Francis as troubadour has been written; it would have been better to write it as knight, for this is the explanation of his whole life, and as it were the heart of his heart. From the day when, forgetting the songs of his friends and suddenly stopped in the public place of Assisi, he met Poverty, his bride, and swore to her faith and love, down to that evening when, naked upon the naked earth of Portiuncula, he breathed out his life, it may be said that all his thoughts went out to this lady of his chaste loves. For twenty years he served her without faltering, sometimes with an artlessness which would appear infantine, if something infinitely sincere and sublime did not arrest the smile upon the most sceptical lips. Poverty agreed marvellously with that need which men had at that time, and which perhaps they have lost less than they suppose, the need of an ideal very high, very pure, mysterious, inaccessible, which yet they may picture to themselves in concrete form. Sometimes a few privileged disciples saw the lovely and pure Lady descend from heaven to salute her spouse, but, whether visible or not, she always kept close beside her Umbrian lover, as she kept close beside the Galilean; in the stable of the nativity, upon the cross at Golgotha, and even in the borrowed tomb where his body lay. During several years this ideal was not alone that of St. Francis, but also of all the Brothers. In poverty the _gente poverelle_ had found safety, love, liberty; and all the efforts of the new apostles are directed to the keeping of this precious treasure. Their worship sometimes might seem excessive. They showed their spouse those delicate attentions, those refinements of courtesy so frequent in the morning light of a betrothal, but which one gradually forgets till they become incomprehensible.[12] The number of disciples continually increased; almost every week brought new recruits; the year 1211 was without doubt devoted by Francis to a tour in Umbria and the neighboring provinces. His sermons were short appeals to conscience; his heart went out to his hearers in ineffable tones, so that when men tried to repeat what they had heard they found themselves incapable.[13] The Rule of 1221 has preserved for us a summary of these appeals: "Here is an exhortation which all the Brothers may make when they think best: Fear and honor God, praise and bless him. Give thanks unto him. Adore the Lord, Almighty God, in Trinity and unity, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Repent and make fruits meet for repentance, for you know that we shall soon die. Give, and it shall be given unto you. Forgive, and you shall be forgiven; for if you forgive not, God will not forgive you. Blessed are they who die repenting, for they shall be in the kingdom of heaven.... Abstain carefully from all evil, and persevere in the good until the end."[14] We see how simple and purely ethical was the early Franciscan preaching. The complications of dogma and scholasticism are entirely absent from it. To understand how new this was and how refreshing to the soul we must study the disciples that came after him. With St. Anthony of Padua ([Cross] June 13, 1231; canonized in 1233[15]), the most illustrious of them all, the descent is immense. The distance between these two men is as great as that which separates Jesus from St. Paul. I do not judge the disciple; he was of his time in not knowing how to say simply what he thought, in always desiring to subtilize it, to extract it from passages in the Bible turned from their natural meaning by efforts at once laborious and puerile; what the alchemists did in their continual making of strange mixtures from which they fancied that they should bring out gold, the preachers did to the texts, in order to bring out the truth. The originality of St. Francis is only the more brilliant and meritorious; with him gospel simplicity reappeared upon the earth.[16] Like the lark with which he so much loved to compare himself,[17] he was at his ease only in the open sky. He remained thus until his death. The epistle to all Christians which he dictated in the last weeks of his life repeats the same ideas in the same terms, perhaps with a little more feeling and a shade of sadness. The evening breeze which breathed upon his face and bore away his words was their symbolical accompaniment. "I, Brother Francis, the least of your servants, pray and conjure you by that Love which is God himself, willing to throw myself at your feet and kiss them, to receive with humility and love these words and all others of our Lord Jesus Christ, to put them to profit and carry them out." This was not a more or less oratorical formula. Hence conversions multiplied with an incredible rapidity. Often, as formerly with Jesus, a look, a word sufficed Francis to attach to himself men who would follow him until their death. It is impossible, alas! to analyze the best of this eloquence, all made of love, intimate apprehension, and fire. The written word can no more give an idea of it than it can give us an idea of a sonata of Beethoven or a painting by Rembrandt. We are often amazed, on reading the memoirs of those who have been great conquerors of souls, to find ourselves remaining cold, finding in them all no trace of animation or originality. It is because we have only a lifeless relic in the hand; the soul is gone. It is the white wafer of the sacrament, but how shall that rouse in us the emotions of the beloved disciple lying on the Lord's breast on the night of the Last Supper? The class from which Francis recruited his disciples was still about the same; they were nearly all young men of Assisi and its environs, some the sons of agriculturists, and others nobles; the School and the Church was very little represented among them.[18] Everything still went on with an unheard-of simplicity. In theory, obedience to the superior was absolute; in practice, we can see Francis continually giving his companions complete liberty of action.[19] Men entered the Order without a novitiate of any sort; it sufficed to say to Francis that they wanted to lead with him a life of evangelical perfection, and to prove it by giving all that they possessed to the poor. The more unpretending were the neophytes, the more tenderness he had for them. Like his Master, he had a partiality for those who were lost, for men whom regular society casts out of its limits, but who with all their crimes and scandals are nearer to sainthood than mediocrities and hypocrites. One day St. Francis, passing by the desert of Borgo San Sepolcro came to a place called Monte-Casale,[20] and behold a noble and refined young man came to him. "Father," he said, "I would gladly be one of your disciples." "My son," said St. Francis, "you are young, refined, and noble; you will not be able to follow poverty and live wretched like us." "But, my father, are not you men like me? What you do I can do with the grace of Jesus." This reply was well-pleasing to St. Francis, who, giving him his blessing, incontinently received him into the Order under the name of Brother Angelo. He conducted himself so well that a little while after he was made guardian[21] of Monte-Casale. Now, in those times there were three famous robbers who did much evil in the country. They came to the hermitage one day to beg Brother Angelo to give them something to eat; but he replied to them with severe reproaches: "What! robbers, evil-doers, assassins, have you not only no shame for stealing the goods of others, but you would farther devour the alms of the servants of God, you who are not worthy to live, and who have respect neither for men nor for God your Creator. Depart, and let me never see you here again!" They went away full of rage. But behold, the Saint returned, bringing a wallet of bread and a bottle of wine which had been given him, and the guardian told him how he had sent away the robbers; then St. Francis reproved him severely for showing himself so cruel.... "I command thee by thine obedience," said he, "to take at once this loaf and this wine and go seek the robbers by hill and dell until you have found them, to offer them this as from me, and to kneel there before them and humbly ask their pardon, and pray them in my name no longer to do wrong but to fear God; and if they do it, I promise to provide for all their wants, to see that they always have enough to eat and drink. After that you may humbly return hither." Brother Angelo did all that had been commanded him, while St. Francis on his part prayed God to convert the robbers. They returned with the brother, and when St. Francis gave them the assurance of the pardon of God, they changed their lives and entered the Order, in which they lived and died most holily.[22] What has sometimes been said of the voice of the blood is still more true of the voice of the soul. When a man truly wakens another to moral life, he gains for himself an unspeakable gratitude. The word _master_ is often profaned, but it can express the noblest and purest of earthly ties. Who are those among us, who in the hours of manly innocence when they examine their own consciences, do not see rising up before them from out of the past the ever beloved and loving face of one who, perhaps without knowing it, initiated them into spiritual things? At such a time we would throw ourselves at the feet of this father, would tell him in burning words of our admiration and gratitude. We cannot do it, for the soul has its own bashfulness; but who knows that our disquietude and embarrassment do not betray us, and unveil, better than words could do, the depths of our heart? The air they breathed at Portiuncula was all impregnated with joy and gratitude like this. To many of the Brothers, St. Francis was truly a saviour; he had delivered them from chains heavier than those of prisons. And therefore their greatest desire was in their turn to call others to this same liberty. We have already seen Brother Bernardo on a mission to Florence a few months after his entrance into the Order. Arrived at maturity when he put on the habit, he appears in some degree the senior of this apostolic college. He knew how to obey St. Francis and remain faithful to the very end to the ideal of the early days; but he had no longer that privilege of the young--of Brother Leo, for example--of being able to transform himself almost entirely into the image of him whom he admired. His physiognomy has not that touch of juvenile originality, of poetic fancy, which is so great a charm of the others. Toward this epoch two Brothers entered the Order, men such as the successors of St. Francis never received, whose history throws a bright light on the simplicity of the early days. It will be remembered with what zeal Francis had repaired several churches; his solicitude went further; he saw a sort of profanation in the negligence with which most of them were kept; the want of cleanliness of the sacred objects, ill-concealed by tinsel, gave him a sort of pain, and it often happened that when he was going to preach somewhere he secretly called together the priests of the locality and implored them to look after the decency of the service. But even in these cases he was not content to preach only in words; binding together some stalks of heather he would make them into brooms for sweeping out the churches. One day in the suburbs of Assisi he was performing this task when a peasant appeared, who had left his oxen and cart out in the fields while he came to gaze at him. "Brother," said he on entering, "give me the broom. I will help you," and he swept out the rest of the church. When he had finished, "Brother," he said to Francis, "for a long time I have decided to serve God, especially when I heard men speak of you. But I never knew how to find you. Now it has pleased God that we should meet, and henceforth I shall do whatever you may please to command me." Francis seeing his fervor felt a great joy; it seemed to him that with his simplicity and honesty he would become a good friar. It appears indeed that he had only too much simplicity, for after his reception he felt himself bound to imitate every motion of the master, and when the latter coughed, spat, or sighed, he did the same. At last Francis noticed it and gently reproved him. Later he became so perfect that the other friars admired him greatly, and after his death, which took place not long after, St. Francis loved to relate his conversion, calling him not Brother John, but Brother St. John.[23] Ginepro is still more celebrated for his holy follies. One day he went to see a sick Brother and offered him his services. The patient confessed that he had a great longing to eat a pig's foot; the visitor immediately rushed out, and armed with a knife ran to the neighboring forest, where, espying a troop of pigs, he cut off a foot of one of them, returning to the monastery full of pride over his trophy. The owner of the pigs shortly followed, howling like mad, but Ginepro went straight to him and pointed out with so much volubility that he had done him a great service, that the man, after overwhelming him with reproaches, suddenly begged pardon, killed the pig and invited all the Brothers to feast upon it. Ginepro was probably less mad than the story would lead us to suppose; Franciscan humility never had a more sincere disciple; he could not endure the tokens of admiration which the populace very early lavished on the growing Order, and which by their extravagance contributed so much to its decadence. One day, as he was entering Rome, the report of his arrival spread abroad, and a great crowd came out to meet him. To escape was impossible, but he suddenly had an inspiration; near the gate of the city some children were playing at see-saw; to the great amazement of the Romans Ginepro joined them, and, without heeding the salutations addressed to him, remained so absorbed in his play that at last his indignant admirers departed.[24] It is clear that the life at Portiuncula must have been very different from that of an ordinary convent. So much youth,[25] simplicity, love, quickly drew the eyes of men toward it. From all sides they were turned to those thatched huts, where dwelt a spiritual family whose members loved one another more than men love on earth, leading a life of labor, mirth, and devotion. The humble chapel seemed a new Zion destined to enlighten the world, and many in their dreams beheld blind humanity coming to kneel there and recover sight.[26] Among the first disciples who joined themselves to St. Francis we must mention Brother Silvestro, the first priest who entered the Order, the very same whom we have already seen the day that Bernardo di Quintevalle distributed his goods among the poor. Since then he had not had a moment's peace, bitterly reproaching himself for his avarice; night and day he thought only of that, and in his dreams he saw Francis exorcising a horrid monster which infested all the region.[27] By his age and the nature of the memory he has left behind him Silvestro resembles Brother Bernardo. He was what is usually understood by a holy priest, but nothing denotes that he had the truly Franciscan love of great enterprises, distant journeys, perilous missions. Withdrawn into one of the grottos of the Carceri, absorbed in the contemplative life, he gave spiritual counsels to his brethren as occasion served.[28] The typical Franciscan priest is Brother Leo. The date of his entrance into the Order is not exactly known, but we are probably not far from the truth in placing it about 1214. Of a charming simplicity, tender, affectionate, refined, he is, with Brother Elias, the one who plays the noblest part during the obscure years in which the new reform was being elaborated. Becoming Francis's confessor and secretary, treated by him as his favorite son, he excited much opposition, and was to the end of his long life the head of the strict observance.[29] One winter's day, St. Francis was going with Brother Leo from Perugia to Santa Maria degli Angeli, and the cold, being intense, made them shiver; he called Brother Leo, who was walking a little in advance, and said: "O Brother Leo, may it please God that the Brothers Minor all over the world may give a great example of holiness and edification; write, however, and note with care, that not in this is the perfect joy." St. Francis, going on a little farther, called him a second time: "O Brother Leo, if the Brothers Minor gave sight to the blind, healed the infirm, cast out demons, gave hearing to the deaf, or even what is much more, if they raised the four days dead, write that not in this is the perfect joy." Going on a little farther he cried: "O Brother Leo, if the Brother Minor knew all languages, all science, and all scriptures, if he could prophesy and reveal not only future things but even the secrets of consciences and of souls, write that not in this consists the perfect joy." Going a little farther St. Francis called to him again: "O Brother Leo, little sheep of God, if the Brother Minor could speak the language of angels, if he knew the courses of the stars and the virtues of plants, if all the treasures of earth were revealed to him, and he knew the qualities of birds, fishes, and all animals, of men, trees, rocks, roots, and waters, write that not in these is the perfect joy." And advancing still a little farther St. Francis called loudly to him: "O Brother Leo, if the Brother Minor could preach so well as to convert all infidels to the faith of Christ, write that not in this is the perfect joy." While speaking thus they had already gone more than two miles, and Brother Leo, full of surprise, said to him: "Father, I pray you in God's name tell me in what consists the perfect joy." And St. Francis replied: "When we arrive at Santa Maria degli Angeli, soaked with rain, frozen with cold, covered with mud, dying of hunger, and we knock and the porter comes in a rage, saying, 'Who are you?' and we answer, 'We are two of your brethren,' and he says, 'You lie, you are two lewd fellows who go up and down corrupting the world and stealing the alms of the poor. Go away from here!' and he does not open to us, but leaves us outside shivering in the snow and rain, frozen, starved, till night; then, if thus maltreated and turned away, we patiently endure all without murmuring against him, if we think with humility and charity that this porter really knows us truly and that God makes him speak thus to us, then, O Brother Leo, write that in this is the perfect joy.... Above all the graces and all the gifts which the Holy Spirit gives to his friends is the grace to conquer oneself, and willingly to suffer pain, outrages, disgrace, and evil treatment, for the love of Christ!"[30] Although by its slight and somewhat playful character this story recalls the insipid statues of the fourteenth century, it has justly become celebrated, its spirit is thoroughly Franciscan; that transcendent idealism, which sees in perfection and joy two equivalent terms, and places perfect joy in the pure and serene region of the perfecting of oneself; that sublime simplicity which so easily puts in their true place the miracle-worker and the scholar, these are perhaps not entirely new;[31] but St. Francis must have had singular moral strength to impose upon his contemporaries ideas in such absolute contradiction to their habits and their hopes; for the intellectual aristocracy of the thirteenth century with one accord found the perfect joy in knowledge, while the people found it in miracles. Doubtless we must not forget those great mystical families, which, all through the Middle Ages, were the refuge of the noblest souls; but they never had this fine simplicity. The School is always more or less the gateway to mysticism; it is possible only to an elect of subtile minds; a pious peasant seldom understands the Imitation. It may be said that all St. Francis's philosophy is contained in this chapter of the Fioretti.[32] From it we foresee what will be his attitude toward learning, and are helped to understand how it happens that this famous saint was so poor a miracle-worker. Twelve centuries before, Jesus had said, "Blessed are the poor in spirit. Blessed are they who suffer." The words of St. Francis are only a commentary, but this commentary is worthy of the text. It remains to say a word concerning two disciples who were always closely united with Brother Leo in the Franciscan memorials--Rufino and Masseo. Born of a noble family connected with that of St. Clara, the former was soon distinguished in the Order for his visions and ecstasies, but his great timidity checked him as soon as he tried to preach: for this reason he is always to be found in the most isolated hermitages--Carceri, Verna, Greccio.[33] Masseo, of Marignano, a small village in the environs of Assisi, was his very opposite; handsome, well made, witty, he attracted attention by his fine presence and his great facility of speech; he occupies a special place in popular Franciscan tradition. He deserves it. St. Francis, to test his humility, made him the porter and cook of the hermitage,[34] but in these functions Masseo showed himself to be so perfectly a _Minor_ that from that time the master particularly loved to have him for companion in his missionary journeys. One day they were travelling together, when they arrived at the intersection of the roads to Sienna, Arezzo, and Florence. "Which one shall we take?" asked Masseo. "Whichever one God wills." "But how shall we know which one God wills?" "You shall see. Go and stand at the crossing of the roads, turn round and round as the children do, and do not stop until I bid you." Brother Masseo began to turn; seized with a vertigo, he was nearly falling, but caught himself up at once. Finally Francis called out, "Stop! which way are you facing?" "Toward Sienna." "Very well; God wills that we go to Sienna."[35] Such a method of making up one's mind is doubtless not for the daily needs of life, but Francis employed still others, like it, if not in form at least in fact. Up to this time we have seen the brethren living together in their hermitages or roving the highways, preaching repentance. It would, however, be a mistake to think that their whole lives were passed thus. To understand the first Franciscans we must absolutely forget what they may have been since that time, and what monks are in general; if Portiuncula was a monastery it was also a workshop, where each brother practised the trade which had been his before entering the Order; but what is stranger still to our ideas, the Brothers often went out as servants.[36] Brother Egidio's case was not an exception, it was the rule. This did not last long, for very soon the friars who entered a house as domestics came to be treated as distinguished guests; but in the beginning they were literally servants, and took upon themselves the most menial labors. Among the works which they might undertake Francis recommended above all the care of lepers. We have already seen the important part which these unfortunates played in his conversion; he always retained for them a peculiar pity, which he sought to make his disciples share. For several years the Brothers Minor may be said to have gone from lazaretto to lazaretto, preaching by day in the towns and villages, and retiring at night to these refuges, where they rendered to these _patients of God_ the most repugnant services. The Crucigeri, who took charge of the greater number of leper-houses, always welcomed these kindly disposed aides, who, far from asking any sort of recompense, were willing to eat whatever the patients might have left.[37] In fact, although created solely for the care of lepers, the Brothers of this Order sometimes lost patience when the sufferers were too exacting, and instead of being grateful had only murmurs or even reproaches for their benefactors. In these desperate cases the intervention of Francis and his disciples was especially precious. It often happened that a Brother was put in special charge of a single leper, whose companion and servant he continued to be, sometimes for a long period.[38] The following narrative shows Francis's love for these unfortunates, and his method with them.[39] It happened one time that the Brothers were serving the lepers and the sick in a hospital, near to the place where St. Francis was. Among them was a leper who was so impatient, so cross-grained, so unendurable, that everyone believed him to be possessed by the devil, and rightly enough, for he heaped insults and blows upon those who waited upon him, and what was worse, he continually insulted and blasphemed the blessed Christ and his most holy Mother the Virgin Mary, so that there was no longer anyone who could or would wait upon him. The Brothers would willingly have endured the insults and abuse which he lavished upon them, in order to augment the merit of their patience, but their souls could not consent to hear those which he uttered against Christ and his Mother. They therefore resolved to abandon this leper, but not without having told the whole story exactly to St. Francis, who at that time was dwelling not far away. When they told him St. Francis betook himself to the wicked leper; "May God give thee peace, my most dear brother," he said to him as he drew near. "And what peace," asked the leper, "can I receive from God, who has taken away my peace and every good thing, and has made my body a mass of stinking and corruption?" St. Francis said to him: "My brother, be patient, for God gives us diseases in this world for the salvation of our souls, and when we endure them patiently they are the fountain of great merit to us." "How can I endure patiently continual pains which torture me day and night? And it is not only my disease that I suffer from, but the friars that you gave me to wait upon me are unendurable, and do not take care of me as they ought." Then St. Francis perceived that this leper was possessed by the spirit of evil, and he betook himself to his knees in order to pray for him. Then returning he said to him: "My son, since you are not satisfied with the others, I will wait upon you." "That is all very well, but what can you do for me more than they?" "I will do whatever you wish." "Very well; I wish you to wash me from head to foot, for I smell so badly that I disgust myself." Then St. Francis made haste to heat some water with many sweet-smelling herbs; next he took off the leper's clothes and began to bathe him, while a Brother poured out the water. And behold, by a divine miracle, wherever St. Francis touched him with his holy hands the leprosy disappeared and the flesh became perfectly sound. And in proportion as the flesh was healed the soul of the wretched man was also healed, and he began to feel a lively sorrow for his sins, and to weep bitterly.... And being completely healed both in body and soul, he cried with all his might: "Woe unto me, for I have deserved hell for the abuses and outrages which I have said and done to the Brothers, for my impatience and my blasphemies." One day, Brother John, whose simplicity we have already seen, and who had been especially put in charge of a certain leper, took him for a walk to Portiuncula, as if he had not been the victim of a contagious malady. Reproaches were not spared him; the leper heard them and could not hide his sadness and distress; it seemed to him like being a second time banished from the world. Francis was quick to remark all this and to feel sharp remorse for it; the thought of having saddened one of _God's patients_ was unendurable; he not only begged his pardon, but he caused food to be served, and sitting down beside him he shared his repast, eating from the same porringer.[40] We see with what perseverance he pursued by every means the realization of his ideal. The details just given show the Umbrian movement, as it appears to me, to be one of the most humble and at the same time the most sincere and practical attempts to realize the kingdom of God on earth. How far removed we are here from the superstitious vulgarity of the mechanical devotion, the deceitful miracle-working of certain Catholics; how far also from the commonplace, complacent, quibbling, theorizing Christianity of certain Protestants! Francis is of the race of mystics, for no intermediary comes between God and his soul; but his mysticism is that of Jesus leading his disciples to the Tabor of contemplation; but when, overflooded with joy, they long to build tabernacles that they may remain on the heights and satiate themselves with the raptures of ecstasy, "Fools," he says to them, "ye know not what ye ask," and directing their gaze to the crowds wandering like sheep having no shepherd, he leads them back to the plain, to the midst of those who moan, who suffer, who blaspheme. The higher the moral stature of Francis the more he was exposed to the danger of being understood only by the very few, and disappointed by those who were nearest to him. Reading the Franciscan authors, one feels every moment how the radiant beauty of the model is marred by the awkwardness of the disciple. It could not have been otherwise, and this difference between this master and the companions is evident from the very beginnings of the Order. The greater number of the biographers have drawn the veil of oblivion over the difficulties created by certain Brothers as well as those which came from the ecclesiastical hierarchy, but we must not allow ourselves to be deceived by this almost universal silence. Here and there we find indications all the more precious for being, so to say, involuntary. Brother Rufino, for example, the same who was destined to become one of the intimates of Francis's later days, assumed an attitude of revolt shortly after his entrance into the Order. He thought it foolish in Francis when, instead of leaving the friars to give themselves unceasingly to prayer, he sent them out in all directions to wait upon lepers.[41] His own ideal was the life of the hermits of the Thebaïde, as it is related in the then popular legends of St. Anthony, St. Paul, St. Paconius, and twenty others. He once passed Lent in one of the grottos of the Carceri. Holy Thursday having arrived, Francis, who was also there, summoned all the brethren who were dispersed about the neighborhood, whether in grottos or huts, to observe with him the memories to which this day was consecrated. Rufino refused to come; "For that matter," he added, "I have decided to follow him no longer; I mean to remain here and live solitary, for in this way I shall be more surely saved than by submitting myself to this man and his nonsense." Young and enthusiastic for the most part, it was not always without difficulty that the Brothers formed the habit of keeping their work in the background. Agreeing with their master as to fundamentals, they would have liked to make more of a stir, attract public attention by more obvious devotion; there were some among them whom it did not satisfy to be saints, but who also wished to appear such. FOOTNOTES: [1] 1 Cel., 44; 3 Soc., 55. [2] 3 Soc., 56; _Spec._, 32b; _Conform._, 217b, 1; _Fior. Bibl. Angel._, Amoni, p. 378. [3] This forest has disappeared. Some of Francis's counsels have been collected in the Admonitions. See 1 Cel., 37-41. [4] Vide Angelo Clareno, _Tribul._ cod. Laur., 3b. [5] 2 Cel., 3, 97 and 98. The Conformities, 142a, 1, cite textually 97 as coming from the _Legenda Antiqua_. Cf. _Spec._, 64b.--2 Cel., 3, 21. Cf. _Conform._, 171a, 1; _Spec._, 19b. See especially Rule of 1221, _cap._ 7; Rule of 1223, _cap._ 5; the Will and 3 Soc. 41. The passage, _liceat eis habere ferramenta et instrumenta suis artibus necessaria_, sufficiently proves that certain friars had real trades. [6] A. SS., Aprilis, t. iii., pp. 220-248; _Fior. Vita d'Egidio_; _Spec._, 158 ff; _Conform._, 53-60. [7] Other examples will be found below; it may suffice to recall here his sally: "The glorious Virgin Mother of God had sinners for parents, she never entered any religious order, and yet she is what she is!" A. SS., _loc. cit._, p. 234. [8] The passage of the Will, _firmiter volo quod omnes laborent_, ... has a capital importance because it shows Francis renewing in the most solemn manner injunctions already made from the origin of the Order. Cf. 1 Cel., 38 and 39; _Conform._, 219b. 1: _Juvabant Fratres pauperes homines in agris eorum et ipsi dabant postea eis de pane amore Dei._ _Spec._, 34; 69. Vide also _Archiv._, t. ii., pp. 272 and 299; Eccleston, 1 and 15; 2 Cel., 1, 12. [9] _Nihil volebat proprietatis habere ut omnia plenius posset in Domino possidere._ B. de Besse, 102a. [10] Their concord and their joyous semblances The love, the wonder and the sweet regard They made to be the cause of holy thought. DANTE: Paradiso, canto xi., verses 76-78. Longfellow's translation. [11] _Amor factus ... castis eam, stringit amplexibus nec ad horam patitur non esse muritus._ 2 Cel., 3, 1; cf. 1 Cel., 35; 51; 75; 2 Cel., 3, 128; 3 Soc., 15; 22; 33; 35; 50; Bon., 87; _Fior._ 13. [12] Bon., 93.--_Prohibuit fratrem qui faciebat coquinam ne poneret legumina de sero in aqua calida quæ debebat dare fratribus ad manducandum die sequenti ut observaverint illud verbum Evangelii: Nolite solliciti esse de crastino._ _Spec._, 15. [13] 2 Cel., 3, 50. [14] _Cap._, 21. Cf. _Fior., I. consid._, 18; 30; _Conform._, 103a, 2; 2 Cel., 3, 99; 100; 121. Vide Müller, _Anfänge_, p. 187. [15] Vide his _Opera omnia postillis illustrata_, by Father de la Haye, 1739, f^o. For his life, Surius and Wadding arranged and mutilated the sources to which they had access; the Bollandists had only a legend of the fifteenth century. The Latin manuscript 14,363 of the Bibliothèque Nationale gives one which dates from the thirteenth. Very Rev. Father Hilary, of Paris: _Saint Antoine de Padone, sa légende primitive_, Montreuil-sur-Mer, Imprimerie Notre-Dame-des-Prés, 1890, 1 vol., 8vo. Cf. _Legenda seu vita et miracula S. Antonii sæculo xiii concinnata ex cod. memb. antoniæ bibliothecæ_ a P.M. Antonio Maria Josa min. comv. Bologna, 1883, 1 vol., 8vo. [16] This evangelical character of his mission is brought out in relief by all his biographers. 1 Cel., 56; 84; 89; 3 Soc. 25; 34; 40; 43; 45; 48; 51; 57; 2 Cel., 3, 8; 50; 93. [17] _Spec._, 134; 2 Cel., 3, 128. [18] The Order was at first essentially lay (at the present time it is, so far as I know, the only one in which there is no difference of costume between laymen and priests). Vide Ehrle, _Archiv._, iii., p. 563. It is the influence of the friars from northern countries which has especially changed it in this matter. General Aymon, of Faversham (1240-1243), decided that laymen should be excluded from all charges; _laicos ad officia inhabilitavit, quæ usque tunc ut clerici exercebant_. (_Chron._ xxiv. _gen._ cod. Gadd. relig., 53, f^o 110a). Among the early Brothers who refused ordination there were surely some who did so from humility, but this sentiment is not enough to explain all the cases. There were also with certain of them revolutionary desires and as it were a vague memory of the prophecies of Gioacchino di Fiore upon the age succeeding that of the priests: _Fior._, 27. _Frate Pellegrino non volle mai andare come chierico, ma come laico, benche fassi molto litterato e grande decretalista._ Cf. _Conform._, 71a., 2. _Fr. Thomas Hibernicus sibi pollecem amputavit ne ad sacerdotium cogeretur._ _Conform._, 124b, 2. [19] See, for example, the letter to Brother Leo. Cf. _Conform._, 53b, 2. _Fratri Egidio dedit licentiam liberam ut iret quocumque vellet et staret ubicumque sibi placeret._ [20] The hermitage of Monte-Casale, at two hours walk northeast from Borgo San Sepolero, still exists in its original state. It is one of the most significant and curious of the Franciscan deserts. [21] The office of guardian (superior of a monastery) naturally dates from the time when the Brothers stationed themselves in small groups in the villages of Umbria--that is to say, most probably from the year 1211. A few years later the monasteries were united to form a custodia. Finally, about 1215, Central Italy was divided unto a certain number of provinces with provincial ministers at their head. All this was done little by little, for Francis never permitted himself to regulate what did not yet exist. [22] _Fior._, 26; Conform., 119b, 1. Cf. Rule of 1221, cap. vii. _Quicumque ad eos (fratres) venerint, amicus vel adversarius, fur vel latro benigne recipiatur._ [23] 2 Cel., 3, 120; _Spec._, 37; _Conform._, 53a, 1. See below, p. 385, n. 1. [24] _Fior._, Vita di fra Ginepro; _Spec._, 174-182; _Conform._, 62b. [25] A. SS., p. 600. [26] 3 Soc., 56; 2 Cel., 1, 13; Bon., 24. [27] Bon., 30; 3 Soc., 30, 31; 2 Cel., 3, 52. Cf. _Fior._, 2. The dragon of this dream perhaps symbolizes heresy. [28] Bon., 83; 172; _Fior._, 1, 16; _Conform._, 49a, 1, and 110b, 1; 2 Cel., 3, 51. [29] Bernard de Besse, _De laudibus_, Turin MS., f^o. 102b and 96a. He died November 15, 1271. A. SS., Augusti, t. ii., p. 221. [30] _Fior._, 8; _Spec._, 89b ff.; _Conform._, 30b, 2, and 140a, 2. [31] I need not here point out the analogy in form between this chapter and St. Paul's celebrated song of love, 1 Cor. xiii. [32] We find the same thoughts in nearly the same terms in _cap._ v. of the _Verba sacræ admonitionis_. [33] He is the second of the Three Companions. 3 Soc., 1; cf. 1 Cel., 95; _Fior._, 1; 29, 30, 31; Eccleston, 12; _Spec._, 110a-114b; _Conform._, 51b ff.; cf. 2 Cel., 2, 4. [34] Very probably that of the Carceri, though the name is not indicated Vide 3 Soc., 1; _Fior._, 4; 10; 11; 12; 13; 16; 27; 32; _Conform._, 51b, 1 ff; _Tribul. Archiv._, t. ii., p. 263. [35] _Fior._, 11; _Conform._, 50b, 2; _Spec._, 104a. [36] Rule of 1221, chap. 7. _Omnes fratres, in quibuscumque locis fuerint apud aliquos ad serviendum, vel ad laborandum, non sint camerarii, nec cellarii, nec præsint in domibus corum quibus serviunt._ Cf. 1 Cel., 38 and 40; A. SS., p. 606. [37] 1 Cel., 103; 39; _Spec._, 28; Reg. 1221, ix.; _Giord._, 33 and 39. [38] Vide _Spec._, 34b.; _Fior._, 4. [39] All the details of this story lead me to think that it refers to Portiuncula and the hospital _San Salvatore delle Pareti_. The story is given by the _Conform._, 174b, 2, as taken from the _Legenda Antiqua_. Cf. _Spec._, 56b; _Fior._, 25. [40] In the _Speculum_, f^o 41a, this story ends with the phrase: _Qui vidit hæc scripsit et testimonium perhibet de hiis_. The brother is here called _Frater Jacobus simplex_. Cf. _Conform._, 174b. [41] _Conform._, 51b, 1. Cf. 2 Cel., 2, 4; _Spec._, 110b; _Fior._, 29. * * * * * CHAPTER IX SANTA CLARA Popular piety in Umbria never separates the memory of St. Francis from that of Santa Clara. It is right. Clara[1] was born at Assisi in 1194, and was consequently about twelve years younger than Francis. She belonged to the noble family of the Sciffi. At the age when a little girl's imagination awakes and stirs, she heard the follies of the son of Bernardone recounted at length. She was sixteen when the Saint preached for the first time in the cathedral, suddenly appearing like an angel of peace in a city torn by intestine dissensions. To her his appeals were like a revelation. It seemed as if Francis was speaking for her, that he divined her secret sorrows, her most personal anxieties, and all that was ardent and enthusiastic in the heart of this young girl rushed like a torrent that suddenly finds an outlet into the channel indicated by him. For saints as for heroes the supreme stimulus is woman's admiration. But here, more than ever, we must put away the vulgar judgment which can understand no union between man and woman where the sexual instinct has no part. That which makes the union of the sexes something almost divine is that it is the prefiguration, the symbol, of the union of souls. Physical love is an ephemeral spark, designed to kindle in human hearts the flame of a more lasting love; it is the outer court of the temple, but not the most holy place; its inestimable value is precisely that it leaves us abruptly at the door of the holiest of all as if to invite us to step over the threshold. The mysterious sigh of nature goes out for the union of souls. This is the unknown God to whom debauchees, those pagans of love, offer their sacrifices, and this sacred imprint, even though effaced, though soiled by all pollutions, often saves the man of the world from inspiring as much disgust as the drunkard and the criminal. But sometimes--more often than we think--there are souls so pure, so little earthly, that on their first meeting they enter the most holy place, and once there the thought of any other union would be not merely a descent, but an impossibility. Such was the love of St. Francis and St. Clara. But these are exceptions. There is something mysterious in this supreme purity; it is so high that in holding it up to men one risks speaking to them in an unknown tongue, or even worse. The biographers of St. Francis have clearly felt the danger of offering to the multitude the sight of certain beauties which are far beyond them, and this is for us the great fault of their works. They try to give us not so much the true portrait of Francis as that of the perfect minister-general of the Order such as they conceive it, such as it must needs be to serve as a model for his disciples; thus they have made this model somewhat according to the measure of those whom it is to serve, by omitting here and there features which, stupidly interpreted, might have furnished material for the malevolence of unscrupulous adversaries, or from which disciples little versed in spiritual things could not have failed to draw support for permitting themselves dangerous intimacies. Thus the relations of St. Francis with women in general and St. Clara in particular, have been completely travestied by Thomas of Celano. It could not have been otherwise, and we must not bear him a grudge for it. The life of the founder of an Order, when written by a monk, in the very nature of things becomes always a sort of appendix to or illustration of the Rule. And the Rule, especially if the Order has its thousands of members, is necessarily made not for the elect, but for the average, for the majority of the flock.[2] Hence this portrait, in which St. Francis is represented as a stern ascetic, to whom woman appears to be a sort of incarnate devil! The biographers even go so far as to assure us that he knew only two women by sight. These are manifest exaggerations, or rather the opposite of the truth.[3] We are not reduced to conjecture to discover the true attitude of the Umbrian prophet in this matter. Without suspecting it, Celano himself gives details enough for the correction of his own errors, and there are besides a number of other documents whose scattered hints correspond and agree with one another in a manner all the more marvellous that it is entirely unintentional, giving, when they are brought together, almost all one could desire to know of the intercourse of these two beautiful souls. After the sermons of Francis at St. Rufino, Clara's decision was speedily taken; she would break away from the trivialities of an idle and luxurious life and make herself the servant of the poor; all her efforts should be bent to make each day a new advance in the royal way of love and poverty; and for this she would have only to obey him who had suddenly revealed it to her. She sought him out and opened to him her heart. With that exaltation, a union of candor and delicacy, which is woman's fine endowment, and to which she would more readily give free course if she did not too often divine the pitfalls of base passion and incredulity, Clara offered herself to Francis. It is one of the privileges of saints to suffer more than other men, for they feel in their more loving hearts the echo of all the sorrows of the world; but they also know joys and delights of which common men never taste. What an inexpressible song of joy must have burst forth in Francis's heart when he saw Clara on her knees before him, awaiting, with his blessing, the word which would consecrate her life to the gospel ideal. Who knows if this interview did not inspire another saint, Fra Angelico, to introduce into his masterpiece those two elect souls who, already radiant with the light of the heavenly Jerusalem, stop to exchange a kiss before crossing its threshold? Souls, like flowers, have a perfume of their own which never deceives. One look had sufficed for Francis to go down into the depths of this heart; he was too kind to submit Clara to useless tests, too much an idealist to prudently confine himself to custom or arbitrary decorum; as when he founded the Order of Friars, he took counsel only of himself and God. In this was his strength; if he had hesitated, or even if he had simply submitted himself to ecclesiastical rules, he would have been stopped twenty times before he had done anything. Success is so powerful an argument that the biographers appear not to have perceived how determined Francis was to ignore the canonical laws. He, a simple deacon, arrogated to himself the right to receive Clara's vows and admit her to the Order without the briefest novitiate. Such an act ought to have drawn down upon its author all the censures of the Church, but Francis was already one of those powers to whom much is forgiven, even by those who speak in the name of the holy Roman Church. Francis had decided that on the night between Palm Sunday and Holy Monday (March 18-19, 1212) Clara should secretly quit the paternal castle and come with two companions to Portiuncula, where he would await her, and would give her the veil. She arrived just as the friars were singing matins. They went out, the story goes, carrying candles in their hands, to meet the bride, while from the woods around Portiuncula resounded songs of joy over this new bridal. Then Mass was begun at that same altar where, three years before, Francis had heard the decisive call of Jesus; he was kneeling in the same place, but surrounded now with a whole spiritual family. It is easy to imagine Clara's emotion. The step which she had just taken was simply heroic, for she knew to what persecutions from her family she was exposing herself, and what she had seen of the life of the Brothers Minor was a sufficient warning of the distresses to which she was exposing herself in espousing poverty. No doubt she interpreted the words of the service in harmony with her own thoughts: "Surely they are my people," said Jehovah. "Children who will not be faithless!" And he was for them a saviour. In none of their afflictions were they without succor. And the angel that is before his face saved them.[4] Then Francis read again the words of Jesus to his disciples; she vowed to conform her life to them; her hair was cut off; all was finished. A few moments after, Francis conducted her to a house of Benedictine nuns[5] at an hour's distance, where she was to remain provisionally and await the progress of events. The very next morning Favorino, her father, arrived with a few friends, inveighing, supplicating, abusing everybody. She was unmovable, showing so much courage that at last they gave up the thought of carrying her off by main force. She was not, however, at the end of her tribulations. Had this scene frightened the Benedictines? We cannot tell, but less than a fortnight after we find her in another convent, that of Sant-Angelo in Panso, at Assisi.[6] A week after Easter, Agnes, her younger sister, joined her there, decided in her turn to serve poverty. Francis received her into the Order. This time the father's fury was horrible. With a band of relatives he invaded the convent, but neither abuse nor blows could subdue this child of fourteen. In spite of her cries they dragged her away. She fainted, and the little inanimate body suddenly seemed to them so heavy that they abandoned it in the midst of the fields, some laborers looking with pity on the painful scene, until Clara, whose cry God had heard, hastened to succor her sister. Their sojourn in this convent was of very short duration. It appears that they did not carry away a very pleasant impression of it.[7] Francis knew that several others were burning to join his two women friends; he therefore set himself to seek out a retreat where they could live under his direction and in all liberty practise the gospel rule. He had not long to seek; the Benedictine monks of Mount Subasio always seized every possible opportunity to make themselves popular. They belonged to that congregation of Camaldoli, whom the common people appear to have particularly detested, and several of whose convents had lately been pillaged.[8] The abbey no longer counted more than eight monks, who were trying to save the wreck of their riches and privileges by partial sacrifices; on the 22d of April, 1212, they had given to the commune of Assisi for a communal house a monument which is standing this day, the temple of Minerva.[9] Francis, who already was their debtor for Portiuncula, once more addressed himself to them. Happy in this new opportunity to render service to one who was the incarnation of popular claims, they gave him the chapel of St. Damian; perhaps they were well pleased, by favoring the new Order, to annoy Bishop Guido, of whom they had reason to complain.[10] However this may be, in this hermitage, so well adapted for prayer and meditation, Francis installed his spiritual daughters.[11] In this sanctuary, repaired by his own hands, at the feet of this crucifix which had spoken to him, Clara was henceforward to pray. It was the house of God; it was also in good measure that of Francis. Crossing its threshold, Clara doubtless experienced that feeling, at once so sweet and so poignant, of the wife who for the first time enters her husband's house, trembling with emotion at the radiant and confused vision of the future. If we are not entirely to misapprehend these beginnings, we must remember with what rapidity external influences transformed the first conception of St. Francis. At this moment he no more expected to found a second order than he had desired to found the first one. In snatching Clara from her family he had simply acted like a true knight who rescues an oppressed woman, and takes her under his protection. In installing her at St. Damian he was preparing a refuge for those who desired to imitate her and apart from the world practise the gospel Rule. But he never thought that the perfection of which he and his disciples were the apostles and missionaries, and which Clara and her companions were to realize in celibacy, was not practicable in social positions also; thence comes what is wrongly called the _Tertiari_, or Third Order, and which in its primitive thought was not separated from the first. This Third Order had no need to be instituted in 1221, for it existed from the moment when a single conscience resolved to practise his teachings, without being able to follow him to Portiuncula.[12] The enemy of the soul for him as for Jesus was avarice, understood in its largest sense--that is to say, that blindness which constrains men to consecrate their hearts to material preoccupations, makes them the slave of a few pieces of gold or a few acres of land, renders them insensible to the beauties of nature, and deprives them of infinite joys which they alone can know who are the disciples of poverty and love. Whoever was free at heart from all material servitude, whoever was decided to live without hoarding, every rich man who was willing to labor with his hands and loyally distribute all that he did not consume in order to constitute the common fund which St. Francis called _the Lord's table_, every poor man who was willing to work, free to resort, in the strict measure of his wants, to this table of the Lord, these were at that time true Franciscans. It was a social revolution. There was then at that time neither one Order nor several.[13] The gospel of the Beatitudes had been found again, and, as twelve centuries before, it could accommodate itself to all situations. Alas! the Church, personified by Cardinal Ugolini, was about, if not to cause the Franciscan movement to miscarry, at least so well to hedge about it that a few years later it would have lost nearly its whole original character. As has been seen, the word poverty expresses only very imperfectly St. Francis's point of view, since it contains an idea of renunciation, of _abstinence_, while in thought the vow of poverty is a vow of liberty. Property is the cage with gilded wires, to which the poor larks are sometimes so thoroughly accustomed that they no longer even think of getting away in order to soar up into the blue.[14] From the beginning St. Damian was the extreme opposite to what a convent of Clarisses of the strict observance is now; it is still to-day very much as Francis saw it. We owe thanks to the Brothers Minor for having preserved intact this venerable and charming hermitage, and not spoiling it with stupid embellishments. This little corner of Umbrian earth will be for our descendants like Jacob's well whereon Christ sat himself down for an instant, one of the favorite courts of the worship in spirit and in truth. In installing Clara there Francis put into her hands the Rule which he had prepared for her,[15] which no doubt resembled that of the Brothers save for the precepts with regard to the missionary life. He accompanied it with the engagement[16] taken by himself and his brothers to supply by labor or alms all the needs of Clara and her future companions. In return they also were to work and render to the Brothers all the services of which they might be capable. We have seen the zeal which Francis had brought to the task of making the churches worthy of the worship celebrated in them; he could not endure that the linen put to sacred uses should be less than clean. Clara set herself to spinning thread for the altar-cloths and corporals which the Brothers undertook to distribute among the poor churches of the district.[17] In addition, during the earlier years, she also nursed the sick whom Francis sent to her, and St. Damian was for some time a sort of hospital.[18] One or two friars, who were called _Zealots of the Poor Ladies_, were especially charged with the care of the Sisters, making themselves huts beside the chapel, after the model of those of Portiuncula. Francis was also near at hand; a sort of terrace four paces long overlooks the hermitage; Clara made there a tiny garden, and when, at twilight, she went thither to water her flowers, she could see, hardly half a league distant, Portiuncula standing out against the aureola of the western sky. For several years the relations between the two houses were continual, full of charm and freedom. The companions of Francis who received Brothers received Sisters also, at times returning from their preaching tours with a neophyte for St. Damian.[19] But such a situation could not last long. The intimacy of Francis and Clara, the familiarity of the earlier friars and Sisters would not do as a model for the relations of the two Orders when each had some hundreds of members. Francis himself very soon perceived this, though not so clearly as his sister-friend. Clara survived him nearly twenty-seven years, and thus had time to see the shipwreck of the Franciscan ideal among the Brothers, as well as in almost every one of the houses which had at first followed the Rule of St. Damian. She herself was led by the pressure of events to lay down rules for her own convent, but to her very death-bed she contended for the defence of the true Franciscan ideas, with a heroism, a boldness, at once intense and holy, by which she took a place in the first rank of witnesses for conscience. Is it not one of the loveliest pictures in religious history, that of this woman who for more than half a century sustains moment by moment a struggle with all the popes who succeed one another in the pontifical throne, remaining always equally respectful and immovable, not consenting to die until she has gained her victory?[20] To relate her life is to relate this struggle; the greater number of its vicissitudes may be found in the documents of the Roman _curia_. Francis had warded off many a danger from his institution, but he had given himself guardians who were little disposed to yield any of their rights; Cardinal Ugolini in particular, the future Gregory IX., took a part in these matters which is very difficult to understand. We see him continually lavishing upon Francis and Clara expressions of affection and admiration which appear to be absolutely sincere; and yet the Franciscan ideal--regarded as the life of love at which one arrives by freeing himself from all servitude to material things--has hardly had a worse adversary than he. In the month of May, 1228, Gregory IX. went to Assisi for the preliminaries of the canonization of St. Francis. Before entering the city he turned out of his way to visit St. Damian and to see Clara, whom he had known for a long time, and to whom he had addressed letters burning with admiration and paternal affection.[21] How can we understand that at this time, the eve of the canonization (July 16, 1228), the pontiff could have had the idea of urging her to be faithless to her vows? He represented to her that the state of the times made life impossible to women who possess nothing, and offered her certain properties. As Clara gazed at him in astonishment at this strange proposition, he said, "If it is your vows which prevent you, we will release you from them." "Holy Father," replied the Franciscan sister, "absolve me from my sins, but I have no desire for a dispensation from following Christ."[22] Noble and pious utterance, artless cry of independence, in which the conscience proudly proclaims its autonomy! In these words is mirrored at full length the spiritual daughter of the Poverello. By one of those intuitions which often come to very enthusiastic and very pure women, she had penetrated to the inmost depths of Francis's heart, and felt herself inflamed with the same passion which burned in him. She remained faithful to him to the end, but we perceive that it was not without difficulty. This is not the place in which to ask whether Gregory IX. was right in desiring that religious communities should hold estates; he had a right to his own views on the subject; but there is something shocking, to say no more, in seeing him placing Francis among the saints at the very moment when he was betraying his dearest ideals, and seeking to induce those who had remained faithful to betray them. Had Clara and Francis foreseen the difficulties which they would meet? We may suppose so, for already under the pontificate of Innocent III. she had obtained a grant of the privilege of poverty. The pope was so much surprised at such a request that he desired to write with his own hands the opening lines of this patent, the like of which had never been asked for at the court of Rome.[23] Under his successor, Honorius III., the most important personage of the curia was this very Cardinal Ugolini. Almost a septuagenarian in 1216 he inspired awe at first sight by the aspect of his person. He had that singular beauty which distinguishes the old who have escaped the usury of life; pious, enlightened, energetic, he felt himself made for great undertakings. There is something in him which recalls Cardinal Lavigerie and all the prelates whose red robes cover a soldier or a despot rather than a priest.[24] The Franciscan movement was attacked with violence[25] in various quarters; he undertook to defend it, and a very long time before the charge of protector of the Order was officially confided to him, he exercised it with devouring zeal.[26] He felt an unbounded admiration for Francis and Clara, and often manifested it in a touching manner. If he had been a simple man he might have loved them and followed them. Perhaps he even had thought of doing so.[27] Alas! he was a prince of the Church; he could not help thinking of what he would do in case he should be called to guide the ship of St. Peter. He acted accordingly; was it calculation on his part or simply one of those states of conscience in which a man absorbed in the end to be attained hardly discusses the ways and means? I do not know, but we see him immediately on the death of Innocent III., under pretext of protecting the Clarisses, take their direction in hand, give them a Rule, and substitute his own ideas for those of St. Francis.[28] In the privilege which as legate he gave in favor of Monticelli, July 27, 1219, neither Clara nor Francis is named, and the Damianites become as a congregation of Benedictines.[29] We shall see farther on the wrath of Francis against Brother Philip, a Zealot of the Poor Ladies, who had accepted this privilege in his absence. His attitude was so firm that other documents of the same nature granted by Ugolini at the same epoch were not indorsed by the pope until three years later. The cardinal's ardor to profit by the enthusiasm which the Franciscan ideas everywhere excited was so great that we find, in the register of his legation of 1221, a sort of formula all prepared for those who would found convents like those of the Sisters of St. Damian; but even there we search in vain for the name of Francis or Clara.[30] This old man had, however, a truly mystical passion for the young abbess; he wrote to her, lamenting the necessity of being far from her, in words which are the language of love, respect, and admiration.[31] There were at least two men in Ugolini: the Christian, who felt himself subdued before Clara and Francis; the prelate, that is, a man whom the glory of the Church sometimes caused to forget the glory of God. Francis, though almost always resisting him, appears to have kept a feeling of ingenuous gratitude toward him to the very end. Clara, on the contrary, had too long a struggle to be able to keep any illusions as to the attitude of her protector. After 1230 there is no trace of any relations between them. All the efforts of the pope to mitigate the rigor of Clara's vow of poverty had remained vain. Many other nuns desired to practise strictly the Rule of St. Francis. Among them was the daughter of the King of Bohemia, Ottokar I., who was in continual relations with Clara. But Gregory IX., to whom she addressed herself, was inflexible. While pouring eulogies upon her he enjoined upon her to follow the Rule which he sent to her--that is, the one which he had composed while he was yet cardinal. The Rule of the Poverello was put among the utopias, not to say heresies.[32] He never, however, could induce St. Clara to completely submit herself. One day, indeed, she rebelled against his orders, and it was the pope who was obliged to yield: he had desired to bring about a wider separation between the friars and the Sisters than had formerly prevailed; for a long time after the death of Francis a certain familiarity had continued between St. Damian and Portiuncula; Clara especially loved these neighborly relations, and often begged one or another Brother to come and preach. The pope thought ill of this, and forbade, under the severest penalty, that any friar of Portiuncula should go to St. Damian without express permission of the Holy See. This time Clara became indignant. She went to the few friars attached to her monastery, and thanking them for their services, "Go," she said; "since they deprive us of those who dispense to us spiritual bread, we will not have those who procure for us our material bread." He who wrote that "_the necks of kings and princes are bowed at the feet of the priests_" was obliged to bow before this woman and raise his prohibition.[33] St. Damian had too often echoed with St. Francis's hymns of love and liberty to forget him so soon and become an ordinary convent. Clara remained surrounded with the master's early companions; Egidio, Leo, Angelo, Ginepro never ceased to be assiduous visitors. These true lovers of poverty felt themselves at home there, and took liberties which would elsewhere have given surprise. One day an English friar, a celebrated theologian, came according to the minister's orders to preach at St. Damian. Suddenly Egidio, though a simple layman, interrupted him: "Stop, brother, let me speak," he said to him. And the master in theology, bowing his head, covered himself with his cowl as a sign of obedience, and sat down to listen to Egidio. Clara felt a great joy in this; it seemed to her that she was once again living in St. Francis's days.[34] The little coterie was kept up until her death; she expired in the arms of Brothers Leo, Angelo, and Ginepro. In her last sufferings and her dying visions she had the supreme happiness of being surrounded by those who had devoted their lives to the same ideal as she.[35] In her will her life shows itself that which we have seen it--a daily struggle for the defence of the Franciscan idea. We see how courageous and brave was this woman who has always been represented as frail, emaciated, blanched like a flower of the cloister.[36] She defended Francis not only against others, but also against himself. In those hours of dark discouragement which so often and so profoundly disturb the noblest souls and sterilize the grandest efforts, she was beside him to show him his way. When he doubted his mission and thought of fleeing to the heights of repose and solitary prayer, it was she who showed him the ripening harvest with no reapers to gather it in, men going astray with no shepherd to lead them, and drew him once again into the train of the Galilean, into the number of those who _give their lives a ransom for many_.[37] Yet this love with which at St. Damian Francis felt himself surrounded frightened him at times. He feared that his death, making too great a void, would imperil the institution itself, and he took pains to remind the sisters that he would not be always with them. One day when he was to preach to them, instead of entering the pulpit he caused some ashes to be brought, and after having spread them around him and scattered some on his head, he intoned the _Miserere_, thus reminding them that he was but dust and would soon return to dust.[38] But in general it is at St. Damian that St. Francis is the most himself; it is under the shade of its olive-trees, with Clara caring for him, that he composes his finest work, that which Ernest Renan called the most perfect utterance of modern religious sentiment, the "Canticle of the Sun." FOOTNOTES: [1] Easy as it is to seize the large outlines of her life, it is with difficulty that one makes a detailed and documentary study of it. There is nothing surprising in this, for the Clarisses felt the rebound of the struggles which divided and rapidly transformed the Order of the Brothers Minor. The greater number of the documents have disappeared; we give summary indication of those which will most often be cited: 1. Life of St. Clara by an anonymous author. A. SS., _Aug._, t. ii., pp. 739-768. 2. Her Will, given by Wadding (_Annales_, 1253, No. 5), but which does not appear to be free from alteration. (Compare, for example, the opening of this will with Chapter VI. of the Rule of the Damianites approved by Innocent IV., August 8, 1253.) 3. The bull of canonization, given September 26, 1255--that is to say, two years after Clara's death; it is much longer than these documents ordinarily are, and relates the principal incidents of her life. A. SS., _loc. cit._, p. 749; Potthast, 16,025. 4. Her correspondence. Unhappily we have only fragments of it; the Bollandists, without saying whence they drew them, have inserted four of her letters in the _Acta_ of St. Agnes of Bohemia, to whom they were addressed. (A. SS., _Martii_, t. i., pp. 506-508.) [2] Reading the Chronicle of Fra Salimbeni, which represents the average Franciscan character about 1250, one sees with what reason the Rule had multiplied minute precautions for keeping the Brothers from all relations with women. The desire of Celano to present the facts in the life of Francis as the norm of the acts of the friars appears still more in the chapters concerning St. Clara than in all the others. Vide 2 Cel., 3, 132: _Non credatis, charissimi (dixit Franciscus), quodeas perfecte non diligam.... Sed exemplum do vobis, ut quemadmodum ego facio, ita et vos faciatis._ Cf. ibid., 134. [3] 2 Cel., 3, 55. _Fateor veritatem ... nullam me si aspicerem recogniturum in facie nisi duas_. This chapter and the two following give us a sort of caricature, in which Francis is represented as so little sure of himself that he casts down his eyes for fear of yielding to desire. The stories of Francis and Jacqueline of Settesoli give a very different picture of the relations between the Brothers and the women in the origin of the Order from that which was given later. Bernard de Besse (Turin MS., f^o. 113) relates at length the coming of Jacqueline to Portiuncula to be present at St. Francis's death. Cf. _Spec._, 107; 133; Bon., 112. Also Clara's repast at Portiuncula. _Fior._, 15; _Spec._, 139b.; A. SS. _Aug. Vita Clar._, No. 39 ff. [4] Isaiah, lxiii., 8 and 9 (Ségond's [French] translation). At the Mass on Holy Monday Isaiah lxiii. is read for the Epistle and Mark xiv. for the Gospel. [5] San Paolo on the Chiasco, near Bastia. [6] At the present day diocesan seminary of Assisi, "_Seminarium seraphicum_." In the thirteenth century the north gate of the city was there. The houses which lie between there and the Basilica form the new town, which is rapidly growing and will unite the city with Sacro Convento. [7] _Nam steteramus in alio loco, licet parum. Test. Clar._ It is truly strange that there is not a word here for the house where the first days of her religious life were passed. Cf. _Vit._, no. 10: _S. Angelus de Panse ... ubi cum non plene mens ejus quiesceret._ [8] Mittarelli, _Annales Camaldulenses_ (Venice, 1755-1773, 9 vols., f^o.), t. iv., app. 431 and 435. Cf. 156. [9] The act of donation is still in the archives of Assisi. An analysis of it will be found in Cristofani, t. i., p. 133. Their munificence remained without result; the bull _Ab Ecclesia_ of July 27, 1232, shows that they were suppressed less than twenty years after. _Sbaralea_, t. 1, p. 81. Potthast, 8984. Cf., ib., p. 195, note c, and 340, note a, and the bulls which are there indicated. [10] See p. 81, note ii. [11] 1 Cel., 18; 21; 3 Soc., 24; 2 Cel., 1, 8. [12] _An. Perus._, A. SS., p. 600. Cf. 3 Soc., 60. The three Orders are contemporary, one might even say, the four, including among them the one that miscarried among the secular priests (see below). In a letter St. Clara speaks of her Order as making only a part with that of the Brothers: _Sequaris consilia Reverendi Patris nostri fratris Eliæ Ministri generalis totius ordinis_. A. SS., Martii, t. i., p. 507. [13] This point of view is brought into relief by an anecdote in the _De laudibus_ of Bernard of Besse (Turin MS., 113a). This is how he ends chap. vii. on the three Orders: _Nec Santus his contentus ordinibus satagebat omnium generi salutis et penitentiæ viam dare. Unde parochiali cuidam sacerdoti dicenti sibi quod vellet suus, retenta tamen ecclesia. Frater esse, dato vivendi et induendi modo, dicitur indixisse ut annuatim, collectis Eclesiæ fructibus daret pro Deo, quod de præteritis superesset._ [14] See the lovely story in the _Fior._, 13. Cf. _Spec._, 65a; _Conform._, 168b. 1. [15] The text of it was doubtless formerly inserted in chapter vi. of the Rule granted to the Clarisses of St. Damian, August 9, 1253, by the bull _Solet annuere_. Potthast, 15,086. But this chapter has been completely changed in many editions. The text of the _Speculum_, Morin, Rouen 1509, should be read. _Tract_ iii., 226b. The critical study to be made upon this text by comparing the indications given by the bull _Angelis guadium_ of May 11, 1238, Sbaralea, i., p. 242, is too long to find a place here. [16] 2 Cel., 3, 132. Cf. _Test. B. Clar._ [17] _In illa gravi infirmitate ... faciebat se erigi ... et sedens filabat._ A. SS., 760e. _Sic vult eas [sorores] operare manibus suis._ Ib. 762a. [18] _Fior._ 33. [19] Rule of 1221, chap xii. _Et nulla penitus mulier ab aliquo frater recipiatur ad obedientiam, sed dato sibi consilio spirituali, ubi voluerit agat penitentiam._ Cf. below, p. 252, note 1, the remainder of this chapter and the indication of the sources. This proves, 1, that the friars had received women into the Order; 2, that at the beginning they said The Order in the singular, and under this appellation included Sisters as well as Brothers. We see how far the situation was, even at the end of 1221, from being what it became a few years later. It is to be noted that in all the reforming sects of the commencement of the thirteenth century the two sexes were closely united. (Vide _Burchardi chronicon_, Pertz, 1, 23, p. 376. Cf. Potthast, 2611, bull _Cum otim_ of Nov. 25, 1205.) On the 7th of June, 1201 (bull _Incunubit nobis_), Innocent III. had approved the Rule of the Humiliants. This was a religious association whose members continued to live in their own homes, and who offer surprising points of contact with the Franciscan Order, though they took no vow of poverty. From them issued a more restricted association which founded convents where they worked in wool; these convents received both men and women. Vide Jacques de Vitry, _Hist. Occidentalis_, cap. 28. _De religione et regula Humiliatorum_ (Douai, 1597, pp. 334-337). The time came when from these two Orders issued a third, composed solely of priests. These _Humiliati_ are too little known, though they have had a historian whose book is one of the noble works of the eighteenth century: Tiraboschi, _Vetera Humiliatorum monumenta_ (Milan, 3 vols., 4to, 1766-1768). Toward 1200 they had monopolized _l'arte della lana_ in all upper Italy as far as to Florence; it is evident, therefore, that Francis's father must have had relations with them. [20] The bull approving the Rule of St. Damian is of August 9, 1253. Clara died two days later. [21] 1 Cel., 122. Cf. Potthast, 8194 ff.; cf. ib., 709. [22] A. SS., _Vita Cl._, p. 758. Cf. bull of canonization. [23] _Vit. S. Clar._, A. SS., p. 758. This petition was surely made by the medium of Francis; and there are several indications of his presence in Perugia in the latter part of the life of Innocent III. _In obitu suo [Alexandri papæ] omnes familiares sui deseruerunt eum præter fratres Minores. Et similiter Papam Gregorium et Honorium et Innocentium in cujus obitu fuit præsentialiter S. Franciscus._ Eccl. xv. _Mon. Germ. hist. Script._, t. 28 p. 568. Sbaralea puts forth doubts as to the authenticity of this privilege, the text of which he gives; wrongly, I think, for Clara alludes to it in her will, A. SS., p. 747. [24] He was born about 1147, created cardinal in 1198. Vide Raynald, _ann._, 1217, § 88, the eulogy made upon him by Honorius III. _Forma decorus et venustus aspectu ... zelator fidei, disciplina virtutis, ... castitatis amator et totius sanctitatis exemplar_: Muratori, _Scriptores rer. Ital._, iii., 1, 575. [25] 1 Cel., 74. [26] The bull _Litteræ tuæ_ of August 27, 1218, shows him already favoring the Clarisses. Sbaralea, i., p. 1. Vide 3 Soc., 61. _Offero me ipsum, dixit Hugolinus, vobis, auxilium et consilium, atque protectionem paratus impendere._ [27] In the Conformities, 107a, 2, there is a curious story which shows Ugolini going to the Carceri to find Francis, and asking him if he ought to enter his Order. Cf. _Spec._, 217. [28] He succeeded so well that Thomas of Celano himself seems to forget that, at least at St. Damian, the Clarisses followed the Rule given by St. Francis himself: _Ipsorum vita mirifica et institutio gloriosa a domino Papa Gregorio, tunc Hostiensi episcopo._ 1 Cel. 20. Cf. _Honorii Opera_ Horoy, t. iii., col. 363; t. iv., col. 218; Potthast, 6179 and 6879 ff. [29] This privilege is inserted in the bull _Sacrosancta_ of December 9, 1219. _Honorii opera_, Horoy, t. iii., col. 363 ff. [30] G. Levi, _Registri dei Cardinali_, no. 125. Vide below, p. 400. Cf. Campi, _Hist. eccl. di Piacenza_, ii., 390. [31] See, for example, the letter given by Wadding: Annals, ii., p. 16 (Rome, 1732). _Tanta me amaritudo cordis, abundantia lacrymarum et immanitas doloris invasit, quod nisi ad pedes Jesu, consolationem solitæ pietatis invenirem, spiritus meus forte deficeret et penitus anima liquefieret._ Wadding's text should be corrected by that of the Riccardi MS., 279. f^o 80a and b. Cf. Mark of Lisbon, t. i., p. 185; Sbaralea, i., p. 37. [32] Bull _Angelis gaudium_ of May 11, 1238; it may be found in Sbaralea, i., p. 242. Cf. Palacky, _Literarische Reise nach Italien_, Prague, 1838, 4to, no. 147. Potthast, 10,596; cf. 11,175. [33] A. SS., _Vit. Clar._, p. 762. Cf. _Conform._, 84b, 2. [34] A. SS., _Aprilis_, t. iii., p. 239a; _Conform._, 54a, 1; 177a, 2. [35] A. SS., _Vit. Clar._, p. 764d. [36] The bull of canonization says nothing of the Saracens whom she put to flight. Her life in the A. SS. relates the fact, but shows her simply in prayer before the Holy Sacrament. Cf. _Conform._, 84b, 1. Mark of Lisbon t. i., part 2, pp. 179-181. None of these accounts represents Clara as going to meet them with a monstrance. [37] Bon., 173; _Fior._ 16; _Spec._, 62b; _Conform._, 84b, 2; 110b 1; 49a, 1. With these should be compared _Spec._, 220b: _Frater Leo narravit quod Sanctus Franciscus surgens orare_ (sic) _venit ad fratres suos dicens: "Ite ad sæculum et dimittatis habitum, licentio vos._" [38] 2 Cel., 3, 134. * * * * * CHAPTER X FIRST ATTEMPTS TO REACH THE INFIDELS Autumn, 1212-Summer, 1215 The early Brothers Minor had too much need of the encouragement and example of Francis not to have very early agreed with him upon certain fixed periods when they would be sure to find him at Portiuncula. Still it appears probable that these meetings did not become true Chapters-General until toward 1216. There were at first two a year, one at Whitsunday, the other at Michaelmas (September 29th). Those of Whitsunday were the most important; all the Brothers came together to gain new strength in the society of Francis, to draw generous ardor and grand hopes from him with his counsels and directions. The members of the young association had everything in common, their joys as well as their sorrows; their uncertainties as well as the results of their experiences. At these meetings they were particularly occupied with the Rule, the changes that needed to be made in it, and above all, how they might better and better observe it;[1] then, in perfect harmony, they settled the allotment of the friars to the various provinces. One of Francis's most frequent counsels bore upon the respect due to the clergy; he begged his disciples to show a very particular deference to the priests, and never to meet them without kissing their hands. He saw only too well that the Brothers, having renounced everything, were in danger of being unjust or severe toward the rich and powerful of the earth; he, therefore, sought to arm them against this tendency, often concluding his counsels with these noble words: "There are men who to-day appear to us to be members of the devil who one day shall be members of Christ." "Our life in the midst of the world," said he again, "ought to be such that, on hearing or seeing us, every one shall feel constrained to praise our heavenly Father. You proclaim peace; have it in your hearts. Be not an occasion of wrath or scandal to anyone, but by your gentleness may all be led to peace, concord, and good works." It was especially when he undertook to cheer his disciples, to fortify them against temptations and deliver them from their power, that Francis was most successful. However anxious a soul might be, his words brought it back to serenity. The earnestness which he showed in calming sadness became fiery and terrible in reproving those who fell away, but in these days of early fervor he seldom had occasion to show severity; more often he needed gently to reprove the Brothers whose piety led them to exaggerate penances and macerations. When all was finished and each one had had his part in this banquet of love, Francis would bless them, and they would disperse in all directions like strangers and travellers. They had nothing, but already they thought they saw the signs of the grand and final regeneration. Like the exile on Patmos they saw "the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, like a bride adorned for her husband ... and the throne upon which is seated the Desired of all nations, the Messiah of the new times, he who is to make all things new."[2] Yet all eyes were turned toward Syria, where a French knight, Jean de Brienne, had just been declared King of Jerusalem (1210), and toward which were hastening the bands of the children's crusade. The conversion of Francis, radical as it was, giving a new direction to his thoughts and will, had not had power to change the foundation of his character. "In a great heart everything is great." In vain is one changed at conversion--he remains the same. That which changes is not he who is converted, but his surroundings; he is suddenly introduced into a new path, but he runs in it with the same ardor. Francis still remained a knight, and it is perhaps this which won for him in so high a degree the worship of the finest souls of the Middle Ages. There was in him that longing for the unknown, that thirst for adventures and sacrifices, which makes the history of his century so grand and so attractive, in spite of many dark features. Those who have a genius for religion have generally the privilege of illusion. They never quite see how large the world is. When their faith has moved a mountain they thrill with rapture, like the old Hebrew prophets, and it seems to them that they see the dawning of the day "when the glory of the Lord will appear, when the wolf and the lamb will feed together." Blessed illusion, that fires the blood like a generous wine, so that the soldiers of righteousness hurl themselves against the most terrific fortresses, believing that these once taken the war will be ended. Francis had found such joys in his union with poverty that he held it for proven that one needed only to be a man to aspire after the same happiness, and that the Saracens would be converted in crowds to the gospel of Jesus, if only it were announced to them in all its simplicity. He therefore quitted Portiuncula for this new kind of crusade. It is not known from what port he embarked. It was probably in the autumn of 1212. A tempest having cast the ship upon the coast of Slavonia, he was obliged to resign himself either to remain several months in those parts or to return to Italy; he decided to return, but found much difficulty in securing a passage on a ship which was about to sail for Ancona. He had no ill-will against the sailors, however, and the stock of food falling short he shared with them the provisions with which his friends had overloaded him. No sooner had he landed than he set out on a preaching tour, in which souls responded to his appeals[3] with even more eagerness than in times past. We may suppose that he returned from Slavonia in the winter of 1212-1213, and that he employed the following spring in evangelizing Central Italy. It was perhaps during this Lent that he retired to an island in Lake Trasimeno, making a sojourn there which afterward became famous in his legend.[4] However that may be, a perfectly reliable document shows him to have been in the Romagna in the month of May, 1213.[5] One day Francis and his companion, perhaps Brother Leo, arrived at the chateau of Montefeltro,[6] between Macerata and San Marino. A grand fête was being given for the reception of a new knight, but the noise and singing did not affright them, and without hesitation they entered the court, where all the nobility of the country was assembled. Francis then taking for his text the two lines, Tanto è il bene ch' aspetto Ch'ogni pena m'è diletto,[7] preached so touching a sermon that several of those present forgot for a moment the tourney for which they had come. One of them, Orlando dei Cattani, Count of Chiusi in Casentino, was so much moved that, drawing Francis aside, "Father," he said to him, "I desire much to converse with you about the salvation of my soul." "Very willingly," replied Francis; "but go for this morning, do honor to those friends who have invited you, eat with them, and after that we will converse as much as you please." So it was done. The count came back and concluded the interview by saying, "I have in Tuscany a mountain especially favorable to contemplation; it is entirely isolated and would well suit anyone who desired to do penance far from the noises of the world; if it pleased you I would willingly give it to you and your brethren for the salvation of my soul." Francis accepted it joyfully, but as he was obliged to be at Portiuncula for the Whitsunday chapter he postponed the visit to the Verna[8] to a more favorable time. It was perhaps in this circuit that he went to Imola; at least nothing forbids the supposition. Always courteous, he had gone immediately on his arrival to present himself to the bishop, and ask of him authority to preach. "I am not in need of anyone to aid me in my task," replied the bishop dryly. Francis bowed and retired, more polite and even more gentle than usual. But in less than hour he had returned. "What is it, brother, what do you want of me again?" "Monsignor," replied Francis, "when a father drives his son out at the door he returns by the window." The bishop, disarmed by such pious persistence, gave the desired authorization.[9] The aim of Francis at that time, however, was not to evangelize Italy; his friars were already scattered over it in great numbers; and he desired rather to gain them access to new countries. Not having been able to reach the infidels in Syria, he resolved to seek them in Morocco. Some little time before (July, 1212), the troops of the Almohades had met an irreparable defeat in the plains of Tolosa; beaten by the coalition of the Kings of Aragon, Navarre, and Castile, Mohammed-el-Naser had returned to Morocco to die. Francis felt that this victory of arms would be nothing if it were not followed by a peaceful victory of the gospel spirit. He was so full of his project, so much in haste to arrive at the end of his journey, that very often he would forget his companion, and hastening forward would leave him far behind. The biographers are unfortunately most laconic with regard to this expedition; they merely say that on arriving in Spain he was so seriously ill that a return home was imperative. Beyond a few local legends, not very well attested, we possess no other information upon the labors of the Saint in this country, nor upon the route which he followed either in going or returning.[10] This silence is not at all surprising, and ought not to make us undervalue the importance of this mission. The one to Egypt, which took place six years later, with a whole train of friars, and at a time when the Order was much more developed, is mentioned only in a few lines by Thomas of Celano; but for the recent discovery of the Chronicle of Brother Giordano di Giano and the copious details given by Jacques de Vitry, we should be reduced to conjectures upon that journey also. The Spanish legends, to which allusion has just been made, cannot be altogether without foundation, any more than those which concern the journey of St. Francis through Languedoc and Piedmont; but in the actual condition of the sources it is impossible to make a choice, with any sort of authority, between the historic basis and additions to it wholly without value. The mission in Spain doubtless took place between the Whitsunday of 1214 and that of 1215.[11] Francis, I think, had passed the previous year[12] in Italy. Perhaps he was then going to see the Verna. The March of Ancona and the Valley of Rieti would naturally have attracted him equally about this epoch, and finally the growth of the two branches of the Order must have made necessary his presence at Portiuncula and St. Damian. The rapidity and importance of these missions ought in no sense to give surprise, nor awaken exaggerated critical doubts. It took only a few hours to become a member of the fraternity, and we may not doubt the sincerity of these vocations, since their condition was the immediate giving up of all property of whatever kind, for the benefit of the poor. The new friars were barely received when they in their turn began to receive others, often becoming the heads of the movement in whatever place they happened to be. The way in which we see things going on in Germany in 1221, and in England in 1224, gives a very living picture of this spiritual germination. To found a monastery it was enough that two or three Brothers should have at their disposition some sort of a shelter, whence they radiated out into the city and the neighboring country. It would, therefore, be as much an exaggeration to describe St. Francis as a man who passed his life in founding convents, as to deny altogether the local traditions which attribute to him the erection of a hundred monasteries. In many cases a glance is enough to show whether these claims of antiquity are justified; before 1220 the Order had only hermitages after the pattern of the Verna or the Carceri, solely intended for the Brothers who desired to pass some time in retreat. Returned to Assisi, Francis admitted to the Order a certain number of learned men, among whom was perhaps Thomas of Celano. The latter, in fact, says that God at that time mercifully remembered him, and he adds further on: "The blessed Francis was of an exquisite nobility of heart and full of discernment; with the greatest care he rendered to each one what was due him, with wisdom considering in each case the degree of their dignities." This does not harmonize very well with the character of Francis as we have sketched it; one can hardly imagine him preserving in his Order such profound distinctions as were at that time made between the different social ranks, but he had that true and eternal politeness which has its roots in the heart, and which is only an expression of tact and love. It could not be otherwise with a man who saw in courtesy one of the qualities of God. We are approaching one of the most obscure periods of his life. After the chapter of 1215 he seems to have passed through one of those crises of discouragement so frequent with those who long to realize the ideal in this world. Had he discovered the warning signs of the misfortunes which were to come upon his family? Had he come to see that the necessities of life were to sully and blight his dream? Had he seen in the check of his missions in Syria and Morocco a providential indication that he had to change his method? We do not know. But about this time he felt the need of turning to St. Clara and Brother Silvestro for counsel on the subject of the doubts and hesitations which assailed him; their reply restored to him peace and joy. God by their mouth commanded him to continue his apostolate.[13] Immediately he rose and set forth in the direction of Bevagna,[14] with an ardor which he had never yet shown. In encouraging him to persevere Clara had in some sort inoculated him with a new enthusiasm. One word from her had sufficed to give him back all his courage, and from this point in his life we find in him more poetry, more love, than ever before. Full of joy, he was going on his way when, perceiving some flocks of birds, he turned aside a little from the road to go to them. Far from taking flight, they flocked around him as if to bid him welcome. "Brother birds," he said to them then, "you ought to praise and love your Creator very much. He has given you feathers for clothing, wings for flying, and all that is needful for you. He has made you the noblest of his creatures; he permits you to live in the pure air; you have neither to sow nor to reap, and yet he takes care of you, watches over you and guides you." Then the birds began to arch their necks, to spread out their wings, to open their beaks, to look at him, as if to thank him, while he went up and down in their midst stroking them with the border of his tunic, sending them away at last with his blessing.[15] In this same evangelizing tour, passing through Alviano,[16] he spoke a few exhortations to the people, but the swallows so filled the air with their chirping that he could not make himself heard. "It is my turn to speak," he said to them; "little sister swallows, hearken to the word of God; keep silent and be very quiet until I have finished."[17] We see how Francis's love extended to all creation, how the diffused life shed abroad upon all things inspired and moved him. From the sun to the earthworm which we trample under foot, everything breathed in his ear the ineffable sigh of beings that live and suffer and die, and in their life as in their death have a part in the divine work. "Praised be thou, Lord, with all thy creatures, especially for my brother Sun which gives us the day and by him thou showest thy light. He is beautiful and radiant with great splendor; of thee, Most High, he is the symbol." Here again, Francis revives the Hebrew inspiration, the simple and grandiose view of the prophets of Israel. "Praise the Lord!" the royal Psalmist had sung, "praise the Lord, fire and frost, snow and mists, stormy winds that do his will, mountains and all hills, fruit-trees and all cedars, beasts and all cattle, creeping things and fowls with wings, kings of the earth and all peoples, princes and all judges of the earth, young men and maidens, old men and children, praise the Lord, praise ye the Lord!" The day of the birds of Bevagna remained in his memory as one of the most beautiful of his whole life, and though usually so reserved he always loved to tell of it;[18] it was because he owed to Clara these pure ardors which brought him into a secret and delicious communion with all beings; it was she who had revived him from sadness and hesitation; in his heart he bore an immense gratitude to her who, just when he needed it, had known how to return to him love for love, inspiration for inspiration. Francis's sympathy for animals, as we see it shining forth here, has none of that sentimentalism, so often artificial and exclusive of all other love, which certain associations of his time noisily displayed; in him it is only a manifestation of his feeling for nature, a deeply mystical, one might say pantheistic, sentiment, if the word had not a too definitely philosophical sense, quite opposite to the Franciscan thought. This sentiment, which in the poets of the thirteenth century is so often false and affected, was in him not only true, but had in it something alive, healthy, robust.[19] It is this vein of poetry which awoke Italy to self-consciousness, made her in a few years forget the nightmare of Catharist ideas, and rescued her from pessimism. By it Francis became the forerunner of the artistic movement which preceded the Renaissance, the inspirer of that group of Pre-Raphaelites, awkward, grotesque in drawing though at times they were, to whom we turn to-day with a sort of piety, finding in their ungraceful saints an inner life, a moral feeling which we seek for elsewhere in vain. If the voice of the Poverello of Assisi was so well understood it was because in this matter, as in all others, it was entirely unconventional. How far we are, with him, from the fierce or Pharisaic piety of those monks which forbids even the females of animals to enter their convent! His notion of chastity in no sense resembles this excessive prudery. One day at Sienna he asked for some turtle-doves, and holding them in the skirt of his tunic, he said: "Little sisters turtle-doves, you are simple, innocent, and chaste; why did you let yourselves be caught? I shall save you from death, and have nests made for you, so that you may bring forth young and multiply according to the commandment of our Creator." And he went and made nests for them all, and the turtle-doves began to lay eggs and bring up their broods under the eyes of the Brothers.[20] At Rieti a family of red-breasts were the guests of the monastery, and the young birds made marauding expeditions on the very table where the Brothers were eating.[21] Not far from there, at Greccio,[22] they brought to Francis a leveret that had been taken alive in a trap. "Come to me, brother leveret," he said to it. And as the poor creature, being set free, ran to him for refuge, he took it up, caressed it, and finally put it on the ground that it might run away; but it returned to him again and again, so that he was obliged to send it to the neighboring forest before it would consent to return to freedom.[23] One day he was crossing the Lake of Rieti. The boatman in whose bark he was making the passage offered him a tench of uncommon size. Francis accepted it with joy, but to the great amazement of the fisherman put it back into the water, bidding it bless God.[24] We should never have done if we were to relate all the incidents of this kind,[25] for the sentiment of nature was innate with him; it was a perpetual communion which made him love the whole creation.[26] He is ravished with the witchery of great forests; he has the terrors of a child when he is alone at prayer in a deserted chapel, but he tastes ineffable joy merely in inhaling the perfume of a flower, or gazing into the limpid water of a brook.[27] This perfect lover of poverty permitted one luxury--he even commanded it at Portiuncula--that of flowers; the Brother was bidden not to sow vegetables and useful plants only; he must reserve one corner of good ground for our sisters, the flowers of the fields. Francis talked with them also, or rather he replied to them, for their mysterious and gentle language crept into the very depth of his heart.[28] The thirteenth century was prepared to understand the voice of the Umbrian poet; the sermon to the birds[29] closed the reign of Byzantine art and of the thought of which it was the image. It is the end of dogmatism and authority; it is the coming in of individualism and inspiration; very uncertain, no doubt, and to be followed by obstinate reactions, but none the less marking a date in the history of the human conscience.[30] Many among the companions of Francis were too much the children of their century, too thoroughly imbued with its theological and metaphysical methods, to quite understand a sentiment so simple and profound.[31] But each in his degree felt its charm. Here Thomas of Celano's language rises to an elevation which we find in no other part of his works, closing with a picture of Francis which makes one think of the Song of Songs.[32] Of more than middle height, Francis had a delicate and kindly face, black eyes, a soft and sonorous voice. There was in his whole person a delicacy and grace which made him infinitely lovely. All these characteristics are found in the most ancient portraits.[33] FOOTNOTES: [1] 3 Soc., 57; cf. _An. Perus._, A. SS., p. 599. [2] Rev. xxi.; 1 Cel., 46; 3 Soc., 57-59; _An. Perus._, A. SS., p. 600. [3] 1 Cel., 55 and 56; Bon., 129-132. [4] _Fior._, 7; _Spec._, 96; _Conform._, 223a, 2. The fact of Francis's sojourn on an island in this lake is made certain by 1 Cel., 60. [5] Vide below, p. 400. Cf. A. SS., pp. 823 f. [6] At present Sasso-Feltrio, between Conca and Marecchio, south of and about two hours' walk from San Marino. [7] The happiness that I expect is so great that all pain is joyful to me. All the documents give Francis's text in Italian, which is enough to prove that it was the language not only of his poems but also of his sermons. _Spec._ 92a ff. _Conform._ 113a, 2; 231a, 1; _Fior., Prima consid._ [8] See p. 400. [9] 2 Cel., 3, 85; Bon., 82. [10] 1 Cel., 56; Bon., 132. [11] Vide Wadding, _ann. 1213-1215_. Cf. A. SS., pp. 602, 603, 825-831. Mark of Lisbon, _lib._ i., _cap._ 45, pp. 78-80; Papini, _Storia di S. Francesco_, i., p. 79 ff. (Foligno, 1825, 2 vols., 4to). It is surprising to see Father Suysken giving so much weight to the _argumentum a silentio_. [12] From Pentecost, 1213, to that of 1214.--_Post non multum vero temporis versus Marochium iter arripuit_, says Thomas of Celano (1 Cel., 56), after having mentioned the return from Slavonia. Taking into account the author's _usus loquendi_ the phrase appears to establish a certain interval between the two missions. [13] _Conform._, 110b, 1; _Spec._, 62b; _Fior._, 16; Bon., 170-174. [14] Village about two leagues S. W. from Assisi. The time is indirectly fixed by Bon., 173, and 1 Cel., 58. [15] 1 Cel. 58; Bon., 109 and 174; _Fior._, 16; _Spec._, 62b; _Conform._, 114b, 2. [16] About halfway between Orvieto and Narni. [17] 1 Cel., 59; Bon., 175. [18] _Ad hæc, ut ipse dicebat_ ... 1 Cel., 58. [19] Francis has been compared in this regard to certain of his contemporaries, but the similarity of the words only makes more evident the diversity of inspiration. Honorius III. may say: _Forma rosæ est inferius angusta, superius ampla et significat quod Christus pauper fuit in mundo, sed est Dominus super omnia et implet universa. Nam sicut forma rosæ_, etc. (Horoy, t. i., col. xxiv. and 804), and make a whole sermon on the symbolism of the rose; these overstrained dissertations have nothing to do with the feeling for nature. It is the arsenal of mediæval rhetoric used to dissect a word. It is an intellectual effort, not a song of love. The Imitation would say: _If thy heart were right all creatures would be for thee a mirror of life and a volume of holy doctrine_, lib. ii., cap. 2. The simple sentiment of the beauty of creation is absent here also; the passage is a pedagogue in disguise. [20] _Spec._, 157. _Fior._; 22. [21] 2 Cel., 2, 16; _Conform._, 148a, 1, 183b, 2. Cf. the story of the sheep of Portiuncula: Bon., 111. [22] Village in the valley of Rieti, two hours' walk from that town, on the road to Terni. [23] 1 Cel., 60; Bon., 113. [24] 1 Cel., 61; Bon., 114. [25] 2 Cel., 3, 54; Bon., 109; 2 Cel., 3; 103 ff.; Bon., 116 ff.; Bon., 110; 1 Cel., 61; Bon., 114, 113, 115; 1 Cel., 79; _Fior._, 13, etc. [26] 2 Cel., 3, 101 ff.; Bon., 123. [27] 2 Cel., 3, 59; 1 Cel., 80 and 81. [28] 2 Cel., 3, 101; _Spec._, 136a; 1 Cel., 81. [29] This is the scene in his life most often reproduced by the predecessors of Giotto. The unknown artist who (before 1236) decorated the nave of the Lower Church of Assisi gives five frescos to the history of Jesus and five to the life of St. Francis. Upon the latter he represents: 1, the renunciation of the paternal inheritance; 2, Francis upholding the Lateran church; 3, the sermon to the birds; 4, the stigmata; 5, the funeral. This work, unhappily very badly lighted, and about half of it destroyed at the time of the construction of the chapels of the nave, ought to be engraved before it completely disappears. The history of art in the time of Giunta Pisano is still too much enveloped in obscurity for us to neglect such a source of information. M. Thode (_Franz von Assisi und die Anfänge der Kunst_, Berlin, 1885, 8vo. illust.) and the Rev. Father Fratini (_Storia della Basilica d'Assisi_, Prato, 1882, 8vo) are much too brief so far as these frescos are concerned. [30] It is needless to say that I do not claim that Francis was the only initiator of this movement, still less that he was its creator; he was its most inspired singer, and that may suffice for his glory. If Italy was awakened it was because her sleep was not so sound as in the tenth century; the mosaics of the façade of the Cathedral of Spoleto (the Christ between the Virgin and St. John) already belong to the new art. Still, the victory was so little final that the mural paintings of St. Lawrence without the walls and of the Quattro Coronate, which are subsequent to it by half a score of years, relapse into a coarse Byzantinism. See also those of the Baptistery of Florence. [31] Hence the more or less subtile explanations with which they adorn these incidents.--As to the part of animals in thirteenth century legends consult Cæsar von Heisterbach, Strange's edition, t. ii., pp. 257 ff. [32] 1 Cel., 80-83. [33] 1 Cel., 83; _Conform._, 111a. M. Thode (_Anfänge_, pp. 76-94) makes a study of some thirty portraits. The most important are reproduced in _Saint François_ (1 vol., 4to, Paris, 1885); 1, contemporary portrait, by Brother Eudes, now at Subiaco (_loc. cit._, p. 30); 2, portrait dating about 1230, by Giunta Pisano (?); preserved at Portiuncula (_loc. cit._, p. 384); 3, finally, portrait dated 1235, by Bon. Berlinghieri, and preserved at Pescia, in Tuscany (_loc. cit._, p. 277). In 1886 Prof. Carattoli studied with great care a portrait which dates from about those years and of which he gives a picture (also preserved of late years at Portiuncula). _Miscellanea francescana_ t. i., pp. 44-48; cf. pp. 160, 190, and 1887, p. 32. M. Bonghi has written some interesting papers on the iconography of St. Francis (_Francesco di Assisi_, 1 vol., 12mo, Citta di Castello, Lapi, 1884. Vide pp. 103-113). * * * * * CHAPTER XI THE INNER MAN AND WONDER-WORKING The missionary journey, undertaken under the encouragement of St. Clara and so poetically inaugurated by the sermon to the birds of Bevagna, appears to have been a continual triumph for Francis.[1] Legend definitively takes possession of him; whether he will or no, miracles burst forth under his footsteps; quite unawares to himself the objects of which he has made use produce marvellous effects; folk come out from the villages in procession to meet him, and the biographer gives us to hear the echo of those religious festivals of Italy--merry, popular, noisy, bathed in sunshine--which so little resemble the fastidiously arranged festivals of northern peoples. From Alviano Francis doubtless went to Narni, one of the most charming little towns in Umbria, busy with building a cathedral after the conquest of their communal liberties. He seems to have had a sort of predilection for this city as well as for its surrounding villages.[2] From thence he seems to have plunged into the valley of Rieti, where Greccio, Fonte-Colombo, San Fabiano, Sant-Eleuthero, Poggio-Buscone retain even stronger traces of him than the environs of Assisi. Thomas of Celano gives us no particulars of the route followed, but, on the other hand, he goes at length into the success of the apostle in the March of Ancona, and especially at Ascoli. Did the people of these districts still remember the appeals which Francis and Egidio had made to them six years before (1209), or must we believe that they were peculiarly prepared to understand the new gospel? However this may be, nowhere else was a like enthusiasm shown; the effect of the sermons was so great that some thirty neophytes at once received the habit of the Order. The March of Ancona ought to be held to be the Franciscan province _par excellence_. There are Offida, San-Severino, Macerata, Fornaro, Cingoli, Fermo, Massa, and twenty other hermitages where, during more than a century, poverty was to find its heralds and its martyrs; from thence came Giovanni della Verna, Jacopo di Massa, Conrad di Offida, Angelo Clareno, and those legions of nameless revolutionists, dreamers, and prophets, who since the _extirpés_ in 1244 by the general of the Order, Crescentius of Jesi, never ceased to make new recruits, and by their proud resistance to all powers filled one of the finest pages of religious history in the Middle Ages. This success, which bathed the soul of Francis with joy, did not arouse in him the smallest movement of pride. Never has man had a greater power over hearts, because never preacher preached himself less. One day Brother Masseo desired to put his modesty to the test. "Why thee? Why thee? Why thee?" he repeated again and again, as if to make a mock of Francis. "What are you saying?" cried Francis at last. "I am saying that everybody follows thee, everyone desires to see thee, hear thee, and obey thee, and yet for all that thou art neither beautiful, nor learned, nor of noble family. Whence comes it, then, that it should be thee whom the world desires to follow?" On hearing these words the blessed Francis, full of joy, raised his eyes to heaven, and after remaining a long time absorbed in contemplation he knelt, praising and blessing God with extraordinary fervor. Then turning toward Masseo, "Thou wishest to know why it is I whom men follow? Thou wishest to know? It is because the eyes of the Most High have willed it thus; he continually watches the good and the wicked, and as his most holy eyes have not found among sinners any smaller man, nor any more insufficient and more sinful, therefore he has chosen me to accomplish the marvellous work which God has undertaken; he chose me because he could find no one more worthless, and he wished here to confound the nobility and grandeur, the strength, the beauty, and the learning of this world." This reply throws a ray of light upon St. Francis's heart; the message which he brought to the world is once again the glad tidings announced to the poor; its purpose is the taking up again of that Messianic work which the Virgin of Nazareth caught a glimpse of in her _Magnificat_, that song of love and liberty, the sighs of which breathe the vision of a new social state. He comes to remind the world that the welfare of man, the peace of his heart, the joy of his life, are neither in money, nor in learning, nor in strength, but in an upright and sincere will. Peace to men of good will. The part which he had taken at Assisi in the controversies of his fellow-citizens he would willingly have taken in all the rest of Italy, for no man has ever dreamed of a more complete renovation; but if the end he sought was the same as that of many revolutionaries who came after him, their methods were completely different; his only weapon was love. The event has decided against him. Apart from the _illuminati_ of the March of Ancona and the _Fraticelli_ of our own Provence his disciples have vied with one another to misunderstand his thought.[3] Who knows if some one will not arise to take up his work? Has not the passion for worm-eaten speculations yet made victims enough? Are there not many among us who perceive that luxury is a delusion, that if life is a battle, it is not a slaughter-house where ferocious beasts wrangle over their prey, but a wrestling with the divine, under whatever form it may present itself--truth, beauty, or love? Who knows whether this expiring nineteenth century will not arise from its winding-sheet to make _amende honorable_ and bequeath to its successor one manly word of faith? Yes, the Messiah will come. He who was announced by Gioacchino di Fiore and who is to inaugurate a new epoch in the history of humanity will appear. _Hope maketh not ashamed._ In our modern Babylons and in the huts on our mountains are too many souls who mysteriously sigh the hymn of the great vigil, _Rorate coeli desuper et nubes pluant Justum_,[4] for us not to be on the eve of a divine birth. All origins are mysterious. This is true of matter, but yet more true of that life, superior to all others, which we call holiness; it was in prayer that Francis found the spiritual strength which he needed; he therefore sought for silence and solitude. If he knew how to do battle in the midst of men in order to win them to the faith, he loved, as Celano says, to fly away like a bird going to make its nest upon the mountain.[5] With men truly pious the prayer of the lips, the formulated prayer, is hardly other than an inferior form of true prayer. Even when it is sincere and attentive, and not a mechanical repetition, it is only a prelude for souls not dead of religious materialism. Nothing resembles piety so much as love. Formularies of prayer are as incapable of speaking the emotions of the soul as model love-letters of speaking the transports of an impassioned heart. To true piety as well as to profound love, the formula is a sort of profanation. To pray is to talk with God, to lift ourselves up to him, to converse with him that he may come down to us. It is an act of meditation, of reflection, which presupposes the effort of all that is most personal in us. Looked at in this sense, prayer is the mother of all liberty and all freedom. Whether or no it be a soliloquy of the soul with itself, the soliloquy would be none the less the very foundation of a strong individuality. With St. Francis as with Jesus, prayer has this character of effort which makes of it the greatest moral act. In order to truly know such men one must have been able to go with them, to follow Jesus up to the mountain where he passed his nights. Three favored ones, Peter, James, John, followed him thither one day; but to describe what they saw, all that a manly _sursum corda_ added to the radiance and the mysterious grandeur of him whom they adored, they were obliged to resort to the language of symbols. It was so with St. Francis. For him as for his Master the end of prayer is communion with the heavenly Father, the accord of the divine with the human; or rather it is man who puts forth his strength to do the work of God, not saying to him a mere passive, resigned, powerless _Fiat_, but courageously raising his head: "Behold me, Lord, I delight to do thy will." "There are unfathomable depths in the human soul, because at the bottom is God himself." Whether this God be transcendent or immanent, whether he be One, the Creator, the eternal and immutable Principle, or whether he be, as say the doctors beyond the Rhine, the ideal objectivation of our Me, is not the question for the heroes of humanity. The soldier in the thick of battle does not philosophize as to how much truth or falsehood there is in the patriotic sentiment; he takes his arms and fights at the peril of his life. So the soldiers of spiritual conflicts seek for strength in prayer, in reflection, contemplation, inspiration; all, poets, artists, teachers, saints, legislators, prophets, leaders of the people, learned men, philosophers, all draw from this same source. But it is not without difficulty that the soul unites itself to God, or if one prefers, that it finds itself. A prayer ends at last in divine communion only when it began by a struggle. The patriarch of Israel, asleep near Bethel, had already divined this: the God who passes by tells his name only to those who stop him and do him violence to learn it. He blesses only after long hours of conflict. The gospel has found an untranslatable word to characterize the prayers of Jesus, it compares the conflict which preceded the voluntary immolation of Christ to the death-struggle: _Factus in agonia_.[6] We might say of his life that it had been a long temptation, a struggle, a prayer, since these words only express different moments of spiritual activity. Like their Master, the disciples and successors of Christ can conquer their own souls only through perseverance. But these words, empty of meaning for devout conventicles, have had a tragic sense for men of religious genius. Nothing is more false, historically, than the saints that adorn our churches, with their mincing attitude, their piteous expression, that indescribably anæmic and emaciated--one may almost say emasculated--air which shows in their whole nature; they are pious seminarists brought up under the direction of St. Alphonso di Liguori or of St. Louis di Gonzagua; they are not saints, not the violent who take the kingdom of heaven by force. We have come to one of the most delicate features of the life of Francis--his relations with diabolical powers. Customs and ideas have so profoundly changed in all that concerns the existence of the devil and his relations with men, that it is almost impossible to picture to oneself the enormous place which the thought of demons occupied at that time in the minds of men. The best minds of the Middle Ages believed without a doubt in the existence of the perverse spirit, in his perpetual transformations in the endeavor to tempt men and cause them to fall into his snares. Even in the sixteenth century, Luther, who undermined so many beliefs, had no more doubt of the personal existence of Satan than of sorcery, conjurations, or possessions.[7] Finding in their souls a wide background of grandeur and wretchedness, whence they sometimes heard a burst of distant harmonies calling them to a higher life, soon to be overpowered by the clamors of the brute, our ancestors could not refrain from seeking the explanation of this duel. They found it in the conflict of the demons with God. The devil is the prince of the demons, as God is the prince of the angels; capable of all transformations, they carry on to the end of time terrible battles which will end in the victory of God, but meantime each man his whole life long is contended for by these two adversaries, and the noblest souls are naturally the most disputed. This is how St. Francis, with all men of his time, explained the disquietudes, terrors, anguish, with which his heart was at times assailed, as well as the hopes, consolations, joys in which in general his soul was bathed. Wherever we follow his steps local tradition has preserved the memory of rude assaults of the tempter which he had to undergo. It is no doubt useless to recall here the elementary fact that if manners change with the times, man himself is quite as strangely modified. If, according to education, and the manner of life, such or such a sense may develop an acuteness which confounds common experience--hearing in the musician, touch with the blind, etc.--we may estimate by this how much sharper certain senses may have been then than now. Several centuries ago visual delusion was with adults what it is now with children in remotest country parts. A quivering leaf, a nothing, a breath, an unexplained sound creates an image which they see and in the reality of which they believe absolutely. Man is all of a piece; the hyperæsthesia of the will presupposes that of the sensibility, one is conditioned on the other, and it is this which makes men of revolutionary epochs so much greater than nature. It would be absurd under pretext of truth to try to bring them back to the common measures of our contemporary society, for they were veritably demigods for good as for evil. Legends are not always absurd. The men of '93 are still near to us, but it is nevertheless with good right that legend has taken possession of them, and it is pitiable to see these men who, ten times a day, had to take resolutions where everything was at stake--their destiny, that of their ideas, and sometimes that of their country--judged as if they had been mere worthy citizens, with leisure to discuss at length every morning the garments they were to wear or the _menu_ of a dinner. Most of the time historians have perceived only a part of the truth about them; for not only were there two men in them, almost all of them are at the same time poets, demagogues, prophets, heroes, martyrs. To write history, then, is to translate and transpose almost continually. The men of the thirteenth century could not bring themselves to not refer to an exterior cause the inner motions of their souls. In what appears to us as the result of our own reflections they saw inspiration; where we say desires, instincts, passions, they said temptation, but we must not permit these differences of language to make us overlook or tax with trickery a part of their spiritual life, bringing us thus to the conclusions of a narrow and ignorant rationalism. St. Francis believed himself to have many a time fought with the devil; the horrible demons of the Etruscan Inferno still haunted the forests of Umbria and Tuscany; but while for his contemporaries and some of his disciples apparitions, prodigies, possessions, are daily phenomena, for him they are exceptional, and remain entirely in the background. In the iconography of St. Benedict, as in that of most of the popular saints, the devil occupies a preponderant place; in that of St. Francis he disappears so completely that in the long series of Giotto's frescos at Assisi he is not seen a single time.[8] In the same way all that is magic and miracle-working occupies in his life an entirely secondary rank. Jesus in the Gospels gave his apostles power to cast out evil spirits, and to heal all sickness and all infirmity.[9] Francis surely took literally these words, which made a part of his Rule. He believed that he could work miracles, and he willed to do so; but his religious thought was too pure to permit him to consider miracles otherwise than as an entirely exceptional means of relieving the sufferings of men. Not once do we see him resorting to miracle to prove his apostolate or to bolster up his ideas. His tact taught him that souls are worthy of being won by better means. This almost complete absence of the marvellous[10] is by so much the more remarkable that it is in absolute contradiction with the tendencies of his time.[11] Open the life of his disciple, St. Anthony of Padua ([Cross] 1231); it is a tiresome catalogue of prodigies, healings, resurrections. One would say it was rather the prospectus of some druggist who had invented a new drug than a call to men to conversion and a higher life. It may interest invalids or devotees, but neither the heart nor the conscience is touched by it. It must be said in justice to Anthony of Padua that his relations with Francis appear to have been very slight. Among the earliest disciples who had time to fathom their master's thought to the very depths we find traces of this noble disdain of the marvellous; they knew too well that the perfect joy is not to astound the world with prodigies, to give sight to the blind, nor even to revive those who have been four days dead, but that it lives in the love that goes even to self-immolation. _Mihi absit gloriari nisi in cruce Domini._[12] Thus Brother Egidio asked of God grace not to perform miracles; he saw in them, as in the passion for learning, a snare in which the proud would be taken, and which would distract the Order from its true mission.[13] St. Francis's miracles are all acts of love; the greater number of them are found in the healing of nervous maladies, those apparently inexplicable disquietudes which are the cruel afflictions of critical times. His gentle glance, at once so compassionate and so strong, which seemed like a messenger from his heart, often sufficed to make those who met it forget all their suffering. The evil eye is perhaps a less stupid superstition than is generally fancied. Jesus was right in saying that a look sufficed to make one an adulterer; but there is also a look--that of the contemplative Mary, for example--which is worth all sacrifices, because it includes them all, because it gives, consecrates, immolates him who looks. Civilization dulls this power of the glance. A part of the education the world gives us consists in teaching our eyes to deceive, in making them expressionless, in extinguishing their flames; but simple and straightforward natures never give up using this language of the heart, "which brings life and health in its beams." "A Brother was suffering unspeakable tortures; sometimes he would roll upon the ground, striking against whatever lay in his way, frothing at the mouth, horrible to see; at times he would become rigid, and again, after remaining stark outstretched for a moment, would roll about in horrible contortions; sometimes lying in a heap on the ground, his feet touching his head, he would bound upward as high as a man's head." Francis came to see him and healed him.[14] But these are exceptions, and the greater part of the time the Saint withdrew himself from the entreaties of his companions when they asked miracles at his hands. To sum up, if we take a survey of the whole field of Francis's piety, we see that it proceeds from the secret union of his soul with the divine by prayer; this intuitive power of seeing the ideal classes him with the mystics. He knew, indeed, both the ecstasy and the liberty of mysticism, but we must not forget those features of character which separate him from it, particularly his apostolic fervor. Besides this his piety had certain peculiar qualities which it is necessary to point out. And first, liberty with respect of observances: Francis felt all the emptiness and pride of most religious observance. He saw the snare that lies hidden there, for the man who carefully observes all the minutiæ of a religious code risks forgetting the supreme law of love. More than this, the friar who lays upon himself a certain number of supererogatory facts gains the admiration of the ignorant, but the pleasure which he finds in this admiration actually transforms his pious act into sin. Thus, strangely enough, contrary to other founders of orders, he was continually easing the strictness of the various rules which he laid down.[15] We may not take this to be a mere accident, for it was only after a struggle with his disciples that he made his will prevail; and it was precisely those who were most disposed to relax their vow of poverty who were the most anxious to display certain bigoted observances before the public eye. "The sinner can fast," Francis would say at such times; "he can pray, weep, macerate himself, but one thing he cannot do, he cannot be faithful to God." Noble words, not unworthy to fall from the lips of him who came to preach a worship in spirit and in truth, without temple or priest; or rather that every fireside shall be a temple and every believer a priest. Religious formalism, in whatever form of worship, always takes on a forced and morose manner. Pharisees of every age disfigure their faces that no one may be unaware of their godliness. Francis not merely could not endure these grimaces of false piety, he actually counted mirth and joy in the number of religious duties. How shall one be melancholy who has in the heart an inexhaustible treasure of life and truth which only increases as one draws upon it? How be sad when in spite of falls one never ceases to make progress? The pious soul which grows and develops has a joy like that of the child, happy in feeling its weak little limbs growing strong and permitting it every day a further exertion. The word joy is perhaps that which comes most often to the pen of the Franciscan authors;[16] the master went so far as to make it one of the precepts of the Rule.[17] He was too good a general not to know that a joyous army is always a victorious army. In the history of the early Franciscan missions there are bursts of laughter which ring out high and clear.[18] For that matter, we are apt to imagine the Middle Ages as much more melancholy than they really were. Men suffered much in those days, but the idea of grief being never separated from that of penalty, suffering was either an expiation or a test, and sorrow thus regarded loses its sting; light and hope shine through it. Francis drew a part of his joy from the communion. He gave to the sacrament of the eucharist that worship imbued with unutterable emotion, with joyful tears, which has aided some of the noblest of human souls to endure the burden and heat of the day.[19] The letter of the dogma was not fixed in the thirteenth century as it is to-day, but all that is beautiful, true, potent, eternal in the mystical feast instituted by Jesus was then alive in every heart. The eucharist was truly the viaticum of the soul. Like the pilgrims of Emmaus long ago, in the hour when the shades of evening fall and a vague sadness invades the soul, when the phantoms of the night awake and seem to loom up behind all our thoughts, our fathers saw the divine and mysterious Companion coming toward them; they drank in his words, they felt his strength descending upon their hearts, all their inward being warmed again, and again they whispered, "Abide with us, Lord, for the day is far spent and the night approacheth." And often their prayer was heard. FOOTNOTES: [1] 1 Cel., 62. [2] 1 Cel., 66; cf. Bon., 180; 1 Cel., 67; cf. Bon., 182; 1 Cel., 69; Bon., 183. After St. Francis's death the Narniates were the first to come to pray at his tomb. 1 Cel., 128, 135, 136, 138, 141; Bon., 275. [3] As concerning: 1, fidelity to Poverty; 2, prohibition of modifying the Rule; 3, the equal authority of the Will and the Rule; 4, the request for privileges at the court of Rome; 5, the elevation of the friars to high ecclesiastical charges; 6, the absolute prohibition of putting themselves in opposition to the secular clergy; 7, the interdiction of great churches and rich convents. On all these points and many others infidelity to Francis's will was complete in the Order less than twenty-five years after his death. We might expatiate on all this; the Holy See in interpreting the Rule had canonical right on its side, but Ubertino di Casali in saying that it was perfectly clear and had no need of interpretation had good sense on his side; let that suffice! _Et est stupor quare queritur expositio super litteram sic apertam quia nulla est difficultas in regulæ intelligentia. Arbor vitæ crucifixæ_, Venice, 1485. lib. v., cap. 3. _Sanctus vir Egidius tanto ejulatu clamabat super regulæ destructionem quam videbat quod ignorantibus viam spiritus quasi videbatur insanus. Id. ibid._ [4] _Heavens drop down your dew, and let the clouds rain down the Just One._ Anthem for Advent. [5] _In foramibus petræ nidificabat._ 1 Cel., 71. Upon the prayers of Francis vide ibid., 71 and 72; 2 Cel., 3, 38-43; Ben., 139-148. Cf. 1 Cel., 6; 91; 103; 3 Soc., 8; 12; etc. [6] Luke, xxii. 44. [7] Felix Kuhn: _Luther, sa vie et son oeuvre_, Paris, 1883, 3 vols., 8vo. t. i., p. 128; t. ii., p. 9; t. iii., p. 257. Benvenuto Cellini does not hesitate to describe a visit which he made one day to the Coliseum in company with a magician whose words evoked clouds of devils who filled the whole place. B. Cellini, _La vita scritta da lui medesimo_, Bianchi's edition, Florence, 1890, 12mo, p. 33. [8] On the devil and Francis vide 1 Cel., 68, 72; 3 Soc., 12; 2 Cel., 1, 6; 3, 10; 53; 58-65; Bon., 59-62. Cf. Eccl., 3; 5; 13; _Fior._, 29; _Spec._, 110b. To form an idea of the part taken by the devil in the life of a monk at the beginning of the thirteenth century, one must read the _Dialogus miraculorium_ of Cæsar von Heisterbach. [9] Matthew, x. 1. [10] Miracles occupy only ten paragraphs (61-70) in 1 Cel., and of this number there are several which can hardly be counted as Francis's miracles, since they were performed by objects which had belonged to him. [11] Heretics often took advantage of this thirst for the marvellous to dupe the catholics. The Cathari of Moncoul made a portrait of the Virgin representing her as one eyed and toothless, saying that in his humility Christ had chosen a very ugly woman for mother. They had no difficulty in healing several cases of disease by its means; the image became famous, was venerated almost everywhere, and accomplished many miracles until the day when the heretics divulged the deception, to the great scandal of the faithful. Egbert von Schönau, _Contra Catharos_. Serm. I. cap. 2. (Patrol. lat. Migne t. 195.) Cf. Heisterbach, _loc. cit._, v. 18. Luc de Tuy, _De altera Vita_, lib. ii. 9; iii. 9, 18 (Patrol. Migne., 208). [12] "But God forbid that I should glory save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ." Gal. vi. 14. This is to this day the motto of the Brothers Minor. [13] _Spec._, 182a; 200a; 232a. Cf. 199a. [14] 1 Cel., 67. [15] _Secundum primam regulam fratres feria quarta et sexta et per licentiam beati Francisci feria secunda et sabbato jejunabant. Giord. 11. cf. Reg. 1221, cap. 3_ and _Reg. 1223, cap. 3_, where Friday is the only fast day retained. [16] 1 Cel., 10; 22; 27; 31; 42; 80; 2 Cel., 1, 1; 3, 65-68; Eccl., 5; 6; _Giord._, 21; _Spec._, 119a; _Conform._, 143a, 2. [17] _Caveant fratres quod non ostendant se tristes extrinsecus nubilosos et hypocritas; sed ostendant se gaudentis in Domine, hilares et convenientes gratiosos._ [18] Eccl., _loc. cit._; Giord., _loc. cit._ [19] Vide _Test._; 1 Cel., 46; 62; 75; 2 Cel., 3, 129; _Spec._, 44a. * * * * * CHAPTER XII THE CHAPTER-GENERAL OF 1217[1] After Whitsunday of 1217 chronological notes of Francis's life are numerous enough to make error almost impossible. Unhappily, this is not the case for the eighteen months which precede it (autumn of 1215-Whitsunday, 1217). For this period we are reduced to conjecture, or little better. As Francis at that time undertook no foreign mission, he doubtless employed his time in evangelizing Central Italy and in consolidating the foundations of his institution. His presence at Rome during the Lateran Council (November 11-30, 1215) is possible, but it has left no trace in the earliest biographies. The Council certainly took the new Order into consideration,[2] but it was to renew the invitation made to it five years before by the supreme pontiff, to choose one of the Rules already approved by the Church.[3] St. Dominic, who was then at Rome to beg for the confirmation of his institute, received the same counsel and immediately conformed to it. The Holy See would willingly have conceded special constitutions to the Brothers Minor, if they had adopted for a base the Rule of St. Benedict; thus the Clarisses, except those of St. Damian, while preserving their name and a certain number of their customs, were obliged to profess the Benedictine rule. In spite of all solicitations, Francis insisted upon retaining his own Rule. One is led to believe that it was to confer upon these questions that we find him at Perugia in July, 1216, when Innocent III. died.[4] However this may be, about this epoch the chapters took on a great importance. The Church, which had looked on at the foundation of the Order with somewhat mixed feelings, could no longer rest content with being the mere spectator of so profound a movement; it saw the need of utilizing it. Ugolini was marvellously well prepared for such a task. Giovanni di San Paolo, Bishop of the Sabine, charged by Innocent III. to look after the Brothers, died in 1216, and Ugolini was not slow to offer his protection to Francis, who accepted it with gratitude. This extraordinary offer is recounted at length by the Three Companions.[5] It must certainly be fixed in the summer of 1216[6] immediately after the death of Giovanni di San Paolo. It is very possible that the first chapter held in the presence of this cardinal took place on May 29, 1216. By an error very common in history, most of the Franciscan writers have referred to a single date all the scattered incidents concerning the first solemn assizes of the Order, and have called this typical assembly the _Chapter of the Mats_. In reality for long years all the gatherings of the Brothers Minor deserved this name.[7] Coming together at the season of the greatest heat, they slept in the open air or sheltered themselves under booths of reeds. We need not pity them. There is nothing like the glorious transparency of the summer night in Umbria; sometimes in Provence one may enjoy a foretaste of it, but if at Baux, upon the rock of Doms, or at St. Baume, the sight is equally solemn and grandiose, it still wants the caressing sweetness, the effluence of life which in Umbria give the night a bewitching charm. The inhabitants of the neighboring towns and villages flocked to these meetings in crowds, at once to see the ceremonies, to be present when their relatives or friends assumed the habit, to listen to the appeals of the Saint and to furnish to the friars the provisions of which they might have need. All this is not without some analogy with the camp-meeting so dear to Americans. As to the figures of several thousands of attendants given in the legends, and furnishing even to a Franciscan, Father Papini, the occasion for pleasantries of doubtful taste, it is perhaps not so surprising as might be supposed.[8] These first meetings, to which all the Brothers eagerly hastened, held in the open air in the presence of crowds come together from distant places, have then nothing in common with the subsequent chapters-general, which were veritable conclaves attended by a small number of delegates, and the majority of the work of which, done in secret, was concerned only with the affairs of the Order. During Francis's lifetime the purpose of these assemblies was essentially religious. Men attended them not to talk business, or proceed to the nomination of the minister-general, but in mutual communion to gain new strength from the joys, the example, and the sufferings of the other brethren.[9] The four years which followed the Whitsunday of 1216 form a stage in the evolution of the Umbrian movement; that during which Francis was battling for autonomy. We find here pretty delicate shades of distinction, which have been misunderstood by Church writers as much as by their adversaries, for if Francis was particular not to put himself in the attitude of revolt, he would not compromise his independence, and he felt with an exquisite divination that all the privileges which the court of Rome could heap upon him were worth nothing in comparison with liberty. Alas, he was soon forced to resign himself to these gilded bonds, against which he never ceased to protest, even to his last sigh;[10] but to shut one's eyes to the moral violence which the papacy did him in this matter is to condemn oneself to an entire misapprehension of his work. A glance over the collection of bulls addressed to the Franciscans suffices to show with what ardor he struggled against favors so eagerly sought by the monastic orders.[11] A great number of legendary anecdotes put Francis's disdain of privileges in the clearest light. Even his dearest friends did not always understand his scruples. "Do you not see," they said to him one day, "that often the bishops do not permit us to preach, and make us remain several days without doing anything before we are permitted to proclaim the word of God? It would be better worth while to obtain for this end a privilege from the pope, and it would be for the good of souls." "I would first convert the prelates by humility and respect," he replied quickly; "for when they have seen us humble and respectful toward them, they themselves will beg us to preach and convert the people. As for me, I ask of God no privilege unless it be that I may have none, to be full of respect for all men, and to convert them, as our Rule ordains, more by our example than by our speech."[12] The question whether Francis was right or wrong in his antipathy to the privileges of the curia does not come within the domain of history; it is evident that this attitude could not long continue; the Church knows only the faithful and rebels. But the noblest hearts often make a stand at compromises of this kind; they desire that the future should grow out of the past without convulsion and without a crisis. The chapter of 1217 was notable for the definitive organization of the Franciscan missions. Italy and the other countries were divided off into a certain number of _provinces_, having each its provincial minister. Immediately upon his accession Honorius III. had sought to revive the popular zeal for the crusades. He had not stopped at preaching it, but appealed to prophecies which had proclaimed that under his pontificate the Holy Land would be reconquered.[13] The renewal of fervor which ensued, and of which the rebound was felt as far as Germany, had a profound influence on the Brothers Minor. This time Francis, perhaps from humility, did not put himself at the head of the friars charged with a mission to Syria; for leader he gave them the famous Elias, formerly at Florence, where he had had opportunity to show his high qualities.[14] This Brother, who from this time appears in the foreground of this history, came from the most humble ranks of society; the date and the circumstances of his entrance into the Order are unknown, and hence conjecture has come to see in him that friend of the grotto who had been Francis's confidant shortly before his decisive conversion. However this may be, in his youth he had earned his living in Assisi, making mattresses and teaching a few children to read; then he had spent some time in Bologna as _scriptor_; then suddenly we find him among the Brothers Minor, charged with the most difficult missions. His adversaries vie with one another in asserting that he was the finest mind of his century, but unhappily it is very difficult, in the existing state of the documents, to pronounce as to his actions; learned and energetic, eager to play the leading part in the work of the reformation of religion, and having made his plan beforehand as to the proper mode of realizing it, he made straight for his goal, half political, half religious. Full of admiration for Francis and gratitude toward him, he desired to regulate and consolidate the movement for renovation. In the inner Franciscan circle, where Leo, Ginepro, Egidio, and many others represent the spirit of liberty, the religion of the humble and the simple, Elias represents the scientific and ecclesiastical spirit, prudence and reason. He had great success in Syria and received into the Order one of the disciples most dear to Francis, Cæsar of Speyer, who later on was to make the conquest of all Southern Germany in less than two years (1221-1223), and who in the end sealed with his blood his fidelity to the strict observance, which he defended against the attacks of Brother Elias himself.[15] Cæsar of Speyer offers a brilliant example of those suffering souls athirst for the ideal, so numerous in the thirteenth century, who everywhere went up and down, seeking first in learning, then in the religious life, that which should assuage the mysterious thirst which tortured them. Disciple of the scholastic Conrad, he had felt himself overpowered with the desire to reform the Church; while still a layman he had preached his ideas, not without some success, since a certain number of ladies of Speyer had begun to lead a new life; but their husbands disapproving, he was obliged to escape their vengeance by taking refuge at Paris, and thence he went to the East, where in the preaching of the Brothers Minor he found again his hopes and his dreams. This instance shows how general was the waiting condition of souls when the Franciscan gospel blazed forth, and how its way had been everywhere prepared. But it is time to return to the chapter of 1217: the friars who went to Germany under conduct of Giovanni di Penna were far from having the success of Elias and his companions; they were completely ignorant of the language of the country which they had undertaken to evangelize. Perhaps Francis had not taken into account the fact that though Italian might, in case of need, suffice in all the countries bathed by the Mediterranean, this could not be the case in Central Europe.[16] The lot of the party going to Hungary was not more happy. Very often it came to pass that the missionaries were fain to give up their very garments in the effort to appease the peasants and shepherds who maltreated them. But no less incapable of understanding what was said to them than of making themselves understood, they were soon obliged to think of returning to Italy. We may thank the Franciscan authors for preserving for us the memory of these checks, and not attempting to picture the friars as suddenly knowing all languages by a divine inspiration, as later on was so often related.[17] Those who had been sent to Spain had also to undergo persecutions. This country, like the south of France, was ravaged by heresy; but already at that time it was vigorously repressed. The Franciscans, suspected of being false Catholics and therefore eagerly hunted out, found a refuge with Queen Urraca of Portugal, who permitted them to establish themselves at Coimbra, Guimarraens, Alenquero, and Lisbon.[18] Francis himself made preparations for going to France.[19] This country had a peculiar charm for him because of his fervent love of the Holy Sacrament. Perhaps also he was unwittingly drawn toward this country to which he owed his name, the chivalrous dreams of his youth, all of poetry, song, music, delicious dream that had come into his life. Something of the emotion that thrilled through him on undertaking this new mission has passed into the story of his biographers; one feels there the thrill at once sweet and agonizing, the heart-throb of the brave knight who goes forth all harnessed in the early dawn to scan the horizon, dreading the unknown and yet overflowing with joy, for he knows that the day will be consecrated to love and to the right. The Italian poet has given the one name of "pilgrimages of love" to the farings forth of chivalry and the journeys undertaken by dreamers, artists, or saints to those parts of the earth which forever mirror themselves before their imagination and remain their chosen fatherland.[20] Such a pilgrimage as this was Francis undertaking. "Set forth," said he to the Brothers who accompanied him, "and walk two and two, humble and gentle, keeping silence until after tierce, praying to God in your hearts, carefully avoiding every vain or useless word. Meditate as much while on this journey as if you were shut up in a hermitage or in your cell, for wherever we are, wherever we go, we carry our cell with us; Brother body is our cell, and the soul is the hermit who dwells in it, there to pray to the Lord and to meditate." Arrived at Florence he found there Cardinal Ugolini, sent by the pope as legate to Tuscany to preach the crusade and take all needful measures for assuring its success.[21] Francis was surely far from expecting the reception which the prelate gave him. Instead of encouraging him, the cardinal urged him to give up his project. "I am not willing, my brother, that you should cross the mountains; there are many prelates who ask nothing better than to stir up difficulties for you with the court of Rome. But I and the other cardinals who love your Order desire to protect and aid you, on the condition, however, that you do not quit this province." "But, monsignor, it would be a great disgrace for me to send my brethren far away while I remained idly here, sharing none of the tribulations which they must undergo." "Wherefore, then, have you sent your brethren so far away, exposing them thus to starvation and all sorts of perils?" "Do you think," replied Francis warmly, and as if moved by prophetic inspiration, "that God raised up the Brothers for the sake of this country alone? Verily, I say unto you, God has raised them up for the awakening and the salvation of all men, and they shall win souls not only in the countries of those who believe, but also in the very midst of the infidels."[22] The surprise and admiration which these words awoke in Ugolini were not enough to make him change his mind. He insisted so strongly that Francis turned back to Portiuncula, the inspiration of his work not even shaken. Who knows whether the joy which he would have felt in seeing France did not confirm him in the idea that he ought to renounce this plan? Souls athirst with the longing for sacrifice often have scruples such as these; they refuse the most lawful joys that they may offer them to God. We cannot tell whether it was immediately after this interview or not till the following year that Francis put Brother Pacifico at the head of the missionaries sent into France.[23] Pacifico, who was a poet of talent, had before his conversion been surnamed Prince of Poesy and crowned at the capital by the emperor. One day while visiting a relative who was a nun at San Severino in the March of Ancona, Francis also arrived at the monastery, and preached with such a holy impetuosity that the poet felt himself pierced with the sword of which the Bible speaks, which penetrates between the very joints and marrow, and discerns the thoughts and intents of the heart.[24] On the morrow he assumed the habit and received his symbolical surname.[25] He was accompanied to France by Brother Agnello di Pisa, who was destined to be put at the head of the first mission to England in 1224.[26] Francis, on sending them forth, was far from dreaming that from this country, which exerted such a fascination over him, was to come forth the influence which was to compromise his dream--that Paris would be the destruction of Assisi; and yet the time was not very far distant; a few years more and the Poverello would see a part of his spiritual family forgetting the humility of their name, their origin, and their aspirations, to run after the ephemeral laurels of learning. We have already seen that the habit of the Franciscans of this time was to make their abode within easy reach of great cities; Pacifico and his companions established themselves at St. Denis.[27] We have no particulars of their work; it was singularly fruitful, since it permitted them a few years later to attack England with full success. Francis passed the following year (1218) in evangelizing tours in Italy. It is naturally impossible to follow him in these travels, the itinerary of which was fixed by his daily inspirations, or by indications as fanciful as the one which had formerly determined his going to Sienna. Bologna,[28] the Verna, the valley of Rieti, the Sacro-Speco of St. Benedict at Subiaco,[29] Gaeta;[30] San Michele on Mount Gargano[31] perhaps received him at this time, but the notes of his presence in these places are too sparse and vague to permit their being included in any scheme of history. It is very possible that he also paid a visit to Rome during this time; his communications with Ugolini were much more frequent than is generally supposed. We must not permit the stories of biographers to deceive us in this matter; it is a natural tendency to refer all that we know of a man to three or four especially striking dates. We forget entire years of the life of those whom we have known the best and loved the most and group our memories of them around a few salient events which shine all the more brilliantly the deeper we make the surrounding obscurity. The words of Jesus spoken on a hundred different occasions came at last to be formed into a single discourse, the Sermon on the Mount. It is in such cases that criticism needs to be delicate, to mingle a little divination with the heavy artillery of scientific argument. The texts are sacred, but we must not make fetiches of them; notwithstanding St. Matthew, no one to-day dreams of representing Jesus as uttering the Sermon on the Mount all at one time. In the same way, in the narratives concerning the relations between St. Francis and Ugolini, we find ourselves every moment shut up in no-thoroughfares, coming up against contradictory indications, just so long as we try to refer everything to two or three meetings, as we are at first led to do. With a simple act of analysis these difficulties disappear and we find each of the different narratives bringing us fragments which, being pieced together, furnish an organic story, living, psychologically true. From the moment at which we have now arrived, we must make a much larger place for Ugolini than in the past; the struggle has definitively opened between the Franciscan ideal--chimerical, perhaps, but sublime--and the ecclesiastical policy, to go on until the day when, half in humility, half in discouragement, Francis, heartsick, abdicates the direction of his spiritual family. Ugolini returned to Rome at the end of 1217. During the following winter his countersign is found at the bottom of the most important bulls;[32] he devoted this time to the special study of the question of the new orders, and summoned Francis before him. We have seen with what frankness he had declared to him at Florence that many of the prelates would do anything to discredit him with the pope.[33] It is evident the success of the Order, its methods, which in spite of all protestations to the contrary seemed to savor of heresy, the independence of Francis, who had scattered his friars in all the four corners of the globe without trying to gain a confirmation of the verbal and entirely provisional authorization accorded him by Innocent III.--all these things were calculated to startle the clergy. Ugolini, who better than any one else knew Umbria, Tuscany, Emilia, the March of Ancona, all those regions where the Franciscan preaching had been most successful, was able by himself to judge of the power of the new movement and the imperious necessity of directing it; he felt that the best way to allay the prejudices which the pope and the sacred college might have against Francis was to present him before the curia. Francis was at first much abashed at the thought of preaching before the Vicar of Jesus Christ, but upon the entreaties of his protector he consented, and for greater security he learned by heart what he had to say. Ugolini himself was not entirely at ease as to the result of this step; Thomas of Celano pictures him as devoured with anxiety; he was troubled about Francis, whose artless eloquence ran many a risk in the halls of the Lateran Palace; he was also not without some more personal anxieties, for the failure of his _protégé_ might be most damaging to himself. He was in all the greater anxiety when, on arriving at the feet of the pontiff, Francis forgot all he had intended to say; but he frankly avowed it, and seeking a new discourse from the inspiration of the moment, spoke with so much warmth and simplicity that the assembly was won.[34] The biographers are mute as to the practical result of this audience. We are not to be surprised at this, for they write with the sole purpose of edification. They wrote after the apotheosis of their master, and would with very bad grace have dwelt upon the difficulties which he met during the early years.[35] The Holy See must have been greatly perplexed by this strange man, whose faith and humility were evident, but whom it was impossible to teach ecclesiastical obedience. St. Dominic happened to be in Rome at the same time,[36] and was overwhelmed with favors by the pope. It is a matter of history that Innocent III. having asked him to choose one of the Rules already approved by the Church, he had returned to his friars at Notre Dame de Prouille, and after conferring with them had adopted that of St. Augustine; Honorius therefore was not sparing of privileges for him. It is hardly possible that Ugolini did not try to use the influence of his example with St. Francis. The curia saw clearly that Dominic, whose Order barely comprised a few dozen members, was not one of the moral powers of the time, but its sentiments toward him were by no means so mixed as those it experienced with regard to Francis. To unite the two Orders, to throw over the shoulders of the Dominicans the brown cassock of the Poor Men of Assisi, and thus make a little of the popularity of the Brothers Minor to be reflected upon them, to leave to the latter their name, their habit, and even a semblance of their Rule, only completing it with that of St. Augustine, such a project would have been singularly pleasing to Ugolini, and with Francis's humility would seem to have some chance of success. One day Dominic by dint of pious insistance induced Francis to give him his cord, and immediately girded himself with it. "Brother," said he, "I earnestly long that your Order and mine might unite to form one sole and same institute[37] in the Church." But the Brother Minor wished to remain as he was, and declined the proposition. So truly was he inspired with the needs of his time and of the Church that less than three years after this Dominic was drawn by an irresistible influence to transform his Order of Canons of St. Augustine into an order of mendicant monks, whose constitutions were outlined upon those of the Franciscans.[38] A few years later the Dominicans took, so to speak, their revenge, and obliged the Brothers Minor to give learning a large place in their work. Thus, while hardly come to youth's estate, the two religious families rivalled one another, impressed, influenced one another, yet never so much so as to lose all traces of their origin--summed up for the one in poverty and lay preaching, for the other in learning and the preaching of the clergy. FOOTNOTES: [1] The commencement of the great missions and the institution of provincial ministers is usually fixed either at 1217 or 1219, but both these dates present great difficulties. I confess that I do not understand the vehemence with which partisans of either side defend their opinions. The most important text is a passage in the 3 Soc., 62: _Expletis itaque undecim annis ab inceptione religionis, et multiplicatis numero et merito fratribus, electi fuerant ministri, et missi cum aliquot fratribus quasi per universas mundi provincias in quibus fides catholica colitur et servatur._ What does this expression, _inceptio religionis_, mean? At a first reading one unhesitatingly takes it to refer to the foundation of the Order, which occurred in April, 1209, by the reception of the first Brothers; but on adding eleven full years to this date we reach the summer of 1220. This is manifestly too late, for the 3 Soc. say that the brethren who went out were persecuted in most of the countries beyond the mountains, as being accredited by no pontifical letter; but the bull _Cum dilecti_, bears the date of June 11, 1219. We are thus led to think that the eleven years are not to be counted from the reception of the first Brothers, but from Francis's conversion, which the authors might well speak of as _inceptio religionis_, and 1206 + 11 = 1217. The use of this expression to designate conversion is not entirely without example. Glassberger says (_An. fr._, p. 9): _Ordinem minorum incepit anno 1206._ Those who admit 1219 are obliged (like the Bollandists, for example), to attribute an inaccuracy to the text of the 3 Soc., that of having counted eleven years as having passed when there had been only ten. We should notice that in the two other chronological indications given by the 3 Soc. (27 and 62) they count from the conversion, that is from 1206, as also Thomas of Celano, 88, 105, 119, 97, 88, 57, 55, 21. Curiously, the Conformities reproduce the passage of the 3 Soc. (118b, 1), but with the alteration: _Nono anno ab inceptione religionis_. Giordano di Giano opens the door to many scruples: _Anno vero Domini_ 1219 _et anno conversionis ejus decimo frater Franciscus ... misit fratres in Franciam, in Theutoniam, in Hungariam, in Hespaniam_, Giord., 3. As a little later the same author properly harmonizes 1219 with the thirteenth year from Francis's conversion, everyone is in agreement in admitting that the passage cited needs correction; we have unfortunately only one manuscript of this chronicle. Glassberger, who doubtless had another before him, substitutes 1217, but he may have drawn this date from another document. It is noteworthy that Brother Giordano gives as simultaneous the departure of the friars for Germany, Hungary, and France; but, as to the latter country, it certainly took place in 1217. So the Speculum, 44a. The chronicle of the xxiv. generals and Mark of Lisbon (Diola's ed., t. i., p. 82) holds also to 1217, so that, though not definitely established, it would appear that this date should be accepted until further information. Starting from slightly different premises, the learned editors of the _Analecta_ arrive at the same conclusion (t. ii., pp. 25-36). Cf. Evers, _Analecta ad Fr. Minorum historiam_, Leipsic, 1882, 4to, pp. 7 and 11. That which appears to me decidedly to tip the balance in favor of 1217, is the fact that the missionary friars were persecuted because they had no document of legitimation; and in 1219 they would have had the bull _Cum dilecti_, from June 11th of that year. The Bollandists, who hold for 1219, have so clearly seen this argument that they have been obliged to deny the authenticity of the bull (or at least to suppose it wrongly dated). A. SS., p. 839. [2] Vide A. SS., p. 604. Cf. Angelo Clareno, _Tribul. Archiv._, i., p. 559. _A papa Innocentis fuit omnibus annuntiatum in concilio generali ... sicut sanctus vir fr. Leo scribit et fr. Johannes de Celano._ These lines have not perhaps the significance which one would be led to give them at the first glance, their author having perhaps confounded _consilium_ and _consistorium_. The Speculum, 20b says: _Eam (Regulam Innocentius) approvabit et concessit et postea in consistorio omnibus annuntiavit._ [3] _Ne nimia Religionem diversitas gravem in Ecclesia Dei confusionem inducat, firmiter prohibemus, ne quis de coetero novam Religionem inveniat; sed quicumque voluerit ad Religionem converti, unam de approbatis assumat._ Labbé and Cossart: _Sacrosancta concilia_, Paris, 1672, t. xi., col. 165. [4] Eccl., 15 (_An. franc._, t. 1, p. 253): _Innocentium in cujus obitu fuit presentialiter S. Franciscus_. [5] 3 Soc., 61; cf. _An. Perus._, A. SS., p. 606f. [6] Thomas of Celano must be in error when he declares that Francis was not acquainted with Cardinal Ugolini before the visit which he made him at Florence (summer of 1217): _Nondum alter alteri erat præcipua familiaritate conjunctus_ (1 Cel., 74 and 75). The Franciscan biographer's purpose was not historic; chronological indications are given in profusion; what he seeks is the _apta junctura_. Tradition has preserved the memory of a chapter held at Portiuncula in presence of Ugolini during a stay of the curia at Perugia (_Spec._, 137b.; _Fior_., 18; _Conform._, 207a; 3 Soc., 61). But the curia did not come back to Perugia between 1216 and Francis's death. It is also to be noted that according to Angelo Clareno, Ugolini was with Francis in 1210, supporting him in the presence of Innocent III. Vide below, p. 413. Finally the bull _Sacrosancta_ of December 9, 1219, witnesses that already during his legation in Florence (1217) Ugolini was actually interesting himself for the Clarisses. [7] See, for example, the description of the chapter of 1221 by Brother Giordano. Giord., 16. [8] With regard to the figure of five thousand attendants given by Bonaventura (Bon., 59) Father Papini writes: _Io non credo stato capace alcuno di dare ad intendere al S. Dottore simil fanfaluca, ne capace lui di crederla_. _... In somma il numero quinque millia et ultra non è del Santo, incapace di scrivere una cosa tanto improbabile e relativamente impossibile. Storia di S. Fr._, i., pp. 181 and 183. This figure, five thousand, is also indicated by Eccl., 6. All this may be explained and become possible by admitting the presence of the Brothers of Penitence, and it seems very difficult to contest it, since in the Order of the Humiliants, which much resembles that of the Brothers Minor (equally composed of three branches approved by three bulls given June, 1201), the chapters-general annually held were frequented by the brothers of the three Orders. Tiraboschi t. ii., p. 144. Cf. above, p. 158. [9] Vide 2 Cel., 3, 121; _Spec._, 42b; 127b. [10] _Præcipio firmiter per obedientiam fratribus universis quod ubicunque sunt, non audeant petere aliquam litteram in Curia Romana._ _Test. B. Fr._ [11] A comparison with the Bullary of the Preaching Friars is especially instructive: from their first chapter at Notre Dame de Prouille, in 1216, they are about fifteen; we find there at this time absolutely nothing that can be compared to the Franciscan movement, which was already stirring up all Italy. But while the first bull in favor of the Franciscans bears the date of June 11, 1219, and the approbation properly so called that of November 29, 1223, we find Honorius already in the end of 1216 lavishing marks of affection upon the Dominicans; December 22, 1216, _Religiosam vitam_. Cf. Pressuti, _I regesti, del Pontefice Onorio III._, Roma, 1884, t. i., no. 175; same date; _Nos attendentes_, ibid., no. 176; January 21, 1217, _gratiarum omnium_, ib., no. 243. Vide 284, 1039, 1156, 1208. It is needless to continue this enumeration. Very much the same could be done for the other Orders; whence the conclusion that if the Brothers Minor alone are forgotten in this shower of favors, it is because they decidedly wished to be. It must be admitted that immediately upon Francis's death they made up for lost time. [12] The authenticity of this passage is put beyond doubt by Ubertino di Casal's citation. _Archiv._, iii., p. 53. Cf. _Spec._, 30a; _Conform._, 111b, 1; 118b, 1; Ubertino, _Arbor vitæ cruc._, iii., 3. [13] _Burchardi chronicon ann. 1217_, _loc. cit._, p. 377. See also the bulls indicated by Potthast, 5575, 5585-92. [14] Before 1217 the office of minister virtually existed, though its definitive institution dates only from 1217. Brother Bernardo in his mission to Bologna, for example (1212?), certainly held in some sort the office of minister. [15] Imprisoned by order of Elias, he died in consequence of blows given him one day when he was taking the air outside of his prison. _Tribul._, 24a. [16] Giord., 5 and 6; 3 Soc., 62. [17] Of Giovanni di Parma, Clareno, Anthony of Padua, etc. [18] Mark of Lisbon, t. i., p. 82. Cf. p. 79, t. ii., p. 86, Glassberger _ann._, 1217. _An. fr._, ii., pp. 9 ff.; _Chron xxiv. gen._, MS. of Assisi, no. 328, f^o 2b. [19] _Spec._, 44a.; _Conform._, 119a, 2; 135a; 181b, 1; 1 Cel., 74 and 75. [20] Cel., 3, 129. _Diligebat Franciam ... volebat in ea mori_. [21] V. bull of January 23, 1217, _Tempus acceptabile_, Potthast, no. 5430, given in Horoy, t. ii., col. 205 ff.; cf. Pressuti, i., p. 71. This bull and those following fix without question the time of the journey to Florence. Potthast, 5488, 5487, and page 495. [22] It is superfluous to point out the error of the Bollandist text in the phrase _Monuit (Cardinalis Franciscum) coeptum non perficere iter_, where the _non_ is omitted, A. SS., p. 704. Cf., p. 607 and 835, which has led Suysken into several other errors. [23] Bon., 51. Cf. Glassberger, _ann_. 1217; _Spec._, 45b. [24] Heb., iv., 12; 2 Cel., 3, 49; Bon., 50 and 51. [25] Brother Pacifico interests us [the French people] particularly as the first minister of the Order in France; information about him is abundant: Bon., 79; 2 Cel., 3, 63; _Spec._, 41b.: _Conform._, 38a, 1; 43a, 1; 71b; 173b, 1, and 176; 2 Cel., 8, 27; _Spec._, 38b; _Conform._, 181b; 2 Cel., 3, 76; _Fior._, 46; _Conform._, 70a. I do not indicate the general references found in Chevalier's Bibliography. The Miscellanea, t. ii. (1887), p. 158, contains a most precise and interesting column about him. Gregory IX. speaks of him in the bull _Magna sicut dicitur_ of August 12, 1227. Sbaralea, Bull, fr., i., p. 33 (Potthast, 8007). Thomas of Tuscany, _socius_ of St. Bonaventura, knew him and speaks of him in his _Gesta Imperatorum (Mon. germ. hist. script._, t. 22, p. 492). [26] Eccl., 1; _Conform._, 113b, 1. [27] Toward 1224 the Brothers Minor desired to draw nearer and build a vast convent near the walls of Paris in the grounds called Vauvert, or Valvert (now the Luxembourg Garden), (Eccl., 10; cf. _Top. hist. du vieux Paris_, by Berty and Tisserand, t. iv., p. 70). In 1230 they received at Paris from the Benedictines of Saint-Germain-des-Prés a certain number of houses _in parocchia SS. Cosmæ et Damiani infra muros domini regis prope portam de Gibardo (Chartularium Universitatis Parisiensis_, no. 76. Cf. _Topographie historique du vieux Paris; Région occid. de l'univ._, p. 95; Félibien, _Histoire de la ville de Paris_, i., p. 115). Finally, St. Louis installed them in the celebrated Convent of the Cordeliers, the refectory of which still exists, transformed into the Dupuytren Museum. The Dominicans, who arrived in Paris September 12, 1217, went straight to the centre of the city, near the bishop's palace on the _Ile de la Cité_, and on August 6, 1218, were installed in the Convent of St. Jacques. [28] _Fior._, 27; _Spec._, 148b; _Conform._, 71a and 113a, 2; Bon., 182. [29] The traces of Francis's visit here are numerous. A Brother Eudes painted his portrait here. [30] Bon., 177. [31] Vide A. SS., pp. 855 and 856. Cf. 2 Cel., 3, 136. [32] Among others those of December 5, 1217, Potthast, 5629; February 8, March 30, April 7, 1218, Potthast, 5695, 5739, 5747. [33] 1 Cel., 74. _O quanti maxime in principio cum hæc agerentur novellæ plantationi ordinis insidiabantur ut perderent._ Cf. 2 Cel., 1, 16. _Videbat Franciscus luporum more sevire quamplures._ [34] 1 Cel., 73 (cf. 2 Cel., 1, 17; _Spec._, 102a); 3 Soc., 64; Bon., 78. The fixing of this scene in the winter of 1217-1218 seems hardly to be debatable; Giordano's account (14) in fact determines the date at which Ugolini became _officially_ protector of the Order; it supposes earlier relations between Honorius, Francis, and Ugolini. We are therefore led to seek a date at which these three personages may have met in Rome, and we arrive thus at the period between December, 1217, and April, 1218. [35] A word of Brother Giordano's opens the door to certain conjectures. "My lord," said Francis to Honorius III., in 1220, "you have given me many fathers (popes) give me a single one to whom I may turn with the affairs of my Order." (Giord., 14, _Multos mihi papas dedisti da unum_, ... etc.) Does not this suggest the idea that the pontiff had perhaps named a commission of cardinals to oversee the Brothers Minor? Its deliberations and the events to be related in the following chapter might have impelled him to issue the bull _Cum dilecti_ of June 11, 1219, which was not an approbation properly so called, but a safe-conduct in favor of the Franciscans. [36] He took possession of St. Sabine on February 28, 1218. [37] 2 Cel., 3, 87. The literal meaning of the phrase is somewhat ambiguous. The text is: _Vellem, frater Francisce, unam fieri religionem tuam et meam et in Ecclesia pari forma nos vivere_. _Spec._ 27b. The echo of this attempt is found in Thierry d'Apolda, _Vie de S. Dominique_ (A. SS., Augusti, t. i., p. 572 d): _S. Dominicus in oscula sancta ruens et sinceros amplexus, dixit: Tu es socius meus, tu curres pariter mecum, stemus simul, nullus adversarius prævalebit_. Bernard of Besse says: _B. Dominicus tanta B. Francisco devotione cohesit ut optatam ab eo cordam sub inferiori tunica devotissimi cingeret, cujus et suam Religionem unam velle fieri diceret, ipsumque pro sanctitate cæteris sequendem religiosis assereret._ Turin MS., 102b. [38] At the chapter held at Bologna at Whitsunday, 1220. The bull _Religiosam vitam_ (Privilege of Notre Dame de Prouille) of March 30, 1218, enumerates the possessions of the Dominicans. Ripolli, _Bull. Præd._, t. i., p. 6. Horoy, _Honorii opera_, t. ii., col. 684. * * * * * CHAPTER XIII ST. DOMINIC AND ST. FRANCIS The Egyptian Mission. Summer 1218-Autumn 1220 Art and poetry have done well in inseparably associating St. Dominic and St. Francis; the glory of the first is only a reflection of that of the second, and it is in placing them side by side that we succeed best in understanding the genius of the Poverello. If Francis is the man of inspiration, Dominic is that of obedience to orders; one may say that his life was passed on the road to Rome, whither he continually went to ask for instructions. His legend was therefore very slow to be formed, although nothing forbade it to blossom freely; but neither the zeal of Gregory IX. for his memory nor the learning of his disciples were able to do for the _Hammer of heretics_ that which the love of the people did for the _Father of the poor_. His legend has the two defects which so soon weary the readers of hagiographical writings, when the question is of the saints whose worship the Church has commanded.[1] It is encumbered with a spurious supernaturalism, and with incidents borrowed right and left from earlier legends. The Italian people, who hailed in Francis the angel of all their hopes, and who showed themselves so greedy for his relics, did not so much as dream of taking up the corpse of the founder of the Order of Preaching Friars, and allowed him to wait twelve years for the glories of canonization.[2] We have already seen the efforts of Cardinal Ugolini to unite the two Orders, and the reasons he had for this course. He went to the Whitsunday chapter-general which met at Portiuncula (June 3, 1218), to which came also St. Dominic with several of his disciples. The ceremonial of these solemnities appears to have been always about the same since 1216; the Brothers Minor went in procession to meet the cardinal, who immediately dismounted from his horse and lavished expressions of affection upon them. An altar was set up in the open air, at which he said mass, Francis performing the functions of deacon.[3] It is easy to imagine the emotion which overcame those present when in its beautiful setting of the Umbrian landscape burst forth that part of the Pentecostal service, that most exciting, the most apocalyptic of the whole Catholic liturgy, the anthem _Alleluia, Alleluia, Emitte Spiritum tuum et creabuntur, et renovabis faciem terræ_. _Alleluia_,[4] does not this include the whole Franciscan dream? But what especially amazed Dominic was the absence of material cares. Francis had advised his brethren not to disquiet themselves in any respect about food and drink; he knew by experience that they might fearlessly trust all that to the love of the neighboring population. This want of carefulness had greatly surprised Dominic, who thought it exaggerated; he was able to reassure himself, when meal-time arrived, by seeing the inhabitants of the district hastening in crowds to bring far larger supplies of provisions than were needed for the several thousands of friars, and holding it an honor to wait upon them. The joy of the Franciscans, the sympathy of the populace with them, the poverty of the huts of Portiuncula, all this impressed him deeply; so much was he moved by it that in a burst of enthusiasm he announced his resolution to embrace gospel poverty.[5] Ugolini, though also moved, even to tears,[6] did not forget his former anxieties; the Order was too numerous not to include a group of malcontents; a few friars who before their conversion had studied in the universities began to condemn the extreme simplicity laid upon them as a duty. To men no longer sustained by enthusiasm the short precepts of the Rule appeared a charter all too insufficient for a vast association; they turned with envy toward the monumental abbeys of the Benedictines, the regular Canons, the Cistercians, and toward the ancient monastic legislations. They had no difficulty in perceiving in Ugolini a powerful ally, nor in confiding their observations to him. The latter deemed the propitious moment arrived, and in a private conversation with Francis made a few suggestions: Ought he not give to his disciples, especially to the educated among them, a greater share of the burdens? consult them, gain inspiration from their views? was there not room to profit by the experience of the older orders? Though all this was said casually and with the greatest possible tact, Francis felt himself wounded to the quick, and without answering he drew the cardinal to the very midst of the chapter. "My brothers," said he with fire, "the Lord has called me into the ways of simplicity and humility. In them he has shown me the truth for myself and for those who desire to believe and follow me; do not, then, come speaking to me of the Rule of St. Benedict, of St. Augustine, of St. Bernard, or of any other, but solely of that which God in his mercy has seen fit to show to me, and of which he has told me that he would, by its means, make a new covenant with the world, and he does not will that we should have any other. But by your learning and your wisdom God will bring you to confusion. For I am persuaded that God will chastise you; whether you will or no you will be forced to come to repentance, and nothing will remain for you but confusion."[7] This warmth in defending and affirming his ideas profoundly astonished Ugolini, who added not a word. As to Dominic, what he had just seen at Portiuncula was to him a revelation. He felt, indeed, that his zeal for the Church could not be greater, but he also perceived that he could serve her with more success by certain changes in his weapons. Ugolini no doubt only encouraged him in this view, and Dominic, beset with new anxieties, set out a few months later for Spain. The intensity of the crisis through which he passed has not been sufficiently noticed; the religious writers recount at length his sojourn in the grotto of Segovia, but they see only the ascetic practices, the prayers, the genuflexions, and do not think of looking for the cause of all this. From this epoch it might be said that he was unceasingly occupied in copying Francis, if the word had not a somewhat displeasing sense. Arrived at Segovia he follows the example of the Brothers Minor, founds a hermitage in the outskirts of the city, hidden among the rocks which overlook the town, and thence he descends from time to time to preach to the people. The transformation in his mode of life was so evident that several of his companions rebelled and refused to follow him in the new way. Popular sentiment has at times its intuitions; a legend grew up around this grotto of Segovia, and it was said that St. Dominic there received the stigmata. Is there not here an unconscious effort to translate into an image within the comprehension of all, that which actually took place in this cave of the Sierra da Guaderrama?[8] Thus St. Dominic also arrived at the poverty of the gospel, but the road by which he reached it was different indeed from that which St. Francis had followed; while the latter had soared to it as on wings, had seen in it the final emancipation from all the anxieties which debase this life, St. Dominic considered it only as a means; it was for him one more weapon in the arsenal of the host charged with the defence of the Church. We must not see in this a mere vulgar calculation; his admiration for him whom he thus imitated and followed afar off was sincere and profound, but genius is not to be copied. This sacred malady was not his; he has transmitted to his sons a sound and robust blood, thanks to which they have known nothing of those paroxysms of hot fever, those lofty flights, those sudden returns which make the story of the Franciscans the story of the most tempest-tossed society which the world has ever known, in which glorious chapters are mingled with pages trivial and grotesque, sometimes even coarse. At the chapter of 1218 Francis had other causes for sadness than the murmurs of a group of malcontents; the missionaries sent out the year before to Germany and Hungary had returned completely discouraged. The account of the sufferings they had endured produced so great an effect that from that time many of the friars added to their prayers the formula: "Lord preserve us from the heresy of the Lombards and the ferocity of the Germans."[9] This explains how Ugolini at last succeeded in convincing Francis of his duty to take the necessary measures no longer to expose the friars to be hunted down as heretics. It was decided that at the end of the next chapter the missionaries should be armed with a papal brief, which should serve them as ecclesiastical passport. Here is the translation of this document: Honorius, bishop, servant of the servants of God, to the archbishops, bishops, abbots, deacons, archdeacons, and other ecclesiastical superiors, salutation and the apostolic blessing. Our dear son, brother Francis, and his companions of the life and the Order of the Brothers Minor, having renounced the vanities of this world to choose a mode of life which has merited the approval of the Roman Church, and to go out after the example of the Apostles to cast in various regions the seed of the word of God, we pray and exhort you by these apostolic letters to receive as good catholics the friars of the above mentioned society, bearers of these presents, warning you to be favorable to them and treat them with kindness for the honor of God and out of consideration for us. Given (at Rieti) this third day of the ides of June (June 11, 1219), in the third year of our pontificate.[10] It is evident that this bull was calculated to avoid awakening Francis's susceptibilities. To understand precisely in what it differs from the first letters usually accredited to new Orders it is necessary to compare it with them; that which had instituted the Dominicans had been, like the others, a veritable privilege;[11] here there is nothing of the kind. The assembly which was opened at Whitsunday of 1219 (May 26) was of extreme importance.[12] It closed the series of those primitive chapters in which the inspiration and fancy of Francis were given free course. Those which followed, presided over by the vicars, have neither the same cheerfulness nor the same charm; the crude glare of full day has driven away the hues of dawn and the indescribable ardors of nature at its awakening. The summer of 1219 was the epoch fixed by Honorius III. for making a new effort in the East, and directing upon Egypt all the forces of the Crusaders.[13] Francis thought the moment arrived for realizing the project which he had not been able to execute in 1212. Strangely enough, Ugolini who, two years before had hindered his going to France, now left him in entire liberty to carry out this new expedition.[14] Several authors have deemed that Francis, having found in him a true protector, felt himself reassured as to the future of the Order; he might indeed have thought thus, but the history of the troubles which burst out immediately after his departure, the astounding story of the kind reception given by the court of Rome to some meddlers who took the opportunity of his absence to imperil his Order, would suffice to show how much the Church was embarrassed by him, and with what ardor she longed for the transformation of his work. We shall find later on the detailed account of these facts. It appears that a Romagnol brother Christopher was at this same chapter nominated provincial of Gascony; he lived there after the customs of the early Franciscans, working with his hands, living in a narrow cell made of the boughs of trees and potter's earth.[15] Egidio set out for Tunis with a few friars, but a great disappointment awaited them there; the Christians of this country, in the fear of being compromised by their missionary zeal, hurried them into a boat and constrained them to recross the sea.[16] If the date of 1219 for these two missions has little other basis than conjecture, the same is not the case as to the departure of the friars who went to Spain and Morocco. The discovery has recently been made of the account of their last preachings and of their tragic death, made by an eye-witness.[17] This document is all the more precious because it confirms the general lines of the much longer account given by Mark of Lisbon. It would be out of place to give a summary of it here, because it but very indirectly concerns the life of St. Francis, but we must note that these _acta_ have beyond their historic value a truly remarkable psychological--one must almost say pathological--significance; never was the mania for martyrdom better characterized than in these long pages, where we see the friars forcing the Mahometans to pursue them and make them win the heavenly palm. The forbearance which Miramolin as well as his fellow religionists at first show gives an idea of the civilization and the good qualities of these infidels, all the higher that very different sentiments would be natural in the vanquished ones of the plains of Tolosa. It is impossible to call by the name of sermons the collections of rude apostrophes which the missionaries addressed to those whom they wished to convert; at this paroxysm the thirst for martyrdom becomes the madness of suicide. Is this to say that friars Bernard, Pietro, Adjutus, Accurso, and Otho have no right to the admiration and worship with which they have been surrounded? Who would dare say so? Is not devotion always blind? That a furrow should be fecund it must have blood, it must have tears, such tears as St. Augustine has called the blood of the soul. Ah, it is a great mistake to immolate oneself, for the blood of a single man will not save the world nor even a nation; but it is a still greater mistake not to immolate oneself, for then one lets others be lost, and is oneself lost first of all. I greet you, therefore, Martyrs of Morocco; you do not regret your madness, I am sure, and if ever some righteous pedant gone astray in the groves of paradise undertakes to demonstrate to you that it would have been better worth while to remain in your own country, and found a worthy family of virtuous laborers, I fancy that Miramolin, there become your best friend, will take the trouble to refute him. You were mad, but I envy such madness, for you felt that the essential thing in this world is not to serve this ideal or that one, but with all one's soul to serve the ideal which one has chosen. When, a few months after, the story of their glorious end arrived at Assisi, Francis discerned a feeling of pride among his companions and reproached them in lively terms; he who would so have envied the lot of the martyrs felt himself humbled because God had not judged him worthy to share it. As the story was mingled with some words of eulogy of the founder of the Order, he forbade the further reading of it.[18] Immediately after the chapter he had himself undertaken a mission of the same kind as he had confided to the Brothers of Morocco, but he had proceeded in it in an entirely different manner: his was not the blind zeal which courts death in a sort of frenzy and forgets all the rest; perhaps he already felt that the persistent effort after the better, the continual immolation of self for truth, is the martyrdom of the strong. This expedition, which lasted more than a year, is mentioned by the biographers in a few lines.[19] Happily we have a number of other papers regarding it; but their silence suffices to prove the sincerity of the primitive Franciscan authors; if they had wanted to amplify the deeds of their subject, where could they have found an easier opportunity or a more marvellous theme? Francis quitted Portiuncula in the middle of June and went to Ancona, whence the Crusaders were to set sail for Egypt on St. John's Day (June 24th). Many friars joined him--a fact which was not without its inconveniences for a journey by sea, where they were obliged to depend upon the charity of the owners of the boats, or of their fellow-travellers. We can understand Francis's embarrassment on arriving at Ancona and finding himself obliged to leave behind a number of those who so earnestly longed to go with him. The Conformities relate here an incident for which we might desire an earlier authority, but which is certainly very like Francis; he led all his friends to the port and explained to them his perplexities. "The people of the boat," he told them, "refuse to take us all, and I have not the courage to make choice among you; you might think that I do not love you all alike; let us then try to learn the will of God." And he called a child who was playing close by, and the little one, charmed to take the part of Providence put upon him, pointed out with his finger the eleven friars who were to set sail.[20] We do not know what itinerary they followed. A single incident of the journey has come down to us: that of the chastisement inflicted in the isle of Cyprus on Brother Barbaro, who had been guilty of the fault which the master detested above all others--evil-speaking. He was implacable with regard to the looseness of language so customary among pious folk, and which often made a hell of religious houses apparently the most peaceful. The offence this time appeared to him the more grave for having been uttered in the presence of a stranger, a knight of that district. The latter was stupefied on hearing Francis command the guilty one to eat a lump of ass's dung which lay there, adding: "The mouth which has distilled the venom of hatred against my brother must eat this excrement." Such indignation, no less than the obedience of the unhappy offender, filled him with admiration.[21] It is very probable, as Wadding has supposed, that the missionaries debarked at St. Jean d'Acre. They arrived there about the middle of July.[22] In the environs of this city, doubtless, Brother Elias had been established for one or two years. Francis there told off a few of his companions, whom he sent to preach in divers directions, and a few days afterward he himself set out for Egypt, where all the efforts of the Crusaders were concentrated upon Damietta. From the first he was heart-broken with the moral condition of the Christian army. Notwithstanding the presence of numerous prelates and of the apostolic legate, it was disorganized for want of discipline. He was so affected by this that when there was talk of battle he felt it his duty to advise against it, predicting that the Christians would infallibly be beaten. No one heeded him, and on August 29th the Crusaders, having attacked the Saracens, were terribly routed.[23] His predictions won him a marvellous success. It must be owned that the ground was better prepared than any other to receive the new seed; not surely that piety was alive there, but in this mass of men come together from every corner of Europe, the troubled, the seers, the enlightened ones, those who thirsted for righteousness and truth, were elbowed by rascals, adventurers, those who were greedy for gold and plunder, capable of much good or much evil, the sport of fleeting impulses, loosed from the bonds of the family, of property, of the habits which usually twine themselves about man's will, and only by exception permit a complete change in his manner of life; those among them who were sincere and had come there with generous purposes were, so to speak, predestined to enter the peaceful army of the Brothers Minor. Francis was to win in this mission fellow-laborers who would assure the success of his work in the countries of northern Europe. Jacques de Vitry, in a letter to friends written a few days later, thus describes the impression produced on him by Francis: "I announce to you that Master Reynier, Prior of St. Michael, has entered the Order of the Brothers Minor, an Order which is multiplying rapidly on all sides, because it imitates the primitive Church and follows the life of the Apostles in everything. The master of these Brothers is named Brother Francis; he is so lovable that he is venerated by everyone. Having come into our army, he has not been afraid, in his zeal for the faith, to go to that of our enemies. For days together he announced the word of God to the Saracens, but with little success; then the sultan, King of Egypt, asked him in secret to entreat God to reveal to him, by some miracle, which is the best religion. Colin, the Englishman, our clerk, has entered the same Order, as also two others of our companions, Michael and Dom Matthew, to whom I had given the rectorship of the Sainte Chapelle. Cantor and Henry have done the same, and still others whose names I have forgotten."[24] The long and enthusiastic chapter which the same author gives to the Brothers Minor in his great work on the Occident is too diffuse to find a place here. It is a living and accurate picture of the early times of the Order; in it Francis's sermon before the sultan is again related. It was written at a period when the friars had still neither monasteries nor churches, and when the chapters were held once or twice a year; this gives us a date anterior to 1223, and probably even before 1221. We have here, therefore, a verification of the narratives of Thomas of Celano and the Three Companions, and they find in it their perfect confirmation. As to the interviews between Francis and the sultan, it is prudent to keep to the narratives of Jacques de Vitry and William of Tyre.[25] Although the latter wrote at a comparatively late date (between 1275 and 1295), he followed a truly historic method, and founded his work on authentic documents; we see that he knows no more than Jacques de Vitry of the proposal said to have been made by Francis to pass through a fire if the priests of Mahomet would do as much, intending so to establish the superiority of Christianity. We know how little such an appeal to signs is characteristic of St. Francis. Perhaps the story, which comes from Bonaventura, is born of a misconception. The sultan, like a new Pharaoh, may have laid it upon the strange preacher to prove his mission by miracles. However this may be, Francis and his companions were treated with great consideration, a fact the more meritorious that hostilities were then at their height. Returned to the Crusading camp, they remained there until after the taking of Damietta (November 5, 1219). This time the Christians were victorious, but perhaps the heart of the _gospel man_ bled more for this victory than for the defeat of August 29th. The shocking condition of the city, which the victors found piled with heaps of dead bodies, the quarrels over the sharing of booty, the sale of the wretched creatures who had not succumbed to the pestilence,[26] all these scenes of terror, cruelty, greed, caused him profound horror. The "human beast" was let loose, the apostle's voice could no more make itself heard in the midst of the savage clamor than that of a life-saver over a raging ocean. He set out for Syria[27] and the Holy Places. How gladly would we follow him in this pilgrimage, accompany him in thought through Judea and Galilee, to Bethlehem, to Nazareth, to Gethsemane! What was said to him by the stable where the Son of Mary was born, the workshop where he toiled, the olive-tree where he accepted the bitter cup? Alas! the documents here suddenly fail us. Setting out from Damietta very shortly after the siege (November 5, 1219) he may easily have been at Bethlehem by Christmas. But we know nothing, absolutely nothing, except that his sojourn was more prolonged than had been expected. Some of the Brothers who were present at Portiuncula at the chapter-general of 1220 (Whitsunday, May 17th) had time enough to go to Syria and still find Francis there;[28] they could hardly have arrived much earlier than the end of June. What had he been doing those eight months? Why had he not gone home to preside at the chapter? Had he been ill?[29] Had he been belated by some mission? Our information is too slight to permit us even to venture upon conjecture. Angelo Clareno relates that the Sultan of Egypt, touched by his preaching, gave command that he and all his friars should have free access to the Holy Sepulchre without the payment of any tribute.[30] Bartholomew of Pisa on his part says incidentally that Francis, having gone to preach in Antioch and its environs, the Benedictines of the Abbey of the Black Mountain,[31] eight miles from that city, joined the Order in a body, and gave up all their property to the Patriarch. These indications are meagre and isolated indeed, and the second is to be accepted only with reserve. On the other hand, we have detailed information of what went on in Italy during Francis's absence. Brother Giordano's chronicle, recently discovered and published, throws all the light that could be desired upon a plot laid against Francis by the very persons whom he had commissioned to take his place at Portiuncula, and this, if not with the connivance of Rome and the cardinal protector, at least without their opposition. These events had indeed been narrated by Angelo Clareno, but the undisguised feeling which breathes through all his writings and their lack of accuracy had sufficed with careful critics to leave them in doubt. How could it be supposed that in the very lifetime of St. Francis the vicars whom he had instituted could take advantage of his absence to overthrow his work? How could it be that the pope, who during this period was sojourning at Rieti, how that Ugolini, who was still nearer, did not impose silence on these agitators?[32] Now that all the facts come anew to light, not in an oratorical and impassioned account, but brief, precise, cutting, dated, with every appearance of notes taken day by day, we must perforce yield to evidence. Does this give us reason clamorously to condemn Ugolino and the pope? I do not think so. They played a part which is not to their honor, but their intentions were evidently excellent. If the famous aphorism that the end justifies the means is criminal where one examines his own conduct, it becomes the first duty in judging that of others. Here are the facts: On July 25th, about one month after Francis's departure for Syria, Ugolini, who was at Perugia, laid upon the Clarisses of Monticelli (Florence), Sienna, Perugia, and Lucca that which his friend had so obstinately refused for the friars, the Benedictine Rule.[33] At the same time, St. Dominic, returning from Spain full of new ardor after his retreat in the grotto of Segovia, and fully decided to adopt for his Order the rule of poverty, was strongly encouraged in this purpose and overwhelmed with favors.[34] Honorius III. saw in him the providential man of the time, the reformer of the monastic Orders; he showed him unusual attentions, going so far, for example, as to transfer to him a group of monks belonging to other Orders, whom he appointed to act as Dominic's lieutenants on the preaching tours which he believed it to be his duty to undertake, and to serve, under his direction, an apprenticeship in popular preaching.[35] That Ugolini was the inspiration of all this, the bulls are here to witness. His ruling purpose at that time was so clearly to direct the two new Orders that he chose a domicile with this end in view, and we find him continually either at Perugia--that is to say, within three leagues of Portiuncula--or at Bologna, the stronghold of the Dominicans. It now becomes manifest that just as the fraternity instituted by Francis was truly the fruit of his body, flesh of his flesh, so does the Order of the Preaching Friars emanate from the papacy, and St. Dominic is only its putative father. This character is expressed in one word by one of the most authoritative of contemporary annalists, Burchard of Ursperg ([Cross] 1226). "The pope," he says, "_instituted_ and confirmed the Order of the Preachers."[36] Francis on his journey in the Orient had taken for special companion a friar whom we have not yet met, Pietro di Catana or _dei Cattani_. Was he a native of the town of Catana? There is no precise indication of it. It appears more probable that he belonged to the noble family _dei Cattani_, already known to Francis, and of which Orlando, Count of Chiusi in Casentino, who gave him the Verna, was a member. However that may be, we must not confound him with the Brother Pietro who assumed the habit in 1209, at the same time with Bernardo of Quintavallo, and died shortly afterward. Tradition, in reducing these two men to a single personage, was influenced not merely by the similarity of the names, but also by the very natural desire to increase the prestige of one who in 1220-1221 was to play an important part in the direction of the Order.[37] At the time of his departure for the East Francis had left two vicars in his place, the Brothers Matteo of Narni and Gregorio of Naples. The former was especially charged to remain at Portiuncula to admit postulants;[38] Gregorio of Naples, on the other hand, was to pass through Italy to console the Brothers.[39] The two vicars began at once to overturn everything. It is inexplicable how men still under the influence of their first fervor for a Rule which in the plenitude of their liberty they had promised to obey could have dreamed of such innovations if they had not been urged on and upheld by those in high places. To alleviate the vow of poverty and to multiply observances were the two points toward which their efforts were bent. In appearance it was a trifling matter, in reality it was much, for it was the first movement of the old spirit against the new. It was the effort of men who unconsciously, I am willing to think, made religion an affair of rite and observance, instead of seeing in it, like St. Francis, the conquest of the liberty which makes us free in all things, and leads each soul to obey that divine and mysterious power which the flowers of the fields adore, which the birds of the air bless, which the symphony of the stars praises, and which Jesus of Nazareth called _Abba_, that is to say, Father. The first Rule was excessively simple in the matter of fasts. The friars were to abstain from meat on Wednesdays and Fridays; they might add Mondays and Saturdays, but only on Francis's special authorization. The vicars and their adherents complicated this rule in a surprising manner. At the chapter-general held in Francis's absence (May 17, 1220), they decided, first, that in times of feasting the friars were not to provide meat, but if it were offered to them spontaneously they were to eat it; second, that all should fast on Mondays as well as Wednesdays and Fridays; third, that on Mondays and Saturdays they should abstain from milk products unless by chance the adherents of the Order brought some to them.[40] These beginnings bear witness also to an effort to imitate the ancient Orders, not without the vague hope that they would be substituted for them. Brother Giordano has preserved to us only this decision of the chapter of 1220, but the expressions of which he makes use sufficiently prove that it was far from being the only one, and that the malcontents had desired, as in the chapters of Citeaux and Monte Cassino, to put forth veritable constitutions. These modifications of the Rule did not pass, however, without arousing the indignation of a part of the chapter; a lay brother made himself their eager messenger, and set out for the East to entreat Francis to return without delay, to take the measures called for by the circumstances. There were also other causes of disquiet. Brother Philip, a Zealot of the Clarisses, had made haste to secure for them from Ugolini the privileges which had already been under consideration.[41] A certain Brother Giovanni di Conpello[42] had gathered together a great number of lepers of both sexes, and written a Rule, intending to form with them a new Order. He had afterward presented himself before the supreme pontiff with a train of these unfortunates to obtain his approbation. Many other distressing symptoms, upon which Brother Giordano does not dwell, had manifested themselves. The report of Francis's death had even been spread abroad, so that the whole Order was disturbed, divided, and in the greatest peril. The dark presentiments which Francis seems to have had were exceeded by the reality.[43] The messenger who brought him the sad news found him in Syria, probably at St. Jean d'Acre. He at once embarked with Elias, Pietro di Catana, Cæsar of Speyer, and a few others, and returned to Italy in a vessel bound for Venice, where he might easily arrive toward the end of July. FOOTNOTES: [1] One proof of the obscurity in which Dominic remained so long as Rome did not apotheosize him, is that Jacques de Vitry, who consecrates a whole chapter of his _Historia Occidentalis_ to the Preaching Friars (27, p. 333) does not even name the founder. This is the more significant since a few pages farther on, the chapter given to the Brothers Minor is almost entirely filled with the person of St. Francis. This silence about St. Dominic has been remarked and taken up by Moschus, who finds no way to explain it. Vide _Vitam J. de Vitriaco_, at the head of the Douai edition of 1597. [2] Francis, who died in 1226, is canonized in 1228; Anthony of Padua, 1231 and 1233; Elisabeth of Thuringia, 1231 and 1235; Dominic, 1221 and 1234. [3] 3 Soc., 61. [4] Shed abroad, Lord, thy Spirit, and all shall be created, and thou shalt renew the face of the earth. [5] 2 Cel., 3. 87; _Spec._, 132b; _Conform._, 207a, 112a; _Fior._, 18. The historians of St. Dominic have not received these details kindly, but an incontestable point gained from diplomatic documents is that in 1218 Dominic, at Rome, procured privileges in which the properties of his Order were indicated, and that in 1220 he led his friars to profess poverty. [6] 2 Cel., 3, 9; _Spec._, 17a. [7] _Spec._, 49a; _Tribul._, Laur. MS., 11a-12b; _Spec._, 183a; _Conform._, 135b 1. [8] The principal sources are indicated in A. SS., Augusti, t. i., pp. 470 ff. [9] Giord., 18; 3 Soc., 62. [10] Sbaralea, _Bull. fr._, t. i, p. 2; Potthast, 6081: Wadding, _ann. 1219_, No. 28, indicates the works where the text may be found. Cf. A. SS., p. 839. [11] The title sufficiently indicated the contents: _Domenico priori S. Romani tolosani ejusque fratribus, eos in protectionem recipit eorumque Ordinem cum bonis et privilegiis confirmat_. _Religiosam vitam_: December 22, 1216; Pressuti, t. i., 175, text in Horoy t. ii., col. 141-144. [12] Vide A. SS., pp. 608 ff. and 838 ff. [13] Vide Bull _Multi divinæ_ of August 13, 1218. Horoy, t. iii., col. 12; Potthast, 5891. [14] The contradiction is so striking that the Bollandists have made of it the principal argument for defending the error in their manuscript (1 Cel., 75), and insisting in the face of, and against everything that Francis had taken that journey. A. SS., 607. [15] He died at Cahors, October 31, 1272. His legend is found in MS. Riccardi, 279, f^o. 69a. _Incipit vita f. Christophori quam compilavit fr. Bernardus de Bessa custodiæ Caturcensis: Quasi vas auri solidum._ Cf. Mark of Lisbon, t. ii., pp. 106-113, t. iii., p. 212, and Glassberger, _An. fr._, t. ii., p. 14. [16] A. SS., Aprilis, t. iii., p. 224; _Conform._, 118b, 1; 54a; Mark of Lisbon, t. ii., p. 1--Brother Luke had been sent to Constantinople, in 1219, at latest. Vide _Constitutus_ of December 9, 1220. Sbaralea, _Bull. fr._, t. i., p. 6; Potthast, 6431. [17] We owe to M. Müller (_Anfänge_, p. 207) the honor of this publication, copied from a manuscript of the Cottoniana. [18] Giord., 8. [19] 1 Cel., 57; Bon., 133-138; 154 and 155; 2 Cel., 2, 2; _Conform._, 113b, 2; 114a, 2; _Spec._, 55b; _Fior._, 24. [20] _Conform._, 113b, 2; cf. A. SS., p. 611. [21] 2 Cel., 3, 92; _Spec._, 30b. Cf. 2 Cel., 3, 115. _Conform._, 142b, 1. This incident may possibly have taken place on the return. [22] With the facilities of that period the voyage required from twenty to thirty days. The _diarium_ of a similar passage may be found in Huillard-Bréholles, _Hist. Dipl._, t. i., 898-901. Cf. _Ibid._, Introd., p. cccxxxi. [23] 2 Cel., 22; Bon 154, 155; cf. A. SS., p. 612. [24] Jacques de Vitry speaks only incidentally of Francis here in the midst of salutations; from the critical point of view this only enhances the value of his words. See the Study of the Sources, p. 428. [25] Vide below, the Study of the Sources, p. 430. [26] All this is related at length by Jacques de Vitry. [27] "Cil hom qui comença l'ordre des Frères Mineurs, si ot nom frère François ... vint en l'ost de Damiate, e i fist moult de bien, et demora tant que la ville fut prise. Il vit le mal et le péché qui comença à croistre entre les gens de l'ost, si li desplot, par quoi il s'en parti, e fu une pièce en Surie, et puis s'en rala en son pais." Historiens des Croisades, ii. _L'Est de Eracles Empereur_, liv. xxxii., chap. xv. Cf. Sanuto; _Secreta fid. cruc._, lib. iii., p. xi., cap. 8, in Bongars. [28] Giord., Chron., 11-14. [29] The episode of Brother Leonard's complaints, related below, gives some probability to this hypothesis. [30] _Tribul._, Laur. MS., 9b. Cf. 10b: _Sepulcro Domini visitato festinat ad Christianorum terram_. [31] Upon this monastery see a letter _ad familiares_ of Jacques de Vitry, written in 1216 and published in 1847 by Baron Jules de St. Genois in t. xiii. of the _Mémoires de l'Académie royale des sciences et des beaux arts de Bruxelles_ (1849). _Conform._, 106b, 2; 114a, 2; _Spec._, 184. [32] A. SS., pp. 619-620, 848, 851, 638. [33] Vide Bull _Sacrosancta_ of December 9, 1219. Cf. those of September 19, 1222; Sbaralea, i., p. 3, 11 ff.; Potthast, 6179, 6879a, b, c. [34] Vide Potthast, 6155, 6177, 6184, 6199, 6214, 6217, 6218, 6220, 6246. See also _Chartularium Universitatis Par._, t. i., 487. [35] Bull _Quia qui seminant_ of May 12, 1220. Ripalli, _Bul. Præd._, t. i., p. 10 (Potthast, 6249). [36] _Mon. Germ. hist. Script._, t. 23, p. 376. This passage is of extreme importance because it sums up in a few lines the ecclesiastical policy of Honorius III. After speaking of the perils with which the _Humiliati_ threatened the Church, Burchard adds: _Quæ volens corrigere dominus papa ordinem Predicatorum instituit et confirmavit._ Now these _Humiliati_ were an approved Order. But Burchard, while classing them with heretics beside the Poor Men of Lyons, expresses in a word the sentiments of the papacy toward them; it had for them an invincible repugnance, and not wishing to strike them directly it sought a side issue. Similar tactics were followed with regard to the Brothers Minor, with that overplus of caution which the prodigious success of the Order inspired. It all became useless when in 1221 Brother Elias became Francis's vicar, and especially when, after the latter's death, he had all the liberty necessary for directing the Order according to the views of Ugolini, now become Gregory IX. [37] 1 Cel., 25; cf. A. SS., p. 581. Pietro di Catana had the title of doctor of laws, Giord., 11, which entirely disagrees with what is related of Brother Pietro, 3 Soc., 28 and 29. Cf. Bon., 28 and 29; _Spec._, 5b; _Fior._, 2; _Conform._, 47; 52b, 2; _Petrus vir litteratus erat et nobilis_, Giord., 12. [38] We know nothing more of him except that after his death he had the gift of miracles. Giord., 11; _Conform._, 62a, 1. [39] He was not an ordinary man; a remarkable administrator and orator (Eccl., 6), he was minister in France before 1224 and again in 1240, thanks to the zeal with which he had adopted the ideas of Brother Elias. He was nephew of Gregory IX., which throws some light upon the practices which have just been described. After having been swept away in Elias's disgrace and condemned to prison for life, he became in the end Bishop of Bayeux. I note for those who take an interest in those things that manuscripts of two of his sermons may be found in the National Library of Paris. The author of them being indicated simply as _fr. Gr. min._, it has only lately become known whose they were. These sermons were preached in Paris on Holy Thursday and Saturday. MS. new. acq., Lat., 338 f^o 148, 159. [40] Giord., 11. Cf. _Spec._, 34b. _Fior._, 4; _Conform._, 184a, 1. [41] Giord., 12. Cf. Bull _Sacrosancta_ of December 9, 1219. [42] Giord., 12. Ought we, perhaps, to read di Campello? Half way between Foligno and Spoleto there is a place of this name. On the other hand, the 3 Soc., 35, indicate the entrance into the Order of a Giovanni di Capella who in the legend became the Franciscan Judas. _Invenit abusum capelle et ab ipsa denominatus est: ab ordine recedens factus leprosus laqueo ut Judas se suspendit._ _Conform._, 104a, 1. Cf. _Bernard de Besse_, 96a; _Spec._, 2; _Fior._, 1. All this is much mixed up. Perhaps we should believe that Giovanni di Campello died shortly afterward, and that later on, when the stories of this troubled time were forgotten, some ingenious Brother explained the note of infamy attached to his memory by a hypothesis built upon his name itself. [43] Giord., 12, 13, and 14. * * * * * CHAPTER XIV THE CRISIS OF THE ORDER[1] Autumn, 1220 On his arrival in Venice Francis informed himself yet more exactly concerning all that had happened, and convoked the chapter-general at Portiuncula for Michaelmas (September 29, 1220).[2] His first care was doubtless to reassure his sister-friend at St. Damian; a short fragment of a letter which has been preserved to us gives indication of the sad anxieties which filled his mind: "I, little Brother Francis, desire to follow the life and the poverty of Jesus Christ, our most high Lord, and of his most holy Mother, persevering therein until the end; and I beg you all and exhort you to persevere always in this most holy life and poverty, and take good care never to depart from it upon the advice or teachings of any one whomsoever."[3] A long shout of joy sounded up and down all Italy when the news of his return was heard. Many zealous brethren were already despairing, for persecutions had begun in many provinces; so when they learned that their spiritual father was alive and coming again to visit them their joy was unbounded. From Venice Francis went to Bologna. The journey was marked by an incident which once more shows his acute and wise goodness. Worn out as much by emotion as by fatigue, he one day found himself obliged to give up finishing the journey on foot. Mounted upon an ass, he was going on his way, followed by Brother Leonard of Assisi, when a passing glance showed him what was passing in his companion's mind. "My relatives," the friar was thinking, "would have been far enough from associating with Bernardone, and yet here am I, obliged to follow his son on foot." We may judge of his astonishment when he heard Francis saying, as he hastily dismounted from his beast: "Here, take my place; it is most unseemly that thou shouldst follow me on foot, who art of a noble and powerful lineage." The unhappy Leonard, much confused, threw himself at Francis's feet, begging for pardon.[4] Scarcely arrived at Bologna, Francis was obliged to proceed against those who had become backsliders. It will be remembered that the Order was intended to possess nothing, either directly or indirectly. The monasteries given to the friars did not become their property; so soon as the proprietor should desire to take them back or anyone else should wish to take possession of them, they were to be given up without the least resistance; but on drawing near to Bologna he learned that a house was being built, which was already called _The house of the Brothers_. He commanded its immediate evacuation, not even excepting the sick who happened to be there. The Brothers then resorted to Ugolini, who was then in that very city for the consecration of Santa Maria di Rheno.[5] He explained to Francis at length that this house did not belong to the Order; he had declared himself its proprietor by public acts; and he succeeded in convincing him.[6] Bolognese piety prepared for Francis an enthusiastic reception, the echo of which has come down even to our times: "I was studying at Bologna, I, Thomas of Spalato, archdeacon in the cathedral church of that city, when in the year 1220, the day of the Assumption, I saw St. Francis preaching on the piazza of the Lesser Palace, before almost every man in the city. The theme of his discourse was the following: Angels, men, the demons. He spoke on all these subjects with so much wisdom and eloquence that many learned men who were there were filled with admiration at the words of so plain a man. Yet he had not the manner of a preacher, his ways were rather those of conversation; the substance of his discourse bore especially upon the abolition of enmities and the necessity of making peaceful alliances. His apparel was poor, his person in no respect imposing, his face not at all handsome; but God gave such great efficacy to his words that he brought back to peace and harmony many nobles whose savage fury had not even stopped short before the shedding of blood. So great a devotion was felt for him that men and women flocked after him, and he esteemed himself happy who succeeded in touching the hem of his garment." Was it at this time that the celebrated Accurso the Glossarist,[7] chief of that famous dynasty of jurisconsults who during the whole thirteenth century shed lustre upon the University of Bologna, welcomed the Brothers Minor to his villa at Ricardina, near the city?[8] We do not know. It appears that another professor, Nicolas dei Pepoli, also entered the Order.[9] Naturally the pupils did not lag behind, and a certain number asked to receive the habit. Yet all this constituted a danger; this city, which in Italy was as an altar consecrated to the science of law, was destined to exercise upon the evolution of the Order the same influence as Paris; the Brothers Minor could no more hold aloof from it than they could keep aloof from the ambient air. This time Francis remained here but a very short time. An ancient tradition, of which his biographers have not preserved any trace, but which nevertheless appears to be entirely probable, says that Ugolini took him to pass a month in the Camaldoli, in the retreat formerly inhabited by St. Romuald in the midst of the Casentino forest, one of the noblest in Europe, within a few hours' walk of the Verna, whose summit rises up gigantic, overlooking the whole country. We know how much Francis needed repose. There is no doubt that he also longed for a period of meditation in order to decide carefully in advance upon his line of conduct, in the midst of the dark conjectures which had called him home. The desire to give him the much-needed rest was only a subordinate purpose with Ugolini. The moment for vigorous action appeared to him to have come. We can easily picture his responses to Francis's complaints. Had he not been seriously advised to profit by the counsels of the past, by the experience of those founders of Orders who have been not only saints but skilful leaders of men? Was not Ugolini himself his best friend, his born defender, and yet had not Francis forced him to lay aside the influence to which his love for the friars, his position in the Church, and his great age gave him such just title? Yes, he had been forced to leave Francis to needlessly expose his disciples to all sorts of danger, to send them on missions as perilous as they had proved to be ineffectual, and all for what? For the most trivial point of honor, because the Brothers Minor were determined not to enjoy the smallest privileges. They were not heretics, but they disturbed the Church as much as the heretics did. How many times had he not been reminded that a great association, in order to exist, must have precise and detailed regulations? It had all been labor lost! Of course Francis's humility was doubted by no one, but why not manifest it, not only in costume and manner of living, but in all his acts? He thought himself obeying God in defending his own inspiration, but does not the Church speak in the name of God? Are not the words of her representatives the words of Jesus forever perpetuated on earth? He desired to be a man of the Gospel, an apostolic man, but was not the best way of becoming such to obey the Roman pontiff, the successor of Peter? With an excess of condescension they had let him go on in his own way, and the result was the saddest of lessons. But the situation was not desperate, there was still time to find a remedy; to do that he had only to throw himself at the feet of the pope, imploring his blessing, his light, and his counsel. Reproaches such as these, mingled with professions of love and admiration on the part of the prelate, could not but profoundly disturb a sensitive heart like that of Francis. His conscience bore him good witness, but with the modesty of noble minds he was ready enough to think that he might have made many mistakes. Perhaps this is the place to ask what was the secret of the friendship of these two men, so little known to one another on certain sides. How could it last without a shadow down to the very death of Francis, when we always find Ugolini the very soul of the group who are compromising the Franciscan ideal? No answer to this question is possible. The same problem presents itself with regard to Brother Elias, and we are no better able to find a satisfactory answer. Men of loving hearts seldom have a perfectly clear intelligence. They often become fascinated by men the most different from themselves, in whose breasts they feel none of those feminine weaknesses, those strange dreams, that almost sickly pity for creatures and things, that mysterious thirst for pain which is at once their own happiness and their torment. The sojourn at Camaldoli was prolonged until the middle of September, and it ended to the cardinal's satisfaction. Francis had decided to go directly to the pope, then at Orvieto, with the request that Ugolini should be given him as official protector intrusted with the direction of the Order. A dream which he had once had recurred to his memory; he had seen a little black hen which, in spite of her efforts, was not able to spread her wings over her whole brood. The poor hen was himself, the chickens were the friars. This dream was a providential indication commanding him to seek for them a mother under whose wings they could all find a place, and who could defend them against the birds of prey. At least so he thought.[10] He repaired to Orvieto without taking Assisi in his way, since if he went there he would be obliged to take some measures against the fomentors of disturbance; he now proposed to refer everything directly to the pope. Does his profound humility, with the feeling of culpability which Ugolini had awakened in him, suffice to explain his attitude with regard to the pope, or must we suppose that he had a vague thought of abdicating? Who knows whether conscience was not already murmuring a reproach, and showing him how trivial were all the sophisms which had been woven around him? "Not daring to present himself in the apartments of so great a prince, he remained outside before the door, patiently waiting till the pope should come out. When he appeared St. Francis made a reverence and said: "'Father Pope, may God give you peace.' 'May God bless you, my son,' replied he. 'My lord,' then said St. Francis to him, 'you are great and often absorbed by great affairs; poor friars cannot come and talk with you as often as they need to do; you have given me many popes; give me a single one to whom I may address myself when need occurs, and who will listen in your stead, and discuss my affairs and those of the Order.' 'Whom do you wish I should give you, my son?' 'The Bishop of Ostia.' And he gave him to him."[11] Conferences with Ugolini now began again; he immediately accorded Francis some amends; the privilege granted the Clarisses was revoked; Giovanni di Conpello was informed that he had nothing to hope from the _curia_, and last of all leave was given to Francis himself to compose the Rule of his Order. Naturally he was not spared counsel on the subject, but there was one point upon which the curia could not brook delay, and of which it exacted the immediate application--the obligation of a year's novitiate for the postulants. At the same time a bull was issued not merely for the sake of publishing this ordinance, but especially to mark in a solemn manner the commencement of a new era in the relations of the Church and the Franciscans. The fraternity of the Umbrian Penitents became an Order in the strictest sense of the word. Honorius, bishop, servant of the servants of God, to Brother Francis and the other priors or custodes of the Brothers Minor, greeting and the apostolic benediction. In nearly all religious Orders it has been wisely ordained that those who present themselves with the purpose of observing the regular life shall make trial of it for a certain time, during which they also shall be tested, in order to leave neither place nor pretext for inconsiderate steps. For these reasons we command you by these presents to admit no one to make profession until after one year of novitiate; we forbid that after profession any brother shall leave the Order, and that any one shall take back again him who has gone out from it. We also forbid that those wearing your habit shall circulate here and there without obedience, lest the purity of your poverty be corrupted. If any friars have had this audacity, you will inflict upon them ecclesiastical censures until repentance.[12] It is surely only by a very decided euphemism that such a bull can be considered in the light of a privilege. It was in reality the laying of the strong hand of the papacy upon the Brothers Minor. From this time, in the very nature of things it became impossible for Francis to remain minister-general. He felt it himself. Heart-broken, soul-sick, he would fain, in spite of all, have found in the energy of his love those words, those glances which up to this time had taken the place of rule or constitution, giving to his earliest companions the intuition of what they ought to do and the strength to accomplish it; but an administrator was needed at the head of this family which he suddenly found to be so different from what it had been a few years before, and he sadly acknowledged that he himself was not in the slightest degree such a person.[13] Ah, in his own conscience he well knew that the old ideal was the true, the right one; but he drove away such thoughts as the temptations of pride. The recent events had not taken place without in some degree weakening his moral personality; from being continually talked to about obedience, submission, humility, a certain obscurity had come over this luminous soul; inspiration no longer came to it with the certainty of other days; the prophet had begun to waver, almost to doubt of himself and of his mission. Anxiously he searched himself to see if in the beginning of his work there had not been some vain self-complacency. He pictured to himself beforehand the chapter which he was about to open, the attack, the criticisms of which it would be the object, and labored to convince himself that if he did not endure them with joy he was not a true Brother Minor.[14] The noblest virtues are subject to scruples, that of perfect humility more than any other, and thus it is that excellent men religiously betray their own convictions to avoid asserting themselves. He resolved then to put the direction of the Order into the hands of Pietro di Catana. It is evident that there was nothing spontaneous in this decision, and the fact that this brother was a doctor of laws and belonged to the nobility squarely argues the transformation of the Franciscan institute. It is not known whether or not Ugolini was present at the chapter of September 29, 1220, but if he was not there in person he was assuredly represented by some prelate, charged to watch over the debates.[15] The bull which had been issued a week before was communicated to the friars, to whom Francis also announced that he was about to elaborate a new Rule. With reference to this matter there were conferences in which the ministers alone appear to have had a deliberative voice. At these conferences the essential points of the new Rule were settled as to principle, leaving to Francis the care of giving them proper form at his leisure. Nothing better reveals the demoralized state into which he had fallen than the decision which was taken to drop out one of the essential passages of the old Rule, one of his three fundamental precepts, that which began with these words, "_Carry nothing with you_."[16] How did they go to work to obtain from Francis this concession which, a little while before, he would have looked upon as a denial of his call, a refusal to accept in its integrity the message which Jesus had addressed to him? It is the secret of history, but we may suppose there was in his life at this time one of those moral tempests which overbear the faculties of the strongest, leaving in their wounded hearts only an unutterable pain. Something of this pain has passed into the touching narrative of his abdication which the biographers have given us. "From henceforth," he said to the friars, "I am dead for you, but here is Brother Pietro di Catana, whom you and I will all obey." And prostrating himself before him he promised him obedience and submission. The friars could not restrain their tears and lamentations when they saw themselves thus becoming in some sort orphans, but Francis arose, and, clasping his hands, with eyes upraised to heaven: "Lord," he said, "I return to thee this family which thou hast confided to me. Now, as thou knowest, most sweet Jesus, I have no longer strength nor ability to keep on caring for them; I confide them, therefore, to the ministers. May they be responsible before thee at the day of judgment if any brother, by their negligence or bad example, or by a too severe discipline, should ever wander away."[17] The functions of Pietro di Catana were destined to continue but a very short time; he died on March 10, 1221.[18] Information abounds as to this period of a few months; nothing is more natural, since Francis remained at Portiuncula to complete the task confided to him, living there surrounded with brethren who later on would recall to mind all the incidents of which they were witnesses. Some of them reveal the conflict of which his soul was the arena. Desirous of showing himself submissive, he nevertheless found himself tormented by the desire to shake off his chains and fly away as in former days, to live and breathe in God alone. The following artless record deserves, it seems to me, to be better known.[19] One day a novice who could read the psalter, though not without difficulty, obtained from the minister general--that is to say, from the vicar of St. Francis--permission to have one. But as he had learned that St. Francis desired the brethren to be covetous neither for learning nor for books, he would not take his psalter without his consent. So, St. Francis having come to the monastery where the novice was, "Father," said he, "it would be a great consolation to have a psalter; but though the minister-general has authorized me to get it, I would not have it unknown to you." "Look at the Emperor Charles," replied St. Francis with fire, "Roland, and Oliver and all the paladins, valorous heroes and gallant knights, who gained their famous victories in fighting infidels, in toiling and laboring even unto death! The holy martyrs, they also have chosen to die in the midst of battle for the faith of Christ! But now there are many of those who aspire to merit honor and glory simply by relating their feats. Yes, among us also there are many who expect to receive glory and honor by reciting and preaching the works of the saints, as if they had done them themselves!" ... A few days after, St. Francis was sitting before the fire, and the novice drew near to speak to him anew about his psalter. "When you have your psalter," said Francis to him, "you will want a breviary, and when you have a breviary you will seat yourself in a pulpit like a great prelate and will beckon to your companion, 'Bring me my breviary!'" St. Francis said this with great vivacity, then taking up some ashes he scattered them over the head of the novice, repeating, "There is the breviary, there is the breviary!" Several days after, St. Francis being at Portiuncula and walking up and down on the roadside not far from his cell, the same Brother came again to speak to him about his psalter. "Very well, go on," said Francis to him, "you have only to do what your minister tells you." At these words the novice went away, but Francis began to reflect on what he had said, and suddenly calling to the friar, he cried, "Wait for me! wait for me!" When he had caught up to him, "Retrace your steps a little way. I beg you," he said. "Where was I when I told you to do whatever your minister told you as to the psalter?" Then falling upon his knees on the spot pointed out by the friar, he prostrated himself at his feet: "Pardon, my brother, pardon!" he cried, "for he who would be Brother Minor ought to have nothing but his clothing." This long story is not merely precious because it shows us, even to the smallest particular, the conflict between the Francis of the early years, looking only to God and his conscience, and the Francis of 1220, become a submissive monk in an Order approved by the Roman Church, but also because it is one of those infrequent narratives where his method shows itself with its artless realism. These allusions to the tales of chivalry, and this freedom of manner which made a part of his success with the masses, were eliminated from the legend with an incredible rapidity. His spiritual sons were perhaps not ashamed of their father in this matter, but they were so bent upon bringing out his other qualities that they forgot a little too much the poet, the troubadour, the _joculator Domini_. Certain fragments, later than Thomas of Celano by more than a century, which relate some incidents of this kind, bear for that very reason the stamp of authenticity. It is difficult enough to ascertain precisely what part Francis still took in the direction of the Order. Pietro di Catana and later Brother Elias are sometimes called ministers-general, sometimes vicars; the two terms often occur successively, as in the preceding narrative. It is very probable that this confusion of terms corresponds to a like confusion of facts. Perhaps it was even intentional. After the chapter of September, 1220, the affairs of the Order pass into the hands of him whom Francis had called minister-general, though the friars as well as the papacy gave him only the title of vicar. It was essential for the popularity of the Brothers Minor that Francis should preserve an appearance of authority, but the reality of government had slipped from his hands. The ideal which he had borne in his body until 1209 and had then given birth to in anguish, was now taking its flight, like those sons of our loins whom we see suddenly leaving us without our being able to help it, since that is life, yet not without a rending of our vitals. _Mater dolorosa!_ Ah, no doubt they will come back again, and seat themselves piously beside us at the paternal hearth; perhaps even, in some hour of moral distress, they will feel the need of taking refuge in their mother's arms as in the old days; but these fleeting returns, with their feverish haste, only reopen the wounds of the poor parents, when they see how the children hasten to depart again--they who bear their name but belong to them no longer. FOOTNOTES: [1] Giord., 14; _Tribul._, f^o 10. [2] Any other date is impossible, since Francis in open chapter relinquished the direction of the Order in favor of Pietro di Catana, who died March 10, 1221. [3] This too short fragment is found in § vi. of the Rule of the Damianites (August 9, 1253): Speculum, Morin, Tract. iii., 226b. [4] 2 Cel., 2, 3; Bon., 162; cf. _Conform._, 184b, 2, and 62b, 1. [5] Sigonius, _Opera_, t. iii. col. 220; cf. Potthast, 5516, and 6086. [6] 2 Cel., 3, 4; _Spec._, 11a; _Tribul._, 13a; _Conform._, 169b, 2. [7] Died in 1229. Cf. Mazzetti, _Repertorio di tutti i professori di Bologna_, Bologna, 1847, p. 11. [8] See _Mon. Germ. hist. Script._, t. 28, p. 635, and the notes. [9] Wadding, _ann. 1220_, no. 9. Cf. A. SS., p. 823. [10] 2 Cel., 1, 16; _Spec._, 100a-101b. [11] Giord., 14; cf. 2 Cel., 1, 17; _Spec._, 102; 3 Soc., 56 and 63. [12] _Cum secundum._ The original is at Assisi with _Datum apud Urbem Veterem X. Kal. Oct. pont. nostri anno quinto_ (September 22, 1220). It is therefore by an error that Sbaralea and Wadding make it date from Viterbo, which is the less explicable that all the bulls of this epoch are dated from Orvieto. Wadding, _ann. 1220_, 57; Sbaralea, vol. i., p. 6; Potthast, 6561. [13] 2 Cel., 3, 118; Ubertin, _Arbor. V._, 2; _Spec._, 26; 50; 130b; _Conform._, 136a, 2; 143a, 2. [14] 2 Cel., 3, 83; Bon. 77. One should read this account in the _Conform._ according to the _Antigua Legenda_, 142a, 2; 31a, 1; _Spec._ 43b. [15] _Tribul._ Laur. MS., 12b; Magl. MS., 71b. [16] Luke, ix., 1-6. _Tribul._, 12b: _Et fecerunt de regula prima ministri removere_.... This must have taken place at the chapter of September 29, 1220, since the suppression is made in the Rule of 1221. [17] 2 Cel., 3, 81; _Spec._, 26; _Conform._, 175b, 1; 53a; Bon., 76; A. SS., p. 620. [18] The epitaph on his tomb, which still exists at S. M. dei Angeli bears this date: see _Portiuncula, von P. Barnabas aus dem Elsass_, Rixheim, 1884, p. 11. Cf. A. SS., p. 630. [19] _Spec._, 9b; _Arbor. V._, 3; _Conform._, 170a, 1; 2 Cel., 3, 124. Cf. Ubertini, _Archiv._, iii., pp. 75 and 177. * * * * * CHAPTER XV THE RULE OF 1221[1] The winter of 1220-1221 was spent by Francis chiefly in fixing his thought by writing. Until now he had been too much the man of action to have been able to give much thought to anything but the _living word_, but from this time his exhausted forces compelled him to satisfy his longing for souls by some other means than evangelizing tours. We have seen that the chapter of September 29, 1220, on one side, and the bull _Cum secundum_ on the other, had fixed in advance a certain number of points. For the rest, complete liberty had been given him, not indeed to make a final and unchangeable statement of his ideas, but to set them forth. The substance of legislative power had passed into the hands of the ministers.[2] That which we call the Rule of 1221 is, then, nothing more than a proposed law, submitted to a representative government at its parliament. The head of authority will one day give it to the world, so thoroughly modified and altered that Francis's name at the head of such a document will give but small promise, and quite indirectly, that it will contain his personal opinion. Never was man less capable of making a Rule than Francis. In reality, that of 1210 and the one which the pope solemnly approved in November 29, 1223, had little in common except the name. In the former all is alive, free, spontaneous; it is a point of departure, an inspiration; it may be summed up in two phrases: the appeal of Jesus to man, "Come, follow me," the act of man, "He left all and followed him." To the call of divine love man replies by the joyful gift of himself, and that quite naturally, by a sort of instinct. At this height of mysticism any regulation is not only useless, it is almost a profanation; at the very least it is the symptom of a doubt. Even in earthly loves, when people truly love each other nothing is asked, nothing promised. The Rule of 1223, on the other hand, is a reciprocal contract. On the divine side the call has become a command; on the human, the free impulse of love has become an act of submission, by which life eternal will be earned. At the bottom of it all is the antinome of law and love. Under the reign of law we are the mercenaries of God, bound down to an irksome task, but paid a hundred-fold, and with an indisputable right to our wages. Under the rule of love we are the sons of God, and coworkers with him; we give ourselves to him without bargaining and without expectation; we follow Jesus, not because this is well, but because we can do no otherwise, because we feel that he has loved us and we love him in our turn. An inward flame draws us irresistibly toward him: _Et Spiritus et Sponsa dicunt: Veni_. It is necessary to dwell a little on the antithesis between these two Rules. That of 1210 alone is truly Franciscan; that of 1223 is indirectly the work of the Church, endeavoring to assimilate with herself the new movement, which with one touch she transforms and turns wholly from its original purpose. That of 1221 marks an intermediate stage. It is the clash of two principles, or rather of two spirits; they approach, they touch, but they are not merged in one another; here and there is a mixture, but nowhere combination; we can separate the divers elements without difficulty. Their condition is the exact reflection of what was going on in Francis's soul, and of the rapid evolution of the Order. To aid him in his work Francis joined to himself Brother Cæsar of Speyer, who would be especially useful to him by his profound acquaintance with the sacred texts. What strikes us first, on glancing over this Rule of 1221, is its extraordinary length; it covers not less than ten folio pages, while that of 1223 has no more than three. Take away from it the passages which emanate from the papacy and those which were fixed at the previous chapter, you will hardly have shortened it by a column; what remains is not a Rule, but a series of impassioned appeals, in which the father's heart speaks, not to command but to convince, to touch, to awaken in his children the instinct of love. It is all chaotic and even contradictory,[3] without order, a medley of outbursts of joy and bitter sobs, of hopes and regrets. There are passages in which the passion of the soul speaks in every possible tone, runs over the whole gamut from the softest note to the most masculine, from those which are as joyous and inspiring as the blast of a clarion, to those which are agitated, stifled, like a voice from beyond the tomb. "By the holy love which is in God, I pray all the friars, ministers as well as others, to put aside every obstacle, every care, every anxiety, that they may be able to consecrate themselves entirely to serve, love, and honor the Lord God, with a pure heart and a sincere purpose, which is what he asks above all things. Let us have always in ourselves a tabernacle and a home for him who is the Lord God most mighty, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, who says, 'Watch and pray always, that you may be found worthy to escape all the things which will come to pass, and to appear upright before the Son of man.' "Let us then keep in the true way, the life, the truth, and the holy Gospel of Him who has deigned for our sake to leave his Father that he may manifest his name to us, saying, 'Father, I have manifested thy name to those whom thou hast given me, and the words which thou hast given me I have given also unto them. They have received them, and they have known that I am come from thee, and they believe that thou hast sent me. I pray for them; I pray not for the world, but for those whom thou hast given me, that they may be one as we are one. I have said these things, being still in the world, that they may have joy in themselves. I have given them thy words, and the world hath hated them, because they are not of the world. I pray not that thou shouldst take them out of the world, but that thou wilt keep them from the evil. Sanctify them through the truth; thy word is truth. As thou hast sent me into the world I have also sent them into the world, and for their sake I sanctify myself that they may themselves be sanctified in the truth; and neither pray I for these alone, but for all those who shall believe on me through their words, that we all may be one, and that the world may know that thou hast sent me, and that thou lovest them as thou hast loved me. I have made known unto them thy name, that the love wherewith thou hast loved me may be in them and I in them.' PRAYER. "Almighty, most high and sovereign God, holy Father, righteous Lord, King of heaven and earth, we give thee thanks for thine own sake, in that by thy holy will, and by thine only Son and thy Holy Spirit thou hast created all things spiritual and corporeal, and that after having made us in thine image and after thy likeness, thou didst place us in that paradise which we lost by our sin. And we give thee thanks because after having created us by thy Son, by that love which is thine, and which thou hast had for us, thou hast made him to be born very God and very man of the glorious and blessed Mary, ever Virgin, and because by his cross, his blood, and his death thou hast willed to ransom us poor captives. And we give thee thanks that thy Son is to return in his glorious majesty to send to eternal fire the accursed ones, those who have not repented and have not known thee; and to say to those who have known and adored thee and served thee by repentance, 'Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from before the foundation of the world.' And since we, wretched and sinful, are not worthy to name thee, we humbly ask our Lord Jesus Christ, thy well-beloved Son, in whom thou art well pleased, that he may give thee thanks for everything; and also the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete, as it may please thee and them; for this we supplicate him who has all power with thee, and by whom thou hast done such great things for us. Alleluia. "And we pray the glorious Mother, the blessed Mary, ever Virgin, St. Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, and all the choir of blessed Spirits, Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones, Dominions, Principalities and Powers, Virtues and Angels, Archangels, John the Baptist, John the Evangelist, Peter, Paul, and the holy Patriarchs, the Prophets, the Holy Innocents, Apostles, Evangelists, Disciples, Martyrs, Confessors, Virgins, the blessed ones, Elijah and Enoch, and all the saints who have been, shall be, and are, we humbly pray them by thy love to give thee thanks for these things, as it pleases thee, sovereign, true, eternal and living God, and also to thy Son, our most holy Lord Jesus Christ, and to the Holy Spirit, the Comforter, forever and ever. Amen. Alleluia. "And we supplicate all those who desire to serve the Lord God, in the bosom of the Catholic and Apostolic Church, all priests, deacons, sub-deacons, acolytes and exorcists, readers, porters, all clerks, all monks and nuns, all children and little ones, paupers and exiles, kings, and princes, workmen and laborers, servants and masters, the virgins, the continent and the married, laics, men and women, all children, youths, young men and old men, the sick and the well, the small and the great, the peoples of every tribe and tongue and nation, all men in every part of the world whatsoever, who are or who shall be, we pray and beseech them, all we Brothers Minor, unprofitable servants, that all together, with one accord we persevere in the true faith and in penitence, for outside of these no person can be saved. "Let us all, with all our heart and all our thought, and all our strength, and all our mind, with all our vigor, with all our effort, with all our affection, with all our inward powers, our desires, and our wills, love the Lord God, who has given to us all his body, all his soul, all his life, and still gives them every day to each one of us. He created us, he saved us by his grace alone; he has been, he still is, full of goodness to us, us wicked and worthless, corrupt and offensive, ungrateful, ignorant, bad. We desire nothing else, we wish for nothing else; may nothing else please us, or have any attraction for us, except the Creator, the Redeemer, the Saviour, sole and true God, who is full of goodness, who is all goodness, who is the true and supreme good, who alone is kind, pious, and merciful, gracious, sweet, and gentle, who alone is holy, righteous, true, upright, who alone has benignity, innocence, and purity; of whom, by whom, and in whom is all the pardon, all the grace, all the glory of all penitents, of all the righteous and all the saints who are rejoicing in heaven. "Then let nothing again hinder, let nothing again separate, nothing again retard us, and may we all, so long as we live, in every place, at every hour, at every time, every day and unceasingly, truly and humbly believe. Let us have in our hearts, let us love, adore, serve, praise, bless, glorify, exalt, magnify, thank the most high, sovereign, eternal God, Trinity and Unity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Creator of all men, both of those who believe and hope in him and of those who love him. He is without beginning and without end, immutable and invisible, ineffable, incomprehensible, indiscernible, blessed, lauded, glorious, exalted, sublime, most high, sweet, lovely, delectable, and always worthy of being desired above all things, in all the ages of ages. Amen." Have not these artless repetitions a mysterious charm which steals deliciously into the very depths of the heart? Is there not in them a sort of sacrament of which the words are only the rude vehicle? Francis is taking refuge in God, as the child throws itself upon its mother's bosom, and in the incoherence of its weakness and its joy stammers out all the words it knows, repeating by them all only the eternal "I am thine" of love and faith. There is in them also something which recalls, not only by citations, but still more by the very inspiration of the thought, that which we call the sacerdotal prayer of Christ. The apostle of poverty appears here as if suspended between earth and heaven by the very strength of his love, consecrated the priest of a new worship by the inward and irresistible unction of the Spirit. He does not offer sacrifice like the priest of the past time; he sacrifices himself, and carries in his body all the woes of humanity. The more beautiful are these words from the mystical point of view, the less do they correspond with what is expected in a Rule; they have neither the precision nor the brief and imperative forms of one. The transformations which they were to undergo in order to become the code of 1223 were therefore fatal when we consider the definitive intervention of the Church of Rome to direct the Franciscan movement. It is probable that this rough draft of a Rule, such as we have it now, is that which was distributed in the chapter of Whitsunday, 1221. The variants, sometimes capital, which are found in the different texts, can be nothing other than outlines of the corrections proposed by the provincial ministers. Once admit the idea of considering this document as a rough draft, we are very soon brought to think that it had already undergone a rapid preliminary revision, a sort of pruning, in which ecclesiastical authority has caused to disappear all that was in flagrant contradiction with its own projects for the Order. If it is asked, who could have made these curtailments, one name springs at once to our lips--Ugolini. He criticised its exaggerated proportions, its want of unity and precision. Later on it is related that Francis had seen in a dream a multitude of starving friars, and himself unable to satisfy their wants, because though all around him lay innumerable crumbs of bread, they disappeared between his fingers when he would give them to those about him. Then a voice from heaven said to him: "Francis, make of these crumbs a wafer; with that thou shalt feed these starving ones." There is little hazard in assuming that this is the picturesque echo of the conferences which took place at this time between Francis and the cardinal; the latter might have suggested to him by such a comparison the essential defects of his project. All this, no doubt, took place during Francis's stay in Rome, in the beginning of 1221.[4] Before going there, we must cast a glance over the similarity in inspiration and even in style which allies the Rule of 1221 with another of St. Francis's works, that which is known under the title of The Admonitions.[5] This is a series of _spiritual counsels_ with regard to the religious life; it is closely united both in matter and form with the work which we have just examined. The tone of voice is so perfectly the same that one is tempted to see in it parts of the original draft of the Rule, separated from it as too prolix to find place in a Rule. However it may be with this hypothesis, we find in The Admonitions all the anxieties with which the soul of Francis was assailed in this uncertain and troubled hour. Some of these counsels sound like bits from a private journal. We see him seeking, with the simplicity of perfect humility, for reasons for submitting himself, renouncing his ideas, and not quite succeeding in finding them. He repeats to himself the exhortations that others had given him; we feel the effort to understand and admire the ideal monk whom Ugolini and the Church have proposed to him for an example: The Lord says in the Gospels: "He who does not give up all that he has cannot be my disciple. And he who would save his life shall lose it." One gives up all he possesses and loses his life when life gives himself entirely into the hands of his superior, to obey him.... And when the inferior sees things which would be better or more useful to his soul than those which the superior commands him, let him offer to God the sacrifice of his will. Reading this one might think that Francis was about to join the ranks of those to whom submission to ecclesiastical authority is the very essence of religion. But no; even here his true feeling is not wholly effaced, he mingles his words with parentheses and illustrations, timid, indeed, but revealing his deepest thought; always ending by enthroning the individual conscience as judge of last resort.[6] All this shows clearly enough that we must picture to ourselves moments when his wounded soul sighs after passive obedience, the formula of which, _perinde ac cadaver_, goes apparently much farther back than the Company of Jesus. These were moments of exhaustion, when inspiration was silent. One day he was sitting with his companions, when he began to groan and say: "There is hardly a monk upon earth who perfectly obeys his superior." His companions, much astonished, said: "Explain to us, father, what is perfect and supreme obedience." Then, comparing him who obeys to a corpse, he replied: "Take a dead body, and put it where you will, it will make no resistance; when it is in one place it will not murmur, when you take it away from there it will not object; put it in a pulpit, it will not look up but down; wrap it in purple, it will only be doubly pale."[7] This longing for corpse-like obedience witnesses to the ravages with which his soul had been laid waste; it corresponds in the moral domain to the cry for annihilation of great physical anguish. The worst was that he was absolutely alone. Everywhere else the Franciscan obedience is living, active, joyful.[8] He drank this cup to the very dregs, holding sacred the revolts dictated by conscience. One day in the later years of his life a German friar came to see him, and after having long discussed with him pure obedience: "I ask you one favor," he said to him, "it is that if the Brothers ever come to live no longer according to the Rule you will permit me to separate myself from them, alone or with a few others, to observe it in its completeness." At these words Francis felt a great joy. "Know," said he, "that Christ as well as I authorize what you have just been asking;" and laying hands upon him, "Thou art a priest forever," he added, "after the order of Melchisedec."[9] We have a yet more touching proof of his solicitude to safeguard the spiritual independence of his disciples: it is a note to Brother Leo.[10] The latter, much alarmed by the new spirit which was gaining power in the Order, opened his mind thereupon to his master, and doubtless asked of him pretty much the same permission as the friar from Germany. After an interview in which he replied _viva voce_, Francis, not to leave any sort of doubt or hesitation in the mind of him whom he surnamed his little sheep of God, _pecorella di Dio_, wrote to him again: Brother Leo, thy brother Francis wishes thee peace and health. I reply _yes_, my son, as a mother to her child. This word sums up all we said while walking, as well as all my counsels. If thou hast need to come to me for counsel, it is my wish that thou shouldst do it. Whatever may be the manner in which thou thinkest thou canst please the Lord God, follow it, and live in poverty. Do this (faites le[11]), God will bless thee and I authorize it. And if it were necessary for thy soul, or for thy consolation that thou shouldst come to see me, or if thou desirest it, my Leo, come. Thine in Christ. Surely we are far enough here from the corpse of a few pages back. It would be superfluous to pause over the other admonitions. For the most part they are reflections inspired by circumstances. Counsels as to humility recur with a frequency which explains both the personal anxieties of the author, and the necessity of reminding the brothers of the very essence of their profession. The sojourn of St. Francis at Rome, whither he went in the early months of 1221, to lay his plan before Ugolini, was marked by a new effort of the latter to bring him and St. Dominic together.[12] The cardinal was at this time at the apogee of his success. Everything had gone well with him. His voice was all powerful not only in affairs of the Church, but also in those of the Empire. Frederic II., who seemed to be groping his way, and in whose mind were germinating dreams of religious reformation, and the desire of placing his power at the service of the truth, treated him as a friend, and spoke of him with unbounded admiration.[13] In his reflections upon the remedies to be applied to the woes of Christianity, the cardinal came at last to think that one of the most efficacious would be the substitution of bishops taken from the two new Orders, for the feudal episcopate almost always recruited from local families in which ecclesiastical dignities were, so to speak, hereditary. In the eyes of Ugolini such bishops were usually wanting in two essential qualities of a good prelate: religious zeal and zeal for the Church. He believed that the Preaching and the Minor Friars would not only possess those virtues which were lacking in the others, but that in the hands of the papacy they might become a highly centralized hierarchy, truly catholic, wholly devoted to the interests of the Church at large. The difficulties which might occur on the part of the chapters which should elect the bishops, as well as on the side of the high secular clergy, would be put to flight by the enthusiasm which the people would feel for pastors whose poverty would recall the days of the primitive Church. At the close of his interviews with Francis and Dominic, he communicated to them some of these thoughts, asking their advice as to the elevation of their friars to prelatures. There was a pious contest between the two saints as to which should answer first. Finally, Dominic said simply that he should prefer to see his companions remain as they were. In his turn, Francis showed that the very name of his institute made the thing impossible. "If my friars have been called _Minores_," he said, "it is not that they may become _Majores_. If you desire that they become fruitful in the Church of God, leave them alone, and keep them in the estate into which God has called them. I pray you, father, do not so act that their poverty shall become a motive for pride, nor elevate them to prelatures which would move them to insolence toward others."[14] The ecclesiastical policy followed by the popes was destined to render this counsel of the two founders wholly useless.[15] Francis and Dominic parted, never again to meet. The _Master_ of the Preaching Friars shortly after set out for Bologna, where he died on August 6th following, and Francis returned to Portiuncula, where Pietro di Catana had just died (March 10, 1221). He was replaced at the head of the Order by Brother Elias. Ugolini was doubtless not without influence in this choice. Detained by his functions of legate, he could not be present at the Whitsunday chapter (May 30, 1221).[16] He was represented there by Cardinal Reynerio,[17] who came accompanied by several bishops and by monks of various orders.[18] About three thousand friars were there assembled, but so great was the eagerness of the people of the neighborhood to bring provisions, that after a session of seven days they were obliged to remain two days longer to eat up all that had been brought. The sessions were presided over by Brother Elias, Francis sitting at his feet and pulling at his robe when there was anything that he wished to have put before the Brothers. Brother Giordani di Giano, who was present, has preserved for us all these details and that of the setting out of a group of friars for Germany. They were placed under the direction of Cæsar of Speyer, whose mission succeeded beyond all expectation. Eighteen months after, when he returned to Italy, consumed with the desire to see St. Francis again, the cities of Wurzburg, Mayence, Worms, Speyer, Strasburg, Cologne, Salzburg, and Ratisbon had become Franciscan centres, from whence the new ideas were radiating into all Southern Germany. The foundation of the Tertiaries, or Third Order, generally in the oldest documents called Brotherhood of Penitence, is usually fixed as occurring in the year 1221; but we have already seen that this date is much too recent, or rather that it is impossible to fix any date, for what was later called, quite arbitrarily, the Third Order is evidently contemporary with the First.[19] Francis and his companions desired to be the apostles of their time; but they, no more than the apostles of Jesus, desired to have all men enter their association, which was necessarily somewhat restricted, and which, according to the gospel saying, was meant to be the leaven of the rest of humanity. In consequence, their life was literally the _apostolic life_, but the ideal which they preached was the _evangelical life_, such as Jesus had preached it. St. Francis no more condemned the family or property than Jesus did; he simply saw in them ties from which the _apostle_, and the apostle alone, needs to be free. If before long sickly minds fancied that they interpreted his thought in making the union of the sexes an evil, and all that concerns the physical activity of man a fall; if unbalanced spirits borrowed the authority of his name to escape from all duty; if married persons condemned themselves to the senseless martyrdom of virginity, he should certainly not be made responsible. These traces of an unnatural asceticism come from the dualist ideas of the Catharists, and not from the inspired poet who sang nature and her fecundity, who made nests for doves, inviting them to multiply under the watch of God, and who imposed manual labor on his friars as a sacred duty. The bases of the corporation of the _Brothers and Sisters of Penitence_ were very simple. Francis gave no new doctrine to the world; what was new in his message was wholly in his love, in his direct call to the evangelical life, to an ideal of moral vigor, of labor, and of love. Naturally, there were soon found men who did not understand this true and simple beauty; they fell into observances and devotions, imitated, while living in the world, the life of the cloister to which for one reason or another they were not able to retire; but it would be unjust to picture to ourselves the _Brothers of Penitence_ as modelled after them. Did they receive a Rule from St. Francis? It is impossible to say. The one which was given[20] them in 1289 by Pope Nicholas IV. is simply the recasting and amalgamation of all the rules of lay fraternities which existed at the end of the thirteenth century. To attribute this document to Francis is nothing less than the placing in a new building of certain venerated stones from an ancient edifice. It is a matter of façade and ornamentation, nothing more. Notwithstanding this absence of any Rule emanating from Francis himself, it is clear enough what, in his estimation, this association ought to be. The Gospel, with its counsels and examples, was to be its true Rule. The great innovation designed by the Third Order was concord; this fraternity was a union of peace, and it brought to astonished Europe a new truce of God. Whether the absolute refusal to carry arms[21] was an idea wholly chimerical and ephemeral, the documents are there to prove, but it is a fine thing to have had the power to bring it about for a few years. The second essential obligation of the Brothers of Penitence appears to have been that of reducing their wants so far as possible, and while preserving their fortunes to distribute to the poor at proper intervals the free portion of the revenue after contenting themselves with the strictly necessary.[22] To do with joy the duties of their calling; to give a holy inspiration to the slightest actions; to find in the infinitely littles of existence, things apparently the most commonplace, parts of a divine work; to keep pure from all debasing interest; to use things as not possessing them, like the servants in the parable who would soon have to give account of the talents confided to them; to close their hearts to hatred, to open them wide to the poor, the sick, to all abandoned ones, such were the other essential duties of the Brothers and Sisters of Penitence. To lead them into this royal road of liberty, love, and responsibility, Francis sometimes appealed to the terrors of hell and the joys of paradise, but interested love was so little a part of his nature that these considerations and others of the same kind occupy an entirely secondary place in those of his writings which remain, as also in his biographies. For him the gospel life is natural to the soul. Whoever comes to know it will prefer it; it has no more need to be proved than the outer air and the light. It needs only to lead prisoners to it, for them to lose all desire to return to the dungeons of avarice, hatred, or frivolity. Francis and his true disciples make the painful ascent of the mountain heights, impelled solely, but irresistibly, by the inner voice. The only foreign aid which they accept is the memory of Jesus, going before them upon these heights and mysteriously living again before their eyes in the sacrament of the eucharist. The letter to all Christians in which these thoughts break forth is a living souvenir of St. Francis's teachings to the Tertiaries. To represent these latter to ourselves in a perfectly concrete form we may resort to the legend of St. Lucchesio, whom tradition makes the first Brother of Penitence.[23] A native of a little city of Tuscany he quitted it to avoid its political enmities, and established himself at Poggibonsi, not far from Sienna, where he continued to trade in grain. Already rich, it was not difficult for him to buy up all the wheat, and, selling it in a time of scarcity, realize enormous profits. But soon overcome by Francis's preaching, he took himself to task, distributed all his superfluity to the poor, and kept nothing but his house with a small garden and one ass. From that time he was to be seen devoting himself to the cultivation of this bit of ground, and making of his house a sort of hostelry whither the poor and the sick came in swarms. He not only welcomed them, but he sought them out, even to the malaria-infected Maremma, often returning with a sick man astride on his back and preceded by his ass bearing a similar burden. The resources of the garden were necessarily very limited; when there was no other way, Lucchesio took a wallet and went from door to door asking alms, but most of the time this was needless, for his poor guests, seeing him so diligent and so good, were better satisfied with a few poor vegetables from the garden shared with him than with the most copious repast. In the presence of their benefactor, so joyful in his destitution, they forgot their own poverty, and the habitual murmurs of these wretches were transformed into outbursts of admiration and gratitude. Conversion had not killed in him all family ties; Bona Donna, his wife, became his best co-laborer, and when in 1260 he saw her gradually fading away his grief was too deep to be endured. "You know, dear companion," he said to her when she had received the last sacraments, "how much we have loved one another while we could serve God together; why should we not remain united until we depart to the ineffable joy? Wait for me. I also will receive the sacraments, and go to heaven with you." So he spoke, and called back the priest to administer them to him. Then after holding the hands of his dying companion, comforting her with gentle words, when he saw that her soul was gone he made over her the sign of the cross, stretched himself beside her, and calling with love upon Jesus, Mary, and St. Francis, he fell asleep for eternity. FOOTNOTES: [1] Text in _Firmamentum_, 10; _Spec._, 189; _Spec._, Morin. Tract., iii., 2b. M. Müller (_Anfänge_) has made a study of the Rule of 1221 which is a masterpiece of _exegetical scent_. Nevertheless if he had more carefully collated the different texts he would have arrived at still more striking results, thanks to the variants which he would have been able to establish. I cite a single example. Text _Firm_.--Wadding, adopted by Mr. M. _Omnes fratres ubicunque sunt vel vadunt, caveant sibi a malo visu et frequentia mulierum et nullus cum eis consilietur solus. Sacerdos honeste loquatur cum eis dando penitentiam vel aliud spirituale consilium._ Text of the _Speculum_, 189 ff. _Omnes fratres ubicunque sunt et vadunt caveant se a malo visu et frequentia mulierum et nullus cum eis concilietur aut per viam vadat solus aut ad mensam in una paropside comedat. (!!) Sacerdos honeste loquatur cum eis dando ... etc._ This passage is sufficient to show the superiority of the text of the Speculum, which is to be preferred also in other respects, but this is not the place for entering into these details. It is evident that the phrase in which we see the earliest friars sometimes sharing the repast of the sisters and eating from their porringer is not a later interpolation. [2] _Tribul._, 12b; _Spec._, 54b; _Arbor._ V., 3; _Spec._, 8b. [3] Cf. _cap._ 17 and 21. [4] 2 Cel., 3, 136. [5] See below, p. 354, text in the _Firmamentum_, 19 ff.; _Speculum_, Morin, tract. iii., 214a ff.; cf. _Conform._, 137 ff. [6] _Cum facit (subditus) voluntatem (prælati) dummodo benefacit vera obedientia est. Admon._, iii.; _Conform._, 139_a_, 2.--_Si vero prælatus subdito aliquid contra animam præcipiat licet ei non obediat tamen ipsum non dimittat._, Ibid.--_Nullus tenetur ad obedientiam in eo ubi committitus delictum vel peccatum. Epist._, ii. [7] 2 Cel., 3, 89; _Spec._, 29b; _Conform._, 176b, 1; Bon., 77. [8] _Per caritatem spiritus voluntarii serviant et obediant invicem. Et hæc est vera et sancta obedientia. Reg._, 1221, v. [9] _Tribul._, Laur. MS., 14b; _Spec._, 125a; _Conform._, 107b, 1; 184b, 1. [10] Wadding gives it (_Epist._ xvi.), after the autograph preserved in the treasury of the Conventuals of Spoleto. The authenticity of this piece is evident. [11] This plural, which perplexed Wadding, shows plainly that Brother Leo had spoken in the name of a group. [12] This date for the new communications between them seems incontestable, though it has never been proposed; in fact, we are only concerned to find a time when all three could have met at Rome (2 Cel., 3, 86; _Spec._, 27a), between December 22, 1216 (the approbation of the Dominicans), and August 6, 1221 (death of Dominic). Only two periods are possible: the early months of 1218 (Potthast, 5739 and 5747) and the winter of 1220-1221. At any other time one of the three was absent from Rome. On the other hand we know that Ugolini was in Rome in the winter of 1220-1221 (Huillard-Bréholles, _Hist. dipl._, ii., pp. 48, 123, 142. Cf. Potthast, 6589).--For Dominic see A. SS., Aug., vol. i., p. 503. The later date is imperative because Ugolini could not offer prelatures to the Brothers Minor before their explicit approbation (June 11, 1219), and this offer had no meaning with regard to the Dominicans until after the definitive establishment of their Order. [13] See the imperial letters of February 10, 1221; Huillard-Bréholles, vol. ii., pp. 122-127. [14] 2 Cel., 3, 86; Bon., 78; _Spec._, 27b. [15] Vide K. Eubel: _Die Bischöfe, Cardinäle und Päpste aus dem Minoritenorden bis_ 1305, 8vo, 1889. [16] He was in Northern Italy. Vide _Registri: Doc._, 17-28. [17] Reynerius, cardinal-deacon with the title of S. M. in Cosmedin, Bishop of Viterbo (cf. Innocent III., _Opera_, Migne, 1, col. ccxiii), 1 Cel., 125. He had been named rector of the Duchy of Spoleto, August 3, 1220. Potthast, 6319. [18] Giord, 16. The presence of Dominic at an earlier chapter had therefore been quite natural. [19] This view harmonizes in every particular with the witness of 1 Cel., 36 and 37, which shows the Third Order as having been quite naturally born of the enthusiasm excited by the preaching of Francis immediately after his return from Rome in 1210 (cf. _Auctor vit. sec._; A. SS., p. 593b). Nothing in any other document contradicts it; quite the contrary. Vide 3 Soc., 60. Cf. _Anon. Perus._; A. SS., p. 600; Bon., 25, 46. Cf. A. SS., pp. 631-634. The first bull which concerns the Brothers of Penitence (without naming them) is of December 16, 1221, _Significatum est_. If it really refers to them, as Sbaralea thinks, with all those who have interested themselves in the question to M. Müller inclusively--but which, it appears, might be contested--it is because in 1221 they had made appeal to the pope against the podestàs of Faenza and the neighboring cities. This evidently supposes an association not recently born. Sbaralea, _Bull. fr._, 1, p. 8; Horoy, vol. iv., col. 49; Potthast, 6736. [20] Bull _Supra montem_ of August 17, 1289, Potthast. 23044. M. Müller has made a luminous study of the origin of this bull; it may be considered final in all essential points (_Anfänge_, pp. 117-171). By this bull Nicholas IV.--minister-general of the Brothers Minor before becoming pope--sought to draw into the hands of his Order the direction of all associations of pious laics (Third Order of St. Dominic, the Gaudentes, the Humiliati. etc.). He desired by that to give a greater impulse to those fraternities which depended directly on the court of Rome, and augment their power by unifying them. [21] Vide Bull _Significatum est_ of December 16, 1221. Cf. _Supra montem_, chap. vii. [22] The Rule of the Third Order of the Humiliati, which dates from 1201, contains a similar clause. Tiraboschi, vol. ii., p. 132. [23] In the A. SS., Aprilis, vol. ii. p. 600-616. Orlando di Chiusi also received the habit from the hands of Francis. Vide _Instrumentum_, etc., below, p. 400. The Franciscan fraternity, under the influence of the other third orders, rapidly lost its specific character. As to this title, Third Order, it surely had originally a hierarchical sense, upon which little by little a chronological sense has been superposed. All these questions become singularly clearer when they are compared with what is known of the Humiliati. * * * * * CHAPTER XVI THE BROTHERS MINOR AND LEARNING Autumn, 1221-December, 1223 After the chapter of 1221 the evolution of the Order hurried on with a rapidity which nothing was strong enough to check. The creation of the ministers was an enormous step in this direction; by the very pressure of things the latter came to establish a residence; those who command must have their subordinates within reach, must know at all times where they are; the Brothers, therefore, could no longer continue to do without convents properly so-called. This change naturally brought about many others; up to this time they had had no churches. Without churches the friars were only itinerant preachers, and their purpose could not but be perfectly disinterested; they were, as Francis had wished, the friendly auxiliaries of the clergy. With churches it was inevitable that they should first fatally aspire to preach in them and attract the crowd to them, then in some sort erect them into counter parishes.[1] The bull of March 22, 1222,[2] shows us the papacy hastening these transformations with all its power. The pontiff accords to Brother Francis and the other friars the privilege of celebrating the sacred mysteries in their churches in times of interdict, on the natural condition of not ringing the bells, of closing the door, and previously expelling those who were excommunicated. By an astonishing inadvertence the bull itself bears witness to its uselessness, at least for the time in which it was given: "We accord to you," it runs, "the permission to celebrate the sacraments in times of interdict in your churches, _if you come to have any_." This is a new proof that in 1222 the Order as yet had none; but it is not difficult to see in this very document a pressing invitation to change their way of working, and not leave this privilege to be of no avail. Another document of the same time shows a like purpose, though manifested in another direction. By the bull _Ex parte_ of March 29, 1222, Honorius III. laid upon the Preachers and Minors of Lisbon conjointly a singularly delicate mission; he gave them full powers to proceed against the bishop and clergy of that city, who exacted from the faithful that they should leave to them by will one-third of their property, and refused the Church's burial service to those who disobeyed.[3] The fact that the pope committed to the Brothers the care of choosing what measures they should take proves how anxious they were at Rome to forget the object for which they had been created, and to transform them into deputies of the Holy See. It is, therefore, needless to point out that the mention of Francis's name at the head of the former of these bulls has no significance. We do not picture the Poverello seeking a privilege for circumstances not yet existing! We perceive here the influence of Ugolini,[4] who had found the Brother Minor after his own heart in the person of Elias. What was Francis doing all this time? We have no knowledge, but the very absence of information, so abundant for the period that precedes as well as for that which follows, shows plainly enough that he has quitted Portiuncula, and gone to live in one of those Umbrian hermitages that had always had so strong an attachment for him.[5] There is hardly a hill in Central Italy that has not preserved some memento of him. It would be hard to walk half a day between Florence and Rome without coming upon some hut on a hillside bearing his name or that of one of his disciples. There was a time when these huts were inhabited, when in these leafy booths Egidio, Masseo, Bernardo, Silvestro, Ginepro, and many others whose names history has forgotten, received visits from their spiritual father, coming to them for their consolation.[6] They gave him love for love and consolation for consolation. His poor heart had great need of both, for in his long, sleepless nights it had come to him at times to hear strange voices; weariness and regret were laying hold on him, and looking over the past he was almost driven to doubt of himself, his Lady Poverty, and everything. Between Chiusi and Radicofani--an hour's walk from the village of Sartiano--a few Brothers had made a shelter which served them by way of hermitage, with a little cabin for Francis in a retired spot. There he passed one of the most agonizing nights of his life. The thought that he had exaggerated the virtue of asceticism and not counted enough upon the mercy of God assailed him, and suddenly he came to regret the use he had made of his life. A picture of what he might have been, of the tranquil and happy home that might have been his, rose up before him in such living colors that he felt himself giving way. In vain he disciplined himself with his hempen girdle until the blood came; the vision would not depart. It was midwinter; a heavy fall of snow covered the ground; he rushed out without his garment, and gathering up great heaps of snow began to make a row of images. "See," he said, "here is thy wife, and behind her are two sons and two daughters, with the servant and the maid carrying all the baggage." With this child-like representation of the tyranny of material cares which he had escaped, he finally put away the temptation.[7] There is nothing to show whether or not we should fix at the same epoch another incident which legend gives as taking place at Sartiano. One day a brother of whom he asked, "Whence do you come?" replied, "From your cell." This simple answer was enough to make the vehement lover of Poverty refuse to occupy it again. "Foxes have holes," he loved to repeat, "and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of man had not where to lay his head. When the Lord spent forty days and forty nights praying and fasting in the desert, he built himself neither cell nor house, but made the side of a rock his shelter."[8] It would be a mistake to think, as some have done, that as time went on Francis changed his point of view. Certain ecclesiastical writers have assumed that since he desired the multiplication of his Order, he for that very reason consented to its transformation. The suggestion is specious, but in this matter we are not left to conjecture; almost everything which was done in the Order after 1221 was done either without Francis's knowledge or against his will. If one were inclined to doubt this, it would need only to glance over that most solemn and also most adequate manifesto of his thought--his Will. There he is shown freed from all the temptations which had at times made him hesitate in the expression of his ideas, bravely gathering himself up to summon back the primitive ideal, and set it up in opposition to all the concessions which had been wrung from his weakness. The Will is not an appendix to the Rule of 1223, it is almost its revocation. But it would be a mistake to see in it the first attempt made to return to the early ideal. The last five years of his life were only one incessant effort at protest, both by his example and his words. In 1222 he addressed to the brethren of Bologna a letter filled with sad forebodings. In that city, where the Dominicans, overwhelmed with attentions, were occupied with making themselves a stronghold in the system of instruction, the Brothers Minor were more than anywhere else tempted to forsake the way of simplicity and poverty. Francis's warnings had put on such dark and threatening colors that after the famous earthquake of December 23, 1222, which spread terror over all northern Italy, there was no hesitation in believing that he had predicted the catastrophe.[9] He had indeed predicted a catastrophe which was none the less horrible for being wholly moral, and the vision of which forced from him the most bitter imprecations: "Lord Jesus, thou didst choose thine apostles to the number of twelve, and if one of them did betray thee, the others, remaining united to thee, preached thy holy gospel, filled with one and the same inspiration; and behold now, remembering the former days, thou hast raised up the Religion of the Brothers in order to uphold faith, and that by them the mystery of thy gospel may be accomplished. Who will take their place if, instead of fulfilling their mission and being shining examples for all, they are seen to give themselves up to works of darkness? Oh! may they be accursed by thee, Lord, and by all the court of heaven, and by me, thine unworthy servant, they who by their bad example overturn and destroy all that thou didst do in the beginning and ceasest not to do by the holy Brothers of this Order."[10] This passage from Thomas of Celano, the most moderate of the biographers, shows to what a pitch of vehemence and indignation the gentle Francis could be worked up. In spite of very natural efforts to throw a veil of reserve over the anguish of the founder with regard to the future of his spiritual family, we find traces of it at every step. "The time will come," he said one day, "when our Order will so have lost all good renown that its members will be ashamed to show themselves by daylight."[11] He saw in a dream a statue with the head of pure gold, the breast and arms of silver, the body of crystal, and the legs of iron. He thought it was an omen of the future in store for his institute.[12] He believed his sons to be attacked with two maladies, unfaithful at once to poverty and humility; but perhaps he dreaded for them the demon of learning more than the temptation of riches. What were his views on the subject of learning? It is probable that he never examined the question as a whole, but he had no difficulty in seeing that there will always be students enough in the universities, and that if scientific effort is an homage offered to God, there is no risk of worshippers of this class being wanting; but in vain he looked about him on all sides, he saw no one to fulfil the mission of love and humility reserved for his Order, if the friars came to be unfaithful to it. Therefore there was something more in his anguish than the grief of seeing his hopes confounded. The rout of an army is nothing in comparison with the overthrow of an idea; and in him an idea had been incarnated, the idea of peace and happiness restored to mankind, by the victory of love over the trammels of material things. By an ineffable mystery he felt himself the Man of his age, him in whose body are borne all the efforts, the desires, the aspirations of men; with him, in him, by him humanity yearns to be renewed, and to use the language of the gospel, born again. In this lies his true beauty. By this, far more than by a vain conformity, an exterior imitation, he is a Christ. He also bears the affliction of the world, and if we will look into the very depths of his soul we must give this word affliction the largest possible meaning for him as for Jesus. By their pity they bore the physical sufferings of humanity, but their overwhelming anguish was something far different from this, it was the birth-throes of the divine. They suffer, because in them the Word is made flesh, and at Gethsemane, as under the olive-trees of Greccio, they are in agony "because their own received them not." Yes, St. Francis forever felt the travail of the transformation taking place in the womb of humanity, going forward to its divine destiny, and he offered himself, a living oblation, that in him might take place the mysterious palingenesis. Do we now understand his pain? He was trembling for the mystery of the gospel. There is in him something which reminds us of the tremor of life when it stands face to face with death, something by so much the more painful as we have here to do with moral life. This explains how the man who would run after ruffians that he might make disciples of them could be pitiless toward his fellow-laborers who by an indiscreet, however well-intentioned, zeal forgot their vocation and would transform their Order into a scientific institute. Under pretext of putting learning at the service of God and of religion, the Church had fostered the worst of vices, pride. According to some it is her title to glory, but it will be her greatest shame. Must we renounce the use of this weapon against the enemies of the faith? she asks. But can you imagine Jesus joining the school of the rabbins under the pretext of learning how to reply to them, enfeebling his thought by their dialectic subtleties and fantastic exegesis? He might perhaps have been a great doctor, but would he have become the Saviour of the world? You feel that he would not. When we hear preachers going into raptures over the marvellous spread of the gospel preached by twelve poor fishermen of Galilee, might we not point out to them that the miracle is at once more and less astounding than they say? More--for among the twelve several returned to the shores of their charming lake, and forgetful of the mystic net, thought of the Crucified One, if they thought of him at all, only to lament him, and not to raise him from the dead by continuing his work in the four quarters of the world; less--for if even now, in these dying days of the nineteenth century, preachers would go forth beside themselves with love, sacrificing themselves for each and all as in the old days their Master did, the miracle would be repeated again. But no; theology has killed religion. The clergy repeat to satiety that we must not confound the two; but what good does this do if in practice we do not distinguish them? Never was learning more eagerly coveted than in the thirteenth century. The Empire and the Church were anxiously asking of it the arguments with which they might defend their opposing claims. Innocent III. sends the collection of his Decretals to the University of Bologna and heaps favors upon it. Frederick II. founds that of Naples, and the Patarini themselves send their sons from Tuscany and Lombardy to study at Paris. We remember the success of Francis's preaching at Bologna,[13] in August, 1220; at the same period he had strongly reprimanded Pietro Staccia, the provincial minister and a doctor of laws, not only for having installed the Brothers in a house which appeared to belong to them, but especially for having organized a sort of college there. It appears that the minister paid no attention to these reproaches. When Francis became aware of his obstinacy he cursed him with frightful vehemence; his indignation was so great that when, later on, Pietro Staccia was about to die and his numerous friends came to entreat Francis to revoke his malediction, all their efforts were in vain.[14] In the face of this attitude of the founder it is very difficult to believe in the authenticity of the note purporting to be addressed to Anthony of Padua: "To my very dear Anthony, brother Francis, greetings in Christ. "It pleases me that you interpret to the Brothers the sacred writings and theology, in such a way, however (conformably to our Rule), that the spirit of holy prayer be not extinguished either in you or in the others, which I desire earnestly. Greetings." Must we see in this a pious fraud to weaken the numberless clear declarations of Francis against learning? It is difficult to picture to ourselves the rivalry which existed at this time between the Dominicans and Franciscans in the attempt to draw the most illustrious masters into their respective Orders. Petty intrigues were organized, in which the devotees had each his part, to lead such or such a famous doctor to assume the habit.[15] If the object of St. Francis had been scientific, the friars of Bologna, Paris, and Oxford could not have done more.[16] The current was so strong that the elder Orders were swept away in it whether they would or no; twenty years later the Cistercians also desired to become legists, theologians, decretalists, and the rest. Perhaps Francis did not in the outset perceive the gravity of the danger, but illusion was no longer possible, and from this time he showed, as we have seen, an implacable firmness. If later on his thought was travestied, the guilty ones--the popes and most of the ministers-general--were obliged to resort to feats of prestidigitation that are not to their credit. "Suppose," he would say, "that you had subtility and learning enough to know all things, that you were acquainted with all languages, the courses of the stars, and all the rest, what is there in that to be proud of? A single demon knows more on these subjects than all the men in this world put together.[17] But there is one thing that the demon is incapable of, and which is the glory of man: to be faithful to God."[18] Definite information with regard to the chapters of 1222 and 1223 is wanting. The proposed modifications of the project of 1221 were discussed by the ministers[19] and afterward definitively settled by Cardinal Ugolini. The latter had long conferences on the subject with Francis, who has himself given us the account of them.[20] The result of them all was the Rule of 1223. Very soon a swarm of marvellous stories, which it would be tedious to examine in detail, came to be clustered around the origin of this document; all that we need to retain of them is the memory that they keep of the struggles of Francis against the ministers for the preservation of his ideal. Before going to Rome to ask for the final approbation he had meditated long in the solitude of Monte Colombo, near Rieti. This hill was soon represented as a new Sinai, and the disciples pictured their master on its heights receiving another Decalogue from the hands of Jesus himself.[21] Angelo Clareno, one of the most complacent narrators of these traditions, takes upon himself to point out their slight value; he shows us Honorious III. modifying an essential passage in the plan at the last moment.[22] I have already so far described this Rule that there is no need to return to the subject here. It was approved November 25, 1223.[23] Many memories appear to have clustered about the journey of Francis to Rome. One day Cardinal Ugolini, whose hospitality he had accepted, was much surprised, and his guests as well, to find him absent as they were about to sit down at table, but they soon saw him coming, carrying a quantity of pieces of dry bread, which he joyfully distributed to all the noble company. His host, somewhat abashed by the proceeding, having undertaken after the meal to reproach him a little, Francis explained that he had no right to forget, for a sumptuous feast, the bread of charity on which he was fed every day, and that he desired thus to show his brethren that the richest table is not worth so much to the poor in spirit as this table of the Lord.[24] We have seen that during the earlier years the Brothers Minor had been in the habit of earning their bread by going out as servants. Some of them, a very small number, had continued to do so. Little by little, in this matter also all had been changed. Under color of serving, the friars entered the families of the highest personages of the pontifical court, and became their confidential attendants; instead of submitting themselves to all, as the Rule of 1221 ordained, they were above everyone. Entirely losing sight of the apostolic life, they became courtiers of a special type; their character, half ecclesiastic and half lay, rendered them capable of carrying out a number of delicate missions and of playing a part in the varied intrigues for which the greater number of Roman prelates have always seemed to live.[25] By way of protest Francis had only one weapon, his example. One day, the Speculum relates, the Blessed Francis came to Rome to see the Bishop of Ostia (Ugolini), and after having remained some time at his house, he went also to visit Cardinal Leo, who had a great devotion for him. It was winter; the cold, the wind, the rain made any journey impossible, so the cardinal begged him to pass a few days in his house and to take his food there, like the other poor folk who came there to eat. ... "I will give you," he added, "a good lodging, quite retired, where if you like you may pray and eat." Then Brother Angelo, one of the twelve first disciples, who lived with the cardinal, said to Francis: "There is, close by here, a great tower standing by itself and very quiet; you will be there as in a hermitage." Francis went to see it and it pleased him. Then, returning to the cardinal, "Monsignor," he said, "it is possible that I may pass a few days with you." The latter was very joyful, and Brother Angelo went to prepare the tower for the Blessed Francis and his companion. But the very first night, when he would have slept, the demons came and smote him. Calling then to his companion, "Brother," he said, "the demons have come and smitten me with violence; remain near me, I beg, for I am afraid here alone." He was trembling in all his members, like one who has a fever. They passed the night both without sleeping. "The demons are commissioned with the chastisements of God," said Francis; "as a podestà sends his executioner to punish the criminal, so God sends demons, who in this are his ministers.... Why has he sent them to me? Perhaps this is the reason: The cardinal desired to be kind to me, and I have truly great need of repose, but the Brothers who are out in the world, suffering hunger and a thousand tribulations, and also those others who are in hermitages or in miserable houses, when they hear of my sojourn with a cardinal will be moved to repine. 'We endure all privations,' they will say, 'while he has all that he can desire; 'but I ought to give them a good example--that is my true mission." ... Early next morning, therefore he quitted the tower, and having told the cardinal all, took leave of him and returned to the hermitage of Monte Colombo, near Rieti. "They think me a holy man," he said, "and see, it needed demons to cast me out of prison."[26] This story, notwithstanding its strange coloring, shows plainly how strong was his instinct for independence. To compare the hospitality of a cardinal to an imprisonment! He spoke better than he knew, characterizing in one word the relation of the Church to his Order. The lark was not dead; in spite of cold and the north wind it gayly took its flight to the vale of Rieti. It was mid-December. An ardent desire to observe to the life the memories of Christmas had taken possession of Francis. He opened his heart to one of his friends, the knight Giovanni di Greccio, who undertook the necessary preparations. The imitation of Jesus has in all times been the very centre of Christianity; but one must be singularly spiritual to be satisfied with the imitation of the heart. With most men there is need that this should be preceded and sustained by an external imitation. It is indeed the spirit that gives life, but it is only in the country of the angels that one can say that the flesh profiteth nothing. In the Middle Ages a religious festival was before all things else a representation, more or less faithful, of the event which it recalled; hence the _santons_ of Provence, the processions of the _Palmesel_, the Holy Supper of Maundy Thursday, the Road to the Cross of Good Friday, the drama of the Resurrection of Easter, and the flaming tow of Whitsunday. Francis was too thoroughly Italian not to love these festivals where every visible thing speaks of God and of his love. The population of Greccio and its environs was, therefore, convoked, as well as the Brothers from the neighboring monasteries. On the evening of the vigil of Christmas one might have seen the faithful hastening to the hermitage by every path with torches in their hands, making the forests ring with their joyful hymns. Everyone was rejoicing--Francis most of all. The knight had prepared a stable with straw, and brought an ox and an ass, whose breath seemed to give warmth to the poor _bambino_, benumbed with the cold. At the sight the saint felt tears of pity bedew his face; he was no longer in Greccio, his heart was in Bethlehem. Finally they began to chant matins; then the mass was begun, and Francis, as deacon, read the Gospel. Already hearts were touched by the simple recital of the sacred legend in a voice so gentle and so fervent, but when he preached, his emotion soon overcame the audience; his voice had so unutterable a tenderness that they also forgot everything, and were living over again the feeling of the shepherds of Judea who in those old days went to adore the God made man, born in a stable.[27] Toward the close of the thirteenth century, the author of the _Stabat Mater dolorosa_, Giacopone dei Todi, that Franciscan of genius who spent a part of his life in dungeons, inspired by the memory of Greccio, composed another Stabat, that of joy, _Stabat Mater speciosa_. This hymn of Mary beside the manger is not less noble than that of Mary at the foot of the cross. The sentiment is even more tender, and it is hard to explain its neglect except by an unjust caprice of fate. Stabat Mater speciosa Juxtum foenum gaudiosa Dum jacebat parvulus. Quæ gaudebat et ridebat Exsultabat cum videbat Nati partum inclyti. Fac me vere congaudere Jesulino cohærere Donec ego vixero.[28] FOOTNOTES: [1] All this took place with prodigious rapidity. The dimensions of the Basilica of Assisi, the plans of which were made in 1228, no more permits it to be considered as a conventual chapel than Santa-Croce in Florence, San Francesco in Sienna, or the Basilica San Antonio at Padua, monuments commenced between 1230 and 1240. Already before 1245 one party of the episcopate utters a cry of alarm, in which he speaks of nothing less than of closing the door of the secular churches, which have become useless. He complains with incredible bitterness that the Minor and Preaching Friars have absolutely supplanted the parochial clergy. This letter may be found in Pierre de la Vigne, addressed at once to Frederick II. and the Council of Lyons: _Epistolæ_, Basle, 1740, 2 vols., vol. i., pp. 220-222. It is much to be desired that a critical text should be given. See also the satire against the two new Orders, done in rhyme about 1242 by Pierre de la Vigne, and of which, allowing for possible exaggerations, the greater number of the incidents cannot have been invented: E. du Méril, _Poésies pop. lat._, pp. 153-177, Paris, 8vo, 1847. [2] And not of the 29th, as Sbaralea will have it. _Bull. fr._, vol. i., n. 10. Horoy, vol. iv., col. 129; the original, still in the archives of Assisi, bears the title: _Datum Anagnie 11 Kalendas Aprilis pontificatus nostri anno sexto_. [3] Potthast, 6809; Horoy, iv., col. 129. See also the bull _Ecce Venit Deus_ of July 14, 1227; L. Auvray: _Registres de Grégoire IX._, no. 129; cf. 153; Potthast, 8027 and 8028, 8189. [4] He had finished his mission as legate in Lombardy toward the close of September, 1221 (see his register; cf. Böhmer, _Acta imp. sel. doc._, 951). In the spring of 1222 we find him continually near the pope at Anagni, Veroli, Alatri (Potthast, 6807, 6812, 6849). The Holy See had still at that time a marked predilection for the Preachers; the very trite privilege of power to celebrate the offices in times of interdict had been accorded them March 7, 1222, but instead of the formula usual in such cases, a revised form had been made expressly for them, with a handsome eulogy. Ripolli, _Bull. Præd._, t. i., p. 15. [5] 2 Cel., 3, 93: _Subtrahebat se a consortio fratrum._ [6] It is needless to say that local traditions, in this case, though as to detail they must be accepted only with great reserve, yet on the whole are surely true. The geography of St. Francis's life is yet to be made. [7] 2 Cel., 3, 59; Bon., 60; _Conform._, 122b, 2. [8] 2 Cel., 3, 5; _Spec._, 12a; _Conform._, 169b, 2. [9] Eccl., 6. Vide Liebermann's text, _Mon. Germ. hist. Script._, t. 28, p. 663. [10] 2 Cel., 3, 93; Bon., 104 and 105; _Conform._, 101a, 2. [11] 2 Cel., 3, 93; _Spec._, 49b; 182a; _Conform._, 182a, 1; _Tribul._, f^o 5a; 2 Cel., 3, 98; 113; 115; 1 Cel., 28, 50; 96; 103; 104; 108; 111; 118. [12] 2 Cel., 3, 27; _Spec._, 38b; _Conform._, 181b, 1; _Tribul._, 7b. Cf. _Spec._, 220b; _Conform._, 103b. [13] Francis's successors were nearly all without exception students of Bologna. Pietro di Catana was doctor of laws, as also Giovanni Parenti (Giord., 51).--Elias had been _scriptor_ at Bologna.--Alberto of Pisa had been minister there (Eccl., 6).--Aymon had been reader there (Eccl., 6).--Crescentius wrote works on jurisprudence (_Conform._, 121b, 1, etc., etc.). [14] This name cannot be warranted; he is called Giovanni di Laschaccia in a passage of the _Conformities_ (104a, 1); Pietro Schiaccia in the Italian MS. of the _Tribulations_ (f^o 75a); Petrus Stacia in the Laurentinian MS. (13b; cf. _Archiv._, ii., p. 258). _Tribul._, 13b; _Spec._, 184b. This story has been much amplified in other places. _Spec._, 126a; _Conform._, 104b, 1. [15] Vide Eccl., 3: History of the entrance of Adam of Oxford into the Order. Cf., _Chartularium Univ. Par._, t. i., nos. 47 and 49. [16] Eccleston's entire chronicle is a living witness to this. [17] _Admonitio_, v.; cf. _Conform._, 141a. Compare the _Constitutiones antiquæ_ (_Speculum_, Morin, iii., f^o 195b-206) with the Rule. From the opening chapters the contradiction is apparent: _Ordinamus quod nullus recipiatur in ordine nostro nisi sit talis clericus qui sit competenter instructus in grammatica vel logica; aut nisi sit talis laicus de cujus ingressu esset valde celebris et edificatio in populo et in clero_. This is surely far from the spirit of him who said: _Et quicumque venerit amicus vel adversarius fur vel latro benigne recipiatur_. Rule of 1221, cap. vii. See also the Exposition of the Rule of Bonaventura. _Speculum_, Morin, iii., f^o 21-40. [18] Upon Francis's attitude toward learning see _Tribul._, Laur., 14b; _Spec._, 184a; 2 Cel., 3, 8; 48; 100; 116; 119; 120-124. Bon., chap. 152, naturally expresses only Bonaventura's views. See especially Rule of 1221, cap. xvii.; of 1223, cap. x. [19] _Spec._, 7b: _Fecit Franciscus regulam quam papa Honorius confirmavit cum bulla, de qua regula multa fuerunt extracta per ministros contra voluntatem b. Francisci_. Cf. 2 Cel., 3, 136. [20] Bull _Quo elongati_ of September 28, 1230; Sbaralea, i., p. 56. [21] Bon., 55 and 56 [3 Soc., 62]; _Spec._, 76; 124a; _Tribul._, Laur., 17b-19b; Ubertini, _Arbor. V._, 5; _Conform._, 88a, 2. [22] _Tribul._, Laur., 19a; _Archiv._, t. iii., p. 601. Cf. A. SS., p. 638e. [23] Potthast, 7108.--The work of this bull was completed by that of December 18, 1223. (The original of the _Sacro Convento_ bears _Datum Laterani XV. Kal. jan._) _Fratrem Minorum_: Potthast, 7123. [24] 2 Cel., 3, 19; Bon., 95; _Spec._, 18b; _Conform._, 171a, 1. [25] 2 Cel., 3, 61 and 62. Cf. Eccl., 6, the account of Rod. de Rosa. [26] _Spec._, 47b ff.; 2 Cel., 3, 61; Bon., 84 and 85. [27] 1 Cel., 84-87; Bon., 149. [28] This little poem was published entire by M. Ozanam in vol. v. of his works, p. 184. * * * * * CHAPTER XVII THE STIGMATA 1224 The upper valley of the Arno forms in the very centre of Italy a country apart, the Casentino, which through centuries had its own life, somewhat like an island in the midst of the ocean. The river flows out from it by a narrow defile at the south, and on all other sides the Apennines encircle it with a girdle of inaccessible mountains.[1] This plain, some ten leagues in diameter, is enlivened with picturesque villages, finely posted on hillocks at the base of which flows the stream; here are Bibbiena, Poppi, the antique Romena sung by Dante, the Camaldoli, and up there on the crest Chiusi, long ago the capital of the country, with the ruins of Count Orlando's castle. The people are charming and refined; the mountains have sheltered them from wars, and on every side we see the signs of labor, prosperity, a gentle gayety. At any moment we might fancy ourselves transported into some valley of the Vivarais or Provence. The vegetation on the borders of the Arno is thoroughly tropical; the olive and the mulberry marry with the vine. On the lower hill-slopes are wheat fields divided by meadows; then come the chestnuts and the oaks, higher still the pine, the fir, the larch, and above all the bare rock. Among all the peaks there is one which especially attracts the attention; instead of a rounded and so to say flattened top, it uplifts itself slender, proud, isolated; it is the Verna.[2] One might think it an immense rock fallen from the sky. It is in fact an erratic block set there, a little like a petrified Noah's ark on the summit of Mount Ararat. The basaltic mass, perpendicular on all sides, is crowned with a plateau planted with pines and gigantic beeches, and accessible only by a footpath.[3] Such was the solitude which Orlando had given to Francis, and to which Francis had already many a time come for quiet and contemplation. Seated upon the few stones of the Penna,[4] he heard only the whispering of the wind among the trees, but in the splendor of the sunrise or the sunset he could see nearly all the districts in which he had sown the seed of the gospel: the Romagna and the March of Ancona, losing themselves on the horizon in the waves of the Adriatic; Umbria, and farther away, Tuscany, vanishing in the waters of the Mediterranean. The impression on this height is not crushing like that which one has in the Alps: a feeling infinitely calm and sweet flows over you; you are high enough to judge of men from above, not high enough to forget their existence. Besides the wide horizons, Francis found there other objects of delight; in this forest, one of the noblest in Europe, live legions of birds, which never having been hunted are surprisingly tame.[5] Subtile perfumes arise from the ground, and in the midst of borage and lichens frail and exquisite cyclamens blossom in fantastic variety. He desired to return thither after the chapter of 1224. This meeting, held in the beginning of June, was the last at which he was present. The new Rule was there put into the hands of the ministers, and the mission to England decided upon. It was in the early days of August that Francis took his way toward Verna. With him were only a few Brothers, Masseo, Angelo, and Leo. The first had been charged to direct the little band, and spare him all duties except that of prayer.[6] They had been two days on the road when it became necessary to seek for an ass for Francis, who was too much enfeebled to go farther on foot. The Brothers, in asking for this service, had not concealed the name of their master, and the peasant, to whom they had addressed themselves respectfully, asked leave to guide the beast himself. After going on a certain time, "Is it true," he said, "that you are Brother Francis of Assisi?" "Very well," he went on, after the answer in the affirmative, "apply yourself to be as good as folk say you are, that they may not be deceived in their expectation; that is my advice." Francis immediately got down from his beast and, prostrating himself before the peasant, thanked him warmly.[7] Meanwhile the warmest hour of the day had come on. The peasant, exhausted with fatigue, little by little forgot his surprise and joy; one does not feel the burning of thirst the less for walking beside a saint. He had begun to regret his kindness, when Francis pointed with his finger to a spring, unknown till then, and which has never since been seen.[8] At last they arrived at the foot of the last precipice. Before scaling it they paused to rest a little under a great oak, and immediately flocks of birds gathered around them, testifying their joy by songs and flutterings of their wings. Hovering around Francis, they alighted on his head, his shoulders, or his arms. "I see," he said joyfully to his companions, "that it is pleasing to our Lord Jesus that we live in this solitary mount, since our brothers and sisters the birds have shown such great delight at our coming."[9] This mountain was at once his Tabor and his Calvary. We must not wonder, then, that legends have flourished here even more numerously than at any other period of his life; the greater number of them have the exquisite charm of the little flowers, rosy and perfumed, which hide themselves modestly at the feet of the fir-trees of Verna. The summer nights up there are of unparalleled beauty: nature, stifled by the heat of the sun, seems then to breathe anew. In the trees, behind the rocks, on the turf, a thousand voices rise up, sweetly harmonizing with the murmur of the great woods; but among all these voices there is not one which forces itself upon the attention, it is a melody which you enjoy without listening. You let your eyes wander over the landscape, still for long hours illumined with hieratic tints by the departed star of day, and the peaks of the Apennines, flooded with rainbow hues, drop down into your soul what the Franciscan poet called the nostalgia of the everlasting hills.[10] More than anyone Francis felt it. The very evening of their arrival, seated upon a mound in the midst of his Brothers, he gave them his directions for their dwelling-place. The quiet of nature would have sufficed to sow in their hearts some germs of sadness, and the voice of the master harmonized with the emotion of the last gleams of light; he spoke with them of his approaching death, with the regret of the laborer overtaken by the shades of evening before the completion of his task, with the sighs of the father who trembles for the future of his children.[11] For himself he desired from this time to prepare himself for death by prayer and contemplation; and he begged them to protect him from all intrusion. Orlando,[12] who had already come to bid them welcome and offer his services, had at his request hastily caused a hut of boughs to be made, at the foot of a great beech. It was there that he desired to dwell, at a stone's throw from the cells inhabited by his companions. Brother Leo was charged to bring him each day that which he would need. He retired to it immediately after this memorable conversation, but several days later, embarrassed no doubt by the pious curiosity of the friars, who watched all his movements, he went farther into the woods, and on Assumption Day he there began the Lent which he desired to observe in honor of the Archangel Michael and the celestial host. Genius has its modesty as well as love. The poet, the artist, the saint, need to be alone when the Spirit comes to move them. Every effort of thought, of imagination, or of will is a prayer, and one does not pray in public. Alas for the man who has not in his inmost heart some secret which may not be told, because it cannot be spoken, and because if it were spoken it could not be understood. SECRETUM MEUM MIHI! Jesus felt it deeply: the raptures of Tabor are brief; they may not be told. Before these soul mysteries materialists and devotees often meet and are of one mind in demanding precision in those things which can the least endure it. The believer asks in what spot on the Verna Francis received the stigmata; whether the seraph which appeared to him was Jesus or a celestial spirit; what words were spoken as he imprinted them upon him;[13] and he no more understands that hour when Francis swooned with woe and love than the materialist, who asks to see with his eyes and touch with his hands the gaping wound. Let us try to avoid these extremes. Let us hear what the documents give us, and not seek to do them violence, to wrest from them what they do not tell, what they cannot tell. They show us Francis distressed for the future of the Order, and with an infinite desire for new spiritual progress. He was consumed with the fever of saints, that need of immolation which wrung from St. Theresa the passionate cry, "Either to suffer or to die!" He was bitterly reproaching himself with not having been found worthy of martyrdom, not having been able to give himself for Him who gave himself for us. We touch here upon one of the most powerful and mysterious elements of the Christian life. We may very easily not understand it, but we may not for all that deny it. It is the root of true mysticism.[14] The really new thing that Jesus brought into the world was that, feeling himself in perfect union with the heavenly Father, he called all men to unite themselves to him and through him to God: "I am the vine, and ye are the branches; he who abides in me and I in him brings forth much fruit, for apart from me ye can do nothing." The Christ not only preached this union, he made it felt. On the evening of his last day he instituted its sacrament, and there is probably no sect which denies that communion is at once the symbol, the principle, and the end of the religious life. For eighteen centuries Christians who differ on everything else cannot but look with one accord to him who in the upper chamber instituted the rite of the new times. The night before he died he took the bread and brake it and distributed it to them, saying, "TAKE AND EAT, FOR THIS IS MY BODY." Jesus, while presenting union with himself as the very foundation of the new life,[15] took care to point out to his brethren that this union was before all things a sharing in his work, in his struggles, and his sufferings: "Let him that would be my disciple take up his cross and follow me." St. Paul entered so perfectly into the Master's thought in this respect that he uttered a few years later this cry of a mysticism that has never been equalled: "I have been crucified with Christ, yet I live ... or rather, it is not I who live, but Christ who liveth in me." This utterance is not an isolated exclamation with him, it is the very centre of his religious consciousness, and he goes so far as to say, at the risk of scandalizing many a Christian: "I fill up in my body that which is lacking of the sufferings of Christ, for his body's sake, which is the Church." Perhaps it has not been useless to enter into these thoughts, to show to what point Francis during the last years of his life, where he renews in his body the passion of Christ, is allied to the apostolic tradition. In the solitudes of the Verna, as formerly at St. Damian, Jesus presented himself to him under his form of the Crucified One, the man of sorrows.[16] That this intercourse has been described to us in a poetic and inexact form is nothing surprising. It is the contrary that would be surprising. In the paroxysms of divine love there are _ineffabilia_ which, far from being able to relate them or make them understood, we can hardly recall to our own minds. Francis on the Verna was even more absorbed than usual in his ardent desire to suffer for Jesus and with him. His days went by divided between exercises of piety in the humble sanctuary on the mountain-top and meditation in the depths of the forest. It even happened to him to forget the services, and to remain several days alone in some cave of the rock, going over in his heart the memories of Golgotha. At other times he would remain for long hours at the foot of the altar, reading and re-reading the Gospel, and entreating God to show him the way in which he ought to walk.[17] The book almost always opened of itself to the story of the Passion, and this simple coincidence, though easy enough to explain, was enough of itself to excite him. The vision of the Crucified One took the fuller possession of his faculties as the day of the Elevation of the Holy Cross drew near (September 14th), a festival now relegated to the background, but in the thirteenth century celebrated with a fervor and zeal very natural for a solemnity which might be considered the patronal festival of the Crusades. Francis doubled his fastings and prayers, "quite transformed into Jesus by love and compassion," says one of the legends. He passed the night before the festival alone in prayer, not far from the hermitage. In the morning he had a vision. In the rays of the rising sun, which after the chill of night came to revive his body, he suddenly perceived a strange form. A seraph, with outspread wings, flew toward him from the edge of the horizon, and bathed his soul in raptures unutterable. In the centre of the vision appeared a cross, and the seraph was nailed upon it. When the vision disappeared, he felt sharp sufferings mingling with the ecstasy of the first moments. Stirred to the very depths of his being, he was anxiously seeking the meaning of it all, when he perceived upon his body the stigmata of the Crucified.[18] FOOTNOTES: [1] The passes that give access to the Casentino have all about one thousand metres of altitude. Until the most recent years there was no road properly so called. [2] In France Mount Aiguille, one of the seven wonders of Dauphiny, presents the same aspect and the same geological formation. St. Odile also recalls the Verna, but is very much smaller. [3] The summit has an altitude of 1269 metres. In Italian they call it the _Verna_, in Latin _Alvernus_. The etymology, which has tested the acuteness of the learned, appears to be very simple; the verb _vernare_, used by Dante, signifies make cold, freeze. [4] Name of the highest point on the plateau. Hardly three-quarters of an hour from the monastery, and not two hours and a half, as these worthy anchorites believed. This is said for the benefit of tourists ... and pilgrims. [5] The forest has been preserved as a relic. Alexander IV. fulminated excommunication against whomever should cut down the firs of Verna. As to the birds, it is enough to pass a day at the monastery to be amazed at their number and variety. M. C. Beni has begun at Stia (in Casentino) an ornithological collection which already includes more than five hundred and fifty varieties. [6] 1 Cel., 91; Bon., 188; _Fior. i., consid._ [7] _Fior. i., consid.;_ _Conform._, 176b, 1. [8] Cel., 2, 15; Bon., 100. _Fior. i., consid._ [9] Bon., 118. _Fior. i., consid._ [10] 2 Cel., 100. [11] _Fior. ii., consid._ [12] The ruins of the castle of Chiusi are three quarters of an hour from Verna. [13] _Fior. iv. and v. consid._ These two considerations appear to be the result of a reworking of the primitive document. The latter no doubt included the three former, which the continuer has interpolated and lengthened. Cf. _Conform._, 231a, 1; _Spec._, 91b, 92a, 97; A. SS., pp. 860 ff. [14] In current language we often include under the word mysticism all the tendencies--often far from Christian--which give predominance in the religious life to vague poetic elements, impulses of the heart. The name of mystic ought to be applied only to those Christians to whom _immediate_ relations with Jesus form the basis of the religious life. In this sense St. Paul (whose theologico-philosophical system is one of the most powerful efforts of the human mind to explain sin and redemption) is at the same time the prince of mystics. [15] He did not desire to institute a religion, for he felt the vanity of observances and dogmas. (The apostles continued to frequent the Jewish temple. Acts, ii., 46; iii., 1; v., 25; xxi., 26.) He desired to inoculate the world with a new life. [16] 2 Cel., 3, 29; cf. 1 Cel., 115; 3 Soc., 13 and 14; 2 Cel., 1, 6; 2 Cel., 3, 123 and 131; Bon., 57; 124; 203; 204; 224; 225; 309; 310; 311; _Conform._, 229b ff. [17] 1 Cel., 91-94; Bon., 189, 190. [18] See the annotations of Brother Leo upon the autograph of St. Francis (Crit. Study, p. 357) and 1 Cel., 94, 95; Bon., 191, 192, 193 (3 Soc., 69, 70); _Fior. iii. consid._ Cf. _Auct. vit. sec._; A. SS. p. 649. It is to be noted that Thomas of Celano (1 Cel., 95), as well as all the primitive documents, describe the stigmata as being fleshy excrescences, recalling in form and color the nails with which the limbs of Jesus were pierced. No one speaks of those gaping, sanguineous wounds which were imagined later. Only the mark at the side was a wound, whence at times exuded a little blood. Finally, Thomas of Celano says that after the seraphic vision _began to appear, coeperunt apparere signa clavorum_. Vide Appendix: Study of the Stigmata. * * * * * CHAPTER XVII THE CANTICLE OF THE SUN Autumn, 1224-Autumn, 1225 The morning after St. Michael's Day (September 30, 1224) Francis quitted Verna and went to Portiuncula. He was too much exhausted to think of making the journey on foot, and Count Orlando put a horse at his disposal. We can imagine the emotion with which he bade adieu to the mountain on which had been unfolded the drama of love and pain which had consummated the union of his entire being with the Crucified One. Amor, amor, Gesu desideroso, Amor voglio morire, Te abrazando Amor, dolce Gesu, meo sposo, Amor, amor, la morte te domando, Amor, amor, Gesu si pietoso Tu me te dai in te transformato Pensa ch'io vo spasmando Non so o io me sia Gesu speranza mia Ormai va, dormi in amore. So sang Giacopone dei Todi in the raptures of a like love.[1] If we are to believe a recently published document,[2] Brother Masseo, one of those who remained on the Verna, made a written account of the events of this day. They set out early in the morning. Francis, after having given his directions to the Brothers, had had a look and a word for everything around; for the rocks, the flowers, the trees, for brother hawk, a privileged character which was authorized to enter his cell at all times, and which came every morning, with the first glimmer of dawn, to remind him of the hour of service.[3] Then the little band set forth upon the path leading to Monte-Acuto.[4] Arrived at the gap from whence one gets the last sight of the Verna, Francis alighted from his horse, and kneeling upon the earth, his face turned toward the mountain, "Adieu," he said, "mountain of God, sacred mountain, _mons coagulatus, mons pinguis, mons in quo bene placitum est Deo habitare_; adieu Monte-Verna, may God bless thee, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit; abide in peace; we shall never see one another more." Has not this artless scene a delicious and poignant sweetness? He must surely have uttered these words, in which suddenly the Italian does not suffice and Francis is obliged to resort to the mystical language of the breviary to express his feelings. A few minutes later the rock of the ecstacy had disappeared. The descent into the valley is rapid. The Brothers had decided to spend the night at Monte-Casale, the little hermitage above Borgo San-Sepolcro. All of them, even those who were to remain on the Verna, were still following their master. As for him, absorbed in thought he had become entirely oblivious to what was going on, and did not even perceive the noisy enthusiasm which his passage aroused in the numerous villages along the Tiber. At Borgo San-Sepolcro he received a real ovation without even then coming to himself; but when they had some time quitted the town, he seemed suddenly to awake, and asked his companion if they ought not soon to arrive there.[5] The first evening at Monte Casale was marked by a miracle. Francis healed a friar who was possessed.[6] The next morning, having decided to pass several days in this hermitage, he sent the brothers back to the Verna, and with them Count Orlando's horse. In one of the villages through which they had passed the day before a woman had been lying several days between death and life unable to give birth to her child. Those about her had only learned of the passage of the saint through their village when he was too far distant to be overtaken. We may judge of the joy of these poor people when the rumor was spread that he was about to return. They went to meet him, and were terribly disappointed on finding only the friars. Suddenly an idea occurred to them: taking the bridle of the horse consecrated by the touch of Francis's hands, they carried it to the sufferer, who, having laid it upon her body, gave birth to her child without the slightest pain.[7] This miracle, established by narratives entirely authentic, shows the degree of enthusiasm felt by the people for the person of Francis. As for him, after a few days at Monte-Casale, he set out with Brother Leo for Città di Castello. He there healed a woman suffering from frightful nervous disorders, and remained an entire month preaching in this city and its environs. When he once more set forth winter had almost closed in. A peasant lent him his ass, but the roads were so bad that they were unable to reach any sort of shelter before nightfall. The unhappy travellers were obliged to pass the night under a rock; the shelter was more than rudimentary, the wind drifted the snow in upon them, and nearly froze the unlucky peasant, who with abominable oaths heaped curses on Francis; but the latter replied with such cheerfulness that he made him at last forget both the cold and his bad humor. On the morrow the saint reached Portiuncula. He seems to have made only a brief halt there, and to have set forth again almost immediately to evangelize Southern Umbria. It is impossible to follow him in this mission. Brother Elias accompanied him, but so feeble was he that Elias could not conceal his uneasiness as to his life.[8] Ever since his return from Syria (August, 1220), he had been growing continually weaker, but his fervor had increased from day to day. Nothing could check him, neither suffering nor the entreaties of the Brothers; seated on an ass he would sometimes go over three or four villages in one day. Such excessive toil brought on an infirmity even more painful than any he had hitherto suffered from: he was threatened with loss of sight.[9] Meanwhile a sedition had forced Honorius III. to leave Rome (end of April, 1225). After passing a few weeks at Tivoli, he established himself at Rieti, where he remained until the end of 1226.[10] The pope's arrival had drawn to this city, with the entire pontifical court, several physicians of renown; Cardinal Ugolini, who had come in the pope's train, hearing of Francis's malady, summoned him to Rieti for treatment. But notwithstanding Brother Elias's entreaties Francis hesitated a long time as to accepting the invitation.[11] It seemed to him that a sick man has but one thing to do; place himself purely and simply in the hands of the heavenly Father. What is pain to a soul that is fixed in God![12] Elias, however, at last overcame his objections, and the journey was determined upon, but first Francis desired to go and take leave of Clara, and enjoy a little rest near her. He remained at St. Damian much longer than he had proposed to do[13] (end of July to beginning of September, 1225). His arrival at this beloved monastery was marked by a terrible aggravation of his malady. For fifteen days he was so completely blind that he could not even distinguish light. The care lavished upon him produced no result, since every day he passed long hours in weeping--tears of penitence, he said, but also of regret.[14] Ah, how different they were from those tears of his moments of inspiration and emotion, which had flowed over a countenance all illumined with joy! They had seen him, in such moments, take up two bits of wood, and, accompanying himself with this rustic violin, improvise French songs in which he would pour out the abundance of his heart.[15] But the radiance of genius and hope had become dimmed. Rachel weeps for her children, and will not be comforted because they are not. There are in the tears of Francis this same _quia non sunt_ for his spiritual sons. But if there are irremediable pains there are none which may not be at once elevated and softened, when we endure them at the side of those who love us. In this respect his companions could not be of much help to him. Moral consolations are possible only from our peers, or when two hearts are united by a mystical passion so great that they mingle and understand one another. "Ah, if the Brothers knew what I suffer," St. Francis said a few days before the impression of the stigmata, "with what pity and compassion they would be moved!" But they, seeing him who had laid cheerfulness upon them as a duty becoming more and more sad and keeping aloof from them, imagined that he was tortured with temptations of the devil.[16] Clara divined that which could not be uttered. At St. Damian her friend was looking back over all the past: what memories lived again in a single glance! Here, the olive-tree to which, a brilliant cavalier, he had fastened his horse; there, the stone bench where his friend, the priest of the poor chapel, used to sit; yonder, the hiding-place in which he had taken refuge from the paternal wrath, and, above all, the sanctuary with the mysterious crucifix of the decisive hour. In living over these pictures of the radiant past, Francis aggravated his pain; yet they spoke to him of other things than death and regret. Clara was there, as steadfast, as ardent as ever. Long ago transformed by admiration, she was now transfigured by compassion. Seated at the feet of him whom she loved with more than earthly love she felt the soreness of his soul, and the failing of his heart. After that, what did it matter that Francis's tears became more abundant to the point of making him blind for a fortnight? Soothing would come; the sister of consolation would give him peace once more. And first she kept him near her, and, herself taking part in the labor, she made him a large cell of reeds in the monastery garden, that he might be entirely at liberty as to his movements. How could he refuse a hospitality so thoroughly Franciscan? It was indeed only too much so: legions of rats and mice infested this retired spot; at night they ran over Francis's bed with an infernal uproar, so that he could find no repose from his sufferings. But he soon forgot all that when near his sister-friend. Once again she gave back to him faith and courage. "A single sunbeam," he used to say, "is enough to drive away many shadows!" Little by little the man of the former days began to show himself, and at times the Sisters would hear, mingling with the murmur of the olive trees and pines, the echo of unfamiliar songs, which seemed to come from the cell of reeds. One day he had seated himself at the monastery table after a long conversation with Clara. The meal had hardly begun when suddenly he seemed to be rapt away in ecstasy. "_Laudato sia lo Signore!_" he cried on coming to himself. He had just composed the Canticle of the Sun.[17] TEXT[18] INCIPIUNT LAUDES CREATURARUM QUAS FECIT BEATUS FRANCISCUS AD LAUDEM ET HONOREM DEI CUM ESSET INFIRMUS AD SANCTUM DAMIANUM. ALTISSIMU, onnipotente, bon signore, tue so le laude la gloria e l'onore et onne benedictione. Ad te sole, altissimo, se konfano et nullu homo ene dignu te mentovare. Laudato sie, mi signore, cum tucte le tue creature spetialmente messor lo frate sole, lo quale jorna, et illumini per lui; Et ellu è bellu e radiante cum grande splendore; de te, altissimo, porta significatione. Laudato si, mi signore, per sora luna e le stelle, in celu l' ài formate clarite et pretiose et belle. Laudato si, mi signore, per frate vento et per aere et nubilo et sereno et onne tempo, per le quale a le tue creature dai sustentamento. Laudato si, mi signore, per sor acqua, la quale è multo utile et humele et pretiosa et casta. Laudato si, mi signore, per frate focu, per lo quale ennallumini la nocte, ed ello è bello et jucundo et robustoso et forte. Laudato si, mi signore, per sora nostra matre terra, la quale ne sustenta et governa et produce diversi fructi con colorite flori et herba. Laudato si, mi signore, per quilli ke perdonano per lo tuo amore et sosteugo infirmitate et tribulatione, beati quilli ke sosterrano in pace, ka da te, altissimo, sirano incoronati. Laudato si, mi signore, per sora nostra morte corporale, de la quale nullu homo vivente po skappare: guai a quilli ke morrano ne le peccata mortali; beati quilli ke se trovarà ne le tue sanctissime voluntati, ka la morte secunda nol farrà male. Laudate et benedicete mi signore et rengratiate et serviteli cum grande humilitate. TRANSLATION.[19] O most high, almighty, good Lord God, to thee belong praise, glory, honor, and all blessing! {To thee alone, Most High, do they belong, and no mortal lips are worthy to pronounce thy Name.} Praised be my Lord God with all his creatures, and specially our brother the sun, who brings us the day and who brings us the light; fair is he and shines with a very great splendor: O Lord, he signifies to us thee! Praised be my Lord for our sister the moon, and for the stars, the which he has set clear and lovely in heaven. Praised be my Lord for our brother the wind, and for air and cloud, calms and all weather by the which thou upholdest life in all creatures. Praised be my Lord for our sister water, who is very serviceable unto us and humble and precious and clean. Praised be my Lord for our brother fire, through whom thou givest us light in the darkness; and he is bright and pleasant and very mighty and strong. Praised be my Lord for our mother the earth, the which doth sustain us and keep us, and bringeth forth divers fruits and flowers of many colors, and grass. Praised be my Lord for all those who pardon one another for his love's sake, and who endure weakness and tribulation; blessed are they who peaceably shall endure, for thou, O most Highest, shalt give them a crown. Praised be my Lord for our sister, the death of the body, from which no man escapeth. Woe to him who dieth in mortal sin! Blessed are they who are found walking by thy most holy will, for the second death shall have no power to do them harm. Praise ye and bless the Lord, and give thanks unto him and serve him with great humility. Joy had returned to Francis, joy as deep as ever. For a whole week he forsook his breviary and passed his days in repeating the Canticle of the Sun. During a night of sleeplessness he had heard a voice saying to him, "If thou hadst faith as a grain of mustard seed, thou wouldst say to this mountain, 'Be thou removed from there,' and it would move away." Was not the mountain that of his sufferings, the temptation to murmur and despair? "Be it, Lord, according to thy word," he had replied with all his heart, and immediately he had felt that he was delivered.[20] He might have perceived that the mountain had not greatly changed its place, but for several days he had turned his eyes away from it, he had been able to forget its existence. For a moment he thought of summoning to his side Brother Pacifico, the King of Verse, to retouch his canticle; his idea was to attach to him a certain number of friars, who would go with him from village to village, preaching. After the sermon they would sing the Hymn of the Sun; and they were to close by saying to the crowd gathered around them in the public places, "We are God's jugglers. We desire to be paid for our sermon and our song. Our payment shall be that you persevere in penitence."[21] "Is it not in fact true," he would add, "that the servants of God are really like jugglers, intended to revive the hearts of men and lead them into spiritual joy?" The Francis of the old raptures had come back, the layman, the poet, the artist. The Canticle of the Creatures is very noble: it lacks, however, one strophe; if it was not upon Francis's lips, it was surely in his heart: Be praised, Lord, for Sister Clara; thou hast made her silent, active, and sagacious, and by her thy light shines in our hearts. FOOTNOTES: [1] Thirty-sixth and last strophe of the song _Amor de caritade Perche m' hai si ferito?_ found in the collection of St. Francis's works. [2] By the Abbé Amoni, at the close of his edition of the Fioretti, Rome, 1 vol., 12mo, 1889, pp. 390-392. We can but once more regret the silence of the editor as to the manuscript whence he has drawn these charming pages. Certain indications seem unfavorable to the author having written it before the second half of the thirteenth century; on the other hand, the object of a forgery is not evident. An apochryphal piece always betrays itself by some interested purpose, but here the story is of an infantine simplicity. [3] 2 Cel., 3, 104; Bon., 119; _Fior. ii. consid._ [4] _Parti san Francesco per Monte-Acuto prendendo la via di Monte-Arcoppe e del foresto._ This road from the Verna to Borgo San-Sepolero is far from being the shortest or the easiest, for instead of leading directly to the plain it lingers for long hours among the hills. Is not all Francis in this choice? [5] 2 Cel., 3, 41; Bon., 141; _Fior. iv. consid._ [6] 1 Cel., 63 and 64; _Fior. iv. consid._ [7] 1 Cel., 70; _Fior. iv. consid._ [8] 1 Cel., 109; 69; Bon. 208. Perhaps we must refer to this circuit the visit to Celano. 2 Cel., 3, 30; _Spec._, 22; Bon., 156 and 157. [9] 1 Cel., 97 and 98; 2 Cel., 3, 137; Bon., 205 and 206. [10] Richard of St. Germano, _ann. 1225_. Cf. Potthast, 7400 ff. [11] 1 Cel., 98 and 99; 2 Cel., 3, 137; _Fior._, 19. [12] 2 Cel., 3, 110; Rule of 1221, _cap._ 10. [13] See the reference to the sources after the Canticle of the Sun. [14] 2 Cel., 3, 138. [15] This incident appeared to the authors so peculiar that they emphasized it with an _ut oculis videmus_. 2 Cel., 3, 67; _Spec._, 119a. [16] _Spec._, 123a; 2 Cel., 3, 58. [17] I have combined Celano's narrative with that of the Conformities. The details given in the latter document appear to me entirely worthy of faith. It is easy to see, however, why Celano omitted them, and it would be difficult to explain how they could have been later invented. 2 Cel., 3, 138; _Conform._, 42b, 2; 119b, 1; 184b, 2; 239a, 2; _Spec._, 123a ff.; _Fior._, 19. [18] After the Assisan MS., 338, f^o 33a. Vide p. 354. Father Panfilo da Magliano has already published it after this manuscript: _Storia compendiosa di San Francesco_, Rome, 2 vols., 18mo, 1874-1876. The Conformities, 202b, 2-203a 1, give a version of it which differs from this only by insignificant variations. The learned philologue Monaci has established a very remarkable critical text in his _Crestomazia italiana dei primi secoli_. Citta di Castello, fas. i., 1889, 8vo, pp. 29-31. This thoroughly scrupulous work dispenses me from indicating manuscripts and editions more at length. [19] Matthew Arnold, Essays in Criticism, First Series. Macmillan & Company, 1883. [20] 2 Cel., 3, 58; _Spec._, 123a. [21] _Spec._, 124a. Cf. _Miscellanea_ (1889), iv., p. 88. * * * * * CHAPTER XIX THE LAST YEAR September, 1225-End of September, 1226 What did Ugolini think when they told him that Francis was planning to send his friars, transformed into _Joculatores Domini_, to sing up and down the country the Canticle of Brother Sun? Perhaps he never heard of it. His _protégé_ finally decided to accept his invitation and left St. Damian in the course of the month of September. The landscape which lies before the eyes of the traveller from Assisi, when he suddenly emerges upon the plain of Rieti, is one of the most beautiful in Europe. From Terni the road follows the sinuous course of the Velino, passes not far from the famous cascades, whose clouds of mist are visible, and then plunges into the defiles in whose depths the torrent rushes noisily, choked by a vegetation as luxuriant as that of a virgin forest. On all sides uprise walls of perpendicular rocks, and on their crests, several hundred yards above your head, are feudal fortresses, among others the Castle of Miranda, more giddy, more fantastic than any which Gustave Doré's fancy ever dreamed. After four hours of walking, the defile opens out and you find yourself without transition in a broad valley, sparkling with light. Rieti, the only city in this plain of several leagues, appears far away at the other extremity, commanded by hills of a thoroughly tropical aspect, behind which rise the mighty Apennines, almost always covered with snow. The highway goes directly toward this town, passing between tiny lakes; here and there roads lead off to little villages which you see, on the hillside, between the cultivated fields and the edge of the forests; there are Stroncone, Greccio, Cantalice, Poggio-Buscone, and ten other small towns, which have given more saints to the Church than a whole province of France. Between the inhabitants of the district and their neighbors of Umbria, properly so called, the difference is extreme. They are all of the striking type of the Sabine peasants, and they remain to this day entire strangers to new customs. One is born a Capuchin there as elsewhere one is born a soldier, and the traveller needs to have his wits about him not to address every man he meets as Reverend Father. Francis had often gone over this district in every direction. Like its neighbor, the hilly March of Ancona, it was peculiarly prepared to receive the new gospel. In these hermitages, with their almost impossible simplicity, perched near the villages on every side, without the least care for material comfort, but always where there is the widest possible view, was perpetuated a race of Brothers Minor, impassioned, proud, stubborn, almost wild, who did not wholly understand their master, who did not catch his exquisite simplicity, his impossibility of hating, his dreams of social and political renovation, his poetry and delicacy, but who did understand the lover of nature and of poverty.[1] They did more than understand him; they lived his life, and from that Christmas festival observed in the woods of Greccio down to to-day they have remained the simple and popular representatives of the Strict Observance. From them comes to us the Legend of the Three Companions, the most life-like and true of all the portraits of the Poverello, and it was there, in a cell three paces long, that Giovanni di Parma had his apocalyptic visions. The news of Francis's arrival quickly spread, and long before he reached Rieti the population had come out to meet him. To avoid this noisy welcome he craved the hospitality of the priest of St. Fabian. This little church, now known under the name of Our Lady of the Forest, is somewhat aside from the road upon a grassy mound about a league from the city. He was heartily welcomed, and desiring to remain there for a little, prelates and devotees began to flock thither in the next few days. It was the time of the early grapes. It is easy to imagine the disquietude of the priest on perceiving the ravages made by these visitors among his vines, his best source of revenue, but he probably exaggerated the damage. Francis one day heard him giving vent to his bad humor. "Father," he said, "it is useless for you to disturb yourself for what you cannot hinder; but, tell me, how much wine do you get on an average?" "Fourteen measures," replied the priest. "Very well, if you have less than twenty, I undertake to make up the difference." This promise reassured the worthy man, and when at the vintage he received twenty measures, he had no hesitation in believing in a miracle.[2] Upon Ugolini's entreaties Francis had accepted the hospitality of the bishop's palace in Rieti. Thomas of Celano enlarges with delight upon the marks of devotion lavished on Francis by this prince of the Church. Unhappily all this is written in that pompous and confused style of which diplomats and ecclesiastics appear to have by nature the secret. Francis entered into the condition of a relic in his lifetime. The mania for amulets displayed itself around him in all its excesses. People quarrelled not only over his clothing, but even over his hair and the parings of his nails.[3] Did these merely exterior demonstrations disgust him? Did he sometimes think of the contrast between these honors offered to his body, which he picturesquely called Brother Ass, and the subversion of his ideal? We cannot tell. If he had feelings of this kind those who surrounded him were not the men to understand them, and it would be idle to expect any expression of them from his pen. Soon after he had a relapse, and asked to be removed to Monte-Colombo,[4] a hermitage an hour distant from the city, hidden amidst trees and scattered rocks. He had already retired thither several times, notably when he was preparing the Rule of 1223. The doctors, having exhausted the therapeutic arsenal of the time, decided to resort to cauterization; it was decided to draw a rod of white-hot iron across his forehead. When the poor patient saw them bringing in the brazier and the instruments he had a moment of terror; but immediately making the sign of the cross over the glowing iron, "Brother fire," he said, "you are beautiful above all creatures; be favorable to me in this hour; you know how much I have always loved you; be then courteous to-day." Afterward, when his companions, who had not had the courage to remain, came back he said to them, smiling, "Oh, cowardly folk, why did you go away? I felt no pain. Brother doctor, if it is necessary you may do it again." This experiment was no more successful than the other remedies. In vain they quickened the wound on the forehead, by applying plasters, salves, and even by making incisions in it; the only result was to increase the pains of the sufferer.[5] One day, at Rieti, whither he had again been carried, he thought that a little music would relieve his pain. Calling a friar who had formerly been clever at playing the guitar, he begged him to borrow one; but the friar was afraid of the scandal which this might cause, and Francis gave it up. God took pity upon him; the following night he sent an invisible angel to give him such a concert as is never heard on earth.[6] Francis, hearing it, lost all bodily feeling, say the Fioretti, and at one moment the melody was so sweet and penetrating that if the angel had given one more stroke of the bow, the sick man's soul would have left his body.[7] It seems that there was some amelioration of his state when the doctors left him; we find him during the months of this winter, 1225-1226, in the most remote hermitages of the district, for as soon as he had a little strength he was determined to begin preaching again. He went to Poggio-Buscone[8] for the Christmas festival. People flocked thither in crowds from all the country round to see and hear him. "You come here," he said, "expecting to find a great saint; what will you think when I tell you that I ate meat all through Advent?"[9] At St. Eleutheria,[10] at a time of extreme cold which tried him much, he had sewn some pieces of stuff into his own tunic and that of his companion, so as to make their garments a little warmer. One day his companion came home with a fox-skin, with which in his turn he proposed to line his master's tunic. Francis rejoiced much over it, but would permit this excess of consideration for his body only on condition that the piece of fur should be placed on the outside over his chest. All these incidents, almost insignificant at a first view, show how he detested hypocrisy even in the smallest things. We will not follow him to his dear Greccio,[11] nor even to the hermitage of St. Urbano, perched on one of the highest peaks of the Sabine.[12] The accounts which we have of the brief visits he made there at this time tell us nothing new of his character or of the history of his life. They simply show that the imaginations of those who surrounded him were extraordinarily overheated; the least incidents immediately took on a miraculous coloring.[13] The documents do not say how it came about that he decided to go to Sienna. It appears that there was in that city a physician of great fame as an oculist. The treatment he prescribed was no more successful than that of the others; but with the return of spring Francis made a new effort to return to active life. We find him describing the ideal Franciscan monastery,[14] and another day explaining a passage in the Bible to a Dominican. Did the latter, a doctor in theology, desire to bring the rival Order into ridicule by showing its founder incapable of explaining a somewhat difficult verse? It appears extremely likely. "My good father," he said, "how do you understand this saying of the prophet Ezekiel, 'If thou dost not warn the wicked of his wickedness, I will require his soul of thee?' I am acquainted with many men whom I know to be in a state of mortal sin, and yet I am not always reproaching them for their vices. Am I, then, responsible for their souls?" At first Francis excused himself, alleging his ignorance, but urged by his interlocutor he said at last: "Yes, the true servant unceasingly rebukes the wicked, but he does it most of all by his conduct, by the truth which shines forth in his words, by the light of his example, by all the radiance of his life."[15] He soon suffered so grave a relapse that the Brothers thought his last hour had come. They were especially affrighted by the hemorrhages, which reduced him to a state of extreme prostration. Brother Elias hastened to him. At his arrival the invalid felt in himself such an improvement that they could acquiesce in his desire to be taken back to Umbria. Toward the middle of April they set out, going in the direction of Cortona. It is the easiest route, and the delightful hermitage of that city was one of the best ordered to permit of his taking some repose. He doubtless remained there a very short time: he was in haste to see once more the skies of his native country, Portiuncula, St. Damian, the Carceri, all those paths and hamlets which one sees from the terraces of Assisi and which recalled to him so many sweet memories. Instead of going by the nearest road, they made a long circuit by Gubbio and Nocera, to avoid Perugia, fearing some attempt of the inhabitants to get possession of the Saint. Such a relic as the body of Francis lacked little of the value of the sacred nail or the sacred lance.[16] Battles were fought for less than that. They made a short halt near Nocera, at the hermitage of Bagnara, on the slopes of Monte-Pennino.[17] His companions were again very much disturbed. The swelling which had shown itself in the lower limbs was rapidly gaining the upper part of the body. The Assisans learned this, and wishing to be prepared for whatever might happen sent their men-at-arms to protect the Saint and hasten his return. Bringing Francis back with them they stopped for food at the hamlet of Balciano,[18] but in vain they begged the inhabitants to sell them provisions. As the escort were confiding their discomfiture to the friars, Francis, who knew these good peasants, said: "If you had asked for food without offering to pay, you would have found all you wanted." He was right, for, following his advice, they received for nothing all that they desired.[19] The arrival of the party at Assisi was hailed with frantic joy. This time Francis's fellow-citizens were sure that the Saint was not going to die somewhere else.[20] Customs in this matter have changed too much for us to be able thoroughly to comprehend the good fortune of possessing the body of a saint. If you are ever so unlucky as to mention St. Andrew before an inhabitant of Amalfi, you will immediately find him beginning to shout "_Evviva San Andrea! Evviva San Andrea!_" Then with extraordinary volubility he will relate to you the legend of the _Grande Protettore_, his miracles past and present, those which he might have done if he had chosen, but which he refrained from doing out of charity because St. Januarius of Naples could not do as much. He gesticulates, throws himself about, hustles you, more enthusiastic over his relic and more exasperated by your coldness than a soldier of the Old Guard before an enemy of the Emperor. In the thirteenth century all Europe was like that. We shall find here several incidents which we may be tempted to consider shocking or even ignoble, if we do not make an effort to put them all into their proper surroundings. Francis was installed in the bishop's palace; he would have preferred to be at Portiuncula, but the Brothers were obliged to obey the injunctions of the populace, and to make assurance doubly sure, guards were placed at all the approaches of the palace. The abode of the Saint in this place was much longer than had been anticipated. It perhaps lasted several months (July to September). This dying man did not consent to die. He rebelled against death; in this centre of the work his anxieties for the future of the Order, which a little while before had been in the background, now returned, more agonizing and terrible than ever. "We must begin again," he thought, "create a new family who will not forget humility, who will go and serve lepers and, as in the old times, put themselves always, not merely in words, but in reality, below all men."[21] To feel that implacable work of destruction going on against which the most submissive cannot keep from protesting: "My God, my God, why? why hast thou forsaken me?" To be obliged to look on at the still more dreaded decomposition of his Order; he, the lark, to be spied upon by soldiers watching for his corpse--there was quite enough here to make him mortally sad. During these last weeks all his sighs were noted. The disappearance of the greater part of the legend of the Three Companions certainly deprives us of some touching stories, but most of the incidents have been preserved for us, notwithstanding, in documents from a second hand. Four Brothers had been especially charged to lavish care upon him: Leo, Angelo, Rufino, and Masseo. We already know them; they are of those intimate friends of the first days, who had heard in the Franciscan gospel a call to love and liberty. And they too began to complain of everything.[22] One day one of them said to the sick man: "Father, you are going away to leave us here; point out to us, then, if you know him, the one to whom we might in all security confide the burden of the generalship." Alas, Francis did not know the ideal Brother, capable of assuming such a duty; but he took advantage of the question to sketch the portrait of the perfect minister-general.[23] We have two impressions of this portrait, the one which has been retouched by Celano, and the original proof, much shorter and more vague, but showing us Francis desiring that his successor shall have but a single weapon, an unalterable love. It was probably this question which suggested to him the thought of leaving for his successors, the generals of the Order, a letter which they should pass on from one to another, and where they should find, not directions for particular cases, but the very inspiration of their activity.[24] To the Reverend Father in Christ, N ..., Minister-General of the entire Order of the Brothers Minor. May God bless thee and keep thee in his holy love. Patience in all things and everywhere, this, my Brother, is what I specially recommend. Even if they oppose thee, if they strike thee, thou shouldst be grateful to them and desire that it should be thus and not otherwise. In this will be manifest thy love for God and for me, his servant and thine; that there shall not be a single friar in the world who, having sinned as much as one can sin, and coming before thee, shall go away without having received thy pardon. And if he does not ask it, do thou ask it for him, whether he wills or not. And if he should return again a thousand times before thee, love him more than myself, in order to lead him to well-doing. Have pity always on these Brothers. These words show plainly enough how in former days Francis had directed the Order; in his dream the ministers-general were to stand in a relation of pure affection, of tender devotion toward those under them; but was this possible for one at the head of a family whose branches extended over the entire world? It would be hazardous to say, for among his successors have not been wanting distinguished minds and noble hearts; but save for Giovanni di Parma and two or three others, this ideal is in sharp contrast with the reality. St. Bonaventura himself will drag his master and friend, this very Giovanni of Parma, before an ecclesiastical tribunal, will cause him to be condemned to perpetual imprisonment, and it will need the intervention of a cardinal outside of the Order to secure the commutation of this sentence.[25] The agonies of grief endured by the dying Francis over the decadence of the Order would have been less poignant if they had not been mingled with self-reproaches for his own cowardice. Why had he deserted his post, given up the direction of his family, if not from idleness and selfishness? And now it was too late to take back this step; and in hours of frightful anguish he asked himself if God would not hold him responsible for this subversion of his ideal. "Ah, if I could go once again to the chapter-general," he would sigh, "I would show them what my will is." Shattered as he was by fever, he would suddenly rise up in his bed, crying with a despairing intensity: "Where are they who have ravished my brethren from me? Where are they who have stolen away my family?" Alas, the real criminals were nearer to him than he thought. The provincial ministers, of whom he appears to have been thinking when he thus spoke, were only instruments in the hands of the clever Brother Elias; and he--what else was he doing but putting his intelligence and address at Cardinal Ugolini's service? Far from finding any consolation in those around him, Francis was constantly tortured by the confidences of his companions, who, impelled by mistaken zeal, aggravated his pain instead of calming it.[26] "Forgive me, Father," said one of them to him one day, "but many people have already thought what I am going to say to you. You know how, in the early days, by God's grace the Order walked in the path of perfection; for all that concerns poverty and love, as well as for all the rest, the Brothers were but one heart and one soul. But for some time past all that is entirely changed: it is true that people often excuse the Brothers by saying that the Order has grown too large to keep up the old observances; they even go so far as to claim that infidelities to the Rule, such as the building of great monasteries, are a means of edification of the people, and so the primitive simplicity and poverty are held for nothing. Evidently all these abuses are displeasing to you; but then, people ask, why do you tolerate them?" "God forgive you, brother." replied Francis. "Why do you lay at my door things with which I have nothing to do? So long as I had the direction of the Order, and the Brothers persevered in their vocation I was able, in spite of weakness, to do what was needful. But when I saw that, without caring for my example or my teaching, they walked in the way you have described, I confided them to the Lord and to the ministers. It is true that when I relinquished the direction, alleging my incapacity as the motive, if they had walked in the way of my wishes I should not have desired that before my death they should have had any other minister than myself; though ill, though bedridden, even, I should have found strength to perform the duties of my charge. But this charge is wholly spiritual; I will not become an executioner to strike and punish as political governors must."[27] Francis's complaints became so sharp and bitter that, to avoid scandal, the greatest prudence was exercised with regard to those who were permitted to see him.[28] Disorder was everywhere, and every day brought its contingent of subjects for sorrow. The confusion of ideas as to the practice of the Rule was extreme; occult influences, which had been working for several years, had succeeded in veiling the Franciscan ideal, not only from distant Brothers, or those who had newly joined the Order, but even from those who had lived under the influence of the founder.[29] Under circumstances such as these, Francis dictated the letter to all the members of the Order, which, as he thought would be read at the opening of chapters and perpetuate his spiritual presence in them.[30] In this letter he is perfectly true to himself; as in the past, he desires to influence the Brothers, not by reproaches but by fixing their eyes on the perfect holiness. To all the revered and well-beloved Brothers Minor, to Brother A ...,[31] minister-general, its Lord, and to the ministers-general who shall be after him, and to all the ministers, custodians, and priests of this fraternity, humble in Christ, and to all the simple and obedient Brothers, the oldest and the most recent, Brother Francis, a mean and perishing man, your little servant, gives greeting! Hear, my Lords, you who are my sons and my brothers, give ear to my words. Open your hearts and obey the voice of the Son of God. Keep his commandments with all your hearts, and perfectly observe his counsels. Praise him, for he is good, and glorify him by your works. God has sent you through all the world, that by your words and example you may bear witness of him, and that you may teach all men that he alone is all powerful. Persevere in discipline and obedience, and with an honest and firm will keep that which you have promised. After this opening Francis immediately passes to the essential matter of the letter, that of the love and respect due to the Sacrament of the altar; faith in this mystery of love appeared to him indeed as the salvation of the Order. Was he wrong? How can a man who truly believes in the real presence of the God-Man between the fingers of him who lifts up the host, not consecrate his life to this God and to holiness? One has some difficulty in imagining. It is true that legions of devotees profess the most absolute faith in this dogma, and we do not see that they are less bad; but faith with them belongs in the intellectual sphere; it is the abdication of reason, and in sacrificing their intelligence to God they are most happy to offer to him an instrument which they very much prefer not to use. To Francis the question presented itself quite differently; the thought that there could be any merit in believing could never enter his mind; the fact of the real presence was for him of almost concrete evidence. Therefore his faith in this mystery was an energy of the heart, that the life of God, mysteriously present upon the altar, might become the soul of all his actions. To the eucharistic transubstantiation, effected by the words of the priest, he added another, that of his own heart. God offers himself to us as to his children. This is why I beg you, all of you, my brothers, kissing your feet, and with all the love of which I am capable, to have all possible respect for the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ. Then addressing himself particularly to the priests: Hearken, my brothers, if the blessed Virgin Mary is justly honored for having carried Jesus in her womb, if John the Baptist trembled because he dared not touch the Lord's head, if the sepulchre in which for a little time he lay is regarded with such great adoration, oh, how holy, pure, and worthy should be the priest who touches with his hands, who receives into his mouth and into his heart, and who distributes to others the living, glorified Jesus, the sight of whom makes angels rejoice! Understand your dignity, brother priests, and be holy, for he is holy. Oh! what great wretchedness and what a frightful infirmity to have him there present before you and to think of other things. Let each man be struck with amazement, let the whole earth tremble, let the heavens thrill with joy when the Christ, the Son of the living God, descends upon the altar into the hands of the priest. Oh, wonderful profundity! Oh, amazing grace! Oh, triumph of humility! See, the Master of all things, God, and the Son of God, humbles himself for our salvation, even to disguising himself under the appearance of a bit of bread. Contemplate, my brothers, this humility of God, and enlarge your hearts before him; humble yourselves as well, that you, even you, may be lifted up by him. Keep nothing for yourselves, that he may receive you without reserve, who has given himself to you without reserve. We see with what vigor of love Francis's heart had laid hold upon the idea of the communion. He closes with long counsels to the Brothers, and after having conjured them faithfully to keep their promises, all his mysticism breathes out and is summed up in a prayer of admirable simplicity. God Almighty, eternal, righteous, and merciful, give to us poor wretches to do for thy sake all that we know of thy will, and to will always what pleases thee; so that inwardly purified, enlightened, and kindled by the fire of the Holy Spirit, we may follow in the footprints of thy well-beloved Son, our Lord Jesus Christ. What separates this prayer from the effort to discern duty made by choice spirits apart from all revealed religion? Very little in truth; the words are different, the action is the same. But Francis's solicitudes reached far beyond the limits of the Order. His longest epistle is addressed to all Christians; its words are so living that you fancy you hear a voice speaking behind you; and this voice, usually as serene as that which from the mountain in Galilee proclaimed the law of the new times, becomes here and there unutterably sweet, like that which sounded in the upper chamber on the night of the first eucharist. As Jesus forgot the cross that was standing in the shadows, so Francis forgets his sufferings, and, overcome with a divine sadness, thinks of humanity, for each member of which he would give his life; he thinks of his spiritual sons, the Brothers of Penitence, whom he is about to leave without having been able to make them feel, as he would have had them feel, the love for them with which he burns: "Father, I have given them the words which thou hast given me.... For them I pray!" The whole Franciscan gospel is in these words, but to understand the fascination which it exerted we must have gone through the School of the Middle Ages, and there listened to the interminable tournaments of dialectics by which minds were dried up; we must have seen the Church of the thirteenth century, honeycombed by simony and luxury, and only able, under the pressure of heresy or revolt, to make a few futile efforts to scotch the evil. To all Christians, monks, clerics, or laymen, whether men or women, to all who dwell in the whole world, Brother Francis, their most submissive servitor, presents his duty and wishes the true peace of heaven, and sincere love in the Lord. Being the servitor of all men, I am bound to serve them and to dispense to them the wholesome words of my Master. This is why, seeing I am too weak and ill to visit each one of you in particular, I have resolved to send you my message by this letter, and to offer you the words of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Word of God, and of the Holy Spirit, which are spirit and life. It would be puerile to expect here new ideas either in fact or form. Francis's appeals are of value only by the spirit which animates them. After having briefly recalled the chief features of the gospel, and urgently recommended the communion, Francis addresses himself in particular to certain categories of hearers, with special counsels. Let the podestàs, governors, and those who are placed in authority, exercise their functions with mercy, as they would be judged with mercy by God.... Monks in particular, who have renounced the world, are bound to do more and better than simple Christians, to renounce all that is not necessary to them, and to have in hatred the vices and sins of the body.... They should love their enemies, do good to them who hate them, observe the precepts and counsels of our Redeemer, renounce themselves, and subdue their bodies. And no monk is bound to obedience, if in obeying he would be obliged to commit a fault or a sin.... Let us not be wise and learned according to the flesh, but simple, humble, and pure.... We should never desire to be above others, but rather to be below, and to obey all men. He closes by showing the foolishness of those who set their hearts on the possession of earthly goods, and concludes by the very realistic picture of the death of the wicked. His money, his title, his learning, all that he believed himself to possess, all are taken from him; his relatives and his friends to whom he has given his fortune will come to divide it among themselves, and will end by saying: "Curses on him, for he might have given us more and he has not done it; he might have amassed a larger fortune, and he has done nothing of the kind." The worms will eat his body and the demons will consume his soul, and thus he will lose both soul and body. I, Brother Francis, your little servitor, I beg and conjure you by the love that is in God, ready to kiss your feet, to receive with humility and love these and all other words of our Lord Jesus Christ and to conform your conduct to them. And let those who devoutly receive them and understand them pass them on to others. And if they thus persevere unto the end, may they be blessed by the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.[32] If Francis ever made a Rule for the Third Order it must have very nearly resembled this epistle, and until this problematical document is found, the letter shows what were originally these associations of Brothers of Penitence. Everything in these long pages looks toward the development of the mystic religious life in the heart of each Christian. But even when Francis dictated them, this high view had become a Utopia, and the Third Order was only one battalion more in the armies of the papacy. We see that the epistles which we have just examined proceed definitely from a single inspiration. Whether he is leaving instructions for his successors, the ministers-general, whether he is writing to all the present and future members of his Order, to all Christians or even to the clergy,[33] Francis has only one aim, to keep on preaching after his death, and perhaps, too, by putting into writing his message of peace and love, to provide that he shall not be entirely travestied or misunderstood. Considered in connection with those sorrowful hours which saw their birth, they form a whole whose import and meaning become singularly energetic. If we would find the Franciscan spirit, it is here, in the Rule of 1221, and in the Will that we must seek for it. Neglect, and especially the storms which later overwhelmed the Order, explain the disappearance of several other documents which would cast a glimmer of poetry and joy over these sad days;[34] Francis had not forgotten his sister-friend at St. Damian. Hearing that she had been greatly disquieted by knowing him to be so ill, he desired to reassure her: he still deceived himself as to his condition, and wrote to her promising soon to go to see her. To this assurance he added some affectionate counsels, advising her and her companions not to go to extremes with their macerations. To set her an example of cheerfulness he added to this letter a Laude in the vulgar tongue which he had himself set to music.[35] In that chamber of the episcopal palace in which he was as it were imprisoned he had achieved a new victory, and it was doubtless that which inspired his joy. The Bishop of Assisi, the irritable Guido, always at war with somebody, was at this time quarrelling with the podestà of the city; nothing more was needed to excite in the little town a profound disquiet. Guido had excommunicated the podestà, and the latter had issued a prohibition against selling and buying or making any contract with ecclesiastics. The difference grew more bitter, and no one appeared to dream of attempting a reconciliation. We can the better understand Francis's grief over all this by remembering that his very first effort had been to bring peace into his native city, and that he considered the return of Italy to union and concord to be the essential aim of his apostolate. War in Assisi would be the final dissolution of his dream; the voice of events crying brutally to him, "Thou hast wasted thy life!" The dregs of this cup were spared him, thanks to an inspiration in which breaks forth anew his natural play of imagination. To the Canticle of the Sun he added a new strophe: Be praised, Lord, for those who forgive for love of thee, and bear trials and tribulations; happy they who persevere in peace, by thee, Most high, shall they be crowned. Then, calling a friar, he charged him to beg the governor to betake himself, with all the notables whom he could assemble, to the paved square before the bishop's palace. The magistrate, to whom legend gives the nobler part in the whole affair, at once yielded to the saint's request. When he arrived and the bishop had come forth from the palace, two friars came forward and said: "Brother Francis has made to the praise of God a hymn to which he prays you to listen piously," and immediately they began to sing the Hymn of Brother Sun, with its new strophe. The governor listened, standing in an attitude of profound attention, copiously weeping, for he dearly loved the blessed Francis. When the singing was ended, "Know in truth," said he, "that I desire to forgive the lord bishop, that I wish and ought to look upon him as my lord, for if one had even assassinated my brother I should be ready to pardon the murderer." With these words he threw himself at the bishop's feet, and said: "I am ready to do whatsoever you would, for the love of our Lord Jesus Christ and his servant Francis." Then the bishop, taking him by the hand, lifted him up and said, "With my position it would become me to be humble, but since I am naturally too quick to wrath, thou must pardon me."[36] This unexpected reconciliation was immediately looked upon as miraculous, and increased still more the reverence of the Assisans for their fellow-citizen. The summer was drawing to a close. After a few days of relative improvement Francis's sufferings became greater than ever: incapable of movement, he even thought that he ought to give up his ardent desire to see St. Damian and Portiuncula once more, and gave the brothers all his directions about the latter sanctuary: "Never abandon it," he would repeat to them, "for that place is truly sacred: it is the house of God."[37] It seemed to him that if the Brothers remained attached to that bit of earth, that chapel ten feet long, those thatched huts, they would there find the living reminder of the poverty of the early days, and could never wander far from it. One evening he grew worse with frightful rapidity; all the following night he had hemorrhages which left not the slightest hope; the Brothers hastening to him, he dictated a few lines in form of a Will and gave them his blessing: "Adieu, my children; remain all of you in the fear of God, abide always united to Christ; great trials are in store for you, and tribulation draws nigh. Happy are they who persevere as they have begun; for there will be scandals and divisions among you. As for me, I am going to the Lord and my God. Yes, I have the assurance that I am going to him whom I have served."[38] During the following days, to the great surprise of those who were about him, he again grew somewhat better; no one could understand the resistance to death offered by this body so long worn out by suffering. He himself began to hope again. A physician of Arezzo whom he knew well, having come to visit him, "Good friend," Francis asked him, "how much longer do you think I have to live?" "Father," replied the other reassuringly, "this will all pass away, if it pleases God." "I am not a cuckoo,"[39] replied Francis smiling, using a popular saying, "to be afraid of death. By the grace of the Holy Spirit I am so intimately united to God that I am equally content to live or to die." "In that case, father, from the medical point of view, your disease is incurable, and I do not think that you can last longer than the beginning of autumn." At these words the poor invalid stretched out his hands as if to call on God, crying with an indescribable expression of joy, "Welcome, Sister Death!" Then he began to sing, and sent for Brothers Angelo and Leo. On their arrival they were made, in spite of their emotion, to sing the Canticle of the Sun. They were at the last doxology when Francis, checking them, improvised the greeting to death: Be praised, Lord, for our Sister the Death of the body, whom no man may escape; alas for them who die in a state of mortal sin; happy they who are found conformed to thy most holy will, for the second death will do to them no harm. From this day the palace rang unceasingly with his songs. Continually, even through the night, he would sing the Canticle of the Sun or some other of his favorite compositions. Then, when wearied out, he would beg Angelo and Leo to go on. One day Brother Elias thought it his duty to make a few remarks on the subject. He feared that the nurses and the people of the neighborhood would be scandalized; ought not a saint to be absorbed in meditation in the face of death, to await it with fear and trembling instead of indulging in a gayety that might be misinterpreted?[40] Perhaps Bishop Guido was not entirely a stranger to these reproaches; it seems not improbable that to have his palace crowded with Brothers Minor all these long weeks had finally put him a little out of humor. But Francis would not yield; his union with God was too sweet for him to consent not to sing it. They decided at last to remove him to Portiuncula. His desire was to be fulfilled; he was to die beside the humble chapel where he had heard God's voice consecrating him apostle. His companions, bearing their precious burden, took the way through the olive-yards across the plain. From time to time the invalid, unable to distinguish anything, asked where they were. When they were half way there, at the hospital of the Crucigeri, where long ago he had tended the leper, and from whence there was a full view of all the houses of the city, he begged them to set him upon the ground with his face toward Assisi, and raising his hand he bade adieu to his native place and blessed it. FOOTNOTES: [1] The following is the list of monasteries which, according to Rodolfo di Tossignano, accepted the ideas of Angelo Clareno before the end of the thirteenth century: Fermo, Spoleto, Camerino, Ascoli, Rieti, Foligno, Nursia, Aquila, Amelia: _Historiarum seraphicæ religionis, libri tres_, Venice, 1586, 1 vol., f^o, 155a. [2] _Spec._, 129b; _Fior._, 19. In some of the stories of this period the evidence is clear how certain facts have been, little by little, transformed into miracles. Compare, for example, the miracle of St. Urbano in Bon., 68, and 1 Cel., 61. See also 2 Cel., 2, 10; Bon., 158 and 159. [3] 1 Cel., 87; 2 Cel., 2, 11; _Conform._, 148a, 2; Bon., 99. Upon this visit see 2 Cel., 2, 10; Bon., 158 and 159; 2 Cel., 2, 11; 2 Cel., 3, 36. [4] The present Italian name of the monastery which has also been called _Monte-Rainerio_ and _Fonte-Palumbo_. [5] 1 Cel., 101; 2 Cel., 3, 102; Bon., 67; _Spec._, 134a. [6] 2 Cel., 3, 66; Bon., 69. [7] _Fior. ii. consid._ Cf. Roger Bacon, Opus tertium (_ap. Mon. Germ. hist._, _Script._ t. 28, p. 577). _B. Franciscus jussit fratri cythariste ut dulcius personaret, quatenus mens excitaretur ad harmonias coelestes quas pluries andivit. Mira enim musicæ super omnes scientias et spectanda potestas._ [8] Village three hours' walk northward from Rieti. Francis's cell still remains on the mountain, three-quarters of an hour from the place. [9] 2 Cel., 3, 71; cf. _Spec._, 43a. [10] Chapel still standing, a few minutes' walk from Rieti. 2 Cel., 3, 70; _Spec._, 15a, 43a. [11] 2 Cel., 2, 14; Bon., 167; 2 Cel., 3, 10; Bon., 58; _Spec._, 122b. [12] Wadding, _ann. 1213_, n. 14, rightly places St. Urbano in the county of Narni. _L'Eremo di S. Urbano_ is about half an hour from the village of the same name, on Mount San Pancrazio (1026 m.), three leagues south of Narni. The panorama is one of the finest in Central Italy. The Bollandists allowed themselves to be led into error by an interested assertion when they placed San Urbano near to Jesi (pp. 623f and 624a). 1 Cel., 61; Bon., 68. (Vide Bull _Cum aliqua_ of May 15, 1218, where mention is made of San Urbano.) [13] As much may be said of the apparition of the three virgins between Campilia and San Quirico. 2 Cel., 3, 37; Bon., 93. [14] _Spec._, 12b; _Conform._, 169a, 1. [15] 2 Cel., 3, 46; Bon., 153; _Spec._, 31b; Ezek., xxxiii., 9. [16] Two years after, the King of France and all his court kissed and revered the pillow which Francis had used during his illness. 1 Cel., 120. [17] Bagnara is near the sources of the Topino, about an hour east of Nocera. These two localities were then dependents of Assisi. [18] And not Sartiano. Balciano still exists, about half way between Nocera and Assisi. [19] 2 Cel., 3, 23; Bon., 98; _Spec._, 17b; _Conform._, 239a, 2f. [20] 2 Cel., 3, 33; 1 Cel., 105, is still more explicit: "The multitude hoped that he would die very soon, and that was the subject of their joy." [21] 1 Cel., 103 and 104. [22] 1 Cel., 102; _Spec._, 83b. [23] 2 Cel., 3, 116; _Spec._, 67a; _Conform._, 143b, 1, and 225b, 2; 2 Cel., 3, 117; _Spec._, 130a. [24] For the text vide _Conform._, 136b, 2; 138b, 2; 142 b, 1. [25] _Tribul., Archiv._, ii., pp. 285 ff. [26] 2 Cel., 3, 118. [27] These words are borrowed from a long fragment cited by Ubertini di Casali, as coming from Brother Leo: _Arbor vit. cruc., lib._ v., _cap._ 3. It is surely a bit of the Legend of the Three Companions; it may be found textually in the Tribulations, Laur., f^o 16b, with a few more sentences at the end. Cf. _Conform._, 136a, 2; 143a, 2; _Spec._, 8b; 26b; 50a; 130b; 2 Cel., 3, 118. [28] _Tribul._, Laur., 17b. [29] See, for example, Brother Richer's question as to the books: Ubertini, _Loc. cit._ Cf. _Archiv._, iii., pp. 75 and 177; _Spec._, 8a; _Conform._, 71b, 2. See also: Ubertini, _Archiv._, iii., pp. 75 and 177; _Tribul._, 13a; _Spec._, 9a; _Conform._, 170a, 1. It is curious to compare the account as it found in the documents with the version of it given in 2 Cel., 3, 8. [30] Assisi MS., 338, f^o 28a-31a, with the rubric: _De lictera et ammonitione beatissimi patris nostri Francisci quam misit fratribus ad capitulum quando erat infirmus._ This letter was wrongly divided into three by Rodolfo di Tossignano (f^o 237), who was followed by Wadding (Epistolæ x., xi., xii.). The text is found without this senseless division in the manuscript cited and in _Firmamentum_, f^o 21; _Spec._, Morin, iii., 217a; Ubertini, _Arbor vit. cruc._, v., 7. [31] This initial (given only by the Assisi MS.) has not failed to excite surprise. It appears that there ought to have been simply an N ... This letter then would have been replaced by the copyist, who would have used the initial of the minister general in charge at the time of his writing. If this hypothesis has any weight it will aid to fix the exact date of the manuscript. (Alberto of Pisa minister from 1239-1240; Aimon of Faversham, 1240-1244.) [32] This epistle also was unskilfully divided into two distinct letters by Rodolfo di Tossignano, f^o 174a, who was followed by Wadding. See Assisi MS., 338, 23a-28a; _Conform._, 137a, 1 ff. [33] The letter to the clergy only repeats the thoughts already expressed upon the worship of the holy sacrament. We remember Francis sweeping out the churches and imploring the priests to keep them clean; this epistle has the same object: it is found in the Assisi MS., 338, f^o 31b-32b, with the rubric: _De reverentia Corporis Domini et de munditia altaris ad omnes clericos_. Incipit: _Attendamus omnes_. Explicit: _fecerint exemplari_. This, therefore, is the letter given by Wadding xiii., but without address or salutation. [34] We need not despair of finding them. The archives of the monasteries of Clarisses are usually rudimentary enough, but they are preserved with pious care. [35] _Spec._, 117b; _Conform._, 185a 1; 135b, 1. Cf. _Test. B. Claræ_, A. SS., Aug., ii., p. 747. [36] This story is given in the _Spec._, 128b, as from eye-witnesses. Cf. _Conform._, 184b, 1; 203a, 1. [37] 1 Cel., 106. These recommendations as to Portiuncula were amplified by the Zelanti, when, under the generalship of Crescentius (Bull _Is qui ecclesiam_, March 6, 1245), the Basilica of Assisi was substituted for Santa Maria degli Angeli as _mater et caput_ of the Order. Vide _Spec._, 32b, 69b-71a; _Conform._, 144a, 2; 218a, 1; 3 Soc., 56; 2 Cel., 1, 12 and 13; Bon., 24, 25; see the Appendix, the Study of the Indulgence of August 2. [38] 2 Cel., 108. As will be seen (below, p. 367) the remainder of Celano's narrative seems to require to be taken with some reserve. Cf. _Spec._, 115b; _Conform._, 225a, 2; Bon., 211. [39] _Non sum cuculus_, in Italian _cuculo_. [40] _Spec._, 136b; _Fior. iv. consid._ It is to be noted that Guido, instead of waiting at Assisi for the certainly impending death of Francis, went away to Mont Gargano. 2 Cel., 3, 142. * * * * * CHAPTER XX FRANCIS'S WILL AND DEATH End of September-October 3, 1226 The last days of Francis's life are of radiant beauty. He went to meet death, singing,[1] says Thomas of Celano, summing up the impression of those who saw him then. To be once more at Portiuncula after so long a detention at the bishop's palace was not only a real joy to his heart, but the pure air of the forest must have been much to his physical well-being; does not the Canticle of the Creatures seem to have been made expressly to be sung in the evening of one of those autumn days of Umbria, so soft and luminous, when all nature seems to retire into herself to sing her own hymn of love to Brother Sun? We see that Francis has come to that almost entire cessation of pain, that renewing of life, which so often precedes the approach of the last catastrophe. He took advantage of it to dictate his Will.[2] It is to these pages that we must go to find the true note for a sketch of the life of its author, and an idea of the Order as it was in his dreams. In this record, which is of an incontestable authenticity, the most solemn manifestation of his thought, the Poverello reveals himself absolutely, with a virginal candor. His humility is here of a sincerity which strikes one with awe; it is absolute, though no one could dream that it was exaggerated. And yet, wherever his mission is concerned, he speaks with tranquil and serene assurance. Is he not an ambassador of God? Does he not hold his message from Christ himself? The genesis of his thought here shows itself to be at once wholly divine and entirely personal. The individual conscience here proclaims its sovereign authority. "No one showed me what I ought to do, but the Most High himself revealed to me that I ought to live conformably to his holy gospel." When a man has once spoken thus, submission to the Church has been singularly encroached upon. We may love her, hearken to her, venerate her, but we feel ourselves, perhaps without daring to avow it, superior to her. Let a critical hour come, and one finds himself heretic without knowing it or wishing it. "Ah, yes," cries Angelo Clareno, "St. Francis promised to obey the pope and his successors, but they cannot and must not command anything contrary to the conscience or to the Rule."[3] For him, as for all the spiritual Franciscans, when there is conflict between what the inward voice of God ordains and what the Church wills, he has only to obey the former.[4] If you tell him that the Church and the Order are there to define the true signification of the Rule, he appeals to common sense, and to that interior certitude which is given by a clear view of truth. The Rule, as also the gospel, of which it is a summary, is above all ecclesiastical power, and no one has the right to say the last word in their interpretation.[5] The Will was not slow to gain a moral authority superior even to that of the Rule. Giovanni of Parma, to explain the predilection of the Joachimites for this document, points out that after the impression of the stigmata the Holy Spirit was in Francis with still greater plenitude than before.[6] Did the innumerable sects which disturbed the Church in the thirteenth century perceive that these two writings--the Rule and the Testament--the one apparently made to follow and support the other, substantially identical as it was said, proceeded from two opposite inspirations? Very confusedly, no doubt, but guided by a very sure instinct, they saw in these pages the banner of liberty. They were not mistaken. Even to-day, thinkers, moralists, mystics may arrive at solutions very different from those of the Umbrian prophet, but the method which they employ is his, and they may not refuse to acknowledge in him the precursor of religious subjectivism. The Church, too, was not mistaken. She immediately understood the spirit that animated these pages. Four years later, perhaps to the very day, September 28, 1230, Ugolini, then Gregory IX., solemnly interpreted the Rule, in spite of the precautions of Francis, who had forbidden all gloss or commentary on the Rule or the Will, and declared that the Brothers were not bound to the observation of the Will.[7] What shall we say of the bull in which the pope alleges his familiar relations with the Saint to justify his commentary, and in which the clearest passages are so distorted as to change their sense completely. "One is stupefied," cries Ubertini of Casali, "that a text so clear should have need of a commentary, for it suffices to have common sense and to know grammar in order to understand it." And this strange monk dares to add: "There is one miracle which God himself cannot do; it is to make two contradictory things true."[8] Certainly the Church should be mistress in her own house; it would have been nothing wrong had Gregory IX. created an Order conformed to his views and ideas, but when we go through Sbaralea's folios and the thousands of bulls accorded to the spiritual sons of him who in the clearest and most solemn manner had forbidden them to ask any privilege of the court of Rome, we cannot but feel a bitter sadness. Thus upheld by the papacy, the Brothers of the Common Observance made the Zelanti sharply expiate their attachment to Francis's last requests. Cæsar of Speyer died of violence from the Brother placed in charge of him;[9] the first disciple, Bernardo di Quintavalle, hunted like a wild beast, passed two years in the forests of Monte-Sefro, hidden by a wood-cutter;[10] the other first companions who did not succeed in flight had to undergo the severest usage. In the March of Ancona, the home of the Spirituals, the victorious party used a terrible violence. The Will was confiscated and destroyed; they went so far as to burn it over the head of a friar who persisted in desiring to observe it.[11] WILL (LITERAL TRANSLATION). See in what manner God gave it to me, to me, Brother Francis, to begin to do penitence; when I lived in sin, it was very painful to me to see lepers, but God himself led me into their midst, and I remained here a little while.[12] When I left them, that which had seemed to me bitter had become sweet and easy. A little while after I quitted the world, and God gave me such a faith in his churches that I would kneel down with simplicity and I would say: "We adore thee, Lord Jesus Christ, here and in all thy churches which are in the world, and we bless thee that by thy holy cross thou hast ransomed the world." Besides, the Lord gave me and still gives me so great a faith in priests who live according to the form of the holy Roman Church, because of their sacerdotal character, that even if they persecuted me I would have recourse to them. And even though I had all the wisdom of Solomon, if I should find poor secular priests, I would not preach in their parishes without their consent. I desire to respect them like all the others, to love them and honor them as my lords. I will not consider their sins, for in them I see the Son of God and they are my lords. I do this because here below I see nothing, I perceive nothing corporally of the most high Son of God, if not his most holy Body and Blood, which they receive and they alone distribute to others. I desire above all things to honor and venerate all these most holy mysteries and to keep them precious. Whenever I find the sacred names of Jesus or his words in indecent places, I desire to take them away, and I pray that others take them away and put them in some decent place. We ought to honor and revere all the theologians and those who preach the most holy word of God, as dispensing to us spirit and life. When the Lord gave me some brothers no one showed me what I ought to do, but the Most High himself revealed to me that I ought to live according to the model of the holy gospel. I caused a short and simple formula to be written, and the lord pope confirmed it for me. Those who presented themselves to observe this kind of life distributed all that they might have to the poor. They contented themselves with a tunic, patched within and without, with the cord and breeches, and we desired to have nothing more. The clerks said the office like other clerks, and the laymen _Pater noster_. We loved to live in poor and abandoned churches, and we were ignorant and submissive to all. I worked with my hands and would continue to do, and I will also that all other friars work at some honorable trade. Let those who have none learn one, not for the purpose of receiving the price of their toil, but for their good example and to flee idleness. And when they do not give us the price of the work, let us resort to the table of the Lord, begging our bread from door to door. The Lord revealed to me the salutation which we ought to give: "God give you peace!" Let the Brothers take great care not to receive churches, habitations, and all that men build for them, except as all is in accordance with the holy poverty which we have vowed in the Rule, and let them not receive hospitality in them except as strangers and pilgrims. I absolutely interdict all the brothers, in whatever place they may be found, from asking any bull from the court of Rome, whether directly or indirectly, under pretext of church or convent or under pretext of preachings, nor even for their personal protection. If they are not received anywhere let them go elsewhere, thus doing penance with the benediction of God. I desire to obey the minister-general of this fraternity, and the guardian whom he may please to give me. I desire to put myself entirely into his hands, to go nowhere and do nothing against his will, for he is my lord. Though I be simple and ill, I would, however, have always a clerk who will perform the office, as it is said in the Rule; let all the other brothers also be careful to obey their guardians and to do the office according to the Rule. If it come to pass that there are any who do not the office according to the Rule, and who desire to make any other change, or if they are not Catholics, let all the Brothers, wherever they may be, be bound by obedience to present them to the nearest custode. Let the custodes be bound by obedience to keep him well guarded like a man who is in bonds night and day, so that he may not escape from their hands until they personally place him in the minister's hands. And let the minister be bound by obedience to send him by brothers who will guard him as a prisoner day and night until they shall have placed him in the hands of the Lord Bishop of Ostia, who is the lord, the protector, and the correcter of all the Fraternity.[13] And let the Brothers not say: "This is a new Rule;" for this is a reminder, a warning, an exhortation; it is my Will, that I, little Brother Francis, make for you, my blessed Brothers, in order that we may observe in a more catholic way the Rule which we promised the Lord to keep. Let the ministers-general, all the other ministers and the custodes be held by obedience to add nothing to and take nothing from these words. Let them always keep this writing near them, beside the Rule; and in all the chapters which shall be held, when the Rule is read let these words be read also. I interdict absolutely, by obedience, all the Brothers, clerics and layman, to introduce glosses in the Rule, or in this Will, under pretext of explaining it. But since the Lord has given me to speak and to write the Rule and these words in a clear and simple manner, without commentary, understand them in the same way, and put them in practice until the end. And may whoever shall have observed these things be crowned in heaven with the blessings of the heavenly Father, and on earth with those of his well-beloved Son and of the Holy Spirit the consoler, with the assistance of all the heavenly virtues and all the saints. And I, little Brother Francis, your servitor, confirm to you so far as I am able this most holy benediction. Amen. After thinking of his Brothers Francis thought of his dear Sisters at St. Damian and made a will for them. It has not come down to us, and we need not wonder; the Spiritual Brothers might flee away, and protest from the depths of their retreats, but the Sisters were completely unarmed against the machinations of the Common Observance.[14] In the last words that he addressed to the Clarisses, after calling upon them to persevere in poverty and union, he gave them his benediction.[15] Then he recommended them to the Brothers, supplicating the latter never to forget that they were members of one and the same religious family.[16] After having done all that he could for those whom he was about to leave, he thought for a moment of himself. He had become acquainted in Rome with a pious lady named Giacomina di Settisoli. Though rich, she was simple and good, entirely devoted to the new ideas; even the somewhat singular characteristics of Francis pleased her. He had given her a lamb which had become her inseparable companion.[17] Unfortunately all that concerns her has suffered much from later retouchings of the legend. The perfectly natural conduct of the Saint with women has much embarrassed his biographers; hence heavy and distorted commentaries tacked on to episodes of a delicious simplicity. Before dying Francis desired to see again this friend, whom he smilingly called Brother Giacomina. He caused a letter to be written her to come to Portiuncula; we can imagine the dismay of the narrators at this far from monastic invitation. But the good lady had anticipated his appeal: at the moment when the messenger with the letter was about to leave for Rome, she arrived at Portiuncula and remained there until the last sigh of the Saint.[18] For one moment she thought of sending away her suite; the invalid was so calm and joyful that she could not believe him dying, but he himself advised her to keep her people with her. This time he felt with no possible doubt that his captivity was about to be ended. He was ready, he had finished his work. Did he think then of the day when, cursed by his father, he had renounced all earthly goods and cried to God with an ineffable confidence, "Our Father who art in heaven!" We cannot say; but he desired to finish his life by a symbolic act which very closely recalls the scene in the bishop's palace. He caused himself to be stripped of his clothing and laid upon the ground, for he wished to die in the arms of his Lady Poverty. With one glance he embraced the twenty years that had glided by since their union: "I have done my duty," he said to the Brothers, "may the Christ now teach you yours!"[19] This was Thursday, October 1.[20] They laid him back upon his bed, and, conforming to his wishes, they again sang to him the Canticle of the Sun. At times he added his voice to those of his Brothers,[21] and came back with preference to Psalm 142, _Voce mea ad Dominum clamavi_.[22] With my voice I cry unto the Lord, With my voice I implore the Lord, I pour out my complaint before him, I tell him all my distress. When my spirit is cast down within me, Thou knowest my path. Upon the way where I walk They have laid a snare for me, Cast thine eyes to the right and look! No one recognizes me; All refuge is lost for me, No one takes thought for my soul. Lord, unto thee I cry; I say: Thou art my refuge, My portion in the land of the living. Be attentive to my cries! For I am very unhappy. Deliver me from those who pursue me! For they are stronger than I. Bring my soul out of its prison That I may praise thy name. The righteous shall compass me about When thou hast done good unto me! The visits of death are always solemn, but the end of the just is the most moving _sursum corda_ that we can hear on earth. The hours flowed by and the Brothers would not leave him. "Alas, good Father," said one of them to him, unable longer to contain himself, "your children are going to lose you, and be deprived of the true light which lightened them: think of the orphans you are leaving and forgive all their faults, give to them all, present and absent, the joy of your holy benediction." "See," replied the dying man, "God is calling me. I forgive all my Brothers, present and absent, their offences and faults, and absolve them according to my power. Tell them so, and bless them all in my name."[23] Then crossing his arms he laid his hands upon those who surrounded him. He did this with peculiar emotion to Bernard of Quintavalle: "I desire," he said, "and with all my power I urge whomsoever shall be minister-general of the Order, to love and honor him as myself; let the provincials and all the Brothers act toward him as toward me."[24] He thought not only of the absent Brothers but of the future ones; love so abounded in him that it wrung from him a groan of regret for not seeing all those who should enter the Order down to the end of time, that he might lay his hand upon their brows, and make them feel those things that may only be spoken by the eyes of him who loves in God.[25] He had lost the notion of time; believing that it was still Thursday he desired to take a last meal with his disciples. Some bread was brought, he broke it and gave it to them, and there in the poor cabin of Portiuncula, without altar and without a priest, was celebrated the Lord's Supper.[26] A Brother read the Gospel for Holy Thursday, _Ante diem festum Paschæ_: "Before the feast of the Passover, Jesus knowing that his hour was come to go from this world to the Father, having loved his own who were in the world he loved them unto the end." The sun was gilding the crests of the mountains with his last rays, there was silence around the dying one. All was ready. The angel of death might come. Saturday, October 3, 1226, at nightfall, without pain, without struggle, he breathed the last sigh. The Brothers were still gazing on his face, hoping yet to catch some sign of life, when innumerable larks alighted, singing, on the thatch of his cell,[27] as if to salute the soul which had just taken flight and give the Little Poor Man the canonization of which he was most worthy, the only one, doubtless, which he would ever have coveted. On the morrow, at dawn, the Assisans came down to take possession of his body and give it a triumphant funeral. By a pious inspiration, instead of going straight to the city they went around by St. Damian, and thus was realized the promise made by Francis to the Sisters a few weeks before, to come once more to see them. Their grief was heart-rending. These women's hearts revolted against the absurdity of death;[28] but there were tears on that day at St. Damian only. The Brothers forgot their sadness on seeing the stigmata, and the inhabitants of Assisi manifested an indescribable joy on having their relic at last. They deposited it in the Church St. George.[29] Less than two years after, Sunday, July 26, 1228, Gregory IX. came to Assisi to preside in person over the ceremonies of canonization, and to lay, on the morrow, the first stone of the new church dedicated to the Stigmatized. Built under the inspiration of Gregory IX. and the direction of Brother Elias, this marvellous basilica is also one of the documents of this history, and perhaps I have been wrong in neglecting it. Go and look upon it, proud, rich, powerful, then go down to Portiuncula, pass over to St. Damian, hasten to the Carceri, and you will understand the abyss that separates the ideal of Francis from that of the pontiff who canonized him. FOOTNOTES: [1] _Mortem cantando suscepit._ 2 Cel., 3, 139. [2] The text here taken as a basis is that of the Assisi MS., 338 (f^o 16a-18a). It is also to be found in _Firmamentum_, f^o 19, col. 4; _Speculum_, Morin, _tract._ iii., 8a; Wadding, _ann. 1226_, 35; A. SS., p. 663; Amoni, _Legenda Trium Sociorum_; Appendix, p. 110. Everything in this document proclaims its authenticity, but we are not reduced to internal proof. It is expressly cited in 1 Cel., 17 (before 1230); by the Three Companions (1246), 3 Soc., 11; 26; 29; by 2 Cel., 3, 99 (1247). These proofs would be more than sufficient, but there is another of even greater value: the bull _Quo elongati_ of September 28, 1230, where Gregory IX. cites it textually and declares that the friars are not bound to observe it. [3] _Promittet Franciscus obedientiam ... papæ ... et successoribus ... qui non possunt nec debent eis præcipere aliquid quod sit contra animam et regulam._ _Archiv._, _i_, p. 563. [4] _Quod si quando a quocumque ... pontifice aliquid ... mandaretur quod esset contra fidem ... et caritatem et fructus ejus tunc obediet Deo magis quam hominibus._ Ib., p. 561. [5] _Est [Regula] et stat et intelligitur super eos ... Cum spei fiducia pace fruemur cum conscientiæ et Christi spiritus testimonio certo._ Ib., pp. 563 and 565. [6] _Archiv._, ii., p. 274. [7] _Ad mandatum illud vos dicimus non teneri: quod sine consensu Fratrum maxime ministrorum, quos universos tangebat obligare nequivit nec successorem suum quomodolibet obligavit; cum non habeat imperium par in parem._ The sophism is barely specious; Francis was not on a par with his successors; he did not act as minister-general, but as founder. [8] _Arbor vit. cruc._, _lib._ v., _cap._ 3 and 5. See above, p. 185. [9] _Tribul._, Laur., 25b; _Archiv._, i., p. 532. [10] At the summit of the Apennines, about half way between Camerino and Nocera (Umbria). _Tribul._, Laur., 26b; Magl., 135b. [11] _Declaratio Ubertini_, _Archiv._, iii., p. 168. This fact is not to be questioned, since it is alleged in a piece addressed to the pope, in response to the liberal friars, to whom it was to be communicated. [12] _Feci moram cum illis._, MS., 338. Most of the printed texts give _miseracordiam_, which gives a less satisfactory meaning. Cf. Miscellanea iii. (1888), p. 70; 1 Cel., 17; 3 Soc., 11. [13] It is evident that heresy is not here in question. The Brothers who were infected with it were to be delivered to the Church. [14] Urban IV. published, October 18, 1263, Potthast (18680), a Rule for the Clarisses which completely changed the character of this Order. Its author was the cardinal protector Giovanni degli Ursini (the future Nicholas III.), who by way of precaution forbade the Brothers Minor under the severest penalties to dissuade the Sisters from accepting it. "It differs as much from the first Rule," said Ubertini di Casali "as black and white, the savory and the insipid." _Arbor. vit. cruc. lib._ v., _cap._ vi. [15] V. _Test. B. Claræ_; _Conform._, 185a 1; Spec., 117b. [16] 2 Cel., 3, 132. [17] Bon., 112. [18] The Bollandists deny this whole story, which they find in opposition to the prescriptions of Francis himself. A. SS., p. 664 ff. But it is difficult to see for what object authors who take great pains to explain it could have had for inventing it. _Spec._, 133a; _Fior._ iv.; _consid._; _Conform._, 240a. I have borrowed the whole account from Bernard of Besse: _De Laudibus_, f^o 113b. It appears that Giacomina settled for the rest of her life at Assisi, that she might gain edification from the first companions of Francis. _Spec._, 107b. (What a lovely scene, and with what a Franciscan fragrance!) The exact date of her death is not known. She was buried in the lower church of the basilica of Assisi, and on her tomb was engraved: _Hic jacit Jacoba sancta nobilisque romana_. Vide Fratini: _Storia della basilica_, p. 48. Cf. Jacobilli: _Vite dei Santi e Beati dell' Umbria_, Foligno, 3 vols., 4to, 1647; i., p. 214. [19] 2 Cel., 3, 139; Bon., 209, 210; _Conform._, 171b, 2. [20] 2 Cel., 3, 139: _Cum me videritis ... sicut me nudius tertius nudum vidistis._ [21] 1 Cel., 109; 2 Cel., 3, 139. [22] 1 Cel., 109; Bon., 212. [23] 1 Cel., 109. Cf. _Epist. Eliæ._ [24] _Tribul._ Laur., 22b. Nothing better shows the historic value of the chronicle of the Tribulations than to compare its story of these moments with that of the following documents: _Conform._, 48b, 1; 185a, 2; _Fior._, 6.; _Spec._, 86a. [25] 2 Cel., 3, 139; _Spec._, 116b; _Conform._, 224b, 1. [26] 2 Cel., 3, 139. A simple comparison between this story in the _Speculum_ (116b) and that in the _Conformities_ (224b, 1) is enough to show how in certain of its parts the _Speculum_ represents a state of the legend anterior to 1385. [27] Bon., 214. This cell has been transformed into a chapel and may be found a few yards from the little church of Portiuncula. Church and chapel are now sheltered under the great Basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli. See the picture and plan, A. SS., p. 814, or better still in _P. Barnabas aus dem Elsass, Portiuncula oder Geschichte U. L. F. v. den Engeln_. Rixheim, 1884, 1 vol., 8vo, pp. 311 and 312. [28] 1 Cel., 116 and 117; Bon., 219; _Conform._ 185a, 1. [29] To-day in the _clôture_ of the convent St. Clara. Vide Miscellanea 1, pp. 44-48, a very interesting study by Prof. Carattoli upon the coffin of St. Francis. * * * * * CRITICAL STUDY OF THE SOURCES * * * * * SUMMARY I. ST. FRANCIS'S WORKS. II. BIOGRAPHIES PROPERLY SO CALLED. 1. Preliminary Note. 2. First Life by Thomas of Celano. 3. Review of the History of the Order 1230-1244. 4. Legend of the Three Companions. 5. Fragments of the Suppressed Portion of the Legend. 6. Second Life by Thomas of Celano. First Part. 7. Second Life by Thomas of Celano. Second Part. 8. Documents of Secondary Importance: Biography for Use of the Choir. Life in Verse. Biography by Giovanni di Ceperano. Life by Brother Julian. 9. Legend of St. Bonaventura. 10. De Laudibus of Bernard of Besse. III. DIPLOMATIC DOCUMENTS. 1. Donation of the Verna. 2. Registers of Cardinal Ugolini. 3. Bulls. IV. CHRONICLERS OF THE ORDER. 1. Chronicle of Brother Giordano di Giano. 2. Eccleston: Arrival of the Friars in England. 3. Chronicle of Fra Salimbeni. 4. Chronicle of the Tribulations. 5. The Fioretti and their Appendices. 6. Chronicle of the XXIV. Generals. 7. The Conformities of Bartolommeo di Pisa. 8. Glassberger's Chronicle. 9. Chronicle of Mark of Lisbon. V. CHRONICLERS NOT OF THE ORDER. 1. Jacques de Vitry. 2. Thomas of Spalato. 3. Divers Chroniclers. * * * * * CRITICAL STUDY OF THE SOURCES There are few lives in history so abundantly provided with documents as that of St. Francis. This will perhaps surprise the reader, but to convince himself he has only to run over the preceding list, which, however, has been made as succinct as possible. It is admitted in learned circles that the essential elements of this biography have disappeared or have been entirely altered. The exaggeration of certain religious writers, who accept everything, and among several accounts of the same fact always choose the longest and most marvellous, has led to a like exaggeration in the contrary sense. If it were necessary to point out the results of these two excesses as they affect each event, this volume would need to be twice and even four times as large as it is. Those who are interested in these questions will find in the notes brief indications of the original documents on which each narrative is based.[1] To close the subject of the errors which are current in the Franciscan documents, and to show in a few lines their extreme importance, I shall take two examples. Among our own contemporaries no one has so well spoken on the subject of St. Francis as M. Renan; he comes back to him with affecting piety, and he was in a better condition than any one to know the sources of this history. And yet he does not hesitate to say in his study of the Canticle of the Sun, Francis's best known work: "The authenticity of this piece appears certain, but we must observe that we have not the Italian original. The Italian text which we possess is a translation of a Portuguese version, which was itself translated from the Spanish."[2] And yet the primitive Italian exists[3] not only in numerous manuscripts in Italy and France, particularly in the Mazarine Library,[4] but also in the well-known book of the _Conformities_.[5] An error, grave from quite another point of view, is made by the same author when he denies the authenticity of St. Francis's Will; this piece is not only the noblest expression of its author's religious feeling, it constitutes also a sort of autobiography, and contains the solemn and scarcely disguised revocation of all the concessions which had been wrung from him. We have already seen that its authenticity is not to be challenged.[6] This double example will, I hope, suffice to show the necessity of beginning this study by a conscientious examination of the sources. If the eminent historian to whom I have alluded were still living, he would have for this page his large and benevolent smile, that simple, _Oui, oui_, which once made his pupils in the little hall of the Collège de France to tremble with emotion. I do not know what he would think of this book, but I well know that he would love the spirit in which it was undertaken, and would easily pardon me for having chosen him for scape-goat of my wrath against the learned men and biographers. The documents to be examined have been divided into five categories. The first includes _St. Francis's works_. The second, _biographies properly so called_. The third, _diplomatic documents_. The fourth, _chronicles of the Order_. The fifth, _chronicles of authors not of the Order_. FOOTNOTES: [1] If any student finds himself embarrassed by the extreme rarity of certain works cited, I shall make it my duty and pleasure to send them to him, as well as a copy of the Italian manuscripts. [2] E. Renan: _Nouvelles études d'histoire religieuse_, Paris, 1884, 8vo, p. 331. [3] See above, pp. 304 ff. [4] Mazarine Library, MS. 8531: _Speculum perfectionis S. Francisci_; the Canticle is found at fo. 51. Cf. MS., 1350 (date of 1459). That text was published by Boehmer in the _Romanische Studien_, Halle, 1871. pp. 118-122. _Der Sonnengesang v. Fr. d'A._ [5] _Conform._ (Milan, 1510), 202b, 2s. For that matter it is correct that Diola, in the _Croniche degli ordini instituti da S. Francisco_ (Venice, 1606, 3 vols. 4to), translated after the Castilian version of the work composed in Portuguese by Mark of Lisbon, was foolish enough to render into Italian this translation of a translation. [6] See pages 333 ff. * * * * * I ST. FRANCIS'S WORKS The writings of St. Francis[1] are assuredly the best source of acquaintance with him; we can only be surprised to find them so neglected by most of his biographers. It is true that they give little information as to his life, and furnish neither dates nor facts,[2] but they do better, they mark the stages of his thought and of his spiritual development. The legends give us Francis as he appeared, and by that very fact suffer in some degree the compulsion of circumstances; they are obliged to bend to the exigencies of his position as general of an Order approved by the Church, as miracle-worker, and as saint. His works, on the contrary, show us his very soul; each phrase has not only been thought, but lived; they bring us the Poverello's emotions, still alive and palpitating. So, when in the writings of the Franciscans we find any utterance of their master, it unconsciously betrays itself, sounding out suddenly in a sweet, pure tone which penetrates to your very heart, awakening with a thrill a sprite that was sleeping there. This bloom of love enduing St. Francis's words would be an admirable criterion of the authenticity of those opuscules which tradition attributes to him; but the work of testing is neither long nor difficult. If after his time injudicious attempts were here and there made to honor him with miracles which he did not perform, which he would not even have wished to perform, no attempt was ever made to burden his literary efforts with false or supposititious pieces.[3] The best proof of this is that it is not until Wadding--that is to say, until the seventeenth century--that we find the first and only serious attempt to collect these precious memorials. Several of them have been lost,[4] but those which remain are enough to give us in some sort the refutation of the legends. In these pages Francis gives himself to his readers, as long ago he gave himself to his companions; in each one of them a feeling, a cry of the heart, or an aspiration toward the Invisible is prolonged down to our own time. Wadding thought it his duty to give a place in his collection to several suspicious pieces; more than this, instead of following the oldest manuscripts that he had before him, he often permitted himself to be led astray by sixteenth-century writers whose smallest concern was to be critical and accurate. To avoid the tedious and entirely negative task to which it would be necessary to proceed if I took him for my starting-point I shall confine myself to a positive study of this question. All the pieces which will be enumerated are found in his collection. They are sometimes cut up in a singular way; but in proportion as each document is studied we shall find sufficient indications to enable us to make the necessary rectifications. The archives of Sacro Convento of Assisi[5] possess a manuscript whose importance is not to be overestimated. It has already been many times studied,[6] and bears the number 338. It appears, however, that a very important detail of form has been overlooked. It is this: that No. 338 is not _one_ manuscript, but _a collection_ of manuscripts of very different periods, which were put together because they were of very nearly the same size, and have been foliated in a peculiar manner. This artificial character of the collection shows that each of the pieces which compose it needs to be examined by itself, and that it is impossible to say of it as a whole that it is of the thirteenth or the fourteenth century. The part that interests us is perfectly homogeneous, is formed of three parchment books (fol. 12a-44b) and contains a part of Francis's works. 1. The Rule, definitively approved by Honorius III., November 20, 1223[7] (fol. 12a-16a). 2. St. Francis's Will[8] (fol. 16a-18a). 3. The Admonitions[9] (fol. 18a-23b). 4. The Letter to all Christians[10] (fol. 23b-28a). 5. The letter to all the members of the Order assembled in Chapter-general[11] (fol. 28a-31a). 6. Counsel to all clerics on the respect to be paid to the Eucharist[12] (fol., 31b-32b). 7. A very short piece preceded by the rubric: "Of the virtues which adorn the Virgin Mary and which ought to adorn the holy soul"[13] (fol. 32b). 8. The _Laudes Creaturarum_, or Canticle of the Sun[14] (fol. 33a). 9. A paraphrase of the _Pater_ introduced by the rubric: _Incipiunt laudes quas ordinavit. B. pater noster Franciscus et dicebat ipsas ad omnes horas diei et noctis et ante officium B. V. Mariæ sic incipiens: Sanctissime Pater_[15] (fol. 34a). 10. The office of the Passion (34b-43a). This office, where the psalms are replaced by several series of biblical verses, are designed to make him who repeats them follow, hour by hour, the emotions of the Crucified One from the evening of Holy Thursday.[16] 11. A rule for friars in retreat in hermitages[17] (fol. 43a-43b). A glance over this list is enough to show that the works of Francis here collected are addressed to all the Brothers, or are a sort of encyclicals, which they are charged to pass on to those for whom they are destined. The very order of these pieces shows us that we have in this manuscript the primitive library of the Brothers Minor, the collection of which each minister was to carry with him a copy. It was truly their viaticum. Matthew Paris tells us of his amazement at the sight of these foreign monks, clothed in patched tunics, and carrying their books in a sort of case suspended from their necks.[18] The Assisi manuscript was without doubt destined to this service; if it is silent on the subject of the journeys it has made, and of the Brothers to whom it has been a guide and an inspiration, it at least brings us, more than all the legends, into intimacy with Francis, makes us thrill in unison with that heart which never admitted a separation between joy, love, and poetry. As to the date of this manuscript, one must needs be a paleographer to determine. We have already found a hypothesis which, if well grounded, would carry it back to the neighborhood of 1240.[19] Its contents seem to countenance this early date. In fact, it contains several pieces of which the _Manual of the Brother Minor_ very early rid itself. Very soon they were content to have only the Rule to keep company with the breviary; sometimes they added the Will. But the other writings, if they did not fall entirely into neglect, ceased at least to be of daily usage. Those of St. Francis's writings which are not of general interest or do not concern the Brothers naturally find no place in this collection. In this new category we must range the following documents: 1. The Rule of 1221.[20] 2. The Rule of the Clarisses, which we no longer possess in its original form.[21] 3. A sort of special instruction for ministers-general.[22] 4. A letter to St. Clara.[23] 5. Another letter to the same.[24] 6. A letter to Brother Leo.[25] 7. A few prayers.[26] 8. The benediction of Brother Leo. The original autograph, which is preserved in the treasury of Sacro Convento, has been very well reproduced by heliograph.[27] As to the two famous hymns _Amor de caritade_[28] and _In foco l'amor mi mise_,[29] they cannot be attributed to St. Francis, at least in their present form. It belongs to M. Monaci and his numerous and learned emulators to throw light upon these delicate questions by publishing in a scientific manner the earliest monuments of Italian poetry. I have already spoken of several tracts of which assured traces have been found, though they themselves are lost. They are much more numerous than would at first be supposed. In the missionary zeal of the early years the Brothers would not concern themselves with collecting documents. We do not write our memoirs in the fulness of our youth. We must also remember that Portiuncula had neither archives nor library. It was a chapel ten paces long, with a few huts gathered around it. The Order was ten years old before it had seen any other than a single book: a New Testament. The Brothers did not even keep this one. Francis, having nothing else, gave it to a poor woman who asked for alms, and when Pietro di Catania, his vicar, expressed his surprise at this prodigality: "Has she not given her two sons to the Order?" replied the master[30] quickly. FOOTNOTES: [1] Collected first by Wadding (Antwerp, 1623, 4to), they have been published many times since then, particularly by De la Haye (Paris, 1641, f^o). These two editions having become scarce, were republished--in a very unsatisfactory manner--by the Abbé Horoy: _S. Francisci Assisiatis opera omnia_ (Paris, 1880, 4to). For want of a more exact edition, that of Father Bernardo da Fivizzano is the most useful: _Opuscoli di S. Francesco d'Assisi_, 1 vol., 12mo, pp. 564, Florence, 1880. The Latin text is accompanied by an Italian translation. [2] "_Die Briefe, die unter seinem Namen gehen, mögen theilweise ächt sein. Aber sie tragen kaum etwas zur näheren Kenntniss bei und können daher fast ganz ausser Acht bleiben_." Müller, _Die Anfänge des Minoritenordens_, Freiburg, 1 vol., 8vo, 1885, p. 3. [3] Pieces have been often attributed to St. Francis which do not belong to him; but those are unintentional errors and made without purpose. The desire for literary exactness is relatively of recent date, and it was easier for those who were ignorant of the author of certain Franciscan writings to attribute them to St. Francis than to admit their ignorance or to make deep researches. [4] For example, the first Rule; probably also a few canticles; a letter to the Brothers in France, Eccl., 6; another to the Brothers in Bologna: "_Prædixerat per litteram in qua fuit plurimum latinum_," Eccl., ib.; a letter to Antony of Padua, other than the one we have, since on the witness of Celano it was addressed: _Fratri Antonio episcopo meo_ (2 Cel., 3, 99); certain letters to St. Clara: "_Scripsit Claræ et sororibus ad consolationem litteram in quâ dabat benedictionem suam et absolvebat_," etc. _Conform._, f^o. 185a, 1; cf. _Test. B. Claræ_. A. SS., Augusti, t. ii., p. 767: "_Plura scripta tradidit nobis, ne post mortem suam declinaremus a paupertate_;" certain letters to Cardinal Ugolini, 3 Soc., 67. It is not to negligence alone that we must attribute the loss of many of the epistles: "_Quod nephas est cogitare, in provincia Marchie et in pluribus aliis locis testamentum beati Francisci mandaverunt (prelati ordinis) districte per obedientiam ab omnibus auferi et comburi. Et uni fratri devoto et sancto, cujus nomen est N. de Rocanato combuxerunt dicum testamentum super caput suum. Et toto conatu fuerunt solliciti, annulare scripta beati patris nostri Francisci, in quibus sua intentio de observantia regule declaratur._" Ubertino di Casali, _apud Archiv._, iii., pp. 168-169. [5] Italy is too obliging to artists, archæologists, and scholars not to do them the favor of disposing in a more practical manner this trust, the most precious of all Umbria. Even with the indefatigable kindness of the curator, M. Alessandro, and of the municipality of Assisi, it is very difficult to profit by these treasures heaped up in a dark room without a table to write upon. [6] In particular by Ehrle: _Die historischen Handschriften von S. Francesco in Assisi._ _Archiv._, t. i., p. 484. [7] See pages 252 ff ... and 283. [8] See pages 333 ff. [9] See pages 259 ff. [10] See page 325 ff. [11] See pages 322 ff. [12] See page 327. [13] I give it entire: "_Regina sapientia, Dominus te salvet, cum tua sorore sancta pura simplicitate.--Domina sancta paupertas, Domimus te salvet, cum tua sorore sancta humilitate.--Domina sancta caritas, Dominus te salvet, cum tua sorrore sancta obedientia. Sanctissimæ virtutes omnes, vos salvet Dominus, a quo venitis et proceditis._" Its authenticity is guaranteed by a citation by Celano: 2 Cel., 3, 119. Cf. 126b and 127a. [14] See pages 304 f. [15] I shall not recur to this: the text is in the Conformities 138a 2. [16] The authenticity of this service, to which there is not a single allusion in the biographies of St. Francis, is rendered certain by the life of St. Clara: "_Officium crucis, prout crucis amator Franciscus instituerat (Clara) didicit et affectu simili frequentavit._" A. SS., Augusti, t. ii., p. 761a. [17] It begins: _Illi qui volunt stare in heremis_. This text is also found in the Conformities, 143a, 1. Cf. 2 Cel., 3, 43; see p. 97. [18] _Nudis pedibus incedentes, funiculis cincti, tunicis griseis et talaribus peciatis, insuto capucio utentes ... nihil sibi ultra noctem reservantes ... libros continue suos ... in forulis a collo dependentes bajulantes._ Historia Anglorum, Pertz: _Script._, t. 28, p. 397. Cf. 2 Cel., 3, 135; _Fior._, 5; _Spec._, 45b. [19] See page 322 n. [20] See page 252. [21] See page 157. [22] See pages 318 ff. [23] See page 239. [24] See page 327. [25] See page 262. [26] _a._ _Sanctus Dominus Deus noster._ Cf. _Spec._, 126a; _Firmamentum_, 18b, 2; _Conform._, 202b, 1. _b._ _Ave Domina sancta._ Cf. _Spec._, 127a; _Conform._, 138a, 2. _c._ _Sancta Maria virgo._ Cf. _Spec._, 126b; _Conform._, 202b, 2. [27] Vide S. François, in 4to, Paris. 1885 (Plon), p. 233. The authenticity of this benediction appears to be well established, since it was already jealously guarded during the life of Thomas of Celano. No one has ever dreamed of requiring historical proof of this writing. Is this perhaps a mistake? The middle of the sheet is taken up with the benediction which was dictated to Brother Leo: _Benedicat tibi Dominus et custodiat te, ostendat faciem suam tibi et misereatur tui convertat vultum suum ad te et det tibi pacem._ At the bottom, Francis added the letter _tau_. ~[Greek: Tau]~, which was, so to speak, his signature (Bon., 51; 308), and the words: _Frater Leo Dominus benedicat te_. Then when this memorial became a part of the relics of the Saint, Brother Leo, to authenticate it in a measure, added the following notes: toward the middle: _Beatus Franciscus scripsit manu sua istam benedictionem mihi fratri Leoni_; toward the close: _Simili modo fecit istud signum thau cum capite manu sua_. But the most valuable annotation is found at the top of the sheet: _Beatus Franciscus duobus annis ante mortem suam fecit quadragesimam in loco Alvernæ ad honorem Beatæ Virginia Mariæ matris Dei et beati Michael archangeli a festo assumptionis sanctæ Mariæ Virginis usque ad festum sancti Michael septembris et facta est super eum manus Domini per visionem et allucotionem seraphym et impressionem stigmatum in corpore suo. Fecit has laudes ex alio latere catule scriptas et manu, sua scripsit gratias agens Domino de beneficio sibi collato._ Vide 2 Cel., 2, 18. [28] Wadding gives the text according to St. Bernardino da Siena. _Opera_, t. iv., _sermo_ 16, _extraord. et sermo feriæ sextæ Parasceves_. Amoni: _Legenda trium sociorum_, p. 166. [29] Wadding has drawn the text from St. Bernardino, _loc. cit._, _sermo_ iv., _extraord._ It was also reproduced by Amoni, _loc. cit._, p. 165. Two very curious versions may be found in the Miscellanea, 1888, pp. 96 and 190. [30] 2 Cel., 3, 35. This took place under the vicariat of Pietro di Catania; consequently between September 29, 1220, and March 10, 1221. * * * * * II BIOGRAPHIES PROPERLY SO CALLED I. PRELIMINARY NOTE To form a somewhat exact notion of the documents which are to occupy us, we must put them back into the midst of the circumstances in which they appeared, study them in detail, and determine the special value of each one. Here, more than anywhere else, we must beware of facile theories and hasty generalizations. The same life described by two equally truthful contemporaries may take on a very different coloring. This is especially the case if the man concerned has aroused enthusiasm and wrath, if his inmost thought, his works, have been the subject of discussion, if the very men who were commissioned to realize his ideals and carry on his work are divided, and at odds with one another. This was the case with St. Francis. In his lifetime and before his own eyes divergences manifested themselves, at first secretly, then in the light of day. In a rapture of love he went from cottage to cottage, from castle to castle, preaching absolute poverty; but that buoyant enthusiasm, that unbounded idealism, could not last long. The Order of the Brothers Minor in process of growth was open not only to a few choice spirits aflame with mystic fervor, but to all men who aspired after a religious reformation; pious laymen, monks undeceived as to the virtues of the ancient Orders, priests shocked at the vices of the secular clergy, all brought with them--unintentionally no doubt and even unconsciously--too much of their old man not by degrees to transform the institution. Francis perceived the peril several years before his death, and made every effort to avert it. Even in his dying hour we see him summoning all his powers to declare his Will once again, and as clearly as possible, and to conjure his Brothers never to touch the Rule, even under pretext of commenting upon or explaining it. Alas! four years had not rolled away when Gregory IX., at the prayer of the Brothers themselves, became the first one of a long series of pontiffs who have explained the Rule.[1] Poverty, as Francis understood it, soon became only a memory. The unexampled success of the Order brought to it not merely new recruits, but money. How refuse it when there were so many works to found? Many of the friars discovered that their master had exaggerated many things, that shades of meaning were to be observed in the Rule, for example, between counsels and precepts. The door once opened to interpretations, it became impossible to close it. The Franciscan family began to be divided into opposing parties often difficult to distinguish. At first there were a few restless, undisciplined men who grouped themselves around the older friars. The latter, in their character of first companions of the Saint, found a moral authority often greater than the official authority of the ministers and guardians. The people turned to them by instinct as to the true continuers of St. Francis's work. They were not far from right. They had the vigor, the vehemence of absolute convictions; they could not have temporized had they desired to do so. When they emerged from their hermitages in the Apennines, their eyes shining with the fever of their ideas, absorbed in contemplation, their whole being spoke of the radiant visions they enjoyed; and the amazed and subdued multitude would kneel to kiss the prints of their feet with hearts mysteriously stirred. A larger group was that of those Brothers who condemned these methods without being any the less saints. Born far away from Umbria, in countries where nature seems to be a step-mother, where adoration, far from being the instinctive act of a happy soul soaring upward to bless the heavenly Father, is, on the contrary, the despairing cry of an atom lost in immensity, they desired above all things a religious reformation, rational and profound. They dreamed of bringing the Church back to the purity of the ancient days, and saw in the vow of poverty, understood in its largest sense, the best means of struggling against the vices of the clergy; but they forgot the freshness, the Italian gayety, the sunny poetry that there had been in Francis's mission. Full of admiration for him, they yet desired to enlarge the foundations of his work, and for that they would neglect no means of influence, certainly not learning. This tendency was the dominant one in France, Germany, and England. In Italy it was represented by a very powerful party, powerful if not in the number, at least in the authority, of its representatives. This was the party favored by the papacy. It was the party of Brother Elias and all the ministers-general of the Order in the thirteenth century, if we except Giovanni di Parma (1247-1257) and Raimondo Gaufridi (1289-1295). In Italy a third group, the liberals, was much more numerous; men of mediocrity to whom monastic life appeared the most facile existence, vagrant monks happy to secure an aftermath of success by displaying the new Rule, formed in this country the greater part of the Franciscan family. We can understand without difficulty that documents emanating from such different quarters must bear the impress of their origin. The men who are to bring us their testimony are combatants in the struggle over the question of poverty, a struggle which for two centuries agitated the Church, aroused all consciences, and which had its monsters and its martyrs. To determine the value of these witnesses we must first of all discover their origin. It is evident that the narratives of the no-compromise party of the right or the left can have but slender value where controverted points are concerned; whence the conclusion that the authority of a narrator may vary from page to page, or even from line to line. These considerations, so simple that one almost needs to beg pardon for uttering them, have not, however, guided those who have studied St. Francis's life. The most learned, like Wadding and Papini, have brought together the narratives of different biographers, here and there pruning those that are too contradictory; but they have done this at random, with neither rule nor method, guided by the impression of the moment. The long work of the Bollandist Suysken is vitiated by an analogous fault; fixed in his principle that the oldest documents are always the best,[2] he takes his stand upon the first Life of Thomas of Celano as upon an impregnable rock, and judges all other legends by that one.[3] When we connect the documents with the disturbed circumstances which brought them into being, some of them lose a little of their authority, others which have been neglected, as being in contradiction with witnesses who have become so to say official, suddenly recover credit, and in fact all gain a new life which doubles their interest. This altered point of view in the valuation of the sources, this criticism which I am inclined to call reciprocal and organic, brings about profound alterations in the biography of St. Francis. By a phenomenon which may appear strange we end by sketching a portrait of him much more like that which exists in the popular imagination of Italy than that made by the learned historians above mentioned. When Francis died (1226) the parties which divided the Order had already entered into conflict. That event precipitated the crisis: Brother Elias had been for five years exercising the functions of minister-general with the title of vicar. He displayed an amazing activity. Intrenched in the confidence of Gregory IX. he removed the _Zelanti_ from their charges, strengthened the discipline even in the most remote provinces, obtained numerous privileges from the curia, and with incredible rapidity prepared for the building of the double basilica, destined for the repose of the ashes of the Stigmatized Saint; but notwithstanding all his efforts, the chapter of 1227 set him aside and chose Giovanni Parenti as minister-general. Furious at this check, he immediately set all influences to work to be chosen at the following chapter. It even seems as if he paid no attention to the nomination of Giovanni Parenti, and continued to go on as if he had been minister.[4] Very popular among the Assisans, who were dazzled by the magnificence of the monument which was springing up on the _Hill of Hell_, now become the _Hill of Paradise_, sure of being supported by a considerable party in the Order and by the pope, he pushed forward the work on the basilica with a decision and success perhaps unique in the annals of architecture.[5] All this could not be done without arousing the indignation of the Zealots of poverty. When they saw a monumental poor-box, designed to receive the alms of the faithful, upon the tomb of him who had forbidden his disciples the mere contact of money, it seemed to them that Francis's prophecy of the apostasy of a part of the Order was about to be fulfilled. A tempest of revolt swept over the hermitages of Umbria. Must they not, by any means, prevent this abomination in the holy place? They knew that Elias was terrible in his severities, but his opponents felt in themselves courage to go to the last extremity, and suffer everything to defend their convictions. One day the poor-box was found shattered by Brother Leo and his friends.[6] To this degree of intensity the struggle had arrived. At this crisis the first legend appeared. II. First Life by Thomas of Celano[7] Thomas of Celano, in writing this legend, to which he was later to return for its completion, obeyed an express order of Pope Gregory IX.[8] Why did he not apply to one of the Brothers of the Saint's immediate circle? The talent of this author might explain this choice, but besides the fact that literary considerations would in this case hold a secondary place, Brother Leo and several others proved later that they also knew how to handle the pen. If Celano was put in trust with the official biography, it is because, being equally in sympathy with Gregory IX. and Brother Elias, his absence had kept him out of the conflicts which had marked the last years of Francis's life. Of an irenic temper, he belonged to the category of those souls who easily persuade themselves that obedience is the first of virtues, that every superior is a saint; and if unluckily he is not, that we should none the less act as though he were. We have some knowledge of his life. A native of Celano in the Abruzzi, he discreetly observes that his family was noble, even adding, with a touch of artless simplicity, that the master had a peculiar regard for noble and educated Brothers. He entered the Order about 1215,[9] on the return of Francis from Spain. At the chapter of 1221 Cæsar of Speyer, charged with the mission to Germany, took him among those who were to accompany him.[10] In 1223 he was named custode of Mayence, Worms, Cologne, and Speyer. In April of the same year, when Cæsar returned to Italy, devoured with the longing to see St. Francis again, he commissioned Celano to execute his functions until the arrival of the new provincial.[11] We have no information as to where he was after the chapter-general held at Speyer September 8, 1223. He must have been in Assisi in 1228, for his account of the canonization is that of an eye-witness. He was there again in 1230, and doubtless clothed with an important office, since he could commit to Brother Giordano the relics of St. Francis.[12] Written in a pleasing style, very often poetic, his work breathes an affecting admiration for his hero; his testimony at once makes itself felt as sincere and true: when he is partial it is without intention and even without his knowledge. The weak point in this biography is the picture which it outlines of the relations between Brother Elias and the founder of the Order: from the chapters devoted to the last two years we receive a very clear impression that Elias was named by Francis to succeed him.[13] Now if we reflect that at the time when Celano wrote, Giovanni Parenti was minister-general, we at once perceive the bearing of these indications.[14] Every opportunity is seized to give a preponderating importance to Elias.[15] It is a true manifesto in his favor. Have we reason to blame Celano? I think not. We must simply remember that his work might with justice be called the legend of Gregory IX. Elias was the pope's man, and the biography is worked up from the information he gave. He could not avoid dwelling with peculiar satisfaction upon his intimacy with Francis. On the other hand, we cannot expect to find here such details as might have sustained the pretension of the adversaries of Elias, those unruly Zealots who were already proudly adorning themselves with the title of _Companions of the Saint_ and endeavoring to constitute a sort of spiritual aristocracy in the Order. Among them were four who during the last two years had not, so to say, quitted Francis. We can imagine how difficult it was not to speak of them. Celano carefully omits to mention their names under pretext of sparing their modesty;[16] but by the praises lavished upon Gregory IX., Brother Elias,[17] St. Clara,[18] and even upon very secondary persons, he shows that his discretion is far from being always so alert. All this is very serious, but we must not exaggerate it. There is an evident partiality, but it would be unjust to go farther and believe, as men did later, that the last part of Francis's life was an active struggle against the very person of Elias. A struggle there surely was, but it was against tendencies whose spring Francis did not perceive. He carried with him to his tomb his delusion as to his co-laborer. For that matter this defect is after all secondary so far as the physiognomy of Francis himself is concerned. In Celano's Life, as in the Three Companions or the Fioretti, he appears with a smile for all joys, and floods of tears for all woes; we feel everywhere the restrained emotion of the writer; his heart is subjected by the moral beauty of his hero. III. SURVEY OF THE HISTORY OF THE ORDER FROM 1230-1244 When Thomas of Celano closed his legend he perceived more than anyone the deficiencies of his work, for which he had been able to collect but insufficient material. Elias and the other Assisan brothers had told him of Francis's youth and his activity in Umbria; but besides that he would have preferred, whether from prudence or from love of peace, to keep silence upon certain events,[19] there were long periods upon which he had not received a single item of information.[20] He therefore seems to indicate his intention of resuming and completing his work.[21] This is not the place to write the history of the Order, but a few facts are necessary to put the documents into their proper surroundings. Elected minister-general in 1232, Brother Elias took advantage of the fact to labor with indomitable energy toward the realization of his own ideas. In all the provinces new collections were organized for the Basilica of Assisi, the work upon which was pushed with an activity which however injured neither the strength of the edifice nor the beauty of its details, which are as finished and perfect as those of any monument in Europe. We may conceive of the enormous sums which it had been necessary to raise in order to complete such an enterprise in so short a time. More than that, Brother Elias exacted absolute obedience from all his subordinates; naming and removing the provincial ministers according to his personal views, he neglected to convoke the chapter-general, and sent his emissaries under the name of visitors into all the provinces to secure the execution of his orders. The moderate party in Germany, France, and England very soon found his yoke insupportable. It was hard for them to be directed by an Italian minister resident at Assisi, a small town quite aside from the highways of civilization, entirely a stranger to the scientific movement concentred in the universities of Oxford, Paris, and Bologna. In the indignation of the _Zelanti_ against Elias and his contempt for the Rule, they found a decisive support. Very soon the minister had for his defence nothing but his own energy, and the favor of the pope and of the few Italian moderates. By a great increase of vigilance and severity he repressed several attempts at revolt. His adversaries, however, succeeded in establishing secret intelligence at the court of Rome; even the pope's confessor was gained; yet in spite of all these circumstances, the success of the conspiracy was still uncertain when the chapter of 1239 opened. Gregory IX., still favorable to Elias,[22] presided. Fear gave sudden courage to the conspirators; they threw their accusations in their enemy's face. Thomas of Eccleston gives a highly colored narrative of what took place. Elias was proud, violent, even threatening. There were cries and vociferations from both sides; they were about to come to blows when a few words from the pope restored silence. He had made up his mind to abandon his _protégé_. He asked for his resignation. Elias indignantly refused. Gregory IX. then explained that in keeping him in charge he had thought himself acting in accordance with the wishes of the majority: that he had no intention to dominate the Order, and, since the Brothers no longer desired Elias, he declared him deposed from the generalate. The joy of the victors, says Eccleston, was immense and ineffable. They chose Alberto di Pisa, provincial of England, to succeed him, and from that time bent all their efforts to represent Elias as a creature of Frederick II.[23] The former minister wrote indeed to the pope to explain his conduct, but the letter did not reach its destination. It must have reached the hands of his successor, and not been sent forward; when Alberto of Pisa died it was found in his tunic.[24] All the fury of the aged pontiff was unchained against Elias. One must read the documents to see to what a height his anger could rise. The friar retorted with a virulence which though less wordy was far more overpowering.[25] These events gained an indescribable notoriety[26] all over Europe and threw the Order into profound disturbance. Many of the partisans of Elias became convinced that they had been deceived by an impostor, and they drew toward the group of Zealots, who never ceased to demand the observance pure and simple of the Rule and the Will. Thomas of Celano was of this number.[27] With profound sadness he saw the innumerable influences that were secretly undermining the Franciscan institute and menacing it with ruin. Already a refrain was going the rounds of the convents, singing the victory of Paris over Assisi, that is, of learning over poverty. The Zealots gained new courage. Unaccustomed to the subtleties of ecclesiastical politics, they did not perceive that the pope, while condemning Brother Elias, had in nowise modified the general course which he had marked out for the Order. The ministers-general, Alberto di Pisa, 1239-1240, Aymon of Faversham, 1240-1244, Crescentius de Jesi, 1244-1247, were all, with different shades of meaning, representatives of the moderate party. Thomas of Celano's first legend had become impossible. The prominence there given to Elias was almost a scandal. The necessity of working it over and completing it became clearly evident at the chapter of Genoa (1244). All the Brothers who had anything to tell about Francis's life were invited to commit it to writing and send it to the minister Crescentius de Jesi.[28] The latter immediately caused a tract to be drawn up in the form of a dialogue, commencing with the words: "_Venerabilium gesta Patrum_." So soon after as the time of Bernard de Besse, only fragments of this were left.[29] But happily several of the works which saw the light in consequence of the decision of this chapter have been preserved to us. It is to this that we owe the Legend of the Three Companions and the Second Life by Thomas of Celano. IV. LEGEND OF THE THREE COMPANIONS[30] The life of St. Francis which has come down to us under the name of the Legend of the Three Companions was finished on August 11, 1246, in a little convent in the vale of Rieti, which appears often in the course of this history, that of Greccio. This hermitage had been Francis's favorite abode, especially in the latter part of his life. He had thus made it doubly dear to the hearts of his disciples.[31] It naturally became, from the earliest days of the Order, the headquarters of the Observants,[32] and it remains through all the centuries one of the purest centres of Franciscan piety. The authors of this legend were men worthy to tell St. Francis's story, and perhaps the most capable of doing it: the friars Leo, Angelo, and Rufino. All three had lived in intimacy with him, and had been his companions through the most important years. More than this, they took the trouble to go to others for further information, particularly to Filippo, the visitor of the Clarisses, to Illuminato di Rieti, Masseo di Marignano, John, the confidant of Egidio, and Bernardo di Quintavalle. Such names as these promise much, and happily we are not disappointed in our expectation. As it has come down to us, this document is the only one worthy from the point of view of history to be placed beside the First Life by Celano. The names of the authors and the date of the composition indicate before examination the tendency with which it is likely to be in harmony. It is the first manifesto of the Brothers who remained faithful to the spirit and letter of the Rule. This is confirmed by an attentive reading; it is at least as much a panegyric of Poverty as a history of St. Francis. We naturally expect to see the Three Companions relating to us with a very particular delight the innumerable features of the legends of which Greccio was the theatre; we turn to the end of the volume, expecting to find the story of the last years of which they were witnesses, and are lost in surprise to find nothing of the kind. While the first half of the work describes Francis's youth, filling out here and there Celano's First Life, the second[33] is devoted to a picture of the early days of the Order, a picture of incomparable freshness and intensity of life; but strangely enough, after having told us so much at length of Francis's youth and then of the first days of the Order, the story abruptly leaps over from the year 1220 to the death and the canonization, to which after all only a few pages are given.[34] This is too extraordinary to be the result of chance. What has happened? It is evident that the Legend of the Three Companions as we have it to-day is only a fragment of the original, which was no doubt revised, corrected, and considerably cut down by the authorities of the Order before they would permit it to be circulated.[35] If the authors had been interrupted in their work, and obliged to cut short the end, as might have been the case, they would have said so in their letter of envoy, but there are still other arguments in favor of our hypothesis. Brother Leo having had the first and principal part in the production of the work of the Three Companions, it is often called Brother Leo's Legend; now Brother Leo's Legend is several times cited by Ubertini di Casali, arraigned before the court of Avignon by the party of the Common Observance. Evidently Ubertini would have taken good care not to appeal to an apocryphal document; a false citation would have been enough to bring him to confusion, and his enemies would not have failed to make the most of his imprudence. We have at hand all the documents of the trial,[36] attacks, replies, counter replies, and nowhere do we see the Liberals accuse their adversary of falsehood. For that matter, the latter makes his citations with a precision that admits of no cavil.[37] He appeals to writings to be found in a press in the convent of Assisi, of which he gives sometimes a copy, sometimes an original.[38] We are then authorized to conclude that we have here fragments which have survived the suppression of the last and most important part of the Legend of the Three Companions. It is not surprising that the work of Francis's dearest friends should have been so seriously mutilated. It was the manifesto of a party that Crescentius was hunting down with all his power. After the fleeting reaction of the generalate of Giovanni di Parma we shall see a man of worth like St. Bonaventura moving for the suppression of all the primitive legends that his own compilation may be substituted for them. It is truly singular that no one has perceived the fragmentary state of the work of the Three Companions. The prologue alone might have suggested this idea. Why should it take three to write a few pages? Why this solemn enumeration of Brothers whose testimony and collaboration are asked for? There would be a surprising disproportion between the effort and the result. More than all, the authors say that they shall not stop at relating the miracles, but they desire above all to exhibit the ideas of Francis and his life with the Brothers, but we search in vain for any account of miracles in what we now have.[39] An Italian translation of this legend, published by Father Stanislaus Melchiorri,[40] has suddenly given me an indirect confirmation of this point of view. This monk is only its publisher, and has simply been able to discover that in 1577 it was taken from a very ancient manuscript by a certain Muzio Achillei di San Severino.[41] This Italian translation contained only the last chapters of the legend, those which tell of the death, the stigmata, and the translation of the remains.[42] It was, then, made at a time when the suppressed portion had not been replaced by a short summary of the other legends. From all this two conclusions emerge for the critics: 1. This final summary has not the same authority as the rest of the work, since the time when it was added is unknown. 2. Fragments of a legend by Brother Leo or by the Three Companions scattered through later compilations may be perfectly authentic. In its present condition this legend of the Three Companions is the finest piece of Franciscan literature, and one of the most delightful productions of the Middle Ages. There is something indescribably sweet, confiding, chaste, in these pages, an energy of virile youth which the Fioretti suggest but never attain to. At more than six hundred years of distance the purest dream that ever thrilled the Christian Church seems to live again. These friars of Greccio, who, scattered over the mountain, under the shade of the olive-trees, passed their days in singing the Hymn of the Sun, are the true models of the primitive Umbrian Masters. They are all alike; they are awkwardly posed; everything in and around them sins against the most elementary rules of art, and yet their memory pursues you, and when you have long forgotten the works of impeccable modern artists you recall without effort these creations of those unknown painters; for love calls for love, and these vapid personages have very true and pure hearts, a more than human love shines forth from their whole being, they speak to you and make you better. Such is this book, the first utterance of the Spiritual Franciscans, in which we already see the coming to life of some of those bold doctrines that not only divided the Franciscan family into two hostile branches, but which were to bring some of their defenders to the heretic's stake.[43] V. FRAGMENTS OF THE SUPPRESSED PART OF THE LEGEND OF THE THREE COMPANIONS We may now take a step forward and try to group the fragments of the Legend of the Three Companions, or of Brother Leo, which are to be found in later writings. We must here be more than ever on our guard against absolute theories; one of the most fruitful principles of historic criticism is to prefer contemporary documents, or at least those which are nearest them; but even with these it is necessary to use a little discretion. It seems impossible to attack the reasoning of the Bollandists, who refuse to know anything of legends written after that of St. Bonaventura (1260), under pretext that, coming after several other authorized biographies, he was better situated than anyone for getting information and completing the work of his predecessors.[44] In reality this is absurd, for it assumes that Bonaventura undertook to write as a historian. This is to forget that he wrote not only for the purpose of edification, but also as minister-general of the Minor Brothers. From this fact his first duty was to keep silent on many facts, and those not the least interesting. What shall we say of a biography where Francis's Will is not even mentioned? It is easy to turn away from a writing of the fourteenth century, on the ground that the author did not see what was going on a hundred years before; still we must not forget that many books of the end of the Middle Ages resemble those old mansions at which four or five generators have toiled. An inscription on their front often only shows the touch of the last restorer or the last destroyer, and the names which are set forth with the greatest complacency are not always those of the real workmen. Such have been many Franciscan books; to attribute them to any one author would be impracticable; very different hands have worked upon them, and such an amalgam has its own charm and interest. Turning them over--I had almost said associating with them--we come to see clearly into this tangled web, for every work of man bears the trace of the hand that made it: this trace may perhaps be of an almost imperceptible delicacy; it exists none the less, ready to reveal itself to practised eyes. What is more impersonal than the photograph of a landscape or of a painting, and yet among several hundreds of proofs the amateur will go straight to the work of the operator he prefers. These reflections were suggested by the careful study of a curious book printed many times since the sixteenth century, the _Speculum Vitæ S. Francisci et sociorum ejus_.[45] A complete study of this work, its sources, its printed editions, the numerous differences in the manuscripts, would by itself require a volume and an epitome of the history of the Order. I can give here only a few notes, taking for base the oldest edition, that of 1504. The confusion which reigns here is frightful. Incidents in the life of Francis and his companions are brought together with no plan; several of them are repeated after the interval of a few pages in a quite different manner;[46] certain chapters are so awkwardly introduced that the compiler has forgotten to remove the number that they bore in the work from which he borrowed them;[47] finally, to our great surprise, we find several _Incipit_.[48] However, with a little perseverance we soon perceive a few openings in the labyrinth. In the first place, here are several chapters of the legend of Bonaventura which seem to have been put in the van as if to protect the rest of the book. If we abstract them and the whole series of chapters from the Fioretti, we shall have diminished the work by nearly three-quarters. If we take away two more chapters taken from St. Bernard of Clairvaux and those containing Franciscan prayers, or various attestations concerning the indulgence of Portiuncula, we finally arrive at a sort of residue, if the expression may be forgiven, of a remarkable homogeneity. Here the style is very different from that in the surrounding pages, closely recalling that of the Three Companions; a single thought inspires these pages, that the corner-stone of the Order is the love of poverty. Why should we not have here some fragments of the original legend of the Three Companions? We find here nothing which does not fit in with what we know, nothing which suggests the embellishments of a late tradition. To confirm this hypothesis come different passages which we find cited by Ubertini di Casali and by Angelo Clareno as being by Brother Leo, and an attentive comparison of the text shows that these authors can neither have drawn them from the Speculum nor the Speculum from them. There is, besides, one phrase which, apart from the inspiration and style, will suffice at the first glance to mark the common origin of most of these pieces.[49] _Nos qui cum ipso fuimus_. "We who have been with him." These words, which recur in almost every incident,[49] are in many cases only a grateful tribute to their spiritual father, but sometimes, too, they have a touch of bitterness. These hermits of Greccio suddenly recall to mind their rights. Are we not the only, the true interpreters of the Saint's instructions--we who lived continually with him; we who, hour after hour, have meditated upon his words, his sighs, and his hymns? We can understand that such pretensions were not to the taste of the Common Observance, and that Crescentius, with an incontestable authority, has suppressed nearly all this legend.[51] As for the fragments that have been preserved to us, though they furnish many details about the last years of St. Francis's life, they still are not those whose loss is so much to be regretted. The authors who reproduce them were defending a cause. We owe them little more than the incidents which in one way or another concern the question of poverty. They had nothing to do with the other accounts, as they were not writing a biography. But even within these narrow limits these fragments are in the first order of importance; and I have not hesitated to use them largely. It is needless to say that while ascribing their origin to the Three Companions, and in particular to Brother Leo, we must not suppose that we have the very letter in the texts which have come down to us. The pieces given by Ubertini di Casali and Angelo Clareno are actual citations, and deserve full confidence as such. As for those which are preserved to us in the Speculum, they may often have been abridged, explanatory notes may have slipped into the text, but nowhere do we find interpolations in the bad sense of the word.[52] Finally, if we compare the fragments with the corresponding accounts in the Second Life of Celano, we see that the latter has often borrowed verbatim from Brother Leo, but generally he has considerably abridged the passages, adding reflections here and there, especially retouching the style to make it more elegant. Such a comparison soon proves that Brother Leo's narratives are the original and that it is impossible to see in them a later amplification of those of Thomas of Celano, as we might at first be tempted to think them.[53] VI. SECOND LIFE BY THOMAS OF CELANO[54] _First Part_ In consequence of the decision of the chapter of 1244 search was begun in all quarters for memorials of the early times of the Order. In view of the ardor of this inquiry, in which zeal for the glory of the Franciscan institute certainly cast the interests of history into the background, the minister-general, Crescentius, was obliged to take certain precautions. Many of the pieces that he received were doing double duty; others might contradict one another; many of them, under color of telling the life of the Saint, had no other object than to oppose the present to the past. It soon became imperative to constitute a sort of commission charged to study and coördinate all this matter.[55] What more natural than to put Thomas of Celano at its head? Ever since the approbation of the first legend by Gregory IX. he had appeared to be in a sense the official historiographer of the Order.[56] This view accords perfectly with the contents of the seventeen chapters which contain the first part of the second legend. It offers itself at the outset as a compilation. Celano is surrounded with companions who help him.[57] A more attentive examination shows that its principal source is the Legend of the Three Companions, which the compilers worked over, sometimes filling out certain details, more often making large excisions. Everything that does not concern St. Francis is ruthlessly proscribed; we feel the well-defined purpose to leave in the background the disciples who so complacently placed themselves in the foreground.[58] The work of the Three Companions had been finished August 11, 1246. On July 13, 1247, the chapter of Lyons put an end to the powers of Crescentius. It is, therefore, between these two dates that we must place the composition of the first part of Thomas of Celano's Second Life.[59] VII. SECOND LIFE BY THOMAS OF CELANO[59] _Second Part_ The election of Giovanni di Parma (1247-1257) as successor of Crescentius was a victory for the Zealots. This man, in whose work-table the birds came to make their nests,[61] was to astonish the world by his virtues. No one saw more deeply into St. Francis's heart, no one was more worthy to take up and continue his work. He soon asked Celano to resume his work.[62] The latter was perhaps alone at first, but little by little a group of collaborators formed itself anew about him.[63] Thenceforth nothing prevented his doing with that portion of the work of the Three Companions which Crescentius had suppressed what he had already done with the part he had approved. The Legend of Brother Leo has thus come down to us, entirely worked over by Thomas of Celano, abridged and with all its freshness gone, but still of capital importance in the absence of the major part of the original. The events of which we possess two accounts permit us to measure the extent of our loss. We find, in fact, in Celano's compilation all that we expected to find in the Three Companions: the incidents belong especially to the last two years of Francis's life, and the scene of many of them is either Greccio or one of the hermitages of the vale of Rieti;[64] according to tradition, Brother Leo was the hero of a great number of the incidents here related[65] and all the citations that Ubertini di Casali makes from Brother Leo's book find their correspondents here.[66] This second part of the Second Life perfectly reflects the new circumstances to which it owes its existence. The question of Poverty dominates everything;[67] the struggle between the two parties in the Order reveals itself on every page; the collaborators are determined that each event narrated shall be an indirect lesson to the Liberals, to whom they oppose the Spirituals; the popes had commented on the Rule in the large sense; they, on their side, undertook to comment on it in a sense at once literal and spiritual, by the actions and words of its author himself. History has hardly any part here except as the vehicle of a thesis, a fact which diminishes nothing of the historic value of the information given in the course of these pages. But while in Celano's First Life and in the Legend of the Three Companions the facts succeed one another organically, here they are placed side by side. Therefore when we come to read this work we are sensible of a fall; even from the literary point of view the inferiority makes itself cruelly felt. Instead of a poem we have before us a catalogue, very cleverly made, it is true, but with no power to move us. VIII. NOTES ON A FEW SECONDARY DOCUMENTS a. _Celano's Life of St. Francis for Use in the Choir._ Thomas of Celano made also a short legend for use in the choir. It is divided into nine lessons and served for the Franciscan breviaries up to the time when St. Bonaventura made his _Legenda Minor_. That of Celano may be found in part (the first three lessons) in the Assisi MS. 338, fol. 52a-53b; it is preceded by a letter of envoy: "_Rogasti me frater Benedicte, ut de legenda B. P. N. F. quædam exciperem et in novem lectionum seriem ordinarem_ ... etc. _B. Franciscus de civitate Assisii ortus a puerilibus annis nutritus extitit insolenter._" This work has no historic importance. b. _Life of St. Francis in Verse._ In the list of biographers has sometimes been counted a poem in hexameter verse[68] the text of which was edited in 1882 by the lamented Cristofani.[69] This work does not furnish a single new historic note. It is the Life by Celano in verse and nothing more; the author's desire was to figure as a poet. It is superfluous, therefore, to concern ourselves with it.[69] c. _Biography of St. Francis by Giovanni di Ceperano._ One of the biographies which disappeared, no doubt in consequence of the decision of the chapter of 1266,[71] is that of Giovanni di Ceperano. The resemblance of his name to that of Thomas of Celano has occasioned much confusion.[72] The most precious information which we have respecting him is given by Bernard of Besse in the opening of his _De laudibus St. Francisci_: "_Plenam virtutibus B. Francisci vitam scripsit in Italia exquisitæ vir eloquentiæ fr. Thomas jubente Domino Gregorio papa IX. et eam quæ incipit: Quasi stella matutina vir venerabilis Dominus et fertur Joannes, Apostolicæ sedis notarius._"[73] In the face of so precise a text all doubt as to the existence of the work of Giovanni di Ceperano is impossible. The Reverend Father Denifle has been able to throw new light upon this question. In a manuscript containing the liturgy of the Brothers Minor and finished in 1256 he found the nine lessons for the festival of St. Francis preceded by the title: _Ex gestis ejus abbreviatis quæ sic incipiunt: Quasi stella_ (_Zeitschrift für kath. Theol._, vii., p. 710. Cf. _Archiv._, i., p. 148). This summary of Ceperano's work gives, as we should expect, no new information; but perhaps we need not despair of finding the very work of this author. d. _Life of St. Francis by Brother Julian._ It was doubtless about 1230 that Brother Julian, the Teuton, who had been chapel-master at the court of the King of France, was commissioned to put the finishing touches to the Office of St. Francis.[74] Evidently such a work would contain nothing original, and its loss is little felt. IX. LEGEND OF ST. BONAVENTURA Under the generalate of Giovanni di Parma (1247-1257) the Franciscan parties underwent modifications, in consequence of which their opposition became still more striking than before. The Zelanti, with the minister-general at their head, enthusiastically adopted the views of Gioacchino di Fiore. The predictions of the Calabrian abbot corresponded too well with their inmost convictions for any other course to be possible: they seemed to see Francis, as a new Christ, inaugurating the third era of the world. For a few years these dreams moved all Europe; the faith of the Joachimites was so ardent that it made its way by its own force; sceptics like Salimbeni told themselves that on the whole it was surely wiser not to be taken unawares by the great catastrophe of 1260, and hastened in crowds to the cell of Hyères to be initiated by Hugues de Digne in the mysteries of the new times: as to the people, they waited, trembling, divided between hope and terror. Nevertheless their adversaries did not consider themselves beaten, and the Liberal party still remained the most numerous. Of an angelic purity, Giovanni di Parma believed in the omnipotence of example: events showed how mistaken he was; at the close of his term of office scandals were not less flagrant than ten years earlier.[75] Between these two extreme parties, against which he was to proceed with equal rigor, stood that of the Moderates, to which belonged St. Bonaventura.[76] A mystic, but of a formal and orthodox mysticism, he saw the revolution toward which the Church was hastening if the party of the eternal Gospel was to triumph; its victory would not be that of this or that heresy in detail, it would be, with brief delay, the ruin of the entire ecclesiastical edifice; he was too perspicacious not to see that in the last analysis the struggle then going on was that of the individual conscience against authority. This explains, and up to a certain point gains him pardon for, his severities against his opponents; he was supported by the court of Rome and by all those who desired to make the Order a school at once of piety and of learning. No sooner was he elected general than, with a purpose that never knew hesitation, and a will whose firmness made itself everywhere felt, he took his steps to forward this double aim. On the very morrow of his nomination he sketched the programme of reforms against the Liberal party, and at the same time secured the summons of the Joachimite Brothers before an ecclesiastical tribunal at Città-della-Pieve. This tribunal condemned them to perpetual imprisonment, and it needed the personal intervention of Cardinal Ottobonus, the future Adrian V., for Giovanni di Parma to be left free to retire to the Convent of Greccio. The first chapter held under the presidence of Bonaventura, in the extended decisions of which we find everywhere tokens of his influence, assembled at Narbonne in 1260. He was then commissioned to compose a new life of St. Francis.[77] We easily understand the anxieties to which this decision of the Brothers was an answer. The number of legends had greatly increased, for besides those which we have first studied or noted there were others in existence which have completely disappeared, and it had become equally difficult for the Brothers who went forth on missions either to make a choice between them or to carry them all. The course of the new historian was therefore clearly marked out: he must do the work of compiler and peacemaker. He failed in neither. His book is a true sheaf, or rather it is a millstone under which the indefatigable author has pressed, somewhat at hazard, the sheaves of his predecessors. Most of the time he inserts them just as they are, confining himself to the work of harvesting them and weeding out the tares. Therefore, when we reach the end of this voluminous work we have a very vague impression of St. Francis. We see that he was a saint, a very great saint, since he performed an innumerable quantity of miracles, great and small; but we feel very much as if we had been going through a shop of objects of piety. All these statues, whether they are called St. Anthony the Abbot, St. Dominic, St. Theresa, or St. Vincent de Paul, have the same expression of mincing humility, of a somewhat shallow ecstasy. These are saints, if you please, miracle-workers; they are not men; he who made them made them by rule, by process; he has put nothing of his heart in these ever-bowed foreheads, these lips with their wan smile. God forbid that I should say or think that St. Bonaventura was not worthy to write a life of St. Francis, but the circumstances controlled his work, and it is no injustice to him to say that it is fortunate for Francis, and especially for us, that we have another biography of the Poverello than that of the Seraphic Doctor. Three years after, in 1263, he brought his completed work to the chapter-general convoked under his presidence at Pisa. It was there solemnly approved.[78] It is impossible to say whether they thought that the presence of the new legend would suffice to put the old ones out of mind, but it seems that at this time nothing was said about the latter. It was not so at the following chapter. This one, held at Paris, came to a decision destined to have disastrous results for the primitive Franciscan documents. This decree, emanating from an assembly presided over by Bonaventura in person, is too important not to be quoted textually: "Item, the Chapter-general ordains on obedience that all the legends of the Blessed Francis formerly made shall be destroyed. The Brothers who shall find any without the Order must try to make away with them since the legend made by the General is compiled from accounts of three who almost always accompanied the Blessed Francis; all that they could certainly know and all that is proven has been carefully inserted therein."[79] It would have been difficult to be more precise. We see the perseverance with which Bonaventura carried on his struggle against the extreme parties. This decree explains the almost complete disappearance of the manuscripts of Celano and the Three Companions, since in certain collections even those of Bonaventura's legend are hardly to be found. As we have seen, Bonaventura aimed to write a sort of official or canonical biography; he succeeded only too well. Most of the accounts that we already know have gone into his collection, but not without at times suffering profound mutilations. We are not surprised to find him passing over Francis's youth with more discretion than Celano in the First Life, but we regret to find him ornamenting and materializing some of the loveliest incidents of the earlier legends. It is not enough for him that Francis hears the crucifix of St. Daraian speak; he pauses to lay stress on the assertion that he heard it _corporeis auribus_ and that no one was in the chapel at that moment! Brother Monaldo at the chapter of Arles sees St. Francis appear _corporeis oculis_. He often abridges his predecessors, but this is not his invariable rule. When he reaches the account of the stigmata he devotes long pages to it,[79] relates a sort of consultation held by St. Francis as to whether he could conceal them, and adds several miracles due to these sacred wounds; further on he returns to the subject to show a certain Girolamo, Knight of Assisi, desiring to touch with his hands the miraculous nails.[81] On the other hand, he uses a significant discretion wherever the companions of the Saint are in question. He names only three of the first eleven disciples,[82] and no more mentions Brothers Leo, Angelo, Rufino, Masseo, than their adversary, Brother Elias. As to the incidents which we find for the first time in this collection, they hardly make us regret the unknown sources which must have been at the service of the famous Doctor; it would appear that the healing of Morico, restored to health by a few pellets of bread soaked in the oil of the lamp which burned before the altar of the Virgin,[83] has little more importance for the life of St. Francis than the story of the sheep given to Giacomina di Settesoli which awakened its mistress to summon her to go to mass.[84] What shall we think of that other sheep, of Portiuncula, which hastened to the choir whenever it heard the psalmody of the friars, and kneeled devoutly for the elevation of the Holy Sacrament?[85] All these incidents, the list of which might be enlarged,[86] betrays the working-over of the legend. St. Francis becomes a great thaumaturgist, but his physiognomy loses its originality. The greatest fault of this work is, in fact, the vagueness of the figure of the Saint. While in Celano there are the large lines of a soul-history, a sketch of the affecting drama of a man who attains to the conquest of himself, with Bonaventura all this interior action disappears before divine interventions; his heart is, so to speak, the geometrical locality of a certain number of visitants; he is a passive instrument in the hands of God, and we really cannot see why he should have been chosen rather than another. And yet Bonaventura was an Italian; he had seen Umbria; he must have knelt and celebrated the sacred mysteries in Portiuncula, that cradle of the noblest of religious reformations; he had conversed with Brother Egidio, and must have heard from his lips an echo of the first Franciscan fervor; but, alas! nothing of that rapture passed into his book, and if the truth must be told, I find it quite inferior to much later documents, to the Fioretti, for example; for they understood, at least in part, the soul of Francis; they felt the throbbing of that heart, with all its sensitiveness, admiration, indulgence, love, independence, and absence of carefulness. X. DE LAUDIBUS OF BERNARD OF BESSE[87] Bonaventura's work did not discourage the biographers. The historic value of their labor is almost nothing, and we shall not even attempt to catalogue them. Bernard of Besse, a native probably of the south of France[88] and secretary of Bonaventura,[89] made a summary of the earlier legends. This work, which brings us no authentic historic indication, is interesting only for the care with which the author has noted the places where repose the Brothers who died in odor of sanctity, and relates a mass of visions all tending to prove the excellence of the Order.[89] Still the publication of this document will perform the valuable office of throwing a little light upon the difficult question of the sources. Several passages of the _De laudibus_ appear again textually in the Speculum,[91] and as a single glance is enough to show that the Speculum did not copy the _De laudibus_, it must be that Bernard of Besse had before him a copy, if not of the Speculum at least of a document of the same kind. FOOTNOTES: [1] Bull _Quo elongati_ of September 28, 1230. See p. 336. [2] It is needless to say that I have no desire to put myself in opposition to that principle, one of the most fruitful of criticism, but still it should not be employed alone. [3] The learned works that have appeared in Germany in late years err in the same way. They will be found cited in the body of the work. [4] Eccl., 13. _Voluerunt ipsi, quos ad capitulam concesserat venire frater Helias; nam omnes concessit, etc._ _An. fr., t. i._, p. 241. Cf. _Mon. Germ. hist. Script._, t., 28, p. 564. [5] The death of Francis occurred on October 3, 1226. On March 29, 1228, Elias acquired the site for the basilica. The _Instrumentum donationis_ is still preserved at Assisi: Piece No. 1 of the twelfth package of _Instrumenta diversa pertinentia ad Sacrum Conventum_. It has been published by Thode: _Franz von Assisi_, p. 359. On July 17th of the same year, the day after the canonization, Gregory IX. solemnly laid the first stone. Less than two years afterward the Lower church was finished, and on May 25, 1230, the body of the Saint was carried there. In 1236 the Upper church was finished. It was already decorated with a first series of frescos, and Giunta Pisano painted Elias, life size, kneeling at the foot of the crucifix over the entrance to the choir. In 1239 everything was finished, and the campanile received the famous bells whose chimes still delight all the valley of Umbria. Thus, then, three months and a half before the canonization, Elias received the site of the basilica. The act of canonization commenced at the end of May, 1228 (1 Cel., 123 and 124. Cf. Potthast, 8194ff). [6] _Spec._, 167a. Cf. _An. fr._, ii., p. 45 and note. [7] The Bollandists followed the text (A. SS., Octobris, t. ii., pp. 683-723) of a manuscript of the Cistercian abbey of Longpont in the diocese of Soissons. It has since been published in Rome in 1806, without the name of the editor (in reality by the Convent Father Rinaldi), under the title: _Seraphici viri S. Francisci Assisiatis vitæ dual auctore B. Thoma de Celano_, according to a manuscript (of Fallerone, in the March of Ancona) which was stolen in the vicinity of Terni by brigands from the Brother charged with bringing it back. The second text was reproduced at Rome in 1880 by Canon Amoni: _Vita prima S. Francisci, auctore B. Thoma de Celano. Roma, tipografia della pace_, 1880, in 8vo, 42 pp. The citations will follow the divisions made by the Bollandists, but in many important passages the Rinaldi-Amoni text gives better readings than that of the Bollandists. The latter has been here and there retouched and filled out. See, for example, 1 Cel., 24 and 31. As for the manuscripts, Father Denifle thinks that the oldest of those which are known is that at Barcelona: _Archivo de la corona de Aragon_, Ripoll, n. 41 (_Archiv._, t. i., p. 148). There is one in the National Library of Paris, Latin alcove, No. 3817, which includes a curious note: "_Apud Perusium felix domnus papa Gregorius nonus gloriosi secundo pontificus sui anno, quinto kal. martii (February 25, 1229) legendam hanc recepit, confirmavit et censuit fore tenendam._" Another manuscript, which merits attention, both because of its age, thirteenth century, and because of the correction in the text, and which appears to have escaped the researches of the students of the Franciscans, is the one owned by the École de Médicine at Montpellier, No. 30, in vellum folio: _Passionale vetus ecclesiæ S. Benigni divionensis_. The story of Celano occupies in it the fos. 257a-271b. The text ends abruptly in the middle of paragraph 112 with _supiriis ostendebant_. Except for this final break it is complete. Cf. Archives Pertz, t. vii., pp. 195 and 196. Vide General catalogue of the manuscripts of the public libraries of the departments, t. i., p. 295. [8] Vide 1 Cel., Prol. _Jubente domino et glorioso Papa Gregorio_. Celano wrote it after the canonization (July 16, 1228) and before February 25, 1229, for the date indicated above raises no difficulty. [9] 1 Cel., 56. Perhaps he was the son of that Thomas, Count of Celano, to whom Ryccardi di S. Germano so often made allusion in his chronicle: 1219-1223. See also two letters of Frederick II. to Honorius III., on April 24 and 25, 1223, published in Winckelmann: _Acta imperii inedita_, t. i., p. 232. [10] Giord., 19. [11] Giord., 30 and 31. [12] Giord., 59. Cf. Glassberger, ann. 1230. The question whether he is the author of the _Dies iræ_ would be out of place here. [13] This is so true that the majority of historians have been brought to believe in two generalates of Elias, one in 1227-1230, the other in 1236-1239. The letter _Non ex odio_ of Frederick II. (1239) gives the same idea: _Revera papa iste quemdam religiosum et timoratum fratrem Helyam, ministrum ordinis fratrum minorum ab ipso beato Francisco patre ordinis migrationis suæ tempore constitutum ... in odium nostrum ... deposuit_. Huillard-Breholles: _Hist. dipl. Fred. II._, t. v., p. 346. [14] He is named only once, 1 Cel., 48. [15] 1 Cel., 95, 98, 105, 109. The account of the Benediction is especially significant. _Super quem inquit (Franciscus) tenes dexteram meam? Super fratrem Heliam, inquiunt. Et ego sic volo, sit...._ 1 Cel., 108. Those last words obviously disclose the intention. Cf. 2 Cel., 3, 139. [16] 1 Cel., 102; cf. 91 and 109. Brother Leo is not even named in the whole work. Nor Angelo, Illuminato, Masseo either! [17] 1 Cel., Prol., 73-75; 99-101; 121-126. Next to St. Francis, Gregory IX. and Brother Elias (1 Cel., 69; 95; 98; 105; 108; 109) are in the foreground. [18] 1 Cel., 18 and 19; 116 and 117. [19] Those which occurred during the absence of Francis (1220-1221). He overlooks the difficulties met at Rome in seeking the approbation of the first Rule; he mentions those connected neither with the second nor the third, and makes no allusion to the circumstances which provoked them. He recognized them, however, having lived in intimacy with Cæsar of Speyer, the collaborator of the second (1221). [20] For example, Francis's journey to Spain. [21] 1 Cel., 1, 88. _Et sola quæ necessaria magis occurrunt_ ad præsens _intendimus adnotare_. It is to be observed that in the prologue he speaks in the singular. [22] In 1238 he had sent Elias to Cremona, charged with a mission for Frederick II. Salembeni, ann. 1229. See also the reception given by Gregory IX. to the appellants against the General. Giord., 63. [23] See the letter of Frederick II. to Elias upon the translation of St. Elizabeth, May, 1236. Winkelmann, _Acta_ i., p. 299. Cf. Huillard-Bréholles, _Hist. dipl._ Intr. p. cc. [24] The authorities for this story are: _Catalogus ministrorum_ of Bernard of Besse, _ap_ Ehrle, _Zeitschrift_, vol. 7 (1883), p. 339; _Speculum_, 207b, and especially 167a-170a; Eccl., 13; Giord., 61-63; _Speculum_, Morin., tract i., fo. 60b. [25] _Asserabat etiam ipse prædictus frater Helyas ... papam ... fraudem facere de pecunia collecta ad succursum Terræ Sanctæ, scripta etiam ad beneplacitum suum in camera sua bullare clam et sine fratrum assensu et etiam cedulas vacuas, sed bullatas, multas nunciis suis traderet ... et alia multa enormia imposuit domino papæ ponens os suum in celo_. Matth. Paris, _Chron. Maj._, _ann. 1239_, _ap Mon. Ger. hist. Script._, t. 28, p. 182. Cf. Ficker, n. 2685. [26] Vide Ryccardi di S. Germano, _Chron._, _ap Mon. Ger. hist. Script._, t. 19, p. 380, ann. 1239. The letter of Frederick complaining of the deposition of Elias (1239): Huillard-Bréholles, _Hist. Dipl._, v., pp. 346-349. Cf. the Bull, _Attendite ad petram_, at the end of February, 1240, ibid., pp. 777-779; Potthast, 10849. [27] He was without doubt one of the bitterest adversaries of the emperor. His village had been burnt in 1224, by order of Frederick II., and the inhabitants transported to Sicily, afterward to Malta. Ryccardi di S. Germano, _loc. cit._, _ann._ 1223 and 1224. [28] Vide the prologue to 2 Cel. and to the 3 Soc. Cf. Glassberger, ann. 1244, _An. fr._, ii., p. 68. _Speculum_, Morin, tract. i., 61b. [29] _Catalogus ministrorum_, edited by Ehrle: _Zeitschrift_, t. 7 (1883). no. 5. Cf. _Spec._, 208a. Mark of Lisbon speaks of it a little more at length, but he gives the honor of it to Giovanni of Parma, ed. Diola, t. ii., p. 38. On the other hand, in manuscript 691 of the archives of the Sacro-Convento at Assisi (a catalogue of the library of the convent made in 1381) is found, fo. 45a, a note of that work: "_Dyalogus sanctorum fratrum cum postibus cujus principium est: Venerabilia gesta patrum dignosque memoria, finis vero; non indigne feram me quoque reperisse consortem. In quo libro omnes quaterni sunt xiii_." [30] The text was published for the first time by the Bollandists (A. SS., Octobris, t. ii., pp. 723-742), after a manuscript of the convent of the Brothers Minor of Louvain. It is from this edition that we make our citations. The editions published in Italy in the course of this century, cannot be found, except the last, due to Abbé Amoni. This one, unfortunately, is too faulty to serve as the basis of a scientific study. It appeared in Rome in 1880 (8vo, pp. 184) under the title: _Legenda S. Francisci Assisiensis quæ dicitur Legenda trium sociorum ex cod. membr._ _Biblioth. Vatic. num. 7339._ [31] 2 Cel., 2, 5; 3, 7; 1 Cel., 60; Bon., 113; 1 Cel., 84; Bon., 149; 2 Cel., 2, 14; 3, 10. [32] Giovanni di Parma retired thither in 1276 and lived there almost entirely until his death (1288). _Tribul._, _Archiv._, vol. ii. (1886), p. 286. [33] 3 Soc., 25-67. [34] 3 Soc., 68-73. [35] The minister-general Crescentius of Jesi was an avowed adversary of the Zealots of the Rule. The contrary idea has been held by M. Müller (_Anfänge_, p. 180); but that learned scholar is not, it appears, acquainted with the recitals of the Chronicle of the Tribulations, which leave not a single doubt as to the persecutions which he directed against the Zealots (_Archiv._, t. ii., pp. 257-260). Anyone who attempts to dispute the historical worth of this proof will find a confirmation in the bulls of August 5, 1244, and of February 7, 1246 (Potthast, 11450 and 12007). It was Crescentius, also, who obtained a bull stating that the Basilica of Assisi was _Caput et Mater ordinis_, while for the Zealots this rank pertained to the Portiuncula (1 Cel., 106; 3 Soc., 56; Bon., 23; 2 Cel., 1, 12; _Conform._, 217 ff). (See also on Crescentius, Glassberger, ann. 1244, _An. fr._, p. 69; Sbaralea, _Bull. fr._, i., p. 502 ff; _Conform._, 121b. 1.) M. Müller has been led into error through a blunder of Eccleston, 9 (_An. fr._, i., p. 235). It is evident that the chapter of Genoa (1244) could not have pronounced against the _Declaratio Regulæ_ published November 14, 1245. On the contrary, it is Crescentius who called forth this _Declaratio_, against which, not without regret, the Zealots found a majority of the chapter of Metz (1249) presided over by Giovanni of Parma, a decided enemy of any _Declaratio_ (_Archiv._, ii., p. 276). This view is found to be confirmed by a passage of the Speculum Morin (Rouen, 1509), f^o 62a: _In hoc capitulo (Narbonnæ) fuit ordinatum quod declaratio D. Innocentii, p. iv., maneat suspensa sicut in Capitulo_ METENSI. _Et præceptum est omnibus ne quis utatur ea in iis in quibus expositioni D. Gregorii IX. contradicit._ [36] Published with all necessary scientific apparatus by F. Ehrle, S. J., in his studies _Zur Vorgeschichte des Concils von Vienne_. _Archiv._, ii., pp. 353-416; iii., pp. 1-195. [37] See, for example, _Archiv._, iii., p. 53 ff. Cf. 76. _Adduxi verba et facta b. Francisci sicut est aliquando in legenda et sicut a sociis sancti patris audivi et in cedulis sanctæ memoriæ fratris Leonis legi manu sua conscriptis, sicut ab ore beati Francisci audivit._ Ib., p. 85. [38] _Hæc omnia patent per sua [B. Francisci] verba expressa per sanctum fratrem virum Leonem ejus socium tam de mandato sancti patris quam etiam de devotione prædicti fratris fuerunt solemniter conscripta, in libro qui habetur in armario fratrum de Assisio et in rotulis ejus, quos apud me habeo, manu ejusdem fratris Leonis conscriptis. Archiv._, iii., p. 168. Cf. p. 178. [39] 3 Soc., Prol. _Non contenti narrare solum miracula ... conversationis insignia et pii beneplaciti voluntatem_. [40] _Leggenda di S. Francesco, tipografia Morici et Badaloni_, Recanati, 1856, 1 vol., 8vo. [41] See Father Stanislaus's preface. [42] 3 Soc., 68-73. [43] The book lacks little of representing St. Francis as taking up the work of Jesus, interrupted (by the fault of the secular clergy) since the time of the apostles. The _viri evangelici_ consider the members of the clergy _filios extraneos._ 3 Soc., 48 and 51. Cf. 3 Soc., 48. _Inveni virum ... per quem, credo Dominus velit in toto mundo fedem sanctæ Ecclesiæ reformare_. Cf. 2 Cel., 3, 141. _Videbatur revera fratri et omnium comitatium turbæ quod Christi et b. Francisci una persona foret_. [44] A. SS. p. 552. [45] _Venetiis, expensis domini Jordani de Dinslaken per Simonem de Luere_, 30 januarii, 1504. _Impressum Metis per Jasparem Hochffeder_, Anno Domini 1509. These two editions are identical, small 12mos, of 240 folios badly numbered. Edited under the same title by Spoelberch, Antwerp, 1620, 2 tomes in one volume, 8vo, 208 and 192 pages, with a mass of alterations. The most important manuscript resembles that of the Vatican 4354. There are two at the Mazarin Library, 904 and 1350, dated 1459 and 1460, one at Berlin (MS. theol. lat., 4to, no. 196 sæc. 14). Vide Ehrle, _Zeitschrift_. t. vii. (1883), p. 392f; _Analecta fr._, t. i., p. xi.; _Miscellanea_, 1888, pp. 119. 164. Cf. A. SS., pp. 550-552. The chapters are numbered in the first 72 folios only, but these numbers teem with errors; fo. 38b. caput lix., 40b, lix., 41b, lxi. ibid., lxii., 42a, lx., 43a, lxi. Besides at fos. 46b and 47b there are two chapters lxvi. There are two lxxi., two lxxii., two lxxiii., etc. [46] For example, the history of the brigands of Monte-Casale, fos. 46b, and 58b. The remarks of Brother Elias to Francis, who is continually singing, 136b and 137a. The visit of Giacomina di Settesoli, 133a and 138a. The autograph benediction given to Brother Leo, 87a; 188a. [47] At fo. 20b we read: _Tertium capitulam de charitate et compassione et condescensione ad proximum. Capitulum_ xxvi. Cf. 26a, 83a, 117b, 119a, 122a, 128b, 133b, 136b, where there are similar indications. [48] Fo. 5b: _Incipit Speculum vitæ b. Francesci et sociorum ejus_. Fo. 7b; _Incipit Speculum perfectionis_. [49] We should search for it in vain in the other pieces of the Speculum, and it reappears in the fragments of Brother Leo cited by Ubertini di Casali and Angelo Clareno. [50] Fo. 8b, 11a, 12a, 15a, 18b, 21b, 23b, 26a, 29a, 33b, 43b, 41a, 48b, 118a, 129a, 130a, 134a, 135a, 136a. [51] Does not Thomas de Celano say in the prologue of the Second Life: "_Oramus ergo, benignissime pater, ut laboris hujus non contemnenda munuscula ... vestra benedictione consecrare velitis, corrigendo errata et superflua resecantes_." [52] The legend of 3 Soc. was preserved in the Convent of Assisi: "_Omnia ... fuerunt conscripta ... per Leonem, ... in libro qui habetur in armario fratrum de Assisio_." Ubertini, _Archiv._, iii., p. 168. Later, Brother Leo seems to have gone more into detail as to certain facts; he confided these new manuscripts to the Clarisses: "_In rotulis ejus quos apud me habeo, manu ejusdem fratres Leonis conscriptis_," ibid. Cf. p. 178. "_Quod sequitur a sancto fratre Conrado predicto et viva voce audivit a sancto fratre Leone qui presens erat et regulam scripsit. Et hoc ipsum in quibusdam rotulis manu sua conscriptis quos commendavit in monasterio S. Claræ custodiendos.... In illis multa scripsit ... quæ industria fr. Bonaventura omisit et noluit in legenda publice scribere, maxime quia aliqua erant ibi in quibus ex tunc deviatio regulæ publice monstrabatur et nolebat fratres ante tempus in famare._" _Arbor._, lib. v., cap 5. Cf. _Antiquitates_, p. 146. Cf. _Speculum_, 50b. "_Infra scripta verba, frater Leo socius et Confessor B. Francisci, Conrado de Offida, dicebat se habuisse ex ore Beati Patris nostri Francisci, quæ idem Frater Conradus retulit, apud Sanctum Damianum prope Assisium._" Conrad di Offidia copied, then, both the book of Brother Leo and his _rotuli_; he added to it certain oral information (_Arbor, vit. cruc._, lib. v., cap. 3), and so perhaps composed the collection so often cited by the Conformists under the title of _Legenda Antiqua_ and reproduced in part in the Speculum. The numbering of the chapters, which the Speculum has awkwardly inserted without noting that they were not in accord with his own division, were vestiges of the division adopted by Conrad di Offida. It may well be that, after the interdiction of his book and its confiscation at the Sacro Convento, Brother Leo repeated in his _rotuli_ a large part of the facts already made, so that the same incident, while coming solely from Brother Leo, could be presented under two different forms, according as it would be copied from the book or the _rotuli_. [53] Compare, for example, 2 Cel., 120: Vocation of John the Simple, and Speculum, f^o 37a. From the account of Thomas de Celano, one does not understand what drew John to St. Francis; in the Speculum everything is explained, but Celano has not dared to depict Francis going about preaching with a broom upon his shoulder to sweep the dirty churches. [54] It was published for the first time at Rome, in 1806, by Father Rinaldi, following upon the First Life (vide above, p. 365, note 2), and restored in 1880 by Abbé Amoni: _Vita secunda S. Francisci Assisiensis auctore B. Thomade Celano ejus discipulo. Romæ, tipografia della pace_, 1880, 8vo, 152 pp. The citations are from this last edition, which I collated at Assisi with the most important of the rare manuscripts at present known: Archives of Sacro Convento, MS. 686, on parchment of the end of the thirteenth century, if I do not mistake, 130 millim. by 142; 102 numbered pages. Except for the fact that the book is divided into two parts instead of three, the last two forming only one, I have not found that it noticeably differs from the text published by Amoni; the chapters are divided only by a paragraph and a red letter, but they have in the table which occupies the first seven pages of the volume the same titles as in the edition Amoni. This Second Life escaped the researches of the Bollandists. It is impossible to explain how these students ignored the worth of the manuscript which Father Theobaldi, keeper of the records of Assisi, mentioned to them, and of which he offered them a copy (A. SS., _Oct._, t. ii., p. 546f). Father Suysken was thus thrown into inextricable difficulties, and exposed to a failure to understand the lists of biographies of St. Francis arranged by the annalists of the Order; he was at the same time deprived of one of the most fruitful sources of information upon the acts and works of the Saint. Professor Müller (_Die Anfänge_, pp. 175-184) was the first to make a critical study of this legend. His conclusions appear to me narrow and extreme. Cf. _Analecta_ fr., t. ii., pp. xvii.-xx. Father Ehrle mentions two manuscripts, one in the British Museum, Harl., 47; the other at Oxford, Christ College, cod. 202. _Zeitschrift_, 1883, p. 390. [55] The Three Companions foresee the possibility of their legend being incorporated with other documents: _quibus (legendis) hæc pauca quæ scribimus poleritis facere inseri, si vestra discretio viderit esse justum._ 3 Soc., Prol. [56] One phrase of the Prologue (2 Cel.) shows that the author received an entirely special commission: _Placuit ... robis ... parvitati nostræ injungere_, while on the contrary the 3 Soc. shows that the decision of the chapter only remotely considered them: _Cum de mandato proeteriti capituli fratres teneantur ... visum est nobis ... pauca de multis ... sanctitati vestræ intimare._ 3 Soc., Prol. [57] Compare the Prologue of 2 Cel. with that of 1 Cel. [58] _Longum esset de singulis persequi, qualiter bravium supernæ vocationis attigerit_. 2 Cel., 1, 10. [59] This first part corresponds exactly to that portion of the legend of the 3 Soc., which Crescentius had authorized. [60] Observe that the Assisi MS. 686 divides the Second Life into two parts only by joining the last two. [61] Salimbeni, ann. 1248. [62] Glassberger, ann. 1253. _An. fr._ t. ii., p. 73. _Frater Johannes de Parma minister generalis, multiplicatis litteris præcipit fr. Thomæ de Celano (cod. Ceperano), ut vitam beati Francisci quæ antiqua Legenda dicitur perficeret, quia solum de ejus conversatione et verbis in primo tractatu, de mandato, Fr. Crescentii olim generalis compilato, ommissis miraculis fecerat mentionem, et sic secundum tractatum de miraculis sancti Patris compilavit, quem cum epistola quæ incipit: Religiosa vestra sollicitudo eidem generali misit_. This treatise on the miracles is lost, for one cannot identify it, as M. Müller suggests (_Anfänge_, p. 177), with the second part (counting three with the Amoni edition) of the Second Life: 1^o, epistle _Religiosa vestra sollicitudo_ does not have it; 2^o, this second part is not a collection of miracles, using this word in the sense of miraculous cures which it had in the thirteenth century. The twenty-two chapters of this second part have a marked unity; they might be entitled _Francis a prophet_, but not _Francis a thaumaturgus_. [63] In the Prologue (2 Cel., 2, Prol.) _Insignia patrum_ the author speaks in the singular, while the Epilogue is written in the name of a group of disciples. [64] Greccio, 2 Cel., 2, 5; 14; 3, 7; 10; 103.--Rieti, 2 Cel., 2, 10; 11; 12; 13; 3, 36; 37; 66; 103. [65] St. Francis gives him an autograph, 2 Cel., 2, 18. Cf. _Fior._ ii. _consid._; his tunic, 2 Cel., 2, 19; he predicts to him a famine, 2 Cel., 2, 21; cf. _Conform._, 49b. Fr. Leo ill at Bologna, 2 Cel., 3, 5. [66] The text of Ubertini di Casali may be found in the _Archiv._, t. iii., pp. 53, 75, 76, 85, 168, 178, where Father Ehrle points out the corresponding passages of 2 Cel. [67] It is the subject of thirty-seven narratives (1, 2 Cel., 3, 1-37), then come examples on the spirit of prayer (2 Cel., 3, 38-44), the temptations (2 Cel., 3, 58-64), true happiness (2 Cel., 3, 64-79), humility (2 Cel., 3, 79-87), submission (2 Cel., 3, 88, 91), etc. [68] Le Monnier, t. i., p. xi.; F. Barnabé, _Portiuncula_, p. 15. Cf. _Analecta fr._, t. ii., p. xxi. _Zeitschrift für kath. Theol._, vii. (1883), p. 397. [69] _Il piu antico poema della vita di S. Francisco d'Assisi scritto inanzi all' anno 1230 ora per la prima volta pubblicato et tradotto da Antonio Cristofani_, Prato, 1882, 1 vol., 8vo. 288 pp. [70] Note, however, two articles of the Miscellanea, one on the manuscript of this biography which is found in the library at Versailles, t. iv. (1889), p. 34 ff.; the other on the author of the poem, t. v. (1890), pp. 2-4 and 74 ff. [71] See below, p. 410. [72] Vide Glassberger, ann. 1244; _Analecta_, t. ii., p. 68. Cf. A. SS., p. 545 ff. [73] Manuscript in the Library of Turin, J. vi., 33, f^o 95a. [74] _Plenam virtutibus S. Francisci vitam scripsit in Italia ... frater Thomas ... in Francia vero frater Julianus scientia et sanctitate conspicuus qui etiam nocturnali sancti officium in littera et cantu possuit præter hymnos et aliquas antiphonas quae summus ipse Pontifex et aliqui de Cardinalibus in sancti præconium ediderunt._ Opening of the _De laudibus_ of Bernard of Besse. See below, p. 413. Laur. MS., f^o 95a. Cf. Giord., 53; _Conform._, 75b. [75] In proof of this is the circular letter, _Licet insufficentiam nostram_, addressed by Bonaventura, April 23, 1257, immediately after his election, to the provincials and custodes upon the reformation of the Order. Text: _Speculum_, Morin, tract. iii., f^o 213a. [76] Salimbeni, ann. 1248, p. 131. The _Chronica tribulationum_ gives a long and dramatic account of these events: _Archiv._, t. ii., pp. 283 ff. "_Tunc enim sapientia et sanctitas fratris Bonaventuræ eclipsata paluit et obscurata est et ejus manswetudo (sic) ab agitante spiritu in furorum et iram defecit._" Ib., p. 283. [77] Bon., 3. 1. At the same chapter were collected the constitutions of the Order according to edicts of the preceding chapters; new ones were added to them and all were arranged. In the first of the twelve rubrics the chapter prescribed that, upon the publication of the account, all the old constitutions should be destroyed. The text was published in the _Firmamentum trium ordinum_, f^o 7b, and restored lately by Father Ehrle: _Archiv._, t. vi. (1891), in his beautiful work _Die ältesten Redactionen der General-constitutionen des Franziskanerordens_. Cf. _Speculum_ Morin, fo. 195b of tract. iii. [78] The _Legenda Minor_ of Bonaventura was also approved at this time; it is simply an abridgment of the _Legenda Major_ arranged for use of the choir on the festival of St. Francis and its octave. [79] "_Item præcipit Generale capitulum per obedientiam quod omnes legenæ de B. Francisco olim factæ deleantur et ubi inveniri poterant extra ordinem ipsas fratres studeant amovere, cum illa legenda quæ facta est per Generalem sit compilata prout ipse habuit ab ore illorum qui cum B. Francisco quasi semper fuerunt et cuncta certitudinaliter sciverint et probata ibi sint posita diligenter._" This precious text has been found and published by Father Rinaldi in his preface to the text of Celano: _Seraphici viri Francisci vitæ duæ_, p. xi. Wadding seems to have known of it, at least indirectly, for he says: "_Utramque Historiam, longiorem et breviorem, obtulit (Bonaventura) triennio post in comitiis Pisanis patribus Ordinis, quas reverentur cum gratiarum actione_, SUPRESSIS ALIIS QUIBUSQUE LEGENDIS, ADMISERUNT." Ad ann., 1260, no. 18. Cf. Ehrle, _Zeitschrift für kath. Theol._, t. vii. (1883), p. 386.--"_Communicaverat sanctus Franciscus plurima sociis suis et fratribus antiquis, que oblivioni tradita sunt, tum quia que scripta erant in legenda prima, nova edita a fratre. Bonaventura deleta et destructa sunt_, IPSOJUBENTE _tum quia_ ..." _Chronica tribul._, _Archiv._, t. ii., p. 256. [80] Bon., 188-204. [81] Bon., 218. [82] Bernardo (Bon., 28), Egidio (Bon., 29), and Silvestro (Bon., 30). [83] Bon., 49. [84] Bon., 112. [85] Bon., 111. [86] Vide Bon., 115; 99, etc. M. Thode has enumerated the stories relating especially to Bonaventura: (_Franz von Assisi_, p. 535). [87] Manuscript I, iv., 33, of the library of the University of Turin. It is a 4to upon parchment of the close of the fourteenth century, 124 ff. It comprises first the biography of St. Francis by St. Bonaventura and a legend of St. Clara, afterwards at f^o 95 the _De laudibus_. The text will soon be published in the _Analecta franciscana_ of the Franciscans of Quaracchi, near Florence. [88] In reading it we quickly discover that he was specially well acquainted with the convents of the Province of Aquitania, and noted with care everything that concerned them. [89] Wadding, ann. 1230, no. 7. Many passages prove at least that he accompanied Bonaventura in his travels: "_Hoc enim_ (the special aid of Brother Egidio) _in iis quæ ad bonum animæ pertinent devotus Generalis et Cardinalis predictus ... nos docuit_." F^o 96a. _Jamdudum ego per Theutoniæ partes et Flandriæ cum Ministro transiens Generali._ Ibid., f^o 106a. [90] Bernard de Besse is the author of many other writings, notably an important _Calalogus Ministrorum generalium_ published after the Turin manuscript by Father Ehrle (_Zeitschrift für kath. Theol._, t. vii., pp. 338-352), with a very remarkable critical introduction (ib., pp. 323-337). Cf. _Archiv für Litt. u. Kirchg._, i., p. 145.--Bartolommeo di Pisa, when writing his _Conformities_, had before him a part of his works, f^o 148b, 2; 126a, 1; but he calls the author sometimes _Bernardus de Blesa_, then again _Johannes de Blesa_. See also Mark of Lisbon, t. ii., p. 212, and Hauréau, _Notices et extraits_, t. vi., p. 153. [91] "_Denique primos Francisci xii. discipulos ... omnes sanctos fuisse audirimus preter unum qui Ordinem exiens leprosus factus laqueo vel alter Judas interiit, ne Francisco cum Christo vel in discipulis similitudo deficeret_," f^o 96a. * * * * * III DIPLOMATIC DOCUMENTS In this category we place all the acts having a character of public authenticity, particularly those which were drawn up by the pontifical cabinet. This source of information, where each document has its date, is precisely the one which has been most neglected up to this time. I. DONATION OF THE VERNA The _Instrumentum donationis Montis Alvernæ_, a notarial document preserved in the archives of Borgo San Sepolcro,[1] not only gives the name of the generous friend of Francis, and many picturesque details, but it fixes with precision a date all the more important because it occurs in the most obscure period of the Saint's life. It was on May 8, 1213, that _Orlando dei Catani_, Count of Chiusi in Casentino, gave the Verna to Brother Francis. II. REGISTERS OF CARDINAL UGOLINI The documents of the pontifical chancellery addressed to Cardinal Ugolini, the future Gregory IX., and those which emanate from the hand of the latter during his long journeys as apostolic legate,[2] are of first rate importance. It would be too long to give even a simple enumeration of them. Those which mark important facts have been carefully indicated in the course of this work. It will suffice to say that by bringing together these two series of documents, and interposing the dates of the papal bulls countersigned by Ugolini, we are able to follow almost day by day this man, who was, perhaps without even excepting St. Francis, the one whose will most profoundly fashioned the Franciscan institute. We see also the pre-eminent part which the Order had from the beginning in the interest of the future pontiff, and we arrive at perfect accuracy as to the dates of his meetings with St. Francis. III. BULLS The pontifical bulls concerning the Franciscans were collected and published in the last century by the monk Sbaralea.[3] But from these we gain little help for the history of the origins of the Order.[4] The following is a compendious list; the details have been given in the course of the work: No. 1. August 18, 1218.--Bull _Literæ tuæ_ addressed to Ugolini. The pope permits him to accept donations of landed property in behalf of women fleeing the world (Clarisses) and to declare that these monasteries are holden by the Apostolic See. No. 2. June 11, 1219.--_Cum delecti filii._ This bull, addressed in a general way to all prelates, is a sort of safe conduct for the Brothers Minor. No. 3. December 19, 1219.--_Sacrosancta romana._ Privileges conceded to the Sisters (Clarisses) of Monticelli, near Florence. No. 4. May 29, 1220.--_Pro dilectis._ The pope prays the prelates of France to give a kindly reception to the Brothers Minor. No. 5. September 22, 1220.--_Cum secundum._ Honorius III. prescribes a year of noviciate before the entry into the Order. No. 6. December 9, 1220.--_Constitutus in præsentia._ This bull concerns a priest of Constantinople who had made a vow to enter the Order. As there is question here of _frater Lucas Magister fratrum Minorem de partibus Romaniæ_ we have here indirect testimony, all the more precious for that reason, as to the period of the establishment of the Order in the Orient. No. 7. February 13, 1221.--New bull for the same priest. No. 8. December 16, 1221.--_Significatum est nobis._ Honorius III. recommends to the Bishop of Rimini to protect the Brothers of Penitence (Third Order). No. 9. March 22, 1222.[5]--_Devotionis vestræ._ Concession to the Franciscans, under certain conditions, to celebrate the offices in times of interdict. No. 10. March 29, 1222.--_Ex parte Universitatis._ Mission given to the Dominicans, Franciscans, and Brothers of the Troops of San Iago in Lisbon. Nos. 11, 12, and 13.--September 19, 1222.--_Sacrosancta Romana._ Privileges for the monasteries (Clarisses) of Lucca, Sienna, and Perugia. No. 14. November 29, 1223.--_Solet annuere._ Solemn approbation of the Rule, which is inserted in the bull. No. 15. December 18, 1223.--_Fratrum Minorum._ Concerns apostates from the Order. No. 16. December 1, 1224.--_Cum illorum._ Authorization given to the Brothers of Penitence to take part in the offices in times of interdict, etc. No. 17. December 3, 1224.--_Quia populares tumultus._ Concession of the portable altar. No. 18. August 28, 1225.--_In hiis._ Honorius explains to the Bishop of Paris and the Archbishop of Rheims the true meaning of the privileges accorded to the Brothers Minor. No. 19. October 7, 1225.--_Vineae Domini._ This bull contains divers authorizations in favor of the Brothers who are going to evangelize Morocco. This list includes only those of Sbaralea's bulls which may directly or indirectly throw some light upon the life of St. Francis and his institute. Sbaralea's nomenclature is surely incomplete and should be revised when the Registers of Honorius III. shall have been published in full.[6] FOOTNOTES: [1] It was published by Sbaralea, Bull., t. iv., p. 156, note h. This act was drawn up July 9, 1274, at a time when the son of Orlando as well as the Brothers Minor desired to authenticate the donation, which until then had been verbal. [2] See _Registri dei Cardinali Ugolino d'Ostia e Ottaviano degli Ubaldini pubblicati a cura di Guido Levi dall'Istituto storico italiano.--Fonti per la storia d'Italia_, Roma, 1890, 1 vol., 4to, xxviii. and 250 pp. This edition follows the manuscript of the National Library, Paris: Ancien fonds Colbert lat., 5152A. We must draw attention to a very beautiful work due also to Mr. G. Levi: _Documenti ad illustrazione del Registro del Card. Ugolino_, in the _Archivio della societa Romana di storia patria_, t. xii. (1889), pp. 241-326. [3] _Bullarium franciscanum seu Rom. Pontificum constitutiones epistolæ diplomata ordinibus Minorum, Clarissarum et Poenitentium concessa, edidit Joh. Hyac. Sbaralea ord. min. conv._, 4 vols., fol., Rome, t. i. (1759), t. ii. (1761), t. iii. (1763), t iv., (1768)--_Supplementum ab Annibale de Latera ord. min. obs. Romæ_, 1780.--Sbaralea had a comparatively easy task, because of the number of collections made before his. I shall mention only one of those which I have before me. It is, comparatively, very well done, and appears to have escaped the researches of the Franciscan bibliographers: _Singularissimum eximiumque opus universis mortalibus sacratissimi ordinis seraphici patris nostri Francisci a Domino Jesu mirabili modo approbati necnon a quampluribus nostri Redemptoris sanctissimis vicariis romanis pontificabus multipharie declarati notitiam habere cupientibus profecto per necessarium. Speculum Minorum ... per Martinum Morin ... Rouen_, 1509. It is 8vo, with numbered folios, printed with remarkable care. It contains besides the bulls the principal dissertations upon the Rule, elaborated in the thirteenth century, and a _Memoriale ordinis_ (first part, f^o 60-82), a kind of catalogue of the ministers-general, which would have prevented many of the errors of the historians, if it had been known. [4] The Bollandists themselves have entirely overlooked those sources of information, thinking, upon the authority of a single badly interpreted passage, that the Order had not obtained a single bull before the solemn approval of Honorius III., November 29, 1223. [5] And not March 29, as Sbaralea has it. The original, which I have had under my eyes in the archives of Assisi, bears in fact: _Datum Anagnie XI. Kal. aprilis pontificatus nostri anno sexto_. [6] The Abbé Horoy has indeed published in five volumes what he entitles the _Opera omnia_ of Honorius III., but he omits, without a word of explanation, a great number of letters, certain of which are brought forward in the well-known collection of Potthast. The Abbé Pietro Pressuti has undertaken to publish a compendium of all the bulls of this pope according to the original Registers of the Vatican. _I regesti del Pontifice Onorio III._ Roma, t. i., 1884. Volume i. only has as yet appeared. * * * * * IV CHRONICLERS OF THE ORDER I. CHRONICLE OF BROTHER GIORDANO DI GIANO[1] Born at Giano, in Umbria, in the mountainous district which closes the southern horizon of Assisi, Brother Giordano was in 1221 one of the twenty-six friars who, under the conduct of Cæsar of Speyer, set out for Germany. He seems to have remained attached to this province until his death, even when most of the friars, especially those who held cures, had been transferred, often to a distance of several months' journey, from one end of Europe to the other. It is not, then, surprising that he was often prayed to commit his memories to writing. He dictated them to Brother Baldwin of Brandenburg in the spring of 1262. He must have done it with joy, having long before prepared himself for the task. He relates with artless simplicity how in 1221, at the chapter-general of Portiuncula, he went from group to group questioning as to their names and country the Brothers who were going to set out on distant missions, that he might be able to say later, especially if they came to suffer martyrdom: "I knew them myself!"[2] His chronicle bears the imprint of this tendency. What he desires to describe is the introduction of the Order into Germany and its early developments there, and he does it by enumerating, with a complacency which has its own coquetry, the names of a multitude of friars[3] and by carefully dating the events. These details, tedious for the ordinary reader, are precious to the historian; he sees there the diverse conditions from which the friars were recruited, and the rapidity with which a handful of missionaries thrown into an unknown country were able to branch out, found new stations, and in five years cover with a network of monasteries, the Tyrol, Saxony, Bavaria, Alsace, and the neighboring provinces. It is needless to say that it is worth while to test Giordano's chronology, for he begins by praying the reader to forgive the errors which may have escaped him on this head; but a man who thus marks in his memory what he desires later to tell or to write is not an ordinary witness. Reading his chronicle, it seems as if we were listening to the recollections of an old soldier, who grasps certain worthless details and presents them with an extraordinary power of relief, who knows not how to resist the temptation to bring himself forward, at the risk sometimes of slightly embellishing the dry reality.[4] In fact this chronicle swarms with anecdotes somewhat personal, but very artless and welcome, and which on the whole carry in themselves the testimony to their authenticity. The perfume of the Fioretti already exhales from these pages so full of candor and manliness; we can follow the missionaries stage by stage, then when they are settled, open the door of the monastery and read in the very hearts of these men, many of whom are as brave as heroes and harmless as doves. It is true that this chronicle deals especially with Germany, but the first chapters have an importance for Francis's history that exceeds even that of the biographers. Thanks to Giordano of Giano, we are from this time forward informed upon the crises which the institute of Francis passed through after 1219; he furnishes us the solidly historical base which seems to be lacking in the documents emanating from the Spirituals, and corroborates their testimony. II. ECCLESTON: ARRIVAL OF THE FRIARS IN ENGLAND[5] Our knowledge of Thomas of Eccleston is very slight, for he has left no more trace of himself in the history of the Order than of Simon of Esseby, to whom he dedicates his work. A native no doubt of Yorkshire, he seems never to have quitted England. He was twenty-five years gathering the materials of his work, which embraces the course of events from 1224 almost to 1260. The last facts that he relates belong to years very near to this date. Of almost double the length of that of Giordano, Eccleston's work is far from furnishing as interesting reading. The former had seen nearly everything that he described, and thence resulted a vigor in his story that we cannot find in an author who writes on the testimony of others. More than this, while Giordano follows a chronological order, Eccleston has divided his incidents under fifteen rubrics, in which the same people continually reappear in a confusion which at length becomes very wearisome. Finally, his document is amazingly partial: the author is not content with merely proving that the English friars are saints; he desires to show that the province of England surpasses all others[6] by its fidelity to the Rule and its courage against the upholders of new ways, Brother Elias in particular. But these few faults ought not to make us lose sight of the true value of this document. It embraces what we may call the heroic period of the Franciscan movement in England, and describes it with extreme simplicity. Aside from all question of history, we have here enough to interest all those who are charmed by the spectacle of moral conquest. On Monday, September 10th, the Brothers Minor landed at Dover. They were nine in number: a priest, a deacon, two who had only the lesser Orders, and five laymen. They visited Canterbury, London, Oxford, Cambridge, Lincoln, and less than ten months later all who have made their mark in the history of science or of sanctity had joined them; it may suffice to name Adam of Marisco, Richard of Cornwall, Bishop Robert Grossetête, one of the proudest and purest figures of the Middle Ages, and Roger Bacon, that persecuted monk who several centuries before his time grappled with and answered in his lonely cell the problems of authority and method, with a firmness and power which the sixteenth century would find it hard to surpass. It is impossible that in such a movement human weaknesses and passions should not here and there reveal themselves, but we owe our chronicler thanks for not hiding them. Thanks to him, we can for a moment forget the present hour, call to life again that first Cambridge chapel--so slight that it took a carpenter only one day to build it--listen to three Brothers chanting matins that same night, and that with so much ardor that one of them--so rickety that his two companions were obliged to carry him--wept for joy: in England as in Italy the Franciscan gospel was a gospel of peace and joy. Moral ugliness inspired them with a pity which we no longer know. There are few historic incidents finer than that of Brother Geoffrey of Salisbury confessing Alexander of Bissingburn; the noble penitent was performing this duty without attention, as if he were telling some sort of a story; suddenly his confessor melted into tears, making him blush with shame and forcing tears also from him, working in him so complete a revolution that he begged to be taken into the Order. The most interesting parts are those where Thomas gives us an intimate view of the friars: here drinking their beer, there hastening, in spite of the Rule, to buy some on credit for two comrades who have been maltreated, or again clustering about Brother Solomon, who had just come in nearly frozen with cold, and whom they could not succeed in warming--_sicut porcis mos est cum comprimendo foverunt_, says the pious narrator.[7] All this is mingled with dreams, visions, numberless apparitions,[8] which once more show us how different were the ideas most familiar to the religious minds of the thirteenth century from those which haunt the brains and hearts of to-day. The information given by Eccleston bears only indirectly on this book, but if he speaks little of Francis he speaks much at length of some of the men who have been most closely mingled with his life. III. CHRONICLE OF FRA SALIMBENI[9] As celebrated as it is little known, this chronicle is of quite secondary value in all that concerns the life of St. Francis. Its author, born October 9, 1221, entered the Order in 1238, and wrote his memoirs in 1282-1287; it is therefore especially for the middle years of the thirteenth century that his importance is capital. Notwithstanding this, it is surprising how small a place the radiant figure of the master holds in these long pages, and this very fact shows, better than long arguments could do, how profound was the fall of the Franciscan idea. IV. THE CHRONICLE OF THE TRIBULATIONS BY ANGELO CARENO[10] This chronicle was written about 1330; we might therefore be surprised to see it appear among the sources to be consulted for the life of St. Francis, dead more than a century before; but the picture which Clareno gives us of the early days of the Order gains its importance from the fact that in sketching it he made constant appeal to eye-witnesses, and precisely to those whose works have disappeared. Angelo Clareno, earlier called Pietro da Fossombrone[11] from the name of his native town, and sometimes da Cingoli, doubtless from the little convent where he made profession, belonged to the Zelanti of the March of Ancona as early as 1265. Hunted and persecuted by his adversaries during his whole life, he died in the odor of sanctity June 15, 1339, in the little hermitage of Santa Maria d' Aspro in the diocese of Marsico in Basilicata. Thanks to published documents, we may now, so to speak, follow day by day not only the external circumstances of his life, but the inner workings of his soul. With him we see the true Franciscan live again, one of those men who, while desiring to remain the obedient son of the Church, cannot reconcile themselves to permit the domain of the dream to slip away from them, the ideal which they have hailed. Often they are on the borders of heresy; in these utterances against bad priests and unworthy pontiffs there is a bitterness which the sectaries of the sixteenth century will not exceed.[12] Often, too, they seem to renounce all authority and make final appeal to the inward witness of the Holy Spirit;[13] and yet Protestantism would be mistaken in seeking its ancestors among them. No, they desired to die as they had lived, in the communion of that Church which was as a stepmother to them and which they yet loved with that heroic passion which some of the _ci-devant_ nobles brought in '93 to the love of France, governed though she was by Jacobins, and poured out their blood for her. Clareno and his friends not only believed that Francis had been a great Saint, but to this conviction, which was also that of the Brothers of the Common Observance, they added the persuasion that the work of the Stigmatized could only be continued by men who should attain to his moral stature, to which men might arrive through the power of faith and love. They were of the violent who take the kingdom of heaven by force; so when, after the frivolous and senile interests of every day we come face to face with them, we feel ourselves both humbled and exalted, for we suddenly find unhoped-for powers, an unrecognized lyre in the human heart. There is one of Jesus's apostles of whom it is difficult not to think while reading the chronicle of the Tribulations and Angelo Clareno's correspondence: St. John. Between the apostle's words about love and those of the Franciscan there is a similarity of style all the more striking because they were written in different languages. In both of these the soul is that of the aged man, where all is only love, pardon, desire for holiness, and yet it sometimes wakes with a sudden thrill--like that which stirred the soul of the seer of Patmos--of indignation, wrath, pity, terror, and joy, when the future unveils itself and gives a glimpse of the close of the great tribulation. Clareno's works, then, are in the strictest sense of the word partisan; the question is whether the author has designedly falsified the facts or mutilated the texts. To this question we may boldly answer, No. He commits errors,[14] especially in his earlier pages, but they are not such as to diminish our confidence. Like a good Joachimite, he believed that the Order would have to traverse seven tribulations before its final triumph. The pontificate of John XXII. marked, he thought, the commencement of the seventh; he set himself, then, to write, at the request of a friend, the history of the first six.[15] His account of the first is naturally preceded by an introduction, the purpose of which is to exhibit to the reader, taking the life of St. Francis as a framework, the intention of the latter in composing the Rule and dictating the Will. Born between 1240 and 1250, Clareno had at his service the testimony of several of the first disciples;[16] he found himself in relations with Angelo di Rieti,[17] Egidio,[18] and with that Brother Giovanni, companion of Egidio, mentioned in the prologue of the Legend of the Three Companions.[19] His chronicle, therefore, forms as it were the continuation of that legend. The members of the little circle of Greccio are they who recommend it to us; it has also their inspiration. But writing long years after the death of these Brothers, Clareno feels the need of supporting himself also on written testimony; he repeatedly refers to the four legends from which he borrows a part of his narrative; they are those of Giovanni di Ceperano, Thomas of Celano, Bonaventura, and Brother Leo.[20] Bonaventura's work is mentioned only by way of reference; Clareno borrows nothing from him, while he cites long passages from Giovanni di Ceperano,[21] Thomas of Celano[22] and Brother Leo.[23] Clareno takes from these writers narratives containing several new and extremely curious facts.[24] I have dwelt particularly upon this document because its value appears to me not yet to have been properly appreciated. It is indeed partisan; the documents of which we must be most wary are not those whose tendency is manifest, but those where it is skilfully concealed. The life of St. Francis and a great part of the religious history of the thirteenth century will surely appear to us in an entirely different light when we are able to fill out the documents of the victorious party by those of the party of the vanquished. Just as Thomas of Celano's first legend is dominated by the desire to associate closely St. Francis, Gregory IX., and Brother Elias, so the Chronicle of the Tribulations is inspired from beginning to end with the thought that the troubles of the Order--to say the word, the apostasy--began so early as 1219. This contention finds a striking confirmation in the Chronicle of Giordano di Giano. V. THE FIORETTI[25] With the Fioretti we enter definitively the domain of legend. This literary gem relates the life of Francis, his companions and disciples, as it appeared to the popular imagination at the beginning of the fourteenth century. We have not to discuss the literary value of this document, one of the most exquisite religious works of the Middle Ages, but it may well be said that from the historic point of view it does not deserve the neglect to which it has been left. Most authors have failed in courage to revise the sentence lightly uttered against it by the successors of Bollandus. Why make anything of a book which Father Suysken did not even deign to read![26] Yet that which gives these stories an inestimable worth is what for want of a better term we may call their atmosphere. They are legendary, worked over, exaggerated, false even, if you please, but they give us with a vivacity and intensity of coloring something that we shall search for in vain elsewhere--the surroundings in which St. Francis lived. More than any other biography the Fioretti transport us to Umbria, to the mountains of the March of Ancona; they make us visit the hermitages, and mingle with the life, half childish, half angelic, which was that of their inhabitants. It is difficult to pronounce upon the name of the author. His work was only that of gathering the flowers of his bouquet from written and oral tradition. The question whether he wrote in Latin or Italian has been much discussed and appears to be not yet settled; what is certain is that though this work may be anterior to the Conformities,[27] it is a little later than the Chronicle of the Tribulations, for it would be strange that it made no mention of Angelo Clareno, if it was written after his death. This book is in fact an essentially local[28] chronicle; the author has in mind to erect a monument to the glory of the Brothers Minor of the March of Ancona. This province, which is evidently his own, "does it not resemble the sky blazing with stars? The holy Brothers who dwelt in it, like the stars in the sky, have illuminated and adorned the Order of St. Francis, filling the world with their examples and teaching." He is acquainted with the smallest villages,[29] each having at a short distance its monastery, well apart, usually near a torrent, in the edge of a wood, and above, near the hilltop, a few almost inaccessible cells, the asylums of Brothers even more than the others in love with contemplation and retirement.[30] The chapters that concern St. Francis and the Umbrian Brothers are only a sort of introduction; Egidio, Masseo, Leo on one side, St. Clara on the other, are witnesses that the ideal at Portiuncula and St. Damian was indeed the same to which in later days Giachimo di Massa, Pietro di Monticulo, Conrad di Offida, Giovanni di Penna, and Giovanni della Verna endeavored to attain. While most of the other legends give us the Franciscan tradition of the great convents, the Fioretti are almost the only document which shows it as it was perpetuated in the hermitages and among the people. In default of accuracy of detail, the incidents which are related here contain a higher truth--their tone is true. Here are words that were never uttered, acts that never took place, but the soul and the heart of the early Franciscans were surely what they are depicted here. The Fioretti have the living truth that the pencil gives. Something is wanting in the physiognomy of the Poverello when we forget his conversation with Brother Leo on the perfect joy, his journey to Sienna with Masseo, or even the conversion of the wolf of Gubbio. We must not, however, exaggerate the legendary side of the Fioretti: there are not more that two or three of these stories of which the kernel is not historic and easy to find. The famous episode of the wolf of Gubbio, which is unquestionably the most marvellous of all the series, is only, to speak the engraver's language, the third state of the story of the robbers of Monte Casale[31] mingled with a legend of the Verna. The stories crowd one another in this book like flocks of memories that come upon us pell-mell, and in which insignificant details occupy a larger place than the most important events; our memory is, in fact, an overgrown child, and what it retains of a man is generally a feature, a word, a gesture. Scientific history is trying to react, to mark the relative value of facts, to bring forward the important ones, to cast into shade that which is secondary. Is it not a mistake? Is there such a thing as the important and the secondary? How is it going to be marked? The popular imagination is right: what we need to retain of a man is the expression of countenance in which lives his whole being, a heart-cry, a gesture that expresses his personality. Do we not find all of Jesus in the words of the Last Supper? And all of St. Francis in his address to brother wolf and his sermon to the birds? Let us beware of despising these documents in which the first Franciscans are described as they saw themselves to be. Unfolding under the Umbrian sky at the foot of the olives of St. Damian, or the firs of the March of Ancona, these wild flowers have a perfume and an originality which we look for in vain in the carefully cultivated flowers of a learned gardener. APPENDICES OF THE FIORETTI In the first of these appendices the compiler has divided into five chapters all the information on the stigmata which he was able to gather. It is easy to understand the success of the Fioretti. The people fell in love with these stories, in which St. Francis and his companions appear both more human and more divine than in the other legends; and they began very soon to feel the need of so completing them as to form a veritable biography.[32] The second, entitled Life of Brother Ginepro, is only indirectly connected with St. Francis; yet it deserves to be studied, for it offers the same kind of interest as the principal collection, to which it is doubtless posterior. In these fourteen chapters we find the principal features of the life of this Brother, whose mad and saintly freaks still furnish material for conversation in Umbrian monasteries. These unpretending pages discover to us one aspect of the Franciscan heart. The official historians have thought it their duty to keep silence upon this Brother, who to them appeared to be a supremely indiscreet personage, very much in the way of the good name of the Order in the eyes of the laics. They were right from their point of view, but we owe a debt of gratitude to the Fioretti for having preserved for us this personality, so blithe, so modest, and with so arch a good nature. Certainly St. Francis was more like Ginepro than like Brother Elias or St. Bonaventura.[33] The third, Life of Brother Egidio, appears to be on the whole the most ancient document on the life of the famous Ecstatic that we possess. It is very possible that these stories might be traced to Brother Giovanni, to whom the Three Companions appeal in their prologue. In the defective texts given us in the existing editions we perceive the hand of an annotator whose notes have slipped into the text,[34] but in spite of that this life is one of the most important of the secondary texts. This always itinerant brother, one of whose principal preoccupations is to live by his labor, is one of the most original and agreeable figures in Francis's surroundings, and it is in lives of this sort that we must seek the true meaning of some of the passages of the Rule, and precisely in those that have had the most to suffer from the enterprise of exegetes. The fourth includes the favorite maxims of Brother Egidio; they have no other importance than to show the tendencies of the primitive Franciscan teaching. They are short, precise, practical counsels, saturated with mysticism, and yet in them good sense never loses its rights. The collection, just as it is in the Fioretti, is no doubt posterior to Egidio, for in 1385 Bartolommeo of Pisa furnished a much longer one.[35] VI. CHRONICLE OF THE XXIV. GENERALS[36] We find here at the end of the life of Francis that of most of his companions, and the events that occurred under the first twenty-four generals. It is a very ordinary work of compilation. The authors have sought to include in it all the pieces which they had succeeded in collecting, and the result presents a very disproportioned whole. A thorough study of it might be interesting and useful, but it would be possible only after its publication. This cannot be long delayed: twice (at intervals of fifteen months) when I have desired to study the Assisi manuscript it was found to be with the Franciscans of Quaracchi, who were preparing to print it. It is difficult not to bring the epoch in which this collection was closed near to that when Bartolommeo of Pisa wrote his famous work. Perhaps the two are quite closely related. This chronicle was one of Glassberger's favorite sources. VII. THE CONFORMITIES OF BARTOLOMMEO OF PISA[37] The Book of the Conformities, to which Brother Bartolommeo of Pisa devoted more than fifteen years of his life,[38] appears to have been read very inattentively by most of the authors who have spoken of it.[39] In justice to them we must add that it would be hard to find a work more difficult to read; the same facts reappear from ten to fifteen times, and end by wearying the least delicate nerves. It is to this no doubt that we must attribute the neglect to which it has been left. I do not hesitate, however, to see in it the most important work which has been made on the life of St. Francis. Of course the author does not undertake historical criticism as we understand it to-day, but if we must not expect to find him a historian, we can boldly place him in the front rank of compilers.[40] If the Bollandists had more thoroughly studied him they would have seen more clearly into the difficult question of the sources, and the authors who have come after them would have been spared numberless errors and interminable researches. Starting with the thought that Francis's life had been a perfect imitation of that of Jesus, Bartolommeo attempted to collect, without losing a single one, all the instances of the life of the Poverello scattered through the diverse legends still known at that time. He regretted that Bonaventura, while borrowing the narratives of his predecessors, had often abridged them,[41] and himself desired to preserve them in their original bloom. Better situated than any one for such a work, since he had at his disposal the archives of the Sacro Convento of Assisi, it may be said that he has omitted nothing of importance and that he has brought into his work considerable pieces from nearly all the legends which appeared in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; they are there only in fragments, it is true, but with perfect accuracy.[42] When his researches were unsuccessful he avows it simply, without attempting to fill out the written testimonies with his own conjectures.[43] He goes farther, and submits the documents he has before him to a real testing, laying aside those he considers uncertain.[44] Finally he takes pains to point out the passages in which his only authority is oral testimony.[45] As he is almost continually citing the legends of Celano, the Three Companions, and Bonaventura, and as the citations prove on verification to be literally accurate, as well as those of the Will, the divers Rules, or the pontifical bulls, it seems natural to conclude that he was equally accurate with the citations which we cannot verify, and in which we find long extracts from works that have disappeared.[46] The citations which he makes from Celano present no difficulty; they are all accurate, corresponding sometimes with the First sometimes with the Second Legend.[47] Those from the Legend of the Three Companions are accurate, but it appears that Bartolommeo drew them from a text somewhat different from that which we have.[48] With the citations from the _Legenda Antiqua_ the question is complicated and becomes a nice one. Was there a work of this name? Certain authors, and among them the Bollandist Suysken, seem to incline toward the negative, and believe that to cite the _Legenda Antiqua_ is about the same as to refer vaguely to tradition. Others among contemporaries have thought that after the approbation and definitive adoption of Bonaventura's _Legenda Major_ by the Order the Legends anterior to that, and especially that of Celano, were called _Legenda Antiqua_. The Conformities permit us to look a little closer into the question. We find, in fact, passages from the _Legenda Antiqua_ which reproduce Celano's First Life.[49] Others present points of contact with the Second, sometimes a literary exactitude,[50] but often these are the same stories told in too different a way for us to consider them borrowed.[51] Finally there are many of these extracts from the _Legenda Antiqua_ of which we find no source in any of the documents already discussed.[52] This would suffice to show that the two are not to be confounded. It has absorbed them and brought about certain changes while completing them with others.[53] The study of the fragments which Bartolommeo has preserved to us shows immediately that this collection belonged to the party of the Zealots of Poverty; we might be tempted to see in it the work of Brother Leo. Most fortunately there is a passage where Bartolommeo di Pisa cites as being by Conrad di Offida a fragment which he had already cited before as borrowed from the _Legenda Antiqua_.[54] I would not exaggerate the value of an isolated instance, but it seems an altogether plausible hypothesis to make Conrad di Offida the author of this compilation. All that we know of him, of his tendencies, his struggle for the strict observance, accords with what the known fragments of the _Legenda Antiqua_ permit us to infer as to its author.[55] However this may be, it appears that in this collection the stories have been given us (the principal source being the Legend of Brother Leo or the Three Companions before its mutilation) in a much less abridged form than in the Second Life of Celano. This work is hardly more than a second edition of that of Brother Leo, here and there completed with a few new incidents, and especially with exhortations to perseverance addressed to the persecuted Zealots.[56] VIII. CHRONICLE OF GLASSBERGER[57] Evidently this work, written about 1508, cannot be classed among the sources properly so called; but it presents in a convenient form the general history of the Order, and thanks to its citations permits us to verify certain passages in the primitive legends of which Glassberger had the MS. before his eyes. It is thus in particular with the chronicle of Brother Giordano di Giano, which he has inserted almost bodily in his own work. IX. CHRONICLE OF MARK OF LISBON[58] This work is of the same character as that of Glassberger; it can only be used by way of addition. There is, however, a series of facts in which it has a special value; it is when the Franciscan missions in Spain or Morocco are in question. The author had documents on this subject which did not reach the friars in distant countries. FOOTNOTES: [1] _Chronica fratris Jordani a Giano._ The text was published for the first time in 1870 by Dr. G. Voigt under the title: "_Die Denkwürdigkeiten des Minoriten Jordanus von Giano_ in the _Abhandlungen der philolog. histor. Cl. der Königl. sächsischen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften_," pp. 421-545, Leipsic, by Hirzel, 1870. Only one manuscript is known; it is in the royal library at Berlin (Manuscript. theolog. lat., 4to, n. 196, sæc. xiv., foliorum 141). It has served as the base of the second edition: _Analecta franciscana sive Chronica aliaque documenta ad historiam minorum spectantia. Ad Claras Aquas (Quaracchi) ex typographia collegii S. Bonaventuræ_, 1885, t. i., pp. 1-19. Except where otherwise noted, I cite entirely this edition, in which is preserved the division into sixty-three paragraphs introduced by Dr. Voigt. [2] Giord., 81. [3] He names more than twenty four persons. [4] It does not seem to me that we can look upon the account of the interview between Gregory IX. and Brother Giordano as rigorously accurate. Giord., 63. [5] _Liber de adventu Minorum in Angliam_, published under the title of _Monumenta Franciscana_ (in the series of _Rerum Britannicarum medii Ævi scriptores_, _Roll series_) in two volumes, 8vo; the first through the care of J. S. Brewer (1858), the second through that of R. Howlett (1882). This text is reproduced without the scientific dress of the _Analecta franciscana_, t. i., pp. 217-257. Cf. English Historical Review, v. (1890), 754. He has published an excellent critical edition of it, but unfortunately partial, in vol. xxviii., _Scriptorum_, of the _Monumenta Germaniæ Historica_ by Mr. Liebermann, Hanover, 1888, folio, pp. 560-569. [6] Eccl., 11; 13; 14; 15. Cf. Eccl., 14, where the author takes pains to say that Alberto of Pisa died at Rome, surrounded by English Brothers "_inter Anglicos_." [7] Eccl., 4; 12. [8] Eccl., 4; 5; 6; 7; 10; 12; 13; 14; 15. [9] It was published, but with many suppressions, in 1857, at Parma. The Franciscans of Quaracchi prepared a new edition of it, which appeared in the _Analecta Franciscana_. This work is in manuscript in the Vatican under no. 7260. Vide Ehrle. _Zeitschrift für kath. Theol._ (1883), t. vii., pp. 767 and 768. The work of Mr. Clédat will be read with interest: _De fratre Salembene et de ejus chronicæ auctoritate_, Paris, 4to, 1877, with fac simile. [10] Father Ehrle has published it, but unfortunately not entire, in the _Archiv._, t. ii., pp. 125-155, text of the close of the fifth and of the sixth tribulation; pp. 256-327 text of the third, of the fourth, and of the commencement of the fifth. He has added to it introductions and critical notes. For the parts not published I will cite the text of the Laurentian manuscript (Plut. 20, cod. 7), completed where possible with the Italian version in the National Library at Florence (Magliabecchina, xxxvii.-28). See also an article of Professor Tocco in the _Archivio storico italiano_, t. xvii. (1886), pp. 12-36 and 243-61, and one of Mr. Richard's: Library of the École des chartes, 1884, 5th livr. p. 525. Cf. Tocco, the _Eresia nel medio Evo_, p. 419 ff. As to the text published by Döllinger in his _Beiträge zur Sektengeschichte des Mittelalters_, Münich, 1890, 2 vols., 8vo, II. _Theil Dokumente_, pp. 417-427, it is of no use. It can only beget errors, as it abounds with gross mistakes. Whole pages are wanting. [11] _Archiv._, t. iii., pp. 406-409. [12] Vide _Archiv._, i., p. 557 ... "_Et hoc totum ex rapacitate et malignitate luporum pastorum qui voluerunt esse pastores, sed operibus negaverunt deum_," et seq. Cf., p. 562: "_Avaritia et symoniaca heresis absque pallio regnat et fere totum invasit ecclesie corpus_." [13] "_Qui excommunicat et hereticat altissimam evangelii paupertatem, excommunicatus est a Deo et hereticus coram Christo, qui est eterna et in commutabilis veritas._" _Arch._, i., p. 509. "_Non est potestas contra christum Dominum et contra evangelium._" Ib. p. 560. He closes one of his letters with a sentence of a mysticism full of serenity, and which lets us see to the bottom of the hearts of the Spiritual Brothers. "_Totum igitur studium esse debet quod unum inseparabiliter simus per Franciscum in Christo._" Ib., p. 564. [14] For example in the list of the first six generals of the Order. [15] The first (1219-1226) extends from the departure of St. Francis for Egypt up to his death; the second includes the generalate of Brother Elias (1232-1239); the third that of Crescentius (1244-1248); the fourth, that of Bonaventura (1257-1274); the fifth commences with the epoch of the council of Lyon (1274) and extends up to the death of the inquisitor, Thomas d'Aversa (1204). And the sixth goes from 1308 to 1323. [16] "_Supererant adhuc multi de sociis b. Francisci ... et alii non pauci de quibus ego vidi et ab ipsis audivi quæ narro._" Laur. Ms., cod. 7, pl. xx., f^o 24a: "_Qui passi sunt eam (tribulationem tertiam) socii fundatoris fratres Aegdius et Angelus, qui supererant me audiente referibant_." Laur. Ms., f^o 27b. Cf., Italian Ms., xxxvii., 28, Magliab., f^o 138b. [17] The date of his death is unknown; on August 11, 1253, he was present at the death-bed of St. Clara. [18] Died April 23, 1261. [19] "_Quem (fratrem Jacobum de Massa) dirigente me fratre Johanne socio fratris prefati Egidii videre laboravi. Hic enim frater Johannes ... dixit mihi_...." _Arch._, ii., p. 279. [20] " ... _Tribulationes preteritas memoravi, ut audivi ab illis qui sustinuerunt eas et aliqua commemoravi de hiis que didici in quatuor legendis quas vidi et legi._" _Arch._, ii., p. 135.--"_Vitam pauperis et humilis viri Dei Francisci trium ordinum fundatoris quatuor solemnes personæ scripserunt, fratres videlicet scientia et sanctitate præclari, Johannes et Thomas de Celano, frater Bonaventura unus post Beatum Franciscum Generalis Minister et vir miræ simplicitatis et sanctitatis frater Leo, ejusdem sancti Francisci socius. Has quatuor descriptiones seu historias qui legerit_...." Laurent. MS., pl. xx., c. 7, f^o 1a. Did the Italian translator think there was an error in this quotation? I do not know, but he suppressed it. At f^o 12a of manuscript xxxvii., 28, of the Magliabecchina, we read: "_Incominciano alcune croniche del ordine franciscano, come la vita del povero e humile servo di Dio Francesco fondatore del minorico ordine fu scripta da San Bonaventura e da quatro altri frati. Queste poche scripture ovveramente hystorie quello il quale diligentemente le leggiera, expeditamente potra cognoscere ... la vocatione la santita di San Francisco._" [21] Laur. MS., f^o 4b ff. On the other hand we read in a letter of Clareno: "_Ad hanc (paupertatem) perfecte servandam Christus Franciscum vocavit et elegit in hac hora novissima et precepit ei evangelicam assumere regulam, et a papa Innocentio fuit omnibus annuntiatum in concilio generali, quod de sua auctoritate et obedientia sanctus Franciscus evangelicam vitam et regulam assumpserat et Christo inspirante servare promiserat, sicut sanctus vir fr. Leo scribit et fr. Johannes de Celano._" _Archiv._, i., p. 559. [22] "_Audiens enim semel quorundam fratrum enormes excessus, ut fr. Thomas de Celano scribit, et malum exemplum per eos secularibus datum._" Laur. MS., f^o 13b. The passage which follows evidently refers to 2 Cel., 3, 93 and 112. [23] "_Et fecerunt de regula prima ministri removeri capitulum istud de prohibitionibus sancti evangelii, sicut frater Leo scribit._" Laur. Ms. f^o 12b. Cf. _Spec._, 9a, see p. 248. "_Nam cum rediisset de partibus ultramarinis, minister quidam loquebatur cum eo, ut frater Leo refert, de capitulo paupertatis_," f^o 13a, cf. _Spec._, 9a, "_S. Franciscus, teste fr. Leone, frequenter et cum multo studio recitabat fabulam ... quod oportebat finaliter ordinem humiliari et ad sue humilitatis principia confitenda et tenenda reduci_." _Archiv._, ii., p. 129. There is only one point of contact between the Legend of the Three Companions, such as it is to-day, and these passages; but we find on the contrary revised accounts in the _Speculum_ and in the other collections, where they are cited as coming from Brother Leo. [24] Clareno, for example, holds that the Cardinal Ugolini had sustained St. Francis without approving of the first Rule, in concert with Cardinal Giovanni di San Paolo. This is possible, since Ugolini was created cardinal in 1198 (Vide Cardella: _Memorie storiche de' Cardinali_, 9 vols., 8vo, Rome, 1792-1793, t. i., pt. 2, p. 190). Besides this would better explain the zeal with which he protected the divers Orders founded by St. Francis, from 1217. The chapter where Clareno tells how St. Francis wrote the Rule shows the working over of the legend, but it is very possible that he has borrowed it in its present form from Brother Leo. It is to be noted that we do not find in this document a single allusion to the Indulgences of Portiuncula. [25] The manuscripts and editions are well-nigh innumerable. M. Luigi Manzoni has studied them with a carefulness that makes it much to be desired that he continue this difficult work. _Studi sui Fioretti_: Miscelenea, 1888, pp. 116-119, 150-152, 162-168; 1889, 9-15, 78-84, 132-135. When shall we find some one who can and will undertake to make a scientific edition of them? Those which have appeared during our time in the various cities of Italy are insignificant from a critical point of view. See Mazzoni Guido, _Capitoli inediti dei Fioretti di S. Francesco_, in the _Propugnatore_, Bologna, 1888, vol. xxi., pp. 396-411. [26] Vide A. SS., p. 865: "_Floretum non legi, nec curandum putavi._" Cf. 553f: "_Floretum ad manum non habeo._" [27] Bartolommeo di Pisa compiled it in 1385; then certain manuscripts of the Fioretti are earlier. Besides, in the stories that the Conformities borrow from the Fioretti, we perceive Bartolommeo's work of abbreviation. [28] I am speaking here only of the fifty-three chapters which form the true collection of the Fioretti. [29] The province of the March of Ancona counted seven custodias: 1, Ascoli; 2, Camerino; 3, Ancona; 4, Jesi; 5, Fermo; 6, Fano; 7, Felestro. The Fioretti mention at least six of the monasteries of the custodia of Fermo: Moliano, 51, 53; Fallerone, 32, 51; Bruforte and Soffiano, 46, 47; Massa, 51; Penna, 45; Fermo, 41, 49, 51. [30] At each page we are reminded of those groves which were originally the indispensable appendage of the Franciscan monasteries: _La selva ch' era allora allato a S. M. degli Angeli_, 3, 10, 15, 16, etc. _La selva d' un luogo deserto del val di Spoleto_ (Carceri?), 4; _selva di Forano_, 42. _di Massa_, 51, etc. [31] The _Speculum_, 46b, 58b, 158a, gives us three states. Cf. _Fior._, 26 and 21; _Conform._, 119b, 2. [32] This desire was so natural that the manuscript of the Angelica Library includes many additional chapters, concerning the gift of Portiuncula, the indulgence of August 2d, the birth of St. Francis, etc. (Vide Amoni, Fioretti, Roma, 1889, pp. 266, 378-386.) It would be an interesting study to seek the origin of these documents and to establish their relationship with the Speculum and the Conformities. Vide _Conform._, 231a, 1; 121b; _Spec._, 92-96. [33] Ginepro was received into the Order by St. Francis. In 1253 he was present at St. Clara's death. A. SS., _Aug._, t. ii., p. 764d. The Conformities speak of him in detail, f^o 62b. [34] The first seven chapters form a whole. The three which follow are doubtless a first attempt at completing them. [35] Conformities, f^o 55b, 1-60a, 1. [36] See _Archiv._, t. i., p. 145, an article of Father Denifle: _Zur Quellenkunde der Franziskaner Geschichte_, where he mentions at least eight manuscripts of this work. Cf. Ehrle: _Zeitschrift_, 1883, p. 324, note 3. I have studied only the two manuscripts of Florence: Riccardi, 279, paper, 243 fos. of two cols. recently numbered. The Codex of the Laurentian Gaddian. rel., 53, is less careful. It is also on paper, 20 x 27, and counts 254 fos. of 1 column. F^o 1 was formerly numbered 88. The order of the chapters is not the same as in the preceding. [37] The citations are always made from the edition of Milan, 1510, 4to of 256 folios of two columns. The best known of the subsequent editions are those of Milan, 1513, and Bologna, 1590. [38] He began it in 1385 (f^o 1), and it was authorized by the chapter general August 2, 1399 (f^o 256a, 1). Besides, on f^o 150a, 1, he set down the date when he was writing. It was in 1390. [39] I am not here concerned with the foolish attacks of certain Protestant authors upon this life. That is a quarrel of the theologians which in no way concerns history. Nowhere does Bartolommeo of Pisa make St. Francis the equal of Jesus, and he was able even to forestall criticism in this respect. The Bollandists are equally severe: "_Cum Pisanus fuerit scriptor magis pius et credulus quam crisi severa usus_...." A. SS., p. 551e. [40] He has avoided the mistakes so unfortunately committed by Wadding in his list of ministers general. Vide 66a. 2, 104a, 1, 118b, 2. He was lecturer on theology at Bologna, Padua, Pisa, Sienna, and Florence. He preached for many years and with great success in the principal villages of the Peninsula and could thus take advantage of his travels by collecting useful notes. Mark of Lisbon has preserved for us a notice of his life. Vide _Croniche dei fratri Minori_, t. iii., p. 6 ff. of the Diola edition. He died December 10, 1401. For further details see Wadding, ann. 1399, vii., viii., and above all Sbaralea, _Supplementum_, p. 109. He is the author of an exposition of the Rule little known which can be found in the Speculum Morin, Rouen, 1509, f^o 66b-83a, of part three. [41] This opinion is expressed in a guarded manner. For example, f^o 207a, 1, Bartolommeo relates the miracle of the Chapter of the Mats, first following St. Bonaventura, then adding: "_Et quia non aliter tangit dicta pars (legendæ majoris) hoc insigne miraculum: antiqua legenda hoc refertur in hunc modum_." Cf. 225a, 2m. "_Et quia fr. Bonaventura succincte multa tangit et in brevi: pro evidentia prefatorum notandum est ... ut dicit antiqua legenda._" [42] However, it is necessary to note that not only are there considerable differences between the editions published, but also that the first (that of Milan, 1510) has been completed and revised by its editor. The judgments passed upon Raymond Ganfridi, 104a, 1, and Boniface VIII., 103b, 1, show traces of later corrections. (Cf. 125a, 1. At f^o 72a, 2m, is indicated the date of the death of St. Bernardin, which was in 1444, etc.) Besides, we are surprised to find beside the pages where the sources are indicated with clearness others where stories follow one another coming one knows not from whence. [43] F^o 70a, 1: "_Cujus nomen non reperi._" 1a, 2: "_Multaque non ex industria sed quia ea noscere non valui omittendo._" [44] F^o 78a, 1: _Informationes quas non scribo quia imperfectas reperi._ Cf. 229b, 2: "_De aliis multis apparitionibus non reperi scripturam, quare hic non pono._" [45] F^o 69a, 1: "_Hec ut audivi posui quia ejus legendam non vidi._" Cf. 68b, 2m: _Fr. Henricus generalis minister mihi magistro Bartholomeo dixit ipse oretenus._ [46] The citations from Bonaventura are decidedly more frequent. We should not be surprised, since this story is the official biography of St. Francis; the chapter from which Bartolommeo takes his quotations is almost always indicated, and, naturally, follows the old division in five parts. Opening the book at hazard at folio 136a I find no less than six references to the _Legenda Major_ in the first column. To give an idea of the style of Bartolommeo of Pisa I shall give in substance the contents of a page of his book. See, for example, f^o 111a (lib. i., conform. x., pars. ii., Franciscus predicator). In the third line he cites Bonaventura: "_Fr. Bonaventura in quarta parte majoris legende dicit quod b. Franciscus videbatur intuentibus homo alterius seculi._" Textual citation of Bonaventure, 45. Three lines further on: "_Verum qualis esset b. F. quoad personam sic habetur in legenda antiqua ... homo facundissimus, facie hilaris_, etc." The literal citation of the sketch of Francis follows as 1 Celano, 83, gives it as far as: "_inter peccatores quasi unus ex illis_," and to mark the end of the quotation Bartolommeo adds: "_Hec legenda antiqua_." In the next column paragraph 4 commences with the words: _B. Francisci predicationem reddebat mirabilem et gloriosam ipsius sancti loquutio: etenim legenda trium Sociorum dicit et Legenda major parte tertia: B. Francisei eloquia erant non inania, neo risu digna_, etc., which corresponds literally with 3 Soc., 25, and Bon., 28. Then come two chapters of Bonaventura almost entire, beginning with: _In duodecima parte legende majoris dicit Fr. Bonaventura: Erat enim verbum ejus_, etc. Textual quotation of Bon., 178 and 179. The page ends with another quotation from Bonaventura: _Sic dicebat prout recitat Bonaventura in octava parte Legende majoris: Hac officium patri misericordiarum_. Vide Bonav., 102 end and 103 entire. This suffices without doubt to show with what precision the authorities have been quoted in this work, with what attention and confidence ought to be examined those portions of documents lost or mislaid which he has here preserved for us. [47] F^o 31b, 2: _ut dicit fr. Thomas in sua legenda_, cf. 2 Cel., 3, 60.--140a, 2: _Fr. in leg. fr. Thome_, cf. 2 Cel., 3, 60.--140a 1, cf. 2 Cel., 3 16.--142b, 1: _Fr. in leg. Thome capitulo de charitate_, cf. 2 Cel., 3, 115.--144b, 1: _Fr. in leg. fr. Thome capitulo de oratione_, cf. 2 Cel., 3, 40.--144b, 1, cf. 2 Cel., 3, 65.--144b, 2, cf. 2 Cel., 3, 78.--176b, 2, cf. 2 Cel., 3, 79.--182b, 2, cf. 2 Cel., 2, 1.--241b, 1, cf. 2 Cel., 3, 141.--181a, 2, cf. 1 Cel., 27. It is needless to say that these lists of quotations do not pretend to be complete. [48] F^o 36b, 2. _Ut enim habetur in leg._ 3 Soc., cf. 3 Soc., 10.--46b, 1, cf. 3 Soc., 25-28.--38b 2, cf. 3 Soc. 3.--111a, 2, cf. 3 Soc., 25.--134a, 2, cf. 3 Soc., 4.--142b, 2, cf. 3 Soc., 57 and 58.--167b, 2, cf. 3 Soc., 3 and 8.--168a, 1, cf. 3 Soc., 10.--170b, 1, cf. 3 Soc., 39, 4.--175b, 2, cf. 3 Soc., 59.--180b, 2, cf. 3 Soc., 4.--181a, 1, cf. 3 Soc., 5, 7, 24, 33, and 67.--181a. 2, cf. 3 Soc., 36.--229b, 2, cf. 3 Soc., 14. etc. The reading of 3 Soc. which Bartolommeo had before his eyes was pretty much the same we have to day, for he says, 181a, 2. referring to 3 Soc., 67: "_Ut habetur quasi in fine leg_. 3 _Soc._" [49] F^o 111a, 1, _Sic habetur in leg. ant._, corresponds literally with 1 Cel., 83.--144a, 2. _Franciscus in leg. ant. cap. v. de zelo ad religionem_, to 1 Cel. 106. [50] F^o 111b, 1. _De predicantibus loqueus sic dicebat in ant. leg._ Cf. 2 Cel., 3, 99 and 106. 140b, 1. Cf. 2 Cel., 3, 84.--144b, 1, cf. 2 Cel., 3, 45--144a, 1, cf. 2 Cel., 3, 95 and 15.--225b, 2, cf. 2 Cel., 3, 116. [51] F^o 31a, 1. Vide 2 Cel., 3, 83.--143a, 2. Vide 2 Cel., 3, 65 and 116.--144a, 1. Vide 2 Cel., 3, 94.--170b. 1. Vide 2 Cel., 3, 11. [52] F^o 14a, 2.--32a. 1.--101a, 2.--169b, 1.--144b, 2.--142a, 2.--143b, 2.--168b, 1.--144b, 1. [53] Chapters 18 (chapter of the mats) and 25 (lepers cured) of the _Fioretti_ are found in Latin in the Conf. as borrowed from the Leg. Ant. Vide 174b, 1, and 207a. 1. Finally, according to f^o 168b, 2, it is also from the Leg. Ant. that the description of the coat, such as we find at the end of the _Chronique des Tribulations_, was borrowed. See _Archiv._, t. ii., p. 153. [54] F^o 182a, 2; cf. 51b, 1; 144a, 1. [55] He died December 12, 1306, at Bastia, near Assisi. See upon him _Chron. Tribul. Archiv._, ii.; 311 and 312; _Conform._, 60, 119, and 153. [56] Although the history of the Indulgence of Portiuncula was of all subjects the one most largely treated in the Conformities, 151b, 2--157a, 2, not once does Bartolommeo of Pisa refer to it in the _Legenda Antiqua_. It seems, then, that this collection also was silent as to this celebrated pardon. [57] Published with extreme care by the Franciscan Fathers of the Observance in t. ii. of the _Analecta Franciscana, ad Claræ Aquas_ (Quaracchi, near Florence), 1888, 1 vol., crown 8vo, of xxxvi.-612 pp. This edition, as much from the critical point of view of the text, its correctness, its various readings and notes, as from the material point of view, is perfect and makes the more desirable a publication of the chronicles of the xxiv. generals and of Salimbeni by the same editors. The beginning up to the year 1262 has been published already by Dr. Karl Evers under the title _Analecta ad Fratrum Minorum historiam_, Leipsic, 1882, 4to of 89 pp. [58] I have been able only to procure the Italian edition published by Horatio Diola under the title _Croniche degli Ordini instituti dal P. S. Francesco_, 3 vols., 8vo, Venice, 1606. * * * * * V CHRONICLES OUTSIDE OF THE ORDER I. JACQUES DE VITRY The following documents, which we can only briefly indicate, are of inestimable value; they emanate from men particularly well situated to give us the impression which the Umbrian prophet produced on his generation. Jacques de Vitry[1] has left extended writings on St. Francis. Like a prudent man who has already seen many religious madmen, he is at first reserved; but soon this sentiment disappears, and we find in him only a humble and active admiration for the _Apostolic Man_. He speaks of him in a letter which he wrote immediately after the taking of Damietta (November, 1219), to his friends in Lorraine, to describe it to them.[2] A few lines suffice to describe St. Francis and point out his irresistible influence. There is not a single passage in the Franciscan biographers which gives a more living idea of the apostolate of the Poverello. He returns to him more at length in his _Historia Occidentalis_, devoting to him the thirty-second chapter of this curious work.[3] These pages, vibrating with enthusiasm, were written during Francis's lifetime,[4] at the time when the most enlightened members of the Church, who had believed themselves to be living in the evening of the world, _in vespere mundi tendentis ad occasum_, suddenly saw in the direction of Umbria the light of a new day. II. THOMAS OF SPALATO An archdeacon of the Cathedral of Spalato, who in 1220 was studying at Bologna, has left us a very living portrait of St. Francis and the memory of the impression which his preachings produced in that learned town.[5] Something of his enthusiasm has passed into his story; we feel that that day, August 15, 1220, when he met the Poverello of Assisi, was one of the best of his life.[6] III. DIVERS CHRONICLES The continuation of William of Tyre[7] brings us a new account of Francis's attempt to conquer the Soudan. This narrative, the longest of all three we have on this subject, contains no feature essentially new, but it gives one more witness to the historic value of the Franciscan legends. Finally, there are two chronicles written during Francis's life, which, without giving anything new, speak with accuracy of his foundation, and prove how rapidly that religious renovation which started in Umbria was being propagated to the very ends of Europe. The anonymous chronicler of Monte Sereno[8] in fact wrote about 1225, and tells us, not without regret, of the brilliant conquests of the Franciscans. Burchard,[9] Abbot Prémontré d'Ursberg (died in 1226), who was in Rome in 1211, leaves us a very curious criticism of the Order. The Brothers Minor appeared to him a little like an orthodox branch of the Poor Men of Lyons. He even desires that the pope, while approving the Franciscans, should do so with a view to satisfy, in the measure of the possible, the aspirations manifested by that heresy and that of the Humiliati. It is impossible to attribute any value whatever to the long pages given to St. Francis by Matthew Paris.[10] His information is correct wherever the activities of the friars are concerned, and he could examine the work around him.[11] They are absolutely fantastic when he comes to the life of St. Francis, and we can only feel surprised to find M. Hase[12] adopting the English monk's account of the stigmata. The notice which he gives of Francis contains as many errors as sentences; he makes him born of a family illustrious by its nobility, makes him study theology from his infancy (_hoc didicerat in litteris et theologicis disciplinis quibus ab ætate tenera incubuerat, usque ad notitiam perfectam_), etc.[13] It would be useless to enlarge this list and mention those chroniclers who simply noticed the foundation of the Order, its approbation, and the death of St. Francis,[14] or those which spoke of him at length, but simply by copying a Franciscan legend.[15] It suffices to point out by way of memory the long chapter consecrated to St. Francis in the Golden Legend. Giachimo di Voraggio ([Cross] 1298) there sums up with accuracy but without order the essential features of the first legends and in particular the Second Life by Celano.[16] As for the inscription of Santa Maria del Vescovado at Assisi it is too unformed to be anything but a simple object of curiosity.[17] * * * * * I have given up preparing a complete bibliography of works concerning St. Francis, that task having been very well done by the Abbé Ulysse Chevalier in his _Répertoire des sources historiques du moyen age_, Bio-Bibliographie, cols. 765-767 and 2588-2590, Paris, 1 vol., 4to, 1876-1888. To it I refer my readers. FOOTNOTES: [1] He was born at Vitry sur Seine, became Curé of Argenteuil, near Paris; Canon of Oignies, in the diocese of Namur, preached the crusade against the Albigenses, and accompanied the Crusaders to Palestine; having been made Bishop of Acre, he was present in 1219 at the siege and at the capture of Damietta and returned to Europe in 1225; created Cardinal-bishop of Frascati in 1229, he died in 1244, leaving a number of writings. For his life, see the preface of his _Historiæ_, edition of Douai, 1597. [2] This letter may be found in (Bongars) _Gesta Dei per Francio_, pp. 1146-1149. [3] _Jacobi de Vitriaco Libri duo quorum prior Orientalis, alter Occidentalis Historiæ nomine inscribitur studio Fr. Moschi Duaci ex officina Balthazaris Belleri_, 1597, 16mo, 480 pp. Chapter xxxii. fills pages 349-353, and is entitled _De ordine et prædicatione fratrum Minorum_. See above, p. 229. [4] This appears from the passage: _Videmus primus ordinis fundatorem magestrum cui tanquam summo Priori suo omnes alii obediunt._ _Loc. cit._, p. 352. [5] It is inserted in the treatise of Sigonius on the bishops of Bologna: _Caroli Sigonii de episcopis Bononiensibus libri quinque cum notis L. C. Rabbii_, a work which occupies cols. 353-590 of t. iii. of his _Opera omnia_, Milan, 1732-1737, 6 vols., f^o. We find our fragment in col. 432. [6] This passage will be found above, p. 241. [7] _Guillelmi Tyrensis arch. Continuala belli sacri historia_ in Martène: _Amplissima Collectio_, t. v. pp. 584-572. The piece concerning Francis is cols. 689-690. [8] _Chronicon Montis Sereni_ (at present Petersberg, near Halle), edited by Ehrenfeuchter in the _Mon. Germ. hist. Script._, t. 23, pp. 130-226, 229. [9] _Burchardi et Cuonradi Urspergensium chronicon_ ed., A. Otto Abel and L. Weiland, _apud Mon. Germ, hist._, t. 23, pp. 333-383. The monastery of Ursperg was half-way between Ulm and Augsburg. Vide p. 376. [10] _Matthæi Parisiensis monachie Albanensis, Historia major_, edition Watts, London, 1640. The Brothers Minor are first mentioned in the year 1207, p. 222, then 1227, pp. 339-342. [11] See the article, _Minores_, in the table of contents of the _Mon. Germ. hist. Script._, t. xxviii. [12] _Franz von Assisi_, p. 168 ff. [13] See above, p. 97, his story of the audience with Innocent III. [14] For example, _Chronica Albrici trium fontium_ in Pertz: _Script._, t. 23, _ad ann. 1207_, 1226, 1228. Vide Fragment of the chron. of Philippe Mousket ([Cross] before 1245). _Recueil des historiens_, t. xxii., p. 71, lines 30347-30360. The number of annalists in this century is appalling, and there is not one in ten who has omitted to note the foundation of the Minor Brothers. [15] For example, Vincent de Beauvais ([Cross] 1264) gives in his _Speculum historiale_, lib. 29, cap. 97-99, lib. 30, cap. 99-111, nearly every story given by the Bollandists under the title of _Secunda legenda_ in their _Commentarium prævium_. [16] _Legenda aurea_, Graesse, Breslau, 1890, pp. 662-674. [17] A good reproduction of it will be found in the _Miscellanea francescana_, t. ii., pp. 33-37, accompanied by a learned dissertation by M. Faloci Pulignani. * * * * * APPENDIX CRITICAL STUDY OF THE STIGMATA AND THE INDULGENCE OF AUGUST 2 I. THE STIGMATA A dissertation upon the possibility of miracles would be out of place here; a historic sketch is not a treatise on philosophy or dogmatics. Still, I owe the reader a few explanations, to enable him with thorough understanding to judge of my manner of viewing the subject. If by miracle we understand either the suspension or subversion of the laws of nature, or the intervention of the first cause in certain particular cases, I could not concede it. In this negation physical and logical reasons are secondary; the true reason--let no one be surprised--is entirely religious; the miracle is immoral. The equality of all before God is one of the postulates of the religious consciousness, and the miracle, that good pleasure of God, only degrades him to the level of the capricious tyrants of the earth. The existing churches, making, as nearly all of them do, this notion of miracle the very essence of religion and the basis of all positive faith, involuntarily render themselves guilty of that emasculation of manliness and morality of which they so passionately complain. If God intervenes thus irregularly in the affairs of men, the latter can hardly do otherwise than seek to become courtiers who expect all things of the sovereign's _favor_. The question changes its aspect, if we call miracle, as we most generally do, all that goes beyond ordinary experience. Many apologists delight in showing that the unheard of, the inexplicable, are met with all through life. They are right and I agree with them, on condition that they do not at the close of their explanation replace this new notion of the supernatural by the former one. It is thus that I have come to conclude the reality of the stigmata. They may have been a unique fact without being more miraculous than other phenomena; for example, the mathematical powers or the musical ability of an infant prodigy. There are in the human creature almost indefinite powers, marvellous energies; in the great majority of men these lie in torpid slumber, but awaking to life in a few, they make of them prophets, men of genius, and saints who show humanity its true nature. We have caught but fleeting glimpses into the domain of mental pathology, so vast is it and unexplored; the learned men of the future will perhaps make, in the realms of psychology and physiology, such discoveries as will bring about a complete revolution in our laws and customs. It remains to examine the stigmata from the point of view of history. And though in this field there is no lack of difficulties, small and great, the testimony appears to me to be at once too abundant and too precise not to command conviction. We may at the outset set aside the system of those who hold that Brother Elias helped on their appearance by a pious fraud. Such a claim might indeed be defended if these marks had been gaping wounds, as they are now or in most cases have been represented to be; but all the testimony agrees in describing them, with the exception of the mark on the side, as blackish, fleshy excrescences, like the heads of nails, and in the palms of the hands like the points of nails clinched by a hammer. There was no bloody exudation except at the side. On the other hand, any deception on the part of Elias would oblige us to hold that his accomplices were actually the heads of the party opposed to him, Leo, Angelo, and Rufino. Such want of wit would be surprising indeed in a man so circumspect. Finally the psychological agreement between the external circumstances and the event is so close that an invention of this character would be as inexplicable as the fact itself. That which indeed almost always betrays invented or unnatural incidents is that they do not fit into the framework of the facts. They are extraneous events, purely decorative elements whose place might be changed at will. Nothing of the sort is the case here: Thomas of Celano is so veracious and so exact, that though holding the stigmata to be miraculous, he gives us all the elements necessary for explaining them in a diametrically opposite manner. 1. The preponderating place of the passion of Jesus in Francis's conscience ever since his conversion (1 Cel., 115; 2 Cel., 1, 6; 3, 29; 49; 52). 2. His sojourn in the Verna coincides with a great increase of mystical fervor. 3. He there observes a Lent in honor of the archangel St. Michael. 4. The festival of the exaltation of the cross comes on, and in the vision of the crucified seraph is blended the two ideas which have taken possession of him, the angels and the crucifix (1 Cel., 91-96, 112-115). This perfect congruity between the circumstances and the prodigy itself forms a moral proof whose value cannot be exaggerated. It is time to pass the principal witnesses in review. 1. Brother Elias, 1226. On the very day after the death of Francis, Brother Elias, in his capacity of vicar, sent letters to the entire Order announcing the event and prescribing prayers.[1] After having expressed his sorrow and imparted to the Brothers the blessing with which the dying Francis had charged him for them, he adds: "I announce to you a great joy and a new miracle. Never has the world seen such a sign, except on the Son of God who is the Christ God. For a long time before his death our Brother and Father appeared as crucified, having in his body five wounds which are truly the stigmata of Christ, for his hands and his feet bore marks as of nails without and within, forming a sort of scars; while at the side he was as if pierced with a lance, and often a little blood oozed from it." 2. Brother Leo. We find that it is the very adversary of Elias who is the natural witness, not only of the stigmata, but of the circumstances of their imprinting. This fact adds a peculiar value to his account. We learned above (Critical Study, p. 377) the untoward fate of a part of the Legend of Brothers Leo, Angelo, and Rufino. The chapters with which it now closes (68-73) and in which the narrative of the miracle occurs, were not originally a part of it. They are a summary added at a later time to complete this document. This appendix, therefore, has no historic value, and we neither depend on it with the ecclesiastical authors to affirm the miracle, nor with M. Hase to call it in question. Happily the testimony of Brother Leo has come down to us in spite of that. We are not left even to seek for it in the Speculum, the Fioretti, the Conformities, where fragments of his work are to be found; we find it in several other documents of incontestable authority. The authenticity of the autograph of St. Francis preserved at Assisi appears to be thoroughly established (see Critical Study, p. 357); it contains the following note by Brother Leo's hand: "The Blessed Francis two years before his death kept on the Verna in honor of the B. V. Mary mother of God, and St. Michael Archangel, a Lent from the festival of the Assumption of the B. V. M. to the festival of St. Michael in September, and the hand of God was upon him by the vision and the address of the seraph and the impression of the stigmata upon his body. He made the laudes that are on the other side, ... etc." Again, Eccleston (13) shows us Brother Leo complaining to Brother Peter of Tewkesbury, minister in England, that the legend is too brief concerning the events on the Verna, and relating to him the greater number of the incidents which form the nucleus of the Fioretti on the stigmata. These memorials are all the more certain that they were immediately committed to writing by Peter of Tewkesbury's companion, Brother Garin von Sedenfeld. Finally Salembeni, in his chronicle (ad ann. 1224) in speaking of Ezzelino da Romano is led to oppose him to Francis. He suddenly remembers the stigmata and says, "Never man on earth, but he, has had the five wounds of Christ. His companion, Brother Leo, who was present when they washed the body before the burial, told me that he looked precisely like a crucified man taken down from the cross." 3. Thomas of Celano, before 1230. He describes them more at length than Brother Elias (1 Cel., 94, 95, 112). The details are too precise not to suggest a lesson learned by heart. The author nowhere assumes to be an eye-witness, yet he has the tone of a legal deposition. These objections are not without weight, but the very novelty of the miracle might have induced the Franciscans to fix it in a sort of canonical and so to say, stereotyped narrative. 4. The portrait of Francis, by Berlinghieri, dated 1236,[2] preserved at Pescia (province of Lucca) shows the stigmata as they are described in the preceding documents. 5. Gregory IX. in 1237. Bull of March 31; _Confessor Domini_ (Potthast, 10307. Cf. 10315). A movement of opinion against the stigmata had been produced in certain countries. The pope asks all the faithful to believe in them. Two other bulls of the same day, one addressed to the Bishop of Olmütz, the other to the Dominicans, energetically condemns them for calling the stigmata in question (Potthast, 10308 and 10309). 6. Alexander IV., in his bull _Benigna operatio_ of October 29, 1255 (Potthast, 16077), states that having formerly been the domestic prelate of Cardinal Ugolini, he knew St. Francis familiarly, and supports his description of the stigmata by these relations. To this pontiff are due several bulls declaring excommunicate all those who deny them. These contribute nothing new to the question. 7. Bonaventura (1260) repeats in his legend Thomas of Celano's description (Bon., 193; cf. 1 Cel. 94 and 95), not without adding some new factors (Bon., 194-200 and 215-218), often so coarse and clumsy that they inevitably awaken doubt (see for example, 201). 8. Matthew Paris ([Cross] 1259). His discordant witness barely deserves being cited by way of memoir (see Critical Study, p. 431). To be able to forgive the fanciful character of his long disquisitions on St. Francis, we are forced to recall to mind that he owed his information to the verbal account of some pilgrim. He makes the stigmata appear a fortnight before the Saint's death, shows them continually emitting blood, the wound on the side so wide open that the heart could be seen. The people gather in crowds to see the sight, the cardinals come also, and all together listen to Francis's strange declarations. (_Historia major_, Watts's edition London, 1 vol. fol., 1640, pp. 339-342.) This list might be greatly lengthened by the addition of a passage from Luke bishop of Tuy (Lucas Tudensis) written in 1231;[3] based especially on the Life by Thomas of Celano, and oral witnesses. The statement of Brother Boniface, an eye-witness, at the chapter of Genoa (1254). (Eccl. 13.) Finally and especially, we should study the strophes relating to the stigmata in the proses, hymns, and sequences composed in 1228 by the pope and several cardinals for the Office of St. Francis; but such a work, to be done with accuracy, would carry us very far, and the authorities already cited doubtless suffice without bringing in others.[4] The objections which have been opposed to these witnesses may be reduced, I think, to the following:[5] _a._ Francis's funeral took place with surprising precipitation. Dead on Saturday evening, he was buried Sunday morning. _b._ His body was enclosed in a coffin, which is contrary to Italian habits. _c._ At the time of the removal, the body, wrested from the multitude, is so carefully hidden in the basilica that for centuries its precise place has been unknown. _d._ The bull of canonization makes no mention of the stigmata. _e._ They were not admitted without a contest, and among those who denied them were some bishops. None of these arguments appears to me decisive. _a._ In the Middle Ages funerals almost always took place immediately after death (Innocent III. dying at Perugia July 16, 1216, is interred the 17th; Honorius III. dies March 18, 1227, and is interred the next day). _b._ It is more difficult than many suppose to know what were the habits concerning funerals in Umbria in the thirteenth century. However that may be, it was certainly necessary to put Francis's body into a coffin. He being already canonized by popular sentiment, his corpse was from that moment a relic for which a reliquary was necessary; nay more, a strong box such as the secondary scenes in Berlinghieri's picture shows it to have been. Without such a precaution the sacred body would have been reduced to fragments in a few moments. Call to mind the wild enthusiasm that led the devotees to cut off the ears and even the breasts of St. Elizabeth of Hungary. [_Quædam aures illius truncabant, etiam summitatem mamillarum ejus quidam praecidebant et pro reliquiis sibi servabant._--_Liber de dictis iv. ancillarum_, Mencken, vol. ii., p. 2032.] _c._ The ceremony of translation brought an innumerable multitude to Assisi. If Brother Elias concealed the body,[6] he may have been led to do so by the fear of some organized surprise of the Perugians to gain possession of the precious relic. With the customs of those days, such a theft would have been in nowise extraordinary. These very Perugians a few years later stole away from Bastia, a village dependent on Assisi, the body of Conrad of Offida, which was performing innumerable miracles there. (_Conform._, 60b, 1; cf. Giord., 50.) Similar affrays took place at Padua over the relics of St. Anthony. (Hilaire, _Saint Antoine de Padoue, sa légende primitive_, Montreuil-sur-Mer, 1 vol., 8vo, 1890, pp. 30-40.) _d._ The bull of canonization, with the greater number of such documents, for that matter, makes no historic claim. In its wordy rhetoric we shall sooner learn the history of the Philistines, of Samson, or even of Jacob, than of St. Francis. Canonization here is only a pretext which the old pontiff seizes for recurring to his favorite figures. This silence signifies nothing after the very explicit testimony of other bulls by the same pontiff in 1227, and after the part given to the stigmata in the liturgical songs which in 1228 he composed for the office of St. Francis. _e._ These attacks by certain bishops are in nowise surprising; they are episodes in the struggle of the secular clergy against the mendicant orders. At the time when these negations were brought forward (1237) the narrative of Thomas of Celano was official and everywhere known; nothing therefore would have been easier, half a score of years after the events, than to bring witnesses to expose the fraud if there had been any; but the Bishop of Olmütz and the others base their objections always and only upon dogmatic grounds. As to the attacks of the Dominicans, it is needless to recall the rivalry between the two Orders;[7] is it not then singular to find these protestations coming from Silesia (!) and never from Central Italy, where, among other eye-witnesses, Brother Leo was yet living ([Cross] 1271)? Thus the witnesses appear to me to maintain their integrity. We might have preferred them more simple and shorter, we could wish that they had reached us without details which awake all sorts of suspicions,[8] but it is very seldom that a witness does not try to prove his affirmations and to prop them up by arguments which, though detestable, are appropriate to the vulgar audience to which he is speaking. II. THE PARDON OF AUGUST 2D, CALLED INDULGENCE OF PORTIUNCULA[9] This question might be set aside; on the whole it has no direct connection with the history of St. Francis. Yet it occupies too large a place in modern biographies not to require a few words: it is related that Francis was in prayer one night at Portiuncula when Jesus and the Virgin appeared to him with a retinue of angels. He made bold to ask an unheard-of privilege, that of plenary indulgence of all sins for all those who, having confessed and being contrite, should visit this chapel. Jesus granted this at his mother's request, on the sole condition that his vicar the pope would ratify it. The next day Francis set out for Perugia, accompanied by Masseo, and obtained from Honorius the desired indulgence, but only for the day of August 2d. Such, in a few lines, is the summary of this legend, which is surrounded with a crowd of marvellous incidents. The question of the nature and value of indulgences is not here concerned. The only one which is here put is this: Did Francis ask this indulgence and did Honorius III. grant it? Merely to reduce it to these simple proportions is to be brought to answer it with a categorical No. It would be tedious to refer even briefly to the difficulties, contradictions, impossibilities of this story, many a time pointed out by orthodox writers. In spite of all they have come to the affirmative conclusion: _Roma locuta est_. Those whom this subject may interest will find in the note above detailed bibliographical indications of the principal elements of this now quieted discussion. I shall confine myself to pointing out the impossibilities with which tradition comes into collision; they are both psychological and historical. The Bollandists long since pointed out the silence of Francis's early biographers upon this question. Now that the published documents are much more numerous, this silence is still more overwhelming. Neither the First nor the Second Life by Thomas of Celano, nor the anonymous author of the second life given in the Acta Sanctorum, nor even the anonymous writer of Perugia, nor the Three Companions, nor Bonaventura say a single word on the subject. No more do very much later works mention it, which sin only by excessive critical scruples: Bernard of Besse, Giordiano di Giano, Thomas Eccleston, the Chronicle of the Tribulations, the Fioretti, and even the Golden Legend. This conspiracy of silence of all the writers of the thirteenth century would be the greatest miracle of history if it were not absurd. By way of explanation, it has been said that these writers refrained from speaking of this indulgence for fear of injuring that of the Crusade; but in that case, why did the pope command seven bishops to go to Portiuncula to proclaim it in his name? The legend takes upon itself to explain that Francis refused a bull or any written attestation of this privilege; but, admitting this, it would still be necessary to explain why no hint of this matter has been preserved in the papers of Honorius III. And how is it that the bulls sent to the seven bishops have left not the slightest trace upon this pontiff's register? Again, how does it happen, if seven bishops officially promulgated this indulgence in 1217, that St. Francis, after having related to Brother Leo his interview with the pope, said to him: "_Teneas secretum hoc usque circa mortem tuam; quia non habet locum adhuc. Quia hæc indulgentia occultabitur ad tempus; sed Dominus trahet eam extra et manifestabitur._" _Conform._, 153b, 2. Such an avowal is not wanting in simplicity. It abundantly proves that before the death of Brother Leo (1271) no one had spoken of this famous pardon. After this it is needless to insist upon secondary difficulties; how is it that the chapters-general were not fixed for August 2d, to allow the Brothers to secure the indulgence? How explain that Francis, after having received in 1216 a privilege unique in the annals of the Church, should be a stranger to the pope in 1219! There is, however, one more proof whose value exceeds all the others--Francis's Will: "I forbid absolutely all the Brothers by their obedience, in whatever place they may be, to ask any bull of the court of Rome, whether directly or indirectly, nor under pretext of church or convent, nor under pretext of preaching, nor even for their personal protection." Before closing it remains for us to glance at the growth of this legend. It was definitively constituted about 1330-1340, but it was in the air long before. With the patience of four Benedictines (of the best days) we should doubtless be able to find our way in the medley of documents, more or less corrupted, from which it comes to us, and little by little we might find the starting-point of this dream in a friar who sees blinded humanity kneeling around Portiuncula to recover sight.[10] It is not difficult to see in general what led to the materialization of this graceful fancy: people remembered Francis's attachment to the chapel where he had heard the decisive words of the gospel, and where St. Clara in her turn had entered upon a new life. When the great Basilica of Assisi was built, drawing to itself pilgrims and privileges, an opposition of principles and of inspiration came to be added to the petty rivalry between it and Portiuncula. The zealots of poverty said aloud that though the Saint's body rested in the basilica his heart was at Portiuncula.[11] By dint of repeating and exaggerating what Francis had said about the little sanctuary, they came to give a precise and so to say doctrinal sense to utterances purely mystical. The violences and persecutions of the party of the Large Observance under the generalship of Crescentius[12] (1244-1247) aroused a vast increase of fervor among their adversaries. To the bull of Innocent IV. declaring the basilica thenceforth _Caput et Mater_ of the Order[13] the Zealots replied by the narratives of Celano's Second Life and the legends of that period.[14] They went so far as to quote a promise of Francis to make it in perpetuity the _Mater et Caput_ of his institute.[15] In this way the two parties came to group themselves around these two buildings. Even to-day it is the same. The Franciscans of the Strict Observance occupy Portiuncula, while the Basilica of Assisi is in the hands of the Conventuals (Large Observance), who have adopted all the interpretations and mitigations of the Rules; they are worthy folk, who live upon their dividends. By a phenomenon, unique, I think, in the annals of the Church, they have pushed the freedom of their infidelity to the point of casting off the habit, the popular brown cassock. Dressed all in black, shod and hatted, nothing distinguishes them from the secular clergy except a modest little cord. Poor Francis! That he may have the joy of feeling his tomb brushed by a coarse gown, some daring friar must overcome his very natural repugnances, and come to kneel there. The indulgence of August 2d is then the reply of the Zealots to the persecutions of their brothers. An attentive study will perhaps show it emerging little by little under the generalship of Raimondo Gaufridi (1289-1295); Conrad di Offida ([Cross] 1306) seems to have had some effect upon it, but only with the next generation do we find the legend completed and avowed in open day. Begun in a misapprehension it ends by imposing itself upon the Church, which to-day guarantees it with its infallible authority, and yet in its origin it was a veritable cry of revolt against the decisions of Rome. FOOTNOTES: [1] The text was published in 1620 by Spoelberch (in his _Speculum vitæ B. Francisci_, Antwerp, 2 vols., 12mo, ii., pp. 103-106), after the copy addressed to Brother Gregory, minister in France, and then preserved in the convent of the Recollects in Valenciennes. It was reproduced by Wadding (Ann. 1226, no. 44) and the Bollandists (pp. 668 and 669). So late an appearance of a capital document might have left room for doubts; there is no longer reason for any, since the publication of the chronicle of Giordano di Giano, who relates the sending of this letter (Giord., 50). The Abbé Amoni has also published this text (at the close of his _Legenda trium Sociorum_, Rome, 1880, pp. 105-109), but according to his deplorable habit, he neglects to tell whence he has drawn it. This is the more to be regretted since he gives a variant of the first order: _Nam diu ante mortem_ instead of _Non diu_, as Spoelberch's text has it. The reading _Nam diu_ appears preferable from a philological point of view. [2] Engraved in Saint François d'Assise, Paris, 4to, 1885, p. 277. [3] _Bibliotheca Patrum._ Lyons, 1677, xxv., _adv. Albigenses_, lib. ii., cap. 11., cf. iii., 14 and 15. Reproduced in the A. SS., p. 652. [4] The curious may consult the following sources: Salimbeni, ann. 1250--_Conform._, 171b 2, 235a 2; Bon., 200; Wadding, _ann. 1228_, no. 78; A. SS., p. 800. Manuscript 340 of the _Sacro Convento_ contains (fo. 55b-56b) four of these hymns. Cf. _Archiv._ i., p. 485. [5] See in particular Hase: _Franz v. Assisi_. Leipsic, 1 vol., 8vo., 1856. The learned professor devotes no less than sixty closely printed pages to the study of the stigmata, 142-202. [6] The more I think about it, the more incapable I become of attributing any sort of weight to this argument from the disappearance of the body; for in fact, if there had been any pious fraud on Elias's part, he would on the contrary have displayed the corpse. [7] See, for example, 2 Cel., 3, 86, as well as the encyclical of Giovanni di Parma and Umberto di Romano, in 1225. [8] The following among many others: Francis had particularly high breeches made for him, to hide the wound in the side (Bon., 201). At the moment of the apparition, which took place during the night, so great a light flooded the whole country, that merchants lodging in the inns of Casentino saddled their beasts and set out on their way. _Fior., iii. consid._ Hase, in his study, is continually under the weight of the bad impression made upon him by Bonaventura's deplorable arguments; he sees the other witness only through him. I think that if he had read simply Thomas of Celano's first Life, he would have arrived at very different conclusions. [9] The most important document is manuscript 344 of the archives of Sacro Convento at Assisi. _Liber indulgentiæ S. Mariæ de Angelis sive de Portiuncula in quo libra ego fr. Franciscus Bartholi de Assisio posui quidquid potui sollicite invenire in legendis antiquis et novis b. Francisci et in aliis dictis sociorum ejus de loco eodem et commendatione ipsius loci et quidquid veritatis et certitudinis potui invenire de sacra indulgentia prefati loci, quomodo scilicet fuit impetrata et data b. Francisco de miraculis ipsius indulgentiæ quæ ipsam declarant certam et veram._ Bartholi lived in the first half of the fourteenth century. His work is still unpublished, but Father Leo Patrem M. O. is preparing it for publication. The name of this learned monk gives every guaranty for the accuracy of this difficult work; meanwhile a detailed description and long extracts may be found in the Miscellanea (ii., 1887). _La storia del perdono di Francesco de Bartholi_, by Don Michele Faloci Pulignani, pp. 149-153 (cf. _Archiv._, i., p. 486). See also in the Miscellanea (i., 1886, p. 15) a bibliographical note containing a detailed list of fifty-eight works (cf. ibid., pp. 48, 145). The legend itself is found in the _Speculum_, 69b-83a, and in the _Conformities_, 151b-157a. In these two collections it is still found laboriously worked in and is not an integral part of the rest of the work. In the latter, Bartolemmeo di Pisa has carried accuracy so far as to copy from end to end all the documents that he had before him, and as they belong to different periods he thus gives us several phases of the development of the tradition. The most complete work is that of the Recollect Father Grouwel: _Historia critica S. Indulgentiæ B. Mariæ Angelorum vulgo de Portiuncula ... contra Libellos aliquos anonymo ac famosos nuper editos_, Antwerp, 1726, 1 vol., 8vo. pp. 510. The Bollandist Suysken also makes a long study of it (A. SS., pp. 879-910), as also the Recollect Father Candide Chalippe, _Vie de saint François d'Assise_, 3 vols., 8vo, Paris, 1874 (the first edition is of 1720), vol. iii., pp. 190-327. In each of these works we find what has been said in all the others. The numerous writings against the Indulgence are either a collection of vulgarities or dogmatic treatises; I refrain from burdening these pages with them. The principal ones are indicated by Grouwel and Chalippe. Among contemporaries Father Barnabas of Alsace: _Portiuncula oder Geschichte Unserer lieben Frau von den Engeln_ (Rixheim, 1 vol., 8vo. 1884), represents the tradition of the Order, and the Abbé Le Monnier (_Histoire de Saint François_, 2 vols., 8vo, Paris, 1889), moderate Catholic opinion in non-Franciscan circles. The best summary is that of Father Panfilo da Magliano in his _Storia compendiosa_. It has been completed and amended in the German translation: _Geschichte des h. Franciscus und der Franziskaner übersetzt und bearbeitet_ von Fr. Quintianus Müller, vol. i., Munich, 1883, pp. 233-259. [10] 2 Cel., 1, 13; 3 Soc., 56; Bon., 24. [11] _Conform._, 239b, 2. [12] See in particular _Archiv._, ii., p. 259, and the bull of February 7, 1246. Potthast, 12007; Glassberger, _ann. 1244_ (_An. fr._ t. ii., p. 69). [13] _Is qui ecclesiam_, March. 6, 1245, Potthast, 11576. [14] 2 Cel., 1, 12 (cf. _Conform._, 218a, 1); 3 Soc., 56; _Spec._, 32b ff.; 49b ff.; _Conform._, 144a, 2. [15] _Conform._, 169a; 2, 217b. 1 ff. Cf. _Fior._, Amoni's ed. (Appendix to the Codex of the Bib. Angelica), p. 378. * * * * * * * * * * TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES TEXT CONVENTIONS Text surrounded by underscores (_text_) indicates italics in the original. Text surrounded by tildes (~text~) indicates bold in the original. 'Folio' abbreviation: The original has two versions. 'F' or 'f' followed by superscripted 'o' is transcribed F^o/f^o. 'fo.'/'fos.' is transcribed 'fo.'/'fos.'. [Cross] is used where the text had a single character that resembled a Maltese Cross, and denotes year of death. Footnotes have been moved from the bottom of each page to the end of each chapter, and renumbered by chapter. CHANGES FROM THE ORIGINAL TEXT In many spots in the scans, primarily in footnote citations, periods and commas are partially or completely obscured, with white space where the mark would logically appear. Where the scan is unclear, punctuation has been transcribed to match the most common use in the book. Where the punctuation is different from common usage, but clearly present (i.e. no extra white space after an abbreviation or full comma where a period seems to make more sense), the scans have been replicated. There were a number of incidences of missing closing quotation marks, particularly for dialog or prayers. These have been corrected without further comment. Two lines missing from the translation of the prayer commonly known as "The Canticle of All Creatures" (Chapter XVII) have been added. The added text is shown in braces ({}). 'Analecta Fracniscana' in CRITICAL STUDY OF THE WORKS, Section IV, Part III, Footnote 9 was changed to 'Analecta Franciscana'. 'Served by a poor priest who scarely' in Chapter IV was changed to 'Served by a poor priest who scarcely'. In the original text, 'obediunt' was NOT italicized in the following quotation: "Videmus primus ordinis fundatorem magestrum cui tanquam summo Priori suo omnes alii obediunt." (CRITICAL STUDY OF THE WORKS, Section III, Part V, Footnote 4). It is italicized here. Chapter XV, footnote 4 had no anchor marker in the original text. The placement of this marker in this transcription is not confirmed. 
33950	----	Transcription Notes: All obvious punctuation errors have been corrected. Both alms-giving and almsgiving appeared in the text. Almsgiving has been retained. Both grey-green and grey green appeared in the text. Grey-green has been retained. Both countryside and country-side appeared in the text. Country-side has been retained. Both lawsuits and law-suits appeared in the text. Lawsuits has been retained. Both unheard of and unheard-of both appeared in text. Unheard of has been retained. Both any one and anyone both appeared in text. Anyone has been retained. Both swineherd and swine-herd appeared in the text. Swine-herd has been retained. Both lay workers and lay-workers appeared in the text. Lay-workers has been retained. Both Bernard di Quintavelle and Bernard di Quintavalle appeared in the text. The variation has been retained. p 1. Appenines has been corrected to Apennines. p 16. delapidated was corrected to dilapidated p 66. Appenines has been corrected to Apennines. p 116. amplication has been corrected to application. p 116. nomed was corrected to named * * * * * THE RED-HOT LIBRARY. EDITED BY BRAMWELL BOOTH. No. I. BROTHER FRANCIS OR, LESS THAN THE LEAST. BY BRIGADIER EILEEN DOUGLAS. [Illustration] THE SALVATION ARMY BOOK DEPARTMENT LONDON: 79 & 81 Fortess Road, N.W. MELBOURNE: 69 Bourke Street NEW YORK: 120 West Fourteenth Street TORONTO: Albert Street CAPE TOWN: Loop Street SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, HAMILTON, KENT & CO., LTD. 4 STATIONERS' HALL COURT, LONDON, E.C. 1911 _Second Edition._ _Uniform with this Volume._ II. ON THE BANKS OF THE RIVER. A Brief History of the Last Days of MRS. GENERAL BOOTH. III. GEORGE FOX, THE RED-HOT QUAKER. IV. HELPS TO HOLINESS. V. DAVID STONER; OR, THE SHY PREACHER. VI. RED FLOWERS OF MARTYRDOM. VII. HEART TALKS ON HOLINESS. VIII. COMMISSIONER DOWDLE, THE SAVED RAILWAY GUARD. IX. PETER CARTWRIGHT: GOD'S ROUGH-RIDER. X. THE LIFE OF LIEUT.-COLONEL JUNKER. XI. THE SOUL-WINNER'S SECRET. XII. GIDEON OUSELEY: AN OLD-TIME IRISH SALVATIONIST. XIII. FLETCHER OF MADELEY. XIV. THE CROSS OUR COMFORT. XV. SIGHS FROM HELL. XVI. WHAT HINDERS YOU? XVII. THE FRUITS OF THE SPIRIT, AND THE WHOLE ARMOUR OF GOD. CONTENTS CHAPTER. PAGE. I.--ASSISI AND FRANCIS 1 II.--A CHANGE 5 III.--A LONELY STRUGGLE 10 IV.--VICTORY WITHOUT AND WITHIN 15 V.--FRANCIS' CALL 21 VI.--FRANCIS' EARLY DISCIPLES 28 VII.--FRANCIS CALLED TO BE A SAINT 36 VIII.--FRANCIS AS A LEADER OF MEN 44 IX.--ESTABLISHMENT OF THE ORDER 50 X.--THE STORY OF CLARA 57 XI.--THE FIRST CHAPTER 62 XII.--SOME OF FRANCIS' CONVERTS 70 XIII.--THE STORY OF THE MARTYRS 80 XIV.--FIRST FOREIGN MISSIONS 87 XV.--FRANCIS' VISIT TO THE SULTAN: DISCOURAGEMENTS 95 XVI.--BRETHREN OF THE MILITIA OF JESUS CHRIST 103 XVII.--CLOUDS 111 XVIII.--LAST DAYS 119 PREFACE. The following pages have been written by my request with a view to making the Soldiers of The Salvation Army somewhat familiar with the life-story of one of the most remarkable men this world has ever seen. While many and varied will be the opinions respecting the methods employed by Francis of Assisi, and while some will doubtless strongly dissent from these methods, yet I think no serious follower of Jesus Christ can do otherwise than admire the sincerity, devotion and sacrifice of the man; and further, there can be, I think, no two opinions as to his having taught and manifested to the world what it means to be possessed entirely by the Saviour's spirit. And what did that spirit produce? Surely it was the same entire devotion of our all to the service of God and humanity which we Salvationists daily teach. The difference between our spirit and that of the subject of this Memoir is, I trust, very slight, although the manifestations of it are widely diverse. We are quite as extreme in our demands as to poverty and solitude as he was, only that we do not value these things for their own sake as he did. We daily induce persons to leave earthly possessions and prospects in order to go and seek the salvation of the poor, amongst whom their future life is to be spent; and we require our Officers to consecrate all they have to the service of the Kingdom of God right through their career, and to live always in a state of readiness to be sent away from all they have known and loved--not, indeed, to live in any cloister or hermitage, but in the solitude amidst the crowd which must ever be more or less the lot of the highest leaders of men. The system established by Francis was not adaptable to family life, whereas it is our joy to show how as complete a devotion to the good of others can be manifested by the father or mother, who spend most of their hours in toil for the support of those dependent upon them, as by the monks and nuns of old, even when they walked in entire harmony with the rules of their various orders. We have demonstrated that most people by the very fact of their being engaged in business, and having to fulfil the duties of family life, acquire extra power to capture for God those who are still in the ranks of worldliness and selfishness. Nevertheless, we must always expect God to require from time to time witnesses who might step out of the ordinary path altogether in order to revolutionise the world for Him. It were better far to aspire to so high and holy a calling than to excuse in ourselves any less self-denial, any easier life than this man's boundless love to Christ constrained him to adopt. It is most melancholy to reflect that Francis died almost broken-hearted over what he felt to be the unfaithfulness of his brethren. We believe that God has guided us to plans which, being consistent with the possibilities of modern human life, are capable of being carried out fully and always. But the vital question is the maintenance of that intense spirit of personal devotion to the good Shepherd and His lost sheep, which can alone render any such scheme of life possible. To that great end may this book minister, and God grant us grace and wisdom to raise up generation after generation of soldiers, who will not only drink in, but fully carry out that spirit. WILLIAM BOOTH. _International Headquarters, London._ BROTHER FRANCIS. OR, LESS THAN THE LEAST. CHAPTER I. ASSISI AND FRANCIS. "Hands love clasped through charmèd hours, Feet that press the bruisèd flowers, Is there naught for you to dare, That ye may his signet wear?" You will not be likely to find Assisi marked on any ordinary map of Italy. It is far too unimportant a place for that. That is to say, geographically unimportant. Assisi lies half-way up the Apennines. The houses, which are built of a curious kind of rosy-tinted stone, press so closely together one above the other on the rocks, so that each house seems trying to look over its neighbours' head. The result of this is that from every window you have one of the grandest views in Europe. Above, the mountains tower into the sky, and yet they are not so close as to suggest crowding. Beneath lies stretched out the Umbrian plain, the centre and heart of Italy. With its rich harvests, plentiful streams and luxuriant vegetation, it might well be called the Eden of Italy. The atmosphere is clear and transparent, and the nights, with their dark blue cloudless skies, studded with myriads of shining, sparkling stars, are better imagined than described! [Sidenote: _Like a Prince._] It was midway up one of the narrow steep little streets, in one of those rosy-tinted houses, that Francis Bernardone was born, about six hundred years ago. Only he wasn't Francis just then. He was John. As a matter of fact there was no such name as Francis known in Assisi, and some think it was invented there and then for the first time by Pietro Bernardone. When his baby was born, Pietro was far away, travelling in France. He was a merchant, and his business often took him away from home. As there were no letters or telegrams to tell him the news, it was not till he got back that he found he had a baby son, who had been duly christened John at the parish church. But Pietro had no idea of letting a little matter of this kind stand in his way, and he told his wife, Pica, that the baby was not to be John, but Francis or Francesca. And Francis he was. The neighbours didn't like it at all. Why should Pietro set himself up to be so much better than other folks that he must needs invent a name for his baby? In what was his baby better than any of theirs? And so forth. Oh, Assisi was a very natural little town! From his babyhood these neighbours sat in judgment on little Francis. There was nothing much about him that pleased them. They disapproved of his dress, which was rich and fine, and always according to the latest fashion; of his idle, free, careless ways, of his handsome face, of his superabundance of pocket-money. "Your son lives like a prince," a neighbour said once to Pica. "What is that to you!" retorted Pica, "our son does indeed live like a prince. Have patience, the day may come when he will live like the Son of God." But in truth that day seemed long in coming, and the neighbours might well be forgiven when they said among themselves that young Francis Bernardone was being utterly spoiled. It was quite true. Frank, gay, good-tempered, easily led, fond of all kinds of beauty and soft living, the life of indulgence and ease and pleasure that he was brought up in was not the one that would best fit him for the battle of life. Pietro was rich, and he was also exceeding proud of his handsome gay son. It delighted him more than anything else to hear people say that he looked like a prince of royal blood, and he denied him nothing that money could procure. [Sidenote: _Young Manhood._] As he grew up into young manhood, Francis nominally assisted his father in his business as cloth merchant. His duties, however, were very light, and he was known more as a leader among the gay youth of Assisi than as a rising business man. He was always chosen as the leader of the sumptuous feasts that the young men of that era wiled away the evening hours with. After the feast was over, Francis used to lead his band out into the streets, and there under those glorious starry skies they finished the night singing the then popular love songs of France and Italy. As Francis was intensely musical, and possessed a very fine voice, he was indispensable at these revelries. He was almost twenty-five before he had his first serious thought. Up to then life had been an enchanted dream. Francis, with his handsome face, beautiful courteous manners, and full pockets the centre of it. He had seen life outside Assisi, for he had fought for his country and suffered imprisonment. He had travelled a little, was fairly well educated, and what was rare in those days spoke and sang in the French language. Of God he seems to have had no knowledge whatever. His kindly, polite nature led him to much almsgiving, but that was merely the outcome of a disposition which hated to see suffering. Francis' lack of religion is not much to be wondered at when we look at the state of the church in his time. Christianity had become old, its first freshness had worn off, and its primitive teaching had fallen into decay. A Christian's life was an easy one, and the service rendered was more of church-going and almsgiving, than purity of heart and life. In many instances those who filled the office of teacher and preacher were corrupt, and lived only for themselves, and the whole tendency of the times was to the most extreme laxity. When almost twenty-five years old, Francis had a very severe illness. For weeks he lay at death's door, and for weeks after all danger was passed, he was confined to the house too weak to move. As his weary convalescence dragged itself along, one absorbing desire filled his mind. If only he could get out of doors, and stand once again in the sunshine, and feast his eyes on the landscape below him! Francis, like all Italians, was a passionate lover of his native country, and at last, one day, he wearily and painfully crawled out. [Sidenote: _Things that Perish._] But what was the matter? The sunshine was there. It flooded the country. The breeze that was to bring him new life and vigor played among his chestnut curls. The mountains towered in their noble grandeur. The wide Umbrian plain lay stretched out at his feet. The skies were as blue, and the flowers as gay and sweet, as ever his fancy painted them. But the young man turned away with a sickening sense of disappointment and failure. "Things that perish," he said mournfully to himself, and thought bitterly of his past life with its gaiety and frivolity. It, too, was among the "things that perish." Life was a dreary emptiness. It was the old, old story. "Thou hast made us for Thyself, oh God, and the heart is restless till it finds its rest in Thee." That tide which flows at least once in the life of every human being was surging round Francis. Happy they who, leaving all else, cast themselves into the infinite ocean of the Divine will and design. CHAPTER II. A CHANGE. "In this easy, painless life, Free from struggle, care, and strife, Ever on my doubting breast, Lies the shadow of unrest; This no path that Jesus trod-- Can the smooth way lead to God?" As health returned, Francis determined that he would no longer waste his life. He had spent a quarter of a century in ease, and pleasure, and amusement. Now, some way or other, there should be a change. Religion to Francis meant acting up to all the duties of his church. This he had already done, and not for a moment did he dream that there was in what he called "religion" any balm for a sore and wounded spirit. It never occurred to him to seek in prayer the mind of the Lord concerning his future. Oh, no, it was many a long day before Francis knew the real meaning of the word prayer. He was convinced of his wrong, and determined to right it. That was as far as he had got. What to do was now the great question. Just about this time, a nobleman of Assisi, Walter of Brienne, was about to start for Apulia, to take part in a war which was going on there. All at once it occurred to Francis that he would go too. He was naturally courageous, and visions filled his mind of the deeds he would do, and the honours that would be bestowed upon him. He hastened at once to the nobleman and begged to be allowed to accompany him. Permission was granted, and Francis set about getting his outfit ready. His rich costume was far more splendid than that of Walter himself, and the trappings of his horse and his general accoutrements were all in keeping, so that altogether Francis was a very magnificent personage indeed! [Sidenote: _A Voice._] A few nights before he started, he dreamed a strange dream. He was sleeping, and he thought somebody called him out of his sleep. "Francis, Francis," said a voice. Then it seemed to Francis that he awoke and found himself in a vast armoury. All around him hung shields and spears and swords, and weapons of all kinds. But the most curious part of it was that each weapon was marked with a cross. In his heart he wondered what it could all mean, and as he was wondering, the voice answered his thoughts. "These are for thee and for thy followers," it said, and then Francis awoke. It was an age when dreams were counted of much importance, and Francis rejoiced over this of his. Heaven, he said to himself, had smiled upon his enterprise. God had undertaken to lead him by the hand, and to what heights could he not aspire! Dreams of earthly honor and distinction floated through his brain as he dressed, and when he went downstairs everybody asked what made him look so radiant. "I have the certainty of becoming a great prince," he answered. Yes, truly, he was to be a prince among men! Could he have seen then the rough road that God was preparing for him, would he have drawn back? Happily for us, we live a day at a time, and further than that our eyes are holden. With a great deal of pomp and display, at the appointed time Francis mounted his horse and set off. But his journey was a short one. About thirty miles from Assisi he was taken ill with an attack of his life-long enemy--the fever--and forced to lie by. He chafed a good deal at this, and wondered and pondered over the mysterious actions of a Providence which had so manifestly sanctioned his expedition. [Sidenote: _The Master or the Servant?_] One evening he was lying half unconscious when he thought he heard the same voice that spoke to him before he started. "Francis," it asked, "what could benefit thee most, the Master or the servant, the rich man or the poor?" "The Master and the rich man," answered Francis in wonderment. "Why, then," went on the voice, "dost thou leave God, Who is the Master and rich, for man, who is the servant and poor?" "Then, Lord, what wilt Thou that I do?" queried Francis. "Return to thy native town, and it shall be shown thee there what thou shalt do," said the voice. It was characteristic of all Francis' after life that he never stopped to query what looked like contradiction of orders, but as soon as ever he was well enough he travelled back home again. His ambition for future greatness, and earthly distinction and honor, all seemed to be lost sight of when the Divine voice spoke. For Francis was convinced that God had spoken to him. It was certainly not easy for a nature like his to return home whence a few short days before, he had departed with such pomp and glory. His father was not over rejoiced to welcome him back, but his friends, who worshipped him, "the flower of Assisi," as they called him, received him gladly. Things had been dull without Francis. His merry songs and jests were missed at the evening feast. For a time he took up the life he had quitted. There was nothing else to do as far as he could see. But he was changed. Even his companions were forced to own that. He sang, and laughed, and jested as usual, but the heart had gone out of his song and laughter, and he was prone to fall into deep fits of meditation. It was a far from satisfactory life. He cared no longer for what was once his very existence, and he knew not as yet to what God would have him turn. He desired to serve God, and gave himself to almsgiving. He made a pilgrimage to Rome, only to be disgusted with the miserable offerings put into the treasury by the pilgrims. [Sidenote: _Conflicts._] "Is this all they spare to God?" he cried, and pulling out his purse flung its contents among the rest. He was tormented and haunted by recollections of his past mis-spent life, and for days he mourned over what was beyond recall. There was a certain old woman in Assisi, horribly deformed and hideously ugly. Francis, with his innate love of the beautiful, recoiled in horror every time he met her. She was a nightmare to him, and he would go far to avoid seeing her. The devil, who is ever ready to work on the weakness of a human soul, used this old woman to torture him. "See," he said, "a picture of what you will become if you persist in mortifying yourself, and leading a life devoted to God. You will become as ugly and repulsive as that old woman in time." The bare idea was agonizing to Francis. The old woman turned up continually, and seemed to pursue him like a phantom. The temptation may seem to stronger souls an ignoble one, but it was an intense and severe one to Francis. He conquered by yielding himself up to the will of God. He accepted everything--deformity, ugliness, pain--if it were God's plan for him. Then and only then had he rest. As soon as he had given up his warlike ambitions and returned to Assisi, he had been in the habit of going off by himself into a cave or grotto, and there being alone with his thoughts. Many a conflict did that cave see, as Francis with tears and cries entreated the Lord to show him how best to employ his life. It was during one of these seasons that his spiritual eyes were opened. Hitherto he had followed blindly an almost unknown God, but he _had_ followed and sought, and the end of his faith was sight. It came upon him all at once. Christ--His love for the sinner, His love for him--Christ, bleeding, dying, suffering, for very love--Christ the pure, long-suffering, merciful, patient--Christ the Son of God made Man for us. A wave of great joy swept over Francis, and he wept for very gladness of heart. Here was his Master, his Lord. He had found Him, and henceforth following was easy. [Sidenote: _The Lepers._] Not one of the many translations of the life of Francis, omits to mention his self-imposed mission to the lepers. Assisi, like most foreign towns of the age, was infested with lepers. They were not allowed to live in the towns, but had houses (lazaretti) built for them quite outside. Francis had a deep-rooted repugnance to a leper, and, in passing a lazaretto, always carefully covered up his nose lest any bad odour might reach him, and he always rode far away in the opposite direction, if he chanced to see one in the plains. Nothing shows the change in Francis more than his alteration towards the lepers. One day, when out riding, he saw a leper approaching. His first instinct was his natural one to get away at once. His second, that God required something more of him. Who was he, to loathe and avoid a fellow-creature. Riding up to the leper, he dismounted, gave him some money, and then without a shudder, kissed the dreadful hand held out to him. He had done the impossible, and from this time he constantly visited the lazaretti, putting himself in personal contact with the lepers, giving them money, and doing all he could to lessen their sufferings. Of this period of his experience he writes long years after:-- "When I was in sin it was very bitter to me to behold lepers, but the Lord Himself having led me amongst them, I exercised mercy towards them, and when I left them I felt that what had seemed so bitter to me was changed into sweetness for my soul and body." CHAPTER III. A LONELY STRUGGLE. "Thou must walk on, however man upbraid thee, With Him who trod the winepress all alone: Thou may'st not find one human hand to aid thee, One human soul to comprehend thy own." A rough, stony uphill path, or rather track, under grey-green olive trees, leading to a perfect tangle of cypresses and pines. Somewhere in the tangle of cypresses almost hidden from sight, lay a dilapidated ancient church, which, long ago had been dedicated to the martyr Damian. Up this stony track one day, stumbled Francis. His was now a solitary life. He was a complete puzzle to parents and friends, and, indeed to a great extent he was a puzzle to himself. His life in his father's house was far from pleasant. Pietro's vanity had received a serious blow from what he regarded as his son's "ignominious" return to Assisi. He had been more than willing to give him ample means for every pleasure, so that he might mingle on an equal footing with the young nobles of the land, but to see his money given lavishly to the beggars in the street, and the lepers in the lazar-houses was more than he could stand. A serious, ever widening breach had formed between father and son. Pica, poor woman, knew that, sooner or later, a rupture would come, and much as she loved her strange son, she could do nothing to prevent it. There was literally no one who could comprehend Francis, much less render him any spiritual aid. One faithful companion there had been, who used to follow him round into the woods when he went to pray, and stand at the doors of caves and grottos until his season of meditation was over, but after a time, this friend had been obliged to leave him. Francis tried timidly to tell people a little of what God was dimly revealing to him, but his--to them--vague ideas only resulted in mocking smiles, and assurances that he was rapidly becoming stark, staring mad! So had things come about, that in spite of himself, Francis was thrown entirely and solely upon his new found Lord. [Sidenote: _A Prayer and its Answer._] The cross lay heavy upon him that day, as he stumbled up the tiny olive-shaded path, and lit upon the almost ruined church. This was a direction Francis seldom walked in, but to-day he had been so occupied with his thoughts, that he scarcely knew where he was going. Seeing the church, he passed in and knelt to pray. "Great and glorious God," was his prayer; "and Thou, Lord Jesus, I pray Thee, shed abroad Thy light in the darkness of my mind. Be found of me, Lord, so that in all things I may act only in accordance with Thy holy will." As he prayed, little by little a sense of peace, and a new feeling of acceptance took possession of him. He had known before that God had pardoned him for the past, and was keeping him in the midst of trials and hourly temptations, but this was something quite different. Jesus accepted him, individually, his body as well as his soul, his time, talents, all his being, and desired his labour and assistance. The poor, lonely, crushed heart, was filled to overflowing. He was conscious of a distinct union with Christ. From this time forth, he was to know what it meant to be crucified with Christ--to die daily. As he knelt there among the ruins and decay, it seemed to him that a voice spoke to his soul thus-- "Francis, dost thou see how my house is falling into ruins? Go and set thyself to repair it." "Most willingly, Lord," he answered, hardly knowing what he said. [Sidenote: _For the Benefit of St. Damian's._] Now, respecting the incidents we are about to relate, there are many and various theories. Some say the revelation made to Francis, referred to the spiritual work to which he had not as yet received his call, others there are, who blame him and call him rash and hot-headed, and accuse him of running before he was sent. We are not prepared to give judgment one way or the other. God has not promised us that we shall never make mistakes, and if Francis made a mistake, God certainly over-ruled it, and made it work to His glory, as He has promised "all things" to work for those who love Him. Again, God has His own ways of working, mysterious and curious though they often seem to us, and what looks like "the foolishness of men," often redounds to His greatest praise. But to return to what really happened. Francis rose from his knees, and sought the priest who had charge of St. Damian's. He pressed all the money he had about him into his hands, begged him to buy oil and keep the lamp always burning, then rushed off home. Saddling his horse, he loaded it with the most costly stuffs he could find, and rode off into a neighbouring town, where they found a ready market, and realized a goodly sum. When his stuff was all sold, he disposed of his horse too, and returning on foot to St. Damian's, he placed a well-filled purse in the priest's hands, told him with much satisfaction what he had done, and begged him to have the church restored at once. To his utter consternation, the priest refused, saying he dare not take so large a sum unless Pietro Bernardone approved. Poor Francis was in despair. He flung the money on a window seat in disgust, and begged the priest at least to give him a shelter for a few days. That much bewildered man, hardly knowing what to say or do, consented, and Francis took up his abode with him. But not for long. Pietro, when he found his son did not return home as usual, made enquiries and found where he was located. He was very anxious and uneasy, as he was sure now that his son was afflicted by a religious mania, he would have to renounce all the high hopes he had formed for him. However, he resolved to make a determined effort to recover him, and set out with a large party of friends to storm St. Damian's. They hoped that Francis would listen to reason, and consent to follow them back quietly to Assisi. [Sidenote: _A Lonely Struggle._] But Francis never waited to receive them. An uncontrollable fear took possession of him, and he fled and hid himself in a cavern he alone knew of. His father's party ransacked the priest's abode, and all the country round, but they had to return home baffled. For a month, Francis remained shut up in the cavern. An old servant who loved him dearly, was let into the secret, and used to bring him food. During this month he suffered intensely. It was the first time in his life he had ever suffered contradiction--the first time in his life he had ever had anyone really, openly opposed to him. To be sure, people did not understand him, but they had never shown him any animosity. A sense of utter failure oppressed him. It was a hard trial to one of his temperament, and if his consecration had not been very real, he would never have stood the test. He wept and prayed, and confessed his utter nothingness, his weakness, his inability to accomplish anything of himself. Never in his life had he felt weak and incapable before. Then humbly he entreated that God would enable him to accomplish His will, and not permit his incapacity to frustrate God's designs for him. A consciousness of Divine strength was manifested to him as never before. It was as if a voice said, "I will be with thee, fear not." Strengthened with a strength he never knew heretofore, he came out of the cavern and made straight for his father's house. That day as Pietro Bernardone sat at work indoors, the voice of a mighty tumult was borne in to him. Such a clamour, and yelling, and shouting he never had heard in Assisi in all his time! Rushing upstairs he looked out of the window. It seemed as though the entire populace had turned loose, and were buffeting someone in their midst. "A madman, a madman," yelled the crowd, and sticks and stones and mud flew from all sides. "A madman, a madman," echoed the children. Determined not to lose the fun, Pietro hastened out into the street, joined the crowd, and discovered that his son Francis was the madman in question! With a howl of rage, he rushed upon him, dragged him into the house with oaths and blows, and locked him up in a sort of dungeon. During the succeeding days, he and his wife did all they could to persuade Francis to return to his old mode of life. Pietro entreated and threatened, Pica wept and caressed, but all in vain. [Sidenote: _A Command from God._] "I have received a command from God," was their answer, and "I mean to carry it out." At last, after some time, Pietro being absent for several days on business, Pica unlocked the dungeon and let her son go free. When Pietro returned, he cursed his wife and set off to St. Damian's to fetch Francis back. But Francis declined to go. He said that he feared neither blows nor chains, but God had given him a work to do, and nothing, nor nobody would prevent him carrying out that mission. Pietro was struck by his son's coolness, and seeing that force would be no use, he went to the magistrates and lodged a complaint against his son, desiring the magistrates to recover the money that his son had given to the church, and to oblige him to renounce in legal form all rights of inheritance. The magistrates seem to have been much shocked at Pietro's harshness, but they summoned Francis, who would not appear. When asked to use violence, they said-- "No, since your son has entered God's service, we have nothing to do with his actions," and utterly refused to have anything further to do with the case. CHAPTER IV. VICTORY WITHOUT AND WITHIN. "For poverty and self-renunciation The Father yieldeth back a thousand-fold; In the calm stillness of regeneration, Cometh a joy we never knew of old." Pietro was not avaricious. He cared nothing for the money as money. His plan now was to cut off all supplies, and when his son, who had always been accustomed to the daintiest and softest of living, and was in no way inured to hardship, found that he was now literally a beggar, he would, after a little privation, come to his senses, and sue his father for pardon. This was his idea when he sought the bishop and made his complaint to him. The bishop called Francis to appear before him. On the appointed day he appeared with his father. The venerable bishop, who was a man of great good sense and wisdom, heard all there was to hear, and then turning to the young man, he said-- "My son, thy father is greatly incensed against thee. If thou desirest to consecrate thyself to God, restore to him all that is his." He went on to say that the money was not really Francis', and therefore he had no right to give away what was not his, besides God would never accept money that was an occasion of sin between father and son. Then Francis rose and said-- "My lord, I will give back everything to my father, even the clothes I have had from him!" Returning into a neighbouring room, he stripped off all his rich garments, and clad only in a hair under-garment, laid them and the purse of money at his father's feet. [Sidenote: _One Father._] "Now," he cried, "I have but one father, henceforth I can say in all truth 'Our Father who art in Heaven!'" There was a moment of dead silence. Everybody present was too astonished to speak, then Pietro gathered up the garments and money, and withdrew. A murmur of pity swept through the crowd as they looked at the young man standing half-naked before the tribunal. But no sentiments of pity stirred Pietro. Easy and good-natured when things went according to his liking, he was equally hard and unbending if his will was crossed. It was to him a rude awakening out of a glorious, golden dream, and from his standpoint life looked hard. When Pietro departed the old bishop threw his own mantle round the young man's shoulders, and sent out for some suitable garment. Nothing, however, was forthcoming except a peasant's cloak belonging to one of the gardeners. This Francis gladly put on and passed out of the bishop's hall--a homeless wanderer on the face of the earth. He was not inclined to return to St. Damian's at once. He desired solitude, so he plunged into the woods. As he travelled he sang with all his might praises to God in the French tongue. His singing attracted the notice of some robbers who were hidden in the fastness of the woods. They sprang out and seized him, demanding-- "Who are you?" Francis always courteous replied, "I am the herald of the Great King. But what does that concern you?" The robbers laughed at him for a madman, and after they had made game of him for a time, they tore his garment from his back, and tossing him into a deep ditch where a quantity of snow still lay, they made off crying, "Lie there, you poor herald of the Good God!" When they had disappeared Francis scrambled out stiff with cold and clad only in his one garment, and went on his way singing as before. [Sidenote: _Kitchen Assistant._] Happily his wanderings speedily brought him to a monastery among the mountains. He knocked at the door and begged for help. The monks regarded this strange half-naked applicant with much suspicion, and one can hardly blame them. Nevertheless they received him, and gave him employment in their kitchen as assistant to the cook, to do the rough and heavy work. His food was of the commonest and coarsest, and it never seemed to occur to any of them that he would be the better for a few more clothes. When his solitary garment appeared in imminent danger of dropping to pieces he left the monastery and went on a little further to a neighbouring town where a friend of his lived. He made his way to this friend and asked him out of charity to provide him with a worn garment to cover his nakedness. The case was manifestly an urgent one, and the friend bestowed upon him a suit of clothes consisting of a tunic, leather belt, shoes, and a stick. It was very much the kind of costume then worn by the hermits. From here he started back again to St. Damian's. He stopped on his way to visit a lazar-house, and help in the care of the lepers. He had quite gotten over all his early antipathies, and it was a joy to him now to minister to those poor diseased ones. Probably he would have spent a much longer season here if it were not that again he seemed to hear the same voice calling him to repair the ruined church. So he left the lazar-house and proceeded on his way. He told his friend the priest that he was in no way disappointed or cast down, and that he had good reason to believe that he would be able to accomplish his purpose. There was only one way in which he could attain this end. Money he had none, neither did he know of anyone who loved God and His cause well enough to expend a little of their riches in rebuilding His house. Next day saw him at work. Up and down the streets of his native town he went begging for stones to rebuild St. Damian. "He who gives me one stone shall receive one blessing, he who gives me two will have two blessings, and he who gives me three, three blessings." [Sidenote: "_He is quite Mad._"] The people were unable to do anything at first from pure astonishment. Francis Bernardone, the gay cavalier, the leader of feasts and song, sueing in the streets like a common beggar! They could hardly believe their eyes! "Truly the fellow was mad," they said to each other! But he did not look mad. His smile was as sweet as ever, and the native, polished, courtly manners that had won for him so many friends, now that they were sanctified, were doubly winning. It was impossible to resist him, and stones were brought him in quantities. Load after load, interminable loads he bore on his back like a labourer to St. Damian. Up the steep little path he toiled between the grey-green olives, on and into the tangle of cypress and pine, and there stone by stone with his own hands he repaired the crumbling walls. It was a long wearisome toilsome work, and told considerably on his health. "He is _quite_ mad," reiterated some as the days passed from spring to summer, and from summer to autumn and from autumn into winter again. But there were others who watched him with tears in their eyes. _They_ knew he was not mad. They realized that a great power had changed the once refined man into a servant of all--even the constraining power of the love of Christ, and they shed tears when they thought how far they came short. The priest of St. Damian's was deeply touched at Francis' self-sacrificing work, and often grieved when he saw him doing what he was physically so unfitted for. He conceived a violent admiration for his young lodger, and in spite of his poverty he always contrived to have some dainty dish, or tit-bit for him when he returned to meals. Now Francis always had been particular as to his food, he liked it well served, and he was also very fond of all kinds of sweets and confectionery. For a time he thanked his friend and ate gratefully the pleasant dishes he had provided. One day as he sat at dinner the thought came to him "what should I do if I had nobody to provide my meals." Then he saw for the first time that he was still under bondage to his appetite. He enjoyed nice food, it seemed necessary to him--but was it like that Life he so earnestly strove to copy. Francis sat condemned. The next moment he jumped up and seizing a wooden bowl he went round the streets from door to door begging for scraps of broken meat and bread. The people stared harder than ever, but in a little time his bowl was quite full, and he returned home and sat down to eat his rations. [Sidenote: _A Beggar._] He tried hard, but he turned against them with loathing. In all his life he thought he had never seen such a horrid collection! Then, lifting his heart to God, he made another trial and tasted the food. Lo and behold it was not bad, and as he continued his coarse meal he thought that no dish had ever tasted better! Praising God for victory he went to the priest and told him that he would be no further expense to him, from henceforth he would beg his meals. When Pietro heard that his son had added to his eccentricities by begging for his food his anger knew no bounds! When he met him in the streets he blushed with shame, and often cursed him. But if his family were ashamed of him, there were many among the townsfolk with whom he found sympathy. Help came in on all sides, and at last the walls were repaired, and the church was no longer in danger of tumbling into a mass of ruins. What was needed for the inside was got in the same way as the stones, and pretty soon a congregation was forthcoming. One of the hardest sacrifices God required from Francis connected with this work was one evening when he was out begging from house to house for oil to light the church. He came to a house where an entertainment was going on, a feast very similar to those he had so often presided over in his worldly days. He looked down on his poor common dress, and thought with shame what a figure he would cut among the gay, well-dressed crowd within. For a moment he felt tempted to skip this house. But it was only for a moment; reproaching himself bitterly, he pushed in and standing before the festive gathering, told them simply how much he had objected to coming in, and for what reason, adding that he feared his timidity was counted to him as sin, because he was working in God's name, and in His service. His request was taken in good part, and his words so touched all present that they were eager to give him the aid he sought. [Sidenote: _St. Damian's Finished._] After St. Damian's was quite restored, Francis set to work and did the same for two other equally needy churches in the vicinity. One was St. Peter's, and the other St. Mary's or the Portiuncula. The second one became eventually the cradle of the Franciscan movement. Here he built for himself a cell, where he used to come to pour out his soul in prayer. When his work of repairing came to an end, he gave himself up to meditation, his whole idea being that he would henceforth lead the life of a recluse. But God disposed! CHAPTER V. FRANCIS' CALL. "Oh, my Lord, the Crucified, Who for love of me hast died, Mould me by Thy living breath, To the likeness of Thy death, While the thorns Thy brows entwine, Let no flower wreath rest on mine." But Francis kept a listening ear. God's word was his law, and though he to a certain extent planned what he would do next, yet he left himself entirely free in his Lord's hands, and at His disposal. Had he not remained in this attitude of soul, or had he become wise in his own conceits, or failed to keep his heart and soul fresh with the first vital freshness of regeneration, what would have become of the great Franciscan movement that was destined ultimately to stir the world? God alone knows. _He_ keeps count of lost opportunities, calls neglected, soul stirrings lulled to barren fruitless slumber! The natural tendency of a soul which has been awakened to great action, and accomplished daring feats, is--the first strain passed--to relax, or settle down. It is only the minority that struggle and fight and get the victory over this subtle temptation. The same principle applies in a larger scale, and that is why it is so many glorious religious movements have run a course and then dwindled into mediocrity, the later disciples carving for themselves a medium way. Francis' life-work might easily have dwindled into nothing just here. He had not the least intimation that the Lord demanded anything more of him but that he should love and serve Him all the days of his life, in an ordinary unobtrusive manner. Two years had been spent in repairing the churches, and Francis was now between twenty-seven and twenty-eight years of age. [Sidenote: _His Commission._] It was on the twenty-fourth of February in the year 1209 that he received his call to direct spiritual work. That morning he went to church as usual, and the words of the Gospel for the day came to him direct from Jesus Christ Himself. "Wherever ye go preach, saying, 'The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand. Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, cast out devils. Freely ye have received, freely give. Provide neither silver nor gold nor brass in your purses, neither scrip, nor two coats, nor shoes, nor staff, for the laborer is worthy of his hire.'" These words were a revelation. "This is what I want," cried Francis, as he left the church, conscious for the first time that he had wanted something. "This is what I have long been seeking, from this day forth I shall set myself with all my strength to put it in practice." Immediately he took up his new commission. He threw away his shoes, his stick, his purse, and put on the coarse dress of the peasant of the Apennines, and girded it with a rough piece of rope, the first thing he could find. Thus equipped, he set out a true Knight of our Lord Jesus Christ, and for the first time in his life began to talk to the people he met about their souls. That eloquent fiery tongue, that was destined to make him one of the orators of the age, had not yet become unloosed, and Francis was simplicity itself. Indeed, he did not at first attempt to make anything like a speech or sermon. His efforts were directed towards people whom he was acquainted with, and these he urged to repent in the name of the Lord. He told his own experience, and spoke of the shortness of life, of punishment after death, of the need of heart and life holiness. His halting words struck home, they pierced like a sword, and many thus convicted, repented and turned from their evil ways. [Sidenote: _A Sanctified Leader of Men._] For over two years now, Francis had lived a solitary, and--humanly speaking--a lonely life. He had, however, during that time proved the sufficiency of God. We do not read that he ever longed for a human friend, one that could understand and sympathise with him, so richly had God supplied his every need. But the time had come when his solitude was to end. God was about to raise him up friends. Again he was to take up his old position as a leader of men, only a sanctified one. Bernardo di Quintavelle was a man of birth and position. He was a few years older than Francis, and as he lived in Assisi, he had full opportunity of watching all Francis' vagaries, for so his actions looked to him at first. However, as time passed, and Francis' supposed mania failed to develop into anything very dangerous, Bernardo puzzled and wondered. What was it, he asked himself, that had so completely changed the gay, frivolous, ease-loving Francis Bernardone, into a poor hard-working beggar? Was he really as good and holy as the common people began to whisper to themselves? We must bear in mind that vital religion in Assisi was at its lowest ebb, and the kind that worked itself out in daily life and action almost unknown. Pretty soon Bernardo determined to study Francis close to. Again and again he invited him to his house, and the more he saw of the gracious, humble, God-fearing, Francis, the more he liked him. One night he asked him to stay till the next day, and Francis consenting, he had a bed made up for him in his own room. They retired. In a short time Bernardo was, to all appearances, extremely sound asleep. Then Francis rose from his bed, and kneeling down began to pray. A deep sense of the Divine presence overflowed him, and he could do nothing but weep and cry, "Oh, my God, oh, my God!" He continued all night praying, and weeping before the Lord. [Sidenote: _Bernardo._] Now Bernardo, who was only pretending to be asleep in order to see what Francis would do, was greatly touched. God visited him too that night, and spoke to his soul so loudly and clearly that he dare not do ought but follow the light that that night began to glimmer on his future path. Little he thought into what a large place it would ultimately lead him. Next morning, true to his new-born inspiration, he said to Francis-- "I am disposed in my heart to leave the world and obey thee in all that thou shalt command me." To say that Francis was surprised is to say too little! He was astonished--so astonished that it was difficult to find words in which to answer. That the people he influenced would rise up and desire to share his life, with its privations, and eccentricities had never as yet occurred to him. His sole and only aim had been that his every individual act and thought should be in conformity to that of our Lord Jesus Christ. But "I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto Me," and Francis, by his humble life and work, had brought that Blessed Life wherever he went. This is the Divine design for every faithful soul that seeks to truly follow its Master. The man who could live and spread holiness as an ordinary day-laborer and stone-mason was now to receive a greater charge. As soon as he recovered from the first surprise of Bernardo's statement, he said-- "Bernardo, a resolution such as the one thou speakest of is so difficult, and so great an action, that we must take counsel of the Lord Jesus, and pray Him that He may point out His will, and teach us to follow it." So they set off together for the church. While on their way there that morning they were joined by another brother called Pietro, who said that he too had been told of God to join Francis. So the three went together to read the Gospels and pray for light. Francis was soon convinced that Bernardo and Pietro were led of God, and joyfully welcomed them as his fellow-laborers. They took up their abode in a deserted mud hut, close by a river known as the Riva Torto. And that mean little hut was the cradle which contained the beginning of a work that spread itself into every quarter of the globe. [Sidenote: _Egidio._] "Francis," said Bernardo, a little later, "What wouldst thou do supposing a great king had given thee possessions for which thou afterwards hadst no use?" "Why, give them back to be sure," answered Francis. "Then," said Bernardo, "I will that I sell all my possessions, and give the money to the poor." So he did. Land, houses, all that he possessed he sold, and distributed the proceeds to the poor in the market-place. One can easily imagine the sensation this caused in Assisi, and how almost the entire population thronged to the spot! The news of this day's doings spread into all the country-side. In a town not far from Assisi, a certain young man, called Egidio, listened intently while his father and mother discussed Bernardo and Francis and went into their history past and present, and speculated on their future. Little they thought as they talked that their cultured, refined son was drinking in every word, and that his soul was being strangely stirred. Before the week was out, Egidio had received the Divine touch that fitted him to respond to the call--"Follow Me." In the marvellously colored dawn of an Italian morning, Egidio rose and "followed." Arriving in Assisi at a crossway he was at a standstill. Where should he look for Francis? Which of those roads should he take? While he thus alternately debated with himself, and prayed for guidance, who should he see coming along out of the forest where he had been to pray, but Francis himself! There was no mistaking that curious bare-footed figure, with its coarse robe of the color known to the peasants as "beast" color, girded with a knotted rope! Egidio threw himself at Francis' feet, and besought him to receive him for the love of God. "Dear brother," said Francis, who during the past week had learned not to be surprised when he received candidates for his work. "Dear brother, God hath conferred a great grace upon thee! If the Emperor were to come to Assisi and propose to make one of its citizens his knight or secret chamberlain, would not such an offer be joyfully accepted as a great mark of honor and distinction? How much more shouldst thou rejoice that God hath called thee to be His Knight and chosen servant, to observe the perfection of His Holy Gospel! Therefore do thou stand firm in the vocation to which God hath called thee." [Sidenote: _First Apostolic Tour._] So bringing him into the hut Francis called the others and said-- "God has sent us a good brother, let us therefore rejoice in the Lord and eat together in charity." After they had eaten breakfast Francis took Egidio into Assisi to get cloth to make him a "beast-colored" uniform robe like the others. On the way Francis thought he would like to try the young man and see what kind of a spirit he had. So upon meeting a poor woman, who asked them for money, Francis said to Egidio-- "I pray you, as we have no money, give this poor woman your cloak." Immediately and joyfully Egidio pulled off his rich mantle and handed it to the beggar, whereat Francis rejoiced much in secret. It was a united household that assembled under the rude roof of the mud hut by the Riva Torto. Four young men bound together in love, and resolved to serve God absolutely in whatever way He should show them, we shall see, ere long, how God used these human instruments which were so unreservedly placed at His disposal. They were very happy for a few days, and gave themselves up almost entirely to prayer; then Francis led them into the seclusion of the woods and explained to them how the Divine will had manifested itself to his soul. "We must," he said, "clearly understand our vocation. It is not for our personal salvation only, but for the salvation of a great many others that God has mercifully called us. He wishes us to go through the world, and by example even more than by words, exhort men to repentance, and the keeping of the commandments." Bernardo, Pietro and Egidio declared that they were willing for anything, and so the four separated, two by two, for a preaching tour. Of Bernardo and Pietro history is silent, but nothing could have been more simple than the Apostolic wanderings of Francis and Egidio in the Marches of Ancona. Along the roads they went wherever the Spirit of God led them singing songs of God and Heaven. Their songs together with their happy countenances and strange costume, naturally attracted the people, and when a number would collect to stare at them, Francis would address them, and Egidio, with charming simplicity accentuated all he said with-- [Sidenote: _A Sermonette._] "You must believe what my brother Francis tells you, the advice he gives you is very good." But don't for a moment imagine that Francis was capable of giving an address. Far from it; he was, truth to say, very little in advance of Egidio, the burden of his cry being-- "Love God, fear Him, repent and you shall be forgiven;" then when Egidio had chorused, "Do as my brother Francis tells you, the advice he gives you is very good," the two missionaries passed singing on their way! But the impression produced was far beyond their simple words. The religious history of the times tells us that the love of God was almost dead in men's hearts, that the world had forgotten the meaning of the word repentance, and was entirely given up to lust and vice and pleasure. People asked each other what could be the object these men had in view. Why did they go about roughly-clad, bare-foot, and eating so little. "They are madmen" some said. Others "Madmen could not talk so wisely." Others again, more thoughtful, said, "They seem to care so little for life, they are desperate, and must be either mad, or else they are aspiring to very great perfection!" When the four had been through almost all the Province they returned to Riva Torto, where they found three new candidates clamoring for admission. Others followed, and when the numbers had increased to about eight, Francis led them to a spot where four roads met, and sent them out two and two to the four points of the compass to preach the Gospel. Everywhere they went they were to urge men to repentance, and point them to a Saviour who could forgive sins. They were to accept no food they had not either worked for, or received as alms for the love of Christ. CHAPTER VI. FRANCIS' EARLY DISCIPLES. 'Then forth they went.... Content for evermore to follow him. In weariness, In painfulness, in perils by the way, Through awful vigils in the wilderness, Through storms of trouble, hatred and reproach.' Bernardo di Quintavelle is perhaps the most important of these first followers, inasmuch as he ultimately took his place as Leader of the Order of Friars minor, which was the name the Franciscans first gave themselves. We have already told how Bernardo came to join Francis, and take upon himself the same vows. From that day his faith and trust in God and His call to him never wavered. That was the secret of his tremendous strength of soul. The strength of a man who is sure of his call and its divinity is as the strength of ten. It was Bernardo whom Francis deputed in the early days of the work to go to Bologna, and labor there. Bologna was the centre of the universe, as far as learning and culture went, to the Italians of that day. As soon as Bernardo and his followers showed themselves in the town, the children, seeing them dressed so plainly and poorly, laughed and scoffed, and threw dirt and stones at them. They accepted these trials manfully, and made their way to the market-place. The children, who followed them here continued to pelt them with stones and dust, and pulled them round by the hoods of their garments. Day after day, and day after day, Bernardo and his little handful returned, though they could never get anybody to give them a civil hearing. Poor fellows, during those first few days, they all but starved. [Sidenote: _A Great Saint!_] There was a doctor of the law, who used to pass round by the market-place every day, and seeing Bernardo patiently put up with such insult and contempt, wondered much to himself. At last he arrived at a conclusion. "This man must be a great saint." Going up to him, he said-- "Who art thou, and whence dost thou come?" Bernardo put his hand into his bosom, and gave him what was then the rules of the Order. This was in other words the Divine commission that Francis had received through the Gospel for that February day, "Go ye forth and preach the gospel, &c." The doctor read it all through and then, turning to some of his friends who were standing by, said-- "Truly, here is the most perfect state of religion I have ever heard of; this man and his companions are the holiest men I have ever met with in this world! Guilty indeed are those who insult him! We ought, on the contrary, to honor him as a true friend of God!" Then addressing Bernardo, he said-- "If it is thy wish to found a convent in this town, in which thou mayst serve God, I will most willingly help thee." Bernardo thanked him, and said-- "I believe it is our Saviour Jesus Christ who hast I inspired thee with this good intention, I most willingly accept the offer, to the honor of Christ." Then the doctor took them home with him and entertained them, and presented them with a convenient building, which he furnished at his own expense. In a short time, Bernardo was much sought after, on account of the holiness, together with the brilliancy of his sermons. The whole town was at his feet, people came from far and near to hear him, and thousands were converted. When things were at a height, Bernardo turned up unexpectedly one day in Assisi, and presented himself before the astonished gaze of Francis. "The convent is founded at Bologna," he said, "send other brothers there to keep it up, I can no longer be of any use; indeed, I fear me that the too great honors I receive might make me lose more than I could gain." Francis, who had heard a great deal of the honor and praise that had been lavished upon Bernardo, thanked God that He had revealed to him the danger his soul was in, and sent someone else to Bologna. [Sidenote: _Elias._] In striking contrast to Bernardo was Elias. Elias was quite as clever and brilliant a man as Bernardo, but he never seems to have become really sanctified. His pride was a constant stumbling-block, and was for ever appearing in some new shape or other. Sometimes it would be in an over-weening desire to rule, and then his rule would go far and beyond that of Francis', in fastings, and similar austerities. Again, we have a picture of him arraying himself in a garment of soft cloth, which could only be said to be "modelled" after that worn by his brethren. Finally, he lapsed altogether, declared that his health was too delicate to stand coarse food and plain living, and left the Order. For some time he was an open backslider, but it is currently supposed he was converted before he died. The story of his life is a sad one. Looking back over these lapse of years, one can easily see what he might have been, and how painfully he fell short. The grace of humility never adorned his character for long. He could not see that in God's sight he was less than least, for him it was impossible-- "To lay his intellectual treasure, At the low footstool of the Crucified." Egidio always remained faithful to his first trust. He also never wavered, never looked back. In the different glimpses we get of his life, we see very clearly the mode of living prescribed by Francis. His intention was never that his disciples were to live on charity, but that they should work for their bread, money being totally forbidden. Work brought them down to the level of the common people, and on the same plane they could more easily reach their hearts and consciences. [Sidenote: _A Question._] Egidio, refined and educated though he undoubtedly was, seems to have been able to put his hand to anything. When on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, he was detained at Brindisi, he borrowed a water jug, and, filling it, went round the town selling water, and crying "Fresh water! Fresh water!" like any of the ordinary water-carriers. On his way back he procured willows, and made baskets, which he sold to supply himself with food. He was always very particular not to take more than he considered was fair for his work. Obedience was another of Egidio's strong points. He believed in his call, he believed in Francis, he never questioned an order, even when it was manifestly not altogether a wise instruction he received, he still considered that "obedience was better than sacrifice." Masseo appears to have had very little idea what kind of a life he was entering upon, when he first joined the band. He was not a spiritual man by nature, but by degrees he learned to look at the inside of things instead of the outside, and to know a little of the mind of God. Masseo was big and handsome, with a decided gift of speech. We are told that because of his physical attractions the people always gave to him the nicest and daintiest portions of food. It was a matter of no little wonderment to him when he discovered that for all a certain kind of people were attracted by his appearance, yet he had little or no power to convict them of sin, and make them long to be good. Francis by this time had lost all his good looks and become pale and worn and thin with work. Masseo compared himself with Francis greatly to his superior's disadvantage. At last one day he said to him-- "Why is it? Why is it?" "What do you mean?" asked Francis. "I mean to ask thee," said Masseo, "why all the world goes after thee? Why all men wish to see thee, to hear thee, and to obey thy word? Thou art not handsome, nor learned, nor of noble birth. How is it then that men go after thee?" The answer which Masseo received, made him see what kind of a character he had come in contact with, and from that day there was no more faithful and adoring disciple than handsome Masseo. "Would you know the reason why all men come after me?" asked Francis. "It is because the Lord has not found among men, a more wicked, a more imperfect, or a greater sinner that I am, and to accomplish the wonderful work He intends doing, He has not found a creature more vile than I upon earth; for this reason He has chosen me to confound beauty, greatness, birth, and all the science of the world, that man may learn that every good gift comes from Him, and not from the creature, that all may glory in the Lord!" [Sidenote: _Sylvester's Avarice._] Sylvester was the first priest who joined Francis. Though a priest, he was possessed of very little true religion, and was inclined to be somewhat avaricious. When Francis was rebuilding St. Damian, Sylvester had sold him some stones, for which he had been well paid. Now, he happened to be among the crowd in the market-place when Bernardo was distributing his fortune, and it occurred to him that he would get some of it for himself. So going up to Francis, he said, "Brother, you did not pay me very well for the stones which you bought of me." Francis, who had not a spark of avarice in his nature, handed him a handful of coins without stopping to count them, saying, "Here, are you sufficiently paid now?" "It is enough, my brother," said Sylvester, taking the money and moving off. But from that hour he never knew a moment's peace. His action haunted him, he could neither sleep by night nor rest by day. The difference between Francis and Bernardo and himself came vividly before him, he repented of his sin, and as soon as ever his affairs would permit--about a year later--he joined Francis. There are some historians who declare that Ginepro was mad. The majority, however, dispute this, and say that what looked like madness was simply zeal--zeal, perhaps untempered with discretion. Ginepro was devoted, self-sacrificing and faithful. He mourned over his mistakes, and was always ready to acknowledge himself in the wrong. It was with the greatest difficulty that he was taught that he mustn't give away anything, and everything he could lay hands on. When he saw anyone poor or ill-clothed, he would immediately take off his clothes and hand them over. He was at last strictly forbidden to do this. A few days later, he met a poor man who begged from him. "I have nothing," said Ginepro, in great compassion, "which I could give thee but my tunic, and I am under orders not to give that away. But if thou wilt take it off my back I will not resist thee." No sooner said than done, and Ginepro returned home tunicless. When questioned he said-- "A good man took it off my back and went away with it." It was necessary to clear everything portable out of Ginepro's way, because whatever he could lay his hands on he gave to the poor. [Sidenote: _Almost a Murder._] His great humility on one occasion nearly led him to the gallows. There was a cruel tyrant named Nicolas, a nobleman living near Viterbo, whom all the town hated. This man had been warned that someone would come in the guise of a poor beggar and take his life. Nicolas gave orders that the castle was to be strictly guarded. A few days later luckless Ginepro appeared in the vicinity of the castle. On the way thither some young men had seized him, torn his cloak, and covered him with dust, so that he was a sight to behold for rags and dirt! As soon as he came near the castle he was taken as a suspicious character and cruelly beaten. He was asked who he was. "I am a great sinner," was the answer. He certainly looked like a ruffian! When further asked his designs he explained, "I am a great traitor, and unworthy of any mercy." Then they asked if he meant to burn the castle and kill Nicolas. "Worse things than these would I do, only for God," he replied. Such a hardened, boldfaced criminal never stood before a bar! He was taken, tied to a horse's tail, and dragged through the town to the gallows. If it had not been for the intervention of a good man in the crowd, who knew the friars, he would have been hung. [Sidenote: _Ginepro's Dinner._] "Brother Ginepro," said one of the friars one day, "we are all going out, and by the time we come back will you have got us a little refreshment?" "Most willingly," said Ginepro, "leave it to me." Out he went with a sack, and asked food from door to door for his brethren. Soon he was well laden and returned home. "What a pity it is," said Ginepro to himself, as he put on two great pots, "that a brother should be lost in the kitchen! I shall cook enough dinner to serve us for two weeks to come, and then we'll give ourselves to prayer." So saying, he piled in everything, salt meat, fresh meat, eggs in their shells, chickens with the feathers on, and vegetables. One of the friars who returned before the others, was amazed to see the two enormous pots on a roaring fire with Ginepro poking at them alternately, protected from the heat by a board he had fastened round his neck. At last dinner was ready, and, pouring it out before the hungry friars, he said complacently, "Eat a good dinner now, and then we'll go to prayer, there'll be no more cooking for a long time to come, for I have cooked enough for a fortnight." Alas! one historian informs us, "there was never a hog in the campagna of Rome so hungry that he could have eaten it." But, in spite of all the curious tales we read about the blunderings of this simple soul, his name has been handed down through the ages as that of a saint; for the highway of holiness is such that a wayfaring man, though a fool, shall not err therein. [Sidenote: _A True Franciscan._] Leo, whom they called "the little sheep of God," who became Francis' secretary, was one of the best loved of the disciples. In Leo, Francis' soul found rest and help and comfort. His nature was simple, affectionate and refined, and in every respect he was a true Franciscan. There are others whose names we find among the early Franciscans, but the foregoing are those who stand out most prominently. CHAPTER VII. FRANCIS--CALLED TO BE A SAINT. "God's interpreter art thou, To the waiting ones below 'Twixt them and its light midway Heralding the better day." We have seen Francis as a young man, gay, careless, pleasure loving, kind-hearted, a leader at every feast and revel, known to his companions as a thorough good fellow. We have watched the first strivings of the Holy Spirit in his soul, and marked his earnest attempts to follow the light that then began to penetrate his hitherto dark soul. We have followed that glimmering light with him, step by step, seen him persecuted, mocked, stoned, beaten, watched his lonely wilderness wrestlings when there was no human eye to pity, no human arm to succour. We have seen, too, how, little by little, this thorny pathway led to a closer and more intimate acquaintance with God, for which acquaintance Francis counted his sufferings as nothing, and the world well lost. [Sidenote: _"Saint" Francis._] Francis was not an extraordinary character in any sense of the word. He was what he was simply and solely by the grace of God, which is ever free for all men. He was not a man created for the hour. He was a vessel, cleansed and emptied, and thus fit for the Master's use, and God used him, as He always uses such vessels. The whole secret of his sainthood lay in his simple, loving, implicit obedience. Not the lifeless obedience that one renders to inexorable law, but the heart-felt, passionate desire to serve, and to anticipate the lightest want of the One Object of the affections! That baptism of personal love for God and union with Christ was poured out upon Francis in the black hour of what looked to him complete failure; when hunted and pursued, he sought refuge from his angry friends in the caves of the earth. The gift that he then received he never ceased to guard and cherish, and other blessings were added to it, for God has promised, "To him that hath it shall be given." And God gave liberally, good measure, pressed down, and running over. But the gifts which were Francis are ours too, by right of grace Divine--to be had for the faithful seeking, and kept by pure, faithful, and obedient living--"Called to be saints." The few? One here and there in every century? Oh, no. "Called to be saints," are the myriad souls who have received the Divine touch of regeneration. This is the calling and election of the redeemed; but oh, how few there are that make them _sure_! Five years had now elapsed since that spring morning, when, weak and ill from fever, Francis dragged himself out of doors, to look again on the glorious landscape that he thought would bring him health and healing. The story of his disappointment we have already told. During those five years Francis made gigantic strides in heavenly wisdom and knowledge, and we feel that we cannot do better than to pause in our narrative and try to give you some idea of the spiritual personality of the man, whose name even now the people were beginning to couple with that of "saint." In appearance Francis was a thorough Italian. He was rather below than over the ordinary height, his eyes and hair were dark, and his bearing free and gracious. He was chiefly remarkable for his happy, joyous expression. This he never lost: even when illness had robbed him of his good looks, the light in his eyes, and the smile on his lips were always the same. [Sidenote: _Holy Boldness._] The most striking points of Francis' character are, perhaps, his humility, his sincerity, and his childlike simplicity. Humble Francis was not by nature. There was nothing in his training to make him so, and everything that would tend to the growth of pride and arrogance. But, with his conversion, humility became one of his strongest convictions. He truly considered himself less than the least, and he held it to be an offence against God if he ever let himself, or his little feelings and prejudices, stand in the way of accomplishing what he believed to be for the extension of the Kingdom. It seemed as though he had no feelings to be hurt. What most people would call justifiable sensitiveness, Francis would call sin. He went straight to the mark, and if he did not accomplish all he wanted to at first, he simply tried again, and generally succeeded sooner or later. In places where the Friars were not known, Francis often found it a little difficult to get permission to preach in the churches. At a place called Imola, for instance, where he went to ask the bishop for the use of the church, the bishop replied, coldly and distantly:-- "My brother, I preach in my own parish; I am not in need of anyone to aid me in my task." Francis bowed, and went out. An hour later, he presented himself again. "What have you come for again?" asked the bishop, angrily. "What do you want?" "My lord," answered Francis, in his simple way, "when a father turns his son out of one door, the son has but one thing to do--to return by another." This holy boldness won the bishop's heart. "You are right," he said. "You and your brothers may preach in my diocese. I give you a general permission to do so. Your humility deserves nothing less!" Francis never considered himself at liberty to "shake the dust" of a city off his feet unless he had tried and tried again and again, to get a hearing there; indeed, nothing convinced him of the uselessness of his quest unless he were thrown out neck and crop, then it was more than likely he would gather himself up, and try another entrance! He entirely forgot himself in his love for his Master. His love of truth was with him almost a passion. Between his thoughts, and his words, and his actions there was a perfect agreement, neither one contradicted the other; he saw to it that it was so, knowing that nothing hurt the Gospel of Christ like insincerity or double dealing. Distractions in prayer he looked upon as secret lies, and saying with the lips what the heart did not go with. "How shameful," he used to say, "to allow oneself to fall into vain distractions when one is addressing the great King! We should not speak in that manner even to a respectable man!" On one occasion he had carved a little olive-wood vase, probably meaning to sell it for food. But, while at prayer one day, some thought connected with this work came into his mind, distracting his soul for the moment. Instantly he was full of contrition, and, as soon as he left his prayer, hastened to put his vase into the fire, where never again it could come between his soul and God! One day, on meeting a friend on the road, they stopped to converse. On parting, the friend said, "You will pray for me?" To which Francis replied, "Willingly." Hardly was the other out of sight, when Francis said to his companion,-- "Wait a little for me; I am going to kneel down and discharge the obligation I have just contracted." This was always his habit. Instead of promising and forgetting as so many do, he never rested till he had fulfilled the promise he had made. [Sidenote: _A Fox-skin._] During the last two years of his life he was often very weak and ailing. One cold winter, his companion, seeing that the clothes he was wearing were very thin and patched, was filled with compassion on his account. He secretly got a piece of fox-skin. "My father," he said, showing him the skin, "you suffer very much from your liver and stomach; I beg of you let me sew this fur under your tunic. If, you will not have it all, let it at least cover your stomach." "I will do what you wish," said Francis; "but you must sew as large a piece _outside_ as in." His companion couldn't see any sense in this arrangement, and objected very strongly. "The reason is quite plain," said Francis: "The outside piece will show everybody that I allow myself this comfort." They had to give in at last, and Francis had his way. "Oh, admirable man," writes a friend after his death; "thou hast always been the same within and without, in words and in deeds, below and above!" [Sidenote: _A Temptation._] On another occasion, he tore off his tunic, because, for a brief moment of weakness, he harbored the thought that he might have led an easier life, and still serve God. Like other men, he might have had a settled home, and lived a tranquil existence. It was a passing temptation, but Francis, tearing off his coarse garment, emblem of the Cross that he strove to follow, cried-- "It is a religious habit--a man given up to such thoughts would be a robber if he wore it." Nor did he put it on again till he felt he could do so with a pure heart and clean conscience. With the crystal transparency of his inner and outer life went a simplicity that was akin to that of a little child. His sermons and addresses were of the very simplest and plainest. Though Francis was undoubtedly one of the orators of the age, his fiery words and burning language were such that even the most unlearned could easily follow. His theme was simply Christ, and Christ crucified for our sins, and an exhortation to repentance and holy living. Learned ones pondered his words and marvelled wherein lay his power, little dreaming that his very plainness of speech was his strength. His delight in the beauties of nature never left him. Sunset and sunrise, mountain and plain, river and sea alike, filled him with joy, and all spoke to him of the glory of God. Flowers always gave him especial pleasure. He insisted that his disciples should always reserve some portion of their gardens for the growth of flowers as well as vegetables, "to give them a foretaste of the eternal sweetness of Heaven." When the brethren went to the fields to chop wood, Francis always warned them to take care of the roots, so that the trunk might sprout again and live. To take life of any kind was intolerable to him. For this reason he always lifted the worms out of his path and laid them at the side of the road, lest an incautious traveller might crush them. His love and power over animals are almost too well known to need mention. He always spoke of them as his brothers and sisters. He disdained nothing. All were to him alike beautiful, because the work of his God. For a long time, he had a tame sheep, that followed him about wherever it could get a chance. This sheep always seemed to know exactly how to behave under all circumstances. When the brethren knelt at prayers, it knelt too; when they sang, it joined in with a not-too-loud little bleat! Near his room, at the Portiuncula, there lived a grasshopper in a fig-vine. This little insect would hop on his finger at his bidding, and when told to "sing and praise the Lord," used to chirp with all its might! Birds, insects, and even fishes and wild animals, we are told, all recognized in Francis a friend, and readily did his bidding. [Sidenote: _Two Small Mites._] Francis' love for God was supreme, and his belief that God loved him never wavered. To make people love and know God was his one burning desire. It was not so much God's service he delighted in as God Himself. He never lost sight of the Master in the Work, and to a large extent this was the key to all his success. His work was the outcome of his love. After we have received, the first natural impulse is to give. Francis possessed "two small mites," an ancient historian writes--"they were his body and his soul. He gave them both, bravely and freely, according to his custom." Whatever came--joy, sorrow, success, failure, pain, weariness, sickness, insult, or favor--Francis took as direct from the hand of God, and blessed Him for all. Why shouldn't he? His heart was right, he had the assurance that his ways pleased God, and his faith was not dependent upon knowledge. He was content, nay, glad to trust where he could not see, confident in the belief that "nothing could hurt a sanctified soul." His disciples could not always follow him so far. Some of them, when they saw their master suffering--as he did suffer severely in his last days--thought that God might have led His beloved Home by a less painful road. One of them once gave expression to his feelings thus:-- "Ah, my brother, pray to the Lord that He may treat you more gently. Truly, He ought to let His hand weigh less heavily upon you." Hurt to the quick, as well as indignant, Francis cried:-- "What is that you are saying? If I did not know your simplicity I should henceforth hold you in horror! What! you have the audacity to blame God's dealings with me!" Then, throwing himself on his knees, he prayed:-- "Oh, my Lord God! I give Thee thanks for all these pains I endure. I pray Thee to send me a hundredfold more if such be Thy good pleasure! I willingly accept all afflictions. Thy holy name is my superabundant joy!" Nothing could ever make Francis say that anything in his lot was "very hard." His love was too loyal, his trust too complete. [Sidenote: _Rejoice Always._] Joy was one of his cardinal articles of faith. "Rejoice always!" was a divine command, and one not to be overlooked. As a young man, he had been of a bright, joyous nature, but easily plunged into depths of sadness and melancholy. God taught him upon what to base his joy, and, when he had torn down all earthly external devices, led him to derive his all from the true source. He held joy to be the normal state of those whom God loves--the fruit of Christian life, without which everything languishes and dies. "The devil," Francis always said, "carries dust with him, and whenever he can, he throws it into the openings of the soul in order to cloud the clearness of its thoughts and the purity of its actions. If joy knows how to defend itself and subsist, then he has had his spite for nothing; but if the servant of Christ becomes sad, bitter or unhappy, he is sure to triumph. Sooner or later, that soul will be overwhelmed by its sadness, or will seek for false joys or consolations. The servant of God who is troubled for any reason" (Francis always allowed that causes for trouble in this world are innumerable) "must immediately have recourse to prayer, and remain in the presence of his Heavenly Father till the joy of salvation has been restored to him, otherwise, his sadness will increase and engender a rust in the soul." [Sidenote: _The Duty of Cheerfulness._] This duty of cheerfulness Francis impressed upon all with whom he had to do. "My brother," he said to a friar, of doleful countenance, one day, "if thou hast some fault to mourn, do it in secret, groan and weep before God, but here, with thy brethren, be as they are in tone and countenance." His conviction of this duty was so strong that, during one large gathering of the friars, he had this advice written in large letters and posted up. "Let the brethren avoid ever appearing sombre, sad and clouded, like the hypocrites, but let them always be found joyful in the Lord, gay, amiable, gracious--as is fitting." Amiability and graciousness he also considered amongst the virtues--courtesy, he called it. And courtesy he always said was akin to charity, her younger sister, who was to go with the elder one and help to open all hearts to her! An historian writes thus of Francis: "He was very courteous and gracious in all things, and possessed a peace and serenity that nothing could disturb. This sympathy and benevolence was expressed on his countenance; his face had in it something angelic." His songs and hymns were the outcome of his perpetual joy in the Lord. In those days there were no popular religious hymns or songs. People praised God in Latin, with psalms and chants. Francis never found that these gave vent to his feelings, and so, with the help of one of the brothers--Pacificus, a trained musician--he began to write his own; and soon, wherever the friars passed, they left a train of simple melody in their wake. It was Francis, and his brethren, who first turned the Italian language into poetry, and gave it that impetus which has since rendered it the typical language for song. CHAPTER VIII. FRANCIS--AS A LEADER OF MEN. "Thou whose bright faith makes feeble hearts grow stronger, And sends fresh warriors to the great campaign, Bids the lone convert feel estranged no longer, And wins the sundered to be one again." Little did Francis think, as he piled up stone after stone upon the walls of St. Damian, that the day was not far distant when he should begin the building of a spiritual temple, built up of "lively stones," with Christ Himself as the "chief corner-stone." Yet it was even so. That day when, in obedience to the heavenly command, he stripped off his shoes and mantle, he laid the first stone. From that hour his spiritual building proceeded, and he who had fancied his work completed, found that it was but barely begun! Dead souls, in whom the Story of the Cross could no longer arouse even the most transient emotion, were awakened and convicted when they saw it lived out before them--a living epistle. We have seen how souls quickened by Divine power, and led only by God, came and joined themselves to Francis, choosing him as their leader, and accepting as their rule of life the revelation made to him, through the gospel, for that memorable February day. To those that followed Francis, God made no more definite manifestation of His will other than that they were to join themselves to him and lead his life. Manifestly, he was their God-appointed leader, and as simply and obediently as he had pulled off his mantle and shoes, he accepted the human trust bestowed upon him. And well he fulfilled that trust! To the very last hour of his life, Francis was true to his first principles. Never for one moment did he wander out of the narrow path in which God had set his feet at the beginning of his career as a leader and teacher of men. As literally as it was possible he modelled his life on that of our Lord Jesus Christ. One of the most noted Atheist writers of the present century says that in no age has there been so close a copy of the life of Christ as that portrayed by Francis and his followers. [Sidenote: _Alms._] The most well-known of all the Franciscan characteristics is their poverty. Though at times they asked alms for Christ's sake from their neighbours, that was not the ideal Francis had before him as their regular mode of life. It was that all should work with their hands at whatever they could best do, and in return receive an equivalent for their labour in food or clothes. "All the brothers who have learnt a trade," Francis said, "will exercise it, those who have not must learn one, and keep to the exercise of it without changing. All will receive everything necessary for the support of life, except money, in remuneration of their work." "When the brothers are in want of the necessaries of life, they shall go and ask for alms like any other poor man," was another of his directions. This was a great trial to some who would have gladly learned the most menial of trades. But there were times when there was no demand for labor, and there was nothing for it but to beg or starve. This latter Francis would not allow, and, repugnant though the former might be, it had to be done. Not that he ever forced anyone. He began by doing this ignominious duty himself, saying as he did so-- "My beloved brethren, the Son of God was far more noble than the noblest of us, and yet He became poor upon earth. It is for love of Him that we have embraced poverty, therefore, we must not be ashamed to resort to the table of our Lord (thus he always spoke of alms). Rejoice then to give good examples to those brethren whose firstfruits ye are, that they in future may have nothing to do but follow you." [Sidenote: _Holy Poverty._] But there were other reasons why Francis was so devoted to poverty. In all his doings he is remarkable for clear common-sense. Money and possessions of any kind were in those days a fruitful source of dispute and quarrels of all kinds; therefore, as Francis reasoned, it were better that the Knights of Christ should possess nothing. Then again in the priesthood, though the individuals themselves possessed nothing, yet large sums of money and great possessions had been amassed by convent and monastery, until, at the period of which we are writing, the luxury and gluttony of priest and monk was a favourite joke, and the splendour of their buildings well-known. As to buildings, Francis would very much have preferred to have none. Since this was impossible, he had everything built at the least possible expense. Just rough beams put together, and the joinings filled with sand. Even then this uncouth mass had to be property of someone outside the community! "Only on this condition," Francis said, "can we be considered as strangers here below in accordance with the apostolic recommendation." Certainly, no one could accuse them of luxury. The furniture of the houses was of the poorest. Beds, often of straw, cups and plates of wood or clay, a few rough tables, and a small number of books in common to the brothers, were all the rooms contained. Carefully and jealously did Francis guard against the first appearance of relaxation on the part of himself or his followers. He would have thought God's commands to him broken if any new-comer found in his community anything that he had given up upon leaving the world. As to clothing, we have already seen what were Francis' views in this respect. The rough robe of "beast color," tied in with a knotted rope, is still to be seen to-day in many parts of the world. But Francis very well knew that a certain kind of vanity can easily lurk in even the coarsest of garments. He was, therefore, constantly on the watch, and was always severe if he saw the least deviation from the rule. "It is an infallible sign," he always said, "that fervour is cooling in the soul." He never allowed his disciples to have more than two tunics. "It may be that one suffers a little," he said, "but what sort of virtue is that that cannot suffer anything! To try and avoid all mortifications under plea of necessity is a cowardly way of losing occasions of merit. It is what the Hebrews would have done had they gone back to Egypt." [Sidenote: _Fatherly Care._] It was more by personal example than anything else that Francis led his followers in the Divine steps that he was so confident had been also marked out for him. And his people believed in him and loved him. They were convinced that through him spoke the Divine voice, and that his way was God's way. And he was worthy of their belief and their love and their esteem. He loved them with a devoted, generous love. By his entire forgetfulness of self and his constant devotion to their needs, he was theirs, always to "serve." Many stories are told of his gentle, delicate kindliness and fatherly care. Once, one of his flock had gone a little too far in depriving himself of natural food. That night, in the silence, came a voice from his room which groaned softly, "I am starving, I am starving of hunger!" Francis, who was awake, rose quietly, and, getting together some food, went to the starving brother and invited him to eat with him, so as not to hurt his feelings or let it appear that he had been overheard. After he had eaten, he explained to him the evil of not giving the body what was necessary for it. Another brother, who was ill, had a great longing for grapes, but feared to indulge himself in case he should be breaking his vows. Francis found out, some way or other, how he felt, and, going to him, led him out into a vineyard, and, gathering some rich clusters, seated himself on the ground, and, beginning to eat, invited his companion to join him. If any were weak and ailing, it was always Francis who was first to take a vessel and go out and beg for more nourishing food for his ailing comrades. A mother could not have been more tender than he was. In a very great measure Francis possessed the discernment of spirits. He seemed to know intuitively what people were thinking about. One day, during the last years of his life, when he had been obliged through bodily weakness to ride on an ass, he surprised the brother who was trudging alongside him, by getting off and saying-- [Sidenote: _Francis' Tact._] "Here, brother, get on, it is more fitting that you, who are of noble birth, should ride, rather than I, who am of humble origin." The brother immediately fell on his knees and, asking forgiveness, confessed that he had been grumbling to himself that he, whose family would never have had anything to do with that of Pietro Bernardone's, had been obliged to follow the ass of Francis Bernardone! Another brother was greatly troubled because he thought Francis did not love him. He told himself that Francis hardly ever noticed or spoke to him, and then he began to argue that probably God, too, paid no attention to him. He determined to see his leader about it. As soon as ever he appeared before Francis, and before he could get out a word, Francis said-- "It is a temptation, my brother, believe me, it is a temptation. I have the truest affection for you, and you deserve this affection. Come to me whenever you want, and we will talk things over." One can easily imagine the joy of the once forlorn brother! Not only could Francis move the crowds and hold them spell-bound with his fiery words, but he had also the power to reach and touch men's hearts in private. He was always accessible to that individual, be he saint or sinner, who was in need. In times of darkness and depression, he was the support of the brothers. He knew well the stages that a soul passes through after it has taken the final step of separateness from the world. In critical moments he was theirs to soothe and comfort with prayer and advice. It was not only the faltering saint that he lavished his tenderness upon; he was just as careful of the faulty and ungrateful, and nothing could exceed the love with which he strove to lure them back when he saw they were inclined to go ever so little astray. "A superior," he used to say, "is more of a tyrant than a father if he waits to interfere until a fault has been committed or a fall has occurred!" [Sidenote: _No Alternative._] However, in spite of his tenderness, Francis could be iron strong when there was any question of right and wrong. Those who were not of his mind were obliged to get out from among the brothers. There was no alternative, no easier way made for anyone. "Little Brothers" or "Friars Minor" they called themselves, a name which then meant "servant of all" or "least of all," and woe betide anyone who departed from the spirit of this name! CHAPTER IX. ESTABLISHMENT OF THE ORDER. "Would you know, oh world, these Warriors; Go where the poor, the old, Ask for pardon and for heaven, and you offer food and gold; With healing and with comfort, with words of peace and prayer, Bearing His greatest gift to men--Christ's chosen priests are there." It was not long before the little hut by the Riva Torto was full to overflowing. The number of brethren had increased so, that there was only just space for them to lie down at night, each under the beam upon which his name had been chalked. It was a poor abode enough, but poor though it was, they were not destined to have its shelter long. One day when they were all engaged in prayer, a peasant noisily threw open the door, and driving his ass right on top of the kneeling occupants cried-- "Go in, go in, Bruno, we shall be better off here." There was nothing to do but get out. The hut was not theirs, and neither was there room for an extra man and a beast! They next betook themselves to the Portiuncula, where they built themselves huts or cells. The Portiuncula was the last church that Francis restored, and one always especially dear to him. A little later it was given to the friars for their own use. From the Portiuncula the brothers travelled all round the country-side, two by two, in true apostolic fashion. Some followed the peasants into the fields, and as they shared their labors, sang and talked of the love of Christ. For days, perhaps, they would live and eat and sleep with the field hands, and then pass, always singing, on their way, leaving hearts that had been touched, behind them. Others sought the lazar-house, and spent their time in helping the brothers tend the sick. They were always welcome here, and very often difficult cases were reserved for their care. In the towns they met with a very different reception. There they were considered "fair game" for anybody who wished to tease or persecute or mock them. Some people called them mad and lazy, others who believed in their good intent said that if they wanted to be religious, there were plenty of Orders they could join which would not be so austere. Even the Bishop of Assisi, who always called Francis his son, said to him once, "Your way of living, without owning anything, seems to me very harsh and difficult." [Sidenote: _On the Right Lines._] Francis, sure that he was on the right lines, replied, "If we possessed property we should have need of arms for its defence, for it is the source of quarrels and lawsuits, and the love of God and one's neighbor usually finds many obstacles therein! This is why we do not desire temporal goods." As the months went on, Francis and his doings attracted more and more attention. They were the talk of the country. The families of those brothers who had given away their possessions could not forgive them for so doing, and attacks from these quarters were bitter and severe. Disappointed heirs could find nothing too evil to say against the foolishness and madness of their friar relatives. From this point of view, many families found the brotherhood very alarming, and parents trembled when their sons took any interest in it, lest they too should join it. The clergy naturally felt somewhat distrustful of the doings of these strange lay-workers. So, taking it altogether, whether he liked it or not, Francis was the most talked of man in Assisi. The more people flocked to him and got converted, the more his enemies slandered him. It was this state of things that led him to take his entire force--numbering twelve--to Rome, and there beg the Pope to sanction their mode of work. It was a bold undertaking, and when it was first presented to the twelve they shrank back in horror at the presumption of such a thing! But Francis had made up his mind and nothing could move him. How was he, Francis, young, without any interest, and a stranger to all churchly usages, to get to see the Pope? the brethren asked him. Francis didn't know. Probably he cared less. Anyway, God had told him to go. Then the brethren pleaded their simplicity. How they should look--travel-stained, bare-footed, and coarse-robed, at the court of Rome! This argument carried no weight whatever with their leader, and his faith prevailing, they set out. Just as they were about to start, Francis said "Let us choose one of us to be our Chief. We will go whither he wills to go, we will sojourn where he wills us to sojourn." The rest agreeing, Bernardo di Quintavelle was chosen as leader. [Sidenote: _Bishop Guido._] As soon as they arrived in Rome they discovered that unexpected help was right at hand. Guido, the good Bishop of Assisi, was in the city, and he met them accidentally just as they arrived. He was a little discomposed at first--seeing the entire brotherhood he immediately jumped to the conclusion that they were about to settle in Rome. However, Francis soon told him the object of their journey, and he promised to do the very best he could for them. Guido had a friend in Rome, Cardinal John, of Sabina. This man was godly and devoted, one who had never been carried away by the grandeur of his position, and he was always a friend of anybody who tried to work for God. Guido had already told him the story of Francis, and said that it was his belief that God meant to do great things through that simple man and his followers. Now that they had turned up so unexpectedly, he hastened to introduce them to John and let him judge them for himself. The Cardinal saw them, and talked to them, and was convinced in his own mind that they were divinely led. Still, he thought he would like to try Francis a little further. Taking him to one side, he asked him a number of questions about his work and its difficulties. "It is beyond your strength," he said, when he had heard him, and went on to advise him to join some already existing Order, or else, if he liked, lead the life of a hermit. Francis listened politely, but still kept to his purpose. "You are mistaken," persisted the Cardinal. "It is much better to follow the beaten tracks." Francis, equally persistent, kept to his point, and then the Cardinal, who would have been sorry had his advice been taken, entered heartily into his plans, and promised to support him with the Pope. As these interviews occupied several days, Francis became impatient at the delay. Nobody knows how he did it, but he succeeded unaided in getting into the Palace, and presenting himself and his brethren before the astonished eyes of the Pope! The Pope was walking in a secluded gallery, meditating mournfully on the declension of the Church of God, and trying to think what would remedy the growing evils, when his meditations were abruptly cut short by what looked to him like a troop of beggars. He was annoyed, and sent them off about their business before they could explain what they wanted. [Sidenote: _A Dream._] That night the Pope dreamed a strange dream. He thought he saw a tiny palm tree spring up at his feet, which immediately grew and grew till it became a splendid tree. When he awoke, the conviction was strong in his mind that the poor man he had turned away the day before was none other than this little tree. And as he was thinking over his dream, Cardinal John came in, and said-- "I have found a man whom I look upon as very perfect. He is resolved to follow literally the teachings of Christ, and I have no doubt that God intends to make use of him to reanimate faith on the earth." The Pope was struck with what he said, for he was convinced in his own mind that this was none other than the man he had driven away. He concealed his feelings from the Cardinal, and merely said he should like to see him. The Cardinal sent for Francis and his twelve, who speedily appeared, and the Pope saw at once they were the beggars of yesterday. He welcomed Francis warmly, and went into the rule he had drawn up for his life, and that of his brotherhood. This rule has not come down to us, but from various sources we learn that it was merely a string of Bible verses, Christ's directions to His apostles, including those that had been Francis' own commission. The Pope listened to all that Francis had to say, then he said-- [Sidenote: _Hesitation._] "My children, the life to which you aspire seems hard and difficult. Doubtless your fervor is great, and we have no anxiety on your account, but it is our duty to consider those who will come after you. We must not impose upon them a burden they cannot bear. All this requires serious reflection." Then he dismissed them, saying he would lay the matter before the Cardinals. Well, the question was put to the Cardinals, and they talked and talked and talked. One said one thing, another said another, and most of them had some objection to raise. They said he went beyond due limits, that human nature could not long endure such a life, and altogether they showed by their conversation, how very, very far they, the leaders of a Church who claimed to follow the steps of the lowly Nazarene, had departed from the initial simplicity of the Gospel. Probably some idea of this sort was in Cardinal John's mind when he rose to address the Assembly. He did not say very much, but what he said went straight to the point. "If we refuse the petition of this poor man on the plea that his rule is difficult, let us beware lest we reject the Gospel itself, for the rule which he desires us to approve of is in conformity with the teachings of the Gospel. For us to say that Gospel perfection contains anything unreasonable or impossible is to rise up against the author of the Gospel and blaspheme Jesus Christ." The force of his words went home, more especially as the rule was entirely composed of Scripture verses! Still the Pope hesitated. He could not come to any immediate decision. "Go my son," he said to Francis, "and pray to God that He may let you know that what you ask is from Him, and if it is we will grant your desire." For several days Francis gave himself up to prayer, and his next interview with the Pope convinced him that these poor beggars had a mission from God. He withheld his approval no longer. Embracing Francis, he said to the little band-- "Go with God's blessing and preach repentance to all, in the way that He is pleased to inspire you with." A few days later the little party were on their way home again, overflowing with joy. For a fortnight they lingered in a little town called Orte. Some historians say they rested awhile from their labours, others that they were attacked with fever in crossing the Campagna. Be that as it may, it was here that Francis endured one of the severest temptations of his life. The beauty of the scenery, the delicious quiet, after the anxious time he had just gone through in Rome, all conspired to make him think that after all perhaps a life hidden from the world and devoted to prayer and meditation would be just as acceptable to God as the more laborious one of preaching and teaching. But he did not remain long under this spell, and in a little time they were all back in Assisi. [Sidenote: _The Order Established._] It was at this point that Francis began first to shine as an orator. Of course the news of his visit to Rome spread all around, and more than ever he was an object of interest. The priests of St. George, who had educated him, asked him to preach in their church. This service must have been a success, because when the Bishop Guido returned to Assisi, he asked Francis to preach in the cathedral. Here Francis surpassed anything he had ever done before, and the large cathedral was too small to hold the crowds that flocked to hear the young man. Men and women came in from all the country-side, monks came down from their mountain monasteries, and learned and simple all agreed that "never man spake like this man!" Yet, as we have said before, his words were of the simplest. He preached repentance, not merely a lip repentance, but kind that worked itself out in daily life. "If you have defrauded any man," he said, "restore unto him that which is his." This sort of plain, practical teaching was rapidly dying out. It came fresh to the people, and they were stirred mightily." [Sidenote: _Less than the Least._] After their return from Rome, they began to be known as the Friars Minor. This was the way in which they got their name. One day a brother was reading aloud the Rule of the Order, and when he came to this passage, "and let the brothers be less than all others," it struck Francis very forcibly. He stopped the reader, and said-- "My brothers, I wish from henceforth that this fraternity should be called the Order of Minors." Minor being the word in the original that expresses the idea of "less than the least." And this was the name they bore for many a year. It was an expressive and suitable one. Less than the least of all the brethren--that was what they desired to be. They were essentially of the people, they wore the garb of the poorest, and shared their life with its toils and privations. There was also another reason for this name, some historians say. Just before Francis formed his Order, there was an Order of Friars established in Italy, who spent their time in working among the poor. "Little Brothers of the Poor," they called themselves, and it was in contradistinction to them that Francis called himself "Minor," or less than the "Little Brothers." CHAPTER X. THE STORY OF CLARA. "So faith grew.... The acknowledgment of God in Christ, Accepted by thy reason solves for thee, All questions in the world and out of it." One of the most interested listeners in the Cathedral, the day that Francis preached his first sermon there, was a little girl of sixteen. Her name was Clara Scifi, and she was of noble family. From her childhood she had been accustomed to hear discussed among the elders the follies and madness of Francis Bernardone. Clara had always been a good child, and from babyhood delighted to distribute food and alms of all kinds to the poor. When she was old enough to understand all Francis' principles, she was greatly drawn to them, though she kept her feelings to herself. A cousin of hers became a friar, and this naturally intensified her interest in the Friars Minor. But when she went to the Cathedral, and, for the first time saw and heard Francis for herself, it was like a revelation straight from God. It seemed to Clara that he spoke directly to her, and that he knew all her secret sorrows, and personal anxieties! Oh how she longed to have some part in his great work! In those days such a thing as a girl leaving her home for any reason except to be married or immured in a convent, and never seen, was unheard of, and when Clara made up her mind that she would break away from her idle luxurious life and become a servant of the poor, she knew that she was going to do an unheard of thing, and that never while the world stood, would she get permission from her father, Favorina, for any such undertaking! Clare's mother, Ortolana, was a pious woman, but even if she were to give her consent, it was quite certain her husband would not. Therefore Clara determined not to tell her mother what she was thinking about doing. [Sidenote: _Clara's Decision._] During the year that ensued after that preaching in the Cathedral, Clara saw a great deal of Francis, and the more she saw of him, and heard him talk, the surer she became that God was calling her to leave home and friends. So one March night, accompanied by two servants, Clara left her beautiful home, and set off for the Portiuncula, where Francis and the brothers were waiting to receive her, and welcome her as a sister in the Lord. Singing hymns, they led her into the little church, and after a short service, during which they read her the Rules, her beautiful long hair was cut off, and she robed herself in a garment of coarse, ash-colored stuff, tied in at the waist with a rope. After this she was conducted to a convent, some two miles away, where the Benedictine nuns gave her a temporary shelter. Francis was too simple and unworldly to think of the possible consequences of this step of Clara's. He was sure that God had called her, and he was equally sure that her friends would never give their consent to her leaving home and becoming an apostle of poverty; therefore, as God had revealed His will, it must be done at once. It also never occurred to him that this was likely to develop into a second Order of his Brotherhood, and an extension of his work. He only saw a soul anxious to leave the world and all that pertained to it, for Christ's sake, and his only thought was to provide it a way of escape, just as he would have cared for a sparrow escaping from the hawk, or a rabbit from the snare. Next day Clara's irate parents arrived at the convent. They saw Clara, and begged and entreated, and threatened, but all to no purpose. She would not come away. She was absolutely unmovable. At last, seeing that she was so determined, they gave up any idea of carrying her away by main force, and listened to her while she talked to them, and explained her position that she was consecrated to the living God, and that nothing should come between Him and her. Her parents struck by her words consented to leave her, and went away promising not to trouble her again. [Sidenote: _Agnes._] But the troubles of the house of Scifi were not yet over. A fortnight later, Agnes, a child of fourteen, ran away to join her sister. Agnes had always been intensely devoted to Clara, and besides, she too had been longing for some more satisfactory mode of life. It cannot be said that Clara was surprised when Agnes knocked at the door, for ever since her consecration she had prayed that Agnes' heart might be touched too, and that she might be led to follow her out of the world. Therefore she received Agnes with open arms. "Ah, sweet sister," she cried, "how I bless God that He has so quickly heard my earnest prayer for thee!" Agnes kissed her and declared that she had come never to leave her, and together they braced themselves for the storm that they felt was coming. And a terrible storm it was! Favorina enraged at losing another daughter, took twelve men relatives and proceeded without delay to fetch her home by main force if necessary. However, they smothered their rage at first, as best they could, and said quietly to Agnes-- "Why have you come here? Get ready and come home." Then, when she refused to leave Clara, one of them fell on her with kicks and blows, and taking her by the hair tried to drag her away. "Ah, my sister," she cried to Clara, "come and help me; let me not be torn away from my Lord." Poor Clara could do nothing but follow her weeping. At last, worn out with her struggles--or, as the legend says, she became so abnormally heavy--they were obliged to drop her. Clara, reproaching them for their cruel treatment, begged of them to give the child back to her. Not knowing what else to do they returned, much disappointed at their failure. [Sidenote: _The "Poor Ladies."_] This action of Clara and Agnes opened the way for many who were hovering on the brink. As soon as they were established at St. Damian's, which the Bishop of Assisi placed at their disposal--they were joined by one woman after another, many their own personal friends, and thus the second Order of what was then called "Poor Ladies," was founded. The rule that they followed was very much like that of the brothers, except in regard to the missionary life. Women in those days never preached! The "Poor Ladies" supplied the passive side of the organisation, and by their prayers and supplications, supported the active workers. Their daily needs were met by what we should call lay-sisters, women for whom a life apart from the world was impossible. At first the people of Assisi brought the ladies the food they needed, but when a little later this first ardour cooled down, the lay-sisters took it upon themselves to provide regularly for their necessities. However, the Sisters themselves were by no means idle. They spun thread, and made linen altar-cloths, and all that was needed for churches round about. Then Francis was always sending the sick and ailing to St. Damian's to be nursed, and for some time it was quite a hospital. Clara, who was eventually put in charge of St. Damian's was as rigid as Francis in her conviction as to the advisability of possessing nothing. When her father died, she was his heir. It was a very rich inheritance she came in for, but she commanded that everything should be sold, and the proceeds given to the poor, and not a penny of it went to enrich the convent. After her father's death Clara had the joy of welcoming her mother and younger sister Beatrice into her family! Clara was always a true Franciscan. All through her life which was a long one, she kept faithful to the principles of the Order, and never would she yield to any dispensation that deviated from the narrow path that Francis trod. When offered certain properties by a Church dignitary, on the plea that the state of the times made it impossible for women to possess nothing, she gazed upon him with speechless astonishment. [Sidenote: _"I want no Release."_] "If it is your vows that prevent you," the worthy man went on, "you will be released from them." "No," she cried, "I want no release from following Christ." She was a staunch defender of Francis. She also defended him from himself! Many a time in hours of dark discouragement, when he was sorely tempted to fly away, and shut himself up to a life of prayer and contemplation, she pointed out to him the sheep who, without a shepherd, were wandering to their own destruction, and drew him back again into his God-marked path. Her teaching, and her mode of caring for her sisters was very similar to that of Francis with his disciples. CHAPTER XI. THE FIRST CHAPTER. "No rushing sound we heard, We saw no fiery token, Only our hearts were stirred, For God had spoken." The temptation to seek a life of quiet and retirement followed Francis all his days. Invariably, after any new departure or special victory he was attacked in that quarter. Why he should have been so troubled when his call to follow Christ was so clear, we are not qualified to say definitely. In all probability this temptation of his was akin to Paul's "messenger of Satan" and thorn in the flesh that buffeted him, lest he should be unduly exalted. The most interesting point to us nineteenth-century Christians is, that by the grace of God Francis never yielded to this temptation--that having once put his hand the plough, he never turned back, but remained faithful to the end. We must take into consideration that the Order of which Francis was the founder was in itself unique. It stood alone in the annals of Church history. It was a novelty in the Church. All other existing orders followed a totally different line of action, or rather inaction. Their disciples were shut up in solitude, and devoted themselves to their own sanctification. When they worked for sinners it was by praying for them, by example, and by a little preaching. They never came face to face with the outside world. Their lives were remote, apart. These facts may have had something to do with Francis' periods of darkness and indecision. A pioneer's life has its own peculiar temptations. [Sidenote: _Darkness._] Perhaps the worst season of darkness that Francis had was after the establishment of the second Order. An internal agony seized him. Was he, he asked himself, not trying to do something superhuman in uniting a contemplative with an active life. So often he had been told by people much wiser and cleverer than himself that the life he had marked out was humanly impossible! He wrestled and prayed, but nothing could dissipate the heavy blackness that spread itself over his pathway. He determined to appeal to his brethren and follow their advice. His appeal for help gives us a striking instance of how subtly Satan can take the form of an Angel of Light. "My brethren what do you advise me?" he asked. "Which do you consider best--that I should attend to prayer, or that I should go and preach? I am a simple man, that speaks without art. I have received the gift of prayer more than of speaking. Besides, there is more profit in prayer. It is the source of grace. In preaching, we only distribute to others the gifts we have received. Prayer purifies the heart and affections. It is the union with the one true and solid Good. Preaching makes the feet of even the spiritual man dusty. It is a work that distracts and dissipates, and leads to relaxation of discipline. In short, in prayer we speak to God, and listen to Him. In preaching we must use much condescension towards men, and living among them it is often necessary to see, hear, think, and speak like them in too human fashion. These are very serious objections. And yet there is a reason that seems to give it most weight with God. It is that His only Son left the bosom of the Father to save souls, and to instruct men by His example and word. He gave all He had for our salvation. He kept nothing for Himself. Therefore it seems to me more in conformity with the Divine Will that I renounce a tranquil life and that I go to work abroad. But what is your advice? Speak! What do you think I ought to do?" The respective merits of the question had been so equally weighed that it is not surprising that the brethren, one and all, declared themselves unable to give any advice. For several days they conferred, but no clear light shone upon their conferences. It was an important matter to decide, because the whole future conduct of the Order hung upon the decision. As Francis would walk, so also would tread his disciples. This fact, together with the general uncertainty, pressed heavily upon his soul. One of the most spiritual of Francis' historians says that God permitted him to pass through this darkness, because He wanted His servant whom He had already made a prophet, to learn by a striking example, that no inspiration comes to us from ourselves. And more than this. He wished the merit and glory of preaching to be consecrated by a species of oracle that could only be attributed to Him. [Sidenote: _How the Answer Came._] This is how the answer came. Francis, always little in his own eyes, was never ashamed of inquiring of anyone, the simple as well as the learned, the imperfect as well as the perfect, if he thought that by so doing he would be the better able to extend the Kingdom. In the present instance, getting no light from the brethren, he sent a message to Brother Sylvester, who was now a very old man, and lived by himself on a mountain, and another to Clara, asking them to pray that God would reveal to them his will. The old priest, and the young girl and her companions, gave themselves up to prayer, and God who declares that He will be inquired of, revealed to them His will. When the messages came, as they did together, Francis was on his knees praying. Both messengers carried the same message. It was God's will, they said, that he should leave his solitude, and preach the Gospel. Immediately, without losing a moment, Francis got up, put on his mantle, and set of. All his doubt had vanished at once. "Let us go, my brethren," he said. "Let us go in the name of the Lord!" It seemed as if he were possessed by a new spirit. Never had he been so fervent. Never had his ardor been so intense. To all that he did God set His seal in a truly marvellous manner! The inhabitants of the various villages flocked to hear him, and they almost stood upon one another to find places in the churches and cathedrals. In those days the cathedrals and great churches were not seated. The people stood all the time. The men to the front, and the women very often far behind. When there was a large crowd, the crush was fearful. In Ascoli some thirty men from the Church joined the Minors, and were given the habit. After this event, Francis could not show himself in the street without being surrounded by a crowd. When once he came into a town the population had no thought for anyone but him. The churches were filled as soon as ever it was known he was going to speak. Even in the streets they eagerly gathered up his words. Thus it was everywhere he went through Central Italy. His name was in everyone's mouth. [Sidenote: _A Great Tree._] It was some time now since the building at the Portiuncula had become far too small to accommodate all who wished to join the Friars. There had been nothing for it but to overflow into the neighbouring provinces. It is a matter of some regret that but little of the history of this extension has been preserved. We shall see how Bernardo of Quintavelle, and Guido of Cortona, established branches of the Order, and no doubt the story of other new ventures would have been equally interesting, but all that history has handed down to us is a list of names. The tiny seed that Francis had sown in weakness was rapidly becoming a great tree. Though this progress was gratifying to him, it also caused him some suffering. By nature he was intensely affectionate, and when one by one he had to send out from him his old companions to take charge of distant branches, his heart was sad indeed. One day while he was thinking, as he often did, about his absent friends, the thought occurred to him that something might be done to alleviate this separation. Something, too, that would benefit the entire Order. Twice a year it was arranged that all the brethren, new and old, should meet at the Portiuncula. This idea proved to be so good that it became one of the fundamental rules of the Order. [Sidenote: _A Curious Scene._] The first of these "Chapters," as they were called, was held after Francis had completed his tour in Central Italy. The brethren came from far and near. They came pouring in from all quarters, up from the valleys, and down from the mountains, and from the shining sea-coast, streams of brown-robed, bare-footed men of all classes and conditions of life. And what were they coming to? A little church and convent as poor as themselves, where there were not even provisions enough on hand to supply one-hundredth part of the hundreds that were flocking there with one meal! But in perfect faith and trust they came, plodding along under the blazing sun, some rapt in meditation, others saluting all they met with their gentle salutation, "the peace of God." Such a sight was never seen in Italy before, and from castle and city poured glittering vividly-colored groups to see the wonderful sight. The richly-colored garments of the crowd, and the gaily-decked cavalcade from the country and castle formed a brilliant foil to the brown-robed stream of friars. The Portiuncula is situated on one of the lowest slopes of the Apennine hills, below it stretches the wide plain. This was the guest-chamber. There were no other beds than the bare ground, with here and there a little straw. But we need not pity them as far as sleeping out of doors goes, because the Umbrian nights are of all things most beautiful. The air was soft and warm, and the brilliant blue-starred heavens above did away with any need of artificial light. Francis met this crowd with great pleasure and cheerfulness, though he had not a crust to offer them. When they were all assembled he told them with sublime faith to give no thought as to what they were to eat or drink, but only to praise God. And his faith was rewarded. The people came from Perugia, Spoleto, Foligno, and Assisi, and from all the neighboring country to carry meat and drink to that strange congregation. They came with horses and asses, and carts laden with bread and cheese and beans and other good things, and besides this they brought plates, and jugs, and knives; and knights, and barons, and other noblemen, who had come to look on, waited on the brothers with much devotion. It was such sight as once seen could never be forgotten. [Sidenote: _Three Grades._] In these chapters Francis was at his best, and happily the historians of the time have preserved for us details of his mode of work. He was there to spend and be spent. His one desire was that the brethren should gain a renewal of spiritual strength in the days passed together, and at the same time that the Order in general should be benefited. To attain the first end, he employed what we have pointed out before as being one of his strongest points--private and individual dealing. As we have also already intimated, we feel sure that the greater part of his phenomenal success resulted from this. In his own mind he had the brethren carefully graded. There were three divisions. First, the fervent; second, the troubled in spirit; and thirdly, the tepid. The correctness with which he assigned everyone to his proper place was well-nigh divine. At the time of writing the fervent were numerous, but they were likely to be carried away by an exaggerated zeal. Some of them wore chains, and were ruining their health with over-watchings and fastings. Francis boldly forbade this. He would have none of it. He spoke to such kindly and tenderly, but he also spoke forcibly in commending that reason which must regulate piety, as it regulates human life. By precise and detailed rules he delivered the fervent from exhausting their strength before its time, and thus preserved them for their work. But it was not an easy task that of controlling the fervent, especially when there was a spice of self-will in addition to the fervency. In a large community, such as Francis now had on his hands, there is always sure to be a large percentage of troubled ones. Francis well knew this, he knew that the devil was always on the alert, that trials without and within are the lot of every mortal. These troubled ones found in their leader a tower of strength. To him they poured out their most secret confidences. The difficulties they had with uncongenial brethren, their interior doubts and fears, and awful dread that such might one day cause them to fall away. Francis showed all such the sincerest compassion. They knew and felt or that he loved them. His sympathy was a remedy in itself. They left him cheered and refreshed and strengthened. Human weakness is never slow in showing itself, and the tepid were easily recognized. They were generally those who had made a very good beginning, but had allowed their zeal to cool and were becoming unfaithful to the grace God had given them, and to the rules of the Order. Francis was always gentle to these as he was gentle to all, but he knew how to maintain his authority--to reprove, blame, and correct. He followed the Divine recommendation, "If thy brother shall offend thee, go and rebuke him between thee and him alone." His happiness was complete if he could gain the tepid brother. [Sidenote: _Duty of Humility._] In the general meetings where all the brethren were assembled he dealt with the interests of the whole work. He was very strong at these times on the duty of humility. "Make yourselves small and humble to everyone," he would say, "but above all, be humble to the priests. The care of souls has been entrusted to them. We are only auxiliaries, to do what they cannot do." They were never to enter any field of labor without the invitation, or at least the consent, of the local clergy. And then, when they had received this permission they must never act as though they were masters. This policy acted well. The local clergy had no misgivings in seeking their assistance. They knew that these men would not try to make the people discontented with their own pastors, but rather sow content. Another spirit Francis strove to get into his followers--that was the spirit of tolerance. He warned them against carrying their attitude, in regard to riches, to excess, and to say that all men must see as they did or remain unsaved. Other reformers had done this and were extinguished. The rule of poverty was God's leading for Francis. All men he recognized were not called to follow this track, though some of his disciples, in their enthusiasm, would have it that they were. To them Francis said-- "Do not use the sacrifices you impose upon yourselves as a weapon. Beware of haughty reproofs. We must show the same mercy that has been shown to us. The God Who has called us may also call them by-and-bye. I wish all that are here never to call the rich anything but brothers and lords. They are our brothers, since they have the same Creator as we, and they are our lords also because without them we could not persevere in the poverty that we have made our law." This spirit of tolerance was to extend to the sinners. He did not like to hear them berated. "Many who are the children of the devil to-day," he said, "will become true disciples. Perhaps they will go before us. This thought alone ought to keep us from all violence of language. We have been sent to bring back to the truth those who are ignorant and in error. That is our office, and one that is not accomplished by the use of cutting words and sharp reproaches.... It is not enough that our compassion be in words only. The important thing is that it should be in our deeds, that all who see us may, by occasion of us, praise our common Father, Who is in Heaven." [Sidenote: _Holiness._] He was also strong on holiness. He taught that there must be a true light within that shines only from a clean heart, before it can shine on the outer world, and without this no good work could be accomplished. Francis was full of the grace and wisdom of Jesus Christ. Of the spiritual effect of the first chapter a historian writes-- "The brethren valued the gift they had received. Not one of them cared to talk of profane matters. They talked about the holy examples given by some amongst them, and sought together ways of growing in grace and in the knowledge of Jesus Christ." CHAPTER XII. SOME OF FRANCIS' CONVERTS. "Ah, the people needed helping-- Needed love--(for love and Heaven Are the only gifts not bartered, They alone are freely given)." It is rather a pity that there have not been more detailed accounts handed down to us of the converts who could point to Francis as their spiritual father. It would have given us yet another side of that life which was the most glorious spiritual light of the dark age in which he lived! From the few that we meet incidentally, here and there, we have no doubt that such documents, were they forthcoming, would be of immense value. But, alas, the age in which Francis lived was not an essentially literary one, and writing was one of the accomplishments left to the few! So we must therefore make the best of such scanty material as we have at our disposal, and try to give you an idea of the different species of humanity that were attracted by the kindly, gracious, Christ-like personality of Francis. We have seen how at first, he had no idea of his call extending any further than himself and his own life and conduct. Then one by one, at first, and more quickly afterwards, men ranged themselves under his standard, and claimed him as their leader. Naturally, and simply, he took up his new position, and the duties attached thereto. He seemed to know by intuition those whom God had singled out to be his followers, and one after another heard Francis, as the voice of God calling them to leave all and follow the lowly despised Christ. [Sidenote: _Soldiers in the Christian Army._] One of the first of these was a laborer named John. It was always a great grief to Francis when he saw a church left dirty and neglected. It gave him positive pain to think that anyone could neglect the House of God, and give it less care than they would their own homes. When he went on different preaching tours he used to call the priests of the locality together, and beg of them to look after the decency of the churches. He was not content merely to preach, but often he bound stalks of heather together and made himself a broom, and set to work and showed them an example. One day he was busily engaged in sweeping out a church when a peasant appeared. He had left his cart and come to see what was going on. After he had stared for a time, he went over to Francis and said-- "Brother, let me have the broom and I will help you." He took the broom, and finished the church. When his task was ended, he said-- "Brother, for a long time, ever since I heard men speak of you, I have decided to serve God. I never knew where to find you. Now it has pleased God that we should meet, and henceforth I will do whatever you command me." Francis was convinced that he would make a good friar, so he accepted him. This John was renowned afterwards for his piety, the other friars admired him greatly. He did not live very long, and after his death, Francis used to love to tell the story of his conversion, always speaking of him as Brother _Saint_ John. Angelo Tancredi was a young knight, rich, and of noble family. Francis met him one day in the neighbourhood of Rieti. He had never seen him before, he knew nothing whatever of him, but inspired by God, he went up to him and said-- "My brother, thou hast long worn belt, sword and spurs. Henceforth thy belt must be a rope, thy sword the Cross of Jesus Christ, and for spurs thou must have dust and mud. Follow me. I will make thee a soldier in the Christian Army." Angelo's heart must have been prepared by God for this call, because we read that "the brave soldier immediately followed Francis as the Apostles followed our Lord." [Sidenote: _New Recruits._] Those who lived with him say that he was distinguished by a "glorious simplicity," meaning, no doubt, that while he accepted the humility of his new life, he retained something of his distinguished manners, and chivalrous bearing. He was a personal friend of Francis', and one to whom he could always unburden his soul. Guido of Cortono is said to have been a born Franciscan. Passing through Cortono, on a preaching tour, Francis found him ready, and almost waiting for him. He was a young man of singular purity of character. He had neither father nor mother, and lived quietly on the means they had left him. What was over from his income, he gave to the poor. After he had heard Francis preach, he went up to him and begged that he would come to his house, and make it his home as long as he stayed in Cortono. Francis consented, and as he and his companion followed Guido home, Francis said-- "By the grace of God this young man will be one of us, and will sanctify himself among his fellow-citizens." After they had eaten and rested, Guido offered himself to Francis to be one of his disciples. Francis agreed to receive him upon condition that he should sell all his goods. This was done, apparently on the spot, for we read that the three went round the town, distributing the money. After this Francis conducted Guido into the Church, and there clothed him with the "beast" colored robe. Guido retired to a place outside the city, and became the founder of a branch of the work. A small monastery was built, and such of his converts in the locality, as were called to be friars, Guido received. Sometimes the very talk about what Francis was doing, was used of God to re-kindle the flame of love to Him in hearts where it had nearly been extinguished. Simply hearing of the crowds that were seeking forgiveness of sins, roused others to a sense of their eternal needs. Amongst this number was John Parenti. Parenti was a magistrate, a clever, thinking man, who lived in the neighbourhood of Florence. He had long been very careless about his soul, and what little religion he ever had had was fast slipping out of his careless hold. He had heard of Francis, and the reformation that was taking place in Umbria, and meditated long and deeply on all that he heard, wondering, no doubt, if there was really "anything in it," or was it not "all mere excitement." Still, he was more than ever convinced that he himself had very little religion to boast of. [Sidenote: _The Swine-herd and his Pigs._] One evening he was taking a walk in the country when he met a swine-herd. This youth was in great difficulty over his contrary flock. As is the nature of pigs, mediæval or otherwise, they went in every direction except that in which they were wanted to go! Parenti stood looking on amused at the boy's efforts. With much labor at last he got them towards the stable door, and as they were rushing in he cried-- "Go in, you beasts, go in as the magistrates and judges go into hell!" It was only the uncouth speech of an equally uncouth swine-herd, but God used it to the salvation of his soul. He began to think about the dangers of his profession, and the state in which he was living, and where he should really go to if he died. The business of salvation looked to him that evening as the only one worth taking up, and the straight and narrow road the only safe place. He went home and confided all his hopes and fears to his son. Together they decided that they would go and find Francis, and tell him they wanted to change their life. They saw Francis, and before they left him, they had made up their minds to become friars. They came back, sold all their goods, and then put on the garment of the Order. Parenti was a valuable acquisition to the Order, and rose to considerable eminence in after days. [Sidenote: _The Prince of Poets._] Perhaps one of the most remarkable of Francis' converts was Pacificus, as he was known in the Order. This man was a noted poet and musician. He was known throughout Italy as "The King of the Verses," and was considered to be the very prince of poets. He excelled in songs, and was greatly appreciated everywhere. His supremacy was so undoubted that several times he had received the poet's crown from the hands of the Emperor of Germany, that very same crown that afterwards adorned the brows of Petrarch and Tasso. He was visiting at San Severino when he met Francis. A house of "Poor Ladies" had just been founded in this place, and Francis was preaching in their chapel. Some friends of Pacificus had relatives among the "Poor Ladies," and as they were going to visit them they asked him to come along too. He went, and as Francis was preaching they stopped to hear him. The tone, and the eloquence of the preacher, arrested Pacificus, and he could not hide his emotion as one truth after another struck his conscience. Francis perceiving that one hearer at least was touched by his words, turned the point of his discourse straight at him. The longer Pacificus listened, the more he was convinced not only that the hand of the Lord was upon him, but that a great work was required of him. As soon as the sermon was over, he asked to speak with Francis. That conversation completely won Pacificus. Francis spoke to him of the judgments of God, and the vanities of the world. "Enough of words," cried the Poet, "let us have deeds! Withdraw me, I pray you, from men, and restore me to the supreme Emperor." Francis was always a lover of decision, and the next day he gave him the habit, and took him on to Assisi with him. Ever after this the poet was known as Pacificus, in memory of the peace of Christ that that day flowed into his soul. His life was beautiful in its simplicity. His historian writes, "he seemed rather to forget what he had been, than have to make any violent effort to force himself to a new life." In other words, his life "was hid with Christ in God." This conversion of Pacificus attracted a great deal of attention and did much towards advertising the Franciscans all over Europe. [Sidenote: _Professor Pepoli._] Professor Pepoli filled an important chair in the Bologna University. He was converted through the preaching of Francis in Bologna. Of this preaching an eye witness writes:-- "I, Thomas, Archdeacon of the Cathedral Church, studying at Bologna, saw Francis preach in the square, where nearly the whole town was assembled. He spoke first of angels, and men, and devils. He explained the spiritual natures with such exactitude and eloquence that his hearers were astonished that such words could come from the mouth of so simple a man. Nor did he follow the usual course of preachers. His discourse resembles rather those harangues that are made by popular orators. At the conclusion he spake only of the extinction of hatred, and the urgency of concluding treaties of peace and compacts of union. His garment was soiled and torn, his person mean, his face pale, but God gave his words unheard of power. He even converted noblemen, whose unrestrained fury had bathed the country in blood, and many of them were reconciled." Professor Pepoli came under the spell of this preaching. A little later all Bologna was electrified by hearing that he was about to give up his professorship and become one of Francis' disciples. His friends did all in their power to keep him. They pointed out to him how much he loved his studies and the glory that was his. All in vain. Professor Pepoli had already been accepted by Francis. Three years later he died, greatly mourned by an entire monastery of which he had been the founder. If there were one class of men that Francis took more interest in than another, after the lepers, it was the thieves and robbers that abounded all over Europe. One day a number of them came begging at the monastery. Angelo Tancredi opened the door to them and, true to his soldierly instincts, was very wroth at their impudence. [Sidenote: _The Robbers._] "What!" he cried, "Robbers, evil-doers, assassins, have you no shame for stealing the goods of others, but would you devour the goods of the servants of God? You who are not worthy to live, and respect neither men or God. Get you hence, and never let me see you here again!" The robbers departed, full of rage. Francis next appeared close on their heels, carrying with him some bread and wine that had been given to him. Angelo told him of the impudence of the robbers, and how he had served them. To his surprise, Francis was much grieved at his conduct, and reproved him for his cruelty. "Go at once," he said, "and take this bread and wine and seek those robbers till you have found them, and offer them this bread from me, then ask their pardon, and pray them in my name to no longer do wrong, but fear God." Angelo departed, while Francis stayed at home and prayed for the success of his undertaking. The robbers were found, and Angelo brought them back to the monastery where they not only sought the pardon of their sins, but became friars, and lived and died in true holiness. One day Francis and some of the friars were passing round the foot of a great castle. It was evident there was some festival going on inside! The banner of the house floated over the gates, and the sound of trumpets were heard half over the country-side. The young Count of Montefeltro was about to be knighted. "Come," said Francis, suddenly inspired, "let us go to the Castle, and with God's help perhaps we may make some spiritual knight." As soon as the ceremony was ended, and the company began to pour out into the courtyard, Francis stood up on a low wall and began to preach. He spoke of the worthlessness of all earthly pleasures compared to the heavenly ones. He showed what the love of God could do in the human soul, pointing them to the apostles and martyrs as illustration, and contrasting the chivalry of the Christian heroes with that which was human glory only. It was an appropriate subject, and the people listened attentively. Amongst the audience was a valiant knight, Count Orlando, Lord of Chiusi. Immediately after the sermon, he went to Francis and said-- "I should like to talk to you about the salvation of my soul." "Most willingly," replied Francis, always courteous, "but this is not quite a fitting moment. You must honor those who have invited you. First go and dine with them, and after the repast we will converse at leisure." Count Orlando did so, and returning to Francis they talked together. Very soon Orlando was happier than he had ever been in his life before, because he knew that his sins were all pardoned. Before he parted with Francis he said-- "I have in my domains a mountain called La Vernia. It is exactly suited to men who wish to live in solitude. If it please thee I will give it to thee most willingly." Francis accepted the offer, and the mountain was used as a place where the brethren could go to pray, and rest when worn out with the fatigue of their work. It was really a huge plateau on top of a steep mountain, covered with trees. Amongst these, some little cells were constructed, and a quieter, more restful place it would be hard to imagine. [Sidenote: _The Peasant's Advice._] It was when Francis was climbing this mountain once, that a peasant, who took him up on his ass, asked him-- "Are you the Francis of Assisi that is so much talked of?" "Yes," said Francis, "I am." "Well," responded the man, "You will have hard work to be as good as they say you are. They have such confidence in you, it is difficult for you to be equal to it, at least that is _my_ opinion." Francis was charmed with this opinion, and thanked the man for his charitable advice, but before that journey was ended, the peasant was convinced that Francis was as good as "they" said he was. Our readers must not imagine that Francis' converts were all men. Far from it. Many women, besides Clara and Agnes, had to thank God that he ever came their way and taught them how to love and serve God. [Sidenote: "_Our Brother Jacqueline!_"] There was Jacqueline. She was of noble family, and though she did not leave the world like Clara, yet she served the cause right nobly. She was a most unusual woman for her times. We are told that "she was not afraid of business!" She went in person and treated with the Benedictines, and induced them to give up certain buildings in favor of the Friars Minor. All her riches and influence she put at the disposal of the Franciscans, who had no more active patron than Jacqueline. Francis used to call her jokingly "our brother Jacqueline!" On one of the last tours Francis was able to make, he suffered much from pain and depression. To cheer him, says a historian, God gave him a piece of work to do for Him. He was passing through a place called Voluisiano, when a young lady, the wife of the baron of the place, ran after him. When she caught up with him she was very much out of breath. Francis looked at her with interest, and asked-- "What can I do for you, Madam?" "I want you to bless me," she said. "Are you married?" went on Francis. "Oh, yes," said the girl, "and my husband is very stern. He sets himself against my serving Jesus Christ. He is my great trouble. I have received a right will from Heaven, and I cannot follow it on account of him. Will you pray that God may soften his heart?" "My daughter," Francis said in great compassion, "Go, I am assured your husband will become your consolation. Tell him this from God and me, 'Now is the time of salvation, recompense will surely come.'" Then he gave her his blessing. The lady went home, and finding her husband, gave him Francis' message. The Spirit of God carried it to his inmost soul. "He is right," he said to his wife, "Let us serve God together, and save our souls in our own house!" "The Lord be praised," cried his wife, and together they thanked God for the gift of His wonderful salvation. They lived for a great many years in godliness and holiness, and passed away to be with Christ, the one in the morning and the other in the evening of the same day. [Sidenote: _A Catalogue of Names._] Other equally interesting incidents, we have no doubt cluster round what, unfortunately, the historians present to us in the form of a catalogue of mere names. Chapter XIII. THE STORY OF THE MARTYRS. "God the Father, give us grace To walk in the light of Jesu's Face. God the Son, give us a part, In the hiding place of Jesu's Heart. God the Spirit, so hold us up, That we may drink of Jesu's Cup." They were five in number. Their names were Berard, Peter, Otho, Adjutorius, and Accurtius. When they first started out for Morocco, a sixth, Vital, was with them, but at an early stage of the journey he fell sick, and rather than the mission should be delayed on his account he insisted on their leaving him behind. He never recovered, but died about the same time as his brothers were martyred. About these martyrs historians are divided in their minds. Some say that they were foolish and extreme and courted persecution, others declare that they were animated by the Holy Ghost, and others that it was a part of God's great plan for the encouraging of the Franciscan movement. Certain it is, that in their case, the blood thus spilled was fruitful, and brought to life rich fruit, and we have no doubt that to-day they are among that mighty throng who are clothed in white raiment, and bear palms in their hands, who on earth "counted not their life dear to them." The memory of such souls is always fragrant, and supreme love, even though it may appear ill-regulated, is better than a tepid affection which is unworthy the name. The five travelled by way of Portugal, where they were well received. At Seville they stopped in the house of a Christian merchant for eight days, which time they spent in prayer. At the end of the eight days they informed the gentleman why they had come, and further said that they were about to commence a little preaching in Seville. Seville was at this period in the hands of the Moors. The poor merchant was utterly horrified at their proposals, he threw every obstacle in their way, telling them that they would do no good, and only make it hard for the Christian merchants who were allowed to trade there! Needless to say, such worldly reasoning had no effect upon the disciples of Francis. [Sidenote: _Preaching in at Mosque._] Their first attempt was, of all places, in a mosque! While the Moors were engaged in devotion one day, they were electrified to hear a loud voice proclaim to them Jesus Crucified. They immediately rose up and drove the intruders out with blows and curses. The five next repaired to a larger mosque, and sought to obtain a hearing there. Again they were thrown out. Then a brilliant idea occurred to the leader, Berard. "We will go to the King," he said. "If we gain him, the victory over the others will be easy!" In spite of all difficulties, they managed to gain admission to the Court, and present their plea. The King was enraged at their audacity, and ordered them to be scourged and beheaded, which was the summary mode in which justice was dealt out in that era. If it had not been for the intercession of the King's son, this sentence would have been carried into effect, as it was they were taken away and imprisoned in a tower. A few hours later all Seville gathered to see a strange sight! There, on top of the prison tower, stood the five, brown-robed, bare-footed strangers, singing with all their might praises to the one true God! They were then taken and thrust into the darkest and deepest dungeon. But as solitary confinement was unknown then, they found that they had a congregation all ready to listen to them, and, as long as they stayed there, they never ceased to preach repentance to the prisoners. They were not left in prison very long. The King sent for them again, and began by coaxing them to leave off preaching. He promised them riches and honor, if they would only stop talking about Jesus Christ. They thanked him courteously, and Berard said-- "Would to God, noble prince, you would show mercy to yourself! You need it more than we do. Treat us as you will, you can, at the utmost, only deprive us of life, and that is a matter of little moment to us who hope for eternal joys!" What to do with these strange men the King did not know! Their courage and heroism he could not but admire, still they were very dangerous. After a consultation with his officers, they decided that the best thing to be done was to get them quietly out of the country. Accordingly they were placed in a vessel bound to Morocco. This exile filled the five with joy! At last they were to begin work in an infidel country! [Sidenote: _Don Pedro._] Now, Don Pedro, the brother of King Alphonso of Portugal, a nominal Christian, had had some kind of a dispute with the King, in consequence of which he had come to live in Morocco. Notwithstanding his Christianity, he had been placed at the head of a Mussulman army. To him the missionaries repaired. By this time their personal appearance was anything but improved. Suffering and imprisonment had done their work, their faces were wan and thin, and their garments were all but in rags. Nevertheless, Don Pedro received them kindly, and promised to befriend them. He warned them against being too extreme, cautioned them to moderation, and begged that they would not expose themselves to danger. But Don Pedro knew nothing about that love, which is as fire in the bones, and is strong as death; so strong that no barriers can keep it within bounds. The next morning found the missionaries hard at work. They had learned that there was going to be some kind of a public procession through the town as the King was going to visit the tomb of his ancestors. [Sidenote: _Prison and Torture._] A procession to the five meant people, a concourse of sinners and infidels, a glorious opportunity, and if they did not make the best of it, they would be unworthy the name they bore. Just as the King was passing, Berard, who could speak Arabic, mounted a cart and began to preach. Instead of stopping when the royal train passed, as a Mussulman would have done, he waxed more vehement. To the King this seemed either insolence or madness, and having charitably decided on madness, he ordered the missionaries to be banished. Don Pedro, who by this time had had enough of his troublesome guests, gave them an escort to the nearest seaport, and hurried their departure. Again he reckoned without his host. It was to the Moors the five were sent to preach, and to the Moors they were bound to go, so they escaped from their escort, returned to Morocco, and began to preach again in the streets. This was too much for the King, and he had them thrown into the vilest of dungeons, where for several weeks they languished in great misery, with barely enough to eat. One of the nobles of the Court who was secretly inclined to the Friars, advised the King to let them out, but place them under proper care. This was done, and they were handed over to the unfortunate Don Pedro, who was far from cheerful at seeing them back again. He was about to start off on a military expedition into the interior, and not daring to leave his awkward charge behind, he took them with him. Nothing much is known of their doings till they got back again to Morocco, whereupon they began their preaching again without any more delay. Yet again the King commanded that they should be thrown into prison, and this time they were sentenced to torture. Albozaida was the name of the officer who was to carry out this sentence. In his heart he pitied and admired the missionaries, and notwithstanding the order he had received, he merely had them shut up, and begged of the King to pardon them. But it was no use. The King was very angry, and demanded that his will be carried out without delay. So there was nothing for Albozaida to do but to hand them over to the executioner. [Sidenote: _The End._] Alas for them! this man was a renegade Christian, and no torture was too great for him to inflict upon them. They were dragged through the streets with cords round their necks, they were beaten, they were rolled over pieces of glass and broken tiles, and when evening came, vinegar was poured into their open wounds, lest the night should bring too much cessation from pain. But they smiled at pain, and praised God in the midst of the greatest tortures. This treatment failing to kill them, the King desired to see them again. He spoke to them at first as though he had never seen them before. "Are you the impious men who despise the true faith, the madmen who blaspheme the Prophet of the Lord?" he said. "Oh King," they replied, "far from despising the true faith, we are ready to die for it. It is true that our faith is not your faith." The King did not appear to be displeased with this bold statement. He had another argument at hand. He sent for a number of richly-dressed women, and presenting them to the missionaries he said, "If you will follow the law of Mahomet, I will give you these women for wives, and you shall have positions of honor and power in my kingdom. If not, you shall die by the sword!" "Prince," they answered, "We want neither your women nor your honors. Be such things yours, and Jesus Christ ours. Make us suffer all your tortures, kill us. Pain will be light to us. We look to Heaven!" Maddened by his own insufficiency the King got up, seized a sword, and cleft their heads as though he were but a common executioner. Thus perished the first Franciscan Martyrs. And did they accomplish nothing? Was their mission an utter failure, as some historians write it? Let us see for ourselves. As soon as the missionaries had been killed, the mob took their bodies, and dragged them in the mire, and horribly mutilated them. However, Don Pedro, who up till now had been but a very poor representative of the Church of Christ, was deeply touched by the death of the five, and his once half-sleeping conscience was awakened into activity. He got possession of the battered bodies, and resolving that he would have nothing further to do with the enemies of Christianity, took them, and went back to his own country. As soon as he arrived at Coimbra, King Alphonse came out to meet him, and with great rejoicing the remains of the Missionary Martyrs were carried to the Church. [Sidenote: _Fernandez._] Amongst those who followed in the train of the king was a young man some twenty-five years old, of noble family, named Fernandez. This young man was tremendously stirred by the story of the martyred five. Their life and death spoke to his soul as nothing had ever done before, he longed to follow in their steps. He had a great deal of conversation with certain Franciscans who lived in a settlement hut outside the town. They came sometimes and begged at his door, and he used to question them. One day he said-- "If I became one of you, would you send me to the country of the Saracens, that like your holy martyrs I might shed my blood for the faith?" They replied, saying, it was the wish of Francis that his people should go and preach to the infidels. "If that is so," said Fernandez, "bring me the habit of your Order and let me put it on." Without any pomp or ceremony Fernandez put on the coarse robe, changed his name to that of Anthony, and, bidding good-bye to his family, joined the Franciscans. To go into all the details of his story would take too much space, but Fernandez became one of the shining lights of the Franciscan movement, and many rose up to call him blessed! [Sidenote: _Father of Souls._] He went to Africa, but it was not God's will that he should labor there. A violent fever reduced him to such a degree of weakness that he had to leave the country. He set sail, meaning to return to his native land and get restored in body, but a storm drove the vessel on to the coast of Italy. He preached there for a time and then went on to the Portiuncula, where Francis was presiding over a gathering of the brethren. There God showed him that Africa and a martyr's crown were not for him, and cheerfully accepting the work that God meant for him, he became the father of thousands of souls. Oh, what, if we are Christ's, Is earthly shame or loss? Bright shall the crown of glory be, When we have borne the cross. Keen was the trial once, Bitter the cup of woe, When martyred saints, baptized in blood, Christ's sufferings shared below. Bright is their glory now, Boundless their joy above, Where, on the bosom of their God, They rest in perfect love. Lord! may that grace be ours, Like them in faith to bear All that of sorrow, grief, or pain, May be our portion here! CHAPTER XIV. FIRST FOREIGN MISSIONS. "They are gone where Love is frozen, and Faith grown calm and cold, Where the world is all triumphant, and the sheep have left the fold, Where His children scorn His blessings, and His sacred shrine despise." It was about the time of the first chapter that Francis began to feel drawn to foreign fields. The Franciscans had now spread all over Italy, and there was a general desire shown by the brethren to extend their ministrations outside that country. It would appear that at its close, a small number of the brethren were sent out to evangelize the various countries of Europe, Portugal, Hungary, Germany, etc. For himself Francis had a larger and more daring scheme. It was the time of the Crusades. All Christian Europe was bending its energies to wrest the tomb of our Saviour out of the hands of the Saracens. Band after band of Crusaders had marched into the Sultan's territory--to suffer defeat and death. Francis was too much of a soldier and knight not be stirred by the tales of bravery and daring which were rife everywhere. But he had his own opinions. "Is there not," he asked himself, "a more beautiful way of gaining the desired end? Why all this bloodshed? why this wholesale hurrying of men to perdition? why all this strife between the children of one Father? Why has no one ever tried to gain these infidels over on Christ's side? How many lives might be spared, and what an increase there would be for His Church if they succeeded!" It was a noble thought, and one worthy of Francis. The more he pondered these matters the more convinced he became that it was his duty to put his ideas into practice. He told some of the brethren his purpose, and they, convinced that God led him, made no objection, and in a very short time he was ready to begin his difficult and dangerous undertaking. Peter of Cantani was appointed to take the government of the Order during his absence. Francis, and his companion, whose name we are not told, embarked at Ancona. How they got their passage without any money we do not know, but it is evident that they managed it somehow. When they were well out to sea, such a storm arose as caused them to seek refuge on the coast of Illyria. It was supposed at first that the delay would only be one of a few weeks, but the stormy weather persistently continuing, it soon became evident that it would be impossible to cross the Levant at that season of the year. This was a great disappointment to Francis, but he was far from being discouraged. He determined to return to Ancona. A vessel was about to sail, and he presented himself as a passenger, but as he had no money they refused to take him on board. [Sidenote: _A Dilemma!_] Here was a dilemma! But help was at hand. One of the ship's officers, a good man, was touched by the harshness with which the missionaries were treated, so he went to Francis and told him that he would take them on board. He conducted them down into the hold, and hid them behind some horses there. Hardly had they been deposited when an unknown friend brought an enormous basket of provisions, and, giving it to their benefactor, said-- "Take this, take great care of it, and as the need arises, distribute it to the poor brethren you have hidden." The need soon arose. Another fearful storm beat the vessel about to such an extent that the voyage was prolonged far beyond the usual limit. Provisions were exhausted and a famine threatened the unhappy crew. Then Francis, hearing of the distress, crept out from among the horses, explained his presence, and said that he had food which he would be glad to share with them. The legend tells us that the food was miraculously made to last the voyage; the real fact was probably that the basket contained large supplies of beans, and lentils, and macaroni, and such Italian foods that swell in the cooking, and go a long way. [Sidenote: _In Spain._] Arriving at Ancona, Francis began to preach. He had a wonderful time, and a great number of clerics and laymen joined the Order. Part of them Francis took with him to the Portiuncula, and offered them to God as the price of his failure! After watching over them for a few weeks, he left them in good hands, and turned his attention again to foreign mission work. The east had been closed to him, but that was no reason why the west should not open. The enemies of the Christians were as powerful in Spain and North Africa, as in Egypt and the Holy Land. The infidels had just been defeated in battle, and all Europe was talking about the victory gained at Las Navas Tolva. The heart of Francis mourned over these defeated ones. "Supposing they had been defeated," he argued, "their natures were still unchanged, their souls were still unsaved." He began to question if their need was not his call. He thought he heard them crying, "Pass over and help us!" He offered himself to God for this work, and, taking with him his well-beloved Bernardo di Quintavelle, set out for Spain. He had another rough experience of the sea, but this time he reached his goal without any mishap. It was autumn when they landed in Spain, and without loss of time, they set off for the interior. At the outset of the journey, a little incident occurred which, though unpleasant at the time, God over-ruled for good. They were passing a vineyard, and Bernardo, who was very thirsty, plucked a bunch of grapes to refresh himself with. This was quite an allowable action in Italy, but Spain appeared to have a different code of morals, and one of the servants of the owner seized Bernardo, called him a rogue and a thief, and insisted upon his paying for what he had taken. Bernardo explained that he had no idea of doing wrong, and that he did not possess the smallest piece of money. The man snatched at his mantle, and said that would have to pay for it. But Francis, without discussing the matter with the servant, insisted upon seeing the owner of the vineyard. To him he explained the state of affairs; the mantle was given back, Bernardo was apologized to, and the good Spaniard did even more, he offered his services to Francis, and threw open his house, which became a sort of hostelry for the Order, and any brother was always welcome, night or day, to the best that there was. [Sidenote: _The Will of the Lord._] Francis' intention was to go straight to the Mussulmans. He even talked of reaching Morocco. But God led him to stay in Spain longer than he had expected. People were converted everywhere, and branches of the work were established. Who took charge of these new ventures we are not told; doubtless friars from Italy were sent there. Just as he began to see his way clear to go to the Mussulmans, he was seized with a violent fever. For some time he lay between life and death, and when at last he began to get well, it was perfectly evident that there could be no talk of his going to Morocco. Always submissive, Francis accepted this as the will of the Lord and returned to Italy. The reason why he was led back to the Portiuncula at that particular time seemed to him quite plain afterwards; for, when he got there, he found a number of learned and noble men waiting to offer themselves to him. Exactly what Francis did after this is not quite clear. Probably he preached round about the North of Italy, and visited the various branches of the work, instructing novices, and establishing fresh centres. At the beginning of the next year we find him attending a conference in Rome, respecting the recovery of the Holy Land. While here, he met Dominic for the first time. Dominic was the founder of another kind of Friar Order. He conceived a great admiration for Francis, and tried very hard to get him to consent to amalgamate the two. This Francis never would consent to do, and the two always remained distinct. [Sidenote: _Ugolin's Visit._] The decision of the conference was that the Pope himself should lead a crusade into the Holy Land. He left Rome in May, and passed through the valley of Assisi, where Francis was presiding over a general Chapter. At Perugia he was taken ill with fever. One of his near relatives, Cardinal Ugolino, accompanied him. This man had heard a great deal about Francis from Cardinal Paul, who had just died, and he thought that now would be a good chance to see for himself. Accordingly, followed by his magnificent suite, he travelled back to Assisi. All he saw filled him with wonder; it bore to him the mark of true holiness. What struck him most was the poverty of it the brethren. He had no idea they carried it so far. He went through the roughly constructed cells, saw the beds made of straw, more like the lairs of wild animals, and he could not restrain his tears. "Alas!" he cried to those who were with him, "what will become of us who need so many superfluities in our lives!" Ugolino did not stop there. He felt impelled to offer himself to fill the place of Cardinal Paul as Protector of the Order. "I offer myself to you," he said to Francis; "if you wish it, I will be your helper, counsellor, and support!" Francis first of all thanked God, and then he answered, "It is with all my heart I salute you, the father and Protector of our religion. I wish all my brothers to you consider you as such!" There are some historians who declare that this friendship--for a very real friendship sprang up between Francis and Ugolino--was no advantage to the Order, but rather harmed it. There is no evidence of this among the best authorities; they lean rather to a contrary opinion, and we are inclined to believe ourselves that the Order would never have developed as it did but for Cardinal Ugolino. He went back and told the Pope what he had seen, and the old man rejoiced greatly. It was the last joy he had on earth, for he died a few days later. [Sidenote: _Growth of the Order._] Time went on, the Order spread and spread till it was impossible for one man to do justice to the whole. To meet the growing need for oversight, Italy was divided into several provinces, these provinces were to be directed by brothers who were called "Ministers" or "Provincial Servants." Francis named Peter Catani for Umbria, Elias for Tuscany, Bennet of Arezzo for the Marches of Ancona, John of Stracchai for Lombardy, Daniel for Calabria. Then it was also decided that Bernardo di Quintavelle was to take charge of Spain, and John of Penna, Germany. Francis himself was to take France, a land he had always been especially drawn to. It was through the intervention of Ugolino that he forewent this mission. Francis stopped at Florence on his way to tell him of his journey. Ugolino saw what Francis could not see, that in view of all their new ventures he could not afford to leave the country just then. Francis argued that he could not stay at home in safety and let the brothers go abroad on dangerous missions, it would raise talk. Ugolino wanted to know if Italy wasn't big enough for him. Francis replied that God had raised them up for the good of the whole world. "Perhaps so," said Ugolino, "but in any case _you_ cannot go away yet without imprudence. Your Order is only just started, you know the opposition it met with at first; its enemies are not yet disarmed, and your presence is necessary to defend and maintain it." Francis saw that Ugolino spoke wisely, and he gave in and stayed at home. For some time he was the guest of the Cardinal, and their mutual liking for each other was greatly increased. The more Ugolino saw of Francis the more he loved him, and though he could not see eye to eye with him in everything at first, he eventually came round to his ways. As much as possible Francis lived his simple manner of life in the Cardinals palace. He prayed and meditated, he went out to preach and to beg, and he even brought back his alms into the palace! One day there were a great many people at the table, and Francis was eating the scraps he had begged. Some of the guests began to joke him about it, but Francis maintained that his food was angels' bread, and if they liked he would share it with them. All--prelates, knights and nobles--accepted willingly, some ate their portion, others put it by to keep as a memento. But Ugolino was a little hurt. He took Francis aside and said-- [Sidenote: _A Quarrel._] "Ah, my brother, wherefore all this begging; you hurt me. Do you not know that my house is yours and your brethren's?" "My lord," answered Francis, "I have not affronted you; I think I have honored you by imitating in your house our Lord Jesus Christ who taught us to love poverty. For, indeed, I mean only to follow the footsteps of my Master!" The Cardinal bowed his head. "Do, my brother, what seems good to you," he said, "the Lord is with you!" This visit of Francis' to Florence resulted in the establishment of a large convent on the borders of Tuscany and Umbria. This is how it came about. The powerful family of the lords of Baschi were divided. The three sons were in open rebellion on account of questions of personal interest, and they were doing their best to drag into this quarrel the numerous friends of their clients and vassals. It was plain to be seen that bloodshed would be the outcome. Francis was very much grieved when he heard of this dissension, and felt that he must do his best to stop it. Accordingly, he visited the three brothers, Ugolino, Buonconte and Ranicu, in turn, and entreated them in the name of Christ to desist. He succeeded in accomplishing his end, they laid down their arms, amicably settled the vexed question, and a charter of reconciliation was drawn up. Then, wishing to show their gratitude to Francis, they presented him with a beautiful hill, and, building a monastery on it, begged of him to send friars to establish a work there. A little later, the Cardinal presided over what was known as the "Chapter of Mats," so called because the brothers lived under little tents made of matting. He was very much surprised at all he saw, and said he never expected to find a well-disciplined army! This was a very important Chapter, and many new Provinces were formed. It was conducted very much like the preceding ones. [Sidenote: _Failure of the German Mission._] It was either in the middle or just before this Chapter, that the German-Hungarian expedition returned. Their mission had been an utter failure! When questioned as to the reason of this failure, they answered, unanimously-- "No one knows us; our dress, our loneliness, excite distrust. The clergy have united to drive us away, they called us heretics, and left us without defence or protection. We fell into the hands of wicked men and thieves, who ill-treated us; we had to come away!" This sounded very badly, but the explanation of it lay in the fact that they did not understand the language of the people they went to! How it happened that they were sent, not knowing the language, we cannot say. Perhaps Francis thought that French and Italian would be spoken, or, at least, understood in these countries, or it may be he expected them to be endowed with the gift of tongues. Those who went to Germany knew but one word of the language, "ja"--"yes." In the first town they entered they attracted a great deal of notice, and people asked them if they would like food and a lodging. They did not understand a word of what was said, but they smiled and said "ja." Finding themselves well treated, they determined to use this expression on all occasions. Unfortunately, the next one asked them if they were heretics, and had come to Germany to preach an evil doctrine. When they again smiled and answered "ja," to their grief and amazement, they were cast into prison, and after having been ill-treated for some time, were driven out of the country. At the close of the "Chapter of Mats," Francis announced that he was about to proceed to Egypt to preach to the Sultan. Ugolino had decided that things were now on such a solid foundation that he could with safety leave the Order while he took this long journey. CHAPTER XV. FRANCIS' VISIT TO THE SULTAN. DISCOURAGEMENTS. "I must not fail Nor be discouraged. In the work of God No man may turn or falter." Francis and his companion Illuminato set out for Egypt with the intention of making straight for the Sultan. They travelled with one of the Crusading parties, which, by a curious coincidence, was commanded by John of Brienne, brother to that Walter of Brienne whom Francis would have enlisted under, only God sent him back to his native town! That Francis made a good impression upon the Crusaders we know, for one of their number writes of him:-- "We saw Brother Francis, Founder of the Order of Minors, arrive; he is a simple man, but very lovable, and dear to God as well as to men, and is much respected by all." The impression the Crusaders made upon Francis was not so favorable! There was a great deal of discord among them. The Knights looked down on the men-at-arms, and the men-at-arms called the Knights treacherous. Francis had grave doubts as to the result of _their_ expedition from the beginning. Immediately upon landing, the Crusaders had planned to do battle with the Saracens. This line of action was totally opposed to Francis' ideas of Christianity. "I know, by a revelation of the Lord," he said to Illuminato, "that they will be defeated in this attempt. If I tell them so, they will treat me as a madman; and, on the other hand, if I do not tell them my conscience will condemn me. What do you think I ought to do?" "My brother," said Illuminato, who was a man of virtue and intelligence, "what does the world's judgment matter to you? If they say you are mad, it will not be the first time they have said so! Do not burden your conscience; fear God rather than man!" So Francis was true to his conscience, and warned the Crusaders, but they laughed him to scorn! They rushed into a battle, and were utterly defeated. Six thousand Christians were killed or taken prisoners. During the battle Francis was very anxious and unhappy, and often he wept bitterly for those whom he had tried to save! Now that force had failed, Francis felt that his time had come. He would go to the Sultan. The Crusaders, what were left of them, in their turn, tried to dissuade him. They told him that he could not get from one camp to another without being killed, and that the Sultan had offered a golden reward to anyone who would bring the head of a Christian. He replied that he did not fear death, and would make the attempt. First though, before he set out, he went to one of the Cardinals who were with the Crusaders, and told him what he proposed doing. A contemporary writer preserves for us this interview. He writes, probably in a letter to some friend-- [Sidenote: _Two Clerks._] "Now I must tell you that two Clerks (Francis and Illuminato) were in the Army, and they came to the Cardinal. They said that they would go to the Sultan to preach, and they wished to go with his leave. The Cardinal said they should not go with his leave, for he knew well if they went they would not escape. Still they said, would he suffer them to go, and much they prayed him. Then, when he heard that they had so great a mind to go, he said thus: 'I do not know your thoughts at all, but beware if you go that your thoughts are always to God.' They said they only wished to go for great good, if they could accomplish it. Then the Cardinal said they could go if they wished, and they departed from the Christian host into the host of the Saracens." Francis was full of confidence. As he travelled he sang, "Though I walk in the midst of shadows of death, I fear no evil." On his way he met two little sheep. This sight gave him much cheer. "Be of good comfort," he said to Illuminato, "it is the accomplishment of the words of the Gospel, 'Behold I send you as sheep in the midst of wolves.'" [Sidenote: _The Saracens._] And the wolves were not very far behind. They appeared in the shape of some Saracen soldiers, who taking them at first for refugees or envoys let them go quietly on, but when they found out that the brethren had no message and that they not only refused to give up the Christian religion, but had come to preach it, they abused them and loaded them with chains. Francis never lost his presence of mind. He knew one word of Arabic, and that was "Soldan"--Sultan. As the soldiers beat him he cried lustily "Soldan, Soldan," and they understood that he wanted to be taken to their Chief. The Sultan was called by the Arabs, Malek-Camel, or the "Perfect Prince." He was very far from being a perfect character, but for a Mussulman, he was not ferocious. When Francis and Illuminato came before him they saluted him. Malek-Camel saluted them, and asked if they wished to become Saracens, or had they come with a message. "Saracens we will never be," they said, "but we have come with a message from God that will save your life. For we say that if you die under this law you are lost, and for that we have come to you, and if you will listen to us we will show you that you are lost!" The Sultan said meekly that he had very good Archbishops and Bishops of his own. "Of this we are glad," the missionaries replied, "send and fetch them." So the Sultan actually sent and fetched eight. He told them what they were wanted for, and repeated to them his conversation with Francis. But there was no mercy in this quarter. "Sire," they said, "thou art expert in the law and art bound to maintain and guard it; we command thee by Mahomet, who gave it to us, that their heads be cut off. We will hear nothing that they say, we command thee to have their heads cut off." With that final decision they filed solemnly away, leaving Francis, Illuminato and the Sultan alone. "Seigneurs," the Sultan said, "they have commanded me by Mahomet and the law to have your heads cut off. This the law commands. But I will go against the law, for else I should render thee a very poor reward for having risked death to save my soul." In a second interview he had with them he promised them possessions and lands if they would only stay with him! "Yes," said Francis, "if you will be converted, with your people I will gladly remain." Then, a bright idea striking him, he went on-- [Sidenote: _Trial by Fire!_] "Your priests will not talk with me, perhaps they would be more ready to act. Have a great fire lighted, I will go into the fire with them, and you will see by the result which faith is the surest and holiest." When Francis had begun this speech there were a number of priests standing round about, but before he had finished they had quietly taken themselves off! The idea filled them with horror! The Sultan perceiving their absence, remarked sarcastically-- "I do not think that any of _my_ priests are inclined to face flames and torture for the defence of their faith." Francis couldn't understand how anybody with a real faith could refuse to have it tested! He offered to go into the fire alone, and if he were burnt it was to be considered due to his sins, but if God protected him, the Sultan was to own Him as Supreme. But the Sultan would not hear of any such trial. He was amazed and astonished at the absolute faith and trust of the man before him. With this refusal Francis retired. He was followed by rich presents from the Sultan, all of which were promptly returned. The Sultan begged of him to take them for his Churches and Order, but Francis persisted in his refusal, and seeing that there was no germ of real religion in the Sultan's heart, he returned to the Crusaders' Camp. He was heavy and sore in soul because he felt his mission to be a failure. [Sidenote: _Victory._] But if he had failure in one direction, he had victory in another. The news of his visit to the Sultan spread, and wherever he was, people flocked to see and hear him, and recruits such as he had never expected, began to gather round him. The following fragment of a letter written by one of the Crusaders to a friend, shows us how they regarded his work. "Master Regnier, Prior of St. Michael's, has entered the Order of Friars Minor. This Order is making rapid progress in the world, because it exactly reproduces the form of the Primitive Church, and closely imitates the life of the Apostles. The Superior of these brethren is Brother Francis, a man of such goodness that we all hold him in veneration. After he came among us, so great was his zeal that he did not fear to go into the Army of our enemies, and preach, during several days, the Word of God to the Saracens. He had not much success, but on his departure, the Sultan King of Egypt asked him secretly to pray for him that he might be guided by an inspiration from above, and attach himself to the religion most approved by God. Colin, the Englishman, one clerk, and two other of our companions, to wit, Michel and Master Mathieu, to whom I have entrusted the care of my Church, have also entered the Order of Minors, and I can hardly keep back the Cantor and several others! As to myself, with my body weakened, and my heart oppressed by all these separations, I aspire to end my life in peace and quiet." Thus when Francis failed, God caused even that failure to be productive of good. The whole question of failure is a very subtle one, and it is a matter of grave doubt as to whether God's errands ever do really fail--what we call failure according to our preconceived ideas, may simply be God's way of working. True, the Sultan was not converted (though there is a legend to the effect that when he was on his death-bed he sent for a Franciscan friar, and professed conversion), but to-day, at time of writing, the Franciscans are spread out all over the Holy Land. They have schools and churches and orphanages in every part of the country. Seventeen years later, John of Brienne, the Commander of the Crusade, after fighting many battles, and rising to great earthly glory, became converted and entered a branch of the Franciscan brotherhood then established in the Holy Land. This was no doubt due to the influence of Francis, who by the power of God alone, subdued the enemies of Christ. [Sidenote: _A Trial._] Upon returning to Italy, a sad trial awaited Francis. He had determined to visit Bologna on his way back. The long sea-voyage and hot climate of Egypt had weakened him very much, so much so that it nearly happened that he passed on without paying the promised visit. Several of the brethren round about had met Francis on his way, as naturally he halted at any monastery on the route. The conversation that he heard among these brethren troubled him not a little. He heard that there had been important additions made to the humble house the lawyer had given to Bernardo when he came first to Bologna. What put the finishing touch to his sadness was when an inhabitant of the city alluded to the building as "the Friars' house," then he knew they had departed from their first principles, for there was no "me" or "mine" in the Order of the Friars Minor. It was a heavy blow to him, sick and smarting under a sense of failure as he was, and he declared that he would not shelter under its roof, but would go elsewhere and beg for hospitality. He sent a message to the monastery to command every one of them to turn out at once! This was done instantly, and even those who were ill were carried into the street! A historian, who was a friar at the time, writes, "he who writes this history was one of the number; he was taken out of his bed and laid in the street like the others." This summary proceeding naturally caused a tremendous stir in the city, and what the outcome of it would have been we cannot say if Ugolino, who seems to have had a knack of turning up at every crisis, had not appeared just then. He went to Francis, and with great difficulty succeeded in quieting him. He would never have done this had he not been able to assure him that the house was his and in no way belonged to the friars. When Francis saw that the brethren were in no danger of becoming proprietors, he allowed them to go back and consented to preach in the city. History tells us that that preaching was one of the most glorious on record. It was through it that Professor Pepoli joined the Friars Minor. But Francis felt keenly that the government of a multitude is difficult and that increase of followers does not invariably mean increase of joy. For several years after this he rather discouraged than encouraged people to enter the First Order. [Sidenote: _Orphans._] But the whole Bologna affair made a deep impression upon Francis. For the first time in his career his brave spirit suffered defeat, the first declension in principle, together with his own failing strength was too much for him. At the next Chapter he presided over, which was soon after his return from Egypt, he publicly resigned from the position of Minister General. No one seems to have been prepared for this action beforehand. "From this moment," he said, "I am dead to you, but here is our brother, Peter Cantani; he it is whom both you and I will henceforth obey." The brethren were broken-hearted. "What!" they said through their tears, "are we to lose our father and become orphans?" Then Francis stood up and prayed-- "Oh my Lord, I commend to Thee this day, this family which Thou hast entrusted to me. My infirmities, Thou knowest, make it impossible for me to take care of it. I put it into the hands of Ministers. If it come to pass through their negligence, their scandals, or their too great severity, one of the brethren perish, they will give account to Thee at the Day of Judgment." No entreaty or argument could get Francis to alter this decision. He was a man in the prime of life, and, humanly speaking, he ought to have had long years of service before him. Perhaps he felt that already his days were numbered, and that it was only a question of a few years at most. As long as he lived his successors were known as Vicar-Generals. He would only consent to preserve the title and rights of Minister General. This arrangement had no serious results as far as Peter Cantani's government went. He was a good man, and carried out Francis' idea exactly, so that Francis could leave all to him, and with a clear conscience, devote himself to visiting the centres and preaching. But, unfortunately, Peter Cantani's reign was a brief one; he died a very short time after his promotion to the Vicar Generalship. [Sidenote: _Storm Clouds._] From the death of Peter Cantani till his own death, the storm-clouds of internal struggle gathered round Francis' path. His life was not to be all one long, if hard worked for, success. No! life is not lived thus; there is the dark as well as the bright in its mosaic, but it is sad, we say in our humanity, when the dark work is done at the end. But God, Who is the chief Workman, knows best how He wants His work ordered; He has His eyes on the beautiful end, while we fix ours tearfully at the unfinished, and, therefore, inexplicable pattern. There was yet, however, one unalloyed joy in store for Francis before he entered upon his last dark years of service, one of the greatest social reforms the world has ever known--the establishment of the Third or Tertiary Order of Brothers Minor. CHAPTER XVI. "BRETHREN OF THE MILITIA OF JESUS CHRIST." "A dream of man and woman, Diviner but still human, Solving the riddle old, Shaping the Age of Gold. The love of God and neighbor, An equal handed labor; The richer life where duty Walks hand and hand with beauty." The idea of this Third Order had been in Francis' mind for a long time; in fact, as far back as his first journey to Rome, when the entire brotherhood numbered twelve! On his way home to Assisi he had preached in every village and town he passed. One day, as he was preaching in the vicinity of a large feudal castle, the whole establishment turned out to hear him, and when he had finished, his listeners, lords and ladies, officers and retainers, threw themselves at his feet, announcing their intention to follow him wherever he went, and renounce the world for ever. Never was preacher in such a plight! There they stood, the tears running down their faces, husbands and wives and little children, soldiers, bower-maidens and pages, the entire retinue that ordinarily made up the household of a mediæval lord. Francis knew that it would not be possible to carry off the lot; beside, there was no Second Order then, and what could he do with the women and children? So he calmed them by telling them that he would endeavor to create an Order into which they could come without shaking the foundations of the universe! Little he thought that the Third Order was destined to make even more stir in the world than the First or Second. [Sidenote: _What must we do?_] As the years passed by, Francis was continually met with the question, "What must we do now we are converted? Teach us how to live!" It was a very important question, and a very natural one, for the first instinct of a healthy, newly-converted soul is to spend and be spent for its Master. Strange as it may seem to us in these days of Bible readers, district visitors, and lay-workers of all kinds, it was a very difficult question to answer. The Church, which as yet was the Church Universal, not having suffered any disruption, knew nothing of lay help, other than setting its members to pray, and give alms. A change of life and action had long since ceased to be preached. Francis and his followers had revived the old Apostolic doctrine of repentance and conversion and holiness of life and thought. As many as could join the First and Second Orders were well disposed of, but the countless multitude who were unable to leave home and friends, were the, as yet, unsolved problem. Francis soon saw that his work would be, to a large extent, a failure if something were not done in the way of organizing his converts. This fact was again pressed home upon him the year after Peter Cantani was appointed Vicar General. He was preaching in a little village called Cannara, and his hearers, who comprised the major portion of the village, were so carried away with his words, that they besought him with tears to take them into his brotherhood. This he refused to do, saying-- "You are not able, nor ought you to do anything of the kind. I will think of you, and I will seek, and with God's blessing I will find a life more within your compass." This promise he found he had to renew wherever he went. "What must we do?" the people asked him. "We cannot forsake our wives!" said the husbands, and "We cannot leave our husbands!" said the wives. "How shall we save ourselves?" [Sidenote: _The Third Order._] After a little, the active mind of Francis found the way out. He would form a new Order of converted men and women, who would be linked on to the First, and so, without leaving the world, they could enjoy the peace and strength of a truly religious life. Such an idea had never been heard of before, and the success of the new institution far surpassed all expectations. It seemed as though men's hearts and minds had been waiting for it, to judge by the numbers that sought admission. The rules of the Order were very simple and based almost entirely on the Sermon on the Mount. The "Tertiaries," as they were called, were required to put an end to all hatred, and to restore all ill-acquired gain, not to engage in lawsuits, to practise the commandments of God, to wear a plain dress, and abstain from all worldly gaieties, such as theatre-going, dancing, etc. No one might speak of his or her neighbor's faults. They were to eat the plainest of food and to avoid a variety of dishes. Then there were various advices given as regards cleanliness. Mediæval folk seldom reckoned cleanliness among the virtues to be cultivated. No one was to appear in Church in soiled or torn clothes, because, in so doing, they showed disrespect to God, and never should there be stain or spot on their garments, for outside purity is in some sort a reflection of inward purity. Houses and furniture also had to be plain and clean. They spent what time they had in visiting the sick, and helping those who needed help out of the surplus of their goods. Before anybody was admitted into the Order, an investigation was made into his or her life, respecting personal character and relations with their neighbors. If he were found with goods not belonging to him, or to be at enmity with anyone, he was not admitted until he had repented and done his first works. In every place where a congregation of the Third Order existed, there was a "Visitor" who was also a Minor of the First Order. It was his duty to oversee these "Tertiaries," and give them instruction. Such was the Order in which people of all grades and classes hastened to enrol themselves. It was first opened in June, and at the end of that year we find branches of it in Tuscany, Umbria, and the Marches of Ancona. A wave of blessing seemed to pass all over Italy. It does not appear that Francis established any other fraternity of the Third Order except the First, and from that the others spread out into all the earth. [Sidenote: _A Strong Order._] The "Tertiaries," or "The brethren of the Militia of Jesus Christ," as someone called them, multiplied to such an extent that very soon they attracted more attention than was altogether pleasant. The different bishops of Italy opposed them, and wrote to the German Emperor, Frederick II., who was a man of bad character and openly irreligious. "The Friars Minor have risen up against us!" they wrote. "They have publicly reproved our life and conversation. They have destroyed our rights, and brought us to nothing. And now, as the finishing stroke against our power, and to deprive us of the devotion of the people, they have created two new confraternities, which include men and women. Everyone runs into them!" Frederick was frightened. He saw a gigantic army ready to fight for the Church at a word of command, because one of the bye-laws of Tertian rule forbade the Tertiaries to carry offensive weapons save in the defence of the faith of Jesus Christ, or in defence of their country. From this time Frederick, who was always fighting against the Church, became their bitterest enemy, and persecuted them wherever they were to be found. If it had not been for the influence of Cardinal Ugolino, who vigorously protected the Third Order after Francis' death, Frederick would, probably, have been able to wipe it out of existence, or what would have been worse, it might have existed only in name. As it was, it grew and spread and struggled for its rights, till it became one of the most powerful religious, social and political influences the world has ever felt. To go into the details of this would occupy too much space, therefore, we shall turn our attention to a few of the first Tertiaries. [Sidenote: _Lucchese._] The _very_ first was a man called Lucchese. This man was young, good-looking, and ambitious. He was a tradesman, and his ruling motive in life was to vie with the nobles. This, after a time, became a passion with him. He knew the only way to success lay through riches. Therefore, he determined to be rich. He began to speculate in grain, and bought up as much as he could, and thus created an artificial famine in his village. Then, when the want was greatest, he resold his stores at enormous prices, and his fortune was made. But God was looking after him, and, one day, when he was sitting alone, the thought of what he had done came before him in all its hideousness. He saw that there was something more in life besides merely pursuing riches, and "what would it profit him," something asked him, "if he should gain all his heart was set on, and be eternally lost in the end?" From that hour he was a changed man. After consultation with his wife, Bonadona, he sold the greater part of his goods, and distributed their price to the poor. He kept only a house and a garden of four acres, which he cultivated with his own hands. This was a hard life for one who had been used to luxury. His house soon became the "poor man's inn" for the district. Thither came the poor and needy in troops, and never were they sent empty away. Such was Lucchese's life when he met Francis, just at the time when the necessity for the Third Order was pressing most heavily upon him. Lucchese opened his heart to Francis, and told him how much he longed to make up for the wrong he had done in the past, and live a life well-pleasing to God. "For some time," said Francis, who felt, as Lucchese talked with him, that the man and the hour had both arrived, "I have been thinking of founding a Third Order, in which married people will have an opportunity of serving God faithfully. You can be the first to enrol yourself." [Sidenote: _Lucchese's Work._] Then he explained the form which he intended to give this Order, and Lucchese gladly enrolled himself, and Bonadona declared that she would join her husband. Encouraged by this good beginning, Francis publicly announced his intentions, and a number of men and women came and offered themselves to him. So, one day, in the Church, in the sight of many spectators, he clothed them in a simple, modest dress of ash-grey, and the first group, or rather the first fraternity, was formed. Lucchese persevered nobly in his good works. He was no longer content with merely helping those who came to him, but he travelled great distances to find the suffering. Sometimes he was to be seen leading three or four poor creatures, and carrying the weakest of them on his back! When once they were in his house, he cared for them, body and soul, and many of them were converted, and some joined the Third Order. Close to where Lucchese lived, there were large tracts of swampy, malarial country. Every summer fever was sure to break out there. Lucchese saw this place now as a beautiful field for Tertiary labor. He bought an ass, and, loading it with suitable drugs and food, he went down into the fever swamps, and did his best in the capacity of doctor and nurse and priest all in one. His wife was always ready to help him in all his good works. His death is reported to have been "serene and grand as that of a patriarch." He and his wife were both taken ill together. She got worse rapidly, and they came to tell him of it. They carried him to her side. Kissing her an affectionate farewell, he said-- "Oh, my beloved and devoted companion, we have served God together in all affection. Wait for me, we shall be permitted to go together to the unspeakable joys!" He returned to his room and lay down in great weakness. Those around saw that his last hour had come. "My dear brother," said one of the Friars Minor, who stood beside him, "be strong and prepare thy soul to appear before thy Saviour." Lucchese raised his head a little and smiled. "My good father," he said, "If I had waited till now to prepare my soul I should still have confidence in God's mercy, but to tell the truth I should leave the world with less security, on account of the terrors of the passage." But the passage had no terrors for Lucchese. He raised his arms and said-- "I feel myself free and ready, not through my merits, but through those of our Lord Jesus Christ." A few minutes after the death of his wife, he, too, followed her to Heaven. [Sidenote: _A Dinner Party._] Once, when passing through Rome, Francis was asked by the chief of a powerful house to dinner. As he was going into the palace of the noble, he descried a number of poor people congregated in the court, to whom food was being distributed. Unable to resist the opportunity, he went down and sat among them! Matthew de Rubeis, his host, was looking out of the window and saw this, so he came out and joined him, saying-- "Brother Francis, since you will not come to me, I must come and sit with you." And with the most courtly air he announced to the astonished crowd that he and Francis would eat with them. After that dinner, during which no doubt Francis expounded his doctrines, Matthew de Rubeis was enrolled in the "New Militia." He was the first Tertiary in Rome. [Sidenote: _Little Rose._] Little Rose, though not actually a contemporary of Francis, is always reckoned in as one of the first Tertiaries. She was one of those children who seem born with deep religious feeling. She always, from her earliest dawning intelligence, loved God with all her heart and soul. She was a beautiful child, very lively in disposition, and she loved to go out into the streets and sing hymns. Before she was ten years old, she began to preach against those who tried to undermine the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ, of whom the chief was the German Emperor, Frederick II. The Archbishop of the town had written a letter warning his people against the dangers that beset them, and nowhere did his appeal take deeper root than in the heart of little Rose. She, childlike, spoke out boldly what her friends were thinking in their hearts. Standing in the street, on a large stone, she preached that the Emperor was an enemy of the true faith, and must be resisted, and that the standard of the faith must be kept high at all costs. Those who thought just so encouraged her, but those who were staunch supporters of the wicked Emperor went to the Prefect of the town, who belonged to their party, and declared-- "If you do not send away Rose and her parents, we will drive you away yourself." The Prefect was frightened. He sent for Rose and her parents, and when they appeared he ordered them, on pain of being cast into prison, and having their goods confiscated, to leave the town. It was then the middle of winter, snow had been falling for some days, and the roads were nearly impassable. The parents begged to have the sentence postponed for a little. "It is death," they said, "to go now." "Well, you can die then," answered the Prefect. "I want nothing better." So they took their child and set off. They did not die, however. God took care of them, and they safely reached Soriano, where they lived in peace and quiet, till the death of the Emperor, a year later, allowed them to return home again. CHAPTER XVII. CLOUDS. "For gold must be tried by fire, As a heart must be tried by pain." It seems a rather strange turn of events that put Elias in the place of the gentle, devout, Peter Cantani. No one could doubt Elias' efficiency. That was beyond all question, but that he had a proud, self-willed spirit was also indisputable. Francis' mind at first turned towards Bernardo di Quintavelle as Peter's successor. He always had a peculiar love for this, his first son. But though Bernardo had risen to considerable importance in the Order, yet for some time he had been harassed with interior temptations, and had been subject to great darkness. Though Francis was not troubled very much by this experience of Bernardo's, saying "It is a trial, he will come out of it, and be the greater for it afterwards," yet he did not think it wise to put him in any new position of authority, as his own trials would not leave him quite free for his work. So Bernardo was passed over, and Elias filled the vacant Vicar Generalship. Elias' Government was active. Splendid order reigned in all the communities. He was unequalled for clearness of business views, and his preaching was greatly sought after. Some historians say that with all Francis' gifts of perception he never until it was too late saw into Elias' character, and that the pride and self-will which were so evident to others were hidden to him. Elias loved show and external greatness rather than interior goodness and holiness. He loved Francis, but he thought he was far more capable of filling the Vicar Generalship than he. He regarded Francis as one to be admired, not imitated. It is quite certain that if Francis had had the faintest idea that the Order would suffer through Elias, he never would have elected him. [Sidenote: _Germany Again._] Elias entered his new appointment in a blaze of glory. He had come from the Minister Generalship of Tuscany, the most important post in the Order, which he had managed in a very skilful manner. Then another event had just happened which added to the lustre of his reputation. A celebrated German preacher, Cesar of Spiers, had attended his preachings and entered the Order. Elias was installed at the next Chapter before five thousand brethren. It was at this Chapter, that on the seventh day they had to beg of the people not to bring them any more food, and even then they had to prolong the Chapter two days, in order to eat up all the provisions that had been donated! Elias presided at the last sitting, which was the one when the brethren received their appointments. We have told you how unfortunate the first German expedition had been and how the poor brethren returned more dead than alive with fright. Well, during the course of this last sitting, Francis felt impressed that they ought to make another attempt for the salvation of Germany. As he was not very well that day, and unable to make himself heard, he pulled Elias by the tunic, and whispered to him aside. Elias stood up and said-- "My brethren, this is what the Brother tells me," they always called Francis "The Brother." "There is a country, Germany, whose inhabitants are Christians, and full of devotion. You have often seen them passing through our country walking in the sunshine with long sticks and great boots, singing the praises of God. Several of our brethren have already been amongst them. They did not succeed, and had to come back. Now I compel none of you to undertake this mission again, but if anyone is sufficiently filled with zeal for the glory of God and the salvation of souls to venture upon it they can give in their names." [Sidenote: _An Unwilling Volunteer._] A wave of horror ran through the assembly, for no mission was more dreaded, but very soon they recovered themselves, and about ninety gave in their names, several of whom were of German origin. Among this last number was Cesar of Spiers, who was appointed Minister for Germany. A rather amusing incident occurred in connection with this expedition. The ninety volunteers were all told to come out of the ranks, and stand together till those who were to go were chosen. As they stood waiting there a certain brother called Giordano, who was one of those most scared at the idea of a mission to Germany, and had taken good care not to volunteer, thought he would go and have a look at them. Giordano had a spirit of investigation that would have led him into the ranks of journalism had he lived only a few centuries later! "They will certainly die," he said to himself, "and it will be as with the martyrs of Morocco. I shall not even have known them by name." With that he took himself off on an unauthorized interviewing tour, and accosting each one he said, "Who are you? What is your country?" Then, as he told himself, when he heard of their martyrdom, he could say, "Oh, I knew this one, and the other one." It was not a very lofty object, but it was an exceeding natural one. In time his investigations brought him to a brother who was a bit of a wag, and who, unluckily for Giordano, knew of his horror of Germany. "I am called Palmerio, and I come from Gargano," he replied meekly, when questioned, "but, my brother," he continued, "you are one of us, you are going too." "No, no, I am not," cried Giordano. "I only want to know you." "Oh, but you are," insisted Palmerio, and taking him by the shoulders, he held him amongst the volunteers. Giordano was still struggling for liberty when Cesar was appointed Minister, and told to choose those out of the ninety whom he would like to have with him. Several of the brethren who had entered into the joke with Palmerio surrounded him, and begged him not to leave out brother Giordano. [Sidenote: _To go, or not to go._] "I'm not going. I'm not going," cried Giordano. Cesar looked at him, and seeing he was a suitable candidate, was inclined to have him. He, knowing that his countrymen were neither savages nor man-eaters, and that there was not the slightest danger to fear, was rather at a loss to understand the fuss. "Will you or will you not go to Germany? You must decide," he said to Giordano. This threw Giordano into great perplexity. If he did not go to Germany, he feared his conscience would condemn him, seeing that he was chosen, and if he went, the Germans were ferocious, and he _knew_ he would not make a good martyr! He consulted a Brother who had been robbed fifteen times during the last Hungarian mission. "In your place," advised the man, "I should not choose. I would say I shall neither go nor stay. I will do as you say." Giordano followed this advice, and was chosen for Germany! He got the better of his fears and worked bravely, and his journalistic talents were used in compiling a valuable chronicle, which tells how the Minors were established in Germany. The next most important event in the history of the Order was the establishment of a school for theology and training. This was begun by Anthony, whom you will remember best under the name of Fernandez, and who was led into the Order by the death of the five Morocco martyrs. He was not only deeply religious, but very learned. Upon hearing him preach one Easter, some of the brethren who were present got the idea that a school was needed in the Order, and that Anthony would make a splendid head. They laid this plan before Elias, who highly approved of it, and undertook to present it to Francis. To convince Francis was quite another matter, and for some time he would not hear of it. But Elias was a clever reasoner, and he got Francis at last to listen to the plans. Still he hesitated. His ideal had always been Apostolic preaching, and he dreaded any change in his beloved Order. At last he gave in, and wrote his consent to Anthony thus-- [Sidenote: _A Definite Rule._] "I consent to your teaching holy theology to our brethren, on condition that such teaching does not stifle the spirit of prayer, either in yourself or others. I hold firmly to this point, for it is our rule." Whether this step was a good or bad one, we cannot say. We only know that under Anthony no harm came of it, but rather good. With all his brilliancy and keenness of intellect, and in spite of the way men ran after him and honoured him, he still kept his simple faith and humble spirit. After the Chapter we have already described, Francis took a tour with Elias into his late province, Tuscany, and then, on his return, he set himself down to compile a definite and comprehensive rule for the benefit of posterity, and to which future generations would be able to refer. Probably the laxities of Elias, which were beginning to make themselves manifest, strengthened Francis in his determination to leave his articles of faith behind him in such tangible form that there could be no questioning the principle and line of action. Elias' influence was being felt all round. The devotion to poverty was not what it once was, and the love of authority and office was doing its deadly poisonous work in the hearts of some. Francis' decision to draw up a definite rule was far from agreeable to Elias and his set. Nevertheless, it was done. Taking with him Leo and Bonizio, Francis went off to a hermitage, and there he dictated the new rule. On his return to Assisi he gave it to Elias to read, telling him to take care of it. When Elias read it, he found that it entirely did away with many of his most cherished plans, so a few days later, when Francis asked him for the rule again, he said that he had lost it. Francis answered never a word. He returned to the same solitude with the same companions, and dictated the Rule a second time. This Rule has been handed down to us intact. It is very largely an application of those first verses of the Gospel which were to Francis his call to his life-work. It is remarkable for its clearness. If any Brother transgressed this Rule, he did it with his eyes open, and knew what he was doing too. There is no sign of any laxity in it. As Francis advanced in years, he became more and more strongly attached to that simplicity of faith and work which was the light of all his life. At the next Chapter a copy of the Rule was given to all the Brethren. They were told to carry it about with them always, and learn it by heart, and repeat it often to themselves. [Sidenote: _Keeping Christmas._] It was drawing near Christmas time when this Rule was finally passed by the Church, and as Francis was in Rome just then he determined to put in practice an idea which long had been simmering in his brain. It was an innovation, but then he was convinced that it would make men think more deeply of the Holy Baby that was born to bring peace and goodwill to earth. Accordingly, he sent the following message to a nobleman named John, who was devotedly attached to Francis:-- "I wish to keep Christmas night with you, and, if you agree, this is how we will celebrate it. You will choose a place in your woods, a grotto if there is one, you will put in it a manger and hay: there must be an ox and an ass also. It must as much as possible be like the manger at Bethlehem." All was prepared, and when Christmas night came an immense multitude, carrying torches and lighted tapers, poured through the dark, midnight woods to the grotto. The Brethren sang carols as they came, and these were caught up by the people till the forest resounded again and again. Francis himself led this mighty procession to the manger, and there, standing at its head, the oxen and asses pressing close beside him, and the flaring torches lighting up the whole with an unearthly lurid light, he preached to them about the meek and lowly Jesus, Who came to earth to be despised, persecuted, and put to death. It was a time of much blessing, and that night saw a dawning of "peace and goodwill" in souls once darkened and lifeless. [Sidenote: _A Great Task._] But all this time, ever since he returned from Egypt, Francis' health was slowly but surely failing. Weak and ill, and with the lurking fear that the principles of the Order were being undermined, his last two years of life were anything but peaceful ones. Not that there was anything done openly--that was the misery of it; an open, bold innovation could have been taken hold of and dealt with, but Elias was far too politic and clever to do anything that might lead to his being put out of office. Any question of departure from the rules that came up, he always blamed on the Provincial Ministers, and professed to be as grieved over their failure as Francis himself though secretly he supported them. He carefully gave all the truest Franciscans appointments far away from Assisi and Francis, and kept those of his own mind near home. This was not a bad thing for the ultimate success of the Order, because it preserved the real spirit abroad, and when Bernardo di Quintavelle stepped into Elias' place, ultimately, he had all his foes close to hand round home, where the Franciscan principles had taken deepest root. It was hard for Francis when one after another of his faithful followers came to him, and with tears reproached him for having given them into the hands of another. When they at last took in the fact that though the spirit might be willing, the flesh was too weak to do what it had once been able to do, their sorrow knew no bounds. Some of them were almost a little selfish in their grief. "You will pass away," said one. "Your family will remain in the valley of tears. Who can take charge and direct it after you? If you know of one on whom your mind can rest, I conjure you to tell me." "My son," said Francis, with tears, "I see no one around me equal to this task of being shepherd to so great a flock." [Sidenote: _Foes._] Thus, tortured by bodily pain and weakness, and tormented by unseen foes and enemies of all that he counted dearest and most sacred, he entered upon the two last dark years, which were his Valley of the Shadow before the Eternal Sun rose, never to set again. God of my life, through all my days My grateful powers shall sound Thy praise, My song shall wake with opening light, And cheer the dark and silent night. When anxious cares would break my rest, And griefs would tear my throbbing breast, Thy tuneful praises, raised on high, Shall check the murmur and the sigh. When death o'er nature shall prevail, And all the powers of language fail, Joy through my swimming eyes shall break And mean the thanks I cannot speak. But oh, when that last conflict's o'er, And I am chained to earth no more, With what glad accents shall I rise To join the music of the skies! The cheerful tribute will I give Long as a deathless soul shall live; A work so sweet, a theme so high, Demands and crowns eternity! CHAPTER XVIII. LAST DAYS. "Sin can never taint thee now, Nor doubt thy faith assail, Nor thy meek trust in Jesus Christ And the Holy Spirit fail; And there thou'rt sure to meet the good, Whom on earth thou lovedst best, Where the wicked cease from troubling, And the weary are at rest." Slowly, but surely, the time came when Francis was compelled to drop all attempt at work. We do not read that he suffered or grieved over this--not even when the blindness which had been gradually creeping upon him suddenly climaxed, and he was plunged into almost total darkness. In the midst of all, his faith shone brighter and brighter, and his love for God grew in intensity. His confidence in God was such, that when he found himself, in what ought to have been the prime of life, a broken-down, pain-tortured wreck, not the faintest shadow of a regret for the golden years that "might have been," had his path been a less stormy one, ruffled the interior calm of his soul. His life had been lived, and was being lived in the will of God, and nothing outside that will could possibly happen to him. So, in the serene confidence that _all_ things--no matter how disastrous they might appear to human understanding--would surely work together for good, he lay down in his narrow cell at the Portiuncula, to _suffer_ the Divine will with the same glad, ready obedience with which he had heretofore hastened to perform it. In no instance do we read of his faith failing him. Not for the smallest fraction of a second. The story of his last days is one of the most vivid pictures of the triumph of a soul over every earthly hindrance. It has its parallel in the story of Gethsemane and Calvary. [Sidenote: "_Thy Will be Done._"] Before we continue our narrative, let us for a moment take a realizing view of Francis, his condition and circumstances. As we have said before, his health was utterly undermined. We are told that "the stomach could ill bear food, the internal organs were the seat of constant sufferings, and all the members were weakened and painful." Add to this almost total blindness, and we have a state of body that would in itself be sufficient excuse for any phase of soul-difficulty, darkness, or depression, had such assailed him. But how much worse than his bodily pains must have been the heart-agony he suffered through the insidious, elusive disease that was sapping the vitality of the vast organization of which he was the tender Father. To the very dregs Francis drained that cup of failure and defeat, which all who are called to lead the vanguard of Christ's conquering host, have at some time or another to drink more or less deeply. That is the time when the cry, "If it be possible, let this cup pass from me," is wrung from the tortured soul, and thrice happy are those who, out of an intimate knowledge of God, can add, "Not my will, but Thine be done," assured that it is best simply because it is His. But it is only those who know God and enjoy Him, who have confidence enough in Him not to demand His reasons--those whose lives have not been mere service alone--who can triumphantly and victoriously cry, "Thy will be done." Such was Francis. Such were those of the whitest of God's saints, and a like eternal, triumphant victory is ours, if we, too, are willing to pay the full price--a life of utter self-renunciation. [Sidenote: _An Operation._] But to return. Up to the time when Francis became blind, he had steadily refused to see any doctor or take any medicine; but after much persuasion, on the part of the brethren and Ugolino, who firmly believed that the Order would suffer collapse if Francis died, he gave in to their request, and tried every remedy the Assisian doctors presented. But he became no better, and from Assisi he was taken to Rieti, to consult an oculist there. He suffered everything from the rude, barbarous surgical treatment of the times, which knew little beyond cauterization, bleeding, and drawing-plasters. But, as he became rather worse than better, the Rieti oculist, who had learned to love him, took him on to Siena, to see an old, celebrated oculist who lived in that town. This man said that there was nothing for it but an operation--a very painful one, too, for he would have to cauterize his patient from the eyebrows to the ears. Francis said he was ready to undergo it. He thought to himself that this was a glorious chance to show that Christ's soldiers could be as brave as any others. One moment only he shuddered. This was when the doctors were heating their instruments in the fire, and he knew that soon he would have to endure them. In those days only the very stoutest-hearted submitted to operations, the majority preferring to die untortured. One can hardly blame them, as there were no means known by which the faculties could be deadened. Before the hot irons touched him, Francis prayed, and then addressed the fire thus: "My brother fire: among all beautiful things the Lord has created thee, beautiful, strong, useful. Be gentle to me this hour. May God, who created thee, temper thine ardour, that I may be able to bear it." With that he gave himself into the surgeon's hands, and without a groan he underwent the operation. The brethren who were with him, ran away the moment it began. Francis called them back. "Oh, faint-hearted cowards!" he said, "Why did you run away! I tell you in truth the iron did not hurt me! I felt no pain." Then, turning to the doctor he said, "If it be not well burnt, thrust it in again." The doctor, who knew the terror most people felt at such operations, exclaimed in amazement-- "My friends, this day I have seen wonders!" [Sidenote: _Failing Health._] For a little time the operation seems to have succeeded, and the winter passed away with alternations of good and bad health. Francis spent the largest portion of his time in prayer and meditation, and after that he was able to see the number who daily begged for the privilege of visiting him for consultation and help. His memory, writes a historian, served him for a book, and furnished him with the principles and facts he needed on every subject. "The important thing," Francis used to say to himself, "is not to have understood a great number of truths, but sincerely to love each truth--to let each one penetrate the heart by degrees, to let it rest there, to have the same object in view for a long time, to unite one's self to it more by the sentiment of the heart than by subtle reflections." In the early days of spring Francis was seized with such a violent hemorrhage that everyone thought his end had come. Elias was hastily sent for, but before he could arrive all immediate danger was past. However, as soon as he was able, Francis determined to travel back to Assisi. His was the true Italian nature, whose heart always turns towards home, as a sunflower to the sun! He must have had a revival of strength just here, because we read of his standing on a stone in the cemetery at Cortona, preaching to the people. But he was not deluded into thinking that this meant recovery. Oh, no, he told the people plainly that he was on his way to Assisi to die. For two months he stayed in Cortona, detained there by the people, who refused to part with him, and then he was seized with dropsy and fever. He begged to be taken back to his native land. It was his last wish, and they at once carried out his desire. For fear the Perugians--through whose town they had to pass--would also try to detain him, Elias sent a messenger to the magistrates of Assisi asking them for an escort back. The magistrates immediately sent a party of armed men on horseback, chosen partly from the nobles, and partly from the principal men of the town. They surrounded the litter in which Francis was laid, and the journey commenced. It was a curious procession, the worn invalid, lying on his hard couch, and borne by his brown-robed, bare-footed brethren, and round them the brilliant costumes and gay trappings of the nobles and their prancing horses. Did Francis, we wonder, compare his present position with that day some twenty years back, when hunted and hounded through his native town, he was glad to take refuge in a cave! If he did, we may be sure that to God he gave all the glory. [Sidenote: "_For the Love of God._"] Francis took a keen delight when as it happened he was able to prove to his gay escort by ocular demonstration the power of his beloved poverty. They were stopping at a tiny mountain village in order to let him rest, and as they had no food, the men set out to buy some. They came back a little later, very discomfited and not a little cross. The people had refused to sell them any, saying loftily, "We are not shopkeepers." "We are reduced to living upon your alms," the men said to Francis, "we cannot find anything to buy." Francis enjoyed their dilemma hugely. "You have found nothing," he explained, "because you have trusted in your money more than God. But return where you have been, and instead of offering money ask food for the love of God. Do not be ashamed; since sin came into the world all we have is alms, it is of the charity of the Great Almoner that we receive what we call our possessions." The knights took courage, and became for the time beggars, and, asking food "for the love of God," received all they wanted! After this halt they reached Assisi in another stage. The old Bishop Guido came to see his "son" as soon as he arrived. The moment he looked at him he knew that his days were numbered, and he entreated him to let himself be moved to his house, where he could have more comfort. This was done, but nothing could really ease Francis' sufferings. The swelling that had begun at Cortona disappeared, and he rapidly became terribly thin. He could not make the slightest effort without terrible suffering, and his eyes were so bad that he could barely distinguish light from darkness--feeling alone remained, and we are told that every part of his body was the seat of sharp pains! The doctors declared they could not tell what kept him alive! [Sidenote: _Farewell to Assisi._] "My father," said one who was tending him once, "Do you not think you would suffer less under the hands of an executioner?" "My brother," answered Francis, "my dearest and sweetest wish has always been, and still is, to do what God demands of me; with all my soul I desire to conform myself in all things to His pleasure and will, but martyrdom would be less difficult to bear than three days of this illness. I mean speaking of the suffering it brings, not of the recompense it merits." As the suffering days lengthened into months, Francis seemed to rise above himself. He lay there smiling and calm, and every hour his soul became more strong and vigorous. Not that he was by any means free from temptation. We read that "his soul bore the most violent assaults without flinching." In October he was taken back to Portiuncula. His one desire now was to die near the spot where God had first revealed Himself to him. He was placed on a litter, and slowly the bearers descended the mountain. "Turn me towards the town," he said when they reached the valley, and sitting up with a painful effort, he gazed for the last time in the direction of Assisi. "Be blessed of the Lord," he said solemnly, "O town faithful to God. Many souls shall be saved in you and by you." His first duty when he arrived at home was to make what he called his will! This is a recapitulation of the fundamental principles of his life, and a short account of the first early days of the brotherhood. He charges all to be true to the one rule of the Order. "I absolutely forbid," he writes at the close, "all my brethren, whether clerks or laymen, to put glosses on the Rule, or on this writing, saying, 'thus it ought to be understood,' but as the Lord has given me grace to dictate purely and simply, understand them simply and without gloss, and put them in practice unto the end." [Sidenote: _Light at Eventide._] Wise Francis, his knowledge of human nature was only equalled to his charity and long-suffering! After this piece of work was accomplished he quietly resigned himself to die, and holding up his hands to Heaven, cried-- "Now, Oh Christ, I have nothing to keep me back! I shall go freely to Thee." The end came rapidly. Each day found him weaker than the preceding one, and it was with difficulty that he was able to speak to those around him. Fifty of the brethren, who were then at the Portiuncula, knelt round his bed. "My father," said one of them, bending over him, "your sons will have no father. In you we lose the light of life. And now forgive those present and those absent for all the sins they have committed. Bless them once more." "My son," said Francis, "God is calling me! I forgive my brethren, those present and those absent, all their sins and faults. I absolve them as much as I can. Tell them so, and bless them in my name." He then asked them to read him the history of the Passion in St. John's Gospel, and then a part of the one hundred and forty-second Psalm. As they were reading the seventh verse: "Bring my soul out of prison that I may praise Thy name," he closed his eyes and slept peacefully in Jesus. His glorious death took place just a few days before he entered his forty-sixth year, twenty years since he received his call to repair the Church, and eighteen since he founded the Order of Friars Minor. THE SALVATION ARMY PRINTING WORKS, ST. ALBANS SALVATION ARMY PUBLICATIONS BY GENERAL BOOTH =Salvation Soldiery.= Stirring Addresses on the Requirements of Jesus Christ's Service. 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33596	----	MARY, THE HELP OF CHRISTIANS MARY, HELP OF CHRISTIANS AND THE Fourteen Saints Invoked as Holy Helpers Instructions, Legends, Novenas and Prayers WITH Thoughts of the Saints for Every Day in the Year COMPILED BY REV. BONAVENTURE HAMMER, O.F.M. TO WHICH IS ADDED AN APPENDIX ON THE Reasonableness of Catholic Ceremonies and Practices BY REV. JOHN J. BURKE --- NEW YORK, CINCINNATI, CHICAGO BENZIGER BROTHERS PRINTERS TO THE HOLY APOSTOLIC SEE PUBLISHERS OF BENZINGER'S MAGAZINE Imprimi Permittitur. FR. CHRYSOSTOMUS THEOBALD, O.F.M., _Minister Provincialis._ Cincinnati, Ohio, die 30, Martii, 1908. Nihil Obstat. REMY LAPORT, S.T.L., _Censor Librorum._ Imprimatur. JOHN M. FARLEY, Archbishop of New York. NEW YORK, March 4, 1909. COPYRIGHT, 1909, BY BENZIGER BROTHERS. PREFACE THE contents of the following pages are based on the Catholic doctrine of the veneration and invocation of the saints, and of the efficacy of the prayer of intercession. The legends of the individual "Holy Helpers" were compiled from authors whose writings have the approval of the Church. In compliance with the decrees of Pope Urban VIII of 1625, 1631, and 1634, the compiler formally declares that he submits everything contained in this little book to the infallible judgment of the Church, and that he claims no other than human credibility for the facts, legends, and miracles related, except where the Church has otherwise decided. THE COMPILER. Contents PREFACE PART I The Veneration and Invocation of Saints and the Efficacy of Prayer CHAPTER I THE VENERATION AND INVOCATION OF SAINTS CHAPTER II EFFICACY OF THE INTERCESSION OF THE SAINTS CHAPTER III FOR WHAT THE INTERCESSION OF THE SAINTS MAY AND SHOULD BE INVOKED CHAPTER IV THE QUALITIES OF PRAYER PART II Mary, the Help of Christians Novenas in Preparation for the Principal Feasts of the Blessed Virgin RULES FOR THE PROPER OBSERVANCE OF NOVENAS ON THE MANNER OF READING THE MEDITATIONS AND OBSERVING THE PRACTICES INTRODUCTION MARY, THE HELP OF CHRISTIANS I. NOVENA IN HONOR OF THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN MARY FIRST DAY.--THE PREDESTINATION OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN MARY SECOND DAY.--MARY'S IMMACULATE CONCEPTION THIRD DAY.--MARY, THE VICTRIX OF SATAN FOURTH DAY.--MARY WITHOUT ACTUAL SIN FIFTH DAY.--MARY, FULL OF GRACE SIXTH DAY.--MARY, OUR REFUGE SEVENTH DAY.--MARY, THE MOTHER OF CHASTITY EIGHTH DAY.--THE IMAGE OF THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION NINTH DAY.--THE FEAST OF THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION II. NOVENA IN HONOR OF THE NATIVITY OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN MARY FIRST DAY.--THE BIRTH OF MARY SECOND DAY.--MARY, THE ELECT OF GOD THIRD DAY.--MARY, THE CHILD OF ROYALTY FOURTH DAY.--MARY, THE CHILD OF PIOUS PARENTS FIFTH DAY.--MARY'S SUPERNATURAL PREROGATIVES SIXTH DAY.--MARY, THE JOY OF THE MOST HOLY TRINITY SEVENTH DAY.--THE ANGELS REJOICE AT MARY'S BIRTH EIGHTH DAY.--THE JOY OF THE JUST IN LIMBO AT MARY'S BIRTH NINTH DAY.--THE HOLY NAME OF MARY III. NOVENA FOR THE FEAST OF THE ANNUNCIATION OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN MARY FIRST DAY.--THE ANNUNCIATION SECOND DAY.--THE IMPORT OF THE ANGEL'S SALUTATION THIRD DAY.--THE EFFECT OF THE ANGEL'S SALUTATION FOURTH DAY.--MARY'S QUESTION FIFTH DAY.--THE SOLUTION SIXTH DAY.--MARY'S CONSENT SEVENTH DAY.--MARY'S FORTITUDE IN SUFFERING EIGHTH DAY.--MARY, THE MOTHER OF GOD NINTH DAY.--MARY OUR MOTHER IV. NOVENA IN HONOR OF THE SEVEN SORROWS OF MARY FIRST DAY.--DEVOTION TO THE SEVEN SORROWS OF MARY SECOND DAY.--MARY'S FIRST SORROW: SIMEON'S PROPHECY IN THE TEMPLE THIRD DAY.--MARY'S SECOND SORROW: THE FLIGHT INTO EGYPT FOURTH DAY.--MARY'S THIRD SORROW: JESUS LOST IN JERUSALEM FIFTH DAY.--MARY'S FOURTH SORROW: SHE MEETS JESUS CARRYING HIS CROSS SIXTH DAY.--MARY'S FIFTH SORROW: BENEATH THE CROSS SEVENTH DAY.--MARY'S SIXTH SORROW: THE TAKING DOWN OF JESUS' BODY FROM THE CROSS EIGHTH DAY.--MARY'S SEVENTH SORROW: JESUS IS BURIED NINTH DAY.--WHY MARY HAD TO SUFFER V. NOVENA FOR THE FEAST OF THE ASSUMPTION OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN MARY FIRST DAY.--MARY'S DEATH WAS WITHOUT PAIN SECOND DAY.--AT MARY'S TOMB THIRD DAY.--THE EMPTY TOMB FOURTH DAY.--REASONS FOR THE BODILY ASSUMPTION OF MARY INTO HEAVEN FIFTH DAY.--MARY'S GLORIOUS ENTRANCE INTO HEAVEN SIXTH DAY.--MARY CROWNED IN HEAVEN SEVENTH DAY.--MARY'S BLISS IN HEAVEN EIGHTH DAY.--MARY, THE QUEEN OF MERCY NINTH DAY.--MARY IN HEAVEN THE HELP OF CHRISTIANS ON EARTH PART III The Fourteen Holy Helpers CHAPTER I THE FOURTEEN HOLY HELPERS CHAPTER II LEGENDS THE LEGENDS OF THE FOURTEEN HOLY HELPERS I.--ST. GEORGE, MARTYR II.--ST. BLASE, BISHOP AND MARTYR III.--ST. ERASMUS, BISHOP AND MARTYR IV.--ST. PANTALEON, PHYSICIAN AND MARTYR V.--ST. VITUS, MARTYR VI.--ST. CHRISTOPHORUS, MARTYR VII.--ST. DIONYSIUS, BISHOP AND MARTYR VIII.--ST. CYRIACUS, DEACON AND MARTYR IX.--ST. ACHATIUS, MARTYR X.--ST. EUSTACHIUS, MARTYR XI.--ST. GILES, HERMIT AND ABBOT XII.--ST. MARGARET, VIRGIN AND MARTYR XIII.--ST. CATHERINE, VIRGIN AND MARTYR XIV.--ST. BARBARA, VIRGIN AND MARTYR PART IV I. Novenas to the Holy Helpers NOVENA TO EACH OF THE HOLY HELPERS I.--NOVENA IN HONOR OF ST. GEORGE II.--NOVENA IN HONOR OF ST. BLASE III.--NOVENA IN HONOR OF ST. ERASMUS IV.--NOVENA IN HONOR OF ST. PANTALEON V.--NOVENA IN HONOR OF ST. VITUS VI.--NOVENA IN HONOR OF ST. CHRISTOPHORUS VII.--NOVENA IN HONOR OF ST. DIONYSIUS VIII.--NOVENA IN HONOR OF ST. CYRIACUS IX.--NOVENA IN HONOR OF ST. ACHATIUS X.--NOVENA IN HONOR OF ST. EUSTACHIUS XI.--NOVENA IN HONOR OF ST. GILES XII.--NOVENA IN HONOR OF ST. MARGARET XIII.--NOVENA IN HONOR OF ST. CATHERINE XIV.--NOVENA IN HONOR OF ST. BARBARA NOVENA TO ALL THE HOLY HELPERS FIRST DAY.--THE DEVOTION TO THE FOURTEEN HOLY HELPERS SECOND DAY.--THE DESTINY OF MAN THIRD DAY.--THE VIRTUE OF FAITH FOURTH DAY.--THE VIRTUE OF HOPE FIFTH DAY.--THE LOVE OF GOD SIXTH DAY.--THE VIRTUE OF CHARITY SEVENTH DAY.--HUMAN RESPECT EIGHTH DAY.--PRAYER NINTH DAY.--PERSEVERANCE II. Prayers and Petitions PRAYERS OF PETITION AND INTERCESSION I.--THREE INVOCATIONS II.--PRAYER IN ILLNESS III.--PRAYER FOR THE SICK IV.--PRAYER OF PARENTS FOR THEIR CHILDREN V.--PRAYER OF CHILDREN FOR THEIR PARENTS VI.--PRAYER FOR MARRIED PEOPLE PART V General Devotions MORNING PRAYERS EVENING PRAYERS PRAYERS AT HOLY MASS PRAYERS AFTER MASS PRAYERS FOR CONFESSION Before Confession After Confession PRAYERS FOR HOLY COMMUNION Before Communion After Communion VISIT TO THE BLESSED SACRAMENT PRAYER TO THE SACRED HEART OF JESUS PRAYERS TO JESUS SUFFERING THE STATIONS OF THE CROSS PRAYER TO OUR SUFFERING REDEEMER PRAYER TO THE BLESSED VIRGIN MARY PRAYER FOR ALL THINGS NECESSARY TO SALVATION THE FOUR APPROVED LITANIES LITANY OF THE MOST HOLY NAME OF JESUS LITANY OF THE SACRED HEART OF JESUS LITANY OF LORETO, IN HONOR OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN MARY LITANY OF ALL SAINTS PART VI Thoughts and Counsels of the Saints for Every Day of the Year JANUARY FEBRUARY MARCH APRIL MAY JUNE JULY AUGUST SEPTEMBER OCTOBER NOVEMBER DECEMBER PART VII Reasonableness of Catholic Ceremonies and Practices THE CEREMONIES OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH I.--Ceremonies Necessary to Divine Worship II.--Vestments Used by the Priest at Mass III.--Ceremonies of the Mass THE PRACTICES OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH I.--Vespers and Benediction II.--Devotion to the Blessed Sacrament III.--Holy Communion IV.--Confirmation V.--Honoring the Blessed Virgin VI.--Confession of Sin VII.--Granting Indulgences VIII.--The Last Sacraments IX.--Praying for the Dead X.--Praying to the Saints XI.--Crucifixes, Relics, and Images XII.--Some Sacramentals--The Books Used by the Priest, the Sign of the Cross, Holy Water, Blessed Candles, Palm and Ashes, Holy Oils, Scapulars, Medals, Agnus Dei, Prayers, Litanies, Rosary, Angelus, Stations, Funeral Service, and Various Blessings XIII.--The Celebration of Feasts XIV.--Infant Baptism XV.--The Marriage Tie--One and Indissoluble XVI.--Respect Shown to Ecclesiastical Superiors XVII.--Celibacy XVIII.--Conclusion PART I The Veneration and Invocation of Saints, and the Efficacy of Prayer "Remember your prelates who have spoken the word of God to you; whose faith follow, considering the end of their conversation" (_Heb._ xiii. 7). "Wherefore I beseech you, be ye followers of me, as I am also of Christ" (_1 Cor._ iv. 16). [Illustration: Presentation of Mary in the temple.] CHAPTER I The Veneration and Invocation of Saints IN THE Creed of the Council of Trent, which the Catholic Church places before the faithful as the Rule of Faith, we read: "I firmly believe that the saints reigning with Christ are to be venerated and invoked." The Church therefore teaches, first, that it is right and pleasing to God to venerate the saints and to invoke their intercession; and second, that it is useful and profitable to eternal salvation for us to do so. The veneration of the saints is useful and profitable to us. Men conspicuous in life for knowledge, bravery, or other noble qualities and unusual merits are honored after death. Why, then, should Catholics not be permitted to honor the heroes of their faith, who excelled in the practice of supernatural virtue and are in special grace and favor with God? That this veneration is profitable to us is evident from the fact that the example of the saints incites us to imitate them to the best of our ability. The veneration of the saints is not only in full accord with the demands of reason, but we are, moreover, enjoined explicitly by Holy Scripture to venerate the memory of the holy patriarchs and prophets: "Let us now praise men of renown, and our fathers in their generation" (_Ecclus_. xliv. 1). "And their names continue for ever, the glory of the holy men remaining unto their children" (_Ecclus_. xlvi. 15). Reason and Holy Scripture, then, are in favor of the veneration of the saints. We find it practised, therefore, also in the early Church. She was convinced from the very beginning of its propriety and utility. As early as the first century the memorial day of the martyrs' death was observed by the Christians. They assembled at the tombs of the sainted victims of pagan cruelty and celebrated their memory by offering up the Holy Sacrifice over their relics. We know this not only from the testimony of the earliest ecclesiastical writers, as Origen, Tertullian, and St. Cyprian, but also from the history of St. Ignatius the Martyr (d. 107), and of St. Polycarp of Smyrna (d. 166). Over one hundred panegyrics of various saints written by St. Augustine are still extant. And why should it not be right and useful to invoke the _intercession_ of the saints? Everybody deems it proper to ask a pious friend for his prayers. St. Paul the Apostle recommended himself to the prayers of the faithful (_Rom._ xv. 30), and God Himself commanded the friends of Job to ask Him for His intercession that their sin might not be imputed to them (_Job_ xlii. 8). How, then, can it be wrong or superfluous to invoke the intercession of the saints in heaven? The saints are _willing_ to invoke God's bounty in our favor, for they love us. They are _able_ to obtain it for us, because God always accepts their prayer with complacency. That they really hear our prayer and intercede with God for us is clearly shown by many examples in Holy Scripture. And if, according to the testimony of St. James (v. 16), the prayer of the just man here on earth availeth much with God, how much more powerful, then, must be the prayer of the saints, who are united with God in heaven in perfect love and are, so to say, partakers of His infinite goodness and omnipotence? A most striking proof of the efficacy of the prayers of the saints is the numerous miracles wrought and the many favors obtained at all times through their intercession. Among these miracles are a great number whose authenticity was declared by the Church after the most scrupulous and strict investigation, as the acts of canonization prove. That the invocation of the saints was a practice of the early Church is proved by the numerous inscriptions on the tombs of the Roman catacombs preserved to this day. We read there, for instance, on the tomb of Sabbatius, a martyr, "Sabbatius, O pious soul, pray and intercede for your brethren and associates!" On another tomb is inscribed, "Allicius, thy spirit is blessed; pray for thy parents!" And again, "Jovianus, live in God, and pray for us!" We have also the testimony of one of the greatest thinkers and Protestant philosophers, Leibnitz, for the claim that the veneration and invocation of the saints is founded in reason, on Holy Scripture, and on the tradition of the Church. He writes: "Because we justly expect great advantage by uniting our prayers with those of our brethren here on earth, I can not understand how it can be called a crime if a person invokes the intercession of a glorified soul, or an angel. If it be really idolatry or a detestable cult to invoke the saints and the angels to intercede for us with God, I do not comprehend how Basil, Gregory Nazianzen, Ambrose, and others, who were hitherto considered saints, can be absolved from idolatry or superstition. To continue in such a practice would indeed not be a small defect in the Fathers, such as is inherent in human nature--it would be an enormous public crime. For if the Church, even in those early times, was infected with such abominable errors, let any one judge for himself what the Christian faith would eventually come to. Would not Gamaliel's proposition, to judge whether Christ's religion be divine or human from its effects, result in its disfavor?" But whilst the Catholic Church practises and recommends the veneration and invocation of the saints, she does not teach us to honor and invoke them as we do God, nor to pray to them as we do to Him. She makes a great distinction. The veneration of the saints differs from the worship of God in the following: 1. We _adore_ God as our supreme Lord. We _honor_ the saints as His faithful servants and friends. 2. We _adore_ God for His own sake. We _honor_ the saints for the gifts and prerogatives with which God endowed them. Therefore there is a difference between the prayer to God and the invocation of the saints. We pray to God asking Him to help us by His omnipotence: we pray to the saints to help us by their intercession with God. Our veneration of the saints should consist, primarily, in the imitation of their virtues. It is truly profitable only when we are intent upon following their example; for only by imitating their virtues shall we share their eternal bliss in heaven. A veneration which contents itself with honoring the saints without imitating their virtues is similar to a tree that produces leaves and blossoms but bears no fruit. The saints themselves desire that we should follow their example. Each of them, so to say, exhorts us with St. Paul, "Be ye followers of me, as I also am of Christ" (_1 Cor._ iv. 16). There is no age, no sex, no station in life for which the Catholic Church has not saints, whose example teaches us to avoid sin and to observe faithfully the commandments of God and the Church at this or that age, or in this or that station. Therefore the principal object of our invocation of the saints ought to be the obtaining of their help in following their example. Thus we shall move them to come to our aid all the more readily. CHAPTER II Efficacy of the Intercession of the Saints NOTHING is more consoling and comforting than the assurance that in the saints of heaven we have powerful protectors and advocates with God. Through their intercession they obtain for us from Him the grace to lead a virtuous life and to gain heaven. However, is there any reasonable doubt that the saints are able to render us such a service? In virtue of the communion of saints, which comprises the Church militant on earth, the Church suffering in purgatory, and the Church triumphant in heaven, all members of the Church are members of one body, whose head is Christ. Hence the saints are united with us in spirit, though separated from us in body. United with Christ, they are imbued with a superior knowledge, and through Him, the All-Knowing, they know everything that concerns us, and for which we have recourse to them in prayer. Our confidence in the intercessory power of the saints is founded on their relation to God and to us. As friends of God they have influence with Him now, even more than during their sojourn on earth, because their intercessory power is one of their glorious prerogatives in heaven. Their love of God and their charity for their fellow-men, and the zeal for the salvation of souls resulting therefrom, together with their conformity with Christ, induces them to use their influence readily in our favor. Because God dispenses His gifts according to His own adorable will, it may please Him to grant a certain favor at the particular intercession of a certain saint; hence it is not superstition to invoke His aid in such cases. Moreover, we justly place our confidence in saints whom we have selected to be our special patrons, or who were given us as such by ecclesiastical authority. By the intercession of the saints the mediatorship of Christ is not set aside or restricted. The power of intercession, the intercession itself, and its invocation are an effect of the grace of Christ; therefore He remains our only mediator. God remains Our Lord and Father, although men share in His lordship and paternity; for all power and authority comes from God, who is pleased to operate in His creatures through other creatures. Hence, only a dependent mediatorship can be ascribed to the saints. Whoever admits that the living can pray for each other can not denounce the intercession of the saints as an usurpation of the mediatorship of Christ. The saints are not the authors and dispensers of grace and heavenly gifts, but they are able to obtain them for us from God. The saints, moreover, do not only pray for mankind in general, but for their clients in particular. As co-reigners with Christ, the denizens of heaven have knowledge of the conditions and events of His kingdom; hence the saints may pray for us individually; therefore it is permissible and profitable for us to invoke them. It is obvious that the knowledge of individual occurrences does not mar the bliss of the saints. How they gain this knowledge is not clear to the spiritual authors; but most of them incline to the view that they attain it by direct divine mediation. God reveals our condition and our invocation to the saints. Can we doubt the willingness of the saints to aid us by their intercession? According to St. Paul, charity is the greatest of all virtues. If, then, the saints, whilst on earth loved their fellow-men, cared for and prayed for them, how much more will they do so now, when their charity is perfected? They, too, were pilgrims on earth, who had to suffer the adversities and miseries of life and therefore know by experience how sorely in need of divine assistance we poor mortals are. Persons who have themselves experienced trials have more compassion for the adversities of others. Therefore it is certain that the saints have compassion on us, that they wish our prayers to be heard and bring them before the throne of God. "The saints," says St. Augustine, "being secure of their eternal welfare, are intent upon ours." Holy Scripture establishes this beyond doubt, saying that the saints bring the prayers of the faithful before the throne of God (_Apoc._ v. 8). Or is there any one that doubts the _efficacy_ of the saints' prayer with God? At any rate, we must concede that their prayer is more effectual than ours; for they are confirmed in justice, and therefore friends and favorites of God, whilst we are sinners, of whom Holy Scripture says, "The Lord is far from the wicked, and He will hear the prayers of the just" (_Prov._ xv. 29). On this subject, let us hear St. Basil in his panegyric on the Forty Martyrs: "You often wanted to find an intercessor: here you have forty who intercede unanimously for you. Are you in distress? Have recourse to the holy martyrs. Rejoicing, do the same. The former that you may find relief, the latter that you may continue to prosper. These saints hear the mother praying for her children, the wife invoking aid for her sick or absent husband. O brave and victorious band, protectors of mankind, generous intercessors when invoked, be our advocates with God!" There is no doubt, then, that during our earthly pilgrimage the saints are our intercessors with God. True, we know that there is One who guides our destinies and whose providence watches over all; but who would not choose, also, to have a friend already abiding with God, sharing His bliss and confirmed for ever in His grace, and who therefore is in a position to aid us, and certainly will do so if we invoke Him? The following is an example illustrating the power of the saints' intercession with God: Basilides was one of the guards that led St. Potamiana to a martyr's death. Whilst the rest of the soldiers and the crowd of spectators insulted the holy virgin, he treated her with great respect and protected her from the assaults of the rabble. The martyr thanked him for his kindness, and promised to pray for him when she came into God's presence. A few days after her death the grace of God touched Basilides' heart, and he professed himself a Christian. His comrades at first imagined that he was jesting. But when he persevered in the confession of the Faith, he was brought before the judge, who sentenced him to be beheaded next day. Taken to prison, he was baptized, and at the appointed time, executed. What else but the intercession of the saint whom he had befriended obtained for this heathen the grace of the Faith and martyrdom? Convinced of the power of the intercession of the saints, Origen writes: "I will fall on my knees, and because I am unworthy to pray to God on account of my sins, I will invoke all the saints to come to my aid. O ye saints of God, I, filled with sadness, sighing and weeping, implore you; intercede for me, a miserable sinner, with the Lord of mercies!" CHAPTER III For What the Intercession of the Saints May and Should be Invoked IT IS obvious that there are objects to attain which we ought not to pray. We shall try to specify them as follows: 1. _We may not pray for things that are evil or injurious in themselves, or injurious on account of circumstances._ Amongst these are comprised all those that are opposed to the salvation of the person praying, or of some one else. It is contrary to the very idea of prayer that God should grant to His creature anything evil, anything that is in itself, and not only by abuse, harmful. Prayer, according to the rules of morality, must have for its object only the attainment of whatever is good and profitable, and only then is it heard by God. 2. _Things completely indifferent are not comprised in the efficacy of prayer. Hence prayer imploring for temporal goods is heard only inasmuch as they relate to the salvation of souls._ Reason, as well as faith, teaches us that God orders all His actions first for the promotion of His glory, and secondly for the salvation of souls. Matters, therefore, that are either in general, or on account of circumstances, positively indifferent, must be excluded from the general plan of God's providence when there is question of His positive agency, and not simply of His permission. It is obvious that temporal goods, such as health, wealth, etc., are classed with things indifferent, in as far as they are not connected with the moral order. Thus considered, the various goods of the temporal order do, or at least may, under certain conditions, co-operate unto man's salvation, and then they belong to the supernatural order. As such, the efficacy of prayer in their regard must be judged according to the principles applying to the latter. 3. _All those things which any one can obtain himself without extraordinary effort, are not comprised within the scope of prayer._ This restriction results from the very nature of prayer. Obviously, prayer is not the only means by which man can obtain those things which, on the one hand, he momentarily does not possess, and which, on the other hand, are necessary or advantageous for his supernatural life. As a rule, man can, by labor and application, procure his sustenance. Persons unable to work can have recourse to the charity of their fellow-men, and will, as a rule, find the necessary assistance. In regard to salvation, it must first be ascertained whether in many or at least in some cases, the faithful co-operation with the graces which God gives to all men is not sufficient. Considered from this view, we may, and even must, in a certain sense say: When there is question of attaining specified goods and specified graces, prayer is often not the primary, but only the secondary and subordinate means. From this premise follows that God in His wise providence does not have regard for our prayer when we easily can help ourselves, either by our own exertion and industry, or by the faithful cooperation with graces already received, or by the reception of the holy sacraments. This self-evident idea is expressed in Holy Scripture as follows, "Because of the cold the sluggard would not plow; he shall beg therefore in the summer, and it shall not be given him" (_Prov._ xx. 4). For this reason formal miracles are, as a rule, not to be expected from the efficacy of prayer. God ordained the world and its course in such a manner, that mankind in general and each individual in particular can be provided, without the intervention of a miracle, with all things necessary for their temporal and eternal welfare. Theologians, therefore, teach that to ask God for a miracle, generally, is the same as to tempt Him. This rule, however, admits of exceptions. And if we may, in exceptional cases, ask for miracles, we may, logically, expect them; for miracles in general are not excluded from the plan of divine Providence. They are rather an essential part of the existing order of God's government of the world. At most we may say: As miracles of their nature belong among the extraordinary manifestations of Providence, they are not obtained by the prayer of each and every one, but only in exceptional cases. However, if we consider how feeble and helpless man's nature is, even with the assistance of divine grace, we may not apply the above principles too strictly. This, for the following reason: Cases in which we can not help ourselves with the aid of the grace given us are rare. Therefore God gives us, in reward of our confident prayer, not only that which is strictly necessary, but also that which is profitable and conducive to our welfare. This being so, the logical deduction is, that God is willing to hear our prayer not only when we, of ourselves, are totally incapable of helping ourselves, but also when great difficulties beset us in this our self-help. Hence, in a certain sense, we may maintain that in the work of our salvation prayer and its efficacy must be considered, together with the sacraments, as one of the chief means, and not as a mere accessory. [Illustration: The Annunciation] This limitation of the main principle is founded on the generality of the divine promises concerning the hearing of prayer, and on the great goodness and bounty of God in which these promises originated. When man, making use of all the means placed at his disposal, can not help himself, a cry for help is sent to Heaven is not presumptuous or unreasonable, and therefore the hope of being heard is not unfounded or in vain. CHAPTER IV The Qualities of Prayer FOR greater convenience of explanation, we condense the various qualities of prayer taught by theologians as conditions of its efficacy into the following four: (1) Devotion; (2) Confidence; (3) Perseverance; (4) Resignation to the will of God. Treating of prayer, some theological authors demand, above all, the intention of praying. This intention is indeed so necessary that it does not belong to the qualities or attributes of prayer, but to its very essence. For whosoever has not the intention or will to pray may recite a formula of prayer with the greatest attention, yet does not really and truly pray. Again, the teachers of the spiritual life tell us that prayer must be "in the name of Jesus." This being a condition insisted upon by our divine Lord Himself, it also belongs to the essence of prayer. It means that we offer up our prayer to God in the name of Jesus His Son, that is, with reference to Him and in the firm confidence that we shall be heard on His account and because of His promises. Again, to pray in the name of Jesus means to pray according to His manner and in His spirit. We now proceed to explain the qualities of true prayer: 1. _Devotion._--What is meant by devotion in prayer? Devotion in prayer means: (_a_) that our prayer must be attentive; that is, the person praying must direct his thoughts as uninterruptedly as possible to his prayer, _viz.,_ to the formula he uses to state the object of his desires, and above all to God, to whom his prayer is directed. (_b_) The person praying must know and acknowledge his own needs, and that of himself he has no claims whatsoever on God, and thus engender in himself sentiments of true humility, (_c_) These sentiments must, moreover, embrace reverence for God and the acknowledgment of dependence on Him, thus giving to prayer the character of piety, (_d_) All this must culminate in full abandonment to God, the Giver of all good things. This abandonment is an essential part of our divine cult. As to the question whether devotion, and what grade of it, is necessary in prayer, and whether prayer without it loses its entire efficacy, and especially its imploring efficiency, it is evident that prayer without devotion is ineffective; it is simulation. An example of this, that is, of a man pretending to pray and not praying in reality, is given us in the parable of the Pharisee and the Publican (_Luke_ xviii. 10-12). To determine accurately what grade of devotion, that is, what degree of attention, humility, and piety is necessary to render prayer from a formality into a reality, is possible only when all the circumstances, dispositions, and qualities of mind of the person praying can be taken into account. Suffice it to remark that when all the other conditions, together with the intention of praying, combine, strict but reliable theologians declare that the true essence of prayer is compatible with a less degree of attention and recollection. 2. _Confidence._--There is no doubt but that strong confidence, or the firm hope of being heard, contributes much to the perfection of prayer and renders it especially effective. Therefore confidence, like devotion or attention, must be reckoned among the essential qualities or attributes of prayer. For it is inconceivable that a rational being should resolve on presenting a petition when he has not the least hope of its being granted. In this case his petition would be entirely useless, and therefore irrational. Again, it is inconceivable that God should have regard for a prayer or the petition of a man who has absolutely no confidence in His mercy. A prayer without confidence is hypocrisy, rather than true and sincere supplication. If we address a petition to God without the confidence that He can and will grant it, He must rather feel offended than honored thereby. How, then, shall He feel moved to grant us new benefits? If we nevertheless receive them, it is the effect of His bountiful goodness, and not the result of our sham prayer. Therefore, to be effective, our prayer must be inspired by confidence. The apostle St. James inculcates this, saying: "But let him ask in faith, nothing wavering; for he that wavereth is like a wave of the sea, which is moved and carried about by the wind. Therefore let not that man think that he shall receive any thing of the Lord" (_James_ i. 6-7). By these words the apostle designates not a common and ordinary confidence, but one firm and steadfast. At the same time he speaks in general; that is, his words have reference not only to extraordinary petitions, but to everything for which we are accustomed to pray. Moreover, the explicit and positive promises made by Christ in regard to prayer manifestly have the purpose of inspiring the person praying with firm confidence and the sure hope of being heard. If, then, our prayer be wanting in this quality, we do not pray in the spirit of Christ, nor in the terms in which we ought to pray, and can not claim the fulfilment of His promises. 3. _Perseverance._--To understand properly in how far perseverance is a quality of prayer, we must, above all, know what may be the objects of our prayer. Of these there are three classes. To the first class belong those cases in which a person needs divine help at the present moment or at least at a time definitely near, and seeks it through prayer. Such a petition would be, for instance, to obtain the necessary and effective aid of divine grace for overcoming an existing transient temptation, or the conversion of a certain sinner approaching death. To the second class belongs the avoidance of temporal evils, or of continuous temptations, or the conversion of a certain sinner now in good health. To the third class belong such benefits which can be granted only for a later period, perhaps at the hour of death. The grace of final perseverance is the foremost among these. Having stated the preliminary conditions, the answer to the question of perseverance in prayer is: _a._ Inasmuch as our prayer is directed toward the attainment of benefits of the first class, that is, of graces which we need immediately, perseverance can obviously not be an essential condition of our prayer. Either we can not attain our object by prayer, or a transient prayer which has the other necessary qualities must suffice for its attainment. The first supposition is contrary to the divine promises; therefore the alternative must stand. _b._ When there is question of benefits and graces of the second and third class, we must concede that perseverance or continuance in prayer is neither impossible, nor is it unreasonable. God is willing to grant us His almighty help, but at the same time He desires that we, being convinced of its necessity, implore it all the more eagerly, and thereby become more worthy to receive it when He shall be pleased to grant our petitions. Therefore 4. _Resignation_ to the will of God is a necessary condition for the efficacy of our prayer. This quality of our prayer needs no lengthy explanation; its application to prayer is self-evident. Finally the petition for a certain benefit, in order to be reasonable and permissible, must include the following two attributes: (_a_) The object prayed for must not be harmful, but profitable; (_b_) it must not be opposed to the will of God. _Conclusions._--Careful observation will convince us that prayer is often wanting in one or more of the above qualities. Often that which one seeks to obtain by prayer is not promotive of God's glory and of the salvation of souls, even considered from a human point of view, much less in the designs of Providence. In cases where the object of prayer in itself presents no difficulties, it is often defective for want of devotion or perseverance. But oftenest our prayer is wanting in confidence and trust, which want originates in the feeble faith of the person praying, or in too little reliance on the promises of Christ and in the merits of His redemption. Thus there is nothing to surprise us if we are not heard. Again, we must never forget that very many, and generally the most precious gifts of divine grace are bestowed secretly. Remember the many and great benefits conferred daily and hourly by God on mankind, universally and individually. Considering them, it is presumption to maintain that in a special case the prayer of the Church, or of a community, or of an individual, was not granted. The opposite is fully proved by the goodness, bounty, and mercy which God shows so profusely to us. We must, moreover, never lose sight of the principle that the promises made to prayer concern directly only the supernatural order of salvation. To the goods of the temporal order they are applicable only relatively. If we, therefore, experience that our prayers relative to temporal things remain unheard, we must, instead of doubting the divine promises, be firmly convinced that the attainment of the object for which we prayed was, under the circumstances, not conducive to our real welfare. We must, moreover, be convinced that God, in order not to leave our petition ungranted, conferred on us some other real benefit. Finally, when the refusal of our prayer is clearly and unmistakably established, the reasons for this may be the following: (_a_) Perhaps the person praying was wanting in effort, or in cooperation with graces formerly received, a deficiency which can not be repaired by prayer alone. (_b_) Or the prayer itself is wanting in one or the other necessary qualities, especially in confidence. (_c_) God does not intend to refuse the desired grace, but, for reasons of His own, delays it (_d_) God gives us in place of what we asked some other grace more salutary to us. PART II Mary, the Help of Christians Novenas in Preparation for the Principal Feasts of the Blessed Virgin "Holy Mary, aid the miserable, assist the desponding, strengthen the weak, pray for the people, plead for the clergy, intercede for the devout female sex. Let all who have recourse to thee experience the efficacy of thy help!"--HOLY CHURCH. Rules for the Proper Observance of Novenas _By St. Alphonsus Liguori_ 1. THE soul must be in the state of grace; for the devotion of a sinful heart pleases neither God nor the saints. 2. We must persevere, that is, the prayers for each day of the novena must never be omitted. 3. If possible, we should visit a church every day, and there implore the favor we desire. 4. Every day we ought to perform certain specified acts of exterior self-denial and interior mortification, in order to prepare us thereby for the reception of grace. 5. It is most important that we receive holy communion when making a novena. Therefore prepare yourself well for it. 6. After obtaining the desired grace for which the novena was made, do not omit to return thanks to God and to the saint through whose intercession your prayers were heard. On the Manner of Reading the Meditations and Observing the Practices HOLY SCRIPTURE says, "Before prayer prepare thy soul; and be not as a man that tempteth God" (_Eccles._ xviii. 23). Therefore place yourself in the presence of God, invoke the assistance of the Holy Ghost, and make a most sincere act of contrition for your sins. Offer up to God your will, your intellect, and your memory, so that your prayer may be pleasing to God and serve to promote your spiritual welfare. Then read the meditation slowly, reflecting on each point of the thought or mystery treated, and consider what you can learn from it, and for what grace you ought to implore God. This is the principal object to be attained by mental prayer. Never rise from your prayer without having formed some special resolution for practical observance. The practices at the end of each consideration in the following novenas will aid you to do so. Finally, ask for grace to carry out effectively your good purposes, and thank God for enlightening your mind during the meditation. Introduction Mary, the Help of Christians NO CATHOLIC denies that Our Lord Jesus Christ is the only mediator through whose merits we became reconciled to God. Nevertheless, it is a doctrine of our faith that God willingly grants us grace if the saints, and especially the Blessed Virgin Mary, the queen of saints, intercede for us. If the saints, during their life on earth, were so potent with God that through their prayers the blind obtained sight, the deaf hearing, and the dumb speech, that the sick of all conditions were healed, the dead restored to life, and the most obstinate sinners converted; if thousands of other miracles in the order of nature and of grace were performed through their intercession; what, then, will not she obtain for us from God, whose virtue and merits transcend those of all the saints, and who did more for the greater honor and glory of God than they all? Mary is the queen of saints not only because she is the Mother of the Most High, but also because her sanctity is more perfect than theirs, and she therefore thrones above them all in heaven. Hence the favor with which God regards her, and consequently the power of her intercession with Him is so much the greater. If Mary's sanctity thus impressively illustrates the potency of her intercession, the contemplation of her dignity as the Mother of God does still more so. Mary brought forth Him who is the Almighty. She calls Him her Son, who by the word of His omnipotence created from out of nothing the whole world with all its beauties, and who can call into being countless millions of other worlds. She calls Him her Son, whose throne is heaven and whose footstool is the earth, who governs all nature with almighty power and reveals His name to mankind through the most astounding miracles. In a word, Mary calls Him her Son, whose omnipotence fills heaven and earth; and this great, almighty God, who honors her as His Mother and has wrought in her such great things, will He not heed her word of intercession, and hear her pleading for those who have recourse to her? On earth He was subject to her. Her intercession moved Him to exercise His omnipotent power at the wedding feast at Cana; and now, when He has glorified and raised her up so high He would let her invoke Him in vain? No, it is inconceivable that God should not hear the prayers of His Mother! [Illustration: The Blessed Virgin visits St. Elizabeth] The holy Fathers and Doctors of the Church vie with each other in proclaiming the power of Mary's intercession with the Heart of her divine Son. Some say that having been subject to her on earth, He desires to be so in heaven, inasmuch as to refuse her nothing she asks. Hence St. Bernard calls her the "Intercessory Omnipotence." Indeed, when all the angels and saints in heaven join in supplication to God, their prayers are but those of servants; but when Mary prays her intercession is that of His Mother. Therefore we can not sufficiently thank God for having given us in Mary so powerful an advocate. St. Bernard aptly says: "The angel announces, 'thou hast found grace before God.' O supreme happiness! Mary shall always find grace. And what else could we wish? If we seek grace, let us seek it through Mary; for what she seeks, she finds. Never can she plead ineffectually." God, then, who in His infinite mercy has been pleased to provide for all our needs, desires through Mary to console us, to comfort us, to remove all distrust, to strengthen our hope. How consoling to him who calls upon God in sore distress, or implores His pardon for sins committed, is the thought that at the throne of divine Mercy he has in Mary an advocate as mighty as she is gracious, who supplements his great unworthiness by her sublime dignity, and who makes good the defects of his prayer by her intercession! Therefore St. Bonaventure exclaims: "Verily, great is Our Lord's mercy! That we, through fear of our divine Judge, depart not forever from Him, He gave us His own Mother for our advocate and mediatrix of grace." I. Novena in Honor of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary INDULGENCES TO ALL the faithful who by themselves or with others, in church or at home, with at least contrite heart and devotion, shall make this novena: (1) 300 days indulgence for each of the nine days; (2) a plenary indulgence on one day of the novena or of the eight days following it. (Pius IX, January 5, 1849.) Conditions: Confession, communion, and prayer, according to the intentions of the Holy Father. _Remark._--Whenever, in the following pages, an indulgence is said to be granted "under the usual conditions," these conditions are the same as above. _Note._--The above indulgences may also be gained for making the novena at any other time of the year, and are not attached to any prescribed formula of prayer. The same applies to all other novenas in honor of the Blessed Virgin. FIRST DAY Predestination of the Blessed Virgin Mary PREPARATORY PRAYER IN THY conception, O Virgin Mary, thou wast immaculate; pray for us to the Father, whose Son Jesus, conceived in thy womb by the Holy Ghost, thou didst bring forth. Indulgence. 200 days, every time. (Pius VI, November 21, 1793.) MEDITATION HOLY Church, our Mother, purposely gathered into the season of Advent everything which might contribute to assist us in preparing for the coming of the Redeemer. Purity of heart is the most necessary and helpful requirement for receiving God worthily, and for participating in the fruits of our Redemption through Christ. To remind us of this, Holy Church celebrates the feast of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary, this primary feast of purity, in Advent. The Church, moreover, intends to remind us that the coming of Christ, our promised Redeemer, depended on the consent of the Blessed Virgin. The Redeemer could not appear before she was born of whom He was to be born. The aurora must precede the rising sun. Thus also Mary, the spiritual aurora, had to be conceived and born before the appearance of the Sun of Justice in this world. PRACTICE IN MARY appeared the woman who was to crush the serpent's head, who was to repair by her willing co-operation with God's designs the damage wrought by the disobedience of our first parents, and who was to become our mother and mighty advocate with God. The designs of God concerning Mary were fully accomplished. God also has designs concerning us. Our life was planned by Him from all eternity, and we were destined to co-operate with Him harmoniously and conscientiously in working out our salvation. Have we corresponded with God's designs? Did we not oppose them by yielding to our evil inclinations and passions? What a disparity between God's intentions concerning us and our own co-operation, between His merciful designs and our cowardly resistance to them! PRAYER OF THE CHURCH O GOD, who through the immaculate conception of the Virgin didst prepare a worthy dwelling-place for Thy divine Son; grant that, as in view of Thy Son Thou didst preserve her from all taint, so Thou wouldst vouchsafe unto us that cleansed from all sin by her intercession we too may arrive at Thine eternal glory. Through the same Christ our Lord. Amen. Litany of Loreto (located in the list of approved litanies). _Prayer_ BEHOLD, Virgin immaculate, at thy sacred feet I bow, while my heart overflows with joy in union with thine own, because from eternity thou wast the Mother-elect of the eternal Word, and was preserved stainless from the taint of Adam's sin. Forever praised, forever blessed be the Most Holy Trinity, who in thy conception poured out upon thy soul the riches of that matchless privilege. I humbly pray thee, most gracious Mother, obtain for me the grace to overcome the bitter results of original sin. Make me victorious over them, that I may never cease to love my God. Hail Mary, etc. _Ejaculation_ O Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee! Indulgence. 100 days, once a day. (Leo XIII, March 25, 1884.) SECOND DAY Mary's Immaculate Conception Preparatory Prayer (located on the first day of the Novena). MEDITATION ACCORDING to the definition of Pope Pius IX, the immaculate conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary is that privilege by which she was preserved, in view of the merits of our Saviour Jesus Christ, from original sin in the first moment of her conception. By solemnly proclaiming the dogma of Mary's immaculate conception, the Church confirmed anew the fundamental principles of Christianity which in our times are so frequently attacked, derided, or forgotten. God reserved the solemn proclamation of this dogma, which seemingly has no practical bearing on the Christian life, for our age, to recall to our mind the doctrines resulting from it. PRACTICE THE most important of these doctrines is that of original sin, which to-day is rejected by many as a debasement of human nature, and is forgotten by others as having no practical influence on our moral state. By the promulgation of the doctrine of the immaculate conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Church solemnly declares and defines as an article of faith, that the Blessed Virgin Mary is conceived without the stain of original sin by a special privilege and grace of God. If, then, Mary's sinlessness is an exception, the general rule remains in force, and all other human beings enter this world in the state of original sin. Thus, by the proclamation of the dogma of the immaculate conception, the Church combats human pride and sensuality, the foremost vices of the age. Prayer of the Church (located on the first day of the Novena). Litany of Loreto (located in the list of approved litanies). _Prayer_ MARY, unsullied lily of heavenly purity, I rejoice with thee, because at thy conception's earliest dawn thou wast full of grace and endowed with the perfect use of reason. I thank and adore the ever-blessed Trinity, who gave thee such high gifts. I am overwhelmed with shame in thy presence, to see myself so poor in grace. O thou who wast filled with heavenly grace, impart some portion of it to my soul, and make me share the treasures of thy immaculate conception. Hail Mary, etc. Ejaculation (located on the first day of the Novena). THIRD DAY Mary, the Victrix of Satan Preparatory Prayer (located on the first day of the Novena). MEDITATION THE immaculate conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary inaugurated the fulfilment of the divine promise made to our first parents in paradise in the words addressed to the serpent: "I shall put enmities between thee and the woman, and thy seed and her seed; she shall crush thy head" (_Gen._ iii. 15). Mary is the woman in whom Satan never had a part. Her intimate connection with God was announced by the angel: "Hail, full of grace; the Lord is with thee." Now was fulfilled the saying of the Psalmist, "The Most High hath sanctified His own tabernacle. God is in the midst thereof, it shall not be moved: God will help it in the morning early" (_Ps._ xlv. 5-6). Mary was chosen to be the glorious tabernacle of the Son of God "in the morning early," that is, in the first moment of her existence. God called her into being that she might assume the exalted dignity of the Mother of His Son, and therefore granted her the singular privilege of exemption from original sin. In her were fulfilled Solomon's prophetic words of praise, "Thou art all fair, O my love, and there is not a spot in thee" (_Cant._ iv. 7). It was in view of her Son's merits applied to her beforehand that God thus produced in her the image of the new man regenerated in the Holy Ghost. PRACTICE THE spirit of darkness holds mankind enslaved, but one human being escapes him. A destructive fire lays waste the whole earth, but one tree remains unscathed. A terrible tyrant conquers the whole world, but one fortified city repels his assaults. This human being retaining liberty, this tree escaping destruction, this city repelling the enemy's attack is the Blessed Virgin Mary. Will the almighty and merciful God, who has accomplished such great things in Mary, who has selected her for His Mother, not listen to her prayers when she intercedes for us? St. William of Paris exclaims: "No other created being can obtain for us so many and so great graces from God as His Mother. By the all-powerful might of her intercession He honors her not only as His handmaid, but also as His Mother." Therefore we ought not be surprised when the holy Fathers maintain that a single sigh of Mary is more effective with God than the combined intercession of all the angels and saints. If, then, Mary's power is so great, she will surely hear us when we invoke her help in our combat with Satan. Having conquered him herself, she will also help us to conquer him. Prayer of the Church (located on the first day of the Novena). Litany of Loreto (located in the list of approved litanies). _Prayer_ MARY, thou mystical rose of purity, my heart rejoices with thine at the glorious triumph which thou didst gain over the infernal serpent by thy immaculate conception, and because thou wast conceived without stain of original sin. I thank and praise with my whole heart the ever-blessed Trinity, who granted thee this glorious privilege; and I pray thee to obtain for me strength to overcome all the wiles of the infernal foe, and never to stain my soul with sin. Be thou mine aid; make me, by thy protection, victorious over the common foe of our eternal welfare. Hail Mary, etc. Ejaculation (located on the first day of the Novena). FOURTH DAY Mary without Actual Sin Preparatory Prayer (located on the first day of the Novena). MEDITATION MARY conceived without sin is the most blessed daughter of the eternal Father, the real and true Mother of the divine Son, the elect spouse of the Holy Ghost. But in the world, in what condition do we behold her? She dwells not in a splendid palace; she is not surrounded by a retinue of servants ready at every moment to do her bidding; she is not exempt from trials and suffering. On the contrary, she is poor; she lives in obscurity, and suffered so much on earth that, without shedding her blood, she merits to be styled the queen of martyrs. Her heart was transfixed with the sword of sorrow. Mary is not exempt from tribulations and adversity; but one thing God does not permit to touch her, _i.e.,_ sin. Hence Holy Church applies to her the words, "Thou art all fair, O my love, and there is not a spot in thee" (_Cant._ iv. 7). PRACTICE THOUGH we were not preserved from sin like Mary, yet God in His ineffable goodness and mercy granted us the grace to be cleansed from sin and to be clothed with the garment of sanctifying grace in Baptism. No treasure of the world can be compared with this prerogative. But as we bear this grace in a fragile vase, we must be most careful to protect and preserve it in ourselves and others from all danger. Let the Blessed Virgin Mary be our example. Well knowing the inestimable value of the grace conferred upon her, she guarded it with the greatest care. Although exempt from concupiscence and "full of grace," she was so distrustful of herself as if she were in continual danger. How much more, then, must we use precaution to preserve in ourselves and in others this treasure of grace, since we feel in ourselves constantly the law of the flesh, which resists the law of the spirit, and urges us on to evil, whilst the world and the devil never weary in placing snares for us in order to accomplish our ruin. Therefore let us have recourse to Mary, and invoking her aid bravely resist all temptations. Prayer of the Church (located on the first day of the Novena). Litany of Loreto (located in the list of approved litanies). _Prayer_ MIRROR of holy purity, Mary, Virgin immaculate, great is my joy while I consider that, from thy immaculate conception, the most sublime and perfect virtues were infused into thy soul, and with them all the gifts of the Holy Ghost. I thank and praise the Most Holy Trinity, who bestowed on thee these high privileges. I pray thee, gentle Mother, obtain for me grace to practise virtue, and to make me worthy to become partaker of the gifts and graces of the Holy Ghost. Hail Mary, etc. Ejaculation (located on the first day of the Novena). FIFTH DAY Mary, Full of Grace Preparatory Prayer (located on the first day of the Novena). MEDITATION SATAN'S relation to God as His child was severed by sin. The beautiful image of God imprinted on man's soul was disfigured by it. But with the immaculate conception of Mary, a being full of grace, an object of God's supreme complacency entered this world. After the lapse of four thousand years God, in His wisdom, power, and love, for the first time again created a human being in that state in which He had originally created our first parents. Mary, from the first moment of her existence was, in virtue of the sanctifying grace infused into her soul, most intimately united with God, and endowed with the most precious gifts of heaven. Because she was predestined to become the Mother of the Redeemer of mankind, it was befitting that she should unite in herself all the gifts becoming to such an ineffable dignity. Hence she surpassed in grace and holiness all other created beings, and was consecrated a worthy temple of the incarnate Word. Therefore she was saluted by the angel as "full of grace," and the Church, in our behalf, addresses the Almighty: "O God, who through the immaculate conception of the Virgin didst prepare a worthy dwelling-place for Thy divine Son; grant, that, as in view of the death of that Son Thou didst preserve her from all taint, so Thou wouldst vouchsafe unto us that, cleansed from all sin by her intercession, we too may arrive at Thine eternal glory." PRACTICE THE world considers men according to their rank and station, their wealth and knowledge. God recognizes in them but one difference, that caused by the presence or absence of sanctifying grace in their soul. A soul in the state of sanctifying grace is God's friend; without it, His enemy. A man dying in the state of sanctifying grace is sure of eternal bliss. Therefore we ought to prize this grace above all else, and do everything in our power to preserve it. St. Leo exhorts us, "Recognize, O man, thy dignity! As thou hast received divine grace, beware of returning to your former sinful condition by a wicked life." Prayer of the Church (located on the first day of the Novena). Litany of Loreto (located in the list of approved litanies). _Prayer_ MARY, bright moon of purity, I rejoice with thee, because the mystery of thy immaculate conception was the beginning of salvation for the race of man and the joy of the whole world. I thank and bless the ever-blessed Trinity, who thus did magnify and glorify thee; and I beg of thee to obtain for me the grace so to profit by thy dear Son's death and passion, that His precious blood may not have been shed in vain for me upon the cross, but that, after a holy life, I may reach heaven in safety. Hail Mary, etc. Ejaculation (located on the first day of the Novena). SIXTH DAY Mary, Our Refuge Preparatory Prayer (located on the first day of the Novena). MEDITATION WE CARRY the precious treasure of sanctifying grace in a frail vessel. Our inclination to evil remains with us, and continues to impel us to that which is forbidden. On whom shall we call for aid? Call on Mary! She is conceived without sin. She, the lily among thorns, who never lost God's friendship, is our advocate. Let her, who was found worthy to become the Mother of our Redeemer, inspire you with trust and confidence. The Church invokes her as the refuge of sinners, and under no other title does she show her love for us more convincingly and her power with God more efficiently. [Illustration: The Adoration of the Shepherds] PRACTICE WE MAY trust confidently in Mary's intercession and aid in all temptations and trials, if we but have recourse to her. Therefore St. John Damascene writes: "Come to my aid, O Mother of my Redeemer! Thou art my help, my consolation in life. Come to my aid, and I shall escape unscorched from the fire of temptation; amongst a thousand I shall remain unharmed; I shall brave the storms of assault unwrecked. Thy name is my shield, thy help my armor, thy protection my defense. With thee I boldly attack the enemy and drive him off in confusion; through thee I shall achieve a triumphant victory." In all temptations, therefore, let us have recourse to Mary and through her intercession we shall overcome them. Prayer of the Church (located on the first day of the Novena). Litany of Loreto (located in the list of approved litanies). _Prayer_ MARY immaculate, most brilliant star of purity, I rejoice with thee because thy immaculate conception has bestowed upon the angels in paradise the greatest joy. I thank and bless the ever-blessed Trinity, who enriched thee with this high privilege. O let me, too, one day enter into this heavenly joy, in the company of angels, that I may praise and bless thee, world without end. Hail Mary, etc. Ejaculation (located on the first day of the Novena). SEVENTH DAY Mary, the Mother of Chastity Preparatory Prayer (located on the first day of the Novena). MEDITATION HOLY Scripture and the Fathers agree in the statement that the Blessed Virgin Mary made the vow of perpetual virginity. For when the Archangel Gabriel brought God's message to the immaculate spouse of St. Joseph, that she was to become the Mother of the Most High, she asked, "How shall this be done, because I know not man?" (_Luke_ i. 34.) Indeed, Mary would not have been, in the full and most excellent sense of the word, the "Virgin of virgins," had she not from her own free choice vowed her virginity to God. During the whole Christian era there have been heroic souls who made the vow of perpetual chastity, consecrating themselves to God. Trusting in the powerful protection of the immaculate Virgin, they persevered in their resolve to bear this priceless treasure before God's throne despite the dangers of the world, the temptations of concupiscence, and the assaults of hell, and with the help of the queen of virgins they achieved a triumphant victory. PRACTICE SINCE the fall of Adam our senses are in rebellion against the law of God. "I see another law in my members, fighting against the law of my mind, and captivating me in the law of sin" (_Rom._ vii. 23). Chastity is the virtue which causes us the greatest struggles. St. Augustine says: "The fiercest of all combats is the one for the preservation of chastity, and we must engage in it every day." Fierce as this combat is, the aid which Mary gives her children to achieve victory is all-powerful. She sustains them by her maternal love and protection. Those who lead a chaste life receive the Divine Spirit, are happy in this life, and will receive a special crown in heaven. Among the means for the preservation of chastity, the following are specially recommended: The assiduous and constant practice of self-denial; the frequentation of the sacraments; the daily invocation of Mary for her aid and protection; scrupulous avoidance of the occasions of sin. St. Chrysostom writes: "He errs who believes that he can overcome his sensual propensities and preserve chastity by his own efforts. God's mercy must extinguish nature's ardor." Have recourse to the intercession of the immaculate Virgin and rest assured that you will obtain this mercy. Prayer of the Church (located on the first day of the Novena). Litany of Loreto (located in the list of approved litanies). _Prayer_ MARY immaculate, rising morn of purity, I rejoice with thee, gazing in wonder upon thy soul confirmed in grace from the very first moment of thy conception, and rendered inaccessible to sin. I thank and magnify the ever-blessed Trinity, who chose thee from all our race for this special privilege. Holy Virgin, obtain for me utter and constant hatred of all sin above every other evil, and let me rather die than ever again fall into sin. Hail Mary, etc. Ejaculation (located on the first day of the Novena). EIGHTH DAY The Image of the Immaculate Conception Preparatory Prayer (located on the first day of the Novena). MEDITATION CHRISTIAN art represents the Immaculate Conception as follows: The Blessed Virgin appears standing on a globe, about which is coiled a serpent holding an apple in its mouth. One of Mary's feet rests upon the serpent, the other is placed on the moon. Her eyes are raised toward heaven; her hands are either joined in prayer, or she holds a lily in her right, and places the left on her breast. Her dress is white; her ample mantle is of blue color. A crown of twelve stars encircles her head. These emblems typify in a most striking manner Mary's power and glory. "And a great sign appeared in heaven. A woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars" (_Apoc._ xii. 1). PRACTICE THE representation of the Immaculate Conception is very instructive. (1) Mary appears standing on the globe. This signifies that being human, she belongs to the earth, and yet is exalted above the world and sin; also, that she trampled under foot earthly possessions, vanities, and joys. (2) A serpent is coiled about the globe, bearing an apple in its mouth. This reminds us of the fall of our first parents, and of the consequences of their sin. (3) Mary's foot rests on the serpent, indicating that she never was under Satan's dominion, but was preserved from sin in the first moment of her existence. (4) Mary stands on the moon. The moon, on account of its changes, is an emblem of inconstancy. We see it at Mary's feet, to be reminded that we ought to be constant in faith and virtue. (5) Mary wears a crown, to indicate that she is a queen. The crown is composed of twelve stars: she is the queen of heaven. (6) Mary's dress is white, to denote her spotless purity and innocence. (7) She folds her hands in prayer, reminding us to imitate her example. (8) Or she holds a lily in her right hand, to indicate her virginity and chastity, and the sweet odor of her virtues. (9) Mary's mantle is blue, which color is emblematic of humility. Its folds are ample, to remind us that all who have recourse to her find a secure refuge in all dangers and necessities. Therefore let us invoke her intercession in the words of Holy Church: "We fly to thy patronage, O holy Mother of God. Despise not our petitions, and deliver us from all danger, O ever glorious and blessed Virgin!" Prayer of the Church (located on the first day of the Novena). Litany of Loreto (located in the list of approved litanies). _Prayer_ O SPOTLESS sun! O Virgin Mary! I congratulate thee. I rejoice with thee because in thy conception God gave thee grace greater and more boundless than He ever shed on all His angels and all the saints, together with all their merits. I am thankful and I marvel at the surpassing beneficence of the ever-blessed Trinity, who conferred on thee this privilege. O make me correspond with the grace of God and never abuse it. Change this heart of mine; make me now begin to amend my life. Hail Mary, etc. Ejaculation (located on the first day of the Novena). NINTH DAY The Feast of the Immaculate Conception Preparatory Prayer (located on the first day of the Novena). MEDITATION EARLY in the Christian era the feast of Mary's immaculate conception was observed in several countries. St. Anselm, Bishop of Canterbury, introduced it in England. A great number of Popes favored the doctrine of Mary's absolute sinlessness, and the adversaries of the Immaculate Conception were bidden to be silent and not publicly assert or defend their view. In 1477, Pope Sixtus IV prescribed the feast of the Immaculate Conception to be observed in the whole Church, and made it obligatory on priests to recite the special canonical office and to use the Mass formula published for the purpose. In 1846, the bishops of the United States assembled in plenary council in Baltimore elected the Blessed Virgin under the title of her immaculate conception Patroness of the Church in their country. Finally, Pope Pius IX, after consulting with the bishops throughout the world, and having implored the Holy Ghost for His guidance in prayer and fasting, promulgated, on December 8, 1854, the dogma which teaches that the Blessed Virgin Mary was in her conception, by a special grace and through the merits of her divine Son, preserved from the stain of original sin. This doctrine was received throughout the world with ineffable joy; and, indeed, no one who loves the Blessed Virgin can help rejoicing at this her most glorious privilege. The invocation, "Queen conceived without the stain of original sin," was added to the Litany of Loreto. In 1866, at the Second Plenary Council in Baltimore, the feast of the Immaculate Conception was raised to the rank of a holyday of obligation for the Church of the United States. PRACTICE IN THE inscrutable designs of His providence God ordained that the mystery of the immaculate conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary should be proclaimed an article of faith as late as the middle of the nineteenth century. But, then, its proclamation was attended by circumstances that undeniably proved that the Holy Father in pronouncing the dogma had been inspired and guided by the Holy Ghost. Let us praise God and thank Him for bestowing this glorious privilege on our beloved Mother, and let us often invoke her under her favorite title, the Immaculate Conception. St. Alphonsus Liguori tells us that the devotion to this mystery is especially efficacious in overcoming the temptations of impurity. Therefore he was accustomed to recommend to his penitents thus tempted to recite three times every day the Hail Mary in honor of Mary immaculate. And the Venerable John of Avila assures us that he never found any one who practised a true devotion to the Immaculate Conception of Mary, who did not in a short time obtain the gift of that virtue which renders us so dear to her immaculate heart. Prayer of the Church (located on the first day of the Novena). Litany of Loreto (located in the list of approved litanies). _Prayer_ O LIVING light of holiness, model of purity, Mary immaculate, virgin and mother! As soon as thou wast conceived thou didst profoundly adore thy God, giving Him thanks that in thee the ancient curse was revoked, and blessing came again upon the sinful sons of Adam. O make this blessing kindle in my heart love for God; and do thou fan this flame of love within me, that I may love Him constantly and one day in heaven eternally enjoy Him, there to thank Him more and more fervently for all the wondrous privileges conferred on thee, and to rejoice with thee for thy high crown of glory. Hail Mary, etc. Ejaculation (located on the first day of the Novena). II Novena in Honor of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary FIRST DAY The Birth of Mary PREPARATORY PRAYER WE FLY to thy patronage, O holy Mother of God. Despise not our petitions in our necessities, and deliver us from all dangers, O ever glorious and blessed Virgin! MEDITATION MARY is born! The dawn announcing the coming salvation of mankind is at hand. The deep significance of Mary's birth is expressed in the words of the Church: "Thy birth, O virgin Mother of God, has brought joy to the world; for from thee is to come forth the Sun of Justice, Christ our Lord, to dispel the curse and bring the blessing, to conquer death and bring us everlasting life. On this day a light broke forth to brighten the paths of men through all time. Let us, then, rejoice in Mary's coming." Equally expressive and touching are the reflections of that great Doctor of the Church, St. Augustine: "The day has dawned, the long-wished-for day of the blessed and venerable Virgin Mary. Well may this earth of ours rejoice and be glad for having been honored and sanctified by the birth of such a virgin." PRACTICE LET us, then, rejoice in Mary's coming. Let us hail the birth of her who attained the dignity of mother without losing the high privilege of a virgin. Let us imitate her holy life, that she may become our intercessor before the throne of her Son, our judge and redeemer. By becoming the Mother of God she became also our Mother. As Mother of the Redeemer she is also the Mother of the redeemed. Richard of St. Lawrence writes: "If we desire grace and help, let us have recourse to Mary and we shall obtain what we desire." For, as St. Alphonsus remarks: "All graces and gifts which God has resolved to bestow upon us He gives us through the hands of Mary." PRAYER OF THE CHURCH GRANT to us, Thy servants, we beseech Thee, O Lord, the gift of heavenly grace; that to those for whom the delivery of the Blessed Virgin was the commencement of salvation, the commemoration of her nativity may give increasing peace. Through Christ our Lord. Amen. Litany of Loreto (located in the list of approved litanies). _Prayer_ MOST lovely child, who by thy birth hast comforted the world, made glad the heavens, struck terror into hell, brought help to the fallen, consolation to the sad, health to the sick, joy to all; we pray thee with all fervent love, be thou born again in spirit in our souls through thy most holy love. Renew our fervor in thy service, rekindle in our hearts the fire of thy love, and bid all virtues blossom there, which may cause us to find more and more fervor in thy gracious eyes. O Mary, may we feel the saving power of thy sweetest name! Let it ever be our comfort to call on that great name in all our troubles; let it be our hope in dangers, our shield in temptation, and in death our last aspiration. _Ejaculation_ O Mary, who didst come into the world free from stain: obtain of God for me that I may leave it without sin! Indulgence. 100 days, once a day. (Pius IX, March 27, 1863.) SECOND DAY Mary, the Elect of God Preparatory Prayer (located on the first day of the Novena). MEDITATION WE FIND the explanation of the great prerogatives and privileges which God bestowed upon the Blessed Virgin Mary by reflecting on her singular and glorious predestination. From all eternity she was predestined to become the Mother of His divine Son; therefore, says Pope Pius IX, God loved her above all created beings, and in His special predilection made her the object of His divine complacency. With singular appropriateness we may apply to her the words of Holy Scripture, "I have loved thee with an everlasting love" (_Jer._ xxxi. 3). The eternal Father regarded Mary as His beloved Daughter; the divine Son honored her as His dearest Mother; the Holy Ghost loved her as His spotless Spouse. "And," says St. Anselm, "they loved each other with an affection unsurpassed by any other." PRACTICE INSPIRED by the contemplation of Mary's extraordinary privileges, St. Anselm exclaims: "Thou, O Mary, art more exalted than the patriarchs, greater than the martyrs, more glorious than the confessors, purer than the virgins, and therefore thou, alone, canst achieve more than they can without thee." Let us, then, rejoice that we possess such a powerful advocate in heaven, and let us place implicit trust in her. But let us also co-operate with the graces and favors which she obtains for us. Moreover, let us remember that we grievously offend God and Mary if we abuse what we obtain through her intercession to gratify our evil inclinations, and that the graces she obtains for us for our salvation will redound to our ruin if we do not use them for the glory of God and the promotion of our soul's welfare. Prayer of the Church (located on the first day of the Novena). Litany of Loreto (located in the list of approved litanies). _Prayer_ WE HAIL thee, Mary, who, sprung from the royal line of David, didst come forth to the light of heaven with high honor from the womb of holy Anna, thy most happy mother. Hail Mary, etc. Ejaculation (located on the first day of the Novena). THIRD DAY Mary, the Child of Royalty Preparatory Prayer (located on the first day of the Novena). MEDITATION ACCORDING to her lineage, as traced in two Gospels, Mary numbers among her paternal and maternal ancestors the holiest and most renowned personages of the Old Testament. We find amongst them Abraham, the friend of God, the father of Israel and of all the faithful; then David, the man after God's own heart, the inspired Royal Prophet; and Solomon, the wise and mighty king, and the whole line of the kings of Juda. On her mother's side she belonged to the tribe of Levi, and was descended from its noblest and most prominent family, that of Aaron the High Priest, and was therefore a relative of the High Priests of the Old Testament. Thus royal and sacerdotal prestige distinguished Mary's lineage. PRACTICE THE Blessed Virgin was not proud of her illustrious ancestry, and not depressed because of the downfall of her family, but applied herself diligently to adhere to the faith and follow the example of her ancestors. Remembering the wicked members of her family, she learned from them that temporal greatness, success, wealth, and glory are more dangerous to virtue than poverty, retirement, and work. Let us imitate Mary's example. Even possessed of the most excellent prestiges of the natural order, of ourselves we are nothing. "What hast thou that thou hast not received? And if thou hast received, why dost thou glory as if thou hadst not received?" (1 _Cor._ iv. 7.) Therefore do not overestimate yourself; do not be conceited; do not strive for praise, honors, and high station; be not boastful or arrogant; do not presume on your merits; rather be distrustful of yourself and patiently bear affronts, neglect, and humiliations. However poor you may be, be content with your lot, remembering the words of the Apostle: "They that will become rich fall into temptation, and into the snare of the devil, and into many unprofitable and hurtful desires which draw men into destruction and perdition. For the desire of money is the root of all evils: which some coveting have erred from the faith, and have entangled themselves in many sorrows" (1 _Tim._ vi. 9, 10). Prayer of the Church (located on the first day of the Novena). Litany of Loreto (located in the list of approved litanies). _Prayer_ WE HAIL thee, O Mary, heavenly babe, white dove of purity, who, despite the infernal serpent, was conceived free from the taint of Adam's sin. With all our hearts we pray thee to vouchsafe in thy goodness to come down again and be born in spirit in our souls, that, led captive by thy loveliness and sweetness, they may ever live united to thy most sweet and loving heart. Hail Mary, etc. Ejaculation (located on the first day of the Novena). [Illustration: The Purification] FOURTH DAY Mary, the Child of Pious Parents Preparatory Prayer (located on the first day of the Novena). MEDITATION TRADITION tells us that Mary's parents were called Joachim and Anna. The holy Fathers rival each other in praising the virtue of this holy couple. St. Epiphanius writes: "Joachim and Anna were pleasing in the sight of God because of the holiness of their lives." St. Andrew of Crete remarks: "Joachim was eminent for the mildness and fortitude of his character. The law of God was his rule of life. He was just, and never relaxed in the fervor of his love of God. Anna was no less noted for her meekness, continence, and chastity." St. Jerome relates: "The life of this holy couple was simple and just before the Lord, edifying and virtuous before men." St. John Damascene exclaims: "O happy, chaste, and immaculate couple, Joachim and Ann! You are known, according to the Lord's word, by your fruit. Your life was pleasing in the sight of God, and worthy of her who was born of you." PRACTICE IT is a great blessing, and one to be esteemed more highly than wealth and high station, to have God-fearing, pious parents. For their sake God is gracious to the children and lavishes His gifts on them. It is certainly a great privilege to be offered up to God immediately after birth by the hands of a pious mother. To have, from childhood up, the example and guidance of virtuous parents is certainly of the greatest importance. St. Chrysostom writes: "The parents' example is the book from which the child learns." A pious bishop was wont to say: "The good example of the parents is the best catechism and the truest mirror that a family can have." If Christian parents imitate the example of Joachim and Ann the blessing of God will rest on them and on their children; for because her parents were so dear to Mary, she will not refuse to join them in their prayers for us. Prayer of the Church (located on the first day of the Novena). Litany of Loreto (located in the list of approved litanies). _Prayer_ WE HAIL thee, brightest morn, forerunner of the heavenly Sun of Justice, who didst first bring light to earth. Humbly prostrate, with all our hearts we pray thee to vouchsafe in thy goodness to be born again in spirit in our souls, that, led captive by thy loveliness and sweetness, they may ever live united to thy most sweet and loving heart. Hail Mary, etc. Ejaculation (located on the first day of the Novena). FIFTH DAY Mary's Supernatural Prerogatives Preparatory Prayer (located on the first day of the Novena). MEDITATION MARY was the masterpiece of God's creation; her soul was the most perfect ever dwelling in a human body. A pious tradition tells us that she possessed the use of reason much earlier than other children. Her intellect was illuminated by supernatural light; her will was exempt from concupiscence. Being preserved from original sin, she surpassed in holiness, from the first moment of her existence, all angels and men. She possessed all virtues in the highest degree, because of her faithful co-operation with sanctifying grace and with the countless actual graces granted to her. She lived in constant communion with God, undisturbed by evil inclinations from within or temptations from without. PRACTICE THROUGH the effects of original sin we have lost the supernatural prerogative of original justice, and even after receiving sanctifying grace in holy Baptism we are exposed to many temptations. Our life is a constant warfare. We must, however, not despair in this struggle, for if we are true children of Mary she will come to our aid. In all temptations Mary is the "Help of Christians" if we have recourse to her. But if we wish her to help us, we must not expose ourselves unnecessarily to temptation. "He that loveth danger shall perish in it" (_Ecclus._ iii. 27). This sad experience has come to many. Let us, therefore, avoid the danger and occasion of sin; and whenever evil approaches us in any shape, let us call upon Mary, and we may rest assured that she will assist us. "I shall certainly triumph over my enemies," exclaims St. Alphonsus, "if I place my trust in thee, O Mary, and if thou art my shield and protection against them." Prayer of the Church (located on the first day of the Novena). Litany of Loreto (located in the list of approved litanies). _Prayer_ WE HAIL thee, O chosen one! who like the untarnished sun didst burst forth into being in the dark night of sin. Humbly prostrate at thy feet, O Mary, we give thee our homage, and with all our hearts we pray thee to vouchsafe in thy goodness to be born again in our souls, that, led captive by thy loveliness and sweetness, they may ever live united to thy most sweet and loving heart. Hail Mary, etc. Ejaculation (located on the first day of the Novena). SIXTH DAY Mary, the Joy of the Most Holy Trinity Preparatory Prayer (located on the first day of the Novena). MEDITATION IN THE child Mary the eternal Father beheld His unsullied glorious image, which image had been defaced in all other human beings by original and actual sin. What a joy to Him to behold this stainless, immaculate child! And how great must have been the joy of the Son of God at the birth of her who was to be His Mother! From her He was to take that sacred body in which He was to dwell on earth, the blood of which He was to shed on the cross for our redemption, and in which He was to return to heaven to sit at the right hand of the Father. He will call her Mother, and regard her with all the filial tenderness of a child for his mother. She will love Him in return with a true mother's affection and devotion. As the Mother of Sorrows she will weep over His inanimate body taken down from the cross. But like Himself, she will leave the tomb, and reign at His side as the queen of heaven. How great, then, must have been His joy at the birth of this child! The Holy Ghost, too, rejoiced at Mary's birth. He infused into her the plenitude of His holy love, for she was destined to become the Mother of God. And how Mary will love God, from whom she received so many and so great graces, and whom she is to bear in her arms as her real and true Son! This, her divine Son's love for mankind, will be imparted also to her. Therefore the Holy Ghost rejoices at this child, who received into her heart the fulness of His grace, and shall be the helper of those who have recourse to her. PRACTICE RAISE your spirit above time and space; try to contemplate well the mystery of Mary's predestination. To make us realize the great privileges conferred upon her, the Church applies to her the words of Holy Scripture, "He that shall find me, shall find life, and have salvation from the Lord" (_Prov._ viii. 35). Only when we consider Mary as the Mother of God, do we arrive at a right conception of her great dignity. Hence St. Bonaventure exclaims, "God might have created a more beautiful world; He might have made heaven more glorious; but it was impossible for Him to exalt a creature higher than Mary in making her His Mother." Prayer of the Church (located on the first day of the Novena). Litany of Loreto (located in the list of approved litanies). _Prayer_ WE HAIL thee, beauteous moon, O Mary most holy, who didst shed light upon a world wrapped in the densest darkness of sin. Humbly prostrate at thy feet, we give thee our homage, and with all our hearts we pray thee to vouchsafe in thy goodness to be born again in spirit in our souls, that led captive by thy loveliness and sweetness they may ever live united to thy most sweet and loving heart. Hail Mary, etc. Ejaculation (located on the first day of the Novena). SEVENTH DAY The Angels Rejoice at Mary's Birth Preparatory Prayer (located on the first day of the Novena). MEDITATION DESCRIBING God's power and wisdom as shown in creation, Holy Scripture, according to the explanation of the Fathers, introduces Him as saying, "When the morning stars praised me together, and all the sons of God made a joyful melody" (_Job_ xxxviii. 7), and by these words intends to convey with what joy the angels praised God's omnipotence on beholding the wonders of creation. What, then, must have been their joy on beholding this new wonder of divine power and wisdom, the child Mary, destined to be their queen. Filled with admiration they exclaimed, "Who is she that cometh forth as the morning rising, fair as the moon, bright as the sun, terrible as an army set in array?" (_Cant._ vi. 9.) And moreover, if, as Our Lord declares, the angels rejoice at the conversion of a sinner, how great must have been their joy at the birth of her who was to be the refuge of sinners and the mother of Him who was to be the Redeemer of sinners? Again, the angels rejoiced at Mary's birth, because she would fill, through the salvation of mankind by her divine Son, the places made vacant in heaven by the apostate angels. PRACTICE GOOD children rejoice on the birthday of their parents and gratefully remember all the benefits they have received from them. Thus should we, also, celebrate the nativity of the Blessed Virgin by a grateful remembrance of the innumerable graces, individual and general, we received through her intercession. In acknowledging Mary's co-operation with our salvation, Holy Church calls her our mediatrix, and greets her as the "Cause of our joy," because, though we receive grace from Christ, it comes to us through her mediation. What cause, then, have we not for rejoicing at her birth! Again, greeting Mary as the cause of our joy, let us remember the protection she extended to the Church in times of adversity and persecution; let us, furthermore, remember all the graces which, according to the holy Fathers, are dispensed to us by Mary's hands. "Of her plenitude," says St. Bonaventure, "we have all received; the captive liberty, the sick health, the sad consolation, the sinner pardon, the just grace." Therefore the Church invokes Mary as the mother of mercy, the health of the sick, the comforter of the afflicted, the refuge of sinners, the help of Christians, in a word, as the cause of our joy. Prayer of the Church (located on the first day of the Novena). Litany of Loreto (located in the list of approved litanies). _Prayer_ WE HAIL thee, fair soul of Mary, who from all eternity wast God's, and God's alone; sanctuary and living temple of the Holy Ghost; sun without blemish, because free from original sin. With all our hearts we pray to thee, O Mary, to vouchsafe in thy goodness to be born again in spirit in our souls, that, led captive by thy loveliness and sweetness, they may ever live united to thy most sweet and loving heart. Hail Mary, etc. Ejaculation (located on the first day of the Novena). EIGHTH DAY The Joy of the Just in Limbo at Mary's Birth Preparatory Prayer (located on the first day of the Novena). MEDITATION FOR four thousand years the just in limbo sighed for redemption, and sent up to Heaven the plaintive cry, "O that Thou wouldst rend the heavens, and wouldst come down!" (_Is._ xiv. 1.) "Drop down dew, ye heavens, from above, and let the clouds rain the just; let the earth be opened and bud forth a Saviour" (_Is._ xlv. 8). What joy must have filled the souls of the just when they heard the welcome tidings of the birth of Mary, the virgin Mother of the promised Messias; how great their consolation at the rising of that dawn which preceded the Sun of Justice, whose splendor was to illuminate the darkness of them that sat in the shadow of death! PRACTICE A JOY similar to that which filled the captive souls in limbo at Mary's birth now fills the souls in purgatory when we implore her to come to their relief. Contemplating the immense love of the Most Holy Trinity for Mary, we may not doubt but that, by her intercession, she might at once deliver all the suffering souls from their prison, if such were in accordance with God's will. But God's wisdom and providence have decreed otherwise. Therefore Mary does not pray for the release of all souls in purgatory, but recommends them, in conformity with God's will, to His mercy. St. Bernardine of Sienna applies to Mary the words of Holy Scripture, "I have penetrated into the bottom of the deep and have walked in the waves of the sea" (_Ecclus._ xxiv. 8), and says: "She descends into that sea of suffering and soothes the pains of the poor souls." St. Denis the Carthusian remarks, that when the name of Mary is mentioned in purgatory, the souls there imprisoned experience the same relief as when a sick person hears words of consolation on his bed of pain. Therefore let us entrust our prayers for the souls in purgatory to Mary. She will present our petitions to God, and thus presented, He will speedily hear and graciously grant them. Prayer of the Church (located on the first day of the Novena). Litany of Loreto (located in the list of approved litanies). _Prayer_ WE HAIL thee, strong child, who didst put to flight all hell and the powers of darkness. We give thee our homage, and with all our hearts we pray thee to vouchsafe in thy goodness to be born again in spirit in our souls, that, led captive by thy loveliness and sweetness, they may ever live united to thy most sweet and loving heart. Hail Mary, etc. Ejaculation (located on the first day of the Novena). NINTH DAY The Holy Name of Mary Preparatory Prayer (located on the first day of the Novena). MEDITATION ST. ALPHONSUS writes of the name of Mary: "This name was neither invented on earth, nor imposed by human agency. It came from heaven and was given to the Mother of God by divine command." Just as it is a peculiar glory of our Saviour's name, that "God hath given Him a name which is above all names, that in the name of Jesus every knee should bow of those that are in heaven, on earth, and under the earth" (_Philipp._ ii. 9), thus it also behooves that Mary, the most perfect, the most pure, and most exalted of all created beings, should receive a most holy, lovely, and powerful name. St. Methodius declares that the name of Mary is so rich in grace and blessing, that no one can pronounce it devoutly without at the same time receiving a spiritual favor. Bl. Jordan exclaims: "Let a heart be ever so obdurate, let a man even despair of God's mercy, if he have recourse to thee, O Mary, virgin most clement, he can not fail to be softened and filled with confidence if he invokes thy name; for thou wilt inspire him with hope in God's mercy, pardon, and grace." PRACTICE IT IS, then, meet and just that we should devoutly honor and praise the name of Mary. Let us never mention it except in reverence and devotion. Let us invoke Mary by it in all dangers of body and soul, mindful of the words of St. Bernard: "O sinner, when the floods and tempests of this earthly life overwhelm thee so that thou canst not firmly set thy foot, turn not away thy gaze from the light of this guiding star. When the storms of temptation assail thee, and the rocks and quicksands of vexation and trial threaten to shatter thy bark of hope, look up to that bright star in the heavens, and call on the name of Mary. When the billows of pride and of ambition, when the floods of calumny are about to submerge thee, look up to this star and call on the name of Mary. When anger, avarice, and concupiscence convulse the peace of thy soul, look up to this star and call on Mary. When thy sins rise up like hideous monsters before thy troubled vision, when thy conscience stings thee, when the terrors of future judgment fill thee with deadly anguish, when gloom and sadness overpower thee, when thou findest thyself on the brink of hellish despair, take courage; think of Mary, and thou wilt find from thy own inward experience how true are the sayings of those who tell thee that the name of the Blessed Virgin is 'Star of the Sea,' the name of the Virgin is Mary." Prayer of the Church (located on the first day of the Novena). Litany of Loreto (located in the list of approved litanies). _Prayer_ WE HAIL thee, beloved child Mary, adorned with every virtue, immeasurably above all the saints, and therefore worthy Mother of the Saviour of the world, who by the operation of the Holy Ghost didst bring forth the incarnate Word. We give thee our homage, and with all our hearts we pray thee to vouchsafe in thy goodness to be born again in our souls, that, led captive by thy loveliness and sweetness, they may ever live united to thy most sweet and loving heart. Hail Mary, etc. Ejaculation (located on the first day of the Novena). III Novena for the Feast of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary FIRST DAY The Annunciation PREPARATORY PRAYER MY QUEEN, my Mother, remember I am thine own. Keep me, guard me, as thy property and possession! Indulgence. 40 days, every time. (Pius IX, August 5, 1851.) MEDITATION AT NAZARETH, a mountain village in Judea, lived poor and in obscurity Mary, the virgin selected by God to become the Mother of His Son. On March 25th she was in prayer in her chamber, and perhaps sent up to heaven the yearning petition, "Drop down dew, ye heavens, from above, and let the clouds rain the just; let the earth be opened and bud a Saviour" (_Is._ xlv. 8). Behold, suddenly the chamber is suffused by a heavenly light. The archangel Gabriel stands reverently before her and says, "Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women. And when Mary heard the angel's words, she was troubled at his saying, and thought with herself what manner of salutation this should be" (_Luke_ i. 28, 29). PRACTICE THE angel's salutation comprises two titles of ineffable greatness. Mary is called "full of grace," because of her innocence and purity; she is called "blessed among women," because she is the elect Mother of God. Never before was a human being thus greeted. It was God Himself who sent the message to Mary. A good angel now repaired the harm once done by a bad angel. For Lucifer, the fallen angel, seduced Eve to sin and thereby caused the ruin of the whole human race; now another angel, Gabriel, was sent to announce the glad tidings to Mary, that she was to conceive the Redeemer from sin, who was to accomplish the salvation of mankind. Mary was troubled at the angel's words, and reflected on the meaning of the message. St. Ambrose writes: "Mary was troubled, not because the angel was a heavenly spirit, but because he appeared to her in the form of a youth. Still more was she troubled at the praises spoken to her. She was innocent and humble, and therefore reflected on the meaning of the message. She had always considered herself as a poor and unknown virgin; she deemed herself unworthy of God's grace; therefore she was troubled at the salutation. In that decisive moment she was and remained our model." [Illustration: The Flight into Egypt] PRAYER OF THE CHURCH POUR forth, we beseech Thee, O Lord, Thy grace into our hearts, that we unto whom the Incarnation of Christ Thy Son was made known by the message of an angel, may, by His passion and cross, be brought to the glory of the resurrection. Through the same Christ our Lord. Amen. Litany of Loreto (located in the list of approved litanies). _Prayer_ WITH wonder I revere thee, holiest Virgin Mary; for of all God's creatures thou wast the humblest on the very day of thy annunciation, when God Himself exalted Thee to the sublime dignity of His own Mother. O mightiest Virgin, make me, wretched sinner that I am, know the depths of my own nothingness, and make me humble myself at last with all my heart, beneath the feet of all men. Hail Mary, etc. _Ejaculation_ Virgin Mary, Mother of God, pray to Jesus for me! Indulgence. 50 days, once a day. (Leo XIII, March 20, 1894.) SECOND DAY The Import of the Angel's Salutation Preparatory Prayer (located on the first day of the novena). MEDITATION "HAIL, full of grace!" Mary was greeted as full of grace by the Giver of grace Himself. The angel's salutation meant: "The grace of God has preserved thee from all sin. Neither the stain of original sin, nor the guilt of actual sin, ever obscured the mirror of thy soul. By the special favor of God the most sublime virtues were infused into thy soul." "The Lord is with thee." From all eternity the Lord was with Mary. He was with her not only as He is with His whole creation, but He was with her in a special manner. The eternal Father was with her from all eternity as with His beloved Daughter. The divine Son was with her from all eternity as with His chosen Mother. The Holy Ghost was with her from all eternity as with His beloved Spouse. This intimate union never was disrupted. Therefore Mary is "Blessed among women," and ever was, and ever shall be the beloved of the Lord. PRACTICE CONSIDER how Mary receives the angel's message. She is troubled, she is disturbed at the praise, at the reverence of the angel. What an example of humility! Let us imitate her in this virtue by the acknowledgment before God of our weakness, our unworthiness, our nothingness, and by ordering our whole being accordingly. Humility renders us pleasing in the sight of God and makes us susceptible of His grace. Hence St. Augustine writes: "God resists the proud and gives His grace to the humble. What a terrible punishment for the proud, what a splendid reward for the humble! The proud man resembles a rock, the humble man a beautiful valley. The grace of God descends from heaven like a gentle rain. It can not penetrate the rock of pride, and hence the proud man loses God's grace and love. But in the valley of humility the waters of divine grace can diffuse themselves and fructify the soul of the humble man, so that it may bring forth fruit unto eternal life." Prayer of the Church (located on the first day of the novena). Litany of Loreto (located in the list of approved litanies). _Prayer_ O MARY, holiest Virgin, who, when the archangel Gabriel hailed thee in thy annunciation, and thou wast raised by God above all choirs of the angels, didst confess thyself "the handmaid of the Lord"; do thou obtain for me true humility and a truly angelic purity, and so to live on earth as ever to be worthy of the blessings of God. Hail Mary, etc. Ejaculation (located on the first day of the novena). THIRD DAY The Effect of the Angel's Salutation Preparatory Prayer (located on the first day of the novena). MEDITATION THE effect of the angel's salutation on Mary was striking. Imbued with sentiments quite different from ours, she was troubled at the praise addressed to her. Meanwhile she is silent and considers within herself what might be the meaning of these words. And now the angel calls her by name, saying, "Fear not, Mary, for thou hast found grace with God. Behold thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and shalt bring forth a son, and thou shalt call His name Jesus. He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God shall give unto Him the throne of David His father: and He shall reign in the house of Jacob for ever, and of His kingdom there shall be no end" (_Luke_ i. 30-33). PRACTICE LET us admire the prudence shining forth in Mary. After hearing the angel's words of praise she was silent and thought within herself what kind of a salutation this was. She is very careful and prudent. On this her conduct St. Thomas Aquinas remarks: "Mary did not refuse to believe, nor did she receive the message with credulity. She avoided Eve's gullibility and the distrust of Zachary the high priest." And St. Bernard writes: "Mary preferred to remain silent in humility, rather than to speak inconsiderately." Let us strive always to speak and act with deliberation. Our conversation ought always to be judicious; for often a word spoken inconsiderately causes bitter regret. St. Thomas Aquinas observes: "Song was given to a number of creatures, but human beings alone were endowed with the faculty of speech, to indicate that in speaking we should use our reason." And St. Chrysostom says: "Let us always guard our tongue; not that it should always be silent, but that it should speak at the proper time." Prayer of the Church (located on the first day of the novena). Litany of Loreto (located in the list of approved litanies). _Prayer_ I REJOICE with thee, O Virgin ever blessed, because by thy humble word of consent thou didst draw down from the bosom of the eternal Father the divine Word into thy own pure bosom. O draw, then, ever my heart to God; and with God bring grace into my heart that I may ever sincerely bless thy word of consent, so mighty and so efficacious. Hail Mary, etc. Ejaculation (located on the first day of the novena). FOURTH DAY Mary's Question Preparatory Prayer (located on the first day of the novena). MEDITATION WELL versed as Mary was in Holy Scripture, she fully understood the words she had heard and knew their great import. She was destined to become the Mother of the Most High, the Son of God. But there is an obstacle which prevents her from giving immediate assent. She has solemnly vowed her virginity to God. Not knowing how the mystery announced to her was to be accomplished, and intent above all on keeping inviolate her vow, she interrupts her silence by the short but comprehensive question, "How shall this be done, because I know not man?" (_Luke_ i. 34.) This is the first word of Mary recorded in the Gospel. PRACTICE "HOW shall this be done, because I know not man?" Truly a momentous question, proceeding from her knowledge of the great excellence and value before God of virginity, which, before Mary, was unknown to the world. Let us follow Mary's example and esteem holy purity and chastity above all things. Let us remember how highly Holy Scripture extols this virtue. "O how beautiful is the chaste generation with glory; for the memory thereof is immortal, because it is known both with God and with men" (_Wis._ iv. 1). St. Athanasius writes: "O chastity, thou precious pearl, found by few, even hated by some, and sought only by those who are worthy of thee! Thou art the joy of the prophets, the ornament of the apostles, the life of the angels, the crown of the saints." Let us therefore carefully guard this inestimable treasure. Prayer of the Church (located on the first day of the novena). Litany of Loreto (located in the list of approved litanies). _Prayer_ MARY, mighty Virgin, thou who on the day of thy annunciation wast found by the archangel so prompt and ready to do God's will, and to correspond with the desires of the august Trinity, who wished for thy consent in order to redeem the world; obtain for me that, whatever happens, good or ill, I may turn to my God, and with resignation say, "Be it done unto me according to thy word." Hail Mary, etc. Ejaculation (located on the first day of the novena). FIFTH DAY The Solution Preparatory Prayer (located on the first day of the novena). MEDITATION THE angel explains to Mary how, without detriment to her virginity, she will become a mother. He says, "The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Most High shall overshadow thee. And therefore also the Holy which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God" (_Luke_ i. 35). St. Bernard remarks: "Let him who can, comprehend it. Who, but that most happy Virgin who was worthy to experience the influence and effect of the power of the Most High and to penetrate this sublime mystery, can understand how the divine Light was poured into the Virgin's womb? The Most Holy Trinity alone co-operated in the sacred act, and it remains an impenetrable mystery to all, except to her who was called to so sublime a destiny." PRACTICE MARY did not entertain a single doubt concerning the wonders which the angel announced to her about the coming Messias and His kingdom. She believed with simple faith the words of the heavenly messenger. Only about that which concerned her personally she asked a question. When the wonderful mystery was explained to her, she did not ask how this _can_ be done, but only how it _shall_ be done. And after the angel had declared to her that she shall conceive by the Holy Ghost, she was fully resigned and announced her implicit belief in these humble words: "Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it done to me according to thy word" (_Luke_ i. 38). Therefore the Holy Ghost Himself praised her by the mouth of Elizabeth: "Blessed art thou that hast believed" (_Luke_ i. 45). Let us remain steadfast in the profession of all articles of faith, and let us oppose, like a strong shield, the words, "Nothing is impossible with God," to all attacks of unbelievers, and to all doubts that may arise in our own minds. Prayer of the Church (located on the first day of the novena). Litany of Loreto (located in the list of approved litanies). _Prayer_ MARY most holy, I see that thy obedience united thee so closely to God, that all creation never shall know again union so fair and so perfect. I am overwhelmed with confusion in seeing how my sins have separated me from God. Help me, then, gentle Mother, to repent sincerely of my sins, that I may be reunited to thy loving Jesus. Hail Mary, etc. Ejaculation (located on the first day of the novena). SIXTH DAY Mary's Consent Preparatory Prayer (located on the first day of the novena). MEDITATION WE ADMIRE the creative word of God, by which heaven and earth were called into existence. But Mary's word, "Be it done to me according to thy word," is even mightier and more efficacious; for it commands the obedience even of the almighty Creator. Without this word of humility and obedience the incarnation of our divine Saviour would not have been accomplished. Mary does not say, "I accept the proposal, I agree to the proposition," nor does she use other words of similar import. She simply says, "Be it done to me according to thy word." It was not her own choice, nor her own decision, but a voluntary, full, and complete surrender to the will of God that the message found in Mary's soul, which was expressed in these words. What a source of consolation to her in the subsequent sorrowful and afflicted stages of her life was this complete surrender to God's will! It comprised the tranquilizing assurance that He to whose designs she submitted, would endow her with the fortitude and strength necessary to co-operate with them. PRACTICE JUST as our divine Lord Himself became obedient unto death, thus also His incarnation and the motherhood of Mary were the result of obedience. Again, in contemplating the works that in the course of time were undertaken in the Church for the glory of God and the salvation of man, we find that only those were really great, effective, and enduring, which had their beginning, continuation, and consummation in obedience. Rejoice, then, if it is your happy lot to walk in the safe path of obedience. Avail yourself of every opportunity to submit your will to the will of your Superiors. They are the representatives of God. By obeying them we fulfil His will, not the will of men. St. Bonaventure calls obedience the key of heaven. Prayer of the Church (located on the first day of the novena). Litany of Loreto (located in the list of approved litanies). _Prayer_ HOLIEST Mary, if through thy modesty thou wert troubled at the appearance of the archangel Gabriel in thy dwelling, I am terrified at the sight of my monstrous pride. By thy incomparable humility, which brought forth God for men, reopened paradise and let the captive souls go free from their prison, draw me, I pray thee, out of the deep pit into which my sins have cast me, and make me save my soul. Hail Mary, etc. Ejaculation (located on the first day of the novena). SEVENTH DAY Mary's Fortitude in Suffering Preparatory Prayer (located on the first day of the novena). MEDITATION ALTHOUGH Mary's consent was free, and freely given, she was clearly convinced and perfectly conscious of the responsibility, the obligations, and the duties involved by that consent, and which she now assumed. Great are the duties and tearful the days of a mother who has to raise her Son, who is also God, to be sacrificed on the cross. Mary assumes with the dignity this responsibility. She consents to conceive the Son of God, to give birth to Him, to nourish Him, to educate Him for the ignominious death of the cross. When she pronounced the words, "Be it done," her eyes were fixed on the distant tragedy of Golgotha, on the cross towering upon its height. Yet she accepts it, together with the dignity of Mother of God. PRACTICE MARY, in consenting to become the Mother of Jesus, became not only His Mother, but the Mother of all mankind. She became, for all time, the refuge of sinners, the health of the sick, the intercessor with God for man; she consented to exercise a mother's love for suffering and sinful humanity. But alas, how many of those adopted by Mary as her children under the cross of her dying Son are unworthy of her mother love! How many are rebellious children, who fill her heart with sorrow and anguish! Others, faithless and obdurate, become a reproach to her. Have you, during your past life, always been a good child of this loving Mother? Are you to her an honor or a disgrace, a joy or a sorrow? Prayer of the Church (located on the first day of the novena). Litany of Loreto (located in the list of approved litanies). _Prayer_ THOUGH my tongue is unhallowed, yet, purest Virgin, I presume to hail thee every day with the angel's salutation, "Hail Mary, full of grace!" From my heart, I pray thee, pour into my soul a little of that mighty grace wherewith the Holy Spirit, overshadowing thee, filled thee to the full. Hail Mary, etc. Ejaculation (located on the first day of the novena). EIGHTH DAY Mary, the Mother of God Preparatory Prayer (located on the first day of the novena). MEDITATION MARY'S true greatness consists in her having been chosen the Mother of God. This sublime dignity, pre-eminently her own and shared by no other creature, elevates her to a station inconceivably exalted. Mother of God! St. Peter Damian thus gives expression to his conception of this dignity: "In what words may mortal man be permitted to pronounce the praises of her who brought forth that divine Word who lives for all eternity? Where can a tongue be found holy and pure enough to eulogize her who bore the author of all created things, whom the elements praise and obey in fear and trembling? When we essay to extol a martyr's constancy, to recount his heroic acts of virtue, to describe his devotion to his Saviour's cause and honor, we are supplied with words by facts and occurrences that belong to the province of human experience. But when we undertake to describe the glories of the Blessed Virgin, we are on unknown ground, on a subject transcending all human effort. We fail to find words suitable to portray her sublime prerogatives, privileges, and mysteries." PRACTICE ST. ANSELM, writing on the motherhood of Mary, says: "It was eminently just and proper that the creature chosen to be the Mother of God should shine with a luster of purity far beyond anything conceivable in any other creature under heaven. For it was to her that the eternal Father decreed to give His only-begotten Son, whom He loves as Himself; and to give Him in such a mysterious manner that He should be at the same time the Son of God and the Son of the Virgin Mary. She must indeed be purity itself, whom the Son of God elected as His Mother, and who was the chosen Spouse of the Holy Ghost, to be overshadowed by Him to bring forth the Second Person of that Most Blessed Trinity from whom He Himself proceeds." Let us honor the virgin Mother with filial devotion, gratefully greeting her often in the words of the angel, "Hail Mary, full of grace!" Let us remember that God alone is above Mary, and beneath her is all that is not God. Prayer of the Church (located on the first day of the novena). Litany of Loreto (located in the list of approved litanies). _Prayer_ I BELIEVE, holiest Mary, that almighty God was ever with thee from thy conception, and is, by His incarnation, still more closely united to thee. Make it thy care, I pray thee, that I may be with that same Lord Jesus ever one heart and soul by means of sanctifying grace. Hail Mary, etc. Ejaculation (located on the first day of the novena). NINTH DAY Mary, Our Mother Preparatory Prayer (located on the first day of the novena). MEDITATION MARY could not consent to become the Mother of the Redeemer without including in her consent those to be redeemed. "She bore one man," says St. Antonine, "and thereby has borne all men again. Beneath the cross of her divine Son she has reborne us to life with great pain, just as Eve our first mother, has borne us under the tree of forbidden fruit unto death. That there be no doubt concerning it, her divine Son made this declaration in His last will." "When therefore Jesus had seen His Mother and the disciple standing whom He loved, He saith to His Mother, Woman, behold thy son. After that He saith to the disciple, Behold thy Mother" (_John_ xix. 26 27). She gave up her Son for the redemption of mankind, and He gave us, in the person of His beloved disciple St. John, to her as her children, declaring her our Mother. From that moment we belong to Mary, and Mary belongs to us: "Behold thy Mother!" [Illustration: The rest in Egypt] PRACTICE MARY loves us because she loves God, and because God loves us. She loves us as her brethren who share human nature with her. She loves us as her children, whom she has borne to eternal life. She loves us because we are miserable and helpless. True, we offended her divine Son, but she knows our frailty, our blindness, the assaults of the flesh and the devil to which we are exposed; and by all this she is moved to come to our aid. Do not, however, imagine that this good and amiable Mother will hear your call for assistance if you continue to offend her divine Son with malice prepense. To obtain her aid you must make yourself in a manner worthy of it. This you do by striving to imitate her virtues. Or is there anything in her example that we are unable to imitate? True, we can not attain to her perfection in virtue, but we can copy it to a certain degree. To follow Mary's example there is no need of performing miracles, of having ecstasies, or of doing any other extraordinary deeds. All that is necessary is to persevere faithfully in the ordinary duties of life, and to perform them to the best of our ability. "Behold thy Mother!" These words of our dying Lord were addressed to the beloved disciple St. John, but were intended for all mankind. Even as Mary never ceases to be the Mother of God, she never will cease to be our Mother. Prayer of the Church (located on the first day of the novena). Litany of Loreto (located in the list of approved litanies). _Prayer_ O HOLIEST Mary, bless me, my heart and my soul, as thou thyself wast ever blessed of God among all women; for I have this sure hope, dear Mother, that if thou bless me while I live, then, when I die, I shall be blessed of God in the everlasting glory of heaven. Hail Mary, etc. Ejaculation (located on the first day of the novena). IV Novena in Honor of the Seven Sorrows of Mary NOTE.--Besides the indulgences granted for every novena in honor of the Blessed Virgin Mary by Pius IX, Pope Leo XIII, January 27, 1888, granted that all the faithful may gain, on the _third Sunday in September_, being the second feast of the Seven Sorrows of Mary (the other is observed on the Friday before Palm Sunday), a plenary indulgence _as often_ as they visit, after confession and communion, a church where the Archconfraternity of the Seven Sorrows is canonically established, and pray there for the intentions of the Holy Father. This indulgence is applicable to the souls in purgatory. FIRST DAY Devotion to the Seven Sorrows of Mary PREPARATORY PRAYER BID me bear, O Mother blessed, On my heart the wounds impressed Suffered by the Crucified! Indulgence. 300 days, once a day. A plenary indulgence, on any one day, in each month, to those who shall have practised this devotion for a month, saying besides seven Hail Marys, followed each time by the above invocation. Conditions: Confession, communion, and prayer for the intentions of the Pope. (Pius IX, June 18, 1876.) MEDITATION FROM the dolorous way of Our Lord's passion Holy Church selected fourteen incidents to place before us for consideration, which are called the Stations of the Cross. In the same manner the pious devotion of the faithful selected seven events in the life of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and gives itself to their religious contemplation. They are: (1) Simeon's prophecy in the Temple; (2) the flight into Egypt with the divine Child; (3) the loss of the divine Child at Jerusalem; (4) Mary's meeting with her Son bearing the cross; (5) Mary beneath the cross; (6) Mary receives the body of her Son from the cross; (7) the placing of Jesus' body in the tomb. PRACTICE "FORGET not the sorrows of thy mother" (_Ecclus._ vii. 29). According to this exhortation of Holy Scripture it is our duty to remember and meditate often on the sorrows of the Blessed Virgin Mary. We ought never to forget that our sins were the cause of the sufferings and death of Jesus, and therefore also of the sorrows of Mary. Holy Church celebrates two feasts in honor of the sorrows of Mary; she approved of the Rosary and of many other devotions in honor of the Seven Dolors, and enriched them with numerous indulgences. Let us practise these devotions to enkindle in our hearts a true and ardent love for our sorrowful Mother. PRAYER OF THE CHURCH GRANT, we beseech Thee, O Lord Jesus Christ, that the most blessed Virgin Mary, Thy Mother, may intercede for us before the throne of Thy mercy, now and at the hour of our death, through whose most holy soul, in the hour of Thine own passion, the sword of sorrow passed. Through Thee, Jesus Christ, Saviour of the world, who livest and reignest with the Father and the Holy Ghost, for ever and ever. Amen. Litany of Loreto (located in the list of approved litanies). _Prayer_ EVER glorious Blessed Virgin Mary, queen of martyrs, mother of mercy, hope, and comfort of dejected and desolate souls, through the sorrows that pierced thy tender heart I beseech thee take pity on my poverty and necessities, have compassion on my anxieties and miseries. I ask it through the mercy of thy divine Son; I ask it through His immaculate life, bitter passion, and ignominious death on the cross. As I am persuaded that He honors thee as His beloved Mother, to whom He refuses nothing, let me experience the efficacy of thy powerful intercession, according to the tenderness of thy maternal affection, now and at the hour of my death. Amen. Hail Mary, etc. _Ejaculation_ Mother of Sorrows, queen of martyrs, pray for us! SECOND DAY Mary's First Sorrow: Simeon's Prophecy in the Temple Preparatory Prayer (located on the first day of the novena). MEDITATION FORTY days after the birth of our divine Saviour, Mary His Mother fulfilled the law of Moses by offering Him to His divine Father in the Temple. "And behold there was a man in Jerusalem named Simeon, and this man was just and devout, waiting for the consolation of Israel, and the Holy Ghost was in Him. And he received an answer from the Holy Ghost, that he should not see death before he had seen the Christ of the Lord. And he came by the Spirit into the temple. And when His parents brought in the child Jesus, to do for Him according to the custom of the law, he also took Him into his arms, and blessed God, and said: Now dost Thou dismiss Thy servant, O Lord, according to Thy word, in peace; because my eyes have seen Thy salvation, which Thou hast prepared before the face of all peoples. A light to the revelation of the gentiles and the glory of Thy people Israel. And His father and mother were wondering at these things which were spoken concerning Him. And Simeon blessed them, and said to Mary His Mother: Behold this child is set for the fall and for the resurrection of many in Israel, and for a sign which shall be contradicted; and thy own soul a sword shall pierce, that out of many hearts thoughts may be revealed" (_Luke_ ii. 25-35). PRACTICE MARY was familiar with the predictions of the prophets and knew that ignominy, sorrow, and suffering would be her divine Son's portion throughout His earthly career. But to have this secret of her anxious soul thus publicly and solemnly declared by Simeon, was a sharp thrust of that seven-edged sword which was to pierce her loving heart. In spirit she viewed that boundless, surging sea of trials, pain, and death on which her Son was to be tossed about, and was willing to be engulfed in its bitter waters. Her affliction would have scarcely been greater had the death sentence of her divine Son been pronounced then and there and put into execution. What a sorrow, what an affliction, what a trial for such a tender Mother! Well might she exclaim with the Royal Prophet: "My life is wasted with grief, and my years in sighs" (_Ps._ xxx. 11). Let us often contemplate this sorrow, and excite our hearts to a tender compassion with the Mother of Sorrows. Prayer of the Church (located on the first day of the novena). Litany of Loreto (located in the list of approved litanies). _Prayer_ I COMPASSIONATE thee, sorrowing Mary, in the grief thy tender heart underwent when the holy old man Simeon prophesied to thee. Dear Mother, by thy heart then so afflicted, obtain for me the virtue of humility and the gift of the holy fear of God. Hail Mary, etc. Ejaculation (located on the first day of the novena). THIRD DAY Mary's Second Sorrow: The Flight into Egypt Preparatory Prayer (located on the first day of the novena). MEDITATION FOR the second time the sword of sorrow pierced Mary's heart when she was commanded to fly into Egypt with her divine Child. Without manifesting undue perplexity or discontent, she hastily gathered a few necessaries for the journey, while St. Joseph saddled the beast of burden. Then taking the infant Jesus into her arms and pressing Him to her throbbing heart, the holy pilgrims set forth into the cold, starry night, away to a foreign land, through the trackless desert, and into a heathen country. Arrived in Egypt, the experience of Bethlehem was renewed; no one gave them shelter. PRACTICE DURING this second great sorrow, what was Mary's behavior? She was content to fulfil the will of God; she did not ask for reasons, or complain of the fatigues of the journey, but preserved her peace of heart amid all the trials of this severe probation. She is poor, but her poverty does not render her unhappy or querulous. If God sends us trials, we ought not murmur or complain. Following the example of Mary, let us bear them submissively. If we suffer patiently with Mary on earth, we shall enjoy eternal bliss with her in heaven. Prayer of the Church (located on the first day of the novena). Litany of Loreto (located in the list of approved litanies). _Prayer_ I COMPASSIONATE thee, sorrowing Mary, for the anxiety which thy most tender heart underwent during thy flight into Egypt and thy sojourn there. Dear Mother, by thy heart then so sorrowful, obtain for me the virtue of liberality, especially toward the poor, and the gift of piety. Hail Mary, etc. Ejaculation (located on the first day of the novena). FOURTH DAY Mary's Third Sorrow: Jesus Lost in Jerusalem Preparatory Prayer (located on the first day of the novena). MEDITATION WHO can describe Mary's sorrow when, returning from Jerusalem, she missed her divine Son? With St. Joseph she retraced her steps in anxious search of Him whom her soul loved. She went to all her relatives and acquaintances in Jerusalem, but heard no tidings of her lost Child. She passed three long days of anxiety in her search, and this constitutes her third sorrow. Of it, Origen writes: "On account of the ineffable love of Mary for her divine Son, she suffered more by His loss than the martyrs suffered amid the most cruel tortures." PRACTICE IN MEDITATING on this sorrow of Mary, we ought to remember how indifferent so many Christians are after having lost God by sin. They feel no compunction, no sorrow at having offended Him, and yet they can weep at the loss of a trifle; they shed copious tears when their will is crossed, or when they receive a deserved reprimand; but for the loss of their God they have not a tear. They have lost Him, perhaps years ago, and never make the least effort to find Him. Pray to the sorrowful Mother that she preserve you from such a deplorable fate! Prayer of the Church (located on the first day of the novena). Litany of Loreto (located in the list of approved litanies). _Prayer_ I COMPASSIONATE thee, sorrowing Mary, for the terrors felt by thy anxious heart when thou didst lose thy dear Son, Jesus. Dear Mother, by thy heart, then so agitated, obtain for me the virtue of chastity, and with it the gift of knowledge. Hail Mary, etc. Ejaculation (located on the first day of the novena). FIFTH DAY Mary's Fourth Sorrow: She Meets Jesus Carrying His Cross Preparatory Prayer (located on the first day of the novena). MEDITATION THE time was at hand when mankind's redemption was to be accomplished. Already the divine Victim of our sins is bearing the instrument of our salvation. Torn by the cruel scourging, crowned with thorns, and covered with blood He proceeds on His way to Calvary, and in this pitiful condition meets His blessed Mother. What a spectacle, what a sight for a Mother such as Mary! Anxious to look upon her, and with one fond glance to thank her for her heroic, unselfish love, He made an effort to change His bowed position beneath the cross, feebly raised His head, and directed toward her one loving glance of ineffable anguish, mingled with grateful recognition and humble resignation. Then the sad procession moves on, Mary following her divine Son on His way to death. PRACTICE WE, BY our sins, placed into the hands of the Jews and executioners the weapons by which Jesus suffered, and thus we thrust the sword of sorrow into Mary's heart. We repeat this, in a certain sense, as often as we commit a grievous sin, because we thereby number ourselves among those whom the Apostle describes as "crucifying again to themselves the Son of God, and making Him a mockery" (_Heb._ vi. 6). Cardinal Hugo writes: "Sinners crucify, as far as is in them, Christ our Lord, because they repeat the cause of His crucifixion." Doing this, we thrust anew the sword of sorrow into Mary's heart. Let this consideration fill us with hatred for and fear of sin. Prayer of the Church (located on the first day of the novena). Litany of Loreto (located in the list of approved litanies). _Prayer_ I COMPASSIONATE thee, sorrowing Mary, for the shock thy mother heart experienced when Jesus met thee as He carried His cross. Dear Mother, by that heart of thine, then so afflicted, obtain for me the virtue of patience and the gift of fortitude. Hail Mary, etc. Ejaculation (located on the first day of the novena). SIXTH DAY Mary's Fifth Sorrow: Beneath the Cross Preparatory Prayer (located on the first day of the novena). MEDITATION AT THE crucifixion of Jesus the soul of Mary was plunged into a sea of sorrow when she stood three hours under the cross. Writhing in excruciating pain, the Son of God hung upon the tree of disgrace and infamy, yet Mary continued to stand at its foot, tearful, grieving, yet persevering, filled with anguish because she could do nothing to help Him. Another great sorrow befell the heart of Mary when she slowly withdrew her tearful gaze from the face of Jesus, and cast her weeping eyes upon the cold and indifferent world that lay in darkness around and about Calvary. And yet, "When Jesus therefore had seen His Mother and the disciple standing whom He loved, He saith to His Mother, Woman, behold Thy son. After that He saith to the disciple, Behold thy Mother" (_John_ xix. 26, 27). PRACTICE THESE words, "Behold thy son, behold thy Mother," contain and express the mystery of unbounded love, which Jesus has for all mankind, but more especially for the Church which is appointed and authorized to lead men to salvation. O blessed, O happy bequest! It was not enough for the love of Jesus to have restored heaven to us by His atoning death; He wished also to give us His dearest Mother. And she has always shown herself as such. To each of us individually she was and is a kind and loving Mother. Give thanks to her, bless and praise her for having adopted you as her child, and strive to become worthy of so great a privilege. Prayer of the Church (located on the first day of the novena). Litany of Loreto (located in the list of approved litanies). _Prayer_ I COMPASSIONATE thee, sorrowing Mary, for the martyrdom thy generous heart bore so nobly whilst thou didst stand by Jesus agonizing. Dear Mother, by thy heart then so cruelly martyred, obtain for me the virtue of temperance and the gift of counsel. Hail Mary, etc. Ejaculation (located on the first day of the novena). SEVENTH DAY Mary's Sixth Sorrow: The Taking Down of Jesus' Body from the Cross Preparatory Prayer (located on the first day of the novena). MEDITATION WHO can describe the sorrow and anguish of Mary's heart when the body of Jesus was taken from the cross, when her tearful eyes fell upon His disfigured features! The pure and holy and beauteous form of her Son was a mass of clotted blood and unsightly wounds; and yet, disfigured as it was, there shone in His countenance a clear, calm expression of divine majesty. Now Mary views the wounds of that sacred body; she looks at the gap made in His side by the cruel spear, and can almost see the Sacred Heart of Jesus, all bruised and broken for love of man. Before her vision passes in detail His life and her own. Memory presents to her mind every day and hour of their quiet, happy life at Nazareth. Is it to be wondered, then, that at this bitter moment her sorrow was so great that, as St. Anselm observes, she should have died had she not been sustained by a miracle of divine omnipotence? PRACTICE OUGHT not the contemplation of the sorrows of our blessed Mother confirm us in patience, in resignation to the will of God in our trials and sufferings? If the Son of God said of Himself: "Ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and so to enter into His glory?" (_Luke_ xxiv. 26); if the most pure and holy Mother of God, despite her great prerogatives and merits, had to suffer a sorrow so ineffable, do not murmur if the word of Christ is addressed also to you: "And he that taketh not up his cross and followeth Me, is not worthy of Me" (_Matt._ x. 38). Prayer of the Church (located on the first day of the novena). Litany of Loreto (located in the list of approved litanies). _Prayer_ I COMPASSIONATE thee, sorrowing Mary, for the pain thou didst suffer when the body of thy divine Son, taken down all torn and bloody from the cross, was placed in thy arms. Dear Mother, by thy heart pierced through, obtain for me the virtue of fraternal charity and the gift of understanding. Hail Mary, etc. Ejaculation (located on the first day of the novena). [Illustration: On the Way to Jerusalem] EIGHTH DAY Mary's Seventh Sorrow: Jesus is Buried Preparatory Prayer (located on the first day of the novena). MEDITATION THE sacrifice for the redemption of the world was accomplished. "And Joseph, taking the body, wrapt it up in a clean linen cloth, and laid it in his own new monument, which he had hewed out in a rock. And he rolled a great stone to the door of the monument, and went his way" (_Matt._ xxvii. 59). Mary also took part in the burial of her beloved Son, though the evangelists do not mention her name amongst those who were present on that mournful occasion. Never, most assuredly, was human soul visited by such woe and desolation, as that which overwhelmed hers as she cast a last glance on the precious remains of her dead Son. PRACTICE LET us learn of the sorrowful Mother at the tomb of her divine Son submission to God's holy will in all things, but especially when He takes from us one of our dear ones. Again, the contemplation of the sufferings of Mary should fortify us in patience, whenever God is pleased to visit us with a light and small cross of affliction, or even with a sorrow that causes our heart to bleed. It should inspire us with a filial confidence in Mary, who thus suffered for us and gave her divine Son for our salvation. We can and ought to prove our love for her, not by sentimental feelings of affection, but by a sincere hatred of sin and great fervor in the service of her divine Son. Prayer of the Church (located on the first day of the novena). Litany of Loreto (located in the list of approved litanies). _Prayer_ I COMPASSIONATE thee, sorrowing Mary, for the anguish felt by thy loving heart when Jesus' body was laid in the sepulcher. Dear Mother, by all the bitterness of desolation thou didst know, obtain for me the virtue of diligence and the gift of wisdom. Hail Mary, etc. Ejaculation (located on the first day of the novena). NINTH DAY Reasons Why Mary Had to Suffer Preparatory Prayer (located on the first day of the novena). MEDITATION THE reasons why God permitted Mary to suffer so much may be briefly stated as follows: He did so from His love for Mary and from His love for us. He did so from His love for Mary, because by suffering she merited greater glory in heaven. As Mother of the Crucified she persevered beneath the cross, and now she thrones in heaven as the glorious Mother of the risen Redeemer. Because she shared in His suffering, she now shares His glory. Again, God permitted Mary to suffer because He loved us. If she had not experienced such bitter sorrow, we would not have recourse to her, for whosoever has not suffered himself can not have sympathy with the sufferings of others. Mary knows the pangs of sorrow by experience, and therefore knows also how to console and help us. PRACTICE BECAUSE she herself drained the most bitter cup of sorrow, Mary is always willing to help those who invoke her aid. But above all she is inclined to help repentant sinners, because she knows how great the price of their redemption was, paid by the blood of her divine Son. She is able to help us, because, after God, she is most powerful; she is most willing to help us, because she loves us, whom God so has loved "as to give His only-begotten Son" (_John_ iii. 16). Let us, therefore, have recourse to her in all our needs, and we shall experience the power of her help in life and death. Prayer of the Church (located on the first day of the novena). Litany of Loreto (located in the list of approved litanies). _Prayer_ I COMPASSIONATE thee, sorrowing Mary, for all thy sorrows. I beseech thee, dear Mother, by thy heart pierced through by them, obtain for me full abandonment to the will of God in everything and perseverance to the end. Hail Mary, etc. Ejaculation (located on the first day of the novena). V Novena for the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary FIRST DAY Mary's Death was without Pain PREPARATORY PRAYER O MARY, Virgin most blessed and Mother of Our Lord and Redeemer Jesus Christ, through thy mercy I beseech thee to come to my aid, and to inspire me with such confidence in thy power, that I may have recourse to thee, pray to thee, and implore thy aid in all needs of soul and body. MEDITATION MARY, the virgin Mother of God, was conceived without original sin. She never dimmed the luster of sanctifying grace which beautified her soul by actual sin. Nevertheless she had to pass through the dark portal of death before she was assumed, body and soul, into heaven. She had not been endowed with the privilege of immortality with which God had invested our first parents in paradise. It was meet that she should be like unto her divine Son in everything, even in death. But as she had drained the bitter cup of suffering during her whole life, and especially when standing beneath the cross, her death was to be free from pain and suffering. She quietly passed away yielding up her spirit in a yearning desire to be united forever with her divine Son in heaven. PRACTICE IF YOU have dispossessed your heart of all unruly attachment to the goods and enjoyments of this earth, you, too, may hope for a happy and tranquil transition from this land of exile to your home in heaven. Therefore, if you are still attached to the transitory things of this life, disengage your heart from them now. The voluntary renouncement of earthly goods alone is meritorious before God. The separation from them enforced by the strong hand of death is of no supernatural value. PRAYER OF THE CHURCH WE BESEECH Thee, O Lord, pardon the shortcomings of Thy servants; that we who, by our own works, are not able to please Thee, may be saved by the intercession of the Mother of Thy Son, Our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen. Litany of Loreto (located in the list of approved litanies). _Prayer_ O MOST benign Mother Mary! I rejoice that by thy happy and tranquil death the yearning of thy heart was appeased, and thy life, so rich in merit and sacrifice, received its crown. I rejoice that after passing from this life, thou, O most loving Mother, wast made the glorious and powerful queen of heaven and dost exercise thy influence as such for the benefit of thy frail, exiled children on earth. Obtain for me, I beseech thee, a happy death, that I may praise and glorify thy might and kindness forever in heaven. Hail Mary, etc. _Ejaculation_ Sweet heart of Mary be my salvation! Indulgence. (1) 100 days, every time. (2) A plenary indulgence, once a month, on any day, to all who shall have said it every day for a month, under the usual conditions. SECOND DAY At Mary's Tomb Preparatory Prayer (located on the first day of the novena). MEDITATION AN ANCIENT legend relates that, led by Heaven, all the Apostles, except St. Thomas, assembled at the Blessed Virgin's death-bed. After she had breathed forth her pure spirit, her sacred remains were prepared for the grave by wrapping the body in new white linen and decking it with flowers. Meanwhile the apostles, assembled in another room, sang psalms and hymns in praise of their departed Mother. The apostles, all the disciples, and the faithful dwelling in Jerusalem followed the blessed remains to the grave chanting psalms and hymns. Arrived in the valley of Josaphat, the body was gently placed in a sepulcher of stone not far from the Garden of Olives. After the entombment the apostles and crowds of the faithful lingered near the sacred spot in prayer, meditation, and chanting of psalms in which angels' voices were heard to mingle. PRACTICE JOIN in spirit with the apostles and faithful in their prayer and meditation at the grave of our blessed Mother. Contemplate and review her whole life. Could a course like hers have terminated more appropriately than with so beautiful, painless, and tranquil a passing away? Prepare yourself even now for your departure from this life. Do not postpone the settlement of your affairs, spiritual and temporal, until the last uncertain hours. Above all, remove now, or as soon as possible, all doubts, anxieties, and irregularities of conscience, because delay is dangerous and leads to impenitence, and because in the last hours the powers of hell usually assail the departing soul with all their might. Prayer of the Church (located on the first day of the novena). Litany of Loreto (located in the list of approved litanies). _Prayer_ GLORIOUS Virgin, who for thy consolation didst deserve to die comforted by the sight of thy dear Son Jesus, and in the company of the apostles and angels; pray for us, that at that awful moment we, too, may be comforted by receiving Jesus in the most holy Eucharist, and may feel thee nigh when we breathe forth our soul. Hail Mary, etc. Ejaculation (located on the first day of the novena). THIRD DAY The Empty Tomb Preparatory Prayer (located on the first day of the novena). MEDITATION ST. JOHN DAMASCENE writes: "St. Thomas was not with the other apostles when the Blessed Virgin died, but arrived in Jerusalem on the third day after that event. Ardently desiring to see once more and to venerate the sacred body which had given flesh and blood to his beloved Master, the grave was opened for this purpose. The body could nowhere be seen, and a delicious perfume filled the empty tomb. The apostles then became convinced that as God had preserved the body of Mary free from sin before, in, and after the birth of His Son, He was pleased likewise, after her death, to preserve that same body from corruption, and to glorify it in heaven." A council held in Jerusalem in the year 1672 declared: "It is beyond all doubt that the Blessed Virgin is not only a great and miraculous sign on earth, because she bore God in the flesh and yet remained a virgin, but she is also a great and miraculous sign in heaven, because she was taken up thither with soul and body. For although her sinless body was enclosed in the tomb, yet, like the body of Our Lord, it arose on the third day and was carried up to heaven." Although the doctrine of the bodily assumption of Mary into heaven was not defined by the Church as an article of faith in the strict sense, yet the learned Pope Benedict XIV remarks, "It would be presumptuous and blameworthy in any one to call into doubt or to question this beautiful and consoling belief of ages." PRACTICE LET us rejoice at the thought of the glorious resurrection of our dear Mother. Let us unite ourselves in spirit with the apostles in heaven and with Holy Church to congratulate her on this extraordinary privilege. But let us also rejoice at the thought of our own resurrection. True, it shall not take place immediately after death, but it is therefore not the less certain, and it depends on us to make it glorious and blessed. Prayer of the Church (located on the first day of the novena). Litany of Loreto (located in the list of approved litanies). _Prayer_ O GLORIOUS Virgin and Mother of God, Mary! As thy sacred body after death was preserved from corruption, and united with thy sinless soul was borne to heaven by the angels; obtain for me the grace that my life and death be holy, so that on the Day of Judgment I may arise to glory everlasting. Hail Mary, etc. Ejaculation (located on the first day of the novena). FOURTH DAY Reasons for the Bodily Assumption of Mary into Heaven Preparatory Prayer (located on the first day of the novena). MEDITATION 1. THE wages of sin is death. Now, as the Blessed Virgin from the first moment of her existence was preserved from all sin, and even from original sin, it necessarily follows that death could have no permanent dominion over her, and that her body would not be permitted to see corruption. 2. This sinless body had been the medium by which the body of Our Lord Jesus Christ, who was the conqueror of death, had been formed. How, then, could such a highly privileged body, a pure and virginal body, be permitted to pass through corruption and decay? 3. As Mary had yielded up her sacred person to be a dwelling-place for the Lord of heaven, it seems fitting that this same Lord, in His turn, should give the kingdom of heaven to her as her resting-place. St. Bernard expresses this sentiment as follows: "When Our Lord came into this world, Mary furnished Him with the noblest dwelling on earth, the temple of her virginal womb. In return, the Lord on this day raises her up to the highest throne in heaven." PRACTICE IF YOU desire to look forward to death without fear, and to expect your dissolution with confidence, follow the Apostle's injunction, "Therefore, whilst we have time, let us work good" (_Gal._ vi. 10). Avoid sin, perform good works, be patient in affliction, and strive to expiate the punishment due to your sins by voluntary acts of penance, thus reducing your inclination to sin. Therefore offer up to God every morning, in a spirit of penitence, all your labors, trials, and sufferings. Prayer of the Church (located on the first day of the novena). Litany of Loreto (located in the list of approved litanies). _Prayer_ O GLORIOUS Virgin and Mother of God, Mary! I beseech thee through the ineffable glory thou didst make for thy departure from this world by a life of retirement, full of merits and virtue, dedicated to God alone; obtain for me the grace that, following thy example, I may detach my heart from this world, and patiently bear affliction and adversity, carefully avoid sin, and always strive to advance in the love of God. Hail Mary, etc. Ejaculation (located on the first day of the novena). FIFTH DAY Mary's Glorious Entrance into Heaven Preparatory Prayer (located on the first day of the novena). MEDITATION A JOY greater than human heart can conceive fills the heavenly spirits when a soul enters heaven to receive her reward. What jubilant transports, then, must those have been with which they hailed the entrance into heavenly bliss of the most pure and holy Virgin, the Mother of the Son of God, body and soul, transfigured in glory! And she is, and shall be, for all eternity, their mistress and queen! What an ineffable joy, too, for the Blessed Virgin, to behold the countless numbers of angels, to admire their beauty, their purity, their intense love of God! But as the feeble light of a candle disappears before the splendor of the sun's rays, thus are these choirs of angels obscured by the ineffable glory of her divine Son coming to welcome His Mother. Who can describe this affecting meeting? What a superabundant reward for affliction and suffering! What an ocean of joy and bliss, when the Son of God presented His Mother before the throne of His heavenly Father, who greeted her as His beloved Daughter! What a joy to behold the Holy Ghost, whose pure Spouse she had been even on earth! These transports of bliss baffle all attempts at description. PRACTICE THOUGH we are unable to have an adequate perception of Mary's glory in heaven, by which she is raised above all angels and saints, yet it is in our power to do one thing; we can rejoice at the glory of our blessed Mother, and join the heavenly spirits and the saints in paying homage to her. Let us resolve to do this, and never to forget that Mary attained to the largest share of her divine Son's glory because she was foremost in sharing His sufferings. Let this encourage us to bear our cross, to bear it with our Saviour even to the height of Calvary, there to die with Him. Prayer of the Church (located on the first day of the novena). Litany of Loreto (located in the list of approved litanies). _Prayer_ O GLORIOUS Virgin and Mother of God, Mary! I beseech thee through the preparation with which thou wast glorified by God--by the Father as His most beloved Daughter, by the Son as His immaculate Mother, and by the Holy Ghost as His most pure Spouse--in heaven; obtain for me the grace to share to some extent this thy glory, and therefore to live so that I may deserve it. Hail Mary, etc. Ejaculation (located on the first day of the novena). SIXTH DAY Mary Crowned in Heaven Preparatory Prayer (located on the first day of the novena). MEDITATION MARY'S glory received its culmination by her coronation as queen of heaven and earth. It was meet that in her should be fulfilled the words of Holy Scripture: "Come from Libanus, my Spouse, come, thou shalt be crowned" (_Cant._ iv. 8), and that her own prophetic words, "He hath put down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted the humble" (_Luke_ i. 52), should be exemplified in her. For it was reasonable and becoming that she, who once with Jesus wore the crown of shame and contempt, should now share with Him the crown of immortal glory. It was but fair and just that the immaculate being who was chosen, above all inhabitants of heaven and earth, to be the true and worthy Mother of God, should now be solemnly installed over all creatures in heaven and on earth as the queen of angels and men, and that to her should be offered homage, praise, and honor by the blessed spirits and by the souls of the saints. But the crown which she received is not one made of gold and precious stones; it is composed of the virtues with which Mary, in faithful co-operation with divine grace, embellished herself; it consists, too, of all the homage and glory which she receives as queen of heaven. The most precious gem in this crown is the filial love and gratitude Jesus shows toward His Mother in heaven. PRACTICE INDEED, "eye hath not seen, ear hath not heard, neither has it entered into the heart of man," what the heavenly Father has prepared in the mansions of eternal bliss for His beloved Daughter, the Son for His Blessed Mother, and the Holy Ghost for His chosen Spouse. She is now queen of heaven and earth; of heaven, for she is the queen of all angels and saints; of earth, for as Mother of God she is the Mother of all mankind, the mediatrix between the Redeemer and the redeemed. You, too, may contribute a gem toward the crown of your heavenly Mother by paying her filial homage, imitating her virtues, and preserving, for the love of her, your innocence and purity of heart. Prayer of the Church (located on the first day of the novena). Litany of Loreto (located in the list of approved litanies). [Illustration: The Blessed Virgin and St. Joseph Finding Jesus in the Temple] _Prayer_ O GLORIOUS Virgin and Mother of God, Mary! I beseech thee through the everlasting crown of glory with which God has crowned thee queen of heaven and earth; obtain for me through thy mighty intercession the grace to persevere in virtue to the end, so that finally I may attain the crown of bliss prepared by God for those that love Him. Hail Mary, etc. Ejaculation (located on the first day of the novena). SEVENTH DAY Mary's Bliss in Heaven Preparatory Prayer (located on the first day of the novena). MEDITATION ACCORDING to Holy Scripture and the doctrine of the Church, there are in heaven various grades of glory and bliss, according to the rank and merit of the saints. They probably attain this higher grade of glory and bliss by the increase of their ability to enjoy the happiness of heaven. Their intellect is enabled to contemplate more profoundly the incomprehensible essence of God; their power of perception is augmented so that they may more readily recognize and admire the splendor of the angels, saints, and heavenly mansions; their will is enabled to be united, in a higher degree, with God. From this we may conclude that Mary's bliss in heaven transcends all human conception. Her heavenly glory and reward consists in the perfect adaptation of her whole being to the enjoyment of God and of eternal bliss. PRACTICE LOOK up, Christian soul, to this great and brilliant queen of heaven. She is your gentle Mother and assures you of her help, and the diadem she wears upon her brow is a proof that she has the power to help you. Do not, therefore, refuse the hand of this mighty friend in heaven, for she will lift you from the depths of your misery, from the rocky shoals of temptation, and lead you strong and victorious into the presence of her divine Son. Thus you will enter into a new and supernatural life in Christ, to share in the grace-laden mysteries of His life, passion, and triumph. Prayer of the Church (located on the first day of the novena). Litany of Loreto (located in the list of approved litanies). _Prayer_ O GREAT and glorious queen of heaven, Mary! I beseech thee by that exalted throne upon which God has raised thee above all angels and saints; let me one day appear amongst them to join them in their praise of thee. Obtain for me the grace that I may never cease to honor thee as thou dost deserve to be honored, and thereby to become worthy of thy mighty protection in life and death. Hail Mary, etc. Ejaculation (located on the first day of the novena). EIGHTH DAY Mary, the Queen of Mercy Preparatory Prayer (located on the first day of the novena). MEDITATION MARY is, then, a queen, but--what a consolation to know it!--a queen always mild and gentle, always willing to confer benefits upon us. Hence the Church teaches us to call her the Mother of mercy. The pious and learned author Gerson says: "God's dominion comprises justice and mercy. He divided it, retaining the administration of justice for Himself, and relinquishing, in a certain sense, the dispensation of mercy to Mary, by conferring through her hands all graces He grants to mankind." How consoling, then, the assurance that our merciful Mother is so mighty and so loving a queen! PRACTICE SO GREAT is the tenderness of Mary's maternal heart "that never was it heard that any one who fled to her protection, implored her help, and sought her intercession was left unaided." How many prayers, petitions, and thanksgivings ascend daily to the throne of this our exalted and merciful protectress! There is not a cry of an afflicted, struggling, and suffering soul that she does not graciously hear. Join, therefore, confidently in the prayer of Holy Church, "Hail, holy queen, Mother of mercy!" Approach her with filial trust. Neglect not to honor her yourself, and do all in your power to lead others to do her honor. Prayer of the Church (located on the first day of the novena). Litany of Loreto (located in the list of approved litanies). _Prayer_ O GLORIOUS Virgin and Mother of God, Mary! Holy Church teaches me that despite the glory to which thou wast exalted, thou didst not forget thy miserable clients, and that in heaven thy mercy is still greater than it was during thy life on earth. Therefore I come to thee and trustingly lay at thy feet all my needs, miseries, and petitions. My queen, my Mother, turn not thy gracious eyes from me. Remember me with thy divine Son; cease not to pray for me and take me under thy protection, so that I may finally have the happiness to see and praise thee in thy glory for ever and ever. Hail Mary, etc. Ejaculation (located on the first day of the novena). NINTH DAY Mary in Heaven, the Help of Christians on Earth Preparatory Prayer (located on the first day of the novena). MEDITATION MARY'S help as Mother of mercy is not confined to individuals. She is the protectress and helper of the whole Church. All over the earth, wherever we cast our glance, in the records of the history of times long past and those of recent occurrence, we find testimony of the graces and benefits obtained through her intercession. The feasts celebrated by the Church throughout the year, what are they but evidences of gratitude offered to the queen of heaven for the oftentimes miraculous delivery from war, pestilence, and other great afflictions? Hence she is rightly invoked as the "Help of Christians." PRACTICE IN OUR days, too, storms and dangers threaten the Church. Let us, therefore, by calling on Mary for help, do our part toward shortening the days of visitation and trial. Let us not confine our petitions to her within the narrow limits of our own personal needs, but let us join in the cry for help ascending to the Mother of mercy throughout all Christendom. Let us daily, for Holy Church, send up our petition to Mary's heavenly throne: "Help of Christians, pray for us!" Prayer of the Church (located on the first day of the novena). Litany of Loreto (located in the list of approved litanies). _Prayer_ O GLORIOUS Virgin and Mother of God, Mary, queen of heaven! Forget us not. Thou art the help of Christians; lighten our tribulations, and help us with motherly intercession at the throne of thy divine Son. With Holy Church I join in the petition to thee: "Holy Mary, aid the miserable, assist the desponding, strengthen the weak, pray for the people, plead for the clergy, intercede for the devout female sex. Let all who have recourse to thee experience the efficacy of thy help!" Hail Mary, etc. Ejaculation (located on the first day of the novena). PART III The Fourteen Holy Helpers "The souls of the just are in the hand of God, and the torment of death shall not touch them. In the sight of the unwise they seemed to die, and their departure was taken for misery, and their going away from us for utter destruction; but they are in peace. And though in the sight of men they suffered torments, their hope is full of immortality. Afflicted in a few things, in many they shall be well rewarded; because God has tried them and found them worth of Himself" (_Wis._ iii 1-5.) CHAPTER I The Fourteen Holy Helpers AMONG the saints who in Catholic devotion are invoked with special confidence, because they have proved themselves efficacious helpers in adversity and difficulties, there is a group venerated under the collective name of Holy Helpers. They are: 1. St. George, Martyr. 2. St. Blase, Bishop and Martyr. 3. St. Pantaleon, Martyr. 4. St. Vitus, Martyr. 5. St. Erasmus, Bishop and Martyr. 6. St. Christophorus, Martyr. 7. St. Dionysius, Bishop and Martyr. 8. St. Cyriacus, Martyr. 9. St. Achatius, Martyr. 10. St. Eustachius, Martyr. 11. St. Giles, Abbot. 12. St. Catherine, Virgin and Martyr. 13. St. Margaret, Virgin and Martyr. 14. St. Barbara, Virgin and Martyr. The reason why these saints are invoked as a group is said to have been an epidemic which devastated Europe from 1346 to 1349. It was called the Plague, or "Black Death," and among its symptoms were the turning black of the tongue, parching of the throat, violent headache, fever, and boils on the abdomen. The malady attacked its victims suddenly, bereft them of reason, and caused death in a few hours, so that many died without the last sacraments. Fear caused many attacks and disrupted social and family ties. To all appearances, the disease was incurable. During this period of general affliction the people in pious confidence turned toward Heaven, and had recourse to the intercession of the saints, praying to be spared an attack, or to be cured when stricken. Among the saints invoked since the earliest times of the Church as special patrons in certain diseases were: St. Christopher and St. Giles against the plague, St. Dionysius against headache, St. Blase against ills of the throat, St. Catherine against those of the tongue, St. Erasmus against those of the abdomen, St. Barbara against fever, St. Vitus against epilepsy. St. Pantaleon was the patron of physicians, St. Cyriacus was had recourse to in temptations, especially in those at the hour of death; St. Achatius was invoked in death agony; Sts. Christopher, Barbara, and Catherine were appealed to for protection against a sudden and unprovided death; the aid of St. Giles was implored for making a good confession; St. Eustachius was patron in all kinds of difficulties, and, because peculiar circumstances separated him for a time from his family, he was invoked also in family troubles. Domestic animals, too, being attacked by the plague, Sts. George, Erasmus, Pantaleon, and Vitus were invoked for their protection. It appears from the invocation of these saints, so widespread in olden times during the plague and other epidemics, that their being grouped as the Fourteen Holy Helpers originated in a like visitation. The fourteen saints venerated as the Holy Helpers are represented with the symbols of their martyrdom, or with the insignia of their state of life; also, as a group of children. The latter representation is accounted for as follows: The abbey of Langheim, in the diocese of Bamberg, Bavaria, owned a farm on which the monks kept their flocks. The sheep were tended by shepherds, who led them along the hillsides, where they grazed quietly during the day, and were driven home in the evening. On the evening of September 22, 1445, a young shepherd, Herman Leicht, who was gathering his flock for the homeward drive, heard what seemed to him to be the cry of a child, and looking about, saw a child sitting in a field near by. Surprised, and wondering how the child came there, he was about to approach, when it disappeared. Feeling rather disturbed, the boy returned to his flock. After reaching it, he turned to look back to the place where he had seen the apparition. There the child sat again, this time in a circle of light, and between two burning candles. Terrified at this second apparition, he made the sign of the cross. The child smiled, as if to encourage him, and he was about to approach it again, when it vanished a second time. Greatly perplexed, he drove his flock home and informed his parents of the occurrence. But they called the apparition a delusion and told him not to mention it to any one. Nevertheless, feeling uneasy, and desiring an explanation, he went to the monastery and related his experience to one of the Fathers, who advised him to ask the child, if it ever should appear to him again, what it wanted. Nearly a year later, June 28, 1446, the eve of the feast of Sts. Peter and Paul, the child again appeared to the boy in the same place as before and about sunset; but this time it was surrounded by thirteen other children, all in a halo of glory. He boldly approached the group and asked the child he had formerly seen in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and the Holy Ghost, what it desired. The child replied: "We are the Fourteen Helpers, and desire that a chapel be built for us. Be thou our servant, and we shall serve thee." Then the group of children disappeared, and the shepherd boy was filled with heavenly consolation. The following Sunday, after he had driven his flock to the pasture, it seemed to him that he saw two lighted candles descending from the sky to the place where he had seen the apparition. A woman who was passing at the time declared that she also saw them. The boy hastened to the monastery and told about the two apparitions. The abbot, Frederic IV, and the rest of the community, were not inclined to believe in the apparition, and ascribed it to the boy's visionary fancy. But when, in the course of time, several extraordinary favors were granted to people who prayed at the place of the apparition, the monks built a chapel there. It was begun in 1447, and finished and dedicated next year under the invocation of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the Fourteen Holy Helpers. The bishop granted an indulgence for the day of the anniversary of the dedication, the Papal Nuncio, Cardinal Joannes, granted another, and Pope Nicholas V a third. These indulgences, and a number of other spiritual privileges granted to the chapel, attracted a great many visitors, so that it became a place of pious pilgrimage. Elector Frederic III, in fulfilment of a vow made when beset with difficulties, visited the chapel in 1485. Emperor Ferdinand also visited it and left, as a votive offering, his gold pectoral chain on the altar. Devotion to the Fourteen Holy Helpers continued to spread. In 1743, a magnificent church, to replace the old chapel, was begun, and completed in 1772. Churches and altars in honor of these saints are found in Italy, Austria, Tyrol, Hungary, Bohemia, Switzerland, and other countries of Europe. In the United States of America two churches are dedicated under the invocation of the Holy Helpers: one in Baltimore, Md., the other in Gardenville, N. Y. Wherever and whenever invoked, these saints have proved themselves willing helpers in all difficulties, vicissitudes, and trials of their faithful clients. CHAPTER II Legends BEFORE proceeding to relate the lives of the Fourteen Holy Helpers, we deem it opportune to define the term usually applied to the narrative of the lives of the saints. The histories of the saints are called Legends. This word is derived from the Latin, and signifies something that is to be read, a passage the reading of which is prescribed. The legends of the saints are the lives of the holy martyrs and confessors of the Faith. Some of them occur in the Roman Breviary which the Catholic clergy is obliged to read every day. Joseph von Goerres, an illustrious champion of the Church during the first half of the nineteenth century, writes as follows concerning legends: "The histories of the lives of the saints were gathered from the earliest times. A collection of such histories is found in 'The Golden Legend.' The Passionales, too, containing the life of a saint for every day in the year, belong to this sort of literature. In Germany these histories were at first translations from the Latin; later, they were written in the native idiom, and, in style, were of a charming simplicity. At that time, when the upper classes did not yet judge themselves too highly cultivated to share in the Faith, and not too privileged to join in the sentiments and affections of the people, and were therefore more in harmony with the lower ranks of society, these legends were in general circulation among all classes: among the wealthy in manuscript, among the poor orally and in the form in which they had become acquainted with them in church and elsewhere. "In early times the science of criticism was unknown; therefore little care was exercised in separating the poetic additions from the authentic legends, especially as the Church had not yet spoken on the subject. Faith was yet of that robust sort which is not affected by miraculous occurrences. Nearly all Europe then still accepted the adage now current only in Spain, 'It is better sometimes to believe what can not be established as truth, than to lose a single truth by want of faith.' But later the science of criticism came into its rights. The Church established canonical rules, according to which a strict investigation of all the facts submitted to her judgment was to be made, and rejected everything that could not stand the most rigid examination. [Illustration: Mary, the Mother of Sorrows] "Then Art devoted itself to that legendary lore which the Church, declaring it outside of her domain, permitted to be embellished at will. Thus poetic legends were multiplied, their authors being more or less convinced that the reader would be able to distinguish truth from poetical embellishment. The common people continued to make little distinction and did not permit criticism to influence their ancient beliefs. They regarded these legends as they regard the pictures of the saints; not as portraits of the persons depicted--for in the very next church the same saint might be represented in a quite different manner-- but as illustrations, more or less apt, whose object was to attract the attention by their artistic character and thus to draw the mind to the contemplation of their original, and by it to God, and thereby serve the purpose of edification." If we are not devoid of all sentiments of piety, the history of the combats and victories of the saints and martyrs, and the narrative of the miracles wrought through their intercession before and after their death, will always be a source of joy and consolation to us, and will tend to animate us with similar fortitude and love of virtue. The legends of the Fourteen Holy Helpers are replete with the most glorious examples of heroic firmness and invincible courage in the profession of the Faith, which ought to incite us to imitate their fidelity in the performance of the Christian and social duties. If they, with the aid of God's grace, achieved such victories, why should not we, by the same aid, be able to accomplish the little desired of us? God rewarded His victorious champions with eternal bliss; the same crown is prepared for us, if we but render ourselves worthy of it. God placed the seal of miracles on the intrepid confession of His servants; and a mind imbued with the spirit of faith sees nothing extraordinary therein, because our divine Saviour Himself said, "Amen, amen I say to you, he that believeth in Me, the works that I do, he also shall do, and greater than these shall he do" (_John_ xiv. 12). In all the miraculous events wrought in and by the saints appears only the victorious omnipotent power of Jesus Christ, and the living faith in which His servants operated in virtue of this power. To obliterate the miracles that appear in the lives of the saints, or even to enfeeble their import by the manner of relating them, would rob these legends of their intrinsic value. If our age is no longer robust enough to acknowledge the effects of divine omnipotence and grace, it does not follow that they must be disavowed or denied. The Legends of the Fourteen Holy Helpers I. St. George, Martyr LEGEND ST. GEORGE is honored throughout Christendom as one of the most illustrious martyrs of Jesus Christ. In the reign of the first Christian emperors numerous churches were erected in his honor, and his tomb in Palestine became a celebrated place of pilgrimage. But his history is involved in great obscurity, as no early records of his life and martyrdom are at present in existence. The following are the traditions concerning him which have been handed down to us by the Greek historians, and which are celebrated in verse by that illustrious saint and poet of the eighth century, St. John Damascene. St. George is said to have been born in Cappadocia of noble Christian parents. After the death of his father, he traveled with his mother into Palestine, of which she was a native. There she possessed a considerable estate, which fell to him upon her death. Being strong and robust in body, he embraced the profession of a soldier, and was made a tribune, or colonel, in the army. His courage and fidelity attracted the attention of Emperor Diocletian, who bestowed upon him marks of special favor. When that prince declared war against the Christian religion, St. George laid aside the signs of his rank, threw up his commission, and rebuked the emperor for the severity of his bloody edicts. He was immediately cast into prison, and alternate threats and promises were employed to induce him to apostatize. As he continued firm, he was put to the torture and tormented with great cruelty. "I despise your promises," he said to the judge, "and do not fear your threats. The emperor's power is of short duration, and his reign will soon end. It were better for you, to acknowledge the true God and to seek His kingdom." Thereupon a great block of stone was placed on the breast of the brave young officer, and thus he was left in prison. Next day he was bound upon a wheel set with sharp knives, and it was put in motion to cut him to pieces. Whilst suffering this cruel torture, he saw a heavenly vision, which consoled and encouraged him, saying, "George, fear not; I am with thee." His patience and fortitude under the torments inflicted on him so affected the numerous pagan spectators that many of them were converted to the Faith and suffered martyrdom for it. On the next day, April 23, 303, St. George was led through the city and beheaded. This took place at Lydda, the city in which, as we read in the Acts of the Apostles (ix.), St. Peter healed a man sick with the palsy. St. George is usually represented as a knight tilting against a dragon; but this is only emblematical of the glorious combat in which he encountered and overthrew the devil, winning for himself thereby a martyr's crown. LESSON WE TOO, like St. George, often have opportunity to confess our faith in Christ. We confess it by patiently bearing adversity, by suppressing our evil inclinations, by suffering injustice without retaliating evil for evil, by using every opportunity of performing deeds of charity, by devoting ourselves unremittingly to our daily duties, by carefully guarding our tongue, etc. Examine yourself whether you have not often denied your Faith, if not in words, through your works. _Prayer of the Church_ O GOD, who dost rejoice us by the merits and intercession of Thy blessed martyr George; graciously grant that we, who through him implore Thee for Thy bounty, may receive thereby the gift of Thy grace. Through Christ our Lord. Amen. II St. Blase, Bishop and Martyr LEGEND ST. BLASE was born at Sebaste, Armenia. He became a physician, but at the same time devoted himself zealously to the practice of his Christian duties. His virtuous conduct gained for him the esteem of the Christian clergy and people to such a degree, that he was elected bishop of his native city. Henceforth he devoted himself to ward off the dangers of soul from the faithful, as he had hitherto been intent on healing their bodily ills. To all, he was a shining example of virtue. During the reign of Emperor Licinius a cruel persecution of Christians broke out. The persecutors directed their fury principally against the bishops, well knowing that when the shepherd is stricken the flock is dispersed. Listening to the entreaties of the faithful, and mindful of the words of Our Lord, "When they shall persecute you in this city, flee into another" (_Matt._ x. 23), St. Blase hid himself in a cave. But one day the prefect Agricola instituted a chase, and his party discovered the holy bishop and brought him before their master. St. Blase remained steadfast in the Faith, and by its able confession and defense attracted the attention of the attendants at his trial. The cruel tyrant had him bound and tortured with iron combs. After suffering these torments with great patience and meekness, the saint was cast into prison. He was kept there a long time, because the prefect hoped to exhaust his powers of endurance, and to bring him to sacrifice to the idols. His jailer permitted the holy bishop to receive visitors in his prison, and many sick and suffering availed themselves of this privilege. He cured some of them and gave good advice to others. One day a mother brought to him her boy, who, while eating, had swallowed a fishbone, which remained in his throat, and, causing great pain, threatened suffocation. St. Blase prayed and made the sign of the cross over the boy, and behold, he was cured. For this reason the saint is invoked in throat troubles. At length the holy bishop was again brought before the judge and commanded to sacrifice to the idols. But he said: "Thou art blind, because thou art not illuminated by the true light. How can a man sacrifice to idols, when he adores the true God alone? I do not fear thy threats. Do with me according to thy pleasure. My body is in thy power, but God alone has power over my soul. Thou seekest salvation with the idols; I hope and trust to receive it from the only true and living God whom I adore." Then the prefect sentenced him to death. St. Blase was beheaded, suffering death for the Faith February 3, 316. LESSON ST. BLASE gave us a glorious example of fortitude in the confession of the Faith. According to the teaching of St. Paul, confession of the Faith is necessary for our salvation. He says, "For if thou confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and believe in thy heart that God hath raised Him up from the dead, thou shalt be saved. For with the heart we believe unto justice, but with the mouth confession is made unto salvation" (_Rom._ x. 9, 10). We are, therefore, not permitted to be silent, much less to agree, when our Faith, and whatever is connected therewith, as the sacraments, ceremonies, priests, etc., are ridiculed and reviled. Parents especially must be most careful in speaking of these subjects before their children and servants, and do so only with due reverence. On the contrary, we must confess our Faith, and if necessary, defend it against all attacks. Often one serious word will suffice to silence a calumniator of the Faith and cause him to blush. We must confess our Faith not only in the bosom of our family, but also in public. We must let our fellow-men know that we are true Catholics, who adhere to our Faith from conviction, without regard to what others say of us, or how they judge us, remembering the words of Our Lord, "Every one, therefore, that shall confess me before men, I will also confess him before my Father who is in heaven" (_Matt._ x. 32). It was remarked above that St. Blase is the patron invoked in throat troubles. Therefore the Church, on his feast, February 3, gives a special blessing, at which she prays over those receiving it: "By the intercession of St. Blase, bishop and martyr, may God deliver thee from all ills of the throat and from all other ills; in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen." Do not neglect to receive this blessing, if you have the opportunity. The blessings of the Church are powerful and effective, for she is God's representative on earth. Therefore her blessing is God's blessing, and is always effective, except we ourselves place an obstacle in its way. _Prayer of the Church_ O GOD, who dost rejoice us through the memory of Thy blessed bishop and martyr Blase: graciously grant us, that we, who honor his memory, may experience his protection. Through Christ our Lord. Amen. III St. Erasmus, Bishop and Martyr LEGEND THE pious historians of the early Christian times state, as a rule, only what the saints did and suffered for the Faith, and how they died. They deemed the martyrs' glorious combat and their victorious entrance into heaven more instructive, and therefore more important, than a lengthy description of their lives. Hence we know little of the native place and the youth of St. Erasmus, except that at the beginning of the fourth century of the Christian era he was bishop of Antioch in Asia Minor, the city where the name of "Christian" first came into use. When a long and cruel persecution broke out under the Emperor Diocletian, St. Erasmus hid himself in the mountains of the Libanon, and led there, for some years, an austere life of penance and fasting. Finally he was discovered and dragged before the judge. At first, persuasions and kindness were employed to induce him to deny the Faith, but when these efforts failed recourse was had to the most cruel torments. He was scourged, and finally cast into a caldron filled with boiling oil, sulphur, and pitch. In this seething mass God preserved him from harm, and by this miracle many spectators were converted to the Faith. Still more enraged thereat, the judge ordered the holy bishop to be thrown into prison and kept there in chains till he died of starvation. But God delivered him, as He had once delivered St. Peter. One night an angel appeared to him and said: "Erasmus, follow me! Thou shalt convert a great many." Thus far he had led numbers to the Faith by suffering, now he was to convert multitudes as a missionary. Delivered from prison by the power of God, he went forth into many lands and preached the Faith. Mighty in word and deed, he wrought many miracles and converted great numbers of heathens. At length he came to Italy, where Emperor Maximin persecuted the Christians as fiercely as did Diocletian in the East. As soon as Maximin heard of Erasmus and the conversions effected by his preaching and miracles, he ordered the slaughter of three hundred of the converts. Erasmus himself was most cruelly tortured, but to no purpose. He remained firm. Then cast into prison, he was again liberated by an angel. At last the hour of deliverance came to this valiant and apostolic confessor and martyr of Christ. He heard a heavenly voice, saying: "Erasmus, come now to the heavenly city and rest in the place which God has prepared for thee with the holy martyrs and prophets. Enjoy now the fruit of thy labor. By thee I was honored in heaven and on earth." Erasmus, looking toward heaven, saw a splendid crown, and the apostles and prophets welcoming him. He bowed his head, saying: "Receive, O Lord, the soul of thy servant!" and peacefully breathed forth his spirit on June 2, 308. LESSON THE tortures which St. Erasmus suffered for the Faith seem almost incredible, and the events related of him are truly wonderful. Martyrdom and miracles illustrated the doctrine he preached; he converted multitudes and gained the crown of heaven. Perhaps you say that in our times there are no longer any martyrs, at least not in civilized countries. Are you quite sure of it? St. Augustine writes: "Peace also has its martyrs." It is certainly not easy to suffer torments like the martyrs and to receive finally the death-dealing blow of the sword. But is it not also a martyrdom to suffer for years the pains of a lingering illness? Again, how difficult the combat with the world, the flesh, and the powers of hell! How carefully must we watch and pray to gain the victory! This is our martyrdom. Let us imitate the example of the holy martyrs in bearing the trials and sufferings of life, and we shall receive, as they did, the crown of heaven. _Prayer of the Church_ O GOD, who dost give us joy through the memory of Thy holy martyrs, graciously grant that we may be inflamed by their example, in whose merits we rejoice. Through Christ our Lord. Amen. IV St. Pantaleon, Physician and Martyr LEGEND ST. PANTALEON was physician to Emperor Maximin and a Christian, but he fell through a temptation which is sometimes more dangerous than the most severe trials by the fiercest torments. This temptation was the bad example of the impious, idolatrous courtiers with whom the young physician associated. He was seduced by them and abandoned the Faith. But the grace of God called him, and he obeyed. Hermolaus, a zealous priest, by prudent exhortation awakened Pantaleon's conscience to a sense of his guilt, and brought him back into the fold of the Church. Henceforth he devoted himself ardently to the advancement of the spiritual and temporal welfare of his fellow-citizens. First of all he sought to convert his father, who was still a heathen, and had the consolation to see him die a Christian. He divided the ample fortune which he inherited amongst the poor and the sick. As a physician, he was intent on healing his patients both by physical and by spiritual means. Christians he confirmed in the practice and confession of the Faith, and the heathens he sought to convert. Many suffering from incurable diseases were restored to health by his prayer and the invocation of the holy name of Jesus. His presence was everywhere fraught with blessings and consolation. St. Pantaleon yearned to prove his fidelity to the Faith by shedding his blood for it, and the opportunity came to him when his heathen associates in the healing art denounced him to the emperor as a zealous propagator of Christianity. He was brought up before the emperor's tribunal and ordered to sacrifice to the idols. He replied: "The God whom I adore is Jesus Christ. He created heaven and earth, He raised the dead to life, made the blind see and healed the sick, all through the power of His word. Your idols are dead, they can not do anything. Order a sick person to be brought here, one declared incurable. Your priests shall invoke their idols for him and I shall call on the only true God, and we shall see who is able to help him." The proposal was accepted. A man sick with the palsy was brought, who could neither walk nor stand without help. The heathen priests prayed for him, but in vain. Then Pantaleon prayed, took the sick man by the hand, and said: "In the name of Jesus, the Son of God, I command thee to rise and be well." And the palsied man rose, restored to perfect health. By this miracle a great number of those present were converted. But the emperor and the idolatrous priests were all the more enraged. Maximin now attempted to gain Pantaleon by blandishments and promises to deny the Faith, but without success. Then he had recourse to threats, and as they too availed nothing, he proceeded to have them put into execution. The brave confessor of the Faith was tortured in every conceivable manner. Finally he was nailed to a tree, and then beheaded. The priest Hermolaus and the brothers Hermippos and Hermocrates suffered death with him, in the year 308. LESSON HAPPY are they who, whatever may be their station or calling in life, are intent on bringing those with whom they come into contact under the influence of religion. But, alas, too many do just the reverse. They permit themselves to be led astray by bad example, and set aside the claims of the Church as too severe and exacting. How do you act in this regard? Do you shun the company of the wicked? A proverb says: "Tell me in whose company you are found, and I will tell you who you are." Bad company insensibly undermines faith and morals, overcomes the fear of evil and the aversion to it and weakens the will. "He that loveth danger shall perish in it" (_Ecclus_. iii. 27). As soon as St. Pantaleon came to a sense of his apostasy, he repented and returned to the practice of the Faith. He did this despite the knowledge that he thereby incurred hatred and persecution. The true Christian will ever follow the dictates of conscience and please God, whether he thereby incur the displeasure of men or not. If, to please men, we become remiss in the service of God, we show that we fear and love Him less than men. What a lamentable folly! Of whom have we to expect greater benefits or to fear greater evils--from God or man? Do not act thus unwisely; rather imitate St. Pantaleon, and live for God and His service. _Prayer of the church_ ALMIGHTY God, grant us through the intercession of Thy blessed martyr Pantaleon to be delivered and preserved from all ills of the body, and from evil thoughts and influences in spirit. Through Christ our Lord. Amen. [Illustration: Our Lord in the Lap of His Blessed Mother] V St Vitus, Martyr LEGEND ST. VITUS belonged to a noble pagan family of Sicily, and was born about the year 291, at Mazurra. His father, Hylas, placed him in early childhood in charge of a Christian couple named Modestus and Crescentia, who raised him in the Christian faith, and had him baptized. He grew in years and in virtue, till, at the age of twelve, he was claimed by his father, who, to his great anger, found him a fervent Christian. Convinced, after many unsuccessful attempts, that stripes and other chastisements would not induce him to renounce the Faith, his father delivered the brave boy up to Valerian, the governor, who in vain employed every artifice to shake his constancy. Finally he commanded Vitus to be scourged, but when two soldiers were about to execute this order their hands and those of Valerian were suddenly lamed. The governor ascribed this to sorcery, yet he invoked Vitus' help, and behold, when the Christian boy made the sign of the cross over the lamed members, they were healed. Then Valerian sent him back to his father, telling him to leave no means untried to induce his son to sacrifice to the idols. Hylas now tried blandishments, pleasures, and amusements to influence the brave boy. He even sent a corrupt woman to tempt him, and for that purpose locked them both together in one room. But Vitus, who had remained firm amid tortures, resisted also the allurements of sensuality. Closing his eyes, he knelt in prayer, and behold, an angel appeared, filling the room with heavenly splendor, and stood at the youth's side. Terrified, the woman fled. But even this miracle did not change the obstinate father. Finally Vitus escaped, and with Modestus and Crescentia fled to Italy. They landed safe in Naples, and there proclaimed Christ wherever they had an opportunity. Their fervor and many miracles which they wrought attracted the attention of Emperor Diocletian to them. He ordered them to be brought before his tribunal, which being done, he at first treated them kindly, employing blandishments and making promises to induce them to renounce Christ. When this had no effect, they were cruelly tormented, but with no other result than confirming them in their constancy. Enraged, the emperor condemned them to be thrown to the wild beasts. But the lions and tigers forgot their ferocity and cowered at their feet. Now Diocletian, whose fury knew no bounds, ordered them to be cast into a caldron of molten lead and boiling pitch. They prayed, "O God, deliver us through the power of Thy name!" and behold, they remained unharmed. Then the emperor condemned them to the rack, on which they expired, in the year 303. LESSON THE heroic spirit of martyrdom exhibited by St. Vitus was owing to the early impressions of piety which he received through the teaching and example of his virtuous foster-parents. The choice of teachers, nurses, and servants who have the care of children is of the greatest importance on account of the influence they exert on them. The pagan Romans were most solicitous that no slave whose speech was not perfectly elegant and graceful should have access to children. Shall a Christian be less careful as to their virtue? It is a fatal mistake to imagine that children are too young to be infected with the contagion of vice. No age is more impressionable than childhood; no one observes more closely than the young, and nothing is so easily acquired by them as a spirit of vanity, pride, revenge, obstinacy, sloth, etc., and nothing is harder to overcome. What a happiness for a child to be formed to virtue from infancy, and to be instilled from a tender age with the spirit of piety, simplicity, meekness, and mercy! Such a foundation being well laid, the soul will easily, and sometimes without experiencing severe conflicts, rise to the height of Christian perfection. _Prayer of the Church_ WE BESEECH Thee, O Lord, to graciously grant us through the intercession of Thy blessed martyrs Vitus, Modestus, and Crescentia, that we may not proudly exalt ourselves, but serve Thee in humility and simplicity, so as to avoid evil and to do right for Thy sake. Through Christ our Lord. Amen. VI St. Christophorus, Martyr LEGEND AN ANCIENT tradition concerning St. Christophorus relates: He was born in the land of Canaan, and was named Reprobus, that is Reprobate, for he was a barbarous heathen. In stature and strength he was a giant. Thinking no one his like in bodily vigor, he resolved to go forth in search of the mightiest master and serve him. In his wanderings, he met with a king who was praised as the most valorous man on earth. To him he offered his services and was accepted. The king was proud of his giant and kept him near his person. One day a minstrel visited the king's castle, and among the ballads he sung before the court was one on the power of Satan. At the mention of this name the king blessed himself, making the sign of the cross. Reprobus, wondering, asked him why he did that. The king replied: "When I make this sign, Satan has no power over me." Reprobus rejoined: "So thou fearest the power of Satan? Then he is mightier than thou, and I shall seek and serve him." Setting forth to seek Satan, he came into a wilderness. One dark night he met a band of wild fellows riding through the forest. It was Satan and his escort. Reprobus bravely accosted him, saying he wished to serve him. He was accepted. But soon he was convinced that his new master was not the mightiest on earth. For one day, whilst approaching a crucifix by the wayside, Satan quickly took to flight, and Reprobus asked him for the reason. Satan replied: "That is the image of my greatest enemy, who conquered me on the cross. From him I always flee." When Reprobus heard this, he left the devil, and went in search of Christ. In his wanderings, he one day came to a hut hidden in the forest. At its door sat a venerable old man. Reprobus addressed him, and in the course of the conversation that ensued the old man told him that he was a hermit, and had left the world to serve Christ, the Lord of heaven and earth. "Thou art my man," cried Reprobus; "Christ is He whom I seek, for He is the strongest and the mightiest. Tell me where I can find Him." The hermit then began instructing the giant about God and the Redeemer, and concluded by saying: "He who would serve Christ must offer himself entirely to Him, and do and suffer everything for His sake. His reward for this will be immense and will last forever." Reprobus now asked the hermit to allow him to remain, and to continue to instruct him. The hermit consented. When Reprobus was fully instructed, he baptized him. After his baptism, a great change came over the giant. No longer proud of his great size and strength, he became meek and humble, and asked the hermit to assign to him some task by which he might serve God, his master. "For," said he, "I can not pray and fast; therefore I must serve God in some other way." The hermit led him to a broad and swift river nearby, and said: "Here build thyself a hut, and when wanderers wish to cross the river, carry them over for the love of Christ." For there was no bridge across the river. Henceforth, day and night, whenever he was called, Reprobus faithfully performed the task assigned to him. One night he heard a child calling to be carried across the river. Quickly he rose, placed the child on his stout shoulder, took his staff and walked into the mighty current. Arrived in midstream, the water rose higher and higher, and the child became heavier and heavier. "O child," he cried, "how heavy thou art! It seems I bear the weight of the world on my shoulder." And the child replied, "Right thou art. Thou bearest not only the world, but the Creator of heaven and earth. I am Jesus Christ, thy King and Lord, and henceforth thou shalt be called Christophorus, that is, Christ-bearer. Arrived on yonder shore, plant thy staff in the ground, and in token of my power and might tomorrow it shall bear leaves and blossoms." And the child disappeared. On reaching the other shore, Christophorus stuck his staff into the ground, and behold, it budded forth leaves and blossoms. Then, kneeling, he promised the Lord to serve Him ever faithfully. He kept his promise, and thenceforth became a zealous preacher of the Gospel, converting many to the Faith. On his missionary peregrinations he came also to Lycia, where, after his first sermon, eighteen thousand heathens requested baptism. When Emperor Decius heard of this, he sent a company of four hundred soldiers to capture Christophorus. To these he preached so convincingly, that they all asked for baptism. Decius became enraged thereat and had him cast into prison. There he first treated him with great kindness, and surrounded him with every luxury to tempt him to sin, but in vain. Then he ordered him to be tortured in the most cruel manner, until he should deny the Faith. He was scourged, placed on plates of hot iron, boiling oil was poured over and fire was lighted under him. When all these torments did not accomplish their purpose, the soldiers were ordered to shoot him with arrows. This, too, having no effect, he was beheaded, on July 25, 254. Two great saints refer to the wonderful achievements of St. Christophorus. St. Ambrose mentions that this saint converted forty-eight thousand souls to Christ. St. Vincent Ferrer declares, that when the plague devastated Valencia, its destructive course was stayed through the intercession of St. Christophorus. LESSON THE legend of St. Christophorus conveys a wholesome truth. We ought all to be Christ-bearers, by preserving in our hearts faith, hope, and charity, and by receiving Our Lord worthily in holy communion. He alone is worthy of our service. In the service that we owe to men, we ought to serve God by doing His will. We can not divide our heart, for Our Lord Himself says, "No man can serve two masters" (_Matt_. vi. 24). If you serve the world, it deceives you, for it can not give you what it promises. If you serve sin, Satan is your master. He, too, deceives his servants, and leads them to perdition. Christ on the cross conquered these two tyrants, and with His help you can also vanquish them. Therefore, give yourself to Him with all your heart, and you shall find peace in this world, and eternal bliss in the next. St. Augustine learned this truth by sad experience, and therefore exclaims: "Thou hast created us for Thee, O Lord, and our heart is restless till it rests in Thee." _Prayer of the church_ GRANT us, almighty God, that whilst we celebrate the memory of Thy blessed martyr St. Christophorus, through his intercession the love of Thy name may be increased in us. Through Christ our Lord. Amen. VII St. Dionysius, Bishop and Martyr LEGEND WHEN St. Paul the Apostle, in the year of Our Lord 51, came to Athens to preach the Gospel, he was summoned to the Areopagus, the great council which determined all religious matters. Among the members of this illustrious assembly was Dionysius. His mind had already been prepared to receive the good tidings of the Gospel by the miraculous darkness which overspread the earth at the moment of Our Lord's death on the cross. He was at that time at Heliopolis, in Egypt. On beholding the sun obscured in the midst of its course, and this without apparent cause, he is said to have exclaimed: "Either the God of nature is suffering, or the world is about to be dissolved." When St. Paul preached before the Areopagus in Athens, Dionysius easily recognized the truth and readily embraced it. The Apostle received him among his disciples, and appointed him bishop of the infant Church of Athens. As such he devoted himself with great zeal to the propagation of the Gospel. He made a journey to Jerusalem to visit the places hallowed by the footsteps and sufferings of our Redeemer, and there met the Apostles St. Peter and St. James, the evangelist St. Luke, and other holy apostolic men. He also had the happiness to see and converse with the Blessed Virgin Mary, and was so overwhelmed by her presence that he declared, that if he knew not Jesus to be God, he would consider her divine. The idolatrous priests of Athens were greatly alarmed at the many conversions resulting from the eloquent preaching of Dionysius, and instigated a revolt against him. The holy bishop left Athens, and, going to Rome, visited the Pope, St. Clement. He sent him with some other holy men to Gaul. Some of his companions remained to evangelize the cities in the south, while Dionysius, with the priest Rusticus and the deacon Eleutherius continued their journey northward as far as Lutetia, the modern Paris, where the Gospel had not yet been announced. Here for many years he and his companions labored with signal success, and finally obtained the crown of martyrdom on Oct. 9, 119. Dionysius was beheaded at the advanced age of 110 years. The spot where the three martyrs Dionysius, Rusticus, and Eleutherius suffered martyrdom, is the well-known hill of Montmartre. An ancient tradition relates that St. Dionysius, after his head was severed from his body, took it up with his own hands and carried it two thousand paces to the place where, later, a church was built in his honor. The bodies of the martyrs were thrown into the river Seine, but taken up and honorably interred by a Christian lady named Catulla not far from the place where they had been beheaded. The Christians soon built a chapel on their tomb. St. Dionysius was not only a great missionary and bishop, but also one of the most illustrious writers of the early Church. Some of his works, which are full of Catholic doctrine and Christian wisdom, are still extant, and well worthy of a convert and disciple of St. Paul, whose spirit they breathe. LESSON THE apostolic men like St. Dionysius, who converted so many to Christ, were filled with His spirit, and acted and lived for Him alone. They gave their lives to spread His religion, convinced that the welfare of individuals and nations depends upon it. On religion depends the security and stability of all government and of society. Human laws are too weak to restrain those who disregard and despise the law of God. Unless a man's conscience is enlightened by religion and bound by its precepts, his passions will so far enslave him, that the impulse of evil inclinations will prompt him to every villainy of which he hopes to derive an advantage, if he can but accomplish his purpose secretly and with impunity. True religion, on the contrary, insures comfort, peace, and happiness amid the sharpest trials, safety in death itself, and after death the most glorious and eternal reward in God. How grateful, therefore, must we be to the men who preached the true religion amid so many difficulties, trials, and persecutions; and also to those who preach it now, animated by the same spirit. And how carefully should we avoid all persons, books, and periodicals that revile and calumniate our holy Faith, and attempt its subversion! _Prayer of the Church_ O GOD, who didst confer on Thy blessed servant Dionysius the virtue of fortitude in suffering, and didst join with him Rusticus and Eleutherius, to announce Thy glory to the heathens, grant, we beseech Thee, that following them, we may despise, for the love of Thee, the pleasures of this world, and that we do not recoil from its adversities. Through Christ our Lord. Amen. VIII St. Cyriacus, Deacon and Martyr LEGEND EMPEROR MAXIMIN in token of his gratitude to Diocletian, who had ceded the western half of his empire to him, ordered the building of that magnificent structure in Rome, whose ruins are still known as the "Baths of Diocletian." The Christians imprisoned for the Faith were compelled to labor under cruel overseers at this building. A zealous Christian Roman, touched with pity at this moving spectacle, resolved to employ his means in improving the condition of these poor victims of persecution. Among the deacons of the Roman Church at that time was one by the name of Cyriacus, who was distinguished by his zeal in the performance of all good works. Him, with two companions, Largus and Smaragdus, the pious Roman selected for the execution of his plan. Cyriacus devoted himself to the work with great ardor. One day, whilst visiting the laborers to distribute food amongst them, he observed a decrepit old man, who was so feeble that he was unable to perform his severe task. Filled with pity, Cyriacus offered to take his place. The aged prisoner consenting, the merciful deacon thenceforth worked hard at the building. But after some time he was discovered, and cast into prison. There he again found opportunity to exercise his zeal. Some blind men who had great confidence in the power of his prayer, came to ask him for help in their affliction, and he restored their sight. He and his companions spent three years in prison, and during that time he healed many sick and converted a great number of heathens from the darkness of paganism. Then Emperor Diocletian's little daughter became possessed by an evil spirit, and no one was able to deliver her from it. To the idolatrous priests who were called, the evil spirit declared that he would leave the girl only when commanded to do so by Cyriacus, the deacon. He was hastily summoned, and prayed and made the sign of the cross over the girl, and the evil spirit departed. The emperor loved his daughter, therefore he was grateful to the holy deacon, and presented him with a house, where he and his companions might serve their God unmolested by their enemies. About this time the daughter of the Persian King Sapor was attacked by a similar malady, and when he heard what Cyriacus had done for Diocletian's daughter, he wrote to the emperor, asking him to send the Christian deacon. It was done, and Cyriacus, on foot, set out for Persia. Arrived at his destination, he prayed over the girl and the evil spirit left her. On hearing of this miracle, four hundred and twenty heathens were converted to the Faith. These the saint instructed and baptized, and then set out on his homeward journey. Returned to Rome, he continued his life of prayer and good works. But when Diocletian soon afterward left for the East, his co-emperor Maximin seized the opportunity to give vent to his hatred for the Christians, and renewed their persecution. One of the first victims was Cyriacus. He was loaded with chains and brought before the judge, who first tried blandishments and promises to induce him to renounce Christ and to sacrifice to the idols, but in vain. Then the confessor of Christ was stretched on the rack, his limbs torn from their sockets, and he was beaten with clubs. His companions shared the same tortures. Finally, when the emperor and the judge were convinced that nothing would shake the constancy of the holy martyrs, they were beheaded. They gained the crown of glory on March 16, 303. LESSON IN THE life of St. Cyriacus two virtues shine forth in a special manner; his love of God and his charity toward his fellow-men. His love of God impelled him to sacrifice all, even his life, for His sake, thereby fulfilling the commandment: "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with thy whole mind" (_Matt_. xxii. 37). A greater love of God no man can have than giving his life for Him. St. Cyriacus also fulfilled the other commandment, of which Our Lord declared, "And the second is like to this: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself" (_Matt_. xxii. 39). He helped his fellow-Christians to bear their burdens, relieved them in their sufferings, assisted and encouraged them by word and deed, and edified them by his example. His sole aim was to do good to all men, mindful of the words of the Royal Prophet: "Blessed is he that understandeth concerning the needy and the poor" (_Ps_. xl. 2). He was so imbued with the virtue of charity, that he was disposed even to sacrifice his life for the relief and assistance of others. [Illustration: The Holy Women at the Tomb.] How shall we justify our unfeeling hardness of heart, by which we seek every trifling pretense to exempt us from the duty of aiding the unfortunate? Remember the threat of the apostle, "Judgment without mercy to him that hath not done mercy" (_James_ ii. 13). _Prayer of the Church_ O GOD, who rejoicest us by the remembrance of Thy blessed martyrs Cyriacus, Largus, and Smaragdus; grant, we beseech Thee, that we, by celebrating their memory, may imitate their fortitude in suffering. Through Christ our Lord. Amen. IX St. Achatius, Martyr LEGEND OF THE saints named Achatius, that one is reckoned among the Holy Helpers who, as a Roman soldier, died for Christ. Achatius was a native of Cappadocia and as a youth joined the Roman army during the reign of Emperor Hadrian, attaining the rank of captain. One day, when leading his company against the enemy, he heard a voice saying to him, "Call on the God of Christians!" He obeyed, was instructed, and received Baptism. Filled with zeal, he henceforth sought to convert also the pagan soldiers of the army. When the emperor heard of this, Achatius was thrown into prison, then placed on the rack, bound to a post and scourged, because he refused to offer sacrifice to the idols. When all these tortures availed nothing, he was brought before the tribune Bibianus. Asked by him what was his name and country, Achatius replied, "My name is Christian, because I am a follower of Christ; men call me Achatius. My country is Cappadocia. There my parents lived; there I was converted to the Christian faith, and was so inspired by the combats and sufferings of the Christian martyrs that I am resolved to shed my blood for Christ to attain heaven." Then Bibianus ordered him to be beaten with leaden clubs, after which he was loaded with chains and returned to the prison. After Achatius had been in prison seven days, Bibianus was called to Byzantium, and ordered all prisoners to be transported there. On the journey Achatius suffered greatly, for his entire body was covered with wounds, his chains were galling, the guards were cruel and the roads were bad. He thought himself dying. Praying to God, a voice from the clouds answered him, "Achatius, be firm!" The soldiers of the guard were terrified and asked each other, "What is this? How can the clouds have a voice?" Many prisoners were converted. Next day some of the converts saw a number of men in shining armor speaking to Achatius, washing his wounds and healing them, so that not even a scar remained. Arrived in Byzantium the saint was again cast into prison, and after seven days dragged before the judge. When neither promises nor the most cruel torments shook the constancy of the brave confessor of the Faith, the judge sent him to Flaccius, the proconsul of Thracia, who imprisoned him for five days, and meanwhile read the records of his former trials. Then he ordered him to be beheaded. Achatius suffered death for Christ on May 8, 311. LESSON ACHATIUS manfully and without fear confessed the Faith amid persecutions and sufferings. We, too, are often placed in circumstances where the profession of our Faith and the practice of the virtues inculcated by it cause us trials. But so deplorable are the effects of sensuality, avarice, and ambition, and such is the laxity and spiritual callousness of many Christians, that there is real cause for every one to be filled with alarm for the safety of his soul. It is not the crowd we are to follow, but the precepts of the Gospel. Therefore we ought to strive to give a good example by our faithful compliance with the demands of religion. For Our Lord Himself exhorts us: "So let your light shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father, who is in heaven" (_Matt._ v. 16). _Prayer of the Church_ O GOD, who dost give us joy through the remembrance of Thy blessed martyrs, Achatius and his companions; grant, we beseech Thee, that we may be inflamed by the example of those for whose merits we rejoice. Through Christ our Lord. Amen. X St. Eustachius, Martyr LEGEND AT THE beginning of the second century, during the reign of Emperor Trajan, there lived in Rome a famous general by the name of Placidus, who was distinguished among his fellow-citizens for his wealth and military prowess. It happened one day, that while following the chase he became separated from his companions, and was pursuing with eagerness a stag of extraordinary size, when suddenly it turned toward him, and he beheld raised aloft between its antlers the image of Jesus Christ suspended on the cross. At the same time our blessed Saviour addressed him in loving words, inviting him henceforth to follow Him by embracing the Christian faith, and to make eternal life in future the object of his pursuit. Faithful to the grace which he had received, Placidus on his return home communicated the heavenly vision to his wife Tatiana, who informed him that she too had been favored with a heavenly apparition. Together they went immediately to the Pope, related their experience, and after due instruction received Baptism. At the sacred font Placidus received the name of Eustachius, and his wife was called Theopista, while his sons were baptized by the names of Agapitus and Theopistus. Upon returning to the spot where he first received the call, Eustachius was favored with another communication from Our Lord, announcing to him that he was destined to endure many and great afflictions for the sake of Christ. It was not long before his faith and patience were put to a severe trial. Stripped of all his possessions and forced to flee from the fury of the persecution, he was reduced to extreme distress, and in the course of his wanderings was by a series of calamitous events separated from his wife and children, of whom he lost all trace. For many years he dwelt in a remote spot, following the occupation of a farm laborer, until he was found by the messengers of the emperor, who was sadly in need of the skill of his former general, because a fierce war had broken out, in which the Romans sustained severe losses. Being again invested with the command of the imperial troops, Eustachius set out for the seat of war, and achieved a decisive victory. In the course of his march he had the happiness, by a singular providence of God, to recover his wife and children, with whom he returned to Rome. His entrance into the city was attended with great rejoicings, and many were the congratulations which he received on his extraordinary good fortune. But soon afterward a solemn sacrifice of thanksgiving to the pagan deities was proclaimed, in which he was ordered by the emperor to take a part. Upon his refusal, after every effort had been made to shake his constancy, he was condemned to be exposed to the lions in the public amphitheater along with his wife and children. Finally, as the savage animals, laying aside their natural ferocity, refused to injure the confessors of Christ, Eustachius and his family were by order of the emperor enclosed in the body of an immense brazen bull, which was heated by means of a great fire enkindled beneath. The last moments of these heroic martyrs was spent in chanting the divine praises, in the midst of which their happy souls passed to the enjoyment of everlasting bliss. Their bodies, miraculously preserved uninjured, were buried with great devotion by the faithful Christians, and were afterward transferred to a magnificent church erected in their honor. LESSON HOW inspiring, to see a great man preferring justice, truth, and religion to the favor of the mighty, readily quitting estate, friends, country, and even sacrificing life, rather than consent to do violence to his conscience; and to see him, at the same time, meek, humble, patient in suffering, forgiving sincerely and loving his unjust and treacherous persecutors! Passion and revenge often beget anger and triumph over virtue and integrity. Ambition and the desire of wealth may, for a time, urge men on to brave danger, but finally they reduce them to the most abject slavery, and result in grievous crimes and misery. Religion alone is the source of charity, magnanimity, and true courage. It so enlightens the mind, as to place a man above the vicissitudes of the world; it renders him steadfast and calm in adversity, preserves him from error, teaches him to bear injustice and calumny in a tranquil spirit, and gives him that ineffable peace and joy which springs from the conviction that God's will is always most just and holy and that He protects, aids, and rewards His servants. Does religion exert this powerful influence on us? Do we show it in our actions and conduct? Our courage and constancy must be apparent not only when we encounter danger and opposition, but also when our evil propensity urges us to yield to temptations that present sin to us in the guise of pleasure. _Prayer of the Church_ O GOD, who dost permit us to celebrate the remembrance of Thy blessed martyrs, Eustachius and companions, grant us, that we may enjoy their company in eternal bliss. Through Christ our Lord. Amen. XI St. Giles, Hermit and Abbot LEGEND ATHENS, in Greece, was the native city of St. Giles. He was of noble parentage, and devoted himself from early youth to piety and learning. After the death of his parents he distributed his rich inheritance to the poor, and to escape the applause of men for his charity left his country to bury himself in obscurity. He sailed for France, and on his arrival there retired to a deserted country near the mouth of the river Rhone. Later he made his abode near the river Gard, and finally buried himself in a forest in the diocese of Nimes. In this solitude he passed many years, living on wild herbs and roots, with water for his drink. It is related that for some time a hind came daily to be milked by him, thus furnishing him additional sustenance. Here he lived, disengaged from earthly cares, conversing only with God, and engaged in the contemplation of heavenly things. One day the king instituted a great hunt in the forest where Giles lived, and encountered the hind. Giving chase, the royal hunter was led to the saint's hut, where the panting animal had sought refuge. The king inquired who he was, and was greatly edified at the holiness of his life. The fame of the saintly hermit now spread far and wide, and was much increased by the many miracles wrought through his intercession. The king tried to persuade him to leave his solitude, but prevailed upon him only in so far, that Giles accepted several disciples and founded a monastery in which the rule of St. Benedict was observed, and of which he was chosen the abbot. He governed his community wisely and well, and at the earnest solicitation of his monks was ordained priest. The fame of St. Giles' sanctity induced the Frankish King, Charles Martel to call him to his court to relieve him of a great trouble of conscience. The saint made the journey, and told the king that he would find relief and comfort only by the sincere confession of a sin which he had hitherto concealed. The king followed his advice, found interior peace and dismissed Giles with many tokens of gratitude. On his homeward journey the saint raised the recently deceased son of a nobleman to life. After a short stay in his monastery St. Giles went to Rome, to obtain from the Pope the confirmation of some privileges and the apostolic blessing for his community. The Pope granted his wishes, and presented him, besides, with two grand and beautifully carved doors of cedar wood for his church. St. Giles died at a ripe old age on September 1, 725. Many miracles were wrought at his tomb. LESSON ST. GILES left his native country and retired into solitude to escape the notice and applause of the world, and served God as a recluse. To lead such a life, there must be a special call from God. It is not suited to all, and even inconsistent with the duties of most men. But all are capable of disengaging their affections from the inordinate attachment to creatures, and of attaining to a pure and holy love of God. By making the service of God the motive of their thoughts and actions, they will sanctify their whole life. In whatever conditions of life we may be placed, we have opportunities of subduing our evil inclinations and mortifying ourselves by frequent self-denials, of watching over our hearts and purifying our senses by recollection and prayer. Thus each one, in his station of life, may become a saint, by making his calling an exercise of virtue and his every act a step higher to perfection and eternal glory. _Prayer of the Church_ O LORD, we beseech Thee to let us find grace through the intercession of thy blessed confessor Giles; that what we can not obtain through our merits be given us through his intercession. Through Christ our Lord Amen. XII St. Margaret, Virgin and Martyr LEGEND ST. MARGARET was the daughter of a pagan priest at Antioch. She lost her mother in infancy and was placed in the care of a nurse in the country, who was a Christian, and whose first care was to have her little charge baptized and to give the child a Christian education. Margaret grew up a modest, pious virgin, and when she returned to her father he was charmed with the grace and virtue of his daughter. He regretted only one thing; she took no part in the worship of the idols. When she told him the reason he was greatly displeased, for she stated that she was a Christian, and that nothing should separate her from the love of Christ. Her father tried every means to change her mind, and when all his endeavors failed became enraged and drove her forth from his house. Margaret returned to her nurse and became her servant, doing all kinds of menial work, and at the same time perfecting herself in virtue. About this time Emperor Diocletian began to persecute the Christians. One day Alybrius, the prefect of the city, saw Margaret, and fell in love with her. He sent a messenger to ask her in marriage. The pious virgin was filled with consternation at the proposal and replied to the messenger: "I can not be espoused to your master, because I am the spouse of Our Lord Jesus Christ. I am promised to Him, and to Him I wish to belong." When the prefect heard this, he became furious with rage, and gave orders to have the virgin brought to him by force. When she appeared before him he thus addressed her: "What is your name and condition?" She replied: "I am called Margaret, and belong to a noble family. I adore Christ and serve Him." The prefect now advised her to abandon the worship of a crucified God. Margaret asked him, "How do you know that we worship a crucified God?" The prefect replied: "From the books of the Christians." Margaret continued: "Why did you not read further on? The books of the Christians would have told you that the Crucified rose on the third day, and that He ascended into heaven. Is it love of truth to believe in the abasement of Christ and to reject His glorification, when both are related in the selfsame book?" At this reproof the prefect became angry and ordered the tender virgin to be cruelly scourged, placed on the rack, and torn with iron combs. Then she was cast into prison. There Margaret fervently thanked God for the victory she had achieved and implored His help for the combat yet in store for her. Suddenly there appeared to her the arch-enemy of mankind in the shape of a furious dragon, threatening to swallow her. The brave virgin feared him not, but made the sign of the cross, and the monster vanished. Then her desolate prison cell became suffused with heavenly light, and her heart was filled with divine consolation. At the same time her terrible wounds were suddenly healed, and not the least scar was left. Next day Margaret was again brought before the prefect. Surprised at her complete recovery from the effects of his cruelty, he remarked that no doubt it was due to the power of the pagan gods, and exhorted her to show her gratitude to them by sacrificing to the idols. Margaret maintained that she had been healed by the power of Christ alone and declared that she despised the heathen gods. At this, the rage of Alybrius knew no bounds. He ordered lighted torches to be applied to Margaret's body, and then had her cast into icy water to intensify her torture. But scarcely had this been done when a violent earthquake occurred. Her bonds were severed and she rose unscathed from the water, without a mark of the burns caused by the flaming torches. On witnessing this miracle, a great number of spectators were converted to the Faith. Finally the prefect ordered Margaret to be beheaded. Her glorious martyrdom and death occurred about the year 275. LESSON THE history of the virgin martyr St. Margaret teaches us that we can and ought to serve God even in youth. In the Old Law God commanded all the first-born and the first-fruits to be offered to Him. "Thou shalt not delay to pay thy tithes and first-fruits. Thou shalt give the first-born of thy sons to Me" (_Ex._ xxii. 29). Certainly our whole life ought to be dedicated to the service of God; but from the above command we are to understand that God especially desires our service during the early years of our life. They are our first-fruits. St. Augustine calls the years of youth the blossoms, the most beautiful flowers of life, and St. Thomas Aquinas writes: "What the young give to God in their early years, they give of the bloom, of the full vigor and beauty of life." Youth is the age beset with countless temptations. Safety is found only in the service of God, by obedience, humility, and docility. This is not so difficult as it appears, and Our Lord Himself invites you to His service, saying: "My son, give Me thy heart" (_Prov._ xxiii. 26), and, "Taste and see that the Lord is sweet" (_Ps._ xxxiii. 9). _Prayer of the Church_ WE BESEECH Thee, O Lord, grant us Thy favor through the intercession of Thy blessed virgin and martyr Margaret, who pleased Thee by the merit of her purity and by the confession of Thy might. Through Christ our Lord. Amen. XIII St Catherine, Virgin and Martyr LEGEND ST. CATHERINE was a native of Alexandria, Egypt, a city then famous for its schools of philosophy. She was a daughter of Costis, half-brother of Constantine, and of Sabinella, queen of Egypt. Her wisdom and acquirements were remarkable, the philosophy of Plato being her favorite study. While Catherine was yet young her father died, leaving her heiress to the kingdom. Her love of study and retirement displeased her subjects, who desired her to marry, asserting that her gifts of noble birth, wealth, beauty, and knowledge should be transmitted to her children. The princess replied that the husband whom she would wed must be even more richly endowed than herself. His blood must be the noblest, his rank must surpass her own, his beauty without comparison, his benignity great enough to forgive all offences. The people of Alexandria were disheartened, for they knew of no such prince; but Catherine remained persistent in her determination to wed none other. Now, it happened that a certain hermit who lived near Alexandria had a vision in which he saw the Blessed Virgin, who sent him to tell Catherine that her divine Son was the Spouse whom she desired. He alone possessed all, and more, than the requirements she demanded. The holy man gave Catherine a picture of Jesus and Mary; and when the princess had gazed upon the face of Christ she loved Him so that she could think of naught else, and the studies in which she had been wont to take delight became distasteful to her. [Illustration: The Descent of the Holy Ghost on the Blessed Virgin and the Apostles.] One night Catherine dreamed that she accompanied the hermit to a sanctuary, whence angels came to meet her. She fell on her face before them, but one of the angelic band bade her, "Rise dear sister Catherine, for the King of glory delighteth to honor thee." She rose and followed the angels to the presence of the queen of heaven, who was surrounded by angels and saints and was beautiful beyond description. The queen welcomed her and led her to her divine Son, Our Lord. But He turned from her, saying: "She is not fair and beautiful enough for me." Catherine awoke at these words and wept bitterly until morning. She then sent for the hermit and inquired what would make her worthy of the heavenly Bridegroom. The saintly recluse instructed her in the true Faith and, with her mother, she was baptized. That night, in a dream, the Blessed Virgin and her divine Son again appeared to her. Mary presented her to Jesus, saying: "Behold, she has been regenerated in the water of Baptism." Then Christ smiled on her and plighted His troth to her by putting a ring on her finger. When she awoke the ring was still there, and thenceforth Catherine despised all earthly things and longed only for the hour when she should go to her heavenly Bridegroom. After the death of Sabinella, Emperor Maximin came to Alexandria and declared a persecution against the Christians. Catherine appeared in the temple and held an argument with the tyrant, utterly confounding him. The emperor ordained that fifty of the most learned men of the empire be brought to dispute with her; but, sustained by the power of God, Catherine not only vanquished them in argument, but converted them to the true Faith. In his fury Maximin commanded that the new Christians be burned; and Catherine comforted them, since they could not be baptized, by telling them that their blood should be their baptism and the flames their crown of glory. The emperor then tried other means to overcome the virtue of the noble princess; but, failing to do this, he ordered her to be cast into a dungeon and starved to death. Twelve days later, when the dungeon was opened, a bright light and fragrant perfume filled it, and Catherine, who had been nourished by angels, came forth radiant and beautiful. On seeing this miracle, the empress and many noble Alexandrians declared themselves Christians, and suffered death at the command of the emperor. Catherine was not spared, for Maximin made a further attempt to win her. He offered to make her mistress of the world if she would but listen to him, and when she still spurned his proposals, he ordered her to the torture. She was bound to four spiked wheels which revolved in different directions, that she might be torn into many pieces. But an angel consumed the wheels by fire, and the fragments flying around killed the executioners and many of the spectators. The tyrant then ordered her to be scourged and beheaded. The sentence was carried into effect on November 25, 307. A pious legend, recognized by the Church, says that angels bore Catherine's body to Mount Sinai, and buried it there. LESSON ST. CATHERINE, for her erudition and the spirit of piety by which she sanctified it, was chosen the model and patroness of Christian philosophers. Learning, next to virtue, is the noblest quality and ornament of the human mind. Profane science teaches many useful truths, but when compared with the importance of the study of the science of the saints, they are of value only inasmuch as when made subservient to the latter. The study of the saints was to live in the spirit of Christ. This science is taught by the Church, and acquired by listening to her instructions, by pious reading and meditation. Be intent on learning this science, and order your life according to its rules. It is the "one thing necessary," for it is the foundation of all wisdom and true happiness. "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom" (_Ps._ cx. 10). _Prayer of the Church_ O GOD, who didst give the law to Moses on the summit of Mount Sinai, and by the holy angels didst miraculously transfer there the body of blessed Catherine, virgin and martyr; grant us, we beseech Thee, to come, through her intercession, to the mountain which is Christ. Through the same Christ our Lord. Amen. XIV St. Barbara, Virgin and Martyr LEGEND NICOMEDIA, a city in Asia Minor, was St. Barbara's birthplace. Her father Dioscurus was a pagan. Fearing that his only child might learn to know and love the doctrines of Christianity, he shut her up in a tower, apart from all intercourse with others. Nevertheless Barbara became a Christian. She passed her time in study, and from her lonely tower she used to watch the heavens in their wondrous beauty. She soon became convinced that the "heavens were telling the glory of God," a God greater than the idols she had been taught to worship. Her desire to know that God was in itself a prayer which He answered in His own wise way. The fame of Origen, that famous Christian teacher in Alexandria, reached even the remote tower, and Barbara sent a trusty servant with the request that he would make known to her the truth. Origen sent her one of his disciples, disguised as a physician, who instructed and baptized her. She practised her new religion discreetly while waiting for a favorable opportunity of acquainting her father with her conversion. This opportunity came in a short time. Some workmen were sent by Dioscurus to make another room in the tower, and when they had made two windows she directed them to make a third. When her father saw this additional window, he asked the reason for it. She replied, "Know, my father, that the soul receives light through three windows, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, and the three are one." The father became so angry at this discovery of her having become a Christian, that he would have killed his daughter with his sword, had she not fled to the top of the tower. He followed her, and finally had her in his power. First he wreaked his vengeance on her in blows, then clutching her by the hair he dragged her away and thrust her into a hut to prevent her escape. Next he tried every means to induce her to renounce her faith; threats, severe punishments, and starvation had no effect on the constancy of the Christian maiden. Finding himself powerless to shake his daughter's constancy, Dioscurus delivered her to the proconsul Marcian, who had her scourged and tortured, but without causing her to deny the Faith. During her sufferings, her father stood by, exulting in the torments of his child. Next night, after she had been taken back to prison, Our Lord appeared to her and healed her wounds. When Barbara appeared again before him, Marcian was greatly astonished to find no trace of the cruelties that had been perpetrated on her body. Again she resisted his importunities to deny the Faith, and when he saw that all his efforts were in vain, he pronounced the sentence of death. Barbara was to be beheaded. Her unnatural father claimed the privilege to execute it with his own hands, and with one blow severed his daughter's head from her body, on December 4, 237. At the moment of the saint's death a great tempest arose and Dioscurus was killed by lightning. Marcian, too, was overtaken by the same fate. LESSON SINCE early times St. Barbara is invoked as the patroness against lightning and explosions, and is called upon by those who desire the sacraments of the dying in their last illness, and many are the instances of the efficacy of her intercession. We all wish for a happy and blessed death. To attain it, we must make the preparation for it the great object of our life; we must learn to die to the world and to ourselves, and strive after perfection in virtue. There is no greater comfort in adversity, no more powerful incentive to withdrawing our affections from this world, than to remember the blessing of a happy death. Well prepared, death may strike us in any form whatsoever, and however suddenly, it will find us ready. We can be guilty of no greater folly than to delay our preparation for death, repentance, the reception of the sacraments, and the amendment of our life, from day to day, from the time of health to the time of illness, and in illness to the very last moments, thinking that even then we can obtain pardon. St. Augustine observes: "It is very dangerous to postpone the performance of a duty on which our whole eternity depends to the most inconvenient time, the last hour." And St. Bernard remarks: "In Holy Scripture we find one single instance of one who received pardon at the last moment. He was the thief crucified with Jesus. He is alone, that you despair not; he is alone, also, that you sin not by presumption on God's mercy." If you, therefore, wish for a happy death, prepare for it in time. _Prayer of the Church_ O GOD, who among the wonders of Thy might didst grant the victory of martyrdom also to the weaker sex, graciously grant us that we, by recalling the memory of Thy blessed virgin and martyr Barbara, through her example may be led to Thee. Through Christ our Lord. Amen. PART IV I Novenas to the Holy Helpers II Prayers and Petitions "In every thing by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your petitions be made known to God" (_Philipp._ iv. 6). "God is wonderful in His saints. The God of Israel is He who will give power and strength to His people; blessed be God" (_Ps._ lxvii. 36). Novena to Each of the Holy Helpers PREPARATORY PRAYER _For Each of the Following Novenas_ ALMIGHTY and eternal God! With lively faith and reverently worshiping Thy divine Majesty, I prostrate myself before Thee and invoke with filial trust Thy supreme bounty and mercy. Illumine the darkness of my intellect with a ray of Thy heavenly light and inflame my heart with the fire of Thy divine love, that I may contemplate the great virtues and merits of the saint in whose honor I make this novena, and following his example imitate, like him, the life of Thy divine Son. Moreover, I beseech Thee to grant graciously, through the merits and intercession of this powerful Helper, the petition which through him I humbly place before Thee, devoutly saying, "Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven." Vouchsafe graciously to hear it, if it redounds to Thy greater glory and to the salvation of my soul. Amen. I Novena in Honor of St. George Preparatory Prayer (located at the start of Part IV). PRAYER IN HONOR OF ST. GEORGE O GOD, who didst grant to St. George strength and constancy in the various torments which he sustained for our holy faith; we beseech Thee to preserve, through his intercession, our faith from wavering and doubt, so that we may serve Thee with a sincere heart faithfully unto death. Through Christ our Lord. Amen. INVOCATION OF ST. GEORGE FAITHFUL servant of God and invincible martyr, St. George; favored by God with the gift of faith, and inflamed with an ardent love of Christ, thou didst fight valiantly against the dragon of pride, falsehood, and deceit. Neither pain nor torture, sword nor death could part thee from the love of Christ. I fervently implore thee for the sake of this love to help me by thy intercession to overcome the temptations that surround me, and to bear bravely the trials that oppress me, so that I may patiently carry the cross which is placed upon me; and let neither distress nor difficulties separate me from the love of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Valiant champion of the Faith, assist me in the combat against evil, that I may win the crown promised to them that persevere unto the end. _Prayer_ MY LORD and my God! I offer up to Thee my petition in union with the bitter passion and death of Jesus Christ, Thy Son, together with the merits of His immaculate and blessed Mother, Mary ever virgin, and of all the saints, particularly with those of the holy Helper in whose honor I make this novena. Look down upon me, merciful Lord! Grant me Thy grace and Thy love, and graciously hear my prayer. Amen. II Novena in Honor of St. Blase Preparatory Prayer (located at the start of Part IV). PRAYER IN HONOR OF ST. BLASE O GOD, deliver us through the intercession of Thy holy bishop and martyr Blase, from all evil of soul and body, especially from all ills of the throat; and grant us the grace to make a good confession in the confident hope of obtaining Thy pardon, and ever to praise with worthy lips Thy most holy name. Through Christ our Lord. Amen. INVOCATION OF ST. BLASE ST. BLASE, gracious benefactor of mankind and faithful servant of God, who for the love of our Saviour didst suffer so many tortures with patience and resignation; I invoke thy powerful intercession. Preserve me from all evils of soul and body. Because of thy great merits God endowed thee with the special grace to help those that suffer from ills of the throat; relieve and preserve me from them, so that I may always be able to fulfil my duties, and with the aid of God's grace perform good works. I invoke thy help as special physician of souls, that I may confess my sins sincerely in the holy sacrament of Penance and obtain their forgiveness. I recommend to thy merciful intercession also those who unfortunately concealed a sin in confession. Obtain for them the grace to accuse themselves sincerely and contritely of the sin they concealed, of the sacrilegious confessions and communions they made, and of all the sins they committed since then, so that they may receive pardon, the grace of God, and the remission of the eternal punishment. Amen. Prayer (located in St. George's novena). III Novena in Honor of St Erasmus Preparatory Prayer (located at the start of Part IV). PRAYER IN HONOR OF ST. ERASMUS O GOD, grant us through the intercession of Thy dauntless bishop and martyr Erasmus, who so valiantly confessed the Faith, that we may learn the doctrine of this faith, practise its precepts, and thereby be made worthy to attain its promises. Through Christ our Lord. Amen. INVOCATION OF ST. ERASMUS HOLY martyr Erasmus, who didst willingly and bravely bear the trials and sufferings of life, and by thy charity didst console many fellow-sufferers; I implore thee to remember me in my needs and to intercede for me with God. Staunch confessor of the Faith, victorious vanquisher of all tortures, pray to Jesus for me and ask Him to grant me the grace to live and die in the Faith through which thou didst obtain the crown of glory. Amen. Prayer (located in St. George's novena). IV Novena to St. Pantaleon Preparatory Prayer (located at the start of Part IV). PRAYER IN HONOR OF ST. PANTALEON O GOD, who didst give to St. Pantaleon the grace of exercising charity toward his fellow-men by distributing his goods to the poor, and hast made him a special patron of the sick, grant, that we, too, show our charity by works of mercy; and through the intercession of this Thy servant preserve us from sickness. But if it be Thy will that illness should afflict us, give us the grace to bear it patiently, and let it promote our soul's salvation. Amen. INVOCATION OF ST. PANTALEON ST. PANTALEON, who during life didst have great pity for the sick and with the help of God didst often relieve and cure them; I invoke thy intercession with God, that I may obtain the grace to serve Him in good health by cheerfully fulfilling the duties of my state of life. But if it be His holy will to visit me with illness, pain, and suffering, do thou aid me with thy powerful prayer to submit humbly to His chastisements, to accept sickness in the spirit of penance and to bear it patiently according to His holy will. Amen. Prayer (located in St. George's novena). [Image: The Blessed Virgin Receives Holy Communion from St. John.] V Novena in Honor of St. Vitus Preparatory Prayer (located at the start of Part IV). PRAYER IN HONOR OF ST. VITUS GRANT us, O God, through the intercession of St. Vitus, a due estimation of the value of our soul and of its redemption by the precious blood of Thy Son Jesus Christ; so that, for its salvation, we bear all trials with fortitude. Give this Thy youthful servant and heroic martyr as a guide and protector to Christian youths, that following his example they may after a victorious combat receive the crown of justice in heaven. Through Christ our Lord. Amen. INVOCATION OF ST. VITUS ST. VITUS, glorious martyr of Christ; in thy youth thou wast exposed to violent and dangerous temptations, but in the fear of God and for the love of Jesus thou didst victoriously overcome them. O amiable, holy youth, I implore thee by the love of Jesus, assist me with thy powerful intercession to overcome the temptations to evil, to avoid every occasion of sin, and thus to preserve spotless the robe of innocence and sanctifying grace, and to bring it unstained to the judgment-seat of Jesus Christ, that I may forever enjoy the beatific vision of God which is promised to the pure of heart. Amen. Prayer (located in St. George's novena). VI Novena in Honor of St. Christophorus Preparatory Prayer (located at the start of Part IV). PRAYER IN HONOR OF ST. CHRISTOPHORUS O GOD, who didst make St. Christophorus a true Christ-bearer, who converted multitudes to the Christian faith, and who didst give him the grace to suffer for Thy sake the most cruel torments; through the intercession of this saint we implore Thee to protect us from sin, the only real evil. Preserve us, also, against harmful elementary forces, such as earthquake, lightning, fire, and flood. Amen. INVOCATION OF ST. CHRISTOPHORUS GREAT St. Christophorus, seeking the strongest and mightiest master thou didst find him in Jesus Christ, the almighty God of heaven and earth, and didst faithfully serve Him with all thy power to the end of thy life, gaining for Him countless souls and finally shedding thy blood for Him; obtain for me the grace to bear Christ always in my heart, as thou didst once bear Him on thy shoulder, so that I thereby may be strengthened to overcome victoriously all temptations and resist all enticements of the world, the devil, and the flesh, and that the powers of darkness may not prevail against me. Amen. Prayer (located in St. George's novena). VII Novena in Honor of St. Dionysius Preparatory Prayer (located at the start of Part IV). PRAYER IN HONOR OF ST. DIONYSIUS O GOD, who didst confer Thy saving faith on the people of France through Thy holy bishop and martyr Dionysius, and didst glorify him before and after his martyrdom by many miracles; grant us through his intercession that the Faith practised and preached by him be our light on the way of life, so that we may be preserved from all anxieties of conscience, and if by human frailty we have sinned, we may return to Thee speedily by true penance. Through Christ our Lord. Amen. INVOCATION OF ST. DIONYSIUS GLORIOUS servant of God, St. Dionysius, with intense love thou didst devote thyself to Christ after learning to know Him through the apostle St. Paul, and didst preach His saving name to the nations, to bring whom to His knowledge and love thou didst not shrink from martyrdom; implore for me a continual growth in the knowledge and love of Jesus, so that my restless heart may experience that peace which He alone can give. Help me by thy powerful intercession with God to serve Him with a willing heart, to devote myself with abiding love to His service, and thereby to attain the eternal bliss of heaven. Amen. Prayer (located in St. George's novena). VIII Novena in Honor of St. Cyriacus Preparatory Prayer (located at the start of Part IV). PRAYER IN HONOR OF ST. CYRIACUS O GOD, who didst grant to St. Cyriacus the grace of heroic charity and trustful resignation to Thy holy will; bestow upon us, through his intercession, the grace to walk before Thee in self-denying charity and to know and fulfil Thy will in all things. Through Christ our Lord. Amen. INVOCATION OF ST. CYRIACUS ST. CYRIACUS, great servant of God, loving Christ with all thy heart, thou didst for His sake also love thy fellow-men, and didst serve them even at the peril of thy life, for which charity God rewarded thee with the power to overcome Satan, the arch-enemy, and to deliver the poor obsessed from his dreadful tyranny; implore for me of God an effective, real, and true charity. Show thy power over Satan also in me; deliver me from his influence when he tries to tempt me. Help me to repel his assaults and to gain the victory over him in life and in death. Amen. Prayer (located in St. George's novena). IX Novena in Honor of St. Achatius Preparatory Prayer (located at the start of Part IV). PRAYER IN HONOR OF ST. ACHATIUS O GOD, who didst fortify Thy holy martyr Achatius with constancy and trustful reliance on Thee in death; grant us through his intercession at the hour of our death to be free from all anxiety and victorious in our last combat with the enemy. Through Christ our Lord. Amen. INVOCATION OF ST. ACHATIUS VALIANT martyr of Christ, St. Achatius, who preached Christ faithfully before kings and judges, and didst gain the victory over the enemies of God; help me through thy powerful intercession to resist and gain the victory over all the enemies of my salvation, over the world and its allurements, over the concupiscence of the flesh, and over the temptations of Satan. I implore thee particularly to assist me in my agony, when the powers of hell rise against me to rob my soul. Then do thou come to my aid and repel the assaults of the enemy, so that I surrender my soul into the hands of my Redeemer in faith, hope, and charity, and confiding in His infinite merits. Through the same Christ our Lord. Amen. Prayer (located in St. George's novena). X Novena in Honor of St. Eustachius Preparatory Prayer (located at the start of Part IV). PRAYER IN HONOR OF ST. EUSTACHIUS O GOD, who didst lead Thy holy martyr Eustachius safely through many trials and dangers to the glorious crown of martyrdom; enlighten and strengthen us through his intercession, that we persevere in Thy love amid the trials of this life, and by resignation to Thy holy will come forth from the darkness of this earth into the light of Thy eternal glory. Amen. INVOCATION OF ST. EUSTACHIUS HEROIC servant of God, St. Eustachius, cast from the height of earthly glory and power into the deepest misery, thou wast engaged for a long time in the labor of a menial servant, eating the bitter bread of destitution; but never didst thou murmur against the severe probation to which God subjected thee. I implore thee to aid me with thy powerful intercession, that in all conditions I may resign myself to the holy will of God, and particularly that I may bear poverty and its consequences with patience, trusting in God's providence, completely resigned to the decrees of Him who humbles and exalts, chastises and heals, sends trials and consolations, and who has promised to those who follow Him in the spirit of poverty His beatific vision throughout all eternity. Amen. Prayer (located in St. George's novena). XI Novena in Honor of St. Giles Preparatory Prayer (located at the start of Part IV). PRAYER IN HONOR OF ST. GILES O GOD, we beseech Thee to grant us through the merits and intercession of St. Giles to flee from the vanity and praise of this world, to avoid carefully all occasions of sin, to cleanse our hearts from all wickedness by a sincere confession, to leave this world in Thy love and rich in good works, and to find Thee gracious on the day of judgment. Through Christ our Lord. Amen. INVOCATION OF ST. GILES ZEALOUS follower of Christ, St. Giles; from early youth thou didst take to heart the words of our Saviour: "Learn of Me, because I am meek and humble of heart." Therefore thou didst flee from the praise and honors of the world, and wast rewarded with the grace to preserve thy heart from all sin and to persevere in a holy life to a ripe old age. I, on my part, through pride, self-confidence, and negligence, yielded to my evil inclinations, and thereby sinned grievously and often, offending my God and Lord, my Creator and Redeemer, my most loving Father. Therefore I implore thee to help me through thy mighty intercession to be enlightened by the Holy Ghost, that I may know the malice, grievousness, and multitude of my sins, confess them humbly, fully, and contritely, and receive pardon, tranquillity of heart, and peace of conscience from God. Amen. Prayer (located in St. George's novena). XII Novena in Honor of St. Margaret Preparatory Prayer (located at the start of Part IV). PRAYER IN HONOR OF ST. MARGARET O GOD, grant us through the intercession of thy holy virgin and martyr Margaret, undauntedly to confess the Faith, carefully to observe the chastity of our state of life, and to overcome the temptations of the world, the devil, and the flesh, and thereby escape the punishments of eternal damnation. Amen. INVOCATION OF ST. MARGARET ST. MARGARET, holy virgin and martyr, thou didst faithfully preserve the robe of holy innocence and purity, valiantly resisting all the blandishments and allurements of the world for the love of thy divine Spouse, Jesus Christ; help me to overcome all temptations against the choicest of all virtues, holy purity, and to remain steadfast in the love of Christ, in order to preserve this great gift of God. Implore for me the grace of perseverance in prayer, distrust of myself, and flight from the occasions of sin, and finally the grace of a good death, so that in heaven I may "follow the Lamb whithersoever He goeth." Amen. Prayer (located in St. George's novena). XIII Novena in Honor of St. Catherine Preparatory Prayer (located at the start of Part IV). PRAYER IN HONOR OF ST. CATHERINE O GOD, who didst distinguish Thy holy virgin and martyr Catherine by the gift of great wisdom and virtue, and a victorious combat with the enemies of the Faith; grant us, we beseech Thee, through her intercession, constancy in the Faith and the wisdom of the saints, that we may devote all the powers of our mind and heart to Thy service. Through Christ our Lord. Amen. INVOCATION OF ST. CATHERINE ST. CATHERINE, glorious virgin and martyr, resplendent in the luster of wisdom and purity; thy wisdom refuted the adversaries of divine truth and covered them with confusion; thy immaculate purity made thee a spouse of Christ, so that after thy glorious martyrdom angels carried thy body to Mount Sinai. Implore for me progress in the science of the saints and the virtue of holy purity, that vanquishing the enemies of my soul, I may be victorious in my last combat and after death be conducted by the angels into the eternal beatitude of heaven. Amen. Prayer (located in St. George's novena). XIV Novena in Honor of St. Barbara Preparatory Prayer (located at the start of Part IV). PRAYER IN HONOR OF ST. BARBARA O GOD, who didst adorn Thy holy virgin and martyr Barbara with extraordinary fortitude in the confession of the Faith, and didst console her in the most atrocious torments; grant us through her intercession perseverance in the fulfilment of Thy law and the grace of being fortified before our end with the holy sacraments, and of a happy death. Through Christ our Lord. Amen. INVOCATION OF ST. BARBARA INTREPID virgin and martyr, St. Barbara, through thy intercession come to my aid in all needs of my soul. Obtain for me the grace to be preserved from a sudden and unprovided death; assist me in my agony, when my senses are benumbed and I am in the throes of death. Then, O powerful patroness of the dying, come to my aid! Repel from me all the assaults and temptations of the evil one, and obtain for me the grace to receive before death the holy sacraments, that I breathe forth my soul confirmed in faith, hope, and charity, and be worthy to enter eternal glory. Amen. St. Barbara, at my last end Obtain for me the Sacrament; Assist one in that direst need When I my God and Judge must meet: That robed in sanctifying grace My soul may stand before His face. Prayer (located in St. George's novena). Novena to All the Fourteen Holy Helpers PREPARATORY PRAYER _(By St Alphonsus Liguori.)_ GREAT princes of heaven, Holy Helpers, who sacrificed to God all your earthly possessions, wealth, preferment, and even life, and who now are crowned in heaven in the secure enjoyment of eternal bliss and glory; have compassion on me, a poor sinner in this vale of tears, and obtain for me from God, for whom you gave up all things and who loves you as His servants, the strength to bear patiently all the trials of this life, to overcome all temptations, and to persevere in God's service to the end, that one day I too may be received into your company, to praise and glorify Him, the supreme Lord, whose beatific vision you enjoy, and whom you praise and glorify for ever. Amen. FIRST DAY The Devotion to the Fourteen Holy Helpers Preparatory Prayer (located at the start of the novena). MEDITATION THE practice of honoring and invoking the saints to obtain, through their intercession, help in the various needs of body and soul, is as old as the Church. At what period, however, the custom of having recourse to the fourteen saints called Holy Helpers originated, is unknown. Nevertheless it is certain that each one of them was invoked for his intercession with God since his entrance into heaven. Prayer is the Christian's resource in every difficulty: and difficulties and trials are never wanting on earth. Because the needs of mankind on earth are various, the faithful selected certain saints as intercessors in certain cases of distress, and obtained relief; hence these saints came to be regarded as special patrons in such trials, and were called Holy Helpers. PRACTICE MAKE this novena with full confidence in the power of the intercession of the Fourteen Holy Helpers. During their earthly life they devoted their whole energy to the spreading of God's kingdom and the relief and succor of their fellow-men. Much more efficiently can they do so now when they are in the enjoyment of eternal happiness, and can supplicate for us at the very throne of God. The saints _can_ help us through their intercession. God hears their prayers and He wrought miracles to confirm us in this belief, even whilst His servants sojourned here on earth. They _desire_ and are willing to help us. St. Bernard says: "In heaven hearts do not grow cold; they are rather rendered more affectionate and tender. By receiving the crown of justice the saints were not hardened against the sufferings of their brethren on earth." Therefore, in calling on them, have full confidence in their power and ability to come to your aid. _Prayer_ WE BESEECH Thee, O Lord, to hear the prayer which we send up to Thee in honor of Thy glorified servants, the Fourteen Holy Helpers: and as we can not rely upon our own justice, grant our petition through the intercession of those whose merits have made them especially dear to Thee. Through Christ our Lord. Amen. [Image: Death of the Blessed Virgin] LITANY OF THE FOURTEEN HOLY HELPERS LORD, have mercy on us. Christ, have mercy on us. Lord, have mercy on us. Christ, hear us. Christ, graciously hear us. God the Father of heaven, have mercy on us. God the Son, Redeemer of the world, have mercy on us. God the Holy Ghost, have mercy on us. Holy Trinity, one God, have mercy on us. Holy Mary, queen of martyrs, pray for us. St. Joseph, helper in all needs, pray for us. Fourteen Holy Helpers, pray for us. St. George, valiant martyr of Christ, pray for us. St. Blase, zealous bishop and benefactor of the poor, pray for us. St. Erasmus, mighty protector of the oppressed, pray for us. St. Pantaleon, miraculous exemplar of charity, pray for us. St. Vitus, special protector of chastity, pray for us. St. Christophorus, mighty intercessor in dangers, pray for us. St. Dionysius, shining mirror of faith and confidence, pray for us. St. Cyriacus, terror of hell, pray for us. St. Achatius, helpful advocate in death, pray for us. St. Eustachius, exemplar of patience in adversity, pray for us. St. Giles, despiser of the world, pray for us. St. Margaret, valiant champion of the Faith, pray for us. St. Catherine, victorious defender of the Faith and of purity, pray for us. St. Barbara, mighty patroness of the dying, pray for us. All ye Holy Helpers, pray for us. All ye saints of God, pray for us. In temptations against faith, pray for us. In adversity and trials, pray for us. In anxiety and want, pray for us. In every combat, pray for us. In every temptation, pray for us. In sickness, pray for us. In all needs, pray for us. In fear and terror, pray for us. In dangers of salvation, pray for us. In dangers of honor, pray for us. In dangers of reputation, pray for us. In dangers of property, pray for us. In dangers by fire and water, pray for us. Be merciful, spare us, O Lord! Be merciful, graciously hear us, O Lord! From all sin, deliver us, O Lord. From Thy wrath, deliver us, O Lord. From the scourge of earthquake, deliver us, O Lord. From plague, famine, and war, deliver us, O Lord. From lightning and storms, deliver us, O Lord. From a sudden and unprovided death, deliver us, O Lord. From eternal damnation, deliver us, O Lord. Through the mystery of Thy holy incarnation, deliver us, O Lord. Through Thy birth and Thy life, deliver us, O Lord. Through Thy cross and passion, deliver us, O Lord. Through Thy death and burial, deliver us, O Lord. Through the merits of Thy blessed Mother Mary, deliver us, O Lord. Through the merits of the Fourteen Holy Helpers, deliver us, O Lord. On the Day of Judgment, deliver us, O Lord! We sinners, beseech Thee, hear us. That Thou spare us, we beseech Thee, hear us. That Thou pardon us, we beseech Thee, hear us. That Thou convert us to true penance, we beseech Thee, hear us. That Thou give and preserve the fruits of the earth, we beseech Thee, hear us. That Thou protect and propagate Thy holy Church, we beseech Thee, hear us. That Thou preserve peace and concord among the nations, we beseech Thee, hear us. That Thou give eternal rest to the souls of the departed, we beseech Thee, hear us. That Thou come to our aid through the intercession of the Holy Helpers, we beseech Thee, hear us. That through the intercession of St. George Thou preserve us in the Faith, we beseech Thee, hear us. That through the intercession of St. Blase Thou confirm us in hope, we beseech Thee, hear us. That through the intercession of St. Erasmus Thou enkindle in us Thy holy love, we beseech Thee, hear us. That through the intercession of St. Pantaleon Thou give us charity for our neighbor, we beseech Thee, hear us. That through the intercession of St. Vitus Thou teach us the value of our soul, we beseech Thee, hear us. That through the intercession of St. Christophorus Thou preserve us from sin, we beseech Thee, hear us. That through the intercession of St. Dionysius Thou give us tranquillity of conscience, we beseech Thee, hear us. That through the intercession of St. Cyriacus Thou grant us resignation to Thy holy will, we beseech Thee, hear us. That through the intercession of St. Eustachius Thou give us patience in adversity, we beseech Thee, hear us. That through the intercession of St. Achatius Thou grant us a happy death, we beseech Thee, hear us. That through the intercession of St. Giles Thou grant us a merciful judgment, we beseech Thee, hear us. That through the intercession of St. Margaret Thou preserve us from hell, we beseech Thee, hear us. That through the intercession of St. Catherine Thou shorten our purgatory, we beseech Thee, hear us. That through the intercession of St. Barbara Thou receive us in heaven, we beseech Thee, hear us. That through the intercession of all the Holy Helpers Thou wilt grant our prayers, we beseech Thee, hear us. Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world, spare us, O Lord. Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world, graciously hear us, O Lord. Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world, have mercy on us, O Lord. V. Pray for us, ye Fourteen Holy Helpers. R. That we may be made worthy of the promise of Christ. _Let us Pray_ ALMIGHTY and eternal God, who hast bestowed extraordinary graces and gifts on Thy saints George, Blase, Erasmus, Pantaleon, Vitus, Christophorus, Dionysius, Cyriacus, Eustachius, Achatius, Giles, Margaret, Catherine, and Barbara, and hast illustrated them by miracles; we beseech Thee to graciously hear the petitions of all who invoke their intercession. Through Christ our Lord. Amen. O God, who didst miraculously fortify the Fourteen Holy Helpers in the confession of the Faith; grant us, we beseech Thee, to imitate their fortitude in overcoming all temptations against it, and protect us through their intercession in all dangers of soul and body, so that we may serve Thee in purity of heart and chastity of body. Through Christ our Lord. Amen. INVOCATION OF THE HOLY HELPERS FOURTEEN Holy Helpers, who served God in humility and confidence on earth and are now in the enjoyment of His beatific vision in heaven; because you persevered till death you gained the crown of eternal life. Remember the dangers that surround us in this vale of tears, and intercede for us in all our needs and adversities. Amen. Fourteen Holy Helpers, select friends of God, I honor you as mighty intercessors, and come with filial confidence to you in my needs, for the relief of which I have undertaken to make this novena. Help me by your intercession to placate God's wrath, which I have provoked by my sins, and aid me in amending my life and doing penance. Obtain for me the grace to serve God with a willing heart, to be resigned to His holy will, to be patient in adversity and to persevere unto the end, so that, having finished my earthly course, I may join you in heaven, there to praise for ever God, who is wonderful in His saints. Amen. SECOND DAY The Destiny of Man Preparatory Prayer (located at the start of the novena). MEDITATION THE Holy Helpers faithfully co-operated with God's designs concerning their eternal destiny. No obstacle could prevail on them to stray from the path of duty. Always and everywhere they fulfilled the will of God. You, too, have an eternal destiny. You are not your own master, but belong to God, whose servant and property you are. Therefore you must obey Him, and not your own inclinations; you must do His will, and not your own. God had the right of requiring our submission to Him without giving us a reward, because He is Our Lord; nevertheless He promised to give us Himself in reward for our faithful service. Ought this not be sufficient inducement for us to serve Him zealously and gratefully? Remember, moreover, that you shall be unhappy both in this and in the next world if you do not give yourself entirely to God, for whom you were created. St. Augustine says: "Thou hast created us for Thee, O Lord, and our heart remains restless till it rests in Thee." PRACTICE THANK God for the undeserved grace of creation and redemption. Make an act of contrition for having served Him so negligently. Promise amendment, and invoke the aid of God's grace through the intercession of the Holy Helpers. _Prayer_ O GOD, who according to the decrees of Thy providence hast created man for eternal bliss; grant, through the intercession of the Holy Helpers, that I may attain to my destiny by being united with Thee in this life and loving and praising Thee for ever in heaven. Amen. Litany and Prayers (located on the first day of the novena). THIRD DAY The Virtue of Faith Preparatory Prayer (located at the start of the novena). MEDITATION THE Holy Helpers were so thoroughly imbued with the virtue of divine faith, that they believed its sacred truths with perfect abandonment of their intellect, will, liberty, and whole being. They wavered not amid the severest torments, but remained firm until death in the confession of Christ. Our time is noted for assaults on the Faith and on the Church that teaches it. The Church, the depository of divine revelation, is blasphemed in her doctrine, in her precepts, in her sacraments, in her ministers, in her cult, in her entire essence. Were you never ashamed of your Catholic name? What cowardliness, what timidity, what downright malice! PRACTICE REVIVE your faith by the consideration of the example of the Holy Helpers. Do not, from human respect, neglect the sanctification of the Lord's Day, the observance of days of fast and abstinence, the reception of the holy sacraments, the profession of your belief in the real presence of Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament, etc. Meditate frequently on the words of Christ: "He that shall deny Me before men, I will also deny him before My Father who is in heaven" (_Matt._ x. 33). _Prayer_ O GOD, I beseech Thee, through the faith of the Holy Helpers, grant me the grace to treasure in my heart the doctrines of our holy faith, to believe them firmly, to confess them bravely, and to live according to their precepts, that through that same faith I may become worthy to be admitted to Thy beatific vision in heaven. Amen. Litany and Prayers (located on the first day of the novena). FOURTH DAY The Virtue of Hope Preparatory Prayer (located at the start of the novena). MEDITATION "HOPE confoundeth not" (_Rom._ v. 6). According to the commentators these words of Holy Scripture are to be understood in the sense that our works must be in conformity with that which is the object of our hope; that is, we must live in such a manner that we really merit the reward of heaven. We sin against hope also by presumption in God's mercy, by despair, and by over-confidence in our own righteousness. According to Holy Scripture we can not, of our own efficacy, perform a good act, but can do all in Him that strengthens us. All these truths are exemplified in the lives of the Holy Helpers. Their hope was based on the firm foundation of faith, and consequently, like it, firm, constant, and unwavering. PRACTICE LIKE the Holy Helpers, hope to obtain from God all things necessary to salvation, for "the Lord is good to them that hope in Him, to the soul that seeketh Him" (_Lam._ iii. 25). Live so that He can fulfil His promises. Place no obstacle to His bounty and might by a sinful life. _Prayer_ ETERNAL God of love and mercy, I thank Thee for all the benefits Thou hast conferred upon me, and hope to obtain, through the intercession of the Holy Helpers, all the graces necessary for my salvation. Through Christ our Lord. Amen. Litany and Prayers (located on the first day of the novena). FIFTH DAY The Love of God Preparatory Prayer (located at the start of the novena). MEDITATION THE love of God which inflamed the Holy Helpers showed forth in their whole life, and particularly at their death. We, too, ought to be inflamed with such love, for without it faith, wisdom, the gift of tongues, and good works in general, avail nothing; for the love of God must inspire them all. "And we know that to them that love God, all things work together unto good" (_Rom._ viii. 28). Such, and such alone, will receive the crown of life. Did not God love us first? To redeem us from sin and eternal death He spared not His only begotten, divine Son. All goods of life and fortune are gifts of His love, evidences of His infinite love. And we find it difficult to return this love? How ungrateful not to love God with your whole heart! PRACTICE IMITATE the Holy Helpers in their ardent love of God. Implore their intercession to obtain it. Meditate often on God's love for you, and your heart will be enflamed with love for Him. _Prayer_ O GOD of mercy and love, I thank Thee from all my heart for the countless graces which Thy infinite love has bestowed on me. By the ardent love which the Holy Helpers had for Thee, I implore Thee to enkindle in my heart the flame of Thy love, so that I may remain in Thee and Thou in me. Amen. Litany and Prayers (located on the first day of the novena). SIXTH DAY The Virtue of Charity Preparatory Prayer (located at the start of the novena). MEDITATION CHARITY is one of the fundamental virtues of the Christian religion. The moral doctrine preached by Christ is comprised in the words: "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with thy whole mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. And the second is like to this. Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments dependeth the whole law and the prophets" (_Matt._ xxii. 37-40). As in everything else, the Holy Helpers are our exemplars also in charity. Charity consists in wishing well to our fellow-men, rejoicing with the glad and sympathizing with the sad, doing good to all, excusing their faults whenever possible, disclosing them only when necessary, being friendly, indulgent, meek, and helpful toward them. We love our neighbor if we succor the poor and distressed, if we harbor no envy for the rich, if we esteem the just for their virtue, and hate--not the sinner--but sin. We love our neighbor if we are not content with harboring these sentiments in our heart, but show them by our actions. PRACTICE ENDEAVOR to exercise this charity according to the spirit of Christ. The love of your neighbor must not be a sentimental affection; it must not originate in casual qualities of character or rank, in inclination, etc., but must have the love of God for its motive. We must exercise charity toward all because God wills it, and in the manner in which He wills it. "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." _Prayer_ O GOD of charity, who dost will that I love my neighbor for Thy sake, grant me the grace, through the intercession of the Holy Helpers, to be animated with that spirit of charity which embraces all and excludes none, which "is patient, kind, envieth not, dealeth not perversely, is not puffed up, is not ambitious, seeketh not her own, is not provoked to anger, thinketh no evil, rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth with the truth, beareth all things, believeth all things, endureth all things, and never falleth away" (1 _Cor._ xiii. 4-8). Amen. Litany and Prayers (located on the first day of the novena). SEVENTH DAY Human Respect Preparatory Prayer (located at the start of the novena). MEDITATION BY THE conscientious fulfilment of the duties of their state of life the Holy Helpers show us that the will of God alone was the motive of all their actions. Human respect, regard for the opinion of others, did not influence them. The cowardly fear, "What will people say?" was the ruin of many a soul. The enemy of mankind is ever intent upon preventing us from doing good through human respect. He insinuates that virtue and piety are out of date and ridiculed. From human respect many a person boasts of that which ought to make him blush; he thinks it discreditable to be less remiss in his religious obligations than others. Ought the opinion and ridicule of the world influence us to prevent our pleasing God? St. Paul says: "If I yet pleased men, I should not be the servant of Christ" (_Gal._ i. 10). Our Lord Himself tells us, "He that shall deny Me before men, I will also deny him before My Father who is in heaven" (_Matt._ x. 33). PRACTICE OUR Lord says: "So let your light shine before men, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father who is in heaven" (_Matt._ v. 16). Do not stray from the path of duty on account of human respect; do not let yourself be influenced by the judgments of the world. _Prayer_ MERCIFUL God, who gavest the Holy Helpers the grace to fulfil Thy will regardless of human respect; grant that we may obtain through their intercession and merits the courage to despise the opinion of men, and ever serve Thee with a fearless heart. Amen. Litany and Prayers (located on the first day of the novena). EIGHTH DAY Prayer Preparatory Prayer (located at the start of the novena). MEDITATION THE Holy Helpers, well knowing the efficacy of prayer, assiduously devoted themselves to it. From it they drew that wonderful strength which sustained them in their combat for the Faith. Prayer is the elevation of the mind to God, intercourse with Him by acts of adoration, praise, thanksgiving, and petition. St. Chrysostom says of prayer: "Without prayer it is impossible to lead a good life; for no one can practise virtue except he humbly implores God for it, who alone can give him the necessary strength. Who ceases to love and practise prayer, no longer possesses the gifts of the Spirit. But he that perseveres in the service of God, and deems it an irreparable loss to miss constant prayer, possesses every virtue and is a friend of God." PRACTICE OFFER yourself at the beginning of each day to God, and thereby you will belong to Him throughout its whole course. Renew your consecration to Him frequently during the day by short acts of virtue and especially by a good intention, thus rendering all your work a prayer, and you will attain perfection. _Prayer_ O GOD, I implore Thee through the merits and intercession of the Holy Helpers, to grant me the spirit of prayer, that following their example I may walk in Thy presence and ever enjoy the consolation of intercourse with Thee. Through Christ our Lord. Amen. Litany and Prayers (located on the first day of the novena). NINTH DAY Perseverance Preparatory Prayer (located at the start of the novena). MEDITATION A VICTORIOUS death was the reward of the Holy Helpers' perseverance in the service of God. During this novena you have, no doubt, formed many good resolutions, exclaiming with the Royal Prophet, "And I said, now I have begun" (_Ps._ lxxvi. 11). But it happens that many, despite their good will, become remiss in the pursuit of virtue. Satan is assiduously trying to accomplish their ruin, representing to them and exaggerating the difficulties to be encountered on the path of virtue. They hesitate, falter, and finally turn back. This is the most unfortunate happening that can occur. Of the condition of such a one Our Lord Himself says: "When the unclean spirit is gone out of a man, he walketh through places without water, seeking rest; and not finding, he saith: 'I will return into my house whence I came out.' And when he is come, he findeth it swept and garnished. Then he goeth and taketh with him seven spirits more wicked than himself, and entering in they dwell there. And the last state of that man becometh worse than the first" (_Luke_ xi. 24-26). Are these words not a sufficient warning to encourage us to persevere in our good resolves? [Image: Assumption of the Blessed Virgin into Heaven.] PRACTICE IN concluding this novena, survey again the depth of that incomprehensible eternity which is awaiting you. Contemplate in spirit the endless chain of centuries following each other there in reward or in punishment. Does this thought not banish all the difficulties of perseverance? _Prayer_ O GOD, whose mercies are infinite and whose goodness is without limit, I beseech Thee through the merits and intercession of the Holy Helpers, grant me the grace of perseverance in Thy love and service to the end. Thou, who dost dispense so many favors through the Holy Helpers, despise not my prayer, but graciously hear and grant it. Amen. Litany and Prayers (located on the first day of the novena). CONCLUDING PRAYER O FAITHFUL servants of God and powerful protectors of man, Holy Helpers! Since Our Lord appointed you the heavenly advocates for our needs on earth, I confidently turn to you for help in my distress. Countless numbers praise you for aiding them with counsel in doubt, with consolation in anxiety, with health in illness, with safety in danger, with delivery from prison, and with help and assistance in all tribulations. Therefore I, too, have recourse to you, and implore you not to refuse me your aid. Give thanks to God for me for all the graces He granted me during this novena. I ascribe them to your great merits and powerful intercession. I thank you all together, and each one in particular, for your interest in my favor before the throne of God. I commend myself to your continued protection, that I may one day be united with you in heaven, there to thank the Giver of all good things and to praise Him for all eternity. Amen. Prayers of Petition and Intercession I. Three Invocations 1. GREAT friends of God, Holy Helpers, humbly saluting and venerating you, I implore your help and intercession. Bring my prayers before the throne of the Most Holy Trinity, so that I may experience in all the difficulties and trials of life the mercy of the eternal Father, the love of the incarnate divine Son, and the assistance of the Holy Ghost; that despondency may not depress me when God's wise decree imposes on my shoulders a heavy burden. Above all, I implore your assistance at the hour of death. Help me then to gain the victory over the temptations and assaults of Satan, and to leave this world hopefully trusting in God's mercy, to join you in heaven, there to praise Him for ever and ever. Amen. 2. With confiding trust I turn to you, Holy Helpers, who were selected by God before many other saints to be the special intercessors and advocates of the distressed. Obtain for me strength and courage to struggle and suffer on earth for the glory of God, for the propagation of our holy faith, and for my own perfection. You are fruitful branches of the true and living vine, Jesus Christ, for whom you heroically suffered hunger and thirst, persecution and ignominy, afflictions and adversity, tortures and death. Here on earth you were true disciples and dauntless martyrs of Christ. Assist me to follow your example and to suffer for His sake, so that I may not be parted from Him as a useless member, but persevere in His service despite all trials and tribulations of life. Knowing my inconstancy and weakness, I have recourse to you, O glorious members of the Church triumphant, and implore you to support my feeble prayers, and to bear them before the throne of the Almighty, who, for your sake, will hear them. Amen. 3. Great friends and servants of God, Holy Helpers! Humbly saluting and venerating you, I implore your help and intercession. God has promised and granted that whosoever invokes your aid shall be relieved in his needs and succored at the hour of death. Therefore I have recourse to you and confidently implore your aid. I am surrounded by difficulties and my soul is oppressed with grief. Burdened with sins, the fear of God's rigorous judgment appalls me, whilst Satan ceases not to exert all his power to accomplish my eternal ruin. Therefore I implore your assistance, powerful Holy Helpers, in my dire distress. By the penitential life you led, by the cruel tortures you suffered, and by your holy death I entreat you to pray for me. Obtain for me the remission of my sins and perseverance to the end in God's grace. Assist me in my agony and protect me against the wily assaults of Satan, that through your help I may die a happy death and enter a blissful eternity. Amen. II. Prayer in Illness COMPASSIONATE Holy Helpers, who restored health to so many through the power of the name of Jesus; behold me suffering from bodily illness and from wounds of the soul. Implore the kind, merciful Good Samaritan, your and my Lord Jesus Christ, to heal the wounds of my soul by washing them in His most precious blood, and to quicken my spirit by His sanctifying grace. If it, then, be God's holy will and for the welfare of my soul, let me experience the powerful effect of your intercession, that, restored to health, I may serve God with greater fervor, and promote your veneration together with so many who experienced your help in illness and suffering. Amen. III. Prayer for the Sick MERCIFUL Holy Helpers, look benignly upon me, who implore your intercession for a sick person. Our Lord and Redeemer Jesus Christ, who Himself went about healing and doing good, appointed you the special protectors and intercessors of the sick, and restored to bodily and spiritual health many for whom you prayed. Encouraged thereby to invoke you, I implore you to offer up to His sacred Heart all the pains and torments He suffered during His bitter passion. Offer up to Him also your own sufferings for God's glory, which you underwent during life, and in death; offer up to Him all the anguish and distress suffered by the sick person for whom I invoke your intercession. Ask Him to restore him to health of body, and to infuse into his soul the grace of salvation, so that he may devote his life with renewed vigor to the service of God and to the fulfilment of his duties, and thereby gather rich merits for eternity. But if God, in the designs of His providence, should otherwise dispose, implore for the sick person patience in his illness, resignation to the divine will, and the grace of a happy death. Assist him in his agony, and conduct his soul to the throne of the Almighty. Amen. IV. Prayer of Parents for Their Children HOLY Helpers, assist me to give thanks to God for blessing me with children. Having received them from Him, it is my duty to train them for His service. Therefore I commend them to your special protection. Guard them from sin, help them to know and fulfil their duties, preserve them from all harm of body and soul; pray for them that they may be and remain children of God. For me, obtain the grace always to take good care of them, to edify them by good example, to punish their faults wisely, to preserve their innocence, and to instruct them unto piety, so that they and I may together enjoy the eternal happiness of heaven. Amen. V. Prayer of Children for Their Parents HOLY Helpers, mighty intercessors with God in all necessities; God strictly commanded that children should love, honor, and obey their parents. Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ Himself gave them the example of submission and obedience by being subject to His mother and foster-father. I commend myself to your powerful intercession and implore you to obtain for me the grace to follow His example. For my parents I implore protection from all evil of body and soul, a long and prosperous life, and a happy death. Reward them for all the care, anxiety, labor, and trouble which they underwent patiently for my sake with the eternal crown of heavenly glory. Amen. VI. Prayer of Married People HOLY Helpers, powerful intercessors at the throne of God, by whose providence we were indissolubly joined in holy wedlock through the sacramental bonds of matrimony; obtain for us, through your intercession, the grace to dwell together in mutual love and peace, and to fulfil faithfully the duties of our state of life; that following the example of the saints and elect who lived in wedlock, we may merit God's grace and blessing by a virtuous life here on earth, and united in heaven praise and bless Him for ever. Amen. PART V General Devotions "The Lord is nigh unto all them that call upon Him, to all that call upon Him in truth. He will do the will of them that fear Him, and He will bear their prayer and save them" (_Ps._ cxliv. 18, 19). "Rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation, instant in prayer" (_Rom._ xii. 12). Morning Prayers On awaking, sign yourself with the sign of the cross, saying: IN THE name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen. I rise in the name of Our Lord Jesus Christ, who redeemed me by His precious blood. Bless, guide, and protect me from all evil, O Lord! Strengthen me to all good and lead me to eternal life. Amen. After dressing, kneel and say: My Lord and my God! I prostrate myself before the throne of Thy divine Majesty, and give Thee infinite thanks, O Lord, that I have passed this night safely and have not died in my sins, but was preserved by Thy bounty for Thy further service. I offer up to Thee all that I shall do and suffer to-day, and unite it with the prayers, labors, and sufferings of Our Lord Jesus Christ and of His blessed Mother Mary. OFFERING TAKE, O Lord, and receive all my liberty, my memory, my understanding, and my whole will. Thou hast given me all that I am and all that I possess; I surrender it all to Thee that Thou mayest dispose of it according to Thy will. Give me only Thy love and Thy grace; with these I will be rich enough, and will have no more to desire. Indulgence. 300 days, once a day. (Leo XIII, May 26, 1883.) Acts of Faith, Hope, and Charity MY LORD and God! I most firmly believe all that Thou hast revealed and all that Thy holy Church believes and teaches, because Thou, who art infallible Truth, hast so revealed and commanded. My Lord and God! Because Thou art almighty, infinitely good and merciful, I hope that by the merits of the passion and death of Jesus Christ, our Saviour, Thou wilt grant me eternal life, which Thou hast promised to all who shall do the works of a good Christian, as I purpose to do by Thy help. My Lord and God! Because Thou art the highest and most perfect good, I love Thee with my whole heart, and above all things; and rather than offend Thee, I am ready to lose all things else; and for Thy love, I love and desire to love my neighbor as myself. Indulgence. (1) A plenary indulgence, once a month, for devoutly making these acts daily; under the usual conditions. (2) A plenary indulgence at the hour of death, under the same conditions. (3) Seven years and seven quarantines, every time. (Benedict XIV, January 28, 1728.) The same Pope declared that it is not necessary to use any set formula, but that any form of words may be used, provided it expresses the particular motive of each of the three theological virtues. To the Blessed Virgin Mary Hail Mary, etc. MY QUEEN, my Mother! I give myself entirely to thee; and to show my devotion to thee I consecrate to thee this day my eyes, my ears, my mouth, my heart, my whole being, without reserve. Wherefore, good Mother, as I am thine own, keep me, guard me, as thy property and possession. Indulgence. (1) 100 days, once a day. (2) A plenary indulgence, once a month, for saying it every day; under the usual conditions. (Pius IX, Aug. 5, 1851.) To the Angel Guardian ANGEL of God, my guardian dear, To whom His love committed me here, Ever this day be at my side, To light and guard, to rule and guide! Amen. Indulgence. (1) 100 days, every time. (2) A plenary indulgence on the feast of the holy Guardian Angels, for saying it morning and evening throughout the year; under the usual conditions. (3) A plenary indulgence at the hour of death, for saying it often during life. (Pius VI, Oct 2, 1795, and June 11, 1796.) (4) A plenary indulgence, once a month, for saying it daily; under the usual conditions. (Pius VII, May 15, 1821.) Evening Prayers ETERNAL and merciful God! I adore Thee and give Thee thanks for all the graces and benefits which Thou hast conferred upon me during my whole life, and particularly during this day. May the saints and elect, especially the Holy Helpers, praise and thank Thee for me. Enlighten me now through Thy holy Spirit, and let me know whether and how I have offended Thee to-day in thought, word, deed, and omission of duty. Examine your conscience. An Act of Contrition O MY God! I am deeply sorry for all my sins, for those I committed to-day, and for those of my whole life, because thereby I offended Thy supreme and most loving goodness. Pardon me for the sake of Jesus, Thy Son, who shed His most precious blood on the cross for our sins. With the help of Thy grace, I firmly resolve to amend my life, and rather to die than again offend Thee by a mortal sin. PETITION PROTECT me and mine and all men during this night, and through the intercession of the blessed Virgin Mary and of the Holy Helpers preserve us from all dangers of body and soul. Keep away from us sickness, fire, and calamities of every kind. Protect us against the assaults of the wicked and of Satan. Into Thy hands I commend my body and soul; let me rest in Thy most holy wounds. Visit, we beseech Thee, O Lord, this habitation, and repel from it all the snares of the enemy; let Thy holy angels dwell herein to preserve us in peace, and may Thy blessings be upon us for ever. Through Christ our Lord. Amen. To the Sacred Heart of Jesus (_Prayer of St Alphonsus._) ADORABLE Heart of my Jesus, Heart created expressly for the love of men! Until now I have shown toward Thee only ingratitude. Pardon me, O my Jesus! Heart of my Jesus, abyss of love and of mercy, how is it possible that I do not die of sorrow when I reflect on Thy goodness to me and my ingratitude to Thee? Thou, my Creator, after having created me, hast given Thy blood and Thy life for me; and, not content with this, Thou hast invented a means of offering Thyself up every day for me in the Holy Eucharist, exposing Thyself to a thousand insults and outrages. O Jesus, do Thou wound my heart with a great contrition for my sins, and a lively love for Thee. Through Thy tears and Thy blood give me the grace of perseverance in Thy fervent love until I breathe my last sigh. Amen. To the Blessed Virgin Mary REMEMBER, O most gracious Virgin Mary, that never was it known that any one who fled to thy protection, implored thy help, and sought thy intercession, was left unaided. Inspired with this confidence, I fly unto thee, O Virgin of virgins, my Mother! To thee I come; before thee I stand, sinful and sorrowful. O Mother of the Word incarnate, despise not my petitions, but in thy mercy hear and answer me. Amen. Indulgence. (1) 300 days, every time, (2) A plenary indulgence, once a month, for having said it daily; under the usual conditions. (Pius IX, December 11, 1846.) Litany of Loreto (located in the list of litanies). To St. Joseph GUARDIAN of virgins and father, holy Joseph, to whose faithful care Christ Jesus, very innocence, and Mary, Virgin of virgins, were committed; I pray and beg of thee by these dear pledges, Jesus and Mary, free me from all uncleanness, and make me with spotless mind, pure heart, and chaste body, ever most chastely to serve Jesus and Mary all the days of my life. Amen. Indulgence. 100 days, once a day. (Pius IX, Feb. 4, 1877.) [Illustration: The Crowning of the Blessed Virgin in Heaven.] Before Retiring (_Prayer of St. Alphonsus._) MY LORD and God Jesus Christ! I adore Thee and give Thee thanks for all the graces which Thou hast granted me to-day. I offer up to Thee my rest and every moment of this night, and implore Thee to preserve me from all sin. Therefore I place myself into the wound of Thy sacred side, and beneath the protecting mantle of my Mother Mary. May Thy holy angels assist me and watch over my peace, and may Thy holy blessing remain with me. Indulgence. 60 days, once a day, also for the souls in purgatory. (Leo XIII, June 30, 1898.) INVOCATION JESUS, Mary, and Joseph, I give you my heart and my soul. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, assist me in my last agony. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, may I breathe forth my soul in peace with you. Indulgence. 100 days for the recital of any one of these invocations, 300 days for all three. (Pius VII, Aug. 26, 1814.) Prayers at Holy Mass Preparatory Prayer ALMIGHTY and eternal God! I appear in Thy presence to assist at the most holy sacrifice of the body and blood of Jesus Christ, Thy Son, my Redeemer, and to offer it up jointly with the priest and the faithful here present, in grateful remembrance of His passion and death, for the promotion of Thy glory, and for my salvation. Together with all the holy Masses that are celebrated throughout the world, I offer up this august sacrifice for the following intentions: To adore Thee, O my God, as Thou dost deserve to be adored; to give Thee due thanks for the innumerable benefits which I owe to Thy bounty; to make reparation for the many offenses I have committed; to appease Thy just anger, and to invoke Thy infinite mercy for me, for Thy holy Church, for the whole world, and for the souls in purgatory. Amen. At the Beginning of Mass O HEAVENLY Father! Hear the prayer of Thy holy Church invoking Thy divine Majesty in the name of Our Lord Jesus Christ, to come to the aid of Thy children in all their needs. Turn not from us Thy gracious eyes, but deliver us from all evil, so that we may live to please Thee, die in Thy love, and enter the kingdom of glory. Amen. At the Gospel ALMIGHTY God, Thou source of all truth, holiness, and justice; having spoken in the Old Law by the mouth of Thy prophets, Thou spokest in the fulness of time through Thy divine Son Jesus Christ, and speakest now through Thy holy Church, appointed by Thee the Teacher of truth. We thank Thee for the saving doctrines entrusted to her for our good, and implore Thy grace to practise them and to please Thee by all our actions. At the Credo Say the Apostles' Creed. At the Offering ALMIGHTY and eternal God! Look graciously on the forms of bread and wine offered up to Thee on the altar by the priest, imploring Thee to bless and sanctify them for the eucharistic sacrifice of the New Law. With this sacrifice, O my God, I offer up to Thee my heart with all its affections, desires, and inclinations. Sanctify my thoughts, words, and deeds, that they may become a sacrifice acceptable and pleasing to Thee. At the Preface TO THEE, O Lord, I raise my heart in gratitude for all Thy mercies. For truly meet and just, right and salutary is it for us to give Thee always and everywhere praise and thanks, O holy Lord, almighty Father and eternal God, through Christ our Lord; through whom the angels and archangels, the cherubs and the seraphs praise Thy majesty and adore Thy might. With them I unite my voice, joining in their hymns of praise, and saying: At the Sanctus HOLY, holy, holy, Lord, God of hosts. Heaven and earth are filled with Thy glory. Hosanna in the highest. Blessed is He that cometh in the name of the Lord. Hosanna in the highest. At the Canon O GOD! Let my prayer be acceptable to Thee, and graciously hear the intercession which I make confiding in the virtue of this holy sacrifice. I commend to Thy mercy our holy Father, N., our bishop, N., and all bishops and priests of Thy holy Church. Let Thy kingdom be spread more and more all over the earth; grant peace and concord to the nations; protect our country; preserve peace and love in all families. Remember graciously my parents, brothers, sisters, and relatives, my benefactors, my enemies, and all for whom I am in justice or charity bound to pray. At the Elevation HAIL, thou body of my Saviour, conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of Mary the immaculate Virgin! With profound humility I adore Thee. Lord, have mercy on me! Eternal Father, I offer Thee the precious blood of Jesus, in satisfaction for my sins, and for the wants of holy Church. Indulgence. 100 days, every time. (Pius VII, Sept. 22, 1817.) After the Elevation MOST amiable Jesus! Thou art now present on the altar, God and man, really, truly, and essentially. Divine victim for our sins, have mercy on us! Be our mediator with Thy Father; avert from us the punishment we have deserved for our sins, deliver us from all dangers that threaten us, and from all evil. Promote the welfare of Thy Church, and remember in Thy mercy those who have gone before us with the sign of faith and rest in peace. (_Remember the departed for whom you intend to pray._) To these, O Lord, and to all that sleep in Christ, grant, we beseech Thee, a place of refreshment, light, and peace. Also to us sinners, Thy servants, confiding in the multitude of Thy mercies, grant some part and fellowship with Thy saints, through whose intercession we invoke Thy favor, and into whose company we beseech Thee to admit us, not in consideration of our merit, but of Thy own pardon. Through Christ our Lord. Amen. At the Pater Noster INSTRUCTED by Thy saving precepts and following Thy divine directions, we presume to say: Our Father, etc. At the Agnus Dei LAMB of God, who takest away the sins of the world, have mercy on us. Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world, have mercy on us. Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world, give us peace. At Communion LORD, I am not worthy that Thou shouldst enter under my roof; say but the word, and my soul shall be healed. (_Three times._) Spiritual Communion O JESUS, I firmly believe that Thou art truly present in the Blessed Sacrament. I see Thee therein full of love, willing to pardon us, anxious to be united with us. I wish most earnestly to respond to this Thy desire and love. I detest all the sins by which I have ever displeased Thee. Pardon me, O Lord! I desire to receive Thee into my heart, and since I now can not receive Thee sacramentally, come at least spiritually to me. I embrace Thee, I unite myself with Thee as if Thou wert really present in my heart. With all my love I cling to Thee. Preserve me from sin, that I may never be separated from Thee, but remain united with Thee for ever. Indulgence. 60 days, once a day. Also for the suffering souls. (Leo XIII, June 30, 1893.) At the Blessing BLESS me, O Lord, by the hand of Thy priest, and let the power of this blessing remain upon me for ever. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen. At the Last Gospel O JESUS, incarnate Word of the eternal Father, Thou true light which enlightens the world! I give thanks to Thee at all times for having dwelt among us, the only-begotten Son of the Father, full of grace and truth. Amen. Prayers after Mass Hail Mary, etc. (_Three times._) Salve Regina HAIL, holy queen, Mother of mercy, our life, our sweetness, and our hope! To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve; to thee do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this vale of tears. Turn then, most gracious advocate, thine eyes of mercy toward us, and after this our exile show unto us the blessed fruit of thy womb, Jesus. O clement, O loving, O sweet Virgin Mary! V. Pray for us, O holy Mother of God. R. That we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ. _Let Us Pray._ O GOD, our refuge and our strength! Look down with favor upon Thy people crying to Thee; and through the intercession of the glorious and immaculate Virgin Mary, Mother of God, of her spouse, blessed Joseph, of thy holy apostles Peter and Paul, and all Thy saints, mercifully and graciously hear the prayers which we pour forth to Thee for the conversion of sinners and for the liberty and exaltation of holy mother Church. Through Christ our Lord. Amen. St. Michael the archangel, defend us in battle; be our protection against the malice and snares of the devil. Command him, O God, we humbly beseech Thee, and do thou, O prince of the heavenly hosts, by the divine power, cast into hell Satan and the other evil spirits who roam through the world seeking the ruin of souls. Amen. Indulgence. 300 days. (Leo XIII, September 25, 1888.) Prayers for Confession Before Confession MERCIFUL God! I give infinite thanks to Thee for the many and great graces Thou hast bestowed upon me during my whole life. Would that I had never been ungrateful to Thee, that I never had offended Thee. But I have sinned exceedingly and often, and have done so again since my last confession. Therefore I come to Thee, imploring Thee in profoundest humility to give me Thy light and Thy grace, that I may know and acknowledge all my sins, faults, and transgressions, be truly sorry for them, sincerely confess them, do penance, and amend my life; for Thy greater glory and for the salvation of my soul. Examine your conscience. SUPREME God and Lord! A poor sinner, I cast myself at the throne of Thy divine Majesty, and contritely confess that I have sinned in thought, word, and deed, and through the omission of my duties. I am heartily sorry that I was ungrateful to Thee and have deserved to be punished in this life and in the life to come. Above all I am sorry because by my sins I have offended Thee, my supreme and infinite God, who art worthy to be loved and honored above all else for Thy supreme goodness and mercy. I detest and abhor my sins above all other evils, and wish I had never committed them. Humbly I implore Thy pardon, and confidently hope to obtain it through the merits of the blood of Jesus Christ shed for us poor sinners, and through those of the Blessed Virgin Mary, of the Holy Helpers, and of all the saints. I firmly purpose to amend my life, to avoid all occasions of sin, to use the means for conquering my passions, and to practise virtue by ordering my life according to Thy divine will and pleasure, and rather to die than to offend Thee again, my God and Lord. I am now ready to make reparation to Thy divine Justice for all the offenses of which I have been guilty against Thee, as far as is in my power. Therefore I will confess my sins sincerely, contritely, fully, and perform the penance imposed upon me. Before entering the confessional. The Lord be in my heart and on my lips that I may worthily and competently confess my sins. After Confession O GOD of infinite mercy! I give Thee due thanks, and praise Thee for having admitted me to the confession of my sins and for having, through Thy minister, granted me absolution for them. I implore Thee by the merits of Jesus Christ, Thy Son, of Mary, His most blessed Mother, of the Holy Helpers, and of all the saints, to accept my confession, and in Thy infinite mercy to condone and amend all the defects and faults I committed in making it, and to ratify in heaven the absolution I received on earth. O my Jesus! How blind I was in not knowing Thee and preferring transitory beauty and earthly attractions to Thy grace and love, and thereby offending Thee! Now I acknowledge my fault, and am convinced that it is my duty and privilege to love Thee above all things. Too late I have learned it, but I shall zealously strive to make reparation for my past neglect. Therefore I renounce the pleasures, vanities, and joys of this deceitful world, and abhor sin and all that leads to it. In the future nothing shall ever part me from Thy love. From this moment on I am resolved nevermore to offend Thee. Confirm, O Jesus, this my resolution, and with Thy almighty power strengthen my frailty. Seal my purpose of amendment with the bestowal of Thy grace, and preserve me in Thy grace and love unto the end. Amen. Prayers for Holy Communion BEFORE COMMUNION An Act of Faith MY LORD and Saviour Jesus Christ! I firmly believe that Thou art really present in the Blessed Sacrament. I believe it contains Thy body and blood, Thy soul and divinity. I acknowledge these truths, I believe these wonders. I adore Thy power which has wrought them; I praise Thy infinite goodness which has prepared them for me. "I will praise Thee, my God, with my whole heart, and will recount all Thy admirable works; I will rejoice in Thee, and bless Thy holy name" (_Ps._ ix. 2, 3). In this faith, and with this acknowledgment, I presume to approach this adorable banquet, wherein Thou bestowest on me the divine food of Thy body and blood to nourish my soul. Grant, O Jesus, that I may approach Thee with such a sense of reverence and humility as is due to Thy divine Majesty. Who am I, O God, that Thou shouldst work such wonders for my sake? Grant, O Lord, that I be not altogether unworthy of them, and that I may now receive Thee with a pure heart, a clean conscience, and a sincere and lively faith. Pardon my sins, which have rendered me most unworthy to approach Thee. I detest them from the bottom of my heart, because they are displeasing to Thee, my God. I renounce them for ever, and promise to be faithful to Thee. An Act of Hope IN THEE, sweet Jesus, I place all my hope, because Thou alone art my salvation, my strength, my refuge, and the foundation of all my happiness. Were it not for the confidence I place in Thy merits, and in the precious blood Thou didst shed for my redemption, I would not presume to partake of this banquet. Encouraged, therefore, by Thy goodness, I come to Thee as one sick to his physician, as a condemned criminal to his powerful intercessor. Heal me as my physician, and as my powerful advocate deliver me from the sentence of sin and death. It is in Thy mercy that I put all my trust. Have pity, therefore, O Jesus, on me, and save me, for Thou forsakest none that place their hope in Thee. An Act of Love O DIVINE Redeemer, how strong was the force of Thy love, that, being about to depart from this world to Thy eternal Father, Thou didst provide for us this divine banquet, enriched with all heavenly sweetness! It was through an excess of Thy love that Thou hast left us Thy body and blood for the food and nourishment of our souls; that, as Thou didst unite Thyself to our humanity, so we might be partakers of Thy divinity. I desire to love Thee, my Jesus, who art my only comfort in this place of banishment, the only hope of my infirm soul, my happiness above all I can enjoy in this life. I love Thee, my God, with my whole heart, with my whole soul, and with all my mind and strength. I wish that, as every moment is an increase of my life, so it may also be of my love toward Thee. I desire, with all the affections and powers of my soul, that, as the inmost thanks are due to Thee, so they may be returned to Thee by all the faithful, for this divine food, which is our refreshment, support, strength, armor, and defense in all our miseries; and that my love may never cease, inflame my heart with the fire of heaven, that it may continue burning till, nature and corruption being consumed, I may at length be transformed into Thee. Come, O Lord, hasten to release me from the bonds of sin, and prepare me for the blessing Thou art now about to bestow on me. An Act of Desire MY LORD and Saviour, Jesus Christ! "As the heart panteth after the fountains of waters so my soul panteth after Thee, O God!" (_Ps._ xlii. 1). Tired with my own evil ways, I now return to Thee, to taste Thy banquet, that my soul may be refreshed. I henceforth despise all human consolations, that I may be comforted by Thee, my only good, my God and Saviour, whom I love above all things and desire to entertain within my heart with as much devotion and affection as is conceived by Thy chosen servants, who now sit at Thy table in celestial bliss. And however I may have been wanting hitherto in my duty, I now for ever renounce my folly and weakness, and from my heart request that for the future my joy, my relief, my treasure, and rest may be entirely centered in Thee. May I never desire anything besides Thee, and may all things seem contemptible and as nothing without Thee, O my God! An Act of Fear O MY God and Saviour, it is with fear and trembling that I approach Thy banquet, having nothing to confide in but Thy goodness and mercy, being of myself a sinner, destitute of all virtue. My soul and body are defiled with many crimes, my thoughts and tongue have been under no restraint. I have frequently resolved to amend, and yet where do I remain but in the midst of sin and vice? How little pains do I take to recover from this misery and return to Thee, to whom I have repeatedly promised to be faithful! These thoughts cause me to fear that what Thou hast mercifully ordained for my salvation, I should now receive to my judgment and condemnation. In this wretched condition I hasten to Thee; to Thee I expose all my wounds, to Thee I disclose my depravity. Look, therefore, on me with the eyes of compassion, and have mercy on me, O Lord and Saviour! [Illustration: The Mother of Our Saviour.] An Act of Humility O IMMENSE, almighty, and incomprehensible God, who am I, that Thou shouldst vouchsafe to come to be my food, and to take Thy habitation within my soul? The consideration of Thy greatness and my unworthiness penetrates me with awe and confusion. With the utmost sincerity I can only declare the extent of my misery, and admire that infinite goodness which induces Thee to visit personally the lowest and basest of Thy creatures. Receive, then, Thy unworthy servant into the compassionate arms of Thy mercy. Cast all my sins out of Thy sight, and with the tenderness of a loving father extend Thy arms to receive me; and let me effectually experience the truth of Thy prophet's words: "A sacrifice to God is an afflicted spirit; a contrite and humble heart, O God, Thou wilt not despise" (_Ps._ l. 19). IMMEDIATELY BEFORE COMMUNION LORD, I am not worthy that Thou shouldst enter under my roof: say but the word, and my soul shall be healed. The body of Our Lord Jesus Christ preserve my soul to life everlasting. AFTER COMMUNION An Act of Thanksgiving O JESUS, my God and Saviour! I return Thee thanks for having, out of Thy pure mercy, without any desert of mine, been pleased to feed my soul with Thine own most sacred body and blood. Suffer me sooner to be forgetful of myself than to be ever unmindful of this great favor. Although I have hitherto been ungrateful, with the help of Thy grace I shall be so no more. But what return can I make Thee, being of myself insolvent, indigent, and miserable? The sacrifice of all that I am or have is not worthy to be presented to Thee; but, behold I offer Thee Thyself, and consider all my debts as abundantly discharged. May Thy infinite mercy be for ever exalted for having given me such an excellent means of repaying Thee to the full. O that I could ever remember Thee, think of Thee, ever love Thee alone! Imprint the memory of what Thou didst for me so deeply in my heart, that I spend my whole life in thanking Thee for all Thy benefits, but especially for this banquet of Thy love. Amen. An Act of Adoration UNDER the sacred veil of Thy eucharistic presence, where Thy love of man conceals the splendor of Thy majesty, I most humbly adore Thee, O almighty God! The grandeur of the heavens is as nothing in Thy sight; they shall perish, but Thou shalt remain for ever. The earth Thou hast poised in Thy hand. The ocean is before Thee but as a drop of water. All nature bows and trembles in Thy presence. How, then, shall I extol Thee, immortal King of glory? What homage can I give in proportion to Thy greatness? Thou art the perfect image of Thy Father's substance. Thou art the splendor of His glory. Thou art His almighty Word, supporting all things. Thee He has seated at His right hand. Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever; a scepter of justice is the scepter of Thy reign. I bow before Thy sacred Majesty. I acknowledge with the sincerest gratitude that Thou art my redeemer, my creator, the supreme arbiter of my eternal destiny. I desire to humble myself as profoundly for Thy sake as Thou art humbled for my love in the center of my soul, and to consecrate to the glory of Thy name the whole extent of my being. Amen. An Act of Oblation O MY Saviour! What pledge can I give as an earnest of the gratitude I owe to Thee? I have nothing worthy of Thee, and if I had, I have nothing but what is Thine on several accounts. But such is Thy goodness as to be content to accept from us what is already Thine. Wherefore, behold, I offer to Thee my body and soul, which are both now sanctified by the honor of Thy divine presence. I consecrate them to Thee for ever, since Thou hast chosen them for Thy temple; my body to be continually employed in Thy service, and nevermore to become an instrument of sin; my soul to know Thee, to love Thee and be evermore faithful to Thee. And as I am now resolved to serve Thee with body and soul, I will take pains to correct their evil inclinations. I will declare war against myself, renounce my wonted pleasures, my delights, my passions, my anger, my self-love, my pride, my own will, and, in fine, whatever may offend Thee. Offering and Petition ALMIGHTY God, I offer Thee this holy communion in union with the superabundant merits of Jesus Christ, Thy beloved Son, and the infinite love of His adorable Heart; in union with the Blessed Virgin and the ardent love of her immaculate heart; in union with the Holy Helpers and all the happy souls who enjoy Thy glorious vision in heaven, and with all the just on earth. O my God and Saviour, Jesus Christ, present in me in the eucharistic species; fill me with that lively faith, profound humility, tender confidence, pure conscience, and ardent love, with which so many happy souls are inflamed in partaking of this sacred banquet, and supply by Thy mercy all my deficiencies. I offer my communion to render Thee the honor and glory which are due to Thy infinite majesty; to satisfy Thy justice, which I have provoked by my sins; to thank Thee for the innumerable benefits which I have received from Thy bounty; and to obtain from Thy infinite mercy the graces necessary for me; particularly the grace to subdue my predominant passion and to acquire the virtue in which I am most deficient; but especially the grace of a happy death. I likewise offer my communion, O merciful Father, in memory of the passion and death of Thy dear Son, my divine Redeemer, to love Him with more ardor and perfection; to participate in the merits of His labors and sufferings; to acquire His spirit; to imitate His virtues; to model my life on His, and to make His adorable Heart a public reparation for all the sacrilegious communions, irreverences, and profanations which are committed against Him in this sacrament of His love. I offer it to thank Thee, O God, for all the graces Thou hast bestowed on mankind, particularly for all those Thou hast conferred on Thy blessed Mother, on all the angels and saints, especially on my guardian angel, on my holy patron, and on the Holy Helpers. I offer it, likewise, for the triumph of our holy religion, for the exaltation of the Catholic Church, for the conversion of infidels, heretics, schismatics, and all those who are in the unhappy state of sin. Also for the needs of my relatives, friends, benefactors, and enemies; for the perseverance of the just, the comfort of the afflicted, and the deliverance of the souls in purgatory; in a word, for all those for whom I am bound to pray; and I desire to enter into the intentions requisite for gaining the indulgences granted by the Church to-day for worthy communicants. INVOCATIONS SOUL of Christ, sanctify me! Body of Christ, save me! Blood of Christ, inebriate me! Water from the side of Christ, wash me! Passion of Christ, strengthen me! O good Jesus, hear me! Within Thy wounds, hide me! Permit me not to be separated from Thee! From the malignant enemy defend me! In the hour of my death call me! And bid me come to Thee, That, with Thy saints, I may praise Thee For ever and ever. Amen. Indulgence, (1) 300 days, every time. (2) 7 years, once a day, after receiving communion. (3) A plenary indulgence, once a month, to all who have the pious custom of saying it at least once a day for a month; under the usual conditions. (Pius IX, January 9, 1854.) Prayer to Jesus Crucified [Illustration: A crucifix] LOOK down upon me, good and gentle Jesus, while before Thy face I humbly kneel, and with burning soul pray and beseech Thee to fix deep in my heart lively sentiments of faith, hope, and charity, true contrition for my sins, and a firm purpose of amendment; while I contemplate with great love and tender pity Thy five wounds, pondering over them within me, and calling to mind the words which David Thy prophet said of Thee, my Jesus: "They pierced my hands and my feet; they numbered all my bones" (_Ps._ xxi. 17, 18). Indulgence. A plenary indulgence, under the usual conditions, if said before an image or picture of the crucified Redeemer, after holy communion. (Pius IX, July 31, 1858.) Visit to the Blessed Sacrament (_Prayer of St. Alphonsus._) LORD Jesus Christ, who through the love which Thou bearest to man, dost remain with them day and night in this sacrament, full of mercy and love, expecting, inviting, and receiving all who come to visit Thee; I believe that Thou art present in the Sacrament of the Altar. From the abyss of my nothingness I adore Thee, and I thank Thee for all the favors which Thou hast bestowed upon me, particularly for having given me Thyself in this sacrament, for having given me for my advocate Thy most holy Mother Mary, and for having called me to visit Thee in this church. I this day salute Thy most loving Heart, and I wish to salute it for three ends: first, in thanksgiving for this great gift; second, in compensation for all the injuries Thou hast received from Thy enemies in this sacrament; third, I wish by this visit to adore Thee in all places in which Thou art least honored and most abandoned in this holy sacrament. My Jesus, I love Thee with my whole heart. I am sorry for having hitherto offended Thy infinite goodness. I purpose, with the assistance of Thy grace, nevermore to offend Thee; and at this moment, miserable as I am, I consecrate my whole being to Thee. I give Thee my entire will, all my affections and desires, and all that I have. From this day forward, do what Thou wilt with me and with whatsoever belongs to me. I ask and desire only Thy holy love, the gift of final perseverance, and the perfect accomplishment of Thy will. I recommend to Thee the souls in purgatory, particularly those who were most devoted to the Blessed Sacrament and to most holy Mary; and I also recommend to Thee all poor sinners. Finally, my dear Saviour, I unite all my affections with the affections of Thy most loving Heart; and thus united I offer them to Thy eternal Father, and I entreat Him, in Thy name and for Thy sake, to accept them. Indulgence. (1) 300 days, every time this prayer is said before the Blessed Sacrament. (2) A plenary indulgence, once a month, for saying it every day for a month; under the usual conditions. (Pius IX, Sept. 7, 1854.) An Act of Oblation to the Sacred Heart DIVINE Heart of my Jesus! I adore Thee with all the powers of my soul, which I consecrate to Thee for ever, with my thoughts, my words, my works, and my whole self. I purpose to offer to Thee, as far as I can, acts of adoration, love, and glory, like unto those which Thou offerest to Thy eternal Father. Be Thou, I beseech Thee, the repairer of my transgressions, the protector of my life, my refuge and asylum in the hour of death. By Thy sighs, and by that sea of bitterness in which Thou wast plunged for me throughout Thy whole mortal life, grant me true contrition for my sins, contempt of earthly things, a burning desire of eternal glory, trust in Thy infinite merits, and final perseverance in Thy grace. Heart of Jesus, all love! I offer Thee these humble prayers for myself and for all who unite with me in spirit to adore Thee. Vouchsafe out of Thy great goodness to hear and answer them, chiefly for that one among us who will first end this mortal life. Sweet Heart of Jesus! pour into his heart, in his death agony, Thine inward consolations; receive him within Thy sacred wound; cleanse him from all stains in that furnace of love, so that Thou mayest soon open to him the gates of Thy eternal glory, there to intercede with Thee for all those who tarry yet in this land of exile. Most holy Heart of my most loving Jesus! For myself, a wretched sinner, and for all who unite with me in adoring Thee, I purpose to renew and offer to Thee these acts of adoration and these prayers at every moment and to the last instant of my life. I recommend to Thee, my Jesus, our holy Church, Thy well-beloved spouse and our true mother; the souls who are following the path of justice, poor sinners, the afflicted, the dying, all men on the face of the entire earth. Let not Thy blood be shed in vain for them; and vouchsafe, lastly, to apply it for the relief of the souls in purgatory, and above all, for those who in life were foremost in their devotion to Thee. Most loving heart of Mary, which, amongst the hearts of all God's creatures, is at once the purest and the most inflamed with love for Jesus, and the most compassionate toward us poor sinners, obtain for us from the Heart of Jesus, our Redeemer, all graces which we ask of thee. Mother of mercies, one throb, a single beat of thy burning heart, offered by thee to the Heart of Jesus, has power to console us to the full. Grant us, then, this favor. And then the Heart of Jesus, through the filial love He had for thee, and will ever have, will not fail to hear and answer our request. Amen. DAILY OFFERING O LORD Jesus Christ! In union with that divine intention, with which Thou, whilst on earth, didst give praise to God through Thy most sacred Heart, and which Thou dost still everywhere offer to Him in the Holy Eucharist, even to the consummation of the world; I, in imitation of the most sacred heart of the ever-immaculate Virgin Mary, do most cheerfully offer to Thee, during this entire day, all my thoughts and intentions, all my affections and desires, my words and all my works. Indulgence. 100 days, once a day. (Leo XIII, Dec. 19, 1885.) _Ejaculation_ Jesus, meek and humble of heart, make my heart like unto Thine! Indulgence. 300 days, once a day. (Pius IX, January 25, 1858.) PRAYERS TO JESUS SUFFERING The Stations of the Cross PREPARATORY PRAYER MOST merciful Jesus! With a contrite heart and penitent spirit I bow down in profound humility before Thy divine majesty. I adore Thee as my supreme Lord and master; I believe in Thee, I hope in Thee, I love Thee above all things. I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee, my supreme and only good. I resolve to amend my life; and though I am unworthy to obtain mercy, yet the sight of Thy holy cross, on which Thou didst die, inspires me with hope and consolation. I will therefore meditate on Thy sufferings, and visit the stations of Thy passion in company with Thy sorrowful Mother and my guardian angel, with the intention of promoting Thy glory and saving my soul. I desire to gain all the indulgences granted for this exercise, for myself and for the suffering souls in purgatory. O merciful Redeemer, who hast said; "And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all things to myself," draw my heart and my love to Thee, that I may perform this devotion as perfectly as possible, and that I may live and die in union with Thee. Amen. _Before Every Station_ We adore Thee, O Christ, and praise Thee: Because by Thy holy cross Thou hast redeemed the world. _After Every Station_ Lord Jesus, crucified: Have mercy on us. First Station JESUS IS CONDEMNED TO DEATH JESUS, most innocent, who neither did nor could commit sin, was condemned to death, and, moreover, to the ignominious death of the cross. To remain a friend of Caesar, Pilate delivered Him to His enemies. A fearful crime--to condemn innocence to death, and to offend God, in order not to displease men. _Prayer_ O INNOCENT Jesus, having sinned I am guilty of eternal death, but Thou dost willingly accept the unjust sentence of death, that I might live. For whom, then, shall I henceforth live, if not for Thee, my Lord? Should I desire to please men, I could not be Thy servant. Let me, therefore, rather displease men and all the world than not please Thee, O Jesus. Our Father, etc. Hail Mary, etc. Second Station JESUS CARRIES HIS CROSS ON BEHOLDING the cross, our divine Saviour most willingly stretched out His bleeding arms, lovingly embraced it, tenderly kissed it, and placing it on His bruised shoulder, despite His exhaustion joyfully carried it. _Prayer_ O MY Jesus, I can not be Thy friend and follower if I refuse to carry the cross. O dearly beloved cross, I embrace thee, I kiss thee, I rejoice to receive thee from the hands of God. Far be it from me to glory in anything save in the cross of my Lord and Redeemer. By it the world shall be crucified to me, and I to the world, that I may be Thine for ever. Our Father, etc. Hail, Mary, etc Third Station JESUS FALLS THE FIRST TIME OUR dear Saviour carrying the cross was so weakened by its heavy weight as to fall exhausted to the ground. Our sins and misdeeds were the heavy burden which oppressed Him; the cross was to Him light and sweet, but our sins were galling and insupportable. _Prayer_ O MY Jesus! Thou didst bear my burden and the heavy weight of my sins. Should I, then, not bear in union with Thee my easy burden of suffering and accept the sweet yoke of Thy commandments? Thy yoke is sweet and Thy burden light; I therefore willingly accept it. I will take up Thy cross and follow Thee. Our Father, etc. Hail Mary, etc, Fourth Station JESUS MEETS HIS AFFLICTED MOTHER HOW painful and how sad it must have been for Mary, the sorrowful Mother, to behold her beloved Son laden with the burden of the cross! What unspeakable pangs her most tender heart experienced! How earnestly she yearned to die instead of, or at least with, Jesus! Implore this sorrowful Mother that she assist you in the hour of your death. _Prayer_ O JESUS, O Mary! I am the cause of the great and manifold pains which pierce your loving hearts. O that my heart also would feel and experience at least some of your sufferings! O Mother of sorrows, let me participate in the sufferings which thou and thy Son endured for me, and let me experience thy sorrow, that, afflicted with thee, I may enjoy thy assistance in the hour of my death. [Illustration: The Immaculate Conception.] Our Father, etc. Hail Mary, etc. Fifth Station SIMON OF CYRENE HELPS JESUS TO CARRY THE CROSS SIMON of Cyrene was compelled to help Jesus carry His cross, and Jesus accepted His assistance. How willingly He would permit you also to carry the cross! He calls you, but you hear Him not; He invites you, but you decline. What a reproach, to bear the cross reluctantly! _Prayer_ O JESUS! Whosoever does not take up His cross and follow Thee is not worthy of Thee. Behold, I join Thee in the way of Thy cross; I will be Thy assistant, following Thy footsteps, that I may come to Thee in eternal life. Our Father, etc. Hail Mary, etc. Sixth Station VERONICA WIPES THE FACE OF JESUS IMPELLED by devotion and compassion, Veronica presents her veil to Jesus to wipe His disfigured face. And Jesus imprints on it His holy countenance; a great recompense for so slight a service. What return do you make to your Saviour for His great and manifold benefits? _Prayer_ MOST merciful Jesus! What return shall I make for all the benefits Thou didst bestow on me? Behold, I consecrate myself entirely to Thy service. I offer and consecrate to Thee my heart. Imprint upon it Thy sacred image, never to be effaced again by sin. Our Father, etc. Hail Mary, etc. Seventh Station JESUS FALLS THE SECOND TIME JESUS, suffering under the weight of His cross, again falls to the ground; but His cruel executioners do not permit Him to rest a moment. Pushing and striking Him, they urge Him onward. It is the frequent repetition of our sins which oppresses Jesus. Witnessing this, how can I continue to sin? _Prayer_ O JESUS, son of David, have mercy on me! Offer me Thy helping hand, and aid me that I may not fall again into my former sins. From this very moment I will earnestly strive to reform; nevermore will I sin. Do Thou, O sole support of the weak, by Thy grace, without which I can do nothing, strengthen me to carry out faithfully this my resolution. Our Father, etc. Hail Mary, etc. Eighth Station THE DAUGHTERS OF JERUSALEM WEEP OVER JESUS THESE devoted women, moved by compassion, weep over the suffering Saviour. But He turns to them, saying, "Weep not for Me, who am innocent, but weep for yourselves and for your children." Weep thou also; for there is nothing more pleasing to Our Lord, and nothing more profitable for thyself, than tears shed from contrition for thy sins. _Prayer_ O JESUS, who shall give to my eyes a torrent of tears, that day and night I may weep for my sins? I beseech Thee through Thy bloody tears to move my heart by Thy divine grace, so that from my eyes tears may flow abundantly, and I may weep all days over Thy sufferings, and still more over their cause, my sins. Our Father, etc. Hail, Mary, etc. Ninth Station JESUS FALLS THE THIRD TIME JESUS, arriving exhausted at the foot of Calvary, falls for the third time to the ground. His love for us is not exhausted, not diminished. What a fearfully oppressive burden our sins must be to cause Jesus to fall so often! Had He, however, not taken them upon Himself, they would have plunged us into the abyss of hell. _Prayer_ MOST merciful Jesus! I return Thee infinite thanks for not permitting me to continue in sin, and to fall, as I have so often deserved, into the depths of hell. Enkindle in me an earnest desire of amendment. Let me never again relapse, but vouchsafe me Thy grace to persevere to the end of my life. Our Father, etc. Hail Mary, etc. Tenth Station JESUS IS STRIPPED OF HIS GARMENTS AFTER arriving on Calvary, our Saviour was cruelly despoiled of His garments. How painful must this have been, because they adhered to His wounded and torn body, and with them parts of His bloody skin were removed! All the wounds of Jesus are renewed. He is despoiled of His garments that He might die possessed of nothing. How happy shall I die after laying aside my former self with all evil inclinations and desires! _Prayer_ INDUCE me, O Jesus! to lay aside my former self, and to be renewed according to Thy will and desire. I will not spare myself, however painful this should be for me; despoiled of things temporal, of my own will, I desire to die, in order to live for Thee for ever. Our Father, etc. Hail Mary, etc. Eleventh Station JESUS IS NAILED TO THE CROSS JESUS, being stripped of His garments, was violently thrown upon the cross, and His hands and feet were most cruelly nailed thereto. In such excruciating torments He remained silent, because it thus pleased His heavenly Father. He suffered patiently because He suffered for us. How do I act in suffering and affliction? How fretful and impatient, how full of complaints I am! _Prayer_ O JESUS, gracious Lamb of God! I renounce for ever my impatience. Crucify, O Lord, my flesh and its concupiscences. Scorch, scathe, and punish me in this world; do but spare me in the next! I commit my destiny to Thee, resigning myself to Thy holy will; may it be done in all things. Our Father, etc. Hail Mary, etc. Twelfth Station JESUS IS RAISED UPON THE CROSS, AND DIES BEHOLD Jesus crucified! Behold the wounds He received for the love of you! His whole appearance betokens love. His head is bent to kiss you; His arms are extended to embrace you; His Heart is open to receive you. O superabundance of love! Jesus, the Son of God dies that man may live and be delivered from everlasting death. _Prayer_ O MOST amiable Jesus! Who will grant me that I may die for love of Thee? I will at least endeavor to die to the world. How must I regard the world and its vanities, when I behold Thee hanging on the cross, covered with wounds? O Jesus, receive me into Thy wounded Heart; I belong entirely to Thee; for Thee alone do I desire to live and to die. Our Father, etc. Hail Mary, etc Thirteenth Station JESUS IS TAKEN DOWN FROM THE CROSS, AND PLACED IN THE ARMS OF HIS MOTHER JESUS did not descend from the cross, but remained on it till after His death. And when taken down from it, He, in death as in life, rested on the bosom of His Mother. Persevere in your resolutions of reform, and do not part from the cross; he that persevereth to the end shall be saved. Consider, moreover, how pure the heart should be that receives the body and blood of Christ in the adorable Sacrament of the Altar. _Prayer_ O LORD Jesus! Thy lifeless body, mangled and torn, found a worthy resting-place on the bosom of Thy virgin Mother. Have I not compelled Thee often to dwell in my heart, full of sin and impurity as it was? Create in me a new heart, that I may worthily receive Thy most sacred body in holy communion, and that Thou mayest remain in me, and I in Thee, for all eternity. Our Father, etc. Hail Mary, etc Fourteenth Station JESUS IS LAID IN THE SEPULCHER THE body of Jesus is laid in a stranger's tomb. He who in this world had not whereupon to rest His head, would not even have a grave of His own, because He was not of this world. You, who are so attached to the world, henceforth despise it, that you may not perish with it. _Prayer_ O JESUS, Thou hast set me apart from the world; what, then, shall I seek therein? Thou hast created me for heaven; what, then, have I to do with the world? Depart from me, deceitful world, with Thy vanities! Henceforth I will follow the way of the cross traced out for me by my Redeemer, and journey onward to my heavenly home, there to dwell for ever and ever. Our Father, etc. Hail Mary, etc. CONCLUSION ALMIGHTY and eternal God, merciful Father, who hast given to the human race Thy beloved Son as an example of humility, obedience, and patience, to precede us on the way of life, bearing the cross; graciously grant, that we, inflamed by His infinite love, may take up the sweet yoke of His Gospel, together with the mortification of the cross, following Him as His true disciples, so that we shall one day rise gloriously with Him, and joyfully hear the final sentence: "Come, ye blessed of my Father, and possess the kingdom which has been prepared for you from the beginning," where Thou reignest with the Father and the Holy Ghost, and where we hope to reign with Thee throughout all eternity. Amen. Prayer to Our Suffering Redeemer O MY Lord Jesus Christ! Who, to redeem the world, didst vouchsafe to be born amongst men, to be circumcised, to be rejected and persecuted by the Jews, to be betrayed by the traitor Judas with a kiss, and as a lamb, gentle and innocent, to be bound with cords and dragged, in scorn, before the tribunals of Annas, Caiphas, Pilate, and Herod; who didst suffer Thyself to be accused by false witnesses, to be torn by the scourge and overwhelmed with ignominy; to be spit upon, to be crowned with thorns, buffeted, struck with a reed, blindfolded, stripped of Thy garments; to be nailed to the cross and raised on it between two thieves; to be given gall and vinegar to drink, and to be pierced with a lance; do Thou, O Lord, by these Thy most sacred pains, which I, all unworthy, call to mind, and by Thy holy cross and death, save me from the pains of hell, and vouchsafe to bring me whither Thou didst bring the good thief who was crucified with Thee, who with the Father and the Holy Ghost, livest and reignest God, for ever and ever. Amen. Our Father, Hail Mary, and Glory be to the Father, etc., five times. Indulgence. (1) 300 days, once a day. (2) A plenary indulgence, under the usual conditions, on any one of the last three days of the month, after saying this prayer daily for a month. (Pius VII, August 25, 1820.) Prayer to the Blessed Virgin Mary (_By St. Alphonsus._) MOST holy and immaculate virgin, O my Mother, thou who art the Mother of my Lord, the queen of the world, the advocate, hope, and refuge of sinners! I, the most wretched among them, come now to thee. I venerate thee, great queen, and give thee thanks for the many favors thou hast bestowed on me in the past. Most of all do I thank thee for having saved me from hell, which I so often deserved. I love thee, Lady most worthy of love, and by the love which I bear thee I promise ever in the future to serve thee, and to do what in me lies to win others to thy love. In thee I put all my trust, all my hope of salvation. Receive me as thy servant, and cover me with the mantle of thy protection, thou who art the Mother of mercy! And since thou hast so much power with God, deliver me from all temptations, or at least obtain for me the grace ever to overcome them. From thee I ask a true love of Jesus Christ, and the grace of a happy death. O my Mother, by thy love for God I beseech thee to be at all times my helper, but above all at the last moment of my life. Leave me not until thou seest me safely in heaven, there for endless ages to bless thee and sing thy praises. Amen. Indulgence, (1) 300 days, every time. (2) A plenary indulgence, once a month, for having said it daily during the month; under the usual conditions. (Pius IX, Sept. 7, 1854.) Prayer for All Things Necessary for Salvation O MY God! I believe in Thee; do Thou strengthen my faith. All my hopes are in Thee; do Thou secure them. I love Thee with my whole heart; teach me to love Thee more and more. I am sorry that I have offended Thee; do Thou increase my sorrow. I adore Thee as my first beginning; I aspire after Thee as my last end. I give Thee thanks as my constant benefactor; I call upon Thee as my sovereign protector. Vouchsafe, O my God, to conduct me by Thy wisdom, to restrain me by Thy justice, to comfort me by Thy mercy, to defend me by Thy power. To Thee I desire to consecrate all my thoughts, my actions, and my sufferings, that I henceforward may think only of Thee, speak only of Thee, and ever refer all my actions to Thy greater glory, and suffer willingly whatever Thou shalt appoint. O Lord, I desire that in all things Thy will be done, because it is Thy will, and in the manner that Thou willest. I beg of Thee to enlighten my understanding, to inflame my will, to purify my body, and to sanctify my soul. Give me strength, O my God, to expiate my offenses, to overcome my temptations, to subdue my passions, to acquire the virtues proper for my state. Fill my heart with tender affection for Thy goodness, a hatred of my faults, a love for my neighbor, and a contempt for the world. Let me always be submissive to my superiors, condescending to my inferiors, faithful to my friends, and charitable to my enemies. Assist me to overcome sensuality by mortification, avarice by almsdeeds, anger by meekness, and tepidity by zeal. O my God, make me prudent in my undertakings, courageous in dangers, patient in affliction, and humble in prosperity. Grant that I may be ever attentive at my prayers, temperate at my meals, diligent in my employments, and constant in my resolutions. Let my conscience be ever upright and pure, my exterior modest, my conversation edifying, my comportment regular. Assist me, that I may continually labor to overcome nature, correspond with Thy grace, keep Thy commandments, and work out my salvation. Discover to me, O my God, the nothingness of this world, the greatness of heaven, the shortness of time, the length of eternity. Grant that I may be prepared for death, fear Thy judgments, escape hell, and, in the end, obtain heaven. All that I have asked for myself I confidently ask for others; for my family, my relations, my benefactors, my friends, and also for my enemies. I ask it for the whole Church, for all the orders of which it is composed; more especially for our Holy Father, the Pope; for our bishop, for our pastors, and for all who are in authority; also for all those for whom Thou desirest that I should pray. Give them, O Lord, all that Thou knowest to be conducive to Thy glory and necessary for their salvation. Strengthen the just in virtue, convert sinners, enlighten infidels, heretics, and schismatics; console the afflicted, give to the faithful departed rest and eternal life; that together we may praise, love, and bless Thee for all eternity. Amen. The Four Approved Litanies Litany of the Most Holy Name of Jesus LORD, have mercy on us. Christ, have mercy on us. Lord, have mercy on us. Jesus, hear us. Jesus, graciously hear us. God the Father of heaven, have mercy on us. God the Son, Redeemer of the world, have mercy on us. God the Holy Ghost, have mercy on us. Holy Trinity, one God, have mercy on us. Jesus, Son of the living God, have mercy on us. Jesus, splendor of the Father, have mercy on us. Jesus, brightness of eternal light, have mercy on us. Jesus, king of glory, have mercy on us. Jesus, sun of justice, have mercy on us. Jesus, Son of the Virgin Mary, have mercy on us. Jesus amiable, have mercy on us. Jesus admirable, have mercy on us. Jesus, powerful God, have mercy on us. Jesus, Father of the world to come, have mercy on us. Jesus, angel of the great council, have mercy on us. Jesus most powerful, have mercy on us. Jesus most patient, have mercy on us. Jesus most obedient, have mercy on us. Jesus meek and humble of heart, have mercy on us. Jesus, lover of chastity, have mercy on us. Jesus, lover of us, have mercy on us. Jesus, God of peace, have mercy on us. Jesus, author of life, have mercy on us. Jesus, model of all virtues, have mercy on us. Jesus, zealous for souls, have mercy on us. Jesus, our God, have mercy on us. Jesus, our refuge, have mercy on us. Jesus, father of the poor, have mercy on us. Jesus, treasure of the faithful, have mercy on us. Jesus, good shepherd, have mercy on us. Jesus, true light, have mercy on us. Jesus, eternal wisdom, have mercy on us. Jesus, infinite goodness, have mercy on us. Jesus, our way and our life, have mercy on us. Jesus, joy of angels, have mercy on us. Jesus, king of patriarchs, have mercy on us. Jesus, master of the apostles, have mercy on us. Jesus, teacher of the evangelists, have mercy on us. Jesus, strength of martyrs, have mercy on us. Jesus, light of confessors, have mercy on us. Jesus, purity of virgins, have mercy on us. Jesus, crown of all saints, have mercy on us. Be merciful, spare us, O Jesus. Be merciful, graciously hear us, O Jesus. From all evil, deliver us, O Jesus. From all sin, deliver us, O Jesus. From Thy wrath, deliver us, O Jesus. From the snares of the devil, deliver us, O Jesus. From the spirit of fornication, deliver us, O Jesus. From eternal death, deliver us, O Jesus. From the neglect of Thy inspirations, deliver us, O Jesus. By the mystery of Thy holy incarnation, deliver us, O Jesus. By Thy nativity, deliver us, O Jesus. By Thy infancy, deliver us, O Jesus. By Thy most divine life, deliver us, O Jesus. By Thy labors, deliver us, O Jesus. By Thy agony and passion, deliver us, O Jesus. By Thy cross and dereliction, deliver us, O Jesus. By Thy languors, deliver us, O Jesus. By Thy death and burial, deliver us, O Jesus. By Thy resurrection, deliver us, O Jesus. By Thy ascension, deliver us, O Jesus. By Thy joys, deliver us, O Jesus. By Thy glory, deliver us, O Jesus. Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world: Spare us, O Jesus. Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world: Graciously hear us, O Jesus. Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world: Have mercy on us, O Jesus. Jesus, hear us. Jesus, graciously hear us. _Let us pray_ O LORD Jesus Christ, who hast said: Ask, and ye shall receive; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you: mercifully attend to our supplications, and grant us the gift of Thy divine charity, that we may ever love Thee with our whole hearts, and never desist from Thy praise. Give us, O Lord, a perpetual fear and love of Thy holy name, for Thou never ceasest to direct and govern by Thy grace those whom Thou instructest in the solidity of Thy love; who livest and reignest world without end. Amen. Indulgence. 300 days, once a day. (Leo XIII, January 16, 1886.) [Illustration: The Children's Offering.] Litany of the Sacred Heart of Jesus (_Approved by Pope Leo XIII, April 2, 1899._) LORD, have mercy on us. Christ, have mercy on us. Lord, have mercy on us. Christ, hear us. Christ, graciously hear us. God, the Father of heaven, have mercy on us. God the Son, Redeemer of the world, have mercy on us. God the Holy Ghost, have mercy on us. Holy Trinity, one God, have mercy on us. Heart of Jesus, Son of the eternal Father, have mercy on us. Heart of Jesus, formed by the Holy Ghost in the womb of the Virgin Mother, have mercy on us. Heart of Jesus, substantially united to the Word of God, have mercy on us. Heart of Jesus, of infinite majesty, have mercy on us. Heart of Jesus, sacred temple of God, have mercy on us. Heart of Jesus, tabernacle of the Most High, have mercy on us. Heart of Jesus, house of God and gate of heaven, have mercy on us. Heart of Jesus, burning furnace of charity, have mercy on us. Heart of Jesus, abode of justice and love, have mercy on us. Heart of Jesus, full of goodness and love, have mercy on us. Heart of Jesus, abyss of all virtues, have mercy on us. Heart of Jesus, most worthy of all praise, have mercy on us. Heart of Jesus, king and center of all hearts, have mercy on us. Heart of Jesus, in whom are all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge, have mercy on us. Heart of Jesus, in whom dwells the fulness of divinity, have mercy on us. Heart of Jesus, in whom the Father was well pleased, have mercy on us. Heart of Jesus, of whose fulness we have all received, have mercy on us. Heart of Jesus, desire of the everlasting hills, have mercy on us. Heart of Jesus, patient and most merciful, have mercy on us. Heart of Jesus, enriching all who invoke Thee, have mercy on us. Heart of Jesus, fountain of life and holiness, have mercy on us. Heart of Jesus, propitiation for our sins, have mercy on us. Heart of Jesus, loaded down with opprobrium, have mercy on us. Heart of Jesus, bruised for our offences, have mercy on us. Heart of Jesus, obedient unto death, have mercy on us. Heart of Jesus, pierced with a lance, have mercy on us. Heart of Jesus, source of all consolation, have mercy on us. Heart of Jesus, our life and resurrection, have mercy on us. Heart of Jesus, our peace and reconciliation, have mercy on us. Heart of Jesus, victim for sin, have mercy on us. Heart of Jesus, salvation of those who trust in thee, have mercy on us. Heart of Jesus, hope of those who die in Thee, have mercy on us. Heart of Jesus, delight of all the saints, have mercy on us. Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world: Spare us, O Lord. Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world: Graciously hear us, O Lord. Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world: Have mercy on us, O Lord. V. Jesus, meek and humble of Heart: R. Make our hearts like unto Thine. _Let us pray_ O ALMIGHTY and eternal God! Look upon the Heart of Thy dearly beloved Son, and upon the praise and satisfaction He offers Thee in the name of sinners and of those who seek Thy mercy; be Thou appeased, and grant us pardon in the name of the same Jesus Christ, Thy Son; who liveth and reigneth with Thee, in the unity of the Holy Ghost, world without end. Amen. Indulgence. 300 days. (Leo XIII, April 2, 1899.) The Litany of Loreto _In Honor of the Blessed Virgin Mary_ LORD, have mercy on us, Christ, have mercy on us. Lord, have mercy on us, Christ, hear us. Christ, graciously hear us. God the Father of heaven, have mercy on us. God the Son, Redeemer of the world, have mercy on us. God the Holy Ghost, have mercy on us. Holy Trinity, one God, have mercy on us. Holy Mary, pray for us. Holy Mother of God, pray for us. Holy Virgin of virgins, pray for us. Mother of Christ, pray for us. Mother of divine grace, pray for us. Mother most pure, pray for us. Mother most chaste, pray for us. Mother inviolate, pray for us. Mother undefiled, pray for us. Mother most amiable, pray for us. Mother most admirable, pray for us. Mother of good counsel, pray for us. Mother of our Creator, pray for us. Mother of our Redeemer, pray for us. Virgin most prudent, pray for us. Virgin most venerable, pray for us. Virgin most renowned, pray for us. Virgin most powerful, pray for us. Virgin most merciful, pray for us. Virgin most faithful, pray for us. Mirror of justice, pray for us. Seat of wisdom, pray for us. Cause of our joy, pray for us. Spiritual vessel, pray for us. Vessel of honor, pray for us. Singular vessel of devotion, pray for us. Mystical rose, pray for us. Tower of David, pray for us. Tower of ivory, pray for us. House of gold, pray for us. Ark of the covenant, pray for us. Gate of heaven, pray for us. Morning star, pray for us. Health of the sick, pray for us. Refuge of sinners, pray for us. Comforter of the afflicted, pray for us. Help of Christians, pray for us. Queen of angels, pray for us. Queen of patriarchs, pray for us. Queen of prophets, pray for us. Queen of apostles, pray for us. Queen of martyrs, pray for us. Queen of confessors, pray for us. Queen of virgins, pray for us. Queen of all saints, pray for us. Queen conceived without original sin, pray for us. Queen of the most holy rosary, pray for us. Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world: Spare us, O Lord. Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world: Graciously hear us, O Lord. Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world: Have mercy on us, O Lord. V. Pray for us, O holy Mother of God: R. That we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ. _Let us pray_ POUR forth, we beseech Thee, O Lord, Thy grace into our hearts, that we, to whom the incarnation of Christ Thy Son was made known by the message of an angel, may by His passion and cross be brought to the glory of His resurrection. Through the same Christ our Lord. Amen. V. Pray for us, O holy Mother of God. R. That we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ. _Let us pray_ VOUCHSAFE, O Lord, that we may be helped by the merits of Thy most holy Mother's spouse; that what of ourselves we can not obtain may be given us through his intercession. Who livest and reignest, world without end. Amen. Indulgence. (1) 300 days, every time. (2) A plenary indulgence on the following five feasts of the Blessed Virgin: Immaculate Conception, Nativity, Purification, Annunciation, and Assumption; under the usual conditions, to all who shall have said it daily during the year. (Pius VII, September 30, 1817.) These indulgences are granted for the litany alone; hence the prayers following it may be omitted. Litany of the Saints LORD, have mercy on us. Christ, have mercy on us. Lord, have mercy on us. Christ, hear us. Christ, graciously hear us. God the Father of heaven, have mercy on us. God the Son, Redeemer of the world, have mercy on us. God the Holy Ghost, have mercy on us. Holy Trinity, one God, have mercy on us. Holy Mary, pray for us. Holy Mother of God, pray for us. Holy Virgin of virgins, pray for us. St. Michael, pray for us. St. Gabriel, pray for us. St. Raphael, pray for us. All ye holy angels and archangels, pray for us. All ye holy orders of blessed spirits, pray for us. St. John Baptist, pray for us. St. Joseph, pray for us. All ye holy patriarchs and prophets, pray for us. St. Peter, pray for us. St. Paul, pray for us. St. Andrew, pray for us. St. James, pray for us. St. John, pray for us. St. Thomas, pray for us. St. James, pray for us. St. Philip, pray for us. St. Bartholomew, pray for us. St. Matthew, pray for us. St. Simon, pray for us. St. Thaddaeus, pray for us. St. Mathias, pray for us. St. Barnabas, pray for us. St. Luke, pray for us. St. Mark, pray for us. All ye holy apostles and evangelists, pray for us. All ye holy disciples of Our Lord, pray for us. All ye holy innocents, pray for us. St. Stephen, pray for us. St. Lawrence, pray for us. St. Vincent, pray for us. SS. Fabian and Sebastian, pray for us. SS. John and Paul, pray for us. SS. Cosmas and Damian, pray for us. SS. Gervaise and Protaise, pray for us. All ye holy martyrs, pray for us. St. Sylvester, pray for us. St. Gregory, pray for us. St. Ambrose, pray for us. St. Augustine, pray for us. St. Jerome, pray for us. St. Martin, pray for us. St. Nicholas, pray for us. All ye holy bishops and confessors, pray for us. All ye holy doctors, pray for us. St. Anthony, pray for us. St. Benedict, pray for us. St. Bernard, pray for us. St. Dominic, pray for us. St. Francis, pray for us. All ye holy priests and levites, pray for us. All ye holy monks and hermits, pray for us. St. Mary Magdalen, pray for us. St. Agatha, pray for us. St. Lucy, pray for us. St. Agnes, pray for us. St. Cecilia, pray for us. St. Catherine, pray for us. St. Anastasia, pray for us. All ye holy virgins and widows, pray for us. All ye men and women, saints of God: Make intercession for us. Be merciful: Spare us, O Lord. Be merciful: Graciously hear us, O Lord. From all evil, O Lord, deliver us. From all sin, O Lord, deliver us. From a sudden and unprovided death, O Lord, deliver us. From the snares of the devil, O Lord, deliver us. From anger, hatred, and ill will, O Lord, deliver us. From the spirit of fornication, O Lord, deliver us. From lightning and tempest, O Lord, deliver us. From the scourge of earthquake, O Lord, deliver us. From pestilence, famine, and war, O Lord, deliver us. From everlasting death, O Lord, deliver us. Through the mystery of Thy holy incarnation, O Lord, deliver us. Through Thy coming, O Lord, deliver us. Through Thy nativity, O Lord, deliver us. Through Thy baptism and holy fasting, O Lord, deliver us. Through Thy cross and passion, O Lord, deliver us. Through Thy death and burial, O Lord, deliver us. Through Thy holy resurrection, O Lord, deliver us. Through Thy admirable ascension, O Lord, deliver us. Through the coming of the Holy Ghost, the Comforter, O Lord, deliver us. In the Day of Judgment, O Lord, deliver us. We sinners, Beseech Thee, hear us. That Thou spare us, we beseech Thee, hear us. That Thou pardon us, we beseech Thee, hear us. That Thou vouchsafe to bring us to true penance, we beseech Thee, hear us. That Thou vouchsafe to govern and preserve Thy holy Church, we beseech Thee, hear us. That Thou vouchsafe to preserve our apostolic prelate and all ecclesiastical orders in holy religion, we beseech Thee, hear us. That Thou vouchsafe to humble the enemies of Thy holy Church, we beseech Thee, hear us. That Thou vouchsafe to give peace and true concord to Christian kings and princes, we beseech Thee, hear us. That Thou vouchsafe to grant peace and unity to all Christian people, we beseech Thee, hear us. That Thou vouchsafe to confirm and preserve us in Thy holy service, we beseech Thee, hear us. That Thou lift up our minds to heavenly desires, we beseech Thee, hear us. That Thou render eternal good things to all our benefactors, we beseech Thee, hear us. That Thou deliver our souls and those of our brethren, kinsfolk, and benefactors from eternal damnation, we beseech Thee, hear us. That Thou vouchsafe to give and preserve the fruits of the earth, we beseech Thee, hear us. That Thou vouchsafe eternal rest to all the faithful departed, we beseech Thee, hear us. That Thou vouchsafe graciously to hear us, we beseech Thee, hear us. Son of God, we beseech Thee, hear us. Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world: Spare us, O Lord. Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world: Graciously hear us, O Lord. Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world: Have mercy on us, O Lord. Christ, hear us. Christ, graciously hear us. Lord, have mercy on us. Christ, have mercy on us. Lord, have mercy on us. Our Father, etc. V. And lead us not into temptation. R. But deliver us from evil. PSALM LXIX INCLINE unto my aid, O God: O Lord, make haste to help me. Let them be confounded and ashamed: that seek after my soul. Let them be turned backward and blush for shame: that desire evils unto me. Let them be presently turned away blushing for shame, that say to me: Tis well, 'tis well. Let all that seek Thee rejoice and be glad in Thee: and let such as love Thy salvation say always, The Lord be magnified. But I am needy and poor: O God, help Thou me. Thou art my helper and my deliverer: O Lord, make no delay. Glory be to the Father, etc. V. Save Thy servants: R. Trusting in Thee, O my God. V. Be unto us, O God, a tower of strength: R. From the face of the enemy. V. Let not the enemy prevail against us: R. Nor the son of iniquity have power to hurt us. V. O Lord, deal not with us according to our sins: R. Neither reward us according to our iniquities. V. Let us pray for our chief bishop, N. R. The Lord preserve him, and give him life, and make him blessed upon earth, and deliver him not up to the will of his enemies. V. Let us pray for our benefactors: R. Vouchsafe, O Lord, for Thy name's sake, to reward with eternal life all those who have done us good. V. Let us pray for the faithful departed: R. Eternal rest give to them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them. V. May they rest in peace. R. Amen. V. For our absent brethren: R. O my God, save Thy servants trusting in Thee. V. Send them help, O Lord, from Thy holy place: R. And from Sion protect them. V. O Lord, hear my prayer: R. And let my cry come unto Thee. _Let us pray_ O GOD, whose property it is always to have mercy and to spare, receive our petitions, that we, and all Thy servants who are bound by the chain of sin, may, in the compassion of Thy goodness, mercifully be absolved. Hear, we beseech Thee, O Lord, the prayer of Thy suppliants, and pardon the sins of them that confess to Thee, that of Thy bounty Thou mayest grant us pardon and peace. Out of Thy clemency, O Lord, show Thy unspeakable mercy to us, that so Thou mayest both acquit us of our sins and deliver us from the punishment we deserve for them. O God, who by sin art offended and by penance pacified, mercifully regard the prayers of Thy people who make supplication to Thee, and turn away the scourges of Thy anger, which we deserve for our sins. O almighty and eternal God, have mercy on Thy servant N., our chief bishop, and direct him, according to Thy clemency, in the way of everlasting salvation, that, by Thy grace, he may desire the things that are agreeable to Thy will, and perform them with all his strength. O God, from whom all holy desires, righteous counsels, and just works do come, give to Thy servants that peace which the world can not give; that, our hearts being disposed to keep Thy commandments, and the fear of enemies being taken away, the times, by Thy protection, may be peaceable. Inflame, O Lord, our reins and hearts with the fire of the Holy Spirit; to the end that we may serve Thee with a chaste body, and please Thee with a clean heart. O God, the Creator and Redeemer of all the faithful, give to the souls of Thy servants departed the remission of all their sins, that by pious supplications they may obtain the pardon they have always desired. Direct, we beseech Thee, O Lord, our actions by Thy holy inspirations, and carry them on by Thy gracious assistance; that every prayer and work of ours may always begin from Thee, and by Thee be happily ended. Almighty and eternal God, who hast dominion over the living and the dead, and art merciful to all whom Thou foreknowest shall be Thine by faith and good works; we humbly beseech Thee that they for whom we have purposed to offer our prayers, whether this present world still detains them in the flesh, or the next world has already received them divested of their bodies, may, by the clemency of Thine own goodness and the intercession of Thy saints, obtain pardon and full remission of all their sins. Through Our Lord Jesus Christ, who liveth and reigneth with Thee in the unity of the Holy Ghost, world without end. Amen. V. O Lord, hear my prayer. R. And let my cry come unto Thee. V. May the almighty and merciful Lord graciously hear us. R. Amen. V. May the souls of the faithful departed through the mercy of God rest in peace. R. Amen. [Illustration: Mary, Help of Christians.] PART VI Thoughts and Counsels of the Saints for Every Day of the Year "Every day will I bless Thee, and I will praise Thy name forever" (_Ps._ cxliv. 2). Thoughts and Counsels of the Saints for every Day in the Year January 1 THERE are two guarantees of a wise rule of conduct: the thought before action, and self-command afterward.--ST. IGNATIUS. 2 When we receive with an entire and perfect resignation the afflictions which God sends us they become for us favors and benefits; because conformity to the will of God is a gain far superior to all temporal advantages.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 3 All perfection consists in the love of God; and the perfection of divine love consists in the union of our will with that of God.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 4 Leave to every one the care of what belongs to him, and disturb not thyself with what is said or done in the world.--ST. THOMAS AQUINAS. 5 Place before your eyes as models for imitation, not the weak and cowardly, but the fervent and courageous.--ST. IGNATIUS. 6 Prayer is a pasturage, a field, wherein all the virtues find their nourishment, growth, and strength.--ST. CATHERINE OF SIENA. 7 A single act of resignation to the divine will in what it ordains contrary to our desires, is of more value than a hundred thousand successes conformable to our will and taste.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 8 The shortest, yea, the only way to reach sanctity, is to conceive a horror for all that the world loves and values.--ST. IGNATIUS. 9 As long as we are in this mortal life, nothing is more necessary for us than humility.--ST. TERESA. 10 Learning without humility has always been pernicious to the Church; and as pride precipitated the rebellious angels from heaven, it frequently causes the loss of learned men.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 11 Why remain sad and idle? Why exhaust thyself in the anguish of melancholy? Have courage, do violence to thyself; meditate on the passion of Jesus Christ, and thou shalt overcome thy sorrow.--BL. HENRY SUSO. 12 Here is the difference between the joys of the world and the cross of Jesus Christ: after having tasted the first, one is disgusted with them; and on the contrary, the more one partakes of the cross, the greater the thirst for it.--ST. IGNATIUS. 13 When the sky is free from clouds we can see more clearly the brightness of the sun. In like manner, when the soul is free from sin and the gloom of passion, it participates in the divine light.--VEN. LOUIS DE GRANADA. 14 Our works are of no value if they be not united to the merits of Jesus Christ.--ST. TERESA. 15 If we are very determined to mortify ourselves and not to be too much occupied with our corporal health, we will soon, by the grace of God, become masters of our bodies.--ST. TERESA. 16 In every creature, however small it be, we may see a striking image of divine wisdom, power, and goodness.--VEN. BARTHOLOMEW OF MARTYRS. 17 Time is but a period. It passes like the lightning flash. Suffering passes with time; suffering, then, is very short.--BL. HENRY SUSO. 18 In order to bear our afflictions with patience, it is very useful to read the lives and legends of the saints who endured great torments for Jesus Christ.--ST. TERESA. 19 Open thine ears to the voices of nature, and thou shalt hear them in concert inviting thee to the love of God.--VEN. LOUIS OF GRANADA. 20 On the feasts of the saints consider their virtues, and beseech God to deign to adorn you with them.--ST. TERESA. 21 When faith grows weak, all virtues are weakened. When faith is lost, all virtues are lost--ST. ALPHONSUS. 22 A precious crown is reserved in heaven for those who perform all their actions with all the diligence of which they are capable; for it is not sufficient to do our part well; it must be done more than well.--ST. IGNATIUS. 23 Nothing created has ever been able to fill the heart of man. God alone can fill it infinitely.--ST. THOMAS AQUINAS. 24 We should only make use of life to grow in the love of God.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 25 In vain men try. They can never find in creatures sincere affection, perfect joy, or true peace.--BL. HENRY SUSO. 26 God is supreme strength, fortifying those who place their trust and confidence in Him.--ST. CATHERINE OF SIENA. 27 God gives each one of us sufficient grace ever to know His holy will, and to do it fully.--ST. IGNATIUS. 28 Shun useless conversation. We lose by it both time and the spirit of devotion.--ST. THOMAS AQUINAS. 29 The upright intention is the soul of our actions. It gives them life and makes them good.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 30 The truth of faith alone, deeply graven in the soul, is sufficient to encourage us to very perfect works; for it strengthens man and increases his charity.--ST. TERESA. 31 It is folly not to think of death. It is greater folly to think of it, and not prepare for it.--ST. ALPHONSUS. February 1 THE most perfect and meritorious intention is that by which, in all our actions, we have in view only the good pleasure of God and the accomplishment of His holy will.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 2 Mary's sorrow was less when she saw her only Son crucified, than it is now at the sight of men offending Him by sin.--ST. IGNATIUS. 3 There is nothing more unreasonable than to estimate our worth by the opinion of others. Today they laud us to the skies, to-morrow they will cover us with ignominy.--VEN. LOUIS OF GRANADA. 4 Act as if every day were the last of your life, and each action the last you perform.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 5 Perfection consists in renouncing ourselves, in carrying our cross, and in following Jesus Christ. Now, he who renounces himself most perfectly carries his cross the best and follows nearest to Jesus Christ is he who never does his own will, but always that of God.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 6 That which would have easily been remedied at first, becomes incurable by time and habit--ST. IGNATIUS. 7 Among the gifts of grace which the soul receives in holy communion there is one that must be numbered among the highest. It is, that holy communion does not permit the soul to remain long in sin, nor to obstinately persevere in it.--ST. IGNATIUS. 8 Be assured that one great means to find favor when we appear before God is to have pardoned the injuries we have received here below.--VEN. LOUIS OF GRANADA. 9 Woe to him who neglects to recommend himself to Mary, and thus closes the channel of grace!--ST. ALPHONSUS. 10 It is folly to leave your goods where you can never return, and to send nothing to that place where you must remain for ever.--VEN. LOUIS OF GRANADA. 11 Discretion is necessary in spiritual life. It is its part to restrain the exercises in the way of perfection, so as to keep us between the two extremes.--ST. IGNATIUS. 12 By denying our self-love and our inclinations in little things, we gradually acquire mortification and victory over ourselves.--ST. TERESA. 13 Should we fall a thousand times in a day, a thousand times we must rise again, always animated with unbounded confidence in the infinite goodness of God.--VEN. LOUIS OF GRANADA. 14 God's way in dealing with those whom He intends to admit soonest after this life into the possession of His everlasting glory, is to purify them in this world by the greatest afflictions and trials.--ST. IGNATIUS. 15 After the flower comes the fruit: we receive, as the reward of our fatigues, an increase of grace in this world, and in the next the eternal vision of God.--BL. HENRY SUSO. 16 God refuses no one the gift of prayer. By it we obtain the help that we need to overcome disorderly desires and temptations of all kinds.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 17 To establish ourselves in a virtue it is necessary to form good and practical resolutions to perform certain and determined acts of that virtue, and we must, moreover, be faithful in executing them.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 18 Love ought to consist of deeds more than of words.--ST. IGNATIUS. 19 There are many things which seem to us misfortunes and which we call such; but if we understood the designs of God we would call them graces.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 20 Let us abandon everything to the merciful providence of God.--BL. ALBERT THE GREAT. 21 Jesus Christ, our great Model, suffered much for us; let us bear our afflictions cheerfully, seeing that through them we have the happiness of resembling Him.--BL. HENRY SUSO. 22 Remember that virtue is a very high and rugged mountain, difficult to ascend, and requiring much fatigue and exertion before we arrive at the summit to rest.--BL. HENRY SUSO. 23 Labor to conquer yourself. This victory will assure you a brighter crown in heaven than they gain whose disposition is more amiable.--ST. IGNATIUS. 24 We should not examine articles of faith with a curious and subtle spirit. It is sufficient for us to know that the Church proposes them. We can never be deceived in believing them.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 25 We should guard against jealousy, and even the slightest sentiment thereof. This vice is absolutely opposed to a pure and sincere zeal for the glory of God, and is a certain proof of secret and subtle pride.-- ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 26 Charity requires us always to have compassion on human infirmity.--ST. CATHERINE OF SIENA. 27 When one does not love prayer, it is morally impossible for him to resist his passions.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 28 Docility and easy acquiescence with good advice are the signs of a humble heart.--VEN. JULIENNE MOREL. 29 There is nothing richer, nothing surer, nothing more agreeable than a good conscience.--BL. BARTHOLOMEW OF MARTYRS. March 1 IT SEEMS as if God granted to other saints to free us from some particular needfulness; but I know by experience that the glorious St. Joseph assists us generally in all our necessities.--ST. TERESA. 2 A most powerful and efficacious remedy for all evils, a means of correcting all imperfections, of triumphing over temptation, and preserving our hearts in an undisturbed peace, is conformity with the will of God.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 3 It often happens that when we take less care of our body, we have better health than when we bestow upon it too much care.--ST. TERESA. 4 Do nothing, say nothing before considering if that which you are about to say or do is pleasing to God, profitable to yourself, and edifying to your neighbor.--ST. IGNATIUS. 5 Sometimes God leaves us for a long time unable to effect any good, that we may learn to humble ourselves, and never to glory in our efforts.-- ST. VINCENT FERRER. 6 We easily lose peace of mind, because we make it depend, not on the testimony of a good conscience, but on the judgment of men.--BL. BARTHOLOMEW OF MARTYRS. 7 You may fast regularly, give alms, and pray without ceasing, but as long as you hate your brother, you will not be numbered among the children of God.--VEN. LOUIS DE BLOIS. 8 He who at the hour of death finds himself protected by St. Joseph, will certainly experience great consolation.--ST. TERESA. 9 Take care that the worldling does not pursue with greater zeal and anxiety the perishable goods of this world than you do the eternal.--ST. IGNATIUS. 10 We should consider our departed brethren as living members of Jesus Christ, animated by His grace, and certain of participating one day of His glory. We should therefore love, serve, and assist them as far as is in our power.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 11 Control thy senses, guard thy mouth, bridle thy tongue, subjugate thy heart, bear all provocation with charity, and thou shalt perfectly fulfil the will of God.--BL. HENRY SUSO. 12 Our perfection consists in uniting our will so intimately with God's will, that we will only desire what He wills. He who conforms most perfectly to the will of God will be the most perfect Christian.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 13 Humility, modesty, sobriety, purity, piety, and prudence, with meekness, ornament the soul, and make us live on earth a truly angelic life.--BL. JORDAN OF SAXONY. 14 In recalling to mind the life and actions of the saints, walk in their footsteps as much as possible, and humble thyself if thou canst not attain to their perfection.--ST. THOMAS AQUINAS. 15 When the devil again tempts you to sin, telling you that God is merciful, remember that the Lord showeth mercy to them that fear Him, but not to them who despise Him.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 16 In prayer we should particularly combat our predominant passion or evil inclination. We should devote continual attention to it, because when it is once conquered we will easily obtain the victory over all our other faults.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 17 I will carefully consider how, on the day of judgment, I would wish to have discharged my office or my duty; and the way I would wish to have done it then I shall do now.--ST. IGNATIUS. 18 It is well to deny ourselves that which is permitted, in order to avoid more easily that which is not.--ST. BENEDICT. 19 I have noticed that all persons who have true devotion to St. Joseph and tender him special honor, are very much advanced in virtue, for he takes great care of souls who recommend themselves to him; and I have never asked of him anything which he did not obtain for me.--ST. TERESA. 20 He who forgets himself in the service of God may be assured that God will not forget Him.--ST. IGNATIUS. 21 Let all our actions be directed to the end that God may be glorified in all things.--ST. BENEDICT. 22 He who suffers in patience, suffers less and saves his soul. He who suffers impatiently, suffers more and loses his soul.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 23 When we remember or hear that the enemies of the Church burn and destroy God's temples, we should grieve therefor; but we should also rejoice much when we see new ones built, and we should co-operate in their erection as much as we possibly can.--ST. TERESA. 24 We should carefully beware of giving ourselves so completely to any employment as to forget to have recourse to God from time to time.--ST. TERESA. 25 Our Lady, deign to intercede for us sinners with thy divine Son, our Lord, and obtain of Him a blessing for us in our trials and tribulations!--ST. IGNATIUS. 26 Whoever would follow Jesus Christ, must walk in His footsteps, if he would not go astray.--ST. TERESA. 27 Let us thank God for having called us to His holy faith. It is a great gift, and the number of those who thank God for it is small.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 28 The trials of life cease to oppress us if we accept them for the love of God.--VEN. LOUIS DE GRANADA. 29 If you wish to take up your abode in the tabernacle of the heavenly kingdom, you must reach there through your good works, without which you can not hope to enter.--ST. BENEDICT. 30 It is a great folly to be willing to violate the friendship of God, rather than the law of human friendship.--ST. TERESA. 31 When the afflictions of this life overcome us, let us encourage ourselves to bear them patiently by the hope of heaven.--ST. ALPHONSUS. April 1 TO PUT into practice the teachings of our holy faith, it is not enough to convince ourselves that they are true; we must love them. Love united to faith makes us practise our religion.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 2 Unite all your works to the merits of Jesus Christ, and then offer them up to the eternal Father if you desire to make them pleasing to Him.-- ST. TERESA. 3 God pardons sin; but He will not pardon the will to sin.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 4 It is a fault, not a virtue, to wish your humility recognized and applauded.--ST. BERNARD. 5 Before engaging in your private devotions, perform those which obedience and your duty toward your neighbor impose upon you in such a manner as to make an abnegation of self.--VEN. LOUIS DE BLOIS. 6 The world is full of inconstancy; its friendship ceases the moment there is no advantage to be expected from us.--BL. JOHN TAULER. 7 There is nothing better to display the truth in an excellent light, than a clear and simple statement of facts.--ST. BENEDICT. 8 Be careful and do not lightly condemn the actions of others. We must consider the intention of our neighbor, which is often good and pure, although the act itself seems blameworthy.--ST. IGNATIUS. 9 He who does not overcome his predominant passion is in great danger of being lost. He who does overcome it will easily conquer all the rest.-- ST. ALPHONSUS. 10 To conquer himself is the greatest victory that man can gain.--ST. IGNATIUS. 11 A soul which does not practise the exercise of prayer is very like a paralyzed body which, though possessing feet and hands, makes no use of them.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 12 When you do a good action, have the intention of first pleasing God, and then of giving good example to your neighbor.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 13 The grace of perseverance is the most important of all; it crowns all other graces.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 14 Prayer is the only channel through which God's great graces and favors may flow into the soul; and if this be once closed, I know no other way He can communicate them.--ST. TERESA. 15 To acquire courage it is very useful to read the lives of the saints, especially of those who, after living in sin, attained great sanctity.-- ST. ALPHONSUS. 16 The truly humble reject all praise for themselves, and refer it all to God.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 17 Prayer should be effective and practical, since it has for its end the acquisition of solid virtue and the mortification of the passions.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 18 We do not keep an account of the graces which God has given us, but God our Lord keeps an account of them. He has fixed the measure thereof.-- ST. ALPHONSUS. 19 The more guilty we are, the greater must be our confidence in Mary. Therefore, courage, timid soul; let Mary know all thy misery, and hasten with joy to the throne of mercy.--BL. HENRY SUSO. 20 Evil is often more hurtful to the doer than to the one against whom it is done.--ST. CATHERINE OF SIENA. 21 During life despise that which will avail you nothing at the hour of death.--ST. ANSELM. 22 He who fails to reflect before acting, walks with his eyes shut and advances with danger. He also falls very often, because the eye of reflection does not enable him to see whither his footsteps lead.--ST. GREGORY THE GREAT. 23 Sanctity and perfection consist not in fine words, but in good actions.--BL. HENRY SUSO. 24 As patience leads to peace, and study to science, so are humiliations the path that leads to humility.--ST. BERNARD. 25 Do not disturb yourself with vain curiosity concerning the affairs of others, nor how they conduct themselves, unless your position makes it your duty to do so.--VEN. LOUIS DE BLOIS. 26 The deceitful charms of prosperity destroy more souls than all the scourges of adversity.--ST. BERNARD. 27 The first degree of humility is the fear of God, which we should constantly have before our eyes.--VEN. LOUIS DE BLOIS. 28 He who cheerfully endures contempt and is happy under crosses and affliction, partakes of the humility and sufferings of Our Lord.--ST. MECHTILDIS. 29 He who is resigned to the divine will shall always surmount the difficulties he meets with in the service of God. The Lord will accomplish His designs concerning him.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 30 Consent to suffer a slight temporary pain, that so thou mayst avoid the eternal pains which sin deserves.--ST. CATHERINE OF SIENA. May 1 MARY was the most perfect among the saints only because she was always perfectly united to the will of God.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 2 After the love which we owe Jesus Christ, we must give the chief place in our heart to the love of His Mother Mary.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 3 When we feel our cross weighing upon us, let us have recourse to Mary, whom the Church calls the "Consoler of the Afflicted."--ST. ALPHONSUS. 4 The devotions we practise in honor of the glorious Virgin Mary, however trifling they be, are very pleasing to her divine Son, and He rewards them with eternal glory.--ST. TERESA. 5 There is nothing which is more profitable and more consoling to the mind than to frequently remember the Blessed Virgin.--ST. TERESA. 6 Blessed are the actions enclosed between two Hail Marys.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 7 Let us consider what the glorious Virgin endured, and what the holy apostles suffered, and we shall find that they who were nearest to Jesus Christ were the most afflicted.--ST. TERESA. 8 The servants of Mary who are in purgatory receive visits and consolations from her.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 9 If you persevere until death in true devotion to Mary, your salvation is certain.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 10 He who remembers having invoked the name of Mary in an impure temptation, may be sure that he did not yield to it.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 11 Mary being destined to negotiate peace between God and man, it was not proper that she should be an accomplice in the disobedience of Adam.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 12 Mary having co-operated in our redemption with so much glory to God and so much love for us, Our Lord ordained that no one shall obtain salvation except through her intercession.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 13 He who wishes to find Jesus will do so only by having recourse to Mary.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 14 Mary having always lived wholly detached from earthly things and united with God, death, which united her more closely to Him, was extremely sweet and agreeable to her.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 15 Mary being in heaven nearer to God and more united to Him, knows our miseries better, compassionates them more, and can more efficaciously assist us.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 16 The Virgin Mother, all pure and all white, will make her servants pure and white.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 17 To assure our salvation it does not suffice to call ourselves children of Mary, therefore let us always have the fear of God.--ST. TERESA. 18 Let us offer ourselves without delay and without reserve to Mary, and beg her to offer us herself to God.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 19 Such is the compassion, such the love which Mary bears us, that she is never tired of praying for us.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 20 O Queen of heaven and earth! The universe would perish before thou couldst refuse aid to one who invokes thee from the depth of his heart.--BL. HENRY SUSO. 21 O most blessed Virgin, who declarest in thy Canticle that it is owing to thy humility that God hath done great things in thee, obtain for me the grace to imitate thee, that is, to be obedient; because to obey is to practise humility.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 22 May the two names so sweet and so powerful, of Jesus and Mary, be always in our hearts and on our lips!--ST. ALPHONSUS. 23 Whatsoever we do, we can never be true children of Mary, unless we are humble.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 24 Let us highly esteem devotion to the Blessed Virgin, and let us lose no opportunity of inspiring others with it.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 25 As a mother feels no disgust in dressing the sores of her child, so Mary, the heavenly infirmarian, never refuses to care for sinners who have recourse to her.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 26 Each of our days is marked with the protection of Mary, who is exceedingly anxious to be our Mother, when we desire to be her children.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 27 When the devil wishes to make himself master of a soul, he seeks to make it give up devotion to Mary.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 28 Let us have recourse to Mary; for of all creatures she is the highest, the purest, the most beautiful, and the most loving.--BL. HENRY SUSO. 29 Let the name of Mary be ever on your lips, let it be indelibly engraven on your heart. If you are under her protection, you have nothing to fear; if she is propitious, you will arrive at the port of salvation.-- ST. BERNARD. 30 Know that of all devotions the most pleasing to Mary is to have frequent recourse to her, asking for favors.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 31 Let the servants of Mary perform every day, and especially on Saturday, some work of charity for her sake.--ST. ALPHONSUS. June 1 CAN WE, amongst all hearts, find one more amiable than that of Jesus? It is on His Heart that God looks with special complacency--ST. ALPHONSUS. 2 One must wage war against his predominant passion, and not retreat, until, with God's help, he has been victorious.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 3 An act of perfect conformity to the will of God unites us more to Him than a hundred other acts of virtue.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 4 The love of God inspires the love of our neighbor, and the love of our neighbor serves to keep alive the love of God.--ST. GREGORY THE GREAT. 5 Live always in the certainty that whatever happens to you is the result of divine Providence; because nothing hard or laborious falls to your lot without the Lord permitting it.--VEN. LOUIS DE BLOIS. 6 Whatsoever good work you undertake, pray earnestly to God that He will enable you to bring it to a successful termination.--ST. BENEDICT. 7 What is a fruitless repentance, defiled almost immediately by new faults?--ST. BERNARD. 8 You propose to give up everything to God; be sure, then, to include yourself among the things to be given up.--ST. BENEDICT. 9 If you can find a place where God is not, go there and sin with impunity.--ST. ANSELM. 10 He can not err who is constantly with the visible Head which Jesus Christ has left to His Church, as its foundation, rule, teacher, and defender of the Faith.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 11 The more numerous the gifts we have received from God, the greater the account we must render to Him.--ST. GREGORY THE GREAT. 12 True penance consists in regretting without ceasing the faults of the past, and in firmly resolving to never again commit that which is so deplorable.--ST. BERNARD. [Illustration: The Sacred Heart of Mary.] 13 We are not raised the first day to the summit of perfection. It is by climbing, not by flying, that we arrive there.--ST. BERNARD. 14 What we do for ourselves during life is more certain than all the good we expect others to do for us after death.--ST. GREGORY THE GREAT. 15 Idleness begets a discontented life. It develops self-love, which is the cause of all our misery, and renders us unworthy to receive the favors of divine love.--ST. IGNATIUS. 16 Have death always before your eyes as a salutary means of returning to God.--ST. BERNARD. 17 If the devil tempts me by the thought of divine justice, I think of God's mercy; if he tries to fill me with presumption by the thought of His mercy, I think of His justice.--ST. IGNATIUS. 18 In time of temptation continue the good thou hast begun before temptation.--ST. VINCENT FERRER. 19 In the eyes of the sovereign Judge the merit of our actions depends on the motives which prompted them.--ST. GREGORY THE GREAT. 20 The benefits to be derived from spiritual reading do not merely consist in impressing on the memory the precepts set forth, but in opening the heart to them, that they may bear fruit.--VEN. LOUIS DE BLOIS. 21 As clouds obscure the sun, so bad thoughts darken and destroy the brightness of the soul.--VEN. LOUIS OF GRANADA. 22 To judge rightly of the goodness and perfection of any one's prayer, it is sufficient to know the disposition he takes to it, and the fruits he reaps from it.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 23 To commence many things and not to finish them is no small fault; we must persevere in whatever we undertake with upright intention and according to God's will.--BL. HENRY SUSO. 24 The perfect champion is he who establishes complete control over his mind by overcoming temptations and the inclination of his nature to sin.--VEN. JOHN TAULER. 25 If the love of God is in your heart, you will understand that to suffer for God is a joy to which all earthly pleasures are not to be compared.--ST. IGNATIUS. 26 The world around us is, as it were, a book written by the finger of God; every creature is a word on the page. We should apply ourselves well to understand the signification of the volume.--VEN. BARTHOLOMEW OF MARTYRS. 27 A man of prayer is capable of everything. He can say with St. Paul, "I can do all things in Him who strengthened me."--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 28 Whilst here below our actions can never be entirely free from negligence, frailty, or defect; but we must not throw away the wheat because of the chaff.--VEN. JOHN TAULER. 29 Strive always to preserve freedom of spirit, so that you need do nothing with the view of pleasing the world, and that no fear of displeasing it will have power to shake your good resolutions.--VEN. LOUIS DE BLOIS. 30 Wo to us poor sinners if we had not the Divine Sacrifice to appease the Lord!--ST. ALPHONSUS. July 1 HOW few there are who avail themselves of the precious blood of Jesus to purchase their salvation!--ST. IGNATIUS. 2 O Queen of heaven and earth! Thou art the gate of mercy ever open, never closed. The universe must perish before he who invokes thee from his heart is refused assistance.--BL. HENRY SUSO. 3 Our Faith will never be true unless it is united to that of St. Peter and the Pontiff, his successors.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 4 Short pleasures and long sufferings are all the world can give.--VEN. JOHN TAULER. 5 Learn to be silent sometimes for the edification of others, that you may learn how to speak sometimes.--ST. VINCENT FERRER. 6 Gratitude for graces received is a most efficacious means of obtaining new ones.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 7 To a useless question we should answer only by silence.--ST. VINCENT FERRER. 8 We should not judge things by their exterior or appearance, but consider what they are in the sight of God, and whether they be according to His good pleasure.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 9 Preserve purity of conscience with care, and never do anything to sully it or render it less agreeable to God.--ST. THOMAS AQUINAS. 10 Give not thyself too much to any one. He who gives himself too freely is generally the least acceptable.--BL. HENRY SUSO. 11 Affliction strengthens the vigor of our soul, whereas happiness weakens it.--ST. GREGORY THE GREAT. 12 To acquire purity of the soul, it is necessary to guard against passing judgment on our neighbor, or useless remarks on his conduct.--ST. CATHERINE OF SIENA. 13 Turn away the eyes of thy body and those of thy mind from seeing others, that thou mayest be able to contemplate thyself.--ST. VINCENT FERRER. 14 The brightest ornaments in the crown of the blessed in heaven are the sufferings which they have borne patiently on earth.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 15 We are not innocent before God if we punish that which we should pardon, or pardon that which we should punish.--ST. BERNARD. 16 Is there any one in the world who has invoked thee, O Mary, without having felt the benefit of thy protection, which is promised to those who invoke thy mercy?--ST. BERNARD. 17 It is the key of obedience that opens the door of paradise. Jesus Christ has confided that key to His vicar, the Pope, Christ on earth, whom all are obliged to obey even unto death.--ST. CATHERINE OF SIENA. 18 It is true that God promises forgiveness if we repent, but what assurance have we of obtaining it to-morrow?--VEN. LOUIS DE BLOIS. 19 We should offer ourselves and all we have to God, that He may dispose of us according to His holy will, so that we may be ever ready to leave all and embrace the afflictions that come upon us.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 20 No one has a right to mercy who can not himself show mercy.--VEN. LOUIS DE GRANADA. 21 We should reflect on all our actions, exterior and interior, and before we commence, examine well if we are able to finish them.--VEN. JOHN TAULER. 22 The reason why the lukewarm run so great a risk of being lost is because tepidity conceals from the soul the immense evil which it causes.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 23 We should learn of Jesus Christ to be meek and humble of heart, and ask Him unceasingly for these two virtues. We ought, particularly, to avoid the two contrary vices which would cause us to destroy with one hand what we seek to raise with the other.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 24 The sufferings endured for God are the greatest proof of our love for Him.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 25 It is in vain that we cut off the branches of evil, if we leave intact the root, which continually produces new ones.--ST. GREGORY THE GREAT. 26 How little is required to be a saint! It suffices to do in all things the will of God.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 27 Wouldst thou know what thou art? Thou art that to which thy heart turns the most frequently.--VEN. BARTHOLOMEW OF MARTYRS. 28 When you covet that which delights you, think not only of the sweet moments of enjoyment, but of the long season of regret which must follow.--ST. BERNARD. 29 They who voluntarily commit sin show a contempt for life eternal, since they willingly risk the loss of their soul.--ST. GREGORY THE GREAT. 30 It suffices not to perform good works; we must do them well, in imitation of Our Lord Jesus Christ, of whom it is written, "He doeth all things well."--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 31 Put not off till to-morrow what you can do today.--ST. IGNATIUS. August 1 CHRIST Himself guides the bark of Peter. For this reason it can not perish, although He sometimes seems to sleep.--ST. ANTONINUS. 2 Prayer teaches us the need of laying before God all our necessities, of corresponding with His grace, of banishing vice from our heart and of establishing virtue in it.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 3 Take this to heart: Owe no man anything. So shalt thou secure a peaceful sleep, an easy conscience, a life without inquietude, and a death without alarm.--VEN. LOUIS DE GRANADA. 4 If you would know whether you have made a good confession, ask yourself if you have resolved to abandon your sins.--ST. BERNARD. 5 He who does that which is displeasing to himself has discovered the secret of pleasing God.--ST. ANSELM. 6 An ordinary action, performed through obedience and love of God, is more meritorious than extraordinary works done on your own authority--VEN. LOUIS DE BLOIS. 7 Vigilance is rendered necessary and indispensable, not only by the dangers that surround us, but by the delicacy, the extreme difficulty of the work we all have to engage in the work of our salvation.--VEN. LOUIS DE GRANADA. 8 Among the different means that we have of pleasing God in all that we do, one of the most efficacious is to perform each of our actions as though it were to be the last of our life.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 9 I have to seek only the glory of God, my own sanctification, and the salvation of my neighbor. I should therefore devote myself to these things, if necessary, at the peril of my life.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 10 Idleness is hell's fishhook for catching souls.--ST. IGNATIUS. 11 Whoever imagines himself without defect has an excess of pride. God alone is perfect.--ST. ANTONINUS. 12 As we take the bitterest medicine to recover or preserve the health of the body, we should cheerfully endure sufferings, however repugnant to nature, and consider them efficacious remedies which God employs to purify the soul and conduct it to the perfection to which He called it.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 13 To give up prayer because we are often distracted at it is to allow the devil to gain his cause.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 14 Curb the desire of display, and do nothing from human respect.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 15 O Mary, vessel of purest gold, ornamented with pearls and sapphires, filled with grace and virtue, thou art the dearest of all creatures to the eyes of eternal Wisdom.--BL. HENRY SUSO. 16 We must be careful not to omit our prayers, confession, communion, and other exercises of piety, even when we find no consolation in them.--ST. VINCENT FERRER. 17 Let us leave to God and to truth the care of our justification, without trying to excuse ourselves, and peace will truly spring up within us.-- VEN. JOHN TAULER. 18 Read good and useful books, and abstain from reading those that only gratify curiosity.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 19 So great is the goodness of God in your regard, that when you ask through ignorance for that which is not beneficial, He does not grant your prayer in this matter, but gives you something better instead.--ST. BERNARD. 20 Men can use no better arms to drive away the devil, than prayer and the sign of the cross.--ST. TERESA. 21 He who knows well how to practise the exercise of the presence of God, and who is faithful in following the attraction of this divine virtue, will soon attain a very high degree of perfection.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 22 One of the most admirable effects of holy communion is to preserve the soul from sin, and to help those who fall through weakness to rise again. It is much more profitable, then, to approach this divine Sacrament with love, respect, and confidence, than to remain away through an excess of fear and scrupulosity.--ST. IGNATIUS. 23 Let us remember that every act of mortification is a work for heaven. This thought will make all suffering and weariness sweet.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 24 Correction should be given calmly and with discernment, at seasonable times, according to the dictates of reason, and not at the impulse of anger.--VEN. LOUIS DE GRANADA. 25 There is nothing more certain, nothing more agreeable, nothing richer than a good conscience.--VEN. BARTHOLOMEW OF MARTYRS. 26 God, to procure His glory, sometimes permits that we should be dishonored and persecuted without reason. He wishes thereby to render us conformable to His Son, who was calumniated and treated as a seducer, as an ambitious man, and as one possessed.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 27 All that God gives us and all that He permits in this world have no other end than to sanctify us in Him.--ST. CATHERINE OF SIENA. 28 If you can not mortify your body by actual penance, abstain at least from some lawful pleasure.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 29 One whose heart is embittered can do nothing but contend and contradict, finding something to oppose in every remark.--VEN. JULIENNE MOREL. 30 Without prayer we have neither light nor strength to advance in the way which leads to God.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 31 I have never gone out to mingle with the world without losing something of myself.--BL. ALBERT THE GREAT. September 1 HE who perseveres with constancy and fervor will, without fail, raise himself to a high degree of perfection.--BL. HENRY SUSO. 2 An upright intention is the soul of our actions. It gives them life, and makes them good.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 3 You wish to reform the world: reform yourself, otherwise your efforts will be in vain.--ST. IGNATIUS. 4 Let all thy care be to possess thy soul in peace and tranquillity. Let no accident be to thee a cause of ill-humor.--ST. VINCENT FERRER. 5 Humility is a fortified town; it repels all attacks. The sight of it obliges the enemy to turn and flee.--VEN. LOUIS OF GRANADA. 6 The world is deceitful and inconstant. When fortune forsakes us, friendship takes flight.--BL. HENRY SUSO. 7 Perform all your actions in union with the pure intention and perfect love with which Our Lord did all things for the glory of God and the salvation of the world.--ST. MECHTILDIS. 8 An air of meekness and a modest speech are pleasing alike to God and men.--VEN. JOHN TAULER. 9 The saints owed to their confidence in God that unalterable tranquillity of soul, which procured their perpetual joy and peace, even in the midst of adversities.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 10 Look not to the qualities thou mayest possess, which are wanting to others; but look to those which others possess and which are wanting to thee, that thou mayest acquire them.--VEN. LOUIS DE GRANADA. 11 Your heart is not so narrow that the world can satisfy it entirely; nothing but God can fill it.--ST. IGNATIUS. 12 If you wish to raise a lofty edifice of perfection, take humility for a foundation.--ST. THOMAS AQUINAS. 13 It ordinarily happens that God permits those who judge others, to fall into the same or even greater faults.--ST. VINCENT FERRER. 14 Raise thy heart and thy love toward the sweet and most holy cross, which soothes every pain!--ST. CATHERINE OF SIENA. 15 Often read spiritual books; then, like a sheep, ruminate the food thou hast taken, by meditation and a desire to practise the holy doctrine found therein.--ST. ANTONINUS. 16 Love others much, but visit them seldom.--ST. CATHERINE OF SIENA. 17 God sends us trials and afflictions to exercise us in patience and teach us sympathy with the sorrows of others.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 18 Armed with prayer, the saints sustained a glorious warfare and vanquished all their enemies. By prayer, also, they appeased the wrath of God, and obtained from Him all they desired.--VEN. LOUIS DE GRANADA. 19 All souls in hell are there because they did not pray. All the saints sanctified themselves by prayer.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 20 The thought of the presence of God renders us familiar with the practice of doing in all things His holy will.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 21 If we consider the number and excellence of the virtues practised by the saints, we must feel the inefficiency and imperfection of our actions.-- ST. VINCENT FERRER. 22 Prayer without fervor has not sufficient strength to rise to heaven.-- ST. BERNARD. 23 The path of virtue is painful to nature when left to itself; but nature, assisted by grace, finds it easy and agreeable.--VEN. LOUIS OF GRANADA. 24 Always give the preference to actions which appear to you the most agreeable to God, and most contrary to self-love.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 25 As the branch separated from the roots soon loses all life and verdure, so it is with good works which are not united with charity.--ST. GREGORY THE GREAT. 26 We should constantly thank the Lord for having granted us the gift of the true faith, by associating us with the children of the holy Catholic Church.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 27 We should not spare expense, fatigue, nor even our life, when there is a question of accomplishing the holy will of God.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 28 Some are unable to fast or give alms; there are none who can not pray.-- ST. ALPHONSUS. 29 We meet with contradictions everywhere. If only two persons are together they mutually afford each other opportunities of exercising patience, and even when one is alone there will still be a necessity for this virtue, so true it is that our miserable life is full of crosses.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 30 We should bear our sufferings in expiation for our sins, to merit heaven, and to please God.--ST. ALPHONSUS. October 1 ALWAYS give good example: teach virtue by word and deed. Example is more powerful than discourse.--BL. HENRY SUSO. 2 If thou wouldst glory, let it be in the Lord, by referring everything to Him, and giving to Him all the honor and glory.--VEN. LOUIS DE GRANADA. 3 There is nothing more holy, more eminently perfect, than resignation to the will of God, which confirms us in an entire detachment from ourselves, and a perfect indifference for every condition in which we may be placed.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 4 Prayer consists not in many words, but in the fervor of desire, which raises the soul to God by the knowledge of its own nothingness and the divine goodness.--BL. HENRY SUSO. 5 Let us make up for lost time. Let us give to God the time that remains to us.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 6 When thou feelest thyself excited, shut thy mouth and chain thy tongue.--BL. HENRY SUSO. 7 If it was necessary that Christ should suffer and so enter by the cross into the kingdom of His Father, no friend of God should shrink from suffering.--VEN. JOHN TAULER. 8 We should grieve to see no account made of time, which is so precious; to see it employed so badly, so uselessly, for it can never be recalled.--BL. HENRY SUSO. 9 Every time that some unexpected event befalls us, be it affliction, or be it spiritual or corporal consolation, we should endeavor to receive it with equanimity of spirit, since all comes from the hand of God.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 10 There are some who sin through frailty, or through the force of some violent passion. They desire to break these chains of death; if their prayer is constant they will be heard.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 11 "Thy will be done!" This is what the saints had continually on their lips and in their hearts.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 12 He who would be a disciple of Jesus Christ must live in sufferings; for "The servant is not greater than the Master."--VEN. JOHN TAULER. 13 He who submits himself to God in all things is certain that whatever men say or do against him will always turn to his advantage.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 14 If he be blind who refuses to believe in the truths of the Catholic faith, how much blinder is he who believes, and yet lives as if he did not believe!--ST. ALPHONSUS. 15 There is no affliction, trial, or labor difficult to endure, when we consider the torments and sufferings which Our Lord Jesus Christ endured for us.--ST. TERESA. 16 Outside of God nothing is durable. We exchange life for death, health for sickness, honor for shame, riches for poverty. All things change and pass away.--ST. CATHERINE OF SIENA. 17 If you would keep yourself pure, shun dangerous occasions. Do not trust your own strength. In this matter we can not take too much precaution.-- ST. ALPHONSUS. 18 After knowing the will of God in regard to a work which we undertake, we should continue courageously, however difficult it may be. We should follow it to the end with as much constancy as the obstacles we encounter are great.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 19 In your prayers, if you would quickly and surely draw upon you the grace of God, pray in a special manner for our Holy Church and all those connected with it.--VEN. LOUIS DE BLOIS. 20 Prayer is our principal weapon. By it we obtain of God the victory over our evil inclinations, and over all temptations of hell.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 21 We should never abandon, on account of the difficulties we encounter, an enterprise undertaken with due reflection.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 22 Being all members of the same body, with the same head, who is Christ, it is proper that we should have in common the same joys and sorrows.-- VEN. LOUIS DE GRANADA. 23 We should be cordial and affable with the poor, and with persons in humble circumstances. We should not treat them in a supercilious manner. Haughtiness makes them revolt. On the contrary, when we are affable with them, they become more docile and derive more benefit from the advice they receive.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 24 Let not confusion for thy fault overwhelm thee with despair, as if there were no longer a remedy.--ST. CATHERINE OF SIENA. 25 As all our wickedness consists in turning away from our Creator, so all our goodness consists in uniting ourselves with Him.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 26 That which we suffer in the accomplishment of a good work, merits for us the necessary graces to insure its success.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 27 We ought to have a special devotion to those saints who excelled in humility, particularly to the Blessed Virgin Mary, who declares that the Lord regarded her on account of her humility.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 28 He who wishes to find Jesus should seek Him, not in the delights and pleasures of the world, but in mortification of the senses.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 29 Let us not despise, judge, or condemn any one but ourselves; then our cross will bloom and bear fruit.--VEN. JOHN TAULER. 30 It is rarely that we fall into error if we are humble and trust to the wisdom of others, in preference to our own judgment.--VEN. LOUIS DE BLOIS. 31 The best of all prayers is that in which we ask that God's holy will be accomplished, both in ourselves and in others.--VEN. LOUIS DE BLOIS. November 1 WE SHOULD honor God in His saints, and beseech Him to make us partakers of the graces He poured so abundantly upon them.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 2 We may have a confident hope of our salvation when we apply ourselves to relieve the souls in purgatory, so afflicted and so dear to God.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 3 The example of the saints is proposed to every one, so that the great actions shown us may encourage us to undertake smaller things.--VEN. LOUIS DE GRANADA. 4 Let us read the lives of the saints; let us consider the penances which they performed, and blush to be so effeminate and so fearful of mortifying our flesh.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 5 The greatest pain which the holy souls suffer in purgatory proceeds from their desire to possess God. This suffering especially afflicts those who in life had but a feeble desire of heaven.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 6 Death is welcome to one who has always feared God and faithfully served Him.--ST. TERESA. 7 True humility consists in being content with all that God is pleased to ordain for us, believing ourselves unworthy to be called His servants.-- ST. TERESA. 8 The best preparation for death is a perfect resignation to the will of God, after the example of Jesus Christ, who, in His prayer in Gethsemani prepared Himself with these words, "Father, not as I will, but as Thou wilt."--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 9 The errors of others should serve to keep us from adding any of our own to them.--ST. IGNATIUS. 10 There is more security in self-denial, mortification, and other like virtues, than in an abundance of tears.--ST. TERESA. 11 A resolute will triumphs over everything with the help of God, which is never wanting.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 12 If humble souls are contradicted, they remain calm; if they are calumniated, they suffer with patience; if they are little esteemed, neglected, or forgotten, they consider that their due; if they are weighed down with occupations, they perform them cheerfully.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 13 When we have to reply to some one who speaks harshly to us, we must always do it with gentleness. If we are angry, it is better to keep silence.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 14 The two principal dispositions which we should bring to holy communion are detachment from creatures, and the desire to receive Our Lord with a view to loving Him more in the future.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 15 In doing penance it is necessary to deprive oneself of as many lawful pleasures as we had the misfortune to indulge in unlawful ones.--ST. GREGORY THE GREAT. 16 In raising human nature to heaven by His ascension, Christ has given us the hope of arriving thither ourselves.--ST. THOMAS AQUINAS. 17 It is useless to subdue the flesh by abstinence, unless one gives up his irregular life, and abandons vices which defile his soul.--ST. BENEDICT. 18 No prayers are so acceptable to God as those which we offer Him after communion.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 19 It avails nothing to subdue the body, if the mind allows itself to be controlled by anger.--ST. GREGORY THE GREAT. 20 What is it that renders death terrible? Sin. We must therefore fear sin, not death.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 21 The Blessed Virgin is of all the works of the Creator the most excellent, and to find anything in nature more grand one must go to the Author of nature Himself.--ST. PETER DAMIAN. 22 If we would advance in virtue, we must not neglect little things, for they pave the way to greater.--ST. TERESA. 23 When one has fallen into some fault, what better remedy can there be than to have immediate recourse to the Most Blessed Sacrament?--ST. ALPHONSUS. 24 Afflictions are the most certain proofs that God can give us of His love for us.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 25 Is it not a great cruelty for us Christians, members of the body of the Holy Church, to attack one another?--ST. CATHERINE OF SIENA. 26 The Church is the pillar and ground of truth, and her infallibility admits of no doubt.--VEN. LOUIS DE GRANADA. 27 He who truly loves his neighbor and can not efficaciously assist him, should strive at least to relieve and help him by his prayers.--ST. TERESA. 28 We should blush for shame to show so much resentment at what is done or said against us, knowing that so many injuries and affronts have been offered to our Redeemer and the saints.--ST. TERESA. 29 The reason why so many souls who apply themselves to prayer are not inflamed with God's love is, that they neglect to carefully prepare themselves for it.--ST. TERESA. 30 It is absolutely necessary, both for our advancement and the salvation of others, to follow always and in all things the beautiful light of faith.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. December 1 IF WE consider all that is imperfect and worldly in us, we shall find ample reason for abasing ourselves before God and man, before ourselves and our inferiors.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 2 No one should think or say anything of another which he would not wish thought or said of himself.--ST. TERESA. 3 We should study the interests of others as our own, and be careful to act on all occasions with uprightness and loyalty.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 4 It is God Himself who receives what we give in charity, and is it not an incomparable happiness to give Him what belongs to Him, and what we have received from His goodness alone?--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 5 Let your constant practice be to offer yourself to God, that He may do with you what He pleases.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 6 It is not enough to forbid our own tongue to murmur; we must also refuse to listen to murmurers.--VEN. LOUIS DE GRANADA. 7 We can obtain no reward without merit, and no merit without patience.-- ST. ALPHONSUS. 8 No harp sends forth such sweet harmonies as are produced in the afflicted heart by the holy name of Mary. Let us kneel to reverence this holy, this sublime name of Mary!--BL. HENRY SUSO. 9 The life of a true Christian should be such that he fears neither death nor any event of his life, but endures and submits to all things with a good heart.--ST. TERESA. 10 We should abandon ourselves entirely into the hands of God, and believe that His providence disposes everything that He wishes or permits to happen to us for our greater good.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 11 Regulate and direct all your actions to God, offering them to Him and beseeching Him to grant that they be for His honor and glory.--ST. TERESA. [Illustration: Hail, Virgin Most Pure!] 12 Conformity to the will of God is an easy and certain means of acquiring a great treasure of graces in this life.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 13 Do not consider what others do, or how they do it; for there are but few who really work for their own sanctification.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 14 To-day God invites you to do good; do it therefore to-day. To-morrow you may not have time, or God may no longer call you to do it.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 15 To advance in the way of perfection it does not suffice to say a number of weak prayers; our principal care should be to acquire solid virtues.--ST. TERESA. 16 Humility is the virtue of Our Lord Jesus Christ, of His blessed Mother, and of the greatest saints. It embraces all virtues and, where it is sincere, introduces them into the soul.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 17 It will be a great consolation for us at the hour of death to know that we are to be judged by Him whom we have loved above all things during life.--ST. TERESA. 18 Humble submission and obedience to the decrees of the Sovereign Pontiffs are good means for distinguishing the loyal from the rebellious children of the Church.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 19 The devil attacks us at the time of prayer more frequently than at other times. His object is to make us weary of prayer.--BL. HENRY SUSO. 20 It is an act as rare as it is precious, to transact business with many people, without ever forgetting God or oneself.--ST. IGNATIUS. 21 God is our light. The farther the soul strays away from God, the deeper it goes into darkness.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 22 True Christian prudence makes us submit our intellect to the maxims of the Gospel without fear of being deceived. It teaches us to judge things as Jesus Christ judged them, and to speak and act as He did.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 23 Remember that men change easily, and that you can not place your trust in them; therefore attach yourself to God alone.--ST. TERESA. 24 If we secretly feel a desire to appear greater or better than others, we must repress it at once.--ST. TERESA. 25 The King of heaven deigned to be born in a stable, because He came to destroy pride, the cause of man's ruin.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 26 To save our souls we must live according to the maxims of the Gospel, and not according to those of the world.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 27 Be gentle and kind with every one, and severe with yourself.--ST. TERESA. 28 If you wish to be pleasing to God and happy here below, be in all things united to His will.--ST. ALPHONSUS. 29 In proportion as the love of God increases in our soul, so does also the love of suffering.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. 30 He who keeps steadily on without pausing, will reach the end of his path and the summit of perfection.--ST. TERESA. 31 The past is no longer yours; the future is not yet in your power. You have only the present wherein to do good.--ST. ALPHONSUS. PART VII Reasonableness of Catholic Ceremonies and Practices "Let the children of Israel make the Phase in due time . . . according to all the ceremonies thereof" (_Num._ ix 2, 3). Reasonableness of Catholic Ceremonies and Practices "The priest shall be vested with the tunic" (_Lev._ vi. 10). "And he made, of violet and purple, scarlet and fine linen, the vestments for Aaron to wear when he ministered in the holy places, as the Lord commanded Moses" (_Ex._ xxxix. 1). "In every place there is sacrifice and there is offered to My name a clean offering" (_Malach._ i. 11). "And another Angel came and stood before the altar, having a golden censer: and there was given to him much incense, that he should offer of the prayers of all saints upon the golden altar, which is before the throne of God" (_Apoc._ viii. 3). The Ceremonies of the Catholic Church THE Catholic Church in the celebration of Mass and in the administration of the sacraments employs certain forms and rites. These are called ceremonies. By these ceremonies the Church wishes to appeal to the heart as well as to the intellect, and to impress the faithful with sentiments of faith and piety. What is more capable of raising the heart and mind of man to God than a priest celebrating Mass? What more inspiring than some of our sacred music? How beneficial and how lasting the impression formed by the ceremonies of the Church, the following incident will show: One of our missionaries once went to visit a tribe of Indians who had been deprived of a priest for nearly half a century. After traveling through the forest for some days he came near their village. 'Twas Sunday morning. Suddenly the silence was broken by a number of voices singing in unison. He stopped to listen. To his great astonishment he distinguished the music of a Mass, and of Catholic hymns well known to him. What could be more touching than this simple, savage people endeavoring to celebrate the Lord's Day as they had been taught by the priest fifty years before? What more elevating than those sacred songs--the _Stabat Mater_, the _O Salutaris_, or the _Te Deum_--uttered by pious lips and resounding through the forest primeval? What better evidence could we have of the beneficial effects of our ceremonies in raising the heart to God? And yet few things connected with our holy religion have been more frequently subjected to ridicule than her ceremonies. People scoff at them, laugh at them, call them foolish and unreasonable. Those people do not stop to consider that by doing so they, themselves, are acting most unreasonably. For no reasonable person, no judge, will condemn another without hearing both sides of the question. These wiseacres, however, flatter themselves that they know all about the Catholic Church and her ceremonies without hearing her side of the case. Hence the misunderstandings and misrepresentations regarding her that exist among well-meaning people. If people would but learn to speak about that which they knew and understood; if they would accord to the Catholic Church the same treatment as to other institutions; if they would examine both sides of the question before criticising and ridiculing her teachings and her ceremonies; if they would but treat her with that openness, that fairness, that candor, that honesty characteristic of the American citizen when dealing with other questions--what a vast amount of ignorance, of prejudice, of sin would be avoided! We claim that ceremonies used in the worship of God are reasonable, because they were sanctioned by God in the Old Testament and by Jesus Christ and His apostles in the New Law. I. Ceremonies Necessary to Divine Worship THE angels are pure spirits. They have no body. Consequently the worship they render God is spiritual, interior. The heavenly bodies are not spiritual, but entirely material substances. They render God a sort of external worship according to the words of the prophet Daniel, "Sun and moon bless the Lord, . . . stars of heaven bless the Lord. Praise and exalt Him forever." Man has a soul, a spiritual substance similar to the heavenly bodies. He should, therefore, honor God by the twofold form of worship, interior and exterior. "God is a spirit; and they that adore Him must adore Him in spirit and in truth" (_John_ iv. 24). From these words of the beloved disciple we are not to conclude that interior worship is prescribed as the only essential, and exterior worship condemned. True piety must manifest itself externally. Man naturally manifests his feelings by outward signs and ceremonies. The Catholic Church recognizes that man has a heart to be moved as well as an intellect to be enlightened. She enlightens the intellect by her good books, sermons, etc.; and she moves the heart by the grandeur of her ceremonies. If any one doubts that God considers ceremonies necessary to divine worship, let him read the books of Leviticus and Exodus. Almost the whole of these books treats of the rites and ceremonies used by the then chosen people of God in their public worship. The 26th, 27th, and 28th chapters of Exodus prescribe the form of the tabernacle and its appurtenances, the size of the altar and the oil for the lamps, and the holy vestments which Aaron and his sons were to wear during the performance of the public ceremonies. The book of Leviticus treats more particularly of the sacrifices, rites, and ceremonies of the priests and Levites. "And the Lord called Moses, and spoke to him from the tabernacle of the testimony, saying: Speak to the children of Israel, and thou shalt say to them: The man among you that shall offer to the Lord a sacrifice of the cattle, that is, offering victims of oxen and sheep, if his offering be a holocaust and of the herd, he shall offer a male, without blemish, at the door of the tabernacle of the testimony, to make the Lord favorable to him. And he shall put his hand upon the head of the victim, and it shall be acceptable and help to his expiation" (_Lev._ i. 1_ et seq._). After enumerating all the sacrifices and ceremonies, the sacred writer closes the book of Leviticus with the words, "These are the precepts which the Lord commanded Moses for the children of Israel in Mount Sinai," thus showing that He considers ceremonies necessary to divine worship. The religion instituted by Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ is more spiritual than that of the Old Law. Nevertheless He did not discard ceremonies. In the Garden of Gethsemani He fell upon His knees in humble supplication. He went in procession to Jerusalem preceded by a great multitude strewing palm-branches on the road and singing, "Hosanna to the Son of David." Before He cured the deaf and dumb man, He put His fingers into his ears and touched his tongue with spittle, and looking up to heaven He groaned and said, "Ephpheta," which is, "Be thou opened." At the Last Supper He invoked a blessing on the bread and wine, and after the supper He chanted a hymn with His disciples--ceremonies similar to those used in the Mass. When He imparted the Holy Ghost to His apostles, He breathed upon them. In a similar way they and their successors communicated the Holy Ghost upon others by breathing upon them, laying their hands upon them and praying over them, when conferring the sacrament of Holy Orders. St. James directs that if any man is sick he shall call in a priest of the Church, who shall anoint him with oil, as is done in the sacrament of Extreme Unction. We must, therefore, admit that ceremonies used in the worship of God are reasonable, since they are sanctioned by God in the Old Law and by Jesus Christ and His apostles in the New Testament. All these acts of Our Saviour--the prostration in the Garden, the procession to Jerusalem, the touching of the deaf man's ears, the chanting of the hymn, the laying on of hands, the anointing of the sick--are but so many ceremonies serving as models of the ceremonies used by the Catholic Church in her public worship and in the administration of her sacraments. II. Vestments Used by the Priest at Mass BEFORE entering upon an explanation of the ceremonies of the Mass, which is our principal act of public worship, let us examine the meaning of the vestments worn by the priest during the celebration of that august sacrifice. First, it is well to remember that these vestments come down to us from the time of the apostles, and have the weight of antiquity hanging upon them. Hence, if they did not demand our respect as memorials of Christ, they are at least deserving of attention on account of their antiquity. The 28th chapter of Exodus tells us the sacred vestments God wished the priests of the Old Law to wear during the public worship. "And these shall be the vestments which they shall make: a rational and an ephod, a tunic and a straight linen garment, a mitre and a girdle. They shall make the holy vestments for thy brother Aaron and his sons, that they may do the office of priesthood unto Me." As God in the Old Law prescribed vestments for the priests, so the Church, guided by God, prescribes sacred vestments to be worn by the priest of the New Law while engaged in the sacred mysteries. The long black garment which the priest wears around the church in all the sacred functions is called a _cassock_. Kings and officers of the army wear a special uniform when performing their public duties; priests wear _cassocks_ and other special garments when performing their public duties. These vestments are used to excite the minds of the faithful to the contemplation of heavenly things. Who, for example, can behold the cross on the chasuble the priest wears without thinking of all Christ suffered for us on the cross? As the priest in celebrating Mass represents the person of Christ, and the Mass represents His passion, the vestments he wears represent those with which Christ was clothed at the time of the passion. The first vestment the priest puts on over the _cassock_ is called an _amice_. It is made of linen, and reminds us of the veil that covered the face of Jesus when His persecutors struck Him. (_Luke_ xxii. 64.) When the priest puts on the _amice_ he first places it on his head, thus recalling to mind the crown of thorns that pierced the head of Jesus. The _alb_ (from _albus_, white) represents the white garment with which Christ was vested by Herod when sent back to Pilate dressed as a fool. (_Luke_ xxii. 11.) White is emblematic of purity. Hence the wearer is reminded of that purity of mind and body which he should have who serves the altar of the Most High. The _cincture_, or girdle, as well as the _maniple_ and _stole_, represent the cords and bands with which Christ was bound in the different stages of His passion. St. Matthew says in the 22d verse of the 27th chapter, "They brought Him _bound_ and delivered Him to Pontius Pilate, the governor." The _chasuble_, or outer vestment the priest wears, represents the purple garment with which Christ was clothed as a mock king. "And they clothed Him with purple" (_Mark_ xv. 17). Upon the back of the _chasuble_ you see a cross. This represents the cross Christ bore on His sacred shoulders to Calvary, and upon which He was crucified. In these vestments, that is, in the _chasuble_, _stole_, and _maniple_, the Church uses five colors--white, red, purple, green, and black. White, which is symbolic of purity and innocence, is used on the feasts of Our Lord, of the Blessed Virgin, of the angels, and of the saints that were not martyrs. Red, the symbol of fortitude, is used on the feast of Pentecost, of the Exaltation of the Cross, of the apostles and martyrs. Purple, or violet (the color of penance), is used in Advent and Lent. Green (the color of hope) is used on all Sundays when no special feast is celebrated, except the Sundays of Lent and Advent. Black (the color of mourning) is used on Good Friday and during the celebration of Mass for the dead. Thus we see that each vestment and color used has a special significance. All are calculated to attract our attention, elevate our minds to God, and fill us with a desire to do something for Him Who has done so much for us--to at least keep His commandments. One word about the use of Latin in the celebration of Mass will perhaps be appropriate here. History tells us that when Christianity was established the Roman Empire had control of nearly all of Europe, Asia, and Africa. Wherever the Roman flag floated to the breeze the Latin language was spoken, just as English is spoken where the sovereign of Great Britain or the President of the United States holds sway. The Church naturally adopted in her liturgy the language spoken by the people. In the beginning of the fifth century vast hordes of barbarians began to come from the north of Europe and spread desolation over the fairest portions of the Roman Empire. Soon the Empire was broken up. New kingdoms began to be formed, new languages to be developed. The Latin finally ceased to be a living language. The Church retained it in her liturgy, 1st, because, as her doctrine and liturgy are unchangeable, she wishes the language of her doctrine and liturgy to be unchangeable; 2d, because, as the Church is spread over the whole world, embracing in her fold children of all climes, nations, and languages--as she is universal--she must have a universal language; 3d, because the Catholic clergy are in constant communication with the Holy See, and this requires a uniform language. Besides, when a priest says Mass the people, by their English Missals or other prayer-books, are able to follow him from beginning to end. The Mass is a sacrifice. The prayers of the Mass are offered to God. Hence when the priest says Mass he is speaking not to the people, but to God, to whom all languages are equally intelligible. Are not these sufficient reasons for the use of the Latin language? Are not good Catholics more attentive, more devout at Mass than others at their prayer-meetings? The good Catholic knows that the Mass represents the passion and death of Christ; that the passion and death of Christ are the sinner's only refuge, the just man's only hope; that it can not but be good and wholesome to turn our minds and our hearts toward this subject; that frequent meditation on Christ's passion will move us to avoid sin, which caused it; and that nothing can more efficaciously cause us to think of Christ's passion and death than the holy sacrifice of the Mass. III. Ceremonies of the Mass THE Mass is the great sacrifice of the New Law. It was foreshadowed by all the sacrifices ordained by God in the Old Law. They were shadows; it is the substance. We learn from Genesis of the fall of man. Universal tradition, as well as Scripture, informs us that the creature formerly became guilty in the eyes of the Creator. All nations, all peoples, endeavored to appease the anger of Heaven and believed that a victim was necessary for this purpose. Hence sacrifices have been offered from the beginning of the human race. Cain and Abel offered victims; the one the first fruits of the earth, the other the firstlings of the flock. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Melchisedech worshiped this way, and their worship was acceptable to God. Everywhere, even among the heathen, you find the altar, the priest, and the sacrifice. As we learn from Leviticus and other portions of the Old Testament, God Himself carefully prescribed the quality, manner, number, and place of the various sacrifices which He was pleased to accept from the hands of His chosen people. From this fact that sacrifice has ever formed a prominent feature in the worship of all people, we conclude that it belongs to the essentials of religion, and that Christians to-day should have an altar of which, as St. Paul says, "they can not eat who serve the tabernacle." The sacrifices of the Old Law were provisional and prefigured the great sacrifice of the New Law foretold by the prophet Malachy. This glorious prophecy of Malachy, "From the rising of the sun even to the going down My name is great among the Gentiles; in every place there is sacrifice, and there is offered to My name a clean offering; for My name is great among the Gentiles, saith the Lord of Hosts"--this glorious prophecy is fulfilled only by the great sacrifice of the Catholic Church. We alone can say with St. Paul, "_Habemus altare_" "We have an altar" and a true sacrifice. Of all the blessings bequeathed by Jesus Christ to His Church, there is none better, none greater, none holier than the holy sacrifice of the Mass. It is the sacrifice of His own body and blood offered to the heavenly Father under the appearances of bread and wine. It was instituted by Our Lord at the Last Supper, when He took bread and wine in His sacred hands and blessed them, saying, "This is My body. . . . This is My blood. . . . Do this for a remembrance of Me." He instituted the holy Mass in order to represent and continue the sacrifice of Calvary. St Paul says, in his first epistle to the Corinthians, xi. 26, that it was instituted to show the death of the Lord until His second coming. After the consecration, which the priest effects by saying over the bread and wine the same words which Jesus Christ said at the Last Supper, there is no longer bread and wine, but the true and living Jesus Christ, God and man, hidden under the appearances of bread and wine, just as in the manger He was hidden under the appearance of an infant. The priest offers Him up to His heavenly Father in the name of the Catholic Church, or rather He offers Himself up, and we can confidently hope that we will obtain more through prayers at the holy Mass than through our own unaided prayers. In order to have part in the holy sacrifice of the Mass a person should follow the actions and prayers of the priest, especially at the offertory, consecration, and communion; meditate on the passion of Christ; say the rosary or the prayers in the prayer-books, at the same time uniting his intention with the intention of the sacrificing priest. The sacrifice of the Mass is a true sacrifice, because it is the oblation of a victim to God to represent by its destruction or change His supreme dominion over life and death. It is offered to satisfy our four great debts and wants in adoration to God on account of His omnipotence, in thanksgiving for His benefits, in atonement for our sins, and to obtain His assistance in difficulties and temptations. The holy Mass obtains for us all graces and blessings, temporal and spiritual. Since the Mass is the highest act of public worship, it is proper that it should be celebrated with fitting sacred ceremonies. Every ceremony which the Church prescribes has its deep significance. All tend to bring before our minds the mystery of the passion. The _altar_, which is reached by means of steps, represents Mount Calvary, upon which Christ died with His arms extended as if to enfold all men as brothers. The _crucifix_ recalls Jesus dying on the cross. The _lighted candles_ are symbols of the faith and devotion which ought to burn in the hearts of the faithful when present at Mass. The _sacred vestments_, embroidered with the sign of the cross, indicate that the priest is the minister and visible representative of Jesus Christ, the invisible priest. The sign of the cross made many times by the priest over the host and chalice reminds us that we offer to God the divine Victim of the cross, and that we ought to unite ourselves to Him by loving the cross, by patience and Christian penance. We genuflect because Our Lord is really present. If we know He is not present on the altar we bow in honor of the place where He sometimes reposes. _Holy water_ is used to signify that our souls must be pure if we wish God to answer our prayers. _Incense_ is used at solemn High Mass and at Vespers. It is symbolic of prayer, agreeably to the words of the 140th psalm: "Let my prayer, O Lord, be directed as incense in Thy sight." And St. John, describing the heavenly Jerusalem in the 8th chapter of the Apocalypse, says: "Another angel came, and stood before the altar, having a golden censer; and there was given him much incense, that he should offer of the prayers of all saints upon the golden altar which is before the throne of God." The sacrifice of the Mass, then, is the sacrifice of Calvary, since the same Victim is offered up and by the same High Priest, Jesus Christ. The Emanuel, the God with us, the thought of whom made the prophets tremble centuries before He came, that divine Teacher who loves to dwell with the children of men, the Catholic Church beholds dwelling in the midst of us on our altars. If you have visited some of our ancient cathedrals, or any of our magnificent modern churches, and admired the varied ornaments or artistic wonders therein; if you have ever been present at our religious solemnities and witnessed the gravity of our ceremonies, the beauty of the chants, the piety of the adorers; if you have reflected upon the spirit of sacrifice and self-forgetfulness so common to Catholicism and so unknown elsewhere--that spirit which moves thousands of the young of both sexes to forsake the world and devote themselves to the care of the sick, the education of the young, and to other works of charity--if you have witnessed these things and reflected upon them, you can not but have asked yourself why are such gorgeous temples built; why such magnificent works of art as displayed on the altar, the sacred vessels, paintings, and other things in the church? What prompts such sacrifices? And the answer will be, because the church is the edifice where God in the holy Mass daily renews the prodigies of His mercy, and it can never be worthy of His love; because God, who sacrificed Himself for us, is ever with us in the Blessed Sacrament of the altar, to soothe our cares and answer our prayers. Yes, the grand feature of the Catholic Church is the holy altar. On the altar is the tabernacle for the residence of the Lord of Hosts. There our "hidden God," Jesus in the Eucharist, dwells night and day in the midst of His people, saying to them with words of love, "Come to me all you that are burdened and heavy laden, and I will refresh you." The Mass, independent of its sacrificial aspect, consists of the best prayers ever uttered. The priest begins by making the sign of the cross, "In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost." This sign is an epitome of the Christian's belief in the unity and trinity of God and in the incarnation and death of Jesus Christ. After making the sign of the cross he repeats the 42d psalm, "Judge me, O God," and then makes an humble confession of his sins to God. He ascends the altar and nine times asks God to have mercy on him, _Kyrie Eleison_; then follows the beautiful hymn the shepherds heard the angels singing at the birth of the Saviour, _Gloria in Excelsis Deo_. The prayer of the feast, the epistle and gospel follow, and then the sermon in the vernacular is usually preached. After the Nicene Creed, _Credo in Unum Deum_, the priest makes the offering of bread and wine. He then washes the tips of his fingers, saying: "I will wash my hands among the innocent," by which he is reminded to be free from stain to offer worthily the Holy Sacrifice. The preface, canon, and solemn words of consecration follow, during which the bread and wine are changed by the power of Jesus Christ into His body and blood. In a short time he comes to the best of all prayers, the prayer taught us by Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, the Our Father, _Pater Noster_. The _Agnus Dei_ follows, then the communion, when he partakes of the consecrated bread and wine, and afterward gives holy communion to the faithful. He then continues the Mass, gives his blessing, and finishes the Mass with the beginning of the Gospel of St. John. Hence you see that, besides the great sacrifice which makes it an act worthy of God, the Mass consists of the best of all prayers. From what has been said it is evident that ceremonies in the worship of God are reasonable, being sanctioned by God in the Old and New Testaments; that the holy sacrifice of the Mass is the greatest of all acts of worship; and that the Catholic Church in using ceremonies is but following the example of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ and His apostles. St. John in the Book of Revelations tells us that before the throne of God angels stand with golden censers, multitudes from all nations follow and adore the Lamb, while virgins sing the new song which they alone can utter. So, too, before the throne of God on earth we swing our censers, multitudes from all nations prostrate themselves in adoration, the sweet incense of their praise and prayer ascends to the throne of grace, their minds are enlightened by God's word, while their hearts are raised to God by the grandeur of our ceremonies. The Son of God, after having taught us by His word, shown us by His example, and merited for us by His grace the virtues necessary for salvation, wished to institute the holy sacrifice of the Mass, that He might come Himself in the Holy Sacrament and imprint them upon us. Of these virtues, the most important are _humility_, _purity_, _obedience_, _patience_, and _charity_. Let us always ask God when present at the holy Mass for a lively faith in His _Real Presence_, an ardent love for Him in the Blessed Sacrament of the altar, and the grace to imitate His humility, His purity, His meekness, obedience, patience, and charity _here_, and enjoy His presence forever _hereafter_. The following beautiful words of Cardinal Newman show that the Mass is something more than a mere form of words, and that ceremonies are reasonable as well as necessary in its celebration: "To me nothing is so consoling, so piercing, so thrilling, so overcoming, as the Mass said as it is among us. I could attend Masses forever and not be tired. It is not a mere form of words--it is a great action, the greatest action that can be on earth. It is not the invocation merely, but, if I dare use the word, the evocation of the Eternal. He becomes present on the altar in flesh and blood, before Whom angels bow and devils tremble. This is that awful event which is the scope and the interpretation of every part of the solemnity. Words are necessary, but as means, not as ends; they are not mere addresses to the throne of grace, they are instruments of what is far higher, of consecration, of sacrifice. "They hurry on as if impatient to fulfil their mission. Quickly they go, for they are awful words of sacrifice; they are a work too great to delay upon, as when it was said in the beginning, 'What thou doest, do quickly.' Quickly they pass, for the Lord Jesus goes with them, as He passed along the lake in the days of His flesh, quickly calling first one and then another; quickly they pass, because as the lightning which shineth from one part of the heaven unto the other, so is the coming of the Son of Man. "Quickly they pass, for they are as the words of Moses, when the Lord came down in the cloud, calling on the name of the Lord as He passed by, 'The Lord, the Lord God, merciful and generous, long suffering, and abundant in goodness and truth.' And as Moses on the mountain, so we, too, make haste and bow our heads to the earth and adore. "So we, all around, each in his place, look for the great Advent 'waiting for the moving of the water,' each in his place, with his own heart, with his own wants, with his own prayers, separate but concordant, watching what is going on, watching its progress, uniting in its consummation; not painfully, and hopelessly following a hard form of prayer from beginning to end, but like a concert of musical instruments each different, but concurring in sweet harmony, we take our post with God's priest, supporting him, yet guided by him. There are little children there, and old men, and simple laborers, and students in seminaries, priests preparing for Mass, priests making their thanksgiving, there are innocent maidens, and there are penitent sinners; but out of these many minds rises one Eucharistic hymn, and the great action is the measure and the scope of it." The Practices of the Catholic Church I. Vespers and Benediction "Remember that thou keep holy the Sabbath day" (_Ex_. xx. 8). THIS commandment teaches us that God wills the whole Sunday to be spent in His honor. We should sanctify it by good works, and by assisting at divine service. On that day servile works and improper amusements are forbidden. A salutary rest and moderate recreation are allowed, but never at the expense of duties of obligation. After hearing Mass on Sunday morning, which is obligatory on all Catholics, there is no better way of sanctifying the remainder of the day than by attending Vespers and Benediction. The Vesper service is a small portion of the divine office, which priests must recite daily, for God's honor and glory. It consists of five of the psalms of David (Dixit Dominus, Ps. 109; Confitebor tibi, Ps. 110; Beatus vir, Ps. 111; Laudate pueri, Ps. 112; In exitu Israel, Ps. 113, or Laudate Dominum, Ps. 116), a hymn, the Magnificat, or canticle of the Virgin Mary, from the first chapter of St. Luke, and some prayers. Is it not reasonable thus to praise God in psalms and hymns and spiritual canticles? Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament usually follows Vespers. The Catholic Church teaches that Jesus Christ is really present in the Blessed Sacrament. The reasonableness of this teaching will be seen in the following article. Since Jesus Christ is present, He ought to be adored by the faithful. Faithful adorers frequently visit Him in the Blessed Sacrament and worship Him in "spirit and in truth." Hence, the Blessed Sacrament is kept in the Tabernacle on our altars to soothe our cares, answer our prayers, and be ready at any time to be administered to the sick and dying. Besides our private devotion to the Blessed Sacrament, the Church has appointed solemn rites to show publicly our faith and devotion toward the Real Presence of Jesus Christ. These rites are processions on Corpus Christi, the Forty Hours' devotion, and, especially, the rite called Benediction. When it is time for Benediction many candles are lighted on the altar. This is done to show our faith in the Real Presence of Jesus Christ. If He were not present, this display would be unreasonable, unnecessary, and meaningless. But the candles we light, the incense we burn, the flowers and other ornaments we use to decorate the altar, and all that we do for Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ can not be too much. Everything being prepared, the priest takes the Blessed Sacrament out of the tabernacle, and, placing it in the ostensorium, exposes it on an elevated throne, while the choir sings in honor of the Blessed Sacrament the hymn "O Salutaris Hostia," "O Saving Host." The priest incenses Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament, as, according to the Apocalypse, angels do in heaven. Another hymn or a litany follows; after which is sung the "Tantum Ergo," "Down in adoration falling," followed by a prayer by the priest. Then in the midst of a solemn silence (except that a small bell is tinkled) the priest takes the monstrance, or ostensorium, containing the Blessed Sacrament, and, turning toward the people, makes with it the sign of the cross over them, thus blessing the faithful with the Most Holy One. This is certainly a most touching and impressive rite even to those who do not believe in it. Cardinal Newman calls it one of the most beautiful, natural, and soothing practices of the Church. No one will deny that this practice, or rite of the Church, is reasonable, if Jesus Christ is really present in the Blessed Sacrament. That He is really present is our belief. This being our belief, is it not reasonable to light candles as a sign of spiritual joy, and thus to show our faith in Him who is the light of the world? He gave us all that we have. He gave us the beautiful world we dwell upon with its variety of scenery--with its snow-capped mountains, its green-carpeted hills, and its blooming valleys. He has no need of our gifts; for the earth is His "and the fulness thereof." Yet as He was pleased to receive the gifts of the Magi and the precious ointment of Mary, so, too, is He pleased to receive our offerings. And is anything too good, too beautiful, too precious, for Him? Can the altar on which He dwells be too richly adorned? Are the pure candles we light, the sweet incense we burn, the choice flowers and costly ornaments with which we decorate the altar, too much to use in honor of Our Lord and our God? Yes, the Catholic practice or rite of Benediction is dictated by right reason. Everything connected with Benediction is reasonable, beautiful, and suggestive of the _noblest sentiments of the heart of man_. [Illustration: Mary, Star of the Sea.] II. Devotion to the Blessed Sacrament "And whilst they were at supper, Jesus took bread, and blessed, and broke, and gave to His disciples, and said: take ye and eat. This is My body" (_Matt_. xxvi. 26). PERHAPS no mystery of revelation has been so universally attacked as the Real Presence of Jesus Christ in the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar. By the Real Presence is meant that Jesus Christ is really and truly, body and blood, soul and divinity, present in the Blessed Sacrament, under the form and appearance of bread and wine. This teaching of the Church is in perfect agreement with Scripture, tradition, and reason. If the reader will take up his Bible and read carefully the 6th chapter of the Gospel according to St. John; the 26th chapter, 26th, 27th, and 28th verses of St. Matthew; the 14th chapter, 22d verse of St. Mark; the First Epistle of St. Paul to the Corinthians, 10th chapter, 16th verse, as well as other portions of the New Testament, he will certainly see that the Catholic teaching and practice concerning the Real Presence of Jesus Christ in the Blessed Sacrament are founded on Scripture. In this 6th chapter of St. John, we learn that before instituting the Blessed Sacrament Our Saviour wished to announce or promise it to His disciples in order to prepare them for it. He first gave them a figure of the Blessed Sacrament in the multiplication of the five loaves of bread by which He fed five thousand persons. After this miracle He told them that He would give them bread superior to that which they had eaten, and that this bread was His own flesh and blood. "The bread that I will give is My flesh, for the life of the world." It is almost impossible to understand these words of Our Lord in any other than a literal sense. He was so understood by those who heard Him. "How can this man give us his flesh to eat?" they said, and many withdrew from Him. It is but reasonable to believe that if He did not wish to be understood in a literal sense He would have told His hearers so, rather than have them leave Him. This promise of a doctrine so difficult to understand was fulfilled at the Last Supper. Then Jesus took bread, and blessed, and broke, and gave to His disciples, and said: "Take ye and eat. This is My body." And taking the chalice He gave thanks; and gave to them, saying: "Drink ye all of this. For this is My blood of the new testament which shall be shed for many for the remission of sins." "Do this for a commemoration of Me." These are substantially the words of SS. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and of the apostle Paul. In the 10th chapter of the First Epistle to the Corinthians, St. Paul says: "The chalice of benediction which we bless, is it not the communion of the blood of Christ? And the bread which we break, is it not the partaking of the body of the Lord?" Any one of these texts abundantly proves the Catholic doctrine of the Real Presence, and shows the reasonableness of the Catholic practice regarding the Blessed Sacrament. Reflect upon them. Reflect especially upon the words of Christ, "This is My body." Think what an insult it is to the divinity and veracity of Christ to doubt His word, because you can not understand how what appears to be bread is in reality His own body and blood. If you remember that Jesus Christ is God, that He had the power to make this change, that He could confer this power on others, as the apostles and their successors, that He did so when He said: "Do this in commemoration of Me," and that this change at the present time as at the time of the apostles is made by His almighty power, you will have no difficulty in believing it. The belief and practice of the Catholic Church of to-day regarding the Blessed Sacrament is the same as it was in every age since the time of Christ. The history of every century tells us this. The Fathers, Doctors, and Church writers of every age say the same. If it were not so, some one ought to be able to find the time when the doctrine was invented, and the person who invented it. But, since no one has been able to find the inventor of this doctrine and practice, the time or place of the invention, we rightly conclude that they came down to us from the time of Christ, and had Christ for an author. (Berengarius, in the eleventh century, was the first who denied this doctrine.) If, then, Christ is the author, is not the Catholic practice reasonable? But I don't understand the Catholic doctrine regarding the Blessed Sacrament, some one may say; therefore it is contrary to reason. Dear reader, did the consummate puerility, silliness, foolishness of such an objection ever present itself to you? Do you understand the Blessed Trinity? And is it contrary to reason? No. Although above reason, it is not against it. Do you understand how Jesus Christ is both God and man? Do you understand any mystery? No. If you did it would no longer be a mystery. For a mystery is something above human intelligence. It is something incomprehensible to us, for it pertains to the divine intelligence. And as well might you attempt to pour the mighty ocean into a small hole on the shore, as attempt to hold with your limited capacity the illimitable ocean of divinity. The proper office of reason is to examine the evidences of revelation, and see if God has spoken. But it constitutes no part of its office to dispute the word of God. That God has spoken is evident from the fulfilment of many prophecies and the authority of many miracles. That these prophecies have been fulfilled, and these miracles performed, is as certain as is any historical fact. Reason teaches us this. It teaches us, too, that no one but God (or by the power of God) can prophesy; no one but God can derogate from the order of nature, by the performance of a miracle. Reason teaches us, then, that God has spoken. When we know God speaks, genuine reason will dictate that we humbly believe His holy word. Thus will true reason ever act. And when God says, "This is My body," it will not hesitate to believe. We all believe that at the baptism of Our Saviour by St. John Baptist, the Holy Ghost appeared in the form of a dove. Now, is it not as reasonable for Jesus Christ, the second person of the Blessed Trinity, to appear in the form of bread as it was for the Holy Ghost, the third person of the Trinity, to appear in the form of a dove? We must therefore admit that the Catholic doctrine of the Real Presence of Jesus Christ in the Blessed Sacrament is reasonable; that it has been believed by the Christian Church of every age from the time of Christ until the present time; and that it is taught by SS. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and by St. Paul in clear and unmistakable terms. Now, dear reader, since Jesus Christ is really present, is not the Catholic practice regarding the Blessed Sacrament reasonable? Should we not honor Our Lord and Our God? Should we not adore Him as really present in the Blessed Sacrament? Should we not frequently receive Him with pure and contrite hearts? Should we not, when we enter the church, genuflect, bend the knee in His honor? Should we not show Him every mark of respect and devotion? Can we do too much in His honor? Let us, then, adore Our Lord and Our God, for we are His people and the sheep of His pasture. Let us return love for love to the great King of suffering, who was born for love of us, who died for love of us, and who, for love of us, remains ever with us in the Blessed Sacrament. Let us ask that our faith and love may persevere to the end; that loving and adoring Him here in the Blessed Sacrament of His love, _we may be united with Him forever hereafter_. III. Holy Communion "He that eateth this bread shall live forever" (_John_ vi. 59) HOLY communion is receiving the body and blood of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament. The clergy when saying Mass, except on Good Friday, receive under both forms. When not celebrating Mass, they receive only the one kind, the consecrated bread. In the early ages of the Church communion was given to the people under both forms. The faithful, however, could, if they wished, dispense with one form and receive under the form of bread. This shows that the Church always taught that Christ is entire both under the form of bread and under the form of wine. At one time the faithful received under both forms; now they receive under one form, the form of bread. It is merely a matter of discipline, which the Church could change, if circumstances demanded it. Whether you receive under one form or both, you receive whole and entire the body and blood of Christ. This is clearly taught by St. Paul in the 11th chapter of the First Epistle to the Corinthians, where he says: "Whosoever shall eat this bread, _or_ drink the chalice of the Lord _unworthily_, shall be guilty of the body _and_ blood of the Lord." How could a person eating that bread unworthily be guilty of the body and blood of the Lord, unless the body and blood of the Lord were there under the form of bread? Since Jesus Christ is whole and entire under the form of bread, as well as under the form of wine, the practice of the Catholic Church of giving holy communion under one form is reasonable. Good Christians frequently receive their Lord and their God in holy communion. He inspires them with feelings of love, gratitude, and adoration. He reminds them to think frequently of their Creator--to give Him their first thoughts in the morning and their last in the evening. He gives them strength to restrain their guilty passions. Holy Communion is the seed of immortality. "He that eateth this bread _shall live forever_." IV. Confirmation "Then they laid their hands upon them, and they received the Holy Ghost" (_Acts_ viii. 17). BEFORE the coming of the Holy Ghost on Pentecost, the apostles were weak and vacillating. One of them betrayed his Master for thirty pieces of silver; another--the Prince of the Apostles, he whom Christ afterward made head of His Church--thrice denied his Lord and his God. After the descent of the Holy Ghost, what a change! What a wonderful transformation! They who before had been as timid as the lamb, as changeable as the chameleon's hue, became now as bold as the lion, as firm as Gibraltar's rock. In a similar way does Confirmation act on the receiver. Confirmation is that sacrament in which, by the imposition of the bishop's hands, we receive the Holy Ghost to make us strong and perfect Christians and soldiers of Jesus Christ. It is the second in the order of the sacraments, because the early Christians were accustomed to receive it immediately after Baptism. In the 8th chapter of the Acts of the Apostles we find the first recorded instance of the administering of Confirmation by the apostles. Here we are told that St. Peter and St. John confirmed the Samaritans who had been baptized by Philip. "They prayed for them that they might receive the Holy Ghost. . . . Then they laid their hands upon them, and they received the Holy Ghost." In a similar way does the bishop, the successor of the apostles, administer Confirmation at the present day. First, he turns toward those to be confirmed and says: "May the Holy Ghost come down upon you and the power of the Most High keep you from sin." Then extending his hands over them he prays that they may receive the Holy Ghost. In the 6th verse of the 19th chapter of the Acts the sacred writer, after telling about the baptism of the disciples at Ephesus, adds: "And when Paul had laid his hands upon them the Holy Ghost came on them." In the 6th chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews St. Paul mentions Confirmation, the laying on of hands, with Baptism and Penance, as among the principal practices of Christianity. The sacrament of Confirmation has been administered to the faithful of every age from the time of Christ until the present. We learn this from the Fathers and writers of the various ages. Among them St. Clement says: "All must make haste to be confirmed by a bishop, and receive the sevenfold grace of the Holy Ghost." The practice of administering Confirmation is founded on tradition, then, as well as on Scripture. Is it not reasonable to believe and practise that which the Christian Church of every age believed and practised? The apostles of Christ administered Confirmation by praying that the faithful may receive the Holy Ghost and laying their hands upon them. The successors of the apostles do likewise. Who will say that this practice is not reasonable? Baptism gives spiritual life; Confirmation increases it. Baptism makes persons children of God; Confirmation strengthens them, causes them to grow, and makes them strong men and soldiers of Jesus Christ. All the morality of life is implied in the sacrament of Confirmation. It strengthens man, it gives him courage to confess God; and as sin is the denial of God, whoever has courage to confess _God will practise virtue_. V. Honoring the Blessed Virgin "The angel Gabriel was sent from God . . . to a Virgin . . . and the Virgin's name was Mary. And the angel being come in said to her: Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with thee; blessed art thou among women" (_Luke_ i. 26, 28). "From henceforth all generations shall call me blessed" (_Luke_ i. 48). THESE words from St. Luke show that the Catholic practice of honoring Mary is scriptural. We alone fulfil the prophecy, "From henceforth all generations shall call me blessed." If Mary was so pure that the archangel Gabriel could salute her as full of grace; if she was so perfect as to be honored, respected, and loved by her divine Son, Jesus Christ, is it not reasonable that we, too, should honor, respect, and love her? How we honor the sword of Washington! What a cluster of tender recollections clings to the staff of Franklin! Is there a loyal American citizen who does not think with feelings of love and respect of the mother of our Revolutionary hero, or who would not doff his hat at the unveiling of a statue of the sage of Monticello? And why? Is it on account of their intrinsic merit? No. We honor them principally on account of the relation they bear to those three brightest stars in the American firmament. So it is with the honor we show to Mary, the Mother of God. Although she was an example of all virtues, we honor her principally because it was through her instrumentality He was born by whom we achieved not civil liberty, but the liberty of the children of God. She did not draw lightning from heaven, nor the scepter from kings; but she brought forth Him who is the Lord of heaven and King of kings. The principal reason, then, why we honor Mary is because she is the Mother of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. This honor consists of love, respect, and veneration. We love her with an interior love, a love proceeding from the heart; nor should we fear to let this love appear outwardly. When others revile her, speak disrespectfully of her, we should shrink from the very idea of acting similarly toward her. We should then remember that she is the Mother of Our Saviour, and should ask ourselves how we would have acted toward her had we lived in her day and been witnesses of the honor shown her by her divine Son. By so doing we will show her that love which is her due. Our respect, our veneration for her, should be affectionate and deep. When we remember that it was her hand that first lifted from the ground and received in maternal embrace the sacred body of Jesus, just born and just dead; when we think how respectfully Elizabeth greeted her; when we recall to mind the reverent salutation of the archangel; when we consider the honor shown her by the apostles and by her own divine Son, can we help feeling a deep love, respect, and veneration for her? You see, dear reader, honoring Mary is scriptural and reasonable. But if we should honor her principally because she is the Mother of God, we should also honor her because she is the peerless glory, the matchless jewel of her sex. She constitutes a sole exception to a general law. Sin never contaminated, never touched her fair soul. This is what we mean by the Immaculate Conception. God created the first man free from sin. But he transgressed the law of God, and, by his transgression, all his posterity are born in sin and conceived in iniquity. For St. Paul says: "By one man sin entered into this world, and by sin death; and so death passed upon all men, in whom all have sinned" (_Rom._ v. 12). But God promised that the woman, Mary, should crush the head of the serpent. Now if she was to crush the head of the serpent, it was fit that she should never be under his power, that she should be pure, free from sin of every kind. There have been exceptions to all general laws. At the time of the deluge Noe was saved. Lot was saved from the destruction of Sodom. In like manner, the Blessed Virgin is an exception to the general law that all sinned in Adam. Isaias and St. John Baptist were sanctified in their mother's womb. Was it any more difficult for God to sanctify Mary at the moment of her conception, at the moment of the union of her soul with her body? God chose His own Mother. If He had the power to choose her did He not also have the power to preserve her from original sin? And does it not appear to you most fitting that God, the Holy Ghost, should preserve His spouse, and God, the Son, His Mother, from sin of every kind? "Hail, full of grace," the angel said to her. If she was full of grace, no vacancy was left for sin. Grace denotes the absence of sin, as light denotes the absence of darkness. Hence if Mary was full of grace, she was never subject to sin; she was always pure and her conception immaculate. It is but natural, then, that we arrive at the belief in the Immaculate Conception, at the belief in the sinlessness, the spotlessness of the Blessed Virgin from the very beginning of her existence. If we honor Mary principally because the angel honored her, because God honored her, we honor her, also, because of her immaculate conception and total freedom from sin. She was a model of all virtues. Is it not reasonable, then, to honor Mary, to love her, and to believe that she loves us? If we honor the good and virtuous, where can we find a nobler example of virtue than Mary? What a beautiful model Mary is for Christians, and especially for Christian women! Good Catholic mothers are continually urging upon their daughters the necessity of choosing as a model Mary, the true type of female excellence. In Mary you find all that is tender, loving, constant, and true. In her you find all virtues. In her humility she refused the highest honors; while in patience she endured more anguish and agony than any other creature on earth. Mary is a creature of God. As the praise we bestow on a beautiful picture redounds to the glory of the artist, so the honor we give Mary redounds to God, since we honor her for His sake. Let us honor her. That person who honors the Blessed Virgin; who loves, respects, and venerates her as the Mother of God; who takes her as a model and imitates her virtues; who prays to her in trials and afflictions and asks her intercession with her divine Son, does not only act in a reasonable manner, but such action is certain to make the path through this world smooth and easy and at the same time safe to a life of _eternal happiness_. VI. Confession of Sin "Whom when He saw He said: Go, show yourselves to the priests" (_Luke_ xvii. 14). "Receive ye the Holy Ghost; whose sins ye shall forgive, they are forgiven them, and whose sins ye shall retain, they are retained" (_John_ xx. 23). THE whole of the life of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ may be summed up in these words of the Acts: "He went about doing good." He healed the sick, gave sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, and raised the dead to life. The healing of the body, however, was to Him a secondary object. The healing of the soul was His mission on earth. He frequently called the attention of His followers to this. For example, He cured the man of the palsy to prove that as man He had the power to forgive sins. Another example is when He gives us in the cure of the lepers a figure of sin and its cure. Leprosy has always been considered a figure of sin. As leprosy covers the body and makes it disgusting and frightful to behold, so sin covers the soul and makes it hideous in the sight of God. The Old Law required lepers to separate themselves from society until their cure was certified to by the priests who were appointed for this purpose. Our Lord has been pleased, in the New Law, to institute a similar method for the cure of the more fatal leprosy of sin. The spiritual leper, the sinner, is to show himself to the priest, make known the diseased state of his soul, and submit to the inspection and treatment of the priest, who is the divinely appointed physician of the soul. But should we not go directly to God, since God alone has power to justify us? It is true, God alone can effect our justification; but He has appointed the priest to judge in His place and pass sentence in His name. To the priests He has said: "Whatsoever you shall bind upon earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatsoever you shall loose upon earth shall be loosed also in heaven" (_Matt._ xviii. 18); and again: "Whose sins you shall forgive, they are forgiven, and whose sins you shall retain, they are retained" (_John_ xx. 23). These two texts clearly show that auricular confession as practised in the Catholic Church was taught by Christ. For how could the apostles and their successors, the pastors of the Church, know what sins to bind and retain and what sins to loose and forgive unless the sins were confessed to them and they were allowed to judge? No matter how numerous or how great these are, provided they are confessed with a sincere repentance, they will be forgiven. And they will be forgiven by the power of the priest. Properly speaking, God alone has power to forgive sins. But no one will deny that He has power to confer this power on others. He communicated this power to His apostles and commanded them, in turn, to communicate it to others by means of the Sacrament of Holy Orders. That Our Saviour communicated this power to His apostles is evident from the words of St. John: "As the Father hath sent Me I also send you. Receive ye the Holy Ghost; whose sins you shall forgive, they are forgiven." But sin was to continue till the end of the world. Hence the necessity of the means of forgiving sin being coextensive with sin. As the people receive from the priests the Word of God and the cleansing from sin in Baptism, so also do they receive from them the cleansing from sin in confession. It is certain that the apostles conferred the power of forgiving sins upon others, if we find that those whom the apostles ordained this power. But we find this to be the case. From the time of Christ until the present the writers of every age tell us that confession of sins was practised. St. John, who lived until the beginning of the second century, says in the 1st chapter of his First Epistle: "If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all iniquity." St. Cyprian, who wrote in the third century, says: "Let each of you confess his faults, and the pardon imparted by the priest is acceptable before God." St. Ambrose, in the fourth century, wrote: "The poison is sin; the remedy, the accusation of one's crime. The poison is iniquity: confession is the remedy." St. Augustine, who lived in the fifth century, seems to be talking to some people of the present day, who say they confess in private to God, when he says: "Let no one say to himself, I do penance to God in private, I do it before God. Is it then in vain that Christ hath said: 'Whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven'? Is it in vain that the keys have been given to the Church? Do we make void the Gospel? void the words of Christ?" These first five centuries were the golden age of Christianity. All admit that the doctrines and practices of those early centuries were pure and undefiled, as they came from Christ. But among the practices of the time we find confession. Hence it is a reasonable practice, because conformable to Christ's teaching. We might continue quotations from writers of every century from the sixth to the nineteenth, showing that the teaching and practice of confession did not vary through the lapse of ages from the time of Christ until the present day. But this is unnecessary. The quotations from the first five centuries show that the power of forgiving sin was not only communicated by Christ to His apostles, but by them to their successors by means of the sacrament of Holy Orders. What would be the necessity of this power if they could not exercise it in confession? If, as some say, priests invented confession, some one ought to find out and tell us when and where it was invented, and why they did not exempt themselves from such a humiliating practice. Confession alone, however, will be of no avail without contrition. Contrition is a sincere sorrow and detestation for sin with a firm determination to sin no more. To the truly humble and sorrowful sinner confession is not a punishment, but a remedy for a tortured conscience. The most painful secret to be kept by a heart not yet corrupted by disease is the secret of sin and crime. The soul that loves God hates sin and desires to separate herself from it. To this desire is associated the desire of expiating it. All, from the mother who questions her child about wrongdoing to the judge who interrogates the criminal, recognize in spontaneous confession an expiatory power. Confession, it is true, is necessarily accompanied by shame and humiliation. This humiliation is diminished by the knowledge that it is of divine origin and that eternal silence is divinely imposed upon him who receives it. Priests never divulge what they know from the confessional. They have been ill-treated, as was Father Kohlmann in this country; have even been tortured and cruelly put to death, as was St. John Nepomucene, in order to extort from them knowledge they gained in the confessional, but without avail. For what they knew through the tribunal of penance, they knew as ministers of God. And as it is better to obey God than man, no minister of state could force them to divulge that which the laws of God forbid. Only sinners, who after a thorough preparation, a sincere sorrow, and a good confession, can realize the soothing and beneficial effects of confession, and feel with David, "Blessed are they whose sins are forgiven." If you have ever noticed such after leaving the confessional you could see joy beaming on their countenances, as if a heavy burden had been removed. Confession quiets the conscience. But this is only one of the benefits it confers upon those who practise going to confession. It has also a salutary influence upon their morals; for one of its necessary conditions is promise of amendment. The pagans of the first centuries were aware of the guiding and reforming power of the confessional. Voltaire, the leading infidel of the last century, one who made sport of everything Christian, says that "there is, perhaps, no wiser institution, and that confession is an excellent thing, a restraint upon inveterate crime, a very good practice to prevent the guilty from falling into despair and relapsing into sin, to influence hearts full of hate to forgive and robbers to make restitution--that the enemies of the _Romish_ Church who have opposed so beneficial an institution have taken from man the greatest restraint that can be put upon crime." While his everyday experience forced these words of praise from the arch-infidel, his hatred of the Church creeps out in the word "Romish." Confession of sin, as we have seen, is a _reasonable practice_, because it was taught by Jesus Christ, and by His apostles and their successors from Christ's time until the present; but _especially_ because it has the power of soothing and pacifying the conscience by freeing it from the torture of sin, the poison of crime. It is not strange, then, that it is so dear to virtuous souls. It is offensive only to those whose hearts are so hardened as to blunt the sting of remorse. Confession is Christianity using its moral power to correct and perfect the individual. In the confessional the minister of God is continually coming in contact with hearts in which reigns an idol that he overthrows, a bad practice that he causes to cease, or some injustice that he has repaired. Confession is one of the gates by which Christianity penetrates the interior man, wipes away stains, heals diseases, and sows therein the seeds of virtue. The lives and experience of millions are witness of the truth of this. Is it not, then, a reasonable, a beneficial practice? It is only the malicious or the ignorant who calumniate the practice and the consecrated minister who sits in judgment in the sacred tribunal. Those who lay aside their prejudice and study the question soon become convinced of its divine origin. A little study and reflection will show them that confession of sin benefits society by preventing crimes that would destroy government, cause riots, and fill prisons; that it promotes human justice, makes men better, nobler, purer, higher, and more Godlike; that it soothes the sorrowful heart whose crime might make the despairing suicide; and that individuals and families who frequently, intelligently, and properly approach this fountain of God's grace will receive His blessing here _and a pledge of His union hereafter_. VII. Granting Indulgences "Whatsoever you shall bind upon earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatsoever you shall loose upon earth shall be loosed also in heaven" (Matt xviii. 18). OF THE many practices of the Church, few have been the cause of more controversy than that of granting indulgences. Though not the cause, the granting of an indulgence furnished a pretext for Luther's apostasy. Leo X, who was Pope at that time, desiring to complete St. Peter's at Rome, appealed to all Catholics for financial aid. There was certainly nothing wrong in this. With these alms it was intended that the most magnificent Christian temple in the world would be completed. "Majesty, Power, Glory, Strength, and Beauty, all are aisled In this eternal ark of worship undefiled." All who contributed toward the completion of St. Peter's and complied with the necessary conditions were granted an indulgence. The alms were not one of the indispensable conditions. Those conditions were a sincere repentance and confession. Hence, those who did not contribute could gain the indulgence. Perhaps the Dominican Tetzel, who was chosen to announce the indulgence, exceeded his powers and made them serve his own ends. His action in the affair was not approved by Rome. If it is certain that the Pope did nothing wrong in asking for aid to build that beautiful monument to religion, it is equally certain that he did nothing wrong, that he did not exceed the limits of his powers when he granted the indulgence. In order to understand this, we must have a clear idea of what is meant by an indulgence. You frequently hear it said that it is the forgiveness of sin, or that it is a permission given to commit sin. It is neither the one nor the other. An indulgence is not the forgiveness of sin. In fact, an indulgence can not be gained until sin has been forgiven. One of the necessary conditions for gaining an indulgence is confession. Neither is an indulgence a license, a permission to commit sin. No one, not even God Himself, could give permission to commit sin. For God is all good, and although all powerful He can not sanction that which is evil in itself. It would be contrary to His very nature. An indulgence, then, is not what it has been painted. Having seen what an indulgence is not, let us see what it is. It is a remission of the whole or a part of the debt of temporal punishment due to sin after the guilt and eternal punishment have been forgiven in the sacrament of Penance. In the early ages of the Church notorious sinners, after being absolved, were sentenced to long public penances. By sincere sorrow, an indulgence or remission of some of the time was granted them. Public confession and public penances have passed away. These public penances are replaced by pious devotions. Upon the performance of certain pious devotions the Church at times grants an indulgence; that is, a remission of such temporal punishment as is equivalent to the canonical penances corresponding to the sins committed. Attached to every mortal sin, besides the guilt, is the punishment incurred. This punishment is eternal and temporal. That there is this twofold punishment we learn from various places in the Bible. We have an example in the sin of David. God sent the prophet Nathan to warn him of his guilt. When Nathan rebuked the king, he confessed his sin with signs of true contrition. Then Nathan told him that God had forgiven his sin, but that many temporal punishments would follow. When God forgave the sin, the guilt and eternal punishment were taken away; but temporal punishment remained. Other examples could be cited, but this is sufficient to show that there is a twofold kind of punishment--eternal and temporal. In confession the guilt and eternal punishment are taken away, but not always the temporal punishment. This temporal punishment is what is taken away in whole by a plenary and in part by a partial indulgence. In a similar manner we have a twofold punishment attached to crime in this world. A man commits a crime. He is sentenced to a term in the penitentiary. After spending his time of punishment he comes back to society, but finds he has another punishment to undergo in being avoided by his friends and others. The practice of granting indulgences was founded on many passages of Scripture, both of the Old and New Testament. In the 12th chapter of the book of Numbers we learn that Mary, the sister of Moses, was forgiven a sin which she had committed. But God inflicted upon her the penalty of leprosy. This was a temporal punishment. By the prayer of Moses an indulgence was granted; for God took away the temporal punishment. Our divine Lord left with His Church the power of granting indulgences, as we learn from His words taken from St. Matthew: "Whatsoever you shall loose upon earth shall be loosed also in heaven." This promise implies the power of loosing not only from sin and its eternal punishment, but also the power of releasing the bond of temporal punishment, of freeing from everything that would prevent the soul from entering the kingdom of heaven. St. Paul granted an indulgence to the incestuous Corinthian, as we learn from the 2d chapter of his Second Epistle to the Corinthians. By the power and authority which he received from Christ, he granted the Corinthian pardon from performing a certain penance. This penance was a temporal punishment. The apostle took away the temporal punishment. That is an indulgence. Non-Catholics grant a kind of plenary indulgence to every one by saying that works of penance are unnecessary. The practice of the Catholic Church of granting an indulgence only to the deserving is certainly more conformable to Scripture as well as more reasonable. Experience teaches us the utility of indulgences. They encourage the faithful to frequent the sacraments, to repent, to do acts of penance, and perform works of piety, charity, and devotion. A practice productive of such beneficial results is reasonable; it is also reasonable because it is sanctioned by Scripture and the Church of every age. For God would not sanction it nor could the Church practise it if it were _not conformable to reason_. VIII. The Last Sacraments "Is any man sick among you? Let him bring in the priests of the Church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord: And the prayer of faith shall save the sick man, and the Lord shall raise him up, and if he be in sins they shall be forgiven him" (_James_ v. 14, 15). BY THESE words St. James admonishes Christians when sick to do that which Our Saviour had previously directed to be done. This you will learn from the 6th chapter of St. Mark: "And [the apostles] anointed with oil many that were sick." The historians of the first centuries tell us that the early Christians were as anxious to receive the last sacraments as are the Catholics of our own day. St. Cesarius, in the fifth century, writes: "As soon as a person falls dangerously sick, he receives the body and blood of Jesus Christ. Then his body is anointed, and thus is fulfilled what stands written: 'Is any man sick among you? Let him call in the priests of the Church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil.'" What the Christians of the first centuries did, we do; and we do it by the direction of Jesus Christ and of St. James. Penance, Holy Eucharist, and Extreme Unction are administered to the sick and are known as the last sacraments. The priest first hears the sick person's confession, then he administers holy communion. Afterward he administers the sacrament of Extreme Unction--last anointing. This sacrament aids the sick to bear their sufferings with patience. It wipes away sin, even mortal sin if the person is unable to confess; and it purifies the soul for its entrance into heaven. The other sacraments assist us in making our lives holy like the life of our divine Model. This sacrament assists in making our death holy, like the death of Jesus. The sacrament of Baptism met us at our entrance into this world; the sacrament of Extreme Unction will be our guide at our departure to the other world. Religion, which rocked us in the cradle of life, will lull us to sleep in the cradle of death. Go to the bedside of the dying Catholic and you will see the reasonableness of the practice of calling the priest to administer the last sacraments. After the sacraments have been administered, peace and joy and contentment are visible on the countenance of the sick person. He clings no more to the things of earth. His thoughts are centered in heaven. The minister of God consoles him with the thought of immortality and the resurrection of the body. He soon hears the singing of the angelic choir; and breathing the sweet names of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, his soul takes its flight to the _regions of eternal bliss_. IX. Praying for the Dead "It is therefore a holy and wholesome thought to pray for the dead, that they may be loosed from their sins" (_2 Mach_. xii. 46). NO ONE will deny that the practice of praying for the dead is reasonable, if the dead are benefited by our prayers. That our prayers are beneficial to the departed we will endeavor to show. We are taught by revelation that besides heaven and hell, a state of everlasting pleasure and a state of eternal pain, there also exists a middle state of punishment for those who die in venial sin, or who have not sufficiently satisfied the justice of God for mortal sins already forgiven. The people of God in the Old Law believed, and Jesus Christ and His apostles in the New Law taught, the existence of this middle state. In the Second Book of Machabees, quoted above, we read that the pious general Judas Machabeus having made a collection, "sent twelve thousand drachmas of silver to Jerusalem for sacrifices to be offered for the dead [soldiers], thinking well and religiously concerning the resurrection [for if he had not hoped that they that were slain should rise again, it would have seemed superfluous and vain to pray for the dead], and because he considered that they who had fallen asleep with godliness had great grace laid up for them. It is, therefore, a holy and wholesome thought to pray for the dead that they may be loosed from their sins." If prayers were not beneficial to the dead, God would not have sanctioned them. This is exactly the practice of the Catholic Church. We pray and offer sacrifices for the souls in purgatory, just as Judas Machabeus did. Even if the Books of Machabees were not inspired, it is historically true that the Jews and almost all nations of antiquity believed in the existence of purgatory and the utility of prayers for the souls detained there. This universal consent is the voice of nature and of God. Hence we see that the practice of praying for the dead is reasonable. This practice is in accordance with the teaching of Christ. In the 12th chapter, 32d verse, of St. Matthew, He says: "He that shall speak against the Holy Ghost, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world nor in the world to come." These words teach us that some sins will be pardoned in the life to come. They can not be pardoned in heaven, since nothing defiled can enter heaven; nor can they be pardoned in hell, out of which there is no redemption, for "their worm shall not die, and their fire shall not be quenched." Therefore, there must be a state in the next world where sins will be forgiven, and we call that place or state purgatory. And the existence of purgatory implies the necessity of praying for those detained there. The belief in the existence of purgatory and the practice of praying for the faithful departed have existed in the Church from the time of its foundation. Tertullian, who lived in the second century, considered it a solemn duty, whose obligation came down from the apostles, to offer sacrifices and prayers for the faithful departed. St. Augustine says: "The whole Church received from the tradition of the Fathers to pray for those who died in the communion of the body and blood of Christ." The dying request of St. Monica, the mother of St. Augustine, is well known. "I request you," she said, "that wherever you may be, you will remember me at the altar of the Lord." And he assures us that he frequently and fervently prayed for her soul. The teaching of the Church of every age confirms the teaching of the Old and New Testament regarding purgatory and praying for the dead. To one who believes in heaven and hell, a place of eternal pleasure and of eternal punishment, the doctrine of purgatory must appear as a necessity, and the practice of praying for the dead reasonable. For it is certain that nothing defiled can enter heaven. But it is possible that many die guilty of but slight sins. Therefore, it must be said that these are damned, which is impious and absurd; that what is defiled can enter heaven, which is unscriptural; or that there is a purgatory, a state in which such souls are made pure as the driven snow, so that they can enter into the presence of their Maker. For an infinitely just God can not condemn to the same eternal punishment the child who dies guilty of a slight fault and the hardened murderer. No. He will render to every one according to his works. The doctrine of purgatory, then, is reasonable as well as scriptural and traditional. Reasonable, too, is the practice of praying for the dead, for they are still members of the Church. All the members of the Church, consisting of the church militant on earth, the church triumphant in heaven, and the church suffering in purgatory, are one family bound together by the bond of charity. The members of the Church on earth pray to those in heaven, who love us and pray for us; and we pray for those in purgatory. They are God's friends deprived of heaven for a time. As those in heaven rejoice when one sinner does penance, so those in purgatory hear us, see us, love us, and are helped by our prayers. We love them and never cease to pray for them and offer the Holy Sacrifice for them. Even the unbeliever will stand or kneel by the remains of his departed friend and offer a prayer for him, thus showing that praying for the dead is reasonable and the natural dictate of the human heart. X. Praying to the Saints "And may the angel that delivereth me from all evils bless these boys" (_Gen_. xlviii. 16). "So I say to you there shall be joy before the angels of God upon one sinner doing penance" (_Luke_ xv. 10). "For in the resurrection they [the saints] shall be as the angels of God in heaven" (_Matt_. xxii. 10). THE saints are friends of God. They are like the angels in heaven. We honor them, not as we honor God, but on account of the relation they bear to God. They are creatures of God, the work of His hands. When we honor them, we honor God; as when we praise a beautiful painting, we praise the artist. We do not believe that the saints can help us of themselves. But we ask them to "pray for us." We believe that everything comes to us "through Our Lord Jesus Christ." With these words all our prayers end. It is useful, salutary, and reasonable to pray to the saints and ask them to pray for us. No doubt all will admit the reasonableness of this practice if the saints can hear and help us. That they hear and help us is evident from many passages of Scripture. The patriarch Jacob would not have prayed to the angel to bless his grandchildren Manasses and Ephraim (as we learn he did from _Gen_. xlviii.), unless he knew the angel could do so. We are informed (_Luke_ xv.) that the angels rejoice when one sinner does penance. We are also informed (_Matt_ xxii.) that the saints are like the angels--_i.e._, have the same happiness and knowledge. Hence the saints, as well as the angels, can hear us, can help us, and are acquainted with our actions, words, and thoughts. It is generally conceded that it is reasonable to ask pious persons on earth to pray for us. St. Paul, in his epistles, frequently asks the Christians to pray for him. "Brethren," he says, "pray for us." It is well known that God was pleased to answer the prayer of Abraham in favor of Abimelech. "More things are wrought by prayer than this world knows of." Now, if we poor sinners here on earth do not pray in vain for one another, will the saints in heaven, the friends of God, who rejoice when a sinner does penance, pray in vain for us? No. We have hosts of friends in heaven to speak a good word for us. And as a child who has disobeyed his parents wisely asks a better brother or sister to intercede with his parents for mercy, so, too, having disobeyed our heavenly Father by sin, we have recourse to others better than ourselves, to our better brothers and sisters, the Blessed Virgin and saints, to intercede with God for us. Is not this a reasonable practice? If your mother or sister crosses the sea she will continue to pray for you. And if she crosses the sea of death will she forget you? No. The love she bore you here will continue in heaven. She will pray for you, and the "Lord will hear the prayers of the just." Ask the saints to pray to your God and their God for you. Honor God by honoring His friends and asking their intercession. And all your friends in heaven will unite in praying to the Father of us all that one day all who love God and His friends, the saints, may be admitted with them into the _company of the Saint of saints, Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ._ XI. Crucifixes, Relics, and Images "Thou shalt not make to thyself a graven thing, nor the likeness of anything that is in the heaven above, or in the earth beneath, nor of those things that are in the waters under the earth. Thou shalt not adore them nor serve them" (_Ex_. xx. 4, 5). THIS first commandment teaches us to adore God alone. It does not forbid the making of images, but it forbids the adoring of them, worshiping them as gods. This would be idolatry. If the making of images were forbidden, it would be improper to have images or pictures of our friends. It has frequently been said that Catholics ate idolaters, because they have in their churches crucifixes, relics, and images of the saints, which they honor. Perhaps many of those who accuse us of idolatry, if asked, could not tell what idolatry is. Idolatry is giving to a creature (whether a crucifix, an image, or any created thing) that honor which belongs to God. The honor we give those sacred things is a relative honor. We honor them on account of the relation they bear to God and His friends, the saints. Every Catholic, even the child, is taught the difference between the idol of the pagan and a Catholic image. Pagans looked upon their idols as gods. They thought these senseless objects had power, intelligence, and other attributes of the Deity. They worshiped them as gods and thought they could assist them. Hence they were image-worshipers or idolaters. Catholics know full well that images have no intelligence to understand, no power to assist them. They do not adore nor serve them. That would be idolatry. It would be breaking the first commandment. They do not say when praying before the crucifix or image of a saint, "I adore thee, O Crucifix"; nor "Help me, O Image," But they say, "I adore thee, O God, whose cruel death is represented by this crucifix," or "Pray for me, O saint represented by this image." We have images, pictures, and relics of Our Lord, His Blessed Mother, and the saints, for the same reason that we have relics and portraits of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, or of our relatives and friends. They remind us of the original. Who can look upon the crucifix or upon a picture of the Crucifixion without being reminded of all the sufferings of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ? And who can seriously contemplate those sufferings, borne for us so patiently, without being moved to pity and to repentance? Such a person will be moved to say with the heart if not with the lips: "Oh, my God, I am sorry for having offended Thee and caused Thee such suffering. Grant that I may love Thee with my whole heart and never more offend Thee." Catholics, as we have seen, adore God alone. They honor the Blessed Virgin and saints represented by images. They use these holy pictures and statues to beautify the house of God. These pictures are also a source of instruction. They are a profession of our faith. If you enter a house and see on one side of the room a picture of the Blessed Virgin, Cardinal Gibbons, or of Pope Leo XIII, and on the other a picture of Lincoln, Cleveland, or Washington, you will at once know the religious faith as well as the political belief or patriotism of the occupant. By the aid of the relics of the martyrs we are reminded of all they suffered for the faith. By the use of religious pictures, our devotion is increased and we are stimulated to imitate the virtues of the saints represented. If it is reasonable to have pictures of our martyred President and relics of our Revolutionary heroes that we may be reminded of their patriotism, it is none the less reasonable to have pictures and relics of Our Lord, the Blessed Virgin, and the saints, that we may be reminded of their virtues. By imitating their virtues here, we may be _happy with them hereafter_. XII. Some Sacramentals "Pray without ceasing" (_2 Thess_. v. 17). "Every creature is sanctified by the word of God and prayer" (_1 Tim_. 4, 5). BY SACRAMENTALS we mean the various prayers, blessings, ceremonies and pious practices of the Church. Here mention will be made of some of the most common of the sacramentals that have not already been treated. Sacramentals, like sacraments, have an outward sign; the latter, however, were instituted by Christ, the former by the Church, and while the latter always give grace if we place no obstacle in the way, the former do not give grace, but excite good thoughts, increase devotion, and raise the mind to God. The chief sacramentals that have not been mentioned are the books used by the priest in the performance of his sacred duties, the sign of the cross, holy water, blessed candles, blessed palm and ashes, holy oils, scapulars, medals, Agnus Dei, prayers, litanies, rosary, the Angelus, stations, the funeral service, and various blessings. The books used by the priest in the performance of his sacred duties are the _Missal_, which contains the Masses for the various feasts of the ecclesiastical year; the _Breviary_, in which is the office recited by the priest every day; and the _Ritual_, where is to be found the form of administering the different sacraments, the funeral service, and the various benedictions. The sacramental of most frequent use in the Church is the _sign of the cross_. It is used to remind us of the Passion and Death of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ on the cross. The cross is the emblem of the Christian, the "sign of the Son of Man." It is an act of faith in the principal truths of Christianity. When we say the words, "In the name," we profess our faith in the unity of God, which means that there is but one God; "of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost," are a profession of faith in the Trinity--_i.e._, that there are three divine persons in one God. The form of the cross which we trace with our right hand from our forehead to our breast, and then from the left to the right shoulder, is a profession of faith in the Incarnation of the Son of God, who became man and died on the cross for our redemption. Tertullian and other writers of the early ages of the Church tell us that before every action, before rising or retiring, before meals, at every step, "we impress on our forehead the sign of the cross." The Catholic Church of to-day, in accordance with the teachings of Christ, His apostles, and their successors of all time, teaches her children to put their trust in the merits of Jesus Christ's sufferings on the cross, and to do everything "in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost." _Holy water_ is water blessed by a priest. During the blessing beautiful prayers are recited. These prayers express the spiritual blessings the Church wishes to follow all who use it. The Church uses holy water in all the benedictions and some of her sacraments. It is placed at the doors of her churches, that all who enter may use it and be reminded of that purity of heart which it symbolizes. Holy water is also kept in the houses of Catholics, to be used in times of trial and when the priest comes to administer the sacraments. The _blessed candles_ used in the service of the Church receive their special blessing on Candlemas Day. We use these lighted candles at different times to remind us of Jesus, who is the "Light of the world." Catholics always keep a blessed candle in the house. The Church puts a lighted candle in our hand at our baptism, and wishes us to die with one in our hand, to remind us to hope in Him who is our Light and the light of the world. On Ash Wednesday _ashes_ are blessed and put on the forehead of the faithful in the form of a cross, with the words, "Remember, man, that thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return," to remind them that they are only dust and ashes. These are the ashes of burnt _palms_ blessed the Palm Sunday of the previous year. These palms are blessed in memory of the triumphal entry of Jesus into Jerusalem, when the people spread palm branches along the way. This palm should remind us to perform faithfully our duty if we wish to enjoy the palm of victory. The _holy oils_ are blessed by the bishop on Holy Thursday of each year. They are of three kinds: oil of the sick, used in the sacrament of Extreme Unction; oil of the Catechumens, used in blessing baptismal water and in the sacrament of Baptism; and Holy Chrism, used in the preparation of baptismal water in the ceremonies of Baptism, Confirmation, and at the consecration of a bishop, of churches, altars, bells and chalices. The olive oil used should remind us of Our Saviour's _passion_ in the Garden of Olives. _Agnus Deis_ (blessed by the Pope), _scapulars_, and _medals_ are small articles worn by Catholics to remind them of Our Lord (the Lamb of God), of the Blessed Virgin, and of the saints. They are emblems of the Christian, as the starry banner is the emblem of the American; and as the flag of our country shows that we are under the protection of the Government of the United States, so the Agnus Dei, scapulars, and medals show that we are under the protection of Jesus Christ, His Blessed Mother, and His saints. _Prayer_ is the elevation of our mind and heart to God to ask Him for all blessings, temporal and spiritual. Prayer is necessary to salvation. We are taught in St. Luke (xviii.) to pray always and faint not. We should pray with attention and devotion, with confidence and humility. We are told in the Lord's Prayer to pray for others as well as for ourselves, and God's choicest blessings will be granted us through Jesus Christ Our Lord. The best of all prayers is the one God taught us--the Lord's Prayer. Other prayers common in the Church are Litanies, Rosaries, the Angelus, Stations, and the Funeral Service for the dead. The Litanies most in use in the Church are the Litany of All Saints, of the Blessed Virgin, of the Holy Name of Jesus. In these Litanies we ask God to have mercy on us and the saints to pray for us; but we ask everything through Jesus Christ Our Lord. Few practices of the Church are more widespread than the _Rosary_ of the Blessed Virgin. It consists of the best of all prayers--the Apostles' Creed, the Our Father, three Hail Marys, and the Glory be to the Father; then the Our Father and ten Hail Marys repeated five times. This constitutes the beads, or one-third part of the Rosary. During the recitation of these prayers the mind should be occupied meditating on the principal mysteries of the life of Our Lord. These mysteries are divided into the five joyful mysteries: the Annunciation by the angel Gabriel, the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin to St. Elizabeth, the Birth of Our Lord, the Presentation, and the Finding in the Temple; the five sorrowful mysteries: the Agony in the Garden, the Scourging, the Crowning with Thorns, the Carrying of the Cross, and the Crucifixion; and the five glorious mysteries: the Resurrection, the Ascension, the Descent of the Holy Ghost, the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, and the Crowning of the Blessed Virgin in heaven. Any one of these mysteries furnishes sufficient material to occupy the mind of man for hours. These mysteries contain the whole history of the Redemption. The prayers and meditations of the Rosary satisfy the minds of the humblest, while they are sufficient to occupy the attention of the most exalted and most cultivated. The _Angelus_ is a beautiful prayer, said morning, noon, and night. In Catholic countries the bell is rung, when all cease their occupations, kneel, and recite: "The angel of the Lord declared unto Mary, and she conceived by the Holy Ghost"--a Hail Mary. "Behold the handmaid of the Lord--be it done unto me according to Thy Word"--a Hail Mary. "And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt amongst us"--a Hail Mary. The prayer: "Pour forth, we beseech Thee, O Lord, Thy grace into our hearts, that we, to whom the Incarnation of Christ, Thy Son, was made known by the message of an angel, may by His passion and cross be brought to the glory of His resurrection, through the same Christ Our Lord. Amen." By this beautiful practice we show in a special manner our faith in the Incarnation of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. The _Stations of the Cross_ are fourteen paintings representing the various stages of the passion and death of Our Redeemer. The faithful pass from station to station and meditate upon that feature of the passion represented by each station. Tradition tells us that from the beginning pious pilgrims were accustomed to tread the path and bedew with their tears the way sanctified by our Saviour on that sorrowful journey from Pilate's tribunal to Calvary's heights. But Jerusalem falling into the hands of infidels, and many being unable to visit those holy places, permission was obtained to erect in churches fourteen crosses and pictures commemorating these sorrowful acts. From these stations all can meditate upon the sufferings of our Saviour, and learn from Him submission to God's holy will, patience, charity, and forgiveness of injuries. The _funeral service_ of the Catholic Church is beautiful, touching, and instructive. After blessing, strengthening, and encouraging us through life with her sacraments; after fortifying our souls for the last great struggle, she follows us beyond the grave with her blessings, her prayers, and her sacrifices. "Eternal rest give unto them, O Lord," she prays; "and let perpetual light shine upon them. May they rest in peace." There are various other prayers and blessings used by the Church on special occasions. In fact, the Church blesses everything she uses. This blessing of the priest is not such an absurd thing as some imagine it to be; it is rather a most reasonable practice. It is simply a prayer said by the priest, asking God to send His blessing upon the person or thing indicated. People of all denominations say grace before meals, asking God to bless the food they are about to use. This is precisely what the priest does when blessing anything. He uses different forms of prayer ordained by the Church to implore God's blessing upon the water, candles, and other things before using them. This blessing of churches, water, candles, and other things has its foundation on Scripture. We read in the Old Testament of the solemn blessing of the Temple of Solomon. St. Paul tells us that "every creature is sanctified by the word of God and prayer." Churches, water, candles, bells, books, persons, and other things blessed by the Church are creatures. Therefore we are following St. Paul in blessing them, for every creature is sanctified by the word of God and prayer. We do not claim that those articles that are blessed have any efficacy in themselves; but we hope and pray that God in His infinite goodness and mercy may render those blessed articles beneficial to those using them, may protect them and lead them to _His blessed abode above, where all is peace and light and love._ XIII. The Celebration of Feasts "Seven days shalt thou celebrate feasts to the Lord thy God, in the place which the Lord shalt choose" (_Deut_. xvi. 15). "If he will not hear the Church, let him be to thee as the heathen and the publican" (_Matt._ xviii. 17). FROM these texts we learn that besides the Sunday God wishes certain other days to be observed religiously, and that the Church has the power of designating these days. As the State sets aside certain national holidays in commemoration of its founder or of the Declaration of Independence, so the Church sets aside these holidays in honor of Jesus Christ, the Blessed Virgin, and the saints. Besides the feasts celebrated on Sundays, there are in this country but six holidays of obligation. Three of these are commemorative of events in the life of Our Lord: Christmas, the Circumcision, and the Ascension; two, the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption, in honor of the Blessed Virgin; and one in honor of God's saints--the Feast of All Saints. The ecclesiastical year begins in Advent. Advent is a period of about four weeks of penance and prayer preparatory to the great feast of Christmas and corresponding to the penitential season of Lent before Easter. During the ecclesiastical year, the first of the feasts of obligation in the order of time is the feast of the _Immaculate Conception_. It is celebrated on the 8th of December. On this day we commemorate the fact that Mary was immaculate when she first came into being in her mother's womb; that she was always pure; that sin never touched her fair soul. Immaculate Conception, as you will see in the article on the Blessed Virgin, means that she was always free from sin. The great feast of _Christmas_, in honor of the birth of Jesus Christ, is celebrated on December 25th. This feast is a time of joy and peace to all mankind, and is celebrated by the Church with much pomp and ceremony. The festival of the _Circumcision_ is kept on the first day of the new year. It is commemorative of Our Lord's strict observance of the law by submitting to the Jewish ceremony of circumcision. We solemnly celebrate the day in honor of our merciful Lord, who is our model in all things. Next in the order of time is the feast of the _Ascension_. It is kept forty days after the grand feast of Easter, and is in honor of Our Lord's glorious ascension into heaven. The _Assumption_ of the Blessed Virgin, celebrated the 15th of August, is commemorative of the glorious taking up to heaven of Mary, soul and body. (This is a pious tradition.) _All Saints'_ Day is November 1st. Every day is a saint's day. There is not a day that the Catholic Church does not celebrate a feast in honor of some special mystery or saint. But as there are more saints in heaven than could be thus specially honored, she sets aside this one day every year in honor of all the saints in heaven. There are various other important feasts, some of which fall on Sunday; but these we have mentioned being feasts of obligation to be observed as Sunday, it was thought that it would not be uninteresting to give a short explanation of them. On them we honor God and His special friends. Let us always, by faith, hope, and love, _bear Jesus in our minds and hearts_. XIV. Infant Baptism "Amen, amen, I say to thee, unless a man be born again of water and the Holy Ghost, he can not enter into the kingdom of God" (_John_ iii 5). WHILE most Christians admit the necessity of Baptism for adults, the Catholic Church is alone in insisting upon the practice of infant Baptism. This practice is in accordance with the teaching of St. John, quoted above. It is also in accordance with apostolic teaching and practice. We read in the 16th chapter of the Acts of the Apostles that St. Paul baptized Lydia "and her household," and that the keeper of the prison was converted and "was baptized and presently all his family." Among these families it is but reasonable to suppose that there were some infants. Infant Baptism was the practice of the apostles; it was the practice of the Christians of the early Church, as Origen tells us. The Church received the tradition from the apostles to give Baptism to infants, and it has been the practice of the Church from the time of Christ until the present. St. Paul tells us that Adam's sin was transmitted to all his posterity. "Wherefore as by one man sin entered into this world, and by sin death, and so death passed unto all men in whom all have sinned" (_Rom_. v. 12). Every infant, according to St. Paul, is born to sin--original sin. But as Baptism takes away original sin, and as nothing defiled can enter heaven (_Apoc_. xxi.), Baptism of infants is necessary to open for them the gates of heaven. Baptism may be validly administered by dipping, sprinkling, or pouring. The method practised in this part of Christendom is pouring the water on the head of the person to be baptized, saying at the same time: "I baptize thee in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost." The reasonableness of the practice of baptizing infants will be evident if we remember that Christ taught the necessity of baptism for all when He said: "Unless a man be born again of water and the Holy Ghost, he can not enter into the kingdom of God"; and that He declared little children capable of entering into the kingdom of God when He said: "Suffer little children to come unto Me and forbid them not, for of such is the kingdom of heaven." Now, if infants are capable of entering heaven (and Christ so declares), they must be capable of receiving Baptism, without which Christ says no one can enter the kingdom of God. While in adults faith and sorrow for sin are required before receiving Baptism, no disposition is required in infants. They contracted original sin without their knowledge; without their knowledge they are freed from it. By Baptism they are made heirs of the kingdom of heaven. They can be made heirs of property, of a kingdom on earth without their consent; why not also of the kingdom of heaven? Baptism is the first of the seven sacraments which the Church confers upon man. It cleanses us from original sin (actual sin also if the recipient be guilty of any), makes us Christians, children of God, and heirs of heaven. It prepares us for the reception of the other sacraments. By Baptism we all contracted the obligation of believing and practising the doctrines of Jesus Christ as taught us by the true Church. We fulfil this obligation by _leading a truly Christian life_. XV. The Marriage Tie--One and Indissoluble "But I say to you that whosoever shall put away his wife, excepting for the cause of fornication, maketh her to commit adultery; and he that shall marry her that is put away committeth adultery" (_Matt_. v. 33). "What, therefore, God hath joined together, let no man put asunder" (_Matt_. xix. 5, 6). FEW practices of the Church have been productive of more good to society than that concerning Christian marriage. The Christian family is the foundation of Christian society, and Christian marriage is the basis of the Christian family. Without marriage neither the family nor society could exist. Marriage was instituted by God before society existed, and, as a natural consequence, it is subject not to the laws of society, but to the laws of God and His Church. The principal law and necessary condition of Christian marriage is its unity and indissolubility. It is the union of one man with one woman for the purposes intended by the Creator, which union is to last as long as both survive. Such was marriage in the beginning; to such it was restored by our Saviour when He made it a sacrament of His law and a type of His union with His Church. The practice of the Catholic Church in not permitting a divorce that will allow either party to marry during the life of the other, is clearly taught by Jesus Christ in the 5th chapter of Matthew: "He who puts away his wife maketh her to commit adultery, and he that marrieth her committeth adultery." No human power can break the bond of marriage. "What God hath joined together, let no man put asunder." It is the work of God. Let no man dare meddle with it. St. Paul teaches the same when he says in the 39th verse of the 7th chapter of the First Epistle to the Corinthians: "A woman is bound by the law as long as her husband liveth; but if her husband die, she is at liberty, let her marry whom she will." The practice of the Catholic Church is conformable to this teaching of Christ, St. Paul, the apostles, and their successors. In defence of this practice of forbidding divorce, since marriage is one and indissoluble, the Catholic Church has had many a severe conflict. And had she not fought this battle bravely for the sanctity, the unity, and the indissolubility of the marriage tie, Europe and America would today be in as degraded a condition as are the Mahometan and other nations where the laws of marriage are disregarded. For divorces are not only contrary to Christ's teaching concerning the sanctity, unity, and indissolubility of the marriage tie, but are also subversive of society. They sever the marriage tie inasmuch as the law of man can do it. If the marriage tie is loosened, the family is dissolved; and if the family is dissolved, society, the state, falls to ruin. Divorce destroys conjugal love, causes unhappiness, renders the proper education of children impossible, and often leads to terrible crimes. Is it not reasonable as well as scriptural to forbid it? The Christian husband and wife, knowing the sanctity, the unity, and the indissolubility of the marriage tie, live in love and peace and honor together; together they rear the issue of their union, teaching them to be good children, good citizens, and good Christians; together, after a long, a prosperous, and a happy union, they return to dust; and together they will meet again beyond the confines of the tomb--_yes, they will meet to part no more_. XVI. Respect Shown to Ecclesiastical Superiors "We are ambassadors for Christ; God, as it were, exhorting by us" (_2 Cor_. v. 20). "As the Father sent me, I also send you" (_John_ xx. 21). "Go ye into the whole world and preach the Gospel to every creature" (_Mark_ xvi. 15). THE respect Catholics have for the bishops and priests of the Church is often a matter of surprise to those not of the Faith. They do not understand, as Catholics do, that the priests are "ambassadors for Christ" sent to "preach the Gospel to every creature." For Christ instituted the priesthood to carry on divine worship, to govern the Church, to preach His doctrine, and to administer the sacraments. As in the Old Law God chose His priests from among the family of Aaron, so in the New Law He chooses them from among those whom His apostles and their successors see fit to ordain. Priests and other ministers of the Church receive in the sacrament of Holy Orders the power and grace to perform their sacred duties. If we would but consider seriously for a moment the importance of these duties and the great dignity of the minister of God, we would have no difficulty in understanding the reasonableness of the Catholic practice of showing profound respect to God's priesthood. The priest is the minister of Jesus Christ, who chose him that he might obtain for himself the greatest good and in return bestow this good upon his fellow-man. Jesus Christ chose him that he might aid Him in the work for which He came on earth. What a noble mission! What important duties! What a great dignity! To aid Jesus Christ in saving souls, to teach them the truths of salvation, to loose them from their sins, to offer the eucharistic sacrifice for them, to pray for them, to minister unto them, and to fill them with Heaven's choice blessings; for such a high mission, for such important duties did Jesus Christ choose the priest. If his duties are so important, his dignity must be correspondingly great. On the banks of the Lake of Genesareth the Great Teacher chose Peter as His vicar and head of His Church. As the pontiff could not be everywhere, Peter and the other apostles imposed hands on others as the needs of the growing Church demanded. They understood that it was by a living, teaching ministry this work of salvation was to be carried on. For we find it recorded in the 14th chapter of the Acts that Paul and Barnabas ordained priests in Lystra and Iconium. Paul also consecrated Titus Bishop of Crete, for the express purpose of ordaining others. Thus we see that as Christ was sent by the Father, the apostles by Christ, so, too, is the priest invested with the same power "for the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry and for the edification of the body of Christ" (_Eph_. iv. 12), and that no one but a priest divinely called, rightly ordained, and legitimately sent has power from God to teach God's words to the faithful. He is the ambassador of God, commissioned to do His work with His authority; the vicar of Christ continuing the work He commenced; and the organ of the Holy Ghost for the sanctification of souls. He is ever imitating his model, going "about doing good." He devotes his life to alleviate the sufferings of men. To spend one's life instructing man is but second in importance to alleviating his sufferings. This the priest is ever doing. He rescued us from barbarism; saved for us at the risk of his life the Holy Scriptures, the classics of Greece and Rome, and the writings of the Fathers; founded the great universities of Europe; and is to-day, as in the past, the greatest educator in the world. He does all this for love of God. Do you wonder, then, that Catholics love and revere their priests? Nowhere can there be found a body of men or a series of rulers so venerable, so renowned for wisdom, justice, charity, and holiness, as the Popes, bishops, and priests of the Catholic Church in every age, _from the time of Christ until the present_. XVII. Celibacy "He who is unmarried careth about the things of the Lord, how he may please God" (_i Cor_. vii. 32). THE Catholic Church recognizes matrimony as a holy state. She recommends celibacy to those desiring greater perfection, and enjoins it on her priests because, as St. Paul says, "He who is unmarried careth about the things of the Lord." It is said that the life of the priest is a hard, lonely one, and that it is unscriptural. Let us see. That his life is one of hardships is certain. His path is by no means one of roses; it is rather one covered with thorns. The young man knows this well before he enters it. With a full knowledge of its duties and responsibilities, he willingly enters the priesthood. He knows well that it is a life full of trials and crosses. He knows, too, that the whole life of Jesus Christ, from the stable of Bethlehem to the cross on Calvary's heights, was one continuous trial, cross, mortification; and that the life of every follower, especially every minister, of Jesus Christ should be fashioned after that of his divine model. "If any man will come after Me," He says in the 16th chapter of St. Matthew, "let him deny himself, take up his cross and follow Me." The disciple, the minister of Christ, is not above his Master; and it is not becoming that the path of the disciple or minister should be covered with flowers while that of the Master was strewn with thorns and sprinkled with His own precious blood. Yes, the priest's life is one of trials, crosses, and hardships. But the more trials he has to bear, the more crosses he has to carry, the more hardships he has to endure, the greater is his resemblance to his model, Jesus Christ; and if he bears those trials, crosses, and hardships, which he shares with his Master here, with a proper spirit, the more certain he is of sharing with Him a happy eternity hereafter. But is the life of celibacy unscriptural? No. In fact, few questions are more clearly defined in Holy Scripture than that of religious celibacy. St. Paul, in the 7th chapter of the First Epistle to the Corinthians, says: "I would have you without solicitude. He who is unmarried careth for the things of the Lord, how he may please God; but he who is married careth about the things of the world, how he may please his wife, and is divided. And the unmarried woman and virgin thinketh about the things of the Lord, how she may be holy in body and spirit. But she that is married thinketh about the things of the world, how she may please her husband. Therefore," he concludes, "he that giveth his virgin in marriage doth well; and he who giveth her not doth better." Could language be clearer? Marriage is good; celibacy is better. "He that is unmarried careth about the things of the Lord, how he may please God." This teaching of St. Paul is the teaching of the Church-- that marriage is honorable, is good, but that there is a better, a holier state for those who are called by the grace of God to embrace it. Religious celibacy is one of the principal reasons why the Catholic priest and missionary will risk all dangers, overcome all obstacles, face all terrors, and in time of plague expose himself to death in its most disgusting forms for the good of his fellow-man. All are acquainted with the noble examples of numbers of priests and Sisters of Charity who, at the risk of their own lives, voluntarily nursed the sick and dying during the yellow-fever scourge in the South a few years ago. Do you think they would have done so had they families depending upon them? No; they would have cared for the things of this world. Jesus Christ has said: "Greater love than this no man hath, that a man give up his life for his fellow-man." This the good priest is ever doing, ever ready to do. Although death stares him in the face, he never shrinks from his post of duty, never abandons his flock while there is a wound to heal, a soul to save. When his duty calls him, he is not afraid of death, because St. Paul says: "_He who is without a wife is solicitous about the things of the Lord._" XVIII. Conclusion "If thou wilt enter into life keep the commandments" (_Matt_. xix. 17). WHEN Jesus Christ died on the cross for us, He did so in order to lead us into life, to open heaven for all mankind. How important our salvation must be, then, for which Christ shed His precious blood. If it is important, He must have taught us how to attain it. This, too, He did by the words, "keep the commandments." To assist us in keeping the commandments He left a representative on earth. His Church, whose ministers were to teach all nations, is this representative. To her He said: "He that hears you, hears Me." The night before He died He instituted the adorable sacrifice of the Mass, saying: "This is My body . . . This is My blood which shall be shed for you." He then gave the apostles and their successors power to do what He had just done: "Do this in commemoration of Me." He also gave them power to baptize, to forgive sins, to bless, to be "dispensers of the mysteries of God." He gave them power to confer these powers on others. "As the Father sent Me [_i.e._, with the same power] I also send you." To these apostles and their successors He spoke when He said that He would remain with them until the consummation of the world. To them and the Church He said: "He that hears you hears Me." What the Church teaches, then, Christ teaches. As, in the natural order, man is born, grows to manhood, is nourished, and if sick needs proper food and remedies: so, in the supernatural order, there is a birth, it is Baptism; there is a manly growth, it is Confirmation; there is a nourishing food, it is the Holy Eucharist, the Bread of Life; there is a medicinal remedy against death, it is Penance; and there is a balm to heal the wounds, the scars of sin, it is Extreme Unction. These are some of the channels through which God's grace flows into our souls to assist us to keep the commandments. The practices of the Church naturally flow from her teachings. She teaches that there is but one God, the creator and Lord of heaven and earth and all things; that man by his reason alone can find out this truth; that the order, beauty, and harmony of the works of nature show God's work; but that there are some truths which the deepest intellect of man can never fathom. Hence she teaches that God has revealed certain truths; such as the mysteries of the Holy Trinity, the Incarnation, and the Blessed Sacrament. When we know that God has revealed these truths we are acting reasonably not only in believing them, but also in showing our belief by practices of respect, adoration, and love. The Church teaches that we must not only believe, but practise our religion. For faith alone will not save us. "Faith without works is dead." To have these works we must "keep the commandments." We must love God above all things and our neighbor as ourselves. All the commandments are comprised in this. In fact, the essence of Christianity is charity. Where will you find charity practised in reality except in the Catholic Church? If you wish to see the truth of this, visit our larger towns and cities, and you will find hundreds of hospitals, asylums, schools, and other charitable institutions in which are thousands of the children of the Catholic Church, who have left everything to alleviate every ill that flesh is heir to, and follow the meek and humble Jesus in His mission of love. The Catholic Church alone teaches, as Jesus taught while on earth, the duty of penance. "If any man will come after Me, let him deny himself, take up his cross and follow Me." According to Christ's teaching, the Church sets aside the penitential season of Lent and other times of mortification. The Church also teaches that we must not only be faithful in the observance of the practices of religion, but that we must also live in peace and justice and charity with all mankind, and die with a hope beyond the grave. If we love God we will faithfully observe the practices of the Church; these practices will assist us in keeping the commandments, by which we will enter into life. We have seen that the various ceremonies and practices of the Catholic Church are dictated by right reason; that they are the rational deduction from Christ's teaching; that they obtain for us divine grace, excite pious thoughts, and elevate our minds to God; and that a true Christian is one who not only believes but also practises the teachings of Christ and His Church. The observance of these pious practices of the Church makes us Christians in fact as well as in name. They assist us to keep the commandment and to live in accordance with our faith. By faithfully observing them, we show that we are not ashamed to be Christ's followers. And if we follow Him, who is the way, the truth, and the life, we will not walk in darkness; but will enter by the narrow way into the presence of truth itself, _in the regions of eternal light_. PRINTED BY BENZINGER BROTHERS, NEW YORK 
52225	----	Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this file which includes the original illustrations. See 52225-h.htm or 52225-h.zip: (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/52225/52225-h/52225-h.htm) or (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/52225/52225-h.zip) Note: Images of the original pages are available through the Google Books Library Project. See https://books.google.com/books?id=9g9EAAAAYAAJ Transcriber's note: Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_). The o-e ligature is represented by [oe]. THE TEMPTATION OF ST. ANTHONY by GUSTAVE FLAUBERT Translated by Lafcadio Hearn Illustrations by Odilon Redon (Added especially for this PG e-book.) The Alice Harriman Company New York and Seattle 1910 INTRODUCTION It was at some period between 1875 and 1876 that Lafcadio Hearn--still a "cub" reporter on a daily paper in Cincinnati--began his translation of Flaubert's "Temptation of St. Anthony." The definitive edition of the work, over which the author had laboured for thirty years, had appeared in 1874. Hearn was, in his early youth, singularly indifferent to the work of the Englishmen of the Victorian period. Though he knew the English masterpieces of that epoch, their large, unacademic freedom of manner awakened no echoes in his spirit. His instinctive taste was for the exquisite in style: for "that peculiar kneading, heightening, and recasting" which Matthew Arnold thought necessary for perfection. Neither did the matter, more than the manner of the Victorians appeal to him. The circumstances of his life had at so many points set him out of touch with his fellows that the affectionate mockery of Thackeray's pictures of English society were alien to his interest. The laughing heartiness of Dickens' studies of the man in the street hardly touched him. Browning's poignant analyses of souls were too rudely robust of manner to move him. Before essaying journalism Hearn had served for a while as an assistant in the Public Library, and there he had found and fallen under the spell, of the great Frenchman of the Romantic School of the '30's--that period of rich flowering of the Gallic genius. Gautier's tales of ancient weirdnesses fired his imagination. The penetrating subtleties of his verse woke in the boy the felicitous emotions which the virtuoso knows in handling cameos and enamellings by hands which have long been dust. So, also, Hugo's revivals of the passions and terrors of the mediæval world stirred the young librarian's eager interest. But most of all his spirit leapt to meet the tremendous drama of the "Temptation." He comprehended at once its large significance, its great import, and in his enthusiastic recognition of its value and meaning he set at once about giving it a language understood of the people of his own tongue. Tunison tells of the little shy, shabby, half-blind boy--the long dull day of police reporting done--labouring at his desk into the small hours, with the flickering gas jet whistling overhead, and his myopic eyes bent close to the papers which he covered with beautiful, almost microscopic characters--escaping thus from the crass, raw world about him to delicately and painstakingly turn into English stories of Cleopatra's cruel, fantastic Egyptian Night's Entertainment. Withdrawing himself to transliterate tales of pallid beautiful vampires draining the veins of ardent boys: of lovely faded ghosts of great ladies descending from shadowy tapestries to coquette with romantic dreamers; or to find an English voice for the tragedy of the soul of the Alexandrian cenobite. It was in such dreams and labours that he found refuge from the environment that was so antipathetic to his tastes, and in his immersion in the works of these virtuosos of words, in his passionate search for equivalents of the subtle nuances of their phrases, he developed his own style. A style full of intricate assonances, of a texture close woven and iridescent. "One of Cleopatra's Night's"--a translation of some of Gautier's tales of glamour--was issued in 1882, but at "The Temptation of St. Anthony" the publishers altogether balked. The manuscript could not achieve even so much as a reading. America had in the '70's just begun to emerge from that state of provincial propriety in which we were accused of clothing even our piano legs in pantelettes. The very name of the work was sufficient to start modest shivers down the spine of all well regulated purveyors of books. It was largely due to the painters' conceptions of the nature of the hermit's trials that the story of Saint Anthony's spiritual struggle aroused instinctive terrors in all truly modest natures. The painters--who so dearly love to display their skill in drawing legs and busts--had been wont to push the poor old saint into the obscure of the background, and fill all the foreground with ladies of obviously the very lightest character, in garments still lighter, if possible. What had reputable American citizens to do with such as these jades? More especially such jades as seen through a French imagination! That Flaubert had brushed aside the gross and jejune conceptions of the painters the publishers would not even take the pains to learn. It is amusing now to recall the nervous, timid proprieties of those days. At the time Hearn failed to see the laughable side of it. He was then too young and earnest, too passionate and too melancholy to have a sense of its humours. He had brought his unfinished manuscript from Cincinnati to New Orleans, and had continued to work upon it in strange lodgings in gaunt, old half-ruined Creole houses; at the tables of odd little French cafés, or among the queer dishes in obscure Spanish and Chinese restaurants. He had snatched minutes for it amidst the reading and clipping of exchanges in a newspaper office; had toiled drippingly over it in the liquifying heats of tropic nights; had arisen from the "inexpungable langours" of yellow fever to complete its last astounding pages. I can remember applauding, with ardent youthful sympathy, his tirades against the stultifying influence of blind puritanism upon American literature. I recall his scornful mocking at the inconsistency which complacently accepted the vulgar seduction, and the theatrical Brocken revels of Faust, while shrinking piously from Flaubert's grim story of the soul of man struggling to answer the riddle of the universe. He had however an almost equal contempt for the author's countrymen, who received with eager interest and pleasure the deliberate analysis--in _Madame Bovary_--of a woman's degradation and ruin, while they yawned over the amazing history of humanity's tremendous spiritual adventures. Hearn's own sensitiveness shrank in pain from the cold insight which uncovered layer by layer the brutal squalour of a woman's moral disintegration. But he was moved and astounded by the revelation, in St. Anthony, of the tragedy and pathos of man's long search for some body of belief or philosophy by which he could explain to himself the strange great phenomena of life and death, and the inscrutable cruelties of Nature. The young translator was filled with a sort of astonished despair at his inability to make others see the book as he did--not realizing, in his youthful impatience, that the average mind clings to the concrete, and is puzzled and terrified by outlines of thought too large for its range of vision; that the commonplace intelligence cannot "see the wood for the trees," and becomes confused and over-weighted when confronted with the huge outlines of so great a picture as that drawn by Flaubert in his masterpiece. There were many points of resemblance between Lafcadio Hearn and the grandson of the French veterinary. A resemblance rather in certain qualities of the spirit than in social conditions and physical endowments. Flaubert, born in 1821, was the son of a surgeon. His father was long connected with the Hôtel Dieu of Rouen, in which the boy was born, and in which he lived until his eighteenth year, when he went to Paris to study law. One of the friends of his early Parisian days describes him as "a young Greek. Tall, supple, and as graceful as an athlete. He was charming, _mais un peu farouche._ Quite unconscious of his physical and mental gifts; very careless of the impression he produced, and entirely indifferent to formalities. His dress consisted of a red flannel shirt, trousers of heavy blue cloth, and a scarf of the same colour drawn tight about his slender waist. His hat was worn 'any how' and often he abandoned it altogether. When I spoke to him of fame or influence.... he seemed superbly indifferent. He had no desire for glory or gain.... What was lacking in his nature was an interest in _les choses extérieures, choses utiles._" ... One who saw him in 1879 found the young Greek athlete--now close upon sixty, and having in the interval created some of the great classics of French literature--"a huge man, a tremendous old man. His long, straggling gray hair was brushed back. His red face was that of a soldier, or a sheik--divided by drooping white moustaches. A trumpet was his voice, and he gesticulated freely ... the colour of his eyes a bit of faded blue sky." The study of the law did not hold Flaubert long. It was one of those _choses extérieures, choses utiles_ to which he was so profoundly indifferent. Paris bored him. He longed for Rouen, and for his little student chamber. There he had lain upon his bed whole days at a time; apparently as lazy as a lizard; smoking, dreaming; pondering the large, inchoate, formless dreams of youth. In 1845 his father died, and in the following year he lost his sister Caroline, whom he had passionately loved, and for whom he grieved all his life. He rejoined his mother, and they established themselves at Croisset, near Rouen, upon a small inherited property. It was an agreeable house, pleasantly situated in sight of the Seine. Flaubert nourished with pleasure a local legend that Pascal had once inhabited the old Croisset homestead, and that the Abbé Prevost had written _Manon Lescaut_ within its walls. Near the house--now gone--he built for himself a pavilion to serve as a study, and in this he spent the greater portion of the following thirty-four years in passionate, unremitting labour. He made a voyage to Corsica in his youth; one to Brittany, with Maxime du Camp, in 1846; and spent some months in Egypt, Palestine, Turkey, and Greece in 1849. This Oriental experience gave him the most intense pleasure, and was the germ of _Salammbo_, and of the _Temptation of St. Anthony._ He never repeated it, though he constantly talked of doing so. He nursed a persistent, but unrealized dream of going as far as Ceylon, whose ancient name, Taprobana, he was never weary of repeating; utterance of its melifluous syllables becoming a positive _tic_ with him. Despite these yearnings he remained at home. Despite his full-blooded physique he would take no more exercise than his terrace afforded, or an occasional swim in the Seine. He smoked incessantly, and for months at a stretch worked fifteen hours out of the twenty-four at his desk. Three hundred volumes might be annotated for a page of facts. He would write twenty pages, and reduce these by exquisite concisions, by fastidious rejections to three; would search for hours for the one word that perfectly conveyed the colour of his thought, and would--as in the case of the _Temptation_--wait fifteen years for a sense of satisfaction with a manuscript before allowing it to see the light. To Maxime du Camp, who urged him to hasten the completion of his book in order to take advantage of a favourable opportunity, he wrote angrily: "Tu me parais avoir à mon endroit un tic ou vice rédhibitoire. Il ne m'embête pas; n'aie aucune crainte; mon parti est pris là-dessus depuis long temps. Je te dirai seulement que tous ces mots; _se dépêcher, c'est le moment, place prise, se poser, ..._ sont pour moi un vocabulaire vide de sens...." In one of his letters he says that on occasion he worked violently for eight hours to achieve one page. He endeavoured never to repeat a word in that page, and tried to force every phrase to respond to a rhythmic law. Guy do Maupassant, his nephew and pupil, says that to ensure this rhythm Flaubert "prenait sa feuille de papier, relevait à la hauteur du regard et, s'appuyant sur un coude, déclaimait, d'une voix mordant et haute. Il écoutait la rythme de sa prose, s'arrêtait comme pour saisir une sonorité fuyant, combinait les tons, éloignait les assonances, disposait les virgules avec conscience, commes les haltes d'un long chemin." ... Flaubert said himself, "une phrase est viable quand elle correspond à toutes les nécessités de respiration. Je sais qu'elle est bonne lorsqu'elle peut être lu tout haut." Henry Irving used to say of himself that it was necessary he should work harder than other actors because nature had dowered him with flexibility of neither voice nor feature, and Faguet says that Flaubert was forced to this excessive toil and incessant watchfulness because he did not write well naturally. Nevertheless Flaubert's work did not smell of the lamp. Whatever shape his ideas may have worn at birth when full grown they moved with large classic grace and freedom, simple, sincere, and beautiful in form. François Coppée calls him "the Beethoven of French prose." So conscientious a workman, so laborious and self-sacrificing an artist had a natural attraction for Lafcadio Hearn, who even in boyhood began to feel his vocation as "a literary monk." The whole tendency of his tastes prepared him to understand the true importance of Flaubert's masterpiece, fitted him especially of all living writers to turn that masterpiece into its true English equivalent. The two men had much in common. Both were proud and timid. Both had a fundamental indifference to _choses extérieures, choses utiles._ Both were realists of the soul. Actions interested each but slightly; the emotions from which actions sprung very much. To both stupidity was even more antipathetic than wickedness, because each realized that nearly all cruelty and vice have their germ in ignorance and stupidity rather than in innate rascality. Flaubert declared, with a sort of rage, that "la bêtise entre dans mes pores." He might too have been speaking for Hearn when he said that the grotesque, the strange, and the monstrous had for him an inexplicable charm. "It corresponds," he says, "to the intimate needs of my nature--it does not cause me to laugh, but to dream long dreams." Hearn, however, mixed with this triste interest a quality that Flaubert seemed almost wholly to lack--a great tenderness for all things humble, feeble, ugly and helpless. Both from childhood were curious of poignant sensations, of the sad, the mysterious and the exotic. And for both the tropics had an irresistible fascination. Flaubert says, in one of his letters: "I carry with me the melancholy of the barbaric races, with their instincts of migration, and their innate distaste of life, which forced them to quit their homes in order to escape from themselves. They loved the sun, all those barbarians who came to die in Italy; they had a frenzied aspiration toward the light, toward the blue skies, toward an ardent existence.... Think that perhaps I will never see China, will never be rocked to sleep by the cadenced footsteps of camels ... will never see the shine of a tiger's eyes in the forest.... You can treat all this as little worthy of pity, but I suffer so much when I think of it ... as of something lamentable and irremediable." This is the nostalgia for the strange, for the unaccustomed, that all born wanderers know. Fate arranges it for many of them that their lives shall be uneventful, passed in dull, provincial narrowness; but behind these bars the clipped wings of their spirit are always flutteringly spread for flight. They know not what they seek, what desire drives them, but a sense of "the great adventure" unachieved keeps them restless until they die. It is such as these, these _voyageurs empassionés_, when condemned by fortune to a static existence--who find their outlet in mental wanderings amid the unusual, the grotesque, and the monstrous. Hearn and Flaubert both were at heart nomads, seekers of the unaccustomed; stretching toward immensities of space and time, toward the ghostly, the hidden, the unrealized. Like that wild fantastic _Chimera_ of the "Temptation" each such soul declares "_je cherche des parfums nouveaux, des fleurs plus large, des plaisirs inéprouvés._" Flaubert was but twenty-six when the first suggestion of his masterpiece came to him. For _La Tentation de St. Antoine_, it is coming to be understood, is his masterpiece; is one of the greatest literary achievements of the French mind. _Madame Bovary_ is more widely famous and popular, but Flaubert himself always deeply resented this preference, and was always astonished at the comparative indifference of the world to the "Temptation." He, too, found it difficult to realize how hardly the average mind is awakened to an interest in the incorporeal; how surely cosmic generalizations escape the grasp of the commonplace intelligence. Wagner waited a lifetime before the world was dragged reluctantly and resentfully up to a point from which it could discern the superiority of the tremendous finale of the Götterdämmerung to the Christmas-card chorus of angels chanting "_Âme chaste et pure_" to the beatified Marguerite. The whole prodigious structure of Wagner's dramatic and musical thought might have remained a mere adumbration in the soul of one German had chance not set a mad genius upon the throne of Bavaria. The bourgeoisie would--lacking this royal bullying--have continued to prefer Goethe and Gounod. Flaubert's great work unfortunately failed of such patronage. It was in 1845 that an old picture by Breughel, seen at Genoa, first inspired Flaubert to attempt the story of St. Anthony. He sought out an engraving of this conception of Peter the Younger (surnamed "Hell-Breughel" for his fondness for such subjects), hung it on his walls at Croisset, and after three years of brooding upon it began, May 24, 1848, _La Tentation de St. Antoine._ In twelve months he had finished the first draught of the work, which bulked to 540 pages. It was laid aside for "Bovary," and a second version of the "Temptation" was completed in 1856, but this time the manuscript had been reduced to 193 pages, and the "blazing phrases, the jewelled words, the turbulence, the comedy, the mysticism" of the first version had been superseded by a larger, more dramatic conception. In 1872 he made still a new draught, and by this time it had shrunk to 136 pages. He even then eliminated three chapters, and finally gave to the world in 1874 "this wonderful coloured panorama of philosophy, this Gulliver-like travelling amid the master ideas of the antique and early Christian worlds." Faguet says, "In its primitive and legendary state the temptation of St. Anthony was nothing more than the story of a recluse tempted by the Devil through the flesh, by all the artifices at the Devil's disposal. In the definite thought of Flaubert the temptation of St. Anthony has become man's soul tempted by all the illusions of human thought and imagination. St. Anthony to the eyes of the first naive hagiologists is a second Adam, seduced by woman, who was inspired by Satan. St. Anthony conceived by Flaubert is a more thoughtful Faust; a Faust incapable of irony, not a Faust who could play with illusions and with himself--secretly persuaded that he could withdraw when he chose to give himself the trouble to do so--rather a Faust who approached, accosted, caressed all possible forms of universal illusions." Flaubert's studies for the "Temptation" were tremendous. For nearly thirty years he touched and retouched, altered, enlarged, condensed. He kneaded into its substance the knowledge, incessantly sought, of all religions and philosophies; of all the forms man's speculations had taken in his endless endeavours to explain to himself Life and Fate; humanity's untiring, passionate effort to find the meaning of its mysterious origin and purpose, and final destiny. How terrible, how naive, how fantastic, bloody, grovelling, and outrageous were most of the solutions accepted, the gigantic panorama of the book startlingly sets forth. What gory agonies, what mystic exaltations, what dark cruelties, frenzied abandons, and inhuman self denials have marked those puzzled gropings for light and truth are revealed as by lightning flashes in the crowding scenes of the epic. For the Temptation of St. Anthony is an epic. Not a drama of man's actions, as all previous epics have been, but a drama of the soul. All its movement is in the adventure and conflict of the spirit. St. Anthony remains always in the one place, almost as moveless as a mirror. His vision--clarified of the sensual and the actual by his fastings and macerations--becomes like the surface of an unruffled lake. A lake reflecting the aberrant forms of thoughts that, like clouds, drift between man and the infinite depths of knowledge. Clouds of illusion forever changing, melting, fusing; assuming forms grotesque, monstrous, intolerable; until at last the writhing mists of speculation and ignorance are drunk up by the widening light of wisdom and the fogs and phantasms vanish, leaving his consciousness aware, in poignant ecstasy, of the cloudless deeps of truth. The temptation of the flesh is but a passing episode. An eidolon of Sheba's queen offers him luxury, wealth, voluptuous beauty, power, dainty delights of eye and palate in vain. Man has never found his most dangerous seductions in the appetites. More lamentable disintegration has grown from his attempts to pierce beyond the body's veil. The parched and tortured saint is whirled by vertiginous visions through cycles of man's straining efforts to know why, whence, whither. He assists at the rites of Mithira, the prostrations of serpent-and-devil-worshippers, worshippers of fire, of light, of the Greeks' deified forces of nature; of the northern enthronement of brute force and war. He is swept by the soothing breath of Quietism, plunges into every heresy and philosophy, sees the orgies, the flagellations, the self mutilations, the battles and furies of sects, each convinced that it has found the answer at last to the Great Question, and endeavouring to constrain the rest of humanity to accept the answer. He meets the Sphinx--embodied interrogation--and the Chimera--the simulacrum of the fantasies of the imagination--dashing madly about the stolid querist. Lucifer--spirit of doubt of all dogmatic solutions--mounts with Anthony into illimitable space. They rise beyond these struggles and furies into the cold uttermost of the universe; among innumerable worlds; worlds yet vaguely forming in the womb of time, newly come to birth, lustily grown to maturity; worlds dying, decaying, crumbling again into atomic dust. Overcome by the intolerable Vast, Anthony sinks once more to his cell, and Lucifer, who has shown him the macrocosm, opens to him the equal immensity of the microcosm. Makes him see the swarming life that permeates the seas, the earth and atmosphere, the incredible numerousness of the invisible lives that people every drop of water, every grain of sand, every breath of air. The unity of life dawns upon him, and his heart, withered by dubiety, melts into joyousness and peace. As the day dawns in gold he beholds the face of Christ. Flaubert's Lucifer has no relation to the jejune Devil of man's early conception of material evil, nor does he resemble Goethe's Mephistopheles; embodiment of the Eighteenth Century's spirit of sneering disbeliefs and negation. He is rather our own tempter--Science. He is the spirit of Knowledge: Nature itself calling us to look into the immensities and read just our dogmas by this new and terrible widening of our mental and moral horizons. This last experience of the Saint reproduces the spiritual experiences of the modern man; cast loose from his ancient moorings, and yet finding at last in his new knowledge a truer conception of the brotherhood of all life in all its forms, and seeing still, in the growing light, the benignant eyes of God. It is not remarkable that Flaubert resented the banality, the dull grossness of the reception of his work, or that Hearn shared his amazement and bitterness. Even yet the world wakes but slowly to the true character of this masterpiece; this epic wrought with so great a care and patience, so instinct with genius, dealing perhaps more profoundly than any other mind has ever done with the Great Adventure of humanity's eternal search for Truth. ELIZABETH BISLAND. ARGUMENT FRAILTY Sunset in the desert. Enfeebled by prolonged fasting, the hermit finds himself unable to concentrate his mind upon holy things. His thoughts wonder; memories of youth evoke regrets that his relaxed will can no longer find strength to suppress,--and, remembrance begetting remembrance, his fancy leads him upon dangerous ground. He dreams of his flight from home,--of Ammonaria, his sister's playmate,--of his misery in the waste,--his visit to Alexandria with the blind monk Didymus,--the unholy sights of the luxurious city. Involuntarily he yields to the nervous dissatisfaction growing upon him. He laments his solitude, his joylessness, his poverty, the obscurity of his life; grace departs from him; hope burns low within his heart. Suddenly revolting against his weakness, he seeks refuge from distraction in the study of the Scriptures. Vain effort! An invisible hand turns the leaves, placing perilous texts before his eyes. He dreams of the Maccabees slaughtering their enemies, and desires that he might do likewise with the Arians of Alexandria;--he becomes inspired with admiration of King Nebuchadnezzar;--he meditates voluptuously upon the visit of Sheba's queen of Solomon;--discovers a text in the Acts of the Apostles antagonistic to principles of monkish ascetism,--indulges in reveries regarding the riches of Biblical kings and holy men. The Tempter comes to tempt him with evil hallucinations for which the Saint's momentary frailty has paved the way; and with the Evil One come also THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS Phantom gold is piled up to excite Covetousness; shadowy banquets appear to evoke Gluttony. The scene shifts to aid the temptations of Anger and of Pride.... Anthony finds himself in Alexandria, at the head of a wild army of monks slaughtering the heretics and the pagans, without mercy for age or sex. In fantastic obedience to the course of his fancy while reading the Scriptures a while before, and like an invisible echo of his evil thoughts, the scene changes again. Alexandria is transformed into Constantinople. Anthony finds himself the honoured of the Emperor. He beholds the vast circus in all its splendour, the ocean of faces, the tumult of excitement. Simultaneously he beholds his enemies degraded to the condition of slaves, toiling in the stables of Constantine. He feels joy in the degradation of the Fathers of Nicæa. Then all is transformed. It is no longer the splendour of Constantinople he beholds under the luminosity of a Greek day; but the prodigious palace of Nebuchadnezzar by night. He beholds the orgies, the luxuries, the abominations;--and the spirit of Pride enters triumphantly into him as the spirit of Nebuchadnezzar.... Awaking as from a dream, he finds himself again before his hermitage. A vast caravan approaches, halts; and the Queen of Sheba descends to tempt the Saint with the deadliest of all temptations. Her beauty is enhanced by oriental splendour of adornment; her converse is a song of withcraft. The Saint remains firm.... The Seven Deadly Sins depart from him. THE HERESIARCHS But now the tempter assumes a subtler form. Under the guise of a former disciple of Anthony,--Hilarion,--the demon, while pretending to seek instruction, endeavours to poison the mind of Anthony with hatred of the fathers of the church. He repeats all the scandals amassed by ecclesiastical intriguers, all the calumnies created by malice;--he cites texts only to foment doubt, and quotes the evangels only to make confusion. Under the pretext of obtaining mental enlightenment from the wisest of men, he induces Anthony to enter with him into a spectral basilica, wherein are assembled all the Heresiarchs of the third century. The hermit is confounded by the multitude of tenets,--horrified by the blasphemies and abominations of Elkes, Corpocrates, Valentinus, Manes, Cerdo,--disgusted by the perversions of the Paternians, Marcosians, Montanists, Serptians,--bewildered by the apocryphal Gospels of Eve and of Judas, of the Lord, and of Thomas. And Hilarion grows taller. THE MARTYRS Anthony finds himself in the dungeons of a vast amphitheatre, among Christians condemned to the wild beasts. By this hallucination the tempter would prove to the Saint that martyrdom is not always suffered for purest motives. Anthony finds the martyrs possessed by bigotry and insincerity. He sees many compelled to die against their will; many who would forswear their faith could it avail them aught. He beholds heretics die for their heterodoxy more nobly than orthodox believers. And he finds himself transported to the tombs of the martyrs. He witnesses the meetings of Christian women at the sepulchres. He beholds the touching ceremonies of prayer, change into orgies,--lamentations give place to amorous dalliance. THE MAGICIANS Then the Tempter seeks to shake Anthony's faith in the excellence and evidence of miracles. He assumes the form of a Hindoo Brahmin, terminating a life of wondrous holiness by self-cremation;--he appears as Simon Magus and Helen of Tyre,--as Appollonius of Tyans, greatest of all thaumaturgists, who claims superiority to Christ. All the marvels related by Philostratus are embodied in the converse of Apollonius and Damis. THE GODS Hilarion reappears taller than ever, growing more gigantic in proportion to the increasing weakness of the Saint. Standing beside Anthony he evokes all the deities of the antique world. They defile before him in a marvellous panorama:--Gods of Egypt and India, Chaldea and Hellas, Babylon and Ultima Thule,--monstrous and multiform, phallic and ithyphallic, fantastic or obscene. Some intoxicate by their beauty; others appall by their foulness. The Buddha recounts the story of his wondrous life; Venus displays the rounded daintiness of her nudity; Isis utters awful soliloquy. Lastly the phantom of Jehovah appears, as the shadow of a god passing away forever. Suddenly the stature of Hilarion towers to the stars; he assumes the likeness and luminosity of Lucifer; he announces himself as SCIENCE And Anthony is lifted upon mighty wings and borne away beyond the world, above the solar system, above the starry arch of the Milky Way. All future discoveries of Astronomy are revealed to him. He is tempted by the revelation of innumerable worlds,--by the refutation of all his previous ideas of the nature of the Universe,--by the enigmas of infinity,--by all the marvels that conflict with faith. Even in the night of immensity the demon renews the temptation of reason: Anthony wavers upon the verge of pantheism. LUST AND DEATH Anthony abandoned by the spirit of Science comes to himself in the desert. Then the Tempter returns under a two-fold aspect: as the Spirit of Lust and the Spirit of Destruction. The latter urges him to suicide,--the former to indulgence of sense. They inspire him with strong fancies of palingenesis, of the illusion of death, of the continuity of life. The pantheistic temptation intensified. THE MONSTERS Anthony in reveries meditates upon the monstrous symbols painted upon the walls of certain ancient temples. Could he know their meaning he might learn also something of the secret lien between Matter and Thought. Forthwith a phantasmagoria of monsters commence to pass before his eyes:--the Sphinx and the Chimera, the Blemmyes and Astomi, the Cynocephali and all creatures of mythologie creation. He beholds the fabulous beings of Oriental imagining,--the abnormities described by Pliny and Herodotus, the fantasticalities to be later adopted by heraldry,--the grotesqueries of future medieval illumination made animate;--the goblinries and foulnesses of superstitious fancy,--the Witches' Sabbath of abominations. METAMORPHOSIS The multitude of monsters melts away; the land changes into an Ocean; the creatures of the briny abysses appear. And the waters in turn also change; seaweeds are transformed to herbs, forests of coral give place to forests of trees, polypous life changes to vegetation. Metals crystallize; frosts effloresce; plants become living things, inanimate matter takes animate form, monads vibrate, the pantheism of nature makes itself manifest. Anthony feels a delirious desire to unite himself with the Spirit of Universal Being.... The vision vanishes. The sun arises. The face of Christ is revealed. The temptation has passed; Anthony kneels in prayer. L. H. THE TEMPTATION OF ST. ANTHONY _It is in the Thebaid at the summit of a mountain, upon a platform, rounded off into the form of a demilune, and enclosed by huge stones._ _The Hermit's cabin appears in the background. It is built of mud and reeds, it is flat-roofed and doorless. A pitcher and a loaf of black bread can be distinguished within also, in the middle of the apartment a large book resting on a wooden STELA; while here and there, fragments of basketwork, two or three mats, a basket, and a knife lie upon the ground._ _Some ten paces from the hut, there is a long cross planted in the soil; and, at the other end of the platform, an aged and twisted palm tree leans over the abyss; for the sides of the mountain are perpendicular, and the Nile appears to form a lake at the foot of the cliff._ _The view to right and left is broken by the barrier of rocks. But on the desert-side, like a vast succession of sandy beaches, immense undulations of an ashen-blonde color extend one behind the other, rising higher as they recede; and far in the distance, beyond the sands, the Libyan chain forms a chalk-colored wall, lightly shaded by violet mists. On the opposite side the sun is sinking. In the north the sky is of a pearl-gray tint, while at the zenith purple clouds disposed like the tufts of a gigantic mane, lengthen themselves against the blue vault. These streaks of flame take darker tones; the azure spots turn to a nacreous pallor; the shrubs, the pebbles, the earth, all now seem hard as bronze; and throughout space there floats a golden dust so fine as to become confounded with the vibrations of the light._ _Saint Anthony, who has a long beard, long hair, and wears a tunic of goatskin, is seated on the ground cross-legged, and is occupied in weaving mats. As soon as the sun disappears, he utters a deep sigh, and, gazing upon the horizon, exclaims_:-- "Another day! another day gone! Nevertheless formerly I used not to be so wretched. Before the end of the night I commenced my orisons; then I descended to the river to get water, and remounted the rugged pathway with the skin upon my shoulder, singing hymns on the way. Then I would amuse myself by arranging everything in my hut. I would make my tools; I tried to make all my mats exactly equal in size, and all my baskets light; for then my least actions seemed to me duties in nowise difficult or painful of accomplishment. "Then at regular hours I ceased working; and when I prayed with my arms extended, I felt as though a fountain of mercy were pouring from the height of heaven into my heart. That fountain is now dried up. Why?" (_He walks up and down slowly, within the circuit of the rocks._) "All blamed me when I left the house. My mother sank to the ground, dying; my sister from afar off made signs to me to return; and the other--wept, Ammonaria, the child whom I used to meet every evening at the cistern, when she took the oxen to drink. She ran after me. Her foot rings glittered in the dust; and her tunic, open at the hips, fluttered loosely in the wind. The aged anchorite who was leading me away called her vile names. Our two camels galloped forward without respite; and I have seen none of my people since that day. "At first, I selected for my dwelling place, the tomb of a Pharaoh. But an enchantment circulates through all those subterranean palaces, where the darkness seems to have been thickened by the ancient smoke of the aromatics. From the depths of Sarcophagi, I heard doleful voices arise, and call my name; or else, I suddenly beheld the abominable things painted upon the walls live and move; and I fled away to the shore of the Red Sea, and took refuge in a ruined citadel. There my only companions were the scorpions dragging themselves among the stones, and the eagles continually wheeling above my head, in the blue of heaven. At night I was torn by claws, bitten by beaks; soft wings brushed against me; and frightful demons, shrieking in my ears, flung me upon the ground. Once I was even rescued by the people of a caravan going to Alexandria; and they took me away with them. "Then I sought to obtain instruction from the good old man Didymus. Although blind, none equalled him in the knowledge of the Scriptures. When the lesson was finished, he used to ask me to give him my arm to lean upon, that we might walk together. Then I would conduct him to the Paneum, whence may be seen the Pharos and the open sea. Then we would return by way of the post, elbowing men of all nations, even Cimmerians clad in the skins of bears and Gymnosophists of the Ganges anointed with cow-dung. But there was always some fighting in the streets--either on account of the Jews refusing to pay taxes, or of seditious people who wished to drive the Romans from the city. Moreover, the city is full of heretics--followers of Manes; Valentinus, Basilides, Arius--all seeking to engross my attention in order to argue with me and to convince me. "Their discourses often come back to my memory. Vainly do I seek to banish them from my mind. They trouble me! "I took refuge at Colzin, and there lived a life of such penance that I ceased to fear God. A few men, desirous of becoming anchorites, gathered about me. I imposed a practical rule of life upon them, hating, as I did, the extravagance of Gnosus and the assertions of the philosophers. Messages were sent to me from all parts, and men came from afar off to visit me. "Meanwhile the people were torturing the confessors; and the thirst of martyrdom drew me to Alexandria. The persecution had ceased three days before I arrived there! "While returning thence, I was stopped by a great crowd assembled before the temple of Serapis. They told me it was a last example which the Governor had resolved to make. In the centre of the portico, under the sunlight, a naked woman was fettered to a column, and two soldiers were flogging her with thongs; at every blow her whole body writhed. She turned round, her mouth open; and over the heads of the crowd, through the long hair half hiding her face, I thought that I could recognize Ammonaria.... [Illustration: ... through the long hair half hiding her face, I thought that I could recognize Ammonaria] "Nevertheless ... this one was taller ... and beautiful ... prodigiously beautiful!" (_He passes his hands over his forehead._) "No! no! I must not think of it! "Another time Athanasius summoned me to assist him against the Arians. The contest was limited to invectives and laughter. But since that time he has been calumniated, dispossessed of his see, obliged to fly for safety elsewhere. Where is he now? I do not know! The people give themselves very little trouble to bring me news. All my disciples have abandoned me--Hilarion like the rest. "He was perhaps fifteen years of age when he first came to me and his intelligence was so remarkable that he asked me questions incessantly. Then he used to listen to me with a pensive air, and whatever I needed he brought it to me without a murmur--nimbler than a kid, merry enough to make even the patriarchs laugh. He was a son to me." (_The sky is red; the earth completely black. Long drifts of sand follow the course of the gusts of wind, rising like great shrouds and falling again. Suddenly against a bright space in the sky a flock of birds pass, forming a triangular battalion, gleaming like one sheet of metal, of which the edges alone seem to quiver._ _Anthony watches them._) "Ah, how I should like to follow them. "How often also have I enviously gazed upon those long vessels, whose sails resemble wings--and above all when they were bearing far away those I had received at my hermitage! What pleasant hours we passed!--what out-pourings of feeling! No one ever interested me more than Ammon: he told me of his voyage to Rome, of the Catacombs, the Coliseum, the piety of illustrious women, and a thousand other things!--and it grieved me to part with him! Wherefore my obstinacy in continuing to live such a life as this? I would have done well to remain with the monks of Nitria, inasmuch as they supplicated me to do so. They have cells apart, and nevertheless communicate with each other. On Sundays a trumpet summons them to assemble at the church, where one may see three scourges hanging up, which serve to punish delinquents, robbers, and intruders; for their discipline is severe. "Nevertheless they are not without some enjoyments. The faithful bring them eggs, fruits, and even instruments with which they can extract thorns from their feet. There are vineyards about Prisperi; those dwelling at Pabena have a raft on which they may journey when they go to seek provisions. "But I might have served my brethren better as a simple priest. As a priest one may aid the poor, administer the sacraments, and exercise authority over families. "Furthermore, all laics are not necessarily damned, and it only depended upon my own choice to become--for example--a grammarian, a philosopher. I would then have had in my chamber a sphere of reeds, and tablets always ready at hand, young men around me, and a wreath of laurel suspended above my door, as a sign. "But there is too much pride in triumphs such as those. A soldier's life would have been preferable. I was robust and bold: bold enough to fasten the cables of the military machines--to traverse dark forests, or to enter, armed and helmeted, into smoking cities.... Neither was there anything to have prevented me from purchasing with my money the position of publican at the toll-office of some bridge; and travellers would have taught me many strange things, and told me strange stories, the while showing me many curious objects packed up among their baggage.... "The merchants of Alexandria sail upon the river Canopus on holidays, and drink wine in the chalices of lotus-flowers, to a music of tambourines which makes the taverns along the shore tremble! Beyond, trees, made cone-shaped by pruning, protect the quiet farms against the wind of the south. The roof of the lofty house leans upon thin colonettes placed as closely together as the laths of a lattice; and through their interspaces the master, reclining upon his long couch, beholds his plains stretching about him--the hunter among the wheat-fields--the winepress where the vintage is being converted into wine, the oxen treading out the wheat. His children play upon the floor around him; his wife bends down to kiss him." (_Against the grey dimness of the twilight, here and there appear pointed muzzles, with straight, pointed ears and bright eyes. Anthony advances toward them. There is a sound of gravel crumbling down; the animals take flight. It was a troop of jackals._ _One still remains, rising upon his hinder legs, with his body half arched and head raised in an attitude full of defiance._) "How pretty he is! I would like to stroke his back gently!" (_Anthony whistles to coax him to approach. The jackal disappears._) "Ah! he is off to join the others. What solitude! what weariness!" (_Laughing bitterly._) "A happy life this indeed!--bending palm-branches in the fire to make shepherds' crooks, fashioning baskets, stitching mats together--and then exchanging these things with the Nomads for bread which breaks one's teeth! Ah! woe, woe is me! will this never end? Surely death were preferable! I can endure it no more! Enough! enough!" (_He stamps his foot upon the ground, and rushes frantically to and fro among the rocks; then pauses, out of breath, bursts into tears, and lies down upon the ground, on his side._ _The night is calm; multitudes of stars are palpitating; only the crackling noise made by the tarantulas is audible._ _The two arms of the cross make a shadow upon the sand; Anthony, who is weeping, observes it._) "Am I, then, so weak, O my God! Courage, let me rise from here!" (_He enters his hut, turns over a pile of cinders, finds a live ember, lights his torch and fixes it upon the wooden desk, so as to throw a light upon the great book._) "Suppose I take the Acts of the Apostles?--yes!--no matter where!" _'And he saw the heaven opened, and a certain vessel descending, as it were a great linen sheet let down by the four corners from heaven to the earth--wherein were all manner of four-footed beasts, and creeping things of the earth and fowls of the air. And there came a voice to him: Arise, Peter! Kill and eat!'_[1] "Then the Lord desired that his apostle should eat of all things?... while I...." (_Anthony remains thoughtful, his chin resting against his breast. The rustling of the pages, agitated by the wind, causes him to lift his head again; and he reads_:) _'So the Jews made a great slaughter of their enemies with the sword, and killed them, repaying according to what they had prepared to do to them...._[2] "Then, comes the number of people slain by them--seventy-five thousand. They had suffered so much! Moreover, their enemies were the enemies of the true God. And how they must have delighted in avenging themselves thus by the massacre of idolaters! Doubtless the city must have been crammed with the dead! There must have been corpses at the thresholds of the garden gates, upon the stairways, in all the chambers, and piled up so high that the doors could no longer move upon their hinges!... But lo! here I am permitting my mind to dwell upon ideas of murder and of blood!..." (_He opens the book at another place._) _'Then King Nabuchodonosor fell on his face, and worshipped Daniel...._'[3] "Ah! that was just! The _Most High_ exalts his prophets above Kings; yet that monarch spent his life in banqueting, perpetually drunk with pleasure and pride. But God, to punish him, changed him into a beast! He walked upon four feet!" (_Anthony begins to laugh; and in extending his arms, involuntarily disarranges the leaves of the book with the tips of his fingers. His eyes fell upon this phrase_:--) _'And Ezechias rejoiced at their coming, and he showed them the house of his aromatical spices, and the gold and the silver, and divers precious odours and ointments, and the house of his vessels, and all that he had in his treasures....'_[4] "I can imagine that spectacle; they must have beheld precious stones, diamonds and darics heaped up to the very roof. One who possesses so vast an accumulation of wealth is no longer like other men. While handling his riches he knows that he controls the total result of innumerable human efforts--as it were the life of nations drained by him and stored up, which he can pour forth at will. It is a commendable precaution on the part of Kings. Even the _Wisest_ of all did not neglect it. His navy brought him elephants' teeth and apes.... Where is that passage?" (_He turns the leaves over rapidly._) "Ah! here it is:" _'And the Queen of Saba, having heard of the fame of Solomon in the name of the Lord, came to try him with hard questions.'_[5] "How did she hope to tempt him? The _Devil_ indeed sought to tempt Jesus! But Jesus triumphed because he was God; and Solomon, perhaps, owing this knowledge of magic! It is sublime--that science! For the world--as a philosopher once explained it to me, forms a whole, of which all parts mutually influence one another, like the organs of one body. It is science which enables us to know the natural loves and natural repulsions of all things, and to play upon them?... Therefore, it is really possible to modify what appears to be the immutable order of the universe?" (_Then the two shadows formed behind him by the arms of the cross, suddenly lengthen and project themselves before him. They assume the form of two great horns. Anthony cries out_:--) "Help me! O my God!" [Illustration: Saint Anthony: Help me, O my God!] (_The shadows shrink back to their former place._) "Ah!... it was an illusion ... nothing more. It is needless for me to torment my mind further! I can do nothing!--absolutely nothing." (_He sits down and folds his arms._) "Nevertheless ... it seems to me that I felt the approach of.... But why should _He_ come? Besides, do I not know all his artifices? I repulsed the monstrous anchorite who laughingly offered me little loaves of warm, fresh bread, the centaur who sought to carry me away upon his croup, and that black child who appeared to me in the midst of the sands, who was very beautiful, and who told me that he was called the Spirit of Lust!" (_Anthony rises and walks rapidly up and down, first to the right, then to the left._) "It was by my order that this multitude of holy retreats was constructed--full of monks all wearing sackcloth of camel's hair beneath their garments of goatskin, and numerous enough to form an army. I have cured the sick from afar off; I have cast out demons; I have passed the river in the midst of crocodiles; the Emperor Constantine wrote me throe letters; Balacius, who had spat upon mine, was torn to pieces by his own horses; when I reappeared the people of Alexandria fought for the pleasure of seeing me, and Athanasius himself escorted me on the way back. But what works have I not accomplished Lo! for these thirty years and more I have been dwelling and groaning unceasingly in the desert! Like Eusebius, I have carried thirty-eight pounds of bronze upon my loins; like Macarius, I have exposed my body to the stings of insects; like Pacomus, I have passed fifty-three nights without closing my eyes; and those who are decapitated, tortured with red hot pincers, or burned alive, are perhaps less meritorious than I, seeing that my whole life is but one prolonged martyrdom." (_Anthony slackens his pace._) "Assuredly there is no human being in a condition of such unutterable misery! Charitable hearts are becoming scarcer. I no longer receive aught from any one. My mantle is worn out. I have no sandals--I have not even a porringer!--for I have distributed all I possessed to the poor and to my family, without retaining so much as one obolus. Yet surely I ought to have a little money to obtain the tools indispensable to my work? Oh, not much! a very small sum.... I would be very saving of it.... "The fathers of Nicæa, clad in purple robes, sat like magi, upon thrones ranged along the walls; and they were entertained at a great banquet and overwhelmed with honours, especially Paphnutius, because he is one-eyed and lame, since the persecution of Diocletian! The Emperor kissed his blind eye several times; what foolishness! Besides, there were such infamous men members of that Council! A bishop of Scythia, Theophilus! another of Persia, John! a keeper of beasts, Spiridion! Alexander was too old. Athanasius ought to have shown more gentleness towards the Arians, so as to have obtained concessions from them. "Yet would they have made any? They would not hear me! The one who spoke against me--a tall young man with a curly beard--uttered the most captious objections to my argument; and while I was seeking words to express my views they all stared at me with their wicked faces, and barked like hyenas. Ah! why cannot I have them all exiled by the Emperor! or rather have them beaten, crushed, and see them suffer! I suffer enough myself." (_He leans against his cabin in a fainting condition._) "It is because I have fasted too long; my strength is leaving me. If I could eat--only once more--a piece of meat." (_He half closes his eyes with languor._) "Ah! some red flesh--a bunch of grapes to bite into ... curdled milk that trembles on a plate!... "But what has come upon me? What is the matter with me? I feel my heart enlarging like the sea, when it swells before the storm. An unspeakable feebleness weighs down upon me, and the warm air seems to waft me the perfume of a woman's hair. No woman has approached this place; nevertheless?--" (_He gazes toward the little pathway between the rocks._) "That is the path by which they come, rocked in their litters by the black arms of the eunuchs. They descend and joining their hands, heavy with rings, kneel down before me. They relate to me all their troubles. The desire of human pleasure tortures them; they would gladly die; they have seen in their dreams God calling to them ... and all the while the hems of their robes fall upon my feet. I repel them from me. 'Ah! no!' they cry, 'not yet! What shall I do?' They gladly accept any penitence I impose on them. They ask for the hardest of all; they beg to share mine and to live with me. "It is now a long time since I have seen any of them! Perhaps some of them will come! why not? If I could only hear again, all of a sudden, the tinkling of mule-bells among the mountains. It seems to me...." (_Anthony clambers upon a rock at the entrance of the pathway, and leans over, darting his eyes into the darkness._) "Yes! over there, far off I see a mass moving, like a band of travellers seeking the way. _She_ is there!... They are making a mistake." (_Calling._) "This way! Come! Come!" (_Echo repeats: Come! Come! he lets his arms fall, stupefied._) "What shame for me! Alas! poor Anthony." (_And all of a sudden he hears a whisper:--"Poor Anthony"!_) "Who is there? Speak!" (_The wind passing through the intervals between the rocks, makes modulations; and in those confused sonorities he distinguishes Voices, as though the air itself were speaking. They are low, insinuating, hissing._) _The First_: "Dost thou desire women?" _The Second_: "Great heaps of money, rather!" _The Third_: "A glittering sword?" (_and_) _The Others_: "All the people admire thee! Sleep!" "Thou shalt slay them all, aye, thou shalt slay them!" (_At the same moment objects become transformed. At the edge of the cliff, the old palm tree with its tuft of yellow leaves, changes into the torso of a woman leaning over the abyss, her long hair waving in the wind. Anthony turns toward his cabin; and the stool supporting the great book whose pages are covered with black letters, seems to him changed into a bush all covered with nightingales._) "It must be the torch which is making this strange play of light.... Let us put it out!" (_He extinguishes it; the obscurity becomes deeper, the darkness profound._ _And suddenly in the air above there appear and disappear successively--first, a stretch of water; then the figure of a prostitute; the corner of a temple, a soldier; a chariot with two white horses, prancing._ _These images appear suddenly, as in flashes--outlined against the background of the night, like scarlet paintings executed upon ebony._ _Their motion accelerates. They defile by with vertiginous rapidity. Sometimes again, they pause and gradually pale and melt away; or else float off out of sight, to be immediately succeeded by others._ _Anthony closes his eyelids._ _They multiply, surround him, besiege him. An unspeakable fear takes possession of him; and he feels nothing more of living sensation, save a burning contraction of the epigastrium. In spite of the tumult in his brain, he is aware of an enormous silence which separates him from the world. He tries to speak;--impossible! He feels as though all the bands of his life were breaking and dissolving;--and, no longer able to resist, Anthony falls prostrate upon his mat._) [1] Acts X: 11-13--T. [2] Esther IX: 5--T. [3] Daniel II: 46.--T. [4] Kings XX: 13 (Vulg.).--T. [5] III Kings X: I (Vulg.).--T. II (_Then a great shadow, subtler than any natural shadow, and festooned by other shadows along its edges, defines itself upon the ground._ _It is the Devil, leaning upon the roof of the hut, and bearing beneath his wings--like some gigantic bat suckling its little ones--the Seven Deadly Sins, whose grimacing heads are dimly distinguishable._ _With eyes still closed, Anthony yields to the pleasure of inaction; and stretches his limbs upon the mat._ _It seems to him quite soft, and yet softer--so that it becomes as if padded; it rises up; it becomes a bed. The bed becomes a shallop; water laps against its sides._ _To right and left rise two long tongues of land, overlooking low cultivated plains, with a sycamore tree here and there. In the distance there is a tinkling of bells, a sound of drums and of singers. It is a party going to Canopus to sleep upon the temple of Serapis, in order to have dreams. Anthony knows this; and impelled by the wind, his boat glides along between the banks. Papyrus-leaves and the red flowers of the nymphæa, larger than the body of a man, bend over him. He is lying at the bottom of the boat; one oar at the stem, drags in the water. From time to time, a lukewarm wind blows; and the slender reeds rub one against the other, and rustle. Then the sobbing of the wavelets becomes indistinct. A heavy drowsiness falls upon him. He dreams that he is a Solitary of Egypt._ _Then he awakes with a start._) "Did I dream? It was all so vivid that I can scarcely believe I was dreaming! My tongue burns. I am thirsty." (_He enters the cabin, and gropes at random in the dark._) "The ground is wet; can it have been raining? What can this mean! My pitcher is broken into atoms! But the goatskin?" (_He finds it._) "Empty!--completely empty! In order to get down to the river, I should have to walk for at least three hours; and the night is so dark that I could not see my way. "There is a gnawing in my entrails. Where is the bread!" (_After long searching, he picks up a crust not so large as an egg._) "What? Have the jackals taken it? Ah! malediction!" (_And he flings the bread upon the ground with fury._ _No sooner has the action occurred than a table makes its appearance, covered with all things that are good to eat._ _The byssus cloth, striated like the bandelets of the sphinx, produces of itself luminous undulations. Upon it are enormous quarters of red meats; huge fish; birds cooked in their plumage, and quadrupeds in their skins; fruits with colors and tints almost human in appearance; while fragments of cooling ice, and flagons of violet crystal reflect each other's glittering. Anthony notices in the middle of the table a boar smoking at every pore--with legs doubled up under its belly, and eyes half closed--and the idea of being able to eat so formidable an animal greatly delights him. Then many things appear which he has never seen before--black hashes, jellies, the color of gold, ragouts in which mushrooms float like nenuphars upon ponds, dishes of whipt cream light as clouds._ _And the aroma of all this comes to him together with the salt smell of the ocean, the coolness of mountains, the great perfumes of the woods. He dilates his nostrils to their fullest extent; his mouth waters; he thinks to himself that he has enough before him for a year, for ten years, for his whole life!_ _As he gazes with widely-opened eyes at all these viands, others appear; they accumulate, forming a pyramid crumbling at all its angles. The wines begin to flow over--the fish palpitate--the blood seethes in the dishes--the pulp of the fruit protrudes like amorous lips--and the table rises as high as his breast, up to his very chin at last--now bearing only one plate and a single loaf of bread, placed exactly in front of him._ _He extends his hand to seize the loaf. Other loaves immediately present themselves to his grasp._) "For me!... all these! But ..." (_Anthony suddenly draws back._) "Instead of one which was there, lo! there are many! It must be a miracle, then, the same as our Lord wrought! "Yet for what purpose?... Ah! all the rest of these things are equally incomprehensible! Demon, begone from me! depart! begone!" (_He kicks the table from him. It disappears._) "Nothing more?--no!" (_He draws a lung breath._) "Ah! the temptation was strong! But how well I delivered myself from it!" (_He lifts his head, and at the same time stumbles over some sonorous object._) "Why! what can that be?" (_Anthony stoops down._) "How! a cup! Some traveller must have lost it here. There is nothing extraordinary...." (_He wets his finger, and rubs._) "It glitters!--metal! Still, I cannot see very clearly...." (_He lights his torch, and examines the cup._) "It is silver, ornamented with ovules about the rim, with a medal at the bottom of it." (_He detaches the medal with his nail!_) "It is a piece of money worth about seven or eight drachmas--not more! It matters not! even with that I could easily buy myself a sheepskin." (_A sudden flash of the torch lights up the cup._) "Impossible! gold? Yes, all gold, solid gold!" (_A still larger piece of money appears at the bottom. Under it he perceives several others._) "Why, this is a sum ... large enough to purchase three oxen ... and a little field!" (_The cup is now filled with pieces of gold._) "What! what!... a hundred slaves, soldiers, a host ... enough to buy...." (_The granulations of the rim, detaching themselves form a necklace of pearls._) "With such a marvel of jewelry as that, one could win even the wife of the Emperor!" (_By a sudden jerk, Anthony makes the necklace slip down over his wrist. He holds the cup in his left hand, and with his right lifts up the torch so as to throw the light upon it. As water streams overflowing from the basin of a fountain, so diamonds, carbuncles, and sapphires, all mingled with broad pieces of gold bearing the effigies of Kings, overflow from the cup in never ceasing streams, to form a glittering hillock upon the sand._) "What! how! Staters, cycles, dariacs, aryandics; Alexander, Demetrius, the Ptolemies, Cæsar!--yet not one of them all possessed so much! Nothing is now impossible! no more suffering for me! how these gleams dazzle my eyes! Ah! my heart overflows! how delightful it is! yes--yes!--more yet! never could there be enough! Vainly I might continually fling it into the sea, there would always be plenty remaining for me. Why should I lose any of it? I will keep all, and say nothing to any one about it; I will have a chamber hollowed out for me in the rock, and lined with plates of bronze, and I will come here from time to time to feel the gold sinking down under the weight of my heel; I will plunge my arms into it as into sacks of grain! I will rub my face with it, I will lie down upon it!" (_He flings down the torch in order to embrace the glittering heap, and falls flat upon the ground._ _He rises to his feet. The place is wholly empty._) "What have I done! "Had I died during those moments, I should have gone to hell--to irrevocable damnation." (_He trembles in every limb._) "Am I, then, accursed? Ah! no; it is my own fault! I allow myself to be caught in every snare! No man could be more imbecile, more infamous! I should like to beat myself, or rather to tear myself out of my own body! I have restrained myself too long. I feel the want of vengeance--the necessity of striking, of killing!--as though I had a pack of wild beasts within me! Would that I could hew my way with an axe, through the midst of a multitude.... Ah, a poniard!..." (_He perceives his knife, and rushes to seize it. The knife slips from his hand; and Anthony remains leaning against the wall of his hut, with wide-open mouth, motionless, cataleptic._ _Everything about him has disappeared._ _He thinks himself at Alexandria, upon the Paneum--an artificial mountain in the centre of the city, encircled by a winding stairway._ _Before him lies Lake Mareolis; on his right hand is the sea, on his left the country; and immediately beneath him a vast confusion of flat roofs, traversed from north to south and from east to west by two streets which intercross, and which offer throughout their entire length the spectacle of files of porticoes with Corinthian columns. The houses overhanging this double colonnade have windows of stained glass. Some of them support exteriorly enormous wooden cages, into which the fresh air rushes from without._ _Monuments of various architecture tower up in close proximity. Egyptian pylons dominate Greek temples. Obelisks appear like lances above battlements of red brick. In the middle of public squares there are figures of Hermes with pointed ears, and of Anubis with the head of a dog. Anthony can distinguish the mosaic pavements of the courtyards, and tapestries suspended from the beams of ceilings._ _He beholds at one glance, the two ports (the Great Port and the Eunostus), both round as circuses, and separated by a mole connecting Alexandria with the craggy island upon which the Pharos-tower rises--quadrangular, five hundred cubits high, nine storied, having at its summit a smoking heap of black coals._ _Small interior ports open into the larger ones. The mole terminates at each end in a bridge supported upon marble columns planted in the sea. Sailing vessels pass beneath it, while heavy lighters overladen with merchandise, thalamegii[1] inlaid with ivory, gondolas covered with awnings, triremes, biremes, and all sorts of vessels are moving to and fro, or lie moored at the wharves._ _About the Great Port extends an unbroken array of royal construction: the palace of the Ptolomies, the Museum, the Posidium, the Cæsareum, the Timonium where Mark Anthony sought refuge, the Soma which contains the tomb of Alexander; while at the other extremity of the city, beyond the Eunostus, the great glass factories, perfume factories, and papyrus factories may be perceived in a suburban quarter._ _Strolling peddlers, porters, ass-drivers run and jostle together. Here and there one observes some priest of Isis wearing a panther skin on his shoulders, a Roman soldier with his bronze helmet, and many negroes. At the thresholds of the shops women pause, artisans ply their trades; and the grinding noise of chariot wheels puts to flight the birds that devour the detritus of the butcher-shops and the morsels of fish left upon the ground._ _The general outline of the streets seems like a black network flung upon the white uniformity of the houses. The markets stocked with herbs make green bouquets in the midst of it; the drying-yards of the dyers, blotches of color; the golden ornaments of the temple-pediments, luminous points--all comprised within the oval enclosure of the grey ramparts, under the vault of the blue heaven, beside the motionless sea._ _But suddenly the movement of the crowd ceases; all turn their eyes toward the west, whence enormous whirlwinds of dust are seen approaching._ _It is the coming of the monks of the Thebaid, all clad in goatskins, armed with cudgels, roaring a canticle of battle and of faith with the refrain_: "Where are they? Where are they?" _Anthony understands that they are coming to kill the Arians._ _The streets are suddenly emptied--only flying feet are visible._ _The Solitaries are now in the city. Their formidable cudgels, studded with nails, whirl in the air like suns of steel. The crash of things broken in the houses is heard. There are intervals of silence. Then great screams arise._ _From one end of the street to the other there is a continual eddy of terrified people._ _Many grasp pikes. Sometimes two bands meet, rush into one; and this mass of men slips upon the pavement--fighting, disjointing, knocking down. But the men with the long hair always reappear._ _Threads of smoke begin to escape from the corners of edifices! folding doors burst open. Portions of walls crumble down. Architraves fall._ _Anthony finds all his enemies again, one after the other. He even recognizes some whom he had altogether forgotten; before killing them he outrages them. He disembowels--he severs throats--he fells as in a slaughter house--he hales old men by the beard, crushes children, smites the wounded. And vengeance is taken upon luxury, those who do not know how to read tear up hooks; others smash and deface the statues, paintings, furniture, caskets,--a thousand dainty things the use of which they do not know, and which simply for that reason exasperates them. At intervals they pause, out of breath, in the work of destruction; then they recommence._ _The inhabitants moan in the courtyards where they have sought refuge. The women raise their tearful eyes and lift their naked arms to heaven. In hope of moving the Solitaries they embrace their knees; the men cast them off and fling them down, and the blood gushes to the ceilings, falls back upon the walls like sheets of rain, streams from the trunks of decapitated corpses, fills the aqueducts, forms huge red pools upon the ground._ _Anthony is up to his knees in it. He wades in it; he sucks up the blood-spray on his lips; he is thrilled with joy as he feels it upon his limbs, under his hair-tunic which is soaked through with it._ _Night comes. The immense uproar dies away._ _The Solitaries have disappeared._ _Suddenly, upon the outer galleries corresponding to each of the nine stories of the Pharos, Anthony observes thick black lines forming, like lines of crows perching. He hurries thither; and soon finds himself at the summit._ _A huge mirror of brass turned toward the open sea, reflects the forms of the vessels in the offing._ _Anthony amuses himself by watching them; and while he watches, their number increases._ _They are grouped together within a gulf which has the form of a crescent. Upon a promontory in the background, towers a new city of Roman architecture, with cupolas of stone, conical roofs, gleams of pink and blue marbles, and a profusion of brazen ornamentation applied to the volutes of the capitals, to the angles of the cornices, to the summits of the edifices. A cypress-wood overhangs the city. The line of the sea is greener, the air colder. The mountains lining the horizon are capped with snow._ _Anthony is trying to find his way, when a man approaches him, and says_: "Come! they are waiting for you." _He traverses a forum, enters a great court, stoops beneath a low door; and he arrives before the facade of the palace, decorated with a group in wax, representing Constantine overcoming a dragon. There is a porphyry basin, from the centre of which rises a golden conch-shell full of nuts. His guide tells him that he may take some of them. He does so. Then he is lost, as it were, in a long succession of apartments._ _There are mosaics upon the walls representing generals presenting the Emperor with conquered cities, which they hold out upon the palms of their hands. And there are columns of basalt everywhere, trellis-work in silver filigree, ivory chairs, tapestries embroidered with pearls. The light falls from the vaults above; Anthony still proceeds. Warm exhalations circulate about him; occasionally he hears the discreet clapping sound of sandals upon the pavement. Posted in the anti-chambers are guards, who resemble automata, holding wands of vermillion upon their shoulders._ [Illustration: And there are columns of basalt everywhere,... The light falls from the vaults above] _At last he finds himself in a great hall, with hyacinth-colored curtains at the further end. They part, and display the Emperor seated on a throne, clad in a violet tunic, and wearing red shoes striped with bands of black._ _A diadem of pearls surround his head; his locks are arranged symmetrically in rouleaux. He has a straight nose, drooping eyelids, a heavy and cunning physiognomy. At the four corners of the dais stretched above his head are placed four golden doves; and at the foot of the throne are two lions in enamel crouching. The doves begin to sing, the lions to roar. The Emperor rolls his eyes; Anthony advances; and forthwith, without preamble, they commence to converse about recent events. In the cities of Antioch, Ephesus, and Alexandria, the temples have been sacked, and the statues of the gods converted into pots and cooking utensils; the Emperor laughs heartily about it. Anthony reproaches him with his tolerance toward the Novations. But the Emperor becomes vexed. Novations, Arians or Meletians--he is sick of them all! Nevertheless, he admires the episcopate; for inasmuch as the Christians maintain bishops, who depend for their position upon five or six important personages, it is only necessary to gain over the latter, in order to have all the rest on one's side. Therefore he did not fail to furnish them with large sums. But he detests the Fathers of the Council of Nicæa._ "Let us go and see them!" _Anthony follows him._ _And they find themselves on a terrace, upon the same floor._ _It overlooks a hippodrome thronged with people, and surmounted by porticoes where other spectators are walking to and fro. From the centre of the race-course rises a narrow platform of hewn stone, supporting a little temple of Mercury, the statue of Constantine, and three serpents of brass twisted into a column; there are three huge wooden eggs at one end, and at the other a group of seven dolphins with their tails in the air._ _Behind the imperial pavilion sit the Prefects of the Chambers, the Counts of the Domestics, and the Patricians--in ranks rising by tiers to the first story of a church whose windows are thronged with women. On the right is the tribune of the Blue Faction; on the left, that of the Green; below, a picket of soldiers is stationed; and on a level with the arena is a row of Corinthian arches, forming the entrances to the stables._ _The races are about to commence; the horses are drawn up in line. Lofty plumes, fastened between their ears, bend to the wind like saplings; and with every restive bound, they shake their chariots violently, which are shell-shaped, and conducted by charioteers clad in a sort of multi-colored cuirass, having sleeves tight at the wrist and wide in the arms; their legs are bare; their beards, faces and foreheads are shaven after the manner of the Huns._ _Anthony is at first deafened by the billowy sound of voices. From the summit of the hippodrome to its lowest tiers, he sees only faces painted with rouge, garments checkered and variegated with many colors, flashing jewelry; and the sand of the arena, all white, gleams like a mirror._ _The Emperor entertains him. He confides to him many matters of high importance, many secrets; he confesses the assassination of his son Criopus, and even asks Anthony for advice regarding his health._ _Meanwhile Anthony notices some slaves in the rear portion of the stables below. They are the Fathers of Nicæa, ragged and abject. The martyr Paphnutius is brushing the mane of one horse; Theophilus is washing the legs of another; John is painting the hoofs of a third; Alexander is collecting dung in a basket._ _Anthony passes through the midst of them. They range themselves on either side respectfully; they beseech his intercession; they kiss his hands. The whole assemblage of spectators hoots at them; and he enjoys the spectacle with immeasurable pleasure. Lo! he is now one of the grandees of the Court--the Emperor's confidant--the prime minister! Constantine places his own diadem upon his brows. Anthony allows it to remain upon his head, thinking this honor quite natural._ _And suddenly in the midst of the darkness a vast hall appears, illuminated by golden candelabra._ _Candles so lofty that they are half lost in the darkness, stretch away in huge files beyond the lines of banquet-tables, which seem to extend to the horizon, where through a luminous haze loom superpositions of stairways, suites of arcades, colossi, towers, and beyond all a vague border of palace walls, above which rise the crests of cedars, making yet blacker masses of blackness against the darkness._ _The guests, crowned with violet wreaths, recline upon very low couches and are leaning upon their elbows. Along the whole length of this double line of couches, wine is being poured out from amphoræ, and at the further end, all alone, coiffed with the tiara and blazing with carbuncles, King Nebuchadnezzar eats and drinks._ _On his right and left, two bands of priests in pointed caps are swinging censers. On the pavement below crawl the captive kings whose hands and feet have been cut off; from time to time he flings them bones to gnaw. Further off sit his brothers, with bandages across their eyes, being all blind._ _From the depths of the ergastula arise moans of ceaseless pain. Sweet slow sounds of a hydraulic organ alternate with choruses of song; and one feels that all about the palace without extends an immeasurable city--an ocean of human life whose waves break against the walls. The slaves run hither and thither carrying dishes. Women walk between the ranks of guests, offering drinks to all; the baskets groan under their burthen of loaves; and a dromedary, laden with perforated water-skins: passes and repasses through the hall, sprinkling and cooling the pavement with vervain._ _Lion tamers are leading tamed lions about. Dancing girls--their hair confined in nets--balance themselves and turn upon their hands, emitting fire through their nostrils; negro boatmen are juggling; naked children pelt each other with pellets of snow, which burst against the bright silverware. There is an awful clamor as of a tempest; and a huge cloud hangs over the banquet--so numerous are the meats and breaths. Sometimes a flake of fire torn from the great flambeaux by the wind, traverses the night like a shooting star._ _The king wipes the perfumes from his face with his arm. He eats from the sacred vessels--then breaks them; and secretly reckons up the number of his fleets, his armies, and his subjects. By and by, for a new caprice, he will burn his palace with all its guests. He dreams of rebuilding the tower of Babel, and dethroning God._ _Anthony, from afar off, reads all these thoughts upon his brow. They penetrate his own brain, and he becomes Nebuchadnezzar. Immediately he is cloyed with orgiastic excesses, sated with fury of extermination; and a great desire comes upon him to wallow in vileness. For the degradation of that which terrifies men is an outrage inflicted upon their minds--it affords yet one more way to stupefy them; and as nothing is viler than a brute, Anthony goes upon the table on all fours, and bellows like a bull._ _He feels a sudden pain in his hand--a pebble has accidentally wounded him--and he finds himself once more in front of his cabin._ _The circle of the rocks is empty. The stars are glowing in the sky. All is hushed._) "Again have I allowed myself to be deceived! Why these things? They come from the rebellion of the flesh. Ah! wretch!" (_He rushes into his cabin, and seizes a bunch of thongs, with metallic hooks attached to their ends, strips himself to the waist and, lifting his eyes to heaven exclaims_:) "Accept my penance, O my God: disdain it not for its feebleness. Render it sharp, prolonged, excessive! It is time, indeed!--to the work!" (_He gives himself a vigorous lash--and shrieks._) "No! no!--without mercy it must be." (_He recommences._) "Oh! oh! oh! each lash tears my skin, rends my limbs! It burns me horribly!" "Nay!--it is not so very terrible after all!--one becomes accustomed to it. It even seems to me...." (_Anthony pauses._) "Continue, coward! continue! Good! good!--upon the arms, on the back, on the breast, on the belly--everywhere! Hiss, ye thongs! bite me! tear me! I would that my blood could spurt to the stars!--let my bones crack!--let my tendons be laid bare! O for pincers, racks, and melted lead! The martyrs have endured far worse; have they not, Ammonaria?" (_The shadow of the Devil's horns reappears._) "I might have been bound to the column opposite to thine,--face to face--under thy eyes--answering thy shrieks by my sighs; and our pangs might have been interblended, our souls intermingled." (_He lashes himself with fury._) "What! what! again. Take that!--But how strange a titillation thrills me! What punishment! what pleasure! I feel as though receiving invisible kisses; the very marrow of my bones seems to melt. I die...." _And he sees before him three cavaliers, mounted upon onagers, clad in robes of green--each holding a lily in his hand, and all resembling each other in feature._ _Anthony turns round, and beholds three other cavaliers exactly similar, riding upon similar onagers, and preserving the same attitude._ _He draws back. Then all the onagers advance one pace at the same time, and rub their noses against him, trying to bite his garment. Voices shout_:-- "Here! here! this way!" _And between the clefts of the mountain, appear standards,--camels' heads with halters of red silk--mules laden with baggage, and women covered with yellow veils, bestriding piebald horses._ _The panting beasts lie down; the slaves rush to the bales and packages, motley-striped carpets are unrolled; precious glimmering things are laid upon the ground._ _A white elephant, caparisoned with a golden net, trots forward, shaking the tuft of ostrich plumes attached to his head-band._ _Upon his back, perched on cushions of blue wool, with her legs crossed, her eyes half closed, her comely head sleepily nodding, is a woman so splendidly clad that she radiates light about her. The crowd falls prostrate; the elephant bends his knees; and_ THE QUEEN OF SHEBA _letting herself glide down from his shoulder upon the carpets spread to receive her, approaches Saint Anthony._ _Her robe of gold brocade, regularly divided by furbelows of pearls, of jet, and of sapphires, sheaths her figure closely with its tight-fitting bodice, set off by colored designs representing the twelve signs of the Zodiac. She wears very high pattens--one of which is black, and sprinkled with silver stars, with a moon crescent; the other, which is white, is sprinkled with a spray of gold, with a golden sun in the middle._ _Her wide sleeves, decorated with emeralds and bird-plumes, leave exposed her little round bare arms, clasped at the wrist by ebony bracelets; and her hands, loaded with precious rings, are terminated by nails so sharply pointed that the ends of her fingers seem almost like needles._ _A chain of dead gold, passing under her chin, is caught up on either side of her face, and spirally coiled about her coiffure, whence, redescending, it grazes her shoulders and is attached upon her bosom to a diamond scorpion, which protrudes a jewelled tongue between her breasts. Two immense blond pearls depend heavily from her ears. The borders of her eyelids are painted black. There is a natural brown spot upon her left cheek; and she opens her mouth in breathing, as if her corset inconvenienced her._ _She shakes, as she approaches, a green parasol with an ivory handle, and silver-gilt bells attached to its rim; twelve little woolly-haired negro-boys support the long train of her robe, whereof an ape holds the extremity, which it raises up from time to time. She exclaims_: "Ah! handsome hermit! handsome hermit!--my heart swoons! "By dint of stamping upon the ground with impatience, callosities have formed upon my heel, and I have broken one of my nails. I sent out shepherds, who remained upon the mountain tops, shading their eyes with their hands--and hunters who shouted thy name in all the forests--and spies who travelled along the highways, asking every passer-by: "'Hast thou seen him?' "By night I wept, with my face turned to the wall. And at last my tears made two little holes in the mosaic, like two pools of water among the rocks;--for I love thee!--oh! how I love thee!" (_She takes him by the beard._) "Laugh now, handsome hermit! laugh! I am very joyous, very gay: thou shalt soon see! I play the lyre; I dance like a bee; and I know a host of merry tales to tell, each more diverting than the other. "Thou canst not even imagine how mighty a journey we have made. See! the onagers upon which the green couriers rode are dead with fatigue!" (_The onagers are lying motionless upon the ground._) "For three long moons they never ceased to gallop on with the same equal pace, holdings flints between their teeth to cut the wind, their tails ever streaming out behind them, their sinews perpetually strained to the uttermost, always galloping, galloping. Never can others be found like them. They were bequeathed me by my paternal grand-father, the Emperor Saharil, son of Iakhschab, son of Iaarab, son of Kastan. Ah! if they were still alive, we should harness them to a litter that they might bear us back speedily to the palace! But ... what ails thee?--of what art thou dreaming?" (_She stares at him, examines him closely._) "Ah, when thou shalt be my husband, I will robe thee, I will perfume thee, I will depilate thee." (_Anthony remains motionless, more rigid than a stake, more pallid than a corpse._) "Thou hast a sad look--is it because of leaving thy hermitage? Yet I have left everything for thee--even King Solomon, who, nevertheless, possesses much wisdom, twenty thousand chariots of war, and a beautiful beard. I have brought thee my wedding gifts. Choose!" (_She walks to and fro among the ranks of slaves and the piles of precious goods._) "Here is Genezareth balm, incense from Cape Gardefui, labdanum, cinnamon, and silphium--good to mingle with sauces. In that bale are Assyrian embroideries, ivory from the Ganges, purple from Elissa; and that box of snow contains a skin of chalybon, the wine, which is reserved for the Kings of Assyria, and which is drunk from the horn of a unicorn. Here are necklaces, brooches, nets for the hair, parasols, gold powder from Baasa, cassiteria from Tartessus, blue wood from Pandio, white furs from Issidonia, carbuncles from the Island Palæsimondus, and toothpicks made of the bristles of the tachas--that lost animal which is found under the earth. These cushions come from Emath, and these mantle-fringes from Palmyra. On this Babylonian carpet there is.... But come hither! come! come!" (_She pulls Saint Anthony by the sleeve. He resists. She continues_:) "This thin tissue which crackles under the finger with a sound as of sparks, is the famous yellow cloth which the merchants of Bactria bring us. I will have robes made of it for thee, which thou shalt wear in the house. Unfasten the hooks of that sycamore box, and hand me also the little ivory casket tied to my elephant's shoulder." (_They take something round out of a box--something covered with a cloth--and also bring a little ivory casket covered with carving._) "Dost thou desire the buckler of Dgian-ben-Dgian, who built the pyramids?--behold it!--It is formed of seven dragon-skins laid one over the other, tanned in the bile of parricides, and fastened together by adamantine screws. Upon one side are represented all the wars that have taken place since the invention of weapons; and upon the other, all the wars that will take place until the end of the world. The lightning itself rebounds from it like a ball of cork. I am going to place it upon thy arm; and thou wilt carry it during the chase. "But if thou didst only know what I have in this little box of mine! Turn it over and over again! try to open it! No one could ever succeed in doing that. Kiss me! and I will tell thee how to open it." (_She takes Saint Anthony by both cheeks. He pushes her away at arms' length._) "It was one night that King Solomon lost his head. At last we concluded a bargain. He arose, and stealing out on tiptoe...." (_She suddenly executes a pirouette._) "Ah, ah! comely hermit, thou shalt not know it! thou shalt not know!" (_She shakes her parasol, making all its little bells tinkle._) "And I possess many other strange things--oh! yes! I have treasures concealed in winding galleries where one would lose one's way, as in a forest. I have summer-palaces constructed in trellis-work of reeds, and winter-palaces all built of black marble. In the midst of lakes vast as seas, I have islands round as pieces of silver, and all covered with mother-of-pearl,--islands whose shores make music to the lapping of tepid waves upon the sand. The slaves of my kitchens catch birds in my aviaries, and fish in my fishponds. I have engravers continually seated at their benches to hollow out my likeness in hard jewel-stones, and panting molders forever casting statues of me, and perfumers incessantly mingling the sap of rare plants with vinegar, or preparing cosmetic pastes. I have female dressmakers cutting out patterns in richest material, goldsmiths cutting and mounting jewels of price, and careful painters pouring upon my palace wainscoting boiling resins, which they subsequently cool with fans. I have enough female attendants to form a harem, eunuchs enough to make an army. I have armies likewise; I have nations! In the vestibule of my palace I keep a guard of dwarfs--all bearing ivory trumpets at their backs." (_Anthony sighs._) "I have teams of trained gazelles; I have elephant quadrigæ; I have hundreds of pairs of camels, and mares whose manes are so long that their hoofs become entangled therein when they gallop, and herds of cattle with horns so broad that when they go forth to graze the woods have to be hewn down before them. I have giraffes wandering in my gardens; they stretch their heads over the edge of my roof, when I take the air after dinner. "Seated in a shell drawn over the waters by dolphins, I travel through the grottoes, listening lo the dropping of the water from the stalactites. I go down to the land of diamonds, where my friends the magicians allow me to choose the finest: then I reascend to earth and return to my home." (_She utters a sharp whistle; and a great bird, descending from the sky, alights upon her hair, from which it makes the blue powder fall._ _Its orange-colored plumage seems formed of metallic scales. Its little head, crested with a silver tuft, has a human face._ _It has four wings, the feet of a vulture, and an immense peacock's tail which it spreads open like a fan._ _It seizes the Queen's parasol in its beak, reels a moment ere obtaining its balance; then it erects all its plumes, and remains motionless._) "Thanks! my beautiful Simorg-Anka!--thou didst tell me where the loving one was hiding! Thanks! thanks! my heart's messenger! "He flies swiftly as Desire! He circles the world in his flight. At eve he returns; he perches at the foot of my couch and tells me all he has seen--the seas that have passed far beneath him with all their fishes and ships, the great void deserts he has contemplated from the heights of the sky, the harvests that were bowing in the valleys, and the plants that were growing upon the walls of cities abandoned." (_She wrings her hands, languorously._) "Oh! if thou wast willing! if thou wast willing!... I have a pavilion on a promontory in the middle of an isthmus dividing two oceans. It is all wain-scoted with sheets of glass, and floored with tortoise shell, and open to the four winds of heaven. From its height I watch my fleets come in, and my nations toiling up the mountain-slopes with burthens upon their shoulders. There would we sleep upon downs softer than clouds; we would drink cool draughts from fruit-shells, and we would gaze at the sun through emeralds! Come!" ... (_Anthony draws back. She approaches him again, and exclaims in a tone of vexation_:--) "How? neither the rich, nor the coquettish, nor the amorous woman can charm thee: is it so? None but a lascivious woman, with a hoarse voice and lusty person, with fire-colored hair and superabundant flesh? Dost thou prefer a body cold as the skin of a serpent, or rather great dark eyes deeper than the mystic caverns?--behold them, my eyes!--look into them!" (_Anthony, in spite of him, gazes into her eyes._) "All the women thou hast ever met--from the leman of the cross-roads, singing under the light of her lantern, even to the patrician lady scattering rose-petals abroad from her litter,--all the forms thou hast ever obtained glimpses of--all the imaginations of thy desire thou hast only to ask for them! I am not a woman: I am a world! My cloak has only to fall in order that thou mayest discover a succession of mysteries." (_Anthony's teeth chatter._) "Place but thy finger upon my shoulder: it will be as though a stream of fire shot through all thy veins. The possession of the least part of me will fill thee with a joy more vehement than the conquest of an Empire could give thee! Approach thy lips: there is a sweetness in my kisses as of a fruit dissolving within thy heart. Ah! how thou wilt lose thyself beneath my long hair, inhale the perfume of my bosom, madden thyself with the beauty of my limbs: and thus, consumed by the fire of my eyes, clasped within my arms as in a whirlwind...." [Illustration: ... there is a sweetness in my kisses as of a fruit dissolving within thy heart] (_Anthony makes the sign of the cross._) "Thou disdainest me! farewell!" (_She departs, weeping; then, suddenly turning round_:--) "Art quite sure?--so beautiful a woman...." (_She laughs, and the ape that bears her train, lifts it up._) "Thou wilt regret it, my comely hermit! thou wilt yet weep! thou wilt again feel weary of thy life; but I care not a whit! La! la! la!--oh! oh! oh!" (_She takes her departure, hopping upon one foot and covering her face with her hands._ _All the slaves file off before Saint Anthony--the horses, the dromedaries, the elephant, the female attendants, the mules (which have been reloaded), the negro boys, the ape, the green couriers each holding his broken lily in his hand; and the Queen of Sheba departs, uttering a convulsive hiccough at intervals, which might be taken either for a sound of hysterical sobbing, or the half-suppressed laughter of mockery._) [1] _Thalamegii_--pleasure-boats having apartments. III (_When she has disappeared in the distance, Anthony observes a child seated upon the threshold of his cabin._) "It is one of the Queen's servants, no doubt," (_he thinks_). (_This child is small like a dwarf, and nevertheless squat of build, like one of the Cabiri; deformed withal, and wretched of aspect. His prodigiously large head is covered with white hair; and he shivers under a shabby tunic, all the while clutching a roll of papyrus. The light of the moon passing through a cloud falls upon him._) ANTHONY (_watches him from a distance, and is afraid of him._) "Who art thou?" THE CHILD (_replies_). "Thy ancient disciple, Hilarion." ANTHONY. "Thou liest! Hilarion hath been dwelling in Palestine for many long years." HILARION. "I have returned! It is really I!" ANTHONY (_draws near and examines him closely_). "Yet his face was radiant as the dawn, candid, joyous. This face is the face of one gloomy and old." HILARION. "Long and arduous labor hath wearied me!" ANTHONY. "The voice is also different. It hath an icy tone." HILARION. "Because I have nourished me with bitter things!" ANTHONY. "And those white hairs?" HILARION. "I have endured many woes!" ANTHONY (_aside_). "Could it be possible?" HILARION. "I was not so far from thee as thou doest imagine. The hermit Paul visited thee this year, during the month of Schebar. It is just twenty days since the Nomads brought thee bread. Thou didst tell a sailor, the day before yesterday, to send thee three bodkins." ANTHONY. "He knows all!" HILARION. "Know further more that I have never left thee. But there are long periods during which thou hast no knowledge of my presence." ANTHONY. "How can that be? Yet it is true that my head is so much troubled--this night especially." HILARION. "All the Capital Sins came hither. But their wretched snares can avail nothing against such a Saint as thou." ANTHONY. "Oh! no!--no! I fall at every moment! Why am I not of those whose souls are ever intrepid, whose minds are always firm,--for example, the great Athanasius?" HILARION. "He was illegally ordained by seven bishops." ANTHONY. "What matter if his virtue...." HILARION. "Go to!--a most vainglorious and cruel man, forever involved in intrigues, and exiled at last as a monopolist."[1] ANTHONY. "Calumny!" HILARION. "Thou wilt not deny that he sought to corrupt Eustates, the treasurer of largesses?" ANTHONY. "It is affirmed, I acknowledge." HILARION. "Through vengeance he burned down the house of Arsenius." ANTHONY. "Alas!" HILARION. "At the council of Nicæa he said in speaking of Jesus: 'The man of the Lord.'" ANTHONY. "Ah! that is a blasphemy!" HILARION. "So limited in understanding, moreover, that he confesses he comprehends nothing of the nature of the "Word!" ANTHONY (_smiling with gratification_). "In sooth his intelligence is not ... very lofty." HILARION. "Hypocrite! burying thyself in solitude only in order the more fully to abandon thyself to the indulgence of thy envious desires! What if thou dost deprive thyself of meats, of wine, of warmth, of bath, of slaves, or honours?--dost thou not permit thy imagination to offer thee banquets, perfumes, women, and the applause of multitudes? Thy chastity is but a more subtle form of corruption, and thy contempt of this world is but the impotence of thy hatred against it! Either this it is that makes such as thyself so lugubrious, or else 'tis doubt. The possession of truth giveth joy. Was Jesus sad? Did he not travel in the company of friends, repose beneath the shade of olive trees, enter the house of the publican, drink many cups of wine, pardon the sinning woman, and assuage all sorrows? Thou!--thou hast no pity save for thine own misery! It is like a remorse that gnaws thee, a savage madness that impels thee to repel the caress of a dog or to frown upon the smile of a child." ANTHONY (_bursting into tears_). "Enough! enough! thou dost wound my heart deeply." HILARION. "Shake the vermin from thy rags! Rise up from thy filth! Thy God is not a Moloch who demands human flesh in sacrifice!" ANTHONY. "Yet suffering is blessed. The cherubim stoop to receive the blood of confessors." HILARION. "Admire, then, the Montanists!--they surpass all others." ANTHONY. "But it is the truth of the doctrine which makes the martyrdom." HILARION. "How can martyrdom prove the excellence of the doctrine, inasmuch as it bears equal witness for error?" HILARION. "Silence!--thou viper!" ANTHONY. "Perhaps martyrdom is not so difficult as thou dost imagine! The exhortations of friends, the pleasure of insulting the people, the oath one has taken, a certain dizzy excitement, a thousand circumstances all aid the resolution of the martyrs...." (_Anthony turns his back upon Hilarion, and moves away from him. Hilarion follows him._) " ... Moreover this manner of dying often brings about great disorders. Dionysius, Cyprian and Gregory fled from it. Peter of Alexandria has condemned it; and the council of Elvira...." ANTHONY (_stops his ears_). "I will listen to thee no longer!" HILARION (_raising his voice_). "Lo! thou fallest again into the habitual sin, which is sloth! Ignorance is the foam of pride. One says, forsoth:--'My conviction is formed! wherefore argue further?'--and one despises the doctors, the philosophers, tradition itself, and even the text of the law whereof one is ignorant! Dost thou imagine that thou dost hold all wisdom in the hollow of thy hand?" ANTHONY. "I hear him still! His loud words fill my brain." HILARION. "The efforts of others to comprehend God are mightier than all thy mortifications to move Him. We obtain merit only by our thirst for truth. Religion alone cannot explain all things; and the solution of problems ignored by thee can render faith still more invulnerable and noble. Therefore, for our salvation we must communicate with our brethren--otherwise the Church, the assembly of the faithful, would be a meaningless word--and we must listen to all reasoning, despising nothing, nor any person. The magician Balaam, the poet Aeschylus, and the Sybil of Cumæ--all foretold the Saviour. Dionysius, the Alexandrian, received from heaven the command to read all books. Saint Clement orders us to cultivate Greek letters. Hennas was converted by the illusion of a woman he had loved...." ANTHONY. "What an aspect of authority! It seems to me thou art growing taller...." (_And, in very truth, the stature of Hilarion is gradually increasing; and Anthony shuts his eyes, that he may not see him._) HILARION. "Reassure thyself, good Hermit. Let us seat ourselves there, upon that great stone, as we used to do in other years, when, at the first dawn of day, I was wont to salute thee with the appellation, 'Clear star of morning'--and thou wouldst therewith commence to instruct me. Yet my instruction is not yet completed. The moon gives us light enough. I am prepared to hear thy words." (_He has drawn a calamus from his girdle, and seating himself cross-legged upon the ground, with the papyrus roll still in his hand, he lifts his face toward Saint Anthony, who sits near him, with head bowed down._ _After a moment of silence Hilarion continues_:--) "Is not the word of God confirmed for us by miracles? Nevertheless the magicians of Pharaoh performed miracles; other imposters can perform them; one may be thereby deceived. What then is a miracle? An event which seems to us outside of nature. But do we indeed know all of Nature's powers; and because a common occurrence causes us no astonishment, does it therefore follow that we understand it." ANTHONY. "It matters little! We must believe the Scriptures!" HILARION. "Saint Paul, Origen, and many others did not understand the Scriptures in a literal sense: yet if Holy Writ be explained by allegories it becomes the portion of a small number, and the evidence of the truth disappears. What must we do?" ANTHONY. "We must rely upon the Church!" HILARION. "Then the Scriptures are useless?" ANTHONY. "No! no! although I acknowledge that in the Old Testament there are some ... some obscurities. But the New shines with purest light." HILARION. "Nevertheless, the Angel of the annunciation, in Matthew, appears to Joseph; while, in Luke, he appears to Mary. The anointing of Jesus by a woman takes place, according to the first Gospel, at the commencement of his public life; and, according to the other three, a few days before his death. The drink offered to him on the cross, is, in Matthew, vinegar mixed with gall; in Mark, it is wine and myrrh. According to Luke and Matthew, the apostles should take with them neither money nor scrip for their journey--not even sandals nor staff; in Mark, on the contrary, Jesus bids them take nothing with them, except sandals and a staff. I am thereby bewildered!" ANTHONY (_in amazement_). "Aye, indeed!... in fact...." HILARION. "At the contact of the woman who had an issue of blood, Jesus turned and said, 'Who hath touched my garments?' He did not know, then, who had touched him? That contradicts the omniscience of Jesus! If the tomb was watched by guards, the women need have felt no anxiety about finding help to roll away the stone from the tomb. Therefore there were no guards, or the holy women were not there. At Emmaus, he eats with his disciples and makes them feel his wounds. It is a human body, a material and ponderable object; and nevertheless it passes through walls! Is that possible?" ANTHONY. "It would require much time to answer thee properly!" HILARION. "Why did he receive the Holy Spirit, being himself Son of the Holy Spirit? What need had he of baptism if he was the Word? How could the Devil have tempted him, inasmuch as he was God? Have these thoughts never occurred to thee?" ANTHONY. "Yes!... often! Sometimes torpid, sometimes furious--they remain forever in my conscience. I crush them; they rise again, they stifle me; and sometimes I think that I am accursed." HILARION. "Then it is needless for thee to serve God?" ANTHONY. "I shall always need to adore Him." (_After a long silence Hilarion continues_:) "But aside from dogma, all researches are allowed us. Dost thou desire to know the hierarchy of the Angels, the virtue of the Numbers, the reason of germs and of metamorphoses?" ANTHONY. "Yes! yes! my thought struggles wildly to escape from its prison. It seems to me that by exerting all my force I might succeed. Sometimes, for an instant, brief as a lightning flash, I even feel myself as thought uplifted,--then I fall back again!" HILARION. "The secret thou wouldst obtain is guarded by sages. They dwell in a distant land; they are seated beneath giant trees; they are robed in white; they are calm as Gods! A warm air gives them sufficient nourishment. All about them, leopards tread upon grassy turf. The murmuring of fountains and the neighing of unicorns mingle with their voices. Thou shalt hear them; and the face of the Unknown shall be unveiled!" ANTHONY (_sighing_). "The way is long; and I am old." HILARION. "Oh! oh! wise men are not rare! there are some even very nigh thee!--here! Let us enter!" [1] Gibbon, a sincere admirer of Athanasius, gives a curious history of these charges, and expresses his disbelief in their truth. The story regarding the design to intercept the corn-fleet of Alexandria is referred to in the use of the word "monopolist." IV (_And Anthony beholds before him a vast basilica._ _The light gushes from the further end, marvellous as a multi-colored sun. It illuminates the innumerable heads of the crowd that fills the nave, and that eddies about the columns toward the side-aisles--where can be perceived, in wooden compartments, altars, beds, little chains of blue stones linked together, and constellations painted upon the walls._ _In the midst of the throng there are groups which remain motionless. Men standing upon stools harangue with fingers uplifted; others are praying, with arms outstretched in form of a cross; others are lying prostrate upon the pavement, or singing hymns, or drinking wine; others of the faithful, seated about a table, celebrate their agape;[1] martyrs are unbandaging their limbs in order to show their wounds; and aged men, leaning upon staffs, recount their voyages._ _There are some from the country of the Germans, from Thrace also, and from the Gauls, from Scythia and from the Indies, with snow upon their beards, feathers in their hair; thorns in the fringe of their garments; the sandals of some are black with dust, their skins are burnt by the sun. There is a vast confusion of costumes, mantles of purple and robes of linen, embroidered dalmaticas, hair shirts, sailors' caps, bishops' mitres. Their eyes fulgurate strangely. They have the look of executioners, or the look of eunuchs._ _Hilarion advances into their midst. All salute him. Anthony, shrinking closer to his shoulder, observes them. He remarks the presence of a great many women. Some of these are attired like men, and have their hair cut short. Anthony feels afraid of them._) HILARION. "Those are Christian women who have converted their husbands. Besides, the women were always upon the side of Jesus, even the idolatrous ones, for example, Procula, the wife of Pilate, and Poppæa, the concubine of Nero. Do not tremble!--come on." (_And others are continually arriving._ _They seem to multiply, to double themselves by self-division, light as shadows--all the while making an immense clamour, in which yells of rage, cries of love, canticles and objurgations intermingle._) ANTHONY (_in a low voice_). "What do they desire?" HILARION. "The Lord said: 'I have yet many things to say to you.... '[2] They possess the knowledge of those things." (_And he pushes Anthony forward to a golden throne approached by five steps, whereon--surrounded by ninety-five disciples, all very thin and pale, and anointed with oil--sits the prophet Manes. He is beautiful as an archangel, immobile as a statue; he is clad in an Indian robe; carbuncles gleam in his plaited hair; at his left hand lies a book of painted images; his right reposes upon a globe. The images represent the creatures that erst slumbered in Chaos. Anthony bends forward to look upon them. Then----_) MANES (_makes his globe revolve; and regulating the tone of his words by a lyre which gives forth crystalline sounds, exclaims_:--) "The celestial earth is at the superior extremity; the terrestrial earth at the inferior extremity. It is sustained by two angels--the Angel Splenditeneus, and Omophorus, whose faces are six. "At the summit of the highest heaven reigns the impassible Divinity; below, face to face, are the Son of God and the Prince of Darkness. "When the darkness had advanced even to his kingdom, God evolved from his own essence a virtue which produced the first man; and he environed him with the five elements. But the demons of darkness stole from him a part; and that part is the soul. "There is but one soul, universally diffused, even as the waters of a river divided into many branches. It is this universal soul that sighs in the wind--that shrieks in the marble under the teeth of the saw--that roars in the voice of the sea--that weeps tears of milk when the leaves of the fig tree are torn off. "The souls that leave this world emigrate to the stars, which are themselves animated beings." ANTHONY (_bursts into a laugh_). "Ah! ah! what an absurd imagination!" A MAN (_having no beard, and of a most austere aspect_). "Wherefore absurd?" (_Anthony is about to reply when Hilarion tells him in a low voice that the questioner is none other than the tremendous Origen himself; and_:--) MANES (_continues_). "But first they remain awhile in the Moon, where they are purified. Then they rise into the sun." ANTHONY (_slowly_). "I do not know of anything ... which prevents us ... from believing it." MANES. "The proper aim of every creature is the deliverance of the ray of celestial light imprisoned within matter. It finds easier escape through the medium of perfumes, spices, the aroma of warmed wine, the light things which resemble thoughts. But the acts of life retain it within its prison. The murderer shall be born again in the form of a celephus; he that kills an animal shall become that animal; if thou plantest a vine, thou shalt be thyself bound within its boughs. Food absorbs the celestial light.... Therefore abstain! fast!" HILARION. "Thou seest, they are temperate!" MANES. "There is much of it in meats, less of it in herbs. Moreover the Pure Ones, by means of their great merits, despoil vegetation of this luminous essence; and, thus liberated, it reascends to its source. But through generation, animals keep it imprisoned within the flesh! Therefore, avoid women!" HILARION. "Admire their continence." MANES. "Or rather contrive that they shall not create..............[3] ANTHONY. "Oh--abomination!" HILARION. "What signifies the hierarchy of turpitudes? The Church has, forsooth, made marriage a sacrament!" SATURNINUS (_in Syrian costume_). "He teaches a most dismal system of the universe!... The Father, desiring to punish the angels who had revolted, ordered them to create the world. Christ came, in order that the God of the Jews, who was one of those angels...." ANTHONY. "He an angel! the Creator!" CERDO. "Did he not seek to kill Moses, to deceive his own prophets, to seduce nations?--did he not sow falsehood and idolatry broadcast?" MARCION. "Certainly, the Creator is not the true God!" SAINT CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA. "Matter is eternal!" BARDESANES (_in the costume of the Babylonian magi_). "It was formed by the Seven Planetary Spirits." THE HERMIANS. "Souls were made by the angels." THE PRISCILLIANISTS. "It was the Devil who made the world." ANTHONY (_rushing back from the circle_). "Horror!" HILARION (_supporting him_). "Thou despairest too hastily!--thou dost misapprehend their doctrine! Here is one who received his teaching directly from Theodas, the friend of St. Paul. Hearken to him." (_And at a sign from Hilarion_ VALENTINUS _appears in a tunic of cloth of silver; his skull is pointed at its summit; his voice has a wheezing sound._) "The world is the work of a God in delirium!" ANTHONY (_bending his head down_). "The work of a God in delirium!..." (_After a long silence_): "How can that be?" VALENTINE. "The most perfect of beings, and of the Æons, the Abyss; dwelt in the womb of the Deep together with Thought. By their union was begotten Intelligence, to whom Truth was given as a companion. "Intelligence and Truth engendered the Word and Life, who in their turn begat Man and the Church; and that doth make eight Æons!" (_He counts upon his fingers._) "The Word and Truth also produced ten other Æons--which is to say, five couples. Man and the Church had begotten twelve more--among these the Paraclete and Faith, Hope and Charity, Perfection and Wisdom--Sophia. "The union of these thirty Æons constitutes the Pleroma, or Universality of God. Thus, even as the echo of a passing voice, as the effluvia of a perfume evaporating, as the fires of the setting sun, the Powers that emanated from the Principle, forever continue to grow weaker. "But Sophia, desirous to know the Father, darted from the Pleroma; and the Word then made another couple, Christ and the Holy Ghost, who reunited all the Æons; and all together formed Jesus, the flower of the Pleroma. "But the effort of Sophia to flee away had left in the void an image of her--an evil substance, Acharamoth.[4] The Saviour took pity upon her, freed her from all passion; and from the smile of Acharamoth redeemed, light was born; her tears formed the waters; by her sorrow was dark matter begotten. "Of Acharamoth was born the Demiurgos,--the fabricator of worlds, the creator of the heaven and of the Devil. He dwells far below the Pleroma--so far that he cannot behold it--so that he deems himself to be the true God, and repeats by the mouths of his prophets--'There is no other God but I.' Then he made man, and instilled into his soul the immaterial Seed which was the Church--a reflection of the other Church established in the Pleroma. "One day Acharamoth shall reach the highest region and unite herself with the Saviour; the fire that is hidden in the world shall annihilate all matter, and shall even devour itself and men, becoming pure spirits, shall espouse the angels!" ORIGEN. "Then shall the Demon be over-thrown and the reign of God commence!" (_Anthony expresses a cry, and forthwith_) BASILIDES (_taking him by the elbow, exclaims_:--) "The Supreme Being with all the infinite emanations is called Abraxas; and the Saviour with all his virtues, Kaulakau--otherwise, line-upon-line, rectitude upon rectitude. "The power of Kaulakau is obtained by the aid of certain words, which are inscribed upon this chalcedony to help the memory." (_And he points to a little stone suspended at his neck, upon which stone fantastic characters are graven._) "Then thou wilt be transported into the Invisible and placed above all law; thou shalt contemn all things--even virtue! "We, the Pure, must flee from pain, after the example of Kaulakau." ANTHONY. "What! and the cross?" THE ELKHESAITES (_in robes of hyacinth answers him_). "The woe and the degradation, the condemnation and oppression of my fathers[5] are blotted out, through the mission which has come. "One may deny the inferior Christ, the man--Jesus; but the other Christ must be adored--whose personality was evolved under the brooding of the Dove's wings. "Honor marriage; the Holy Spirit is feminine!" (_Hilarion has disappeared; and Anthony, carried along by the crowd, arrives in the presence of_--) THE CARPOCRATIANS (_reclining with women upon scarlet cushions._) "Before entering into the Only thou shalt pass through a series of conditions and of actions. To free thyself from the powers of darkness, thou must at once accomplish their works. The husband shall say to the wife: 'Have charity for thy brother'--and she will kiss thee." THE NICOLAITANS (_gathered about a mass of smoking meats_:) "This is a portion of the meat offered to idols;--partake of it! Apostasy is permissible when the heart is pure. Gorge thy flesh with all that it demands. Seek to exterminate it by dint of debauchery! Prounikos, the Mother of Heaven, wallowed in ignominies." THE MARCOSIANS (_wearing rings of gold, and glistening with precious balm and unguents_:) "Enter among us that thou mayst unite thyself to the Spirit! Enter among us that thou mayst quaff the draught of immortality!" (_And one of them shows him, behind a tapestry-hanging, the body of a man terminated by the head of an ass. This represents Sabaoth, father of the Devil. He spits upon the image in token of detestation._ _Another shows him a very low bed, strewn with flowers, exclaiming_:) "The spiritual marriage is about to be consummated." (_A third, who holds a cup of glass, utters an invocation;--blood suddenly appears in the cup_:) "Ah! behold it! behold it!--the blood of Christ!" (_Anthony withdraws, but finds himself be-spattered by water splashed from a cistern._) THE HELVIDIANS (_are flinging themselves into it head foremost, muttering_:--) "The man regenerated by baptism is impeccable!" (_Then he passes by a great fire at which the Adamites are warming themselves--all completely naked in imitation of the purity of Paradise; and he stumbles over_) THE MESSALINES (_wallowing upon the pavement, half-slumbering, stupid_:) "Oh! crush us if thou wilt! we shall not move! Work is crime; all occupation is evil." (_Behind these, the abject_) PATERNIANS (_--men, women, and children lying pell mell upon a heap of filth, lift their hideous faces, wine-besmeared, and they cry aloud_:) "The inferior parts of the body, which were created by the Devil, belong to him! Let us eat, drink, and sin!" ÆTIUS. "Crimes are necessities beneath the notice of God!" (_But suddenly_--) A MAN (--_clad in a Carthaginian mantle, bounds into their midst, brandishing a scourge of thongs in his hand; and strikes violently and indiscriminately at all in his path_:) "Ah! imposters! simonists, heretics and demons!--vermin of the schools!--dregs of hell! Marcion, there, is a sailor of Sinopus excommunicated for incest;--Carpocrates was banished for being a magician; Ætius stole his concubine; Nicholas prostituted his wife; and this Manes, who calls himself the Buddha, and whose real name is Cubricus, was flayed alive with the point of a reed, so that his skin even now hangs at the gates of Ctesiphon!" ANTHONY (_recognizing Tertullian, rushes to join him_): "Master! help! help!" TERTULLIAN (_continuing_): "Break the images! veil the virgins! Pray, fast, weep and mortify yourselves! No philosophy! no books! After Jesus, science is useless!" (_All have fled away; and Anthony beholds, in lieu of Tertullian, a woman seated upon a bench of stone._ _She sobs; leaning her head against a column; her hair is loose; her body, weakened by grief, is clad in a long brown simar. Then they find themselves face to face and alone, far from the crowd; and a silence, an extraordinary stillness falls--as in the woods when the winds are lulled, and the leaves of the trees suddenly cease to whisper._ _This woman is still very beautiful, although faded, and pale as a sepulcher. They look at one another; and their eyes send to each other waves, as it were, of thoughts, bearing drift of a thousand ancient things, confused, mysterious. At last_--) PRISCILLA (_speaks_:) "I was in the last chamber of the baths; and the rumbling sounds of the street caused a sleep to fall upon me. "Suddenly I heard a clamour of voices. Men were shouting--'It is a magician!--it is the Devil!' And the crowd stopped before our house, in front of the Temple Æsculapius. I drew myself up with my hands to the little window. "Upon the peristyle of the temple, there stood a man who wore about his neck a collar of iron. He took burning coals out of a chafing-dish, and with them drew lines across his breast, the while crying out--'Jesus! Jesus!' The people shouted--'This is not lawful! let us stone him!' But he continued. Oh! those were unheard of marvels--things which transported men who beheld them! Flowers broad as suns circled before my eyes, and I heard in the spaces above me the vibrations of a golden harp. Day died. My hands loosened their grasp of the window-bars; my body fell back, and when he had led me away to his house...." ANTHONY. "But of whom art thou speaking?" PRISCILLA. "Why, of Montanus!" ANTHONY. "Montanus is dead!" PRISCILLA. "It is not true!" A VOICE. "No: Montanus is not dead!" (_Anthony turns; and sees upon the bench near him, on the opposite side, another woman sitting; she is fair, and even paler than the other; there are swellings under her eyes, as though she had wept a long time. She speaks without being questioned_:) MAXIMILLA. "We were returning from Tarsus by way of the mountains, when, at a turn in the road, we saw a man under a fig tree. "He cried from afar off: 'Stop! stop!' and rushed toward us, uttering words of abuse. The slaves ran up; he burst into a loud laugh. The horses reared; the molossi all barked. "He stood before us. The sweat streamed from his forehead; his mantle napped in the wind. "And calling us each by our names, he reproached us with the vanity of our work, the infamy of our bodies; and he shook his fist at the dromedaries because of the silver bells hanging below their mouths. "His fury now filled my very entrails with fear and yet there was a strange pleasure in it which fascinated me, intoxicated me! "First the slaves came. 'Master,' they said, 'our animals are weary.' Then the women said, 'We are frightened,' and the slaves departed. Then the children began to weep,--'We are hungry.' And as the women were not answered, they disappeared also from our view. "He still spoke. I felt some one near me. It was my husband; but I listened only to the other. My husband crawled to me upon his knees among the stones, and cried--'Dost thou abandon me,' and I replied: 'Yes! go thy way!' that I might accompany Montanus." ANTHONY. "A eunuch!" PRISCILLA. "Ah! does that astound thee, vulgar soul! Yet Magdalen, Johanna, Martha and Susannah did not share the couch of the Saviour. Souls may know the delirium of embrace better than bodies. That he might keep Eustolia with impunity, the bishop Leontius mutilated himself--loving his love more than his virility. And then, it was no fault of mine. Sotas could not cure me; a spirit constrained me. It is cruel, nevertheless! But what matter? I am the last of the prophetesses; and after me the end of the world shall come." MAXIMILLA. "He showered his gifts upon me. Moreover, no one loves him as I, nor is any other so well beloved by him!" PRISCILLA. "Thou liest! I am the most beloved!" MAXIMILLA. "No: it is I!" (_They fight. Between their shoulders suddenly appears the head of a negro._) MONTANUS (_clad in a black mantle, clasped by two cross-bones_): "Peace, my doves! Incapable of terrestrial happiness, we have obtained the celestial plentitude of our union. After the age of the Father, the age of the Son; and I inaugurate the third, which is that of the Paraclete. His light descended upon me during those forty nights when the heavenly Jerusalem appeared shining in the firmament, above my house at Pepuzza. "Ah, how ye cry out with anguish when the thongs of the scourge lacerate! how your suffering bodies submit to the ardor of my spiritual discipline! how ye languish with irrealizable longing! So strong has that desire become that it has enabled you to behold the invisible world; and ye can now perceive souls even with the eyes of the body!" ANTHONY. (_Makes a gesture of astonishment._) TERTULLIAN (_who appears again, standing beside Montanus_): "Without doubt; for the soul has a body, and that which is bodiless has no existence." MONTANUS. "In order to render it yet more subtle, I have instituted many mortifications, three Lents a year, and prayers to be uttered nightly by the mind only, keeping the mouth closed, lest breathing might tarnish thought. It is necessary to abstain from second marriages, or rather from all marriage! The Angels themselves have sinned with women!" THE ARCHONTICS (_wearing cilices of hair_): "The Saviour said: 'I come to destroy the work of the Woman!'" THE TATIANITES (_wearing cilices of reed_): "She is the tree of evil. Our bodies are but garments of skin." (_And continuing to advance along the same side, Anthony meets_:--) THE VALESIANS (_extended upon the ground, with red wounds below their bellies, and blood saturating their tunics. They offer him a knife._) "Do as Origen did and as we have done! Is it the pain that thou fearest, coward? Is it the love of thy flesh that restrains thee, hypocrite?" (_And while he watches them writhing upon their backs, in a pool of blood_--) THE CAINITES (_wearing knotted vipers as fillets about their hair, pass by, vociferating in his ear_):-- "Glory to Cain! Glory to Sodom! Glory be to Judas! "Cain made the race of the strong; Sodom terrified the earth by her punishment, and it was by Judas that God saved the world! Yes! by Judas: without him there would have been no death and no redemption!" (_They disappear beneath the horde of the_--) CIRCUMCELLIONES (_all clad in the skins of wolves, crowned with thorns, and armed with maces of iron_). "Crush the fruit! befoul the spring! drown the child! Pillage the rich who are happy--who cat their fill! Beat the poor who envy the ass his saddle-cloth, the dog his meal, the bird his nest,--and who is wretched at knowing that others are not as miserable as himself. "We, the Saints, poison, burn, massacre, that we may hasten the end of the world. "Salvation may be obtained through martyrdom only. We give ourselves martyrdom. We tear the skin from our heads with pincers; we expose our members to the plough; we cast ourselves into the mouths of furnaces! "Out upon baptism! out upon the Eucharist! out upon marriage! universal damnation!" (_Then throughout all the basilica there is a redoubling of fury._ _The Audians shoot arrows against the Devil; the Collyridians throw blue cloths toward the roof; the Ascites prostrate themselves before a waterskin; the Marcionites baptise a dead man with oil. A woman, standing near Appelles, exhibits a round loaf within a bottle, in order the better to explain her idea. Another, standing in the midst of an assembly of Sampseans distributes, as a sacrament, the dust of her own sandals. Upon the rose-strewn bed of the Marcosians, two lovers embrace. The Circumcellionites slaughter one another; the Valesians utter the death-rattle; Bardesanes sings; Carpocras dances; Maximilla and Priscilla moan; and the false prophetess of Cappadocia, completely naked, leaning upon a lion, and brandishing three torches, shrieks the Terrible Invocation._ _The columns of the temple sway to and fro like the trunks of trees in a tempest; the amulets suspended about the necks of the Heresiarchs seem to cross each other in lines of fire; the constellations in the chapels palpitate; and the walls recoil with the ebb and flow of the crowd, in which each head is a wave that leaps and roars._ _Nevertheless, from the midst of the clamor arises the sound of a song, in which the name of Jesus is often repeated, accompanied by bursts of laughter._ _The singers belong to the rabble of the people; they all keep time to the song by clapping their hands. In their midst stands_--) ARTUS (_in a deacon's vestments_): "The fools who declaim against me pretend to explain the absurd; and in order to confound them utterly, I have composed ditties so droll that they are learned by heart in all the mills, in the taverns and along the ports. "No! a thousand times no!--the Son is not coeternal with the Father, nor of the same substance! Otherwise he would not have said: 'Father, remove this chalice from me! Why dost thou call me good? God alone is good! I go to my God, to your God!'--and many other things testifying to his character of creature. The fact is further demonstrated for us by all his names:--lamb, shepherd, fountain, wisdom, son-of-man, prophet; the way, the corner-stone!" SABELLIUS. "I hold that both are identical." ARIUS. "The Council of Antioch has decided the contrary." ANTHONY. "Then what is the Word?... What was Jesus?" THE VALENTINIANS. "He was the husband of Acharamoth repentant!" THE SETHIANIANS. "He was Shem, the son of Noah!" THE THEODOTIANS. "He was Melchisedech!" THE MERINTHIANS. "He was only a man!" THE APOLLINARISTS. "He assumed the appearance of one! He simulated the Passion!" MARCEL OF ANCYRA. "He was a development of the Father!" POPE CALIXTUS. "Father and Son are but two modes of one God's manifestation!" METHODIUS. "He was first in Adam, then in man!" CERINTHUS. "And He will rise again!" VALENTINUS. "Impossible--his body being celestial!" PAUL OF SAMOSATA. "He became God _only_ from the time of his baptism!" HERMOGENES. "He dwells in the sun!" (_And all the Heresiarchs form a circle about Anthony, who weeps, covering his face with his hands._) A JEW (_with a red beard, and spots of leprosy upon his shin, approaches close to Anthony, and, with a hideous sneer, exclaims_): "His soul was the soul of Esau! He suffered from the Bellephorentian sickness. Was not his mother, the seller of perfumes, seduced by a Roman soldier, one Pantherus?.......................... [6] ANTHONY (_suddenly raising his head, looks at them a moment in silence; then advancing boldly upon them, exclaims_): "Doctors, magicians, bishops, and deacons, men and phantoms, away from me! begone! Ye are all lies!" THE HERESIARCHS. "We have martyrs more martyrs than thine, prayers that are more difficult, outbursts of love more sublime, ecstasies as prolonged as thine are." ANTHONY. "But ye have no revelation! no proofs!" (_They all at once brandish in the air their rolls of papyrus, tablets of wood, scrolls of leather, rolls of woven stuff bearing inscriptions; and elbowing; and pushing each other, they all shout to Anthony._) THE CERINTHIANS. "Behold the Gospel of the Hebrews!" THE MARCIONITES. "Behold the Gospel of the Lord!" THE MARCOSIANS. "The Gospel of Eve!" THE EUCRATITES. "The Gospel of Thomas!" THE CAINITES. "The Gospel of Judas!" BASILIDES. "The Treatise upon the Destiny of the Soul!" MANES. "The Prophecy of Barkouf!" (_Anthony struggles, breaks from them, escapes them; and in a shadowy corner perceives_--) THE AGED EBIONITES (_withered as mummies, their eyes dull and dim, their eyebrows white as frost._ _In tremulous voices they exclaim_:--) "We have known him, we have seen him! We knew the Carpenter's Son! We were then the same age as he; we dwelt in the same street. He used to amuse himself by modelling little birds of mud; aided his father at his work without fear of the sharp tools, or selected for his mother the skeins of dyed wool. Then he made a voyage to Egypt, from whence he brought back wondrous secrets. We were at Jericho when he came to find the Eater of Locusts. They talked together in a low voice, so that no one could hear what was said. But it was from that time that his name began to be noised abroad in Galilee, and that men began to relate many fables regarding him." (_They reiterate, tremulously_:) "We knew him! we others, we knew him!" ANTHONY. "Ah, speak on, speak! What was his face like?" TERTULLIAN. "His face was wild and repulsive; forasmuch as he had burthened himself with all the crimes, all the woes, all the deformities of mankind." ANTHONY. "Oh! no, no! I imagine, on the contrary, that his entire person must have been glorious with a beauty greater than the beauty of man!" EUSEBIUS OF CÆSAREA. "There is indeed, at Paneades, propped up against the walls of a crumbling edifice surrounded by a wilderness of weeds and creeping plants, a certain statue of stone which, some say, was erected by the Woman healed of the issue of blood. But time has gnawed the face of the statue, and the rains have worn the inscription away." (_A woman steps forward from the group of the Carpocratians._) MARCELLINA. "I was once a deaconess at Rome, in a little church, where I used to exhibit to the faithful, the silver images, of Saint Paul, Homer, Pythagoras and Jesus Christ. "I have only kept that of Jesus." (_She half opens her mantle._) "Dost thou desire it?" A VOICE. "He reappears himself when we call upon him! It is the hour!--come!" (_And Anthony feels a brutal hand seize him by the arm, and drag him away._ _He mounts a stairway in complete darkness; and after having ascended many steps, he finds himself before a door._ _Then the one who is leading him--(is it Hilarion?--he does not know)--whispers in the ear of another_: "The Lord is about to come!"--_and they are admitted into a chamber, with a very low ceiling, and without furniture._ _The first object which attracts his attention is a long blood-colored chrysalis, with a human head surrounded by rays, and the word_ Knouphus _inscribed all around it in Greek characters. It is placed upon the shaft of a column, which is in turn supported by a broad pedestal. Hanging upon the walls of the chamber are medallions of polished iron representing the heads of various animals:--the head of an ox, the head of a lion, the head of an eagle, the head of a dog, and the head of an ass--again!_ [Illustration: ... a long blood-colored chrysalis] _Earthen lamps, suspended below these images, create a vacillating light. Through a hole in the wall, Anthony can see the moon shining far off upon the waves; he can even hear the feeble regular sound of lapping water; together with the heavy thud occasionally caused by the bumping of a ship's hull against the stones of the mole._ _There are men crouching down, with their faces hidden by their mantles. From time to time they utter sounds resembling a smothered bark. There are women also, sleeping with their foreheads resting upon their arms, and their arms supported by their knees; they are so hidden by their garments as to resemble heaps of cloth piled up at intervals against the wall. Near them are half naked children, whose persons swarm with vermin. They watch with idiotic stare the burning of the lamps; and nothing is done: all are waiting for something._ _They talk in undertones about family matters, or recommend to each other various remedies for their ailments. Some of them must embark at earliest daylight; the persecution is becoming too terrible to be endured. Nevertheless, the pagans are easily enough deceived_:--"The fools imagine that we are really adoring Knouphus!" _But one of the brethren, feeling himself suddenly inspired, takes his place before the column, where a basket has already been placed, filled with fennel and aristolochia. On the top of the basket is placed a loaf._) THE INSPIRED BROTHER (_unrolling a placard covered with designs representing cylinders blending with and fitting into one another, commences to pray_:) "The ray of the Word descended upon the darknesses; and there arose a mighty cry, like unto the voice of Light." ALL (_swaying their bodies in unison, respond_): "Kyrie eleison!" THE INSPIRED BROTHER. "Then was Man created by the infamous God of Israel, aided by those who are these (_pointing to the medallions_)--Astophaios, Oraios, Sabaoth, Adonai, Eloi, Iao! "And Man, hideous, feeble, formless and thoughtless, lay upon the slime of the earth." ALL (_in plaintive accents_): "Kyrie eleison!" THE INSPIRED BROTHER. "But Sophia, compassionating him, vivified him with a spark of her own soul. "Then God, beholding Man so beautiful, waxed wroth; and imprisoned him within His own kingdom, forbidding him to touch the Tree of Knowledge. "Again did the other succor him. She sent to him the Serpent, who, by many long subterfuges, made him disobey that law of hate. "And Man, having tasted knowledge, understood celestial things." ALL (_raising their voices_): "Kyrie Eleison!" THE INSPIRED BROTHER. "But Iabdalaoth through vengeance cast down man into the world of matter, and the Serpent with him." ALL (_in a very low tone_): "Kyrie Eleison!" (_Then all hold their peace, and there is silence._ _The odors of the port mingle with the smoke of the lamps in the warm air. The lamp-wicks crepitate; their flames are about to go out, long mosquitoes flit in rapid circlings about them. And Anthony groans in an agony of anguish, as with the feeling that a monstrosity is floating about him, as with the fear of a crime that is about to be accomplished._ _But_--) THE INSPIRED BROTHER (_stamping his heel upon the floor, snapping his fingers, tossing his head wildly, suddenly chants to a furious rhythm, with accompaniment of cymbals and a shrill flute_:--) "Come! come! come!--issue from thy cavern! "O swift one, who runneth without feet, captor who seizeth without hand! "Sinuous as the rivers, orbicular as the sun, black, with spots of gold, like the firmament star-besprinkled! Like unto the intertwinings of the vine, and the circumvolutions of entrails! "Unengendered! eater of earth! immortally young! unfailing perspicacious! honored at Epidaurus! Kindly to man! thou who didst heal King Ptolemy, and the warriors, of Moses, and Glaucus, son of Minos! "Come! come! come!--issue from thy cavern!" ALL (_repeat_): "Come! come! come!--issue from thy cavern!" (_Nevertheless, nothing yet appears._) "Why? What aileth him?" (_And they concert together, devise means._ _An old man presents a clod of turf as an offering. Then something upheaves within the basket. The mass of verdure shakes; the flowers fall, and the head of a python appears._ [Illustration: ... the flowers fall and the head of a python appears] _It passes slowly around the edge of the loaf, like a circle moving around an immovable disk;--then it unfolds itself, lengthens out; it is enormous and of great weight. Lest it should touch the floor, the men uphold it against their breasts, the women support it upon their heads, the children hold it up at arms' length; and its tail, issuing through the hole in the wall, stretches away indefinitely to the bottom of the sea. Its coils double; they fill the chamber; they enclose Anthony._) THE FAITHFUL (_press their mouths against its skin, snatch from one another the loaf which it has bitten, and cry aloud_:--) "It is thou! it is thou! "First raised up by Moses, broken by Ezechias, re-established by the Messiah. He drank thee in the waters of baptism; but thou didst leave him in the Garden of Olives; and then indeed he felt his own weakness! "Writhing about the arms of the cross, and above his head, while casting thy slime upon the crown of thorns, thou didst behold him die! For thou art not Jesus, thou!--thou art the Word! thou art the Christ!" (_Anthony faints with horror, and falls prostrate in front of his hut upon the splinters of wood, where the torch that had slipped from his hand, is burning low._ _The shock arouses him. Opening his eyes again, he perceives the Nile, brightly undulating under the moon, like a vast serpent winding over the sands; so that the hallucination returns upon him again; he has not left the company of the Ophites; they surround him, call him; he sees them carrying baggage, descending to the port. He embarks along with them._ _An inappreciable time elapses._ _Then the vaults of a prison environ him. Iron bars in front of him make black lines against a background of blue; and in the darkness beside him people are praying and weeping surrounded by others who exhort and console._ [Illustration: ... and in the darkness beside him people are praying] _Without, there is a murmur like the deep humming of a vast crowd, and there is splendour as of a summer's day._ _Shrill voices announce watermelons for sale, iced drinks, and cushions of woven grass to sit upon. From time to time there are bursts of applause. He hears the sound of footsteps above his head._ _Suddenly a long roar is heard, mighty and cavernous as the roar of water in an aqueduct._ _And he sees, directly opposite, behind the bars of another compartment across the arena a lion walking to and fro, then a line of sandals, bare legs, and purple fringes. Beyond are the vast circling wreaths of people, in symmetrical tiers, enlarging as they rise, from the lowest which hems in the arena to the uppermost above which masts rise to sustain a hyacinth-colored awning, suspended in air by ropes. Stairways radiating toward the centre, divide these huge circles of stone at regular intervals. The benches disappear under a host of spectators--knights, senators, soldiers, plebeians, vestals, and courtesans--in woollen hoods, in silken maniples, in fallow-colored tunics; together with aigrettes of precious stones, plumes of feathers, the fasces of lictors; and all this swarming multitude deafens and stupefies Anthony with its shoutings, its tumultuous fury, as of an enormous boiling vat. In the middle of the arena, a vase of incense smokes upon an altar._ _Anthony thus knows that the people with him are Christians condemned to be thrown to the wild beasts. The men wear the red mantle of the pontiffs of Saturn; the women, the bandellettes of Ceres. Their friends divide among themselves shreds of their garments, and rings. To obtain access to the prison, they say, costs a great deal of money. But what matter! They will remain until it is all over._ _Anthony notices among these consolers, a certain bald-headed man, in a black tunic: Anthony has seen that face somewhere before. The consoler discourses to them concerning the nothingness of this world, and the felicity of the Elect. Anthony feels within him a transport of celestial love; he longs for the opportunity to lay down his life for the Saviour--not knowing as yet whether he himself is to be numbered among the martyrs._ _But all--except a certain Phrygian, with long hair, who stands with his arms uplifted--have a look of woe. One old man is sobbing upon a bench; a youth standing close by, with drooping head, abandons himself to a reverie of sorrow._ THE OLD MAN _had refused to pay the customary contribution before the statue of Minerva, erected at the angle of the cross-roads; and he gazes at his companions with a look that signifies_:--) "Ye ought to have succored me! Communities can sometimes so arrange matters as to insure their being left in peace. Some among ye also procured those letters which falsely allege that one has sacrificed to idols." (_He asks aloud_:--) "Was it not Petrus of Alexandria who laid down the rule concerning what should be done by those who have yielded to torture?" (_Then, to himself_:--) "Ah! how cruel this at my age! My infirmities make me so weak! Nevertheless, I might easily have lived until the coming winter, or longer!" (_The memory of his little garden makes him sad, and he gazes toward the altar._) THE YOUNG MAN (_who disturbed the festival of Apollo by violence and blows, murmurs_:--) "Yet it would have been easy for me to have fled to the mountains!" (_One of the brothers answers_:--) "But the soldiers would have captured thee!" THE YOUNG MAN. "Oh! I would have done as Cyprian did--I would have returned, and the second time I would surely have had more force!" (_Then he thinks of the innumerable days that he might have lived, of all the joys that he might have known, but will never know; and he gazes toward the altar._ _But_--) THE MAN IN THE BLACK TUNIC (_rushes to his side._) "What scandal! What! Thou! a victim of God's own choice! And all these women here who are looking at thee! Nay, think what thou art doing! Moreover, remember that God sometimes vouchsafes to perform a miracle. Pionius numbed and made powerless the hands of his executioners; the blood of Polycarp extinguished the fire of the stake." (_Then he turns to the Old Man_:--) "Father, father! it behooves thee to edify us by thy death! By longer delaying it, thou wouldst doubtless commit some evil action that would lose thee the fruit of all thy good works. Remember, also, that the power of God is infinite; and it may come to pass that all the people will be converted by thy example." (_And in the great den opposite, the lions stride back and forth, ceaselessly, with a rapid continuous motion. The largest suddenly looks at Anthony and roars, and a vapour issues from his jaws._ _The women are huddled against the men._) THE CONSOLER (_goes from one to the other._) "What would ye say, what wouldst thou say if thou wert to be burned with red-hot irons, if thou wert to be torn asunder by horses, if thou hadst been condemned to have thy body smeared with honey, and thus exposed to be devoured by flies! As it is, thou wilt only suffer the death of a hunter surprised by a beast in the woods." (_Anthony would prefer all those things to death by the fangs of the horrible wild beasts; he fancies already that he feels their teeth and their claws, that he hears his bones cracking between their jaws._ _A keeper enters the dungeon; the martyrs tremble._ _Only one remains impassable, the Phrygian, who prays standing apart from the rest. He has burned three temples; and he advances with arms uplifted, mouth open, face turned toward heaven, seeing nothing around him, like a somnambulist._) THE CONSOLER (_shouts_). "Back! back! lest the spirit of Montanus might come upon you." ALL (_recoil from the Phrygian, and vociferate_) "Damnation to the Montanist!" (_They insult him, spit upon him, excite each other to beat him._ _The rearing lions bite each other's manes_;) THE PEOPLE "To the beasts with them, to the beasts." _The Martyrs burst into sobs, and embrace each other passionately. A cup of narcotic wine is offered them. It is passed from hand to hand, quickly._ _Another keeper, standing at the door of the den, awaits the signal. The den opens; a lion comes out._ _He crosses the arena with great oblique strides. Other lions follow in file after him; then a bear, three panthers, and some leopards. They scatter through the arena like a flock in a meadow._ _The crack of a whip resounds. The Christians stagger forward; and their brethren push them, that it may be over the sooner._ _Anthony closes his eyes._ _He opens them again. But darkness envelopes him._ _Soon the darkness brightens; and he beholds an arid plain, mamillated with knolls, such as might be seen about abandoned quarries._ [Illustration: ... and he beholds an arid plain, mamillated with knolls] _Here and there a tuft of shrubbery rises among the slabs of stone, level with the soil; and there are white figures, vaguer than clouds, bending over the slabs._ _Others approach, softly, silently. Eyes gleam through the slits of long veils. By the easy indifference of their walk, and the perfumes exhaled from their garments, Anthony knows they are patrician women. There are men also, but of inferior condition; for their faces are at once simple-looking and coarse._ (_One of the Women, taking a long breath_:) "Ah! how good the cool air of night is, among the sepulchers! I am so weary of the softness of beds, the turmoil of days, the heavy heat of the sun!" (_Her maid-servant takes from a canvas bag, a torch which she ignites. The faithful light other torches by it, and plant them upon the tombs._) A WOMAN (_panting_). "I am here at last! Oh how wearisome to be the wife of an idolator!" ANOTHER. "These visits to the prisons, interviews with our brethren, are all matters of suspicion to our husbands! And we must even hide ourselves in order to make the sign of the cross; they would take it for a magical conjuration!" ANOTHER. "With my husband it was a quarrel every day. I would not submit myself to his brutal exactions; therefore he has had me prosecuted as a Christian." ANOTHER. "Do you remember Lucius, that young man who was so beautiful, who was dragged like Hector, with his heels attached to a chariot, from the Esquiline Gate to the mountains of Tibur?--and how his blood spattered the bushes on either side of the road? I gathered up the drops of his blood. Behold it!" (_She drags a black sponge from her bosom, covers it with kisses, and flings herself down upon the slabs, crying aloud_:--) [Illustration: She drags a black sponge from her bosom, covers it with kisses ...] "Ah! my friend! my friend!" A MAN. "It is just three years to-day since Domitilla died. They stoned her at the further end of the Grove of Proserpine. I gathered her bones, which shone like glowworms in the grass. The earth how covers them." (_He casts himself down upon a tomb._) "O my betrothed! my betrothed!" (_And all the others scattered over the plain_:--) "O my sister! O my brother! O my daughter! O my mother!" (_Some kneel, covering their faces with their hands; others lie down upon the ground with their arms extended; and the sobs they smother shake their breasts with such violence as though their hearts were breaking with grief. Sometimes they look up to heaven, exclaiming_:--) "Have mercy upon her soul, O my God! She languishes in the sojourn of Shades; vouchsafe to admit her to thy Resurrection, that she may enjoy Thy Light!" (_Or, with eyes fixed upon the gravestones, they murmur to the dead_:--) "Be at peace, beloved! and suffer not! I have brought thee wine and meats!" A WIDOW. "Here is pultis, made by my own hands, as he used to like it, with plenty of eggs and a double measure of flour! We are going to eat it together as in other days, are we not?" (_She lifts a little piece to her lips, and suddenly bursts into an extravagant and frenzied laugh._ _The others also nibble a little bit as she does and drink a mouthful of wine._ _They recount to each other the stories of their martyrs; grief becomes exalted! libations redouble. Their tear-swimming eyes are fixed upon each other's faces. They stammer with intoxication and grief; gradually hands touch hands, lips join themselves to lips, and they seek each other upon the tombs, between the cups and the torches._ _The sky begins to whiten. The fog makes damp their garments; and, without appearing even to know one another, they depart by different ways and seek their homes._ _The sun shines; the weeds and the grass have grown higher; the face of the plain is changed._ _And Anthony, looking between tall bamboos, sees distinctly a forest of columns, of bluish-grey color. These are tree-trunks, all originating from one vast trunk. From each branch of the colossal tree descend other branches which may bury themselves in the soil; and the aspect of all these horizontal and perpendicular lines, indefinitely multiplied, would closely resemble a monstrous timber-work, were it not that they have small figs[7] growing upon them here and there, and a blackish foliage, like that of the sycamore._ _He perceives in the forkings of their branches, hanging bunches of yellow flowers, violet flowers also, and ferns that resemble the plumes of splendid birds._ _Under the lowest branches the horns of a bubalus gleam at intervals, and the bright eyes of antelopes are visible; there are hosts of parrots; there are butterflies flittering hither and thither; lizards lazily drag themselves up or down; flies buzz and hum; and in the midst of the silence, a sound is audible as of the palpitation of a deep and mighty life._ _Seated upon a sort of pyre at the entrance of the wood is a strange being--a man--besmeared with cow-dung, completely naked, more withered than a mummy; his articulations form knots at the termination of bones that resemble sticks. He has bunches of shells suspended from his ears; his face is very long, and his nose like a vulture's beak. His left arm remains motionlessly erect in air, anchylosed, rigid as a stake; and he has been seated here so long that birds have made themselves a nest in his long hair._ _At the four corners of his wooden pyre flame four fires. The sun is directly in front of him. He gazes steadily at it with widely-opened eyes; and, then without looking at Anthony, asks him_:--) "Brahmin from the shores of the Nile, what hast thou to say regarding these things?" (_Flames suddenly burst out on all sides of him, through the intervals between the logs of the pyre; and_--) THE GYMNOSOPHIST (_continues_). "Lo! I have buried myself in solitude, like the rhinoceros. I dwelt in the tree behind me." [Illustration: I have buried myself in solitude, like the rhinoceros. I dwelt in the tree behind me.] (_The vast fig-tree, indeed, shows in one of its groves, a natural excavation about the size of a man._) "And I nourished me with flowers and fruits, observing the precepts so rigidly that not even a dog ever beheld me eat. "Inasmuch as existence originates from corruption, corruption from desire, desire from sensation, sensation from contact, I have ever avoided all action, all contact, and perpetually--motionless as the stela of a tomb, exhaling my breath from my two nostrils, fixing my eyes upon my nose, and contemplating the ether in my mind, the world in my members, the moon in my heart--I dreamed of the essence of the great Soul whence continually escape the principles of life, even as sparks escape from fire. "Thus at last I found the supreme Soul in all beings, and all beings in the supreme Soul; and I have been able to make mine own soul all my senses. "I receive knowledge directly from heaven, like the bird Tchataka, who quenches his thirst from falling rain only. "Even by so much as things are known to me, things no longer exist. "For me now there is no more hope, no more anguish, there is neither happiness nor virtue, nor day nor night, nor Thou nor I--absolutely nothing! "My awful austerities have made me superior to the Powers. A single contraction of my thought would suffice to kill a hundred sons of kings, to dethrone gods, to overturn the world." (_He utters all these things in a monotonous voice._ _The surrounding leaves shrivel up. Fleeing rats rush over the ground._ _He slowly turns his eyes downward toward the rising flames, and then continues_:--) "I have loathed Form, I have loathed Perception, I have loathed even Knowledge itself, for the thought does not survive the transitory fact which caused it; and mind, like all else, is only an illusion. "All that is engendered will perish; all that is dead must live again; the beings that have even now disappeared shall sojourn again in wombs as yet unformed, and shall again return to earth to serve in woe other creatures. "But inasmuch as I have rolled through the revolution of an indefinite multitude of existences, under the envelopes of gods, of men, and of animals, I renounce further wanderings; I will endure this weariness no more! I abandon the filthy hostelry of this body of mine, built with flesh, reddened with blood, covered with a hideous skin, full of uncleanliness; and, for my recompense, I go at last to slumber in the deepest deeps of the Absolute--in Annihilation." (_The flames rise to his chest, then envelope him. His head rises through them as through a hole in the wall. His cavernous eyes still remain icicle open, gazing._) ANTHONY (_rises_). (_The torch, which had fallen to the ground, has ignited the splinters of wood; and the flames have singed his beard._ _With a loud cry, Anthony tramples the fire out; and, when nothing remains but ashes, he exclaims_:--) "Where can Hilarion be? He was here a moment ago. I saw him! "What! No; it is impossible; I must have been mistaken! "Yet why?... Perhaps my cabin, these stones, this sand, have no real existence. I am becoming mad! Let me be calm! Where was I? What was it that happened? "Ah! the gymnosophist!... Such a death is frequent among the sages of India. Kalanos burned himself before Alexander; another did likewise in the time of Augustus. What hatred of life men must have to do thus! Unless, indeed, they are impelled by pride alone?... Yet in any event they have the intrepidity of martyrs.... As for the latter, I can now well believe what has been told me regarding the debauchery they cause. "And before that? Yes: I remember now! the host of the Heresiarchs! What outcries! What eyes! Yet why so much rebellion of the flesh, so much dissoluteness, so many aberrations of the intellect. "They claim, nevertheless, to seek God through all those ways! What right have I to curse them--I, who stumble so often in mine own path? I was perhaps about to learn more of them at the moment when they disappeared. Too rapid was the whirl; I had no time to answer. Now I feel as though there were more space, more light in my understanding. I am calm. I even feel myself able to.... What is this? I thought I had put out the fire!" (_A flame flits among the rocks; and soon there comes the sound of a voice--broken, convulsed as by sobs--from afar off, among the mountains._) "Can it be the cry of a hyena, or the lamentation of some traveler that has lost his way?" (_Anthony listens. The flame draws nearer._ _And he beholds a weeping woman approach, leaning upon the shoulder of a white-bearded man._ _She is covered with a purple robe in rags. He is bareheaded like lier, wears a tunic of the same color, and carries in his hands a brazen vase, whence arises a thin blue flame._ _Anthony feels a fear come upon him, and wishes to know who this woman may be._) THE STRANGER SIMON. "It is a young girl, a poor child that I lead about with me everywhere." (_He uplifts the brazen vase._ _Anthony contemplates the girl, by the light of its vacillating flame._ _There are marks of bites upon her face, traces of blows upon her arms; her dishevelled hair entangles itself in the rents of her rags; her eyes appear to be insensible to light._) SIMON. "Sometimes she remains thus for a long, long time without speaking; then all at once she revives, and discourses of marvellous things." ANTHONY. "In truth?" SIMON. "Ennoia; Ennoia! Ennoia!--tell us what thou hast to say!" (_She rolls her eyes like one awaking from a dream, slowly passes her fingers over her brows, and in a mournful voice, speaks_:--) Helena[8] (_Ennoia_). [Illustration: Helena - Ennoia] "I remember a distant land, of the color of emerald. Only one tree grows there. (_Anthony starts_). "Upon each of its tiers of broad-extending arms, a pair of Spirits dwell in air. All about them the branches intercross, like the veins of a body; and they watch the eternal Life circulating, from the roots deep plunging into darkness even to the leafy summit that rises higher than the sun. I, dwelling upon the second branch, illuminated the nights of Summer with my face." ANTHONY, (_tapping his own forehead_:--) "Ah! ah! I comprehend! her head!..." SIMON (_placing his finger to his lips_:--) "Hush!" HELENA. "The sail remained well filled by the wind; the keel cleft the foam. He said to me: 'What though I afflict my country, though I lose my kingdom! Thou wilt belong to me, in my house!' "How sweet was the lofty chamber of his palace! Lying upon the ivory bed, he caressed my long hair, singing amorously the while. "Even at the close of the day I beheld the two camps, the watchfires being lighted, Ulysses at the entrance of his tent, armed Achilles driving a chariot along the sea-beach." ANTHONY. "Why! she is utterly mad! How came this to pass?..." SIMON. "Hush! hush!" HELENA. "They anointed me with unguents, and sold me to the people that I might amuse them. "One evening I was standing with the sistrum in my hand, making music for some Greek sailors who were dancing. The rain was falling upon the roof of the tavern like a cataract, and the cups of warm wine were smoking. "A man suddenly entered, although the door was not opened to let him pass." SIMON. "It was I! I found thee again! "Behold her, Anthony, she whom they call Sigeh, Ennoia, Barbelo, Prounikos! The Spirits governing the world were jealous of her; and they imprisoned her within the body of a woman. "She was that Helen of Troy, whose memory was cursed by the poet Stesichorus. She was Lucretia, the patrician woman violated by a king. She was Delilah, by whom Samson's locks were shorn.... She has loved adultery, idolatry, lying and foolishness. She has prostituted herself to all nations. She has sung at the angles of all cross-roads. She has kissed the faces of all men. "At Tyre, she, the Syrian, was the mistress of robbers. She caroused with them during the nights; and she concealed assassins amidst the vermin of her tepid bed." ANTHONY. "Ah! what is this to me?..." SIMON (_with a furious look_:--) "I tell thee that I have redeemed her, and re-established her in her former splendor; insomuch that Caius Cæsar Caligula became enamoured of her, desiring to sleep with the Moon!" ANTHONY. "What then?..." SIMON. "Why this, that she herself is the Moon! Has not Pope Clement written how she was imprisoned in a tower? Three hundred persons surrounded the tower to watch it; and the moon was seen at each of the loop-holes at the same time, although there is not more than one moon in the world, nor more than one Ennoia!" ANTHONY. "Yes ... it seems to me that I remember...." (_He falls into a reverie._) SIMON. "Innocent as the Christ who died for men, so did she devote herself for women. For the impotence of Jehovah is proven by the transgression of Adama, and we must shake off the yoke of the old law, which is antipathetic to the order of things.[9] "I have preached the revival in Ephraim and in Issachar by the torrent of Bizor, beyond the Lake of Houleh, in the valley of Maggedo, further than the mountains, at Bostra and at Damascus. Let all come to me who are covered with wine, who are covered with filth, who are covered with blood! and I shall take away their uncleanliness with the Holy Spirit, called Minerva by the Greeks. She is Minerva! she is the Holy Spirit! I am Jupiter, Apollo, the Christ, the Paraclete, the great might of God, incarnated in the person of Simon!" ANTHONY. "Ah! it is thou!... so it is thou! But I know thy crimes! "Thou wast born at Gittoi near Samaria, Dositheas, thy first master, drove thee from him. Thou didst execrate Saint Paul because he converted one of thy wives; and, vanquished by Saint Peter, in thy rage and terror thou didst cast into the waves the bag which contained thy artifices!" SIMON. "Dost thou desire them?" (_Anthony looks at him, and an interior voice whispers hi his heart:--"Why not?"_) SIMON (_continues_). "He who knows the forces of Nature and the essence of Spirits must be able to perform miracles. It has been the dream of all sages; it is the desire which even now gnaws thee!--confess it!" "In the sight of the multitude of the Romans, I flew in the air so high that none could behold me move. Nero ordered that I should be decapitated; but it was the head of a sheep which fell upon the ground in lieu of mine. At last they buried me alive; but I rose again upon the third day. The proof is that thou dost behold me before thee!" (_He presents his hands to Anthony to smell. They have the stench of corpse-flesh. Anthony recoils with loathing._) "I can make serpents of bronze writhe; I can make marble statues laugh; I can make dogs speak. I will show thee vast quantities of gold; I will reestablish kings; thou shalt see nations prostrate themselves in adoration before me! I can walk upon the clouds and upon the waves, I can pass through mountains, I can make myself appear as a youth, as an old man, as a tiger, or as an ant; I can assume thy features; I can give thee mine; I can make the thunder follow after me. Dost hear it?" (_The thunder rumbles; flashes of lightning succeed._) "It is the voice of the Most High; for 'the Lord thy God is a fire;' and all creations are accomplished by sparks from the fire-centre of all things. Thou shalt even now receive the baptism of it--that second baptism announced by Jesus, which fell upon the apostles on a day of tempest when the windows were open!" (_And stirring up the flame with his hand, slowly, as though preparing to sprinkle Anthony with it, he continues_:--) "Mother of mercies, thou who discoverest all secrets, in order that we may find rest in the eighth mansion...." ANTHONY (_cries out_:--) "Oh! that I had only some holy water!..." (_The flame goes out, producing much smoke._ _Ennoia and Simon have disappeared._ _An exceedingly cold, opaque and f[oe]tid mist fills the atmosphere._) ANTHONY (_groping with his hands like a blind man_:--) "Where am I?... I fear lest I fall into the abyss! And the cross, surely, is too far from me. Ah! what a night! what a terrible night!" (_The mist is parted by a gust of wind; and Anthony sees two men covered with long white tunics._ _The first is of lofty stature, with a gentle face, and a grave mien. His blond hair, parted like that of Christ, falls upon his shoulders. He has cast aside a wand that he had been holding in his hand; his companion takes it up, making a reverence after the fashion of the Orientals._ _The latter is small of stature, thick set, flat-nosed; his neck and shoulders expresses good natured simplicity._ _Both are barefooted, bareheaded, and dusty, like persons who have made a long journey._) ANTHONY (_starting up_:--) "What do ye seek? Speak!... Begone from here!" DAMIS (_who is a little man_). "Nay! nay! be not angered, good hermit. As for that I seek, I know not myself what it is! Here is the Master!" (_He sits down. The other stranger remains standing. Silence._) ANTHONY (_asks_). "Then ye come?..." DAMIS. "Oh! from afar off--very far off!" ANTHONY. "And ye go?..." DAMIS (_pointing to the other_) "Whithersoever he shall desire!" ANTHONY. "But who may he be?" DAMIS. "Look well upon him!" ANTHONY (_aside_). "He looks like a saint! If I could only dare...." (_The mist is all gone. The night is very clear. The moon shines._) DAMIS. "Of what art thou dreaming, that thou dost not speak?" ANTHONY. "I was thinking.... Oh! nothing!" DAMIS (_approaches Apollonius, and walks all round him several times, bending himself as he walks, never raising his head_:--) "Master, here is a Galilean hermit who desires to know the beginnings of wisdom." APOLLONIUS. "Let him approach!" (_Anthony hesitates._) DAMIS. "Approach!" APOLLONIUS (_in a voice of thunder_:--) "Approach! Thou wouldst know who I am, what I have done, and what I think,--is it not so, child?" ANTHONY. "Always supposing that these things can contribute to the salvation of my soul." APOLLONIUS. "Rejoice! I am about to inform thee of them!" DAMIS (_in an undertone, to Anthony_:--) "Is it possible? He must surely have at the first glance discerned in thee extraordinary aptitude for philosophy. I shall also strive to profit by his instruction." APOLLONIUS. "First of all, I shall tell thee of the long course which I have followed in order to obtain the doctrine; and if thou canst discover in all my life one evil action, thou shalt bid me pause, for he who hath erred in his actions may well give scandal by his words." DAMIS (_to Anthony_). "How just a man? Is he not?" ANTHONY. "Indeed I believe him to be sincere." APOLLONIUS. "Upon the night of my birth, my mother imagined that she was gathering flowers by the shore of a great lake. A flash of lightning appeared; and she brought me into the world to the music of the voices of swans singing to her in her dream. "Until I had reached the age of fifteen I was plunged thrice a day into the fountain, Asbadeus, whose waters make perjurers hydropical; and my body was rubbed with the leaves of the onyza, that I might be chaste. "A Palmyrian princess came one evening to seek me, offering me treasures that she knew to be in the tombs. A hierodule of the temple of Diana, slew herself in despair with the sacrificial knife; and the governor of Cilicia, finding all his promises of no avail, cried out in the presence of my family that he would cause my death; but it was he that died only three days after, assassinated by the Romans." DAMIS (_nudging Anthony with his elbow_). "Eh? did I not tell thee? What a man!" APOLLONIUS. "For the space of four successive years I maintained the unbroken silence of the Pythagoreans. The most sudden and unexpected pain never extorted a sigh from me; and when I used to enter the theatre, all drew away from me, as from a phantom." DAMIS. "Wouldst thou have done so much?--thou?" APOLLONIUS. "After the period of my trial had been accomplished, I undertook to instruct the priests regarding the tradition they had lost." ANTHONY. "What tradition?" DAMIS. "Interrupt him not! Be silent!" APOLLONIUS. "I have conversed with the Samaneans of the Ganges, with the astrologers of Chaldea, with the magi of Babylon, with the Gaulish Druids, with the priests of the negroes! I have ascended the fourteen Olympii; I have sounded the Scythian lakes; I have measured the breadth of the Desert!" DAMIS. "It is all true! I was with him the while!" APOLLONIUS. "But first I had visited the Hyrcanian Sea; I made the tour of it; and descending by way of the country of the Baraomati, where Bucephalus is buried, I approached the city of Nineveh. At the gates of the city, a man drew near me...." DAMIS. "I--even I, good master! I loved thee from the first. Thou wert gentler than a girl and more beautiful than a god!" APOLLONIUS (_without hearing him_). "He asked me to accompany him, that he might serve as interpreter." DAMIS. "But thou didst reply that all languages were familiar to thee, and that thou couldst divine all thoughts. Then I kissed the hem of thy mantle, and proceeded to walk behind thee." APOLLONIUS. "After Ctesiphon, we entered upon the territory of Babylon." DAMIS. "And the Satrap cried aloud on beholding a man so pale." ANTHONY (_aside_). "What signifies this?..." APOLLONIUS. "The king received me standing, near a throne of silver, in a hall constellated with stars; from the cupola hung suspended by invisible threads four great birds of gold, with wings extended." ANTHONY (_dreamily_). "Can there be such things in the world?" DAMIS. "Ah! that is a city! that Babylon! everybody there is rich! The houses, which are painted blue, have doors of bronze, and flights of steps descending to the river." (_Drawing lines upon the ground, with his stick_:) "Like that, seest thou? And then there are temples, there are squares, there are baths, there are aqueducts! The palaces are roofed with red brass; and the interior ... ah! if thou only knewest!" APOLLONIUS. "Upon the north wall rises a tower which supports a second, a third, a fourth, a fifth, and there are also three others! The eighth is a chapel containing a bed. No one enters it save the woman chosen by the priests for the God Belus. I was lodged there by order of the King of Babylon." DAMIS. "As for me, they hardly deigned to give me any attention! So I walked through the streets all by myself. I informed myself regarding the customs of the people; I visited the workshops; I examined the great machines that carry water to the gardens. But I soon wearied of being separated from the Master." APOLLONIUS. "At last we left Babylon; and as we travelled by the light of the moon, we suddenly beheld an Empusa." DAMIS. "Aye, indeed! She leaped upon her iron hoof; she brayed like an ass; she galloped among the rocks. He shouted imprecations at her; she disappeared." ANTHONY (_aside_). "What can be their motive?" APOLLONIUS. "At Taxilla, the capital of five thousand fortresses, Phraortes, King of the Ganges, showed us his guard of black men, whose stature was five cubits, and under a pavilion of green brocade in his gardens, an enormous elephant, which the queens amused themselves by perfuming. It was the elephant of Porus which had taken flight after the death of Alexander." DAMIS. "And which had been found again in a forest." ANTHONY. "Their speech is superabundant, like that of drunken men!" APOLLONIUS. "Phraortes seated us at his own table." DAMIS. "How strange a country that was! During their drinking carousels, the lords used to amuse-themselves by shooting arrows under the feet of a dancing child. But I do not approve...." APOLLONIUS. "When I was ready to depart, the king gave me a parasol, and he said to me: 'I have a stud of white camels upon the Indus. When thou shalt have no further use for them, blow in their ears. They will come back.' "We descended along the river, marching at night by the light of the fire-flies, which glimmered among the bamboos. The slave whistled an air to drive away the serpents; and our camels bent down in passing below the branches of the trees, as if passing under low gates. "One day a black child, who held a golden caduceus in his hand, conducted us to the College of the Sages. Iarchas, their chief, spoke to me of my ancestors, told me of all my thoughts, of all my actions, of all my existences. In former time he had been the River Indus; and he reminded me that I had once been a boatman upon the Nile, in the time of King Sesostris." DAMIS. "As for me, they told me nothing; so that I know not who or what I have been." ANTHONY. "They have a vague look, like shadows!" APOLLONIUS. "Upon the shores of the sea we met with the milk-gorged Cynocephali, who were returning from their expedition to the Island Taprobana. The tepid waves rolled blond pearls to our feet. The amber crackled beneath our steps. Whale-skeletons were whitening in the crevasses of the cliffs. At last the land became narrow as a sandal; and after casting drops of ocean water toward the sun, we turned to the right to return. "So we returned through the Region of Aromatics, by way of the country of the Gangarides, the promontory of Comaria, the country of the Sachalites, of the Adramites and of the Homerites; then, across the Cassanian mountains, the Red Sea, and the Island Topazos, we penetrated into Ethiopia through the country of the Pygmies." ANTHONY (_to himself_). "How vast the world is!" DAMIS. "And after we had returned home, we found that all those whom we used to know, were dead." (_Anthony lowers his head. Silence._) APOLLONIUS (_continues_). "Then men began to talk of me the world over. "The plague was ravaging Ephesus; I made them stone an old mendicant there." DAMIS. "And forthwith the plague departed." ANTHONY. "What! Does he drive away pestilence?" APOLLONIUS. "At Cnidos, I cured the man that had become enamored of Venus." DAMIS. "Aye! a fool who had even vowed to espouse her! To love a woman is at least comprehensible; but to love a statue--what madness! The Master placed his hand upon the young man's heart; and the fire of that love was at once extinguished." ANTHONY. "How! does he also cast out devils?" APOLLONIUS. "At Tarentum they were carrying the dead body of a young girl to the funeral pyre." DAMIS. "The Master touched her lips; and she arose and called her mother." ANTHONY. "What! he raises the dead!" APOLLONIUS. "I predicted to Vespasian his accession to power." ANTHONY. "What! he foretells the future!" DAMIS. "At Corinth there was a ..." APOLLONIUS. "It was when I was at table with him, at the waters of Baia ..." ANTHONY. "Excuse me, strangers--it is very late ..." DAMIS. "At Corinth there was a young man called Menippus ..." ANTHONY. "No! no!--go ye away!" APOLLONIUS. "A dog came in, bearing a severed hand in his mouth." DAMIS. "One evening, in one of the suburbs, he met a woman." ANTHONY. "Do ye not hear me? Begone!" APOLLONIUS. "He wandered in a bewildered way around the couches ..." ANTHONY. "Enough!" APOLLONIUS. "They sought to drive him out." DAMIS. "So Menippus went with her to her house; they loved one another." APOLLONIUS. "And gently beating the mosaic pavement with his tail, he laid the severed hand upon the knees of Flavius." DAMIS. "But next morning, during the lessons in the school, Menippus was pale." ANTHONY (_starting up in anger_). "Still continuing! Ah! then let them continue till they be weary, inasmuch as there is no ..." DAMIS. "The Master said to him: 'O beautiful youth, thou dost caress a serpent; by a serpent thou art caressed! And when shall be the nuptials?' We all went to the wedding." ANTHONY. "Assuredly I am doing wrong, to hearken to such a story!" DAMIS. "Servants were hurrying to and fro in the vestibule; doors were opening; nevertheless there was no sound made either by the fall of the footsteps nor the closing of the doors. The Master placed himself beside Menippus. And the bride forthwith became angered against the philosophers. But the vessels of gold, the cupbearers, the cooks, the panthers disappeared; the roof receded and vanished into air; the walls crumbled down; and Apollonius stood alone with the woman at his feet, all in tears. She was a vampire who satisfied the beautiful young men in order to devour their flesh, for nothing is more desirable for such phantoms than the blood of amorous youths." APOLLONIUS. "If thou shouldst desire to learn the art ..." ANTHONY. "I do not wish to learn anything!" APOLLONIUS. "The same evening that we arrived at the gates of Rome ..." ANTHONY. "Oh! yes!--speak to me rather of the City of Popes!" APOLLONIUS. "A drunken man accosted us, who was singing in a low voice. The song was an epithalamium of Nero; and he had the power to cause the death of whosoever should hear it with indifference. In a box upon his shoulders he carried a string taken from the Emperor's cithara. I shrugged my shoulders. He flung mud in our faces. Then I unfastened my girdle and placed it in this hand." DAMIS. "In sooth, thou wert most imprudent!" APOLLONIUS. "During the night the Emperor summoned me to his house. He was playing at osselets with Sporus, supporting his left arm upon a table of agate. He turned and, knitting his brows, demanded: 'How comes it that thou dost not fear me?' 'Because,' I replied, 'the God who made thee terrible, also made me intrepid." ANTHONY (_to himself_). "There is something inexplicable that terrifies me!" (_Silence._) DAMIS (_breaking the silence with his shrill voice_). "Moreover, all Asia can tell thee ..." ANTHONY (_starting up_). "I am ill! let me be!" DAMIS. "But listen! At Ephesus, he beheld them killing Domitian, who was at Rome." ANTHONY (_with a forced laugh_). "Is it possible?" DAMIS. "Yes: at the theatre at noon-day, the fourteenth of the Kalenda of October, he suddenly cried out: 'Cæsar is being murdered!' and from time to time he would continue to ejaculate: 'He rolls upon the pavement ... Oh! how he struggles ... He rises ... He tries to flee ... The doors are fastened ... Ah! it is all over! He is dead!' And in fact Titus Flavius Domitianus was assassinated upon that very day, as thou knowest." ANTHONY. "Without the aid of the Devil ... certainly ..." APOLLONIUS. "He had purposed putting me to death, that same Domitian! Damis had taken flight according to my order, and I remained alone in my prison." DAMIS. "A terrible hardihood on thy part, it must be confessed!" APOLLONIUS. "About the fifth hour, the soldiers led me before the tribunal. I had my harangue all ready hidden beneath my mantle." DAMIS. "We others were then upon the shores of Puteoli, we believed thee dead; we were all weeping, when all of a sudden about the sixth hour, thou didst suddenly appear before us, exclaiming: 'It is I.'" ANTHONY (_to himself_). "Even as He...!" DAMIS (_in a very loud voice_). "Precisely!" ANTHONY. "Oh! no! ye lie! is it not so?--ye lie!" APOLLONIUS. "He descended from heaven. I rise thither, by the power of my virtue that has lifted me up even to the height of the Principle of all things!" DAMIS. "Thyana, his natal city, has established in his honor a temple and a priesthood!" APOLLONIUS (_draws near Anthony, and shouts in his ear_:--) "It is because I know all gods, all rites, all prayers, all oracles! I have penetrated into the cave of Trophonius, son of Apollo! I have kneaded for Syracusan women the cakes which they carry to the mountains. I have endured the eighty tests of Mithra! I have pressed to my heart the serpent of Sabasius! I have received the scarf of Kabiri! I have laved Cybele in the waters of the Campanian gulfs! and I have passed three moons in the caverns of Samothracia!" DAMIS (_with a stupid laugh_). "Ah! ah! ah! at the mysteries of the good Goddess!" APOLLONIUS. "And now we recommence our pilgrimage. "We go to the North to the land of Swans and of snows. Upon the vast white plains, the blind hippopodes break with the tips of their feet the ultramarine plant." DAMIS. "Hasten! it is already dawn. The cock has crowed, the horse has neighed, the sail is hoisted!" ANTHONY. "The cock has not crowed! I hear the locusts in the sands, and I see the moon still in her place." APOLLONIUS. "We go to the South, beyond the mountains and the mighty waters, to seek in perfumes the secret source of love. Thou shalt inhale the odor of myrrhodion which makes the weak die. Thou shalt bathe thy body in the lake of Rose-oil which is in the Island Junonia. Thou shalt see slumbering upon primroses that Lizard which awakes every hundred years when the carbuncle upon its forehead, arriving at maturity, falls to the ground. The stars palpitate like eyes; the cascades sing like the melody of lyres; strange intoxication is exhaled by blossoming flowers; thy mind shall grow vaster in that air; and thy heart shall change even as thy face." DAMIS. "Master! it is time! The wind has risen, the swallows awaken, the myrtle leaves are blown away." APOLLONIUS. "Yes! let us go!" ANTHONY. "Nay! I remain here!" APOLLONIUS. "Shall I tell thee where grows the plant Balis, that resurrects the dead?" DAMIS "Nay; ask him rather for the audrodamas which attracts silver, iron and brass!" ANTHONY. "Oh! how I suffer! how I suffer!" DAMIS. "Thou shalt comprehend the voices of all living creatures, the roarings, the cooings!" APOLLONIUS. "I shall enable thee to ride upon unicorns and upon dragons, upon hippocentaurs and dolphins!" ANTHONY (_weeping_). "Oh ... oh!... oh!" APOLLONIUS. "Thou shalt know the demons that dwell in the caverns, the demons that mutter in the woods, the demons that move in the waves, the demons that push the clouds!" DAMIS. "Tighten thy girdle, fasten thy sandals!" APOLLONIUS. "I shall explain to thee the reason of divine forms--why Apollo stands, why Jupiter is seated, why Venus is black, at Corinth, square-shaped at Athens, conical at Paphos." ANTHONY (_clasping his hands_). "Let them begone! let them begone!" APOLLONIUS. "In thy presence I will tear down the panoplies of the Gods; we shall force open the sanctuaries, I will enable thee to violate the Pythoness!" ANTHONY. "Help! O my God!" (_He rushes to the cross._) APOLLONIUS. "What is thy desire? What is thy dream? Thou needst only devote the moment of time necessary to think of it ..." ANTHONY. "Jesus! Jesus! Help me!" APOLLONIUS. "Dost thou wish me to make him appear, thy Jesus?" ANTHONY. "What? How!" APOLLONIUS. "It shall be He!--no other! He will cast off his crown, and we shall converse face to face!" DAMIS (_in an undertone_). "Say thou dost indeed wish it! say thou dost desire it!" (_Anthony kneeling before the cross, murmurs prayers. Damis walks around him, with wheedling gestures._) "Nay, nay! good hermit. Be not horrified! These are only exaggerated forms of speech, borrowed from the Orientals. That need in no way ..." APOLLONIUS. "Let him alone, Damis! "He believes, like a brute, in the reality of things. The terror which he entertains of the Gods prevents him from comprehending them; and he debases his own God to the level of a jealous king! "But thou, my son, do not leave me!" (_He moves to the edge of the cliff, walking backward, passes beyond the verge of the precipice, and remains suspended in air._) "Above all forms, further than the ends of the earth, beyond the heavens themselves, lies the world of Idea, replete with the splendor of the Word! With one bound we shall traverse the impending spaces, and thou shalt behold in all his infinity, the Eternal, the Absolute, the Being! Come! give me thy hand! Let us rise." (_Side by side, both rise up through the air, slowly. Anthony, clinging to the cross, watches them rise. They disappear._) [1] Agape.--Love-feast of the primitive Christians. [2] John XVI: 12.--T. [3] See note at end. [4] Masheim gives _Achamoth._ I prefer to remain faithful to the orthography given by Flaubert. [5] The French text gives _mes pères_ not _nos pères._ Elxai, or Elkhai, who established his sect in the reign of Trajan, was a Jew. [6] See note. [7] The banyan is a fig-tree--the _Ficus indicus._--Trans. [8] Readers may remember Longfellow's exquisite poem "Helena of Tyre." [9] See the second part of "Faust," and _Kundry_ in "Parsifal." V. ANTHONY (_walking to and fro, slowly_). "That one, indeed, seems in himself equal to all the powers of Hell! "Nebuchadnezzar did not so much dazzle me with his splendours;--the Queen of Sheba herself charmed me less deeply. "His manner of speaking of the gods compels one to feel a desire to know them. "I remember having beheld hundreds of them at one time, in the island of Elephantius, in the time of Diocletian. The emperor had ceded to the Nomads a great tract of country, upon the condition that they should guard the frontiers; and the treaty was concluded in the name of the 'Powers Invisible.' For the gods of each people were unknown unto the other people. "The Barbarians had brought theirs with them. They occupied the sand-hills bordering the river. We saw them supporting their idols in their arms, like great paralytic children;--others, paddling through the cataracts upon trunks of palm tree, displayed from afar off the amulets hung about their necks, the tattooings upon their breasts; and these things were not more sinful than the religion of the Greeks, the Asiatics, and the Romans! "When I was dwelling in the temple of Heliopolis I would often consider the things I beheld upon the walls:--vultures bearing sceptres, crocodiles playing upon lyres, faces of men with the bodies of serpents, cow-headed women prostrating themselves before ithyphallic gods:--and their supernatural forms attracted my thoughts to other worlds. I longed to know that which drew the gaze of all those calm and mysterious eyes. "If matter can exert such power, it must surely contain a spirit. The souls of the Gods are attached to their images ... "Those possessing the beauty of forms might seduce. But the others ... those of loathsome or terrible aspect ... how can men believe in them?..." (_And he beholds passing over the surface of the ground,--leaves, stones, shells, branches of trees,--then a variety of hydropical dwarfs: these are gods. He bursts into a laugh. He hears another laugh behind him;--and Hilarion appears, in the garb of a hermit, far taller than before, colossal._) ANTHONY (_who feels no surprise at seeing him_). "How stupid one must be to worship such things!" HILARION. "Aye!--exceedingly stupid!" (_Then idols of all nations and of all epochs--of wood, of metal, of granite, of feathers, of skins sewn together,--pass before them._ _The most ancient of all anterior to the Deluge are hidden under masses of seaweed hanging down over them like manes. Some that are too long for their bases, crack in all their joints, and break their own backs in walking. Others have rents torn in their bellies through which sand trickles out._ _Anthony and Hilarion are prodigiously amused. They hold their sides for laughter. Then appear sheep-headed idols. They totter upon their bandy-legs, half-open their eye-lids, and stutter like the dumb,_ "Ba! ba! ba!" _The more that the idols commence to resemble the human forms, the more they irritate Anthony. He strikes them with his fist, kicks them, attacks them with fury. They become frightful,--with lofty plumes, eyes like balls, fingers terminated by claws, the jaws of sharks._ _And before these gods men are slaughtered upon altars of stone; others are brayed alive in huge mortars, crushed under chariots, nailed upon trees. There is one all of red-hot iron with the horns of a bull, who devours children._) ANTHONY. "Horror!" HILARION. "But the gods always demand tortures--and suffering. Even thine desired ..." ANTHONY (_weeping_). "Ah! say no more!--do not speak to me!" (_The space girdled by the rocks suddenly changes into a valley. A herd of cattle are feeding upon the short grass._ _The herdman who leads them, observes a cloud;--and in a sharp voice, shouts out words of command, as if to heaven._) HILARION. "Because he needs rain, he seeks by certain chants to compel the King of heaven to open the fecund cloud." ANTHONY (_laughing_). "Verily, such pride is the extreme of foolishness!" HILARION. "Why dost thou utter exorcisms?" (_The valley changes into a sea of milk, motionless and infinite. In its midst floats a long cradle formed by the coils of a serpent, whose many curving heads shade, like a dais, the god slumbering upon its body._ _He is beardless, young, more beautiful than a girl, and covered with diaphanous veils. The pearls of his tiara gleam softly like moons; a chaplet of stars is entwined many times about his breast, and with one hand beneath his head, he slumbers with the look of one who dreams after wine._ _A woman crouching at his feet, awaits the moment of his awaking._) HILARION. "Such is the primordial duality of the Brahmans,--the Absolute being inexpressible by any form." (_From the navel of the god has grown the stem of a lotus flower; it blossoms, and within its chalice appears another god with three faces._) ANTHONY. "How strange an invention!" HILARION. "Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are but one and the same Person!" (_The three faces separate; and three great gods appear._ _The first, who is pink, bites the end of his great toe._ _The second, who is blue, uplifts his four arms._ _The third, who is green, wears a necklace of human skulls._ _Before them instantly arise three goddesses--one is enveloped in a net; another offers a cup; the third brandishes a bow._ [Illustration: ... instantly arise three goddesses] _And these gods, these goddesses, decuple themselves, multiply. Arms grow from their shoulders; at the end of these arms hands appear bearing standards, axes, bucklers, swords, parasols and drums. Fountains gush from their heads, plants grow from their nostrils._ _Riding upon birds rocked in palanquins, enthroned upon seats of gold, standing in ivory niches,--they dream, voyage, command, drink wine, respire the breath of flowers. Dancing girls whirl in the dance; giants pursue monsters; at the entrances of grottoes solitaries meditate. Eyes cannot be distinguished from stars; nor clouds from banderolles; peacocks quench their thirst at rivers of gold dust; the embroidery of pavilions seems to blend with the spots of leopards; coloured rays intercross in the blue air, together with flying arrows, and swinging censers._ _And all this develops like a lofty frieze, resting its base upon the rocks, and rising to the sky._) ANTHONY (_dazzled by the sight_). "How vast is their number! What do they seek?" HILARION. "The god who rubs his abdomen with his elephant-trunk, is the solar Deity, the inspiring spirit of wisdom. "That other whose six heads are crowned with towers, and whose fourteen arms wield javelins,--is the prince of armies,--the Fire-Consumer. "The old man riding the crocodile washes the soul of the dead upon the shore. They will be tormented by that black woman with the putrid teeth, who is the Ruler of Hell. "That chariot drawn by red mares, driven by one who has no legs, bears the master of the sun through heaven's azure. The moon-god accompanies him, in a litter drawn by three gazelles. "Kneeling upon the back of a parrot, the Goddess of Beauty presents to Love, her son, her rounded breast. Behold her now, further off, leaping for joy in the meadows. Look! Look! Coiffed with dazzling mitre, she trips lightly over the ears of growing wheat, over the waves; she rises in air, extending her power over all elements. "And among these gods are the Genii of the winds, of the planets, of the months, of the days,--a hundred thousand others;--multiple are their aspects, rapid their transformations. Behold, there is one who changes from a fish into a tortoise: he assumes the form of a boar, the shape of a dwarf." ANTHONY. "Wherefore?" HILARION. "That he may preserve the equilibrium of the universe, and combat the works of evil. But life exhausts itself; forms wear away; and they must achieve progression in their metamorphoses." (_All upon a sudden appears a_ NAKED MAN _seated in the midst of the sand, with legs crossed._) (_A large halo vibrates, suspended in air behind him. The little ringlets of his black hair in which blueish tints shift symmetrically surround a protuberance upon the summit of his skull. His arms, which are very long, hang down against his sides. His two hands rest flat upon his thighs, with the palms open. The soles of his feet are like the faces of two blazing suns; and he remains completely motionless--before Anthony and Hilarion--with all the gods around him, rising in tiers above the rocks, as if upon the benches of some vast circus. His lips, half-open; and he speaks in a deep voice_): "I am the Master of great charities, the succor of all creatures; and not less to the profane than to believers, do I expound the law. "That I might deliver the world, I resolved to be born among men. The gods wept when I departed from them. "I sought me first a woman worthy to give me birth: a woman of warrior race, the wife of a king, exceedingly good, excessively beautiful, with body firm as adamant;--and at time of the full moon, without the auxiliation of any male, I entered her womb. "I issued from it by the right side. Stars stopped in their courses." HILARION (_murmurs between his teeth_). "And seeing the star, they rejoiced with exceeding great joy!"[1] (_Anthony watches more attentively._) THE BUDDHA[2] (_continuing_). "From the furthest recesses of the Himalayas, a holy man one hundred years of age, hurried to see me." HILARION. "A man named Simeon ... who should not see death, before he had seen the Christ of the Lord."[3] THE BUDDHA. "I was led unto the schools; and it was found that I knew more than the teachers." HILARION. "... In the midst of the doctors ... and all that heard him were astonished at his wisdom!"[4] (_Anthony makes a sign to Hilarion to be silent._) THE BUDDHA. "Continually did I meditate in the gardens. The shadows of the trees turned with the turning of the sun; but the shadow of that which sheltered me turned not. "None could equal me in the knowledge of the Scriptures, the enumeration of atoms, the conduct of elephants, the working of wax, astronomy, poetry, pugilism, all the exercises and all the arts! "In accordance with custom, I took to myself a wife; and I passed the days in my kingly palace;--clad in pearls, under a rain of perfumes, refreshed by the fans of thirty thousand women,--watching my peoples from the height of my terraces adorned with fringes of resonant bells. "But the sight of the miseries of the world turned me away from pleasure. I fled. "I begged my way upon the high roads, clad myself in rags gathered within the sepulchres;--and, hearing of a most learned hermit, I chose to become his slave. I guarded his gate! I washed his feet. "Thus I annihilated all sensation, all joy, all languor. "Then, concentrating my thoughts within vaster meditation, I learned to know the essence of things, the illusion of forms. "Soon I exhausted the science of the Brahmans. They are gnawed by covetousness and desire under their outward aspect of austerity; they daub themselves with filth, they live upon thorns,--hoping to arrive at happiness by the path of death!" HILARION.... "Pharisees, hypocrites, whited sepulchres, generation of vipers!" THE BUDDHA. "I also accomplished wondrous things,--eating but one grain of rice each day (and the grains of rice in those times were no larger than at present)--my hair fell off; my body became black; my eyes receding within their sockets, seemed even as stars beheld at the bottom of a well. "During six years I kept myself motionless, exposed to the flies, the lions and the serpents; and the great summer suns, the torrential rains, lightnings and snows, hails and tempests,--all of these I endured without even the shelter of my lifted hand. "The travellers who passed by, believing me dead, cast clods of earth upon me! "Only the temptation of the Devil remained! "I summoned him. "His sons came,--hideous, scale-covered, nauseous as charnel-houses,--shrieking, hissing, bellowing; interclashing their panoplies, rattling together the bones of dead men. Some belched flame through their nostrils; some made darkness about me with their wings; some wore chaplets of severed fingers; some drank serpent-venom from the hollows of their hands;--they were swine-headed; they were rhinoceros-headed or toad-headed; they assumed all forms that inspire loathing or affright." ANTHONY (_to himself_). "I also endured all that in other days!" THE BUDDHA. "Then did he send me his daughters--beautiful with daintily painted faces, and wearing girdles of gold. Their teeth were whiter than the jasmine-flower; their thighs round as the trunk of an elephant. Some extended their arms and yawned, that they might so display the dimples of their elbows; some winked their eyes; some laughed; some half-opened their garments. There were blushing virgins, matrons replete with dignity, queens who came with great trains of baggage and of slaves." ANTHONY (_aside_). "Ah! he too ..." THE BUDDHA. "Having vanquished the Demon, I nourished myself for twelve years with perfumes only;--and as I had acquired the five virtues, the five faculties, the ten forces, the eighteen substances, and had entered into the four spheres of the invisible world, Intelligence became mine! I became the Buddha." [Illustration: Intelligence became mine! I became the Buddha.] (_All the gods bow themselves down. Those having several heads, bend them all simultaneously. He lifts his mighty hand aloft, and resumes_:) "That I might effect the deliverance of beings, I have made hundreds of thousands of sacrifices! To the poor I gave robes of silk, beds, chariots, houses, heaps of gold and of diamonds. I gave my hands to the one-handed, my legs to the lame, my eyes to the blind;--even my head I severed for the sake of the decapitated. In the day that I was King, I gave away provinces;--when I was a Brahman I despised no one. When I was a solitary, I spake kindly words to the robber who slew me. When I was a tiger I allowed myself to die of hunger. "And having, in this last existence, preached the law, nothing now remains for me to do. The great period is accomplished! Men, animals, the gods, the bamboos, the oceans, the mountains, the sand-grains of the Ganges, together with the myriad myriads of the stars,--all shall die;--and until the time of the new births, a flame shall dance upon the wrecks of worlds destroyed!" (_Then a great dizziness comes upon the gods. They stagger, fall into convulsions, and vomit forth their existences. Their crowns burst apart; their banners fly away. They tear off their attributes, their sexes, fling over their shoulders the cups from which they quaffed immortality, strangle themselves with their serpents, vanish in smoke;--and when all have disappeared_ ...) HILARION (_solemnly exclaims_): "Thou hast even now beheld the belief of many hundreds of millions of men." (_Anthony is prostrate upon the ground, covering his face with his hands. Hilarion, with his back turned to the cross, stands near him and watches him._ _A considerable time elapses._ _Then a singular being appears--having the head of a man upon the body of a fish. He approaches through the air, upright, beating the sand from time to time with his tail; and the patriarchal aspect of his face by contrast with his puny little arms, causes Anthony to laugh._) OANNES (_in a plaintive voice_): "Respect me! I am the contemporary of beginnings. "I dwelt in that formless world where hermaphroditic creatures slumbered, under the weight of an opaque atmosphere, in the deeps of dark waters--when fingers, fins, and wings were blended, and eyes without heads were floating like mollusks, among human-headed bulls, and dog-footed serpents. [Illustration: ... and eyes without heads were floating like mollusks] "Above the whole of these beings, OMOROCA, bent like a hoop, extended her woman-body. But Belus cleft her in two halves; with one he made the earth; with the other, heaven;--and the two equal worlds do mutually contemplate each other. "I, the first consciousness of CHAOS, arose from the abyss that I might harden matter, and give a law unto forms:--also I taught men to fish and to sow: I gave them knowledge of writing, and of the history of the gods. [Illustration: I, the first consciousness of Chaos, arose from the abyss that I might harden matter, and give a law unto forms ...] "Since then I have dwelt in the deep pools left by the Deluge. But the desert grows vaster about them; the winds cast sand into them; the sun devours them;--and I die upon my couch of slime, gazing at the stars through the water. Thither I return!" (_He leaps and disappears in the Nile._) HILARION. "That is an ancient God of the Chaldæans!" ANTHONY (_ironically_). "What, then, were those of Babylon?" HILARION. "Thou canst behold them!" (_And they find themselves upon the platform of a lofty quadrangular tower dominating six other towers, which, narrowing as they rise, form one monstrous pyramid. Far below a great black mass is visible--the city, doubtless--extending over the plains. The air is cold; the sky darkly blue; multitudes of stars palpitate above._ _In the midst of the platform rises a column of white stone. Priests in linen robes pass and repass around it, so as to describe by their evolutions a moving circle; and with faces uplifted, they gaze upon the stars._ ...) HILARION. (_pointing out several of these stars to Anthony_): "There are thirty principal stars. Fifteen look upon the upper side of the earth; fifteen below. At regular intervals one shoots from the upper regions to those below; while another abandons the inferior deeps to rise to sublime altitudes ... "Of the seven planets, two are beneficent; two evil; three ambiguous:--all things in the world depend upon the influence of these eternal fires. According to their position or movement presages may be drawn;--and here thou dost tread the most venerable place upon earth. Here Pythagoras and Zoroaster have met;--here for twelve thousand years these men have observed the skies that they might better learn to know the gods." ANTHONY. "The stars are not gods." HILARION. "Aye, they say the stars are gods; for all things about us pass away;--the heavens only remain immutable as eternity." ANTHONY. "Yet there is a master!" HILARION (_pointing to the column_): "He! Belus!--the first ray, the Sun, the Male! The Other, whom he fecundates, is beneath him!" (_Anthony beholds a garden, illuminated by lamps_: _He finds himself in the midst of the crowd, in an avenue of cypress-trees. To right and left are little pathways leading to huts constructed within a wood of pomegranate trees, and enclosed by treillages of bamboo._ _Most of the men wear pointed caps, and garments bedizened like the plumage of a peacock. But there are also people from the North clad in bearskins, nomads wearing mantles of brown wool, pallid Gangarides with long earrings;--and there seems to be as much confusion of rank as there is confusion of nations; for sailors and stone-cutters elbow the princes who wear tiaras blazing with carbuncles and who carry long canes with carven knobs. All proceed upon their way with dilated nostrils, absorbed by the same desire._ _From time to time, they draw aside to make way for some long covered wagon drawn by oxen, or some ass jolting upon his back a woman bundled up in thick veils, who finally disappears in the direction of the cabins._ _Anthony feels afraid; he half-resolves to turn back. But an unutterable curiosity takes possession of him, and draws him on._ _At the foot of the cypress-trees there are ranks of women squatting upon deerskins, all wearing in lieu of diadem, a plaited fillet of ropes. Some, magnificently attired, loudly call upon the passers-by. Others, more timid, seek to veil their faces with their arms, while some matron standing behind them, their mother doubtless, exhorts them. Others, their heads veiled with a black shawl, and their bodies entirely nude, seem from afar off to be statues of flesh. As soon as a man has thrown some money upon their knees, they arise._ _And the sound of kisses is heard under the foliage,--sometimes a great sharp cry._) HILARION. "These are the virgins of Babylon, who prostitute themselves to the goddess." ANTHONY. "What goddess?" HILARION. "Behold her!" (_And he shows him at the further end of the avenue, upon the threshold of an illuminated grotto, a block of stone representing a woman._) ANTHONY. "Ignominy!--how abominable to give a sex to God!" HILARION. "Thou thyself dost figure him in thy mind as a living person!" (_Anthony again finds himself in darkness._ _He beholds in the air a luminous circle, poised upon horizontal wings. This ring of light, girdles like a loose belt, the waist of a little man wearing a mitre upon his head and carrying a wreath in his hand. The lower part of his figure is completely concealed by immense feathers outspreading about him like a petticoat._ _It is_--ORMUZD--_the God of the Persians. He hovers in the air above, crying aloud_:) "I fear! I can see his monstrous jaws! I did vanquish thee, O Ahriman! But again thou dost war against me. "First revolting against me, thou didst destroy the eldest of creatures, Kaiomortz, the Man-Bull. Then didst thou seduce the first human couple, Meschia and Meschiané; and thou didst fill all hearts with darkness, thou didst urge thy battalions against heaven! "I also had mine own, the people of the stars; and from the height of my throne I contemplated the marshalling of the astral hosts. "Mithra, my son, dwelt in heavens inaccessible. There he received souls, from thence did he send them forth; and he arose each morning to pour forth the abundance of his riches. "The earth reflected the splendour of the firmament. Fire blazed upon the crests of the mountains,--symbolizing that other fire of which I had created all creatures. And that the holy flame might not be polluted, the bodies of the dead were not burned; the beaks of birds carried them aloft toward heaven. "I gave to men the laws regulating pastures, labour, the choice of wood for the sacrifices, the form of cups, the words to be uttered in hours of sleeplessness;--and my priests unceasingly offered up prayers, so that worship might be as the eternity of God in its endlessness. Men purified themselves with water; loaves were offered upon the altars, sins were confessed aloud. "Homa[5] gave himself to men to be drank, that they might have his strength communicated to them while the Genii of heaven were combating the demons, the children of Iran were pursuing the serpents. The King, whom an innumerable host of courtiers served upon their knees, represented me in his person, and wore my coiffure. His gardens had the magnificence of a heaven upon earth; and his tomb represented him in the act of slaying a monster,--emblem of Good destroying Evil. "For it was destined that I should one day definitely conquer Ahriman, by the aid of Time-without-limits. "But the interval between us disappears;--the deep night rises! To me! ye Amschaspands, ye Izeds, ye Ferouers! Succor me, Mithra! seize thy sword! And thou, Kaosyac, who shall return for the universal deliverance, defend me! What!--none to aid! Ah! I die! Thou art the victor, Ahriman!" (_Hilarion, standing behind Anthony, restrains a cry of joy;--and_ ORMUZD _is swallowed up in the darkness._) (_Then appears_:) THE GREAT DIANA OF EPHESUS (_black with enamelled eyes, her elbows pressed to her side, her forearms extended, with hands open._ _Lions crawl upon her shoulders; fruits, flowers, and stars intercross upon her bosom; further down three rows of breasts appear; and from her belly to her feet she is covered with a tightly fitting sheath from which bulls, stags, griffins, and bees, seem about to spring, their bodies half-protruding from it. She is illuminated by the white light emanating from a disk of silver, round as the full moon, placed behind her head._) "Where is my temple? Where are my Amazons? "What is this I feel?--I, the Incorruptible!--a strange faintness comes upon me!"... (_Her flowers wither, her over-ripe fruits become detached and fall. The lions and the bulls hang their heads; the deer foam at the mouth, with a slimy foam, as though exhausted; the buzzing bees die upon the ground._ _She presses her breasts, one after the other. All are empty! But under a desperate effort her sheath bursts. She seizes it by the bottom, like the skirt of a robe, throws her animals, her fruits, her flowers, into it,--then withdraws into the darkness._ _And afar off there are voices, murmuring, growling, roaring, bellowing, belling. The density of the night is augmented by breaths. Drops of warm rain fall._) ANTHONY. "How sweet the odour of the palm trees, the trembling of leaves, the transparency of springs! I feel the desire to lie flat upon the Earth that I might feel her against my heart; and my life would be reinvigorated by her eternal youth!" (_He hears the sound of castanets and of cymbals; and men appear, clad in white tunics with red stripes,--leading through the midst of a rustic crowd an ass, richly harnessed, its tail decorated with knots of ribbons, and its hoofs painted._ _A box, covered with a saddle-cloth[6] of yellow material shakes to and fro upon its back, between two baskets,--one receives the offerings contributed,--eggs, grapes, pears, cheeses, fowls, little coins; and the other basket is full of roses, which the leaders of the ass pluck to pieces as they walk before the animal, shedding the leaves upon the ground._ _They wear earrings and large mantles; their locks are plaited, their cheeks painted, olive-wreaths are fastened upon their foreheads by medallions bearing figurines;--all wear poniards in their belts, and brandish ebony-handled whips, having three thongs to which osselets are attached._[7] _Those who form the rear of the procession, place upon the soil,--so as to remain upright as a candelabrum,--a tall pine, which burns at its summit, and shades under its lower branches a lamb._ _The ass halts. The saddle-cloth is removed. Underneath appears a second covering of black felt. Then one of the men in white tunics begins to dance, rattling his crotali;--another, kneeling before the box, beats a tambourine and_--) THE OLDEST OF THE BAND, _begins_:-- "Here is the Good Goddess, the Idæan of the mountains, the Great Mother of Syria! Come ye hither, good people all! [Illustration: Here is the Good Goddess, the Idæan of the mountains ...] "She gives joy to men, she heals the sick; she sends inheritances; she satisfies the hunger of love! "We bear her through the land, rain or shine, in fair weather, or in foul. "Oft times we lie in the open air, and our table is not always well served. Robbers dwell in the woods. Wild beasts rush from their caverns. Slippery paths border the precipices. Behold her! behold her!" (_They lift off the covering; and a box is seen, inlaid with little pebbles._) "Loftier than the cedars, she looks down from the blue ether. Vaster than the wind she encircles the world. Her breath is exhaled by the nostrils of tigers; the rumbling of her voice is heard beneath the volcanoes; her wrath is the tempest; the pallor of her face has whitened the moon. She ripens the harvest; by her the tree-bark swells with sap; she makes the beard to grow. Give her something; for she hates the avaricious!" (_The box opens; and under a little pavilion of blue silk appears a small image of Cybele--glittering with spangles, crowned with towers, and seated in a chariot of red stone, drawn by two lions, with uplifted paws._ _The crowd presses forward to see._) THE ARCHIGALLUS (_continues_): "She loves the sound of resounding tympanums, the echo of dancing feet, the howling of wolves, the sonorous mountains and the deep gorges, the flower of the almond tree, the pomegranate and the green fig, the whirling dance, the snoring flute, the sugary sap, the salty tear,--blood! To thee, to thee!--Mother of the mountains!" (_They scourge themselves with their whips; and their chests resound with the blows;--the skins of the tambourines vibrate almost to bursting. They seize their knives; they gash their arms._) "She is sorrowful; let us be sorrowful! Thereby your sins will be remitted. Blood purifies all--fling its red drops abroad like blossoms! She, the Great Mother, demands the blood of another creature--of a pure being!" (_The Archigallus raises his knife above the head of a lamb._) ANTHONY (_seized with horror_): "Do not slay the lamb!" (_There is a gush of purple blood. The priest sprinkles the crowd with it; and all--including Anthony and Hilarion--standing around the burning tree, silently watch the last palpitations of the victim._ _A Woman comes forth from the midst of the priests; she resembles exactly the image within the little box._ _She pauses, perceiving before her a Young Man wearing a Phrygian cap. His thighs are covered with a pair of narrow trousers, with lozenge-shaped openings here and there at regular intervals, closed by bow knots of coloured material. He stands in an attitude of languor, resting his elbow against a branch of the tree, holding a flute in his hand._) CYBELE (_flinging her arms about his waist_). "I have traversed all regions of the earth to join thee--and famine ravaged the fields Thou hast deceived me! It matters not! I love thee! Warm my body in thine embrace! Let us be united!" ATYS. "The springtime will never again return, O eternal Mother! Despite my love, it is no longer possible for me to penetrate thy essence! Would that I might cover myself with a painted robe like thine! I envy thy breasts, swelling with milk, the length of thy tresses, thy vast flanks that have borne and brought forth all creatures! Why am I not thou?--Why am I not a woman?--No, never! depart from me! My virility fills me with horror!" (_With a sharp stone he dismembers himself, and runs furiously from her ..._ _The priests imitate the god; the faithful do even as the priests. Men and women exchange garments, embrace;--and the tumult of bleeding flesh passes away, while the sound of voices remaining, becomes even more strident,--like the shrieking of mourners, like the voices heard at funerals._ _ ... A huge catafalque, hung with purple, supports upon its summit an ebony bed, surrounded by torches and baskets of silver filagree, in which are verdant leaves of lettuce, mallow and fennel. Upon the steps of the construction, from summit to base, sit women all clad in black, with loosened girdles and bare feet, holding in their hands with a melancholy air, great bouquets of flowers._ _At each corner of the estrade urns of alabaster, filled with myrrh, slowly send up their smoke._ _Upon the bed can be perceived the corpse of a man. Blood flows from his thigh. One of his arms hangs down lifelessly;--and a dog licks his finger nails and howls._ _The row of torches placed closely together, prevents his face from being seen; and Anthony feels a strange anguish within him. He fears lest he should recognize some one._ _The sobs of the women cease--and after an interval of silence_,) ALL (_psalmody together_): "Fair! fair!--all fair he is! Thou hast slept enough!--lift thy head!--arise! "Inhale the perfume of our flowers--narcissus--blossoms and anemones, gathered in thine own gardens to please thee. Arouse thee! thou dost make us fear for thee! "Speak to us! What dost thou desire? Wilt thou drink wine?--wilt thou lie in our beds?--dost wish to eat the honeycakes which have the form of little birds? "Let us press his lips,--kiss his breast! Now!--now!--dost thou not feel our ring-laden fingers passing over thy body?--and our lips that seek thy mouth?--and our tresses that sweep thy thighs? O faint God, deaf to our prayers!" (_They cry aloud, and rend their faces with their nails; then all rush,--and the howling of the dog continues in the silence._) "Alas! alas! Woe!--the black blood trickles over his snowy flesh! See! his knees writhe!--his sides sink in! The bloom of his face hath dampened the purple. He is dead, dead! O weep for him! Lament for him!" (_In long procession they ascend to lay between the torches the offerings of their several tresses, that seem from afar off like serpents, black or blond;--and the catafalque is lowered gently to the level of, a grotto,--the opening of a shadowy sepulchre that yawns behind it._ _Then_--) A WOMAN (_bends over the corpse. Her long hair, uncut, envelopes her from head to feet. She sheds tears so abundantly that her grief cannot be as that of the others, but more than human--infinite!_ _Anthony dreams of the Mother of Jesus. She speaks_:--) "Thou didst emerge from the Orient, and didst take me, all trembling with the dew, into thy arms, O Sun! Doves fluttered upon the azure of thy mantle; our kisses evoked low breezes among the foliage; and I abandoned myself wholly to thy love, delighting in the pleasure of my weakness. "Alas! alas--Why didst thou depart, to run upon the mountains! A boar did wound thee at the time of the autumnal equinox! "Thou art dead; and the fountains weep,--the trees bend down. The wind of winter whistles through the naked brushwood. "My eyes are about to close, seeing that darkness covers them! Now thou dwellest in the underworld near the mightiest of my rivals. "O Persephone, all that is beautiful descends to thee, never to return!" (_Even while she speaks, her companions lift the dead, to place him within the sepulchre. He remains in their hands! It was only a waxen corpse._ _Wherefore Anthony feels something resembling relief._ _All vanish;--and the hut, the rocks, and the cross reappear._ _But upon the other side of the Nile, Anthony beholds a Woman, standing in the midst of the desert._ _She retains in her hand the lower part of a long black veil that hides all her face; supporting with her left arm a little child to whom she is giving suck. A great ape crouches down in the sand beside her._ _She uplifts her head toward heaven; and in spite of the great distance, her voice is distinctly heard_:) ISIS. "O Neith, Beginning of all things! Ammon, Lord of Eternity; Pthah, demiurgos; Thoth, his intelligence; gods of the Amenthi, particular triads of the Nomes,--falcons in the azure of heaven, sphinxes before the temples, ibises perched between the horns of oxen, planets, constellations, shore, murmurs of the wind, gleams of the light,--tell me where I may find Osiris. "I have sought him in all the canals and all the lakes--aye, further yet, even to Ph[oe]nician Byblos. Anubis, with ears pricked up, leaped about me, and yelped, and thrust his muzzle searchingly into the tufts of the tamarinds. "Thanks, good Cynocephalos--thanks to thee!" (_She gives the ape two or three friendly little taps upon the head._) "Hideous Typhon, the red-haired slew him, tore him in pieces! We have found all his members. But I have not that which rendered me fecund!" (_She utters wild lamentations._) ANTHONY (_is filled with fury. He casts stones at her, reviles her._) "Begone! thou shameless one!--Begone!" HILARION. "Nay! respect her! Her religion was the faith of thy fathers!--thou didst wear her amulets when thou wert a child in the cradle!" ISIS. "In the summers of long ago, the inundation drove the impure beasts into the desert. The dykes were opened, the boats dashed against each other; the panting earth drank the river with the intoxication of joy. Then, O God, with the horns of the bull, thou didst lie upon my breast, and then was heard, the lowings of the Eternal Cow! "The seasons of sowing and reaping, of threshing and of vintage, followed each other in regular order with the years. In the eternal purity of the nights, broad stars beamed and glowed. The days were bathed in never-varying splendour. Like a royal couple the Sun and the Moon appeared simultaneously, at either end of the horizon. "Then did we both reign above a sublimer world, twin-monarchs, wedded within, the womb of eternity--he bearing a concupha-headed sceptre; I, the sceptre that is tipped with a lotus-flower; both of us erect with hands joined; and the crumblings of empires affected not our attitude. "Egypt extended, below us, monumental and awful, long-shaped like the corridor of a temple; with obelisks on the right, pyramids on the left, and its labyrinth in the midst. And everywhere were avenues of monsters, forests of columns, massive pylons flanking gates summit-crowned with the mysterious globe--the globe of the world, between two wings. "The animals of her Zodiac also existed in her pasture lands; and filled her mysterious writing with their forms and colours. Divided into twelve regions as the year is divided into-twelve months--each month, each day also having its own god--she reproduced the immutable order of heaven. And man even in dying changed not his face; but saturated with perfumes, invulnerable to decay, he lay down to sleep for three thousand years in another and silent Egypt. "And that Egypt, vaster than the Egypt of the living, extended beneath the earth. "Thither one descended by dark stairways leading into halls where were represented the joys of the good, the tortures of the wicked, all that passes in the third and invisible world. Ranged along the wall the dead in their painted coffins awaited their turn; and the soul, exempted from migrations, continued its heavy slumber until the awakening into a new life. "Nevertheless, Osiris sometimes came to see me. And by his ghost I became the mother of Harpocrates." (_She contemplates the child._) "Aye! it is he. Those are his eyes; those are his locks, plaited into ram horns! Thou shalt recommence his works. We shall bloom again like the lotus. I am still the Great Isis!--none has yet lifted my veil! My fruit is the Sun! [Illustration: I am still the Great Isis!�none has yet lifted my veil! My fruit is the Sun!] "Sim of Springtime, clouds now obscure thy face! The breath of Typhon devours the pyramids. But a little while ago I beheld the Sphinx flee away. He was galloping like a jackal. "I look for my priests,--my priests clad in mantles of linen, with their great harps, and bearing a mysterious bark, adorned with silver pateras. There are no more festivals upon the lakes!--no more illuminations in my delta!--no more cups of milk at Philæ! Apis has long ceased to reappear. "Egypt! Egypt! thy great motionless gods have their shoulders already whitened by the dung of birds; and the wind that passes over the desert rolls with it and the ashes of thy dead!--Anubis, guardian of ghosts, abandon me not!" (_The Cynocephalos has vanished. She shakes her child._) "But ... what ails thee ... thy hands are cold, thy head droops!" (_Harpocrates expires. Then she cries aloud with a cry so piercing, funereal, heart-rending, that Anthony answers it with another cry, extending his arms as to support her._ _She is no longer there. He lowers his face, overwhelmed by shame._ _All that he has seen becomes confused within his mind. It is like the bewilderment of travel, the illness of drunkenness. He wishes to hate; but a vague and vast pity fills his heart. He begins to weep, and weeps abundantly._) HILARION. "What makes thee sorrowful?" ANTHONY (_after having long sought within himself for a reply_): "I think of all the souls that have been lost through these false gods!" HILARION. "Dost thou not think that they ... sometimes ... bear much resemblance to the TRUE?" ANTHONY. "That is but a device of the Devil to seduce the faithful more easily. He attacks the strong through the mind, the weak through the flesh." HILARION. "But luxury, in its greatest fury, has all the disinterestedness of penitence. The frenzied love of the body accelerates the destruction thereof,--and proclaims the extent of the impossible by the exposition of the body's weakness." ANTHONY. "What signifies that to me! My heart sickens with disgust of these beautiful bestial gods, forever busied with carnages and incests!" HILARION. "Yet recollect all those things in the Scripture which scandalize thee because thou art unable to comprehend them! So also may these Gods conceal under their sinful forms some mighty truth. There are more of them yet to be seen. Look around!" ANTHONY. "No, no!--it is dangerous!" HILARION. "But a little while ago thou didst desire to know them! Is it because thy faith might vacillate in the presence of lies? What fearest thou?" (_The rocks fronting Anthony have become as a mountain. A line of clouds obscures the mountain half way between summit and base; and above the clouds appears another mountain, enormous, all green, unequally hollowed by valleys nestling in its slopes, and supporting at its summit, in the midst of laurel-groves a palace of bronze, roofed with tiles of gold, and supported by columns having capitals of ivory._ _In the centre of the peristyle Jupiter,--colossal, with torso nude,--holds Victory in one hand, his thunderbolts in the other; and his eagle, perched between his feet, rears its head._ _Juno, seated near him, rolls her large eyes, beneath a diadem whence her wind-blown veil escapes like a vapour._ _Behind them, Minerva, standing upon a pedestal, leans on her spear. The skin of the Gorgon covers her breast, and a linen peplos falls in regular folds to the nails of her toes. Her glaucous eyes, which gleam beneath her vizor, gaze afar off, attentively._ _On the right of the palace, the aged Neptune bestrides a dolphin beating with its fins a vast azure expanse which may be sea or sky, for the perspective of the Ocean seems a continuation of the blue ether: the two elements are interblended._ _On the other side weird Pluto in night-black mantle, crowned with diamond tiara and bearing a sceptre of ebony, sits in the midst of an islet surrounded by the circumvolutions of the Styx;--and this river of shadow empties itself into the darknesses, which form a vast black gulf below the cliff,--a bottomless abyss!_ _Mars, clad in brass, brandishes as in wrath his broad shield and his sword._ _Hercules, leaning upon his club, gazes at him from below._ _Apollo, his face ablaze with light, grasps with outstretched right arm the reins of four white horses urged to a gallop; and Ceres in her ox-drawn chariot advances toward him with a sickle in her hand._ _Behind her comes Bacchus, riding in a very low chariot, gently drawn by lynxes. Plump and beardless, with vine leaves garlanding his brow, he passes by holding in his hand an overflowing cup of wine. Silenus riding beside him reels upon his ass. Pan of the pointed ears, blows upon his syrinx; the Mimalonæides beat drums; the Mænads strew flowers; the Bacchantes turn in the dance with heads thrown back and hair dishevelled._ _Diana, with tunic tucked up, issues from the wood together with her nymphs._ _At the further end of a cavern, Vulcan among his Cabiri, hammers the heated iron; here and there the aged Rivers leaning recumbent upon green rocks pour water from their urns; the Muses stand singing in the valleys_. _The Hours, all of equal stature, link hands; and Mercury poses obliquely upon a rainbow, with his caduceus, winged sandals, and winged petasus._ _But at the summit of the stairway of the Gods,--among clouds soft as down, from whose turning volutes a rain of roses falls,--Venus Anadyomene stands gazing at herself in a mirror:--her eyes move languorously beneath their slumbrous lids._ _She has masses of rich blond hair rolling down over her shoulders; her breasts are small; her waist is slender; her hips curve out like the sweeping curves of a lyre; her thighs are perfectly rounded; there are dimples about her knees; her feet are delicate: a butterfly hovers near her mouth. The splendour of her body makes a nacreous-tinted halo of bright light about her; while all the rest of Olympus is bathed in a pink dawn, rising gradually to the heights of the blue sky._) ANTHONY. "Ah! my heart swells! A joy never known before thrills me to the depths of my soul! How beautiful, how beautiful it is!" HILARION. "They leaned from the heights of cloud to direct the way of swords; one used to meet them upon the high roads; men had them in their houses--and this familiarity divinized life. "Life's aim was only to be free and beautiful. Nobility of attitude was facilitated by the looseness of garments. The voice of the orator, trained by the sea, rolled its sonorous waves against the porticoes of marble. The ephebus, anointed with oil, wrestled all naked in the full light of the sun. The holiest of actions was to expose perfection of forms to all. "And these men respected wives, aged men, suppliants. "Behind the temple of Hercules there was an altar erected to Pity. "Victims were immolated with flowers wreathed about the fingers of the sacrificer. Even memory was exempted from thoughts of the rottenness of death. Nothing remained but a little pile of ashes. And the Soul, mingling with the boundless ether, rose up to God." (_Bending to whisper in Anthony's ear_:--) "And they still live! The Emperor Constantine adores Apollo. Thou wilt find the Trinity in Samothracian mysteries,--baptism in the religion of Isis,--redemption in the faith of Mithra,--a martyrdom of a God in the festivals of Bacchus. Prosperpine is the Virgin!... Aristæus is Jesus!" ANTHONY (_remains awhile with downcast eyes, as if in deep thought; then suddenly repeats aloud the Symbol of Jerusalem, as he remembers it, uttering a long sigh between each phrase_):-- "I believe in one only God, the Father,--and in one only Lord, Jesus Christ,--the first born son of God, who was incarnated and made man,--who was crucified, and buried,--who ascended into Heaven,--who will come to judge the living and the dead,--of whose Kingdom there shall be no end;--and in one Holy Spirit,--and in one baptism of repentance,--and in one Holy Catholic Church,--and in the resurrection of the flesh,--and in the life everlasting!" (_Immediately the cross becomes loftier and loftier; it pierces the clouds, and casts its shadow upon the heaven of the gods._ _All grow pale;--Olympus shudders._ _And at its base Anthony beholds vast bodies enchained, sustaining the rocks upon their shoulders,--giant figures half buried in the deeps of caverns. These are the Titans, the Giants, the Hecatonchires, the Cyclops._) A VOICE (_rises, indistinct and awful, like the far roar of leaves, like the voice of forests in time of tempest, like the mighty moaning of the wind among the precipices_): "We knew these things!--we knew them! There must come an end even for the Gods! Uranus was mutilated by Saturn,--Saturn by Jupiter. And Jupiter himself shall be annihilated. Each in his turn;--it is Destiny!" (_And little by little they sink into the mountain, and disappear._ _Meanwhile the golden tiles of the palace rise and fly away._) JUPITER (_has descended from his throne. At his feet the thunderbolts lie, smoking like burning coals about to expire;--and the great eagle bends its neck to pick up its falling feathers_): "Then I am no longer the master of all things,--most holy, most mighty, god of the phatrias and Greek peoples,--ancestor of all the Kings,--Agamemnon of heaven. "Eagle of apotheoses, what wind from Erebus has wafted thee to me? or, fleeing from the Campus Martins, dost thou bear me the soul of the last of the Emperors? "I no longer desire to receive those of men. Let the Earth keep them; and let them move upon the level of its baseness. Their hearts are now the hearts of slaves;--they forget injuries, forget their ancestors, forget their oaths,--and everywhere the folly of crowds, the mediocrity of individuals, the hideousness of races, hold sway!" (_He pants with such violence that his sides seem ready to burst asunder; he clenches his hands. Weeping_, HEBE _offers him a cup. He seizes it._) "No, no! So long as there shall be a brain enclosing a thought, in whatsoever part of the world;--so long as there shall exist a mind hating disorder, creating LAW,--so long will the spirit of Jupiter live!" (_But the cup is empty. He turns its edge down over his thumbnail._) "Not one drop left! When the ambrosia fails, the Immortals must indeed depart!" (_The cup drops from his hands; and he leans against a column, feeling himself about to die._) JUNO. "Thou shouldst not have had so many amours! Eagle, bull, swan, rain of gold, cloud and flame, thou didst assume all forms,--dissipate thy light in all elements,--lose thy hair upon all beds! This time the divorce is irrevocable; and our domination, our very existence, dissolved." (_She passes away in air._) MINERVA (_has no longer her spear; and the ravens nesting among the sculptures of the friezes, wheel about her, peeking at her helmet._) "Let me see whether my vessels cleave the bright sea, returning to my three ports,--let me discover why the fields are deserted, and learn what the daughters of Athens are now doing. "In the month of Hecatombeon my whole people came to worship me, under the guidance of their magistrates and priests. Then, all in white robes and wearing chitons of gold, they advanced the long line of virgins bearing cups, baskets, parasols; then the three hundred sacrificial oxen, and the old men having green boughs, the soldiers with clashing of armour, the ephebi singing hymns, flute players, lyre players, rhapsodists, dancing women;--and lastly attached to the mast of a trireme mounted upon wheel, my great veil embroidered by virgins who had been nourished in a particular way for a whole year. And when it had been displayed in all the streets, in all the squares, and before the temples, in the midst of the ever-chanting procession, it was borne step by step up the hill of the Acropolis, grazed the Propylæa, and entered the Parthenon.... "But a strange feebleness comes upon me,--me the Industrious One! What! what! not one idea comes to me! Lo! I am trembling more than a woman!" (_She turns, beholds a ruin behind her, utters a cry, and stricken by a fallen fragment, falls backward upon the ground._) HERCULES (_has flung away his lion-skin; and with feet firmly braced, back arched, teeth clenched, he exhausts himself in immeasurable efforts to bear up the mass of crumbling Olympus._) "I vanquished the Cercopes, the Amazons, and the Centaurs. Many were the kings I slew. I broke the horn of the great river, Achelous. I cut the mountains asunder; I freed nations from slavery; and I peopled lands that were desolate. I travelled through the countries of Gaul; I traversed the deserts where thirst prevails. I defended the gods from their enemies; and I freed myself from Omphale. But the weight of Olympus is too great for me. My arms grow feebler:--I die!" (_He is crushed beneath the ruins._) PLUTO. "It is thy fault, Amphytrionad;--wherefore didst thou descend into my empire? "The vulture that gnaws the entrails of Tityus lifted its head;--the lips of Tantalus were moistened;--the wheel of Ixion stopped. "Meanwhile the Kæres extended their claws to snatch back the escaping ghosts; the Furies tore the serpents of their locks; and Cerberus fettered by thee with a chain, sounded the death rattle in his throat, and foamed at all his three mouths. "Thou didst leave the gate ajar; others have come. The daylight of men has entered into Tartarus!" (_He sinks into the darkness._) NEPTUNE. "My trident can no longer call up the tempests. The monsters that terrified of old, lie rotting at the bottom of the sea. "Amphitrite whose white feet tripped lightly over the foam, the green Nereids seen afar off in the horizon, the scaly Sirens who stopped the passing vessels to tell stories, and the ancient Tritons mightily blowing upon their shells, all have passed away. All is desolate and dead; the gaiety of the great Sea is no more!" (_He vanishes beneath the azure._) DIANA (_clad in black and surrounded by her dogs, which have been changed into wolves_). "The freedom of the deep forests once intoxicated me; the odours of the wild beasts and the exhalations of the marshes made me as one drank with joy. But the women whose maternity I protected, now bring dead children into the world. The moon trembles with the incantations of witches. Desires of violence, of immensity, seize me, fill me! I wish to drink poisons,--to lose myself in vapours, in dreams...!" (_And a passing cloud carries her away._) MARS (_unhelmed and covered with blood_). "At first I fought alone;--singlehanded I would provoke a whole army by my insults,--caring nothing for countries or nations, demanding battle for the pleasure of carnage alone. "Afterward I had comrades. They marched to the sound of flutes, in good order, with equal step, respiring above their bucklers, with plumes loftily nodding, lances oblique. Then on rushed to battle with mighty eagle cries. War was joyous as a banquet. Three hundred men strove against all Asia. "But the Barbarians are returning;--by myriads they come, by millions! Ah! since numbers, and engines, and cunning are stronger than valour, it were better that I die the death of the brave!" (_He kills himself._) VULCAN (_sponging the sweat from his limbs_): "The world is growing cold. The source of heat must be nourished, the volcanoes and rivers of flowing metal underground. Strike harder!--with full swing of the arms,--with might and main!" (_The Cabiri wound themselves with their hammers, blind themselves with sparks, and groping, lose themselves in the darkness._) CERES (_standing in her chariot, impelled by wheels having wings at their hubs_): "Stop! Stop! Ah! it was with good reason that the exclusion of strangers, atheists, Epicureans, and Christians was commended! Now the mystery of the basket has been unveiled; the sanctuary profaned: all is lost!" (_She descends a precipitous slope--shrieking, despairing, tearing her hair._) "Ah! lies, lies! Daira has not been restored to me. The voice of brass calls me to the dead. This is another Tartarus, whence there is no return! Horror!" (_The abyss engulfs her._) BACCHUS (_with a frenzied laugh_). "What matters it? The Archon's wife is my spouse! The law itself reels in drunkenness! To me the new song, the multiplied forms! "The fire by which my mother was devoured, flows in my veins! Let it burn yet more fiercely, even though I perish! "Male and female, complaisant to all, I abandon myself to you, Bacchantes! I abandon myself to you, Bacchanalians!--and the vine shall twine herself about the tree-trunks! Howl! dance! writhe! Loosen the tiger and the slave!--rend flesh with ferocious bitings!" (_And Pan, Silenus, the Bacchantes, the Mimalonæides, and the Mænads,--with their serpents, torches, sable masks,--cast flowers at each other ... shake their tympanums, strike their thyrsi, pelt each other with shells, devour grapes, strangle a goat, and tear Bacchus asunder._) APOLLO (_furiously whipping his coursers, while his blanching locks are falling from his head_): "I have left far behind me stony Delos, so pure that all now there seems dead; and I must strive to reach Delphi ere its inspiring vapour be wholly lost. The mules browse in its laurel groves. The Pythoness has wandered away, and cannot be found. "By a stronger concentration of my power, I will obtain sublime hymns, eternal monuments; and all matter will be penetrated by the vibrations of my cithara!" (_He strikes the strings of the instrument. They burst, lashing his face with their broken ends. He flings the cithara away; and furiously whipping his quadriga, cries_): "No! enough of forms!--Further, higher!--to the very summit!--to the realm of pure thought!" (_But the horses back, rear, dash the chariot to pieces. Entangled by the harness, caught by the fragments of the broken pole, he falls head foremost into the abyss._ [Illustration: ... he falls head foremost into the abyss.] _The sky is darkened._) VENUS (_blue with cold, shivering_): "Once with my girdle I made all the horizon of Hellas. "Her fields glowed with the roses of my cheeks; her shores were outlined after the fashion of my lips; and her mountains, whiter than my doves, palpitated beneath the hands of the statuaries. My spirit's manifestation was found in the ordinances of the festivals, in the arrangement of coiffures, in the dialogues of philosophers, in the constitution of republics. But I have doted too much upon men! It is Love that has dishonoured me!" (_She casts herself back weeping_): "This world is abominable;--there is no air for me to breathe! "O Mercury, inventor of the lyre, conductor of souls, take me away!" (_She places one finger upon her lips, and describing an immense parabola, falls into the abyss._ _Nothing is now visible. The darkness is complete._ _Only, that from the eyes of Hilarion escape two flashes, two rays of lurid light._) ANTHONY (_begins at last to notice his immense stature_): "Already several times, while thou wert speaking, it seemed to me thou wert growing taller; and it was no illusion! How? Explain to me ... Thy aspect terrifies me!" (_Footsteps are heard approaching._) "What is that?" HILARION (_extending his arm_): "Look!" (_Then, under a pale beam of moonlight, Anthony distinguishes an interminable caravan defiling over the summit of the rocks;--and each voyager, one after the other, falls from the cliff into the gulf below._ _First comes the three great gods of_ Samothrace,--AXIEROS, AXIOKEROS, AXIOKERSA,--_united together as in a fascia, purple-masked, all with hands uplifted._ _Æsculapius advances with a melancholy air, not even perceiving Samos and Telesphorus, who question him with gestures of anguish._ ELEAN SOSIPOLIS, _of python-form, rolls his coils toward the abyss._ DOSIPOENA, _becomes dizzy, leaps in of her own accord._ BRITOMARTIS, _shrieking with fear, clutches fast the meshes of her net. The Centaurs come at a wild gallop, and roll pell-mell into the black gulf._ _Behind them, all limping, advance the bands of the mourning Nymphs. Those of the meadows are covered with dust; those of the woods moan and bleed; wounded by the axes of the woodcutters._ _The Gelludes, the Strygii, the Empusæ, all the infernal goddesses, form one pyramid of blended fangs, vipers, and torches;--and seated upon a vulture-skin at its summit, Eurynome, blue as the flies that corrupt meat, devours her own arms._ _Then in one great whirl simultaneously disappear the bloody Orthia, Hymina of Orchomenus, the Laphria of the Patræns, Aphia of Agina, Bendis of Thrace, Stymphalia with thighs like a bird's. Triopas, in lieu of three eyes, has now but three empty orbits. Erichthonius, his legs paralysed, crawls upon his hands like a cripple._) HILARION. "What a pleasure, is it not!--to see them all in the abjection of their death-agony! Climb up here beside me, on this rock; and thou shalt be even as Xerxes, reviewing his army. "Beyond there, very far, dost thou behold that fair-bearded giant, who even now lets fall his sword crimsoned with blood?--that is the Scythian Zalmoxis between two planets,--Artimpasa, Venus, and Orsiloche, the Moon. "Still further away, now emerging from pallid clouds, are the gods whom the Cimmerians adore, even beyond Thule. "Their huge halls were warm, and by the gleam of swords that tapestried the vault, they drank their hydromel from horns of ivory. They ate the liver of the whale in dishes of brass wrought by the hammers of demons; or, betimes, they listened to captive sorcerers whose fingers played upon harps of stone. "They are feeble! They are cold! The snow makes heavy their bearskins; and their feet show through the rents in their sandals. "They weep for the vast fields upon whose grassy knolls they were wont to draw breath in pauses of battle; they weep for the long ships whose prows forced a way through the mountains of ice;--and the skates wherewith they followed the orb of the poles, upbearing at the length of their mighty arms all the firmament that turned with them." (_A gust of frosty wind carries them off. Anthony turns his eyes another way. And he perceives--outlined in black against a red background--certain strange personages, with chinbands and gauntlets, who throw balls at one another, leap over each other's heads, make grimaces, dance a frenzied dance._) HILARION. "Those are the divinities of Etruria, the innumerable Æsars. "There is Tages, by whom augury was invented. With one hand he seeks to augment the divisions of the sky; with the other he supports himself upon the earth: let him sink therein! "Nortia gazes at the wall into which she drave nails to mark the number of the passing years. Its whole surface is now covered; and the period is accomplished. "Like two travellers overtaken by a storm, Kastur and Pulutuk, trembling, seek to shelter themselves beneath the same mantle." ANTHONY (_closes his eyes_): "Enough! Enough!" (_But with a mighty noise of wings, all the Victories of the Capitol pass through the air,--hiding their faces with their hands, dropping the trophies hanging upon their arms._ _Janus,--lord of crepuscules,--flees upon a black ram; and one of his two faces is already putrified; the other slumbers with fatigue._ _Summanus, the headless god of the dark heavens, presses against his heart an odd cake shaped like a wheel._ _Vesta, beneath a ruined cupola, tries to relight her extinguished lamp._ _Bellona gashes her cheeks,--without being able to make that blood flow by which her devotees were purified._) ANTHONY. "Mercy!--they weary me!" HILARION. "Before, they amused thee!" (_And he shows him in a grove of bean-trees,_ A WOMAN, _naked.... .........and a black man, holding in each hand a torch._[8]) "It is the goddess of Aricia, with the demon Virbius. Her sacerdote, the King of the grove, had to be an assassin;[9] and the fugitive slaves, the despoilers of corpses, the brigands of the Via Salaria, the cripples of the Pons Sublicius, all the human vermin of the Suburra worshipped no deities so fervently. "In the time of Marcus Antonius the patrician women preferred Libitina." (_And he shows him under the shadow of cypresses and rose-trees_, ANOTHER WOMAN, _clad in gauze. Around her lie spades, litters, black hangings, all the paraphernalia of funerals. She smiles. Her diamonds shine afar off through spiders' webs. The Larvæ, like skeletons, show their bones through the branches; and the Lemures, who are phantoms, extend their bat-like wings._ _At the end of a field lies the god Terminus, uprooted, and covered with ordures._ _In the centre of a furrow, the great corpse of Vertumnus is being devoured by red dogs._ _The rustic deities all depart, weeping:--Sartor, Sarrator, Vervactor, Collina, Vallona, Hostilinus--all wearing little hooded mantles, and carrying either a hoe, a pitchfork, a hurdle, or a boar-spear._) HILARION. "Their spirits made prosperous the villa,--with its dovecots, its parks of dormice, its poultry-yards protected by nets, its warm stables fragrant with odours of cedar. "Also they protected all the wretched population who dragged the irons upon their legs over the flinty ways of the Sabine country,--those who called the swine together by sound of horn,--those who were wont to gather the bunches at the very summits of the elms,--those who drove the asses, laden with manure, over the winding bypaths. The panting labourer, leaning over the handle of his plough, prayed them to give strength to his arms; and under the shade of the lindens, beside calabashes filled with milk, the cow-herds were wont, in turn, to sound their praises upon flutes of reed." ANTHONY (_sighs._) (_And in the centre of a chamber, upon a lofty estrade, an ivory bed is visible, surrounded by persons bearing torches of pine._) "Those are the deities of marriage. They await the coming of the bride. "Domiduca should lead her in,--Virgo unfasten her girdle,--Subigo place her in the bed,--and Præma open her arms, and whisper sweet words into her ear. "But she will not come!--and they dismiss the others:--Nona and Decima who watch by sick-beds; the three Nixii who preside over child-birth; the two nurses, Educa and Potina; and Carna, guardian of the cradle, whose bouquet of hawthorne keeps evil dreams from the child. "Afterwards, Ossipago should strengthen his knees;--Barbatus give him his first beard; Stimula inspire his first desires; Volupia grant him his first enjoyment; Fabulimus should have taught him to speak, Numera to count, Cam[oe]na to sing, Consus to reflect." (_This chamber is empty; and there remains only the centenarian Nænia beside the bed,--muttering to herself the dirge she was wont to howl at the funerals of aged men._ _But her voice is soon drowned by sharp cries. These are uttered by_-- _The_ LARES DOMESTICI, _crouching at the further end of the atrium, clad in dog-skins, with flowers wreathed about their bodies,--pressing their clenched hands against their cheeks, and weeping as loudly as they can._) "Where is the portion of food we received at each repast, the kindly care of the maid-servant, the smile of the matron, the merriment of the little boys playing at knuckle-bones on the mosaic pavement of the court-yard? When grown up, they used to hang about our necks their bullæ of gold or leather! "What happiness it was, when on the evening of a triumph, the master, entering, turned his humid eyes upon us! He would recount his combats; and the little house would be prouder than a palace; sacred as a temple! "How sweet were the family repasts, above all on the morrow of the Feralia! Tenderness for the dead appeased all discords; all kissed each other, while drinking to the glories of the past, and the hopes of the future. "But the ancestors, of painted wax, locked up behind us, are slowly becoming covered with mold. The new races, visiting their own deceptions upon us, have shattered our jaws; our wooden bodies are disappearing piece-meal under the teeth of rats." (_And the innumerable gods, watching over doors, kitchens, cellars, baths, disperse in every direction--under the form of enormous ants running over the pavement, or great butterflies soaring away._ _Then a roll of thunder is heard._) A VOICE: "I was the God of Armies, the Lord, the Lord God! I pitched the tents of Jacob on the hills; and in the midst of the sands I nourished my chosen people in their flight. "It was I who consumed the city of Sodom with fire! It was I who overwhelmed the world with the waters of the Deluge! It was I that drowned Pharaoh, with all the princes, sons of Kings,--making the sea to swallow up his chariots of war, and his charioteers! "I, the Jealous God, held all other gods in abomination. I brayed the impure in my anger; the mighty I cast down; and swiftly the desolation of my wrath ran to the right and to the left, like a dromedary loosened in a field of maize. "I chose the humble to deliver Israel. Angels, flame-winged, spake to them from out the bushes. "Perfumed with spikenard, with cinnamon and myrrh, clad in transparent robes, and shod with high-heeled sandals,--women of valiant heart went forth to slay captains. The passing wind carried my prophets with it. "My law I graved upon tables of stone. Within that law my people were enclosed, as within a strong citadel. They were my people. I was their God! The land was mine; the men also belonged to me, together with their every thought, and all their works, and the tools they wrought with, and their prosperity. "My ark reposed within a triple sanctuary,--surrounded by curtains of purple and lighted candelabra. I had a whole tribe to serve me as servants, swinging censers; and the high-priest, robed in robes of hyacinth, wore upon his breast precious stones disposed in symmetrical order. "Woe! Woe! the Holy of Holies is open, the veil is rent, the perfumes of the holocaust are dissipated by all the winds of heaven! The jackal whines in the sepulchres; my temple is destroyed; my people dispersed! "The priests have been strangled with the girdles of their robes. The women languish in captivity; the holy vessels have all been melted!" (_The voice, becoming more distant_): "I was the God of Armies; the Lord, the Lord God!" (_An enormous silence follows,--and deepest night._) ANTHONY. "All have passed away!" SOME ONE (_replies_): "I remain!" (_And Hilarion stands before him--but transfigured wholly,--beautiful as an archangel, luminous as a sun, and so lofty that in order to behold his face_-- ANTHONY _is compelled to throw back his head, to look up as though gazing as a star_): "Who art thou?" HILARION. "My kingdom is vast as the universe; and my desire knows no limits. I go on forever,--freeing minds, weighing worlds,--without hatred, without fear, without pity, without love, and without God. Men call me SCIENCE!" ANTHONY (_recoiling from him_): "Say, rather, that thou art ... the Devil!" HILARION (_fixing his eyes upon him_:) "Wouldst thou behold him?" ANTHONY (_cannot detach his eyes from that mighty gaze:--the curiosity of the Devil comes upon him. His terror augments; yet his wish grows even to boundlessness_): "Yet if I should see him ... if I were to see him!" (_Then in a sudden spasm of wrath_): "The horror that I have of him will free me from his presence forever!... Yes!" (_A cloven foot appears. Anthony regrets his wish._ _But the Devil flings him upon his horns and bears him away._) [1] Matthew II: 10--T. [2] "Buddha, or more correctly, the Buddha, for Buddha is an appellative meaning Enlightened."--Max Müller (Chips, Vol. I., 206). [3] Luke II: 25-26.--T. [4] Ibid II: 46-47.--T. [5] Or, Haoma, also Hom, the sacred plant, whose fermented juice occupied an important place in the practical rites of Iran. Supposed to be the same plant known in botany as _Sarcostemma viminalis._ Deified in Iranian worship, like the sacred drink _Soma_ in the Vedic hymns. The _Soma_ was the fermented extract of the _Asclepias acida_ or _Sarcostemma ritalis._ See Marius Fontane, "L'Inde Védique," "Les Iraniens."--Trans. [6] Apuleius says, "a silken mantle."--Trans. [7] Apuleius says, "strung with knuckle-bones of sheep."--Trans. [8] This scene, like certain paintings in the Naples museum, is all suited for public exhibition.--Trans. [9] Readers will recollect the lines in Macaulay's _Lays of Ancient Rome_: "Beneath Aricia's trees, Those trees in whose dim shadow A ghastly priest doth reign, The priest who slew the slayer, And must himself be slain." VI (_He flies beneath him, outstretched like a swimmer; his vast-spreading wings, wholly concealing him, seem like one huge cloud._) ANTHONY. "Whither do I go? But a little while ago I beheld in a glimpse the form of the Accurst. Nay!--'tis a cloud that upbears me! Perhaps I am dead, and am ascending to God.... "How freely I respire. The immaculate air seems to vivify my soul. No sense of weight!--no more suffering. "Far below me the lightning breaks,--the horizon broadens, widens,--the rivers cross each other. That blond-bright spot is the desert; that pool of water the ocean! "And other oceans appear!--vast regions of which I knew nothing! There are the countries of the blacks, which seem to smoke like brasiers!--then is the zone of snows always made dim by fog! Would I might behold those mountains where the sun, each evening, sinks to rest!" THE DEVIL. "The sun never sinks to rest; the sun never rests!" (_Anthony is not surprised at this voice. It seems to him an echo of his own thought--a response made by his own memory._ _Meanwhile the earth gradually assumes the shape of a ball; and he beholds it in the midst of the azure, turning upon its poles, and revolving with the sun._) THE DEVIL. "So it does not form the centre of the universe! Pride of man! humiliate thyself!" ANTHONY. "Now I can scarcely distinguish it. It mingles confusedly with other glowing worlds. The firmament itself is but one tissue of stars." (_And they still rise._) "No sound!--not even the hoarse cry of eagles! Nothing? I listen for the harmony of the spheres." THE DEVIL. "Thou wilt not hear them! Nor wilt thou behold the antichtonus of Plato,--or the central furnace of Philolaüs,--or the spheres of Aristotle, or the seven heavens of the Jews, with the great waters above the vault of crystal!" ANTHONY. "Yet from below the vault seemed solid as a wall!--on the contrary I penetrate it, I lose myself in it!" (_And he beholds the moon,--like a rounded fragment of ice filled with motionless light._) THE DEVIL. "Formerly it was the sojourn of souls! Even the good Pythagoras adorned it with magnificent flowers, populated it with birds!" ANTHONY. "I can see only desolate plains there, with extinct craters yawning under a black sky! "Let us go towards those milder-beaming stars, that we may contemplate the angels who uphold them at arms' length, like torches!" THE DEVIL (_bears him into the midst of the stars_): "They attract at the same time that they repel each other. The action of each one results from that of others, and contributes thereunto,--without the aid of any auxiliary, by the force of a law, the virtue of order alone!" ANTHONY. "Yes!...yes! My intelligence grasps the great truth! It is a joy greater than all tender pleasures! Breathless I find myself with astonishment at the enormity of God!" THE DEVIL. "Even as the firmament ever rises as thou dost ascend, so with the expansion of thy thought will He become greater to thee; and after this discovery of the universe thou wilt feel thy joy augment with the broadening and deepening of the infinite." ANTHONY. "Ah! higher!--higher still!--- forever higher!" (_Then the stars multiply, scintillate. The Milky Way develops in the zenith like a monstrous belt, with holes at intervals; through these rents in its brightness stretches of prolonged darkness are visible. There are rains of stars, long trains of golden dust, luminous vapours that float and dissolve. At times a comet suddenly passes by; then the tranquillity of innumerable lights recommences. Anthony, with outstretched arms, supports himself upon the Devil's horns, and thus occupies all the space between them. He remembers with disdain the ignorance of other days, the mediocrity of his dreams. And now those luminous globes he was wont to gaze upon from below, are close to him. He distinguishes the intercrossing of the lines of their orbits, the complexity of their courses. He beholds them coming from afar,--and, like stones suspended in a sling, describe their circles, form their hyperbolas. He perceives, all within the field of his vision at once, the Southern Cross and the Great Bear, the Lynx and the Centaur, the nebula of Dorado, the six suns in the constellation of Orion, Jupiter with his four satellites, and the triple ring of the monstrous Saturn!--all the planets, all the stars that men will discover in the future. He fills his eyes with their light; he over-burthens his mind with calculation of their distances: then, bowing his head, he murmurs_): "What is the purpose of all that?" THE DEVIL. "There is no purpose. How could God have a purpose? What experience could have instructed him?--what reflection determined him? [Illustration: Anthony: What is the purpose of all that? The Devil: There is no purpose.] "Before the beginning he could not have acted;--and now his action would be useless." ANTHONY. "Yet he created the world, at one time, by his word only." THE DEVIL. "But the beings that people the earth come upon it successively. So also, in heaven, new stars arise--different effects of varying causes." ANTHONY. "The varying of causes is the will of God!" THE DEVIL. "But to admit several acts of will in God is to admit various causes, and therefore to deny his unity. "His will is inseparable from his essence. He can have but one will, having but one essence; and inasmuch as he externally exists, he acts eternally. "Contemplate the sun! From its surface leap vast jets of flame, casting forth sparks that disperse beyond to become worlds here-after;--and further than the last, far beyond those deeps where thou seest only night, whirl other suns,--and behind them others again, and beyond those yet others ... without end!" ANTHONY. "Enough! Enough! I fear!--I will fall into the abyss!" THE DEVIL (_pauses, and rocks Anthony gently in the midst of space_). "Nothingness is--not--there is no void! Everywhere and forever bodies move upon the immovable deeps of space! Were there boundaries to space, it would not be space, but a body only: it is limitless!" ANTHONY (_stupefied by wonder_): "Limitless!" THE DEVIL. "Ascend skyward forever and forever,--yet thou wilt not attain the summit. Descend below the earth for billions of billions of centuries: never wilt thou reach the bottom. For there is no summit, there is no bottom; there is no Above, no Below--nor height, nor depth as signified by the terms of human utterance. And Space itself is comprised in God, who is not a portion thereof of such or such a size,--but is Immensity itself!" ANTHONY (_slowly_): "Matter ..., then, ... must be a part of God?" THE DEVIL. "Why not? Canst thou know the end of God?" ANTHONY. "Nay: on the contrary, I prostrate, I crush myself beneath his mightiness!" THE DEVIL. "And yet thou dost pretend to move him! Thou dost speak to him,--thou dost even adorn him with virtues,--with goodness, justice, mercy,--in lieu of recognising that all perfections are his! "To conceive aught beyond him is to conceive God above God, the Being above the Being. For He is the only being, the only substance. "If the Substance could be divided, it would not be the Substance, it would lose its nature: God could not exist. He is therefore indivisible as infinite;--and if he had a body, he would be composed of parts, he would not be One--he would not be infinite. Therefore he is not a Person!" ANTHONY. "What? my prayers, my sobs, my groans, the sufferings of my flesh, the transports of my love,--have all these things gone out to a lie,--to emptiness, unavailingly--like the cry of a bird, like a whirl of dead leaves?" (_Weeping_): "Oh, no!--there is Some One above all things,--a great Soul, a Lord, a Father whom my heart adores and who must love me!" THE DEVIL. "Thou dost desire that God were not God;--for did he feel love, or anger, or pity,--he would abandon his perfection for a greater or a lesser perfection. He can stoop to no sentiment, nor be contained in any form." ANTHONY. "One day, nevertheless, I shall see him!" THE DEVIL. "With the blessed, is it not?--when the finite shall enjoy the infinite in some restricted place, containing the Absolute!" ANTHONY. "Matters not!--there must be a paradise for the good, as there is a hell for the wicked." THE DEVIL. "Can the desire of thy mind create the law of the universe? Without doubt evil is indifferent to God,--forasmuch as the Earth is covered with it! "Is it through impotence that he endures it, or through cruelty that he maintains it? "Dost thou fancy that he is eternally readjusting the world, like an imperfect machine?--that he is forever watching the movements of all beings, from the flight of a butterfly to the thought of a man? "If he have created the universe, his providence is superfluous. If Providence exists, then creation is defective. "But evil and good concern only thee--even like night and day, pleasure and pain, death and birth, which are relative only to one corner of space, to a special centre, to a particular interest. Since the Infinite is permanent, the Infinite is;--and that is all." (_The Devil's wings have been gradually expanding: now they cover all space._) ANTHONY (_now perceives nothing: a great faintness comes upon him_): "A hideous cold freezes me, even to the depths of my soul! This is beyond the extreme of pain! It is like a death that is deeper than death! I roll in the immensity of darkness; and the darkness itself enters within me. My consciousness bursts beneath this dilation of nothingness!" THE DEVIL. "Yet the knowledge of things comes to thee only through the medium of thy mind. Even as a concave mirror, it deforms the objects it reflects; and thou hast no means whatever of verifying their exactitude." "Never canst thou know the universe in all its vastness; consequently it will never be possible for thee to obtain an idea of its cause, to have a just notion of God, nor even to say that the universe is infinite,--for thou must first be able to know what the Infinite is!" "May not Form be, perhaps, an error of thy senses,--Substance a figment of thy imagination?" "Unless, indeed, that the world being a perpetual flux[1] of things, appearance, on the contrary, be wholly true; illusion the only reality." "But art thou sure thou dost see?--art thou even sure thou dost live? Perhaps nothing exists!" (_The Devil has seized Anthony, and, holding him at arms' length, glares at him with mouth yawning as though to devour him_): "Adore me, then!--and curse the phantom thou callest God!" (_Anthony lifts his eyes with a last effort of hope._ _The Devil abandons him._) [1] The original text seems to me slightly obscure. The idea of the universe being a perpetual ebb and flow of shapes, is that of forms passing away to reappear like waves, is that of the Nidana-Sutris: "Individuality is only a form ... _Everything is only a flux of aggregates_, interminably uniting and disuniting," as Barth observes in his "Religions of India."--Trans. VII ANTHONY (_finds himself lying upon his back, at the verge of the cliff._ _The sky commences to blanch._) "Is it the glow of dawn, or only an effect of moonlight?" (_He tries to rise, falls back,--his teeth chattering_): "I feel such a helplessness of weakness, as though all my bones were broken! "Why? "Ah! the Devil!--I remember!--he even repeated to me all that I learned from the aged Didymus respecting the opinions of Xenophanes, Heraclitus, of Melissus, of Anaxagoras,--concerning the infinite, the creation, the impossibility of knowing anything! "And yet I believed that I could unite myself to God!" (_Laughing bitterly_): "Ah! madness! madness! Is the fault mine? Prayer has become intolerable to me! My heart is dry as a rock! Once, it was wont to overflow with love!... "The sand used to smoke of mornings like the odourous dust of a censer;--at sunset flowers of fire used to bloom upon the cross; and in the middle of the night, it often seemed as though all beings and all things, lying under the same awful silence, were adoring the Lord with me. O charms of prayer, felicities of ecstasy, gifts of heaven,--what have become of you? "I remember a voyage I made with Ammon in search of a solitary place suited for the establishment of a monastery. It was the last evening; we hastened our steps, walked side by side, murmuring hymns, without conversing. As the sun sank, the shadows of our bodies lengthened like two obelisks, continually growing taller, and moving before us. Here and there we planted crosses, made with fragments of our sticks, to mark the site of a future cell. Night was tardy in her coming; and waves of darkness overspread the earth, even while a vast rose-coloured light still glowed in heaven. "When I was a child, I used to amuse myself by building hermitages with pebbles. My mother sitting beside me would watch me so attentively! "Will she not have cursed me for having abandoned her?--will she not have plucked out her white hair by handfuls in the despair of her grief? And her corpse remains lying on the floor of the hut, under the roof of reeds, between the crumbling walls. Through an orifice a hyena, snuffing, thrusts his head, advances his mouth ... horror! horror!" (_Sobbing_): "No: Ammonaria will not have abandoned her! Where is she now,--Ammonaria? "Perhaps at the further end of a bathroom, she removes her garments one after the other: first the mantle, then the girdle, then the first tunic, the second lighter tunic, all her necklaces,--and the vapour of cinnamon envelops her naked limbs. At last she lies down upon the tepid mosaic. Her long hair spreading below the curve of her hips, seems like a sable fleece; and the oppressiveness of the heated air causes her to pant; her waist arched, her breasts standing out ... What! my flesh rebels again! Even in the midst of grief am I tortured by concupiscence. To be subjected thus unto two tortures at once is beyond endurance! I can no longer bear myself!" (_He leans over, and gazes into the abyss._) "The man who should fall would be killed. Nothing easier: it were only necessary to roll over upon my left side:--only one movement--one!" (_Then suddenly appears_--AN AGED WOMAN. _Anthony starts to his feet in affright. It seems to him that he beholds his mother arisen._ _But this woman is far older, and prodigiously thin._ _A shroud, knotted about her head, hangs down, together with her white hair, so as to cover her legs, slender as crutches. The brilliancy of her ivory-coloured teeth make her earthy skin darker still. The orbits of her eyes are full of shadow; and far back within them two flames vacillate, like the lamps of sepulchres._ _She exclaims_): "Advance! What hinders thee?" ANTHONY (_stammering_): "I fear ... to commit a sin!" SHE (_replies_): "But King Saul killed himself! Razias, a just man, killed himself! Saint Pelagia of Antioch killed herself! Dommina of Aleppo and her two daughters--all three saints--killed themselves: and remember also how many confessors delivered themselves up to the executioner in their impatient longing for death! That they might enjoy death more speedily, the virgins of Miletus strangled themselves with their girdles. At Syracuse the philosopher Hegesias preached so eloquently upon death that men deserted the lupanars to go hang themselves in the fields. The patricians of Borne sought for death as a new form of debauch." ANTHONY. "Aye! the love of death is strong; and many a anchorite has succumbed to it." THE OLD WOMAN. "To do that which will make thee equal unto God--think! He created thee: thou wilt destroy his work--thou! and by thy courage,--of thy own free will! The enjoyment that Erostratus knew was not greater than this. And moreover thy body has so long mocked thy soul that it is full time thou shouldst take vengeance upon it. Thou wilt not suffer. It will soon be over. Of what art thou afraid?--a wide, black hole! Perhaps it is a void!" [Illustration: The Old Woman: Of what art thou afraid?�a wide, black hole! Perhaps it is a void!] (_Anthony hearkens without replying; and upon the other side appears_-- ANOTHER WOMAN--_young and marvellously beautiful. At first he takes her to be Ammonaria. But she is taller, blond as honey, very plump, with paint upon her cheeks and roses upon her head. Her long robe, weighty with spangles, gleams with metallic lustre;--her fleshy lips are sanguinolent; and her somewhat heavy eyelids are so drowned with languor that one would almost take her to be blind._ _She murmurs_): "Nay, live! enjoy! Solomon counsels joy! Follow the guiding of thy heart and the desire of thine eyes!" ANTHONY. "What joy is there for me? My heart is weary; my eyes are dim!" SHE (_answers_): "Seek the suburb of Racotis; push open a door that is painted blue;--and when thou shalt be in the atrium where a fountain jet murmurs unceasingly, a woman will present herself before thee--in peplos of white silk striped with gold; her hair is unloosed, her laugh like the clatter of crotali. She is skilful. In her caress thou wilt taste the pride of initiation and the appeasement of desire. "Hast ever pressed to thy bosom a virgin who loved thee? Dost remember the surrenders of her modesty,--the passing away of her remorse in a sweet flow of tears? "Thou canst even now imagine thyself walking with her--canst thou not?--in the wood by the light of the moon? At each pressure of your joined hands, a sweet shuddering passes through you both,--looking closely into each other your eyes seem to outpour into one another something like immaterial fluid;--and thy heart fills: it bursts: it is a suave whirl of eddying passion, an overflowing of intoxication...." THE OLD WOMAN. "One need not possess joys in order to taste their bitterness! Even to view them from afar off begets loathing of them. Thou must be fatigued by the monotony of the same actions, the length of the days, the hideousness of the world, the stupidity of the sun?" ANTHONY. "Aye, indeed!--I loathe all that he shines upon." THE YOUNG WOMAN. "Hermit! hermit! thou wilt find diamonds among the flints, fountains beneath the sand, a delectation in all the hazards thou dost despise; and there are even upon earth places of such beauty that the sight of them would make thee desire to press the whole world against thy heart with love!" THE OLD WOMAN. "Each evening that thou liest down upon the earth to slumber, thou dost hope that it may soon lie upon thee and cover thee." THE YOUNG WOMAN. "Yet thou dost believe in the resurrection of the flesh--which is but the translation of life into eternity!" (_Even as she speaks, the Old Woman becomes still more fleshless; and above her skull, from which the white hair has disappeared, a bat circles in the air._ _The Young Woman has become fatter. Her robe gleams with shifting colours; her nostrils palpitate, her eyes roll softly._) THE FORMER (_opening her arms, exclaiming_): "Come to me!--I am Consolation, repose, oblivion, eternal calm!" THE OTHER. "I am the sleep-giver, life, happiness inexhaustible!" (_Anthony turns to fee from them. Each lays a hand on his shoulder._ _The Shroud parts, exposes the Skeleton of Death._ _The robe splits asunder, and leaves the whole body of Lust exposed:--her waist is slender; her long and undulating hair flutters in the wind._ _Anthony stands motionless between the two, considering them_): DEATH (_says to him_): "What matters it, whether now or at another time! Thou art mine,--like suns, nations, cities, kings, mountain-snows, and the grasses of the fields. I fly higher than the hawks of heaven. I run more swiftly than the gazelle; I overtake even Hope; I vanquished the Son of God!" LUST. "Resist not! I am the Omnipotent! The forests re-echo with my sighs; the waters tremble with my agitations. Virtue, courage, piety, dissolve in the perfume of my mouth. Man I accompany in every step that he makes; and even from the threshold of the tomb he turns to me!" DEATH. "I will find for thee that which thou hast vainly sought for, by the gleam of torches, upon the faces of the dead,--or among those awful sands that are formed of human remains, where thou wast wont to wander beyond the Pyramids. From time to time, the fragment of a skull rolled under thy sandal. Thou didst take up the dust: thou didst let it trickle through thy fingers; and thy thought, blending with it, sank into nothingness." LUST. "My gulf is deeper! Marbles have inspired loves. Men rush to conjunctures that terrify. Fetters are riveted that the fettered curse. Whence the bewitchment of courtesans, the extravagance of dreams, the immensity of my sadness?" DEATH. "Mine irony depasseth all others! There are convulsions of delight at the funerals of kings, at the extermination of a whole people; and war is made with music, with plumes, with harness of gold,--with vast display of ceremony that my due of homage may be greater!" [Illustration: Death: Mine irony depasseth all others!] LUST. "My rage equals thine! I also yell; I bite! I, too, have sweats of agony, and aspects cadaverous!" DEATH. "It is I that make thee awful! Let us intertwine!" [Illustration: Death: It is I that make thee awful! Let us intertwine!] (_Death laughs mockingly; Lust roars. They clasp each other about the waist, and chant alternately_): "I hasten the dissolution of matter!" "I facilitate the dispersion of germs!" "Thou dost destroy for my renovations!" "Thou dost engender for my destructions!" "Ever-active my power!" "Fecund, my putrefaction!" (_And their voices, whose rolling echoes fill the horizon, deepen and become so mighty that Anthony falls backward as if thunder-stricken. A shock from time to time causes him to reopen his eyes; and he perceives in the midst of the darkness a manner of monster before him._ _It is a skull, crowned with roses, dominating the torso of a woman nacreously white. Below, a shroud starred with specks of gold forms something like a tail; and the whole body undulates, after the fashion of a gigantic worm erect on end._ _The vision attenuates,--disappears._) ANTHONY (_rising to his feet_): "The Devil yet again, and under his two-fold aspect: the spirit of fornication, and the spirit of destruction. "Neither affrights me! I repel happiness; and I know myself to be eternal. "Thus death is only an illusion, a veil-masking betimes the continuity of life. "But Substance being unique, wherefore should forms be varied? "Somewhere there must be primordial figures, whose bodily forms are only symbols. Could I but see them, I would know the link between matter and thought; I would know in what Being consists. [Illustration: Anthony: Somewhere there must be primordial figures, whose bodily forms are only symbols.] "Such were the figures painted at Babylon upon the walls of the temple of Belus; and others like them covered a mosaic in the port of Carthage. I myself have sometime beheld in the sky, as it were, forms of spirits. Those who cross the desert meet with animals surpassing all conception...." [Illustration: I myself have sometime beheld in the sky, as it were, forms of spirits.] (_And opposite, upon the further side of the Nile, suddenly appears the Sphinx.[1] He stretches his paws, shakes the bandelets upon his forehead, and crouches upon his belly._ _Leaping, flying, spitting fire through her nostrils, lashing her winged sides with her dragon-tail, the green-eyed Chimera circles, barks._ _The thick curls of her head tossed back upon one side mingle with the hair of her loins; on the other side they hang down to the sand, quivering with the swinging of her body, to and fro._) THE SPHINX (_remaining motionless, and gazing at the Chimera_): "Hither, Chimera! rest awhile!" THE CHIMERA. "No! never!" THE SPHINX. "Do not run so fast, do not fly so high, do not bark so loudly!" THE CHIMERA. "DO not call me!--call me no more; since thou must remain forever dumb." THE SPHINX. "Cease casting thy flames in my face, and uttering thy yells in my ear: thou canst not melt my granite." THE CHIMERA. "Thou shalt not seize me, terrible sphinx!" THE SPHINX. "Thou art too mad to dwell with me!" THE CHIMERA. "Thou art too heavy to follow me!" THE SPHINX. "Yet whither goest thou, that thou shouldst run so fast?" THE CHIMERA. "I gallop in the corridors of the Labyrinth--I hover above the mountains--I graze the waves in my flight--I yelp at the bottom of precipices--I suspend myself with my mouth from the skirts of clouds--I sweep the shores with my dragging tail; and the curves of the hills have taken their form from the shape of my shoulders! But thee I find perpetually immobile, or perhaps making strange designs with thy claws upon the sand." THE SPHINX. "It is because I keep my secret;--I dream and calculate. "The sea returns to its bed; the wheat bends back and forth in the wind; the caravans pass by; the dust flies; cities crumble; and yet my gaze, which naught can deviate, remains fixed, gazing through all intervening things, upon a horizon that none may reach." [Illustration: The Sphinx: ... and yet my gaze, which naught can deviate, remains fixed, gazing through all intervening things, upon a horizon that none may reach. The Chimera: I am light and joyous!] THE CHIMERA. "I am light and joyous! I offer to the eyes of men dazzling perspectives with Paradise in the clouds above, and unspeakable felicity afar off. Into their souls I pour the eternal madnesses; projects of happiness, plans for the future, dreams of glory and vows of love, and all virtuous resolutions. "I urge men to perilous voyages and great enterprises. I have chiselled with my claws the wonders of architecture. It was I who suspended the little bells above the tomb of Porsenna, and surrounded the quays of Atlantis with a wall of orichalcum. "I seek for new perfumes, for vaster flowers, for pleasures never felt before. If I perceive in any place a man whose mind reposes in wisdom, I fall upon him, and strangle him." THE SPHINX. "All those tormented by the desire of God, I have devoured. "In order to climb up to my royal brow, the strongest ascend upon the flutings of my bandelets as upon the steps of a stairway. Then a great lassitude comes upon them, and they fall backward." (_Anthony begins to tremble._ _He is no longer before his cabin, but in the desert itself, with those two monsters beside him, whose breath is hot upon his shoulders._) THE SPHINX. "O thou Fantasy, bear me away upon thy wings that my sadness may be lightened!" THE CHIMERA. "O thou Unknown, I am enamoured of thine eyes! Like a hyena in heat I turn about thee, soliciting those fecundations whereof the desires devour me! "Ope thy mouth, lift thy feet--mount upon my back!" THE SPHINX. "My feet, since they have been outstretched, can move no more. The lichen, like an eruption, has formed upon my jaws. By dint of long dreaming I have no longer aught to say." THE CHIMERA. "Thou liest, hypocrite Sphinx! Wherefore dost thou always call me and always disown me!" THE SPHINX. "It is thou, indomitable caprice, that dost forever pass and repass, whirling in thy course!" THE CHIMERA. "Is the fault mine? What? Let me be!" (_She barks._) THE SPHINX. "Thou movest away! thou dost escape me!" (_He growls._) THE CHIMERA. "Essay!--Thou crushest me!" THE SPHINX. "Nay!--impossible!" (_And gradually sinking down he disappears in the sand; while the Chimera, ramping with tongue protruding, departs, describing circles on her way._ _The breath of her mouth has produced a fog._ _Through this mist Anthony perceives wreathings of clouds, undecided curves._ _At last he can distinguish something like the appearance of human bodies._ _And first_:-- THE ASTOMI--_approach, like bubbles of air traversed by sunlight. They cry_): "Do not breathe too hard! The drops of rain bruise us, false notes excoriate us, darknesses blind us! Composed wholly of breezes and of perfumes, we float along, we roll along:--a little more than Dreams, yet not quite beings...." THE NISNAS (_have only one eye, one cheek, one hand, one leg, half a body, half a heart. They say_): "We live quite in our halves of houses, with our halves of wives and our halves of children!" THE BLEMMYES (_who have no head at all_): "Our shoulders are all the broader;--and there is no ox, rhinoceros, or elephant able to carry what we carry. "Something dimly resembling features--as it were a vague face--imprinted upon our breasts: that is all! We think digestions; we subtleize secretions. God, in our belief, floats peacefully within the interior chyles. "We go straight upon our way, through all mires, crossing all morasses, skirting the edges of all abysses: and we are the most laborious, the most happy, the most virtuous of all peoples!" THE PYGMIES: "We, good little men, swarm upon the world like vermin upon the hump of a dromedary. "We are burned, drowned, crushed; and we always reappear, more vivacious and countless than before--terrible by reason of our numbers!" THE SCIAPODS: "Fettered to the earth by our hair, long as lianas, we vegetate beneath the shelter of our feet, broad as parasols; and the light comes to us through the thickness of our heels. No annoyances for us, no work! The head as low as possible--That is the secret of happiness." [Illustration: The Sciapods: The head as low as possible�That is the secret of happiness.] (_Their lifted thighs,--resembling the trunks of trees,--multiply._ _And a forest appears. Great apes clamber through it on all fours:--these are men with the heads of dogs._) THE CYNOCEPHALI: "We leap from branch to branch in search of eggs to suck; and we pluck the little fledglings alive; then we put their nests upon our heads in lieu of caps. "We tear off the teats of cows; and we put out the eyes of lynxes: we let fall our dung from the heights of the trees--we parade our turpitude in the full light of the sun. "Lacerating the flowers, crushing the fruits, befouling the springs, violating women, we are the masters of all,--by the strength of our arms, and the ferocity of our hearts. "Ho! companions!--gnash with your jaws!" (_Blood and milk pour down their chops. The rain streams over their hairy backs._ _Anthony inhales the freshness of the green leaves._ _There is a movement among them, a clashing of branches; and all of a sudden appears a huge black stag, with the head of a bull, having between his ears a thicket of white horns._) THE SADHUZAG: "My seventy-four antlers are hollow like flutes. "When I turn me toward the wind of the South, there issue from them sounds that draw all the ravished animals around me. The serpents twine about my legs; the wasps cluster in my nostrils; and the parrots, the doves, the ibises, alight upon the branches of my horns. "Listen!" (_He throws back his horns, whence issues a music of sweetness ineffable._ _Anthony presses both hands upon his heart. It seems to him as though his soul were being borne away by the melody._) THE SADHUZAG: "But when I turn me toward the wind of the North, my antlers, more thickly bristling than a battalion of lances, give forth a sound of howlings: the forests are startled with fear; the rivers remount toward their sources; the husks of fruits burst open; and the bending grasses stand erect on end, like the hair of a coward. "Listen!" (_He bends his branching antlers forward: hideous and discordant cries proceed from them. Anthony feels as though his heart were torn asunder._ _And his horror augments upon beholding_)-- THE MARTICHORAS (_A gigantic red lion, with human face, and three rows of teeth_): "The gleam of my scarlet hair mingles with the reflection of the great sands. I breathe through my nostrils the terror of solitudes. I spit forth plague. I devour armies when they venture into the desert. "My claws are twisted like screws, my teeth shaped like saws; and my curving tail bristles with darts which I cast to right and left, before and behind! "See! see!" (_The Martichoras shoots forth the keen bristles of his tail, which irradiate in all directions like a volley of arrows. Drops of blood rain down, spattering upon the foliage._) THE CATOBLEPAS (_A black buffalo with a pig's head, falling to the ground, and attached to his shoulders by a neck long, thin, and flaccid as an empty gut._ _He wallows flat upon the ground, and his feet entirely disappear beneath the enormous mane of coarse hair which covers his face_): "Fat, melancholy, fierce--thus I continually remain, feeling against my belly the warmth of the mud. So heavy is my skull that it is impossible for me to lift it. I roll it slowly all around me, open-mouthed; and with my tongue I tear up the venemous plants bedewed with my breath. Once, I even devoured my own feet without knowing it! "No one, Anthony, has ever beheld mine eyes,--or at least, those who have beheld them are dead. Were I to lift my eyelids--my pink and swollen eyelids, thou wouldst forthwith die!" ANTHONY. "Oh, that one! Ugh! As though I could desire it?--Yet his stupidity fascinates me! No, no! I will not!" (_He gazes fixedly upon the ground._ _But the weeds take fire; and amidst the contorsions of the flames, arises_)-- THE BASILISK (_A great violet serpent, with trilobate crest, and two fangs, one above, one below_): "Beware, lest thou fall into my jaws! I drink fire. I am fire!--and I inhale it from all things: from clouds, from flints, from dead trees, the fur of animals, the surface of marshes. My temperature maintains the volcanoes: I lend glitter to jewels: I give colours to metals!" THE GRIFFIN (_A lion with a vulture's beak, and white wings, red paws and blue neck_): "I am the master of deep splendours. I know the secrets of the tombs wherein the Kings of old do slumber. "A chain, issuing from the wall, maintains their heads upright. Near them, in basins of porphyry, the women they loved float upon the surfaces of black liquids. Their treasures are all arrayed in halls, in lozenge-shaped designs, in little heaps, in pyramids;--and down below, far below the tombs, and to be reached only after long travelling through stifling darkness, there are rivers of gold bordered by forests of diamonds, there are fields of carbuncles and lakes of mercury. "Addossed against the subterranean gate I remain with claws uplifted; and my flaming eyes spy out those who seek to approach. The vast and naked plain that stretches away to the end of the horizon is whitened with the bones of travellers. But for thee the gates of bronze shall open; and thou shalt inhale the vapour of the mines, thou shalt descend into the caverns.... Quick! quick!" (_He burrows into the earth with his paws, and crows like a cock._ _A thousand voices answer him. The forest trembles._ _And all manner of frightful creatures arise:--The Tragelaphus, half deer, half ox; the Myrmecoles, lion before-and ant behind, whose genitals are set reversely; the python Askar, sixty cubits long, that terrified Moses; the huge weasel Pastinaca, that kills the trees with her odour; the Presteros, that makes those who touch it imbecile; the Mirag, a horned hare, that dwells in the islands of the sea. The leopard Phalmant bursts his belly by roaring; the triple-headed bear Senad tears her young by licking them with her tongue; the dog Cepus pours out the blue milk of her teats upon the rocks. Mosquitoes begin to hum, toads commence to leap; serpents hiss. Lightnings flicker. Hail falls._ _Then come gusts, bearing with them marvellous anatomies:--Heads of alligators with hoofs of deer; owls with serpent tails; swine with tiger-muzzles; goats with the crupper of an ass; frogs hairy as bears; chameleons huge as hippopotami; calves with two heads, one bellowing, the other weeping; winged bellies flitting hither and thither like gnats._ _They rain from the sky, they rise from the earth, they pour from the rocks; everywhere eyes flame, mouths roar, breasts bulge, claws are extended, teeth gnash, flesh clacks against flesh. Some crouch; some devour each other at a mouthful._ _Suffocating under their own numbers, multiplying by their own contact, they climb over one another; and move about Anthony with a surging motion as though the ground were the deck of a ship. He feels the trail of snails upon the calves of his legs, the chilliness of vipers upon his hands:--and spiders spinning about him enclose him within their network._ _But the monstrous circle breaks, parts; the sky suddenly becomes blue; and_)-- THE UNICORN (_appears_): "Gallop! Gallop! "I have hoofs of ivory, teeth of steel; my head is the colour of purple, my body the colour of snow; and the horn of my forehead is bestreaked with the tints of the rainbow. "I travel from Chaldea to the Tartar desert,--upon the shores of the Ganges and in Mesopotamia. I overtake the ostriches. I run so swiftly that I draw the wind after me. I rub my back against the palm-trees. I roll among the bamboos. I leap rivers with a single bound. Doves fly above me. Only a virgin can bridle me. "Gallop! Gallop!" (_Anthony watches him depart._ _And as he gazes he beholds all the birds that nourish themselves with wind: the Gouith, the Ahuti, the Alphalim, the Iukneth, of the mountains of Kaf, the homai of the Arabs--which are the souls of murdered men. He hears the parrots that utter human speech; and the great Pelasgian palmipeds that sob like children or chuckle like old women._ _A saline air strikes his nostrils. Now a vast beach stretches before him._ _In the distance jets of water arise, spouted by whales; and from the very end of the horizon come_)-- THE BEASTS OF THE SEA (_round as wineskins, flat as blades, denticulated like saws, dragging themselves over the sand as they approach_): [Illustration: The beasts of the sea round as wineskins ...] "Thou wilt accompany us to our immensities, whither as yet no one has descended. "Divers peoples inhabit the countries of the Ocean. Some dwell in the sojourn of tempests; others swim freely amid the transparency of chill waves;--or, like oxen, graze upon the coral plains, or suck in through their trunks the reflux of the tides,--or bear upon their shoulders the vast weight of the sources of the sea." [Illustration: Divers peoples inhabit the countries of the Ocean.] (_Phosphorences gleam in the moustaches of the seals, shift in the scales of fish. Echini whirl like wheels; ammonites uncoil like cables; oysters make their shell hinges squeak; polypi unfold their tentacles; medusæ quiver like balls of crystal suspended; sponges float hither and thither, anemones ejaculate water; wrack and sea-mosses have grown all about._ _And all sorts of plants extend themselves into branches, twist themselves into screws, lengthen into points, round themselves out like fans. Gourds take the appearance of breasts; lianas interlace like serpents._ _The Dedaims of Babylon, which are trees, bear human heads for fruit; Mandragoras sing;--the root Baaras runs through the grass._ _And now the vegetables are no longer distinguishable from the animals. Polyparies that seem like trees, have arms upon their branches. Anthony thinks he sees a caterpillar between two leaves: it is a butterfly that takes flight. He is about to step on a pebble: a grey locust leaps away. One shrub is bedecked with insects that look like petals of roses; fragments of ephemerides form a snowy layer upon the soil._ _And then the plants become confounded with the stones._ _Flints assume the likeness of brains; stalactites of breasts; the flower of iron resembles a figured tapestry._[2] _He sees efflorescences in fragments of ice, imprints of shrubs and shells--yet so that one cannot detect whether they be imprints only, or the things themselves. Diamonds gleam like eyes; metals palpitate._ _And all fear has departed from him! He throws himself down upon the ground, and leaning upon his elbows, watches breathlessly._ _Insects that have no stomachs persistently eat; withered ferns bloom again and reflower; absent members grow again._ _At last he perceives tiny globular masses, no larger than pinheads, with cilia all round them. They are agitated with a vibratile motion_): ANTHONY (_deliriously_): "O joy! O bliss! I have beheld the birth of life! I have seen the beginning of motion! My pulses throb even to the point of bursting! I long to fly, to swim, to bark, to bellow, to howl! Would that I had wings, a carapace, a shell,--that I could breathe out smoke, wield a trunk,--make my body writhe,--divide myself everywhere,--be in everything,--emanate with odours,--develop myself like the plants,--flow like water,--vibrate like sound--shine like light, squatting upon all forms--penetrate each atom--descend to the very bottom of matter,--be matter itself!" (_Day at last appears;--and, like tabernacle curtains uplifted, clouds of gold uprolling in broad volutes unveil the sky._ _Even in the midst thereof, and in the very disk of the sun, beams the face of Jesus Christ._ [Illustration: Day at last appears ... in the midst thereof and in the very disk of the sun, beams the face of Jesus Christ.] _Anthony makes the sign of the cross, and resumes his devotions._) FINIS [1] Winkelmann claims to have been the first to discover that the Egyptian sphinxes were bisexual--females before--males otherwise. (See Book II, chap. I, § 25.) Flaubert speaks of the Sphinx in the masculine like Philemon. (See also Signor Carlo Fea's note upon the paragraph in Winkelmann, old French edition. An II, R. F.)--Trans. [2] Fleurs de fer, "flowers of iron." In mineralogy _flos ferri_, a form of Aragonite.--Trans. [NOTE Those who compare this translation with the original will observe the omission of some few paragraphs on pages 77, 96 and 211. They are speeches put in the mouths of certain Heresiarchs, or complaints of certain of the minor Roman household gods. The translator relegated these to an addenda, which the publishers have omitted as being unnecessary. Those who are familiar with the original will be able to supply them, and will realize that while they might be offensive to some persons, they are in no respect an integral or important part of the great drama.] ADDENDA (added by transcribers) A. Observation of Manes, pages 82-3, original text; page 89 of translation. MANES _Ou plutôt, faites si bien qu'elle ne soit pas fécondes. Mieux vaut pour l'ame tomber sur la terre que de languir dans des entraves charnelles._ Probably a calumny against Manes; for the Eastern philosophy, especially that of Zoroaster, which is said to have inspired the tenets of Manichæism, advocated no such abominations. B. Page 105 of original; page 108 translation. The realistic phraseology of the original passage is rather brutal. The French text reads: "_Il souffrait de la maladie Bellerephontienne; et sa mère, la parfumeuse, s'est livrée à Pantherus, un soldat Romain, sur des gerbes de mais, un soir de moisson._" C. Descriptive text, page 237 original, partly suppressed on page 223 translation: "_Et il lui montre dans un bosquet d'aliziers Une Femme toute nue, à quatre pattes comme une bête, et saillie par un homme noir, tenant dans chaque main un flambeau._" D. Curious text of Crepitus, on page 228, pages 241-3 of original: CREPITUS (----se fait entendre): _Moi aussi l'on m'honora jadis. On me faisait des libations. Je fus un Dieu!_ _L'Athénien me saluait comme un presage de fortune, tandis que le Romain dévot me maudissait les poings levés et que le pontife d'Egypte, s'abstinant des fèves, tremblait à ma voix et pâlissait à mon odeur._ _Quand le vinaigre militaire coulait sur les barbes non rasées, qu'on se régalait de glands, de pois, et d'oignons crus, et que le bouc en morceau cuissait dans le beurre rance des pasteurs, sans souci du voisin, personne alors ne se gênait. Les nourritures solides faisaient digestions retentissantes. Au soleil de la campagne les hommes se soulageaient avec lenteur._ _Ainsi, je passais sans scandale, comme les autres besoins de la vie, comme Mena, tourment des vierges, et la douce Rumina qui protège le sein de la nourrice, gonflé, des veines bleuâtres. J'étais joyeux. Je faisais rire. Et se dilatant d'aise à cause de moi, le convive exhalait toute sa gaieté par les ouvertures de son corps._ _J'ai eu mes jours d'orgeuil. Le bon Aristophane me promena sur la scène, et l'empereur Claudius Drusus[1] me fit asseoir à sa table. Dans les laticlaves des patriciens j'ai circulé majestueusement! Les vases d'or, comme des tympanons, resonnaient sous moi; et, quand plein de murènes, de truffles, et de pâtés, l'intestin du maître se dégageait avec fracas, l'univers attentif apprenait que César avait diné!_ _Mais à présent, je suis confiné dans la populace_[2] _et l'on se récrie, même à mon nom!_ _Et Crepitus s'éloigne, en poussant un gémissement...._ E. For descriptions of the Martichoras and other monsters, appearing page 287 in the original and 263 in the translation, see also Rabelais' Pantagruel, Book V, Chap. XXX. [1] Needless to refer to the comedies of Aristophanes, with which English readers have been familiarized through the Bohn translations. The reference to Claudius ius Drusus seems based upon the following lines in Suetonius: "_Dicitur etiam meditatus edictum, quo veniam daret flatum crepitumque ventris in convivio emittendi: cum periclitatum quemdam prae pudore ex continentia reperisset._" (_Suetonius-Tiberius Claudius Drusus_: 32.) [2] The so-called divinities, _Deus Crepitus, Dea Pertunda, Deus Stercutius, Dea Rumina_ (or _Rumilia_), _Dea Mena_, concerning whose curious attributes the reader may consult English or French classical encyclopedists, were doubtless regarded by the intelligent classes of antiquity much as certain religious superstitions are regarded by educated moderns. It is true that they furnished grotesque themes to artists; but many existing superstitions regarding elves and goblins have inspired modern sculptors, painters and designers. Certainly, seriously worshipped as deities, Priapus might seem equally contemptible as a divinity; but his worship, degenerate as it became in later years, was primitively symbolical. The obscene image merely typified the procreative Spirit of Nature. The eccentric gods and goddesses above referred to had no such excuse for being. As previously observed, however, Flaubert artistically represents these divinities not as they were really considered in the antique world, but rather as they would have appeared to the eyes of zealous Christians in the third century--infamous and loathsome.--Translator. * * * * * * Transcriber's note: This translation of the "Tentation" by Lafcadio Hearn, still regarded by many as the best up until now in English, still misses some small fragments (of a couple of words) not deemed fit for the Anglo-Saxon temperament of that time. There is a contemporary version (2002) of this translation available, with introduction by Michel Foucault and the inclusion of some missing expressions. The original French by Gustave Flaubert is also available at Project Gutenberg--see http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/10982 
749	----	Barlaam and Ioasaph by St. John Damascene (?) ("St. John of Damascus") c. 676-749 A.D. It is not known where or when this story was written, but it is believed to have been translated into Greek (possibly from a Georgian original) sometime in the 11th Century A.D. Although the ultimate author is usually referred to as "John the Monk", it has been traditionally ascribed to St. John of Damascus. The text of this edition is based on that published as ST. JOHN DAMASCENE: BARLAAM AND IOASAPH (Trans: G.R. Woodward and H. Mattingly; Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 1914). This text is in the PUBLIC DOMAIN in he United States. This electronic edition was edited, proofed, and prepared by Douglas B. Killings (DeTroyes@EnterAct.COM), November, 1996. PREPARER'S NOTE: Readers of this work will note some startling similarities between the story of Ioasaph and the traditional Tale of Buddha. The work seems to be a retelling of the Buddha Legend from within a Christian context, with the singular difference that the "Buddha" in this tale reaches enlightenment through the love of Jesus Christ. The popularity of the Greek version of this story is attested to by the number of translations made of it throughout the Christian world, including versions in Latin, Old Slavonic, Armenian, Christian Arabic, English, Ethiopic, and French. Such was its popularity that both Barlaam and Josaphat (Ioasaph) were eventually recognized by the Roman Catholic Church as Saints, and churches were dedicated in their honor from Portugal to Constantinople. It was only after Europeans began to have increased contacts with India that scholars began to notice the similarities between the two sets of stories. Modern scholars believe that the Buddha story came to Europe from Arabic, Caucasus, and/or Persian sources, all of which were active in trade between the European and Indian worlds. --DBK ***************************************************************** SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY: ORIGINAL TEXT-- Woodward, G.R. & H. Mattingly (Ed. & Trans.): "St. John Damascene: Barlaam and Ioasaph" (Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 1914). English translation with side-by-side Greek text. RECOMMENDED READING-- Lang, David Marshall (Trans.): "The Balavariani: A Tale from the Christian East" (California University Press, Los Angeles, 1966). Translation of the Georgian work that probably served as a basis for the Greek text. ***************************************************************** BARLAAM AND IOASAPH AN EDIFYING STORY FROM THE INNER LAND OF THE ETHIOPIANS, CALLED THE LAND OF THE INDIANS, THENCE BROUGHT TO THE HOLY CITY, BY JOHN THE MONK (AN HONOURABLE MAN AND A VIRTUOUS, OF THE MONASTERY OF SAINT SABAS); WHEREIN ARE THE LIVES OF THE FAMOUS AND BLESSED BARLAAM AND IOASAPH. INTRODUCTION "As many as are led by the Spirit of God they are sons of God" saith the inspired Apostle. Now to have been accounted worthy of the Holy Spirit and to have become sons of God is of all things most to be coveted; and, as it is written, "They that have become his sons find rest from all enquiry." This marvellous, and above all else desirable, blessedness have the Saints from the beginning won by the practice of the virtues, some having striven as Martyrs, and resisted sin unto blood, and others having struggled in self-discipline, and having trodden the narrow way, proving Martyrs in will. Now, that one should hand down to memory the prowess and virtuous deeds of these, both of them that were made perfect by blood, and of them that by self-denial did emulate the conversation of Angels, and should deliver to the generations that follow a pattern of virtue, this hath the Church of Christ received as a tradition from the inspired Apostles, and the blessed Fathers, who did thus enact for the salvation of our race. For the pathway to virtue is rough and steep, especially for such as have not yet wholly turned unto the Lord, but are still at warfare, through the tyranny of their passions. For this reason also we need many encouragements thereto, whether it be exhortations, or the record of the lives of them that have travelled on the road before us; which latter draweth us towards it the less painfully, and doth accustom us not to despair on account of the difficulty of the journey. For even as with a man that would tread a hard and difficult path; by exhortation and encouragement one may scarce win him to essay it, but rather by pointing to the many who have already completed the course, and at the last have arrived safely. So I too, "walking by this rule," and heedful of the danger hanging over that servant who, having received of his lord the talent, buried it in the earth, and hid out of use that which was given him to trade withal, will in no wise pass over in silence the edifying story that hath come to me, the which devout men from the inner land Of the Ethiopians, whom our tale calleth Indians, delivered unto me, translated from trustworthy records. It readeth thus. I. The country of the Indians, as it is called, is vast and populous, lying far beyond Egypt. On the side of Egypt it is washed by seas and navigable gulphs, but on the mainland it marcheth with the borders of Persia, a land formerly darkened with the gloom of idolatry, barbarous to the last degree, and wholly given up to unlawful practices. But when "the only-begotten Son of God, which is in the bosom of the Father," being grieved to see his own handiwork in bondage unto sin, was moved with compassion for the same, and shewed himself amongst us without sin, and, without leaving his Father's throne, dwelt for a season in the Virgin's womb for our sakes, that we might dwell in heaven, and be re-claimed from the ancient fall, and freed from sin by receiving again the adoption of sons; when he had fulfilled every stage of his life in the flesh for our sake, and endured the death of the Cross, and marvellously united earth and heaven; when he had risen again from the dead, and had been received up into heaven, and was seated at the right hand of the majesty of the Father, whence, according to his promise, he sent down the Comforter, the Holy Ghost, unto his eyewitnesses and disciples, in the shape of fiery tongues, and despatched them unto all nations, for to give light to them that sat in the darkness of ignorance, and to baptize them in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, whereby it fell to the lot of some of the Apostles to travel to the far-off East and to some to journey to the West-ward, while others traversed the regions North and South, fulfilling their appointed tasks then it was, I say, that one of the company of Christ's Twelve Apostles, most holy Thomas, was sent out to the land of the Indians, preaching the Gospel of Salvation. "The Lord working with him and confirming the word with signs following," the darkness of superstition was banished; and men were delivered from idolatrous sacrifices and abominations, and added to the true Faith, and being thus transformed by the hands of the Apostle, were made members of Christ's household by Baptism, and, waxing ever with fresh increase, made advancement in the blameless Faith and built churches in all their lands. Now when monasteries began to be formed in Egypt, and numbers of monks banded themselves together, and when the fame of their virtues and Angelic conversation "was gone out into all the ends of the world" and came to the Indians, it stirred them up also to the like zeal, insomuch that many of them forsook everything and withdrew to the deserts; and, though but men in mortal bodies, adopted the spiritual life of Angels. While matters were thus prospering and many were soaring upward to heaven on wings of gold, as the saying is, there arose in that country a king named Abenner, mighty in riches and power, and in victory over his enemies, brave in warfare, vain of his splendid stature and comeliness of face, and boastful of all worldly honours, that pass so soon away. But his soul was utterly crushed by poverty, and choked with many vices, for he was of the Greek way, and sore distraught by the superstitious error of his idol-worship. But, although he lived in luxury, and in the enjoyment of the sweet and pleasant things of life, and was never baulked of any of his wishes and desires, yet one thing there was that marred his happiness, and pierced his soul with care, the curse of childlessness. For being without issue, he took ceaseless thought how he might be rid of this hobble, and be called the father of children, a name greatly coveted by most people. Such was the king, and such his mind. Meanwhile the glorious band of Christians and the companies of monks, paying no regard to the king's majesty, and in no wise terrified by his threats, advanced in the grace of Christ, and grew in number beyond measure, making short account of the king's words, but cleaving closely to everything that led to the service of God. For this reason many, who had adopted the monastic rule, abhorred alike all the sweets of this world, and were enamoured of one thing only, namely godliness, thirsting to lay down their lives for Christ his sake, and yearning for the happiness beyond. Wherefore they preached, not with fear and trembling, but rather even with excess of boldness, the saving Name of God, and naught but Christ was on their lips, as they plainly proclaimed to all men the transitory and fading nature of this present time, and the fixedness and incorruptibility of the life to come, and sowed in men the first seeds, as it were, towards their becoming of the household of God, and winning that life which is hid in Christ. Wherefore many, profiting by this most pleasant teaching, turned away from the bitter darkness of error, and approached the sweet light of Truth; insomuch that certain of their noblemen and senators laid aside all the burthens of life, and thenceforth became monks. But when the king heard thereof, he was filled with wrath, and, boiling over with indignation, passed a decree forthwith, compelling all Christians to renounce their religion. Thereupon he planned and practised new kinds of torture against them, and threatened new forms of death. So throughout all his dominions he sent letters to his rulers and governors ordering penalties against the righteous, and unlawful massacres. But chiefly was his displeasure turned against the ranks of the monastic orders, and against them he waged a truceless and unrelenting warfare. Hence, of a truth, many of the Faithful were shaken in spirit, and others, unable to endure torture, yielded to his ungodly decrees. But of the chiefs and rulers of the monastic order some in rebuking his wickedness ended their lives by suffering martyrdom, and thus attained to everlasting felicity; while others hid themselves in deserts and mountains, not from dread of the threatened tortures, but by a more divine dispensation. II. Now while the land of the Indians lay under the shroud of this moonless night, and while the Faithful were harried on every side, and the champions of ungodliness prospered, the very air reeking with the smell of bloody sacrifices, a certain mall of the royal household, chief satrap in rank, in courage, stature, comeliness, and in all those qualities which mark beauty of body and nobility of soul, far above all his Fellows, hearing of this iniquitous decree, bade farewell to all the grovelling pomps and vanities of the world, joined the ranks of the monks, and retired across the border into the desert. There, by fastings and vigils, and by diligent study of the divine oracles, he throughly purged his senses, and illumined a soul, set free from every passion, with the glorious light of a perfect calm. But when the king, who loved and esteemed him highly, heard thereof, he was grieved in spirit at the loss of his friend, but his anger was the more hotly kindled against the monks. And so he sent everywhere in search of him, leaving "no stone unturned," as the saying is, to find him. After a long while, they that were sent in quest of him, having learnt that he abode in the desert, after diligent search, apprehended him and brought him before the king's judgement seat. When the king saw him in such vile and coarse raiment who before had been clad in rich apparel,--saw him, who had lived in the lap of luxury, shrunken and wasted by the severe practice of discipline, and bearing about in his body outward and visible signs of his hermit-life, he was filled with mingled grief and fury, and, in speech blended of these two passions, he spake unto him thus: "O thou dullard and mad man, wherefore hast thou exchanged thine honour for shame, and thy glorious estate for this unseemly show? To what end hath the president of my kingdom, and chief commander of my realm made himself the laughingstock of boys, and not only forgotten utterly our friendship and fellowship, but revolted against nature herself, and had no pity on his own children, and cared naught for riches and all the splendour of the world, and chosen ignominy such as this rather than the glory that men covet? And what shall it profit thee to have chosen above all gods and men him whom they call Jesus, and to have preferred this rough life of sackcloth to the pleasures and delights of a life of bliss." When the man of God heard these words, he made reply, at once courteous and unruffled: "If it be thy pleasure, O king, to converse with me, remove thine enemies out of mid court; which done, I will answer thee concerning whatsoever thou mayest desire to learn; for while these are here, I cannot speak with thee. But, without speech, torment me, kill me, do as thou wilt, for "the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world,' as saith my divine teacher." The king said, "And who are these enemies whom thou biddest me turn out of court?" The saintly man answered and said, "Anger and Desire. For at the beginning these twain were brought into being by the Creator to be fellow-workers with nature; and such they still are to those 'who walk not after the flesh but after the Spirit.' But in you who are altogether carnal, having nothing of the Spirit, they are adversaries, and play the part of enemies and foemen. For Desire, working in you, stirreth up pleasure, but, when made of none effect, Anger. To-day therefore let these be banished from thee, and let Wisdom and Righteousness sit to hear and judge that which we say. For if thou put Anger and Desire out of court, and in their room bring in Wisdom and Righteousness, I will truthfully tell thee all." Then spake the king, "Lo I yield to thy request, and will banish out of the assembly both Desire and Anger, and make Wisdom and Righteousness to sit between us. So now, tell me without fear, how wast thou so greatly taken with this error, to prefer the bird in the bush to the bird already in the hand?" The hermit answered and said, "O king, if thou askest the cause how I came to despise things temporal, and to devote my whole self to the hope of things eternal, hearken unto me. In former days, when I was still but a stripling, I heard a certain good and wholesome saying, which, by its three took my soul by storm; and the remembrance of it, like some divine seed, being planted in my heart, unmoved, was preserved ever until it took root, blossomed, and bare that fruit which thou seest in me. Now the meaning of that sentence was this: 'It seemed good to the foolish to despise the things that are, as though they were not, and to cleave and cling to the things that are not, as though they were. So he, that hath never tasted the sweetness of the things that are, will not be able to understand the nature of the things that are not. And never having understood them, how shall he despise them?' Now that saying meant by 'things that are' the things eternal and fixed, but by 'things that are not' earthly life, luxury, the prosperity that deceives, whereon, O king, thine heart alas! is fixed amiss. Time was when I also clung thereto myself. But the force of that sentence continually goading my heart, stirred my governing power, my mind, to make the better choice. But 'the law of sin, warring against the law of my mind,' and binding me, as with iron chains, held me captive to the love of things present. "But 'after that the kindness and love of God our Saviour' was pleased to deliver me from that harsh captivity, he enabled my mind to overcome the law of sin, and opened mine eyes to discern good from evil. Thereupon I perceived and looked, and behold! all things present are vanity and vexation of spirit, as somewhere in his writings saith Solomon the wise. Then was the veil of sin lifted from mine heart, and the dullness, proceeding from the grossness of my body, which pressed upon my soul, was scattered, and I perceived the end for which I was created, and how that it behoved me to move upward to my Creator by the keeping of his Commandments. Wherefore I left all and followed him, and I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord that he delivered me out of the mire, and from the making of bricks, and from the harsh and deadly ruler of the darkness of this world, and that he showed me the short and easy road whereby I shall be able, in this earthen body, eagerly to embrace the Angelic life. Seeking to attain to it the sooner, I chose to walk the strait and narrow way, renouncing the vanity of things present and the unstable changes and chances thereof, and refusing to call anything good except the true good, from which thou, O king, art miserably sundered and alienated. Wherefore also we ourselves were alienated and separated from thee, because thou wert falling into plain and manifest destruction, and wouldst constrain us also to descend into like peril. But as long as we were tried in the warfare of this world, we failed in no point of duty. Thou thyself will bear me witness that we were never charged with sloth or heedlessness. "But when thou hast endeavoured to rob us of the chiefest of all blessings, our religion, and to deprive us of God, the worst of deprivations, and, in this intent, dost remind us of past honours and preferments, how should I not rightly tax thee with ignorance of good, seeing that thou dost at all compare these two things, righteousness toward God, and human friendship, and glory, that runneth away like water? And how, in such ease, may we have fellowship with thee, and not the rather deny ourselves friendship and honours and love of children, and if there be any other tie greater than these? When we see thee, O king, the rather forgetting thy reverence toward that God, who giveth thee the power to live and breathe, Christ Jesus, the Lord of all; who, being alike without beginning, and coeternal with the Father, and having created the heavens and the earth by his word, made man with his own hands and endowed him with immortality, and set him king of all on earth and assigned him Paradise, the fairest place of all, as his royal dwelling. But man, beguiled by envy, and (wo is me!) caught by the bait of pleasure, miserably fell from all these blessings. So he that once was enviable became a piteous spectacle, and by his misfortune deserving of tears. Wherefore he, that had made and fashioned us, looked again with eyes of compassion upon the work of his own hands. He, not laying aside his God-head, which he had from the beginning, was made man for our sakes, like ourselves, but without sin, and was content to suffer death upon the Cross. He overthrew the foeman that from the beginning had looked with malice on our race; he rescued us from that bitter captivity; he, of his goodness, restored to us our former freedom, and, of his tender love towards mankind, raised us up again to that place from whence by our disobedience we had fallen, granting us even greater honour than at the first. "Him therefore, who endured such sufferings for our sakes, and again bestowed such blessings upon us, him dost thou reject and scoff at his Cross? And, thyself wholly riveted to carnal delights and deadly passions, dost thou proclaim the idols of shame and dishonour gods? Not only hast thou alienated thyself from the commonwealth of heavenly felicity but thou hast also severed from the same all others who obey thy commands, to the peril of their souls. Know therefore that I will not obey thee, nor join thee in such ingratitude to God-ward; neither will I deny my benefactor and Saviour, though thou slay me by wild beasts, or give me to the fire and sword, as thou hast the power. For I neither fear death, nor desire the present world, having passed judgement on the frailty and vanity thereof. For what is there profitable, abiding or stable therein? Nay, in very existence, great is the misery, great the pain, great and ceaseless the attendant care. Of its gladness and enjoyment the yoke-fellows are dejection and pain. Its riches is poverty; its loftiness die lowest humiliation; and who shall tell the full tale of its miseries, which Saint John the Divine hath shown me in few words? For he saith, 'The whole world lieth in wickedness'; and, 'Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. For all that is in the world is the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life. And the world passeth away, and the lust thereof, but he that doeth the will of God abideth for ever.' Seeking, then, this good will of God, I have forsaken everything, and joined myself to those who possess the same desire, and seek after the same God. Amongst these there is no strife or envy, sorrow or care, but all run the like race that they may obtain those everlasting habitations which the Father of lights hath prepared for them that love him. Them have I gained for my fathers, my brothers, my friends and mine acquaintances. But from my former friends and brethren 'I have got me away far off, and lodged in the wilderness' waiting for the God, who saveth me from faintness of spirit, and from the stormy tempest." When the man of God had made answer thus gently and in good reason, the king was stirred by anger, and was minded cruelly to torment the saint; but again he hesitated and delayed, regarding his venerable and noble mien. So he answered and said: "Unhappy man, that hast contrived thine own utter ruin, driven thereto, I ween, by fate, surely thou hast made thy tongue as sharp as thy wits. Hence thou hast uttered these vain and ambiguous babblings. Had I not promised, at the beginning of our converse, to banish Anger from mid court, I had now given thy body to be burned. But since thou hast prevented and tied me down fast by my words, I bear with thine effrontery, by reason of my former friendship with thee. Now, arise, and flee for ever from my sight, lest I see thee again and miserably destroy thee." So the man of God went out and withdrew to the desert, grieved to have lost the crown of martyrdom, but daily a martyr in his conscience, and 'wrestling against principalities and powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness'; as saith Blessed Paul. But after his departure, the king waxed yet more wroth, and devised a yet fiercer persecution of the monastic order, while treating with greater honour the ministers and temple-keepers of his idols. While the king was under this terrible delusion and error, there was born unto him a son, a right goodly child, whose beauty from his very birth was prophetic of his future fortunes. Nowhere in that land, they said, had there ever been seen so charming and lovely a babe. Full of the keenest joy at the birth of the child, the king called him Ioasaph, and in his folly went in person to the temples of his idols, for to do sacrifice and offer hymns of praise to his still more foolish gods, unaware of the real giver of all good things, to whom he should have offered the spiritual sacrifice. He then, ascribing the cause Of his son's birth to things lifeless and dumb, sent out into all quarters to gather the people together to celebrate his son's birth-day: and thou mightest have seen all the folk running together for fear of the king, and bringing their offerings ready for the sacrifice, according to the store at each man's hand, and his favour toward his lord. But chiefly the king stirred them up to emulation. He brought full many oxen, of goodly size, for sacrifice, and thus, making a feast for all his people, he bestowed largesses on all his counsellors and officers, and on all his soldiers, and all the poor, and men of low degree. III. Now on his son's birth-day feast there came unto the king some five and fifty chosen men, schooled in the star-lore of the Chaldaeans. These the king called into his presence, and asked them, severally, to tell him the future of the new-born babe. After long counsel held, they said that he should be mighty in riches and power, and should surpass all that had reigned before him. But one of the astrologers, the most learned of all his fellows, spake thus: "From that which I learn from the courses of the stars, O king, the advancement of the child, now born unto thee, will not be in thy kingdom, but in another, a better and a greater one beyond compare. Methinketh also that he will embrace the Christian religion, which thou persecutest, and I trow that he will not be disappointed of his aim and hope." Thus spake the astrologer, like Balaam of old, not that his star-lore told him true, but because God signifieth the truth by the mouth of his enemies, that all excuse may be taken from the ungodly. But when the king heard thereof, he received the tidings with a heavy heart, and sorrow cut short his joy. Howsoever he built, in a city set apart, an exceeding beautiful palace, with cunningly devised gorgeous chambers, and there set his son to dwell, after he had ended his first infancy; and he forbade any to approach him, appointing, for instructors and servants, youths right seemly to behold. These he charged to reveal to him none of the annoys of life, neither death, nor old age, nor disease, nor poverty, nor anything else grievous that might break his happiness: but to place before him everything pleasant and enjoyable, that his heart, revelling in these delights, might not gain strength to consider the future, nor ever hear the bare mention of the tale of Christ and his doctrines. For he was heedful of the astrologer's warning, and it was this most that he was minded to conceal from his son. And if any of the attendants chanced to fall sick, he commanded to have him speedily removed, and put another plump and well-favoured servant in his place, that the boy's eyes might never once behold anything to disquiet them. Such then was the intent and doing of the king, for, 'seeing, he did not see, and hearing, he did not understand.' But, learning that some monks still remained, of whom he fondly imagined that not a trace was left, he became angry above measure, and his fury was hotly kindled against them. And he commanded heralds to scour all the city and all the country, proclaiming that after three days no monk whatsoever should be found therein. But and if any were discovered after the set time, they should be delivered to destruction by fire and sword. "For," said he, "these be they that persuade the people to worship the Crucified as God." Meanwhile a thing befell, that made the king still more angry and bitter against the monks. IV. There was at court a man pre-eminent among the rulers, of virtuous life and devout in religion. But while working out his own salvation, as best he might, he kept it secret for fear of the king. Wherefore certain men, looking enviously on his free converse with the king, studied how they might slander him; and this was all their thought. On a day, when the king went forth a-hunting with his bodyguard, as was his wont, this good man was of the hunting party. While he was walking alone, by divine providence, as I believe, he found a man in a covert, cast to the ground, his foot grievously crushed by a wild-beast. Seeing him passing by, the wounded man importuned him not to go his way, but to pity his misfortune, and take him to his own home, adding thereto: "I hope that I shall not be found unprofitable, nor altogether useless unto thee." Our nobleman said unto him, "For very charity I will take thee up, and render thee such service as I may. But what is this profit which thou saidest that I should receive of thee?" The poor sick man answered, "I am a physician of words. If ever in speech or converse any wound or damage be found, I will heal it with befitting medicines, that so the evil spread no further." The devout man gave no heed to his word, but on account of the commandment, ordered him to be carried home, and grudged him not that tending which he required. But the aforesaid envious and malignant persons, bringing forth to light that ungodliness with which they had long been in travail, slandered this good man to the king; that not only did he forget his friendship with the king, and neglect the worship of the gods, and incline to Christianity, but more, that he was grievously intriguing against the kingly power, and was turning aside the common people, and stealing all hearts for himself. "But," said they, "if thou wilt prove that our charge is not ungrounded, call him to thee privately; and, to try him, say that thou desirest to leave thy fathers' religion, and the glory of thy kingship, and to become a Christian, and to put on the monkish habit which formerly thou didst persecute, having, thou shalt tell him, found thine old course evil." The authors of this villainous charge against the Christian knew the tenderness of his heart, how that, if he heard such speech from the king, he would advise him, who had made this better choice, not to put off his good determinations, and so they would be found just accusers. But the king, not forgetful of his friend's great kindness toward him, thought these accusations incredible and false; and because he might not accept them without proof, he resolved to try the fact and the charge. So he called the man apart and said, to prove him, "Friend, thou knowest of all my past dealings with them that are called monks and with all the Christians. But now, I have repented in this matter, and, lightly esteeming the present world, would fain become partaker of those hopes whereof I have heard them speak, of some immortal kingdom in the life to come; for the present is of a surety cut short by death. And in none other way, methinks, can I succeed herein and not miss the mark except I become a Christian, and, bidding farewell to the glory of my kingdom and all the pleasures and joys of life, go seek those hermits and monks, wheresoever they be, whom I have banished, and join myself to their number. Now what sayest thou thereto, and what is thine advice? Say on; I adjure thee in the name of truth; for I know thee to be true and wise above all men." The worthy man, hearing this, but never guessing the hidden pitfall, was pricked in spirit, and, melting into tears, answered in his simplicity, "O king, live for ever! Good and sound is the determination that thou hast determined; for though the kingdom of heaven be difficult to find, yet must a man seek it with all his might, for it is written, 'He that seeketh shall find it.' The enjoyment of the present life, though in seeming it give delight and sweetness, is well thrust from us. At the very moment of its being it ceaseth to be, and for our joy repayeth us with sorrow sevenfold. Its happiness and its sorrow are more frail than a shadow, and, like the traces of a ship passing over the sea, or of a bird flying through the air, quickly disappear. But the hope of the life to come which the Christians preach is certain, and as surety sure; howbeit in this world it hath tribulation, whereas our pleasures now are short-lived, and in the beyond they only win us correction and everlasting punishment without release. For the pleasures of such life are temporary, but its pains eternal; while the Christians' labours are temporary, but their pleasure and gain immortal. Therefore well befall this good determination of the king! for right good it is to exchange the corruptible for the eternal." The king heard these words and waxed exceeding wroth: nevertheless he restrained his anger, and for the season let no word fall. But the other, being shrewd and quick of wit, perceived that the king took his word ill, and was craftily sounding him. So, on his coming home, he fell into much grief and distress in his perplexity how to conciliate the king and to escape the peril hanging over his own head. But as he lay awake all the night long, there came to his remembrance the man with the crushed foot; so he had him brought before him, and said, "I remember thy saying that thou weft an healer of injured speech." "Yea," quoth he, "and if thou wilt I will give thee proof of my skill." The senator answered and told him of his aforetime friendship with the king, and of the confidence which he had enjoyed, and of the snare laid for him in his late converse with the king; how he had given a good answer, but the king had taken his words amiss, and by his change of countenance betrayed the anger lurking within his heart. The sick beggar-man considered and said, "Be it known unto thee, most noble sir, that the king harboureth against thee the suspicion, that thou wouldest usurp his kingdom, and he spake, as he spake, to sound thee. Arise therefore, and crop thy hair. Doff these thy fine garments, and don an hair-shirt, and at daybreak present thyself before the king. And when he asketh thee, 'What meaneth this apparel?' answer him, 'It hath to do with thy communing with me yesterday, O king. Behold, I am ready to follow thee along the road that thou art eager to travel; for though luxury be desirable and passing sweet, God forbid that I embrace it after thou art gone! Though the path of virtue, which thou art about to tread, be difficult and rough, yet in thy company I shall find it easy and pleasant, for as I have shared with thee this thy prosperity so now will I share thy distresses, that in the future, as in the past, I may be thy fellow.'" Our nobleman, approving of the sick man's saying, did as he said. When the king saw and heard him, he was delighted, and beyond measure gratified by his devotion towards him. He saw that the accusations against his senator were false, and promoted him to more honour and to a greater enjoyment of his confidence. But against the monks he again raged above measure, declaring that this was of their teaching, that men should abstain from the pleasures of life, and rock themselves in visionary hopes. Another day, when he was gone a-hunting, he espied two monks crossing the desert. These he ordered to be apprehended and brought to his chariot. Looking angrily upon them, and breathing fire, as they say, "Ye vagabonds and deceivers," he cried, "have ye not heard the plain proclamation of the heralds, that if any of your execrable religion were found, after three days, in any city or country within my realm, he should be burned with fire?" The monks answered, "Lo! obedient to thine order, we be coming out of thy cities and coasts. But as the journey before us is long, to get us away to our brethren, being in want of victuals, we were making provision for the way, that we perish not with hunger." Said the king, "He that dreadeth menace of death busieth not himself with the purveyante of victuals." "Well spoken, O king," cried the monks. "They that dread death have concern how to escape it. And who are these but such as cling to things temporary and are enamoured of them, who, having no good hopes yonder, find it hard to be wrenched from this present world, and therefore dread death? But we, who have long since hated the world and the things of the world, and are walking along the narrow and strait road, for Christ his sake, neither dread death, nor desire the present world, but only long for the world to come. Therefore, forasmuch the death that thou art bringing upon us proveth but the passage to that everlasting and better life, it is rather to be desired of us than feared." Hereupon the king, wishing to entrap the monks, as I ween, shrewdly said, "How now? Said ye not but this instant, that ye were withdrawing even as I commanded you? And, if ye fear not death, how came ye to be fleeing? Lo! this is but another of your idle boasts and lies." The monks answered, "Tis not because we dread the death wherewith thou dost threaten us that we flee, but because we pity thee. 'Twas in order that we might not bring on thee greater condemnation, that we were eager to escape. Else for ourselves we are never a whit terrified by thy threats." At this the king waxed wroth and bade burn them with fire. So by fire were these servants of God made perfect, and received the Martyr's crown. And the king published a decree that, should any be found leading a monk's life, he should be put to death without trial. Thus was there left in that country none of the monastic order, save those that had hid them in mountains and caverns and holes of the earth. So much then concerning this matter. V. But meanwhile, the king's son, of whom our tale began to tell, never departing from the palace prepared for him, attained to the age of manhood. He had pursued all the learning of the Ethiopians and Persians, and was as fair and well favoured in mind as in body, intelligent and prudent, and shining in all excellencies. To his teachers he would propound such questions of natural history that even they marvelled at the boy's quickness and understanding, while the king was astounded at the charm of his countenance and the disposition of his soul. He charged the attendants of the young prince on no account to make known unto him any of the annoys of life, least of all to tell him that death ensueth on the pleasures of this world. But vain was the hope whereon he stayed, and he was like the archer in the tale that would shoot at the sky. For how could death have remained unknown to any human creature? Nor did it to this boy; for his mind was fertile of wit, and he would reason within himself, why his father had condemned him never to go abroad, and had forbidden access to all. He knew, without hearing it, that this was his father's express command. Nevertheless he feared to ask him; it was not to be believed that his father intended aught but his good; and again, if it were so by his father's will, his father would not reveal the true reason, for all his asking. Wherefore he determined to learn the secret from some other source. There was one of his tutors nearer and dearer to him than the rest, whose devotion he won even further by handsome gifts. To him he put the question what his father might mean by thus enclosing him within those walls, adding, "If thou wilt plainly tell me this, of all thou shalt stand first in my favour, and I will make with thee a covenant of everlasting friendship." The tutor, himself a prudent man, knowing how bright and mature was the boy's wit and that he would not betray him, to his peril, discovered to him the whole matter the persecution of the Christians and especially of the anchorets decreed by the king, and how they were driven forth and banished from the country round about; also the prophecies of the astrologers at his birth. "'Twas in order," said he, "that thou mightest never hear of their teaching, and choose it before our religion, that the king hath thus devised that none but a small company should dwell with thee, and hath commanded us to acquaint thee with none of the woes of life." When the young prince heard this he said never a word more, but the word of salvation took hold of his heart, and the grace of the Comforter began to open wide the eyes of his understanding, leading him by the hand to the true God, as our tale in its course shall tell. Now the king his father came oftentimes to see his boy, for he loved him passing well. On a day his son said unto him, "There is something that I long to learn from thee, my lord the king, by reason of which continual grief and unceasing care consumeth my soul." His father was grieved at heart at the very word, and said, "Tell me, darling child, what is the sadness that constraineth thee, and straightway I will do my diligence to turn it into gladness." The boy said, "What is the reason of mine imprisonment here? Wily hast thou barred me within walls and doors, never going forth and seen of none?" His father replied, "Because I will not, my son, that thou shouldest behold anything to embitter thy heart or mar thy happiness. I intend that thou shalt spend all thy days in luxury unbroken, and in all manner joy and pleasaunce." "But," said the son unto his father, "know well, Sir, that thus I live not in joy and pleasaunce, but rather in affliction and great straits, so that my very meat and drink seem distasteful unto me and bitter. I yearn to see all that lieth without these gates. If then thou wouldest not have me live in anguish of mind, bid me go abroad as I desire, and let me rejoice my soul with sights hitherto unseen by mine eyes." Grieved was the king to hear these words, but, perceiving that to deny this request would but increase his boy's pain and grief, he answered, "My son, I will grant thee thy heart's desire." And immediately he ordered that choice steeds, and an escort fit for a king, be made ready, and gave him license to go abroad whensoever he would, charging his companions to suffer nothing unpleasant to come in his way, but to show him all that was beautiful and gladsome. He bade them muster in the way troops of folk intuning melodies in every mode, and presenting divers mimic shows, that these might occupy and delight his mind. So thus it came to pass that the king's son often went abroad. One day, through the negligence of his attendants, he descried two men, the one maimed, and the other blind. In abhorrence of the sight, he cried to his esquires, "Who are these, and what is this distressing spectacle?" They, unable to conceal what he had with his own eyes seen, answered, "These be human sufferings, which spring from corrupt matter, and from a body full of evil humours." The young prince asked, "Are these the fortune of all men?" They answered, "Not of all, but of those in whom the principle of health is turned away by the badness of the humours." Again the youth asked, "If then this is wont to happen not to all, but only to some, can they be known on whom this terrible calamity shall fall? or is it undefined and unforeseeable?" "What man," said they, "can discern the future, and accurately ascertain it? This is beyond human nature, and is reserved for the immortal gods alone." The young prince ceased from his questioning, but his heart was grieved at the sight that he had witnessed, and the form of his visage was changed by the strangeness of the matter. Not many days after, as he was again taking his walks abroad, he happened with an old man, well stricken in years, shrivelled in countenance, feeble-kneed, bent double, grey-haired, toothless, and with broken utterance. The prince was seized with astonishment, and, calling the old man near, desired to know the meaning of this strange sight. His companions answered, "This man is now well advanced in years, and his gradual decrease of strength, with increase of weakness, hath brought him to the misery that thou seest." "And," said he, "what will be his end?" They answered, "Naught but death will relieve him." "But," said he, "is this the appointed doom of all mankind? Or doth it happen only to some?" They answered, "Unless death come before hand to remove him, no dweller on earth, but, as life advanceth, must make trial of this lot." Then the young prince asked in how many years this overtook a man, and whether the doom of death was without reprieve, and whether there was no way to escape it, and avoid coming to such misery. They answered him, "In eighty or an hundred years men arrive at this old age, and then they die, since there is none other way; for death is a debt due to nature, laid on man from the beginning, and its approach is inexorable." When our wise and sagacious young prince saw and heard all this, he sighed from the bottom of his heart. "Bitter is this life," cried he, "and fulfilled of all pain and anguish, if this be so. And how can a body be careless in the expectation of an unknown death, whose approach (ye say) is as uncertain as it is inexorable?" So he went away, restlessly turning over all these things in his mind, pondering without end, and ever calling up remembrances of death. Wherefore trouble and despondency were his companions, and his grief knew no ease; for he said to himself, "And is it true that death shall one day overtake me? And who is he that shall make mention of me after death, when time delivereth all things to forgetfulness? When dead, shall I dissolve into nothingness? Or is there life beyond, and another world?" Ever fretting over these and the like considerations, he waxed pale and wasted away, but in the presence of his father, whenever he chanced to come to him, he made as though he were cheerful and without trouble, unwilling that his cares should come to his father's knowledge. But he longed with an unrestrainable yearning, to meet with the man that might accomplish his heart's desire, and fill his ears with the sound of good tidings. Again he enquired of the tutor of whom we have spoken, whether he knew of anybody able to help him towards his desire, and to establish a mind, dazed and shuddering at its cogitations, and unable to throw off its burden. He, recollecting their former communications, said, "I have told thee already how thy father hath dealt with the wise men and anchorets who spend their lives in such philosophies. Some hath he slain, and others he hath wrathfully persecuted, and I wot not whether any of this sort be in this country side." Thereat the prince was overwhelmed with woe, and grievously wounded in spirit. He was like unto a man that hath lost a great treasure, whose whole heart is occupied in seeking after it. Thenceforth he lived in perpetual conflict and distress of mind, and all the pleasures and delights of this world were in his eyes an abomination and a curse. While the youth was in this way, and his soul was crying out to discover that which is good, the eye that beholdeth all things looked upon him, and he that willeth that 'all men should be saved, and come to the knowledge of the truth,' passed him not by, but showed this man also the tender love that he hath toward mankind, and made known upon him the path whereon he needs must go. Befel it thus. VI. There was at that time a certain monk, learned in heavenly things, graced in word and deed, a model follower of every monastic rule. Whence he sprang, and what his race, I cannot say, but he dwelt in a waste howling wilderness in the land of Senaar, and had been perfected through the grace of the priesthood. Barlaam was this elder's name. He, learning by divine revelation the state of the king's son, left the desert and returned to the world. Changing his habit, he put on lay attire, and, embarking on ship board, arrived at the seat of the empire of the Indians. Disguised as a merchant man, he entered the city, where was the palace of the king's son. There he tarried many days, and enquired diligently concerning the prince's affairs, and those that had access to him. Learning that the tutor, of whom we have spoken, was the prince's most familiar friend, he privily approached him, saying, "I would have thee understand, my lord, that I am a merchant man, come from a far country; and I possess a precious gem, the like of which was never yet found, and hitherto I have shewed it to no man. But now I reveal the secret to thee, seeing thee to be wise and prudent, that thou mayest bring me before the king's son, and I will present it to him. Beyond compare, it surpasseth all beautiful things; for on the blind in heart it hath virtue to bestow the light of wisdom, to open the ears of the deaf, to give speech to the dumb and strength to the ailing. It maketh the foolish wise and driveth away devils, and without stint furnisheth its possessor with everything that is lovely and desirable." The tutor said, "Though, to all seeming, thou art a man of staid and steadfast judgment, yet thy words prove thee to be boastful beyond measure. Time would fail me to tell thee the full tale of the costly and precious gems and pearls that I have seen. But gems, with such power as thou tellest of, I never saw nor heard of yet. Nevertheless shew me the stone; and if it be as thou affirmest, I immediately bear it to the king's son, from whom thou shalt receive most high honours and rewards. But, before I be assured by the certain witness of mine own eyes, I may not carry to my lord and master so swollen a tale about so doubtful a thing." Quoth Barlaam, "Well hast thou said that thou hast never seen or heard of such powers and virtues; for my speech to thee is on no ordinary matter, but on a wondrous and a great. But, as thou desiredst to behold it, listen to my words. "This exceeding precious gem, amongst these its powers and virtues, possesseth this property besides. It cannot be seen out of hand, save by one whose eyesight is strong and sound, and his body pure and thoroughly undefiled. If any man, lacking in these two good qualities, do rashly gaze upon this precious stone, he shall, I suppose lose even the eyesight that he hath, and his wits as well. Now I, that am initiated in the physician's art, observe that thine eyes are not healthy, and I fear lest I may cause thee to lose even the eyesight that thou hast. But of the king's son, I have heard that he leadeth a sober life, and that his eyes are young and fair, and healthy. Wherefore to him I make bold to display this treasure. Be not thou then negligent herein, nor rob thy master of so wondrous a boon." The other answered, "If this be so, in no wise show me the gem; for my life hath been polluted by many sins, and also, as thou sayest, I am not possest of good eyesight. But I am won by thy words, and will not hesitate to make known these things unto my lord the prince." So saying, he went in, and, word by word, reported everything to the king's son. He, hearing his tutor's words, felt a strange joy and spiritual gladness breathing into his heart, and, like one inspired, bade bring in the man forthwith. So when Barlaam was come in, and had in due order wished him Peace!, the prince bade him be seated. Then his tutor withdrew, and Ioasaph said unto the elder, "Shew me the precious gem, concerning which, as my tutor hath narrated, thou tellest such great and marvellous tales." Then began Barlaam to discourse with him thus: "It is not fitting, O prince, that I should say anything falsely or unadvisedly to thine excellent majesty. All that hath been signified to thee from me is true and may not be gainsaid. But, except I first make trial of thy mind, it is not lawful to declare to thee this mystery; for my master saith, 'There went out a sower to sow his seed: and, as he sowed, some seeds fell by the wayside, and the fowls of the air came and devoured them up: some fell upon stony places, where they had not much earth: and forthwith they sprang up, because they had no deepness of earth: and when the sun was up, they were scorched: and because they had no root, they withered away. And some fell among thorns; and the thorns sprung up and choked them: but others fell upon good ground, and brought forth fruit an hundredfold.' Now, if I find in thine heart fruit-bearing ground, and good, I shall not be slow to plant therein the heavenly seed, and manifest to thee the mighty mystery. But and if the ground be stony and thorny, and the wayside trodden down by all who will, it were better never to let fall this seed of salvation, nor to cast it for a prey to fowls and beasts, before which I have been charged not to cast pearls. But I am 'persuaded better things of thee, and things that accompany salvation,'--how that thou shalt see the priceless stone, and it shall be given thee in the light of that stone to become light, and bring forth fruit an hundredfold. Aye, for thy sake I gave diligence and accomplished a long journey, to shew thee things which thou hast never seen, and teach thee things which thou hast never heard." Ioasaph said unto him, "For myself, reverend elder, I have a longing, all irresistible passion to hear some new and goodly word, and in mine heart there is kindled fire, cruelly burning and urging me to learn the answer to some questions that will not rest. But until now I never happened on one that could satisfy me as touching them. But if I meet with some wise and understanding man, and hear the word of salvation, I shall not deliver it to the fowls of the air, I trow, nor yet to the beasts of the field; nor shall I be found either stony or thorny-hearted, as thou saidest, but I shall receive the word kindly, and guard it wisely. So if thou knowest any such like thing, conceal it not from me, but declare it. When I heard that thou were come from a far country, my spirit rejoiced, and I had good hope of obtaining through thee that which I desire. Wherefore I called thee straightway into my presence, and received thee in friendly wise as one of my companions and peers, if so be that I may not be disappointed of my hope." Barlaam answered, "Fair are thy deeds, and worthy of thy royal majesty; seeing that thou hast paid no heed to my mean show, but hast devoted thyself to the hope that lieth within. "There was once a great and famous king: and it came to pass, when he was riding on a day in his golden chariot, with his royal guard, that there met him two men, clad in filthy rags, with fallen-in faces, and pale as death. Now the king knew that it was by buffetings of the body and by the sweats of the monastic life that they had thus wasted their miserable flesh. So, seeing them, he leapt anon from his chariot, fell on the ground, and did obeisance. Then rising, he embraced and greeted them tenderly. But his noblemen and counsellors took offence thereat, deeming that their sovran had disgraced his kingly honour. But not daring to reprove him to the face, they bade the king's own brother tell the king not thus to insult the majesty of his crown. When he had told the king thereof, and had upbraided him for his untimely humility, the king gave his brother an answer which he failed to understand. "It was the custom of that king, whenever he sentenced anyone to death, to send a herald to his door, with a trumpet reserved for that purpose, and at the sound of this trumpet all understood that that man was liable to the penalty of death. So when evening was come, the king sent the death-trumpet to sound at his brother's door; who, when he heard its blast, despaired of his life, and all night long set his house in order. At day-break, robed in black and garments of mourning, with wife and children, he went to the palace gate, weeping and lamenting. The king fetched him in, and seeing him in tears, said, 'O fool, and slow of understanding, how didst thou, who hast had such dread of the herald of thy peer and brother (against whom thy conscience doth not accuse thee of having committed any trespass) blame me for my humility in greeting the heralds of my God, when they warned me, in gentler tones than those of the trumpet, of my death and fearful meeting with that Master against whom I know that I have often grievously offended? Lo! then, it was in reproof of thy folly that I played thee this turn, even as I will shortly convict of vanity those that prompted thy reproof.' Thus he comforted his brother and sent him home with a gift. "Then he ordered four wooden caskets to be made. Two of these he covered over all with gold, and, placing dead men's mouldering bones therein, secured them with golden clasps. The other two he smeared over with pitch and tar, but filled them with costly stones and precious pearls, and all manner of aromatic sweet perfume. He bound them fast with cords of hair, and called for the noblemen who had blamed him for his manner of accosting the men by the wayside. Before them he set the four caskets, that they might appraise the value of these and those. They decided that the golden ones were of greatest value, for, peradventure, they contained kingly diadems and girdles. But those, that were be-smeared with pitch and tar, were cheap and of paltry worth, said they. Then said the king to them, 'I know that such is your answer, for with the eyes of sense ye judge the objects of sense, but so ought ye not to do, but ye should rather see with the inner eye the hidden worthlessness or value.' Whereupon he ordered the golden chests to be opened. And when they were thrown open, they gave out a loathsome smell and presented a hideous sight. "Said the king, 'Here is a figure of those who are clothed in glory and honour, and make great display of power and glory, but within is the stink of dead men's bones and works of iniquity.' Next, he commanded the pitched and tarred caskets also to be opened, and delighted the company with the beauty and sweet savour of their stores. And he said unto them, 'Know ye to whom these are like? They are like those lowly men, clad in vile apparel, whose outward form alone ye beheld, and deemed it outrageous that I bowed down to do them obeisance. But through the eyes of my mind I perceived the value and exceeding beauty of their souls, and was glorified by their touch, and I counted them more honourable than any chaplet or royal purple.' Thus he shamed his courtiers, and taught them not to be deceived by outward appearances, but to give heed to the things of the soul. After the example of that devout and wise king hast thou also done, in that thou hast received me in good hope, wherein, as I ween, thou shalt not be disappointed." Ioasaph said unto him, "Fair and fitting hath been all thy speech; but now I fain would learn who is thy Master, who, as thou saidest at the first, spake concerning the Sower." VII. Again therefore Barlaam took up his parable and said, "If thou wilt learn who is my Master, it is Jesus Christ the Lord, the only-begotten Son of God, 'the blessed and only potentate, the King of kings, and Lords of lords; who only hath immortality, dwelling in the light which no man can approach unto'; who with the Father and the Holy Ghost is glorified. I am not one of those who proclaim from the house-top their wild rout of gods, and worship lifeless and dumb idols, but one God do I acknowledge and confess, in three persons glorified, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, but in one nature and substance, in one glory and kingdom undivided. He then is in three persons one God, without beginning, and without end, eternal and everlasting, increate, immutable and incorporeal, invisible, infinite, incomprehensible, alone good and righteous, who created all things out of nothing, whether visible or invisible. First, he made the heavenly and invisible powers, countless multitudes, immaterial and bodiless, ministering spirits of the majesty of God. Afterward he created this visible world, heaven and earth and sea, which also he made glorious with light and richly adorned it; the heavens with the sun, moon and stars, and the earth with all manner of herbs and divers living beasts, and the sea in turn with all kinds of fishes. 'He spake the word and these all were made; he commanded and they were created.' Then with his own hands he created man, taking dust of the ground for the fashioning of his body, but by his own in-breathing giving him a reasonable and intelligent soul, which, as it is written, was made after the image and likeness of God: after his image, because of reason and free will; after his likeness, because of the likeness of virtue, in its degree, to God. Him he endowed with free will and immortality and appointed sovran over everything upon earth; and from man he made woman, to be an helpmeet of like nature for him. "And he planted a garden eastward in Eden, full of delight and all heart's ease, and set thereto the man whom he had formed, and commanded him freely to eat of all the heavenly trees therein, but forbade him wholly the taste of a certain one which was called the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thus saying, 'In the day that ye eat thereof ye shall surely die.' But one of the aforesaid angel powers, the marshall of one host, though he bore in himself no trace of natural evil from his Maker's hand but had been created for good, yet by his own free and deliberate choice turned aside from good to evil, and was stirred up by madness to the desire to take up arms against his Lord God. Wherefore he was cast out of his rank and dignity, and in the stead of his former blissful glory and angelick name received the name of the 'Devil' and 'Satan' for his title. God banished him as unworthy of the glory above. And together with him there was drawn away and hurled forth a great multitude of the company of angels under him, who were evil of choice, and chose in place of good, to follow in the rebellion of their leader. These were called Devils, as being deluders and deceivers. "Thus then did the devil utterly renounce the good, and assume an evil nature; and he conceived spite against man, seeing himself hurled from such glory, and man raised to such honour; and he schemed to oust him from that blissful state. So he took the serpent for the workshop of his own guile. Through him he conversed with the woman, and persuaded her to eat of that forbidden tree in the hope of being as God, and through her he deceived Adam also, for that was the first man's name. So Adam ate of the tree of disobedience, and was banished by his maker from that paradise of delight, and, in lieu of those happy days and that immortal life, fell alas! into this life of misery and woe, and at the last received sentence of death. Thenceforth the devil waxed strong and boastful through his victory; and, as the race of man multiplied, he prompted them in all manner of wickedness. So, wishing to cut short the growth of sin, God brought a deluge on the earth, and destroyed every living soul. But one single righteous man did God find in that generation; and him, with wife and children, he saved alive in an Ark, and set him utterly desolate on earth. But, when the human race again began to multiply, they forgat God, and ran into worse excess of wickedness, being in subjection to divers sins and ruined in strange delusions, and wandering apart into many branches of error. "Some deemed that everything moved by mere chance, and taught that there was no Providence, since there was no master to govern. Others brought in fate, and committed everything to the stars at birth. Others worshipped many evil deities subject to many passions, to the end that they might have them to advocate their own passions and shameful deeds, whose forms they moulded, and whose dumb figures and senseless idols they set up, and enclosed them in temples, and did homage to them, 'serving the creature more than the Creator.' Some worshipped the sun, moon and stars which God fixed, for to give light to our earthly sphere; things without soul or sense, enlightened and sustained by the providence of God, but unable to accomplish anything of themselves. Others again worshipped fire and water, and the other elements, things without soul or sense; and men, possest of soul and reason, were not ashamed to worship the like of these. Others assigned worship to beasts, creeping and four-footed things, proving themselves more beastly than the things that they worshipped. Others made them images of vile and worthless men, and named them gods, some of whom they called males, and some females, and they themselves set them forth as adulterers, murderers, victims of anger, jealousy, wrath, slayers of fathers, slayers of brothers, thieves and robbers, lame and maim, sorcerers and madmen. Others they showed dead, struck by thunderbolts, or beating their breasts, or being mourned over, or in enslavement to mankind, or exiled, or, for foul and shameful unions, taking the forms of animals. Whence men, taking occasion by the gods themselves, took heart to pollute themselves in all manner of uncleanness. So an horrible darkness overspread our race in those times, and 'there was none that did understand and seek after God.' "Now in that generation one Abraham alone was found strong in his spiritual senses; and by contemplation of Creation he recognized the Creator. When he considered heaven, earth and sea, the sun, moon and the like, he marvelled at their harmonious ordering. Seeing the world, and all that therein is, he could not believe that it had been created, and was upheld, by its own power, nor did he ascribe such a fair ordering to earthly elements or lifeless idols. But therein he recognized the true God, and understood him to be the maker and sustainer of the whole. And God, approving his fair wisdom and right judgement, manifested himself unto him, not as he essentially is (for it is impossible for a created being to see God), but by certain manifestations in material forms, as he alone can, and he planted in Abraham more perfect knowledge; he magnified him and made him his own servant. Which Abraham in turn handed down to his children his own righteousness, and taught them to know the true God. Wherefore also the Lord was pleased to multiply his seed beyond measure, and called them 'a peculiar people,' and brought them forth out of bondage to the Egyptian nation, and to one Pharaoh a tyrant, by strange and terrible signs and wonders wrought by the hand of Moses and Aaron, holy men, honoured with the gift of prophecy; by whom also he punished the Egyptians in fashion worthy of their wickedness, and led the Israelites (for thus the people descended from Abraham were called) through the Red Sea upon dry land, the waters dividing and making a wall on the right hand and a wall on the left. But when Pharaoh and the Egyptians pursued and went in after them, the waters returned and utterly destroyed them. Then with exceeding mighty miracles and divine manifestations by the space of forty years he led the people in the wilderness, and fed them with bread from heaven, and gave the Law divinely written on tables of stone, which he delivered unto Moses on the mount, 'a type and shadow of things to come' leading men away from idols and all manner of wickedness, and teaching them to worship only the one true God, and to cleave to good works. By such wondrous deeds, he brought them into a certain goodly land, the which he had promised aforetime to Abraham the patriarch, that he would give it unto his seed. And the task were long, to tell of all the mighty and marvellous works full of glory and wonder, without number, which he shewed unto them, by which it was his purpose to pluck the human race from all unlawful worship and practice, and to bring men back to their first estate. But even so our nature was in bondage by its freedom to err, and death had dominion over mankind, delivering all to the tyranny of the devil, and to the damnation of hell. "So when we had sunk to this depth of misfortune and misery, we were not forgotten by him that formed and brought us out of nothing into being, nor did he suffer his own handiwork utterly to perish. By the good pleasure of our God and Father, and the co-operation of the Holy Ghost, the only-begotten Son, even the Word of God, which is in the bosom of the Father, being of one substance with the Father and with the Holy Ghost, he that was before all worlds, without beginning, who was in the beginning, and was with God even the Father, and was God, he, I say, condescended toward his servants with an unspeakable and incomprehensible condescension; and, being perfect God, was made perfect man, of the Holy Ghost, and of Mary the Holy Virgin and Mother of God, not of the seed of man, nor of the will of man, nor by carnal union, being conceived in the Virgin's undefiled womb, of the Holy Ghost; as also, before his conception, one of the Archangels was sent to announce to the Virgin that miraculous conception and ineffable birth. For without seed was the Son of God conceived of the Holy Ghost, and in the Virgin's womb he formed for himself a fleshy body, animate with a reasonable and intelligent soul, and thence came forth in one substance, but in two natures, perfect God and perfect man, and preserved undefiled, even after birth, the virginity of her that bore him. He, being made of like passions with ourselves in all things, yet without sin, took our infirmities and bare our sicknesses. For, since by sin death entered into the world, need was that he, that should redeem the world, should be without sin, and not by sin subject unto death. "When he had lived thirty years among men, he was baptized in the river Jordan by John, an holy man, and great above all the prophets. And when he was baptized there came a voice from heaven, from God, even the Father, saying, 'This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased,' and the Holy Ghost descended upon him in likeness of a dove. From that time forth he began to do great signs and wonders, raising the dead, giving sight to the blind, casting out devils, healing the lame and maim, cleansing lepers, and everywhere renewing our out-worn nature, instructing men both by word and deed, and teaching the way of virtue, turning men from destruction and guiding their feet toward life eternal. Wherefore also he chose twelve disciples, whom he called Apostles, and commanded them to preach the kingdom of heaven which he came upon earth to declare, and to make heavenly us who are low and earthly, by virtue of his Incarnation. "But, through envy of his marvellous and divine conversation and endless miracles, the chief priests and rulers of the Jews (amongst whom also he dwelt, on whom he had wrought his aforesaid signs and miracles), in their madness forgetting all, condemned him to death, having seized one of the Twelve to betray him. And, when they had taken him, they delivered him to the Gentiles, him that was the life of the world, he of his free will consenting thereto; for he came for our sakes to suffer all things, that he might free us from sufferings. But when they had done him much despite, at the last they condemned him to the Cross. All this he endured in the nature of that flesh which he took from us, his divine nature remaining free of suffering: for, being of two natures, both the divine and that which he took from us, his human nature suffered, while his Godhead continued free from suffering and death. So our Lord Jesus Christ, being without sin, was crucified in the flesh, for he did no sin, neither was guile found in his mouth; and he was not subject unto death, for by sin, as I have said before, came death into the world; but for our sakes he suffered death in the flesh, that he might redeem us from the tyranny of death. He descended into hell, and having harrowed it, he delivered thence souls that had been imprisoned therein for ages long. He was buried, and on the third day he rose again, vanquishing death and granting us the victory over death: and he, the giver of immortality, having made flesh immortal, was seen of his disciples, and bestowed upon them peace, and, through them, peace on the whole human race. "After forty days he ascended into heaven, and sitteth at the right hand of the Father. And he shall come again to judge the quick and the dead, and to reward every man according to his works. After his glorious Ascension into heaven he sent forth upon his disciples the Holy Ghost in likeness of fire, and they began to speak with other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance. From thence by his grace they were scattered abroad among all nations, and preached the true Catholic Faith, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, and teaching them to observe all the commandments of the Saviour. So they gave light to the people that wandered in darkness, and abolished the superstitious error of idolatry. Though the enemy chafeth under his defeat, and even now stirreth up war against us, the faithful, persuading the fools and unwise to cling to the worship of idols, yet is his power grown feeble, and his swords have at last failed him by the power of Christ. Lo, in few words I have made known unto thee my Master, my God, and my Saviour; but thou shalt know him more perfectly, if thou wilt receive his grace into thy soul, and gain the blessing to become his servant." VIII. When the king's son had heard these words, there flashed a light upon his soul. Rising from his seat in the fulness of his joy, he embraced Barlaam, saying: "Most honoured sir, methinks this might be that priceless stone which thou dost rightly keep secret, not displaying it to all that would see it, but only to these whose spiritual sense is strong. For lo, as these words dropped upon mine ear, sweetest light entered into my heart, and the heavy veil of sorrow, that hath now this long time enveloped my heart, was in an instant removed. Tell me if my guess be true: or if thou knowest aught better than that which thou hast spoken, delay not to declare it to me." Again, therefore, Barlaam answered, "Yea, my lord and prince, this is the mighty mystery which hath been hid from ages and generations, but in these last days hath been made known unto mankind; the manifestation whereof, by the grace of the Holy Ghost, was foretold by many prophets and righteous men, instructed at sundry times and in divers manners. In trumpet tones they proclaimed it, and all looked forward to the salvation that should be: this they desired to see, but saw it not. But this latest generation was counted worthy to receive salvation. Wherefore he that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned." Said Ioasaph, "All that thou hast told me I believe without question, and him whom thou declarest I glorify as God. Only make all plain to me, and teach me clearly what I must do. But especially go on to tell me what is that Baptism which thou sayest that the Faithful receive." The other answered him thus, "The root mid sure foundation of this holy and perfect Christian Faith is the grace of heavenly Baptism, fraught with the cleansing from all original sins, and complete purification of all defilements of evil that come after. For thus the Saviour commanded a man to be born again of water and of the spirit, and be restored to his first dignity, to wit, by supplication and by calling on the Saving Name, the Holy Spirit brooding on the water. We are baptized, then, according to the word of the Lord, in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, and thus the grace of the Holy Ghost dwelleth in the soul of the baptized, illuminating and making it God-like and renewing that which was made after his own image and likeness. And for the time to come we cast away all the old works of wickedness, and we make covenant with God of a second life and begin a purer conversation, that we may also become fellow-heirs with them that are born again to incorruption and lay hold of everlasting salvation. But without Baptism it is impossible to attain to that good hope, even though a man be more pious than piety itself. For thus spake God, the Word, who was incarnate for the salvation of our race, 'Verily I say unto you, except ye be born of water and of the Spirit, ye shall in no wise enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.' Wherefore before all things I require thee to receive faith within thy soul, and to draw near to Baptism anon with hearty desire, and on no account to delay herein, for delay is parlous, because of the uncertainty of the appointed day of death." Ioasaph said unto him, "And what is this good hope whereto thou sayest it is impossible without baptism to attain? And what this kingdom which thou callest the kingdom of Heaven? And how cometh it that thou hast heard the words of God incarnate? And what is the uncertain day of death? For on this account much anxiety hath fallen on my heart, and consumeth my flesh in pain and grief, and fasteneth on my very bones. And shall we men, appointed to die, return to nothing, or is there some other life after our departure hence? These and kindred questions I have been longing to resolve." Thus questioned he; and Barlaam answered thus: "The good hope, whereof I spake, is that of the kingdom of Heaven. But that kingdom is far beyond the utterance of mortal tongue; for the Scripture saith, 'Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man the things which God hath prepared for them that love him.' But when we have shuffled off this gross flesh, and attained to that blessedness, then will that Master, which hath granted to us not to fail of this hope, teach and make known unto us the glory of those good things, whose glory passeth all understanding:--that light ineffable, that life that hath no ending, that converse with Angels. For if it be granted us to hold communion with God, so far as is attainable to human nature, then shall we know all things from his lips which now we know not. This doth my initiation into the teaching of the divine Scriptures teach me to be the real meaning of the kingdom of Heaven; to approach the vision of the blessed and life-giving Trinity, and to be illumined with his unapproachable light, and with clearer and purer sight, and with unveiled face, to behold as in a glass his unspeakable glory. But, if it be impossible to express in language that glory, that light, and those mysterious blessings, what marvel? For they had not been mighty and singular, if they had been comprehended by reason and expressed in words by us who are earthly, and corruptible, and clothed in this heavy garment of sinful flesh. Holding then such knowledge in simple faith, believe thou undoubtingly, that these are no fictions; but by good works be urgent to lay hold on that immortal kingdom, to which when thou hast attained, thou shalt have perfect knowledge. "As touching thy question, How it is that we have heard the words of the Incarnate God, know thou that we have been taught all that appertaineth to the divine Incarnation by the Holy Gospels, for thus that holy book is called, because it telleth us, who are corruptible and earthly, the 'good spell' of immortality and incorruption, of life eternal, of the remission of sins, and of the kingdom of heaven. This book was written by the eyewitnesses and ministers of the Word, and of these I have already said that our Lord Jesus Christ chose them for disciples and apostles; and they delivered it unto us in writing, after the glorious Ascension of our Master into Heaven, a record of his life on earth, his teachings and miracles, so far as it was possible to commit them to writing. For thus, toward the end of his volume, saith he that is the flower of the holy Evangelists, 'And there are also many other things which Jesus did, the which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written.' "So in this heavenly Gospel, written by the Spirit of God, is recorded the history of his Incarnation, his manifestation, his miracles and acts. Afterward, it telleth of the innocent suffering which the Lord endured for our sake, of his holy Resurrection on the third day, his Ascent into the heavens, and of his glorious and dreadful second coming; for the Son of God shall come again on earth, with unspeakable glory, and with a multitude of the heavenly host to judge our race, and to reward every man according to his works. For, at the beginning, God created man out of earth, as I have already told thee, and breathed into him breath, which is called a reasonable and understanding soul. But since we were sentenced to death, we die all: and it is not possible for this cup to pass any man by. Now death is the separation of the soul from the body. And that body which was formed out of earth, when severed from the soul, returneth to earth from whence also it was taken, and, decaying, perisheth; but the soul, being immortal, fareth whither her Maker calleth, or rather to the place where she, while still in the body, hath prepared for herself lodgement. For as a man hath lived here, so shall he receive reward there. "Then, after long seasons, Christ our God shall come to judge the world in awful glory, beyond words to tell; and for fear of him the powers of heaven shall be shaken, and all the angel hosts stand beside him in dread. Then, at the voice of the archangel, and at the trump of God, shall the dead arise and stand before his awful throne. Now the Resurrection is the re-uniting of soul and body. So that very body, which decayeth and perisheth, shall arise incorruptible. And concerning this, beware lest the reasoning of unbelief overtake thee; for it is not impossible for him, who at the beginning formed the body out of earth, when according to its Maker's doom it hath returned to earth whence it was taken, to raise the same again. If thou wilt but consider how many things God hath made out of nothing, this proof shall suffice thee. He took earth and made man, though earth was not man before. How then did earth become man? And how was earth, that did not exist, produced? And what foundation hath it? And how were countless kind of things without reason, of seeds and plants, produced out of it! Nay, now also consider the manner of our birth. Is not a little seed thrown into the womb that receiveth it? Whence then cometh such a marvellous fashioning of a living creature? "So for him, who hath made everything out of nothing, and still doth make, it is not impossible to raise deadened and corrupt bodies from the earth, that every man may be rewarded according to his works; for he saith, 'The present is the time for work, the future for recompense.' Else, where were the justice of God, if there were no Resurrection? Many righteous men in this present life have suffered much ill-usage and torment, and have died violent deaths; and the impious and the law-breaker hath spent his days here in luxury and prosperity. But God, who is good and just, hath appointed a day of resurrection and inquisition, that each soul may receive her own body, and that the wicked, who received his good things here, may there be punished for his misdeeds, and that the good, who was here chastised for his misdeeds, may there inherit his bliss. For, saith the Lord, 'They that are in the graves shall hear the voice of the Son of God, and shall come forth; they that have done good unto the resurrection of life, and they that have done evil unto the resurrection of doom.' Then also shall thrones be set, and the Ancient of days and Maker of all things shall sit as Judge, and there shall be opened books with records of the deeds and words and thoughts of all of us, and a fiery stream shall issue, and all hidden things shall be revealed. There can no advocate, no persuasive words, no false excuse, no mightiness of riches, no pomp of rank, no lavishment of bribes, avail to pervert righteous judgement. For he, the uncorrupt and truthful Judge, shall weigh everything in the balance of justice, every act, word and thought. And they that have done good shall go into life everlasting, into light unspeakable, rejoicing in the fellowship of the Angels, to enjoy bliss ineffable, standing in purity before the Holy Trinity. But they that have done evil, and all the ungodly and sinners, shall go into everlasting punishment, which is called Gehenna, and outer darkness, and the worm that dieth not, and the gnashing of teeth, and a thousand other names of punishment; which meaneth rather--bitterest of all,--alienation from God, the being cast away from the sweetness of his presence, the being deprived of that glory which baffleth description, the being made a spectacle unto the whole creation, and the being put to shame, and shame that hath no ending. For, after the passing of that terrible sentence, all things shall abide immutable and unchangeable. The blissful life of the righteous shall have no close, neither shall the misery and punishment of sinners find an end: because, after him, there is no higher Judge, and no defence by after-works, no time for amendment, no other way for them that are punished, their vengeance being co-eternal with them. "Seeing that this is so, what manner of persons ought we to be in all holy conversation and godliness, that we may be counted worthy to escape the wrath to come, and to be ranged on the right hand of the Son of God? For this is the station of the righteous: but to sinners is allotted the station of misery on the left. Then shall the Lord call the righteous 'Blessed,' and shall lead them into his everlasting kingdom. But, as for sinners, with anger and curse he will banish them from his serene and gentle countenance the bitterest and hardest lot of all and will send them away into everlasting punishment." IX. Ioasaph said unto him, "Great and marvellous, sir, are the things whereof thou tellest me, fearful and terrible, if indeed these things be so, and, if there be after death and dissolution into dust and ashes, a resurrection and re-birth, and rewards and punishments for the deeds done during life. But what is the proof thereof? And how have ye come to learn that which ye have not seen, that ye have so steadfastly and undoubtingly believed it? As for things that have already been done and made manifest in deed, though ye saw them not, yet have ye heard them from the writers of history. But, when it is of the future that ye preach tidings of such vast import, how have ye made your conviction on these matters sure?" Quoth Barlaam, "From the past I gain certainty about the future; for they that preached the Gospel, without erring from the truth, but establishing their sayings by signs and wonders and divers miracles, themselves also spake of the future. So, as in the one case they taught us nothing amiss or false, but made all that they said and did to shine clearer than the sun, so also in the other matter they gave us true doctrine, even that which our Lord and Master Jesus Christ himself confirmed both by word and deed. 'Verily,' he spake, 'I say unto you, the hour is coming in the which all that are in the graves shall hear the voice of the Son of God and they that hear shall live:' and again, 'The hour cometh when the dead shall hear his voice, and shall come forth, they that have done good unto the resurrection of life, and they that have done evil unto the resurrection of damnation.' And again he said concerning the resurrection of the dead, 'Have ye not read that which was spoken unto you by God, saying, I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. God is not the God of the dead but of the living.' 'For as the tares are gathered and burned in the fire, so shall it be in the end of this age. The Son of God shall send forth his Angels, and they shall gather all things that offend, and them which do iniquity, and shall cast them into the furnace of fire; there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth. Then shall the righteous shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their father.' Thus spake he and added this thereto, 'Who hath ears to hear, let him hear.' "In such words and many more did the Lord make manifest the resurrection of our bodies, and confirm his words in deed, by raising many that were dead. And, toward the end of his life upon earth, he called from the grave one Lazarus his friend, that had already been four days dead and stank, and thus he restored the lifeless to life. Moreover, the Lord himself became the first-fruits of that resurrection which is final and no longer subject unto death, after he had in the flesh tasted of death; and on the third day he rose again, and became the first-born from the dead. For other men also were raised from the dead, but died once more, and might not yet attain to the likeness of the future true resurrection. But he alone was the leader of that resurrection, the first to be raised to the resurrection immortal. "This was the preaching also of them that from the beginning were eye-witnesses and ministers of the word; for thus saith blessed Paul, whose calling was not of men, but from heaven, 'Brethren, I declare unto you the Gospel which I preached unto you. For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures. Now if Christ be preached that he rose from the dead, how say some among you that there is no resurrection of the dead? For if the dead rise not, then is not Christ raised. And if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain, ye are yet in your sins. If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable. But now is Christ risen from the dead and become the first-fruits of them that slept. For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.' And after a little while, 'For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality. So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory. O death where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?' For then the power of death is utterly annulled and destroyed, no longer working in us, but for the future there is given unto men immortality and incorruption for evermore. "Beyond all question, therefore, there shall be a resurrection of the dead, and this we believe undoubtingly. Moreover we know that there shall be rewards and punishments for the deeds done in our life-time, on the dreadful day of Christ's coming, 'wherein the heavens shall be dissolved in fire and the elements shall melt with fervent heat,' as saith one of the inspired clerks of God; 'nevertheless we, according to his promise, look for new heavens and a new earth.' For that there shall be rewards and punishments for men's works, and that absolutely nothing, good or bad, shall be overlooked, but that there is reserved a requital for words, deeds and thoughts, is plain. The Lord saith, 'Whosoever shall give to drink unto one of these little ones a cup of cold water only, in the name of a disciple, he shall in no wise lose his reward.' And again he saith, 'When the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy Angels with him, then before him shall be gathered all nations, and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats. And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left. Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, 'Come ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was anhungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in: naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me.' Wherefore saith he this, except he count the kind acts we do unto the needy as done unto himself? And in another place he saith, 'Whosoever shall confess me before men, him will I also confess before my Father which is in heaven.' "Lo, by all these examples and many more he proveth that the rewards of good works are certain and sure. Further, that punishments are in store for the bad, he foretold by parables strange and wonderful, which he, the Well of Wisdom most wisely put forth. At one time he brought into his tale a certain rich man which was clothed in purple and fine linen, and fared sumptuously every day, but who was so niggardly and pitiless toward the destitute as to overlook a certain beggar named Lazarus laid at his gate, and not even to give him of the crumbs from his table. So when one and other were dead, the poor man, full of sores, was carried away, he saith, into Abraham's bosom, for thus he describeth the habitation of the righteous--but the rich man was delivered to the fire of bitter torment in hell. To him said Abraham, 'Thou in thy lifetime receivedst thy good things, and likewise Lazarus his evil things, but now he is comforted, and thou art tormented." "And otherwhere he likeneth the kingdom of heaven to a certain king which made a marriage-feast for his son and thereby he declared future happiness and splendour. For as he was wont to speak to humble and earthly minded men, he would draw his parables from homely and familiar things. Not that he meant that marriages and feasts exist in that world; but in condescension to men's grossness, he employed these names when he would make known to them the future. So, as he telleth, the king with high proclamation called all to come to the marriage to take their fill of his wondrous store of good things. But many of them that were bidden made light of it and came not, and busied themselves: some went to their farms, some to their merchandize, and others to their newly wedded wives, and thus deprived themselves of the splendour of the bride chamber. Now when these had, of their own choice, absented themselves from this joyous merriment, others were bidden thereto, and the wedding was furnished with guests. And when the king came in to see the guests, he saw there a man which had not on a wedding garment, and he said unto him, "Friend, how camest thou in hither, not having a wedding garment?" And he was speechless. Then said the king to the servants, "Bind him hand and foot, and take him away, and cast him into outer darkness; there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.' Now they who made excuses and paid no heed to the call are they that hasten not to the faith of Christ, but continue in idolatry or heresy. But he that had no wedding garment is he that believeth, but hath soiled his spiritual garment with unclean acts, and was rightly cast forth from the joy of the bride chamber. "And he put forth yet another parable, in harmony with this, in his picture of the Ten Virgins, 'five of whom were wise, and five were foolish. They that were foolish took their lamps and took no oil with them, but the wise took oil.' By the oil he signifieth the acquiring of good works. 'And at midnight,' he saith, 'there was a cry made, "Behold the bridegroom cometh, go ye out to meet him."' By midnight he denoteth the uncertainty of that time. Then all those virgins arose. 'They that were ready went forth to meet the bridegroom and went in with him to the marriage, and the door was shut.' But they that were un-ready (whom rightly he calleth foolish), seeing that their lamps were going out, went forth to buy oil. Afterward they drew nigh, the door being now shut, and cried, saying, 'Lord, Lord, open to us.' But he answered and said, 'Verily I say unto you, I know you not.' Wherefore from all this it is manifest that there is a requital not only for overt acts, but also for words and even secret thoughts; for the Saviour said, 'I say unto you, that for every idle word that men shall speak they shall give account thereof in the day of judgement.' And again he saith, 'But the very hairs of your head are numbered,' by the hairs meaning the smallest and slightest phantasy or thought. And in harmony herewith is the teaching of blessed Paul, 'For the word of God,' saith he, 'is quick and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, and piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart. Neither is there any creature that is not manifest in his sight: but all things are naked and laid bare unto the eyes of him with whom we have to do." "These things also were proclaimed with wondrous clearness by the prophets of old time, illumined by the grace of the Spirit. For Esay saith, 'I know their works and their thoughts,' and will repay them. 'Behold, I come to gather all nations and all tongues; and they shall come and see my glory. And the heaven shall be new, and the earth, which I make before me. And all flesh shall come to worship before me, saith the Lord. And they shall go forth, and look upon the carcasses of the men that have transgressed against me: for their worm shall not die, neither shall their fire be quenched; and they shall be a spectacle unto all flesh." And again he saith concerning that day, "And the heavens shall be rolled together as a scroll, and all the stars shall fall down as leaves from the vine. For behold, the day of the Lord cometh, cruel with wrath and fierce anger, to lay the whole world desolate and to destroy the sinners out of it. For the stars of heaven and Orion and all the constellations of heaven shall not give their light, and there shall be darkness at the sun's rising, and the moon shall not give her light. And I will cause the arrogancy of the sinners to cease, and will lay low the haughtiness of the proud.' And again he saith, 'Wo unto them that draw their iniquities as with a long cord, and their sins as with an heifer's cart-rope! Wo unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter! Wo unto those of you that are mighty, that are princes, that mingle strong drink, which justify the wicked for reward, and take justice from the just, and turn aside the judgement from the needy, and take away the right from the poor, that the widow may be their spoil and the fatherless their prey! And what will they do in the day of visitation, and to whom will they flee for help? And where will they leave their glory, that they fall not into arrest? Like as stubble shall be burnt by live coal of fire, and consumed by kindled flame, so their root shall be as foam, and their blossom shall go up as dust, for they would not the law of the Lord of hosts, and provoked the oracle of the Holy One of Israel." "In tune therewith saith also another prophet, 'The great day of the Lord is near, and hasteth greatly. The bitter and austere voice of the day of the Lord hath been appointed. A mighty day of wrath is that day, a day of trouble and distress, a day of wasteness and desolation, a day of blackness and gloominess, a day of clouds and thick darkness, a day of the trumpet and alarm. And I will bring distress upon the wicked, and they shall walk like blind men, because they have sinned against the Lord. Neither their silver nor their gold shall be able to deliver them in the day of the Lord's wrath; for the whole land shall be devoured by the fire of his jealousy, for he shall make a riddance of all them that dwell in the land.' Moreover David, the king and prophet, crieth thus, 'God shall come visibly, even our God, and shall not keep silence: a fire shall be kindled before him, and a mighty tempest round about him. He shall call the heaven from above, and the earth, that he may judge his people.' And again he saith, 'Arise, O God, judge thou the earth, because "the fierceness of man shall turn to thy praise." And thou shalt "reward every man according to his works."' And many other such things have been spoken by the Psalmist, and all the Prophets inspired by the Holy Ghost, concerning the judgement and the recompense to come. Their words also have been most surely confirmed by the Saviour who hath taught us to believe the resurrection of the dead, and the recompense of the deeds done in the flesh, and the unending life of the world to come." X But Ioasaph was filled hereby with deep compunction, and was melted into tears; and he said to the elder, "Thou hast told me everything plainly, and hast completed unerringly thy terrible and marvellous tale. With such truths set before us, what must we do to escape the punishments in store for sinners, and to gain the joy of the righteous?" Barlaam answered: "It is written of Peter, who was also called chief of the Apostles, that once when he was preaching the people were pricked in their heart, like thyself to-day: and when they asked, 'What shall we do?', Peter said unto them, 'Repent, and be baptized every one of you for the remission of sins, and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost. For to you is the promise, and to your children, and to all that are afar off even as many as the Lord our God shall call.' Behold therefore upon thee also hath he poured forth the riches of his mercy, and hath called thee that wert afar off from him in heart, and didst serve others, not Gods, but pernicious devils and dumb and senseless wooden images. Wherefore before all things approach thou him who hath called thee, and from him shalt thou receive the true knowledge of things visible and invisible. But if, after thy calling, thou be loth or slack, thou shalt be disherited by the just judgement of God, and by thy rejection of him thou shalt be rejected. For thus too spake the same Apostle Peter to a certain disciple. But I believe that thou hast heard the call, and that, when thou hast heard it more plainly, thou wilt take up thy Cross, and follow that God and Master that calleth thee, calleth thee to himself from death unto life, and from darkness unto light. For, soothly, ignorance of God is darkness and death of the soul; and to serve idols, to the destruction of all nature, is to my thinking the extreme of all senselessness. "But idolaters--to whom shall I compare them, and to what likeness shall I liken their silliness? Well, I will set before thee an example which I heard from the lips of one most wise. "'Idol worshippers,' said he, 'are like a fowler who caught a tiny bird, called nightingale. He took a knife, for to kill and eat her; but the nightingale, being given the power of articulate speech, said to the fowler, 'Man, what advantageth it thee to slay me? for thou shalt not be able by my means to fill thy belly. Now free me of my fetters, and I will give thee three precepts, by the keeping of which thou shalt be greatly benefited all thy life long.' He, astonied at her speech, promised that, if he heard anything new from her, he would quickly free her from her captivity. The nightingale turned towards our friend and said, 'Never try to attain to the unattainable: never regret the thing past and gone: and never believe the word that passeth belief. Keep these three precepts, and may it be well with thee.' The man, admiring the lucidity and sense of her words, freed the bird from her captivity, and sent her forth aloft. She, therefore, desirous to know whether the man had understood the force of her words, and whether he had gleaned any profit therefrom, said, as she flew aloft, 'Shame, sir, on thy fecklessness! What a treasure that hast lost to-day! For I have inside me a pearl larger than an ostrich-egg.' When the fowler heard thereof, he was distraught with grief, regretting that the bird had escaped out of his hands. And he would fain have taken her again. 'Come hither,' said he, 'into my house: I will make thee right welcome, and send thee forth with honour.' But the nightingale said unto him, 'Now I know thee to be a mighty fool. Though thou didst receive my words readily and gladly, thou hast gained no profit thereby. I bade thee never regret the thing past and gone; and behold thou art distraught with grief because I have escaped out of thy hands there thou regrettest a thing past and gone. I charged thee not to try to attain to the unattainable, and thou triest to catch me, though thou canst not attain to my path. Besides which, I bade thee never believe a word past belief, and behold thou hast believed that I had inside me a pearl exceeding the measure of my size, and hadst not the sense to see that my whole body doth not attain to the bulk of ostrich eggs. How then could I contain such a pearl?"' "Thus senseless, then, are also they that trust in idols: for these be their handiwork, and they worship that which their fingers made, saying, 'These be our creators.' How then deem they their creators those which have been formed and fashioned by themselves? Nay more, they safeguard their gods, lest they be stolen by thieves, and yet they call them guardians of their safety. And yet what folly not to know that they, which be unable to guard and aid themselves, can in no wise guard and save others! 'For' saith he, 'why, on behalf of the living, should they seek unto the dead?' They expend wealth, for to raise statues and images to devils, and vainly boast that these give them good gifts, and crave to receive of their hands things which those idols never possessed, nor ever shall possess. Wherefore it is written, 'May they that make them be like unto them, and so be all such as put their trust in them, who,' he saith, 'hire a goldsmith, and make them gods, and they fall down, yea, they worship them. They bear them upon the shoulders, and go forward. And if they set them in their place, they stand therein: they shall not remove. Yea, one shall cry unto them, yet call they not answer him, nor save him out of his trouble.' 'Wherefore be ye ashamed with everlasting shame, ye that trust in graven images, that say to the molten images, Ye are our gods.' 'For they sacrificed,' he saith, 'unto devils, and not to God; to gods whom their fathers knew not. There came new and fresh gods; because it is a froward generation, and there is no faith in them.' "Wherefore out of this wicked and faithless generation the Lord calleth thee to him, saying, 'Come out from among them, and be thou separate, and touch no unclean thing,' but 'save thyself from this untoward generation.' 'Arise thou, and depart, for this is not thy rest;' for that divided lordship, which your gods hold, is a thing of confusion and strife and hath no real being whatsoever. But with us it is not so, neither have we many gods and lords, but one God, the Father, of whom are all things, and we unto him: and one Lord Jesus Christ, by whom are all things and we by him, 'who is the image of the invisible God, the first born of every creature' and of all ages, 'for in him were all things created that are in the heavens and that are upon the earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers.' 'All things were made by him, and without him was not anything made that was made:' and one Holy Ghost, in whom are all things, 'the Lord and Giver of life,' God and making God, the good Spirit, the right Spirit, 'the Spirit the Comforter,' 'the Spirit of adoption.' Of these each person, severally, is God. As the Father is, so also is the Son, and as the Son, so also the Holy Ghost. And there is one God in three, one nature, one kingdom, one power, one glory, one substance, distinct in persons, and so only distinct. One is the Father, whose property it is not to have been begotten; one is the only-begotten Son, and his property it is to have been begotten; and one is the Holy Ghost, and his property it is that he proceedeth. Thus illuminated by that light, which is the Father, with that light, which is the Son, in that light, which is the Holy Ghost, we glorify one Godhead in three persons. And he is one very and only God, known in the Trinity: for of him and through him, and unto him are all things. "By his grace also, I came to know thy ease, and was sent to teach thee the lessons that I have learned and observed from my youth even to these grey hairs. If then thou shalt believe and be baptized, thou shalt be saved; but if thou believe not, thou shalt be damned. All the things that thou seest to-day, wherein thou gloriest,--pomp, luxury, riches, and all the deceitfulness of life,--quickly pass away; and they shall cast thee hence whether thou wilt or no. And thy body will be imprisoned in a tiny grave, left in utter loneliness, and bereft of all company of kith and kin. And all the pleasant things of the world shall perish; and instead of the beauty and fragrance of to-day, thou shalt be encompassed with horror and the stink of corruption. But thy soul shall they hurl into the nether-regions of the earth, into the condemnation of Hades, until the final resurrection, when re-united to her body, she shall be cast forth from the presence of the Lord and be delivered to hell fire, which burneth everlastingly. These, and far worse haps than these, shall be thy destiny, if thou continue in unbelief. "But and if thou readily obey him that calleth thee to salvation, and if thou run unto him with desire and joy, and be signed with his light, and follow him without turn, renouncing every thing, and cleaving only unto him, hear what manner of security and happiness shall be thine. 'When thou sittest down, thou shall not be afraid of sudden fear. When thou liest down, sweet shall be thy sleep.' And thou shalt not be afraid of terror coming or the assaults of evil spirits, but shalt go thy way bold as any lion, and shalt live in bliss and everlasting joyaunce. For joy and praise shall crown thy head, and gladness shall befall thee there, where pain and sorrow and wailing shall flee away.' 'Then shall thy light break forth as the morning, and thine health shall rise speedily: and thy righteousness shall go before thee, and the glory of the Lord shall be thy reward.' Then shalt thou call, and the Lord shall answer; while thou art yet speaking, he shall say, 'Here am I.' 'I, even I, am he that blotteth out thy transgressions, and will not remember them. Put me in remembrance: let us plead together: declare thou thy sins that thou mayst be justified.' 'Though thy sins be as scarlet, I will make them white as snow: though they be red as crimson I will make them white as wool, for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it.'" XI. Ioasaph said unto him, "All thy words are fair and wonderful, and, while thou spakest, I believed them and still believe them; and I hate all idolatry with all my heart. And indeed, even before thy coming hither, my soul was, in uncertain fashion, doubtful of it. But now I hate it with a perfect hatred, since I have learned from thy lips the vanity thereof, and the folly of those who worship idols; and I yearn to become the servant of the true God, if haply he will not refuse me, that am unworthy by reason of my sins, and I trust that he will forgive me everything, because he is a lover of men, and compassionate, as thou tellest me, and will count me worthy to become his servant. So I am ready anon to receive baptism, and to observe all thy sayings. But what must I do after baptism? And is this alone sufficient for salvation, to believe and be baptized, or must one add other services thereto?" Barlaam answered him, "Hear what thou must do after baptism. Thou must abstain from all sin, and every evil affection, and build upon the foundation of the Catholick Faith the practice of the virtues; for faith without works is dead, as also are works without faith. For, saith the Apostle, 'Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh.' Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these: Adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envyings, murders, love of money, railing, love of pleasure, drunkenness, revelling, arrogance, and such like, of the which I tell you before, as I have also told you in time past, that they which do such things shall not inherit the Kingdom of God. But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance, sanctification of soul and body, lowliness of heart and contrition, almsgiving, forgiveness of injuries, loving-kindness, watchings, perfect repentance of all past offences, tears of compunction, sorrow for our own sins and those of our neighbours, and the like. These, even as steps and ladders that support one another and are clinched together, conduct the soul to heaven. Lo, to these we are commanded to cleave after baptism, and to abstain from their contraries. "But if, after receiving the knowledge of the truth, we again lay hold on dead works, and, like a dog, return to our vomit, it shall happen unto us according to the word of the Lord; 'for,' saith he, 'when the unclean spirit is gone out of a man' (to wit, by the grace of baptism) 'he walketh through dry places, seeking rest, and finding none.' But enduring not for long to wander homeless and hearthless, he saith, 'I will return to my house whence I came out.' And, when he cometh, he findeth it swept and garnished, but empty and unoccupied, not having received the operation of grace, nor having filled itself with the riches of the virtues. Then goeth he, and taketh to him seven other spirits more wicked than himself; and they enter in and dwell there: and the last state of that man becometh worse than the first.' For baptism burieth in the water and completely blotteth out the hand-writing of all former sins, and is to us for the future a sure fortress and tower of defence, and a strong weapon against the marshalled host of the enemy; but it taketh not away free will, nor alloweth the forgiving of sins after baptism, or immersion in the font a second time. For it is one baptism that we confess, and need is that we keep ourselves with all watchfulness that so we fall not into defilement a second time, but hold fast to the commandments of the Lord. For when he said to the Apostles, 'Go make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost,' he did not stop there, but added, 'teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you.' "Now he commanded men to be poor in spirit, and such he calleth blessed and worthy of the kingdom of heaven. Again he chargeth us to mourn in the present life, that we may obtain comfort hereafter, and to be meek, and to be ever hungering and thirsting after righteousness: to be merciful, and ready to distribute, pitiful and compassionate, pure in heart, abstaining from all defilement of flesh and spirit, peacemakers with our neighbours and with our own souls, by bringing the worse into subjection to the better, and thus by a just decision making peace in that continual warfare betwixt the twain; also to endure all persecution and tribulation and reviling, inflicted upon us for righteousness' sake in defence of his name, that we may obtain everlasting felicity in the glorious distribution of his rewards. Ay, and in this world he exhorteth us to let our 'light so shine before men, that they may see,' he saith, 'your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.' "For the law of Moses, formerly given to the Israelites, saith, 'Thou shalt not kill; thou shalt not commit adultery; thou shalt not steal; thou shalt not bear false witness:' but Christ saith 'Whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgement; and whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire:' and, 'if thou bring thy gift to the altar, and there rememberest that thy brother hath aught against thee, leave there thy gift before the altar, and go thy way and first be reconciled to thy brother.' And he also saith, 'Whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her, hath committed adultery with her in his heart.' And hereby he calleth the defilement and consent of the affection adultery. Furthermore, where the law forbade a man to forswear himself, Christ commanded him to swear not at all beyond Yea and Nay. There we read, 'Eye for eye and tooth for tooth': here, 'Whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloke also. And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain. Give to him that asketh time, and from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away. Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you and persecute you; that ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust. Judge not, that ye be not judged. Forgive, and ye shall be forgiven. Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal: for where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on: for your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things.' He therefore that gave life and body will assuredly give food and raiment: he that feedeth the fowls of the air and arrayeth with such beauty the lilies of the field. 'But, seek ye first,' saith Christ, 'the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you. Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them. Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat. Strait and narrow is the way which leadeth unto life and few there be that find it. Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven. He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and he that loveth son and daughter more than me is not worthy of me. And he that taketh not up his cross and followeth after me, is not worthy of me.' Lo these and the like of these be the things which the Saviour commanded his Apostles to teach the Faithful: and all these things we are bound to observe, if we desire to attain to perfection and receive the incorruptible crowns of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, shall give at that day unto all them that have loved his appearing." Ioasaph said unto the elder, "Well then, as the strictness of these doctrines demandeth such chaste conversation, if, after baptism, I chance to fail in one or two of these commandments, shall I therefore utterly miss the goal, and shall all my hope be vain?" Barlaam answered, "Deem not so. God, the Word, made man for the salvation of our race, aware of the exceeding frailty and misery of our nature, hath not even here suffered our sickness to be without remedy. But, like a skilful leech, he hath mixed for our unsteady and sin-loving heart the potion of repentance, prescribing this for the remission of sins. For after that we have received the knowledge of the truth, and have been sanctified by water and the Spirit, and cleansed without effort from all sin and all defilement, if we should fortune to fall into any transgression, there is, it is true, no second regeneration made within us by the spirit through baptism in the water of the font, and wholly re-creating us (that gift is given once for all); but, by means of painful repentance, hot tears, toils and sweats, there is a purifying and pardoning of our offences through the tender mercy of our God. For the fount of tears is also called baptism, according to the grace of the Master, but it needeth labour and time; and many hath it saved after many a fall; because there is no sin too great for the clemency of God, if we be quick to repent, and purge the shame of our offences, and death overtake us not, and depart us not from this life still defiled; for in the grave there is no confession nor repentance. But as long as we are 'among the living, while the foundation of our true faith continueth unshattered, even if somewhat of the outer roof-work or inner building be disabled, it is allowed to renew by repentance the part rotted by sins. It is impossible to count the multitude of the mercies of God, or measure the greatness of his compassion: whereas sins and offences, of whatever kind, are subject to measure and may be numbered. So our offences, being subject to measure and number, cannot overcome the immeasurable compassion, and innumerable mercies of God. "Wherefore we are commanded not to despair for our trespasses, but to acknowledge the goodness of God, and condemn the sins whereof forgiveness is offered us by reason of the loving-kindness of Christ, who for our sins shed his precious blood. In many places of Scripture we are taught the power of repentance, and especially by the precepts and parables of our Lord Jesus Christ. For it saith, 'From that time began Jesus to preach and to say, "Repent ye, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand."' Moreover he setteth before us, in a parable, a certain son that had received his father's substance, and taken his journey into a far country, and there spent all in riotous living. Then, when there arose a famine in that land, he went and joined himself to one of the citizens of that land of iniquity, who sent him into his fields to feed swine,--thus doth he designate the most coarse and loathsome sin. When, after much labour, he had come to the utmost misery, and might not even fill his belly with the husks that the swine did eat, at last he came to perceive his shameful plight, and, bemoaning himself, said, 'How many hired servants of my father's have bread enough and to spare, and I perish with hunger! I will arise and go to my father, and will say unto him, "Father, I have sinned against heaven and before thee, and am no more worthy to be called thy son: make me as one of thy hired servants."' And he arose, and came to his father. But, when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and embraced him, and kissed him tenderly, and, restoring him to his former rank, made a feast of joyaunce because his son was found again, and killed the fatted calf. Lo, this parable, that Jesus spake to us, concerneth such as turn again from sin, and fall at his feet in repentance. Again, he representeth a certain good shepherd that had an hundred sheep, and, when one was lost, left the ninety and nine, and went forth to seek that which was gone astray, until he found it: and he laid it on his shoulders, and folded it with those that had not gone astray, and called together his friends and neighbours to a banquet, because that it was found. 'Likewise,' saith the Saviour, 'joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons which need no repentance.' "And, in sooth, even the chief of the disciples, Peter, the Rock of the Faith, in the very season of the Saviour's Passion, failing for a little while in his stewardship, that he might understand the worthlessness and misery of human frailty, fell under the guilt of denial. Then he straightway remembered the Lord's words, and went out and wept bitterly, and with those hot tears made good his defeat, and transferred the victory to his own side. Like a skilful man of war, though fallen, he was not undone, nor did he despair, but, springing to his feet, he brought up, as a reserve, bitter tears from the agony of his soul; and straightway, when the enemy saw that sight, like a man whose eyes are scorched with a fierce flame, he leaped off and fled afar, howling horribly. So the chief became chief again, as he had before been chosen teacher of the whole world, being now become its pattern of penitence. And after his holy resurrection Christ made good this three-fold denial with the three-fold question, 'Peter, lovest thou me?', the Apostle answering, 'Yea, Lord, thou knowest that I love thee.' "So from all these and many other examples beyond count we learn the virtue of tears and repentance. Only the manner thereof must be noted it must arise from a heart that abominateth sin and weepeth, as saith the prophet David, 'I am weary of my groaning: every night will I wash my bed and water my couch with my tears.' Again the cleansing of sins will be wrought by the blood of Christ, in the greatness of his compassion and the multitude of the mercies of that God who saith, 'Though your sins be as scarlet, I will make them white as snow,' and so forth. "Thus therefore it is, and thus we believe. But after receiving the knowledge of the truth and winning regeneration and adoption as sons, and tasting of the divine mysteries, we must strive hard to keep our feet lest we fall. For to fall becometh not the athlete, since many have fallen and been unable to rise. Some, opening a door to sinful lusts, and clinging obstinately to them, have no more had strength to hasten back to repentance; and others, being untimely snatched by death, and having not made speed enough to wash them from the pollution of their sin, have been damned. And for this cause it is parlous to fall into any kind of sinful affection whatsoever. But if any man fall, he must at once leap up, and stand again to fight the good fight: and, as often as there cometh a fall, so often must there at once ensue this rising and standing, unto the end. For, 'Turn ye unto me, and I will turn unto you,' saith the Lord God." XII. To this said Ioasaph, "But how, after baptism, shall a man keep himself clear from all sin? For even if there be, as thou sayest, repentance for them that stumble, yet it is attended with toil and trouble, with weeping and mourning; things which, methinks, are not easy for the many to accomplish. But I desired rather to find a way to keep strictly the commandments of God, and not swerve from them, and, after his pardoning of my past misdeeds, never again to provoke that most sweet God and Master." Barlaam answered, "Well said, my lord and king. That also is my desire; but it is hard, nay quite impossible, for a man living with fire not to be blackened with smoke: for it is an uphill task, and one not easy of accomplishment, for a man that is tied to the matters of this life and busied with its cares and troubles, and liveth in riches and luxury, to walk unswervingly in the way of the commandments of the Lord, and to preserve his life pure of these evils. 'For,' saith the Lord, 'no man can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other; or else he will hold to the one and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and Mammon.' So also writeth the beloved Evangelist and Divine in his Epistle, thus saying, 'Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world. And the world passeth away, and the lust thereof; but he that doeth the will of God abideth for ever.' "These things were well understood by our holy and inspired fathers; and mindful of the Apostle's word that we must through much tribulation enter into the Kingdom of Heaven, they strove, after holy baptism, to keep their garment of immortality spotless and undefiled. Whence some of them also thought fit to receive yet another baptism; I mean that which is by blood and martyrdom. For this too is called baptism, the most honourable, and reverend of all, inasmuch as its waters are not polluted by fresh sin; which also our Lord underwent for our sakes, and rightly called it baptism. So as imitators and followers of him, first his eyewitness, disciples, and Apostles, and then the whole band of holy martyrs yielded themselves, for the name of Christ, to kings and tyrants that worshipped idols, and endured every form of torment, being exposed to wild beasts, fire and sword, confessing the good confession, running the course and keeping the faith. Thus they gained the prizes of righteousness, and became the companions of Angels, and fellow-heirs with Christ. Their virtue shone so bright that their sound went out into all lands, and the splendour of their good deeds flashed like lightning into the ends of the earth. Of these men, not only the words and works, but even the very blood and bones are full of all sanctity, mightily casting out devils, and giving to such as touch them in faith the healing of incurable diseases: yea, and even their garments, and anything else that hath been brought near their honoured bodies, are always worthy of the reverence of all creation. And it were a long tale to tell one by one their deeds of prowess. "But when those cruel and brutal tyrants brought their miserable lives to a miserable end, and persecution ceased, and Christian kings ruled throughout the world, then others too in succession emulated the Martyrs' zeal and divine desire, and, wounded at heart with the same love, considered well how they might present soul and body without blemish unto God, by cutting off all the workings of sinful lusts and purifying themselves of every defilement of flesh and spirit. But, as they perceived that this could only be accomplished by the keeping of the commandments of Christ, and that the keeping of his commandments and the practice of the virtues was difficult to attain in the midst of the turmoils of the world, they adopted for themselves a strange and changed manner of life, and, obedient to the voice divine, forsook all, parents, children, friends, kinsfolk, riches and luxury, and, hating everything in the world, withdrew, as exiles, into the deserts, being destitute, afflicted, evil entreated, wandering in wildernesses and mountains, and in dens and caves of the earth, self-banished from all the pleasures and delights upon earth, and standing in sore need even of bread and shelter. This they did for two causes: firstly, that never seeing the objects of sinful lust, they might pluck such desires by the root out of their soul, and blot out the memory thereof, and plant within themselves the love and desire of divine and heavenly things: and secondly, that, by exhausting the flesh by austerities, and becoming Martyrs in will, they might not miss the glory of them that were made perfect by blood, but might be themselves, in their degree, imitators of the sufferings of Christ, and become partakers of the kingdom that hath no end. Having then come to this wise resolve, they adopted the quiet of monastic life, some facing the rigours of the open air, and braving the blaze of the scorching heat and fierce frosts and rain-storms and tempestuous winds, others spending their lives in the hovels which they had builded them, or in the hiding of holes and caverns. Thus, in pursuit of virtue, they utterly denied themselves all fleshly comfort and repose, submitting to a diet of uncooked herbs and worts, or acorns, or hard dry bread, not merely saying good-bye to delights in their quality, but, in very excess of temperance, extending their zeal to limit even the quantity of enjoyment. For even of those common and necessary meats they took only so much as was sufficient to sustain life. Some of them continued fasting the whole week, and partook of victuals only of a Sunday: others thought of food twice only in the week: others ate every other day, or daily at eventide, that is, took but a taste of food. In prayers and watchings they almost rivalled the life of Angels, bidding a long farewell to the possession of gold and silver, and quite forgetting that buyings and sellings are concerns of men. "But envy and pride, the evils most prone to follow good works, had no place amongst them. He that was weaker in ascetic exercises entertained no thought of malice against him of brighter example. Nor again was he, that had accomplished great feats, deceived and puffed up by arrogance to despise his weaker brethren, or set at nought his neighbour, or boast of his rigours, or glory in his achievements. He that excelled in virtue ascribed nothing to his own labours, but all to the power of God, in humility of mind persuading himself that his labours were nought and that he was debtor even for more, as saith the Lord, 'When ye shall have done all those things which are commanded you, say, "We are unprofitable servants: we have done that which was our duty to do."' Others again persuaded themselves that they had not done even the things which they were commanded to do, but that the things left undone outnumbered the things already well done. Again, he that was far behind in austerity, perchance through bodily weakness, would disparage and blame himself, attributing his failure to slothfulness of mind rather than to natural frailty. So each excelled each, and all excelled all in this sweet reasonableness. But the spirit of vain glory and pleasing of men--what place had it among them? For they had fled from the world, and were dwelling in the desert, to the end that they might show their virtues not to men, but to God, from whom also they hope to receive the rewards of their good deeds, well aware that religious exercises performed for vain glory go without recompense; for these are done for the praise of men and not for God. Whence all that do thus are doubly defrauded: they waste their body, and receive no reward. But they who yearn for glory above, and strive thereafter, despise all earthly and human glory. "As to their dwellings, some monks finish the contest in utter retirement and solitude, having removed themselves far from the haunts of men throughout the whole of their earthly life-time, and having drawn nigh to God. Others build their homes at a distance one from another, but meet on the Lord's Day at one Church, and communicate of the Holy Mysteries, I mean the unbloody Sacrifice of the undefiled Body and precious Blood of Christ, which the Lord gave to the Faithful for the remission of sins, for the enlightenment and sanctification of soul and body. They entertain one another with the exercises of the divine Oracles and moral exhortations, and make public the secret wiles of their adversaries, that none, through ignorance of the manner of wrestling, may be caught thus. Then turn they again, each to his own home, eagerly storing the honey of virtue in the cells of their hearts, and husbanding sweet fruits worthy of the heavenly board. "Others again spend their life in monasteries. These gather in multitudes in one spot, and range themselves under one superior and president, the best of their number, slaying all self-will with the sword of obedience. Of their own free choice they consider themselves as slaves bought at a price, and no longer live for themselves, but for him, to whom, for Christ his sake, they have become obedient; or rather, to speak more properly, they live no more for themselves, but Christ liveth in them, whom to follow, they renounce all. This is retirement, a voluntary hatred of the world, and denial of nature by desire of things above nature. These men therefore live the lives of Angels on earth, chanting psalms and hymns with one consent unto the Lord, and purchasing for themselves the title of Confessors by labours of obedience. And in them is fulfilled the word of the Lord, when he saith, 'Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.' By this number he limiteth not the gathering together in his name, but by 'two or three' signifieth that the number is indefinite. For, whether there be many, or few, gathered together because of his holy name, serving him with fervent zeal, there we believe him to be present in the midst of his servants. "By these ensamples and such like assemblies men of earth and clay imitate the life of heavenly beings, in fastings and prayers and watchings, in hot tears and sober sorrow, as soldiers in the field with death before their eyes, in meekness and gentleness, in silence of the lips, in poverty and want, in chastity and temperance, in humbleness and quietude of mind, in perfect charity toward God and their neighbour, carrying their present life down to the grave, and becoming Angels in their ways. Wherefore God hath graced them with miracles, signs and various virtues and made the voice of their marvellous life to be sounded forth to the ends of the world. If I open my mouth to declare in every point the life of one of them who is said to have been the founder of the monastic life, Antony by name, by this one tree thou shalt assuredly know the sweet fruits of other trees of the like kind and form, and shalt know what a foundation of religious life that great man laid, and what a roof he built, and what gifts he merited to receive from the Saviour. After him many fought the like fight and won like crowns and guerdons. "Blessed, yea, thrice blessed, are they that have loved God, and, for his love's sake, have counted every thing as nothing worth. For they wept and mourned, day and night, that they might gain everlasting comfort: they humbled themselves willingly, that there they might be exalted: they afflicted the flesh with hunger and thirst and vigil, that there they might come to the pleasures and joys of Paradise. By their purity of heart they became a tabernacle of the Holy Ghost, as it is written, 'I will dwell in them and walk in them.' They crucified themselves unto the world, that they might stand at the right hand of the Crucified: they girt their loins with truth, and alway had their lamps ready, looking for the coming of the immortal bridegroom. The eye of their mind being enlightened, they continually looked forward to that awful hour, and kept the contemplation of future happiness and everlasting punishment immovable from their hearts, and pained themselves to labour, that they might not lose eternal glory. They became passionless as the Angels, and now they weave the dance in their fellowship, whose lives also they imitated. Blessed, yea, thrice blessed are they, because with sure spiritual vision they discerned the vanity of this present world and the uncertainty and inconstancy of mortal fortune, and cast it aside, and laid up for themselves everlasting blessings, and laid hold of that life which never faileth, nor is broken by death. "These then are the marvellous holy men whose examples we, that are poor and vile, strive to imitate, but cannot attain to the high level of the life of these heavenly citizens. Nevertheless, so far as is possible for our weakness and feeble power, we take the stamp of their lives, and wear their habit: even though we fail to equal their works; for we are assured that this holy profession is a means to perfection and an aid to the incorruption given us by holy baptism. So, following the teachings of these blessed Saints, we utterly renounce these corruptible and perishable things of life, wherein may be found nothing stable or constant, or that continueth in one stay; but all things are vanity and vexation of spirit, and many are the changes that they bring in a moment; for they are slighter than dreams and a shadow, or the breeze that bloweth the air. Small and short-lived is their charm, that is after all no charm, but illusion and deception of the wickedness of the world; which world we have been taught to love not at all, but rather to hate with all our heart. Yea, and verily it is worthy of hatred and abhorrence; for whatsoever gifts it giveth to its friends, these in turn in passion it taketh away, and shall hand over its victims, stripped of all good things, clad in the garment of shame, and bound under heavy burdens, to eternal tribulation. And those again whom it exalteth, it quickly abaseth to the utmost wretchedness, making them a foot-stool and a laughing stock for their enemies. Such are its charms, such its bounties. For it is an enemy of its friends, and traitor to such as carry out its wishes: dasheth to dire destruction all them that lean upon it, and enervateth those that put their trust therein. It maketh covenants with fools and fair false promises, only that it may allure them to itself. But, as they have dealt treacherously, it proveth itself treacherous and false in fulfilling none of its pledges. To-day it tickleth their gullet with pleasant dainties; to-morrow it maketh them nought but a gobbet for their enemies. To-day it maketh a man a king: to-morrow it delivereth him into bitter servitude. To-day its thrall is fattening on a thousand good things; to-morrow he is a beggar, and drudge of drudges. To-day it placeth on his head a crown of glory; to-morrow it dasheth his face upon the ground. To-day it adorneth his neck with brilliant badges of dignity; to-morrow it humbleth him with a collar of iron. For a little while it causeth him to be the desire of all men; but after a time it maketh him their hate and abomination. To-day it gladdeneth him: but to-morrow it weareth him to a shadow with lamentations and wailings. What is the end thereof, thou shalt hear. Ruthlessly it bringeth its former lovers to dwell in hell. Such is ever its mind, such its purposes. It lamenteth not its departed, nor pitieth the survivor. For after that it hath cruelly duped and entangled in its meshes the one party, it immediately transferreth the resources of its ingenuity against the other, not willing that any should escape its cruel snares, "These men that have foolishly alienated themselves from a good and kind master, to seek the service of so harsh and savage a lord, that are all agog for present joys and are glued thereto, that take never a thought for the future, that always grasp after bodily enjoyments, but suffer their souls to waste with hunger, and to be worn with myriad ills, these I consider to be like a man flying before the face of a rampant unicorn, who, unable to endure the sound of the beast's cry, and its terrible bellowing, to avoid being devoured, ran away at full speed. But while he ran hastily, he fell into a great pit; and as he fell, he stretched forth his hands, and laid hold on a tree, to which he held tightly. There he established some sort of foot-hold and thought himself from that moment in peace and safety. But he looked and descried two mice, the one white, the other black, that never ceased to gnaw the root of the tree whereon he hung, and were all but on the point of severing it. Then he looked down to the bottom of the pit and espied below a dragon, breathing fire, fearful for eye to see, exceeding fierce and grim, with terrible wide jaws, all agape to swallow him. Again looking closely at the ledge whereon his feet rested, he discerned four heads of asps projecting from the wall whereon he was perched. Then he lift up his eyes and saw that from the branches of the tree there dropped a little honey. And thereat he ceased to think of the troubles whereby he was surrounded; how, outside, the unicorn was madly raging to devour him: how, below, the fierce dragon was yawning to swallow him: how the tree, which he had clutched, was all but severed; and how his feet rested on slippery, treacherous ground. Yea, he forgat, without care, all those sights of awe and terror, and his whole mind hung on the sweetness of that tiny drop of honey. "This is the likeness of those who cleave to the deceitfulness of this present life,--the interpretation whereof I will declare to thee anon. The unicorn is the type of death, ever in eager pursuit to overtake the race of Adam. The pit is the world, full of all manner of ills and deadly snares. The tree, which was being continually fretted by the two mice, to which the man clung, is the course of every man's life, that spendeth and consuming itself hour by hour, day and night, and gradually draweth nigh its severance. The fourfold asps signify the structure of man's body upon four treacherous and unstable elements which, being disordered and disturbed, bring that body to destruction. Furthermore, the fiery cruel dragon betokeneth the maw of hell that is hungry to receive those who choose present pleasures rather than future blessings. The dropping of honey denoteth the sweetness of the delights of the world, whereby it deceiveth its own friends, nor suffereth them to take timely thought for their salvation." XIII. Ioasaph received this parable with great joy and said, "How true this story is, and most apt! Grudge not, then, to shew me other such like figures, that I may know for certain what the manner of our life is, and what it hath in store for its friends." The elder answered, "Again, those who are enamoured of the pleasures of life, and glamoured by the sweetness thereof, who prefer fleeting and paltry objects to those which are future and stable, are like a certain man who had three friends. On the first two of these he was extravagantly lavish of his honours, and clave passionately to their love, fighting to the death and deliberately hazarding his life for their sakes. But to the third he bore himself right arrogantly, never once granting him the honour nor the love that was his due, but only making show of some slight and inconsiderable regard for him. Now one day he was apprehended by certain dread and strange soldiers, that made speed to hale him to the king, there to render account for a debt of ten thousand talents. Being in a great strait, this debtor sought for a helper, able to take his part in this terrible reckoning with the king. So he ran to his first and truest friend of all, and said, 'Thou wottest, friend, that I ever jeopardied my life for thy sake. Now to-day I require help in a necessity that presseth me sore. In how many talents wilt thou undertake to assist me now? What is the hope that I may count upon at thy hands, O my dearest friend?' The other answered and said unto him, 'Man, I am not thy friend: I know not who thou art. Other friends I have, with whom I must needs make merry to-day, and so win their friendship for the time to come. But, see, I present thee with two ragged garments, that thou mayest have them on the way whereon thou goest, though they will do thee no manner of good. Further help from me thou mayest expect none.' The other, hearing this, despaired of the succour whereon he had reckoned, and went to his second friend, saying, 'Friend, thou rememberest how much honour and kindness thou hast enjoyed at my hands. To-day I have fallen into tribulation and sorrow, and need a helping hand. To what extent then canst thou share my labour? Tell me at once.' Said he, 'I have on leisure today to share thy troubles. I too have fallen among cares and perils, and am myself in tribulation. Howbeit, I will go a little way with thee, even if I shall fail to be of service to thee. Then will I turn quickly homeward, and busy myself with mine own anxieties.' So the man returned from him too empty-handed and baulked at every turn; and he cried misery on himself for his vain hope in those ungrateful friends, and the unavailing hardships that he had endured through love of them. At the last he went away to the third friend, whom he had never courted, nor invited to share his happiness. With countenance ashamed and downcast, he said unto him, 'I can scarce open my lips to speak with thee, knowing full well that I have never done thee service, or shown thee any kindness that thou mightest now remember. But seeing that a heavy misfortune hath overtaken me, and that I have found nowhere among my friends any hope of deliverance, I address myself to thee, praying thee, if it lie in thy power, to afford me some little aid. Bear no grudge for my past unkindness, and refuse me not.' The other with a smiling and gracious countenance answered, 'Assuredly I own thee my very true friend. I have not forgotten those slight services of thine: and I will repay them to-day with interest. Fear not therefore, neither be afraid. I will go before thee and entreat the king for thee, and will by no means deliver thee into the hands of thine enemies. Wherefore be of good courage, dear friend, and fret not thyself.' Then, pricked at heart, the other said with tears, 'Wo is me! Which shall I first lament, or which first deplore? Condemn my vain preference for my forgetful, thankless and false friends, or blame the mad ingratitude that I have shown to thee, the sincere and true?'" Ioasaph heard this tale also with amazement and asked the interpretation thereof. Then said Barlaam, "The first friend is the abundance of riches, and love of money, by reason of which a man falleth into the midst of ten thousand perils, and endureth many miseries: but when at last the appointed day of death is come, of all these things he carrieth away nothing but the useless burial cloths. By the second friend is signified our wife and children and the remnant of kinsfolk and acquaintance, to whom we are passionately attached, and from whom with difficulty we tear ourselves away, neglecting our very soul and body for the love of them. But no help did man ever derive from these in the hour of death, save only that they will accompany and follow him to the sepulchre, and then straightway turning them homeward again they are occupied with their own cares and matters, and bury his memory in oblivion as they have buried his body in the grave. But the third friend, that was altogether neglected and held cheap, whom the man never approached, but rather shunned and fled in horror, is the company of good deeds,--faith, hope, charity, alms, kindliness, and the whole band of virtues, that can go before us, when we quit the body, and may plead with the Lord on our behalf, and deliver us from our enemies and dread creditors, who urge that strict rendering of account in the air, and try bitterly to get the mastery of us. This is the grateful and true friend, who beareth in mind those small kindnesses that we have shown him and repayeth the whole with interest." XIV. Again said Ioasaph, "The Lord God prosper thee, O thou Wisest of men! For thou hast gladdened my soul with thine apt and excellent sayings. Wherefore sketch me yet another picture of the vanity of the world, and how a man may pass through it in peace and safety." Barlaam took up his parable and said, "Hear then a similitude of this matter too. I once heard tell of a great city whose citizens had, from old time, the custom of taking some foreigner and stranger, who knew nothing of their laws and traditions, and of making him their king, to enjoy absolute power, and follow his own will and pleasure without hindrance, until the completion of a year. Then suddenly, while he was living with never a care in rioting and wantonness, without fear, and alway supposing that his reign would only terminate with his life, they would rise up against him, strip him bare of his royal robes, lead him in triumph up and down the city, and thence dispatch him beyond their borders into a distant great island; there, for lack of food and raiment, in hunger and nakedness he would waste miserably away, the luxury and pleasure so unexpectedly showered upon him changed as unexpectedly into woe. In accordance therefore with the unbroken custom of these citizens, a certain man was ordained to the kingship. But his mind was fertile of understanding, and he was not carried away by this sudden access of prosperity, nor did he emulate the heedlessness of the kings that had gone before him, and had been miserably expelled, but his soul was plunged in care and trouble how he might order his affairs well. After long and careful search, he learned from a wise counsellor the custom of the citizens, and the place of perpetual banishment, and was taught of him without guile how to ensure himself against this fate. So with this knowledge that within a very little while he must reach that island and leave to strangers this chance kingdom among strangers, he opened the treasures whereof he had awhile absolute and unforbidden use, and took a great store of money and huge masses of gold and silver and precious stones and delivered the same to trusty servants and sent them before him to the island whither he was bound. When the appointed year came to an end, the citizens rose against him, and sent him naked into banishment like those that went before him. But while the rest of these foolish kings, kings only for a season, were sore anhungred, he, that had timely deposited his wealth, passed his time in continual plenty mid dainties free of expense, and, rid of all fear of those mutinous and evil citizens, could count himself happy on his wise forethought. "Understand thou, therefore, that the city is this vain and deceitful world; that the citizens are the principalities and powers of the devils, the rulers of the darkness of this world, who entice us by the soft bait of pleasure, and counsel us to consider corruptible and perishable things as incorruptible, as though the enjoyment that cometh from them were co-existent with us, and immortal as we. Thus then are we deceived; we have taken no thought concerning the things which are abiding and eternal, and have laid up in store for ourselves no treasure for that life beyond, when of a sudden there standeth over us the doom of death. Then, then at last do those evil and cruel citizens of darkness, that received us, dispatch us stript of all worldly goods,--for all our time has been wasted on their service--and carry us off 'to a dark land and a gloomy, to a land of eternal darkness, where there is no light, nor can one behold the life of men.' As for that good counsellor, who made known all the truth and taught that sagacious and wise king the way of salvation, understand thou that I, thy poor and humble servant, am he, who am come hither for to shew thee the good and infallible way to lead thee to things eternal and unending, and to counsel thee to lay up all thy treasure there; and I am come to lead thee away from the error of this world, which, to my woe, I also loved, and clave to its pleasures and delights. But, when I perceived, with the unerring eyes of my mind how all human life is wasted in these things that come and go; when I saw that no man hath aught that is stable and steadfast, neither the rich in his wealth, nor the mighty in his strength, nor the wise in his wisdom, nor the prosperous in his prosperity, nor the luxurious in his wantonness, nor he that dreameth of security of life in that vain and feeble security of his dreams, nor any man in any of those things that men on earth commend ('tis like the boundless rush of torrents that discharge themselves into the deep sea, thus fleeting and temporary are all present things); then, I say, I understood that all such things are vanity, and that their enjoyment is naught; and, that even as the past is all buried in oblivion, be it past glory, or past kingship, or the splendour of rank, or amplitude of power, or arrogance of tyranny, or aught else like them, so also present things will vanish in the darkness of the days to come. And, as I am myself of the present, I also shall doubtless be subject to its accustomed change; and, even as my fathers before me were not allowed to take delight for ever in the present world, so also shall it be with me. For I have observed how this tyrannical and troublesome world treateth mankind, shifting men hither and thither, from wealth to poverty, and from poverty to honour, carrying some out of life and bringing others in, rejecting some that are wise and understanding, making the honourable and illustrious dishonoured and despised, but seating others who are unwise and of no understanding upon a throne of honour, and making the dishonoured and obscure to be honoured of all. "One may see how the race of mankind may never abide before the face of the cruel tyranny of the world. But, as when a dove fleeing from an eagle or a hawk flitteth from place to place, now beating against this tree, now against that bush, and then anon against the clefts of the rocks and all manner of bramble-thorns, and, nowhere finding any safe place of refuge, is wearied with continual tossing and crossing to and fro, so are they which are flustered by the present world. They labour painfully under unreasoning impulse, on no sure or firm bases: they know not to what goal they are driving, nor whither this vain life leadeth them this vain life, whereto they have in miserable folly subjected themselves, choosing evil instead of good, and pursuing vice instead of goodness; and they know not who shall inherit the cold fruits of their many heavy labours, whether it be a kinsman or a stranger, and, as oft times it haps, not even a friend or acquaintance at all, but an enemy and foeman. "On all these things, and others akin to them, I held judgement in the tribunal of my soul, and I came to hate my whole life that had been wasted in these vanities, while I still lived engrossed in earthly things. But when I had put off from my soul the lust thereof, and cast it from me, then was there revealed unto me the true good, to fear God and do his will; for this I saw to be the sum of all good. This also is called the beginning of wisdom, and perfect wisdom. For life is without pain and reproach to those that hold by her, and safe to those who lean upon her as upon the Lord. So, when I had set my reason on the unerring way of the commandments of the Lord, and had surely learned that there is nothing froward or perverse therein, and that it is not full of chasms and rocks, nor of thorns and thistles, but lieth altogether smooth and even, rejoicing the eyes of the traveller with the brightest sights, making beautiful his feet, and shoeing them with 'the preparation of the Gospel of peace,' that he may walk safely and without delay, this way, then, I rightly chose above all others, and began to rebuild my soul's habitation, which had fallen into ruin and decay. "In such wise was I devising mine estate, and establishing mine unstable mind, when I heard the words of a wise teacher calling loudly to me thus, 'Come ye out,' said he, 'all ye that will to be saved. Be ye separate from the vanity of the world, for the fashion thereof quickly passeth away, and behold it shall not be. Come ye out, without turning back, not for nothing and without reward, but winning supplies for travelling to life eternal, for ye are like to journey a long road, needing much supplies from hence, and ye shall arrive at the place eternal that hath two regions, wherein are many mansions; one of which places God hath prepared for them that love him and keep his commandments, full of all manner of good things; and they that attain thereto shall live for ever in incorruption, enjoying immortality without death, where pain and sorrow and sighing are fled away. But the other place is full of darkness and tribulation and pain, prepared for the devil and his angels, wherein also shall be cast they who by evil deeds have deserved it, who have bartered the incorruptible and eternal for the present world, and have made themselves fuel for eternal fire.' "When I heard this voice, and recognized the truth, I did my diligence to attain to that abode, that is free from all pain and sorrow, and full of security and all good things, whereof I have knowledge now only in part, being but a babe in my spiritual life, and seeing the sights yonder as through mirrors and riddles; but when that which is perfect is come, and I shall see face to face, then that which is in part shall be done away. Wherefore I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord; for the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and of death, and hath opened mine eyes to see clearly that the will of the flesh is death, but the will of the Spirit is life and peace. And even as I did discern the vanity of present things and hate them with a perfect hatred, so likewise I counsel thee to decide thereon, that thou mayest treat them as something alien and quickly passing away, and mayest remove all thy store from earth and lay up for thyself in the incorruptible world a treasure that can not be stolen, wealth inexhaustible, in that place whither thou must shortly fare, that when thou comest thither thou mayest not be destitute, but be laden with riches, after the manner of that aptest of parables that I lately showed thee." XV. Said Ioasaph unto the elder, "How then shall I be able to send before me thither treasures of money and riches, that, when I depart hence, I may find these unharmed and unwasted for my enjoyment? How must I show my hatred for things present and lay hold on things eternal? This make thou right plain unto me." Quoth Barlaam, "The sending before thee of money to that eternal home is wrought by the hands of the poor. For thus saith one of the prophets, Daniel the wise, unto the king of Babylon, 'Wherefore, O Prince, let my counsel be acceptable unto thee, and redeem thy sins by almsgiving, and thine iniquities by showing mercy to the poor.' The Saviour also saith, 'Make to yourselves friends of the mammon of unrighteousness; that, when ye fail, they may receive you into everlasting habitations.' And, in divers places, the Master maketh much mention of almsgiving and liberality to the poor, as we learn in the Gospel. Thus shalt thou most surely send all thy treasure before thee by the hands of the needy, for whatsoever thou shalt do unto these the Master counteth done unto himself, and will reward thee manifold; for, in the recompense of benefits, he ever surpasseth them that love him. So in this manner by seizing for awhile the treasures of the darkness of this world, in whose slavery for a long time past thou hast been miserable, thou shalt by these means make good provision for thy journey, and by plundering another's goods thou shalt store all up for thyself, with things fleeting and transient purchasing for thyself things that are stable and enduring. Afterwards, God working with thee, thou shalt perceive the uncertainty and inconstancy of the world, and saying farewell to all, shalt remove thy barque to anchor in the future, and, passing by the things that pass away, thou shalt hold to the things that we look for, the things that abide. Thou shalt depart from darkness and the shadow of death, and hate the world and the ruler of the world; and, counting thy perishable flesh thine enemy, thou shalt run toward the light that is unapproachable, and taking the Cross on thy shoulders, shalt follow Christ without looking back, that thou mayest also be glorified with him, and be made inheritor of the life that never changeth nor deceiveth." Ioasaph said, "When thou spakest a minute past of despising all things, and taking up such a life of toil, was that an old tradition handed down from the teaching of the Apostles, or is this a late invention of your wits, which ye have chosen for yourselves as a more excellent way?" The elder answered and said, "I teach thee no law introduced but yesterday, God forbid! but one given unto us of old. For when a certain rich young man asked the Lord, 'What shall I do to inherit eternal life?' and boasted that he had observed all that was written in the Law, Jesus said unto him, 'One thing thou lackest yet. Go sell all that thou hast and distribute unto the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven, and come, take up thy cross and follow me. But when the young man heard this he was very sorrowful, for he was very rich. And when Jesus saw that he was very sorrowful, he said, 'How hardly shall they which have riches enter into the kingdom of God! For it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God!' So, when all the Saints heard this command, they thought fit by all means to withdraw from this hardness of riches. They parted with all their goods, and by this distribution of their riches to the poor laid up for themselves eternal riches; and they took up their Cross and followed Christ, some being made perfect by martyrdom, even as I have already told thee; and some by the practice of self-denial falling not a whit short of those others in the life of the true philosophy. Know thou, then, that this is a command of Christ our King and God, which leadeth us from things corruptible and maketh us partakers of things everlasting." Said Ioasaph, "If, then, this kind of philosophy be so ancient and so salutary, how cometh it that so few folk now-a-days follow it?" The elder answered, "Many have followed, and do follow it; but the greatest part hesitate and draw back. For few, saith the Lord, are the travellers along the strait and narrow way, but along the wide and broad way many. For they that have once been taken prisoners by the love of money, and the evils that come from the love of pleasure, and are given up to idle and vain glory, are hardly to be torn therefrom, seeing that they have of their own free will sold themselves as slaves to a strange master, and setting themselves on the opposite side to God, who gave these commands, are held in bondage to that other. For the soul that hath once rejected her own salvation, and given the reins to unreasonable lusts, is carried about hither and thither. Therefore saith the prophet, mourning the folly that encompasseth such souls, and lamenting the thick darkness that lieth on them, 'O ye sons of men, how long will ye be of heavy heart? Why love ye vanity, and seek after leasing?' And in the same tone as he, but adding thereto some thing of his own, one of our wise teachers, a most excellent divine, crieth aloud to all, as from some exceeding high place of vantage, 'O ye sons of men, how long will ye be of heavy heart? Why love ye vanity and seek after leasing? Trow ye that this present life, and luxury, and these shreds of glory, and petty lordship and false prosperity are any great thing?'--things which no more belong to those that possess them than to them that hope for them, nor to these latter any more than to those who never thought of them: things like the dust carried and whirled about to and fro by the tempest, or vanishing as the smoke, or delusive as a dream, or intangible as a shadow; which, when absent, need not be despaired of by them that have them not, and, when present, cannot be trusted by their owners. "This then was the commandment of the Saviour; this the preaching of the Prophets and Apostles; in such wise do all the Saints, by word and deed, constrain us to enter the unerring road of virtue. And though few walk therein and more choose the broad way that leadeth to destruction, yet not for this shall the life of this divine philosophy be minished in fame. But as the sun, rising to shine on all, doth bounteously send forth his beams, inviting all to enjoy his light, even so doth our true philosophy, like the sun, lead with her light those that are her lovers, and warmeth and brighteneth them. But if any shut their eyes, and will not behold the light thereof, not for that must the sun be blamed, or scorned by others: still less shall the glory of his brightness be dishonoured through their silliness. But while they, self-deprived of light, grope like blind men along a wall, and fall into many a ditch, and scratch out their eyes on many a bramble bush, the sun, firmly established on his own glory, shall illuminate them that gaze upon his beams with unveiled face. Even so shineth the light of Christ on all men abundantly, imparting to us of his lustre. But every man shareth thereof in proportion to his desire and zeal. For the Sun of righteousness disappointeth none of them that would fix their gaze on him, yet doth he not compel those who willingly choose darkness; but every man, so long as he is in this present life, is committed to his own free will and choice." Ioasaph asked, "What is free will and what is choice?" The elder answered, "Free will is the willing of a reasonable soul, moving without hindrance toward whatever it wisheth, whether to virtue or to vice, the soul being thus constituted by the Creator. Free will again is the sovran motion of an intelligent soul. Choice is desire accompanied by deliberation, or deliberation accompanied by desire for things that lie in our power; for in choosing we desire that which we have deliberately preferred. Deliberation is a motion towards enquiry about actions possible to us; a man deliberateth whether he ought to pursue an object or no. Then he judgeth which is the better, and so ariseth judgement. Then he is inclined towards it, and loveth that which was so judged by the deliberative faculty, and this is called resolve; for, if he judge a thing, and yet be not inclined toward the thing that he hath judged, and love it not, it is not called resolve. Then, after inclination toward it, there ariseth choice or rather selection. For choice is to choose one or other of two things in view, and to select this rather than that. And it is manifest that choice is deliberation plus discrimination, and this from the very etymology. For that which is the 'object of choice' is the thing chosen before the other thing. And no man preferreth a thing without deliberation, nor makeeth a choice without having conceived a preference. For, since we are not zealous to carry into action all that seemeth good to us, choice only ariseth and the deliberately preferred only becometh the chosen, when desire is added thereto. Thus we conclude that choice is desire accompanied by deliberation for things that lie in our power; in choosing we desire that which we have deliberately preferred. All deliberation aimeth at action and dependeth on action; and thus deliberation goeth before all choice, and choice before all action. For this reason not only our actions, but also our thoughts, inasmuch as they give occasion for choice, bring in their train crowns or punishments. For the beginning of sin and righteous dealing is choice, exercised in action possible to us. Where the power of activity is ours, there too are the actions that follow that activity in our power. Virtuous activities are in our power, therefore in our power are virtues also; for we are absolute masters over all our souls' affairs and all our deliberations. Since then it is of free will that men deliberate, and of free will that men choose, a man partaketh of the light divine, and advanceth in the practice of this philosophy in exact measure of his choice, for there are differences of choice. And even as water-springs, issuing from the hollows of the earth, sometimes gush forth from the surface soil, and sometimes from a lower source, and at other times from a great depth, and even as some of these waters bubble forth continuously, and their taste is sweet, while others that come from deep wells are brackish or sulphurous, even as some pour forth in abundance while others flow drop by drop, thus, understand thou, is it also with our choices. Some choices are swift and exceeding fervent, others languid and cold: some have a bias entirely toward virtue, while others incline with all their force to its opposite. And like in nature to these choices are the ensuing impulses to action." XVI. Ioasaph said unto the elder, "Are there now others, too, who preach the same doctrines as thou? Or art thou to-day the only one that teacheth this hatred of the present world?" The other answered and said, "In this your most unhappy country I know of none: the tyranny of thy father hath netted all such in a thousand forms of death; and he hath made it his aim that the preaching of the knowledge of God be not once heard in your midst. But in all other tongues these doctrines are sung and glorified, by some in perfect truth, but by others perversely; for the enemy of our souls hath made them decline from the straight road, and divided them by strange teachings, and taught them to interpret certain sayings of the Scriptures falsely, and not after the sense contained therein. But the truth is one, even that which was preached by the glorious Apostles and inspired Fathers, and shineth in the Catholick Church above the brightness of the sun from the one end of the world unto the other; and as an herald and teacher of that truth have I been sent to thee." Ioasaph said unto him, "Hath my father then, learned naught of these things?" The elder answered, "Clearly and duly he hath learned naught; for he stoppeth up his senses, and will not admit that which is good, being of his own free choice inclined to evil." "Would God," said Ioasaph, "that he too were instructed in these mysteries?" The elder answered, "The things that are impossible with men are possible with God. For how knowest thou whether thou shalt save thy sire, and in wondrous fashion be styled the spiritual father of thy father? "I have heard that, once upon a time, there was a king who governed his kingdom right well, and dealt kindly and gently with his subjects, only failing in this point, that he was not rich in the light of the knowledge of God, but held fast to the errors of idolatry. Now he had a counsellor, which was a good man and endued with righteousness toward God and with all other virtuous wisdom. Grieved and vexed though he was at the error of the king, and willing to convince him thereof, he nevertheless drew back from the attempt, for fear that he might earn trouble for himself and his friends, and cut short those services which he rendered to others. Yet sought he a convenient season to draw his sovereign toward that which was good. One night the king said unto him, "Come now, let us go forth and walk about the city, if haply we may see something to edify us." Now while they were walking about the city, they saw a ray of light shining through an aperture. Fixing their eyes thereon, they descried an underground cavernous chamber, in the forefront of which there sat a man, plunged in poverty, and clad in rags and tatters. Beside him stood his wife, mixing wine. When the man took the cup in his hands, she sung a clear sweet melody, and delighted him by dancing and cozening him with flatteries. The king's companions observed this for a time, and marvelled that people, pinched by such poverty as not to afford house and raiment, yet passed their lives in such good cheer. The king said to his chief counsellor, 'Friend, how marvellous a thing it is, that our life, though bright with such honour and luxury, hath never pleased us so well as this poor and miserable life doth delight and rejoice these fools: and that this life, which appeareth to us so cruel and abominable, is to them sweet and alluring!' The chief counsellor seized the happy moment and said, 'But to thee, O king, how seemeth their life?' 'Of all that I have ever seen,' quoth the king, 'the most hateful and wretched, the most loathsome and abhorrent.' Then spake the chief counsellor unto him, "Such, know thou well, O king, and even more unendurable is our life reckoned by those who are initiated into the sight of the mysteries of yonder everlasting glory, and the blessings that pass all understanding. Your palaces glittering with gold, and these splendid garments, and all the delights of this life are more loathsome than dung and filth in the eyes of those that know the unspeakable beauties of the tabernacles in heaven made without hands, and the apparel woven by God, and the incorruptible diadems which God, the Creator and Lord of all, hath prepared for them that love him. For like as this couple were accounted fools by us, so much the more are we, who go astray in this world and please ourselves in this false glory and senseless pleasure, worthy of lamentation and tears in the eyes of those who have tasted of the sweets of the bliss beyond.' "When the king heard this, he became as one dumb. He said, 'Who then are these men that live a life better than ours?' 'All,' said the chief-counsellor 'who prefer the eternal to the temporal.' Again, when the king desired to know what the eternal might be the other replied, 'A kingdom that knoweth no succession, a life that is not subject unto death, riches that dread no poverty: joy and gladness that have no share of grief and vexation; perpetual peace free from all hatred and love of strife. Blessed, thrice blessed are they that are found worthy of these enjoyments! Free from pain and free from toil is the life that they shall live for ever, enjoying without labour all the sweets and pleasaunce of the kingdom of God, and reigning with Christ world without end.' "'And who is worthy to obtain this?' asked the king. The other answered, 'All they that hold on the road that leadeth thither; for none forbiddeth entrance, if a man but will.' "Said the king, 'And what is the way that beareth thither?' That bright spirit answered, 'To know the only true God, and Jesus Christ, his only-begotten Son, and the Holy and quickening Spirit.' "The king, endowed with understanding worthy of the purple, said unto him, 'What hath hindered thee until now from doing me to wit of these things? For they appear to me too good to be put off or passed over, if they indeed be true; and, if they be doubtful, I must search diligently, until I find the truth without shadow of doubt.' "The chief counsellor said, 'It was not from negligence or indifference that I delayed to make this known unto thee, for it is true and beyond question, but 'twas because I reverenced the excellency of thy majesty, lest thou mightest think me a meddler. If therefore thou bid thy servant put thee in mind of these things for the future, I shall obey thy behest.' 'Yea,' said the king, 'not every day only, but every hour, renew in me the remembrance thereof: for it behoveth us not to turn our mind inattentively to these things, but with very fervent zeal.' "We have heard," said Barlaam, "that this king lived, for the time to come, a godly life, and, having brought his days without tempest to an end, failed not to gain the felicity of the world to come. If then at a convenient season one shall call these things to thy father's mind also, peradventure he shall understand and know the dire evil in which he is held, and turn therefrom and choose the good; since, for the present at least, 'he is blind and cannot see afar off,' having deprived himself of the true light and being a deserter of his own accord to the darkness of ungodliness." Ioasaph said unto him, "The Lord undertake my father's matters, as he ordereth! For, even as thou sayest, the things that are impossible with men, are possible with him. But for myself, thanks to thine unsurpassable speech, I renounce the vanity of things present, and am resolved to withdraw from them altogether, and to spend the rest of my life with thee, lest, by means of these transitory and fleeting things, I lose the enjoyment of the eternal and incorruptible." The elder answered him, "This do, and thou shalt be like unto a youth of great understanding of whom I have heard tell, that was born of rich and distinguished parents. For him his father sought in marriage the exceeding fair young daughter of a man of high rank and wealth. But when he communed with his son concerning the espousals, and informed him of his plans, the son thought it strange and ill-sounding, and cast it off, and left his father and went into exile. On his journey he found entertainment in the house of a poor old man, where he rested awhile during the heat of the day. "Now this poor man's daughter, his only child, a virgin, was sitting before the door, and, while she wrought with her hands, with her lips she loudly sang the praises of God with thanksgiving from the ground of her heart. The young man heard her hymn of praise and said, 'Damsel, what is thine employment? and wherefore, poor and needy as thou art, givest thou thanks as though for great blessings, singing praise to the Giver?' She answered, 'Knowest thou not that, as a little medicine often times delivereth a man from great ailments, even so the giving of thanks to God for small mercies winneth great ones? Therefore I, the daughter of a poor old man, thank and bless God for these small mercies, knowing that the Giver thereof is able to give even greater gifts. And this applieth but to those external things that are not our own from whence there accrueth no gain to those who possess much (not to mention the loss that often ariseth), nor cometh there harm to those who have less; for both sorts journey along the same road, and hasten to the same end. But, in things most necessary and vital, many and great the blessings I have enjoyed of my Lord, though indeed they are without number and beyond compare. I have been made in the image of God, and have gained the knowledge of him, and have been endowed with reason beyond all the beasts, and have been called again from death unto life, through the tender mercy of our God, and have received power to share in his mysteries; and the gate of Paradise hath been opened to me, allowing me to enter without hindrance, if I will. Wherefore for gifts so many and so fine, shared alike by rich and poor, I can indeed in no wise praise him as I ought, yet if I fail to render to the Giver this little hymn of praise, what excuse shall I have?' "The youth, astonished at her wit, called to her father, and said unto him, 'Give me thy daughter: for I love her wisdom and piety.' But the elder said, 'It is not possible for thee, the son of wealthy parents, to take this a beggar's daughter.' Again the young man said, 'Yea, but I will take her, unless thou forbid: for a daughter of noble and wealthy family hath been betrothed unto me in marriage, and her I have cast off and taken to flight. But I have fallen in love with thy daughter because of her righteousness to God-ward, and her discreet wisdom, and I heartily desire to wed-her.' But the old man said unto him, 'I cannot give her unto thee, to carry away to thy father's house, and depart her from mine arms, for she is mine only child.' 'But,' said the youth, 'I will abide here with your folk and adopt your manner of life.' Thereupon he stripped him of his own goodly raiment, and asked for the old man's clothes and put them on. When the father had much tried his purpose, and proved him in manifold ways, and knew that his intent was fixed, and that it was no light passion that led him to ask for his daughter, but love of godliness that constrained him to embrace a life of poverty, preferring it to his own glory and noble birth, he took him by the hand, and brought him into his treasure-house, where he showed him much riches laid up, and a vast heap of money, such as the young man had never beheld. And he said unto him, 'Son, all these things give I unto thee, forasmuch as thou hast chosen to become the husband to my daughter, and also thereby the heir of all my substance.' So the young man acquired the inheritance, and surpassed all the famous and wealthy men of the land." XVII. Said Ioasaph unto Barlaam, "This story also fitly setteth forth mine own estate. Whence also me thinketh that thou hadst me in mind when thou spakest it. But what is the proof whereby thou seekest to know the steadfastness of my purpose?" Said the elder, "I have already proved thee, and know how wise and steadfast is thy purpose, and how truly upright is thine heart. But the end of thy fortune shall confirm it. For this cause I bow my knees unto our God glorified in Three Persons, the Maker of all things visible and invisible, who verily is, and is for ever, that never had beginning of his glorious being, nor hath end, the terrible and almighty, the good and pitiful, that he may enlighten the eyes of thine heart, and give thee the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of him, that thou mayest know what is the hope of his calling, and what the riches of the glory of his inheritance in the Saints, and what is the exceeding greatness of his power to us-ward who believe; that thou mayest be no more a stranger and sojourner, but a fellow-citizen with the Saints, and of the household of God, being built upon the foundation of the Apostles and Prophets, Jesus Christ our Lord himself being the chief corner-stone, in whom all the building fitly framed together groweth unto an holy temple in the Lord." Ioasaph, keenly pricked at the heart, said, "All this I too long to learn: and I beseech thee make known to me the riches of the glory of God, and the exceeding greatness of his power." Barlaam said unto him, "I pray God to teach thee this, and to plant in thy soul the knowledge of the same; since with men it is impossible that his glory and power be told, yea, even if the tongues of all men that now are and have ever been were combined in one. For, as saith the Evangelist and Divine, 'No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him.' But the glory and majesty of the invisible and infinite God, what son of earth shall skill to comprehend it, save he to whom he himself shall reveal it, in so far as he will, as he hath revealed it, to his Prophets and Apostles? But we learn it, so far as in us lieth, by their teaching, and from the very nature of the world. For the Scripture saith, 'The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament sheweth his handiwork;' and, 'The invisible things of him from the creation Of the world are clearly understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead.' "Even as a man, beholding an house splendidly and skilfully builded, or a vessel fairly framed, taketh note of the builder or workman and marvelleth thereat, even so I that was fashioned out of nothing and brought into being, though I cannot see the maker and provider, yet from his harmonious and marvellous fashioning of me have come to the knowledge of his wisdom, not to the full measure of that wisdom, but to the full compass of my powers; yea I have seen that I was not brought forth by chance, nor made of myself, but that he fashioned me, as it pleased him, and set me to have dominion over his creatures, howbeit making me lower than some; that, when I was broken, he re-created me with a better renewal; and that he shall draw me by his divine will from this world and place me in that other life that is endless and eternal; and that in nothing I could withstand the might of his providence, nor add anything to myself nor take anything away, whether in stature or bodily form, and that I am not able to renew for myself that which is waxen old, nor raise that which hath been destroyed. For never was man able to accomplish aught of these things, neither king, nor wise man, nor rich man, nor ruler, nor any other that pursueth the tasks of men. For he saith, 'There is no king, or mighty man, that had any other beginning of birth. For all men have one entrance into life, and the like going out.' "So from mine own nature, I am led by the hand to the knowledge of the mighty working of the Creator; and at the same time I think upon the well-ordered structure and preservation of the whole creation, how that in itself it is subject everywhere to variableness and change, in the world of thought by choice, whether by advance in the good, or departure from it, in the world of sense by birth and decay, increase and decrease, and change in quality and motion in space. And thus all things proclaim, by voices that cannot be heard, that they were created, and are held together, and preserved, and ever watched over by the providence of the uncreate, unturning and unchanging God. Else how could diverse elements have met, for the consummation of a single world, one with another, and remained inseparable, unless some almighty power had knit them together, and still were keeping them from dissolution? 'For how could anything have endured, if it had not been his will? or been preserved, if not called by him?' as saith the Scripture. "A ship holdeth not together without a steersman, but easily foundereth; and a small house shall not stand without a protector. How then could the world have subsisted for long ages, a work so great, and so fair and wondrous,--without some glorious mighty and marvellous steersmanship and all-wise providence? Behold the heavens, how long they have stood, and have not been darkened: and the earth hath not been exhausted, though she hath been bearing offspring so long. The water-springs have not failed to gush out since they were made. The sea, that receiveth so many rivers, hath not exceeded her measure. The courses of Sun and Moon have not varied: the order of day and night hath not changed. From all these objects is declared unto us the unspeakable power and magnificence of God, witnessed by Prophets and Apostles. But no man can fitly conceive or sound forth his glory. For the holy Apostle, that had Christ speaking within him, after perceiving all objects of thought and sense, still said, 'We know in part, and we prophesy in part. But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away.' Wherefore also, astonied at the infinite riches of his wisdom and knowledge, he cried for all to understand, 'O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! how unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out!' "Now, if he, that attained unto the third heaven and heard such unspeakable words, uttered such sentences, what man of my sort shall have strength to look eye to eye upon the abysses of such mysteries, or speak rightly thereof, or think meetly of the things whereof we speak, unless the very giver of wisdom, and the amender of the unwise, vouchsafe that power? For in his hand are we and our words, and all prudence and knowledge of wisdom is with him. And he himself hath given us the true understanding of the things that are; to know the structure of the world, the working of the elements, the beginning, end and middle of times, the changes of the solstices, the succession of seasons, and how he hath ordered all things by measure and weight. For he can shew his great strength at all times, and who may withstand the power of his arm? For the whole world before him is as a little grain of the balance, yea, as a drop of the morning dew that falleth down upon the earth. But he hath mercy upon all; for he can do all things, and winketh at the sins of men, because they should amend. For he abhorreth nothing, nor turneth away from them that run unto him, he, the only good Lord and lover of souls. Blessed be the holy name of his glory, praised and exalted above all for ever! Amen." XVIII. Ioasaph said unto him, "If thou hadst for a long time considered, most wise Sir, how thou mightest best declare to me the explanation of the questions that I propounded, methinks thou couldest not have done it better than by uttering such words as thou hast now spoken unto me. Thou hast taught me that God is the Maker and preserver of all things; and in unanswerable language thou hast shown me that the glory of his majesty is incomprehensible to human reasonings, and that no man is able to attain thereto, except those to whom, by his behest, he revealeth it. Wherefore am I lost in amaze at thine eloquent wisdom. "But tell me, good Sir, of what age thou art, and in what manner of place is thy dwelling, and who are thy fellow philosophers; for my soul hangeth fast on thine, and fain would I never be parted from thee all the days of my life." The elder said, "Mine age is, as I reckon, forty and five years, and in the deserts of the land of Senaar do I dwell. For my fellow combatants I have those who labour and contend together with me on the course of the heavenly journey." "What sayest thou?" quoth Ioasaph. "Thou seemest to me upwards of seventy years old. How speakest thou of forty and five? Herein methinks thou tellest not the truth." Barlaam said unto him, "If it be the number of years from my birth that thou askest, thou hast well reckoned them at upwards of seventy. But, for myself, I count not amongst the number of my days the years that I wasted in the vanity of the world. When I lived to the flesh in the bondage of sin, I was dead in the inner man; and those years of deadness I can never call years of life. But now the world hath been crucified to me, and I to the world, and I have put off the old man, which is corrupt according to the deceitful lusts, and live no longer to the flesh, but Christ liveth in me; and the life that I live, I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. And the years, that have passed since then, I may rightly call years of life, and days of salvation. And in numbering these at about forty and five, I reckoned by the true tale, and not off the mark. So do thou also alway hold by this reckoning; and be sure that there is no true life for them that are dead to all good works, and live in sin, and serve the world-ruler of them that are dragged downward, and waste their time in pleasures and lusts: but rather be well assured that these are dead and defunct in the activity of life. For a wise man hath fitly called sin the death of the immortal soul. And the Apostle also saith, 'When ye were the servants of sin, ye were free from righteousness. What fruit had ye then in those things whereof ye are now ashamed? for the end of those things is death. But now being made free from sin, and become servants to God, ye have your fruit unto holiness, and the end everlasting life. For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life.'" Ioasaph said unto him, "Since thou reckonest not the life in the flesh in the measure of life, neither canst thou reckon that death, which all men undergo, as death." The elder answered, "Without doubt thus think I of these matters also, and fear this temporal death never a whit, nor do I call it death at all, if only it overtake me walking in the way of the commandments of God, but rather a passage from death to the better and more perfect life, which is hid in Christ, in desire to obtain which the Saints were impatient of the present. Wherefore saith the Apostle, 'We know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle be dissolved, we have a building of God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. For in this we groan, earnestly desiring to be clothed upon with our house which is from heaven: if so be that being clothed we shall not be found naked. For we that are in this tabernacle do groan, being burdened: not for that we would be unclothed, but clothed upon, that mortality might be swallowed up of life.' And again, 'O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?' And once more, 'I desire to depart and be with Christ.' And the prophet saith, 'When shall I come and appear before the presence of God?' Now that I the least of all men, choose not to fear bodily death, thou mayest learn by this, that I have set at nought thy father's threat, and come boldly unto thee, and have preached to thee the tidings of salvation, though I knew for sure that, if this came to his knowledge, he would, were that possible, put me to a thousand deaths. But I, honouring the word of God afore all things, and longing to win it, dread not temporal death, nor reek on it at all worthy of such an appellation, in obedience to my Lord's command, which saith, 'Fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.'" "These then," said Ioasaph, "are the good deeds of that true philosophy, that far surpass the nature of these earthly men who cleave fast to the present life. Blessed are ye that hold to so noble a purpose! But tell me truly what is thy manner of life and that of thy companions in the desert, and from whence cometh your raiment and of what sort may it be? Tell me as thou lovest truth." Said Barlaam, "Our sustenance consisteth of acorns and herbs that we find in the desert, watered by the dew of heaven, and in obedience to the Creator's command; and for this there is none to fight and quarrel with us, seeking by the rule and law of covetousness to snatch more than his share, but in abundance for all is food provided from unploughed lands, and a ready table spread. But, should any of the faithful brethren in the neighbourhood bring a blessed dole of bread, we receive it as sent by providence, and bless the faith that brought it. Our raiment is of hair, sheepskins or shirts of palm fibre, all thread-bare and much patched, to mortify the frailty of the flesh. We wear the same clothing winter and summer, which, once put on, we may on no account put off until it be old and quite outworn. For by thus afflicting our bodies with the constraints of cold and heat we purvey for ourselves the vesture of our future robes of immortality." Ioasaph said, "But whence cometh this garment that thou wearest?" The elder answered, "I received it as a loan from one of our faithful brethren, when about to make my journey unto thee; for it behoved me not to arrive in mine ordinary dress. If one had a beloved kinsman carried captive into a foreign land, and wished to recover him thence, one would lay aside one's own clothing, and put on the guise of the enemy, and pass into their country and by divers crafts deliver one's friend from that cruel tyranny. Even so I also, having been made aware of thine estate, clad myself in this dress, and came to sow the seed of the divine message in thine heart, and ransom thee from the slavery of the dread ruler of this world. And now behold by the power of God, as far as in me lay, I have accomplished my ministry, announcing to thee the knowledge of him, and making known unto thee the preaching of the Prophets and Apostles, and teaching thee unerringly and soothly the vanity of the present life, and the evils with which this world teems, which cruelly deceiveth them that trust therein, and taketh them in many a gin. Now must I return thither whence I came, and thereupon doff this robe belonging to another, and don mine own again." Ioasaph therefore begged the elder to shew himself in his wonted apparel. Then did Barlaam strip off the mantle that he wore, and lo, a terrible sight met Ioasaph's eyes: for all the fashion of his flesh was wasted away, and his skin blackened by the scorching sun, and drawn tight over his bones like an hide stretched over thin canes. And he wore an hair shirt, stiff and rough, from his loins to his knees, and over his shoulders there hung a coat of like sort. But Ioasaph, being sore amazed at the hardship of his austere life, and astonished at his excess of endurance, burst into tears, and said to the elder, "Since thou art come to deliver me from the slavery of the devil, crown thy good service to me, and 'bring my soul out of prison,' and take me with thee, and let us go hence, that I may be fully ransomed from this deceitful world and then receive the seal of saving Baptism, and share with thee this thy marvellous philosophy, and this more than human discipline." But Barlaam said unto him, "A certain rich man once reared the fawn of a gazelle; which, when grown up, was impelled by natural desire to long for the desert. So on a day she went out and found an herd of gazelles browsing; and, joining them, she would roam through the glades of the forest, returning at evenfall, but issuing forth at dawn, through the heedlessness of her keepers, to herd with her wild companions. When these removed, to graze further afield, she followed them. But the rich man's servants, when they learned thereof, mounted on horseback, and gave chase, and caught the pet fawn, and brought her home again, and set her in captivity for the time to come. But of the residue of the herd, some they killed, and roughly handled others. Even so I fear that it may happen unto us also if thou follow me; that I may be deprived of thy fellowship, and bring many ills to my comrades, and everlasting damnation to thy father. But this is the will of the Lord concerning time; thou now indeed must be signed with the seal of holy Baptism, and abide in this country, cleaving to all righteousness, and the fulfilling of the commandments of Christ; but when the Giver of all good things shall give thee opportunity, then shalt thou come to us, and for the remainder of this present life we shall dwell together; and I trust in the Lord also that in the world to come we shall not be parted asunder." Again Ioasaph, in tears, said unto him, "If this be the Lord's pleasure, his will be done! For the rest, perfect me in holy Baptism. Then receive at my hands money and garments for the support and clothing both of thyself and thy companions, and depart to the place of thy monastic life, and the peace of God be thy guard! But cease not to make supplications on my behalf, that I may not fall away from my hope, but may soon be able to reach thee, and in peace profound may enjoy thy ministration." Barlaam answered, "Nought forbiddeth thee to receive the seal of Christ. Make thee ready now; and, the Lord working with thee, thou shalt be perfected. But as concerning the money that thou didst promise to bestow on my companions, how shall this be, that thou, a poor man, shouldest give alms to the rich? The rich always help the poor, not the needy the wealthy. And the least of all my comrades is incomparably richer than thou. But I trust in the mercies of God that thou too shalt soon be passing rich as never afore: and then thou wilt not be ready to distribute." Ioasaph said unto him, "Make plain to me this saying; how the least of all thy companions surpasseth me in riches--thou saidest but now that they lived in utter penury, and were pinched by extreme poverty and why thou callest me a poor man, but sayest that, when I shall be passing rich, I, who am ready to distribute, shall be ready to distribute no more." Barlaam answered, "I said not that these men were pinched by poverty, but that they plume themselves on their inexhaustible wealth. For to be ever adding money to money, and never to curb the passion for it, but insatiably to covet more and more, betokeneth the extreme of poverty. But those who despise the present for love of the eternal and count it but dung, if only they win Christ, who have laid aside all care for meat and raiment and cast that care on the Lord, and rejoice in penury as no lover of the world could rejoice, were he rolling in riches, who have laid up for themselves plenteously the riches of virtue, and are fed by the hope of good things without end, may more fitly be termed rich than thou, or any other earthly kingdom. But, God working with thee, thou shalt lay hold on such spiritual abundance that, if thou keep it in safety and ever rightfully desire more, thou shalt never wish to dispend any part of it. This is true abundance: but the mass of material riches will damage rather than benefit its friends. Meetly therefore called I it the extreme of poverty, which the lovers of heavenly blessings utterly renounce and eschew, and flee from it, as a man fleeth from an adder. But if I take from thee and so bring back to life that foe, whom my comrades in discipline and battle have slain and trampled under foot, and carry him back to them, and so be the occasion of wars and lusts, then shall I verily be unto them an evil angel, which heaven forfend! "Let the same, I pray thee, be thy thoughts about raiment. As for them that have put off the corruption of the old man, and, as far as possible, cast away the robe of disobedience, and put on Christ as a coat of salvation and garment of gladness, how shall I again clothe these in their coats of hide, and gird them about with the covering of shame? But be assured that my companions have no need of such things, but are content with their hard life in the desert, and reckon it the truest luxury; and bestow thou on the poor the money and garments which thou promisedst to give unto our monks, and lay up for thyself, for the time to come, treasure that cannot be stolen, and by the orisons of these poor folk make God thine ally; for thus shalt thou employ thy riches as an help toward noble things. Then also put on the whole armour of the Spirit, having thy loins girt about with truth, and having on the breast-plate of righteousness, and wearing the helmet of salvation, and having thy feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace, and taking in thine hands the shield of faith, and the sword of the spirit, which is the word of God. And, being thus excellently armed and guarded on every side, in this confidence go forth to the warfare against ungodliness, until, this put to flight, and its prince, the devil, dashed headlong to the earth, thou be adorned with the crowns of victory from the right hand of thy master, the Lord of life." XIX. With such like doctrines and saving words did Barlaam instruct the king's son, and fit him for holy Baptism, charging him to fast and pray, according to custom, several days: and he ceased not to resort unto him, teaching him every article of the Catholick Faith and expounding him the holy Gospel. Moreover he interpreted the Apostolick exhortations and the sayings of the Prophets: for, taught of God, Barlaam had alway ready on his lips the Old and New Scripture; and, being stirred by the Spirit, he enlightened his young disciple to see the true knowledge of God. But on the day, whereon the prince should be baptized, he taught him, saying, "Behold thou art moved to receive the seal of Christ, and be signed with the light of the countenance of the Lord: and thou becomest a son of God, and temple of the Holy Ghost, the giver of life. Believe thou therefore in the Father, and in the Son, and in the Holy Ghost, the holy and life-giving Trinity, glorified in three persons and one Godhead, different indeed in persons and personal properties, but united in substance; acknowledging one God unbegotten, the Father; and one begotten Lord, the Son, light of light, very God of very God, begotten before all worlds; for of the good Father is begotten the good Son, and of the unbegotten light shone forth the everlasting light; and from very life came forth the life-giving spring, and from original might shone forth the might of the Son, who is the brightness of his glory and the Word in personality, who was in the beginning with God, and God without beginning and without end, by whom all things, visible and invisible, were made: knowing also one Holy Ghost, which proceedeth from the Father, perfect, life-giving and sanctifying God, with the same will, the same power, coeternal and impersonate. Thus therefore worship thou the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost, in three persons or properties and one Godhead. For the Godhead is common of the three, and one is their nature, one their substance, one their glory, one their kingdom, one their might, one their authority; but it is common of the Son and of the Holy Ghost that they are of the Father; and it is proper of the Father that he is unbegotten, and of the Son that he is begotten, and of the Holy Ghost that he proceedeth. "This therefore be thy belief; but seek not to understand the manner of the generation or procession, for it is incomprehensible. In uprightness of heart and without question accept the truth that the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost, are in all points one except in the being unbegotten, and begotten, and proceeding; and that the only begotten Son, the Word of God, and God, for our salvation came down upon earth, by the good pleasure of the Father, and, by the operation of the Holy Ghost, was conceived without seed in the womb of Mary the holy Virgin and Mother of God, by the Holy Ghost, and was born of her without defilement and was made perfect man and that he is perfect God and perfect man, being of two natures, the Godhead and the manhood, and in two natures, endowed with reason, will, activity, and free will, and in all points perfect according to the proper rule and law in either case, that is in the Godhead and the manhood, and in one united person. And do thou receive these things without question, never seeking to know the manner, how the Son of God emptied himself, and was made man of the blood of the Virgin, without seed and without defilement; or what is this meeting in one person of two natures. For by faith we are taught to hold fast those things that have been divinely taught us out of Holy Scripture; but of the manner we are ignorant, and cannot declare it. "Believe thou that the Son of God, who, of his tender mercy was made man, took upon him all the affections that are natural to man, and are blameless (he hungered and thirsted and slept and was weary and endured agony in his human nature, and for our transgressions was led to death, was crucified and was buried, and tasted of death, his Godhead continuing without suffering and without change; for we attach no sufferings whatsoever to that nature which is free from suffering, but we recognize him as suffering and buried in that nature which he assumed, and in his heavenly glory rising again from the dead, and in immortality ascending into heaven); and believe that he shall come again, with glory, to judge quick and dead, and by the words which himself knoweth, of that diviner body, and to reward every man by his own just standards. For the dead shall rise again, and they that are in their graves shall awake: and they that have kept the commandments of Christ, and have departed this life in the true faith shall inherit eternal life, and they, that have died in their sins, and have turned aside from the right faith, shall go away into eternal punishment. Believe not that there is any true being or kingdom of evil, nor suppose that it is without beginning, or self-originate, or born of God: out on such an absurdity! but believe rather that it is 'the work of us and the devil, come upon us through our heedlessness, because we were endowed with free-will, and we make our choice, of deliberate purpose, whether it be good or evil. Beside this, acknowledge one Baptism, by water and the Spirit, for the remission of sins. "Receive also the Communion of the spotless Mysteries of Christ, believing in truth that they are the Body and Blood of Christ our God, which he hath given unto the faithful for the remission of sins. For in the same night in which he was betrayed he ordained a new testament with his holy disciples and Apostles, and through them for all that should believe on him, saying, 'Take, eat: this is my Body, which is broken for you, for the remission of sins.' After the same manner also he took the cup, and gave unto them saying, 'Drink ye all of this: this is my Blood, of the new testament, which is shed for you for the remission of sins: this do in remembrance of me.' He then, the Word of God, being quick and powerful, and, working all things by his might, maketh and transformeth, through his divine operation, the bread and wine of the oblation into his own Body and Blood, by the visitation of the Holy Ghost, for the sanctification and enlightenment of them that with desire partake thereof. "Faithfully worship, with honour and reverence, the venerable likeness of the features of the Lord, the Word of God, who for our sake was made man, thinking to behold in the Image thy Creator himself. 'For the honour of the Image, saith one of the Saints, passeth over to the original.' The original is the thing imaged, and from it cometh the derivation. For when we see the drawing in the Image, in our mind's eye we pass over to the true form of which it is an Image, and devoutly worship the form of him who for our sake was made flesh, not making a god of it, but saluting it as an image of God made flesh, with desire and love of him who for us men emptied himself, and even took the form of a servant. Likewise also for this reason we salute the pictures of his undefiled Mother, and of all the Saints. In the same spirit also faithfully worship and salute the emblem of the life-giving and venerable Cross, for the sake of him that hung thereon in the flesh, for the salvation of our race, Christ the God and Saviour of the world, who gave it to us as the sign of victory over the devil; for the devil trembleth and quaketh at the virtue thereof, and endureth not to behold it. In such doctrines and in such faith shalt thou be baptized, keeping thy faith unwavering and pure of all heresy until thy latest breath. But all teaching and every speech of doctrine contrary to this blameless faith abhor, and consider it an alienation from God. For, as saith the Apostle, 'Though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed.' For there is none other Gospel or none other Faith than that which hath been preached by the Apostles, and established by the inspired Fathers at divers Councils, and delivered to the Catholick Church." When Barlaam had thus spoken, and taught the king's son the Creed which was set forth at the Council of Nicaea, he baptized him in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, in the pool of water which was in his garden. And there came upon him the grace of the Holy Spirit. Then did Barlaam come back to his chamber, and offer the holy Mysteries of the unbloody Sacrifice, and communicate him with the undefiled Mysteries of Christ: and Ioasaph rejoiced in spirit, giving thanks to Christ his God. Then said Barlaam unto him, "Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, which according to his abundant mercy hath begotten thee again unto a lively hope, to an inheritance incorruptible and undefiled, that fadeth not away, reserved in heaven in Christ Jesus our Lord by the Holy Ghost; for to-day thou hast been made free from sin, and hast become the servant of God, and hast received the earnest of everlasting life: thou hast left darkness and put on light, being enrolled in the glorious liberty of the children of God. For he saith, 'As many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name.' Wherefore thou art no more a servant, but a son and an heir of God through Jesus Christ in the Holy Ghost. Wherefore, beloved, give diligence that thou mayest be found of him without spot and blameless, working that which is good upon the foundation of faith: for faith without works is dead, as also are works without faith; even as I remember to have told thee afore. Put off therefore now all malice, and hate all the works of the old man, which are corrupt according to the deceitful lusts; and, as new-born babe, desire to drink the reasonable and sincere milk of the virtues, that thou mayest grow thereby, and attain unto the knowledge of the commandments of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ: that thou mayest henceforth be no more a child in mind, tossed to and fro, and carried about on the wild and raging waves of thy passions: or rather in malice be a child, but have thy mind settled and made steadfast toward that which is good, and walk worthy of the vocation wherewith thou wast called, in the keeping of the commandments of the Lord, casting off and putting far from thee the vanity of thy former conversation, henceforth walking not as the Gentiles walk in the vanity of their mind, having their understanding darkened, alienated from the glory of God, in subjection to their lusts and unreasonable affections. But as for thee, even as thou hast approached the living and true God, so walk thou as a child of light; for the fruit of the Spirit is in all goodness and righteousness and truth; and no longer destroy by the works of the old man the new man, which thou hast to-day put on. But day by day renew thyself in righteousness and holiness and truth: for this is possible with every man that willeth, as thou hearest that unto them that believe on his name he hath given power to become the sons of God; so that we can no longer say that the acquiring of virtues is impossible for us, for the road is plain and easy. For, though with respect to the buffeting of the body, it hath been called a strait and narrow way, yet through the hope of future blessings is it desirable and divine for such as walk, not as fools but circumspectly, understanding what the will of God is, clad in the whole armour of God to stand in battle against the wiles of the adversary, and with all prayer and supplication watching thereunto, in all patience and hope. Therefore, even as thou hast heard from me, and been instructed, and hast laid a sure foundation, do thou abound therein, increasing and advancing, and warring the good warfare, holding faith and a good conscience, witnessed by good works, following after righteousness, godliness, faith, charity, patience, meekness, laying hold on eternal life whereunto thou wast called. But remove far from thee all pleasure and lust of the affections, not only in act and operation, but even in the thoughts of thine heart, that thou mayest present thy soul without blemish to God. For not our actions only, but our thoughts also are recorded, and procure us crowns or punishments: and we know that Christ, with the Father and the Holy Ghost, dwelleth in pure hearts. But, just as smoke driveth away bees, so, we learn, do evil imaginations drive out of us the Holy Spirit's grace. Wherefore take good heed hereto, that thou blot out every imagination of sinful passion from thy soul, and plant good thoughts therein, making thyself a temple of the Holy Ghost. For from imaginations we come also to actual deeds, and every work, advancing from thought and reflection, catcheth at small beginnings, and then, by small increases, arriveth at great endings. "Wherefore on no account suffer any evil habit to master thee; but, while it is yet young, pluck the evil root out of thine heart, lest it fasten on and strike root so deep that time and labour be required to uproot it. And the reason that greater sins assault us and get the mastery of our souls is that those which appear to be less, such as wicked thoughts, unseemly words and evil communications, fail to receive proper correction. For as in the case of the body, they that neglect small wounds often bring mortification and death upon themselves, so too with the soul: thus they that overlook little passions and sins bring on greater ones. And the more those greater sins grow on them, the more cloth the soul become accustomed therto and think light of them. For he saith, 'When the wicked cometh to the depth of evil things, he thinketh light of them': and finally, like the hog, that delighteth to wallow in mire, the soul, that hath been buried in evil habits, doth not even perceive the stink of her sin, but rather delighteth and rejoiceth therein, cleaving to wickedness as it were good. And even if at last she issue from the mire and come to herself again, she is delivered only by much labour and sweat from the bondage of those sins, to which she hath by evil custom enslaved herself. "Wherefore with all thy might remove thyself far from every evil thought and fancy, and every sinful custom; and school thyself the rather in virtuous deeds, and form the habit of practising them. For if thou labour but a little therein, and have strength to form the habit, at the last, God helping thee, thou shalt advance without labour. For the habit of virtue, taking its quality from the soul, seeing that it hath some natural kinship therewith and claimeth God for an help-mate, becometh hard to alter and exceeding strong; as thou seest, courage and prudence, temperance and righteousness are hard to alter, being deeply seated habits, qualities and activities of the soul. For if the evil affections, not being natural to us, but attacking us from without, be hard to alter when they become habits, how much harder shall it be to shift virtue, which hath been by nature planted in us by our Maker, and hath him for an help-mate, if so be, through our brief endeavour, it shall have been rooted in habit in the soul?" XX. "Wherefore a practician of virtue once spake to me on this wise: 'After I had made divine meditation my constant habit, and through the practice of it my soul had received her right quality, I once resolved to make trial of her, and put a check upon her, not allowing her to devote herself to her wonted exercises. I felt that she was chafing and fretting, and yearning for meditation with an ungovernable desire, and was utterly unable to incline to any contrary thought. No sooner had I given her the reins than immediately she ran in hot haste to her own task, as saith the Prophet, 'Like as the hart desireth the water brooks, so longeth my soul after the strong, the living God.' Wherefore from all these proofs it is evident that the acquirement of virtue is within our reach, and that we are lords over it, whether we will embrace or else the rather choose sin. They then, that are in the thraldom of wickedness, can hardly be torn away therefrom, as I have already said. "But thou, who hast been delivered therefrom, through the tender mercy of our God, and hast put on Christ by the grace of the Holy Ghost, now transfer thyself wholly to the Lord's side, and never open a door to thy passions, but adorn thy soul with the sweet savour and splendour of virtue, and make her a temple of the Holy Trinity, and to his contemplation see thou devote all the powers of thy mind. He that liveth and converseth with an earthly king is pointed out by all as a right happy man: what happiness then must be his who is privileged to converse and be in spirit with God! Behold thou then his likeness alway, and converse with him. How shalt thou converse with God? By drawing near him in prayer and supplication. He that prayeth with exceeding fervent desire and pure heart, his mind estranged from all that is earthly and grovelling, and standeth before God, eye to eye, and presenteth his prayers to him in fear and trembling, such an one hath converse and speaketh with him face to face. "Our good Master is present everywhere, hearkening to them that approach him in purity and truth, as saith the Prophet, 'The eyes of the Lord are over the righteous, and his ears are open unto their cry.' For this reason the Fathers define Prayer as 'the union of man with God,' and call it 'Angels' work,' and 'the prelude of gladness to come.' For since they lay down before all things that 'the kingdom of heaven' consisteth in nearness to and contemplation of the Holy Trinity, and since all the importunity of prayer leadeth the mind thither, prayer is rightly called 'the prelude' and, as it were, the 'fore-glimpse' of that blessedness. But not all prayer is of this nature, but only such prayer as is worthy of the name, which hath God for its teacher, who giveth prayer to him that prayeth; prayer which soareth above all things on earth and entreateth directly with God. "This acquire thou for thyself, and strive to advance thereto, for it is able to exalt thee from earth to heaven. But without preparation and at hap-hazard thou shalt not advance therein. But first purify thy soul from all passion, and cleanse it like a bright and newly cleansed mirrour from every evil thought, and banish far all remembrance of injury and anger, which most of all hindereth our prayers from ascending to God-ward: and from the heart forgive all those that have trespassed against thee, and with alms and charities to the poor lend wings to thy prayer, and so bring it before God with fervent tears. Thus praying thou shalt be able to say with blessed David, who, for all that he was king, and distraught with ten thousand cares, yet cleansed his soul from all passions, and could say unto God, 'As for iniquity, I hate and abhor it, but thy law do I love. Seven times a day do I praise thee, because of thy righteous judgements. My soul hath kept thy testimonies, and loved them exceedingly. Let my complaint come before thee, O Lord: give me understanding according to thy word.' "While thou art calling thus, the Lord hear thee: while thou art yet speaking, he shall say, 'Behold I am here.' If then thou attain to such prayer, blessed shalt thou be; for it is impossible for a man praying and calling upon God with such purpose not to advance daily in that which is good, and soar over all the snares of the enemy. For, as saith one of the Saints, 'He that hath made fervent his understanding, and hath lift up his soul and migrated to heaven, and hath thus called upon his Master, and remembered his own sins, and spoken concerning the forgiveness of the same, and with hot tears hath besought the Lover of mankind to be merciful to him: such an one, I say, by his continuance in such words and considerations, layeth aside every care of this life, and waxeth superior to human passions, and meriteth to be called an associate of God.' Than which state what can be more blessed and higher? May the Lord vouchsafe thee to attain to this blessedness! "Lo I have shown thee the way of the commandments of the Lord, and have not shunned to declare unto thee all the counsel of God. And now I, have fulfilled my ministry unto thee. It remaineth that thou gird up the loins of thy mind, obedient to the Holy One that hath called thee, and be thou thyself holy in all manner of conversation: for, 'Be ye holy: for I am holy,' saith the Lord. And the chief prince of the Apostles also writeth, saying, 'If ye call on the Father, who without respect of persons judgeth according to every man's work, pass the time of your sojourning here in fear; knowing that ye were not redeemed with corruptible things, as silver and gold, from your vain conversation received by tradition from your fathers, but with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot.' "All these things therefore store thou up in thine heart, and remember them unceasingly, ever keeping before thine eyes the fear of God, and his terrible judgement seat, and the splendour of the righteous which they shall receive in the world to come, and the shame of sinners in the depths of darkness, and the frailty and vanity of things present, and the eternity of things hereafter; for, 'All flesh is grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass. The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away: but the word of the Lord endureth for ever.' Meditate upon these things alway and the peace of God be with thee, enlightening and informing thee, and leading thee into the way of salvation, chasing afar out of thy mind every evil wish, and sealing thy soul with the sign of the Cross, that no stumbling block of the evil one come nigh thee, but that thou mayest merit, in all fulness of virtue, to obtain the kingdom that is to come, without end or successor, and be illumined with the light of the blessed life-giving Trinity, which, in the Father, and in the Son, and in the Holy Ghost, is glorified." XXI. With such moral words did the reverend elder exhort the king's son, and then withdrew to his own hospice. But the young prince's servants and tutors marvelled to see the frequency of Barlaam's visits to the palace; and one of the chiefest among them, whom, for his fidelity and prudence, the king had set over his son's palace, named Zardan, said to the prince, "Thou knowest well, sir, how much I dread thy father, and how great is my faith toward him: wherefore he ordered me, for my faithfulness, to wait upon thee. Now, when I see this stranger constantly conversing with thee, I fear he may be of the Christian religion, toward which thy father hath a deadly hate; and I shall be found subject to the penalty of death. Either then make known to thy father this man's business, or in future cease to converse with him. Else cast me forth from thy presence, that I be not blameable, and ask thy father to appoint another in my room." The king's son said unto him, "This do, Zardan, first of all. Sit thou down behind the curtain, and hear his communication with me: and then thus will I tell thee what thou oughtest to do." So when Barlaam was about to enter into his presence, Ioasaph hid Zardan within the curtain, and said to the elder, "Sum me up the matter of thy divine teaching, that it may the more firmly be implanted in my heart." Barlaam took up his parable and uttered many sayings touching God, and righteousness toward him, and how we must love him alone with all our heart, and with all our soul, and with all our mind, and keep his commandments with fear and love-and how he is the Maker of all things visible and invisible. Thereon he called to remembrance the creation of the first man, the command given unto him, and his transgression thereof, and the sentence pronounced by the Creator for this transgression. Then he reckoned up in order the good things wherefrom we excluded ourselves by the disannulling of his commandment. Again he made mention of the many grievous misfortunes that unhappily overtook man, after the loss of the blessings. Besides this he brought forward God's love toward mankind; how our Maker, heedful of our salvation, sent forth teachers and prophets proclaiming the Incarnation of the Only-begotten. Then he spake of the Son, his dwelling among men, his deeds of kindness, his miracles, his sufferings for us thankless creatures, his Cross, his spear, his voluntary death; finally, of our recovery and recall, our return to our first good estate; after this, of the kingdom of heaven awaiting such as are worthy thereof; of the torment in store for the wicked; the fire that is not quenched, the never ending darkness, the undying worm, and all the other tortures which the slaves of sin have laid up in store for themselves. When he had fully related these matters, he ended his speech with moral instruction, and dwelt much upon purity of life, and utterly condemned the vanity of things present, and proved the utter misery of such as cleave thereto, and finally made an end with prayer. And therewith he prayed for the prince, that he might hold fast the profession of the Catholick Faith without turning and without wavering, and keep his life blameless and his conversation pure, and so ending with prayer again withdrew to his hospice. But the king's son called Zardan forth, and, to try his disposition, said unto him, "Thou hast heard what sort of discourses this babbler maketh me, endeavouring to be-jape me with his specious follies, and rob me of this pleasing happiness and enjoyment, to worship a strange God." Zardan answered, "Why hath it pleased thee, O prince, to prove me that am thy servant? I wot that the words of that man have sunk deep into thine heart; for, otherwise, thou hadst not listened gladly and unceasingly to his words. Yea, and we also are not ignorant of this preaching. But from the time when thy father stirred up truceless warfare against the Christians, the men have been banished hence, and their teaching is silenced. But if now their doctrine commend itself unto thee, and if thou have the strength to accept its austerity, may thy wishes be guided straight toward the good! But for myself, what shall I do, that am unable to bear the very sight of such austerity, and through fear of the King am divided in soul with pain and anguish? What excuse shall I make, for neglecting his orders, and giving this fellow access unto thee?" The King's son said unto him, "I knew full well that in none other wise could I requite thee worthily for thy much kindness, and therefore have I tasked myself to make known unto thee this more than human good, which doth even exceed the worth of thy good service, that thou mightest know to what end thou wast born, and acknowledge thy Creator, and, leaving darkness, run to the light. And I hoped that when thou heardest thereof thou wouldst follow it with irresistible desire. But, as I perceive, I am disappointed of my hope, seeing that thou art listless to that which hath been spoken. But if thou reveal these secrets to the king my father, thou shalt but distress his mind with sorrows and griefs. If thou be well disposed to him, on no account reveal this matter to him until a convenient season." Speaking thus, he seemed to be only casting seed upon the water; for wisdom shall not enter into a soul void of understanding. Upon the morrow came Barlaam and spake of his departure: but Ioasaph, unable to bear the separation, was distressed at heart, and his eyes filled with tears. The elder made a long discourse, and adjured him to continue unshaken in good works, and with words of exhortation established his heart, and begged him to send him cheerfully on his way; and at the same time he foretold that they should shortly be at one, never to be parted more. But Ioasaph, unable to impose fresh labours on the elder, and to restrain his desire to be on his way, and suspecting moreover that the man Zardan might make known his case to the King and subject him to punishment, said unto Barlaam, "Since it seemeth thee good, my spiritual father, best of teachers and minister of all good to me, to leave me to live in the vanity of the world, while thou journeyest to thy place of spiritual rest, I dare no longer let and hinder thee. Depart therefore, with the peace of God for thy guardian, and ever in thy worthy prayers, for the Lord's sake, think upon my misery, that I may be enabled to overtake thee, and behold thine honoured face for ever. But fulfil this my one request; since thou couldest not receive aught for thy fellow monks, yet for thyself accept a little money for sustenance, and a cloak to cover thee." But Barlaam answered and said unto him, "Seeing that I would not receive aught for my brethren (for they need not grasp at the world's chattels which they have chosen to forsake), how shall I acquire for myself that which I have denied them? If the possession of money were a good thing, I should have let them share it before me. But, as I understand that the possession thereof is deadly, I will hazard neither them nor myself in such snares." But when Ioasaph had failed once again to persuade Barlaam, 'twas but a sign for a second petition, and he made yet another request, that Barlaam should not altogether overlook his prayer, nor plunge him in utter despair, but should leave him that stiff shirt and rough mantle, both to remind him of his teacher's austerities and to safe-guard him from all the workings of Satan, and should take from him another cloak instead, in order that "When thou seest my gift," said he, "thou mayest bear my lowliness in remembrance." But the elder said, "It is not lawful for me to give thee my old and worn out vestment, and take one that is new, lest I be condemned to receive here the recompense of my slight labour. But, not to thwart thy willing mind, let the garments given me by thee be old ones, nothing different from mine own." So the king's son sought for old shirts of hair, which he gave the aged man, rejoicing to receive his in exchange, deeming them beyond compare more precious than any regal purple. Now saintly Barlaam, all but ready for to start, spake concerning his journey, and delivered Ioasaph his last lesson, saying, "Brother beloved, and dearest son, whom I have begotten through the Gospel, thou knowest of what King thou art the soldier, and with whom thou hast made thy covenant. This thou must keep steadfastly, and readily perform the duties of thy service, even as thou didst promise the Lord of all in the script of thy covenant, with the whole heavenly host present to attest it, and record the terms; which if thou keep, thou shalt be blessed. Esteem therefore nought in the present world above God and his blessings. For what terror of this life can be so terrible as the Gehenna of eternal fire, that burneth and yet hath no light, that punisheth and never ceaseth? And which of the goodly things of this world can give such gladness as that which the great God giveth to those that love him? Whose beauty is unspeakable, and power invincible, and glory everlasting; whose good things, prepared for his friends, exceed beyond comparison all that is seen; which eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man: whereof mayest thou be shown an inheritor, preserved by the mighty hand of God!" Here the king's son burst into tears of pain and vexation, unable to bear the parting from a loving father and excellent teacher. "And who," quoth he, "shall fill thy place, O my father? And whom like unto thee shall I find to be shepherd and guide of my soul's salvation? What consolation may I find in my loss of thee? Behold thou hast brought me, the wicked and rebellious servant, back to God, and set me in the place of son and heir! Thou hast sought me that was lost and astray on the mountain, a prey for every evil beast, and folded me amongst the sheep that had never wandered. Thou hast shown me the direct road to truth, bringing me out of darkness and the shadow of death, and, changing the course of my feet from the slippery, deadly, crooked and winding pathway, hast ministered to me great and marvellous blessings, whereof speech would fail to recount the exceeding excellence. Great be the gifts that thou receivest at God's hand, on account of me who am small! And may the Lord, who in the rewards of his gifts alone overpasseth them that love him, supply that which is lacking to my gratitude!" Here Barlaam cut short his lamentation, and rose and stood up to pray, lifting up his either hand, and saying, "O God and Father of our Lord Jesu Christ, which didst illuminate the things that once were darkened, and bring this visible and invisible creation out of nothing, and didst turn again this thine handiwork, and sufferedst us not to walk after our foolishness, we give thanks to thee and to thy Wisdom and Might, our Lord Jesu Christ, by whom thou didst make the worlds, didst raise us from our fall, didst forgive us our trespasses, didst restore us from wandering, didst ransom us from captivity, didst quicken us from death by the precious blood of thy Son our Lord. Upon thee I call, and upon thine only begotten Son, and upon the Holy Ghost. Look upon this thy spiritual sheep that hath come to be a sacrifice unto thee through me thine unworthy servant, and do thou sanctify his soul with thy might and grace. Visit this vine, which was planted by thy Holy Spirit, and grant it to bear fruit, the fruit of righteousness. Strengthen him, and confirm in him thy covenant, and rescue him from the deceit of the devil. With the wisdom of thy good Spirit teach him to do thy will, and take not thy succour from him, but grant unto him, with me thine unprofitable servant, to become an inheritor of thine everlasting bliss, because thou art blessed and glorified for ever, Amen." When that he had ended his prayer, he turned him round and embraced Ioasaph, now a son of his heavenly father, wishing him eternal peace and salvation, and he departed out of the palace, and went his way, rejoicing and giving thanks to God, who had well ordered his steps for good. XXII. After Barlaam was gone forth, Ioasaph gave himself unto prayer and bitter tears, and said, "O God, haste thee to help me: O Lord, make speed to help me, because the poor hath committed himself unto thee; thou art the helper of the orphan. Look upon me, and have mercy upon me; thou who willest have all men to be saved and to come unto the knowledge of the truth, save me, and strengthen me, unworthy though I be, to walk the way of thy holy commandments, for I am weak and miserable, and not able to do the thing that is good. But thou art mighty to save me, who sustainest and holdest together all things visible and invisible. Suffer me not to walk after the evil will of the flesh, but teach me to do thy will, and preserve me unto thine eternal and blissful life. O Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, the consubstantial and undivided Godhead, I call upon thee and glorify thee. Thou art praised by all creation; thou art glorified by the intelligent powers of the Angels for ever and ever. Amen." From that time forth he kept himself with all vigilance, seeking to attain purity of soul and body, and living in continency and prayers and intercessions all night long. In the day-time he was often interrupted by the company of his fellows, and at times by a visit from the king, or a call to the king's presence, but the night would then make good the shortcomings of the day, whilst he stood, in prayer and weeping until daybreak, calling upon God. Whence in him was fulfilled the saying of the prophet, "In nights raise your hands unto holy things; and bless ye the Lord." But Zardan observed Ioasaph's way of life, and was full of sorrow, and his soul was pierced with grievous anxieties; and he knew not what to do. At the last, worn down with pain, he withdrew to his own home, feigning sickness. When this had come to the knowledge of the king he appointed in his place another of his trusty men to minister unto his son, while he himself, being concerned for Zardan's health, sent a physician of reputation, and took great pains that he should be healed. The physician, seeing that Zardan was in favour with the king, attended him diligently, and, having right well judged his ease, soon made this report to the king; "I have been unable to discover any root of disease in the man: wherefore I suppose that this weakness is to be ascribed to distress of spirit." But, on hearing his words, the king suspected that his son had been wroth with Zardan, and that this slight had caused his retirement. So, wishing to search the matter, he sent Zardan word, saying "To-morrow I shall come to see thee, and judge of the malady that hath befallen thee." But Zardan, on hearing this message, at daybreak wrapt his cloak around him and went to the king, and entered and fell in obeisance on the ground. The king spake unto him, "Why hast thou forced thyself to appear? I was minded to visit thee myself, and so make known to all my friendship for thee." He answered, "My sickness, O king, is no malady common to man; but pain of heart, arising from an anxious and careful mind, hath caused my body to suffer in sympathy. It had been folly in me, being as I am, not to attend as a slave before thy might, but to wait for thy Majesty to be troubled to come to me thy servant." Then the king enquired after the cause of his despondency; Zardan answered and said, "Mighty is my peril, and mighty are the penalties that I deserve, and many deaths do I merit, for that I have been guilty of neglect of thy behests, and have brought on thee such sorrow as never before." Again said the king, "And of what neglect hast thou been guilty? And what is the dread that encompasseth thee?" "I have been guilty," said he, "of negligence in my close care of my lord thy son. There came an evil man and a sorcerer, and communicated to him the precepts of the Christian religion." Then he related to the king, point by point, the words which the old man spake with his son, and how gladly Ioasaph received his word, and how he had altogether become Christ's. Moreover he gave the old man's name, saying that it was Barlaam. Even before then the king had heard tell of Barlaam's ways and his extreme severity of life; but, when this came to the ears of the king, he was straightway astonied by the dismay that fell on him, and was filled with anger, and his blood well-nigh curdled at the tidings. Immediately he bade call one Araches, who held the second rank after the king, and was the chief in all his private councils: besides which the man was learned in star-lore. When he was come, with much despondency and dejection the king told him of that which had happened. He, seeing the king's trouble and confusion of mind, said, "O king, trouble and distress thyself no more. We are not without hope that the prince will yet change for the better: nay, I know for very certain that he will speedily renounce the teaching of this deceiver, and conform to thy will." By these words then did Araches set the king in happier frame of mind; and they turned their thoughts to the thorough sifting of the matter. "This, O king," said Araches, "do we first of all. Make we haste to apprehend that infamous Barlaam. If we take him, I am assured that we shall not miss the mark, nor be cheated of our hope. Barlaam himself shall be persuaded, either by persuasion or by divers engines of torture, against his will to confess that he hath been talking falsely and at random, and shall persuade my lord, thy son, to cleave to his father's creed. But if we fail to take Barlaam, I know of an eremite, Nachor by name, in every way like unto him: it is impossible to distinguish the one from the other. He is of our opinion, and was my teacher in studies. I will give him the hint, and go by night, and tell him the full tale. Then will we blazon it abroad that Barlaam hath been caught; but we shall exhibit Nachor, who, calling himself Barlaam, shall feign that he is pleading the cause of the Christians and standing forth as their champion. Then, after much disputation, he shall be worsted and utterly discomfited. The prince, seeing Barlaam worsted, and our side victorious, will doubtless join the victors; the more so that he counteth it a great duty to reverence thy majesty, and do thy pleasure. Also the man who hath played the part of Barlaam shall be converted, and stoutly proclaim that he hath been in error." Tim king was delighted with his words, and rocked himself on idle hopes, and thought it excellent counsel. Thereupon, learning that Barlaam was but lately departed, he was zealous to take him prisoner. He therefore occupied most of the passes with troops and captains, and, himself, mounting his chariot, gave furious chase along the one road of which he was especially suspicious, being minded to surprise Barlaam at all costs. But though he toiled by the space of six full days, his labour was but spent in vain. Then he himself remained behind in one of his palaces situate in the country, but sent forward Araches, with horsemen not a few, as far as the wilderness of Senaar, in quest of Barlaam. When Araches arrived in that place, he threw all the neighbour folk into commotion: and when they constantly affirmed that they had never seen the man, he went forth into the desert places, for to hunt out the Faithful. When he had gone through a great tract of desert, and made the circuit of the fells around, and journeyed a-foot over untrodden and pathless ravines, he and his hosts arrived at a plateau. Standing thereon, he descried at the foot of the mountain a company of hermits a-walking. Straightway at their governor's word of command all his men ran upon them in breathless haste, vying one with another, who should arrive first. When they arrived, they came about the monks like so many dogs, or evil beasts that plague mankind. And they seized these men of reverend mien and mind, that bore on their faces the hall-mark of their hermit life, and haled them before the governor; but the monks showed no sign of alarm, no sign of meanness or sullenness, and spake never a word. Their leader and captain bore a wallet of hair, charged with the relics of some holy Fathers departed this life. When Araches beheld them, but saw no Barlaam--for he knew him by sight--he was overwhelmed with grief, and said unto them, "Where is that deceiver who hath led the king's son astray?" The bearer of the wallet answered, "He is not amongst us, God forbid! For, driven forth by the grace of Christ, he avoideth us; but amongst you he hath his dwelling." The governor said, "Thou knowest him then?" "Yea," said the hermit, "I know him that is called the deceiver, which is the devil, who dwelleth in your midst and is worshipped and served by you." The governor said, "It is for Barlaam that I make search, and I asked thee of him, to learn where he is." The monk answered, "And wherefore then spakest thou in this ambiguous manner, asking about him that had deceived the king's son? If thou wast seeking Barlaam, thou shouldest certainly have said, 'Where is he that hath turned from error and saved the king's son?' Barlaam is our brother and fellow-monk. But now for many days past we have not seen his face." Said Araches, "Show me his abode." The monk answered, "Had he wished to see you, he would have come forth to meet you. As for us, it is not lawful to make known to you his hermitage." Thereupon the governor waxed full of indignation, and, casting a haughty and savage glance upon him, said, "Ye shall die no ordinary death, except ye immediately bring Barlaam before me." "What," said the monk, "seest thou in our case that should by its attractions cause us to cling to life, and be afraid of death at thy hands? Whereas we should the rather feel grateful to thee for removing us from life in the close adherence to virtue. For we dread, not a little, the uncertainty of the end, knowing not in what state death shall overtake us, lest perchance a slip of the inclination, or some despiteful dealing of the devil, may alter the constancy of our choice, and mis-persuade us to think or do contrary to our covenants with God. Wherefore abandon all hope of gaining the knowledge that ye desire, and shrink not to work your will. We shall neither reveal the dwelling-place of our brother, whom God loveth, although we know it, nor shall we betray any other monasteries unbeknown to ye. We will not endure to escape death by such cowardice. Nay, liefer would we die honourably, and offer unto God, after the sweats of virtue, the life-blood of courage." That man of sin could not brook this boldness of speech, and was moved to the keenest passion against this high and noble spirit, and afflicted the monks with many stripes and tortures. Their courage and nobility won admiration even from that tyrant. But, when after many punishments he failed to persuade them, and none of them consented to discover Barlaam, he took and ordered them to be led to the king, bearing with them the wallet with the relics, and to be beaten and shamefully entreated as they went. XXIII. After many days Araches brought them to the king, and declared their case. Then he set them before the bitterly incensed king: and he, when he saw them, boiled over with fury and was like to one mad. He ordered them to be beaten without mercy, and, when he saw them cruelly mangled with scourges, could scarcely restrain his madness, and order the tormentors to cease. Then said he unto them, "Why bear ye about these dead men's bones? If ye carry these bones through affection for those men to whom they belong, this very hour I will set you in their company, that ye may meet your lost friends and be duly grateful to me." The captain and leader of that godly band, setting at naught the king's threats, showing no sign of the torment that he had undergone, with free voice and radiant countenance that signified the grace that dwelt in his soul, cried out, "We carry about these clean and holy bones, O king, because we attest in due form our love of those marvellous men to whom they belong: and because we would bring ourselves to remember their wrestlings and lovely conversation, to rouse up ourselves to the like zeal; and because we would catch some vision of the rest and felicity wherein they now live, and thus, as we call them blessed, and provoke one another to emulate them, strive to follow in their footsteps: because moreover, we find thereby that the thought of death, which is right profitable, lendeth wings of zeal to our religious exercises; and lastly, because we derive sanctification from their touch." Again said the king, "If the thought of death be profitable, as ye say, why should ye not reach that thought of death by the bones of the bodies that are now your own, and are soon to perish, rather than by the bones of other men which have already perished?" The monk said, "Five reasons I gave thee, why we carry about these relics; and thou, making answer to one only, art like to be mocking us. But know thou well that the bones of them, that have already departed this life, bring the thought of death more vividly before us than do the bones of the living. But since thou judgest otherwise, and since the bones of thine own body are to thee a type of death, why dost thou not recollect thy latter end so shortly to come, and set thine house in order, instead of giving up thy soul to all kinds of iniquities, and violently and unmercifully murdering the servants of God and lovers of righteousness, who have done thee no wrong, and seek not to share with thee in present goods, nor are ambitious to rob thee of them?" Said the king, "I do well to punish you, ye clever misleaders of the folk, because ye deceive all men, counselling them to abstain from the enjoyments of life; and because, instead of the sweets of life and the allures of appetite and pleasure, ye constrain them to choose the rough, filthy and squalid way, and preach that they should render to Jesus the honour due unto the gods. Accordingly, in order that the people may not follow your deceits and leave the land desolate, and, forsaking the gods of their fathers, serve another, I think it just to subject you to punishment and death." The monk answered, "If thou art eager that all should partake of the good things of life, why dost thou not distribute dainties and riches equally amongst all? And why is it that the common herd are pinched with poverty, while thou addest ever to thy store by seizing for thyself the goods of others? Nay, thou carest not for the weal of the many, but fattenest thine own flesh, to be meat for the worms to feed on. Wherefore also thou hast denied the God of all, and called them gods that are not, the inventors of all wickedness, in order that, by wantonness and wickedness after their example, thou mayest gain the title of imitator of the gods. For, as your gods have done, why should not also the men that follow them do? Great then is the error that thou hast erred, O king. Thou fearest that we should persuade certain of the people to join with us, and revolt from thy hand, and place themselves in that hand that holdeth all things, for thou willest the ministers of thy covetousness to be many, that they may be miserable while thou reapest profit from their toil; just as a man, who keepeth hounds or falcons tamed for hunting, before the hunt may be seen to pet them, but, when they have once seized the quarry, taketh the game with violence out of their mouths. So also thou, willing that there should be many to pay thee tribute and toll from land and water, pretendest to care for their welfare, but in truth bringest on them and above all on thyself eternal ruin; and simply to pile up gold, more worthless than dung or rottenness, thou hast been deluded into taking darkness for light. But recover thy wits from this earthly sleep: open thy sealed eyes, and behold the glory of God that shineth round about us all; and come at length to thyself. For saith the prophet, 'Take heed, ye unwise among the people, and, O ye fools, understand at last.' Understand thou that there is no God except our God, and no salvation except in him." But the king said, "Cease this foolish babbling, and anon discover to me Barlaam: else shalt thou taste instruments of torture such as thou hast never tasted before." That noble-minded, great-hearted monk, that lover of the heavenly philosophy, was not moved by the king's threats, but stood unflinching, and said, "We are not commanded to fulfil thy hest, O king, but the orders of our Lord and God who teacheth us temperance, that we should be lords over all pleasures and passions, and practise fortitude, so as to endure all toil and all ill-treatment for righteousness' sake. The more perils that thou subjectest us to for the sake of our religion, the more shalt thou be our benefactor. Do therefore as thou wilt: for we shall not consent to do aught outside our duty, nor shall we surrender ourselves to sin. Deem not that it is a slight sin to betray a fellow-combatant and fellow-soldier into thy hands. Nay, but thou shalt not have that scoff to make at us; no, not if thou put us to ten thousand deaths. We be not such cowards as to betray our religion through dread of thy torments, or to disgrace the law divine. So then, if such be thy purpose, make ready every weapon to defend thy claim; for to us to live is Christ, and to die for him is the best gain." Incensed with anger thereat, the monarch ordered the tongues of these Confessors to be rooted out, and their eyes digged out, and likewise their hands and feet lopped off. Sentence passed, the henchmen and guards surrounded and mutilated them, without pity and without ruth. And they plucked out their tongues from their mouths with prongs, and severed them with brutal severity, and they digged out their eyes with iron claws, and stretched their arms and legs on the rack, and lopped them off. But those blessed, shamefast, noble-hearted men went bravely to torture like guests to a banquet, exhorting one another to meet death for Christ his sake undaunted. In such divers tortures did these holy monks lay down their lives for the Lord. They were in all seventeen. By common consent, the pious mind is superior to sufferings, as hath been said by one, but not of us, when narrating the martydom of the aged priest, and of the seven sons with their equally brave mother when contending for the law of their fathers: whose bravery and lofty spirit, however, was equalled by these marvellous fathers and citizens and heirs of Hierusalem that is above. XXIV. After the monks had made this godly end, the king bade Araches, his chief councillor, now that they had failed of their first plan, to look to the second and summon the man Nachor. At dead of night Araches repaired to his cave (he dwelt in the desert practising the arts of divination), and told him of their plans, and returned to the king at day-break. Again he demanded horsemen, and made as though he went in quest of Barlaam. When he was gone forth, and was walking the desert, a man was seen to issue from a ravine. Araches gave command to his men to pursue him. They took and brought him before their master. When asked who he was, what his religion and what his name, the man declared himself a Christian and gave his name as Barlaam, even as he had been instructed. Araches made great show of joy, apprehended him and returned quickly to the king, and told his tale and produced his man. Then said the king in the hearing of all present, "Art thou the devil's workman, Barlaam?" But he denied it, saying, "I am God's workman, not the devil's. Revile me not; for I am thy debtor to render me much thanks, because I have taught thy son to serve God, and have turned him from error to the true God, and have schooled him in all manner of virtue." Feigning anger, again spake the king, "Though I ought to allow thee never a word, and give thee no room for defence, but rather do thee to death without question, yet such is my humanity that I will bear with thine effrontery until on a set day I try thy cause. If thou be persuaded by me, thou shalt receive pardon: if not, thou shalt die the death." With these words he delivered him to Araches, commanding that he should be most strictly guarded. On the morrow the king removed thence, and came back to his own palace, and it was blazoned abroad that Barlaam was captured, so that the king's son heard thereof and was exceeding sad at heart, and could in no wise refrain from weeping. With groans and lamentations he importuned God, and called upon him to succour the aged man. Nor did the good God despise his complaint, for he is loving with them that abide him in the day of trouble, and knoweth them that fear him. Wherefore in a night-vision he made known the whole plot to the young prince, and strengthened and cheered him for the trial of his righteousness. So, when the prince awoke from sleep, he found that his heart, erstwhile so sore and heavy, was now full of joyaunce, courage and pleasant light. But the king rejoiced at that which he had done and planned, imagining that he was well advised, and showering thanks on Araches. But wickedness lied to itself, to use the words of holy David, and righteousness overcame iniquity, completely overthrowing it, and causing the memorial thereof to perish with sound, as our tale in its sequel shall show. After two days the king visited his son's palace. When his son came forth for to meet him, instead of kissing him, as was his wont, the father put on a show of distress and anger, and entered the royal chamber, and there sat down frowning. Then calling to his son, he said, "Child, what is this report that soundeth in mine ears, and weareth away my soul with despondency? Never, I ween, was man more filled with gladness of heart at the birth of a son than was I at thine; and, I trow, never was man so distressed and cruelly treated by child as I have now been by thee. Thou hast dishonoured my grey hairs, and taken away the light of mine eyes, and loosed the strength of my sinews; 'for the thing which I greatly feared concerning thee is come upon me, and that which I was afraid of hath come unto me.' Thou art become a joy to mine enemies, and a laughing-stock to mine adversaries. With untutored mind and childish judgement thou hast followed the teaching of the deceivers and esteemed the counsel of the malicious above mine; thou hast forsaken the worship of our gods and become the servant of a strange God. Child, wherefore hast thou done this? I hoped to bring thee up in all safety, and have thee for the staff and support of mine old age, and leave thee, as is most meet, to succeed me in my kingdom, but thou wast not ashamed to play against me the part of a relentless foe. And shouldst thou not rather have listened to me, and followed my injunctions, than have obeyed the idle and foolish pratings of that crafty old knave, who taught thee to choose a sour life instead of a sweet, and abandon the charms of dalliance, to tread the hard and rough road, which the Son of Mary ordereth men to go? Dost thou not fear the displeasure of the most puissant gods, lest they strike thee with lightning, or quell thee with thunderbolt, or overwhelm thee in the yawning earth, because thou hast rejected and scorned those deities that have so richly blessed us, and adorned our brow with the kingly diadem, and made populous nations to be our servants, that, beyond my hope, in answer to my prayer and supplication, allowed thee to be born, and see the sweet life of day, and hast joined thyself unto the Crucified, duped by the hopes of his servants who tell thee fables of worlds to come, and drivel about the resurrection of dead bodies, and bring in a thousand more absurdities to catch fools? But now, dearest son, if thou hast any regard for me thy father, bid a long farewell to these longwinded follies, and come sacrifice to the gracious gods, and let us propitiate them with hecatombs and drink-offerings, that they may grant thee pardon for thy fall; for they be able and strong to bless and to punish. And wouldst thou have an example of that which I say? Behold us, who by them have been advanced to this honour, repaying them for their kindness by honouring their worshippers and chastising the runagates." Now when the king had ended all this idle parleying, gainsaying and slandering of our religion, and belauding and praising of his idolatry, the saintly young prince saw that the matter needed no further to be hid in a corner, but to be lighted and made plain to the eyes of all; and, full of boldness and courage, he said: "That which I have done, sir, I will not deny. I have fled from darkness and run to the light: I have left error and joined the household of truth: I have deserted the service of devils, and joined the service of Christ, the Son and Word of God the Father, at whose decree the world was brought out of nothing; who, after forming man out of clay, breathed into him the breath of life, and set him to live in a paradise of delight, and, when he had broken his commandment and was become subject unto death, and had fallen into the power of the dread ruler of this world, did not fail him, but wrought diligently to bring him back to his former honour. Wherefore he, the framer of all Creation and maker of our race, became man for our sake, and, coming from a holy Virgin's womb; on earth conversed with men: for us ungrateful servants did the master endure death, even the death of the Cross, that the tyranny of sin might be destroyed, that the former condemnation might be abolished, that the gates of heaven might be open to us again. Thither he hath exalted our nature, and set it on the throne of glory, and granted to them that love him an everlasting kingdom and joys beyond all that tongue can tell, or ear can hear. He is the mighty and only potentate, King of kings and Lord of lords, whose might is invincible, and whose lordship is beyond compare, who only is holy and dwelleth in holiness, who with the Father and with the Holy Ghost is glorified; into this faith I have been baptized. And I acknowledge and glorify and worship One God in Three persons, of one substance, and not to be confounded, increate and immortal, eternal, infinite, boundless, without body, without passions, immutable, unchangeable, undefinable, the fountain of goodness, righteousness and everlasting light, maker of all things visible and invisible, containing and sustaining all things, provident for all, ruler and King of all. Without him was there nothing made, nor without his providence can aught subsist. He is the life of all, the support of all, the light of all, being wholly sweetness and insatiable desire, the summit of aspiration. To leave God, then, who is so good, so wise, so mighty, and to serve impure devils, makers of all sinful lusts, and to assign worship to deaf and dumb images, that are not, and never shall be, were not that the extreme of folly and madness? When was there ever heard utterance or language from their lips? When have they given even the smallest answer to their bedesmen? When have they walked, or received any impression of sense? Those of them that stand have never thought of sitting down; and those that sit have never been seen to rise. From an holy man have I learned the ugliness, ill savour and insensibility of these idols, and, moreover, the rottenness and weakness of the devils that operate in them and by them deceive you; and I loathe their wickednesses and, hating them with a perfect hatred, have joined myself to the living and true God, and him will I serve until my latest breath, that my spirit also may return into his hands. When these unspeakable blessings came in my path I rejoiced to be freed from the bondage of evil devils, and to be reclaimed from dire captivity and to be illumined with the light of the countenance of the Lord. But my soul was distressed and divided asunder, that thou, my lord and father, didst not share in my blessings. Yet I feared the stubbornness of thy mind, and kept my grief to myself, not wishing to anger thee; but, without ceasing, I prayed God to draw thee to himself, and call thee back from the long exile that thou hast imposed upon thyself, a runagate alas! from righteousness, and a servant of all sin and wickedness. But sith thou thyself, O my father, hast brought mine affairs to light, hear the sum of my resolve: I will not be false to my covenant with Christ; no, I swear it by him that bought me out of slavery with his own precious blood; even if I must needs die a thousand deaths for his sake, die I will. Knowing then how matters now stand with me, prithee, no longer trouble thyself in endeavouring to persuade me to change my good confession. For as it were a thankless and never ending task for thee to try to grasp the heavens with thy hand, or to dry up the waters of the sea, so hard were it for thee to change me. Either then now listen to my counsel, and join the household of Christ, and so thou shalt gain blessings past man's understanding, and we shall be fellows with one another by faith, even as by nature; or else, be well assured, I shall depart thy sonship, and serve my God with a clear conscience." Now when the king heard all these words, he was furiously enraged: and, seized with ungovernable anger, he cried out wrathfully against him, and gnashed his teeth fiercely, like any madman. "And who," said he, "is blameable for all my misfortunes but myself, who have dealt with thee so kindly, and cared for thee as no father before? Hence the perversity and contrariness of thy mind, gathering strength by the licence that I gave thee, hath made thy madness to fall upon mine own pate. Rightly prophesied the astrologers in thy nativity that thou shouldest prove a knave and villain, an impostor and rebellious son. But now, if thou wilt make void my counsel, and cease to be my son, I will become thine enemy, and entreat thee worse than ever man yet entreated his foes." Again said Ioasaph, "Why, O king, hast thou been kindled to wrath? Art thou grieved that I have gained such bliss? Why, what father was ever seen to be sorrowful in the prosperity of his son? Would not such an one be called an enemy rather than a father? Therefore will I no more call thee my father, but will withdraw from thee, as a man fleeth from a snake, if I know that thou grudgest me my salvation, and with violent hand forcest me to destruction. If thou wilt force me, and play the tyrant, as thou hast threatened, be assured that thou shalt gain nought thereby save to exchange the name of father for that of tyrant and murderer. It were easier for thee to attain to the ways Of the eagle, and, like him, cleave the air, than to alter my loyalty to Christ, and that good confession that I have confessed in him. But be wise, O my father, and shake off the rheum and mist from the eyes of thy mind, lift them aloft and look upward to view the light of my God that enlighteneth all around, and be thyself, at last, enlightened with this light most sweet. Why art thou wholly given up to the passions and desires of the flesh, and why is there no looking upward? Know thou that all flesh is grass and all the glory of man as the flower of grass. The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away; but the word of my Lord, which by the gospel is preached unto all, shall endure for ever. Why then dost thou thus madly cling to and embrace that glory, which, like spring flowers, fadeth and perisheth, and to beastly unsavoury wantonness, and to the abominable passions of the belly and the members thereunder, which for a season please the senses of fools, but afterwards make returns more bitter than gall, when the shadows and dreams of this vain life are passed away, and the lovers thereof, and workers of iniquity are imprisoned in the perpetual pain of dark and unquenchable fire, where the worm that sleepeth not gnaweth for ever, and where the fire burneth without ceasing and without quenching through endless ages? And with these sinners alas! thou too shalt be imprisoned and grievously tormented, and shalt bitterly rue thy wicked counsels, and bitterly regret thy days that now are, and think upon my words, but there shall be no advantage in repentance; for in death there is no confession and repentance. But the present is the set time for work: the future for reward. Even if the pleasures of the present world were not evanescent and fleeting, but were to endure for ever with their owners, not even thus should any man choose them before the gifts of Christ, and the good things that pass man's understanding. Soothly, as the sun surpasseth in radiance and brightness the dead of night, even so, and much more so, doth the happiness promised to those that love God excel in glory and magnificence all earthly kinship and glory; and there is utter need for a man to choose the more excellent before the more worthless. And forasmuch as everything here is fleeting and subject to decay, and passeth and vanisheth as a dream, and as a shadow and vision of sleep; and as one may sooner trust the unstable breezes, or the tracks of a ship passing over the waves, than the prosperity of men, what simplicity, nay, what folly and madness it is to choose the corruptible and perishable, the weak things of no worth, rather than the incorruptible and everlasting, the imperishable and endless, and, by the temporal enjoyment of these things, to forfeit the eternal fruition of the happiness to come! Wilt thou not understand this, my father? Wilt thou not haste past the things which haste pass thee, and attach thyself to that which endureth? Wilt thou not prefer a home land to a foreign land, light to darkness, the spirit to the flesh, eternal life to the shadow of death, the indestructible to the fleeting? Wilt thou not escape from the grievous bondage of the cruel prince of this world, I mean the evil one, the devil, and become the servant of the good, tenderhearted, and all merciful Lord? Wilt thou not break away from serving thy many gods, falsely so called, and serve the one, true and living God? Though thou hast sinned against him often times by blaspheming him, and often times by slaying his servants with dread torments, yet, I know well, that if thou turn again, he shall in his kindness receive thee, and no more remember thine offences: because he willeth not the death of a sinner but rather that he may turn and live--he, who came down from the unspeakable heights, to seek us that had gone astray: who endured for us Cross, scourge and death: who bought with his precious blood us who had been sold in bondage under sin. Unto him be glory and praise for ever and ever! Amen." The king was overwhelmed with astonishment and anger; with astonishment, at his son's wisdom and unanswerable words; with anger, at the persistence with which he denounced his father's gods, and mocked and ridiculed the whole tenour of his life. He could not admit the glory of his discourse because of the grossness of the darkness within, but natural affection forbad him to punish his son, or evilly to entreat him, and he utterly despaired of moving him by threats. Fearing then that, if he argued further with him, his son's boldness and bitter satire of the gods might kindle him to hotter anger, and lead him to do him a mischief, he arose in wrath and withdrew. "Would that thou hadst never been born," he cried, "nor hadst come to the light of day, destined as thou weft to be such an one, a blasphemer of the gods, and a renegade from thy father's love and admonition." But thou shalt not alway mock the invincible gods, nor shall their enemies rejoice for long, nor shall these knavish sorceries prevail. For except thou become obedient unto me, and right-minded toward the gods, I will first deliver time to sundry tortures, and then put thee to the cruellest death, dealing with thee not as with a son, but as with an enemy and rebel." XXV. In such wise did the father threaten and wrathfully retire. But the son entered his own bedchamber, and lifted up his eyes to the proper judge of his cause, and cried out of the depth of his heart, "O Lord my God, my sweet hope and unerring promise, the sure refuge of them that are wholly given up to thee, with gracious and kindly eye look upon the contrition of my heart, and leave me not, neither forsake me. But, according to thine unerring pledge, be thou with me, thine unworthy and sorry servant. Thee I acknowledge and confess, the maker and provider of all creation. Therefore do thou thyself enable me to continue in this good confession, until my dying breath: look upon me, and pity me; and stand by and keep me unhurt by any working of Satan. Look upon me, O King: for my heart is enkindled with longing after thee, and is parched as with burning thirst in the desert, desiring thee, the well of immortality. Deliver not to the wild beasts my soul that confesseth thee: forget not the soul of the poor for ever; but grant me that am a sinner throughout my length of days to suffer all things for thy name's sake and in the confession of thee, and to sacrifice my whole self unto thee. For, with thy might working in them, even the feeble shall wax exceeding strong; for thou only art the unconquerable ally and merciful God, whom all creation blesseth, glorified for ever and ever. Amen." When he had thus prayed, he felt divine comfort stealing over his heart, and, fulfilled with courage, he spent the whole night in prayer. Meanwhile the king communed with Araches, his friend, as touching his son's matters, and signified to him his son's sheer audacity and unchangeable resolution. Araches gave counsel that he should, in his dealings with him, show the utmost kindness and courtesy, in the hope, perchance, of alluring him by flattering attentions. The day following, the king came to his son, and sat down, and called him to his side. He embraced and kissed him affectionately, coaxing him gently and tenderly, and said, "O my darling and well-beloved son, honour thou thy father's grey hairs: listen to my entreaty, and come, do sacrifice to the gods; thus shalt thou win their favour, and receive at their hands length of days, and the enjoyment of all glory and of an undisputed kingdom, and happiness of every sort. Thus shalt thou be well pleasing to me thy father throughout life and be honoured and lauded of all men. It is a great count in the score of praise to be obedient to thy father, especially in a good cause, and to gain the goodwill of the gods. What thinkest thou, my son? Is it that I have willingly declined from the right, and chosen to travel on the wrong road: or that, from ignorance and inexperience of the good, I have given myself to destruction? Well, if thou thinkest that I willingly prefer the evil to the profitable, and choose death before life, thou seemest to me, son, completely to have missed the goal in judging. Dost thou not see to what discomfort and trouble I often expose myself in mine expeditions against my foes, or when I am engaged in divers other business for the public good, not sparing myself even hunger and thirst, if need be, the march on foot, or the couch on the ground? As for riches and money, such is my contempt and scorn thereof, that I have at times ungrudgingly lavished all the stores of my palace, to build mighty temples for the gods, and to adorn them with all manner of splendour, or else to distribute liberal largess to my soldiers. Possessing then, as I also do, this contempt of pleasure and this courage in danger, what zeal would I not have devoted to contemning all else, and winning my salvation, had I only found that the religion of the Galileans were better than mine own? But, if thou condemnest me for ignorance and inexperience of the good, consider how many sleepless nights I have spent, with some problem before me, oft-times no very important one, giving myself no rest until I had found the clear and most apt solution. Seeing then that I reckon that not even the least of these temporal concerns is unworthy of thought until all be fitly completed for the advantage of all and seeing that all (I ween) bear me witness that no man under the sun can search out secrets with more diligence than I, how then could I have considered divine things, that call for worship and serious consideration, unworthy of thought, and not rather have devoted all my zeal and might, all my mind and soul to the investigation thereof, to find out the right and the true? Aye, and I have laboriously sought thereafter. Many nights and days have I spent thus: many wise and learned men have I called to my council; and with many of them that are called Christians have I conversed. By untiring enquiry and ardent search I have discovered the pathway of truth, witnessed by wise men honoured for their intelligence and wit,--that there is none other faith than ours. This is the path that we tread to-day, worshipping the most puissant gods, and holding fast to that sweet and delightsome life, given by them to all men, fulfilled with all manner of pleasure and gladness of heart, which the leaders and priests of the Galileans have in their folly rejected; so that, in hope of some other uncertain life, they have readily cast away this sweet light, and all those pleasures which the gods have bestowed on us for enjoyment, and all the while know not what they say, nor whereof they confidently affirm. "But thou, dearest son, obey thy father, who, by diligent and honest search, hath found the real good. Lo, I have shown thee that, neither willingly, I no, nor by way of ignorance, have I failed of the good, but rather that I have found and laid hold thereon. And I earnestly desire that thou too shouldest not wander as a fool, but shouldest follow me. Have respect then unto thy father. Dost thou not know how lovely a thing it is to obey one's father, and please him in all ways? Contrariwise, how deadly and cursed a thing it is to provoke a father and despise his commands? As many as have done so, have come to a miserable end. But be not thou, my son, one of their number. Rather do that which is well pleasing to thy sire, and so mayest thou obtain all happiness and inherit my blessing and my kingdom!" The high-minded and noble youth listened to his father's windy discourse and foolish opposition, and recognized therein the devices of the crooked serpent, and how standing at his right hand he had prepared a snare for his feet, and was scheming how to overthrow his righteous soul, and hinder him of the prize laid up in store. Therefore the prince set before his eyes the commandment of the Lord, which saith, "I came not to send peace, but strife and a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and so forth; and "He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me"; and "Whosoever shall deny me before men, him will I also deny before my Father which is in heaven." When he had considered these things, and fettered his soul with divine fear, and strengthened it with longing desire and love, right opportunely he remembered the saying of Solomon, "There is a time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace." First of all he prayed in silence, and said, "Have mercy of me, Lord God, have mercy of me; for my soul trusteth in thee; and under the shadow of thy wings I shall hope till wickedness overpass. I shall cry to the highest God; to God that did well to me," and the rest of the psalm. Then said Ioasaph to the king, "To honour one's father, and to obey his commands, and to serve him with good will and affection is taught us by the Lord of us all, who hath implanted in our hearts this natural affection. But, when loving devotion to our parents bringeth our soul into peril, and separateth her from her Maker, then we are commanded, at all costs, to cut it out, and, on no account, to yield to them that would depart us from God, but to hate and avoid them, even if it be our father that issueth the abominable command, or our mother, or our king, or the master of our very life. Wherefore it is impossible for me, out of devotion to my father, to forfeit God. So, prithee, trouble not thyself, nor me: but be persuaded, and let us both serve the true and living God, for the objects of thy present worship are idols, the works of men's hands, devoid of breath, and deaf, and give nought but destruction and eternal punishment to their worshippers. "But if this be not thy pleasure, deal with me even as thou wilt: for I am a servant of Christ, and neither flatteries nor torments shall separate me from his love, as I told thee yesterday, swearing it by my Master's name, and confirming the word with surest oath. But, whereas thou saidest that thou didst neither wilfully do wrong, nor didst fail of the mark through ignorance, but after much laborious enquiry hadst ascertained that it was truly a good thing to worship idols and to be riveted to the pleasures of the passions--that thou art wilfully a wrong doer, I may not say. But this I know full well, and would have thee know, O my father, that thou art surrounded with a dense mist of ignorance, and, walking in darkness that may be felt, seest not even one small glimmer of light. Wherefore thou hast lost the right pathway, and wanderest over terrible cliffs and chasms. Holding darkness for light, and clinging to death as it were life, thou deemest that thou art well advised, and hast reflected to good effect: but it is not so, not so. The objects of thy veneration are not gods but statues of devils, charged with all their filthy power; nor is the life, which thou pronouncest sweet and pleasant, and thinkest to be full of delight and gladness of heart, such in kind: but the same is abominable, according to the word of truth, and to be abhorred. For for a time it sweeteneth and tickleth the gullet, but afterwards it maketh the risings more bitter than gall (as said my teacher), and is sharper than any two-edged sword. "How shall I describe to thee the evils of this life? I will tell them, and they shall be more in number than the sand. For such life is the fishhook of the devil, baited with beastly pleasure, whereby he deceiveth and draggeth his prey into the depth of hell. Whereas the good things, promised by my Master, which thou callest 'the hope of some other uncertain life,' are true and unchangeable; they know no end, and are not subject to decay. There is no language that can declare the greatness of yonder glory and delight, of the joy unspeakable, and the everlasting gladness. As thou thyself seest, we all die; and there is no man that shall live and not see death. But one day we shall all rise again, when our Lord Jesus Christ shall come, the Son of God, in unspeakable glory and dread power, the only King of kings, and Lord of lords; to whom every knee shall bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth. Such terror shall he then inspire that the very powers of heaven shall be shaken: and before him there shall stand in fear thousand thousands, and ten thousand times ten thousand of Angels and Archangels, and the whole world shall be full of fear and terror. For one of the Archangels shall sound with the trump of God, and immediately the heavens shall be rolled together as a scroll; and the earth shall be rent, and shall give up the dead bodies of all men that ever were since the first man Adam until that day. And then shall all men that have died since the beginning of the world in the twinkling of an eye stand alive before the judgement seat of the immortal Lord, and every man shall give account of his deeds. Then shall the righteous shine forth as the sun; they that believed in the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, and ended this present life in good works. And how can I describe to thee the glory that shall receive them at that day? For though I compare their brightness and beauty to the light of the sun or to the brightest lightning flash, yet should I fail to do justice to their brightness. Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him, in the kingdom of heaven, in the light which no man can approach unto, in his unspeakable and unending glory. "Such joys and such bliss shall the righteous obtain, but they that have denied the only true God and not known their Maker and Creator, but have worshipped foul devils, and rendered homage to dumb idols, and loved the pleasures of this vain world, and, like swine, wallowed in the mire of sinful lusts, and made their lives a headquarters for all wickedness, shall stand naked and laid bare, downright ashamed and downcast, pitiable in appearance and in fact, set forth for a reproach to all creation. All their life in word, deed and thought shall come before their faces. Then, after this bitter disgrace and unbearable reproach, shall they be sentenced to the unquenchable and light-less fire of Gehenna, unto the outer darkness, the gnashing of teeth and the venomous worm. This is their portion, this their lot, in the which they shall dwell together in punishment for endless ages, because they rejected the good things offered them in promise, and, for the sake of the pleasure of sin for a season, made choice of eternal punishment. For these reasons--to obtain that unspeakable bliss, to enjoy that ineffable glory, to equal the Angels in splendour, and to stand with boldness before the good and most sweetest Lord, to escape those bitter and unending punishments and that galling shame--time after time, were it not worth men's while to sacrifice their riches and bodies, nay, even their very lives? Who is so cowardly, who so foolish, as not to endure a thousand temporal deaths, to escape eternal and everlasting death, and to inherit life, blissful and imperishable, and to shine in the light of the blessed and life-giving Trinity?" XXVI. When the king heard these words, and saw the steadfastness, and unbuxomness of his son, who yielded neither to flattery, nor persuasion, nor threat, he marvelled indeed at the persuasiveness of his speech and his irrefutable answers, and was convicted by his own conscience secretly assuring him that Ioasaph spake truly and aright. But he was dragged back by his evil habit and passions, which, from long use, had taken firm grip on him, and held him in as with bit and bridle, and suffered him not to behold the light of truth. So he left no stone unturned, as the saying is, and adhered to his old purpose, determining to put into action the plot which he and Araches had between them devised. Said he to his son, "Although, child, thou oughtest in all points simply to give in to my commands, yet, because thou art stubborn and disobedient, and hast thus stiffly opposed me, insisting that thine own opinion should prevail over all, bid we now farewell to vain insistance, and let persuasion be now our policy. And, forasmuch as Barlaam, thy deceiver, is here, my prisoner in iron chains, I will make a great assembly, and summon all our people and your Galileans, to one place; and I will charge heralds to proclaim expressly that none of the Christians shall fear, but that all shall muster without dread; and we will hold debate together. If your side win, then shall ye and your Barlaam gain your desires; but if ye lose, then shall ye with right good will yield yourselves to my commands." But this truly wise and prudent youth, forewarned, by the heavenly vision sent him, of his father's mischief, replied, "The Lord's will be done! Be it according to thy command! May our good God and Lord himself vouchsafe that we wander not from the right way, for my soul trusteth in him, and he shall be merciful unto me." There and then did the king command all, whether idolaters or Christians, to assemble. Letters were despatched in all quarters: heralds proclaimed it in every village town that no Christian need fear any secret surprise, but all might come together without fear, as friends and kindred, for the honest and unrestrained enquiry that should be held with their chief and captain, Barlaam. In like manner also he summoned the initiate and the temple-keepers of his idols, and wise men of the Chaldeans and Indians that were in all his kingdom, beside certain augurs, sorcerers and seers, that they might get the better of the Christians. Then were there gathered together multitudes that held his loathly religion; but of the Christians was there found one only that came to the help of the supposed Barlaam. His name was Barachias. For of the Faithful, some were dead, having fallen victims to the fury of the governors of the cities; and some were hiding in mountains and dens, in dread of the terrors hanging over them; while others had feared the threats of the king, and durst not adventure themselves into the light of day, but were worshippers by night, serving Christ in secret, and in no wise boldly confessing him. So noble-hearted Barachias came alone to the contest, to help and champion the truth. The king sat down before all on a doom-stool high and exalted, and bade his son sit beside him. He, in reverence and awe of his father, consented not thereto, but sat near him on the ground. There stood the learned in the wisdom which God hath made foolish, whose unwise hearts had gone astray, as saith the Apostle; for, "professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and four-footed beasts, and creeping things." These were assembled for to join argument with the king's son and his fellows, and on them was fulfilled the proverb, "Gazelle against lion." The one made the most High his house of defence, and his hope was under the shadow of his wings; while the others trusted in the princes of this world, who are made of none effect, and in the ruler of the darkness of this world, to whom they have subjected themselves miserably and wretchedly. Now came on Nachor, in the disguise of Barlaam; and the king's side were like to reach their goal; but, once again, very different was the ordering of the wise providence of God. When all the company was come, thus spake the king to his orators and philosophers, or rather to the deceivers of his people, and fools at heart, "Behold now, there lieth before you a contest, even the mightiest of contests; for one of two things shall befall you. If ye establish our cause, and prove Barlaam and his friends to be in error, ye shall have your fill of glory and honour from us and all the senate, and shall be crowned with crowns of victory. But if ye be worsted, in all ignominy ye shall pitiably perish, and all your goods shall be given to the people, that your memorial may be clean blotted out from off the earth. Your bodies will I give to be devoured by wild beasts and your children will I deliver to perpetual slavery." When the king had thus spoken, his son said, "A righteous doom hast thou judged this day, O king. The Lord establish this thy mind! I too have the same bidding for my teacher." And, turning round to Nachor, who was supposed to be Barlaam, he said, "Thou knowest, Barlaam, in what splendour and luxury thou foundest me. With many a speech thou persuadedst me to leave my father's laws and customs, and to serve an unknown God, drawn by the promise of some unspeakable and eternal blessings, to follow thy doctrines and to provoke to anger my father and lord. Now therefore consider that thou art weighed in the balance. If thou overcome in the wrestling, and prove that the doctrines, which thou hast taught me, be true, and show that they, that try a fall with us, be in error, thou shalt be magnified as no man heretofore, and shalt be entitled 'herald of truth'; and I will abide in thy doctrine and serve Christ, even as thou didst preach, until my dying breath. But if thou be worsted, by foul play or fair, and thus bring shame on me to-day, speedily will I avenge me of mine injury; with mine own hands will I quickly tear out thy heart and thy tongue, and throw them with the residue of thy carcase to be meat for the dogs, that others may be lessoned by thee not to cozen the sons of kings." When Nachor heard these words, he was exceeding sorrowful and downcast, seeing himself falling into the destruction that he had made for other, and being drawn into the net that he had laid privily, and feeling the sword entering into his own soul. So he took counsel with himself, and determined rather to take the side of the king's son, and make it to prevail, that he might avoid the danger hanging over him, because the prince was doubtless able to requite him, should he be found to provoke him. But this was all the work of divine providence that was wisely establishing our cause by the mouth of our adversaries. For when these idol-priests and Nachor crossed words, like another Barlaam, who, of old in the time of Balak, when purposing to curse Israel, loaded him with manifold blessings, so did Nachor mightily resist these unwise and unlearned wise men. There sat the king upon his throne, his son beside him, as we have said. There beside him stood these unwise orators who had whetted their tongues like a sharp sword, to destroy truth, and who (as saith Esay) conceive mischief and bring forth iniquity. There were gathered innumerable multitudes, come to view the contest and see which side should carry oft the victory. Then one of the orators, the most eminent of all his fellows, said unto Nachor, "Art thou that Barlaam which hath so shamelessly and audaciously blasphemed our gods, and hath enmeshed our king's well beloved son in the net of error, and taught him to serve the Crucified?" Nachor answered, "I am he, I am Barlaam, that, as thou sayest, doth set your gods at nought: but the king's son have I not enmeshed in error; but rather from error have I delivered him, and brought him to the true God." The orator replied, "When the great and marvellous men, who have discovered all knowledge of wisdom, do call them high and immortal gods, and when all the kings and honourable men upon earth do worship and adore them, how waggest thou tongue against them, and, in brief, how durst thou be so mighty brazen-faced? What is the manner of thy proof that the Crucified is God, and these be none?" Then replied Nachor, disdaining even to answer the speaker. He beckoned with his hand to the multitude to keep silence, and opening his mouth, like Balaam's ass, spake that which he had not purposed to say, and thus addressed the king. XXVII. "By the providence of God, O king, came I into the world; and when I contemplated heaven and earth and sea, the sun and moon, and the other heavenly bodies, I was led to marvel at their fair order. And, when I beheld the world and all that therein is, how it is moved by law, I understood that he who moveth and sustaineth it is God. That which moveth is ever stronger than that which is moved, and that which sustaineth is stronger than that which is sustained. Him therefore I call God, who constructed all things and sustaineth them, without beginning, without end, immortal, without want, above all passions, and failings, such as anger, forgetfulness, ignorance, and the like. By him all things consist. He hath no need of sacrifice, or drink-offering, or of any of the things that we see, but all men have need of him. "Now that I have said thus much concerning God, according as he hath granted me to speak concerning himself, come we now to the human race, that we may know which of them partake of truth, and which of error. It is manifiest to us, O king, that there are three races of men in this world: those that are worshippers of them whom ye call gods, and Jews, and Christians. And again those who serve many gods are divided into three races, Chaldeans, Greeks and Egyptians, for these are to the other nations the leaders and teachers of the service and worship of the gods whose name is legion. Let us therefore see which of these hold the truth, and which error. "The Chaldeans, which knew not God, went astray after the elements and began to worship the creature rather than their Creator, and they made figures of these creatures and called them likenesses of heaven, and earth and sea, of sun and moon, and of the other elements or luminaries. And they enclose them in temples, and worship them under the title of gods, and guard them in safety lest they be stolen by robbers. They have not understood how that which guardeth is ever greater than that which is guarded, and that the maker is greater than the thing that is made; for, if the gods be unable to take care of themselves, how can they take care of others? Great then is the error that the Chaldeans have erred in worshipping lifeless and useless images. And I am moved to wonder, O king, how they, who are called philosophers among them, fail to understand that even the very elements are corruptible. But if the elements are corruptible and subject to necessity, how are they gods? And if the elements are not gods, how are the images, created to their honour, gods? "Come we then, O king, to the elements themselves, that we may prove concerning them, that they are not gods, but corruptible and changeable things, brought out of non-existence by the command of him who is God indeed, who is incorruptible, and unchangeable, and invisible, but yet himself seeth all things, and, as he willeth, changeth and altereth the same. What then must I say about the elements? "They, who ween that the Heaven is a god, are in error. For we see it turning and mowing by law, and consisting of many parts, whence also it is called Cosmos! Now a 'Cosmos' is the handiwork of some artificer; and that which is wrought by handiwork hath beginning and end. And the firmament is moved by law together with its luminaries. The stars are borne from Sign to Sign, each in his order and place: some rise, while others set: and they run their journey according to fixed seasons, to fulfil summer and winter, as it hath been ordained for them by God, nor do they transgress their proper bounds, according to the inexorable law of nature, in common with the heavenly firmament. Whence it is evident that the heaven is not a god, but only a work of God. "They again that think that the Earth is a goddess have gone astray. We behold it dishonoured, mastered, defiled and rendered useless by mankind. If it be baked by the sun, it becometh dead, for nothing groweth from a potsherd. And again, if it be soaked overmuch, it rotteth, fruit and all. It is trodden under foot of men and the residue of the beasts: it is polluted with the blood of the murdered, it is digged and made a grave for dead bodies. This being so, Earth can in no wise be a goddess, but only the work of God for the use of men. "They that think that Water is a god have gone astray. It also hath been made for the use of men. It is under their lordship: it is polluted, and perisheth: it is altered by boiling, by dyeing, by congealment, or by being brought to the cleansing of all defilements. Wherefore Water cannot be a god, but only the work of God. "They that think that Fire is a god are in error. It too was made for the use of men. It is subject to their lordship, being carried about from place to place, for the seething and roasting of all manner of meats, yea, and for the burning of dead corpses. Moreover, it perisheth in divers ways, when it is quenched by mankind. Wherefore Fire cannot be a god, but only the work of God. "They that think that the breath of the Winds is a goddess are in error. This, as is evident, is subject to another, and hath been prepared by God, for the sake of mankind, for the carriage of ships, and the conveyance of victuals, and for other uses of men, it riseth and falleth according to the ordinance of God. Wherefore it is not to be supposed that the breath of the Winds is a goddess, but only the work of God. "They that think that the Sun is a god are in error. We see him moving and turning by law, and passing from Sign to Sign, setting and rising, to warm herbs and trees for the use of men, sharing power with the other stars, being much less than the heaven, and falling into eclipse and possessed of no sovranty of his own. Wherefore we may not consider that the Sun is a god, but only the work of God. "They that think that the Moon is a goddess are in error. We behold her moving and turning by law, and passing from Sign to Sign, setting and rising for the use of men, lesser than the sun, waxing and waning, suffering eclipse. Wherefore we do not consider that the Moon is a goddess, but only the work of God. "They that think that Man is a god are in error. We see man moving by law, growing up, and waxing old, even against his will. Now he rejoiceth, now he grieveth, requiring meat and drink and raiment. Besides he is passionate, envious, lustful, fickle, and full of failings: and he perisheth in many a way, by the elements, by wild beasts, and by the death that ever awaiteth him. So Man cannot be a god, but only the work of God. Great then is the error that the Chaldeans have erred in following their own lusts; for they worship corruptible elements and dead images, neither do they perceive that they are making gods of these. "Now come we to the Greeks that we may see whether they have any understanding concerning God. The Greeks, then, professing themselves to be wise, fell into greater folly than the Chaldeans, alleging the existence of many gods, some male, others female, creators of all passions and sins of every kind. Wherefore the Greeks, O king, introduced an absurd, foolish and ungodly fashion of talk, calling them gods that were not, according to their own evil passions; that, having these gods for advocates of their wickedness, they might commit adultery, theft, murder and all manner of iniquity. For if their gods did so, how should they not themselves do the like? Therefore from these practices of error it came to pass that men suffered frequent wars and slaughters and cruel captivities. But if now we choose to pass in review each one of these gods, what a strange sight shalt thou see! "First and foremost they introduce the god whom they call Kronos, and to him they sacrifice their own children, to him who had many sons by Rhea, and in a fit of madness ate his own children. And they say that Zeus cut off his privy parts, and cast them into the sea, whence, as fable telleth, was born Aphrodite. So Zeus bound his own father, and cast him into Tartarus. Dost thou mark the delusion and lasciviousness that they allege against their gods? Is it possible then that one who was prisoner and mutilated should be a god? What folly? What man in his senses could admit it? "Next they introduce Zeus, who, they say, became king of the gods, and would take the shape of animals, that he might defile mortal women. They show him transformed into a bull, for Europa; into gold, for Danae; into a swan, for Leda; into a satyr, for Antiope; and into a thunder-bolt, for Semele. Then of these were born many children, Dionysus, Zethus, Amphion, Herakles, Apollo, Artemis, Perseus, Castor, Helen, Polydeukes, Minos, Rhadamanthos, Sarpedon, and the nine daughters whom they call the Muses. "In like manner they introduce the story of Ganymede. And so befel it, O king, that men imitated all these things, and became adulterers, and defilers of themselves with mankind, and doers of other monstrous deeds, in imitation of their god. How then can an adulterer, one that defileth himself by unnatural lust, a slayer of his father be a god? "With Zeus also they represent one Hephaestus as a god, and him lame, holding hammer and fire-tongs, and working as a coppersmith for hire. So it appeareth that he is needy. But it is impossible for one who is lame and wanteth men's aid to be a God. "After him, they represent as a god Hermes, a lusty fellow, a thief, and a covetous, a sorcerer, bowlegged, and an interpreter of speech. It is impossible for such an one to be a God. "They also exhibit Asklepius as god, a physician, a maker of medicines, a compounder of plasters for his livelihood (for he is a needy wight), and in the end, they say that he was struck by Zeus with a thunder-bolt, because of Tyndareus, son of Lakedaemon, and thus perished. Now if Asklepius, though a god, when struck by a thunder-bolt, could not help himself, how can he help others? "Ares is represented as a warlike god, emulous, and covetous of sheep and other things. But in the end they say he was taken in adultery with Aphrodite by the child Eros and Hephaestus and was bound by them. How then can the covetous, the warrior, the bondman and adulterer be a god? "Dionysus they show as a god, who leadeth nightly orgies, and teacheth drunkenness, and carrieth off his neighbours' wives, a madman and an exile, finally slain by the Titans. If then Dionysus was slain and unable to help himself, nay, further was a madman, a drunkard, and vagabond, how could he be a god? "Herakles, too, is represented as drunken and mad, as slaying his own children, then consuming with fire and thus dying. How then could a drunkard and slayer of his own children, burnt to death by fire, be a god? Or how can he help others who could not help himself? "Apollo they represent as an emulous god, holding bow and quiver, and, at times, harp and flute, and prophesying to men for pay. Soothly he is needy: but one that is needy and emulous and a minstrel cannot be a god. "Artemis, his sister, they represent as an huntress, with bow and quiver, ranging the mountains alone, with her hounds, in chase of stag or boar. How can such an one, that is an huntress and a ranger with hounds, be a goddess? "Of Aphrodite, adulteress though she be, they say that she is herself a goddess. Once she had for leman Ares, once Anchises, once Adonis, whose death she lamenteth, seeking her lost lover. They say that she even descended into Hades to ransom Adonis from Persephone. Didst thou, O king, ever see madness greater than this? They represent this weeping and wailing adulteress as a goddess. "Adonis they show as an hunter-god, violently killed by a boar-tusk, and unable to help his own distress. How then shall he take thought for mankind, he the adulterer, the hunter who died a violent death? "All such tales, and many like them, and many wicked tales more shameful still, have the Greeks introduced, O king, concerning their gods; tales, whereof it is unlawful to speak, or even to have them in remembrance. Hence men, taking occasion from their gods, wrought all lawlessness, lasciviousness and ungodliness, polluting earth and air with their horrible deeds. "But the Egyptians, more fatuous and foolish than they, have erred worse than any other nation. They were not satisfied with the idols worshipped by the Chaldeans and Greeks, but further introduced as gods brute beasts of land and water, and herbs and trees, and were defiled in all madness and lasciviousness worse than all people upon earth. From the beginning they worshipped Isis, which had for her brother and husband that Osiris which was slain by his brother Typhon. And for this reason Isis fled with Horus her son to Byblos in Syria, seeking Osiris and bitterly wailing, until Horus was grown up and killed Typhon. Isis then was not able to help her own brother and husband; nor had Osiris, who was slain by Typhon, power to succour himself; nor had Typhon, who killed his brother and was himself destroyed by Horus and Isis, any resource to save himself from death. And yet, although famous for all these misadventures, these be they that were considered gods by the senseless Egyptians. "The same people, not content therewith, nor with the rest of the idols of the heathen, also introduced brute beasts as gods. Some of them worshipped the sheep, some the goat, and others the calf and the hog; while certain of them worshipped the raven, the kite, the vulture, and the eagle. Others again worshipped the crocodile, and some the cat and dog, the wolf and ape, the dragon and serpent, and others the onion, garlic and thorns, and every other creature. And the poor fools do not perceive, concerning these things, that they have no power at all. Though they see their gods being devoured, burnt and killed by other men, and rotting away, they cannot grasp the fact that they are no gods. "Great, then, is the error that the Egyptians, the Chaldeans, and the Greeks have erred in introducing such gods as these, and making images thereof, and deifying dumb and senseless idols. I marvel how, when they behold their gods being sawn and chiselled by workmen's axes, growing old and dissolving through lapse of time, and molten in the pot, they never reflected concerning them that they are no gods. For when these skill not to work their own salvation, how can they take care of mankind? Nay, even the poets and philosophers among the Chaldeans, Greeks and Egyptians, although by their poems and histories they desired to glorify their people's gods, yet they rather revealed and exposed their shame before all men. If the body of a man, consisting of many parts, loseth not any of its proper members, but, having an unbroken union with all its members, is in harmony with itself, how in the nature of God shall there be such warfare and discord? For if the nature of the gods were one, then ought not one god to persecute, slay or injure another. But if the gods were persecuted by other gods, and slain and plundered and killed with thunder-stones, then is their nature no longer one, but their wills are divided, and are all mischievous, so that not one among them is God. So it is manifest, O king, that all this history of the nature of the gods is error. "Furthermore, how do the wise and eloquent among the Greeks fail to perceive that law-givers themselves are judged by their own laws? For if their laws are just, then are their gods assuredly unjust, in that they have offended against law by murders, sorceries, adulteries, thefts and unnatural crimes. But, if they did well in so doing, then are their laws unjust, seeing that they have been framed in condemnation of the gods. But now the laws are good and just, because they encourage good and forbid evil; whereas the deeds of their gods offend against law. Their gods then are offenders against law; and all that introduce such gods as these are worthy of death and are ungodly. If the stories of the gods be myths, then are the gods mere words: but if the stories be natural, then are they that wrought or endured such things no longer gods: if the stories be allegorical, then are the gods myths and nothing else. Therefore it hath been proven, O king, that all these idols, belonging to many gods, are works of error and destruction. So it is not meet to call those gods that are seen, but cannot see: but it is right to worship as God him who is unseen and is the Maker of all mankind. "Come we now, O king, to the Jews, that we may see what they also think concerning God. The Jews are the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and went once to sojourn in Egypt. From thence God brought them out with a mighty hand and stretched out arm by Moses their lawgiver; and with many miracles and signs made he known unto them his power. But, like the rest, these proved ungrateful and unprofitable, and often worshipped images of the heathen, and killed the prophets and righteous men that were sent unto them. Then, when it pleased the Son of God to come on earth, they did shamefully entreat him and deliver him to Pilate the Roman governor, and condemn him to the Cross, regardless of his benefits and the countless miracles that he had worked amongst them. Wherefore by their own lawlessness they perished. For though to this day they worship the One Omnipotent God, yet it is not according unto knowledge; for they deny Christ the Son of God, and are like the heathen, although they seem to approach the truth from which they have estranged themselves. So much for the Jews. "As for the Christians, they trace their line from the Lord Jesus Christ. He is confessed to be the Son of the most high God, who came down from heaven, by the Holy Ghost, for the salvation of mankind, and was born of a pure Virgin, without seed of man, and without defilement, and took flesh, and appeared among men, that he might recall them from the error of worshipping many gods. When he had accomplished his marvellous dispensation, of his own free will by a mighty dispensation he tasted of death upon the Cross. But after three days he came to life again, and ascended into the heavens, the glory of whose coming thou mayest learn, O king, by the reading of the holy Scripture, which the Christians call the Gospel, shouldst thou meet therewith. This Jesus had twelve disciples, who, after his ascent into the heavens, went out into all the kingdoms of the world, telling of his greatness. Even so one of them visited our coasts, preaching the doctrine of truth; whence they who still serve the righteousness of his preaching are called Christians. And these are they who, above all the nations of the earth, have found the truth: for they acknowledge God the Creator and Maker of all things in the only begotten Son, and in the Holy Ghost, and other God than him they worship none. They have the commandments of the Lord Jesus Christ himself engraven on their hearts, and these they observe, looking for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. They neither commit adultery nor fornication; nor do they bear false witness, nor covet other men's goods: they honour father and mother, and love their neighbours: they give right judgement. They do not unto other that which they would not have done unto themselves. They comfort such as wrong them, and make friends of them: they labour to do good to their enemies: they are meek and gentle. They refrain themselves from all unlawful intercourse and all uncleanness. They despise not the widow, and grieve not the orphan. He that hath distributeth liberally to him that hath not. If they see a stranger, they bring him under their roof, and rejoice over him, as it were their own brother: for they call themselves brethren, not after the flesh, but after the spirit. For Christ his sake they are ready to lay down their lives: they keep his commandments faithfully, living righteous and holy lives, as the Lord their God commanded them, giving him thanks every hour, for meat and drink and every blessing. Verily, then, this is the way of truth which leadeth its wayfarers unto the eternal kingdom promised by Christ in the life to come. "And that thou mayest know, O king, that I speak nought of myself, look thou into the writings of the Christians, and thou shalt find that I speak nothing but the truth. Well, therefore, hath thy son understood it, and rightly hath he been taught to serve the living God, and to be saved for the world to come. Great and marvellous are the things spoken and wrought by the Christians, because they speak not the words of men but the words of God. But all other nations are deceived, and deceive themselves. Walking in darkness they stagger one against another like drunken men. This is the end of my speech spoken unto thee, O king, prompted by the truth that is in my mind. Wherefore let thy foolish wise-acres refrain from babbling idly against the Lord; for it is profitable to you to worship God the Creator, and hearken to his incorruptible sayings, in order that ye may escape judgement and punishment, and be found partakers of deathless life." XXVIII. When Nachor had fully delivered this oration, the king changed countenance for very anger, but his orators and temple-keepers stood speechless, having nothing but a few weak and rotten shreds of argument in reply. But the king's son rejoiced in spirit and with glad countenance magnified the Lord, who had made a path, where no path was, for them tat trusted in him, who by the mouth of a foeman and enemy was establishing the truth; and the leader of error had proved a defender of the right cause. But the king, although furiously enraged with Nachor, was nevertheless unable to do him any mischief, because of the proclamation already read before all, wherein he urged him to plead without fear in behalf of the Christians. So he himself made answer in many words, and by dark speeches hinted that Nachor should relax his resistance, and be worsted by the argument of the orators. But Nachor the more mightily prevailed, tearing to pieces all their propositions and conclusions and exposing the fallacy of their error. After the debate had been prolonged till well-nigh eventide, the king dismissed the assembly, making as though he would renew the discussion on the morrow. Then said Ioasaph to the king his father, "As at the beginning, Sir, thou commandedst that the trial should be just, so too crown the end thereof with justice, by doing one or other of these two things. Either allow my teacher to tarry with me to-night, that we may take counsel together as touching those things which we must say unto our adversaries tomorrow: and do thou in turn take thine advisers unto thee, and duly practise yourselves as ye will. Or else deliver thy counsellors to me this night, and take mine to thyself. But if both sides be with thee, mine advocate in tribulation and fear, but thine in joy and refreshment, me thinketh it is not a fair trial, but a tyrannical misuse of power, and a breaking of the covenants." The king, compelled to yield by the gracefulness of this speech took his wise men and priests to himself, and delivered Nachor to his son, still having hopes of him and thinking fit to keep his agreement. The king's son, therefore, departed unto his own palace, like a conqueror in the Olympic games, and with him went Nachor. When alone, the prince called him and said, "Think not that I am ignorant of thy tale, for I wot, of a surety, that thou art not saintly Barlaam, but Nachor the astrologer; and I marvel how it seemed thee good to act this play, and to think that thou couldst so dull my sight at mid-day, that I should mistake a wolf for a sheep. But well sung is the proverb, 'The heart of a fool will conceive folly.' So this your device and counsel was stale and utterly senseless; but the work that thou hast accomplished is full of wisdom. Wherefore, rejoice, Nachor, and be exceeding glad. I render thee many thanks, that thou hast been to-day advocate of the truth, and hast not polluted thy lips with foul words and crafty simulation, but hast rather cleansed them from many defilements, and thoroughly proven the error of the gods, as they be wrongly called, and hast established the truth of the Christian faith. I have been zealous to bring thee hither with me for two reasons; that the king might not privily seize and punish thee, because thou spakest not after his heart, and next that I might recompense thee for the favour that thou hast done me to-day. And what is my recompense for thee? To show thee how to turn from the evil and slippery road which thou hast trodden until now, and to journey along the straight and saving pathway which thou hast avoided, not in ignorance, but by wilful wrongdoing, throwing thyself into depths and precipices of iniquity. Understand then, Nachor, man of understanding as thou art, and be thou zealous to gain Christ only, and the life that is hid with him, and despise this fleeting and corruptible world. Thou shalt not live for ever, but, being mortal, shalt depart hence ere long, even as all that have been before thee. And wo betide thee, if, with the heavy load of sin on thy shoulders, thou depart thither where there is righteous judgement and recompense for thy works, and cast it not off, while it is easy to rid thyself thereof!" Pricked at heart by these words, spake Nachor, "Well said! Sir prince, well said! I do know the true and very God, by whom all things were made, and I wot of the judgement to come, having heard thereof from many texts of the Scriptures. But evil habit and the insolence of the ancient supplanter hath blinded the eyes of my heart, and shed a thick darkness over my reason. But now, at thy word, I will cast away the veil of gloom, and run unto the light of the countenance of the Lord. May be, he will have mercy on me, and will open a door of repentance to his wicked and rebellious servant, even if it seem impossible to me that my sins, which are heavier than the sand, be forgiven; sins, which, wittingly or unwittingly, I have sinned from childhood upwards to this my hoary age." When the king's son heard these words, immediately he arose, and his heart waxed warm, and he began to try to raise Nachor's courage which was drooping to despair, and to confirm it in the faith of Christ, saying, "Let no doubt about this, Nachor, find place in thy mind. For it is written, God is able of these very stones to raise up children unto Abraham. What meaneth this (as father Barlaam said) except that men beyond hope, stained with all manner of wickedness, can be saved, and become servants of Christ, who, in the exceeding greatness of his love toward mankind, hath opened the gates of heaven to all that turn, barring the way of salvation to none, and receiving with compassion them that repent? Wherefore to all that have entered the vineyard at the first, third, sixth, ninth or eleventh hour there is apportioned equal pay, as saith the holy Gospel: so that even if, until this present time, thou hast waxen old in thy sins, yet if thou draw nigh with a fervent heart, thou shalt gain the same rewards as they who have laboured from their youth upwards." With these and many other words did that saintly youth speak of repentance to that aged sinner Nachor, promising him that Christ was merciful, and pledging him forgiveness, and satisfying him that the good God is alway ready to receive the penitent, and with these words, as it were with ointments, did he mollify that ailing soul and give it perfect health. Nachor at once said unto him, "O prince, more noble in soul even than in outward show, well instructed in these marvellous mysteries, mayst thou continue in thy good confession until the end, and may neither time nor tide ever pluck it out of thine heart! For myself, I will depart straightway in search of my salvation, and will by penance pacify that God whom I have angered: for, except thou will it, I shall see the king's face no more." Then was the prince exceeding glad, and joyfully heard his saying. And he embraced and kissed him affectionately; and, when he had prayed earnestly to God, he sent him forth from the palace. So Nachor stepped forth with a contrite heart, and went bounding into the depths of the desert, like as doth an hart, and came to a den belonging to a monk that had attained to the dignity of the priesthood, and was hiding there for fear of the pressing danger. With a right warm heart knelt Nachor down before him, and washed his feet with his tears, like the harlot of old, and craved holy Baptism. The priest, full of heavenly grace, was passing glad, and did at once begin to instruct him, as the custom is, and after many days, perfected him with baptism in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. And Nachor abode with him, always repentant of his sins, and blessing that God who never willeth that ally should perish, but receiveth all that turn again unto him, and lovingly accepteth the penitent. Now on the morrow when the king heard what had befallen Nachor, he despaired of the hopes that he once had in him: and, seeing those wise and foolish orators of his mightily discomfited, he was at his wits' end. Them he visited with terrible outrage and dishonour, scourging some severely with whips of oxhide, besmearing their eyes with soot, and casting them away from his presence. He himself began to condemn the impotence of the gods falsely so called, although as yet he refused to look fully at the light of Christ, for the dense cloud of darkness, that enveloped him, still bound the eyes of his heart. Howbeit he no longer honoured his temple-keepers, nor would he keep feasts, nor make drink offerings to his idols, but his mind was tossed between two opinions. On the one hand, he poured scorn on the impotence of his gods; on the other, he dreaded the strictness of the profession of the Gospel, and was hardly to be torn from his evil ways, being completely in slavery to the pleasures of the body, and like a captive drawn towards sinful lusts, and being drunken, as saith Esay, but not with wine, and led as it were with the bridle of evil habit. While the king was thus wrestling with two opinions, his noble and truly royal-hearted son dwelt at peace in his palace, proving to all men by his deeds the nobility, order and steadfastness of his nature. Theatres, horse-races, riding to hounds, and all the vain pleasures of youth, the baits that take foolish souls, were reckoned by him as nothing worth. But he hung wholly on the commands of Christ for whom he yearned, his heart being wounded with love divine. For him he longed, who alone is to be longed for, who is all sweetness and desire and aspiration insatiable. Now, when he came to think upon his teacher Barlaam, and as in a mirror saw his life, his soul was enchanted with love, and he much occupied himself a-thinking how he might see him; and ever carrying his sayings in his heart, he was like the tree in the Psalms planted by the river side, unceasingly watered, and bringing forth unto the Lords his fruits in due season. Many were the souls that he delivered from the snares of the devil, and brought safely unto Christ; for many resorted unto him, and profited by his wholesome words. And not a few left the way of error, and ran toward the word of salvation; while others bade a long farewell to the concerns of the world, and came to the wrestling-school of the monastic life. He himself spent his time in prayers and fastings, and would often offer up this prayer, "O Lord, my Lord and King, in whom I have trusted, to whom I have fled and been delivered from my error, render thou due recompense to Barlaam thy servant, because when I was in error he pointed thee to me, who art the way of truth and life. Forbid me not to behold once more that angel in bodily shape, of whom the world is not worthy, but grant me in his company to finish the residue of my life, that, treading in the footsteps of his conversation, I may be well-pleasing to thee my God and Lord." XXIX. Now about the same time there was in that city a public assembly in honour of the false gods, and the king must needs be present at the feast, and grace it with lavish sacrifices. But the temple-keepers, seeing that he was careless and lukewarm with regard to their worship, feared that he might neglect to be present in their temple, and that they might lose the royal largess, and the rest of their revenues. So they arose, and withdrew to a cavern situate in the depth of the desert, where dwelt a man who busied himself with magical arts, and was a fervent champion of the error of idolatry. Theudas was his name. Him the king honoured exceedingly, and counted him his friend and teacher, because, he said, it was by the guidance of his prophecies that his kingdom ever prospered. So these idol-priests, that were no priests, came to him, and appealed to him for help, and made known to him the evil opinion of their gods which was growing on their king, and all that the king's son had done, and all the eloquent discourse that Nachor had held against them. And they said, "Except thou come thyself to our succour, gone is all hope! and lost is all the reverence of the gods. Thou only art left to be our comfort in this misfortune, and upon thee we fix our hopes." So forth marched Theudas, in company with his Satanic host; and he armed himself against the truth, invoking many of his evil spirits, who knew how to lend ready aid for evil ends, and whom he alway used for his ministers; and with these allies he came to the king. When his arrival had been announced to the king, and he had entered in, with a palm-staff in his hand and a sheep-skin girt about his loins, the king arose from his throne, and met and welcomed him; and, fetching a seat, he made him to sit down beside him. Then spake Theudas unto the king, "O king, live for ever under the shelter of the favour of the most puissant gods! I have heard that thou hast foughten a mighty fight with the Galileans, and hast been crowned with right glorious diadems of victory. Wherefore I am come, that we may celebrate together a feast of thanksgiving, and sacrifice to the immortal gods young men in the bloom of youth and well-favoured damsels, and eke offer them an hecatomb of bullocks and herds of beasts, that we may have them from henceforth for our allies invincible, making plain our path of life before us." Hereto the king made answer, "We have not conquered, aged sir, we have not conquered: nay, rather have we been defeated in open fight. They that were for us turned suddenly against us. They found our host a wild, half-drunken, feeble folk, and utterly overthrew it. But now, if there be with thee any power and strength to help our fallen religion and set it up again, declare it." Theudas replied in this wise, "Dread not, O king, the oppositions and vain babblings of the Galileans: for of what worth against reasonable and sensible men are the arguments that they use? These methinks shall be more easily overthrown than a leaf shaken with the wind. They shall not endure to face me, far less join argument, or come to propositions and oppositions with me. But, in order that the coming contest and all our wishes may prosper, and that our matters may run smoothly with the stream, adorn thou with thy presence this public festival, and gird on for thy strong sword the favour of the gods, and well befall thee!" When the mighty in wickedness had thus boasted himself and thought of mischief all the day long (let David bear his part in our chorus), and when, as saith Esay, he had given his neighbour a drink of turbid dregs, by the help of the evil spirits his comrades he made the king utterly to forget the thoughts that inclined him to salvation, and caused him again to cleave to his wonted ways. Then the king despatched letters hither and thither, that all men should gather together to this loathsome assembly. Then mightest thou have seen multitudes streaming in, and bringing with them sheep and oxen and divers kinds of beasts. So when all were assembled, the king arose, with that deceiver Theudas, and proceeded to the temple, bringing one hundred and twenty bullocks and many animals for sacrifice. And they celebrated their accursed feast till the city resounded with the cry of the brute beasts and the very air was polluted with the reek of sacrifice. This done, when the spirits of wickedness had greatly vaunted them over Theudas' victory, and when the temple-keepers had rendered him thanks, the king went up again unto his palace, and said milo Theudas, "Behold now, as thou badest us, we have spared no pains over the splendour of this gathering and the lavishness of the sacrifice. Now, therefore, it is time for thee to fulfil thy promises, and to deliver from the error of the Christians my son that hath rebelled against our religion, and to reconcile him to our gracious gods. For, though I have left no device and deed untried, yet have I found no remedy for the mischief, but I perceive that his will is stronger than all. When I have dealt gently and kindly with him, I have found that he payeth me no regard whatsoever. When I have treated him harshly and severely, I have seen him driven the quicker to desperation. To thy wisdom for the future I leave the care of this calamity that hath befallen me. If then I be delivered from this trouble by thy means, and once more behold my son worshipping my gods with me, and enjoying the gratification of this life of pleasure, and this royal estate, I will set up unto thee a golden statue, and make thee to receive divine honours from all men for all time to come." Hereupon Theudas, bowing an attentive ear to the evil one, and learning from him the secret of his evil and deadly counsel, became himself the devil's tongue and mouthpiece, and spake unto the king, "If thou wilt get the better of thy son, and make his opposition vain, I have discovered a plan, which he shall in no wise be able to resist, but his hard and obdurate mind shall melt quicker than wax before the hottest fire." The king, seeing this foolish fellow swelling with empty pride, immediately grew merry and joyful, hoping that the unbridled and boastful tongue would get the mastery of that divinely instructed and philosophic soul. "And what is the plan?" he asked. Then began Theudas to weave his web. He made his villainy sharp as any razor and did cunningly prepare his drugs. Now behold this malicious device and suggestion of the evil one. "Remove, O king," said he, "all thy son's waiting men and servants far from him, and order that comely damsels, of exceeding beauty, and bedizened to be the more winsome, be continually with him and minister to him, and be his companions day and night. For myself, I will send him one of the spirits told off for such duties, and I will thus kindle all the more fiercely the coals of sensual desire. After that he hath once only had intercourse with but one of these women, if all go not as thou wilt, then disdain me for ever, as unprofitable, and worthy not of honour but of dire punishment. For there is nothing like the sight of women to allure and enchant the minds of men. Listen to a story that beareth witness to my word." XXX. "A certain king was grieved and exceeding sad at heart, because that he had no male issue, deeming this no small misfortune. While he was in this condition, there was born to him a son, and the king's soul was filled with joy thereat. Then they that were learned amongst his physicians told him that, if for the first twelve years the boy saw the sun or fire, he should entirely lose his sight, for this was proved by the condition of his eyes. Hearing this, the king, they say, caused a little house, full of dark chambers, to be hewn out of the rock, and therein enclosed his child together with the men that nursed him, and, until the twelve years were past, never suffered him to see the least ray of light. After the fulfilment of the twelve years, the king brought forth from his little house his son that had never seen a single object, and ordered his waiting men to show the boy everything after his kind; men in one place, women in another; elsewhere gold and silver; in another place, pearls and precious stones, fine and ornamental vestments, splendid chariots with horses from the royal stables, with golden bridles and purple caparisons, mounted by armed soldiers; also droves of oxen and flocks of sheep. In brief, row after row, they showed the boy everything. Now, as he asked what each ox these was called, the king's esquires and guards made known unto him each by name: but, when he desired to learn what women were called, the king's spearman, they say, wittily replied that they were called, "Devils that deceive men." But the boy's heart was smitten with the love of these above all the rest. So, when they had gone round everywhere and brought him again unto the king, the king asked, which of all these sights had pleased him most. "What," answered the boy, "but the Devils that deceive men? Nothing that I have seen to-day hath fired my heart with such love as these." The king was astonished at the saying of the boy, to think how masterful a thing the love of women is. Therefore think not to subdue thy son in any other way than this." The king heard this tale gladly; and there were brought before him some chosen damsels, young and exceeding beautiful. These he bedizened with dazzling ornaments and trained in all winsome ways: and then he turned out of the palace all his son's squires and serving men, and set these women in their stead. These flocked around the prince, embraced him, and provoked him to filthy wantonness, by their walk and talk inviting him to dalliaunce. Besides these, he had no man at whom to look, or with whom to converse or break his fast, for these damsels were his all. Thus did the king. But Theudas went home to his evil den, and, dipping into his books that had virtue to work such magic, he called up one of his wicked spirits and sent him forth, for to battle with the soldier of the army of Christ. But the wretch little knew what laughter he should create against himself, and to what shame he should be put, with the whole devilish troop under him. So the evil spirit, taking to him other spirits more wicked than himself, entered the bed-chamber of this noble youth, and attacked him by kindling right furiously the furnace of his flesh. The evil one plied the bellows from within, while the damsels, fair of face, but uncomely of soul, supplied the evil fuel from without. But Ioasaph's pure soul was disturbed to feel the touch of evil, and to see the warlike host of strange thoughts that was charging down upon him. And he sought to find deliverance from this great mischief, and to present himself pure unto Christ, and not defile in the mire of sinful lust that holy apparel, wherein the grace of holy Baptism had clothed him. Immediately he set love against love, the divine against the lascivious; and he called to remembrance the beauty and unspeakable glory of Christ, the immortal bridegroom of virgin souls, and of that bride chamber and marriage, from whence they that have stained their wedding-garment are piteously cast out, bound hand and foot, into outer darkness. When he had thought thereon, and shed bitter tears, he smote upon his breast, driving out evil thoughts, as good-for-nothing drones from the hive. When he rose, and spread out his hands unto heaven, with fervent tears and groans calling upon God to help him, and he said, "Lord Almighty, who alone art powerful and merciful, the hope of the hopeless, and the help of the helpless, remember me thine unprofitable servant at this hour, and look upon me with a gracious countenance, and deliver my soul from the sword of the devil, and my darling from the paw of the dog: suffer me not to fall into the hands of mine enemies, and let not them that hate me triumph over me. Leave me not to be destroyed in iniquities, and to dishonour my body which I swore to present unto thee chaste. For for thee I yearn; thee I worship, the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost, now and for evermore, and world without end." When he had added the Amen, he felt heavenly comfort stealing over him from above, and the evil thoughts withdrew, and he continued in prayer until early morn. Being ware of the devices of the crafty foe, he began more and more to afflict his body by abstinence from meat and drink, and by other severities, standing in prayer all the night long, and reminding himself of his covenants made with God, and picturing in his mind the glory of the righteous yonder, and recounting to himself the full terrors of the Gehenna wherewith the wicked are threatened; all this, that the enemy might not find his soul lying fallow and untilled, and thus easily sow therein the seeds of evil thoughts, and befoul the cleanness of his mind. So, when the enemy was in great straits on every side, and altogether in despair of taking this noble youth, like a cunning knave, he proceeded to another more subtil device, he that is for ever wicked, and never stinteth to contrive mischief and hurt. For he made furious endeavour to carry out the orders that Theudas had given him, and once more prepared his drugs, and on this wise. The devil entered into the heart of one of the young damsels. Of all she was the most seemly, a king's daughter, carried away captive from her own country, given to king Abenner as a great prize, and sent by him, being of ripe beauty, to his own son, for to cause him to slip or to trip. Of her the deceiver took possession, and whispered in her ear suggestions that plainly showed the wisdom and understanding of her mind; for the evil one easily pursueth all devices that make for wickedness. Then the evil spirit attacked the king's son on the right hand, and gave him a potion to make him love the maiden, by reason--so he pretended--of her prudence and discretion and of her nobility and royal blood that yet had not saved her from banishment and loss of glory. Moreover the devil secretly sowed in Ioasaph's heart thoughts that he might recover her from idolatry, and make her a Christian. But these were all stratagems of the wily serpent. For the king's son, being in this frame of mind, could see in himself no unclean thought or passionate affection for the damsel, but only sympathy and pity for her misfortune, and the ruin of her soul, and knew not that this matter was a device of the devil; for verily he is darkness, and feigneth to be light. So he began to commune with the damsel, and talk with her over the oracles of the knowledge of God, and said, "Lady, be thou acquainted with the ever-living God, and perish not in the error of these idols; but know thy Lord, and the Maker of all this world, and thou shalt be happy, the bride of the immortal bridegroom." While he exhorted her with many such-like words, immediately the evil spirit whispered to the girl that she should spread under his feet the nets of deceit to drag his blessed soul into the pit of lust, as he once did to our first parent by means of Eve, thus miserably banishing him, alas! from Paradise and God, and making him to become subject to death in lieu of bliss and everlasting life. When the damsel heard Ioasaph's words fulfilled with all wisdom, being without understanding, she understood them not, but made answer thus, becoming the tongue and mouth-piece of the evil one: "If, sir, thou takest thought for my salvation, and desirest to bring me to thy God, and to save my poor soul, do thou also thyself grant me one request, and straightway I will bid good-bye to my fathers' gods, and join thy God, serving him until my last breath; and thou shalt receive recompense for my salvation, and for my turning to God-ward." "Lady, and what is thy request?" said he. But she, setting her whole self, figure, look and voice in a fashion to charm him, answered, "Be thou joined with me in the bonds of wedlock, and I will joyfully follow out thy behests." "In vain, O Lady," said he, "hast thou made this hard request. For though I earnestly care for thy salvation, and long to heave thee from the depth of perdition, yet to pollute my body through unclean union is grievous for me, and utterly impossible." She, seeking to make the way straight and smooth for him, cried, "Why dost thou, who are so wise, talk thus? Wherefore speakest thou of it as of defilement and shameful intercourse? I am not unacquainted with the Christian books: nay, I have met with many volumes in mine own country, and have heard the discourses of many Christians. What, is it not written in one of your books, 'Marriage is honourable, and the bed undefiled'? and, 'It is better to marry than to burn'? and again, 'What God hath joined together, let not man put asunder'? Do not your Scriptures teach that all the righteous men of old, patriarchs and prophets, were wedded? Is it not written that the mighty Peter, whom ye call Prince of the Apostles, was a married man? Who, then, hath persuaded thee to call this defilement? Methink, sir, thou strayest utterly away from the truth of your doctrines." "Yea, Lady," said he, "all this is even as thou sayest. It is permitted to all who will to live in wedlock, but not to them that have once made promise to Christ to be virgins. For myself, ever since I was cleansed in the laver of Holy Baptism from the sins of my youth and ignorance, I have resolved to present myself pure to Christ, and how shall I dare break my covenants with God?" Again quoth the damsel, "Let this also be thy pleasure, as thou wilt. But fulfil me one other small and trivial desire of mine, if thou art in very truth minded for to save my soul. Keep company with me this one night only, and grant me to revel in thy beauty, and do thou in turn take thy fill of my comeliness. And I give thee my word, that, with daybreak, I will become a Christian, and forsake all the worship of my gods. Not only shalt thou be pardoned for this dealing, but thou shalt receive recompense from thy God because of my salvation, for thy Scripture saith, 'There is joy in heaven over one sinner that repenteth.' If, therefore, there is joy in heaven over the conversion of a sinner, shall not great recompense be due to the causer of that conversion? Yea, so it is: and dispute it not. Did not even the Apostles, the leaders of your religion, do many a thing by dispensation, at times transgressing a commandment on account of a greater one? Is not Paul said to have circumcised Timothy on account of a greater dispensation? And yet circumcision hath been reckoned by Christians as unlawful, but yet he did not decline so to do. And many other such things shalt thou find in thy Scriptures. If then in very sooth, as thou sayest, thou seekest to save my soul, fulfil me this my small desire. And although I seek to be joined with thee in the full estate of matrimony, yet, sith this is contrary to thy mind, I will never constrain thee again, but will do everything that liketh thee. For the rest, do not thou utterly abhor me; but hearken to me for the nonce, and thou shalt deliver me from superstitious error, and thou shalt do whatever seemeth thee good hereafter all the days of thy life." Thus spake she; for indeed she had, for her adviser, one to whom she lent a privy ear, and the pirate was well versed in Scripture, being verily the creator and teacher of iniquity. Thus then she spake with fawning words entangling him, right and left, around with her toils and meshes, and she began to shake the citadel of his soul, and to slacken his tension of purpose, and to soften the temper of his mind. Then the sower of these evil tares, and enemy of the righteous, when he saw the young man's heart wavering, was full of joy, and straightway called to the evil spirits that were with him, crying, "Look you how yond damsel hasteth to bring to pass all that we were unable to accomplish! Hither! fall we now furiously upon him: for we shall find none other season so favourable to perform the will of him that sent us." Thus spake this crafty spirit to his hounds: and straightway they lept on that soldier of Christ, disquieting all the powers of his soul, inspiring him with vehement love for the damsel, and kindling within him the fiercest fire of lust. When Ioasaph saw that he was greatly inflamed, and was being led captive into sin, and perceived that his thoughts about the salvation of the damsel and her conversion to God had been set like bait on hook to hide the deed which she purposed, and were troubling him with the suggestion of the enemy, that, for the salvation of a soul, it was not sin for once to lie with a woman, then in the agony of his soul he drew a deep and lamentable groan, and nerved himself to pray, and, with streams of tears running down his cheeks, he cried aloud to him that is able to save them that trust in him, saying, "On thee, O Lord, have I set my trust: let me not be confounded for ever; neither let mine enemies triumph over me, that hold by thy right hand. But stand thou by me at this hour, and according to thy will make straight my path, that thy glorious and dreadful name may be glorified in me thy servant, because thou art blessed for ever. Amen." Now when he had prayed in tears for many hours, and often bent the knee, he sunk down upon the pavement. After he had slumbered awhile, he saw himself carried off by certain dread men, and passing through places which he had never heretofore beheld. He stood in a mighty plain, all a-bloom with fresh and fragrant flowers, where he descried all manner of plants of divers colours, charged with strange and marvellous fruits, pleasant to the eye and inviting to the touch. The leaves of the trees rustled clearly in a gentle breeze, and, as they shook, sent forth a gracious perfume that cloyed not the sense. Thrones were set there, fashioned of the purest gold and costly stones, throwing out never so bright a lustre, and radiant settles among wondrous couches too beautiful to be described. And beside them there were running waters exceeding clear, and delightful to the eye. When these dread men had led him through this great and wondrous plain, they brought him to a city that glistered with light unspeakable, whose walls were of dazzling gold, with high uprear'd parapets, built of gems such as man hath never seen. Ah! who could describe the beauty and brightness of that city? Light, ever shooting from above, filled all her streets with bright rays; and winged squadrons, each of them itself a light, dwelt in this city, making such melody as mortal ear ne'er heard. And Ioasaph heard a voice crying, "This is the rest of the righteous: this the gladness of them that have pleased the Lord." When these dread men had carried him out from thence, they spake of taking him back to earth. But he, that had lost his heart to that scene of joyaunce and heartsease, exclaimed, "Reave me not, reave me not, I pray you, of this unspeakable joy, but grant me also to dwell in one corner of this mighty city." But they said, "It is impossible for thee to be there now; but, with much toil and sweat, thou shalt come hither, if thou constrain thyself." Thus spake they; and again they crossed that mighty plain, and bare him to regions of darkness and utter woe, where sorrow matched the brightness which he had seen above. There was darkness without a ray of light, and utter gloom, and the whole place was full of tribulation and trouble. There blazed a glowing furnace of fire, and there crept the worm of torment. Revengeful powers were set over the furnace, and there were some that were burning piteously in the fire, and a voice was heard, saying, "This is the place of sinners; this the punishment for them that have defiled themselves by foul practices." Hereupon Ioasaph was carried thence by his guides; and, when he came to himself, immediately he trembled from head to foot, and, like a river, his eyes dropped tears, and all the comeliness of that wanton damsel and her fellows was grown more loathsome to him than filth and rottenness. And as he mused in his heart on the memory of the visions, in longing for the good and in terror of the evil, he lay on his bed utterly unable to arise. Then was the king informed of his son's sickness; and he came and asked what ailed him. And Ioasaph told him his vision, and said, "Wherefore hast thou laid a net for my feet, and bowed down my soul? If the Lord had not helped me, my soul had well nigh dwelt in hell. But how loving is God unto Israel, even unto such as are of a true heart! He hath delivered me that am lowly from the midst of the dogs. For I was sore troubled and I fell on sleep: but God my Saviour from on high hath visited me, and showed me what joy they lose that provoke him and to what punishments they subject themselves. And now, O my father, since thou hast stopped thine ears not to hear the voice that will charm thee to good, at least forbid me not to walk the straight road. For this I desire, this I long for, to forsake all, and reach that place, where Barlaam the servant of Christ hath his dwelling, and with him to finish what remaineth of my life. But if thou keep me back by force, thou shalt quickly see me die of grief and despair, and thou shalt be no more called father, nor have me to thy son." XXXI. Again therefore the king was seized with despondency, and again he was like to abjure his whole way of life; and with strange thoughts he went again unto his own palace. But the evil spirits, that had been sent out by Theudas for to attack the young saint, returned to him, and, lovers of leasing though they were, confessed their shameful defeat, for they bare visible tokens of their defeat, upon their evil countenance. Said Theudas, "And be ye so weak and puny that ye cannot get the better of one young stripling?" Then did the evil spirits, constrained, to their sorrow, by the might of God, bring to light the truth, saying, "We cannot abide even the sight of the might of Christ, and the symbol of his Passion, which they call the Cross. For, when that sign is made, immediately all we, the princes of the air, and the rulers of the darkness of the world, are utterly routed and discomfited, even before the sign is completed. When we first fell upon this youth, we vexed him sore; but when he called on Christ for help, and armed him with the sign of the Cross, he routed us in angry wise, and stablished himself in safety. So incontinent we found a weapon, wherewith our chief did once confront the first-made man and prevailed against him. And verily we should have made this young man's hope vain; but again Christ was called on for help, and he consumed us in the fire of his wrath from above, and put us to flight. We have determined to approach the prince no more." Thus, then, did the evil spirits plainly make known unto Theudas all that was come to pass. But the king, perplexed on every side, again summoned Theudas, and said, "Most wisest of men, all that seemed good to thee have we fulfilled, but have found no help therein. But now, if thou hast any device left, we will make trial thereof. Peradventure I shall find some escape from this evil." Then did Theudas ask for a meeting with his son; and on the morrow the king took him and went forth to visit the prince. The king sat down and provoked debate, upbraiding and chiding him for his disobedience and stubbornness of mind. When Ioasaph again maintained his ease, and loudly declared that he valued nothing so much as the love of Christ, Theudas came forward and said, "Wherefore, Ioasaph, dost thou despise our immortal gods, that thou hast departed from their worship, and, thus incensing thy father the king, art become hateful to all the people? Dost thou not owe thy life to the gods? And did they not present thee to the king in answer to his prayer, thus redeeming him from the bondage of childlessness?" While this Theudas, waxen old in wickedness, was putting forth these many vain arguments and useless propositions, and weaving words about the preaching of the Gospel, desiring to turn it into mockery, and magnify idolatry, Ioasaph, the son of the heavenly king, and citizen of that city which the Lord hath builded and not man, waited a while and then said unto him, "Give ear, thou abyss of error, blacker than the darkness that may be felt, thou seed of Babylon, child of the building of the tower of Chalane, whereby the world was confounded, foolish and pitiable dotard, whose sins out-weigh the iniquity of the five cities that were destroyed by fire and brimstone. Why wouldest thou mock at the preaching of salvation, whereby darkness hath been made light, the wanderers have found the way, they that were lost in dire captivity have been recalled. Tell me whether is better? To worship God Almighty, with the only-begotten Son and the Holy Ghost, God increate and immortal, the beginning and well-spring of good, whose power is beyond compare, and his glory incomprehensible, before whom stand thousand thousands, and ten thousand times ten thousand of Angels and heavenly hosts, and heaven and earth are full of his glow, by whom all things were brought into being out of nothing, by whom everything is upheld and sustained and ordered by his providence; or to serve deadly devils and lifeless idols, whose glory and boast is in adultery and the corrupting of boys, and other works of iniquity that have been recorded concerning your gods in the books of your superstition? Have ye no modesty, ye miserable men, fuel for unquenchable fire, true copy of the Chaldean race, have ye no shame to worship dead images, the works of men's hands? Ye have carved stone and graven wood and called it God. Next ye take the best bullock out of your folds, or (may be) some other of your fairest beasts, and in your folly make sacrifice to your dead divinity. Your sacrifice is of more value than your idol; for the image was fashioned by man, but the beast was created by God. How much wiser is the unreasonable beast than thou the reasonable man? For it knoweth the hand that feedeth it, but thou knowest not that God by whom thou wast created out of nothing, by whom thou livest, and art preserved; and thou callest God that which thou sawest, but now, smitten by steel, and burnt and moulded in the fire, and beaten with hammers, which thou hast covered around with silver and gold, and raised from the ground, and set on high. Then, falling upon the earth, thou liest baser than the base stone, worshipping not God but thine own dead and lifeless handiwork. Or rather, the idol hath no right to be called even dead, for how can that have died which never lived? Thou shouldest invent some new name worthy of such madness. Thy stone god is broken asunder; thy potsherd god shattered; thy brazen god rusteth; thy gold or silver god is melted down. Aye, and thy gods are sold, some for a paltry, others for a great price. Not their divinity but their material giveth them value. But who buyeth God? Who offereth God for sale? And how is that god that cannot move called God? Seest thou not that the god that standeth cannot sit, and the god that sitteth cannot stand? "Be ashamed, thou fool, and lay thine hand upon thy mouth, thou victim of folly, that commendest such things as these. Estranged from the truth, thou hast been led astray by false images, fashioning statues and attaching to the works of thine own hands the name of God. O wretched man, return to thy senses, and learn that thou art older than the god made by thee. This is downright madness. Being a man, thou hast persuaded thyself that thou canst make God. How can this be? Thou makest not God, but the likeness of a man, or of some beast, sans tongue, sans throat, sans brains, sans inwards, so that it is the similitude neither of a man, nor of a beast, but only a thing of no use and sheer vanity. Why therefore flatterest thou things that cannot feel? Why sittest thou at the feet of things that cannot move and help thee? But for the skill of the mason, or timber-wright, or hammer-smith, thou hadst not had a god. Had there been no warders nigh at hand, thou hadst lost thy god. He, to whom many a populous city of fools prayeth as God to guard it, the same hath suite of guards at hand to save him from being stolen. And if he be of silver or gold, he is carefully guarded; but if of stone or clay or any other less costly ware, he guardeth himself, for with you, no doubt, a god of clay is stronger than one of gold. "Do we not, then, well to laugh you to scorn, or rather to weep over you, as men blind and without understanding? Your deeds are deeds of madness and not of piety. Your man of war maketh to himself an image after the similitude of a warrior, and calleth it Ares. And the lecher, making a symbol of his own soul, deifieth his vice and calleth it Aphrodite. Another, in honour of his own love of wine, fashioneth an idol which he calleth Dionysus. Likewise lovers of all other evil things set up idols of their own lusts; for they name their lusts their gods. And therefore, before their altars, there are lascivious dances, and strains of lewd songs and mad revelries. Who could recount in order their abominable doings? Who could endure to defile his lips by the repeating of their filthy communications? But these are manifest to all, even if we hold our peace. These be thine objects of worship, O Theudas, who art more senseless than thine idols. Before these thou biddest me fall down and worship. This verily is the counsel of thine iniquity and senseless mind. But thou thyself shalt be like unto them, and all such as put their trust in them. "As for me, I will serve my God, and to him will I wholly sacrifice myself, to God, the Creator and protector of all things through our Lord Jesus Christ, my hope, by whom we have access unto the Father of lights, in the Holy Ghost: by whom we have been redeemed from bitter slavery by his blood. For if he had not humbled himself so far as to take the form of a servant, we had not received the adoption of sons. But he humbled himself for our sake, not considering the Godhead a thing to be grasped, but he remained that which he was, and took on himself that which he was not, and conversed with men, and mounted the Cross in his flesh, and was laid in the sepulchre by the space of three days; he descended into hell, and brought out from thence them whom the fierce prince of this world held prisoners, sold into bondage by sin. What harm then befell him thereby that thou thinkest to make mock of him? Seest thou not yonder sun, into how many a barren and filthy place he darteth his rays? Upon how many a stinking corpse doth he cast his eye? Hath he therefore any stain of reproach? Doth he not dry and shrivel up filth and rottenness, and give light to dark places, himself the while unharmed and incapable of receiving any defilement? And what of fire? Doth it not take iron, which is black and cold in itself, and work it into white heat and harden it? Doth it receive any of the properties of the iron? When the iron is smitten and beaten with hammers is the fire any the worse, or doth it in any way suffer harm? "If, then, these created and corruptible things take no hurt from contact with things commoner than themselves, with what reason dost thou, O foolish and stony-hearted man, presume to mock at me for saying that the Son, the Word of God, never departing from the Father's glory, but remaining the same God, for the salvation of men hath taken upon him the flesh of man, to the end that he may make men partakers of his divine and intelligent nature and may lead our substance out of the nether parts of hell, and honour it with heavenly glory; to the end that by taking of our flesh he may ensnare and defeat the ruler of the darkness of this world, and free our race from his tyranny. Wherefore, I tell thee, without suffering he met the suffering of the Cross, presenting therein his two natures. For, as man, he was crucified; but, as God, he darkened the sun, shook the earth, and raised from their graves many bodies that had fallen asleep. Again, as man, he died; but, as God, after that he had harried hell, he rose again. Wherefore also the prophet cried, Hell is in bitterness at having met thee below: for it was put to bitter derision, supposing that it had received a mere man, but finding God, and being made suddenly empty and led captive. Therefore, as God, he rose again, and ascended into heaven, from whence he was never parted. And our nature, so worthless and senseless beyond everything, so graceless and dishonoured, hath he made higher than all things, and established it upon a throne of honour, with immortal honour shining round. What harm therefore came to God, the Word, that thou blasphemest without a blush? Go to! Better were it to make this confession, and to worship such a God, who is good and a lover of mankind, who commandeth righteousness, enjoineth continency, ordaineth chastity, teacheth mercy, giveth faith, preacheth peace; who is called and is himself the very truth, the very love, the very goodness. Him were it not better to worship than thy gods of many evil passions, of shameful names and shameful lives? Woe unto you that are more stony-hearted than the stones, and more senseless than the senseless, sons of perdition, inheritors of darkness! But blessed am I, and all Christian folk, having a good God and a lover of mankind! They that serve him, though, for a season in this life they endure evil, yet shall they reap the immortal harvest of recompense in the kingdom of unending and divine felicity." XXXII. Theudas said unto him, "Behold, it is evident that our religion was instituted by many mighty wise men, and interpreters, marvellous in virtue and learning; and all the kings and rulers of the earth have received it as good and sure in every point. But that of the Galileans was preached by some country peasants, poor and common men, a mere handful, not exceeding twelve in number. How then should one prefer the preaching of these few obscure countrymen to the ordinance of the many that are mighty and brilliantly wise? What is the proof that your teachers be right and the others wrong?" Again the king's son made answer, "Belike, Theudas, thou art the ass of the proverb, that heard but heeded not the harp; or rather the adder that stoppeth her ears, that she may not hear the voice of the charmers. Well, therefore, spake the prophet concerning thee, If the Ethiopian can change his skin, or the leopard his spots, then mayest thou also do good, that hast been taught to do evil. Thou fool and blind, why doth not the force of truth bring thee to thy senses? The very fact that your foul idols are commended by many men of marvellous wisdom, and established by kings, while the Gospel is preached by a few men of no mark, sheweth the might of our religion and the weakness and deadliness of your wicked doctrines. Because your side, despite its having wise advocates and mighty champions, is dying down, and waxing weak, whilst our religion, though possessed of no human help, shineth from afar brighter than the sun, and hath won the fulness of the world. If it had been set up by orators and philosophers, and had had kings for its succour, thou that art evil wouldst have found occasion to declare that it was wholly of human power. But now, seeing, as thou dost, that the holy Gospel, though composed but by common fishermen, and persecuted by every tyrant, hath after this won the whole world for its sound hath gone out into all lands, and its words into the ends of the world--what canst thou say but that it is a divine and unconquerable power establishing its own cause for the salvation of mankind? But what proof seekest thou, O fool, that thy prophets are liars and ours true, better than the truths I have told thee? Except thy cause had been vain talk and falsehood, it could not, possessing such human support as it did, have suffered loss and decline. For he saith, 'I have seen the ungodly in great power, and exalted like the cedars of Libanus: and I went by and lo, he was gone: and I sought him but his place could nowhere be found.' "Concerning you, the defenders of idolatry, were these words spoken by the prophet. For a very, very little while and your place shall not be found: but, like as the smoke vanisheth, and like as wax melteth in face of the fire, so shall ye fail. But, as touching the divine wisdom of the Gospel, thus saith the Lord, 'Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.' And again the Psalmist saith, 'Thou, Lord, in the beginning hast laid the foundation of the earth; and the heavens are the work of thy hands. They shall perish, but thou endurest; and they all shall wax old as doth a garment, and as a vesture shalt thou fold them up, and they shall be changed, but thou art the same, and thy years shall not fail!' And those divine preachers of the coming of Christ, those wise fishers of the world, whose nets drew all men from the depths of deceit, whom thou, in thy vileness and bondage to sin, dost vilify, did by signs and wonders and manifold powers shine as the sun in the world, giving sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, motion to the lame, and life to the dead. Their shadows alone healed all the ailments of men. The devils, whom ye dread as gods, they not only cast forth from men's bodies, but even drave out of the world itself by the sign of the cross, whereby they destroyed all sorcery, and rendered witchcraft powerless. And these men, by curing every disease of man by the power of Christ, and renewing all creation, are rightly admired as preachers of truth by all men of sound mind. But what hast thou thyself to say of thy wise men and orators, whose wisdom God hath made foolish, the advocates of the devil? What worthy memorial have they bequeathed to the world? Tell me. And what canst thou tell of them but unreason and shamefulness, and vain craft that with glosing words concealeth the mire of their unsavoury worship? "Moreover such of your poets as have been able to soar a little above this great madness have said, with more truth, that they, which are called gods, were men; and because certain of them had been rulers of regions and cities, and others had done something of no great account in their lifetime, men were so deceived as to call them gods. It standeth on record that the man Seruch was the first to bring in the use of images. For it is said that in the old times he honoured those who had achieved some memorable deed of courage, friendship, or any other such virtue with statues and pillars. But after generations forgat the intention of their ancestors: and, whereas it was only for remembrance sake that they had set up statues and pillars to the doers of noble deeds, now they were, little by little, led astray through the working of the prince of evil, the devil, and treated as immortal gods men of like passions and corruptible as themselves and further devised sacrifices and drink-offerings for them,--the devils, thou mayest know, taking up their abode in these images and diverting to themselves these honours and sacrifices. Accordingly these devils persuade men, who refuse to have God in their knowledge, to consider them as gods for two reasons: first, that they may be glorified by this title (for they are puffed up with arrogance, and delight to be honoured as gods) next, that they may drag their poor dupes into the unquenchable fire prepared for themselves. Hence they teach men all iniquity and filthiness, seeing that they have once subjected themselves to their deceit. So when men had arrived at this pinnacle of evil, they, being darkened, set up every man an idol of his own vice and his own lust, and call it a god. They were abominable in their error, more abominable in the absurdity of the objects that they chose to worship, until the Lord came, and of his tender mercy redeemed us that trust in him from this wicked and deadly error, and taught men the true knowledge of God. For there is no salvation except in him, and there is none other God, neither in heaven, nor in earth, except him only, the Maker of all, who moveth all things by the word of his power: for he saith, 'By the word of the Lord were the heavens made stedfast, and all the power of them by the breath of his mouth,' and, 'All things were made by him, and without him was not anything made that was made.'" When Theudas had heard these sayings, and seen that the word was full of divine wisdom, like one thunder-struck, he was smitten dumb. Now late in time, and with difficulty, came he to understand his own misery, for the word of salvation had touched the darkened vision of his heart, and there fell upon him deep remorse for his past sins. He renounced the error of his idols, and ran towards the light of godliness, and from henceforth departed from his miserable life, and made himself as bitter an enemy of vile affections and sorceries as he before had pledged himself their devoted friend, For at this season he stood up in the midst of the assembly, and cried with a loud voice, saying, "Verily, O king, the Spirit of God dwelleth in thy son. Verily, we are defeated, and have no further apology, and have no strength to face the words that he hath uttered. Mighty therefore, in sooth, is the God of the Christians: mighty is their faith: mighty are their mysteries." Then he turned him round toward the king's son and said, "Tell me now, thou man, whose soul is enlightened, will Christ accept me, if I forsake my evil deeds and turn to him?" "Yea," said that preacher of truth; "Yea, he receiveth thee and all that turn to him. And he not only receiveth thee, but he goeth out to meet thee returning out of the way of iniquity, as though it were a son returning from a far country. And he falleth on his neck and kisseth him, and he strippeth him of the shameful robe of sin, and putteth on him a cloak of brightest glory, making mystic gladness for the powers on high, keeping feast for the return of the lost sheep. The Lord himself saith, 'There is exceeding great joy in heaven over one sinner that repenteth': and again, 'I am not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance.' And he saith also by the Prophet, 'As I live, saith the Lord, I have no pleasure in the death of the sinner, and the ungodly, but that he should turn from his way and live. Turn ye, turn ye from your evil way. And why will ye die, O house of Israel?' For the wickedness of the wicked shall not hurt him in the day that he turneth from his wickedness, if he do righteousness and walk in the statutes of life, he shall surely live; he shall not die. None of his sins which he hath committed shall be remembered against him. Because he hath done the decree of righteousness, he shall live thereby. And again he crieth by the mouth of another prophet, 'Wash you, make you clean; put away the evil of your doings from before mine eyes; cease to do evil: learn to do well. Come now, and let us reason together: though your sins be as scarlet, I will make them white as snow; though they be red like crimson, I will make them white as wool.' Such therefore being the promises made by God to them that turn to him, tarry not, O thou man, nor make delay: but draw nigh to Christ, our loving God, and be enlightened, and thy face shall not be ashamed. For as soon as thou goest down into the laver of Holy Baptism, all the defilement of the old man, and all the burden of thy many sins, is buried in the water, and passeth into nothingness, and thou comest up from thence a new man, pure from all pollution, with no spot or wrinkle of sin upon thee; and thenceforward it is in thy power ever to keep for thyself the purity that thou gainest hereby through the tender mercy of our God." When Theudas had been thus instructed, he went out immediately and gat him to his evil den, and took his magical books, and, because they were the beginnings of all evil, and the storehouses of devilish mysteries, burnt them with fire. And he betook himself to the cave of that same holy man, to whom Nachor also had resorted, and told him that which had befallen him, casting dust upon his head, and groaning deeply, and watering himself with his tears, and telling the aged man the full tale of his loathly deeds. He, well skilled in the saving of a soul and the snatching it from the jaw of the wily serpent, charmed away his sorrow with words of salvation, and pledged him forgiveness and promised him a merciful Judge. Then, after he had instructed and charged him to fast many days, he cleansed him in Holy Baptism. And all the days of his life Theudas heartily repented him of his misdeeds, with tears and sighs seeking the favour of God. XXXIII. As for the king, when things fortuned thus, he was completely bewildered, and plainly showed his sore vexation and tumult of soul. So again he called all his senators together, and considered what means were still his to deal with his son. Many men put forward many counsels, but that Araches, of whom we have spoken, the most famous in his office, and first of his councillors, spake unto the king, saying, "What was there to be done with thy son, O king, that we have not done, to induce him to follow our doctrines and serve our gods? But, as I perceive, we aim at the impossible. By nature, or, it may be, by chance, he is contentious and implacable. Now, if it be thy purpose to deliver him to torture and punishment, thou shalt do contrary to nature, and be no more called a father; and thou shalt lose thy son, willing, as he is, to lay down his life for Christ his sake. This, then, alone remaineth: to divide thy kingdom with him, and entrust him with the dominion of that part which falleth to his lot; and if the course of events, and the care of the business of life, draw him to embrace our aim and way, then the thing shall be according to our purpose; for habits, firmly established in the soul, are difficult to obliterate, and yield quicker to persuasion than to violence. But if he shall continue in the Christian religion, yet shall it be some solace to time in thy distress, that thou hast not lost thy son." Thus spake Araches, and all bare witness that they welcomed his proposal. Therefore also the king agreed that this matter should thus be settled. So at day-break he called his son, and said unto him, "This is now my latest word with thee, my son. Unless thou be obedient thereto, and in this way heal my heart, know thou well, that I shall no longer spare thee." When his son enquired the meaning of his word, he said, "Since, after all my labours, I find thee in all points unyielding to the persuasion of my words, come now; I will divide with thee my kingdom, and make thee king over the half-part thereof; and thou shalt be free, from now, to go whatsoever way thou wilt without fear." He, though his saintly soul perceived that the king was casting yet another snare to trip his purpose, resolved to obey, in order that he might escape his hands, and take the journey that he desired. So he answered and said, "I have indeed been longing to go in quest of that man of God that pointed out to me the way of salvation, and, bidding farewell to everything, to pass the rest of my life in his company. But, father, since thou sufferest me not to fulfil my heart's desire, I will obey thee herein: for where there is no clear danger of perdition and estrangement from God, it is right to obey one's father." The king was filled with exceeding great joy, and divided all the country under his sovranty into two parts, and appointed his son king, and adorned him with the diadem, and arrayed him in all the splendour of kingship, and sent him forth with a magnificent body-guard into the kingdom set apart for him. And he bade his rulers and governors and satraps, every one that would, to depart together with his son the king. And he set apart a mighty and populous city for his kingdom, and gave him everything that befitted a king. Thus then did Ioasaph receive the power of kingship; and when he had reached that city, where royal state had been prepared for him, on every tower of his city he set up the sign of his Lord's passion, the venerable Cross of Christ. And in person he besieged the idolatrous temples and altars, and razed them to the ground, and uncovered their foundations, leaving no trace of their ungodliness. And in the middle of the city he upreared for Christ, his Lord, a temple mighty and passing fair, and he bade the people there often to resort thither, and offer their worship to God by the veneration of the Cross, himself standing in the midst in the presence of all, and earnestly giving himself unto prayer. And as many as were under his hand he admonished and exhorted, and did everything to tear them away from superstitious error, and to unite them to Christ; and he pointed out the deceits of idolatry, and proclaimed the preaching of the Gospel, and recounted the things concerning the condescension of God, the Word, and preached the marvels of his coming, and made known his sufferings on the Cross whereby we were saved, and the power of his Resurrection, and his Ascension into heaven. Moreover he declared the terrible day of his dreadful second coming, and the bliss laid up for the righteous, and the punishments awaiting sinners. All these truths he expounded with kindly mien and gentle words. For he was not minded to be reverenced and feared for the grandeur of his power and kingly magnificence, but rather for his humility and meekness. Hereby also he more easily drew all men unto himself, being verily marvellous in his acts, and equitable and modest in spirit. Wherefore his power, being strongly reinforced by his gentleness and equity, caused all men to yield themselves to his words. What wonder, then, if, in a little while, all his subjects, in city or country, were so well initiated into his inspired teachings, that they renounced the errors of their many gods, and broke away from idolatrous drink-offerings and abominations, and were joined to the true faith and were created anew by his doctrine, and added to the household of Christ? And all, who for fear of Ioasaph's father had been shut up in mountains and dens, priests and monks, and some few bishops, came forth from their hiding places and resorted to him gladly. He himself would meet and receive with honour those who had fallen upon such tribulation and distress, for Christ his sake, and bring them to his own palace, washing their feet, and cleansing their matted hair, and ministering to them in every way. Then he dedicated his newly built church, and therein appointed for chief-priest one of the bishops that had suffered much, and had lost his own see, on account of his faith in Christ, an holy man, and learned in the canons of the Church, whose heart was fulfilled with heavenly zeal. And forthwith, when he had made ready a rude font, he bade baptize them that were turning to Christ. And so they were baptized, first the rulers and the men in authority; next, the soldiers on service and the rest of the multitude. And they that were baptized not only received health in their souls, but indeed as many as were afflicted with bodily ailments and imperfections cast off all their trouble, and came up from the holy font pure in soul, and sound in body, reaping an harvest of health for soul and body alike. Wherefore also from all quarters multitudes flocked to King Ioasaph, desirous to be instructed by him in godliness. And all idolatrous images were utterly demolished, and all their wealth and temple treasure was taken from them, and in their stead holy courts were built for God. For these King Ioasaph dedicated the riches and costly vestments and treasures of the idolatrous temples, thereby making this worthless and superfluous material fit for service, and profitable. And the foul fiends that dwelt in their altars and temples were rigorously chased away and put to flight; and these, in the hearing of many, loudly lamented the misfortune that had overtaken them. And all the region round about was freed from their dark deceit, and illuminated with the light of the blameless Christian faith. And, soothly, the king was a good example to all; and he inflamed and kindled the hearts of many to be of the same mind with himself. For such is the nature of authority. Its subjects alway conform to its likeness, and are wont to love the same objects, and to practise the pursuits which they perceive to be pleasing to their governor. Hence, God helping, religion grew and increased amongst them. The king was wholly dependent on the commandments of Christ and on his love, being a steward of the word of grace, and pilot to the souls of many, bringing them to safe anchorage in the haven of God. For he knew that this, afore all things, is the work of a king, to teach men to fear God and keep righteousness. Thus did he, training himself to be king over his own passions, and, like a good pilot, keeping a firm hold of the helm of good government for his subjects. For this is the end of good kingship, to be king and lord over pleasure--which end also he achieved. Of the nobility of his ancestors, or the royal splendour around him, he was in no wise proud, knowing that we all have one common forefather, made of clay, and that, whether rich or poor, we are all of the same moulding. He ever abased his soul in deepest humility, and thought on the blessedness of the world to come, and considered himself a stranger and pilgrim in this world, but realised that that was his real treasure which he should win after his departure hence. Now, since all went well with him, and since he had delivered all the people from their ancient and ancestral error, and made them servants of him who redeemed us from evil servitude by his own precious blood, he turned his thoughts to his next task, the virtue of almsgiving. Temperance and righteousness he had already attained; he wore on his brow the crown of temperance, and wrapped about him the purple of righteousness. He called to mind the uncertainty of earthly riches, how they resemble the running of river waters. Therefore made he haste to lay up his treasure where neither 'moth nor rust doth corrupt and where thieves do not break through nor steal.' So he began to distribute all his money to the poor, sparing naught thereof. He knew that the possessor of great authority is bound to imitate the giver of that authority, according to his ability; and herein he shall best imitate God, if he hold nothing in higher honour than mercy. Before all gold and precious stone he stored up for himself the treasure of almsgiving; treasure, which here gladdeneth the heart by the hope of enjoyment to come, and there delighteth it with the taste of the hoped-for bliss. After this he searched the prisons, and sought out the captives in mines, or debtors in the grip of their creditors; and by generous largesses to all he proved a father to all, orphans, and widows, and beggars, a loving and good father, for he deemed that by bestowing blessings on these he won a blessing for himself. Being endowed with spiritual riches, and, in sooth, a perfect king, he gave liberally to all that were in need, for he hoped to receive infinitely more, when the time should come for the recompense of his works. Now, in little while, the fame of Ioasaph was blazoned abroad; and led, as it were by the scent of sweet ointment, all men flocked to him daily, casting off their poverty of soul and body: and his name was on every man's lips. It was not fear and oppression that drew the people to him, but desire and heart-felt love, which by God's blessing and the king's fair life had been planted in their hearts. Then, too, did his father's subjects begin to come to him, and, laying aside all error, received the Gospel of truth. And the house of Ioasaph grew and waxed strong, but the house of Abenner waned and grew weak, even as the Book of the Kings declareth concerning David and Saul. XXXIV. When king Abenner saw this, though late and loth, he came to his senses, and renounced his false gods with all their impotence and vain deceit. Again he called an assembly of his chief counsellors, and brought to light the thoughts of his heart. As they confirmed his words (for the day-spring from on high had visited them, the Saviour who had heard the prayer of his servant Ioasaph), it pleased the king to signify the same to his son. Therefore on the morrow he wrote a letter to Ioasaph, running thus: "King Abenner to his well-beloved son Ioasaph, greeting. Dearest son, many thoughts have been stealing into my soul, and rule it with a rod of iron. I see our state vanishing, like as smoke vanisheth, but thy religion shining brighter than the sun; and I have come to my senses, and know that the words which thou hast ever spoken unto me are true, and that a thick cloud of sin and wickedness did then cover us, so that we were unable to discern the truth, and recognize the Creator of all. Nay, but we shut our eyes, and would not behold the light which thou didst enkindle more brightly for us. Much evil did we do unto thee, and many of the Christians, alas! did we destroy; who, strengthened by the power that aided them, finally triumphed over our cruelty. But now we have removed that dense mist from our eyes, and see some small ray of truth, and there cometh on us repentance of our misdeeds. But a new cloud of despair would overshadow it; despair at the multitude of mine offences, because I am now abominable and unacceptable to Christ, being a rebel and a foeman unto him. What, then, sayest thou, dearest son, hereto? Make known to me thine answer, and teach me that am thy father what I should do, and lead me to the knowledge of my true weal." When Ioasaph had received this letter, and read the words therein, his soul was filled with mingled joy and amazement. Forthwith he entered his closet, and falling on his face before the image of his Master, watered the ground with his tears, giving thanks to his Lord and confessing him, and tuning lips of exultation to sing an hymn of praise, saying: "I will magnify thee, O God, my King, and I will praise thy name for ever and ever. Great art thou O Lord, and marvellous-worthy to be praised, and of thy greatness there is no end. Who can express thy noble acts, or show forth all thy praise, who hast turned the hard rock into a standing water and the flint-stone into a springing well? For behold this my father's flinty and more than granite heart is at thy will melted as wax; because thou art able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham. I thank thee, Lord, thou lover of men, and God of pity, that thou hast been, and art, long-suffering towards our offences, and hast suffered us until now to go unpunished. Long have we deserved to be cast away from thy face, and made a by-word on earth, as were the sinful inhabiters of the five cities, consumed with fire and brimstone; but thy marvellous long-suffering hath dealt graciously with us. I give thanks unto thee, vile and unworthy though I be, and insufficient of myself to glorify thy greatness. And, by thine infinite compassions, I pray thee, Lord Jesu Christ, Son and Word of the invisible Father, who madest all things by thy word, and sustainest them by thy will; who hast delivered us thine unworthy servants from the bondage of the arch-fiend our foe: thou that wast stretched upon the Rood, and didst bind the strong man, and award everlasting freedom to them that lay bound in his fetters: do thou now also stretch forth thine invisible and almighty hand, and, at the last, free thy servant my father from that cruel bondage of the devil. Show him full clearly that thou art the ever living true God, and only King, eternal and immortal. Behold, O Lord, with favourable and kindly eye, the contrition of my heart; and, according to thine unerring promise, be with me that acknowledge and confess thee the Maker and protector of all creation. Let there be a well of water within me springing up, and let utterance be given unto me that I may open my mouth, and a mind well fixed in thee, the chief corner-stone, that I, thine unprofitable servant, may be enabled to preach to my father, as is right, the mystery of thine Incarnation, and by thy power deliver him from the vain deceit of wicked devils, and bring him unto thee his God and Lord, who willest not the death of us sinners, but waitest for us to return and repent, because thou art glorified for ever and ever. Amen." When he had thus prayed, and received fulness of assurance that he should not miscarry in his desire, he took courage by the tender mercy of Christ, and arose thence, with his royal bodyguard, and arrived at his father's palace. When it was told unto his father, "Thy son is come," he went forth straightway for to meet him, and embraced and kissed him lovingly, and made exceeding great joy, and held a general feast in honour of the coming of his son. And afterward, they two were closeted together. But how tell of all that the son spake with his father, and of all the wisdom of his speech? And what was that speech but the words put into his mouth by the Holy Ghost, by whom the fishermen enclosed the whole world in their nets for Christ and the unlearned are found wiser than the wise. This Holy Spirit's grace and wisdom taught Ioasaph to speak with the king his father, enlightening him with the light of knowledge. Before now he had bestowed much labour to drag his father from superstitious error, leaving nothing unsaid and nothing undone to win him over, but he seemed to be twanging on a broken string, and speaking to deaf ears. But when the Lord looked upon the lowliness of his servant Ioasaph, and, in answer to his prayer, opened the closed gates of his father's heart (for it is said, he will fulfil the desire of them that fear him, and will hear their cry), then the king easily understood the things that were spoken; so that, when a convenient season came, through the grace of Christ, this son triumphed over those evil spirits that had lorded it over the soul of his father, and clean freed him from their error, and made the word of salvation clearly known unto him, and joined him to the living God on high. Ioasaph took up his tale from the beginning, and expounded to his father great and marvellous things which he knew not, which he had never heard with the ears of his heart; and he told him many weighty sayings concerning God, and showed him righteousness: to wit that there is no other God in heaven above, nor in the earth beneath, except the one God, revealed in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. And he made known unto him many mysteries of divine knowledge; and amongst them he told him the history of creation, visible and invisible, how the Creator brought every thing out of nothing, and how he formed man after his own image and likeness and endowed him with power of free-will, and gave him Paradise to his enjoyment, charging him only to abstain from one thing, the tree of knowledge; and how, when man had broken his commandment, he banished him out of Paradise; and how man, fallen from union with God, stumbled into these manifold errors, becoming the slave of sins, and subject unto death through the tyranny of the devil, who, having once taken men captive, hath made them utterly forget their Lord and God, and hath persuaded them to serve him instead, by the abominable worshipping of idols. So our Maker, moved with compassion, through the good-will of the Father, and the co-operation of the Holy Ghost, was pleased, for our sakes, to be born of an holy Virgin, Mary, the mother of God, and he, that cannot suffer, was acquainted with sufferings. On the third day he rose again from the dead, and redeemed us from our first penalty, and restored to us our first glory. When he ascended into the heavens, from whence he had descended, he raised us up together with him; and thence, we believe that he shall come again, to raise up his own handiwork; and he will recompense every man according to his works. Moreover Ioasaph instructed his father concerning the kingdom of heaven that awaiteth them that are worthy thereof, and the joy unspeakable. Thereto he added the torment in store for the wicked, the unquenchable fire, the outer darkness, the undying worm and whatsoever other punishment the servants of sin have laid up in store for themselves. All these things set he forth in many words, which bore witness that the grace of the Spirit was dwelling richly within him. Then he described the uncharted sea of the love of God towards mankind, and how he is ready to accept the repentance of them that turn to him; and how there is no sin too great for his tender mercy, if we will but repent. And when he had confirmed these truths by many an example, and testimony of Scripture, he made an end of speaking. XXXV. King Abenner was pricked to the heart by this inspired wisdom and with loud voice and fervent heart confessed Christ his Saviour, and forthwith forsook all superstitious error. He venerated the sign of the life-giving Cross in the sight of all and, in the hearing of all, proclaimed our Lord Jesus Christ to be God. By telling in full the tale of his former ungodliness, and of his own cruelty and blood-thirstiness toward the Christians, he proved himself a great power for religion. So here was proved in fact, the saying of Paul; that where sin abounded, there did grace much more abound. While then the learned Ioasaph was speaking of God, and of piety towards him, to the dukes and satraps and all the people there assembled, and was as it were with a tongue of fire piping unto them a goodly ode, the grace of the Holy Spirit descended upon them, and moved them to give glory to God, so that all the multitude cried aloud with one voice, "Great is the God of the Christians, and there is none other God but our Lord Jesus Christ, who, together with the Father and Holy Ghost, is glorified." Waxen full of heavenly zeal, King Abenner made a sturdy assault on the idols, wrought of silver and gold, that were within his palace, and tore them down to the ground. Then he brake them into small pieces, and distributed them to the poor, thus making that which had been useless useful. Furthermore he and his son besieged the idols' temples and altars and levelled them even to the ground, and in their stead, and to the honour of God, built holy courts. And not only in the city but throughout all the country also, thus did they in their zeal. And the evil spirits that dwelt in those altars were driven forth with shrieks, and cried out in terror at the invincible power of our God. And all the region round about, and the greater part of the neighbour nations, were led, as by the hand, to the true Faith. Then came the holy Bishop, of whom we have spoken, and King Abenner was instructed, and made perfect with Holy Baptism, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. And Ioasaph received him as he came up from the Holy Font, in this strange way appearing as the begetter of his own father, and proving the spiritual father to him that begat him in the flesh: for he was the son of his heavenly Father, and verily divine fruit of that divine Branch, which saith, "I am the vine, ye are the branches." Thus King Abenner, being born again of water and of the spirit, rejoiced with joy unspeakable, and with him all the city and the region round about received Holy Baptism, and they that were before darkness now became children of light. And every disease, and every assault of evil spirits was driven far from the believers, and all were sane and sound in body and in soul. And many other miracles were wrought for the confirmation of the Faith. Churches too were built, and the bishops, that had been hiding for fear, discovered themselves, and received again their own churches, whilst others were chosen from the priests and monks, to shepherd the flock of Christ. But King Abenner, having thus forsaken his former disgraceful life, and repented of his evil deeds, handed over to his son the rule of all his kingdom. He himself dwelt in solitude, continually casting dust on his head, and groaning for very heaviness, and watering his face with his tears, being alone, communing with him who is everywhere present and imploring him to forgive his sins. And he abased himself to such a depth of contrition and humility, that he refused to name the name of God with his own lips, and was scarce brought by his son's admonitions to make so bold. Thus the king passed through the good change and entered the road that leadeth to virtue, so that his righteousness now surpassed his former sins of ignorance. For four years did he live thus in repentance and tears and virtuous acts, and then fell into the sickness whereof he died. But when the end drew nigh, he began to fear and to be dismayed, calling to remembrance the evil that he had wrought. But with comfortable words Ioasaph sought to ease the distress that had fallen on him, saying, "Why art thou so full of heaviness, O my father, and wily art thou so disquieted within time? Set thy hope on God, and give him thanks, who is the hope of all the ends of the earth, and of them that remain in the sea afar, who crieth by the mouth of his prophet, 'Wash you, make you clean: put away from before mine eyes the wickedness of your souls; learn to do well'; and 'Though your sins be as scarlet, I will make them white as snow; though they be red like crimson, I will make them as wool.' Fear not, therefore, O my father, neither be of doubtful mind: for the sins of them that turn to God prevail not against his infinite goodness. For these, however many, are subject to measure and number: but measure and number cannot limit his goodness. It is impossible then for that which is subject to measure to exceed the unmeasurable." With such comfortable words did Ioasaph cheer his soul, and bring him to a good courage. Then his father stretched out his hands, and gave him thanks and prayed for him, blessing the day whereon Ioasaph was born, and said "Dearest child, yet not child of me, but of mine heavenly Father, with what gratitude can I repay thee? With what words of blessings may I bless thee? What thanks shall I offer God for thee? I was lost, and was found through thee: I was dead in sin and am alive again: an enemy, and rebel against God, and am reconciled with him. What reward therefore shall I give thee for all these benefits? God is he that shall make the due recompense." Thus saying, he pressed many kisses on his beloved son; then, when he had prayed, and said, "Into thy hands, O God, thou lover of men, do I commit my spirit," he committed his soul unto the Lord in penitence and peace. Now, when Ioasaph had honoured with his tears his father that was dead, and had reverently cared for his body, he buried him in a sepulchre wherein devout men lay; not indeed clad in royal raiment, but robed in the garment of penitence. Standing on the sepulchre, and lifting up his hands to heaven, the tears streaming in floods from his eyes, he cried aloud unto God saying, "O God, I thank thee, King of glory, alone mighty and immortal, that thou hast not despised my petition, and hast not held thy peace at my tears, but hast been pleased to turn this thy servant, my father, from the way of wickedness, and to draw him to thyself, the Saviour of all, departing him from the deceitfulness of idolatry, and granting him to acknowledge thee, who art the very God and lover of souls. And now, O my Lord and God, whose ocean of goodness is uncharted, set him in that place where much grass is, in a place of refreshment, where shineth the light of thy countenance. Remember not his old offences; but, according to the multitude of thy mercies, blot out the handwriting of his sins, and destroy the tablets of his debts, and set him at peace with thy Saints whom he slew with fire and sword. Charge them not to be bitter against him. For all things are possible with thee, the Lord of all, save only to withhold pity from them that turn not unto thee; this is impossible. For thy pity is poured out upon all men, and thou savest them that call upon thee, Lord Jesu Christ, because glory becometh thee for ever and ever. Amen." Such were the prayers and intercessions that he made unto God, by the space of seven full days, never leaving the grave, and never thinking of meat or drink, and taking no refreshment of sleep: but he watered the ground with his tears, and continued praying and moaning unceasingly. But, on the eighth day, he went back to his palace and distributed amongst the poor all his wealth and riches, so that not one person was left in want. XXXVI. In a few days, after he had ended this ministry, and emptied all his coffers, in order that the burden of his money might not hinder him from entering in at the narrow gate, on the fortieth day after his father's decease, and in remembrance of him, he called together all his officers, and those who wore soldiers' attire, and of the citizens not a few. Sitting in the front, according to custom, in the audience of all he said, "Lo, as ye see, Abenner, my father the king, hath died like any beggar. Neither wealth nor kingly glory, nor I his loving son, nor any of his kith and kindred, has availed to help him, or to save him from the sentence without reprieve. But he is gone to yonder judgement seat, to give account of his life in this world, carrying with him no advocate whatsoever, except his deeds, good or bad. And the same law is ordained by nature for every man born of woman, and there is no escape. Now, therefore, hearken unto me, friends and brethren, people and holy heritage of the Lord, whom Christ our God hath purchased with his own precious blood, and delivered from the ancient error, and bondage of the adversary. Ye yourselves know my manner of life among you; that ever since I knew Christ, and was counted worthy to become his servant, I have hated all things, and loved him only, and how this was my desire, to escape from the tempest and vain tumult of the world, and commune alone with him, and in undisturbed peace of soul serve my God and Master. But my father's opposition held me back, and the command that biddeth us to honour our fathers. So, by the grace and help of God, I have not laboured in vain, nor spent these days for naught, I have brought my father nigh to Christ, and have taught you all to know the one true God, the Lord of all; and yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me, which rescued me also from superstitious error, and from the worship of idols, and freed you, O my people, from cruel captivity. So now it is high time to fulfil the service that I promised to God; high time to depart thitherward, where he himself shall lead me, where I may perform my vows which I made unto him. Now, therefore, look you out a man whom ye will, to be your leader and king; for by this time ye have been conformed to the will of the Lord, and of his commandments nothing hath been hidden from you. Walk ye therein; turn not aside, neither to the right hand, nor to the left, and the God of peace be with you all!" When all that company and the common people heard thereof, anon there arose a clamour, an uproar, and a mighty cry and confusion, all weeping like orphans and bewailing their loss. Lamenting bitterly, they protested with oaths and with tears, that they would never let him go, but would restrain him and not suffer in any wise his departure. While the common people, and they in authority, were thus crying aloud, the king broke in, and beckoned with his hand to the multitude and charged them to keep silence. He declared that he gave in to their instancy, and dismissed them still grieving, and bearing on their cheeks the signs of sorrow. And Ioasaph did thus. There was one of the senators first in favour with Ioasaph, a man honoured for his godliness and dignity, Barachias by name, who, as hath been already told, when Nachor, feigning to be Barlaam, was disputing with the philosophers, alone was ready to stand by Nachor and fight for him, for his heart was fired with heavenly love. Him the king took apart, and spake gently with him, and earnestly besought him to receive the kingdom, and, in the fear of God, to shepherd his people; in order that he himself might take the journey that he desired. But Barachias would put aside and reject his offer, saying, "O king, how wrongful is thy judgement, and thy word contrary to divine command! If thou hast learned to love thy neighbour as thyself, with what right art thou eager to shift the burden off thy back and lay it upon mine? If it be good to be king, keep the good to thy self: but, if it be a stone of stumbling and rock of offence to thy soul, why put it in my pathway and seek to trip me up?" When Ioasaph perceived that he spake thus, and that his purpose was fixed, he ceased from communing with him. And now, at about the dead of night, he wrote his people a letter, full of much wisdom, expounding to them all godliness; telling them what they should think concerning God, what life, what hymns and what thanksgiving they should offer unto him. Next, he charged them to receive none other than Barachias to be ruler of the kingdom. Then left he in his bed-chamber the roll containing his letter, and, unobserved of all, went forth from his palace. But he might not win through undetected, for, early on the morrow, the tidings, that he was departed, anon made commotion and mourning among the people, and, in much haste, forth went every man for to seek him; they being minded by all means to cut off his flight. And their zeal was not spent in vain; for, when they had occupied all the high-ways, and encompassed all the mountains, and surrounded the pathless ravines, they discovered him in a watercourse, his hands uplifted to heaven, saying the prayer proper of the Sixth Hour. When they beheld him, they surrounded him, and besought him with team, upbraiding him for departing from them. "But," said he, "why labour ye in vain? No longer hope to have me to your king." Yet gave he way to their much opposition, and turned again to his palace. And, when he had assembled all the folk, he signified his will. Then with oath he confirmed his word, that he would dwell with them not one day more. "For," said he, "I have fulfilled my ministry toward you, and have omitted naught, neither have I kept back anything that was profitable unto you, in failing to show or teach you, testifying to all the faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, and pointing out the paths of repentance. And now behold I go the road that I have long time desired, and all ye shall see my face no more. Wherefore I take you to record this day, as saith the holy Apostle, that I am pure from the blood of you all, for I have not shunned to declare unto you all the counsel of God." When they heard this, and perceived the steadfastness of his purpose, that nothing could hinder him from his resolve, they wept like orphans over their bereavement, but could in no wise over-persuade him. Then did the king take that Barachias, of whom we have already spoken, saying, "This is he, brethren, whom I appoint to be your king." And though Barachias stoutly resisted, yet he established him, unwilling and reluctant, upon the royal throne, and placed the diadem on his head, and gave the kingly ring into his hand. Then he stood facing the cast and made prayer for King Barachias, that his faith toward God might be preserved unwavering, and that he might keep without faltering the path of Christ's commandments. Therewith he prayed for the clergy and all the flock, asking of God succour for them and salvation, and all that might fitly be asked for their welfare. Thus he prayed, and then turning said unto Barachias, "Behold, brother, I charge thee, as the Apostle once adjured his people, 'Take heed unto thyself, and to all the flock, over the which the Holy Ghost hath made thee king, to feed the Lord's people, whom he hath purchased with his own blood.' And even as thou wast before me in the knowledge of God, and didst serve him with a pure conscience, so now also show the more zeal in pleasing him. For, as thou hast received of God a mighty sovereignty, thou owest him the greater repayment. Render therefore to thy Benefactor the debt of thanksgiving, by the keeping of his holy commandments and by turning aside from every path whose end is destruction. For it is with kingdoms as with ships. If one of the sailors blunder it bringeth but small damage to the crew. But if the steersman err, he causeth the whole ship to perish. Even so it is with sovranty: if a subject err, he harmeth himself more than the state. But if the king err, he causeth injury to the whole realm. Therefore, as one that shall render strict account, if thou neglect aught of thy duty, guard thyself with all diligence in that which is good. Hate all pleasure that draweth into sin: for, saith the Apostle, 'Follow peace with all men, and holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord.' Consider the wheel of men's affairs, how it runneth round and round, turning and whirling them now up, now down: and amid all its sudden changes, keep thou unchanged a pious mind. To change with every change of affairs betokeneth an unstable heart. But be thou steadfast, wholly established upon that which is good. Be not lifted and vainly puffed up because of temporal honour; but, with purified reason, understand the nothingness of thine own nature, and the span-length and swift flight of life here, and death the yoke-fellow of the flesh. If thou consider these things, thou shalt not be cast into the pit of arrogance, but shalt fear God, the true and heavenly King, and verily thou shalt be blessed. For he saith, 'Blessed are all they that fear the Lord, and walk in his ways,' and 'Blessed is the man that feareth the Lord: he shall have great delight in his commandments.' And which commandments above all shouldest thou observe? 'Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy,' and 'Be ye merciful, as your heavenly Father is merciful.' For the fulfilment of this commandment, above all, is required of them that are in high authority. And, soothly, the holder of great authority ought to imitate the giver of that authority to the best of his ability. And herein shall he best imitate God, by considering that nothing is to be preferred before showing mercy. Nay, further, nothing so surely draweth the subject to loyalty toward his Sovereign as the grace of charity bestowed on such as need it. For the service that cometh from fear is flattery in disguise, with the pretence of respect cozening them that pay heed to it; and the unwilling subject rebelleth when he findeth occasion. Whereas he that is held by the ties of loyalty is steadfast in his obedience to the ruling power. Wherefore be thou easy of access to all and open thine ears unto the poor, that thou mayest find the ear of God open unto thee. For as we are to our fellow-servants, such shall we find our Master to us-ward. And, like as we do hear others, so shall we be heard ourselves: and, as we see, so shall we be seen by the divine all-seeing eye. Therefore pay we first mercy for mercy, that we may obtain like for like. "But hear yet another commandment, the fellow of the former; 'Forgive, and it shall be forgiven unto you;' and 'If ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your heavenly father forgive you your trespasses.' Wherefore bear no malice against them that offend against thee; but, when thou askest forgiveness of thy sins, forgive thyself also them that injure thee, because forgiveness is repaid by forgiveness, and by making peace with our fellow-servants we are ourselves delivered from the wrath of our Master. Again, a lack of compassion towards them that trespass against us maketh our own trespasses unpardonable, even as thou hast heard what befell the man that owed ten thousand talents, how, through his want of pity on his fellow-servant, he was again required to pay all that mighty debt. So we must take good heed lest a like fate betide us. But let us forgive every debt, and cast all anger out of our hearts, in order that our many debts, too, may be forgiven. Beside this, and before all things, keep thou that good thing which is committed to thy trust, the holy Word of faith wherein thou hast been taught and instructed. And let no tare of heresy grow up amongst you, but preserve the heavenly seed pure and sincere, that it may yield a manifold harvest to the master, when he cometh to demand account of our lives, and to reward us according to our deeds, when the righteous shall shine forth as the sun, but darkness and everlasting shame shall cover the sinners. And now, brethren, I commend you to God, and to the word of his grace, which is able to build you up, and to give you an inheritance among all them which are sanctified." And when he had thus spoken, he kneeled down, as it is written, and prayed again in tears. And he turned him round, and kissed Barachias, whom he had chosen to their king, and all the officers. Then came a scene fit, belike, to make one weep. They all crowded around him, as though his presence meant life to them, and his departure would reave them of their very souls; and what piteous pleading, what extravagance of grief did they omit? They kissed him; they hung about him; they were beside themselves for anguish of heart. "Wo is us," cried they, "for this grievous calamity!" They called him, Master, Father, Saviour, Benefactor. "Through thine," said they, "we learned to know God, and were redeemed from error, and found rest from every ill. What remaineth us after thou art gone? What evils shall not befall us?" Thus saying, they smote upon their breasts, and bewailed the misfortune that had overtaken them. But he with words of comfort hushed their sobs, and promised to be with them still in the spirit though he might no longer abide with them in the body. And when he had thus spoken, in the sight of all he went forth from the palace. And immediately all the people followed him. They despaired of his return; they ran from the city, as from a sight that they could no longer endure. But when they were outside the city, Ioasaph addressed them with sharp words, and chode with them harshly; and so they were parted from him, and unwillingly went home, often turning round to look on him, and stumbling on their road. And some of the hotter spirits also followed afar off weeping, until the shades of night parted them one from another. XXXVII. Thus this noble man went forth from his palace rejoicing, as when after long exile a man returneth with joy to his own country. Outwardly he wore the robes that he was wont to wear, but beneath was the hair-shirt which Barlaam had given him. That night he halted at a poor man's cabin, and stripped himself of his outer raiment, which, as his last alms, he bestowed upon his poor host, and thus by the prayers of that poor man, as well as of so many others, he made God his ally, and put on his grace and help as a garment of salvation; and, clad in a coat of gladness, thus went he off to his hermit-life, carrying with him neither bread, nor water, nor any necessary food, with no garment upon him save the aforesaid rough shirt. For his heart was wounded with a marvellous longing and divine love for Christ the immortal King; he was beside himself with longing, mad for God, possessed by love of him; "For love," he saith, "is strong as fire." So drunken was he with this heavenly love, so parched with thirst, according to him that saith, "Like as the hart desireth the water-brooks, so longeth my soul after time, O God. My soul is athirst for the mighty and living God"; or, as the soul that is sick of love crieth in the Song of Songs, "Thou hast ravished us, ravished us with the desire of thee"; and, "Let me see thy countenance, and let me hear thy voice, for thy voice is a sweet voice, and thy countenance is comely." It was the desire for this unspeakable comeliness of Christ that fired the hearts of the Apostolic Quire and of the Martyr folk to despise the things that are seen, and all this temporal life, and the rather to choose ten thousand forms of death and torture, being enamoured of his heavenly beauty, and bearing in mind the charm that the divine Word used for to win our love. Such was the fire that was kindled in the soul of this fair youth also, noble in body, but most noble and kingly in soul, that led him to despise all earthly things alike, to trample on all bodily pleasures, and to contemn riches and glory and the praise of men, to lay aside diadem and purple, as of less worth than cobwebs, and to surrender himself to all the hard and irksome toils of the ascetic life, crying, "O my Christ, my soul is fixed upon thee, and thy right hand hath upholden me." Thus, without looking back, he passed into the depth of the desert; and, laying aside, like a heavy burden and clog, the stress of transitory things, he rejoiced in the Spirit, and looked steadfastly on Christ, whom he longed for, and cried aloud to him, as though he were there present to hear his voice, saying, "Lord, let mine eyes never again see the good things of this present world. Never, from this moment, let my soul be excited by these present vanities, but fill mine eyes with spiritual tears; direct my goings in thy way, and show me thy servant Barlaam. Show me him that was the means of my salvation, that I may learn of him the exact rule of this lonely and austere life, and may not be tripped up through ignorance of the wiles of the enemy. Grant me, O Lord, to discover the way whereby to attain unto thee, for my soul is sick of love for thee, and I am athirst for thee, the well of salvation." These were the thoughts of his heart continually, and he communed with God, being made one with him by prayer and sublime meditation. And thus eagerly he pursued the road, hoping to arrive at the place where Barlaam dwelt. His meat was the herbs that grow in the desert; for he carried nothing with him, as I have already said, save his own bones, and the ragged garment that was around him. But whilst he found some food, though scanty and insufficient, from the herbs, of water he was quite destitute in that waterless and dry desert. And so at noon-tide, as he held on his way under the fierce blaze of the sun, he was parched with thirst in the hot drought of that desert place, and he suffered the extreme of anguish. But desire of Christ conquered nature, and the thirst wherewith he thirsted for God bedewed the heat of thirst for water. Now the devil, being envious and full of hate for that which is beautiful, unable to endure the sight of such steadfastness of purpose, and glowing love towards God, raised up against Ioasaph many temptations in the wilderness. He called to his remembrance his kingly glory, and his magnificent body-guard, his friends, kinsfolk and companions, and how the lives of all had depended on his life, and he minded him of the other solaces of life. Then he would confront him with the hardness of virtue, and the many sweats that she requireth, with the weakness of his flesh, with his lack of practice in such rigours, the long years to come, this present distress from thirst, his want of any comfort, and the unendingness of his toils. In a word, he raised a great dust-cloud of reasonings in his mind, exactly, I ween, as it hath been recorded of the mighty Antony. But, when the enemy saw himself too weak to shake that purpose (for Ioasaph set Christ before his mind, and glowed with love of him, and was well strengthened by hope, and steadfast in faith, and recked nothing of the devil and his suggestions), then was the adversary ashamed of having fallen in the first assault. So he came by another road (for many are his paths of wickedness), and endeavoured to overthrow and terrify Ioasaph by means of divers apparitions. Sometimes he appeared to him in black, and such indeed he is: sometimes with a drawn sword he leapt upon him, and threatened to strike, unless he speedily turned back. At other times he assumed the shapes of all manner of beasts, roaring and making a terrible din and bellowing; or again he became a dragon, adder, or basilisk. But that fair and right noble athlete kept his soul in quietness, for he had made the Most High his refuge: and, being sober in mind, he laughed the evil one to scorn, and said, "I know thee, deceiver, who thou art, which stiffest up this trouble for me; which from the beginning didst devise mischief against mankind, and art ever wicked, and never stintest to do hurt. How becoming and right proper is thy habit, that thou shouldest take the shape of beasts and of creeping things, and thus display thy bestial and crooked nature, and thy venomous and hurtful purpose! Wherefore, wretch, attempt the impossible? For ever since I discovered that these be the contrivances and bug-bears of thy malice, I have now no more anxiety concerning thee. The Lord is on my side, and I shall see my desire upon mine enemies. I shall go upon the adder and basilisk, the which thou dost resemble; thee, the lion and dragon I shall tread under my feet; for I am strengthened with the might of Christ. Let mine enemies be ashamed and turned backward: let them be driven and put to shame suddenly." Thus speaking, and girding on that invincible weapon, the sign of the Cross, he made vain the devil's shows. For straightway all the beasts and creeping things disappeared, like as the smoke vanisheth, and like as wax melteth at the fire. And he, strong in the might of Christ, went on his way rejoicing and giving thanks unto the Lord. But there dwelt in that desert many divers beasts, and all kinds of serpents, and dragon-shaped monsters, and these met him, not now as apparitions but in sober sooth, so that his path was beset by fear and toil. But he overcame both, for love, as saith the scripture, cast out fear, and longing made toil light. Thus he wrestled with many sundry misfortunes and hardships until, after many days, he arrived at that desert of the land of Senaar, wherein Barlaam dwelt. There also he found water and quenched the burning of his thirst. XXXVIII. Now two full years spent Ioasaph wandering about the ocean of that desert, without finding Barlaam; for here also God was proving the steadfastness of his purpose, and the nobility of his soul. He lived thus in the open air, scorched with heat or frozen with cold, and, as one in search of precious treasure, continually looking everywhere for his treasured friend, the aged Barlaam. Frequent were the temptations and assaults of the evil spirits that he encountered, and many the hardships that he endured through the lack of herbs that he needed for meat, because the desert, being dry, yielded even these in but scant supply. But, being kindled by love of her Master, this adamantine and indomitable soul bore these annoyances more easily than other men bear their pleasures. Wherefore he failed not of the succour that is from above, but, many as were the sorrows and toils Chat he endured, comfort came to him from Christ, and, asleep or awake, refreshed his soul. By the space of those two years Ioasaph went about continually, seeking him for whom he yearned, and rivers of waters ran from his eyes, as he implored God, crying aloud and saying, "Show me, O Lord, show me the man that was the means of my knowledge of thee, and the cause of my many blessings. Because of the multitude of mine offences, deprive me not of this good thing; but grant me to see him, and fight with him the ascetic fight." By the grace of God, he found a cave, by following footsteps that led thither. There he met a monk pursuing a hermit life. Him he embraced and saluted tenderly. He asked where to find Barlaam's dwelling, and told him his own tale, laying all bare. Of him then he learned the abode of the man whom he sought, and thither went foot-hot, as when a cunning hunter happeneth on the tracks of his game. And when he had met with certain signs, pointed out to him by this other old hermit, he went on rejoicing, strong in hope, like a child hoping after long absence to see his father. For when divine love hath broken into a soul, it proveth hotter and stronger than the natural. So he stood before the door of the cave, and knocked, saying "Benedic, father, benedic!" When Barlaam heard his voice, he came forth from the cave, and by the spirit knew him, who by outward appearance could not easily be known, because of the marvellous change and alteration that had changed and altered his face from its former bloom of youth; for Ioasaph was black with the sun's heat, and overgrown with hair, and his cheeks were fallen in, and his eyes deep sunken, and his eyelids seared with floods of tears, and much distress of hunger. And Ioasaph recognised his spiritual father, for his features were, for the more part, the same. So the old man stood, and, facing the East, offered up to God a prayer of thanksgiving; and, after the prayer, when they had said the Amen, they embraced and kissed each other affectionately, taking their full fill of long deferred desire. But, when they had done with embracing and greeting, they sat them down and conversed. Barlaam began, saying, "Welcome art thou, son well beloved son of God, and inheritor of the heavenly kingdom through Jesus Christ our Lord, whom thou lovest, whom thou rightly desirest above the things that are temporal and corruptible! Like a prudent and wise merchant, thou hast sold all, and bought the pearl that is beyond price, and hast found the treasure that cannot be stolen, hidden in the field of the commandments of the Lord; thou hast parted with all, and spared naught of the things that so soon pass away, that thou mightest purchase that field for thyself. The Lord give thee the eternal for the temporal, the things that are incorruptible and wax not old for the corruptible! "But tell me, dearly beloved, how thou camest hither? How did thy matters speed after my departure? And hath thy father learned to know God, or is he still carried away with his former foolishness, still under the bondage of devilish deceits?" Thus questioned Barlaam, and Ioasaph answered, telling him piece by piece all that had befallen him since he went away; and in how many ways the Lord had prospered him, until they were come together again. The old man listened with pleasure and amazement, and with hot tears said, "Glory to thee, our God, that ever standest by and succourest them that love thee! Glory to thee, O Christ, King of all and God all-good, that it was thy pleasure that the seed, which I sowed in the heart of Ioasaph, thy servant, should thus bring forth fruit an hundredfold worthy of the husbandman and Master of our souls! Glory to thee, good Paraclete, the all-holy Spirit, because thou didst vouchsafe unto this man to partake of that grace which thou gavest thine holy Apostles, and by his hand hast delivered multitudes of people from superstitious error, and enlightened them with the true knowledge of God!" Thus was God blessed by both, and thus were they conversing and rejoicing in the grace of God until evenfall. Then stood they up for to pray and to perform the sacred services. Then also remembered they that it was meal-time, and Barlaam spread his lavish table, laden with spiritual dainties, but with little to attract the palate of sense. These were uncooked worts, and a few dates, planted and tended by Barlaam's own hands, such as are found in the same desert, and wild herbs. So they gave thanks and partook of the victuals set before them, and drank water from the neighbour springing well, and again gave thanks to God, who openeth his hand and filleth all things living. Then they arose again, and, when they had ended their Night Hours, after prayer, they joined in spiritual converse again, discoursing wholesome words, and full of heavenly wisdom, all the night long until daybreak bade them once more remember the hour of prayer. So Ioasaph abode with Barlaam for some many years, pursuing this marvellous and more than human life, dwelling with him as with a father and tutor, in all obedience and lowliness, exercising himself in every kind of virtue, and learning well from practice how to wrestle with the invisible spirits of evil. From that time forward he mortified all his sinful passions, and made the will of the flesh as subject to the spirit as slave is to his master. He was altogether forgetful of comforts or repose, and tyrannized over sleep as over a wicked servant. And, in brief, such was his practice of the religious life, that Barlaam, who had spent many years therein, marvelled at him, and failed to equal the earnestness of his life. For he took only so much of that coarse and cheerless food as would keep him alive; else had he died afore his time, and forfeited the reward of his well-doing. He subdued himself to watchings, as though he were without flesh and body. In prayer and mental exercise his work was unceasing, and all the time of his life was spent in spiritual and heavenly contemplation, so that not an hour, nor even a single moment was wasted, from the day that he came to dwell in the desert. For this is the end of monastic life, never to be found idle in spiritual employment: and well herein did this noble and active runner of the heavenly race order his way. And he kept his ardour unquenched from beginning to end, ever ascending in his heart, and going from strength to strength, and continually adding desire to desire, and zeal to zeal, until he arrived at the bliss that he had hoped and longed for. XXXIX. Thus did Barlaam and Ioasaph dwell together, rivals in the good rivalry, apart from all anxious care and all the turmoils of life, possessing their minds undisturbed and clear of all confusion. After their many labours after godliness, one day Barlaam called to him his spiritual son, whom he had begotten through the Gospel, and opened his mouth to discourse of spiritual things, saying, "Long ago, dearly beloved Ioasaph, was it destined that thou shouldest dwell in this wilderness; and, in answer to my prayer for thee, Christ promised me that I should see it before the ending of my life. I have seen my desire: I have seen thee severed from the world and the concerns of the world, united to Christ, thy mind never wavering, and come to the measure of the perfection of his fulness. Now therefore as the time of my departure is at the door, and seeing that my desire, that hath grown with my growth and aged with my years, to be for ever with Christ, is even now being fulfilled, thou must bury my body in the earth and restore dust to dust, but thyself abide for the time to come in this place, holding fast to thy spiritual life, and making remembrance of me, poor as I am. For I fear lest perchance the darksome army of fiends may stand in the way of my soul, by reason of the multitude of mine ignorances. "So do thou, my son, think no scorn of the laboriousness of thy religious life, neither dread the length of the time, nor the tricks of devils. But, strong in the grace of Christ, confidently laugh at the weakness of these thy foes; and, as for the hardness of thy toils, and the long duration of the time, be as one that daily expecteth his departure hence, and as if the same day were the beginning and the end of thy religious life. Thus, always forgetting the things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus, according to the exhortation of the holy Apostle, who saith, 'Let us not faint; but though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day. For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding eternal weight of glory; while we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal." "Ponder thou over these things, beloved: quit thee like a man; yea, be strong; and, as a good soldier, do thy diligence to please him who hath called thee to be a soldier. And, even if the evil one stir in thee thoughts of neglecting duty, and thou art minded to slacken the string of thy purpose, fear not his devices, but remember the Lord's command, which saith, 'In the world ye shall have tribulation, but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.' Wherefore, rejoice in the Lord alway; for he hath chosen and separated thee out of the world, and set thee, as it were before his countenance. The Master, who hath called thee with a holy calling, is alway near. Be careful for nothing, but in everything, by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let thy requests be made known unto God. For he himself hath said, "I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee." So, by the hardness of thy life, and by scorn of its rigours, win such thoughts as these, and rejoice, remembering our Lord God, for he saith, 'I remembered God and was glad.' "But when the adversary, seeking another fashion of war, proposeth high and arrogant thoughts, and suggesteth the glory of the kingdom of this world, which thou hast forsaken, and all its lures, hold out, as a shield before thee, the saving word that saith, 'When ye shall have done all those things which are commanded you, say, "We are unprofitable servants, for we have done that which was our duty to do."' And, indeed, which of us is able to repay the debt that we owe our Master, for that he, though he was rich, yet for our sakes became poor, that we through his poverty might become rich, and, being without suffering, yet suffered, that we might be delivered from suffering? What thanks hath the servant if he suffer like as his Master? But we fall far short of his sufferings. Meditate upon these things, casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ. And the peace of God which passeth all understanding shall keep thy heart and thoughts in Christ Jesus." When blessed Barlaam had so said, Ioasaph's tears knew no measure, but, like water from the brimming fountain, bedewed him and the ground whereon he sat. He mourned over the parting, and earnestly implored that he might be his companion on his last journey, and might remain no longer in this world after Barlaam's decease, saying, "Wherefore, father, seekest thou only thine own, and not thy neighbour's welfare? How fulfillest thou perfect love in this, according to him that said, 'Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself,' in departing thyself to rest and life, and leaving me to tribulation and distress? And, before I have been well exercised in the conflicts of the religious life, before I have learned the wily attacks of the enemy, why expose me to fight singlehanded against their marshalled host? And for what purpose but to see me overthrown by their mischievous machinations, and to see me die, alas! the true spiritual and eternal death? That is the fate which must befall inexperienced and cowardly monks. But, I beseech thee, pray the Lord to take me also together with thee from life. Yea, by the very hope that thou hast of receiving the reward of thy labour, pray that, after thy departure, I may not live one day more in the world, nor wander into the ocean depths of this desert." While Ioasaph spake thus in tears, the old man cheeked him gently and calmly, saying, "Son, we ought not to resist the judgements of God, which are beyond our reach. For though I have oftentimes prayed concerning this matter, and constrained the Master, that cannot be constrained, not to part us one from the other, yet have I been taught by his goodness that it is not expedient for thee now to lay aside the burden of the flesh: but thou must remain behind in the practice of virtue, until the crown, which thou art weaving, be more glorious. As yet, thou hast not striven enough after the recompense in store for thee, but must toil yet a little longer, that thou mayest joyfully enter into the joy of thy Lord. For myself, I am, as I reckon, well-nigh an hundred winters old, and have now spent seventy and five years in this desert place. But for thee, even if thy days be not so far lengthened as mine, yet must thou approach thereto, as the Lord ordereth, that thou mayest prove no unworthy match for them that have borne the burden and heat of the day. Therefore, beloved, gladly accept the decrees of God. What God hath ordered, who, of men, can scatter? Endure, then, under the protection of his grace. "But be thou ever sober against thoughts other than these; and, like a right precious treasure, keep safely from robbers thy purity of heart, stepping up day by day to higher work and contemplation, that that may be fulfilled in thee, which the Saviour promised to his friends, when he said, 'If any man love me, he will keep my word: and my father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him.'" With these words, and many others, full worthy of that sanctified soul and inspired tongue, did the old man comfort Ioasaph's anguished soul. Then he sent him unto certain brethren, which abode a long way off, for to fetch the things fitting for the Holy Sacrifice. And Ioasaph girded up his loins, and with all speed fulfilled his errand: for he dreaded lest peradventure, in his absence, Barlaam might pay the debt of nature, and, yielding up the ghost to God, might inflict on him the loss of missing his departing words and utterances, his last orisons and blessings. So when Ioasaph had manfully finished his long journey, and had brought the things required for the Holy Sacrifice, saintly Barlaam offered up to God the unbloody Sacrifice. When he had communicated himself, and also given to Ioasaph of the undefiled Mysteries of Christ, he rejoiced in the Spirit. And when they had taken together of their ordinary food, Barlaam again fed Ioasaph's soul with edifying words, saying, "Well-beloved son, no longer in this world shall we share one common hearth and board; for now I go my last journey, even the way of my fathers. Needs must thou, therefore, prove thy loving affection for me by thy keeping of God's commandments, and by thy continuance in this place even to the end, living as thou hast learned and been instructed, and alway remembering my poor and slothful soul. Rejoice, therefore, with great joy, and make merry with the gladness that is in Christ, because thou hast exchanged the earthly and corruptible for the eternal and incorruptible; and because there draweth nigh the reward of thy works, and thy rewarder is already at hand, who shall come to see the vineyard which thou hast dressed, and shall richly pay thee the wages of thine husbandry. 'Faithful is the saying, and worthy of all acceptation,' as proclaimed by Paul the divine, 'For if we be dead with him, we shall also live with him; if we endure, we shall also reign with him in his eternal and everlasting kingdom, being illuminated with the light unapproachable, and guerdoned with the effulgence of the blessed and life-giving Trinity.'" Thus until even-tide and all night long did Barlaam converse with Ioasaph, who wept tears that could not be stayed, and could not bear the parting. But just as day began to dawn, Barlaam ended his discourse, lifted up his hands and eyes to heaven, and offered his thanks to God, thus saying, "O Lord, my God, who art everywhere present, and fillest all things, I thank thee, for that thou hast looked upon my lowliness, and hast granted me to fulfil the course of this mine earthly pilgrimage in thy true Faith, and in the way of thy commandments. And now, thou lover of good, all-merciful Master, receive me into thine everlasting habitations; and remember not all the sins that I have committed against thee, in knowledge or in ignorance. Defend also this thy faithful servant, before whom thou hast granted to me, thine unprofitable servant, to stand. Deliver him from all vanity, and all despiteful treatment of the adversary, and set him clear of the many-meshed nets which the wicked one spreadeth abroad for to trip all them that would full fain be saved. Destroy, Almighty Lord, all the might of the deceiver from before the face of thy servant, and grant him authority to trample on the baneful head of the enemy of our souls. Send down from on high the grace of thy Holy Spirit; and strengthen him against the invisible hosts, that he may receive at thy hands the crown of victory, and that in him thy name may be glorified, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, for to thee belongeth glory and praise for ever and ever. Amen." Thus prayed he, and in fatherly wise embraced Ioasaph, and saluted him with an holy kiss. Then he sealed himself with the sign of the Cross, and gathered up his feet, and, with exceeding great joy, as at the home-coming of friends, departed on that blessed journey, to receive his reward yonder, an old man and full of days in the Spirit. XL. Then did Ioasaph embrace the good father, with all the devotion and sorrow that can be told, and washed his corpse with his tears. Then he wrapped it in the hair-shirt, which Barlaam had given him in his palace; and over him he recited the proper psalms, chanting all the day long, and throughout the night, and watering the venerable body of the Saint with his tears. On the morrow, he made a grave hard by the cave, and thither reverently bore the sacred body, and there, like a good and honourable son, laid his spiritual father in his sepulchre. And then, the fire of grief kindling all the hotter within his soul, he set himself to pray the more earnestly, saying: "O Lord my God, hearken unto my voice, when I cry unto thee. Have mercy upon me, and hear me, for I seek thee with all my heart. My soul hath sought for thee: O hide not thy face from me, and turn not away in anger from thy servant. Be thou my helper; cast me not utterly away, and forsake me not, O God my Saviour, because my father and mother forsake me; but do thou, O Lord, take me up. Teach me thy way, O Lord, and lead me in the right way because of mine enemies. Deliver me not over unto the souls of them that afflict me; for I have been cast upon thee ever since I was born; thou art my God even from my mother's womb. O go not from me, because, except thee, there is none to help me. For lo, I set the hope of my soul upon the ocean of thy mercies. Be thou the pilot of my soul, thou that steerest all creation with the unspeakable forethought of thy wisdom; and shew thou me the way that I should walk in; and, as thou art a good God and a lover of men, save me by the prayers and intercessions of Barlaam thy servant, for thou art my God, and thee I glorify, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, world without end. Amen." Thus prayed he, and sat him down nigh the sepulchre, a-weeping. And as he sat, he fell asleep, and saw those dread men, whom he had seen before, coming to him, and carrying him away to the great and marvellous plain, and bringing him to that glorious and exceeding bright city. When he had passed within the gate, there met him others, gloriously apparelled with much light, having in their hands crowns radiant with unspeakable beauty, such as mortal eye hath never seen. And, when Ioasaph enquired, "Whose are these exceeding bright crowns of glory, which I see?" "Thine," said they, "is the one, prepared for thee, because of the many souls which thou hast saved, and now made still more beautiful because of the religious life that thou leadest, if thou continue therein bravely until the end. And this other crown is thine also; but it must thou give unto thy father, who, by thy means, turned from his evil way unto the Lord, and was truly penitent." But Ioasaph was as one sore vexed, and said, "How is it possible that, for his repentance alone, my father should receive reward equal to mine, that have laboured so much?" Thus spake he, and straightway thought that he saw Barlaam, as it were, chiding him and saying, "These are my words, Ioasaph, which I once spake unto thee, saying, 'When thou waxest passing rich, thou wilt not be glad to distribute,' and thou understoodest not my saying. But now, why art thou displeased at thy father's equality with thee in honour, and art not rather glad at heart that thine orisons in his behalf have been heard?" Then Ioasaph said unto him, as he was ever wont to say, "Pardon! father, pardon! But shew me where thou dwellest?" Barlaam answered, "In this mighty and exceeding fair city. It is my lot to dwell in the mid-most street of the city, a street that flasheth with light supernal." Again Ioasaph thought he asked Barlaam to bring him to his own habitation, and, in friendly wise, to shew him the sights thereof. But Barlaam said that his time was not yet come to win those habitations, while he was under the burden of the flesh. "But," said he, "if thou persevere bravely, even as I charged thee, in a little while thou shalt come hither, and gain the same habitations, and obtain the same joy and glory, and be my companion for ever." Hereupon Ioasaph awoke out of sleep, but his soul was still full of that light and ineffable glory; and greatly wondering, he raised to his Lord a song of thanksgiving. And he continued to the end, verily leading on earth the life of an angel, and after the death of his aged friend using himself to severer austerity. Twenty and five years old was he when he left his earthly kingdom, and adopted the monastic life; and thirty and five years in this vast desert did he, like one dis-fleshed, endure rigours above the endurance of man, but not before he had delivered the souls of many men from the soul-devouring dragon, and presented them to God, saved for aye; winning herewith the Apostolic grace. In will he had proved a martyr, and had with boldness confessed Christ before kings and tyrants, and had proved himself the mighty-voiced preacher of his greatness, and had overthrown many spirits of wickedness in the desert, and had overcome all in the strength of Christ. Partaking richly of the gift of grace from above, he kept his mind's eye purified from every earth-born cloud, and looked forward to the things that are to come, as though they were already come. Christ was his recompense for all: Christ was his desire: Christ he ever saw as present with him: Christ and his fair beauty everywhere met his sight, according to the saying of the prophet, "I have set God always before me; for he is on my right hand, therefore I shall not fall." And again, "My soul cleaveth to thee; thy right hand hath upholden me." For verily Ioasaph's soul clave to Christ, being knit to him in indissoluble union. From this marvellous work he never swerved, never altered the rule of his ascetic life, from beginning to end, but maintained his zeal from his youth even until old age; or rather, he daily advanced higher in virtue, and daily gained purer power of vision. Thus did Ioasaph spend his days, and render unto him that called him labour worthy of his calling, having crucified the world to himself, and himself unto the world, and, at the last, departed in peace unto the God of peace, and passed to that Master whom he had alway longed for. There he appeared in the immediate presence of the Lord, and was crowned with the crown of glory already prepared for him: there it is granted to him to behold Christ, to be with Christ, to rejoice for ever in the fair beauty of Christ, into whose hands he commended his spirit, when he departed to walk in the land of the living, where is the song of them that feast, the dwelling-place of them that rejoice. As for his venerable body, it befell thus; about the very hour of Ioasaph's death, there came by divine revelation, from one of the neighbouring cells, a certain holy man. It was the same that once pointed out to Ioasaph his way to Barlaam. This man honoured the corpse with sacred hymns, and shed tears, the token of affection, over him, and performed all the last Christian rites, and laid him in the sepulchre of his father Barlaam; for it was only meet that their bodies should rest side by side, since their souls were to dwell through eternity together. In obedience to the strict command of a dread Angel that appeared to him in a dream, this hermit, who had performed the last rites, journeyed to the kingdom of India, and, entering in to King Barachias, made known unto him all that had befallen Barlaam, and this blessed Ioasaph. Barachias, making no delay, set forth with a mighty host, and arrived at the cave, and beheld their sepulchre, and wept bitterly over it, and raised the gravestone. There he descried Barlaam and Ioasaph lying, as they had been in life. Their bodies had not lost their former hue, but were whole and uncorrupt, together with their garments. These, the consecrated tabernacles of two holy souls, that sent forth full sweet savour, and showed naught distressful, were placed by King Barachias in costly tombs and conveyed by him into his own country. Now when the people heard tell of that which had come to pass, there assembled a countless multitude out of all the cities and regions round about, to venerate and view the bodies of these Saints. Thereupon, sooth to say, they chanted the sacred hymns over them, and vied one with another to light lamps lavishly, and rightly and fitly, might one say, in honour of these children and inheritors of light. And with splendour and much solemnity they laid their bodies in the Church which Ioasaph had built from the very foundation. And many miracles and cures, during the translation and deposition of their relics, as also in later times, did the Lord work by his holy servants. And King Barachias and all the people beheld the mighty virtues that were shown by them; and many of the nations round about, that were sick of unbelief and ignorance of God, believed through the miracles that were wrought at their sepulchre. And all they that saw and heard of the Angelic life of Ioasaph, and of his love of God from his childhood upward, marvelled, and in all things glorified God that alway worketh together with them that love him, and granteth them exceeding great reward. Here endeth this history, which I have written, to the best of my ability, even as I heard it from the truthful lips of worthy men who delivered it unto me. And may God grant that all we that read or hear this edifying story may obtain the heritage of such as have pleased the Lord, by the prayers and intercessions of blessed Barlaam and Ioasaph, of whom this story telleth, in Christ Jesu our Lord; to whom belongeth worship, might, majesty and glory, with the Father and the Holy Ghost, now and for evermore, world without end. Amen. 
46947	----	THE Lives of the Saints REV. S. BARING-GOULD _SIXTEEN VOLUMES_ VOLUME THE FIRST [Illustration: SILVER-GILT MONSTRANCE, In the Treasury of the Cathedral, Aix-la-Chapelle.] THE Lives of the Saints BY THE REV. S. BARING-GOULD, M.A. New Edition in 16 Volumes Revised with Introduction and Additional Lives of English Martyrs, Cornish and Welsh Saints, and a full Index to the Entire Work _ILLUSTRATED BY OVER 400 ENGRAVINGS_ VOLUME THE FIRST January LONDON JOHN C. NIMMO 14 KING WILLIAM STREET, STRAND MDCCCXCVII _Printed by_ BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO. _At the Ballantyne Press_ AUTHOR'S PREFACE TO FIRST EDITION (1872) The Lives of the Saints, which I have begun, is an undertaking, of whose difficulty few can have any idea. Let it be remembered, that there were Saints in every century, for eighteen hundred years; that their Acts are interwoven with the profane history of their times, and that the history, not of one nation only, but of almost every nation under the sun; that the records of these lives are sometimes fragmentary, sometimes mere hints to be culled out of secular history; that authentic records have sometimes suffered interpolation, and that some records are forgeries; that the profane history with which the lives of the Saints is mixed up is often dark and hard to be read; and then some idea may be formed of the difficulty of this undertaking. After having had to free the Acts of a martyr from a late accretion of fable, and to decide whether the passion took place under--say Decius or Diocletian, Claudius the Elder, or Claudius the younger,--the writer of a hagiology is hurried into Byzantine politics, and has to collect the thread of a saintly confessor's life from the tangle of political and ecclesiastical intrigue, in that chaotic period when emperors rose and fell, and patriarchs succeeded each other with bewildering rapidity. And thence he is, by a step, landed in the romance world of Irish hagiology, where the footing is as insecure as on the dark bogs of the Emerald Isle. Thence he strides into the midst of the wreck of Charlemagne's empire, to gather among the splinters of history a few poor mean notices of those holy ones living then, whose names have survived, but whose acts are all but lost. And then the scene changes, and he treads the cool cloister of a mediaeval abbey, to glean materials for a memoir of some peaceful recluse, which may reflect the crystalline purity of the life without being wholly colourless of incident. And then, maybe, he has to stand in the glare of the great conflagration of the sixteenth century, and mark some pure soul passing unscathed through the fire, like the lamp in Abraham's vision. That one man can do justice to this task is not to be expected. When Bellarmine heard of the undertaking of Rosweydus, he asked "What is this man's age? does he expect to live two hundred years?" But for the work of the Bollandists, it would have been an impossibility for me to undertake this task. But even with this great storehouse open, the work to be got through is enormous. Bollandus began January with two folios in double columns, close print, of 1200 pages each. As he and his coadjutors proceeded, fresh materials came in, and February occupies three volumes. May swelled into seven folios, September into eight, and October into ten. It was begun in 1643, and the fifty-seventh volume appeared in 1861. The labour of reading, digesting, and selecting from this library is enormous. With so much material it is hard to decide what to omit, but such a decision must be made, for the two volumes of January have to be crushed into one, not a tenth of the size of one of Bollandus, and the ten volumes for October must suffer compression to an hundredth degree, so as to occupy the same dimensions. I had two courses open to me. One to give a brief outline, bare of incident, of the life of every Saint; the other to diminish the number of lives, and present them to the reader in greater fulness, and with some colour. I have adopted this latter course, but I have omitted no Saint of great historical interest. I have been compelled to put aside a great number of lesser known saintly religious, whose eventless lives flowed uniformly in prayer, vigil, and mortification. In writing the lives of the Saints, I have used my discretion, also, in relating only those miracles which are most remarkable, either for being fairly well authenticated, or for their intrinsic beauty or quaintness, or because they are often represented in art, and are therefore of interest to the archaeologist. That errors in judgment, and historical inaccuracies, have crept into this volume, and may find their way into those that succeed, is, I fear, inevitable. All I can promise is, that I have used my best endeavours to be accurate, having had recourse to all such modern critical works as have been accessible to me, for the determining of dates, and the estimation of authorities. Believing that in some three thousand and six hundred memoirs of men, many of whose lives closely resembled each other, it would be impossible for me to avoid a monotony of style which would become as tedious to the reader as vexatious to myself, I have occasionally admitted the lives of certain Saints by other writers, thereby giving a little freshness to the book, where there could not fail otherwise to have been aridity; but I have, I believe, in no case, inserted a life by another pen, without verifying the authorities. At the head of every article the authority for the life is stated, to which the reader is referred for fuller details. The editions of these authorities are not given, as it would have greatly extended the notices, and such information can readily be obtained from that invaluable guide to the historian of the Middle Ages, Potthast: _Bibliotheca Historica Medii Aevi_, Berlin, 1862; the second part of which is devoted to the Saints. I have no wish that my work should be regarded as intended to supplant that of Alban Butler. My line is somewhat different from his. He confined his attention to the historical outlines of the saintly lives, and he rarely filled them in with anecdote. Yet it is the little details of a man's life that give it character, and impress themselves on the memory. People forget the age and parentage of S. Gertrude, but they remember the mouse running up her staff. A priest of the Anglican Church, I have undertaken to write a book which I hope and trust will be welcome to Roman and Anglican Catholics, alike. It would have been unseemly to have carried prejudice, impertinent to have obtruded sectarianism, into a work like this. I have been called to tread holy ground, and kneel in the midst of the great company of the blessed; and the only fitting attitude of the mind for such a place, and such society, is reverence. In reading the miracles recorded of the Saints, of which the number is infinite, the proper spirit to observe is, not doubt, but discrimination. Because much is certainly apocryphal in these accounts, we must not therefore reject what may be true. The present age, in its vehement naturalism, places itself, as it were, outside of the circle of spiritual phenomena, and is as likely to deny the supernatural agency in a marvel, as a mediaeval was liable to attribute a natural phenomenon to spiritual causes. In such cases we must consider the evidence and its worth or worthlessness. It may be that, in God's dealings with men, at a time when natural means of cure were unattainable, the supernatural should abound, but that when the science of medicine became perfected, and the natural was rendered available to all, the supernatural should, to some extent, at least, be withdrawn. Of the Martyrologies referred to, it may be as well to mention the dates of the most important. That of Ado is of the ninth century, Bede's of the eighth;[1] there are several bearing the name of S. Jerome, which differ from one another, they are forms of the ancient Roman Martyrology. The Martyrology of Notker (D. 912), of Rabanus Maurus (D. 856), of Usuardus (875), of Wandalbert (circ. 881). The general catalogue of the Saints by Ferrarius was published in 1625, the Martyrology of Maurolycus was composed in 1450, and published 1568. The modern Roman Martyrology is based on that of Usuardus. It is impossible, in the limited space available for a preface, to say all that is necessary on the various Kalendars, and Martyrologies, that exist, also on the mode in which some of the Saints have received apotheosis. Comparatively few Saints have received formal canonization at Rome; popular veneration was regarded as sufficient in the mediaeval period, before order and system were introduced; thus there are many obscure Saints, famous in their own localities, and perhaps entered in the kalendar of the diocese, whose claims to their title have never been authoritatively inquired into, and decided upon. There is also great confusion in the monastic kalendars in appropriating titles to those commemorated; here a holy one is called "the Venerable," there "the Blessed," and in another "Saint." With regard also to the estimation of authorities, the notes of genuineness of the Acts of the martyrs, the tests whereby apocryphal lives and interpolations may be detected, I should have been glad to have been able to make observations. But this is a matter which there is not space to enter upon here. The author cannot dismiss the work without expressing a hope that it may be found to meet a want which he believes has long been felt; for English literature is sadly deficient in the department of hagiology. FOOTNOTES: [1] This only exists in an interpolated condition. INTRODUCTION TO THE LIVES OF THE SAINTS THE MARTYROLOGIES A martyrology means, properly, a list of witnesses. The martyrologies are catalogues in which are to be found the names of the Saints, with the days and places of their deaths, and generally with the distinctive character of their sanctity, and with an historic summary of their lives. The name is incorrect if we use the word "martyr" in its restricted sense as a witness unto death. "Hagiology" would be more suitable, as a martyrology includes the names of many Saints who were not martyrs. But the term "Martyrology" was given to this catalogue at an early age, when it was customary to commemorate only those who were properly martyrs, having suffered death in testimony to their faith; but it is not unsuitable if we regard as martyrs all those who by their lives have testified to the truth, as indeed we are justified in doing. In the primitive Church it was customary for the Holy Eucharist to be celebrated on the anniversary of the death of a martyr--if possible, on his tomb. Where in one diocese there were several martyrs, as, for instance, in that of Caesarea, there were many days in the year on which these commemorations were made, and the Church--say that of Caesarea--drew up a calendar with the days marked on which these festivals occurred. In his "Church History," Eusebius quotes a letter from the Church of Smyrna, in which, after giving an account of the martyrdom of their bishop, S. Polycarp, the disciple of S. John the Divine, the Smyrnians observe: "Our subtle enemy, the devil, did his utmost that we should not take away the body, as many of us anxiously wished. It was suggested that we should desert our crucified Master, and begin to worship Polycarp. Fools! who knew not that we can never desert Christ, who died for the salvation of all men, nor worship any other. Him we adore as the Son of God; but we show respect to the martyrs, as His disciples and followers. The centurion, therefore, caused the body to be burned; we then gathered his bones, more precious than pearls, and more tried than gold, and buried them. In this place, God willing, we will meet, and celebrate with joy and gladness the birthday of this martyr, as well in memory of those who have been crowned before, as by his example to prepare and strengthen others for the combat."[2] S. Polycarp suffered in the year 166; he had been ordained Bishop of Smyrna by S. John in 96. This passage is extremely interesting, for it shows us, in the age following that of the apostles, the Church already keeping the festivals of martyrs, and, as we may conclude from the words of the letter, over the tombs of the martyrs. In this the Church was following the pattern shown to S. John in vision; for he heard the cry of the souls of the martyrs reposing under the altar in heaven. Guided, doubtless, by this, the Church erected altars over the bodies of saints. Among the early Christian writers there are two, S. Paulinus of Nola, and Prudentius, whose testimony is of intrinsic value, not only from its being curiously interesting, but because it is so full and unequivocal as to the fact of the tombs of the martyrs being used as altars.[3] In one of his letters to Severus, S. Paulinus encloses some verses of his own composition, which were to be inscribed over the altar under which was deposited the body of S. Clavus, of whom the venerable prelate says: "Sancta sub aeternis altaribus ossa quiescunt."[4] Before describing the basilica of Nola, the Saint proceeds to give a sketch of another but a smaller church, which he had just erected in the town of Fondi. After furnishing some details about this latter edifice, he says, "The sacred ashes--some of the blessed relics of the apostles and martyrs--shall consecrate this little basilica also in the name of Christ, the Saint of saints, the Martyr of martyrs, and the Lord of lords."[5] For this church two inscriptions were composed by Paulinus: one, to accompany the painting with which he had adorned the apse; the other, to announce that portions of the relics of the Apostle S. Andrew, of the Evangelist S. Luke, and of S. Nazarius, and other martyrs, were deposited under the altar. His verses may be thus rendered: "In royal shrines, with purple marble graced, Their bones are under lighted altars placed. A holy band enshrined in one small chest, Full mighty names within its tiny breast." Prudentius visited not only the more celebrated churches in Spain built over the bodies of the martyrs, he being a Spaniard by birth, but he also visited those of Italy and Rome on a journey made in 405. During his residence in the capital of Christianity, the poet frequented the catacombs; and he has bequeathed to us a valuable record of what he there saw. In his hymn in honour of S. Hippolytus, he tells us that he visited the sepulchral chapel in which were deposited the remains of the martyr; and, after having described the entrance into the cemetery, and the frescoes that adorned it, he adds: "In gloomy cave the martyr's corpse is placed, And there to God with sacred altars graced, To give the sacrament the board is spread, And zealous guard the holy martyr's bed. The bones are resting in this hallowed tomb, To wait th' eternal Judge's gracious boon; And there with holy food are nourished those Who call on Christ where tawny Tiber flows."[6] In his other hymns, Prudentius bears the most unequivocal testimony to the practice, even then a long time in use, of depositing the relics of the Saints immediately under the altar. It is unnecessary to quote more. The assertions of ancient writers on this point have been several times verified. The bodies of the martyrs have been discovered under the high altars of the churches dedicated to God in their memory. The body of S. Martina, together with those of two other martyrs, SS. Concordens and Epiphanius, were found in 1624 under the high altar of the ancient church near the Roman Forum, which bears the name of the Saint. The body of S. Agnes, and that of another virgin martyr, were also ascertained to be under the high altar of her church, denominated Fuori delle Mura. These, however, had all been removed from the Catacombs into Rome, within the walls. Now this fact being established, as well as that of the annual commemoration of the Saint reposing in the church, it follows that it became necessary for a Church to draw up calendars marking those days in the year which were consecrated to the memory of martyrs whose relics were preserved in it; for instance, in the Church of Fondi, which contained relics of S. Andrew, S. Luke, S. Nazarius, and others, the Holy Eucharist would be celebrated over the relics on the day of S. Andrew, on that of S. Luke, on that of S. Nazarius, and so on; and it would be necessary for the Church to have a calendar of the days thus set apart. In the first centuries of the Church, not only the Saints whose bodies reposed in the church, but also the dead of the congregation were commemorated. When a Roman Consul was elected, on entering on his office he distributed among his friends certain presents, called diptychs. These diptychs were folding tablets of ivory or boxwood, sometimes of silver, connected together by hinges, so that they could be shut or opened like a book. The exterior surface was richly carved, and generally bore a portrait of the Consul who gave them away. Upon the inner surface was written an epistle which accompanied the present, or a panegyric on himself. They were reminders to friends, given much as a Christmas card is now sent. The diptych speedily came into use in the Church. As the Consul on his elevation sent one to his friends to remind them of his exaltation, so, on a death in the congregation, a diptych was sent to the priest as a reminder of the dead who desired the prayers of the faithful. At first, no doubt, there was a pack of these little memorials, each bearing the name of the person who desired to be remembered at the altar. But, for convenience, one double tablet was after a while employed instead of a number, and all the names of those who were to be commemorated were written in this book. From the ancient liturgies we gather that it was the office of the deacon to rehearse aloud, to the people and the priest, this catalogue registered in the public diptychs. In the "Ecclesiastical Hierarchy," attributed to S. Dionysius the Areopagite, but really of a later date, the end of the fifth century, the author says of the ceremonies of the Eucharist, that after the kiss of peace, "When all have reciprocally saluted one another, there is made the mystic recitation of the sacred tablets."[7] In the Liturgy of S. Mark we have this, "The deacon reads the diptychs (or catalogue) of the dead. The priest then bowing down prays: To the souls of all these, O Sovereign Lord our God, grant repose in Thy holy tabernacle, in Thy kingdom, bestowing on them the good things promised and prepared by Thee," etc. It is obvious that after a while the number of names continually swelling would become too great to be recited at once. It became necessary, therefore, to take some names on one day, others on another. And this originated the Necrologium, or catalogue of the dead. The custom of reading the diptychs has ceased to be observed in the Roman Liturgy, though we find it indicated there by the "Oratio supra Diptycha." At present, when the celebrating priest arrives at that part of the Canon called the "Memento," he secretly commemorates those for whose souls he more particularly wishes to pray. But, in addition to the diptychs of those for whom the priest and congregation were desired to pray, there was the catalogue of the Martyrs and Saints for whom the Church thanked God. For instance, in the modern Roman Mass, in the Canon we have this commemoration: "Joining in communion with, and reverencing, in the first place, the memory of the glorious and ever-virgin Mary, Mother of our God and Lord Jesus Christ; as also of Thy blessed apostles and martyrs, Peter and Paul, Andrew, James, John, Thomas, James, Philip, Bartholomew, Matthew, Simon and Thaddaeus; Linus, Cletus, Clement, Xystus, Cornelius, Cyprian, Laurence, Chrysogonus, John and Paul, Cosmas and Damian, and of all Thy Saints," etc. This is obviously a mere fragment of a commemoration of the Blessed Virgin, of the apostles, and then of the special Roman martyrs. The catalogue of the Saints to be remembered was long; there were hundreds of martyrs at Rome alone, and their names were written down on sacred diptychs especially appropriated to this purpose. Such an inscription was equivalent to the present ceremony of canonization. The term canonization itself tells the history of the process. It is derived from that part of the Mass called the Canon, in which occurs that memorial already quoted. On the day when the Pope, after a scrutinizing examination into the sanctity of a servant of God, formally inscribes him among the Saints, he adds his name at the end of those already enumerated in the Canon, after "Cosmas and Damian," and immediately reads Mass, adding this name at this place. Formerly every bishop could and did canonize--that is, add the name of any local Saint or martyr worthy of commemoration in his diocese. When the list became long, it was found impracticable to commemorate all _nominatim_ at once, and the Saints were named on their special days. Thus, out of one set of diptychs grew the Necrologium, and out of the other the Martyrology. The Church took pains to collect and commit to writing the acts of the martyrs. This is not to be wondered at; for the martyrs are the heroes of Christianity, and as the world has her historians to record the achievements of the warriors who have gained renown in conflict for power, so the Church had her officers to record the victories that her sons won over the world and Satan. The Saints are the elect children of the spouse of Christ, the precious fruit of her body; they are her crown of glory. And when these dear children quit her to reap their eternal reward, the mother retains precious memorials of them, and holds up their example to her other children to encourage them to follow their glorious traces. The first to institute an order of scribes to take down the acts of the martyrs was S. Clement, the disciple of S. Peter, as we are told by Pope S. Damasus, in the "Liber Pontificale."[8] According to this tradition, S. Clement appointed seven notaries, men of approved character and learning, to collect in the city of Rome, each in his own region of the city, the acts of the martyrs who suffered in it. To add to the guarantee of good faith, Pope S. Fabian[9] placed these seven notaries under the control of the seven subdeacons, who with the seven deacons were placed over the fourteen cardinal regions of the city of Rome. Moreover, the Roman Pontiffs obtained the acts of martyrs who had suffered in other churches. These acts were the _procès verbal_ of their trial, with the names of the judges under whom they were sentenced, and an account of the death endured. The acts of S. Philip of Heraclea, SS. Hilary and Tatian, and SS. Peter, Paul, Andrew, and Dionysia, are examples of such acts. Other acts were those written by eye-witnesses, sometimes friends of the martyrs; those of the martyrs, SS. Perpetua, Felicitas, and their companions are instances. The first part of these was written by S. Perpetua herself, and reaches to the eve of her martyrdom; then another confessor in the same prison took the pen and added to the eve of his death, and the whole was concluded by an eye-witness of their passion. Other acts again were written by those who, if not eye-witnesses, were able, from being contemporaries and on the spot, to gather reliable information; such are the narratives of the martyrs of Palestine by Eusebius, Bishop of Caesarea. Unfortunately, comparatively few of the acts of the martyrs have come down to us in their genuine freshness; and the Church of Rome, which set the example in appointing notaries to record the facts, has been most careless about preserving these records unadulterated; so that even the acts of some of her own bishops and martyrs, S. Alexander, and S. Marcellinus, and S. Callixtus, are romances devoid of all stamp of truth. Tertullian[10] says that on the natal days, that is, on the days of martyrdom of the Saints who have suffered for Christ, "We keep an annual commemoration." It is easy to see how this usage necessitated the drawing up of lists in which were inscribed not only the names of the martyrs, and the place of their decease, but also a few words relative to their conflict, so that the people might associate their names with their victories, and the names might not become, in time, to them empty sounds. S. Cyprian was absent from Carthage when the persecution was raging there, but he wrote to his clergy, "Note the days of their death, that we may celebrate their commemorations along with the memorials of the martyrs."[11] S. Augustine says,[12] "The Christian people celebrate the memory of the martyrs with religious solemnity, both to excite to imitation, and that they may become fellows in their merits and be assisted by their prayers." Adrian I. quotes the 13th Canon of the African Church and the 47th of the third Carthaginian Council, in a letter to Charlemagne, in which he says, "The Sacred Canons approved of the passions of the Holy Martyrs being read in Church when their anniversary days were being celebrated." The names of the martyrs to be commemorated were announced on the eve. By degrees other names besides those of martyrs were introduced into the Martyrologies, as those of faithful servants of God whose lives were deserving of imitation, but who had not suffered to the death in testimony to the truth. Thus we have confessors, or those who endured hardships for Christ, doctors, or teachers of the Church, virgins, widows, bishops and abbots, and even penitents. The Martyrologies may be divided into two series, the ancient and the modern. We need only concern ourselves with the Ancient Martyrologies. The first to draw up a tolerably full Martyrology was Eusebius the historian, Bishop of Caesarea in Palestine, and he did this at the request of the Emperor Constantine. In this Martyrology he noted all the martyrs of whom he had received an authentic account on the days of their suffering, with the names of the judges who sentenced them, the places where they suffered, and the nature of their sufferings. Eusebius wrote about A.D. 320, but there were collections of the sort already extant, as we may learn from the words of S. Cyprian already quoted, who in his instructions to his clergy ordered them to compile what was practically a Martyrology of the Carthaginian Church. We have not got the Greek Martyrology of Eusebius, but we have the Latin version made by S. Jerome. Bede says of this, "Jerome was not the author, but the translator of this book; Eusebius is said to have been the author." But even this Latin version has not come down to us in its original form. There are numerous copies, purporting to be the Martyrology of S. Jerome, still extant, but hardly two of them agree. The copies have been amplified. The occasion of S. Jerome making his translation was as follows. At the Council of Milan, held in 390, the presiding Bishop, Gregory of Cordova, read out daily on the eve, as usual, the lists of martyrs whose anniversary was to be celebrated on the morrow. As a good number of those present knew nothing of the martyrs thus commemorated, they wrote by the hands of Chromatius, Bishop of Aquileja, and Heliodorus, Bishop of Altino, to S. Jerome, then at Bethlehem, to request him to draw up for their use a Martyrology out of the collection made by Eusebius of Caesarea. To this S. Jerome answered by letter, stating that he had got the passions of the martyrs written by Eusebius, and that he would gladly execute what was asked of him. With this letter he sent the Martyrology, with the name of a martyr to every day in the year except the first of January.[13] Unfortunately, as already said, we have not got a copy of the Martyrology unamended and unenlarged. Next in importance to the Martyrology of Jerome comes the "Martyrologium Romanum Parvum," mentioned by S. Gregory the Great, who sent a copy of it to the Bishop of Aquileja. Ado, Bishop of Vienne, saw this; it was lent him for a few days, and he made a transcript with his own hand, as he tells us in the preface to his own Martyrology, and it served him as the basis for his work. Baronius was unable to discover a copy, though he made inquiry for it, in the libraries of Italy; but it was discovered by Rosweydus, the learned Bollandist, and published by him in 1613. S. Gregory the Great, in his 29th Epistle, says, "We have the names of nearly all the martyrs with their passions set down on their several days, collected into one volume, and we celebrate the Mass daily in their honour." Cassiodorus, in his "Institution of Divine Lessons," says, "Read constantly the passions of the martyrs, which among other places you will find in the letter of S. Jerome to Chromatius and Heliodorus; they flourished over the whole earth, and provoked to imitation; you will be led thereby to the heavenly kingdom." Next in importance to the Martyrology of Jerome and the little Roman Martyrology, comes that of the Venerable Bede. In the catalogue of his own works that he drew up, he says, "I wrote a Martyrology of the natal days of the holy martyrs, in which I took care to set down all I could find, not only on their several days, but I also gave the sort of conflict they underwent, and under what judge they conquered the world." If we compare this Martyrology with the Acts of the Martyrs, we see at once that Bede took his account from them verbatim, merely condensing the narrative. The Martyrology of Bede was written about 720; Drepanius Florus, a priest of Lyons, who died 860, added to it considerably, and most of the copies of Bede's Martyrology that we have are those enlarged by Florus. The next martyrologist was Usuardus, monk of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, who died in 876. He wrote his Martyrology at the request of Charles the Bald, who was dissatisfied with the Martyrologies of Jerome and of Bede because they were too short in their narratives, and also because several days in the calendar were left blank. This account, which Usuardus gives in his preface, does not tally with the words of the epistle attributed to S. Jerome that precedes his Martyrology; and leads to the suspicion that this portion of the epistle, at least, is not genuine. Usuardus certainly used the Hieronyman Martyrology as the basis of his work, and this has caused his work to be designated the larger Hieronyman Martyrology. This work of Usuardus was so full, that it displaced the earlier Martyrologies in a great many churches. The best edition of the Martyrology of Usuardus is that of Solerius, Antwerp, 1714-1717. Usuardus was followed by Wandelbert, monk of Prum, who died in 870. Wandelbert followed the Martyrologies of SS. Jerome and Bede, as amplified by Florus, and wrote the notices of the martyrs in hexameter Latin verses. This monument of patience is composed of about 360 metrical pieces, of which each contains the life of the Saint commemorated on the day. To these, which form the bulk of the work, are prefixed others of less importance, prefaces, dedicatory epistles to Lothair, preliminary discourses on the importance of the Martyrology, on the knowledge of times and seasons, months and days, etc. Although Wandelbert wrote for the most part in hexameters, he abandoned them occasionally for lyric metres, which he managed with less facility. D'Achéry published this Martyrology in his "Spicilegium," but the edition is a bad one. The next martyrologist is Ado, Bishop of Vienne, who has been already mentioned in connection with the "Martyrologium Parvum." Ado was born about the year 800, and died in 875. In his preface, Ado says: "For this work of noting on their proper days the nativities of the Saints, which are generally found confusedly in calendars, I have made use of a venerable and very ancient Martyrology, at Aquileja, sent to a certain holy bishop by the Roman Pontiff, and this was lent me, when at Ravenna, for a few days by a certain religious brother. This I diligently copied, and thought to place it at the head of my work. I have, however, inserted the passions of the Saints somewhat longer in this Martyrology, for the use of the infirm brothers, and those less able to get at books, that they may be able to read out of a little book a compendium to the praise of God and the memory of the martyrs, instead of overhauling a host of big volumes with much labour." The best edition of Ado's Martyrology is that by Geo. Rhodigini, published at Rome, 1740. There have been many later Martyrologies, but these are of far inferior importance, and need not be here enumerated. In the East, the Greeks had anciently their collections. That of Eusebius probably formed the basis of later Menologies. In the Horology are contained calendars of the Saints for every day with prayers; this portion of the Horology is called the Menology. The Menology is divided into months, and contains the lives of the Saints, in abridgment, for each day, or the simple commemoration of those whose acts are extant. The Menology of the Greeks is, therefore, much the same as the Latin Martyrology, and there are almost as many Menologies as there are Martyrologies. The principal is that of the Emperor Basil II. (d. 1025), published by Ughelli in his "Italia Sacra." The larger Menologies are entitled "Synaxaria," because they were read in the churches on days of assembly. These lives are very long, and the Menology contains the substance in a condensed form. The modern Roman Martyrology was drawn up by order of Pope Gregory XIII., who appointed for the purpose eight commissaries, amongst whom was Baronius. It leaves much to be desired, as it bristles with inaccuracies. A fresh edition was issued with some corrections by Benedict XIV. It demands a careful revision. Many of its inaccuracies have been pointed out in the course of this work. It is impossible to dismiss the subject of Martyrologies without a word on the "Acta Sanctorum" of the Bollandists. This magnificent collection of Lives of the Saints is arranged on the principle of the Synaxarium, or Martyrology--that is to say, the Saints are not given in their chronological order, but as they appear in the calendar. Heribert Resweidus, of Utrecht, was a learned Jesuit father, born in 1563, who died 1629. In 1607 he published the "Fasti sanctorum quorum vitae manuscriptae in Belgio," a book containing the plan of a vast work on the lives of all the Saints, which he desired to undertake. In 1613 he published "Notes on the old Roman Martyrology," which he was the first to discover. In 1615 he brought out the "Lives of the Hermits," and in 1619 another work on the "Eremites of Palestine and Egypt." In 1626 he published the "Lives of the Virgin Saints." He died before the great work for which he had collected, and to which he had devoted his time and thoughts, was begun. But the project was not allowed to drop. It was taken up by John Bollandus, another Jesuit; with him were associated two other fathers of the same order, Henschenius and Papebrock, and in 1643 appeared the January volumes, two in number. In 1648 the three volumes of the February Saints issued from the press. Bollandus died in 1665, and the March volumes, three in number, edited by Henschenius and Papebrock, appeared in 1668. As the work proceeded, material came in in abundance, and the work grew under their hands. May was represented by seven volumes; so also June, July, and August. The compilation is not yet complete. At present, this huge work consists of about sixty folio volumes, which bring the student down to within three days of the end of the month of October; but a large store of material is being utilized in order to complete that month forthwith, and further stores have been accumulated towards the Lives of the Saints for November and December, about 4000 of such biographies being still to be actually written. Moreover, the earlier volumes are very incomplete, and at least the months of January to April need rewriting. The principle on which the Bollandists have worked is an excellent one. They have not themselves written the lives of the Saints, but they publish every scrap of record, and all the ancient acts and lives of the Saints that are extant. The work is a storehouse of historical materials. To these materials the editors prefix an introductory essay on the value and genuineness of the material, and on the chronology of the Saint's life. They have done their work conscientiously and well. Only occasionally have they omitted acts or portions of lives which they have regarded as mythical or unedifying. These omissions are to be regretted, as they would have been instructive. Another valuable repository of the lives of Saints is Mabillon's "Collection of the Acts of the Saints of the Order of S. Benedict," in nine volumes, published 1668-1701. The arrangement in this collection is by centuries. Theodoric Ruinart, in 1689, published the Acts of the Martyrs, but not a complete series; he selected only those which he regarded as genuine. With regard to England there is a Martyrology of Christ Church, Canterbury, written in the thirteenth century, and now in the British Museum (Arundell MSS., No. 68); also a Martyrology written between 1220 and 1224, from the south-west of England; this also is in the British Museum (MSS. Reg. 2, A. xiii.). A Saxon Martyrology, incomplete, is among the Harleian MSS. (2785) in the same museum. It dates from the fourteenth century. There is a transcript among the Sloane MSS. (4938), of a Martyrology of North English origin, but this also is incomplete. There are others, later, of less value. The most interesting is "The Martiloge in Englysshe, after the use of the chirche of Salisbury," printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1526, reissued by the "Henry Bradshaw Society" in 1893. To these Martyrologies must be added the "Legenda" of John of Tynemouth, A.D. 1350; that of Capgrave, A.D. 1450, his "Nova Legenda," printed in 1516; Whitford's "Martyrology," 1526; Wilson's "Martyrologue," 1st edition, 1608, 2nd edition, 1640; and Bishop Challoner's "Memorial of Ancient British Piety," 1761. Recently the Rev. Richard Stanton, Priest of the Oratory, London, has issued an invaluable "Martyrology of England and Wales," 1887. Scottish Kalendars have been reprinted and commented on, and brief lives of the Saints given by the late Bishop Forbes of Brechin, in "Kalendars of Scottish Saints," Edinburgh, 1872. Unhappily little is known of the Welsh and Cornish and some local English Saints, but it is my purpose to add such information as can be gathered concerning them. S. BARING-GOULD. _January 1897._ [Illustration: Decoration] FOOTNOTES: [2] Euseb., "Hist. Eccl.," lib. iv., cap. xv. [3] S. Paulinus was born A.D. 353, and elected Bishop of Nola A.D. 409. Prudentius was born A.D. 348. [4] Ep. xii., ad Severum, "His holy bones 'neath lasting altars rest." [5] Ep. xii., ad Severum. [6] Hymn xi. [7] "Eccl. Hierarch.," cap. iii. [8] S. Damasus was born A.D. 304, and died A.D. 384. [9] He died A.D. 250; see Ep. i. [10] Born A.D. 160, died A.D. 245. [11] Ep. xxxvii. [12] Lib. xx., contra Faustum, cap. xxi. [13] The copies of these letters prefixed to the Martyrology vary greatly, and their authenticity has been questioned; but the circumstance is probably true. [Illustration: Decoration] CONTENTS A PAGE S. Adalhardt 34 " Adelelm 461 " Adrian 128 " Aelred 176 " Agatho 137 " Agnes 317 " Aidan 467 " Aldegund 460 " Aldric 96 " Alexander Acoemetus 228 SS. Anastasius and comp. 334 B. Angela of Foligni 63 S. Anteros 38 " Anthony 249 " Apollinaris Synclet 70 " Apollo 372 " Arcadius 162 SS. Archelaa and others 278 S. Artemas 370 " Asclas 346 " Athanasius 38 " Atticus 100 " Audifax 285 " Augurius 312 B S. Babylus 361 " Baldwin 112 " Balthazar 148 " Barsas of Edessa 460 " Bassian of Lodi 286 " Bathild 394 " Benedict Biscop 167 " Bertilia 51 SS. Blaithmac and comp. 289 S. Brithwald 131 C S. Cadoc 363 " Caesaria 167 " Canute Lavard 97 " Cedd 91 " Ceolwulf 236 " Charlemagne 437 " Christiana 146 Circumcision, The 1 S. Clement of Ancyra 347 " Concord 3 Conversion of S. Paul 370 S. Cyriacus 163 " Cyril, Alexandria 418 " Cyrinus 44 SS. Cyrus, John, and others 465 D S. Dafrosa 57 " Datius 210 " Deicolus 280 " Devota 399 " Domitian 136 E S. Egwin 160 SS. Elvan and Mydwyn 5 Epiphany, The 82 S. Erminold 86 " Eulogius 312 " Euthymius 305 " Eutropius 163 F S. Fabian 299 " Fechin 310 " Felix 199 " Fillan 127 " Francis of Sales 443 " Frodobert 112 " Fructuosus 312 " Fulgentius 10 " Fursey 243 G S. Gaudentius 334 " Genoveva 46 " Genulph 247 " Gerlach 81 " Germanicus 284 " Gildas 440 " Gonsalvo 142 " Gordius 42 B. Gotfried 194 S. Gregory of Langres 58 " Gudula 115 H S. Habakkuk 285 " Henry 245 SS. Hermylus and Stratonicus 179 S. Hilary 182 " Honoratus 240 " Hyacintha 462 " Hyginus 149 I S. Isidore 228 J S. James (Tarantaise) 242 " James the Penitent 433 " John the Almsgiver 348 " John the Calybite 233 " John Chrysostom 400 " John of Therouanne 415 " Julian of Le Mans 398 SS. Julian and comp. 121 S. Justina 133 SS. Juventine and Maximus 371 K S. Kentigern 187 L S. Launomar 287 " Laurence Justiniani 119 " Leobard 278 " Lucian of Antioch 88 " Lucian of Beauvais 99 " Lupus of Châlons 413 M S. Macarius, Alexandria 28 " Macarius, Egypt 221 " Macedonius 362 " Macra 85 " Macrina 202 " Marcella 466 " Marcellus 238 " Marcian 134 " Marciana 120 " Mares 374 SS. Maris and others 285 S. Martha 285 SS. Martyrs at Lichfield 28 " Martyrs in the Thebaid 65 S. Maurus 234 " Maximus 371 " Meinrad 321 " Melanius 85 " Melas 239 " Melor 44 " Mildgytha 273 " Mochua or Cronan 20 " Mochua or Cuan 19 " Mosentius 163 N S. Nicanor 133 O S. Odilo 20 B. Ordorico 211 S. Oringa 146 P S. Palaemon 149 " Palladius 417 " Patiens 100 " Patroclus 315 " Paul 215 " Paula 384 SS. Paul and comp. 277 S. Paulinus 436 " Pega 118 " Peter Balsam 39 " Peter Nolasco 470 " Peter of Canterbury 86 " Peter of Sebaste 125 " Peter's Chair 275 " Pharaildis 60 " Polycarp 378 " Poppo 375 " Praejectus 375 " Primus 44 " Prisca 276 " Priscilla 238 R S. Raymund 357 " Rigobert 61 " Rumon 57 S S. Sabine 273 SS. Sabinian and Sabina 439 S. Salvius 160 SS. Satyrus and others 163 S. Sebastian 300 " Serapion 470 " Sethrida 138 " Severinus 101 " Silvester 36 " Simeon Stylites 72 " Simeon the Old 383 SS. Speusippus and others 246 S. Sulpicius Severus 442 S. Susanna 278 " Syncletica 67 T S. Telemachus 7 " Telesphorus 65 " Thecla 278 SS. Thecla and Justina 133 S. Theodoric 414 " Theodosius 151 SS. Theodulus & comp. 202 " Theognis & comp. 44 S. Theoritgitha 397 SS. Thyrsus and comp. 416 " Tigris and Eutropius 163 S. Timothy 359 " Titus 53 " Tyllo 94 U S. Ulphia 468 V S. Valentine 90 " Valerius of Trèves 439 " Valerius (Saragossa) 417 " Veronica of Milan 196 " Vincent 331 " Vitalis 156 W B. Walter of Bierbeeke 341 S. William (Bourges) 139 " Wulsin 118 " Wulstan 290 X SS. Xenophon and Mary 389 " XXXVIII Monks, in Ionia 175 Z SS. Zosimus and Athanasius 38 [Illustration: Decoration] LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS SILVER-GILT MONSTRANCE _Frontispiece_ _In the Treasury of the Cathedral, Aix-la-Chapelle._ THE CIRCUMCISION OF CHRIST _to face p._ 1 _From the grand Vienna edition of the "Missale Romanum."_ OBLATION OF AN INFANT TO A RELIGIOUS COMMUNITY _on p._ 37 S. Genoveva _to face p._ 48 _From "Caractéristiques des Saints dans l'Art populaire énumérées et expliquées," par le_ P. CH. CAHIER, _de la Compagnie de Jesus. 4to. Paris, 1867._ S. SIMEON STYLITES " 72 _From_ HONE'S "_Everyday Book._" THE EPIPHANY " 82 _From the Vienna Missal._ WORSHIPPERS AT THE SHRINE OF A SAINT _on p._ 87 SEAL OF THE CITY OF BRUSSELS " 98 S. GENOVEVA " 132 S. EGWIN, BP. OF WORCESTER _to face p._ 160 _After_ CAHIER. S. AELRED, AB. OF RIEVAUX _to face p._ 176 _From a Design by_ A. WELBY PUGIN. S. ODILO _on p._ 178 S. HILARY BAPTIZING S. MARTIN OF TOURS _to face p._ 184 _From a Window, dated 1528, in the Church of S. Florentin, Yonne._ THE THREE CHILDREN IN THE FIERY FURNACE 184 _From the Catacombs._ SEAL OF ROBERT WISHART, BP. OF GLASGOW, 1272-1316 _on p._ 198 HERMIT SAINTS--S. ANTHONY " 214 HERMIT SAINT _to face p._ 216 _From a Drawing by_ A. WELBY PUGIN. S. CEOLWULF (?) _on p._ 237 S. HONOR� _to face p._ 240 _After_ CAHIER. S. ANTHONY TORTURED BY DEMONS " 252 _From the Design by_ MARTIN SCHONGUER. THE CHAIR OF S. PETER IN THE VATICAN _on p._ 274 S. PETER'S COMMISSION, "FEED MY FLOCK" _to face p._ 274 THE APOSTOLIC SUCCESSION " 274 BAPTISM AND CONFIRMATION _on p._ 283 _From a Painting in the Catacombs._ S. WULSTAN, BP. OF WORCESTER _to face p._ 296 _From a Design by_ A. WELBY PUGIN. SS. FABIAN AND SEBASTIAN _on p._ 298 S. SEBASTIAN _to face p._ 304 _From a Drawing by_ LUCAS SCHRAUDOLF. THE PEACOCK AS A CHRISTIAN EMBLEM _on p._ 311 S. AGNES _to face p._ 316 _From the Vienna Missal._ THE VIRGIN APPEARING TO S. ILDEPHONSUS " 356 _After a Painting by_ MURILLO _in the Museum at Madrid._ S. TIMOTHY " 360 _From a Window of the Eleventh Century at Neuweiler._ S. PAUL _on p._ 369 _After a Bronze in Christian Museum in the Vatican._ THE CONVERSION OF ST. PAUL _to face p._ 370 _After the Cartoon by_ RAPHAEL. ALPHA AND OMEGA; THE FIRST AND THE LAST _on p._ 377 SS. PAULA, PRISCA, AND PAUL _to face p._ 384 S. CYRIL OF ALEXANDRIA " 424 _After the Picture by_ DOMINICHINO (_or_ DOMINIQUIN) _in the Church of Grotta Ferrata, Rome._ S. CYRIL OF ALEXANDRIA " 432 _After_ CAHIER. CHARLEMAGNE AND S. LOUIS " 436 _After a Picture in the Palais de Justice, Paris._ BAPTISM OF VANQUISHED SAXONS BY COMMAND OF CHARLEMAGNE _on p._ 438 _From a Miniature of the 15th Century in the Burgundy Library at Brussels._ S. FRANCIS OF SALES _to face p._ 448 S. ALDEGUND " 460 _After_ CAHIER. VIRGIN IN CRESCENT _on p._ 464 _After_ ALBERT D�RER. S. MARCELLA _to face p._ 466 _After an Engraving of the Seventeenth Century._ S. ULPHIA " 468 _From_ CAHIER. S. PETER NOLASCO " 470 _From_ CAHIER. [Illustration: Decoration] [Illustration: THE CIRCUMCISION OF CHRIST. From the grand Vienna Edition of the "Missale Romanum." Jan. 1.] LIVES OF THE SAINTS January 1. The Feast of the Circumcision of our Lord Jesus Christ. S. GASPAR, _one of the Magi_. S. CONCORD, _P. M., at Spoleto, in Umbria, circ._ A.D. 175. SS. ELVAN, _B., and_ MYDWYN, _in England, circ._ A.D. 198. S. MARTINA, _V. M., at Rome_, A.D. 235. S. PARACODIUS, _B. of Vienne_, A.D. 239. S. SEVERUS, _M., at Ravenna_, A.D. 304. S. TELEMACHUS, _M., at Rome_, A.D. 404. S. FULGENTIUS, _B. C. of Ruspe, in N. Africa_, A.D. 533. S. MOCHUA, or CUAN, _Ab. in Ireland, 6th cent._ S. MOCHUA, or CRONAN, _Ab. of Balla, in Ireland, 7th cent._ S. EUGENDUS, _Ab. of Condate, in the Jura_, A.D. 581. S. FANCHEA, or FAIN, _V. Abss., of Rosairthir, in Ireland, 6th cent._ S. CLARE, _Ab. of Vienne, circ._ A.D. 660. S. WILLIAM, _Ab. S. Benignus, at Dijon_, A.D. 1031. S. Odilo, _Ab. Cluny_, A.D. 1049. THE CIRCUMCISION OF OUR LORD. This festival is celebrated by the Church in order to commemorate the obedience of our Lord in fulfilling all righteousness, which is one branch of the meritorious cause of our redemption, and by that means abrogating the severe injunctions of the Mosaic law, and placing us under the grace of the Gospel. God gave to Abraham the command to circumcise all male children on the eighth day after birth, and this rite was to be the seal of covenant with Him, a token that, through shedding of the blood of One to come, remission of the original sin inherited from Adam could alone be obtained. It was also to point out that the Jews were cut off, and separate, from the other nations. By circumcision, a Jew belonged to the covenant, was consecrated to the service of God, and undertook to believe the truths revealed by Him to His elect people, and to hold the commandments to which He required obedience. Thus, this outward sign admitted him to true worship of God, true knowledge of God, and true obedience to God's moral law. Circumcision looked forward to Christ, who, by His blood, remits sin. Consequently, as a rite pointing to Him who was to come, it is abolished, and its place is taken by baptism, which also is a sign of covenant with God, admitting to true worship, true knowledge, and true obedience. But baptism is more than a covenant, and therefore more than was circumcision. It is a Sacrament; that is, a channel of grace. By baptism, supernatural power, or grace, is given to the child, whereby it obtains that which by nature it could not have. Circumcision admitted to covenant, but conferred no grace. Baptism admits to covenant, and confers grace. By circumcision, a child was made a member of God's own peculiar people. By baptism, the same is done; but God's own people is now not one nation, but the whole Catholic Church. Christ underwent circumcision, not because He had inherited the sin of Adam, but because He came to fulfil all righteousness, to accomplish the law, and for the letter to give the spirit. It was, probably, the extravagances committed among the heathen at the kalends of January, upon which this day fell, that hindered the Church for some ages from proposing it as an universal set festival. The writings of the Fathers are full of invectives against the idolatrous profanations of this day, which concluded the riotous feasts in honour of Saturn, and was dedicated to Janus and Strena, or Strenua, a goddess supposed to preside over those presents which were sent to, and received from, one another on the first day of the year, and which were called after her, strenae; a name which is still preserved in the _étrennes_, or gifts, which it is customary in France to make on New Year's Day. But, when the danger of the heathen abuses was removed, by the establishment of Christianity in the Roman empire, this festival began to be observed; and the mystery of our Blessed Lord's Circumcision is explained in several ancient homilies of the fifth century. It was, however, spoken of in earlier times as the Octave of the Nativity, and the earliest mention of it as the Circumcision is towards the end of the eleventh century, shortly before the time of S. Bernard, who also has a sermon upon it. In the Ambrosian Missal, used at Milan, the services of the day contain special cautions against idolatry. In a Gallican Lectionary, which is supposed to be as old as the seventh century, are special lessons "In Circumcisione Domini." Ivo, of Chartres, in 1090, speaks of the observance of this day in the French Church. The Greek Church also has a special commemoration of the Circumcision. S. CONCORD, P. M. (ABOUT 175.) [S. Concord is mentioned in all the Latin Martyrologies. His festival is celebrated at Bispal, in the diocese of Gerona, in Spain, where his body is said to be preserved, on the 2nd Jan. His translation is commemorated on the 4th July. The following is an abridgment of his genuine Acts.] In the reign of the Emperor Marcus Antoninus, there raged a violent persecution in the city of Rome. At that time there dwelt in Rome a sub-deacon, named Concordius, whose father was priest of S. Pastor's, Cordianus by name. Concord was brought up by his father in the fear of God, and in the study of Holy Scripture, and he was consecrated sub-deacon by S. Pius, Bishop of Rome. Concord and his father fasted and prayed, and served the Lord instantly in the person of His poor. When the persecution waxed sore, said Concord to his father, "My lord, send me away, I pray thee, to S. Eutyches, that I may dwell with him a few days, until this tyranny be overpast." His father answered, "My son, it is better to stay here that we may be crowned." But Concord said, "Let me go, that I may be crowned where Christ shall bid me be crowned." Then his father sent him away, and Eutyches received him with great joy. With him Concord dwelt for a season, fervent in prayer. And many sick came to them, and were healed in the name of Jesus Christ. Then, hearing the fame of them, Torquatus, governor of Umbria, residing at Spoleto, sent and had Concord brought before him. To him he said, "What is thy name?" He answered, "I am a Christian." Then, said the Governor, "I asked concerning thee, and not about thy Christ." S. Concord replied, "I have said that I am a Christian, and Christ I confess." The Governor ordered: "Sacrifice to the immortal gods, and I will be to thee a father, and will obtain for thee favour at the hands of the Emperor, and he will exalt thee to be priest of the gods." S. Concord said, "Harken unto me, and sacrifice to the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt escape eternal misery." Then the governor ordered him to be beaten with clubs, and to be cast into prison. Then, at night, there came to him the blessed Eutyches, with S. Anthymius, the bishop; for Anthymius was a friend of the governor; and he obtained permission of Torquatus to take Concord home with him for a few days. And during these days he ordained him priest, and they watched together in prayer. And after a time, the governor sent and brought him before him once more and said to him, "What hast thou decided on for thy salvation?" Then Concord said, "Christ is my salvation, to whom daily I offer the sacrifice of praise." Then he was condemned to be hung upon the little horse; and, with a glad countenance, he cried, "Glory be to Thee, Lord Jesus Christ!" After this torment he was cast into prison, with irons on his hands and neck. And blessed Concord began to sing praise to God in his dungeon, and he said, "Glory be to God on high, and in earth peace to men of good will." Then, that same night, the angel of the Lord stood by him, and said, "Fear not to play the man, I shall be with thee." And when three days had passed, the governor sent two of his officers, at night, to him with a small image of Jupiter. And they said, "Hear what the governor has ordered; sacrifice to Jupiter or lose thy head." Then the blessed Concord spat in the face of the idol, and said, "Glory be to Thee, Lord Jesus Christ." Then one of the officers smote off his head in the prison. Afterwards, two clerks and certain religious men carried away his body, and buried it not far from the city of Spoleto, where many waters flow forth. SS. ELVAN AND MYDWYN. (ABOUT 198.) [Mentioned in English Martyrologies, and by Ferrarius in his General Catalogue of the Saints. The evidence for these Saints is purely traditional; the first written record of them was by Gildas, A.D. 560, but his account is lost. It is referred to by Matthew of Westminster.] Saint Elvan of Avalon, or Glastonbury, was brought up in that school erroneously said to have been founded by S. Joseph of Arimathea. He vehemently preached the truth before Lucius, a British king, and was mightily assisted by S. Mydwyn of Wales (Meduinus), a man of great learning. Lucius despatched Elvan and Mydwyn to Rome, on an embassy to Pope Eleutherius, in 179, who consecrated Elvan bishop, and appointed Mydwyn teacher. He gave them, as companions, two Roman clerks, Faganus and Deruvianus; or, according to some, Fugatius and Damianus. They returned with these to King Lucius, who was obedient to the word of God, and received baptism along with many of his princes and nobles. Elvan became the second archbishop of London. He and Mydwyn were buried at Avalon. S. Patrick is said to have found there an ancient account of the acts of the Apostles, and of Fugatius and Damianus, written by the hand of S. Mydwyn. Matthew of Westminster gives the following account of the conversion of Lucius, under the year 185:--"About the same time, Lucius, king of the Britons, directed letters to Eleutherius, entreating him that he would make him a Christian. And the blessed pontiff, having ascertained the devotion of the king, sent to him some religious teachers; namely, Faganus and Deruvianus, to convert the king to Christ, and wash him in the holy font. And when that had been done, then the different nations ran to baptism, following the example of the king, so that in a short time there were no infidels found in the island." There is a considerable amount of exaggeration in this account of Matthew of Westminster, which must not be passed over. Lucius is known in the Welsh triads by the name of Lleurwg, or Lleufer Mawr, which means "The great Luminary," and this has been Latinized into Lucius, from _Lux_, light. He was king of a portion of South Wales only. The Welsh authorities make no mention of the alleged mission to Rome, though, that such a mission should have been sent, is extremely probable. Some accounts say that Medwy and Elfan were Britons, and that Dyfan and Ffagan (Deruvianus and Faganus) were Roman priests. But both these names are British, consequently we may conjecture that they were of British origin, but resided then at Rome. Four churches near Llandaf bore the names of Lleurwg (Lucius), Dyfan, Ffagan, and Medwy, which confirms the belief in the existence of these Saints, and indicates the scene of their labours. Matthew of Westminster adds:--"A.D. 185. The blessed priests, Faganus and Deruvianus, returned to Rome, and easily prevailed on the most blessed Pope that all that they had done should be confirmed. And when it had been, then the before-mentioned teachers returned to Britain, with a great many more, by whose teaching the nation of the Britons was soon founded in the faith of Christ, and became eminent as a Christian people. And their names and actions are found in the book that Gildas the historian wrote, concerning the victory of Aurelius Ambrosius." Geoffrey, of Monmouth, who, unsupported, is thoroughly untrustworthy, mentions the same circumstance, on the authority of the treatise of Gildas, now lost. The embassy to Rome shall be spoken of at length, under the title of S. Lucius, December 11th. See also Nennius, § 22; Bede's Eccles. Hist. i. 4; and the Liber Landavensis, p. 65. S. TELEMACHUS, H. M. (ABOUT 404.) The following account of the martrydom of S. Telemachus is given by Theodoret, in his Ecclesiastical History, book v., chap. 26:--"Honorius, who had received the empire of Europe, abolished the ancient exhibitions of gladiators in Rome on the following occasion:--A certain man, named Telemachus, who had embraced a monastic life, came from the East to Rome at a time when these cruel spectacles were being exhibited. After gazing upon the combat from the amphitheatre, he descended into the arena, and tried to separate the gladiators. The bloodthirsty spectators, possessed by the devil, who delights in the shedding of blood, were irritated at the interruption of their savage sports, and stoned him who had occasioned the cessation. On being apprised of this circumstance, the admirable Emperor numbered him with the victorious martyrs, and abolished these iniquitous spectacles." For centuries the wholesale murders of the gladiatorial shows had lasted through the Roman empire. Human beings, in the prime of youth and health, captives or slaves, condemned malefactors, and even free-born men, who hired themselves out to death, had been trained to destroy each other in the amphitheatre for the amusement, not merely of the Roman mob, but of the Roman ladies. Thousands, sometimes in a single day, had been "Butchered to make a Roman holiday." The training of gladiators had become a science. By their weapons, and their armour, and their modes of fighting, they had been distinguished into regular classes, of which the antiquaries count up full eighteen: Andabatae, who wore helmets, without any opening for the eyes, so that they were obliged to fight blindfold, and thus excited the mirth of the spectators; Hoplomachi, who fought in a complete suit of armour; Mirmillones, who had the image of a fish upon their helmets, and fought in armour, with a short sword, matched usually against the Retiarii, who fought without armour, and whose weapons were a casting-net and a trident. These, and other species of fighters, were drilled and fed in "families" by lanistae, or regular trainers, who let them out to persons wishing to exhibit a show. Women, even high-born ladies, had been seized in former times with the madness of fighting, and, as shameless as cruel, had gone down into the arena, to delight with their own wounds and their own gore, the eyes of the Roman people. And these things were done, and done too often under the auspices of the gods, and at their most sacred festivals. So deliberate and organized a system of wholesale butchery has never perhaps existed on this earth before or since, not even in the worship of those Mexican gods, whose idols Cortez and his soldiers found fed with human hearts, and the walls of their temples crusted with human gore. Gradually the spirit of the Gospel had been triumphing over this abomination. Ever since the time of Tertullian, in the second century, Christian preachers and writers had lifted up their voice in the name of humanity. Towards the end of the third century, the Emperors themselves had so far yielded to the voice of reason, as to forbid, by edicts, the gladiatorial fights. But the public opinion of the mob, in most of the great cities, had been too strong both for Saints and for Emperors. S. Augustine himself tells us of the horrible joy which he, in his youth, had seen come over the vast ring of flushed faces at these horrid sights. The weak Emperor Honorius bethought himself of celebrating once more the heathen festival of the Secular Games, and formally to allow therein an exhibition of gladiators. But, in the midst of that show, sprang down into the arena of the Colosseum of Rome, this monk Telemachus, some said from Nitria, some from Phrygia, and with his own hands parted the combatants, in the name of Christ and God. The mob, baulked for a moment of their pleasure, sprang on him, and stoned him to death. But the crime was followed by a sudden revulsion of feeling. By an edict of the Emperor, the gladiatorial sports were forbidden for ever; and the Colosseum, thenceforth useless, crumbled slowly away into that vast ruin which remains unto this day, purified, as men well said, from the blood of tens of thousands, by the blood of this true and noble martyr.[14] S. FULGENTIUS, B. C. (A.D. 533.) [Roman Martyrology and nearly all the Latin Martyrologies. His life was written by one of his disciples, and addressed to his successor, Felicianus. Many of his writings are extant.] Fulgentius belonged to an honourable senatorial family of Carthage, which had, however, lost its position with the invasion of the Vandals into Northern Africa. His father, Claudius, who had been unjustly deprived of his house in Carthage, to give it to the Arian priest, retired to an estate belonging to him at Telepte, a city of the province of Byzacene. And here, about thirty years after the barbarians had dismembered Africa from the Roman empire, in the year 468, was born Fulgentius. Shortly after this his father died, and the education of the child devolved wholly on his mother, Mariana. It has been often observed that great men have had great mothers. Mariana was a woman of singular intelligence and piety. She carefully taught her son to speak Greek with ease and good accent, and made him learn by heart Homer, Menander, and other famous poets of antiquity. At the same time, she did not neglect his religious education, and the youth grew up obedient and modest. She early committed to him the government of the house, and servants, and estate; and his prudence in these matters made his reputation early, and he was appointed procurator of the province. But it was not long before he grew weary of the world; and the love of God drew him on into other paths. He found great delight in religious reading, and gave more time to prayer. He was in the habit of frequenting monasteries, and he much wondered to see in the monks no signs of weariness, though they were deprived of all the relaxations and pleasures which the world provides. Then, under the excuse that his labours of office required that he should take occasional repose, he retired at intervals from business, and devoted himself to prayer and meditation, and reduced the abundance of food with which he was served. At length, moved by a sermon of S. Augustine on the thirty-sixth Psalm, he resolved on embracing the religious life. There was at that time a certain bishop, Faustus by name, who had been driven, together with other orthodox bishops, from their sees, by Huneric, the Arian king. Faustus had erected a monastery in Byzacene. To him Fulgentius betook himself, and asked to be admitted into the monastery. But the Bishop repelled him saying, "Why, my son, dost thou seek to deceive the servants of God? Then wilt thou be a monk when thou hast learned to despise luxurious food and sumptuous array. Live as a layman less delicately, and then I shall believe in thy vocation." But the young man caught the hand of him who urged him to depart, and, kissing it said, "He who gave the desire is mighty to enable me to fulfil it. Suffer me to tread in thy footsteps, my father!" Then, with much hesitation, Faustus suffered the youth to remain, saying, "Perhaps my fears are unfounded. Thou must be proved some days." The news that Fulgentius had become a monk spread far and wide. His mother, in transports of grief, ran to the monastery, crying out, "Faustus! restore to me my son, and to the people their governor. The Church always protects widows; why then dost thou rob me, a desolate widow, of my child?" Faustus in vain endeavoured to calm her. She desired to see her son, but he refused to give permission. Fulgentius, from within, could hear his mother's cries. This was to him a severe temptation, for he loved her dearly. Shortly after, he made over his estate to his mother, to be discretionally disposed of, by her, in favour of his brother Claudius, when he should arrive at a proper age. He practised severe mortification of his appetite, totally abstaining from oil and everything savoury, and his fasting produced a severe illness, from which, however, he recovered, and his constitution adapted itself to his life of abstinence. Persecution again breaking out, Faustus was obliged to leave his monastery, and Fulgentius, at his advice, took refuge in another, which was governed by the Abbot Felix, who had been his friend in the world, and who became now his brother in religion. Felix rejoiced to see his friend once more, and he insisted on exalting him to be abbot along with himself. Fulgentius long refused, but in vain; and the monks were ruled by these two abbots living in holy charity, Felix attending to the discipline and the bodily necessities of the brethren, Fulgentius instructing them in the divine love. Thus they divided the authority between them for six years, and no contradictions took place between them; each being always ready to comply with the will of the other. In the year 499, the country being ravaged by the Numidians, the two abbots were obliged to fly to Sicca Veneria, a city of the proconsular province of Africa. Here they were seized by orders of an Arian priest, and commanded to be scourged. Felix, seeing the executioners seize first on Fulgentius, exclaimed, "Spare my brother, who is not sufficiently strong to endure your blows, lest he die under them, and strike me instead." Felix having been scourged, Fulgentius was next beaten. His pupil says, "Blessed Fulgentius, a man of delicate body, and of noble birth, was scarce able to endure the pain of the repeated blows, and, as he afterwards told us, hoping to soothe the violence of the priest, or distract it awhile, that he might recover himself a little, he cried out, 'I will say something if I am permitted.'" The priest ordered the blows to cease, expecting to hear a recantation. But Fulgentius, with much eloquence, began a narration of his travels; and after the priest had listened awhile, finding this was all he was about to hear, he commanded the executioners to continue their beating of Fulgentius. After that, the two abbots, naked and bruised, were driven away. Before being brought before the Arian priest, Felix had thrown away a few coins he possessed; and his captors, not observing this, after they were released, he and Fulgentius returned to the spot and recovered them all again. The Arian bishop, whose relations were acquainted with the family of Fulgentius, was much annoyed at this proceeding of the priest, and severely reprimanded him. He also urged Fulgentius to bring an action against him, but the confessor declined, partly because a Christian should never seek revenge, partly also because he was unwilling to plead before a bishop who denied the divinity of the Lord Jesus Christ. Fulgentius, resolving to visit the deserts of Egypt, renowned for the sanctity of the solitaries who dwelt there, went on board a ship for Alexandria, but the vessel touching at Sicily, S. Eulalius, abbot at Syracuse, diverted him from his intention, assuring him that "a perfidious dissension had severed this country from the communion of S. Peter. All these monks, whose marvellous abstinence is noised abroad, have not got with you the Sacrament of the Altar in common;" meaning that Egypt was full of heretics. Fulgentius visited Rome in the latter part of the year 500, during the entry of Theodoric. "Oh," said he, "how beautiful must the heavenly Jerusalem be, if earthly Rome be so glorious." A short time after, Fulgentius returned home, and built himself a cell on the sea-shore, where he spent his time in prayer, reading and writing, and in making mats and umbrellas of palm leaves. At this time the Vandal heretic, King Thrasimund, having forbidden the consecration of Catholic bishops, many sees were destitute of pastors, and the faithful were reduced to great distress. Faustus, the bishop, had ordained Fulgentius priest, on his return to Byzacene, and now, many places demanded him as their bishop. Fulgentius, fearing this responsibility, hid himself; but in a time of such trial and difficulty the Lord had need of him, and He called him to shepherd His flock in a marvellous manner. There was a city named Ruspe, then destitute of a bishop, for an influential deacon therein, named Felix, whose brother was a friend of the procurator, desired the office for himself. But the people, disapproving his ambition, made choice unanimously of Fulgentius, of whom they knew only by report; and upon the primate Victor, bishop of Carthage, giving his consent that the neighbouring bishops should consecrate him, several people of Ruspe betook themselves to the cell of Fulgentius, and by force compelled him to consent to be ordained. Thus, he might say, in the words of the prophet, "A people whom I have not known shall serve me." The deacon, Felix, taking advantage of the illegality of the proceeding, determined to oppose the entrance of S. Fulgentius by force, and occupied the road by which he presumed the bishop would enter Ruspe. By some means the people went out to meet him another way, and brought him into the Cathedral, where he was installed, whilst the deacon, Felix, was still awaiting his arrival in the road. Then he celebrated the Divine Mysteries, with great solemnity, and communicated all the people. And when Felix, the deacon, heard this, he was abashed, and refrained from further opposition. Fulgentius received him with great sweetness and charity, and afterwards ordained him priest. As bishop, S. Fulgentius lived like a monk; he fed on the coarsest food, and dressed himself in the plainest garb, not wearing the orarium, which it was customary for bishops to put upon them. He would not wear a cloak (_casula_) of gay colour, but one very plain, and beneath it a blackish, or milk-coloured habit (_pallium_), girded about him. Whatever might be the weather, in the monastery he wore this habit alone, and when he slept, he never loosed his girdle. "In the tunic in which he slept, in that did he sacrifice; he may be said, in time of sacrifice, to have changed his heart rather than his habit."[15] His great love for a recluse life induced him to build a monastery near his house at Ruspe, which he designed to place under the direction of his old friend, the Abbot Felix. But before the building could be completed, King Thrasimund ordered the banishment of the Catholic bishops to Sardinia. Accordingly, S. Fulgentius and other prelates, sixty in all, were carried into exile, and during their banishment they were provided yearly with provisions and money by the liberality of Symmachus, Bishop of Rome. A letter of this Pope to them is still extant, in which he encourages them, and comforts them. S. Fulgentius, during his retirement, composed several treatises for the confirmation of the faith of the orthodox in Africa. King Thrasimund, desirous of seeing him, sent for him, and appointed him lodgings in Carthage. The king drew up a set of ten objections to the Catholic faith, and required Fulgentius to answer them. The Saint immediately complied with his request, and his answer had such effect, that the king, when he sent him new objections, ordered that the answers should be read to himself alone. He then addressed to Thrasimund a confutation of Arianism, which we have under the title of "Three Books to King Thrasimund." The prince was pleased with the work, and granted him permission to reside at Carthage; till, upon repeated complaints from the Arian bishops, of the success of his preaching, which threatened, they said, the total conversion of the city to the faith in the Consubstantial, he was sent back to Sardinia, in 520. He was sent on board one stormy night, that he might be taken away without the knowledge of the people, but the wind being contrary, the vessel was driven into port again in the morning, and the news having spread that the bishop was about to be taken from them, the people crowded to say farewell, and he was enabled to go to a church, celebrate, and communicate all the faithful. Being ready to go on board when the wind shifted, he said to a Catholic, whom he saw weeping, "Grieve not, I shall shortly return, and the true faith of Christ will flourish again in this realm, with full liberty to profess it; but divulge not this secret to any." The event confirmed the truth of the prediction. Thrasimund died in 523, and was succeeded by Hilderic, who gave orders for the restoration of the orthodox bishops to their sees, and that liberty of worship should be accorded to the Catholics. The ship which brought back the bishops to Carthage was received with great demonstrations of joy. The pupil of the bishop, and eye-witness of the scene, thus describes it:--"Such was the devotion of the Carthaginian citizens, desiring to see the blessed Fulgentius again, that all the people ardently looked for him whom they had seen wrestle so manfully before them. The multitude, which stood upon the shore, was silent in expectation as the other bishops disembarked before him, seeking with eyes and thoughts only him whom they had familiarly known, and eagerly expecting him from the ship. And when his face appeared, there broke forth a huge clamour, all striving who should first salute him, who should first bow his head to him giving the benediction, who should deserve to touch the tips of his fingers as he walked, who might even catch a glimpse of him, standing afar off. From every tongue resounded the praise of God. Then the people, going before and following after the procession of the blessed confessors, moved to the Church of S. Agileus. But there was such a throng of people, especially around Fulgentius, whom they especially honoured, that a ring had to be formed about him by the holy precaution of the Christians, to allow him to advance upon his way. Moreover, the Lord, desiring to prove the charity of the faithful, marvellously poured upon them, as they moved, a heavy shower of rain. But the heavy down-pour deterred none of them, but seemed to be the abundant benediction of heaven descending on them, and it so increased their faith, that they spread their cloaks above blessed Fulgentius, and composed of their great love a new sort of tabernacle over him. And the evening approaching, the company of prelates presented themselves before Boniface, the bishop (of Carthage) of pious memory, and all together praised and glorified God. Then the blessed Fulgentius traversed the streets of Carthage, visiting his friends and blessing them; he rejoiced with them that did rejoice, and wept with them that did weep; and so, having satisfied all their wishes, he bade farewell to his brethren, and went forth out of Carthage, finding on all the roads people coming to meet him in the way with lanterns, and candles, and boughs of trees, and great joy, giving praises to the ineffable God, who had wondrously made the blessed Fulgentius well pleasing in the sight of all men. He was received in all the churches as if he were their bishop, and thus the people throughout Byzacene rejoiced as one man over his return." Arrived at Ruspe, S. Fulgentius diligently laboured to correct what was evil, and restore what was fallen down, and strengthen what was feeble in his diocese. The persecution had lasted seventy years, so that many abuses had crept in, and the faith of many was feeble, and ignorance prevailed. He carried out his reformation with such gentleness, that he won, sooner or later, the hearts of the most vicious. In a council, held at Junque, in 524, a certain bishop, named Quodvultdeus, disputed the precedency with the Bishop of Ruspe, who made no reply, but took the first place accorded him by the council. However, S. Fulgentius publicly desired, at the convention of another council, that he might be allowed to yield the precedence to Quodvultdeus. About a year before his death, the bishop retired from all business, to prepare his soul for its exit, to a little island named Circinia. The necessities of his flock recalled him, however, to Ruspe for a little while. He bore the violent pains of his last illness with great resignation, praying incessantly, "Lord grant me patience now, and afterwards pardon." He called his clergy about him, and asked them to forgive him if he had shewn too great severity at any time, or had offended them in any way, and then, committing his soul into the hand of God as a merciful Creator, he fell asleep in the evening of January 1ST, A.D. 533, in his sixty-fifth year. Relics, at Bourges, in France, where May 16 is observed as the feast of his translation, in the year 714. S. MOCHUA, OR CUAN. (ABOUT 6TH CENT.) [Commemorated in the ancient Irish Martyrologies on the 11th April; probably as being the day of his translation. But he died on Jan. 1st. The life of S. Mochua, in the Bollandists, is legendary, and is full of the wildest fable.] SAINT MOCHUA was the son of a certain Cronan, of noble race, and spent his youth in fighting. At the age of thirty, he laid aside his arms, and burnt a house, with all its contents, which had been given to him by his uncle, saying that a servant of Christ should take nothing from sinners. Then he settled at a spot called Teach Mochua. He is said to have healed S. Finnan, or Munnu, of leprosy, and when S. Finnan was about to return home, and his horse broke its leg, S. Mochua summoned a stag out of the forest to come and draw the vehicle, in place of the horse. In his time, the first stone church was erected in Ireland by S. Kieran, and during the building of the church, there fell no rain to impede the masons, for the clouds were stayed by the prayers of S. Mochua. He is said to have founded thirty churches. To assist in drawing wood from the forest to build these churches, Mochua called to his aid twelve stags, which served as patiently and obediently as oxen. And when his virtues drew to him many people and much praise, the old man fled from place to place, for he considered that the glory of this world would turn his heart from the glory of the world to come. And when very aged, he escaped with his oratory bell into a wild and mountainous part, and there the clapper fell to the ground, at a place called Dagrinnis. He was troubled in spirit, so bleak and lonely did the place appear; but an angel announced to him that there he was to build a cell, and there to die; and in this spot he spent thirty years, and wrought many miracles, and died in the ninety-ninth year of his age. It is difficult to clear the lives of many of the Irish Saints from the fable wherewith lively imaginations have invested them, in their oral transmission through many hundreds of years. S. MOCHUA, OR CRONAN, OF BALLA (7TH CENT.) [The day of his death is unknown. He is here mentioned because of the similarity of his name to that of S. Mochua, of Teach Mochua. His life is legendary.] Saint Mochua, or Cronan, was the third son of Began, a man of good family. As a child, he was despised by his parents, and sent to keep sheep. But S. Congal, passing by his father's house, called the boy to follow him, and made him a monk. S. Mochua founded the monastery of Balla in Connaught. He departed to the Lord in the fifty-sixth year of his age. S. ODILO, AB. CLUNY. (A.D. 1049.) [Roman and Benedictine Martyrologies. Two lives of S. Odilo are extant, one written by Jotsald, a monk, who had lived under his rule, and who wrote it for Stephen, the nephew of the Saint. The other, a very inferior life, by S. Peter Damian. Both are printed in the Bollandists, but the first is from an imperfect MS. It was printed entire by Mabillon, Acta SS. O. S. B.] Odilo belonged to the family of Mercoeur, one of the most illustrious of Auvergne. Jotsald says:--"In the beginning of the account of his virtues I must relate what happened to him as a boy. And lest it be thought incredible, I mention that I heard it from those to whom he was wont to narrate the circumstance. When he was quite a little boy in his father's house, before he was sent to school, he was destitute of almost all power in his limbs, so that he could not walk or move himself without help. It happened that one day his father's family were moving to another place, and a nurse was given charge of him to carry him. On her way, she put the little boy down with her bundles before the door of a church, dedicated to the Mother of God, as she and the rest were obliged to go into some adjacent houses to procure food. As they were some while absent, the boy finding himself left alone, impelled by divine inspirations, began to try to get to the door and enter the Church of the Mother of God. By some means, crawling on hands and knees, he reached it, and entered the church, and went to the altar, and caught the altar vestment with his hands; then, with all his power, stretching his hands on high, he tried to rise, but was unable to do so, his joints having been so long ill-united. Nevertheless, divine power conquered, strengthening and repairing the feeble limbs of the boy. Thus, by the intervention of the Mother of God, he rose, and stood upon his feet whole, and ran here and there about the altar. The servants returning to fetch their bundles, and not finding the child, were much surprised, and looked in all directions, and not seeing him, became greatly alarmed. However, by chance, entering the church, they saw him rambling and running about it; then they recognised the power of God, and joyously took the boy in their arms, and went to their destination, and gave him, completely whole, to his parents, with great gladness." As a child, he showed singular simplicity, modesty, and piety. "Thus passed his childish years, and as the strength of youth began to succeed to boyhood, he silently meditated how to desert the flesh-pots of Egypt, and to strive to enter the Land of Promise, through the trials of the world. O good Jesu! how sweet is Thy call! how sweet the inspiration of Thy Spirit, which as soon as Thou strikest on the heart, turns the fire of the Babylonish furnace into love of the celestial country. So! as soon as thou strikest the heart of the youth, thou changest it." Whilst he was thus meditating, S. Majolus passed through Auvergne, and Odilo came to him; then the old man, looking on the graceful form and comely face of the youth, and by the instinct of the Saints seeing into his soul, he loved him greatly; also the youthful Odilo felt a great affection for the aged monk. And when they spoke to one another, Odilo opened his heart to Majolus, and the venerable man encouraged the youth to persevere in his good intentions. Shortly after, Odilo left his home, "as Abraham of old went forth out of Ur of the Chaldees, and sought admittance into the abbey of Cluny, as into the Promised Land. O good Jesu! how pleasant it was to see this sheep shorn of its worldly fleece, again ascend as from the baptismal font! Then, wearing our habit, you might have seen our sheep amongst the others of His flock, first in work, last in place, seeking the pastures of eternal verdure; attending to the lamps, sweeping the floors, and doing other common offices. But the pearl could not remain long concealed. After four years, S. Majolus, after many hard labours borne for Christ, went out of the darkness of Egypt, entered Jerusalem, and was placed in eternal peace by Christ. As death approached, he chose Odilo to be his successor, and to him and to the Lord, he committed his flock." But S. Odilo shrank from the position for which his youth, as he considered, disqualified him; however, he was elected by the whole community, and was therefore unable to refuse the office wherewith he was invested by the vote of the brethren, and the desire of the late abbot. His disciple, Jotsald, gives a very beautiful picture of his master. He describes him as being of middle stature, with a face beaming with grace, and full of authority; very emaciated and pale; his eyes bright and piercing, and often shedding tears of compunction. Every motion of his body was grave and dignified; his voice was manly, and modulated to the greatest sweetness, his speech straightforward and without affectation or artificiality. His disciple says that he would recite psalms as he lay on his bed, and falling asleep, his lips would still continue the familiar words, so that the brethren applied to him the words of the bride, "I sleep but my heart waketh," _Ego dormio et cor meum vigilat_. He read diligently, and nothing gave him greater delight than study. His consideration for others was very marked. "He was burdensome to none, to none importunate, desirous of no honour, he sought not to get what belonged to others, nor to keep what was his own." His charity was most abundant; often the brethren feared that it exceeded what was reasonable, but they found that though he gave largely, he did not waste the revenues of the monastery. Once, in time of famine, he was riding along a road, when he lit on the naked bodies of two poor boys who had died of hunger. Odilo burst into tears, and descending from his horse, drew off his woollen under garment and wrapping the bodies in it, carefully buried them. In this famine he sold the costly vessels of the Sanctuary, and despoiled the Church of its gold and silver ornaments, that he might feed the starving people. Amongst the objects thus parted with was the crown of gold presented to the abbey by Henry, King of the Romans. He accompanied this Prince in his journey to Rome, when he was crowned emperor, in 1014. This was his second journey thither; he made a third in 1017, and a fourth in 1022. Out of devotion to S. Benedict, he paid a visit to Monte Cassino, where he kissed the feet of all the monks, at his own request, which was granted him with great reluctance. "The convocation of the brethren was regularly held by him till he was at the point of death. O how joyous he was in the midst of them, as standing in the midst of the choir, and looking to right and left he saw the ring of young plantings, and remembered the verse of David's song, 'Thy children shall be as the olive branches round about thy table.' _Filii tui sicut novellae olivarum, in circuitu mensae tuae._ And the more the number of brothers increased, the more he exhibited his joy of heart by signs. And when some seemed distressed thereat, he was wont to say, 'Grieve not that the flock has become great, my brothers, He who has called us in, He governs, and will provide.'" Fulbert, Bishop of Chartres, called him the archangel of monks; and the name, says his disciple, became him well. S. Odilo, out of his great compassion for the souls of the dead expiating the penalty of their sins in purgatory, instituted the commemoration of All Souls for the morrow of All Saints, in the Cluniac order, which was afterwards adopted by the whole Catholic Church in the West. Many incidents of his travels, and miracles that he wrought, are related by his pupil. As he was riding over the Jura mountains, in snowy weather, the horse carrying his luggage fell, and was precipitated into the valley, and all the baggage was scattered in the snow-drifts. With much trouble, the horse and much of the baggage were recovered, but a valuable Sacramentary, inscribed with gilt letters, and some glass vessels, with embossed work, were lost. That evening, Odilo and his monks arrived at a cell, under the jurisdiction of S. Eugendus, and being much troubled at his loss, as much rain fell in the night, S. Odilo sent some of the brethren early next morning to search for the lost treasures. But the snow-drifts were so deep that they could not find them, and he was obliged to leave without them. However, as the spring came round, a certain priest, named Ermendran, was walking in the glen, and he found the book uninjured, and the glass goblets unbroken. He brought them to the cell, and on the return of Odilo to the Jura, he received his lost treasures intact. Another story of a glass vessel comes on good authority. The circumstances were related by Albert, Bishop of Como, in these words, "Once our Abbot and Superior came to the court of the Emperor Henry, and whilst there, it happened one day that at table a goblet of glass, of Alexandrine workmanship, very precious, with coloured enamel on it, was placed before him. He called me and Landulf, afterwards Bishop of Turin, to him, and bade us take this glass to Odilo. We accordingly, as the Emperor had bidden, took it, and going to the abbot, offered it to him, on the part of the Emperor, humbly bowing. He received it with great humility, and told us to return after a while for the goblet again. Then, when we had gone away, the monks, filled with natural curiosity to see and handle a new sort of thing, passed the vessel from hand to hand, and as they were examining it, it slipped through their fingers to the ground, and was broken. When the gentle man of God was told this, he was not a little grieved, and said, 'My brothers, you have not done well, for by your negligence, the young clerks who have the custody of these things will, maybe, lose the favour of the Emperor, through your fault. Now, that those who are innocent may not suffer for your carelessness, let us all go to church and ask God's mercy about this matter.' Therefore, they all ran together into the church, and sang psalms and prayed, lest some harm should befall us--Albert and Landulf, each of them earnestly supplicating God for us. When the prayer was over, the holy man ordered the broken goblet to be brought to him. He looked at it, and felt it, and could find no crack or breakage in it. Wherefore, he exclaimed indignantly, 'What are you about, brothers? You must be blind to say that the glass is broken, when there is not a sign of injury done to it.' The brethren, considering it, were amazed at the miracle, and did not dare to speak. Then, after a while, I and my companion came back for the vessel, and we asked it of him who was carrying it. He called me apart, and returned it to me, bidding me tell the Emperor to regard it as a great treasure. And when I asked his meaning, he told me all that had happened." S. Odilo seems to have been fond of art, for he rebuilt the monasteries of his order, and made them very beautiful, and the churches he adorned with all the costly things he could procure. The marble pillars for Cluny were brought, by his orders, in rafts down the Durance, into the Rhone, and he was wont to say of Cluny, that he found it of wood and left it of marble. He erected over the altar of S. Peter, in the church, a ciborium, whose columns were covered with silver, inlaid with nigello work. When he felt that his death approached, he made a circuit of all the monasteries under his sway, that he might leave them in thorough discipline, and give them his last admonitions. On this journey he reached Souvigny, a priory in Bourbonnais, where he celebrated the Vigil of the Nativity, and preached to the people, although at the time suffering great pain. After that, he announced to the brethren in chapter, that he was drawing nigh to his end, and he besought their prayers. As he was too weak to go to the great Church of S. Peter, which was attended by the monks, he kept the festival of the Nativity with a few brethren, whom he detained, to be with him in the Chapel of S. Mary; joyously he praecented the psalms and antiphons, and gave the benedictions, and performed all the ceremonies of that glad festival, forgetful of his bodily infirmities, knowing that soon he was to see God face to face, in the land of the living, and no more in a glass darkly. Most earnest was he, lest death should come and find him unprepared. Throughout the Octave, he was carried in the arms of the monks to church, where he assisted at the choir offices, night and day, and at the celebration of the mass, refreshing himself at the sacred mysteries, and looking forward to the feast of the Circumcision, when his friend William, abbot of Dijon, had fallen asleep, on which day, he foretold, he also should enter into his rest. On that day, carried by his brethren, he was laid before the altar of the Virgin Mother, and the monks sang vespers. Now and then their voices failed, through over much sorrow, and then he recited the words of the psalms they in their trouble had omitted. As night crept in at the windows, he grew weaker and fainter. Then the brothers laid sack-cloth and ashes under him, and as he was lifted in the arms of one, brother Bernard, he asked, reviving a little, where he was. The brother answered, "On sack-cloth and ashes." Then he sighed forth, "God be thanked!" and he asked that the little children, and the whole body of the brethren, might be assembled. And when all were gathered around him, he directed his eyes to the Cross, and his lips moved in prayer, and he died thus in prayer, gazing on the sign of his salvation. His body was laid in the nave of the Church of Souvigny, near that of S. Majolus. He is often represented saying mass, with purgatory open beside the altar, and those suffering extending their hands to him, in allusion to his having instituted the commemoration of All Souls. FOOTNOTES: [14] The Hermits, by Rev. C. Kingsley, p. 153, 154. [15] This passage has been quoted by some to show that at this period special vestments were not in general use for the Eucharist, as an argument against their present use. But it by no means appears from the passage quoted that Fulgentius did not wear Eucharistic vestments. It simply says that he wore at Mass the habit he lived and slept in. This is what monks and friars do now; they put the vestment over the habit. JANUARY 2. The Octave of S. Stephen, the First Martyr. SS. FRONTASIUS, AND COMPANIONS, _MM. in Gaul_. SS. MARTYRS, _at Lichfield, circ._ A.D. 304. S. ISIDORE, _B.C., in Egypt, 4th cent._ S. MACARIUS, OF ALEXANDRIA, _Ab._, A.D. 394. S. ASPASIUS, C., _at Melun, France_, A.D. 550. S. MAXIMUS, _Ab. M., in France_, A.D. 614. S. ADALHARDT, _Ab. of Corbie_, A.D. 826. S. SILVESTER, _Monk of Trani, in S. Italy_, A.D. 1185. THE HOLY MARTYRS OF LICHFIELD. (A.D. 304.) [Anglican Martyrologies.] Lichfield derives its name from Lyke-field, the field of dead bodies, because it is traditionally said, that in the persecution of Diocletian, many Christians suffered there for the faith. The arms of Lichfield are a plain strewn with corpses. Nothing certain is known of this event, which is probably altogether apocryphal. S. MACARIUS OF ALEXANDRIA, AB. (A.D. 394.) [There were two Macarii. Both are commemorated together by the Greeks, on Jan. 19th; but the Latins commemorate S. Macarius of Alexandria, on Jan. 2nd; and S. Macarius the Egyptian, on Jan. 15th. The history of this S. Macarius is perfectly authentic, having been written by S. Palladius (B. 368,) in the year 421; the writer knew S. Macarius personally, having been nine years in "the cells," of which S. Macarius was priest. Three of these years Macarius and Palladius lived together; so that, as the author says, he had every opportunity of judging of his manner of life and actions.] Saint Macarius the younger was born in Alexandria, of poor parents, and followed the trade of confectioner. Desirous of serving God with his whole heart, he forsook the world in the flower of his age, and spent upwards of sixty years in the deserts, in the exercise of fervent penance and prayer. He first retired into the Thebaid, or Upper Egypt, about the year 335; then, aiming at greater disengagement, he descended to Lower Egypt, in or about the year 373. Here there were three deserts almost adjoining each other; that of Scété; that of the Cells, so called because of the multitude of cells wherewith its rocks were honey-combed; and a third, which reached the western bank of the Nile, called the Nitrian desert. S. Macarius had a cell in each of these deserts. When he was in Nitria he gave advice to those who sought him. But his chief residence was in the desert of the Cells. There each hermit lived separate, assembling only on Saturday and Sunday, in the church, to celebrate the divine mysteries, and to partake of the Holy Communion. All the brothers were employed at some handicraft, generally they platted baskets or mats. All in the burning desert was still; in their cells the hermits worked, and prayed, and cooked their scanty victuals, till the red ball of the sun went down behind the sandy plain to the west; then from all that region rose a hum of voices, the rise and fall of song, as the evening psalms and hymns were being chanted by that great multitude of solitaries in dens and caves of the earth. Palladius has recorded an instance of the great self-denial observed by these hermits. A present was made to S. Macarius of a bunch of grapes, newly gathered. The holy man carried it to a neighbouring solitary who was sick; he sent it to another, and each wishing that some dear brother should enjoy the fruit rather than himself, passed it on to another; and thus the bunch of grapes made the circuit of the cells, and was brought back to Macarius. The severity of life practised by these hermits was great. For seven years together S. Macarius lived on raw herbs and pulse, and for the three following years contented himself with four or five ounces of bread a day. His watchings were not less surprising. He told Palladius that it had been his great desire to fix his mind on God alone for five days and nights continuously. And when he supposed he was in the proper mood, he closed his cell, and stood up, and said, "Now thou hast angels and archangels, and all the heavenly host in company with thee. Be in heaven, and forget earthly things." And so he continued for two nights and days, wrapped in heavenly contemplations, but then his hut seemed to flame about him, even the mat on which he stood, and his mind was diverted to earth. "But it was as well," said he; "for I might have fallen into pride." The reputation of the monastery of Tabenna, under S. Pachomius, drew him to it in disguise. S. Pachomius told him he seemed too far advanced in years to begin to practise the austerities undergone by himself and his monks; nevertheless, on his earnest entreaty, he admitted him. Then Lent drew on, and the aged Macarius saw the monks fasting, some two whole days, others five, some standing all night, and sitting at their work during the day. Then he, having soaked some palm leaves, as material for his work, went apart into a corner, and till Easter came, he neither ate nor drank, nor sat down, nor bowed his knee, nor lay down, and sustained life on a few raw cabbage leaves which he ate on Sundays; and when he went forth for any need he returned silently to his work, and occupied his hands in platting, and his heart in prayer. But when the others saw this, they were astonished, and remonstrated with S. Pachomius, saying, "Why hast thou brought this fleshless man here to confound us with his austerities. Send him away, or we will desert this place." Then the abbot went to Macarius, and asked him who he was, and when he told his name, Pachomius was glad, and cried, "Many years have I desired to see thee. I thank thee that thou hast humbled my sons; but now, go thy way, sufficiently hast thou edified us; go, and pray for us." Macarius, on one occasion, to subdue his flesh, filled two great baskets with sand, and laying them on his shoulders, walked over the hot desert, bowed beneath them. A friend meeting him, offered to ease him of his burden, but "No," said the old hermit, "I have to torment my tormentor;" meaning his body. One day, a gnat stung him in his cell, and he killed it. Then, ashamed that he had allowed himself to be irritated by the petty insect, and to have lost an opportunity of enduring mortification with equanimity, he went to the marshes of Scété, and stayed there six months, suffering greatly from the stings of the insects. When he returned, he was so disfigured by their bites, that he was only recognized by his voice. The terrible severity with which these Egyptian hermits punished themselves is perhaps startling, but it was something needed at a time when the civilized world was sunk in luxury, profligacy, and indifference. That was a time which called for a startling and vivid contrast to lead minds into self-inspection. "Private profligacy among all ranks was such as cannot be described in any modern pages. The clergy of the cities, though not of profligate lives, and for the most part unmarried, were able to make no stand against the general corruption of the age, because--at least if we are to trust such writers as Jerome and Chrysostom--they were giving themselves up to ambition and avarice, intrigue and party spirit. No wonder if, in such a state of things, the minds of men were stirred by a passion akin to despair. It would have ended often, but for Christianity, in such an actual despair as that which had led, in past ages, more than one noble Roman to slay himself, when he lost all hope for the Republic. Christianity taught those who despaired of society, of the world--in one word, of the Roman empire, and all that it had done for men--to hope at last for a Kingdom of God after death. It taught those, who, had they been heathens and brave enough, would have slain themselves to escape out of a world which was no place for honest men, that the body must be kept alive, at least, for the sake of the immortal soul, doomed, according to its works, to endless bliss or endless torment. But that the world--such, at least, as they saw it then--was doomed, Scripture and their own reason taught them. They did not merely believe, but see, in the misery and confusion, the desolation, and degradation around them, that all that was in the world, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, and the pride of life, was not of the Father, but of the world; that the world was passing away, and the lust thereof, and that only he who did the will of God could abide for ever. They did not merely believe, but saw, that the wrath of God was revealed from heaven against all unrighteousness of men; and that the world in general was treasuring up to themselves wrath, tribulation, and anguish, against a day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God, who would render to every man according to his works. That they were correct in their judgment of the world about them, contemporary history proves abundantly. That they were correct, likewise, in believing that some fearful judgment was about to fall on man, is proved by the fact that it did fall; that the first half of the fifth century saw, not only the sack of Rome, but the conquest and desolation of the greater part of the civilized world, amid bloodshed, misery, and misrule, which seemed to turn Europe into a chaos, which would have turned it into a chaos, had there not been a few men left who still felt it possible and necessary to believe in God, and to work righteousness. Under these terrible forebodings, men began to flee from a doomed world, and try to be alone with God, if by any means they might save each man his own soul in that dread day."[16] S. Macarius, of Alexandria, and his namesake, the Egyptian, lived much together. They were both exiled in 375, at the instigation of the Arian patriarch of Alexandria, who dreaded their influence over the people, and zeal for the orthodox faith. They crossed the Nile together in a ferryboat, when they encountered two military tribunes, accompanied by a great array of horses, with decorated bridles, of equipages, soldiers, and pages covered with ornaments. The officers looked long at the two monks in their old dresses, humbly seated in a corner of the bark. They might well look at them, for in that bark two worlds stood face to face; old Rome, degraded by the emperors, and the new Christian republic, of which the monks were the precursors. As they approached the shore, one of the tribunes said to the cenobites, "You are happy, for you despise the world." "It is true," answered the Alexandrine, "we despise the world, and the world despises you. You have spoken more truly than you intended; we are happy in fact, and happy in name, for we are called Macarius, which means in Greek happy." The tribune made no answer, but, returning to his house, renounced all his wealth and rank, and went to seek happiness in solitude. In art, S. Macarius is represented with wallets of sand on his shoulders; sometimes with a hyaena and its young, because the story is told that one day a hyaena brought her young one and laid it at the feet of the hermit. He looked at the animal, and saw that it was blind, therefore he pitied the poor whelp, and prayed to God; then he touched the eyes of the young hyaena, and it saw plain. Next day, the mother brought a sheepskin and laid it at his feet, and this the hermit wore continually afterwards, till he gave it to S. Melania. FOOTNOTES: [16] Kingsley, The Hermits, p. 4, 6. S. ADALHARDT, OR ADELARD, AB. C. (A.D. 826.) [Named in many later Western Martyrologies, but not enrolled in the Roman Kalendar. He is variously called Adelhard, Adalarch, Alard, and Adelhardt. His life was written by S. Paschasius Radbertus, his disciple, and this was epitomized by S. Gerard, of Sauve-Majeur, in the 11th century. Paschasius says that the reason of his writing the life, was "to recall him whom almost the whole world regards as holy and admirable; whom we have seen, and whose love we enjoyed."] Adalhardt was of royal race, having been the son of Bernhardt, son of Charles Martel, the brother of King Pepin; so that Adalhardt was cousin-german to Charlemagne, by whom he was called to court in his youth, and created Count of the Palace. But when the king put away his wife, the daughter of Desiderius, King of Italy, to marry another, Adalhardt left the court, disgusted with its lawlessness and vice, and became a monk at Corbie, at the age of twenty, in the year 773. He was made gardener, and, as his historian says, "With Mary he sought Jesus in the garden." At Corbie, he was so frequently visited by his relations, his friends, and acquaintances, that he had not sufficient solitude for the labour of turning his soul from earth to heaven; therefore he left Corbie and betook himself to Monte Cassino; but by order of the Emperor Charles, he was brought back again to Corbie, where he was shortly after elected abbot. He was compelled at last, by Charlemagne, to quit the monastery, and take upon him the charge of prime minister to his son Pepin, to whom he had intrusted the government of Italy. On the death of Charlemagne, Louis the Pious succeeded to the throne, and dismissed all the old ministers and officers of his father. Bernard, son of Pepin, the elder brother of Louis, who was dead, having asserted his right to the throne, King Louis suspected the abbot of Corbie of having been privy to this attempt, and he exiled him to the island of Heri, or Herimoutier, and his brothers and sisters were sent into monasteries. His brother Walla was forced to become a monk at Corbie; Bernharius was sent to Lerins; his sister Gundrada was given to the charge of S. Radegund, at Poictiers, and only Theodradra was left unmolested at Soissons. Adalhardt spent seven years in banishment at Herimoutier, and then the king, having recognized his error, recalled him, to the great grief of the monks of Heri, to whom his meekness and charity had made him dear, and to the joy of those of Corbie, to whom he returned. He was not, however, allowed to remain at peace in his abbey at the head of his monks, but was recalled to court, where the king, whose disposition was much changed, followed his advice in all his undertakings, and Adalhardt was of great use to him, in suggesting improvement in the laws. At length, in 823, he obtained leave to return to Corbie, which he governed till his death. He had an admirable memory, so that he never forgot the face, or name, or disposition of one of his monks; and he was careful to speak with each of them once a week. During the banishment of the Saint, another Adalhardt, who governed the monastery by his appointment, began the foundation of another Corbie, in the diocese of Paderborn, in Westphalia, that it might be a nursery of missionaries for the conversion of the northern nations. S. Adalhardt often journeyed from one Corbie to the other, that he might provide for the welfare, and look to the discipline of both houses. Finding himself attacked with fever, and knowing that he should not recover, he used every effort to reach the mother house before Christmas. This he achieved, and there he calmly prepared for his passage, communicating daily. Hearing of his sickness, Hildemann, Bishop of Beauvais, who had been a monk under him, hurried to his side, and administered to him the Sacrament of extreme unction, and scarcely left him. One day, however, the bishop left the room for a moment, and, on his return, saw the sick man in great transport. The Abbot exclaimed, "Hither speedily, Bishop, I urge you, and kiss the feet of Jesus, my Lord, for He is at my side." Then the Bishop of Beauvais trembled with awe, and stood still, not knowing what to say or do. But Adalhardt said no more. On the Octave of the Nativity, he called together the brethren, and having received the Body and Blood of Christ, he said to the assembled monks, "O my sons, the fruit of my old age in the Lord! I have finished the number of my days, and to-day I shall depart, and go the way of all flesh, and appear in the presence of my Redeemer. I have finished the course of my struggle, and what reward I shall receive, I know not. But help me, I pray, that I in you, and you in me, may rejoice in the Lord." Thus saying, he surrendered his pure soul to Him who made it. He was buried at the foot of the chancel steps in the Church of S. Peter, at Corbie; but in the year 1040 the body was taken up and enshrined. S. SILVESTER, OF TRANI, MONK. (A.D. 1185.) [S. Silvester, monk of Trani, near Barletta, in South Italy, is held there in great reverence, and commemorated on the 2nd Jan. and 2nd May.] Saint Silvester, of whom nothing authentic is known, is traditionally said to have been a monk of the order of S. Basil, in the convent of S. Michael, at Bari. Various miracles are attributed to him, as his having gone one winter day to Catania and back on foot. He is also said to have entered a baker's furnace to scrape the living embers together for him, when he had lost his shovel, and to have come forth unhurt. [Illustration: Oblation of an Infant to a Religious Community. After a Miniature in the Burgundy Library at Brussels.] January 3. The Octave of S. John, the Evangelist. S. ANTEROS, _Pope and M., at Rome_, A.D. 236. S. FLORENTIUS, _B.M., at Vienne, in France, circ._ A.D. 258. SS. ZOSIMUS AND ATHANASIUS, _MM., in Cilicia, circ._ A.D. 290. S. PETER BALSAM, _M., at Aulane in Palestine_, A.D. 291. S. GORDIUS, _M., at Caesarea, circ._ A.D. 320. SS. THEOGNIS, PRIMUS, AND CYRINUS, _MM., circ._ A.D. 320. S. MELOR, _M., in Cornwall, circ._ A.D. 411. S. GENOVEVA, _V., at Paris_, A.D. 512. S. BERTILIA, _V., at Marolles_, A.D. 687. S. ANTEROS, P. M. (A.D. 236.) [Commemorated in the Roman Martyrology, and in that attributed to Bede, that of Usuardus, &c.] Saint Anteros succeeded S. Pontianus as Bishop of Rome in 235. He instituted the office of notaries in the Church, to take down the sayings and sufferings of the martyrs, so that faithful records of their acts might be preserved. He died, June 18th, A.D. 236. SS. ZOSIMUS AND ATHANASIUS, MM. (ABOUT A.D. 290.) [Roman Martyrology and Greek Menaea. The Greeks keep their commemoration, however, on Jan. 4th. The authority for the following account is the Greek Menaea.] These martyrs suffered under Diocletian, in Cilicia. S. Zosimus was a hermit. His ears were burnt off with red hot irons, afterwards he was plunged into a vessel of molten lead, and was then dismissed. He returned to his desert, converted and baptized Athanasius, and died in his cell. S. PETER BALSAM, M. (A.D. 291.) [Commemorated in most Latin Martyrologies, and in the Greek Menaea on the 12th Jan. He is mentioned as Peter the Ascetic, by Eusebius; his genuine Acts are given in Ruinart.] Eusebius, in his account of the martyrs of Palestine, appended to the 8th book of his Ecclesiastical History, says:--"On the eleventh of the month Audynoeus, _i.e._, on the third of the ides of January (11th Jan.), in the same city of Caesarea, Peter the Ascetic, also called Absolom, from the village of Anea, on the borders of Eleutheropolis, like the purest gold, with a good resolution, gave proof of his faith in the Christ of God. Disregarding both the judge and those around him, that besought him in many ways to have compassion on himself, and to spare his youth and blooming years, he preferred his hope in the Supreme God of all, and even to life itself." The name of this Saint seems to have been Peter Absolom; the latter appellation has been corrupted into Apselm, Anselm, and Balsam. The acts of his martrydom are authentic. They are as follows:-- At that time Peter, called Balsam, was captured at Aulane, in the time of persecution. He came from the borders of Eleutheropolis, and was brought before the governor, Severus, who said to him, "What is your name?" Peter answered, "I am called by my paternal name of Balsam, but in baptism I received my spiritual name of Peter." The Governor, "To what family do you belong?" Peter, "I am a Christian." The Governor, "What office do you bear?" Peter, "What office can be more honourable than to live a Christian?" The Governor, "Have you any parents?" Peter, "I have none." The Governor, "There you lie, for I have heard that you have." Peter, "In the Gospel I am commanded to renounce all things when I come to confess Christ." The Governor, "Do you know the imperial edicts?" Peter, "I know the laws of God, the Sovereign true and everlasting." The Governor, "It is commanded by the most clement emperors that all Christians shall either sacrifice, or be executed in various ways." Peter, "And this is the command of the everlasting King. If thou sacrifice to any demon, and not to God alone, thou shalt be plucked out of the Book of the Living. Judge thou which I shall obey." The Governor, "Come, listen to me, sacrifice and obey the law." Peter, "I will not sacrifice to gods made by men's hands of wood and stone." And he poured forth a vehement invective against idolatry. The governor ordered him to the rack, and when he was slung to it, he said, "Well, Peter, what say you to this? How do you like your swing?" Peter said, "Bring the iron hooks; I have already told thee that I will not sacrifice to devils, but to God alone, for whom I suffer." The governor ordered him to be tortured. And when the stress of torment was very great, the martyr uttered no cry of pain, but sang, "One thing have I desired of the Lord, which I will require: even that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the fair beauty of the Lord, and to visit His temple. What reward shall I give unto the Lord for all the benefits that He hath done unto me? I will take the cup of salvation, and call upon the Name of the Lord." As he thus spake, the governor ordered other executioners to come to the work, being much exasperated. And the crowd standing by, when they saw much blood run over the pavement, lamented, and urged him, saying, "O man, compassionate thyself, and sacrifice, that thou mayest escape these dreadful pains." But the holy man of God answered them, "These pains are nothing, and give me no suffering; but were I to deny the name of my God, I know that I should fall into greater torments, which would last eternally." The Governor said, "You had better sacrifice, or you will repent it." "No," answered Peter; "I will not sacrifice, and I shall not repent it." The Governor said, "Well, then I shall pronounce sentence." "That," said Peter, "is what I most ardently desire." Then the governor gave sentence in these words, "I command Peter, continuously despising the commands of the unconquered emperors, to suffer the death of the cross." Thus, the venerable athlete of Christ, fulfilling his agony, was found worthy to participate in the Passion of his Lord. And he suffered at Aulane, on the third of the nones of January (Jan. 3rd,) under Maximian, the emperor. This account is somewhat abbreviated from the Acts. There is some little discrepancy between it and that of Eusebius. The ecclesiastical historian says he was executed at Caesarea; the Acts say at Aulane; but as this was an insignificant village in the district over which the governor of Caesarea held jurisdiction, the discrepancy is only apparent. Eusebius says he suffered on the third of the ides; the Acts, that he suffered on the third of the nones. It is probable that Eusebius is right, for the Greeks observe the martyrdom of S. Peter Balsam on the 12th Jan., and in the Martyrology, attributed to S. Jerome, the passion of this Saint is given as occurring on the third of the ides, 11th Jan. S. GORDIUS M. (ABOUT 320.) [Commemorated by the Roman Martyrology and the Greek Menaea on the same day. The account of his passion is given by S. Basil the Great in a panegyric at Caesarea, on the anniversary of his martyrdom, which he says was then recent. This account, given on the scene of his suffering, within the memory of man, so that some of those who heard the discourse of S. Basil, had seen the conflict of the martyr, is unquestionably trustworthy.] Saint Gordius was a native of Caesarea, in Cappadocia, and was a centurion in the army. When Galerius issued his edicts against the Church in the East (303,) Gordius laid aside his office, and retired into the desert, where he lived in fasting and prayer amongst the wild beasts. In the desert he spent many years, but his zeal for Christ gave him no rest. The churches in Caesarea had been destroyed, the clergy scattered, and many Christians had conformed, rather than lose their lives. It was a heathen city once more, and such salt as had remained had lost its savour. The spirit of the Lord stirred in the soul of Gordius, and urged him to return to his native city, and there play the man for Christ, where so many had fallen away from the faith. "One day that the amphitheatre was crowded to see horse and chariot races in honour of Mars, the god of war, when the benches were thronged, and Jew and Gentile, and many a Christian also," says S. Basil, "was present at the spectacle, and all the slaves were free to see the sight, and the boys had been given holiday from school for the same purpose, suddenly, in the race-course, appeared a man in rags, with long beard and matted locks; his face and arms burned with exposure to the sun, and shrivelled with long fasting; and he cried aloud, "I am found of them who sought me not, and to them who asked not after me, have I manifested myself openly." Every eye was directed upon this wild-looking man, and when it was discovered who he was, there rose a shout from Gentile and Christian; the latter cried because they rejoiced to see the faithful centurion in the midst of them again; the former, because they hated the truth, and were wrath at the disturbance of the sports. "Then," continues S. Basil, "the clamour and tumult became more, and filled the whole amphitheatre; horses, chariots, and drivers were forgotten. In vain did the rush of wheels fill the air; none had eyes for anything but Gordius; none had ears to hear anything but the words of Gordius. The roar of the theatre, like a wind rushing through the air, drowned the noise of the racing horses. When the crier had made silence, and all the pipes and trumpets, and other musical instruments were hushed, Gordius was led before the seat of the governor, who was present, and was asked, blandly, who he was and whence he came. Then he related, in order, what was his country, and family, and the rank he had held, and why he had thrown up his office and fled away. 'I am returned,' said he, 'to shew openly that I care naught for your edicts, but that I place my hope and confidence in Jesus Christ alone.'" The governor, being exceedingly exasperated at the interruption in the sports, and the open defiance cast in his face by a deserter, before the whole city, ordered him at once to be tortured. "Then," S. Basil proceeds to relate in his graphic style, "the whole crowd poured from the theatre towards the place of judgment, and all those who had remained behind in the city ran to see the sight. The city was deserted. Like a great river, the inhabitants rolled to the place of martyrdom; mothers of families, noble and ignoble, pushed there; houses were left unprotected, shops were deserted by the customers, and in the market-place goods lay here and there neglected. Servants threw up their occupations, and ran off to see the spectacle, and all the rabble was there to see this man. Maidens forgot their bashfulness and shame of appearing before men, and sick people and old men crawled without the walls, that they, too, might share the sight." The relations of Gordius, in vain, urged him to yield and apologise for his defiance of the state religion; signing himself with the cross, he cheerfully underwent the torments of leaded scourges, of the little horse, fire, and knife, and was finally beheaded. SS. THEOGNIS, PRIMUS, AND CYRINUS, MM. (ABOUT A.D. 320.) [The Martyrologies of S. Jerome, Bede, Usuardus, &c. Commemorated in the Roman Martyrology on this day; in the Greek Menaea on the 2nd Jan. Theognis, especially, is famous throughout East and West. The account in the Menaea and Menology is probably trustworthy. The Acts published by the Bollandists are of doubtful authority.] Theognis was the son of the Bishop of Cyzicus, in Hellespont. In the persecution of Licinius, he and his companions suffered at Cyzicus, being first scourged, and then cast into the sea. S. MELOR, M. (ABOUT A.D. 411.) [English Martyrologies on this day, though he died on Oct. 1st, on which day he is mentioned in Usuardus. His life in Capgrave is of no historical value--a composition of the 11th cent. "incertum" even to William of Malmesbury.] When first Christianity penetrated Britain, a great number of Saints existed, especially in Wales and Cornwall. At this time there was a duke, or prince, of Cornwall, named Melian, whose brother, Rivold, revolted against him, and put him to death. Melian left a son, Melor, and the usurper only spared his life at the intercession of the bishops and clergy. He, however, cut off his right hand and left foot, and sent him into one of the Cornish monasteries to be brought up. The legend goes on to relate that the boy was provided with a silver hand and a brazen foot, and that one day, when he was aged fourteen, he and the abbot were nutting together in a wood, when the abbot saw the boy use his silver hand to clasp the boughs and pick the nuts, just as though it were of flesh and blood. Also, that one day he threw a stone, which sank into the earth, and from the spot gushed forth a fountain of pure water. Rivold, fearing lest the boy should depose him, bribed his guardian, Cerialtan, to murder him. This Cerialtan performed. He cut off the head of Melor, and carried it to the duke; but angels with lights stood around the body and guarded it. On his way to the duke, Cerialtan was parched with thirst, and exclaimed, "Wretched man that I am! I am dying for a drop of water." Then the head of the murdered boy said, "Cerialtan, strike the ground with thy rod, and a fountain will spring up." He did so, and quenched his thirst at the miraculous well, and pursued his way. When Rivold saw the head, he touched it, and instantly sickened, and died three days after. The head was then taken back to the body, and was buried with it. But the relics were afterwards taken to Amesbury, in Wiltshire. It must be remembered, in reading the legends of the British and Irish Saints of the first period, that we have nothing like contemporary histories of their lives, and that these legends were committed to writing many hundreds of years after their death, so that the original facts became surrounded with an accretion of fable so dense that it is impossible to distinguish truth from falsehood in the legends as they have reached us. S. GENOVEVA, V. (A.D. 512.) [S. Genoveva is mentioned in almost all the Latin Martyrologies. Her life was written by an anonymous learned man, in the reign of Childebert, about eighteen years after her death. Three ancient lives exist, but whether one of these is that then composed, it is impossible to say.] The blessed Genoveva was born at Nanterre, near Mont Valerien, on the outskirts of Paris. Her father's name was Severus; that of her mother was Gerontia. When S. Germanus, Bishop of Auxerre, was on his way to Britain, to oppose the heresy of Pelagius, with his companion, S. Lupus, they passed through Nanterre. The people went out to meet him, and receive the benedictions; men, and women, and children in companies. Amongst the children, S. Germanus observed Genoveva, and bade her be brought before him. The venerable bishop kissed the child, and asked her name. The surrounding people told him, and the parents coming up, S. Germanus said to them, "Is this little girl your child?" They answered in the affirmative. "Then," said the bishop, "happy are ye in having so blessed a child. She will be great before God; and, moved by her example, many will decline from evil and incline to that which is good, and will obtain remission of their sins, and the reward of life from Christ the Lord." And then, after a pause, he said to Genoveva, "My daughter, Genoveva!" She answered, "Thy little maiden listens." Then he said, "Do not fear to tell me whether it be not thy desire to dedicate thy body, clean and untouched, to Christ, as His bride?" She said, "Blessed be thou, father, for thou hast spoken my desire. I pray God earnestly that He will grant it me." "Have confidence, my daughter," said S. Germain; "be of good courage, and what thou believest in thy heart, and confessest with thy lips, perform in work. God will add to thy comeliness virtue and fortitude." Then they went to the church, and sang Nones and Vespers, and throughout the office the bishop held his hand on the little maiden's head. And that evening, after supper had been eaten, and they had sung a hymn, S. Germain bade Severus retire with his daughter, but bring her to him very early in the morning again. So when the day broke, Severus came back bringing the child, and the old bishop smiled, and said, "Hail, my daughter Genoveva. Dost thou recall the promise thou didst make yesterday, about keeping thy body in integrity?" She answered, "I remember what I promised to thee, my father, and to God, that with His help I would preserve the chastity of my mind, and the integrity of my body, unto the end." Then S. Germain picked up from the ground a little brass coin with the sign of the cross on it, which he had observed lying there whilst he was speaking, and gave it her, saying, "Bore a hole in this, and wear it round thy neck in remembrance of me, and let not any other metal ornament, gold or silver, or pearls, adorn thy neck or fingers." Then he bade her farewell, commending her to the care of her father, and pursued his journey. It has been supposed by some that the command of S. Germain not to wear gold, &c., indicates that she was of wealthy parents, and they are disposed to doubt the common tradition of the place, and the ancient Breviary, which says that she kept sheep for her father on the slopes of Valerien at Nanterre. But there need be no difficulty upon this point, for the sons and daughters of men of some position, at that period, were thus employed, and there was not supposed to be anything demeaning in the office. Thus, S. Cuthbert, though of noble race, kept sheep on the Northumbrian moors. At the age of fifteen she was presented to the Bishop of Paris, to be consecrated to the religious life. With her were two other virgins, and though she was the youngest of the three, the bishop, moved by some interior inspiration, placed her first, saying that heaven had already sanctified her. On the death of her parents, she moved to Paris, where she was remarked for her sanctity and miraculous powers. When S. Germain was on his way to Britain again, he passed through Paris, and asked after Genoveva, when certain envious persons tried to poison his mind against her; but he, despising their slanders, greeted her with great kindness openly, so as to testify before all the people how highly he honoured her, as he had done before at Nanterre. The influence exerted by this holy woman must have been very great, for she persuaded the Parisians to remain in the city, instead of flying into the country, when the hosts of Attila, King of the Huns, threatened it. Then Genoveva assembled the pious matrons, and with them fasted, and prayed, asking God incessantly, with many tears, to avert the scourge of the Huns from the city. [Illustration: S. GENOVEVA, Patroness of the City of Paris. From Cahier. Jan. 3.] A tumult, however, arose; many people saying that she was a false prophet, and that she would bring ruin on the citizens by dissuading them from escaping with their goods to places of greater security. The mob, headlong and cruel--as a Parisian mob has ever been--came upon her to stone her, or drown her in the Seine, and they would have carried their ferocious purpose into execution, had not her ancient friend and father in God, S. Germain, stood by her in her extremity. He was then dying at Auxerre, and his thoughts turned to the little girl he had consecrated to God in bygone years, in the humble church of Nanterre. Then, he bade the archdeacon take to her the _Eulogae_, or blessed bread,[17] in token of love and regard. The archdeacon arrived when the feeble woman was in greatest peril. He had heard the prophecy of S. Germain of old; and, running among the people, he exhibited the Eulogies sent by the holy bishop, and told them how highly he had venerated her virtues; so he appeased the multitude and dispersed them. The saying of the Apostle was fulfilled, "All men have not faith; but the Lord is faithful, who shall stablish you, and keep you from evil;" for by the prayers of S. Genoveva the city was preserved, and the army of Alaric came not near it. S. Genoveva lived on a little barley bread, and a few beans stewed in oil; but after she was aged fifty, at the command of the bishop, she ate also fish, and drank milk. Feeling a great reverence for S. Denis, she desired greatly to build a church in his honour, and she, one day, urged some priests to undertake the work. But they hesitated, saying that they were not able to do so; one reason being that there was no means of burning lime. Then S. Genoveva said, "Go, and cross the city bridge, and tell me what you hear." The priests left her, and as they passed over the bridge, they heard two swineherds in conversation. One said to the other, "Whilst I was following one of my pigs the other day, it led me into the forest to a large limekiln." "That is no marvel," answered the other, "for I found a sapling in the forest uprooted by the wind, and under its roots was an old kiln." On hearing this, the priests returned and told Genoveva what the swineherds had said, and she rejoiced, and set the Priest Genes over the work; and all the citizens, at the instigation of S. Genoveva, assisted; and she encouraged the workmen, till the church of S. Denis was built and roofed in. This incident is not a little curious, as it exhibits the fall and prostration of the arts at this period, when, apparently, the science of building was forgotten, and old Roman limekilns had to be used, because the Gauls, owing to the incursions of barbarians and civil war, had lost the art of building them. Childeric, though a heathen, had a great respect for Genoveva, and was unable to refuse her, when she requested him, to spare the lives of his prisoners. On one occasion, when he was about to execute, outside the city, a large number of captives made in war, he ordered the gates to be closed behind him, lest Genoveva should follow, and obtain pardon for them. But when the saintly woman heard that the blood of so many men was about to flow, in a paroxysm of compassion, she hurried through the streets, and reaching the gates, put her hand to them, and though locked and barred, they unclosed at the touch of charity, and she pursued the king; and, falling down before him, would not be comforted till she had obtained pardon for all those whom he had ordered to be executed. After Paris was blockaded by the Franks, the neighbourhood suffered greatly from famine, as the harvests had been destroyed and the country laid waste. Genoveva, seeing that many died of want, conducted vessels to Arcis, and procuring sufficient supplies, returned with them to Paris. Every Saturday night, Genoveva was wont to watch in prayer, that the Lord coming in the Holy Eucharist of His day, might find his servant watching. It fell out that one stormy night, as the Sabbath drew towards Sunday morn, and the cock had crowed, she left her home to betake herself to the church of S. Denis, with the virgins who were her fellows, and the lantern that was carried before her was extinguished by a puff of wind; then the maidens were frightened at the pitch darkness, the howling of the storm, and the rain, and the road was so muddy that, without a light, they could not pick their way. Then Genoveva took the lantern in her hand, and the candle lighted of itself within; and holding it, she entered the church. She performed several pilgrimages to the shrine of S. Martin, at Tours, in company with those holy women who lived with her, and imitated her virtues. She died at the age of eighty-nine, probably in the year 512; but the date is not to be ascertained with certainty. Patroness of Paris. Relics, in the church of S. Etienne du Mont, at Paris. In art, S. Genoveva is represented, (1), with a devil blowing out her candle, and an angel rekindling it. Sometimes, in old sculpture, the devil is provided with a pair of bellows; or, (2), she is restoring sight to her mother with the water of the well of Nanterre; or, (3), guarding her father's sheep; or, (4), with the keys of Paris at her girdle, as patroness of the city; or, (5), holding bread in her lap; or, (6), with the well of Nanterre at her side. S. BERTILIA, V. (A.D. 687.) [Belgian and Gallo-Belgian Martyrologies. The life is from a MS. at Marolles, of uncertain date, but apparently authentic.] Saint Bertilia was born of noble parents. From an early age her heart turned to the service of God alone, and she delighted in attending the offices of religion. A youth of noble blood, named Guthland, sought her hand in marriage, for she was very beautiful, gentle in speech, and modest in manner. But Bertilia refused him, desiring to retire into a solitary place; however, when her parents urged her vehemently, she gave a reluctant consent to their wishes, and was married. Nevertheless, at her desire, the young husband and she lived together in all chastity, as brother and sister, serving the poor, and given to hospitality. On the death of her husband, she divided his goods with the Church, and built a great church at Marolles, with a little cell adjoining it for her habitation. One night, after long protracted prayer in the church, she returned to her cell, where she was seized with excruciating pains; nevertheless, she knelt down and prayed with fervour, and prepared her soul for its departure. After having received the last Sacraments, she fell asleep in Christ, and was buried in the church she had built at Marolles. She was taken up and enshrined by Gerard II., Bishop of Cambray, on September 14th, 1081; and translated to another shrine on the 8th October, 1221. Patroness of Marolles, in the diocese of Cambray. Relics at Marolles. [Illustration: Decoration] FOOTNOTES: [17] The custom of blessing bread and distributing it amongst the faithful, prevails still in the French Church, as may be seen at any festival in a church of importance. The blessed bread is not to be confounded with the Holy Eucharist. It is taken about the church in baskets, and is a sort of sweet-cake. This is a relic of the ancient Love Feasts or Agapae. January 4. Octave of the Holy Innocents. S. TITUS, _B. and Ap. of Crete, circ_. A.D. 105. SS. AQUILINUS, GEMINUS, EUGENIUS, AND OTHERS, _Martyrs in Africa_. S. DAFROSA, _W. C., at Rome_, A.D. 361. S. RUMON, _B. C., at Tavistock, in Devonshire_. S. GREGORY, _B. of Langres, in France, circ_. A.D. 541. S. PHARAILDIS, _V., in Brabant, about_ A.D. 745. S. RIGOBERT, _B. of Rheims_, A.D. 749. S. LIBENTIUS, _Abp. of Bremen_, A.D. 1013. B. ANGELA, _of Foligni, in Umbria_, A.D. 1309. S. TITUS, B. (ABOUT 105.) [S. Titus is commemorated on this day in the Roman, and all the Latin Martyrologies. But the Greeks observe the feast of S. Titus on August 25th. Much of his history can be gathered from the first and second epistles of S. Paul to the Corinthians, and from his epistle to S. Titus; also from the Greek Menologium, and his life, written by Zenas, the lawyer, in the Menaea; and that by Peter de Natalibus, compiled from Greek sources.] Saint Titus was born of Gentile parents, being descended from the ancient royal family of Crete.[18] He was a favourite companion of S. Paul, who calls him his son in Christ. His virtue gained him the particular esteem of this Apostle; for we find him employed as secretary and interpreter by S. Paul; and the Apostle styles him his brother.[19] On one occasion, when much depressed, he was consoled by the presence of Titus: "God, that comforteth those that are cast down, comforted us by the coming of Titus;"[20] and he testified, on another occasion, that he found no rest in his spirit, because at Troas he had not met Titus.[21] In the year 51, Titus accompanied S. Paul to the Council that was held at Jerusalem, on the subject of the Mosaic rites. Though the Apostle had consented to the circumcision of Timothy, in order to render his ministry more acceptable among the Jews, he would not allow the same in the case of Titus, apprehensive of giving thereby a sanction to the faction which held to the necessity of combining the rites of the Law with the Sacraments of the Gospel. Towards the close of the year 56, S. Paul sent Titus from Ephesus to Corinth, with full commission to remedy several subjects of scandal, and to allay the dissensions in that Church. He was there received with great respect, and was satisfied with the penance and submission of the offenders; but could not be prevailed upon to accept from them any present, not even so much as his own maintenance. His love for that Church was very great, and at the request of the Corinthians, he interceded with S. Paul for the pardon of the incestuous man whom he had excommunicated. He was sent the same year by the Apostle, a second time, to Corinth, to bring the alms of that Church to Jerusalem, for the relief of the necessity of the poor Christians there. All these particulars we learn from S. Paul's two epistles to the Corinthians. S. Paul, after his first imprisonment, returning from Rome into the East, made some stay in the island of Crete, of which Rustilius, the governor, was married to the sister of S. Titus. He consecrated his beloved disciple, Titus, to be bishop of that island, and left him there to finish the work he had begun.[22] "We may form a judgment," says S. Chrysostom, "from the importance of the charge, how great was the esteem of S. Paul for his disciple."[23] But the Apostle, on his return into Europe the year after, finding the loss of such a companion too material, ordered him to meet him at Nicopolis, in Epirus, where he intended to pass the winter, as soon as Artemas or Tychicus, whom the Apostle was about to send to him, to take the place of the bishop during his absence, should arrive.[24] And when he came, he bade him assist Zenas, the lawyer, and Apollos on their journey.[25] From this Zenas we have certain incidents of the life of S. Titus, which have been preserved in a fragmentary condition in the Greek Menaea. Zenas relates the conversion of S. Titus thus:--Titus, living in the island of Crete, was learned in Greek literature, having been studious in youth. But the dreams of the poets and philosophers did not satisfy the inward craving of his soul after truth. One day, when twenty years old, he heard a voice say to him, "Titus, depart hence and save thy soul, for the learning of the Greeks will not profit thee unto salvation." Wondering in himself what this could mean, he was bidden by the same voice to take up a Hebrew volume that he had long disregarded, and open it. And the book was the Prophet Isaiah, and the place of the Scriptures that his eye rested on was this, "Keep silence before me, O islands; and let the people renew their strength: let them come near; then let them speak,"[26] and what follows. He seems to have read on much of that chapter, with its promise to the isles, and to have applied to himself the words, "Thou whom I have taken from the ends of the earth, and called thee from the chief men thereof, and said unto thee, Thou art my servant; I have chosen thee, and not cast thee away. Fear thou not; for I am with thee: be not dismayed; for I am thy God: I will strengthen thee; yea, I will help thee; yea, I will uphold thee with the right hand of my righteousness.... When the poor and needy seek water, and there is none, and their tongue faileth for thirst, I the Lord will hear them, I the God of Israel will not forsake them."[27] These were words very different from those of the poets of Greece, and gave an idea of God quite other from that formed by Homer, in whose writings he had found delight; so Titus left his Greek studies and his native island, and sought Jerusalem, the chief city of that people of whom the prophet spake such great things. And when he was there he saw Jesus, and heard Him teach. Perhaps he was one of those Greeks whom S. Andrew brought to Christ.[28] He believed, and was of the number of the first disciples. He remained at Jerusalem after the ascension and the descent of the Holy Ghost. After he joined S. Paul, he accompanied him in most of his journeys. In 65, S. Paul sent him to preach the Word of God in Dalmatia, after he had visited him in Nicopolis;[29] but he probably was there for no great length of time, though the Dalmatians honour him as their Apostle. Peter de Natalibus relates that when death approached, he saw angels coming from heaven in a glorious train to fetch his soul, and that his face lit up with joy at their approach, and shone with supernatural splendour. He committed his people to God in long and earnest prayer, and then yielded up his spirit in peace to Christ his Saviour. The body of S. Titus was kept, with great veneration, in the Cathedral of Gortyna; but that city having been ruined by the Saracens, in 823, the metropolitan see was transferred to Candia, seventeen miles from the ancient Gortyna; there the head of S. Titus was preserved, till it was carried off by the Venetians, and is now among the sacred treasures of S. Mark's, at Venice. Patron of Candia, or Crete. S. DAFROSA, W. C. (A.D. 361.) [Mentioned in Roman Martyrology, and in those of Bede, Ado, Notker, Maurolycus, &c. All known of her is contained in the Martyrologies.] This Saint was the wife of S. Flavian, a martyr. She was one of the few who suffered in the reign of Julian, the Apostate; having been sentenced by Apronianus, praefect of the city, in Rome, along with her daughters, Demetria and Bibiana. S. Flavian, her husband, was crowned on the 22nd December; and she followed him shortly. She was sent to the house of a certain Faustus, who desired to have her in marriage; but she refused to become his wife, and converted him to the faith. He was baptized by S. John the priest, who is commemorated on June 23rd. Faustus was executed, and his body cast to the dogs; but Dafrosa saved it, and buried it secretly at night. Then, in a dream, her husband Flavian appeared to her, and called her to follow him. And at the expiration of five days, whilst engaged in prayer, she migrated to her heavenly country. S. RUMON, B. C. [Does not occur in the Roman Martyrology.] William of Malmesbury informs us that the history of S. Rumon's life was destroyed by the wars, which devastated England. He was a bishop; but of what see we do not know. Many of the early Saints of the Church in Cornwall, Wales, and Ireland, received episcopal consecration, without jurisdiction. His body was preserved at Tavistock, in Devonshire, where Ordulf, Earl of Devonshire, built a church under his invocation, before the year 960. S. GREGORY OF LANGRES, B. (ABOUT A.D. 541.) [Roman and Gallican Martyrologies. The life of S. Gregory of Langres was written by S. Gregory of Tours, who died 591.] Saint Gregory, one of the principal senators of Autun, in France, was appointed count of the city, and for many years administered justice with the utmost prudence and uprightness. His wife, Armentaria, was also of senatorial rank; by her he had several children, of whom Tetricus was numbered among the Saints. After the death of his wife, having been elected by the clergy and citizens of Langres to be their bishop, he was consecrated by the metropolitan. As bishop, his life was edifying. He was a model of humility, and sought, above all things, to conceal his acts of self-denial, and long communings with God. He ate barley bread, but that this might not be observed, he had wheat cakes piled on the table above his brown barley cakes, so that he could draw from the dish those for his own eating, whilst the others ate white bread, and supposed him to be doing the same. In like manner, at table he used a dull glass goblet, so that it might not be noticed that he drank water, whereas, the others were supplied with wine. At night, he was wont to rise from his bed, when everybody else was asleep, and steal, on tip-toe, to the baptistery of the church, where he passed several hours in prayer and singing psalms. This was long unobserved; but one night a deacon was awake, and saw the bishop rise. Wondering at his proceeding, when S. Gregory had left the dormitory, he rose also, and stole softly after him, and saw him enter the baptistery, the gate opening to him of its own accord. For some time there was silence; and then the bishop's voice was heard chanting, and immediately many voices took up the psalm, and the singing continued for three hours. "I, for my part," says S. Gregory, of Tours, "think that the Saints, of whom the relics were there preserved, revealed themselves to the blessed man, and sang praises to God in company with him." One day, as he was walking to Langres, he was struck with fever, and he died shortly after; "and his blessed countenance was so glorified after his departure, that it looked like a blushing rose, whilst the rest of his body was shining like a white lily, so that it seemed then to have a foretaste of its future resurrection beauty." He was buried at Dijon, which was then in the diocese of Langres, and his son, Tetricus, succeeded him in the see of Langres. There is much uncertainty about the date of his death. In some Martyrologies he is said to have died in 535; Galesinius says in 524. But he was present at the Council of Clermont, in 535, and signed the decrees of the third Council of Orleans by his deputy, Evantius, the priest, in 538; but did not appear at, or send a deputy to, the fourth Council of Orleans, in 541. It is, therefore, probable that the see was then vacant by his death. In art, S. Gregory appears before a church door, which an angel opens to him; or with chains, because it is said that as his body was being taken to burial, the bier was set down before a prison, and the chains fell off the prisoners, and they were freed at the same moment. S. PHARAILDIS, V. (ABOUT A.D. 745.) [Belgian and German Martyrologies. Authorities for her life:--A MS. life from the monastery of Mont Gerard, published by the Bollandists, and by Molanus on the Belgian Saints. Besides, we have mention of her in the lives of her mother and sisters.] Saint Pharaildis was the daughter of Theodoric, duke of Lorraine, and his wife, S. Amalberga. The family was one of Saints. The brother of S. Pharaildis, on the mother's side, was S. Emenbert, Bishop of Cambray, and her sisters were S. Rainelda and S. Gudula. She was born at Ghent, and after her baptism, was taken by her aunt, S. Gertrude, to be by her brought up. She was married, but lived with her husband as though single. For thirty years she rose every night at cock-crow, and sought the church of the nearest monastery to hear prime, and matins, and lauds. She died at the age of ninety, and was buried in the church of S. Bavo, in Ghent, A.D. 745, but afterwards was carried to Nivelles by the religious of Ghent, fleeing the incursions of the Normans. A portion of the relics was left at Nivelles, but the major part was brought back to Ghent, and enshrined in the new church of S. Pharaildis, which was destroyed by the Calvinists in 1566. The relics, however, were saved. On the 17th Dec., 1608, the chapter of S. Pharaildis, in Ghent, gave some portion to a little chapel at Steenockerzeel. In Flemish, S. Pharaildis is called Veerle, or Verelde. In art, S. Pharaildis appears as a patroness of Ghent, with a goose in her arms, or at her feet, Gans being the Flemish for a goose; in base Latin, Ganta or Gansa; and the Latin name of Ghent, in the Middle Ages, being Gantum. She is also represented with loaves of bread; for, according to a legend, a woman having begged bread of her sister for her child, the sister said, "I have none to give to you; there's no bread in the house." And when the poor woman urged her, she exclaimed, "May S. Pharaildis change the bread into stones if there be any here." Whereupon, some loaves she had by her were petrified. S. RIGOBERT, ABP. OF RHEIMS. (ABOUT A.D. 749.) [Roman, Benedictine, and Gallican Martyrologies. Authority:--A life of the 9th cent.] Saint Rigobert, a Benedictine monk, was ordained archbishop of Rheims in the year 696. He consecrated Dagobert II., Chilperic II., and Theoderic II., kings of the Franks. In his diocese he laboured to restore discipline and sanctity of life. When Charles Martel and Ragenfried were fighting for the mastery, the former came with his troops before Rheims, and demanded to be admitted. The bishop refused to open the gates, "Because," said he, "I know not whether you or Ragenfried will be given the kingdom." Charles Martel went away in a fury, and vowed, if he gained the day, he would make the cautious archbishop suffer for it. When Charles Martel had subdued his rival, he returned to Rheims, and drove S. Rigobert into exile, and gave the revenues of the see to laymen, creatures of the court. Whilst at Rheims, S. Rigobert had lived over the city gate, and kept the keys of the town. The window of his chamber looked towards the Basilica of S. Remigius, and at it he was wont to pray, like Daniel, with his face turned to Jerusalem. That he might easily, and at will, descend into the church of S. Peter, which was situated near the gateway, S. Rigobert had a hole knocked in a turret of the church, so that by a ladder he could descend into the church to prayer, and return by it to a little oratory, dedicated to S. Michael, which he had built on the city wall. But this oratory did not stand very long, for King Louis gave the monastery of S. Peter to his daughter Alpaida; and her husband, Begus, having knocked his head against the lintel of the door when entering the little chapel--he being a very tall man--ordered it to be pulled down, pretending that it cut off the light from the windows of the church. "Humility," says the chronicler dryly, "never knocks its head against any thing." S. Rigobert, when in exile, retired to Gascony, but was recalled by Pepin, and returned to Rheims; but finding that, contrary to canon law, Milo, an abbot, had been appointed to the see, he went away to Gernicour, a village at no great distance. At Gernicour, he lived in poverty, in great humility and prayer; sometimes he visited Rheims, that he might celebrate on the altar of S. Mary, which had been conceded to him by Milo. One day he was at Cormicy, and visited the church of S. Cyriac, to pray for his poor diocese, a prey to ravening wolves; and his prayer being ended, he conversed with Wibert, comptroller of Rheims, who invited him to dine with him, as the table was ready. But S. Rigobert answered, "I may not eat, as I have to celebrate mass this morning in the church of S. Peter, at Gernicour." Whilst he was speaking, a poor widow brought the deputy-governor a goose. "Here," said Wibert, "as you will not dine with me, take this goose home with you, and cook it for your own dinner." Then S. Rigobert gave it to his little serving boy to carry before him; and he went on his way saying his office; when the goose flew out of the boy's hands, and was gone. The boy was much grieved, and was on the point of crying. The bishop, seeing the sad face of the child, interrupted his psalm to console him, and to tell him that the loss of this world's goods should not draw forth tears, but that the heart should trust in God, who gives all things bountifully. Then the bishop resumed his psalms, now reciting them to himself, and then breaking forth into song. Presently the goose came fluttering down before the feet of the old man, so the boy put it under his arm again, and brought it safely to Gernicour. But it was not cooked for dinner. Indeed, the bishop would not allow it to be killed, and the goose became so tame, that it followed him about, and would even accompany him on his walks to Rheims, and wait there for him when he said mass at the altar of S. Mary. Relics, in the church of S. Denis, at Rheims, and in the chapel of S. Rigobert, in the Cathedral of Notre Dame, at Paris. In art, he is represented with a goose. B. ANGELA. OF FOLIGNI. (A.D. 1309.) [B. Angela was beatified by Pope Innocent XII. in 1693. Her life and revelations were written by her confessor, Arnald, friar of the order of S. Francis, in her lifetime, and the revelations were submitted to her for correction.] The Blessed Angela, of Foligni, belonged to a rich and honourable family in Umbria. She was married, and had children. Upon the death of her mother, husband, and children, her heart turned in an agony of love to God alone, and appeared filled to overflowing with that divine charity of which an earthly affection is but a reflection. She was frequent in prayer, and made a discreet use of the Sacrament of penance. "Once she confessed her sins to me," says Friar Arnald, "preserving the most perfect knowledge of her sins, and was filled with so much contrition and tears, from the beginning of her confession to the end, and with so great humility, that I wept in my heart, believing most surely, that if the whole world was deceived, God would not permit her, who was full of so much truth and integrity, to be deceived. The following night she was sick, well nigh to death, and next morning she drew herself, with great effort, to the Franciscan Church, and I was then saying mass, and I communicated her, and I know that she never communicated without God giving her some great favour, and that a new one continually. But so great were the consolations and illuminations which she received in her soul, that frequently they seemed to overflow into her body. Thus, when she was standing with me, and her soul was lifted up, her face and body were transformed, through joy, at the divine words of address, and devotion, and delight at the consolations, that her eyes shone as candles, and her face flushed like a rose, and became radiant and angelical, as was beyond nature." The inner life and meditations of the Blessed Angela were written down from her lips, and were read over to her by the confessor. They are full of instruction and beauty, and are of considerable length. She died on the 4th January, 1309. Her body reposes in a shrine in the Franciscan Church at Foligni. [Illustration: Decoration] FOOTNOTES: [18] Peter de Nat. [19] 2 Cor. xii. 16. [20] 2 Cor. vii. 6. [21] 2 Cor. xi. 13. [22] Zenas and Peter de Nat. The latter does not say that S. Paul visited Crete, but that he sent Titus there. S. Paul says, "I left thee in Crete," Tit. i. 4, showing that he did visit that island with Titus. [23] Homil. i. in Tit. [24] Tit. iii. 12. [25] Tit. iv. 13. [26] Isa. xli. 1. [27] Isa. xli. 9, 10, 17. [28] John xii. 21. [29] 2 Tim. iv. 10. January 5. The Vigil of the Epiphany. S. TELESPHORUS, _P. M._, A.D. 139. THE HOLY MARTYRS IN THE THEBAID, A.D. 302. S. SYNCLETICA, _V., in Egypt, 4th cent._ S. APOLLINARIS SYNCLETICA, _V., 5th cent._ S. SIMEON STYLITES, _H._, A.D. 460. S. EMILIANA, _V., 6th cent._ S. EDWARD THE CONFESSOR, _K. of England_, A.D. 1066. S. GERLACH, _H., near Maestrecht_, A.D. 1170. S. TELESPHORUS, POPE, M. (A.D. 139.) [Mentioned originally in the Carmelite Breviary. This Pope was inserted in the Roman Breviary by Clement VIII. He is commemorated by the Greeks on Feb. 22.] Saint Telesphorus was by birth a Greek, and was the seventh Bishop of Rome. Towards the end of the year 128, he succeeded S. Sixtus I., and sat eleven years on the throne of S. Peter, and saw the havoc which the persecution of Hadrian wrought in the Church. "He ended his life by an illustrious martyrdom," says Eusebius.[30] THE MARTYRS IN THE THEBAID. (ABOUT A.D. 302.) "One cannot but admire," says Eusebius, in his Ecclesiastical History (lib. viii., c. 8, 9), "those who suffered in Egypt, their native land, where thousands, both men, and women, and children, despising the present life for the sake of our Saviour's doctrine, submitted to death in various shapes. Some, after being tortured with scrapings and the rack, and the most dreadful scourgings, and other innumerable agonies, which one might shudder to hear, were finally committed to the flames; some plunged and drowned in the sea, others voluntarily offering their heads to the executioners; others dying in the midst of their torments, some wasted away by famine, and others again fixed to the cross. Some, indeed, were executed as malefactors usually were; others, more cruelly, were nailed head downwards, and kept alive, until they were destroyed by starving, on the cross itself. But it would exceed all power of detail to give an idea of the sufferings and tortures which the martyrs of Thebais endured. These, instead of hooks, had their bodies scraped with potsherds, and were mangled in this way until they died. Women, tied by one foot, and then raised on high in the air by certain machines, with their naked bodies wholly uncovered, presented this most foul, cruel, and inhuman spectacle to all beholders; others again perished, bound to trees and branches. For, drawing the stoutest of the branches together by machines for this purpose, and binding the limbs of the martyrs to each of these, they then let loose the boughs to resume their natural position, designing thus to produce a violent action, to tear asunder the limbs of those whom they thus treated. But all these things were doing not only for a few days, or for some time, but for a series of whole years. At one time, ten or more; at another, more than twenty; at another time, not less than thirty, and even sixty; and again, at another time, a hundred men, with their wives and little children, were slain in one day, whilst they were condemned to various and varied punishments. We ourselves, when on the spot, saw many crowded together in one day, some suffering decapitation, some the torments of flames; so that the murderous weapon was completely blunted, and having lost its edge, broke to pieces; and the executioners themselves, wearied with slaughter, were obliged to relieve one another. Then, also, we were witnesses to the most admirable ardour of mind, and the truly divine energy and alacrity of those that believed in the Christ of God. For, as soon as the sentence was pronounced against the first, others rushed forward from other parts to the tribunal before the judge, confessing they were Christians, most indifferent to the dreadful and many kinds of tortures that awaited them, but declaring themselves fully, and in the most undaunted manner, on the religion which acknowledges only one Supreme God. They received, indeed, the final sentence of death with gladness and exultation, so far as even to sing and send up hymns of praise and thanksgiving, until they breathed their last." The names of these blessed ones, whose bones are strewn over the deserts of Egypt, are unknown to us; but they are written in the Book of Life. At the day of the general Resurrection they will rise and stand, on their feet, a great army. S. SYNCLETICA, V. (4TH CENT.) [S. Syncletica is commemorated by the Westerns on the 5th Jan., and by the Easterns on the 4th Jan. Her life, written shortly after her death, has been attributed to S. Athanasius, but on insufficient grounds.] At a time when luxury was carried to extremities, and the body was pampered, and the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, and the pride of life, were the objects for which men and women lived, here and there the spirit of man throbbed with higher aspirations, and yearned to break away from the gilded round of wealthy frivolity, to live a truer life and breathe a purer air. Society was rotten to its core; decency was not observed in conversation; modesty was forgotten in dress, and all that could gratify the flesh, and excite passion, was studied as an art. In the midst of this hot, sickly atmosphere of evil, pure souls, like that of Syncletica, stifled. The modest mind of a young girl shrank into itself, like a delicate flower that closes at the rude touch, and died to the world. If she were a heathen, she bent her head, and sickened and faded. If she were a Christian, she found in the shadow of the Church, a fresh spot where she might bloom, fanned by the breezes of Paradise. Syncletica was born at Alexandria, of wealthy parents, of Macedonian extraction, who had settled there. Being very beautiful and well-dowered, she was sought in marriage by many suitors; but declined all offers, for her girlish heart had awakened to a love truer and deeper than any human affection; the best of her love she gave to God, and she desired to be His, and His alone. On the death of her parents she devoted her attention to her blind sister; and together, they served God in prayer and almsgiving. In token of renunciation of the world, and to deliver herself from troublesome pursuit by fortune-hunters, she cut off her hair, and disposed of her estates, but she sought to avoid notice in all that she did, and to conceal her good deeds and self-sacrifices. Nevertheless, she became known, and young maidens and women resorted to her for advice, and to study her example. She was reluctant to be forced thus into a position which she dreaded; nevertheless, unable to refuse the girls and young women that assistance they so much needed, she gave them much instruction, which has been preserved to us in the record we have of her life, and her words abound in practical common sense. "Listen to me," she said to the maidens; "we all know how we can be saved, but we fail through our own carelessness. The first thing to be done, is to keep the commandment, 'Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and thy neighbour as thyself; for in this consists all perfection.' These are few words, but there is plenty of matter in them. Then beware of retrogression. The corn in the Gospel brought forth; some an hundred-fold, some sixty-fold, and some thirty-fold. Beware lest, beginning at sixty, we fall back to thirty. Let those who are virgins take care of their eyes, and their tongue, and their ears, and keep them in modesty, not looking about them boldly, nor talking flippantly, nor listening to certain things that may be said. Obedience is better than asceticism, for asceticism may puff up, but obedience brings one down. There is an asceticism which is of the devil. How are we to distinguish right asceticism from that which is wrong? By its moderation. Have you begun fasting? Don't make pretexts to wriggle out of it on the score of health, for the lady who does not fast is just as much subject to maladies as she who does." S. Syncletica died at the age of eighty, of cancer on the mouth, and consumption in the lungs, from which she suffered with great patience for three years. The cancer made horrible ravages in her face, and became so distressingly offensive, that to ward off infection from those who nursed her, she allowed it to be treated with the mixture which is used for embalming corpses. [Illustration: Decoration] S. APOLLINARIS SYNCLETICA, V. (BEGINNING OF 5TH CENT.) [Commemorated in the Latin Martyrologies on this day, but by the Greeks on Jan. 4th. Her life, written by one who lived at the same time, is given by Metaphrastes. This life represents her as daughter of Anthemius, the Emperor. Metaphrastes concludes, but wrongly, that she was daughter of Anthemius, who was appointed Emperor of the West by Leo I. But it appears more probable that she was the daughter of Anthemius, consular prefect of the city, who acted as regent after the death of Arcadius, during the minority of Theodosius the younger. This Anthemius was grandfather of the Emperor Anthemius. It is quite possible that the regent may have received imperial honours. The narrative in one place, speaking of the expedition of Apollinaris to the Holy Land, says, "A few days after, when we had found companions, we went on to the Holy City. And when, at a certain place, we turned aside, on account of our burdens, and the slaves and serving maids who were with us, we rested awhile." This is the only allusion to himself made by the writer, and it is so casual, that it is difficult not to regard it as an evidence of the authenticity of the piece. The story is, however, so much like a romance, and is open to so many critical objections, that it is difficult to accept it exactly as it is.] Saint Apollinaris, called from her high rank Syncletica, was the daughter of Anthemius. She had a sister of a different spirit from herself. The parents of Apollinaris desired to unite her in marriage, at an early age, to some wealthy noble, but she manifested such a fixed resolution to remain single, that they yielded to her wish. In her heart she desired to retire completely from the world; having heard of the wondrous lives of the recluses in Egypt, she longed greatly to see and imitate them. Her parents having consented to her making a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, she visited the holy places, and in Jerusalem she liberated all the slaves who had been sent to bear her company, and dismissed them with liberal gifts, retaining in her service only an eunuch and an old man to prepare her tent. In Jerusalem, she bribed an aged woman to procure for her, secretly, the habit of a recluse, and this she kept by her for a proper moment. On her way back she visited the tomb of S. Meria, on the Egyptian coast; and after prayer retired to her sleeping tent, when she assumed the monastic habit, and cast aside her worldly dress, with all its ornaments. Then, in the night, when the two men were asleep without, she stole from her tent, and fled into the desert, and took refuge in a morass. Next morning the servants were filled with consternation, and sought her everywhere in vain. Then they appeared before the governor of the city Lemna (?) where they were; and he assisted in the search, but all was in vain; so the governor sent a letter to the parents of Apollinaris, with her clothes and baggage, narrating the circumstances. Anthemius and his wife wept when they heard of the loss of their daughter, but consoled themselves with the belief that she had entered some community of religious women. However, S. Apollinaris made her way into the desert of Scété, where lived S. Macarius of Alexandria, at the head of a large monastery of recluses in cells and caves. Apollinaris, having cut off her hair, and being much tanned by exposure to the sun, and wasted with hunger in the marsh, where she had lived on a few dates, passed as a man, and was supposed, from being beardless, to be an eunuch. She spent many years there under the name of Dorotheus. Now it fell out that her sister, being grievously tormented with a devil, Anthemius bethought himself on sending her to Macarius to be healed, for the fame of his miracles had spread far and wide. But when the young girl was brought to Macarius, the aged abbot, moved by some interior impulse, conducted her to Dorotheus, and bade him heal the possessed by prayer. Then S. Apollinaris earnestly, and with many tears, besought Macarius not to tempt her thus, for God had not given to her the gift of performing miracles. Nevertheless he persisted; then the possessed woman was shut into the cell of Dorotheus for several days, that he might, by prayer and fasting, cast the demon forth. And when, after a while, the virgin seemed to be healed, she was restored to the attendants, who conducted her to her parents with great joy. Some months after, the maiden suffered from an attack of dropsy, and the parents, in shame and grief, supposing her to be pregnant, questioned her closely thereabout. But she could not account for her size, and when they pressed her more vehemently, moved by the evil spirit, she declared that Dorotheus, the hermit, had seduced her. On hearing this, Anthemius sent to Scété, that Dorotheus should be brought before him. The holy congregation was filled with horror and dismay on hearing the charge, and they went with one accord and cried to God to put away from them so grievous a reproach. Then said Dorotheus, "Be of good courage, my brethren, the Lord will reveal my innocence." And when she was brought before Anthemius, she said, "I am your daughter, Apollinaris." Then they fell on her neck and wept, and she prayed to God, and kissed her sister, and the Lord heard her cry, and healed the damsel of her disease. And after having tarried with them a few days, she returned to the desert once more. S. SIMEON STYLITES, H. (A.D. 460.) [Commemorated on this day in the Latin Martyrologies, but on Sept. 1st by the Greeks. There were three of this name; the second, who lived at a later date, is commemorated by the Greeks on May 24th; and the third, whom they designate Priest and Archimandrite, on July 26th. These two later Saints copied the great Simeon Stylites, of world-wide renown. The life of this famous hermit was written by a disciple of his, named Anthony, who was with him when he died; and also by Theodoret, who knew him well in life. Also, by Evagrius in his Ecclesiastical History.] [Illustration: S. SIMEON STYLITES. From Hone's "Every Day Book." Jan. 5.] "Simeon," says Theodoret, "was born in the village of Gesa, between Antioch and Cilicia, and as a boy kept his father's sheep. One day, forced by heavy snow to leave them in the fold, he went with his parents to the church, and there heard the Gospel read, which blesses those who mourn and weep; which calls those enviable who have a pure heart. And when he asked a bystander what he would gain who kept the Beatitudes, the man propounded to him the life of self-sacrifice. This," Theodoret adds, "he heard from the Saint's own tongue." Forthwith, Simeon going out of the church, went to a neighbouring monastery, governed by one Timothy; and falling down before the gate, he lay five days, neither eating nor drinking. And on the fifth day, the abbot, coming out, asked him, "Whence art thou, my son? What parents hast thou, that thou art so afflicted? Or, what is thy name, lest perchance thou hast done wrong? or, perchance, thou art a slave, and fleest from thy master?" Then the lad answered with tears, "No, master! I long to be a servant of God, and to save my soul. Suffer me to enter the monastery, and send me not away." Then the abbot, taking him by the hand, introduced him into the house, saying to the brethren, "My sons, behold I deliver you this brother; teach him the rules." He was in the convent about four months, serving all without complaint, and in that time he learned the whole Psalter by heart. But the food which he took with his brethren, he gave away secretly to the poor, reserving for himself only food for one day in the seven. But one day, having gone to the well to draw water, he took the rope from the bucket and wound it round his body, from the loins to the neck, and wore it till his flesh was cut into by the rope. One day, some of the brethren found him giving his food to the poor; and when they returned, they complained to the abbot, saying, "We cannot abstain like him; he fasts from Lord's day to Lord's day, and gives away his food." Then the abbot rebuked him, and Simeon answered not. And the abbot being angry, bade strip him, and found the rope round him, sunk into the flesh, and with great trouble it was uncoiled, and the skin came off with it; then the monks took care of him and healed him. When he was healed, he went out of the monastery and entered a deserted tank, where there was no water; no man knowing. After a few days, he was found, and the abbot descended into the tank. Then the blessed Simeon, seeing him, began to entreat, saying, "I beg you, servants of God, let me alone one hour, that I may render up my spirit; for yet a little while, and it will fail. But my soul is very weary, because I have angered the Lord." But the abbot said to him, "Come, servant of God, that we may take thee to the monastery." But when he would not, they brought him by force, and he stayed in the community about one year. "After this," says Theodoret, "he came to the Telanassus, under the peak of the mountain, on which he lived till his death, and having found a little house, he remained in it shut up for three years. But, eager to advance in virtue, he tried to persuade Blasus, who was archpriest of the villages around, to leave nothing within by him, for forty days and nights, but to close up the door with clay. The priest warned him that to die by one's own act is no virtue, but is a great crime." "Put by me then, father," he said, "ten loaves, and a cruse of water, and if I find my body needs sustenance, I will partake of them." Then Blasus did so, and at the end of the days Blasus removed the clay, and going in, found the bread and water untouched, and Simeon lying, unable to speak or move. Getting a sponge, he moistened and opened his lips, and then gave him the Holy Eucharist; and strengthened by this immortal Food, he chewed, little by little, lettuces and succory, and such like. When he had passed three years in that little house, he took possession of the peak, which has since been so famous; and when he had commanded a wall to be made round him, and procured an iron chain, he fastened one end of it to a great stone, and the other to his right foot, so that he could not, if he wished, have left those bounds. But when Meletius, Bishop of Antioch, saw him, he told him that if he had the will to remain, the iron profited nothing. Then, having sent for a smith, he bade him strike off the chain. The fame of the wondrous austerities of this man wrought upon the wild Arab tribes, and effected what no missionaries had been able, as yet, to perform. No doubt the fearful severities exercised by Simeon, on himself, are startling and even shocking. But the Spirit of God breathes where He wills, and thou canst not tell whence He cometh and whither He goeth. What but the divine Spirit could have caught that young boy's soul away from keeping sheep, and looking forward to the enjoyment of youth, and precipitated it into this course, so contrary to flesh and blood? Theodoret says, that as kings change the impression on their coins, sometimes stamping them with the image of lions, sometimes of stars, sometimes of angels, so the divine Monarch produces different marks of sanctity at different periods, and at each period He calls forth these virtues, or characters, He needs for a particular work. So was it now; on the wild sons of the desert, no missionaries had made an impression; their rough hearts had given no echo to the sound of the Gospel. Something of startling novelty was needed to catch their attention, and strike their imagination, and drag them violently to the cross. These wild men came from their deserts to see the weird, haggard man in his den. He fled from them as they crowded upon him, not into the wastes of sand, but up a pillar; first up one six cubits, then one twelve cubits, and finally, one of thirty-six. The sons of Ishmael poured to the foot of the pillar, "like a river along the roads, and formed an ocean of men about it." "And," says Theodoret, "myriads of Ishmaelites, who had been enslaved in the darkness of impiety, were illuminated by that station on the column. For this most shining light, set as it were on a candlestick, sent forth all around its beams, like the sun, and one might see Iberi, Persians, and Armenians coming and receiving divine baptism. But the Ishmaelites (Arabs,) coming by tribes, 200 and 300 at a time, and sometimes even 1,000, denied with shouts the error of their ancestors; and breaking in pieces the images they had worshipped, and renouncing the orgies of Venus, they received the divine Sacraments, and accepted laws from that holy tongue. And this I have seen with my own eyes, and have heard them renouncing the impiety of their fathers, and assenting to Evangelic doctrine." Here was the result. Little did the boy know, as he lay before the monastery door five days without eating, to what God had called him; for what work he was predestined, when he coiled the rope about his body. The Spirit had breathed, and he had followed the impulse, and now he wrought what the tongue of a prophet could not have affected. And it was worth the pain of that rope torn from his bleeding body; it was recompense for those long fastings. "Three winters, that my soul might grow to Thee, I lived up there on yonder mountain side; My right leg chain'd into the crag, I lay Pent in a roofless close of ragged stones; Inswathed sometimes in wandering mist, and twice Black'd with Thy branding thunder, and sometimes Sucking the damps for drink, and eating not." It was worth all this, if souls could be added to the Lord, as they were, by hundreds and thousands. God's ways are not as our ways. The God who needed these souls, called up the soul of Simeon to do the work, and Simeon obeyed, and traversed perhaps the most awful path man has yet trod. It is not for us to condemn a mode of life which there is no need for men to follow now. It was needed then, and he is rightly numbered with the Saints, who submitted his will to that of God, to make of him an instrument for His purpose in the way that He saw best. "There came from Arabena a certain good man," says Theodoret, "who, when he had come to that mountain peak, 'Tell me,' he cried, 'by the very Truth, art thou a man, or of incorporeal nature?' But when all there were displeased with the question, the Saint bade them all be silent, and bade them set a ladder to the column, and bade the man come up; and first look at his hands, and then feel inside his cloak of skins, and see not only his feet, but also a severe ulcer in them. But when he saw that he was a man, and the size of that sore, and learnt from him how he took nourishment, he came down and told me all." "On festivals, from the setting of the sun till its appearance again, he stood all night with his hands uplifted to heaven, neither soothed with sleep, nor conquered by fatigue. But in toils so great, and so great magnitude of deeds, and multitude of miracles, his self-esteem is as moderate as if he were in dignity the least of men. Besides his modesty, he is easy of access of speech, and gracious, and answers every man who speaks to him. And from the bounteous God he has received the gift of teaching, and he makes exhortations to the people twice every day. He may be seen also acting as a judge, giving just decisions. This, and the like, is done after the ninth hour. For all night, and through the day to the ninth hour, he prays perpetually. After that he sets forth divine teaching to those who are present, and then, having heard each man's petition, having performed some cures, he settles disputes. About sunset, he begins the rest of his converse with God. But though he is employed in this way, he does not give up the care of the churches, sometimes fighting against the impiety of the Greeks, sometimes checking the audacity of the Jews, sometimes putting to flight the heretics, and sometimes sending messages to the emperor; sometimes stirring up rulers to zeal for God, and sometimes exhorting the pastors of the churches to bestow more care on their flocks." To make trial of his humility, an order was sent him, in the name of the neighbouring bishops and abbots, to quit his pillar, and new manner of life. The Saint, ready to obey the summons, was about to step down; when the messenger, seeing his willingness to obey, said he was empowered to authorize him to follow his vocation. Once, his mother hearing of his fame, came to see him, but was not allowed to enter the enclosure around the pillar. But when Simeon heard his mother's voice, he said to her, "Bear up, my mother, a little while, and we shall see each other, if God will." But she began to weep and rebuke him, saying, "Son, why hast thou done this? In return for the body I bore thee, thou has filled me with grief. For the milk with which I nourished thee, thou hast given me tears. For the kiss with which I kissed thee, thou hast given me an aching heart." "She made us all weep," says Anthony, who writes this incident. Simeon, on his pillar, was also deeply agitated, and, covering his face with his hands, he wept bitterly, and cried to her, "Lady mother, be still a little while, and we shall see each other in eternal rest." The poor mother, with harrowed heart, hung about the place for three days, crying to her son, and wrung with grief to see his terrible penance. Then Simeon, grieving for her, prayed to God to give her rest, and at the end of those three days she fell asleep in Christ. Then the people took up her body and brought it where Simeon might see it. And he, weeping, said, "The Lord receive thee in joy, mother! because thou hast endured tribulation for me, and borne me, and nursed and nourished me with labour." Then he prayed, "Lord God of virtues, who sittest above the Cherubim, and searchest the foundations of the abyss, who knewest Adam before he was; who hast promised the riches of the kingdom of heaven to those who love Thee; who didst speak to Moses out of the burning bush; who blessedst Abraham our father; who bringest to Paradise the souls of the just, and sinkest the souls of the ungodly in perdition; who didst humble the lions before Daniel, and mitigate for the Three Children the strong fire of the Chaldees; who didst nourish Elijah by the ravens which brought him food, receive her soul in peace, and put her in the place of the holy Fathers, for Thine is the power, for ever and ever." A robber, Jonathan by name, fled to S. Simeon, and embraced the column, weeping bitterly, and confessing his sins, and saying that he desired to repent. Then the Saint cried, "Of such is the kingdom of heaven. But beware that thou fall not again." Then came the officials from Antioch, demanding the poor wretch, that he might be cast to wild beasts in the amphitheatre. But Simeon answered, "My sons, I brought him not hither, but One greater than I. I cannot give him up, for I fear Him who sent the man to me." Then the sergeants, struck with fear, went away. And Jonathan lay for seven days embracing the column, and then asked leave to depart. The Saint asked him if he was going to return to sin. "No, my lord!" answered the robber; "but my time is fulfilled." And straightway he gave up the ghost; and when the sergeants came from Antioch, again insisting that he should be given up to suffer for his crimes, Simeon replied, pointing to the body, "He who brought the poor sinner here, has come with His angels, and has pardoned this man Himself." Anthony, his disciple, thus relates the death of the old hermit. "After a few years, it befell one day, that he bowed himself in prayer, and remained so three days, Friday, the Sabbath, and the Lord's day. Then I was terrified, and went up to him on the pillar, and stood before his face, and said, 'Master, arise! bless us, for the people have been waiting three days and nights for a blessing from thee.' But he answered me not, so I said to him again, 'Wherefore dost thou grieve me, my lord! I beseech thee, put out thy hand to me.' And seeing that he did not answer, I thought to tell no one; for I feared to touch him, and standing about half-an-hour, I bent down, and put my ear to listen; and there was no breathing. And so I understood that he rested in the Lord; and turning faint, I wept most bitterly; and bending down, I kissed his eyes; and I cried, 'Master, remember me in thy holy rest.' And lifting up his garments, I fell at his feet, and kissed them, and holding his hands, I laid them on my eyes, saying, 'Bless me, I beseech thee, my lord!'" The body was taken to Antioch, and there buried with great pomp. S. EDWARD THE CONFESSOR, K. [S. Edward is commemorated on this day in the Roman Martyrology, by order of Innocent IV. On this day, he is mentioned in the old English Martyrologies as well, but the festival of his Translation, Oct. 13th, is that which is chiefly observed in his honour, and to that day we shall refer our readers for his life.] S. GERLACH, H. (ABOUT 1170.) [Mentioned in the Cologne, German, and Gallo-Belgic Martyrologies. Two lives of this Saint exist, one written during the life of those who remembered him, and were able to describe his personal appearance; the other written by Wilhelm Cripius, son of the Chancellor of Gueldres, by command of the bishop, Henry Cuyck, of Roermund.] Saint Gerlach sprang from a noble family, in the neighbourhood of Maestricht. He was a knight, and lived a somewhat disorderly life; but one day, as he was about to engage in a tournament, the news reached him of the sudden death of his wife, whom he loved passionately. Casting aside lance and shield, he hastened to his castle, and in grief over her loss, formed the resolution of renouncing the world. He visited Rome, and confessed the sins of his life to Pope Eugenius III., who bade him, as a penance, go to Jerusalem, and for seven years nurse the sick in its hospitals. He obeyed, and on his return to Rome, at the expiration of seven years, found Adrian IV. on the throne. Adrian bade him live a retired life. Accordingly, Gerlach returned to his estates, and distributed all his possessions among the poor, reserving for himself only sufficient for his support. He then took up his abode in a hollow oak; but some envious persons having complained to the Bishop of Liege that he offered idolatrous worship to the tree, the bishop ordered it to be cut down; but afterwards, recognizing the virtue of the penitent knight, he became his protector. He wore sack-cloth next his skin, and over that a battered suit of mail. He spent his nights in prayer, in the church of S. Servais, Maestricht. FOOTNOTES: [30] Hist., lib. iv. c. 10. January 6. The Epiphany. S. MELCHIOR, _one of the Magi_. S. MACRA, _V. M., near Rheims, circ._ A.D. 303. S. MELANIUS, _B. of Rennes_, A.D. 580. S. PETER, _Ab. of Canterbury_, A.D. 608. S. ERMINOLD, _Ab. of Prufening, and M._, A.D. 1121. THE VEN. GERTRUDE VAN OOSTEN, _V., at Delft_, A.D. 1358. S. JOHN RIBEIRA, _Patr. of Antioch, and Abp. of Valencia, in Spain_, A.D. 1611. THE EPIPHANY. The principal design of the Church in celebrating this feast is, that her members may show gratitude to God for manifesting the Gospel to the Gentile world, and vouchsafing to it the same privileges as to the Jews, who had hitherto been His chosen and peculiar people; the first instance of this divine favour was the Manifestation of Christ to the Wise Men of the East. But, in all, there are three great manifestations of our Saviour commemorated on this day; all of which, S. Chrysostom says, happened on the same day, though not in the same year. The first of these was His manifestation by a star, which conducted the Magi to come and worship Him. The second Manifestation was that of the Blessed Trinity, at His Baptism. The third was the Manifestation of the Divinity of Christ, at Cana, by miraculously changing water into wine. [Illustration: THE EPIPHANY. From the Vienna Missal. Jan. 6.] But the principal event which is this day celebrated, is the Manifestation of our Lord to the Wise Men of the East. These, who are called Magi in Greek, were doubtless men of high rank. Tradition holds them to have been princes or kings; and they are given the names of Gaspar, Melchior, and Balthasar. They are said to have been baptized by the Apostle Thomas, and to have preached the Gospel in Persia. Their bodies were brought by the first Christian emperors from the East to Constantinople, whence they were conveyed to Milan. But the Emperor Frederick I. carried them off to Cologne, in 1162, where they still remain. Many very curious traditions, of no authority, have attached to these three holy men. They were said to have been Shem, Ham, and Japhet, who had fallen asleep in a cave, and to have woke only at the Nativity of Christ, when they came to adore Him; and then to have returned to their cave and died. A much more trustworthy tradition is to the effect that each wise man belonged to a different stock; that one was of the seed of Shem, another of the family of Japhet, and that the third, represented in art as black, belonged to the descendants of Ham. The three names Gaspar, Melchior, and Balthazar, are not found in any writers earlier than the twelfth century. Before Pope S. Leo the Great spoke of them as three, the number was sometimes supposed to have been as many as twelve. Barhebraeus says, "Magi came from the East. Some affirm that three princes came with a thousand men; but James, the bishop (of Edessa,) said that there were twelve princes, who, having left seven thousand soldiers at the Euphrates, came on with a thousand men to Jerusalem." Some authors have suggested that the seeming star, which appeared to the Magi in the East, might be that glorious Light which shone upon the shepherds of Bethlehem, when the angel came to impart to them the tidings of our Saviour's birth, which, at a distance, might appear like a star. According to an ancient commentary on S. Matthew, this star, on its first appearance to the wise men, had the form of a radiant child, bearing a sceptre or cross; and in some early Italian frescoes it is thus depicted:-- "In a trice a star shone forth Oh! so brightly shining! Nearer, nearer yet it came, Still towards earth inclining; And 'twas shaped--O! wondrous sight! Like a child with visage bright, Holding sign of kindly might, With a Cross combining." It is to be expected that the Epiphany, containing in itself, as has been observed, three distinct festivals, would be known by a variety of distinct names. In the Mozarabic ritual it is called the "Apparition of the Lord;" in Germany it is the "Three-Kings' Day." The Greeks keep the Nativity and the Manifestation to the Wise Men on the same day, the 25th December, and keep the 6th January as the festival of the Baptism of our Lord. The first historical notice of the Epiphany is found in S. Clement of Alexandria, A.D. 200; in the time of S. Chrysostom, A.D. 400, it is mentioned as an ancient and principal festival of the Asiatic Church. The earliest distinct trace of it in the West is found in Gaul, in the middle of the fourth century. Ammianus Marcellinus (xxi. 2), relates of Julian the Apostate, that in A.D. 361, he celebrated in the Christian Church at Paris, the feast of the Epiphany in January, shortly before he publicly renounced the Christian religion. The title of Day of Lights was given to this festival as commemorating the earthly manifestation of the Light of the World, and also because it was the supposed day of the Baptism of our Lord, to which rite the term "illumination" was especially given. Hence it became, and in the Greek Church it is still, one of the three solemn times of baptism. Greek Hymn.--O Christ, the True Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world, let the Light of Thy Countenance shine upon us, that thereby we may behold the unapproachable Light, and guide Thou our steps to fulfil Thy Commandments. S. MACRA, V. M. (ABOUT 303.) [Mentioned in the Roman and German Martyrologies. The account of her martyrdom is from the Martyrologies, and from her Acts, published by the Bollandists.] During the savage persecutions of Diocletian and Maximian, emperors, one Rictiovarus was governor at Soissons, in Gaul, who laboured to put down Christianity. The virgin Macra was treated by him with inhuman barbarity; she was exposed to fire, her breasts were cut off, and she was rolled on potsherds and coals; then, spreading out her hands, she prayed, "O Lord Jesu Christ, who madest me triumph over the chains in my dungeon, and madest the fire to which I was exposed as sweet as dew, I pray Thee, receive my soul, for now is the time come for Thee to set my spirit free!" So saying, she entered into her rest. She is regarded as the patroness of Fimes, near Rheims. In art, she is represented with her breasts on a book which she carries. S. MELANIUS, B. OF RENNES. (A.D. 580.) [Commemorated in the Roman Martyrology on this day. His life was written by a contemporary, according to Ducange.] S. Melanius was born at Plas, in the neighbourhood of Vannes, in Brittany, and became a monk when grown to man's estate. Upon the death of S. Amandus, Bishop of Rennes, he was compelled by the clergy and people to fill that see. He accepted the election of himself with great reluctance. He is related to have performed many miracles, and to have extirpated the last remnants of heathenism in his diocese. He died on a journey through his diocese, at La Vilaine. His body was placed in a boat, which, says the legend, returned to Rennes against the stream, without oars or sail. S. PETER, AB. OF CANTERBURY. (A.D. 608.) [Named in the English Martyrologies. Authority for his life, Bede. Hist. Eccl., i. 33.] Bede says of this Saint, that he was a disciple of S. Gregory the Great, and first abbot of the monastery of S. Peter, at Canterbury, which was in later years called S. Augustine's monastery. Going to France in 608, he was drowned near the harbour of Ambleteuse, near Boulogne. The peasants of the place buried the body without much regard, not knowing at first whose it was, but by night a light appeared above it; and, perceiving that the drowned man was a Saint, his body was exhumed, and conveyed to Boulogne. S. ERMINOLD, AB. OF PRUFENING, AND M. (A.D. 1121.) [Mentioned in the German Martyrologies. His life was written by a monk of Prufening, about the year 1290.] S. Erminold sprang from one of the first families in Swabia, and was given in early life to William, abbot of Hirschau, to be educated. A better tutor could not have been found for him, for William was one of the most learned and pious men of the age. The youthful Erminold made rapid progress in his studies, and he grew up in favour with God and man. When his pupilage was ended, he took the vows of monastic life upon him. In 1110, he was appointed by the Emperor Henry V., to the abbey of Lorch, on the Rhine; but hearing that this had been given him at the request of his brother, as a return for something his brother had done for the Emperor, Erminold threw up the office, so as not to incur the least suspicion of simony, and returned to Hirschau. But the Bishop of Bamberg, having founded an abbey at Prufening, near Ratisbon, he was invited to colonize it, and be its first father. He accordingly betook himself thither, with a few brethren. Having incurred the hostility of some of his monks, by insisting on strict discipline, one, named Aaron, struck him with a knife and mortally wounded him. He died, forgiving his murderer. [Illustration: Worshippers at the Shrine of a Saint.] January 7. S. LUCIAN, _P. M., at Antioch, circ._ A.D. 312. S. NICETAS, _B. C., circ._ A.D. 402. S. VALENTINE, _B. of Passau, circ._ A.D. 440. S. CEDD, _B. of London_, A.D. 664. S. TYLLO, _Monk in Gaul, circ._ 700. B. WITTEKIND, _Duke of Westphalia_, A.D. 800. S. RAINOLD, _Monk and M., of Dortmund, in Westphalia._ S. ALDRIC, _B. of Le Mans, in France, circ._ A.D. 855. S. CANUTE, _Duke of Schleswig_, A.D. 1133. S. LUCIAN, P. M., OF ANTIOCH. (ABOUT 312.) [Commemorated on this day by the Latins, on the 15th October by the Greeks. This S. Lucian is not to be confused with S. Lucian of Beauvais, commemorated on Jan. 8th. He is spoken of by S. Jerome and Theodoret. S. Chrysostom has a homily on S. Lucian. Information concerning him is also obtained from the Greek Menaea, and from the Acts of his martyrdom in Metaphrastes.] Saint Lucian was born at Samosata, in Syria; his parents were Christians, and sought above all things to educate their son in the fear of God. Both died and left him an orphan at the age of twelve, and the boy, in his desolation, distributed his goods to the poor, and took refuge with Macarius at Edessa, who taught out of Holy Scripture the things concerning eternal life. Arrived at man's estate, he was ordained priest, and opened a school at Antioch, and diligently laboured at procuring a correct version of the Holy Scriptures, by comparing together the different Hebrew copies. His version of the sacred writings was used by S. Jerome, and proved of much assistance to him in his work of writing the Vulgate. When Maximian persecuted the Church, S. Lucian concealed himself, but was betrayed by a Sabellian priest into the hands of the persecutors; he was taken to Nicomedia, and brought before Maximian. On his way he was the means of recovering forty Christian soldiers, who had lapsed. In Nicomedia he was subjected to torture. His feet were placed in the stocks, which were distended, so as to dislocate his legs. His hands were fastened to a beam, which was above his head, and he was laid on sharp potsherds, so that his back was lacerated and pierced. After this, he was allowed to lie on his cell floor, unable to rise, on account of his legs being out of joint, and was starved to death. He lingered fourteen days. And when the feast of the Manifestation drew nigh, he desired greatly to receive the Holy Eucharist. "When the fatal day had arrived, which was looked forward to, some of the disciples desired to receive from their master his last celebration of the divine mystery. But it seemed doubtful how they might bring a table into the prison, and how they might conceal it from the eyes of the impious. But when many of the disciples were assembled, and others were arriving, he said: 'This breast of mine shall be the table, and I reckon it will not be less esteemed of God than one of inanimate material; and ye shall be a holy temple, standing round about me.' And thus it was accomplished, for because the saintly man was at the end of his life, the guards were negligent, and so God, as I think, to honour his martyr, removed all impediments to that being done which was proposed. For when all stood in close ring round the martyr, so that one standing by the other shut him completely from view, he ordered the symbols of the divine Sacrifice to be placed on his breast. After that he raised his eyes to heaven, and uttered the accustomed prayers. Then, when he had uttered many sacred prayers, and had done all the requisite acts in the sacred rite, he and the rest communicated, and he sent to those who were absent, as he himself shows in his last Epistle to them. Next day some officers came from the Emperor to see if he were still alive. And as he saw them standing about him, he said thrice, 'I am a Christian,' and so saying, he died." The body was then thrown into the sea, to the great grief of his disciples, who desired to bury it. But fifteen days after it was recovered. A legend says that a dolphin brought it ashore; be that as it may, it was found and was buried. In art, S. Lucian is sometimes represented with a chalice and Host, in allusion to his offering the holy Sacrifice in prison; sometimes with a dolphin at his side. S. VALENTINE, B. OF PASSAU. (ABOUT 440.) [Some German Martyrologies, and the Roman, commemorate S. Maximilian, M., and S. Valentine, B.C., on Oct. 29. But S. Valentine is commemorated alone on this day at Passau.] Valentine was sent by the Pope to preach the Gospel in the Passau. He found that his work was without fruit, and returned to Rome to implore the Holy Father to send him elsewhere. But the Pope consecrated him bishop, and sent him back to Passau, to preach in season and out of season, whether it produced fruit or not. The Bishop renewed his efforts, but the Pagans and Arians combined to drive him out of the city. Thereupon he went among the Rhaetian Alps, and his teaching produced abundant fruit among the mountaineers. At length he resolved to serve God, and purify his own soul, in a life of retirement. He therefore built a little chapel and monastery at Mais, in Tyrol, and there he died. Relics, at Passau. S. CEDD, B. OF LONDON. (A.D. 664.) [English Martyrologies. His life is given by Bede, in his Ecclesiastical History, lib. 3, caps. 21, 22, 23.] Peada, son of Penda, King of Mercia, being appointed by his father King of the Midland English, by which name Bede distinguished the inhabitants of Leicestershire, and part of Lincolnshire and Derbyshire, from the rest of the Mercians; the young king visited Oswy, King of Northumbria, at Atwell, or Walton, was baptized along with several of his nobles, by Bishop Finan, and was provided by Oswy with two priests to instruct his people in Christianity. One of these was S. Cedd, who had been trained in the monastery of Lindisfarne. "When these two," says Bede, "travelling to all parts of that country, had gathered a numerous church to the Lord, it happened that Cedd returned home, and came to the church of Lindisfarne to confer with Bishop Finan; who, finding how successful he had been in the work of the Gospel, made him Bishop of the Church of the East Saxons, calling to him two other bishops, to assist at the ordination. Cedd, having received the episcopal dignity, returned to his province, and pursuing the work he had begun, with more ample authority, built churches in several places, ordaining priests and deacons to assist him in the work of faith, and the ministry of baptizing, especially in the city which, in the language of the Saxons, is called Ithancester,[31] as also in that named Tilabury (Tilbury); the first of which places is on the bank of the Pante, the other on the bank of the Thames; where, gathering a flock of servants of Christ, he taught them to observe the discipline of regular life, as far as those rude people were then capable. "Whilst the doctrine of everlasting life was thus, for a considerable time, making progress, to the joy of the King and of all the people, it happened that the King, at the instigation of the enemy of all good men, was murdered by his own kindred. The same man of God, whilst he was bishop among the East Saxons, was wont also to visit, at intervals, his own country, Northumberland, to make exhortations. Ethelwald, the son of King Oswald, who reigned over the Deiri, finding him a holy, wise, and good man, desired him to accept some land to build a monastery, to which the King himself might frequently resort, to offer his prayers and hear the word, and be buried in it when he died; for he believed that he should receive much benefit by the prayers of those who were to serve God in that place. The King had before with him a brother of the same bishop, called Celin, a man no less devoted to God; who, being a priest, was wont to administer to him the word and the Sacraments, by whose means he chiefly came to know and love the bishop. "That prelate, therefore, complying with the King's desires, chose himself a place to build a monastery among craggy and distant mountains, which looked more like lurking places for robbers, and retreats for wild beasts, than habitations for men. The man of God, desiring first to cleanse the place for the monastery from former crimes, by prayer and fasting, that it might become acceptable to our Lord, and so to lay the foundations, requested the King to give him leave to reside there all the approaching Lent, to pray. All which time, except Sundays, he fasted till the evening, according to custom, and then took no other sustenance than a little bread, one egg, and a little milk mixed with water. This, he said, was the custom of those of whom he had learnt the rule of regular discipline; first, to consecrate to our Lord, by prayer and fasting, the places which they had newly received for building a monastery or a church. When there were ten days of Lent still remaining, there came a messenger to call him to the King; and he, that the religious work might not be intermitted, on account of the King's affairs, entreated his priest, Cynebil, who was also his own brother, to complete that which had been so piously begun. Cynebil readily complied, and when the time of fasting and prayer was over, he there built the monastery, which is now called Lestingan,[32] and established therein the religious customs of Lindisfarne." At this time, owing to the influence of S. Wilfrid, who had been established at Ripon by Alchfrid, son of King Oswy, a great split was forming in the Church, which made itself felt even in the Royal family. All the missionaries of the north had been brought up in Iona, or Lindisfarne, and followed the Keltic ritual; Wilfrid, ordained by a French bishop, introduced Roman ways. Oswy had been baptized and educated by Keltic monks, and followed the usages of the Mother Church of Iona; but his wife, Eanfleda, had learned in exile Roman ways, and she brought with her to the court of Oswy a Canterbury priest--Romanus by name, and Roman in heart--who guided her religious exercises. Two Easter feasts were thus celebrated every year in the same house; and as the Saxon kings had transferred to the chief festivals of the Christian year, and especially to the Queen of Feasts, the meeting of assemblies, and the occasion which those assemblies gave them of displaying all their pomp, it is easy to understand how painful it must have been for Oswy to sit, with his earls and thanes, at the great feast of Easter, at the end of a wearisome Lent, and to see the Queen, with her maids of honour and her servants, persisting in fasting and penance, it being with her still only Palm Sunday.[33] To settle this difference, and prevent a rupture, the King convoked a parliament at Whitby, in 664. In this parliament Colman, Bishop of Lindisfarne, Cedd, Bishop of the East Saxons, who had at this time re-established the episcopal see of London, and S. Hilda, the great abbess of Whitby, upheld the Keltic rite. On the other side were S. Wilfrid, the young Prince Alchfrid, and James, the deacon of York. In this parliament, it was decided that the Roman usages should be adopted, and Cedd renounced the customs of Lindisfarne, in which he had been educated, and returned to his diocese of London to spread the Roman usages there. "Cedd," says Bede, "for many years had charge of his bishopric and of the monastery of Lastingham, over which he had placed superiors. It happened that he came there at the time that a plague was raging, and he fell sick and died. He was first buried in the open air, but in process of time, a church of stone was built in the monastery, in honour of the Mother of God, and his body was interred in the same, on the right hand of the altar." The Bishop left the monastery to be governed after him by his brother Chad, who was afterwards made bishop. For the four brothers, Cedd, and Cynebil, Celin, and Ceadda (Chad)--which is a rare thing to be met with--were all celebrated priests of our Lord, and two of them also came to be bishops. S. TYLLO, H. (ABOUT 700.) [Cologne, German, and Belgian Martyrologies. The name is sometimes Tyllo, Thillo, or Hillo; in Belgium, Theaulon or Tilman. Authority: A life published in the Bollandists, which agrees with scattered notices of him in various writers.] S. Tillo, the Patron of Iseghem, in Belgium, was a son of Saxon parents, but was stolen, when young, from his home, and sold as a slave in Gaul. S. Eligius, who redeemed many slaves, bought the lad, and being struck with his beauty and intelligence, sent him to the monastery of Solignac, to be educated by S. Remacle, then abbot of Solignac. After his education was complete, he was returned to S. Eligius, who was a goldsmith, patronized by King Dagobert and the nobles of the court. With him Tillo learned the trade of a goldsmith, and made many vessels and ornaments of gold and silver, encrusted with gems, for the King. Whilst he worked, he had the Holy Scriptures open before him, and as he chased the silver and gold he studied the Word of God. He kept ever in his heart the maxim, "Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them," and all his work was done to the best of his ability, and executed with punctuality. Thus, he found favour with Eligius, and with all the customers of his master. When Eligius left his shop, and became a bishop, he called to the clerical office and to the religious life, his apprentice whom he had bought in the market many years before. Tillo, as priest and monk, showed a pattern of holiness, and was made abbot of Solignac, near Limoges. But ruling three hundred monks and attending to the worldly affairs of a great monastery, and more than that, the multitude of visitors, made the life one for which the goldsmith's apprentice, trained to work in silence, and think and read, felt himself unfitted; so one night he fled away and was lost. He penetrated the woods and mountains of Auvergne, seeking out a suitable spot for a hermitage, and one day he lit upon a quiet place, hid away among the rocky mountains, into which he could only just crawl on hands and knees. Having got in, he found a pleasant glade, surrounded with trees, having streams watering it from the mountain side, and there were plenty of apple trees, from which he concluded it had been previously a hermitage. Here he lived for some time, praying and reading, and tilling the soil. By degrees, it was rumoured that a holy hermit lived in that glade, and the people of the neighbourhood came to see him, and he called himself Brother Paul. And to all who visited him this was the rule of life he gave, "Believe in God the Father Almighty, and in Jesus Christ his Son, also in the Holy Ghost, three persons, but one God. Keep your mind from vain cogitations and your body pure from all uncleanness; avoid self-conceit, and be instant in prayer." And when there was ever more and more of a concourse, and many desired to put themselves under his direction, he went forth, and sought out a suitable spot, and found it at Bayac, where he founded a monastery. There he remained some while, till a longing came over him to revisit Solignac, and he fled away when all his monks were asleep, as he had fled previously from Solignac. And when he reached Solignac, he was received with great joy. Then he asked the abbot Gundebert to build him a little cell outside the monastery, in which he might reside with one or two of the brethren who sought a stricter life. His wish was granted, and in this cell he spent the rest of his days. He is regarded with special veneration at Iseghem, in Flanders, because he visited that place in company with S. Eligius, and there remained some time teaching the people. In art, he is represented with a chalice in one hand and an abbatial staff in the other. S. ALDRIC, B. OF MANS. (A.D. 855.) [Gallican Martyrology. Ancient Life in Baluze: Miscel. iii.] S. Aldric was born about the year 800. When aged fourteen his father sent him to the court of Louis the Pious. One day, as he was praying in church at Aix-la-Chapelle, he felt called by God to leave a life in the world, and dedicate himself to the service of the altar. With difficulty he persuaded the King to let him depart, and he was sent to the Bishop of Metz. There he remained some years, received the tonsure, and was ordained priest. Louis the Pious, hearing of the wisdom and sanctity of Aldric, appointed him to be his chaplain and confessor. Aldric was afterwards elected Bishop of Mans, and was consecrated on the 22nd December, 832. When raised to the episcopal throne, he kept a stricter guard over himself, and treated his body with great rigour, but to others he was gentle and lenient. All his income was spent in works of mercy. He redeemed captives, relieved the poor, built churches, and founded monasteries. In the civil wars which divided the French monarchy, his fidelity to his prince and to Charles the Bald, his successor, involved him in trouble, and he was expelled for about a twelvemonth from his see. On his return, he laboured more indefatigably than ever to perfect the discipline of his diocese, for which purpose he collected the canons of Councils and decrees of the Popes into what he called a Capitulary. Some fragments have reached us of the regulations which he made for the celebration of divine service; in which he orders ten wax candles, and ninety lamps, to be lighted in his Cathedral on all great festivals. S. CANUTE LAVARD, M. (A.D. 1133.) [Schleswig and Scandinavian Breviaries. Life in Knytlinga Saga, Saxo Grammaticus, Schleswig Breviary, &c.] Canute Lavard was second son of Eric the Good, King of Denmark. His elder brother, Nicolas, became King of Denmark, though he was illegitimate, as Canute was very young. Nicolas had a son named Magnus, who was also brought up with Canute. Canute purchased the duchy of Schleswig, and occupied himself with clearing the seas and islands of Denmark of the pirates who infested them. On one occasion, a pirate whom he had captured, and condemned with others to be hung, cried out that he was of royal blood, and was related to Canute. "Then," said the duke, "you shall hang at the topmast head above the others." Henry, King of the Sclaves, being dead, Canute succeeded him. The popularity of this prince, owing to his gentleness, virtue, and piety, stirred up the envy of Magnus, who feared lest he should put in a claim to the throne of Denmark, to which indeed he had a right prior to Magnus and his father. In order to make sure of the succession, Magnus decoyed his unsuspicious kinsman into a wood, surrounded him with armed men, and killed him. [Illustration: Seal of the City of Brussels. S. Gudule, p. 115.] FOOTNOTES: [31] On the Blackwater; there is no city there now, but numerous traces of an ancient settlement, and an old chapel marks the site, in the parish of Bradwell. [32] Lastingham, near Pickering, in Yorkshire. [33] Bede iii. 25. January 8. S. LUCIAN, _B. M._, AND COMPANIONS, _at Beauvais_. S. PATIENS, _B. of Metz, circ._ A.D. 152. S. ATTICUS, _Patr. of Constantinople_, A.D. 425. S. SEVERINUS, _P. and Apostle of Austria_, A.D. 482. S. SEVERINUS, _B. C., in Italy, 6th cent._ B. BALDWIN, _Archdeacon of Laon, M., 6th cent._ S. FRODOBERT, _Ab., at Troyes, 7th cent._ S. GUDULA, _V., at Brussels, circ._ A.D. 712. S. PEGA, _V., in England, circ._ A.D. 718. S. ERARD, _Bishop in Bavaria, 8th cent._ S. GARIBALD, _B. of Ratisbon, circ._ A.D. 1252. S. WULSIN, _B. of Sherbourn_, A.D. 983. S. LAURENCE JUSTINIANI, _Patr. of Venice_, A.D. 1455. S. LUCIAN, B. M. AT BEAUVAIS. [Roman, Gallican, and Anglican Martyrologies; Bede, Ado, Notker, and others. His date uncertain. As little is known of this S. Lucian, it is probable that the so-called Reformers retained his name in the Anglican Calendar by mistake, confusing him with the S. Lucian of Antioch, Jan. 7th, a much better known Saint.] There is much uncertainty about this martyr. Some writers maintain that he was a disciple of S. Peter. Others say that he was sent into Gaul by S. Clement, Bishop of Rome, at the end of the first century, and suffered death under the reign of Domitian. It is certain, however, that he came into Gaul to preach the faith to the pagan inhabitants, and that he finished his labours at Beauvais, by the death of a martyr. There is good reason to believe that he was of noble Roman blood, and that he accompanied S. Denys of Paris, or S. Quentin of Amiens, on his mission, about the year 245. S. Lucian was accompanied by his friends, Maximian and Julian. They suffered in different places, and on different days; but they were laid by faithful disciples in one tomb, and are commemorated together. S. Lucian is called in some calendars a priest; but in an ancient one of the ninth century, he is styled a bishop, and such has been the constant tradition at Beauvais. In art, he is represented holding his head in his hands. S. PATIENS, B. (ABOUT A.D. 152.) [Roman Martyrology; Martyrologies of Cologne, of Rabanus, Notker, &c. His life is traditional.] S. Patiens is said to have been a disciple of S. John the Evangelist, and to have been sent by him into Gaul. He settled at Metz, where he became the fourth Bishop. S. ATTICUS, PATR. OF CONSTANTINOPLE. (A.D. 425.) [Roman Martyrology, that of Usuardus and the German Martyrologies. Authorities for his life, very numerous: Socrates, Sozomen, Synesius, Palladius, Photius, Nicephorus, Zonaras, &c.] Atticus, a man of gentle spirit and conciliatory manners, succeeded S. Chrysostom in the see of Constantinople. He, at first, refused to admit the name of his predecessor into the diptychs; but was afterwards moved to yield, in accordance with the Latin Church, which refused communion with the see of Constantinople till the righteousness of the cause of the great Chrysostom had been acknowledged. Atticus was engaged in correspondence on this subject with S. Cyril of Alexandria, who vehemently resented the admission of the name of Chrysostom, till he also yielded at the instance of Isidore of Pelusium. S. SEVERINUS, P. AP. OF NORICUM. (A.D. 482.) [Roman Martyrology and those of Germany. The life of S. Severinus was written by his disciple, Eugippius, in the year 511, as he states in a letter to Paschatius, the deacon. The following life is extracted from Mr. Kingsley's "Hermits,"[34] with certain necessary modifications. What has been once well done, the author is unwilling to do again, and do in an inferior manner.] In the middle of the fifth century the province of Noricum (Austria, as we should now call it), was the very highway of invading barbarians, the centre of the human Maelstrom, in which Huns, Allemanni, Rugii, and a dozen wild tribes more, wrestled up and down, and round the starving and beleaguered towns of what had once been a happy and fertile province, each tribe striving to trample the other under foot, and to march southward, over their corpses, to plunder what was still left of the already plundered wealth of Italy and Rome. The difference of race, of tongue, and of manners, between the conquered and their conquerors, was made more painful by difference in creed. The conquering Germans and Huns were either Arians or heathens. The conquered race (though probably of very mixed blood), who called themselves Romans, because they spoke Latin, and lived under the Roman law, were orthodox Catholics; and the miseries of religious persecution were too often added to the usual miseries of invasion. It was about the year 455-60. Attila, the great King of the Huns, who called himself--and who was--"the Scourge of God" was just dead. His empire had broken up. The whole centre of Europe was in a state of anarchy and war; and the hapless Romans along the Danube were in the last extremity of terror, not knowing by what fresh invader their crops would be swept off up to the very gates of the walled towers, which were their only defence; when there appeared among them, coming out of the East, a man of God. Who he was he would not tell. His speech showed him to be an African Roman--a fellow-countryman of S. Augustine--probably from the neighbourhood of Carthage. He had certainly at one time gone to some desert in the East, zealous to learn "the more perfect life." Severinus, he said, was his name; a name which indicated high rank, as did the manners and the scholarship of him who bore it. But more than his name he would not tell. "If you take me for a runaway slave," he said, smiling, "get ready money to redeem me with when my master demands me back." For he believed that they would have need of him; that God had sent him into that land that he might be of use to its wretched people. And certainly he could have come into the neighbourhood of Vienna, at that moment, for no other purpose than to do good, unless he came to deal in slaves. He settled first at a town, called by his biographer Casturis; and, lodging with the warden of the church, lived quietly the hermit life. Meanwhile the German tribes were prowling round the town; and Severinus, going one day into the church, began to warn the priests and clergy, and all the people, that a destruction was coming on them which they could only avert by prayer, and fasting, and the works of mercy. They laughed him to scorn, confiding in their lofty Roman walls, which the invaders--wild horsemen, who had no military engines--were unable either to scale or batter down. Severinus left the town at once, prophesying, it was said, the very day and hour of its fall. He went on to the next town, which was then closely garrisoned by a barbarian force, and repeated his warning there: but while the people were listening to him, there came an old man to the gate, and told them how Casturis had been already sacked, as the man of God had foretold; and going into the church, threw himself at the feet of S. Severinus, and said that he had been saved by his merits from being destroyed with his fellow-townsmen. Then the dwellers in the town hearkened to the man of God, and gave themselves up to fasting, and almsgiving, and prayer for three whole days. And on the third day, when the solemnity of the evening sacrifice was fulfilled, a sudden earthquake happened, and the barbarians, seized with panic fear, and probably hating and dreading--like all those wild tribes--confinement between four stone walls, instead of the free open life of the tent and the stockade, forced the Romans to open their gates to them, rushed out into the night, and, in their madness, slew each other. In those days a famine fell upon the people of Vienna; and they, as their sole remedy, thought good to send for the man of God from the neighbouring town. He went, and preached to them, too, repentance and almsgiving. The rich, it seems, had hidden up their stores of corn, and left the poor to starve. At least S. Severinus discovered (by divine revelation, it was supposed), that a widow named Procula had done as much. He called her out into the midst of the people, and asked her why she, a noble woman and free-born, had made herself a slave to avarice, which is idolatry. If she would not give her corn to Christ's poor, let her throw it into the Danube to feed the fish, for any gain from it she would not have. Procula was abashed, and served out her hoards thereupon willingly to the poor; and a little while afterwards, to the astonishment of all, vessels came down the Danube laden with every kind of merchandize. They had been frozen up for many days near Passau, in the thick ice of the river Enns: but the prayers of God's servant had opened the ice-gates, and let them down the stream before the usual time. Then the wild German horsemen swept around the walls, and carried off human beings and cattle, as many as they could find. Severinus, like some old Hebrew prophet, did not shrink from advising hard blows, where hard blows could avail. Mamertinus, the tribune, or officer in command, told him that he had so few soldiers, and those so ill-armed, that he dare not face the enemy. Severinus answered that they should get weapons from the barbarians themselves; the Lord would fight for them, and they should hold their peace: only if they took any captives they should bring them safe to him. At the second milestone from the city they came upon the plunderers, who fled at once, leaving their arms behind. Thus was the prophecy of the man of God fulfilled. The Romans brought the captives back to him unharmed. He loosed their bonds, gave them food and drink, and let them go. But they were to tell their comrades that, if ever they came near that spot again, celestial vengeance would fall on them, for the God of the Christians fought from heaven in his servants cause. So the barbarians trembled, and went away. And the fear of S. Severinus fell on all the Goths, heretic Arians though they were; and on the Rugii, who held the north bank of the Danube in those evil days. S. Severinus, meanwhile, went out of Vienna, and built himself a cell at a place called "At the Vineyards." But some benevolent impulse--divine revelation his biographer calls it--prompted him to return, and build himself a cell on a hill close to Vienna, round which other cells soon grew up, tenanted by his disciples. "There," says his biographer, "he longed to escape the crowds of men who were wont to come to him, and cling closer to God in continual prayer: but the more he longed to dwell in solitude, the more often he was warned by revelations not to deny his presence to the afflicted people." He fasted continually; he went barefoot even in the midst of winter, which was so severe, the story continues, in those days around Vienna, that waggons crossed the Danube on the solid ice: and yet, instead of being puffed-up by his own virtues, he set an example of humility to all, and bade them with tears to pray for him, that the Saviour's gifts to him might not heap condemnation on his head. Over the wild Rugii S. Severinus seems to have acquired unbounded influence. Their king, Flaccitheus, used to pour out his sorrows to him, and tell him how the princes of the Goths would surely slay him; for when he had asked leave of him to pass on into Italy, he would not let him go. But S. Severinus prophesied to him that the Goths would do him no harm. Only one warning he must take: "Let it not grieve him to ask peace even for the least of men." The friendship which had thus begun between the barbarian king and the cultivated Saint was carried on by his son Feva: but his "deadly and noxious wife," Gisa, who appears to have been a fierce Arian, always, says his biographer, kept him back from clemency. One story of Gisa's misdeeds is so characteristic both of the manners of the time and of the style in which the original biography is written, that I shall take leave to insert it at length. "The King Feletheus (who is also Feva), the son of the afore-mentioned Flaccitheus, following his father's devotion, began, at the commencement of his reign, often to visit the holy man. His deadly and noxious wife, named Gisa, always kept him back from the remedies of clemency. For she, among the other plague-spots of her iniquity, even tried to have certain Catholics re-baptized: but when her husband did not consent, on account of his reverence for S. Severinus, she gave up immediately her sacrilegious intention, burdening the Romans, nevertheless, with hard conditions, and commanding some of them to be exiled to the Danube. For when one day, she, having come to the village next to Vienna, had ordered some of them to be sent over the Danube, and condemned to the most menial offices of slavery, the man of God sent to her, and begged that they might be let go. But she, blazing up in a flame of fury, ordered the harshest of answers to be returned. 'I pray thee,' she said, 'servant of God, hiding there within thy cell, allow us to settle what we choose about our own slaves.' But the man of God hearing this, 'I trust,' he said, 'in my Lord Jesus Christ, that she will be forced by necessity to fulfil that which in her wicked will she has despised.' And forthwith a swift rebuke followed, and brought low the soul of the arrogant woman. For she had confined in close custody certain barbarian goldsmiths, that they might make regal ornaments. To them the son of the aforesaid king, Frederick by name, still a little boy, had gone in, in childish levity, on the very day on which the queen had despised the servant of God. The goldsmiths put a sword to the child's breast, saying, that if any one attempted to enter, without giving them an oath that they should be protected, he should die; and that they would slay the king's child first, and themselves afterwards, seeing that they had no hope of life left, being worn out with long prison. When she heard that, the cruel and impious queen, rending her garments for grief, cried out, 'O servant of God, Severinus, are the injuries which I did thee thus avenged? Hast thou obtained, by the earnest prayer thou hast poured out, this punishment for my contempt, that thou shouldst avenge it on my own flesh and blood?' Then, running up and down with manifold contrition and miserable lamentation, she confessed that for the act of contempt which she had committed against the servant of God she was struck by the vengeance of the present blow; and forthwith she sent knights to ask for forgiveness, and sent across the river the Romans, his prayers for whom she had despised. The goldsmiths, having received immediately a promise of safety, and giving up the child, were in like manner let go. "The most reverend Severinus, when he heard this, gave boundless thanks to the Creator, who sometimes puts off the prayers of suppliants for this end, that as faith, hope, and charity grow, while lesser things are sought, He may concede greater things. Lastly, this did the mercy of the Omnipotent Saviour work, that while it brought to slavery a woman free, but cruel over much, she was forced to restore to liberty those who were enslaved. This having been marvellously gained, the queen hastened with her husband to the servant of God, and showed him her son, who, she confessed, had been freed from the verge of death by his prayers, and promised that she would never go against his commands." To this period of Severinus' life belongs the famous story of his interview with Odoacer, the first barbarian king of Italy, and brother of the great Onulf or Wolf, who was the founder of the family of the Guelphs, Counts of Altorf, and the direct ancestors of Victoria, Queen of England. Their father was Aedecon, secretary at one time of Attila, and chief of the little tribe of Turklings, who, though German, had clung faithfully to Attila's sons, and came to ruin at the great battle of Netad, when the empire of the Huns broke up at once and for ever. Then Odoacer and his brother started over the Alps to seek their fortunes in Italy, and take service, after the fashion of young German adventurers, with the Romans; and they came to S. Severinus' cell, and went in, heathens as they probably were, to ask a blessing of the holy man; and Odoacer had to stoop and to stand stooping, so huge he was. The Saint saw that he was no common lad, and said, "Go to Italy, clothed though thou be in ragged sheepskins: thou shalt soon give greater gifts to thy friends." So Odoacer went up into Italy, deposed the last of the Caesars, a paltry boy, Romulus Augustulus by name, and found himself, to his own astonishment, and that of all the world, the first German king of Italy; and, when he was at the height of his power, he remembered the prophecy of Severinus, and sent to him, offering him any boon he chose to ask. But all that the Saint asked was, that he should forgive some Romans whom he had banished. S. Severinus meanwhile foresaw that Odoacer's kingdom would not last, as he seems to have foreseen many things. For when certain German knights were boasting before him of the power and glory of Odoacer, he said that it would last some thirteen, or at most fourteen years; and the prophecy (so all men said in those days) came exactly true. There is no need to follow the details of S. Severinus's labours through some five-and-twenty years of perpetual self-sacrifice--and, as far as this world was concerned, perpetual disaster. Eugippius's chapters are little save a catalogue of towns sacked one after the other, from Passau to Vienna, till the miserable survivors of the war seemed to have concentrated themselves under S. Severinus's guardianship in the latter city. We find, too, tales of famine, of locust-swarms, of little victories over the barbarians, which do not arrest wholesale defeat: but we find, through all, S. Severinus labouring like a true man of God, conciliating the invading chiefs, redeeming captives, procuring for the cities which were still standing supplies of clothes for the fugitives, persuading the husbandmen, seemingly through large districts, to give even in time of dearth a tithe of their produce to the poor;--a tale of noble work indeed. Eugippius relates many wonders in his life of S. Severinus. The reader finds how the man who had secretly celebrated a heathen sacrifice was discovered by S. Severinus, because, while the tapers of the rest of the congregation were lighted miraculously from heaven, his taper alone would not light. He records how the Danube dared not rise above the mark of the cross which S. Severinus had cut upon the posts of a timber chapel; how a poor man, going out to drive the locusts off his little patch of corn instead of staying in the church all day to pray, found the next morning that his crop alone had been eaten, while all the fields around remained untouched. Also he records the well-known story, which has a certain awfulness about it, how S. Severinus watched all night by the bier of the dead priest Silvinus, and ere the morning dawned bade him, in the name of God, speak to his brethren; and how the dead man opened his eyes, and Severinus asked him whether he wished to return to life, and he answered complainingly, "Keep me no longer here; nor cheat me of that perpetual rest which I had already found," and so, closing his eyes once more, was still for ever. At last the noble life wore itself out. For two years Severinus had foretold that his end was near; and foretold, too, that the people for whom he had spent himself should go forth in safety, as Israel out of Egypt, and find a refuge in some other Roman province, leaving behind them so utter a solitude, that the barbarians, in their search for the hidden treasures of the civilization which they had exterminated, should dig up the very graves of the dead. Only, when the Lord willed to deliver them, they must carry away his bones with them, as the children of Israel carried the bones of Joseph. Then Severinus sent for Feva, the Rugian king and Gisa, his cruel wife; and when he had warned them how they must render an account to God for the people committed to their charge, he stretched his hand out to the bosom of the king. "Gisa," he asked, "dost thou love most the soul within that breast, or gold and silver?" She answered that she loved her husband above all. "Cease then," he said, "to oppress the innocent: lest their affliction be the ruin of your power." Severinus' presage was strangely fulfilled. Feva had handed over the city of Vienna to his brother Frederick--"poor and impious," says Eugippius. Severinus, who knew him well, sent for him, and warned him that he himself was going to the Lord; and that if, after his death, Frederick dared touch aught of the substance of the poor and the captive, the wrath of God would fall on him. In vain the barbarian pretended indignant innocence; Severinus sent him away with fresh warnings. "Then on the nones of January he was smitten slightly with a pain in the side. And when that had continued for three days, at midnight he bade the brethren come to him." He renewed his talk about the coming emigration, and entreated again that his bones might not be left behind; and having bidden all in turn come near and kiss him, and having received the most Holy Sacrament, he forbade them to weep for him, and commanded them to sing a psalm. They hesitated, weeping. He himself gave out the psalm, "Praise the Lord in His saints, and let all that hath breath praise the Lord;" and so went to rest in the Lord. No sooner was he dead than Frederick seized on the garments kept in the monastery for the use of the poor, and even commanded his men to carry off the vessels of the altar. Then followed a scene characteristic of the time. The steward sent to do the deed shrank from the crime of sacrilege. A knight, Anicianus by name, went in his stead, and took the vessels of the altar. But his conscience was too strong for him. Trembling and delirium fell on him, and he fled away to a lonely island, and became a hermit there. Frederick, impenitent, swept away all in the monastery, leaving nought but the bare walls, "which he could not carry over the Danube." But on him, too, vengeance fell. Within a month he was slain by his own nephew. Then Odoacer attacked the Rugii, and carried off Feva and Gisa captive to Rome. And then the long-promised emigration came. Odoacer, whether from mere policy (for he was trying to establish a half-Roman kingdom in Italy,) or for love of S. Severinus himself, sent his brother Onulf to fetch away into Italy the miserable remnant of the Danubian provincials, to be distributed among the wasted and unpeopled farms of Italy. And with them went forth the corpse of S. Severinus, undecayed, though he had been six years dead, and giving forth exceeding fragrance, though (says Eugippius) no embalmer's hand had touched it. In a coffin, which had been long prepared for it, it was laid on a waggon, and went over the Alps into Italy, working (according to Eugippius) the usual miracles on the way, till it found a resting-place near Naples, in that very villa of Lucullus at Misenum, to which Odoacer had sent the last Emperor of Rome to dream his ignoble life away in helpless luxury. So ends this tragic story. Of its truth there can be no doubt. M. Ozanam has well said of that death-bed scene between the saint and the barbarian king and queen--"The history of invasions has many a pathetic scene: but I know none more instructive than the dying agony of that old Roman expiring between two barbarians, and less touched with the ruin of the empire, than with the peril of their souls."[35] But even more instructive, and more tragic also, is the strange coincidence that the wonder-working corpse of the starved and bare-footed hermit should rest beside the last Emperor of Rome. It is the symbol of a new era. The kings of this world have been judged and cast out. The empire of the flesh is to perish, and the empire of the spirit to conquer thenceforth for evermore. Relics, in the church of S. Severino at Naples. Patron (but not sole Patron) of Austria, Vienna, Bavaria. B. BALDWIN, M. OF LAON. (6TH CENT.) [German and Gallican Martyrologies. Life by an unknown author.] The Blessed Baldwin, archdeacon of Laon, in the reign of Dagobert, was the son of Basus, a nobleman, and Salaberga, who is numbered among the Saints. His sister's name was Astruda, who is also reckoned a Saint. Baldwin having incurred the enmity of certain evil men, was by them treacherously murdered. The details are not known. S. FRODOBERT, AB. OF TROYES. (7TH CENT.) [Gallican and German Martyrologies. S. Frodobert died on Jan. 1st, but his body was translated on Jan. 8th, and on that day, accordingly, his festival is observed at Troyes, and by the Benedictine Order. His life was written by his disciple, Lupellus, and used in the compilation of a later life, by a monk of Moutier la Celle, near Troyes, about 872.] S. Frodobert, the son of parents of the middle class, from the earliest age was inspired with the love of God, and a wondrous gentleness and child-like simplicity. He is said, as a little boy, to have healed his mother of blindness, as, in a paroxysm of love and compassion for her affliction, he kissed her darkened eyes, and signed them with the cross. At an early age he entered the abbey of Luxeuil, where his singleness of soul and guilelessness exposed him to become the butt of the more frivolous monks. During the time that he was there, a certain Teudolin, abbot of S. Seguanus, was staying at Luxeuil for the purpose of study, and Frodobert was much with him, being ordered to attend on the wants of the visitor, and obey him implicitly. This Teudolin diversified his labours with playing practical jokes on his gentle assistant; but Frodobert never resented any jest. One day the abbot Teudolin sent Frodobert to another monk, who was also fond of practising jokes on Frodobert, for a pair of compasses, saying that he wanted them for writing. The lay brother took the message without in the least knowing what compasses were. The monk, suspecting that the abbot had sent Frodobert on a fool's errand, put a pair of stones off a hand-mill round his neck, and told him to take them to Teudolin. Frodobert obeyed, but was scarcely able to stagger along the cloister under the weight. On his way, the abbot of Luxeuil, his own superior, met him, and amazed to see the poor brother bowed to earth under this burden, bade him throw down the mill-stones, and tell him whither he was taking them. Frodobert obeyed, and said that the abbot Teudolin had sent him for them, as he wanted them for literary purposes. The superior burst into tears, grieved that the good, simple-minded lay brother should have been thus imposed upon, and hastening to the visitor, and then to the monk who had put the "compasses" about Frodobert's neck, he administered to them such a sharp rebuke, that from that day forward no more practical jokes were played upon him. As years passed, his virtue became more generally known, and the Bishop of Troyes summoned him to be in attendance on himself. The humble monk in vain entreated to be allowed to return to his monastery; the bishop retained him about his person in his palace. As he was unable to return to the quiet of his cloister, Frodobert withdrew as much as possible from the world in which he moved, into the calm of his own heart, and practised great abstinence in the midst of the abundance wherewith the bishop's table was supplied. Living outside his cloister, he kept its rules, and in Lent he never ate anything till after sunset. Those who were less strict in their living, sneered at his self-denial, and told the bishop that Frodobert kept a supply of victuals in his bedroom, and ate privily. To prove him, the prelate gave him a chamber in the church tower, and burst in upon him at all unseasonable moments, but was never able to detect the slightest proof of the charge being well founded. He, therefore, regretted his mistrust, and restored the monk to his room in the palace. Frodobert was given at last, by Clovis II., some marshy land near Troyes, and on this he built a monastery, which he called La Celle, which was soon filled with numerous monks, and became famous for the learned men it educated. Here S. Frodobert spent many years. He passed his declining years in building a church to S. Peter, and when the church was completed, his strength failed, and he knew that he had not many days to live. His great desire was to see it consecrated on the feast of the Nativity, and he sent two of his monks to the bishop to beseech him to dedicate his new church that day. But the duties of Christmas, in his Cathedral, rendered it impossible for the prelate to grant this request. Frodobert received the refusal with many tears, but lifting his eyes and hands to heaven, he prayed, and God prolonged his days, so that he survived to see his church consecrated on the Octave of the Nativity, Jan. 1st; and when the ceremony was over, he resigned his soul into the hands of God. The body was translated, some years after, on the 8th January. The weather had been wet, and the marshes were under water, so that the abbot and monks were in trouble, because their house was surrounded with the flood, and it would be difficult for the bishop and clergy of Troyes to attend the ceremony of the translation. "Grant," said the abbot, "that the blessed Frodobert may obtain for us a sharp frost, or we shall have no one here tomorrow." This was said on the eve of the projected translation. That night, so hard a frost set in, that by morning the whole surface of the water was frozen like a stone, and the bishop, clergy, and faithful of Troyes, came to the monastery over the ice. S. GUDULA, V. (ABOUT 712.) [Gallo-Belgian and Cologne Martyrologies. Two lives of S. Gudula exist, besides notices of her in the lives of other members of the family of saints to which she belonged. One life, by a certain Hubert, was compiled after 1047, the other is anonymous, given by Surius. That of Hubert is an amplification of an older life, written in simple and rude style. He did not apparently add anything to the history, except the account of the various translations of her relics, up to his time; but he re-wrote the life in more pedantic and florid style.] The date of the birth of this holy virgin is uncertain. During the reign of King Dagobert, or of his son Sigebert, there lived in Brabant a count named Witgere. His wife Amalberga, who is said to have been the sister of Pepin of Landen, presented him with many children; Rainilda, Pharaildis, and Emebert, who occupied the episcopal throne of Cambrai, and was afterwards elevated to the ranks of the blessed. Amalberga was again pregnant, and an angel announced to her, in a dream, that the child that should be born to her, would be a model of sanctity. A few days after, S. Gudula was born, and her relative, S. Gertrude, was her sponsor, and took charge of her education. When Gudula was still a child, she longed to fly the world. She and her sister Rainilda betook themselves to Lobbes, and asked to be admitted into the monastery. But as women were not permitted to invade its precincts, their request was denied. After waiting three days at the gates, Gudula turned away sorrowful, but her sister Rainilda, more persevering, remained undeterred by repeated refusals, till, overcoming by her persistency, she was allowed to live under the rule of the monastery. Gudula returned to her parents; but living at home, she lived a recluse. In those wild times of civil war and general violence, it is not surprising to see gentle spirits flutter like doves to the convent gates, as to an ark of refuge, from the storms raging without, which they were so powerless to withstand. About two miles from her parents' castle was a little village named Moorsel, where was an oratory dedicated to the Saviour; thither went S. Gudula every morning at cock-crow. And now follows an incident similar to that related of S. Genoveva. One wild night, the Prince of the Power of the air extinguished the light which the servant girl carried before the Saint; and she, in profound darkness, on a barren heath, knew not how to find the path. Gudula knelt down and prayed to God, and the light rekindled in her lantern, so that she went on her way rejoicing. At early mass, one frosty morning, the priest, as he turned towards the people, noticed Gudula wrapped in devotion, and her feet were exposed from beneath her gown; he saw with dismay that there were no soles to her shoes, so that though she appeared to be well shod, she in reality walked barefoot. The good priest, pained to think that her tender feet should be chilled by the icy stones of the pavement, as soon as he had unvested, took his warm mittens, and put them under the feet of the young countess; but she rejected them, much distressed that her act of penance had been discovered. On leaving the church, she met a poor woman, with her crippled dumb son on her back. The boy was bowed double, and was so deformed that he could not feed himself. The Saint looked at the poor mother and then at the unfortunate child, and actuated by a movement of compassion, she took the cripple into her arms, and besought God to pity him. Instantly the stiff joints became supple, and the back was straightened, and the child, feeling himself whole, cried out: "See, mother! see!" Gudula, abashed at the miracle, implored the poor woman to keep what had taken place a secret; but she, full of gratitude, published it abroad. When S. Gudula died, all the people followed her body to the grave. She was buried on the 8th January, 712, according to the general opinion, in a tomb before the door of the oratory of the village of Hamme, near Releghem. On the morrow, a poplar that stood at the foot of her grave was seen, in spite of the season, to have burst into green leaf.[36] The body was afterwards transported to Nivelles, Mons, and Maubeuge, through fear of the Normans; and then was laid in the oratory of Moorsel, which she had loved so well in life. When Charlemagne came to Moorsel, he built there a monastery, richly endowed; but the convent disappeared in the times of anarchy which followed the death of the founder, and the body was finally taken from the robber baron who had appropriated to himself the lands of Moorsel, and brought to Brussels; where, since 1047, a magnificent church has eternalized the memory of the daughter of Witgere. The site of the chapel at Hamme is now a kiln. Gudula; _French_, Gudule; _Flemish_, Goole. Relics, at the church of SS. Michel et Gudule, Brussels. Patroness of Brussels. In art, represented with a lantern, and an angel kindling it. S. PEGA, V. (ABOUT A.D. 718.) [English Martyrologies. Authorities: Felix of Croyland, Florence of Worcester, Ordericus Vitalis, lib. iv. c. 17.] S. Pega was the sister of S. Guthlac of Croyland, and though of the royal blood of the Mercian kings, forsook the world and led a retired life in the country, where now stands Peakirk, in Northamptonshire. "There Pega, S. Guthlac's sister, was for a long time a servant of the Lord. After her brother's death, she used all her endeavours to wear out her life for the love of Christ, by still severer austerities. She, therefore, undertook a pilgrimage to Rome, to pray at the threshold of the holy Apostles, for herself and her kinsfolk, and she there triumphantly departed, on the sixth of the ides (8th) of January." S. Pega, called in Northamptonshire S. Pee, is not to be confounded with S. Bega, or S. Bees, who is commemorated on September 8th. S. WULSIN, B. OF SHERBOURN. (A.D. 983.) [Benedictine Martyrology. In English Martyrologies S. Wulsin was commemorated on Sept. 27th. Mentioned by Matthew of Westminster. His life is given by Capgrave.] Matthew of Westminster says (De gestis Pontif. Anglorum, lib. 2):--"Dunstan, the archbishop, when he was Bishop of London, made him (Wulsin), abbot of Westminster, a place where formerly Mellitus had raised a church to S. Peter, and here he formed a monastery of twelve monks. Having discharged his office prudently and with sanctity, he was made Bishop of Sherbourn. Then he at once instituted monks in the episcopal seat, and dismissed the secular clerks, lest he should seem to sleep when so many bishops of the time were patrons of diligence. His sanctity, if manifest in life, was more so in death. For when he was nigh the gates of death, the eyes of his understanding being opened, he exclaimed singing, 'I see the heavens opened, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God!' Which song he uttered without faltering, and singing, he died." S. LAURENCE JUSTINIANI, PATR. OF VENICE. (A.D. 1455.) S. Laurence Justiniani died on Jan. 8th. He was beatified by Clement VII., in the year 1524, and was canonized in 1698 by Alexander VIII. The 5th Sept., the day of his consecration as bishop, is generally observed in his honour, instead of Jan. 8th, and to that day we refer our readers for his life. [Illustration: Decoration] FOOTNOTES: [34] "The Hermits," by the Rev. C. Kingsley. Macmillan, 1869, pp. 224, 239. [35] La Civilisation Chretienne chez les Francs. Paris, 1861, p. 41. [36] So related in one of the lives. The other exaggerates the incident, and says that in the night a poplar tree sprang up. January 9. S. MARCIANA, _V. M., in Africa_, _circ._ A.D. 300. SS. JULIAN, BASILISSA, CELSUS, AND COMPANIONS, MM, _in Egypt, circ._ A.D. 310. S. PETER, _B. of Sebaste, circ._ A.D. 387. S. MARCELLINUS, _B. of Ancona, circ._ A.D. 566. S. FILLAN, _Ab., in Scotland, 8th cent._ S. ADRIAN, _Ab., at Canterbury_, A.D. 709. S. BRITHWALD, _Abp. of Canterbury_, A.D. 731. S. MARCIANA, V. M. (ABOUT 300.) [Roman, Spanish, German, and other Martyrologies. There is some difficulty as to whether the African S. Marciana and the Saint of the same name, honoured at Toledo, are to be distinguished; but probably they are the same. Some hagiographers have supposed that there were two, because at Toledo, S. Marciana is commemorated on July 12th, but that is in all probability the day of her translation. The Acts of the African Saint and the Toledan hymn to S. Marciana, as well as the account of her in the Mozarabic Breviary, relate the same incidents. None of these are of any great authority.] Saint Marciana was a native of Rusuccus, in Mauritania. When at Caesarea, in Mauritania, she was brought before the governor on the charge of having overthrown a marble statuette of Diana, which stood above a drinking fountain in the public street. For this outrage on the established religion, she was scourged, and then delivered over to the lust of the gladiators, but was miraculously delivered, for God was as careful to protect the modesty of his servant, as was she to proclaim the honour of His name. She was exposed in the amphitheatre to a lion, which, however, spared her; but a bull gored her with its horns, and a leopard despatched her. Patroness of Tortosa, in Spain. SS. JULIAN, BASILISSA, CELSUS, AND COMPANIONS, MM. (ABOUT 310.) [Roman Martyrology and Greek Menaea. Authority:--The Acts of these martyrs. They are referred to by S. Eulogius, the martyr, who flourished about A.D. 850. They have been inserted by Metaphrastes in his collection of the lives of the Saints, in Greek. S. Aldhelm of Sherbourne, wrote a panegyric on these Saints, in Anglo-Saxon, in 700; and S. Venantius Fortunatus wrote a hymn in honour of them in 620. The Acts purport to have been written by an eye-witness of the martyrdom, for he says:--"We write the Acts of the Saints from what we saw with our eyes, wherefore we hope to receive some little share in future blessedness." The writer survived to the time of Constantine the Great, for he speaks of churches erected to the memory of these martyrs. Nevertheless, the Acts cannot be regarded as genuine. They are nothing but a religious romance, possibly founded on fact. Such religious romances were common in the 5th cent., written to supply Christians with wholesome reading in place of the sensual fictions of Heliodorus, Achilles, Tatius, &c. As there are no less than thirty-six Julians in the Roman Martyrology, and of these seven are commemorated in January, there is great liability to confusion. S. Julian seems to have suffered on the 6th January; but on account of the concurrence of the Epiphany, his memorial was transferred to different days in different dioceses, and this again has proved an element of confusion.] S. Julian was born at Antinoë, in Egypt, of noble parents. The love of God, and God alone, filled his heart from earliest childhood. At the age of eighteen his parents required him to marry. This troubled him much, for he had read the saying of S. Paul, "He that is unmarried careth for the things that belong to the Lord, how he may please the Lord: but he that is married careth for the things that are of the world, how he may please his wife." 1 Cor. vii. 32, 33. He besought his parents to allow him to defer giving them a final answer till he had well considered their proposal during seven days. He now fasted, and watched, and prayed, revealing to God the desire of his heart, to keep his body in virginity, and his soul devoted to God alone. At the end of the seven days he saw Christ in a vision, who said to him, "Fear not, Julian, to take thee a wife, and to fulfil the desire of thy parents. As virgins ye shall serve me, and I shall not be separated from you, and as virgins shall ye enter into my kingdom." Then Julian was filled with great joy, and he considered whom he should choose. Now there was one maiden, Basilissa by name, who was well-known to his parents, and with whom he had been acquainted from childhood, and whom he loved for her whiteness of soul. Therefore he told his father that he consented to marry Basilissa. And she, on her side, was glad to be the wife of Julian, but her timid soul shrank from the cares and responsibilities of marriage, for she was as yet young and fresh to the world. The marriage took place with all the boisterous merriment and display, usual then as now; and evening approaching, the young bride was led by the maidens, who were her fellows, to the nuptial chamber. Now when Julian entered, there came an odour in the apartment, as of lilies and roses, though the season was mid-winter, and an awe fell on their young hearts. And they put their hands together, and promised to serve God together in purity and fervour, with singleness of heart all their days. Then they were aware of One present in the room, and kneeling down, they fell prostrate, and besought Him to accomplish the good work He had begun in them. And when they looked up, the chamber was full of light, and they saw Jesus and Mary, and an innumerable company of virgin Saints. Then the Lord said, "Thou hast conquered, O Julian, thou hast conquered!" And the Blessed Virgin said, "Blessed art thou, Basilissa, who hast thus sought with single heart the glory that is eternal." Then said Jesus, "My soldiers, who have overcome the wiles of the old serpent, rise and behold what is prepared for you!" Thereupon came two clothed in white robes, and girded about the loins with golden zones, having crowns of flowers in their hands, and they raised them from the ground and showed them an open book seven times brighter than silver, inscribed with golden letters, and round about it stood four elders, having vials in their hands of pure gold, from which ascended diverse odours. And one, answering, said, "In these four vials your perfection is contained. For out of these daily ascends an odour of sweet fragrance before the Lord. Therefore, blessed are ye, because ye have rejected the unsatisfying pleasures of this world to strive after those which are eternal, which eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither hath it entered into the heart of man to conceive." Then Julian looked, and beheld his name, and the name of his wife, Basilissa, written in the book. And the elder said, "In that book are written the chaste and the sober, the truthful and the merciful, the humble and gentle, those whose love is unfeigned, bearing adversities, patient in tribulation, and those who, for the love of Jesus Christ, have given up father and mother, and wife and children, and lands, for his sake, lest they should impede the progress of their souls to perfection, and they who have not hesitated to shed their blood for his name, in the number of whom you also have merited to be written." Then the vision passed. But Julian and Basilissa spent the night in prayer, and singing joyful praises to the Lord. And when his parents were dead, Julian divided his house and made it into a hospital, and all his substance he spent in relieving the necessities of the sick and suffering. He ruled over the portion devoted to the men, and Basilissa, his wife, at the head of a number of devout virgins, governed the women's department. Many men placed themselves under the guidance of S. Julian, and assisted him in his works of charity, and laboured for the advancement of God's glory, and the salvation of their own souls. It is from the circumstance of S. Julian having been the first to establish a hospital for the sick, that he has been called by distinction Julian the Hospitaller. After many years, Basilissa died in peace; her husband Julian survived her. In the persecution of Diocletian he was seized and subjected to cruel tortures. The governor, Marcian, ordered him to be dragged, laden with chains, and covered with wounds, about the city. As the martyr passed the school where Celsus, the son of the governor, was being instructed, the boys turned out into the street to see the soldier of Christ go by. Then suddenly the lad exclaimed, "I see angels accompanying, and extending a glorious crown to him. I believe, I believe in the God of the Christians!" And throwing away his books, he fell at the feet of Julian, and kissed his wounds. When the father heard this, he was filled with ungovernable fury, and believed that the Saint had bewitched the boy; he ordered them both to be cast into the lowest dungeon, a loathsome place, where the corrupting carcases of malefactors lay, devoured by maggots. But God filled this hideous pit with light, and transformed the stench into fragrant odours, so that the soldiers who kept the prison were filled with wonder, and believed. That same night, a priest, Antony, who lived with seven little boys, orphans committed to his care by their parents, summoned by God, came with these seven children to the prison. An angel went before them, and at his touch the gates flew open. Then Antony, the priest, baptized Celsus and the believing soldiers. On the morrow the governor, supposing that the night in the pit had cured his son, sent him to his mother, and the boy, having related to her in order all he had seen and heard, she believed with her whole heart, and was baptized by the priest. The governor, Marcian, ordered all these converts to death. The soldiers were executed with the sword, the seven boys were cast into the fire, the rest were tortured to death. Relics, at Morigny, near Etampes, and in the church of S. Basilissa, at Paris. Patron of hospitals. In art, S. Julian and S. Basilissa are represented holding the same lily stalk, or looking on the Book of Life wherein their names are written. S. PETER, B. OF SEBASTE. (ABOUT 387.) [Roman Martyrology and Greek Menaea. The life of S. Peter occurs in that of his sister, S. Macrina, written by his brother, S. Gregory of Nyssa. He is also spoken of by Socrates, Theodoret, and Philostorgius.] The family of which S. Peter was descended was very ancient and illustrious, as we are informed by S. Gregory Nazianzen. It has become famous for its saints, for three brothers were at the same time eminently holy bishops, S. Basil, S. Gregory of Nyssa, and S. Peter of Sebaste; and their elder sister, S. Macrina, was the spiritual mother of many saints. Their father and mother, S. Basil the elder, and S. Emilia, were banished for their faith in the reign of Galerius Maximian, and fled into the deserts of Pontus; they are commemorated in the Roman martyrology on May 30th. The grandmother of S. Peter was S. Macrina the elder, who had been instructed in the way of salvation by S. Gregory the Wonder-worker. S. Peter of Sebaste, was the youngest of ten children; he lost his father whilst still an infant, and was therefore brought up by his mother and sister. When the aged Emilia was dying, she drew her two children--the only two who were present--to her, and taking their hands, she looked up to heaven, and having prayed God to protect, govern, and sanctify her absent children, she said, "To Thee, O Lord, I dedicate the first-fruits; and the tenth of my womb. This, my first-born, Macrina, I give thee as my first-fruits; and this, my tenth child, Peter, I give thee as my tithe. They are thine by law, and thine they are by my free gift. Hallow, I pray thee, this my first-born daughter, and this my tenth child, and son." And thus blessing them, she expired, says S. Gregory Nyssen. S. Emilia had founded two monasteries, one for men, the other for women; the former she put under the direction of her son Basil, the latter under that of her daughter Macrina. Peter, whose thoughts where wholly bent on cultivating the seeds of piety sown in his heart, retired into the house governed by his brother, situated on the bank of the river Iris; and when S. Basil was obliged to quit that post in 362, he left the abbacy in the hands of S. Peter, who discharged this office for several years with great prudence and virtue. Soon after S. Basil was made Bishop of Caesarea, in Cappadocia, in 370, he promoted his brother Peter to the priesthood. His brother, S. Basil, died on Jan. 1st, A.D. 379, and Eustathius, Bishop of Sebaste, an Arian and a furious persecutor of S. Basil, died soon after. S. Peter was consecrated in his room, in 380, to root out the Arian heresy in that diocese, where it had taken deep hold. In 381, he attended the general council held at Constantinople, and joined in the condemnation of the Macedonian heresy. His death happened in summer, about the year 387, and his brother, S. Gregory of Nyssa, mentions that his memory was honoured at Sebaste by an anniversary solemnity. "Peter," says Nicephorus (lib. ii. c. 44), "who sprang from the same parents as Basil, was not so well-read in profane literature as his brother, but he was not his inferior in the splendour of his virtue." S. FILLAN, AB. (8TH CENT.) [Scottish and Irish Martyrologies. Life in the Aberdeen Breviary.] S. Fillan, whose name is famous in ancient Scottish and Irish Calendars, was the son of Feriach, a noble, and his saintly wife Kentigerna, daughter of Cualann, king of Leinster. His father ordered him to be thrown into the lake, near his castle, and drowned, when he was shown to him, for he was somewhat unshapely. But, by the ministry of the angels, at the prayer of his mother, he floated ashore. S. Fillan was given by Bishop Ibar to the abbot Munna, to be educated. As he wrote at night in his cell, he held up his left hand, and it shone so brilliantly that he was able to write with the right hand by the light shed by the left hand. When the abbot Munna died (A.D. 635), S. Fillan was elected to succeed him as head of the monastery of Kilmund in Argyleshire. After some years, he resigned his charge, and retired to his uncle Congan, brother to his mother, in a place called Siracht, a mountainous part of Glendarshy, in Fifeshire, where, with the assistance of seven others, he built a church. He was buried at Straphilline, and his relics were long preserved there with honour. The Scottish historians attribute to his intercession a memorable victory obtained by King Robert Bruce, in 1314, over the English at Bannockburn. His pastoral staff and bell still exist. S. ADRIAN, AB. OF CANTERBURY. (A.D. 709.) [Anglican and some of the German Martyrologies. Life in Bede, Eccles. Hist., lib. iv., c. 1, 2; lib. v. c. 20.] "Deusdedit," says the Venerable Bede, "the sixth Bishop of the church of Canterbury, died on the 14th July, 665. The see then became vacant for some considerable time, until the priest Wighard, a man skilled in ecclesiastical discipline, of the English race, was sent to Rome by King Egbert (of Kent), and Oswy, King of the Northumbrians, with a request that he might be ordained Bishop of the Church of England; sending at the same time presents to the Apostolic Pope, and many vessels of gold and silver. Arriving at Rome, where Vitalian presided at that time over the Apostolic see, and having made known to the aforesaid Pope the occasion of his journey, he was not long after snatched away, with almost all his companions that went with him, by a pestilence which happened at that time. "But the Apostolic Pope, having consulted about that affair, made diligent inquiry for some one to send to the Archbishop of the English Churches. There was then in the Niridian monastery, which is not far from the city of Naples, an abbot called Adrian, by nation an African, well versed in holy writ, experienced in monastic and ecclesiastical discipline, and excellently skilled in both Greek and Latin. The Pope, sending for him, commanded him to accept the bishopric, and repair to Britain; he answered that he was unworthy of so great a dignity, but said he would name another, whose learning and age were fitter for the ecclesiastical office. And having proposed to the Pope a certain monk, belonging to a neighbouring monastery of virgins, whose name was Andrew, he was by all that knew him, judged worthy of a bishopric; but bodily infirmity prevented his being advanced to the episcopal office. Then again Adrian was pressed to accept the bishopric, but he desired a respite for a time, to see whether he could find another fit to be ordained bishop. "There was at that time, in Rome, a monk called Theodore, well-known to Adrian, born at Tarsus, in Cilicia, a man well instructed in worldly and divine literature, as also in Greek and Latin; of known probity of life, and venerable for age, being sixty-six years old. Adrian offered him to the Pope to be ordained bishop, and prevailed; but upon these conditions, that he should conduct him into Britain, because he had already travelled through France twice upon several occasions, and was, therefore, better acquainted with the way, and was, moreover, sufficiently provided with men of his own; as also that, being his fellow labourer in doctrine, he might take special care that Theodore should not, according to the custom of the Greeks, introduce anything contrary to the true faith into the Church where he presided. Theodore, being ordained sub-deacon, waited four months for his hair to grow, that it might be shorn into the shape of a crown; for he had before the tonsure of S. Paul[37] the Apostle, after the manner of the Easterns. He was ordained by Pope Vitalian, in the year of the Lord 668, on Sunday, the 26th of March, and on the 27th of May was sent with Adrian into Britain. "They proceeded by sea to Marseilles, and thence by land to Arles, and having delivered to John, Archbishop of that city, Pope Vitalian's letters of recommendation, were by him detained, till Ebroin, the king's mayor of the palace, sent them a pass to go where they pleased. Having received the same, Theodore repaired to Agilbert, Bishop of Paris, and was by him kindly received, and long entertained. But Adrian went first to Emme, and then to Faro, Bishops of Sens and Meaux, and lived with them a considerable time; for the hard winter had obliged them to rest wherever they could. King Egbert, being informed by messengers, that the bishop they had asked of the Roman prelate was in the kingdom of France, sent thither his praefect, Redford, to conduct him; who, being arrived there, with Ebroin's leave, conveyed him to the port of Quentavic (S. Quentin); where, being indisposed, he made some stay, and as soon as he began to recover, sailed over into Britain. But Ebroin detained Adrian, suspecting that he went on some message from the Emperor to the kings of Britain, to the prejudice of the kingdom, of which he at that time took especial care; however, when he found that he really had no such commission, he discharged him, and permitted him to follow Theodore. "As soon as he came, he received from him the monastery of S. Peter the Apostle, where the Archbishops of Canterbury are usually buried; for at his departure, the Apostolic Lord had ordered that Theodore should provide for him in his diocese, and give him a suitable place to live in with his followers. "Theodore arrived in his church the second year after his consecration, on Sunday, May 27th. Soon after, he visited all the island, wherever the tribes of the Angles inhabited; and everywhere attended and assisted by Adrian, he taught the right rule of life, and the canonical custom of celebrating Easter. This was the first Archbishop whom all the English Church obeyed. And forasmuch as both of them were well read in both sacred and secular literature, they gathered a crowd of disciples, and there flowed from them daily rivers of knowledge to water the hearts of their hearers; and, together with the books of Holy Writ, they also taught them the arts of ecclesiastical poetry, astronomy, and arithmetic. A testimony of which is, that there are still living at this day some of their scholars, who are as well versed in the Greek and Latin tongues as in their own, in which they were born. Nor were there ever happier times since the English came into Britain; for their kings, being brave men and good Christians, were a terror to all barbarous nations, and the minds of all men were bent upon the joys of the heavenly kingdom of which they had just heard; and all who desired to be instructed in sacred reading had masters at hand to teach them." S. Adrian died A.D. 709, after having spent thirty-nine years in Britain. His tomb was famous for miracles wrought at it. S. BRITHWALD, ABP. OF CANTERBURY. (A.D. 731.) [Bede, lib. v., c. 8, 23. William of Malmesbury: De Gest. Pontificum Anglorum; Roger of Hoveden; Matthew of Westminster, &c. He is called also Bretwald and Berthwald.] Bede says that after the death of S. Theodore, Archbishop of Canterbury, in 690, "Berthwald succeeded, being abbot of the monastery of Reculver, which lies on the north side of the mouth of the river Inlade. He was a man learned in the Scriptures, and well instructed in ecclesiastical and monastic discipline, yet not to be compared with his predecessor. He was chosen Bishop in the year of our Lord's Incarnation, 692, on the first day of July, Withred and Suebhard being kings of Kent; he was consecrated the next year, on Sunday, the 29th June, by Godwin, Metropolitan Bishop of France, and was enthroned on Sunday, April 31st." "In the year of our Lord's Incarnation, 731, Archbishop Berthwald died of old age, on the 9th of January, having held his see thirty-seven years six months and fourteen days." [Illustration: S. Genoveva, Jan. 3, p. 46.] FOOTNOTES: [37] This tonsure consisted in shaving the whole head. January 10. S. NICANOR, _M._, A.D. 76. SS. THECLA, _V., and_ JUSTINA, _Confessors in Sicily, 3rd cent._ S. MARCIAN, _P. C., at Constantinople, circ._ A.D. 476. S. DOMITIAN, _B. C., in Armenia, circ._ A.D. 600. S. AGATHO, _Pope of Rome_, A.D. 682. S. SETHRIDA, _V., Abbess of Brie, in France, 7th cent._ S. WILLIAM, _Ab. and Abp. of Bourges_, A.D. 1209. S. GONSALVO, _P. C., Portugal_, A.D. 1259. B. CHRISTIANA, or ORINGA, _V., in Etruria_, A.D. 1310. S. NICANOR, M. (A.D. 76.) [Roman Martyrology. Commemorated by the Greeks on July 28th and December 28th.] Saint Nicanor, one of the first seven deacons appointed by the Apostles, was a native of Cyprus, to which he returned, that he might preach the Gospel on the dispersion of the Apostles. He was variously tortured and then executed, in the reign of Vespasian, but where is not known. SS. THECLA, V., AND JUSTINA. (3RD CENT.) [Authority for the lives of these Saints: the lections in the proper offices for this day in the church of Lentini, in Sicily.] S. Thecla was a noble virgin of Lentini, and daughter of S. Isidore. She buried the bodies of the martyrs with loving reverence. For three years she suffered from paralysis, and could not leave her bed, but was healed by the prayers of SS. Alphius, Philadelphus, and Cyrinus. When they were in prison for the faith, she visited them and ministered to their necessities, and when they had been slain and cast into a well, she extracted the bodies and buried them. Tertullus, the governor, hearing of this, sent for her, but his sudden death saved her from injury. During the persecution, she concealed Agatho, Bishop of Lipari, in one of her farms; and when the persecution was over, she and her friend Justina spent their fortunes in works of mercy. S. MARCIAN, P. (ABOUT 476.) [Honoured in the Greek Menaea and Roman Martyrology on the same day. His life, by an anonymous writer, is given by Simeon Metaphrastes.] S. Marcian was born at Constantinople; he belonged to a noble Roman family, related to that of the Emperor Theodosius. From his childhood he served God in watching, fasting, and prayer. His great compassion for the necessities of the poor made it impossible for him to refuse relief, when he had anything to give away. In the reign of the Emperor Marcian, Anatolius, the Archbishop, ordained him priest. His love for the poor manifested itself, not merely in abundant almsgiving, but also in his making their instruction in the truth his favourite pursuit. The severity of his morals was made a handle by those who feared the example of his virtue, as a tacit rebuke of their sloth and avarice, to fasten on him a suspicion of Novatianism; but his meekness and silence triumphed over this, and other slanders. The patriarch Gennadius conferred on him the dignity of treasurer of the church of Constantinople. S. Marcian built, or repaired, in a stately manner a great number of churches. The following incident is related of the dedication of the church of S. Anastasia, for which he had obtained a site, and which he had built in spite of numerous impediments. On the day that the church was to be consecrated, he was on his way to attend the ceremony, when he was accosted in the street by a very poor man, whose rags scarce held together, and who implored him, for the love of God, to give him an alms. S. Marcian felt in his bosom, but found he had no money there. The pauper would take no refusal, and the compassionate heart of the treasurer was melted at the aspect of his tatters and emaciation. Quickly he slipped off the tunic he wore under his sacerdotal vestments, handed it to the beggar, and then hurried on to the new church, drawing his alb and chasuble about him, to conceal the deficiency of a nether garment. The church was crowded, the Emperor Leo and the Empress, the senate, and almost the whole city were present. Marcian was bidden celebrate the Holy Sacrifice before all, in the new church he had built. So, full of shame, he began, hoping that the folds of his chasuble would conceal the absence of a tunic. But all saw him as though clothed beneath his sacerdotal vestments with a garment as of pure gold, which flashed as he moved. The patriarch Gennadius was offended, and rebuked him when the liturgy was over, for having worn a private garment, more splendid than his ecclesiastical vesture, and worthy only of an emperor. Marcian fell at his feet, and denied that he had worn any such raiment. Then Gennadius, wroth at his having spoken falsely, as he thought, for he supposed his eyes could not have been deceived, caught him by the vesture, and drew it aside, and behold! Marcian was bare of all other garments save his sacerdotal apparel. S. Marcian built also the church of S. Irene, another of S. Isidore, and a baptistery of magnificent appearance, surrounded with five porches, like that at Jerusalem. "But this one," says the chronicler, "was greater than that by the sheep market, for here greater miracles were wrought than there. To that, an angel descended on one day in the year, and healed but one at a time; at this, whenever a servant of the Lord ministers, Christ himself is present. The healing, moreover, is not but once a year, but daily, and not of bodies only, but of souls as well." S. Marcian's great compassion extended to women of bad character, and despising the slander and gossip which he might occasion, by visiting them in their houses, setting only before his eyes the blessedness of plucking these brands from the burning, he often sought them out in haunts of crime; and if they had taken up evil courses through poverty only, he found for them honest occupations, and by his exhortations and tears, and his overflowing charity, he convinced and persuaded many of these unhappy women, so that they came openly and did penance, and some he sent on pilgrimages to Jerusalem, and some went into solitude, and recompensed for the past by self-mortification in the desert. S. DOMITIAN, B. C. (ABOUT 600.) [Greek Menaea and Roman Martyrology. His life in the Menaea, and fuller by Theophylact Simocatta. He is mentioned also by Evagrius, his contemporary. A letter to him from S. Gregory the Pope, is extant, praising his learning, prudence and zeal.] S. Domitian was the son of pious parents, Theodore and Eudoxia by name. He was an intimate friend, if not, as Evagrius says, "a kinsman of the Emperor Maurice." He was married for a few years, but his wife dying, he devoted himself to the services of the Church, and was consecrated Bishop of Melitene, in Armenia, at the age of thirty. On the murder of Hormisdas, the Persian King, his son Chosroës II., succeeded him (592), but the General Varam having revolted against him, and being deserted by many of his soldiers, Chosroës fled with his wife, and two newly-born children, to Circesium. Thence he sent an embassy to the Emperor Maurice, desiring peace; for at that time war was being waged between the Persians and the Roman emperors. At the persuasion of S. Domitian, Maurice admitted his suit, and treated Chosroës as his guest, instead of as an exile, welcomed him with royal gifts, and placed the whole of his body-guards, and the entire Roman army, at his disposal. Moreover, by way of still greater distinction, he sent Domitian, Bishop of Melitene, to attend him. The Roman army defeated Varam, and Chosroës was reinstated on the throne of Persia. Domitian was liberally recompensed for his share in this transaction, but he kept nothing for himself. Every gift made him, he offered to the Church, or to the poor; restoring churches, and supporting hospitals. He died at Constantinople, whither he had been summoned by the Emperor. S. AGATHO, POPE. (ABOUT 682.) [His life by Anastasius, the librarian. Commemorated by the Greeks on Feb. 21st.] Agatho, a Sicilian by birth, was remarkable for his charity and gentleness. Having been several years treasurer of the Church of Rome, he succeeded Domnus in the Pontificate, in 679. He was represented by three legates in the sixth general council, the third of Constantinople, in 680, against the Monothelite heresy, which he confuted in a learned letter to the Emperor Constantine Pogonatus, appealing to the constant tradition of the Apostolic Church of Rome, "acknowledged," says he, "by the whole Catholic Church to be the mother and mistress of all the churches, and to derive her superior authority from S. Peter, the Prince of the Apostles, to whom Christ committed his whole flock, with a promise that his faith should never fail." On the 25th day of February, the Council decided against Macarius, author of the Monothelite heresy, and solemnly was the episcopal stole (orarium) removed from his shoulders, and from those of Basil, Bishop of Crete, who followed his opinion, and their thrones were cast out of the council hall, in token that they were removed from their office, and ejected from the communion of the Church. This Pope restored S. Wilfrid to the see of York, from which he had been ejected by the Bishops and King of Northumbria, with the consent of S. Theodore, Archbishop of Canterbury. S. SETHRIDA, V., ABSS. (7TH CENT.) [Anglican Martyrologies, Saussaye. Authority:--Bede, Eccles. Hist., lib. iii. c. 8.] Bede says that Sethrida was a daughter of the wife of Anna, King of the East Angles, and that she served God in the monastery of Brie, "for at that time, but few monasteries being built in the country of the Angles, many were wont, for the sake of the monastic conversation, to repair to the monasteries of the Franks or Gauls; and they also sent their daughters there to be instructed, and delivered to their heavenly bridegroom, especially in the monasteries of Brie, Chelles, and Andelys." S. WILLIAM, AB. AND ABP. OF BOURGES. (A.D. 1209.) [Gallican Martyrologies. His life, written by a contemporary, was published, with the style altered and shortened, by Surius; the same is re-published by the Bollandists, together with a second life, written by another contemporary, from a MS. at Antwerp. Another life by a Canon of Bourges, date uncertain, was published by Labbe, Bibl. nova II., p. 379, 386.] On the death of Henry de Sully, Archbishop of Bourges, the clergy of that church, unable to agree upon a successor, requested Eudo, Bishop of Paris, to nominate. For this purpose, the bishop came to Beauvais, but found it no easy matter to decide, without causing an eruption of party feeling. In his desire to choose a good man, and one who would commend himself to all, in consultation with two friends, he resolved on committing the matter to God. Accordingly, all the most advisable names were written on slips of parchment, and were sealed, and then deposited beneath the corporal on the altar. The Bishop celebrated very early, with great devotion, and earnestly besought God to indicate him whom he had chosen. When mass was over, he put his hand beneath the corporal, and drew forth one of the billets. He broke the seal in the presence of his two friends, and saw that the name of William, abbot of Challis, was written on the parchment. No one else was privy to this appeal. As he left the church, the clergy whom he had convened to elect cried out "that they desired William of Challis as their bishop," and on him the majority of votes fell. Then the bishopric was offered to William, but he recoiled from accepting it, with the greatest dismay, for he was a man of retiring habits and of singular humility. However, on an order coming to him from the superior of the society, the abbot of Citeaux, and also from the papal legate, he was unable to refuse; and he was consecrated in the year 1200. After the ceremony was over, he laid aside the vestments in which he had received his ordination, and which were of little value, in a press, till his dying day. In his new dignity he omitted nothing of the severity of his cloister life, disciplining himself more strictly than before, because his business was calculated to distract his thoughts, and his high position was dangerous to humility. He was gentle and loving to penitent sinners; and towards the incorrigible he was stern, but he refused to have recourse to the civil power against them; he had a horror of shedding blood, so that he looked with the utmost repugnance upon the violence and warlike customs of his time. When the crusade against the Albigenses was resolved upon, William of Beauvais resolved on accompanying the expedition. Perhaps his earnestness would move the heretics to repentance, and his horror of bloodshed might serve as a check upon the crusaders. The Albigensian heresy, which was a revival of Paulicianism, ate as a canker into the Church of France. It was not even a form of Christianity, but was a heathen philosophical sect which had adopted a few Christian tenets. The history of the sect was as follows:--Manes, a Persian heathen, flourished in the middle of the third century, dying about 277, the founder of a new religion, after having been, like Simon Magus, a temporary and nominal convert to the Gospel. He was not an inventor of his religion, but merely a blender of the earlier Gnostic heresies with the Persian doctrines of Zoroaster, added to a somewhat larger element of Christianity than the Gnostics had chosen to accept. The Paulicians were a sect which took shape about 660, out of Manichaeism, or the religion of Manes. They were cruelly persecuted by the Byzantine Emperors, during two whole centuries, and spread to the West by degrees; one stream emigrated to Bohemia, where it became the parent of Hussitism; the other to the south of France, where it was called Albigensianism. The fundamental dogma of this new Manichaeism was a dualism of good and evil principles or gods, equally matched. The evil was the origin of the visible creation, the world and men's bodies; the good God was the creator of the invisible world and men's souls. The opposition of matter and spirit constituted the basis of their moral systems. These systems were diverse; some, regarding everything natural as evil, abstained from meat, from marriage, and from all employments; whilst others, regarding the soul as so distinct from the body as to be incapable of being soiled by any of its actions, gave themselves up to the grossest licentiousness. The moral condition of Provence, where Albigensianism held sway, was like Sodom and Gomorrah, as may be seen by the poetry of the troubadours; so that God's wrath could not but fall on a land so polluted. The licentiousness which this creed encouraged, helped to make it spread, and the Christianity of the whole of the south of France was imperilled. At the head of these heretics, the Count of Toulouse invaded the lands of the King of Aragon, devastated them, robbed the churches, burnt the monasteries, and ill-treated the clergy, "and slaughtered the Christians of either sex, and every age, without mercy," says Matthew Paris. "But this being at length made known, their heretical aggression was put down by the faithful Christians, who, at the command of Pope Gregory, had come as crusaders from various parts of the West, for the defence of the Christian faith." William of Beauvais was not, however, destined to play a part in that sanguinary war. He was called to his rest in January, 1209. Drawing near his end, he received first extreme unction, and then, as the Blessed Sacrament was brought to him, he struggled up in his bed, and falling on his knees, with many tears, and hands outspread in the shape of a cross, he adored the presence of his Saviour. The night following, he began as usual to recite the Office of Nocturns, but was unable to pronounce more than the first two words, and sign himself with the cross. Then he was laid, at his desire, on ashes, and the vestments in which he had been consecrated bishop were produced, that he might be laid dressed in them in his grave. His body was buried in the Cathedral of Bourges, but was burnt, and the ashes scattered to the winds, by the Calvinists, on the occasion of their plundering the Cathedral in 1562. Patron of Bourges, and of the ancient University of Paris. In art, he is represented holding a monstrance, or in adoration before one, to represent his great devotion towards the Blessed Sacrament. He is also represented with tears on his cheeks, for he is said to have wept whenever he was told of some scandal of his diocese, or wrong done to the poor. It may be noted, as a coincidence, that his festival was the day of Archbishop William Laud's martyrdom in 1644. S. GONSALVO, P. C. (ABOUT 1259.) [His life was compiled in Portuguese, by Didacus de Rosario, of the order of Friar Preachers, from scattered notices and confused accounts.] S. Gonsalvus or Gonsalvo, was born of noble parents, at the little village of Vizzella, in the diocese of Braga, in Portugal. Many little incidents are related of his childhood, as how, when an infant at the font, he stretched out his little hands to the crucifix; how his nurse was wont to take him with her to church, and watch his little eyes fixed intently upon the figure of Christ crucified, on the rood screen; how, when nothing else would still his cries, the child was taken to church, and there was content looking at the statues and pictures of the Saints. When he grew to man's estate, he was ordained priest, and was appointed rector of the church of S. Payo, near his father's estates. Here he lived as a father to the poor, and was regular in the fulfilment of his duties as parish priest. After a while the desire came upon him to visit the Holy Land, and he left his nephew, a priest, who had been trained in his house, and in whose principles he had confidence, to take charge of the parish during his absence. He then started on his pilgrimage, and was absent for fourteen years. In the meantime, his nephew, relieved of the constraint of his uncle's presence, abandoned himself to the indulgence of his ruling passion, a love of field sports. He filled the parsonage house with dogs and hawks, and spent his time in hunting and revelry. The poor were forgotten, and the church was neglected. At length, Gonsalvo not returning, the nephew asked the Bishop to institute him to the living, pretending that he had received authentic information of the death of his uncle. One day Gonsalvo, ragged, sunburnt, with grizzled locks and foot-sore, returned to his parsonage; but the dogs, at the sight of a mendicant, began to bark furiously, and when he attempted to pass them, bit him and tore his rags, so that he was compelled to retire. The parish priest hearing the noise, looked from his window, and seeing a poor man in tatters defending himself against the dogs, sent a servant to call them off, and tell the poor man that the owner of the house objected to beggars. Gonsalvo, filled with indignation against his nephew for the manner in which he had betrayed his trust, rushed into the house, passed the dogs which the servant restrained, and appeared in the door of the dining apartment, as the nephew was seating himself to an abundant and sumptuous meal. Then the old pilgrim's wrath flamed forth, and he cried, "Was it for this that thy uncle left his parish and committed the care of souls into thy hands? A wolf now guards the sheep and devours them!" The nephew, exasperated at the words of reproach, and angry at the intrusion, caught up a stick, and running upon the old man, drove him with many blows from the house, refusing to listen to him, and believe him, when he declared his name. Then Gonsalvo, full of grief, retired to a wild spot near Amarante, where was an old shed, beside the river Tamego. Amarante was once a small town; at this time it had fallen into complete ruin, and was deserted. Here Gonsalvo erected a little oratory in honour of the Blessed Virgin, and laboured to instruct the peasantry of the neighbourhood in Christian doctrine, and to stir up in their hearts the love of God. But he was not satisfied that he was serving his Master in the way which He willed. He therefore prayed most earnestly to be guided aright, and to have the will of God made clear to him. After long fasting, one day, as he lay prostrate in supplication before the altar, Our Lady appeared to him and said, "Rise, Gonsalvo, and enter that religious order in which thou shalt hear the Angelic Salutation open and close the offices of prayer." Then Gonsalvo took his staff and wandered from city to city, and from monastery to monastery, listening to the choir offices, but ever being disappointed, for they closed with _Benedicamus Domino_, and not with the _Ave Maria_. And when he came to Vinerana, where were four religious houses, whereof one was Dominican, and another Franciscan, by chance he sought shelter in the former. Then when the bells began to chime for vespers, he went to the church, and heard the friars begin their office with _Ave Maria_. With beating heart he waited for the conclusion of vespers, and heard them close with the Angelic Salutation. Then he knew that he had found the place of his rest; and he asked to be admitted into the order, and was gladly received. But after awhile he desired to go back to his poor peasants at Amarante; therefore he asked leave of the superior, and it was accorded him. So he returned to his cell and oratory, and there preached to the people the word of God. Now it happened that at Amarante there was a ford of the Tamego, which was much used, as it lay in the direct route from Braga to Lamego and the south. It was, however, dangerous, and a great number of lives were lost whilst Gonsalvo lived at Amarante. He considered much the necessity there was that a bridge should be built, how many lives it would be the means of saving, and what a great convenience it would prove to travellers. He accordingly resolved on building one, and he went round the country begging for his bridge. By many his project was regarded as visionary, and he would himself have despaired of accomplishing his undertaking, had he not been upheld by his strong confidence in the goodness of God. This confidence was, moreover, sustained by signs and wonders, showing him that God approved his undertaking. If we may believe the life of him, written by De Rosario, on one occasion he begged of a nobleman, who, as a rude joke, and to get rid of the beggar, scribbled a couple of lines on a scrap of paper, and bade him take it to his wife, who would give him something. The Saint walked to the nobleman's castle, and was exhausted with fatigue when he reached it and presented the note. The lady looked at it, and saw written therein, "The bearer is a poor fool who wishes to build a bridge. Let him have the weight of this paper in cash." She laughed, and showed the message to Gonsalvo, telling him that her husband had been making sport of him. "Be it so," said the priest, "yet give me the weight of that note in money." She cast the paper into one scale, and into the other she put silver; then, to her amazement, the note weighed a large sum of money. Thus God compensated his servant for his labour, and punished the nobleman for his bitter jest. Little by little the money was begged, and at length the poor priest was able to set masons to work, and to erect the desired bridge over the Tamego. S. Gonsalvo died, and was buried at Amarante, of which place he is patron. (Gonsalvus, in Portuguese, Gonçalo, Gonsallo, or Gonsalvo.) In art, he is represented with a bridge in his hand. B. ORINGA, OR CHRISTIANA, V. (A.D. 1310.) [Her life, from an ancient MS., in the Convent of S. Clara, at Florence, was published by Silvanus Razzi, and reprinted in the Acta Sanctorum.] The Blessed Oringa was born at Sancta Croce, on the Arno, in the year 1237, of poor parents, who died whilst she was young. She kept the cattle on the farm occupied by her two brothers. The cows were taken by her into the woods to pasture, and they became so docile that they obeyed her voice in all things. When she grew to a marriageable age, her brothers determined that she should become the wife of a small farmer in the parish; but she ran away, and escaping across the river, made her way to Lucca. The way was long, and night falling, the young girl lost the road, and wandered in a forest. At the same time her fancy conjured up horrible forms to frighten her. She would had died of terror, but for the companionship of a little hare which played about her skirts, as tamely as if it had been a favourite kitten, and rested on her lap all night, when she cast herself down in weariness. Next morning, the hare gambolled before her, and led her into the road, after which it ran away. At Lucca she entered the service of a pious family. As she was annoyed on account of her beauty, she stained her skin with walnut juice. Having gone on a pilgrimage to Mount Gargano, on which the archangel Michael had once appeared, for she held the angels in great reverence; on her return, some men with whom she fell in on the road, towards dusk, misled her with evil purpose; but S. Michael himself flashing out of the darkness at her side, protected her, and led her in the right road. Later in life she visited Rome, and took service in the house of a pious widow, named Margaret, who treated her as a daughter rather than as a domestic. At Rome she was called Christiana, instead of her baptismal name of Oringa. She occasionally fell into ecstasies as she prayed, and saw into futurity. When aged seventy she was struck with paralysis, in which she lay three years. As she died, her face is said to have shone with a celestial light. [Illustration: Decoration] January 11. S. BALTHAZAR, _K., one of the Magi, circ._ A.D. 54. S. HYGINUS, _Pope_, A.D. 156. S. LEUCIUS, _B. of Brindisi, in Italy_. S. PALAEMON, _H., 4th cent._ S. THEODOSIUS, _of Antioch, circ._ A.D. 412. S. THEODOSIUS THE COENOBIARCH, A.D. 529. S. VITALIS, _Monk of Gaza, 7th cent._ S. SALVIUS, _B. of Amiens, circ._ A.D. 615. S. EGWIN, _B. of Worcester, circ._ A.D. 720. S. PAULINUS, _Patr. of Aquileia_, A.D. 803. (See Jan. 28.) S. BALTHAZAR, K. (ABOUT 54.) [Cologne Breviary. In some Martyrologies S. Gaspar is commemorated on this day, and S. Balthazar on the 6th Jan.; but the Cologne use is to commemorate S. Melchior on the 1st, S. Gaspar on the 6th, and S. Balthazar on the 11th January, as the 1st Jan. is the Circumcision, and the 6th is the Epiphany; at Cologne this day is kept, with special services, as the Feast of the Three Kings; Melchior, Gaspar, and Balthazar being hereon commemorated together.] On this day S. Balthazar, one of the Magi, King and Bishop, having received consecration from the hands of the Apostle S. Thomas, after celebrating the Holy Sacrifice, fell asleep. According to some authorities, the Three Kings met in the royal church of the city Sewe, in the East; when the eldest, Melchior, being one hundred and sixteen years old, consecrated the venerable mysteries on Jan. 1st, the Octave of the Nativity, and then died. On the feast of the Epiphany, Gaspar, aged one hundred and twelve, did the same; and on the 11th January, Balthazar, aged one hundred and nine, offered the adorable sacrifice, gave up the ghost, and was laid in the same sepulchre with the two others. See what has been said on the subject of the Three Kings in the account of the Epiphany. S. HYGINUS, POPE. (156.) Of this Pope, who succeeded S. Telesphorus, little is known. Eusebius informs us that he sat four years in the chair of S. Peter. He brought the church in Rome into more complete organization than heretofore, taking advantage of the repose after persecution, enjoyed under the mild Emperor Antoninus Pius. He is said to have been a Greek, and to have been educated in philosophy. In his reign the heretics Cerdo and Valentine came to Rome. S. PALAEMON, H. (4TH CENT.) [From the authentic life of S. Pachomius, of whom S. Palaemon was the master.] S. Palaemon was an aged hermit in the deserts of Upper Egypt, when Pachomius, released from military service, and desiring to flee the world, came to him and desired to become his pupil. The old anchorite refused to receive him, because his manner of life was too severe for a youth. "I eat nothing but bread and salt," said he; "I never taste wine, and I watch half the night." Then, answered Pachomius, "I believe in Jesus Christ my Lord, who will give me strength and patience to assist thee in thy prayers to follow thy holy conversation." Then Palaemon, beholding him with his spiritual eye, saw that he was a chosen vessel, and admitted him to be his disciple. So they lived together, serving the Lord in fasting and tears and prayer. When the feast of Easter came, Pachomius, to honour the day of the Resurrection, prepared a dinner of herbs and oil, and set it before the master. But Palaemon, pressing his brow with his hands, exclaimed, "My Lord suffered on the Cross, and shall I taste oil?" So he refused it, and contented himself with bread and salt. One evening, a solitary came into their cell, and asked to join them in prayer; then, filled with a spirit of presumption, he said, "If we are the true servants of God, let us say our prayers standing on live coals." But Palaemon was wroth, and rebuked him for his pride. However, the monk persisted, and by Satan's craft, he stood unhurt on the red-hot cinders. Then he retired to his own cell, puffed up with self-confidence. But pride goes before a fall, and shortly after he fell into fleshly lust; then, filled with shame, he crept back to the cave of Palaemon, and falling at his feet, with bitter tears, confessed his sin. When S. Pachomius was inspired to found a monastery at Tabenna, he announced his intention to S. Palaemon. The old man accompanied his pupil, and took up his abode at Tabenna, for he loved Pachomius as his own son, and he could not bear to be separated from him. Therefore he said, "Let us make a compact together, that we part not the one from the other, till God break our union." And to this Pachomius gladly agreed. So they lived much together, till the old man died, and then his disciple buried him at Tabenna. S. THEODOSIUS, THE COENOBIARCH, H. (A.D. 529.) [Greek Menaea and Roman Martyrology. The life of S. Theodosius, written by a contemporary anonymous author, supposed by Baronius, but without sufficient grounds, to be Cyril, the author of the lives of SS. Euthemius, Saba, and John the Silent. But Cave says that the life of S. Theodosius was written by Theodore, Bishop of Pera.] Theodosius was born in the little town of Marissa, in Cappadocia, in 423. He was ordained reader, but some time after, being moved by Abraham's example, to quit his country and friends, he resolved to visit the holy places. He accordingly set out for Jerusalem, and visited the famous S. Simeon Stylites, near Antioch, on his way. S. Simeon accosted him by name, and bade him ascend his pillar, when he embraced him, and foretold several circumstances of his life, giving him advice how to act under them. Having satisfied his devotion in visiting the holy places in Jerusalem, he betook himself to the cell of Longinus, a holy man, who dwelt near the tower of David, and to him he became dear, on account of his singular virtue. A lady, named Icelia, having built a church to the honour of the Virgin Mother of God, on the high road to Bethlehem, Longinus appointed his disciple, Theodosius, to the charge of this church. But he did not retain this charge long; loving solitude, he retired to the mountains, and took up his abode in the cave, where the Wise Men were traditionally held to have reposed on their way to Bethlehem. Here he passed his time in labouring with his hands, in fasting, and in prayer. His food was coarse pulse and herbs; for thirty years he did not taste bread. Many desired to serve God under his direction: he at first determined to admit six or seven, but was soon obliged to receive a greater number, and at length came to a resolution never to reject any that presented themselves with dispositions that seemed sincere. The first lesson he taught his monks was, that the continual remembrance of death is the foundation of religious perfection. To impress the thought of death more deeply on their minds, he caused a great sepulchre to be constructed as the common burying place of his monks. When it was complete, half seriously and half in jest, he said: "The tomb is finished, which of you will be its first inmate?" Then one, Basil, a priest, knelt at his feet, and asked to be the first to celebrate the dedication of the sepulchre. Therefore S. Theodosius ordered all the offices of the dead to be recited for Basil, first for three days, then for nine, and then for forty; and at the close of the forty days he died without sickness or pain, as though going to sleep. And for forty days after his death he was seen by the abbot Theodosius in his place among the brethren, chanting the praises of God. None others saw him, but one Aetius heard his voice. Then the abbot, hearing Aetius confess this, prayed to God to open his eyes, and seeing the dead monk again in choir, he pointed him out; and then Aetius saw him, and ran, and would have embraced him, but he vanished out of his sight. Once, as Easter approached, there was a deficiency of food in the monastery, and they had not even bread for the Holy Sacrifice. This troubled them sore, for they feared that the holy feast would come, and pass, without their being able to celebrate the divine liturgy. Therefore they prayed with one accord to God, and behold! mules laden with provisions arrived at the monastery, and amongst the provisions was bread for the sacrifice. The lustre of the sanctity of S. Theodosius drawing great numbers to him, who desired to serve God under his direction, he resolved on building a large monastery to receive them all; but where to build it he knew not. After some consideration, he took a censer, and put charcoal and incense thereon, but no fire, and he prayed: "O God who didst of old, by many and great miracles, confirm Israel; who didst to thy servant Moses persuade by many and various marvels, to take on him the burden of ruling that people; who didst turn the water of Egypt into blood, and then re-convert it again; who didst give to Gideon an earnest of his victory in the fleece and the dew; who didst assure Hezekiah of an addition to his days, by the return of the shadow on the dial; who didst at the cry of Elias send fire from heaven to consume his sacrifice. Thou art the same Lord, unto whom this day I plead! Hear thou the prayers of the servant, and show me where I shall build a temple to Thy honour, and a habitation for thy servants and my disciples. Show, O Lord! by the kindling of these coals, where the place shall be, to Thy glory, and to the acknowledgment of many, and the confirmation of the truth." Having uttered this prayer, he walked through the land with the censer in his hand. And when he came, after much wandering, to a desert spot called Gutilla, on the shores of the Dead Sea, he turned and came home, and as he neared his cave the coals kindled, and the smoke of the incense rose towards heaven, as a sign that thence should ascend the prayers of the faithful from age to age, in the daily sacrifice. There accordingly he erected his monastery, and it was soon filled with holy monks. To this monastery were annexed several infirmaries; one for the sick monks, two for sick lay folk; one for the aged and feeble monks, and one for persons deranged. All succours, spiritual and temporal, were afforded in these hospitals, which were kept in admirable order, and were attended by the monks with alacrity and care. S. Theodosius erected also several buildings for the reception of strangers, in which he exercised an unbounded hospitality, entertaining all that came, for whose use there were, on one occasion, above a hundred tables served with provisions. The monastery itself was like a city of saints in the midst of a desert; and in it reigned regularity, silence, charity, and peace. There were four churches belonging to it, one for each of the three nations of which his community was composed, each speaking a different language, and the fourth church was for the use of the recovering lunatics. The nations into which his community was divided were the Greeks, and all those using the liturgy in the Greek tongue; the second church was used by those having divine worship in the Armenian language; and in the third church the holy praises of God were sung, and the sacrifice was offered in the language of the Bessi, that is, of the wandering nations of Arab race. "Thus by them," says the contemporary writer; "the rule of hymnody was carried out, and seven times a day was it offered to the God of all. But when it behoved them to participate in the venerable Sacrament, the law was very beautifully constituted among them, that till after the Gospel, divinely inspired, each should hear in his own church and language the divine voice; but after that they were assembled into one--the possessed alone excepted--namely, into the large church of the Greeks, as is done to this day, and there they participate together of the sanctifying gifts." At times not set apart for public prayer and necessary rest, every monk was obliged to apply himself to some trade or manual labour. Sallust, patriarch of Jerusalem, appointed S. Sabas superior of all the hermits in Palestine, and S. Theodosius head of all the monks living in community, for which reason he obtained the title of Coenobiarch. These two great servants of God lived in close friendship, and together strove against the heresy of Eutyches, which then devastated the Church. For the Emperor Anastasius favoured the Eutychians; he banished the patriarch of Antioch and the patriarch of Jerusalem, and introduced an heretical bishop, Severus, into the latter see, commanding the Syrians to obey and hold communion with him. Then these great ascetic saints, with those bodies of religious men whom they ruled, proved bulwarks of the faith, uncompromising defenders of the truth. Like rocks in the desert, they remained unchanged and immovable. In vain did the emperor employ persuasion, attempt bribery, and finally exile the Cenobiarch; he could not be moved, but journeyed through the land from which the bishops had been expelled, confirming the faithful, and denouncing the established heresy. At Jerusalem, having assembled the people together, he from the pulpit cried with a loud voice, "If any man receives not the four General Councils as the four Gospels, let him be anathema!" Such boldness in an old man, venerated for his sanctity, inspired with courage those whom the edicts had frightened. His discourses produced a wonderful effect on the people, and God gave a sanction to his zeal by miracles. The Emperor sent an order for his banishment, which was executed; but dying soon after, Theodosius was recalled by his successor Justin, who was a Catholic. Our Saint survived his return eleven years. So great was his humility, that, seeing two monks at variance with each other, he threw himself at their feet, and would not rise till they were reconciled. Once, having excommunicated one of his monks for some offence, the man defiantly excommunicated Theodosius, and he meekly accepted the sentence, and acted as one cut off from the society of the faithful and participation in the Sacraments, till the guilty monk, confounded and repentant, removed the ban. During the last year of his life he was afflicted with a painful disease, which reduced him to a shadow. It was noticed by those who nursed him, that, even in his sleep, his lips murmured the familiar words of prayer. Perceiving the hour of his dissolution draw nigh, he gave his last exhortations to his disciples, and foretold many things which came to pass after his death; and then fell asleep in Christ, on the 11th Jan., 529. Peter, patriarch of Jerusalem, and the whole country, assisted at his interment. He was buried in the first cell the cave of the Magi. S. VITALIS, MONK. (BEGINNING OF 7TH CENT.) [Greek Menaea. His history occurs as an episode in the life of S. John the Almsgiver, patriarch of Alexandria, by Leontius, Bishop of Naplous in Cyprus, from the relation of the Acts of S. John, by his clergy. This life was commended in the seventh General Council, and is perfectly authentic.] The story of Vitalis, or Vitali, monk of Gaza, is brought in by the Bishop of Naplous, in his life of S. John the Almsgiver, almost accidentally, to illustrate the long suffering and charity of S. John, that thinketh not evil. But I know not, in all the glorious histories of the blessed ones, one story so deeply touching as that of the little known, and soon forgotten, monk of Gaza. Where he was born we know not; of what parents he was born we are ignorant; but we do know that his was a heart full, to overflowing, with the divine charity of Him who came to seek and to save those that were lost. Whilst John the Almsgiver was patriarch of Alexandria, there arrived in that city, an old man of sixty, or thereabouts, in monk's garb. In his cell he had thought over the crimes of that pleasure-loving city, and having read in the Gospel the story of the woman taken in adultery, in the old monk's heart kindled a sudden fire of zeal, which drove him to Alexandria, that he might save some of those poor women who sold themselves. Arrived in the city, he obtained the names of all the harlots, and then hired himself as a day labourer. Every evening he took his wage, and with it went to one of the unfortunate women, and supped with her, and gave her the rest, and said, "I pay thee this, that thou mayest spend one night without sin." Then he retired into a corner of the room, where she slept, and passed the night in reciting psalms, and praying with many tears for the woman present; and he rejoiced that, by his toil of the day, he had saved her from evil on that one night. And thus he visited all the harlots in Alexandria, and from each, as he went forth in the morning, he took a solemn promise that she would reveal to none what had taken place, so long as he was alive. Now, considerable scandal arose, and Vitalis was loudly condemned. One said to him, "Monk, take to thyself a wife, and lay aside thy religious garb, that the name of God be not blasphemed through thee." But Vitalis answered, "I will not take to myself a wife, nor will I change my habit. He that will be scandalized, let him be scandalized. What hast thou to do with me? Hath God constituted you to be my judges? Go to, look to yourselves, ye have not to answer for me. There is one Judge and one holy day of judgment, wherein every man shall give an account of his own works." One of the Defenders of the Church (this was the name of an officer who saw to the order and morals of the clergy and monks,) came to the patriarch John, and told him what he had heard of the abbot Vitalis. But the patriarch closed his ears, and rebuked the accuser, saying, "Remember what were the words of Constantine of pious memory; he said that the crimes of priests ought not to be divulged, and that if he detected a priest or a monk in wrong-doing, he would draw his purple imperial robe over him, so that none might be scandalized. And when quarrelsome individuals wrote accusations against certain prelates, he formed them into a packet, and cast them into the fire."[38] But Vitalis, though he bore without a murmur the shame, the hard speeches, and false accusations that fell to his share, was deeply sensitive for the souls of others, lest through him they should be wounded. Yet he could not relinquish his mission;--the love of God constrained him thereto, and many a poor woman, moved by the tears and prayers of the holy man, deserted her evil courses, and married and settled into ways of steadiness; and many, filled with bitter compunction, fled from that city of temptation, to expiate their offences in the desert. Seeing how great a blessing attended his work, Vitalis persevered in spite of obloquy; but he prayed to God to reveal the truth after his death, that the reproach might be wiped off the monastic garb he wore; but he would not suffer the truth to be known whilst he lived, or the houses of ill-fame would be closed against him, and the prosecution of his mission would be hindered. One morning, very early, as he left a harlot's door, a man came in, and seeing a monk issue forth, he struck him over the head, exclaiming, "How long, rascal, do you outrage Christ by not mending your wicked ways?" Then said Vitalis, "Believe me, friend, thou shalt receive from me, a humble monk, such a stroke that all Alexandria shall ring with it." So saying, he went his way to the little chamber where he lodged, by the church of S. Metras, near the Gate of the Sun. What followed is not very clear. But if we put aside some absurd fable which has attached itself to the story, we shall find that it was something like this:--Probably from the unfortunate woman, from whom Vitalis had gone forth, and to whom the man who had smitten him entered, that man heard the truth; then, full of contrition, he rushed forth and proclaimed abroad how he had wronged Vitalis, and how mistaken was the popular opinion concerning him. So a crowd collected, and rolled in the direction of the cell of Vitalis, by the Gate of the Sun. The man foremost of all cried, "Pardon me my violence, Vitalis, thou man of God!" And so the mob broke into the little hovel where he dwelt. Then they saw the despised monk kneeling upright, with his hands clasped, dead and rigid; and before him lay a sheet of paper, whereon were written the words of the Apostle, 1 Cor. iv. 5, "Judge nothing before the time, until the Lord come, who both will bring to light the hidden things of darkness, and will make manifest the counsels of the heart." Then, when this was noised abroad, almost the whole city came together, and the patriarch John arrived, and all the clergy, and they took up the body of Vitalis. Thereupon, all those women who had been converted by him, and were married, came forth, bearing lamps and candles, and went before him, beating their breasts and crying, "We have lost our deliverer and instructor!" And they told how, by his urgent prayers and burning zeal for their souls, he had rescued them from a life of misery. But he who had smitten the old monk his death-blow, struck with compunction, renounced his vicious ways, and entered the monastery at Gaza, and lived and died in the cell once occupied by Vitalis. Thus did Vitalis deal him such a blow that all Alexandria rang with it. S. SALVIUS, OF AMIENS, B. C. (ABOUT 615.) [Roman Martyrology. There are three bishops, Saints, of this name, one Bishop of Albi, one Bishop of Angoulême, and this one, Bishop of Amiens; they are often confounded by writers.] S. Salvius lived as a monk for many years, in what monastery is not known. He was afterwards elected abbot. Being chosen Bishop of Amiens, he ruled the diocese with prudence, but little or nothing is known of his acts. As he died in an ecstasy, a brilliant light is said to have illuminated his cell, and praying with extended arms, he surrendered his soul. S. EGWIN, OF WORCESTER, B. C. (ABOUT 720.) [The life of S. Egwin was written by his contemporary, S. Brithwald, Archbishop of Canterbury. This original has not descended to us, but a fragment of a somewhat later recension of this life exists; and a still later life, probably an amplification of that by Brithwald. Moreover, S. Egwin is mentioned by Matthew of Westminster, Florence of Worcester; William of Malmesbury also speaks of him in his Acts of the English Bishops.] S. Egwin was of the royal blood of the Mercian kings, and was born at Worcester, in the reign of Ethelred and Kenred. He was elected Bishop in 692. By his zeal in rebuking the illicit connexions formed by some of the great men in his diocese, and vehemence in reforming the corrupt morals of all, he stirred up a party against him, and with the connivance of the King, he was expelled his diocese. Egwin, meekly bending to his fate, determined to make a pilgrimage to Rome. According to a popular mediaeval legend, he also resolved to expiate at the same time certain sins of his youth, by putting iron fetters on his feet, which were fastened with a lock, and he cast the key into the Avon. As he neared Italy, on a ship from Marseilles, a huge fish floundered upon deck, and was killed and cut open; when, to the surprise of the Saint, in its belly was found the key to his fetters. He accepted this as an expression of the will of heaven, and released his limbs. According to another version of the story, the fish was caught in the Tiber, after S. Egwin had appeared before the Pope in Rome; but William of Malmesbury doubts the whole story as an idle legend. [Illustration: S. EGWIN, BISHOP OF WORCESTER, After Cahier. [Jan. 11.]] After his return, with the assistance of Kenred, King of Mercia, S. Egwin founded the famous abbey of Evesham, under the invocation of the Blessed Virgin. After this he undertook a second journey to Rome, in company with Kenred, and Offa, King of the East Saxons. S. Egwin died on the 30th December, 717, and was buried in the monastery of Evesham. The translation of his relics probably took place on Jan. 11th, on which day many English Martyrologies mark his festival. [Illustration: Decoration] FOOTNOTES: [38] Theodoret, lib. i. c. 11. January 12. S. ARCADIUS, _M., in Africa, circ._ A.D. 260. SS. SATYRUS, CYRIACUS, MOSENTIUS, _MM._ SS. TIGRIS, _P., and_ EUTROPIUS, _MM._, A.D. 404. S. JOHN, _B. C. of Ravenna, circ._ A.D. 495. S. CAESARIA, _V., at Arles, circ._ A.D. 530. S. VICTORINUS, _Ab., in Spain_, A.D. 560. S. BENEDICT BISCOP, _in England_, A.D. 703. SS. XXXVIII, MONKS, _MM., in Ionia, circ._ A.D. 750. S. AELRED, _Ab. of Rievaulx, in Yorkshire_, A.D. 1166. S. ARCADIUS, M. (ABOUT A.D. 260.) [Roman Martyrology, those of Bede, Ado, Usuardus, Notker, &c. Authority, a panegyric by S. Zeno, Bishop of Verona, his contemporary.] During a severe outbreak of persecution, in the reign of Gallienus, in the north of Africa, Arcadius, doubting his own constancy, sought refuge in flight, and escaping from Caesarea, hid himself. As he did not appear at the sacrifices, the Governor ordered his house to be searched. It was found to be deserted, save by a relative of his, whom the soldiers seized, and, at the command of the Governor, detained till Arcadius should surrender himself. Hearing of this capture, and unwilling that his kinsman should suffer, Arcadius deserted his hiding place, and gave himself up. The Governor, exasperated at his constancy in refusing to adore the gods of the state religion, ordered him to be dismembered, piecemeal and leisurely. First his fingers were taken off, joint by joint; then his toes, then his hands at the wrists, and his feet at the ankles. As he extended his hands to amputation, he prayed, "Thy hands have made me and fashioned me; O give me understanding that I may keep thy law." Thereupon the judge ordered his tongue to be cut out. He was cast on his back, and his feet were taken off. Then his legs and arms were amputated at the knees and elbows, finally at the thighs and shoulders, so that he was nothing save a human trunk in a pool of blood, with his limbs in little fragments scattered about him. Thus he expired; but the Christians collected the portions of his body, and buried them with the trunk reverently, glorifying God for having given such constancy to his martyr. In art, represented as a torso; sometimes, for some reason unknown, with a candle in his hand. SS. SATYRUS, CYRIACUS, MOSENTIUS, MM. (DATE UNCERTAIN.) [All Martyrologies. Nothing is known for certain of the date of their martyrdoms, or whether they all suffered together.] S. Satyrus is said to have signed the cross, and breathed on an idol in the street of Achaia (on the Euxine?), and it fell. Wherefore he was executed by decapitation. This is stated in all the Martyrologies, but some say the act was done at Antioch. Of the others, his companions, nothing is known. SS. TIGRIS, P., AND EUTROPIUS, LECTOR, MM. (A.D. 404.) [Roman Martyrology and German Martyrologies. Not commemorated by the Greeks. Authorities: Sozomen, lib. viii. c. 22, 23; Nicephorus Callistus, lib. xiii.; S. John Chrysostom also, in his 12th letter to S. Olympias, speaks of Tigris the priest.] When S. John Chrysostom had incurred the anger of the Empress Eudoxia, by declaiming against her silver statue set up close to the church of the Eternal Wisdom at Constantinople, by her machinations he was deposed and exiled from the city, and Arsacius was ordained patriarch of Constantinople in his room. But a large company of bishops and priests, and others of the clerical order, refused to recognize the right of Arsacius, and being driven from the churches, held their divine worship in places apart. For the space of two months after his deposition, Chrysostom remained at his post, though he refrained from appearing in public; after that he was obliged to leave, being banished by the Emperor Arcadius. On the very day of his departure the church caught fire, and a strong easterly wind carried the flames to the senate house.[39] The party opposed to S. John Chrysostom immediately spread the report that this fire was the result of a wilful act of incendiarism by the Johannites, or party of the exiled bishop. Socrates, the historian, strongly prejudiced against Chrysostom, distinctly charged them with the act. He says, "On the very day of his departure, some of John's friends set fire to the church," and then he adds, "The severities inflicted on John's friends, even to the extent of capital punishment, on account of this act of incendiarism, by Optatus, the prefect of Constantinople, who being a pagan was, as such, an enemy to the Christians, I ought, I believe, to pass by in silence." There can be no doubt that the fire was purely accidental, and that it was used as a means of endeavouring to excite the people of Constantinople against their favourite Chrysostom, that bold champion of the truth against spiritual wickedness in high places, and the Erastianism of a large party of bishops and clergy, just as before Nero had charged the burning of old Rome on the Christians. On this false charge some of the most faithful and zealous adherents of Chrysostom suffered, amongst them were the priest Tigris, and the reader Eutropius. The rest shall be quoted from Sozomen, who, belonging to the party of Chrysostom, gives those details which Socrates found it convenient to omit:--"Both parties mutually accused each other of incendiarism; the enemies of John asserted that his partizans had been guilty of the deed from revenge; the other side, that the crime had been perpetrated by their enemies, with intention of burning them in the church. Those citizens who were suspected of attachment to John, were sought out and cast into prison, and compelled to anathematize him. Arsacius was not long after ordained over the Church of Constantinople. Nothing operated so much against him as the persecution carried on against the followers of John. As these latter refused to hold communion, or even to join in prayer with him, and met together in the further parts of the city, he complained to the Emperor of their conduct. The tribune was commanded to attack them with a body of soldiers, and by means of clubs and stones he soon dispersed their assembly. The most distinguished among them in point of rank, and those who were most zealous in their adherence to John, were cast into prison. The soldiers, as is usual on such occasions, went beyond their orders, and stripped the women of their ornaments. Although the whole city was thus filled with trouble and lamentation, the affection of the people for John remained the same. After the popular insurrection had been quelled, the prefect of the city appeared in public, as if to inquire into the cause of the conflagration, and to bring the perpetrators of the deed to punishment; but, being a pagan, he exulted in the destruction of the Church, and ridiculed the calamity. "Eutropius, a reader, was required to name the persons who had set fire to the church; but, although he was scourged severely, although his sides and cheeks were torn with iron nails, and although lighted torches were applied to the most sensitive parts of his body, no confession could be extorted from him, notwithstanding his youth and delicacy of constitution. After having been subjected to these tortures, he was cast into a dungeon, where he soon afterwards expired. "A dream of Sisinius concerning Eutropius seems worthy of insertion in this history. Sisinius, the Bishop of the Novatians, saw in his sleep a man, tall in stature, and handsome in person, standing near the altar in the Novatian Church of S. Stephen. This man complained of the rarity of goodness among men, and said that he had been searching throughout the city, and found but one who was good, and that one was Eutropius. Astonished at what he had seen, Sisinius made known the dream to the most faithful of his priests, and commanded him to make search for Eutropius, wherever he might be. The priest, rightly conjecturing that this Eutropius could be no other than he who had been so barbarously tortured by the prefect, went from prison to prison in quest of him. At length he found him, and made known to him the dream of the Bishop, and besought him with tears to pray for him. Such are the details we possess concerning Eutropius. "Tigris, a priest, was about the same time stripped of his clothes, scourged on the back, bound hand and foot, and stretched on the rack. He was a foreigner, and an eunuch, but not by birth. He was originally a slave in the house of a man of rank, and on account of his faithful services had obtained his freedom. He was afterwards ordained priest, and was distinguished by his moderation and meekness of disposition, and by his charity towards strangers and the poor. Such were the events which took place in Constantinople. Those who were in power at court procured a law in favour of Arsacius, by which it was enacted that the orthodox were to assemble together in churches only, and that if they seceded from communion with the above-mentioned Bishop, they were to be exiled." S. CAESARIA, V. (ABOUT A.D. 530.) [Gallican Martyrologies. Her history from the life of S. Caesarius of Arles, her brother, by his disciple, Cyprian.] S. Caesaria was the superior of a convent of religious women, erected by her brother, S. Caesarius, at Arles. When, in 507, the Franks and Burgundians, under Alaric, had been defeated by Clovis, Theodoric invaded the south of Gaul from Italy, and besieged the city, and battered down the convent which had been erected for S. Caesaria. When tranquillity was re-established, Caesarius rebuilt the monastery, and called his sister from Marseilles to inhabit it. The rule of S. Caesaria, drawn up by her brother, exists, and is published by the Bollandists. S. BENEDICT BISCOP. (A.D. 703.) [Roman, Benedictine, and Anglican Martyrologies. Life from William of Malmesbury, Bede's Homilies and Ecclesiastical History, Florence of Worcester, Matthew of Westminster. The following account is condensed from the life of S. Benedict Biscop, in Montalembert's Monks of the West, Bk. xiii., c. 2.] Benedict was born of the highest Anglo-Saxon nobility, in the year 628. While he was still very young, he held an office in the household of King Oswy. At twenty-five he gave up secular life, marriage, and his family, restored his lands to the king, and dedicated himself to the service of God. Before he settled in any community he went to Rome, whither he had been long attracted by that desire of praying at the tomb of the Apostles, which became so general among the Anglo-Saxons. He started in company with S. Wilfrid, but the two young Northumbrian nobles separated at Lyons. After his first visit to Rome, Benedict returned thither a second and a third time, having in the meantime assumed the monastic habit in the island of Lerins. Pope Vitalianus, struck with the piety and knowledge of so constant and zealous a pilgrim, assigned to him, as guide and interpreter, that Greek, Theodore, who became Archbishop of Canterbury, and who, when he went to England, transferred the monk of Lerins to be abbot of the principal monastery in Canterbury. After thus spending two years with the new Archbishop, the abbot Benedict, instead of re-visiting his native district, went for the fourth time to Rome, 671. He was then in the prime of life; but when it is considered what were the difficulties and dangers of such a journey--at such a time--when we remember that a journey from London to Rome then took twice as long, and was a hundred times more dangerous than a journey from London to Australia is now, we are amazed at the energy which induced so many Anglo-Saxon monks, not once only, but many times in their life, to cross the sea and the Alps on their way to Rome. His fourth expedition was undertaken in the interests of literature. He brought back a cargo of books, partly sold, partly given to him; and, in passing by Vienne, the ancient capital of the Gauls, on his return, he brought with him many more which he had deposited there in the charge of his friends. When he returned at length to his native Northumbria, he sought King Egfrid, the son of his former master, Oswy, then the reigning monarch, and told him all he had done during the twenty years that had passed since he left his country and the royal service. Then, endeavouring to communicate to him the religious ardour with which his own heart was filled, he explained to the King all he had learned at Rome and elsewhere, of ecclesiastical and monastic discipline, showing him the books and relics which he had brought back. Egfrid, who had not yet begun his struggle with Wilfrid, allowed himself to be won by the stories of the pilgrim, for whom he conceived a great affection; and in order that he might apply his experience to the government of a new community, he detached from his own possessions, and presented to Benedict, an estate situated at the mouth of the Wear, a little stream which flows through Durham, and throws itself into the Northern sea, a little south of the Tyne.[40] This gave the name of Wearmouth to the new monastery, which was dedicated to S. Peter, the Prince of the Apostles, according to the express wish of Egfrid, in agreement with that of Benedict, as an evidence of his leanings towards Rome. This foundation was no sooner assured, than the unwearied Benedict took ship again, to seek in France masons to build him a stone church, in the Roman style, for everything that came from Rome was dear to him. The church was carried on with so much energy, that, a year after the first stone was laid, the church was roofed in, and mass was celebrated under one of those stone arches which excited the surprise of the English in the seventh century. He brought glass-makers also from France, for there were none in England; and these foreign workmen, after having put glass into the windows of the church and new monastery, taught their art to the Anglo-Saxons. Animated by a zeal which nothing could discourage, and inspired by intelligent patriotism, and a sort of passion for beauty in art, which shrank neither from fatigue nor care, he sent to seek beyond the seas all that he could not find in England--all that seemed necessary to him for the ornamentation of his church; and not finding even in France all he wanted, he went for the fifth time to Rome. Even this was not his last visit, for some years later he made a sixth pilgrimage. On both occasions he brought treasures back with him, chiefly books in countless quantities, and of every kind. He was a passionate collector, as has been seen, from his youth. He desired each of his monasteries to possess a great library, which he considered indispensable to the instruction, discipline, and good organization of the community; and reckoned upon the books as the best means of retaining his monks in their cloisters; for much as he loved travelling himself, he did not approve of other monks passing their time on the highways and byways, even under pretext of pilgrimages. Along with the books he brought a great number of pictures and coloured images. By introducing these images from Rome to Northumberland, Benedict Biscop has written one of the most curious, and, at the same time, forgotten pages in the history of art. The Venerable Bede, who speaks with enthusiasm of the expeditions of his master and friend, leads us to suppose that he brought back with him only portable pictures, but it may be supposed that the abbot of Wearmouth brought back with him both painters and mosaic-workers, to work on the spot at the decoration of his churches. How can it be otherwise explained, how pictures on wood, brought even by water from Rome to England, should have been large enough to cover the walls and arches of the two or three churches of which Bede speaks. However this may be, the result was that the most ignorant of the Christians of Northumbria found, on entering these new monastic churches, under a material form, the attractive image of the instructions which the monastic missionaries lavished on them. Learned and unlearned could contemplate and study with delight, we are told, here the sweet and attractive form of the new-born Saviour, there the Twelve Apostles surrounding the Blessed Virgin; upon the northern wall all the parables of the Gospels; upon the southern, the visions of the Apocalypse; elsewhere, a series of pictures which marked the harmony between the Old and New Testaments; Isaac carrying the wood for his sacrifice opposite to Jesus bearing His Cross; the brazen serpent opposite Jesus crucified, and so on.[41] All these Bede, who had seen them, describes with great delight. After Latin and Greek books, after art, it was the turn of music. On his return from his fifth voyage, Benedict brought back with him from Rome an eminent monk, called John, precentor of S. Peter's, to establish at Wearmouth the music and Roman ceremonies with entire exactitude. As soon as he had arrived at Wearmouth, this learned abbot set out in writing the order of the celebration of all feasts for all the year, of which he soon circulated numerous copies. Then he opened classes, at which he taught, _viva voce_, the liturgy and ecclesiastical chants. The best singers of the Northumbrian monasteries came to listen to him, and invited him to visit their communities. The passionate zeal of Benedict for the building and decoration of his monastic houses, did not make him forget the more essential interests of his foundations. Before leaving Rome he took care to constitute his community upon the immovable basis of the rule of S. Benedict. He obtained from Pope Agatho a charter which guaranteed the liberty and security of the new monastery of Wearmouth. In order to give Benedict a new mark of sympathy, King Egfrid assigned to him another estate, near to the first. This was the cradle of the monastery of Jarrow, the name of which is inseparably linked with that of Bede. This monastery he dedicated to S. Paul, and appointed one of his most intimate friends and fellow pilgrims, Ceolfrid, abbot of the new foundation. In order to be more at liberty to devote his time to travel, Benedict took a coadjutor in the government of Wearmouth. This new abbot was his nephew, Easterwin, his junior by twenty-two years, and like Biscop, of high birth. The noble youth took pride in following minutely the rule of the house, like any other monk. Thanks to his illustrious biographer, we know what the occupations of a Saxon thane turned monk were in the seventh century. His duties were to thrash and winnow the corn, to milk the goats and cows, to take his turn in the kitchen, the bakehouse, and the garden, always humble and joyous in his obedience. When he became coadjutor, and was invested, in Biscop's absence, with all his authority, the young abbot continued the course of communal life; and when his duties as superior led him out of doors to where the monks laboured in the fields, he set to work along with them, taking the plough or the fan in his own hands, or forging iron upon the anvil. He was robust as well as young and handsome; but his look was infinitely gentle, and his conversation full of amiability. When he was compelled to reprove a fault, it was done with such tender sadness that the culprit felt himself incapable of any new offence which should bring a cloud over the benign brightness of that beloved face. His table was served with the same provisions as that of the monks; and he slept in the general dormitory, which he left only five days before his death, being then hopelessly ill, to prepare himself in a more solitary place, for the last struggle. When he felt his end approaching, he had still strength enough left to go down into the garden; and, seating himself there, he called to him all his brethren, who wept the anticipated loss of such a father. Then, with the tenderness which was natural to him, he gave to each of them a last kiss. The following night (March 7th, 686) he died, aged thirty-six, whilst the monks were singing matins. When Benedict returned from his last expedition to Rome he found his benefactor, King Egfrid, and his nephew, Easterwin, both dead, along with a great number of his monks, carried off by one of the epidemics then so frequent. The only survivors at Jarrow were the abbot and one little scholar, whose fame was destined to eclipse that of all the Saxon Saints and kings, who are scarcely known to posterity except by his pen.[42] Benedict Biscop did not lose courage, but promptly collected new subjects under his sway, recommenced and pursued, with his habitual energy, the decoration of his two churches of S. Peter and S. Paul. The monks had already chosen as successor to Easterwin a deacon named Sigfried, a learned and virtuous man, but affected with lung disease, and the first of the English in whom history indicates a malady so general and so fatal to their race. Benedict's own turn was, however, soon to come. God preserved his life to purify him, and put his patience to a long and cruel trial, before calling him to his eternal recompense. After having devoted the first thirteen years of his abbacy to the laborious and wandering life so dear to him, and to those distant expeditions that produced so many fruits for his order and his country, he was stricken with a cruel disease, which lasted for three years, and paralysed all his members one after the other. Though kept to his bed by his infirmity, and unable to follow his brethren to the choir, he, notwithstanding, continued to celebrate each service, both day and night, with certain of the monks, mingling his feeble voice with theirs. At night his sleepless hours were consoled by the reading of the Gospels, which was kept up without interruption by a succession of priests. Often, too, he collected the monks and novices round his couch, addressing to them urgent and solemn counsels, and among other things begging them to preserve the great library which he had brought from Rome, and not to allow it to be spoiled or dispersed; but above all, to keep faithfully the rules which, after a careful study of the seventeen principal monasteries which he had visited during his journeys, he had collected for them. He also dwelt much upon the injunction he had already often repeated, that they should pay no regard to high birth in their choice of an abbot, but look simply to his life and doctrine. "If I had to choose between two evils," said he, "I should prefer to see the spot on which I have established our dear monastery fall back into eternal solitude, rather than to be succeeded here by my own brother, who, we all know, is not in the good way." The strength of the abbot, and at the same time that of his poor coadjutor, was by this time so exhausted by their respective diseases, that they both perceived that they must die, and desired to see each other for the last time before departing from this world. In order that the wish of these two tender friends should be accomplished, it was necessary to bring the dying coadjutor to the bed of the abbot. His head was placed on the same pillow; but they were both so feeble that they could not even embrace each other, and the help of brotherly hands was necessary to join their lips. All the monks assembled in chapter round this bed of suffering and love; and the two aged Saints, having pointed out among them a successor, approved by all, breathed together, with a short interval between, their last breath. Thus died, at the age of sixty-two, S. Benedict of England, a worthy rival of the great patriarch of the monks of the West, whose robe and name he bore. SS. XXXVIII MONKS, IN IONIA. (ABOUT 750.) [The account of their martyrdom was written by Theosterictus, a confessor in the same Iconoclastic persecution.] In the horrible persecution of the orthodox by Constantine Copronymus, on the subject of the images, concerning which more shall be said elsewhere, the blessed martyr Stephen the younger, Archimandrite of Auxentia, was in prison, when a monk, Theosterictus by name,[43] was admitted to him, with his nose cut off, and his cheeks burnt with pitch; he came from the monastery of Peleceta, and related to the abbot how, on the Wednesday in Holy Week, as the unbloody Sacrifice was being offered in the monastery church, a band of soldiers, by command of the heretical Emperor, broke into the sacred building and interrupted the mysteries. Thirty-eight monks were chained, the rest were mutilated, their noses cut off, and their beards steeped in tar, and then fired. Then the soldiers set the whole convent in flames. The thirty-eight were carried off to the borders of Ephesus, and thrust into the furnace of an old bath; the openings were then closed, and they were suffocated therein. [Illustration: S. AELRED, ABBOT OF RIEVAULX. From a Design by A. Welby Pugin. Jan. 12.] S. AELRED, AB. OF RIEVAULX. (A.D. 1166.) [Authorities: His life in Capgrave, and his own writings, still extant.] He was of noble descent, and was born in the north of England, in 1109. Being educated in learning and piety, he was invited by David, the pious King of Scotland, to his court, made master of his household, and highly esteemed both by him and the courtiers. His virtue shone with bright lustre in the world, particularly his meekness, which Christ declared to be his favourite virtue, and the distinguishing mark of his true disciples. The following is a memorable instance to what a degree S. Aelred possessed this virtue:--A certain person of quality having insulted and reproached him in the presence of the King, Aelred heard him out with patience, and thanked him for his charity and sincerity, in telling him his faults. This behaviour had such an influence on his adversary that it made him ask his pardon on the spot. Another time, whilst he was speaking on a certain matter, one interrupted him with very harsh reviling expressions: the servant of God heard him with tranquility, and afterward resumed his discourse with the same calmness and presence of mind as before. He desired ardently to devote himself entirely to God, by forsaking the world; but the charms of friendship detained him some time longer in it, and were fetters to his soul; reflecting notwithstanding that he must sooner or later be separated by death from those he loved most, he condemned his own cowardice, and broke at once those bands of friendship, which were more agreeable to him than all other sweets of life. To relinquish entirely all his worldly engagements, he left Scotland, and embraced the austere Cistercian order, at Rievaulx, in Yorkshire, where Walter de l'Especke had founded a monastery in 1122. At the age of twenty-four, in 1133, he became a monk under the first abbot, William, a disciple of S. Bernard. In spite of the delicacy of his body he set himself cheerfully to practise the greatest austerities, and employed much of his time in prayer and reading. His heart turned with great ardour to the love of God, and this made him feel all his mortifications sweet and light. "Thy yoke doth not oppress, but raiseth the soul; thy burden hath wings, not weight," said he. He speaks of divine charity with love, and by his frequent ejaculations on the subject, it seems to have been the sweet consolation of his soul. "May thy voice (says he) sound in my ears, O Good Jesus, that my heart may learn how to love thee, that my mind may love thee, that the interior powers, the bowels of my soul, and very marrow of my heart may love thee, and that my affections may embrace thee, my only true good, my sweet and delightful joy! O my God! He who loves thee possesses thee; and he possesses thee in proportion as he loves, because thou art love itself. This is that abundance with which thy beloved are inebriated, dissolved to themselves, that they may live into thee, by loving thee." He had been much delighted in his youth with reading Cicero; but after his conversion found that author, and all other reading, tedious and bitter, which was not sweetened with the honey of the holy name of Jesus, and seasoned with the word of God, as he says in the preface to his book _On Spiritual Friendship_. He was much edified with the very looks of a holy monk, called Simon, who had despised high birth, an ample fortune, and all the advantages of mind and body, to serve God in that penitential state. This monk went and came as one deaf and dumb, always recollected in God; and was such a lover of silence, that he would scarce speak a few words to the prior on necessary occasions. His silence however was sweet, agreeable, and full of edification. Our Saint says of him, "The very sight of his humility stifled my pride, and made me blush at the want of mortification in my looks." This holy monk, having served God eight years in perfect fidelity, died in 1142, in wonderful peace, repeating with his last breath, "I will sing eternally, O Lord, thy mercy, thy mercy, thy mercy!" S. Aelred, much against his inclination, was made abbot of a new monastery of his order, founded by William, Earl of Lincoln, at Revesby, in Lincolnshire, in 1142, and after, in 1143, of Rievaulx, where he governed three hundred monks. Describing their life, he says that they drank nothing but water, ate little, laboured hard, slept little, and on hard boards; never spoke, except to their superiors on necessary occasions; and loved prayer. [Illustration: S. Odilo, Jan. 1, p. 20.] FOOTNOTES: [39] Socrates, Eccl. Hist., lib. vi. c. 18. [40] Monk-Wearmouth on the north bank of the river. [41] Bede: Vitae Abbt. in Wiramuth, c. 6. [42] This is Bede, who describes, further on, how the abbot and that little boy celebrated alone, and in great sadness, the whole psalms of the monastic service, with no little labour, until new monks arrived. [43] Not to be confused with Theosterictus, disciple of the abbot S. Nicetas, who writes this account. January 13. The Octave of the Epiphany. S. POTITUS, _M._, A.D. 166. SS. HERMYLUS AND STRATONICUS, _MM., at Belgrade_, A.D. 315. S. GLAPHYRA, _V., at Amasia, circ._ A.D. 324. S. AGRICIUS, _B. of Trèves, circ._ A.D. 335. S. HILARY, _B. of Poictiers_, A.D. 368. S. VIRENTIUS, _P._, _in Burgundy_, A.D. 400. S. KENTIGERN, _B. of Glasgow_, A.D. 601. B. BERNO, _Ab. of Cluny_, A.D. 920. S. HELDEMAR, _H., in Artois_, A.D. 1097. B. GOTFRIED, _of Kappenberg_, A.D. 1127. B. JUTTA, _W. and Recluse, at Huy, in Belgium_, A.D. 1228. B. VERONICA, _V. at Milan_, A.D. 1497. SS. HERMYLUS AND STRATONICUS, MM., AT BELGRADE. (A.D. 315.) [Greek Menaea and Menologium. The Acts in Metaphrastes are compiled from the original genuine Acts, and may be trusted.] When Licinius was in Mysia he sought out the Christians, to punish them with death, being moved thereto by his great hatred to the religion of Christ, which Constantine protected. Socrates says, in his "Ecclesiastical History," that Licinius hated the Christians; and that, although for a while, from dread of Constantine, he avoided open persecution, yet he managed to plot against them covertly, and at length proceeded to acts of undisguised malevolence. The persecution, however, was local, not extending beyond those districts where Licinius himself was, but these and other public outrages could not long remain concealed from Constantine. By this perfidy he drew upon himself the Emperor Constantine's heaviest displeasure; and the pretended treaty of friendship having been so flagrantly violated, it was not long before they took up arms against each other.[44] When Licinius was at Sigidunum (Belgrade), on the Danube, a deacon, named Hermylus, was denounced to him as a despiser of the gods of Rome. The Emperor ordered him to be brought before him. The order was obeyed. Then the Emperor said, "Answer me, and tell me openly, dost thou confess thyself to be a Christian?" "Not only do I acknowledge myself to be a Christian, but to be consecrated a deacon to the service of God." "Well then, be deacon in the service of the gods," said Licinius. "Thou must be deaf, Emperor! I said that I served God the all-seeing, not these blind stocks." Licinius ordered the deacon to be smitten on the cheeks, and said, "Not so glib with thy tongue, Hermylus. Honour the Emperor, sacrifice to the gods, and save thy life." Then Hermylus cried out with a loud voice, "Thou shalt endure torments without end, from the hand of God, because thou dost adore vain idols, and seekest to destroy those who serve the living God, as though envious of their superiority." Then the martyr was taken back to prison. And after three days he was again brought forth, and when Licinius had mounted the tribunal, he said, "Well now, Hermylus, art thou prepared to abandon this folly and escape what is in store for thee?" But the deacon answered, "I am ready to endure. There is one God in heaven to whom I live, and to whom I am ready to die. He will succour me." "We shall soon see what His succour is worth," said the Emperor; and ordered him to be beaten. Then six men cast him on the ground and stripped him, and scourged him. But Hermylus cried, "O Lord my God, who before Pilate enduredst the scourge, strengthen me suffering for Thee, that I may finish my course, and that, being made partaker in Thy sufferings, I maybe made also to partake in Thy glory." Then there was heard a voice from heaven, saying, "Verily, verily, Hermylus, in three days shalt thou receive a glorious reward!" Hearing this, the martyr was filled with boldness, and a great fear fell on all around. Then Licinius hastily remitted the deacon to prison. Now the jailor's name was Stratonicus, and he was a disciple, but secretly, like Nicodemus, not having great boldness, and he comforted Hermylus in the dungeon as well as he could, for he was also his personal friend. On the morrow, the Emperor ordered the brave soldier of Christ to be led forth again, and beaten on the stomach, as his back was one great wound, and the instrument wherewith he was to be beaten was a willow rod, twisted and knotted into a triangle, and this, say the Acts, was a most excruciating torture, for the angles and knots cut like knives into the flesh. But as he bore this with unflinching constancy, the tyrant commanded that his belly should be torn with little iron hooks. Then Stratonicus, the jailor, unable to bear the sight of his friend's sufferings, covered his face with his hands and burst into tears. Seeing this, the soldiers who stood by jeered him, and called the attention of the Emperor to the agitation of the jailor. Then Stratonicus, mustering up all his courage, cast himself before Licinius, and cried, "Sire! I am a Christian, I believe in God, the maker of heaven and earth." Then Licinius ordered him to be scourged. And Stratonicus, looking piteously at his friend, said, "Hermylus, pray for me to Christ, that I may be able to endure!" And when Licinius saw that Stratonicus was covered with wounds, he bade the executioners desist, and he remitted the jailor and the prisoner to the same dungeon. But on the morrow, finding Stratonicus resolute, he ordered him and Hermylus to be drowned in the Danube. Then they were tied up in nets and cast into the river. Three days after their bodies were washed up, and were buried by the Christians. S. HILARY, B. D. OF POICTIERS. (A.D. 368.) [In the Roman Missal, before 1435, there was no mention of S. Hilary; in the reformed Breviary of Cardinal Quignon, published by authority of Pope Paul III., S. Hilary was commemorated on Jan. 31st, the same day as that on which he was noted in the York Calendar, because Jan. 13th is the Octave of the Epiphany. Afterwards, however, the commemoration of S. Hilary was fixed for Jan. 14th, his name being inserted in the Martyrology on the 13th; but with this clause, "His festival is, however, to be celebrated on the morrow," so as not to interfere with the Octave of the Epiphany. The Sarum, Dominican, Belgian, and some of the German Calendars mark the 13th as the feast of S. Hilary. The Anglican Calendar also notes his name on this day. The Bollandists give his life on this day, though in the Roman offices the commemoration is on the morrow. His own writings, and the histories of his age, contain all the materials for his life.] S. Hilary was born at Poictiers in Gaul. There is some reason to believe that his family was illustrious in that country. His parents were pagans, and he was brought up in idolatry. He gives an account of his conversion to the faith of Christ in his book "On the Trinity." He was married before his conversion; and his wife, by whom he had a daughter, named Apra, was yet living when he was chosen Bishop of Poictiers, about the year 353; but from the time of his ordination he lived in perpetual continence. It is probable that S. Hilary was elected Bishop from the rank of a layman, as was often the case in the early ages, and received all orders by accumulation. He soon became renowned in Gaul as a preacher; and S. Martin, then a young man, was attracted by his name, and lived for a time at Poictiers as his disciple. Immediately after the Arian Council at Milan, in A.D. 355, which had condemned S. Athanasius, and had prevailed on the Emperor Constantius to banish all the Bishops who adhered to him, S. Hilary wrote to the Emperor, entreating him to stop the persecution, to recall the Catholic Bishops, and forbid secular judges to interfere in the affairs of the Church. This remonstrance had no effect; but he had the satisfaction of seeing the Gallican Bishops remain firm during those days of trial. Saturninus, Bishop of Arles, alone united with Ursacius and Valens, two Illyrian Bishops, to vex the Catholics. They held an Arian synod at Béziers in Languedoc, at which Saturninus himself presided. S. Hilary there made a noble confession of the Nicene Faith, and refuted the heresy of Arius; but the party of Saturninus, reinforced by Bishops from the neighbouring countries, was too strong for him, and he was condemned and deposed; and immediately afterwards the Emperor Constantius banished him into Phrygia. He left Gaul early in A.D. 356, in company with Rhodanus, Bishop of Toulouse, whom God called from those evils to His kingdom, soon after their arrival in Phrygia. His departure was followed by a cruel persecution of the Gallican clergy; but nothing could daunt their constancy, or prevail on them to communicate with the enemies of S. Hilary and the Nicene Faith, or to fill up his see, which in the eye of the Church was not vacant. The priests and deacons of Toulouse were severely beaten, and their church profaned. In A.D. 357 the Bishops wrote a letter to S. Hilary assuring him of their fidelity and firmness. About the same time S. Hilary received a letter from Apra, his only daughter, informing him that she had been asked in marriage by a young man. She was then about thirteen or fourteen years of age. He immediately wrote to her, entreating her to set her thoughts on the more precious rewards which the Lord Jesus has promised to those virgins who devote themselves wholly to their Heavenly Spouse, and are not entangled in the snares of earthly love. He reminded her of that blissful company whom the Church commemorates on the feast of the Holy Innocents (Dec. 28), who sing a new song which no man can learn but they who are virgins and follow the Lamb whithersoever He goeth. She yielded to his pious counsel; and on his return home God took her to Himself at his request, without pain or any visible sickness. Bishop Jeremy Taylor relates this little story in his own beautiful language in the "Holy Dying." In return for the comforting letter which the Gallican Bishops had sent him, and at their request to be informed regarding the faith of the Eastern Churches, S. Hilary wrote his "History of Synods" in the end of A.D. 358. It contains an account of the various councils that had been assembled in the East on the subject of the Arian heresy, together with a defence of the Nicene Faith. It is addressed to the British Bishops among others, whom he congratulates on their steadfastness. The Saint also wrote his book "On the Trinity" during his exile, and a smaller treatise "Against the Arians." He was also the undoubted author of several hymns, and others have been attributed to him. [Illustration: S. HILARY BAPTIZING S. MARTIN, OF TOURS. From a Window, dated 1528, in the Church of S. Florentin, Yonne.] [Illustration: THE THREE CHILDREN IN THE FIERY FURNACE. From the Catacombs. Jan. 13.] In A.D. 359 the Western Bishops held a synod at Rimini, at which nearly four hundred were present. The Arian party among them beguiled the rest by its address, to sanction its errors by their signatures. The Bishops of Agen and Tongres took a prominent lead in the proceedings of the synod. In September of the same year S. Hilary was invited with other Catholic Bishops by the semi-Arians to their council at Seleucia, in Isauria. Their object was to defeat the Arians, and they hoped that the Catholics would assist them. In this council S. Hilary bore witness to the faith of the Western Church being the same as that declared to be the Catholic Faith at the Council of Nice in A.D. 325, and he protested against both the Arian and semi-Arian opinions as novelties. He accompanied the deputies of the council to Constantinople, in hopes of obtaining from the Emperor Constantius the recall of his sentence of banishment. While the Arian synod was sitting at Constantinople, in January, A.D. 360, he entreated the Emperor to grant him a conference with Saturninus, Bishop of Arles, the author of his exile, and that he might be allowed to appear in the synod, and bear witness to the Catholic Faith. He also complained of the perplexity which the multiplication of creeds and confessions of faith had occasioned; for in the preceding year alone four had been published to the Church. The Emperor refused to grant S. Hilary what he asked; but the Arians so much dreaded his presence in the East, that they persuaded Constantius to send him back to Gaul, yet without formally recalling the sentence of exile. The joy of his return to his Church and his native land was much lessened by the miserable confusion which he left behind him in the East. Still it must have been very great; and his approach was hailed with delight by the Church in Gaul. S. Martin, who had been living in retirement in the island of Gallenari, off the city of Genoa, went to Rome to meet him; but finding that he had already left it, he followed him to Poictiers, and soon after built a monastery near the town (see November 11.) S. Hilary immediately applied himself to repair the mischief which the Council of Rimini had done: and a synod was assembled at Paris, which condemned its proceedings, and declared the true Faith of the _consubstantiality_ of the Son of God. The Bishops also corresponded with their banished brethren in the East. In A.D. 363 S. Hilary made a journey into Italy in company with Eusebius of Vercelli. They were at Milan in the autumn of the following year, at the time when the Emperor Valentinian arrived there. The people were Catholic, and even abstained from entering the churches, to avoid communicating with Auxentius their Arian Bishop. In a public disputation which the Emperor invited him to hold, S. Hilary extorted from the Arian a confession of the Nicene Faith, which was taken down in writing and preserved. Auxentius was enraged at being thus vanquished, and prevailed on the Emperor to send S. Hilary away from Milan. Before his departure he addressed a letter to the Catholic Bishops and laity in the neighbourhood, exhorting them to remain firm. This was the last public act of his life which is recorded. He returned home to Poictiers, and finished his labours by a blessed death in January, A.D. 368, according to the testimony of the greater number of historians. A brilliant light is said to have filled the chamber where the body of the holy man was lying. S. Gregory of Tours attests the truth of a miracle performed at his tomb; and others also are authenticated by various writers. But neither the fame of these, nor respect for the memory of the saintly Confessor, prevented his tomb from being violated by the Calvinists in 1567. S. KENTIGERN, OR MUNGO, B. OF GLASGOW. (A.D. 601.) [His life was written by S. Asaph, his disciple in the monastery of Llan-Elwyn, in Wales, founded by Kentigern when exiled. This life has not come down to us in its original form. We have, however, his life compiled in 1125 by Jocelyn, monk of Furness, from ancient authorities, by order of Bishop Jocelyn of Glasgow. Undoubtedly the life of S. Asaph formed the basis of this compilation. S. Kentigern is also spoken of by many ancient Scottish historians, John Major de Gest. Scotorum, lib. ii. c. 7; Hector Boece, lib. ix; Leslie, lib. iv., &c.] S. Kentigern is said[45] to have been the illegitimate son of Themin, daughter of Loth, King of the Picts, by Eugenius III., King of the Scots; but there is great uncertainty about his origin. When the Pictish King found that his daughter was likely to become a mother, he was filled with grief and anger, and ordered her to be thrown down a rock, on Mount Dunpeld. By God's mercy she was not injured, and was then, by her father's orders, sent to Culross, where she brought forth a son. At the same time S. Servan, being engaged in saying matins, heard angels singing. When he had finished his office he left his cell, and descending to the sea shore in the grey dusk, found there a mother rocking her new-born babe, wherefore the old hermit exclaimed, being moved with compassion, "Mochoche, mochoche!" which being interpreted is, My dear, my dear! Then he took the unfortunate girl and her babe to his cell, instructed her in the faith of Christ, and baptized her and her little one, and he called her Tanca, and him he named Kentiern.[46] So the child grew up in the old man's cell, and became so dear to him, that he called him familiarly Mungho, or Dearest, and by this name he is generally known in Scotland. His mother learned to love God, and to serve him with all her heart, and bitterly to bewail her fault. Many pretty legends of the childhood of Kentigern have been wafted down to us. S. Servan had a pet redbreast which was wont to eat out of his hand, and to perch on his shoulder, and when he chanted the psalms of David, the little bird flapped its wings and twittered shrilly. Now Servan had several lads whom he educated at Culross, and these envied Kentigern, because he was the favourite of the old master, so in spite they wrung the neck of the redbreast, and charged the favourite boy with having done the deed. But Kentigern took the little dead bird, and crying bitterly, and praying to God, signed the cross over it. Then when the old man returned from church, the bird hopped to meet him as usual, chirping joyously. In those days it was no easy matter to kindle a fire, indeed, without a flame from which to light one, it was impossible, for in the north, sticks are not dry enough to be rubbed into a blaze as they can be in hot climates. Therefore it was necessary that fires should never be allowed to become extinct. It was the duty of the boys of S. Servan, in turn by weeks, to rise during the night and mend the fire, so that there should not be a deficiency of light for illumining the Church at the matin offices. When it was Kentigern's week, the boys, to bring him into trouble, extinguished the fire. Mungo, rising as usual, went to the hearth but found the fire out. Then he took a stick and placed it over the cold ashes, and invoking the name of the Holy Trinity, he blew upon the dead cinders, and a flame leaped up which kindled the branch; and thereat he lighted the Church candles. At last, unable to endure longer the envy of his fellow pupils, Kentigern ran away. And when S. Servan discovered it, he pursued him, and reached the bank of a river, but Kentigern had escaped to the other side. Then the old man cried to him, "Alas! my dearest son, the light of my eyes, and the staff of my age, wherefore hast thou deserted me? Remember that I took thee from thy mother's womb, nursed thee, and taught thee to this day. Do not desert my white hairs." Then Kentigern, bursting into tears, answered, "My father, it is the will of the Most High that I should go." Servan cried out, "Return, return, dear son, and I, from being a father, will be to thee as a son, from being a master I will become a disciple." But Kentigern, suffused with tears, replied, "It cannot be, my father; return and admonish thy disciples, and instruct them by thine example. I must go where the Lord God calls me." Then Servan blessed him across the river, lifting up his holy hands, and sorrowfully they parted the one from the other, to see each other's face no more in this life. Kentigern settled near Glasgow, where he inhabited a cave in the face of a rock, where the people looked at him with respectful curiosity, while he studied the direction of the storms at sea, and drank in with pleasure the first breezes of the spring. Having converted many of the people, together with the King of Strathclyde, he was consecrated Bishop by an Irish prelate, the Keltic Church being ignorant of the Nicene canon requiring three to consecrate, "with unction of holy oil, invocation of the Holy Spirit, and imposition of hands." The district of Strathclyde, or Cumbria, on the west coast of Britain, from the mouth of the Clyde to that of the Mersey, that is to say, from Glasgow to Liverpool, was occupied by a mingled race of Britons and Scots, whose capital was Al-Cluid, now Dumbarton. It was in this region that S. Kentigern was called to labour. As bishop, he still dwelt in his rocky cell, where he used a stone for a pillow, and to inure his body to hardships, he stood in the Clyde to recite his psalter. He wore a dress of goat-skin bound about his loins, and a hood, and over all, his white linen alb, which he never left off; and carried in his hand his pastoral staff of wood without ornament, and in his other hand his office book. Thus he was ever prepared to execute his ministry; and thus attired, he went through the kingdom from the Clyde to the Firth of Forth. In his cell he lived on bread and cheese and milk, but when he was with the King, he relaxed the severity of his fasting, so as not to appear ungracious when offered more abundant and better food; however, on his return to his cell, he curtailed his allowance, so as to make up for his relaxation of rule at court. When S. Kentigern was made Bishop of Glasgow, Gurthmel Wledio was King of the North Britons. He was succeeded by Roderick the Liberal (Rydderach Hael), a religious and deserving prince, who was driven by his rebellious subjects under Morken Mawr to Ireland. Morken having usurped the throne of Strathclyde, drove S. Kentigern out of the country, and the Saint took refuge in Wales with S. David, Bishop of Menevia, and remained with him till the Prince of Denbigh bestowed on him lands, where he built the famous monastery of Llan-Elwyn, afterwards called S. Asaph. Here he gathered about him a great number of disciples and scholars, and he was there at the date of the death of S. David, in 544. On the death of Morken, Roderick returned to Scotland, and recovered his crown. He immediately recalled Kentigern to his see, and he, leaving his monastery to the care of S. Asaph, went back to Glasgow in 560. Roderick's mother was Irish, and he had been baptized by an Irish monk, and greatly respected Kentigern. The Saint returned bringing with him a hive of Welsh monks, and established the seat of his renewed apostleship once more at Glasgow, where Ninian had preceded him nearly a century before, without leaving any lasting traces of his passage. Kentigern, more fortunate, established upon the site of a burying-ground, consecrated by Ninian, the first foundation of that magnificent cathedral which still bears his name, though diverted to a religion different from that he professed. Kentigern collected round him numerous disciples, all learned in holy literature, all working with their hands, and possessing nothing as individuals. "They dwelt," says Jocelyn, "in separate cells, as did Kentigern, thence were they called Calledei." He distinguished himself during his episcopate by his efforts to bring back to the faith the Picts of Galloway, which formed part of the kingdom of Strathclyde; and afterwards, by numerous mission and monastic foundations throughout all Albyn--a name which was then given to midland Scotland. His disciples penetrated even to the Orkney Isles, where they probably met with the missionaries of S. Columba, despatched from Iona. The salutary and laborious activity of Kentigern must often have encroached upon the regions which were specially within the sphere of Columba. But the generous heart of Columba was inaccessible to jealousy. He was, besides, the personal friend of Kentigern and of King Roderick.[47] The fame of the Bishop of Strathclyde's apostolic labours drew him from his isle to do homage to his rival in love and good works. He arrived from Iona with a great train of monks, whom he arrayed in three companies at the moment of their entrance into Glasgow. Kentigern distributed in the same way the numerous monks who surrounded him in his episcopal monastery, and whom he led out to meet the abbot of Iona. He divided them, according to their age, into three bands, the youngest of whom walked first; then those who had reached the age of manhood; and last of all, the old and grey-haired, among whom he himself took his place. They all chanted the anthem, "They shall sing in the ways of the Lord: that great is the glory of the Lord. The path of the just is made: and the way of the saints is prepared." The monks of Iona, on their side, chanted the versicle, "The saints shall go from strength to strength: and unto the God of gods appeareth every one of them in Sion."[48] From every side echoed the Alleluia; and it was to the sound of these words of Holy Scripture that the Apostles of the Picts and Scots met at what had been the extreme boundary of the Roman empire, and limit of the power of the Caesars, and upon a soil henceforth for ever freed from paganism and idolatry. They embraced each other tenderly, and passed several days in intimate and friendly intercourse. The historian, who has preserved for us the account of this interview, does not conceal a less edifying incident. He confesses that some robbers had joined themselves to the following of the abbot of Iona, and that they took advantage of the general enthusiasm to steal a ram from the Bishop's flock. They were soon taken; but Kentigern pardoned them. Columba and his fellow Apostle exchanged their pastoral staves before they parted, in token of mutual affection. The staff of S. Columba, afterwards used by S. Kentigern, was in later times given to S. Wilfred, who placed it in the monastic church he founded at Ripon. I know not how far we may put faith in another narrative of Jocelyn, which has remained Kentigern's most popular title to fame. The wife of King Roderick, led astray by a guilty passion for a knight of her husband's court, had the weakness to bestow on him a ring which had been given to her by the King. When Roderick was out hunting with this knight, the two took refuge on the banks of the Clyde, during the heat of the day, and the knight, falling asleep, unwittingly stretched out his hand, upon which the King saw the ring which he had given to the Queen as a token of his love. It was with difficulty that he restrained himself from killing the knight on the spot; but he subdued his rage, and contented himself by taking the ring from his finger, and throwing it into the river, without awakening the guilty sleeper. When he had returned to the town, he demanded his ring from the Queen, and, as she could not produce it, threw her into prison, and gave orders for her execution. She obtained, however, a delay of three days, and having in vain sought the ring from the knight to whom she had given it, she had recourse to S. Kentigern. He, moved by the remembrance of his mother, through whose sin he had entered the world, and anxious that the unhappy woman should be given time for repentance, prayed to God, and the ring was found in the belly of a salmon caught in the Clyde, and sent by him to the Queen, who showed it to her husband, and thus escaped the punishment which awaited her. On her liberation she hastened to Kentigern, confessed her fault to him, and was exhorted by him to amend her life and do penance for the past. It is for this reason that the ancient effigies of the Apostle of Strathclyde represent him holding the episcopal cross in one hand, and in the other a salmon with a ring in its mouth. S. Kentigern lived to a very advanced age, and his jaws being too weak to masticate his food, his lower jaw was supported by a band of linen tied round his head. He died gently as he was being lifted out of a warm bath, in the year 601. Patron of Glasgow. In art, represented with a fish and a ring. (See above.) B. GOTFRIED OF KAPPENBERG. (A.D. 1127.) [His life by a writer of the same time, a monk of Kappenberg, who, though he did not know Gotfried himself, derived his information from those who knew him well. He is also mentioned, and the principal incidents of his life noticed, in the life of S. Norbert.] Godfrey or Gotfried, Count of Kappenberg,[49] in Westphalia, lived at a period when the nobles of Germany were engaged in constant feuds with one another, falling on each others lands, burning the villages, and carrying off the cattle. It was a period when the poor suffered untold woes. "It is good to live under the crook," they said, meaning that their only place, where they could live in security, was on the lands of the abbeys. One little incident mentioned in the life of Count Gotfried, shews the lawlessness of the times. The Count and the city of Münster not being on good terms, a party of the Kappenbergers made a foray, and swept up all the cattle from the farms in the neighbourhood of Münster, and brought them in triumph to the Count; but he rebuked them saying, "Take all these back again; my quarrel is with the men of the city; it is not seemly that the innocent and helpless farmers should lose their all on account of a contest of the rights of which they know nothing." Gotfried happening to attend, along with his brother Otto, the preaching of S. Norbert, who traversed Westphalia at this time, was converted, and resolved on turning his fortress into a monastery. His wife at first opposed his intention, and his relations used all their influence to dissuade him. But his earnestness moved his wife at last to withdraw her objections, and to consent to his entering the religious life; she, at the same time, also resolved to take the veil. Accordingly, Gotfried and his brother Otto, who was his junior, received the tonsure, and became canons of S. Augustine, under the rule of S. Norbert of Prémontré. Frederick, Count of Arnsberg, the father of Gotfried's wife, was furious. He was a man of great cruelty, in whose dungeons languished many wretches, and who delighted in war. His protests were in vain, the Count of Kappenberg transformed his castle into a monastery, and built two more, at Varlar and Elstadt. So great was the humility of Gotfried, that finding he was continually given his title of Count, even by the brethren, he took upon himself the most disagreeable office in the house, that of scourer of the privies. Frederick, Count of Arnsberg, finding remonstrances in vain, threatened to fall on the county of Kappenberg, and drive the monks out "As for that Norbert!" he exclaimed, "who has come riding on an ass through Westphalia, turning men's heads, let me catch him, and I'll hang him and his ass at the two ends of one rope over a bough, and see which is the heaviest fool of the twain." Gotfried and his brethren sent to Prémontré, to tell their father in religion, that it was impossible for them to remain in Germany, that Count Arnsberg would attack them shortly; and they added the threat uttered against Norbert himself and his ass. "Be of good cheer, I have overcome the world, said Christ," he wrote back to them, "and as for me and my ass, we are coming into Westphalia to be weighed one against the other." Nor was S. Norbert long in coming; he rode upon his ass to the door of Kappenberg; but there was no further danger, Count Frederick of Arnsberg was dead. Before he died, Gotfried visited the cradle of his order, Prémontré, the home of S. Norbert. On his way back, next year, he sickened, and died at Elstadt. B. VERONICA, V. OF MILAN. (A.D. 1497.) [Beatified by Pope Leo X. Her life and revelations were written by Brother Isidore of Isolani, O.S.D., from the account given him by those who had known her well; among others from the notes of Benedetta, and the recital of Thaddaea, two sisters, who had been intimately acquainted with Veronica. This account was printed in 1518, at Milan.] Veronica was the daughter of a pious peasant at Binasco, a small village between Milan and Pavia. Her father was noted for his integrity, and when he sold a horse he always mentioned its defects to the purchaser. Veronica was employed in the fields weeding, as the parents were too poor to send her to the school. Veronica desired earnestly to become a sister in the convent of S. Martha, at Milan, but her mother assured her that it was impossible to join a religious community without a knowledge of letters. Accordingly, every night Veronica laboured, by the light of her little oil lamp, at her alphabet and spelling book; but she made little progress. One night, as she lay with her hands spread out on the table, and her head bowed, disheartened at the difficulty of her task, the Blessed Virgin appeared to her in a robe of dazzling blue, like the summer sky. "My child," said the gentle Mother, "trouble thyself not with this scholarship, the only learning thou needst is comprised in three letters, white, black, and red. This white letter is purity of soul and body; this black letter is simplicity, contentedness with what God sends you, and freedom from taking offence; this red letter is meditation on the passion of my dear Son. Let these three branches of learning be mastered, and all the other letters come of themselves." Veronica, some years later, entered the convent of S. Martha, as a lay sister, and her duties were to beg for the society, as her ignorance of reading and Latin disqualified her from chanting the choir offices with the full sisters. She persevered in the study of those three letters shown her by the Queen of Heaven, and in studying them she advanced far on the way of perfection. She was honoured with wondrous revelations, but her modesty was so great that she sought to conceal them. On the Octave of Corpus Christi, 1487, during mass, she saw in the adorable Sacrament exposed in the Tabernacle, the form of Jesus Christ as a little child surrounded by adoring angels. In her simplicity she asked one of the other sisters if she had seen the Holy Child, and when she answered in the negative, Veronica flushed red, and said no more. It was a great disappointment to her that she was unable to sing the choir offices, and she made it a special object of prayer that her understanding might be enlightened, so that she might join the others in their psalmody. Then an angel descended to her cell, and he held in his hand the psalter, and opening it before her, bade her read, and all her difficulty passed away, and she chanted the psalms of David, with the antiphons and responses, alternately with the Angel of God. One night, when she had been very ill, and deprived of the privilege of communion, she rose from her sick bed, drawn by an irresistible impulse to the church. It was full of light; she cast herself at the altar steps, before the adorable Sacrament, and Jesus in a cloud of glory communicated her Himself. She lay three years in a lingering illness, all which time she would never be exempted from any of the duty of the house, or make use of the least indulgence, though she was given leave; her answer always was, "I must work whilst I can, whilst I have time." Sister Thaddaea informed the writer of her life, that on Whitsun-Monday, 1496, she went to the cell of Veronica, who was ill, at the hour of nones, and was astonished to see a bright light streaming from the chinks in the door. Looking in through a hole, she saw Veronica, in dazzling light, chanting nones. Veronica died in the year 1497. [Illustration: Seal of Robert Wishart, Bp. of Glasgow, 1272-1316. See life of S. Kentigern, p. 193.] FOOTNOTES: [44] Lib. I., c. 3, 4. [45] By David Camerarius, Hector Boece, and Condeus. [46] From Ken-tiern, chief lord. [47] Adamnan i. 15. [48] In viis Domini magna est gloria Domini, et via justorum facta est: et iter sanctorum praeparatum est. Ibunt sancti de virtute in virtutem: videbitur Deus corum in Sion. [49] Near Lunen, on the river Lippe. January 14. S. PONTIAN, _M., at Spoleto, 2nd cent._ S. FELIX, _P. C., at Nola, 3rd cent._ S. MACRINA, _at Neocaesarea, 4th cent._ SS. THEODULUS, PAUL, PROCLUS, HYPATIUS, ISAAC, AND OTHERS, _Monks, MM., at Sinai, 5th cent._ S. DATIUS, _Abp. of Milan_, A.D. 552. S. FULGENTIUS, _B. of Carthagina_, A.D. 619. B. ENGELMAR, _H. M. in Bavaria, beginning of 12th cent._ B. SABBAS, _Abp. of Servia, 13th cent._ B. ORDORICO, _Friar at Udine, in Italy_, A.D. 1331. For S. HILARY, see JAN. 13. S. FELIX, P. C., AT NOLA. (3RD CENT.) [On this day are commemorated two priests, Confessors, of Nola, of the same name, Felix. This has led to almost inextricable confusion among Martyrologists. There is another, a martyr, of this name. The life of S. Felix is given by S. Gregory of Tours, De Glor. Martyr, lib. i. c. 104, and by the Venerable Bede. The miracles wrought by him have also been recorded by S. Paulinus of Nola.] Saint Felix was a native of Nola, in Campania, where his father, Hermias, who was by birth a Syrian, and had served in the army, had purchased an estate and settled. He had two sons, Felix and Hermias, to whom, at his death, he left his property. The younger, loving the things of Caesar rather than the things of God, says Bede, served in the army, but Felix, more _happy_--as his name implies--enrolled himself as a soldier of Jesus Christ. Having passed the grades of lector and exorcist, he was finally ordained priest by Maximus, Bishop of Nola. Persecution having broken out, the aged Bishop, mindful of the injunction, "When they persecute you in one city flee to another" (Matt. x. 23), escaped to the hills, and left his flock to the charge of Felix, whom he designated as his successor. The persecutors, not finding the Bishop, seized on Felix, and cast him, heavily ironed, into a dungeon strewn with broken crockery, into which no ray of light entered. In the meantime, Maximus was perishing with cold and hunger in the mountains, hardships which his great age made him unable to endure. One night an angel appeared to Felix, and bade him go forth out of prison and succour the aged Bishop. Then his chains fell off his neck, and hands, and feet, and the doors opened to him of their own accord, and guided by the angel, he was brought to the hiding place of Maximus, whom he found prostrate and speechless, and apparently dying. He moistened the old man's lips with wine, and forced some food into his mouth, and chafed his frozen limbs. By slow degrees the Bishop was restored, and then laying him upon his shoulders, Felix carried him home before daybreak, where a pious old woman took care of him. Felix, with the blessing of his pastor, repaired secretly to his own lodgings, and there kept himself concealed, praying for the Church without ceasing, till peace was restored to it by the death of the Emperor Decius in 251. Persecution breaking forth again, the sergeants were sent in quest of Felix. Meeting him in the street, and not recognizing him, they stopped him and asked if he had met Felix on the way. "No," he answered; "I have not met him." They went on, but something arousing their suspicion, they had not gone far before they turned and hastened back. Felix had, in the meantime, crept through a small hole in some old broken walls. The officers came to the place, but seeing a spider's web covering the hole, they did not search the place, thinking that Felix could not have passed that way. But this was the Lord's doing. He had sent the little spider to drop his lines and lace them together, with the utmost rapidity, over the place through which His servant had escaped. Felix, finding among the ruins, between two houses, an old well half dug, hid himself in it for six months; and received during that time wherewithal to subsist from a devout Christian woman. Peace having been restored to the Church, the Saint quitted his retreat, and was received in the city as an angel from heaven. Soon after, S. Maximus dying, Felix was unanimously elected Bishop; but he persuaded the people to make choice of Quintus, because he was the senior priest, having been ordained seven days before him. His property having been confiscated in the persecution, S. Felix rented a little spot of barren land, not exceeding three acres, which he tilled with his own hands, and was able by his industry to support himself, and give something in alms to the poor. He died at a good old age, on Jan. 14th, on which day the Martyrology, under the name of S. Jerome, and all others of later date mention him. Patron of Nola, in conjunction with other Saints. Relics, in the Cathedral at Nola. In art, he is represented (1), with an angel striking off his chains; (2), with a bunch of grapes, wherewith he fed S. Maximus; (3), bearing S. Maximus on his shoulders, or in his arms; (4), with a spider. S. MACRINA THE ELDER, C., AT NEOCAESAREA. (4TH CENT.) [Spoken of by S. Gregory Nyssen, her grandson, in his life of his sister Macrina. S. Gregory Nazianzen gives a fuller account in his life of her grandson, S. Basil the Great.] In the persecution of Galerius, A.D. 304, S. Macrina and her husband were obliged to hide till the tyranny was overpast, in a wooded mountain in Pontus, for seven years, suffering severely from cold and from insufficiency of food. They were, however, able to catch and kill wild deer. SS. THEODULUS, P. PAUL, PROCLUS, HYPATIUS, ISAAC, AND OTHERS, MONKS AND MM. AT SINAI. (5TH CENT.) [Roman Martyrology. German Martyrology on the 13th Jan. The account of the martyrdom of these monks was written by S. Nilus himself, an eye-witness of their passion, and father of Theodulus, one of the sufferers, though not the martyr of the same name.] "O my friends," says S. Nilus, in his account of the tragedy commemorated this day;[50] "I, wretched man that I am, had two sons, one of whom I had to lament, the other remained with his mother. After I had become the father of these two, my wife and I separated. A vehement craving after solitude and rest drew me into the desert; I could think and look to nothing else. When the desire of anything has engrossed the mind, it draws it violently from all things else, even from good works, and strains towards that which it desires, heeding no impediments and toils. When, then, I was thus impelled to go forth, I took my two sons--they were quite little fellows then--and I led them to their mother, and I gave one to her, and kept the other with me, and I told her my design, and begged her not to oppose it. She did not resist me, seeing my earnestness, yielding rather to necessity than consenting spontaneously. But know, all of you, that the separation of those who have been united in legitimate marriage, and have become one body, by Him who in His secret council has joined them, is no light matter. It is like hacking through a living body with a sword." Nilus, having escaped with his little son Theodulus into the deserts of Sinai, took up his abode with the monks, and served God in the solitude and rest he had so much desired, "Among these," continues Nilus, "Caesar's money does not circulate, for they neither buy nor sell. Each is ready to give freely to the other whatever he wants. Olives and dates, and rarely bread, is all they have to give, but they become tokens of charity, and sufficiently evidence liberality of intention. There is no envy among them, and he who abounds less in good works does not feel jealous of him who abounds more. Their cells are not close together, but at some little distance from one another, not because of want of love, but that they may mould themselves to the pattern God has set before them in all quiet and silence. On the Lord's Day they all assemble in one church, and meet accordingly once a week; lest, on the other hand, total isolation should break the bonds of concord and make them forgetful of the offices due to one another, and their manners become savage and uncouth. After having all participated of the Divine Mysteries, they accordingly meet to converse. But why should I relate more of their ways? All at once a storm came on, a cloud of barbarians burst upon the settlement, early one morning, when the hymns had just ceased. I was there then with my son. I was descending the holy mountain to visit the Saints who inhabited the bush, as I was wont to do often, when I heard the noise of shouts and cries, and like yelping of dogs, the barbarians carried off all the Saints had prepared for their winter provision. They dragged them out of the church and stripped them, and made a circle round them with drawn swords, and eyes filled with fury, ready to kill them. Then, first they bade the priest stretch out his neck, and he, without a cry, though they cut him on the back with their blades, signed himself and whispered, 'Blessed be the Lord!' One blow cut him from the back-bone to the jaw, and cut through his ear; the next blow was from his shoulder to his cheek. So the holy man sank down modestly. The previous evening that admirable man at supper had said, 'How do we know whether we shall all live to meet again at table?' After that they killed him who lived with the old priest, and then the boy who served them." Then the Arabs, brandishing their bloody weapons, rushed after the monks, who scattered in all directions, some escaping down the valley, and some, Nilus included, flying up the all but inaccessible rocks of Sinai, whither the Arabs did not trouble themselves to pursue them. Nilus escaped reluctantly, for his boy was in the hands of the barbarians. "I stood bewildered," he says "not knowing what to do, and bound to the child by my bowels of love, and unable to fly till the boy made signs to me with his eyes to escape; but I could hardly persuade myself to do so. My feet went forward and dragged my body along, I hardly knew how, for my heart would not leave him, and I turned my face ever and anon to look at the boy. Thus I reached the mountain, following the others, and saw my poor boy carried away, unable to look about him as he would, but furtively casting glances towards where I was. Such is the tie of nature, that separation of bodies does not break it, but it is cruelly wrenched. The cow which is led away lows piteously and often, always turning its head towards the dear calf, and by its eyes proving the intensity of its grief. And I, when I had reached, I know not how, the mountain top, with my mind one way and my body elsewhere, I tried still to see my son, but I could not, the distance was too great. Then I burst into prayer to God, weeping for my captive son and the murdered saints." "After the barbarians had killed many others, they went their way; and as day declined we were able, without fear, to descend and bury the bodies. We found some quite dead, but Theodulus, the priest, was still breathing and able to speak. Therefore we, sitting down there, passed the night there, weeping, at the old man's request." The dying priest bade them be of good cheer, reminding them that Job was robbed of his substance and his children, and was grievously plagued in his body, yet, trusting in God, he was given in the end more than he had lost. Then, kissing the survivors, he breathed forth his holy soul. S. Theodulus and these martyrs fell on Jan. 14th; but other sufferers who were put to death by this horde of barbarians are commemorated with them. S. Nilus gives an account of the sufferings of several of these, whom the Arabs hunted from the rocks, wherever there was a spring of water and a patch of herbage. Nilus, having obtained money, went into the desert in quest of the Arabs, in company with an armed embassy, to their chief or king, that he might ransom his son. "Having gone eight days, we were hard pressed for want of water; but those who knew the locality said that there was a spring somewhere near. So the party ran here and there in their eagerness to find and enjoy it; and I went along too, but on account of my age was not able to travel as fast as they, and could not run without loss of dignity. Now the well was really behind them, hidden behind a little hill, so that they kept rushing further from it, and I, ascending the mound, lighted suddenly upon it, for it lay on the other side, and there I saw a number of Arabs gathered round it. When I thus fell into the hands of the enemy, I cannot say whether I was glad or sorry, for I was between the two conditions of mind, being fearful for my personal safety, but very anxious to see my son, whom I hoped to deliver out of captivity, or at least to share captivity with him. Those who had accompanied me escaped, throwing themselves down, and creeping away behind the hill; but the barbarians, shouting, surrounded me, and dragged me violently about, but I looked about with great desire, hoping among them to catch a sight of my boy. "Suddenly, some of our party, armed, appeared on the horizon, and the barbarians, in great alarm, fled away, and in a moment the spot where they had swarmed was bare and lifeless. "Next day we continued our course, and so for four days did we persevere, till we reached the camp; and when it was announced that there were ambassadors come to the King, we were brought before Haman, the chief of the barbarians. Who, when we had presented gifts, gave us a gracious reception, and lodged us near him, till he could make perquisition for the offenders. My heart beat violently, and I waited the result in an agony of suspense. Every sound seemed to me to speak of him whom I sought so anxiously; my ears were ever on the alert, and my mind on the stretch for the tidings, that I might be certified whether my son lived or was dead. Ever before my eyes I saw his image, sometimes I saw him killed in one way, sometimes in another, and I fancied I heard his weeping voice calling me. O wretched boy! art thou alive or art thou dead? If thou hast escaped death, what miserable bondage is thine? If thou hast died, where is thine unburied corpse? "At last the messengers returned, and by their faces I read the sad news. 'You need not speak,' I said, 'I see in your countenances that I have no hope.' But they assured me that Theodulus, my little fellow, was not dead, but was sold to some one or other in the city Eleusa. Then I resolved to go there in quest of him. But I had no rest in mind, for I thought, Well, if he lives, he is lost to me, for he serves as a slave; he cannot follow his free will, but is for ever subject to the caprice of a master. "As we were on our way to Eleusa, a young man, driving some laden animals, met us. He had already seen me in the camp, and he knew all about my affair. He, being in Eleusa, made inquiries, and learned that my son had been brought there by the barbarians, and had been sold. Seeing me coming, he advanced last and smiling towards me, and when we were within speaking distance, he shouted cheerily to me, and stretching forth his right hand, he turned it behind him over his shoulder, and pulled out a letter from his quiver, which he gave to me, telling me that my boy was alive, and bade me be of good cheer, and not to be out of heart because he was a slave, for he had been bought by a Christian priest. "Then I, being without money or home, and unable thus to reward the fellow, blessed him with many tears, and prayed that he might be abundantly rewarded by God for the joy he gave me, I being unable to offer him anything. "But I, as soon as I reached the city, went first of all to the church, as to the source of all good, and I gave honour there to God, watering the pavement with my tears, and filling the sacred building with the sound of my sobs. Thence I was guided to the house where my son was, sending first of all before me messengers to break the news of my coming. All knew me, by the report which had preceded me, to be the father of the boy who had been sold there, and there was not a person all along the street who did not express joy, in countenance, and running out of their houses with glad faces, seemed as though each rejoiced with me over a lost son re-found. "Now when we came to the door of the house, he was called out and told that I was there, and they brought him to salute me. And when we saw one another, we did not rejoice, nor exclaim at first, but both cried till our tears dribbled over our breasts. He ran to me, but scarcely knew me, I was so ragged in dress, and my hair uncombed. Believing what others said rather than knowing me, he came with arms outspread and clasped me round with bursting heart. But _I_ knew _him_ when he was a long way off, though there were numbers of others there, for it was just the same face, stamped by constant remembrance on my mind; and unable to contain my joy, my strength suddenly failed me, and I fell down. Then the people, seeing me with open mouth on the ground, thought me dead. There was great outcry, but when my son had clasped me in his arms, my spirit came back, and I knew where I was, and who I was, whom I saw before me with mine eyes. Then I hugged him and he hugged me, never satisfying our great desire. However, at last, when more composed, I blamed myself to him as the cause of all these misfortunes, because I had taken him away from his home to a wild place which was full of danger, and it was so, as I said." Then Theodulus told his father all his adventures with the Arabs. "Father," said he, "on the night after we were taken, the barbarians had prepared everything for a sacrifice, altar, sword, incense, and the like, and we thought we were sure to be killed and offered up on the morrow. Then my fellow captive, in the night, ran away and escaped, but I was afraid to do so, not knowing whither to go in the desert, but I prayed to God till I fell asleep. And, waking early in the morning when dawn broke on the horizon, I knelt with my hands on my knees, and my face bowed upon them, wetting my bosom with my tears, and again with my whole heart I cried out to Him who alone could deliver me, 'Thou, Lord, alone hast power over life and death, Thou hast shown wonders of old and hast delivered Thy servants out of peril. Thou didst save Isaac, lying on the altar, and Joseph from the hands of his brethren. Save me, too, for Thy great Name's sake.' "Then, presently, the Arabs awoke, and making a great noise because my companion was gone, asked me where he was; but when I said that I did not know, because I had not run away, they were not angry. Then my mind became calm, and I blessed God. After that they consulted, and brought me to the city to sell me. They stripped me naked, and put a sword round my neck, to show that if I was not bought they would kill me. Then I was exposed for sale, and I stretched out my hands suppliantly to the purchasers to save me from death, promising my glad service if they would redeem my blood. Then after a while he came by and bought me, even the Bishop of this place." Now the Bishop had bought the boy out of charity, and he at once surrendered him to his father, regarding nothing the price he had paid for him, and he, moreover, furnished them with food for their long journey home; and before he dismissed them, feeling confident of their vocation, he ordained together to the priesthood both father and son. S. DATIUS, ABP. C., OF MILAN. (A.D. 552.) [Roman and other Latin Martyrologies. Datius, Dacius, or Dasius, is spoken of by Procopius Cassidorus, whose letter to S. Datius is extant, and by S. Gregory the Great, who relates the incident of his reduction of the evil spirits to silence, narrated in the text, in his Dialogues, lib. iii., c. 4.] S. Datius ruled the see of Milan in a stormy time, when Italy was over-run with the Goths. When Milan was threatened, S. Datius implored Belisarius to come to its protection, or send troops to defend the city. Belisarius was then at Rome, and S. Datius made the journey to Rome, on purpose to urge upon him, in person, the protection of the city. Belisarius, though hard pressed through the deficiency of supplies afforded him by the Emperor Justinian, detached a body of men to the defence of the Milanese, and for a time Milan was thought to be safe. Soon, however, a large army of Goths and Burgundians swooped down upon it and besieged it. Belisarius, seeing the danger to which the city was exposed, sent troops under his generals, Martin and Uliaris, to the succour. But they, through timidity, did not venture to attack the Goths. In the city famine prevailed to such an extent, that as S. Datius relates in his Annals, an unfortunate mother roasted and ate her infant, that being the first morsel she had eaten since her confinement. The city was surrendered, but the terms of surrender were not kept. It was given up to plunder, and the streets ran with the blood of the butchered citizens. What became of the Archbishop is not known; some assert that he was taken captive to Ravenna, but was liberated at the intercession of his friend Cassiodorus. The Arian King, Totila, drove S. Datius from his see, and he escaped to Constantinople. On his way occurred that incident recorded by S. Gregory the Great, by which he is chiefly known. Arriving at Corinth, and looking about for a large house, which would lodge him and his companions, he saw a mansion, which seemed exactly suited to his purpose, and was apparently unoccupied. Having instituted inquiries, he was told that the house was haunted, and that it was impossible for any man to spend the night in it. "Ghost and devil will not scare a servant of God!" said S. Datius, and he ordered beds to be made in the haunted house. He said his prayers as usual, and then retired to rest. About midnight he was aroused by a hideous rout, like the braying of asses, the grunting of swine, the squeaking of rats, and the hissing of serpents. Then Datius, raising himself in bed, shouted, "Oh, Satan! thou who saidst in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will be like the most High! (Isa. xiv. 13, 14.) Well done, I say, Satan. Thou, who wouldst be like God, art reduced to bray like a jackass, and grunt like a hog." Instantly there was dead silence, and S. Datius was no more troubled with unearthly noises. B. ORDORICO, O.S.F. (A.D. 1331.) [His life, by several writers on the Franciscan Saints. His travels were dictated by him to Friar Guglielmo, who wrote them down, and added an account of his death. No copy of his original Latin MS. exists, and the Italian and Latin copies we have vary so much from one another that it is difficult to know which is the most correct. Copyists, not considering the things related in his travels as sufficiently marvellous, have supplied by their fancy what Ordorico never dictated. Although no copy of the original MS. exists, we can trace the progress of amplification and error by comparing the oldest and best account of the travels extant, with some of the later narratives of Friar Ordorico's life and adventure.] Among the early travellers in the East a conspicuous place is due to Friar Ordorico de Pordenone, commonly called Il Beato, the Blessed. He was born in the district of Pordenone, in the Friuli, about the year 1286. Early in life he entered the Order of Friars Minors, or Franciscans, and took the vows in their house at Udine. After many years of exemplary life and industry he girded up his loins for the perilous pilgrimage and great mission--that is, he proceeded to the remote countries of the East to convert the infidel and idolater. He is believed to have been absent from Italy for the long space of sixteen years. He took with him his monastic habit, his cord, and his pilgrim's staff, and apparently no other thing. Where there were Christians, he claimed their charity; and where there were none, he threw himself upon the hospitality of the unbelievers. Friar Ordorico went from the Adriatic Sea to Constantinople, and proceeding from that great city to the Black Sea, he landed at Trebizond. From Trebizond he travelled through Armenia and Persia, and came to Ormuz on the Persian Gulf. At Ur of the Chaldees, he was shocked to find that the men did the knitting and spinning; and he was surprised that they liked a head of venison more than four fat partridges. At Bagdad, says he, the men are handsome and the women ugly; the women carry loads and the men saunter about in idleness. But this, alas! is not confined to Bagdad. At the port of Balsora he embarked, and crossing the Indian Ocean, he reached the coasts of Malabar. There, says he, he much surprised, the people prefer dates to venison. Thence he turned round upon Ceylon. He landed in that magnificent island, and travelled through the greater part of it. He describes the quantities of elephants which are found in the interior of that country; the blood-sucking land-leeches, so well-known to the Indians, which render the passage through the jungle so painful to Europeans; he correctly describes the general qualities of that remarkable tree, the talipot, which flourishes in the island of Ceylon, and in the contiguous Malabar country. He mentions Adam's Peak, and the lake at its side, which the natives told him was formed of the tears of Adam and Eve after their fall. "But," adds the friar, "I perceived this to be false, for I saw the water flowing from the mountain into the lake, and filling it." He adds that on the sides of the lake rubies are discovered. His account of the pearl fishery is without exaggeration. In the neighbouring continent some of the Brahminical superstitions are correctly set down. The excessive cruelty and indisputable cannibalism of the Andaman Islanders, who are called natives of Bodan, are accurately noted. So shocked was the friar with what he saw there, that he remained there some while preaching, but he admits with no success. Then he voyaged to Meliapore. After this he ran down the Indian Ocean to Sumatra and Java, whence he appears to have reached some of the islands of Japan, which he calls Zapan. He next entered the empire of China, and there he remained several years. He travelled through various of the vast provinces of China, and then turned West, and after long and dangerous wayfaring, he entered the country of Thibet. In company with three other friars, he was one day resting with them under a tree, when the Khan passed by. Then one of the friars, who was a bishop, put on his pontifical vestments, and took his pastoral cross, and all four advanced to meet the Khan chanting the _Veni Creator_. Then the Khan stopped his car, and asked who these were, and when told that they were four Frank missionaries, he called them to him, and kissed the cross of the bishop. Then, because it is the custom of the country not to approach the king empty-handed, the friars offered him a plate with some apples on it. The Khan took two, ate one, and drove away tossing the other about in his hands. From his kissing the cross the friars were satisfied that he knew something of the Catholic faith. The account left of these travels breaks off abruptly in Thibet, leaving us entirely in the dark as to the route and the manner by which the friar reached Europe. It is known, however, from a postscript to his book, that he returned in 1330, when he was forty-four years old. His health appears to have been much broken by the fatigues and privations he had undergone during his peregrinations; and he died within a few months after his return to his native country.[51] [Illustration: Hermit Saints. S. Anthony.] FOOTNOTES: [50] The narrative of S. Nilus is necessarily much condensed. I regret having to do this, as it is most touching in its entirety. [51] A much fuller account of the travels of B. Ordorico than I am able to give here may be read in MacFarlane's "Romance of Travel," II. c. 1. The most correct version of these travels is that given by Bollandus, Jan. T. 1, pp. 920-986, which MacFarlane does not seem to have seen. January 15. S. EPHYSIUS, _M., at Cagliari_. S. PAUL, _the First Hermit in Egypt_, A.D. 341. S. MACARIUS OF EGYPT, _P. and Ab., in Scété_, A.D. 391. S. ISIDORE, _P. and Monk, at Alexandria_, A.D. 404. S. ALEXANDER ACOEMETUS, _at Constantinople, circ._ A.D. 430. S. JOHN THE CALYBITE, _5th cent_. S. MAURUS, _Ab. of Glanfeuil, in France_, A.D. 584. S. YTHA, _V., in Ireland, 6th cent._ S. BONITUS, OR BON, _B. of Claremont, beginning of 8th cent._ S. EMBERT, _B. of Cambrai, beginning of 8th cent._ S. CEOLWULF, _K. and Monk, in England, 8th cent._ S. PAUL, THE FIRST HERMIT IN EGYPT. (A.D. 341.) [S. Paul died on Jan. 10th, on which day he is commemorated in most ancient Martyrologies, as the Roman, that of Cologne, Bede, &c. But both Greeks and Latins have transferred his feast to Jan. 15th, so as not to interfere with the celebration of the Octave of the Epiphany. The York Breviary and those of Paul III., and of the Dominican Order, commemorate him on the 29th Jan. His life, written by S. Jerome, is perfectly authentic. The following is a translation, much abridged, from the original.] Under the persecuting Emperors Decius and Valerius, at the time that Cornelius was Bishop at Rome, and Cyprian, Bishop at Carthage, were condemned to shed their blessed blood, a cruel tempest swept over the Churches in Egypt and the Thebaid. "In those days, in the Lower Thebaid, was Paul, to whom had been left a rich inheritance, at the death of both his parents, with a sister already married. He was then about fifteen years old, well taught in Greek and Egyptian literature, gentle tempered, and loving God much. When the storm of persecution burst, he withdrew into a distant city. But his sister's husband purposed to betray him, notwithstanding the tears of his wife; however, the boy discovered it, and fled into the desert hills. Once there, necessity became a pleasure, and going on, and then stopping awhile, he reached at last a stony cliff, at the foot of which was a great cave; its mouth closed with a stone. Having rolled this away, and exploring more greedily, he saw within a great vault open to the sky above, but shaded by the spreading boughs of an ancient date-palm; and in it a clear spring, the rill of which, flowing a short space forth, was sucked up again by the soil. "There were, besides, not a few dwellings in that cavernous mountain, in which he saw rusty anvils and hammers, with which coin that had been stamped of old. For this place was an old workshop for base coin. "Therefore, in this beloved dwelling, offered him as it were by God, he spent all his life in prayer and solitude, while the palm-tree gave him food and clothes. "When the blessed Paul had been leading the heavenly life on earth for 113 years, and Antony, ninety years old, was dwelling in another solitude, this thought (so Antony was wont to assert) entered his mind--that no monk more perfect than himself had settled in the desert. But as he lay still by night, it was revealed to him that there was another monk far better than he, to visit whom he must set out. So when the light broke, the venerable old man, supporting his weak limbs on a staff, began to go he knew not whither. And now the mid-day, with the sun roasting above, grew fierce; and yet he was not turned from the journey he had begun, for he said 'I trust in my God, that he will show His servant that which He has promised.' Antony went on through that region, seeing only the tracks of wild beasts, and the wide waste of the desert. What he should do, or whither turn, he knew not. A second day had now run by. [Illustration: HERMIT SAINT. From a Drawing by A. Welby Pugin. Jan. 15.] One thing remained, to be confident that he could not be deserted by Christ. All night through he spent a second darkness in prayer, and while the light was still dim, he saw afar a she-wolf, panting with heat and thirst, creeping in at the foot of the mountain. Following her with his eyes, and drawing nigh to the cave when the beast was gone, he began to look in: but in vain; for the darkness stopped his view. However, as the Scripture saith, perfect love casteth out fear; with gentle step and bated breath the cunning explorer entered, and going forward slowly, and stopping often, watched for a sound. At length he saw afar off a light through the horror of the darkness; then he hastened on more greedily, struck his foot against a stone, and made a noise, at which the blessed Paul shut and barred his door, which had stood open. "Then Antony, casting himself down before the entrance, prayed there till the sixth hour, and more, to be let in, saying, 'Who I am, and whence, and why I am come, thou knowest I know that I deserve not to see thy face; yet, unless I see thee, I will not return. Thou who receivest beasts, why repellest thou a man? I have sought, and I have found. I knock that it may be opened to me: which if I win not, here will I die before thy gate. Surely thou shalt at least bury my corpse.' "'No one begs thus to threaten. No one does injury with tears. And dost thou wonder why I do not let thee in, seeing thou art a mortal guest?' Thus spake Paul, and then smiling, he opened the door. They mutually embraced and saluted each other by name, and committed themselves in common to the grace of God. And after the holy kiss, Paul, sitting down with Antony, thus began-- "'Behold him whom thou hast sought with such labour; with limbs decayed by age, and covered with unkempt white hair. Behold, thou seest but a mortal, soon to become dust. But, because charity bears all things, tell me, I pray thee, how fares the human race? whether new houses are rising in the ancient cities? by what emperor is the world governed? whether there are any left who are led captive by the deceits of the devil?' As they spoke thus, they saw a raven settle on a bough; who, flying gently down, laid, to their wonder, a whole loaf before them. When he was gone, 'Ah,' said Paul, 'the Lord truly loving, truly merciful, hath sent us a meal. For sixty years past I have received daily half a loaf, but, at thy coming, Christ hath doubled his soldiers' allowance.' Then, having thanked God, they sat down on the brink of the glassy spring. "But here a contention arising as to which of them should break the loaf, occupied the day till well-nigh evening. Paul insisted, as the host; Antony declined, as the younger man. At last it was agreed that they should take hold of the loaf at opposite ends, and each pull towards himself, and keep what was left in his hand. Next they stooped down, and drank a little water from the spring; then, offering to God the sacrifice of praise, they passed the night watching. "And when day dawned again, the blessed Paul said to Antony, 'I knew long since, brother, that thou wert dwelling in these lands; long since God had promised thee to me as a fellow-servant: but because the time of my falling asleep is now come, and (because I always longed to depart, and to be with Christ) there is laid up for me, when I have finished my course, a crown of righteousness; therefore thou art sent from the Lord to cover my corpse with mould, and give back dust to dust.' "Antony, hearing this, prayed him with tears and groans not to desert him, but take him as his companion on such a journey. But he said, 'Thou must not seek the things which are thine own, but the things of others. It is expedient for thee, indeed, to cast off the burden of the flesh, and to follow the Lamb: but it is expedient for the rest of the brethren that they should be still trained by thine example. Wherefore go, unless it displeases thee, and bring the cloak which Athanasius the bishop gave thee, to wrap up my corpse.' But this the blessed Paul asked, not because he cared greatly whether his body decayed covered or bare (for he had long been used to clothe himself with woven palm leaves), but that Antony's grief at his death might be lightened when he left him. Antony astounded that he had heard of Athanasius and his own cloak, dared answer nothing: but keeping in silence, and kissing his eyes and hands, returned to the monastery. Tired and breathless, he arrived at home. There two disciples met him, who had been long sent to minister to him, and asked him, 'Where hast thou tarried so long, father?' He answered, 'Woe to me a sinner, who falsely bear the name of a monk. I have seen Elias; I have seen John in the desert; I have truly seen Paul in Paradise;' and so, closing his lips, and beating his breast, he took the cloak from his cell, and when his disciples asked him to explain more fully what had befallen, he said, 'There is a time to be silent, and a time to speak.' Then going out, and not taking even a morsel of food, he returned by the way he had come. For he feared--what actually happened--lest Paul in his absence should render up his soul to Christ. "And when the second day had shone, and he had retraced his steps for three hours, he saw amid hosts of angels, amid the choirs of prophets and apostles, Paul shining white as snow, ascending up on high. The blessed Antony used to tell afterwards, how he ran the rest of the way so swiftly, that he seemed to fly like a bird. Nor without cause. For entering the cave he saw Paul on bended knees, erect with hands spread out on high,--a lifeless corpse. And at first, thinking that it still lived, he prayed in like wise. But when he heard no sighs come from the worshipper's breast, he gave him a tearful kiss, understanding how the very corpse of the Saint was praying to that God to whom all live. "So, having wrapped up and carried forth the corpse, and chanting hymns, Antony grew sad, because he had no spade, wherewith to dig the ground; and thinking over many plans in his mind, said, 'If I go back to the monastery, it is a three days' journey. If I stay here, I shall be of no more use. I will die, then, as it is fit; and, falling beside thy warrior, O Christ! breathe my last breath.' "As he was thinking thus to himself, two lions came running from the inner part of the desert, their manes tossing on their necks. Seeing these, he shuddered at first: but then, turning his mind to God, he remained without fear. They came straight to the corpse of the blessed old man, and crouched at his feet, wagging their tails, and roaring with mighty growls, so that Antony understood them to lament, as best they could. Then they began to claw the ground with their paws, and, carrying out the sand eagerly, dug a place large enough to hold a man: then at once, as if begging a reward for their work, they came to Antony, drooping their necks, and licking his hands and feet. But he perceived that they prayed a blessing from him; and at once, bursting into praise of Christ, because even dumb animals felt that He was God, he said, 'Lord, without whose word not a leaf of the tree drops, nor one sparrow falls to the ground, give to them as thou knowest how to give.' And, signing to them with his hand, he bade them go. "And when they had departed, he bent his aged shoulders to the weight of the holy corpse; and laying it in the grave, heaped earth on it, and raised a mound as is the wont. And when another dawn shone, lest the pious heir should not possess aught of the goods of the intestate dead, he kept for himself the tunic which Paul had woven out of the leaves of the palm; and returning to the monastery, told his disciples all throughout; and, on the solemn days of Easter and Pentecost, he always clothed himself in Paul's tunic." S. MACARIUS OF EGYPT, AB. (A.D. 391.) [Not to be confounded with S. Macarius of Alexandria (Jan. 2nd). This Macarius is commemorated by the Greeks on Jan. 19th; by the Roman later Martyrology on Jan. 15th, but in earlier ones on the same day as the other Macarius, Jan. 2nd. Authorities for his life are Palladius, in his History Lausiaca, a thoroughly trustworthy contemporary, Ruffinus, Sozomen, Socrates, Cassian, &c.] S. Macarius the Elder was born in Upper Egypt, about the year 300, and was brought up in the country to attend cattle. In his childhood, in company with some others, he stole some figs and ate one of them; but from his conversion to his death, he never ceased bewailing this offence. By a powerful call of divine grace, he was led to desert the world in his youth, and to take up his abode in a little cell made of mats. A wicked woman falsely accused him of having deflowered her; for which supposed crime he was dragged through the streets, beaten and insulted, as a base hypocrite under the garb of a monk. He suffered all with patience, and sent the woman what he earned by his work, saying to himself, "Well, Macarius, having now another to provide for, you must work all the harder." But the woman, in the anguish of her travail, confessed that she had maligned him, and told the real name of her seducer. Then the people regarded him as a Saint, whom lately they would have slain. To shun the esteem of men he fled into the desert of Scété, being then about thirty years of age. In this solitude he lived sixty years, and became the spiritual father of innumerable holy persons, who put themselves under his direction, and were governed by the rules he prescribed them; but all dwelt in separate hermitages. S. Macarius admitted only one disciple with him to entertain strangers. He was compelled by an Egyptian bishop to receive the order of priesthood, about the year 340, the fortieth of his age, that he might celebrate the Divine Mysteries for the convenience of his holy colony. When the desert became better peopled, there were four churches built in it, served by as many priests. The austerities of S. Macarius were very severe. He usually ate but once a week. Evagrius, his disciple, once asked him leave to drink a little water, under a parching thirst: but Macarius bade him be satisfied with reposing a little in the shade, saying, "For these twenty years I have never eaten, drunk, nor slept as much as nature demanded." To deny his own will, he did not refuse to drink a little wine, when others desired him; but he would punish himself for this indulgence by abstaining two or three days from all manner of drink; and it was for this reason that his disciples desired strangers never to tender him a drop of wine. He delivered his instructions in few words, and principally inculcated silence, humility, mortification and continual prayer, to all sorts of people. He used to say, "In prayer you need not use many or grand words. You can always repeat, Lord, show me mercy as Thou knowest best; or, Assist me, O Lord!" His mildness and patience were invincible, and occasioned the conversion of a heathen priest. A young man applying to S. Macarius for spiritual advice, he directed him to go to a burying place and upbraid the dead; and after that to go and flatter them. "Well," said Macarius, when the young man returned, "How did the dead receive thy abuse of them." "They answered not a word," he replied. "And how did they behave when flattered?" "They took no notice of that either." "Go," said Macarius, "and do thou likewise." A monk complained to Macarius that he could fast in the monastery, but not in solitude. "Ah!" said the abbot, "thou likest to have people see that thou art fasting. Beware of vainglory." God revealed to Macarius that two women in the nearest city excelled him in virtue, in spite of all his fasting, and tears, and prayer. He took his staff, and left the desert, and went in quest of them, and lo! they were two homely married women, of whom no one talked, but who were extremely careful not to say spiteful things of their neighbours, who had not the smallest idea that they were saints, and who laboured night and day to make home pleasant to their husbands and children. Lucius, the Arian usurper of the see of Alexandria, who had expelled Peter, the successor of S. Athanasius, in 376, sent troops into the deserts, to disperse the zealous monks, several of whom sealed their faith with their blood. The chiefs, the two Macarii, Isidore, Pambo, and others, were banished, by the authority of the Emperor Valens, to a little isle of Egypt, in the midst of stagnant marshes. The inhabitants, who were pagans, were all converted to the faith by these confessors. The public indignation obliged Lucius to suffer them to return to their cells. The Church of God flashes forth some peculiar type of sanctity at one time, and then another. It is like a rain-drop in the sun, blazing now crimson, now green, now yellow, now blue. As there is need, God calls up an army of Saints, exactly adapted to meet the difficulties of the times, to uphold the truth, and form, as it were, a prop to stay up his tottering Church. Now it is the martyrs, who by their constancy conquer the infidels, now it is these hermits of the Syrian and Egyptian deserts, against whose orthodoxy Arianism breaks and crumbles to powder. Humanly speaking, these hermits saved the doctrine of the Godhead of Christ from being denied, and disappearing from the creed of the Church. An age like the present, so like the condition of the Roman world in its highest civilization, when pleasure and self-will are the sole things sought, and when Arianism is in power in high places, and the learned and polished, admitting the excellency of Christianity in general, allow to Christ only the place of a founder of a school of religious thought--such an age as this seems one meet for the revival of the hermit life as a witness for the truth, and a protest against luxury. This, and this only, as far as we can judge, will meet the great want of the day; it is not preaching that will recover the multitude lapsed into religious indifference; it must be the example of men, believing with such a fiery faith, that they sacrifice everything the world holds precious, for the sake of the truth that Jesus Christ, the everlasting God, came in the Flesh. Nothing in the wonderful history of the hermits of Egypt is so incredible as their number. But the most weighty authorities agree in establishing it. It was a kind of emigration of towns to the desert, of civilization to simplicity, of noise to silence, of corruption to innocence. The current once begun, floods of men, of women, and of children threw themselves into it, and flowed thither during a century, with resistless force. Let us quote some figures. Pachomius, who died at fifty-six, reckoned three thousand monks under his rule; his monasteries of Tabenna soon included seven thousand, and S. Jerome affirms that as many as fifty thousand were present at the annual gathering of the general congregation of monasteries which followed his rule. There were five thousand on the mountain of Nitria alone. Nothing was more frequent than to see two hundred, three hundred, or five hundred monks under the same abbot. Near Arsinoë (now Suez), the abbot Serapion governed ten thousand, who, in the harvest time, spread themselves over the country to cut the corn, and thus gained the means of living and giving alms. It has even been asserted that there were as many monks in the deserts of Egypt as inhabitants in the towns. The towns themselves were, so to speak, inundated by them, since in 356, a traveller found in the single town of Oxyrynchus (Abou Girge) upon the Nile, ten thousand monks and twenty thousand virgins consecrated to God.[52] The immense majority of these religious were cenobites, that is to say, they lived in the same enclosure, and were united by common rule and practice under an elected head, whom they everywhere called abbot, from the Syriac word _abba_, which means _father_. The cenobitical life superseded rapidly, and almost completely, the life of solitaries. Scarcely any man became a solitary until after having been a cenobite, and in order to meditate upon God during the last years of his life. Custom has, therefore, given the title of monks to cenobites alone. Ambitious at once of reducing to subjection their rebellious flesh, and of penetrating the secrets of the celestial light, these cenobites united the active with the contemplative life. The various and incessant labours which filled up their days are known. In the great frescoes of the cemetery of Pisa, they appear in their coarse black or brown dresses, a cowl upon their shoulders, occupied in digging up the soil, in cutting down trees, in fishing in the Nile, in milking the goats, in gathering the dates which served them for food, in plaiting the mats on which they were to die. Others are absorbed in reading or meditating on the Holy Scriptures. Thus a Saint has said that the cells united in the desert were like a hive of bees. There each had in his hands the wax of labour, and in his mouth the honey of psalms and prayers. The days were divided between prayer and work. The work was divided between field labour and the exercise of various trades. There were among these monks entire colonies of weavers, of carpenters, of curriers, of tailors, and of fullers.[53] All the rules of the patriarchs of the desert made labour obligatory, and the example of their holy lives gave authority to the rule. When Macarius of Egypt came to visit the great Antony, they immediately set to work on their mats together, conferring thus upon things important to souls; and Antony was so edified by the zeal of the priest, that he kissed his hands, saying, "What virtues proceed from these hands!" Each monastery was then a great school of labour; it was also, at the same time, a great school of charity. The monks practised charity not only among themselves, and with regard to the poor inhabitants of the neighbouring countries, but especially in the case of travellers whom the necessities of commerce called to the banks of the Nile, and of the numerous pilgrims, whom their increasing fame drew to the desert. A more generous hospitality had never been exercised, nor had the universal mercy, introduced by Christianity into the world, blossomed anywhere to such an extent. A thousand incidents in their history reveal the most tender solicitude for the miseries of the poor. The _Xenodochium_--that is, the asylum for the poor and strangers--formed from that time a necessary appendix to every monastery. The most ingenious combinations, and the most gracious inspirations of charity are to be found in this history. A certain monastery served as an hospital for sick children; another was transformed by its founder into an hospital for lepers and cripples. "Behold," said he, in shewing to the ladies of Alexandria the upper floor which was reserved for women, "behold my jacinths." Then conducting them to the floor below, were the men were placed, "See my emeralds." They were hard only upon themselves. Under a burning sky, in a climate which has always seemed the cause, or the excuse of vice, in a country given up at all times to every kind of luxury and depravity, there were thousands of men who, during two centuries, interdicted themselves from the very shadow of a sensual gratification, and made of the most rigorous mortification a rule as universal as a second nature. It was their rule also to cultivate the mind by the study of sacred literature. The rule of S. Pachomius made the reading of divers portions of the Bible a strict obligation. All the monks, besides, were required to be able to read and write. To qualify themselves for reading the Scriptures was the first duty imposed upon the novices. When, towards evening, at the hour of vespers, after a day of stifling heat, all work ceased, and from the midst of the sands, from the depths of caverns, from pagan temples cleared of their idols, and from all the vast tombs of a people dead, now occupied by these men dead to the world, the cry of a living people rose to heaven; when everywhere, and all at once, the air vibrated with hymns, prayers, and the pious and solemn, tender and joyous songs of these champions of the soul and conquerors of the desert, who celebrated, in the language of David, the praises of the living God, the thanksgivings of the freed soul, and the homage of vanquished passions,--then the traveller, the pilgrim, and especially the new convert stood still, lost in emotion, and transported with the sounds of that sublime concert, cried aloud, "Behold, this is Paradise."[54] "Go," said the most eloquent doctor of the Church at that period; "go to the Thebaid; you will find there a solitude still more beautiful than Paradise, a thousand choirs of angels under human form, nations of martyrs, armies of virgins, the diabolical tyrant chained, and Christ triumphant and glorified."[55] S. ISIDORE, P. AND MONK IN ALEXANDRIA. (A.D. 404.) [Almost all the ancient Martyrologies commemorate S. Isidore on the same day as S. Macarius the Elder. Authorities for his life, same as for S. Macarius.] S. Isidore, priest and monk, lived in Alexandria as hospitaller, that is, in charge of a hospital for the reception of strangers and the poor. He suffered many persecutions, first from Lucius, the Arian Bishop, who ill-treated the two Macarii, and afterwards from the orthodox bishop, Theophilus, who, moved by some jealousy, unjustly charged him with favouring the views of Origen. He took refuge at Constantinople with S. John Chrysostom, where he repudiated the heresy of Origen, declaring that he was falsely accused of holding it, and died in 404. S. ALEXANDER, OF THE SLEEPLESS ONES, MONK AT ALEXANDRIA. (ABOUT A.D. 430.) [Roman Martyrology and Greek Menaea. The life of S. Alexander, written by a disciple of his, exists in Greek. From this the following epitome is taken.] S. Alexander was of Asiatic origin, and was educated at Constantinople, where he entered the army, and was advanced to the office of eparchus, or proctor. Being a studious reader of the Old and New Testament, he often mused on the words of Christ, "If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven; and come, follow Me." (Matt. xix. 21). Then, moved by these words, he resolved to obey the command, and he sold his possessions and made distribution unto those that had need; and hastening away, into the solitudes of Syria, he became a monk for seven years. After that, inflamed with zeal against idolatry, he went into the nearest city, which was Edessa, on a solemn festival of the heathen gods, and set fire to the temple. He was at once seized and brought before the governor, Rabbulus, who remanded him till the rage of the populace should be abated, and he could be judged with calmness and equity. Rabbulus often sent for Alexander out of prison, and heard him gladly. And Alexander unfolded to him the doctrine of Christ and the great power of God. And as he expounded to him the Scriptures, he related the wondrous works of Elijah, how that he had prayed, and God had withheld the rain three years, and at his prayer had again brought a cloud and abundance of rain upon the earth, and also how he had cried, and God had sent fire from heaven to consume his sacrifice. Then, hearing this, Rabbulus said, "Nay! thou speakest of marvels. If the God of whom thou tellest wrought those wonders then, He can work them now. Cry unto Him to send fire on earth, that I may see and believe." Instantly, filled with confidence, the holy man, Alexander, turned to the East and spread forth his hands, and prayed; then there fell fire from heaven, and consumed the mats that were laid upon the ground, but hurt nothing else. And the Governor bowed his head, and said, "The Lord He is God, the Lord He is God!" Then he was baptized,[56] he and all his house, and he suffered Alexander to go forth to the people, and in their audience plead for the cause of Christ against their false gods. So they hastened and destroyed their images, and multitudes were added to the Church. And after that Alexander went away into the desert, where he heard there was a band of robbers, desiring to save their souls, as Jesus on the Cross had saved the thief. So the robbers took him, and he exhorted them, and spake the Word to them, and they believed, they and their chief, so that he tarried some while with them--they were thirty in number--and he baptized them. But the robber-chief, as he was being baptized, prayed in secret. Then said Alexander, "I saw thy lips move. What was thy petition?" And he answered, "I have been a great sinner, and I fear my old habits of evil resuming the mastery. I prayed God, if it were His will, to let His servant depart in peace, now that mine eyes have seen salvation." The prayer was heard, and the captain died within eight days, whilst still in the white dress he wore for his baptism. But Alexander remained with the robbers, and turned their den into a monastery, and converted the robbers into monks, and they served God in fasting and prayer. Now when he saw that they were established firmly in the course of penitence, he appointed one of them to be their abbot, and he went his way into Mesopotamia, and founded a monastery on the Euphrates, where he dwelt twenty years, and had very many monks under him. And after that he visited Antioch, Palmyra, and other cities, taking with him one hundred and fifty of his monks, that they might preach the Gospel to those who were yet in heathen darkness. The people of Palmyra shut their gates against him, saying that such a host of monks would devour all the produce in the market. Then Alexander and his brethren halted outside the city for three days, and the heathen people around brought them food, which they accepted with thanks. After that Alexander took the Book of the Gospels, and stood in the way, and cried: "Glory be to God in the Highest, and on earth peace, goodwill towards men." This was the signal of departure, so the whole moving monastery deserted their camp and went towards Antioch, where the brother of Alexander, Peter by name, was superior of a large monastery. Alexander and one companion went to the gate and knocked. Then the porter looked forth, and said, "Wait without, till I go to the abbot, and ask permission for you to enter and refresh yourselves." But Alexander thrust in on the heels of the porter, and went after him to the abbot's chamber, and there Peter knew him, and cast himself on his neck. But Alexander said, "Our father Abraham went forth himself to receive strangers, and invited them in, and our Lord Jesus Christ exhorted his followers to show glad hospitality, but thou lettest a wayfaring man stand without, and makest a favour of admitting him!" Then he turned, and went away in a rage, and would not eat in the monastery of his brother. And when they would enter into Antioch, the bishop, Theodotus, being prejudiced against Alexander, ordered that he and his monks should be refused admission. So they sat down all day in the heat outside, but rising up to sing their psalms at midnight, they all went forward chanting, and no man stayed them, through the streets of Antioch, and they found an old bath-house, and lodged there. Then the Bishop feared to disturb them, for all the people magnified them. There they stayed some time and erected a large hospital, where they cherished the sick and the poor. But one Malchus, a sub-deacon, who was greatly offended with the monks, went to the Bishop, and urged that they should be expelled. And when he had been given license, he went with all the church sextons and drove the monks from their lodgings, and he boxed Alexander on the ear, saying, "Go forth, thou rascal!" But Alexander said nothing, save that he quoted the words of S. John, "The servant's name was Malchus." (xviii. 10.) Then the Governor of the city, finding that the people would take part with the monks, and that a tumult would be made, came with force, and drave the brethren without the walls. So Alexander and his monks swarmed off to the Crithenian monastery, which he had founded, and there he saw that the discipline was admirable. Thence he went to Constantinople, taking with him from Crithene twenty-four monks, and in all he was now followed by three hundred, and they were Greeks, and Romans, and Syrians, and he settled them at Gomon, on the Bosphorus, near Constantinople, and divided them into six choirs, who should alternately sing the divine office, so that ceaselessly, night and day, the praises of Christ might ascend. Thence his order was called the Acoemeti, or the Sleepless Ones, for, in it, some were ever watching for the coming of the Bridegroom. However, even in Constantinople, he was not left in peace, but the civil powers interfered and broke up the monastery, and the monks were imprisoned and beaten, and ill-treated in divers ways, so that, for a while, the incessant song was interrupted. But when the persecution was over, the monks flowed together again, and the sleepless vigil recommenced. S. Alexander died and was buried at Gomon. S. JOHN THE CALYBITE, H. (ABOUT 450.) [Commemorated on the same day by Greeks and Latins. Some old Western Martyrologies honoured him on Feb. 27th. Authority, his life by Simeon Logotheta.[57]] S. John the Calybite is the Eastern counterpart of the Western S. Alexis. At an early age he met a monk of the Sleepless Ones, founded by S. Alexander, as mentioned in the immediately preceding life; and he was so struck with what he heard of the religious life, that he desired to enter it. Returning home, he asked his parents, who were wealthy, to make him a present of the Holy Gospels. They, surprised that the boy desired a book, instead of some article of dress or of play, purchased him a handsomely illuminated and illustrated book of the Gospels. The boy read, "He that loveth father and mother more than me, is not worthy of me." Then he ran away from home, and made his way to Gomon, where he entered the Sleepless order. The archimandrite, or abbot, thinking him too young, objected to receive him, but when the boy persisted, he made him undergo the discipline of the monks. He remained there, however, six years, and then a longing came over him to see his father and mother again; so he told the superior, who said, "Did I not say to thee, thou art too young. Go in peace to thy home." So John left the monastery. But returning home, he did not make himself known to his parents, but, changing clothes with a beggar, he crouched at the gate of his father's house and begged. Then his father gave him daily food from his kitchen; but after a while his mother, disliking the presence of a squalid beggar at the door, bade the servants remove him to a little cot, and thence he took his name of Calybite, or Cotter. Three years after, as he was dying, he sent for his mother, and revealed himself to her. He was buried beneath the hut, and his parents built a church over his tomb. Relics, in the church dedicated to him at Rome; his head at Besançon, in the church of S. Stephen. S. MAURUS, AB. OF GLANFEUIL. (A.D. 584.) [The life of S. Maurus, professing to be by S. Faustus, is not of the date it pretends to. It was written by Odo of Glanfeuil (D. 868); it is, however, probable that he used a previous composition of S. Faustus, monk of Cassino (D. 620), amplifying and altering in style. Other authorities are S. Gregory the Great, Dialog. II., and a metrical life, falsely attributed to Paulus Diaconus.] A nobleman, named Eguitius, gave his little son Maurus, aged twelve, to the holy patriarch Benedict, to be by him educated. The youth surpassed all his fellow monks in the discharge of his monastic duties, and when he was grown up, S. Benedict made him his coadjutor in the government of Subiaco. Placidus, a fellow-monk, going one day to fetch water, fell into the lake, and was carried about a bow-shot from the bank. S. Benedict seeing this from his cell, sent Maurus to run and draw him out. Maurus obeyed, walked upon the water, without perceiving it, and pulled out Placidus by the hair, without himself sinking. The fame of Benedict and his work had not been slow to cross the frontiers of Italy; it resounded especially in Gaul. A year before the death of the patriarch, two envoys arrived at Monte Cassino, from Innocent, Bishop of Mans, who, not content with forty monasteries which had arisen during his episcopate in the country over which he ruled, still desired to see his diocese enriched by a colony formed by the disciples of the new head and law-giver of the cenobites in Italy. Benedict confided this mission to the dearest and most fervent of his disciples, the young deacon Maurus. He gave him four companions, one of whom, Faustus, is the supposed author of the history of the mission; and bestowed on him a copy of the rule, written with his own hand, together with the weights for the bread, and the measure for the wine, which should be allotted to each monk every day, to serve as unchanging types of that abstinence which was to be one of the strongest points of the new institution. At the head of this handful of missionaries, who went to sow afar the seed destined to produce so great a harvest, Maurus came down from Monte Cassino, crossed Italy and the Alps, paused beneath the precipices which overhang the monastery of Agaunum now S. Maurice in the Valais, beside the foaming Rhone, which the Burgundian king, Sigismund, had just raised over the relics of the Theban Legion; then went into the Jura to visit the colonies of Condate. Arrived upon the banks of the Loire, and repulsed by the successor of the Bishop who had called him, he stopped in Anjou, which was then governed by a viscount called Florus, in the name of Theodebert, King of Austrasia. This viscount offered one of his estates to the disciple of Benedict, that he might establish his colony there, besides giving one of his sons to become a monk, and announcing his own intention of consecrating himself to God. On this estate, bathed by the waters of the Loire, Maurus founded the monastery of Glanfeuil, which afterwards took his own name. The site of this monastery, now lost among the vineyards of Anjou, merits the grateful glance of every traveller who is not insensible to the advantages which flowed from that first Benedictine colony over the whole of France. The beloved son of S. Benedict spent forty years at the head of his French colony; he saw as many as a hundred and forty monks officiate there; and when he died, after having lived apart for two years in an isolated cell, to prepare himself in silence for appearing before God, he had dropped into the soil of Gaul, a germ which could neither perish nor be exhausted. In art, S. Maurus is represented holding the weights and measures given him by S. Benedict. S. CEOLWULF, K., MONK. (A.D. 767.) [Old English Martyrologies on March 14th; later ones on this day, on which he is commemorated in the Roman Calendar. Authorities: Bede, Florence of Worcester, William of Malmesbury, Henry Huntingdon, Simeon of Durham, &c.] Bede dedicated his "History of the English" to Ceolwulf, King of Northumbria, whose tender solicitude for monastic interests made the monk of Jarrow look to him as a patron. Ceolwulf was of the race of Ida the Burner; after two obscure reigns, Ceolwulf was called to the throne, and vainly attempted to struggle against the disorder and decay of his country. He was vanquished and made captive by enemies whose names are not recorded, and was shut up in a convent. He escaped, however, regained the crown, and reigned for some time in a manner which gained the applause of Bede. But after a reign of eight years, a regret, or an unconquerable desire for that monastic life which had been formerly forced upon him against his will, seized him. He made the best provisions possible for the security of his country, and for a good understanding between the spiritual and temporal authorities, nominating as his successor a worthy prince of his race. Then, giving up the cares of power, and showing himself truly the master of the wealth he resigned, he cut his long beard, had his head shaved in the form of a crown, and retired to bury himself anew in the holy island of Lindisfarne, in the monastery beaten by the winds and waves of the northern sea. There he passed the last thirty years of his life in study and happiness. He had, while king, enriched this monastery with many great gifts, and obtained permission for the use of wine and beer for the monks, who, up to that time, according to the rigid rule of ancient Keltic discipline, had been allowed no beverage but water and milk. [Illustration: Decoration] FOOTNOTES: [52] For authorities for these statements, see Montalembert's Monks of the West, I. p. 315. [53] S. Jerome, Proef. in Reg. S. Pachomii, § 6. [54] Pallad. Hist. Lausiaca, c. 7. [55] S. John Chrysostom, in Matt., hom. VIII. The above account of the life of the monks in Egypt is by the eloquent pen of the Count de Montalembert. [56] Rabbulus was afterwards consecrated Bishop of Edessa. [57] Bollandus gives two lives; one is authentic, the other is not. The first states that he lived at Constantinople, from which he escaped to Gomon, threescore furlongs from the city, by water. The second, mistaking new Rome for old Rome, makes him voyage from Italy to Bithynia. January 16. S. PRISCILLA, _Matron, at Rome, 1st cent._ S. MARCELLUS, _Pope, M., at Rome, circ._ A.D. 309. S. MELAS, _B. C., at Rhinoclusa, 4th cent._ S. HONORATUS, _B. C., of Arles, circ._ A.D. 430 S. JAMES, _B. C., of the Tarantaise, 5th cent._ S. VALERIUS, _B. C., of Sorrente, circ._ A.D. 600. S. TATIAN, _B. C., at Underzo, in Italy, 7th cent._ S. FURSEY, _Ab., in France, circ._ A.D. 653. S. TOSSA, _B. C., of Augsburg_, A.D. 661. S. HENRY, _H., in Northumberland_, A.D. 1127. SS. FRANCISCAN MARTYRS, _in Mauritania_, A.D. 1220. S. PRISCILLA, MATRON, AT ROME. (1ST CENT.) [Roman Martyrology. This Priscilla is not to be confounded with the wife of Aquila (Acts xviii. 26.) She was the mother of S. Pudens (2 Tim. iv. 21), who was the father of SS. Praxedes and Pudentiana, the guests and disciples of S. Peter. Nothing more is known of her.] S. MARCELLUS, POPE, M. (ABOUT A.D. 309.) [The Greeks have confounded Marcellus with his predecessor, Marcellinus, who is commemorated on April 26th. Roman Martyrology, that of Bede, Ado, Notker, &c. The Acts are not to be trusted.] Saint Marcellus succeeded Pope Marcellinus, in 308, after the see had been vacant for three years and a half. An epitaph written on him by Pope Damasus, says that by enforcing the penitential canons, he drew on himself the hostility of lukewarm Christians. For his severity to an apostate he was exiled by the tyrant Maxentius. Relics, in the church of S. Marcellus at Rome; also at Mons and Namur, in Belgium. S. MELAS, B. C. OF RHINOCLUSA. (4TH CENT.) [Roman and German Martyrologies. Authority for his life, Sozomen.] Rhinoclusa, or Rinocorurus, was near the river of Egypt, dividing Egypt from Palestine; of this city and monastic settlement S. Melas was Bishop. Sozomen, in his Ecclesiastical History, gives the following account of him (lib. vi. c. 31):-- "Rinocorurus was celebrated at this period, on account of the holy men who were born and flourished there. I have heard that the most eminent among them were Melas, the Bishop of the country; Denis and Solon, the brothers and successors of Melas. When the decree went forth for the ejection of all bishops opposed to Arianism, the officers appointed to execute the mandate found Melas engaged in trimming the lights of the church, and clad in an old cloak soiled with oil, fastened by a girdle. When they asked him for the Bishop, he replied that he was within, and that he would conduct them to him. As they were fatigued with their journey, he led them to the episcopal dwelling, made them sit down at his table, and placed before them such things as he had. After the repast, he supplied them with water to wash their hands, and then told them who he was. Amazed at his conduct, they confessed the mission on which they had arrived; but, from respect to him, gave him full liberty to go wherever he would. He, however, replied that he would not shrink from the sufferings to which the other bishops, who maintained the same sentiments as himself, were exposed, and that he was ready to go into exile. He had been accustomed, from his youth up, to practise all the virtues of asceticism. The Church of Rinocorurus, having been thus, from the beginning, under the guidance of such exemplary bishops, never afterwards swerved from their doctrine. The clergy of this Church dwell in one house, sit at the same table, and have all things in common." S. HONORATUS, B. OF ARLES. (ABOUT A.D. 430.) [Honoratus, in French Honoré, is commemorated in almost all the Western Kalendars. His life by his kinsman and successor, S. Hilary. Another life of him is apocryphal. "A tissue," says Bollandus, "of fables and crazes;" "which," says Baronius, "cannot be read without nausea, except by those with iron stomachs, and wits covered with the rust of ignorance." This life, therefore, must be completely put aside, as worthless, and we must draw all our information from that by S. Hilary, Bishop of Arles.] The sailor who proceeds from the roadstead of Toulon towards Italy or the East, passes among two or three islands, rocky and dry, surmounted here and there by a slender cluster of pines. He looks at them with indifference, and avoids them. However, one of these islands has been, for the soul and for the mind, a centre purer and more fertile than any famous isle of the Greek sea. It is Lerins, formerly occupied by a city, which was already ruined in the time of Pliny, and where, at the commencement of the fifth century, nothing more was to be seen than a desert coast, rendered unapproachable by the number of serpents which swarmed there. [Illustration: S. HONOR�. After Cahier. Jan. 16. ] In 410 a man landed and remained there; he was called Honoratus. Descended from a consular race, educated and eloquent, but devoted from his youth to great piety; he desired to be made a monk. His father charged his eldest brother, a gay and impetuous young man, to turn him from the ascetic life; but, on the contrary, it was he who gained his brother. After many difficulties, he at last found repose at Lerins; the serpents yielded the place to him; a multitude of disciples gathered round him. A community of austere monks and indefatigable labourers was formed there. The face of the isle was changed, the desert became a paradise; a country bordered with deep woods, watered by streams, rich with verdure, enamelled with flowers, revealed the fertilizing presence of a new race. Honoratus, whose fine face was radiant with a sweet and attractive majesty,[58] opened the arms of his love to the sons of all countries who desired to love Christ. A multitude of disciples of all nations joined him. There is, perhaps, nothing more touching in monastic annals than the picture traced by S. Hilary, one of the most illustrious sons of Lerins, of the paternal tenderness of Honoratus for the numerous family of monks whom he had collected round him. He could reach the depths of their souls to discover all their griefs. He neglected no effort to banish every sadness, every painful recollection of the world. He watched their sleep, their health, their food, their labours, that each might serve God according to the measure of his strength. Thus he inspired them with a love more than filial. "In him," they said, "we find not only a father, but an entire family, a country, the whole world." When he wrote to any of those who were absent, they said, on receiving his letter, written according to the usage of the time, upon tablets of wax, "It is honey which he has poured back into that wax, honey drawn from the inexhaustible sweetness of his heart." In that island paradise, and under the care of such a shepherd, the perfume of life breathed everywhere. These monks, who had sought happiness by renouncing secular life, felt and proclaimed that they had found it; to see their serene and modest joy, their union, their gentleness, and their firm hope, one would have believed one's self, says S. Eucher, in the presence of a battalion of angels at rest.[59] How S. Honoratus converted S. Hilary by his prayers, as told by S. Hilary himself, shall be related when we speak of that Saint. Honoratus was, by compulsion, made to assume the direction of the see of Arles, and was consecrated Bishop in 426. He died in the arms of S. Hilary, who succeeded him in 429. Relics, at S. Honoré, formerly Lerins. In art, he appears expelling serpents from the isle with his staff. S. JAMES, B. OF THE TARANTAISE. (5TH CENT.) [Authority for his life, a fragmentary life of uncertain date, published by Bollandus.] James, of Asiatic origin, and a soldier, was one of the first disciples of S. Honoratus in his monastic settlement at Lerins. When S. Honoratus was appointed Archbishop of Arles, he called James to be the first Bishop of the Tarantaise, the valleys of the Isère and Arc, of which Moutiers is the modern capital, between the Graian and Pennine Alps. S. James made Centronum, or Moutiers, the seat of the bishopric, and there he laboured to convert the people still buried in heathenism. Of him is related a story very similar to that told of other Saints, viz., that as his monks were cutting down trees in the forest, for the construction of his cathedral church, a bear killed one of the oxen which drew the timber. Then the monks fled in consternation to S. James, who went boldly to the bear and said, "I, James, the servant of Christ, command thee, cruel beast, to bow thy stubborn neck to the yoke, in place of the ox thou hast slain." Then the bear was obedient, and drew the timber to the church. S. James is also said to have taken an ass's load of pure snow of the mountain in mid-summer, as a tribute to Gondecar, King of the Burgundians, having nothing else to offer, when the king had ordered a tax to be levied on all the produce of the land. S. FURSEY, AB. (ABOUT A.D. 653.) [Roman, Donegal, and Scottish Martyrologies, but English on March 4th; Feb. 25th is noted in several Kalendars as the festival of the translation of his relics, also Sept. 28. A very ancient life of S. Fursey, of the date of Bede, exists; later and more prolix lives exist, but are of less authority. Bede himself relates the principal events of the life of this Saint in his history, and quotes the above-mentioned life, lib. iii. c. 19.] Fursey, son of Fintan, an Irish prince, was abbot of a monastery in the diocese of Tuam. Afterwards, travelling with two of his brothers, Fullan and Ultan, through England, he entered the province of Essex, and was honourably received by the king, Sigebert, "and performing his usual employment of preaching the Gospel," says Bede, "by the example of his virtue, and the efficacy of his discourse, he converted many unbelievers to Christ, and confirmed in faith and love those that already believed. Here he fell into some infirmity of body, and was thought worthy to see a vision from God; in which he was admonished diligently to proceed in the ministry of the Word, and indefatigably to continue his usual vigils and prayers. Being confirmed by this vision, he applied himself with all speed to build a monastery on the ground which had been given him by King Sigebert, and to establish regular discipline therein. The monastery was pleasantly situated in the woods, and with the sea not far off; it was built within the area of a castle called Cnobheresburg (Burghcastle, in Suffolk.) There, falling sick, he fell into a trance, and quitting his body from evening till cock-crow, he was found worthy to behold the choirs of angels, and to hear the praises which are sung in heaven." The abbot Fursey, becoming desirous of ridding himself of all business of this world, quitted his monastery, having first confided the care of it to his brother Fullan; and resolved to end his life as a hermit. He repaired to his brother Ultan, who had already adopted the life of a solitary, and lived a whole year with him in prayer and hard labour. Afterwards, the province being desolated by war, he crossed the sea to France, and was there honourably entertained by Clovis, King of the Franks, and then by the noble Erconwald. He built a monastery at Lagny, about six miles north of Paris, on the Marne, and falling sick not long after, departed this life. Erconwald took his body, and deposited it in the porch of a church he was building in his town of Peronne, till the church itself should be dedicated. This happened twenty-seven days after, and the body being taken from the porch to be re-buried, near the altar, was found as entire as if he had but just died. Fursey in _French_ is Fourcy, and in _Flemish_ Fro. Patron of Lagny and Peronne. Relics, at Peronne. In art, (1), with oxen at his feet, because his body was placed on a wagon, and the oxen allowed to conduct it without guide, and they went to Peronne; or (2), making a fountain spring up at Lagny, by thrusting his staff into the soil; or beholding a vision, (3), of angels, or (4), of the flames of purgatory and hell, in reference to his remarkable vision.[60] S. HENRY, H. IN NORTHUMBERLAND. (A.D. 1127.) [English Martyrologies. His life in Capgrave.] S. Henry was of Danish origin. Leaving his parents and wife, he resolved to serve God in solitude, and escaped to Coquet Island, off the coast of Northumberland. His relatives came after him, urging him to return to his home; then, in an agony of doubt, he cast himself before his crucifix, and implored God to reveal to him what was His will. Then it seemed to him that the Saviour said to him, "Abide here, play the man, and strengthen thine heart to resist. I have called thee in mine eternal purpose." So he remained, and laboured in the islet, and a few brethren joined him, but lived in separate cells. And when he died, they heard the bell of his little hovel ring violently, so they ran, and found him dead, with the bell rope in his hand, and the candle by his side was alight. His body was taken to Tynemouth, and was buried in the church of the Blessed Virgin, near that of S. Oswin. FOOTNOTES: [58] S. Eucher, De laude Eremi, p. 342. [59] So far Montalembert's Monks of the West, Vol. I., Book III. [60] There is not space to give an account of S. Fursey's vision, which seems to have been the original of Dante's Divina Commedia. January 17. SS. BRETHREN, SPEUSIPPUS, ELEUSIPPUS, MELEUSIPPUS, AND COMPANIONS, _MM. in Cappadocia_. S. GENULPH, _B. in France, 3rd cent._ S. ANTONY THE GREAT, _Ab. in Egypt_, A.D. 356. S. SABINE, _B. of Piacenza, in Italy, 4th cent._ S. NENN, _Ab. in Ulster, Ireland, 6th cent._ S. SULPICIUS, _B. of Bourges, in France, circ._ A.D. 647. S. MILDGYTHA, _V. in Kent, circ._ A.D. 730. S. RICMER, _Ab. at Le Mans, in France, circ._ A.D. 700. SS. SPEUSIPPUS, ELEUSIPPUS, MELEUSIPPUS, LEONILLA, JONILLA, NEO AND TURBO, MM. (DATE UNCERTAIN.) [Roman Martyrology and Greek Menaea. The relics of these Saints having been moved to Langres, in France, they are sometimes called Martyrs of Langres, and are supposed to have suffered there; but this is a mistake. A copy of the Acts of their martyrdom was sent from Langres by one Varnahair to S. Ceraunus, Bishop of Paris, in the beginning of the 7th century. The original Acts are said to have been written by SS. Neo and Turbo, but they have not come down to us without manifest corruption and interpolation.] Speusippus, Eleusippus, and Meleusippus were three sons at a birth of a believing mother and a heathen father. They were instructed in the Christian faith by their aunt, Leonilla, and then, in boyish enthusiasm, they rushed from her knee, where they had been taught, to demolish the idols in the temples of the city they inhabited. They were taken and burnt in one pyre, and received the baptism of blood. Jonilla, a woman standing by, with her little babe in her arms, cried out, "I also am a Christian, I believe in Christ, my God and my King." Then the judge ordered her hands to be bound behind her back, and that she should be hung by her hair. Her husband, horrified at the sentence, implored her to save her life for his sake and that of the babe; but she answered, "True, that I gave life to this dear little one, but it is true also that I owe my life to God, and I cannot set God after my child." Leonilla, the aunt of the brothers, was executed. Then Neo, who wrote these Acts, closing his tablets, in which he had inscribed what had taken place, gave them to his colleague, Turbo, and ran to the image of Nemesis, and cast it down, and stamped on the marble fragments. And when the guardians of the temple saw this, they seized him and beat and stoned him till he yielded up his soul to God. "Turbo also, who wrote the victories of these confessors, not long afterwards suffered martyrdom." With these words the Acts close. These saintly brothers are called in France Les SS. _Jaumes_, that is to say Gemelli, for Tergemini; sometimes _Geaumes_. S. GENULPH, B. C. (3RD CENT.) [Commemorated on this day at Cahors, of which diocese he is regarded as the Apostle and first Bishop. He is however mentioned in several Martyrologies as Bishop of Bourges. It is probable that he was a missionary Bishop without settled see. Called in the Roman Martyrology, June 17th, Gundulph; same day and name the same in the Bourges Breviary, that being the day of his translation, Jan. 17th, of his death. His life was written by S. Sebastus, three years after the death of S. Genulph, but this has not come down to us in its original form. It has, however, doubtless formed the basis of a life written about A.D. 910, published by Bollandus.] Genitus and his wife, Aclia, were pious Christians at Rome, serving God constantly, night and day, and happy in one another's love. But one thing they lacked which grieved them sore, they had no child. Having asked God to look upon them and give them a son, He heard their prayer, and the wife of Genitus brought forth a man-child, and they called him Genulph, or Gundulph. At the age of five, the parents gave him to S. Sixtus, Bishop of Rome, to educate him in the knowledge and love of God. On the breaking out of the Decian persecution, S. Sixtus ordained Genulph bishop, bade him and his father go into Gaul, and preach the Gospel there. S. Genulph ever wore a garment of camel's hair, "except when he celebrated the Holy Mysteries, when he was arrayed in soft linen, and such other shining vestments as pertain to so great a mystery. But when the mystery was celebrated, he put on him again the rough garb."[61] Having entered the territory of the Cadurci, now called Cahors, he preached the word of God vehemently, and wrought many miracles of healing. Then he and his father were denounced to the Governor, and were beaten and scorched with fire, but remained constant to the faith, witnessing a good profession, so that the Governor marvelled, and questioned them about their faith, and so was brought to a knowledge of the truth; and he released the confessors from prison, and they preached boldly, and multitudes came and were baptized; so mightily grew the word of God and prevailed. And afterwards he left Cahors, and went north, till he came to the country of the Bituriges, or Berry, and there he took up his residence in a haunted cell, which all the people of the neighbourhood avoided, through fear. But Genulph sprinkled it with holy water, and signed himself with the cross, and boldly took up his residence therein, nor was he troubled by evil spirits. Living in this cell, he laboured diligently with his hands, cultivating the soil, and keeping very many cocks and hens. The fame of his sanctity drew others to him, and he became the head of a community. Also many sick came there to be nursed, and the peasants to be instructed. Then Genulph fed them with the eggs, and with the hens, which he killed and roasted. One day a fox came, and carried off a hen. Hearing the noise in the poultry yard, Genulph ran out, and saw the fox stealing away with his prey. Then he cried, "Reynard! that hen is not thine. Wherefore dost thou rob the poor brothers, who have not injured thee?" And the fox let go the hen unhurt. When he was dying, he exhorted the brethren to wrap him in sack-cloth and bury him outside the church, "for it seemed to him unfitting that the prey of worms and corruption should be placed within the holy tabernacle." S. ANTONY THE GREAT, AB. (A.D. 356.) [S. Antony is famous in the East as in the West, and is named in all Kalendars. His life was written by S. Athanasius, and is quite genuine. S. Antony is also spoken of at length by Sozomen, Socrates, S. Jerome, Ruffinus, Theodoret, Evagrius, &c. The following account is a condensed translation of the life of the great patriarch of monks, by S. Athanasius. It is necessarily very much abbreviated.] Antony was an Egyptian by race, born of noble parents,[62] who had a sufficient property of their own: and as they were Christians, he too was Christianly brought up, and when a boy was nourished in the house of his parents, besides whom and his home he knew nought. But when he grew older, he would not be taught letters,[63] not wishing to mix with other boys; but all his longing was (according to what is written of Jacob) to dwell simply in his own house. But when his parents took him into the Lord's house he was not saucy, as a boy, nor inattentive as he grew older; but was subject to his parents, and attentive to what was read, turning it to his own account. Nor, again, did he trouble his parents for various and expensive dainties; but was content with what he found, and asked for nothing more. When his parents died, he was left alone with a little sister, when he was about eighteen or twenty years of age, and he took care both of his house and of her. But not six months after their death, as he was going as usual to the Lord's house, and collecting his thoughts, he meditated, as he walked, how the Apostles had left all and followed the Saviour; and how those in the Acts brought the price of what they had sold, and laid it at the Apostles' feet, to be given away to the poor; and what, and how great, a hope was laid up for them in heaven. With this in his mind he entered the church. And it befell then that the Gospel was being read; and he heard how the Lord had said to the rich man, "If thou wilt be perfect, go, sell all that thou hast, and give to the poor; and come, follow me, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven." Antony, therefore, as if the remembrance of the saints had come to him from God, and as if the lesson had been read on his account, went forth at once from the Lord's house, and gave away to those of his own village the possessions he had inherited from his ancestors (three hundred plough-lands, fertile and very fair), that they might give no trouble either to him or his sister. All his moveables he sold, and a considerable sum which he received for them he gave to the poor. But having kept back a little for his sister, when he went again into the Lord's house, he heard the Lord saying in the Gospel, "Take no thought for the morrow;" and, unable to endure any more delay, he went out and distributed that too to the needy. And having committed his sister to known and faithful virgins, and given to her wherewith to be educated in a nunnery, he himself thenceforth devoted himself, outside his house, to training; taking heed to himself, and using himself severely. For monasteries were not then common in Egypt, nor did any monks know the wide desert; but each, who wished to take heed to himself, exercised himself alone, not far from his own village. There was then, in the next village, an old man who had trained himself in a solitary life from his youth. When Antony saw him, he emulated him in that which is noble. And first he began to stay outside the village; and then, if he heard of any earnest man, he went to seek him, and did not return till he had seen him. So dwelling there at first, he settled his mind neither to look back towards his parents' wealth nor to recollect his relations; but he put all his longing and all his earnestness on training himself more intensely. For the rest he worked with his hands, because he had heard, "If any man will not work, neither let him eat;" and of his earnings he spent some on himself and some on the needy. He prayed continually, because he knew that one ought to pray secretly, without ceasing. He attended also so much to what was read, that with him none of the Scriptures fell to the ground, but he retained them all, and for the future his memory served him instead of books. Behaving thus, Antony was beloved by all; and submitted truly to the earnest men to whom he used to go. And from each of them he learnt some improvement in his earnestness and his training: he contemplated the courtesy of one, and another's assiduity in prayer; another's freedom from anger; another's love of mankind: he took heed to one as he watched; to another as he studied: one he admired for his endurance, another for his fasting and sleeping on the ground; he laid to heart the meekness of one, and the long-suffering of another; and stamped upon his memory the devotion to Christ and the mutual love which all in common possessed. And thus filled full, he returned to his own place of training, gathering to himself what he had got from each, and striving to show all their qualities in himself. He never emulated those of his own age, save in what is best; and did that so as to pain no one, but make all rejoice over him. And all in the village who loved good, seeing him thus, called him the friend of God; and some embraced him as a son, some as a brother. But the devil, who hates and envies what is noble, would not endure such a purpose in a youth: but attempted against him all that he is wont to do; suggesting to him the remembrance of his wealth, care for his sister, relation to his kindred, love of money, love of glory, the various pleasures of luxury, and the other solaces of life; and then the harshness of virtue, and its great toil; and the weakness of his body, and the length of time; and altogether raised a great dust-cloud of arguments in his mind, trying to turn him back from his righteous choice. But when the enemy saw himself to be too weak for Antony's determination, then he attacked him with the temptations which he is wont to use against young men; but Antony protected his body with faith, prayers, and fastings. At last, when the evil one could not overthrow Antony even thus, as if beside himself he appeared to the sight as a black child, and falling down before him, no longer tempted him to argue, but using a human voice, said, "I have deceived many; I have cast down many. But now I have been worsted in the battle." Then, when Antony asked him, "Who art thou who speakest thus to me?" he forthwith replied in a pitiable voice, "I am the spirit of impurity." [Illustration: S. ANTHONY TORTURED BY DEMONS. From the Design by Martin Schonguer. Jan. 17.] This was Antony's first struggle against the devil: or rather this mighty deed in him was the Saviour's, who condemned sin in the flesh that the righteousness of the Lord should be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit. But neither did Antony, because the evil one had fallen, grow careless and despise him; neither did the enemy, when worsted by him, cease from lying in ambush against him. Antony ate once a day, after the setting of the sun, and sometimes only once in two days, often even in four; his food was bread with salt, his drink nothing but water. When he slept he was content with a rush-mat; but mostly he lay on the bare ground. He would not anoint himself with oil, saying that it was more fit for young men to be earnest in training than to seek things which softened the body; and that they must accustom themselves to labour. So forgetting the past, he daily, as if beginning afresh, took more pains to improve, saying over to himself continually the Apostle's words, "Forgetting what is behind, stretching forward to what is before." Antony then went to the tombs, which happened to be some way from the village; and having bidden one of his acquaintances bring him bread at intervals of many days, he entered one of the tombs, and, shutting the door upon himself, remained there alone. But Satan, terrified lest in a little while he should fill the desert with his training, coming one night with a multitude of daemons, beat him so much with stripes that he lay speechless from the torture. But by the providence of God, the next day his acquaintance came, bringing him the loaves. And having opened the door, and seeing him lying on the ground for dead, he carried him to the Lord's house in the village, and laid him on the ground; and many of his kinsfolk and the villagers sat round him, as round a corpse. But about midnight, Antony coming to himself, and waking up, saw them all sleeping, and only his acquaintance awake, and, nodding to him to approach, begged him to carry him back to the tomb, without waking any one. When that was done, the door was shut, and he remained as before, alone inside. And because he could not stand on account of the daemon's blows, he prayed prostrate. And after his prayer, he said with a shout, "Here am I, Antony: I do not fly from your stripes; yea, do your worst, nothing shall separate me from the love of Christ." And then he sang, "Though an host were laid against me, yet shall not my heart be afraid." So then, in the night, the devils made such a crash, that the whole place seemed shaken, and the daemons, as if breaking in the four walls of the room, seemed to enter through them, changing themselves into the shapes of beasts and creeping things; and the place was forthwith filled with shapes of lions, bears, leopards, bulls and snakes, asps, scorpions and wolves, and each of them moved according to his own fashion. The lion roared, longing to attack; the bull seemed to toss; the serpent writhed, and the wolf rushed upon him; and altogether the noises of all the apparitions were dreadful. But Antony lay unshaken and awake in spirit. He groaned at the pain of his body: but clear in intellect, and as it were mocking, he said, "If there were any power in you, it were enough that one of you should come on; but since the Lord has made you weak, therefore you try to frighten me by mere numbers. And a proof of your weakness is, that you imitate the shapes of brute animals." And taking courage, he said again, "If ye can, and have received power against me, delay not, but attack; but if ye cannot, why do ye disturb me in vain? For a seal to us and a wall of safety is our faith in the Lord." The devils, having made many efforts, gnashed their teeth at him, because he rather mocked at them than they at him. But neither then did the Lord forget Antony's wrestling, but appeared to help him. For, looking up, he saw the roof as it were opened, and a ray of light coming down towards him. The devils suddenly became invisible, and the pain of his body forthwith ceased, and the building became quite whole. But Antony, feeling the succour, and getting his breath again, and freed from pain, questioned the vision which appeared, saying, "Where wert thou? Why didst thou not appear to me from the first, to stop my pangs?" And a voice came to him, "Antony, I was here, but I waited to see thy fight. Therefore, since thou hast withstood, and hast not been worsted, I will be to thee always a succour, and will make thee become famous everywhere." Hearing this, he rose and prayed, and was so strong, that he felt that he had more power in his body than he had before. He was then about thirty-and-five years old. And on the morrow he went out, and was yet more eager for devotion to God; and, going to that old man aforesaid, he asked him to dwell with him in the desert. But when he declined, because of his age, and because no such custom had yet arisen, he himself straightway set off to the mountain. But the fiend cast in his way a great silver plate. But Antony, perceiving the trick of him who hates what is noble, stopped. And he judged the plate worthless; and said, "Whence comes a plate in the desert? This is no beaten way. Had it fallen, it could not have been unperceived, from its great size; and besides, he who lost it would have turned back and found it, because the place is desert. This is a trick of the devil. Thou shalt not hinder, devil, my determination by this: let it go with thee into perdition." Then again he saw gold lying in the way as he came up. Antony, wondering at the abundance of it, stepped over it and never turned, but ran on in haste, until he had lost sight of the place. And growing even more and more intense in his determination, he rushed up the mountain, and finding an empty enclosure full of creeping things, on account of its age, he dwelt in it. The creeping things straightway left the place: but he blocked up the entry, having taken with him loaves for six months (for the Thebans do this, and they often remain a whole year fresh), and having water with him, entering, as into a sanctuary, he remained alone, never going forth, and never looking at any one who came. Thus he passed a long time there training himself, and only twice a year received loaves, let down from above through the roof. But those of his acquaintance who came to him, as they often remained days and nights outside (for he did not allow any one to enter), used to hear as it were crowds inside clamouring, thundering, lamenting, crying, "Depart from our ground. What dost thou even in the desert? Thou canst not abide our onset." At first those without thought that there were some men fighting with him, and that they had got in by ladders: but when, peeping in through a crack, they saw no one, then they took for granted that they were devils. His acquaintances came up continually, expecting to find him dead, and heard him singing, "Let God arise, and let his enemies be scattered; let them also that hate Him flee before Him. Like as the wax melteth at the fire, so let the ungodly perish at the presence of God." And again, "All nations compassed me round about, but in the name of the Lord will I destroy them." He endured this for twenty years, training himself alone; neither going forth, nor being seen by any one for long periods of time. But after this, when many longed for him, and wished to imitate his training, and others who knew him came, and would have burst in the door by force, Antony came forth, as from some inner shrine, initiated into the mysteries of God. And when they saw him they wondered; for his body had neither grown fat, nor waxed lean from fasting, but he was just such as they had known him before his retirement. They wondered again at the purity of his soul, because it was neither contracted, as if by grief, nor relaxed by pleasure, nor possessed by laughter or by depression; for he was neither troubled at beholding the crowd, nor over-joyful at being saluted by too many; but was altogether equal, as being governed by reason, and standing on that which is according to nature. Many sufferers in body, who were present, did the Lord heal by him. And He gave to Antony grace in speaking, so that he comforted many who grieved, and reconciled others who were at variance, exhorting all to prefer nothing in the world to the love of Christ, and persuading and exhorting them to be mindful of the good things to come, and of the love of God towards us, who spared not His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all. He persuaded many to choose the solitary life; and so, thenceforth, cells sprang up in the mountains, and the desert was colonized by monks. But when he returned to the cell, he persisted in the noble labours of his youth; and by continued exhortations he increased the willingness of those who were already monks, and stirred to love of training the greater number of the rest; and quickly, as his speech drew men on, the cells became more numerous; and he governed them all as a father. The cells in the mountains were like tents filled with divine choirs, singing, discoursing, fasting, praying, rejoicing over the hope of the future, working that they might give alms thereof, and having love and concord with each other. And there was really to be seen, as it were, a land by itself, of piety and justice; for there was none there who did wrong, or suffered wrong; but a multitude of men training themselves, and in all of them a mind set on virtue. After these things, the persecution which happened under the Maximinus of that time,[64] laid hold of the Church; and when the holy martyrs were brought to Alexandria, Antony too followed, leaving his cell, and saying, "Let us depart too, that we may wrestle if we be called, or see them wrestling." And he longed to be a martyr himself, but, not choosing to give himself up, he ministered to the confessors in the mines, and in the prisons. And he was very earnest in the judgment-hall to excite the readiness of those who were called upon to wrestle; and to receive and bring on their way, till they were perfected, those of them who went to martyrdom. At last the judge, seeing the fearlessness and earnestness of him and those who were with him, commanded that none of the monks should appear in the judgment-hall, or haunt at all in the city. So all the rest thought good to hide themselves that day; but Antony cared so little for the order, that he washed his cloak, and stood next day upon a high place, and appeared to the Governor in shining white. Therefore, when all the rest wondered, and the Governor saw him, and passed by with his array, he stood fearless. He himself prayed to be a martyr, and was like one grieved, because he had not borne his witness. But the Lord was preserving him for our benefit, and that of the rest, that he might become a teacher to many in the training which he had learnt from Scripture. For many, when they only saw his manner of life, were eager to emulate it. So he again ministered continually to the confessors; and, as if bound with them, wearied himself in his services. And when at last the persecution ceased, and the blessed Bishop Peter had been martyred, he left the city, and went back to his cell. And he was there, day by day, a martyr in his conscience, and wrestling in the conflict of faith; for he imposed on himself a much more severe training than before; and his garment was within of hair, without of skin, which he kept till his end. When, then, he retired, and had resolved neither to go forth himself, nor to receive any one, one Martinian, a captain of soldiers, came and gave trouble to Antony. For he had with him his daughter, who was possessed by a devil. And while he remained a long time knocking at the door, and expecting him to come to pray to God for the child, Antony could not bear to open, but leaning from above, said, "Man, why criest thou to me? I, too, am a man, as thou art. But if thou believest, pray to God, and it shall come to pass." Forthwith, therefore, he believed, and called on Christ; and went away, his daughter made whole. Most of the sufferers, when he did not open the door, sat down outside the cell, and praying, were cleansed. But when he saw himself troubled by many, and not being permitted to retire, as he wished, being afraid lest he himself should be puffed up by what the Lord was doing by him, or lest others should count of him above what he was, he resolved to go to the Upper Thebaid, to those who knew him not. And, in fact, having taken loaves from the brethren, he sat down on the bank of the river, watching for a boat to pass, that he might embark and go up in it. And as he watched, a voice came to him: "Antony, whither art thou going, and why?" And he, not terrified, but as one accustomed to be often called thus, answered when he heard it, "Because the crowds will not let me be at rest; therefore am I minded to go up to the Upper Thebaid, on account of the many annoyances which befall me; and above all, because they ask of me things beyond my strength." And the voice said to him, "Even if thou goest up to the Thebaid, even if, as thou art minded to do, thou goest down to the cattle pastures,[65] thou wilt have to endure more; but if thou wilt really be at rest, go now into the inner desert." And when Antony said, "Who will show me the way, for I have not tried it?" forthwith he was shown Saracens who were going to journey that road. So, going to them, and drawing near them, Antony asked leave to depart with them into the desert. They willingly received him; and, journeying three days and three nights with them, he came to a very high mountain;[66] and there was water under the mountain, clear, sweet, and very cold, and a plain outside; and a few neglected date-palms. Then Antony, as if stirred by God, loved the spot. Having received bread from those who journeyed with him, he remained alone in the mount, no one else being with him. For he recognized that place as his own home, and kept it thenceforth. And the Saracens themselves seeing Antony's readiness, came that way on purpose, and joyfully brought him loaves; and he had, too, the solace of the dates, which were then small and paltry. But after this, the brethren, having found out the spot, like children remembering their father, were anxious to send things to him; but Antony saw that, in bringing him bread, some were put to trouble and fatigue; so he asked some who came to him to bring him a hoe and a hatchet, and a little corn; and when these were brought, having gone over the land round the mountain, he found a very narrow place which was suitable, and tilled it; and, having plenty of water to irrigate it, he sowed; and, doing this year by year, he got his bread from thence, rejoicing that he should be burdensome to no one on that account. But after this, seeing again some people coming, he planted also a very few pot-herbs, that he who came might have some small solace, after the labour of that hard journey. At first, however, the wild beasts in the desert, coming on account of the water, often hurt his crops and his tillage; but he, gently laying hold of one of them, said to them all, "Why do you hurt me, who have not hurt you? Depart, and, in the name of the Lord, never come near this place." And from that time forward, as if they were afraid of his command, they never came near the place. So he was there alone in the inner mountain, having leisure for prayer and for training. But the brethren who ministered to him asked him that they might bring him olives, and pulse, and oil every month; for, after all, he was old. Being once asked by the monks to come down to them, and to visit them and their places, he journeyed with the monks who came for him. A camel carried their loaves and their water, for that desert is all dry, and there is no drinkable water except in that mountain where his cell is. But when the water failed on the journey, and the heat was most intense, they all began to be in danger; for finding no water, they could walk no more, but lay down on the ground, and they let the camel go, and gave themselves up. Then the old man, seeing them in danger, was grieved, and departing a little way from them, he bent his knees, and stretching out his hands, he prayed, and forthwith the Lord caused water to come out where he had stopped and prayed. Thus all of them drinking, took breath again; and having filled their skins, they sought the camel, and found her; for it befell that the halter had been twisted round a stone, and thus she had been stopped. So, having brought her back, and given her to drink, they put the skins on her, and went through their journey unharmed. And when they came to the outer cells, all embraced him, looking on him as a father. And there was joy again in the mountains, and comfort through their faith in each other. And he too rejoiced, seeing the willingness of the monks, and his sister grown old in maidenhood, and herself the leader of other virgins. And so, after certain days, he went back again to his own mountain. And after that many came to him; and others, who suffered, dared also to come. Now to all the monks who came to him he gave continually this command: To trust in the Lord and love Him, and to keep themselves from foul thoughts and fleshly pleasures; and not to be deceived by fulness of bread; and to avoid vainglory; and to pray continually; and to sing before sleep and after sleep; and to lay by in their hearts the commandments of Scripture; and to remember the works of the Saints, in order to have their souls attuned to emulate them. But especially he counselled them to meditate continually on the Apostle's saying, "Let not the sun go down upon your wrath;" and this he said was spoken of all commandments in common, in order that, not on wrath alone, but on every other sin, the sun should never go down; for it was noble and necessary that the sun should never condemn us for a baseness by day, nor the moon for a sin or even a thought by night; therefore, in order that that which is noble may be preserved in us, it was good to hear and to keep what the Apostle commanded: for he said, "Judge yourselves, and prove yourselves." Let each then take account with himself, day by day, of his daily and nightly deeds; and if he has not sinned, let him not boast, but let him endure in what is good and not be negligent, neither condemn his neighbour, neither justify himself until the Lord comes who searches secret things. For we often deceive ourselves in what we do. Giving therefore the judgment to Him, let us sympathize with each other; and let us bear each other's burdens, and examine ourselves; and what we are behind in, let us be eager to fill up. And let this, too, be our counsel for safety against sinning. Let us each note and write down the deeds and motions of the soul as if we were about to relate them to another; and be confident that as we shall be utterly ashamed that they should be known, we shall cease from sinning, and even from desiring anything mean. As therefore, when in each other's sight we dare not commit a crime, so if we write down our thoughts, and confess them, we shall keep ourselves the more from foul thoughts, for shame lest they should be known. And thus forming ourselves we shall be able to bring the body into slavery, and please the Lord on the one hand, and on the other trample on the snares of the enemy. This was his exhortation to those who met him: but with those who suffered he suffered, and prayed with them. And those who suffered he exhorted to keep up heart, and to know that the power of cure was none of his, nor of any man's; but only belonged to God, who works when and whatsoever He chooses. So the sufferers received this as a remedy, learning not to despise the old man's words, but rather to keep up heart; and those who were cured, learned not to bless Antony, but God alone. But when two brethren were coming to him, and water failed them on the journey, one of them died, and the other was about to die. In fact, being no longer able to walk, he too lay upon the ground expecting death. But Antony, as he sat on the mountain, called two monks who happened to be there, and hastened them, saying, "Take a pitcher of water, and run on the road towards Egypt; for of two who are coming hither one has just expired, and the other will do so if you do not hasten. For this has been showed to me as I prayed." So the monks, going, found the one lying dead, and buried him; and the other they recovered with the water, and brought him to the old man. Now the distance was a day's journey. But this alone in Antony was wonderful, that sitting on the mountain he kept his heart watchful, and the Lord showed him things afar off. And concerning those who came to him, he often predicted some days, or even a month, beforehand, and the cause why they were coming. For some came only to see him, and others on account of sickness, and all thought the labour of the journey no trouble, for each went back aware that he had been benefited. But how tolerant was his temper, and how humble his spirit! for though he was so great, he wished to put every ecclesiastic before himself in honour. For to the bishops and priests he bowed his head; and if a deacon came to him, he discoursed with him on what was profitable, but in prayer he gave place to him. He often asked questions, and deigned to listen to all present, confessing that he was profited if any one said aught that was useful. Moreover, his countenance had great and wonderful grace; and this gift too he had from the Saviour. For if he was present among the multitude of monks, and any one who did not previously know him wished to see him, as soon as he came, he passed by all the rest, and ran to Antony himself, as if attracted by his eyes. He did not differ from the rest in stature or in stoutness, but in the steadiness of his temper, and the purity of his soul; for as his soul was undisturbed, his outward senses were undisturbed likewise, so that the cheerfulness of his soul made his face cheerful. And he was altogether wonderful in faith, and pious, for he never communicated with the Meletian[67] schismatics, knowing their malice and apostasy from the beginning; nor did he converse amicably with Manichaeans or any other heretics, save only to exhort them to be converted to piety. For he held that their friendship and converse was injury and ruin to the soul. So also he detested the heresy of the Arians, and exhorted all not to approach them, nor hold their misbelief.[68] Being sent for by the bishops and all the brethren, he went down from the mountain, and entering Alexandria, he denounced the Arians, teaching the people that the Son of God was not a created thing, but that He is the Eternal Word and Wisdom of the Essence of the Father. Wherefore he said, "Do not have any communication with these most impious Arians; for there is no communion between light and darkness. For you are pious Christians: but they, when they say that the Son of God, who is from the Father, is a created being, differ nought from the heathen, because they worship the creature instead of the Creator." All the people therefore rejoiced at hearing that heresy anathematized by such a man; and all those in the city ran together to see Antony; and the Greeks,[69] and those who are called their priests, came into the church, wishing to see the man of God. And many heathens wished to touch the old man, believing that it would be of use to them; and in fact as many became Christians in those few days as would have been usually converted in a year. And when some thought that the crowd troubled him, he quietly said that they were not more numerous than the fiends with whom he wrestled on the mountain. But when he left the city, and we were setting him on his journey, when we came to the gate, a certain woman called to him: "Wait, man of God, my daughter is grievously vexed with a devil; wait, I beseech thee, lest I too harm myself with running after thee." The old man hearing it, and being asked by us, waited willingly. But when the woman drew near, the child dashed itself on the ground; and when Antony prayed and called on the name of Christ, it rose up sound, the unclean spirit having gone out; and the mother blessed God, and we all gave thanks: and he himself rejoiced at leaving the city for the mountain, as for his own home. Now he was very prudent; and what was wonderful, though he had never learnt letters, he was a shrewd and understanding man. When some philosophers met him in the outer mountain, and thought to mock him, because he had not learnt letters, Antony answered, "Which is first, the sense or the letters? And, which is the cause of the other, the sense of the letters, or the letters of the sense?" And when they said that the sense came first, Antony replied, "If then the sense be sound, the letters are not needed." So they went away wondering, when they saw so much understanding in an unlearned man. For though he had lived, and grown old, in the mountain, his manners were not rustic, but graceful and courteous; and his speech was seasoned with the divine salt. The fame of Antony reached even the kings, for Constantine, and his sons, Constantius and Constans, hearing of these things, wrote to him as to a father, and begged to receive an answer from him. But he did not make much of the letters, nor was puffed up by their messages; and he was just the same as he was before the kings wrote to him. And he called his monks and said, "Wonder not if a king writes to us, for he is but a man: but wonder rather that God has written His law to man, and spoken to us by His own Son." So he declined to receive their letters, saying he did not know how to write an answer to such things; but being admonished by the monks that the kings were Christians, and that they must not be scandalized by being despised, he permitted the letters to be read, and wrote an answer; accepting them because they worshipped Christ, and counselling them, for their salvation, not to think the present life great, but rather to remember judgment to come; and to know that Christ was the only true and eternal king; and he begged them to be merciful to men, and to think of justice and the poor. And they, when they received the answer, rejoiced. Thus was he kindly towards all, and all looked on him as their father. He then betook himself again into the inner mountain, and continued his accustomed training. But often, when he was sitting and walking with those who came unto him, he was astounded, as is written in Daniel. And after the space of an hour, he told what had befallen to the brethren who were with him, and they perceived that he had seen some vision. Often he saw in the mountain what was happening in Egypt, and once he told what he had seen, to Serapion the Bishop, who saw him occupied with a vision. For as he sat, he fell as it were into an ecstasy, and groaned much at what he saw. Then, after an hour, turning to those who were with him, he fell into a trembling, and rose up and prayed, and bending his knees, remained so a long while; and then the old man rose up and wept. The bystanders, therefore, trembling and altogether terrified, asked him to tell them what had happened, and they tormented him so much, that he was forced to speak. And he groaning greatly--"Ah! my children," he said, "it were better to be dead than to live and behold the things that I have seen shall come to pass." And when they asked him again, he said with tears, that "Wrath will seize on the Church, and she will be given over to men like unto brutes, which have no understanding; for I saw the table of the Lord's house, and mules standing all around it in a ring and kicking inwards, as a herd does when it leaps in confusion; and ye all perceived how I groaned, for I heard a voice saying, 'My sanctuary shall be defiled.'" This the old man saw, and after two years there befell the present inroad of the Arians,[70] and the plunder of the churches, when they carried off the holy vessels by violence, and made the heathen carry them: and when too they forced the heathens from the prisons to join them, and in their presence did on the Holy Table what they would.[71] Then we all perceived that the kicks of those mules foreshadowed to Antony what the Arians are now doing, without understanding, as brute beasts. But when Antony saw this sight, he exhorted those about him, saying, "Lose not heart, children; for as the Lord has been angry, so will He again be appeased, and the Church shall soon receive again her own order and shine forth as she is wont; and ye shall see the persecuted restored to their place, and impiety retreating again into its own dens, and the pious faith speaking boldly everywhere with all freedom. Only defile not yourselves with the Arians, for this teaching is not of the Apostle, but of their father the devil; barren and irrational like the deeds of those mules." All the magistrates asked him to come down from the mountain, that they might see him, because it was impossible for them to go in thither to him. And when he declined, they insisted, and even sent to him prisoners under the charge of soldiers, that at least on their account he might come down. So being forced by necessity, and seeing them lamenting, he came to the outer mountain. And his labour this time too was profitable to many, and his coming for their good. To the magistrates, he was of use, counselling them to prefer justice to all things, and to fear God, and to know that with what judgment they judged they should be judged in turn. But he loved best of all his life in the mountain. Once again, when he was compelled in the same way to leave it, by those who were in want, and by the general of the soldiers, who entreated him earnestly, he came down, and having spoken to them somewhat of the things which conduced to salvation, he was pressed also by those who were in need. But being asked by the general to lengthen his stay, he refused, and persuaded him by a graceful parable, saying, "Fishes, if they lie long on the dry land, die; so monks who stay with you lose their strength. As the fishes then hasten to the sea, so must we to the mountain, lest if we delay we should forget what is within." Another general, named Balacius, bitterly persecuted us Christians on account of his affection for those abominable Arians. His cruelty was so great that he even beat nuns, and stripped and scourged monks. Antony sent him a letter to this effect:--"I see wrath coming upon thee. Cease, therefore, to persecute the Christians, lest the wrath lay hold upon thee, for it is near at hand." But Balacius, laughing, threw the letter on the ground, and spat on it; and insulted those who brought it, bidding them tell Antony, "Since thou carest for monks, I will soon come after thee likewise." And not five days had passed, when the wrath laid hold on him. For Balacius himself, and Nestorius, the Eparch of Egypt, went out to the first station from Alexandria, which is called Chaereas's. Both of them were riding on horses belonging to Balacius, and the most gentle in all his stud: but before they had got to the place, the horses began playing with each other, as is their wont, and suddenly the more gentle of the two, on which Nestorius was riding, attacked Balacius and pulled him off with his teeth, and so tore his thigh that he was carried back to the city, and died in three days. But the rest who came to Antony he so instructed that they gave up at once their lawsuits, and blessed those who had retired from this life. And those who had been unjustly used he so protected, that you would think he, and not they, was the sufferer. And he was able to be of use to all; so that many who were serving in the army, and many wealthy men, laid aside the burdens of life and became thenceforth monks; and altogether he was like a physician given by God to Egypt. For who met him grieving, and did not go away rejoicing? Who came mourning over his dead, and did not forthwith lay aside his grief? Who came wrathful, and was not converted to friendship? What poor man came wearied out, and, when he saw and heard him, did not despise wealth and comfort himself in his poverty? What monk, who had grown remiss, was not strengthened by coming to him? What young man coming to the mountain and looking upon Antony, did not forthwith renounce pleasure and love temperance? Who came to him tempted by devils, and did not get rest? Who came troubled by doubts, and did not get peace of mind? For this was the great thing in Antony's asceticism, that (as I have said before), having the gift of discerning spirits, he understood their movements, and knew in what direction each of them turned his endeavours and his attacks. And not only he was not deceived by them himself, but he taught those who were troubled in mind how they might turn aside the plots of devils, teaching them the weakness and the craft of their enemies. How many maidens, too, who had been already betrothed, and only saw Antony from afar, remained unmarried for Christ's sake! Some, too, came from foreign parts to him, and all, having gained some benefit, went back from him as from a father. He was visiting, according to his wont, the monks in the outer mountain, and having learned from Providence concerning his own end, he said to the brethren, "This visit to you is my last, and I wonder if we shall see each other again in this life. It is time for me to set sail, for I am near a hundred and five years old." And when they heard that, they wept, and kissed the old man. And he, as if he were setting out from a foreign city to his own, spoke joyfully, and exhorted them not to grow idle in their labours, or cowardly in their training, but to live as those who died daily. And when the brethren tried to force him to stay with them and make his end there, he would not endure it, on many accounts, as he showed by his silence; and especially on this:--The Egyptians are wont to wrap in linen the corpses of good persons, and especially of the holy martyrs, but not to bury them underground, but to lay them upon benches and keep them in their houses;[72] thinking that by this they honour the departed. Now Antony had often asked the bishops to exhort the people about this, and, in like manner, he himself rebuked the laity and terrified the women; saying that it was a thing neither lawful, nor in any way holy; for that the bodies of the patriarchs and prophets are to this day preserved in sepulchres, and that the very body of our Lord was laid in a sepulchre, and a stone placed over it to hide it, till He rose the third day. And thus saying, he showed that those broke the law who did not bury the corpses of the dead, even if they were saints; for what is greater or more holy than the Lord's body? Many, then, when they heard him, buried their dead thenceforth underground; and blessed the Lord that they had been taught rightly. Being then aware of this, and afraid lest they should do the same by his body, he hurried himself, and bade farewell to the monks in the outer mountain; and coming to the inner mountain, where he was wont to abide, after a few months he grew sick, and calling those who were by--and there were two of them who had remained there within fifteen years, he said to them, "I indeed go the way of the fathers, as it is written, for I perceive that I am called by the Lord. Promise to bury me secretly, so that no one shall know the place, save you alone, for I shall receive my body incorruptible from my Saviour at the resurrection of the dead. And distribute my garments thus. To Athanasius, the bishop, give one of my sheepskins, and the cloak under me, which was new when he gave it me, and has grown old by me; and to Serapion, the bishop, give the other sheepskin; and do you have the hair-cloth garment. And for the rest, children, farewell, for Antony is going, and is with you no more." Saying this, when they had embraced him, he stretched out his feet, and, as if he saw friends coming to him, and grew joyful on their account (for, as he lay, his countenance was bright), he departed and was gathered to his fathers. And they forthwith, as he had commanded them, preparing the body and wrapping it up, hid it under ground: and no one knows to this day where it is hidden, save those two servants only. In art, S. Antony appears (1), with a hog which has a bell attached to its neck. Sometimes, however, S. Antony holds the bell. He was regarded as the Patron of the Hospitallers; and when ordinances were passed forbidding the poor from allowing their swine to run loose about the streets, as they were often in the way of horses, an exception was made in favour of the pigs of the hospitallers, on consideration of their wearing a bell round their necks. But it is possible that this did not originate the symbol, but that rather, on account of the hog being the symbol of S. Antony, the Antonine Hospitallers were allowed to preserve theirs, and that the hog represents the flesh which S. Antony controlled, and the bell is a common symbol of hermits; (2), he is represented with his peculiar cross. The cross of S. Antony is a crutch, or the Egyptian cross, like the letter T. S. SABINE, B. OF PIACENZA. (END OF 4TH CENT.) [Authorities: Roman Martyrology and the Dialogues of S. Gregory the Great, lib. III., c. 10.] S. Sabine or Savine, was of Roman origin; he was made Bishop of Piacenza in Italy, and was present at the great Council of Nicaea, and also at that of Aquileija. S. Gregory relates of him, that on one occasion the river Po had overflowed its banks, and was devastating the church lands. Then Sabine said to his deacon, "Go and say to the river, 'The Bishop commands thee to abate thy rage, and return into thy bed.'" But the deacon refused to go, thinking he was sent on a fool's errand. Therefore Sabine said to his notary, "Write on a strip of parchment these words, Sabine, servant of the Lord Jesus Christ to the river Po, greeting:--I command thee, O river, to return into thy bed, and do no more injury to the lands of the church, in the name of Jesus Christ, our common Lord." And when the notary had thus written, the Bishop said, "Go, cast this into the river." And he did so; then the flood abated, and the Po returned within its banks, as aforetime. After having governed his diocese forty-five years, he died on December 11th, and was buried in the church of the Twelve Apostles, but now known as the church of S. Savine, on Jan. 17th. S. MILDGYTHA, V. (ABOUT A.D. 730.) [Mildgytha, Mildwitha, Milgith or Milwith, as she is variously called, is commemorated in the English Kalendars.] Nothing more is known of S. Mildgytha than that she was the youngest sister of S. Mildred and S. Milburgh, and daughter of S. Ermenburga and Merewald, Prince of Mercia, who was the son of the terrible Penda, the great enemy of Christianity in Mid-England. Mildgytha, like her sisters, took the veil, and died a nun at Canterbury. [Illustration: The Chair of S. Peter in the Vatican.] [Illustration: S. PETER'S COMMISSION, "FEED MY FLOCK."] [Illustration: THE APOSTOLIC SUCCESSION. Jan. 18.] FOOTNOTES: [61] Vita, ex duobus veteribus MSS., Bolland. II. p. 83 [62] He is said to have been born at Coma, near Heracleia, in Middle Egypt, A. D. 251. [63] Seemingly the Greek language and literature. [64] A.D. 301. Galerius Valerius Maximinus (his real name was Daza) had been a shepherd-lad in Illyria, like his uncle Galerius Valerius Maximianus; and rose, like him, through the various grades of the army to be co-Emperor of Rome, over Syria, Egypt, and Asia Minor; a furious persecutor of the Christians, and a brutal and profligate tyrant. Such were the "kings of the world" from whom those old monks fled. [65] The lonely alluvial flats at the mouths of the Nile. "Below the cliffs, beside the sea," as one describes them. [66] Now the monastery of Deir Antonios, over the Wady el Arabah, between the Nile and the Red Sea, where Antony's monks endure to this day. [67] Meletius, Bishop of Lycopolis, was the author of an obscure schism calling itself the "Church of the Martyrs," which refused to communicate with the rest of the Eastern Church. [68] Arius (whose most famous and successful opponent was Athanasius, the writer of this biography) maintained that the Son of God was not co-equal and co-eternal with the Father, but created by Him out of nothing, and before the world. His opinions were condemned in the famous Council of Nicaea, A.D. 325. [69] _I.e._ those were still heathens. [70] Probably that of A.D. 341, when Gregory of Cappadocia, nominated by the Arian Bishops, who had assembled at the Council of Antioch, expelled Athanasius from the see of Alexandria, and great violence was committed by his followers and by Philagrius the Prefect. Athanasius meanwhile fled to Rome. [71] _I.e._ celebrated there their own Communion. [72] Evidently the primaeval custom of embalming the dead, and keeping mummies in the house, still lingered among the Egyptians. January 18. S. PETER'S CHAIR, _at Rome_, A.D. 43. S. PRISCA, _V. M., at Rome, about_ A.D. 50. SS. PAUL AND THIRTY-SIX COMPANIONS, _MM., in Egypt_. SS. ARCHELAA, THECLA, AND SUSANNA, _V., MM., at Salerno, in Italy_, A.D. 285. S. VOLUSIAN,_ B. C. of Tours, in France, circ._ A.D. 400. SS. LIBERATA AND FAUSTINA, _VV., at Como, in Italy, circ._ A.D. 580. S. LEOBARD, _H., Marmoutier, France, circ._ A.D. 583. S. DEICOLUS, _Ab. of Lure, in Burgundy, beginning of 7th cent._ S. FACE, C., _at Cremona, in Italy_, A.D. 1272. S. PETER'S CHAIR. (A.D. 43.) [All ancient Latin Martyrologies. The commemoration having, however, died out, it was restored by Pope Paul IV. The feast of the Chair of S. Peter is found in a copy of the ancient Martyrology, passing under the name of S. Jerome, made in the time of S. Willibrod, in 720.] It was an ancient custom observed by churches to keep an annual feast of the consecration of their bishops, and especially of the founding of the episcopate in them. The feast of S. Peter's Chair is the commemoration of the institution of the patriarchal see of Rome by S. Peter, the Prince of the Apostles. "This day," says S. Augustine (Serm. xv. de Sanctis), "has received the name of the Chair from our predecessor, because S. Peter, the first of the Apostles, is said on this to have taken the throne of his episcopate. Rightly, therefore, do the churches venerate the natal day of that chair which the Apostle received for the good of the churches." The ancient wooden seat of S. Peter is preserved in the Vatican. That S. Peter founded the church at Rome by his preaching is expressly asserted by Caius, an ecclesiastical writer born about A.D. 202,[73] who relates that he and S. Paul suffered there. The same is affirmed by Dionysius, Bishop of Corinth, in the second age.[74] S. Irenaeus, who lived in the same age, calls the Church of Rome "the greatest and most ancient church, founded by the two glorious Apostles, Peter and Paul."[75] Eusebius says, "Peter, that powerful and great Apostle, like a noble commander of God, fortified with divine armour, bore the precious merchandise of the revealed light from the east to those in the west, and came to Rome, announcing the light itself, and salutary doctrine of the soul, the proclamation of the kingdom of God."[76] And he adds that his first epistle was said to have been composed at Rome, and that he shows this fact, by calling the city by an unusual trope, Babylon; thus, "The Church of Babylon, elected together with you, saluteth you." (1 Pet. v. 13.[77]) S. PRISCA, V. M., AT ROME. (ABOUT A.D. 50.) [Roman Martyrology. She is often confounded with S. Priscilla mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles, the wife of Aquila, but called Prisca in the second epistle of Paul to Timothy. What adds to the confusion is, that S. Prisca is said in her Acts to have suffered under Claudius, but whether Claudius, who reigned from 41-54, or the second Claudius, who reigned from 263 to 270, is not stated; but it seems probable that it was under the first Claudius.[78] The Acts of S. Prisca are a forgery, and deserve no confidence. The following account is taken from the Martyrologies.] S. Prisca, a maiden of consular birth, being accused of Christianity, at the age of thirteen, was ordered by the Emperor Claudius to sacrifice to idols. On her steadfastly refusing, she was beaten with the hand and cast into prison. On the morrow she was again urged to sacrifice, but when she remained invincible, she was beaten with rods, and then taken back to prison. The third day she was exposed to a lion, which however crouched at her feet, doing her no injury. Then, having been tortured on the little horse, with hooks and pincers, she was led outside of the city, and was decapitated. An eagle is said to have defended her body from dogs, till Christians came and buried it. SS. PAUL AND THIRTY-SIX COMPANIONS, MM. IN EGYPT. (DATE UNCERTAIN.) [From the ancient Acts in Bollandus and Ruinart.] In Egypt thirty-seven Christian soldiers entered into a zealous confederacy to spread the Gospel throughout the country. Their leader was one Paul. They divided themselves into four companies. Paul and nine others went eastwards. Recumbus, with eight more, went to the north; Theonas, with the like number, to the south; and Popias, with the remainder, to the west. The Governor of Egypt, alarmed at the report he heard of this confederacy, sent troops to apprehend them, and when they were brought before him he ordered them to instant execution; those who went to the east and south, to be burnt; those who went to the north to be beheaded, and those who travelled west to be crucified. They suffered on the 18th January, but in what year is not mentioned. SS. ARCHELAA, THECLA, AND SUSANNA, VV., MM. AT SALERNO. (ABOUT A.D. 285.) [The Acts of these martyrs constitute the lections for this day in the Salerno Breviary.] Archelaa, a virgin consecrated to God, during the persecution of Diocletian, took refuge with two maidens, Thecla and Susanna, in a private house outside the walls of Nola, in Campania, hoping to remain unnoticed till the storm was passed. But Leontius, Governor of Salerno, having heard that they were Christians, ordered them to be brought before him. Archelaa was exposed to lions, but was unhurt; then the inhuman judge ordered boiling oil and pitch to be poured over her naked body. In her agony, she spread her hands to heaven, and cried: "Look, O Lord, on us, and be mindful of thy servants. Extinguish the fire which consumes me, and cool my tortured body, refreshing me after the wounds the wicked one has dealt me!" Then a sudden sunbeam shot from between the clouds upon her, and a voice was heard, "O Martyr, fear not! A crown is laid up for thee in heaven. Fear not, I am with thee, and I will give thee refreshment and succour." Then Leontius ordered Archelaa, Thecla, and Susanna to have their heads smitten off with the executioner's sword. S. LEOBARD, H., AT MARMOUTIER. (ABOUT A.D. 583.) [Gallican Martyrologies. Authority: the life of S. Leobard, written by his friend, S. Gregory of Tours.] Leobard was the son of noble parents in Auvergne. The youth loved study and prayer. On reaching his majority, his father urged him to marry, but the young man, having no wish to take to himself a wife, refused. The father, however, pressed him so strongly, that at last he consented to be betrothed. "Then," says S. Gregory, "the ring, the kiss, and the shoe were given, and the betrothal feast was kept." But Leobard lost his father shortly after, and taking the betrothal gifts, he rode to his brother's house, to make them over to him. He found his brother so drunk that he did not even invite him to stay the night with him, so Leobard tied up his horse, and crept into a hay loft and slept there. But in the middle of the night he woke, and his mind turned to the importance of saving his soul, and of striving to be like Christ. Then he resolved to renounce the world wholly; but first to seek counsel at the tomb of S. Martin at Tours. From Tours he went to Marmoutier, and joined himself to a hermit named Alaric, who spent his time in making parchment and writing out Holy Scripture. Leobard lived in a cave, which he dug out of the rock, enlarging it and improving it as he saw fitting; and here he spent twenty-two years in prayer and study and writing, and in labour with his hands. He was frequently visited by S. Gregory of Tours, who was his personal friend. On a Sunday, being very ill, he said to him who ministered to him in his sickness, "Prepare me some food." "It is ready, sir," answered the servant shortly after. "Go forth," said the hermit, "and see if the people are returning from mass." And this he said because he knew that his hour was come, and he desired to be alone with God when he migrated. So the servant went out and looked towards the church, and waited, and presently he returned to say that he saw the congregation drifting homewards, then he saw his master lying dead upon the ground, and he, too, was going home. S. DEICOLUS, AB. OF LURE. (BEGINNING OF 7TH CENT.) [Deicolus, in Irish _Deichul_, in French _Déel_, _Dèlé_, _Dielf_, _Dieu_, or _Diel_, is commemorated on this day in the Roman Martyrology and in the Anglican Kalendars. His translation is observed on Feb. 15th or Nov. 21st. His life was written by an anonymous author about the year 700.] Deicolus quitted Ireland, his native country, with S. Columbanus, and lived with him, first in the kingdom of the East Angles, and afterwards at Luxeuil, the great monastery he founded in France. When S. Columbanus was expelled by the fierce Queen Brunehaut and her son Thierri, King of Burgundy, Deicolus followed him, but his strength failing him, he was unable to continue in the companionship of the energetic and active Columbanus; therefore, falling at the feet of his superior, he besought his permission to retire to some solitude where he could serve God in tranquillity. Then Columbanus, compassionating the exhaustion of his companion, said in a fatherly tone, "God Almighty, out of love to whom thou didst leave thy country, and hast ever obeyed me, make us together to rejoice in the presence of His Majesty." And when they had long clasped each other, and had shed many tears, then the abbot blessed his follower with these words, "The Lord give thee blessing out of Zion, and make thee to see Jerusalem in prosperity all thy life long." Then he hastily tore himself away weeping, and Deicolus remained alone in Burgundy. And after he had knelt down and commended himself to God, he turned and went through the wild tangled thicket and waste lands, seeking where he might settle. But the country was a wilderness without habitation. Then, by chance, he lighted on a swineherd, who was feeding pigs on acorns in the forest; who was much surprised to see a stranger. But Deicolus said, "Fear not, my brother, I am a monk. And now I beseech thee, show me a commodious spot where I may settle." Then the swineherd mused and said, "There is no such place in this wilderness, save a little lake we call Luthra, with fresh springs." And when Deicolus urged him to conduct him thither, the swineherd said, "I cannot do so, for I shall lose my hogs if I leave them without a keeper." But Deicolus took his staff, and planted it in the ground, and said, "Be without fear, my staff shall be thy substitute, and the swine will not stray till thou returnest." Then the pigwarden believed the word of the man of God, and he left his swine, and guided Deicolus to the place called Luthra; and there was a little chapel, dedicated to S. Martin, built by a gentleman named Weifhardt, where service was occasionally performed by his chaplain.[79] Now Deicolus was pleased with the place, and he dwelt in the forest, and every day he visited the little chapel and opened the door and went in, and there he prayed. But the priest who served that chapel was very wroth, and he spoke to the people, saying, "There is a man, a sort of hermit, who haunts the woods, and he intrudes on this chapel, and uses it, as if it were his own private property. If he be caught here by me, I swear that I will beat him well." Then the people choked the windows and door with brambles and thorns, to prevent the ingress of the hermit. Nevertheless, regardless of the impediment, he came as usual. So the priest complained to Weifhardt, who flew into a rage, and ordered his servants to scour the woods for Deicolus, and when they had caught him, savagely to maltreat him. All which they obeyed. But shortly after, the gentleman fell sick of a most painful disorder, and when his wife, Berthilda, thought that he must die, she considered that perhaps the disease was sent in punishment for the injury done to the hermit. Therefore she bade her servants find him and bring to the sick-bed. Now when Deicolus heard that Weifhardt was grievously tormented, mindful of the command of Christ, to return good for evil, he hasted and went to the castle of the gentleman, and entered the room. And as the day was hot, and he had walked fast, he plucked off his mantle, for he was heated. Then the servants ran to take it from him, but Deicolus exclaimed, "On him who serves God the elements attend, and he needeth not the assistance of man." Then, seeing a sunbeam shot through the window, he cast his mantle upon it, and it rested on the sunbeam.[80] And when he had prayed, the Lord healed the gentleman; and Berthilda gave Deicolus the farm of Luthra, and the little chapel, and the wood adjoining. Then the hermit walked round the land given him, and he rejoiced and cried, "This shall be thy rest for ever; here shalt thou dwell, for thou hast a delight therein." Now it happened one day, as he sat reading in his cell, that King Clothaire II. was hunting in the forest, and his dogs pursued a wild boar, and when the beast was hard pressed, it rushed into the oratory of Deicolus, covered with foam. Thereupon the hermit extended his hand, and laid it on the boar, and said, "Believe me, because thou hast taken refuge in the love of the brethren, thy life shall be spared to-day." Then the hunters came up, with the hounds, and they found the boar lying panting before the altar, and the man of God standing at the door to protect the beast. So the King asked Deicolus who he was, and whence he came, and when the hermit had told him that he was the disciple of Columbanus, who had promised to him in old times that he should reign over three kingdoms, which now had come to pass, he gave to Deicolus the game in the wood and the fish in the waters, and some vineyards. So Deicolus gathered brethren, and built a monastery. And after a time the abbot Deicolus became desirous of visiting Rome, so he went with some of his brethren, and obtained a charter from the Pope, conferring privileges on his monastery. After his return he remained some years governing his monks, ever cheerful and of amiable disposition; the joy and peace of his soul beamed in his countenance. S. Columbanus once said to him in his youth, "Deicolus, why art thou always smiling?" He answered in simplicity, "Because no one can take my God from me." The year of his death is not known with certainty. It was on the 18th January that he heard God's call to depart. Then he took the Holy Sacrament, and after having communicated himself, he kissed all the brethren, and when he had kissed the last he fell asleep. [Illustration: Baptism and Confirmation, from a Painting in the Catacombs.] FOOTNOTES: [73] Euseb. Hist. Eccl., lib. II. c. 25. [74] Euseb. lib. II. c. 25. [75] Lib. III. c. 3. [76] Euseb. lib. II. c. 14. [77] Ibid. c. 15. [78] That Claudius I. did persecute the Church appears from Acts xviii. 2. Why Alban Butler should give S. Prisca the date 275, after the death of the second Claudius, when all notices of her are unanimous in saying she suffered under Claudius I., I am at a loss to conjecture. [79] Lure is in the diocese of Besançon, among the Vosges mountains, between Vesoul and Belfort. [80] A similar story is told of S. Goar (July 6th), S. Florence (Nov. 7th), S. Amabilis (Oct. 19th), S. Cuthman (Feb. 8th), S. David, abbot in Sweden (July 15th), S. Hildevert, B. of Meaux (May 27th), S. Robert of Chaise-Dieu, S. Cunegunda, S. Odo of Urgel, S. Leonore, S. Lucarus of Brixen, S. Bridget, B. Utho of Metten, and the Blessed Alruna of Altaich. I give it for what it is worth. The story is traditional, not having been consigned to writing for a hundred years after the death of S. Deicolus. January 19. S. GERMANICUS, _M., at Smyrna, in Asia Minor_, A.D. 161. SS. MARIS, MARTHA, AUDIFAX, AND HABAKKUK, _MM., near Rome_, A.D. 270. S. BASSIAN, _B. of Lodi, in Italy, circ._ A.D. 409. S. CATELLUS, _B. of Castellamare, in Italy_, A.D. 617. S. LAUNOMAR, _P., Ab. of Corbion, in France_, A.D. 593. S. REMIGIUS, _B. of Rouen, circ._ A.D. 771. SS. BLAITHMAIC, _Ab._, AND COMPANIONS, _Monks and MM., at Iona, in Scotland_, A.D. 824. S. CANUTE, _K. M., in Denmark_, A.D. 1086. _See_ July 10. S. WULSTAN, _B. of Worcester_, A.D. 1095. S. HENRY, _B. M., at Upsala, in Sweden_, A.D. 1150. S. GERMANICUS, M. (A.D. 161.) [Roman Martyrology, and those of Usuardus, Ado, Notker and that attributed to Bede, also the later ones of Maurolycus, Bellinus and Galesinius, sometimes also on Feb. 18. Authority, the contemporary Epistle of the Church of Smyrna to the Church of Pontus, describing the martyrdom of SS. Germanicus, Polycarp, and others; quoted by Eusebius, lib. IV. c. 15.] The Epistle of the Church of Smyrna, narrating its sufferings under the Emperors Marcus Antoninus and Lucius Aurelius, says:--"Germanicus, a noble youth, was particularly pre-eminent as a martyr, for, strengthened by divine grace, he overcame the natural dread of death implanted in us; although the pro-consul was desirous of persuading him, and urged him from consideration of his youth, that, as he was so young and blooming, he should take compassion on himself. He, however, hesitated not, but eagerly irritated the wild beast let loose upon him, that he might be the sooner freed from this unjust and lawless generation." The Acts of this martyr have been lost. SS. MARIS, MARTHA, AUDIFAX AND HABAKKUK, MM. (A.D. 270.) [Modern Roman Martyrology, but the ancient Roman Martyrology commemorated them on Jan. 20th, so did that attributed to S. Jerome, and many others. Authority, the authentic Acts.] In the time of the Emperor Claudius II., there came a man from Persia, named Maris, with his wife Martha, and his two sons, Audifax and Habakkuk, to Rome, where they sought out the Christians who were in prison, and ministered to them. At this time Claudius had given orders for the suppression of Christianity. Two hundred and sixty Christians were condemned to work in the sand-pits on the Salarian way; but were afterwards brought into the amphitheatre, and were killed with arrows, and their bodies thrown on a pyre. Maris and his sons withdrew the bodies from the fire, and with the assistance of a priest, named John, they buried many of them in the catacomb on the Salarian way. And in the evening, passing under a house, they heard singing, and they knew that what they heard was a Christian canticle. Then they struck at the door, and those who were within feared to open, thinking it was the soldiers come to take them; but the bishop, who was with the congregation, went boldly to the door and opened it; then they knew that these were Christians who stood without; so they fell on their necks and kissed them. Now it fell out that Maris and his wife and sons were in the house of Asterius, a new convert, on a certain occasion, with Valentine the priest, when the soldiers entered the house and took all within before the Emperor, who remanded them to Muscianus, the prefect, to be by him sentenced according to their deserts. Muscianus ordered Maris and his two sons to be beaten, and then to be placed on the little horse and tortured with iron hooks and lighted torches, but Martha to stand by, and see her husband and children tormented. As they remained constant, he commanded their hands to be struck off. Then Martha stooped and dipped her finger in their blood, and signed her brow therewith. Exasperated to the last degree, the judge ordered Maris and the two sons to be decapitated in a sand-pit, and Martha to be drowned in a well, all which was carried into execution.[81] A pious matron, named Felicitas, rescued the bodies, and buried them in her farm. S. BASSIAN, B. OF LODI. (ABOUT A.D. 409.) [Roman and many other Martyrologies. Double feast with octave at Lodi. Authorities, his life by an anonymous author, of uncertain date, also the lections for this day in the Lodi Breviary. S. Ambrose, in his 60th letter, speaks of S. Bassian.] Bassian was the son of Sergius, praefect of Syracuse, a heathen. As a child he is said to have scrawled the sign of the cross in the dust, and was rebuked for so doing by his nurse. This set him wondering, and his mind turned to the religion of the Crucified, so that when sent to Rome, at the age of twelve, to be educated in the liberal arts, he sought out those who reverenced that sign which his nurse had forbidden him to scribble. A priest, named Gordian, instructed the lad in the Christian faith, and finally baptized him. As soon as his father heard of his conversion, he sent orders to have him brought home at once. Then Bassian, fearing the result, should he be re-conducted to Syracuse, ran away to Ravenna. On his way occurred one of those simple and touching incidents which abound in the lives of the saints, and which in spite of repetition, must be related. A stag with her two fawns bounded into the road, the hunters were in pursuit, the stag was not willing to desert her little ones, and they were too young to make good their escape. Seeing the distress of the mother, Bassian called to her, and she came to him with her fawns, and licked his feet, as he caressed her dappled hide. Soon after the hunters came up, and one more impetuous than the rest, attempted to take the stag. Then Bassian threw his arms round her neck, and called on God to protect her. Instantly the man, whose anger had flamed up at the resistance offered him, fell in an apoplectic fit; and when he recovered, withdrew in fear, without injuring the stag. In the reign of Valerian, Bassian was elected Bishop of Lodi, and ruled the diocese with zeal and discretion. He built in his Cathedral city the church of the Twelve Apostles, and S. Ambrose assisted in its dedication. Bassian was with S. Ambrose when he died. S. LAUNOMAR, AB. OF CORBION. (A.D. 593.) [S. Launomar, called in French _Laumer_ or _Lomer_, is commemorated in the Gallican Martyrologies. His life was written by one who apparently knew him, as we may conclude from certain passages therein.] S. Laumer as a boy kept his father's sheep near Chartres; afterwards, having learned his letters, he heard the call of God, and gave himself up to his service. He was ordained priest, and entering a monastery, was appointed steward. However, such a life did not suit him, and he retired into the forest, escaping from the monastery one stormy night, when all the brethren were asleep, taking in his hand nothing save his staff. He took refuge in the depths of the forest, where he hoped none would find him, but his sanctity becoming known, disciples flocked to him. Two miracles occur in his forest life very similar to those related of other saints. One night as he prayed, the Prince of the power of the Air, hoping to frighten him, by leaving him in the dark, thrice extinguished his light, and thrice was it rekindled. One day he saw a hind pursued by wolves, he ordered the wolves to desist from pursuing the poor animal, which came and crouched at his feet, whilst he patted it. Then he gave the hind his blessing and dismissed it. When the number of his disciples increased, so that he felt his solitude dissolved, Laumer fled away again, and hid himself in the wood, where afterwards rose the monastery of Corbion, near Dreux. But a city set on a hill cannot be hid, his cell of green leaves and wattles soon became the centre of a colony of monks, and a nobleman whose land this was, gave it to him, that he might build thereon a monastery. One instance of the gentleness of S. Laumer deserves not to be passed over. During the night, some robbers stole a cow belonging to the monks. The brethren were in despair. The robbers however, had lost their way in the tangled forest, as they drove the cow away, and they wandered all night and the next day, unable to discover the road; when, as evening settled in, they saw the forest lighten, and they came out, driving the cow, upon the clearing of the monastery, and S. Laumer himself stood before them. They at once fell at his feet, asking his pardon, and imploring him to direct them aright; but he raised them, and said, "I thank you, kind friends, for finding and bringing back to me my strayed cow; you must be very tired and hungry, follow me." Then he led them into his hut, and set before them such things as he had, and they ate and were refreshed, and he set them on their right road, but of course, without the cow. SS. BLAITHMAC AND COMP. MONKS, M.M. (A.D. 824) [Irish Martyrologies. Authority:--The Acts of S. Blaithmac written in verse by his contemporary Walafrid Strabo, and the Irish Annals.] S. Blaithmac was a native of Ireland, son of Flann, perhaps one of the southern Niells, princes of Meath, the names of Flann and Blaithmac having been common in that family. He was heir to a principality, but he abandoned his prospects in this world to become a monk, and afterwards an abbot. Blaithmac had an ardent desire to visit foreign parts, but he was prevented by his friends and companions from leaving Ireland. At length he passed over to Iona, which was shortly after invaded by a party of Northmen. As he was anxious to receive the crown of martyrdom, he determined to remain there whatever might happen, and by his example induced some others to stay with him, advising those who feared death to take refuge on the mainland. While he was celebrating mass the Danes burst into the church, and having slaughtered the monks, demanded of the abbot where was the precious shrine of S. Columba. This had been carried off and concealed underground, where the abbot knew not. Accordingly he answered that he was ignorant where it was, and added that even if he had known, he would not have pointed out the spot to them. They then put him to death. The Ulster Annals give his martyrdom in 825-828. The Irish annals generally agree in fixing his death at 823 (A.D. 824). Mabillon was wrong in supposing it took place in 793. Blaithmac is derived from Blaith, a flower; hence his latinized name is Florigenius or Florus. S. WULSTAN, B. OF WORCESTER. (A.D. 1095.) [Anglican and German and Roman Martyrologies. Authorities: his life by Florence of Worcester (D. 1118),[82] and William of Malmesbury, written 47 years after the death of S. Wulstan; another in Roger of Wendover, and numerous notices in other old English historians. He is called variously Wulstan and Wulfstan.] S. Wulstan was born in Warwickshire of pious parents. His father's name was Ealstan, and his mother's Wulfgeova. Both his parents were so devoted to the religious life, that, by mutual consent, they retired into monastic houses. Inspired by such examples, but chiefly by his mother's persuasion, Wulfstan quitted the world whilst yet young, and took the monastic habit in the same monastery in Worcester where his father had devoted himself to the service of God. He was there ordained deacon, and then priest, by the bishop. Observing a very strict course of life, he soon became remarkable for his vigils, fasting and prayers. In consequence of his discipline of himself, he was first appointed master of the novices, and afterwards, on account of his acquaintance with the ecclesiastical services, precentor and treasurer of the church. Being now intrusted with the custody of the church, he embraced the opportunities it afforded him for being almost perpetually in the sacred edifice, spending whole nights before the altar in prayer; and when he was exhausted with fatigue, he lay on one of the church benches, and placed his prayer-book beneath his head as a pillow. After some time, on the death of the prior, Bishop Aldred appointed Wulstan to succeed him. As prior, he preached every Lord's Day to the people, with so great unction, that they were moved to tears. One of the monks grumbled, and said that Wulfstan forgot his place,--it was the office of the bishop to preach, and that of the monk to hold his tongue. Hearing this, Wulfstan said, "My brother, the Word of God is not bound." Although very abstemious and moderate in his diet, he had not refrained from meat, till one day that roast goose was being prepared for dinner, the fragrance filled the church, and Wulstan, who was at the altar celebrating mass, was so distracted with the delicious odour, for he was very hungry, as it was the late choral mass, that he could not collect his thoughts. Then, filled with shame, before he left the altar he vowed never to touch meat again, and he kept this vow to his dying day. On the elevation of Aldred, Bishop of Worcester, to the archbishopric of York, by unanimous consent of the clergy and laity in the election of a successor, Wulstan was chosen; the king having granted them permission to elect whom they pleased. It chanced that the legates from the Pope were present at the election, but neither they nor the clergy and people could persuade Wulstan to accept the charge, of which he declared himself to be unworthy. At last, being sharply reproved for his obstinate willfulness by Wulfsi, a hermit, and being strongly urged by S. Edward the Confessor, then king, he yielded, and was consecrated on the Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, 1062. As bishop, Wulstan maintained the same severity towards himself; every day he sang the late high mass; it being usual for the priests to take the choral mass by weeks, in turns, it being very trying, as the celebrant had to remain fasting till a late hour. Wulstan not only sang the high mass daily, but also all the canonical hours, and when he rode on journeys, he had his book open before him on the pommel of his saddle, and he chanted aloud the psalms of David. As the old church and monastic buildings reared by S. Oswald were being demolished, to make way for more splendid edifices, Wulstan stood one day, and looked at the roofless church, and the walls that were being torn down, and his eyes filled with tears. "Why should you weep," said a monk, standing by; "you should rather laugh, to see the meanness of the first house swept away, to make room for a glorious second one." "No," answered Wulstan, "I see nothing to rejoice over in the demolition of the work of our Saints. True, they knew not how to rear a stately building; but under a mean roof, they offered the adorable sacrifice to God with great devotion, and set saintly examples to their flock; and we--we collect and carve the stones of the material temple, and neglect the edification of that which is spiritual--the souls of men." Below him in church sat a curly-headed choir boy. One day the bishop bent down, and laying his hand on the glossy curls, said, "All these will fall off one day!" Then the boy in alarm, turned round and said, "Oh, save my curls for me!" "My child, do not fear, as long as I live you shall retain your abundant hair." And so he did, for many long years, till Wulstan died, and then, says the chronicler who records this strange little incident, his hair came off as the bishop had foretold.[83] When William the Conqueror established himself in England, he not only gave the lands to his Norman nobles, but also the bishoprics to his Norman clergy. "Wulstan is a fool, he cannot speak French!" said William, and he ordered Lanfranc, his Norman Archbishop of Canterbury, to depose the plain Saxon Bishop of Worcester, on the charge of ignorance. A conclave was held in Westminster Abbey in 1074, to decide a dispute between Robert, Archbishop of York, and Lanfranc, Archbishop of Canterbury, as to the question whether the diocese of Worcester belonged to the northern or the southern province, and at the same time to deprive Wulstan. When called in question as to his slender attainments in learning, he rose and said, "We have not sung Sext yet. Let us chant the office first, and I will answer afterwards." But those around him remonstrated, saying, "Let us do our business first, and we can sing the service afterwards; we shall become objects of ridicule to the king and nobles, if we keep them waiting till we have done our office." "No!" exclaimed Wulstan; "the duty to God must be done first, and then we will consider the petty disputes of men." Having sung the service, he directly proceeded to the council chamber. To his dependants, who were desirous of withholding him, and who could not be persuaded that their cause was not in danger, he said, "Know for certain, that I here see the holy archbishops, Dunstan of Canterbury and Oswald of York, defending me this day by their prayers, and they will darken the understandings of my gainsayers." Then he gave his benediction to a monk who could speak Norman French, but imperfectly at best, and ordered him to state his case for him.[84] There stood the grave long-bearded Saxon bishop arraigned for ignorance before the Norman king, and his smooth-shaven[85] Norman prelates. Wulstan, the representative of the people, Lanfranc of the nobles; Wulstan, the bishop of the conquered, and Lanfranc of the conquerors. When the poor Saxon peasants had come to him at Worcester, and had complained that these Norman invaders trampled down their corn, and robbed them of their cattle, and ground them down with taxes; "They are God's scourge, these Normans, punishing us for our sins, my children," said Wulstan. And now he was to be deprived of his office by these invaders, that a Norman might occupy his stool, and shepherd with his crook the Saxon bondsmen. The council decided, in accordance with the royal pleasure, that Wulstan was too ignorant to deserve to retain his see, and that therefore he must resign his pastoral staff and ring. The ring, the token that he was wedded to his diocese before God, that he said he would never resign, in life or in death. "I received this ring without coveting it, and I will bear it with me to my grave."[86] But the staff, the token of jurisdiction, that he could be deprived of, so rising from his place, with unruffled composure, and placid countenance, holding his staff, he said, "Truly, my Lord Archbishop, truly I know that I am unworthy of this honour, nor fit to bear this burden, nor sufficient to endure the labour. I knew this when the clergy elected me, and when the bishops urged me, and when my own master, King Edward, invited me. He, with the authority of the apostolic see, laid this burden on my shoulders, and ordered me to be invested with the episcopate, by the token of this staff. Now thou desirest of me this pastoral staff, which thou gavest me not; thou demandest of me the surrender of the office thou laidest not on me. I, indeed, am well aware of my ignorance, and yielding to the sentence of this holy conclave, I resign my staff--not to thee, but to him who gave it me." Saying this he went forth from the chapter house to the tomb of S. Edward the Confessor, and standing before the stone, he cried, "Thou knowest, O my Master! how reluctantly I received this burden, how often I fled away from it; how, when sought, that it might be imposed on me, I secreted myself. I confess that I am a fool, but thou didst constrain me. There lacked not the election of the brethren, the entreaty of the people, the will of the bishops, the favour of the nobles; but none of these things weighed with me like thy authority; it was thy will that bent mine. And now we have a new king, a new law, a new archbishop, who found new rights and declare new sentences. They convince thee of error, who commanded, and me of presumption, who obeyed. Therefore, not to them who demand, but to thee who gavest; not to them, fallible, walking in darkness, but to thee who hast been led forth into the clear light of very truth, and hast escaped out of this region of error and ignorance, to thee I resign my staff, to thee I surrender the cure of those thou didst commend to me, to thee I commit them in confidence, knowing well thy merits." Having said this, he slowly raised his hand a little, and said, "My lord and king, accept this, and surrender it to whom thou choosest!" Then he struck the staff into the sepulchral stone, and laying aside his pontifical habit, he seated himself, as a monk, among the monks. Was there ever a grander incident in English Church history? Was there ever a nobler speech uttered by an English bishop? Then all, surprised, saw that the staff stood in the stone; and one ran and told Lanfranc, but he believed it not, and bade Gundulf, Bishop of Rochester, to whom he had promised the bishopric of Worcester, to go and bring back the staff. So Gundulf went, but the staff was immovably imbedded in the stone. Then the archbishop and the king went to the tomb, and sought to wrench the staff from where it stood, but they were unable. Lanfranc at once turned, and coming straight down to where the monk sat, he bowed to him, and said, "Verily God resisteth the proud and giveth grace unto the humble. Thy simplicity was scorned by us, brother, but thy righteousness is made clear as the light. Our wisdom has been brought to naught, and thy ignorance has prevailed. Take then again that charge which we unadvisedly deprived thee of, but which we, by our authority and the judgment of God, commit to thee once more." But Wulstan hesitated; however, being urged vehemently by those who stood by, he went to the tomb again, and said:--"Now, my lord and king, to whose judgment I commended myself, and to whom I resigned my staff, show me what is thy pleasure. Thou hast preserved thine honour, thou hast made manifest my innocence. If thine old sentence stands, restore to me my staff; if not, yield it to whom thou wilt!" Then he put forth his hand, and touched the staff, and he removed it at once with ease.[87] To Lanfranc and Wulstan, acting conjointly, is due the cessation of the slave traffic in England. It was the custom of the English to sell slaves to the Irish, and this was subject to a tax which passed into the royal exchequer. "The credit of this action," says Malmesbury,[88] "I know not whether to attribute to Lanfranc, or to Wulstan, who would scarcely have induced the king, reluctant from the profit it produced to him, to this measure, had not Lanfranc commended it, and Wulstan, powerful through the sanctity of his character, commended it by episcopal authority." [Illustration: S. WULSTAN, BISHOP OF WORCESTER. From a Design by A. Welby Pugin. Jan. 19.] Having taken the oath of allegiance to William, Wulstan remained faithful. When, in the same year, 1074, some of the Saxon earls rose against the Conqueror, Wulstan and the abbot of Evesham, supported by the sheriff of Worcester and Walter de Lacy, prevented their junction, by raising their vassals and occupying the ford of the Severn.[89] In the Barons' revolt, 1088, "Bernard du Neuf-Marché, Roger de Lacy, who had lately wrested Hereford from the king, and Ralph de Mortimer, with the vassals of the Earl of Shrewsbury, having assembled a numerous army of English, Normans and Welsh, burst into the province of Worcester, declaring that they would burn the city of Worcester, plunder the Church of God and S. Mary, and take summary vengeance on the inhabitants for their loyalty to the king. On hearing this, the reverend father Wulstan, Bishop of Worcester, a man of deep piety and dove-like simplicity, beloved alike by God and the people he governed, faithful to the king as his earthly lord, was in great tribulation; but soon rallying, by God's mercy, prepared to stand manfully by his people and city. While they armed themselves to repel the enemy, he poured forth supplications in the impending danger, exhorting his people not to despair. Meanwhile, the Normans, taking counsel, entreated the bishop to remove from the church into the castle, saying that his presence there would give them more security, if they were in great peril, for they loved him much. Such was his extraordinary kindness of heart, that from duty to the king, and regard for them, he assented to their request. "Thereupon, the bishop's retainers made ready, and the garrison and the whole body of citizens assembled, declaring that they would encounter the enemy on the other side of the Severn, if the bishop would give them leave. Taking their arms, and being arrayed for battle, they met the bishop, as he was going to the castle, and besought him to grant their desire, to which he freely assented. 'Go,' said he, 'My sons, go in peace, go in confidence, with God's blessing and mine. Trusting in God, I promise you that no sword shall hurt you this day. Be loyal, and do valiantly for the safety of the people and the city.'" The victory was complete. The rebels were routed, and the king's liege-men and the bishop's retainers returned home in triumph, without the loss of a single man.[90] He died in the year 1095, on January the 19th, and was buried with his ring on his finger. "God suffered no man to remove from his finger the ring with which he had received episcopal consecration," says Florence of Worcester; "that the holy man might not appear to forfeit his engagement to his people, to whom he had often protested that he would not part with it during his life, nor even on the day of his burial." [Illustration: SS. Fabian and Sebastian. Jan. 20.] FOOTNOTES: [81] At Santa Ninfa, about thirteen miles from Rome. [82] Florence knew S. Wulstan personally, as appears from his account of his vigils. He says, "He sometimes went four days and nights without sleep,--a thing we could hardly have believed, if we had not heard it from his own mouth." [83] S. Wulstan sometimes joked; but the specimen recorded by Malmesbury is not striking for wit, nor for its reverence, wherefore I give it in Latin. Being asked why he wore lamb's wool garments in winter, instead of cat's skin like the other clergy he answered, "Nunquam audivi cantari Cattus Dei, sed Agnus Dei; ideo non catto, sed agno volo calefieri." [84] So far William of Malmesbury, who abruptly closes, saying that he will no longer torture the patience of his readers. What follows is from Roger of Wendover. [85] Dr. Rock: Church of our Fathers, II. p. 99, plate. [86] Roger of Wendover, and Capgrave. [87] This most striking incident is not mentioned by Florence of Worcester, or William of Malmesbury, but occurs in Roger of Wendover and Matthew of Westminster. [88] Chronicle, lib. III. [89] Florence of Worcester. [90] Florence of Worcester. January 20. S. FABIAN, _Pope and M., at Rome_, A.D. 250. S. SEBASTIAN, _M., at Rome_, A.D. 303. S. EUTHYMIUS THE GREAT, _Ab. in Palestine_, A.D. 473. S. FECHIN, _Ab., at Fore, in Ireland_, A.D. 665. S. MAUR, _B. of Cesena, in Italy, middle of 7th cent._ S. BENEDICT, _H., near Fiesole, in Italy_. S. FABIAN, POPE AND M., AT ROME. (A.D. 250.) [Roman Martyrology. Authorities: Eusebius, lib. vi. c. 29 and 39; the Liber de Romanis Pontificibus; S. Jerome, lib. de Eccles. Script. c. 54; a letter of S. Cyprian (55) to Cornelius, &c.] Saint Fabian succeeded Anteros in the see of Rome. It is said that Fabian had come to Rome out of the country, and, by divine grace, he was singled out in a very remarkable manner to be bishop. For, when all the brethren had assembled in the church for the purpose of ordaining him that should succeed in the episcopate, though there were many eminent and illustrious men present, yet no one thought of any but Fabian. They relate that a dove, suddenly fluttering down, rested upon his head, bringing up before their minds the scene when the Holy Spirit of old came down on the Saviour. Thereupon the whole body exclaimed with one voice, as if moved by the Spirit of God, "He is worthy!"[91] and without delay they took him and placed him upon the episcopal throne.[92] S. Fabian governed the Church of Rome for sixteen years. He is said by some to have converted and baptized the Emperor Philip. "Philip, after a reign of seven years," says Eusebius, "was succeeded by Decius, who, in consequence of his hatred to Philip, raised a persecution against the Church, in which Fabian suffered martyrdom, and was succeeded, as Bishop of Rome, by Cornelius."[93] Relics, in the churches of S. Martin de la Monte, S. Praxedes, a head and an arm in that of S. Sebastian, in Rome. In art, he appears with the pontifical tiara and a dove. S. SEBASTIAN, M., AT ROME. (A.D. 303.) [All the ancient Latin Martyrologies. The Greeks commemorate him on December 18th. The original Acts are not in our possession. What is regarded as the Acts appears to be a panegyric, falsely attributed to S. Ambrose, on S. Sebastian's Day. The incidents are no doubt taken from the original Acts, but the long sermons and theological instructions put into the mouths of S. Sebastian and Tranquillinus, are certainly oratorical compositions of the author who passes for S. Ambrose.] S. Sebastian was born at Narbonne, in Gaul, but his parents were of Milan, in Italy, and he was brought up in that city. He was a fervent soldier of Christ at the same time that he served in the army of the Emperor. He was so greatly regarded by the Emperors Diocletian and Maximian, that he was elevated to the command of the first cohort, for he was a man prudent, upright in word and act, faithful in business, fervent in spirit. He was enabled, by his rank and office, to be of service to those who were imprisoned for the faith of Christ. He relieved their sufferings, and urged them to constancy. Two brothers, Marcus and Marcellianus, had been accused of being Christians, and were expecting execution in prison, when their friends, admitted to see them, implored them with tears to save their lives by apostasy. They seemed to waver; they promised to deliberate. Sebastian heard of this, and rushed to save them. He was too well known to be refused admittance, and he entered their gloomy prison as an angel of light. Tranquillinus, the father of the two youths, had obtained from Agrestius Chromatius,[94] prefect of the city, a respite of thirty days for them, to try their constancy; and, to second his efforts, they had been placed in the house of Nicostratus, the keeper of the records (_primiscrinius_). Sebastian's was a bold and perilous office. Besides the two Christian captives, there were gathered in the place sixteen heathen prisoners; there were the parents of the unfortunate youths weeping over them, to allure them from their threatened fate; and there was the magistrate, Nicostratus, with his wife Zoë, drawn thither by the compassionate wish of seeing the youths snatched from their fate. Could Sebastian hope that of this crowd not one would be found whom a sense of official duty, or a hope of pardon, or hatred of Christianity, might impel to betray him, if he avowed himself a Christian? The room was illumined only by an opening in the roof, and Sebastian, anxious to be seen by all, stood in the ray which shot through it; strong and brilliant where it beat, but leaving the rest of the apartment dark. It broke against the gold and jewels of his rich tribune's armour, and as he moved, scattered itself in brilliant reflections into the darkest recesses of the gloom; while it beamed with serene steadiness on his uncovered head.[95] "O most happy soldiers of Christ, valiant warriors in the fight! are ye now, after having undergone so much that ye touch the palm, are ye now, I ask, about to withdraw from the fight and lay aside the crown, overcome by these blandishments? Let them see in you the fortitude of Christian soldiers, sheathed rather in fortitude than in armour of iron. Can it be that you will cast away the rewards of victory at the instigation of a woman? Can it be that half-conquering already, you will bow your necks to be trampled on by the deadly foe?" Words of reproach and threatening and promise poured from his lips.[96] The scene that followed baffles description. All were moved; all wept. Marcus and Marcellianus were ashamed of their late hesitation. Tranquillinus and his wife were convinced; the prisoners joined in the tumult of these new affections; and Sebastian saw himself surrounded by a group of men and women smitten by grace, softened by its influences, and subdued by its power; yet all was lost if one remained behind. He saw the danger, not to himself, but to the Church, if a sudden discovery were made, and to those souls fluttering in uncertain faith. Zoë knelt before Sebastian with a beseeching look and outstretched arm, but she spoke not a word, for, six years before, her tongue had been paralysed in a severe sickness, and she had not spoken since. Sebastian looked at her earnestly, and read in her signs, and the expression of her countenance, that she believed in her heart. Then he asked wherefore she spoke not, and it was told him that she was dumb. Then, raising his hand and signing her mouth with a cross, he said, "If I am the true servant of Christ, and those things are true which I have spoken, and thou O, woman, hast heard, may the Lord Jesus Christ, in whom I believe, restore the use of thy tongue, and open thy mouth, as he opened the mouth of his prophet Zachariah." Then suddenly the woman cried out:--"Blessed art thou, and blessed is the word of thy mouth, and blessed are they that believe in Jesus Christ, the Son of the living God." And when Nicostratus saw the grace of God revealed by the healing of his wife, he fell at the feet of Sebastian, and offered to break the chains off the hands and feet of the confessors, and let them go; but to this they would not consent. Then Nicostratus transferred them all, with Tranquillinus and his wife, to the full liberty of his house, after having obtained leave from Claudius the keeper of the prisons (_Commentariensis_.) Sebastian lost no time in putting them under the care of the priest Polycarp, of the title, or parish of S. Pastor, who diligently instructed them, night and day. In the meantime, Claudius, the gaoler, came to the house of Nicostratus, and said, "The prefect is much disturbed at my having allowed the prisoners to be in your house; and therefore he requires you to appear before him and explain the reason." Nicostratus at once went to the prefect, and told him that he had taken the Christian prisoners into his own house, with the purpose of moving them the more easily to apostasy. "You did well," said Chromatius, and he dismissed him. On his way home, the keeper of the rolls told Claudius the truth; and when he related how Sebastian had healed his wife, Claudius exclaimed in an agony of eagerness:--"Send him to my house, I have two lads, sons of my first wife, one dropsical, the other a poor wretched cripple. If he cured your wife, he can heal my sons." Then running home, he brought his two boys, one in each arm, to the house of Nicostratus, and introduced them into the company of the neophytes, and casting the boys in the midst, implored the disciples to recover his poor children, and declaring that he believed with all his heart. Then Polycarp, the priest, took the names of the whole company, they were sixty-eight in all, and he baptized them. Now when the two boys rose from the baptismal water, they were healed of their infirmities; and Tranquillinus, who had suffered excruciating torments from the gout, also felt that he was made whole. Chromatius, the prefect, was afterwards converted, and having resigned his office, retired into privacy. The care which Sebastian took of the Christian prisoners, and the efforts he made to stimulate their courage, could not long remain secret; and he was denounced to the Emperor Diocletian, who sent for him, and in a rage, exclaimed, "What! I have had thee about my person, and thou hast conspired against my safety!" S. Sebastian answered, "I pray daily for thy safety and for the prosperity of the state, to the God of heaven, for I reckon no succour can be got from gods of stone." Then Diocletian ordered him to be taken out into a field, and be shot to death with arrows. Therefore the soldiers placed him as their mark, and left him for dead, bristling with arrows. But a certain woman, named Irene, the widow of the martyr Castulus, finding that he still lived, took him to her lodgings, at the head of the great staircase of the palace, and there nursed him till he was convalescent. And one day, as he began to walk, the Emperor passed. Then he started out to the head of the stairs. He had heard the familiar trumpet notes, which told him of the Emperor's approach, and he had risen, and crept to greet him. [Illustration: S. SEBASTIAN. From a Drawing by Lucas Schraudolf. Jan. 20.] "Diocletian!" he cried out, in a hollow but distinct voice; "False are the words of thy idol priests, my sovereign, who say that we Christians are adversaries to the state; who cease not to pray for thy welfare and that of the realm." "What!" exclaimed the Emperor; "Art thou Sebastian?" "I am Sebastian, raised as from death to witness against thee for thy cruel persecution of the servants of Christ." Then the Emperor, in a rage, ordered him to be taken into the court-yard of the palace, and to be beaten to death with clubs, and his body to be cast into the sewer. And when all this had been done, a devout woman, named Lucina, by night rescued the body from the place where it had been cast, and buried it reverently in her own garden. A church was afterwards built over his relics by Pope Damasus. Patron of Chiemsee, Mannheim, Oetting, Palma, Rome, Soissons; of makers of military laces, of archers, makers of fencing foils. Relics, at Soissons, the head at Eternach, in Luxemburg, portions at Mantua, at Malaga, Seville, Toulouse, Munich, Paris, Tournai, in the Cathedral; Antwerp, in the church of the Jesuits; and at Brussels, in the Court Chapel. In art, can always be recognized as a young man, transfixed with arrows. S. EUTHYMIUS THE GREAT, AB. (A.D. 473.) [Greek and Latin, and Syriac Martyrologies. Authority, his life by Cyrillus, monk of his monastery, in 543, sixty years after the death of Euthymius; he derived much of his information from an old monk who had been the disciple of the Saint.] There was a man named Paul, with his wife Dionysia, at Melitene in Armenia, good Christians, loving one another, but childless. Then, with one consent, they entered into the church of the Martyr Polyeuctus, and abode there many days instant in prayer, that they might be given a son. And after this had continued some time, in a vision of the night, the martyr appeared to them, and said, "Your prayer is heard, now therefore depart in peace; and when the child is born, let him be named Euthymius, or the 'Well disposed.'" Now it fell out, that shortly after the child's birth, Paul died. Then Dionysia, the widow, took her babe, and went to her brother Eudoxius, the chaplain or confessor to the Bishop of Melitene, and gave the little boy to him, as Hannah presented Samuel to Eli, that he should minister before the Lord. After that, Dionysia was ordained deaconess, and in due course Euthymius received the sacred orders of lector, and sub-deacon, and finally was made priest, and appointed to the oversight of all the monasteries in the diocese. Euthymius often visited the church of S. Polyeuctus, and loving solitude, was wont to spend whole nights in prayer on a neighbouring mountain. But the love of being alone with God grew upon him, so that he could not rest, and at the age of twenty-nine, he secretly deserted his native place, and went to Jerusalem, where he visited the holy places; and then retired into the desert, near the Laura of Paran,[97] he found a cell in every way convenient, and there he abode. Now there was a monk near his cell, named Theoctistus, and him Euthymius loved greatly, for he was a good man, and full of the Holy Ghost. "The love of the same things," says his biographer; "and society in labour, united them so closely in the bond of charity, and to such an extent were their spirits blended in affection, that each was, as it were, planted in the heart of the other." After five years spent in Paran, Euthymius resolved, with his friend Theoctistus, to fly into a solitude, more remote. So they went away into the barren mountains, near the Dead Sea; and there, searching for a place where they might dwell, they discovered a ravine, down which a torrent poured, and in the face of the rock was a cave. Then they entered into it and there they abode, living on vegetables, and drinking the water of the brook. Now it fell out, one day, that some shepherds came that way, and ascending to the cavern looked in, and were frightened when they saw two men, very haggard, with long beards. But Euthymius bade them be of good cheer, for they were hermits who dwelt there on account of their sins. Then the shepherds noised it abroad, and many disciples came to them, and they built a monastery, and Euthymius appointed Theoctistus to rule over it; and then he retired, loving solitude, into a remote hermitage, whence he issued forth only on the Sabbath (Saturday) and the Sunday. He enjoined on the monks to be diligent in work, and never to allow their hands to be idle. "For," said he, "if men in the world labour to support themselves, their wives, families and children, how much rather we, who have the poor depending upon us." Having cured Terebon, the son of Aspebetes, of paralysis, which afflicted one side of his body, Aspebetes, chief of the Arabs in Palestine, desired baptism, and took the name of Peter. Such multitudes of Arabs followed his example, that Juvenal, patriarch of Jerusalem, ordained him bishop of the wandering tribes, and he assisted at the council of Ephesus against Nestorius, in 431. He built S. Euthymius a Laura on the right hand of the road from Jerusalem to Jericho, in the year 420. Euthymius could never be prevailed upon to depart from his rule of strict solitude; but he governed his monks by superiors to whom he gave directions on Sundays. "Do not suppose," said he to his monks, "that you come into the desert to leave temptation behind you." And then he related to them the following story. There was in Egypt a man afflicted with a very violent temper. So he ran away from his home into a monastery, where he thought he would be free from incentives to anger. But there he was frequently irritated by the other monks who, unintentionally, gave him annoyance. So he determined to escape wholly from the society of men, and then said he, I cannot give way, for I shall never be tempted. So he took with him only an earthenware bowl, out of which to drink, and he hid himself in a remote desert. Now, one day, he was fetching water from the spring, and he upset the bowl, and the water fell; then he dipped the vessel again, and as he was going, his foot tripped, and again the water was spilt; he dipped it once more, but his hand shook, and he overturned the basin a third time. Then, flaming into a furious passion, he dashed the bowl against a stone, and shivered it to fragments. And when his anger cooled down, he looked at his shattered bowl, and said, "Oh fool that I am! how can I escape the temptation which is in my nature! If I have not men to be angry with I rage against an earthen pot!" There was a man in the Laura, named Auxentius, whom the steward told to attend upon the mules, for "he was apt at mule-grooming." But Auxentius indignantly refused, saying, he came to the monastery to be a monk, and not an ostler. And when he constantly refused, on the next Lord's Day, the steward complained to Euthymius, who sent for the man. Then Euthymius said, "My son, it is necessary that some one of the brethren should attend to the stables. Why shouldst not thou do this?" "Because," answered Auxentius, "I don't like it." "Alas," exclaimed the abbot; "I see thou art not imitating Him who said, I came not to do mine own will, I came not to be ministered to, but to minister." When the monk still refused, Euthymius said sadly, "Well, go thy way, and see if self-will will make thee happy." And presently the man fell ill, and in his sickness his conscience smote him, and he sent for the abbot, and he said, "I was wrong, I will look to the mules." Then Euthymius healed him, and Auxentius did as was required of him. S. Euthymius showed great zeal against the Nestorian and Eutychian heretics. The turbulent Empress Eudocia, after the death of her husband, Theodosius, retired into Palestine, and there continued to favour them with her protection. Aroused by domestic affliction, the captivity of her daughter and grand-daughters, and the plunder of Rome, she sent to ask advice of S. Simeon Stylites. He answered that her misfortunes were the consequence of her sins, and especially of her having persecuted the orthodox faith; and ordered her to follow the direction of Euthymius. By the advice of S. Euthymius, she renounced Eutychianism, and embraced the Catholic communion. In 459, she sent word to Euthymius that she was coming to see him, and that she designed settling on his Laura sufficient revenues for its subsistence. He returned her answer that she need not do so, and that she must prepare for death. She obeyed, and died shortly after. One of the last disciples of our Saint was the young S. Sabas, whom he dearly loved. In the year 473, on the 13th January, Martyrius and Elias, two monks, to whom S. Euthymius had foretold that they should become patriarchs of Jerusalem, came with several others to visit him, and to conduct him to his Lent retreat in a solitary place. He said that he would stay with them all that week, and leave them on the Saturday following, meaning, by death. Three days after, he gave orders that a general vigil should be observed on the eve of S. Anthony's Day; on this he made a discourse to his spiritual children. He appointed Elias to be his successor, and foretold that Domitian, a beloved disciple, who had long ministered to him, should follow him out of this world, on the seventh day, which happened accordingly. Euthymius died on Saturday, the 20th of January, being ninety-five years old, of which he had spent sixty-eight in his beloved deserts. S. FECHIN, AB. OF FORE. (A.D. 665.) [Authority, a life written in the 12th century, from tradition. Like so many of these Irish lives which were handed down from generation to generation, it contains many improbabilities.] S. Fechin was abbot of Foure, in West Meath, where he governed three hundred monks. He is said to have pitied the monks engaged in grinding their corn in querns, he therefore brought water from a marsh to the monastery, by cutting a tunnel through the rock, and then established a water mill. Of this Giraldus Cambrensis relates the following:--There is a mill at Foure, which S. Fechin made most miraculously with his own hands, in the side of a certain rock. No women are allowed to enter either this mill or the church of the saint; and the mill is held in as much reverence by the natives as any of the churches dedicated to him.[98] The Saint finding a poor leper, full of sores one day, took him to the Queen, and bade her minister to him as to Christ. She bravely overcame her repugnance, and tended him with gentle care.[99] Fechin was the son of Coelcharna, descendant of Eochad Fionn, brother to the famous king Conn of the Hundred Battles, and his mother Lassair was of the royal blood of Munster. When fit to be sent to school he was placed under S. Nathy of Achonry. Having finished his studies he was ordained priest, and retired to a solitary place at Fore in Westmeath, there to live as a hermit. But he was followed by many disciples, and Fore became a monastery of three hundred monks. He also established a religious house in the island of Immagh, near the coast of Galway. The inhabitants were then pagans, but Fechin and his monks converted them. His influence was very great with the kings and princes of his age. He died of a dreadful pestilence which swept Ireland in A.D. 665. [Illustration: The Peacock as a Christian Emblem.] FOOTNOTES: [91] This was the common acclamation at the election of bishops, of which we have many examples in Philostorgius, lib. ix. c. 10. And in the relation of things done at the election of Eradins (recorded in S. Augustine's Epistles), we read that they cried out twenty times, "He is worthy and just!" and five times, "He is deserving, he is worthy!" [92] Eusebius. lib. vi. c. 29. [93] Ibid. c. 39. [94] This name presents a difficulty, as it does not appear in the lists of the prefects of the city. Bollandus suggests, not very plausibly, that on account of his secession from the state religion, his name was expunged. [95] This is H. E. Cardinal Wiseman's elegant description of the scene, which accords exactly with the Acts. This incident is not due to his imagination, but occurs in the Acts in these words:--"Igitur, cum haec Beatissimus Sebastianus, indutus chlamyde, succinctus baltheo, ex suo ore proferret, subito per unam fere horam splendore nimio de coelo veniente illuminatus est." [96] In the version of the Acts by S. Ambrose, the whole lengthy exhortation is given. This can hardly, however, be original, but is the composition of the author who passes for S. Ambrose. [97] A Laura was a colony of eremites dwelling in separate hovels or caves, and differed in this particular from a monastery, where all dwelt under one roof. [98] Topography of Ireland, c. 52. [99] Here occurs a very favourite incident in the lives of these Irish saints; it shall be given in Latin. The same is told of S. Mochua and others. "Leprosus ad Reginam dixit: Nares meas in ore tuo suge, et phlegma inde extrahe. At illa viriliter agens, sicut imperavit fecit, et phlegma in linteum posuit; iterum quoque ei mandavit, ut similiter faceret, et id quod extraheret, S. Fechino reservaret." When the Queen looked into the handkerchief, she found two clots of solid gold, one of which she retained, the other she gave to S. Fechin. The incident I give as characteristic, rather than edifying. January 21. SS. FRUCTUOSUS, _B.M._, AUGURIUS, AND EULOGIUS, _DD., MM., at Tarragona, in Spain_, A.D. 259. S. PATROCLUS, _M., at Troyes, in France, circ._ A.D. 272. S. AGNES, _V.M., at Rome, circ._ A.D. 303. S. EPIPHANIUS, _B. of Pavia, in Italy_, A.D. 496. S. MEINRAD, _H. M., at Einsiedeln, in Switzerland_, A.D. 861. SS. FRUCTUOSUS, B. M., AUGURIUS AND EULOGIUS, DD., MM. (A.D. 259.) [Roman Martyrology, those of Usuardus, Bede, Notker, Ado, &c. The perfectly genuine Acts, which are extant, were read in the Church on this day, as S. Augustine testifies in his sermon for their commemoration.] Valerian and Gallienus being emperors,[100] Aemilian and Bassus consuls, on January 16th, being the Lord's-day, Fructuosus, the Bishop, Augurius and Eulogius, the deacons, were taken. Fructuosus was in bed, but hearing the tramp of the officers, he rose at once and went out barefoot.[101] To whom the soldiers said, "Come, the governor wants thee and thy deacons." Fructuosus said, "Let us go, but please, let me put on my shoes." The soldiers said, "As thou desirest, shoe thyself." As soon as they were come, they were put into prison. Fructuosus, certain and glorying in the crown of the Lord, to which he was called, prayed without ceasing. There were also with him some of the brethren, praying him to have them in remembrance. Next day, he baptized in the prison our brother Rogatian. And they were six days in prison, and then were brought forth. It was on the 21st January, and a Friday, that they were heard. Aemilian, the governor, said, "Let Fructuosus, the Bishop, Augurius and Eulogius be brought forward." According to custom it was said, "They are here." Aemilian, the governor, said to Fructuosus, the Bishop, "Hast thou heard what the Emperors have ordered!" Fructuosus, the Bishop, said, "I do not know what their orders are; I am a Christian." Aemilian said, "They have ordered that the gods be worshipped." Fructuosus said, "I worship one God, who made heaven and earth, the sea and all that therein is." Aemilian said, "Do you know that there are many gods?" The Bishop said, "No, I do not." "Then thou soon shalt," said the governor. Fructuosus, the Bishop, looked up to the Lord, and began to pray within himself. Aemilian said, "Who will be heard, who feared, who adored, if the gods and the countenance of the Emperor are despised?" Then he said to Augurius, the deacon, "Don't listen to the words of Fructuosus." Augurius answered, "I worship the Almighty God." Aemilian, the governor, said to Eulogius, the deacon, "Dost thou not worship Fructuosus?" "By no means," said Eulogius, "but I worship the same God as does Fructuosus." Aemilian said to Fructuosus, "Art thou a Bishop?" Fructuosus answered, "I am." "You were one," said the Governor, and he ordered them to be burnt alive. And when Fructuosus, the Bishop, and his deacons, were led into the amphitheatre, the people began to mourn for Fructuosus, for he was greatly beloved, not by the brethren only, but also by the heathen. For he was a vessel of election and a teacher of the people. And when some, in brotherly charity, offered them a spiced cup to drink, he said, "The hour of breaking fast is not yet come." For it was the fourth hour, though indeed they had solemnly celebrated the station (fast) on the fourth day (Wednesday) in the prison. Therefore joyously on the sixth day (Friday) they hastened to conclude this station (fast) with prophets and martyrs in Paradise. And when they had come to the amphitheatre, one, named Augustalis, a lector, ran to him, with tears, beseeching him to suffer him to unloose his shoes. But the blessed martyr said, "Stand aside, I can put off my own shoes." And when he had done so, our brother and fellow-soldier, Felix, went up to him, and took his right hand, asking him to remember him.[102] To him S. Fructuosus replied in a clear voice, so that all heard, "It behoves me to hold in mind the whole Catholic Church, extending from east to west." Then, as he was in the gate of the amphitheatre, ready to advance to his unfading crown, rather than to his pains, as the officers saw, and the brethren heard, and the Holy Spirit urged and spake, Fructuosus the Bishop, exclaimed, "A pastor will not be lacking to you, nor will the love and promises of the Lord fail, now or hereafter. This which ye behold is the infirmity of one hour." And when the bands wherewith their hands were tied had been burnt through, rejoicing, they cast themselves on their knees, sure of the resurrection, and having formed the sign of victory,[103] they poured forth their souls, praying to the Lord. The brethren, sad as if bereft of a shepherd, endured their solitude; not that they lamented Fructuosus, but rather they desired to be mindful of the faith and passion of each. When night came, they hastened to the amphitheatre with wine, with which to extinguish the charred bodies, which being done, they collected the ashes of the martyrs, and each carried away a portion. But neither in this did the marvellous works of the Lord fail; that the faith of the believers might be stimulated, and an example might be given to the little ones. After his passion, Fructuosus appeared to the brethren, and exhorted them to restore, without delay, what each had carried off of the ashes, out of love, that they might be laid altogether in one place.[104] Fructuosus in Spanish _Frutos_, in French _Fruteux_. Patron of Taragona. Relics, in the Benedictine monastery, near the Porto Fino, at Genoa; some portions, however, in the church of S. Montana, at Barcelona. S. PATROCLUS, M. (ABOUT A.D. 272.) [From the Acts published by Bollandus, an early recension of the original Acts.] When the Emperor Aurelian was in Gaul, he came to Troyes, and hearing that there was a Christian there, named Patroclus, he ordered him to be brought before him, when the following examination was had of him:-- _Aurelian_--"What is thy name?" He answered, "I am called Patroclus." _Aurelian_--"What is thy religion, or, what God dost thou worship?" _Patroclus_--"I adore the living and true God, who inhabits heaven, and regards the humble, and knows all things or ever they are done." _Aurelian_--"Give up this nonsense, and adore and serve our Gods, from whom you will derive honour and riches." _Patroclus_--"I will adore only the true God, who made all things visible and invisible." _Aurelian_--"Dispute of those things which you say are true." _Patroclus_--"Those things which I declare are true and probable; but I know why falsehood hates the truth." _Aurelian_--"I will burn you alive if you will not sacrifice to the gods." _Patroclus_--"I offer the sacrifice of praise, and myself as a living victim to God who has deigned to call me to martyrdom." Then Aurelian commanded--"Put fetters on his feet, and hot manacles on his hands, and cudgel him on the back, and then shut him up in a privy cell, until I make up my mind what is to be done with him." Then Patroclus was given into custody to one Elegius until the third day. And when he was brought forth again to be examined, Aurelian greeted him with, "Well, despiser, hast thou thought better of it, and art thou ready to sacrifice?" _Patroclus_--"The Lord delivereth the souls of his servants, and will not forsake them that hope in Him. If thou desirest anything out of my treasures, I will freely give it thee, for, believe me, thou art poor." _Aurelian_--"I, poor!" _Patroclus_--"Thou hast earthly wealth, but art poor in faith of our Lord Jesus Christ." _Aurelian_--"Enough of this. Our gods are mighty." _Patroclus_--"Who are they?" _Aurelian_--"First Apollo, the chief;[105] then Jove, the great god; and Diana, the mother of the gods."[106] _Patroclus_--"Why, how can they be almighty, when Apollo kept sheep for Admetus, and Jove died of a pain in his belly; and as for your Diana, every one knows she is the noon-tide demon." Then Aurelian, inflamed with rage, ordered Patroclus to be taken to a marshy place, and to be there executed. But when the soldiers led him to the bank of the Seine, which had overflowed, Patroclus escaped from them across the river, and took refuge on a hill dedicated to idol worship. Here a woman saw him, and she went straightway and told the soldiers. Then they came upon him, and smote off his head. [Illustration: S. AGNES. From the Vienna Missal. Jan. 21.] S. Patroclus in France is called _S. Parre_. He is one of the Patrons of Troyes. S. AGNES, V. M. (ABOUT A.D. 303.) [Roman Martyrology, modern Anglican Kalendar, and Greek Menaea. The Greeks commemorate her on Jan. 14th, 21st, and July 5th. Her Acts, attributed to S. Ambrose, are a rhetorical recension of her genuine Acts. S. Ambrose refers to S. Agnes in lib. I. De Virginibus, and in his Commentary on Ps. civ., and in lib. I. c. 4 of his offices. There is also a hymn of Prudentius, relating the Acts of this famous martyr. The Acts are sufficiently elegant to be really by S. Ambrose, and are far superior in style to those of S. Sebastian, falsely attributed to him.] S. Jerome says that the tongues and pens of all nations are employed in the praises of this Saint, who overcame both the cruelty of the tyrant, and the tenderness of her age, and crowned the glory of chastity with that of martyrdom.[107] S. Augustine observes that her name signifies chaste in Greek, and a lamb in Latin. She has been always looked upon in the Church as a special patroness of purity. We learn from S. Ambrose and S. Augustine, that she was only thirteen years old at the time of her death. She suffered in the persecution of Diocletian. Her riches and beauty excited one of the young nobles of Rome, the son of the prefect of the city, to attempt to gain her hand in marriage. To him she answered, "I am already engaged to one--to him alone I keep my troth."[108] And when he asked further, her answer was, "He has already pledged me to Him by his betrothal ring, and has adorned me with precious jewels. He has placed a sign upon my brow that I should have no other lover but he. He has showed me incomparable treasures, which he has promised to give me if I persevere. Honey and milk have I drawn from His lips, and I have partaken of His body, and with His blood has he adorned my cheeks. His mother is a virgin, and His father knew not woman. Him the angels serve, His beauty sun and moon admire; by His fragrance the dead are raised, by His touch the sick are healed. His wealth never fails, and His abundance never grows less. For Him alone do I keep myself. To Him alone in true confidence do I commit myself. Whom loving I am chaste, whom touching I am clean, whom receiving I am a virgin." The youth repulsed, and filled with jealousy against the unknown lover, complained to the father of Agnes, who was much disturbed, doubting whether she were mad, or had given her heart to some one without his knowing it. By degrees it transpired that Agnes was a Christian. Thereupon Symphronius,[109] the governor, sent for her parents, and they, alarmed for her safety, urged her to submit, and marry the young man. She, however, constantly refused, declaring that she desired to remain a virgin. "Very well," said the Governor; "then become a vestal virgin, and serve the goddess in celibacy." "Do you think," answered Agnes, "that if I have refused your living son, of flesh and blood, that I shall dedicate myself to gods of senseless stone?" "Be not headstrong," said Symphronius; "you are only a child, remember, though forward for your age." "I may be a child," replied Agnes; "but faith dwells not in years, but in the heart." "I will tell you how I shall deal with you," cried Symphronius. "You shall be stripped, and driven naked into a house of ill-fame, to be subjected to insult and outrage." Then the clothes were taken off the slender body of the girl, and she was forced out into the street. In shame she loosened the band that confined her abundant hair, and let it flow over her body, and cover her. "You may expose my virtue to insult," said she to the prefect, "but I have the angel of God as my defence. For the only-begotten Son of God, whom you know not, will be to me an impenetrable wall, and a guardian never sleeping, and an unflagging protector." And so it was. For when she was placed in the brothel, the room was filled with light, and an angel brought her a robe, white as snow, to cover her nakedness. And also, when the governor's son burst in at the door in tumultuous exultation, the angel smote him, that he fell senseless on the ground.[110] Thereupon there was an uproar, and the people said, she had slain him by her enchantments. But when he was come to himself he was ashamed, and the governor feared. Therefore he committed the sentencing of Agnes to the deputy, Aspasius, who ordered that she should be immediately executed. And all the people rushed after her, crying, "Away with the witch, away with her!" Then a fire was kindled, and Agnes was placed upon the pyre. But she, lifting up her hands in the midst of the fire, prayed, "O Father Almighty, who alone art to be worshipped, feared, and adored, I give Thee thanks for that through thy holy Son, I have escaped the threats of the profane tyrant, and with unstained footstep have passed over the filthy slough of lust; and now, behold, I come to Thee, whom I have loved, have sought, and have always longed for. Thy name I bless, I glorify, world without end."[111] And she continued, "So now I am bedewed with the Holy Ghost from on high; the furnace grows cold about me, the flame is divided asunder, and its heat is rolled back on them that quickened it. I bless Thee, O Father of my Lord Jesus Christ, who permittest me, intrepid, to come to Thee through the fires. Lo! what I have believed, that now I see; what I have hoped for, that now I hold; what I have desired, that now I embrace. I confess Thee with my lips, and with my heart, I altogether desire Thee. I come to Thee one and true God, who with our Lord Jesus Christ, thy Son, and with the Holy Ghost, livest and reignest through ages of ages. _Amen._" And when she had finished praying, the fire became wholly extinct; then Aspasius, the deputy, ordered a sword to be thrust into her throat. "But," said he suddenly, "why is she not bound?" The executioner turned over a quantity of manacles, and selected the smallest pair he could find, and placed them round her wrists. Agnes with a smile, shook her hands, and they fell, like S. Paul's viper, clattering at her feet.[112] Then she calmly knelt down, and with her own hands drew forward her hair, so as to expose her neck to the blow.[113] A pause ensued, for the executioner was trembling with emotion, and could not wield his sword.[114] As the child knelt alone, in her white robe, with her head inclined, her arms crossed modestly upon her bosom, and her locks hanging to the ground, and veiling her features, she might not inaptly have been compared to some rare plant, of which the slender stalk, white as a lily, bent with the luxuriance of its golden blossom. "And thus, bathed in her rosy blood," said the author of the Acts, "Christ betrothed to Himself his bride and martyr." Then her parents, having no sorrow, but all joy, took her body, and placed it in a tomb on their farm, not far from the city, on the Numentan road. But there being a great crowd of Christians following, the pagan mob and soldiers pursued them, and drove them away with stones and weapons. But Emerentiana, who was the foster-sister of Agnes, a holy virgin, though only a catechumen, stood intrepid and motionless by the tomb, and there she was stoned to death. After her death Agnes appeared in glory to her parents. From the heavenly regions Girt with heavenly legions, Eight days past, her home she sought; And a lamb, the whitest, Loveliest, purest, brightest, In her loving arms she brought. "These thou seest, my mother These, and many another, Are my blest companions now." Relics, in the church of S. Agnes, at Rome; portions at Utrecht; a few small particles at Rouen, in the church of S. Ouen; at Melun; in the Cathedral at Cologne; in the Court Chapel at Brussels; and in the Jesuit Church at Antwerp. In art, she appears (1) with a lamb, or (2) with an angel protecting her, or (3) standing on a flaming pyre, or (4) with a sword. S. MEINRAD, H. M. (A.D. 861.) [Authority, an ancient anonymous and perfectly authentic life in the library of the monastery at Einsiedeln.] About the year of grace 797, was born Meinrad, Count of Hohenzollern. He was born in that part of Swabia, then called Sulichgau, which comprised the valleys of Steinlach and Sturzel, and the towns of Rottenburg and Sülchen. Berthold, the father of Meinrad, had married the daughter of the Count of Sülchen, and lived with his wife in the strong castle of Sülchen on the Nekar. Meinrad lived at home till he was ten or eleven years old. At that time the island of Reichenau possessed a Benedictine monastery of great reputation. This island is situated in the arm of the lake of Constance, called the Zeller-see, and very fertile. The monks superintended two schools in this island, connected with their monastery, one for the boys who were in training to be monks, the other for the sons of nobles, who desired to live in the world. At the time that Meinrad entered the school, his kinsman, Hatto of Sülchen, was abbot. At this period the great lesson that the monks had to teach the Germans was, the dignity of labour. The Germans were a turbulent people, loving war, harrying their neighbour's lands, hunting and fighting, despising heartily the work of tilling the land, and tending cattle. The monks began to labour with their hands, and by degrees they broke through the prejudices of the time, and converted the Germans into an agricultural people. In 818, when Meinrad was aged 21, the first vines were planted in Reichenau, to become, to this day, the principal source of revenue to those to whom it belongs. The position of Reichenau, on the main road to Italy, gave it a special importance. Many foreign bishops, who, halting there on their journeys, had carried away with them a pleasant memory of that quiet isle in the blue lake, returned to it to spend their last years in peace. Thus the Bishop Egino retired to Reichenau, and built there, in 799, the church of Our Lady, at the western extremity of the island, which still exists. At the time of the consecration of this church, Meinrad was in the monastery school; this was in 816. Seven hundred monks, a hundred novices, and four hundred scholars assisted at the ceremony, and sang the grand psalms and _Coelestis urbs_ with wondrous effect. The time came for Meinrad to leave school and decide on his career. The voice of his heart called him to the service of God, and he prepared for Holy Orders. In 821 he was ordained deacon, and shortly afterwards priest. He was fond of study; but the book that most charmed his imagination was the account of the Fathers of the Desert, by Cassian. The forms of these venerable hermits in their caves seemed to appear to him and beckon him on. The voice which had called him to the priesthood said to him, "Friend, go up higher," and he took vows as a monk in the abbey of Reichenau, to his great-uncle Erlebald, now superior, on the resignation of Hatto in 822. He was then aged twenty-five. At the upper extremity of the Lake of Zürich was the little cloister of Bollingen, dependant on that of Reichenau. It contained a prior and twelve brethren, who had established themselves in this wild neighbourhood, lost, as it were, among the mountains, to become the teachers of a neighbourhood buried in darkness. They established a school for the gentry and also for the serfs, in which they taught the boys what was suitable for their different stations in life. Being in want of a master for this school, they sent to the abbot of Reichenau for one. His choice fell on Meinrad, who was at once despatched to the humble priory, situated on the confines of civilization, to which the mountains and dense forests seemed to say, "Thus far and no further shalt thou go." In his new situation, Meinrad drew upon himself general esteem and affection. His prudence in the direction of souls, his learning, and his modesty, endeared him to all. Nevertheless, from the moment of his entering into the priory, Meinrad had felt a yearning in his heart for a life more secluded, in which he could pray and meditate without distraction. About two leagues off, beyond the lake, rose Mount Etzel, covered with dense forest. Often from the window of his cell did his eyes rest, with an invincible longing, on the blue mountain. The desire became, at length, so uncontrollable, that he resolved to visit the Etzel, and seek among its rocks for some place where he might pass his days in repose. One day, accordingly, he took with him one of his pupils, and, entering a boat, rowed to the foot of the desired mount. A few hours after he was at the summit, and his heart beat with a sweet joy at the sight of a place to which his yearning soul had long turned. Behind him was a pathless forest of pines, inhabited by wolves, but he feared them not. He descended the hill by the side of Rapperschwyl, and arrived at the village, called afterwards Altendorf. He rested at the house of a pious widow, who received him hospitably. To her Meinrad confided his design, and asked her to minister to his necessities on the Etzel, should he retire thither. She readily promised to do so. Having thanked her, he returned full of joy to Bollingen. He asked the prior to give him his benediction and permission to accomplish his project. He, with regret, permitted him to respond to the call of grace, and Meinrad at once tore himself from his companions and pupils, and crossed the lake to the beloved mountain. This was in June, 828, when Meinrad was aged thirty-one. He took nothing with him save his missal, a book of instructions on the Gospels, the rule of S. Benedict, and the works of Cassian. Burdened with these volumes, he climbed the Etzel, and stood on a commanding point. At his feet and before him lay the blue lake of Zürich, its waters sleeping in sunshine; behind him was the gloomy horror of the forest. Beyond, the Alpine peaks wreathed in glaciers, glittering in the light, and around him a solemn silence, broken only by the distant scream of a magpie, or the creaking of the pines in the breeze. The first care of the new solitary was to provide himself with shelter against rain and storm. He collected broken boughs, and interlaced them between four pines that served as corner posts to his hovel, and roofed it in with fern. This was his first house; but shortly after, the widow, having heard that he had retired to the Etzel, built him a hut of pine logs, and a little chapel, in which he might offer the Holy Sacrifice. She attended to all his necessities, as she had promised, and Meinrad was now at the summit of happiness. Strange must have been those first evenings and nights in loneliness. There is a sense of mystery which oppresses the spirit when alone among the fragrant trees, that stand stiff and entranced, awaiting the coming on of night. To persons unaccustomed to the woods, few moments of greater solemnity could occur than those following the set of sun. A shadow falls over the forest, and in the deep winding tunnels that radiate among the grey, moss-hung trunks, the blackness of night condenses apace. Mysterious noises are heard; the rustling of large birds settling themselves for the night, the click of falling cones, the cry of the wild cat, or the howl of the wolf. The gold light, that all day has flickered through the boughs and diapered the spine strewn soil, has wholly disappeared, save that for a moment it lies a flake of fire on the distant snowy peak. Patches of ash-grey sky, seen through the interstices of the branches, diffuse no light. Perhaps an evening breeze whispers secrets among the pine-tops and pipes between the trunks, or hums an indistinct tune, pervading the whole air, among the green needle-like leaves of the firs. And then, when night has settled in, the moon shoots its fantastic silver among the moving branches, and draws weird pictures over the brambles and uneven soil. Branches snap with a report like a pistol, and voices of unseen birds and beasts sound ghost-like among the dark aisles of the labyrinth of firs. It is well to picture these surroundings, when we call up before us the figures of the old hermits. Their trials were not only of hunger, and thirst, and cold; there was the trial of nerve as well. In the forest cell, Meinrad disciplined his body by rigorous fasts, and his soul by constant prayer. By degrees, his cabin became a resort of pilgrims, who arrived seeking ease to their troubled consciences, or illumination to their dark understandings. Always united to God, always penetrated with the sense of His presence, he strove to know the will of God, and to submit his own will wholly to that. Seven years passed, and the number of those who visited him increased every day. Then, finding his solitude no more a solitude, he resolved to leave the Etzel, and bury himself in some nook far from the habitations of men. Behind the Etzel extended a vast forest untrodden by man, whose savage and gloomy loneliness attracted Meinrad. Whilst he was musing on his projected flight, some of his old pupils at Bollingen came, as was their wont occasionally, to visit their former master. Meinrad descended the mountain with them to the point where the river Sihl, after numerous windings in the forest, flows gently through an agreeable valley, and empties itself into the lake. The pines on its banks were reflected in the glassy water, and in its crystal depths could be seen multitudes of trout. The young monks desiring to have a day's fishing, Meinrad crossed the river, and entered the forest. He walked on silent and meditating, looking around him, in hopes of discovering some place suitable for the purpose that occupied his mind. After a walk of an hour and a half, in a southerly direction, he reached the foot of a range of hills which formed a semi-circle as far as the Alb. In this basin, enclosed within the arms of the mountain, wound a little stream over a bed of moss, from a spring beneath the roots of two large pines. To the south lay the valley of the Alb, blocked by the rugged snow-topped crags of the Mythen. This was just such a solitude as Meinrad had desired. He fell on his knees, and thanked God for having brought him to so pleasant a spot, and drinking for the first time from the fountain, he returned to his companions, who, having caught a bag full of fish, went back with him to his hermitage, and as evening fell, returned to Bollingen. Meinrad now prepared to leave the Etzel. He went to Altendorf to thank the widow who had provided for him, and then he departed, taking with him one monk of Bollingen and a peasant, to carry such things as would be necessary in the wilderness. As they descended the hill towards the river, the brother saw a nest of ravens on a branch; he climbed the tree, and taking the nest, brought it along with the two young birds it contained to Meinrad, who kept them, to be the companions of his solitude. A few paces above the spring, where there was a gentle rise, he decided should be the site of his habitation, and there accordingly he erected a simple hut of logs. Providence did not desert him. The abbess Hedwig, head of a small community of women at Zürich, undertook to minister to his necessities, in place of the widow of Altendorf; and from time to time she sent him food, and such things as be needed. He was now left in complete solitude, and often the temptation came upon him, as he lay shivering with cold in the winter nights, and the snow drifted about his cabin, to give up this sort of life, and return to the community at Bollingen or Reichenau. But he resisted these thoughts, as temptations of the evil one, with redoubled prayer and fasting. In this place he spent several years in perfect retirement, till a carpenter of Wollerau, coming there one day in quest of some wood, discovered his cell. After that, he was visited by hunters, and then, by degrees, a current of pilgrims flowed towards his abode, as had been the case on the Etzel. What added to this was the present of a statue of the Blessed Virgin and Child, made to Meinrad by Hildegard, daughter of Louis the German, who had been appointed by her father abbess of Zürich, in 853. This image speedily acquired the credit of being miraculous, and thus began that incessant pilgrimage which has continued for over a thousand years to the venerated shrine where it is preserved. Meinrad had spent twenty-five years in solitude; and his love for this mortified and retired life had grown stronger in his heart as he grew older. He was glad when winter, the frost, and the snow came to block the paths, and diminish the concourse of pilgrims; yet in spite of the rigour of the climate at that season, and the want of roads through the forest, he still saw many visitors, who came to confide to him their troubles, as children to a father, and to ask counsel of his prudence. There were also days in which he was alone, and, shut up in his log-hut, heard only the hissing of the wind among the trees, and the howling of the wolves, pressed by hunger in the forest; all was sad around the hermitage, the flowers, the grass, the little spring slept under the snow, spread like a white pall over dead nature. The two ravens, perched on a branch of pine which overhung the cabin door, uttered their plaintive croak. Meinrad alone was happy. He celebrated the Divine Mysteries, and holding in his hands the eternal Victim, offered himself, in conjunction with the sacrifice of Calvary; desiring earnestly that he might be found worthy to die the death of a martyr. His prayer was heard. During the last years of Meinrad's life, pilgrims laid presents at the door of Meinrad, and before the image of Mary. Those that served to adorn the chapel he kept, the rest he gave away to the poor. Two men, one from the Grisons, named Peter, the other a Swabian, named Richard, suspecting that he had a store of money collected from the pilgrims, resolved on robbing him. They met in a tavern at Endigen, where now stands Rapperschwyl, where they spent the night. Next day, January 21st, 861, long before daybreak, they took the road to the Etzel and entered the forest. For a while they lost their way, for the paths were covered with snow. However, at length they discovered the hermitage. The ravens screamed at their approach, and fluttered with every token of alarm about the hut, so that, as the murderers afterwards confessed, they were somewhat startled at the evident tokens of alarm in the birds. The assassins reached the chapel door. S. Meinrad had said his morning prayers, and had celebrated mass. The murderers watched him through a crack in the door, and when he had concluded the sacrifice, and had turned from the altar, they knocked. Meinrad opened, and received them cheerfully. "My friends," said he; "had you arrived a little earlier, you might have assisted at the sacrifice. Enter and pray God and His Saints to bless you; then come with me and I will give you such refreshments as my poor cell affords." So saying he left them in the chapel, and went to prepare food in his own hut. The murderers rushed after him, and he turned and said, smiling, "I know your intention. When I am dead, place one of these tapers at my head, and the other at my feet, and escape as quickly as you can, so as not to be overtaken." He gave to one his cloak and to the other his tunic; and they beat him about the head with their sticks, till he fell dead at their feet. Then they threw his body on the bed of dried leaves whereon he was wont to sleep, and cast a rush mat over it. They then searched the hut for money, but found none. Before leaving, they remembered the request of Meinrad, and placed one of the tapers at his head, the other they took to the chapel, to light it at the ever-burning lamp. When they returned, to their astonishment, they saw that the candle at the head of the body was alight. Filled with a vague fear, they set down the other candle and took to flight. But the two faithful ravens pursued them, screaming harshly, and dashing against the heads of the murderers with their beaks and claws, as though desirous of avenging their master's death. Frightened more and more, and continually pursued and exposed to the attack of the enraged birds, the murderers ran towards Wollerau, where they met the carpenter who had discovered the retreat of Meinrad. This man, recognizing the tame ravens of the hermit, and suspecting mischief, hastily bade his brother not allow the two men to escape out of his sight, and then ran to the hermitage, where he found the body of the Saint. The candle at his feet had set fire to the mat, but the flame had expired as soon as it had reached the corpse. The carpenter at once returned to Wollerau, where he spread the news of the murder, and having bade his wife and some friends take care of the body of S. Meinrad, he went in pursuit of the assassins on the Zürich road. He soon overtook them. The ravens were fluttering with shrill screams at the windows of a house. He entered and denounced the murderers. They were taken, and delivered over to justice. By their confession all the circumstances of the martyrdom were made known. Relics, at Einsiedeln, where, in 1861, the thousandth anniversary of the Saint's death was celebrated with great pomp. FOOTNOTES: [100] This account is a translation of the Acts; it is a very fair specimen of the original documents as written by the Church notaries at the time. The style being too simple to please the taste of later ages, too many of them were re-written in florid diction, and long speeches were put in the martyrs' mouths. [101] One reading is _insolutus_, another _in soleis_. [102] That is, to intercede for him when he, the martyr, stood in the presence of Christ in Paradise. [103] That is, extending their arms, so that they formed the symbol of the Cross. [104] Slightly abbreviated from the Acts. [105] Aurelian was a special votary of the sun. [106] There is some blunder here. [107] S. Hieron, Ep. 6. [108] S. August. Serm. 274. [109] Here a difficulty occurs. There is no such name in the lists of the prefects of the city. According to this account, he transferred to the deputy, Aspasius, the duty of sentencing her. In some accounts he is called Aspasius Paternus. A Paternus was prefect of the city in 264 and 265; an Ovinius Paternus in 281. Aspasius Paternus, pro-consul of Africa, in or about 260, is mentioned by S. Cyprian. It is probable that Symphronius was not prefect of the city, but a powerful senator, and that Aspasius is the same as Ovinius Paternus. Transcribers made havoc of the names in the Acts. [110] Antiphon to Ps. cix. _Dixit Dominus_, for S. Agnes' Day, and Greek Menaea. [111] This is appointed as the antiphon to the Magnificat for S. Agnes' Day. [112] Prudentius. [113] Ibid. [114] S. Ambrose lib. I. _De Virgin._ c. 2. January 22. S. VINCENT, _D. M., at Saragossa, in Spain_, A.D. 304. SS. VINCENT, ORONTIUS, VICTOR, AND AQUILINA, _MM., at Gerunda, in Spain_, A.D. 304. S. BLAESILLA, _W., at Rome_, A.D. 383. S. GAUDENTIUS, _B. of Novara, in Italy, circ._ A.D. 418. SS. ANASTASIUS AND LXX. COMPANIONS, _MM., in Assyria_, A.D. 628. S. DOMINIC, _Ab. of Sora, in Italy_, A.D. 1031. S. BRITHWALD, _B. of Wilton, in England_, A.D. 1045. B. WALTER VAN BIERBEEKE, _Monk, at Hemmerode, in Belgium, circ._ A.D. 1220. S. VINCENT, D. AND M. (A.D. 304.) [All Western Martyrologies, and by the Greeks on the same day, and Nov. 11th. The Acts, very ancient, quoted by Metaphrastes, are a very early recension of the original Acts by the notaries of the Church. Also, a hymn of Prudentius.] This most illustrious martyr of the Spanish Church was born at Saragossa in Arragon, the mother of martyrs, as Prudentius calls it. His parents are mentioned in his Acts, which are at least older than S. Augustine (August 28), in whose time they were publicly read in the church of Hippo. The name of his father was Eutychius; and his mother, Enola, was a native of Osca, or Huesca, which sometimes claims the honour of his birth. He was trained in the discipline of the Christian faith by Valerius, Bishop of Saragossa, and was in due time ordained to the office of deacon. The Bishop was a man of venerable piety, but laboured under an impediment in his speech. He therefore devoted himself to prayer and contemplation, and intrusted the care of teaching to S. Vincent, whom he also appointed his principal or archdeacon. Dacian was then Governor of Spain under Diocletian and Maximian, and had already distinguished himself by his cruelty against the Christians. The imperial edict for the seizure of the clergy had just been published in the end of the year 303, in which the laity were not included until the following year. Valerius and his deacons were accordingly loaded with chains and carried to Valencia, where the Governor then was. The pains of hunger were added to their sufferings, in the hope of subduing their fortitude. When they were brought before Dacian he first tried the effect of mild language and promises of reward if they would obey the orders of the Emperors and sacrifice to the gods. He reminded Valerius of the influence which his episcopal dignity gave him; and to Vincent he represented the honour of his family, and the sweet joys of youth which still lay before him. But the confessors of Christ were not to be thus moved. Valerius, being unable from his infirmity to reply to the artful persuasions of the tempter, Vincent made a noble profession of the faith in the name of them both. The Bishop was condemned to exile, where he seems afterwards to have finished his course by martyrdom; and Vincent was remanded to prison, thence to pass by a more painful but a speedier way to his crown. His body was stretched upon the rack and cruelly torn with iron hooks, but no torture could shake his resolution or disturb the calm which sat upon his countenance. He defied the utmost efforts of his tormentors; and, when they began to grow weary, Dacian ordered them to be beaten, suspecting that they spared the martyr. But the Governor himself was at last moved to a faint pity by the miserable spectacle, and entreated Vincent to purchase his deliverance by at least giving up the Christian books. Vincent, still continuing firm, was taken from the rack and led to a more terrible torture called the _Question_. It was an iron frame with bars running across it, sharp as scythes, and underneath a fire was kindled, which made the whole frame red hot. To this fearful agony the martyr walked with a willing step, and even went before the executioners. And, as he lay bound upon the bed of torture, his eyes were fixed on heaven, his lips moved as if in prayer, and a peaceful smile would sometimes pass across his countenance. No cruelty was spared that diabolical ingenuity could invent, but the love of Christ surpassed the wrath of man and won the day. When the malice of his enemies could do no more, he was carried back to prison, and laid in a dark dungeon strewn with broken potsherds, which allowed his wounded body no rest. His feet, too, were fastened in the stocks. But God was mindful of His servant, and sent His angels to comfort him, bestowing a foretaste of his reward while his trial was as yet unfinished. His cell was illuminated with the light of heaven, his bonds were loosed, and the floor of his prison seemed to be strewn with flowers. The martyr and his celestial visitants sang hymns together, and the unwonted sound astonished the jailer. He looked into the cell, and, overpowered by what he saw and heard, confessed the power of God and the truth of the Christian faith. When Dacian heard of it he shed tears of rage; but, finding it was useless to continue his cruelty, he gave orders that some repose should be allowed to the martyr. His motives for this act of clemency are variously represented; perhaps he only meant to recruit the strength of Vincent that he might endure further tortures; or perhaps he feared that, if he expired under them, the Christian faith might be exalted in the eyes of the people by his constancy. But, whatever was the policy of Dacian, God overruled it to obtain for His blessed servant an easy departure. The scattered remnant of Christians gathered round him, and tended him with anxious care. They provided a soft bed, on which he was no sooner laid than he yielded up his soul to the Lord, on January 22, A.D. 304. The rage of the Governor followed his poor remains. His body was cast out into a field to become the prey of wild beasts and birds; but was defended by a raven. Then, to add further indignities to it, it was taken out in a boat and thrown into the sea with a mill-stone about the neck. During the night it was washed ashore, and at last was privately buried by some good Christians in a humble chapel near Valencia. When the fury of the persecution had ceased, it was removed with great honour, and buried under the altar of the principal church. S. GAUDENTIUS, B. OF NOVARA. (ABOUT A.D. 418.) [From his life by an anonymous writer in, or about, 760; quite trustworthy.] Gaudentius was a native of Ivrea (Eporoedia), under the shadows of the Alps; he was brought up as a Christian, and exhibited early indications of piety. On reaching man's estate he went to Novara, was ordained priest, and became so distinguished for his sanctity, that S. Ambrose visited him. When Constantius, the Arian Emperor, exiled S. Eusebius, the Catholic Bishop of Vercelli, Gaudentius went into exile with him; on his return he was elected to the episcopal throne of Novara. S. ANASTASIUS THE PERSIAN, AND LXX. COMPANIONS, MM. IN ASSYRIA. (A.D. 628.) [Commemorated by Greeks and Westerns. His Acts are genuine, having been written either by the monk commissioned to attend him during his passion, or from his dictation. These Acts were referred to in the 7th General Council, 180 years after his death.] There lived in Rages, in Persia, at the time when the true Cross fell into the hands of Chosroës, King of Persia, A.D. 614, a young man, named Magundat, the son of a Magian of rank. The capture of the Cross was famed all through Persia, and Magundat was led by curiosity to enquire about it of some Christians. Thus he learned the history of the Passion of Jesus Christ, and the doctrine of the Redemption. It left a deep impression on his mind. He was soon after called to serve in the army that marched under Sarbar through the north of Asia Minor to Chalcedon, but on his retreat, Magundat left the army, and visited Hierapolis in Syria. In that city he lodged with a Persian Christian, a silversmith, with whom he often went to the Christian Church. There he contemplated the pictures of saints glorified on golden grounds, and martyrs in their agonies, and asked about them. His curiosity was satisfied, and being greatly moved by what he heard, he felt a desire to visit those holy places where Christ had been born and where he had died, as he had seen painted on the walls of the Church of the Martyrs in Hierapolis. Therefore he went to Jerusalem, and he lodged there also in the house of a smith, who was a Christian; and to him he opened his heart, and related how he had been led to desire baptism, and a right to the Resurrection of the Just. He was, therefore, placed under instruction, and was afterwards baptized by Modestus, "vicar of the Apostolic seat," as he is called in the Acts, who governed Jerusalem, Zachary the patriarch being in captivity. He prepared himself for the Holy Sacrament with great devotion, and spent the octave after it--which persons baptized passed in white garments--in continuous prayer. At his baptism he took the name of Anastasius, thereby meaning, in Greek, his resurrection to a new life. After his baptism, the more perfectly to keep inviolably his baptismal vows and obligations, he resolved on becoming a monk in a monastery five miles from Jerusalem. Justin, the abbot, made him first learn the Greek tongue and the psalter; then cutting off his hair, gave him the monastic habit, in the year 620. Anastasius was always most earnest in all spiritual duties, especially in assisting at the celebration of the Divine Mysteries. His favourite reading was the lives of the saints; and when he read the triumphs of the martyrs, his eyes overflowed with tears, and he longed to be found worthy to share their glory. Being tormented with the memory of the superstitious and magical rites, which his father had taught him, he was delivered from that troublesome temptation by discovering it to his director, and by his advice and prayers. After seven years spent in great perfection in this monastery, his desire of martyrdom daily increasing, and having been assured by a revelation that his prayers for that grace were heard, he left that house, and visited the places of devotion in Palestine, at Diospolis, Gerizim, and Our Lady's church at Caesarea, where he stayed two days. This city, with the greatest part of Syria, was then subject to the Persians. The Saint, seeing certain Persian soothsayers of the garrison occupied in their abominable superstitions in the streets, boldly spoke to them, remonstrating against the impiety of such practices. The Persian magistrates apprehended him as a suspected spy; but he informed them that he had once enjoyed the dignity of Magian amongst them, but had renounced it to become a humble follower of Christ. Upon this confession he was thrown into a dungeon, where he lay three days without eating or drinking, till the return of Marzabanes, the governor, to the city. When interrogated by him, he confessed his conversion to the faith. Marzabanes commanded him to be chained by the foot to another criminal, and his neck and one foot to be also linked together by a heavy chain, and condemned him, in this condition, to carry stones. The Persians, especially those of his own province, and his former acquaintance, upbraided him with having disgraced his country, kicked and beat him, plucked his beard, and loaded him with burdens above his strength. The Governor sent for him a second time, but could not induce him to pronounce the impious words which the Magians used in their superstitions; "For," said he, "the wilful calling of them to remembrance defiles the heart." The judge then threatened he would write immediately to the king, if he did not comply. "Write what you please," said the Saint, "I am a Christian: I repeat it again, I am a Christian." Marzabanes commanded him to be forthwith beaten with knotty clubs. The executioners were preparing to bind him fast to the ground; but the Saint told them it was unnecessary, for he had courage enough to lie down under the punishment without moving, and he regarded it as his greatest happiness to suffer for Christ. He only begged leave to put off his monk's habit, lest it should be treated with that contempt which only his body deserved. He therefore laid it aside respectfully, and then stretched himself on the ground, and, without being bound, remained all the time of the cruel torment, bearing it without changing his posture. The Governor again threatened him to acquaint the king with his obstinacy. "Whom ought we rather to fear," said Anastasius, "a mortal man, or God, who made all things out of nothing?" The judge pressed him to sacrifice to fire, and to the sun and moon. The Saint answered, he could never acknowledge as gods creatures which God had made only for the use of man; upon which he was remanded to prison. His old abbot, hearing of his sufferings, sent two monks to assist him, and ordered prayers to be offered daily for him. The confessor, after carrying stones all the day, spent the greatest part of the night in prayer, to the surprise of his companions; one of whom, a Jew, saw and showed him to others at prayer in the night, shining in brightness and glory like a blessed spirit, and angels praying with him. As the confessor was chained to a man condemned for a public crime, he prayed always with his neck bowed downwards, keeping his chained foot near his companion, not to disturb him. Marzabanes, in the meantime, having informed Chosroës, and received his orders, acquainted the martyr by a messenger, without seeing him, that the king would be satisfied if he would by word of mouth abjure the Christian faith: after which he might choose whether he would be an officer in the king's service, or still remain a Christian and a monk; adding he might in his heart always adhere to Christ, provided he would but for once renounce Him in words privately, in his presence, "in which there could be no harm, nor any great injury to his Christ," as he said. Anastasius answered firmly, that he would never even seem to dissemble, or to deny his God. Then the Governor told him that he had orders to send him bound into Persia to the king. "There is no need of binding me," said the Saint: "I go willingly and cheerfully to suffer for Christ." The Governor put on him and on two other prisoners the mark, and gave orders that they should set out after five days. In the meantime, on the feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, the 14th of September, at the request of the Commerciarius, or tax-gatherer for the king, who was a Christian of distinction, Anastasius had leave to go to the church and assist at the Divine Sacrifice. His presence and exhortations encouraged the faithful, excited the lukewarm to fervour, and moved all to tears. He dined that day with the Commerciarius, and then returned with joy to his prison. On the day appointed, the martyr left Caesarea in Palestine, with two other Christian prisoners, under a strict guard, and was followed by one of the monks whom the abbot had sent to assist and encourage him. The Acts of his martyrdom were written by this monk, or at least from what he related by word of mouth. The Saint received great marks of honour, much against his inclination, from the Christians, wherever he came. This made him fear lest human applause should rob him of his crown, by infecting his heart with pride. He wrote from Hierapolis, and again from the river Tigris to his abbot, begging the prayers of his brethren. Having reached Barsaloe in Assyria, six miles from Discartha or Dastagerde, near the Euphrates, where the king then was, the prisoners were thrown into a dungeon, till his pleasure was known. An officer came from Chosroës to interrogate the Saint, who made answer, touching his magnificent promises: "My religious habit and poor clothes show that I despise from my heart the gaudy pomp of the world. The honours and riches of a king, who must shortly die himself, are no temptation to me." Next day the officer returned to the prison, and endeavoured to intimidate him by threats and reproaches. But the Saint said calmly, "My lord judge, do not give yourself so much trouble about me. By the grace of Christ I am not to be moved: so execute your pleasure without more ado." The officer caused him to be unmercifully beaten with staves, after the Persian manner, insulting him all the time, and often repeating, that because he rejected the king's bounty, he should be treated in that manner every day, as long as he lived. This punishment was inflicted on him three days; on the third, the judge commanded him to be laid on his back, and a heavy beam pressed down by the weight of two men on his legs, crushing the flesh to the very bone. The martyr's tranquility and patience astonished the officer, who went again to acquaint the king with his behaviour. In his absence the jailer, a Christian, gave every one free access to the martyr. The Christians immediately filled the prison; every one sought to kiss his feet or chains, and kept as relics whatever had been sanctified by their touch. The Saint, with confusion and indignation, strove to hinder them, and expressed his dissatisfaction at their proceedings. The officer, returning from the king, caused him to be beaten again, which the confessor bore rather as a statue than as flesh and blood. Then he was hung up for two hours by one hand, with a great weight at his feet, and tampered with by threats and promises. The judge, despairing to overcome him, went back to the king for his last orders, which were, that Anastasius and all the Christian captives should be put to death. He returned speedily to put these orders into execution, and caused the two companions of Anastasius, with threescore and eight other Christians, to be strangled one after another, on the banks of the river, before his face, the judge all the time pressing them to return to the Persian worship, and to escape so disgraceful a death. Anastasius, with his eyes lifted up to heaven, gave thanks to God for bringing his life to so happy a conclusion; and said he expected that he should have met with a more cruel death, by the torture of all his members; but seeing that God granted him one so easy, he embraced it with joy. He was accordingly strangled, and when dead, his head was struck off. This was in the year 628, the seventeenth of the Emperor Heraclius. His body, along with the rest of the dead, was exposed to be devoured by dogs, but it was the only one they left untouched. It was afterwards redeemed by the Christians, who laid it in the monastery of S. Sergius, a mile from his place of triumph, in the city of Barsaloe, called afterwards from that monastery, Sergiopolis. The monk that attended him brought back his _colobium_, or linen sleeveless tunic. The Saint's body was afterwards brought into Palestine, thence it was removed to Constantinople, and finally to Rome. Relics, in the church of SS. Vincent and Anastasius at Rome, also in the chapel of the Santa Scala, near S. John Lateran, at Rome. In art, he figures with a hatchet. Often his head alone, on a plate; to be distinguished from that of S. John Baptist, by the cowl that accompanies it. B. WALTER OF BIERBEEKE, MONK AT HEMMERODE. (ABOUT A.D. 1220.) [Authority, life in Caesarius of Heisterbach's "Dialogus Miraculorum," Distinctio VII. c. xxxviii. ed. Strange. Caesarius knew Walter, and some of the things he relates from what Walter told him, or from some of the brethren who where eye-witnesses to the events he describes. At the same time allowance must be made for the great credulity of Caesarius.] Walter of Bierbeeke, in Brabant, was a knight of noble blood, having been related to Henry, Duke of Louvain. He fought against the Saracens in the Holy Land, and was a brave and upright chevalier. He was also a man of deep piety, and of a fervent devotion to the Blessed Virgin. Like Sir Galahad he might have said:-- "---- all my heart is drawn above, My knees are bowed in crypt and shrine; I never felt the kiss of love, Nor maiden's hand in mine. More beauteous aspects on me beam, Me mightier transports move and thrill; So keep I fair through faith and prayer A virgin heart in work and will." The great German writer, Fouqué, seems to have had this Brabantine hero in his mind's eye, when he wrote his "Aslauga's Knight." Like Froda, in that exquisite story, Walter of Bierbeeke had fixed his heart on a heavenly mistress, whose pure image haunted his dreams. A story told by Caesarius, illustrative of this, must not be omitted, though we may doubt its truth. Walter rode with a brilliant company of knights to a tournament. On his way he passed a little chapel, and the bell was tinkling for mass. It was a feast of Our Lady, and the good knight, leaping from his horse, entered the chapel to hear the mass of the Blessed Virgin. "You will be late for the tournament!" shouted his companions. "My duty is first to Her," answered Walter, pointing to the image of the Mother of God. Now when the mass was said, and the beginning of the Gospel of S. John was read, then the knight rose from his knees, remounted his horse, and rode towards the town. As he neared the lists, he asked of some hurrying from it how matters fared. "The tournament is well nigh over," was the answer, "Walter of Bierbeeke has borne down all competitors. He has done marvellously." But the knight understood not. He asked others, and the same answer was given. Then he rode into the lists, but met with no distinguished success. And when all was over, many knights came to him and said, "Deal graciously by us." "What mean you?" he asked. "We were captured and disarmed by thee in the lists, and we must ransom ourselves." "But I was not there." "Nay, but it was thou," they replied; "for we saw thy cognizance on helm and shield, and heard thy cry, and knew thy voice." Then Walter knew that his heavenly Mistress had sent an angel to fight for him, whilst he worshipped at her humble shrine. And after that, many a token did she show, that she had accepted Walter as her knight. Then his love to her waxed daily stronger, and he said, "I have been her knight, now will I be her slave." So he went into a little chapel, dedicated to his dear Lady, and put a rope round his neck, and offered himself at the altar to be her serf, and to pay to her a yearly tax. "And because out of honour to the heavenly queen he so humbled himself," says Caesarius; "therefore she, on the other hand, glorified him, whom she loved, in many ways." After a while he wearied of wearing coat of mail, and he cast his weapons and harness aside, and donned the Cistercian habit in the monastery of Hemmerode. There he was not allowed to live in such retirement as he loved; being unskilled in Latin, he was made to serve as a lay-brother instead of being in constant attendance in choir. Several pretty stories are told of his cloister life. At dinner, as is usual in monasteries, a monk read aloud from a Latin book. The abbot noticed Walter during the meal, every day, to seem very intent on what was being read; smiles came out on his face, and sometimes tears trickled down his cheeks. At last the abbot sent for him, and asked him, "What art thou attending to? Thou understandest not the Latin book." "No, not that book," said Walter; "but I have another book open before my mind's eye, full of sacred pictures, and I look at the first, and there I see Gabriel announcing to Mary that Christ is coming. Then I turn over the leaf, and I see the stable of Bethlehem, and the adoring shepherds; and I see the Magi come; and the next picture is the Presentation in the Temple; and so my book goes on, and I come at last to Calvary and the grave. And that is a picture book of which I never weary." Once he was sent in a boat laden with wine to Zealand. And a storm arose so that the vessel was in great danger, and she drave before the wind all night. Thinking that they must all perish, Walter made his confession to his servant, there being no priest on board, and then he descended into the hold, after midnight, and placing his little ivory statue of the Blessed Virgin before him, he knelt down and prayed, expecting death. As he prayed he slept. Then, in a dream, he saw the monastery of Hemmerode, and in it was an old monk, Arnold by name, harping, and singing psalms, and praying for those who "go down to the sea in ships and exercise their business in great waters." Then Walter awoke, and went to the mariners and said, "Be of good cheer, we shall not perish, Arnold at Hemmerode is not asleep to-night, but is harping on his harp and singing to God for us." Now when they had come safe to land, Walter returned to his monastery, and told the abbot of his dream. Then the abbot sent for the monk Arnold, and he said to him, "What wast thou doing on the vigil of S. Nicholas?" For it was on that night that the vessel had been in danger. "I could not sleep at all that night," answered the monk, "so I prayed to, and praised God." "But thou wast harping on a harp," said the abbot. "Nay, my lord," answered the monk Arnold; "this is what I do. I play with my fingers on an imaginary harp, under my habit, making music in my soul; and this I do whenever my devotion flags." Now Walter went with his superior, the abbot Eustace, to the monastery of Villars, which was of the same Cistercian order. And in the evening the abbot of Villars called all the monks before the abbot Eustace of Hemmerode. And he said, "Are they all here?" He answered, "All are here but two little French boys, who have communicated to-day, and on such days as they communicate they love to remain in silence by themselves." Now on the morrow, when the convent had gone to nones, and the elder of these boys was waiting the sound of the bell, leaning on his spade before the church door, he read the little nones of Our Lady, and reading, he fell asleep. Then he thought he saw the Blessed Virgin, with a great company enter the church, and she looked not towards him. And he cried, "Oh wretched me! she calls me not!" Then the Mother of God turning, looked at him, and signing to a monk, bade him go and call the boy, and this the monk did, coming to him, and saying, "The Mistress calleth thee." When he woke, he told his fellow the dream; and when they went within, he saw Walter, and he whispered to his companion, "If that monk had a grey habit instead of a white one, I would say that it was he who summoned me." Now on the morrow, when Walter and the abbot Eustace were about to depart, they stood in the door, and Walter wore his grey travelling habit. Then the boy exclaimed, "Yes, that certainly is he." A few days after, the blessed Walter of Bierbeeke died at Hemmerode, and strange to say, within a day or two, the little French boy was called away also. [Illustration: Decoration] January 23. S. PARMENAS, _one of the first Seven Deacons, end of 1st cent._ S. MESSALINA, _V. M., at Foligno, in Italy_, A.D. 250. S. ASCLAS, _M., at Antinoë, in Egypt, circ._ A.D. 304. S. EMERENTIANA, _V. M., at Rome_, A.D. 304. (_See p. 321._) S. CLEMENT, _B. of Ancyra_, AND COMPANIONS, _MM., beginning of 4th cent._ S. AMASIUS, _B. C. of Teano, near Capua, circ._ A.D. 356. S. EUSEBIUS, _Ab. in Syria, 4th cent._ S. MAUSIMAS, _P. in Syria, circ._ A.D. 400. S. URBAN, _B. of Langres, 5th cent._ S. JOHN THE ALMSGIVER, _Patr. of Alexandria_, A.D. 616. S. ILDEPHONSUS, _B. of Toledo_, A.D. 667. S. BOISILUS, _of Melrose, circ._ A.D. 664. S. MAIMBOD, _M., at Besançon._ S. BERNARD, _Ab. of Vienne, in France, 9th cent._ S. RAYMOND, _of Pennaforte, C. in Spain_, A.D. 1275. S. MARGARET, _V., at Ravenna_, A.D. 1505. S. ASCLAS, M. (ABOUT A.D. 304) [S. Asclas was martyred on Jan. 21st, but his body was found on Jan. 23rd, and on this latter day he is usually commemorated. His Acts, in a fragmentary condition, are genuine.] Asclas, a native of Antinoë, was brought before the Roman governor, Arrianus, when he visited Hermopolis, in the Thebaid, or Upper Egypt. After a close interrogation, which is faithfully recorded in the Acts of this martyr, the Governor exclaimed, "Come, now! sacrifice to the gods, and consult thy safety. I have various instruments at hand, as thou seest." "Try, now," said the martyr, boldly. "Try, now, which will prevail, thou and thy instruments, or I and my Christ." The Governor ordered him to be swung from the little horse, and his flesh to be torn off in ribands. This was done. Then Arrianus said sullenly, "I see he is as obdurate as ever." An orator, standing by, remarked, "The approach of death has robbed him of his wits." Asclas turned his head, and said, "No, I am robbed neither of my wits nor of my God." Now this had taken place on the further side of the river, near Antinoë; and as there were not sufficient conveniences for continuing the torture, the Governor said, "We will return to Hermopolis." So he ordered Asclas into one boat; and when he had been taken over the Nile, then Arrianus entered his boat, and began to cross. Thereupon Asclas cried out, "O Lord, for whose sake I have suffered, may Thy name be glorified now, even by unwilling lips. Retain the vessel in the midst of the river, till Arrianus confesses Thy power." Then suddenly the boat stood, as though it had grounded on a sand-bank, and it could not be moved, till the Governor wrote on a piece of parchment: "The Lord of Asclas, He is God, and there is none other god save He." And when he had sent this to the martyr, the boat floated, and was propelled to the shore. Then the Governor, inflamed with rage, thinking that the captive had used magical arts, tortured him by applying fire to his sides and belly, till his body was one great sore. And after that he cast him, with a stone attached to his neck, into the Nile. S. CLEMENT, B. OF ANCYRA, AND HIS COMPANIONS, MM. (BEGINNING OF 4TH CENT.) [Commemorated by the Greeks. The Greek Acts of these martyrs are not genuine.] S. Clement, Bishop of Ancyra, was the son of a heathen father and a Christian mother. When Clement was ten years old, his mother died. Before her death, she summoned him to her side, and urged him not to desert Christ, whatever sufferings he might be called on to endure for His sake. Being possessed of private means, on coming of age, he adopted a number of poor boys, and educated them in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. He was at length ordained Bishop of Ancyra, his native city. In the persecution of Diocletian, he was taken and brought before the governor. He was treated with great barbarity, being torn with hooks, and his teeth and jaw broken with a large stone. As he lay among other prisoners that night in the jail, a bright light filled it, and the prisoners saw a man enter in dazzling garments, who held in his hand the Holy Eucharist, and therewith he communicated the bishop. But whether he were mortal priest, or an angel of God, no man knows. Along with Clement, one Agathangelus and many others, men, women, and boys suffered for Christ, whose names are written in the Book of Life. S. JOHN THE ALMSGIVER, PATRIARCH OF ALEXANDRIA. (A.D. 616.) [S. John died on Nov. 11th. But as that is the feast of S. Mennas, among the Greeks, they commemorate him on Nov. 12th; and as the 11th is the feast of S. Martin among the Latins, the commemoration of S. John is transferred in some Martyrologies to Jan. 23rd, in others to Feb. 3rd, and in others again to July 13th. Authority, his life by Leontius, Bishop of Cyprus, and S. John Damascene, Orat. 3; also a life in Metaphrastes. Leontius wrote from the account of the priests of Alexandria, who had been under S. John.] John the Eleemosynary, or the Almsgiver, was a very wealthy native of Amathus in Cyprus, and a widower. Having buried all his children, he employed his whole fortune in relieving the necessities of the poor. On his election to the metropolitan see of Alexandria, he at once ordered a list to be made of his masters. When asked what he meant, he replied that he desired to know how many poor there were demanding his services in the great city, for, like his Lord, he had come to minister to their needs. As many as 7,500 were found without a livelihood. John at once undertook to relieve them. Finding that their poor little savings were wasted by the fraud of tradesmen, who used unequal balances and unjust measures, he at once began an attack on such dealings, and thereby stirred up no small hostility against himself on the part of the petty shopkeepers. Twice in the week he drew his chair outside the church door, and placed two benches before it, that he might hear the complaints of the oppressed, and remedy them, as far as lay in his power. One day he was found softly crying. "Why these tears?" he was asked. "None seek my assistance this day," he replied. "Thou shouldst rather rejoice that there is no need," said his interlocutor. Then he raised his eyes to heaven, with a joyous smile, and thanked God. He built hospitals for the sick and visited them, "not as captives, but as brothers," says Leontius. He was discreet in his charities. To women and girls he gave twice as much as to men, because they are less able to earn a living. But he would not allow anything to be given to those who were dressy and adorned with trinkets. But it was not the poor alone that he assisted. A merchantman, having been twice ruined by shipwrecks, had as often relief from the good patriarch, who the third time gave him a ship belonging to the church, laden with corn. This vessel was driven by a storm to Britain, where raged a famine. He was therefore able to sell the corn at a good price, and brought back a load of British silver.[115] A nobleman having been greatly reduced, the patriarch ordered his treasurer to give him fifteen pounds of gold. The treasurer thinking this too much, reduced the gift to five. Almost directly after, a wealthy lady sent him an order for five hundred pounds. The patriarch, who had expected more from that quarter, asked her to come to him. "May it please your Holiness," said she; "I wrote the order last night for fifteen hundred pounds, but this morning I saw that the 10 on the cheque had disappeared." S. John at once concluded that this was God's doing. He turned to the treasurer and asked how much had been given the poor nobleman. On the hesitation of this man, he sent for the gentleman, and found that his liberal orders had not been complied with. "What is sown to the Lord, the Lord restores an hundred fold," said the patriarch. "I knew that five pounds alone could have been given, when He returned me only five hundred." Nicetas Patricius, sub-praetor of Africa, saw the lavish charity of the patriarch with a jealous eye. The state exchequer was without funds, and he thought to appropriate the wealth of the patriarch to such purposes as the state required. Accordingly, one day he visited John the Almsgiver, with his attendants, and peremptorily demanded his money. "Here is my strong box," said the patriarch; "but the money belongs to the church, not to the state. If you choose to take it, you may do so, but I will not give it you, for it is not mine to give." Nicetas, without more ado, ordered his servants to shoulder the money chest, and take it away. As he opened the door to leave, he saw some domestics bringing up a number of pots labelled "VIRGIN HONEY." "Hah!" said the sub-praetor, "I wish you would give me a taste of your honey!" "You shall have some," said the Patriarch. Now when the pots were opened, it was found that they contained a contribution in money sent to the Bishop; as indeed those who brought them announced.[116] When John saw the amount thus supplied to his pillaged treasury, he ordered one of his servants to take a pot, labelled as it was, to Nicetas, and to put it on his table, saying, "All those pots you met coming upstairs, as you went out, were full of the same sort of honey." And John wrote a note, which he attached to the pot, to this effect: "I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee, said the Lord; and His word is true, and no lie. Think not that mortal man can restrain the everlasting God. Farewell." Now, Nicetas was sitting at table with friends at supper, when it was announced that the patriarch's honey awaited him. He ordered it at once to be set on the table, and said, "That patriarch is out of temper with me, that I can see, or he would have sent me more than one miserable little pot." But when he opened the jar, behold! it was full of money. Then he felt compunction for what he had done, and he ordered his servants to haste, and return to the patriarch his cash-box, and all the contents of the honey-pot. Nicetas, after this, became friendly to the patriarch, who, as a token of response, stood godfather to his children. On one occasion this friendship was clouded, and threatened dissolution. The governor had imposed a tax, which fell with peculiar severity on the poor. John complained, and back-biters were not slow to excite Nicetas against John, by representing him as fomenting general discontent. The governor rushed to the patriarch's lodgings, and exploded into a storm of angry words, which left our Saint agitated and distressed. As evening drew on, he wrote on a scroll the words, "_The sun is setting_," and sent it to Nicetas, who, recalling the maxim of S. Paul, "Let not the sun go down upon your wrath," was moved to regret his violence, and he sped with the same celerity as before, but with different purpose, to the residence of the patriarch, to ask his pardon, and heal their friendship. The good prelate could ill bear to be at discord with another, though the fault was none of his. On one occasion he had excommunicated, for a few days, two clerks, who had attacked each other with their fists. One bore the sentence in a right spirit of compunction, but the other with resentment. Next Sunday, the patriarch was at the altar celebrating. As the deacon was about to remove the veil covering the sacred vessels, John remembered all at once the hostility of the clerk, and the words of our Lord: "If thou bringest thy gift to the altar, and there rememberest that thy brother hath ought against thee, leave there thy gift before the altar, and go thy way; first be reconciled to thy brother, and then come and offer thy gift." (Matt. v. 25, 24.) Then, bidding the deacon recite the general prayer over and over again till his return, he left the altar, and, entering the vestry, sent a minister to bring the clerk who was not in charity with him. And when this man came, the patriarch fell before him on his knees, and bowed his white head, and said, "Pardon me, my brother!" Then the clerk, full of shame to see the patriarch, an aged man, in all his splendid vestments, at his feet, flung himself down, weeping, confessed his wrong, and asked forgiveness. Then the patriarch embraced him, and returning to the altar, finished the sacrifice. Having in vain exhorted a certain nobleman to forgive one with whom he was at variance, he invited him to his private chapel, to assist at his mass. Now as they were reciting the Lord's Prayer, the patriarch kept silence after he had said, "Give us this day our daily bread;" and the server, at a signal from him, ceased also; but the nobleman continued, "And forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass against us,"--and then noticed that he had made that one petition alone, so he paused. Then the patriarch turned round at the altar and said, "What hast thou now asked?--to be forgiven by God as thou forgivest others." The nobleman was pricked at the heart, and fell down and promised to forget the wrong that had been done him. Observing that as soon as the Gospel was read at Mass, a portion of the congregation retired and stood outside the church, talking among themselves, the patriarch went forth and seated himself amongst them, saying, "Where the sheep are, there the shepherd must also be," and they with shame came into church. Thus he broke through a pernicious custom. The patriarch, one day, took a bishop named Troilus, then visiting Alexandria, to see his poor in a certain quarter, where he had erected for their accommodation a number of domed huts, supplied with beds, mattrasses, and blankets for the winter. Now Troilus had seen a handsome chased silver drinking cup in the town, and had set his heart upon it; it cost thirty pounds, and he had brought this sum with him, intending to buy the cup on his return, and when he had shaken himself free from the charitable patriarch. "I see," said John, "you have some money with you--many pounds, if I mistake not; distribute it among these my poor." Troilus was unable to refuse; and so, most reluctantly, his gold went into the pocket of the beggars instead of into that of the silversmith. He was so greatly put out about this that he fretted himself into a fever. The patriarch, not seeing him, or hearing of him, for some days, sent a servant to invite him to dinner; but the Bishop declined, saying that he suffered from a bad cold and fever. Then S. John hastened to his house to sympathize with the sick man, but soon discovering that there was more of temper than malady in the case, he guessed the cause, and said, "By the way, I borrowed of you thirty pounds the other day, for my poor; if you are so disposed, I will at once repay the sum." Then--says the writer of the life of S. John--when the Bishop saw the money in the hand of the patriarch, all at once his fever vanished, his cold flew away, and his colour and vigour came back; so that any one might have seen what was the real cause of his indisposition. "And now, if you are well enough, you will dine with me," said the patriarch. "I am ready," answered Bishop Troilus, jumping off his bed, on which he had cast himself in his fever of vexation. Now it fell out that after dinner the Bishop dropped asleep with his head on the table, and in a dream he saw himself in a wondrous land of rare beauty; and there he beheld a glorious house of unearthly beauty, over the door of which was inscribed, "THE ETERNAL MANSION AND PLACE OF REPOSE OF TROILUS, THE BISHOP." Having read this, he was glad. But there came by a certain One, with many attendants in robes of white, and He looked up and read the title, and said: "Not so, change the superscription." Then the attendants removed the writing, and replaced it with this, "THE ETERNAL MANSION AND PLACE OF REPOSE OF JOHN, ARCHBISHOP OF ALEXANDRIA, PURCHASED FOR THIRTY POUNDS." One of his domestic servants having fallen into great difficulties, the patriarch privately helped him, by giving him two pounds. "I do not know how I can sufficiently thank your excellence and angelic holiness," said the servant. "No thanks," said the patriarch, "Humble John"--so he was wont to call himself--"has not yet shed his blood for you, as his Master taught him." There was a certain man, named Theopentus, greatly given to charity, who died leaving an only son. And on his death-bed, he called the boy, and said to him, "I have ten pounds, and that is all that remains to me; shall I give it to you or to the Virgin Mother of God?" And when the boy said, "It shall be her's;" then the father said, "Go and spend it among the poor." Now when the patriarch heard of this, and that the orphan was left destitute, and was in great want; knowing that it would hurt him to offer him charity, he devised an innocent deception. He bade a scribe draw up a false pedigree, making himself and the deceased to be cousins, and he bade him show it to the youth, and bring him to the residence of the patriarch. And when this was done, the holy man ran to the lad and kissed him, and said, "How is this! that the child of my dear kinsman is in poverty. I must provide for thee, my dear son." So he made him an allowance, and married and settled him comfortably in Alexandria. When the Persians devastated the Holy Land and sacked Jerusalem, S. John entertained all who fled into Egypt, and nursed the wounded. He also sent to Jerusalem, for the use of the poor there, a large sum of money, and a thousand sacks of corn, as many of pulse, one thousand barrels of wine, and one thousand Egyptian workmen to assist in rebuilding the churches. He moreover despatched two bishops and an abbot to ransom the captives. S. John lived a simple life, his apparel, the furniture of his house, his diet, were all of the meanest. A person of distinction in the city, being informed that he had only an old tattered blanket on his bed, sent him a very handsome one. "Humble John" wore it over him for one night, but sold it next day, and gave the price to the poor; for, during the night, he thought of some poor wretches who had no blankets at all. The friend, being informed of this, bought the blanket, and sent it to him again. It met with the same fate as before, and he again and again re-purchased it. "We shall see who will be tired first," said the patriarch; "he of buying, or I of selling, the blanket." There was one class of men to whom it was peculiarly difficult to offer assistance, and that was the slaves, placed at the almost complete disposal of their masters. But the watchful care of S. John did not forget them. To the masters he spoke noble words: "These men are made in the image of God. What constitutes you different from them? You and your slaves have legs and arms, and eyes and mouths, and a soul alike. S. Paul said, 'Whosoever is baptised into Christ hath put on Christ--ye are all one in Christ.' In Christ master and slave are equal. Christ took on Him the form of a servant, teaching us to respect our servants. God regardeth the humble, we are taught; He says not, the lofty ones, but those who are least esteemed. For the sake of the poor slave were the heavens made, for him the earth, for him the stars, for him the sun, for him the sea and all that therein is. For him Christ abased Himself to wash His servants' feet, for him He suffered, for him He died. Shall we purchase with money such an one, so honoured, redeemed with such precious blood? You ill-treat a servant, as though he were not of like nature with you, yet is he highly honoured by God." A monk arrived in Alexandria with a young Jewess in his company, whom he had converted and baptized; this caused great scandal, and by order of the patriarch, he was severely beaten. The monk bore his chastisement meekly, without exculpating himself. Next day it was made so evident that the monk was without the least blame, that the patriarch sent for him to ask his forgiveness, and ever after he was most careful not to judge rashly. "My sons," said he, when he heard people blame others; "be not hasty to judge and condemn. We see often the sin of fornication, but we see not the hidden repentance. We see the crime of a theft, but we see not the sighs and tears of contrition. We severely blame the fornicator, the thief, or the perjurer, but God receives his hidden confessions, and bitter sorrow, and holds it as very precious." [Illustration: THE VIRGIN APPEARING TO S. ILDEPHONSUS. After a Painting by Murillo in the Museum at Madrid. Jan. 23.] Nicetas, the governor, persuaded the Saint to accompany him to Constantinople, to pay a visit to the Emperor. S. John was admonished from heaven, whilst he was on his way, at Rhodes, that his death drew near; so he said to Nicetas, "You invite me to the king of the earth; but the King of heaven calls me to Himself." He therefore sailed to his native island of Cyprus, and soon after died at Amanthus, the home of his boyhood and married life, and where he had laid his wife and children, and there he fell asleep in Christ at the age of sixty-four, after having ruled the patriarchal see of Alexandria ten years. S. RAYMUND, OF PENNAFORTE, O.S.D. (A.D. 1275.) [Roman Martyrology. Authorities: The bull of his canonization, by Clement VIII., in 1601, and a life by Leander Albertus.] S. Raymund was born in 1175, at Pennaforte, a castle in Catalonia. At the age of thirty he went to Bologna, in Italy, to perfect himself in the study of canon and civil law. In 1219 the Bishop of Barcelona, who had been at Rome, took Raymund home with him and made him archdeacon of Barcelona. In 1222 he took the religious habit of S. Dominic, eight months after the founder had died. James, King of Arragon, had married Eleonora of Castile within the prohibited degrees, without a dispensation. A legate of Pope Gregory IX., in a council of bishops held at Tarragona, declared the marriage null. Acting on the mind of the prince, by his great sanctity and earnestness, Raymund persuaded him to introduce the inquisition into the kingdom to suppress the Waldenses and Albigenses, who had made many converts to their pernicious doctrines. The object of S. Raymund doubtless was that it should serve as a check to the diffusion of heresy, and be a protection to simple souls against the poison which the ministers of Antichrist strove to infuse into them. The inquisitors were to be the dogs protecting the sheep from the wolves. S. Raymund laboured diligently, by exhortation and example, to convert the Moors and heretics, and his efforts were attended with extraordinary success. Pope Gregory IX., having called S. Raymund to Rome, made him his confessor. In 1235 he was named to the archbishopric of Tarragona, but, by his tears, he persuaded the Pope not to enforce his acceptance of the responsible charge. In 1238 he was chosen general of the Dominican order. He made the visitation of the order on foot, and reduced the constitution to a more complete system than heretofore. Being in Majorca with the king, he discovered that King James was living in adultery with a lady of his court. As the king would not dissolve the sinful union, the Saint implored leave to depart; the king refused, and forbade any shipper taking him into his vessel. Thereupon Raymund boldly spread his cloak on the water, and standing on it, was wafted across to Barcelona. This miracle so alarmed the king, that he became a sincere penitent. Raymund died on Jan. 6th, 1275, at the age of a hundred. FOOTNOTES: [115] From the mines in the Cassiterides, Devon and Cornwall. [116] We see here an instance of the manner in which some stories of miracles were formed. Leontius, who heard the story from the clergy acquainted with all the circumstances, says that the bearer of the pots told the Patriarch that they contained money; but that, for greater security, they were labelled honey. But Metaphrastes, in telling the story, says that, miraculously, the honey was converted into gold. January 24. S. TIMOTHY, _B. M. at Ephesus_, A.D. 97. SS. BABYLUS, _B._, and COMPANIONS, _MM., at Antioch, 3rd cent._ S. FELICIAN, _B. M. of Foligni, in Italy_, A.D. 250. S. MACEDONIUS, _H., in Syria, beginning of 5th cent._ S. EUSEBIA, _V., at Mylasa, in Caria (Asia Minor), 5th cent._ S. CADOC, _Ab., in Wales, and M., 6th cent._ S. ZOSIMUS, _B. of Babylon, in Egypt, 6th cent._ S. TIMOTHY, B. OF EPHESUS. (A.D. 97.) [By almost all the ancient Latin Martyrologies, S. Timothy is commemorated on this day, but by the Greeks on Jan. 22. The Martyrology called by the name of S. Jerome on Sept. 27. That of Wandelbert on May 16, possibly because of some translation of relics. Authorities: the Epistles of S. Paul, and the Acts of S. Timothy, by Polycrates, Bishop of Ephesus (210), which, however, we have not in their original form, but in a recension of the 5th or 6th century; other Acts of S. Timothy, also in Greek, and a life in Metaphrastes.] Saint Timothy, the beloved disciple of S. Paul, was born at Lystra in Lycaonia. His father was a Gentile, but his mother, Eunice, was a Jewess. She, with Lois, his grandmother, embraced Christianity, and S. Paul commends their faith. S. Timothy had made the writings of the Old Testament his study from infancy.[117] S. Paul took the young man as the companion of his labours,[118] but first he had him circumcised at Lystra, as a condescension to the prejudices of the Jews. He would not suffer S. Titus, born of Gentile parents, to be brought under the law, but Timothy, on account of his Jewish mother, to avoid scandal to the Jews, he submitted to circumcision. When S. Paul was compelled to quit Beraea, he left Timothy behind him to confirm the new converts. But on his arrival at Athens S. Paul sent for him, and sent him to Thessalonica where the Christians were suffering persecution. Thence he returned to S. Paul, who was then at Corinth, to give an account of his mission.[119] From Corinth S. Paul went to Jerusalem, and thence to Ephesus. Here he formed the resolution of returning into Greece, and he sent Timothy and Erastus before him through Macedonia, to apprize the faithful in those parts of his intention of visiting them. Timothy had a special charge to go afterwards to Corinth, to correct certain abuses there. S. Paul awaited his return, in Asia, and then went with him into Macedonia and Achaia. During the subsequent imprisonment of S. Paul, Timothy appears to have been with him. He was ordained Bishop of Ephesus, probably in the year 64. S. Paul wrote his first Epistle to Timothy from Macedonia, in 64; and his second in 65, from Rome, while there in chains, to press him to come to Rome, that he might see him again before he died. S. Timothy was afterwards associated with S. John; and in the Apocalypse he is the Angel, or Bishop, of the Church of Ephesus, to whom Christ sends His message by S. John.[120] During the great annual feast of the Catagogii, which consisted of processions bearing idols, with women lewdly dancing before them, and ending in bloodshed, S. Timothy moved by righteous zeal, rushed into the portico of the temple, and exhorted the frenzied revellers to decency; but this so enraged them, that they fell upon him with sticks and stones, and killed him. [Illustration: S. TIMOTHY. From a Window of the Eleventh Century at Neuweiler. Jan. 24.] SS. BABYLUS, B., AND COMPANIONS, MM. (3RD CENT.) [Latin Martyrologies Jan. 24; Greek Menaea Sept. 4. Authorities: Eusebius, Sozomen, Philostorgius; and his Acts, written by Leontius, patriarch of Antioch, A.D. 348, which exist only in a fragmentary condition; also S. Chrysostom: Contra Gentiles de S. Babyla, and Hom. de S. Babyla; the latter written in 387.] On the death of Zebinus, patriarch of Antioch, in the year 237, S. Babylus was elected to the patriarchal throne. The Emperor Philip, passing through Antioch in 244, and being, as is supposed, a catechumen, desired to visit the church. Babylus, informed of his approach, went to meet him at the gate, and forbade his ingress, because he was stained with the blood of his predecessor, Gordian, who had associated him in the empire, and whom he had basely murdered. According to S. Chrysostom, who relates this anecdote, the Emperor withdrew in confusion. But according to the Acts it was not the Emperor Philip, but the governor, Numerian, who attempted to enter the church, but was repulsed as being an idolator and stained with murder, by the dauntless Bishop; and Nicephorus Callistus, and Philostorgius say the same. Certain it is that S. Babylus suffered under this governor Numerian, son of Carus, who was afterwards, for eight months, emperor, conjointly with his brother Carinus. Babylus, and three little boys, aged respectively twelve, nine, and seven, orphans, whom he brought up in his house, were so cruelly handled by the torturers before the governor, that the boys died, and Babylus expired shortly after in prison. In order to put a stop to the abominations of the famous temple and oracle of Daphne, the zealous Emperor Gallus, brother of Julian, buried the body of S. Babylus opposite the temple gate. From that day the oracle ceased to speak. The apostate Emperor Julian ordered its removal, in hopes of restoring liberty to the demon who uttered the oracles, and the Christians translated the sacred relics to the city, "singing psalms along the road," says Sozomen. "The best singers went first, and the multitude chanted in chorus, and this was the burden of their song: _Confounded are all they that worship carved images, and delight in vain gods._"[121] S. MACEDONIUS, H. (BEGINNING OF 5TH CENT.) [Greek Menaea. Authorities: Theodoret in his Philotheus, c. 13, and his Ecclesiastical Hist. lib. v. c. 20; Nicephorus Callistus, lib. xii. 44. Theodoret's mother was under the direction of S. Macedonius.] S. Macedonius lived a life of great austerity on barley and water. For forty-five years he inhabited a dry ditch, after that he spent twenty-five in a rude cabin. A sedition having broken out in Antioch, and the people having overthrown the statue of the Empress Flacilla, Theodosius, the Emperor, in a fit of rage, ordered the city to be set on fire and reduced to the condition of a village. Blood would also have been infallibly shed, had not S. Ambrose obtained from Theodosius, shortly before, the passing of the law that no sentence against a city should take effect till thirty days had expired. The Emperor sent his chamberlain, Eleutherius, to Antioch to execute his severe sentence against the city and its inhabitants. As he entered the streets lined with trembling citizens, a ragged hermit, it was Macedonius, plucked him by the cloak and said: "Go to the Emperor, and say to him from me, You are not only an Emperor, but a man; and you ought not only to remember what is due to an empire, but also to human nature. Man was made in the image and likeness of God. Do not then order the image of God to be destroyed. You pass this cruel sentence, because an image of bronze has been overthrown. And for that will you slay living men, the hair of whose head you cannot make to grow?" When this speech was reported to the Emperor, he regretted his angry sentence, and sent to withdraw it. S. CADOC, AB. (BETWEEN A.D. 522 AND 590.) [English and Gallican Martyrologies. Through a strange confusion, S. Cadoc of Wales has been identified with S. Sophias of Beneventum in Italy; because S. Cadoc appears in the Martyrologies as S. Cadoc, at Benavenna (Weedon), and S. Sophias or Sophius Bishop of Beneventum being commemorated the same day, the life given by Bollandus, with hesitation, is a confused jumble of these two saints into one. The best account of S. Cadoc is in Rees "Lives of the Cambro-British Saints;" and in La Ville-marqué's La Légende Celtique. There is also a poem composed in honour of S. Cadoc, by Richard ap Rhys of Llancarvan, between 1450 and 1480, published in the Iolo MSS., p. 301, and the sentences, proverbs and aphorisms of S. Cadoc are to be found in Myvrian Archaeology, iii. p. 10. The following epitome of his life is from M. de Montalembert's Monks of the West, with additions from M. de Ville-marqué and corrections from Rees.] Immediately after the period occupied in the annals of Wales by King Arthur and the monk-bishop David, appears S. Cadoc, a personage regarding whom it is difficult to make a distinction between history and legend, but whose life has left a profound impression upon the Keltic races. His father Gwynllyw Filwr, surnamed the Warrior, one of the petty kings of South Wales, having heard much of the beauty of the daughter of a neighbouring chief, had her carried off by a band of three hundred vassals, from the midst of her sisters, and from the door of her own chamber, in her father's castle. The father hastened to the rescue of his daughter with all his vassals and allies, and soon overtook Gwynllyw, who rode with the young princess at the croup, going softly not to fatigue her. It was not an encounter favourable for the lover: two hundred of his followers perished, but he, himself, succeeded in escaping safely with the lady. Of this rude warrior and this beautiful princess was to be born the saint who has been called the Doctor of the Welsh, and who founded the great monastic establishment of Llancarvan. The very night of his birth, the soldiers, or, to speak more justly, the robber-followers of the king, his father, who had been sent to pillage the neighbours right and left, stole the milch cow of a holy Irish monk, who had no sustenance, he nor his twelve disciples, except the abundant milk of this cow. When informed of this nocturnal theft, the monk got up, put on his shoes in all haste, and hurried to reclaim his cow from the king, who was still asleep. The latter took advantage of the occasion to have his new-born son baptized by the pious solitary, and made him promise to undertake the education and future vocation of the infant. The Irishman gave him the name of Cadoc, (Cattwg,) which means warlike; and then, having recovered his cow, went back to his cell to await the king's son, who was sent to him at the age of seven, having already learned to hunt and fight. The young prince passed twelve years with the Irish monk, whom he served, lighting his fire and cooking his food, and who taught him the rudiments of Latin grammar. Preferring the life of a recluse to the throne of his father, he went to Ireland for three years, to carry on his education at Lismore, a celebrated monastery school, after which he returned to Wales, and continued his studies under a famous Roman rhetorician, newly arrived from Italy. This doctor had more pupils than money; famine reigned in his school. One day poor Cadoc, who fasted continually, was learning his lesson in his cell, seated before a little table, and leaning his head on his hands, when suddenly a white mouse, coming out of a hole in the wall, jumped on the table, and put down a grain of corn; then Cadoc rising, followed the mouse into a cellar, one of those old Keltic subterranean granaries, remains of which are found to this day in Wales and Cornwall. There Cadoc found a large heap of corn, which served to feed the master and his pupils for many days. Having early decided to embrace monastic life, he hid himself in a wood, where, after making a narrow escape from assassination by an armed swineherd of a neighbouring chief, he saw, near a forgotten fountain, where a white swan floated, an enormous wild boar, white with age, coming out of his den, and make three bounds, one after another, stopping each time, and turning round to stare furiously at the stranger who had disturbed him in his resting place. Cadoc marked with three branches the three bounds of the wild boar, which afterwards became the site of the church, dormitories, and refectory of the great abbey of Llancarvan. The abbey took its name, "The Church of the Stags," from the legend that two deers from the neighbouring wood came one day to replace two idle and disobedient monks who had refused to perform the necessary labour for the construction of the monastery, saying, "Are we oxen, that we should be yoked to carts, and compelled to drag timber?" The rushes were torn up, the briars and thorns were cut down, and S. Cadoc dug deep trenches to drain the morass formed about the fountain he had discovered. One day, when the chapel he was building was nearly completed, a monk came that way, bearing on his back a leather pouch containing tools for working metal, and some specimens of his handicraft. His name was Gildas. He was the son of a chief in Westmoreland, and his brother, Aneurin, was one day famous among the bards of Britain.[122] Gildas opened his bag and produced a bell. Its form was that of a tall square cap, and it was made of a mixture of silver and copper, not molten, but hammered. Cadoc took the bell and sounded it, and the note was so sweet that he greatly desired the bell, and asked Gildas to give it him. "No," said the bell-maker; "I have destined it for the altar of S. Peter at Rome." But when Gildas offered the bell to the Pope, the holy father was unable to sound it; then Gildas knew he must give it to the Welsh monk; so he returned to Britain, and offered it to Cadoc, and when he held it, the bell rang sweetly as heretofore. Llancarvan became a great workshop, where numerous monks, subject to a very severe rule, bowed their bodies under the yoke of continual fatigue, clearing the forests, and cultivating the fields when cleared; it was besides, a great literary and religious school, in which the study of the Holy Scriptures held the van, and was followed by that of the ancient authors, and their more modern commentators. Cadoc loved to sum up, chiefly under the form of sentences in verse and poetical aphorisms, the instructions given to his pupils of the Llancarvan cloister. A great number of such utterances have been preserved. We instance a few. "Truth is the elder daughter of God. Without light nothing is good. Without light there is no piety. Without light there is no religion. Without light there is no faith. The sight of God, that is light." "Without knowledge, no power. Without knowledge, no wisdom. Without knowledge, no freedom. Without knowledge, no beauty. Without knowledge, no nobility. Without knowledge, no victory. Without knowledge, no honour. Without knowledge, no God." "The best of attitudes is humility. The best of occupations is work. The best of sentiments, pity. The best of cares, justice. The best of pains, peacemaking. The best of sorrows, contrition. The best of characters, generosity." When one of his disciples asked him to define love, he answered, "Love, it is Heaven." "And hate?" asked his disciple. "Hate is hell." "And conscience?" "It is the eye of God in the soul of man." "The best of patriots," said S. Cadoc, "is he who tills the soil." When a chief at the head of a band of robbers, came to pillage Llancarvan, S. Cadoc went against him with his monks armed with their harps, chanting and striking the strings. Then the chief recoiled, and left them unmolested. Another chief, enraged at Cadoc receiving his son into his monastery, came with a force to reclaim the youth and destroy the cloister. Cadoc went to meet him, bathed in sunshine, and found the chief and his men groping in darkness. He gave them light, and they returned ashamed to their homes. Cadoc had the happiness of assisting in the conversion of his father. In the depths of his cloister he groaned over the rapines and sins of the old robber from whom he derived his life. Accordingly he sent to his father's house three of his monks, to preach repentance. His mother, the beautiful Gwladys, was the first to be touched, and it was not long before she persuaded her husband to agree with her. They called their son to make to him a public confession of their sins, and then, father and son chanted together the psalm, "Exaudiat te Dominus"--"The Lord hear thee in the day of trouble." When this was ended, the king and queen retired into solitude, establishing themselves in two cabins on the bank of a river, where they worked for their livelihood, and were often visited by their son. The invasion of the Saxons obliged S. Cadoc to fly, first to the island of Flat-holmes in the Bristol Channel, and then into Brittany, where he founded a new monastery, on a little desert island of the archipelago of Morbihan, which is still shown from the peninsula of Rhuys; and to make his school accessible to the children of the district, who had to cross to the isle and back again in a boat, he threw a stone bridge four hundred and fifty feet long across this arm of the sea. In this modest retreat the Welsh prince resumed his monastic life, adapting it especially to his ancient scholarly habits. He made his scholars learn Virgil by heart: and one day, while walking with his friend and companion, the famous historian Gildas, with his Virgil under his arm, the abbot began to weep at the thought that the poet, whom he loved so much, might be even then perhaps in hell. At the moment when Gildas reprimanded him severely for that "perhaps," protesting that without any doubt Virgil must be damned, a sudden gust of wind tossed Cadoc's book into the sea. He was much moved by this accident, and, returning to his cell, said to himself, "I will not eat a mouthful of bread, nor drink a drop of water, till I know truly what fate God has allotted to one who sang upon earth as the angels sing in heaven." After this, he fell asleep, and soon after, dreaming, he heard a soft voice addressing him, "Pray for me, pray for me," said the voice, "never be weary of praying; I shall yet sing eternally the mercy of the Lord." The next morning a fisherman brought him a salmon, and the Saint found in the fish the book which the wind had snatched out of his hands. After a sojourn of several years in Brittany, Cadoc left his new community flourishing under the government of another pastor, and to put in practice that maxim which he loved to repeat to his followers:--"Wouldst thou find glory? march to the grave." He returned to Britain, not to find again the ancient peace and prosperity of his beloved retreat of Llancarvan, but to establish himself in the very centre of the Saxon settlements, and console the numerous Christians who had survived the massacres of the Conquest, and lived under the yoke of a foreign and heathen race. He settled at Weedon, in the county of Northampton;[123] and it was there that he awaited his martyrdom. One morning, when vested in the ornaments of his priestly office, as he was celebrating the Divine Sacrifice, a furious band of Saxon cavalry, chasing the Christians before them, entered pell-mell into the church, and crowded towards the altar. The Saint continued the sacrifice as calmly as he had begun it. A Saxon chief, urging on his horse, and brandishing his lance, went up to him and struck him to the heart. Cadoc fell on his knees; and his last desire, his last thought, were still for his dear countrymen. "Lord," he said, while dying, "invisible King, Saviour Jesus, grant me one grace,--protect the Christians of my country!" [Illustration: S. Paul, after a Bronze in Christian Museum in the Vatican.] FOOTNOTES: [117] 2 Tim. iii. 14. [118] 1 Thess. iii. 2; 1 Cor. iv. 17. [119] Acts xviii. [120] Rev. ii. 1, 7. [121] Hist. Eccl. v. c. 19: also Socrates, Eccl. Hist. iii. 19. [122] The Gododdin, a poem descriptive of the massacre of the British chiefs at Stonehenge by Hengest, was composed by Aneurin whilst in prison. [123] The ancient name of Weedon having been Benavenna, this has helped to cause the confusion which arose between S. Cadoc and S. Sophias of Benevento in Italy. January 25. CONVERSION OF S. PAUL. S. ARTEMAS, _M., at Puteoli_. SS. JUVENTINE AND MAXIMUS, _MM., at Antioch_, A.D. 362. S. PUBLIUS, _Ab. of Zeugma, in Syria, 4th cent._ S. APOLLO, _Ab. in Egypt, circ._ A.D. 395. S. MARES, _Ab. in Syria, 5th cent._ S. PRAEJECTUS, _B._, AND COMPANIONS, _at Clermont_, A.D. 674. S. POPPO, _Ab. of Stavelot, in Belgium_, A.D. 1048. B. HENRY OF SUSO, _O.S.D., at Ulm, in Germany_, A.D. 1365. THE CONVERSION OF S. PAUL. [The circumstances of the Conversion of S. Paul are so fully recorded in the Acts of the Holy Apostles, chaps. xix., xxii., xxvi., as not to need repetition here, being familiar to all. Among the Greeks, S. Ananias, who baptized S. Paul, is commemorated on this day.] S. ARTEMAS, M. [Commemorated at Puteoli and Naples under the name of Artemas, but in the ancient Martyrology attributed to S. Jerome, he is called Antimasius, a mistake of copyists for Artimasius or Artemas. The Acts are those preserved by the Church of Puteoli, and seem to be founded on others of great antiquity; they exist only in a fragmentary condition, and give no clue to the date of the martyrdom.] Artemas was a pious Christian boy in Puteoli, in the south of Italy. He was sent to school to one Cathageta, a heathen. Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh, and the boy, filled with faith, spoke of his belief to some of his fellow-scholars. It was soon known among the boys that Artemas was a Christian, and it came to the master's ears. Cathageta lectured and browbeat the little scholar, and threatened him with the rod. "You may whip," said the brave boy; "but you will only whip my faith deeper into me." Then the master, in a rage, shouted to the boys to punish him, and the cruel tiger-cubs, educated to bloodshed by the atrocities of the arena, fell upon him with their iron pens, used for scratching on wax tablets, and stabbed him to death. [Illustration: THE CONVERSION OF S. PAUL. After the Cartoon by Raphael. Jan. 25.] SS. JUVENTINE AND MAXIMUS, MM., AT ANTIOCH. (A.D. 362.) [Authorities: the 40th Homily of S. John Chrysostom; Theodoret, Hist. Eccl. lib. iii. c. 15; Nicephorus Callistus, lib. x. c. 12.] Theodoret says:--"The Emperor Julian continued to oppose religion with greater and greater boldness, while he assumed the specious appearance of clemency, in order to lay snares to entrap men, and seduce them into irreligion. He cast things offered to idols into the fountains of the city of Antioch, so that no one could drink of the streams without partaking of the hateful sacrifices. He defiled in the same way everything that was sold in the market-place; for he had water which had been offered to idols sprinkled on the bread, meat, fruit, herbs, and all other articles of food. The Christians lamented these abominations, yet partook of the food according to the precept of the Apostle. (1 Cor. x. 25.) Two of the Emperor's guards, who were his shield-bearers and companions in arms, vehemently deplored, at a certain convivial meeting, the perpetration of such odious deeds. One of those who had been present acquainted the Emperor with this speech. The Emperor sent for these two men, and asked what it was that they had said. This question they answered thus, in the warmth of their zeal: 'O Emperor, having been brought up in the true religion, and having been accustomed to the admirable laws of Constantine, we cannot but be deeply grieved at witnessing the very food contaminated by being mixed with idol offerings. We lamented this privately, and now, publicly, we express our regret. This is the only cause of sorrow which we experience under your government.' On hearing these words the Emperor threw off the mask of clemency. Such excruciating tortures were, by his orders, inflicted on these two men, that they expired under them. The Church of Antioch honoured them as defenders of religion, and interred them in a magnificent tomb; and even to this day an annual festival is celebrated in their honour. Their names were Juventius (Juventinus) and Maximus." S. APOLLO, AB. IN THE THEBAID. (ABOUT A.D. 395.) [Commemorated on this day by Greeks and Latins alike, though some Latin Martyrologies note him on the 18th April. Authorities: his life by Palladius in the Hist. Lausiaca; and Sozomen, lib. iii. c. 14, who calls him Apollonius. Palladius is an excellent authority, for during his residence among the hermits of the Thebaid, he was personally acquainted with Apollo.] This illustrious hermit began his discipline of himself by a solitary life in the desert, at the age of fifteen. He spent forty years by himself, and then, called by God to guide the souls of others, he became head of a congregation of monks in Upper Egypt. In the reign of Julian the Apostate, hearing that his brother, who was in the army, was imprisoned for his religion, he went at the head of his monks to visit him. The tribune entering the prison shortly after, and seeing so many monks within, ordered the gates to be closed, and vowed he would enlist them all as soldiers. But in the night an angel came, bearing a lamp, and opened the doors of the prison and led them forth, and they escaped with great joy to their beloved desert. About fifty monks obeyed him; but he did not confine his sympathies to them. Hearing that the country people were about to fight one another about some trifling subject of contention, Apollo rushed from his rocks, and flinging himself amongst them, conjured them not to shed one another's blood. One party promised to retire, but the other, headed by a redoubted robber, confident in his powers, held out. Then Apollo turned to the chief and said, "My son, lay down thine arms, and I will pray God to pardon thy many offences." The man cast away his weapons, and threw himself at the feet of the abbot. On another occasion he heard that a village procession of a famous wooden idol was about to take place; he went down, and kneeling, prayed God to prevent it. Then the image became immovable, so that neither priest nor people could take it from its place in the temple. The priests said, "A Christian has done this." "Yes," said Apollo, "I have done it by my prayers," and he exhorted the people to forsake the worship of such vain gods. One Easter day the community had only some old stale loaves and a few dried olives, and they lamented that on so great a day they must fast, as in Lent. "Be of good cheer," said the abbot, "let each ask for what he likes best, and on such a day the loving God will give it him." But they would not ask, thinking themselves unworthy of such a favour. But he said, "Fear not, I will pray." Then they all knelt down, and Apollo asked, and they said Amen. Now as this response came, behold there arrived men and asses bringing a present to the monks, and it consisted of fresh loaves, pomegranates, citrons, honey in the comb, nuts, and a pitcher of fresh milk, grapes and figs, and large luscious dates (_nicolai_). The monks of Apollo communicated every day, and some ate nothing from communion to communion, living only on this heavenly food. These were some of the pieces of advice Apollo gave to his monks:--"It behoves us to be ever joyous, for we ought not to be sad about our salvation. The Gentiles are sad, the Jews weep, and sinners mourn, all those whose affections are fixed on earthly things have cause to be agitated in mind, but not we." And it was so, that the monks were always cheerful and gay, and if any appeared sad, the abbot knew the cause must be sin, and he sent for him. "Let the monks communicate every day, for those who withdraw from the Sacraments, from them God withdraws Himself. But he who approaches them assiduously receives the Saviour. That is a salutary saying, 'He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood dwelleth in Me, and I in him.' Daily, therefore, let the monks prepare themselves, and daily let them receive it." "Let asceticism," he added, "be secret. I do not like those who put chains on their necks,--they do it to be seen of men; let them rather fast in their cells, where no one will know anything about it." S. MARES, AB. IN SYRIA. (5TH CENT.) [From the Philotheus of Theodoret, cap. 20.] S. Mares spent thirty-seven years in a small damp cell, constant in prayer. Theodoret says that towards his end, "I went to his door, and he bade me open. He was aged ninety, and wore common goat's hair garments. All his food was bread and salt. As, for long, he had desired to see the Holy Sacrifice offered, but was not able, he asked that the oblation of the Divine Gift might be made there. I willingly obeyed, and having ordered the sacred vessels to be brought from the village, and using for an altar the hands of the deacons, I offered the mystic, divine, and salutary Sacrifice. But he was filled with all spiritual delight, and thought that he saw heaven, and declared he had never had such joy. I was greatly pleased with him, and I should be doing him and myself a wrong, if after his death I did not praise him." S. PRAEJECTUS, B., AND OTHERS, MM., AT CLERMONT. (A.D. 674.) [S. Praejectus, in French _S. Priest_, _Priets_, _Prie_, or _Prix_, is commemorated in the Gallican, Belgic, Sarum, and other Martyrologies. Authority: his life by two contemporary writers.] S. Praejectus, Bishop of Clermont in Auvergne, severely rebuked one Hector, a noble of Marseilles, for having ravished a young lady of Auvergne, and seized on her estates. His remonstrances having been disregarded, he hastened to King Childeric II. to lay his complaint before him, and the king gave orders for the execution of Hector. On the return of the Saint to his see, some friends of Hector waylaid him at a place called Volvic, near Clermont, and murdered him. S. POPPO, AB. OF STAVELOT. (A.D. 1048.) [Modern Roman Martyrology. The name occurs in no ancient Martyrologies; it owes its insertion to Baronius. His life was written by Everhelm, abbot of Hautmont, his contemporary, in 1069.] The blessed Poppo, born in Flanders in 978, as a youth served in arms. He made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and, on his return, engaged himself to the daughter of his friend Frumhold. When the time of his marriage drew nigh, Poppo mounted his horse one night, together with some retainers, to ride to fetch his bride. He had not gone far before a dazzling flash of light illumined him within, in his soul, and bathed his body in a blaze of glory. As it faded away, he spurred on his horse, and then noticed that a flame burnt on the point of his spear; it was as though he rode bearing a tall church taper in his hand. Astounded at this marvel, he reined in his steed, and turning to his companions said, "God calls me to another life." Then he left home and went, with the light still illuminating his soul, and served in a hospital for the sick. One day a miserable leper was brought in so covered with sores that he could not be placed with the other inmates. Thinking that the poor creature was cold in the night, Poppo went to him with his own coverlid, and laid it over him. Next morning the leper was whole, the charity of Poppo had healed him. Richard, abbot of Verdun, appointed Poppo to rule the abbey of S. Vedast, which had fallen into scandalous disorder. When the Emperor Henry II. was in the Betawe, between the two branches of the Rhine, Poppo, having to visit him about some affairs concerning his monastery, found the prince enjoying a favourite pastime of his; a naked man was smeared with honey and exposed to bears; and the sport consisted in the bears trying to lick the man, and he eluding their embraces. As this sport not unfrequently ended in the man being injured, and sometimes killed, Poppo rebuked the king, and brought him to a sense of the impropriety of encouraging such coarse and dangerous amusements. That this sport was popular, appears from Hincmar, Archbishop of Rheims, being obliged to forbid his clergy and monks attending either it or bear-bating. On another occasion, when Poppo was on his way to the Emperor, then at Strasburg, as he passed through the Ellisgau, with some of his monks, they saw a wolf carry off a man by the neck into a marsh. Poppo at once called his monks to the rescue. They were unable, on account of the loose texture of the swamp, to go direct to where the man lay, but they surrounded the marsh, and following the bloody traces, recovered the man, who was much mangled; they bound up his wounds, and he finally recovered. What became of the wolf they saw not, and hoped, and hoping believed, he was smothered in the marsh. Poppo was afterwards created abbot of Stavelot, where the monks had fallen into grave disorders. His efforts to reform them so irritated some of the worst, that they attempted to poison him, but failed. Having thoroughly reformed the monastery, he rebuilt and beautified the church, and died on the feast of the Conversion of S. Paul, after having received extreme unction from the hands of the abbot Everhelm, who is his biographer. [Illustration: Alpha and Omega; the first and the Last.] January 26. S. POLYCARP, _B. M. of Smyrna_, A.D. 167. S. SIMEON THE OLD, _Ab. in Syria, end of 4th cent._ S. PAULA, _W., at Bethlehem_, A.D. 404. S. XENOPHON, HIS WIFE AND SONS, _5th cent._ S. BATHILD, _Q., in France, circ._ A.D. 670. S. THEORITGITHA, _V., at Barking, in Essex, 7th cent._ S. GOBERT, _C., at Foss, in Belgium_. S. ALBERIC, _Ab. of Citeaux, beginning of 12th cent._ B. HASEKA, _R., in Westphalia_, A.D. 1261. S. POLYCARP, B. M. OF SMYRNA. (A.D. 167.) [Roman Martyrology. Authorities: His Acts, written by the Church of Smyrna immediately after his martyrdom, Eusebius, &c.] Saint Polycarp was converted to Christianity in the year 80, when quite young, and he had the privilege of accompanying those who had seen Jesus Christ. S. John, whose special disciple he was, consecrated him Bishop of Smyrna in the year 96. He is supposed to be the Angel or Bishop of the Church of Smyrna, to whom alone, in the messages recorded in the Apocalypse, did Jesus Christ address praise unmixed with blame.[124] "I know thy works, and tribulation, and poverty, (but thou art rich), and I know the blasphemy of them which say they are Jews, and are not, but are the synagogue of Satan. Fear none of those things which thou shalt suffer; behold, the devil shall cast some of you into prison, that ye may be tried; and ye shall have tribulation ten days; be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life." In the year 158, S. Polycarp visited Rome. The cause of his visit is not exactly declared; but he had a conference with Pope Anicetus concerning the time of celebrating the Paschal Feast; and the disputes upon this subject were carried on so warmly, in the second century, that perhaps we are to seek no other reason for Polycarp undertaking so long a journey. The first day of the week, or Sunday, appears to have been held sacred, on account of our Lord's Resurrection, from the very beginning of the Church. The eastern and western Christians agreed in keeping a solemn fast for some time preceding the feast of the Resurrection. There was, however, one important difference between them. The Asiatic Christians kept a feast on the true Passover, as well as observing the great Easter festival. The western Christians kept the Paschal feast on Easter Day. By separating the Passover feast from the feast of the Resurrection, the Easterns had a burst of festivity interrupting discordantly the hush of the great fast, which caused great offence to the western sense of propriety. Both parties laid claims to apostolic authority for their respective customs. The eastern Christians asserted that SS. John and Philip had sanctioned their custom; while the brethren at Rome defended themselves by the authority of SS. Peter and Paul. This being the case, and neither of the parties being willing to concede, a conference between an Asiatic Bishop and the Bishop of Rome seemed a very desirable measure. Polycarp had been personally known to S. John, and had been appointed by him to his bishopric. Anicetus was, singularly enough, the seventh Bishop of Rome since the beginning of the century, but Polycarp had occupied the see of Smyrna during the whole of that time. S. Irenaeus, who relates the conference between Anicetus and Polycarp, states that neither could convince the other. The meeting was, however, conducted and terminated in perfect amity. The two bishops were firm, and wedded to their respective customs; but the bond of peace was not broken between them; and as proof of their mutual goodwill, they received together the supersubstantial food, the Pope allowing Polycarp, out of respect for his age and character, to celebrate. In the sixth year of the reign of Marcus Aurelius, an exhibition of games in Smyrna kept the city in excitement for some days, and the Christians were made to fight with wild beasts for the amusement of the populace. Polycarp himself was advised to withdraw from the storm, and he concealed himself for some time at a short distance from the city. His retreat was betrayed by a boy, who was threatened with the rack unless he discovered him. Herod, the magistrate, whose office it was to prevent misdemeanours, sent horsemen by night to beset his lodgings. The Saint was above stairs in bed, but refused to make his escape, saying, "God's will be done." He went down, met them at the door, ordered them a handsome supper, and desired only some time for prayer before he went with them. This granted, he began his prayer standing, and continued it in that posture for two hours, recommending to God his own flock and the whole Church, with so much earnestness and devotion, that several of those that were come to seize him, repented having undertaken the commission. They set him on an ass, and were conducting him towards the city, when he was met on the road by Herod and his father, Nicetes, who took him into their chariot, and endeavoured to persuade him to a little compliance, saying, "What harm is there in sacrificing, to escape death?" The bishop at first was silent, in imitation of our Saviour: but being pressed, he gave them this resolute answer, "I shall never do what you desire of me." At these words, they thrust him out of the chariot with such violence, that his leg was bruised by the fall. The holy man went forward cheerfully to the place where the people were assembled. Upon his entering it, a voice from heaven was heard by many: "Polycarp, be courageous, and play the man." He was led directly to the tribunal of the pro-consul, who exhorted him to respect his own age, to swear by the genius of the Emperor, and blaspheme Christ. Polycarp replied, "I have served Him these fourscore and six years, and He never did me any harm, but much good. How can I then blaspheme my King and my Saviour? If you require of me to swear by the genius of Caesar, as you call it, hear my free confession; I am a Christian: but if you desire to learn the Christian religion, appoint a time, and hear me." The pro-consul then, assuming a tone of severity, said, "I have wild beasts." "Call for them," replied the Saint: "for we are unalterably resolved not to change from good to evil. It is only good to pass from evil to good." The pro-consul said, "If you despise the beasts, I will cause you to be burnt to ashes." Polycarp answered, "You threaten me with a fire which burns for a short time, and then goes out; but are, yourself, ignorant of the judgment to come, and of the fire prepared for the wicked. Why do you delay? Bring against me what you please." Whilst he said this his countenance shone with a certain heavenly grace, insomuch that the pro-consul was struck with admiration. However, he ordered a crier to make public proclamation three times, "Polycarp has confessed himself a Christian." At this proclamation the whole multitude of Jews and Gentiles gave a great shout. They unanimously demanded that he should be burnt alive. Their request was no sooner granted than every one ran, with all speed, to fetch wood from the baths and shops. The Jews were particularly active and busy on this occasion. The pile being prepared, Polycarp put off his garments, untied his girdle, and began to take off his shoes. The wood and other combustibles were heaped around him. The executioners would have attached him to the stake; but he said to them, "Suffer me to be as I am. He who gives me grace to endure this fire, will enable me to stand still without that precaution." They, therefore, contented themselves with tying his hands behind his back, and in this posture, looking up towards heaven, he prayed as follows: "O Almighty Lord God, Father of Thy beloved and blessed Son Jesus Christ, by whom we have received the knowledge of Thee, God of angels, powers, and every creature, and of all the race of the just that live in Thy presence! I bless Thee for having been pleased in Thy goodness to bring me to this hour, that I may receive a portion in the number of Thy martyrs, and partake of the chalice of Thy Christ, for the resurrection to eternal life, in the incorruptibleness of the Holy Spirit. Grant me to be received this day as a pleasing sacrifice, such an one as thou Thyself hast prepared, that so Thou mayest accomplish what Thou, O true and faithful God! hast foreshown. Wherefore, for all things I praise, bless, and glorify Thee, through the eternal high priest Jesus Christ, Thy beloved Son, with whom, to Thee, and the Holy Ghost, be glory now and for ever. Amen." He had scarce said Amen, when fire was set to the pile, and increased to a mighty flame. "But behold a wonder seen by us," say the authors of these Acts. "The flames forming themselves into an arch, like the sails of a ship swelled with the wind, gently encircled the body of the martyr; which stood in the middle, like purified gold or silver, appearing bright through the flames; and his body sending forth such a fragrance, that we seemed to smell precious spices." The heathen were exasperated to see that his body could not be consumed, and ordered a spearman to pierce him through, which he did, and such a quantity of blood issued out of his left side as to quench the fire. The malice of the devil ended not here: he endeavoured to obstruct the relics of the martyr being carried off by the Christians; for many desired to do it, to show their respect to his body. Therefore, by the suggestion of Satan, Nicetes advised the pro-consul not to bestow it on the Christians, lest, said he, abandoning the crucified man, they should adore Polycarp: the Jews suggested this, "Not knowing," say the authors of these Acts, "that we can never forsake Christ, nor adore any other, though we love the martyrs, as his disciples and imitators, for the great love they bore their King and Master." The centurion then cast the body into the midst of the fire, and burnt it to ashes. "We afterwards took up the bones," say the writers of the Acts, "more precious than the richest jewels or gold, and deposited them decently in a place at which, may God grant us to assemble with joy, to celebrate the birthday of the martyr." His tomb is still shown near Smyrna. S. SIMEON THE OLD, AB. (END OF 4TH CENT.) [Greek Menaea. Authority, Theodoret, in his Philotheus, c. 6.] Simeon the Old dwelt a life of solitude in a cave, feeding on vegetables. One day some travellers arrived at his cell, having lost their way and asked the old hermit to direct them to a certain fort for which they were bound. The hermit called two lions from the desert, and gave them to the travellers as guides. This incident was related to Theodoret by one who was present on the occasion. When a large number of disciples assembled under his direction, the aged Simeon went away to mount Amanus, near Antioch, and there built a monastery. But afterwards, being desirous of ending his days on Sinai, he went into the desert of that mountain. And there he saw one day two hands raised from the mouth of a cave. Thinking it might be a snare of the devil, he approached with caution. At the sound of his footsteps the supplicating hands were drawn in, and he saw no man; then he cried to the dweller of the cave to come forth, and there issued out of it an old hermit dressed in palm leaves, who said that he and a brother hermit had come to establish themselves on Sinai, and they had promised each other never to separate. Now before they reached the holy mount the brother hermit died; so the survivor buried his corpse, and, faithful to his promise, tarried by his grave till the Lord should call him; and every day a lion brought him a bunch of dates. Now when Simeon had partaken of his dates, and they had sung together the matin office, he went on, and reaching Sinai with his monks, established on the mountain two monasteries, one at the summit, and the other at the foot. S. PAULA, W., AT BETHLEHEM. (A.D. 404.) [Roman Martyrology. S. Paula died on Jan. 26th, after sunset, consequently some commemorate her on Jan. 27th. Authority: her life written by S. Jerome, her director, in a letter to her daughter Eustochium.] [Illustration: S. PAULA. Jan. 26.] [Illustration: S. PRISCA. From a Window at Winchester. Jan. 18.] [Illustration: S. PAUL. After Vischer. Jan. 18.] The blessed Paula was born at Rome in the year 347. Her father was Rogatus, of noble Grecian origin. Her mother, Blesilla, reckoned the Gracchi, the Scipios and Paulus Aemilius among her ancestors. This illustrious birth was made more honourable by her union with Toxotius, of the Julian race, and very wealthy. Her virtues endeared her to the people of Rome, and her modesty, gravity, and prudence caused her to be generally respected. Her husband died when she was aged twenty-three, and grief for his loss nearly brought her to the grave as well. Toxotius left behind him four daughters, Blesilla, Paulina, Eustochium, Julia, and Ruffina; the youngest child was a boy, and he bore the name of his father. The heart-broken widow at length found repose in submission to the will of God. Filled with a sense of the vanity of all earthly things, she strove to detach her affections daily from all save God. After the death of her husband she would not sit down to table with any man, not even with the bishops, whose advice she sought, and who were most hospitably entertained in her house. By degrees she accustomed herself to plain food, and inexpensive clothing. Instead of a downy couch, she made her bed on the hard floor. "Hitherto all my care has been how I might please my husband," said she, "now I will care for naught save how I may best serve Jesus Christ." She was now called on to bewail the death of her eldest daughter Blesilla, who died shortly after her husband, to whom she had been married only for a short time. S. Jerome wrote on this occasion to S. Paula from Bethlehem. After having tenderly recalled the pale and gentle face, bowed with exhaustion after fever on the slender neck, the angelic form, of the departed daughter, S. Jerome adds; "But what am I doing? I would dry the tears of a mother and mingle mine with hers. I do not conceal my emotion. I write weeping. But Jesus wept over Lazarus, because He loved him. It is difficult to console another when one is also overwhelmed with grief, and when the broken heart can find no words. O Paula, I take Jesus Christ to witness, whose Majesty Blesilla now sees; I take the holy angels to witness, whose companion she now is; that I suffer the same anguish of heart as you, for I, having been her spiritual father, had learned to love her dearly." Paula saw also her second daughter Paulina die, who had been married to Tammachius, a man of noble consular birth, as illustrious for his piety as for his descent, "the first of monks in the first of cities," S. Jerome called him in after years, when he had embraced the monastic life in Rome. She also survived her fourth daughter Ruffina, married to the patrician Aletheus, but this affliction fell upon her when she was no longer in Rome. Her daughters had grown up, and her son Toxotius, having been secured a careful bringing up, by his sister Ruffina, S. Paula felt that she might now follow at liberty the bent of her desire. The stirring life in Rome gave her no rest. Her noble birth and great wealth made her in great request, and the time, which she desired to devote to God alone, was broken up by the petty business and formalities of social life, which could not be dispensed with in the great city. She therefore resolved to abandon Rome, her palace, her crowds of servants, her numerous acquaintances, many friends, and dear children. She desired to visit the holy scenes consecrated by Christ, and then to settle quietly down near her old confessor and director Jerome, then inhabiting a cell at Bethlehem. It was no light matter parting with her relations and children, but she had this consolation, Eustochium, her unmarried daughter, accompanied her, one in heart with her mother, desirous of consecrating her virginity, as Paula desired to dedicate her widowhood, to Jesus Christ. When they left Rome, the kinsmen accompanied them to the port. It was a heart-breaking scene. Paula took her place on the deck of the vessel that was to bear her away for ever. The anchor was drawn up, the moorings cast loose, and the rowers bowed to their task. Then the grief of Toxotius became incontrollable; he stretched forth his arms to her, sobbing, "Mother, mother! do not leave me." The grief of the others was silent, manifesting itself in copious tears. But Paula, raising her dry eyes to heaven, turned her face from the shore, and conquered by a superhuman effort the agony caused by the rending of so many dear ties. On reaching Jerusalem she found that a palace had been furnished for her reception by the governor, with every comfort and even luxury. She, however, chose the meanest chamber therein, in which to lodge, and spent her time in visiting the holy sites. She prayed long and earnestly before the true Cross, kissed the stones on which the body of Jesus had lain, and watered with her tears the dust of the Dolorous Way along which He had borne His Cross. She then journeyed to Bethlehem, and adored Christ in the cave of the Nativity. Overwhelmed with awe she exclaimed, "Oh, how dare I, a poor sinner, kiss the crib where the Lord wailed as a little babe? How dare I offer my prayer, where the Virgin brought the Word into the world in the substance of our flesh! Let the home of my Redeemer be henceforth my resting place, here will I dwell where He walked the earth as man." Having settled at Bethlehem into a poor little house, she engaged workpeople to erect on the road to Jerusalem a spacious hospital for pilgrims and sick persons, and also a monastery for S. Jerome and his monks. She then erected three convents for women, with one church in which all the inmates of the three houses assembled for the divine office. There they met to sing prime, tierce, sext, nones, vespers, compline, and the midnight lauds; thus they daily sang the whole psalter, which every sister was required to learn by heart. On Sundays they went to the neighbouring church where the Divine Sacrifice was offered, and where they communicated. All the sisters worked with their hands, and made clothes for themselves and for the poor. No man was ever suffered to set foot within their doors. Paula governed them with great charity and discretion, animating them by her own example. Neither she nor her daughter, Eustochium, refused to perform the most menial offices in the sisterhood. If any of the sisters proved talkative she was separated from the rest, and made to walk last and to eat alone. She was gladdened to hear in her retreat of the marriage of her son Toxotius to a pious maiden, named Leta, to whom S. Jerome addressed the first treatise on the education of women which the Christian spirit had inspired, and which prepared for cloistral life the young Paula, her daughter, devoted to the Lord from the cradle, and a nun, like her grandmother and her aunt. He offered with the candour of genius, to educate the child himself, and "old as I am," said he, "I shall accustom myself to infantine lispings, more honoured in this than was Aristotle, for I shall instruct not a king of Macedon, destined to perish by poison of Babylon, but a servant and spouse of Christ, to be presented to Him in the heavens." But Toxotius and his wife seem to have thought that an aged monk, immersed in study, would not prove so suitable for the nurture of the little maiden as a woman, and they therefore sent her to S. Paula, her grandmother. S. Paula lived to the age of fifty-six years and eight months, of which she had spent in her widowhood five at Rome, and almost twenty at Bethlehem. In her last illness she repeated almost incessantly the verses of the psalms, which express the ardour of the soul to see Jerusalem which is above, and there to be united to her God. When she was no longer able to speak, she formed the sign of the Cross on her lips, and expired in perfect peace, on Jan. 26th, A.D. 404. Her body, borne by bishops, attended by acolytes holding lighted tapers, was buried on the 28th of the same month, in the church of the Holy Manger at Bethlehem. S. XENOPHON, HIS WIFE, AND SONS. (5TH CENT.) [Commemorated by the Greeks on this day, and introduced into the Roman Martyrology by Clement the VIII. Authority: a life in Simeon Metaphrastes of uncertain date.] In the Court of Constantine the Great at Byzantium was a senator named Xenophon, a devout Christian, whose wife's name was Mary. They had two sons whom they loved as the apples of their eyes, John and Arcadius. These sons were destined for the law, and after they had finished their education in Greek at home, Xenophon sent them in a ship destined for Berytus, to be there instructed in law, that being then a great legal school. At the time of their departure, Xenophon was sick nigh unto death, and he bade them farewell from his bed. The young men had not been many days at sea before a violent tempest burst upon them, and the vessel was speedily reduced to a wreck. The brothers cast their arms round each other's necks and kissing, bade one another farewell. Then the wreck broke up on a reef, and in the havoc of the waves rending the fragile ship, they lost sight of one another. However, it fell out that both reached the land on broken pieces of the vessel, but they were cast up so far apart that each supposed that he alone was saved. John came ashore not far from a monastery, into which he was hospitably received, and where he was well cared for till he had recovered the exhaustion consequent on battling with the waves for life. In the monastery John found a calm and cheerfulness such as he had not experienced in the world; it seemed to him a peaceful refuge for the storm-tossed soul as well as for the shipwrecked body, and he resolved to remain there as a monk. Arcadius had also come ashore; he made his way to Jerusalem, in great trouble of mind, having lost in the vessel all the money his father had given him wherewith to prosecute his studies, and above all, his brother. Now alone and poor, he knew not whither to go, and what to do. Then one day he came to a monastery governed by an aged abbot, who comforted him, and urged him to despise the world, and seek rest in God. Arcadius remembered how, as a little boy, he had heard his father descant on the peace of the cloister and the happiness of monastic life. He therefore gladly assumed the habit, and bent his head for the tonsure. Now at Byzantium, Xenophon had recovered of his malady, and he and his wife often communed together of their absent sons. Not hearing any news of them, he sent a servant to Berytus to make enquiries. The servant returned one day when Xenophon was at court, so that the mother, Mary, was the first to hear of the loss of the vessel. The servant said that it was feared at Berytus that all on board had perished. "The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away, blessed be the name of the Lord," said she. Evening came, and with it returned her husband from the court, with a crowd of servants and torch-bearers. He found supper spread, and his wife awaiting him. He sat down, but noticing that she was grieved in spirit, and that her eyes were full of tears, he asked the reason. She changed the subject, and after a while, so as gently to break the news to him, she said that the servant was on his way home. Xenophon started from the table in agitation, and asked where he was. "How do you know that he is here? he may have been delayed through sickness on the way," said Mary, restraining her grief with an effort. "But the letters, where are the letters?" asked her husband, white with emotion. "Surely you can delay reading them till tomorrow," said the wife; "eat your supper now, at least, with a glad mind." Then her tears streamed down her cheeks. Xenophon looked steadily at her, and asked in a low voice, "Is it well with the boys?" Then she told him all. And Xenophon said, "The Lord's name be praised who has given me such a prudent and self-constrained wife," and instead of giving way, went to Mary and kissed her and comforted her, for now that the need for control was removed, all her mother's heart gave way in a passion of tears and sobs. Xenophon and his wife had no rest. Were their children dead or alive? That they must know; so they resolved to go together to Palestine to find them alive or dead. On arriving at Jerusalem they visited the holy places, and prayed everywhere that if it were the Lord's will, they might see again once more the faces of their sons. One day in the street they saw a servant they had given to the youths now wearing the monastic habit; Xenophon fell down reverently before him, and when the man, full of shame, implored him not to do so, "It is not you I reverence, but your habit," said the nobleman. Then the man told him how the ship had been wrecked, and how nearly all had perished, but he, escaping to land, had taken the monastic profession upon him. Three years had passed since John and Arcadius had sailed from Byzantium, and the parents began to despair of hearing any tidings of them, when one day they visited the monastery of the abbot who had received Arcadius. The old man having heard their story, knew at once that one of their sons was with him, and from what he had learned, he conjectured that the other was alive in another house. He therefore bade them be of good cheer, assuring them that their sons lived, and he bade them meet him on a certain day upon Mount Calvary, by which time he would be supplied with further information. Now it fell out that John was then in Jerusalem visiting the scenes of the Passion. The aged abbot sent for him and spake with him, and soon learned that his suspicions were correct, and that he was the brother of his monk. Arcadius at this moment arrived. The abbot said to John, "Brother, what is thy history, I pray thee relate it to me." So John began, "I am the son of wealthy parents in Byzantium, who sent me with my brother to Berytus, to study law; I loved my brother as my own soul. He was dearer to me than my life. On our voyage a storm fell on us, and the vessel was wrecked, then my brother Arcadius and I"--hereat Arcadius trembled, and extended his hands, and fell at the feet of the abbot, and stammered forth, "It is my brother, my brother!" And when John heard his voice, he knew him; but they knew each other not before, for they were both cowled, and greatly altered through fasting. And the brothers lifted up their voices and wept, and embraced each other with exceeding joy. Then the abbot said, "My sons, I bid you be silent and restrain yourselves. Your parents come this way, and too great joy falling too suddenly upon them may be more than they can bear, therefore I say unto you, refrain yourselves awhile." Hardly had he done speaking, and the two monks had fallen behind, before Xenophon came up Calvary, leading Mary. They were much aged by care. They came on with their wistful eyes fixed on the old abbot; and scarce regarded the monks who followed him, for their thoughts were on what he had to tell them. They cried, "Where are our dear sons, father?" Then the abbot said, "Rejoice, my children, rejoice and praise the Lord! your sons are found. Now go and prepare a feast, and I will come shortly with my two disciples whom you see here, and when we have eaten, I will bring your sons to your arms." Now when Xenophon and Mary heard this, they were filled with joy, and they hasted and made ready a feast, and the abbot came, he and his two disciples, and they sat down and did eat. But all the while, as Arcadius and John heard the dear voices of father and mother, they shook with suppressed emotion, and turned their heads aside, and bowed them on their breasts, that the tears might trickle unseen. And as they ate, the conversation turned to the holy lives of the ascetics in the monasteries and lauras of Palestine. "Oh" said Xenophon; "how peaceful and glad of heart are all there; methinks there the word of the prophet is fulfilled, that the desert should bloom as a rose. Right glad should I be, were my dear boys to seek such blessed places of heavenly consolation, and lying down in those green pastures, there find rest." "But if they were to do this, thou wouldst be deprived of their society," said the abbot. "That matters not," said Xenophon; "If I could but see their faces again, and know that they had set their hearts on God alone, I should be comforted." "And now," said the abbot; "let one of these monks speak, and say why he has entered on the monastic life." Thereupon Arcadius began with faltering voice: "I and my brother here present were born at Byzantium, of good Christian parents, and the name of the one was Xenophon, and the name of the other was Mary." Upon this the father and mother uttered a cry, and ran, and they were locked in the embrace of their children. The abbot stood by and saw with joy their tears and kisses; and after a while he said, "Give glory to God!" so they raised their hands and eyes to heaven, and praised Him who had brought them together again. But now that Xenophon and his wife had found their children, they felt that there was nothing more for which they cared on earth, and they also went into solitude, and served God in fasting and prayers night and day. Thus the whole family laboured with one heart for one end, the salvation of their souls and the glory of God; and though separated in body, they were united in heart, and now they dwell together in the Paradise of God. S. BATHILD, Q. (ABOUT A.D. 670.) [Roman and other Martyrologies. In some, however, on Jan. 27th; at Paris on Jan. 30th. Authorities: her life by two contemporary writers. The first is in plain unpolished style. Its date appears from allusions such as this:--"The venerable Theudofred, who is now bishop, was then abbot." "The illustrious offspring of Bathild, now reigning, &c." The writer of the other expressly states that he had seen and known the virtues of her whom he describes.] Archimbold, mayor of the palace, in the reign of Dagobert, King of France, bought a slender fair-haired English slave girl. The name of this girl was Bathild, given her probably because of her work, for the name signifies "the damsel of the lady's bower."[125] In service she grew up to woman's estate, and was very beautiful, but, withal, adorned with a meek and quiet spirit. She is thus described by one of her biographers:--"Her pious and admirable conversation attracted the admiration of the prince, and all his ministers. For she was of a benignant spirit and sober manners, prudent and shy, never scheming evil, never light in talk, or pert in speech; but in all her actions upright. She was of Saxon race, in shape graceful and pleasing, with a bright face and a staid gait, and as such, she found favour with the prince, so that he constituted her his cup-bearer, and as such, dealing honestly, she stood often by him ministering to him. But so far from being lifted up by her position, she showed the utmost humility to her fellow-servants, cheerfully obeying them, ministering reverently to her elders, often taking their shoes off for them, scraping and cleaning them, and bringing them their washing water, and mending their clothes also. All this she did without a murmur, with gentle and pious alacrity." Now it fell out that Archimbold lost his wife, and he looked about for one to fill her place. Then his glance rested on the fair-haired, blue-eyed Saxon maid, so kindly and so obliging. But when he announced that it was his intention to make her his wife, she was so alarmed that she hid herself among the under maids of the kitchen, dishevelled her light hair, begrimed her face, and worked in rags, so that the mayor supposed she had gone clean away, and after a while forgot her, and possibly thinking that such a match might have been after all a mistake, he married some one else. Then Bathild shook her tatters off, braided her flaxen hair, washed her sunny face, and shone forth in her accustomed place. But she had fled the mayor to catch the king. How Clovis became attached to her is not recorded; possibly he had long noticed the meek maiden at the mayor's elbow filling his wine goblet, and her disappearance had made him aware of the strength of his passion. Certain it is that shortly after, he asked her to be his lawful wife, and to sit at his side on the throne of France. There was no escaping a king; and at the age of nineteen, in 649, she was married accordingly to Clovis II. As queen she exercised a most salutary influence over the mind of her husband, and persuaded him to enact many salutary laws. She became a nursing mother to the Church in France, and exerted herself to the utmost of her power to relieve the necessities of the poor, and ameliorate the condition of the serfs. She bore her husband three sons, who all successively wore the crown, Clothaire III., Childeric II., and Thierry I. After six years of married life, in 655, Bathild was left a widow, when her eldest son was only five years old. She then became regent of the kingdom. The gentle queen remembered her sorrows as a slave, and resolved to become the benefactress of the slave. Slavery was universally and firmly established in France. To root out such an institution at once was impossible; it could only be done with caution, lest it should alarm and rouse to opposition the great slave owners. She had sufficient penetration to discover the great cause of slavery in France. The old Gallic population was crushed beneath an enormous tax, to pay which mothers were obliged to sell their children, and which reduced into bondage those unfortunates who could not pay. This impost she abolished, and thereby cut off the source of slavery. She also forbade the retention or purchase of Christian slaves; but, to save vested interests, this law did not emancipate those already in bonds, but was of future operation only. She employed, moreover, all the money she could spare in the purchase out of bondage of such children as mothers had sold, out of dire necessity. She also sent ambassadors to all the European courts, to announce that the sale of French subjects was strictly forbidden, and that any slave who should set foot on French soil would be held from that moment to be free. Bathild also founded a large number of religious houses. France was then overspread with forests; vast districts were pathless wildernesses, uninhabited by men. Old cities which had thriven under the Roman empire had fallen into ruins, and the wolf made his lair in the deserted chambers. How was all this desolation to be remedied, this waste land to be reclaimed? A number of men must be gathered together at certain spots, and these must become civilizing centres, diffusing knowledge amongst the people, and cultivating the soil. Such were the monasteries. They were dotted about in the wildest parts of the vast woods, and little by little the trees were cleared away about them, and pastures and corn land usurped their place, and with the advance of agriculture, civilization spread. Bathild founded Corbie, Chelles, and Jumièges, besides others of less note. Towards the close of her days, when her son Clothaire was of an age to govern, she retired into the monastery of Chelles, where she finished her days in peace, dying at the age of fifty, in 680. S. THEORITGITHA, V., AT BARKING. (7TH CENT.) [Anglican Martyrologies, but new Anglo-Roman Martyrology, Jan. 23. Authority: Bede's Eccl. Hist. lib. 4. c. 9.] Theoritgitha was a holy sister in the convent of Barking on the Thames, under the rule of the abbess Ethelberga. "She had always endeavoured to serve God in all humility and sincerity," says Bede, "and she took care to assist this same mother in keeping up regular discipline, by instructing and reproving the younger ones." She suffered nine years from a cruel distemper, which purified her soul. She saw in a vision a sign of the approaching death of S. Ethelberga. [Illustration: Decoration] FOOTNOTES: [124] Rev. ii. 9. [125] _Bath-hildr_ in Norse, meaning the maiden (_hildr_) of the _Bath-stofa_, the female apartment in a Norse, Saxon or Frankish house. She is sometimes called Bathildes, sometimes Baltidis. January 27. S. JULIAN, _B., of Mans, in France_. S. JULIAN, _M., at Atina, in Italy, circ._ A.D. 133. S. DEVOTA, _M., in Corsica, circ._ A.D. 303. S. PETER THE EGYPTIAN, _H., in Syria, circ._ A.D. 400. S. CHRYSOSTOM, _B. D., at Constantinople_, A.D. 407. S. DOMITIAN, _Monk and Deacon in Judea_, A.D. 473. S. MARIUS, _Ab. of La-val-benoit, near Sisteron, in France, 6th cent._ S. LUPUS, _B., of Chalons-sur-Saone, in France, beginning of 7th cent._ S. VITALIAN, _Pope of Rome_, A.D. 671. S. EMERIUS, _Ab., and his mother_, S. CANDIDA, _at Banoles, in Spain, end of 8th cent._ S. GAMELBERT, _P., in Bavaria, end of 8th cent._ S. SULPICIUS, _B., of S. Ghislain in Belgium_. S. THEODORIC II., _B, of Orleans_, A.D. 1022. S. GILDWIN, _Can. of Dol, in Brittany_, A.D. 1077. S. JOHN, _B. of French Flanders_, A.D. 1130. S. JULIAN, B. OF MANS. (DATE UNCERTAIN.) [Called the Apostle of Celtic Gaul; he is commemorated on this day in the Roman Martyrology. In the Paris Martyrology on the 28th Jan., others on the 31st; that of Cologne on 26th Jan. In the Roman Martyrology he is said to have been sent by S. Peter into Gaul; but as Bollandus has shown, this is an error. His life was written by one Brother Lethald in, or about, A.D. 990.] Saint Julian was the first to carry the light of the Gospel into that portion of France of which Le Mans is the capital. There he laboured with great success, destroyed the idol which the people worshipped, and persuaded great numbers to be baptized. His life, written several hundreds of years after his death, is of small authority, and contains little of interest. His relics were given to Paderborn in Westphalia, in 1143. S. DEVOTA, V. M., IN CORSICA. (ABOUT A.D. 303.) [Deivota seems to have been the correct form of her name, but she is usually called Devota. Authority: her Acts.] Deivota, or Devota was brought up from childhood in the Christian faith; when she was quite young, she was taken into the house of Eutyches, a senator, and probably a relation. Eutyches was not a Christian, but he was a kindly disposed man, who disliked persecution. On the publication of the edict of Diocletian against Christianity, he sacrificed along with the other senators; but the governor, being told that he sheltered in his house a little Christian maiden, ordered him to be poisoned, and Devota to be executed with great barbarity. Her feet were tied together, and she was dragged over rough ground till her limbs were dislocated, and she was cut and bruised over her entire person. When, after this, she was stretched on the rack, she besought Jesus Christ to release her. Her prayer was heard, and with a gentle sigh she expired. At the same moment a white dove was seen fluttering over her; it expanded its pure wings, and mounting, was lost in the deep blue of the sky. During the night a devout priest, named Benenatus, a deacon, Apollinarius, and a believing boatman, Gratian by name, removed her body, and placing it amidst spices in the little skiff, rowed out to sea. Then a white dove appeared, skimming over the water, then waiting, and hovering before them, then darting forward; and they, remembering the apparition at her death, followed the guidance of the dove, and reached Monaco, where they laid her. S. JOHN CHRYSOSTOM, B. D. (A.D. 407.) [Authorities: Socrates, Sozomen, life by Palladius, and his own writings, &c.] John Chrysostom was the son of Secundus, a military officer, born about 347, at Antioch, and on his father's death, soon afterwards, he became indebted for a careful and Christian training to his pious mother, Anthusa. He studied rhetoric under the accomplished pagan teacher Libanius, who afterwards, on being asked to name his own successor, replied, "John would be the fittest, if the Christians had not stolen him." He was baptized by Meletius, patriarch of Antioch; his chief friend was S. Basil, and Anthusa's earnest pleadings were required to counteract Basil's proposal that they should both retire into monastic life. Chrysostom, as we may most conveniently call him, could not resist his mother's appeal; he continued to live at home, but in the practice of monastic asceticism and the diligent reading of Scripture. He studied theology under Diodore, the companion of Flavian, who had been the champions of orthodoxy against Arianism, first as laymen, and afterwards as priests, in Antioch. Meletius, who had baptized John Chrysostom, was himself a confessor. It was probably about 372-374 that Chrysostom and Basil were spoken of as likely to be made bishops; and Chrysostom, by a singular artifice--the justification of which forms the least pleasing portion of his treatise "On the Priesthood,"--procured Basil's consecration while evading the burden himself. For several years he carried out the plan which, during his mother's lifetime he had abandoned, living first in cenobitic "tabernacles," and afterwards as a hermit in a cave, until his health, never robust, gave way, and he was obliged to return to Antioch, where he entered the ministry. Early in 387, an increase of taxes provoked the people of Antioch to sedition. They threw down the brazen statues of the Emperor Theodosius, and his deceased wife, the pious and charitable Flacilla. Flavian, who had been elected and consecrated patriarch, on the death of Meletius, set forth a little before Lent, to appease the emperor, and met the officers of the empire, sent from court to avenge the insult. His absence was well supplied by Chrysostom, who had recently received priest's orders, and who began to turn this trouble to account by a course of "Sermons on the Statues," as they are called. In these he endeavoured to allay the people's terror, and to convince them of their besetting sins--of which swearing was the chief--and so far succeeded, that the churches were thronged all day. The people of Antioch were pardoned by the emperor at the intercession of the patriarch. S. Chrysostom had been five years deacon, and twelve years priest, when Nectarius, bishop of Constantinople died, in 397, after an episcopate which had relaxed the general tone of the clergy. "Then," says the biographer of S. Chrysostom, "there came together some who were not wanted, priests unworthy of the priesthood, besetting the palace gates, resorting to bribery, falling on their knees even, before the people." Disgusted by this scandalous eagerness for an office which saints were wont to dread, the faithful entreated Arcadius, the Emperor, to look out for one who could administer it worthily. Eutropius, the emperor's chamberlain, had learned by visiting Antioch to admire the character of Chrysostom. He made Arcadius write to the military commander at Antioch, desiring him to send the priest John to Constantinople, without causing any public excitement. The commander sent a message to Chrysostom, asking him to meet him "at the Church of the Martyrs, near the Roman Gate." Chrysostom complied; was placed in a public conveyance, and hurried away from the scene of his early life and priestly labours. Several bishops were summoned for the consecration. Theophilus of Alexandria had come to Constantinople to solicit the appointment for his priest Isidore. He was required to consecrate Chrysostom, but endeavoured to withdraw, reading the decision and earnestness of Chrysostom in his face, and disliking him, for he was a thoroughly worldly, self-seeking prelate. Eutropius showed him some papers, however, saying, "Choose between consecrating John, and undergoing a trial on the charges made against you in these documents." Theophilus could make no reply. He consecrated Chrysostom on Feb. 26th, A.D. 398; but he never forgave him for having been the cause of this severe mortification. Over a city in which intrigue and adulation were practised as the royal road to honour, John Chrysostom, straight forward and outspoken, was set as patriarch. He came to be chief shepherd over a clergy given up to ease and sycophancy, flattering the rich and powerful, fawning on the emperor for place, and betraying their charge, the poor. Chrysostom set to work at once as a reformer of abuses. He forbad the clergy frequenting the banquets of great men; he struggled against the practice of entertaining "spiritual sisters." Several clergy were deprived; Chrysostom drew upon himself the bitter dislike of many members of their body. He examined the accounts of the church-stewards, cut off superfluous expenses, and ordered the sum thus saved to be applied to the maintenance of hospitals. He scrutinized the lives of the widows receiving pension from the Church; he earnestly besought contributions to a fund for the poor; he exhorted the faithful to attend the nocturnal services, but to leave their wives at home with the children. He rebuked the rich for their pride and selfishness. So great was the charm of his "golden tongued" eloquence, and of the unmistakeable nobleness and sincerity of his character, that "the city put on a new aspect of piety;" and the worship of the Catholics became more real, and their lives more earnest and pure. Among those of the higher classes in Constantinople who were offended by the uncompromising character of their new archbishop, was Eutropius, the chamberlain, who had raised him to the see. He desired to see the Church respectable and subservient, the patriarch pious and obedient, to the state. The Church, in his view, was a portion of the state organization, the clergy the moral police, always to be under the direction of the crown. But under Chrysostom's government it was becoming unmanageable and independent. To curtail its liberties, he procured a law to annul the right of asylum in the churches, which had been growing up during the century. But he was soon driven himself, by a revolution in the emperor's counsels, to clasp the altar as the safeguard of his life. Chrysostom violated the new law in defence of its author; and while Eutropius lay cowering in the sanctuary, bade the people take home this new lesson on the vanity of vanities. "The altar," said he, "is more awful than ever, now that it holds the lion chained." He called on his hearers to beg the emperor's clemency, or rather, to ask the God of mercy to save Eutropius from threatened death, and enable him to put away his many crimes. He bravely withstood the court in the cause of Christian humanity; but Eutropius himself quitted the church, and was condemned to exile. At this time the Origenist controversy was raging with great acrimony. It is difficult to pronounce an opinion upon it. Origen had unquestionably published some heretical opinions, but some were also attributed to him which he did not hold. Theophilus of Alexandria had leaned strongly towards the Origenists, but he was not a man of principle, and he adopted that view which suited his purposes at the time. Finding it would answer his ends better to oppose Origenism, he denounced it in his Paschal letters, in 401. The monks and hermits of Egypt had been regarded with an evil eye by heathens, Arians, and insincere Christians. All the learned, the philosophers, and men of letters, among the pagans, were emulous in their protest. The impassioned activity of the monks against idolatry, their efforts, more and more successful, to extirpate it from the heart of the rural population, naturally exasperated the last defenders of the idols. The Arians were still more implacable than the Pagans. The tendency of these enemies of the Divinity of Christ was in everything to abuse, degrade, and restrain the spirit of Christianity. How should the monastic life, which was its most magnificent development escape their fury? The war between them and the monks was therefore long and cruel. The persecution which Paganism had scarcely time to light up to its own advantage under Julian, was pitiless under the Arian Constantius, and more skilful, without being more successful, under the Arian Valens. In the time of Constantius, entire monasteries, with the monks they contained, were burnt in Egypt, and in the frightful persecution under the Arian patriarch Lucius, raised in Alexandria, a troop of imperial soldiers ravaged the solitude of Nitria, and massacred its inhabitants. And now Lucius was succeeded by the worldly, ambitious, and utterly unspiritual Theophilus, who hated the poor monks of the desert as a living reproach upon his own self-seeking, and his aim to accommodate Christianity to worldliness. He soon quarrelled with S. Isidore the hospitaller, who had suffered under the Arian Lucius, and whom he now drove from Alexandria, hating him, as those holding to mammon always will hate those who hold to Christ. Isidore fled to Nitria. Theophilus brought the charge of Origenism against the monks there. The chief Nitrian monks were Dioscorus, Bishop of Nitria, Ammonius, Eusebius, and Euthymius; they were known as the "Tall Brothers." Theophilus ordered them to be expelled; when they came to remonstrate, his eyes flashed, his face became livid, he threw his episcopal pall round the neck of Ammonius, struck him on the face with open palm and clenched fist, and cried, "Heretic, anathematize Origen!" They returned to Nitria; the patriarch, in a synod, condemned them unheard, and proceeded by night to attack their monasteries, at the head of a drunken band. Dioscorus was dragged from his throne; the cells of the other three were burned, together with copies of both Testaments, and even the reserved portions of the Holy Eucharist. It was said that a boy perished in the flames. The brothers, with many of their companions, fled to Scythopolis in Palestine, hoping to support themselves in a place famous for palms, by their occupation of weaving palm-baskets. The enmity of Theophilus hunted them out of this refuge; they reached Constantinople, and fell at Chrysostom's feet, "Who is it," asked he with tears, "that has injured you?" They answered, "Pope Theophilus; prevail upon him, father, to let us live in Egypt, for we have never done aught against him or against our Saviour's law." He lodged them in the church called Anastasia; allowed them to attend the service, but prudently, to avoid, if possible, a breach with their persecutor, debarred them from the communion. They had been condemned by their own patriarch, and it was not for him to admit them to communion without a fair investigation and authoritative exculpation. He wrote to Theophilus, in the tone of a "son and brother," praying him to be reconciled to the fugitives; but Theophilus, who disclaimed his right to interfere, defamed them as sorcerers and heretics. The Tall Brothers now appealed to the emperor and empress, who ordered Theophilus to be summoned, and the accusations against the brothers made by him to be examined. The accusations were soon proved to be groundless. Theophilus, who openly said he was "going to court in order to depose John," arrived in Constantinople in June, 402, with a load of gifts for the emperor, the empress, and the court, from Egypt and India. He at once assumed a tone of contumelious hostility towards S. Chrysostom. He would not visit or speak to him; he even abstained from entering the church. While Chrysostom declined to hear judicially the complaints of the Tall Brothers, Theophilus was concocting a scheme for his deposition. All the courtiers among the bishops, and the worldly among the clergy desired it, for their tempers rebelled against godly discipline, and the example of his own self-denial was a standing protest against their self-indulgence. Acacius, Bishop of Berrhoea, had been provided with so homely a lodging by Chrysostom that he joined the malcontents, venting his spleen in the curious menace, "I will cook a dish for him!" Eudoxia, the empress, who had heard of a sermon in which Chrysostom had lashed the pride of women, took the side of his enemies, who determined to hold a council at a suburb of Chalcedon, called "The Oak." The bishops who attended were thirty-six. Twenty-nine charges were advanced against the patriarch. Some were of open violence; that he had beaten and chained a monk, had struck a man in church so as to draw blood, and then had offered the sacrifice. Others were of evil speaking; he had said his clergy "were not worth three-pence;" he had accused three deacons of having stolen his pall. He was also charged with misconduct in his office; he sold church furniture, had been careless in conferring orders; he was unsociable, gave women private interviews, was irreverent in church, and ate wafers while sitting on his throne. Some of these charges were gross exaggerations of that plain-spoken severity which knew no respect of persons. Others were inventions more or less malignant. One of the basest was the charge about disposing of church ornaments. Like other saints, he had done so for the sake of the suffering poor. While these charges were being read at the Oak, he sat in his palace with forty bishops, and consoled them by quoting texts of Scripture. "I am now ready to be offered. Do not weep and break my heart! To me to live is Christ, and to die is gain." Now entered two young bishops from the council at the Oak citing "John" to appear, with other clergy. The forty bishops sent a deputation to remonstrate with Theophilus. Chrysostom, for himself, sent word that he objected to Theophilus and three others as disqualified, by avowed hostility, to be his judges. A bishop, named Isaac, produced a new list of charges, three of which were remarkable. He had used strong language about fervour of rapturous devotion. He had been emphatic in his assurances of Divine long-suffering. This was denounced as an encouragement of sinners in their sins; but it was forgotten that he had warned men against presuming thereon. "He had eaten before administering baptism," that is the Paschal baptism which was followed immediately by a celebration of the Holy Eucharist, and which therefore implied non-fasting performance of the sacrifice; and "he had given the Eucharist to persons who were not fasting;" two charges which he vehemently denied. "If I have done this, may my name be effaced from the roll of bishops," he said. The council pronounced him contumacious, and deposed him, requesting the emperor, Arcadius, also to punish him for insolence towards Eudoxia. This was in 403. Appealing in vain to a more just tribunal, Chrysostom was dragged from his church, and hurried by night into Bithynia. That night an earthquake shook the palace; Eudoxia, frightened at the omen, wrote to the exile, entreating him to return. He was escorted to the city by a joyous multitude, bearing tapers and chanting psalms, who forced him, in spite of the irregularity of such a proceeding, to ascend his throne, before the sentence of the council of the Oak could be annulled. This was, however, speedily done by a synod of sixty bishops; the hostile assembly could not stand its ground, and Theophilus, after meanly forcing the two surviving brothers, on the ground of their monastic obedience, to ask his pardon, consulted his safety by flight to Alexandria. New troubles soon began. In September of the same year 403, a silver statue of the Empress Eudoxia was erected near the cathedral, and the Manichean governor of the city encouraged wild and heathenish dancing in its honour, which interrupted the church service. Chrysostom spoke strongly on the subject, and was said to have begun a sermon with the words, "Again Herodias rages, again she demands the head of John." The foes of the archbishop seized the opportunity. His old enemy Theophilus sent three bishops to Constantinople. The feeble Emperor Arcadius was persuaded to order that Chrysostom should be refused the use of the churches. Easter-eve came, April 16. Arcadius said to the chief adversaries of Chrysostom, "See to it, that you are not giving me wrong counsel." "On our heads," they answered, "be the deposition of John!" One of the forty faithful bishops bade the haughty empress fear God, and have pity on her own children. As the churches were closed to S. John Chrysostom, he held the solemn services of the day in the Baths of Constantine. Thither the people thronged, abandoning the churches. The courtier bishops complained, and it was resolved to break up this assembly. A band of soldiers was sent together with four hundred barbarian recruits to clear the bath, about 9 p.m. They pressed onwards to the font, dispersed the catechumens, for on that day it was customary to baptize great numbers, struck the priests on the head until their blood was mingled with the baptismal water, rushed up to the altar where the sacred Body and Blood were reserved for communicating the newly baptized, and overthrew them, so that as S. Chrysostom says in his letter to Pope Innocent of Rome, "the most holy Blood of Christ, as might be expected in so great a tumult, was spilled on the clothes of the soldiers." Thus were the Arian horrors renewed. On Easter-day, Arcadius, riding out of the city, saw some three thousand newly baptized in their white robes. "Who are those persons?" he asked. "They are heretics," was the answer; and a new onslaught was made upon them. During the paschal season, those who would not disown S. Chrysostom were cast into prison. Within the churches, instead of the joyful worship of the season, were heard the sounds of torture, and the terrible oaths by which men were commanded to anathematize the archbishop. His life was twice attempted; his people guarded his house; he wrote an account of what had happened to the Bishops of Rome, Milan and Aquileia. Pope Innocent, who had already heard Theophilus' version of the story, continued his communion for the present to both parties, but summoned Theophilus to attend a council. Towards the end of Whitsun-week, Arcadius was prevailed upon to send another mandate to Chrysostom--"Commend your affairs to God, and depart." Chrysostom was persuaded to depart secretly; he called his friends to prayer; kissed them, bade farewell in the baptistry to the deaconesses, and desired them to submit to a new bishop, if he were ordained without having solicited the see. "The Church cannot be without a bishop." Whilst the people waited for him to mount his horse at the great western door, he went out at the eastern; repeating to himself the words of Job, "Naked came I out of my mother's womb, and naked I return thither!" This was his final expulsion, June 20th, 404; he crossed over to Bithynia, while a fire broke out which consumed the cathedral and the palace of the senate. Some ascribed it to incendiaries; others called it a sign of divine wrath. Several of Chrysostom's friends, the "Joannites," as they were called, were cruelly treated, as if guilty of the fire.[126] The place of his exile was Cucusus, in Armenia; and there, after a journey, the pain of which was only alleviated by marks of sympathy and reverence, he arrived in the middle of September. The bishop of Cucusus offered to resign his see in his favour; and Dioscorus, a man of rank, entreated him as a favour to occupy his own house, which he fitted up for the exile's convenience, with a liberality against which Chrysostom writes, "I am continually exclaiming." Very soon after he reached Cucusus, the Empress Eudoxia bore a dead child and expired. Pope Innocent wrote to the exile, exhorting him to patience by Scriptural examples. "A good man can be exercised, but he cannot be overcome, while the Divine Scriptures fortify his mind. Venerable brother, let your conscience comfort you." He also wrote to the clergy and laity of Constantinople, declaring his intention of holding a General Council for the composing of these miserable quarrels. The saintly exile in Cucusus, while suffering from illness and intense cold, and in constant peril from freebooters, continued to discharge the office of a good shepherd. He wrote letter after letter to the faithful lady Olympias in Constantinople, exhorting her to remember that the only trial really terrible was sin. He lamented that faithful bishops were suffering for adherence to his communion; he exhorted them and their clergy to be of good courage. His pastoral thoughtfulness extended far beyond a merely general care for his brethren's welfare. We find him rebuking two priests of Constantinople, one of whom had only preached five times between his expulsion and October, while the other had not preached once; setting on foot a mission to the pagans of Phoenicia; anxious to have a good bishop consecrated for the Goths; drawing tighter the old ties which bound him to the clergy of Antioch, and employing part of his friend's contributions in the redemption of captives, and the relief of the poor. Pope Innocent now boldly espoused his cause, as that of a confessor for righteousness' sake. He assembled a synod, and persuaded Honorius, Emperor of the West, who had already remonstrated with Arcadius, Emperor of the East, to write in a more peremptory tone, demanding a council at Thessalonica, and pointing out Theophilus of Alexandria as the reputed author of the present evils. Towards the end of the year, the furious incursions of the Isaurian robbers, filling the country with rapine and bloodshed, compelled S. Chrysostom to take shelter in the castle of Arabiscus. The winter was again a time of discomfort; he could not obtain a sufficiency of medicines; and the snow-drifts prevented him from receiving his friend's letters. About this time the western delegates sent from Rome with four eastern bishops who had gone thither to plead the cause of Chrysostom, were intercepted on their way to Constantinople, and confined in a fortress, their credentials were violently wrung from them, and instead of being allowed to see Arcadius, the westerns were sent back to Italy, the easterns banished to the frontiers of the empire. On their way they were cruelly harassed, robbed of their money, wearied by prolonged days' journeys, and compelled to lodge in the lowest haunts of profligacy. One of them consoled his brethren by observing that their presence recalled the wretched women to thoughts of God, which might result in their salvation, and His glory. That the persecution was in great measure a systematic revenge on Chrysostom as the representative of clerical strictness, is evidenced by such a fact as that a venerable man named Hilary was scourged, not by a judge, but by the clergy. Chrysostom wrote to thank his western friends for their sympathy, and sent a second letter to Pope Innocent, assuring him that "in the third year of exile, amid famine, pestilence, war, sieges, indescribable solitude, and daily peril from Isaurian swords, he was greatly consoled and delighted by Innocent's genuine, stedfast, and abundant charity." The winter of 406-7 was severe, but Chrysostom preserved his health by never stirring out of a close and well-warmed chamber. In the summer his enemies, dreading his influence on the people of Antioch, who went to visit him, procured an order for his removal to Pityus on the shores of the Black Sea, the last fortress of the empire. His guards were ordered to exhaust him by long journeys. Through scorching heat and drenching rains, he was hurried on, and never allowed the refreshment of the bath; one only of the guards being disposed to show him furtive kindnesses. For three months this painful journey lasted; at length they halted at the Church of S. Basiliscus, a short distance from Comana, in Pontus. That night, the sufferer had a foreboding that his release was at hand. The martyr Basiliscus appeared to him and said, "Courage, brother John, tomorrow we shall be together." In the morning, Sept 14, 407, he begged to be allowed to stay in the church until eleven o'clock in the forenoon. It could not be; he was forced to proceed, but after travelling about four miles, he was so evidently dying, that they returned to the church. There he asked for white garments, and exchanged for them those which he wore. He was still fasting; he received the Holy Communion, doubtless from the priest of the church, offered up his last prayer, added his usual thanksgiving, "Glory to God for all things," and sealed it with a final, Amen. "Then he stretched out his feet, which had run so beauteously for the salvation of the penitent, and the rebuke of the habitual sinners," and calmly expired, in about the sixtieth year of his age, and in the tenth of his episcopate. He was buried beside the martyr Basiliscus, the funeral being attended by a throng of virgins and monks from Syria, Cilicia, Pontus, and Armenia. No comment on his glorious life could be so expressive as the doxology with which it closed, and which, gathering into one view all its contrasts, recognised not only in success and honour, but in cruel outrage, and homeless desolation, the gracious presence of a never-changing Love.[127] S. LUPUS, B. OF CHALONS. (7TH CENT.) [Called in France _Loup_, _Leul_, or _Leu_. He was canonized by Pope John VIII, in 879; he is commemorated on this day at Châlons; also there on April 30th, the day of his canonization. His life is by an anonymous writer, who says that he wrote it from the remembrance of those who had read the Acts of S. Lupus which had been destroyed by fire.] S. Lupus, Bishop of Cabilinum, or Châlons sur Saone, flourished about the year 610. He was the son of honourable parents, and he commended himself to the people by his abundant charity, his self-denial, and his tenderness to the sick. Châlons being ill-provided with drinking water, and the soil dry and sandy, he miraculously provided it with an abundant spring which flows to the present day. The story is thus told. He stood one day with his ivory pastoral staff in hand watching the hay makers; the sun was hot, and the labourers were exhausted. Moved with compassion, and knowing that the turbid waters of the river were unfit to drink, he struck his staff into the sand, and a limpid spring bubbled up. When dying he sent for the governor of Châlons, and begged him to pardon the unfortunate wretches who languished in the prison under sentence of death. The governor roughly refused. After Lupus was dead, his funeral passed the city prison, and the bier was set down at that place. The prisoners stretched their hands through the bars of their windows crying piteously. Instantly their chains fell off, the doors flew open, and they were set at liberty. S. THEODORIC II, B. C. OF ORLEANS. (A.D. 1022.) [Called in France _Thierry_. Authority: an ancient life in Bollandus.] S. Thierry was born at Château Thierry, so called from an ancestor of the saint, whose family was noble and wealthy. He was taken to court and gained the confidence of King Robert the Good. On the death of Bishop Arnulf of Orleans, Thierry was elected, with the consent of the king, to fill the vacant see. His appointment was opposed by a priest named Adalric who had desired the throne for himself, and who had the indecency to burst into the church with a band of armed men, and thrust up to the very altar, uttering violent menaces, when Thierry was being consecrated, in the hopes of terrifying the consecrating bishops from what they were doing. Afterwards the priest at the head of a party of ruffians waylaid the Bishop by night, in a lane, and throwing him from his horse, ran him through, as they believed, with a sword. The weapon providentially cut through his garments without wounding him; and when the would-be assassins had fled, he rose and regained the city. Adalric, fearing the consequences, threw himself on the compassion of the Bishop, and asked his pardon, which Thierry frankly accorded him. Thierry died on a journey at Tonnerre, where his kinsman Count Milo built the church of S. Michael over his body. He was succeeded on the throne of Orleans by the priest Adalric. S. JOHN, B. OF FRENCH FLANDERS. (A.D. 1130.) This saint was forced into the episcopate by Pope Urban against his desire. He was a most meek and gentle-spirited man, full of thought for others, but severe upon himself, as was evidenced by one little fact noticed by his biographer. He was wont to rise very early to his prayers, and when he did so, he took the greatest care not to disturb others in the room and house. When he was dying, crowds of people came to see his loved face for the last time, and he gave them his benediction, and died in so doing. FOOTNOTES: [126] See concerning the fire and subsequent persecution in the account of SS. Eutropius and Tygris, Jan. 12th; p. 163. [127] This life is, for the most part, taken from the Rev. Canon Bright's "Hist. of the Church from A.D. 313 to A.D. 451." London, 1863. January 28. SS. THYRSUS, LEUCIUS AND OTHERS, _MM., in Asia_, A.D. 250. SS. EMILIAN, _B._, HILARIAN, _Mk._, AND OTHERS, _MM., at Trevi, in Umbria_, A.D. 303. S. VALERIUS, _B. of Saragossa, beginning of 4th cent._ S. PALLADIUS, _H., in Syria, end of 4th cent._ S. CYRIL, _Pat. of Alexandria_, A.D. 444. S. JOHN, _Ab. of Reomay, circ._ A.D. 545. S. JAMES, _H., in Palestine, 6th cent._ S. PAULINUS, _Patr. of Aquileia_, A.D. 804. B. CHARLEMAGNE, _Emp._, A.D. 814. S. RICHARD, _Ab. of Valcelles, in France, 12th cent._ S. JULIAN, _B. of Cuenca, in Spain_, A.D. 1207. B. MARGARET, _of Hungary, V.O.S.D._; A.D. 1271. B. GENTILE, _W., Ravenna_, A.D. 1530. SS. THYRSUS, LEUCIUS, CALLINICUS, AND OTHERS, MM. (A.D. 250.) [Roman Kalendar on Jan. 28th; Greek Menaea on Dec. 14th; Mart. attributed to S. Jerome on Jan. 20th. The martyrs not having all suffered the same day or in the same places, has led to considerable variety in the days of their commemoration. Their Acts are extant in three forms, agreeing together in most particulars, and evidently amplifications by different hands of the original Acts. They are not to be implicitly relied upon.] In the reign of the Emperor Decius, Combritius, the governor of Bithynia, made the circuit of the province, to carry into execution the severe imperial edict against the Christians. Being a man of a naturally cruel disposition he subjected those brought before him to the most exquisite torments his ingenuity could devise. Thyrsus had his eyelids pierced, and rings put through them, and molten lead was poured down his back. His arms and legs were broken. He died in prison. Leucius was hung up, and torn with iron hooks, and then decapitated; Callinicus and several others suffered in this persecution by various deaths. S. VALERIUS, B. OF SARAGOSSA. (BEGINNING OF 4TH CENT.) [Roman Martyrology, but in others on Jan. 19th, 22th, 23rd, or 29th.] Of this saint little is known, except that he associated with him S. Vincent, to speak for him, he having an impediment in his speech. When Dacian persecuted the Church, S. Valerius was taken to Valentia and there imprisoned. When brought forth and interrogated, his nervousness prevented him from articulating a word, therefore Vincent, the deacon, spoke for him. Vincent was ordered to execution, but Valerius was banished. S. PALLADIUS, H. IN SYRIA. (END OF 4TH CENT.) [This Palladius is not to be confounded with the author of the Historia Lausiaca. He is mentioned by Theodoret, who relates of him all that is known.] Palladius was a friend of Simeon the Ancient; they often met to encourage one another in the practice of self-denial and prayer. One incident in the life of this hermit has been alone transmitted to us. Not far from his cell was a frequented market. A merchant who had been at it was waylaid, robbed and murdered by a man who, after having done the deed, cast the body by the door of the hermit's cell. Next day a crowd assembled, instigated by the murderer, and with threatening looks and words, they broke open the hermit's door, and drew him forth, charging him with the murder. Then Palladius raised his hands and eyes to heaven and prayed. And when his prayer was concluded, he turned to the corpse and said, "Young man, designate the murderer!" Thereupon the dead man partly rose, raised his hand and pointed at him who had killed him; and when he was apprehended, articles belonging to the deceased were discovered upon him. S. CYRIL, PATR. OF ALEXANDRIA. (A.D. 444.) [Roman Martyrology. The Greeks celebrate the memory of S. Cyril on June 9th, and commemorate him together with S. Athanasius on June 18th. Authorities: Socrates, Sozomen, Marius Mercator, the Acts of the council of Ephesus, and his own letters and treatises &c.] This great champion of the faith has been attacked by modern writers as passionate and intolerant; it is true that he was guilty of several errors in administrating his patriarchate, and that his impetuosity gave the impulse which led to serious violation of justice. But we must remember that no man, not the greatest of saints, is without imperfection of character, and that the greatest of saints are they who, having serious natural defects, have mastered them by their faith and self-control. S. Cyril began his patriarchate under disadvantageous circumstances. He was the nephew of Theophilus, patriarch of Alexandria, Chrysostom's worst enemy, a man devoid of principle, wholly given up to pride of station; on October 15th, 412, he closed his episcopate of twenty-seven years; a melancholy instance of great powers rendered baneful to the Church by a worldly spirit and a violent temper. He was succeeded by his nephew Cyril. The evil of his uncle's example hung about him for some time, obscuring the nobleness which was to shine out afterwards. He desired above all things the ascendancy of the Church; as to the means of obtaining which, he had fewer scruples than became a minister of Him who rebuked the attack on Malchus. He closed the Novatian church, took away its sacred ornaments, and deprived its Bishop of his property. The Jews of Alexandria--a powerful body during many centuries--had procured the disgrace and punishment of Hierax, an admirer of Cyril's sermons. Cyril, naturally indignant, menaced the chief of their community; the Jews' revenge was to raise a cry at midnight, "The Church of S. Alexander is on fire!" and to massacre those Christians who rushed out to save their church. Cyril appears to have made up his mind that the Christians must right them, without expecting justice from the praefect Orestes, and he organized at daybreak a force which attacked the synagogues, expelled the Jews from Alexandria, and treated their property as rightful spoil. Orestes, exasperated at this hasty and lawless vengeance, would not listen to the explanations which Cyril offered; and the archbishop, after vainly holding out the Gospels to enforce his attempts at a reconciliation, gave up all hopes of peace. Five hundred monks of Nitria, inflamed by a furious partisanship, entered the city and reviled the praefect as a pagan. "I am a Christian," he exclaimed; "Atticus of Constantinople baptized me." A monk named Ammonius disproved his own Christianity by throwing a stone at the praefect, which inflicted a ghastly wound. He was seized, and expired under tortures; but Cyril so miserably forgot himself as to call this ruffian an "admirable" martyr, a proceeding of which he was afterwards heartily ashamed. Then followed a darker tragedy. Hypatia, a learned lady, and teacher of philosophy, and a heathen, who had great influence in the city in opposing Christianity, was supposed to have embittered Orestes against Cyril; and some fiery zealots, headed by a reader of the church, named Peter, dragged her from her house and tore her to pieces, limb from limb. Cyril was no party to this hideous deed,[128] but it was the work of men whose passions he had originally called out. Had there been no onslaught on the synagogues, there would have been no murder of Hypatia. The people of Alexandria were singularly fiery and given to civil contensions. Gibbon says of them, "The most trifling occasion, a transient scarcity of flesh or lentils, the neglect of an accustomed salutation, a mistake of precedency in the public baths, or even a religious dispute, were at any time sufficient to kindle a sedition among that vast multitude, whose resentments were furious and implacable."[129] A ferocious civil war which lasted twelve years, and raged within the city, till a considerable portion had been reduced to ruins in the reign of Valerian, had originated in a dispute between a soldier and a townsman about a pair of shoes. Cyril had inherited all his uncle's violent prejudice against S. John Chrysostom. Pope Innocent had not been able to procure the vindication of his memory at Constantinople. But soon after his death, Atticus his successor, a good man, but weak and timid, and a declared enemy to Chrysostom, who had resisted the Pope's exhortation, yielded to the popular feeling, and to the advice of the Emperor Theodosius, who thought that "for peace and unity there would be no harm in writing a dead man's name on a diptych," _i.e._, on the table of names of the departed prayed for at the Mass. Atticus excused himself for this compliance in a letter to Cyril, in which he observed that, in these Eucharistic commemorations, laymen as well as bishops were included. The nephew of Theophilus was not likely to be thus appeased; and he extracted from the messengers of Atticus the confession that Chrysostom was now commemorated as a Bishop. In his view, Chrysostom was simply a man who had forfeited the episcopate; and he called upon Atticus to "expunge from the sacerdotal catalogue the name of one who was no minister," distinctly intimating that unless he resolved to uphold the authority of the Council of the Oak,[130] he would forfeit the communion of the patriarchate of Alexandria. But as time passed, Cyril thought better of this, and regretted his violence and prejudice. Isidore of Pelusium, a pious abbot, wrote to him, "Put an end to these dissensions, lest you incur the judgment of God," and urged him not to make a perpetual schism in the Church by refusing to commemorate Chrysostom. He placed the name of Chrysostom on his diptychs, and immediately was received into communion with Rome from which he had been estranged by his adherence to the prejudices of his uncle. Atticus, patriarch of Constantinople, was succeeded in 426, by Sisinius, who died on Christmas Eve, 427. Nestorius, a Syrian bred in Antioch, of high reputation and great powers as a speaker, ascetic and studious in his habits, was consecrated to the see on April 10th, 428. His first sermon indicated a feverish polemical zeal. "Give me," he exclaimed, addressing the Emperor, "give me the earth clear of heretics, and I will give you heaven in return! Help me to overthrow the heretics, and I will help you to overthrow the Persians." He began his episcopate by attacking an Arian meeting-house; the Arians set fire to it in their despair; the flames caught other buildings, and the new patriarch received the ominous name of "the Incendiary." The early violence of Cyril ought neither to be extenuated nor exaggerated; but there was somewhat less of provocation for the persecuting zeal of Nestorius. Shortly before Christmas, 428, a priest named Anastasius, whom the new archbishop had brought from Antioch, was preaching in S. Sophia. In the sermon he said, "Let no one call Mary the Mother of God; for she was a human creature, of whom God could not be born." Nestorius was present and approved; and on Christmas Day he himself began a short course of sermons, in which he called the title heathenish, and spoke of Mary's Son as a mere man, the instrument employed, and the vesture worn by God. Eusebius, a lawyer in the city, stood up in full church, and proclaimed that the Eternal Word Himself was born after the flesh. Nestorius denounced this doctrine; "It was not the Word that was born," said he; "It was only the _man_ Jesus." Soon after, on a festival in honour of the Virgin, probably the Annunciation, a certain Bishop Proclus preached in the great church before Nestorius. After speaking of S. Mary in glowing language, as the bush burning and unconsumed, the cloud that bore the cherub-throne, Gideon's fleece filled with heavenly dew, he passed to the practical bearings of the Catholic doctrine. "If the Word had not dwelt in the womb, Flesh had never sat down on the holy throne. It was necessary, either that the doom of death should be executed on all, for all have sinned, or that such a price should be paid in exchange as could fully claim the release. Man could not save, for he was under the pressure of the debt of sin. An angel could not redeem humanity, for he had lacked such a ransom as was needed. One only course remained, that the sinless God should die for sinners. It was God who out of His compassion became Man. We do not proclaim a man deified, but we confess a God Incarnate. The Self-same was in the Father's bosom, and in the Virgin's womb; in a mother's arms, and on the wings of the wind. He was adored by angels, while He sat at meat with publicans. The servant buffeted Him, and creation shuddered. He was laid in the tomb, and he spread out the heavens as a curtain. O the mystery! I see the miracles, and I proclaim the Godhead; I see the sufferings and I declare the Manhood." Nestorius rose from his throne and rebuked the preacher. He said that to speak of God as virgin-born was erroneous, and in after sermons he argued that God who "held the circle of the earth" could not be wrapt in grave-clothes; that the Sustainer of all things could not rise from the dead. Christ, he said, was a sinless man, the image of the Godhead through His goodness; and that as a child was of the same nature as its mother, therefore that Christ could not be divine as Mary was not divine. He allowed to Christ _a_ divinity, but not _the_ divinity, placing Him rather as chiefest of saints than as God. It was Arianism under another form. His sermons caused a great excitement at home as well as abroad. Men saw that the question was no strife of words; laymen who felt that Catholic truth was their inheritance, no less than that of the clergy, shrank from the communion of a bishop who made void the Incarnation. Clergy began to preach against him, "They are croaking frogs," said Nestorius, and he obtained an imperial order to silence them. A priest began to celebrate in private, an abbot and a monk told Nestorius to his face that he was in error, and were savagely beaten and imprisoned for so doing. A monk who dared to denounce him as a heretic was scourged and exiled. Among his supporters a bishop named Dorotheus was the chief. When he preached his heresy, the congregation uttering a cry of indignation, rushed out of church, but Nestorius proceeded with the service, and administered Communion to the preacher. The careful circulation of the archbishop's sermons brought them into the hands of the Egyptian monks. Cyril strove to undo their effect by a letter addressed to the monks, about the end of April, 429. They would have done better, he said, by abstaining from the controversy; but it was necessary as things stood, to impress on them the positive truth. Since Christ was Emmanuel, since He who was in the form of God assumed the form of a servant, since the Son of Man was adorable, since the Lord of glory was crucified, it was impossible to divide the persons, and separate the manhood from the Godhead. To sum up all in one simple formula; "If our Lord Jesus Christ is God, how can His Mother, the holy Virgin, be _not_ Mother of God?" He guarded himself from misrepresentation by clearly confessing that it was from Mary that Christ derived His human nature, but that it was not from her that He derived His divine nature. He was God, from her He received His humanity, but to her He was not indebted for His Godhead. About Midsummer he wrote his first letter to Nestorius, urging him not to produce scandal and a schism by asserting that God dwelt in Christ instead of proclaiming the Catholic doctrine that Christ was God. In February, 430, S. Cyril wrote his second letter to Nestorius--the great Epistle which received in subsequent councils a formal sanction from the Church. He set forth his faith in the clearest terms, insisting on a real, not a merely moral union of God and Man in Christ. Nestorius replied, showing a strange confusion of mind in the matter, which contrasts painfully with the bright, crisp, and lucid style of Cyril. He was ready to allow that Christ was an association of God with the man, Jesus; but he would not admit that God and man made one Christ. Now it was that Cyril shone as a bright star in the firmament of the Church, proved a pillar in the house of God, sustaining the truth. For this God had raised him up, to maintain in the face of heresy, the Unity of the Person in our Blessed Lord. What S. Athanasius had done for the Church when assailed by Arianism, Cyril was called to perform when she was beaten by Nestorianism. "I care not for distress, or insult, or bitterest revilings," said he in a letter to his clergy, "Only let the faith be kept safe." [Illustration: S. CYRIL OF ALEXANDRIA. After the Picture by Dominiquin in the Church of Grotto Ferrata, Rome. Jan. 28.] Early in August a council met at Rome. Pope Celestine quoted a stanza from the Christmas hymn of S. Ambrose:-- "Redeemer of Earth's tribes forlorn. Come, show Thyself the Virgin-born; Let every age the marvel greet-- No common birth for God were meet." "Thus," he added, "Our brother Cyril's meaning, when he calls Mary, the mother of God, entirely agrees with _Talis decet partus Deum_." He cited S. Hilary and S. Damasus as teaching the same doctrine of One Christ; and the council pronounced Nestorius guilty of heresy. On August 11th, he wrote to Cyril, accepting his doctrinal statements, and giving him an important commission. "Join the authority of our see to your own, and freely occupying our place, execute this sentence with strictness and rigour; so that, unless in ten days time from this monition, he condemns in writing his unholy doctrine, and assures us that he holds that faith concerning the birth of Christ our God, which is held by the Roman Church, and by your Holiness' Church, and by all who belong to our religion, your Holiness may provide for his Church, and let him know that he must needs be cut off from our body." On the 19th of November, the emperor Theodosius, at the request of Nestorius and his opponents, summoned a general council to meet at Ephesus at the ensuing Pentecost. Besides the circular letter, Cyril received a private one, angry in tone, from the emperor, asking, "Why have you despised us, and raised all this agitation, as if a rash impetuosity were more befitting than accurate inquiry, or audacity and versatility more pleasing to us than good taste and simple dealing." In a council held at Alexandria, Nestorius was declared heretical, and was excommunicated. On Sunday, December 7th, four bishops entered the cathedral of Constantinople, during the time of service, and presented to Nestorius the letters of Celestine and Cyril excommunicating him. About four or five days before Whit-sunday, which in 431, fell on June 7th, Cyril reached Ephesus, accompanied by fifty bishops, and found that Nestorius had arrived with sixteen before him. The Roman legates, Arcadius and Projectus, bishops, with Philip, a priest, were on their way. Pope Celestine had already expressed to Cyril his opinion, that if Nestorius were minded to repent, he should by all means be received, notwithstanding the sentence already pronounced by Rome and Alexandria. The bishops of the patriarchate of Antioch had not yet arrived. The church of Africa devastated by the Vandals could send no prelate; but Capreolus of Carthage wrote, entreating the bishops to maintain the ancient doctrine. Hostilities were, in one sense, commenced between the parties before the opening of the council. Memnon, bishop of Ephesus, excluded the Nestorians from the churches, so that they had no place wherein to celebrate Pentecost, or to say matins and vespers. Acacius, bishop of Melitene, endeavoured to convert Nestorius. A bishop of the Nestorian party said to him, "The Son who suffered is one, God the Word is another." Acacius withdrew in horror; but another saying that fell from Nestorius impressed itself yet more indelibly upon every Catholic heart. On June 19th, some prelates were arguing with him on the divinity of Jesus. "For my part," said he, several times over, "I cannot say that a child of two or three months old was God." Thus he declared his disbelief in the foundation doctrine of Christianity. On Sunday, June 21st, a fortnight had elapsed from the time fixed for the meeting of the council. The Bishops were weary of waiting; illness and even death, had appeared among them; and John, patriarch of Antioch had not arrived. The majority therefore sent a message to Nestorius, telling him that the council should begin, next day. On Monday, June 22nd, when 198 Bishops assembled in S. Mary's Church, he personally remonstrated against the council being opened till the Bishops of the patriarchate of Antioch had arrived. It was in vain; Cyril and the majority absolutely refused to delay. On the episcopal throne, in the centre of the assembly, were laid the Gospels; the Bishops sat on each side; Cyril, as highest in rank, and as holding the proxy of Coelestine, until the arrival of the Roman legates, presided in the assembly. It would have been better if some other bishop had discharged this office; but it appears that Cyril's part in the proceedings was mainly that of a producer of evidence, and that he called on the council to judge between himself and Nestorius. A second citation was then directed to Nestorius; but soldiers with clubs denied the deputies access to his presence, and he sent out word that he would attend when all the bishops had reached the city. A third message was then dispatched to him; care being taken to treat him simply as an accused bishop, not as a condemned heretic. Again the rude sentinels thrust back the deputies. "If you stand here all night, you will get no satisfaction; Nestorius has ordered that no one from your council shall enter." They returned to S. Mary's. "Nestorius," said the Bishop of Jerusalem, "shows a bad conscience. Let us now proceed to compare all recent statements with the creed of Nicaea." When the great confession had been read, then the second letter of Cyril to Nestorius, and extracts from the sermons of the accused, the fathers proceeded to depose and excommunicate Nestorius, in the name of "our Lord Jesus Christ whom he has blasphemed." The sentence was signed by all the bishops; the first signature being, "I, Cyril, Bishop of Alexandria, subscribed to the judgment of the council." It was now late in the summer evening. The bishops, on issuing from the church, were welcomed with loud applause by the people, who had thronged the streets all day. Torches and perfumes were burnt before them, as they proceeded to their several abodes; and thus ended the memorable first session of the council of Ephesus. It is interesting to think that while the bishops were going home that night, after a day of intense excitement, Paulinus of Nola was calmly giving up his soul. His last words, breathed forth in a low chant at the hour of vespers, were those of Psalm cxxxi. 17, (cxxxii.) _Paravi lucernam Christo meo_. "I have prepared a lamp for my Christ." On Saturday, June 27th, John of Antioch arrived with fifteen Bishops. The council sent deputies to his lodging: he consented to see them, but permitted Count Irenaeus, a friend of Nestorius, to beat them cruelly. Dusty and travel-stained as he was, John proceeded to assemble a conclave of the partisans of Nestorius, numbering forty-three Bishops, and deposed Cyril of Alexandria, and Memnon of Ephesus. Theodosius, the emperor, prejudiced in favour of Nestorius, and thinking, perhaps not without reason, that the prelates of Antioch should have been awaited before the opening of the council, wrote on June 29th, in severe terms, ordering that no bishop should leave Ephesus until the doctrinal question had been fairly scrutinized, and declaring the proceedings null. And now the Roman legates arrived, and the second session was held in Memnon's house, July 10th. Celestine's letter to the council, dated May 8, expressed full confidence that the council would join with the legates in executing what Rome had already decided was good. The bishops answered by applause, "One Coelestine, one Cyril, one faith of the council, one faith of the world!" Next day, in the third session, the council wrote to the emperor that the whole Church was against Nestorius; and in a fourth session John, patriarch of Antioch, who supported the heretic, was deposed and excommunicated. The emperor then sent his high-treasurer, Count John, to compose the differences in a summary manner. On his arrival he at once arrested Cyril, Memnon, and Nestorius, and soldiers were stationed at the doors of their bed-rooms, to keep them close prisoners. The bishops of the council, in a letter to the clergy of Constantinople, described the distress which they were enduring. "We are killed with the heat, the air is unhealthy, there is a funeral nearly every day, the servants are all gone home sick; but if they make us die here, we will not alter what Christ has through us ordained." Many of the bishops were very ill; some had been obliged to sell all that they had, in order to pay their expenses. Cyril wrote also, but there was a difficulty in getting these letters carried to their destination. The Nestorians of Constantinople beset the ships and the roads, and would allow no ordinary messenger to enter the city. It was determined to give them into the care of a beggar, who might carry them in the hollow of a cane on which he leant. This ingenious device succeeded. The clergy of Constantinople received the sentence of deposition pronounced on their patriarch, and the letters of Cyril and the council. The clergy openly addressed the emperor on behalf of Cyril. There was a great stir among the monks, who were for the most part determined enemies of Nestorianism. The aged abbot Dalmatius had not left his monastery for nearly fifty years. The emperor had vainly striven to make him take a part in the processional services during earthquakes. But now he felt, as he expressed it, that in a cause which so truly belonged to God he could not be inactive. He issued forth, at the head of a solemn train of monks and abbots, chanting in two choirs, which moved towards the palace; the abbots were at once admitted to the presence of Theodosius, and he having read the letter of the council, said, "If these things are so, let the Bishops come hither." "They are prevented," said Dalmatius. "No they are not," said the emperor. "They are under arrest," persisted the abbot. The conference ended to the satisfaction of the abbots; they came forth, and directed the multitude without to proceed to a large church at the extremity of the city. Again the procession swept onwards; monks, bearing wax tapers, led the psalmody, without which in those days no great religious movement was conceivable; and the inspiring, "O praise God in His holiness," was thundered forth as they approached their destination. The church was thronged with eager listeners; Dalmatius caused the letter of the council to be read, and then described the interview with Theodosius. Dalmatius might well write to the council, "I have not neglected your wishes." His interposition was a great event; he had proved too many for the Nestorians. By his simple devotion and impressive firmness, the old recluse had given force and unity to a great mass of public feeling, and broken the spell by which a party had bound the emperor. It is unnecessary to follow the tangled threads of party strife much further. Theodosius confirmed the decree of the council, and on Sunday, Oct. 25th, 431, a new patriarch was consecrated to fill the room of Nestorius. John of Antioch had been led astray by party feeling, and in faith he had not been really heretical; his mind like that of other supporters of Nestorius was bewildered, and fearing lest Cyril should fall in the opposite error, that of Apollinaris, which lost one nature in the other, making of Christ but one nature, he had adopted the side of Nestorius. Now he was reconciled to Cyril, who gladly met him halfway, and by mutual explanation blew away the dust of strife, and found that their faith was identical. John sent Paul, Bishop of Emesa, to Alexandria with this confession, "We confess our Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, to be perfect God and perfect Man, of a reasonable soul and a body; before the ages begotten of the Father according to His Godhead, but for us and for our salvation, in the latter days, born of the Virgin Mary according to His Manhood; of one essence with the Father as to Godhead, of one essence with us as to Manhood. For there took place an union of two natures; wherefore we confess one Christ, one Son, one Lord. According to this notion of the union without confusion, we confess Holy Mary to be Mother of God, because God the Word was incarnate and made man, and from His very conception united to Himself the temple taken from her." This formulary Cyril gladly accepted as orthodox, and then, and not till then, Paul of Emesa was permitted to attend the church service, and invited to preach, as a Catholic Bishop, on Christmas Day. The scene that ensued was a very striking one. He began with the angelic hymn, proceeded to Isaiah vii. 14, and then pronounced the momentous words, "Thus Mary, Mother of God, brings forth Emmanuel!" The church rang with joyful cries; "Lo, this is the faith! 'Tis God's gift, orthodox Cyril! This is what we wanted to hear!" Paul resumed, and presently enforced both sides of the great verity. "A combination of two perfect natures, I mean Godhead and Manhood, constitutes for us the one Son, the one Christ, the one Lord." Again the people shouted applause; "Welcome, orthodox Bishop, the worthy to the worthy!" S. Cyril died in June, 444, after a pontificate of thirty-two years, during the last fifteen of which he may be said to have as truly lived for the truth of the unity of the two natures in Christ, as his mightiest predecessor, S. Athanasius, had lived for the truth of the Divinity of Christ. Doubtless, the fiery spirit, which Cyril could not always restrain, impelled him, during this great controversy, into some steps which show that he was not an Athanasius. But modern critics of his character have said more than enough on this point, and too little on points of a different kind. Historical justice can never demand that we should take the hardest possible view of his conduct at the opening of the council of Ephesus, and ignore the noble unselfishness, the patience in explaining over and over again his own statements, the readiness in welcoming substantial agreement on the part of others, in a word, the "power, and love, and command" which made him a true minister of peace in the reunion of 433. We need not dwell on other instances in which he showed a remarkable forbearance, as when he bore without irritation the schooling of S. Isidore; on his care for the due probation of aspirants to the priesthood, his depth and acuteness as a dogmatic theologian, his faith and thankfulness when treated as a deposed prisoner. The way _not_ to understand him is to substitute a haughty and heartless dogmatist for the ardent, anxious, often the deeply suffering man, who, against an opponent strong in sophistry, in court influence, and in church power, persevered in defending the simple truth of the Scriptural and Nicene mystery, that "the one Lord Jesus Christ was very God of very God, who for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven, and was incarnate, and was made Man."[131] [Illustration: S. CYRIL OF ALEXANDRIA. After Cahier. Jan. 28.] S. JAMES, THE PENITENT, H. (6TH CENT.) [Roman Martyrology and Greek Menaea, but by the Gallo-Belgic Martyrology on Jan. 29th. Authority: a life written apparently not long after the death of S. James. There are so many saints, and even hermit saints of this name, that some confusion would have arisen but for the remarkable peculiarity of the life of this man.] The story of this hermit is a painful and very sad one; it is that of a great fall and bitter repentance. As a warning to all those who are living lives near to God, to be not high-minded but fear, the Church has placed it in her sacred Kalendar, but not only as a lesson to such, but also as an encouragement to the poor wretch who has fallen, to look up, not to despair, for great as may be his sin, greater is the mercy of God. Near the city of Porphyrio in Samaria lived a hermit in a cave. He was not old, but in the bloom of manhood. Some wicked men, desirous of disgracing the anchorite, suborned a harlot to bewitch him. She therefore went to his cave one evening, and knocked at the door. He opened the door, and, seeing a woman, slammed it in her face. But she continued knocking and imploring to be admitted. Night fell, and the howl of the wolf and the snarl of the hyaena sounded dolefully without; then the hermit, fearing lest the woman should become prey to wild beasts, opened the door, and asked her who she was. She replied that she was a religious woman on her road from one convent to another, who sought shelter for the night. Then he admitted her to the outer chamber of his cave, where burnt his fire, and there he bade her rest, whilst he retired into the inner chamber, and closed the door. But, during the night, he heard her moaning and sobbing, then he looked through the little window in the door, and saw her rolling on the ground, as if in great pain. He asked what ailed her, and she answered that she had cramp of the heart, and implored him to relieve her, by signing her bosom and heart with holy oil. Then she tore open her garment, and exposed her breast; and he, entering, took oil and anointed her bosom; but fearing temptation, he prayed to God with great devotion, and at the same time placed his left hand in the fire, whilst with his right he continued doing as she demanded, till suddenly, she was aware that his left hand was so burned that the fingers were completely charred through. Then, horror-struck, and filled with compunction, she threw herself at his feet, and sobbing confessed her evil design. So he bade her go and sin no more, and the woman was converted from her evil life, and she went and lived the rest of her days in the exercise of penitence. Now, after this, James was of good confidence that he had completely mastered the lust of the flesh, and he was less on his guard against the wiles of Satan than before. And people saw his maimed hand, and they praised his great continence, so his heart was lifted up within him, and he was filled with spiritual pride. After many years, when he was over sixty, there came to his cell a father bringing his daughter, a very beautiful girl, who was possessed with an evil spirit, and he besought the pious hermit to cast forth the demon. And when he had prayed, the evil spirit went out of her, but left her almost inanimate. Then the father, thinking her too much exhausted to be at once removed, or fearing another access of her disorder, left her in the cell of the God-fearing recluse. And when she was there some days, and he saw her beauty, he was overcome with a violent passion of love, and he lost all control over himself, and forgot God, and deceived the unfortunate girl, and in madness he savagely murdered her, and threw the body into a river. And now, as the sun set on that day of passion and crime, and the dark night settled down on the wilderness, the horror of remorse came upon him, and he writhed in his cave in an agony of shame and despair, lying with his face on the ground. Then, at last, haggard and hopeless, he rushed forth, resolving to confess his crime and then to return into the world, as one unworthy to aspire to a close walk with God. And when he had come to the nearest monastery, he called the monks together, and casting himself at their feet, sobbed forth his story of shame. The good brothers raised him, and mingled their tears with his, and prayed God to have mercy on the poor sinner, and to pluck him as a brand from the burning. After that, finding no rest, he went forth, and lighted, as evening fell, on an old hermit sitting in his cave, who offered him a lodging, and spread for him such food as he had to offer. But James would eat nothing. Then the hermit said, "Dear Christian brother, give me some good advice, how I may escape evil thoughts." And when James heard that, he uttered a piercing cry, staggered to his feet and fell on the ground, burying his face in his hands. He told all his sin to the hermit, and said that now he was about to return into the world, being unworthy to wear the habit of a monk, and live a life demanding such holiness. "When I was young, then I controlled my passions, now that I am old, my passions have conquered me. I cannot raise my eyes," he said; "I despair of salvation. I cannot name the Saving Name; fire will fall from heaven to consume me, I am lost!" Then the good old hermit cast his arms round his neck and kissed him, and said, "Brother, despair not of God's forbearance, but believe that there is a place for repentance. A broken and a contrite heart God will not despise. Great is God's mercy, ever following us, therefore despair not, brother!" He ceased not from speaking, till the black cloud of despair was rolled away, and the fallen monk had the courage to hope. Then he led him on his way for many miles, earnestly dissuading him from going into the world; and so they parted, with many tears. So James sought out a doleful cave which had been used as an old sepulchre, and he hid himself there, and spent in it ten years, bewailing his crime, only opening the door twice in the week, to collect a few olives on which to sustain life, and esteeming himself viler than the dust. And when ten years were accomplished, he felt that God was about to call him, therefore he went to the nearest city, and to the Bishop there, and besought him, when he was dead, to bury him in the old sepulchre in which he had undergone his penance, and in the soil he had moistened with his many tears. After that he returned to his cave, and there died, at the age of seventy-five. S. PAULINUS, PATR. OF AQUILEIA. (A.D. 804.) [S. Paulinus died on Jan. 11th, but his festival is observed on Jan. 28th. Authorities: various histories of his time, and the writings of himself and Alcuin.] S. Paulinus, born about 726, was one of the most illustrious of the patriarchs who sat in the throne of Aquileia, which he ascended, about the year 776. He assisted at the council of Aix-la-Chapelle in 782, of Ratisbon in 792, and of Frankfort in 794; and he held one himself, at Friuli, in 791 or 796. He combated a form of Nestorianism propagated by Felix, Bishop of Urgel, and Elipandus, Bishop of Toledo, with such success that their heresy made no headway in the West. In 802, S. Paulinus assembled a council at Altino. He died on the 11th Jan., 804. [Illustration: CHARLEMAGNE AND S. LOUIS. After a Picture in the Palais de Justice, Paris, wrongly attributed to Van Eyck. Jan. 28.] B. CHARLEMAGNE, EMP. (A.D. 814.) [Inserted in many French, German, and Belgian Martyrologies. He was canonized by the Anti-pope Paschal III. The life of this emperor, written by his secretary Eginhart, together with the numerous historical accounts of his transactions, supply abundant material for his life.] The public life of the Emperor Charlemagne belongs to the domain of secular history, rather than to hagiology. We shall confine ourselves, in this notice, to those acts which have obtained for him a place in the Kalendar of the Church. Charlemagne, son of King Pepin, was born in 742, and was crowned king of France in 768. In the early years of his reign he was guilty of grave moral faults, which he deeply deplored in his after life. He comes before us as a man penetrated with a strong sense of religious responsibility, and of faith in the divine mission of the Church. In the midst of his wars, the spread of the true faith, and the advancement of learning, were never absent from his mind. He was zealous in reforming the monasteries, and for the sake of uniformity, he introduced into them the rule of S. Benedict. For the discipline of the clergy, he procured the convention of many synods, in which were drawn up his famous Capitulars. He meditated assiduously on the Scriptures, assisted at the divine office, even that of midnight, if possible; had good books read to him at table, and took but one meal a day. He died at the age of seventy-two, at Aix-la-Chapelle, in 814, and was there buried. His tomb was opened in 1165. The body was found, not reclining in his coffin, as is the usual fashion of the dead, but seated on his throne as one alive, clothed in the imperial robes, bearing the sceptre in his hand, and on his knees a copy of the Gospels. On his fleshless brow was the crown, the imperial mantle covered his shoulders, the sword Joyeuse was by his side, and the pilgrim's pouch, which he had borne always while living, was still fastened to his girdle. His skull and throne and hunting horn are preserved in the sacristy at Aix. [Illustration: Baptism of Vanquished Saxons by command of Charlemagne. From a Miniature of the 15th Century in the Burgundy Library at Brussels.] FOOTNOTES: [128] "That Cyril had any share in this atrocity," says Canon Robertson, i. 401, "appears to be an unsupported calumny." [129] Decline and Fall, Ed. Bohn, i. p. 348. [130] See p. 406. [131] Chiefly from Bright's Church History. January 29. S. VALERIUS, _B. of Trèves, end of 1st. cent._ S. CONSTANTIUS, _B.M. at Perugia, between_ A.D. 161-8. SS. SABINIAN, _M._, AND SABINA, V., _at Troyes, in France, circ._ A.D. 275. SS. PAPIAS AND MAURUS, _MM., at Rome, circ._ A.D. 303. S. GILDAS THE WISE, _Ab. in Brittany, 6th cent._ S. SULPICIUS SEVERUS, _B. of Bourges_, A.D. 591. S. BACULUS, _B. of Sorrento, circ._ A.D. 679. S. PETER THOMASIUS, _Latin Patr. of Constantinople_, A.D. 1366. S. FRANCIS OF SALES, _B. of Geneva_, A.D. 1622. S. VALERIUS, B. OF TREVES. (END OF 1ST CENT.) [There are many Saints of this name. This S. Valerius appears in very many of the most ancient Martyrologies. His Acts, together with those of SS. Eucher and Maternus, his companions, was written by a certain Goldscher, of uncertain date, but ancient; for it is quoted by Heriger, Ab. Lobie, who died 1007. Goldscher says that he collected the accounts he found of Valerius and his companions from various ancient chronicles.] Eucher, Valerius, and Maternus, according to legend wholly unreliable, were three disciples of S. Peter, and were sent by him to preach the Gospel in Gaul. The first was consecrated by him bishop, the second, deacon, and Maternus, sub-deacon. S. Eucher fixed his see at Trèves, then an important city. After his death Valerius was elevated to the episcopate, and preached the word of God with so much zeal, that many were added to the Church. On his death, he was succeeded by S. Maternus. SS. SABINIAN, M., AND SABINA, V. (ABOUT A.D. 275.) [Commemorated in some churches on Jan. 25th, in others on Jan. 29th, June 8th, Aug. 29th, Sept. 5th; sometimes together, and sometimes severally. Authorities: two ancient lives of S. Sabinian, and one of S. Sabina, published by Bollandus.] SS. Sabinian and Sabina were brother and sister, natives of Samos. Sabinian's soul having been touched by Christian teaching, he left his native island, and coming to Gaul reached Troyes, where he fell in with Christians, and he was there baptized in the river Seine. It is said that his staff, which he had driven into the bank, as he went down into the water, on his return put forth leaves and flowered. In the reign of Aurelian he was brought before the emperor, then at Vienne in Gaul, and was cruelly tormented, by being seated on a heated bench of iron, and a red-hot helmet was placed on his head. He was afterwards executed with the sword. His sister Sabina, who had followed him, arrived at Troyes after his martyrdom. She was there baptized, spent a holy life, and died a virgin. S. GILDAS THE WISE, AB., IN BRITTANY. (6TH CENT.) [There are said to have been several British saints of this name. But that commemorated on this day is the famous author, whose writings are extant. It is probable that Gildas, having been born in Scotland, bred in Wales, and a monastic founder in Brittany, has been divided into three, and some of the incidents have attached themselves to S. Gildas the Scotchman, others to S. Gildas the Welshman, and others again to him of Brittany. Yet these are all easily reducible into a consecutive history, and belong, in fact, to one man. His life was written by Caradoc of Llancarvan, about 1150; another life is by an anonymous monk of Rhys.] S. Gildas, surnamed the Wise, was born in North-Britain near the Clyde, in the kingdom of which Dumbarton was the capital. His father was of princely birth; his eldest son, Howel, was a great warrior, who, succeeding his father in the principality, was slain by King Arthur. Mailoc, another son, was brought up to the religious life. Two other brothers, and their sister, Peteona, in like manner left the world, and choosing a retired place in the furthest extremity of that country, built themselves separate oratories, where, by watching, fasting, and fervent prayer, they continually strove to reach their heavenly country. As to Gildas, we learn from his own writings, that he was born in the year of the famous victory, gained (as some say, by Ambrose; or, as others say, by Arthur,) over the Saxons at Mount Badon, near Bath, about A.D. 520. He was, when a child, committed by his parents to the care of S. Iltut, who brought him up in his monastery of Llan-Iltut in Glamorganshire, instructing him in the divine Scriptures, and in the liberal arts. These divine meditations wonderfully increased his faith and love of heavenly things, and influenced in such a manner the whole conduct of his life, that from his very youth he attained to great perfection and was favoured with the gift of miracles. From S. Iltut's school, where he had for companions S. Samson and S. Paul of Leon, both of whom were afterwards illustrious prelates, he went over into Ireland, for his further improvement in virtue and learning, among the disciples of S. Patrick. There he frequented the most celebrated masters of divine and human learning; and like the industrious bee, gathered honey from every flower--the honey of virtue and of knowledge. In the meantime, he failed not to chastise his body and bring it into subjection, lest, with all his learning and preaching to others, he himself might become a cast-away. Therefore he fasted much, and often watched whole nights, employing that silent time in prayer. After Gildas was ordained priest, he preached the Gospel in the northern parts of Britain; where a great part of the inhabitants were heathen, and those calling themselves Christians were infected with the Pelagian heresy. God blessed his labours there with such success, that great numbers of heathen and heretics were by his means converted to Christ; and many miracles were wrought through him in the cure of the sick, in confirmation of his doctrine. The reputation of his success having reached Ireland, the king, Ainmeric, invited him over. Gildas accepted the call, and there, by his preaching and miracles, he mightily advanced the kingdom of God. He built churches and monasteries, established Christian discipline, regulated the liturgy, taught for some time in the famous school of Armagh, and was, in a word, another S. Patrick to that nation, by which he has been ever since gratefully honoured among their most illustrious Saints. After these things, leaving Ireland and Britain, he sailed over into Armorica or Brittany, and there founded the monastery of Rhys. But as he was desirous of solitude and undisturbed contemplation, he made himself an oratory, at some distance from that monastery, under a rock upon the bank of the river Blavet, where he devoted his solitary hours to prayer.[132] The exact date of his death is uncertain. S. SULPICIUS SEVERUS, B. OF BOURGES. (A.D. 591.) [There is great confusion caused by there having been so many archbishops of this name. There was a Sulpicius the Pious, Archbishop of Bourges about 644; commemorated on Jan. 17th. There was also Sulpicius Severus, the disciple of S. Martin, whose life Butler gives on this day, and who is the famous historian, but there seems to be no authority for numbering him with the Saints. Butler also says that there were four Sulpicii, Archbishops of Bourges, but this seems to be a mistake, for Bollandus gives only two, Sulpicius the Pious and Sulpicius Severus.] Little of the acts of this Saint is known, and he is here mentioned solely to enable the reader to distinguish the Saint of this name from the historian, and also from his successor Sulpicius the Pious. S. FRANCIS OF SALES, B.C. OF GENEVA. (A.D. 1622.) [Roman Martyrology. Beatified, A.D. 1661, canonized, A.D. 1665. Jan. 29th, is the day of the translation of his body to Annecy; he died on Holy Innocents' Day. Authorities: authentic lives by his nephew, Charles Augustus de Sales, also by F. Goulu, general of the Feuillans, also by Henry de Maupas du Tour, Bishop of Puys, and afterward of Evreux; also by Madame de Bussi-Rabutin, nun of the Visitation; also anecdotes of him collected by his friend Camus, Bishop of Belley; and finally, his own writings.[133]] S. Francis of Sales was the eldest son of one of the principal nobles of Savoy,--John, Lord of Sales, of Boisy, of Balleyson, and of Ville-Roget, usually styled by the second of these titles. His mother Frances, daughter of the Lord of La Thuille and of Vallieres, came of no less noble stock. He had many brothers and sisters, of whom Louis, Lord of La Thuille, was the father of Charles Augustus, the pious biographer of the Saint. Francis was born, Aug. 21st, 1567. He was sent in early childhood to the college of Annecy, where he was trained in all the accomplishments which in those days were considered essential to the rank of a young noble. He was five years at the college of Annecy. At the age of eleven, he entreated permission of his father to take the tonsure, having at that early age decided to adopt the ecclesiastical life. M. de Boisy by no means desired this, for his ambition was, that his eldest son should succeed him as the head of the family, and distinguish himself in political life; but, with that sort of management which men of great experience often prefer to violent measures, he permitted him to do as he pleased. The old lord knew that the tonsure did not bind his son finally to become an ecclesiastic; and he depended on the changes to which a young man's mind is subject, to dissipate this predilection. In 1580, he was sent to pursue his studies in the University of Paris. At Paris one of the most critical events of his life took place, a terrible temptation to despair, which came on suddenly, and lasted for a considerable time, but from which he was released in a wonderful manner. He was about the age of seventeen, when the idea took possession of his mind, that he was not in a state of grace, and that the face of God was turned away from him. In his agony of mental distress he prayed, "Lord if I may not see Thee hereafter, yet, oh grant, that I may never blaspheme Thee!" He seems, if it were possible, to have suffered the very anguish of hell, without the loss of the love of God. During the six weeks this shadow lay upon him, he could hardly eat or sleep, he wasted to a skeleton and his friends became greatly alarmed for his health. At length, this great cross disappeared as suddenly as it came. He one day entered the church of S. Etienne des Grés and knelt down before an image of the Blessed Virgin. His eye was caught by a tablet on the wall, on which was inscribed the famous prayer of S. Bernard, called the _Memorare_. He repeated it with great emotion; and implored that, through the intercession of Mary, it might please God to restore his peace of mind. He also made a vow of perpetual chastity. The dark thoughts which had brooded over his soul for many weeks now sped away, and the sun of God's favour shone on it and warmed it once more. He came out of the church in that sweet and profound calmness of mind which he never afterwards lost. Considering what he was to become in after life, the guide and comforter of such a multitude of souls, it was necessary, in order to give him his tender overflowing sympathy, that he should have sounded the most unusual depths of human agony. After having spent five years at Paris, he was sent to finish his education at the university of Padua, and there he remained till he was twenty-four years of age, when, in 1591, he took his degree of doctor of laws. Soon after his return home, his father sent him to Chambéry, to take the office of senator in the court, and the young Francis took the opportunity of conferring with the Bishop on the steps which it would be most advisable for him to take, in order to ensure the consent of his family to his embracing the ecclesiastical state, on which his heart had long been set. The Bishop advised him to wait a little, before declaring this intention; and, in the mean time he obtained a bull from Rome authorizing the appointment of Francis to the deanery of the cathedral, knowing that the attainment of this dignity would soften the feelings of the family towards the purposed steps. The hopes of Francis, however, seemed destined to be frustrated altogether by the extreme anxiety of his father, both that he should accept the post offered him, and also that he should marry a rich, amiable, and beautiful girl, the daughter of one of their oldest friends. But Francis, to the surprise and despair of his parents, refused both offers. Not long after, the suspense becoming intolerable to him, and his vocation day by day stronger, he resolved to reveal the cause to his father and mother, and taking with him his cousin, Louis of Sales, he implored their consent to his becoming a priest. M. de Boisy was stupified at his son's proposal, which took him completely by surprise, and at first flatly refused his consent. But after combating the resolution of Francis for a long time, he yielded to the entreaties of his wife, who warned him that, should he oppose so decided a vocation, it would be refusing him permission to follow the voice of God. Armed with his father's consent and blessing, Francis lost no time in hastening back to the Bishop of Geneva, from whom he received minor orders on June 8th, 1593. The Bishop, who had the highest opinion of his power, told him that he expected him to preach on the following Thursday, which was the Feast of Corpus Christi. When the morning came, Francis was seized with a sudden panic, and he cast himself on his bed when the bells were ringing for service. But, overcoming his bashfulness, he rose and went to the cathedral, where he preached on the Real Presence in the Holy Eucharist, a sermon which flowed from a heart which had long loved and adored that Presence. The Bishop was much moved by this discourse, and three leading Calvinist gentlemen who had come out of sheer curiosity to hear the new preacher were convinced, and shortly after were received into the Church of God. On the 18th December of the same year, Francis was promoted to priests' orders, on which occasion his ecstatic devotion amazed the assistants. At this time the Bishop received an appeal from the Duke of Savoy to send missionaries into the Chablais. This is a portion of Savoy to the south of the lake of Geneva, which had been forced into heresy by the canton of Berne in Switzerland. The circumstances were as follows. During the wars between the canton of Berne, supporting insurgent Geneva against the Duke of Savoy, Charles III, who was thus engaged in war with Francis I., King of France, the troops of Berne had invaded the province of Chablais, and has wrested it from him. Not content with this usurpation, the senate of Berne determined to undermine the Catholic religion in this canton, and for this purpose divided the conquered province into townships, of which the principal was fixed at Thonon, on the borders of the lake. There were two large churches in the town, those of S. Hippolytus, and S. Augustine. The authorities of Berne drove out the Catholic clergy, and sent two violent reformers, Farel and Lambertet to preach during Lent in 1536, and try to prevail on the people to disbelieve the majority of those truths which the Church had taught them. This they accordingly did, but when Lambertet began to preach in the pulpit of the church of S. Hippolytus, a scene of confusion ensued; he was absolutely refused a hearing, and one of the citizens forced him to come down from the pulpit. The government of Berne, to punish this tumult, sent six commissioners, who, on the 4th of June, destroyed and defaced the sacred images, burnt the crosses, forbade the exercise of the Catholic religion, and drove away all the priests and religious; and by edict forbade the exercise of any Catholic rite under a penalty of ten florins for each offence. In a few years, to all intents and purposes, Catholicism was banished from the land. Fifty-seven years had passed, and by means of rigid suppression of Catholicism, the people had grown up in heresy or total unbelief. Now, the Chablais was returned to the Duke of Savoy, and he wrote to the Bishop of Geneva, entreating him to send some holy priest to Thonon to inaugurate the work of leading the people out of the darkness of error into the clear light of the Gospel of Christ. The Bishop sent a virtuous priest, but the following year the castle of Thonon was betrayed and destroyed by the Bernese troops, and the poor priest, fearing for his life, and utterly despairing of effecting any conversions among the Protestants, quitted his post, and returned to report his failure to the Bishop at Annecy. But the Duke, no way disheartened by this state of things, rebuilt and fortified the castle of Allinges not far from Thonon, placed it in a garrison, and wrote again to the Bishop, imploring for fresh workers in the neglected spiritual vineyard. The Bishop summoned a meeting of the Cathedral Chapter, and made a moving discourse before them on the subject of the Duke's letter, which he first read to the assembly. A profound and chilling silence followed the Bishop's appeal, but all turned to look at the young dean, whose face seemed radiant with joy and emotion. He rose, and said simply and earnestly, "My Lord, if you think me capable and worthy of this mission, I undertake it with joy. At thy word will I let down my net!" The Bishop gratefully accepted the generous offer, and prepared to do all for Francis that lay in his power to ensure his success. Far different, however, was the scene in the castle of Sales, when the fatal news became known. M. de Boisy flew to Annecy, and overwhelmed Francis with entreaties and reproaches. "Wist ye not that I must be about my Father's business," was the reply of the Saint; then throwing himself at his father's feet, he besought his consent and his blessing. M. de Boisy replied, "As to consenting to this mad undertaking, I cannot do it. It is of no use asking me;" and so saying, the poor old man left the palace, and returned in tears to his castle, there to be soothed, but not consoled, by the stronger faith of his wife. [Illustration: François de Sales Euesque et Prince de Geneue] On Sept. 9th, 1594, Francis, accompanied by his cousin, Louis, started on his evangelical mission. It was necessary to pass by the castle of Sales, when Frances had a fresh battle to fight with his family. "The Château of Sales," writes a contemporary of our Saint, "was at that time one of the most beautiful in Savoy, situated at the foot of mount Ferreo, and surrounded with lovely gardens and shrubberies. A fountain in the centre, and a lake on one side, added to its charms." Yet all this Francis seems to have left without a thought or even a regret. During their visit, the cousins determined to spend a couple of days in retreat. The evening of the second day, Francis went to take leave of his mother. Her conduct throughout had been admirable. This terrible parting over, Francis went back to the chapel, where, as a child, he had so often knelt with that tender mother before the altar and repeated, evening after evening, his childish prayers, and there the noble sacrifice of his whole future life to God was consummated and accepted. His natural sorrow quenched in the Sacred Presence, Francis spent the rest of the night in prayer, for the success of his mission; and the next morning the cousins started at break of day, avoiding all further leave-takings; and without either servants or provisions; his father having expressly forbidden any assistance being given to them, hoping thereby to disgust them of their enterprise. So, in poverty, S. Francis left his ancestral home. Nine years afterwards, writing to the Pope, he says, "On arriving in the Chablais, nothing but heart-breaking sights met our eyes. Out of sixty-five parishes, excepting a few officers of the Duke's garrisons, there were scarcely fifty Catholics. The churches were desecrated or destroyed, and the cross everywhere broken down." It would be impossible to give an idea of the fury of the Protestants of Thonon when they heard of the mission of the two cousins. The news flew to Geneva, where a public meeting was instantly held to declare that any one was at liberty to take the lives of the two Papists who had dared to undertake the mission; some of the Protestants present went so far as to swear that they themselves would be their assassins. M. de Boisy was alarmed when news reached him that the life of his son was menaced, and he sent his old and faithful servant, George Roland, with positive orders to bring Francis back; but the Saint was not to be moved; he, however, persuaded his cousin, Louis, to go back for a short while, in order to calm the anxiety of his family, whilst he himself remained to prosecute his great work. Louis obeyed, but soon returned, and the two earnest missioners laboured indefatigably together to advance the Gospel. Francis went on foot among the villages, his stick, his breviary, and his Bible being his sole companions; Louis being sent into other parts of the province. One night, on the 12th December, being on an expedition of this kind, night came on suddenly; the earth was covered with snow, and he found himself alone in a large wood infested with wolves. Afraid of being devoured, he climbed up into a tree to pass the night; and then, lest he should fall asleep and drop from the branch, he tied himself with his leathern girdle to the stem. The next morning some peasants from a neighbouring village found him there, nearly frozen with cold, and unable to move. They carried him to their home, gently chafed his numbed limbs, and brought him back to warmth and consciousness. Their charity was not without its reward, for the Saint profited by the occasion to speak to them on things concerning their eternal salvation. His gentle, loving voice and manner effected even more than his words, and the zeal he had shown in braving every kind of peril and suffering for the sake of bringing back a few stray sheep to the fold, spoke more forcibly to their hearts than a thousand sermons. These poor peasants were moved and touched, and S. Francis numbered them among his first converts. M. de Boisy sent George Roland back to Francis at the beginning of the year 1595, and to the records of this faithful servant, who from that hour never left him, we are mainly indebted for the details of the most interesting personal adventures which befell the Saint. But God Himself interposed on several occasions to save His servant from dangers of which even George Roland knew nothing. There was one bigoted Protestant, who in the height of fanatical fury, swore that he would murder Francis and carry his head to Geneva. This man was afterwards converted, and declared on oath that he had thrice waylaid the Saint to accomplish his purpose, and that each time his gun missed fire, and that he had posted various other persons to kill him, but on each occasion God had rendered His apostle invisible. The instigator of this diabolical design was at last touched by the wonderful way in which providence shielded Francis from harm; he abjured his heresy, and became afterwards one of the Saint's most devoted followers. At the beginning of the year 1595, Francis began a short, clear, and simple exposition of Catholic doctrine, written on loose sheets for distribution among Protestants, with an answer to the principal objections raised against the Faith. Every one read and discussed these fly-leaves--and the Protestants were beyond measure surprised at the way in which all their favourite arguments were disproved, while some among them were equally startled at finding how their prejudices regarding the Catholic faith melted away before the sunshine of God's truth. The winter, always severe in Savoy, was this year one of unusual rigour. The roads were one sheet of ice, and Francis was obliged to put iron clamps on his shoes, in order to prevent himself from slipping. As he suffered terribly from broken chilblains, his heels became in such a state that the blood stained the snow as he walked along, penetrating through his stockings and gaiters. One night he arrived, with his cousin, Louis, at a village where all the doors were closed against him. In vain they knocked and entreated for admission; the inhabitants, who had been prejudiced against them, refused to give them shelter; they crept into the village oven, which was still warm, and there slept. On the 17th July, he preached a wonderful sermon at Thonon on the mediation of Jesus Christ. He showed his hearers that the Catholic Church, so far from destroying this doctrine, as the Protestant asserted, based her whole system upon it. The Calvinist ministers were exasperated at the effect of the sermon, and held a public meeting, in which it was resolved to charge him with sorcery and magic. They even suborned a man to swear that he had seen Francis in communication with devils at a witch's festival. As he was walking through a wood at dusk immediately after this, two men rushed upon him with swords, uttering horrid imprecations. Francis met them with such composure, that they were overcome, and casting themselves at his feet, implored his pardon, alleging as their excuse the orders they had received from the Protestant clergy. The Saint forgave and blessed them, and pursued his road, unmolested. The Calvinists, more furious than ever, hired a body of assassins who came secretly, in the dead of the night to the house in which he lodged. Francis had not yet gone to bed. He was watching and praying in his room, when he heard the tramp of armed men in the street, and their whispered consultation at the door. He quietly slipped into a secret chamber, cleverly concealed by a panel in the wall which had been provided in case of any such emergency, and the assassins hunted through the house from garret to cellar without being able to find him. What promoted the Catholic faith far more than his sermons, was his daily life of never-failing charity. Madame de Boisy at last brought her husband to see and feel the beauty and reality of the mission in which their son was engaged. This was an untold relief to Francis; and from that time, father and mother worked together in forwarding to the utmost of their power the apostolic labours of their son. They gave shelter in the castle of Sales to such of the converts as were compelled to resort to flight in order to escape the fury of the heretics; and it is impossible to exaggerate the tender zeal with which Madame de Boisy looked after their temporal and spiritual wants. The Saint, in the meanwhile, continued without intermission his pastoral work. As he could not carry the Blessed Sacrament publicly through the streets of Thonon to the sick, he used to take a Host in a little silver pyx in the shape of a triangle, suspended by three little silver chains round his neck, and thus bear our Lord on his breast. Then wrapping himself up in a large cloak, he would walk along very gravely, looking on the ground, without speaking to any one, or raising his hat. This was the sign he had given to the faithful, who no sooner saw him passing in that manner than they left their occupations and silently followed, though at a little distance, so as not to excite hostile observation. It was an intense joy to him to carry the Blessed Sacrament in that way: his flock often remarked that his face on such occasions positively shone with the fire of his love. As prudence still forbade the public sacrifice of the Mass in Thonon, S. Francis used to celebrate it in the little village of Marin, on the other side of the river Drance, in the old church of S. Stephen. On one occasion he went to preach in an old parish church near Allinges; it was S. Stephen's Day, 1595, and he summoned the inhabitants as usual by ringing a bell, but, as it was very bad weather, only seven people came. Some one said to him that it was not worth while his preaching to so small an audience. He replied, "One soul is as precious to me as a thousand;" and he began a most eloquent discourse on the Invocation of Saints, of which he explained the doctrine, and refuted the Protestant objections with great clearness. Among his seven hearers was a magistrate of Thonon who had lately joined the Church, but had been beset by the ministers, who had succeeded in shaking his feeble faith. After the sermon, he threw himself at the feet of S. Francis and exclaimed, "You have saved my soul this day!" He then declared that he had meditated abjuring his new Catholicism next Thursday; that having heard the bell ring, and seen only half-a-dozen poor peasants obey the summons, and come to the church, he had thought that, if S. Francis were to preach, it would be a proof that he loved souls, but if he did not preach, then he would be convinced that he sought applause. He went on to say that the pains taken by S. Francis to explain to those half-dozen peasants the doctrine of the Communion of Saints, had cleared away his difficulties, and had convinced him of the grand and unutterable truth of the Catholic Church, of which he would ever remain a member. Little by little the work advanced; Francis was given three energetic assistants; for some time the progress was very small, but the great mass of the people were like an avalanche, slowly undermined, to fall in a body at the foot of the Cross. It would exceed our limits to detail the steps by which S. Francis advanced the cause. Let us turn to the crowning of his labour. In 1597, he celebrated the "Forty Hours" Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament at Thonon. The churches of S. Augustine and S. Hippolytus had been given up to the Catholics, and the Bishop arrived to consecrate them anew, and to administer the Sacraments of Confirmation and Ordination for the first time for sixty-three years. An enormous crowd assembled from all quarters. After the Blessed Sacrament had been carried in procession through the town, it was placed in an oratory erected for the purpose. Very soon a crowd came up, consisting of three hundred people, inhabitants of Bellevaux, all begging to be admitted into the Church. The inhabitants of S. Cergue arrived next, bearing with them a cross which had been concealed by them between two walls during the Calvinist persecution, and which cross remains in the hamlet to this day. Some of these poor people arrived barefoot bearing other emblems of the Passion of our Lord, the spear, the nails, the crown of thorns. Then came the people of Bonneville, with the nobility of the Chablais. One portion of the procession arrived later than the rest, and that was from the village of Ternier. They had been attacked by the fanatics of Geneva on their way. During the "Forty Hours" of Adoration, prayers, meditations, catechizings, and sermons succeeded each other without intermission. The personal love which all the people felt for S. Francis, together with his tender and touching exhortations, gave an additional impulse to the devotion of the spectators. Whole villages took the opportunity of returning to the faith of their fathers; and when the Exposition was over, the Bishop and S. Francis had several hard days' work in receiving such numberless abjurations and administering to them the rites of conditional baptism and confirmation. On September 30th, the Duke of Savoy visited Thonon, and the Chablais ceased to be Protestant. Few heretics now remained, and the Duke ordered them to cross the lake to the land of Vaud, as the Calvinists before had expelled those who would not submit to the abolition of their religion. The spiritual conquest achieved by Francis has been commonly reckoned to have amounted to 72,000 souls. In 1599, S. Francis was appointed coadjutor bishop of Geneva. The continual disputes between France and Savoy were at length adjusted by a treaty contracted at Lyons, by which the latter government yielded to the former the province of Gex to the north of the lake of Geneva, containing thirty-seven parishes, with about 30,000 inhabitants. S. Francis visited Paris in 1602, and persuaded Henry IV. to re-establish the exercise of the Catholic religion throughout Gex, wherever there were a sufficient number of Catholics; only the king stipulated that this should be done gradually, so as to avoid giving alarm to the Protestants. Francis now returned to Savoy, where the failing health of the aged Bishop of Geneva made it necessary for him to be present. Some time previous to his death, he had the consolation of celebrating the jubilee at Thonon, by which the history of the conversion of the Chablais was wound up. Hundreds of thousands of pilgrims of all ranks, in companies preceded by cross and banner, poured from all the country round, making the Alpine valleys resound with their pious chants, as they thanked God for having brought them out of darkness into the glorious liberty of the children of God. More than a hundred confessors were engaged continually at the tribunal of penance; and altogether 62,000 communions were made in the church of Thonon. On Dec. 8th, 1702, Francis was consecrated bishop, and appointed to the see of Geneva, in the parish church of Thonon. The first business which Francis undertook after he was settled at Annecy, the seat of the Bishops of Geneva, after their expulsion by the Calvinists from the city of Geneva, was to establish a confraternity of Christian Doctrine, and to make catechetical instruction his strongest point. He heard the classes himself every Sunday. A more interesting sight there could not be than to behold him, seated in front of the altar, teaching the little ones, the girls on one side, and the boys on the other. Twice in the year he made a festival for the children, and went through the city with them processionally, singing Litanies. The influence of his kindness over them was so great, that he never came forth, without the children running out from every nook and corner of the streets to ask his blessing or kiss his robe. When some friends complained of the troops of them who followed him, he said gently, "Suffer them to come, they are my own dear little people." In 1603, when he was preaching the Lent course of sermons at Dijon, by invitation of the magistrates, he made the acquaintance of Jane Frances of Chantal, in combination with whom he afterwards founded the Order of the Visitation. In 1605 and 1606, he made a general visitation of his whole diocese, undergoing great fatigue, and often danger, in traversing the Alpine districts, which formed the greatest part of it, and everywhere preaching, catechizing, and hearing confessions. In 1618, Francis was chosen by the Duke of Savoy to accompany an embassy to Paris to negotiate the marriage of his son with the daughter of Henry IV., and sister of Louis XIII. The negotiations of the embassy lasted for nearly a year, during which Francis received incessant invitations to preach, which he did almost daily; the people never tiring of listening to him. The secret of his power lay in the exquisite charm of divine grace which radiated from him. The churches were so crowded, that it more than once happened that a ladder had to be brought for the preacher to enter by the window, the doors being completely blocked up. People ran to gaze at him, or to touch his robe as he passed in the streets. Cardinal de Retz, Bishop of Paris, had set his heart on having him as his coadjutor, and offered him a rich pension, the entire control of his diocese, and the appointment of his brother, John Francis, to succeed him at Geneva, if he would consent to come; but all was in vain. By degrees the whole of the territory of Gex was catholicized, and Francis had the felicity of continually organizing fresh parishes which had submitted to the Gospel of Christ. Towards the close of 1622, he was invited to attend the Duke of Savoy at Avignon, where he was to meet Louis XIII. Francis had a presentiment that this journey would be his last; but he did not think it right to decline the invitation of his sovereign. Accordingly he made preparation, with the utmost calmness, as if to return no more. He made his will, and gave directions concerning his funeral, which he desired should be modest. On November 8th he bade farewell to his friends and started next day. At Lyons a trifling incident happened, which is worth relating, as an example of his sweet and gentle demeanour. As he was going on board the boat, the ferryman refused to receive him without his passport. When his attendants were angry at the delay, the bishop remarked, "Let him alone, he knows the duties of a boatman; we have forgotten that of a traveller." He had to wait an hour for the passport in a bitterly cold wind. When at last they got on board, he went and sat by the boatman, observing, "I wish to make friends with this good man, and to talk to him a little of our Blessed Lord." At Avignon he held aloof from all the magnificence which the reunion of two courts in that splendid age so lavishly displayed, and spent his time in prayer, and in conference with religious persons. On his way home he remained at Lyons, very ill. Nevertheless he said his midnight Mass on Christmas morning and preached on the day with great fervour. He then heard confessions, and said his third Mass shortly before noon, after which he broke his fast. Then he gave the habit to two novices, preached, received a number of visitors, and waited on the Queen Marie de Medicis, who was to leave Lyons next day. Yet he was actually a dying man when he thus crowded such astonishing exertions into one day. Next day, the Feast of S. Stephen, he bade his last farewell to the nuns of the Visitation, the order he had founded. On the following morning he confessed, said Mass, and gave the Holy Communion to the nuns. The Superioress noticed his altered looks. Outside the church he was detained talking to some noblemen. It was cold and foggy, and he felt a chill. By the time he got home he was excessively fatigued and ill; but he sat down to write letters, and received several visitors. On their departure his servant came in, and began to tell him about a sermon he had heard, in which the preacher exhorted the Queen to love her servants. Francis said, "And you, do you love me?" The good servant could not speak for weeping, seeing how deadly ill he looked. The saint continued: "And I, too, love you well; but let us love God above all," As he said these words he sank back in a fit. Next day the physicians resorted to all the expedients used in the barbarous surgery of the age, blisters on the head, the application of a hot iron to the nape of the neck, and a red-hot ball pressed on the crown till it burnt to the bone. He gradually sank after these operations, and his lips moving in prayer, when unable to utter words, those in attendance knelt and recited the "Recommendation for a departing soul," during which his gentle spirit departed to its rest. The body, after having been embalmed, was removed to Annecy, and reposes in the Church of the Visitation. [Illustration: Decoration] FOOTNOTES: [132] He is said to have glazed the east window of his oratory with a pane of an hitherto unheard of size. [133] The following life is epitomized from Mr. Ormsby's "Life of S. Francis of Sales," and "The Mission of S. Francis of Sales in the Chablais" by Lady Herbert. See also Addenda at end of this volume. January 30. S. SERENA, _M., at Metz_, A.D. 303. S. SABINA OR SAVINA, _W., in the Milanese, beginning 4th cent._ S. BARSAS, _B.C., of Edessa, circ._ A.D. 371. S. FELIX, _Pope_, A.D. 530. S. ALDEGUND, _V., at Maubeuge in France, circ._ A.D. 680. S. ADELELM, _Ab., Burgos, circ._ A.D. 1100. S. HYACINTHA, _V., at Viterbo_, A.D. 1640. S. BARSAS, B.C. OF EDESSA. (ABOUT A.D. 371.) [Roman Martyrology. Authority: Theodoret, Hist. Eccles. lib. iv. c. 16.] Barses or Barsas, Bishop of Edessa was banished by the Arian Emperor Valens to the Isle of Aradus; but when it was found that multitudes resorted to him, for he was filled with apostolic gifts, the emperor sent him to Oxyrynchus, a city of Egypt But as his fame still attracted attention, he was banished to a greater distance; and this old man, "who was worthy of heaven, was then conveyed to the fortress called Philae, situated on the frontier of the barbarian nations." S. ALDEGUND, V. (A.D. 680.) [Roman and many ancient Martyrologies; by others on Jan. 27th, or Nov. 13th, but these were probably days of translation of relics. Authorities; a life by a contemporary quoted in an anonymous life compiled from already existing notices; another by one Hugbald, and another by a monk of S. Ghislain.] [Illustration: S. ALDEGUND. After Cahier. Jan. 30.] The blessed Aldegund was the daughter of Waldbert, Count of Hainault. Her whole heart was given to Christ whom she chose as her heavenly bridegroom. Her parents, moved by her example, renounced the world, and distributed their wealth among the poor. After their death, in the year 661, Aldegund took the veil, and retired into the forest of Maubeuge where she built a convent, and became the first abbess. When her fair fame was attacked by wicked slanders, so that she suffered agonies of grief, she struggled hard to submit to the hand of God, and at last, bowing completely to His will, she desired that He would try her with ever keener sufferings, to perfect her by affliction. She was shortly after attacked with cancer in the breast, from which she died on Jan. 30th, A.D. 680. S. ADELELM, AB. OF BURGOS. (ABOUT A.D. 1100.) [Authority: his life by Rudolf the monk, who died 1137. S. Adelelm is called also _Elesmo_ or _Elmo_; and is not to be confounded with another Adelelm or Elmo, who is only beatified.] S. Adelelm was a noble of Lyons in France, and served in the army, till God called him to a higher walk, then he renounced the world, and became a monk in the Abbey of Chaise-Dieu, after a visit to Rome. He was ordained priest by Ranco, Bishop of the Auvergne, but when he heard that the bishop had been suspended for having simonically obtained the see, he refused to execute the priestly office, till a successor was appointed. To see him, Adelelm started one stormy night. The way was dark, and the tempest raged with such fury that, but that it was necessary, he would not have started then. However, he took a candle, lighted it, and gave it to his comrade, and bade him lead the way. Notwithstanding the violence of the gale, the flame burnt steady, though not enclosed in a lantern, and illumined their road. From this, the electric lights seen at mastheads are called by sailors in the Mediterranean S. Elmo's lights. He was afterwards invited to Spain, and he was chosen abbot of his order in the monastery of Burgos, where he died. S. HYACINTHA, V. (A.D. 1640.) [Roman Martyrology. Authority: the Bull of her Canonization.] S. Hyacintha was the daughter of Mark Anthony Mariscotti, Count of Vignanello, and of Octavia Orsini; she was born in 1588, and received in baptism the name of Clarissa, which she exchanged for that of Hyacintha on entering the cloister. In her earliest childhood she was remarkable for her piety, but as she grew older she became giddy and frivolous. In her 17th year she was, one day, playing with the rope of a well at Vignanello, when she slipped over the edge, and hung, entangled in the rope, which held her some minutes suspended above the horrible pit, till a servant, observing her peril, from the castle window, ran to her assistance, and rescued her. The shock of this accident seemed for a while to steady her. She shortly after fell in love, and a marriage was projected, but when, through family circumstances, it was broken off, Clarissa would hear of nothing but of taking the veil, and burying her broken heart in a convent. Her father refused at first, but yielding at length to her sentimental vehemence, which he mistook for real vocation, allowed her to take the veil in the convent of S. Bernardine at Viterbo. In the convent her heart soon healed, and she became an annoyance to the whole sisterhood by her vanity and frivolity. After ten years, she fell ill, and sent for her confessor. He, knowing her character, and wearied with her shallowness, sharply rebuked her with, "Beware, Hyacintha, heaven is no place for giddy-pates!" His words startled her, and she cried out, "Am I then lost for ever." "No," he answered, "not if you seek pardon for your sins of the just and merciful God, with sincere resolution of amendment, and cease to be a scandal and worry to the poor sisters of this house, by your emptiness and light talk, and worldly ways." Bursting into a flood of tears, she promised amendment, sent for all the sisters, and humbly asked their pardon, and prayers. Then she cast herself at her confessor's feet, and made a sincere confession. She now completely changed her life; she would not wear shoes, and only put on the meanest dress. She strove manfully to overcome the purposelessness of her life and the feebleness of her will; and as she gradually mastered herself and her vanity, there broke on that soul, so long entangled in a fog of petty cares and pleasures, the burning sun of the love of Jesus, filling her with reality, earnestness, and devotion. In after years her character was completely the reverse of what it had been, was full of dignity and meekness, and above all, had a _purpose_ in it. In a time of want, she founded two institutions, one for the secret relief of decayed gentlefolks, suffering, but too proud to ask alms, or display their misery; the other a hospital for old people. Both societies, known under the name of the Oblates of S. Mary, exist to this day at Viterbo. The mercy of God rewarded this poor servant, and she was given singular privileges, a remarkable gift of prayer, and a discernment of spirits, that is, she could read the troubles of hearts. She died in the year 1640, calling on the sacred names of Jesus and Mary, in the 55th year of her age. She was beatified by Benedict XIII., in 1726, and canonized by Pius VII., on May 24th, 1807. This is one of those instances of the love and fore-thought of the Church in holding up to every class of mind and sort of temptation, an example of salvation in it. We have seen her fearlessness in exhibiting S. James the hermit to the fallen religious, here she shows to the thoughtless and giddy female mind, that for it Jesus thirsts in spite of its emptiness, and that for it there is sanctity if it will try to seek it. [Illustration: Virgin in Crescent, after Albert Durer.] January 31. S.S. CYRUS, JOHN, ATHANASIA AND OTHERS, _MM. in Egypt_ A.D. 250. S. GEMINIAN, _B. of Modena, in Italy_. S. JULIUS _P._, AND JULIAN _D._, _at Novara, in Italy, beginning of 5th cent._ S. MARCELLA, _W., at Rome_, A.D. 410. S. PATROCLUS, _B.M. in France_. S. GAUD, _B., of Evreux in Normandy, circ._ A.D. 531. S. AIDAN OR MAIDOC, _B., of Ferns, in Ireland, beginning of 7th cent._ S. ADAMNAN, _P., of Coldingham, end of 7th cent._ S. ULPHIA, _V., at Amiens, 8th cent._ S. ATHANASIUS, _B., of Methone in the Peloponesus, 9th cent._ S. EUSEBIUS, _Monk of S. Gall in Switzerland_, A.D. 884. S. MARTIN, _P., of Soure near Coimbra, in Portugal_, A.D. 1147. S. SERAPION, _M., among the Moors_, A.D. 1240. S. PETER NOLASCO, _C., in Spain_, A.D. 1256. S.S. CYRUS, JOHN AND OTHERS, MM., IN EGYPT. (A.D. 250.) [Commemorated by Greeks, Latins, and Copts on the same day. Authority: ancient Greek Acts.] Cyrus, a physician of Alexandria, who, by the opportunities which his profession gave him, had converted many sick persons to the faith; and John, an Arabian, hearing that a lady, called Athanasia, and her three daughters, Theodosia, Theoctista and Eudoxia, of whom the eldest was only fifteen years of age, had suffered torments at Canope in Egypt for the name of Christ, went thither to console them. They were themselves apprehended and cruelly beaten; their sides were burnt with torches, and salt and vinegar were poured into their wounds in the presence of Anastasia and her daughters, who were also tortured after them. At length the four ladies, and a few days after, Cyrus and John, were beheaded, the two latter on this day. S. MARCELLA, W. (A.D. 410.) [Roman Martyrology. Authority: the Letters of S. Jerome.] Marcella, a young widow, whose name alone is enough to recall the best days of the Roman republic, and whose rare beauty, enhanced by the long and illustrious line of her ancestors, drew around her numerous suitors, rejected the suit of Cerealtis, the consul, and resolved to imitate the lives of the ascetics of the East. Afterwards, when S. Jerome came to Rome to renew the instructions and narratives of those holy men by adding to them the living commentary of his own life, Marcella, with her mother Albinia, and her sister Asella, placed herself at the head of that select number of illustrious matrons who took him as their guide and oracle. She astonished the holy doctor by her knowledge of the Divine Scriptures; she fatigued him by her thirst always to know more of them than he could teach her; she made him afraid to find in her a judge rather than a disciple. In her palace on Mount Aventine, she collected, under the presidency of Jerome, the most pious among the noble ladies, for mutual strength and enlightenment. After having thus first given to Rome the true model of a Christian widow, she passed the last thirty years of her life in her suburban villa transformed into a monastery. The Goths under Alaric plundered Rome in 410. S. Marcella was scourged by them to deliver up her treasures, which however she had long before distributed among the poor. All the while she was in anguish of soul for her dear spiritual child Principia, and falling at the feet of the cruel soldiers, she tearfully implored them to spare her insult. They conducted them both to the Church of S. Paul, to which Alaric had granted the right of sanctuary, and suffered the beautiful young nun Principia to remain unmolested. S. Marcella did not survive this long, but died peacefully in the arms of Principia, about the end of August, 410, but her name occurs in the Roman Martyrology on Jan. 31st. [Illustration: S. MARCELLA. After an Engraving of the Seventeenth Century. Jan. 31.] S. AIDAN OR MAIDOC, B., OF FERNS. (ABOUT A.D. 632.) [S. Aidan of Ferns is not to be confounded with the illustrious S. Aidan of Lindisfarne, the apostle of Northumbria, who is commemorated on Aug. 31st. The name seems to have been a very common one in Ireland, for Colgan asserts that there are in the ancient Irish Martyrologies as many as thirty-five Saints of this name. Authority: an ancient life from Kilkenny, but certainly not more ancient than the 12th cent.] S. Maidoc or Aidan was the son of Setna, a noble of Connaught, by his wife Edna; who, having for a long time no heir, sought that blessing from God by alms-deeds and prayers; which was at last granted. This child of prayer was born in the island called Innis-Breagh-muigh, in a lake in the diocese of Kilmore, and from his childhood declined evil and followed that which is good. After having learnt the first rudiments of piety in his own country, he left home, and sailed into Britain, to place himself under the discipline of the great S. David of Menevia. With that holy man he remained many years, and was one of his favourite disciples. A remarkable instance of his prompt obedience is related. Being called by a superior from reading his book in the field near the monastery, to follow a pair of oxen at the plough, he made such haste to obey, that he left his book open in the field, a heavy shower of rain fell, but when he recovered the book it was not wet. S. David had seen him leave the volume open before the rain fell, and calling him to him, bade him prostrate himself as a punishment for having, as he supposed, by his carelessness, spoiled a valuable book. S. Maidoc at once obeyed, and S. David went about his work and forgat him. After some hours, when the office was being said, he observed that Maidoc was not present. Then he sent in quest of him, and he was found prostrate on the sea shore, where his master had bidden him lie, and he had not risen, because S. David had not removed his penance. At length, with the blessing of his master, taking with him other religious of Menevia, he returned to Ireland, where he founded many churches and monasteries; of which the chief was Ferns to which he was consecrated first Bishop. The prodigies related of him, are like so many in the lives of the Irish Saints, quite incredible, as for instance, his having driven to Rome and back in twenty-four hours, his having fed six wolves with six sheep and then restored the sheep whole; his having brought a sea-cow out of the ocean to draw his plough, and having returned from a visit to S. David in Wales on the back of a sea-monster; his having called his bell, which he had left behind him Wales, and it came over the waves with promptitude. All these are fables, which accumulated in process of time about the lives of the Irish Saints, before they were committed to writing. S. ULPHIA V. (8TH CENT.) [From the life of S. Domitius, October 23rd; and from an ancient life of the Saint.] [Illustration: S. ULPHIA. From Cahier. Jan 31.] The blessed Ulphia was the daughter of noble parents in Gaul, she was singularly beautiful in face and graceful in person; consequently she was sought by many suitors, but, with her father's consent she vowed to observe perpetual chastity. At the age of twenty-five she received the veil from the hands of the Bishop of Amiens, and then she retired to S. Acheuil at some little distance from the city, where she ministered to S. Domitius, an aged hermit and canon of Amiens. The old man was wont to knock at the door of her little hut as he passed on his way to matins, and she rose and accompanied him. Now the place was marshy and many frogs inhabited the pools. One night they sang so shrilly that Ulphia could not sleep, but tossed on her couch, and drew her serge-habit about her ears, without being able to stop their voices from penetrating her brain and keeping her awake. After many hours she fell asleep. Shortly after, Domitius came by and rapped with his stick at the door. There was no answer, so he called, "Ulphia, my child, get up!" Then he rapped louder than before. Still there was no answer, so he called, "Ulphia, my child, the second watch of the night is past." As he received no answer, he supposed she had gone on before. But when he reached the church, he looked round, and he saw her not. And when matins was over, he returned in haste and fear, thinking something had befallen his dear child. But when he came to the cell, Ulphia stood in the door. Then she reproached him for not having called her. "I did call thee, I knocked loud," said the old man. "It was the frogs' doing!" exclaimed Ulphia, and she told him how they had kept her awake half the night. Then casting herself on the ground, she prayed to God to quiet the noisy frogs; and Domitius knelt beside her and said, Amen. After that the reptiles troubled her no more. When she was dying she prayed, "Saviour! sanctify, confirm, keep, rule, strengthen, comfort me; and in the end bring me to Thy sempiternal joys." And when the two virgins who had watched by her had said Amen, she fell asleep, and they left her. At dawn, one of them looked in and saw that she was dead, and in dying she had crossed her hands upon her breast, her face was bright and her lips as though she smiled. S. SERAPION, M. (A.D. 1240.) He was an Englishman, whom S. Peter Nolasco received into his Order at Barcelona. He made two journeys among the Moors for the ransoming of captives, in 1240. The first was to Murcia, in which he purchased the liberty of ninety-eight slaves; the second to Algiers, in which he redeemed eighty-seven, but remained himself a hostage for the full payment of the money. He boldly preached Christ to the Mahometans, and baptised several, for which he was cruelly tortured, scourged, cut and mangled, at length fastened to a cross, and was thereon stabbed and quartered alive in the same year, 1240. [Illustration: S. PETER NOLASCO, FOUNDER OF THE ORDER OF OUR LADY OF MERCY FOR THE REDEMPTION OF CAPTIVES. From Cahier. Jan. 31.] S. PETER NOLASCO, C. (A.D. 1256.) [Roman Martyrology. Authority: life by Franciscus Zumel.] Peter Nolasco sprang from one of the first families of Languedoc. He was born in the year 1189, in the village of Mas des Saintes Pucelles. His pious parents took pains to give him a good education, and to cultivate the germs of virtue which appeared early in his soul. They saw with gladness his compassion for the poor, and his love of prayer. The child was wont to distribute his pocket-money in alms, and he went regularly to the matin office sung shortly after midnight. When he was aged 15, he lost his father, who left him heir to a large estate, but he remained with his mother, a pious woman, who laboured to strengthen and confirm in him those graces which grew and expanded daily. Being solicited to marry, he remained some little while in hesitation, but at last, rising one night he cast himself before his crucifix in prayer, and remained till day broke in the east, imploring God's guidance, and then feeling a clear call, he resolved to devote his patrimony to the honour and glory of God, and himself to celibacy. He followed Simon de Montfort, in the crusade against the Albigenses, an heretical, or rather heathen sect, holding two Gods, one good, the other evil, and who had devastated Navarre, burning churches and massacring priests and monks. The crusade was conducted with too much of worldly ambition, and without that compassionate love which should seek to win by gentleness rather than force by the sword. But the cruel massacres which took place were not the work of the crusaders, but of a mixed multitude of camp-followers, who obeyed no officers but such as they chose to appoint, as appears from the contemporary accounts of that war. However, Peter Nolasco was in no way responsible for the barbarities which sullied this terrible war. In the battle of Muset, the King of Aragon, who headed the Albigenses, was killed, and his son, aged six, fell into the hands of Simon de Montfort, who appointed Peter Nolasco, then aged twenty-five, to be his tutor, and sent both together into Spain. In the court of the King of Barcelona, where the Kings of Aragon resided, Peter led the life of a recluse. The Moors at that time were possessed of a considerable portion of Spain, and great numbers of Christians groaned under their tyranny in miserable slavery both there and in Africa. Whenever Peter saw a Christian slave, he was moved with sorrow; and he resolved to devote his life to the redemption of captives. He endeavoured to found a religious order for a constant supply of men and means whereby to carry on so charitable an undertaking. This design met with great obstacles in the execution; but the Blessed Virgin appearing to the king, S. Raymund of Pennaforte, and S. Peter Nolasco, the same night, in visions, encouraged the prosecution of this charitable scheme. In the year 1223 S. Peter took the vows before the Bishop of Barcelona, and he became first general of the new order, which was entitled "the Order of Our Lady of Mercy for the redemption of captives." It was confirmed by Pope Gregory IX. in 1225. The habit is white, with a white scapular, and the arms of Aragon were worn on the breast, by desire of the king. S. Peter, after his religious profession, renounced all his business at court, and no entreaties of the king could prevail on him to appear there again, except once, when called to reconcile two powerful nobles, who by their dissension had kindled a civil war. He made several journeys along the coasts, and to Algiers to purchase captives; on one of these expeditions he underwent imprisonment for the faith. He died on Christmas day, 1286. Almost his last words were those of the Psalmist, which summed up the efforts of his life, "The Lord hath sent redemption unto His people; He hath commanded His covenant for ever." ADDENDA _Page 443, S. Francis of Sales, B.C._ When he wrote this biography the author had not access to the original materials, as the Acta Sanctorum for January did not include S. Francis. He was therefore obliged to have recourse to two modern biographies, those of Mr. Ormsby and Lady Herbert, based on the "Vie de S. François de Sales," by M. Hamon, that has gone through a good number of editions. In 1878 appeared an article, "Two Sides to a Saint--S. Francis de Sales," by the Rev. L. Woolsey Bacon, which was published in _Macmillan's Magazine_ for September; it was founded on the Lives of S. Francis by Marsollier and Loyau d'Amboise, and M. Gabriel, the Protestant historian of Geneva. Marsollier did not write till 1700, and he quoted Cotolandi, who composed his Notice of the Saint in 1687. D'Amboise is unworthy of consideration, as his work was mere romance. Hamon's Life is, on the other hand, based on the letters of the Saint, and on the sworn depositions of eye-witnesses at his canonization. These latter are of very little value, as any unpartial reader who wades through such documents can assure himself. Anyhow they may contain, and do contain, fact along with some romance. In "Bulls of Canonization" much fable is introduced that will not endure serious examination. Where biographers disagree and mutually vituperate one another as false witnesses, our only resource is to go to the original letters of the Saint. Canon Mackey has written four essays to clear the character of Francis of Sales (London: Burns and Oates. 1883), and again in _Christian Literature_, 1896, and it must be admitted that he shows a good reason for mistrusting the charges brought against the Saint. Mr. Bacon had, for instance, accused S. Francis of addressing a female friend as "my dearest girl of my heart," whereas the original is "Ma très chère fille de mon coeur." At the time S. Francis was a bishop of fifty-one, and although the expression is not at all to the taste of an Englishman, has no more meaning than the gushing and fulsome words which close a French letter, or than our "My dear So-and-So," and "Yours sincerely." Mr. Bacon also charges the Saint with having played fast and loose with the affections of the young lady to whom he was engaged. But the evidence goes no further than to show that at the time he was moved by conflicting considerations--submission to the will of his parents and his own strong reluctance to enter the marriage state. Mr. Bacon, moreover, accuses the Saint of having carried on the conversion of the Chablais under the cover of the soldiers of the Duke of Savoy. The circumstances seem to have been these. In 1536 the Bernese, taking advantage of a rupture between France and Savoy, treacherously and without declaring war entered the territory of the latter power and occupied Gex and a portion of the Chablais. They then wrecked the churches, drove out the priests, and forbade the exercise of the Catholic religion. In 1564 Savoy recovered the country, and engaged to allow therein the exercise of the Protestant religion. This agreement was faithfully observed for twenty-five years, but in 1589 the Genevese and Bernese combined to reoccupy the country. It was recovered by the Duke of Savoy, who considered, and justly, that by this violation of the treaty by the Bernese he was freed from his obligation to tolerate Protestantism. The mission of S. Francis lasted for four years from September 1597, and unquestionably he had the power of the Duke of Savoy at his back, and did not scruple to invoke it. But that was the way of proselytising at the time. Protestants and Catholics alike leaned on the arm of flesh, and each was equally ready to employ the sword against the other. But certainly at first S. Francis was not supported by the Duke in the manner he had expected and desired, and also no doubt can exist that when the sword was used he employed his best endeavours to prevent its being wantonly and cruelly wielded. His letters show plainly that his success in convincing the people of the Chablais was almost _nil_ till their fears were excited, and they were afforded other reasons for renouncing Protestantism than conviction that Romanism was better. The real difficulty S. Francis encountered at first was that the people would not listen to him. The attitude of the people he thus describes: "One party do not wish to hear; the other excuse themselves on the risk they would run if the truce were broken, should they have shown any approval of Catholicism; ... others again are persuaded of the faith, but we cannot induce them to confess it, not knowing what will be the end of the truce" (Letter 9). In Letter 32 he asked the Duke to allow a senator to call the citizens together, and in his magisterial robes invite them to listen to his sermons. At last conviction was supposed to be obtained, and a profession of submission to the Catholic faith extorted, when the inhabitants who were contumacious were threatened with expulsion. But it must be remembered that the Protestant cantons of Switzerland were equally intolerant, and determined to expel recalcitrant Catholics. END OF VOL. 1. Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO. Edinburgh & London Transcriber's notes: - Difference in spelling of 'Ken-tiern' and 'Kentiern' is caused by usage of words. - Difference in spelling of 'Münster' and 'Munster' is caused by different meanings. - Ligatures '[ae]' converted - as used/possible in latin texts - to 'ae'. - Inserted 'S.' (for Saint) Theoritgitha in alphabetical list (toc) of Saints. 
45604	----	Transcriber's Note: Notes and lists in smaller type in the original have been indented two spaces. Illustrations on separate plates have been incorporated in the text. Small capitals have been replaced by full capitals, italics are indicated by _underscores_, and "oe" ligatures have been removed. Apparent typographical errors have been corrected. The use of hyphens is not always consistent. THE Lives of the Saints REV. S. BARING-GOULD _SIXTEEN VOLUMES_ VOLUME THE SECOND [Illustration: THE REPOSE IN EGYPT, WITH DANCING ANGELS. After Luca Cranach. By the robbery of the nest in the tree, the painter ingeniously points to the Massacre of the Innocents as to the cause of the Flight into Egypt. Feb.-Front.] THE Lives of the Saints BY THE REV. S. BARING-GOULD, M.A. New Edition in 16 Volumes Revised with Introduction and Additional Lives of English Martyrs, Cornish and Welsh Saints, and a full Index to the Entire Work _ILLUSTRATED BY OVER 400 ENGRAVINGS_ VOLUME THE SECOND February LONDON JOHN C. NIMMO 14 KING WILLIAM STREET, STRAND MDCCCXCVII _Printed by_ BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO _At the Ballantyne Press_ [Illustration] CONTENTS A PAGE S. Abraham 298 " Adalbald 41 " Adelheid 140 " Adeloga 42 " Æmilian 212 " Agatha 136 " Aldetrudis 413 " Alexander 433 " Alnoth 448 " Amandus 182 SS. Ananias and comp. 412 S. Andrew Corsini 105 " Angilbert 337 " Ansbert 246 " Anskar 56 " Apollonia 231 " Aristion 366 " Athracta 236 " Augulus 190 " Auxentius 299 " Auxibius 339 " Aventine of Chateaudun 86 " Aventine of Troyes 84 " Avitus 138 B S. Baldomer 447 " Baradatus 368 " Barbatus 342 " Belina 344 " Benedict of Aniane 284 " Berach 307 " Berlinda 50 " Bertulf 139 " Besas 442 " Blaise 47 " Boniface, Lausanne 343 " Bridget 14 " Bruno 304 C S. Cæsarius 412 " Castor 289 " Catharine de Ricci 295 " Ceadmon 272 " Celerina 46 SS. Celerinus and comp. 46 " Charalampius and comp. 248 S. Chronion 442 " Chrysolius 189 " Clara of Rimini 256 SS. Claudius and comp. 329 " Constantia and comp. 330 S. Cornelius of Rome. 314 " Cornelius the Cent. 38 " Cuthman 220 D S. Damian 376 " Darlugdach 22 SS. Dionysius and others 212 S. Dionysius (Augsburg) 432 " Dorothy 176 " Dositheus 378 E S. Earcongotha 382 " Eleutherius 350 " Elfleda 214 SS. Elias and others 314 S. Ephraem, Syrian 7 " Ermenilda 292 " Ethelbert 406 " Ethelwold 283 " Eubulus 449 " Eucher 355 " Eulalia 276 " Euphrosyne 264 " Eusebius 306 F SS. Faustinus and Jovita 305 S. Finan 325 " Fintan 324 " Flavian 331 " Fortchern 321 " Fortunatus 47 " Fulcran 294 SS. Fusca and Maura 286 G S. Gabinius 340 " Gelasius, Boy 83 " Gelasius, Actor at Heliopolis 443 " George of Amastris 363 " Georgia 306 SS. German and Randoald 361 S. Gilbert 99 " Gregory II. (Pope) 293 H S. Hadelin 49 " Honestus 313 " Honorina 444 " Hrabanus Maurus 91 I S. Ignatius, Antioch 1 " Ignatius, Africa 46 " Ina 186 " Indract and comp. 140 " Isaias 314 " Isidore 84 J S. Jeremias 314 " Joan of Valois 109 " John de Britto 112 " John of the Grate 26 " John of Matha 226 " John William 255 " Jonas the Gardener 263 " Joseph of Leonissa 111 " Jovita 305 " Julian of Cæsarea 320 " Julian in Africa 395 " Julian, Alexandria 442 " Juliana 316 " Juventius 211 L S. Laurence, Cant. 39 " Laurence, the Illuminator 49 " Laurentinus 46 " Lazarus, B. Milan 264 " Lazarus, Constantinople 386 " Leander 445 " Licinius 292 " Limnæus 367 SS. Loman and Fortchern 321 S. Lucius 395 M SS. Mael and others 178 S. Mansuetus 341 " Margaret of Cortona 371 " Mariamne 318 " Martha 373 " Martian 289 Martyrs at Alexandria 449 " in Arabia 367 " of Japan 141 " of Ebbecksdorf 45 S. Matthias, Ap. 393 " Maura 286 SS. Maurice and comp. 358 S. Maximian 369 " Maximus 329 " Mary, B. V., Purification of 34 " Melchu 178 " Meldan 193 " Meletius 278 " Mengold 220 " Milburgh 382 " Mildred 354 " Modan 91 " Modomnoc 291 SS. Montanus and comp. 395 " Moses and others 192 S. Moses of Syria 376 " Mun 178 N S. Nestor 430 " Nicephorus 233 " Nicolas 92 " Nithard 56 SS. Nymphas and Eubulus 449 O S. Odran 341 " Olcan 349 " Onesimus 312 " Oswald, York 455 P S. Papias 366 " Parthenius 191 " Paula 348 " Paul of Verdun 213 " Pepin 360 " Peter Cambian 45 " Peter Damiani 387 " Peter's Chair at Antioch 365 SS. Phileas and others 80 S. Photinus 358 SS. Pionius and comp. 5 S. Polychronius, B. M. 319 " Polychronius, H. 376 " Polyeuctus 287 " Porphyrius 434 " Prætextatus 402 " Priamianus 376 " Proterius 451 Purification of B. V. Mary 34 R S. Randoald 361 " Raymond of Fitero 29 " Rembert 98 " Richard 194 " Rioch 178 " Robert of Arbrissel 426 " Romanus 452 " Romuald 194 S S. Sabine 241 " Saturninus 259 " Scholastica 250 " Sebastian 212 " Serenus 374 " Sergius 402 " Severus (Avranches) 23 " Severus (Ravenna) 12 " Severus (Valeria) 306 " Sigebert 24 " Sigfried 310 " Simeon 328 " Soteris 248 " Stephen of Grandmont 224 " Sura 252 " Susanna 246 " Symphorian 451 T S. Tanco 317 " Taraghta 236 " Tarasius 416 " Teilo 238 SS. Thalassius and Limnæus 367 S. Thalelæus 444 " Theodora, Empress 275 " Theodore of Apamea 358 " Theodore of Heraclea 190 SS. Theodulus and Julian 320 S. Theophilus, Penitent 88 " Tresan 192 SS. Tyrannio and comp. 346 V S. Valentine 296 " Vedast 179 " Verdiana 31 " Veronica 73 " Victor 410 SS. Victor and Susanna 246 " Victorinus and comp. in Egypt 410 S. Vitalina 359 W S. Walburga 414 " Walfrid 309 " Werburga 52 " William of Maleval 253 " Wulfric 356 Z S. Zabdas 341 " Zacharias (Jerusalem) 359 SS. Zebinus and others 376 S. Zeno 249 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS THE REPOSE IN EGYPT, WITH DANCING ANGELS _Frontispiece_ _After_ LUCA CRANACH. MARTYRDOM OF S. IGNATIUS _to face p._ 2 _From the "Menologium Græcorum."_ S. EPHRAEM " 8 _After_ CAHIER. S. BRIDGET " 16 _After_ CAHIER. TOMB OF JOSHUA _on p._ 33 _The Greek Menology_. PURIFICATION OF S. MARY THE VIRGIN _to face p._ 34 _From the Great Vienna Missal._ THE FLIGHT INTO EGYPT " 36 _After_ FRA ANGELICO. S. BLAISE " 48 _From_ CAHIER. S. WERBURGA " 52 _From_ CAHIER. S. GILBERT, PRIOR OF SEMPRINGHAM _to face p._ 104 _From a Drawing by_ A. WELBY PUGIN. S. VERONICA (_see p. 73_) _on p._ 135 SS. AGNES, CECILIA, AND DOROTHY _to face p._ 176 _After_ ANGELICA DE FIESOLE. S. AMANDUS (_see p. 184_) _on p._ 188 S. RICHARD THE SAXON AND HIS SONS _to face p._ 192 _From_ CAHIER. FAMILY OF S. RICHARD THE SAXON " 194 _From a Drawing by_ A. WELBY PUGIN. A LEARNED DOCTOR AND CHURCH HISTORIAN _on p._ 210 AN ENTHUSIASTIC COLLECTOR OF SAINTLY LEGENDS " 230 S. EUPHROSYNE, FINDING HERSELF AT DEATH'S DOOR, MAKES HERSELF KNOWN TO HER FATHER _to face p._ 272 _From the "Menologium Græcorum" of_ CARDINAL ALBANI. THE PAPERMAKER _on p._ 285 AN EARLY RELIQUARY _to face p._ 318 S. AGATHA (_see p. 136_) _on p._ 338 THE PRINTER " 357 S. MARGARET CORTONA _to face p._ 370 _From_ CAHIER. THE BOOKBINDER _on p._ 372 S. MILBURGH _to face p._ 384 _After_ CAHIER. BEHEADING OF S. MATTHIAS " 392 _From_ CAHIER. WINDOW IN THE CATHEDRAL AT TOURS (VIRGIN WITH ANGELS) " 408 ENAMELLED CHEST WHICH CONTAINED THE REMAINS OF KING ETHELBERT " 408 S. WALBURGA " 414 _From_ CAHIER. [Illustration] [Illustration] LIVES OF THE SAINTS. February 1. SS. CÆCILIUS, _B. of Elvira_, AND COMPANIONS, _MM. in Spain, 1st cent._ S. IGNATIUS, _B. of Antioch, M. at Rome_, A.D. 107. SS. PIONIUS AND COMPANIONS, _MM. at Smyrna_, A.D. 251. S. EUBERT, _B. of Lisle, 4th cent._ S. EPHRAEM SYRUS, _D. C. at Edessa_, A.D. 378. SS. SEVERUS, _B._, VINCENTIA _his wife, and_ INNOCENTIA, _V., their daughter, at Ravenna, end of 4th cent._ S. PAUL, _B. of Trois-Chateaux in France, beginning of 5th cent._ S. PETER THE GALATIAN, _M. at Antioch in Syria, 5th cent._ S. KINNEA, _V. in Ireland, 5th cent._ S. BRIDGET, _V. Abs. at Kildare_, A.D. 525. S. DARLUGDACH, _V. at Kildare_, A.D. 526. S. SEVERUS, _B. of Avranches, 6th cent._ S. PRÆCORDIUS, _P. at Corbie, 6th cent._ S. SORUS, _H. at Perigeux, 6th cent._ SS. AGRIPANUS, _B._, AND URSICINUS, _MM. at Le Puy, after_ A.D. 650. S. SIGEBERT III., _K. C. at Metz_, A.D. 656. B. WOLFHOLD, _P. at Hohenwast in Bavaria, after_ A.D. 1100. S. JOHN OF THE GRATE, _B. of S. Malo_, A.D. 1163. S. RAYMOND, _of Fitero, A.C., Founder of the Order of Calatrava_, A.D. 1163. S. VERDIANA, _V. R. at Castel Fiorentino, in Tuscany_, A.D. 1242. S. IGNATIUS, B. M. (A.D. 107.) [S. Ignatius is commemorated variously, on June 10th, Oct. 8th, Nov. 24th, Dec. 14th or 19th; but by the Roman Martyrology his festival is fixed for Feb. 1st. In the Bruges and Treves Martyrologies, his commemoration was placed on Jan. 31st, so as not to interfere with that of S. Bridget on this day. The authorities for his life and passion are his own genuine Epistles, the Acts of his martyrdom, Eusebius, and S. Chrysostom's Homily on S. Ignatius.] Saint Ignatius was a convert and disciple of S. John the Evangelist. He was appointed by S. Peter to succeed Evodius in the see of Antioch, and he continued in his bishopric full forty years. He received the name of Theophorus, or one who carries God with him. In his Acts, Trajan is said to have asked him why he had the surname of God-bearing, and he answered, because he bore Christ in his heart.[1] Socrates, in his "Ecclesiastical History," says, "We must make some allusion to the origin of the custom in the Church of singing hymns antiphonally. Ignatius, third bishop of Antioch in Syria from the apostle Peter, who also had conversed familiarly with the apostles themselves, saw a vision of angels, hymning in alternate chants the Holy Trinity; after which he introduced this mode of singing into the Antiochian Church, whence it was transmitted by tradition to all the other churches."[2] It seems probable that Evodius vacated the see of Antioch about the year 70. There are traditions that represent Evodius to have been martyred; and Josephus speaks of a disturbance in Antioch about that period, which was the cause of many Jews being put to death.[3] There is a difficulty in supposing S. Peter to have appointed Ignatius bishop of Antioch, if he did not succeed Evodius till the year 70. But it is probable, that later writers have confounded the appointment of Ignatius to the see of Antioch, with his consecration to the episcopal office; and it is highly probable that he received this from the hands of the Prince of the Apostles. The date of the martyrdom of Ignatius can be fixed with tolerable certainty as occurring in the year 107. The Acts expressly state that Trajan was then at Antioch, and that Sura and Senecio were consuls: two events, which will be found to meet only in the year 107. Trajan made his entry into Antioch in January; his first concern was to examine into the state of religion there, and the Christians were denounced to him as bringers-in of strange gods. Ignatius was brought before him, and boldly confessed Christ to be God. "Dost thou mean Him who was crucified?" asked the emperor, scornfully. Ignatius answered, "The very same, Who by His death overcame sin, and enabled those who bear Him in their hearts to trample under foot all the power of the devils." [Illustration: MARTYRDOM OF S. IGNATIUS. From the "Menologium Græcorum." Feb. 1.] Then Trajan ordered him to be taken to Rome, and exposed to wild beasts in the amphitheatre. It was generally a distinction reserved for Roman citizens, that if they had committed an offence in the provinces, they were sent for punishment to the capital. This, however, does not appear to have been the reason in the case of Ignatius. The punishment to which he was condemned was generally reserved for culprits of the lowest condition; and the Christians were perhaps viewed in this light by the heathen. Ecclesiastical history has scarcely preserved a more interesting and affecting narrative, than that of the journey of Ignatius from Antioch to Rome. In tracing the procession of the martyr to his final triumph, we forget that we are reading of a prisoner who was dragged to his death in chains. He was committed to a guard of ten soldiers, who appear to have treated him with severity; and, after taking ship at Seleucia, they landed for a time at Smyrna. He had here the gratification of meeting with Polycarp, who was bishop of that see, and who, like himself, had enjoyed a personal acquaintance with S. John. His arrival also excited a sensation through the whole of Asia Minor. Onesimus, bishop of Ephesus; Polybius, bishop of Tralles; and Demas, bishop of Magnesia, came from their respective cities, with a deputation of their clergy, to visit the venerable martyr. Ignatius took the opportunity of writing from Smyrna to the Churches over which these bishops presided; and his epistles to the Ephesians, Trallians, and Magnesians, are still extant. Hearing also of some Ephesians, who were going to Rome, and who were likely to arrive there more expeditiously than himself, he addressed a letter to the Church in that city. His principal object in writing was to prevent any attempt which the Roman Christians might have made to procure a reprieve from the death which was awaiting him. He expresses himself not only willing, but anxious, to meet the wild beasts in the amphitheatre; and there never, perhaps, was a more perfect pattern of resignation than that which we find in this letter. From Smyrna he proceeded to Troas, where he was met by some of the neighbouring bishops, and the bishop of Philadelphia became the bearer of a letter which he wrote to the Christians in that city. He also wrote from the same place to the Church of Smyrna; and the personal regard which he had for Polycarp, the bishop of that see, will explain why he also wrote to him, and made it his dying request that he would attend to the Church of Antioch. These seven epistles, which were written by Ignatius from Smyrna and Troas, are still extant. It appears that Ignatius had intended to write letters to some other Churches, from Troas; but his guards were impatient to proceed, and once more setting sail, they followed the course which S. Paul had taken upon his first journey into Greece, and landed at Neapolis. Hurrying through Macedonia, he embarked once more on the western coast of Epirus, and crossing the Adriatic, arrived at Rome. There was now an exhibition of games, which lasted some days; and it seems to have been intended that the death of Ignatius should form part of the spectacle. The voyage had been hurried on this account; and on the last day of the games, which was the 19th December, the holy martyr was led into the amphitheatre, and his death seems to have been the work of a moment. In his letter to the Roman Church, he had prayed that the wild beasts might despatch him speedily, and not refuse to touch him, as had sometimes been the case. His prayer was heard; and the Christians of Rome, who had thought themselves blessed to have even seen the apostolic bishop of Antioch among them, had now to pick up a few of the larger and harder bones, which was all that the wild beasts had spared. These were carried to Antioch, and it is evidence of the great reverence at that early age shown to the relics of the saints, that the same honours were paid to the sacred relics as had been paid to the holy martyr himself, when he touched at the different cities. The friends of Ignatius speak of his remains as "an invaluable treasure;" and as such they were deposited near one of the gates in the suburbs of Antioch. The relics of S. Ignatius were retranslated to Rome, and are dispersed among several of the churches of the city. The head, however, is in the possession of the Jesuits of Prague. SS. PIONIUS, P. AND COMPANIONS, MM. (A.D. 251.) [Roman and many ancient Martyrologies on this day. The Greeks on March 11th; the Martyrology attributed to S. Jerome, on March 12th. Authorities:--The genuine Acts of these martyrs, and the brief account in Eusebius, lib. iv. c. 15.] In the persecution of Decius, S. Pionius, a priest of Smyrna, was apprehended; together with Sabina, Macedonia, Asclepiades, and Linus a priest, whilst they were celebrating the festival of S. Polycarp, on February 23. Pionius having fasted on the vigil, was forewarned of his coming passion in a vision. On the morning, which was the Sabbath, or Saturday, they took holy bread (the Eulogies) and water, and were then surprised and taken by Polemon, the chief priest of the idol temple in Smyrna, and his satellites. Polemon in vain urged them to conform to the imperial edicts, and sacrifice to the gods; but they set their faces as flint against his solicitations, and were led into the forum, where Pionius took the opportunity of haranguing the crowds who hurried up to be present at their trial. The Smyrnian Church was then suffering the shame of having seen its bishop, Eudæmon, apostatize, and his example had been followed by many timorous Christians. The interrogatory was conducted by Polemon, and is dryly recorded by the notary who wrote the acts:--The Idol priest said, "Pionius! sacrifice." But he answered, "I am a Christian." "Whom," said Polemon, "dost thou worship?" "The Almighty God," answered Pionius, "who made heaven and earth, and all things in heaven and earth, and us men; who giveth to all men liberally, as they need; whom we know through His Word, Christ." Polemon said, "Sacrifice then, only to the Emperor." Pionius said, "I cannot sacrifice to any man. I am a Christian." Then--the notary writing all down--Polemon asked, "What is thy name?" He answered, "Pionius." Polemon said, "Thou art a Christian?" He answered, "Certainly I am." "To what Church dost thou belong?" asked Polemon. "I belong to the Catholic Church," answered Pionius. "There is none other with Christ." Then he went to Sabina, and put to her the same questions, which she answered almost in the same words. Next he turned to Asclepiades, and asked, "What is thy name?" "Asclepiades." "Art thou a Christian?" "I am." Then said Polemon, "Whom dost thou worship?" Asclepiades answered, "I worship Jesus Christ." "What!" asked Polemon, "Is that another God?" "No," answered Asclepiades, "He is the same God of whom the others spake." After this the martyrs were taken to prison, followed by a crowd jeering and insulting them. On the morrow they were led forth again to trial, and the idol priest endeavoured to force them to enter the temple, and by violence to compel them to sacrifice. Pionius tore from his head the sacrificial garlands that the priest had placed upon him. Polemon, unable to bend the holy martyrs to submission, delivered them over to Quintilian, the pro-consul, on his arrival at Smyrna, and he sentenced Pionius to be hung on a rack, and his body to be torn with hooks of iron, and afterwards to be nailed to a post, and burnt alive. Metrodorus, a Marcionite priest, underwent the same punishment with him. S. EPHRAEM THE SYRIAN, D. C. (A.D. 378.) [Roman and all Latin Martyrologies, except that of Bede, which gives July 9th. Commemorated by the Greeks on Jan. 28th. His death took place in summer or autumn. Authorities:--His own narration to his monks of his conversion, his confession and testament; also the oration upon him by S. Gregory Nyssen; an account of him in the Life of S. Basil, attributed to S. Amphilochius, Sozomen, etc.] Saint Ephraem was the son of poor parents of Nisibis, who had confessed Christ before the persecutors, under Diocletian or his successors. In his narrative of his conversion, S. Ephraem laments some of the faults of his youth. "When I was a boy," says he, "I was rather wild. One day my parents sent me out of the town, and I found a cow that was in calf feeding in the road leading to the wood. This cow belonged to very poor people. I took up stones, and began pelting the cow, and driving it before me into the wood, and I drove the beast on till in the evening, it fell down dead, and during the night wild beasts ate it. On my way back I met the poor man who owned it, and he asked me, 'My son, have you been driving away my cow?' Then I not only denied, but heaped abuse and insult upon him." Some few days after he was sent out of the town by his parents again, and he wandered in the wood, idling with some shepherds, till night fell. Then, as it was too late to return, he remained the night with the shepherds. That night the fold was broken into, and some of the sheep were carried off. Then the shepherds, thinking the boy had been in league with the robbers, dragged him before the magistrate, and he was cast into prison, where he found two men in chains, charged, one with homicide, the other with adultery, though they protested their innocence. In a dream an angel appeared to Ephraem, and asked him why he was there. The boy began at once to declare himself guiltless. "Yes," said the angel, "guiltless thou art of the crime imputed to you, but hast thou forgotten the poor man's cow? Listen to the conversation of the men who are with thee, and thou wilt learn that none suffer without cause." In the morning, the two men began to speak, and one said, "The other day, as I was going over a bridge, I saw two fellows quarrelling, and one flung the other over into the water; and I did not put forth my hand to save him, as I might have done, and so he was drowned." Presently the other man said, "I am not guilty of this adultery of which I am charged, but nevertheless I have done a very wicked thing. Two brothers and a sister were left an inheritance by their father, and the two young men wished to deprive their sister of what was her due, and they bribed me to give false evidence whereby the will was upset, and the property divided between them, to the exclusion of the poor girl." After an imprisonment of forty days, Ephraem was brought before the magistrate along with his fellow prisoners. He says, that when he saw the two men stripped, and stretched on the rack, "An awful terror came over me, and I trembled, thinking I was sure to be subjected to the same treatment as they. Therefore I cried, and shivered, and my heart altogether failed me. Then the people and the apparitors began to laugh at my tears and fright, and asked me what I was crying for? 'You ought to have considered this before, boy! but now tears are of no avail. You shall soon have a taste of the rack too, never doubt it.' Then, at these words, my soul melted clean away." [Illustration: S. EPHRAEM SYRUS. After Cahier. Feb. 1.] However, he was spared this time, and the innocence of his companions having been proved, they were set free. Ephraem was taken back to prison, where he spent forty more days; and whilst he was there, the two men who had defrauded their sister of her inheritance, and the man who had flung his adversary into the river, were caught and chained in the dungeon with him. These men and Ephraem were brought forth to trial together, and the men were sentenced, after they had been racked, and had confessed their crime, to lose their right hands. Ephraem, in another paroxysm of fear, made a vow that he would become a monk, if God would spare him the suffering of the rack. To his extreme terror the magistrate ordered him to be stripped, and the question to be applied. Then Ephraem stood naked and trembling beside the rack, when fortunately the servant came up to the magistrate to tell him that dinner was ready. "Very well," said the magistrate, "then I will examine this boy another day." And he ordered him back to prison. On his next appearance, the magistrate, thinking Ephraem had been punished enough, dismissed him, and he ran off instantly to the mountains, to an old hermit, and asked him to make of him a monk.[4] He was eighteen years old when he was baptized, and immediately after he had received the Sacrament of Regeneration, he began to discipline his body and soul with great severity. He lay on the bare ground, often fasted whole days, and spent a considerable part of the night in prayer. He exercised the handicraft of a sail-maker. He was naturally a very passionate man, but he learned so completely to subdue his temper, that the opposite virtue of meekness became conspicuous, so that he received the title of the "Peaceable man of God." Sozomen relates that once, after Ephraem had fasted several days, the brother, who was bringing him a mess of pottage, let the dish fall and broke it, and strewed the food upon the floor. The saint seeing his confusion, said cheerfully, "Never mind, if the supper won't come to me, I will go to the supper." Then, sitting down on the ground by the broken dish, he picked up the pottage as well as he could. "He devoted his life to monastic philosophy," says Sozomen; "and although he had received no education, he became, contrary to all expectation, so proficient in the learning and language of the Syrians, that he comprehended with ease the most abstruse problems of philosophy. His style of writing was so full of glowing oratory and sublimity of thought, that he surpassed all the writers of Greece. The productions of Ephraem were translated into Greek during his life, and translations are even now being made, and yet they preserve much of their original force, so that his works are not less admired in Greek than in Syriac. Basil, who was subsequently bishop of the metropolis of Cappadocia, was a great admirer of Ephraem, and was astonished at his condition. The opinion of Basil, who was the most learned and eloquent man of his age, is a stronger testimony I think, to the merit of Ephraem, than anything that could be indicted in his praise."[5] S. Gregory Nyssen gives the following testimony to the eloquence of S. Ephraem: "Who that is proud would not become the humblest of men, reading his discourse on Humility? Who would not be inflamed with a divine fire, reading his treatise on Charity? Who would not wish to be chaste in heart and soul, by reading the praises he has lavished on Virginity? Who would not be frightened by hearing his discourse on the Last Judgment, wherein he has depicted it so vividly, that nothing can be added thereto? God gave him so profound a wisdom, that, though he had a wonderful facility of speech, yet he could not find expression for the multitude of thoughts which poured from his mind." At Edessa, S. Ephraem was ordained deacon; it has been asserted that he afterwards received the priesthood from the hands of S. Basil, but this is contradicted by most ancient writers, who affirm that he died a deacon. He was elected bishop of one town, but hearing it, he comported himself so strangely, that the people and clergy, supposing him to have lost his mind, chose another in his place; and he maintained the same appearance of derangement till the other candidate was consecrated. The city of Edessa having been severely visited by famine, he quitted the solitary cell in which he dwelt, and entering the city, rebuked the rich for permitting the poor to die around them, instead of imparting to them of their superfluities; and he represented to them that the wealth which they were treasuring up so carefully would turn to their own condemnation, and to the ruin of their souls, which were of more value than all the wealth of earth. The rich men replied, "We are not intent on hoarding our wealth, but we know of no one whom we may trust to distribute our goods with equity." "Then," said Ephraem, "entrust me with that office." As soon as he had received their money, he fitted up three hundred beds in the public galleries, and there tended those who were suffering from the effects of the famine. On the cessation of the scarcity, he returned to his cell; and after the lapse of a few days expired. S. Ephraem was a valiant champion of the orthodox faith. Finding that the Syrians were fond of singing the heretical hymns of Bardasanes, he composed a great number of orthodox poems which he set to the same tunes, and by introducing these, gradually displaced those which were obnoxious. One instance of his zeal against heresy is curious, though hardly to be commended. The heretic Apollinarius had composed two reference books of quotations from Scripture, and arguments he intended to use in favour of his doctrines, at a public conference with a Catholic, and these books he lent to a lady. Ephraem borrowed the books, and glued the pages together, and then returned them. Apollinarius, nothing doubting, took his volumes to the discussion, but when he tried to use them, found the pages fast, and retired from the conference in confusion. S. SEVERUS, B. C., OF RAVENNA. (ABOUT A.D. 390.) [S. Severus, B. M., of Ravenna, is commemorated on Jan. 1; S. Severus, B. C., of Ravenna, on Feb. 1st. Authorities:--Three ancient lives, with which agree the accounts in the Martyrologies.] S. Severus was a poor weaver in Ravenna. Upon the see becoming vacant, the cathedral was filled with electors to choose a new bishop. Severus said to his wife Vincentia, "I will visit the minster and see what is going on." "You had much better remain at home, and not show yourself in your working clothes among the nobles and well-dressed citizens," said she. "Wife! what harm is there in my going?" "You have work to do here, for your daughter and me, instead of gadding about, sight seeing." And when Severus persisted in desiring to go, "Very well," said Vincentia, "go, and may you come back with a good box on your ear." And when she saw that he was bent on going, she said, mocking, "Go then, and get elected bishop." So he went, and entering the cathedral, stood behind the doors, as he was ashamed of his common dress covered with flocks of wool. Then when the Holy Spirit had been invoked to direct the choice of the people, suddenly there appeared in the cathedral a beautiful white dove, fluttering at the ear of the poor spinner. And he beat it off, but the bird returned, and rested on his head. Then the people regarded this as a heavenly sign, and he was unanimously chosen to be their bishop. Now Vincentia was at home, and one came running, and told her that her husband was elected bishop of Ravenna. Then she laughed, and would not believe it, but when the news was repeated, she said, "This is likely enough, that a man who tosses a shuttle should make a suitable prelate!" But when she was convinced, by the story being confirmed by other witnesses, her amazement rendered her speechless. After his consecration, Severus lived with her as with a sister, till she died, and was followed shortly after by her daughter, Innocentia. Then he laid them both in a tomb, in the church, which had been prepared for himself. And after many years he knew that he was to die. So he sang High Mass before all the people, and when the service was over, he bade all the congregation depart, save only one server. And when they were gone, he bade the boy close the doors of the cathedral. Then the bishop went, vested in his pontifical robes, to the sepulchre of his wife and daughter, and he and the boy raised the stone, and Severus stood, and looking towards the bodies of his wife and daughter, he said, "My dear ones, with whom I lived in love so long, make room for me, for this is my grave, and in death we shall not be divided." Having said this, he descended into the grave, and laid himself down between his wife and daughter, and crossed his hands on his breast, and looked up to heaven and prayed, and then closing his eyes, gave one sigh, and fell asleep. The relics were translated to Mayence, in 836, and Oct. 22nd is observed as the feast of this translation. In art, Severus is represented as a bishop with a shuttle at his side. S. BRIDGET, V. ABSS. (A.D. 525.) [S. Bridget, or Bride as she is called in England, is the Patroness of Ireland, and was famous throughout northern Europe. Leslie says, "She is held in so great honour by Picts, Britons, Angles, and Irish, that more churches are dedicated to God in her memory, than to any other of the saints;" and Hector Boece says, that she was regarded by Scots, Picts, and Irish as only second to the B. Virgin Mary. Unfortunately, little authentic is known of her. The lives extant are for the most part of late composition, and are collected from oral traditions of various value. One life is attributed, however, to Bishop Ultan Mac Concubar, d. circ. 662; another, a metrical one, is by the monk Chilian, circ. 740; another by one Cogitosus, is of uncertain date; another is by Laurence, prior of Durham, d. 1154; and there is another, considered ancient, by an anonymous author.] Ireland was, of old, called the Isle of Saints, because of the great number of holy ones of both sexes who flourished there in former ages; or, who, coming thence, propagated the faith amongst other nations. Of this great number of saints the three most eminent, and who have therefore been honoured as the special patrons of the island, were S. Patrick their apostle, S. Columba, who converted the Picts, and S. Bridget, the virgin of Kildare, whose festival is marked in all the Martyrologies on the 1st day of February. This holy virgin was born about the middle of the fifth century, in the village of Fochard, in the diocese of Armagh. Her father was a nobleman, called Dubtach, descended from Eschaid, the brother of King Constantine of the Hundred Battles, as he is surnamed by the Irish historians. The legend of her origin is as follows, but it is not to be relied upon, as it is not given by Ultan, Cogitosus, or Chilian of Inis-Keltra.[6] Dubtach had a young and beautiful slave-girl, whom he dearly loved, and she became pregnant by him, whereat his wife, in great jealousy and rage, gave him no peace till he had sold her to a bard, but Dubtach, though he sold the slave-girl, stipulated with the purchaser that the child should not go with the mother, but should be returned to him when he claimed it. Now one day, the king and queen visited the bard to ask an augury as to the child they expected shortly, and to be advised as to the place where the queen should be confined. Then the bard said, "Happy is the child that is born neither in the house nor out of the house!" Now it fell out that Brotseach, the slave-girl, was shortly after returning to the house with a pitcher of fresh warm milk from the cow, when she was seized with labour, and sank down on the threshold, and was delivered neither in the house nor out of the house, and the pitcher of warm sweet milk, falling, was poured over the little child. When Bridget grew up, her father reclaimed her, and treated her with the same tenderness that he showed to his legitimate children. She had a most compassionate heart, and gave to every beggar what he asked, whether it were hers or not. This rather annoyed her father, who took her one day with him to the king's court, and leaving her outside, in the chariot, went within to the king, and asked his majesty to buy his daughter, as she was too expensive for him to keep, owing to her excessive charity. The king asked to see the girl, and they went together to the door. In the meantime, a beggar had approached Bridget, and unable to resist his importunities, she had given him the only thing she could find, her father's sword, which was a present that had been made him by the king. When Dubtach discovered this, he burst forth into angry abuse, and the king asked, "Why didst thou give away the royal sword, child?" "If beggars assailed me," answered Bridget calmly, "and asked for my king and my father, I would give them both away also." "Ah!" said the king, "I cannot buy a girl who holds us so cheap." Her great beauty caused her to be sought in marriage by a young noble of the neighbourhood, but as she had already consecrated herself by vow to Jesus, the Spouse of virgins, she would not hear of this match. To rid herself of the importunity of her suitor, she prayed to God, that He would render her so deformed that no one might regard her. Her prayer was heard, and a distemper fell on one of her eyes, by which she lost that eye, and became so disagreeable to the sight, that no one thought of giving her any further molestation.[7] Thus she easily gained her father's consent that she should consecrate her virginity to God, and become a nun. She took with her three other virgins of that country, and bidding farewell to her friends, went in 469 to the holy bishop Maccail, then at Usny hill, Westmeath; who gave the sacred veil to her and her companions, and received their profession of perpetual virginity. S. Bridget was then only fourteen years old, as some authors assert. The Almighty was pleased on this occasion to declare how acceptable this sacrifice was, by restoring to Bridget the use of her eye, and her former beauty, and, what is still more remarkable, and is particularly celebrated, as well in the Roman, as in other ancient Martyrologies, was, that when the holy virgin, bowing her head, kissed the dry wood of the feet of the altar, it immediately grew green, in token of her purity and sanctity. The story is told of her, that when she was a little child, playing at holy things, she got a smooth slab of stone which she tried to set up as a little altar; then a beautiful angel joined in her play, and made wooden legs to the altar, and bored four holes in the stone, into which the legs might be driven, so as to make it stand. [Illustration: S. BRIDGET. After Cahier. Feb. 1.] S. Bridget having consecrated herself to God, built a cell for her abode, under a goodly oak, thence called Kil-dare or the Cell of the Oak; and this foundation grew into a large community, for a great number of virgins resorted to her, attracted by her sanctity, and put themselves under her direction. And so great was the reputation of her virtues, and the place of her abode was so renowned and frequented on her account, that the many buildings erected in the neighbourhood during her lifetime formed a large town, which was soon made the seat of a bishop, and in process of time, the metropolitan see of the whole province. What the rule embraced by S. Bridget was, is not known, but it appears from her history, that the habit which she received at her profession from S. Maccail was white. Afterwards, she herself gave a rule to her nuns; so that she is justly numbered among the founders of religious Orders. This rule was followed for a long time by the greatest part of the monasteries of sacred virgins in Ireland; all acknowledging our Saint as their mother and mistress, and the monastery of Kildare as the headquarters of their Order. Moreover, Cogitosus informs us, in his prologue to her life, that not only did she rule nuns, but also a large community of men, who lived in a separate monastery. This obliged the Saint to call to her aid out of his solitude, the holy bishop S. Conlaeth, to be the director and father to her monks; and at the same time to be the bishop of the city. The church of Kildare, to suit the requirements of the double monastery and the laity, was divided by partitions into three parts, Cogitosus says, one for the monks, one for the nuns, and the third for the lay people. As S. Bridget was obliged to go long journeys, the bishop ordained her coachman priest, and the story is told that one day as she and a favourite nun sat in the chariot, the coachman preached to them the Word of God, turning his head over his shoulder. Then said the abbess, "Turn round, that we may hear better, and throw down the reins." So he cast the reins over the front of the chariot, and addressed his discourse to them with his back to the horses. Then one of the horses slipped its neck from the yoke, and ran free; and so engrossed were Bridget and her companion in the sermon of the priestly charioteer, that they did not observe that the horse was loose, and the carriage running all on one side. On another occasion she was being driven over a common near the Liffey, when they came to a long hedge, for a man had enclosed a portion of the common. Then the man shouted to them to go round, and Bridget bade her charioteer so do. But he, thinking that they had a right of way across the newly made field, drove straight at the hedge; then the proprietor of the field ran forward, and the horses started, and the jolt of the chariot threw S. Bridget and the coachman out of the vehicle, and severely bruised them both. Then the abbess, picking herself up said, "Better to have gone round; short cuts bring broken bones." Once a family came to Kildare, leaving their house and cattle unguarded, that they might attend a festival in the church, and receive advice from S. Bridget. Whilst they were absent, some thieves stole their cows, and drove them away. They had to pass the Liffey, which was much swollen, consequently the thieves stripped, and tied their clothes to the horns of the cattle, intending to drive the cows into the river, and swim after them. But the cows ran away, carrying off with them the clothes of the robbers attached to their horns, and they did not stop till they reached the gates of the convent of S. Bridget, the nude thieves racing after them. The holy abbess restored to them their garments, and severely reprimanded them for their attempted robbery. Other strange miracles are attributed to her, of which it is impossible to relate a tithe. She is said, after a shower of rain, to have come hastily into a chamber, and cast her wet cloak over a sunbeam, mistaking it, in her hurry, for a beam of wood. And the cloak remained there, and the ray of sun did not move, till late at night one of her maidens ran to her, to tell her that the sunbeam waited its release, so she hasted, and removed her cloak, and the ray retired after the long departed sun. Once a rustic, seeing a wolf run about in proximity to the palace, killed it; not knowing that it was the tame creature of the king; and he brought the dead beast to the king, expecting a reward. Then the prince in anger ordered the man to be cast into prison and executed. Now when Bridget heard this, her spirit was stirred within her, and mounting her chariot, she drove to the court, to intercede for the life of the poor countryman. And on the way, there came a wolf over the bog racing towards her, and it leaped into the chariot, and allowed her to caress it. Then, when she reached the palace, she went before the king, with the wolf at her side, and said, "Sire! I have brought thee a better wolf than that thou hast lost, spare therefore the life of the poor man who unwittingly slew thy beast." Then the king accepted her present with great joy, and ordered the prisoner to be released. One evening she sat with sister Dara, a holy nun, who was blind, as the sun went down; and they talked of the love of Jesus Christ, and the joys of Paradise. Now their hearts were so full, that the night fled away whilst they spoke together, and neither knew that so many hours had sped. Then the sun came up from behind Wicklow mountains, and the pure white light made the face of earth bright and gay. Then Bridget sighed, when she saw how lovely were earth and sky, and knew that Dara's eyes were closed to all this beauty. So she bowed her head and prayed, and extended her hand and signed the dark orbs of the gentle sister. Then the darkness passed away from them, and Dara saw the golden ball in the east, and all the trees and flowers glittering with dew in the morning light. She looked a little while, and then, turning to the abbess, said, "Close my eyes again, dear mother, for when the world is so visible to the eyes, God is seen less clearly to the soul." So Bridget prayed once more, and Dara's eyes grew dark again. A madman, who troubled all the neighbourhood, came one day across the path of the holy abbess. Bridget arrested him, and said, "Preach to me the Word of God, and go thy way." Then he stood still and said, "O Bridget, I obey thee. Love God, and all will love thee. Honour God, and all will honour thee. Fear God, and all will fear thee." Then with a howl he ran away. Was there ever a better sermon preached in fewer words. A very remarkable prophesy of the heresies and false doctrines of later years must not be omitted. One day Bridget fell asleep whilst a sermon was being preached by S. Patrick, and when the sermon was over, she awoke. Then the preacher asked her, "O Bridget, why didst thou sleep, when the Word of Christ was spoken?" She fell on her knees and asked pardon, saying, "Spare me, spare me, my father, for I have had a dream." Then said Patrick, "Relate thy vision to me." And Bridget said, "Thy hand-maiden saw, and behold the land was ploughed far and wide, and sowers went forth in white raiment, and sowed good seed. And it sprang up a white and goodly harvest. Then came other ploughers in black, and sowers in black, and they hacked, and tore up, and destroyed that beauteous harvest, and strewed tares far and wide. And after that, I looked, and behold, the island was full of sheep and swine, and dogs and wolves, striving with one another and rending one another." Then said S. Patrick, "Alas, my daughter! in the latter days will come false teachers having false doctrine; who shall lead away many, and the good harvest which has sprung up from the Gospel seed we have sown will be trodden under foot; and there shall be controversies in the faith between the faithful and the bringers-in of strange doctrine." Now when the time of her departure drew nigh, Bridget called to her a dear pupil, named Darlugdach and foretold the day on which she should die. Then Darlugdach wept bitterly, and besought her mother to suffer her to die with her. But the blessed Bridget said, "Nay, my daughter, thou shalt live a whole year after my departure; and then shalt thou follow me." And so it came to pass. Having received the sacred viaticum from the hands of S. Nennidh, the bishop, the holy abbess exchanged her mortal life for a happy immortality, on February 1st, 525.[8] Her body was interred in the church of Kildare; where her nuns for some ages, to honour her memory, kept a fire always burning; from which that convent was called the House of Fire, till Henry of London, Archbishop of Dublin, to take away all occasion of superstition, in 1220, ordered it to be extinguished. The body of the Saint was afterwards translated to Down-Patrick, where it was found in a triple vault, together with the bodies of S. Patrick and S. Columba, in the year 1185. These bodies were, with great solemnity, translated the following year by the Pope's legate, accompanied by fifteen bishops, in presence of an immense number of the clergy, nobility, and people, to a more honourable place of the cathedral of Down; where they were kept, with due honour, till the time of Henry VIII., when the monument was destroyed by Leonard, Lord Grey, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. S. Bridget's head was saved by some of the clergy, who carried it to Neustadt, in Austria; and from thence, in 1587, it was taken to the church of the Jesuits at Lisbon, to whom the Emperor Rudolf II. gave it. In art, S. Bridget is usually represented with her perpetual flame as a symbol; sometimes with a column of fire, said to have been seen above her head when she took the veil. S. DARLUGDACH, V. (A.D. 526.) [Authorities:--The lives of S. Bridget.] Amongst the nuns of S. Bridget's monastery of Kildare, there was one named Darlugdach. When young, she followed S. Bridget, and being very dear to her, slept with the abbess. Darlugdach, not guarding her eyes with sufficient strictness, saw, and fell in love with a man, who also became enamoured of her, and their ardent glances revealed their mutual passion. A plan was formed that she should elope with him, on a certain night; and she laid herself in the bosom of the sleeping abbess with beating heart, troubled by a conflict between duty and passion. At last she rose, and in an agony of uncertainty, cast herself on her knees, and besought God to give her strength to master her love, and then, in the vehemence of her resolve, she thrust her naked feet into the red coals that glowed on the hearth, and held them there till the pain had conquered the passion. After that, she softly stole into bed again, and crept into the bosom of her holy mother. When morning broke, Bridget rose, and looked at the blistered and scorched soles, and touching them, said gently, "I slept not, dear child, but was awake, and saw thy struggle, and now, because thou hast fought valiantly, and hast conquered, the flame of lust shall no more hurt thee." And she healed her feet. Darlugdach, as has been related in the life of S. Bridget, besought her spiritual mother to let her die with her, but S. Bridget promised that she should follow on the anniversary of her departure, after the expiration of a year. And so it was. S. SEVERUS, B. OF AVRANCHES. (6TH CENT.) [French Martyrologies. Authority:--A life by an anonymous author of uncertain date, but apparently trustworthy.] S. Severus was the child of very poor Christian parents, who hired him to a nobleman named Corbecan, a heathen, who employed him in tending his herd of mares. The boy loved to pasture the horses in the neighbourhood of a little church dedicated to S. Martin, on the excuse that the herbage there was richer than elsewhere, but really out of love for the House of God. Unable to bear the sight of the misery of the poor, during a cold winter, the boy gave them the clothes off his back, and returned one day through the snow to his master's castle, stripped of everything save his breeches. Corbecan, in a rage, drove him out of the house, and forbade him to shelter in it that night. The lad went to the horses, and crouched among them, taking warmth from their breath. His gentleness and piety, in the end, produced such an impression on Corbecan, that he placed himself under instruction in the faith, and was baptized, he and his whole house. Severus afterwards retired into a solitary place, and lived as an hermit, till a number of disciples gathering round him, he was ordained priest. Against his will he was dragged from his beloved retreat to be consecrated bishop of Avranches. He ruled that see for several years with great zeal and discretion, till the burden became intolerable, and he besought the people to elect a successor. Then he laid down his staff, and retired once more to his forest cell, where he became the master of the blessed Giles. The day of his death is uncertain. His body was translated to the cathedral of Rouen. In art he is represented with the mares of his master. S. SIGEBERT, K. C. (A.D. 656.) [French Martyrology. Authorities:--His life by Sigebert of Gemblours, d. 1112, and mention by Gregory of Tours, and Flodoard.] This royal saint was the son of Dagobert I., King of France. The father for a long time refused to have his son baptized, but at length by the advice of S. Ouen and S. Eligius, then laymen in his court, he recalled S. Amand, bishop of Maestricht, whom he had banished for reproving his vices, and bade him baptize his son Sigebert. The young prince's education was entrusted to Pepin, mayor of the palace, who carried his charge into Aquitain, to his estates. But at the age of three, Sigebert was invested by his father with the kingdom of Austrasia, or Eastern France, including Provence, Switzerland, Bavaria, Swabia, Thuringia, Franconia, the Rhenish Palatinate, Alsace, Trèves, Lorraine, Champagne, Upper Picardy, and Auvergne. Dagobert died in 638, and was succeeded by Clovis II., in the kingdom of Western France. Pepin of Landen, was mayor of the palace to Sigebert, and strove to train the young king in godliness and Christian virtues. By his justice and temperance, S. Sigebert rendered himself in his youth greatly beloved and respected by his subjects. Pepin dying in 640, the king appointed Grimoald, mayor of the palace, in his father's room. The Thuringians revolting, Sigebert reduced them to their duty; and this is the only war in which he was engaged. His munificence in founding churches and monasteries, his justice in ruling, and the private virtues of his spotless life, made him to be regarded as a model of a saintly king. After a reign of eighteen years from the date of his father's death, he died at the age of twenty-five, and was buried in the abbey of S. Martin, near Metz, which he had built. His body was found incorrupt in 1063, and in 1170 it was enshrined in a silver case. When Charles V. laid siege to Metz, Francis of Lorraine, Duke of Guise, demolished all the monasteries and other buildings in the suburbs which could give harbour to the enemy, amongst others that of S. Martin. The relics of the saintly king were then removed to the collegiate church of Our Lady, at Nancy, where they repose in a magnificent shrine. S. JOHN OF THE GRATE, B. C. (A.D. 1163.) [His festival is observed as a double by the Church of S. Malo, in Brittany. His name is inserted in Saussaye's supplement to the Gallican Martyrology. Authorities:--The letters of S. Bernard and Nicolas of Clairvaux.] The illustrious prelate S. John, commonly called "Of the Grate," because of an iron grating which surrounded his sepulchre, was a Breton, the son of parents in a middle class of life. He was born about the year 1098; and from an early age gave indications of piety. In the schools to which he was sent, in a short time he made rapid progress. Peter, abbot of Celle, speaking of him, calls him "the holy bishop, faithful servant of God, a man of courage, loving poverty, a brilliant light, dissipating the densest darkness." His life, as a bishop, was spent in a series of lawsuits with the monks of Marmoutiers. His episcopal seat was at Aleth on the main land, but he desired to transfer it to the island of Aaron, now called S. Malo, on account of the peril to which Aleth was exposed through pirates, and the intestine wars which devastated Brittany. He claimed the island as belonging to the episcopal property of Aleth, but was opposed by the monks of Marmoutiers, who claimed the Church of S. Malo. The case was referred to the Pope, who ordered a commission of French bishops to try the case, and they decided against John. He considered that his cause had been prejudged by them, and visited Rome to carry his appeal in person to the Pope. But Lucius II. would not listen to him, and he was condemned to lose his see. He then retired under the protection of S. Bernard, to Clairvaux, till, on the decease of Lucius II., a monk of Clairvaux was elevated to the papal throne, under the title of Eugenius III. John at once appealed again, and was heard; a fresh commission was appointed, and he was restored to all his rights, and the monks of Marmoutiers were obliged to cede the Church of S. Malo to the bishop. John obtained decisions conformable to that of Eugenius III., from his successors, Anastasius IV. and Adrian IV. That the claim of John was reasonable appears certain. Only three years before he made it, the inhabitants of Aleth had been obliged to take refuge in the island of Aaron to escape the ravages of the Normans, who had already twice pillaged and burnt the city; and it is certain that several of the predecessors of John of the Grate had borne the title of bishop of S. Malo, as well as of Aleth. During his reign a strange heresy broke out. Eon de l'Etoile, a fanatic, took to himself the title of "Judge of the quick and dead," and armed with a forked stick, shared with God the empire of the universe. When he turned upwards the two prongs of his stick, he gave to the Almighty the government of two-thirds of the world, and when he turned the prongs downwards, he assumed them as his own. This poor visionary was followed by a number of peasants who pillaged churches, and committed all sorts of disorders. They were condemned, in 1148, by the Council of Rheims, and were reduced to submission by the temporal power. John exerted himself, by persuasion and instruction, to disabuse of their heresy such of the fanatics as over-ran his diocese, and succeeded in converting many of his wandering sheep. He died in the odour of sanctity on Feb. 1st, 1163, and was buried on the Gospel side of the altar in the Church of S. Malo. His reputation for virtue was so well established, that almost immediately he received popular reverence as a Saint. Numerous miracles augmented the devotion of the people. In 1517, one of his successors, Denis Brigonnet, ambassador of the king to Rome, obtained from Pope Leo X. permission for him to be commemorated in a solemn office, as a confessor bishop. This was the year in which began the schism of Luther. On the 15th October, 1784, Mgr. Antoine-Joseph des Laurents, last bishop of S. Malo but one, examined the relics of the blessed one. He found the bones of S. John enveloped in his pontifical vestments, his pastoral staff at his side, and ring on his finger. During the Revolution the relics of the Saint were ordered to be cast into the sea, but the order was countermanded, and the sexton was required to bury them on the common fosse in the cemetery. The grave-digger, whose name was Jean Coquelin, being a good Catholic, disobeyed the order so far as to lay the bones apart in a portion of the new cemetery as yet occupied by no other bodies. In November, 1799, he announced the secret to M. Manet, a priest who had remained through the Reign of Terror, in S. Malo; and this venerable ecclesiastic assisted by another priest and some religious, verified the relics. A sealed box received the precious deposit, and it was restored to its ancient shrine on 7th March, 1823. Unfortunately the loss of a document which supplied one necessary link in the chain of evidence authenticating the relics was missing, consequently they could not be exposed to the veneration of the faithful. By a strange accident this document was recovered later; whereupon the bishop wrote to Rome to state the proofs which were now complete. The necessary sanction having been received, the sacred relics were enshrined on the 16th November, 1839, with great ceremony; and are now preserved in the Church of S. Malo. In French, S. John is called S. Jean de la Grille; in Latin, S. Joannes de Craticula. B. RAYMOND OF FITERO, AB. C. (A.D. 1163.) [Cistercian Breviary. Authority:--Radez, Chronic de las ordines y Cavall. de Santiago, Calatrava, y Alcantara.] In the year A.D. 714, the Moors, having conquered King Roderick, took possession of Andalusia, and fortified the city of Oreto, to which they gave the name of Calatrava; of which they remained masters for nearly four hundred years, till Alfonso the Warlike took possession of it, in the year 1147, and gave it to the Templars, to guard against the irruption of the infidels. But they held it for only eight years. The forces which the Moors assembled to recover Calatrava so discouraged them, that they gave up the city into the hands of Don Sancho, who had succeeded to the kingdom of Castille, on the death of Alfonso, and withdrew from it. This prince announced to his court that if any nobleman would undertake the defence of the place, he should have and hold it, in perpetuity, as his own property. But no one offered; the host of the Moors which had so alarmed the Templars, caused equal dismay in the minds of the nobles at court. A monk of the order of Citeaux alone had courage to undertake the defence of the town. This was Don Didacus Velasquez, monk of the abbey of Our Lady of Fitero, in the kingdom of Navarre. He had borne arms before he assumed the white habit of Citeaux, and was well known to King Sancho, and this perhaps was the reason why his abbot, Don Raymond, had taken him with him on a visit to the king, about some matter concerning his monastery, at this very time. He entreated the abbot to allow him to ask permission of Sancho to undertake the defence of Calatrava. Raymond, at first, rejected the proposal, but at length, gained by the zeal and confidence of Didacus, he boldly asked the city of the prince. He was regarded as mad, but Sancho was prevailed upon by the evident assurance of the two monks to give the town of Calatrava to the Cistercian Order, and especially to the abbey of Fitero, on condition that the monks held it against the infidels. This was in 1158. The abbot Raymond and his companion Velasquez then proposed to the king to found a military Order of Calatrava, and after having obtained his consent, they communicated their design to the bishop of Toledo, who not only approved it, but gave them a large sum of money for the fortification of the town, and accorded indulgences to all such as should take arms in its defence, or contribute arms or money for the purpose. Several persons joined the two monks, and in a short while an army was raised, at the head of which they entered Calatrava, and took possession of it. The walls were repaired and completed with such expedition and strength, that the Moors abandoned their purpose of attacking it, and withdrew. The abbot Raymond, having nothing further to fear from the infidels, applied himself to organise the new military Order, which took its name from this town. The general chapter of Citeaux prescribed the manner of life and habit of these warrior monks, but historians are not agreed as to the colour or shape of the original habit. As the territory of Calatrava was almost devoid of inhabitants, the abbot Raymond returned to Fitero, where he left only the aged and infirm monks, bringing all who were active and young to Calatrava, together with a great number of cattle, and twenty thousand peasants, that he might settle them in the newly acquired territory. He governed the order six years, and died at Cirvelos, in the year 1163. After his death, the knights of Calatrava, although they were novices of Citeaux into whose hands he had put arms, refused to be governed by an abbot, and to have monks among them. They elected as their Grand Master one of their number, Don Garcias; and the monks, who had chosen their new abbot, Don Rudolf, retired with him to Cirvelos, where they began an action against the knights, to eject them, that they might recover possession of Calatrava, which the king had given to their order, and especially to their house of Fitero. But a reconciliation was effected, probably through fear of the Moors, and the knights ceded to them a house at S. Petro de Gurniel, in the diocese of Osma, with all its dependencies, and there they built a monastery, leaving Calatrava in the hands of the knights. In the year 1540, the knights were allowed to marry, and took only the vows of poverty, obedience, and conjugal fidelity; since the year 1652, they have added a fourth; to defend and maintain the Immaculate Conception of the blessed Virgin. S. VERDIANA, V. R. (A.D. 1242.) [Roman and Benedictine Martyrology, those of Menardus, Ferrarius, &c. Authority:--An old contemporary life, falsely attributed to Atto, B. of Pistoria.] Verdiana was the child of poor, though well-born parents; and her knowledge of the sufferings of the poor from her own experience in early years made her ever full of pity for those in need. At twelve years old she was noted for her beautiful and modest countenance, and humble deportment. A wealthy relation, a count, took her into his house, and made her wait upon his wife. Her strict probity and scrupulous discharge of her duties so gained the confidence of her master and mistress, that they entrusted to her the entire management of their house. One day that there was a famine raging in the diocese of Florence, and the poor were in extreme distress, the girl saw some miserable wretches dying from exhaustion at the door. Her master had a vessel of beans, and she hastily emptied the box, and fed the starving wretches with them. This would have been an act of questionable morality, were it not for the extremity of the case, when, to save life, an act is justified which would have been unjust were there no such an imperious necessity. Her master had, in the meantime, sold the beans, and he shortly after returned with the money. He went to the vessel, to send it to the purchaser, but found it empty. "Then," says the contemporary writer, "he began to shout and storm against the servants, and make such a to-do as to cause great scandal in the house and among the neighbours. Now when all the house was turned topsy-turvy about these beans, and was in an uproar, the lord's hand-maiden, with great confidence, betook herself to prayer, and spent the night in supplication. And on the morrow, the vessel was found full of beans as before. Then the master was called, and she bade him abstain for the future from such violence, for Christ who had received the beans had returned them." By the kindness of the Count, her relative, she was enabled to make a pilgrimage to S. James, of Compostella, in company with a pious lady. On her return, she resolved to adopt the life of a recluse, and after long preparation, and a visit to Rome, where she spent three years, she obtained the desire of her heart, and received the veil from the hands of a canon of the Church of Castel Fiorentino, her native place, and bearing the Cross, preceded and followed by all the clergy and people, she was conducted to her cell, and, having been admitted into it, the door was walled up. In this cell she spent many years, conversing with those who visited her, and receiving her food through a window, through which, also, the priest communicated her. Two large snakes crept in at this window, one day, and thenceforth took up their abode with her. She received these fellow-comrades with great repugnance, but overcame it, and fed them from her own store of provisions. They would glide forth when no one was near, but never failed to return for the night, and when she took her meals. On one occasion they were injured by some peasants who pursued them with sticks and stones. Verdiana healed them, nevertheless the rustics attacked them again, killed one, and drove the other away, so that it never returned to the cell of the recluse. When the holy woman felt that the hour of her release approached, she made her last confession and received the Blessed Sacrament through her window, and then closing it opened her psalter, and began to recite the penitential psalms. Next morning the people finding the window closed, and receiving no answer to their taps, broke into the cell, and found her dead, kneeling with eyes and hands upraised to heaven, and the psalter before her open at the psalm _Miserere mihi_, "Have mercy upon me, O God! after Thy great goodness; and according to the multitude of Thy mercies, do away mine offences." [1] Vincent of Beauvais, and other late writers, say that the name of God was found after his death written in gold letters on his heart; but this is only one instance of the way in which legends have been coined to explain titles, the spiritual significance of which was not considered sufficiently wondrous for the vulgar. [2] Lib. vi. c. 8. [3] De Bel. Jud. vii. 3. [4] As S. Ephraem related the incident several times to his monks, and they wrote it down from what he had related, there exist several versions of the story slightly differing from one another. [5] Hist. Eccl. lib. iii. c. 16. [6] Moreover it contradicts the positive statements of more reliable authors, that Bridget was the legitimate daughter of Brotseach, the wife of Dubtach. [7] But this legend is given very differently in another Life, and Cogitosus and the first and fourth Lives do not say anything about it. [8] As near as can be ascertained; see Lanigan, Eccl. Hist. of Ireland, vol. 1, p. 455. [Illustration: Tomb of Joshua. _From the Greek Menology._] February 2. The Purification of S. Mary. S. CORNELIUS, _the Centurion, B. of Cæsarea, 1st cent._ S. FLOSCULUS, _B. of Orleans, circ._ A.D. 500. S. LAURENCE, _Abp. of Canterbury_, A.D. 619. S. ADALBALD, _C. in Belgium and Aquitaine_, A.D. 652. S. ADELOGA, _V. Abss. at Kitzingen, 8th cent._ SS. MARTYRS, _of Ebbecksdorf_, A.D. 880. B. PETER CAMBIAN, _O. S.D., M. in Piedmont_, A.D. 1365. THE PURIFICATION OF S. MARY, OR THE PRESENTATION OF CHRIST IN THE TEMPLE. The purification is a double feast, partly in memory of the B. Virgin's purification, this being the fortieth day after the birth of her Son, which she observed according to the Law (Leviticus xii. 4), though there was no need for such a ceremony, she having contracted no defilement through her childbearing. Partly also in memory of Our Lord's presentation in the temple, which the Gospel for the day commemorates. The Old Law commanded, that a woman having conceived by a man, if she brought forth a male child, should remain forty days retired in her house, as unclean; at the end of which she should go to the temple to be purified, and offer a lamb and a turtle dove; but, if she were poor, a pair of turtle doves or pigeons, desiring the priest to pray to God for her. This law the Blessed Virgin accomplished (Luke ii. 12) with the exercise of admirable virtues; especially did she exhibit her obedience, although she knew that she was not obliged to keep the law, yet, inasmuch as her Son had consented to be circumcised, though He needed it not, so did she stoop to fulfil the law, lest she should offend others. She also exhibited her humility, in being willing to be treated as one unclean, and as one that stood in need of being purified, as if she had not been immaculate. Among the Greeks, the festival goes by the name of _Hypapante_, which denotes the meeting of our Lord by Symeon and Anna, in the temple; in commemoration of which occurrence it was first made a festival in the Church by the emperor Justinian I., A.D. 542. The emperor is said to have instituted it on occasion of an earthquake, which destroyed half the city of Pompeiopolis, and of other calamities. It was considered in the Greek Church as one of the feasts belonging to her Lord (Despotikaì Heortaì). The name of the Purification was given to it in the 9th century by the Roman pontiffs. In the Greek Church the prelude of this festival, which retains its first name, Hypapante, is "My soul doth magnify the Lord, for He hath regarded the lowliness of his hand-maiden;" and a festival of Symeon and Anna is observed on the following day. [Illustration: PURIFICATION OF S. MARY THE VIRGIN. From the Great Missal. Feb. 2.] In the Western Church it has usually been called "Candlemas Day," from the custom of lighting up churches with tapers and lamps in remembrance of our Saviour having been this day declared by Symeon to be "a light to lighten the Gentiles." Processions were used with a similar object, of which S. Bernard gives the following description:--"We go in procession, two by two, carrying candles in our hands, which are lighted not at a common fire, but a fire first blessed in the church by a bishop. They that go out first return last; and in the way we sing, 'Great is the glory of the Lord.' We go two by two in commendation of charity and a social life; for so our Saviour sent out his disciples. We carry light in our hands: first, to signify that our light should shine before men; secondly, this we do on this day, especially, in memory of the Wise Virgins (of whom this blessed Virgin is the chief) that went to meet their Lord with their lamps lit and burning. And from this usage and the many lights set up in the church this day, it is called Candelaria, or Candlemas. Because our works should be all done in the holy fire of charity, therefore the candles are lit with holy fire. They that go out first return last, to teach humility, 'in humility preferring one another.' Because God loveth a cheerful giver, therefore we sing in the way. The procession itself is to teach us that we should not stand idle in the way of life, but proceed from virtue to virtue, not looking back to that which is behind, but reaching forward to that which is before." The Purification is a common subject of representation in Christian art, both Eastern and Western. From the evident unsuitableness of the mystery of the Circumcision to actual representation, it is not usually depicted in works of art, and the Presentation in the Temple has been generally selected, with better taste, for this purpose. The prophecy of Symeon, "Yea, a sword shall pierce through Thine own soul also," made to the blessed Virgin, is the first of her seven sorrows. The Christian rite of "The Churching of Women" is a perpetuation of the ancient ceremony required by the Mosaic Law. How long a particular office has been used in the Christian Church, for the thanksgiving and benediction of woman after child-birth, it would be difficult to say; but it is probably most ancient, since we find that all the Western rituals, and those of the patriarchate of Constantinople, contain such an office. The Greeks appoint three prayers for the mother on the first day of the child's birth. On the eighth day, the nurse brings the child to church, and prayer is made for him before the entrance to the nave. On the fortieth day, the mother and the future sponsor at the child's baptism bring the child. After an introductory service of the usual kind, the mother, holding the child, bows her head; the priest crosses the child, and touching his head, says, "Let us pray unto the Lord; O Lord God Almighty, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who didst create by Thy word all creatures, rational and irrational, who didst bring into being all things out of nothing; we beseech and entreat Thee, purify from all sin and pollution this Thy handmaid, whom by Thy will, Thou hast preserved and permitted to enter into Thy holy Church; that she may be deemed worthy to partake, without condemnation, of Thy holy mysteries." (If the child has not survived, the prayer ends here; if it be alive, the priest continues), "And bless the child born of her. Increase, sanctify, direct, teach, guide him; for Thou hast brought him to the birth and hast shown him the light of this world; that so he may be deemed worthy of the mental light at the time that Thou hast ordained, and be numbered among Thy holy flock: through Thy only begotten Son, with whom Thou art blessed, together with Thy all-holy, good, life-giving Spirit, now, always, and for ever and ever." Other prayers referring to the mother of the child follow. Allusion is made to the presentation of Christ, in the Temple. The child is taken in the priest's arms to various parts of the church as an introduction to the sanctuary. A boy is taken to the altar; a girl only to the central door of the screen. There is a separate form in case of miscarriage. [Illustration: THE FLIGHT INTO EGYPT. After Fra Angelico. Feb. 2.] S. CORNELIUS THE CENTURION, B. (1ST CENT.) [Roman and other Western Martyrologies. Commemorated by the Greeks on Sept. 13th. Authorities:--The Acts of the Holy Apostles, c. 10, the notices in the Martyrologies, and allusions in the Epistles of S. Jerome. The Acts given by Metaphrastes are not deserving of much attention.] Cornelius, the centurion, was officer of the Italian band at Cæsarea. He was a devout proselyte, who feared God, with all his household, and gave much alms to the poor and prayed often and earnestly to God. He saw in a vision an angel, who told him that his prayers and alms had come up for a memorial before God, and that he was now to hear the words of Salvation, and to be instructed in the fulness of divine truth. He was to send to Joppa, to the house of one Simon, a tanner, for S. Peter, the prince of the Apostles, who would instruct and baptize him. This he accordingly did, and S. Peter, hastening to Cæsarea, baptized him and all his house. And the Holy Ghost fell upon them. Cornelius was afterwards, by S. Peter, ordained bishop of Cæsarea, where he strove mightily to advance the kingdom of Christ, and witnessed a good confession before the chief magistrate. He died at a ripe old age, and was buried secretly in a tomb belonging to a friend, a Christian of wealth. And, it is said, that a bramble grew over the spot and laced the entrance over with its thorny arms, so that none could enter in till S. Silvanus, bishop of Philippopolis, in Thrace, in the beginning of the 5th century, hacked away the bramble, and discovered, and translated the sacred relics. S. LAURENCE, ABP. OF CANTERBURY. (A.D. 619.) [Roman and other Western Martyrologies. Authorities:--Bede, Hist. Eccl. lib. ii. c. 4, 6, 7. Malmesbury lib. de Gest. Pontif. Angl.] Laurence was one of the first missionaries to the Saxons, who came over with S. Augustine; and he succeeded the Apostle of England in the see of Canterbury, in 608, in which he sat eleven years. Bede says, "Laurence succeeded Augustine in the bishopric, having been ordained thereto by the latter, in his lifetime, lest, upon his death, the state of the Church, as yet unsettled, might begin to falter, if it were destitute of a pastor, though but for one hour. Wherein he followed the example of the first pastor of the Church, Peter, who, having founded the Church of Christ at Rome, is said to have consecrated Clement his assistant in preaching the Gospel, and at the same time, his successor. Laurence, being advanced to the degree of archbishop, laboured indefatigably, both by frequent exhortations and examples of piety, to raise to perfection the foundation of the Church, which had been so nobly laid. In short, he not only took care of the new Church formed among the English, but endeavoured also to employ his pastoral solicitude among the ancient inhabitants of Britain, as also among the Scots, who inhabited the island of Ireland. For when he understood that the course of life and profession of the Scots, as well as that of the Britons, was not truly ecclesiastical, especially that they did not celebrate Easter at the correct time, he wrote jointly with his fellow-bishops, an exhortatory epistle, entreating and conjuring them to observe unity of peace, and conformity with the Church of Christ spread throughout the world." But soon troubles arose which obliged Archbishop Laurence to withdraw his attention from the British bishops to the condition of his own Kentish diocese. The pious King Ethelbert died, and his son Eadbald, instead of following his father's example, opposed Christianity, and caused great scandal by taking to him his step-mother to wife, his own mother, the saintly Bertha, having died some years before. The condition of Christianity became so hopeless in Kent, that Laurence resolved to desert his see, and he was confirmed in his determination by Mellitus, bishop of London, and Justus, bishop of Rochester, who fled from the violence of the sons and successors of the Christian Sebert, king of the East Saxons. Bede says, "Laurence, being about to follow Mellitus and Justus, and to quit Britain, ordered his bed to be laid, the night before, in the church of the blessed Apostles, Peter and Paul; wherein, having laid himself to take some rest, after he had poured out many prayers and tears to God for the state of the Church, he fell asleep. In the dead of the night, the blessed prince of the apostles appeared to him, and scourging him a long time with apostolic severity, asked of him, 'Why he would forsake the flock which he had committed to him? or to what shepherds he would commit Christ's sheep that were in the midst of wolves? Have you,' said he, 'forgotten my example, who, for the sake of those little ones, whom Christ recommended to me in token of His affection, underwent at the hands of the infidels and enemies of Christ, bonds, stripes, imprisonment, afflictions, and lastly, the death of the cross, that I might be crowned with Him?' Laurence being excited by these words and stripes, the very next morning repaired to the king, and taking off his garment, showed the scars of the stripes he had received. The king astonished, asked, 'Who had presumed to give such blows to so great a man?' and was much frightened when he heard that the bishop had suffered so much at the hands of the apostle of Christ for his salvation. Then, abjuring the worship of idols, and renouncing his unlawful marriage, he embraced the faith of Christ, and being baptized, promoted the affairs of the Church to the utmost of his power." In the reign of this same king, Archbishop Laurence died, and was buried in the Church of S. Peter, close beside his predecessor Augustine, and was succeeded by Mellitus. S. ADALBALD, C. (ABOUT A.D. 652.) [Belgian Martyrologies, and in Saussaye's supplement to the Gallican Martyrology. Authorities:--Mention of him in the life of his wife S. Richtrudis, by Hucbald the monk, A.D. 907; and in the life of his daughter, S. Eusebia. In some Martyrologies he is styled Martyr, but generally Duke.] Duke Adalbald was a grandson of S. Gertrude of Hamage. His mother's name was Gerberta. From his earliest youth he was a model of virtue, even in the court of the king. He married S. Richtrudis, by whom he had S. Maurontus, his eldest son, who became afterwards abbot; and three virgin saintly daughters, Clotsendis, Eusebia, and Andalsendis. S. Amandus baptized Clotsendis, and Queen Nanthild, wife of King Dagobert, was sponsor to Eusebia. On his way to Gascony for some purpose, he was waylaid and murdered, by certain persons who were displeased at his marriage with Richtrudis. It seems probable, therefore, that the crime was committed on account of some property, but nothing for certain is known of the motive actuating the murderers. Relics at S. Amand, in Flanders. S. ADELOGA, V. ABSS. (8TH CENT.) [Benedictine Martyrology and those of Menardus, Ferrarius, &c. Authority:--An ancient, apparently authentic, life by an anonymous writer, published by Bollandus.] The blessed Adeloga was a daughter of Charles Martel, son of Pepin l'Heristal, by Kunehilda, whether his wife or concubine is uncertain. Adeloga was of singular beauty, so that she was greatly sought in marriage, but she constantly refused all offers, having given her heart wholly to her heavenly Spouse. Her father, greatly exasperated against her, on this account, treated her with studied brutality, subjecting her to public insult; and observing that the bruised spirit of his child sought refuge and comfort in the advice of her director, his private chaplain, he was filled with bitterness, and said, "Hearken, my daughter, you have refused kings, dukes, and peers to anger me, that you might wanton with a curate." Then calling to him one of his knights, who stood by, as he thus insulted his daughter, he bade him "Go and tell the chaplain to be off, he and his woman here, or they shall both be driven forth with contumely, to-morrow morning." Hearing this, the priest groaned in spirit, and said, "O God of heaven and earth, who searchest the secrets of all hearts, and every thought of man, Thou knowest my innocence in this matter. But, although my lord has exercised his anger upon me, I will not desert my lady and mistress, but for Christ's sake will wait upon her with all reverence." Then Adeloga went forth, and the priest with her, and they journeyed till they came to a wild and desert place, and there they built a convent. The name of the place was Kitzingen. To her came many virgins, and the priest gave her the veil, and made her abbess, enjoining her to adopt the rule of SS. Benedict and Scholastica. He, himself, attended to the temporal affairs of the convent, till he was summoned to his rest. The story is told that after his death, a young nun, having fallen in love with a youth, resolved to fly the convent. She waited till night, and then, when all were asleep, stole to the gates, but there she saw the form of the white-haired chaplain beckoning her back, and with a gentle voice addressing her, "Go back, dear virgin! A heavenly Spouse calleth thee, and no earthly lover! Return to him, my child. I watch without over this sacred house, and the abbess keeps ward within." And not many days after, the girl sickened and died. There was another nun who was also smitten with passion for a young noble, and harboured in her mind the thought of escaping from her monastery, and flying to his arms. But in the night, as she slept, she saw the holy abbess, Adeloga, pass before her with a lamp in her hand, who turned and looked on her and said, "Lo, Christ cometh, prepare to meet Him. Awake, the Bridegroom cometh, go forth and trim thy light." Then she started from sleep, and was moved with compunction, and never after yielded to sensual thoughts. Now it fell out that in after years Charles Martel was reconciled to his daughter, and endowed her monastery with lands, and visited her. Then, in the night, there stood before him, in vision, the old chaplain, who said to him, "The Eternal King hath sent me unto thee, to declare to thee my innocence in that thing whereof thou didst once accuse me. And if thou believest me not now, then will I cite thee to appear, and hear me plead my cause, before the just judgment seat of God." And when Charles awoke, he called to him his daughter, and said, "Pray for me, my dearest child, that the Lord lay not this sin to my charge, that once in wrath I spoke falsely against thee and my chaplain, thy director." It is related that among the retainers of the abbey was a noble youth very fond of dogs, and above all, he loved one hound, which was with him in the field and forest by day, and slept at the foot of his bed at night. One day that he was in the wood, a couple of ruffians fell upon him, and murdered him for the sake of his clothes and purse, and left the body naked under the trees. For three days the faithful hound kept guard, and then it sought the abbey, and whined at the door of the lady Adeloga, and when she came forth, plucked at her dress, as though to lead her into the forest. Suspecting something was amiss, she called to her some servants, and they followed the dog to where his master lay slain. The abbess was determined to discover who were the murderers. She therefore summoned before her all the retainers and serfs on the land, and questioned them closely, but could obtain no confession. Then she solemnly warned the culprits to beware how they left the matter to the judgment of God, and she bade them, for the last time, confess. When all were silent, the hound of the murdered man was introduced, and it flew at the throats of the culprits and tore them so fearfully that one died. The historian of the life of S. Adeloga, concludes with the following prayer. "We pray thee, most holy and gentle mother, that, as thou hast encouraged us in this life with thy good example and virtuous acts, so mayest thou deign to assist us with God in life eternal; that as we rejoice in thy commemoration on earth, so may we merit to be strengthened by thy intercession in heaven; for the sake of Christ Jesus, our Lord, who of all Saints is the reward, the glory, joy, and crown, through ages of ages, Amen." THE HOLY MARTYRS OF EBBECKSDORF. (A.D. 880.) [Authority:--The contemporary Fulda Annals of the Franks. See also the Legend in Langebek, Script. Rer. Danicarum II., pp. 57-71.] These martyrs were Duke Bruno of Saxony, Theodoric, bishop of Minden, Marquard, bishop of Hildesheim, Erlulf of Fulda, Gosbert, bishop of Osnabrück, and many others; massacred by the Northmen. B. PETER CAMBIAN, O. S.D., M. (A.D. 1365.) [Roman Martyrology.] This Saint was sent by the Sovereign pontiff, into the vallies inhabited by the Waldensian heretics, as Inquisitor-general in Piedmont, in 1351, and was murdered by the heretics in the Franciscan convent of Susa. The person who did the deed stabbed him in the cloister, on the feast of the Purification of Our Lady, in 1365. His tomb was opened in 1854, and the relics were elevated to the altars of several churches to which they were given. Pius IX. confirmed the devotion of the Catholics towards this martyr. [Illustration] February 3. SS. CELERINUS, _D. C._, CELERINA, IGNATIUS, AND LAURENCE, _MM. in Africa, 3rd cent._ S. FORTUNATUS, _M. at Rome_. S. CANDIDUS, _M. at Volaterra_. SS. TIGRIS AND REMEDIUS, _BB., MM. at Gap, 4th cent._ S. BLAISE, _B. M._, AND COMPANIONS, _at Sebaste, circ._ A.D. 316. S. SIMPLICIUS, _B. of Vienne; beginning of 5th cent._ S. ANATOLIUS, _B. of Adana, in Cilicia; beginning of 5th cent._ S. LAURENCE THE ILLUMINATOR, _B. of Spoleto, circ._ A.D. 576. S. PHILIP, _B. of Vienne, circ._ A.D. 578. S. EVANTIUS, _B. of Vienne_, A.D. 586. S. HADELIN, _P. at Celles in Belgium, circ._ A.D. 690. S. BERLINDA, _V. at Meerbeeke in Belgium, circ._ A.D. 698. S. WERBURGA, _V. Patroness of Chester; beginning of 8th cent._ S. NITHARD, _P. M. in Sweden, circ._ A.D. 840. S. ANSKAR, _B. of Hamburg, Apostle of Sweden and Denmark_, A.D. 865. S. LIAFDAG, _B. M. at Ripe in Denmark, circ._ A.D. 980. S. ELINAND, _Monk of Froidmont, near Beauvais_, A.D. 1237. SS. CELERINUS, D. C., CELERINA, IGNATIUS, AND LAURENTINUS, MM. (3RD CENT.) [Roman and other Latin Martyrologies. Authorities:--The letters of S. Cyprian of Carthage, and S. Cornelius of Rome. A letter of S. Celerinus to the Confessor Lucian is inserted in some editions of the works of S. Cyprian.] Of Celerina, Ignatius, and Laurence nothing, except their names, is known, and even these would not have come down to us, but for their being mentioned as glorious martyrs by S. Cyprian, in a letter to their nephew, S. Celerinus. This Celerinus was first Reader, and then Deacon, in the Church of Carthage, and received orders from S. Cyprian. He was in Rome in the year 250, and confessed Christ there in the Decian persecution, spending nineteen days in chains; but to his great sorrow, his sister yielded to her fears, and was numbered among the lapsed. Afterwards Celerinus was unfortunately drawn away by Novatian into schism, but when he perceived that the schismatic sought his own advancement rather than the glory of God, he acknowledged his error, and returned to the communion of the Catholic Church. S. FORTUNATUS, M. S. Fortunatus is mentioned, together with many other martyrs, in the Roman and other Martyrologies on Feb. 2nd, as having suffered at Rome; but their Acts have not been preserved. The body of S. Fortunatus was found in 1606, in the cemetery of S. Callixtus, and was given by Pope Paul V. to the Rev. Jacobus Tirinus, S.J., for the new and beautiful Jesuit church he had built in Antwerp, in the year 1622. On account of Feb. 2nd being the Feast of the Purification, the commemoration of S. Fortunatus has been postponed in that church till Feb. 3rd. S. BLAISE, B. M. (A.D. 316.) [Roman and Western Martyrologies. Commemorated by the Greeks on Feb. 11th, in some ancient Martyrologies, on Feb. 15th. The Greek Acts, of which there are four versions, are modern, and deserve little regard.] Blasius, Blase, Blayse, Blays, or Blaise, was bishop of Sebaste, a city of Cappadocia, in the Lesser Asia. He spent a great part of his time in retirement on a hill not far from the city, whither he withdrew, after the duties of his office were finished, to be alone with God. During the persecution of the Christians in the reign of Diocletian, he lay concealed for some time in this retreat; but was at last taken and brought before Agricolaus, the governor of the province, and confessing himself a Christian, was thrown into prison. After enduring many tortures, he received the crown of martyrdom in the beginning of the fourth century. Some historians refer this event to the year 316, under the reign of Licinius. Seven holy women and two young children suffered at the same time. The Acts of his martyrdom are so untrustworthy that it is not possible to state any further particulars which are authentic. The Council of Oxford, A.D. 1222, prohibited servile labour on this day. Its observance in England was marked by several curious ceremonies. Among others a taper used to be offered at High Mass; and it was lately the custom in many parts of England to light bonfires on the hills on S. Blaise's night. Some have affirmed that these usages arose from an absurd pun on the Saint's name (sc. "blaze"); but this seems clearly erroneous, as they are not peculiar to England. In some parts of Germany, S. Blaise's Day is called "Little Candlemas Day," because of the bonfires that it was usual (for an uncertain reason) to kindle on that night. At Bradford, Yorkshire, a festival is holden every five years in memory of S. Blaise. In the Greek paintings, S. Blaise is depicted as an old man with a pointed beard. In Western art he appears in the vestments of a bishop; his peculiar emblem is an iron comb, such as is used by wool-combers, which is said to have been an instrument of his torture. Owing, probably, to this reason, he has been esteemed the patron of manufacturers of wool, and that trade in the city of Norwich still observes his day, or did so until lately. S. Blaise is also frequently represented as surrounded by wild beasts, or birds are bringing him food; the text, Job v. 23, which occasionally accompanies these emblems, indicates that, in his case as in that of other saints, by long continuance in a solitary course of life, the denizens of the wood had become accustomed to the Saint's presence. Sometimes again, S. Blaise has a swine's head at his feet, typical of his victory over the sensual desires of the flesh. Finally, he occasionally holds in one hand, or has borne before him by a chorister, a lighted taper, typical of his being "a burning and a shining light." [Illustration: S. BLAISE. From Cahier. Feb. 3.] S. LAURENCE THE ILLUMINATOR, B. (ABOUT A.D. 576.) [The learned Bollandus, S.J., pithily remarks: "Magnas Umbria circa veterum suorum Sanctorum res gestas ortum ætatem, contraxit umbras, si non tenebras." Little is known of this Saint.] S. Laurence the Illuminator, is said to have come from Syria with many other illustrious bishops and confessors, to Italy, in the reign of Diocletian. He was elected by the clergy bishop of Spoleto; and illumined his diocese with his teaching and miracles. S. HADELIN, P. C. (ABOUT A.D. 690.) [Martyrologies of Ado, of Wyon, Menardus, those of Liége, Cologne, &c. Authorities:--Two ancient lives, one by Notker, B. of Liége (971-1007).] S. Hadelin was one of the disciples of S. Remacle, and when that Saint resigned his bishopric of Tongres, that he might retire from the world into the peaceful monastery of Staveloo, lately founded by S. Sigebert, King of Austrasia, he took with him the pious and humble Hadelin. On their way they rested on a bare plain, under a glaring sun, for their afternoon repose. S. Remacle remained awake, whilst his companion slept, and saw an angel bending over Hadelin, shading him with his wings from the burning heat. Remacle sent Hadelin into the neighbourhood of Dinant, on the Meuse, in 669, and finding a quiet retreat at Celles, on the Lesse, he dwelt there in a cave, and built a little chapel, on the site of which rose in after years a collegiate church. S. Hadelin is the patron of five churches in the diocese of Liége and Namur. His hermitage still exists, and from his time has never been without a pious successor. The body of the Saint was buried there, but was translated to Vise in the diocese of Liége, in 1338. His translation is commemorated on October 11th. S. BERLINDA. (ABOUT A.D. 698.) [Molanus in his addition to Usuardus, Wyon, Menardus, and Ferrarius. Authority:--An ancient life by an anonymous writer, published by Bollandus.] Berlinda was the daughter of a nobleman named Odelard, who resided at Meerbeeke, near Ninove, in Brabant, in the reign of King Dagobert, and of Nona, his wife, the sister of S. Amandus. To a rare beauty, Berlinda joined all the gifts of intellect, but she had the misfortune to incur the anger of her father. After the death of his wife and only son, Odelard was attacked by leprosy, and lived a miserable languishing life, ministered to by his daughter. One day that he asked her for something to drink, she filled a bowl with water, and took it to him, and then, being herself thirsty, she rinsed out the vessel, and filled it again. The father, highly offended at her doing this, drove off at once to Nivelles and offered all his lands to S. Gertrude, by the symbolic gift of a white glove and a reaping-hook and a branch of foliage. Before accomplishing his donation, he supplicated the Saint to accept his offering with her own hands. Then the reliquary, in which the holy abbess reposed, opened, and the lifeless hands of S. Gertrude were extended to receive the glove, the branch, and the sickle. Then it closed upon them. Berlinda, being disinherited, retired to the monastery of Moorsel, near Alost, where she lived in penitence and prayer. One night she heard a choir of angels singing, as they sailed across the dark starlit sky, bearing the soul of her father to Paradise. She at once besought of the superior permission to return to Meerbeeke for a while. Her request was complied with, and she flew to her father's castle. He was dead, so Berlinda buried him in the little church he had erected there to the honour of S. Peter. Retained by force in her paternal dwelling by the servants and tenants, Berlinda remained at Meerbeeke, where she continued her life of austerities and prayer, and died about 690, on the 3rd of February. As no stone sarcophagus could be found in which she might be laid, a large oak was cut down and scooped out to serve as a coffin, and her body was placed in it. Numerous miracles were wrought at her tomb, so that at the end of seven years the coffin was opened, and the wood was found to have become petrified. On this occasion a church was built in her honour and that of the Blessed Virgin, and thirty years later, her relics were solemnly enshrined on May 2nd, 728. S. Berlinda has remained in great honour at Meerbeeke. She is invoked against cattle diseases; and in accordance with an ancient custom, pilgrims pray before a wooden image of the saint represented beside a cow, and touch the udder of the cow, which has become black through the innumerable touchings to which it has become subjected. According to a popular saying S. Berlinda protects trees transplanted on her festival. S. WERBURGA, V. ABSS. (BEGINNING OF 8TH CENTURY.) [English Martyrology. Authorities:--Life of Goscelin, the monk (fl. 1100), and mention in Bede, John of Brompton, Florence of Worcester, Hyden, Langherne, Simeon of Durham.] Werburga, patroness of Chester, was born at Stone, in Staffordshire, and was the daughter of Wulfhere, King of Mercia, or the Midland English. From the lips of her sainted mother, Ermingilde, she received those first lessons of Christian truth which afterwards produced such beautiful fruit in her life. Being one of four children, all trained under the same godly discipline, she is said to have excelled them all in virtue and discretion. Her mind was open to receive good impressions, and she listened with earnest attention to every word of instruction and advice. Thus, she "daily grew in grace, and in the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ:" her mind continually expanding under the influence of holy thoughts and pure desires. At an age when most persons of her exalted position would have been found joining in the giddy whirl of pleasure, she found truest joy in contemplation of heavenly things, and holiest bliss, arising from a pure conscience chastened by fasting and sanctified by prayer. She daily assisted her mother in the performance of the whole Church Offices, and spent much time on her knees in the exercise of private devotions. Having early resolved to devote herself to a life of virginal purity, she sought every opportunity to prepare her mind for that holy state. But she was not to overcome the world without a struggle. Temptations began to gather around her. The beauty of her person attracted a crowd of admirers, who eagerly sought her hand in marriage. Foremost among these was a prince of the West Saxons, who offered her rich gifts and made flattering proposals. She refused to accept his gifts; and to his proposals answered that she had resolved to become the bride of Christ, and wished no earthly spouse. [Illustration: S. WERBURGA. From Cahier. Feb. 3.] Another, and more violent temptation soon presented itself. Werbode, a powerful knight of her father's court, backed by the influence of her father, entreated Werburga to become his wife; but to his entreaties she turned a deaf ear. Imagining that to this refusal she was influenced by her two brothers, who were then under the instruction of S. Chad, and resolving by fair or foul means to compass his designs, Werbode sought an opportunity to murder the two brothers, and thus remove them from his path. In the accomplishment of this diabolical design, he was, to a certain extent, assisted by the father, whom he had incensed against his sons. Werbode soon after died a miserable death. The king, stung by remorse, saw reflected, as in a mirror, all the deeds of his past life, and remembered how he had promised to extirpate idolatry from his dominions, but had failed to perform his vow. With earnestness he began to atone for his faults; destroyed the idols and converted their temples into churches, built the great abbey of Peterborough, founded the priory of Stone, and in every way endeavoured to propagate the true faith among his people. Seeing this happy change in his disposition, Werburga revealed to her father the earnest desire of her heart, and earnestly entreated his permission to consecrate herself wholly to God. At first he appeared to be very grieved, but yielding at length to her passionate entreaties, Wulfhere, attended by his whole court, conducted her with great state to the convent of Ely. Here they were met at the gates by a long procession of nuns, singing hymns of praise and thanksgiving to God. Werburga, falling on her knees, begged of the royal abbess, S. Etheldreda, that she might be received as a postulant. Having obtained her request, the voice of praise again ascended to heaven, the virgins chanting the _Te Deum_, as they returned to the convent. Now followed the usual trials; Werburga was first stripped of her costly apparel, her rich coronet was exchanged for a poor veil, purple and silks and gold were replaced by a rough coarse habit, and she resigned herself into the hands of her superior, henceforward to live only to Christ. The virgin, with great fervour, now devoted herself to God. Her affections being weaned from earthly things, were fixed more firmly upon those things which are above. By prayer and fasting, by self-sacrifice and mortification, by obedience and penance, she sought to sanctify her soul and body, that she might present them, a holy and acceptable sacrifice, unto God. After many years she was chosen, at the request of her uncle King Ethelred, to superintend all the religious houses for women in his kingdom. When she entered upon this larger sphere of duty, she laboured with earnest diligence to make all the houses under her care models of exact monastic discipline. Through the liberality of her uncle, she was enabled to found new convents at Trentham, in Gloucestershire; Hanbury, in Staffordshire; and Weedon, in Northamptonshire. These remained for several centuries as evidences of her godly zeal. The king also, at her request, founded the collegiate church of S. John the Baptist, in the suburbs of West Chester, and gave to S. Egwin the ground for the great abbey of Evesham. S. Werburga, both by precept and example, sought to develope the religious life in those committed to her charge, and many through her influence were won from a life of dissipation and vice to a life of holiness and love. God, in answer to continual prayers, had crowned her with many spiritual and celestial blessings. The old chroniclers say that she became the most perfect pattern of meekness, humility, patience, and purity. Her fastings and mortifications were almost incredible. She never took more than one meal during the day, and that of the coarsest food: seeking in this to emulate the lives of those fathers of the desert who shed such radiance over the Eastern and African Church. Beside the usual monastic offices, she was in the habit of reciting, upon her knees, the whole of the Psalter daily. She often remained in the church all night, bathed in tears and prostrate in prayer. In the exercise of these holy devotions she lived to a ripe old age. Receiving at last some premonitions of her approaching departure, she made a farewell visit to all the houses under her care, and exhorted the inmates to prepare for the coming of the heavenly Bridegroom. Then retiring to the convent at Trentham, she quietly waited her departure. The messenger soon came, and found the bride ready, and so with quiet faith and perfect trust she went to the home of her Spouse, on the 3rd of February, 699. Her corpse, in accordance with her own directions, was conveyed to the monastery at Hanbury. It was interred with great honour, and there remained until the year 708. Then it was disinterred in presence of King Ceolred and many bishops, and transferred to a costly shrine. The old chroniclers say that it was found incorrupt, and remained so until A.D. 875, when, for fear of the Danes, who were invading the country, the shrine was carried to Chester. The body, however, fell to dust soon after its translation. In course of time a stately church was erected over the relics; this became the cathedral, and as such exists to this day. During the reign of Henry VIII., the shrine was desecrated, and the holy relics of S. Werburga scattered abroad. What remained of the costly shrine was afterwards converted into an episcopal throne, and may still be seen, carved with the curious images of kings of Mercia, ancestors of S. Werburga, who flourished eleven centuries ago. To this day it is used as the throne of the bishops of Chester. S. NITHARD, P. M. (A.D. 840.) [From the Life of S. Anskar, c. 6; Adam of Bremen, Hist. Eccl. lib. i.] Nithard, nephew of Bishop Gauzbert, accompanied him in his mission to the Swedes; at first he was heard with patience, but the wild pagans, enraged at his denunciation of their worship of Thorr and Odin, burst into the house where he was, and killed him. S. ANSKAR, B.; AP. OF SWEDEN. (A.D. 865.) [German, Scandinavian, and Belgian martyrologies. Authorities:--His life by his successor, S. Rembert, who was personally acquainted with him, and had shared in his mission. The following outline of the life of this illustrious saint is from the pen of the Rev. G. F. Maclear, B.D., and is extracted from his "Apostles of Mediæval Europe," somewhat curtailed, and with some modifications.] Charlemagne was once, we are told,[9] at Narbonne, when, in the midst of the banquet, some swift barks were seen putting into the harbour. The company started up, while some pronounced the crew to be Jewish, others African, others British traders, the keen eye of the great emperor discerned that they were bound on no peaceful errand. "It is not with merchandise," said he, "that yonder barks are laden; they are manned by most terrible enemies." And then he advanced to the window, and stood there a long while in tears. No one dared to ask him the cause of his grief, but at length he explained it himself. "It is not for myself," said he, "that I am weeping, or for any harm that yon barks can do to me. But truly I am pained to think that even while I am yet alive they have dared to approach this shore; and still greater is my grief when I reflect on the evils they will bring on my successors." His words were only too truly fulfilled. The sight of those piratical banners told its own tale. The fleets he had built, the strong forts and towns he had erected at the mouths of the various rivers throughout his empire, were neglected by his successors, and what he foresaw came to pass. Year after year, during the ninth century, the children of the North burst forth from their pine forests, their creeks, their fiords, and icebound lakes, and prowled along the defenceless shores of Germany, France, and England. They laughed at the fiercest storms, landed on the most inaccessible coasts, and pushed up the shallowest rivers, while Charlemagne's degenerate successors tamely beheld the fairest towns in their dominions sacked and burnt by the terrible crews of those terrible barks. "Take a map," writes Sir Francis Palgrave, "and colour with vermilion the provinces, districts, and shores which the Northmen visited, as the record of each invasion. The colouring will have to be repeated more than ninety times successively before you arrive at the conclusion of the Carlovingian dynasty. Furthermore, mark by the usual symbol of war, two crossed swords, the localities where battles were fought by or against the pirates; where they were defeated or triumphant, or where they pillaged, burned, destroyed; and the valleys and banks of the Elbe, Rhine, and Moselle, Scheldt, Meuse, Somme, and Seine, Loire, Garonne, and Adour, the inland Allier, and all the coasts and coastlands between estuary and estuary, and the countries between the river-streams, will appear bristling as with _cheveux-de-frise_. The strongly-fenced Roman cities, the venerated abbeys, and their dependent _bourgades_, often more flourishing and extensive than the ancient seats of government, the opulent sea-ports and trading-towns, were all equally exposed to the Danish attacks, stunned by the Northmen's approach, subjugated by their fury."[10] But while the mind faintly strives to conceive the misery and desolation thus inflicted, on well-nigh every town and village of Germany and France, it finds satisfaction in the thought that even now missionary zeal did not falter; that while every estuary and river darkened under the sails of the Northmen's barks, there were not lacking those who had the Christian bravery to penetrate into the dreary regions whence they issued forth, to seek them out amidst their pine forests and icebound lakes, and to plant amongst them the first germs of Christian civilization. The first mission in Denmark was organized in the year A.D. 826, when Harold, king of Jutland, his queen, and a large retinue of Danes, were baptized with great pomp in the vast Dom of Mayence. On this occasion, Harold solemnly did homage to Louis the Pious, and agreed to hold the Danish kingdom as a feudatory of the Carlovingian crown. On this occasion also, Ebbo, the primate of France, determined to seek out a monk who would be willing to accompany the newly-baptized king on his return to Denmark, and remain at his court as a priest and teacher. But the well-known ferocity of the Northmen long deterred any one from offering himself for such a duty. At length the abbot of Corbey, near Amiens, announced that one of his monks was not unwilling to undertake the arduous task. The intrepid volunteer was Anskar, a native of a village not far from Corbey. Born in the year A.D. 801, and early devoted by his parents to the monastic life, he had always evinced the deepest religious enthusiasm, and his ardent imagination taught him to believe that he often saw visions and heard voices from another world. When he was only five years of age, he lost his mother: and a dream, in which he saw her surrounded by a majestic choir of virgins, the fairest of whom bade him, if he would join his mother in bliss, flee the pomps and vanities of the world, exerted a profound impression upon him, and induced him to devote himself more than ever to prayer and meditation. But when he was thirteen years of age, A.D. 814, an event occurred which exercised a still deeper influence over his susceptible mind. News reached the monastery that Charlemagne was dead. The greatest of great emperors had passed away, and now, in the sepulchre which he had made for himself, "he was sitting on his curule chair, clad in his silken robes, ponderous with broidery, pearls, and orfray, the imperial diadem on his head, his closed eyelids covered, his face swathed in the dead-clothes, girt with his baldric, the ivory horn slung in his scarf, his good sword 'Joyeuse' by his side, the Gospel-book open on his lap, musk and amber and sweet spices poured around."[11] Anskar at this time had relaxed somewhat of his usual austerities, and now the thought that even that mighty prince, whom he himself had seen in all the plenitude of his power could not escape the hand of death, filled him with awe, and he gave himself up more unreservedly than ever to the severest discipline. Meanwhile his talents had brought him into general notice, and when his abbot founded another monastic outpost in Westphalia, in a beautiful valley on the west bank of the Weser, and called it New Corbey, Anskar was removed to the new foundation, and at the age of twenty-five was elected, with the common consent of all, to superintend its conventual school, and to preach to the neighbouring population. He was on a visit to Old Corbey, when the news arrived that a monk was much needed to accompany the Danish Harold to his native land, and that the abbot Wala had nominated him to the emperor as a fit person to be entrusted with the arduous mission. Summoned to the court, Anskar calmly but resolutely announced his willingness to go. In dreams and visions, he said, he had heard the voice of Christ himself bidding him preach the word to the heathen tribes: and nothing could induce him to shrink from the plain path of duty. In vain, therefore, on his return to the monastery, the brethren learning that he was about to resign all his hopes and prospects to preach amongst heathens and barbarians, warned, protested, and even mocked at him for his madness. Immoveable in his resolution to brave all risks, he began to prepare himself for his great enterprise by prayer and study of the Scriptures; and so deep was the impression made by his evident sincerity and self-devotion, that Autbert, steward of the monastery, and a man of noble birth, when every one else hung back, declared that he could not find it in his heart to desert his friend, and was resolved to become his companion. A foretaste of the difficulties that awaited them was experienced at the very outset. No one could possibly be prevailed on to accompany them as an attendant. The abbot himself shrank from interposing his authority, and they were fain to set out alone. Before starting, they had an interview with Louis, and received from him everything they were likely to need for their undertaking, in the shape of church vessels, tents, and books. From Harold, however, they met with but little encouragement, and neither he nor his nobles cared much for their company. On their arrival at Cologne, whence they were to sail up the Rhine to Holland, and so to Denmark, Bishop Hadebold bestowed upon them a ship with two cabins. The better accommodation promised in such a vessel induced Harold to share it with Anskar; and the engaging manners of the missionary gradually won his respect, and inspired him with an interest in his undertaking. On landing, Anskar fixed his head-quarters at Schleswig, and commenced the foundation of a school, purchasing, or receiving, from Harold, Danish boys, whom he tried to train, so as to form the nucleus of a native ministry. Two years thus passed away, and some impression seemed to have been made upon the people, when Autbert sickened, and was obliged to return to Corbey, where he died. Meanwhile the baptism of Harold, and still more his destruction of the native temples, was bitterly resented by his subjects. Before long a rebellion broke out, and the king was obliged to fly for refuge to a spot within the ancient Frisian territory, while Anskar finding it necessary to leave Schleswig, was consoled by an unexpected opportunity of commencing a similar work in Sweden. In the year A.D. 829, ambassadors from Sweden presented themselves at the court of Louis, and after arranging the political object of their mission, announced that many of their countrymen were favourably disposed towards Christianity. The commerce carried on at this period between Sweden and the port of Doerstadt, combined with the teaching of some Christian captives, whom the Swedes had carried off in their piratical excursions, had predisposed not a few towards lending a favourable ear to Christian teachers. The emperor gladly embraced the opportunity thus afforded, and summoned Anskar to the palace, who, after an interview, declared his entire willingness to undertake the enterprise. A monk named Gislema was therefore left with Harold, and Anaskar having found a new companion in Witmar, a brother monk of Corbey, set out in the year A.D. 831 with presents from Louis to the King of Sweden. But the voyage was most disastrous. The missionaries had not proceeded far when they were attacked by pirates. A fierce battle ensued, and their crew, though first victorious, were overpowered in a second engagement, and barely escaped to land. The pirates plundered them of everything, the presents for the king, their sacred books, and all their ecclesiastical vestments. In this forlorn and destitute condition they reached Birka, a haven and village on the Mälar lake, not far from the ancient capital Sigtuna, the residence of rich merchants, and the centre of the northern trade. Here they were hospitably welcomed by the king, Biorn "of the Hill," and received full permission to preach and baptize. The nucleus of a church was found already existing in the persons of many Christian captives, who had long been deprived of the consolation of Christian ordinances. The work, therefore, of the missionaries commenced under fair auspices, and before long Herigar, the king's counsellor, announced himself a convert, and erected a church on his estate. A year and a half was thus employed, and then Anskar returned to the court of Louis with a letter from the King of Sweden, and an account of all that had befallen him. Thereupon Louis resolved, without delay, to give effect to the ecclesiastical plans of his father, and to make Hamburg an archiepiscopal see, and the centre of operations for the northern missions. Accordingly, Anskar was elevated to the archiepiscopal dignity, and was consecrated at Ingleheim by Drogo, Archbishop of Mayence, and other prelates. At the same time, because of the poverty of the diocese, and the dangers to which the mission would be inevitably exposed, the monastery of Thourout in Flanders, between Bruges and Ypres, was assigned to him as a place of refuge, and a source of revenue. Then he was directed to repair to Rome, where he received the pall from Gregory IV., and was regularly authorized to preach the Gospel to the nations of the North. These arrangements made, Anskar returned from Rome. Ebbo, who had been associated with him in the commission to evangelize the northern tribes, deputed his missionary duties to his nephew Gauzbert, who was raised to the episcopal dignity, and entrusted with the special care of the Swedish mission. Thither, accordingly, Gauzbert set out, received a hearty welcome from Biorn and his people, and laid the foundation of a church at Sigtuna. Meanwhile Anskar had proceeded to Hamburg, and, in pursuance of his former plan, bought or redeemed from slavery a number of Danish youths, whom he either instructed himself, or sent for that purpose to the monastery of Thourout. But the times were hardly ripe for successful operations. Three years had barely elapsed, when an enormous army of Northmen, led by Eric, king of Jutland, attacked Hamburg, and before relief could arrive, sacked and burnt it, together with the church and monastery which Anskar had erected with great trouble. He himself had barely time to save the sacred vessels, and, before the sun went down, every external memorial of his mission was reduced to ashes. "The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord," was the exclamation of the archbishop, as he surveyed the scene. Driven from Hamburg, he now wandered for a long time over his devastated diocese, followed by a few of his clergy and scholars, and at length sought refuge at Bremen. But the envious Bishop Leutbert refusing to receive him, he was fain to avail himself of the hospitality of a noble lady in the district of Holstein. And, as if this was not enough, he now received intelligence that, owing to similar risings of Northmen, the hopes of the Swedish missions were utterly crushed. The pagan party had conspired against Bishop Gauzbert, expelled him from the country, and murdered his nephew Nithard. But divine vengeance did not fail to pursue the conspirators. One of them had carried home some of the property of the missionaries. Before long he died, together with his mother and sister, and his father found his own property wasting from day to day. Alarmed at this sudden reverse of fortune, he began to consider what God he could have offended, to bring all these troubles on his house. Unable to solve the difficulty himself, he had recourse to a soothsayer. The lots were cast, and it was found that none of the native deities bore him any ill will. At length the soothsayer explained the cause. "It is the God of the Christians," said he, "who is the author of thy ruin. There is something dedicated to Him concealed in thy house, and therefore all these evils have come upon thee, nor canst thou hope to prosper till the sacred thing is restored." After vainly trying, for some time, to comprehend what this could mean, he suddenly recollected the day when his son had brought home one of the sacred books from the spoil of the missionaries' dwellings. Stricken with alarm, he immediately called together the inhabitants of the place, told them all that had occurred, and prayed their advice in the emergency. Every one declined to receive the terrible relic, and at last, fearful of further vengeance if he retained it any longer in his house, the man covered it carefully, and then fastened it to a stake on the public road, with a notice that any one who wished might take it down, and that for the crime he had unwittingly been guilty of against the Christians' God he was ready to offer any satisfaction that might be required. One of the native Christians took it down, and the man's terrors were appeased. Anskar meanwhile was still wandering over his desolated diocese. Even the monastery of Thourout, which Louis had bestowed upon him for the very purpose of being a covert from such storms as these, was closed against him, having been bestowed upon a layman by Charles the Bald. Under such accumulated misfortunes most men would have sunk, but Anskar waited patiently in the hope of some change, and comforted himself with the words addressed to him by Archbishop Ebbo before his death: "Be assured, my dear brother, that what we have striven to accomplish for the glory of Christ will yet, by God's help, bring forth fruit. For it is my firm and settled belief, nay, I know of a surety, that though the work we have undertaken among these nations is for a time subject to obstacles and difficulties on account of our sins, yet it will not be lost or perish altogether, but will, by God's grace, thrive and prosper, until the Name of the Lord is made known to the uttermost ends of the earth." Before long, events occurred which seemed to promise that the clouds would roll away, and a brighter era be initiated. Mindful of the converted chief, Anskar sent to Sigtuna an anchoret named Ardgar, with directions to see how he fared, and to strengthen him against falling back into heathenism. Thither Ardgar set out, and was rejoiced to find Herigar still remaining faithful to the faith he had embraced. The recollection of the Divine vengeance which had attended the previous outbreak, protected the missionary from injury, and the new king who had succeeded Biorn was persuaded by Herigar to permit Ardgar to preach the Gospel without fear of molestation. That chief was no half-hearted believer, and openly confronted the malice of the pagan party. On one occasion, as they were boasting of the power of their gods, and of the many blessings they had received by remaining faithful to their worship, he bade them put the matter to an open and decisive proof. "If there be so much doubt," said he, "concerning the superior might of our respective gods, let us see whose power is greatest: whether that of the many whom ye call gods, or that of my one omnipotent Lord, Jesus Christ. Lo! the season of rain is at hand. Do ye call upon the names of your gods, that the rain may be restrained from falling upon you, and I will call upon the name of my Lord, Jesus Christ, that no drop may fall on me; and the god that answereth our prayers, let him be God." The heathen party agreed, and repairing to a neighbouring field, took their seats in great numbers on one side, while Herigar, attended only by a little child, sat on the other. In a few moments the rain descended in torrents, drenched the heathens to the skin, and swept away their tents; while on Herigar and the little child no drop fell, and even the ground around them remained dry. "Ye see," he cried, "which is the true God; bid me not, then, desert the faith I have adopted, but rather lay aside your errors, and come to a knowledge of the truth." On another occasion the town of Birka was attacked by a piratical expedition of Danes and Swedes, under the command of a king of Sweden, who had been expelled from his realm. The place was closely invested, and there seemed to be no prospect of a successful defence. In their alarm, the townspeople offered numerous sacrifices to their gods, and when all other means failed, collected such treasures as they possessed, together with a hundred pounds of silver, and succeeded in coming to terms with the hostile chiefs. But their followers, not satisfied with the amount, prepared to storm the town. Again the gods were consulted, the altars raised, the victims offered, but with results equally unpromising. Herigar now interposed, rebuked the people for their obstinate adherence to the worship of gods that could not give aid in trouble, and when they bade him suggest some device, and promised to follow his council, he urged them to make a solemn vow of obedience to the Lord of the Christians, assuring them that, if they turned to Him, He at any rate, would not fail them in the hour of danger. The people took his advice, went forth to an open plain, and there solemnly vowed to keep a fast in honour of the God of the Christians, if He would rescue them from their enemies. Help came in an unexpected fashion. The Swedish king, while the army was clamouring for the signal to attack, suggested that the gods should be consulted by lot, whether it was their will that Birka should be destroyed. "There are many great and powerful deities there," said he; "there also formerly a church was built, and even now the worship of the Great Christ is observed by many, and He is more powerful than any other god. We ought, then, to inquire first whether it is the divine will that we attack the place." Accordingly the lots were cast, and it was discovered that the auspices were not favourable for the assault; and thus Birka was spared. The arrival, therefore, of Ardgar was well timed, and he was not only welcomed by Herigar, but the Christians were strengthened in their adherence to the faith by his coming. Nor was it in Sweden only that the prospects of the missionaries brightened. In A.D. 847, Leutbert, bishop of Bremen, died. Anskar's own see of Hamburg was now reduced, by the desolating inroads of the Northmen, to four baptismal churches. It was therefore proposed that the see of Bremen should be annexed to the archbishopric of Hamburg, and, after the plan was matured, Anskar no longer found himself hampered by want of means from devoting all his energies to the wider planting of the faith. At the same time he was enabled to appoint a priest over the church at Sleswik, and from Horik, king of Jutland, he no longer experienced opposition in preaching the word amongst the people. This encouraged many who had been baptized at Hamburg and Doerstadt, but who had subsequently conformed to idolatrous practices, to publicly profess their adhesion to the Christian faith, and they rejoiced in the opportunity of joining in Christian fellowship. The trade also of Doerstadt prospered by the change; Christian merchants flocked thither in greater numbers, and with greater confidence, and thus helped forward the work of Anskar and his colleagues. At this juncture the hermit Ardgar returned from Sweden. Anskar, more than ever unwilling that the mission there should be allowed to drop, tried to prevail on Gauzbert to revisit the scene of his former labours. But the latter, discouraged by his previous failure, declined, and Anskar finding no one else willing to undertake the work once more girded up his loins, and encouraged by Horik, who gave him letters to Olaf king of Sweden, set out for Birka. The time of his landing was unfortunate. The heathen party had been roused by the native priests, and a crusade was proclaimed against the strange doctrines. Suborning a man who pretended to have received a message from the native deities, the priest announced it to be the will of heaven that, if the people wished for new gods, they should admit into their company the late king Eric, and allow divine honours to be paid to him. This wrought up the feelings of the populace to such a pitch, that the retinue of the archbishop pronounced it absolute madness to persevere in his undertaking. But Anskar was not thus to be thwarted. He invited Olaf to a feast, set before him the presents sent by the king of Jutland, and announced the object of his visit. Olaf, on his part, was not indisposed to make the concessions he desired, but as former missionaries had been expelled from the country, he suggested that it would be well to submit the affair, once for all, to the solemn decision of the sacred lots, and consult in an open council the feelings of the people. Anskar agreed, and a day was fixed for deciding the question. First, the council of the chiefs was formally asked, and their opinion requested. They craved the casting of the sacred lots. The lots were accordingly cast, and the result was declared to be favourable to the admission of the archbishop and his retinue. Then the general assembly of the people of Birka was convened, and at the command of the king a herald proclaimed aloud the purport of the archbishop's visit. This was the signal for a great tumult, in the midst of which an aged chief arose, and thus addressed the assembly: "Hear me, O king and people. The God whom we are invited to worship is not unknown to us, nor the aid He can render to those that put their trust in Him. Many of us have already proved this by experience, and have felt His assistance in many perils, and especially in the sea. Why, then, reject what we know to be useful and necessary for us? Not long ago some of us went to Doerstadt, and believing that this new religion could profit us much, willingly professed ourselves its disciples. Now the voyage thither is beset with dangers, and pirates abound on every shore. Why, then, reject a religion thus brought to our very doors? Why not permit the servants of God, whose protecting aid we have already experienced, to abide amongst us? Listen to my counsel, then, O king and people, and reject not what is plainly for our advantage. We see our own deities failing us, and unable to aid us in time of danger. Surely it is a good thing to obtain the favour of a God who always can and will aid those that call upon Him." His words found favour with the people, and it was unanimously resolved that the archbishop should be permitted to take up his abode in the country, and should not be hindered in disseminating the Christian faith. This resolution was announced to Anskar in person by the king, who further conceded a grant of land for building a church, and welcomed Erimbert, a colleague of the archbishop, whom he presented as the new director of the Swedish mission. Meanwhile matters had not been so prosperous in Denmark. Eric "the Red," though not professedly a Christian, had, as we have seen, aided the archbishop materially in the introduction of Christianity. His apostasy provoked the inveterate hostility of the Northmen, and the sea-kings determined to avenge the insult offered to the national gods. Rallying from all quarters under the banner of Guthrun, nephew of Eric, they attacked the apostate king near Flensburg, in Jutland. The battle raged for three days, and at its close Eric and Guthrun, and a host of kings and jarls lay dead upon the field; and so tremendous had been the slaughter, that the entire Viking nobility seemed to have been utterly exterminated. The new king, Eric II., easily persuaded that the recent reverses were entirely due to the apostasy of his predecessor, ordered one of Anskar's churches to be closed, and forbade all further missionary operations. After a while, however, he was induced to change his policy, and Anskar, on his return from Sweden, was reinstated in the royal favour, and received a grant of land for the erection of a second church at Ripe, in Jutland, over which he placed Rembert, his favourite disciple, charging him to win the hearts of his barbarous flock by the sincerity and devotion of his life. Anskar now returned to Hamburg, and devoted himself to the administration of his diocese. One of the latest acts of his life was a noble effort to check the infamous practice of kidnapping and trading in slaves. A number of native Christians had been carried off by the northern pirates, and reduced to slavery. Effecting their escape, they sought refuge in the territory of Northalbingia. Instead of sheltering the fugitives, some of the chiefs retained a portion of them as their own slaves, and sold others to heathen, and even professedly Christian tribes around. News of this reached Anskar, and at the risk of his life he sternly rebuked the chiefs and succeeded in inducing them to set the captives free, and to ransom as many as possible from the bondage into which they had sold them. This noble act formed an appropriate conclusion to his life. He was now more than sixty-four years of age, and during more than half that period had laboured unremittingly in the mission field. His friend and biographer expatiates eloquently on his character, as exhibiting the perfect model of ascetic perfection. Even when elevated to the episcopal dignity, he never exempted himself from the rigid discipline of the cloister. He wore a haircloth shirt by night as well as by day. He measured out his food and drink by an exact rule. He chanted a fixed number of Psalms, alike when he arose in the morning and when he retired to rest at night. His charity knew no bounds. Not only did he erect a hospital at Bremen for the sick and needy, distribute a tenth of his income among the poor, and divide amongst them any presents he might receive, but every five years he tithed his income afresh, that he might be quite sure the poor had their proper share. Whenever he went on a tour of visitation through his diocese, he would never sit down to dinner, without first ordering some of the poor to be brought in, and he himself would sometimes wash their feet, and distribute amongst them bread and meat. Such a practical exhibition of Christian love could not fail to exercise a gradual influence even over the rough pirates of the North, which was increased by the many miracles he wrought. But he was not one to seek distinction of this kind. "One miracle," he once said to a friend, "I would if worthy, ask the Lord to grant me; and that is, that by His grace, He would make me a good man." He employed his last days in arranging the affairs of his diocese, and calmly expired on the 3rd of February, A.D. 865. Relics. At Corbie is preserved an arm of the Saint. [9] Pertz, "Mon. Germ." vol. ii. p. 757. [10] Palgrave's "Normandy and England," vol. i. p. 419. [11] Palgrave's "Normandy and England," vol. i. p. 158. February 4. S. VERONICA, _Matr. at Rome, 1st cent._ S. PHILEAS, _B. of Thmuis_, S. PHILOROMUS AND OTHERS, _MM. at Alexandria_, A.D. 304. S. ABRAHAM, _M. B. of Arbela, in Persia_, A.D. 348. S. GELASIUS, _C. at Piacenza, beginning of 5th cent._ S. ISIDORE _of Pelusium, P. Monk in Egypt, 5th cent._ S. AVENTINE, _H. of Troyes_, A.D. 538. S. AVENTINE, _B. of Chateaudun_, 6th cent. S. THEOPHILUS THE PENITENT, _C. at Adana in Cilicia_, _circ._ A.D. 538. S. LIEPHARD, _B. M. at Honcourt_, _circ._ A.D. 640. S. MODAN, _Ab. in Scotland, 7th cent._ S. ULGIS, _Ab. B. at Lobies, 8th cent._ B. HRABANUS MAURUS, _Abp. of Mainz_, A.D. 856. S. NICHOLAS OF THE STUDIUM, _Ab. C. at Constantinople_, A.D. 868. S. PROBATIUS, _P. at Nogent_. S. REMBERT, _B. of Hamburg and Bremen_, A.D. 888. S. GILBERT OF SEMPRINGHAM, _Ab. in England_, A.D. 1189. S. ANDREW CORSINI, _B. C. of Fiesoli_, A.D. 1373. S. JEANNE DE VALOIS, _Q. of France_, A.D. 1505. S. JOSEPH OF LEONISSA, _C. in Italy_, A.D. 1612. S. JOHN DE BRITTO, _S.J., M. at Madura_, A.D. 1693. S. VERONICA. (1ST CENT.) [Ferrarius in his Catalogue of the Saints. Some give March 25th as the anniversary of the Crucifixion, and as therefore the most appropriate day for the commemoration of the act, which has made Veronica famous. The festival of S. Veronica with special office, found its way into the Ambrosian Missal printed in 1555 and 1560, but it was expunged by the judicious S. Charles Borromeo.] On the 8th December, 1854, when the Eternal City was crowded with bishops, assembled to promulgate the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, Pius IX., at the expressed and urgent desire of the prelates, allowed the sacred relics of the passion of Christ to be exhibited in the chapel of the Blessed Sacrament at S. Peter's. In the midst, over the altar, between burning tapers, loomed the veil of S. Veronica, impressed with the sacred lineaments of the Saviour. None but bishops were permitted to enter the chapel, all others looked through a grating, and to them, from the depth of the chapel, the portrait was wholly undistinguishable. One inferior ecclesiastic alone, by especial favour, was suffered to enter, accompanying a prelate. This was M. Barbier de Montault, canon of the basilica of Anagni; and he took advantage of the opportunity to scrutinize closely the miraculous portrait. He has fortunately communicated to the world the result of his examination. His words are full of interest:--"The Holy Face is enclosed in a frame of silver, partially gilt, and square, of a severe character and little adorned. The simplicity of the bordering gives prominence to the interior of the picture, which is protected by a thin plate of crystal. Unfortunately, a sheet of metal covers the field, and only leaves apparent the figure by indicating its outline. By this outline one is led to conjecture flowing hair reaching to the shoulders, and a short beard, bifurcated, and small. The other features are so vaguely indicated, or so completely effaced, that it requires the liveliest imagination in the world to perceive traces of eyes or nose. In short, one does not see the material of the substance, because of the useless intervention of a metal plate, and the place of the impression exhibits only a blackish surface, not giving any evidence of human features."[12] The legend of the origin of this portrait is as follows: A holy woman, named Bernice, or, as it has been Latinized, Veronica, lived on the way to Calvary. As Christ was on the road bearing the cross, He fell near her door, and she, moved with compassion, went to Him, and gently wiped the sweat from His face with her veil or napkin. Then the impression of the sacred countenance remained on the veil. Marianus Scotus, the historian (d. 1086), tells the rest of the story thus: "The emperor Tiberius was afflicted with leprosy. Hearing of the miracles of Our Lord, he sent to Jerusalem for Him. But Christ was already crucified, and had risen and was ascended into heaven. The messengers of Tiberius, however, ascertained that a certain Veronica possessed a portrait of Christ, impressed by the Saviour Himself on a linen handkerchief, and preserved by her with reverence. Veronica was persuaded by them to come to Rome, and the sight of the sacred image restored the emperor to health. Pilate was then sentenced by him to death, for having unjustly crucified our Lord." It is hardly necessary to say that there is no foundation of truth for this addition to the original story. How far the first part of the story is true it is impossible to decide. It is by no means improbable that a pious woman may have wiped the face of Christ. Mabillon, the learned Benedictine, propounded the theory that each early portrait of Christ was called, in barbarous jargon, a mixture of Latin and Greek, _vera icon_, true image; and that later, a fable was invented to account for the introduction of these representations into Europe, and the name given to the image was transferred to the person who was supposed to have brought it to the West. This explanation has been generally adopted. "By the name of Veronica," says Baillet, "nothing more was signified than the true image--_vera icon_ of the Saviour painted on a handkerchief or piece of linen called the Holy Sudarium, because, ordinarily, only the head of the Saviour from before was represented on it, that is, the face and hair. Nothing further was meant at Rome, where was to be seen, dating from the 12th century, in the Church of S. Peter, one of these Veronicas, before which lamps were kept burning day and night."[13] But the legend itself seems to be an importation, not a fabrication, as Mabillon suggested. For Constantine Porphyrogeneta (d. 959), in whose reign the sacred Abgarus portrait of Christ was brought to Constantinople, relates the following story of _that_ portrait:--"As Christ was on His way to Calvary, bearing His cross, the blood and sweat streaming from His brow obscured His eyes. Then taking from one of His disciples a piece of linen, He wiped His face, and left thereon His sacred portrait. S. Thomas preserved the towel till after the Ascension, when he gave the miraculous picture to Thaddæus, who bore it to Edessa. There he lodged with a Jew named Tobias. He began to work miracles in the name of Christ. Abgarus, king of Edessa, hearing of his works, sent for him. As Thaddæus entered the chamber of the sick king, he elevated above his head the sacred picture, and at the same time, such a blaze of light shot from his face, that Abgarus could not endure the splendour, and, forgetful of his sickness, leaped out of bed. Then he took the linen, covered his head and limbs with it, and was forthwith made whole." How it was that this venerable picture passed into the hands of the Emperor of Constantinople we learn from the Arabic historian, El Matzin.[14] He says that in the year 331 of Hegira, that is A.D. 953--which is a mistake for 944--the Greeks besieged the city of Edessa, then in the hands of the Saracens, and demanded the surrender of the holy picture and the accompanying letters of Abgarus and the Saviour, in exchange for the captives they had made. The treasured relics were handed over to the Christians, and were brought to Byzantium, where they were placed in a befitting shrine in the church of the Eternal Wisdom. What became of the picture when Constantinople fell into the hands of the Mussulmans is uncertain. The Venetians claimed to have brought it to Rome, and to have presented it to the Church of S. Sylvester. The Genoese, on the other hand, lay claim to the possession of the sacred portrait, and say that it was brought by Leonard de Montalto, in 1384, to their city, and by him presented to the Armenian Church of S. Bartholomew, where it is still preserved and exhibited once a year. We shall briefly notice such other portraits of Christ as claim to be authentic, whether in colour or in writing. Of the former, that said to have been painted by S. Luke is the most interesting. The Greek monk Michael, in his life of his master, Theodore of the Studium, relates that S. Luke painted a beautiful likeness of our Saviour. This assertion was readily adopted by later writers. Among others, Simeon Metaphrastes (fl. 936) repeats it, and S. Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274) refers to the picture as existing in the Chapel of the Santa Scala, in the Lateran, at Rome. Another sacred painting of Christ by S. Luke is in the possession of the Benedictines of Vallombrosa. This portrait is certainly of very great antiquity, and is in tempora on a panel of cypress wood. The features are strongly emphasized, the face long, the eyes large and bright, with eyelids drooping, and arched brows. Another sacred picture is that given by S. Peter to the Senator Pudens, which is exhibited on Easter Day, in the monastery of S. Praxedes. The story goes that it was sketched by S. Peter for the daughters of Pudens, one evening at supper, on the napkin of Praxedes. It will be remembered that when Christ was laid in the tomb, His body was wrapped in fine linen, and a linen napkin was on his face. These relics are said to be preserved at Besançon and Turin. The Turin linen shows the bloodstained outline of the Saviour's body; that at Besançon is marked with the ointments. The features are impressed on the napkin, and are of the Byzantine type. A crucifix, by Nicodemus, is exhibited in the cathedral of Lucca. Another portrait is the Nazaræum, which is certainly of considerable antiquity, and is probably the earliest extant copy of the famous Edessa picture. It is in the Latin convent at Nazareth. This picture is engraved in Abraham Norow's travels in Palestine. (S. Petersburg, 1844). Let us now turn to the literary sketches of the portrait of our Lord which have descended to us. S. Jerome, (d. 420), says that in the face and eyes of Christ there was something heavenly, so that from their glory and majesty the hidden Godhead flashed forth. S. John of Damascus, (d. about 760), in his letter to the Emperor Theophilus, says, "Christ was tall and stately, had brows uniting over the nose, beautiful eyes, a large nose, curled hair, and a black beard. His hair was a gold-brown, like wheat, resembling that of his mother, and his head was bowed somewhat forward." The next, and more precise account is that of the apocryphal letter of Lentulus, (who is supposed to have lived at the time of Christ, and to have been about the person of Pilate, to the Roman senate,) which is said to have been extracted from the Roman annals by a certain Eutropius. This first appears in the writings of S. Anselm, (d. 1107). "He is a man of tall stature, comely, having a venerable countenance, which those beholding must love or fear. His hair is waving and curled, rolling to his shoulders, having a parting in the middle of the head, after the manner of the Nazarenes, a brow smooth and serene, a face without wrinkle or blemish of any kind, rendered beautiful by a moderate colour. There is no fault to be found with the nose and mouth; he has a full and red beard, the colour of his locks, not long, but forked, and eyes bright and changeable." Another version of this letter adds that the hair was the colour of the hazel-nut, the eyes greyish-blue, and full of light. "His hands and arms are beautiful. He is terrible in reprehension, but mild and full of love in instruction; cheerful, but with steadfast earnestness. No one ever saw Him laugh, but often has He been seen to weep. Precise and modest in his speech, he is in all perfect, and the fairest of the sons of men." But the most precise and complete account is that of Nicephorus Callistus, (fl. 1330). His description is as follows:--"He was beautiful in body, his height seven complete spans, his hair was yellowish, not bushy, and at the ends somewhat curled. His eyebrows were black, only a little arched, and without break; his eyes were hazel, of that description called bright-eyed, not dim, in no way misformed, not wandering. His nose was prominent, his beard reddish, not profuse, but the hair of his head was abundant, for never had razor or hand of man shorn it. His neck was somewhat bent, so that he did not walk perfectly upright; the colour of his face was a yellow-brown, like ripe wheat; his face was not round, nor pointed, but, like his mother's, a little drooping, and slightly blushing. His very countenance indicated a man of intelligence, with manners grave, calm, and removed from anger. In all things, he was like his most pure mother." And this is the account of S. Mary given by Nicephorus:--"Mary was in everything modest and earnest; she spake little, and then only about necessaries; she was very courteous, and rendered to all honour and respect. She was of middle stature, though some assert her to have been somewhat taller. She spake to all with an engaging frankness, without laughing, without embarrassment, and especially without rancour. She had a pale tint, light hair, piercing eyes, with yellowish olive-coloured pupils. Her brows were arched and black, her nose moderately long, her lips fresh, and full of amiability when speaking; her face not round or pointed, but longish; hands and fingers fairly long. Finally, she was without pride, simple, and without guile; she had no insipidity about her, but was unassuming. In her dress she was fond of the natural colour; in short, there was in all her ways divine grace."[15] S. PHILEAS, B. M., AND OTHERS. (A.D. 304.) [Roman Martyrology. Authorities:--Authentic Acts by Gregory, a contemporary. Mention by S. Jerome in his Treatise on Ecclesiastical Writers, c. 78; Ruffinus Hist. Eccl. lib. viii. c. 9; Eusebius, lib. viii. c. 9, 10.] Phileas was a wealthy nobleman of Thmuis, in Egypt, who was elected bishop of that city, but in the persecution of Dioclesian was carried to Alexandria, before the governor Culcian. In his dungeon he wrote a letter to his flock to encourage them, narrating the sufferings endured by the martyrs for the true faith. This letter has been preserved by Gregory, and in part, by Eusebius. Culcian, who had been prefect of Thebais, was then governor of all Egypt, under the tyrant Maximius, but he afterwards lost his head, in 313, by order of Licinius. The Acts of S. Phileas are scrupulously particular in detailing every question and answer in the examination of the saint. They are too long to be given in their entirety, but extracts from them deserve insertion. Culcian, the governor, said to him, "Now, then, art thou sober?" Phileas answered, "I am always sober." Culcian said, "Sacrifice to the gods." Phileas answered, "I will not." "Why not?" enquired Culcian. "Because it is forbidden by Scripture to offer sacrifice, save to one God." "Then offer a sacrifice to Him." "God loveth not such sacrifices as you make," answered Phileas. "What sort of sacrifices then does thy God approve of?" asked the judge. Phileas replied, "I offer him a pure heart and clean senses, and true words." Culcian said, "But Paul sacrificed." "No, he did not," answered Phileas. "Well, then Moses did." "Yes," said Phileas, "the command was to the Jews only to sacrifice to God in Jerusalem; now the Jews sin in celebrating their solemn rites elsewhere." "Enough of these empty words; sacrifice," said the magistrate. "I will not do so, and stain my soul." "Why," said the governor, "Paul denied God." "He did not," answered Phileas. "Wilt thou swear that he did not?" asked Culcian. "I will not swear," answered the bishop, "for oaths are forbidden us. It is a matter of conscience." Culcian said, "Is it not a matter of conscience for thee to take care of thy wife and sons?" Phileas said, "Yes, but I have a higher duty to God." Culcian exclaimed, "Hold thy tongue, and sacrifice." "I will not sacrifice," said the bishop. Culcian asked, "Is Christ God?" And Phileas replied, "He is." Culcian said, "How could God be crucified?" "For our salvation," answered Phileas; "He suffered for our sakes." The governor said, "I might have tortured thee in the city, but I spared thee, wishing to shew thee respect." "I thank thee," said the bishop, "Go on with thy work." "Dost thou desire to die without cause?" asked Culcian. "Not without cause; I wish to die for God and the truth." The governor said, "If thou hadst been a poor man I should soon have despatched thee, but seeing thou art rich enough to feed all the province, I have shewn patience, and endeavoured to move thee by persuasion." Some lawyers standing by said, "Phileas sacrificed in the monastery," for they had heard something of the Eucharistic mystery, but understood it not. Phileas said, "You are right, I did sacrifice, but I did not immolate victims." Culcian said, "Thy poor wife is looking at thee." Phileas replied, "Jesus Christ calls me to glory, and He can also, if He pleases, call my wife." The lawyers said to the judge, "Phileas asks delay." Culcian said, "I will grant it willingly, that he may think over the consequences of his persistency in this course." But Phileas cried out, "I have thought well over this, and it is my unchangeable resolution to die for Jesus Christ." Then the lawyers, the emperor's lieutenant, the other officers of justice, and his relations fell at his feet, embracing his knees, and conjuring him to have compassion on his disconsolate family, and not to abandon his children in their tender years. Philoromus, a Christian present, tribune of the soldiers, moved with indignation, cried out, "Why strive ye to make this brave man renounce his God, do ye not see that contemplating the glory of Heaven, he makes no account of earthly things?" Then with a shout, all cried that he must be condemned to die along with Phileas, and to this Culcian assented. As they were led to execution, the brother of Phileas, who was a lawyer, exclaimed, "Phileas appeals." Culcian called Phileas back, and asked if it were so. The bishop denied that he had so done. Then the procession resumed its way to the place of execution. And when they had reached the spot, Phileas extended his arms to the east, and cried, "O my best beloved sons, whosoever worship God, watch over your hearts, for your adversary, the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour. We have not yet suffered, dearest ones, but we are about to suffer. Now are we becoming disciples of our Lord Jesus Christ. Attend to the precepts of Christ. We invoke the immaculate, incomprehensible One, who sitteth above the Cherubim, the maker of all things, who is the beginning and the ending, to whom be glory through ages of ages. Amen." And when he had thus spoken, the executioner struck off his head, and that of his companion, Philoromus. S. GELASIUS, BOY, C. (BEGINNING OF 5TH CENTURY.) [Commemorated as a semi-double in the Church of Piacenza. Authority:--The Offices of the Breviary of Piacenza for this day.] S. Gelasius was a little boy, child of pious and wealthy parents in Placentia, the modern Piacenza, in Northern Italy. His brother, older than himself, was S. Olympius, who is commemorated on October 12th. The children slept in the same room. One evening Gelasius heard his brother praying, and angels singing, "Suffer little children to come unto Me, for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven." The child died early, in the white innocence of his baptismal robe, and was laid by S. Maurus, bishop of Placentia, in the Church of S. Savin, outside the walls. It was afterwards translated to the new Church of S. Savin within the city, in 1481, by the Bishop Fabricius, together with the bodies of SS. Peregrine and Victor. S. ISIDORE OF PELUSIUM, MONK, P. (ABOUT A.D. 449.) [Roman Martyrology. Same day in the Greek Church.] S. Isidore of Pelusium, in Egypt, was a monk from his youth. Suidas asserts that he was promoted to the dignity of the priesthood. In the time when the turbulent Theophilus was patriarch of Alexandria, Isidore espoused the cause of S. Chrysostom, praised his writings and doctrine, and consequently became an object of hostility to the proud patriarch. On the death of Theophilus, S. Cyril, his nephew, succeeded him, and, as has already been related in the life of that saint, inherited his uncle's prejudices against the great Chrysostom, and after his death opposed the insertion of his name in the diptychs, or list of persons who were commemorated at the Holy Eucharist. But by the influence of S. Isidore, who earnestly strove to bring councils of peace before Cyril, the patriarch of Alexandria was induced to withdraw his objections. The letters of S. Isidore are extant. S. AVENTINE OF TROYES, H. (ABOUT A.D. 538.) [Roman Martyrology, and that of Usuardus, on Feb. 4th; but in the diocese of Troyes, on Feb. 6th, as a semi-double. Authorities:--A very ancient life, written in crude style; mention by S. Gregory of Tours, and in two extant lives of S. Fidolus.] S. Aventine was much beloved and respected for his singular virtues by S. Camelian, Bishop of Troyes, who made him steward of the possessions of the church. He afterwards became the abbot of a monastery at Troyes, and spent all the money he could collect in redeeming captives. During the reign of Thierry, son of Clovis, he purchased of a band of soldiers, who were leading captives past his door, the boy Fidolus, whom for his gentleness and piety he learned greatly to love; and treating him as a son rather than as a servant, he made of him a monk, and finally, when he himself was old, and Fidolus had grown to man's estate, with the consent of the monks, he delivered over into his hands the government of the monastery, and he himself retired into a lone hermitage in the forest, and spent many years in a cave. When he opened his window, and thrust forth his hand full of crumbs, multitudes of little birds came fluttering up, and perched on his fingers, and ate the crumbs. He was ministered to by a monk, who, in bringing water from the river, sometimes caught in the pitcher very little fish. The gentle Aventine invariably returned the small fish to the river, for he would not hurt or destroy any animal, unless it were necessary. One day he trod on a snake and crushed it, so that it lay numb, and as though lifeless. Then he bent over it, and cherished it, till life returned, and it glided away. Once a stag, pursued by hunters, took refuge in his cave, and he closed the door on it, and hid it, till the hunters had passed further. One stormy night, a bear came roaring to the door of the cell, and strove to beat it in. The hermit, in terror, sang the song, "Thou wilt not leave my soul in hell, neither wilt Thou suffer Thy holy one to see corruption!" and armed himself with prayer. Now when the sky grew white with dawn, Aventine opened his cell, and there lay the bear crouched on the threshold, and it stretched out its paw to him, and licked his feet. Then the hermit perceived that there was a splinter of wood in the paw, and he said, "Poor beast, thou wast in pain, and didst seek relief, and I thought that thou wast raging for my life." And he took the paw on his lap, drew forth the piece of wood, bathed and bandaged the wound, gave the bear his blessing, and let it depart. Relics in the parish churches of Creney and S. Aventin and in the cathedral at Troyes. In Art he is represented drawing the splinter from the bear's paw. S. AVENTINE OF CHATEAUDUN, B. C. (6TH CENT.) [Gallican Martyrologies. Authorities:--Mention in the life of his brother, S. Solemnis, and an ancient metrical French life.] In the reign of Clovis there lived a Count John, at Chateaudun, who was married to Agnes, daughter of the Count of Blois. By her he had three sons, Solemnis, Aventine, and John, and a daughter Agnes, who died young. Flavius, uncle of Agnes of Blois, was bishop of Chartres, and called thither Solemnis and Aventine for the purpose of attending to their education. As both showed signs of sanctity, he ordained both, whilst young; Solemnis was raised to the priesthood, and Aventine was appointed archdeacon. On the death of Flavius, the clergy and people, with the king's consent, proceeded to elect Solemnis to fill the vacant see; but he, knowing their intention, fled, and hid himself in a cave outside the city. When he could not be found, the electors with one consent shouted, "Aventine is worthy!" that being the customary formulary of election. Thereupon, Aventine, much against his will, was drawn into the cathedral, and ordained priest, and consecrated bishop. Now Solemnis, from his place of retreat, heard the shout in the city, and knew that a bishop had been chosen. Yet he waited till he saw peasants returning along the road that ran by his retreat, and he overheard them speaking of the consecration of his brother Aventine. So he, deeming all further concealment unnecessary, came forth, and entered the city. Then, at once, a crowd surrounded him, and the roar of a thousand voices proclaimed, "Solemnis is worthy! Solemnis shall be bishop!" And he was drawn to the cathedral, vested in white, a mitre placed on his head, the pastoral staff put into his hands, and the bishops of the province there present, proclaimed him. And when this was done, men asked, "What shall be done with Aventine?" and he was sent to be bishop of Chateaudun, his native town. Then he went his way. And as he drew near to the city, there met him a leper, who ran towards him, and stopped, and cried out, "I am John, thy brother." He would have rejoiced to meet his brother, had he not seen that he was afflicted with leprosy; for which reason John had retired from the city, and fled from the society of men. Then the bishop ran to him, and fell on his neck, and his tears flowed over him, and he kissed him; and the flesh of John came again as the flesh of a little child, and he was made perfectly whole. Of the works of the holy Aventine in his diocese little is known, save that he laboured in season and out of season in the ministry of God, and that he lived in a little cell outside the city gates, in the face of a rock. After the death of Solemnis, about 509, Aventine governed the whole Chartrain Church, and subscribed the council of Orleans, 511, as bishop of Chartres. Relics translated in 1853 to the parish church of S. Madeleine in Chateaudun. S. THEOPHILUS THE PENITENT. (ABOUT A.D. 528.) [Commemorated by the Greeks on this day. Not by the Westerns, though the story is quoted by a great number of Latin writers. Authority:--The Greek account by Eutychianus, who pretends to have been a disciple of Theophilus, and declares that he relates what he had seen with his own eyes, and heard from the mouth of Theophilus himself. Metaphrastes embodied the narrative of Eutychianus in his great collection of the Lives of the Saints. For a full account of this strange story, see my "Myths of the Middle Ages."] The following story must be received with caution. It has not received the sanction of the Western Church, and is probably a mere religious romance. It was very popular in the middle ages, and was frequently represented in sculpture and stained glass. A few years before the Persian invasion, in 538, there lived, in the town of Adana in Cilicia, a priest named Theophilus, treasurer and archdeacon. He lived in strict observance of all his religious duties, was famous for his liberality to the poor, his sympathy with the afflicted, his eloquence in the pulpit, his private devotion, and severe asceticism. On the decease of the bishop, by popular acclamation he was summoned to the episcopal oversight of the diocese, but his deep humility urged him to refuse the office, even when it was pressed upon him by the metropolitan. A stranger was raised to the vacant seat, and the treasurer resumed the course of life he had pursued for so many years with credit to himself and advantage to the diocese, content in his own mind with having refused the office, which might have aroused his pride, and which certainly would have diminished his opportunities of self-sacrifice. Virtue invariably arouses the spirit of detraction, and Theophilus, by his refusal of the bishopric, was thrust into public notice, and attracted public attention. The consequence was, that the evil-minded originated slanders, which circulated widely, produced a revulsion of feeling towards Theophilus, and, what was generally reported, was accepted as substantially true. These stories reached the ears of the new bishop, he sent for the archdeacon, and, without properly investigating the charges, concluded he was guilty, and deprived him of his offices. One would have supposed that the humility which had required the holy man to refuse a mitre, would have rendered him callous to the voice of slander, and have sustained him under deprivation. But the trial was too great for his virtue. He brooded over the accusations raised against him, and the wrongs inflicted upon him, till the whole object of his desire became the clearing of his character. He sought every available means of unmasking the calumnies of his malingers, and exposing the falsity of the charges raised against him. But he found himself unable to effect his object; one man is powerless against a multitude, and slander is a hydra which, when maimed in one head, produces others in the place of that struck off. Baffled, despairing, and without a friend to sustain his cause, the poor clerk sought redress in a manner which, a month before, would have filled him with horror. He visited a necromancer, who led him at midnight to a place where four cross-roads met, and there conjured up Satan, who promised to reinstate Theophilus in all his offices, and, what he valued more, to completely clear his character. The priest, to obtain these boons, signed away his soul with a pen dipped in his own blood, and abjured for ever Jesus Christ and His spotless Mother. On the morrow, the bishop, discovering his error, how we know not, sent for Theophilus, and acknowledged publicly that he had been misled by false reports, the utter valuelessness of which he was ready frankly to acknowledge; and he asked pardon of the priest, for having unjustly deprived him of his office. The populace enthusiastically reversed their late opinion of the treasurer, and greeted him as a Saint and confessor. For some days all went well, and in the excitement of a return to his former occupations, the compact he had made was forgotten. But after a while, as reason and quietness resumed their sway, the conscience of Theophilus gave him no rest. His face lost its colour, his brow was seamed with wrinkles, an unutterable horror gleamed out of his deep-set eyes. Hour by hour he prayed, but found no relief. At length he resolved on a solemn fast of forty days. This he accomplished, praying nightly in the Church of the Blessed Virgin, till the grey of morning stole in at the little window of the dome, and obscured the lamps. On the fortieth night, the Blessed Virgin appeared to him, and rebuked him for his sin. He implored her pardon and all-prevailing intercession, and this she promised him. The following night she re-appeared, and assured him that Christ had forgiven him at her prayer. With a cry of joy he awoke; and on his breast lay the deed which had made over his soul to Satan, obtained from the evil one by the mercy of the holy Mother of God. The next day was Sunday. He rose, spent some time in acts of thanksgiving, and then went to church, where the divine liturgy was being celebrated. After the reading of the Gospel, he flung himself at the bishop's feet, and requested permission to make his confession in public. Then he related the circumstances of his fall, and showed the contract signed with his blood to the assembled multitude. Having finished his confession, he prostrated himself before the bishop, and asked for absolution. The deed was torn and burned before the people. He was reconciled, and received the blessed Sacrament; after which he returned to his house in a fever, and died at the expiration of three days. The story is probably a mere religious romance. S. MODAN, AB. (7TH CENT.) [Aberdeen Breviary:--from which almost all that is known of his life is gathered.] S. Modan was first monk, and then abbot of Mailros, in Scotland, and preached the faith in Stirling and at Falkirk. When old he retired among the mountains of Dumbarton, and there died. His body was kept till the change of religion, with honour, in the church of Rosneath. B. HRABANUS MAURUS, B. C. (A.D. 856.) [From his life by Rodolph the priest, monk of Fulda, d. 865; and various writers of a later period.] Rabanus, or Hrabanus Maurus, was one of the most illustrious writers of the 9th century. He was born at Mainz, in the year 788. When very young he was sent to the monastery of Fulda, where he was brought up. From thence he was sent to Tours, where he studied for some time under the famous Alcuin. He returned afterwards to Germany, into his monastery, where he was entrusted with the government of the novices, was afterwards ordained priest in the year 814, and at last chosen abbot of Fulda, in 822. After he had managed this charge twenty years, he voluntarily quitted it, to satisfy the monks, who complained that his studies so engrossed his time that the affairs of the monastery were neglected. He retired to Mount S. Peter, and was shortly after chosen archbishop of Mainz or Mayence, in the year 847. He held a council in the same year for the reformation of discipline; and died in 856. As a mystical interpreter to Holy Scripture, his commentaries will ever be read. He was a voluminous writer on various subjects, sacred and profane, and was certainly one of the most learned men of his day. S. NICOLAS OF THE STUDIUM, C. (A. D. 868.) [Greek Menæa for this day. Authorities:--Life by a contemporary monk in his monastery.] This glorious confessor was born in Crete, and was the son of pious parents, who educated him from earliest infancy in the fear of God. At the age of ten he was sent to Constantinople, to see his kinsman Theophanes. He found him a monk of the order of the Sleepless Ones,[16] in the monastery called the Studium. He entered the same order, and fulfilled his monastic duties with regularity and devotion. Having set a brilliant example, he was deemed worthy to be invested with the priesthood. Then broke out the furious persecution of the Iconoclasts, about which a few words must be said in this place.[17] When God was made Man, He was put at once into the most intimate relation with men; and just as it is lawful for any son to have a portrait of his father or mother, so did it become lawful and reasonable that he should have a picture of that God-Man, who is dearer to him than father or mother. The picture served as a constant reminder, an evidence for the Incarnation. It is a sermon declaring God to be made Man. But the Arians, who denied the divinity of our Lord, were most hostile to sacred representations of Christ, and with reason, for these pictures were a testimony against them. At first the Arian attack on the foundation doctrine of the Incarnation was open. But, when the theological statement of that mystery was made so plain that there was no opposing it by counter statement, Arianism adopted other tactics, and appeared as Iconoclasm, or war against sacred pictures. He who disbelieved, or only coldly acquiesced in the Incarnation of God, saw that this chief corner-stone of Christianity could only be uprooted by chilling the ardour of Christian affection. And no better method of chilling that affection could be devised, than the obliteration of representations of Christ, His acts, His passion, and of His mother, and His Saints; then there was some prospect of religious acceptance of this dogma sinking into cold intellectual apprehension, and thence it could be dislodged without difficulty. After the reconciliation of large congregations of Gnostics and Arians with the Catholic Church, they maintained that icy worship which had preceded their separation, they adored God as a Spirit, but actually, though they had ceased to do so formally, overlooked His manhood. These reconciled bodies afforded a fund of passive prejudice and aversion of small account so long as Catholic princes were on the throne, but which, in the fortune of a soldier, might produce serious results to the Church. Of such adventurers, the most fortunate was the Emperor Leo III., who, from the mountains of Isauria, ascended to the throne of the East. He was ignorant of sacred and profane letters; but his education, his reason, perhaps his intercourse with Jews and Arabs, had inspired the martial peasant with a hatred of images; and he held it to be the duty of a prince to impose on his subjects the dictates of his own conscience. In the reformation of religion, his first steps were moderate and cautious; he assembled a great council of senators and bishops, and enacted, with their consent, that all the images should be removed from the sanctuary and altar to a proper height in the churches, where they might be visible to the eyes, and inaccessible to the devotion of the people. But it was impossible on either side to check the rapid though adverse impulses of veneration and abhorrence: in their lofty position, the sacred images still edified their votaries, and exasperated their enemies. He was himself provoked by resistance and invective; and his own party accused him of an imperfect discharge of his duty, and urged for his imitation the example of the Jewish king, who had broken without scruple the brazen serpent of the temple. By a second edict, he proscribed the existence, as well as the use of sacred pictures; images of Christ, the Blessed Virgin, and the Saints, were demolished, or a smooth surface of plaster was spread over the walls of the edifice. The sect of the Iconoclasts was supported by the zeal and despotism of six emperors, and this topic involved the East and West in an angry conflict of one hundred and twenty years. It was the design of Leo the Isaurian to pronounce the condemnation of images as an article of faith, and by the authority of a General Council; but the convocation of such an assembly was reserved for his son Constantine Copronymus. This council was attended by three hundred and thirty-eight bishops of Europe and Anatolia, but not by those of the Western Church, African Church, or that of Palestine. It was, in fact, an assembly of those prelates who were weak enough to assist, fearing condemnation and exile if they did not submit, ambitious enough to follow the caprice of the reigning emperor, in hopes of emolument, and also of those who heartily concurred with his semi-Arianism. After a serious deliberation of six months, the prelates subscribed such a decree as the emperor desired, condemning all visible symbols of Christ,[18] except the Eucharist, as blasphemous and heretical; and denouncing veneration for images as the idolatry of Paganism. "As if," says a Catholic writer of the time, "there were not this great difference between the Christian image and the heathen idol, that the latter is the thing worshipped, whereas the former is the representation of the person adored." The first hostilities of Leo had been directed against a lofty Christ on the vestibule, and above the gate, of the palace, placed there to exhibit to all men that the emperors had bowed before the King of kings. A ladder had been placed for the assault, but it was shaken by a crowd of women and zealots, and for their opposing the execution of the mandate, severe and savage reprisals were taken. The execution of the imperial mandates were resisted by frequent tumults in Constantinople and the provinces, which were quelled by the military, and much blood flowed. In the cruel persecution that ensued, the monks, ever the champions of the Incarnate God, suffered most severely. Nicolas of the Studium, together with S. Theodore, the abbot, or archimandite, of the monastery were called to suffer. Nicolas was scourged with leather thongs on the back and limbs, and his arms extended, so that they became for a time paralysed. His back, which was lashed and bleeding, was tenderly bathed with warm water and healing lotions by S. Theodore, his superior, till it was healed. Both were driven into exile, and kept for three years in nakedness, and without sufficient food and drink, in a wretched prison. They were beaten again at Smyrna, and further imprisoned for twenty-two months, with their feet in the stocks. On the death of Leo, the confessors were released, and visited S. Nicephorus at Chalcedon. This took place during the absence of Constantine Copronymus, who had undertaken an expedition against the Saracens. During this absence, his kinsman, Artavasdus, assumed the purple, and everywhere the sacred images were triumphantly restored. Constantine flew for refuge to his paternal mountains; but he descended at the head of the bold Isaurians, and his final victory placed the unfortunate Catholics once more at the mercy of a brutal tyrant. This monster of crime derived his name Copronymus from having defiled his baptismal font. This incident of his infancy was accepted as an augury of his maturity, and he did not belie it. His reign was one long butchery of whatever was most noble, or holy, or innocent, in his empire. In person the emperor assisted at the execution of his victims, surveyed their agonies, listened to their groans, and indulged, without satiating, his appetite for blood: a plate of noses was accepted as a grateful offering, and his domestics were often scourged or mutilated by his royal hand. His long reign was distracted with clamour, sedition, conspiracy, mutual hatred, and sanguinary revenge. The hatred borne by this ruffian against monks and images was implacable. Images were torn down and defaced with wanton malice throughout the empire by an officer called the Dragon, sent round for that purpose; all religious communities were dissolved, their buildings were converted into magazines or barracks; the lands, moveables, and cattle, were confiscated, and the monks were mutilated in eyes and ears and limbs, with refined cruelty. Under this emperor, Theophilus (829), Nicolas and Theodore again suffered persecution. Theodore, and the abbot Theophanes, kinsman of Nicolas, were mutilated by certain verses being cut upon their brows. During the persecution, S. Nicolas remained concealed; on the accession of the indifferent emperor, Michael III., (842), he emerged from his hiding place, and was elected archimandite of the Studium, the abbot Theodore being dead. After exercising the government for three years, he resigned it to Sophronius, and retired to Firmopolis, that he might pass the remainder of his days in peace; but it was not so to be; after four years he was recalled to the abbacy of the Studium, on the death of Sophronius, and was at once involved in conflict. For the patriarch Ignatius, having rebuked the Cæsar Bardas for incest, and then excommunicated him, the emperor Michael III., his nephew, was persuaded to exile Ignatius, and to intrude Photius into the Patriarchal see. The abbot Nicolas refused to communicate with the intruder, and was consequently driven from his monastery, and a monk, Achillas, was appointed in his room. Nicolas was pursued from one retreat to another by the hostility of the intruded patriarch, and after many wanderings, rested in the Crimea. Upon the death of Bardas and Michael, Bardas having been murdered by his nephew Michael, and Michael by his successor, Basil I., (867), the patriarch Ignatius was recalled, and the patriarch persuaded Nicolas to return to his government of the Studium, where he died the following year. S. REMBERT, B. C. (A.D. 888.) [Roman Martyrology; this being the day of his consecration to the Archbishopric of Bremen and Hamburg. But in some German Martyrologies, on June 11th, the day of his death. Authority:--his life written by a coeval author or authors]. This saint was born at Thourout, in Flanders, where was a monastic cell, that had been given by King Louis the Pious to S. Anskar. As Anskar was at Thourout one day, he noticed some boys going to church, and amongst them was one who, by his gravity, pleased him; and when the boy entered the church, he crossed himself, and behaved with so great reverence, that the archbishop went to him, and asked his name. He told him that he was called Rembert. Then S. Anskar took him and placed him in the little monastery, and bade that he should be well instructed. In after years, the apostle of Sweden called Rembert to assist him in his mission; and he loved his young friend greatly, and prayed to God for three days incessantly that He would grant to Rembert to accomplish the work that he, Anskar, had begun, and to make them companions together in the Heavenly Zion. After Anskar died, in 865, S. Rembert was unanimously chosen Archbishop of Hamburg and Bremen, and he superintended all the churches of Sweden, Denmark, and Lower Germany. He also began a mission to the Wends and Sclavonic race of Mecklenburg and Brandenburg, which was attended with considerable success. He sold the sacred ornaments of the Church to redeem captives from the Northmen. On one occasion he saw a party of these marauders pass, dragging after them a poor girl, who raised her shackled hands towards the bishop, and began to chant one of David's psalms. Then S. Rembert leaped off his horse, and ran to the chief, and offered him the horse if he would release the captive Christian maiden. And this he did, well pleased to obtain so valuable a horse. S. Rembert died on June 11th, in the year 888. S. GILBERT OF SEMPRINGHAM, AB. (A.D. 1189.) [Roman, Anglican, Belgian, Benedictine, and Cistercian Martyrologies. Authority:--his life, by a contemporary, published by Bollandus.] This S. Gilbert, of whom Henricus Chrysostomus, a Cistercian chronicler, speaks as "a disciple of Bernard the mellifluous, a man of apostolical zeal, of most severe and rigid life, in purity conspicuous, illustrious for his gift of prophecy, and the mirific performer of stupendous miracles," was born about the year A.D. 1083, near the close of the reign of William the Conqueror. From an apparently contemporary pedigree he seems to have been related on the mother's side to that monarch, who may have rewarded the services of his father, "a bold and skilful warrior," with the hand of one of his relations, in addition to the manor of Sempringham, where Gilbert first saw the light. His mother is said to have received, shortly before his birth, a miraculous presage of the future greatness of her child, a greatness, however, of which few external tokens would seem to have manifested themselves during his childhood; since one of his biographers relates that as a child he was so dull and spiritless as to provoke the contempt and ill-usage of even the servants of his father's household. Driven by this maltreatment from his home and country, or more probably sent from home by the care of his parents, who discerned in him a greater aptitude for the cloister than for the camp, he passed some years in Gaul in the peaceful study of letters and philosophy. His childish education completed, he returned to England, and took up his abode with one of his father's dependents. Here he fell in love with the daughter of his host, and gave the first proof of his vocation to the counsels of perfection; for finding his passion increase daily in strength, and fearing lest he should be overcome by it, he fortified his soul by prayer and fasting; and then seeking the company of his beloved, he so wrought upon her by his exhortations and entreaties, that he prevailed upon her to join him in a vow of perpetual chastity, and she was one of the first who afterwards became nuns under his rule. He now took to keeping a school, and gathered together a number of children of both sexes, to be instructed in the rudiments of religion, and especially taught them to live an orderly and pious life in the world, without as yet leading them forward to the higher life of the cloister; and these afterwards became the nucleus (primitiæ plantæ) of his order. During this time he seems to have lived in the family of the then Bishop of Lincoln, and to have been admitted by him to the minor orders of the ministry; for the next thing related of him is that being presented by his father to the united benefices of Sempringham and Torrington he most willingly accepted the charge, and devoted the whole revenue of his livings to charitable purposes. Such was the fervour of his devotion at this time, that it is related that having one day invited one of his companions to join him in his prayers, the youth was so fatigued by the length of the office, and the punctilious care with which Gilbert genuflected whenever the holy names of God and of Christ occurred, that he swore he would never pray with him again. After a while he was ordained priest by Alexander, Bishop of Lincoln, who held him in such high esteem that he made him his confessor, and would have appointed him Archdeacon; but this Gilbert resolutely declined saying, "that he knew not of a shorter road to perdition." Persevering in his resolve to give his all to the poor, he now for the first time formally constituted his religious order, by assembling a number of poor girls, amongst them the object of his youthful attachment, whom he made cloistered nuns at Sempringham, and maintained them at his own cost. He next founded a monastery for male religious, to whom he entrusted all the more responsible affairs of the order, providing both nuns and monks with a habit "expressive of humility." To this time of his life we must probably refer his miraculous escape from death by fire. The story is that a great fire having broken out either in his own house, or in the buildings immediately contiguous, Gilbert remained sitting abstractedly in his window seat, praying and singing psalms; the fire devoured all before it until it reached the spot in which he sat; there its progress was arrested, and the flames died away on every side, leaving the saint and his seat unharmed. His order continued to expand, many religious flocked to him, and gifts of manors and farms pouring in from all quarters, many monasteries arose under his rule. The charge of his Order now became so onerous that he is said to have attended the general chapter of the order at Citeaux, in the year 1140, for the purpose of formally resigning his authority. To this, however, his brother abbots refused their consent, and Gilbert returned to his labours, which he was to relinquish only with his life. A peculiar interest attaches to this chapter, from the circumstance related by the same writer,[19] who tells us of Gilbert's presence there, that the Pope Eugenius[20] was present and took part in the proceedings, "not, however, presiding as with apostolical authority, but in brotherly love taking his seat among the assembled abbots, as one of themselves." Returned to Sempringham, Gilbert resumed his life of prayer and mortification, observing the fasts of the Church with such rigidity that from Septuagesima to Easter, and throughout Advent, he not only abstained from flesh-meat, but even a morsel of fish never passed his lips. He practised also great austerity with regard to sleep, hardly allowing himself to lie down for months together. His unwearied devotion and severe asceticism so forwarded his growth in grace that his influence over the religious under his authority became almost unbounded; with such prudence and persuasiveness was he endued, that he allayed without difficulty a serious disturbance which arose in the order from a spirit of insubordination that had crept in among the lay brethren. Overcome by his skilful reasonings and loving exhortations, the greater number returned to their obedience, "whereas," the chronicler adds, "those who held out and refused to do so, all perished miserably." His holiness and his acceptance with God were also attested by many miracles and wonders. Being at one time afflicted with a very severe fever, a friend came to condole with him; the saint enquired whether he had ever experienced the sensations of a fever; finding that he had not, Gilbert asked him whether he would be willing to take the fever from which he himself was suffering, if he might be thereby cured. The friend assented, and returning home, was the next morning seized with the fever, whereas the saint arose entirely free from it. Another time, a man suffering from gout was cured by simply wearing Gilbert's list slippers; and another man, sick of a fever, was healed by drinking out of his cup. Overcome at length by the infirmities of advancing age, he resigned the charge of Sempringham to one of his disciples, Roger by name; but he seems still to have retained his authority, as it is mentioned that some time after this, he gave shelter to S. Thomas à Becket in one of his houses when that prelate, worsted in his contest with Henry II., was wandering about the kingdom in search of means to escape to the continent. He also supplied the archbishop with money during his exile, thereby drawing upon himself the displeasure of Henry, who, however,--such was Gilbert's popularity in the kingdom,--found it expedient to refrain from any proceedings against him. At last, in the year 1189, and the 106th of Gilbert's age, his death drew near, and the man of God, full of years, and not less full of grace, prepared to render up his account with joy. He announced to his disciples his approaching departure, and on the evening of Christmas Day he was fortified with the last sacraments of the Church. The remaining time which God vouchsafed him on earth he devoted to the edification of others, and during this time many prelates, and men of various degrees, resorted to him in order to be consoled by his blessing, and instructed by his discourse. The night before the day on which he died "an immense globe of fire, and an appearance as of many candles" were seen to hover in the air over the church of Sempringham, in which his tomb was prepared. Three times the appearance descended from above, rising again twice towards heaven; the third time it penetrated the roof of the church, and descended to the floor. Then the brethren and the nuns knew that the time was at hand when their abbot must indeed leave them. And so, on the next day, the 3rd of February, he departed this life, amid the sighs and lamentations of all, leaving behind him of religious men about 700, and of sisters in religion 1500; all serving God night and day without ceasing. He was interred within the church at Sempringham, his tomb being placed between the two choirs, the monks on the one side, and the nuns at the other, so that the religious might offer their prayers at his sepulchre, and continually bearing in mind his holy life and happy death, might both be incited to diligence in prayer and good works, and also might profit by his intercessions for them. Not long after his death, a certain canon of that order saw in a vision a brother not long since deceased, who, among other things, told him of S. Gilbert: "he is not amongst us, a different place possesses him; for from that place to which he departed (from the world) he has been translated to the choir of the virgins." [Illustration: S. GILBERT, Prior of Sempringham. From a Drawing by A. Welby Pugin. Feb. 4.] The veneration in which he was held may be seen in the eulogium of William of Newbury:-- "Nor must we in silence pass over the venerable Gilbert, a man altogether admirable, and of singular skill in the guardianship of women; from whom also the order of Sempringham took its beginning, and its rapid advancement. He, as it is said, from his very youth, by no means contented with being in the way of salvation himself, but kindled with a zeal for gaining souls for Christ, began eagerly to rival the weaker sex in the imitating of God, deriving his pious boldness from the consciousness of his own chastity, and his confidence in heavenly grace. "Yet, fearing lest he should fail in his enterprise, he first sought the advice of the holy Bernard, and being instructed and encouraged by him, he commenced his work, and proceeding with great prudence and caution, he was mightily carried forward, both in the abundant multitude of persons gathered together for the service of Almighty God, and in the acquisition of temporal things; 'seeking first,' as it is written, 'the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, all necessary things were added to him.' "At last he organized a not ignoble monastery of two servants and eight handmaids of God, which also he replenished with numerous societies, and, according to the wisdom given him, furnished it with regular rules. And truly the gift of instructing the servants of God, divinely imparted to him, abounded especially in the care of women; indeed, in my judgment, he bears the palm in this respect amongst all whom we know to have devoted themselves to the instruction of female religious; moreover, having some years before been loaded with spiritual gains, the worn-out bridesman of the heavenly Bridegroom now departed to the Lord. Further, the multitude of his sons and daughters in religion still remains, and his seed is mighty upon earth, and his generation shall be blessed for ever." The Order was peculiarly constituted, the men being Augustinian Canons, and the women following the rule of S. Benedict. S. ANDREW CORSINI, B. C. (A.D. 1373.) [S. Andrew died Jan. 6th; he was formally canonized by Urban VIII., in 1629, and his festival was transferred to Feb. 4th. Authorities:--Two lives, one by a disciple, the other by Friar Peter Andrew Castagna, written a hundred years after his death.] Nicolas, a member of the illustrious Florentine house of Corsini, lived with his pious wife, Peregrina, for some time without children, which was to them a great grief, and they besought God to give them that blessing which He had hitherto withheld. Their prayer was heard, and on November 30th, 1302, a son was born to them, who received at the font the name of Andrew, because he was born on the festival of that apostle. His parents, who regarded him as the child of prayer, had already, before his birth, dedicated him to the Lord, and sought, in his childhood, to inspire him with devotion and morality. But Andrew was possessed of a vehement, independent spirit, which brooked no restraint, and he grew up to cause them bitter sorrow by his disorderly life. Nevertheless father and mother prayed on, hoping against hope. The wild youth passed for being one among the most dissolute young men of the city, and was acknowledged as the worst of a bad set, utterly godless and abandoned. But his parents prayed on. The mother cast herself before a figure of the Queen of Heaven, and, in the bitterness of her anguish of soul, cried, "Oh, Mother of my Saviour! Thou knowest how the soul of my child, for whom thy Son bled, is sinking to destruction. Thou knowest, Holy One! how, in his earliest youth, I dedicated my child to thee, and trusted him to thy protection, how I have done all that earthly mother can do to keep him clean and unspotted from the world! And now, pity me, weeping over my guilty son, thou, whose tears flowed for thy innocent Son! Thou, who art so mighty, entreat thy divine Son, that mine may be moved to true and broken-hearted repentance." Thus praying, and with streaming eyes, Andrew lit upon her one day, as he was going forth to the commission of some new work of evil. He stood still and looked at her, and a feeling of compunction stirred his heart. Then, turning her reddened eyes towards him, she said, "I cannot doubt it; thou art the wolf whom I saw in a dream." "What mean you, mother?" asked the young man. She answered: "Before thou wast born, my child, I dreamt that I brought forth a wolf which rushed into a church, and was there transformed into a lamb. Thy father and I, on account of this dream, placed thee under the protection of the Mother of God. My son, thou art not ours, thou belongest not to the world, but only to the service of God. Oh, would to heaven, that as the first part of my dream has been fulfilled, the second part might find its accomplishment also!" Andrew covered his face, and fell at his mother's feet, and sobbed forth: "Oh, good, pious mother! the wolf shall indeed become a lamb. Thou didst dedicate me to God, and to Him will I, also, devote myself. Pray, pray for me, mother, that I may obtain pardon for all my grievous offences." Next day Andrew sought the Church of the Carmelites, and kneeling before an image of the Holy Virgin, wept bitterly over his past life, which now appeared to him in all its bare deformity. And he felt so powerfully called by the grace of God, that he resolved at once to take refuge from his evil companions and associations, in the cloister. He, therefore, sought the convent door that same hour, and asked to be admitted as a novice. He was received, and spent his novitiate in constant battle with his passions, and in trampling out the memory of the past, by not suffering his mind for a moment to repose on the thoughts of the evil he had done, save only for the purpose of stirring up compunction, and abasing himself in profound humility. After having been received into the Order, he became a model of self-restraint and earnestness, so that in the year 1328, at the age of twenty-six, he was ordained priest. He was shortly after appointed to preach in Florence; and his fervour and love for sinners produced very astonishing fruit, in moving many who had lived in sin to turn in sorrow to the cross, and renounce their evil ways. Andrew was next sent to Paris, there to prosecute his studies, and was there invested with the degree of doctor; and after he had completed his studies with Cardinal Corsini, his uncle, at Avignon, he returned to Florence, where he was elected prior of his cloister. His renown as a preacher of righteousness prevailed again, and his sermons produced such an effect, that he was regarded as the apostle of the land. After the death of the bishop of Fiesole, the chapter elected Andrew Corsini to be his successor. But when the news of his election reached him, he fled away, and hid himself in a Carthusian monastery. He was sought for long in every direction, without result, and the chapter, despairing of finding him, were proceeding with the election of another, in his room, when a child cried out "He who is to be our bishop is praying in the Carthusian monastery." He was there sought, and Andrew recognising in this the will of God, yielded, and, in 1360, was consecrated bishop of Fiesole. As prelate, he maintained the same discipline over himself, and never abandoned the penance he had imposed on himself for his youthful sins, of reciting daily the Seven Penitential Psalms, of sleeping on a faggot of vine twigs, and of never speaking without necessity. But however severe he was in his dealing with himself, nothing could exceed the tenderness and love with which he sought out and dealt with the greatest sinners in his diocese. And this love which overflowed from his heart rendered him peculiarly successful in reconciling enemies. Knowing this, Urban V. sent him to Bologna to appease a disturbance which had broken out between the nobles and the people, and he achieved this mission with signal success. In his 71st year, as he was singing midnight mass on Christmas Eve he felt great exhaustion, which was followed by a fever, from which he died on Jan. 6th, 1373. Relics, in the Carmelite Church at Florence. In Art he appears between a wolf and a lamb. S. JOAN OF VALOIS, Q. (A.D. 1505.) [French Martyrology. The process of her canonization began under Clement XII., and was completed by Pius VI. in 1775; but she was venerated at Bourges from the time of her death.] Before Louis the son of Charles VII, ascended the throne of France, his wife, Charlotte of Savoy, bore him a daughter, called Anne of France. When he succeeded his father, with the title of Louis XI., he desired greatly to become the father of a son, and when his wife became pregnant in the third year after his coronation, his hopes were at the highest. When, however, she gave birth to a daughter, his disgust manifested itself in bitter antipathy towards the child, who was baptized Jeanne, or Joan. When she was eight days old, she was betrothed, May 19th, 1464, according to the custom of the time, to Louis, son of the Duke of Orleans and Mary of Cleaves, and sent to the house of her father and mother-in-law. At the expiration of four years, she was ordered to appear before her father at Plessis-le-Tours, where she was received by her mother with love, but when she was brought before her father, Louis turned from her with contempt, saying, "Bah! I did not think she was so ugly;" and he thrust her away. She was in fact somewhat deformed, and plain in face. It will be remembered that Sir Walter Scott has introduced her into his novel of Quentin Durward, taking, however, considerable liberties with her history. To such an extent did the spite of the king manifest itself, that when he saw how devout his daughter was, and that in her loneliness, she found comfort in the House of God, he forbade her frequenting churches and even the castle chapel. When Joan was six years old, a son was born to Louis XI., and this was to her a day of good fortune, for her brother became her friend and protector; and because she was now once more permitted to frequent the churches. Louis XI. then visited Paris, to thank God for the birth of his son. Joan was in the splendid retinue which on this occasion entered the cathedral church of Notre Dame. She cast herself before an image of Our Lady, and taking her gold crown from her head, besought the holy Virgin to be her protector. Then a voice made itself heard in her soul, "My daughter, thou shalt found an Order in mine honour!" The dislike of Louis XI. for Joan increased every day: the Countess of Linières was allowed to treat her with gross contempt; and the king, once so far forgot himself as to rush into her room sword in hand, and threaten to kill her. The Count of Linières threw himself between the king and his daughter, and saved her life, but could not prevent her receiving a wound, the scar of which never disappeared. The king retired in shame, and for a while gave her greater liberty. In her twelfth year Joan was married, against her will, to Duke Louis of Orleans; however she fulfilled her duties, as wife, to the best of her ability. But her husband, who had married her for political reasons, made no scruple of treating her with coldness and contempt; deserting her almost entirely, that he might spend his time amidst the pleasures of the court, scornfully remarking that there was no risk to his honour in leaving his young bride unprotected, as her diminutive stature and plain face would be her defence. Louis XI. died in August, 1483, and his son succeeded him, as Charles VIII., under the regency of his elder sister Anne, who was married to Peter of Bourbon. The husband of Joan, thinking that the regency ought to have been entrusted to him, endeavoured to stir up an insurrection; but was unsuccessful; and knowing that his life was threatened, fled to Duke Francis II. of Brittany, the bitter foe of France, and entered into league with him against Charles VIII. War broke out, and Joan stood as an angel of peace and reconciliation between the contending parties. Twice she obtained pardon for her captured and imprisoned husband, and as often he returned to his perfidy,--once against his sovereign, and once against his wife. After the death of Charles VIII., on April 7th, 1498, the Duke of Orleans ascended the throne, as Louis XII. He at once obtained a divorce from Pope Alexander VI., by taking an oath that his marriage with Joan was not complete. Joan offered no opposition, rejoicing to see herself at liberty; and her husband at once concluded another marriage with Anne of Brittany, the widow of the young king. As some recompence to his divorced wife, Louis XII. gave her the Duchy of Berry, besides Pontoise, and other townships. She resided at Bourges, where she spent her time in the exercise of charity, to which she devoted her large revenues. In 1500, she founded the order of the Annunciation, for women. S. Joan took the habit herself in 1504, but died on the 4th of February, 1505; and was buried at Bourges. Her body was torn from its resting place, in 1562, and burned by the Calvinists. S. JOSEPH OF LEONISSA, C. (A.D. 1612.) [Roman Martyrology Authority:--The Acts of his Beatification, which took place in 1737, and those of his canonization in 1746.] This Saint was born at Leonissa, in the States of the Church, in 1556. He entered the Capuchin Order, and laboured at the redemption of Christian slaves. He died of cancer, at the age of fifty-eight. As the doctors desired to perform a painful operation on him, to remove the cancer, they ordered him to be bound, but he placed his crucifix before him saying, "this is the firmest of all bonds; it will hold me immoveable. Cut deep, I shall not flinch." B. JOHN DE BRITTO, M., S.J. (A.D. 1693.) [Roman Martyrology. Beatified on August 21st, 1853. The following account is epitomised from his life in "Pictures of Christian Heroism."] John de Britto was born at Lisbon, March 1st, 1647; he was the son of Don Salvador de Britto Peregra and Beatrix his wife, both of whom were of noble birth. His father dying when he was only four years old, he was committed by his mother to the care of the Jesuits; and under them grew up full of the grace of God. At the age of nine he was sent to court in the capacity of page to Don Pedro, the youngest son of the king, and probable heir to the throne of Portugal. During the six years he spent at court, he persevered in the pious habits he had formed under his mother's roof, and in the Jesuit school, frequently retiring for private prayer, and attending mass daily. By this exemplary course of life he incurred the hatred of his fellow pages; for his rigid rule of life was a check upon their profligacy. They ridiculed his piety, and heaped upon him persecution, not only by words, but also by blows. He bore their ill-treatment with great patience; but it produced an illness which brought him into hourly danger of death. At the very moment of his agony his patron, S. Francis Xavier, at the earnest prayer of his mother, restored his health. She had from his birth dedicated her son to the apostle of India, and she now vowed that if her child were to recover, he should wear the Jesuit habit for the whole year in honour of his deliverer. When, therefore, he appeared at court again after his recovery, it was in a little black robe, with a chaplet of the Blessed Virgin hanging by his side; and in this garb he served the Prince, and attended the Jesuit college of S. Antony of Padua. The people stopped in the streets to see him pass; not on account of the strangeness of such a dress on a child, but to mark his holy and edifying demeanour. When the term of his vow had expired, he put off the dress, but with the intention to assume it one day for ever. Notwithstanding his infirm health, he had long resolved to leave the world, and lead an apostolic life as a Jesuit, and at the age of fifteen he carried this resolution into effect. He applied for admission into the society to the father-provincial, Michael Tinsco, by whom he was placed in the novitiate at Lisbon. The Prince, Don Pedro, opposed his resolution, but the mother rejoiced that her son should possess a vocation for the Company of Jesus. It was on the 17th of December, 1662, that John de Britto entered the novitiate at Lisbon. A novena had just commenced in preparation for Christmas. At its close each postulant had to present the Infant Jesus with a petition, according to his wants. De Britto wrote his petition with the others. It was that he might be sent as a missionary to Japan, there to live and labour, and at length obtain the crown of martyrdom. After two years he took the three vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, having passed through the novitiate a very model of holiness. On leaving the novitiate at Lisbon, he went to Evora for two years, and thence to Coimbra, to study literature and philosophy. He then removed to Lisbon to teach grammar; and while thus employed, his thirst to go out as a missionary received an additional impulse from the visit of Father Balthazar da Costa, who had just returned from Madura to find recruits. To him he stated the wish of his heart, and he promised to plead his cause at Rome; the consequence of which was that a few months afterwards orders were received by the father-provincial to despatch John de Britto, along with several other young missionaries, in the first ship which should sail for Madura. John returned hearty thanks to God for the favour, but his mother was distracted at the thought of losing her child. She appealed to the provincial, to her son himself, to the papal nuncio, and to the king, but without effect; and at length, fearing to offend God by persisting in her opposition, she offered him up as the dearest sacrifice she could render. His departure was fixed for the 25th of March, 1674. The night before, he paid a visit to his mother; but to save her the pang of parting, he forebore to tell her that it was the last. He carefully avoided any thing which might interfere with his object; and therefore, instead of joining the other missionaries, when, with a great crowd of people, they attended church on the banks of the Tagus, he embarked secretly, and only appeared when all danger of being delayed was over. He was ordained priest just before leaving. During the voyage he won the favour of the captain, and took advantage of it to exercise his ministry with the utmost freedom. He had to preach every Sunday, taught the catechism to the ignorant and the children on board, and continually engaged the passengers and sailors in exercises of devotion. Scarcely had the father set foot on shore, than he ran to embrace the brethren of the college. Having then paid a visit to the Blessed Sacrament, he prostrated himself at the tomb of S. Francis Xavier, thus gathering fresh ardour for his apostolic course. At Goa he commenced the austere life of the Madura missionaries,--which consists in neither eating flesh-meat nor fish, in sleeping on the ground, and walking bare-foot,--that he might be ready for his apostolate when his summons should arrive. In April, 1674, orders arrived from the father-provincial that he should set sail for Malabar, with Father Emmanuel Rodriguez and some other companions. The mission of Madura, to which Father de Britto was called, comprised a tract of country two hundred leagues long by eighty broad. It presented the most arduous field of labour for the missionary, on account of its extent, the denseness of the population, the climate and nature of the country, and the wild beasts with which it is infested. The inhabitants generally are very intelligent; they have made great progress in many sciences, and their Brahmins are perfectly able to sustain an argument in defence of their religion. To holiness, devotion, energy, and courage, the essential qualities of an apostle, the Indian missionary must add the advantages of a logical mind and a ready wit. But perhaps the opposition of the Brahmins is less to be feared by the missionary than the popular veneration for caste. The first missionaries in India, not possessing caste, found it impossible to obtain a hearing. With all their holiness, earnestness, and zeal, no one would listen to a pariah. It was reserved for Father Robert de' Nobili to surmount, or at least show how to surmount, this obstacle. He was a Roman Jesuit, nephew of Cardinal Bellarmine, and grand-nephew of Pope Marcellus II. After carefully studying the peculiarities of the Brahmins, their laws, traditions, customs, and tenets, he saw the rock on which his predecessors had split. He determined to lay aside whatever should denote his European extraction, and adopt the dress and mode of life of some class of the natives possessing caste. First he appeared as a rajah, then as a secular Brahmin, with a long flowing robe and a silk shoulder-knot; but without success. He then discovered that, over and above caste, a mortified exterior is required to influence the Indians. He appeared, therefore, partly in the dress of the Samasks, or Brahmins of Penance; and in this he was completely successful. This class is in the highest repute among the natives; they are regarded as the masters of the law, and their word is final. They are distinguished by their ascetic life, and their renunciation of the pleasures of the world. They live on a little boiled rice, which they receive only once a day, at sunset. In this character Father de' Nobili converted a vast number of Brahmins. Father de Britto approved the principle of his great predecessor, but somewhat varied his practice. He adopted the dress of the Pandarists, a sect in very great estimation on account of their ascetism; they are not held in equal honour with the Samasks, but they mix more with the various sects, and their garb therefore affords greater opportunities of intercourse with the natives. The reader then must imagine our blessed martyr for the future not in his own black habit, but in the long yellow wrapping of the Pandarist. The Pandarists wear no other garment than a piece of yellow cloth enveloping the whole figure. This dress guards them from the dangerous rays of the tropical sun, to which they are exposed the whole day. They sometimes wear a cap, an addition absolutely necessary to the European who would avoid a stroke of the sun; but they walk barefoot, except on occasions of ceremony, and in crossing the burning sands of the country, when they adopt a sandal of a peculiar construction. It is not fastened by a strap, but attached to the foot by means of a wooden peg between two toes. This clog is of little value for purposes of travelling, as it produces violent swellings of the legs and feet; but it is useful in crossing the deserts. The Pandarists allow the beard to grow, which is a mark of distinction in India, and carry a staff as a symbol of authority. Their diet is of the plainest kind, and entirely vegetable; animal life being held too sacred among them for the purposes of food, and therefore of course interdicted to all who would adopt their mode of life. This rigorous rule might have discouraged souls less ardent than John de Britto; but to him no sacrifice, no painfulness, seemed too great in his Master's service; and he cheerfully entered upon it, in spite of his feeble health and European constitution for the love he bore to Jesus Christ, and his yearning for the salvation of the idolators. Father de Britto set sail from Goa for the coast of Malabar, and landed at Ignapatam; then through Tanjore, where he was detained nearly a year by illness, he passed on to Ambalgata. In the college at this station Father de Britto, after a retreat of a month, took his monastic vows, and received his appointment to the Madura mission. He set out immediately with one other missionary and a few neophytes for Colli. They suffered excessive hardships on the route: they had to climb steep and rugged mountains, to pass through forests dense with briers and brushwood, and swarming with reptiles, to cross swollen rivers and pathless deserts; but at length they reached Colli, on the festival of S. Ignatius. There he found the plague raging, and he made it the means of converting very many to the faith by his intrepidity in relieving the sufferers. After the pestilence had ceased, the conversions increased so rapidly, that it became necessary to divide the northern and southern district of the mission, and the latter was committed to Father de Britto. His plan was to send on before him two or more catechists to get the work ready; so that when he arrived himself, he might proceed without loss of time. On arriving, he assembled the Christians and catechumens, and preached a sermon; then he visited the sick and dying, and baptized the infants of Christian parents; after which he entered the tribunal of penance, in which he sat often for twelve consecutive hours, for the whole neighbourhood flocked, and made their confessions to him. He preached on all Sundays and holidays, catechized the children, and passed from house to house to warn bad Christians, or to resolve the doubts of inquiring idolators. In the evenings he assembled the whole congregation to recite the rosary of the Blessed Virgin, and in this way he made a vast number of converts; and when he had stayed long enough in one place for the requirements of the people, he passed on to some other station. In his dress of a Pandarist, De Britto always obtained a ready hearing, and hence perhaps the great success of his preaching. But in all these labours he was obliged, by the universal prejudice against the pariahs, to direct his endeavours mainly towards the conversion of the upper classes. To his great sorrow, he found that even as a Pandarist he could not openly make proselytes among that caste without exposing his religion to universal contempt. He therefore was compelled to recognise their distinctions in society for the present, in order to establish Christianity on the broader basis ultimately. But, notwithstanding, he took care to advance the cause of the pariahs, or lowest and most despised caste, by showing to the converts the universality of the Gospel of Christ; and secretly he effected many conversions among the pariahs themselves. But the caste-prejudices of the natives were so strong, that he found it impossible to overcome them; and he did not consider them incompatible with the most sincere acceptance of Christianity. As the Apostles had for a time consented to circumcision, the more effectually to recommend the new faith,--so the Indian missionaries judged it right to waive for awhile, in the infant state of Christianity in India, their objection to the social distinctions between man and man. In addition to the natural obstacle from caste, and the ability of the Brahmins, which the Indian missionary has to encounter, the saint had to labour at a time when the whole country was convulsed with civil war. Hordes of savage Indians from the interior traversed the country; fire and the sword destroyed whole villages; and the inhabitants, being unable to take vengeance on the real aggressors, the tide of popular fury set in against the Christians. Thus it was that in many cases prosperous missions had to be given up, and the trembling Christians fled to celebrate the rites of religion in secret places. Solitary chapels rose up in the depths of the forest, or by the lone riverside, and thither the faithful repaired with their beloved pastor. But here they were exposed to a danger from which they had been free in the cities. The fury of the inundations rendered their retreats exceedingly perilous. An instance of this occurred near the river Corolam, where the Christians, who had been driven from Ginghi, erected a chapel. De Britto was praying in the chapel with sixteen of his flock, when the cry was raised that the building was surrounded with water. They tried to dam the water out, but unsuccessfully; and were compelled to construct a raft out of the beams of the roof, and upon that they floated to a wood at a little distance, situated on an eminence. There they intended to remain till the flood subsided; but they had no food; and even their place of security threatened to fail them, for the waters ran with terrible rapidity, and almost covered the hill; so one of the Christians, at the risk of his life, swam back to the chapel, and succeeded in obtaining a little rice; this, along with some bitter herbs, which they procured with difficulty, was all their sustenance during the three days they were encompassed by the floods. But this was not all; they were attacked by a number of serpents, which, driven out of their holes by the water, sought the same place of safety. But throughout his missionary career, the blessed De Britto enjoyed that power over venomous beasts which our Saviour promised to His followers, and the band of Christians were unhurt. Power over serpents gives its possessor an unbounded influence with the Indians; and this terrible situation of the little band of Christians, being perfectly well understood by the idolaters, procured for De Britto a wonderful reputation. When the waters subsided, the Christians returned to their chapel, and found it almost swept away; but the foundations remained, and they set to work with such vigour, that in a short time the walls were raised again, and the chapel was ready for the Christmas solemnity. Father de Britto, with streaming eyes, thanked God for their escape, and besought him to look down with pity upon the struggling society, and prosper the cause of Christ in his hands. In consequence of the wonderful success of De Britto, his superiors would have made him rector of Ambalucata. This preferment he evaded; but he accepted the post of superior of both districts of the mission. His journeys now became longer and more arduous. He travelled on foot, and was detained neither by the heat of the sun nor by the floods in the rainy seasons. Rocky mountains, sandy plains, dense forests, broad and rapid rivers were traversed. At Madura, as he was preparing 200 catechumens for baptism, a band of armed men rushed upon him and took him prisoner. They struck him with their fists and with sticks, and kicked him, and threw him into a dungeon with his hands tied behind his back. But God suffered them not to hurt him; and after trying to terrify him with threats of death, they at length let him go. Journeying northward, he made a stay at Marava of three months, in the year 1686, during which he baptized more than 2000 idolaters; but not withstanding his success he was anxious to get on, in consequence of the accounts which reached him of the ripeness of the natives for Christianity still farther north. This anxiety was the cause of a long and painful imprisonment. At Mangalam the idolaters laid wait for the missionary, and seized him as he was entering the gates of the city. They bound him hand and foot with iron chains, and conducted him immediately to the presence of General Conmara, the first minister of state of the King of Marava. This man had an implacable hatred of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The father was first accused of being a magician; but he meekly answered that he was under no guidance of the spirit of darkness, but that he preached the law of the true God, the Maker of heaven and earth. The judge then addressed the two catechists and other churchmen who were taken with him: "And you," he said, "what do you say?" "We say the same," they replied. For which answer they were all condemned to be scourged. And so cruelly were they scourged, that some of them died from the effects. The tyrant then ordered the others to be confined in dungeons, and loaded with irons. Afterwards he tried to shake the constancy of De Britto, believing that if he could gain over the leader the rest would follow. After heaping upon him insults and reproaches, he desired him to sprinkle his forehead with ashes consecrated to the idols, as that would have been tantamount to an acknowledgement of their divinity; the saint of course refused, and the judge in a fury exclaimed that he would have him torn limb from limb. He was then beaten again, and taken back to his dungeon, laden with irons, and tied to a pillar. On the fourth day, the persecutors tried a new kind of torture, common enough in that country. The sufferer is taken to the bank of a river, and a cord is fastened to his feet; his hands are tied behind his back, and he is then allowed to fall into the water; then an executioner jumps upon his back, and with his whole weight presses the poor victim to the bottom, where he is kept till he is almost dead; next he is dragged out gasping for breath, and before he has recovered is cast in again; and so on, at the pleasure of his executioners, always being dragged out before life is extinct. It is a torture enough to overcome the staunchest courage. Up to this moment all the companions of the blessed father had remained stedfast; but now one of them, unhappily, entreated the executioners to let him loose. The wretched man saved his life at the expense of his faith. After enduring farther hardships for some days, the father and his fellow-sufferers were brought into the judgment-hall, where all sorts of instruments had been laid out to terrify their minds,--axes, scourges, torches, pincers, knives, and all the horrible apparatus of torture. The sight of these things, however, inspired them with fresh courage, and a more vehement desire for martyrdom; and as the spectacle had only been produced to impress their minds, they were led back again, the better rather than the worse for what they had seen. But the next day an order came for the execution; and they were taken to Paganari to be tortured and put to death. The executioners began with Valentine, a catechist; whom they led full of wounds and with one of his eyes forced out, to De Britto, and taunted the father with being the cause of the poor man's sufferings. "He is a happy man," said Father de Britto; "when will you do the like for me?" Amazed at fortitude such as this, the executioners perceived that while the father lived they could effect nothing by tormenting the disciples; and leaving Valentine alone, they cast themselves upon Father de Britto. Valentine's sufferings had been very great, but they had reserved a special torture for the blessed father. Hard by was a flag of pumice-stone, which the sun had heated up to blister-heat; after beating the missionary violently, they stripped off his clothes and laid him down upon this burning stone; eight of the executioners then jumped upon his body, so as to press the sharp and heated points into his back, already raw with the scourges; and then they took him by the feet and shoulders, and rubbed him up and down till his back was entirely excoriated. In this miserable plight he was left to scorch in the sun; but a charitable idolater dragged him into the shade; and a storm coming on, his murder was deferred till the following day, and he was thrown back into his dungeon, more dead than alive. Valentine's eye was miraculously cured by the blessed father. The most ignominious death which a criminal can die in that country is by impalement; and the idolaters determined to stamp Christianity in India with infamy by subjecting its ministers to this punishment. The next morning Father de Britto and his companions were marshalled for the execution; in front marched a detachment of armed men; then followed the man of God in irons, with his eyes raised to heaven and his face beaming with joy; last came the executioners and an immense crowd of people. But Almighty God had yet work for him to do, and suspended the blow as it was about to fall. A messenger arrived from court, bearing an order to General Conmara to come immediately to the capital with all his forces, as an insurrection had broken out against the government. At this news the crowd dispersed, the soldiers made ready to march, and the officers of justice retraced their steps with their prisoner. But they revenged themselves upon him for their disappointment by ill-usage of every kind. At last, after three weeks, he was ordered up to Ramanadabouram, the capital, to see the prince. On his arrival, he was to his astonishment received with favour by Prince Ranganadeven. He made the missionary sit by his side, and explain the principal doctrines, and practices of the Christian religion. The prince having listened, said, "I grant you your liberty, and your companions may go also: worship your God and preach His law; but do not preach it in my country. It is an excellent law; but it forbids stealing and polygamy, so it will not suit my subjects. If you dare to disobey me, depend upon it I will cut off your head." Thus De Britto obtained his liberty; and as he thought it best to obey the prince's injunctions, he left Marava. When Father Rodriguez, Provincial of Malabar, heard of the liberation of De Britto, he summoned him to the pearl-fishery coast, to regain his strength after their labours. He obeyed, though he would rather have continued in the mission while any strength remained to him. But his journey to the coast had been ordered by God. Father Francis Paolo, who was returning to Europe in his capacity of procurator of Malabar, had been shipwrecked; and Father de Britto was sent home in his place. He left the fishery in 1687; and after a voyage of ten months he reached Lisbon in September, 1688, having been absent fourteen years and a half. On the news of his arrival, the whole city rose to greet him, for the fame of his sanctity and heroism had reached Portugal long before. The king, whose page he had been, the infanta Isabella Louisa, the ministers of state and the grandees, the people and the religious orders, all showed him a thousand marks of respect and honour. He maintained in Portugal the same mortified habits which he had formed in India, wore the same dress, used the same food, and slept on the bare ground. He set about the work upon which he had been sent home with great diligence; and in the college of the Jesuits which he visited, he awoke an extraordinary enthusiasm among the young men; even old priests were seized with the same fervour. Of the volunteers, Father de Britto selected six, and to that number he added several who had been missionaries, but were now occupying chairs in different universities, and whom he wanted to argue with the Brahmins. Having once selected his band, he commenced instructing them in the details of their work; and when all things were ready, and he had obtained larger funds for the support of this increase to his mission, from the king, they set sail for India in 1690; but not without great opposition; for the King of Portugal would have retained him at home, first to superintend the education of his son, and then to promote him to a bishopric--both of which _persecutions_, however, as he called them, he happily surmounted. They started with a favourable wind, and the voyage was at first prosperous; but presently they were detained by a calm, when their provisions became tainted, and a fever broke out. The holy father fell ill, and two of his missionaries died. De Britto, writing home, gave a horrible account of that voyage, and the miseries they endured from the sickness of the crew, the stench of the vessel, the heat and cold, the contrary winds, the incessant fatigues which they all had to suffer. In his great humility he attributed them all to his own sins. On their arrival at Goa, his return was celebrated by the whole college of Santa Fé and the Christians there with rejoicings. After a short stay, he passed on to see the Provincial at the pearl fishery, with whom he held a council on the plan of his future campaign. In consequence of the maturity of judgment, which the father displayed on this occasion, he was nominated Visitor of the mission, and immediately after Easter he set out for Madura on his new charge. Then he visited in succession all the stations, encouraged the missionaries, confirmed the faithful, and converted a great number of idolaters to the faith of Christ. But his chief longings were in the direction of Marava, where he hoped to find that palm and crown of martyrdom which five years before had fallen from his grasp. Thither accordingly he bent his steps. The kings of Marava and Madura were still at war; and all the sufferings which he had formerly experienced under the same circumstances awaited him now upon his second arrival. Soldiers were ravaging the country, and he and his flock were compelled to skulk about in the woods. It is difficult to realize the sufferings which the holy father endured for several months with so much joy and resignation. It was his zeal for the salvation of sinners, and the numerous conversions with which God accredited his mission, that supported him under all. We should scarcely be able to credit the fact, if it had not been asserted on oath by one of the catechists in the process of Beatification; that, in the short space of ten days the blessed father administered Baptism with his own hand to twelve thousand idolaters; and more than once his right hand fell powerless through fatigue. He established his head quarters in the principality of Mouni, on the borders of Marava. In order to obtain for the Maravians a proper place for celebrating the holy mysteries, he chose a thick forest not far from Mouni, and there constructed three chapels, to which catechists were attached for the instruction of converts in Christian doctrine; and at night the holy father came to administer the Sacraments. In a short time he gained to the faith a vast number of heathen. And Almighty God deigned to confirm the faith of these converts by the most extraordinary miracles. By the mere touch of the father, devils were cast out and the sick cured. The same power was possessed even by the catechists and neophytes. They read the Gospel over the sick, and made the sign of the Cross, and God restored them to health. The report of these wonderful cures reached the ears of Prince Teriadeven, the real heir to the throne of Marava, now in the possession of Prince Ranganadeven the usurper, a young man who had before shown some signs of favour towards Christianity. Being taken ill, he sent to the blessed father to come and heal him. The father did not go at once himself, but sent one of his catechists, to instruct the prince in the elements of Christian doctrine, and exhort him to put his whole trust in Jesus Christ, as at once the Saviour of soul and body. The catechist went and read the Gospel to him, made him repeat the Apostles' Creed, and that instant the sickness left him. Awed by the sudden miracle of which he had been the subject, the prince no longer delayed his resolution, but expressed his readiness at once to be baptized. He sent to the father and desired to be made a Christian, and was the more confirmed in his desire when he had witnessed on the feast of Epiphany a large assembly of the faithful, and the holy sacrament of Baptism conferred upon two hundred catechumens. But the missionary, who knew him to be possessed of five wives, replied that he could not conscientiously grant him so great a favour until he had put away all save one, with the firm resolution of adhering to her alone for the remainder of his life. The noble Indian upon the spot sent for his wives, selected the first of the five, who herself wished to be a Christian, and informed the others of the resolution he had taken in consequence of his miraculous cure by the holy missionary. Stupefied at this announcement, they assailed the prince, now with tears and caresses, then with threats and reproaches; but nothing could change his resolution; and they went away transported with fury against Father de Britto, whom they looked upon as the author of their calamity. Teriadeven received baptism solemnly with two hundred of his court. This was in the beginning of 1693. Immediately after the ceremony he returned to Mouni, where a great multitude awaited baptism. The joy of the Church was raised to its highest pitch by these glorious conversions, and by the prospect of greater still, when suddenly there burst out the most terrible persecution that had yet fallen upon them. It confounded in its fury the whole of that infant society, and tore from them their sole support, the holy father, to whom they owed their birth unto Jesus Christ, and whose hour of martyrdom had at length arrived. In every one of the four wives put away by Prince Teriadeven, Father de Britto had raised up an enemy, who would be satisfied with no sacrifice short of his life. But among them all the youngest, who happened to be the usurper's niece, was the most furious. In a transport of rage she ran to her uncle and told him of the outrage she had suffered from the European. Then she appealed to the Brahmins, who hated him too bitterly to remain deaf to her cries. They had long nourished their thirst for revenge, and now they saw an opportunity of slaking it. A consultation was held as to the best course to be pursued, and it was decided that they should go in a body to the king, and make a formal complaint against Father de Britto. They selected Pomparanam to be their spokesman, an old man, and very spiteful, who pronounced a set speech on the occasion. The king saw perfectly well through the motives of the Brahmins in thus taking up the woman's cause; but as the honour of his own family was concerned in the person of his niece, he acceded to their request. He ordered the Christians to be fined, and their houses to be burnt. The father had foreseen the storm that was gathering, and had warned his flock of the danger, but they all refused to fly. They determined to stand by their dear master, upon whom they knew the great fury of the persecution would fall, and if God required it, die with him. The king despatched four companies of soldiers to seize the missionary. Three of them advanced to the chapels which he had built in the woods, where they arrested the catechists who were in charge of them. The fourth hastened to Mouni, and there they found the holy father. It was the morning of the 8th of January, and he was offering, as was his wont, the Holy Sacrifice, when God revealed to him what was coming; and after Mass he addressed the people, and said that those who had not courage to give up their lives in testimony to the faith of Jesus Christ, had better depart at once and hide themselves. He pronounced these words in so decided and significant a manner, that they all perceived he had received some definite intelligence, and, seized with a sudden panic, they all dispersed except one Brahmin, a convert, and two children, who preferred remaining with him. In the evening, warning came of the approach of a troop of mounted soldiery. He knew their errand, and raising his eyes towards heaven, he offered up his life as a sacrifice to God, and went forth to meet them. They seized him violently, and led him off with his three companions. In a neighbouring village, there was being celebrated at that time a grand festival to one of their gods. Thither on their arrival they drew the Christian victims, and harnessed them to the triumphal car of the idol, and exposed them to the jeers of the multitude. Next day they were taken to the royal city of Ramanadabouram, and there the saint was incarcerated in a filthy hovel, and with him the three catechists who had been arrested in the forest chapels. The holy father embraced them, and exhorted them to continue firm to the end. The heroism of the two children is especially recorded. They animated each other to suffer for Jesus Christ. The imprisonment lasted for several days. Teriadeven only heard of their captivity when it was too late to avert it; but he gave orders that they should be treated with kindness till the king's wishes should be known. Those orders, however, were not attended to, and the brutal jailors amused themselves with the sufferings of the martyrs, and fed them with food which the soldiers rejected. At last the prisoners were brought before the chief minister of state. A small crucifix had been found upon De Britto, and the judge asked him what that image represented. "It is the image of my God," said the father, "who being immortal and impassible in his own nature, was made man, and died upon a cross to rescue us from the slavery of the devil." At these words the impious wretch threw it down upon the ground in contempt, and stamped upon it with his feet. The holy man, although chained and bound, fell upon his knees, and crawling with difficulty to the crucifix, pressed it to his breast, and watered it with tears, in reparation of the insult. There was a great crowd of spectators present, who regarded this action as a contempt of court, and loudly demanded sentence. But the judge, not knowing what to say, ordered the confessors back to prison, and there they remained for a month. Prince Teriadeven boldly pleaded their cause before the king, in face of the personal danger he incurred by his advocacy of the Christians. Ranganadeven, in a rage, ordered him at once to adore the gods. The prince refused, and said he would rather die than again offer the worship to idols which was due only to Jesus Christ. The tyrant answered that he would soon show which religion was the most powerful, and forthwith gave orders to the magicians to prepare a certain incantation considered infallible in its operation, to cause the death of the missionary. The incantation failed, to the shame of the king, and the discomfiture of his priests; and Father de Britto was sent for, and asked whether the failure of the sorcerers was owing to the enchanted book, meaning the Breviary, which he was still allowed to retain in his possession. The missionary replied that that book was devoted to the praise of God, and to nothing so hateful as sorcery. The tyrant ordered the book to be hung round his neck, and the executioners to shoot at him in the market-place: "And we shall see," said he "whether your God can deliver you." He was led away, and the soldiers were taking aim, when Teriadeven broke through their ranks, and ordered them to desist. They obeyed, knowing him to be the true owner of the crown; and as he was very popular, the tyrant feared a revolt if he should persist in the execution. De Britto's death was accordingly again deferred; and the tyrant ordered him to be sent to Oureiadeven, his brother, who lived at Orejour, a distance of two days' journey from the court, with instructions that he should be put to death on his arrival. The father rejoiced when he heard whither he was going, for he knew that it was to die; but he wept at leaving his dear companions; they separated, never more to meet again in this world. He had to travel barefoot, tightly bound, and surrounded by guards, who hurried him over rocks and briers, through sand and brushwood. The blood gushed from the wounds he had received in prison, and from his torn and blistered feet; but instead of receiving pity from these wretches, they heaped abuse upon him. On his journey, the Christians assembled to see him pass, and receive his blessing. He arrived at Orejour on the last day of January, and was immediately taken before Oureiadeven, the king's brother. This prince laboured under an incurable leprosy. Having heard of the missionary's gift of miracles, he doubted not that he would gladly purchase his life by exerting it for his cure. The father replied, that it appertained to God alone to cure disease; all that he could do was to apply the remedies, and entreat Almighty God to bless them; and he added, that if the prince desired to be made whole of his bodily disease, he must first heal the sickness of his soul, by accepting the true faith. When the prince saw that nothing would move the holy man, he turned to one of his suite named Margharittei, and bade him cut off his head upon the spot. Margharittei answered, that he was a Christian himself, and nothing would induce him to imbrue his hands in innocent blood. Then the prince's own wife rushed in, and threatened her husband with the judgments of heaven if he dared to execute the sentence of the king. Moved by these remonstrances, he ordered the servant of God to be carried back to his dungeon. As soon as this got abroad, the Brahmins, fearing that their prey might escape their hands, went to the governor of the town, who was a bitter enemy of the Christians, and represented the case to him. Mourougapapoullei, for that was his name, instantly demanded an audience of the prince, and in the strongest terms reproached him for not obeying the commands of the king. The cowardly prince yielded through fear of the king's displeasure, and granted the governor leave to execute the sentence of death. It was on the morning of the 4th of February, being Ash-Wednesday, that the servant of God was apprised of his final sentence. At the joyful news, his countenance lighted up; he fell on his knees, and returned thanks to God. Then rising up, he said to the executioners, "I am ready." He walked to the place of execution without restraint, and with his Breviary hanging from his neck, his eyes fixed on heaven, and his steps so rapid that his guards were compelled to restrain him. Along the road a multitude of the faithful were waiting to see him pass. The spot which had been selected for the martyrdom was a little hill by the bank of the river, not far from the city. On arriving there he was allowed by the guards to retire for a short time to pray. The executioner who at that moment came up, seeing the servant of God absorbed in prayer, was afraid to disturb him. More than a quarter of an hour had elapsed, when the son of the prince ran up and reprimanded the executioner for his delay in executing the sentence. Then the holy man approached the side of the river, and, after embracing the executioner, knelt down, and holding out his head, said, "I am ready; do as you are commanded." The executioner drew his scymitar, and raising his arm, was about to give the fatal blow, when he perceived the martyr's reliquary hanging by a cord from his neck. Taking it for granted that it was some charm which would ward off the stroke, he had first to remove it; but he durst not take it away with his hand, lest he should be bewitched. He therefore severed the string with the scymitar, and made a frightful gash on the breast and shoulder. The holy martyr offered to God the first fruits of his sacrifice; and then the executioner, no longer fearing any amulet to turn the edge of his weapon, raised the scymitar and hewed off his head. This glorious triumph of the faith of Jesus Christ took place at Marava, on the 4th of February, 1693. After Father de Britto's death the executioner drove a stake into the ground, on which he impaled the body; and having cut off the hands and feet, he hung them, along with the head, from the waist. The faithful tried hard to obtain possession of the relics, but in vain; they were too well guarded by the soldiers. His crucifix the martyr had given to a faithful convert, who transmitted it to Father Laine, and from his hands it reached his house of profession in Paris. And all that could be collected of the clothing, writing, objects of devotion, and instruments of penance were forwarded to the same father, by whom they were laid up in the Jesuit Church at Pondicherry, and thence they found their way to Goa. But it was some time before any fragments of the body fell into the hands of the Christians. The soldiers kept guard over the body while it remained impaled on the stake; but at last a violent storm came on, and the cord which supported the head and hands broke; the head rolled into the river, and was saved; but wild beasts preyed upon the body. When the soldiers had retired, the catechists came and gathered up all they could find of the body. In the river they discovered the head; they bought the stake, on which his limbs had been impaled, of the soldiers, and the scymitar of the executioner; this scymitar Father John de Corte brought with him to Europe a few years afterwards, and presented it to the king of Portugal, Pedro II. And these are all the relics that remain of the blessed Father John de Britto. [12] 'Annales Archeologiques,' Tom. xxiii. p. 232. [13] "Vie des Saints" Tom. ix. p. 22. [14] Elmasini 'Hist. Sarac.' Lugd. Batav. 1625, p. 267. [15] This article is condensed from an article by the Author in the Quarterly Review for October, 1867, on "Portraits of Christ." [16] For information on this Order, see Jan. 15, S. Alexander. [17] See for more information on the Iconoclastic heresy the life of S. Tarasius, Feb. 25th. [18] This very term "Symbol of Christ," as applied to the Holy Eucharist, is indication of heretical views on the Presence. [19] Gofredus in Vita S. Bernardi. [20] Eugenius III. [Illustration: S. Veronica. See page 73.] February 5. S. AGATHA, _V. M. at Catania_, A.D. 251. S. AGRICOLAUS, _B. of Utrecht, beginning of 5th cent._ S. AVITUS, _B. of Vienne, in France, circ._ A.D. 524. S. GENUINE, _B. of Savio, circ._ A.D. 640. S. BERTULF, _Ab. at Ghent; beginning of 8th cent._ SS. INDRACT, DOMINICA AND COMPANIONS, _MM. at Glastonbury, beginning of 8th cent._ S. VODAL, _Mk. at Soissons, beginning of 8th cent._ SS. DOMITIAN, _Duke of Carinthia, and_ MARY, _his wife, beginning of 9th cent._ S. POLYEUCTUS, _Patr. of Constantinople_, A.D. 970. S. ADELHEID, _V. Abss. at Villich; circ._ A.D. 1015. SS. JAPANESE MARTYRS, _at Nangasaki_, A.D. 1592-1642. S. AGATHA, V. M. (A.D. 251.) [Roman Martyrology and all others. Famous also among the Greeks. There are various editions of the Acts of her Martyrdom in Latin and in Greek. The latter are not as trustworthy as the former, which are very ancient, and though apparently tampered with by copyists, are on the whole to be relied upon. The Latin Acts were written by eye-witnesses, as appears from a passage in them, "From this we supposed he was her angel." There is an older version of the Greek Acts than that given by Metaphrastes (fl. 867), and there is a sermon on S. Agatha by S. Methodius. The name of S. Agatha occurs in the Canon of the Roman Mass; among the first five Virgin Saints enumerated in _Nobis quoque peccatoribus_.] The honour of being the birth-place of S. Agatha is claimed by Catania and Palermo, in Sicily. The probabilities in favour of either are nearly equally divided, though there seems to be a slight superiority in the claims of Catania. It certainly was the scene of her martyrdom, which took place during the persecution of Decius in A.D. 251, as all her acts testify. If these are not in all particulars to be relied on, their main facts seem to be pretty well established. According to these, S. Agatha was the daughter of an illustrious and wealthy house in Sicily, and was famed for her beauty and her gentle and amiable manners. But her love was consecrated to God from her very earliest youth. Quintianus the Consular of Sicily, as the Governor was then called, admired her exceedingly, and the holy virgin retired to Palermo to avoid his importunities. As often happened in those days of heathen cruelty, his love was turned into hatred when he discovered that she was a Christian. She was seized and brought to Catania; and all the way thither she could only weep and pray to the Lord to strengthen her for the conflict which awaited her. Every means was tried during the space of a month to prevail on her to forget her vow; but she was supported by continual prayer, and at last came off victorious from this lingering martyrdom. She was privately examined before Quintianus as to her faith, and confessed Christ with undaunted firmness, declaring the service of the Lord Jesus to be the highest nobility and the truest freedom: she was then sent to prison, to which she went joyfully, recommending herself to God, and entreating His aid. The day after she was tortured on the rack, and suffered with calmness and constancy. And, when she was put to the cruel torment of having her breasts cut off, she mildly reproached the inhuman Quintianus with the remembrance of his own infancy, and with the tenderness of his mother. She was then led again to prison, and all sustenance and medical aid were denied her. Four days afterwards she was put to still further tortures, and then, being taken back to prison, sweetly fell asleep in the Lord, and was buried by the people with great honour. Relics in Catania, and some in the Church of S. Méry, at Paris. Patroness of Catania, La Mirandola, and the Order of Malta. In Art S. Agatha is represented as a majestic virgin wearing a long veil, and over this, in early figures, a crown, the symbol of her victory over death; she usually holds a clasped book in her left hand, and a palm branch in the right; occasionally the place of this latter emblem is supplied by a pair of pincers, having a nipple between the teeth, in allusion to the fearful torture to which she was subjected. Sometimes she carries both her breasts cut off in a dish, or a sword is passed through them. S. AVITUS, B. OF VIENNE, C. (ABOUT 524.) [Not to be confounded with S. Avitus, P. of Orleans, commemorated on June 27th. Roman Martyrology, Usuardus, Gallican, German, and others. Commemorated at Vienne on August 20th. Authorities:--S. Gregory of Tours, Hist. lib. i. c. 2; and his successor Ennodius.] S. Avitus was the son of S. Hesychius, archbishop of Vienne after S. Mammertus, who baptized him. He succeeded his father in the archiepiscopal throne in 490. Ennodius, his successor, says that he was a treasure of learning and piety; and adds that the Burgundians having crossed the Alps, and carried off a large number of captives, this holy prelate spent all his revenue in redeeming as many as he could. Clovis, king of France, though still a pagan, and Gundebald, king of Burgundy, though an Arian, held him in high veneration. The latter, for fear of offending his subjects, durst not embrace the Catholic faith, he nevertheless did all in his power to advance the cause of Catholicism, and in a public conference at Lyons, in his presence, S. Avitus boldly proclaimed the divinity of Christ and reduced the Arian bishops to silence. Gundebald died in 516. His successor Sigismond was brought over by S. Avitus to the true faith. When this king had executed his son Sigeric on a false charge, brought against him by his stepmother, S. Avitus wrought by his exhortations so great a change in the passionate prince, that he retired to Agaunum, now S. Maurice, in the Valais, where he lived the life of a recluse in a cell on the face of the precipice above the monastery he had built at its foot. Most of the works of S. Avitus have been lost, but a poem by him in praise of virginity, some epistles, and fragments of homilies remain. It is a blot on the memory of the saint, that with fulsome flattery he excused the murder of his brothers by Gundebald. See June 3, p. 26. S. BERTULF, AB. (BEGINNING OF 8TH CENT.) [Additions to Usuardus and some editions of the Martyrology of Bede. No authentic account of S. Bertulf exists. All known of him is from a life written in 1703, from old materials, but of what authority it is impossible to decide.] S. Bertulf is said to have been an abbot at Renescure, where the church is dedicated to him. He is regarded also as the patron of Harlebeke, near Courtrai. Renescure is a village on the canal between Aire and S. Omer. His body was taken to Ghent, where it was enshrined in an iron coffin, and for many centuries it was believed that on the approach of danger to the city, the dead abbot knocked against the side of his iron shrine. His bones were scattered by the Calvinists in 1578. S. Bertulf is represented in art in monastic habit distributing alms, with an eagle over his head with wings expanded, a legend relating that he was thus protected from rain in a heavy shower. SS. INDRACT AND COMPANIONS, MM. (BEGINNING OF 8TH CENT.) [Ancient English Martyrologies. Authority:--William of Malmesbury, and Capgrave.] Of old, on the 5th of February, were commemorated in the famous monastery of Glastonbury, S. Indract, S. Dominica, and nine companions, martyrs. He was of royal extraction, son of one of the kings of Ireland; but quitted all this world could give for the love of God. He left his country, with his sister Dominica or Drusa, and seven, or according to another account nine, companions, and settled at Skipwith near Glastonbury, in Somersetshire, where they lived a retired and eremitical life. At length, some wicked men, thinking to meet with great booty, murdered them at night; and to conceal their villainy, cast the bodies into a deep pit. But a column of light standing over the place warned the neighbours that some sacred bodies lay there, and the relics were removed to Glastonbury, in the reign of king Ina. S. ADELHEID, V. ABSS. OF VILLICH. (ABOUT A.D. 1015.) [Cologne Kalendar, and additions to Usuardus. Commemorated with special office at Villich on the Rhine, opposite Bonn. She is variously called Adelheid, Alkeid, Adelaide, Alheidis, and Aleidis. Her local name at Villich is S. Alen. Her life was written by a contemporary, one Bertha, a nun in her convent.] This holy virgin was the daughter of a Count Megingand of Gueldres, and became abbess of the convent of Villich, founded by her father and mother. Her piety, charity, and gravity are celebrated by Bertha, the nun who wrote her life. She died in 1015. The church and nunnery were burnt in the war between Truchsess Gerhard, the apostate archbishop of Cologne, and the archduke Ernest of Bavaria, and again by the Swedes in the Thirty years' war. It is not known what has become of her relics. THE MARTYRS OF JAPAN. (A.D. 1597.) [Roman Martyrology. Pope Urban VIII beatified 26 of these martyrs in 1627. On June 8, 1862, the twenty-six were canonized as Saints. These were Peter Baptist, Martin d'Aguera, Francis Blanco, Philip de Las Casas, Gonzalez Garcia, Francis de S. Miguel, all of the Order of S. Francis; Cosmo Tachegia, Michael Cozaki, Paul Ibarki, Leo Carasumo, Louis, a child, Antony, a child, Thomas Cozaki, also a child; Matthias, Ventura, Joachim Saccakibara, Francis Miaco, Thomas Dauki, John Kimoi, Gabriel Duisco, Paul Suzuki, Francis and Paul Sukegiro, all these Japanese; also Paul Miki, John de Gota, and James Quigai, Japanese Jesuits. Authorities: Numerous contemporary accounts. The following account is epitomised from the history of the Japanese missions by Miss Cecilia M. Caddell. In the brief space accorded us it is impossible to give anything like a full account of this wonderful history. We refer our readers to Miss Caddell's most interesting account.] The history of the brief existence of Christianity in Japan and of the terrible persecution by which it was utterly extirpated in that island, is at once a melancholy and a glorious episode in the annals of the Church. In the Japanese we behold the most highly-gifted of the Asiatic races of modern times receiving the Gospel with a joy and a fervour which remind us of primitive ages, when thousands in one single day would run at the divine call to fill the apostolic net, and when the multitude of the faithful, serving God with one heart and one soul, resembled rather the chosen few who in later days have left the crowd to follow the higher path of evangelical perfection, than the mass of ordinary believers. But if the Japanese excite our admiration in their willing reception of gospel-truth, and their fervour in obeying its precepts and counsels, no less, or rather still more exalted are the feelings with which we must regard the spirit in which they met the fiery trial which came upon them. Never in the times of the old pagan persecutions was a more glorious spectacle exhibited of men, women, and children, rushing to claim the martyr's palm, and seeking sufferings and torments as others seek honours and pleasures. Wonderful are the ways of the Almighty, and inscrutable as wonderful! The conversion of China, for which S. Francis Xavier, the apostle of the Indies, had long and ardently sighed, was denied to his prayers; while that of Japan, of which apparently he had never even dreamed, was given to him unasked. China was the object of all his wishes and aspirations,--the promised land of his spiritual ambition. It was in his dreams by night and his thoughts by day,--the subject alike of his penance and of his prayers; when a young Japanese, tormented by remorse of conscience for a crime committed years ago, and forgotten probably by everybody but himself, arrived at Malacca, where the Saint then was, and throwing himself at his feet, besought of him that peace and pardon which his native bonzes had been unable to bestow. The great heart of Francis exulted at the prospect of winning another empire to the banner of his Divine Lord; while his vivid faith saw in the sinner who had thus sought him from afar a direct ambassador from Heaven, which had doubtless pursued this youth with the fear of retribution, not for his sake alone, but also to effect the conversion of the idolatrous nation represented in his person. Two years afterwards, on the Feast of the Assumption (1549), he and his chosen companion, Father Cosmas de Torres, landed at Kagoxima, the birthplace of the youth who had come to Francis, and who, under his new name of Paul, accompanied the fathers as their guide and interpreter to the nations of Japan. So the little seed of the Word of God was sown in Japan, and from the time of this visit, Jesuits freely entered Japan, and were established by Papal brief as the chief missionaries for that country. Their eminent success is said to have been based upon their invariably laying down a solid educational foundation, and securing the careful training of the scholars who flocked to them. To each mission were attached a public school, in which Christian doctrine, literature, and ecclesiastical and secular music were taught, and wherever unusual capacity was evinced, the missionaries gathered those boys together in their own houses, and there instructed them how to make mental prayer, to practise virtue, to avoid and overcome sin, and excite the spirit of penance. Every Friday the boys went in procession to the churches, singing psalms and motetts. In this way, the fervour generally induced by corporal austerities, and the generous, uncalculating devotedness flowing from the continual thought of Christ's Passion, sprang up in full vigour from the very beginning of the missions, and ripened to its legitimate harvest, while _to die for Christ_ became the habitual aspiration of the child-neophytes of Japan. Meanwhile, no foreboding of coming reverses, or dread of trials which might prove fatal, hindered the generous missionaries from their work. Like the Apostles and their early successors, they went about from day to day, literally fulfilling our Lord's commands to carry neither purse nor scrip, nor to provide two coats, nor to abide in any one place, except for the good of the souls around them. When persecutions sprang up in one town or territory, they took their crucifixes and their breviaries in their hands, and went on to another, doing whatever good was nearest at hand, and leaving all the consequences of it to God to make fruitful or not. As in the early ages of the Church, noble women were continually raised up to do great things for Christ, and to show forth that perfection of love in weakness and childlike faith by which good women so peculiarly glorify God. One of them, Maria Kiogscou, gained two sons, a daughter, and a daughter-in-law to the faith, and her house became the centre of good works and alms-deeds, and a place of meeting for all the upper classes in Osaka, most of whom either actually declared themselves Christians, or shielded and helped those who did. Another noble lady named Julia, being accustomed to frequent the houses of the nobility at Meaco, baptized great numbers of other ladies with her own hands, and instructed a crowd of young people in Christian doctrine. One fact, strikingly like those of the first centuries of the faith, is told of a Japanese physician, who happening to read a book lent by one of the missionaries to a friend of his, became convinced that there was only one true God, but as the book was not one of doctrine, he learnt no more than this for four years. Every morning and evening he knelt down and prayed to the "one true God," and as soon as he knew what to do, he applied for instruction at Osaka, and was baptized. The persecution, sometime brooding, broke out first in Fingo, and the governor, with assumed gentleness, issued certain papers for all his subjects to sign. Those who firmly refused were seized, carried away from their homes, and banished. They must have taken refuge on some other governor's territory, or on a wild border-land, for the band of exiles built themselves miserable straw-wattled huts, and there lived as they could, without food or necessaries, and deprived of all countenance and sympathy whatever, as any one speaking to them was threatened with severe punishment. In this condition, their courage and constancy was unbroken, and as soon as it was possible, a Japanese Priest, Father Luis, visited them in the disguise of a peasant, and comforted them very much. The bishop then sent them books and other things, with beautiful letters, exhorting them to persevere, looking to the reward they would surely earn. Some of the letters written in return are very touching and beautiful, expressing the strongest desire for martyrdom, and humbly wondering that any among themselves should be reckoned worthy of so great a grace as to be "the first fruits of Japan." They were at length allowed to depart to the town of Nangasaki, where they were received with tenderness by the bishop and clergy. Scarcely had the exiles reached this asylum, ere another edict was published in Fingo, commanding all the remaining Christians to apostatize. Death was to be the penalty of a refusal; and two noblemen, named John and Simon, were chosen as examples of severity to the rest. Both were friends of the governor to whom the order had been intrusted, and he did what he could to save them. "If they would but _feign_ compliance with the king's decree," or "have the ceremony privately performed at their own houses," or "bribe the bonze to allow it to be supposed that he had received their recantation,"--each of these alternatives was as eagerly urged as it was indignantly rejected. The execution of John took place in the presence of the governor; and from the chamber, still reeking with the blood of one friend, he went to the house of the other on a similar mission, and with equal reluctance. Simon was quietly conversing with his mother when the governor entered; and the latter could not refrain from beseeching that lady to have pity upon them both, and by advising compliance with the king's commands, to spare herself the anguish of losing a son, and himself that of imbruing his hands in the blood of a friend. The appeal was made in vain; and the governor left the house, indignantly declaring that by her obstinacy she was guilty of the death of her son. Another nobleman entered soon afterwards, charged with the execution of the sentence. Jotivava was a friend of Simon's, and he proceeded with what heart he might to his sad and revolting duty. Knowing his errand well, Simon received him with an affectionate smile, and then prostrated himself in prayer before an image of our Saviour crowned with thorns, while his wife and mother called for warm water that he might wash,--a ceremony the Japanese always observe upon joyful occasions. His wife Agnes, falling upon her knees, besought her husband to cut off her hair, as a sign that she never would marry again. After a little hesitation, he complied with this request; prophesying, however, that she and his mother would soon follow him to heaven; and then, accompanied by the three _Giffiaques_, or officers of the Confraternity of Mercy, whom he had summoned to be present at the execution, they all entered the hall where it was intended to take place. Michael, one of the Giffiaques, carried a crucifix; the other two bore lighted torches; and Simon walked between his wife and mother, while his disconsolate servants brought up the rear. Simon and his friends recited the litany; and then, bowing before a picture of our Saviour, until his forehead touched the ground, the nobleman, who acted as executioner, took off his head at a single blow. Foreseeing that her own death would speedily follow upon his, Agnes and her mother continued in prayer, the three Giffiaques remaining in attendance, in order to be able to assist at their execution; and, in fact, twenty-four hours had not elapsed before it was told them they were to die on the cross; the officer who came to acquaint them with their sentence bringing with him Magdalen, the wife of John, and Luis, a little child whom the latter had adopted as his own, both of whom were condemned to a similar fate. With eager joy the prisoners embraced each other, praising, and thanking God, not only that they were to suffer for Jesus, but also that they were to suffer on a cross like Jesus; and then, robed in their best attire, they set off for the place of execution in palanquins which the guards had provided for the purpose. The Giffiaques walked at their side. Jane, the mother of Simon, besought the executioner to bind her limbs as tightly as possible, that she might thus share the anguish which the nails inflicted upon those of Jesus; and she spoke from her cross with so much force and eloquence, that the presiding officer, fearing the effects of her words upon the people, had her stabbed, without waiting for the rest of the victims. Luis and Magdalen were tied up next. They bound the child so violently that he could not refrain from shrieking; but when they asked him if he was afraid to die, he said he was not; and so they took and set him up directly opposite his mother. For a brief interval the martyr and her adopted child gazed silently on each other; then, summoning all her strength, she said, "Son, we are going to heaven: take courage, and cry, 'Jesus, Mary!' with your latest breath." And again the child replied, as he had done before when, on leaving their own home, she had made him a similar exhortation, "Mother, you shall be obeyed!" The executioner struck at him first, but missed his aim; and more than ever fearing for his constancy, Magdalen exhorted him from her cross, while Michael, standing at its foot, spoke words of comfort to him. But the child needed not their urging; he did not shriek again, nor did he shrink, but waited patiently until a second blow had pierced him through and through; and the lance, yet reeking with his blood, was directly afterwards plunged into the heart of his mother, whose sharpest pang had probably already passed on the instant when the son of her love expired before her. And now the fair and youthful Agnes alone remained, kneeling, as when she first had reached the place of execution; for no one yet had the courage to approach her. Like the headsman of her namesake, the loveliest child of Christian story, her executioners could only weep that they were bid to mar the beauty of any thing so fair; their hands were powerless to do their office; and finding at last that no one sought to bind her, she went herself and laid her gently and modestly down upon her cross. There she lay, waiting for her hour, calm and serene as if pillowed on an angel's bosom, until at length some of the spectators, induced partly by a bribe offered by the executioner, but chiefly by a bigoted hatred of her religion, bound her, and lifted up her cross, and then struck her blow after blow, until beneath their rude and unaccustomed hands she painfully expired. For a year and a day the bodies were left to hang upon their crosses, as a terror to all others of the same religion; but Christians were not wanting to watch the blackening corpses, and, with a love like that of Rizpah, the mother of the sons of Saul, to drive from thence the fowls of the air by day, and the beasts of the field by night; and finally, when the period of prohibition was expired, reverently to gather the hallowed bones to their last resting-place in the church of Nangasaki. The Giffiaques were the next who felt the tyrant's rage. The governor himself urged on their punishment, for the loss of his friends had made him furious; and, attributing it entirely to the fact of their religion, he resolved to wreak his vengeance upon all others who professed it. "What shall I do with these men?" he cried, in a kind of savage perplexity, upon being told that the Giffiaques had rather courted than evaded their imprisonment: "Death they rejoice in, as in the acquisition of an empire, and they go to exile as a slave to freedom. The cross is a royal throne, which they mount with pleasure and occupy with pride. I will therefore contrive for them a fate which shall make death, under any form whatever, a boon to be desired, but not to be attained." Within the city walls there was a prison which the king had constructed for the reception of his debtors. Open on every side, its inmates were exposed both to the curious gaze of the passing crowds, and to the suffering of alternate heat and cold, as summer or winter revolved over their heads. There, huddled together in this enclosure, the prisoners lay, not upon mats, nor yet upon the damp cold earth, which in comparison would have been a mercy, but upon heaps of horrible filth, the accumulation of many years; for by a hideous cruelty of invention, the monster would never permit the cleansing out of these loathsome places, hoping by the disgusting condition of their dungeon to extort a speedier payment from his victims. Into this den of suffering the governor cast the three Christians whom he had selected for his prey, never doubting that they would be soon subdued by the anguish of a life more terrible than the most lingering and painful death; and so for years the Giffiaques lingered on, breathing this infected air--pillowed, sleeping and waking, on the loathsome dung which matted all the pavement, feeding upon such dry crusts and filthy water as their jailors chose to give them; until at length one among them died, and then the tyrant, weary of such willing victims, commanded the other two to be cut in pieces. According to the usual custom of Japan, their children were condemned to suffer with them; and however hateful such a practice must appear to the natural heart of man, yet was it ever to the martyrs a most welcome boon; for theirs was a Christian as well as a parental love, teaching them to set the spiritual above the temporal welfare of their children, and therefore rather to rejoice in, than simply to meet with calm submission, that double condemnation which, by uniting the fate of their little ones with their own, snatched them from any future chance of perversion, and put them at once in possession of their heavenly kingdom. One of these little victims was sleeping when they came to fetch him: he was only six years old, and so tiny, that he had to run as fast as he could in order to keep up with the soldier who conducted him to execution; yet, so far from being frightened at his fate, he even gazed without dismay on the disfigured corpses of his father, uncle, and cousin, who had all suffered ere he reached the spot; and then, kneeling down and joining his hands together, looked up smiling in the face of him who was to lay him at their side. That look disarmed his executioner. The man suddenly sheathed his sword, declaring that he had not the heart to perform his office; and when two others sought to do it for him, they also burst into tears, as that innocent smiling face met their downward gaze; nor was the deed accomplished until a common slave, compelled by force to the odious duty, literally hacked and hewed the poor infant to pieces. While these scenes, and scenes like these, were constantly recurring at Fingo, the kingdom of Firando was likewise giving its quota of martyr-triumphs to the Church; Damian, a blind man of Amangucchi, being almost the first to lay down his life for the faith. From the time when the Jesuit fathers were forcibly driven out of that city, the entire management of the infant mission had devolved upon this poor old man, whose life was henceforth passed in preaching, catechizing and baptizing, visiting the sick, and burying the dead, and doing as much of the work of a zealous missionary as could be accomplished by any one lacking holy orders. This was sufficient for the tyrant, and Damian received his choice between Christianity and death on the one hand, and on the other apostasy and life, with all that could make life most desirable to the heart of man. The brave old Christian was not long in making his choice; and he died for a testimony to the faith, as he had lived for its propagation, his body being cut to pieces, in order to prevent the other Christians from collecting his relics for more honourable interment. His death was the signal for innumerable other massacres in this and other kingdoms of Japan; but nowhere was the heathen enmity more unrelentingly displayed than in the once flourishing and Christian kingdom of Arima. The king of that country, Michael, was mean, heartless, and ambitious, and exerted his authority and power every day in committing fresh acts of cruelty against the Christians of Arima. Under the guidance of his chief minister Safiori, he had already pulled down the churches, overthrown the crosses, sent hundreds of the principal Christians into exile, and banished the Jesuit fathers, to whose influence he attributed their constancy in the struggle; and having thus, as he hoped, destroyed every landmark to which they could confidently look for guidance, he published an edict commanding them all to embrace idolatry or die. At the first mutterings of the coming storm, the Christians, by general consent, had enrolled themselves in a confraternity, styled especially "of martyrs," because, beside the usual practices of prayer, fasting, and penance, common to all similar associations, the members pledged themselves to suffer loss of property, banishment, or martyrdom itself, faithfully and joyfully, for the name of Jesus. This confraternity afterwards extended itself over other parts of Japan; and it was even adopted by the little children, who were destined to play nearly as prominent a part in the coming persecutions as their parents themselves, and to whom it was therefore given by the Jesuit fathers, with rules and practices adapted to their tender years. Thus prepared and strengthened for the struggle, the Christians waited in patient courage its commencement; and they had not long to wait. Michael sent first for a nobleman of the name of Thomas, renowned for his prowess both by sea and by land, and with every art of persuasion in his power, sought to induce him to yield obedience to his orders. The blunt soldier listened impatiently to the miserable sophisms of his chieftain, and then flatly told him, that as a soldier would be deserving of death for deserting his colours, so he should consider himself the most despicable of human beings, if for fear or favour of earthly monarch he could desert that King of kings to whom on the day of his baptism he had sworn allegiance; ending (so great was his indignation that he could not contain himself) with a rough speech, to the effect that he hated traitors as he hated treason, and would prefer death itself to the baseness of committing the one, or of being associated with the other. Such a speech to such a man the Christian well knew could only be uttered at the hazard of his head; no sooner, therefore, had he left the royal presence, than he sent for one of the Jesuit fathers, then lying hid in the city, and prepared himself for death. When urged by his friends, for his own sake, and for the sake of his family, who would otherwise be involved in his ruin, to seek safety by flight, he answered with characteristic spirit, "that so far from fleeing martyrdom, he would go to the end of the earth to seek it; and that he loved his children all too well to think of depriving them of a blessing which he coveted for himself above the empire of the world." The next day the governor of the city invited him to dinner (so strangely do they manage these affairs in Japan); and Thomas, well aware of his approaching fate, took an affectionate farewell of his wife and children before accepting the ominous invitation. While he sat at table, his host presented him with a sword, asking his opinion as to its capabilities for the decapitation of a human head. Thomas, looking at it carelessly, pronounced it well made, and fitted for such a work; whereupon the governor receiving it out of his hands, stabbed him dead on the spot. A few hours afterwards his brother, quite as uncompromising a Christian as himself, suffered a similar fate; his mother Martha and his two young sons were also condemned; while his wife and daughter were, by a caprice of mercy, or perhaps of cruelty, exempted from the sentence. Very different from the ordinary effects of such opposite judgments were the feelings elicited by them on the present occasion: those who were to die blessed God, in an ecstasy of pious joy, that He had called them to suffer for the faith; while she who was to live--a widow, and now all but childless--gave way to an agony of grief at the double loss she was destined to endure. While she wept over her cruel lot, Martha called her grandchildren, and embracing them tenderly, told them, that as their father had died for Jesus Christ, so she and they were now to do the same, and then to go and live with him in heaven. The children quietly answered, "that there was nothing which they wished for better;" asking, at the same time, "when it was to be." "Just now," she said; "so go and take leave of your mother, and prepare yourselves for death." With smiling countenances, the children hastened to obey; and having distributed their toys among their playfellows, and made some parting presents to their nurses, they clothed themselves in the white robes which Martha had taken care to provide for the occasion, and knelt before their mother, saying "Adieu, dear mother; we are going to be martyred." She was weeping at the instant as if her very heart would break; but fearing to discourage her children, or cast the shadow of her own maternal grief over their coming hour of trial, she embraced them, saying, "Go, dear children; and remembering Him who died for you, tread courageously in the footsteps of your father and your uncle. Behold them stretching out their arms to help you; behold the saints and angels with crowns prepared to set upon your heads; behold Jesus Christ Himself inviting you to His most sweet embraces; and when you reach the place of execution, show yourselves to be indeed His followers by your contempt of death. Fall on your knees, loosen your collars, join your hands, bow down your heads, and cry out Jesus! Mary! with your latest breath. Oh, how wretched am I that I cannot be with you in that hour!" Then, hiding her face in the arms of her little ones, the poor mother burst into an uncontrollable fit of weeping, moving the very soldiers to such compassion, that, fearful of yielding to their feelings, they tore the children from her embraces, and almost threw them into the palanquin which was to convey them and their grandmother to the place of execution. During the short transit thither, that venerable Christian took care to occupy the little victims in prayer and pious ejaculations; nor did she cease her guardian-care when they reached the fatal spot; for she stood and saw them one by one butchered before her eyes, and then, advancing with a grave and stately pace, she in her turn submitted to the sword. After this execution, eight of the principal citizens of Arima were summoned to the presence of their king, and there commanded to abjure the faith; while he, persecuting tyrant as he was, had the face to tell them that he only required an external submission, since he too was in heart a Christian like themselves, though compelled for the present by the emperor's orders to conceal his faith. Five out of the eight agreed to this infamous proposal; but four of them afterwards sincerely repented. The others were not to be cajoled out of their convictions, and were consequently condemned with their families to the penalty of fire. As soon as their sentence was made known at Nangasaki, one of the Fathers came privately to Arima to give spiritual succour to the captives, and thousands of Christians also flocked from every part of the country to witness their execution. Never before perhaps had the Church presented such a spectacle to the world; and possibly never will she offer such another again. For three whole days that vast multitude remained camped in the open fields, patiently waiting for the execution of their brethren; but their presence struck terror into the heart of the craven king; and dreading lest they should either rescue the prisoners or seize upon the town, he faltered in his purpose. It never occurred to him that they of whom he feared such things would as soon have thought of robbing him of his material crown as of depriving the martyrs of their palm; they had, in fact, been careful to come without even their ordinary weapons of defence, in order to avoid the possibility of a doubt as to their peaceable intentions; and no sooner did they suspect the cause of the delay, than some of the gravest of their number waited on the governor to explain that they were merely there to witness the ceremony, and to promise that there should be neither tumult nor resistance if they were permitted to remain. Thus encouraged and reassured, preparations for the martyrdom went on apace. A wide plain just beneath the castle of the town was chosen for the purpose; the prisoners were confessed and communicated by a Jesuit father; and on the day appointed they came forth, dressed in their robes of ceremony, and with their hands tied behind their backs, accompanied by upwards of 40,000 Christians, bearing lights in their hands and garlands on their heads, and singing the Litanies of our blessed Lady as they went along. Among the victims was a boy not more than eleven years old, and a young girl called Magdalen, who having already made a vow of virginity, had always led a life holy and pure as that of the martyr-virgins of old. These children, as well as their elder companions, all affectionately embraced the stakes to which they were afterwards tied; then Gaspar, the chief of the Confraternity of Martyrs, unrolling a banner upon which was displayed a figure of the Son of God, bound like themselves to a pillar, made them a brief exhortation to perseverance; and even as he was speaking, fire was set to the piles of combustible materials, which had been laid at a considerable distance from the martyrs, for the cruel purpose of prolonging their tortures. As the first gleam of this fearful element of death shot upwards to the skies, the entire multitude fell with one accord upon their knees; and still, as the fire drew near its victims, the plain re-echoed with the oft-repeated "Jesus! Mary!"--"Jesus! Mary!" of the spectators, who sadly struck their breasts in penance for their own sins, and to obtain the grace of perseverance for their brethren. Nearer and nearer yet it hurried; but even above the roar of the rapidly-approaching flames, and the sighs and lamentations of those who watched them, the voice of the martyrs might be heard praising God, and animating each other to constancy and courage. At length the fiery sea had reached them, and their cords were burst; and then every eye was riveted on the child, to see whether he would stand of his own free will in that burning scorching furnace. A moment's pause--he leaves his stake; but it is only to run through the dense flames, until he has reached and flung his arms around his mother; while the young Magdalen avails herself of her freedom to stoop to the burning embers, and picking up the living coals, set them as a garland of roses on her head. She died almost in the very effort; but the mother of the child James, with a heroism of even perhaps a higher order, found strength in the midst of her own tortures to speak words of courage to her little one, until death released them from their sufferings. The flames had scorched the bodies, but had not consumed them; and they were carried off, together with the blackened and half-burnt stakes, as precious relics, by the assembled Christians. The bodies were laid to rest in the church of Nangasaki; where over their honoured graves was afterwards erected a monument, telling alike of their heroic end, and calling upon all who read to follow in their footsteps. Enraged at finding himself foiled by the constancy of the Christians, the emperor resolved to banish them by hundreds out of Japan; and in this sentence the Jesuit and Franciscan fathers were formally included. Fortunately most of the former, in anticipation of some such event, had been dispersed throughout the country in various disguises: but it was impossible for those living openly in the college to evade it; and a sad day it was, both for them and for their flock, when they found themselves forced to depart from a Church, which in sunshine and in storm they had now governed for upwards of fifty years. They had dwelt in peace at Miako, even when persecution was rife in other kingdoms of the country; and their college had become the resort alike of Christians and of heathens. Such was the respect and reverence in which they were held, even by their most determined enemies in the court of Japan, that they were permitted to say a farewell Mass publicly in their church, and afterwards to receive the adieus of their sorrowful flock. Vast multitudes attended on this occasion; and when High Mass was over, the Jesuits proceeded to the mournful ceremony of stripping the altars, the people weeping piteously all the while, and the fathers nearly as broken-hearted as themselves. All was at length removed that could tempt to sacrilege; the sacred vessels and robes of ceremony were confided to the care of such of the Christians as could best be relied on, the church-doors flung open for all who might choose to enter; and the next morning the fathers, under a guard of soldiers, were far on their way to Nangasaki, whence they were to embark. At that town they were joined by numbers of prisoners, both clerical and lay, collected from all parts of the country, and finally sixty-three Jesuits, with a crowd of converts of every age, sex, and condition were embarked for Macao; while twenty-three others, besides a proportionate number of Franciscans, Dominicans, and Augustinians (for each of these orders had now missions in Japan), were dispatched to the Manillas. In the same year (1614) in which this wholesale banishment took place, the Christians had to mourn for the death of Luis Cerquiera, bishop of Japan. He is said to have literally died of a broken heart for the ruin that had fallen on the infant Church committed to his love and care. It is true, indeed, that from the first he had undertaken the task in times of great difficulty and danger; but at the period of his arrival, though there was much to discourage, there had also been much to strengthen and to cheer his heart. From Nangasaki, where he had fixed his residence, he had succeeded in making innumerable journeys to the most distant parts of the kingdom; and withersoever he went, thousands had flocked around him for instruction and confirmation. No kingdom or city was too distant, no road too untrodden, no mountains too high or too rugged to be accessible to his zeal; and when he returned from these weary wanderings, he could sit down at Nangasaki, and feel that there at least Almighty God had the entire homage of all hearts; for not only was it wholly inhabited by Christians, but the five parishes into which it was divided were governed by native pastors, the truest test of the conversion of a people, and one which only the Catholic Church has ever succeeded in presenting to the world in the history of the propagation of the Christian faith. Sadly had this fair scene changed within the last few years, and rapidly had all that was brightest and best disappeared from the picture. At the moment of the bishop's death the emperor had fulminated his final edict against the Christians. Fingo, Amangucchi, and Firando were already deluged in their blood; Nangasaki was the head-quarters of Safiori, their implacable foe, and an army of ten thousand men had been let loose upon Arima, to exterminate religion by fire and sword. Whenever any of these troops were sent into a district, a judgment-seat, surrounded by a palisade, was set up in the most public place of the city; the best known among the Christians were then dragged by the hair and cast into the enclosure, thrown upon the ground, trampled underfoot, beaten until they were half-dead, and their legs, by a cruel contrivance, broken between two pieces of wood; the most intrepid were then put to death, and their bodies, after having been cut into pieces, were cast to the birds of prey. At Cochinotzu sixty Christians were taken, five by five at a time, with their hands tied behind them, lifted high up into the air, and then dashed upon the ground with such violence, that blood gushed from their ears, eyes, and mouths. Many of them were dreadfully lacerated, others had all their bones broken; and as if this were not already sufficient torture, they were afterwards pricked and pierced all over their bodies with sharp instruments. The governor all the while was exhorting them with affected compassion to spare themselves further torments by renouncing their religion; but when he found that they were deaf to his entreaties, he proceeded to inflict a new punishment, so horrible that it is difficult to conceive the cruelty of the mind by which it was invented. The victim was made to lie flat on the ground, and a stone, which four men could scarcely lift, was placed on his back; and then, by means of a pulley, with cords attached to the legs and arms, he was raised from the earth in such a manner that the body was bent completely backwards, the limbs cruelly crushed and broken, and in many instances the eyes forced out of their sockets; the fingers and toes of the victims were then cut off, their teeth knocked out, and if the eyesight yet remained, it was next destroyed. Many were not beheaded until death had indeed become a mercy; while others, less fortunate, after undergoing a yet further mutilation of their persons, were compelled in the midst of their agony to climb up and down a flight of stairs, for the amusement of their tormentors; after which they were consigned to the care of their friends, until one by one, as the strength of their constitutions more or less prolonged the struggle of death, they passed from their painful martyrdom to the crowns prepared for them in heaven. The bloody scenes of Cochinotzu were only a sample of those which likewise desolated Aria, Obama, Simabara, Swota, and every other city of note in the kingdom of Arima; but more especially the capital, where Safiori presided in person over the cruelties which he had invented for his victims. To prevent any further addition from without to the number of the missionaries already in the kingdom, all the ports of Japan were irrevocably closed against the vessels of Europe, with the exception indeed of Nangasaki and Firando, which were always under the rigid surveillance of the officers of the emperor. It was also made death to be convicted as a priest, or to be discovered in the exercise of priestly functions; death to introduce a priest into the kingdom, and death to give him shelter; death not only to the person so exercising hospitality, but likewise to his ten next neighbours, with their innocent wives and children,--a reward being generally offered for the discovery of those who, in any of these ways, should have incurred the penalties of the law. From that hour the life of each individual priest was at the mercy of every one to whom he had been previously known; while the lives of those who sheltered him were equally liable to be forfeited to the curiosity or cupidity of such of their neighbours as might chance to discover the fact of their delinquency. To Father John Baptist Machades, a Jesuit, and Father Peter, a Franciscan, the honour was accorded of taking the first place on this long list of priestly victims. The former was going to Omura by order of his superior, when he and his catechist were made prisoners at Goto, and sent by sea to the capital. Contrary winds, however, detaining them at Canomi, the magistrates of that place received Father Machades on his landing with every mark of courtesy and kindness. An unrestricted communication was permitted with the Christians, who flocked to him in crowds; and after the due administration of the Sacraments he made them a most spirit-stirring address, in the course of which he told them that, at seven years of age he had been moved by some secret impulse to a strong desire of preaching the Gospel to the Japanese. These duties having been fulfilled, the father returned, of his own accord, to his prison on board the ship. But so great was the veneration inspired by his virtues, that the sailors refused to bind him as he wished; and thus unshackled, and almost unwatched, he remained until he arrived at the prison of Omura. There he found a Franciscan father lying under the same sentence of death as himself. Having confessed and communicated each other, they set out to the place of execution,--each carrying his crucifix and exhorting the crowd as they went along, until the final moment came, when each affectionately embraced the other, and then in peace and joyfulness submitted to his sentence. About the same time six other religious commenced a still longer captivity in the prisons of Omura. Three were Dominicans, one a Franciscan, and the two others Jesuits, Father Charles Spinola, and Ambrose Fernandez, a Brother of the Society. When first they were taken prisoners they had been thrown for greater security into a sort of subterranean cave where they lay huddled together and deprived of light. It was not until the close of the year 1622, that an order arrived for the removal of these religious and other Christian prisoners to Nangasaki, and for their subsequent execution. They were thirty in number as they marched out of Omura; and partly by sea and partly by land, each with a rope round his neck, and an executioner at his side, they went on their way to the old city of the Christians. It was not considered prudent that they should enter Nangasaki, so the inhabitants went forth in multitudes to meet them, and flinging themselves at their feet, begged with many tears their blessings and their prayers; and thus escorted, the martyrs stood at length upon a high hill between the city and the sea. A moment of suspense followed. Some victim or spectator was yet wanting to the solemnity; and every eye was directed towards the town, from whence a troop of persons might be descried approaching,--men, women, and children; thirty of the former, with, of course a larger proportion of the latter. Every doubt as to the ultimate destination of this company soon vanished when it was seen that they were dressed in their robes of ceremony, and with looks of gladness and of holy joy were ascending to the calvary of the Christians. One of the new-comers had been guilty of giving shelter to a missionary; the others were his ten next neighbours, with their families, besides the wives and children of some previous martyrs; and of this almost incredible number of victims, amounting to upwards of a hundred, some were to be beheaded, while others were to perish by the slower martyrdom of fire. A throne had been erected overlooking this scene of slaughter, and when the governor had taken his seat upon it, those who were to undergo the sentence of fire were fastened to their stakes, but loosely, in order that they might escape if only they chose to apostatize, and then the executioners prepared to decapitate the others. Among these last was Isabella, the widow of the man in whose house Father Spinola had been taken captive, and her son Ignatius, a child now about four years old, but at that time a new-born infant, whom he had baptized on the very evening before his arrest. From the stake to which he was already bound, the father had been exhorting both natives and Portuguese to perseverance, telling them, almost in a spirit of prophecy, that they need not look for any cessation in the persecution, which would go on increasing in fury from day to day; when chancing to see Isabella standing in the crowd, and anxious for the fate of her child, he suddenly cried out, "Where then is my little Ignatius?" The mother held him up, exclaiming, "Here he is, my father, ready and glad to die for Jesus;" and then addressing the infant, she bade him ask the blessing of the good father, who in the waters of baptism had conferred upon him a spiritual life infinitely more precious than that which he was now about to forfeit for his God. Instantly the little creature fell upon his knees, joining his tiny hands together, as if he would supplicate the blessing of the father. So touching in its simplicity was this little scene, that the crowd, already interested by the movement of the mother, now broke into such open murmurs of compassion, that the officers were obliged to proceed at once with the execution, in order to prevent the possibility of an attempt at a rescue. Two or three heads had already fallen close by the child's side, and now his mother's followed; yet it was observed that he neither shrank nor changed colour, but his turn being next, he fell upon his knees, loosened (for there was no one to do the office for him) with his infant but untrembling fingers the collar that would have impeded the aim of the executioner, and without a cry or murmur submitted to the sword. The remaining victims were speedily despatched; and their heads having been placed opposite to such of their companions as were to die at the stakes, fire was set to the piles of wood by which the latter were surrounded. With the usual diabolical ingenuity of the Japanese pagans, the faggots had been placed full five-and-twenty feet from the stakes; and whenever the fire was seen to gain too fast upon its victims, water was cast upon it, that inch by inch they might taste the full agony of the sentence to which they had been condemned. Many of them died from the mere effects of the heated atmosphere;--among others, Father Rimura, a Japanese priest, after having lived for full three hours in the midst of the flames; and Father Spinola also, whose body was afterwards found unburnt, and wrapped in his cassock, which was literally glued to the flesh by the combined action of the heat and of the water which had been cast upon his person. Terrible beyond expression as their sufferings must have been, two only of this heroic company showed the slightest symptoms of being even conscious of its anguish. Both were Japanese, and very young; and both simultaneously, and as if from an absolute physical inability to endure such frightful torture any longer, rushed out of the flames, and threw themselves at the feet of the governor, imploring his mercy. They did not, however, ask for life; they asked only for an easier and quicker death. But, poor as the boon was, it was denied them, save upon the condition of apostasy, which they would not accept; and again they were flung back into the flames. This martyrdom, which was distinguished among the Japanese as the "Great Martyrdom," on account both of the rank and number of its victims, had been preceded by another at Miako, which took place under circumstances of peculiar barbarity. One of the victims was in daily expectation of giving birth to a child; nevertheless she was included in the sentence which sent her husband, a nobleman of the highest rank, and their six young children, with upwards of forty other Christians, to the stake. The tragical situation in which she was placed had however, no terrors for this heroic woman. She employed her prison-hours in preparing robes for herself and her children to wear at their execution; and when she was brought to the destined place, calmly, and without assistance, she stepped from the cart, and throwing a rich mantle over her shoulders, prepared to suffer with a modesty and composure that won her the admiration of all beholders. It was dark night before fire was set to their several piles; but as soon as the smoke had cleared away, the martyrs were seen by the light of the bright flames amid which they stood, with eyes fixed on heaven and their forms motionless and erect, as though they had been figures chiselled out of stone. In very horror the spectators were silent, and the stillness and hush of death was upon the midnight air, when suddenly from out of that fiery furnace a flood of melody was poured,--men and women and children singing the praises of the living God as sweetly, and with notes as true as though the red and thirsty flames had been but the dews of heaven upon their brows. The sighs and prayers of the assistants, which could no longer be repressed, the shouts and execrations of the soldiers and executioners, soon mingled with this death-song; and these and the dark night, and the fierce fire that illuminated its gloom, now flashing intolerable light upon the victims, now glancing lividly on the pale faces and shrinking forms of the densely-packed spectators, altogether formed an union of sights and sounds that alternately swayed the feelings to terror and compassion. But the music of that marvellous choir died gradually away; the sudden failing of each gladsome voice, the silent sinking of each upright form, telling that another, and yet another had yielded to their doom, was marked by the watchers with redoubled lamentations; though their tenderest sympathies were still reserved for the mother dying in the midst of her little ones. From the cross to which they had bound her, Thecla (for such was her name) still kept her eyes fixed upon her children, animating them by gentle smiles and words of comfort to suffer well; while the youngest, an infant only three years old, she held with superhuman courage in her arms during the whole of the terrible scene that followed. Her own anguish had no power to extort a single sigh from her lips; but those who watched her wept to see the useless efforts which she made to diminish the sufferings of her babe. She caressed it, soothed it, hushed its cries, wiped away its tears, sought with her own hands to shelter its tender face from the terrible contact of the fire, and died at last with the little victim so closely folded to her bosom, that it was afterwards found almost impossible to separate the bodies of the mother and the child. These martyrdoms are only specimens of those which during this period continually took place in Japan. Some Christians were crucified, others burnt, others beheaded; numbers again branded upon the cheeks and forehead with the sign of the cross, their fingers and toes cut off, and their eyes forced out; and thus maimed and helpless, they were sent back to their families, who (to their honour be it written) never failed to receive them with all the more pride and affection, the more deeply and hideously they had been disfigured for the sake of Jesus. The great majority of the martyrdoms hitherto recorded had been accomplished by fire; but now a different mode of torture was to be pressed into the service. Water was called into requisition; and Father James Caravail, with several lay Christians, was the leader of many heroic confessors who perished from cold. They were left in the first instance, for three hours in freezing water, during which time one of them died; the rest on being carried back to prison and threatened with the martyrdom of fire in case of perseverance, cried out with one voice; "Oh, happy we, to pass through fire and water to the place of our repose!" Instead of the stake, however, the next day they were again placed up to their necks in water; while, the better to attempt them to apostasy, tents, warm baths, and comfortable clothing, were made ready on the banks of the pool, and as near as possible to the spot where their sentence was to be carried into execution. As the day advanced, the water froze more and more; and heavy drifts of snow beating continually upon them, added greatly to their agony. Scarcely able to endure it any longer, one among them sobbed heavily for breath; but Father Paul hearing it, cried out, "Have patience, son, for yet a little while; and these torments will be changed into everlasting repose." At the sound of the father's voice, and his cheering words, the poor victim regained his courage, and soon afterwards happily expired, at the very moment when another reduced to a similar extremity, exclaimed, "Father, my course is nearly finished." "Depart then," replied the latter; "depart in peace to God, and die in his holy grace." Thus one by one they perished in this icy grave; and at length the father, who through the live-long day had cheered his fellow-martyrs to the combat, was left to suffer and to die alone. Night had already closed in heavy and chill around him; and with the exception of his guards and some few faithful Christians, none were there to watch him, for the spectators had all retired to their comfortable homes, and it was not until just midnight, that after fifteen hours of stern endurance, he bowed himself down to the frozen wave, and placidly expired. This martyrdom took place in the year 1624, and shortly afterwards four more religious were burnt at Faco; in June of the same year the provincial of the Jesuits, with eight of the Society, perished in a similar manner; and in the following month Lewis Xanch, a Dominican, was put to death at Omura. We have mentioned these executions of priests without alluding to the almost weekly massacres which took place among the lay converts, merely to show the virulence and success with which the missionaries were now every where pursued; and when it is remembered that at the commencement of the persecution there were, besides the Jesuits, but a few secular priests and about thirty religious of other orders, in Japan, and that no reinforcement had succeeded in reaching them from without, words will not be needed to point out the deadly nature of the blow which the Xoguno was at last inflicting on the church. Having said thus much, however, upon the fate of the religious, it would be a crying injustice to the rest of the Christians to pass over their sufferings altogether in silence. The Xoguno having once explicitly declared himself opposed to their religion, the inferior monarchs, as a matter of course, vied with each other in their efforts to uproot it. It was only on an express condition to that effect that Bugendono, the new governor of Nangasaki, had been installed in that office; and taunted continually by his rivals for courtly favour with his little success, he employed himself day and night in the invention of more ingenious barbarities to effect his purpose. The object being rather to produce apostasy than death, every species of torture was made as slow as possible in its execution, and was generally eked out with intervals of rest and refreshment--a thousand times more dangerous to the perseverance of the victim than the sharpest continued agony. Some were placed in deep pits, and there nearly buried alive; while executioners appointed for the purpose, slowly, and with blunt weapons, sawed off sometimes the arms and sometimes the head, salt being thrown on the bleeding wound to sharpen its anguish; physicians were also at hand, whose business it was to prolong the life of the sufferer for as many days as possible, by carefully ascertaining the amount of his physical strength, and administering cordials when it was beginning to fail. Others were hung with their head downwards in a pit, where, with the necessary precaution of occasional bleeding, they were made to exist for a considerable time in all the sufferings of an apoplexy; while others again, by means of a funnel forced far down into their throats, were compelled to swallow enormous quantities of water, which was afterwards forced out of the body by violent pressure. Even the Dutch, themselves more than half the authors of these evils, speak with horror of the deeds which they witnessed at Firando. The nails of the victims were violently wrenched off, holes bored into their legs and arms, great morsels of flesh torn out of their persons by the insertion of hollow reeds which were turned round like a screw, burning brimstone and sulphur forced by long tubes up their noses; and they were, besides, frequently compelled to walk about with executioners holding lighted torches close to their persons. Nor were these cruelties inflicted singly, or upon solitary and more noted delinquents. By tens, by fifties, by hundreds at a time, they were assembled for their trial; one torture rapidly succeeding another, and each new one being so cunningly contrived, that the slightest word of complaint, the most trivial movement of resistance when pain had become almost intolerable, was to be considered as a signal of apostasy, and was greeted by cries of "He is fallen! he is fallen!"--the favourite and most significant words by which the heathen expressed at once the fact of a Christian's recantation, and their own opinion of the weakness through which he had succumbed. Under circumstances such as these, it is not so wonderful that many failed, as that hundreds and thousands persevered to the end, winning their crown by a long-suffering and patience which, even in the primitive Church, were never surpassed. Men offered themselves willingly to every torture which Eastern ingenuity could devise, or reckless disregard of human life put into execution. Women looked calmly on while their infants perished, and then followed with gladness and joy in the same path to glory. At a city near Omura, a brave Christian plunged his hand into the burning coals, and never withdrew it until commanded to do so by the tyrant who had taunted and dared him to the deed; while at Firando fifty young Christians were made to kneel naked upon living embers, on the express understanding that the most involuntary expression of pain should be considered as apostasy; and having by their unflinching firmness baffled the closest scrutiny of those who watched them, were sent back to die, half roasted as they were, to their several homes. In one place eighteen infants were put to death in the presence of their parents; at another, a child only seven years old, suspected with the rest of his family of the concealment of a priest, lived for as many days in the midst of the torture they inflicted on him, without once flinching or failing in his heroic resolution. To each fresh invention of their cruelty he only answered, probably to avoid being betrayed into imprudent disclosures, "Jesus, Mary! Jesus, Mary! How I long to be in heaven with my God!" Nor could other words be extorted from his lips, even when, in their despair of succeeding, they cut open the little creature's shoulders, and poured boiling lead into the wound; and finally, he and his family were burnt alive, without a single one among them having been induced by weakness to give evidence against the priest. Opposed to constancy such as this, every ordinary mode of torture must have seemed only useless and unmeaning; but at length another was hit upon, and one so barbarous in its nature, that no tyrant, however cruel or ferocious, who had hitherto ruled in Japan, had ever thought of inflicting it on the most guilty of his subjects. Between Nangasaki and Sima-bara lies a mountain, bald, bleak, and treeless, whitening beneath the masses of cinders with which it is every where covered, and with a thick and stifling smoke, which can be seen at a distance of several leagues, for ever rising from its summit. The soil that covers its steep ascent is every where soft and spongy, often burning and trembling beneath the footsteps; while so strong is the smell of sulphur which it continually exhales, that it is said no bird can live, or will even attempt to fly within breathing distance of its tainted atmosphere. Deep and unfathomable pools of boiling water lie hidden amid the clefts and fissures which split this gloomy mountain into peaks and precipices of various sizes; but one, deeper and more unfathomable than all the rest, instead of water, is filled with a mixture of sulphur and other volcanic matter, which seethe and bubble and boil within its dark abyss, emitting all the while so horrible a stench as to have gained it the title of the "Mouth of Hell." One drop alone of this fearful fluid is sufficient to produce an ulcer on the human flesh; and when Bugendono thought on the terrible nature of the chastisement he could thus inflict, and upon the fear and superstition with which the Japanese always regarded the sulphurous waters of Unsen, and the mysterious cavern in which they were produced, he felt that he could not have hit upon a more efficient or infallible means for the intimidation of the Christians, and the extirpation of their creed. At the very time when he came to this resolution, there chanced to be dispersed throughout Arima a band of faithful confessors, upon whom all his previously-invented tortures had been tried in vain; and for this reason the governor considered they would prove the fittest objects for his new experiment. Paul Uciborg was the chief, both for courage and virtue, of this troop of victims; and he had already witnessed the massacre of every member of his family, down even to the youngest of his children, who, in company with fifteen other Christians, had been thrown into the sea, after having first suffered every possible cruelty that could barbarously be inflicted upon them. "Which shall I begin with?" asked the executioner, as he approached the two youngest of Paul's children for the purpose of chopping off their fingers. "That is your affair, not mine," the old Christian answered bluntly, probably to conceal a softer feeling. "Cut off which, and as many, as you please." "And oh!" sighed little Ignatius, as, in the very spirit of the brave man his father, he watched his brother's fingers falling joint by joint beneath the knife of the executioner; "how beautiful your hand looks, my brother, thus mutilated for the sake of Jesus Christ, and how I long for my own turn to come!" The child who made this exclamation was but five years old; yet without shedding a tear, he afterwards endured a similarly protracted amputation, and then silently and unresistingly suffered himself to be cast into the ocean. The father and about twenty of the remaining Christians, who were reserved for a different fate, were, after the massacre of their companions, brought back to shore; although so frightfully crippled, from the mutilations they had already undergone, that one at least of their number was compelled to be carried to his house in a kind of coffin on men's shoulders. The governor had hoped that their ghastly appearance would terrify others from following their example; but he soon found that Jesus was more easily and more eloquently preached by such wounds and such deeds as theirs, than by any words that could be uttered; and in his vexation at the numbers who flocked to them for edification and encouragement, he condemned them, as we have seen, to the boiling sulphurs of Unsen. As the little company of martyrs approached this terrible chasm, one among them, at the bidding of the executioner, and in the spirit of an Apollonia, rushed forward at once, and flung himself into its depths; but Paul, with a more measured courage, commanded the others to restrain their zeal; while to the heathens who taunted him with cowardice, he contented himself by saying, "that they were not masters of their own lives, which God having given, God alone had a right to take away; and that, in reality, there was more real courage in calmly waiting the approach of death, than in rushing into its arms in such a way as to put an end to all its terrors in a moment." Silenced by this answer, so calm and noble in its genuine Christian courage, the executioners proceeded to their duties; and having tied each of the martyrs by ropes, in order to prevent their falling entirely into the chasm, they lowered them one by one into its seething contents. Some were destroyed at a single plunge; others, by being quickly withdrawn, were reserved for the torment of a second immersion; but old Paul, who suffered last, and who had excited the hatred of the heathens by the courage with which it was believed he had inspired his companions, they managed, with dexterous cruelty, to let down three several times into the abyss before life was altogether extinguished; and each time as he rose to the surface he was heard to exclaim: "Eternal praise be to the ever adorable Sacrament of the Altar!" After this first trial of its power, the scalding sulphurous waters of Unsen became a favourite mode of torture for the Christians. Men, women, children, and infants were sent hither in crowds. Some expired after a single plunge; others after two or three successive immersions; others, again, and the greater number, were with a more elaborate cruelty sprinkled with the boiling liquor day after day, often for a period of thirty days together, until their bodies were one mass of sores and vermin, and they died from the effects of this universal ulceration. [Illustration] February 6. S. BUCOLUS, _B. of Smyrna, circ._ A.D. 100. S. ANTHOLIAN, _M. at Clermont, circ._ A.D. 255. SS. DOROTHY, _V. M._, AND THEOPHILUS, _M., at Cæsarea, in Cappadocia, circ._ A.D. 303. SS. SYLVAN, _B. M._, LUKE, _D. M._, AND MUCIUS, _Lect. M. at Emesa_, A.D. 312. SS. MAEL, MELCHU, MUN, AND RIOCH, _Bishops in Ireland, end of 5th cent._ S. AVENTINE, _Ab. H. at Troyes, circ._ A.D. 538. S. VEDAST, _B. of Arras, circ._ A.D. 540. S. AMANDUS, _B. of Maestricht_, A.D. 684. S. INA, _K. of the West Saxons, about_ A.D. 728. S. GUARIN, _Card. B. of Preneste_, A.D. 1159. S. ALDERICK, _Swineherd at Fussenich_, A.D. 1200. S. BRYNJOLF, _B. of Skara in Sweden_, A.D. 1317. S. DOROTHY, V. M. (ABOUT A.D. 303.) [This Saint, so famous in Western Martyrologies, is unknown to the Greeks. Her Acts are not to be relied upon.] This holy martyr was a native of Cæsarea in Cappadocia, and in the persecution of Dioclesian she was brought before the governor Sapricius. After the usual interogatories she was stretched on the _catasta_, an iron bed over a slow fire. Then as laid thereon, the servant of God exclaimed, "Do thy worst, I fear not pain, if only I may see Him, for whose love I am ready to die." Sapricius said, "Who is he whom thou lovest?" Dorothy answered, "Christ, the Son of God." Sapricius asked, "And where is this Christ?" Dorothy replied, "In His omnipotence He is everywhere; in His humanity he is in Heaven, the Paradise to which He invites us: where the woods are ever adorned with fruit, and lilies ever bloom white, and roses ever flower; where the fields are green, the mountains wave with fresh grass, and the springs bubble up eternally." [Illustration: S. AGNES. S. CECILIA. S. DOROTHY. After Angelica de Fiesole. Feb. 6.] Then said a lawyer present, named Theophilus, "Thou spouse of Christ, send me from Paradise some of these apples and roses." And Dorothy answered him, "I will." Now the governor pronounced sentence against her, that she should lose her head. And as she knelt, and the executioner prepared to smite, she asked him to delay the stroke for a moment. Then she prayed, and suddenly there stood by her a beauteous youth, in dazzling raiment, who held in his hands three apples, and three red roses, the like of which earthly garden had never produced. Then Dorothy said, "I pray thee take these to Theophilus, and tell him that they are what I promised him." And at that instant the sword of the executioner fell, and she entered into the joy of her Lord. Now Theophilus, the advocate, was at home with his companions; and to them he told with great laughter how he had asked the virgin to send him the flowers and fruit of the Paradise to which she hoped to enter. And, all at once, as he spake, the angel stood before him, with grave face, and held out to him the wondrous apples and roses, and said, "Dorothy sends these to thee, as she promised." Then Theophilus believed, and going before the governor, he confessed Christ, and was sentenced to death; and so died, receiving the baptism of blood. Relics at Arles; where March 28th is observed as the feast of their translation; also at Cologne, in the churches of S. Gereon, S. Severinus, S. Andrew, S. Paul, SS. John and Cordula, &c.; the head at Prague. In Art, S. Dorothea is easily recognized by the sword she holds, and the apples and roses at her side, or in her hand. SS. MAEL, MELCHU, MUN, AND RIOCH, BISHOPS. (END OF 5TH CENTURY.) [Inserted in the Sarum Martyrology by Richard Wytford from the Irish Kalendar, in these words: "In Ireland the feast of S. Mel, S. Melkus, S. Munys, Bishops, and Riockus, Abbot: these four were brothers, nephews of S. Patrick, by his sister S. Darerca, all famous for their singular holiness and great miracles." They are also given by Colgan. Authorities:--Joselyn's Life of S. Patrick; The Life of S. Bridget, &c.] These four brothers are said to have been the sons of Darerca, the saintly sister of S. Patrick, and his coadjutors in his apostolic labours in Ireland.[21] S. Mael, or Mel, who was ordained Bishop of Ardagh, in Longford, lived there in a poor cell with his mother's aged sister, Lupita. She watched and prayed till midnight, and then woke her nephew, who continued the watch and prayer till day broke, and she retired to bed. S. Mel died about the year 488, and was buried at Ardagh. S. Melchu was the companion of his brother Mael, in his missionary labours and preaching, and lived with him in the monastery founded by Mael at Ardagh, and was ordained Bishop by his uncle Patrick. S. Mun, or Munis, after having for a long time accompanied S. Patrick, was raised to the episcopate, and founded the Church of Forgney in Longford, in the year 486. S. Rioch, after many labours in the Gospel, with the leave of S. Patrick, retired to the island of Inisbofinde in Lough-ree; and thus devoted the remainder of his days to a contemplative life, in a monastery, which he founded in the island. S. VEDAST, B. OF ARRAS. (ABOUT A.D. 540.) [Roman, Gallican, Belgian, and other Martyrologies. Double feast with octave at Arras. In the Salisbury Martyrology, he is inserted on this day under the name of S. Zawster. In many Kalendars, SS. Vedast and Amandus are commemorated together. Authorities:--A very ancient life, published from an imperfect copy by Bollandus. Another life revised or rewritten by Alcuin, (d. 804). Another erroneously attributed to the Venerable Bede.] Clovis, King of the Franks, began his reign in 482, on the decease of his father, Childeric. He extended his dominions in every quarter by force of arms, and in the space of thirty years conquered part of Germany, and nearly the whole of Modern France. In the early part of his career, the King of the Franks signalized himself by repelling with success the attacks of Syagius, the Roman general, who had been ordered to advance and check his progress. This impediment in the path of victory removed, the five ensuing years were actively employed by Clovis in the reduction of Soissons and of Rheims; in a successful expedition against the Thuringians and other neighbouring nations, in the course of which he extended his territories from the Seine to the Loire; and lastly in the conquest of the Alemanni, at that time the possessors of Switzerland. The Alemanni attacked the Franks with the fury of men actuated by despair, and were irrevocably defeated on the field of Tolbiac. The great soul of Clovis had long been agitated by religious doubts--should he cling to the gods of his family, from whom he claimed to be lineally descended, or should he submit to the faith of Christ which his gentle wife, Clothildis, made so attractive to his better nature? His ancestral gods alarmed him. To their anger he attributed the death of his first-born; he hesitated to abandon them for that "new, unarmed God," said he, "who is not of the race of Thor and Odin." He dreaded also his people, of whose consent he wished to be assured. The peril of the field of Tolbiac constrained him to decide. When the scale of success seemed turned against him, he vowed, if he conquered, to adopt the faith of Christ. The victory remained in his hands, and he hastened to fulfil his vow. On his return from the subjugation of the Alemanni, he passed through Toul, and asked for some priest who might instruct him in the Christian religion. S. Vedast was presented to him for this purpose. Whilst he accompanied the king at the passage of the river Aisne, a blind man begging on the bridge besought the servant of God to restore to him his sight. The saint, divinely inspired, prayed, and made the sign of the cross on his eyes, and he immediately recovered it. The miracle confirmed the king in the faith, and moved several of his courtiers to embrace it. But Clovis was not a man to yield at once. Nicetius of Trèves, writing to the grand-daughter of Clovis says, "You have learnt from your grandmother of happy memory, Clothildis, how she attracted to the faith her lord and husband, and how he, who was a most shrewd man, would not yield, till he had been thoroughly convinced of the truth." Clovis was baptized at Rheims, whither in after times the kings of France went to be crowned. S. Vedast assisted S. Remigius in converting the Franks, and was consecrated by that prelate bishop of Arras, in the year 500. His diocese, together with that of Cambrai, which was also entrusted to his care, had once been the seat of a flourishing Christian community, but the ravages of the Vandals and Alani had eradicated every trace of Christianity, save that here and there was to be seen a ruined church, overgrown with briars, and nettles waving where the altar had stood. Vedast wept over these sad relics, and made earnest supplication to God to enable him faithfully to accomplish his mission, and once more to plant the seed of life in this devastated field. His own Cathedral Church of Arras he found had become the den of a huge bear, which came shambling towards him, as he knelt weeping over the broken altar stair. The saint started up and drove the wild beast forth, and bade it never again enter to pollute by its presence that holy ground; a type, surely, of that brutality which had invaded and desolated the Church of God in that land, which he had come to exorcise. He ruled the diocese for forty years, and died on Feb. 6th, in, or near, the year 540. All Martyrologists are agreed as to the day of his death, but historians differ as to the year. The name of S. Vedast has gone through strange transformation. He is called Vaast, Vaat, Wâst, Wât; and in French, Gaston; in English, Foster, a corruption marked by Foster Lane, (properly S. Vedast's Lane) in the City of London. Relics at Arras, of which he is patron, and at S. Waast. In Art he appears with a child at his feet, or with a wolf, from whose mouth he saves a goose, a popular tradition being to the effect that he saved the goose belonging to some poor people from the wolf that was running away with it; or, with a bear. S. AMANDUS, B. OF MAESTRICHT. (ABOUT A.D. 684.) [Roman Martyrology, also an ancient addition to the so-called Martyrology of S. Jerome, which addition is earlier than 741. Bede (so-called), Notker, Rabanus, German and Belgian Martyrologies, &c. In the Church of Maestricht, the 6th Feb. is celebrated as the Feast of S. Amandus and the other Bishops of Maestricht, with a double. His ordination and translation are celebrated variously on 26th October, or on 20th, 25th, 27th, and even on the 19th Sept. Various other days commemorate translations of his relics. Authorities:--An ancient anonymous life. Another by Bandemand, monk of Elno, about 680; another by Milo, monk of Elno, d. 871; another by Philip Harveng, d. after 1180; another by Justus, the Archpriest, about 1128.] This great apostle of Flanders was a native of Herbauges, near Nantes. His father, Serenus and his mother, Amantia, were of noble family, and were wealthy. But Amandus, renouncing all these advantages, left his paternal house, in his youth, and retired into the isle of Oye, near La Rochelle, where he embraced the religious life in a monastery which was there. His father, who looked to his worldly advantage, followed him, and threatened to disinherit him, if he did not quit the habit he had assumed. He replied, "My father, I care not for thy property; all I ask of thee is to suffer me to follow Jesus Christ, who is my true heritage." This reply did not satisfy his father, and Amandus, to escape his solicitations, fled the island, and visited the tomb of S. Martin at Tours. Kneeling by this shrine, with many tears, he besought God to grant that he might never more return to his native place. Shortly after he received the clerical tonsure. He soon distinguished himself among the clergy of Tours; but the fame of S. Austragisle drew him to Bourges, when this holy bishop, together with S. Sulpicius, then his archdeacon, and afterwards his successor, received him with great joy. They built him a little cell, near the cathedral, in which he lived as a recluse, to die and be buried to the world. There, lying on ashes, clothed in sack-cloth, and eating only barley-bread, and drinking water alone, he spent fifteen years. It was the preparation for his future apostleship. At the end of these years, Amandus felt an inspiration to visit Rome. It was at the tomb of the great Apostles, that he was to receive his call and mission. One night, as he prayed with fervour before the door of the basilica of S. Peter, because it was locked for the night, the prince of the apostles appeared to him, and ordered him to return instantly to Gaul, and to preach the glad tidings of salvation to the heathen there. Amandus obeyed promptly, and on his return, he preached with such success, that King Clothaire II. ordered him to be consecrated bishop, that he might preach with more authority, but without any particular see, over which he was to exercise jurisdiction. The new apostle maintained his dignity by his virtues. He knew how to make the poor love him, and the rich respect him. He found means of ransoming young slaves, whom he baptized, instructed in letters, and ordained; sending them through the country to minister the Word of God. S. Amandus chose for his mission Belgic Gaul, especially the territory of Ghent, where idolatry still held its sway. The people there had rejected former missionaries; their savage manners, and inflexible obstinacy seemed insurmountable barriers to the stream of Grace. Amandus visited S. Acharius, bishop of Noyon and Tournai in whose diocese Ghent then was; and besought him to obtained for him letters from King Dagobert, to oblige his idolatrous subjects to listen to Christian instruction. The zeal of the prince seconded that of the missionary, who, in spite of this powerful support, had much to endure; but his patience and sweetness triumphed over every obstacle, and his virtues were more efficacious in persuading the people, than all the orders of the king. Whilst S. Amandus was at Tournai, he learnt that a Frankish Count, named Dotto, had condemned a robber to death. He hastened to implore pardon for the unhappy man, but was unsuccessful, and the robber was executed. But Amandus ran to the gallows and cut down the man, and bore the body home, laid it on his bed, and passed the night in prayer. Next morning, he summoned his clerks, and bade them bring him water. They supposed this was for the purpose of washing the corpse, before burying it; but, what was their surprise on entering the chamber, to find the man, who had been hung, alive and conversing with their bishop. He still bore the marks of the rope, but they disappeared when Amandus had washed them. Bandemand, who relates this incident, says that he heard it from the mouth of an eye-witness. The fame of this miracle spread through the country, and many of the heathen were so convinced thereby, that they cast away their idols, and submitted their necks to the yoke of Christ's commandments. After having reaped an abundant harvest in Flanders, Amandus resolved to preach the faith to the heathen races in Germany; and he made a second journey to Rome, to obtain approval of his design. Accordingly, armed with the blessing of the successor of S. Peter, he went to the Sclavonic races, hoping to convert them to the Gospel, or to receive the palm of martyrdom. But finding that the people were neither sufficiently docile to receive the Word, nor ferocious to shed the blood of him who declared it, he quitted these ungrateful people, and returned to Gaul, where he found the opportunity of suffering for the truths he announced, which had been denied him among the barbarians. Dagobert, the king, was guilty of gross licentiousness; he had, at once, three wives, not to mention Gomatrudis whom he had repudiated at Reuilli, nor Ragntrudis, the mother of Sigebert III.; and beside these wives he had numerous concubines. S. Amandus boldly rebuked him for the scandal he caused, and for his audacity in so doing was ordered into exile. He retired to the territory of Charibert, who reigned on the further side of the Loire; but was soon recalled. A son was born to Dagobert, in 630, and the king desired to have the child baptized by some holy bishop, who might draw down on it the benediction of heaven. He remembered the fearless Amandus, who alone had had the courage to reprimand him for his iniquities; showing, thereby, that if princes do not always love those who tell them disagreeable truths, they can sometimes respect them. Amandus obeyed, and came to salute the king at Clichy, near Paris. As soon as Dagobert saw him, he cast himself at his feet, to ask him pardon for what was passed. After which he said: "The Lord has given me a son, though I merited it not. I pray thee, baptize him, and regard him as thy spiritual child." Amandus, at first, refused the honour, but at the entreaty of Ouen and Eligius, two pious laymen of his court, he yielded and baptized the child at Orleans, in the year 630; Charibert, his protector in exile, standing as sponsor at the font. The child was called Sigebert, and is reckoned among the Saints.[22] In the year 647, Sigebert, who loved him as a father, and was now king of Austrasia, obliged him to accept the bishopric of Maestricht, and thenceforth he exchanged his missionary work over scattered districts for the supervision of a single diocese. But he soon found that this was not his vocation, and that it was easier for him to convert the heathen than to discipline the clergy. He therefore visited Rome, after holding his diocese three years, and obtained the sanction of the Pope to his resignation of it into the hands of S. Remacle, then abbot of Stavelot. Amandus, relieved of the burden of his diocese, visited Gascony, to preach to the Basques who were still heathen, but met with little or no success. He therefore returned to Flanders, where he supervised the many monasteries he had founded. The date of his death is very uncertain; some place it in 661, others in 676, and others in 684. S. INA, K. C. (ABOUT A.D. 728.) [Anglican Martyrology of Wyon, Ferrarius, Menardus, &c. Authorities: Malmsbury and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.] Ina, king of Wessex, which consisted of Wiltshire, Hampshire, Gloucestershire, Dorsetshire, and Oxfordshire, was the son of Cerdic, and his wife was Ethelburga. He reigned as much as thirty-eight years; from 688 to 726. He put together the laws of the West Saxons, so as to form a code, and this is the oldest code of West Saxon laws that we have, though there are Kentish laws which are older still. He also divided the kingdom into two bishoprics. Hitherto all Wessex had been under the bishops of Winchester; but now that the kingdom was so much larger, Ina founded another bishopric at Sherborne in Dorsetshire. He also in 704, founded S. Andrew's Church in Wells, which is now a Cathedral. And at Glastonbury Ina did great things. He built the monastery and richly adorned it, he also translated to it the bodies of SS. Indract and his companions. Ina fought with the Welsh under their King Gerent, and also with the other English kings. He fought against the men of Kent, and made them pay him much gold for his kinsman Mul, whom they had slain. He had also wars in Sussex and East Anglia, and in 714 he fought a great battle with Ceolred, king of the Mercians, in which neither gained the victory, at Wanborough in Wiltshire. Towards the end of his reign, Ina seems to have been troubled by some rebellions among his own people, and also to have been less successful than before in his wars with the Welsh. In 726 he gave up his kingdom and went to Rome and died there. William of Malmesbury relates a curious story about the occasion of this which is deserving of record.[23] Ina once made a feast to his lords and great men in one of his royal houses; the house was hung with goodly curtains, and the table was spread with vessels of gold and silver, and Ina and his lords ate and drank and were merry. Now on the next day, Ina set forth from that house to go to another that he had, and Ethelburga, his queen, went with him. So men took down the curtains and carried off the goodly vessels and left the house bare and empty. Moreover, Ethelburga, the queen spake to the steward who had care of that house, saying "When the king is gone, fill the house with rubbish, and with the dung of cattle, and lay in the bed where the king slept a sow with her litter of pigs." So the steward did as the queen commanded. And when Ina and the queen had gone forth, about a mile from the house, the queen said to Ina, "Turn back, my lord, to the house whence we have come, for it will be greatly for thy good so to do." So Ina hearkened to the voice of his wife, and turned back to the house. There he found all the curtains and the goodly vessels gone, and the house full of rubbish and defiled with the dung of cattle, and a sow and her pigs lying in the bed where Ina and Ethelburga his queen had slept. So Ethelburga spake to her husband, saying, "Seest thou, O king, how the pomp of this world passeth away? Where are all thy goodly things? How foul is now the house which but yesterday was thy royal abode! Are not all the things of this life as a breath, yea as smoke, and as a wind that passeth away?" Then the old king entered into himself, and he resolved to lay aside his dignity and rule, and to devote the rest of his days to the custody of his soul. So he and his wife went to Rome to pray at the tomb of the Apostles, and Pope Gregory II. received them gladly; and he died there. [21] The story is without any foundation in fact. The brothers were probably no relations to S. Patrick. According to the fabulous history of the relatives of S. Patrick, his pretended sister Tigridia had seventeen sons all bishops, priests, or monks, and five daughters all nuns. Some of Darerca's sons are attributed to Tigridia, and some to Liemania. Lupita, another pretended sister is said by some to have remained a consecrated virgin, by others to have been the mother of bishops. [22] See Feb 1. [23] It is only found in Malmesbury's English Chronicle, lib. i., c. 2; and is not found in all copies of Malmesbury. [Illustration: S. Amandus. See page 184.] February 7. S. CHRYSOLIUS, _B. M. in Flanders_, A.D. 302. SS. ADAUCTUS AND COMPANIONS, _MM. at Antandris, circ._ A.D. 303. S. AUGULUS, _B. M. in London_. SS. ONE THOUSAND AND THREE MARTYRS AT NICOMEDIA, _circ._ A.D. 302. S. MAXIMUS, _B. of Nola_ (_see_ S. FELIX, _Jan. 15_). S. THEODORE, _M. at Heraclea_, A.D. 319. S. PARTHENIUS, _B. of Lampsacus, 4th cent._ S. MOSES, _B. of the Saracens in Arabia, end of 5th cent._ SS. MOSES AND SIX MONKS, _MM. in Egypt, 5th cent._ S. JULIANA, _W. at Bologna, circ._ A.D. 435. S. TRESAN, _P. C. of Mareuil, 6th cent._ S. LAURENCE, _B. of Manfredonia, circ._ A.D. 550. S. FIDELIS, _B. of Merida, circ._ A.D. 570. S. MELDAN, _B. at Peronne, end of 6th cent._ S. RICHARD, _C. at Lucca_, A.D. 719. S. LUKE THE YOUNGER, _C. at Soterio, in Greece, circ._ A.D. 946. S. ROMUALD, _Ab. Founder of the Order of Camaldoli, circ._ A.D. 1027. S. CHRYSOLIUS, B. M. (A.D. 302.) [Molanus in his additions to Usuardus. Ferrarius in his General Catalogue of Saints. Authorities:--The Lections in use in the Church of Comines.] On this day at Comines, in Flanders, is celebrated the Feast of S. Chrysolius, the patron of the church, who is said to have founded the first sanctuary of the B. Virgin in Flanders. This saint, a native of Armenia, accompanied S. Piatus and S. Quentin in their apostolic mission to France and Belgium. From Tournai he started on a preaching expedition through Flanders, but the pagans cut off his scalp, in derision of his tonsure, at Vrelenghem, and he died at Comines, two leagues distant, on the river Lys. His body was taken up by S. Eligius, and is, to this day, honoured in the collegiate church there, originally erected under the invocation of Our Lady. S. AUGULUS, B. M. [Martyrology of S. Jerome, falsely so-called, and others.] Little or nothing is known of this Saint, but all Martyrologies place him in Britain, and at Augusta, which is probably London. It is questionable if he was a martyr. S. THEODORE OF HERACLEA, M. (A.D. 319.) [Roman Martyrology on this day. By the modern Greeks on Feb. 8th, but anciently on the 7th. The Acts purport to be written by one Augarius, a notary; he says, "I, the Scribe Augarius, was present, and saw these cruel punishments, and hearing also the pain of his stifled sighs, casting aside my parchments, I threw myself weeping at his feet." He says also that he wrote this account at the request of the dying martyr. If this be not a forgery, the original Acts have been sadly tampered with. To the account of the martyrdom is prefixed--very probably by a later hand--a story of the fight of S. Theodore with a dragon, which belongs to the Western version of the story of S. George. These Acts certainly existed in their present condition in 550, for they were then translated into Latin.] S. Theodore of Heraclea, who is not to be confounded with S. Theodore of Amasea, surnamed Tyro, also a warrior martyr, is numbered among the Great Martyrs by the Greek Church. Theodore of Heraclea was a general of the forces of Licinius, and governor of the country of the Mariandyni, whose capital was Heraclea of Pontus. Here he was sentenced to death by order of the emperor. After having been scourged, and his flesh torn by hooks, and burnt with fire, he was for a short while attached to a cross, and then beheaded. Relics at S. Saviour's, Venice. S. Theodore is regarded as one of the chief patrons of the Venetian republic. The body of this glorious martyr was brought from Constantinople to Venice by Mark Dandolo, in 1260. In Art, S. Theodore appears as a warrior in armour, very generally trampling on the dragon. He is to be distinguished from S. George by being represented on foot, whereas S. George usually appears mounted. S. PARTHENIUS, B. OF LAMPSACUS. (4TH CENT.) [Greek Anthology and Menæa. Authority:--A life written by one Christinus, a contemporary, and native of Lampsacus, and probably a disciple.] S. Parthenius, a native of Melitopolis, as a boy, occupied his leisure in fishing. He sold the fish he caught, and gave the proceeds to the poor. He was afterwards ordained Bishop of Lampsacus, and having obtained from Constantine authority to overthrow the heathen temples and idols, he destroyed those in his city. The story is told of him that having ordered an evil spirit to leave a man who for many years had been possessed, the evil spirit asked first to be given an habitation. "I know thee," cried the demon, "thou wilt cast me out, and bid me enter into a swine." "Nay, verily," answered the saint, "I will offer thee a man to dwell in." Then the devil came out of the man, and the Bishop said, "Come now, thou foul spirit, I am the man. Enter into me if thou canst." Then the devil cried out that he could not abide in a tabernacle kept holy to God, and so fled away. SS. MOSES, AB. AND SIX MONKS, MM. (5TH CENT.) [Salisbury Martyrology of Wytford, and all other Western Martyrologies. This S. Moses is not to be confounded with the S. Moses, B. among the Arabs, nor with S. Moses the Ethiopian. Authorities:--The Lives of the Fathers of the Desert and Rufinus.] This holy abbot ruled a community of monks at Scete, in Egypt. He was once sent for to judge a brother who had been overtaken in a fault; but he would not go. Then he was sent for again, and told that all the brethren awaited him. So he arose and filled a basket with sand, laid it on his back, and went to them. Then they asked, "Oh, Father! what art thou doing?" He answered, "My sons, all my sins are behind my back, following me, and I see them not; and shall I judge, this day, the sins of another man?" A party of Arabs fell upon him in his cell and killed him, together with six of his monks. S. TRESAN, P. C. (6TH CENT.) [Gallican Martyrology. Authorities:--Mention by Flodoard in his Hist. Eccl. Remensis, lib. iv. c. 9; and a life from the Lections of the Avenay Breviary; a life given in Colgan; all late.] Tresan, with his six brothers and three sisters, left Ireland, their native place, and settled at Mareuil on the river Marne, in France, where Tresan hired himself as swineherd to a nobleman. He was wont to drive the pigs to the door of a little church dedicated to St. Martin, and to stand at the door and listen to the recitation of Matins, and assist at the holy Sacrifice of the Mass. By this means he became gradually so thoroughly acquainted with the divine office, that S. Remigius, hearing of him, and having evidence of his sanctity, ordained him priest. The legend is told of him that one day having celebrated Mass in this little Church of S. Martin, where he had learnt the holy offices, he returned to Mareuil, but being weary, he thrust his staff into the ground, and laid himself down and slept. And when he woke up, behold the staff had taken root and budded. Then he left it there, and it grew to become a great tree. When he was dying, the Holy Eucharist was brought to him. He rose from his bed, and casting himself down on the ground, exclaimed, "Hail, most blessed hope, and most holy redemption! Hail, true flesh of Christ, to me precious above gold and topaz and all most goodly stones! Hail, most blessed blood of Christ, poured forth to ransom me, a sinner, and wash away my stains! Hail, Jesus Christ, defend me against the ancient enemy, that the prince of darkness secure me not! I pray thee, number me with thine elect." Then he received the holy Viaticum, and sighed, and his soul had fled. Relics at Pont-aux-Dames, in Brie. In Art he is represented with a budding staff. S. MELDAN, B. (END OF 6TH CENTURY.) Of this Irish saint and bishop, who left his native land and died at Peronne, nothing is known. His acts have been lost. Yet, at one time he must have been famous, for many churches are dedicated to him. He is sometimes called Medan. In the revelations of S. Fursey, reference is made to S. Meldan. S. RICHARD, C. (A.D. 719.) [Roman Martyrology. German Mart., and that of Sarum by Wytford. His life is to be gathered from the Acts of his sons SS. Willibald and Wunibald; the life of S. Willibald was written by his cousin, a nun of Heidenheim.] This saint was, according to the belief of the people of Lucca, a prince in Wessex; but there is not only no evidence that he was of royal rank, but there is strong contemporary evidence that he was merely a petty noble. Taking with him his two sons, Willibald and Wunibald, he undertook a pilgrimage to Rome; and sailing from Hamblewich, _i.e._ Southampton, landed in France. He made a brief stay at Rouen, and paid his devotions at all the principal shrines on his way through France. On his arrival at Lucca, in Italy, he was taken ill and died. He was buried in the Church of S. Fridian, there, where his relics are still preserved; and his festival is kept with singular devotion. See further the life of S. Willibald (July 7). [Illustration: S. RICHARD AND HIS SONS. From Cahier. Feb. 7.] [Illustration: FAMILY OF S. RICHARD THE SAXON. S. WALBURGA, Virg. Abbess. S. WUNIBALD, Abbot. S. WILLIBALD, Bishop. From a Drawing by A. Welby Pugin. Feb. 7.] S. ROMUALD, AB. C. (A.D. 1027.) [Roman Martyrology. Authority:--a life by S. Peter Damian written fifteen years after his death.] S. Romuald, who was destined to be the restorer of the religious life in Italy, came into the world, according to the most credible account, about the year A.D. 907, at a time when the universal lawlessness and corruption of life and manners which had overflowed Europe, had penetrated to the recesses of the cloister, and had filled the monasteries of his native land with unworthy monks, who made the religious profession a mere cloak for vice, or at best as a pretext for an idle self-indulgent life. He belonged to the noble family of the Onesti, the Ducal race of the state of Ravenna; he is said in his youth to have been much given to sins of the flesh, but nevertheless to have been strongly drawn inwardly towards God. It is said that when in hunting he got separated from his companions in the woods, he would allow his horse to come to a standstill, and overcome by the peaceful beauty of nature, would give way to reflections on the happiness of those to whom it was given to live retired from the world far from the clash of arms, the whirl of pleasure, and the struggles of civil life. The immediate cause of his forsaking the world was as follows. His father Sergius Onesti, a man of a proud and passionate disposition, and wholly given to worldly things, had a violent quarrel with a relative about the possession of a certain meadow; so resolutely determined was he to press his quarrel to the end, that perceiving Romuald to be but half-hearted in it, and more fearful of blood-guiltiness, than desirous for the victory of his house, he threatened to disinherit him unless he displayed more zeal in the cause. The relation being equally resolved, the dependents on both sides were armed, and a fight ensued; at which Romuald, in spite of his scruples, was obliged to be present. The relation fell by the hand of Sergius himself; and Romuald, horror-stricken at the crime, of which his enforced presence at its perpetration seemed to make him a partaker, fled to the Monastery of S. Apollinaris in Classe, intending there to expiate his guilt by a penance of forty days. During the performance of this penance he was by some means attracted to the society of a lay-brother in the monastery, and in the intervals of his penitential exercises had many conversations with him. This lay-brother, a truly spiritual man, perceiving in Romuald signs of a vocation to the religious life, strongly urged him to forsake the world altogether and at once. For this, however, Romuald was not yet prepared, and, without absolutely rejecting the advice of his friend, yet resisted, and put him off from day to day. At last one day in the course of a talk upon the visions of the Saints, the lay-brother asked him what he would give for a sight of the blessed martyr Apollinaris, the patron of the monastery. Romuald replied that for such a favour he would consent to forsake the world. That same night watching in prayer in the monastery church, they beheld a supernatural brightness issue from the high altar and fill the whole church. This was the precursor of the appearance of the blessed martyr, who came forth from the midst of the high altar habited in priestly vestments, and with a golden censer in his hand; with this he went round the church and censed each altar in its turn; and having done this, retired as he had come, leaving the church once more in darkness. His friend immediately claimed the fulfilment of the promise. But even a second vision of the martyr failed to overcome his reluctance, and he still held off. But one day praying in the church before this very altar, a sudden access of the love of God came over his soul. In a moment all his fears, all his lingering affection for worldly things vanished; he hastened to the brethren, and humbly besought them to receive him as a novice. This, however, in dread of his father's resentment, they refused to do; Romuald, once resolved, would yield to no difficulties, and betook himself at once to the Archbishop of Ravenna, laid his case before him, and asked for his help. The Archbishop, moved by the earnestness and fervour of the youth, took up his cause, and on his assurances of protection against the violence of Sergius, the brethren consented to receive him; and Romuald entered upon the course from which throughout a long life he was never to swerve, in which his ardour was to know no cooling, and which was to end in peopling many of the solitary places of Italy with refugees from the wickedness and perils of, perhaps, the most troublous time which Europe has ever known. He passed three years in this monastery in the strictest observance of S. Benedict's rule, in the daily practise of mortification, and incessant prayer. The greater part of the monks, however, were of a different mind. They bitterly resented both Romuald's literal interpretation of the monastic vow, and the rebukes of their laxity and unfaithfulness, which he did not hesitate to address to them; and at length, in their rage, conspired to murder him, by throwing him out of the dormitory window, near which it was his custom to pray in the early morning, while they were yet in their beds, and the door of the oratory was not yet open. Romuald, however, aware of their design, prayed that morning just as usual, and by the mere power of prayer, without other effort of his own, he escaped the threatened danger, and saved the brethren from the guilt which they meditated. Soon after, hearing by report of one Marinus, who was leading a hermit life in a desert in the Venetian territory, he resolved to retire from the fruitless struggle with the unfaithful monks, and to place himself under his guidance. He made known his desire to the abbot and the brethren, and craved permission from them to retire from the community, and this was granted with great alacrity. He immediately made his way to the neighbourhood in which Marinus dwelt, found him out, and was accepted by him as his disciple. Marinus, who was a man of singular simplicity of character, and most rigid in his asceticism, took in hand the training of his neophyte in good earnest. His first task was to teach Romuald to read; for up to the time of his forsaking the world his literary education had been altogether neglected. Master and pupil would go forth together to roam about the wild, and recite the Psalter, sheltering now under one tree, now under another, and sitting always face to face at their work. Romuald, wearied by incessant poring over his book, would sometimes yield to the overwhelming lassitude which came over him, and seek a moment's repose; on which Marinus would strike him smartly on the left side of his head with a roll which he held in his right hand. At last, quite unable to bear the pain, Romuald one day said to him humbly, "Master, if you please, strike me next time on the right side of my head, for I am becoming quite deaf in my left ear," "On which," says the biographer, "Marinus, marvelling at his patience, relaxed the indiscreet severity of his discipline." Before long they were joined in their solitude by Peter, Duke of Dalmatia, and a comrade of his, who had been moved to embrace the religious life. Romuald who, in time, had mastered the difficulties of the Psalter, kept so far in advance of his companions in devotion, and in the acquisition of every virtue, that they unanimously deferred to him in everything, and even Marinus, his whilom master, now became his scholar, and submitted to his direction in everything. The whole party maintained themselves by bodily labour, cultivating a piece of ground, all the time fasting most rigidly, but, as it would appear, living together in one common dwelling. However, reading one day in the Lives of the Fathers, that certain of the brethren in old time had lived a solitary life, fasting the whole week through, but on Saturdays and Sundays met together and relaxed the rigour of their fast, they at once resolved to adopt this way of life; viz., to live each in his own hut, apart from the rest, in silence and mortification, for five days of the week, and to allow themselves the solace of community life only on the Saturday and Sunday; and thus they lived for the space of fifteen years. Once, during this time, it is related that Duke Peter came to Romuald with a piteous complaint that he could not subsist on the half-cake,[24] which formed the daily allowance of the brethren, and urging that his huge and corpulent frame really required more sustenance. Whereupon Romuald, condescending to the weakness of a brother, and willing to hold out a helping hand to save him from falling, increased his allowance to three-quarters. Another occurrence tended greatly to increase the reputation of the hermit Saint. A peasant farmer in the neighbourhood, who had often ministered of his subsistence to Romuald and the brethren, was robbed of his only cow by the dependents of a certain Count, a proud and arrogant man. The poor man came to Romuald bewailing his loss with many lamentations. Romuald at once sent a messenger to the Count, beseeching him in all humility to restore his beast to the poor man. The Count turned a deaf ear to the message, sent back a haughty and insolent reply, adding moreover that he expected highly to enjoy the cow's sirloin at dinner that very day. But he had better have yielded to Romuald; for at dinner-time the meal was set before him, he inhaled its rich savour with a greedy joy, and at the first mouthful was choked and died miserably. Romuald's sojourn in the Venetian territory was brought to an end, by the death of several of his companions. On this he returned to the neighbourhood which he had left years before, and erected a cell for himself, in the marsh of Classe, in the place called "Pons Petri," removing it subsequently to the locality in which afterwards arose the church of the Blessed Martin "in sylva." Here he experienced many and violent temptations of the devil, who plied him sometimes with terrifying visions, sometimes with distressing doubts about the reality of his vocation, and his hope of final salvation. But as a good soldier of Jesus Christ he combated the evil one with the spiritual weapons of prayer and fasting, and meeting him boldly at every turn, repelled all his assaults. After a while, he removed again to another place, where he built a monastery in honour of Michael the Archangel, which he peopled with monks, he himself still living solitary in his cell. While he was living here, a friend one day sent him a sum of money, about £21 sterling, intending it as a relief to his bodily necessities. He immediately sent off a portion of the money to the brethren of a monastery which had been just burnt down, to help towards the rebuilding, and put the remainder away for some similar purpose. This coming to the ears of the monks at S. Michael's they were so enraged that they came down to his cell in a body, gave him a good beating, and drove him from the neighbourhood with insults and reproaches. Highly delighted with their exploit, they returned to the monastery, and made preparations to celebrate the occasion by a great feast. But their triumph was short; for the ringleader in the attack on Romuald, on his way to obtain some honey to make mead for the carouse, had to cross a bridge which overhung a furious torrent; in the midst of the bridge something tripped him up, he stumbled, and falling headlong into the stream, perished by the just judgment of God; and that very night the rest of the monks were all but buried in the ruins of their dwelling, which fell upon them as they were sleeping heavily after their banquet, and bruises and broken bones convinced them that they had made a bad bargain in revolting against Romuald's severe rule. After this, the martyr Apollinaris appeared to Romuald in a vision, and commanded him to return to Classis, and assume the government of the monastery there. He at once removed to the vicinity, probably taking up his quarters in his old cell. At this same time the brethren at the monastery being without an abbot were desired by the Emperor Otho III. to choose one for themselves. Their choice fell unanimously upon Romuald. The emperor himself went to announce his election to him, and to obtain his consent. He did not arrive at the cell until nightfall, and was glad to accept Romuald's invitation to spend the night there. The next morning the emperor broached the subject of the Abbacy. Romuald at first refused to listen to the proposal; but Otho threatening him with "excommunication and anathema from all the bishops and archbishops and the whole Synod of Council," he at last yielded, at the same time telling the emperor that the matter was by no means new to him, for that he had had a divine intimation of it some time before, and accompanied him to the monastery, where he was duly installed. Before long however, the brethren took offence at the severity of his rule, and began to repent of their choice. Perceiving this, Romuald, as eager to lay down his office as he had been backward to accept it, hastened to seek an interview with the emperor; and in his presence and that of the Archbishop of Ravenna, broke his rod of office, and formally dissolved the monastery, probably judging the traditions of laxity which had grown up in the place too strong to be disturbed except by the extirpation of the community. About this time, hearing of one Venerius, a holy man, who was leading a solitary life in great austerity, but not under obedience to anyone, Romuald sought him out and persuaded him to return to the monastery which he had forsaken in consequence of the persecutions of unworthy brethren, and seek permission of his abbot to live apart from the community. "If thou bearest the Cross of Christ," said he, "it yet remains that thou forsake not the obedience of Christ." Venerius took Romuald's advice, obtained leave from his abbot, and returned in great peace of mind to the beloved solitude. Romuald remained with him for some time, and gave him much needful instruction in spiritual things. It is a good illustration of the reality and thoroughness of the religious sentiment at that time, that men of the highest rank were found to submit themselves readily to the discipline of the Church. It is related that the famous Crescentius, Senator of Rome, had incurred Otho's displeasure, and apprehensive of the consequences, had taken sanctuary. Thammus, one of Otho's courtiers, had induced Crescentius by an oath of safe conduct to leave the sanctuary, and so to place himself in the emperor's power. The oath was violated, and Crescentius perished by the hand of the executioner. Before long the pangs of conscience drove both the emperor and his satellite to unburden their souls in confession to Romuald. He ordered Thammus to embrace the solitary life and "His every future year, In ceaseless pain and penance dree;" a command which was unhesitatingly obeyed; while Otho himself accepted a severe penance for his share in the crime, which was avenged on him later by his victim's widow. We now come upon a story which shows how Romuald's rule succeeded in training such as had the true vocation to be real heroes of the kingdom of heaven, and how the supernatural sanctity of his character impressed itself on his faithful followers. Boleslas, king of Poland, had besought Otho to send him a missionary to convert his subjects, a people then, as ever, noted for a wild and lawless ferocity. Otho at once appealed to Romuald, who communicated the matter to his disciples, explaining to them the perils attending the mission, and saying that he would lay no command upon any of them, but that if any were willing to go and meet danger and death for Christ's sake, he would gladly send him. At once two of his monks, by name John and Benedict, came forward and offered to go. Before they had been long in the country, they were set upon at midnight in their hut, and murdered for the sake of treasures which they were supposed to possess. In order to conceal their crime, the murderers set fire to the hut, hoping to consume the bodies of their victims with the dwelling. To their horror the flames refused to approach the bodies of the holy men, and even the hut, built as it was of light and inflammable materials, could not be made to burn. Trembling and terror-struck, they then attempted to fly from the place; but an invisible power compelled them to wander round and round the scene of their crime, and held them enchained to the spot until daylight. The matter came to the ears of the king, who went with his guards and apprehended them. The soldiers would have put them to death at once, but the king prevented them, saying that the criminals should be reserved for the judgment of the martyrs. With their hands tied together they were dragged into the hut, and forced up to the couch on which the bodies yet lay, when in a moment their bonds fell off; and the king, saying that the martyrs had forgiven and acquitted them, ordered them to be set at liberty. Meantime Romuald after vainly endeavouring to persuade Otho to lay down the sceptre, and retire from the world, and predicting his approaching death, which accordingly took place, had betaken himself into Istria, and built a monastery in the neighbourhood of Parenzo. Near this he lived, built into a cell, for two years, during which time he made great advance in piety and in knowledge of the Scriptures. At this time he experienced a great dryness of spirit, which caused him to long and pray earnestly for the gift of holy contrition. One day while in this state, singing the Psalter in his cell, the words "I will instruct thee and teach thee in the way wherein thou shalt go, and I will guide thee with Mine eye," came upon him with a strange light and force; his dryness of spirit vanished in a moment, he dissolved into tears, and from that day forward he never again experienced lack of contrition. His mission in Istria being accomplished, he prepared to return into Italy. But the bishop of Parenzo left no stone unturned to keep him in his diocese; when persuasion and entreaty failed, he resorted to force, and forbade anyone to let Romuald have a boat in which to make the voyage across the bay. Romuald, no way discomposed, sat down on the shore to wait, saying that other boats from Italy were on their way, and would soon come purposely to take him off. Before long the vessels made their appearance, with an invitation to Romuald to return; and in one of them the journey was safely accomplished. Immediately on his arrival, he founded a new monastery, and filled it with monks; labouring meanwhile with great zeal and success for the conversion of the people in the vicinity. One day there, as Romuald and the brethren were sitting in chapter, the brethren who had been left in charge of the door came running in to give the alarm that a thief was breaking into one of the cells. The monks ran to the place, and caught the robber in the very act. They brought him to Romuald to know what was to be done with him. "Well but, brethren," said the holy man, looking pleasantly at them, "I really do not know what can be done with such a rascal. If we put his eyes out, he won't be able to see; if we cut off his hands, he won't be able to work; or his feet--there will be no more walking for him. Bring him in, and give him something to eat, while we consider what _is_ to be done with him." And so says the story, "having ministered to his bodily wants, and given him a sweet and gentle reproof, he dismissed the robber in peace." About this time intelligence of the martyrdom of the blessed martyr Boniface reached Romuald, and inspired by the desire to win for himself the martyr's crown, he at once formed a plan to take a missionary journey into Hungary. But, before setting out, he proceeded to consolidate his order by the foundation of three new monasteries, one the parent house in the Val di Castro, and two others. Having appointed an abbot and priors over these houses, he obtained a commission from the Apostolic See for the conversion of the Huns, and set forth on his expedition, accompanied by a party of twenty-four monks; and such was the ardour and zeal that burned in the breasts of all his disciples to encounter death for Christ, that he had great difficulty to reconcile to their lot those whom he had decided to leave behind. Hardly, however, had they entered the confines of Hungary, when Romuald was seized with a mysterious malady, which arrested their progress; for as often as he attempted to renew his journey and push forward to his destination, his sickness so increased in severity, as to compel him to desist; whereas, whenever he only thought of giving up the enterprise and returning homewards, the symptoms abated and his strength returned. Judging this to be a divine warning, he resolved to retrace his steps. Two of the brethren returned with him; the remainder pursued their journey with Romuald's consent, though he warned them that the crown of martyrdom would be granted to none of them. Accordingly they met with all manner of persecution and ill-treatment from the barbarious Huns, but to none of them was it given to lay down his life for Christ. On his return, hearing that some one had obtained the abbacy of the monastery "in Classe," which would seem to have been reconstituted, by perjury and simony, he made all haste hither to rebuke the intruder, and exhort him to lay down his ill-gotten authority. The bad abbot in a rage attempted to murder Romuald, who was only saved by the special interposition of Providence. He returned to the monastery in the Val di Castro, and occupied his cell in the neighbourhood. But before long he experienced one of the many afflictions which befel him in the course of his life through false brethren; for the abbot of his own appointment, an unworthy monk, annoyed at the daily rebuke of his own laxity, conveyed by Romuald's silent example of ascetic holiness, managed to procure his expulsion from the territory. He did not move far, however, but settled for a time at a place in the Apennines called Agua Bella, where the disciples gathered round him, and began to erect huts or cells for the hermit life. One day in the midst of this work a secular priest who was helping the brethren in their work was attacked by an intolerable toothache, and after bearing up against the pain for some time, was reluctantly obliged to excuse himself to the brethren, and to desist from his work. Moaning piteously he was making his way home, when he encountered Romuald, who, from age and infirmity, was unable to take any active part in the manual labour of the brotherhood, and in answer to an enquiry from him explained why he was leaving them. Romuald bade him open his mouth, and placing his finger on the offending tooth desired him to apply to it a rough-and-ready remedy much in vogue among the country folk. The priest proceeded on his way, but scarce had he traversed a rood of ground when the pain left him of a sudden, and he felt that he was cured. Forthwith he returned to his work, loudly declaring the praises of God, who had sent among them so bright a light, so eminent a worker of miracles, as Romuald; and with great difficulty could the disciples succeed in silencing him; for if such expressions reached Romuald's ears, great was his displeasure. In connection with this story, the biographer mentions an occurrence which took place at Camaldoli; his cell there was overshadowed by a large beech tree, which, for some reason or other, he desired might be felled. The workmen began to cut it down, and were in the midst of their work, when it became evident that the tree must fall right across the hut and crush both the dwelling and its occupant. They all, with one voice, besought him to come out; but, making the sign of the cross towards the tree, he desired them to proceed; they obeyed, and to the amazement of all, the tree swerved and fell wide of the cell. "They all, therefore, thunderstruck at so great a miracle, raised their voices to heaven in praise, and gave grateful thanks to God." After setting everything in order in his monasteries in the Apennines, Romuald revisited Istria, where he is said to have lived, built up[25] in his cell, and in unbroken silence, for seven years. "But though his lips were silent, his life preached," and innumerable conversions were the fruit of his sojourning there. As the infirmities of age began to creep over him, he became more and more austere in his acts of self-mortification, pressing forward incessantly to new victories over the flesh, and yielding less and less indulgence to even the most innocent infirmities of his lower nature. But there was no sourness in his asceticism; in the midst of his bitterest mortifications his countenance bore at all times the impress of an unruffled serenity and cheerfulness of spirit. But the wanderings of Romuald's long life were not yet at an end. He made a further excursion to the north, and settled for a while in Styria. And these many wanderings, says his biographer, arose not from fickleness of spirit, as if he were unable to rest long in one place, but solely from the wonderful attraction which his presence exercised where-ever he went. No sooner did he erect his cell anywhere, than men flocked to him from every quarter to be guided by his teaching, and to be edified by his life; so that the most complete solitudes speedily become populous. And as soon as he had duly instructed those who came to him in the discipline of a holy life, he would form them into a community, appoint one of their number to be prior over them, and then betake himself to some other solitude, soon to people that also, and to be driven from it in the same way. In Styria it is related that those who gathered around him, all lived so devoutly, that the rage for mortification reached even to the herdsmen and shepherds of the neighbourhood, who vied with the monks and hermits in all the exercises of the religious life, fasting, keeping silence, and administering the discipline to each other with great zeal and earnestness. On which Peter Damian ejaculates, "Oh! holy time of Romuald! in which, though the torments of persecution were unknown, yet there was no lack of spontaneous martyrdom!" The whole career of Romuald from the time of his profession, is one continuous illustration of the two-fold force of reality in religion--a force of attraction on the one hand, of repulsion on the other. We see in him one, who in the depth and fervour of his penitence, stedfastly adhered through a long life to his first renunciation, not only of the pomps and vanities of this world, but of the most necessary and innocent refinements of life, and by the mere force of reality drew after him crowds of disciples of every class, and peopled the waste places of his native land with monks and hermits. We see, on the one hand, those in whom the grace of a true vocation responded to the example and teaching of their master, led on by degrees to vie with him in the fervour of his self-devotion; and those, on the other hand, who sought in monasticism only a coward's refuge from the temptations and trials of secular life, repelled almost at once by the stern thoroughness of his religion, and by their own unreality forced into rebellion against his rule. At the age of 102 he visited the Apennines, seeking a new retreat, and one day falling asleep beside a fountain in a pleasant plain among the mountains, he dreamed that he saw a ladder set up between heaven and earth, up which his monks ascended in white habits. On awaking, he resolved to change the colour of the dress of his monks, and to found a monastery on the spot. It was the property of a gentleman named Maldoli, who at once gave it him, and the monastery was called Campo Maldoli, whence the order assumed its name of Camaldoli. Romuald died on June 19th, 1027. He is said to have attained the age of 120, but this has been disputed with every show of reason by Bollandus and Baronius. He died in his monastery of the Val di Castro, in the Marches of Ancona, and was there buried. The elevation of the relics took place in 1467, and they were translated to the Church of S. Blase, in the town of Fabri, where they remain to this day. The Roman Breviary celebrates his festival on the day of the translation, which took place in the year 1481. In Art he appears with his finger on his lips, and the ladder, he saw in vision, at his side. [24] Paximatium. A cake baked under the ashes on the hearth. [25] Inclusus. [Illustration: A learned Doctor and Church Historian.] February 8. S. JUVENTIUS, _B. of Pavia, 2nd cent._ SS. DIONYSIUS, ÆMILIAN, AND SEBASTIAN, _MM., in Lesser Armenia_. SS. MARTYRS IN PERSIA, _under Cabades, beginning of 6th cent._ S. HONORATUS, _B. of Milan_, A.D. 570. S. NICETIUS, _B. of Besancon, beginning of 7th cent._ S. PAUL, _B. of Verdun, circ._ A.D. 649. S. ELFLEDA, _V. Abss. of Whitby_, A.D. 716. S. MENGOLD, _M. at Huy in Belgium, circ._ A.D. 892. S. CUTHMAN, _C. at Steyning in Sussex_. B. PETER ALDOBRANDINI, _Card. B. of Albano, circ._ A.D. 1000. S. STEPHEN, _Ab. Founder of the Order of Grandmont_, A.D. 1124. S. JOHN OF MATHA, _C. Founder of the Trinitarians_, A.D. 1213. B. ISAIAH BONER, _C. at Casimir and Cracow, circ._ A.D. 1380. S. JEROME ÆMILIAN, _Founder of the Order of Somasch_, A.D. 1537. S. JUVENTIUS, B. C. (2ND CENT.) [Roman Mart., and that of Usuardus. Juventius is sometimes called Eventius, but it seems that Eventius, B. of Pavia, was a later prelate, and ought not to be confounded with Juventius. The Acts are late, written by Paulus Diaconus, or at all events re-written by him in what was regarded as a more polished style. These Acts belong to S. Syrus, see December 9th; but contain much concerning S. Juventius.] Hermagoras, the disciple of S. Peter the Apostle, and S. Mark the Evangelist, who was also Bishop of Aquileia, sent Syrus and Juventius to preach the Gospel in Ticinum, or Pavia. When it was known that SS. Celsus and Nazarius had shed their blood for the faith at Milan, and that SS. Gervase and Protasius were in bonds, Syrus sent Juventius to Milan, to comfort the church there, and to animate the Confessors. On his return he was ordained by S. Syrus, who had received episcopal consecration from S. Hermagoras. He succeeded Syrus, his master, in the see of Pavia. But few traditions of his episcopate have been wafted down to us. Perhaps the most interesting is this. A collector of taxes in crossing the river was nearly drowned, and lost the money for which he was held responsible. In great tribulation, the man hastened to the bishop, who, commiserating his trouble, advanced with him to the banks of the Ticino, and cried, "I say unto thee, O water, on which Christ the Lord walked, in His name restore the money for which this man is distressed!" Immediately the bag of coins was washed to their feet. Porphyrius, præfect of Rome, having made the circuit of the country, came to Pavia, holding inquisition upon the Christians and other reputed disturbers of the Commonwealth. Juventius was brought before him, and Porphyrius was so won by his gentleness and innocence that he let him go, with an admonition to abstain from preaching the doctrine of Christ to the people; and the bishop, to prevent a persecution, abandoned public orations and discussions, and confined himself to private expositions of the truth. SS. DIONYSIUS, ÆMILIAN, AND SEBASTIAN, MM. (DATE UNCERTAIN.) [Roman Mart., and those of S. Jerome, Bede, Notker, Ado, Usuardus, &c.] Of these saints, who suffered in Lesser Armenia, though noticed in nearly all Martyrologies, nothing whatever is known; and Bollandus supplies the place of their lost Acts with the Acts of certain other saints,--Æmilian, Hermippus, and Dionysius, commemorated on Jan. 28th, with the caustic heading: "Acta horum sanctorum martyrum, vel potius quatuor aliorum." S. PAUL, B. OF VERDUN. (ABOUT A.D. 649.) [Roman Martyrology, Usuardus, &c. Authority:--A very ancient anonymous life, of which Restarius, Canon of S. Vito, who flourished in 887, made use in his "Hist. brevis episcoporum Virdunensium."] This saint, a native of Autun, and not, as some have maintained, of Flanders, was of noble birth. He received an excellent education in his youth, whereby his parents, unintentionally, prepared him for the service of the church, their desire being that he should distinguish himself in the world. But he, despising the pomps and pleasures of a secular life, retired into the Vosges mountains, and lived as a hermit on that mountain which has since borne his name, the Paulsberg, within sight of Trèves. On one occasion, having visited the monastery of Tholey, near S. Wendelin, he was so moved by the piety of the monks, and their earnest desire to number him amongst them, that he entered the monastery, where he soon endeared himself to all the brethren by his gentleness and holy example. Amongst the pupils at Tholey was Grimo, a kinsman of king Dagobert, on whose property the monastery was situated. On the death of Ermenfried, bishop of Verdun, on the recommendation of Grimo, Paul was nominated to the vacant see. He found that on account of the disorder of the times, his church was in the most profound debasement. The cathedral was without clergy to celebrate mass and recite the psalter, and it was served occasionally by a priest who visited it at wide intervals, and was unendowed. The bishop at once sent for his friend and patron, Grimo, and exposed to him the spiritual and temporal distress; and by the intercession of Grimo with Dagobert, the king, Paul was provided with land, by means of which he could support a staff of clergy. By his diligence and zeal he was enabled, before he died, to organise the diocese, and to provide for its spiritual supervision. In Art, he is represented, for some unknown reason, with a taper in his hand, also with an oven, for he is said to have been baker at Tholey for the community, and to have, on one occasion, gone into the oven to place the loaves, when the shovel was lost. S. ELFLEDA, V. ABSS. OF WHITBY. (A.D. 716.) [Inserted in Anglican Martyrology by J. Wilson, and in the Benedictine by Hugh Menard; and Ferrarius in his Gen. Catalogue. Authorities:--Bede and Malmesbury.] Throughout his life, Penda, the fierce heathen king of Mercia, or the midland counties of England, waged war with the kingdom of Northumbria, which included Yorkshire, Durham, and Northumberland. But this bloodthirsty and stubborn hatred led him to his destruction. Oswy, son of Ethelfrid, the ravager, and grandson of Ida, the Man of Fire, was king of Northumbria, which had been so wasted and exhausted by the former ravages of Penda, that it could ill withstand another attack. It was only at the last extremity, that king Oswy resolved to engage in a final conflict with the terrible enemy who had conquered and slain his two predecessors, Edwin and the saintly Oswald. He had married his son and his daughter to children of Penda; and he gave him another of his sons as a hostage. But Penda would not consent to any durable peace. During the thirteen years that had elapsed since the overthrow of Oswald, and the accession of Oswy, he had periodically subjected Northumberland to frightful devastations. In vain Oswy, driven to desperation, offered him all his jewels, ornaments, and treasures, of which he could dispose, as a ransom for his desolated and hopeless provinces. The arrogant and fierce octogenarian refused everything, being resolute, as he said, to exterminate the whole Northumbrian race, from first to last. "Well, then," said Oswy, "since this heathen despises our gifts, let us offer them to one who will accept them--to the Lord our God." He then made a vow to devote to God a daughter who had just been born to him, and at the same time to give twelve estates for the foundation of as many monasteries. After this he marched at the head of a small army against Penda, whose troops were, according to a Northumbrian tradition, thirty times more numerous, and a battle was fought near the site of the present town of Leeds, in which Penda was defeated and slain. Thus perished, at the age of eighty, after a reign of thirty years, the conqueror and murderer of five Anglo-Saxon kings, and the last and indefatigable champion of paganism among the Anglo-Saxons. Oswy faithfully kept his word. He set apart twelve estates to be thenceforward monastic property--six in the north, and six in the south of his double kingdom. He then took his daughter Elfleda, who was but yet a year old, and consecrated her to God by the vow of perpetual virginity. Her mother, the daughter of Edwin, first Christian king of Northumbria, had been also dedicated to God from her birth, but only by baptism, and as a token of the gratitude of a still pagan father for the protection of the Christian's God. The daughter of Oswy was to be the price of a yet higher gift of heaven--the conclusive victory of his race, and of the Christian faith in his country; the sacrifice reminds us of that of Jepthah's daughter; but she, far from desiring to escape her vow, showed herself, during a long life, always worthy of her heavenly Bridegroom. The king took her from the caresses of her mother, to intrust her to the abbess Hilda of Hartlepool, who nearly ten years before had been initiated into the monastic life by S. Aidan. In 658, when Elfleda was three years old, S. Hilda founded her monastery of Streaneshalch, now called Whitby, and moved thither with her little spiritual daughter. Elfleda was scarcely twenty-five years of age, when S. Hilda died, and she was called to succeed her as abbess of Whitby. She is described by Bede as a most pious mistress of spiritual life. But like all the Anglo-Saxon princesses whom we meet within the cloister at this epoch, she did not cease to take a passionate interest in the affairs of her race and her country, and to exercise that extraordinary and salutary influence which was so willingly yielded by the Anglo-Saxon kings and people to those princesses of their sovereign races who became the brides of Christ. She maintained that reverent and affectionate relation with S. Cuthbert which had been maintained by S. Hilda. Before he became bishop, while he lived on a desert rock near Lindisfarne, she prevailed on him to grant her an interview in an island on the Northumbrian coast, called then, as now, Coquet Island. She was anxious and alarmed for her brother Egfrid, and she desired to consult the holy Cuthbert on the affairs of the state and her family. The hermit and the abbess went each to their meeting by sea; and when he had answered all her questions, she threw herself at his feet, and entreated him to tell her, by virtue of those prophetic powers, with which he was known to be gifted, whether her brother, Egfrid, would have a long life and reign. "I am surprised," he answered, "that a woman well versed, like you, in the Holy Scriptures should speak to me of length with regard to human life, which lasts no longer than a spider's web, as the Psalmist has said. How short then must life be for a man who has but a year to live, and has death at his door!" At these words, she wept long; then, drying her tears, she continued, with feminine boldness, and inquired who should be the king's successor, since he had neither sons nor brothers. "Do not say," he replied, "that he is without heirs; he shall have a successor whom you will love, as you love Egfrid, as a sister." "Then tell me, I entreat you, where this successor is." "You see," returned Cuthbert, directing the eyes of his companion towards the archipelago of islets which dots the Northumbrian coast around Lindisfarne, "how many isles are in the vast ocean; it is easy for God to bring from them some one to reign over the English." Elfleda then perceived that he spoke of a young man, Aldfrid, supposed to be the son of her father Oswy, by an Irish mother, and who, since his infancy, had lived as an exile at Iona, where he gave himself up to study. The troubles concerning S. Wilfrid which had vexed the Northumbrian Church still prevailed. Wilfrid was still in banishment for his persistence in introducing the Roman customs into the Keltic Church of the north of England. The new king, Aldfrid, had brought with him from Iona attachment to the ritual of SS. Columba and Aidan. Elfleda inherited the prejudices of her spiritual mother, Hilda, against the stern and inflexible innovator; but there was on their side a desire for reconcilation with the Church of the province of Canterbury, which was of Roman foundation, and they hoped that now Wilfrid was an aged man, some of his harshness might have been softened.[26] To the new king, as well as to his sister, the Abbess Elfleda, Archbishop Theodore of Canterbury wrote, to exhort them both to lay aside their enmity against Wilfrid, and to receive him with unreserved kindness. They yielded, and recalled Wilfrid, but were mistaken in supposing that age had altered his determination. He returned in 687 to excite storms throughout his diocese, and was again exiled, in 691. Aldfrid died in 705, and the Northumbrian crown descended to a prince named Eadwulf. Wilfrid had taken advantage of the death of Aldfrid to return to Ripon, but was ordered to leave the country in six days. But Eadwulf was dethroned, and a son of Aldfrid, Osred, aged eight, was given the realm of Bernicia, the counties of Northumberland and Durham. By means of some mysterious influence, the nature of which is unknown, the aged exile Wilfrid, who had been expelled from the country for fourteen years, and was to all appearance forgotten, became, all at once, the master of the situation, and the arbiter of events. He soon acquired a more powerful protector than the young sovereign in the person of Earl Bertfrid, who was considered the most powerful noble in the kingdom, and who was at the head of Osred's party. King Eadwulf marched against the insurgents, and obliged them to retreat to the fortress of Bamborough, where the earl, shut up in the narrow enclosure of this fortified rock, and reduced to the last extremity, vowed that, if God would deliver him and his charge, the young prince and his people should bow to the Roman subjection. An opportune desertion of Eadwulf's followers gave victory to Bertfrid, and Eadwulf was exiled after a short reign of two months. As soon as the royal child was placed on the throne, the Archbishop of Canterbury made his appearance, perceiving that the time was come for reinstating Wilfrid, and settling his affairs in a general assembly. This was held in the open air on the banks of the Nid. Wilfrid was present, and met there Bertfrid and the Abbess Elfleda, who had come over to his side, and to Roman obedience. All the Northumbrians regarded her as the consoler and best counsellor of the kingdom. The bishops and abbots present opposed the claims of Wilfrid, and refused to accept him, though he came armed with the authority of the Holy See. At this point, the Abbess Elfleda interposed: in a voice which all listened to as an utterance from heaven, she described the last illness and agony of the king her brother, and how he had vowed to God and S. Peter to accomplish the papal decrees which he had so vigorously rejected. "This," she said, "is the last will of Aldfrid the king; I attest the truth of it before Christ." Bertfrid afterwards spoke and announced his vow. Nevertheless the three bishops would not yield, they retired from the assembly to confer among themselves, and with Archbishop Britwald, but above all with the sagacious Elfleda. Thanks to her, all ended in a general reconciliation. Shortly before his death, and during his last pastoral visitation, S. Cuthbert went to see Elfleda in the neighbourhood of the great monastery of Whitby, to consecrate a church which she had built there, and to converse with her for the last time. They dined together, and during the meal, seeing his knife drop from his trembling hand in the abstraction of supernatural thoughts, she had a last opportunity of admiring his prophetic intuition, and his constant care for the salvation of souls. The fatigue of the holy bishop, who said laughingly, "I cannot eat all day long; you must give me a little rest"; the eagerness and pious curiosity of the young abbess, anxious to know and do everything, who rushed up breathlessly during the ceremony of the dedication to ask the bishop a _memento_ for a monk, whose death she had just heard of,--all these details, says a modern writer,[27] form a picture complete in its simplicity, upon which the charmed mind can repose amid the savage habits and wild vicissitudes of the struggle, then more violent than ever, between the Northumbrians and Picts, the Saxons and the Celts. S. Elfleda died at the age of sixty. No account of her last illness has been transmitted to us. S. MENGOLD, M. (ABOUT A.D. 892.) S. Mengold, second patron of the town of Huy on the Meuse, where a church is erected under his invocation, was count of Huy, and was murdered by some knights of his court, whose vices he attempted to restrain. His relics, along with those of several other saints of Huy, are preserved in the noble church of Our Lady in that town. S. CUTHMAN, C. (DATE UNCERTAIN.) [In Ancient Anglo-Saxon Kalendar belonging to the Abbey of Fécamp, and French Martyrology. Authority:--Two lives of uncertain date, by anonymous writers.] The blessed Cuthman was by birth a native of Devonshire or Cornwall, and his youth was spent in pasturing his father's sheep on the granite moors. One day, when dinner time came, he was hungry, and not having a companion to whom he could entrust his flock during his absence, he drew a circle in the heather and gorse with his staff, and then planted it in the soil, and said, "In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, I command you sheep not to transgress the bounds I have drawn, till I return from my dinner." And, wonderful to relate, the sheep obeyed his command. Now there was a grey moorstone on which he was wont to sit; and this moorstone has been ever since regarded with singular veneration, says the ancient writer of his life. After some years his father died, and the widow was reduced to great poverty. Cuthman ministered to her with the tenderest care and filial devotion, and worked for their joint subsistence. When the poor woman fell sick, he was unable to leave her, at the same time he was so destitute that, unless he went forth to work or beg, they must starve. He, therefore, contrived a wooden truck or barrow on two wheels, and laid his mother on it, and went behind, thrusting her on with his hands, and supporting her by a rope slung round his neck, and begged from door to door, as her condition incapacitated him from working. One day, as he was thus thrusting his little cart through a field where the hay-makers were mowing the grass, the rope broke, and the holy youth stood a while hesitating what to do. Then he tore from an elder tree a bough, and twisted it, and attached it to his mother's cart, and supported it therewith. But the mowers laughed at him as a fool for endeavouring to supply the place of a rope with hollow elder wood. Their mockery was, however, soon arrested by a pelting rain, which drove them from their work, and by seeing the bough hold as firmly as a rope. And when Cuthman saw that God assisted and avenged him, he vowed to build a church to his holy Name. But how to do so he knew not. So he continued his wanderings, ever journeying East way, and thrusting his mother before him, till he came to Steyning, in Sussex, where the rope suddenly broke, and his mother was much shaken, but, mercifully, was not injured. Then he thought that this was to be the place of his rest, and he said, "O Lord, on me has fallen to undertake the work of building Thee a house; for to do this thou didst inspire me with the will. Whither shall I fly from Thy Spirit? This is the place where I shall finish my wanderings, this shall be my habitation, in which I shall offer and pay Thee my vows, day by day. Almighty Father, who hast brought my journey to an end, bless my work of building to thee a temple. Thou knowest how poor I am, and a labourer from my youth, and of myself I can do nothing, unless thou dost succour me." The place was still and solitary, trees surrounded it, and hard by flowed the tidal river Adur. The land was little populated; here and there only a farm, buried in a nook of the great chalk downs. He chose a spot at the foot of these downs, and there he built a hut and laid his poor mother in it, and at once began to measure out the ground for his proposed church. He found favour with the people round about, and they contributed to his sustenance and the support of his mother, as they watched him single-handed dig the foundations, cut the timber, and rear the walls of the church he had vowed to God. He was given two oxen to help him in his work of carrying stones. Now, one day, these oxen strayed into the field of a woman who had two grown up sons. The young men at once seized on the oxen, and took them into their house. Cuthman went after the oxen, and when he could not find them, asked the young men for them, but they refused to surrender them. Then he said angrily, "I need them not to do my own work, but to labour for God. See I have laded my cart with those logs, and must move them to the house of God. Come then you and draw them." And he grasped the youths, and yoked them to the wain, and made them drag the stones to their destination. Now as the church approached completion, Cuthman was grieved one day to find that a wooden pillar he had set up, was bent with the weight imposed upon it, and he feared to remove it, lest he should bring down a part of the building. Then there came a traveller to the door, of very grave and beautiful aspect, and asked Cuthman why he was troubled. And Cuthman pointed to the bent post. Then said the stranger, "O man of little faith! to those who fear God, nothing is impossible. Stretch forth thine hand and let me help thee, and we will straighten it." And he did so, and the pillar became upright. Then Cuthman fell at the stranger's feet, and said, "My lord, tell me thy name!" And he answered, "I am Jesus, to whom thou buildest this house;" and so vanished. Now Cuthman not only built and laboured for his old bed-ridden mother, but he also preached to the people, and stirred up the love of God, and zeal for His commandments in their hearts. And as his church approached completion, he was glad, and he worked without, and then rested for a while in prayer within. And chipping at the logs without, he wore thick gloves, and when he went within he took off his gloves, and hung them on a little ray of light that pierced through one of the small windows he had made in the walls. And there, where he worked, he died, but what was the nature of his illness, and his disposition at death is not recorded. He was buried at Steyning, and the Adur, then navigable as far as this place, long bore the name of S. Cuthman's Port. Steyning was given by Edward the Confessor, and afterwards by the Conqueror, to the abbey of Fécamp, in Normandy, from which circumstance Bollandus supposed Steyning was in Normandy, and many have been misled thereby. The church of Steyning, dedicated to S. Cuthman, was built by monks of Fécamp to replace his wooden one. The Monasticon Anglicanum of Dugdale, (II. p. 992), Leland, Collect. I. p. 96; II. p. 409; III. p. 82; and Camden asserts plainly that S. Cuthman was buried at Steyning in Sussex. "Cella de Stening Nigrorum Monachorum in quâ sepultus Stus. Cudman;" "S. Cudmannus in Stenig prope Brambre flumen." "Stus. Caudmannus in loco qui dicitus ad Staning requiescit prope amnem Brembre;" this Brembre is Bramber; the name is no longer given to the river, but to the castle hard by, upon it. S. STEPHEN OF GRANDMONT, AB. (A.D. 1124.) [Roman Martyrology. Authority: a life by Gerald Itherius, prior of Grandmont.] S. Stephen was born in the year 1046, in the castle of Thiers, in Auvergne, belonging to his father, the Viscount de Thiers. At an early age of twelve he was taken by his pious father a pilgrimage into Italy. On their return, the lad fell ill at Benevento, and the father was obliged to leave him in the charge of Milo, archbishop of that city, a native of Auvergne. This prelate took the greatest care of the young Stephen and reared him in all holy lore; and as he grew up intent on serving God in a spiritual and ecclesiastical state, he ordained him, first sub-deacon, and afterwards deacon. After the death of the archbishop, Stephen, being then twenty-four years old, went to Rome and remained there four years. There the vocation to the religious life growing stronger in him, he formed the resolution of imitating certain monks of Calabria, living in great holiness, of whom he had heard Milo speak, and whom he had once visited. He therefore asked permission of Pope Gregory VII. to live apart in some solitude, following the rule of the Calabrian hermits. The pope hesitated for some while, thinking him too delicate of constitution, but at length yielded to his pressing solicitations in 1073. Stephen then returned to France, and resided at Thiers for a short time with his parents; and then, departing, established himself at Aureille or Soviat, a few leagues from Limoges, where he placed himself under the direction of S. Gaucher, who had built a monastery of regular Canons, called S. Jean d'Aureille. But S. Gaucher having erected a nunnery in the neighbourhood, S. Stephen disliking the proximity to women, left Aureille, and retired to Muret, in 1076. This is a mountain near Limoges, where, amongst the rocks and trees, he built a small cabin, and vowed himself to Jesus Christ in a very special manner. Having retained a ring, the only thing belonging to his father and home, that he had not given away or refused, he placed it on his finger saying, "I, Stephen, renounce the devil and all his pomps, and offer myself to God the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, the One true God in Three Persons." Then having written these words, he placed them on his head, and added, "O God Almighty, who livest eternally, and reignest One in Three Persons, I promise to serve Thee in this hermitage in the Catholic faith; in sign whereof I place this writing on my head, and place this ring on my finger, that at the hour of my death this promise may serve as my defence against my enemies." Then addressing himself to the Holy Virgin he said, "Holy Mary, Mother of God, I commend my body, soul, and senses to thy Son and to thee." In this wild solitude, amidst rocks and trees, Stephen passed forty-six years in prayer, and the practice of such austerities as almost surpassed the strength of a human body. He lived at first on wild herbs and roots. In the second summer he was discovered by certain shepherds who brought him a little coarse bread; which some country people from that time continued to do as long as he lived. He always wore next his skin a hair-cloth with iron plates and hoops studded with sharp spikes, over which his only garment, made of the coarsest stuff, was the same both in summer and winter. When overcome by sleep, he took a short rest on rough boards, laid in the form of a coffin. By degrees, disciples gathered about him, and placed themselves under his rule. He would not suffer them to call him abbot or master, but only corrector. To them he was ever compassionate, urging them not to discipline their bodies by excessive fasting, but with himself he was never lenient. Gregory de Papercesis and Pierre de Léon, two legates of the Holy Father, having visited him in his retreat, asked him what he was, a monk, a hermit, or a canon. "I am a sinner," was his answer. Eight days after their departure, he knew that his end was nigh. He therefore called his disciples about him, and said to them, "My sons, I leave you only God, to whom all things belong, and for whom you have renounced all things, and your own selves. If you love poverty, and cleave to God constantly, He will give you all things that you shall need." Five days after he was carried into the chapel, where, having heard Mass, and received extreme Unction and the Holy Viaticum, he died on Friday, February 8th, 1124, at the age of nearly eighty. S. JOHN OF MATHA, AB. (A.D. 1213.) [Roman Martyrology. Authority:--the Bull of his Canonization by Innocent III.] S. John was born of pious and noble parents, at Faucon, on the borders of Provence, June 24th, 1169, and was baptized John, in honour of S. John the Baptist. His mother dedicated him to God by a vow from his infancy. His father Ephemius sent him to Aix, where he learned grammar, fencing, riding, and other exercises fit for a young nobleman. But his chief desire was to advance in virtue. He gave the poor a considerable part of the money his parents sent him for his own use; he visited the hospital every Friday, assisting the sick poor, dressing and cleansing their sores, and affording them all the comfort in his power. On his return home he begged his father's leave to continue the pious exercises he had begun, and retired to a little hermitage not far from Faucon, with a view of living at a distance from the world, united to God alone. But finding his solitude interrupted by the frequent visits of his friends, he desired his father's consent to go to Paris to study divinity, and this he easily obtained. He accomplished his studies with extraordinary success, and received the degree of doctor of divinity with uncommon applause. He was soon after ordained priest, and said his first mass in the chapel of the bishop of Paris, at which the bishop himself, Maurice de Sully, the abbots of S. Victor and of S. Geneviève, and the rector of the university, assisted; admiring the graces of heaven in him, which appeared in his extraordinary devotion on this occasion, as well as at his ordination. On the day he said his first mass, by a special inspiration from God, he resolved to devote himself to the ransoming of Christian slaves from captivity. But before he entered upon so important a work, he thought it needful to spend some time in retirement, prayer, and mortification. And having heard of a holy hermit, S. Felix of Valois, living in a great wood near Grandlieu, in the diocese of Meaux, he repaired to him, and begged he would admit him into his solitude. Felix soon discovered him to be no novice, and would not treat him as a disciple, but as a companion. One day, as they were sitting together on the bank of a spring, John disclosed to Felix the design he had formed on the day on which he said his first Mass, of succouring the Christians under Mahomedan slavery, and spoke so movingly upon the subject, that Felix was convinced the design was from God, and offered to assist him in carrying it into execution. They took some time to recommend it to God by prayer and fasting, and then set out for Rome in the midst of a severe winter, towards the end of the year 1197, to obtain the Pope's benediction. They found Innocent III. promoted to the chair of St. Peter, and he being already informed of their sanctity and charitable design by letters of recommendation from the Bishop of Paris, received them as two angels from heaven; lodged them in his own palace, and gave them many long private audiences. After which he assembled the cardinals and some bishops in the palace of S. John Lateran, and asked their advice. After their deliberations he ordered a fast and special prayers, to ascertain the will of heaven. At length, being convinced that these two holy men were led by the Spirit of God, and that great advantage would accrue to the Church from such an institute, he consented to their erecting a new religious order, and declared S. John the first general minister. The Bishop of Paris, and the abbot of S. Victor, were ordered to draw up the rules, which the Pope approved by a bull, in 1198. He ordered the religious to wear a white habit, with a red and blue cross on the breast, and to take the name of the Order of the Holy Trinity. He confirmed it some time after, adding new privileges by a second bull, in 1209. The two founders having obtained the Pope's blessing and certain indulgences, returned to France, presented themselves to the king, Philip Augustus, who authorized the establishment of their Order in his kingdom, and favoured it with his liberalities. Gauthier III., lord of Châtillon, gave them land whereon to build a convent. Their number increasing, the same lord, seconded by the king, gave them Cerfroid, near Grandlieu, the place in which S. John and S. Felix concerted the first plan of their institute. It is situated in Brie, on the confines of Valois. This house of Cerfroid, or De Cervo frigido, was the chief of the order. The two saints founded many other convents in France, and sent several of their religious to accompany the counts of Flanders and Blois, and other lords, to the Crusade. Pope Innocent III. wrote to recommend these religious to the Emir of Morocco; and S. John sent thither two of his religious in 1201, who, on the first voyage, redeemed one hundred and eighty-six Christian slaves. The year following, S. John went himself to Tunis, where he purchased the liberty of one hundred and ten more. He returned into Provence, and there received great charities, which he carried into Spain, and redeemed many in captivity under the Moors. On his return he collected large alms among the Christians towards this charitable undertaking. His example produced a second order of Mercy, instituted by S. Peter Nolasco, in 1235. S. John made a second voyage to Tunis, in 1210, in which he suffered much from the infidels, enraged at his zeal and success in exhorting the poor slaves to patience and constancy in their faith. As he was returning with one hundred and twenty slaves he had ransomed, the barbarians took away the helm from his vessel, and tore all its sails, that they might perish in the sea. The saint, full of confidence in God, begged Him to be their pilot, and hung up his companions' cloaks for sails, and, with a crucifix in his hands, kneeling on the deck, singing psalms, after a prosperous voyage they all landed safe at Ostia, in Italy. Felix, by this time, had greatly propagated his order in France, and obtained for it a convent in Paris, in a place where stood before a chapel of S. Mathurin, whence these religious in France were called Mathurins. S. John lived two years more in Rome, which he employed in exhorting all to penance with great energy and fruit. He died on the 21st of December, in 1213, aged sixty-one. He was buried in his church of S. Thomas, where his monument yet remains, though his body has been translated into Spain. [26] For an account of the conflict with S. Wilfrid, and the opposition of the Northumbrian Church and princes to his innovations, see his life, Oct. 12. [27] Montalembert, Monks of the West, iv. p. 412. [Illustration: An enthusiastic Collector of Saintly Legends] February 9. S. APOLLONIA, _V. M. at Alexandria_, A.D. 249. S. NICEPHORUS, _M. at Antioch in Syria_, _circ._ A.D. 258. S. ATHENODORUS, _B. M. at Pontus_, _circ._ A.D. 270. (_Translated in Modern Roman Martyrology to October 18th._) SS. PRIMUS AND DONATUS, _DD. MM. at Lemele in Africa, 3rd cent._ S. ROMANUS THE WONDER-WORKER, _Monk at Antioch in Syria, 5th cent._ S. ATHRACTA, _V. in Ireland, 6th cent._ S. NEBRIDIUS, _B. of Egara, near Barcelona, 6th cent._ S. TEILO, _B. of Llandaff_; _circ._ A.D. 560. S. SABINE, _B. of Canosi_; _circ._ A.D. 566. SS. SABINE AND EUNOMIUS, _Bishops of Lesina, in Italy_. SS. VICTOR, _M_. AND SUSANNA, _V. at Mouzon_. S. ANSBERT, _B. of Rouen_, A.D. 695. S. AUDOBERT, _B. of Senlis_; _circ._ A.D. 700. S. ALTO, _Ab. in Bavaria_; _circ._ A.D. 760. B. MARIANUS SCOTUS, _Ab. at Ratisbon_, A.D. 1088. S. RAYNALD, _B. of Nocera, in Umbria_, A.D. 1225. S. APOLLONIA, V. M. (A.D. 249.) [This saint is named in the Roman and all Western Martyrologies. There is, however, another Apollonia, martyr under Julian the Apostate, 114 years her junior, commemorated in some churches on this day, and some apocryphal Acts of this latter saint are extant. There is much doubt whether this Roman Apollonia ever really existed, and whether the Martyrologists have not fallen into an inaccuracy in writing S. Apollonia "of Rome," instead of "of Alexandria," because her relics were brought to Rome. The account of the martyrdom of S. Apollonia of Alexandria is perfectly authentic, it occurs in a letter from S. Dionysius B. of Alexandria, during the persecution, to Fabius, B. of Antioch, giving him an account of the sufferings of his church. This letter is preserved by Eusebius, in his Ecclesiastical History, lib. vi. c. 41.] The following is the account of the martyrdom of S. Apollonia, by Dionysius, the bishop of Alexandria, himself a confessor at the time, in the persecution. "The persecution with us did not begin with the imperial edict, but preceded it a whole year. And a certain prophet and poet excited the mass of the heathen against us, stirring them up to their native superstition. Stimulated by him, and taking full liberty to exercise any kind of wickedness, they considered this the only way of showing their piety--to slay us. First, then, seizing a certain aged man, named Metras, they called on him to utter impious expressions, and as he did not obey, they beat his body with clubs, and pricked his face and eyes; after which they led him away to the suburbs, where they stoned him. Next, they led a woman called Quinta, who was a believer, to the temple of an idol, and attempted to force her to worship; but when she turned away in disgust, they tied her by the feet, and dragged her through the whole city, over the rough stones of the paved streets, dashing her against the millstones, and scourging her at the same time, until they brought her to the same place, where they stoned her. Then, with one accord, all rushed upon the houses of the pious, and whomsoever of their neighbours they knew, they drove thither in all haste, and despoiled and plundered them, setting apart the more valuable of the articles for themselves; but the more common and wooden furniture they threw about and burnt in the roads, presenting a sight like a city taken by the enemy. They also seized that admirable virgin Apollonia, then in advanced age, and beating her jaws, they broke out all her teeth, and kindling a fire before the city, threatened to burn her alive, unless she would repeat their impious expressions. She appeared at first to shrink a little, but when suffered to go, she suddenly sprang into the fire, and was consumed." Relics in the Church of S. Apollonia, at Rome; her head in S. Maria Transtiberina; her arms in S. Laurence, outside the walls; part of her jaw in S. Basil's; other relics at Naples, Volaterra, Bonona, at Antwerp in the Jesuit Church; in S. Augustine's, at Brussels; in the Jesuit Church at Mechlin; in S. Cross at Liége; at Cologne, in the Jesuit Church; and in those of S. Gereon, S. Maurice, S. Alban, S. Cunibert, and others; and elsewhere. These relics consist in some cases of a tooth only, or a splinter of bone. S. Apollonia is invoked, and the application of her relics is sought against toothache, and other pains in the jaw. In Art, she is always to be recognized by her being represented holding a tooth, sometimes pincers grasping a tooth, in her hand. S. NICEPHORUS, M. (ABOUT A.D. 258.) [The Roman and Greek Churches commemorate this Saint on the same day. Authorities:--The ancient Acts by an anonymous author, and another life, by John, B. of Sardis.] There dwelt in Antioch, a priest called Sapricius, and a layman, named Nicephorus, who had been linked together for many years by the strictest friendship. But the enemy of mankind, sowing between them the seeds of discord, their friendship was succeeded by the most implacable hatred, and they no longer accosted each other when they met in the streets. Thus it continued for a considerable time. At length, Nicephorus, entering into himself, and reflecting on the grievousness of the sin of hatred, resolved on seeking a reconciliation. He accordingly deputed some friends to go to Sapricius to beg his pardon, promising him all reasonable satisfaction for the injury done him. But the priest refused his forgiveness. Nicephorus sent other friends to him on the same errand, but though they pressed and entreated him to be reconciled, Sapricius remained inflexible. Nicephorus sent a third time, but to no purpose; Sapricius having shut his ears not to men only, but to Christ Himself, who commands us to forgive, as we ourselves hope to be forgiven. Nicephorus, finding him deaf to the remonstrances of their common friends, went in person to his house, and casting himself at his feet, owned his fault, and begged pardon for Christ's sake; but this also was in vain. Persecution suddenly began to rage under Valerian and Gallienus, about A.D. 258. Sapricius was apprehended and brought before the governor, who asked him his name. "It is Sapricius," answered he. The governor: "Of what profession are you?" Sapricius: "I am a Christian." The Governor: "Are you of the clergy?" Sapricius: "I have the honour to be a priest. We Christians acknowledge one Lord and Master Jesus Christ, who is God; the only and true God, who created heaven and earth. As for the gods of the heathen they are but devils." The president, exasperated at his answers, gave orders for him to be put into an engine, like a screw press. The excessive pain of this torture did not shake Sapricius's constancy, and he said to the judges, "My body is in your power, but my soul you cannot touch; only my Saviour Jesus Christ is master of that." The governor seeing him so resolute, pronounced this sentence: "Sapricius, priest of the Christians, who is ridiculously persuaded that he shall rise again, shall be delivered over to the executioner of public justice to have his head severed from his body, because he has disregarded the edict of the emperors." Sapricius seemed to receive the sentence with great cheerfulness, and was in haste to arrive at the place of execution, in hopes of his crown. On his way to martyrdom, Nicephorus ran out to meet him, and, casting himself at his feet, said, "Martyr of Jesus Christ, forgive me my offence." But Sapricius made him no answer. Nicephorus waited for him in another street, through which he was to pass, and, as soon as he saw him coming up, broke through the crowd, and falling again at his feet, conjured him to pardon the fault he had committed against him, through frailty, rather than design. This he begged by the glorious confession he had made of the divinity of Jesus Christ. Sapricius's heart was more and more hardened, and now he would not so much as look on him. The soldiers laughed at Nicephorus, saying, "A greater fool than thee was never seen, in being so solicitous for a man's pardon who is upon the point of execution." On their arrival at the place of execution, Nicephorus redoubled his humble entreaties and supplications, but all in vain; for Sapricius continued as obstinate as ever, in refusing to forgive. The executioners said to Sapricius, "Kneel down that we may cut off your head." And now, for the first time, there was a sign of wavering in the Confessor. He grew pale and trembled, and asked, "Upon what account?" They answered, "Because you will not sacrifice to the gods, or obey the Emperor's orders, for the love of that man that is called Christ." The unfortunate Sapricius cried out, "Stop, my friends; do not put me to death: I will do what you desire: I am ready to sacrifice." Nicephorus, dismayed at his apostasy, cried aloud to him, "Brother, what are you doing? renounce not Jesus Christ, our good Master. Forfeit not a crown you have already gained by tortures and sufferings." But the holy Spirit of Fortitude had been withdrawn from him, who would not show forgiveness to his brother, and he tremblingly renounced his Lord and Master. Then Nicephorus, with tears of bitter anguish for the fall of Sapricius said to the executioners, "I am a Christian, and believe in Jesus Christ, whom this wretch has renounced; behold me here ready to die in his stead." All present were astonished at such an unexpected declaration. The officers of justice, uncertain how to proceed, despatched a messenger to the governor for further orders. The governor, on hearing the account of the confession of Nicephorus, dictated the following sentence: "If this man persist in refusing to sacrifice to the immortal gods, let him die by the sword:" which was accordingly put in execution. Thus Nicephorus received the three immortal crowns of faith, humility, and charity, triumphs of which Sapricius had made himself unworthy. S. ATHRACTA OR TARAGHTA, V. (6TH CENT.) [There is great uncertainty as to the day on which this Irish Saint is commemorated. Some say Feb. 9th; some Feb. 3rd; and others Aug. 11th. She is mentioned in the Tripartite Life of S. Patrick. Her life, which exists only in a fragmentary condition, given by Colgan from an ancient imperfect MS., is of no authority.] The same caution must be renewed, which has been given so often in writing the lives of the Irish Saints,--not to trust the records we have, too implicitly. Doubtless, the main outline of their histories is true, but lively fancies, through many centuries, have filled those outlines with wondrous details which it is impossible to accept, and which have made an almost inextricable confusion in their history. The virgin Athracta, was of noble race. She dedicated herself at an early age to God, and built a lodging where seven roads met, that she might have abundant opportunity of showing hospitality to wayfarers. She is said in her legend to have received the veil from the hands of S. Patrick, when he was founding a church in Druimnea. Lanigan says that this is a mistake, as S. Athracta did not live till some time in the sixth century. He adds, "The statements relative to her are indeed so contradictory that the period in which she flourished cannot be precisely ascertained. According to some accounts she was contemporary with S. Patrick. But we find her spoken of as living in the times of S. Corbmac, brother of S. Erin, and, consequently, in the sixth century. S. Nathy, that is, according to every appearance, Nathy of Achonry, who lived in the same century, is also mentioned as a contemporary of hers. On these grounds it may be fairly concluded that S. Athracta belonged to the same period. She is said to have been the daughter of Talan, of a princely family of Dalaradia, in Ulster, and sister of S. Coeman, of Aird-ne-Coemhain, a consanguinity which it would be difficult to reconcile with her having been a native of Ulster. Whatever were her family connexions, S. Athracta presided over a nunnery called Kill-Athracta (Killaraght), near the lake Techet, now Lough Cara, in the county of Sligo."[28] The legend of the saint contains the following incidents, the first of which, as will be seen from what has been said above, it is impossible to reconcile with history:-- This virgin was of noble race; she dedicated herself at an early age to God, and built a lodging where seven roads met, that she might have abundant opportunity of showing hospitality to wayfarers. She received the veil from the hands of S. Patrick, at Dromanna, the modern Kill-Athractha, Connaught. The story goes that on a visit to the church, built there by the Holy Apostles, S. Patrick prepared to celebrate Mass, when it was discovered that his attendants had forgotten to bring a paten. He was, therefore, about to lay aside his vestments, when the virgin said, "Proceed, father! with God all things are possible." So he began the confession. Then, as Athracta knelt bowed forward, she felt something lightly fall on her shoulder, and she put up her hand, and lo! there was a paten resting upon it. She rose, and, going to the altar, handed it to S. Patrick. On one occasion the King of Connaught desired to build a strong castle, and for that purpose summoned all his vassals to contribute their assistance. Athracta in vain pleaded to be excused; the King roughly ordered her to take her part in the erection of his fortress. Then she, and her servants, and horses, went into the wood to cut timber and transport it. But her maid exclaimed, "Oh, if the stags drew our logs of wood, instead of these old broken-down horses, it would humble the King's pride." Then Athracta called the stags to her, and because the ropes or chains for dragging the timber were broken, she harnessed the stags to the felled trees by some of her long delicate hairs, and these proved as strong to draw the timber as the stags proved docile for the draught. These quaint legends are, it must be repeated, on no account to be estimated above what they are worth. S. TEILO, B. OF LLANDAFF. (ABOUT A.D. 560.) [Patron of Llandaff. His name occurs in the Salisbury Martyrology of Wytford, and in the Anglican Mart. of John Wilson, who placed him on Dec. 26th, and was followed by Ferrarius. The correct day is, however, certainly Feb. 9th. He is recorded in the Welsh triads as one of the three canonized Saints of Britain; the two others are S. David and S. Cadoc. Authorities:--The Life, by Galfredus, of Llandaff (circ. 1120); another anonymous life in Capgrave; the Regestum Landavense; and the Liber Landavensis.] S. Teilo or Theliav was descended from a noble British stock. His father's name was Enlleu, son of Hydwn Dwn, and the place of his birth was Eccluis Cunnian, near Tenby. From his infancy he bent his neck beneath the gentle yoke of Christ, and, despising worldly vanities, was given to prayer and alms-deeds. He studied first under S. Dubricius, by whose assistance he attained great proficiency in the knowledge of the Scriptures; his next instructor was Paulinus, under whom he pursued the same study, and in whose school he was the associate of S. David. Under the patronage of Dubricius he opened a college, at Llandaff, which was called Bangor Deilo, or the great choir of Teilo; and his settlement at that place may serve to account for his appointment to fill the See of Llandaff upon the retirement of his patron to the Isle of Bardsey. The idea that he was made bishop of Llandaff at the time S. Dubricius was raised to the Archbishopric of Caerleon, is irreconcilable with chronology. The original diocese governed by S. Teilo, as ascertained by the absence of churches founded by S. David, was co-extensive with the ancient lordships of Glamorgan, containing the present rural deaneries of Croneath, Llandaff, and Newport. How long he continued to preside over this limited district is uncertain; but, in the reign of Maelgwn Cwynedd, the Yellow Plague desolated the Principality. Upon this occasion S. Teilo, with several others, retired to Cornwall, and thence into Brittany, where he was honourably received by S. Samson, Bishop of Dol. After he had remained seven years and as many months in Brittany, he returned, with several of his disciples, to his native country, and on his arrival was elected to the Archbishopric of Menevia, vacant by the death of Cynog. Like S. David, he, however, retained a predilection for the seat of his original bishopric, and, appointing Ismael to the situation of Bishop of Menevia, he removed the archbishopric to Llandaff. In order to maintain his title to the primacy undisturbed, he appears to have kept under his immediate government the whole of the diocese held before by S. David, with the exception of the part north of the river Tivy, which was henceforth attached to the diocese of Llanbadarn. There is a story told of his having made a pilgrimage, before all this, to the Holy Land, in company with S. David and S. Padarn, and of their having received episcopal consecration from the Patriarch of Jerusalem; but it is probable that this was a story, borrowed by Giraldus from one of the lost Triads, and was invented to establish the independence of the Welsh bishops of the See of Rome. In the Triads, S. Teilo is called one of the Three Blessed Visitors to the Isle of Britain, and he is associated with SS. David and Padarn. "They were so called," says the Triad, "because they went as guests to the houses of the noble, the plebeian, the native, and the stranger, without accepting either fee or reward, or victuals, or drink; but what they did was to teach the faith in Christ to every one without payment or thanks. Besides which, they gave to the poor and needy, gifts of their gold and silver, their raiment and provisions." His companions, or pupils, playing on his name, compared it to _Helios_, which, in Greek, means the sun; because, by his heavenly doctrine and example, he illumined the Church in South Wales, and warmed the hearts of the faithful. Twelve churches in the diocese of S. David's, and six in that of Llandaff, claim to have been founded by S. Teilo.[29] A curious, late, and utterly worthless story, save as an example of the manner in which the popular tongue forges marvels, is related of his relics. At his death, three priests of different parishes were present, one from Llandaff, where he had been bishop; one of Llandeilo Fawr, where he died; and one of Penaly, near Tenby, where his ancestors had been buried. Each wished to claim the body for his church. The contention grew sharp between them, and was only terminated by the oldest of the three exhorting his brethren to leave the decision to God. Then they retired to rest, and, next morning, when they entered the room where the dead saint lay, lo! his one body had become three, perfectly identical in every particular, and each priest was able to carry off a S. Teilo to his own church. The origin of this foolish story is self-evident. It is an attempt to account, by a miracle, for the existence, in three places, of bodies of S. Teilo; a portion of his relics being probably preserved in each of these churches, and the popular tongue having magnified each portion into an entire body. S. SABINE, B. OF CANOSI. (ABOUT A.D. 566.) [There is great uncertainty whether there were one or two bishops of Canosi of this name, as it is impossible to fit all that is recorded of the Acts of S. Sabine into the life of one man; as a S. Sabine of Canosi was certainly present, in 493, at the dedication of the Church of S. Michael, on Mount Gargano; and a S. Sabine of Canosi is mentioned as meeting Totila, K. of the Goths, in 549, fifty-six years after. That there were two is, therefore, most probable, the name being that of the great and wide-spread Sabine family, occurs repeatedly among the bishops and saints of Italy, and has led to much confusion. It is impossible to distinguish, from the confused Acts of S. Sabine of Canosi, which events belong to the first, and which to the second, bishop of that name. S. Sabine is the second patron of Canosi, and also of Bari, after S. Nicolas. His life was written by an anonymous writer of the eight century.] This saint belonged to a noble family at Canosi, in the present arch-diocese of Bari, in Italy. He was elected to the see of his native city, and distinguished himself by his zeal in building and adorning churches, as also by his learning. He was one of the prelates present at the consecration of the Church of S. Michael, on the scene of the apparition of the archangel, on Monte Gargano, journeying thither in company with the blessed Roger of Canosi. And as the sun was hot in the heavens, and they fainted with the burning of its rays, Sabine raised his eyes to heaven, and prayed that a cool breeze might spring up and fan their fevered brows. But his prayer was heard and answered in other sort, for a great eagle came between the travellers and the sun, and floated over their heads with wings expanded, accompanying them, so that they walked on in the shadow. Now, Sabine's ardour in prosecuting his studies raised the suspicion of the multitude, and they denounced him as addicted to the arts of magic; so this report came to the ears of the Pope, and he summoned him to Rome, to clear his character from the aspersion cast upon it. Then Sabine hasted and went to Rome, and arrived in the evening, and was lodged in the palace of the Holy Father, who, prejudiced against him, received him coldly, and harshly bade him not set foot outside the house till his case were heard. And at midnight, a strange, unearthly music resounded through the courts, and men started from sleep to listen. Then they were aware of chanting, as of a multitude, and they rose, and the Pope also, and they followed the sound, and till they came to the door of the hall in which the Bishop of Canosi lay. And beneath the door was a streak of dazzling light. Then they burst in, and beheld the accused prelate standing in a blaze of heavenly radiance, amidst angel forms, chanting the Psalms of David. So the Pope cast himself at his feet, and acknowledged his complete innocence. Now, on his way home, the holy bishop doubtless visited S. Benedict, at Monte Cassino, for between them there existed a warm friendship; and we find that S. Placidus, the loved disciple of Benedict, often visited and was entertained by the Bishop of Canosi, for the love he bare to the great Patriarch of the Monks of the West. A pretty incident of his life is as follows,--it is but a trifle, but these trifling anecdotes give the character of the man. He was walking in his garden one day, among the flower-beds, reciting psalms and hymns, when a bright smile broke out over his face. Those accompanying him were surprised, and asked the reason of that smile. "Listen to those sparrows," said he, "there is a wagon upset yonder, which was laden with corn, and they are all eagerly communicating to one another the joyful news of an abundant feast. Oh! the charity to one another of those dear little birds!"[30] In the year 535, Pope Agapetus sent an embassy to the Emperor Justinian at Constantinople, of which the bishop of Canosi was a member. Agapetus was himself obliged to follow his embassy, the following year, on a deputation to the emperor from Theodatus, the Gothic king. Theodoric, king of the Goths, had been succeeded by Athalaric, son of his daughter Amalasvintha, but he, being a minor, the public affairs were administered by his mother, who did not spare any pains in the education of her child. But the young king fell a victim to intemperance, before he had attained the age of manhood. On the failure of issue in the male line, Amalasvintha, in order to maintain herself on the throne, gave her hand to Theodatus, her cousin, and allowed him to participate in the sovereign power. But Theodatus grasping at supreme sovereignty, suffocated his wife and benefactress in a bath, and then, in abject terror for the consequences, sent off Pope Agapetus to Constantinople, to deprecate the wrath of the Emperor Justinian. Agapetus arrived in Constantinople, when that see was vacant, Epiphanius, the patriarch, being dead. He found the Empress Theodora in power, favouring the Eutychian heretics, and encouraging Anthimus, bishop of Trebizond, a ringleader of the sect. Agapetus at once deposed Anthimus, and ordained one Mennas, a Catholic, in his place; then, feeling his end approach, he exhorted Sabine and his companions to stand by and maintain the new bishop of Trebizond. Agapetus died in 536, and the same year a council was held against Anthimus the heretic, at which Sabine was present, and the anathemas of which he subscribed. In consequence of this decided action, the bishop of Canosi suffered much from the anger of the Empress Theodora. In 537 he returned to Italy, and according to some accounts, died on his way, and was buried at Tripalta on the Sabbato, above Benevento, near Avellino, where his body, entire, still rests enshrined. But at Bari is the body of S. Sabine, bishop of Canosi, and it is believed that there were two saints of this name, and that the first Sabine, bishop of Canosi, is at Bari, and that the events we are about to relate, occurred to the second bishop of this name, who lies at Tripalta. That there were two is most probable, as it is hardly possible that he who was bishop in 493, could have sat till 566, which would give an episcopate of over seventy-three years. Totila, king of the Goths, the seventh of that race who had governed Italy, swept Campania and Samnium with his barbarian army, occupied Naples, and in the midst of his victorious course, visited S. Benedict on his rock of Cassino. The incident of the meeting between the barbarian king and the ascetic patriarch shall be recorded in the life of S. Benedict. S. Gregory relates in his Dialogues, (lib. iii. c. 5), that Totila, hearing of S. Sabine of Canosi, now blind with age, that he was endued with the spirit of prophecy, visited him and invited him to dinner, and to prove the old bishop, when the page brought wine round, the king took the goblet from the boy's hand, and himself offered it to the prelate. Then Sabine, taking the goblet, and turning his darkened eyes on the royal bearer, said, "May that hand that offers live long!" And the king blushed, joyous at receiving this part blessing, part prophecy. S. Gregory relates another story of this saint. The Archdeacon of Canosi, a man full of ambition and pride, desiring the episcopate, and impatient of the long life of Sabine, bribed his butler to poison him. The deadly cup was offered him, and the aged prelate drank it off, but instantly the Archdeacon was seized with all the symptoms of having been poisoned, and died in agony, whereas the bishop remained unhurt. It is unfortunate, that owing to the carelessness of the historian, who wrote two hundred years after the death of S. Sabine I., the records of the two bishops of that name should have been so run together as to render it almost impossible to dissever them. There seems also to have been a third S. Sabine of Canosi, bishop of Lesina, a ruined and deserted city, on the lagoon of the same name in the Capitanta. Lesina, in the 10th century, was the seat of a bishop. No records of this saint exist, but in November, 1597, the cathedral and second church of Lesina being thoroughly ruinous, officials were deputed to remove from the deserted churches such relics as could be found, and works of value that remained. They found the roof of the cathedral fallen in, doors and windows broken and open, and grass growing on the sacred floor. The crypt was in better preservation, and there they found altars standing, containing sacred relics. In one of these they found a marble sarcophagus, on which was inscribed, S. Sabinus Canusinus, "S. Sabine of Canosi." Within was a leaden coffin, on which was engraved, S. Sabinus Canusianus, pontifex Lesinensis. "S. Sabine of Canosi, bishop of Lesina." The skeleton in this was perfect. This body, together with others there discovered, was removed to Naples, where it now reposes in the church of the Annunciata. SS. VICTOR, M., AND SUSANNA, V. C. (DATE UNKNOWN.) [Of local celebrity at Mouzon, on the Meuse, above Sedan. The names occur, however, in some Martyrologies of minor importance. Authority:--A MS. life published by Bollandus.] SS. Victor and Susanna were peasants at Mouzon, or the neighbourhood, Victor being the brother and protector of Susanna, a modest and beautiful girl. The Lord of Mouzon having cast his lustful eyes on Susanna, endeavoured to deceive her, but her virgin modesty withstood his threats and promises; and finding her inflexible, in a paroxysm of rage, he tore out her eyes. Victor, her brother, denounced the tyrant to his face, and threatened him with the vengeance of the God of the fatherless, and protector of the poor, whereupon the noble, furious at being insulted by a vile peasant, ordered his retainers to despatch him, which they did. S. ANSBERT, B. OF ROUEN. (A.D. 695.) [Roman and other Martyrologies. Authority:--Life by Ansgrad, the monk, dedicated to Abbot Hilbert, the successor of S. Ansbert. This life has, however, suffered from interpolators.] This saint was at one time chancellor to Clothaire III., and in the midst of the temptations of a court, preserved his integrity and purity. At length, quitting the court, he assumed the monastic habit at Fontenelle, and on the election of the abbot Lantbert to the see of Lyons, he succeeded him as abbot of that famous monastery. He was confessor to Thierri III., and was, with his consent, chosen archbishop of Rouen, on the death of S. Ouen, in 683. Pepin, mayor of the palace, afterwards banished him, on a false accusation of treason, to the monastery of Hautmont in Hainault, where he died on the 9th February, 695. His body was transported to the abbey of Fontenelle, and afterwards to Boulogne, but in 944, through fear of the Northmen, it was translated to the convent of S. Peter in Ghent; but was dragged from its resting-place by the furious Calvinists, under William of Orange, in 1578; some portions of the sacred relics have, however, we believe, been preserved. S. Ansbert is often called S. Aubert. [28] Dr. Lanigan's Eccles. Hist. of Ireland, Dublin, 1827; Vol. iii., p. 39, & i. p. 243. [29] Rees: Essay on the Welsh Saints, pp, 245-6. [30] In the original, the simplicity of this story is quite spoiled by what is evidently added by the monkish author, unable to see the beauty of the unadorned incident; for, it is said, this was a proof of miraculous power in the saint, that he was able to see through a stone wall the upsetting of a corn-cart. [Illustration] February 10. SS. CHARALAMPIUS, _P. and Companions, MM. at Magnesia_, A.D. 202. S. SOTERIS, _V. M. at Rome, 4th cent._ S. ZENO, _Monk at Antioch, in Syria; circ._ A.D. 419. S. SCHOLASTICA, _V. at Monte Cassino_, A.D. 543. S. PROTADIUS, _B. of Besancon_, A.D. 626. S. TRUMWINE, _B. of the Picts, circ._ A.D. 700. S. AUSTREBERTHA, _V. in French Flanders_, A.D. 704. S. SURA OR ZUWARDA, _V. M. at Dortrecht_. S. WILLIAM OF MALEVAL, _H. in Italy_, A.D. 1157. B. JOHN WILLIAM OF THE OLIVE, _P. H. at Mariemont, in Belgium_, A.D. 1241. S. ARNALD OF CATANEA, _Ab. at Padua_, A.D. 1255. S. CLARA OF RIMINI, _Matr._, A.D. 1346. SS. CHARALAMPIUS, P. AND COMPANIONS, MM. (A.D. 202.) [Commemorated in the West on this day; in the East on Sept. 17th. The Acts are not trustworthy.] Saint Charalampius was priest at Magnesia, in the reign of Severus. He was brought before the governor, Lucianus, and was flayed with iron scrapers; the governor himself, in his rage, assisting the executioners in their barbarous work. With him suffered two soldiers and three women. S. SOTERIS, V. M. (4th CENT.) [Modern Roman Martyrology, and those of Usuardus and Ado. But the ancient Roman Martyrology, bearing the name of S. Jerome, and those of Notker Bede (so-called), Rabanus, and others, on Feb. 6th. Nor are the Martyrologies agreed as to where she suffered, some saying, "in the East," others "at Rome." Authority:--S. Ambrose, who was of her family, gives an account of her martyrdom in his Exhort. Virginit. lib. iii.] S. Ambrose boasts of this saint as the greatest honour of his family. She was descended from a long series of consuls and prefects; but her greatest glory was in despising, for Christ's sake, her wealth, birth, and beauty. When the edicts of persecution were issued under Diocletian and Maximian, against the Christians, she was summoned before the judge, and her face was beaten because she would not deny Christ. She, however, counted it all joy to suffer in the like manner of her Master, and, though cruelly beaten, shed not a tear. At length, overcome by her constancy, the judge ordered her head to be struck off. One of the Roman catacombs on the Appian way, bears the name of S. Soteris. This catacomb was restored by Pope Stephen III., when the roof had fallen in. It has been erroneously supposed, by some, that this catacomb was called after Pope S. Soter; but Anastasius the Librarian, in recording the restoration of the cemetery, calls it "Cemeterium Sanctæ Soteris." Stephen III. (II.) reigned from 752 to 757. The body was removed from this catacomb by Pope Symmachus, (498-514,) to the church of S. Sylvester, in the city of Rome. A portion of the relics were given to the church of Sezanne, in the modern department of Marne, in France. One of her bones is preserved in the Jesuit Church at Luxembourg. A body of S. Soteris is preserved in the Cistercian Church at Madrid; but as the history of the Acts of this S. Soteris cannot be adapted to the saint of Rome, it is probable that she is some local Spanish saint, of whom nothing authentic is known. S. ZENO, H. (ABOUT A.D. 419.) [Theodoret in his Philotheus, c. 12, gives an account of this venerable monk, whom he had visited, and knew personally.] This venerable hermit lived in an old tomb cut out of the rocks in the neighbourhood of Antioch, in Syria. He observed the monastic rule for forty years, living on bread and water, and on Sunday visiting a church, that he might partake of the divine mysteries, and listen to sermons. Theodoret makes a quaint little remark about him: "That he used to borrow one book at a time from his friends, read it through, and return it when read, and then borrow another." S. SCHOLASTICA, V. (A.D. 543.) [Famous wherever the name of S. Benedict, her brother, is known. Authorities for her life, the same as those for his. The following sketch of her life is extracted from Montalembert's Monks of the West.] In the history of most saints who have exercised a reformatory and lasting influence upon monastic institutions, the name and influence of some holy woman is almost invariably found associated with their work and devotedness. These bold combatants in the war of the Spirit against the flesh seemed to have drawn strength and consolation from a chaste and fervent community of sacrifices, prayers, and virtues, with a mother or a sister, by blood or choice, whose sanctity shed upon one corner of their glorious lives a ray of sweeter and more familiar light. To instance only the greatest: Macrina is seen by the side of S. Basil, and the names of Monica and Augustine are inseparable; as in later ages are those of S. Francis of Assisi and S. Clara, S. Francis of Sales and S. Jeanne Chantal. S. Benedict had also a sister, born on the same day with himself, named Scholastica; they loved each other as twins often love, with fraternal regard, elevated into a passion. But both loved God above all. Still earlier than her brother, Scholastica had consecrated herself to God from her infancy; and, in becoming a nun, she made herself the patroness and model of the innumerable family of virgins who were to acknowledge, adopt, and follow the code of her brother. She rejoined him at Monte Cassino, and established herself in a monastery, in the depths of a valley near the holy mountain. Benedict directed her from afar, as he did many other nuns in the neighbourhood. But they met only once a year, and then it was Scholastica who left her cloister, and sought her brother. He, on his side, went to meet her: they met upon the side of the mountain, not far from the door of the monastery, in a spot which has long been venerated. There, at their last meeting, occurred that struggle of fraternal love, and the austerity of the rule, recorded by S. Gregory,[31] which is the only known episode in the life of Scholastica, and which has insured an imperishable remembrance to her name. They had passed the entire day in pious conversation, mingled with praises of God. Towards the evening they ate together. While they were still at table, and the night approached, Scholastica said to her brother, "I pray thee, do not leave me to-night, but let us speak of the joys of heaven till the morning." "What sayest thou, my sister?" answered Benedict; "on no account can I remain out of the monastery." Upon the refusal of her brother, Scholastica bent her head between her clasped hands on the table, but prayed to God, shedding torrents of tears, to such an extent, that the table was flooded with them. The weather was very serene: there was not a cloud in the air. But scarcely had she raised her head when thunder was heard, and a violent storm began; the rain, lightning, and thunder were such, that neither Benedict, nor any of his brethren, who accompanied him, could take a step beyond the roof that sheltered them. Then he said to Scholastica, "May God pardon thee, my sister, but what hast thou done?" "Ah, yes," she answered him, "I prayed thee, and thou would'st not listen to me; then I prayed God, and he heard me. Go now, if thou canst, and send me away, to return to thy monastery." He resigned himself, against his will, to remain, and they passed the rest of the night in spiritual converse. S. Gregory, who has preserved the tale to us, adds that it is not to be wondered at, that God granted the desire of the sister rather than that of the brother, because, of the two, it was the sister who loved most, and that those who love most have the greatest power with God. In the morning they parted, to see each other no more in this life. Three days after, Benedict, being at the window of his cell, had a vision, in which he saw his sister entering heaven under the form of a dove. Overpowered with joy, his gratitude burst forth in songs and hymns to the glory of God. Her body was translated to Le Mans, in France, of which city she is patroness, but her relics were dispersed by the Huguenots, in 1562. However, some portions have been preserved, some in the Jesuit Church at Antwerp, and a bone in the Carthusian Church at Cologne. S. SURA, V. M. (DATE UNKNOWN.) This Saint, called in Dutch, Zuwardt, is said to have built the first Christian Church at Dordrecht. She was murdered by some ruffians, who hoped to possess themselves of her money, wherewith she paid for the edification of the house of God, but found only three pennies in her purse, whence arose the tradition that she had only that sum the whole time, and that as often as she paid it away, the same sum remained in her purse. S. WILLIAM OF MALEVAL, H. (A.D. 1157.) [Roman Martyrology. Authority:--His Life, by his friend and disciple, Albert, in whose arms he died. Several modern writers have confused S. William of Maleval with S. William of Mariemont, and even with S. William I., Duke of Aquitaine, and S. William IX., Duke of Guienne, who died 1137.] Nothing is known of the birth of this saint, or of his early life, on which he preserved an impenetrable secrecy. It is said that he made a pilgrimage to S. Jago of Compostella, but even this is uncertain, as S. William of Guienne, his contemporary, is known to have made this expedition, and it is quite possible that the act of one S. William has been transferred to the other. In the year 1153, there appeared in Tuscany a man, who sought to hide himself from the eyes of his fellow-men. The islet of Lupocavio, in the district of Pisa, seemed to him to answer his desire; there he constructed a small habitation, and remained there. His edifying example attracted several persons to him, who settled near his cell, and undertook to follow his rule of life. But their fervour soon cooled down, and their undisciplined manners obliged him to withdraw from his solitude, and retire to Monte Prunio, where he hoped to be alone with his God, and where he erected in a dense wood, a hut of boughs, and thatched it with leaves and fern. He was soon joined by idle vagrants, who, under the pretence of a religious life, attempted to impose on the charity of pious persons. S. William soon discovered that these men were actuated by no religious vocation, and their hypocrisy drove him again from his resting-place. He was, indeed, compulsorily ejected by these miscreants, who could ill bear his sanctity subsisting as a reproach upon their irregularities. He then returned to the island of Lupocavio, but not finding his former associates there disposed to receive him, he fixed his habitation in a desert valley, called at that time "The stable of Rhodes," but since known as "the bad valley," Maleval. It was situated in the territory of Sienna, about a league distant from Castigline, Pescara, and Buriano. It was in 1155, that he hid himself in this solitude, having at first only a hole in the earth, in which he could shelter from the inclemency of the weather, till the Lord of Buriano, taking compassion on him, built a little cell for his lodging. For four months he lived only on roots and herbs, having no other companions than the wild beasts; but, in the beginning of the year 1156, he received a disciple, named Albert, who wrote the account of the close of his life. The saint practised surprising austerities; thrice in the week he took only very little bread, and wine much diluted; on the other days he took bread, and herbs and water. He wore sackcloth next his skin, and slept on the bare ground. He was endowed with the gift of prophecy, of which Albert had himself experience, for when the saint was dying, and his disciple was lamenting that he should be left alone, S. William bade him be of good cheer, for God would give him a companion shortly. This seemed so improbable, that Albert could not trust it; but going forth from the cell shortly after, he met a man, named Raynald, a physician, who had come to renounce the world and place himself under the direction of the pious hermit. Albert, fearing that the death of the saint might make him change his purpose, cast himself at his feet, and implored him to come and make his profession before the dying saint at once. Raynald did so, and Albert submitted himself to the direction of his new companion on the death of his first master. S. William died in the arms of Albert, after having received the last sacraments from a priest of Castigline, who had been warned of the illness of the hermit. Raynald and Albert buried S. William in his little garden. After his death they preserved the spirit of penitence and mortification with which he had inspired them during his life, and they endeavoured to follow his maxims as their rule of life; and thus originated the Order of the Guillemites, which rapidly spread from Italy, through France, the Low Countries, and Germany. At first they followed the institutes of S. William only, and fasted almost perpetually, and walked barefoot. But Pope Gregory IX. moderated their great austerities, allowed them to be shod, and required them to follow the rule of S. Benedict. S. JOHN-WILLIAM, H. (A.D. 1241.) [Day unfixed for his commemoration, but locally, he is commemorated on the same day as his namesake. He is called Saint in Belgium, but is of local canonization only. Authorities:--Life by an anonymous Cistercian monk, of undecided date, published by Bollandus, and another life in the annals of Jacobus Guisius.] This venerable hermit of Brabant was the founder of the ancient abbey "of the Olive," whose ruins may still be seen at some little distance from the ancient castle of Mariemont, near Binche in Hainault. Having lived a life of great irregularity during his youth, John-William retired, in a moment of remorse, to the abbey of Chérailles, near Vervins; but he shortly afterwards quitted it, being drawn into the world again by his passions. But God, says the legend, gave him a warning which brought him once more to his senses, and he retired to a lonely place near Morlanwelz, where he built a little hermitage of branches, and lived for some time, unknown, exercising himself in prayer and vigil, and living on roots and wild fruit. If we may believe a popular legend, to punish himself for having yielded to his animal passions so long, he would not stand upright, but walked about like a beast, on all fours. Later on, Dame Bertha, the widow of Eustace de Ræulz, having heard of his piety, offered him the choice of any spot on her lands, where he might cultivate the soil to supply his necessities. He accepted her offer, and began diligently to till the ground. John of Béthune, Bishop of Cambrai, informed of the perfection of the hermit, conferred upon him priest's orders; after which, John-William undertook the construction of a stone church on the ground given him by the lady Bertha. When this was complete, the hermit asked the abbess of Fontenelle to send some of her nuns to establish themselves there. She complied with his request, but the place not suiting them, they returned to their convent. At his request, seven nuns from Monstres-sur-Sambre were then sent to him, and they placed themselves under his direction; the institution was incorporated in the order of Citeaux, an abbess was elected, and the place which had formerly borne the designation of "The Hermitage," was now called "The Olive." There are many hypotheses to account for the origin of this name. One is, that it was derived from the number of cures wrought by olive oil, from the lamp burnt before the image of the Holy Virgin in the church. The founder died in 1240, on the 10th February, at the age of sixty-six, and was buried in the monastery church. S. CLARA OF RIMINI, MATR. (A.D. 1346.) [Roman Martyrology. Authority:--Life by Cardinal Joseph Garampi.] Clara was born at Rimini, her father's name was Chiarello, and her mother's Gaudiana; they belonged to a noble family, and were very wealthy. Clara was married early, but shortly after lost her husband. Having been exiled on account of a civil war, she returned to Rimini, to see her father and one of her brothers perish on the scaffold. She was married again, but after a while, with the consent of her husband, devoted her life to the practice of self-mortification. She slept on a hard board, and encircled her neck and wrists with iron rings to punish herself for her extravagance in jewelry when young. Her food was bread and water, and a little oil on Sundays. Not content with these austerities, and the rigorous fasts she imposed on herself from the feast of S. Martin till Christmas, and from Epiphany till Easter, she spent the greater part of many nights in prayer, and during Lent she retired into an old look-out box on the town walls, where, exposed to the cold and rain, she spent the time in confessing her faults, and reciting the Lord's Prayer, a hundred times a day. Her close communing with God made her heart overflow with charity towards all men. Hearing that her brother had been banished a second time from his native town, and was sick at Urbino, she flew to his bedside, and nursed him with the utmost tenderness, escaping occasionally into an ancient ruined tower, near the cathedral at Urbino, to refresh her spirit with prayer. On the restoration of tranquillity, she returned to Rimini with her brother, where she became shortly the solace of all the afflicted. One day, hearing that the poor Clares were without fuel, she ran into the country, and getting a large log of wood, laid it on her shoulder, and carried it through the streets to their door. A noble kinsman, not liking to see her thus demean herself, as he considered it, sent a servant to relieve her of the load, but she refused to surrender it, saying that her Lord was not ashamed to bear His cross for the sake of sinners, and that, therefore, it was no dishonour for her to carry wood for the use of His servants. Once, hearing that a man was sentenced to pay a heavy fine, or have his hand chopped off, and that he was unable to ransom his hand, she sold herself as a slave, and with the money would have redeemed the hand from amputation, had not the magistrates, touched by her charity, pardoned the man. Having once given way to intemperate speech towards someone who had annoyed her, she punished herself by nipping her tongue with a pair of pincers, so that she was unable to speak for two or three days after. She built a convent for those women who had placed themselves under her direction, near the old watch-box on the walls, and gave it the name of "The Annunciation," but the title was changed afterwards to that of "Our Lady of the Angels." Towards the end of her life she lost her sight. She died on Feb. 10th, 1346, and was buried in the church of her convent, where her relics are still preserved. The cult of her was approved in 1784 by Pope Pius VI., and her commemoration was fixed for the 10th February. [31] Dialog. ii., c. 12, 23, 33. [Illustration] February 11. S. CALOCERUS, _B. of Ravenna, 2nd cent._ S. TIGRINUS, _M. at Rome; relics at Turin, 2nd cent._ SS. SATURNINUS AND COMPANIONS, _MM. at Carthage_, A.D. 303. S. JONAS THE GARDENER, _Monk in Egypt, 4th cent._ S. LAZARUS, _B. of Milan; circ_. A.D. 449. S. CASTRENSIS, _B. of Volterra; circ_. A.D. 450. S. SECUNDINUS, _B. of Troja in Southern Italy; circ._ A.D. 450. S. EUPHROSYNE, _V. at Alexandria; circ._ A.D. 470. (_Transferred from Jan. 1st._) S. SEVERINUS, _Ab. of S. Maurice in the Valais_, A.D. 506. S. ECIAN, B. in Ireland; circ. A.D. 587. S. CEADMON, _Monk at Whitby; circ._ A.D. 680. S. THEODORA, _Empress at Constantinople_, A.D. 867. S. MARTIN, _P. at Leon in Spain_, A.D. 1221. S. ADOLPH, _B. of Osnaburgh_, A.D. 1222. SS. SATURNINUS AND COMPANIONS, MM. (A.D. 303.) [Roman Martyrology. In the ancient African Church, as we learn from S. Augustine, their commemoration took place on Feb. 12th, and on that day they are given by Usuardus. The Acts are genuine. They were appealed to in the reign of Honorius, in 412, during the Donatist controversy to prove that even in the stress of persecution, Christians had not failed to attend Divine Service on the Lord's Day. S. Augustine also quotes them in his book against Cresconius, lib. iii. c. 17, 26, 27, and 29, written in 406. The Synodical Epistle of the Council of the Catholic Bishops held at Cirta which quotes these Acts, is included among the works of S. Augustine in the Benedictine Edition, numbered Ep. 141. It is dated the 14th June, 412.] The persecution of Diocletian having broken out in Africa, the magistrates of Abitina broke, one Sunday, into the house of a citizen, Octavius Felix, during the celebration of the Divine Mysteries, and took the priest Saturninus, his four children, and forty-four other Christians who were assisting at the Holy Sacrifice. The two elder sons of the priest, Saturninus and Felix, were both lectors; Mary, his daughter, had consecrated her virginity to God; Hilarion, the youngest, was still quite a child. Among the other prisoners were Dativus, a noble senator, Ampelius, Rogatianus, Januarius, Cassian, Victorian, in all thirty men, and nineteen women. Dativus marched at the head of the troop which surrounded Saturninus, standing as children about their father. When brought before the magistrates, they confessed Christ so resolutely, that their very judges applauded their courage. The confessors were shackled and sent to Carthage, the residence of the pro-consul. They rejoiced to see themselves in chains for Christ, and sang hymns and canticles during their whole journey to Carthage, praising and thanking God. The pro-consul, Anulinus, addressing himself first to Dativus, asked him of what condition he was, and if he had assisted at the collect or assembly of the Christians. He answered that he was a Christian, and had been present at it. The pro-consul bade him declare who presided, and in whose house those religious assemblies were held: but without waiting for his answer, commanded him to be put on the rack and torn with iron hooks, to force the information from him. The martyrs underwent severally the tortures of the rack, iron hooks, and cudgels. Felix was asked if he had been at the collect or assembly[32] on the Lord's day. Felix answered, "I am a Christian." "I did not ask that," said the magistrate, "but whether you had been at the collect." "Oh, foolish judge!" cried Felix, "Could I be a Christian and not be present? As if the Lord's day gathering should be without the Christian, and the Christian without the Lord's day gathering. Knowest thou not that the one was made for the other, and the one cannot be without the other?" Then he was savagely beaten and sent to prison. The weaker sex fought no less gloriously, particularly the illustrious Victoria; who, having been converted to Christ in her tender years, had signified a desire to lead a single life, but to this her pagan parents would not agree having promised her in marriage to a rich young nobleman. Victoria, on the day appointed for the wedding, full of confidence in the protection of Him whom she had chosen for the only spouse of her soul, leaped out of a window, and took refuge in a Christian church, where she consecrated her virginity to God, with the ceremonies then used on such occasions at Carthage, in Italy, Gaul, and all over the West.[33] To the crown of virginity she earnestly desired to join that of martyrdom. The pro-consul, on account of her quality, and for the sake of her brother, a Pagan, tried all means to prevail with her to renounce her faith. He inquired what was her religion. Her answer was, "I am a Christian." Her brother, Fortunatianus, undertook her defence, and endeavoured to prove her lunatic. The saint, fearing his plea might be the means of her losing the crown of martyrdom, made it appear by her intelligent answers that she was in her perfect senses, and she protested that she had not been brought to Christianity against her will. The pro-consul asked her if she would return with her brother. She replied, "Being a Christian, I acknowledge none as brethren but those who keep the law of God." The pro-consul then laid aside the quality of judge to become her suppliant, and entreated her not to throw away her life. But she rejected his entreaties with disdain, and said to him, "I have already told you my mind. I am a Christian, and I assisted at the holy assembly." Anulinus, provoked at this constancy, ordered her to prison with the rest, to wait the sentence of death which he not long after pronounced upon them all. However, he made an effort to gain the little boy, Hilarion, not doubting that he would easily prevail with one of his tender age. But the child showed more contempt than fear of the tyrant's threats, and answered his interrogatories, "I am a Christian: I have been at the collect,[34] and it was of my own voluntary choice, without any compulsion." The pro-consul threatened him with those little punishments with which children are accustomed to be chastised, little knowing that God himself fights in his martyrs. The child only laughed at him. The governor then said to him, "I will cut off your nose and ears." Hilarion replied, "You may do it; but I am a Christian still." Then the governor ordered the child to be taken to the prison with the rest, and Hilarion, with his shrill voice cried, "God be thanked!"--and so was led away. At this point these interesting Acts break off abruptly, but a fragment which has been tampered with by some Donatist hand has, at the end, this passage, which has been lost from the genuine Acts:--"These blessed martyrs, being deprived of all nourishment for their bodies, one by one, and by degrees, sank, overcome with hunger, and migrated to the heavenly kingdom with the victor's palm, our Lord Jesus Christ sustaining them, who, with the Father, reigns through ages of ages. Amen." S. JONAS THE GARDENER, MONK. (4TH CENT.) [Roman Martyrology, not to be confounded with the S. Jonas, monk, commemorated by the Greeks on Sept 21st. Authority:--Mention in the Life of S. Pachomius.] In the monastery of Muchon, in Egypt, lived an old monk who acted as gardener. For eighty-five years he cultivated the fruits of the monastery garden, and gathered them, and gave of them to the monks, and to guests, and to travellers, as much as they would, but in all those years he never tasted so much as a grape, a date, or a fig; but lived on raw herbs with a little vinegar. Now, there stood in the midst of the monastery a very fruitful fig-tree, and the boys were in the habit of climbing it to gather and eat the luscious figs. And when S. Pachomius came one day to inspect the monastery, he saw that this fig-tree was a cause of self-indulgence and gluttony to some of the younger aspirants after an ascetic life. So he said to Jonas the gardener, "Cut that tree down!" Then the gardener lifted up his hands in dismay, and when Pachomius saw how greatly it would grieve the good man, he let him spare it. But lo! on the morrow the fig-tree was withered away, and Jonas knew that he had acted wrongly in opposing his will to the command of his superior. Jonas wore a dress made of three sheep-skins sewn together, and over this he cast a linen surplice without sleeves,[35] when he approached the Divine Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ; but as soon as he had communicated, he laid it aside. Jonas, after supper, was wont to retire to his cell, sit on his chair weaving rushes in the dark, reciting passages of Scripture, till the midnight call to the monks to rise for the night office. Then, when that was concluded, he returned to his seat, and slept seated till dawn. And one day he was found dead in his chair with the rushes in his stiff hand. Then the monks buried him as he sat, with the half-plaited mat on his knees. S. LAZARUS, B. OF MILAN. (ABOUT A.D. 449.) [Roman Martyrology. He died on March 14th, but as by the Milan use no saint is commemorated in Lent, his festival has been there thrown back to Feb. 11th; and adopted thence into the Roman Martyrology. His life from scattered notices is given by Bollandus.] Of the acts of this saint, who was bishop of Milan before 440, but in what year consecrated is unknown, we have scarcely any records. He lived in the stormy time of the Gothic invasion of Italy. It is disputed whether he or S. Mamertus, bishop of Vienne, was the first to institute the use of litanies. It is certain that Bishop Lazarus ordered their use for three days in succession in all the principal churches of Milan. S. EUPHROSYNE, V. (ABOUT A.D. 470.) [Roman Martyrology on Jan. 1st, but anciently on Feb. 11th; with great solemnity by the Greeks on September 25th. She is sometimes erroneously called Euphrosia or Euphrasia by martyrologists. The life of S. Euphrosyne is found inserted in the _Vitæ Patrum_. The authors of some of these lives are known, as S. Ephrem, S. Jerome, Sophronius of Jerusalem, Paulus Diaconus, but it is not known by whom the life of S. Euphrosyne was written. In gravity and purity of style it is not behind any of the others. That after her death a Greek life was written, which was translated into Latin, seems probable, from the extension of her cultus in the ancient Latin Church. Her life exists in an ancient Greek ode, and in a Latin heroic poem; another life is given by Simeon Metaphrastes, in all particulars of importance agreeing with that in the Lives of the Fathers, but without its freshness and ring of antiquity.] The history of S. Euphrosyne, as given in the "Lives of the Fathers of the Desert," written, apparently, shortly after her death, is told so simply and beautifully by the ancient historian, that it shall be given here, somewhat abbreviated, but otherwise literally translated. There was a man of Alexandria named Paphnutius, honourable, and observing the commandments of God. He married a wife worthy of his race, and of honest manners, but she was barren. Thereat the man was troubled much and sorrowful, likewise his wife was sore afflicted, seeing the distress of her husband. And after some time he told a certain abbot his desire; and he, compassionating him, besought the Lord to give him a child. Then God heard the prayers of these twain, and gave to Paphnutius a daughter. After that, Paphnutius brought his wife to the monastery, that she should be blessed by the abbot and the brethren. And when the little girl was seven years old, she was baptized, and called Euphrosyne, and her parents rejoiced over her, because they had received her of the Lord, and she was comely of face. Now when she was twelve years old, her mother died, and she lived with her father, who taught her her letters, and to read, and all the rest of the world's knowledge. The good report of her spread through the town, for she was wise in knowledge, and very comely, and composed in face and spirit. Thus many desired to mate her with their sons, and tried to come to terms with the father, but could not gain their point; for he said, "God's will be done." But one man excelled all in wealth and honour, and he sought the father and asked him to give his daughter to his own son in marriage; and he consented; so the usual betrothal gifts were made. And after some time, when she was aged eighteen, Paphnutius, taking her, went to the monastery with her, and gave monies for the need of the brethren, and said to the abbot, "I have brought to thee the fruit of thy prayers, that thou mayest pray for her, for I am about to deliver her in marriage." Then the abbot bade that she should be taken to the guest-house, and he spake with her, and said much about purity, humility, and meekness. Now she was there three days, and she gave ear to the psalmody every day, and saw the holy conversation of the monks, and she wondered at their life, and said, "Blessed indeed are these men." So her heart began to be solicitous in the fear of the Lord. And when three days were accomplished, Paphnutius led her to the abbot and said, "Come, my father, that thy handmaiden may salute thee, and pray for her, for we are going home to town." And the maiden cast herself at the abbot's feet, saying, "I pray thee, my Father, entreat the Lord to give me my heart's desire," so he, extending his hand over her, blessed her, saying, "God, who knewest man before ever he was born, take care of this thy handmaiden, that she may merit a portion and fellowship in thy heavenly kingdom." So they returned to the city. Now, it fell out, one day, that the abbot was about to be ordained, and he sent a monk to Paphnutius, to invite him to the solemnity. Then the brother asked after him, and the servants said, "He has gone out." Then Euphrosyne called to her the monk, and began to question him. "Tell me of your charity, my brother, how many brethren are there in the monastery?" He answered, "There are three hundred and fifty-two." The maiden said, "If anyone desired to go there for conversion, would your abbot receive him?" He answered, "He would receive him with the greatest joy, for the Lord said, 'He that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out.'" Euphrosyne said, "Do all of you chant in your church, and all fast together alike?" The monk answered, "We all chant together, but every one fasts following his own way, as much and how suits him best; there is no constraint, but ready will." Presently Paphnutius returned from his walk, and the monk, seeing him, told him the message of the abbot. Then Paphnutius was glad, and went with him in a little boat to the monastery. Now, when he was gone, Euphrosyne sent a trusty servant, saying, "Go into the monastery of Theodosius, enter the church, and bring hither any monk you find there." Now, by the goodness of God, there was a monk just coming from the monastery, and when the boy saw him, he bade him come to the house of Euphrosyne. And when the maiden saw him, she rose and saluted him, saying, "Pray for me, my Father!" So, praying, he blessed her, and sat down. Then Euphrosyne said to him, "My lord, I have a Christian father, but my mother is dead. My father wishes to give me to this world, and I shrink from being defiled thereby, but I fear to be disobedient to my father, so I am in a strait and know not what to do. I spent all last night without sleep, asking God to show me His way, and this morning I have sent into the church for a father, who might tell me what I should do. I know that God hath sent thee to me; declare to me, now, His will." Then the old man said, "This is the Word of the Lord. If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple. (Luke xiv., 26.) This is the saying of the Lord Christ. I have nothing to add thereto." Then said Euphrosyne, "I trust in God and in thy prayers. Cut off my hair." So the old man arose, and shore off the hair of her head, and laid on her the tunic of profession, and praying, he blessed her, saying, "The God, who hath delivered all His saints, protect thee from all evil." And when he had thus spoken, he departed, and went on his way rejoicing. But Euphrosyne thought in herself, "If I go to a convent of maidens my father will make inquiries and drag me violently away, and give me to the bridegroom. I will go to a monastery of men, where none will suspect me." So saying, she put off her female attire, and clothed herself in the habit of a man, and, leaving her house in the dusk of evening, taking with her 500 pennies, concealed herself all night. Next morning her father came to the city, and went, by the will of God, to church, before going home. Now, Euphrosyne made her way to that monastery where her father was so well known, and announced to the abbot, through the porter, that an eunuch of the palace was without desiring to speak with him. Then, when the abbot came forth, Euphrosyne cast herself on the ground, and when they had prayed they sat down. Then said the old man, "Wherefore hast thou come hither, my son?" And she answered, "I desire to dwell here and follow your holy conversation." Then said the old man, "Thou hast done well, my son! Here is the monastery. If it please thee, dwell with us. But tell me, what is thy name?" She answered, "Smaragdus (Emerald)." He said, "Thou art very young, and not able to dwell alone, but needest a master to teach thee the rule and conversation of the monks." To whom she made answer, "As thou willest, my father." So she put the five hundred pence in his hand, and he called to him an aged brother, named Agapitus, a holy man, and gave to him Smaragdus, saying, "Henceforth he shall be to thee a son and disciple." Then, having knelt, he blessed them, and they responded Amen, and Agapitus led her away to his cell. Now Paphnutius, her father, went home, and when he found her not he sought through Alexandria. He searched every convent of women. Now, there were ships in the harbour, and his servants by force entered them, and searched them through, and they hunted the country round, the deserts and the caves, not to mention the houses of their friends, and they found her not. Then he bewailed her as one dead, together with the bridegroom and his father; but Paphnutius could not be comforted, he had no rest, not knowing where his daughter was. And at last, unable to bear his anguish longer, he hastened to the abbot of whom we have already spoken, and fell at his feet, and cried, "I pray thee, cease not from supplication that the child of thy prayer may be found, for I know not what has befallen my daughter." Hearing this, the venerable old man was mightily troubled, and he summoned all the brethren, and said, "Show your charity, my brothers, and let us all entreat the Lord, that he may declare to us what has befallen the daughter of our good friend, Paphnutius." So they all fasted and prayed for the space of a week, and nothing was revealed touching Euphrosyne, as was wont, when they at other times besought the Lord. Now when nothing was revealed to any, the abbot began to console the father, saying, "Do not be downcast, my son, at the Lord's discipline, for whom He loveth He chasteneth. Know this, of a surety, that no sparrow falls to the ground, without His knowledge, how then can anything have happened to thy daughter without His consent? If any evil had befallen her--which God forbid!--would not the Lord have showed it to one of the brethren praying for her? I have confidence in God, that thou shalt see thy daughter again in this life." So the father went away comforted. But he often returned to commend himself to the prayers of the brethren, and one day he cast himself down before the abbot and said, "I cannot bear my anguish, O my father! because of my lost daughter, but the wound in my heart bleeds more every day, and my spirit is vexed within me." Now when the old man saw him so broken, he said, "Wouldst thou converse with a spiritual brother here, from the palace of Theodosius?" But he knew not that he spake of the daughter of Paphnutius; and the man said "I am willing." Then the abbot called Agapitus, and said, "Take Paphnutius, and introduce him to the cell of Smaragdus." And he did so, knowing nothing. Now, when she suddenly heard her father's voice, and knew him, her eyes filled with tears. But Paphnutius did not recognize her, for her face was much shrunk with fasting, vigils, and tears; and she drew her hood over her face, that he might not see her distinctly. And when they had prayed, they sat down. Then she began to speak to him of the future kingdom of happiness and eternal glory, and how it was to be won through humility and purity, and a holy life, and tender love. For she saw that her father was much depressed, and she pitied him; yet fearing lest he should recognize her, and it would prove a hindrance in her path, and willing to comfort him, she said, "Believe me, God will not despise thy groaning. If thy child were living in wickedness, God would shew thee the way to her, that thou mightest pluck her away. No! trust God, she has chosen the better course, and is serving God somewhere. He is able to lead thee to her. Be of good courage, He will reveal her to thee some day." Then she said "Go, sir!" And as he retired, she grew deadly pale, and tears flowed from her eyes. But he was full of comfort, and he said to the abbot, "I go comforted as though to-day I had seen my child." And he returned home magnifying the Lord. Now after Smaragdus had lived thirty-eight years in the cell, she fell sick, and knew that she must die. And when, on a certain day, as was his frequent custom, Paphnutius came to the monastery, and asked to see Smaragdus, the abbot bade that he should be conducted to the cell. But when he found that Smaragdus lay sick, he kissed him, and weeping, said "Woe is me! where are all the promises, and sweet hopes, that thou didst give me, of seeing my daughter again? Not only do I not see her, but thou in whom I have found some consolation, thou goest away, and there is none left to be the comfort of my old age. For thirty and eight years I have lost my daughter, and nothing has been revealed to me concerning her, though I have prayed for her night and day." And when Smaragdus saw the old man's distress and tears, he said, "Be of good courage, is the hand of the Lord shortened, that He cannot perform what is promised? Lay aside thy sorrow. Remember how Joseph was revealed by God to the patriarch Jacob, who bewailed him as one dead. But I pray thee, tarry here three days, and leave me not." So Paphnutius remained beside him three days, for he said, "May be, the Lord will reveal somewhat to him;" and he was all that while full of anxiety. And on the third day he said, "I have waited, my brother!" Then Smaragdus knew that he should not survive that day, and he said to Paphnutius, "Draw near to me." And he drew near. Then said Smaragdus, who is also Euphrosyne, "Because the Almighty Lord hath brought me to the end of my contest, not by might of mine, but by His help, there remaineth to me the crown. And now I would not have thee troubled about thy daughter--I am thy daughter, Euphrosyne, and thou art my father, Paphnutius. And now I pray thee, (for none know that I am a woman), when I am dead, do thou, my father, wash and lay me out for my grave, and pray for me." And when she had said this, she gave up her soul. And it was the first of January. [Illustration: S. EUPHROSYNE FINDING HERSELF AT DEATH'S DOOR, MAKES HERSELF KNOWN TO HER FATHER. From the "Menologium Græcorum" of Cardinal Albani. Feb. 11] Then when Paphnutius heard these words, and saw that she was fallen asleep, all his bowels were moved, and he fell on the ground, and was as one dead. Now Agapitus came running in, and saw Smaragdus dead, and Paphnutius lying senseless on the ground, so he cast water on his face and said, "What aileth thee, Master Paphnutius?" Then said Paphnutius, "Let me go that I may die." And when he was risen up, he cast himself on the face of the dead monk, and cried, "Woe is me! my sweetest daughter, why didst thou not tell me before, that I might have died with thee?" So Agapitus, having guessed the truth, was amazed, and hasted and told the abbot, who came, and cried "Euphrosyne, spouse of Christ, forget not thy fellow-servants, who dwell in this monastery, but pray for us to our Lord Jesus Christ, that he may make us manfully contend to reach the port of safety, and to have our portion with Him, and with all His saints." Then he called all the brethren together, and they buried Euphrosyne reverently. And after that her father came and dwelt in the same cell, and was there for ten years, and after that he migrated to God, and they laid him beside his daughter. S. CEADMON, MONK. (ABOUT A.D. 680.) [Anglican Martyrology, published by John Wilson. Authority:--Bede: Hist. Eccl. iv. 24.] According to an usage very general in the 7th century in England, but principally prevailing in Celtic countries, monasteries and nunneries were placed under the rule of one abbot or abbess. This was the case at Whitby, where the abbess Hilda governed a community of men, as well as one of women; and she inspired the monks subject to her authority with so great a devotion to their rule, so true a love of sacred literature, that this monastery, ruled by a woman, became a true school of missionaries, and even of bishops. But not all the bishops and saints nurtured in her school, occupy in the annals of the human mind a place comparable to that held by an old cowherd who lived on the lands belonging to Hilda's community. It is on the lips of this cowherd that Anglo-Saxon speech first bursts into poetry, and nothing in the whole history of European literature is more original or more religious than this first utterance of the English muse. His name was Ceadmon. He had already reached an advanced age, having spent his life in his humble occupation without ever learning music, or being able to join in the joyous choruses which held such a high place at the feasts and social gatherings of all classes, both poor and rich, among the Anglo-Saxons as among the Celts. When it was his turn to sing at any of these festal meetings, and the harp was handed to him, his custom was to rise from the table and go home. One evening, when he had thus withdrawn himself from his friends, he went back to his humble shed and went to sleep by the side of the cattle. During his slumber he heard a voice, which called him by name, and said to him, "Sing me something"; to which he replied, "I cannot sing, and that is why I have left the supper and am come hither." "Sing, notwithstanding," said the voice. "But what, then, shall I sing?" "Sing the beginning of the world: the Creation." Immediately on receiving this command he began to sing verses, of which before he had no knowledge, but which celebrated the glory and power of the Creator. On awaking he recollected all that he had sung in his dream, and hastened to tell all that had happened to him to the farmer in whose service he was. The Abbess Hilda, when the story was repeated to her, called for Ceadmon and questioned him in the presence of all the learned men whom she could assemble around her. He was made to relate his vision and recite his songs, and then the different passages of sacred history and various points of doctrine were explained to him that he might put them into verse. The next morning he was again called, and immediately began to repeat all that had been told him, in verses, which were pronounced to be excellent. He was thus discovered all at once to possess the gift of improvisation in his mother tongue. Hilda, and her learned assessors, did not hesitate to recognise in this a special gift of God, worthy of all respect and of the most tender care. She received Ceadmon and his whole family within the monastic community of Whitby, and afterwards admitted him to the number of monks who were under her rule, and made him carefully translate the whole Bible into Anglo-Saxon. As soon, accordingly, as the sacred history and the gospel were narrated to him, he made himself master of the tale, ruminated it, as Bede said, and transformed it into songs, so beautiful that all who listened to him were delighted. He thus put into verse the whole of Genesis and Exodus, with other portions of the Old Testament, and, afterwards the life and passion of Our Lord, and the Acts of the Apostles. His talent and his poetic faculty thus went on, day by day, to fuller development, and he devoted numerous songs to such subjects as were best calculated to induce his companions to forsake evil, and love and practise the good: the terrors of the last judgment, the pains of hell, the joys of paradise--all these great and momentous subjects were in their turn woven into verse. The fragments that remain enable us to estimate the earnest and impassioned inspirations, strongly Christian and profoundly original, which characterised these first efforts of genius, barbarous, but subdued and baptized. But it would be a totally mistaken idea to recognise in the Abbess Hilda's dependant, nothing but a poet or a literary pioneer; he was, above all, a primitive Christian, a true monk, and, in one word, a saint. His mind was simple and humble, mild and pure; he served God with tranquil devotion, grateful for the extraordinary grace that he had received from heaven. But he was full of zeal for monastic regularity. No frivolous or worldly subjects ever inspired his verse; he composed his songs only that they might be useful to the soul, and their solemn beauty did even more for the conversion than for the delight of his countrymen. Many were moved by them to despise this world, and to turn with ardent love to the divine life. He died as poets seldom die. At the very beginning of his illness he desired his bed to be made in that part of the infirmary which was assigned to the dying, and, while smiling and talking cheerfully with his brethren, asked for the _viaticum_. At the moment when he was about to administer the Communion to himself, from the pyx brought from the Church, according to the usage of the period, and while holding in his hands the Holy Eucharist, he asked all those around him, if any one had any grudge against him, or any complaint to make? All answered, "No." Then said he, "I, too, my children, have a mind at peace with all God's servants." A little while after he had received the venerable Sacrament, as they were about to waken the monks for Matins, he made the sign of the Cross, laid his head on the pillow, and fell asleep in silence, to awake no more. S. THEODORA, EMPRESS. (A.D. 867.) [Commemorated by the Greeks; not regarded as a Saint by the Western Church.] Theodora, wife of Theophilus, the Byzantine Emperor, has the glory of having brought to an end the triumph of the Iconoclasts in the East. After the death of her savage husband she ruled during the minority of her son, Michael III. Her claim to sanctity is certainly very questionable. [32] The term used throughout in the Acts is "the Collect." [33] These were, by laying her head on the altar to offer it to God, and all her life after wearing her hair long, as did the ancient Nazarenes: Act. p. 417. S. Optatus, c. 6. S. Ambr. and Virg. c. 8. But in Egypt and Syria the ceremony of this consecration consisted in the virgin cutting off her hair in the presence of a priest. [34] An instance of a child being, in the fourth century, allowed to assist at Mass. [35] _Lebito_, or _Levitonarium_, described thus in the life of S. Pachomius, c. 14. Levitonarium est colobium lineum sine manticis, quali Monachi Ægyptii utuntur. February 12. S. EULALIA, _V. M. at Barcelona_, A.D. 303. S. MELETIUS THE GREAT, _Patr. of Antioch_, A.D. 381. S. RIOCH, _Monk in Brittany_, 5th cent. S. ETHELWOLD, _B. of Lindisfarne_, A.D. 740. S. BENEDICT OF ANIANE, _Ab._, A.D. 821. S. ANTONY CAULEAS, _Patr. of Constantinople_, A.D. 896. S. BENEDICT, _B. of Albenga, in N. Italy_, A.D. 900. S. GOSLIN, _Ab. of Turin_, A.D. 1061. S. LUDAN, _C. near Strasbourg_, A.D. 1202. S. EULALIA, V. M. (A.D. 303.) [There are two saints of this name very celebrated in Spain, whereof one is of Merida, the other, the subject of this notice, of Barcelona. The former is commemorated on the 10th of December; the latter on Feb. 12th. The former is said to have been aged twelve or thirteen, the latter aged fourteen. There is also a striking similarity in their acts and their legends; and it seems that writers have often confounded the one with the other, that is, supposing there were two saints, virgins and martyrs of this name. But it seems not improbable, that the Eulalia of Barcelona and her namesake of Merida are the same. Such a mistake as the making one saint into two might easily arise, if a portion of the relics of Eulalia of Barcelona had been transferred to Merida. Martyrologists as generally name a saint as "of such a place" by the place where his or her relics are, as by the scene of the martyrdom. The Roman Martyrology says, on Feb. 12th, "At Barcelona, in Spain, S. Eulalia, V., who endured the little-horse, hooks, and flames, in the reign of Diocletian, the Emperor, and was finally fastened to a cross,[36] and received the crown of Martyrdom." Usuardus says much the same. The Martyrologies of Bede, Ado, and Notker enter into fuller details. The feast of S. Eulalia is observed with an octave according to ancient custom, sanctioned by a decree of the Congregation of Rites, Dec. 6th, 1608, at Barcelona, even when it falls in Lent. It is difficult to fix the date of the Acts, but it is certain that we have not got them in their original form, though there is no reason for doubting their substantial authority.] Eulalia, the daughter of Christian parents, lived on a farm outside the gates of Barcelona. Now, when she heard that persecution had broken out, she cried, "Thanks do I render to Thee, Lord Jesu Christ, and glory to Thy holy Name, for now I behold that which I have desired, and I believe that with Thy help all my desire shall find accomplishment." Then the young girl at night escaped from her home, and, entering the city in the morning, presented herself before the magistrate, and defied him and his gods. The magistrate ordered her to be whipped, thinking that the lashes on her tender skin would subdue her constancy. But he was mistaken. She accepted the sufferings with joy, and was then stretched on the little-horse and her sides torn with iron hooks and burnt with torches. And in her agony she looked up to heaven and cried, "Lord Jesu Christ, hear my prayer, and perfect Thy work in me, and bid me be numbered among Thine elect in the rest of life eternal." And when she had so prayed, her soul sped from her, and entered into the Paradise of God, as a dove flies to its nest. Then the executioners cast her off from the rack upon the blood-stained soil; but the magistrate ordered, "Let the body hang to be devoured by the birds of the air." Then a light snow began to fall out of heaven and softly cover the virgin's naked and mangled body with a pure white pall. Then the executioners, astonished, withdrew, and on the third day the Christians were allowed to bear away the sacred relics. Patroness of Barcelona and of sailors. Her relics are preserved at Barcelona, in the Cathedral. She is represented in art, with her soul, as a dove, issuing from her mouth, or lying covered with snow before a rack. It seems to be an error to regard her as having been crucified. In the Acts the command of the magistrate is, "Let her hang on the cross"; but this refers to the rack on which she was stretched. She is, however, sometimes represented with a cross. S. MELETIUS, PATR. OF ANTIOCH. (A.D. 381.) [Commemorated by Greeks and Romans on the same day. But Maurolycus, by mistake, inserts him along with S. Meletius, B. of Pontus, on Dec. 4th. Authorities:--Sozomen, Socrates, Theodoret, and the oration of S. John Chrysostom in his honour.] The history of this noble Confessor is a sad one, for it opens up to us a picture of the dissensions which tore the Church in the 4th century. It will be remembered that the Church was at that period suffering from the prevalence of Arianism, which denied the Eternal Godhead of the Son. Favoured by the Court, Arianism had penetrated into the Church on all sides; many of the bishops were Arian, others were semi-Arian, unwilling to pronounce decidedly against the Godhead of Christ, and unwilling also to declare that great doctrine to be the Truth. The election of the bishops being in the hands of the people, if among the laity and clergy low views of Christ's nature prevailed, an Arian was chosen to be their bishop. It was none the better when the emperors interfered to nominate, for they would expel an orthodox prelate and substitute for him one who was an Arian. And it must be remembered that Arians were at that time mixed up with Catholics, as parties in the Church, and did not at first stand to one another in the position of separate and antagonistic communions. By the predominance of the votes of Arians, Meletius was elected and consecrated bishop of Beroea, and was afterwards by the same influence translated to the See of Sebaste.[37] He was present at the council of Seleucia (359), where he sided with the shifty semi-Arian Acacius of Cæsarea. But his eyes seem to have opened to the truth, and that gentle and peace-loving disposition which made him at first willing to soften differences was braced up by the imminence of the danger to true religion, to take a bold step. A council, assembled at Antioch in 361, placed Meletius in the see. This excellent man had a persuasive eloquence and a disposition which endeared him both to Catholics and Arians. A rumour began to spread that he was positively Catholic. After some sermons of a general character, he was desired to take part in a series of expositions of the great controverted text, Prov. viii. 22. After George, bishop of Laodicea, had given a strongly Arian address, and Acacius, bishop of Cæsarea, had read a paper which seemed to aim at a safe ambiguity, Meletius rose, and asserted, in unequivocal language, the essential doctrine of Nicæa. The church rang with cries of applause and wrath, proceeding from Catholics and Arians. The Arian archdeacon stopped the new patriarch's mouth with his hand. Meletius held out three fingers, then one; and when his lips were freed by the archdeacon's seizing his hands, he repeated aloud his former words, and exhorted the people to cling to the Nicene faith. This could not be borne; the council, at another session, deposed Meletius; the Emperor Constantius drove him into exile; Euzoius, an old comrade of Arius, was made bishop of Antioch; and a new creed was published which affirmed that the Son was in nowise like to the Father, and was made out of what once was not. This led to a separation between the Catholics and the Arians. The latter were put in possession of all the churches, by imperial authority. Unfortunately, the Catholics were divided. Many held with the orthodox banished patriarch, Meletius, but some of the more obstinate refused to acknowledge him, and to communicate with those who did, because he had been ordained through Arian influence at Sebaste. On the accession of the Emperor Julian the Apostate, Lucifer, bishop of Cagliari, and Eusebius of Vercelli resolved to do what was possible to allay the miserable schisms which devastated the East and Egypt. Accordingly a council was summoned at Alexandria, to which Eusebius betook himself, but Lucifer, sending a representative to the council, hasted to Antioch, where, with that unfortunate precipitancy which characterised all his actions, he ordained one Paulinus to the Patriarchate, a man belonging to the extreme orthodox side, without waiting the return of Meletius, who had been recalled from banishment. As soon as the council of Alexandria had reinstated S. Athanasius, Eusebius of Vercelli arrived at Antioch, and found that the visit of Lucifer of Cagliari had made matters worse instead of healing divisions. There were now three Patriarchs of Antioch: one, Euzoius, the Arian, in possession of all the churches except one, which, out of personal friendship for Paulinus he had ceded to him; another, Meletius, the banished and now recalled patriarch, against whose orthodoxy no breath of doubt was raised; and Paulinus, acknowledged by the Roman pontiff, at the head of a small party who rejected Meletius, because he had once been mixed up with Arians. Eusebius regretted what had been done, but his respect for Lucifer, says Socrates, induced him to be silent about it, and, on his departure, he engaged that all things should be set right by a council of bishops. Subsequently, he laboured with great earnestness to unite the dissentients, but without effect. Shortly after the departure of Eusebius, Meletius arrived in Antioch, and was obliged to assemble the faithful who clung to him outside the walls of the city. This was in 362. On June 26th, 363, Julian died, and his successor, Jovian, was a Catholic. Instantly the party of Acacius held a conclave, and agreed to become orthodox, conforming to the Catholic creed, showing very plainly, says Socrates, that their great object was to be in agreement with the imperial mind. Acacius had a meeting with Meletius, and joined his party. The Emperor Jovian was succeeded by Valens in the East, in 364, and Meletius was again driven into exile, for the cruel tyrant was an Arian. As he was being taken out of the city in the chariot of the governor, the mob, exasperated at losing their beloved prelate, would have stoned the chief magistrate, had not Meletius screened him with his mantle. He was banished into Armenia, and during his absence, the Catholics were left without pastors through the severity of the imperial orders. Valens fell before the Goths, in the great battle of Hadrianople, in 378, and was succeeded by Gratian, who recalled the bishops that had been banished, and ordered "that the churches should be given up to those who held communion with Damasus, bishop of Rome."[38] Paulinus promised to communicate on the subject with Damasus. "Meletius, the mildest of men," continues Theodoret, "addressed Paulinus in a kind and affectionate manner: 'As God,' said he, 'committed to me the care of this flock, and as you have received the charge of another, and as our respective sheep hold the same doctrines, let us, O friend, unite our flocks. Let us throw aside all contests for superiority, and tend with equal assiduity the sheep entrusted to us. If the episcopal chair of this city be to us a matter of contention, let us place the holy gospel upon it, and let us seat ourselves on each side of it. If I die first, thou, O friend, wilt become the only ruler of the flock; but if your death occur before mine, I will, as far as I am able, tend the flock alone.' Paulinus, however, refused to comply with the offer so kindly and affectionately made by Meletius. The general sent by Gratian to execute his orders, after reflecting on what had been stated, gave up the churches to the holy Meletius. Paulinus continued to rule those who had from the beginning separated themselves from the rest of the flock." S. Athanasius, S. Eusebius of Samosata, S. Gregory Nazianzen, S. Gregory Nyssen, S. Basil the Great, S. Cyril of Jerusalem, S. Pelagius of Laodicæa, S. Amphilochius of Iconium, and nearly the whole of the East were in communion with Meletius, whereas Paulinus alone was acknowledged by Pope Damasus of Rome, the whole of the West, and Egypt. The Pope sent to him a synodal letter denouncing various heresies which prevailed in the East. Meletius at once summoned a council at Antioch, in 378, and accepted the synodal letter, though addressed to his rival. Two great saints arose from the rival parties: S. Jerome, who was ordained priest by Paulinus, and S. John Chrysostom, who was the disciple of Meletius, from whom he received deacon's orders. The Emperor Theodosius resolved to assemble a council in order to settle various affairs concerning the welfare of the Church, and to crush the Macedonian heresy. The bishops, 150 in number, met at Constantinople on May 2nd, 381, and Meletius was appointed to preside. "When the whole assembly of bishops had been ushered into the palace," says Theodoret, "the emperor, without noticing the others, ran up directly to the great Meletius, and embraced him kissed his eyes, lips, breast, head, and the right hand which had crowned him, and exhibited all those demonstrations of affection which would be shown by a dutiful son on beholding a beloved father after a long separation."[39] During the council, Meletius was attacked by an illness which proved fatal. He exhorted the bishops to peaceful courses, and died while the council was sitting. "Where now," asked S. Gregory of Nyssa, in the funeral sermon, "is that sweet calm look, that radiant smile, that kind hand which was wont to second the kind voice?" His name, as S. Gregory observed, expressed the sweetness of his character; and S. Chrysostom adds, that so dear had the gentle patriarch become to the people of Antioch that they had engraved his likeness on their rings, their cups, and the walls of their bed-rooms. His funeral was magnificent; lights were borne before the embalmed corpse, and psalms sung--this latter was "a practice quite contrary to the usual Roman customs," curiously says Sozomen.[40] These honours were repeated in all cities through which it passed, until it rested beside the grave of S. Babylas, at Antioch. S. ETHELWOLD, B. OF LINDISFARNE. (A.D. 740.) [Anglican Martyrology of Wilson. Authorities:--Simeon of Durham and Malmesbury.] There is nothing of much importance to relate concerning this saint, who was minister to S. Cuthbert in Farne, afterwards abbot of Mailros, and finally bishop of Lindisfarne. S. BENEDICT OF ANIANE, AB. (A.D. 821.) [Roman Martyrology. Authority:--His life by Ardo Smaragdus, his disciple.] This Benedict, the reviver of monastic discipline, was the son of Aigulf, Count of Languedoc, and served King Pepin and his son Charlemagne as cupbearer. But, at the age of twenty, he resolved to seek the kingdom of God and His righteousness with all his heart. From that time forward he led a mortified life in the Court for three years, eating sparingly and allowing himself little sleep. In 774, having narrowly escaped drowning, he made a vow to quit the world entirely. Returning to Languedoc, he was confirmed in his resolution by the advice of a hermit, named Widmar, and, under pretext of going to the Court at Aix-la-Chapelle, he went to the abbey of S. Seine, five leagues from Dijon, and became a monk there. His discipline of himself was most severe. He frequently spent the whole night in prayer, standing barefoot on the ground in a keen frost. On the death of the abbot, the brethren desired to elect Benedict, but he, knowing their aversion to a reformation, left them, and retired to a hermitage, in 780, on the brook Aniane, on his own estate in Languedoc. Here he was joined by the hermit Widmar and other solitaries, who placed themselves under his direction. They earned their livelihood by their labour, and lived on bread and water, except on Sundays and great festivals. In a short while Benedict had three hundred monks under his rule, and he built a monastery; and also exercised the office of general inspector to all the monasteries of Provence, Languedoc, and Gascony. King Louis the Pious, who succeeded his father, Charlemagne, in 814, committed to the saint the inspection of all the abbeys in his kingdom. In 817 he presided at an assembly of abbots, to enforce restoration of discipline in their monasteries. He died at Inde, a monastery near Aix-la-Chapelle, on February 11th, 821, at the age of seventy one; but his festival is usually observed on the following day, which is that of his burial. [36] This is a mistake, as Bollandus has pointed out; the cross means the little-horse on which she was extended. [37] It is uncertain whether he was first at Sebaste or at Beroea. Socrates says he was translated from Beroea to Sebaste, but there are circumstances which make this statement impossible to reconcile with other facts. [38] Theodoret, lib. v. c. 2. [39] Lib. v., c. 7. [40] Lib. vii., c. 10. [Illustration: The Papermaker.] February 13. SS. FUSCA, _V._, AND MAURA, _MM. at Ravenna, 3rd cent._ S. POLYEUCTUS, _M. at Melitene, in Armenia; circ._ A.D. 259. S. JULIANA, _Matron at Turin, 9th cent._ S. DOMNINUS, _B. of Digne in France, 4th cent._ S. CASTOR, _P. at Coblenz, end of 4th cent._ S. MARTIAN, _H. in Palestine; circ._ A.D. 400. S. STEPHEN, _of Lyons, B. C.; circ._ A.D. 512. S. MODOMNOC, _of Ossory, C. 6th cent._ S. STEPHEN, _Ab. of Riete in Italy, 6th cent._ S. LICINIUS, _B. of Angers; circ._ A.D. 617. S. ERMENILDA, _Q. Abbess of Ely; circ._ 700. S. GREGORY II., _B. of Rome_; A.D. 731. SS. AYMON AND WEREMUND, _Counts of Turbio in Italy; circ._ A.D. 790. S. FULCRAN, _B. of Lodeve in France_, A.D. 1006. S. GISLBERT, _B. of Meaux, after_ A.D. 1000. B. JORDAN, _O. S.D._ A.D. 1237. S. CATHERINE, _of Ricci, V., O. S.D_., A.D. 1590. SS. FUSCA AND MAURA, MM. (3RD CENT.) [Roman Martyrology. It is doubtful whether these martyrs suffered under Caracalla, or under Decius. The Roman Martyrology says "under Decius;" the Acts are silent on this point. Baronius says under Decius, in the year 254; but Decius fell in 251. There exist several editions of the Acts, all apparently derived from the original authentic account of their passion, and differing from one another in no important particular.] The blessed Fusca was a young girl of Ravenna, aged fifteen, who, with her nurse Maura, had been instructed in the faith of Christ, and had been baptized by S. Hermolaus. Her parents, who were heathens, were exceedingly annoyed, and endeavoured by persuasion and threats to turn their daughter from her confidence in God; and on one occasion her father was so far exasperated as to rush upon her to strike her, but the mother interposed and restrained him. The Præfect Quintianus, hearing of the conversion of Fusca, sent for her, together with her nurse, and having scourged her, ordered the executioner to run her through with his spear. The maiden fell into the arms of Maura, and the old woman, clasping her bleeding mistress, implored the man to despatch her also; this request was readily complied with, and the nurse and her young charge died together. The relics of these holy martyrs are preserved at Torcelli. In Art they are represented holding a spear. S. POLYEUCTUS, M. (ABOUT 259.) [Commemorated by Greeks, Armenians, and Latins. The ancient Roman Martyrology, called that of S. Jerome, on Jan. 7th, as also the Armenians; another on Feb. 13th; another on Feb. 14th; by the Greeks on Jan. 9th. Usuardus, Ado, and the modern Roman Martyrology on Feb. 13th; some ancient ones on Jan. 10th. There are two editions of the Acts of S. Polyeuctus, one in Latin, the other in Greek, based on the original by Nearchus, who took his body to burial after his death. The following account is a literal translation of the later Acts.] Whilst the Christians, especially those in the East, were suffering persecution under the Emperors Decius and Valerian, there were two men very friendly, Polyeuctus and Nearchus by name. Now Nearchus was a Christian, but Polyeuctus was a heathen. But when Decius and Valerian could not be satiated with the blood of the saints, they issued an edict that those Christians who would sacrifice to the gods, should be favoured by the majesty of the empire, but that those who refused should be cruelly punished. Which things being heard, Nearchus, who desired to be dissolved, and to be with Christ, lamented because his comrade, whom he loved as a second self, would be left in peril of eternal damnation. Going therefore to his friend, Polyeuctus, he announced to him that on the morrow their friendship must come to an end. And when he answered that death alone could terminate this, Nearchus said, "You speak the truth, we are about to be separated by death." And he showed him the imperial edict. Then Polyeuctus narrated to Nearchus how Christ had appeared to him in vision, and had taken off his dirty vestment, together with his military harness, and had thrown over him a gorgeous silk robe, linking it at his shoulder with a golden brooch, and had mounted him on a winged horse. Hearing this, Nearchus was glad, and having expounded the vision, and instructed Polyeuctus more fully in the faith, his friend believed perfectly, and began to thirst for martyrdom. Now when Polyeuctus declared himself openly to be a Christian, and rebuked idolatry, being tried by the persecutors, he was for a long time tortured. And when he had been a long while scourged with rods, the tormentors were weary, and endeavoured to persuade him with bland speeches and promises, to return to the worship of the gods. But he, remaining immoveable in the confession of the Lord, and deriding them, was more furiously beaten. Then came his wife and only son, and she filled the place with her cries, and held out to him his son, alleging his marriage ties, with many tears and sighs, and laboured to call the saint from martyrdom, by the thoughts of his son, of his wealth, and of his friends. But he, divinely inspired, could not be separated from Christ by any temptations, but all the more exhorted his wife to desert her idols and believe in Christ. Now when the governors saw that the constancy of the martyr was not to be shaken, they pronounced capital sentence against him. And when the martyr heard this, he gave thanks, and praising God, was led to the place of execution, confirming the faithful with his holy exhortations, so that not a few of the unbelievers were converted. Then, turning to the Blessed Nearchus, he announced to him that he should follow him according to mutual agreement; and bidding him farewell, died a glorious death. S. CASTOR, P. C. (END OF 4TH CENTURY.) [Cologne, Belgian, Treves Martyrologies. The accounts we have of him are not of any great antiquity.] S. Castor was ordained first deacon, and then priest, by S. Maximus, second bishop of Trèves. He was appointed to preach the Gospel at Carden, on the Moselle, where is a church founded by him. A popular legend represents him as having asked of a boat which was going up the river with a load of salt, a small quantity of that useful condiment, which was however refused him; but when the vessel was shortly after nigh sinking in a storm, Castor saved it by making the sign of the cross over the tossing waves. His body, or part of it, was translated in after years to Coblenz. S. MARTIAN, H. (ABOUT 300.) [Commemorated by the Greeks with special solemnity on this day. Authority:--A Life written by a contemporary. Anciently, S. Martian was venerated at Constantinople in the Church of S. Peter, with great honour, probably because his relics reposed there.] Martian was a native of Cæsarea in Palestine. At the age of eighteen he retired to a mountain near that city, where he lived for twenty-five years among many holy solitaries in the practice of all virtues. A courtesan of Cæsarea, called Zoe, having heard of his sanctity, moved by an evil spirit, resolved to endeavour to lead him into sin. One stormy night she presented herself at his door, and cried to be admitted. "Have pity on me!" she pleaded, "I fear the wild beasts, I have lost my way!" Then he admitted her, and when she used all her efforts to fascinate him, and he felt his heart rebel against the law of God, by a sudden act of resolution, he thrust his legs into the fire, crying, "O Martian! how feels this fire to thee now? Yet it is not comparable to that which the devil kindles to consume the sinner." The woman, horror-struck at his proceeding, was filled with shame at her wicked purpose and manner of life. She burst into tears, and entreated the holy man to give her a rule whereby she might conform her life to the will of God. Then he sent her to S. Paula,[41] who governed a convent at Bethlehem, who received her; and Zoe became a model of penitence, eating only once a day, and sometimes spending two days without food; sleeping on the bare ground, and ever bewailing with many tears her former wicked life. Martian, after his legs were healed, resolved to escape to some place where he could not be tempted so readily. He therefore found a rock at some little distance from the shore, in the sea, and in that was a cave. Martian spent six years in this solitude, deprived of all human consolations, but full of joy in being separated from all creatures who might draw his heart from God. After the lapse of six years, one stormy day a vessel was wrecked near his islet, and a girl, who was one of the passengers, managed to save herself upon the rock of Martian. The hermit was placed in a sore predicament; he had no wish for the society of a young damsel in his place of retreat, and yet he had no power to drive her from her refuge. He therefore said to her, "My daughter, we must not both live here together. In two months a ship will touch on this island to bring me what is needful for my support. Till then there is bread and water in my cave. Take it, and live here; when the ship arrives, tell the captain how you came here, and he will take you on board and convey you to the main land." Then he flung himself into the sea and swam ashore. For two years he wandered without finding a home, but at last died at Athens. The girl left on the island, had, in the meantime, become attached to the solitary life, and when the boat arrived, she besought the ship-master to give her a warm dress, some wool to spin, and bread and water. The captain readily promised to do as she required, and returned shortly after with his wife, bringing her all she needed; and from that day he came to the island every three months, bringing her what she needed, during the six years she lived there. S. MODOMNOC, C. (6TH CENT.) [Irish Martyrologies. Sometimes called S. Domnoc.] This saint, who is greatly reverenced in Ossory, was a pupil of S. David in Wales, but a native of Ireland, a member of the princely house of the Nialls, son of Saran, and fourth in descent from Eugene, one of the sons of Neill Neigilliach. After having spent some time in Wales in the little monastery cultivating flowers and vegetables and bees, he returned to his native island. And as he mounted the ship, his bees swarmed, and settled on the boat. So Modomnoc took the swarm with him to the Emerald Isle. After his return home he served God at Tiprat Fachtua, in the west of Ossory, near the Suir, now Tibrach, in Kilkenny. S. LICINIUS, B. C. (ABOUT A.D. 617.) [Roman Martyrology. Usuardus, Gallican Martyrologies, &c. Authorities:--Two ancient lives, one by an anonymous author, the other by Marbod, archdeacon of Angers, and afterwards Bishop of Rennes.] This saint was born about the year 540, and at the age of twenty was sent to the court of King Clothaire I., whose cousin he was. He was made Count of Anjou by King Chilperic, and was about to be married in 578, when, on the wedding morning, the bride was struck with leprosy. This incident so affected Licinius, that he renounced the world; and in the year 600, was elected bishop of Angers, where he set an example of great piety and zeal. He is called in French _Lessin_. S. ERMENILDA, Q. ABSS. (ABOUT A.D. 700.) [Wytford, Maurolycus, Carthusian Mart. of Cologne, Ferrarius and Cansius. Authorities:--Bede, John of Brompton, the Historia Eliensis, &c.] Ermenilda was the daughter of the saintly queen of Kent, Sexburga, who after the death of her husband, and regency till her son was of age, retired to Ely, where she became abbess. Ermenilda was married to Wulfhere, king of Mercia, and became the mother of S. Wereburga. She used all the influence which the love of her husband gave her to extirpate the last vestiges of idolatry in the country which had been the centre and last bulwark of Anglo-Saxon heathenism. The example of her virtues was the most effectual of sermons, and it was, above all, by her incomparable sweetness, her pity for all misfortunes, her unwearied kindness, that she touched the hearts of her subjects most. Like her mother, it was her desire to offer herself entirely to God; to whom she had finally led back her people; as soon as she became a widow, she took the veil like her mother, and under her mother--for it was to Ely that she went to live in humility and chastity, under a doubly maternal rule. The mother and daughter contended which should give the finest examples of humility and charity. At last, and still following in her mother's steps, Ermenilda, on the death of Sexburga, became abbess, and was thus the third princess of the blood of the Uffings who ruled the flourishing community of Ely. The local chronicle affirms that it was not her birth, but her virtues, and even her love of holy poverty, which made her preferred to all others by the unanimous suffrages of her numerous companions. She showed herself worthy of their choice; she was less a superior than a mother. After a life full of holiness and justice, her soul went to receive its eternal reward in heaven, and her body was buried beside those of her mother and aunt, in the church of the great abbey, which had thus the singular privilege of having for its three first abbesses, a queen of Northumbria, a queen of Kent, and a queen of Mercia. S. GREGORY II., POPE. (A.D. 731.) [Roman and other Western Martyrologies on this day, though he died on Feb. 10th.] S. Gregory II. was ordained sub-deacon by pope Sergius I., and under the four succeeding popes he acted as treasurer and librarian to the Church in Rome. When elected pope, he signalized himself by his unwearied zeal in defending the pure faith against heresy, and in combating the Iconoclasts who, protected by the Emperor Leo the Isaurian, waged war against sacred pictures and images. The tyrant sent officers on several occasions to murder the holy pope; but he was so faithfully guarded by the Romans, that he escaped unhurt. He held the pontificate fifteen years, eight months, and twenty-three days, and died on Feb. 10th, 731. S. FULCRAN, B. C. (A.D. 1006.) [Gallican Martyrology, Authority:--A Life by Bishop Bernard Guido, compiled from ancient notices and lives of this saint, published by Bollandus.] The blessed Fulcran was a native of Lodeve, in the archdiocese of Narbonne, in France; and from his childhood exhibited marked piety. He was educated by Theodoric, Bishop of Lodeve, who also ordained him. On the death of Theodoric, the city elected Fulcran to be his successor; and he was consecrated at Narbonne by Archbishop Imerick, on the 4th February, 949. His zeal and humility endeared him to his flock, as did also his abundant charity in time of famine. Having been told of a certain neighbouring bishop that had fallen into heresy, Fulcran, in a moment of indignation, without weighing his words, exclaimed, "The man deserves to be burnt!" Shortly after he heard that the people had burnt the bishop alive. He was at once filled with remorse, fearing lest his rash and uncharitable speech should have been reported, and encouraged the people to commit this crime. Unable to find rest of conscience, he went to Rome, and entering the city, tore the clothes off his back, and bade his companions beat him through the streets with thorn branches, till he reached the Church of S. Peter, where he made his confession with many tears. After this, he returned to his diocese, but again feeling agonies of remorse, revisited Rome, and again a third time, subjecting himself to various penances. When his end drew near, he announced it to his friends, and the rumour spreading, multitudes poured to Lodeve to see him for the last time, and receive his parting benediction. Though consumed with fever, he said Mass in the Cathedral before all, and weeping, prayed for his flock; then he blessed the tomb he had ordered to be prepared for himself, and died peacefully shortly after. S. CATHARINE DE RICCI, V. (A.D. 1590.) [Roman Martyrology. Canonised by Pope Benedict XIV, in 1746.] S. Catharine, born of the noble Ricci family at Florence, from her infancy exhibited a precocious piety. Being placed in a convent when young, she prayed every day before a crucifix, shedding many tears, and meditating continually on the passion. She afterwards entered the Dominican convent of S. Vincent, in the town of Prato. She was asked to come home, but refused to revisit her parents till they had given her a promise that they would not oppose her vocation. At the age of thirteen she embraced the religious profession. The grace of God descended upon her in abundant measure, and she is said to have received from our Blessed Lord the ring of espousal, and the stigmata. Being at Prato, she is said also to have seen and conversed with S. Philip Neri, who was then in Rome. At length after a life of great self-denial and continual ecstasy, exhausted by grave sickness, and strengthened with the sacraments of the Church, she departed to her rest, in the year 1590, in the sixty-ninth year of her age, on Feb. 2nd. [41] See Jan. 26th. February 14. SS. VITALIS, FECHULA, ZENO, _MM. at Rome_. S. ELEUCODIUS, _B. of Ravenna_, A.D. 112. S. VALENTINE, _P. M. at Rome_, A.D. 269. S. VALENTINE, _B. M. at Teramo in Umbria; circ._ A.D. 273. SS. MODESTINE, _B._, FLORENTINE, _P._, AND FLAVIAN, _D., at Avellino in Italy_. S. MARO, _H. in Syria; circ._ A.D. 370. S. ABRAHAM, _B. at Carrhæ, in Mesopotamia; circ._ A.D. 390. S. AUXENTIUS, _Ab. in Bithynia; circ._ A.D. 470. S. ANTONINE, _Ab. at Sorrento; circ._ A.D. 830. SS. BRUNO, _B._, AND EIGHTEEN COMPANIONS, _in Prussia, MM._ A.D. 1008. S. VALENTINE, P. M. (A.D. 269.) [All Western Martyrologies. Acts contained in those of SS. Marius, Martha, Audifax, and Habachuc.] This saint was a priest of the Roman Church, and was put in chains by Claudius II. for having assisted the martyrs during the Emperor's persecution of the Christians. Calpurnius, the prefect of the city, who had charge of him, intrusted him to the care of Asterius, his chief officer. S. Valentine used his opportunity, and preached the faith to his guard, and restored sight to his adopted daughter. Asterius was converted and baptized with his whole family, and confirmed by a bishop named Callistus. Claudius hearing this, condemned Valentine to be beaten with clubs, and afterwards beheaded. He suffered on the Flaminian Way, on February 14th, A.D. 269. The body of S. Valentine is preserved in the Church of S. Praxedis, in Rome; but the head in that of S. Sebastian. Much difficulty is caused by the great number of relics of saints called Valentine, commemorated on the same day, but of whose acts nothing is known. There is a S. Valentine, bishop and martyr, whose body is preserved at Baga, in the Asturias, and the head at Toro, on the Douro. The body of a S. Valentine, together with that of a S. Albinus, and S, Paulianus, Bishop of Rieux, are preserved at Annecy. The body of another S. Valentine, M. at Rome, was extracted from the cemetery of S. Calixtus, and given by Pope Urban VIII. to the monastery of Socuellamos, in Albacete, in Spain. Another body claiming to be that of a S. Valentine, Roman martyr, is venerated in Belgium, at Hamme; this body was extracted from the catacomb of S. Laurence on the Flaminian Way, and given by Pope Gregory XV., in 1623, to Count Louis Egmont; part of these relics were translated to Armentières on the Lys, upon the French frontier. Again, another body of a S. Valentine, martyr at Rome, was found in the catacomb of S. Cyriac, and was given in 1651 to the Jesuits of Ghent. The name was so common in the later period of the Roman Empire, that it is probable there were many martyrs of the same name. This is proved by the discovery in the catacombs of three, with the palm branch and bottle of blood. Besides, the ancient Martyrology, called that of S. Jerome, mentions on this day, "In Africa, Valentine and twenty-four soldiers, martyrs," of whom nothing further is known. There was also a S. Valentine, first Bishop of Teramo, in Umbria, who having healed the crippled son of one Crato, a citizen of distinction, was seized and beheaded by order of the governor, about the year 273. S. ABRAHAM, B. C. (ABOUT A.D. 390.) [Greek Menæa. Authority:--The Philotheus of Theodoret, c. 17.] Abraham was a native of Cyrus in Syria, and a monk, who, moved by desire to spread the kingdom of God, visited the Lebanon in the quality of a merchant buying nuts. And whilst there he collected the Christians into his hut, and together they recited the divine office in a low tone. But when the heathen heard the subdued strains of music, they supposed that they were engaged in incantations, and assembled about the house, then climbed upon the roof, broke it, and poured down dust and sand upon those within, to choke and bury them. However some of the elders of the village interfered, and the half-stifled Christians were drawn out of the house, and bidden to depart. After this the taxgatherers of the Emperor came round, and the people being hardly able to pay, Abraham went to Emesa and begged the money, and then, returning, paid the tax for the whole village, thereby completely conciliating the barbarous people, who at once insisted on his remaining among them, and teaching them the way of God. He accordingly sought priest's orders, and became their pastor for three years, till he was elected Bishop of Charan. In his new position he remained a monk, living on lettuces and water, and never using a bed for rest, nor fire for warmth. Every night he chanted forty hymns, interspersed with prayer, and slept seated in his chair. The Emperor Theodosius visited him, having heard of his fame, and found him a poor old man in a country smock, unable to speak a word of Greek. S. AUXENTIUS, AB. P. (ABOUT A.D. 470.) [Commemorated on the same day by Greeks and Latins. Authorities:--A life by a contemporary and a disciple; mention also by Sozomen, who wrote his history before Auxentius had retired from the world, and whilst the saint was setting a holy example in the court of Theodosius the Younger.] S. Auxentius was the son of Abdas, a Persian Christian, who had fled to Syria from the persecution of king Sapor. In the reign of Theodosius the Younger, Auxentius visited Constantinople, to see his uncle, who had a charge in the imperial guard; but finding that he was dead, he attached himself to the court, and was placed in the fourth company of the guards. He was well built, handsome, active, and strong, and to these bodily perfections was added a lively intelligence, and rigid rectitude. Sozomen says that he was especially commendable at this period for his piety towards God, the purity of his morals, his learning in profane and ecclesiastical sciences, and his courtesy and gentleness. By this conduct he preserved himself from the contagion of the world, and drew upon himself such heavenly benediction, that, before renouncing a secular life, he received of God the gift of miracles. He associated with pious persons, but chiefly with a solitary named John, who lived as a recluse in the Hebdon, a suburb of Constantinople. He visited this man frequently in company with Marcian and Anthimius, both at that time laymen like himself, but afterwards priests. At length the voice of God spake so clear in the soul of the young officer, that he could not mistake its import, and renouncing his position in the court, about the year 446, he retired to a mountain in the neighbourhood of Chalcedon, in Bithynia, where he hoped to live unknown to men. His dress consisted in a sheep-skin, and he had no shelter from the rain and snow. When he prayed, he ascended a rock, and then, raising his hands and eyes to heaven, his heart swelled with joy at the thought of his disengagement from all creatures. But he had not spent a month in this retreat before he was discovered by some shepherd boys, who sought, crying, some strayed sheep. When they first saw him, they ran away screaming, thinking he must be some mountain goblin, but he called after them, and asked them the cause of their sorrow; and when they plucked up courage and told him their grief, he bade them be of good cheer, their sheep were on the left side of the mountain. The boys, having recovered their sheep, returned to their parents, who hastened to visit the strange man. They found him on his rock in the attitude of prayer, with uplifted hands. After this, many people resorted to him, and he instructed them in their duty to God, and healed many that were sick and possessed. The heresy of Eutyches, which consisted in denying the duality of natures in Christ, then imperilled the Church. Nestorius had denied that "God and Man made one Christ." Eutyches denied that in Christ the nature of man and the nature of God remained distinct. "Was Christ of two natures after the Incarnation, or of only one?" he was asked at his trial. Eutyches replied, "Of two natures before the union; but after it, I acknowledge but one." Eutyches being the chief abbot in Constantinople, his views had influenced many of the religious there and throughout Asia Minor. A general council met at Chalcedon, in 451, to try Eutychianism, into which so many had fallen in their eagerness to escape Nestorianism. The Emperor Marcian sent messengers to Auxentius to demand of him a confession of his faith, and his presence at the council. He now inhabited a little cell, which had been built for him. The messengers spoke to him through the window; Auxentius refused to be mixed up with the controversy, and shut his window in their faces. They beat at his door, and endeavoured to break in, but in vain. Then he opened to them his window once more, and asked, "My fathers and my brethren, of what error am I accused?" They replied that his presence was required at Chalcedon. Auxentius said that he believed that the Word had truly taken flesh in the womb of the holy Virgin, ever virgin; and that he adored Him as the only Son of God the Father, and that He was without beginning as to His Godhead, but that He assumed flesh in the end of time; and that it was heresy to declare that the Son of God was man only. This reply showed that Auxentius was profoundly ignorant of the subject of dispute; it was a theologic point that had not been raised when he lived in the world, and it had not invaded and troubled his retreat on Mount Oxia. As the messengers still insisted on his accompanying them, he opened his door reluctantly, and came forth, so fearfully emaciated, ragged, and covered with sores, that their hearts were moved with pity and veneration. As he stepped over the threshold one of his nails fell from off his foot, and one of the company reverently stooped to pick it up. Then the hermit recoiled in shame and indignation, exclaiming, "What! am not I a man like you? I pray you, spare me this distress." As he was too feeble to ride, he was mounted on a car, and thus conveyed to Chalcedon, followed by troops of poor, amongst whom he had distributed the charities placed at his disposal by rich visitors, and surrounded by multitudes bearing their sick, so many of whom were healed by the benediction of the saint, that his guards were astonished and irritated, believing him, at heart, to be an Eutychian. Under the same impression, the monks of the monastery of Phileas, with whom he was placed, treated him with roughness, lodging him in an obscure cell without window; but placing a candle and a basket of dates beside him, to prove him; as also a little child, to watch him. At the end of a week they opened the cell, and found the candle still burning, and the fruit untouched. The child said that the holy man had spent the time in prayer and praises, and that angelic forms had surrounded him, and a dove had brought him food. The saint was next taken to the monastery of the abbot Hypacius, where he was received with much cordiality; and thence he was brought before the Emperor at Constantinople, and required to subscribe to the decrees of the Council of Chalcedon. "If the council has decided nothing contrary to that of Nicæa, if it has declared that Jesus Christ our Lord was truly incarnate, and that the holy Virgin is truly the Mother of God, I will gladly communicate with it." The prince, satisfied with this answer, embraced him, and commanded him to be conducted to the great church. He sent also to the patriarch of Constantinople, to show him the decrees of the Council of Chalcedon, concerning the errors of Eutyches. The saint went to the church followed by a crowd. He read the Acts of the council, and declared that he thoroughly and heartily agreed with them. It is probable that he was then ordained priest, but his historian does not state the time of his reception of holy orders. He then returned to the monastery of Hypacius, and asked to be allowed to inhabit Mount Sinope, instead of Mount Oxia. This mountain was nearer to Chalcedon than that on which he had before resided. It was very high, barren, and deficient in springs. Thither he was conducted by the monks of the monastery of Hypacius, singing hymns; a little hut was erected for his accommodation in a cave, with a window, through which he could receive food, and converse with his visitors. Here he spent some years, becoming more and more emaciated and covered with wounds. Those who visited him in the morning, he retained with him till the hour of Tierce, after which he dismissed them; those coming after, he kept till Sext, which he repeated with them, and then sent them away. He composed hymns and spiritual songs, which he taught to those who came to him, and made them sing them along with him. He daily preached to the people, and gave them instruction in the faith, and how to conduct themselves in the most difficult circumstances. His sermons produced a most striking effect, and many who heard him renounced the world, and adopted the religious habit. As the saint was one night saying Matins, he suddenly opened his window, and exclaimed thrice, "The Lord be praised!" Then he bent his head and said, "Simeon, the great father, is dead." And it was so, for the news reached Bithynia afterwards, that Simeon Stylites,[42] the great anchorite, had died that night. Many women having renounced the world, and placed themselves under the direction of Auxentius, a convent was built to receive them not far from his cavern, at the foot of the mountain, and the nuns visited his cell once a week, to receive instruction from his lips. At length, when he knew that he had not many days to live, he came forth from his hut, and visited the convent, where he prayed with many tears for the spiritual welfare of his children. Then he returned to his cave followed by a great multitude. Three days after he was stricken with a sickness which proved fatal; and he died on the 14th February. S. BRUNO, B. M. (A.D. 1008.) [Roman Martyrology on October 15th, that being, as Baronius conjectures, the commemoration of a translation of the relics, as it is certain that S. Bruno died on Feb. 14th. Authority:--His life by his kinsman Ditmar, bishop of Merseburg, in his Chronicles, lib. 6; and mention by Marianus Scotus, and other chroniclers of Germany.] The Sclavonic races in Prussia were some of the last to receive Christianity in Germany. S. Adalbert, bishop of Prague, had gone amongst the Lithuanians and Prussians, bearing the gospel, and, in 997, had fallen a victim to his zeal. Probably obeying the call of S. Adalbert, Bruno, a monk of Magdeburg, a man of good education, and kinsman to Ditmar, bishop of Merseburg, went on the mission to these heathen. Boleslas, king of Poland, sent, urging his coming, and, after having visited Merseburg, where he received episcopal ordination, Bruno, with many companions, entered on his apostolic mission. But the Pagans refused to hear the word of salvation, and, falling on the little band, hacked off Bruno's hands and feet, and put to death with him eighteen men who accompanied him. [42] See January 5th. [Illustration] February 15. SS. FAUSTINUS, _P._, AND JOVITA, _D., MM. at Brescia_, A.D. 120. SS. CRATO, HIS WIFE AND SERVANTS, _MM. at Rome, circ._ A.D. 273. S. AGAPE, _V. M. at Teramo, in Umbria, circ._ A.D. 273. S. EUSEBIUS, _H. in Syria, after_ A.D. 400. S. GEORGIA, _V. at Clermont_. S. SEVERUS, _P. in Valeria, circ._ A.D. 530. S. QUINIDIUS, _B. of Vaison in Vaucluse, circ._ A.D. 578. S. BERACH, _B. Ab. in Ireland, circ._ A.D. 615. S. FAUSTUS, _Monk, O. S. B.; circ._ A.D. 607. S. WALFRID, _Ab. of Monte Virido, circ._ A.D. 765. S. SIGFRIED, _B., Ap. of Sweden, circ._ A.D. 1045. SS. FAUSTINUS, P., AND JOVITA, D., MM. (A.D. 120.) [Roman Martyrology, and those of Bede, Usuardus, and others; but Usuardus, misled by the name, makes Jovita a virgin martyr. Three different versions of their Acts are published by Bollandus. None of these are the original.] Faustinus and Jovita were brothers, nobly born. Faustinus, the elder, was a priest; Jovita was in deacon's orders. During a time of persecution under Hadrian, the bishop of Brescia lay concealed, and the brothers strengthened and encouraged the fainting flock. The Acts of their Martyrdom are of such doubtful authority that it is unsafe to affirm concerning them more than that their zeal provoked the fury of the heathen against them, and procured them a glorious death for their faith, at Brescia. Their constancy, under the torments of boiling lead and red-hot iron, was the means of converting one Calocerus, who afterwards also suffered for the faith. These saints are venerated as the chief patrons of Brescia, where their relics are preserved in the church dedicated under their invocation. S. EUSEBIUS, H. (AFTER A.D. 400.) [Greek Menæa. Life from the Philotheus of Theodoret, c. 18.] Was a hermit at Aschia, in Syria. Theodoret visited him, and was admitted into his cell. There is nothing remarkable related concerning him. S. GEORGIA, V. (DATE UNCERTAIN, BUT PROBABLY IN THE 5TH CENT.) [Gallican Martyrology. Authority:--S. Gregory of Tours, De Gloria Confess., c. 34.] This pious virgin was a native of Clermont, in Auvergne, where she served God like Anna, constantly attending in the temple. Very little is known of her life, which flowed on in calm simplicity, and would hardly have required a more particular notice than the insertion of her name, were it not for one graceful incident narrated by S. Gregory of Tours, to the effect that as her body was being carried to the cathedral for sepulture, a great company of doves or pigeons fluttered above the mourning train, and settled on the roof of the minster, whilst the last rites were being performed; and this the pious and simple people regarded as a token of divine favour. S. SEVERUS, P. (ABOUT A.D. 530.) [Roman Mart. Authority:--S. Gregory the Great, Dialog., lib. i., c. 12.] S. Severus was priest to a church in the district of Valeria, which is that part between the Tiber and the Velino, occupied by the cities Riete, Terni, and Narni. S. Gregory relates that on one occasion a message was brought him, whilst he was pruning his vines, that a dying man needed his pastoral assistance. Severus promised to go as soon as he had done cutting the vine he was then engaged upon. When he drew near to the sick man's house, the people ran out to meet him, saying, "Oh, sir! why didst thou delay? the man is dead." Then Severus entered, full of self-reproach, praying to God for pardon. And when he saw the dead body, he burst into tears, and beat his head against the ground, reproaching himself for his neglect. Then the dead man's spirit returned, and he opened his eyes, and sat up. So he made his confession and received absolution, and died shortly after. The relics were translated to the monastery of Münster-Maifeld, near Coblenz, about the year 980, by S. Egbert, bishop of Trèves. S. BERACH, B., AB. (ABOUT A.D. 615.) [Irish Kalendar. Two lives of this saint exist, but both are late, collected from oral tradition, and full of fable.] The lives of the Irish saints were, for the most part, written from popular tradition, many centuries after their decease. They are characterised by a love of the marvellous and the grotesque, diminishing their historical value. The same quaint legends re-appear in almost all, or with slender modifications. It seems that every Irish saint yoked stags to his plough, and made bells come to him over the water. If some of these fanciful stories are here inserted, it is not that we desire a ready credence to be yielded to them, but rather because it is all that there is to be told about these saints, and some of them possess a strange beauty or are characteristically grotesque. Berach is said to have been the son of Nemnald, descendant of Brian, Prince of Connaught, by his wife, Finmaith, who took him to be baptized by his uncle, S. Froech. And here follows a strange tale. When Berach was taken from the font, the mother wished to resume her charge of him, but "No," said the bishop, "let me have the bringing up of this little one; God will provide for his sustenance." So S. Froech took him, and when the babe cried for the breast of his mother, his uncle gave him the lobe of his ear to suck, and thence flowed a copious supply of honey. Now, when the boy was grown up, guided by an angel, he went to Glendalough, and there he settled, leading a monastic life under S. Coemgen. One day a wolf fell on a calf, belonging to the monks, and devoured it, then the cow ran lowing painfully about, and Berach, pitying her, bade the wolf come and suck her, and be to her in place of the calf he had eaten. Now there was in the charge of S. Coemgen, a lad, the son of Duke Colman, who was very ill, and consumed with fever. As the boy fretted in his bed, and cried for apples and sorrel to quench his burning thirst, S. Coemgen said to Berach, "Go forth, my son, taking my staff, and bring me what the sick boy needs." So Berach went forth. And it was midwinter. Then he prayed to God, with whom nothing is impossible, for he was stirred with pity for the fevered child, and he went to a willow, and blessed it; then it thrust forth its little silky flowers, and these swelled and ripened into red apples, and beneath the willow the snow dissolved, and green sorrel thrust up its shoots and spread its delicate leaves; so he gathered of the apples a lap-full, and picked a large bunch of sorrel, and came with them to his master.[43] And after some time, Berach went forth and built a monastery in a remote spot, Clon-cairpthe, in the desert of Kinel-dobhtha; but a certain wealthy man interfered to pull it down, and to disturb him in many ways. So Berach appealed for protection to the king; and when he came to the court his adversary arrived also, and was admitted by the porter, for he was well-dressed; but the door was shut against the abbot in his tattered clothing. Now it was winter, and the ground was white with snow, and rude boys, seeing the poor man, scantily clothed, shivering outside the gate, began to pelt him with snow-balls, but suddenly they were struck as by an icy blast, that they could not stir. And Berach saw that the snow had been scraped from the palace-door into a great heap. So he approached it, and blew upon it, and a flame crackled in the snow heap, and leaped up, and he stood and warmed himself at the flaming snow. Then, when the king heard what had taken place, he was full of wonder, and went forth, and besought the man of God; so he restored the boys to their usual activity, and quenched the blazing snow-heap. S. WALFRID, AB. OF MONTE VIRIDO. (ABOUT A.D. 765.) [On this day Benedictine Kalendar; but Wyon, Menardus, and Ferrarius, on April 17th. The life of this saint was written by his friend and companion in monastic life, Andrew, who was third abbot of the monastery. Walfrid was founder and first abbot; he was succeeded by his son, Gimfrid, and then by Andrew.] Walfrid, a native of Pisa, was married to a virtuous wife, by whom he had five sons. Both he and his wife then resolved to retire from the world. He founded and governed the abbey of Monte Virido, in Tuscany, near Volterra. There is nothing of remarkable interest in his life. S. SIGFRIED, B. AP. OF SWEDEN. (ABOUT A.D. 1045.) [Anciently venerated in Sweden; named in the Cologne and other German Kalendars. Authority:--Joannes Magnus, Archb. of Upsal, Hist. Goth. lib. xvii., c. 18, 19, 20.] The faith of Christ was first preached in Sweden, as has been already related (February 3rd) by S. Ansgar, in the ninth century; but the Swedes soon relapsed into their former heathenism, partly from want of a sufficient supply of teachers, till the reign of Olaf Scobkongr. This prince sent ambassadors to King Edred (others say Ethelred) of England, to renew the ancient alliance between the two crowns, and desired that some persons might be sent to him, knowing the Christian law, to instruct him and his people. Edred received the proposition with joy; and, assembling the prelates and chief clergy of his kingdom, exhorted them to make choice of proper missionaries for this great work. Sigfried, archdeacon of York, perceiving that most of those present shrank from the undertaking, as one hazardous and laborious, sprang to his feet, and offered himself for the mission. His offer was at once accepted. He was consecrated bishop, and then sailed to Sweden, taking with him his three nephews Sunaman, Unaman, Wiaman, and other companions. He landed in South Gothland, where now stands the cathedral of Wexiö, which, by the admonition of an angel, he caused to be erected; and there he made some stay, the king being at that time absent in West Gothland. The chief Jarl or earl of those parts came to see the strangers, and observed their conduct with interest; he was even present when Sigfried celebrated the Holy Sacrifice; of all which he gave an account to the king, informing him that he had seen the old man, as he called him, whilst he was standing at the table of his religion, raise above his head a most radiant and beautiful infant, who extended his arm towards him with a smile. The king sent for the saint, and, at his coming, went forth to meet him, and received him with joy; and, after he had been sufficiently instructed in the Christian faith and moral law, was baptized with his queen, and many of his nobles, and gave the saint the royal castle of Husaby to be converted into a church. For this it was well adapted, for the palaces of the Scandinavian kings and nobles consisted of huge halls with sleeping-apartments in what might be termed the aisles, and doors at both ends. By removing the partitions and beds, and blocking up one door, the building at once assumed the appearance of a stately church, of nave and side aisles, separated by huge square pillars of pine-wood. At Husaby, Sigfried long resided, till he had converted all West Gothland to the faith of Christ. But this was not effected without opposition, and his three nephews, Sunaman, Unaman, and Wiaman, to whom he had committed the care of the Church of Wexiö, were murdered, and their bodies cast into a neighbouring pool. The murderers were discovered, and the king would have put them to death, but they were spared at the intercession of S. Sigfried, but the king forced them to pay a blood-fine, which he offered to the bishop as the nearest kinsman of the deceased. Sigfried, however, refused to receive the money. The relics of the three brothers were miraculously discovered by a light hovering above the pool in which they lay. Their names have been recorded among the saints on Feb. 15th, along with their uncle, S. Sigfried. This loss of his coadjutors did not discourage the saint from the work of the Gospel, which he carried on with great success. He was buried in the cathedral of Wexiö, and canonized by the Pope in 1155. [43] See Giraldus Cambrensis, who refers to the legend in his book, De Mirabilibus Hiberniæ, c. 28, but relates it of S. Keiven. February 16. S. ONESIMUS, _Disciple of S. Paul_, A.D. 95. S. ONESIMUS, _B. M. of Ephesus_, A.D. 109. S. HONESTUS, _P. M., Ap. of Pampeluna, circ._ A.D. 270. SS. PROCLUS, EPHEBUS, APOLLONIUS, _MM. at Teramo, circ._ A.D. 283. S. CORNELIUS, _M. at Rome, relics at Ghent_. SS. ELIAS, JEREMIAS, ISAIAS, SAMUEL, AND COMP., _MM. at Cæsarea, in Palestine_, A.D. 309. S. JULIANA, _V. M. at Nicomedia, circ._ A.D. 309. S. FLAVIAN, _H. in the East_. S. EULALIUS, _B. of Syracuse, after_ A.D. 503. S. TANCO, _B. of Verden, in Hanover, circ._ A.D. 800. S. ONESIMUS. (A.D. 95.) [There is much confusion between the S. Onesimus, disciple of St. Paul, and his namesake, bishop of Ephesus. Indeed, by many it is supposed that there was only one Onesimus, and that the runaway slave spoken of by S. Paul was afterwards bishop of Ephesus. The Greeks commemorate the first on Feb. 15th, and the second on December 1st.] Onesimus was a Phrygian by birth, slave to Philemon, a person of note of the city of Colossæ, converted to the faith by S. Paul. Having run away from his master, he providentially met with S. Paul, then a prisoner at Rome, who there converted and baptized him, and sent him, with his canonical letter of recommendation, to Philemon, by whom he was pardoned, set at liberty, and sent back to his spiritual father, whom he afterwards faithfully served. The apostle made him, with Tychicus, the bearer of his Epistle to the Colossians,[44] and afterwards, as S. Jerome[45] and other fathers witness, a preacher of the gospel and a bishop. The Greeks say he suffered under Domitian. There was a bishop of Ephesus, after S. Timothy, of the same name, who showed great respect for S. Ignatius, when on his journey to Rome, in 107, and is highly commended by him.[46] He was conducted to Rome two years after, and was stoned to death. S. HONESTUS, P. M. (ABOUT A.D. 270.) [Commemorated at Pampeluna, as the apostle of that place, and at Amiens with nine lections, and at Toulouse, where his head is preserved. Besides being mentioned in these Breviaries, his name occurs in the Anglican Martyrology of Wytford, and in the additions to Usuardus, by Molanus. All that is known of him is found in the Acts of S. Firmin, B. M. See Sept. 25th.] Honestus, a native of Nismes, was found by S. Saturninus, as he passed through that city, to be of so pious and zealous a disposition that he called him to follow him, as a disciple, and after he had fully instructed him, he ordained him priest, and sent him into Spain. He preached with great effect at Pampeluna, where he converted one Firmus, a senator, with all his house, and his son, Firmin, became his most devoted pupil. He so completely succeeded in the destruction of superstition in the minds of the people of Pampeluna, that he persuaded them to entirely overthrow a temple of Diana, which adorned their town. In some martyrologies he is called a martyr, but nothing is known of the place or manner of his death. S. CORNELIUS, M. (DATE UNKNOWN.) The relics of this martyr, found in one of the Roman catacombs, were given by Pope Innocent X., in 1649, to the Jesuit church at Ghent, where they are enshrined in a silver reliquary, and are exhibited on Feb. 16th. SS. ELIAS, JEREMIAS, ISAIAS, AND COMP., MM. (A.D. 309.) [Commemorated on this day by the Greeks, and in some Western Martyrologies. On this day also the Roman Martyrology. Authority:--Eusebius; Martyrs of Palestine, c. ii.] In the year 309, the Emperors Galerius and Maximinus continuing the persecution begun by Diocletian, five pious Egyptians went to visit the confessors condemned to the mines in Cilicia, and on their return were stopped by the guards of the gates of Cæsarea, in Palestine, as they were entering the town. They readily declared themselves Christians, together with the motives of their journey; upon which they were apprehended. The day following they were brought before Firmilian, governor of Palestine, together with S. Pamphilus, and others. The judge, before he began his interrogatory, ordered the five Egyptians to be laid on the rack. After they had long suffered all manner of tortures, he addressed himself to him who seemed to be their chief, and asked him his name and his country. They had changed their names, which, before their conversion, were those of some heathen gods, as was customary in Egypt. The martyr answered according to the names they had given themselves, which were those of prophets, as Elias, Jeremy, Isaiah, Samuel, and Daniel.[47] Firmilian then asked their country; he answered, Jerusalem, meaning the heavenly Jerusalem, the true country of all Christians. The judge inquired in what part of the world that was, and ordered him to be tormented with fresh cruelty. All this while the executioners continued to tear his body with scourges, whilst his hands were bound behind him, and his feet squeezed in stocks. The judge, at last, tired of tormenting them, condemned all five to be beheaded, and this command was immediately executed. Porphyry, a youth, the servant of S. Pamphilus, hearing the sentence pronounced, exclaimed that the honour of burial ought to be accorded to these men. Firmilian, provoked at this boldness, ordered him to be apprehended, and, finding that he confessed himself a Christian, and refused to sacrifice, "commanded," says Eusebius, "that they should scrape and mutilate him, not as though they were dealing with flesh of a human being, but as with stone and wood, to the very bones, and the inmost recesses of the bowels. This being continued for a long time, he at length perceived that he was labouring in vain, as he continued without uttering a sound, or evincing any feeling, and almost totally lifeless, although his body was dreadfully mangled. But, as the judge was of an inflexible cruelty, he condemned him to be committed to a slow fire. One could then see Porphyry covered with dust, but with his countenance bright and cheerful, advancing on his way to death, covered only with his philosophical garb thrown round him like a cloak, and, with a calm and composed mind, beckoning to his acquaintance and friends, and preserving a cheerful countenance at the stake. When the fire was kindled, which was done at some distance from him, he attracted and inhaled the flame, and then, most nobly persevering in silence, until his last breath, he uttered not another word, save that which he uttered when the flame reached him, a call upon Christ, the Son of God, his helper." Seleucus, an eye-witness of this victory, was heard by the soldiers applauding the heroism of these martyrs, whereupon he was apprehended, and his head was struck off. S. Pamphilus is commemorated in the Roman Martyrology on June 1st; Elias, Jeremias, Isaiah, Samuel, Daniel, Porphyry, and Seleucus, on Feb. 16th. The relics of S. Daniel are preserved at Bologna, in the churches of S. Cecilia and S. Gabriel. S. JULIANA, V. M. (ABOUT A.D. 309.) [Commemorated by the Greeks on December 21st. The ancient Latin Martyrologies on Feb. 16th. The Acts are very ancient. They were certainly written before 600, when her relics were at Puteoli. Usuardus, whose Martyrology dates 800, speaks of her relics as at Cumæ, to which place they had been translated about the year 600. The Acts are not, however, to be trusted. They have apparently been interpolated by those who were not satisfied with their original brevity.] S. Juliana was a Christian maiden, the daughter of heathen parents, very beautiful, and of good birth. Her father resolved on marrying her to the prefect Eleusius, but she refused, alleging, as her excuse, that she was resolved not to marry a heathen. Her father, much exasperated, beat her severely, and when he could not shake her constancy he gave her over to the prefect, hoping that the terror of appearing in court would quell her courage. But he was deceived. She enthusiastically confessed Christ, and her betrothed, brutally ordered her to be stripped and beaten before him, for his love was turned into rage and hatred. The more cruelly she was treated, the more resolved she seemed to become, and the more exasperated grew Eleusius. At last he ordered molten metal to be poured over her, and then that she should be thrown into prison, with her feet made fast in the stocks. On the following day he ordered her to be let down into a vessel of molten lead, and then he bade the executioner strike off her head. The head of S. Juliana is preserved at Hal, in the Tyrol, but the chief portion of her relics is in the church of Notre Dame de Sablon, in Brussels. S. TANCO, B. OF VERDEN. (ABOUT A.D. 800.) [Authorities:--Krantzius, Leslie, and Wion, in Mart. Benedict.] Patto, abbot of Amabaric, in Scotland, having gone to preach the faith to the heathen in Germany, and being appointed bishop of Verden, in the kingdom of Hanover, Tanco, monk of Amabaric, was chosen abbot; but, desiring to follow his former superior, he resigned his charge, and sought Patto at Verden, whom he succeeded after a while, being the third bishop of that see. He is said to have fallen a victim to a barbarous mob who were enraged with him for denouncing their licentious and savage manners. [44] Colos. iv. [45] Ep. lxii. c. 2. [46] Ep. ad Ephes. [47] It is, perhaps, inaccurate to say that these were the names of the five brethren, Eusebius does not affirm as much. He says, "The governor asked the chief of them who he was, when, instead of his proper name, he heard him repeat some name of the prophets, which was done by them, if they happened to have had names given to them by their parents from the names of idols, in which case you would hear them calling themselves Elias, Jeremiah, Isaiah, Samuel and Daniel.... When Firmilian had heard some name like this from the martyr, &c." February 17. S. MARIAMNE, V., _sister of S. Philip the Apostle, 1st cent._ S. POLYCHRONIUS, _B. M. of Babylon_, A.D. 251. SS. DONATUS, CASTULUS, MAGNUS, AND COMPANIONS, _MM. at Teramo, circ._ A.D. 273. SS. DONATUS, SECUNDIAN, ROMULUS, AND COMPANIONS, _MM. at Concordia, in N. Italy_, A.D. 303. SS. THEODULUS AND JULIAN, _MM. at Cæsarea, in Palestine_, A.D. 308. SS. LOMAN AND FORTCHERN, _BB. in Ireland, 7th cent._ S. FINTAN, _P. Ab. of Cluain-Ednech, in Ireland, 6th cent._ S. FINAN, _B. of Lindisfarne_, A.D. 661. S. SILVINE, _B. of Auxy-les-Moines, circ._ A.D. 720. S. FULRAD, _Ab. of S. Denys, in France_, A.D. 784. S. CONSTABILIS, _Ab. of Cavia, in Italy_, A.D. 1124. S. EVERMOD, _B. of Ratzeburg_, A.D. 1178. S. MARIAMNE, V. (1ST CENT.) [Commemorated by Greeks only. Authority:--Nicephorus Callistus, Hist. Eccl. lib. ii. c. 89, of no weight, as he wrote in 1341.] After the Ascension of our Blessed Lord, S. Philip, with Bartholomew, and Mariamne, his sister, came to Hierapolis, where the people held in special veneration a monstrous serpent. The apostles, filled with holy zeal, rushed into the temple and drove the serpent from its sanctum, but the people, enraged, fell on them, and hung S. Philip to a pillar, and would have executed S. Bartholomew and S. Mariamne, had they not been terrified by the shock of an earthquake. They released SS. Bartholomew and Mariamne, who buried Philip, and then went into India. [Illustration: AN EARLY RELIQUARY. Feb. 17.] S. POLYCHRONIUS, B. M. (A.D. 251.) [Roman, and almost all Martyrologies. The Acts of this martyr, somewhat fragmentary, are extant.] The following fragment is all that remains of the Acts of S. Polychronius, slightly epitomized at the commencement: "In those days the storm rose under Decius Cæsar, and many Christians were slain in the city of Rome. Galba being regent in Rome, Decius went against the Persians. Coming to the city Ponticum, he stayed there, but he was warring. Then Decius went up into the Median hill-country, and gained a victory, and took several cities of the Persians, as Babylon, Bactria, Hyrcania, Cordula, where he found many Christians, whom he slew with tortures. At that time he found in the city of Babylon, a bishop named Polychronius, with the priests Parmenias, Elymas, Chrysotelus, and the deacons Luke and Mucius; whom, when he had taken, he ordered to be led forth and to sacrifice to idols. Then Polychronius answered promptly, 'We offer ourselves to the Lord Jesus Christ, and will not bow to devils, or idols made with hands.' Then Decius ordered him and his clergy to prison. And he built there a temple to Saturn, and made a gypsum image, and gilded it....[48] And when it was ready, he ordered Polychronius, his priests, and deacons, to be led before him, and he questioned them, saying, 'Thou art the sacrilegious Polychronius, who will not keep the commandments of the gods of the Emperor.' But Polychronius answered not. Then Decius said to the clergy, 'Your chief is silent.' Parmenias answered, 'Our chief will not defile his mouth; he keeps the command of Our Lord, Cast not your pearls before swine. Dost thou deem it seemly that what has once been purified should be defiled with dung?' Decius said, 'Ha! we are dung, are we?' and he ordered their tongues to be cut out. Now when they had cut out the tongue of Parmenias,[49] Parmenias exclaimed, 'O blessed father Polychronius, pray for me, for I see that the Holy Spirit rules thee, signs thy mouth, and distils honey thereunto.' Decius said, 'Polychronius, sacrifice to the gods;' but he answered not a word. Then Decius ordered his mouth to be beaten in with stones; and he, as they beat him, raised his eyes to heaven, and spread forth his hands, and so expired." SS. THEODULUS AND JULIAN, MM. (A.D. 308.) [Roman Martyrology. The Greeks on Feb. 16th. See account of SS. Elias, Jeremias, Isaiah, and Companions, Feb. 16th. Authority the same.] "Immediately after Seleucus, (see p. 316) came the aged Theodulus, a grave and pious man," says Eusebius, "who was of the governor's family, and who, on account of his age, had been treated with more regard by Firmilian than any of his domestics, as also, because he was now a father of the third generation, and had always evinced great fidelity and attachment to himself and family. He, however, pursuing the same cause as Seleucus, when arraigned before his master, was condemned to endure the same martyrdom as our Saviour on the cross. After all the rest came Julian. He had just come from abroad, and had not yet entered the city; but learning on the road the death of the martyrs, he hastened at once, just as he was, to the sight. Then, when he saw the earthly tabernacles of the holy men lying on the ground, filled with joy, he embraced every one, and kissed them all. Upon this, he was immediately seized by the ministers of death, and conducted to Firmilian, who consigned him to a slow and lingering fire. Then Julian, exulting with joy, gave thanks to God with a loud voice, who had honoured him with martyrdom. He was a native of Cappadocia; in his manner he was most religious, and eminent for the sincerity and soundness of his faith." SS. LOMAN AND FORTCHERN, BB. (7TH CENT.) [Colgan is the only authority for their insertion; he says that in Ireland these saints are venerated on Feb. 17th, and Oct. 11th. These saints are mentioned in the Tripartite Life of S. Patrick, and in that by Jocelin.] S. Loman is said to have been the son of Tigridia, sister of S. Patrick; his brothers Brochan and Mogenoch, were, like him, also bishops; and his cousins, Mel, Rioch and Mun, (Feb. 6th), sons of his aunt Darerca, were saints and prelates. S. Loman accompanied S. Patrick to Ireland, and when they landed at Temora, the great apostle left Loman in charge of the boat, ordering him to bring it up the river Boyne to Trim. And when one Fortchern, son of Fethlemid, chief of Trim, heard the sweet chanting of Loman on his boat, a great longing came over him to hear the doctrine which exhaled such sweetness. Therefore he came to him and received instruction out of the boat, and he sang with him the songs of Zion. Then came the mother of Fortchern, seeking her son, and she was a Scottish princess, and she saluted the priest of God reverently, and rejoiced that the Gospel of Christ was wafted to the shores of Ireland. And Fethlemid came also, and received instruction, and himself believed, and his whole house; and they were baptized; and he gave Antrim to the church as a possession. Then came Patrick and founded there a church, and placed Loman over it, as chief pastor. Jocelin, the writer of the life of S. Patrick, states that he used a life of the great apostle of the Irish, written by S. Loman, his nephew. Now when Loman was dying, he called to him Fortchern, that he might consecrate him to be his successor in the See of Antrim, but he would not, "Lest," said he, "it should be thought that the government of this diocese was mine by hereditary right, for my father owned it till he gave it to God." Then Loman recognised this reason as fitting, and he was succeeded by one named Cathald. Such is the legend, and a sad confusion of history and fable does it prove to be. These are Dr. Lanigan's judicious remarks: "The Tripartite Life makes S. Loman or Luman a nephew of S. Patrick, left in charge of the boat, and adds that, in consequence of the order of the saint, he sailed up against the current of the river as far as Trim. This was too good a story to be slightly passed over by Jocelin, who, to make it still more marvellous, subjoins that, the sails being hoisted, he went up, without the assistance of oars, notwithstanding furious blasts of wind in the direction opposite to its course. He might as well have said that it had been carried in the air; for the channel of the Boyne is so unfit for navigation, that it would be impossible for a boat to proceed as far as Trim, even were both the current and the winds favourable."[50] There can be no doubt that Loman lived much later, and that he is no other than the bishop Loman of Trim, who lived in the 7th century, of whom nothing authentic is known. Dr. Lanigan carefully traces the fable of the donation of Antrim, and shows that it is partly blunder, partly wilful invention. Colgan patched up the Acts of S. Loman from the stories in the Tripartite Life of S. Patrick, and in Jocelin, who quotes from the Martyrologum Tamlachtense the following passage:--"Loman of Trim and his companions, who were (of the list two only are worth noting) Ossan and Fortchern." "If," says Dr. Lanigan, "by _sociis suis_ we should understand disciples of Loman, Loman must be brought to much later times than those of S. Patrick, for Ossan was, in all appearance, the person of that name whose memory was revered at Rath-Ossan, near the west gate of Trim, and whose death is marked at A.D. 686. Some of them are placed by Colgan himself in still later times. It may be objected that Tirechan, who is supposed to have lived in the 7th century, speaks of Loman as being in S. Patrick's days. But if Tirechan lived so early, the account given of Loman is undoubtedly an interpolation thrust into his work. For no author of that country would have written certain nonsense therein contained, such as that prince Fethlemid, a son of king Leogaire, made a grant of _all_ his territory, property, and family, to Saints Patrick and Loman, and thus to the Church of Trim. Such fables, relative to ecclesiastical endowments, did not appear in Ireland until a much later period."[51] With regard to Fortchern the same difficulty exists. Notwithstanding that he is made the son of Fethlemid, prince of Trim, he is spoken of in the Tripartite Life as blacksmith to S. Patrick; and if he were a disciple of S. Loman, he must be moved from the 5th to the 7th century. Anyhow he is not to be confounded with Bishop Fortchern of Ross, as does the legend; if he was a bishop at all, it was of Trim. S. FINTAN, AB. OF CLONENAGH. (6TH CENT.) [Roman Martyrology, and those of Bede, Usuardus, Ado, &c. Colgan says there were twenty-four saints of this name in Ireland, which has led to some confusion. Authority:--An ancient life published by Colgan, and also by Bollandus, but, like all the lives of Irish saints, late, and resting on tradition.] S. Fintan, abbot of Cluain-Ednech, (Clon-Enach), was born in Leinster, in the sixth century. He was brought up in piety and letters by a holy man, who led a religious life in a place called Cluain-mhic-Trein,[52] under whom he made such progress, as to give early evidence that God was with him. When he was grown to man's estate, he took leave of his spiritual father, and went for further improvement to S. Columba of Trydaglas, (December 13th), with whom he remained, till he was ordered to Cluain-Ednech, in East Meath, where he laid the foundations of a famous monastery, to which many resorted from all parts of Ireland, to place themselves under his direction, (about A.D. 548.) The rules he gave his monks were very strict; they abstained from all kind of meat, butter, and milk; living only upon vegetables; they laboured like hermits in the fields, and tilled their ground with their own hands. This rigour appeared excessive to the other holy solitaries in those parts, and assembling together, they resolved to send a deputation to remonstrate with the saint for imposing a rule which it was impossible for flesh and blood to endure. The night before they were to come to him, with S. Cannech at their head, Fintan was admonished from heaven of their coming; and for further instructions how he was to proceed, was ordered to go out in the morning, and follow the directions of one whom God would send to meet him. The first person he met was one born dumb. Fintan blessed him, and bade him declare to him the will of God. Then the dumb man spake, "All these good things that thou thyself hast begun for God carry out unto the end; but beware of scandalizing others; for some vessels are weaker than are others." The saint observed this lesson, and when the deputation reached him, he was in a compliant mood, and ready to remit the rigour of his rule with regard to those under his direction; but with respect to himself, he persevered in his penitential exercises. Amongst the disciples of S. Fintan was the famous S. Comgal, who afterwards founded the monastery of Bangor, where S. Columbanus, and many other saints, received their education. When this holy abbot had served God in great perfection, from his very childhood to a venerable old age; after a long exercise of humility, charity, patience, meekness to others, and severity towards himself, he called his children about him, and recommending to them his successor, gave them his benediction, and arming himself with the Holy Sacrament, fell asleep in the Lord. S. FINAN, B. OF LINDISFARNE. (A.D. 661.) [Anglican Martyrology. Colgan in his Acts of the Irish Saints notes him on the same day. Same day in the Aberdeen Breviary, but Dempster says he was commemorated in Scotland on Feb. 16th. Among the Irish, Jan. 9th was regarded as a day on which S. Finan was honoured. Authority:--Bede, Hist. Eccl. lib. iii. c. 17, 21, 25, &c.] England was Christianized from two quarters; Kent and all the south received the Gospel from Rome through the mission of S. Augustine; but the whole of the north-east of the island, called Northumbria, including the modern Northumberland, Durham, and Yorkshire, was Christianized from Iona, the great monastery of S. Columba. The first four successors of Augustine at Canterbury were all chosen from the Italian monks who had accompanied him to England; but they all belonged to that first mission; whereas the See of Lindisfarne, as it became vacant, was filled from Iona. The Scottish monks, thus placed during thirty years at the head of the Church in the North of England, showed themselves worthy of the saintly school whence they issued, and of the glorious mission to which they were consecrated. The first monk sent from Iona to replace the noble Aidan, (Oct. 22nd), was S. Finan. His episcopate was prosperous; it lasted ten years, and was not interrupted by any melancholy event, such as those which had troubled the life of Aidan, by taking from him his two royal friends. S. Finan always lived on good terms with king Oswy, and before going to join his predecessor in heaven, he had the happiness of introducing to the Church the heads of the two great Saxon kingdoms. Sigebert, king of the East Saxons, and Peada, king of the Midland English, came to seek baptism at the gates of Lindisfarne. This made way to the conversion of their respective provinces, which this holy prelate furnished with proper missioners; and after some time, he ordained the Scot, Diuma, bishop of the Midland English, and S. Cedd (January 7th), bishop of the East Saxons. In the island sanctuary of Lindisfarne, S. Finan caused a cathedral to be built, not of stone, like that which Paulinus and Edwin had commenced at York, but according to the Keltic custom, and like the churches built by Columba and his Irish monks, it was made entirely of wood, and covered with bent, that long rough sea-grass, whose pivot-like roots bind together the sands on the seashore, and which is still found in great abundance on the island, as well as on the sandy beach which has to be crossed before the traveller can reach Lindisfarne. Vast as was his diocese, which embraced the two great Northumbrian kingdoms, and great as must have been his influence over the other Saxon provinces, S. Finan seems to have preserved and exercised an authority not less complete over the country of his origin, the kingdom of the Dalriadian Scots. The Scotch annalists all speak of a certain king Fergus, who, by his violence and exactions, had raised the indignation of the Scottish clergy, and called down upon himself a sentence of excommunication from the bishops of Lindisfarne, Finan and his successors. Bede, who is prejudiced against this holy prelate, because of his adhesion to the Keltic ritual, and resistance of the introduction of the Roman usages in vogue in the South of England, nevertheless admits his great virtues, his contempt of the world, love of poverty and disinterestedness, and great diligence in preaching the Word of Life.[53] [48] Portion lost. [49] A mistake of a copyist for Polychronius, apparently. [50] Lanigan, i. p. 222. [51] Lanigan. ii., p. 345. [52] Whence it appears that S. Fintan was a native of Ross, (in Wexford), for Ross is _Ros_-mhic-Trein; _i.e._, Ross of the Sons of Trein. [53] Montalembert: "Monks of the West." [Illustration] February 18. S. SIMEON, _BM. of Jerusalem_, A.D. 107. SS. LEO AND PAREGORIUS, _MM. at Patara (commemorated by Greeks only)_. SS. MAXIMUS, CLAUDIUS, PRÆPEDIGNA, ALEXANDER, AND CUTIAS, _MM. at Rome_, A.D. 295. SS. CONSTANTIA, AUGUSTA, ATTICA, AND ARTEMIA, _VV. at Rome, 4th cent._ S. FLAVIAN, _BM. of Constantinople_, A.D. 449. S. HELLADIUS, _B. of Toledo_, A.D. 632. S. ANGILBERT, _Ab. of S. Riquier, in France_, A.D. 814. S. THEOTONTIUS, _Prior of S. Cruz, at Coimbra_, A.D. 1166. S. SIMEON, B. OF JERUSALEM. (A.D. 107.) [Roman, and all ancient Martyrologies, but commemorated by the Greeks on April 27th. Authorities:--Eusebius, Hist. Eccl., lib. iii., c. 10, 32; Hegesippus quoted by Eusebius.] After the martyrdom of S. James, and the capture of Jerusalem by the Romans, the surviving apostles and disciples of our Lord are reported to have assembled at Jerusalem to consult who should be appointed bishop in the room of S. James. They unanimously declared Simeon, the son of Cleopas, as deserving to succeed to that important office. He is said to have been cousin-german to our Saviour, for Hegesippus asserts that Cleopas was the brother of Joseph. Hegesippus gives the following account of his martyrdom:--"There are those that take the lead of the whole Church as martyrs, even the kindred of our Lord. Profound peace had lasted for the Church till the days of Trajan, when Simeon, the relative of our Lord, being the son of Cleopas, was waylaid by the heretics, and was accused to the Consul Atticus. After he had been tormented many days, he died a martyr, with such firmness that all wondered, even the president himself, that a man of one hundred and twenty years of age should endure such tortures. At last he was ordered to be crucified." In art, S. Simeon appears with a cross, and as a very aged man. Some of his relics are preserved in the church of S. James the Great, at Bologna; his head in the Jesuit church at Brussels; other portions of the body at Lisborne, near Lipstadt, in Westphalia. SS. CLAUDIUS, MAXIMUS, AND COMP., MM. (A.D. 295.) [Almost all Martyrologies. Authority:--The very ancient, but fabulous Acts of S. Susanna, VM. See Aug. 11th.] Claudius and Maximus were brothers of Pope S. Caius, and S. Gabinius, priest in Rome. Maximus was count of the privy purse to Diocletian, and Claudius also held a post of distinction about the person of the emperor. Their family was one of the most noble in Rome, and when Galerius Maximianus, the Cæsar, had lost his wife, Valeria, daughter of Diocletian, the emperor resolved on finding for his son-in-law another wife, of good repute and honourable birth. Hearing of the beauty and modesty of Susanna, daughter of Gabinius, he sent Claudius to the father, to ask the hand of Susanna for the young Cæsar. But Susanna had resolved to love and devote herself to none, save Jesus Christ. When she was brought into the room by her father to hear the flattering announcement, her uncle Claudius would have kissed her, but she gently withdrew her face, saying, "Pardon me, my uncle, but no man has ever kissed me." Then she declared that she was resolved to continue in celibacy, loving none save Jesus. Claudius was surprised and alarmed, for the request of an emperor is the same as a command. He had already received some Christian teaching from his brothers, the bishop and the priest, and now was fully convinced of the power of that religion which could make a young girl reject a princely lover and the prospect of a throne, with every prospect of death as an alternative. He consulted with his brother Maximus, and with his wife Præpedigna, and they, together with his sons, Alexander and Cutias, forseeing an explosion of imperial rage, which would sweep them all away, hastened to receive the sacrament of regeneration, and then Claudius and Maximus calmly informed the emperor that the maiden preferred a heavenly to an earthly crown. Diocletian was furious, and gave over Maximus, Claudius, and the whole family to be disposed of by one Julian, a heathen favourite, and apparently personally hostile to Maximus and Claudius. He hurried these brothers, with the wife and sons of Claudius, to Cumæ, where they were burnt alive, and their ashes cast into the river. Gabinius and his daughter Susanna were reserved in prison to suffer later. SS. CONSTANTIA, AND HER COMPANIONS, VV. (4TH CENT.) [In some authors on Jan. 28th; in others, on Feb. 17th; in others, on Feb, 25th; also on Feb. 18th. Authority:--The Acts of S. Agnes, attributed to S. Ambrose, but of questionable authenticity; and the apocryphal Acts of SS. John and Paul.] S. Constantia, daughter of Constantine the Great, was afflicted with a distressing disease, apparently scrofula. The Roman general, Gallicanus, being much in favour with Contantine, and having lost his wife, was offered Constantia in marriage by the emperor. Gallicanus was called off to oppose an inroad of the barbarians on Thrace, and he vowed, if he obtained the victory, to accept the faith of Christ. He succeeded in repulsing the enemy, and returned to Rome to find that Constantia had been healed of her scrofula at the tomb of S. Agnes, and that she had persuaded his three daughters, Augusta, Attica, and Artemia, to live with her, as consecrated virgins, near the shrine of the virgin martyr, to whose intercession she attributed her cure. It is difficult to decide what shadow of historical foundation there is for this story. S. FLAVIAN OF CONSTANTINOPLE, B. M. (A.D. 449.) [Roman Martyrology; but by the Greeks on Feb. 16th. Authorities:--Nicephorus Callistus, Evagrius, and the letters of S. Leo the Great to Flavian.[54]] It is not easy to understand the position of any great man of the eventful 4th and 5th centuries, without a general knowledge of the struggles of the Church against one heresy after another for the maintenance of the true doctrine, as to the natures and person of Christ Jesus, and this it is almost impossible to compress into a single article on the life of one actor in that eventful period. S. Proclus, author of the famous "Tome," as it was called, or doctrinal statement on the Incarnation, was patriarch of Constantinople. S. Leo, pious, earnest, Roman-spirited, was bishop of Rome. Domnus was patriarch of Antioch. The great S. Cyril of Alexandria was dead, and had left a large bequest to his successor, conjuring him, "by the venerable and awful mysteries," to befriend his kindred. The archdeacon Dioscorus was elected in his place, and forthwith extorted from the family of Cyril considerable sums, and imprisoned and otherwise outraged the nephews of the deceased patriarch. The new patriarch had previously borne a fair character, but his exaltation revealed a spirit at once tyrannous and sensual. His life became openly scandalous. He deposed from their functions those whom Cyril had favoured; he burnt the house, felled the trees, and hacked up the land of one deacon against whom he bore a grudge. S. Proclus of Constantinople died on October 24th, 447, and Flavian, the treasurer of the church, was elected to succeed him. He immediately became obnoxious to the eunuch Chrysaphius, by refusing him the fee which the creatures of the court attempted to impose on the patriarchs on their appointment. Theodosius, the younger, was then emperor; his sister, Pulcheria, was at the head of the orthodox party in the Church, and the royal chamberlain, Chrysaphius, godson of Eutyches, supported the heretical party out of motives of hostility to the rival power of Pulcheria, and affection for his godfather. Dioscorus of Alexandria took the same side as Chrysaphius, and these men used their influence to expel from their dioceses bishops who did not satisfy them. Theodoret, bishop of Cyrus, the famous ecclesiastical historian, was anathematized by the haughty patriarch, Dioscorus, in his cathedral at Alexandria; and Theodoret wrote to Flavian of Constantinople, complaining of the outrage. Domnus of Antioch took part with Theodoret, and sent envoys to Constantinople in his favour, whom Theodoret charged with letters, in which he protested his orthodoxy, declaring that he believed in one Christ, truly God, and truly man. "I give Him one worship," he wrote, "yet I know that the Godhead and the flesh are distinct, for the union is without confusion." But now began the great Eutychian struggle. Eutyches, abbot of the principal monastery of Constantinople, denied that Christ, at His incarnation, was "perfect God and perfect man--one, not by confusion of substance, but by unity of person." On November 8th, 448, a council of bishops assembled in the synod-room of Flavian's palace, at Constantinople. One of these bishops was Eusebius of Dorylæum, who begged the council to summon Eutyches, asserting that he would convict him of heresy. Flavian observed that an accusation against one so respected was simply astonishing. Could not Eusebius visit Eutyches before invoking the judgment of the council? Eusebius, who was greatly excited, declared that Eutyches had once been his friend; he had repeatedly warned him to desist from heterodox language, he could not, after these vain remonstrances, "go and hear him once again blaspheme." It was, therefore, agreed that Eutyches should be summoned; the council adjourned to the 12th, and the patriarch Flavian, having made profession of his faith in Christ as perfect God and perfect man, of one substance with the Father as to his Godhead, and with Mary as to his manhood, called on the other bishops to declare the true faith on this great doctrine. When they had done so, the council was adjourned till Nov. 15th, when the messengers who had been sent to Eutyches reported that he would not leave the monastery; that he regarded Eusebius of Dorylæum as his personal enemy; and that, as to his faith, he denied that Christ's flesh was of one substance with ours, and that, after the incarnation, there was more than one nature in Him. He also sent a brother abbot to inform the council that he was ill. Flavian answered, kindly, "We have no idea of pressing hardly upon him. We are old friends of his; we will wait till he is better, and then let him come and confess that he has erred." He added, after the sitting was broken up, that "fire itself seemed cold to Eusebius," whose vehemence he had endeavoured to calm down. A third summons was followed, on Nov. 27th, by the personal attendance of Eutyches. His great influence and position was shown by the officers, soldiers, and monks who escorted him, and by an imperial order that the patrician Florentius should have a seat in the synod to see that justice was shown to the accused. The patriarch Flavian asked if Eutyches confessed an union out of two natures. He replied that he did. "My lord abbot," asked Eusebius, "do you confess two natures after the incarnation?" Eutyches attempted to fence with the question, but, when brought to the point, he denied the existence of two natures in the one Christ. Then, all the bishops rose, and Flavian, in the name of the synod, passed sentence of deposition and excommunication against Eutyches. After the council was broken up, Eutyches said, in a low voice, to Florentius, "I appeal to Rome, Alexandria, and Jerusalem." He at once wrote to S. Leo of Rome. Flavian also wrote, and sent a record of what had passed. On Feb. 18th, before Flavian's letter, which was unaccountably delayed, had reached Rome, Leo wrote to Flavian, marvelling at his silence, and requesting him to explain the grounds on which Eutyches had been thus severely punished. Dioscorus of Alexandria was forward in espousing the quarrel of Eutyches. He at once admitted him into his communion, and worked, in conjunction with the chamberlain Chrysaphius, in support of his petition for a general council. Flavian now replied to Pope Leo's letter; he entreated Leo to give a written approval of the sentence against Eutyches, and thereby to preserve Christendom from any fresh disturbance. Before S. Leo could receive this letter, the Emperor Theodosius wrote on March 30th to Dioscorus, announcing his will that a general council should meet at Ephesus, on August 1st. S. Leo sent three legates to attend this council: Julius, bishop of Puteoli; Renatus, a priest; and Hilarus, a deacon. On the 13th of June, he wrote several letters, one of them was his famous "Tome," a doctrinal epistle addressed to S. Flavian, a clear, forcible, intelligible text-book on both aspects of the incarnation-mystery. On the 8th of August, 449, the council met in the church of S. Mary at Ephesus. About a hundred and thirty bishops were present. Dioscorus of Alexandria presided. Next to him sat the papal legate, Julius. It was evident from the first that this council was not free. The eunuch Chrysaphius was at hand to support his godfather Eutyches; veteran troops of Asia, a band of archers, were collected to obey the summons of Dioscorus. After the writ of convocation had been read in due form, Hilarus explained the reason of Leo's absence, and announced that Leo had sent a letter. "Let it be received." The letter was handed in, but, by a pre-concerted scheme, it was put aside unread, as Dioscorus dreaded its effects on the assembled fathers, in its place being read a letter of the emperor to Dioscorus. Eutyches was then introduced. The records of his trial were read, and Dioscorus still kept back the letter of Leo of Rome, promising to read it afterwards. During the reading of the trial a scene of tumult took place. One bishop exclaimed, when he heard that Christ was of two natures, "This language turns the Church upside down!" Another cried, "Let him who says that in Christ are two natures be cut in twain." "Will you endure," asked Dioscorus, "to hear of two natures after the incarnation?" His followers, among the bishops, responded, "Anathema." "I want your voices, and your hands too," said Dioscorus, "if anyone cannot shout, let him hold up his hand." In the uproar, one bishop after another yielded, and re-habilitated Eutyches. Hilarus again vainly attempted to procure a hearing of Leo's letter. Dioscorus, not content with having restored Eutyches, determined on having Flavian of Constantinople and Eusebius of Dorylæum deposed and excommunicated. The scene now became really terrific. The bishops who had acquitted Eutyches against their conscience, struggled hard to escape this new degradation. Several started up, and clasped the knees of the president, Dioscorus. Onesiphorus of Iconium cried, imploringly, "By the feet of your piety, I pray you forbear; Flavian has done nothing worthy of condemnation. If he deserves rebuke, rebuke him; but do not condemn a bishop for the sake of a priest." Dioscorus rose from his throne, and, standing upon the footstool, made a signal with his hand, and exclaimed, "Look you, he that will not sign the sentence has to deal with _me_. If my tongue were to be cut out for it, I would say, 'Depose Flavian.' Are you making a sedition? Where are the counts?" At the signal, which had been pre-concerted, a body of soldiers, with clubs and swords, rushed in; monks followed; the trembling bishops hid themselves behind the altar, or under the benches, and as they were not inspired with a zeal of martyrdom, they successively subscribed a blank paper, which was afterwards filled with the condemnation of the patriarch of Constantinople. Flavian was instantly delivered to the wild beasts of this spiritual amphitheatre, the monks and soldiers, and the bishops even, most hostile to him, fell on him. Dioscorus, the patriarch of Alexandria, buffeted and kicked,--like a wild ass, says Zonaras,--and trampled his brother of Constantinople. Some of the bishops were locked up in the vestry of the church, and not allowed to leave till they signed the sentence. Hilarus escaped without compromising his fidelity. Nothing is known of the conduct of Julius. Renatus was not there; he had died on his way. Flavian was ordered into exile, but was so bruised by the treatment he had received in the church at Ephesus, that he died three days after, August 11th, in a village of Lydia. So closed the assembly, which has received its name from an indignant letter of S. Leo: "It was no court of justice, but a gang of robbers." This _Latrocinium_, it is almost needless to say, has been rejected by the Church; its decrees were reversed by the council of Chalcedon; and S. Flavian, "that second Abel," as he was called by S. Leo, was re-vindicated with honour. S. ANGILBERT, AB. (A.D. 814.) [Some French Martyrologies. Authorities:--A life by Hariulph the Monk, which is, however, much interpolated; and a later life.] Angilbert, a man of noble birth, was much loved by Pepin the Short, son of Charles Martel, and by his sons, Charles and Carloman. He was destined to rule one of the Archiepiscopal sees. Nevertheless, he married Bertha, daughter of Charlemagne, after he was ordained priest, with the king's consent, and by her had two sons, Nithard and Harnid.[55] Charlemagne now made his son-in-law duke of the northern coast, and his office was to watch against, and resist the attacks of the Norman pirates. In his perigrinations he often stopped at Centulum, where was a monastery, and prayed with fervour at the tomb of S. Richarius (Riquier). Falling into a dangerous illness, he vowed that, should he recover, he would embrace the monastic life. On his restoration to health, he was summoned to resist the Danes, who had run their boats up the Somme, and were devastating the country on both sides. Angilbert at once went to the tomb of S. Richarius, renewed his vow, and then, buckling on his harness, fell like a thunderbolt on the pirates, and utterly defeated and exterminated them. He at once communicated his intention to his wife and to the king; neither raised any objections, and the gentle Bertha herself took the veil at the same time that her husband donned the monastic habit, in the same house of Centulum, though, probably, in a different part of the monastery. S. Angilbert was sent on several missions to Rome. On one occasion he was charged to conduct thither Felix, bishop of Urgel, who had been condemned by a provincial council at Ratisbon, for having affirmed that Christ was merely the adopted son of God. He died twenty-two days after Charlemagne. [54] To a great extent taken from Canon Bright's Church History. [55] This is stated by the author of his life, and Nithard himself (lib. 4) says of his father, "He begot me, Nithard, and my brother, Harnid, of the daughter of this great king, called Bertha"; but, on the other hand, Eginhard does not mention Angilbert, and this has led Bollandus to express a doubt on the matter. [Illustration: S. Agatha. See page 136.] February 19. S. AUXIBIUS, _B. of Solias, in Cyprus, circ._ A.D. 102. S. GABINIUS, _P. M. at Rome_, A.D. 296. S. ZABDAS, _B. of Jerusalem_, A.D. 304. S. ODRAN, _M. in Ireland; about_ A.D. 451. S. CONON, _Ab. in Palestine; circ._ A.D. 555. S. MANSUETUS, _B. of Milan; after_ A.D. 680. S. BARBATUS, _B. of Benevento_, A.D. 682. S. BEATUS, _P. at Valle-cava in Asturia_, A.D. 798. S. BELINA, _V. M. at Landreville_, A.D. 1153. S. BONIFACE, _B. of Lausanne_, A.D. 1265. B. CONARD, _H. at Noto in Sicily_, A.D. 1351. S. AUXIBIUS, B. OF SOLIAS. (A.D. 102.) [Roman Martyrology. Greek Menæa on Feb. 17th. Authority:--A Greek life of uncertain authority, written by a native of Solias.] Saint Auxibius was a Roman, who coming to Cyprus after the martyrdom of S. Barnabas, was baptized and ordained priest by John Mark, the companion of the apostle whose sister's son he was, and sent to Solias, the modern Lerka, in the north of the island, where he succeeded in converting to the faith a priest of Jove. After Mark had visited Alexandria, he went to S. Paul,[56] who, hearing that there was a deficiency of apostles in Crete, sent Epaphras and Tychicus to Heraclias, the bishop of Crete, ordering him to place Epaphras in the See of Paphos, and Tychicus in that of Neapolis, and to seek out Auxibius, at Solias, who had been ordained by Mark, and consecrate him bishop. Amongst the converts made by Auxibius was one, a native of Solopotamus, his namesake, who was afterwards bishop. Auxibius of Solias is said to have foreseen his future elevation in the following way. One day that he and his pupil were out walking, they came to a tree, where there was pleasant shade, and beneath this they sat down to rest; whereupon Auxibius of Solopotamus fell asleep with his head against the trunk. Then a great multitude of ants, which were running over the bark, came down on his head, and the bishop thought it was a token of the future industry which his namesake would exhibit, and a sign that he would be a suitable person to receive the grace of episcopal orders. Auxibius had the happiness of converting and baptizing his brother Themistagoras, and his sister-in-law Tima; and when he was dying, he bade his disciples not open his sepulchre till the death of Themistagoras, when his brother was to be laid beside him. He then appointed his namesake to succeed him, and expired. But when Themistagoras was about to die, he felt himself unworthy to lie beside his brother, and bade that he should be entombed elsewhere, and "thus it follows," says the writer of the Life of S. Auxibius, "that to this day the sepulchre of the saint remains unopened." S. GABINIUS, P. M. (A.D. 296.) [Roman Martyrology, and those of Usuardus, Bede, Notker, &c.; by some of these however on the 18th.] S. Gabinius, priest at Rome, and brother of S. Caius, the pope, was father of S. Susanna, (August 11th), and was brother of the martyrs Claudius and Maximus, (February 18th), to the account of whose Acts the reader is referred. It is uncertain by what death Gabinius glorified God. S. ZABDAS, B. C. (A.D. 304.) [Roman Martyrology. Name mentioned by Eusebius among the Bishops of Jerusalem. He is also called Zambdas and Bazas. He is said to have baptized a portion of the Theban legion, but nothing authentic is known of him.] S. ODRAN, M. (ABOUT A.D. 451.) [Irish Martyrologies of Tamlach and Donegal; another Odran on October 27th. Authorities:--The Life of S. Patrick, by Jocelyn, the Tripartite Life, and others.] There was a noble named Faigle, who bore a bitter hatred against S. Patrick and the Christian faith, and who resolved to murder the apostle. Now Odran, the chariot-driver, heard of his threats, and fearing for his master's life, one day, as they passed near the castle of Foilge, he said to S. Patrick, "Master, for long have I driven thee. For this once let me ride in the chariot, and do thou run beside the horse, and urge it on." Then Patrick consented, and changed places with Odran. Shortly after Faigle rushed out upon them from an ambush, and thrust his spear through Odran, deeming him to be the apostle. Then Patrick raising his eyes, saw angels bearing the soul of his faithful servant to the mansions of eternal bliss. S. MANSUETUS OF MILAN, B. C. (AFTER A.D. 680.) [Roman Martyrology.] S. Mansuetus is alluded to by many writers, but nothing of interest connected with him has survived; except the fact that he was present at the Roman Synod in 680, under S. Agatho, in which the heresy of the Monothelites was condemned. His relics are preserved in the Church of S. Stephen at Milan. S. BARBATUS OF BENEVENTO, B. C. (A.D. 682.) [Roman Martyrology, and some others. Authorities:--Two lives, one of which, very ancient, is found in MS., in Lombardic characters. Both lives seem to be genuine, and may be trusted.] Of the early life of S. Barbatus nothing authentic is known.[57] He first comes before us as a priest, zealously combating the superstition of the people of Benevento, who, though nominal Christians, retained much of their ancient heathen belief. The great objects of their veneration in the city were a golden image of a viper, and a sacred tree; and Romuald, the Lombard Duke, son of the famous Grimoald, was not more enlightened than his subjects. It is said of the tree to which they offered religious honours that they were wont to hang on it the skin of a wild beast, and shoot over their shoulders at it. S. Barbatus preached for long zealously against these abuses, but with no result; however he did not desist, but joined to his exhortations fervent prayer and rigorous fasting, for the conversion of the unhappy people. At length he roused their attention by foretelling the distress of their city, and the calamities which it was to suffer from the army of the emperor Constans, who landing soon after in Italy, laid siege to Benevento. In their extreme distress, and still more grievous alarm, they listened to the holy preacher, and renounced their idolatrous practices. Thereupon S. Barbatus gave them the comfortable assurance that the siege should be raised, and the emperor worsted: which happened as he had foretold. Upon their repentance, the saint with his own hand cut down the tree, which was the object of their superstition, and afterwards melted down the golden viper which they adored, of which he made a chalice and paten for the use of the altar. Hildebrand, bishop of Benevento, dying during the siege, S. Barbatus was consecrated bishop on the 10th of March, 663. Barbatus, having been invested with the episcopal character, pursued and completed the good work he had so happily begun, and destroyed every trace of superstition in the diocese over which he presided. In the year 680, he assisted in a council held by pope Agatho at Rome, and the year following, in the sixth general council, held at Constantinople against the Monothelites. He did not long survive this great assembly, for he died on the 29th of February, 682, being about seventy years old, nineteen of which he had spent in the episcopal chair. He is honoured at Benevento among the chief patrons of the town; in Art he appears with the golden viper under his foot, and an axe in his hand. His relics are said to be preserved in the monastery of Monte Vergine. S. BONIFACE OF LAUSANNE, B. C. (A.D. 1265.) [Molanus, in his additions to Usuardus. Not extensively known. Authority:--A Life by an anonymous monk of the Cistercian Order, date uncertain, but probably very little posterior to the death of S. Boniface.] Boniface, son of a goldsmith at Cantersteen, was trained in the Cistercian monastery of Cambre, near Brussels; he afterwards studied, and in 1258, became lecturer on theology in the university of Paris. But after a while his pupils fell off, and he went to Cologne, where he taught with success for two years. He was then appointed bishop of Lausanne, where he laboured to enforce celibacy on the clergy, and some, enraged, armed themselves, and entered the church where he was celebrating mass, with intent to kill him. But a Franciscan friar, seeing his peril, ran through the streets of Lausanne calling for help; and the people crowding into the cathedral, rescued him. Boniface, despairing of his power to accomplish the work, with the consent of the Holy Father, resigned his charge, and returned to Cambre, where he died in 1265. He was buried in the choir. A small chapel has been recently erected at Cambre, by a Recollet father, Francis Vancutzen, in his honour. His festival is solemnized in Brabant in virtue of a bull of Pope Clement XI., in the year 1702. On June 25th, 1600, his relics were exhumed, and placed in a wooden coffer, by Robert Van Ostebaere, abbot of Cambron, and Hautmont, acting under authority for the archbishop of Mechlin. This reliquary was translated to the Church of Notre-Dame de la Chapelle, at Brussels, in 1796, whence a portion was transported on May 9th, 1852, to the Church of Ixelles, of which S. Boniface is patron. S. BELINA, V. M. (A.D. 1153.) [Venerated in the diocese of Troyes in France. Canonized in 1203.] Belina was a little peasantess of Landreville, in the diocese of Troyes, the daughter of pious parents, who were the serfs of John, Lord of Pradines and of D'Arcy, in the popular legend called John Paterne. She was engaged to a young man in her village of the same humble rank; and her parents asked the Lord of Pradines' permission to allow the marriage to take place, for no serf could marry without the consent of his or her lord. The nobleman made some demur, and declared he chose the beautiful little maiden to be his mistress. She indignantly rejected his sinful proposals, and one day as he surprised her when she was keeping her sheep in a little glen, she defended herself against his violence with such vehemence that he lost all control over himself, and drawing his sword struck at her, and the blade falling on her slender neck, dealt her her death-wound. The peasants, enraged at this act of barbarity, rose in a body and burnt the castle, and would have killed the Lord of Pradines, had he not escaped in disguise. Shortly after, pope Anastasius IV. excommunicated him for the crime, and laid the lordship of Landreville under an interdict for a brief space, till the king confiscated the territory, and the parliament of France condemned John de Pradines to perpetual exile. Most of the relics of the saintly virgin were dispersed and lost at the Revolution, but some particles of bone remain in a bust at Landreville. The day on which she was killed was September 8th, but her festival is observed with great solemnity at Landreville, on Feb. 19th. [56] Col. iv. 10; 2 Tim. iv. 11. [57] Butler gives an account of his early life, and his ministry at Moncona, but nothing of all this is found in the two ancient lives. It is taken from a life by Ovid, a monk of Monte Vergine, quoted by Vincent Chiarlanti, but this seems to be no authority. February 20. SS. TYRANNIO, _B. M._, AND COMPANIONS, _MM. at Tyre_, A.D. 304 _and_ 310. S. PAULA, THE BEARDED, _V. at Avila, in Spain_. SS. SADOTH, _B. M._, AND CXXVIII. COMPANIONS, _MM. in Persia_, A.D. 345. SS. EUCHER AND FALCO, _HB. at Mæstrecht, circ._ A.D. 500. S. OLCAN, _B. in Ireland, circ._ A.D. 500. S. ELEUTHERIUS, _B. of Tournai_, A.D. 531. S. MILDRED, _V., Abs. in Thanet, circ._ A.D. 700. S. EUCHER, _B. of Orleans_, A.D. 743. S. LEO, THE WONDERWORKER, _B. of Catanea, circ._ A.D. 780. S. WULFRIC, _P. H. at Haselborough, in Wiltshire_, A.D. 1154. SS. TYRANNIO, B. M., AND COMPANIONS, MM. (A.D. 304 AND 310.) [Roman Martyrology. Not mentioned in any Martyrologies earlier than that of Usuardus. Among these martyrs are some commemorated separately on other days. Sylvanus, by the Greeks, on Jan. 29th; by the Latins, on Feb. 6th. Zenobius, on Oct. 29th. Peleus and Nilus, on Sept. 17th or 19th. Tyrannio is not noticed on any other day, nor named by the Greeks, but they celebrate four martyrs at Tyre, on Jan. 21st, without name given, and, possibly, Tyrannio may be one of these. In the old Roman Martyrology, published by Rosweydus, on this day, Feb. 20th, the notice is of martyrs at Tyre, without any name given, save that of the governor who sentenced them. The authorities for these martyrdoms are Eusebius, lib. viii., c. 7, and Ruffinus in his paraphrase thereon.] Eusebius, an eye-witness of what he relates concerning these martyrs, gives the following account of them:--"Several Christians of Egypt, whereof some had settled in Palestine, others at Tyre, gave astonishing proof of their patience and constancy in the faith. After innumerable stripes and blows, which they cheerfully underwent, they were exposed to wild beasts, such as leopards, wild bears, boars, and bulls. I, myself, was present when these savage creatures, accustomed to human blood, being let loose upon them, instead of devouring or rending them, as it was natural to expect, refused to touch them, but turned upon their keepers, and others that came in their way. They utterly refused to touch the soldiers of Christ, though these martyrs, pursuant to the order given them, tossed about their arms, which was thought a ready way to provoke the beasts, and stir them up against them. Sometimes, indeed, they were perceived to rush towards them with their usual impetuosity, but, withheld by a divine power, they suddenly withdrew; and this many times, to the great admiration of all present. The first having done no execution, others were let out upon them, a second and a third time, but in vain; the martyrs standing all the while unshaken, though many of them were very young. Among them was a youth, not yet twenty, who had his eyes lifted up to heaven, and his arms extended in the form of a cross, not in the least daunted, nor trembling, nor shifting his place, while the bears and leopards, with their jaws wide open, threatening immediate death, seemed just ready to tear him to pieces; but, by a miracle, not being suffered to touch him, they speedily withdrew. Others were exposed to a furious bull, which had already gored and tossed into the air several infidels who had ventured too near, and left them half dead: only the martyrs he could not approach; he stopped, and stood scraping the dust with his feet, and though he seemed endeavouring to rush forward, butting with his horns on every side, and pawing the ground with his feet, and was urged on by red-hot iron goads, yet it was all to no purpose. After repeated trials of this kind with other wild beasts, with as little success as the former, the saints were slain by the sword, and their bodies cast into the sea. Others, who refused to sacrifice, were beaten to death, or burned, or executed divers other ways." This happened in the year 304, under Veturius, a Roman general, in the reign of Diocletian. The church on this day commemorates the other holy martyrs, whose crown was deferred till 310. The principal of these was S. Tyrannio, bishop of Tyre, who had been present at the glorious triumph of the former, and encouraged them in their conflict. He had not the comfort to follow them till six years after; when, being conducted from Tyre to Antioch, with S. Zenobius, a holy priest and physician of Sidon, after many torments, he was thrown into the river Orontes. Zenobius expired on the rack, whilst his sides were being laid open with iron hooks. S. Sylvanus, bishop of Emesa, in Phoenicia, was, some time after, under Maximin, devoured by wild beasts in the midst of his own city, with two companions, after having governed that church forty years. Peleus and Nilus, two other Egyptian priests, in Palestine, were consumed by fire. S. Sylvanus, bishop of Gaza, was condemned to the copper mines of Phoenon, near Petra, in Arabia, and afterwards beheaded there with thirty-nine others. S. PAULA, THE BEARDED. (DATE UNCERTAIN.) [Venerated at Avila, in Spain, where her relics are preserved. No authority for her story except popular tradition.] This saint was the daughter of poor parents, near Avila. She was very beautiful, and a youth fell in love with her, and pursued her one day to an oratory, whither she was wont to resort, in the forest. Knowing that his intentions were evil, and that there was no human assistance at hand, according to the popular legend, Paula fled to the crucifix, and, embracing it, besought the Saviour to be her deliverer from the young pursuer. At once a beard sprouted on her chin, and moustaches on her lip. The youth coming in, shortly after, did not recognise her, and asked the bearded personage if he had seen a young damsel pass that way. Paula replied that no one had come into the chapel except herself, whereupon the youth withdrew. It is impossible to say what foundation of truth there is in this curious story, which bears some resemblance to that of S. Wilgifortis (July 20th). The festival of S. Paula is observed on Feb. 20th, at Avila. This story would not deserve notice, but that it is sometimes represented in Spanish art. S. OLCAN, B. OF DERKAN.[58] (ABOUT 500.) [According to Wytford, S. Olcan or Bolcan is on this day commemorated in Ireland. In the Tamlacht Martyrology he is called Olcan; in the Donegal Martyrology he is Bolcan. Authorities:--The Tripartite Life of S. Patrick, and that by Jocelin.] A wild legend is connected with this saint. His mother is said to have been an Englishwoman, married in Ireland, whose husband died, leaving her pregnant. She fell into a fit, and was buried, as dead. But a certain nobleman, passing near her tomb, heard, from within, the wailing of a child, and, opening it, found that a new-born babe lay by the dead mother. It is probable that this is an exaggeration of the simple fact that Olcan's mother died in childbirth, and that he was taken up by a noble. He grew up to be admitted to holy orders, and to receive episcopal consecration. A certain chief, named Saran, had incurred the malediction of S. Patrick, for having driven him from his territories and overthrown the churches he had erected. Saran, having made many captives in war, would have massacred or sold them, had not Olcan hastened to him to implore him to show pity upon them. Saran answered that he would spare the captives, if Olcan would promise him eternal life. Olcan hesitated. Then Saran gave orders for a general butchery. The bishop, rather than see so much innocent blood flow, consented to baptize Saran on the spot. When S. Patrick heard of this he was very angry that the holy Sacrament of Regeneration should be administered thus to an unrepentant and uninstructed tyrant. Olcan, hearing of S. Patrick's anger, ran to seek him, and, seeing him in his chariot, he fell on his knees and implored pardon. Patrick sternly averted his head. Then Olcan flung himself prostrate in the road before the horses. The driver stopped. Patrick ordered him to whip the horses on. The charioteer replied that he dare not drive over a bishop. Then Patrick, after having reproached Olcan, forgave him. He is said to have studied in Gaul. S. ELEUTHERIUS OF TOURNAI, B. M. (A.D. 531.) [Roman Martyrology. Additions to Usuardus by Molanus; all modern Martyrologies. Authorities:--A very ancient life written before 880, but not until long after the death of the saint; a second, written before 900; a third by Guibert of Tournai, is late, 1257. The authority of these lives is much diminished by the length of time which elapsed between the death of Eleutherius and their composition.] Tournai was evangelized by S. Piatus, in 287. During its early history it had seen the blood of martyrs shed. The Vandals had taken possession of it in 407; then it had become the principal seat of the Salic Franks. In the reign of Childeric, there lived in this city a rich and noble citizen, named Serenus, with his wife, Blanda. They had been converted from heathenism, and they honoured the religion they had adopted by their virtues, and especially by their abundant charity to the poor and infirm. In 456, they became parents of a son, whom they named Eleutherius. All their care tended towards educating him in every science befitting his condition. The young Eleutherius so thoroughly responded to their hopes, that S. Medard, who frequented along with him the school of S. Quentin, foretold that his friend would one day become a bishop. About the year 484, whilst Clovis was marching upon Soissons, the governor of Tournai, an inveterate heathen, profited by his absence, to banish from the city all who bore the name of Christians, or to seize on their goods. Serenus and Blanda were included in the number of exiles. They took their son with them, and found a place of refuge at a distance of about six miles from Tournai, where they built a church, in honour of S. Peter. A number of Christians settled on the same spot, and many heathen, converted by Serenus, helped to swell the colony, which was called Blandinium.[59] The number was now so great that they asked for, and obtained, a bishop, Theodore by name, who died immediately after his ordination. The faithful assembled at Blandinium, charmed by the virtues of Eleutherius, elected him to succeed Theodore, and sent him to Rome. The Pope approved of the choice, and the new pastor was consecrated in the year 487, at the age of thirty. Now it fell out that the daughter of the governor of Tournai was passionately in love with the young and handsome Eleutherius, and she resolved to make the attempt to withdraw him from the ministry of God, that he might serve the world, reposing in her love, and the favour of her father. She found him engaged in prayer, but, regardless of what he was about, she arrested his attention, and declared to him her passion. He started to his feet, and she held him by the mantle. Then, like another Joseph, he cast his mantle from him, and fled from her presence. The unfortunate girl, heart-broken, sank upon the ground, breathless and motionless. When she had been buried, Eleutherius returned, and now, touched at her misfortune, as much as he had been irritated at her offence, he summoned the father, and promised to restore to him his daughter, if he would embrace Christianity. The governor readily consented. Then Eleutherius celebrated the holy sacrifice, and followed by all his clergy and the faithful, went to the tomb, and struck it with his pastoral staff. But God revealed to the bishop that the promise of the father was made without purpose of observing it. The earth shook, but the dead rose not. Eleutherius passed the night in prayers, and returned to the grave on the morrow; again, the earth trembled, but the heart of the heathen governor remained unshaken. On the third day the father came with tears, and all tokens of true contrition, to promise sincere repentance; then the bishop went again to the sepulchre. At his command the stone was rolled away. He called thrice to the dead girl to rise. Then she sat up, and the people uttered a shout of joy. Eleutherius took her by the hand, and presented her to her father. After that, he bade her fast for six days, and, on the seventh, he baptized her, his mother, Blanda, standing as god-mother, and giving her her name. The father, however, would not keep his promise, but withdrew his child from the hands of the Christians, and threatened to disinherit her unless she returned to the worship of idols. A plague breaking out shortly after, in Tournai, was attributed to the incantations of Eleutherius, who was seized at night, severely beaten, and thrown into prison, from which, however, he escaped, and returned to his flock. The plague continued its ravages with such fury, that the city of Tournai was deserted of its inhabitants, who fled into the country, in hopes of escaping the epidemic by isolation. Then the governor was humbled, and, coming to Eleutherius, implored him to forgive his past resistance to the truth, and to baptize him in the faith of Christ. Eleutherius, after having instructed him, and made him prepare, by fasting, for the holy sacrament, afterwards baptized him. The submission of the governor led to the recall of Eleutherius, who re-entered the city of Tournai on the 22nd September; a day which has ever since been celebrated as a feast in that place. Eleutherius at once overthrew the temple of Apollo and the altars of the heathen deities in Tournai; and his labours to convince the pagans were followed by such effect that, in one week, probably that of Pentecost, he baptized as many as eleven thousand persons. As soon as heathenism was overcome, heresy manifested itself, and, as Eleutherius was himself accused, he visited Rome, in 501, to vindicate his orthodoxy before Pope Symmachus. He combated Arian false doctrine with word of mouth, and with his pen, and made a second journey to Rome, to Pope Hormisdas, to obtain confirmation of his writings. On his return some of the heretics fell upon him, as he left the church after mass one morning, and wounded him so cruelly that he died of his injuries five weeks later, in the 66th year of his age. He was laid in the church built by his father at Blandain, but his relics were afterwards removed to Tournai, of which city he is patron. S. MILDRED, V. ABSS. (END OF 7TH CENT.) [Anglican Martyrology, Molanus, and Saussaye. It is uncertain which of her two festivals, Feb. 20th or July 13th, is the day of her death, and which the day of her translation. In the first edition of Wilson's Anglican Martyrology, Feb. 20th is given as the day of her death; in the second edition as that of her translation; and he is probably right, for he follows in this William Thorne's Chronicle.] Domneva, or Ermenberga, the wife of Merewald, son of Penda, King of Mercia, had by him three daughters and a son, who were all reckoned by our ancestors among the saints. These were Milburgh, Mildred, Mildgitha, and Mervin. King Egbert having built and endowed the nunnery of Minster, in the isle of Thanet, Domneva became its first abbess, and the house was soon occupied by seventy nuns. But she soon gave up the government to her daughter Mildred, whom she had sent to France, to Chelles, to receive a literary and religious education. The Abbess of Chelles, far from encouraging the young princess to embrace monastic life, employed every kind of threat and ill-usage to compel her to marry one of her relations. But Mildred resisted victoriously. She returned to England to govern the abbey founded by her mother, and to give an example of all monastic virtues to her seventy companions. Very few details of her life have been preserved, which makes the extraordinary and prolonged popularity which has attached to her name, her relics, and everything belonging to her, all the more wonderful. Her popularity eclipsed that of S. Augustine, even in the district which he first won to the faith, and to such a point that the rock which had received the mark of his first footsteps, and which lies a little east of Minster, took and retained, up to the last century, the name of S. Mildred's Rock. S. EUCHER, B. OF ORLEANS. (A.D. 743.) [Roman Martyrology. In those of Bede, Notker, and Rabanus, on Feb. 21st. Authorities;--A Life by a contemporary, published by Bollandus.] This saint was dedicated to God from his infancy. About the year 714, he retired to the abbey of Jumièges, on the banks of the Seine, in the arch-diocese of Rouen. After having spent six or seven years there, his uncle Suavaric, bishop of Orleans, died, and Eucher was elected in his room, with the consent of Charles Martel, mayor of the palace, in 721. But he shortly afterwards incurred the anger of Charles Martel, for some political reason not mentioned by the author of the life of the saint, and Charles, on his return from defeating the Saracens near Tours, in 732, took the bishop from his see, and sent him into exile to Cologne, where, however, his piety and gentleness attracted such general admiration, that Charles ordered him to be removed into the less populous county of Hasbain, or Haspengau, in the territory of Liége, under the guard of Robert, the governor of that county, who allowed him to retire into the monastery of S. Trond, where he passed the rest of his days in prayer, glad to rest once more in the peaceful round of cloister life. He was buried at S. Trond, and there his relics are preserved. In Art, S. Eucher is often represented contemplating a man in the flames of hell, on account of a legend which relates that he saw Charles Martel undergoing torment in the place of the damned. Sometimes he is depicted lying in his sepulchre, with a serpent marked with the arms of France, symbolising Charles Martel, writhing beneath it. S. WULFRIC, P. H. (A.D. 1154.) [S. Wulfric is also called Ulric. Wilson's Anglican Martyrology; also the Benedictine Kalendar. Authorities:--John Fordun, Roger of Wendover, Henry of Huntingdon, and other historians.] S. Ulric was born at Lenton, eight miles from Bristol. When he had reached man's estate, he entered holy orders, and was made priest, without much thought of the responsibilities of his calling. He allowed himself to follow the sports of hunting, hawking, and other diversions inconsistent with his profession. One day, whilst out hunting, there came to him a man, who by his dress seemed needy, and begged of him a new piece of money, as alms; for at that time there was a new coinage in England, but it was rare, on account of its recency. Wulfric replied that he did not know whether he had any of the new coins or not; upon which the man said, "Look in thy purse and thou wilt find two pieces and a half." Wulfric did as he was bidden, and found the money, which he at once bestowed on the beggar. Then the man said, "May He, for whose love thou hast done this, give thee a fitting reward. Behold, in His name, I tell thee that thou shalt remove hence, and at length find repose; and He will summon thee to join the communion of His saints." Musing on these words, S. Wulfric felt that his life must undergo a change; and he resolved at once to embrace a very austere life. He therefore retired to Haselbury, in Dorsetshire, to a cell given him by a knight of his acquaintance, and there he served God in cold and want and tears. He wore a suit of chain mail next his flesh, even in winter. One Easter Eve he was troubled by impure thoughts. Then, next day, he went to the church and made public confession of what had befallen him, and humbly besought the prayers of the congregation. His shirt of mail hindering him from kneeling, he privately called to him his patron, and asked him to shorten it. The knight said that he would send the coat to London, and have it cut shorter. "Take a pair of shears and cut," said the recluse. The knight obeyed, and found that he was able to cut it as if it had been cloth. [58] In Antrim. [59] Blandain, on the high road from Tournai to Lisle. [Illustration: The Printer.] February 21. SS. MAURICE, PHOTINUS, THEODORE, AND COMPANIONS, _MM. at Apamea, circ._ A.D. 298. SS. VERULUS, SECUNDINUS, AND COMPANIONS, _MM. at Adrumetum, in Africa_. S. VITALIANA, _V. at Artonne, in Auvergne, circ._ A.D. 390. S. SEVERIAN, _B. M. of Scythopolis_, A.D. 452. S. ZACHARIAS, _Patriarch of Jerusalem_, A.D. 631. S. PATERIUS, _B. of Brescia; beginning of 7th cent._ B. PEPIN _of Landen, C. at Nivelles, in Belgium_, A.D. 646. S. GONDEBERT, _B. of Sens, in France, 7th cent._ SS. GERMAN, _Ab. M._, AND RANDOALD, _Prior, M. of Munsterthal, in Switzerland, end of 7th cent._ S. PETER _of Majuma, M. in Palestine_, A.D. 743. S. GEORGE, _B. of Amastris, in Paphlagonia, beginning of 9th cent._ SS. MAURICE, PHOTINUS, THEODORE, AND COMPANIONS, MM. (ABOUT A.D. 298.) [Commemorated by the Greeks on this day, and also on December 27th. Theodoret, Bishop of Cyrus, speaks of the festival of S. Maurice being observed in his time, (A.D. 400); the Acts in Metaphrastes are not altogether trustworthy. This S. Maurice is not to be mistaken for the S. Maurice who suffered at Agaunum, commemorated by the Westerns on September 22nd.] During the persecution by the tyrant Maximian, which began in the army, Maurice and seventy soldiers, amongst whom was his son Photinus, boldly confessed Christ, and refused to sacrifice to the gods. They were deprived of their military belts, a humiliation similar to the striking off the spurs of a knight in the Middle Ages, and were consigned to prison. The head of Photinus, who was only a lad, was struck off; the others were tormented with iron hooks and fire; and then, with cruel malice, they were conducted to a low, marshy spot, near Apamea, were smeared with honey, and tied to stakes, that they might be tormented by wasps, hornets, and musquitos. The brave soldiers of Christ lingered without food for many days, but by the tenth day all were dead; their heads were then cut off, and they were buried. S. VITALINA, V. (ABOUT A.D. 390.) [Commemorated as Patron at Antonne, between Riome and Gannat, in Auvergne. Commemorated also at Metz. Nothing is known concerning her except a strange story of her having spoken to S. Martin out of her tomb, and told him she was still mourning for having washed her head on a Friday,--a story related by Gregory of Tours. De gloria Confessorum, c. v.] S. ZACHARIAS, PATR. OF JERUSALEM. (A.D. 631.) [Greek Menæa, Authorities:--The Chronicon Alexandrinum, Theophanes, the Annals of Eutychius, Anastasius Bibliothecarius, Paulus Diaconus, Cedrenus, &c.] Zacharias was made Patriarch of Jerusalem in the year 609, having been previously warden of the sacred vessels at Constantinople. During his reign, in the year 614, the holy city was taken by the Persians, and as many as 90,000 Christians are said, by Theophanes, to have perished in the massacre which ensued, the Jews taking the opportunity to revenge themselves on the worshippers of the Crucified: Chosroes having swelled his army with twenty-six thousand Jews, who fought with fury, in the hopes of recovering Jerusalem for themselves. The sepulchre of Christ, and the stately churches of Helena and Constantine, were consumed, or at least damaged, by the flames; the devout offerings of three hundred years were rifled in one sacrilegious day; the patriarch Zacharias, and the true Cross, were transported into Persia. The fugitives of Palestine were entertained at Alexandria, by the charity of John, the Patriarch, who is distinguished by the epithet of the Alms-giver, (Jan. 23rd), and Modestus, abbot of S. Theodosius, was appointed vicar of the scattered and bleeding flock in the Holy Land, during the captivity of their pastor. In 628 Chosroes was deposed and assassinated by his son Siroes, who concluded peace with the Emperor Heraclius, restored to him all that had been taken by his father, the wood of the true Cross, and the captives, amongst whom was Zacharias, who returned to Jerusalem, the following year. The seals of the case in which the venerable relic had been enclosed before it was carried into Persia, were found unbroken, and it was easy for the patriarch, who had been its fellow-captive, to verify it. Zacharias died in the year 631, two years after his restoration. B. PEPIN OF LANDEN, C. (A.D. 646.) [Of local veneration only, at Nivelles; mentioned in some of the later Martyrologies, and called, sometimes Saint, sometimes the Blessed. Authorities:--A Life contained in the Acts of his daughter, S. Gertrude, (March 17th), Fredegar, and other early French historians.] The Blessed Pepin of Landen[60] died on February 21st, in 640, or 647, at Landen, where he had also been born, in all probability. He was buried at Landen, but afterwards, at what date is unknown, his body was translated to Nivelles, where he reposes beside the altar of his daughter, S. Gertrude, and where one tomb enshrines his body and that of his wife, S. Itta, and that of his nurse. On the day of his translation, a great procession of people bearing candles accompanied his relics from Landen to Nivelles, and during the long course, the wind, though very violent, did not extinguish one of the tapers, says the story. This prince has always been venerated at Nivelles and Landen as a saint, though he has never been canonized, and every year, in the Rogation processions, his reliquary is borne, together with those of S. Itta or Iduberga, his wife, and S. Gertrude, his daughter. To Pepin is attributed the foundation of the Church of S. Mary, which subsists to this day at Landen. SS. GERMAN, AB., AND RANDOALD, PRIOR, MM. (END OF 7TH CENT.) [Commemorated as a double in the diocese of Basle. Not noticed in any other Kalendar. Authority:--A Life by a contemporary, Bobolen, Priest, at the request of the Monks of Münsterthal, who asked him to put in record what had taken place under their eyes.] S. German was a native of Trèves, son of a man of senatorial rank, named Optardus. His brother Opthomar became a favourite courtier of king Dagobert, and afterwards with the saintly Sigebert, King of Austrasia, (February 1st.) When German was quite young he was given to S. Modoald, bishop of Trèves,[61] that he might be educated in all the knowledge of the times. At the age of seventeen the boy longed to devote himself wholly to God, in the monastic life, and as his parents were dead, he asked permission of his preceptor, but Modoald answered that he dare not give him the requisite permission, without the consent of the king. The boy then evidenced his sincerity by at once disposing of all his possessions. With three other boys similarly disposed, he went to the blessed Arnulf, a holy bishop living as a hermit at Herenberg, and grew to man's estate, disciplining himself after the example, and by the advice, of his new preceptor. Then he sent two of his companions to Trèves to bring to him his little brother, Numerian, who was still quite a child;[62] and migrated first to Remiremont, and thence, followed by numerous monks who had placed themselves under his direction, to the famous abbey of Luxeuil, which was then ruled by S. Waldebert, (May 2nd), who had him ordained priest, and sent him to found a house in the valley of Münsterthal, or Val Moutier, in the Jura, which was given to him by a nobleman of great piety named Gundoin, the father of S. Salaberga, (September 22nd.) The Münsterthal is a grand and romantic defile, traversed by the Birs. The huge cleft through which the stream passes testifies to the mighty convulsion which has forced the horizontal strata to assume their present almost perpendicular position, resembling gigantic walls on either side of the old Roman road which passed through it, and served as the line of communication between Aventiacum (Avenches), the most important town of Helvetia, and Augusta Rauracorum (Rheinfelden.) German found the old road blocked up with fallen rocks, so as to be impassable. He cleared these away, and enlarged the entrance to the gorge, and settled with his monks at the present Moutier. On the death of his protector Gundoin, Duke Boniface Kattemund succeeded to the government of the land, and crushed the poor people with his taxes. He also traversed the country exacting large sums from all who could pay, and wasting the lands of those who refused. On his appearance in the valley, the abbot German and the prior Randoald went to meet him, to implore him to deal less harshly with the people; but Kattemund repulsed them with insolence, and allowed some ruffians of his suite to fall on the helpless monks, strike off the head of the prior, and transfix the abbot with a lance, whilst they were kneeling in prayer in the church of S. Maurice. S. GEORGE OF AMASTRIS, B. C. (BEGINNING OF 9TH CENT.) [Mentioned in no late Martyrologies; but commemorated by the Greeks on this day. Authority:--A Life written towards the end of the 9th cent.] S. George was born of parents who had long been childless, at Cromna, near Amastris, in Paphlagonia. When three years old he fell into the fire, and burnt his hands and foot, but though disfigured by the scars, he was not thereby deprived of the use of these members. When a youth, he secretly fled his home, and retired into a mountain, followed only by one servant, and lived among the rocks the life of an anchorite, with an old hermit whom he there discovered. When this hermit was on the point of death, he bade George go to the monastery of Bonyssa, and serve God there. George obeyed, and among the monks he distinguished himself by the perfection of his self-control. On the death of the bishop of Amastris, the citizens elected George, whose fame had reached them, and sent a deputation to announce to him their choice; but George steadfastly refused the proffered dignity; whereupon the deputation forcibly carried him off to Constantinople, where the patriarch, S. Tarasius, who had known him as a boy, gladly agreed to consecrate him. But the Emperor interfered, and nominated some one else. The patriarch, however, would not yield, as George had been canonically elected. He nevertheless, brought forward the two candidates, and bade the clergy and people proceed to a new election, and decide which was to be chosen. As the lot fell again upon George, the patriarch resolutely rejected the imperial nominee, and ordained George. He was received at Amastris with demonstrations of the holiest joy. During his episcopate Asia Minor was overrun by the Saracens. George, foreseeing an incursion, and finding that the farmers and peasants could not be induced by others to take warning, and flee in time, went round the country, cross in hand, and urged all to escape within the walls. The threatened incursion took place, and the Saracens, not being in sufficient force to take the city, retired without having done serious damage. [60] See further, S. Sigebert, (February 1st.) [61] He was Bishop of Trèves about 622, and is honoured as a saint on May 22nd. [62] He became afterwards Bishop of Trèves, and is venerated on July 5th. [Illustration] February 22. S. PETER'S CHAIR _at Antioch_, A.D. 37. S. ARISTION, _at Salamis, 1st cent._ S. PAPIAS, _B. of Hierapolis, in Phrygia, beginning of 2nd cent._ SS. MARTYRS _in Arabia, circ._ A.D. 304. S. PASCHASIUS, _B. of Vienne, circ._ A.D. 313. SS. THALASSIUS AND LIMNÆUS, _HH. near Cyrus, in Syria, 5th cent._ S. BARADATUS, _H. in Syria, circ._ A.D. 460. S. MAXIMIAN, _B. of Ravenna_, A.D. 556. S. MARGARET of _Cortona, Pen._, A.D. 1297. S. PETER'S CHAIR AT ANTIOCH. (A.D. 37.) [Roman Martyrology; the ancient Roman Martyrology, called that of S. Jerome; Bede; Ado; Usuardus, &c.] Under this name is celebrated the foundation of the see of Antioch by S. Peter the Apostle, before he went to Rome, so that this day may be called the birthday of the Church and Patriarchate of Antioch. Through the coincidence of this Christian festival with some ancient pagan solemnities, its observance has become surrounded by spurious usages, at least among the Northern races. These usages were so rooted into the habits of the people, that the Church, unable to eradicate them, sought to give them a Christian significance, and to substitute the feast of the Chair of S. Peter for the _cara cognitio_ celebrated by the pagans of the Teutonic races on this day. This heathen festival was a commemoration of deceased relations by a great banquet, called in Flanders the _dadsisas_, or death-wake, on the 27th Feb., the day on which, in the North of Europe, the year was supposed to begin. S. ARISTION, DISCIPLE OF CHRIST. (1ST CENT.) [Latin Martyrology. S. Aristion is not mentioned in the Greek Menæa. No Acts exist, but he is mentioned in the Apocryphal Acts of S. Barnabas. The Apocryphal Synopsis of the 72 Disciples, by Dorotheus of Tyre, does not mention S. Aristion, but S. Jerome mentions him in his Ecclesiastical Writers, c. 18; and Papias quoted by Eusebius, lib. iii., c. 39.] Aristion is mentioned by Eusebius in his account of the writings of Papias. Eusebius quotes the words of Papias, who says, "If I met with any one who had been a follower of the Elders anywhere, I made a point of inquiring what those Elders taught; what had been said by Andrew, Peter, or Philip; and what by Thomas, James, John, Matthew, or any other of the disciples of our Lord; and what was said by Aristion, and by the priest John, disciples of the Lord; for I do not think that I derived so much benefit from books, as from the living voice of those that are still surviving." Papias inserted in his book, says Eusebius, many accounts given him, concerning our Lord, by Aristion. It is much to be regretted that the book of Papias is lost. S. PAPIAS, B. C. (BEGINNING OF 2ND CENT.) [Roman, and all Latin Martyrologies. Authorities:--Eusebius, lib. iii. c. 39; and S. Jerome, De Scrip. Ecclesiasticis, c. 9; epist. 29, ad. Theodoram.] Papias lived at the same time as the illustrious Polycarp, and had the privilege of conversing with those who had known and heard the Apostles, as also with Aristion and the priest John, who had been disciples of our blessed Lord. He wrote a work entitled "The interpretation of Our Lord's declaration," in five books, containing various parables of Our Lord not contained in the Gospels, and other portions of His doctrine. Papias was visited at Hierapolis, where he was bishop, by the daughters of S. Philip the Apostle, and from them also he derived much information. Papias does not seem, from Eusebius' account, to have been a man of much mental power. He says, "He was very limited in his comprehension, as is evident from his discourses." Nor had he much acuteness of judgment, for he is accused by the same writer of having inserted in his work much that was fabulous. SS. MARTYRS IN ARABIA. (ABOUT A.D. 304.) [Roman Martyrology. Authority:--Eusebius, lib. viii., c. 12.] Nothing more is known of these martyrs than that in the persecution of Maximin they were slain with the axe. SS. THALASSIUS AND LIMNÆUS, HH. (5TH CENT.) [Commemorated by the Greeks. Authority:--The Philotheus of Theodoret, c. 12. Theodoret knew these hermits, and visited them. He wrote whilst the latter was still alive.] Thalassius was a hermit, living on the side of a hill near the village of Pillima, in the diocese of Cyrus, in Syria, then governed by the famous Theodoret, the ecclesiastical historian. Under his direction was disciplined Limnæus, who, as a boy, having a too glib tongue, learned to control it by imposing on himself, for many years, complete silence. Limnæus afterwards became the pupil of the hermit Maro. He lived in a sort of court, made of rough stone walls, open to the sky, with a little door and window. Through the latter he spoke with the people who visited him, but he suffered none, save the bishop, to enter through the door. One day, as he went forth, he trod on a viper, which bit his heel. He put forth his right hand to withdraw the venomous beast, when it turned and fixed its fangs in his hand, and when he endeavoured to grasp it by the left, it bit his left hand also. He was bitten in more than ten places before he could disengage the serpent, yet he would not allow the wounds to be dressed by a physician, but signed them with the cross. He suffered great torture from the bites, but recovered. He loved to assemble the blind around his cell, and teach them to sing hymns to the glory of God. For their accommodation he built two houses adjoining his cell, and he devoted himself especially to their spiritual direction. Theodoret wrote of him when he had spent thirty-eight years in this manner of life. S. BARADATUS, H. (ABOUT A.D. 460.) [Greek Menæa. Authority:--Theodoret, in his Philotheus, c. 27; who wrote whilst Baradatus was still alive, and from personal knowledge of him and his manner of life.] S. Baradatus held so high a position among the solitaries of Syria, that the Emperor Leo, wishing to know the opinion of the Eastern Church touching the council of Chalcedon, wrote to him, as well as to S. Simeon Stylites and S. James the Syrian. All we know of him is derived from the account left us by Theodoret, bishop of Cyrus, who calls him the admirable Baradatus, and says that he manifested his ingenuity in discovering new austerities. Baradatus at first dwelt in a hut, but afterwards he ascended a rock and built himself a cabin, so small that he was unable to stand upright in it, and was obliged to move therein bent nearly double. The joints of the stones were, moreover, so open that it resembled a cage, and exposed him to the sun and rain. But Theodosius, patriarch of Antioch, ordered him to leave this den, and the hermit, at his advice, chose one more commodious. He spent most of his time in prayer, with his hands raised to heaven. His clothing was of leather, which covered him so completely that only his nose and mouth were visible. Theodoret says that his knowledge of heavenly things and doctrinal perspicuity were very remarkable. His answer to the Emperor Leo is found appended to the Acts of the Council of Chalcedon. S. MAXIMIAN OF RAVENNA, B. C. (A.D. 556.) [Roman Martyrology; insertion by Baronius on Feb. 21st, by mistake, apparently, for Maximian died on Feb. 22nd. Authority:-An ancient life used by Rubæus in his Hist. Ravennæ.] The story of the elevation of Maximian to the Archiepiscopal See of Ravenna is by no means edifying. He was a deacon at Pola, and was one day ploughing up his land when he lighted on an immense treasure, which had probably been hidden at some time of invasion, and never recovered. He was at a loss what to do with this wealth, but, after some consideration, he killed his ox, disembowelled it, and filled the belly with money, and also a pair of tall goatskin boots he possessed. Then he presented all the rest to the Emperor Justinian, and it was quite sufficient to highly gratify the monarch, who, however, claiming all treasure-trove as belonging to the crown, asked Maximian whether he would swear that this was all he had found. "It is all but what is in my boots and belly,"[63] he answered; and Justinian, not seeing through the equivocation, allowed him to depart, promising to reward him for what had been given to the crown. Shortly after, in 546, the see of Ravenna became vacant, and Justinian, remembering the deacon, appointed him to the archiepiscopal throne, and he was ordained thereto by Pope Vigilius, on Oct. 12th, 546. But the people of Ravenna had already canonically elected a successor, and refused to acknowledge the archbishop sent them by the emperor. They even refused to admit him into the city, and he was obliged to lodge in the suburbs. Those who took part with Maximian desired to carry a complaint to the emperor against the citizens, but Maximian would not permit it. He preferred waiting patiently, till the hostility of the people and clergy should die away. His course was wise, and it succeeded in the end, for the people of Ravenna, seeing it was impossible to resist the will of a despot, yielded their right, and admitted Maximian into possession of the see. He spent his ten years of rule in building and adorning the churches, using for that purpose the money "in the boots and belly," and exhibited such gentleness, piety, and prudence, that he gained the love of his flock, and was regarded by them as a saint. S. MARGARET OF CORTONA, PENITENT. (A.D. 1297.) [Leo X. allowed the festival of this saint to be celebrated in the diocese of Cortona on Feb. 22nd. Urban VIII. extended this faculty to all congregations of the Order of S. Francis, in 1623. She was canonized by Benedict XIII., in 1728. She is mentioned by Ferrarius in his Catalogue of the Saints of Italy, on this day, but, probably on account of the coincidence of the day with the Chair of S. Peter, the festival of S. Margaret is usually observed in the Franciscan Order on the day following, Feb. 23rd. Authority:--A Life written by Friar Juncta, her Confessor; but he trips lightly over her life before her conversion, saying nothing concerning it but giving only vague allusions. For fuller details we must go to some of the writers on the Saints of the Franciscan Order, and to Ferrarius.] Margaret was a girl of Alviano, in Tuscany. Her good looks attracted the attention of a young nobleman, and, led astray by passion and love of dress, she deserted her father's house, and followed her seducer for nine years. One day he went out, followed by his dog,[64] and did not return. Some days passed, and, at last, the dog appeared at the door, and, plucking at Margaret's dress, drew her forwards, as though it wished her to follow. She obeyed the animal, and it led her into the wood, and began to scratch where dry leaves and sticks were thrown over a sort of pit. She hastily uncovered the spot, and found the body of her lover, who had been assassinated, frightfully decomposed. The shock was great. She went sorrowfully to her father's house, but he refused to admit his fallen daughter, urged thereto by her step-mother. Then she sought the protection and guidance of the Minorite friars at Cortona, and, after two years, she entered the third order of S. Francis. Her director had now to restrain her enthusiastic self-mortification. Knowing that it was her beauty which had turned her head and led her astray, she wanted to cut off her nose and lips, but was peremptorily forbidden by her confessor. Then she desired to make public confession in Cortona of all her iniquities, but was also forbidden this. She, however, went, one Sunday, to her native village, with a halter round her neck, and, casting herself down before all the congregation, expressed her deep sorrow for the scandal she had caused there. Her conversion took place in 1274, when she was aged twenty-five. The rest of her life was spent in penance for her sin. At length, worn out by her austerities, she died on the 22nd February, 1297, in the forty-eighth year of her age. [Illustration: S. MARGARET CORTONA. From Cahier. Feb. 22.] Her body is preserved at Cortona. In art, she appears contemplating a corpse, or more often a skull at her feet, whilst a dog plucks at her robe. [63] Apparently a vulgar expression used at the period to mean, "All but a mere trifle." [64] _Catella_ is the word in Ferrarius; in art it is a dog. [Illustration: The Bookbinder.] February 23. S. MARTHA, _V. M. at Astorga, in Spain_, A.D. 251. S. PRIAMIAN, _B. M. at Ancona_. S. POLYCARP, _P. C. at Rome, circ._ A.D. 300. S. ROMANA, _V. at Rome, circ._ A.D. 324. S. SERENUS, _M. at Sirmisch, in Hungary, circ._ A.D. 327. S. PRIAMIANUS, _B. M. at Ancona_. SS. ZEBINAS, POLYCHRONIUS, MOSES, AND DAMIAN, _HH. in Syria, 5th cent._ S. DOSITHEUS, _Monk in Palestine, circ._ A.D. 530. S. FELIX, _B. of Brescia, circ._ A.D. 652. S. EARCONGOTHA, _V. Abss. at Faremoutier, end of 7th cent._ S. MILBURGH, _V. Abss. of Wenlock in Shropshire, 7th cent._ S. LAZARUS, Monk at Constantinople, circ. A.D. 870. S. CELSUS, _B. of Trèves, circ._ A.D. 980. B. PETER DAMIANI, _Card. B. of Ostia_, A.D. 1072. S. MARTHA, V. M. (A.D. 251.) [Roman Martyrology. Authority:--The ancient Acts, which are not, however, in their original form; but the substantial authenticity of the facts mentioned by them there is no reason to dispute.] This blessed saint suffered in the reign of Decius, under the proconsul Paternus. He ordered her to be racked, and beaten with knotted sticks, and then taken back to prison. She seems to have been noble by birth, and wealthy, for the proconsul endeavoured to persuade her to relinquish her religion and marry his son. She, however, constantly refused, declaring that she had chosen Jesus Christ as her heavenly bridegroom. She was then ordered to be executed with the sword, and her body to be cast into a foul place. It was withdrawn from this place by a pious matron; and her relics are preserved at the monastery of Rivæ de Sil, and in the church of Tera, in the diocese of Astorga. S. SERENUS, M. (ABOUT A.D. 327.) [Roman Martyrology; also the ancient one of S. Jerome. In the Anglican Martyrology of Richard Wilson (1608) on Feb. 24th. Authority:--The genuine Acts; of these there are two editions; one, the most ancient, given by Bollandus, terse and short; the other, by Ruinart, longer.] Serenus was by birth a Greek. He quitted estate, friends, and country to serve God in an ascetic life. Coming with this design to Sirmium, the modern Sirmisch, or Mitrowitz, in Hungary, he there bought a garden, which he cultivated with his own hands, and lived on the fruits and herbs it produced. When persecution broke out, he hid himself for some months, but, on its abatement, he returned to his garden. One day there came thither a woman to walk. Serenus, knowing that she had come there to meet a lover, gravely rebuked her, saying, "A lady of your quality ought not to walk here at unseasonable hours, and this, you know, is an hour you ought to be at home. Let me advise you to withdraw, and be more regular in your hours and conduct for the future, as decency requires, in persons of your sex and condition." It was usual for the Romans to repose themselves at noon, as it is still the custom in Italy. The woman, stung at our saint's remonstrance, retired in confusion, but resolved on revenging the supposed affront. She accordingly wrote to her husband, who belonged to the guards of the Emperor Maximian, to complain of Serenus as having insulted her. Her husband, on receiving her letter, went to the emperor to demand justice, and said, "Whilst we are waiting on your Majesty's person, our wives in distant countries are insulted." Whereupon the emperor gave him a letter to the governor of the province, to enable him to obtain satisfaction. With this letter he set out for Sirmium, and presented it to the governor, conjuring him, in the name of the emperor his master, to revenge the affront offered to him, in the person of his wife, during his absence. "And who is that insolent man," said the magistrate, "who has dared to insult such a gentleman's wife?" "It is," said he, "a vulgar fellow, one Serenus, a gardener." The governor ordered him to be immediately brought before him, and asked him his name. "It is Serenus," said he. The judge said, "Of what profession are you?" He answered, "I am a gardener." The governor said, "How durst you affront the wife of this officer in your garden?" Serenus: "I never insulted any woman, to my knowledge, in my life; but, I remember that, some time ago, a lady came into my garden at an unseasonable hour, with the design, as she pretended, of taking a walk; and I own I took the liberty to tell her it was against decency for one of her sex and quality to be abroad at such an hour." This plea of Serenus having put the officer to the blush for his wife's conduct, he dropped his prosecution against the gardener and withdrew. But the governor's suspicions were roused, and he determined to convince himself whether this gardener were a Christian or not. He, therefore, said, "What is your religion?" Serenus at once replied, "I am a Christian." Then, said the magistrate, "Where have you been lurking, that you have not sacrificed to the gods?" The gardener replied, "God reserved me till this day. Now he calls me, and I am ready to magnify his name, that I may inherit his kingdom." Then the governor ordered him to be executed with the sword. Relics at Billome, in Auvergne. The feast of his translation is observed in the diocese of Clermont, on May 10th. In art, S. Serenus is represented with a sword in his hand. S. PRIAMIANUS, B. M. (UNKNOWN DATE.) [Commemorated at Ancona, and nowhere else.] The story of this saint, of local celebrity, is somewhat curious. In 1370, a marble tomb, on which was inscribed "Here reposes the body of the Blessed Bishop Priamian, a Greek," was discovered under the tabernacle, in the wall. It was opened, and found to contain a human body. This was now enshrined in silver. But, as yet, nothing was known of who S. Priamian was, beyond what was stated on the tomb. One night, however, he appeared in a dream to an old woman, in Ancona, and announced to her that he had been a martyr for the faith more than a thousand years before, with many details, which do not deserve record, as the revelation is very questionable. SS. ZEBINAS, POLYCHRONIUS, MOSES, AND DAMIAN, HH. (5TH CENT.) [Commemorated by the Greek Church on this day. Authority:--The Philotheus of Theodoret, c. 24. Theodoret knew personally Polychronius, the disciple of Zebinas, and Moses and Damian were admitted to be disciples of Polychronius at the advice of Theodoret. Theodoret wrote whilst these three latter were still alive.] Zebinas, a hermit in Syria, was said to have exceeded all others of his time in the ardour of his devotion. The bishop of Cyrus says that he was engaged in prayer night and day, without finding his fervour satisfied, but with ever increasing vehemence of desire. And when people came to him for counsel, it was with an effort that he detached his mind from heavenly meditation that he might attend to them, impatiently desiring release that he might soar again to divine communings. And when very old he had a staff on which he leaned to pray. After his death he was followed in the same ascetic way of life by his disciple Polychronius, on whom Zebinas had impressed his spirit, just, says Theodoret, as a signet stamps its device on wax. His mind was ever in heaven, and when he talked with those who came to see him, it was as though his voice spoke from celestial habitations. Theodoret, the bishop, seeing the old man worn with years and feeble, urged him to take two disciples into his cell to tend him. He consented, and admitted Moses and Damian. But they had not been long with him before they ran away; "For," said they, "his manner of life is too austere for our endurance. He stands all night in prayer, and he urges us to lie down and sleep, but how can we, who are young and robust, do so, when that aged and infirm man stands all night without repose?" Moses, however, returned to him, and served him continually, but Damian went elsewhere, and found an old cottage, where he served God in an ascetic life, and gradually trained himself to bear fatigue and privations like Polychronius, so that he grew greatly to resemble him. "In both," says Theodoret, "there is the same simplicity, and gentleness, and moderation; the same kindliness in speech, and sweetness in conversation; the same watchfulness of spirit, intelligence of God, and condition of life, labours, vigils, and fastings." S. DOSITHEUS, MONK. (A.D. 530.) [Not in Roman Martyrology nor in Greek Menæa, but inserted in the Martyrology of Peter Galesinius on this day, and by Ferrarius, and also in the Acta Sanctorum by the Bollandists, on this day. Authority:--His Life, by a fellow-disciple.] Dositheus was page to an officer in the army, who was warmly attached to him, and regarded him almost as a son. He grew up among soldiers, without the least knowledge of the truths of religion. One day he heard a conversation turn on Jerusalem, which was called the Holy City, and he was filled with curiosity to see it, and know why it was regarded as sacred. As a friend of his master's was about to visit Jerusalem, he asked permission to accompany him, and his request was readily granted. On his arrival at Jerusalem, Dositheus went to Gethsemane, and saw there a painting which represented the lost in the flames of hell. This picture produced a most powerful impression upon him, and he stood long before it, wondering what it meant. A lady who was present, seeing the astonishment of the boy, explained to him about the judgment and hell, truths he had not heard before. When he asked her how the terrible place could be escaped, she replied, by fasting and prayer. The instruction of the lady made upon the youth so deep an impression that he at once began to abstain from meat, and pray as best he could. His companions, astonished at the change, said, laughing, that he was going to become a monk. But he had not heard of monks before, and when he ascertained what monks were, he resolved to seek the nearest monastery. He accordingly went to that governed by S. Serides, who was at first disposed to reject him, on account of his rich dress, youth, and delicate complexion; but, at last, overcome by the boy's earnestness, he committed him to S. Dorotheus, as a disciple. Dorotheus saw that the youth was not of sufficiently robust temperament to stand austerities, he, therefore, laboured to correct his self-will, and discipline his hitherto ungoverned tongue. "Well, Dositheus," said the master to him, soon after his admission, "How much hast thou eaten to-day?" "A loaf and a half," answered the boy;--this was equivalent to about five pounds. "That is pretty well," said Dorotheus, smiling. "Try, my son, to be a little more moderate tomorrow." And then, when the lad had taken somewhat less, "How farest thou to-day?" asked the master. "Well, my father." "Then learn to eat sufficient to satisfy thy need, but never devour food in excess of what is necessary." He made the youth serve the hospital. Dositheus was so cheerful, that the sick therein loved his presence. Sometimes he lost patience, and when a sick man provoked him he gave way to temper and bad words. Then, filled with compunction, he ran to his cell, and fell, crying, on the floor, and would not be comforted till his master came to assure him that God would on his repentance pardon the little outbreak. One day, Dorotheus heard the lad talking noisily in the infirmary, so he called him, and said, "Go, my son, and bring a bottle of wine." Thereupon the lad obeyed, and presented the flask to his master. "Oh, Dositheus," said his superior, "the bottle is for thee, not for me. It is the way of the rollicking Goths to drink and shout. I heard thy clamouring, and I thought the bottle of wine was all that was wanted to make a complete Goth of thee." Dorotheus was watchful to check every feeling of vanity and self-will in his young pupil, and for this purpose he sometimes assumed a harshness of manner, which ill-accorded with his natural gentleness. "There, father," said Dositheus one day, "See how neatly I have made the infirmary beds." "Humph!" answered Dorotheus; "thou art an excellent bed-maker, no doubt, but not much of a monk." The steward one day gave Dositheus a knife, which he showed with much elation to his master. "Let me see it," said Dorotheus. And when the youth had put it into his hand, the old monk turned it and studied it. "It will serve me admirably for cutting up my cakes," said Dositheus. "Art thou very much delighted with it, my son?" asked the master. "Indeed, I am, father," was the reply. "Then, my son," said Dorotheus, "give the knife to the other brethren; let them use it, and do thou never touch it again." Dositheus obeyed without a murmur. Dorotheus obliged him diligently to study the Holy Scriptures. Sometimes the youth came to a passage he could not understand, and he sought his master to have it explained. One day, to prove his humility, he said, roughly, "I cannot attend to thee, go to the abbot." Now, he had before advised the Abbot Serides what he should do. So the novice came to him with the book, and said, "My father, explain to me this passage." Then the abbot boxed his ears, and sent him away, saying, "I have other matters to attend to than to teach an ignorant fellow like thee." Then Dositheus went patiently back to his cell, and God illumined his understanding in the reading of the Scriptures. Now, after five years, the lay brother began to spit blood, and exhibit marks of consumption. He had heard it reported that raw eggs would cure this complaint, and the idea haunted him. However, he schooled himself till he was quite able to feel that if they were denied him he would cheerfully submit without a contrary wish. Then he said to Dorotheus, "Dear master, I have heard that raw eggs will stop the blood, but, I pray thee, forbid me to try this remedy." "Well, my son," answered Dorotheus, "thou shalt not prove the efficacy of eggs, but of every other remedy." Accordingly, everything was done for the young novice that could be devised, but he became rapidly worse. Now, when he was ill, Dorotheus said to him, "Dositheus, be instant in prayer, lose not hold of that." He replied, "Master, it is well, pray for me." And when he became greatly exhausted, Dorotheus asked him, "Well, Dositheus, how farest thou in prayer?" "Oh, pardon me, master, I cannot continue." "Then," said the monk, "give it up, my son, but keep God in thy mind as though He were present beside thee." And, after some days, he said to the old man, "Send me away, I care no more." Then Dorotheus answered, "Patience a while, my son. The mercy of God is not far off." And again, after some days, he said, "I can bear no more." Then the old man said to him, "Go in peace, and stand before the Holy Trinity, and pray for us." Now, some of the monks murmured that Dorotheus should have thus promised heaven, and asked the intercession of one who had never done anything in the way of fasting, and had wrought no miracles. Then Dorotheus said, "He fasted not, but he never gave way to his self-will." And after some days, there was an old monk taken into the hospital, who prayed to God to show him all the holy fathers of that house who had served Him, and had entered into their rest. And he saw in vision a goodly choir of aged saints, and amongst them was a young lay brother, with hair on which the snows of age had not fallen, and a hectic colour in his cheek. Now the old man told his vision to the brethren, and when he described the novice, the monks knew that it was Dositheus, touching whose sanctity they had doubted. S. EARCONGOTHA, V. ABSS. (END OF 7TH CENT.) [Benedictine Martyrology. Authority:--Bede, lib. iii., c. 8.] Earcongotha, great granddaughter of the first Christian king of the Anglo-Saxons, and daughter of Ercombert, King of Kent, was a nun in the French community of Faremoutier, where so many of the English princesses were trained. She was, says Bede, a virgin of great virtue, worthy in everything of her illustrious origin, and was elevated to become Abbess. Being warned of her approaching end, she went from cell to cell in the infirmary of the monastery, asking for the prayers of her sick nuns. She died during the following night, at the first glimpse of dawn. At the same hour the monks, who occupied another part of the double monastery, heard a sound like the noise of a multitude, who, to the sound of heavenly music, invaded the monastery. When they went out to see what it was, they found themselves in a flood of miraculous light, in the midst of which the soul of the foreign princess ascended to heaven. S. MILBURGH, V. ABSS. (7TH CENT.) [Milburgh or Milburga is inscribed in the Roman Martyrology, and in that bearing the name of Bede. Authority:--William of Malmesbury and Capgrave.] Perhaps no higher commendation can be passed upon Domneva, the saintly wife of Merewald, than this, that she was the mother of three eminent saints, Milburgh, Mildred, and Mildgytha. S. Milburgh was the eldest, if the names are mentioned according to the order of birth, and this being most probably the case, the date of her birth would be about the year of grace, 662. We are told that from her earliest years she dedicated herself to God with all the ardour of her soul. Whatever she did, she did it for the love of Christ alone, endeavouring always to please Him, and to grow up in His holy service. The world, which would have many attractions to a highborn maiden, she thoroughly despised, and even life itself she counted as nothing, unless it were spent in entire devotion to God. That she might live such a life with greater freedom, and in holy companionship with others, moved by the same heavenly desire, she founded a monastery for religious virgins at Wenlock, in Shropshire. Wenlock Magna it was afterwards called, and Much Wenlock at the present day. Her father, and her uncle Wulfhere, king of Mercia, assisted her in this pious undertaking, and the monastery was endowed with ample possessions, many precious relicts of saints, and great privileges. Milburgh was consecrated abbess by Archbishop Theodore, and under her gentle rule the monastery became like a paradise in which Our Lord had planted the fairest flowers, and the sweetest fruits; and among them all S. Milburgh was pre-eminent in every virtue, and more especialty did the grace of humility shine forth in her. But the more she humbled herself, so much the more did God manifest His power in her by many gifts, enabling her to restore sight to the blind, and life to the dead. Her exhortations, full of heavenly unction, and the teaching of her saintly life, had a marvellous effect in bringing many souls from the darkness of error to the light of truth; and from the death of sin to a life of righteousness. Among the many wonderful things related of her, we read, that one day she went on some good errand to a village called Stoke, (Stoke S. Milburgh), when she was seen by the son of some neighbouring king, who wished to carry her off by force, that he might marry her. He got together a few soldiers, and formed a plan for intercepting her; but she, divinely admonished of the wicked scheme, fled at once with a companion she had with her. On her way she crossed a shallow stream called the Corve. As soon as the rash man heard of her flight, he followed in great haste, but when he came to the stream, the water suddenly rose, and rendered further pursuit impossible; so Christ's lamb escaped, while he stood still, confounded and amazed. One night she had continued longer than usual in prayer and contemplation, and, overcome with fatigue, fell asleep; nor did she awake till the rays of the morning sun fell upon her. Then she started up so suddenly that the sacred veil fell from her head, but a slanting sunbeam caught it ere it touched the ground, and held it suspended in mid-air until she had time to rouse herself. Then she perceived the divine manifestation, and gave thanks to God, praising and magnifying Him. Upon another occasion, when she was alone in her oratory, a widow came in carrying her dead child, and fell down at the feet of the holy virgin, and with many tears implored her to intercede for her, that her child might be restored to life. Milburgh rebuked her for making such a strange request, and recommended submission to the divine will. "Go," she said, "and bury thy dead, then prepare to follow thy son, for man is born to die." But the widow refused to go. "No, I will not leave thee, unless thou restore my child to life." When the holy virgin saw the woman's faith, she prostrated herself in prayer by the body of the child. Immediately she was surrounded by fire, which came down from heaven, and so entirely enveloped her, that it seemed impossible that she could escape being consumed by it. One of the sisters coming in, cried out to her to fly, but she had no sooner spoken, than all trace of fire was gone, and S. Milburgh, rising from her knees, presented the now living child to his mother. [Illustration: S. MILBURGH. After Cahier. Feb. 23.] S. Milburgh is represented as having authority over the birds of the air, and protecting crops from their ravages. In the parable, the fowls that came and devoured the good seed, were, we know, evil spirits. After many years spent in good works and holy exercises, she was further purified and fitted, by long and painful illnesses, for those eternal mansions for which her soul longed. When the time of her departure drew near, she called together the whole community, and exhorted them all to have ever before them those two heavenly sentences: "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God." She then recommended them to choose the most pious of the sisters for their future abbess. Taking leave of them, she said, "Most dear sisters, I have loved you as my own bowels, and have been over you, as a mother over her children, with pious care. A higher call now in mercy invites me, I go the way of all flesh, and commend you to God and the Blessed Virgin." Having armed herself for her passage with the holy sacraments, she gave up her pure soul into the hands of her Maker, on Feb. 23rd, 722, and was buried with honour near the altar, in the church of the monastery. The monastery was afterwards destroyed by the Danes, and, in course of time, all trace of the tomb of the saint was lost. But many ages after, when it was being re-built by some Cluniac monks, two boys who were playing there, fell through the pavement, and sunk down to their knees in the ground. This accident occasioned some surprise, and the monks had the ground opened, and found human bones in the very foundation of the altar. An odoriferous exhalation, as of a most precious balsam, perfumed the whole church when the tomb was opened, and numerous miracles are said to have taken place at the tomb of the saint; so many, that of all the crowds who went to it, none came away without receiving some benefit. On May 26th, 1501, the relics were enclosed in a costly chest, and deposited in a conspicuous and eminent place in the same monastery, where they remained till its destruction in the time of Henry VIII. Some ruins of the abbey church, built in the year 1080, may still be seen at Wenlock. They consist of south aisle and transept, and part of the cloister, sufficient to shew the magnificence of the ancient building. S. LAZARUS, P. C. (ABOUT A.D. 870.) [Inserted in the Roman Martyrology by Baronius. Venerated by the Greeks on November 17th, and his translation on October 17th. Authorities:--Cedrenus and Zonaras.] S. Lazarus was priest, monk, and painter. During the persecution by the emperor Theophilus against sacred images and monks, Lazarus, as a painter of pictures for churches, was imprisoned, and his right hand was fearfully burnt by the application of red-hot iron plates. On the death of the emperor he recovered his liberty, and painted two celebrated pictures, one at Constantinople, of S. John the Baptist, the other at Chalcis, of the Saviour, on a wall, where there had been a similar picture, which had been scraped off by the Iconoclasts. He was sent to Rome by the Emperor Michael the Stammerer, with some magnificent corporals and altar vestments, minutely described by Anastasius the Librarian. On a second expedition to Rome he died. S. PETER DAMIANI, B. D. (A.D. 1072.) [Roman Martyrology. A double of the Breviary. Pope Leo XII. gave to S. Peter Damiani the title of Doctor of the Church, and extended to the whole of the Catholic Church the right of venerating him, which was formerly reserved to the Camaldolese, and to the dioceses of Ravenna and Falonza. Authority:--Life by his disciple, John of Lodi.] Peter, surnamed of Damian, was born about the year 988, in Ravenna, of a good family, the Onesti, that was considerably reduced in circumstances. He was the youngest of many children, and when very young, losing his father and mother, he was left in the hands of a married brother, in whose house he was treated more as a slave than a relation; and when grown up, he was sent to keep swine. One day he became possessed of a piece of money, which, instead of spending on himself, he bestowed in alms on a priest, desiring him to offer up prayers for his father's soul. He had another brother called Damian, who was arch-priest of Ravenna, and afterwards a monk; who, taking pity on him, gave him an education. Damian sent Peter to school, first at Faenza, afterwards at Parma. Having good natural parts, it was not long before Peter found himself in a capacity to teach others. To arm himself against the allurements of pleasure, and the artifices of the devil, he began to wear a rough hair-shirt under his clothes, and to inure himself to fasting, watching, and prayer. In the night, if any temptation of concupiscence arose, he got out of bed and plunged into the river. After this, he visited churches, reciting the psalter whilst he performed this devotion, till the church office began. He not only gave much away in alms, but was seldom without some poor person at his table, and took a pleasure in serving them with his own hands. But at length he came to the resolution of deserting the world, and embracing the monastic life, at a distance from his own country. While his mind was full of these thoughts, two religious of the order of S. Benedict, belonging to Font-Avellano, a desert at the foot of the Apennines in Umbria, happened to call at the place of his abode; and being much edified at their disinterestedness, he resolved to embrace their institute; which he did shortly after. This hermitage had been founded by Blessed Ludolf, about twenty years before S. Peter came thither, and was then in the greatest repute. The hermits, in pairs, occupied separate cells. They lived on bread and water four days in the week: on Tuesdays and Thursdays they ate pulse and herbs, which every one dressed in his own cell: on their fast days all their bread was given them by weight. They never used any wine (the common drink of the country) except for mass, or in sickness: they went barefoot, used disciplines, made many genuflections, struck their breasts, stood with their arms stretched out in prayer, each according to his strength and devotion. After the night office they said the whole psalter before day. This severe life brought on S. Peter a nervous attack of wakefulness, which nearly wore him out, and of which he was cured with very great difficulty. But he learned from this to use more discretion. He gave a considerable time to sacred studies, and became as well versed in the Scriptures as he was before in profane literature. His superior ordered him to make frequent exhortations to the religious, and as he had acquired a very great character for virtue and learning, Guy, abbot of Pomposia, begged his superior to send him to instruct his monastery, which consisted of a hundred monks. Peter staid there two years, and was then called back by his abbot, and sent to perform the same function in the large abbey of S. Vincent, near the Pietra Pertusa, or Hollow Rock. On his recall, he was commanded by his abbot, with the unanimous consent of the hermitage, to take upon him the government of the desert after his death, Therefore, on the decease of the abbot, in 1041, Peter assumed the direction of that holy family, which he governed with wisdom and sanctity. He founded five other hermitages; in which he placed priors subject to his jurisdiction. His principal care was to cherish in his disciples the spirit of solitude, charity, and humility. Among them, many became great lights of the Church, as S. Ralph, bishop of Gubbio, whose festival is kept on the 26th of June; S. Dominic, surnamed Loricatus, the 14th of October; S. John of Lodi, his successor in the priory of the Holy Cross, who was also bishop of Gubbio, and wrote S. Peter's life; and many others. He was for twelve years much employed in the service of the Church by many zealous bishops, and by four popes successively, namely, Gregory VI., Clement II., Leo IX., and Victor II. Their successor, Stephen IX., 1057, prevailed on him to quit his desert, and made him cardinal bishop of Ostia. Stephen IX. dying in 1058, Nicolas II. was chosen pope, a man of deep penetration, of great virtue and learning. Upon complaints of simony in the Church of Milan, Nicolas II. sent Peter thither as his legate. Nicolas II. dying, after having sat two years and six months, Alexander II. was chosen pope, in 1062. S. Peter had with great importunity solicited Nicolas II. to grant him leave to resign his bishopric, and return to his solitude; but could not obtain it. His successor, Alexander II., out of affection for the holy man, was prevailed upon to allow it, in 1062, but not without great difficulty, and the reserve of a power to employ him in Church-matters of importance, as he might have occasion hereafter for his assistance. The saint from that time thought himself discharged, not only from the burden of his flock, but also from the government, as Superior of the several priories, dependent on his monastery. In this retirement he edified the Church by his penance and compunction, and laboured by his writings to enforce the observance of discipline and morality. He wrote a treatise to the bishop of Besançon, against the custom which the canons of that Church had, of saying the divine office sitting, a custom which has unfortunately, since his time, become general; but he saw the propriety of all sitting during the lessons. This saint wrote most severely on the obligations of religious, particularly against their rambling over the country, and going from monastery to monastery. He complained of certain evasions, by which many palliated real infractions of their vow of poverty. He justly observed, "We can never restore what is decayed of primitive discipline; and if we, by negligence, suffer any diminution in what remains established, future ages will never be able to repair such breaches. Let us not draw upon ourselves so base a reproach; but let us faithfully transmit to posterity the examples of virtue which we have received from our forefathers." The holy man was obliged to interrupt his solitude in obedience to the pope, who sent him in the capacity of legate, into France, in 1063, commanding the archbishops and others to receive him as himself. S. Peter there reconciled discords, settled the bounds of the jurisdiction of certain dioceses, and condemned and deposed in councils those who were convicted of simony. He notwithstanding, tempered his severity with mildness and indulgence towards penitents, where charity and prudence required such a condescension. Henry IV., king of Germany, in 1067, married Bertha, daughter of Otho, marquis of the Marches of Italy, but afterwards, in 1069, sought a divorce, and persuaded the Archbishop of Mentz to favour his design, by promising full payment of monies due to him if he complied, and threatening to fall on his territories with an armed band if he refused. For the purpose of sanctioning the divorce, the archbishop assembled a council at Mentz. Pope Alexander II. forbade him ever to consent to such an injustice, and chose Peter Damiani for his legate to preside in the synod. The venerable legate met the king and bishops at Frankfort, laid before them the orders and instructions of the pope, and in his name conjured the king to pay a due regard towards the law of God, the canons of the Church, and his own reputation, and seriously reflect on the public scandal of so pernicious an example. The noblemen likewise all rose up, and entreated their sovereign never to stain his honour by so foul an action. The king, unable to resist so cogent an authority, dropped his project of a divorce; but remaining the same man in his heart, continued to hate the queen more than ever. S. Peter hastened back to his desert of Font-Avellano. Whatever austerities he prescribed to others he was the first to practise himself, remitting nothing of them, even in his old age. He lived shut up in his cell as in a prison, fasted every day, except festivals, and allowed himself no other subsistence than coarse bread, bran, herbs, and water, and this he never drank fresh, but what he had kept from the day before. He tortured his body with iron girdles and frequent disciplines, to render it more obedient to the spirit. He passed the first three days of every Lent and Advent without taking any kind of nourishment whatsoever; and often for forty days together, lived only on raw herbs and fruits, or on pulse steeped in cold water, without touching so much as bread, or anything that had passed the fire. A mat spread on the floor was his bed. He used to make wooden spoons and such like useful cheap things, to exercise himself at certain hours in manual labour. Henry, archbishop of Ravenna, having been excommunicated for grievous enormities, S. Peter was sent by Pope Alexander II. in the character of legate, to adjust the affairs of the Church. When he arrived at Ravenna, in 1072, he found the unfortunate prelate just dead; but brought the accomplices of his crimes to a sense of their guilt, and imposed on them a suitable penance. This was his last undertaking for the Church, God being pleased soon after to call him to eternal rest, and to the crown of his labours. Old age and the fatigues of his journey did not make him lay aside his accustomed mortifications, by which he fulfilled his burnt-offering. In his return towards Rome, he was stopped by a fever in the monastery of Our Lady, outside the gates of Faenza, and died there, on the eighth day of his sickness, whilst the monks were reciting Matins round about him. He passed from that employment, which had been the delight of his heart on earth, to sing the same praises of God in eternal glory, on the 22nd of February, 1072, being fourscore and three years old. He is honoured as patron at Faenza and Font-Avellano, on the 23rd of the same month. [Illustration] February 24. S. MATTHIAS, _Ap. M., after_ A.D. 60. SS. MONTANUS, LUCIUS, JULIAN, VICTORIUS, AND COMPANIONS., _MM. in Africa_, A.D. 259. S. SERGIUS, _M. at Cæsarea in Cappadocia_, A.D. 304. S. MODESTUS, _B. of Treves, circ._ A.D. 480. S. PRÆTEXTATUS, _of Rouen, B. M._, A.D. 586. S. LIUTHARD, _of Senlis, B. C. in England, end of 7th cent._ S. ETHELBERT, _K. of Kent_, A.D. 616. S. JOHN THERISTIS, _Monk at Stylum in Calabria; circ._ A.D. 1129. S. MATTHIAS, AP. M. (AFTER A.D. 60.) [Roman Martyrology, but in leap year on Feb. 25th. So all Latin Martyrologies, with the exception of the ancient Roman one bearing the name of S. Jerome, which does not include any mention of S. Matthias, and the Church of Milan venerates S. Matthias on Feb. 7; the Greeks commemorate him on August 9th. The election of this Apostle is said to have taken place on May 12th. Authorities:--The Acts of the Apostles, and various traditional notices concerning him. The Apocryphal Syriac Acts of S. Matthias are extant.] Saint Matthias not having been an Apostle of the first election, immediately called and chosen by our Blessed Lord, particular remarks concerning him are not to be expected in the narrative of the Holy Gospels. He was, probably, one of the Seventy disciples who had attended on Christ the whole time of his public ministry. A vacancy having been made in the college of the Apostles by the suicide of the traitor Judas, the first thing which they did after their return from Mount Olivet--where Our Lord took leave of them on His Ascension--to S. John's house on Mount Sion, was to fill up their number with a fit person; for this purpose, S. Peter informed them that Judas, according to the prophetic prediction, having fallen from his ministry, it was necessary that another should be substituted in his room, one that had been a constant companion and disciple of the Holy Jesus, and, consequently, capable of bearing witness to His life, death, and resurrection. Two were proposed as candidates--Joseph, called Barsabas and Justus (whom some make the same with Joses, one of the brethren of Our Lord), and Matthias--both duly qualified for the place. The way of election was by lots, a way frequently used both among Jews and Gentiles for the determination of doubtful and difficult cases, and especially in the choosing judges and magistrates: and this course the Apostles rather took because the Holy Ghost was not yet given, by whose immediate dictates and inspiration they were chiefly guided afterwards. The lots were put into the urn, and the name of Matthias was drawn out, and thereby the Apostolate devolved upon him. Not long after, the promised powers of the Holy Ghost were conferred upon the Apostles, to fit them for that great and difficult employment upon which they were sent; and, among the rest, S. Matthias betook himself to his charge and province. The first period of his ministry he spent in Judæa; whence, having reaped a considerable harvest, he betook himself to other provinces. The Greeks, with some probability, report him to have travelled eastwards into Cappadocia (which they erroneously call Æthiopia). Here, meeting with a people of a fierce and intractable temper, he was treated by them with great rudeness and inhumanity; and from them, after all his labour and sufferings, and a numerous conversion of men to Christianity, he obtained at last the crown of martyrdom, about the year of Christ, 64. Little certain information can be ascertained concerning the manner of his death; but the Greek Menæa, which are corroborated by several ancient breviaries, relate that he was crucified, and that as Judas was hanged upon a tree, so Matthias suffered upon a cross. His body is said to have been kept a long time at Jerusalem, thence thought to have been translated to Rome by S. Helena, mother of Constantine the Great, where some supposed portions of it are shown with great veneration at this day; though others contend that his relics were brought to and are still preserved at Trèves. Among many apocryphal writings attributed to the Apostles, there was a Gospel published under his name, mentioned by the ancient ecclesiastical historians, and condemned with the rest by Gelasius, Bishop of Rome, as it had been rejected by others before him. [Illustration: BEHEADING OF S. MATTHIAS. From Cahier. Feb. 24.] S. Matthias is seldom represented in works of art; when his figure does occur, he generally carries an axe or halbert, sometimes a spear or lance, occasionally a book and a stone. The Greeks represent S. Matthias as an old man with a rounded beard. SS. MONTANUS, LUCIUS, JULIAN, AND COMP., MM. (A.D. 259.) [Roman and other Western Martyrologies. Authority:--The very interesting letter written by these Martyrs, when in prison, to their brethren, with the conclusion, relating their passion, by an eye-witness.] The persecution raised by Valerian had raged two years, during which, many had received the crown of martyrdom, and amongst others, S. Cyprian, in September, 258. The proconsul, Galerius Maximus, who had pronounced sentence on that saint, dying soon after, the procurator, Solon, continued the persecution, waiting for the arrival of a new proconsul from Rome. After some days, a sedition was raised in Carthage against him, in which many were killed. Solon, instead of making search after the perpetrators of the riot, vented his fury upon the Christians, knowing that this would be agreeable to the idolaters. Accordingly, he caused eight Christians, all disciples of S. Cyprian, and most of them of the clergy, to be apprehended. "As soon as we were taken," say the martyrs, "we were given in custody to the officers of the quarter. The governor's soldiers told us that we were to be condemned to the flames; then we prayed to God, with great fervour, to be delivered from that punishment, and he, in whose hands are the hearts of men, was pleased to grant our request. The governor altered his first intent, and ordered us into a very dark and incommodious prison, where we found the priest Victor, and some others; but we were not dismayed at the filth and darkness of the place, our faith and joy in the Holy Ghost reconciled us to our sufferings in that place, though they were such as it is not easy for words to describe; but the greater our trials, the greater is He who overcomes them in us. Our brother Rhenus in the meantime had a vision, in which he saw several of the prisoners going out of the jail with a lighted lamp preceding each of them, whilst others, who had no such lamp, stayed behind. He discerned us in this vision, and assured us that we were of the number of those who went forth with lamps. This gave us great joy, for we understood that the lamp represented Christ, the true Light, and that we were to follow Him by martyrdom. "The next day we were sent for by the governor, to be examined. It was a triumph to us to be conducted, as a spectacle, through the market place and the streets, with our chains rattling. The soldiers, who knew not where the governor would hear us, dragged us from place to place till, at length, he ordered us to be brought into his closet. He put several questions to us; our answers were modest, but firm: at length we were remanded to prison; here we prepared ourselves for new conflicts. The sharpest trial was that which we underwent through hunger and thirst, the governor having commanded that we should be kept without meat and drink for several days, insomuch that water was refused us after our work; yet Flavian the deacon added great voluntary austerities to these hardships, often bestowing on others that little refreshment which was most sparingly allowed us at the public charge. "God was pleased himself to comfort us in this our extreme misery, by a vision which he vouchsafed to the priest Victor, who suffered martyrdom a few days after. 'I saw last night,' said he to us, 'a child, whose countenance was of a wonderful brightness, enter the prison. He took us to all parts to make us go out, but there was no outlet; then he said to me,--Thou art still concerned at being retained here, but be not discouraged, I am with thee: carry these tidings to thy companions, and let them know that they shall have a more glorious crown. I asked him where heaven was; the child replied, Beyond the world.' Victor then desired to be shown the place of the blessed, but the child in the vision reprimanded him gently, saying, 'Where then would be thy faith?' Victor said, 'I cannot retain what thou dost command me: tell me a sign that I may give to my companions.' He answered, 'Give them the sign of Jacob, that is, his mystical ladder, reaching to the heavens.'" Soon after this vision Victor was put to death. "This vision," continues the letter of the martyrs, "filled us with joy." "God gave us, the night following, another assurance of his mercy, by a vision to our sister Quartillosia, a fellow-prisoner, whose husband and son had suffered death for Christ three days before, and who followed them by martyrdom a few days after. 'I saw,' says she, 'my son, who suffered; he was in the prison sitting on a vessel of water, and he said to me,--God has seen thy sufferings. Then entered a young man, of a wonderful stature, and he said,--Be of good courage, God hath remembered thee.'" The martyrs had received no nourishment the preceding day, nor had they any on the day that followed this vision; but, at length, Lucian, then priest, and afterward bishop of Carthage, surmounting all obstacles, got food to be carried to them in abundance by the subdeacon Herennian, and by Januarius, a catechumen. The Acts say, they brought the never-failing Food,[65] that is, the blessed Eucharist. They continue: "We have all one and the same spirit, which unites and cements us together in prayer, in mutual conversation, and in all our actions. These are the lovely bands which put the devil to flight, are most agreeable to God, and obtain of Him, by joint prayer, whatever they ask. These are the ties which link hearts together, and which make men the children of God. To be heirs of His kingdom we must be His children, and to be His children we must love one another. It is impossible for us to attain to the inheritance of heavenly glory, unless we keep that union and peace with all our brethren which our heavenly Father has established amongst us. Nevertheless, this union suffered some prejudice in our troop, but the breach was soon repaired. It happened that Montanus had some words with Julian about a person who was not of our communion, and who was got among us (probably admitted by Julian). Montanus on this account rebuked Julian, and they, for some time afterward, behaved towards each other with coldness, which was, as it were, a seed of discord. Heaven had pity on them both, and, to reunite them, admonished Montanus by a dream, which he related to us, as follows:--'It appeared to me that the centurions were come to us, and that they conducted us through a long path into a spacious field, where we were met by Cyprian and Lucius. After this, we came into a very luminous place, where our garments became white, and our flesh whiter than our garments, and so wonderfully transparent, that there was nothing in our hearts but what was clearly exposed to view; but, in looking into myself, I could discover some filth in my own bosom: and, meeting Lucian, I told him what I had seen, adding, that what I had observed in my breast denoted my coldness towards Julian. Wherefore, brethren, let us love, cherish, and promote, with all our might, peace and concord. Let us be here unanimous, in imitation of what we shall be hereafter. As we hope to share in the rewards promised to the just, and to avoid the punishments wherewith the wicked are threatened, as we desire to be, and to reign with Christ, let us do those things which will lead us to Him and to His heavenly kingdom.'" Thus far, the martyrs wrote in prison what happened to them; the rest was written by those persons who were present, according to the recommendation of Flavian, one of the martyrs. After suffering extreme hunger and thirst, with other hardships, during an imprisonment of many months, the confessors were brought before the president, and made a glorious confession. The edict of Valerian condemned only bishops, priests, and deacons to death. The false friends of Flavian maintained before the judge that he was not a deacon, and, consequently, was not comprehended in the emperor's decree; whereupon, though he protested that he was one, he was not then condemned; but the rest were sentenced to death. They walked cheerfully to the place of execution, and each of them gave exhortations to the people. Lucius, who was naturally mild and modest, was a little dejected on account of a sickness he had contracted in prison; he, therefore, went before the rest, accompanied by only a few persons, lest he should be oppressed by the crowd, and so not have the honour of spilling his blood. Some cried out to him, "Remember us." "Do you also," said he, "remember me." Julian and Victoricus exhorted the brethren to peace, and recommended to their care the whole body of the clergy, especially those who had undergone the hardships of imprisonment. Montanus, who was endued with great strength, both of body and mind, cried out, "He that sacrificeth to any God but the true one shall be utterly destroyed." This he often repeated. He also checked the pride and wicked obstinacy of the heretics, telling them that they might discern the true Church by the multitude of its martyrs. Like a true disciple of S. Cyprian, and a zealous lover of discipline, he exhorted those that had fallen not to be over hasty, but fully to accomplish their penance. He exhorted the virgins to preserve their purity, and to honour the bishops, and all the bishops to abide in concord. When the executioner was ready to give the stroke, he prayed aloud to God that Flavian, who had been reprieved at the people's request, might follow them on the third day. And, to express his assurance that his prayer was heard, he rent in pieces the handkerchief with which his eyes were to be covered, and ordered one-half of it to be reserved for Flavian, and desired that a place might be kept for him where he was to be buried, that they might not be separated even in the grave. Flavian, seeing his crown delayed, made it the object of his ardent desires and prayers. And as his mother kept close by his side, with the constancy of the mother of the holy Maccabees, and with longing desire to see him glorify God by death, he said to her, "Thou knowest, mother, how much I have longed to enjoy the happiness of dying by martyrdom." In one of the two nights during which he survived, he was favoured with a vision, in which one said to him, "Why dost thou grieve? Twice hast thou been a confessor, and thou shalt suffer martyrdom by the sword." On the third day he was ordered to be brought before the governor. Here it appeared how much he was beloved by the people, for they endeavoured by all means to save his life. They cried out to the judge that he was no deacon; but he affirmed that he was. A centurion presented a billet, which set forth that he was not. The judge accused him of lying, to procure his own death. He answered, "Is that probable? are not they rather guilty of an untruth who say the contrary?" The people demanded that he might be tortured, in hopes he would recall his confession on the rack; but the judge condemned him to be beheaded. The sentence filled him with joy, and he was conducted to the place of execution, accompanied by a great multitude, and by many priests. A shower dispersed the infidels, and the martyr was led into a house till the storm was passed, and there he had an opportunity of taking his last leave of the faithful, without the presence of any heathen spectators. He told them that in a vision he had asked Cyprian whether the stroke of death is painful, and that the martyr answered, "The body feels no pain when the soul gives itself entirely to God." At the place of execution, he prayed for the peace of the Church and the union of the brethren. Having done speaking, he bound his eyes with that half of the handkerchief which Montanus had ordered to be kept for him, and, kneeling in prayer, received the last stroke. Although he suffered two days after the others, the whole glorious company receives commemoration together on one day. S. SERGIUS, M. (A.D. 304.) [Roman and German Martyrologies, and those of Bede, Usuardus, Ado, &c. Authority:--The Acts, apparently not in their original form, but trustworthy.] S. Sergius lived a retired, hermit life, near Cæsarea, in Cappadocia. When he heard of the breaking out of persecution, under the Emperors Diocletian and Maximian, his zeal led him to come into the city, and appear before Sapricius, the governor, and proclaim his abhorrence of the gods of Rome. The governor at once ordered him to execution. His relics were translated to Ubeda, in the diocese of Taragona, in Spain. S. PRÆTEXTATUS OF ROUEN, B. M. (A.D. 586.) [Roman Martyrology. Authority:--S. Gregory of Tours, Hist. Franc. lib. ix. c. 39, 42, and the zealous champion of Prætextatus in the Council of Paris.] On the death of Clothair, sole king of the Franks, (A.D. 561), his dominions were divided amongst his four sons, Charibert, who became king of Paris and the adjacent country; Guntram, of Orleans; Chilperic, of Soissons; and Sigebert, of Austrasia. The reign of Charibert was unattended by any important event; he died at the expiration of eleven years from the date of his accession, leaving an only daughter, Bertha, who married Ethelbert, king of Kent, and converted him to Christianity. The brothers Sigebert and Chilperic were engaged in bloody wars with each other. Sigebert had espoused Brunhild, daughter of Athanagild, king of the Visigoths. Chilperic was married at three several periods to as many wives: first, to Audovera, by whom he had three sons; Theodebert, Meroveus, and Clovis; secondly, to Gailesuinth, sister of Brunhild, by whom he had a daughter. During the lifetime of his second queen, Chilperic became enamoured of Fredegund, and his passion led him to put Gailesuinth to death, and elevate her rival to the throne. This barbarous action induced Sigebert to take up arms against his brother, urged thereto by the vehement Brunhild, desirous of revenging the murder of her sister; and a destructive war ensued, in the course of which Chilperic and his guilty consort were driven from their country, and became exiles in a foreign land. At no very distant interval of time, in 575, Sigebert was assassinated by the directions of his unnatural brother. Brunhild, his widow, sued for protection to Meroveus, son of Chilperic by his first wife, who was at Rouen, where Chilperic had imprisoned her. Meroveus, dreading the power of Fredegund, who wished to secure the succession to the crown for her son, took up arms against his father, and making common cause with Brunhild, his aunt, married her. At that time, Prætextatus was bishop of Rouen. His position was difficult. The insurgent son had made Rouen his head-quarters, and expected, or exacted contributions from the Church, which Prætextatus was unwilling to grant, but which the prince was strong enough to obtain. To make the case more difficult, Meroveus was the spiritual son of this bishop, that is, Prætextatus had baptized him, and this spiritual relationship was then regarded as a sacred and dear tie. Chilperic heard exaggerated accounts of what the bishop had done, and hastily concluding that Prætextatus was privy to the revolt of Meroveus, ordered a council of prelates to meet in Paris, to try and sentence Prætextatus either to have his episcopal habit rent in twain, and to have Psalm cviii. (A. V. 109), said over him, in token that his bishopric was taken from him, or that he should be excommunicated. Prætextatus was first charged by the king with having broken the canons by marrying Meroveus to his aunt, and with having fomented rebellion by giving large contributions to the prince. The bishop denied both charges. The king in person pressed the charge. S. Gregory, bishop of Tours, who gives us a full account of the affair, and Aetius, archdeacon of Paris, were the only two who had courage to take the part of the bishop, on whose destruction the king was resolved. Gregory steadfastly refused to condemn Prætextatus on charges which could not be substantiated. Then the king sent for him privately, and endeavoured by flattery to break his resolution, but in vain. Then bursting out in a passion, he exclaimed, "Hah! bishop, you who have to dispense justice, will not show justice to me. True, by my faith! is the proverb, Hawks will not peck out hawks' een. Here is a collation I had prepared for you," pointing to a table on which were roast fowl and other delicacies. Gregory refused to eat, till the king had sworn that he would not violate the laws of the realm and the canons of the Church, by forcing the council to condemn an innocent man. After that he took, so he tells us, some bread, and even a little wine; and so departed. That night queen Fredegund sent to his lodgings a large sum of money, in hopes of bribing him to consent to the sentence on Prætextatus, but Gregory refused the bribe. The king next raked up another charge against the bishop of Rouen, of having stolen some handsome birds he valued at three thousand sous, but this charge broke down also. Then some false friend urged Prætextatus to deliver the bishops who tried him from their perilous predicament, by confessing himself guilty, assuring him that this would satisfy the king, who would not press further punishment on him. Prætextatus was weak enough to yield to this treacherous advice,[66] and thus to remove it out of the power of his two defenders to maintain their opposition to the majority. The bishop of Rouen was at once condemned and banished to a little island off Coutances, probably Jersey. The ferocious Fredegund now cleared the way for her own son to the throne of her husband, by causing Meroveus, Theodobert, and Clovis, the sons of Chilperic by his first wife, Audovera, to be put to death. The only remaining obstacle to the accession of her child, was Chilperic, her husband; but that impediment was speedily removed by his assassination, (584), after which his son ascended the vacant throne. On the death of Chilperic, Prætextatus returned to Rouen, with the sanction of Guntram, second son of Clothair, king of Soissons, much against the wishes of Fredegund. A council was assembled at Macon, and the Bishop of Rouen was reinstated, against the protest of Fredegund, who asserted that it was indecent to overthrow the sentence of deprivation pronounced against him by forty-five bishops. In 586 the queen was at Rouen, where words passed between her and Prætextatus. Seeing him on her arrival, she greeted him with, "The time is coming when thou shalt revisit the place of thine exile." "I was a bishop always, whether in exile or out of exile," answered Prætextatus; "and a bishop I shall remain; but as for thee, thou shalt not for ever enjoy thy crown;" and then he earnestly besought her to abandon her wicked life, and seek reconciliation with God. This was shortly before Easter. On Easter morning he went after midnight to the church to sing Matins; he precented the antiphons, and then during the psalms rested in his seat; an assassin, sent by the queen, approached at this time, and stabbed him under the armpit. He rose with a cry, and staggered to the altar, on which he placed his hands, dabbled with blood, and received the Holy Sacrament. He was then carried to his bed, where he died. His death took place on April 14th, 586; but Feb. 24th is observed in his honour, as being probably the day of his translation. S. ETHELBERT, K. C. (A.D. 616.) [Roman, Ancient Anglican and German Martyrologies, that of Usuardus, &c. Authority:--Bede, lib. i. c. 11-15, 25, 26; lib. ii. c. 5.] S. Ethelbert was son and successor of Irmenric, king of Kent, and great grandson of Hengist, the first of the Saxon conquerors of Britain. He reigned for thirty-six years over the oldest kingdom of the Heptarchy--that of Kent--and gained over all the other Saxon kings and princes, even to the confines of Northumbria, that kind of military supremacy which was attached to the title of Bretwalda, or temporary chief of the Saxon Confederation. His wife was Bertha, daughter of Charibert, son of Clovis, king of France; a Christian princess, who brought over with her as chaplain, one Lethard or Liudhard, of Senlis, a bishop, who exercised his ministry in a church formerly built, in Roman times, near the walls of Canterbury, and dedicated to S. Martin. Tradition records the gentle and lovable virtues of queen Bertha, but little is known of her life; she has left but a brief and uncertain illumination on those distant and dark horizons, over which she sits like a star, the herald of the sun. Her example and the virtues of Liudhard probably did much to break up the ground in the heart of Ethelbert; but his conversion was reserved for the coming and preaching of S. Augustine and his companions, the missioners sent from Rome by Gregory the Great. These landed first in the Isle of Thanet, which joins close to the east part of Kent, and thence they sent a message to king Ethelbert, saying why they had come into his land. The king sent word back to them to stay in the isle till he fully made up his mind how to treat them; and he gave orders that they should be well taken care of in the meanwhile. After some days he came himself into the isle, and bade them come and tell him what they had to say. He sat under an oak, and received them in the open air, for he would not meet them in a house, as he thought they might be wizards, and they might use some charm or spell, which, according to the superstition of the time, was held to be powerless out of doors. So they came, carrying a silver cross, and a picture of Our Lord painted on a wooden panel, chanting in procession the litanies in use at Rome, in the solemn and touching strains which they had learnt from Gregory, their spiritual father, and the father of religious music. At their head marched Augustine, whose lofty stature and patrician presence attracted every eye, for, like Saul, "he was taller than any of the people from his shoulders and upwards."[67] The king, surrounded by a great number of his followers, received them graciously, and made them sit down before him. After having listened to the address which they delivered to him and to the assembly, he gave them a loyal, sincere, and, as we should say in these days, truly liberal answer. "You make fair speeches and promises," he said, "but all this is to me new and uncertain. I cannot all at once put faith in what you tell me, and abandon all that I, with my whole nation, have for so long a time held sacred. But since you have come from so far away to impart to us what you yourselves, by what I see, believe to be the truth and the supreme good, we shall do you no hurt, but, on the contrary, shall show you all hospitality, and shall take care to furnish you with the means of living. We shall not hinder you from preaching your religion, and you may convert whom you can." So he gave them a house to dwell in, in the royal city of Canterbury, and he let them preach openly to the people, of whom they quickly brought some over to the faith, moved by the innocence of their lives, and the sweetness of their heavenly doctrine, which was confirmed by miracles. They were given, as Bede tells us, the Church of S. Martin in which "to sing, to pray, to say mass, to preach, and to baptize." But it was not long before the king also submitted to the truth, and was baptized; and before the year was out, there was added to the Church more than ten thousand souls. It was on Whitsun-Day, in the year of grace, 497, that the English king entered into the unity of the Holy Church of Christ Since the conversion of Constantine, excepting that of Clovis, there had not been any event of greater moment in the annals of Christendom. Then the king told Augustine and his companions that they might build new churches, and repair the old ones which Christians had used before the Saxons invaded England, and drove the ancient Church into Cornwall and Wales. Ethelbert, faithful to the last to that noble respect for the individual conscience, of which he had given proof even before he was a Christian, was unwilling to constrain anyone to change his religion. He allowed himself to show no preference, save a deeper love for those who, baptized like himself, became his fellow-citizens in the heavenly kingdom. The Saxon king had learnt from the Italian monks that no constraint is compatible with the service of Christ.[68] It was not to unite England to the Roman Church, but it was in order to tear her from it, a thousand years after this, that another king, and another queen, Henry VIII., and his cruel daughter Elizabeth, had to employ torture and the gallows. From the time of his conversion, Ethelbert behaved for the twenty remaining years of his life, as became a good king and a good Christian. He gave his royal palace in Canterbury for the use of the archbishop, founded Christ Church in Canterbury, S. Andrew's in Rochester, S. Paul's in London, and built and endowed the abbey and church of SS. Peter and Paul without the walls of Canterbury, commonly called S. Augustine's; and was instrumental in bringing over to the faith of Christ, Sebert, king of the East Saxons, with his people, and Redwald, king of the East Angles. The former remained true to Christ till his death; but Redwald returned, at least in part, to the worship of Thor and Wodin. Ethelbert died in the year 616, and was buried in the Church of SS. Peter and Paul, near the body of his devout queen Bertha, and the holy prelate Liuthard. A light was always kept burning before his tomb by our pious ancestors. Liuthard of Senlis, the chaplain of queen Bertha, is also commemorated on this day. [65] Alimentum indeficiens. [66] Alban Butler, in his life of S. Prætextatus, says that the bishop married Meroveus to his aunt, deeming the case one deserving a dispensation, and that he confessed this at the council; but S. Gregory of Tours, who is the authority for all that passed, says that the bishop denied having married them, and when he was persuaded to confess, he did not confess that he had done this, but that by giving money to Meroveus, he had encouraged him in his revolt. [67] Gotselinus: Vita S. Aug. c. 45. [68] "Didicerat enim a doctoribus auctoribusque suæ salutis, servitium Christ voluntarium, non coactum esse debere." Bede i. 26. [Illustration: ENAMELLED CHEST, which contained the remains of King Ethelbert.] [Illustration: WINDOW in the Cathedral at Tours. Feb. 24.] February 25. SS. VICTORINUS, VICTOR, AND COMP., _MM. in Egypt_, A.D. 284. SS. ANANIAS, P. M., Peter, and Seven Soldiers, _MM. in Phoenicia, circ._ A.D. 298. S. CÆSARIUS, _C. in Bithynia, circ._ A.D. 369. S. FELIX III., _Pope of Rome_, A.D. 492. S. ALDETRUDIS, _V. Abss. of Maubeuge, end of 7th cent._ S. WALBURGA, _V. Abss. of Heidenheim, about_ A.D. 780. S. TARASIUS, _Patr. of Constantinople_, A.D. 806. S. GERLANDUS, _B. of Girgenti, Sicily_, A.D. 1101. B. ROBERT OF ARBRISSEL, _Founder of the Order of Fontevrault_, A.D. 1117. S. AVERTANUS, _O. M. C. in Tuscany, 16th cent._ SS. VICTORINUS, VICTOR, AND COM., MM. (A.D. 284.) [Roman Martyrology, and those of Bede, Ado, &c. But the ancient Roman Martyrology, bearing the name of S. Jerome, on Feb. 24th. By the Greeks commemorated on Jan, 31st and April 5th. A mere epitome of their Acts was all that was known to Bollandus, as contained in the Menæa and Martyrologies; but Assemani has since recovered the genuine Acts in Chaldaic.] Victorinus, Victor, Nicephorus, Claudian, Dioscorus,[69] Serapion, and Papias, were citizens of Corinth, and had witnessed a good confession before Tertius, the proconsul, in 249. They then passed into Egypt, for what reason is not stated, and were again called upon to confess Christ, in the reign of Numerian, in Diospolis, capital of the Thebaid, in 284, under Sabinus, the governor. After the governor had tried the constancy of the martyrs with the rack and scourge, he caused Victorinus to be thrown into a great marble mortar. The executioners began by pounding his extremities, saying to him, at every stroke, "Spare thy life, Victorinus, by abjuring thy new God." But, as he continued to maintain his steadfastness, by order of Sabinus they crushed his head and chest. Victor was threatened with the same death. He pointed to the mortar, stained with the blood and brains of his companions, and said, calmly, "My salvation and my true joy await me there!" He was immediately cast into it, and pounded to death. Nicephorus was impatient of delay, and leaped of his own accord into the mortar. He met with the same fate. Sabinus caused Claudian, the fourth, to be chopped to pieces, and his bleeding joints to be thrown at the feet of the survivors. He expired, after his feet, hands, arms, legs, and thighs had been cut off. The governor then, pointing to the mangled limbs and bleeding trunk, said to the three who remained, "It concerns you to escape this punishment; I do not compel you to suffer." The martyrs replied, with one accord, "We desire of thee to bid us suffer by the most excruciating pains thou canst devise, for never will we break our fidelity to God, and deny Jesus Christ, our Saviour, for He is our God, from whom we have our being, and to whom alone we aspire." The tyrant then condemned Dioscorus to be roasted to death; Serapion was suspended by his heels and decapitated; and Papias was cast into the sea with a stone attached to his neck, and drowned. This happened on Feb. 25th, on which day these martyrs are commemorated in the Western Martyrologies; but the Greek Menæa and the Menology of the Emperor Basil Porphyrogenitus honour them on January 31st, the day of their confession at Corinth. SS. ANANIAS, P., AND COMP., MM. (ABOUT A.D. 298.) [Greek Menæa, on Feb. 26th; Martyrology of Ado on Feb. 25th. Inserted in many of the later Western Martyrologies, but in none of the earlier ones except that of Ado. Authority:--The notices in the Martyrologies, and an ancient MS. Acts of these saints found in the Monastery of Gladbach, which is, however, of very doubtful value.] S. Ananias was a priest in Phoenicia, who was put to a terrible death by the governor for his testimony to the truth. After having been scourged till his back was a mass of wounds, salt and vinegar were rubbed into the exposed and bleeding flesh, and he was wrapped in a horse-hair garment so as still further to inflame and irritate the wounds. In prison he converted the gaoler, Peter. He was brought forth again, and slowly scorched on a grate over live coals; then salt was again applied to his sores, and the charred flesh was then cut off with a fish-slice. Peter was also exposed to a slow fire, and was then, with the priest, and seven believing soldiers, cast into the sea and drowned. S. CÆSARIUS, C. (ABOUT A.D. 369.) [Roman Martyrology. Greek Menæa on March 9th. Authority:--His life, written by his brother, S. Gregory Nazianzen.] S. Cæsarius was given by his parents an excellent education, and, being a man of great natural parts, he soon distinguished himself for his accomplishments in all the known sciences. He became one of the first physicians of his day, and was urged by the Emperor Constantius to reside in the imperial city, but declined to do so. Julian the Apostate nominated him his first physician, and loaded him with marks of favour, without, however, being able to shake his Christian constancy. Jovian, who succeeded Julian, also honoured him, and finding that, moved by the remonstrances of his father and brother, Cæsarius had thrown up his appointment at the court of the Apostate, he recalled him. Valens created him keeper of the privy purse, and treasurer of Bithynia. A narrow escape in an earthquake at Nicæa, in 368, when almost all the chief men of that city were killed, moved him to renounce the world. He died shortly after, and was buried with great solemnity, his parents assisting at the funeral with lighted tapers in their hands, and his brother, S. Gregory, Bishop of Nazianzus, preaching his funeral oration. S. ALDETRUDIS, V. ABSS. (END OF 7TH CENT.) [Molanus, Wyon, Miræus, Menardus, Bollandus, &c., on this day; some other hagiographers on March 15th. Authority:--An ancient life, part of which formed the lections of the Breviary for the Collegiate Church of Mons, founded by S. Waldetrudis.] The Abbey of Maubeuge, in France, on the Sambre, near the confines of Belgium, was founded by S. Aldegund (Jan. 30th), sister of S. Waldetrudis (April 9th), wife of S. Vincent, a count, (July 14th), and aunt of the two holy daughters of this pious couple, S. Aldetrudis and S. Madelbertha (Sept. 7th), who succeeded Aldegund as abbesses of Maubeuge. Aldetrudis was brought up by her saintly parents to tread the path of light and life from her earliest infancy. She chose the religious life, and entered the house founded and governed by her aunt, whom she succeeded. One little incident of her life has retained its hold on the popular memory, and is sometimes represented in art. Determined not to waste the precious wax from the altar and other candles, Aldetrudis melted up all the scrapings, drippings, and ends of the tapers in a large pot on the fire, but, when it was melted, the wax caught fire. Aldetrudis, thinking there was danger from the blaze, and not wishing to lose the wax, boldly caught the pot from the fire with both her hands, and placed it on the stone floor. The legend adds that though some of the melted wax ran over her hands she was not burnt. Another story is to this effect. One evening she stood at the convent gate, looking out at an advancing thunderstorm. Presently there came a flash and a roar, which so frightened her that she cried out, "Lord Jesus, into Thy hands I commend my spirit!" Then there passed her the Lord Himself, shining out of the darkness, fairer than the sons of men, and comforted her with the words, "Be not afraid, I am with thee." S. WALBURGA, V. ABSS. (A.D. 779.) [On this day the Martyrology bearing the name of Bede; also those of the metropolitan Churches of Prague, of Treves, and Utrecht; the Benedictine Kalendar; and as usually commemorated in Germany. But some give April 27th. No mention of S. Walburga in the French Martyrologies. Some give Feb. 25th as the day of her Translation, others October 12th, others September 21st; but May 1st is the most solemn day of her Translation. Authority:--Her Life by a priest of Eichstadt in the following century; another life by Adelbold, B. of Maestrecht, d. 1027; another by Eynwick, provost of S. Florian; another by an anonymous writer, and others later. Walburga is variously called Waldburga, Wilburga, Vaubone, Valpurgis, Vaubourg.] The blessed Walburga was a daughter of S. Richard, West Saxon Thane, (Feb. 7th), and sister of S. Willibald, (July 7th), and S. Wunnibald, (December 18th). These holy brothers accompanied their uncle, the great S. Boniface, (June 5th), apostle of Germany, on his mission, and are regarded and honoured as his fellow apostles. S. Walburga was educated from early childhood in the monastic calm of Wimbourne, in Dorsetshire, where she took the veil, and spent an untroubled youth till called by S. Boniface to Germany. Boniface had asked his kinswoman, the abbess Tatta, to send him a colony of nuns to found a religious house in the newly acquired provinces of the kingdom of Christ. She sent S. Lioba, with several under her, amongst whom was S. Walburga, and they settled at first at Bischofsheim, in the diocese of Mainz. Two years after she was appointed abbess of Heidenheim, a religious house founded by her brothers, Willibald, bishop of Eichstadt, and Wunnibald, who ruled an abbey of men. So great was her prudence and virtue, that on the death of Wunnibald, in 760, following the Anglo-Saxon precedent, Walburga was appointed to superintend the abbey of monks, as well as her own convent of nuns, and this double charge she executed till her death. S. Willibald translated the body of his brother to Eichstadt, in 776; and S. Walburga was present at the ceremony. She died in 779 or 780, but on what day is not mentioned by her biographer. [Illustration: S. WALBURGA. From Cahier. Feb. 25.] In art she is represented with a flask of oil, on account of the miraculous and fragrant oil which distilled from her relics in the church of S. Cross, at Eichstadt; or with three ears of corn, with which she is said to have cured and satisfied a girl afflicted with a ravenous appetite. Her relics were translated in 870, to Eichstadt, on Sept. 21st. A considerable part still remains there; another portion was carried by Baldwin the Bearded, Count of Flanders, in 1109, to the abbey of Furnes, near Ostend, where they are still preserved, and the festival of the translation is kept on May 1st. From Furnes, small portions have been distributed to churches in Antwerp, Brussels, Thiel, Arnheim, Zutphen, and Gröningen. Other relics of this saint are said to be preserved at Prague, Cologne, Augsburg, and Hanover, and many were anciently distributed over Lorraine, Alsace, and Burgundy. There can be no doubt that S. Walburga has inherited the symbols and much of the cultus anciently devoted to Walborg, or Walburg, the Earth Mother. S. TARASIUS, PATR. OF CONSTANTINOPLE. (A.D. 806.) [By Greeks and Latins on the same day. Authority:--His life by Ignatius, deacon and keeper of the sacred vessels at Constantinople, afterwards bishop of Nicæa, a disciple of Tarasius; also the Church historians of the period.] The Incarnation of God was the descent of the Most High to the level of human necessity. Man had found a difficulty in believing in and loving the Infinite; human language failed to express the nature of God save by a multitude of abstractions and negations. He was not limited, had no localized habitation, was not comprehensible by man; so the philosophers taught, and so they strove to make men believe; men made the effort, believed, and in the effort, their devotion expired. The philosophers had lifted God into the region of an idea, and in so doing, had divested him of personality; and when His personality was lost, all interest in Him died away. God was to them an object of speculation, not an object of worship. God the Father, knowing man's natural incapacity for realizing the Godhead, sent His Son into the world clothed in flesh. Man had now a God-Man, whose nature and personality had been brought vividly before him to believe in and to love. God was "manifest in the flesh," the visible and the invisible, the spiritual and the material, the finite and the infinite, the local and the omnipresent were united in One. Thenceforth the law of God's dealings with man was to be in accordance with his natural capacities, the visible was to become the medium of the invisible, the material the vehicle of the spiritual, the omnipresent adorable through a local presence, the infinite discernible through the finite. In Jesus Christ men saw God and lived; and when He was withdrawn from the eyes of men, He did not leave them orphans, but perpetuated his presence in the Holy Eucharist, even unto the end of the world. In the old heathen world men had been idolaters or philosophers. The idolater saw in the material image his God; the philosopher declared that God was everywhere present, and he despised the idol. Christianity combined in one the truth taught by the philosopher, and the craving felt by the idolater. Through the sacraments as outward and visible means, grace was conveyed to man, chiefly through the Holy Eucharist; and through sacred images and the holy cross, worship was addressed to God. Through the seen to the unseen, to God; from the unseen through the seen to man, is the law of the Incarnation. At first, on account of the idolatry which surrounded them, the early Christians did not deem it prudent to introduce images into their churches. Idolatry was so prevalent, that the first lesson they had to insist upon to the heathen, was the omnipresence of God; but when heathenism was conquered, the danger of idolatry ceased, and the peril was in the other direction; men began to insist on the infinity of the essence of the Godhead, and to deny the possibility of His becoming local by incarnation. They were ready to admit that Christ was inspired with a divine afflatus, but not that He was very and eternal God. Then, at once, it became necessary for the Church to use her every effort to impress on men's minds and hearts the truth that God had become very man, of the substance of His mother. Then pictures and images were introduced into churches. We must remember that the Church, to defend the truth, had to assume successively opposite positions, for the truth was double,--if we are to understand how she first opposed images, and then defended them. She did not contradict herself, her attitude was forced upon her, to maintain a two-fold truth. The use of images was commonly received in the east, when the Emperor Leo the Isaurian, resolved to abolish the practice. The contest began about the year 725. He was opposed by Pope Gregory II., Germanus, patriarch of Constantinople, and S. John Damascene. The first wrote vehemently to him on this subject. He maintained that the Word by having rendered Himself visible in taking a human body, subjected Himself to all conditions of a man, and that as it was lawful to represent any man, emperor or prince, so it was lawful to make representations of Christ. But, said he, Christians do not worship the cloth on which the picture is painted, nor the stone out of which the statue is hewn, but they use these visible representations as means of renewing the memory of the saints, and of raising up the mind to God. He denied that images received divine honours, but if "Lord Jesus, save us," be said before an image of Christ, "Holy Mother of God, intercede with Thy Son for us," before one of the Virgin, and "Intercede for us," before one of a Martyr; these prayers are not addressed to the image, but to Christ, or the Holy Virgin, or the Saint whom the figure is designed to portray. Constantine Copronymus, the son of Leo, followed in his father's steps, and for the better establishing his purpose, he called together a council (A.D. 754) at Constantinople, composed of 338 bishops. It began its sittings in February and ended in August. The Western Church, and the patriarchates of Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem, were not represented at this council, which was thus composed of prelates under the immediate control of the emperor, gathered together in his imperial city, surrounded by guards, and, unfortunately, the majority of these bishops partook of that time-serving and obsequious disposition which characterised and disgraced the episcopal order in the Eastern Empire for many centuries. This council decreed the destruction of images in churches, and the erasure of paintings on the walls.[70] By the authority of the emperor, a great part of the Eastern Church received and executed this decree; but Irene, who had married Leo the Fourth, son of Constantine Copronymus, though a cruel, ambitious woman, espoused, perhaps out of caprice, the opposite side, and on the death of her husband, during the minority of her son Constantine, who was but ten years old, assumed the regency, and stopped the savage persecution of the monks, and the ruthless destruction of images which had proceeded without intermission through the three preceding reigns. Paul III., patriarch of Constantinople, had been raised to that dignity by the late emperor. Being a timid man, desirous of remaining in favour with court, he had bowed to the will of the emperor in the matter of images. But he was a good and charitable man, greatly beloved by the poor. Finding that the Iconoclasts were now out of favour, and fearing for himself, he suddenly resigned his patriarchal see, and took refuge in a monastery. The empress and her son visited him, and endeavoured to dissuade him from his intention, but found him resolved. Tarasius, an officer of the court, noted for his piety, was then appointed patriarch, in spite of his urgent remonstrance. He declared that he would not accept the office till a council had been called, which exhibited those marks of being oecumenical which the former council had lacked, and which might compose the differences which had agitated the Eastern Church. This being agreed to, he was solemnly declared patriarch, and was consecrated soon after, on Christmas Day. His first act was to write synodal letters to the patriarchs of Rome, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem, convening a general council. Pope Adrian sent two priests to act as his legates, and the Eastern bishops did the same. The council assembled on the 1st August, 786, in the Church of the Apostles at Constantinople, but a tumult having broken out, and the soldiers having besieged the bishops in the church, and endeavoured to break up the council, it was adjourned till the following year, when it met at Nicæa. The papal legates sat in the first place, then Tarasius, patriarch of Constantinople, then the deputies of the Eastern bishops, who were themselves unable to attend because not permitted by the Saracen conquerors, afterwards Agapetus, bishop of Cæsarea, in Cappadocia, John, bishop of Ephesus, Constantine, metropolitan of Cyprus, with 250 bishops and archbishops, and above 100 priests and monks, and two commissioners of the emperor and empress to maintain order. The first session was held on the 24th September, 787, in the Church of S. Sophia; it opened with the reading of the letter of the empress Irene and the emperor, wherein they assured to the bishops that they had assembled the synod with the consent of the patriarchs, and that they left the bishops at full liberty to speak their minds; that Paul, the last patriarch of Constantinople, acknowledging his fault in having received the decrees of the council of the Iconoclasts, had quitted his see, and had caused Tarasius to be elected in his room; that Tarasius had refused the dignity, but having been urged to accept it, had required a council to be held to suppress the schism which divided the Church on the subject of images; and that, therefore, in accordance with his request, this council was convened. In conclusion, the empress and her son exhorted the bishops to judge truthfully and courageously, in accordance with Catholic doctrine and practice; and they said that letters had been received from Pope Adrian, which should be read to the assembly. After this many of the prelates who had taken part with the Iconoclasts, or had submitted to the decrees, seeing that the direction of the courtly breeze had changed, veered round with obsequious readiness. Such were, Basil, bishop of Ancyra, Theodosius of Myra, Theodosius of Amorn, Hypatius of Nicæa, and others, who now acknowledged that they reverenced sacred images. In the next session the letters of Pope Adrian were read, declaring the utility of images as means of teaching the ignorant, and of awakening piety and compunction. He demanded also that all archbishops of his patriarchate should receive ordination from the bishop of Rome, and that the primacy of the see of Rome should receive general recognition, as also that the patriarch of Constantinople should be prevented from assuming the title of "Universal Bishop." These latter articles were not transcribed by the Greek fathers. Dupin, the judicious historian, suggests that probably the legates of the Pope did not judge it prudent at that moment to present them. A letter from Adrian to Tarasius was then read, expressing the trouble given to the Pope by the news of the nomination of a layman to the influential see of Constantinople, and exhorting him to procure the condemnation of the synod which had forbidden images in churches. After the reading of this letter, the Papal legates asked Tarasius whether he approved of it. He answered that he did, and that he did reverently honour the images of Christ, the Holy Virgin, and the saints, but that to God alone was due true adoration and worship (latria). Of this the synod approved. Our English word _worship_ has got at the present time a meaning which it had not of old. Worship now means to adore as God, with supreme reverence; and such worship may not be given to creatures, however exalted; but the old signification of the word had not this force, but was synonymous with reverence. Thus, in the Anglican prayer book, in the marriage service, the husband says to the wife, "With my body I thee worship," _i.e._, honour; and magistrates are called the "worshipful." When Protestants accuse Catholics of worshipping images, in one sense they are right, but in another sense they are wrong. Catholics do worship sacred images so far as to render them respect and honour, but they do not give to them that honour which is implied by the word "worship" in its modern sense. In the old signification of the word, the sailor worships the quarterdeck when he touches his cap on passing it, the soldier worships the royal standard when he presents arms to it, and the peers the throne when they bow to it on taking their places in the House of Lords. In the third session of the council, a letter from the patriarch of Jerusalem, approved by his bishops, was read, wherein he acknowledged that reverence and honour were to be shown to sacred images. In subsequent sessions the acts of the Iconoclastic Council at Jerusalem were examined and refuted in order, and the council closed with the usual acclamations and prayers for the prosperity of the emperor and empress; after which synodal letters containing the decrees were sent to all churches. Pope Adrian approved of all that had been decreed, and sent copies of the Acts into France, where pictures and images were used historically, but no honour, such as burning candles or offering of incense before them, was allowed. On receiving these copies, Charlemagne wrote, or caused to be written, or put forth under his name, a work containing an examination of the decrees of the second council of Nicæa, by some of the bishops, of whom Alcuin was chief. This contained a repudiation of these Acts, and a rejection of image-worship. It maintained that respect was due to pictures and statues of the Saviour and the Saints, but refused the right of offering them any sort of religious honour, as by lighting candles and incensing them. This work was presented to Pope Adrian by Engilbert, the ambassador of Charlemagne, and it drew forth from the pope an answer which, however, did not alter the practice of the Gallican Church, for in the Council of Frankfort, held in 794, the decrees relative to the worshipping of images passed by the second Council of Nicæa were rejected, as was the case again in a council held at Paris, in 824. Tarasius, in the meantime, obedient to the decrees of the synod, restored holy images throughout the extent of his patriarchate. His life was a model of perfection to both clergy and laity. He lived a quiet, austere life, in the midst of magnificence and luxury. He reduced to the smallest possible amount the expenses of his household, and gave to the poor what he had economised. He often took the dishes of meat from his table to distribute among them with his own hands: and he assigned them a large annual revenue. And that none might be overlooked, he visited every house and hospital in Constantinople. His discourses turned on the mortification of the senses, and he was particularly severe against all theatrical entertainments, which served then to encourage and diffuse licentiousness. Some time after, the emperor became enamoured of Theodota, a maid of honour to his wife, the empress Mary, and, after having spent seven years in marriage, in 795, he resolved to divorce the empress. He used every effort to gain the patriarch. He sent an officer to him to inform him that a plot of the empress to poison him had been discovered. S. Tarasius, however, received the request to divorce the emperor, and marry him to Theodota, with a stern refusal. "Tell him that I will rather suffer death and all manner of torments than consent to his design." The emperor, hoping to prevail with him by flattery, sent for him to the palace, and said, "I can conceal nothing from you, whom I regard as my father. No one can deny but I may divorce one who has attempted my life. The Empress Mary deserves death or perpetual penance." He then produced a vessel, full of the poison, which he pretended she had prepared for him. The patriarch, with good reason, judging this to be an attempt to impose upon him, answered, that he was too well convinced that his passion for Theodota was at the bottom of all his complaints against the empress. He boldly declared to Constantine that even if she were guilty of the crime laid to her charge, a second marriage during her lifetime would be adulterous. The monk John, who had been legate of the Eastern patriarchs in the council at Nicæa, being present, also spoke resolutely to the emperor, who was so irritated that he drove them both out of his presence, and John narrowly escaped with his life. As soon as they were gone, he turned the empress Mary out of the palace and obliged her to assume the veil. Tarasius persisted in his refusal to marry him to Theodota, and the ceremony was performed by Joseph, the treasurer of the church of Constantinople. The patriarch became thenceforth an object of persecution to the emperor, who placed spies about his person, suffered no one to speak with him without their leave, and banished many of his relations and servants. This confinement gave the patriarch more leisure for prayer and contemplation. In the meantime, the ambitious Irene, discontented at being no longer at the head of the administration, formed a conspiracy to dethrone her son. The secret was faithfully kept above eight months, till the emperor, suspicious of his danger, escaped from Constantinople, with the design of appealing to the provinces and armies. By this hasty flight the empress was left on the brink of a precipice. She addressed a private epistle to the friends whom she had placed about his person with a menace that, unless they accomplished, she would reveal, their treason. Their fear rendered them intrepid. They seized the emperor on the Asiatic shore, and transported him to Constantinople, where his mother and the other conspirators decided to render him incapable of the throne by blinding him. Her emissaries assaulted the sleeping prince, and stabbed their daggers into his eyes. He survived for several years, oppressed by the court, and forgotten by the world; whilst his unnatural mother resumed the sovereign power, of which he had divested her by becoming of age. She reigned for five years, during which she recalled all the banished, and favoured the Catholics. But she was in turn conspired against by the high treasurer, Nicephorus, who was secretly invested with the purple, and crowned at S. Sophia by the patriarch. The empress was sent into exile in the isle of Lesbos, where she was obliged to earn a scanty subsistence by the labours of her distaff, till her haughty spirit consuming her, she died of grief. Under Nicephorus, S. Tarasius persevered peaceably in his practices of penance, and in the functions of his pastoral charge. Through his last sickness he continued to offer daily the holy Sacrifice as long as he was able to move. A little before his death he fell into a trance, as the author of his life, who was an eye-witness of the scene, relates, wherein he was heard disputing with a number of accusers, very busy in sifting his whole life, and objecting to his actions. He seemed to be in fear and agitation, and defending himself against everything laid to his charge. This filled all present with fear, seeing the endeavours of the enemy of man to find some condemnation in the life of so holy and so irreprehensible a bishop. But a great serenity succeeded, and the holy man gave up his soul to God in peace, on the 25th of February, in 806, having sat twenty-one years and two months. God honoured his memory with miracles, some of which are related by the author of his life. His festival began to be celebrated under his successor. B. ROBERT OF ARBRISSEL. (A.D. 1117.) [Authority:--His life, by Baldric, B. of Dôle (d. 1130); and another attributed to Andrew, monk of Fontevrault, and his disciple.] Robert of Arbrissel was born of poor parents, in a village of Brittany, then called Arbrissel, and now known as Arbresec, in the diocese of Rennes, near La Guierche, in the year 1045 or 1047. His father, Damalioc, who afterwards embraced a religious life, and his mother, Orvenda, were pious people who brought him up to love God above all things. When of an age to study, with their consent he went to several towns of his native province, to learn in the schools without being a charge to his parents; and, making great progress, he went to Paris, where he so distinguished himself that he became a doctor in the university. At this time Silvester de la Guierche, Chancellor of Conon II., duke of Brittany, was placed upon the episcopal throne of Rennes, but being desirous of relieving himself of his duties on various accounts, he chose Robert, and appointed him his vicar-general, with absolute power in the diocese. Robert employed his authority in restoring ecclesiastical discipline, putting down simony, prohibiting incestuous marriages amongst the laity, and in enforcing clerical celibacy. As long as Silvester de la Guierche was alive, Robert was safe from the enemies his discipline had aroused, but, on the death of his protector, he was obliged to leave Brittany, and take refuge in Angers, where he gave lessons in theology. But, wishing to consecrate himself entirely to God, he quitted Angers, and buried himself in the forest of Craon, in Anjou, where he lived in great austerity, wearing a habit of pig skin, and eating roots and wild fruit. His fame as a second S. John the Baptist, having been bruited about, great numbers came to place themselves under his direction, so that he speedily saw his forest solitude invaded by many hundreds of anchorites. The number became at length so great as to oblige him to disperse them through the neighbouring forests. Not being able to watch over all, he divided them into three colonies, of which he retained one, and gave the others to two of his disciples: the B. Vitalis of Mortain, who founded the order of Savigny; and the B. Raoul de la Futaye, founder of the abbey of S. Sulpice, at Rennes. Robert was obliged to quit his retired life, and preach the Crusade, by order of Pope Urban II. He, therefore, placed his colony under the care of the bishop of Angers, and undertook the execution of the task imposed upon him. On the confines of Anjou and Poitou, about four miles from the little town of Candes, was an extensive tract of undulating land, covered with bushes, and wholly uncultivated; a little valley, traversed by a slender stream in this district, bore the name of Fontevrault. Here, in 1099, Robert began to build some huts to shelter his followers, and here he settled to found a new colony. Many religiously disposed persons of both sexes, young and old, gathered round him, and Robert found it necessary to establish distinct residences for the men and for the women, each with its own separate oratory. The work of the women was to sing continually the praises of God; that of the men was, between their spiritual exercise, the tillage of the soil. Charity, unity, modesty, and gentleness, prevailed in this singular colony. All lived on what their hands produced, or on the alms sent them; and they bore the name of "The poor of Jesus Christ." The example of these new solitaries attracted great numbers, many of whom had only an imperfect or a mistaken vocation. Women who had led dissolute lives, feeling a passing compunction, hastened thither, assumed the outward profession, waxed cold, and gave great scandal by fresh lapses. This drew forth severe censure from Marbod, bishop of Rennes, and Godfrey, abbot of Vendôme. The former wrote to Robert a letter full of reproach, in which he told him that he had quitted the Order of the Regular Canons to run after women, and that the colony of Fontevrault was a scandal to the Church, through the confinement of some of the women, and the cries of new born babes; and he rebuked him for having given the religious habit to persons who asked for it, without having previously tested their sincerity. The letter of Godfrey of Vendôme, was couched in a similar strain of remonstrance; but he went further, and, trusting to hearsay, reprimanded Robert for associating too freely with the females of his Order, and seeing them in private without the presence of witnesses. Some have supposed these letters to be spurious, but without sufficient grounds. A man of great singleness of mind and guilelessness of spirit is easily deceived by the professions of others, and is liable to be led into actions which, with more worldly wisdom, he would avoid as indiscreet. Indeed, the formation of this double society was hardly consistent with prudence, and Robert found it necessary to keep it within the bounds of severe and vigilant prescriptions, to prevent the recurrence of those scandals which had called forth the reprimand of Marbod and the abbot of Vendôme. Godfrey was afterwards so thoroughly convinced that he was in error in attributing evil to the saintly Robert, that he became his ardent champion. Robert erected three convents, strictly enclosed, for the women: one for virgins and widows, called the Grand Moutier, was dedicated to the Blessed Virgin; another for penitents, was placed under the patronage of S. Mary Magdalene; and a third, for leprous and infirm women, was dedicated to S. Lazarus. The house of the men was completely distinct, and was placed under the invocation of S. John the Divine. One large church was erected to serve the four houses, and the whole community was placed by Robert under the supreme direction of an abbess; and he set the example of submission, by appointing Petronilla de Craon, widow of the Baron de Chemille, Superior to the Order, and he lived in obedience to her till his death, which took place on February 25th, 1117. [69] Or Diodorus. [70] The Iconoclastic party was not actuated by any religious feeling, but was simply that of free-thinkers, as the Protestant and very prejudiced ecclesiastical historian Gieseler is constrained to admit. He says, "the enlightenment party, the opponents of images, was not created by a religious feeling, but merely by the emperor's will, and thus partly fostered a superficial, free-thinking, rather than a beneficial reformatory tendency." February 26. S. NESTOR, _B. M. of Magida_, A.D. 251. SS. FORTUNATUS AND COMPANIONS, _MM. at Antioch_. S. DIONYSIUS, _B. M. of Augsburg_, A.D. 303. S. ALEXANDER, _Patr. of Alexandria_, A.D. 326 S. FAUSTIAN, _B. of Bologna, in Italy, 4th cent._ S. PORPHYRY, _B. of Gaza_, A.D. 421. SS. EOLADIUS AND AGRICOLA, _BB. of Nevers, 6th cent._ S. VICTOR, _P. at Arcis-sur-Aube, in France, 6th or 7th cent._ S. EDIGNA, _V. at Puech, in Bavaria_, A.D. 1119. S. NESTOR, B. M. (A.D. 251.) [Roman Martyrology, the ancient one called S. Jerome's, those of Bede, Ado, Usuardus, Notker, &c. By the Greeks on Feb. 28th. Authority:--The ancient and genuine Acts.] In the reign of Decius, Pollio was governor of Pamphylia. When persecution broke out, Nestor, bishop of Magida, an obscure town in that province, knowing that he was particularly feared by the pagans, and that the first stroke was sure to fall upon him, ordered his flock to disperse into places of safety, and then calmly awaited the officers of justice. They found him in prayer, and led him forth with his head covered with a hood (_mafortium_). And when he came into the forum, he was honourably received, all the court rising and saluting him. He said, "God pardon you, why have you done this?" They answered, "Thy manner of life is deserving of respect." Then he was taken apart from the public, and stools were placed for the magistrates and his advocates, and a chair for the bishop, and he was requested to sit down. He replied, "The honour of being summoned into your presence suffices me." Then the Irenarch said, "Sir, dost thou know the order of the emperor?" "I know the command of the Almighty, not that of the emperor," was the reply of the Bishop. "O Nestor," said the magistrate, "consent without difficulty, that we be not called to judge thee." "I obey the commands of the heavenly King," answered Nestor. "Thou art possessed," said the magistrate. "Nay," said the bishop, "not I, but thou, for thy gods are devils." "I shall have to send thee to the governor," said the Irenarch, "for they are true gods. Beware of torture." Then Nestor signing the cross on his brow, said, "Wherefore dost thou threaten me with torture? The only torments I dread are those of my God. Be well assured, in torture, or out of torture, Him shall I confess." Then he was taken to Perga, where was the governor of the province, which he reached on the fourth Sabbath (Saturday.) And when the Irenach had presented him to Pollio the governor, Nestor was again urged with kind and courteous words to renounce his religion; but he as constantly refused. "Torment me as thou wilt," said he, "with chains or wild beasts, or sword, as long as there is any breath in my nostrils, I will confess the name of my Lord Jesus Christ." Then the judge ordered him to be suspended on the little horse, and to be cruelly tortured. The executioner laid his sides bare, tearing them with iron hooks; but Nestor chanted, "I will alway give thanks unto the Lord: his praise shall ever be in my mouth." (Ps. xxxiii.; (A. V. 34) 1.) The judge, astonished at his endurance, exclaimed, "Why, wretched man! art thou not ashamed to put thy faith in a man, and he short-lived?" "Let that be my confusion, and that also of all who call on the name of the Lord Jesus," answered the martyr. And when the crowd clamoured that he should be released from his sufferings, the governor asked again, "What, then, is thy final choice, to be with us, or with thy Christ?" Then the martyr exclaimed, "With my Christ have I ever been, with Him am I now, and with Him shall I ever be." Seeing his inflexibility, Pollio said scornfully, "Nestor, as thou hast rejected the immortal gods to follow the crucified One, I will not be so wanting in devotion to this God of thine, as to condemn thee to any other death. Thou shalt be crucified on the wood." Then a cross was made ready, and Nestor, the bishop, was nailed to it. And as he hung, he exhorted the people, and at length he bid them kneel and pray to God through Jesus Christ; and all knelt, and when he had said the final Amen, he breathed forth his spirit. S. DIONYSIUS, B. OF AUGSBURG, M. (A.D. 303.) [German Martyrology. No trustworthy authorities for his life and acts. The following account is from the Augsburg Breviary.] Dionysius, together with his sister Hilaria, (August 12th), her daughter Afra, (August 7th), and the rest of his family, was converted and baptized by S. Narcissus the bishop, afterwards chief pastor of the Church of Gerona, in Spain, (March 18th.) As Narcissus was obliged to leave the little band of Christians at Augsburg, he instructed, and then ordained, Dionysius to be their priest, or, as some writers assert, their bishop. Thus Dionysius became the spiritual father of a little family of true believers, and was called to encourage them during the fiery trial of persecution. He saw his sister Hilaria, and her daughter Afra, glorify God by martyrdom. Knowing that his own turn had come, he fortified himself with the Holy Sacrament, yielded himself into the hands of those who sought his life, and dying a martyr's death, gained the crown and palm. The relics of this saint, who is reckoned the first bishop of Augsburg, together with those of Quiriacus, were discovered in the year 1118, and were translated by the abbot Egino to the Church of S. Ulrich, in Augsburg, and enclosed in an altar. Later, in the year 1258, Hartmann, bishop of Augsburg, opened this altar, and placed them, on 26th Feb., in a new altar, dedicated to SS. Dionysius and Quiriacus, and he ordered that this day should be observed as the festival of S. Dionysius. The Church of Augsburg honours him as her first bishop, though the episcopal see of Augsburg was not regularly constituted till 250 years later, when Sosimus became the first of a succession of prelates which from that time to the present has not failed. S. ALEXANDER, PATR. OF ALEXANDRIA. (A.D. 326.) [Roman Martyrology, and those of Bede, Usuardus, Ado, Notker, &c. Authorities:--Sozomen, Socrates, Eusebius, and the Apology of S. Athanasius.] S. Alexander was patriarch of Alexander when Arius, the arch-heretic, began to preach his denial of the eternal Godhead of Christ. Alexander, one of the mildest of men, endeavoured by gentleness and kind expostulation to bring the heretic back to the true belief. But when he found that he was incorrigible, he summoned an assembly of his clergy, and therein questioned Arius, and on his boldly proclaiming his disbelief in the fundamental doctrine of the Catholic faith, he excommunicated him. A council was called at Alexandria about the end of the year 320, in which Arius was again tried, and the sentence of excommunication was ratified by nearly one hundred bishops, who were present. Alexander attended the famous General Council of Nicæa, assembled in 325, which finally condemned the heresy of Arius. S. Alexander, after this triumph of the faith, returned to Alexandria; where, after having recommended S. Athanasius for his successor, he died on the 26th February, in the year 326. For a fuller account of the Arian heresy, and the Council of Nicæa, the reader is referred to the life of S. Athanasius, (May 2nd.) S. PORPHYRIUS, B. OF GAZA. (A.D. 421.) [Commemorated by Greeks and Latins on the same day. Authority:--His life, written by Mark the Deacon, his disciple.] Porphyrius, a native of Thessalonica, in Macedonia, was of a noble and wealthy family. The desire of renouncing the world made him leave his friends and country at twenty-five years of age, in 378, to pass into Egypt, where he consecrated himself to God in a famous monastery in the desert of Sceté. After five years spent there in the penitential exercises of a monastic life, he went into Palestine to visit the holy places of Jerusalem. After this he took up his abode in a cave near the Jordan, where he passed other five years in great austerity, till he fell sick, when a complication of disorders obliged him to return to Jerusalem. There he never failed daily to visit all the holy places, leaning on a staff, for he was too weak to stand upright. It had happened that, about the same time, Mark, an Asiatic, and the author of his life, came to Jerusalem with the same intent. He was much edified by the devotion with which Porphyrius visited the holy places. And seeing him, one day, labour with great pain up the stairs in the chapel built by Constantine, he ran to him to offer his assistance; but Porphyrius refused it, saying, "It is not right that I who am come hither to supplicate pardon for my sins should be eased by any one: rather let me undergo some labour and inconvenience, that God, beholding it, may have compassion on me." He never omitted his visits of piety to the holy places, and daily partook of the Holy Sacrament. The only thing that afflicted him was, that his fortune had not as yet been sold for the use of the poor. This he commissioned Mark to do for him, who accordingly set out for Thessalonica, and in three months' time returned to Jerusalem with money and effects, to the value of four thousand five hundred pieces of gold. When the blessed man saw him, he embraced him, with tears of joy. But Porphyrius was now so completely recovered, that Mark scarcely knew him to be the same person: for his body was erect and vigorous, and his face looked full, fresh, and ruddy. Porphyrius perceiving his friend's amazement, said with a smile, "Be not surprised, Mark, to see me in perfect health and strength, but admire the unspeakable goodness of Christ, who can easily cure what man has despaired of." Mark asked him by what means he had recovered. He replied, "Forty days ago, being in extreme pain, I made a shift to reach Mount Calvary, where, fainting away, I fell into a kind of trance, during which, methought I saw our Saviour on the cross, and the good thief hanging beside him. I said to Christ, _Lord, Remember me, when Thou comest into Thy kingdom_: whereupon he ordered the thief to come to my assistance, and he, raising me off the ground on which I lay, bade me go to Christ. I ran to Him, and He coming off His cross, said to me, _Take this wood_ (meaning the cross) _into thy custody_. In obedience to Him, methought I laid it on my shoulders and carried it some way. I awoke soon after, and have been free from pain ever since, and without the least appearance of my having ever ailed any thing." Mark was so edified with the holy man's discourse and good example, that he resolved to live with him, for he was endued with a divine prudence, an eminent spirit of prayer, and a complete control over his passions. He distributed all the money and effects Mark had brought him among the necessitous in Palestine and Egypt, so that in a very short time, he had reduced himself to the necessity of labouring for his daily food. He therefore learned to make shoes and dress leather, while Mark, being well skilled in writing, obtained a handsome livelihood by copying books. He therefore desired the saint to partake of his earnings. But Porphyrius replied, in the words of S. Paul, _He that doth not work, neither let him eat_. He led this laborious and penitential life till he was forty years of age, when the bishop of Jerusalem ordained him priest, though much against his will, and committed to him the keeping of the holy Cross. This was in 393. The saint changed nothing in his austere life, feeding only upon roots and the coarsest bread, and not eating till after sunset, except on Sundays and holy days, when he ate at noon, and added a little oil and cheese; and a small quantity of wine in the water he drank. This was his method of living till his death. Having been elected bishop of Gaza without his knowledge, in 396, John, the metropolitan and archbishop of Cæsarea, wrote to the patriarch of Jerusalem to desire him to send over Porphyrius, that he might consult him on certain difficult passages of Scripture. He was sent accordingly, but charged to return in seven days. Porphyrius, receiving this order, seemed at first disturbed, but said, "God's will be done." That evening he called Mark, and said to him, "Brother Mark, let us go and venerate the holy places and the sacred Cross, for it will be long before we shall be able to do it again." Mark asked him why he said this. He answered, "Our Saviour appeared to me the night past, and said 'Give up the treasure of the cross which thou hast, for I will marry thee to a wife, poor indeed, and despicable, but of great piety and virtue. Take care to adorn her well; for, however contemptible she may appear, she is My sister.' This," said he, "Christ signified to me last night: and I fear, in consequence, that I am about to be charged with the sins of others, whilst I labour to expiate my own; but the will of God must be obeyed." When they had venerated the holy places, and the sacred Cross, and Porphyrius had prayed long before it, with many tears, he shut up the Cross in its golden case, and delivered the keys to the bishop; and, having obtained his blessing, he, and his disciple, Mark, set out, with three others. They arrived the next day, which was Saturday, at Cæsarea. The archbishop obliged them to sup with him. After spiritual discourse they took a little sleep, and then rose to assist at the night service. Next morning the archbishop bid the Gazæans lay hold on Porphyrius, and, while they held him, he ordained him bishop. The holy man wept bitterly, and was inconsolable at being promoted to a dignity for which he judged himself unfit. The Gazæans, however, performed their part in endeavouring to comfort him; and, having assisted at the Sunday office, and stayed one day more at Cæsarea, they set out for Gaza, and, late on Wednesday night, arrived there much harassed and fatigued. For the heathens living in the villages near Gaza, having notice of their coming, had so damaged the roads in several places, and clogged them with thorns and logs of wood, that they were scarcely passable. That year happened to be one of great drought, and this the pagans ascribed to the coming of the new Christian bishop, saying that their god Marnas had foretold that Porphyrius would bring public calamities on their city. In Gaza stood a famous temple of that idol, which the emperor Theodosius the Elder had commanded to be shut up, but not demolished, on account of its beautiful structure. The governor afterwards had permitted the heathens to open it again. As no rain fell the two first months after the arrival of S. Porphyrius, the idolaters, in great affliction, assembled in this temple to offer sacrifices, and make supplications to their god Marnas, whom they called the Lord of rains. These they repeated for seven days, going also to a place of prayer outside the town. But, finding all their endeavours ineffectual, they lost all hopes of a supply. A dearth ensuing, the Christians, to the number of two hundred and eighty, women and children included, after a day's fast and a night's vigil, by the order of their bishop, went in procession to S. Timothy's church, in which lay the relics of the holy martyr, S. Meuris, and of the confessor, S. Theis, singing hymns. But, on their return to the city, they found the gates shut against them, and the heathens obstinately determined not to open them. In this situation, the Christians addressed Almighty God with redoubled fervour, imploring Him to send them the blessing so much wanted. Presently the clouds gathered, and there fell such a quantity of rain, that the heathens opened their gates, and, joining them, cried out, "Christ alone is God: He alone has overcome." They accompanied the Christians to the church, to thank God for the benefit received; and this miracle resulted in the conversion of one hundred and seventy-six persons, whom the saint instructed, baptized, and confirmed, as he did also one hundred and five more before the end of that year. The miraculous preservation of the life of a pagan woman in labour, who had been despaired of, occasioned the conversion of that family and others, to the number of sixty-four. The heathens, perceiving their number decrease, grew very troublesome to the Christians, whom they excluded from commerce, and all public offices, and annoyed in various ways. S. Porphyrius, to screen himself and his flock from their outrages, had recourse to the Emperor's protection. On this errand he sent Mark, his disciple, to Constantinople, and went thither, afterward, himself, in company with John, his metropolitan, archbishop of Cæsarea. At Constantinople they applied to S. John Chrysostom, who joyfully received them, and recommended them to the eunuch Amantius, who had great credit with the Empress, and was a zealous servant of God. Amantius, having introduced them to the Empress, she received them with great distinction, assured them of her protection, and begged their prayers for her safe delivery, a favour she received a few days after. She desired them, in another visit, to sign her and her new-born son, Theodosius the Younger, with the cross, which they did. The young prince was baptized with great solemnity, and on that occasion the Empress obtained from the Emperor all that the bishops had requested, and in particular that the temple of Gaza should be demolished. An imperial edict was drawn up for this purpose, and delivered to Cynegius, a patrician full of zeal, who was charged to see it executed. They stayed at Constantinople during the feast of Easter, and, at their departure, the Emperor and Empress bestowed on them great presents. When they landed in Palestine, near Gaza, the Christians came out to meet them, with a cross carried before them, singing hymns. In the place called Tetramphodos, or Four-ways-end, stood a marble statue of Venus, on a marble altar, which was in great reputation for giving oracles to young women about the choice of husbands. As the two bishops, with the procession of the Christians, and the cross borne before them, passed through that square, this idol fell down of itself, and was broken to pieces; whereupon thirty-two men and seven women were converted. Ten days after, arrived Cynegius, having with him a duke, or general, with a strong guard of soldiers, and the civil magistrates of the country. He assembled the citizens, and read to them the emperor's edict, commanding their idols and temples to be destroyed. This was accordingly done, and no less than eight public temples in the city were burnt; viz., those of the Sun, Venus, Apollo, Proserpine, Hecate, the Hierion, the temple of fortune, and that of Marnas. The Marnion, in which men had been often sacrificed, burned for many days. After this, the private houses and courts were all searched; the idols were every where burned or thrown into the common sewers, and all books of magic and superstition were cast into the flames. Many idolators desired baptism; but the saint gave them a long probation, and prepared them for that sacrament by daily instructions. On the spot where the temple of Marnas had stood, was built the church of Eudoxia, in the figure of a cross. The empress sent for this purpose, precious pillars and rich marble from Constantinople. Of the marble taken out of the Marnion, S. Porphyrius made steps and a road to the church, that it might be trampled upon. Before he would suffer the church to be begun, he proclaimed a fast, and the next morning, attended by his clergy and all the Christians in the city, they went in a body to the place, from the church Irene, singing the _Venite exultemus Domino_, and other psalms, and answering to every verse, Allelulia; the procession being led by a cross. They all set to work, carrying stones and other materials, and digging the foundations, according to the plan marked out and directed by Rufinus, a celebrated architect, singing psalms and saying prayers during their work. The church was begun in 403, when thirty high pillars arrived from Constantinople, two of which, called Carostiæ, shone like emeralds, when placed in the church. It took five years to build, and, when finished in 408, the bishop performed the consecration of it on Easter-day, with the greatest pomp and solemnity. His alms to the poor on that occasion seemed boundless. The good bishop spent the remainder of his life in zealously instructing his flock in the doctrine of God, and in all virtuous living. The heathen, on one occasion, rose in sedition, attacked the house of the bishop, and set it on fire, so that he and his deacons were obliged to escape over the roof, and take refuge in the room of a maiden of fourteen, an orphan, named Salaphtha, and a heathen. The girl showed them every kindness, keeping their place of retreat secret, and supplying them with bread and cheese and vegetables. The bishop took the opportunity of infusing into the young mind of the girl the first principles of Christianity, and when the tumult was abated, and he with his companions were able to go forth in safety, he left her earnestly desiring baptism. The maiden afterwards became a zealous Christian, and was consecrated to a life of virginity by the old bishop, whom she had saved from the rage of his enemies. [Illustration] February 27. SS. JULIAN, CHRONION, AND BESAS, _MM. at Alexandria_, A.D. 250. S. GELASIUS, _M. at Heliopolis, in Phoenicia_, A.D. 297. S. HONORINA, _V. M. at Conflans, in France_. S. THALELÆUS, _H. in Syria, circ._ A.D. 460. S. COMGAN, _Ab. in Ireland, before_ A.D. 569. S. LEANDER, _B. of Hispala or Seville_, A.D. 596. S. BALDOMER, _Subd. at Lyons, circ._ A.D. 660. S. ALNOTH, _H. M. in England, circ._ A.D. 727. B. JOHN, _Ab. of Gorze, near Metz_, A.D. 1162. SS. JULIAN, CHRONION, AND BESAS, MM. (A.D. 250.) [Roman Martyrology; but some on Feb. 19th; by the Greeks on Oct. 30th. Authority:--The contemporary letters by Dionysius, B. of Alexandria, to Germanus, quoted by Eusebius, Hist. Eccles. vi., c. 41.] Saint Dionysius, bishop of Alexandria, in a letter describing the sufferings of his church during the persecutions of Decius, after having lamented the apostacy of some, adds: "But others remained firm and blessed pillars of the Lord, confirmed by the Lord himself, and receiving of Him strength suited to their measure of faith, proved admirable witnesses of His kingdom. The first of these was Julian, a man afflicted with the gout, neither able to walk nor to stand, who, with two others that carried him, was arraigned. Of these, the one immediately denied his faith, but the other, named Chronion, surnamed Eunus, and the aged Julian himself, having confessed the Lord, were carried on camels through the whole city, a very large one, as you know, and were scourged, and finally consumed in an immense fire, in the midst of a crowd of spectators. But a soldier, named Besas, standing near, having opposed the insolence of the multitude whilst these martyrs were on the way to execution, was assailed by them with loud shouts, and this brave soldier of God, after he had excelled in the great conflict of piety, was beheaded." Relics at Autun. S. GELASIUS, M. (A.D. 297.) [Greek Menæa. Authority:--The Chronicon Alexandrinum, or Chron. Paschale, under date 269 from the Ascension, which is equivalent to 297 of the vulgar era. In this Chronicle he is called Gelasinus. Theodoret may, perhaps, allude to him, when he says that some have passed from the stage of the theatre to the ranks of the martyrs. Du curand Græc. Affect., Serm. 8. Much the same circumstances are related of S. Genesius (Aug. 25th), who suffered about 286, unless both are the same; Gelasius in the West becoming Genesius by a slight change of liquids.] Gelasius was a comic actor, the second clown of the theatre at Heliopolis, in Phoenicia. One day, on the stage was performed a parody of Christian rites for the amusement of the heathen spectators. A large bathing tub was introduced on the stage, filled with warm water, and the clown, Gelasius, was dipped in it, the other clown pronouncing over him the sacramental words. When he rose from the bath, and was vested in white, it was observed that a change had come over him; the jesting air and laugh were gone, and a solemn expression had overspread his countenance. "I am a Christian," said he; "in the font I saw a dazzling light. Therefore, I will die as a Christian." As soon as the audience became aware that he spoke in sober earnest, the theatre became a scene of wild tumult, the people deserted their seats, and rushed on the stage, and dragged the poor actor forth, clothed in his white robe, and stoned him to death outside the theatre. His body was transported to the village of Mariamnia, near Heliopolis, of which he was a native, and an oratory was erected by the Christians over his tomb. S. HONORINA, V. M. (DATE UNKNOWN.) [Some Gallican Martyrologies.] Nothing whatever is known of this saint. The author of the history of the translation of her relics to Conflans, near Pontoise, a short distance from Paris, says that her virtues, her merits, and her mode of passion, are utterly unknown. So also is the date of her death. The relics were translated about the year A.D. 912. As an instance of the manner in which confusion has arisen in the lives and acts of martyrs of an early date, it is deserving of mention that in the church of Quimper, the Matin lections for the feast of S. Honorina are portions of the Acts of S. Dorothea, transferred to Feb. 27th, to do duty for the unrecorded S. Honorina. S. THALELÆUS, H. (ABOUT A.D. 460.) [Greek Menæa. No commemoration in Western Church. Authority:--Theodoret, Philothaeus, c. xxviii.] "Not only have I heard of this man from others," says Theodoret, "but I saw him myself." Thalelæus erected for his habitation a small hut against an idol shrine, near Gabala, to which many people resorted, and where they offered sacrifice to devils. The evil spirits, enraged at his thus assaulting them in their sanctuary, endeavoured by hideous clamours and frightful apparitions, to scare the Christian hermit away; but every effort of demons and idolaters to drive him from this shrine proved ineffectual. Thalelæus succeeded in converting many who came as votaries to the temple, and persuaded them to bend their necks to the sweet yoke of Christ's law. With many of these converts Theodoret conversed. After that Thalelæus had lived thus a while, he devised for himself a strange and horrible penance. He made two wheels, and then joined them by pieces of wood into a species of barrel, but open between the bars. He enclosed himself within this case, which was so low that his chin rested on his knees, and remained therein for many years. He had been ten years in it when Theodoret saw him. This frightful self-immolation is by no means to be regarded as deserving of imitation. But it was called forth by peculiar circumstances, and for a special purpose. The rude people of Syria could be impressed no other way. To win these souls from heathenism this phase of the ascetic life was evoked, it served its purpose, and passed away. S. LEANDER, B. OF HISPALA. (ABOUT A.D. 596.) [Roman Martyrology, and those of Usuardus, Notker, Ado, and Bede; but by the Spanish Church and Mozarabic Kalendar, followed by the Bollandists, on March 13th. Authorities:--His own writings, the letters of S. Gregory the Great, and early Spanish histories.] This illustrious friend of the great S. Gregory, this apostle of the Visigoths, was of illustrious birth. His father, Severian duke of Carthagena, and mother, Turtura, of royal Ostrogoth blood, had three sons and two daughters. The sons were, S. Leander, S. Fulgentius, B. of Ecija, and S. Isidore, who succeeded Leander as archbishop of Seville. The daughters were S. Florentina, abbess of fifty convents, and the princess Theodosia, married to king Leovigild, who became the mother of the illustrious martyr, S. Hermenigild. From his boyhood, Leander was regarded as endowed with singular eloquence and power of fascinating others. He retired, when young, from the world, and took the religious habit in a monastery of Seville, where he gained so great a reputation that, on the archiepiscopal see becoming vacant, he was elected to it by the unanimous voice of clergy and people. Leovigild, his brother-in-law, then reigned over the Visigoth kingdom, in Spain, and openly professed Arianism. This caused great embarrassment to Leander, who used every effort to confirm the Catholics in their faith, and to oppose the heretics at every point. He was sent on an embassy from the Catholics to the emperor Tiberius, at Constantinople, where he made the acquaintance of S. Gregory the Great, then cardinal-deacon of Pope Pelagius II., who had sent him at this time on the affairs of the church, to the imperial court. The warmest attachment sprang up between these two great men, and it was at the instance of S. Leander, that S. Gregory wrote his famous "Morals of the Book of Job." When their business was concluded, both saints returned to their country, S. Gregory to Italy, and S. Leander to Spain, where he succeeded in converting prince Hermenigild, his nephew, the eldest son of king Leovigild. This placed the Catholics in great danger. The king, in an explosion of rage, executed his son on Easter-day, 586, and began a furious persecution of the Church. S. Leander and his brother, S. Fulgentius, together with several other bishops, were exiled, and the king seized on the property and revenues of the Church, and, adding cruelty to robbery, put several nobles to death, and confiscated their lands. S. Leander, though exiled, warred with his pen against the Arian heresy, and wrote two works confuting the errors of Arianism, and a third book answering objections which had been raised against his arguments. The persecution did not last long, for in the following year, 587, Leovigild, finding himself about to die, recalled the Catholic bishops, and commended his son, Recared, to the care of S. Leander. Thus, to use the words of S. Gregory, Recared, following not the perfidy of his father, an Arian, but the faith of his martyred brother, was brought himself, and the whole nation of the Visigoths, to the true faith. In the third council of Toledo, 589, the archbishop of Seville presiding, a solemn declaration of the consubstantiality of the Divine Persons was drawn up, and signed by the king, Recared, and his queen, Badda, daughter of king Arthur, of Britain. Next year another synod was held at Seville, in which he presided, to establish the complete conversion of the nation from Arianism to the true faith. S. Leander died in 596, on March 13th, and his body was laid in the church of SS. Justus and Rufina. His relics are now preserved in a chapel of the Cathedral church. In art, S. Leander appears with (1) a flaming heart in his hand, to represent his zeal for the conversion of the Visigoths, but this is a symbol used for a multitude of other saints; or with (2) a pen; or (3) with Recared or Hermenigild as a boy at his side. S. BALDOMER, SUBD., C. (ABOUT A.D. 660.) [Roman Martyrology, and those of Bede, Usuardus, Ado, Notker, &c. Authority:--An ancient epitome of his life, pub. by the Bollandists. In French he is called _S. Garmier_ or _S. Germier_.] Baldomer was a blacksmith of Lyons, living a simple, pious life, "in chastity clean, in friendship firm, in charity benign, in reading intent, in watchings solicitous, in almsgiving prompt," says his biographer. S. Viventius, abbot of S. Just, going into a church one day, noticed the blacksmith at his devotions, and afterwards entering into conversation with him, was so struck with his holiness and knowledge of the Scriptures, that he gave him a cell in his abbey, where he edified all the brethren by his modesty and diligence. His gentleness was so great, that at meal times he crumbled bread in his hand, and, holding it out of the window, the wild birds came, full of trust, and perched on his fingers. Then he would say, "Eat, little birds, eat, and praise the Lord." He was ordained subdeacon much against his will, by Caudrick, bishop of Lyons, and died about the year 660. S. ALNOTH, H. M. (ABOUT A.D. 727.) [Anglican Martyrology of John Wilson, in the first edition; but in the second edition on Nov. 25th. Ferrarius and Bollandus on Feb. 27th. Authority:--Mention in the life of S. Wereburga, attributed to Joscelyn, c. 3.] S. Alnoth was a hermit, who had been a cowherd of S Wereburga, but embracing the eremitical life, settled in a wood at Stowe, near Bugbrook, in Northamptonshire, but was murdered by robbers. His body was buried at Stowe. February 28. SS. NYMPHAS AND EUBULUS, _1st cent._ SS. ALEXANDRINE, _Martyrs in the plague_, A.D. 261. SS. SYMPHORIAN, MACARIUS, AND OTHERS, _MM. at Rome_. S. PROTERIUS, _M. Patr. of Alexandria_, A.D. 457. S. ROMANUS, _Ab. of Condate; circ._ A.D. 460. SS. NYMPHAS AND EUBULUS. (1ST CENT.) On the last day of February are commemorated two friends of S. Paul, Nymphas, of whom he speaks in his Epistle to the Colossians, and Eubulus, whom he mentions in his Second Epistle to S. Timothy, as being with him at Rome. Nymphas was at Laodicea. Nothing further is known of these two. SS. MARTYRS IN THE PLAGUE AT ALEXANDRIA (A.D. 261-3.) [Roman Martyrology. Authority:--A paschal letter by Dionysius, patriarch of Alexandria, quoted by Eusebius. lib. viii. c. 21, 22.] These brave victims of the plague in Alexandria, who died through ministering to pest-stricken heathens and Christians alike, are commemorated by the Church as examples to all whose office or charity calls them to attend to the sick. Dionysius, the patriarch, writes of the pestilence which succeeded war and famine in Alexandria, in one of his Easter letters, "To other men the present is a fit season for a festival, but now to us all things are filled with tears; all are mourning, and by reason of the multitudes, already dead and dying, the whole city resounds with groans. As when the first-born of Egypt were slain, so is it now; there is a great lamentation, for there is not a house in which is not one dead. I wish this were all, but we have undergone other calamities before this plague. First, we were driven into exile, and persecuted, and put to death; then came war and the famine, which, indeed, we and the heathen endured alike; and now we are assailed by this pestilence, a calamity to the heathen more dreadful than anything else, but not so to us, but rather a school to try us. Most of our brethren, by their exceeding great love and brotherly affection, not sparing themselves, were constant in their attendance on the sick, ministering to their wants without fear and without cessation, and they have departed most sweetly with those to whom they ministered. Many also, who had healed others, fell victims themselves. The best of our brethren have departed this life in this way, some were priests, others deacons, and some laity of great commendation. This death, with the piety and ardent faith which attended it, appears to be but little inferior to martyrdom itself. Our people took up the bodies of these saints with their open hands and on their bosoms, cleansed their eyes and closed their mouths, carried them on their shoulders, and composed their limbs, and decently washed and clothed them for burial, and those who did this themselves shared in receiving the same offices. Those that survived always followed those going before them. But it was different with the heathen. They repelled those who began to sicken, and avoided their dearest friends. They would cast them out into the roads half-dead, or throw them out when dead without burial, shunning all communication with the sick and infected." SS. SYMPHORIAN AND OTHERS, MM. (UNKNOWN DATE.) The bodies of fourteen martyrs, by name, Symphorian, Macarius, Victorinus, Maurice, Anicetus, Modestus, Cyriacus, Faustus, Placidus, Rocchus, Alexander, Genesius, Eulalia, and Irene, extracted from the catacombs of S. Callixtus and S. Lucina, are preserved at Antwerp, in the Church of the Jesuits, to which they were translated on Feb. 27th, 1650. Nothing is known of the acts and martyrdom of these saints. S. PROTERIUS, M. PATR. OF ALEXANDRIA. (A.D. 457.) [Greek Menæa on this day. Baronius and others have expressed surprise that the name of S. Proterius is inserted in no Western Martyrologies. Authority:--Evagrius, lib. iii. 13; Theophanes, the letters of Anatolius, Patr. of Constantinople, &c.] S. Proterius was the head of the orthodox party at Alexandria, when the patriarch Dioscorus adopted Eutychian views. That unprincipled and haughty prelate, knowing the esteem in which Proterius was held, made him arch-priest of his diocese; but as his heretical opinions became more evident, Proterius took decided steps to oppose him, and on the condemnation and deposition of Dioscorus by the Council of Chalcedon, in 452, he was ordained in his room. This led to a schism in the Church of Alexandria, the Catholics acknowledging Proterius, and the Eutychians holding with Dioscorus. The Eutychians were headed by two ecclesiastics, Timothy Ailurus, and Mongus, who had been excommunicated for heresy. In a tumult that broke out, Ailurus, having obtained consecration from two bishops of their faction, mounted the episcopal throne, and proclaimed himself sole patriarch of Alexandria. Proterius fled for safety to the baptistery of the Church of S. Quirinus, but the heretics broke in and stabbed him to death; then dragged his body through the streets, hacked it to pieces, and burnt it. S. ROMANUS, AB. OF CONDATE. (A.D. 460.) [Roman, Benedictine, and most Latin Martyrologies. Authorities:--A life by a contemporary monk of Condate, also a life by S. Gregory of Tours.] Romanus, trained in the monastery of Ainay, near Lyons, left his father's house at the age of thirty-five, and carrying with him "Lives of the Fathers of the Desert," and some tools and vegetable seeds, made his way into the high mountains and inhabited forests of the Jura, found a site enclosed between three steep heights, at the confluence of two streams, and there founded, under the name of Condate, a monastery destined to become one of the most celebrated in the West. The soil was well adapted for cultivation, but in consequence of the difficulty of access to the place, it became the property of the first occupant. He found shelter at first under an enormous fir tree, the thick branches of which represented to him the palm which served Paul, the first hermit, in the desert of Egypt, for a tent; then he began to read, to pray, and to plant his herbs, with a certainty of being protected against the curious and importunate, by the extreme roughness of the paths which crossed those precipices, and also by the masses of fallen and interlaced trees, which are often met with in fir woods not yet subjected to regular care and tendance. His solitude was disturbed only by the wild animals, and now and then by some bold huntsman. However, he was joined there by his brother Lupicinus and others, in so great a number, that they were soon obliged to spread themselves, and form new establishments in the environs. The two brothers governed these monasteries together, and maintained order and discipline, not without difficulty, among the increasing multitude of novices, against which an old monk protested, complaining that they did not even leave him room in which to lie down. Women followed; and upon a neighbouring rock, suspended like a nest at the edge of a precipice, the sister of our two abbots ruled five hundred virgins, so severely cloistered, that having once entered the convent, they were seen no more, except during the transit of their bodies from the death bed to the grave. As for the monks, each had a separate cell; they had only the church and the refectory in common. In summer they took their siesta under the great firs, which in winter protected their dwelling against the snow and the north wind. They sought to imitate the anchorites of the East, whose various rules they studied daily, tempering them by certain alleviations, which were necessitated by the climate; their daily labour, and even by the constitution of the Gaulish race. They wore sabots, and tunics of skins tacked together, which protected them from the rain, but not from the rigorous cold of these bleak heights, where people are, says their biographer, in winter sometimes crushed beneath the snow, and in summer stifled by the heat produced by the reflection of the sun upon the perpendicular walls of rock. Lupicinus surpassed them all in austerity; he slept in the trunk of an old tree, and lived only upon pottage made of barley-meal, ground with the bran, without salt, without oil, and without even milk; and one day, disgusted at the delicacy of his brethren, he threw indiscriminately into the same pot, the fish, the herbs, and the roots, which the monks had prepared apart, and with some care. The community was greatly irritated, and twelve monks, whose patience was exhausted, went away. Upon this, an altercation arose between the two brothers. "It would have been better," said Romanus to Lupicinus, "not to have come hither, than to be a cause of dispersion to our monks." "Never mind," answered Lupicinus, "it is the straw separating from the corn; those twelve are proud, mounted on stilts, and God is not with them." However, the more gentle and forbearing Romanus succeeded in bringing back the fugitives, who all, in their turn, became superiors of communities. S. Romanus made a pilgrimage to Agaunum (S. Maurice in the Valais), to visit the scene of the martyrdom of the Theban Legion. On his way, he cured two lepers by a kiss, and the fame of this miracle coming to the ears of the Genevese, the bishop and clergy, and the whole town, turned out to meet and receive him with honour. When he felt that he must die, he called to him his sister from the convent on the rock, and his brother Lupicinus, to whom he commended the care of his monks, and then fell asleep in Christ.[71] Relics in the Church of S. Romain-de-Roche in the Jura. [71] Chiefly from the Monks of the West, ii. p. 486, seq. February 29. S. OSWALD, _ARCHBISHOP OF YORK_, A.D. 992. S. OSWALD, ARCHB. OF YORK. (A.D. 992.) [Wilson's Anglican Martyrology, and those of Wyon, Menardus, and Morolycus. But Molanus on October 15th. Authorities:--His life by Eadmer; also Florence of Worcester, William of Malmesbury, and the Ramsey Chronicle.] Oswald, the only saint commemorated on Feb. 29th, was the nephew of S. Odo, archbishop of Canterbury, and of Osketill, bishop, first of Dorchester, and afterwards of York. He was educated by S. Odo, and made first canon and then dean of Winchester, but he took the monastic habit in the abbey of Fleury, in France, and was recalled by S. Odo to England, where he found favour with S. Dunstan, who commended him to king Edgar, and, by his command, he was chosen bishop of Worcester, about the year 959. One of his first acts was to establish twelve monks at Westbury, in his diocese. He afterwards built Ramsey monastery, on an island in Ramsey Mere, given to the Order of S. Benedict by Earl Hilwyn, cousin of king Edgar, who had been cured of gout by an apparition of the patriarch of western monks. S. Dunstan, as is well known, laboured diligently to enforce celibacy on the clergy in England. A council was held in 969, in which the clergy were ordered to live single or to resign their cures, and Oswald of Worcester, and Ethelwold of Winchester, were commissioned to enforce this decree. Oswald was afterwards made archbishop of York, without resigning the see of Worcester. He had established a Benedictine monastery, dedicated to the Mother of God, at Worcester, and the monastic church from that time became the Cathedral. It was his wont to wash every day the feet of twelve poor men, whom he afterwards fed. On the Tuesday after the third Sunday in Lent, Feb. 29th, he was performing this duty as usual. After he had wiped the feet of the last poor man, and had stooped to kiss them, he said "Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost," and gently expired. He died, and was buried at Worcester. Ten years after, his remains were taken up by his successor, Adulph, and translated to York, on October 15th. It is said that when his body was taken into Worcester Abbey Church, after his death, a white dove hovered above it. His purple and gold stole was preserved in Beverley Minster, in the time of Thomas Stubbs, who mentions the fact in his account of the Archbishops of York. [Illustration] _Printed by_ BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO. _Edinburgh and London_ 
52481	----	[Frontispiece: ST. RITA RECEIVES HER MIRACULOUS WOUND] LIFE OF ST. RITA OF CASCIA, O.S.A. from the Italian BY VERY REV. RICHARD CONNOLLY O.S.A., D.D. R. & T. WASHBOURNE 4 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON BENZIGER BROS.: NEW YORK, CINCINNATI AND CHICAGO 1903 Nihil Obstat: FR. JOANNES L. CONDON, O.S.A., CENS. DEPUTATUS. PERMISSION TO PUBLISH We approve of the publication of the 'Life of St. Rita of Cascia,' from the Italian, by the Very Rev. Fr. Richard Connolly, O.S.A., D.D. FR. W. O'SULLIVAN, O.S.A., VICAR PROVINCIAL. CORK, _Feast of St. Patrick_, 1903. Imprimatur: HERBERTUS CARDINALIS VAUGHAN, ARCHIEPISCOPUS WESTMONASTERIENSIS. CONTENTS PART I RITA IN THE WORLD CHAPTER I. CASCIA: A GLANCE AT ITS HISTORY II. RITA'S PARENTS III. RITA'S WONDERFUL CONCEPTION IV. RITA'S BIRTH V. THE WHITE BEES OF ST. RITA VI. RITA'S CHILDHOOD VII. RITA'S LOVE OF RETIREMENT VIII. RITA'S MARRIAGE IX. RITA AS WIFE X. DEATH OF RITA'S HUSBAND AND CHILDREN--RITA AS WIDOW PART II RITA IN THE CLOISTER I. RITA'S MIRACULOUS ENTRY INTO THE CLOISTER AND HER RECEPTION II. RITA AS NOVICE--HER PROFESSION III. RITA'S CHARITY IV. OTHER VIRTUES WHICH RITA PRACTISED IN THE CLOISTER V. RITA'S OBSERVANCE OF THE RELIGIOUS VOWS VI. RITA'S PENANCES VII. RITA'S SPIRIT OF PRAYER VIII. A THORN FROM THE SAVIOUR'S CROWN OF THORNS WOUNDS RITA'S FOREHEAD IX. RITA GOES TO ROME TO GAIN THE INDULGENCE OF THE JUBILEE X. RITA'S LAST ILLNESS AND DEATH PART III RITA IN HEAVEN I. WONDERFUL EVENTS THAT HAPPENED AT RITA'S DEATH--BURIAL OF HER SACRED BODY II. MIRACLES WROUGHT BY GOD THROUGH RITA'S INTERCESSION BEFORE HER BEATIFICATION III. EFFICACY OF THE RELICS OF ST. RITA IV. MARVELS OF ST. RITA'S SEPULCHRE V. IMMEMORIAL WORSHIP OF ST. RITA VI. SOLEMN BEATIFICATION OF RITA VII. MIRACLES WORKED BY RITA AFTER HER BEATIFICATION VIII. MORE RECENT MIRACLES OF ST. RITA IX. HER CANONIZATION X. THE THREE MIRACLES APPROVED FOR HER CANONIZATION CONCLUSION Part I RITA IN THE WORLD LIFE OF ST. RITA OF CASCIA CHAPTER I CASCIA: A GLANCE AT ITS HISTORY St. Bernard observes that the place in which our Saviour died attracts our devotion in a greater degree than any of those places in which He dwelt during His life, and can therefore boast of a certain pre-eminence. Speaking of St. Rita, we can say the same of Cascia compared with Rocca Porena, her birthplace. Cascia governed Rocca Porena as did Jerusalem Nazareth, but it is not on this account we claim its superiority, but because our saint lived there for many years and died there, and there her relics are venerated. Cascia is therefore looked upon as St. Rita's home, and hence she is called St. Rita of Cascia. Were we but to give a cursory sketch of the history of Cascia from its annals, which still exist, the present volume could not contain what we should be forced to write, so important did it become; we will therefore content ourselves with alluding to a few of the more salient points in its story. This ancient and illustrious town is built under the shadow of the Apennines, at a point in that chain of mountains almost midway between the Alps and the Mediterranean. It is on the borders of Umbria, seven miles from Norcia, ten from Leonessa, thirty from Rieti, and twenty-three from Spoleto. It stands on the site of the ancient Cursula, which is believed to have been a Roman free-town--that is, its people enjoyed the honours, rights, and privileges of Roman citizenship, and their town was governed by its own laws. That Cursula was a town of some importance is attested by its remains, which are still extant, notably by the Temple of the Augurs, the Temple of Mars, and the House of the Duumviri. We have nothing else than these remains to guide us in inquiring into the history of Cursula, nor can we surmise the epoch from whence to date its existence. We know from Dionysius of Halicarnassus that it was destroyed, and that a new town rose on the ruins of the original one, but the dates of these events cannot be fixed with certainty. The date of the rebuilding of Cursula may, with some probability, be placed at something more than ten years before the birth of our Saviour, and hence its pagan inhabitants were strengthening the foundations of its future greatness when Jesus Christ, born in Bethlehem, was laying the _foundation of the Redemption of man_. We know, too, that it was a republic, but are left in the dark as to how it managed to achieve and preserve its independence. It is credible that, like other Italian cities, it acquired its liberty at the time of the second fall of the Roman Empire, after the death of the Emperor-Saint Henry, during the Pontificate of John XIX., or about the year 1025. This independence it retained till 1260, in which year, through the ambition of rival leaders, the seeds of civic dissension were sown, and the republic was exposed to dangers from without. It was at this time that the people of Cascia determined to put themselves under the authority of Alexander IV., who then occupied the Papal chair. They were induced to this action by what they saw of the peaceful nature of the Papal government, and because they adhered to the Guelph party, which was favourable to the Holy See. Alexander IV. was the great Pontiff who, uniting the greatest virtues to the highest mental attainments, contrived during the height of the sanguinary quarrels between Guelphs and Ghibellines, which had for twenty years torn and divided Italy, to stamp out incendiarism, to crush tyranny, and cause peace and happiness to flourish again in the distracted peninsula. Cascia had no reason to regret the changed state of affairs, for the monarchical system which its submission to the Pope introduced by no means destroyed its republican form of government. Hence it retained the right of regulating its own affairs by its own laws; hence its mayor, elected every six months, retained his authority; hence it retained those chiefs of the people, at first called 'Ateposti,' then 'Gonfalonieri,' and finally 'Consuls.' To these latter a troop of soldiers, called the people's jury, was subject, who had the duty not only of defending the people, but of acting on the offensive when necessary. The court of justice, the guards and robes of the consuls, the stately retinue of the mayor, the fortifications with their garrisons, the number of subject towns and villages--of which more than forty recognise Cascia as their chief at present, without speaking of the many which the ravages of time have destroyed--the right of peace and war left, at least in part, to the brave people of Cascia--these and other memories of the past, which even now may be seen in the consular registers, constitute a proof of the liberty which Cascia enjoyed under the Popes and of the fame which it acquired. But at the beginning of the disastrous and prolonged schism of the anti-Popes, Cascia unfurled the standard of rebellion, either through a desire of complete independence, or, as some say, on account of the insolent conduct of the Papal soldiers, and for a period of about 131 years--till the year 1517--it remained under a sort of mixed government. This interval of complete independence was filled up by an uninterrupted series of wars waged with its neighbours of Norcia, of Leonessa, of Monreale, of Aquila, or of Cerreto. But after the first outburst of enthusiasm for complete independence, and in the midst of quarrels with its neighbours, the republic of Cascia took occasion to show its pristine reverence and love for the See of Rome. A clear proof of the correspondence between Cascia and the Papal See is the formal announcement, made by the Cardinals met together in council at Constance, to the commune of Cascia, of the election of Pope Martin V. to the Pontifical throne. The prompt assistance given by the people of Cascia to Eugene IV., successor to Martin V., against Corrado Trinci, Governor of Foligno, who tried to make himself lord and master of that city, is another proof of their loyalty to the Holy See. When the wise and great-minded Leo X. ascended the Papal throne he brought back Cascia to its obedience to the Holy See by a brief dated 1517. All its ancient privileges and distinctions were confirmed by him, and a Cardinal was appointed to govern the city; for Cascia still continued to have the title 'city,' as it had till 1600 at least. Some speak of money coined there, of its coats of arms, of printing done there, of its prosperity and commerce, of the cultivation of the fine arts; but the cultivation of souls is what chiefly adorns it. And, in the first place, if nobility presupposes the talents or merits of ancestors either in field or court, what must we say of Cascia, which reckoned in its environs 200 famous families, which are extinct only within the last two centuries, without speaking of others that betook themselves elsewhere, or of the ancient patrician families that still dwell in the homes of their ancestors? There is no need to go back to remote antiquity to catch a glimpse of the great men who had their origin in Cascia in the splendour of its greatest glories. The great ones born there, even in the latest years of its decadence, are a proof of what it produced in the past, and are sufficient to renew the honours it merited in its beginnings. The Cardinals, the Bishops, the Prelates, the names distinguished in science and in arms of the Poli, Frenfanelli, Benenati, Cruciani, Squarcipani, Colangeli, Negroni, Graziani, Franceschini, Leonetti, Giudici, Elemosina, Girolami, Gregorietti, and of other illustrious families, would supply ample material to whosoever would wish to pronounce the praises of Cascia. We, who have for our study a nun and a saint, shall content ourselves with going into the shadow of the cloister and of the sanctuary. We find Andrew of Cascia, a Franciscan who lived at the same time as St. Rita, who had the happiness of bringing the Gospel to the Turks at Fez, where he suffered martyrdom after converting many to Christ and working many miracles. The glory of this humble friar outshines the glory which the honours of the world can give. Blessed Pace, a Minor Conventual, born in Cascia, great in virtue and by the miracles he worked, raised himself above every earthly greatness. But what must have most drawn the soul of our St. Rita to desire from her childhood the life of the cloister, and to follow it in her mature years, were the singular models of sanctity which the Augustinian institute in Cascia could furnish. The memory of the saintly heroes, followers of the great Augustine, who dwelt in the woods about Cascia, was to her the memory of a recent event. The first of these recluses is Blessed John, who from being lord of three towns shut himself in the Valley of Attino, not far from Cascia, in order to lead a life hidden in God in the deepest contemplation. Then comes Blessed Ugolino, who imitated the example of Blessed John in renouncing the pleasant things of this world to engage himself entirely with heavenly things in the hermitage of St. Anatolia, in the territory of Cascia, where, living in misery, he prepared for himself a way to a high degree of glory in heaven. The third is Blessed Simon Fidati, whom the shades of the hermitage could not hide from the world. For the books on the ascetic life which this very learned hermit of St. Augustine wrote in these solitudes began to make him known; then his unwearying and fruitful preaching through the chief cities of Italy, especially Florence and Siena; the conversions of which he was the instrument; the number of enemies he reconciled; his spirit of prophecy; his unconquerable charity on most difficult occasions; the foundation of two monasteries in the city of Florence; the other works written by him, whence he deserved to be reckoned the brightest ornament of the Augustinian Order at that time, both by his eloquence and profound learning, more infused than acquired, as well as for the piety and fervour which animated him in writing--these and many other of his merits made him glorious in this world, and still more glorious in heaven. Contemporary with Blessed Simon were many other remarkable men of the same Order, and born in the same place, as Fr. Bartolo, Vicar of the Lateran Basilica, who enriched his convent of Cascia with more than 600 relics; the Venerable Andrew, noble standard-bearer of the Gospel in Turkey; another Venerable Andrew, of the Capozi family, rendered famous his country, his name, and the Augustinian Order by his fruitful preaching and his learning. Fr. Nicholas, of the noble family of the Saracini of Cascia, was also a contemporary of St. Rita. After leaving the pomp of the world to follow Jesus Christ in poverty and humiliation, he was raised through all the ranks of the monastic hierarchy till he was elected and re-elected General of his Order, and then promoted by Pope John XXIII. to the episcopal See of Macerata and Recanati, where he died in the odour of sanctity in the arms of the people whom he had reformed and whom he loved. In those times, too, Stephen of Castel San Giorgio, in the district of Cascia, by his virtues and talents, obtained the highest honours in his Order, and became Procurator-General. We might mention the names of many other famous men of the convent and city of Cascia, either contemporary with St. Rita or nearly so, as Angelus and Louis of Cascia, Cherubinus Lavosi (Bishop of Telesia), Paoletti, Squarcipani, Amici, three of the Simonetti family--all either theologians of some eminence or famous preachers, or remarkable for their writings; but the notice of these and of others, however praiseworthy for virtue or honourable to their native city of Cascia, might seem beside our purpose and be tedious to those who wish to read the life of St. Rita. At all events, it may be deduced from what we have written that Cascia was not without honour in its history and in its inhabitants. Still, what is Cascia in the sight of God? What is even Jerusalem before Him and in the light of His inscrutable judgment? Human greatness, which dazzles our eyes, disappears in the glance of God, and is lost in its own nothingness. There is no distinction of persons with Him, nor is there distinction of places. The little town of Nazareth, out of which, in the common very poor opinion of it, it seemed nothing good could come, was, in the Divine councils, preordained to be the fatherland of the Saviour of the world; and the still meaner town of Bethlehem--even a stable in Bethlehem--was chosen as His place of birth. Thus it often happens that God chooses the weak things, the lowly, the despicable, the things of naught to confound the goodly things and the strong, and to work great designs, in order that the creature may not have whence to vaunt himself before his Creator. Such was the case exactly with that humble spot Rocca Porena, which was destined to be the birthplace of St. Rita. To give some idea of it, let us say it is two miles and a half from Cascia towards the west, where it is closed in, not to say buried. An overhanging mountain crushes it in on all sides and dominates it, and with difficulty gives access to it from the east by two narrow roads, one on either side of a precipitous rock. The river which flows to the base of this rock, famous in the life of the saint, does not approach the small piece of level ground which, together with the village, forms the bottom of a deep basin. The sun is tardy there in rising, and sets early, leaving the barren plain to its languor and sadness. One would say that a place so isolated and confined, where neither the beauty of nature nor of art appears, and where the sky is almost the only thing in view, was created for contemplation and to be the home of innocence. The two houses of St. Rita are still to be seen, almost at opposite ends of the village, the one in which she was born and lived until her marriage in that part called the Borghetto, and the other where she lived a wife, and which is now turned into a little chapel in her honour, in the place called the Piazza. The saint's garden, now grown wild, is also shown to the pious traveller. Besides these there does not seem to be anything worthy of mention. We may therefore infer that as Bethlehem was styled the least amongst the cities of Judea, so, perhaps, is Rocca Porena the least amongst the towns of Cascia--the least, indeed, as a place, but memorable by reason of the favour shown it, which exalts it far above the others, since it has given to us that great saint who, by her singular example of innocence and virtue, is become the guide and model in the way of perfection to virgins, to married women, to widows, and to those living in the cloisters, in such a manner as Bethlehem--if we may lawfully make a comparison between the original and a faint copy--was exalted by the birth of Jesus Christ, where, as Blessed Simon of Cascia says, He made Himself the mystical and life-giving bread for our common nourishment and comfort on the way which leads to heaven. CHAPTER II RITA'S PARENTS The fortunate parents of Rita were Antonio Mancini, of Rocca Porena and Amata Ferri, who is believed to be from a village called Fogliano. Antonio was not noble, nor had he a title, but we may apply to him the praise which the Holy Spirit gives to Noah--that he was a just man and perfect in his times, and he walked with God. The Gracchi, the Scipios, the Cæsars among the number of their family honours cannot find a title greater or even equal to this. Every other superiority is vanity, and if there be glory from other titles, it is the glory of another, which cannot pass to the posterity of those who merited it. Justice alone makes that real nobility which St. Augustine and other holy fathers call nobility according to the heart of God. And although even this cannot be passed on to descendants, as it did not pass from Noah to his son Cham, whom he cursed, yet it is not unusual for God to recall the justice of parents, not only for a model, but to give a certain extrinsic glory to their descendants. Hence, when the Holy Spirit wished to record the praises of St. John the Baptist, He wished also for his honour that we should remember that his parents were both 'just before God, walking in all the commandments and justifications of the Lord without blame.' So we can also say of Antonio and Amata, of whom was born St. Rita, who had a special devotion to St. John. They were not of noble blood, but they were noble in their works; they were not rich in temporal goods, but they were rich in the true treasures of Divine grace, which do not pass from those who possess them. They enjoyed the esteem of all who knew them, an esteem more precious than that which flattery offers to the rich and great of this world. Their fortune constituted that mediocrity which the wise man sought from God in order that abundance might not tempt him to forget his Creator, nor poverty to give himself a prey to any vice. The industrious and honourable labour, and the innocent pastoral life which in their time did not degrade the Patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, did not make the Mancini family less worthy of honour. Rather from the fruits of their labour did they acquire the means of exercising a beneficent liberality towards the poor of Jesus Christ, whom they cherished with an ardent charity. Whether the fruits of their fields were abundant or scarce, these two happy ones, husband and wife, lived contented in their frugality, always giving thanks to the Giver of every good gift, and placing themselves entirely in conformity with the most just and providential dispositions of heaven. Perfect concord, which was their dearest virtue, since in it is the fulness of the law, always reigned in their home. And hence when they heard of divisions amongst others, which were only too frequent in that age and country, they were speedily present with them, and with their insinuating manners and holy zeal they insisted in their charitable offices till peace was restored. They were, on this account, commonly called the 'peacemakers of Jesus Christ.' They corrected the erring according to the rules of the Gospel; they interceded for them with so fervent prayers, with so great concern, and with so happy results, that, like Moses, they appeared to be constituted mediators between the people and God. They steadily hated vice, and practised every virtue. The book from which they learned and cherished sentiments so virtuous was none other than the Passion of the Redeemer. It furnished them with inexhaustible matter for their meditations, for their liveliest compassion, and for that remarkable piety which, from her cradle, they instilled into the heart of Rita, and which they left her as a heritage. In a word, it may with reason be said of them what was said of the parents of St. John the Baptist--that they were both just to the eyes of God, walking without stain in the exact observance of the law. This was their nobility, this was their wealth, which it pleased God to pass to their daughter and to multiply in her in a singular way. Thus we may say, as Blessed Simon of Cascia writes, that the parents' goodness instilled the best dispositions even before her birth into her who was to be born from them, as the goodness of Zachary and Elizabeth went to exalt the holy precursor St. John. Thus these two holy souls, husband and wife, lived a long series of years in these exercises of virtue and piety, without, however, seeing any fruit of their chaste union. God so disposed it that the desires of their youthful years should be vain, that they should labour to detach their minds still more from mortal things, and in order that the proofs of an extraordinary work of His providence should one day shine the brighter. Meanwhile, their desire of offspring, with which nature innocently inspired them, had not only grown cold with advancing years, but was quite extinct; no other care should remain with them now than that of ascending to the eternal heritage of the heavenly Father, instead of descending to the care of children and transmitting their temporal possessions to their posterity on earth. CHAPTER III RITA'S WONDERFUL CONCEPTION That God, who is wonderful in His saints, and who, to use a sacred expression, seems at times to play sport with the world, and especially with those creatures that form His delight, wished in the end, and at a time when in the natural order offspring could least be expected from these old and barren consorts, to grant them in a prodigious manner the fulfilment of their ancient desires--a fulfilment the more acceptable as more unforeseen, and the happier and more certain inasmuch as it was marked and sealed with the seal of the Omnipotent. So great and so remarkable graces can foreshadow only great and remarkable sanctity. Isaac was meant to be the type of Jesus Christ sacrificed for the human race; he was intended to be a figure of the propagation of the faithful; he should be great in the order of grace. Still, he was born out of the order of nature, of parents also barren by reason of their age. He who was to prepare the way for the impending appearance of the Redeemer, and who was to be more than a prophet and the greatest amongst the saints, he also was miraculously born of parents aged and barren; not to speak of other distinguished personages, both of the Old and New Testaments, who in various ways were born in a supernatural manner to exalt the stupendous works of omnipotence and of grace. Not otherwise did the Lord, who in His lofty designs intended great things for our heroine, dispose that her conception should be most remarkable and above the order of nature. Amata became conscious of the wonderful event, and, full of amazement, she dared not credit the evidence of it. In such a state she felt her heart agitated, now by fears that she was deceived, again by hope of the contrary; at one time by shame at so unusual an occurrence at such an age as hers, at another her feelings of wonder overwhelmed her; and again she experienced renewed struggles of fresh fears, emotions, and passions. But, as is the way with the just, the troubled woman had recourse to prayer to the Father of light, to the God of consolation, and whilst she persevered in her humble, fervent, and constant prayers, there appeared to her an angel, a bearer of certainty, of peace, and of happy tidings, as an angel appeared to Abraham and Sara while they were employed in the charitable exercise of hospitality, and to Zachary amidst his prayers and offerings of incense. However joyful and consoling in itself was this angelic apparition, it did not fail to cause in her heart feelings of perturbation. Daniel and the other prophets had a like sensation in similar circumstances; Zachary had the same feelings, and so had the most holy Mother of God herself. The reason is, as Blessed Simon of Cascia wisely observes, that humanity is naturally disturbed and stricken with fear at the sudden sight of things extraordinary or greater than itself. But, as the same blessed writer adds, since those heavenly spirits, when they are sent for our relief, are accustomed to comfort the timid, thus, as the archangel told the father of the future Precursor not to fear, and by the announcement of his birth in the near future calmed his heart with efficacious words, so did another ambassador from heaven bring the same security and joy to the troubled mind of Rita's mother, and assure her that she should bring forth a child; and that nothing should be wanting to the fulness of her consolation, he made known to her in brief the eminent virtues and glory of the daughter that was to be born to her, as the sanctity of the Baptist was likewise foretold to Zachary. The miraculous pledge of grace which Antonio's happy wife bore already in her womb and her lively faith prevented her from smiling at announcements so wonderful; unlike Abraham's wife, who smiled at a not dissimilar announcement. Nor did she sin through incredulity, as did Elizabeth's husband, who was punished for his sin, but forewarned by fact, and full of that faith which teaches that God can raise up children to Abraham even from the very stones, she instantly believed in the words of the angel. The angelic vision disappeared, and Amata, considering her own unworthiness, was seized with fresh wonder and profound humility. Thinking at the same time on the signal favour, she retired, with great contentment and singular gratitude and love towards the Divine goodness, to pour out the fulness of her pure and fervent affection at the feet of her most beneficent God. It is easy to think what a new stimulus to piety in herself and her virtuous husband was this great grace. Thus they remained happy in their virtue and secure in the hands of Divine providence, joyously awaiting the happy day of Rita's extolled birth. CHAPTER IV RITA'S BIRTH Now that we are about to describe Rita's birth, it will not be out of place to cast a passing glance at the unhappy state of those times, in order to see things more clearly as we progress with our history, and in order that the providence of God and His grace may more clearly be discerned to His honour and glory. The memories are still fresh in our minds, or, rather, the wounds which the avenging sword of the God of armies inflicted on us. There is not a moment in which we do not recall with horror the mournful losses inflicted by arms on property, commerce, arts, study, families, States, good order, morals, on religion and the Church. But however true and just our regrets may be, it is a fact that Italy was much more harassed and afflicted at the period about the birth of Rita. To read of the extortions of the Visconti through the wide extent of their dominions in Lombardy, the cruelty exercised by them on the pretext of punishing treason, their unbridled lust, and their most unworthy harassing of the clergy, excites our horror. At the other extremity of Italy, in the kingdom of Naples, a territory of equal importance, wrongs and scandals of every description, and the most deplorable calamities, caused by the parties of the Dukes of Anjou and Surazzo, who laid claim to the kingdom, spread themselves and took root as the civil war that followed on the death of King Robert became more widespread. The different other States into which Italy was then divided were not anything better. For the luxury of these little Courts which tried to rival the great ones to the grave oppression of the people, their despotism, their rivalry and wars, their unbridled ambition to command which multiplied the domestic treasons and assassinations of brothers by brothers, of relatives by relatives (if we except the houses of Savoy, Monferrato, Saluzzo, and Este)--these and the other dominant vices and scandals served only to increase misery and sorrow. The cities of the Papal States were also, for the most part, groaning under the yoke of rebels--bloody, inexorable, lewd tyrants--and especially before Gregory IX. re-established his throne in Rome after his return from Avignon. And, as if these Italian tyrants were not sufficient to cause public misery, hordes of devastating soldiers issued from Germany, Hungary, and England to complete the confusion. Warner, Muriale, Sando, Anchino, Augustus, and others--all captains of the dissolute soldiers of fortune--were the stubborn arbiters of Italian affairs from the middle of the fourteenth century till the time of Charles V., although they were not owners of even a perch of land. These gave their services in the perpetual wars to whoever paid them best, and went about pillaging, imposing tribute and subsidies--and woe to him who was slow in satisfying their demands!--laying waste fields, besieging towns, and universally exercising their pitiless power. Hence, as the people model themselves after the manners of kings and nobles, it is easy to divine the general state of morals in the midst of such depravity. Let us draw a veil over that picture, the sight of which would move to horror humanity, religion, and especially modesty. Let it suffice to say that so deeply rooted was this universal depravity that not even the pestilence, that so evident sign of the anger of heaven, which in the middle of that century carried off more than half the inhabitants of Italy, was able to check it. And that which the prophet Isaias seems to have foreseen in his time, but in another sense, was fulfilled here too: such as the people is, so shall the priest be--so strong was the influence of the bad example and want of discipline introduced into Italy by the abandoning of their Apostolic See in Rome by the Popes. The prevailing depravity afterwards opened the way to still greater evils. For the zeal with which Urban VI., successor of Gregory XI., sought to remedy the evils which afflicted the Church was intolerable to some, and hence followed the election of an anti-Pope, which gave rise to that terrible schism which burst forth a little before the birth of Rita, and ended only a short time before her death. Who can recall without tears the separations between friends, princes taking opposing sides, the spiritual and temporal arms put in antagonism, the neglect of the canons, the numberless scandals and losses of the Church, which would at that time have been threatened with absolute ruin, but that the gates of hell can never prevail against the unshakable edifice founded on the rock of Peter, which can never fail? The Church was at that time, moreover, filled with sorrow by the heresies of the Beguins, the Flagellants, the Adamites, the Waldensians, the Wickliffites, and others, and by the rapid successes of Amurath I., who, to the loss of the Christian name, took possession of Thessaly and Macedonia about the time of Rita's birth. Neither in the Eastern nor in the Western Church was there an Emperor either fitted to oppose a bulwark against the inrush of such evils or disposed to oppose them. John Paleologus in the East had lost heart through his frequent defeats, and was leagued against the powers of Christendom; and in the West, Wenceslaus, given to the wine-cup and to luxury, was become good for nothing. The republics of the time, amongst which was Cascia, were not much more fortunate than the kingdoms. Genoa and Venice, which only a short time previous might have been compared in their rivalry to Rome and Carthage in the ancient world, had now both become exhausted of all their strength through a long series of stubborn wars undertaken against one another, and although they were now mutually at peace and also with the other Powers, through the intervention of the Duke of Savoy, they were unable to show any opposition to the common enemy of Christendom. Nor did the avarice and ambition of these States fail to bring in their train a fruitful crop of all other vices. Florence, too, although happy in the cultivation of the fine arts, was infected with the general depravity. The city was torn by faction, and weakened by those other vices against which Blessed Simon of Cascia had so strenuously preached a few years earlier. And although these exhortations brought about a reform, it was but half-hearted and short-lived. Vicious practices increased in the city, and open rebellion against the Holy See was their eventual outcome. Of Cascia itself we read that in 1380 the Guelphs and the Ghibellines committed horrible atrocities throughout the city and its dependent territory. And although the opposing factions patched up a peace between them in that year, it was of no long duration, since, as we have said in the first chapter, the people of Cascia rebelled against the Holy See during the first years of the schism of the anti-Popes, just after the birth of Rita. Murder and robbery, pillage and incendiarism followed in the wake of rebellion, and brought ruin to many families in Cascia and destruction upon her religious places. A war soon broke out between Cascia and Leonessa, which lasted for twelve months, and would have continued much longer but for the friendly intervention of the Trinci of Foligno, through whose efforts peace was made. Such was the wretched condition of affairs in Italy at that time. It is truly wonderful, as St. John Chrysostom says of a somewhat similar case, how so fair a rose as St. Rita was could have bloomed amid so many thorns. Yet such was the disposition of Divine providence, which decreed that where sin superabounded grace should abound in that chosen soul who, from the miraculous events that preceded her birth and her innocence, which she preserved intact, seemed almost to have been sanctified in her mother's womb. Rita, then, was born in the village of Rocca Porena in the year 1381, during the pontificate of Urban. Her parents were Antonio Mancini and Amata Ferri, the child of whose old age she was, the first and only fruit of their chaste love, or, rather, of their remarkable virtue. The pure joy which filled Amata's heart at the sight of the infant, which heaven itself had extolled, must have made her forget those trials which every mother has experienced since our first mother Eve committed original sin. Antonio, too, as he gazed tenderly on the predestined child, must have exulted in the Lord, and must, like Simeon of old, have felt himself ready to die content; he, too, could now sing a hymn of thanksgiving to God, who had granted him the happiness of seeing the glory of his family, of his country, and of the new house of Israel. The general joy and universal congratulation of relatives and neighbours added to the happiness of the pious couple, whose virtue and charity had made them esteemed by all. Thus did the relatives and neighbours of the holy Elizabeth rejoice at the equally wonderful birth of St. John the Baptist, for the Lord desired to make known the mercy he had shown in the first appearance of the Precursor. 'All who love goodness,' says Simon of Cascia, 'participate in the joy that is occasioned by the birth of one destined to live for the common good.' Those who rejoice in grace, and in the sight of the fruits of justice, must let their sentiments be evident to all, as in the present case, in which a pious mother brought forth a saintly child. It is part of the spiritual life to be pleased at the prosperity of others, and to rejoice with those especially who have been marked by the favour of the Omnipotent God. Meanwhile, the parents of the newly-born infant, in the midst of these rejoicings, were pondering on what name they should call her, and again that God, who had by an angel announced her birth, again in a vision of the night made them know that Rita was to be her name. It is a rare privilege of some saints, remarks St. Ambrose, to deserve to get their names from God Himself. Thus Jacob was named Israel by the Lord, thus was the Baptist named John by the angel, thus the Eternal Father called the Word made flesh by the name Jesus before He was born, and thus did she who was to imitate the virtues of the Baptist and be a faithful follower of Jesus Christ get her name from heaven. The name Rita, as being quite an unusual name, must have been meant to signify the sanctity that was to mark the life of the child so designated, and if we were to give credence to the opinion of the Augustinian author Didacus, Rita signifies virtue and grace. But this name foreshadowed only what Rita was to be, not what she was. For although she could be considered from then as a child of God in the order of predestination, yet according to the order of nature, and according to her actual state, she was, owing to original sin, a child of wrath; and to become an adopted child of God she needed to be cleansed from the hereditary stain of original sin in the sanctifying waters of the Redeemer. Her baptism took place on the fourth day after her birth, although we may believe her pious parents wished her to be baptized with all possible speed, and from the delay we may conclude that the time of her birth must have been in the winter season. There was no baptismal font at that time in Rocco Porena, and the child had therefore to be taken to the collegiate church of St. Mary in Cascia, where that grace which was to be the beginning and the seal of her sanctification awaited her. There Rita put off the garb of sin, and came forth from the salutary bath of baptism clothed in the garment of innocence and enriched with the gifts of the Holy Ghost, who from the moment chose her to be His spouse. Thus did the regenerated babe return to her mother's bosom and the joyful embraces of her parents, fairer to the eyes of faith than her beauty made her to the eyes of men. CHAPTER V THE WHITE BEES OF ST. RITA When the godmother and her attendants returned from Cascia after the baptism, a feast was prepared for them and the relatives of the happy parents, to celebrate in a manner becoming their humble position the double birth of Rita in the order of nature and of grace. Meanwhile, the child had closed her eyes in a tranquil slumber. When the next day dawned, the fifth day of her existence, a swarm of bees, all of the fairest white colour, and such as were never before seen, made their appearance. They flew a-buzzing about the cradle of the child, and after alighting for a moment on her angelic face were seen to go in and come out of her slightly open mouth in a sort of regular order, as if to take from her lips the honey of Paradise. What feelings of wonder and awe must have been awakened in the heart of Amata and those who were present by so marvellous an occurrence! The Gospel tells us that fear came upon all the neighbours of Elizabeth and Zachary as they considered the miraculous events that marked the birth of the Baptist, and that they noised abroad all these things that foretold his future extraordinary sanctity. In like manner similar the wonderful signs that were given at Rita's birth, for Divine providence so disposed it in order that honour should be rendered to her by those whose attention had been attracted by these extraordinary happenings, and that those who came in contact with her should be induced to order their own lives more exactly by following the salutary example she was to give. This incident of the appearance of the white bees in the cradle of our saint is the one which the painters and poets who have illustrated her life have vied most with one another in depicting. To avoid having to return again to the subject of the bees, which have ever been mentioned in connection with the life of St. Rita, we will here describe what seems to be a confirmation and perpetuation of the wonderful occurrence we have just related. Going from Rocca Porena to Cascia, and entering the convent where our saint resided, there, in an old wall opposite the convent gate, at a point midway between the cell which Rita inhabited and the spot in which her body was laid to rest, we are met with a sight that cannot fail to move us to admiration. For there, even to the present day, the bees, commonly called St. Rita's bees, have their nest. They are called St. Rita's, for they have been there since her time, and have come there, we may believe, owing to her, and, as it were, to do her honour. There is only a small number of them--some twelve or fifteen--and everything connected with them is extraordinary and wonderful. In the first place, as we have hinted above, the species to which these bees belong has never, as far as we are aware, been determined. They live each one to itself in a hole which it has dug in the wall, and as often as these holes have been stopped up in the process of plastering the wall they have again excavated them. They spin a sort of white substance, with which they stop the entrance to their retreat, as if to hide themselves from view during their long retirement and fast of eleven months. They appear only on those days dedicated to the memory of our Lord's Passion, and, be it noted, these are mostly movable feasts; and they betake themselves to retirement about the time of the death of St. Rita, who was devoted, as we shall see, to meditation on the Passion of our Lord. For four centuries they have been found in the same place, without ever having changed their place of abode. These ascertained facts seem to declare clearly enough that it has been the will of the Most High to extol through them the merit and the glory of His beloved servant. There is no need to add the many anecdotes of these bees, which are related in some lives of our saint, and which the nuns of Cascia still tell; let one suffice. Jacobilli says that one of these bees was sent to Pope Urban VIII. in a crystal vessel, and that it soon flew back again to the place it occupied in the convent wall. Here it may be asked whether the bees we have described are the same that appeared when Rita was an infant in swaddling-clothes. It would be harder to give an answer to this question than to the riddle which Sampson proposed to his bridesmen. Sampson's faithless spouse was able to wrest his secret from him and then reveal it to her Philistine friends: that the sweetness that came forth out of the strong was the honeycomb that was made in the mouth of the lion that he had torn in pieces a short time before. But we can find no answer to our question. However, those biographers of St. Rita who, without hesitation, confused the bees that appeared at her birth with those in the convent may be excused, as they supposed both to be of the same white colour. But they have been mistaken, for those at present in the convent wall are not white--in fact, they do not differ in colour from ordinary bees, except that they are of a deep red on the back and they want the sting. But perhaps these writers were not so far from the truth, since there is but the accidental variety of colour that distinguishes the present bees from the white ones that appeared first at Rita's birth. And who can say but that those once meant by God to symbolize by their whiteness the splendour of Rita's baptismal innocence may not, through the power of God, have taken on their present appearance to signify the humiliation and sadness of the penances she took upon herself? To change the appearance of a species already existing or to create a new species is easy to God. Let the truth of the matter be where it may, it is clear that both are marvellous, and worthy to be recorded in the history of our saint. But it is time we returned to gaze on her, surrounded in her cradle by those lilies of her incipient sanctity, and crowned with the bright circle of bees that still buzzed around her. We might now inquire whether the bees that entered her innocent mouth made a honeycomb in it, as is believed to have happened to St. Ambrose in his infancy, as if to forecast the mellifluous eloquence which he poured forth in his manhood in defence of the Church. Although this anecdote as related of St. Rita is not sufficiently well proven, neither is it impossible; for when there is question of miraculous events the difficulties of time and place do not form an insurmountable obstacle, as they did not in the case of St. Ambrose. At all events, we have two authors that assert it, and perhaps their opinion is supported by the farther statement that is made--that Rita abstained from her mother's milk on the day on which the bees appeared, the fifth day after her birth. God may have wished to give her for corporal food mystical or symbolical honey of unearthly origin, as He had fed her soul with the food of baptismal grace. In this way would be more clearly signified that which was foreshadowed by the appearance of the bees, the insinuating sweetness in word and manner which was afterwards the cause of the conversion of many sinners, which ever brought consolation to the afflicted, and spiritual profit to all who had the good fortune to converse with her. CHAPTER VI RITA'S CHILDHOOD St. Augustine in his Confessions takes up two chapters in describing his infancy, and he discovers in that period of his life only misery and vestiges of sin, but he recalls these evils that spring from our sinful origin only to extol the triumphs which Divine grace obtained in his mature years. The time of infancy is, however, one in which, since there can be no acts of reflection, nor exercise of will, there can be no demerit or actual sin, nor merit or virtue. It will not, therefore, be strange if our history passes over the infancy of Rita and proceeds to describe her childhood. From the extraordinary piety that distinguished her parents we can easily surmise what care they took in training and educating their child to instil into her mind the truths of religion. They had abundant proofs that Rita was especially dear to God, that she was born for heaven, and that Divine grace had marked her for its own. But they knew also that God, who disposes all things wisely, wished them to co-operate in moulding the chosen child to virtue and in establishing her in holiness. They were well aware that even the chiefest vessels of election had for a time kicked against the goads of grace. Nor were they ignorant what a bulwark of defence is raised by education and by the example of parents--a fact which many unhappy parents either know not or are careless of, and hence by their neglect they become the cause of the eternal ruin of their children. It will not, therefore, be useless to remark the watchfulness, the care and anxiety, with which Rita's parents observed all the movements, words, and actions of a child so dear to them, lest she should take a step to the right or to the left of the way that leads to heaven, and which, with the dawning of reason, she began to discern for herself. But these happy parents had no cause for anxiety during the process of instructing and moulding the character of their child, for she had, through God's grace, acquired a disposition marked by uncommon submission and precocious wisdom. Let it suffice to say that even then she could not bear those pastimes and sports which are proper to that tender age, and which are universally regarded as innocent. She had an example in Tobias, who, although he was the youngest in his tribe, showed himself to be the wisest, and never did anything that was childish. Another failing, which is dear not only to children, but to all, and especially to the female sex, the love of fine clothes, was an abomination to Rita. We must not believe that a virtuous mother like Amata, especially considering her lowly condition, could allow her daughter to appear in anything savouring of pride or ostentation. On the other hand, Rita, although scrupulously obedient in other things to the slightest wish of her parents, became uneasy whenever they wished her to put on some pretty ornament; she used even to run away and hide herself at such times, till she saw that her disinclination provoked a smile. Thus, satisfied with her humble dress, she took more pains to adorn her soul than to improve her appearance by the addition of the least ornament. To simplicity in dress she joined a sedateness of manner so beyond her years that it attracted universal respect, admiration, and love, and set a salutary example not only to those of her own age, but to older people also. She restrained to a wonderful degree that common tendency of women to curiosity and gossip, and having her thoughts occupied with higher subjects she avoided all human conversation as far as good manners and obedience permitted. Obedience was the virtue according to which she regulated all her actions. She regarded a beck of her parents as a command of God which she could not violate; and her obedience was all the more willing as it accorded with the impulse of grace which impelled her to the practice of all other virtues. For obedience, as Blessed Simon of Cascia observes, is the gate of the virtues. Rita's love of retirement and of prayer had already risen to the heroic point. Whoever wished to see her was certain of finding her either at home or in the neighbouring parish church, which was her favourite place of prayer, where she spent entire hours in meditation and devotion, to the great edification of all. Although penance is a virtue hardly suitable to so tender an age or to such perfect innocence, yet Rita began from her earliest years to chastise her body by different mortifications, and especially by fasting; and to render her abstinence more meritorious and acceptable to God she distributed to the poor children of the neighbourhood that food which she denied herself, thus bringing forth fruits of mercy and charity from the root of penance. This was the only way in which her loving good-will and tender compassion could show themselves in action; poverty made anything further impossible. But the Lord, who searches the heart, and delights in men of goodwill, sought nothing more from Rita then. But she was unconsciously increasing in charity and in merit as she grew in years, so that she could apply to herself the saying of Job--that mercy came out with him from his mother's womb, and from his infancy grew up with him.[1] Not only did her spirit grow, as it were, and become strong by the exercise of these beautiful virtues, but her progress in all virtue was extraordinary. [1] Job xxi. 18. CHAPTER VII RITA'S LOVE OF RETIREMENT St. John the Baptist experienced a similar strengthening of the spirit, as we read in that place in which it is also written that he went into the desert, where he hid himself, as Blessed Simon says, in order to give himself up entirely to prayer, contemplation, and penance. The comparison between these saints is often a fitting one, for Rita always follows closely in the footsteps of her great model. It is true that, according to the example of the Psalmist, she walked in the innocence of her heart, in the bosom of her virtuous family, for she found nothing abroad that could distract her spirit from the affairs of her home, whilst her gravity, modesty, and habitual seclusion opened to her a wide field for the exercise of her love of prayer. Yet she was so enamoured of heavenly things that she wearied of the things of earth, and desired, in a certain sense, to be out of the world; and since this could not be, she regarded with a holy envy the lot of so many anchorites and heroines of solitude, who, in deserts and in the depths of woods, lived lives more like those of angels than of men. She had before her eyes the examples of Blessed Simon, of Blessed Ugolino, of Blessed John, and of the other saintly hermits of St Augustine, who had only recently passed to their reward in heaven, or were still living in the neighbourhood of Rocca Porena. The example of these models of holiness increased in her heart her dearest desire to serve her beloved Jesus amid the silence of the woods and on the mounts of myrrh. But the love of her aged parents, and obedience, more than any thought of her youth and sex, prevented her from fulfilling her generous design. The sacred love with which she was animated made her industrious, and suggested the thought of converting her home into the solitude she longed for. With the consent of her parents she chose a little room separated from the others, and turned it into an oratory. Its walls she decorated with pictures of our Lord's Passion, and there she shut herself in, as into the midst of all delights. Her Divine Lover awaited her there to speak to her heart, and there, far from the eyes of men, in perpetual silence and abstinence, she enjoyed those ineffable consolations of grace which the profane know not of. The constant object of her thoughts, of her ecstasies of soul, of the most ardent love of her heart, was the Passion of her crucified Spouse; and in the midst of the tears which accompanied her meditation, whilst her heart was filled with Divine compassion, she experienced that true peace and happiness of soul which only grace can produce--how we know not--from sorrow. She felt herself transformed into the Crucified One, for whom alone she now lived--rather, she no longer lived, but Jesus Christ lived in her. In that school of love, through that Divine teaching, she came to know more certainly the fallacy of all worldly things; she saw how the world deceives us, and she saw also the charms and pomps and pleasures of this life, but she saw them as they really are, and could therefore say with the wise man that they are but vanity and affliction of spirit. She therefore resolved to have no part in this deceitful world, and since life in the desert was denied her, she resolved to bury herself in a cloister. But she had not yet reached the age in which to put her design into execution. Meanwhile the holy child lived in her first place of retirement for a full twelvemonth, until the obligation of assisting her parents and the duties of charity and obedience forced her from the place of her spiritual happiness. This happened probably when she was about eleven years old. Her parents were now beginning to feel the burden of their years, and Rita had perforce to enter upon an active life, and exercise works of mercy and justice, without, however, entirely abandoning her practices of meditation. Her history does not tell us how she performed the domestic duties that fell to her lot, perhaps because, from what we know of her life hitherto, that may more easily be imagined than described. Whilst fulfilling the parts of both sisters of Lazarus, she did not cease to envy John in the desert. Although the Holy Spirit had, through her prayers, made known to her many things, and although she continued still to be enlightened from above, yet she knew not what was written in the eternal decrees concerning herself, that Providence only put off to a better time the fulfilment of her thirst for solitude and for a cloistered life. Rita was intended to be an example to every age and condition; she should therefore live other lives before reaching the cloister she panted for. CHAPTER VIII RITA'S MARRIAGE In the year 1393 Italy, not to say the whole world, was suffering under the evils that proceed from political disturbance, and the state of morals throughout the peninsula was deplorable. Still, the honour of the Church was upheld by the many saints whose lives then adorned it, not the least of whom was Rita. Urban VI. was dead, and Boniface IX. ruled in his place. But the Holy See had to withstand many a rude shock, for the anti-Pope Robert, then near his end, continued to dispute the possession of the Apostolic keys, and at his death left to his more impious successor, Pietro di Luna, his sad legacy of obstinate schism. Heresy, fanaticism,--religious and political--and the utmost corruption of morals were not wanting to fill the cup of Italy's woes. The weak hands of the cruel and dissolute Wenceslaus still held the sceptre of the West, and John Paleologus, who had succeeded his father Emmanuel, could only weep over the impending ruin of his falling empire, that was shaken in every part by the infidel arms of the Sultan Bajazet. In Italy the rivalry of the different States, and, above all, the vaulting ambition of Gian Galeazzo Visconti, Lord of Milan, served to keep alive disunion, antagonism, and wretchedness. At this very time the republic of Cascia, which, since its revolt against the Holy See, had hardly enjoyed a moment of peace or prosperity, was in arms against the Guelphs of Cerreto, and had at the same time to prosecute a stubborn war against Aquila. In these contests the military portion of Cascia, by their deeds of violence, their robberies, and their atrocities, trampled on every law of humanity and modesty. It is true that hostilities came to an end in 1395, when terms of peace were agreed on; but warlike Cascia could not remain long at rest, but took up arms against Monte Reale in a new war, which lasted till 1397. Whilst Cascia and the other States we have mentioned were seeking by iniquitous means to widen the borders of the kingdom of confusion and sin, Rita, in Rocca Porena, was meditating only how she could best please God, that, as the Apostle says, she might be holy in body and in spirit. The lurid picture of universal disorder rightly excited in her feelings of horror, and convinced her all the more of the vanity and cruelty of the world. She saw the deceitful pleasures, the snares and thorns, the inevitable evils that show themselves at every step, and the dangers that at every moment threaten the soul with ruin. On the other hand, she perceived the great advantages that result from separating one's self from the world; she recalled all the spiritual joy and interior consolation she experienced during the time she lived in retirement in her home, and she therefore felt herself more firmly grounded in her determination to flee for ever from the tumult of worldlings. The solitude which formed the object of her desires, and in which she resolved to offer to God the holocaust of her virginity, was the convent of Cascia, where she afterwards lived and died, called at that time St. Mary Magdalen's, and occupied then, as well as now, by nuns of the Order of St. Augustine. This pious project had been for some time maturing in her mind, and although she was hardly twelve years of age she determined to carry it into effect without any of those wearisome delays which the grace of the Holy Spirit knows not of, which belong to certain weak and hesitating souls that cannot break the world's ties, or those of vain fear, when God calls them to a state of perfection. Although Rita then heard the call of her Divine Lover, she did not know the time He had fixed for the fulfilling of her wishes, but, overcome by a holy impatience, she resolved to make known to her parents her desire for a religious life. Who can tell what struggles the voice of nature must have caused in her soul at this crisis, as she thought that she was for ever about to separate herself from the side of her dearly loved and aged parents? Even the saints feel the strength of nature, but, like giants, they pass on to triumphs in the kingdom of grace. Thus Rita acted. She shut her ears to the insinuating voice of flesh and blood, informed her parents of her religious vocation, and humbly and fervently begged their leave to obey the voice of God. When they heard their daughter express such a wish, Antonio and Amata, pious though they were, did not hide their sorrow and the trouble they felt. They besought with tears that their only child, the one object of their tenderest love, their only prop and consolation, should not abandon them in their old age. Their tearful pleading, acting on the filial love and obedience which filled Rita's heart, prevailed on her to put off for a better time the fulfilment of her noble purpose. Being so far successful, her parents turned their attention to providing a husband for her, in order both to make sure of retaining her society and her assistance that had become necessary to them, and to save their family from extinction; and they fixed their eyes on a young man called, according to some, Ferdinand, and to others Paul. But old eyes do not always see clearly. The young man whom they selected was impulsive and irascible, with a character formed amid the savage surroundings of that time and place--in a word, he was well fitted to try the patience and virtue of Rita. He was proposed as a husband to the saintly girl, and all the weight of parental authority, and every motive that human nature could suggest, were adduced to win her consent. We do not know with what prayers and entreaties the distressed girl opposed the suggestion, but we do know that she showed the repugnance her soul felt. It was not, however, the disposition of her intended husband that made her hate the idea of marriage, for if the knowledge of it were hidden from her parents, it could scarcely be known to a young girl so fond of retirement. All Rita's aversion and complaining sprang from the fear of seeing closed to her the road that led to the conventual life to which she aspired, and the dread of having to dwell in the midst of an evil and destroying world, in which she would be plunged into the dangerous cares of married life. Seeing at last that her tears could not bend her parents to her wishes, and feeling somewhat shaken by considerations of filial piety and obedience, she had recourse in her hard trial to the Father of light. During her prayer she became conscious of an inspiration that told her to bend her neck to the yoke of matrimony, and thus understood that what she took to be a suggestion of paternal love, purely human and the voice of flesh and blood, was in reality a disposition of heaven. Resignation to the Divine will partly restored her peace of mind, and the consent to her marriage which she announced to her parents filled them with satisfaction. Rita gave her consent through an impulse of obedience, and since perfect obedience to the Divine will requires a holy blindness, she took no care to inquire about the fortune, appearance, or other qualities of her future husband. Rita was therefore in the first flower of her youth, her beauty, and virtue when, under the nuptial veil of her modesty, she stood before the altar to become a party to that indissoluble contract which Jesus Christ raised to the dignity of a Sacrament, and which gives children to the people of God. The relatives and friends on both sides were resolved to celebrate the nuptials with feastings, but the common joy did not reach the heart of the pious bride, for that was fixed on nobler objects. To the hour of her marriage Rita had been an excellent example to all virgins. In those few years she had given enough lessons to show how virginal candour and pure innocence should be preserved; she had now to follow another path to become a bright example of virtue to all who live in the married state. CHAPTER IX RITA AS WIFE The Apostle's saying, that 'all things work together for good to those who love God,' remains always true. Rita had passed from the state of virginity to that of matrimony, yet this step towards a lower state was destined to lead her to a higher grade of glory. Thus St. Monica, whose faithful follower our heroine was ever to be, would not have been St. Augustine's mother by nature, and in the order of grace would not have drawn the erring Patrizio, her husband, to God, would not have so wide a field wherein to exercise her patience and fortitude, would not have left all those examples of virtue which her son Augustine admires and exalts in his book of 'Confessions,' if Divine Providence had not led her by that path which, long after, her daughter Rita followed. The ways are diverse and diverse are the gifts, but the Spirit is the same which guides souls in a wonderful manner towards greater good. The way of tribulation was that which the Lord opened to our saint, and by the means of matrimony He wished her to pass through fire and water--in other words, through every sort of danger, temptation, and persecution, in order to prove and purify her, as gold is purified in the furnace, and thence to receive her into heaven as a most pure holocaust. Hence the God whose wish placed her in the married state so disposed it that she should pass from her original life of filial submission to that of slavery under a tyrannical husband. Thus it was that hardly had a few days passed after the marriage than her unworthy husband began to illtreat the innocent Rita with reproaches, abuse, threats, and even blows, of which the only cause was his own brutal inclination. But our gentle heroine had studied in the school of the Crucified One; she had already learned how to conquer her passions even to the extent of rejoicing in the midst of tribulation, for she was convinced that tribulation is the food of Christian patience, that penitence is the great proof of real virtue, and that on the exercise of it is based our priceless hope of eternal good that shall not fail us. Yet because she was aware that not all who suffer are blessed, but only those who surfer for justice' sake, she took every care and tried every means to please her husband, whom nothing could satisfy. She waited on him, tried to discover his wants, sought to interpret his unspoken wishes, studied his temper--in a word, she did her utmost never to give him the least cause to complain, at least in everything in which her duty as a Christian permitted. She was well aware that a wife ought to regard her husband as a master to whom that obedience and reverential fear are due which the Church owes to her head, Christ Jesus. She not only knew, but practised it 111 a way that astonished all who were acquainted with the natural brutality of her husband and her own heroic submission, meekness, and invincible constancy. She obeyed his every beck, and undertook no duty without first seeking his approval. So far did she carry this submission that she did not go out of her house even to attend the Divine offices in church without having first obtained his permission. With all this the contest was a long one between the husband's cruelty and the wife's sweetness of temper, between his vicious nature and her virtue, between his pride and her humility, his ferocity and her meekness, his arrogance and her tractableness, between his power to give pain and her ability to surfer. But the victory was gained by Rita's virtues, for her long-suffering at length won her husband's heart, and brought unity and love into their home. Whenever afterwards Ferdinand felt inclined, as he sometimes did, to have recourse to cutting words or unseemly acts, at the sight of her humility and patience, and the memory of her gentle admonitions, he adopted the expedient of going out of the house till his mind recovered its tranquillity. We read, too, that, completely overcome by her sweet gentleness, he one day threw himself at her feet to ask pardon from her for his faults and to promise to correct them. To the unspeakable consolation of Rita he kept this promise, nor was she slow to refer all the praise of this conversion to the Giver of all good things, who alone is Lord of the human heart. When fraternal correction is not the outcome of irritation or pride, it is an instrument of Divine grace, and we know that it has no other object than the salvation of him who is corrected when the word and manner which convey it are marked by moderation and kindness. Rita therefore brought into action all the graces, natural and supernatural, which she possessed, in order to bind closely to her that unquiet heart of her husband, and to draw him to the Lord, and induce him to fulfil his Christian obligations. Two sons were born to them, the elder of whom was named Gian Giacomo, and the other Paolo Maria. Both of them inherited their father's quarrelsome and irascible temperament, and his example did not help to improve them. We may easily imagine the trouble, the watchfulness, the uneasiness, the fear, and anxiety which a devoted Christian mother like Rita must have experienced in rearing, educating, and, above all, in forming the minds of her young children. The words which she kept continually repeating in their ears, and which she would have wished to impress indelibly on their hearts, were words of the holy fear of God, of piety and devotion. But not so much with words did the pious mother endeavour to instil into them the pure maxims of the Gospel as by the example of her own exalted virtues. Would that fathers and mothers would learn once for all from the saints, and become convinced of the undeniable truth that their children are moulded more by their example than by their words, even when these are not contradicted by their deeds! Rita, however, in her vigilance spared nothing, neither words nor actions, nor advice nor blame, nor threats nor chastisements, to train these tender plants heavenwards; but their natural and more easy tendency was downwards, and this was her greatest cause of sorrow amongst so many causes, and the worst of all her troubles. We do not mean to say that Gian Giacomo and Paolo were like David's sons Amnon and Absolom, yet it is a fact that the children of holy people are sometimes self-willed and wicked, however holy their upbringing may have been. Rita, however, knew what a mother's duty was, and she therefore, in bringing up her children, never allowed her zeal to slacken, nor her patience to wear out, nor her watchfulness to grow weary. The trials were severe enough which our heroine had to undergo from the society of an irascible husband, whose virtue was none of the most steadfast, but they were redoubled by the evil inclinations she saw appear in her children, and their hatred of all good instruction. The citizens of the heavenly kingdom, whilst they live in this world amongst the sinful and the wicked, must, as St. Augustine teaches, be tossed about by temptations, in order that they may keep themselves in the practice of virtue, and be proved as gold is proved in the crucible. Tried by such afflictions, Rita seemed to have come to such a pass that she could do nothing else than, with the prophet, raise her pure hands to heaven night and day, to seek in God alone some relief in her troubles and some defence against the evils of her house.[1] If ever she deemed it necessary to have recourse to prayer, now assuredly was a time that called for redoubled prayer and the greatest fervour. She therefore prayed without ceasing. Her continued meditations on the sufferings of our Lord was a relief in her distress; frequent communion brought comfort to her troubled state, and her particular devotion to our Blessed Lady, consoler of the afflicted, to St. John the Baptist, St. Augustine, and St. Nicholas of Tolentine, often brought forgetfulness of her woes. Women of the world enduring the like suffering and trouble would deem themselves dispensed from the practice of any other mortification, and in their love of ease, which readily flatters them, would find a thousand pretexts to exempt themselves even from the fasts that are commanded. But Rita, who was in the world but not of it, far from suspending the acts of penitence she was used to practise before her marriage, took refuge in works of greater austerity, in abstinence and fastings and in chastising her body. In spite of these acts of mortification, she still had sufficient strength and vigour to attend to all the needs of her house and assist the wants of her neighbours; she relieved the necessities of the poverty stricken, and with her own hands prepared food for them; by the bedsides of the sick she was unwearying, and, in a word, made herself all things to all men. When she had to appear abroad, either in the performance of her works of charity or to be present at the Divine mysteries in the church, her angelic modesty and the goodness and interior peace which shone in her countenance served to edify all who saw her. These were her adornments, not the trappings of worldly show, which from childhood she abhorred, and which were more detestable in her eyes now that she had advanced so far on the way of perfection. She carefully avoided all unbecoming neglect in dress, and appeared in a garb free from everything savouring of vanity, not to say indecency--such a dress as would escape the eyes of the curious, and which, instead of luxuriousness, showed a contempt of the present life, and was exactly what necessity and Christian humility required. In her intercourse with others, whilst always well-mannered and agreeable, she possessed singular tact in avoiding all conversations which were not of God or of works of corporal or spiritual mercy to her neighbours. No one ever heard from her lips any of those complaints against her husband which are so frequent when women meet together. If ever any of her female acquaintances who knew how she was treated by her ill-tempered husband tried to provoke her to complain by affected pity, as grumbling women not unfrequently did, she either turned the conversation to another subject or covered her husband's faults with the mantle of charity, and thereby gave a practical example of virtue which her neighbours might to their advantage imitate. In brief, St. Rita was another St. Monica: she was the strong woman of the parables of Solomon, and was in all respects the best model for married women. [1] Ps. lxxvi. 2. CHAPTER X DEATH OF RITA'S HUSBAND AND CHILDREN--RITA AS WIDOW Rita had succeeded, as we have said, in assuaging the cruelty that seemed to have been natural to her husband. The means she employed to effect this change were the gentle manner which she naturally possessed, and which Divine grace made still more gentle; the good advice she ever gave, her kindness and unwearying patience, her good example, and, above all, her fervent prayers. But whether it was that his enemies, brooding over old causes of hate, resolved to take revenge for past offences, or that Ferdinand, in a fresh outburst of passion, had exposed himself to new quarrels and new dangers, the fact remains that when he had lived eighteen years with Rita he was barbarously murdered a short distance outside Rocca Porena (the place where the unfortunate victim fell is still shown). Hardly had the report of his tragic death reached the ears of his widowed spouse than, despite her magnanimous heart, she paid the tribute of nature in an outburst of bitter, scalding tears. In the depths of her heart the holy woman felt the wounds that had taken from her side the husband she loved. But the thoughts that made her weep were not thoughts of temporal losses, or of her sorrow, or of being left alone to provide for her family, or of having to dwell with undutiful children with no one to support her. Far other sadder and more serious considerations were breaking her heart. A little human feeling and a weak grasp of faith are enough to fill us with horror at hearing of a violent death. We may, then, easily imagine what grief Rita felt as she considered in the light of her lively faith all the evil on the one part and the other that may have preceded and accompanied that homicidal attempt, or as she dwelt on the uncertainty of pardon or of her husband's penitence, or his having to appear before his Judge without having received the last Sacraments. Nevertheless, that lively faith which made her feel doubly the crushing force of the calamity that had overtaken her soon raised her above herself, above death and every human consideration. She raised the eyes of her soul to heaven and remembered, and was sure that Divine Providence, whose designs are inscrutable, not only disposes all the good that is done, but permits all the evil which comes from man's free-will. This thought sufficed to bow her down before the throne of the Divine Majesty, to adore His just judgments, and hence came comfort to her bruised heart. The saints have no need of the barren consolations of the world; they find in religion that comfort which reason alone can never give. Our noble heroine did not for a moment hesitate to pardon sincerely from her heart the murderers of her unfortunate husband, but, mindful of the example of Jesus Christ, who prayed to the Eternal Father for those who crucified Him, and of St. Stephen, who interceded for those who were stoning him to death, she too offered fervent supplications to the Divine Mercy for those cruel murderers. Hardly had Rita raised her mind above the stormy sea of her sorrows than a new trouble appeared to afflict her. She perceived with consternation that her sons, although yet of tender years, were plotting vengeance against those who were guilty of their father's blood. The afflicted widow exerted all her force by word and deed to excite in them sentiments of resignation and of forgiveness and of Christian charity. She ceased not to keep before their minds the eternal maxims, the fear of judgment and of hell, the examples of the saints, and especially the example of our crucified Redeemer, who, in the extremity of His sufferings, interceded for His inhuman executioners. She took care, too, immediately to remove out of the sight of her sons the bloody garments of her slain husband. But in spite of all her advice and solicitude, the sorrowing mother could not touch her children's vengeful hearts, or, if she did succeed in softening them, it was but for a moment they abandoned their wicked intentions. Amidst circumstances of such distress, and oppressed by her fears, the unhappy widow knew not whither to turn, and on earth she found only subjects of sorrow and vestiges of sin. She turned her weeping eyes once more to heaven, and there again she found the greatest comfort in her sufferings. Although she was a mother, and had a mother's affectionate heart, yet because she loved and sought God's honour more than her own flesh and blood, like a noble Christian heroine, she supplicated the Lord either to change her children's hearts or to take them out of this world before they could accomplish the vengeance they were meditating. Rita's vows were acceptable to heaven, and to her was granted to complete Abraham's sacrifice in a new way--for the patriarch's knife was arrested in mid-air, and Isaac was saved; but she saw her two sons fall one after another victims to her prayers that pierced the heavens. Thus we may well hope that the most merciful Lord provided for their eternal salvation during their mortal illness, and then took them, lest wickedness should alter their understanding,[1] and at the same time provided for the mother by opening to her a way into a new life far removed from the world and so long the object of her wishes, a life altogether spiritual and by anticipation blessed. The brave woman did not weep, and although at the time of her husband's tragic end she was dissolved in tears through fear about the salvation of his soul and the souls of his murderers, yet at the deaths of her children she only thanked her God who had taken them away from the dangers of sin and the risk of another more dreadful death--that of the soul. It is difficult to discover how long Rita had to struggle with her vengeful children, or how long she remained in the world after they had passed to eternity. It seems certain, however, that the time she lived as a widow was short. But we know that during that period she placed all her confidence in God, and that she was engaged night and day in the practice of most perfect prayer,[2] according to St. Paul's instruction to widows. She bore the cross with Jesus Christ, and lived a life of perpetual self-denial. More than ever she kept her body in subjection by scourgings and continued fasting, and she distributed to the poor that part of her food which her abstinence spared. She rejoiced in performing works of mercy, and was, in a word, all love towards God and her neighbour, and in no way solicitous about herself. Amongst other instances of her heroic charity we read that, happening one day upon a poor man half naked and trembling with cold, she took one of her own garments and gave it to him, and went on her way rejoicing that God had given her the opportunity and the grace to deprive herself of what she herself needed in order to help one of the poor of the Lord. Her dress was of coarse serge, and was a dark blue in colour, and during the severity of the winter she added a rough cloak. She always wore sackcloth that she might always be doing penance. In retirement alone she found her consolation and joy; and no sooner were her children dead than her old burning desire to enclose herself once for all within the cherished shadows of the cloister sprang into life again. We may relate an incident which gave a new impetus to her vocation, as it is told by an ancient writer: Having gone one day from Rocca Porena to Cascia, she went into the church of the Augustinian nuns whilst Mass was being said, and there she felt as if those words of our Saviour were being imprinted on her mind, 'I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life'--words which then passed into her heart to pierce it with the Divine love which spoke to her and invited her. We may well believe, too, that the worthy examples of other female saints then living or but recently gone to their reward offered new arguments to urge her not to delay entering on a conventual life. The memory of St. Bridget of Sweden and Blessed Angela of Foligno was still recent, whilst St. Margaret of Monferrato and St. Frances of Rome were then still living, all of them illustrious women raised up by God, as Rita was in Cascia, to oppose and bear testimony against the corruption of those times, and all of them predestined to become models to the virgins of the cloister after having adorned in the world the three states of virginity, married life and widowhood. But even without these examples Rita was sufficiently conscious of the interior voice of her heavenly Spouse, and she readily prepared to obey it. Thus Abraham had hardly heard the angel's voice when he arose in the darkness of the night and went to sacrifice his son; the shepherds who were watching their flocks when they heard the announcement of the Divine Infant's birth ran to offer Him their homage; the Magi, as soon as they saw the new star, did not hesitate to undertake their long journey to adore the King of kings in His swaddling-clothes; the Apostles, at the first call of the Redeemer, left their nets and followed Him; the head of the Apostles, Peter, at a sign from the angel, rose quickly from his broken chains; so Rita determined to hide herself without delay in that sacred retreat where her Divine Lover was awaiting her. That retreat, as we have said, was the convent in Cascia of the nuns who follow the rule of the great Augustine, who were called at that time nuns of St. Mary Magdalen, from the ancient title of their church, and who were remarkable for strict observance. We have said before that the Augustinian Order flourished there not only in the convent of the nuns, but in the wonderful sanctity of the worthy followers of the Blessed Simon, Blessed Ugolino, and Blessed John and Simon, all of whom had dwelt in the woods of Cascia. This, too, must have been a strong attraction to our saint, and a further inducement to fix her mind unchangeably on Cascia. The memory of the heroic virtues practised by St. Nicholas of Tolentine, her special advocate, was still fresh in the minds of men, and the fame of his stupendous miracles had spread throughout the land. But the principal motive why she sought to wear the habit of St. Augustine was that God in His inscrutable decrees had called her to that state by the loving invitations of His grace. The pious widow approached the nuns, and, throwing herself at their feet, in simple words and with all the fervour of her heart expressed her desire to serve God within their walls and in that penitential garb they wore. But her request was vain; it was not thought convenient to receive a widow in a convent intended for virgins, and it was against their custom. Rita took her refusal patiently, but she did not lose courage, and, like Abraham, she hoped against hope.[3] Some time after she went back again, represented that she had a vocation, renewed her prayers and sighs; but she was rejected a second and, again, a third time. But the more the nuns persisted in refusing her admission, the more did Rita acquire the merit of humility, patience, and unalterable confidence in God. She attributed her refusal to her own unworthiness, and in her self-contempt she more and more conformed herself to her model, Jesus. This was the manner of life which Rita led in the world, where she was a mirror of every virtue to virgins, to the married, and to widows. We shall see how she became an example of sanctity to religious in the cloister. [1] Wisd. of Sol. iv. ii. [2] 1 Tim. v. 5. [3] Rom. iv. 18. END OF PART I Part II RITA IN THE CLOISTER CHAPTER I RITA'S MIRACULOUS ENTRY INTO THE CLOISTER AND HER RECEPTION All Rita's thoughts and all her affections were centred in heaven, and the reason why she desired to lead a more perfect life in the cloister was thereby to make more certain of attaining the object of her desires. But the world in that century of wickedness was engaged about far different things; the vortex of worldly hopes and ambitions had engulfed almost all the aspirations of men. In the East, rapine, vice, violence, murder, irreligion, and a long train of irreparable wrongs, had followed quickly upon the victories of Sultan Bajazet and the defeats of the Emperor Emmanuel. The prolonged war was still being waged in the German Empire between Sigismund and the rebellious Hussites, who despised human life in their endeavours to spread their heresy and profane and overthrow the altar. The government of the Church, then under Pope John XXIII., was most violently harassed by the anti-Pope Pietro di Luna, whose contumacy the Council of Constance failed to break down, as the Council of Pisa had failed before. Italy continued to be the laughing-stock of tyrants and of the resuscitated factions of the Guelphs and the Ghibellines. Of the two Visconti who governed the Cisalpine province, one was the slave of his vices and the other was the prisoner of his rebellious subject Facino Cane, tyrant of Alexandria, who was the formidable chief of a marauding band and the despoiler of the province. The tyrannous usurpations of Ottobono in Parma, Da Vignate in Lodi, Fondolo in Cremona, and Malatesta in Brescia still continued. The Romagna and the Marshes enjoyed no higher degree of liberty or prosperity under the yoke of despotism. The factions of Durozzo and of Anjou still disputed possession of the kingdom of Naples, and the ambitious Ladislaus, with designs on the whole Italian peninsula, began to threaten Rome with the fugitive Pontiff. The republics of Venice, Genoa, Florence, and Siena were either plotting against one another or actually at war. Cascia was the only one of the republics that had begun to taste the almost forgotten fruits of peace. But neither in Cascia nor elsewhere were good morals to be found; they seemed to have barely secured a refuge in the cloisters. Hence Rita was sighing night and day for the sacred shelter, and although she had till then bloomed as a stainless lily among thorns, yet she did not consider that she could live secure in the danger-laden atmosphere that surrounded her. But how could she aspire to a cloistered life when all hope seemed futile after the repulses she had received? Yet to that life she aspired, and not in vain. For those undertakings which seem arduous and sometimes impossible become not only practicable, but easy to heroic faith. The invitations which Divine grace held out to her and the refusals with which Rita was met by the nuns were nothing more than the loving pleasantries of her heavenly Spouse, and but trials of her virtue and constancy. Therefore the more her wishes were frustrated, the more frequent became her prayers and the more fervent the sighs of her heart. She had recourse, too, to the mediation of the saints, and did not fear to make herself importunate to her protectors, St. John the Baptist, St. Augustine, and St. Nicholas. And the measure of the effect which her prayers produced was, as St. Augustine teaches, the fervour of the love that preceded them. She merited the favour she sought, and received it. Here is how the incident is related by the writers of her life: The saint was one night kneeling on the ground, rapt in prayer, her hands extended to heaven after her usual manner and as the royal prophet teaches, when she suddenly heard a knocking at the door of her house, and someone calling out her name. The first feeling of the lonely widow was one of trouble and fear, but she invoked the Divine assistance, took courage, and went to the window--but nothing was to be seen or heard. She returned to her prayer, but was interrupted by the same unknown voice calling her. Her fear increased, but she went to the window again--and again there was only darkness and silence without. She then began to think it might be some trick of the devil, and, puzzled between doubt and fear, she threw herself at the feet of Jesus Christ, and besought Him more fervently to enlighten and to help her, and that He would be pleased to make known His Divine will, whether what she had experienced was a delusion of the devil or a voice from heaven. Her short prayer was so pleasing to God that Rita soon felt herself rapt in ecstasy, and then she saw and heard clearly, and her fear was changed into joyful consolation. She saw her three holy patrons, and heard the joyous words with which the spouse of the Canticles called his beloved, 'Arise, make haste, my love, and come--come, for it is time at last to enter the cloister from which thou hast been repulsed so many times.' As soon as these words had been uttered, the rapture of her ecstasy ceased, but she still retained, deeply impressed on her mind, a vivid picture of the entire vision. Then, by a Divine impulse, she went to the window a third time, and, enlightened by God, she saw, to her great surprise, a person of venerable aspect, who invited her by signs to follow him. Whether he appeared in his usual rough vesture of woven camel-hair, or clad in skins, or in other guise, we know not, but for certain it was no other than St. John the Precursor, as Rita was not slow to recognise, and he it was who was so clearly manifested to her in the preceding vision. She felt her heart overflowing with rapture, and hastened to obey the signs of her heavenly guide. Hardly had she reached the spot where he stood than her astonishment and joy were still further increased, for there, at either side of her great protector, stood her other patrons, Augustine and Nicholas, both ready and prepared to escort her towards the fate she desired so ardently for herself. It will not be out of place to remark here that the house in which Rita dwelt and out of which she went on the night in which these extraordinary events occurred was built at the base of a steep shelf of rock anciently called the 'Gun' of Rocca Porena, and which it was almost impossible to climb. Yet, leaving the usual road, it was by way of this rock that her sainted guides led Rita, perhaps to indicate to her by the precipitous nature of the place the steepness of the mountain of monastic perfection which she was destined to scale, and by the chasm below the terrible nature of a fall from grace. Rita was seized by sudden fear at the sight here presented to her, but Divine grace and her holy companions brought her comfort, and enabled her to rise superior to herself, so that she mounted fearlessly through the darkness of the night over the rough stones and trunks of fallen trees till she reached the highest point of that beetling rock, which is now called the 'Saint's Rock,' from so memorable an occurrence. If the ascent of the rock is difficult, the descent on the side of Cascia is quite impossible, from whence it is believed that when the four saints had accomplished the difficult ascent they were either borne through the air from mountain to mountain, or else passed without pause to their intended goal, as if to signify the liberty enjoyed by all who reach the highest point of perfection and have climbed the mount of God. However the authors may differ in minor points in describing this event, we may well judge that everything connected with it is miraculous, as Rita's entry into the convent was also miraculous, for she entered whilst the gates were closed, or through a gate opened for her and closed when she had passed the portals by an invisible hand. When Rita found herself within the sacred enclosure where she had so ardently desired to be, her glorious escort disappeared in a moment from sight, and she was abandoned and left all alone in the darkness, and had to pass the remainder of the night in an ecstasy of wonder, but tossed about on a sea of uncertainty by the rush of the thoughts that filled her mind. The nuns rose in the early morning to sing the praises of the Lord, and what was their surprise when they saw within their convent, and trembling with fright, the humble widow whom they had repeatedly rejected! They plied her with questions, and Rita replied simply and modestly by describing the whole history of the miraculous occurrence of the night. For the last time she begged them with the greatest fervour not to reject her any longer--and how could they refuse her in the face of so evident a miracle? The nuns, therefore, with common consent and unusual applause, received the holy widow into their number, and after joining with her in thanking and praising the Most High, they put on her their penitential habit, and admitted her to the novitiate with all solemnity and every mark of general satisfaction. The nuns were delighted at the turn of events, and Rita's joy exceeded all bounds, till, comparing her unworthiness with the great goodness of God, she was abashed before Him. The more she thought on the greatness of the remarkable favours conferred on her, the more profound did her humility become, and she poured forth a thousand times her tribute of gratitude to heaven, but could never find words or thoughts able to express the thanks she owed to Divine Providence. This miraculous entry into the convent occurred during the unhappy years we have before described, or about the year 1413, when Rita was nearly thirty-two years of age; for she was married in her thirteenth year, and lived eighteen years with her husband, and was a widow for about a year, when her second son died; whilst the interval between that event and her entry to the convent, the period of her repeated rejections, must have been short. In the same year the Augustinian Order could boast of another splendid addition to its members, for the reception of Alexander Oliva, called the Blessed, occurred then. He afterwards reached the highest honours within the Order, and was raised to the dignity of Cardinal before he passed to the glory he had prepared for himself in heaven. But the Order has greater reason to be proud of Rita's reception, because, although her life was passed in obscurity and far from the eyes of the world, it certainly was not less bright with the splendour of the Saints, and after death she has acquired more of the veneration of the faithful. CHAPTER II RITA AS NOVICE: HER PROFESSION From her early youth Rita had a great longing for a solitary life, but now that the Omnipotent God had placed her in the convent she had no further reason to sigh for the deserts of the Jordan, the solitudes of Tagaste, the silence of Valmanente, the groves of her native place, or any other home of hermits. The cloister constituted the fulfilment of all her desires, and her only remaining anxiety was to emulate the great virtues of her three holy patrons, the blessed hermits of Cascia, and the other holy ones whose lives had made the glory of the solitudes. To say truth, it must have cost her very little labour to follow in their footsteps, for there was no need for her to change her habits and manners when she put off a secular dress for the garb of a nun, and she had but to live the remainder of her life as she had hitherto lived in order to reach the highest point of perfection. Jesus Christ teaches us that the surest way of attaining perfection is by renouncing all earthly possessions, and our saint, although she had always lived completely detached from worldly things, hastened to practise the Saviour's teaching in the most effectual manner by distributing all her slender fortune amongst the poor. Thus, without property, without husband or children, and far from her relatives, Rita rejoiced to be an abject slave in the house of the King of Peace, and deemed herself to enjoy a nobler freedom, more ample wealth, and a happier lot than they who dwell in the sumptuous tabernacles of sinners surrounded by the riches, the pomp, and the glory of this world. No one can tell us better than her companions in religion how she lived during the year of her noviceship, and they were astonished and confused at what they observed in her, and from the first regarded her as a model of the purest and most tried virtue. Poverty, chastity, and obedience had nothing to alarm her, for she was long accustomed to live in poverty in Rocca Porena; her body she had crucified with Christ in God; and she had lived subject not only to her prudent parents, but to a cruel husband. So also had the other virtues which she practised in her noviceship become familiar to her in the world, if we except alone some prescribed corporal penances and the more abundant prayers which she was enabled to offer. Nothing else regarding her can be established from the scanty memorials of those obscure times, and we only know that as the time of noviceship went on she persevered in those holy practices of extraordinary piety and austere penance, and prepared to bind herself to her God with stronger ties on the day of her new regeneration. The learned Cardinal Seripando and others call the day of the formal profession of monastic vows the day of new regeneration, for through the sacrifice then made of one's will, of bodily pleasures, and of property, the total remission of all punishment due to sin may be merited. That day at length arrived, and the holy novice, having first made a rigorous examination of her whole life and marked all the stains on her pure conscience, which she removed by the fire of her sorrow and the blood of Jesus Christ, presented herself before the altar to vow perpetual observance of the evangelical counsels. She had no hesitation in placing her hand on the holy Rule of the great Augustine, for her heroic trust in the assistance of grace gave her courage, and for the rest, although the Rule may seem severe to the minds of worldlings, the saints regard it but as a law of love, and a cord to unite souls to God. Therefore Rita preferred this sweet servitude to all the kingdoms of earth, and considered herself the happiest of women since she had at last reached the goal towards which from her earliest years she had felt herself drawn by heaven's gentle violence. The exact date of the profession is unknown, but it very probably took place when Fr. Pietro di Vena Tolosano was General of the Order, and he succeeded in that office Fr. Saracini, who was from Rocca Porena, and who had been made Bishop of Macerata. The date of profession would therefore be about 1414. History leaves us to imagine also the feelings of the newly-professed nun, but we may well judge from her past that that solemn day was one of an outpouring of love and gratitude to God. But of one incident connected with the day we are informed, and it is that whilst Rita, never satisfied that she had sufficiently extolled the goodness of the Lord, was still kneeling late at night before the crucifix, she suddenly felt herself ravished out of her senses into a state of sublime ecstasy. She thereupon saw in spirit what was given Jacob to see in a dream--a ladder that reached from earth to heaven, and angels ascending and descending by it, and at the summit our Lord, who was inviting her to ascend. We may believe that this was the mystic ladder of charity, whose steps, as St. Augustine says, God Himself prepares, so that those chosen souls which He wishes to exalt may ascend by them, and at whose top He stands to await them at the term of their journey to receive and introduce them into the possession of heaven. But no one could penetrate its meaning better than the ecstatic Rita. The holy woman awoke from her ecstasy enlightened by these heavenly instructions, and came out of the light of God to seek Him again and follow His leading with greater anxiety amidst the darkness of our mortal state. CHAPTER III RITA'S CHARITY What constitutes the greatness of the mystic city, the new Jerusalem, is not the number and variety of its inhabitants, or the fame of great undertakings, but charity alone. In fact, the Virgin Mary was exalted above all the choirs of heaven, and St. John the Baptist was called the greatest of the saints even before the testimony at the Jordan, although their lives were nothing more than a continuous exercise of charity. Hence, coming to speak of Rita, if she had charity she possessed all things,[1] since the fulness of the law is charity, and if she had it in an eminent degree she was a great saint, for perfect charity is perfect justice.[2] This is the sublime principle which St. Augustine, himself a great master of charity and evangelical perfection, proposes in that golden Rule of his, which so many religious Orders have adopted, and which Rita observed to the last letter--a principle which, as Blessed Alphonsus of Oroza says, is a summary of the entire Christian religion, and which at the same time proves the excellence and the adaptability of the Rule to all ages. It was to the attainment of charity that Rita even before her profession, but more determinedly afterwards, gave her undivided attention, and employed all the affections of her heart and the powers of her mind. We leave it to others to describe her heroic faith and hope; for us it will be enough to treat of that virtue which presupposes the other two--embraces them and gives them their life. The first proof that one possesses this virtue is fulfilling the will of God by observing His holy law, as Jesus Christ taught us when He said: 'He that hath My commandments, and keepeth them: he it is that loveth Me. And He that loveth Me shall be loved of My Father, and I will love him, and will manifest Myself to him.'[3] Now, all those who have written the life of our saint and the evidence of tradition regarding her assure us that she observed with the utmost exactness all the commandments of God, the precepts of the Church, and the commands of her superiors. The very manner with which she observed these precepts was perfect, for she always obeyed cheerfully, and with joy readily and exactly sought to anticipate commands, and to exceed in fulfilling them. And this exact observance was extended not only to what is of command, but to the evangelical counsels also, and yet so light to her was the weight of this burden that she took upon herself very many works of supererogation to give an outlet to her burning piety. She was the first to rise from her bed at midnight, the first at prayer, in the choir, at instruction, at penitential observances and the works of mercy, in obedience, first at all the duties of the community, in which latter she was always best pleased the meaner the office entrusted to her to perform. In the midst of her uninterrupted occupations and vigils she had no other thought than to find the safest ways of seconding the holy will of God, a thought that produced in her that holy fear which is the offspring of love. She was always afraid of offending her most loving God even in the slightest matter, and so fearsome of it was she that the very name of sin was a horror to her. Hence, to remove as far as possible all danger of sin, she imposed on herself a law of rigorous silence, for she knew the truth of the saying of St. James the Apostle, that 'if any man offend not in word, the same is a perfect man.'[4] In order more easily to carry out her design she remained shut up in her cell alone with her agonized Spouse Jesus, like a 'dove in the clefts of the rock, in the hollow places of the wall.'[5] She never left her cell except to find her sovereign good either in the Blessed Sacrament or amongst the poor and sick, or in such other works of charity as her state permitted her to perform. Even in circumstances such as these she was on her guard to utter no word that she had not weighed well, and it is said of her that she even used to keep a pebble in her mouth to remind her to preserve the silence she loved. Sometimes, of course, she had to speak, through necessity or politeness, or for convenience' sake, and in such cases her words were in accord with the feelings of her heart, and hence, since she was all spirit, her discourses were on things of the spirit; she was all charity, and her speech therefore tended to the greater glory of God and the salvation of her neighbours. She was not wanting in that easy fluency which springs from the heart and can reach hearts, which is proper to the saints and inspires sanctity, which feeds on love and draws souls to God. Whether Rita possessed this honied eloquence from the time the wonderful bees appeared over her cradle, or acquired it by the practice of the greatest charity towards her neighbour, only God, who gave it to her, knows. We only know that she made use of the opportunities which this gift afforded her to give advice to doubting souls, to comfort the pusillanimous, to console the afflicted, to bring back the erring to the way of salvation, to practise these and other works of mercy with that happy success which the Giver of every good gift was wont to grant her. Amongst her wonderful deeds of charity we find it recorded that having heard of two persons of the town who had been long living in a state of sin, and were thereby the cause of great public scandal, she wept for their sins, and then determined on the difficult task of making them separate and leading them to repent. Rita had had too many proofs of the Divine goodness not to be confident of success in her present undertaking. She first had recourse to prayer and to penance, which she offered in union with the sufferings of Jesus Christ for the conversion of the sinners, and then had each of the scandal-givers brought to her in turn, and, alone with them, by her gentle insinuating manner she brought them to see their deplorable condition, and she had the happiness of seeing them shed tears of compunction and afterwards perform constant penance for their past transgressions. In very truth, such evils as those under which these two sinners laboured were what excited Rita's greatest compassion, but she was by no means wanting in compassion for those suffering from bodily ills, nor was her fervent charity slow in coming to their assistance. Never was anyone ill in the convent whom Rita did not nurse, often for whole days and nights. She saw in the sick Jesus Christ Himself, and therefore delighted to be by their bedsides. She pitied them, and sought to soothe their pains by the sweet considerations which religion, and especially the Passion of Christ, inspired her. With her own hands she gladly rendered them every service, even the meanest and most nauseating, and for this blessed work of charity she did not hesitate to forsake her usual devotional practices, and feared not to leave God for God's work. In a word, she was all things to all, for, as St. Paul, too, had experienced, her compassion made the infirmities of the suffering her own. And therefore all those who died in the convent during her forty years of life in it had the happiness of having her for their attendant and consoler, and drew their last breath in her holy arms, reclining against her tender heart. Her very charity was the reason which condemned her for many years to a total separation from her beloved sisters in religion, lest, as we shall tell later, the offensive odour of a sore on her forehead, by which she was afflicted, might render her presence disagreeable to them. She then saw very well that she had become almost an outcast from the community, but she felt no resentment on that account, but lived as an exile, contented in her cell, since she knew that she was no inconvenience to her neighbour, and gave no offence to God. She even rejoiced in her humiliation and in her infirmities and her separation from creatures. We omit many other proofs of the greatness of the charity to God and her neighbour which filled Rita's heart. In order to know her charity we have but to recall how she lived with a cruel and ferocious husband, how she interceded for his murderers, how she offered her very children as a sacrifice to God, how she devoted her time in the world to deeds and prayers for her neighbour's good. Such was her charity, heartfelt, unbounded, kind, patient, strong, and unconquerable. Hitherto we have spoken only of Rita's effective or working charity, or, at most, of her love to her neighbour, but what description dare we give of her internal love of God? It would never be possible for us to describe the ardour and fire of love which was ever consuming her heart. How her affections soared towards heaven, how her soul was transformed through Divine love, how the interior life of that seraph of charity was lived, it would be impossible to describe. However, we shall try to convey an idea, though imperfect, of it, especially when we come to speak of her spirit of prayer. Meanwhile, the reader may form some notion of it by gauging the measure of Rita's charity to her neighbour, and from the consideration of what we have hitherto described of a life not only blameless and holy, but everywhere aided and distinguished by heaven's most singular favours. [1] 1 Cor. xiii. [2] St. Augustine. [3] John xiv. 21. [4] Jas. iii. 2. [5] Cant. ii. 14. CHAPTER IV OTHER VIRTUES WHICH RITA PRACTISED IN THE CLOISTER That truth to which St. Augustine draws our attention in many passages in his works--that charity is the source of all other virtues and their life-giving principle--is confirmed by St. Gregory, who illustrates it by comparing the virtues to the branches of a tree, which all spring from the same root, which root of the virtues is charity. In fact, the virtue of Christian prudence, for example, is nothing else than a continued eagerness, in those who love God, to distinguish good from evil, and to select the fittest means to please the Object of their love, and attain to Him as their last end; justice is but a constant desire in those who love God to render Him the worship due to Him and their neighbour whatever is theirs; temperance is a curb which they who prefer Divine to earthly love employ in order to keep their rebellious appetites under the sweet yoke of that heavenly love; fortitude is but the strength of charity which makes man superior to every trouble and suffering; and the teaching of St. Augustine regarding the other virtues is the same, according to their various natures. Now, if Rita's charity was as great as we have described it, and as we shall afterwards see more clearly, to what a pitch of perfection must she not have reached in her practice of the other virtues! Prudence, which is the first of the moral virtues, was quite characteristic of Rita, and invariably showed its presence in her exercise of all her other extraordinary gifts. This it was that taught her the saving art of examining and judging rightly and adopting the most suitable means for attaining that better part which, like another Mary, she had irrevocably chosen for herself; this suggested to her the surest method of regulating her conduct, her appetites, and her very works of penance and devotion; this made her sparing of conversation, diligent, circumspect, cautious, compliant and gentle-mannered; and, finally, this virtue, through her long practice of it, or, rather, because its origin is in God, enabled her to give the solidest and holiest counsel to the advantage of her neighbour. The virtue of justice also shone brightly in her life, for her life was a continuous act of reverential homage to religion, the majesty of God, the greatness of the most holy Virgin Mary, the merits of the Saints, the authority of the Church, the laws of right, of friendship, of gratitude, and of truth. Nor was she less remarkable for the virtue of temperance, for she had conquered her passions, and kept them subject to the spirit in a way entirely heroic, by her continued rigorous fastings and the uninterrupted practice of the most austere penances. It is wonderful to consider how her virtue of temperance, which increased and waxed strong amidst harsh and stern surroundings of penitential practices, brought in its train a pretty group of gentler virtues--modesty, purity, clemency, meekness, urbanity, graciousness. Rita's fortitude also, which whilst she lived in the world was extraordinary, increased in the cloister in proportion with her other virtues, if we may not say it surpassed the others, since it was the distinguishing mark of her character. The devil, of course, tried, by insidious suggestions, to tarnish the purity of her heart and inspire her with a love of sensual pleasures and a distaste for perfection; but although his infernal assaults were strong and long continued, our saint, who had prepared her mind against temptation from her youth, and was now become an unconquerable heroine in the army of Christ, was so well able to defend herself and fight valiantly that temptation only served to multiply her triumphs and her laurels. It is said, too, that the tempter, seeing that he failed in his interior assaults, sought to frighten her by horrible phantoms; but in vain, for Rita, by the sign of the Cross, put him to flight, and showed her scorn for him as a powerless enemy. The flesh, too, tried to rebel against the law of the spirit; but the holy woman kept it as a slave in bonds of sackcloth, and brought it into subjection by sanguinary scourgings. Even the little world of her convent tried her virtue in some sense, especially during the years she suffered from the sore on her forehead. But Rita's fortitude made these little trials seem but playful caresses. The pain and the stench of the sore, the inconveniences of her poverty and mortification, the great length of her last illness, and other similar troubles with which the Lord tries the souls that are most acceptable to Him, instead of depressing her were rather as food to strengthen and increase her fortitude, magnanimity, patience, confidence in God, and final perseverance. With all this precious equipment of wonderful gifts and sublime virtues, Rita had, nevertheless, the meanest opinion of herself, and spoke of herself as if she were the vilest of creatures, thankless for the gifts which Divine goodness had bestowed on her, a miserable sinner, and unworthy to enjoy the companionship of so many sacred virgins of the Lord. She not only spoke in this manner, but wished everyone to have the same opinion which, in her heart, she had of herself. Hence she had a horror of praise, and when at meditation she felt those extraordinary lights and that spiritual ardour which preceded her ecstasies, she used to beseech God that He would condescend so to work in her soul that her companions might not be conscious of it, and might never be led to have a favourable opinion of her. But it was her humility that betrayed her expectations, for the more she humbled herself, the more was she exalted, not only in the eyes of God, but of men, and the deeper she sunk herself in the abyss of lowliness, the higher was raised the edifice of her sanctity. CHAPTER V RITA'S OBSERVANCE OF THE RELIGIOUS VOWS There is a love which is the soul of every virtue, and another love which is an incentive to every vice; the former we call charity, the latter concupiscence. Charity, since it comes from heaven, has for its aim three noble objects--God, ourselves, and our neighbours. Concupiscence, since it is altogether of the earth, has low aims, which are likewise threefold--the pomp of the world, self-interest, and pleasure. According as one or other of these is stronger in us we attain sanctification and happiness, or spiritual ruin and misery. To destroy the reign of perverse love and these three hostile passions there are no arms more reliable than those which attack their very foundations, and these arms are obedience, poverty, and chastity. These were the arms which Rita continued to wield until she received from her Divine Spouse the eternal crown prepared for her ripe and splendid virtues! The strongest weapon of the perfect is obedience, and when it is employed by charity it opens up the way to every good object, as, on the other hand, disobedience lays open the way to every evil, visible and invisible, of the world. To begin with the consideration of this great virtue, which Rita made a solemn vow to practise, we can affirm that she possessed it in a most eminent degree. All her actions were so many acts of obedience, or, rather, her whole conventual life was an uninterrupted act of the humblest, truest, and readiest obedience. Following the principles of her enlightened piety, she knew only too well the truth declared to Samuel, that the sacrifice of the will is more acceptable to God than the sacrifice of victims.[1] She always kept before her eyes the example of a God who, for our instruction, willed to live subject to His own creatures. She felt moved to imitate the heroic virtue of so many sainted monks and nuns, and she saw clearly the great advantage which obedience gave in directing our steps through this world of darkness and sin. She therefore subjected herself not only to all the laws of the Gospel, of the Church, of the Rule and Constitutions of her Order, and not only obeyed with respect and alacrity all the commands of the different superiors she had, and carried out the duties of the various offices she filled, but she eagerly desired to subject herself to her equals or juniors in the convent, and sought to anticipate the commands even of these, to follow their counsels and carry out their desires, esteeming herself only as the unworthy servant of all. Virtue so rare deserved to be put to the severest proof, since God often tries the virtue of the pious either Himself or through the means of others. The trial of Rita's obedience was this: The Prioress, who had observed her great spirit of submission, commanded her to water every day a dried-up tree that was in the convent garden. Rita made no objection against so strange a command; she did not say that such an order was outside the matters to which the Rule obliged her; she did not even submit that it would be time lost, for she was convinced that the time in which any work of obedience is done is time well spent. Therefore, with her will in complete accord with the orders she received, she continued to obey them for several seasons, and in this she was imitating the example of the holy abbot John, of whom we read in the lives of the Fathers that, in order to follow the instructions of his director, he humbled himself so far as to carry a pail of water a considerable distance to water a dry trunk of a tree. So did St. Rita likewise, and not in vain; for so pleasing to God were her acts of heroic obedience that, as tradition tells, the tree bloomed again, and began to bear flowers and fruit, and from that fact it was called the 'Saint's Tree.' What chiefly concerned her was that her obedience should bear fruit unto eternal life, and hence the love which her heart felt for this beautiful virtue was ever increasing. She therefore sought the approval, direction, and restraining influence of another's will not only in her temporal undertakings, but also in her devotional and penitential exercises. When there was question of going to Rome to gain the indulgences of the jubilee year, and again when she was to be separated during the last years of her life from the pleasant society of her sisters in religion, she allowed no consideration of fervent piety, no personal reluctance, to come between her and her duty towards holy obedience, from which she would not swerve an iota. Thus our saint passed the rest of her life without a will of her own, or, if she had a will, it was one that desired to do nothing except what obedience ordered, in this way making certain of doing the will of God in all things, which was the single object of all her desires. This is how she conquered in herself and annihilated that great predominant passion of man, the love of worldly glory. She conquered also the second strong passion--love of self-interest--by a generous love of evangelical poverty. We have already remarked how from her earliest years, and amongst the comforts of her father's house, she was enamoured of this holy poverty, and how she was accustomed to observe it in her humble manner of dress, in opposing all outward show, in the frugality of her living, in her abstinence, in depriving herself of her best garments for the poor, and in renouncing in their favour all her earthly possessions at her entrance into religion, whence it seems, there was nothing else that could be added except the vow and perseverance. Nevertheless, the spirit of poverty markedly increased in Rita whilst she lived in the convent, where she was chosen to dwell till her death. There, in truth, everything breathed humility and straitness of means, and she might well be satisfied that by ordinary observance she was fulfilling her vow. But saints are never satisfied unless they go beyond the goal of ordinary mortals and if they do not reach the heroic point of virtue. It happened thus in Rita's case, for although she loved uniformity and was opposed to those singularities which often deserve to be the subject of suspicion, yet she felt that she ought not to oppose God's inspirations, or confine herself solely to the usages of the community, but, subject to obedience, she carried the rigours of religious poverty much farther. We might tell here of her protracted fastings and the small quantity of food of the poorest sort with which she kept herself alive, but we shall speak of these things in a subsequent chapter, and shall now only touch on the poverty of her dress and of her abode. She did not show her poverty by wearing a coarser habit or one differing in any way from those of her sisters in religion, yet there is one particular that shows in a singular, not to say miraculous, manner her spirit of poverty; for, like the Hebrews in the desert, from the moment she put her foot in the convent till she entered the promised land of the blessed, a period of more than forty years, she had only one habit, which she wore night and day, and even during her illnesses. As regards the poverty of her dwelling-place, her little room, which may still be seen, declares it sufficiently, for it is only a narrow cell, the least of all, crushed into a corner of the dormitory, and with no light except a sort of twilight that filters into it from the common window. A few pictures representing the mysteries of our Lord's Passion were its only ornaments; the bed was hard and rough, and more adapted to give pain than rest; all other necessaries were wanting. Yet the holy penitent lived there contented, and considered herself rich and wealthy, especially when she considered the nakedness of the Crucified One, for she regarded the Cross of Christ, her loving Spouse, as a mirror wherein to behold herself. The cold words 'mine' and 'thine' which have been the cause of division in families and kingdoms, and still divide hearts, never issued from her lips, and even the things most necessary to her she let depend on her Superior's will, and was always ready to deprive herself of them at the slightest beck of authority, for she never had the least desire to own anything. There is related of her a singular fact, which proves her detachment from the things of earth. Going on a journey undertaken for reasons of devotion, of which we shall speak later, with some of the nuns of the convent, she threw into a river the money that had been given her to defray her expenses, or, as others say, which she accidentally found. Her companions thought that, considering their great necessity, this was an act of real imprudence, and could not refrain from blaming her. But Rita, who was full of confidence in the protection of heaven, assured them they would want for nothing; and so it happened, for they wanted for nothing throughout their journey. That God who feeds the birds of the air and the fishes of the deep took care to provide His servant and her companions with every necessary on their long way. In such a way did Rita, poor in possessions and in spirit, advance with great strides on the way of perfection, and add new riches to the incorruptible treasures she had laid up in heaven. By poverty and obedience she had overcome the two passions of self-interest and worldly glory; there remained the third passion, that for sensual pleasures, against which our saint had to wage a more bitter war, because, like the Apostle, she felt in herself that law that was contrary to the law of the spirit, and because, as St. Augustine writes, this is precisely the hardest fight that has to be fought by Christians and the perfect. It is true that this most virtuous woman was accustomed from her earliest years to watch over all her thoughts and to keep a careful guard on her senses, and that from her youth she had determined to preserve the candour of her virginity intact; that she constantly preserved the most exemplary modesty; that she avoided to the utmost of her power, even when in the world, all evil discourse and companions and other incentives to impurity; that she had lived most chastely and immaculately even as a wife. Yet with all this she was not free from temptations, and to conquer them she had recourse to an extreme rigour of life. The demon used all his power in attacking Rita's purity; at one time he tempted her by impure phantasms, at another by seductive apparitions. But she put him to flight by her lively faith and her austere penances. In the fiercest assaults of temptation she went so far as to burn her hand or foot, thus putting out one fire by the pain of another, in order to keep herself entirely pure in the sight of her most pure heavenly Spouse. Through love of this virtue she avoided all opportunities of seeing or being seen, and she adopted this safeguard even with her own relatives. When she had sometimes to appear abroad she showed such recollection, modesty, and gravity as to excite the wonder of others and attract universal veneration. So remarkable was her modesty on such occasions that when she came back to the convent (in those days the obligations of enclosure were not so strict as they now are) she was sometimes able to declare that she had not seen a single person. This circumspection which our saint employed in the custody of her eyes may seem excessive to worldly-minded people, but 'everyone hath his proper gift from God';[2] and besides, the means of attaining to extraordinary virtue like Rita's are not always ordinary; nor were her penances, which were a means to this end, ordinary penances. If such was the violence of her spiritual struggles, there is no doubt but that the victories she gained were remarkable and productive of many good results, and that the reward which God reserved for her in a happy eternity was passing great. [1] 1 Kings xv. 22. [2] 1 Cor. vii. 7. CHAPTER VI RITA'S PENANCES However hard and sharp penance may appear at the first glance, yet it, too, is a daughter of love, love that gives strength to put a curb on carnal appetites, which are ever striving to rebel against the first uncreated love, and which incites to reparation of past offences and atonement for them. It is no wonder, then, that Rita, who was burning with the flame of Divine love, and who had the holiest horror of sin, should carry her austerities even to the point of heroism. True, such innocence did not deserve so great pains; but she who, in her profound humility, thought herself full of defects and faults, who knew human frailty and the frequent dangers of falling into sin, and who was not exempt from the wicked suggestions of the world, the flesh, and the devil, did not consider herself exempt from those penances which she practised, for the good of sinners, as a defence against danger and an assurance of victory in temptation. Her whole life, therefore, was one continued exercise of penance owing to the great self-denial which she exhibited from her early youth, but more markedly in her married life and her widowed state, and owing also to the fastings she practised in the world, and the other mortifications which we mentioned in former chapters, but, above all, owing to the severe and almost incredible chastising of the flesh, which she made a law that she observed during all the years she lived in the cloister. To begin with her fastings, hardly had she embraced the Rule of St. Augustine, which exhorts all to conquer the flesh by fasting as much as health will permit, than she abandoned herself to a life of the most rigorous and prolonged fasting. She never admitted any of those exaggerated pretexts which the delicate sex finds it so easy to allege in order to be dispensed from the laws of fasting and abstinence. She only knew that God is not deceived, and that to desire to deceive one's self is impious folly. She therefore had no hesitation in fulfilling the most rigorous laws of abstinence without any ill-timed fear of injuring her health. Every year she fasted during three entire Lents, and also on the vigils of all holidays of obligation, of all the feasts of the Blessed Virgin, of all the saints of the Order, and of her particular advocates, not to mention other extraordinary fasts which she observed. She took food only once a day, and never drank wine. Her condiments were often wormwood, ashes, and tears. For the greater part of the year she lived on bread and water, and as she advanced in years and progressed in sanctity she reduced her food to such scanty proportions that it was looked on as a miracle how she could in such a way support life. St. Augustine's most prudent Rule does not prescribe such things, and therefore Rita, by her heroic fasts, gave all the more glory to the Most High; and by imitating the abstinences of the Baptist, of St. Nicholas of Tolentine, and her other protectors, all well-known models of penitence, she rendered them the truest honour, for the best way of honouring the saints is to imitate their virtues. But not only did she try to follow their example by penances of this sort, but in all the other austerities of her life she endeavoured to imitate them as exactly as her condition allowed. The very dwelling-place in which she hid herself proclaimed her penitential disposition, for it was only a little cell, bare and dark, and had rather the appearance of a prison to which she had been condemned for some serious crime. We do not know for certainty whether even for appearance' sake there was a bed in it, but we do know very well that when Rita was overcome by natural weariness she took her short repose stretched on the ground, or, at best, on a board. She rose without fail from that hardest of couches at midnight to begin the infliction of greater torment on herself; for at that hour she scourged herself with a scourge of iron in order to appease Divine justice in favour of the souls in purgatory, who, though still of the communion of saints and participators in our suffrages, are left to suffer the greatest sorrow, deprived as they are of the Beatific Vision and tortured by the pain of their fires. Her great charity made her feel the holiest compassion for these unhappy souls, and it was charity that nerved her arm to continue these scourgings; but if she ever felt for herself charity, too, might have induced her to lay aside her ensanguined whip of iron. On two other occasions every day she took the discipline, once for the benefactors of her convent and Order, when she used thongs of leather, and again for the conversion of sinners, at which her whip was of twisted and knotted cords. With all this she was not satisfied if that rebellious enemy her flesh were not suffering continual pain, and hence she always wore next her skin a cilicium made of rough bristles, and on the inner side of her habit she fastened thorns that pricked her painfully at every movement she made. Amongst these thorns and the painful practices of her life our saint lay hidden, like the mystic lily of the sacred Canticles, inaccessible to passions, guarded on every side, growing more beautiful and brighter every day, because more like her heavenly Spouse crowned with thorns. CHAPTER VII RITA'S SPIRIT OF PRAYER If Rita's body, oppressed by fastings, imprisoned in hair shirts and galling bonds, made livid by scourgings, was forced to groan and sigh, it was far otherwise with her spirit. The more the body was crushed under the weight of penances, the more were the spaces of the soul enlarged, the greater its liberty, the more readily might it raise itself above all earthly things, to be plunged into the sublime depths of heavenly things and taste of their ineffable sweetness. And if her spirit sighed, it was a far different sigh from that of the body; it was the sigh of the dove--a sigh of peace and love such as was foretold by the Holy Spirit the Consoler by the mouth of the Psalmist to all souls that devote themselves to penance and prayer--'Rise ye after ye have sitten, you that eat the bread of sorrow.'[1] The same wonderful effects of grace were experienced by St. Augustine, who in his exposition of that verse of the Psalms could not refrain from exclaiming, 'How sweet are the sighs and the tears of prayer! No pleasure of the theatres or of the world can equal the joy of such tears.'[2] We must not, however, come to the conclusion that this interior joy was the chief motive that made our saint love prayer, for she loved the God of consolations much more than she loved the consolations of God; but it was an innocent attraction to her God-loving heart, and on that account she never could interrupt exercises so dear to her without feeling pain. We have already related that from her childhood she had received the gift of prayer, and which she developed in a striking way even in the years of her early youth; and we have told how she gave herself entirely to prayer during the year of her marvellous retirement in her father's house, and how she continued to make progress in devotional practices, especially when she was freed from the ties and cares of matrimony. Yet when we compare all these things with her advancement after she has embraced a conventual life, they seem but the very beginning of piety. As a nun, Rita's prayers were offered in the darkness of the night, in the early morning, throughout the day--prayer, in a word, was her life, for not even for a moment could she withdraw herself from the presence of her uncreated Love. The hours between midnight and the break of day were the fullest of delight for her, and the most favourable in which to treat all alone with God the most important affairs of eternity and to pour out the fulness of her love at the feet of the Crucified One. In the winter time, however prolonged her vigils were, that time was always short to her, and daylight came unlooked for. It seemed to her, as once to St. Anthony the abbot, that the sun was doing her wrong by appearing too soon, for she feared that he was coming to scatter with his rays the beautiful light of her heavenly exaltations and seraphic thoughts. She never wanted matter whereon to meditate, for the attributes of God and His inexhaustible beneficence were to her subjects that she could never be weary of considering. The sole thought that she was in the presence of the majesty of God, that infinite majesty that fills with its being heaven and earth and the abysses, was sufficient to raise her above every created thing and transform her into God Himself. One subject, nevertheless, beyond every other, occupied Rita's mind--that of the Passion of Jesus Christ. It almost seems as if she had inherited from her parents this particular devotion, and that upon it she had laid the foundation-stone of her sanctity. It was to the Passion that she was accustomed from childhood to direct her thoughts and affections, her sighs and tears. The reader may remember how at a tender age she shut herself into the little room at home, and there continued to meditate on the sorrowful mysteries, which also were depicted in the pictures which hung on the walls, and, better still, were carved on her heart. The senses should do their part the better to assist the soul in its efforts after piety, and this was the reason why Rita procured and kept in her cell in the convent certain representations of the Passion of her dear Jesus. To this end she kept in two distinct parts of her cell objects that recalled to her the history of the Passion. In one place she constructed a representation of a mountain, which, whenever she looked upon it, recalled Mount Calvary and all the torments which the Saviour of the world suffered there. She meditated with sighs and tears on her Divine Spouse arriving there, falling under the terrible weight of His torments, His cross, and all the sins of men. With an outburst of weeping she thought of Him deprived of His garments and fixed to the cross with rough nails. She meditated with the liveliest compassion on the cruel strokes of the hammer that tore His hands and feet, and on all the other terrible torments that Jesus suffered for love of men. In another corner of her cell she had a representation of the Holy Sepulchre, and at sight of it she considered how the adorable body of Christ was placed in it, how for three days it remained buried, how His spirit went down to console the holy fathers in Abraham's bosom, and, finally, how the Redeemer rose again to a new life triumphant and glorious. During these meditations our saint was always alone; as Jeremias says, 'she sat solitary and held her peace, and was raised above herself';[3] in that sweet silence, in those loving soliloquies, in that intimate intercourse with God she was superior to passion, to nature, and to herself. So great was her mental exaltation during her meditation on the Divine mysteries that she was often raised above the life of the senses and rapt in delicious ecstasies, and on one occasion, so strong was the ecstatic influence, the nuns thought she was dead. Now, seeing that she soared to such sublime heights in prayer, it will be no wonder that she possessed also as she did, and in a singular manner, the gifts of wisdom and intelligence, so that she could reason on the perfections of God and on the most abstruse mysteries of faith with a subtle knowledge that could be acquired by no study nor any natural capacity. Thus God hides the secrets of His wisdom from the wise of this world and reveals them to His humble servants, to those who appear ignorant in the eyes of the world. All these things excited to rage the infernal enemy of all good and all sanctity, and in order to make the holy nun desist from her pious practice he tried to frighten her with horrible yells and dreadful apparitions. But she continued to be motionless in prayer, and by prayer itself triumphed over all the powers of hell. By the merit of her prayers, too, she acquired a certain authority over devils. A proof of this is that a woman who had for years been harassed by diabolical interference was freed from it by Rita. Through prayer, too, she obtained the grace of a supernatural healing for a young girl who was ill, whose mother had the consolation of seeing her cured after having brought her to the saint to ask the help of her prayers. We know that God was accustomed to grant whatever she asked for, and so great was the fame of her successful intercession and sanctity that devout people, confident in her advocacy, came to her in crowds, and of all who came none went away dissatisfied. Yet these were but the first-fruits that appeared externally and to the eyes of men to testify to the extraordinary efficacy of her prayers. We shall see more clearly in the remainder of her life, and much more so after her death, in the many prodigious works that God performed through her intercession, how great was the merit of our saint's faith and of her prayers. We may also mention at the conclusion of this chapter the most fervent prayers which she often offered before Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament and before the pictures of the most holy Virgin; but it was not the circumstance of place that chiefly enkindled her devotion, for at every instant and in all places she found Jesus and Mary, and a thousand objects adapted to excite her most fervent piety. [1] Ps. cxxvi. 3. [2] Ps. cxxvi. [3] Lam. iii. 28. CHAPTER VIII A THORN FROM THE SAVIOUR'S CROWN OF THORNS WOUNDS RITA'S FOREHEAD Rita had lived thirty years in the convent, leading that saintly life we have described, and had attained her sixty-second year, when, in the year 1443, it pleased God to mark in a wonderful manner, and, as it were, put His seal on her merit by conferring on her a privilege that is well worthy to be described. There lived at that time St. James of the Marshes, one of those Apostolic men whom God then raised up, like St. Vincent Ferrer, St. Laurence Giustiniani, St. Bernardine of Siena, and St. John of Capestrano, to be strong barriers against the depravity of the world, the rage of civil discord, the shock of schism, and the advance of rising heresies. After many years passed with great advantage to souls in the missions of Bosnia, Hungary, and the East, he was recalled in that year by Pope Eugene IV., who destined him to preach the Crusade in the province of Aquila, against the infidel Sultan Amurath II., who had already penetrated into the heart of Hungary. On his return he had occasion to go through the territory and towns of Spoleto preaching the Gospel, and he expounded the word of God in Cascia amongst other places. His discourses in Cascia were on the subject of our Lord's Passion, and Rita was present at them. That a nun was present amongst the people to hear the holy preacher will cause no astonishment when we know that although the law of religious enclosure had been established by many Councils and by Pope Boniface VIII., yet its observance was not rigorously enforced until the time of the Council of Trent, and nuns might go out of their convents, especially when there was question of fulfilling religious duties or to hear the word of God preached. Rita, then, with the other nuns of her convent, was present at the sermons, which she listened to with that purity of intention that casts out all curiosity, and has for its only objects the glory of God and the sanctification of the soul. The sanctity and zeal of the preacher, who had long known the secret of touching the most hardened hearts, will enable us to judge of the effects of his preaching. That his subject was our Lord's Passion--the chief object of Rita's meditation, and which excited her to the highest point of the love of God--will be enough to tell us how deeply his discourses must have impressed her. A divine compassion filled her heart, and she only restrained her tears as she listened in order afterwards to pour them copiously forth when she knelt before the crucifix in the old oratory of the convent. One day, as she was there prostrated, wounded in spirit by the vehemence of her great sorrow, with much sobbing she prayed and besought her Love, who had been crowned with thorns, to permit her whilst still in the flesh to taste at least of the bitter chalice of His sufferings. Her heartfelt prayers were heard, and she saw one of the thorns of the crown of the crucifix detach itself, as it were, and strike her on the left side of the forehead with such force that it almost penetrated the bone, causing her exquisite pain. She fainted from the pain, and it seemed to her that only by a miracle could she survive such great suffering. But love was stronger than pain in her, and grace supported the weakness of nature itself. The wound, which by time grew larger, festered, and became wormy, was visible on her forehead for fifteen years. The worms and the offensive smell, similar to that which once tormented Job, increased the pain of the wound and disgusted others. But these things formed the delight of the patient nun, whose one desire was to become like her Saviour, who, as the prophet Isaias says,[1] was become for her and for the human race the most abject of men and the Man of Sorrows, whose look was hidden and despised--a prophecy so exactly fulfilled that He was unrecognisable when the streams of blood flowed down His face from the wounds the thorns had made in His head. When Rita was asked, as she sometimes was, what the worms were that occasionally fell from her forehead, she used to reply, with a joyous smile, 'They are my little angels,' letting it thereby be seen that the more she was humbled and afflicted in the flesh, the more she rejoiced in spirit, as was also the case with St. Francis of Assisi and St. Catherine of Siena, whose great privilege of the stigmata is celebrated by feasts of the Church, and also with another Augustinian nun, St. Clare of Montefalco, on the living flesh of whose heart miraculous representations of the Passion were impressed. Rita rejoiced the more in this gift, inasmuch as it procured for her more frequent occasion of exercising herself in humility, patience, retirement, silence, prayer, and the love of that God who had conferred on her so marked a distinction. From thenceforward as long as she bore that mark of the Redemption on her forehead, which was as long as she lived, she never ceased to thank Him for it and to praise and bless Him. She, too, was become an outcast from amongst men, but instead of being afflicted thereby she was only the more strongly united to God, in whom all her desires and all her hopes of consolation were centred. She considered that singular effect of Divine grace which is not offended by unsightliness of body as abundant compensation for any sufferings she had to bear and as a pledge of an ample eternal reward in heaven. [1] Isa. liii. 3. CHAPTER IX RITA GOES TO ROME TO GAIN THE INDULGENCE OF THE JUBILEE If Rita's life till the time when she received the wound in her forehead may be called a hidden life, from thenceforward it was a buried life, and invisible to the eyes of men. On that account, passing in silence over an interval of eight years, our history proceeds to describe the events of her life in the year 1450. The intervening years were not, however, years of idleness for our holy nun, or if she did enjoy repose it was not very dissimilar from that of the blessed in heaven, and perhaps of more advantage to the Church than any active efforts of hers. The Western Church, as a matter of fact, had just then, through the prayers of the saints, arisen from its state of dejection and abasement. The schism of the Greeks, Armenians, and Ethiopians had come to an end ten years before, and the glory of that happy event was attributed principally to the merits of St. Nicholas of Tolentine, who was canonized at that time by Pope Eugene IV. The other schism, of the anti-Popes, died out, too, a few months later, when Felix V. voluntarily abdicated; and Rita's penances and prayers must have co-operated in bringing about so joyful a conclusion. Nicholas V., who occupied the chair of Peter, was thus enabled to proclaim peacefully a solemn jubilee for the year 1450, to throw open the treasure-house of Divine indulgences for the advantage of the faithful. This was the sixth jubilee celebrated in the new Church of Jesus Christ, and seeing that the Church was enjoying the lately restored peace, and that piety had begun again to spring up, greater crowds of people than ever before, from all parts of the world, were flocking to Rome to participate in the extraordinary spiritual favours. When even the least devout were hastening thither, we may judge how ardent was Rita's desire of availing of so precious an occasion. She was aware that even her sisters in religion were preparing to set out for Rome, and she, who for many years and until that moment seemed in her retirement to hate the very light of day, was not afraid to leave her cell for a purpose so holy; and making light of the inconveniences of travel and of her advanced age, she threw herself at the feet of the Superior, and begged leave to join the other nuns in their devout pilgrimage. But the Prioress did not think it prudent that Rita, owing to the offensive nature of the sore on her forehead, should appear in public or undertake a journey, and therefore sent her back to her cell, telling her that she should first think of curing her wound, and then she would grant the permission asked for. The condition imposed almost in jest was not long in being fulfilled, for Rita had recourse to fervent prayer to the Lord, who had inspired her with the desire of going on the pilgrimage, and who was accustomed to grant all her petitions, and she received instantly the favour she so ardently desired. It is to be remarked here that Rita, who always, in her profound humility, endeavoured to hide the favours of heaven, chose in this instance to make use of an ointment in order to conceal the miracle of her instantaneous healing. But the work of God was too evident, and the Superior had therefore no hesitation in granting the permission that Rita sought, and her blessing. She set out on foot in the company of her sisters in religion without any consideration for her age, which was then about sixty-nine years, with no dread of the long journey or the inconveniences of the season, and she pushed forward joyously towards the metropolis of the Catholic world. It was on this journey that the incident occurred which was mentioned when speaking of her spirit of poverty, that when she was crossing over a river she threw into it the little sum of money that was given to her probably to supply their wants on the pilgrimage. Her companions blamed her for what she had done; but not God, who had secretly urged her to that act of generosity, and who afterwards provided herself and her companions with all they needed until their return to the convent. When she arrived at her journey's end she lost no time in gazing on those monuments of profane antiquity of which Rome is so proud, but directed all the feelings and sentiments of her body and soul towards those things that were the objects of her piety--the memories of the holy martyrs, the confessions of the blessed Apostles Peter and Paul, devout visits to the churches, and the gaining of the holy indulgences. It would seem, indeed, that having led such a stainless life, and after so great and so severe penances, that she had no need to have recourse to those extraordinary means of atonement for sin; but holiness is always deeply humble, and the same humility which led St. Briget and St. Catherine to the second jubilee brought St. Rita a century later to the sixth. Enriched with new treasures of grace, and impatient to be free from the din of the streets and the perpetual crush of people, she with her companions, ever in the arms of Divine Providence, began the journey back to Cascia, and after walking four or five days arrived again at the convent and her beloved cell. She had hardly reached home when, wonderful to tell, the sore on her forehead, which had healed up by the power of God a little before she set out from Cascia, suddenly broke out again, and thereby made it more evident that the preceding cure had been miraculous. Never more, until the day of her death, was Rita to be deprived of a privilege so dear to her. CHAPTER X RITA'S LAST ILLNESS AND DEATH Rita survived seven years after her return from Rome. The first three of these, like the eight preceding years, are hidden under the veil of God's deep designs, for it is not granted to us to discover anything of her exterior life during that period. Of her interior life, too, there is nothing left, if we except certain general knowledge of her spirit of penance, her continued love of prayer, and her union with God ever becoming closer. Three years passed, and Rita had reached the seventy-second year of her age and the fortieth of her life in religion, when it pleased the Lord to visit her with an illness which afflicted her for four years, and ended only with her life. This is the first time after so many years that any illness of Rita's is mentioned, except the sore on her forehead, which goes far to prove that even long-continued and rigorous penances are not--contrary to the opinion of the world's delicacy--opposed to bodily health or calculated to shorten life. It might seem, indeed, that, considering the great misfortunes she had to bear, the many humiliations, and the many voluntary penances she undertook, she ought to be exempted from this final suffering. With all that, God wished that this beautiful work of His hands should be marked by the greatest perfection, and desired to exalt her to the higher places in His glory, and He also willed to add to her past sufferings and the still present troubles of her wounded forehead the pain of this long illness. We do not know with certainty what malady she suffered from, but, whatever it was, it resisted all the remedies of science. It is not improbable that, as one of the writers of her life suggests, it was a wasting fever, one of those maladies that sap the vital strength by degrees through an obstinate and mortal languor, and finally causes death. During all that time she remained confined to her hard bed, and the manner in which she bore all the pains and annoyances of her long illness was a cause of the greatest edification to all who assisted, for her face not only showed the resignation and serenity of her mind, but she was always desiring to suffer still greater pain, and was for ever thanking Divine Providence that deigned to purify her in this world and give her some occasion of acquiring merit. But there was one pain she felt more than any other, and it was because through illness she was become useless to the community, and even a burden and trouble to her sisters, especially by reason of the deformity and offensiveness of the sore on her forehead; yet not even the grief of this could take away from her the merit of her most heroic resignation to the will of God and equally heroic humility and patience. Yet another matter there was which must have weighed heavily on her, when we compare the very lowly opinion she had of herself with that sublimest idea she had been enabled to form of God's infinite majesty, and that was that she could now no longer present herself at the Eucharistic table to receive her Jesus with that frequency with which she had been accustomed to partake of that heavenly bread, but was now, on the contrary, obliged to receive Him lying on her miserable pallet. But the holy soul supplied in ardent desire and in the intensest internal acts of adoration and love for that external veneration which her bodily weakness rendered impossible. As her disease progressed, or, rather, as her sanctity increased, so small was the quantity of food she consumed that it could not be told how she was able to live, and therefore the nuns who were attending on her came to the conclusion that she was kept alive by the bread of angels. Nor was their idea so far from the truth, for Rita herself had to confirm it when, on their pressing her to take some more nourishment, she replied: 'My soul, fixed to the sacred wounds of Jesus Christ, is fed with other food.' Now, it happened that whilst the saint was in this state, and not far from the end of her mortal life, a relative came to visit her, and after passing some time in condoling with her and giving her comfort, was about to go away. Before her departure she asked Rita if she wanted anything, and said she would willingly do her a service. 'Yes,' said Rita. 'I beg you to go to the garden of my house as soon as you reach Rocca Porena, and pluck a rose there and bring it to me.' It was then the month of January, the time in which the greatest rigour of winter is felt, especially in that valley, which is closed in on all sides by overhanging mountains, where the sun rises late and sets early, and where at that season all nature is buried under snow and ice. At the strange request the woman did not know what to think except that Rita was wandering in her mind through the severity of her illness. She pitied her, and went back to Rocca Porena. When she reached home it happened that she went to the garden, either through curiosity or because God so disposed it, and she saw, conspicuous amidst the frozen bushes, a full-blown red rose. At the sight she was seized by various feelings of wonder, joy, and devotion, and ran to pluck the flower, with which she returned without delay to the convent of Cascia to deliver the wonderful gift to the saint. Rita took it as coming from the hands of her Divine Spouse, and with holy joy offered it to her sisters who were standing around. They, too, were seized with wonder and amazement, and joined with her in praising the goodness and omnipotence of God. Another prodigious occurrence, not unlike that we have just related and not less wonderful, happened very soon after. The same woman who had brought the flower to the saint was bidding her farewell on another occasion, and asked her again if she needed anything. Rita thus answered the charitable question: 'Since you are so kind, I beg that you will go to the same garden, where you will find two figs, which you will have the charity to bring me.' This time the woman did not hesitate a moment, but as soon as she heard the words hurried home, and in a short time was in the garden mentioned. There, on a leafless tree, she found the two ripe figs, which she plucked with renewed wonder and pleasure, and carried immediately to the sick nun. At the sight of this second wonder Rita broke forth into new acts of gratitude and love to the Lord, in which her sisters joined. The fame of these miraculous events was spread throughout the neighbourhood, and wonder seized on all the people, and they conceived a great veneration for the dying saint, whom they clearly perceived to be beloved by God. Thus compassed about with flowers and fruit, like the bride of the sacred Canticles,[1] Rita felt that she was languishing with love, and by this growing weaker, she eagerly desired to be free from the ties of the body, and at last take flight to enjoy for all eternity her Uncreated Good. Her chaste sighs were not in vain, for her Divine Spouse Jesus, accompanied by the most holy Virgin, appeared to her to announce the joyous tidings that in three days she should be taken from the world and from pain, and received into Paradise to receive the reward due to her virtues and sufferings. The vision disappeared, and joy inundated Rita's heart, and well was this known from that extraordinary and angelic serenity of her countenance which she preserved till her last breath, in spite of the pains and sorrows of death. The nuns alone wept as they stood around her bed. In these last moments of hers, profoundly moved by her tranquillity and the wonders they had seen, they had come to know her better, and to appreciate more perfectly her extraordinary virtues. In the midst of these tears the saint turned to her dear sisters, humbly asked pardon of all of them for any offence she might have given them and for the trouble she had caused, left them in remembrance of her beautiful words of peace, obedience, and piety, and then asked the blessing of the Superior. Her desolate sisters wanted, too, to get a blessing from her as a pledge of that charity with which she had always loved them, and with which they besought that she would love and protect them when she was in heaven. Rita blessed them, tried to console them, and then had no thought for anything but eternity. Our heroine, it is true, was assured from above of the possession of future glory, yet she in no wise neglected to fortify herself with all the aids and comforts with which our holy Mother Church prepares us for the great passage. Gathering, therefore, all the strength of her spirit, she expressed her desire that the Holy Viaticum should be brought to her, and Extreme Unction administered. She received these holy Sacraments with a fervour which cannot easily be imagined, much less described, and with these fresh pledges of grace, and with her eyes turned towards the home of the Blessed, her soul took its flight thither, where she lives an immortal life filled with ineffable joy, the reward of her heroic Virtues. Her precious death took place during the Pontificate of Calixtus III., in the year 1457, when she had attained the seventy-sixth year of her age and the forty-fourth of her religious life, on the night of the 22nd of May, when Saturday was ending, a day specially consecrated to the honour of the Virgin Mary, to whom she was always most devout, and towards the beginning of Sunday, the day dedicated to the Lord and figurative of eternal repose. [1] Cant. ii. 5. END OF PART II Part III RITA IN HEAVEN CHAPTER I WONDERFUL EVENTS THAT HAPPENED AT RITA'S DEATH--BURIAL OF HER SACRED BODY In describing Rita's mortal life, we judged it expedient to give from time to time some idea of the trend of events and of the calamities of the times in which she lived, and we have hopes that it will not be displeasing to the reader nor outside the scope we proposed to ourselves if we continue to follow the same plan now that we are come to speak of her immortal life in so far as it may be said to be visible in those works in which God willed to give glory to His servant even on earth. For her, indeed, time was changed into changeless eternity, but the world was, as ever, in its instability, and was perpetually changing appearance. The short-lived peace which had been established at the Council of Florence had once more fled from the distracted East, and Mahomet II., destined by God to punish those relapsing schismatics, had at this time overturned the Empire of Constantinople, and was threatening with ruin the newly-established Empire of Trebizond, as well as other kingdoms. It is true that in the year 1457--the year of Rita's death--the infidel usurper was driven back out of Hungary and Belgrade, and had been defeated by the brave Scanderbeg in Albania, by Cardinal de Aquileia on the �gean Sea, and by Uson Cassano near the confines of Persia. But these losses caused only a temporary check, and were but the last flattering hope of the hardened and perfidious Greeks. Calixtus III. was then Pope, and from his Apostolic throne it was his sad lot to see the heritage of Jesus Christ despoiled, and could only weep over what he could not prevent. The wise Pontiff strained every effort to prevent still greater ruin, but the effeminacy, egoism, and rivalry of the Courts of Europe opposed his brave purpose, and left open a free passage to the progress of the conqueror. In the West the outlook was brighter for the Church and the world, for affairs were directed by the Emperor Frederick III., surnamed the Peacemaker, and Pope Calixtus, whose great desire was to see peace firmly established in Italy, from whence it had so long been banished. Indeed, it was only in the year before he ascended the Papal throne that the first signs of reviving peace were seen in that troubled peninsula. It was through the means of a humble Augustinian friar that in the end was obtained that peace which princes and monarchs had in vain attempted to restore; for Fr. Simonetto of Camerino, a priest of extraordinary piety, is famous in history for being the pacificator of Italy. Good morals and piety began to gain vigour, and brought consolation to the Church for the irreparable losses it had sustained in the East. The reigning houses also that were least friendly to national concord, and which had not remained unstained by depravity, began again to give indications of sanctity. In this very year of 1457, Fr. Gabriel Sforza, Archbishop of Milan, styled the Blessed, passed to his heavenly reward, and a few months after his death Blessed Christina Visconti followed him to the kingdom of heaven. Like Rita, both of these were Augustinians. The Governments of the republics of Siena and of Genoa were the last to suffer from the disasters of war, the former having been attacked by the ambitious Picunino, and Genoa having been engaged with the maritime forces of Alphonsus, King of Naples; but even these wars had at last come to an end. Cascia, which still continued to be governed as a republic, in common with the other States was enjoying in prosperity the fruits of peace, and was now about to acquire greater renown through the death of Rita, whose imperishable glory was soon to be proclaimed. Scarcely, indeed, had she breathed her last when began a long series of prodigious events, which immediately spread her fame abroad. The first of these to excite wonder was that at the moment of her death the nun who had been her closest companion in life saw the soul of the saint take its flight to heaven, accompanied by angels, in the garb of brightness in which it had pleased God to clothe her. The second wonder was that at that same moment the bell of the convent rang out, tolled by no visible agency, and the saint's cell was radiating with an unaccustomed splendour. The sore on her forehead, too, which in life had been most offensive, was now giving forth an odour of heavenly fragrance, and that wound, which had been an unsightly deformity, now took on the appearance of a shining jewel. Her body, which before had exhibited all the wasting effects of continual mortification, but was the seat of a most pure soul and the temple of the Holy Ghost, was now transformed and clothed with almost superhuman beauty. In a word, not only her soul, but her very body seemed as if it had been assumed into the splendour of the saints. At the manifestation of events so wonderful the nuns and the faithful who were present changed their sorrow into a holy joy, and ceased not to bless the Lord and recommend themselves to Rita's patronage. As the report of these prodigies spread about, the people flocked in crowds to see and to venerate that sacred body, and thus God was praised in the wonders He had worked, the virtues of His saint were published, and in the hearts of many there sprang up the desire of imitating her example. The obsequies were to be solemnly celebrated on the following morning, and meanwhile the crowds arriving from all the surrounding country were continually increasing. Amongst the others came a woman who was a near relative of Rita, whose arm had been many years paralysed. This woman approached the sacred body, and, to relieve her feelings of love, sorrow, and devotion, clasped it around the neck. On the instant her withered arm suddenly regained feeling and strength. She began to cry out that a miracle was wrought for her, and all the bystanders took up the cry of 'A miracle! a miracle!' whilst she who was healed kissed again and again the body of her deliverer, and returned thanks to God for His great mercy. The body was brought from the cell into the ancient chapel, where it was quickly surrounded by a crush of impatient people, who seemed as if they never could be satisfied with gazing on the sacred remains of the holy nun. The last solemn offices were celebrated, but the body had to be left visible for a long time to satisfy the pious curiosity and devotion of the faithful. At last it was placed in a coffin of poplar, which was enclosed in another of walnut wood, in order that one who was so honoured by God should receive honourable sepulture. This was but the beginning of Rita's renown. We shall see as we advance how God gave greater glory to His servant. CHAPTER II MIRACLES WROUGHT BY GOD THROUGH RITA'S INTERCESSION BEFORE HER BEATIFICATION The primary object of miracles is to establish the Catholic religion, and this is the reason why the Son of God and His disciples performed so many miraculous works that filled the world with amazement and invited men to embrace the faith. Even when the kingdom of Christ had been established miracles did not altogether cease, but rather it pleased God for His greater glory to raise up miracle workers in every age for the edification of the faithful, to place a more distinctive mark on His Church, and to confirm His followers in the faith. A little before Rita's time there were chosen, amongst others, St. Nicholas of Tolentine, St. Vincent Ferrer, St. Bernardine of Siena, St. Francis of Paul to be famous ministers of His omnipotence and mercy. Then followed St. Rita, who, although during her life she did not perform marvels as did these Apostolic men, yet after her death became celebrated, and is still celebrated throughout the whole world for the many great miracles with which it pleased the Lord to publish the merits of His beloved spouse. But as St. John the Evangelist has said, speaking of our Lord, so very numerous were the miracles He wrought that only a small proportion of them is recorded in the Sacred Writings, we may say, preserving due proportion, much the same of Rita. For not only have lapse of time and carelessness deprived us of the memory of many of the miracles worked through her intercession, but even in the present, when nearly every part of the world is ringing with the fame of her great prodigies, authentic testimony is often wanting, and sometimes we are at a loss for a simple relation of the facts. We must therefore perforce be contented with recording a certain number of them taken from the process of her beatification, and we shall follow the order in which they are related by those writers of her life who have preceded us. The series of miracles of which we have authentic knowledge begins from the third day after the saint's death. We give it here in compendium. On the 25th of the month of May in which St. Rita died a certain Baptist d'Angelo of Col Giacone, in the territory of Cascia, who had completely lost his sight, having heard of the miracles which God was working through her intercession in those first days after her death, had his faith quickly aroused, and with confidence recommended himself to her patronage, and in an instant his sight was restored. Two days later a woman named Lucrezia di Paolo, from Col Forcella, a village also in the territory of Cascia, whose body was swollen and doubled up through advanced years and owing to a sort of dropsy from which she suffered, went to where the saint's body was lying, and, having prayed there with strong faith, was enabled to return to her home free from disease and in perfect health. On the same day another woman named Frances, the wife of Antonio Fucelli of Cascia, who had been deaf for five years, was praying before the body of the saint in the presence of a multitude of people. On a sudden she felt that her hearing was restored. The truth of this miracle is attested by the people who were present. Two days later still a man named Salimbene d'Antonio, from Poggio-Primocaso, one of whose fingers had lost all power of motion and was dried up for many years, went to pray that he might be cured, and touched the saint's sacred body with his powerless finger; he, too, was instantaneously cured, and went back to his home rejoicing. On the last day of May a woman called Giacomuccia di Leonardo, from Ocosce, a village quite close to Cascia, was miraculously cured of grievous pains, from which she had been tormented for two years, and which had reduced her to a state of extreme weakness. This grace was granted to her after having prayed most fervently for eight days, at the end of which her persevering faith was rewarded by her restoration to health. Frances di Giovanni, from Bisella, in Nursia, who was deaf and dumb from birth, was brought on the same day to visit the miraculous body of the saint. She ardently recommended herself to her patronage, and performed the acts of devotion possible to a deaf mute. Speech and hearing were thereupon suddenly granted to her. The first words she uttered were 'Ave Maria,' a fact which amazed her parents and the people who witnessed the miracle. Still another miracle was wrought by the omnipotence of God, through Rita's intercession, before the end of that month of May. A certain Lucrezia, wife of Ser Paolo of Golforalla, who was all swollen with dropsy, and whose case the physicians judged incurable, had herself brought before the saint's body, and there with the strongest confidence begged that her heart's desire might be granted. She, too, was restored to health and strength. On the 2nd of June in the same year a youth named Bernard, the son of Matteo Del-re, from Ocosce, who was suffering from the gravel and was in very great pain, was brought to where the saint's coffin was by his father, who besought for him the pity of the saint, and was granted the grace he prayed for. The next day a man called Spirito d'Angelo, from Cascia, through the intercession of St. Rita, was cured of chronic sciatica, from which he had suffered grievous pain for four years. Four days later a young girl from Rocca, in the territory of Nursia, whose name was Maria d'Angelo, who had been deaf and dumb from birth, went with her parents to do homage to the saint of Cascia, and, like Frances di Giovanni, she, too, obtained hearing and speech. When this miracle was made known the girl had to get into the pulpit to satisfy the pious curiosity of the people, and there for the first time she pronounced the sweet name of Mary and the names of other saints, and so great was the wonder of the people that a thanksgiving procession was formed, in which the clergy took part, and a sermon was preached by Fr. Giovanni Paoletti of Cascia. On the 13th of the same month Francesco, son of Antonio Pasquali, of the village of San Cipriano, in the district of Amatrice, who was also a deaf mute, was brought by his father and others to Rita's glorious tomb, and departed thence with the full use of his senses, astonished at the novelty of his sensations and the greatness of the miracle. Another miracle took place five days after in favour of Lucia di Sante Lalli, from the town of S. Maria, in the territory of Nursia. One of her eyes was entirely blind for fifteen years, and the other was nearly so. She went, accompanied by her mother, to visit the holy body of the saint in Cascia, and remained there praying for fifteen days, at the end of which, through her faith and the intercession of the saint, she regained her sight, as she had ardently desired. After describing the last-mentioned miracle there is a break in the ancient records, and we read of no other miracles till thirty years later. Under the date of the 3rd of June, 1487, we find that Pietro di Giovanni of Paganelli, and his wife, a native of Nursia, made a vow to St. Rita for the restoration to health of their son Pietro, who was so tongue-tied that he could not utter a word. The saint consoled them, for in a short time their son was in perfect health, with full use of speech. A daughter of Gregorio d'Antonio of Col Giacone, who had lost the power of speech after a severe illness, recovered it after being brought to the saint's tomb. This fact is mentioned under the date of the 22nd of June in the same year. About the same time Sante di Mariano of Rocca Porena, whilst playing bull, was thrown violently against one of his companions, who had a knife in his belt, and was accidentally so severely wounded in the ventral region that the physicians despaired of curing him. He had recourse to the saint, and although he was not cured instantly, yet he immediately began to improve, and ultimately he was restored to perfect health. On the 18th of May, about two years afterwards, Angela, wife of Domenico Berardi of Logna, a town in the territory of Cascia, whose arm was crippled and so diseased that it brought on feverish feelings every day, had recourse to the invisible virtue of that holy body, and was completely healed. Father Nicola Galli, who had been confessor of the nuns in the convent in which the saint lived, and who wrote her life, which to a great extent we are making use of in this chapter, and who declares that he took his account of Rita's miracles from the process of her beatification given him by the nuns, relates as the sixteenth of her miracles that a certain Giovanni di Rocca Porena was restored from death to life through the merits of the saint, but he mentions no circumstances. A woman named Fior di Pier Antonio had a son named Spirito, who suffered from a sort of insanity, which doctors would call _lycanthropy_ (a species of insanity in which the patient imagines himself to be a wolf), owing to which he was given to wandering through the woods and mountains, and felt a tendency to hurl himself from high places. His afflicted mother, seeing that all the remedies of science were useless, had recourse to St. Rita, and was consoled by her son's being restored to health and his right mind. About the year 1491 a certain Vannetta, daughter-in-law of Ser Antonio di Nardo, from the town of Fogliano, near Cascia, was suffering from so dangerous an affection of the throat that she could swallow neither food nor drink, and therefore believed that she had reached the end of her days. Once, on being awakened from a heavy sleep, which her friends thought was the lethargy of death, she complained of being deprived by them of the beautiful vision she had been enjoying. To their questions about her vision she replied that she had seen St. Rita, who had called to her and touched her throat with her finger and disappeared. It was found that the cure was not simply imaginary, but that the girl was freed from her disease. About the same time a boy named Amico, the son of Antonio of Col Forcella, who was suffering great pain from gravel, was recommended by his mother to the powerful intercession of the saint, and her faith was rewarded by his instantaneous cure. In the following year Giovan Marino, of Logna, was cured of a disease called _serpentina_, through which his whole body was paralysed, for it pleased God to hear, through the intercession of Rita, the fervent prayers offered in his behalf by his aunt Donna Santa. Towards the end of the same year Pier Marino, son of Marino Bruchi of Nursia, who had received two mortal wounds in a scuffle, had recourse to the patronage of Rita, and not in vain, for he was seen to get better, and through persevering prayer was soon restored to health. Three other miracles are described as having taken place about this time through Rita's intercession. The first was the healing of Donna Santa (perhaps the same as was mentioned before), daughter of Domenico of Logna, who was suffering from headaches, and tumours, and swelling of the throat. She besought the saint to obtain her restoration to health, and vowed to send a florin as offering to her convent. Rita heard her prayers, and became her advocate before the Giver of every good gift, who instantly gave her back the health she prayed for. The next was that wrought in favour of a certain woman named Giacoma, the wife of Martino of S. Anatolia, in the territory of Cascia, who broke her shoulder-blade and her thigh by falling from a height on a rock. She was tortured by most violent pains, against which she could find no better remedy than to have recourse to Rita, to whose convent she vowed to present a half-florin. Her prayers were heard, and she was instantly cured. The third of the cases, registered under date of the 18th of November, happened thus: Antonio, the son of Giuliano and Gemma of Nursia, was lying mortally wounded and left for dead, having received fourteen wounds, one of which had almost severed his shoulder from his body. His mother and his sister Maria determined to trust themselves to the help of heaven, and had recourse to the intercession of St. Rita. They therefore made a vow to visit her venerated body and to bring a waxen image. Hardly had they made the vow than the young man was cured of his wounds. Lucchessa, the wife of Giovan Marino of Collecurioso, now destroyed, in the territory of Cascia, had been possessed by the devil for many days. She was brought to Rita's grave, and there was delivered from that molestation through the saint's intercession. When this favour was conferred there were many present, religious and seculars, who also bore witness to the horrible yells uttered by the infernal spirit as it left the body. In 1494 Monica di Colantonio of Colle, in the district of Nursia, was cured of a fistula solely because her father, Domenico, had gone to Cascia to honour the saint, to whose efficacious patronage he had recommended himself. Towards the end of the same year, on the 16th of December, a man named Giovanni Andrea, son of Giovannuccio, from Atri, a town in the territory of Cascia, came to Cascia to thank his protectress Rita, who, he affirmed, had formerly delivered him from a serious illness, and had saved him again from imminent danger of death when a chestnut-tree had fallen on him and threatened to crush him. Two years later a certain Paolo, son of Giovanni, a native of Collecurioso, whose son Angelo was suffering torture from the gravel, made a vow to bring his son to return thanks at the saint's tomb if he were cured, and to have the miracle painted on a tablet. His faith was rewarded by his son being cured. In the same year Andrea d'Angelo, from Onelli, in the Cascia district, was cured, through the intercession of the saint, from an illness by which he was confined to bed for ten months. In 1501 a woman named Perna, wife of Marino di Aliena, who was tormented by evil spirits, was delivered from them by favour of the saint, to whom she had had recourse. At the same time Giovanni di Bartolomeo, from Roccatervi, in the neighbourhood of Cascia, who had cut a vein near his left instep eight years before, and whose case was considered incurable, besought St. Rita with fervent prayers to come to his aid. When he perceived that his prayers were heard, and that a cure impossible to human science had been effected, he made an offering on the 10th of June of a silver crown to the church that guards the saint's body. Pier Angelo, son of Pier Domenico, from the neighbourhood of Spoleto, had fled in the year 1503 from that district to escape an epidemic that was raging there. When he thought the danger was past he returned, but one of his daughters was seized by the malady. The afflicted father bethought him of seeking the protection of the miracle-worker St. Rita. He promised to visit her venerated tomb and to make an offering of four carlins. His faith was rewarded by his daughter's deliverance. Vannuccio di Sante of Foligno, one of whose arms was withered, had recourse to the saint to obtain the favour of being cured, and made a vow to offer the figure of an arm in wax. The power of his arm was immediately restored. He determined thereupon to fulfil his vow on a certain Sunday, but when the day came he changed his mind, and meant to go to Nursia. But he paid the penalty of his ungrateful fickleness, for he was seized with such a pain in one of his feet that he could not walk. Thereupon he resolved to fulfil immediately his vow, and he added a second one of bringing also the waxen figure of a foot. He was relieved of the pain, and hesitated no longer to fulfil his double vow. This happened in 1506. It happened about the year 1510 that a certain Messer Francesco of Monferrato, who was five years bedridden owing to gangrene of the throat, saw St. Rita appear to him in a dream. He paid no attention to the vision, but the saint appeared to him a second and a third time. On the third occasion she informed him who she was and whence, and exhorted him to go to her tomb; she then touched his throat, and he was restored to health. He arose from his bed cured, and set out for Tuscany, and from thence he went to Rome, for he did not know where Cascia was, where Rita was buried. But in Rome he found a farmer from Nursia, who gave him the information he needed, and when he arrived at Cascia he made an offering of a box full of silver coins, had a procession of thanksgiving celebrated, and on the occasion of it a sermon was preached by Fr. Ludovico of Cascia, a Franciscan. Giovan Angelo, the son of Leonardo, from Ocosce, in the district of Cascia, was freed on the 26th of April, 1525, from an evil spirit by which he was obsessed, and to express his gratitude for the favour, obtained through Rita's intercession, made an offering of four carlins to the convent, a thousand wooden stakes for the vineyard, and his own services as long as he lived. In the same year and month another man obsessed by the devil, whose name was Bernardino, the son of Domenico Saccomadi, from the town of San Giovanni, in the Cascia district, was delivered from the infernal enemy after being brought to visit the body of St. Rita, before which public prayers were recited for his liberation. On the 26th of December of the same year a son of Giovan Francesco of Nardi, in the suburbs of Cascia, a child three years old, after a very serious illness, which lasted for thirteen days, was become quite blind, and could take no nourishment, and was, in fact, at the point of death. The father went to Cascia to beg the intercession of St. Rita, and to his prayers were added those of the nuns, who also gave him a little piece of Rita's habit. He returned home, and with firm faith touched his son's eyes with the relic he had received, and invoked the name of Rita, and immediately it was seen that the grace he had sought had been granted. As a sign of gratitude he brought an offering of eight florins' worth of articles to be used in the services of the saint's church. A similar miracle happened towards the year 1535, in the case of Constantino, the son of Scolastica and Giacomo di Pietro Zocchi, from Agriano, in the district of Nursia. He, too, was suffering from a mortal illness when his mother made a vow in his favour to St. Rita, and he was cured on the instant. To fulfil her vow and testify her gratitude, Scolastica presented a vestment to the church on the 1st of June. About the same time it also happened that a little girl of ten years, called Antonia, who was the daughter of Giovanni di Silvestro of Rocca Porena, fell into the river Corno, then very much swollen by floods, and was swept along in the strong current for nearly half a mile. Before losing consciousness she offered herself to St. Rita, and the waters bore her to the river bank as one returned to life from the dead. Donna Brigida, wife of the noble Marsiglio di Marino of Nursia, was also the recipient of a singular favour from St. Rita in the year 1548. She was lying ill in bed, despaired of by the physicians and near death. A certain Girolamo di Giovanni, who occupied a room not far from where the sick woman was lying, twice heard a voice commanding her to make a vow to the saint. At the second time of hearing he woke the servants, the vow was registered by the invalid, who instantly spoke. She was cured without the application of other remedies, and the same day the little silver crown she vowed to send to Cascia was despatched. The year after a certain Ferrantino di Benedetto of Collecurioso, in the Cascia district, was so terrified by a phantom of the night that he fell into convulsions and became delirious. St. Rita, to whom he had remembered to pray, appeared to him in one of his lucid intervals and advised him to go to her tomb and pray there, and that he would there regain his health. He went on St. James's Day, and although he was as ill as usual whilst going, no sooner had he reached the blessed tomb than he was cured in body and mind. Nicola, the son of Francesco Cascianelli of Antrodoco, in October, 1562, had recourse to the saint to heal him of a chronic illness, promising to make an offering of three crowns at her sepulchre. He, too, was instantaneously cured. On the last day of May, in the year 1563, there happened another noteworthy miracle wrought in favour of Donna Cheava di Paolo, of the Castle of Uncciafora. Two months before she had an apoplectic fit, and during all the intervening time her tender mother could obtain no relief for her, and was herself condemned to useless weeping, till she determined to make a vow to the saint. After two days she had the happiness of seeing her daughter restored to her former health. On the very day of the recovery the mother went to Cascia to perform her vow at Rita's tomb, and the assembled people celebrated the miracle with a procession. Four years afterwards, on the 23rd of April, Angelina di Marco of Poggio-Primocaso was prostrate at the saint's tomb, returning thanks to her for having saved her nephew, who had been at the point of death after falling down a precipice. Many other wonderful cures are recorded in the process of beatification without a date being mentioned. We read, for example, that a woman from Monte Leone named Pazienza, who was obsessed by the devil, was freed from her great misfortune on being brought to the tomb of the saint; that Ristorio Sarsio from Amatrice, who was brought almost to death's door by pains in his sides, was cured whilst in the act of making a vow in the saint's honour; that a child of four years--Giovanni Andrea, son of Fabiano Fortunati--who had fallen into a vessel of boiling water, and thereby lost sight and speech, as soon as his mother had asked the saint's intercession for him, again spoke and recovered sight, and in a short time was as well as ever; that a certain Bernardino di Tiberio, who had become blind of an eye from a wound, was brought to the saint's tomb, and instantly regained the sight of his eye whilst the coffin was being uncovered; and that a woman from Logna, who was returning from Cascia after being cured there miraculously, suggested to another woman to make a vow to St. Rita in order that a daughter of hers who was blind might recover sight. The daughter promised St. Rita to become a nun in the Augustinian convent in Cascia, and her vision was immediately restored. She was afterwards Prioress of the convent for thirty-five years. Fr. Galli, who wrote the saint's life, through fear of wearying his readers contented himself with simply alluding to many other like miracles and wonderful favours worked by St. Rita. Most other writers of her life have followed his example, except that a few have given some little additions. We, too, shall imitate these older examples, and close our list of miracles worked by St. Rita before her beatification. CHAPTER III EFFICACY OF RELICS OF ST. RITA It is quite certain that the power of working miracles belongs only to Omnipotence; nevertheless, the many wonderful works done at the tombs of the saints seem to indicate that in those holy places there breathes an air participated through that incommunicable virtue by means of which not only those sacred bodies, but everything that belongs to them, co-operates in performing the wonderful works of God and in celebrating and making known these wonders. This is the same power that first accompanied the shadow of St. Peter, as the Holy Spirit assures us it did,[1] and that afterwards, on the testimony of St. Augustine, was communicated to those renowned chains that were the instruments of his generous confession and his guide to martyrdom. The Church's history supplies us with innumerable examples of cases in which similar virtue was annexed to relics of the saints and to objects connected with the veneration of them, and in St. Rita's case we have a special confirmation of this fact. And, to keep to our subject, the truth of this assertion as regards St. Rita is witnessed by immemorial report, by such examples being recorded in the process for her beatification, and by proven cases, some of which we here record. Before the saint's body was removed to its new resting-place--that is, before the year 1745--it was the long-established custom of the nuns to cover it with a new veil every year, the old one being divided into minute portions and distributed to the faithful to satisfy their devotion. 'Many miracles were worked through them,' says Father Rabbi, who cites the following case as an example: On the 27th of April, 1652, twenty-four years after an office in honour of St. Rita had been granted, a fire broke out in the house of Giovanni Polidori in Narni, and soon spread to an alarming degree. His wife Chiara, seeing that human aid was of no avail in overcoming the increasing flames, and recollecting that she had a little piece of the saint's veil, hurriedly sent her daughter to the roof of a house that had not yet taken fire to cast from there the piece of veil into the flames. The daughter did as she was told, and for fear the relic, which was wrapped in a piece of paper, should not carry so far owing to its lightness, she tied it with a thread to a piece of mortar. As soon as she had done so, she threw it, and the fire immediately ceased. Then Chiara, her family, and the others who were living in the house, went directly to St. Augustine's Church to offer their thanks to God and His saint. They found in the church the woman who had given the piece of veil to Chiara, and who was of even greater faith than her. Chiara considered that the relic was burned, but the woman maintained that it must have escaped the fire, for the instrument of the miracle ought not to have become the food of the conquered flames, and told them to go and look for it amidst the ashes. They went, and Chiara soon had reason to wonder at a second marvel, for she found the relic just as it had been when it was thrown into the flames, and neither the paper around it nor the string was in the least burned. They then returned to the church to renew their thanksgiving for the wonderful works done in their favour. The report of the occurrence was soon spread abroad, and a public account of it was printed on the 25th of the following May. It was also a pious custom of the nuns to distribute to the people the dust, the scrapings from the walls, and such things, of the saint's cell, and of the first coffin in which her sacred body had been placed and in which it had lain until 1745, and many marvellous results were obtained also from the employment of these things. Amongst other wonders Father Rivarola relates this one: A servant of Cardinal Fachinetti, Bishop of Spoleto, had a daughter who was blind of one eye, and whose other eye was so diseased that no hope could be entertained of curing it. She recovered the sight of both eyes by the sole use of that dust, which her mother cast into her eyes, an act which would naturally have further injured her eyes if the dust had not been made salutary by the Omnipotent, who, as we read in the Gospel,[2] gave sight to the blind by using clay. A certain Francesco Armilli obtained a similar grace by the same means. Both of these afterwards went to Cascia to give public testimony of the facts, and to return heartfelt fervent thanks to St. Rita. There are authentic documents in existence to prove that marvellous cures were also wrought through the means of the oil of the lamp that burns before the receptacle wherein the saint's body is placed. By means of that oil Alessandro Alessandrini of Amatrice, who had been stabbed in the side, and was almost at death's door, got better in a moment of the violent pain he was suffering, and was afterwards entirely cured without the use of any other remedy, nor did any sign of the wound remain on his body. Granita, the wife of Antonio Vanatelli of Atri, was cured in the same manner of a large abscess on her side. Signor Pompeo Benenati of Cascia, who was a captain in Ferrara, was cured of a dangerous hemorrhage by the same marvellous remedy, and as a mark of his gratitude sent a silver lamp to the sepulchre of the saint of his native town, his deliverer. A son of Signora di Giovanni Andrea of Nursia, whose feet, legs, and arms were so crippled that he could not stir from his bed, was healed by the virtue of that same oil, and was afterwards as able to go about as if he had never been ill. Don Sante Mazzuti, parish priest of Castel San Giorgio, near Cascia, who was attacked by the plague, which was devastating many parts of Italy in the time of Pope Alexander VII., was also cured by applying the same wondrous oil. It was also customary with the nuns, from the year 1500 at least, to bake little loaves on which they impress the image of St. Rita, and these, after having placed them in presence of the sacred body, they distribute in large quantities, and even send them to distant countries. Devout people who are seeking favours from the saint in their necessities, after reciting a _Pater Noster_ and _Hail Mary_, or some other prayer, eat a little of that bread, and they drink a little water, perhaps in memory or in honour of the very little food the saint was accustomed to use, for bread and water were her usual sustenance. Now, as many authors testify, on the authority of the process of beatification, and the witnesses cited for the canonization confirm them, the sick have often found this bread a very efficacious remedy in their illnesses, and especially those suffering fever. Moreover, in cases of storm by sea or land, it is a pious practice in some places to throw a bit of the bread towards the sky or into the sea whilst reciting a prayer to the saint, and it has often been observed that thereupon calm and tranquillity succeeded. It is, in fact, related that many sailors have been thereby delivered from shipwreck, and, amongst others, Pompeo Martini of Cascia and his companions whilst they were on a voyage to Sicily. They tell, too, that in time of pestilence many were either preserved from infection by using this bread, or else regained their lost health. With regard to this matter, there is one fact at least which we ought not to pass over in silence. We have already made mention of that contagious disease which was rife in the year 1656, to the great loss of many Italian cities, and which brought desolation to Rome itself. There lived in Rome at that time a girl of about twelve years of age, daughter of an innkeeper, whose house was near the Church of St. Blase, which had been dedicated about that time to St. Rita. The little girl, by reason of the great devotion which she had towards the saint, was accustomed to make use of these little loaves. It happened that whilst she was sleeping one night with her two aunts they were both unexpectedly attacked by the pestilence, and both of them died that night whilst she was asleep. When she awoke she was so frightened by what had happened that she fell off into a faint so deep that she, too, was thought to be dead, and she was put with the two corpses on a car and carried to the cemetery of St. Paul that had been arranged for those who died of that disease. When they were removing the bodies from the car she was found to be alive and conscious, and was carried back to her home amidst the astonishment and joy of all who were present. When she was asked at home how it was that she was alive, she answered, 'I do not know, except that when I awoke and saw that I was lying between two dead bodies I said, "Blessed Rita, help me."' Now, let us ask how could a person of tender years, after being so long between two persons just then dead of the plague, escape the contagion without the special favour of heaven, or of that saint who had been the special protector of her devout client? How admirable, indeed, is God in His saints! [1] Acts v. 15. [2] John ix. 6. CHAPTER IV MARVELS OF ST. RITA'S SEPULCHRE It was the Almighty's will that the body of the saint, born of a mother so long barren, visited by the wonderful bees, miraculously brought into the convent, marked by a wound from a thorn of the Crucified One, and in death crowned with splendour and clothed with a beauty almost heavenly, should also be glorified in a singular manner after death. And so it has remained for several centuries without showing the least sign of decay, and may be seen even to the present day miraculously preserved. Before the year 1628--that is, for a space of 171 years--its eyes were always seen to be closed, and so they appear in pictures taken before that date; but in that year there was a tumult excited in the church by an insignificant cause on a day on which ceremonies more solemn than usual were being observed to celebrate the granting of an Office in the saint's honour, and on that occasion the eyes of the saint were seen to open, to the great amazement of all present. The scandalous conduct of those who caused the tumult, and through passion violated the laws of charity and the sanctity of the holy place, seems to have awakened that venerable body from its long repose; for it raised itself aloft out of its resting-place, whilst a perfume as from Paradise filled the church, its eyes opened, and thus struck terror into the hearts of the brawlers, and filled them with penitence for their deeds, so that the sacred offices were finished in peace. The scene we have described calls us to consider a second prodigy, that of the odour which is often observed in the vicinity of the saint's body--an odour of unsurpassed sweetness, which invites to devotion and brings spiritual comfort and consolation. It lasts sometimes for a considerable period, sometimes is very transient; it diffuses itself to a great distance at times, or is only apparent in the vicinity of the body, and at different times has different degrees of pleasantness. This, which we might call an odour of Paradise, is sometimes so widely diffused as to be noticeable not only in the church where the body is preserved and in the adjacent convent, but also in the neighbouring houses and in the streets, and it is wonderful that it has never seemed unpleasant to anyone, but, on the contrary, has brought spiritual consolation, and excited the devotion of those who have had the happiness of experiencing it. There are many documents in existence which give the fullest testimony regarding this wonderful odour, and notably the processes of St. Rita's canonization, which put beyond all doubt the fact that it is really supernatural, for neither was Rita's body ever embalmed, as we have said, nor were any spices or other odoriferous substances ever placed either within or near the receptacle wherein it lies. Moreover, it is an ancient tradition in Cascia, which is confirmed also by the writers of her life and by the processes of beatification and canonization, that on the occasions of the triduums that are accustomed to be offered at the altar of the saint for the sick who have recourse to her, it is not hard to discover whether they are going to get back health or are going to die; for a sweeter perfume is given forth when the object of prayer is to be granted, whereas an odour somewhat like that of incense, or the absence of odour altogether, is an indication of death. Stranger still, the same wonderful fragrance has been experienced even in distant countries, when extraordinary graces have been obtained by the intercession and through the invocation of St. Rita. So the constant tradition affirms, and the processes of canonization confirm tradition in this point. Fr. Rabbi quotes a specific case in proof of this belief. A medical doctor, Signor Andrea, came from Sinigaglia to Cascia with his wife Violante to thank the saint for her intercession and to present a silver votive offering for the healing of their son, who had been cured of a mortal illness. The healing of their son had been signified to them a little before they came to Cascia by the same wonderful fragrance. These sweet odours are also manifest, not to mention many other occasions, whenever the Bishop of Spoleto or the Augustinian Provincial come to hold their usual visitations. Another fact calculated to cause still greater surprise is that Rita's body has been seen to raise itself in its coffin from the bottom of that receptacle up to the grating on its top, especially during the time of the Provincial's visitation. The same wonderful occurrence has also been remarked during the visitations of the Bishops of Spoleto in the convent, as if the saint thereby wished to renew her homage to her episcopal Superior. On these occasions the motion of the body is not always the same. Sometimes it has been remarked to be much slower than at other times, and it has on occasions been seen to raise itself for a moment and then sink back again into its usual place. On many other occasions besides at times of visitation this spontaneous raising of the body has been noticed. In order not to make so seemingly incredible a statement without sufficient evidence, we transcribe a deposition sworn by some of the most prominent people in the town of Cascia. NOTE TO CHAPTER IV _In the Name of God. Amen._ On Saturday the 16th May, 1682, in the church called anciently St. Mary Magdalen's, but now called B. Rita's, we the undersigned, of the territory of Cascia, diocese of Spoleto, by means of our oath, etc., in the presence of me a notary and Chancellor forane of the bishop of the territory of Cascia, give full and undoubted testimony, etc., for the truth, and not otherwise, etc., that at the present the blessed body of our B. Rita is entire, uncorrupted, with its flesh white, without any stain of corruption, with its eyes open, and especially the left, which is seen to be more open than the right, and with the eyelids separated, and with the mouth somewhat opened, in which are seen and very clearly distinguished the white teeth, the hands likewise white, etc. Similarly have been observed by us, and recognised, the garments and the veils, that she has on her head, which are the same that she wore when she was alive, and with them was the blessed body placed and arranged in the same coffin, where at present she is found, as by relation and continued ancient tradition of the nuns of this convent, which garments and veils have been found to be sound, entire, and not corrupted by moths, nor by time, these garments appearing, as the veils also, as if they were worn at the present time by a living person. Similarly we attest as above, that we have felt many times an odour and a fragrance wonderful and of Paradise, without being able to say what kind of odour it is, and this sometimes has been observed in a manner that it was felt outside the church. And by much more is this odour marvellous inasmuch as her body was not embalmed, or opened, but placed in the coffin where it is found, with all the internal portions not separated, nor divided from the body. Similarly we fully testify as above, that we have many times observed that her blessed body had raised itself from the place where ordinarily it lies up to the top of the little grating which is above the said coffin, where reposes the same blessed body, and especially this happens on the occurrence of her feast, and when she has worked some miracle, as happened in the year 1628 for the first time, when was celebrated the feast of her beatification, of which appears authentic testimony made under date 13 June, 1660, by deed of Signor Giuseppe Benenati, native of Montefalco, with the legal form of this public office, and so much we say and attest for the truth, etc., not only, etc., but in every other better way, etc. I Carlo Giudici, Vice-Governor of Cascia, was present, and affirm as above with my own hand. I Raffaele Cittadoni, Archpriest of the collegiate church of said place, was present and affirm, etc. I Dionigi Panfili, Vic. forane of Cascia, was present and affirm, etc. I Ortensio Martini, Canon of the collegiate church of said territory, was present and affirm, etc. I Antonio Frenfenelli, Canon of the collegiate church of said territory, was present and affirm, etc. I Cerulino Berardi, Captain of the company of the cuirassiers of said place, was present and affirm, etc. I Angelo Graziani, Captain of the infantry of Cascia, was present and affirm, etc. I Alessio Martini, notary public of Cascia, was present and affirm, etc. I Giovanni Graziani of Cascia was present and affirm, etc. I Giovanni Battista Leonetti of Cascia was present, etc. _In the Name of God. Amen._ In the year of our Lord 1682, the fifth declaration, on the 28th day of the month of May, 6th year of the Pontificate of Innocent XI., Pope by Divine Providence, I Petrus Gentilis of Tutia in Cascia, of the diocese of Spoleto, by public Apostolic authority notary, etc. L+S. _The Consuls of the Renowned Territory of Cascia._ To all, etc. The aforesaid D. Petrus Gentilis and our other fellow-citizens are such as they describe themselves in their public and private declarations, and in this the usual and due forms were observed, and in the present matter undoubted faith is to be given them, etc., and therefore we have given these at Cascia from the Consular Palace this last day of May, 1682. L+S. DOMINICUS DE LANCELLOTTIS, _Canc. Secr._ CHAPTER V IMMEMORIAL WORSHIP OF ST. RITA It had been provided by the sapient Pontiff Alexander III. three centuries before Rita's death that no one, however remarkable for holiness of life, and dying in the fame of sanctity, should receive public and ecclesiastical worship, unless after the approbation of the Holy Apostolic See. But it must be admitted that Rita's sanctity and miracles had more effect than any decree that interfered with the devotion of so many, and, indeed, the decree was unknown to most of them. Hardly was Rita dead than there was a great concourse of the people of Cascia gathered at the feet of the sacred body, with hands raised in veneration and entreaty, beseeching the favour of their new protectress. The constant and wonderful works which it then pleased God to perform to the advantage of those faithful people justified their confidence, and served to augment their fervour and at the same time the veneration and glory of the saint. Following the example of the people of Cascia, and incited by the fame of Rita's miracles, the peoples of other places, near and far, hastened to offer her their religious homage also, in order to become participants in her favours, or to make votive offerings, or to leave memorials of graces received. As a consequence, lamps and candles were soon burning around her venerated tomb; her picture became honoured, and many votive tablets and gifts in ever-increasing numbers were offered. Hence, also, devout processions began to be celebrated on the occasions of the more extraordinary miracles, and hence her feast began to be kept on the anniversary day of her death, or, rather, of her birth to immortal life. This singular devotion to the saint never declined; it rather acquired greater vigour and wider bounds as years went on. The processions took place only in Cascia in the beginning, but in the course of time they began to be held by the faithful of the neighbouring towns and villages, who had begun to invoke, as they still invoke, the favour of their common advocate. These pious demonstrations of public and solemn veneration are usually celebrated about the time of her feast, and are always accompanied by pious offerings. The feast itself, which at first used to be observed in an ordinary way, came to be celebrated even magnificently when the devotion increased, and to be regarded as a holiday of obligation. The Offices of the Church, which were attended by great crowds of people, many of them from distant places, were made more impressive by the aid of the choicest music and the rich decoration of the church. But what has ever caused the greatest edification in connection with this festival was to see the number of strangers, and especially women, who came on pilgrimage in bare feet and humble attire. From that period the convent and church, which were formerly known as St. Mary Magdalen's, came, in a beautiful way, to be called, as they are so called at present, by the title of St. Rita. For the pilgrims, as they approached the goal of their journey, had no other care than to find out where the convent of St. Rita was, and on their return were used to say that they had been in the country and in the Church of St. Rita. Hence that manner of speaking, which has prevailed from an early date, has finally succeeded in giving its fixed name to that venerated shrine. It is also deserving of notice here that the custom of calling her the Blessed, which had been introduced even during the century after her death, in a short time became public and general. About eight years after her most glorious death the learned Cardinal Girolamo Seripando had already placed Rita on his list of the Saints and Blesseds of the Augustinian Order; Panfilo, Crusenio, Gelsomini, and Ferrario had in their works already confirmed these titles and honours; the Fathers-General of the Order were already accustomed in their official documents and letters patent to style her either by the title of Blessed or that of Saint, and distinguished her convent by the same title. In a word, the general body of the faithful had already beatified her long before the Vicar of Jesus Christ had her name inserted in the Roman Martyrology or had granted an Office in her honour. Now, if the worship given to Rita was so great before it was allowed by the Church to honour her publicly, we may imagine how much it was increased when the decree of the Supreme Head of the Church, who could do no less than add his voice to the general chorus of praise, set his seal and approval on it. Religious veneration to the famous Rita then speedily spread throughout the whole earth, and together with the people, Kings, Cardinals, Prelates, and personages of the greatest distinction, bent their knees in devotion before the humble servant of God, and deemed themselves happy in her patronage. Amongst the countries remarkable for devotion to her, the kingdoms of Spain and Portugal were pre-eminent, both in their European possessions and their vast colonies in the Western world; for throughout them all the name of Rita was glorious, and their monarchs gave the most edifying examples of piety and munificence. And it was in these Catholic dominions that, owing to the very many great miracles she wrought, she began to be known by the title of '_the Saint of the Impossible_,' and in them hard to find a church which has not an altar dedicated to her honour. So much was her veneration extended that the inhabitants of the city of St. Sebastian, in Brazil, made a supplication to Pope Benedict XIII. to obtain the extraordinary faculty of consecrating a church under the invocation of B. Rita, and when the faculty had been granted their pious intention was soon carried into effect. Seventy years before that Monsignor Giuseppe Cruciani of Cascia, chamberlain of Pope Alexander VII., had obtained possession of the Church of St. Blase in Rome, with the intention of rededicating it to B. Rita, and to-day we find it so dedicated, and it has become the church proper to the people of Cascia in Rome. Still earlier, and immediately after her beatification, Monsignor Fausto Poli, himself a native of Cascia, who was then Maggiordomo to Pope Urban VIII., and afterwards became Cardinal and Bishop of Orvieto, acquired possession of the house in which the saint lived during her married life, and at his own expense had it converted into a little chapel; and so it remains to the present, and in it is preserved as a relic the mantle she wore in the world. We must not pass over in silence a noteworthy fact recorded by some biographers of the saint, which is confirmed by a tradition in Rocca Porena, and sworn to in a deposition included in the first process. It is this: The saint's room received its light whilst she dwelt in it, and until it was changed into a chapel, from a little window, or, rather, aperture, in the roof, and there, as is piously believed, the angels used to appear who came to comfort her in her sorrows. When she entered the convent others dwelt there until the time of her beatification. Her successors in the house--and amongst them was a priest, Don Diamante di Pier Felice, who was examined as a witness in the first process--tried to close the aperture; but all their efforts were fruitless, for as often as they closed it they found it opened again, and it was, moreover, observed that through that opening neither rain nor snow ever entered. The convent cell, too, which Rita sanctified by so many years of her presence, by her profound meditations, and by the pitiless scourging of her body, and where the two coffins in which she was first buried are at present preserved, began to be held in veneration from an early period and to be looked upon as a private oratory. In brief, it is an undoubted fact that the religious honours shown to our saint began from the very time of her death, and as time went on they increased without any interruption and became more distinguished, till veneration to Rita was spread in a singular manner throughout the whole Catholic world. Thus are the humble exalted by God, and thus are the just in the everlasting memory of the ages. CHAPTER VI SOLEMN BEATIFICATION OF RITA A period of one hundred and seventy years had passed since Rita went to live crowned with glory in the kingdom of the blessed, where there is no change of years or of things, and from whence she was regarding with compassionate eyes the ever-changing vicissitudes of this valley of tears. In that interval between Rita's death and her solemn beatification the world had changed a hundred times its form and appearance. Convulsions of nature, ruling passions, kingdoms ceasing to be, new Governments, dominions extended, fires of war enkindled, extinguished, and enkindled again, heresies ever variable, now spreading themselves, now kept within bounds, councils assembled, Apostolic enterprises, and the barque of Peter always safe amid the shocks of tempests--these are the things that make up the long history of that time, and, indeed, of every epoch. However, at the time in which the honours of beatification were being prepared for Rita, the world and the Church were enduring only minor afflictions, and the aspect of affairs would have been still more serene but that the question of the succession to the extinct House of Mantua was giving rise to some hostile movements in Italy, and that the rebellious Calvinists were causing civil discord in France. Still, compared with the past, those were times of peace, of gentleness, and of religion. In the East, in fact, the infidel Amurath IV., sunk in debauchery, had lost the taste for war and conquest. The Emperor Frederick V., in the West, was keeping the heretics in subjection and preparing the way to restore to the Church the rights and property they had usurped. Italy had no longer to tolerate those wandering troops of armed men of which we have elsewhere spoken, who, however they may have bargained to bring help, were much more accustomed to bring ruin and mourning in their train; nor was there that multiplicity of Governments, each as ambitious and tyrannical as it was insignificant. Cascia, too, although fallen from its primitive splendour, was yet at peace, as was the rest of the Pontifical dominions. The arts were flourishing and gaining new lustre in this time of tranquillity. But what is of most importance is good order, religious and moral, and the Council of Trent had brought back order into the bosom of Christianity, and there it continued to rule. At that time the chair of Peter was occupied by Urban VIII., whose virtue, learning, and illustrious enterprises have made his name immortal. Before ascending the Papal throne he had governed the Church of Spoleto with great edification and splendid success, and there he had every facility for inquiring into Rita's virtues and miracles, and the antiquity and fame of the veneration paid to her. God afterwards so disposed it that he should take upon himself the government of the Universal Church, and should co-operate in the fulness of power in exalting our saint. It is true that she had already been beatified by the people from the time of her death, but in strict truth and in accordance with the sacred Canons, it did not belong, nor does it belong, to the people to declare anyone saint or blessed, for the oracle of the Apostolic See is needed. For Jesus Christ alone sanctifies in the Church triumphant, as He teaches in the Book of Leviticus, where He says, 'I am the Lord who sanctifies them,' and so in the Church militant it is the prerogative of His Vicar on earth, the Roman Pontiff, to set the seal of his approval on sanctification and publish it to the world. Never was there a more favourable opportunity than that which then presented itself, when the Papal throne was occupied by a Pope who had been himself a witness of the devotion with which the faithful flocked to Rita's tomb and of the ever-increasing veneration in which she was held; and therefore the Augustinian fathers, the nuns, and the Council of Cascia, determined to unite their influence with that of Monsignor Fausto Poli and other distinguished persons, amongst whom was pre-eminent the Lady Costanza Barberini, the Pope's sister-in-law, in supplicating him graciously to proceed to the anxiously desired beatification of Rita. Their petitions were sufficient for the Pope, who ordered the Sacred Congregation of Rites to set about the affair. The Congregation committed to the Bishop of Spoleto the task of investigating into the fame of the sanctity, the virtues, and miracles of the saint, and instructed him to prepare what is called the informative process. On the 16th of October, 1626, the legal inquiry was therefore begun, and in due time brought to a happy conclusion. In the month of March of the following year the results of the Bishop of Spoleto's investigation were submitted to a rigorous examination by the Sacred Congregation and approved of. The Cardinals of that Congregation delivered the canonical relation of the investigation and its issue to the Pope, who was rejoiced with the success of their labours. Thereupon, by a Special Brief of the 2nd of October, 1627, he granted leave to the whole Augustinian Order and the Diocese of Spoleto to recite the Office and celebrate Mass in honour of B. Rita, and this privilege was extended four months later by a Brief of the 4th of February, 1628, at the instance of the Father-General of the Order, to all priests celebrating Mass in any church of the Order, or of the Diocese of Spoleto, on the day of Rita's feast. The joy of the Augustinian Order and of Spoleto for so sovereign and gracious a concession may not be described. But the solemn beatification was not promulgated until the 16th of July, 1628, when the religious ceremony was celebrated in the Church of St. Augustine in Rome in the presence of twenty-two Cardinals and a great number of other prelates. We make no mention of the splendid festivals organized in honour of the illustrious Blessed Rita, of the panegyrics preached, of the poetical compositions with which her virtues and miracles were celebrated. The devout clients of Rita vied with one another in defraying the expenses of these pious festivities, but the most distinguished for his liberality was Cardinal Antonio Barberini, the nephew of the reigning Pope. The pomp of the ecclesiastical functions was renewed in all the churches of the Order, but the people of Cascia and the nuns of Rita's convent rightly determined that their celebrations more than any other should be remarkable for magnificence. The joyful pealing of the bells, which continued for several days and nights; the bonfires on the hill-tops that illuminated the whole country around; the silken hangings and rich ornaments that decorated the church within and without; the new paintings representing Rita's glorious deeds and her miracles; the solemn procession in which all the clergy, secular and regular, and all the confraternities of the town and district took part, bearing in triumph the banner of the blessed one; the band of children dressed to represent angels that accompanied it; the many wax torches and gifts; the enormous concourse of the faithful, many of them from distant places; the solemn religious functions; the sacred plays and representations; and other like pomps, all publicly testified the common applause and universal joy. Even the body of the saint seemed as if, on so glorious a day, it wished to add to the splendour and gladness of the extraordinary festivity; for, after the many years that had passed since Rita's death, it opened its eyes, as if to take pleasure from the solemn feast and general rejoicing, and at the same time to appease that momentary tumult of which we have already spoken. Then, too, the church was filled with that sweet odour we have described, and the sacred body raised itself to the height of the grating at the top of its resting-place. And, lest anything should be left to mar the tranquillity of that happy day, she imposed silence on the demons by then liberating from their influence two women--one from Spoleto and the other from Sinigaglia--who had been obsessed. But all that we have hitherto narrated was only accidental honour, and but a shadow of the immortal glory which Rita enjoys in heaven. CHAPTER VII MIRACLES WORKED BY RITA AFTER HER BEATIFICATION It is related in the holy Gospels that once when the Saviour was going to Jerusalem, as He entered into a certain town He saw ten lepers coming to meet Him, who began to shout from afar off, 'Jesus, have mercy on us,' and that all of them were miraculously healed by Him, but only one fulfilled the duty of gratitude by publicly giving glory to God and going back to give thanks to his Divine Benefactor. We are forced to think that something similar must have been the case with those who have received extraordinary favours and graces through the invocation and protection of Rita. For, on the one hand, the constant appeals of the faithful for her intercession, the numerous triduums and novenas which the sick cause to be celebrated in many places in order to be cured of their diseases, and the fame which is spread throughout the earth of the benefits she has conferred and the miracles she has worked, show with sufficient clearness the truth of them and their frequency. But, on the other hand, there are few who give full praise to God by publishing the wonderful works He has done in honour of His beloved, or, at most, they content themselves with hanging a tablet or votive offering on her altars. The present author, too, may perhaps be not altogether free from fault, for he confesses in his nothingness that he has neither sufficient zeal, nor correspondence sufficiently wide, to enable him to know all the facts. Nevertheless, we shall for the last time, for the glory of God and of Rita, relate a few of the more striking miracles we have been able to gather, and which seem best authenticated. When we were speaking of the marvels done through such relics of the saint as the portions of the veil or by the use of the little loaves, we took occasion to mention some miracles that took place after the time of her beatification, and now, in order to avoid repetition and to pass over what is hidden in the obscurity of a period long past, we shall confine our attention to the century in which the cause of her canonization was resumed. A youth of fifteen years, by name Francesco Cavalieri of Cascia, was in the year 1746 confined to his bed by gangrene of the leg, which had broken out in five different places, and was so bad that the surgeons had resolved to amputate the limb. His father thereupon made a vow to the saint, who heard his prayer, and deigned to appear to the sick youth, first in the silence of the night, and again at dawn, telling him to get up and go to her church. He went as told by the saint, and was restored to perfect health. Sister Chiara Isabella Garofili, professed nun of the convent of Cascia, was twice cured through the saint's intercession in ways that were certainly more than natural. The first case happened in 1775, when she had been suffering for eight years from a complication of diseases, of which the description would be long, and which had then become incurable. St. Rita appeared to her in a dream, telling her to get up--that she was cured. When she awoke she found that she had been restored again to health. The second case occurred in 1786, in which year Sister Chiara's right arm unexpectedly lost all power of motion, and she was also deprived of speech. She tried several medical remedies without avail, and ultimately abandoned their use, and put all her confidence in the help of Rita alone. Her trust was rewarded, for then, to the surprise of the doctor and of the community, she found herself well once more. Yet the impediment in speech still remained to some extent; but she went to the saint's tomb accompanied by her sisters in religion, and the Superior anointed her tongue with oil from the lamp that was burning there, and in an instant her cure was perfected. This fact is confirmed by the legal testimony of the doctor, Laurenti. During the year 1777 Giovanni Graziano of Poggiodomo, in the district of Cascia, fell from his horse, and was dragged for a considerable distance along the road, receiving a number of bruises and lacerations; but as soon as he invoked St. Rita she appeared to him, and restored him to his former health and strength. Another miraculous recovery, which has been authenticated in legal form, was that of Sister Vittoria Teresa Bargagnati, which took place in 1781, when she was a novice in the convent of St. Teresa in Terni. Her malady was that she could retain no food in her stomach. She had in consequence been confined to bed for several months, and seemed at the last extremity. In this state, seeing that all the resources of medical science were of no avail, she resolved to have recourse to more effective aid, the intercession of St. Rita. Animated, then, by that lively faith which is able even to move mountains, she applied to her stomach a picture of her saintly advocate, and immediately after rose from her bed, went to the refectory, and ate the same food as the others, nor did she ever after experience any trace of her malady. There is a still more marvellous recovery, which is also proved and confirmed by legal testimony--that of Rosa Mazzi, a young lady of Cittei di Castello, who was afterwards Sister Anna Rita of the Augustinian convent of St. Maria Maddalena in Spello. In the year 1780 she began to suffer from pains, difficulty of breathing, and vomitings of copious quantities of blood, and afterwards from inflammatory fevers and ischury, so that in two years she was reduced almost to the point of death. In this desperate crisis her confessor, who was attending her as a dying person, told her of the miracle we have just related, which had recently happened in Terni, and encouraged her to have equal confidence. She determined to make a devout triduum to the saint. The triduum was hardly finished when Rosa felt herself well again, rose from her bed, and continued to be even haler and stronger than she had been before her long and mortal illness. This wonderful miracle occurred on February 6, 1783. Signora Rosalia, the daughter of Francesco Pelagalli of St. Anatolia, but then living in Camerino, was seized in the year 1802 by constant rheumatic pains, which tormented her for two years, and brought her to a deplorable state. One evening, when she was suffering more than usual, and so much that she was forced by the pains to cry out aloud, she thought of recommending herself in her extreme anguish to the merciful intercession of Rita. She put into her mouth one of the little loaves blessed in her honour, and that instant was completely cured, and she continued to enjoy good health from that time. The documents, drawn up in legal form, which attest this remarkable recovery, are still extant in the archives of the convent. For the sake of brevity we omit many other wonderful cures obtained by those who sought the assistance of St. Rita. But we must not altogether neglect to speak of the solemn transposition of her body. After death, as we have already said, Rita's body was placed in a coffin which was enclosed in another coffin, and there it remained for public veneration for the space of 288 years, from the year 1457 till 1745. But in that year a devout client of the saint resolved to provide a more worthy resting-place for those venerated remains, and a new urn, ample and beautiful, was sent to the convent. This the Augustinian nuns adorned with hangings and ornamentations, so that its appearance should in some way correspond with their devotion. Monsignor Paolo Bonavisa, Bishop of Spoleto, added by his presence to the solemnity of the occasion, and on Sunday, October 24, in the presence of many notable witnesses, carried out with due formality the transposition of the sacred body into its new place of repose, where now it lies. So may God grant us, through the abundant merits and powerful intercession of Rita, to keep our minds and hearts raised above earthly things, so that we may one day be transported with her to participate in the immense and eternal joy of Paradise. CHAPTER VIII[1] MORE RECENT MIRACLES OF ST. RITA [1] Added to this edition. We must not pass over in silence the marvellous fact that, as the time of the canonization of our heroine was drawing nearer, it pleased the Lord to let men see more clearly how powerful before the throne of His infinite mercy is her patronage in favour of those who piously invoke her. The devotion towards St. Rita, which was already of ancient date and widely spread, has, in fact, in these latter years become more universal and more fervent. Amongst every class of persons are found some who confidently have recourse to her intercession; triduums and novenas are offered in her honour, her pictures are looked for everywhere, relics of her are eagerly sought, and in the severest crises her name is invoked. This great increase of worship is due principally, we believe, to the very many signal graces which have been obtained in every country through Rita's intercession. It would be too long to narrate all those cases we have knowledge of, but we must not entirely disappoint the pious curiosity of devout readers by omitting them all. We select, therefore, a few cases from a collection of these extraordinary favours made by Monsignor Casimiro Gennari, titular Archbishop of Lepanto, who is himself a most devoted client of St. Rita and most zealous in spreading veneration towards so powerful an advocate. We have chosen those which in our opinion are most extraordinary and miraculous. At the same time we wish to protest, out of veneration to the decrees of Urban VIII. of the 13th of March, 1625, and of the 5th of June, 1831, and of those of the Congregation of Rites, that if anything we have hitherto written or are about to write of the miracles of St. Rita be not approved by the Holy See, it ought to receive only that amount of credence to which the evidence adduced entitles it. Sister Mary Consiglia Giona, a native of Naples, who entered the convent of St. Cosmo in Conversano in the year 1859, contracted in 1863 a very painful malady of the eyes, which gave her no rest night or day. During six years she consulted many doctors, who prescribed various internal and external remedies, but always without result. Ultimately she had to leave the convent and go to live at Bari for six months under the care of an expert oculist, but even then she experienced no relief. The malady went on increasing, till, to her great grief, she lost the sight of her eyes, whilst the pain in them continued as great as ever. She thus returned blind to the convent, and having lost all confidence in human aid, she turned to God and asked Him to cure her through the patronage of the Blessed Virgin and the saints. She thought many times that in a dream she had seen the most Blessed Virgin, who was blaming her for having too much complained of her sufferings, and who exhorted her to offer her pains to God. One night when Sister Mary Consiglia had been suffering more than usual, worn out she fell asleep, and she seemed to see in a dream the three Babylonian youths, who wanted her to give them some bunches of grapes that were not yet ripe which were hanging from a branch near her room. She refused, and the youths then said: 'Why do you want a grace that is not yet ripe?' They disappeared as soon as they had uttered these words, and the nun was covered with great confusion. She continued, however, to have Masses celebrated, and to address her prayers to the most holy Virgin and to various saints, but the grace she sought was still denied her. About this time she heard people speak of Rita of Cascia as the saint who obtains from God what is otherwise impossible, but having lost her confidence she had no desire to have recourse to that saint. Nevertheless, she was induced, and almost constrained by violence of pain, to begin a novena of prayer in her honour. Shortly after the saint appeared to her in a dream, and assured her that she should soon be cured. And so it was. Her recovery had not long to be waited for; it was speedy and complete, without any human aid, for once more she joyfully opened her eyes to the light of heaven, and her pain ceased as if by magic. She has preserved her sight strong and perfect even to the present day, nor has she any need of spectacles even for reading, as so many of her sisters in religion have. This nun, grateful for the great favour conferred on her, began to spread devotion to St. Rita with the utmost zeal. She had her statue placed in the convent church and exposed for veneration by permission of the Holy See, and her proper Mass is said on the feast day, which is celebrated with great solemnity and attended by a large concourse of the faithful. In this way special devotion to St. Rita began in Conversano and the neighbouring towns, and many wonderful graces have been granted in those places by this most powerful patron. Sister Anna Rosa Biscozzi, a nun of the same convent, was, in 1885, attacked by a violent pain in the ear, which continued for four months, and not only rendered her completely deaf, but nearly drove her mad with agony. The disease made such progress that one evening blood began to pour from her ear, and no means of stanching it could be found. The doctor's efforts were quite useless, and not being able to suggest anything better he ordered the ear to be dressed with oil of almonds. But the invalid, instead of using the oil that was prescribed, made use of oil from St. Rita's lamp, and she anointed the affected part with it for seven days, reciting three Glorias and an Ave, whilst she made the sign of the Cross with the oil, and finally saying the ejaculation, 'Blessed Rita, pray for me.' On the seventh night she had a feeling as if something inside her head had opened, and from that moment she noticed she could hear the ticking of the clock, and in a short time every trace of her malady had disappeared. Signora Nicoletta de Bellis of Rutigliano was often complaining of an intolerable pain in her head, which came on every fifth or sixth day, and had reduced her to a condition of the utmost emaciation. She had consulted many physicians, amongst them some of the most distinguished in Naples, and had submitted to many courses of treatment, but all to no effect. The malady was obstinate, and her health was failing day by day. Her aunt, who was a nun in the convent of St. Cosmo in Conversano, of which we have had reason to speak already, told her of St. Rita's miracles, and persuaded her to have recourse to that saint by a fervent novena. The invalid followed her advice, and we may imagine her joy and wonder on finding herself freed from her malady at the very beginning of the novena. The recovery was a perfect and lasting one, and no vestige of disease was left. A poor man from Conversano had the misfortune to get a fistula on one of his eyes, which could be got rid of only by a difficult and costly surgical operation. He would have to go to Bari and pay 200 lire to the surgeon, which it was quite impossible for him to do. He had recourse to St. Rita in his trouble, and besought her intervention with a lively, ardent faith. His prayers were heard; the fistula disappeared from his eye without the intervention of the surgeon's knife. He had a solemn Mass of thanksgiving sung every year in honour of his deliverer. In 1886 a little boy of four years fell on the fire of a brazier, and besides being badly burnt, his eyes were so seriously injured that he could no longer open them. His afflicted mother called in the doctors, and applied the remedies they prescribed, but without effect. Day passed after day, and the child remained blind, nor was there any hope left that he would recover his sight. His pious mother then betook herself to prayer to God and His saints; she addressed many appeals on her child's behalf to various heavenly patrons, but the favour she sought was not granted. One night, whilst she was sleeping, there appeared to her a nun, who said, 'You have had recourse to many saints: why have you not applied to me?' 'And who are you?' asked the woman. 'I am Blessed Rita,' was the reply, 'whose statue is in the Church of St. Cosmo. I promise you that if you come to visit me your son's eyes will be opened when you return.' The woman was in the church early next morning to pay the visit suggested to her and to beg the saint's intercession. On her return she heard her son calling, and on going to him found him with eyes open and entirely cured. In March, 1887, Signora Maria Soria Carcaterra of Conversano received a remarkable favour from St. Rita, which she herself thus describes: 'I, the undersigned, testify that I have received the following favour from B. Rita of Cascia. A cyst having appeared on my right eyelid, I consulted various distinguished doctors, who told me I should have to undergo an operation. But I thought it better to recommend myself to B. Rita, and after many prayers she did me the favour of causing the cyst to disappear without any need of doctors or of medicine. 'MARIA SORIA CARCATERRA.' Signor Giovanni Biscozzi had in 1887 been ill for a long time with a painful malady. The physicians thought he was suffering from disease of the heart, and therefore incurable. It is certain that he had to remain shut up in his room, for every changing of place caused him grievous torment. When his aunt, who was a nun in the convent of St. Cosmo in Conversano, came to learn this, she sent him one of St. Rita's blessed loaves, advising him to take a little piece of it every day and then drink a little water in memory of the saint's fastings, and to recite three Glorias and an Ave and the invocation, 'Blessed Rita, pray for me.' The sick man followed the advice, and immediately had experience of its salutary effects, for he felt considerably better, and very soon was restored to his former health. As a mark of gratitude he sent the convent a present of oil to be used in the lamp at the saint's statue. Paolina Giannetti, a lay sister of the same convent of St. Cosmo, had a large pustule on her arm which was very painful, and since she could not be dispensed from working, it festered, and her whole arm became swollen, and in consequence of this she fell into a violent fever. It was thought indispensable that a doctor should be called in, and that evening a message was sent to the doctor asking him to come next day, that a lay sister had need of his services. That night a picture of St. Rita was given to the sick nun, and she placed it on her diseased arm all night. Hardly had she awakened from sleep when she found that the swelling had entirely subsided, that the fever had left her, and that every trace of the pustule had also disappeared. The doctor came later, and was told there was no need for his services. Signora Natalizia Scattone of Conversano relates that her husband had a large tumour on one of his legs, which forced him to keep his bed for many days, and which had ultimately to be removed by an operation. His wife was very much afraid that the wound made by the surgeon would become a fistula, for even the slightest scratch on her husband took several days to heal. She had before received many favours from St. Rita, and was therefore very devout towards her; and on this occasion, hardly had the surgeon departed after the operation, than she placed a relic of the saint over the bandages, and prayed with all her heart for her husband. On the following day the surgeon returned to dress the wound, but when the bandages were removed, it was found to be completely healed, to his great amazement and that of the family. Signor Domenico Lopriore of Conversano had a tooth extracted in 1887, and perhaps owing to the damp to which he exposed himself by going into the country at an early hour, an abscess was formed in his mouth, which reduced him to the last extremity. A very high fever, with swellings in his throat, face, and tongue, deprived him of all repose. His tongue especially had grown so large that he had perforce to keep it full two fingers' breadth hanging out of his mouth. The doctors, seeing that he was growing worse, ordered him the last Sacraments. He had a cousin who was a boarder in the convent of St. Cosmo, and who was very devoted to St. Rita. She, with the nuns, prayed very fervently to the saint for the sick man's recovery, and his uncle, a priest, offered Mass for the same intention on the saint's altar in the church. The holy sacrifice and the prayers soon brought about the desired effect, for the sick man suddenly became much better, and in a short time was completely cured. Devotion to St. Rita has not only brought health to bodies, but salvation to souls, as the following shows: Sister Genefosa Perrini, nun of the convent of St. Cosmo, having to live out of _clausura_ for some time owing to ill-health, had occasion to go to Bari one day with her brother, Canon Francesco Perrini. In that town they heard of a young lady who was dying, and who, masquerading as a freethinker, refused to have anything to do with priests or Sacraments. Her relatives, who were in the utmost affliction at such a misfortune, begged the Canon and his sister to go and see her, in the hope that their visit might excite some good thought in her. They went to see the invalid, but as soon as she caught sight of them she began to abuse them bitterly. Said the Canon to her: 'Signora, I am only come to pay you a simple visit, and also, if you please, to bring you a cure for your disease.' 'What cure?' asked she, growing calmer. 'If, indeed, you have an efficacious one, you are welcome.' By good fortune the Canon had a little picture of the saint, and, offering it to the sick lady, he said: 'Here is the cure. If you will have recourse to this advocate, who is called the Saint of the Impossible, you will be saved.' The sight of the picture, indeed, worked a wonder. Instead of flying into a passion and throwing it back to them, as she had done on other occasions, the invalid freely accepted it, took it with devotion, and placed it under her pillow. After this the Canon with his sister took his leave and went away, but hardly had he gone a few yards than he was called back in a great hurry, and when he went to the invalid she asked him to hear her confession. The Canon showed her that he could not hear confessions outside his own diocese, and he exhorted her to avail herself of a confessor of the place. She allowed herself to be persuaded, a confessor was called in, and she made her confession with great sorrow. She said that Rita had appeared to her as a nun, and incited her to die well. She received the Holy Viaticum and Extreme Unction with signs of sincere piety, and then delivered up her soul to God. In March, 1888, Signora Caterina Bianchini had a little son of five years of age who was attacked by cancerous diphtheria in the throat, which soon placed him in extreme danger of death. The physicians had despaired of him, and gave him only four hours to live. His mother, who at other times had received signal favours from St. Rita, had recourse to her, confident in her assistance, and beseeching her with tears to help her. She anointed the child's throat with the oil of the saint, and, most wonderful to tell, hardly had the oil touched his throat than he moved himself, recovered consciousness, spoke, and in a few days was well. On the following day the doctor and their relations called rather to visit the parents than the child, who they thought was dead, but imagine their astonishment on seeing him restored to health! 'My mother,' said he, 'rubbed me with St. Rita's oil, and said. "Saint Rita, give me my son," and I was well again.' In 1890 Signorina Susanna Pallieri of Conversano had suffered from a severe pulmonary complaint, and when she recovered from it she was troubled by a gathering in one of her eyes which remained from that disease, and which resisted all the efforts of her doctors. When she found that none of the doctors of her native place could effect a cure, she put herself under the care of Dr. Vitali, a distinguished oculist of Bari, for three months. But the gathering in her eye grew worse instead of better, and finally the oculist, seeing that all his attempts produced no result, had to throw up the case. It would be impossible to tell the sorrow of the poor young lady at so unfortunate a result of her efforts. Having lost all hope in human aid, she, with her mother, began to beseech St. Rita either to cure her of her malady or else take her out of this world to escape the intolerable anguish of the pain she had to bear. Their prayers were not in vain, for on the very next day after beginning the prayers her eye was very much improved, and that evening she was entirely cured. Dr. Vitali was immediately informed of what had happened, and at first did not believe it; but when he saw that she had really been cured, he declared openly that such a cure ought to be regarded as a real miracle. From that day Signorina Pallieri was entirely cured of the disease of her eye, and enjoyed excellent health, nor does she cease to return thanks to the Saint of the Impossible. In the town of Turi, in February, 1893, a boy of five years of age named Filippo d'Addabbo, who had just had an attack of scarlatina, developed symptoms of violent fever accompanied by swellings of his whole body. For two days he had remained in bed unable to speak, and the doctors gave him up for dead. In this state he suddenly opened his eyes, made a sign towards a picture of St. Rita that was hanging in the room, and said to his mother: 'Take down that picture, and light some candles before it,' and they did so. Early on the following morning he said: 'Mamma, write to Aunt Chiara Maria (she was a nun in the convent of St. Cosmo) in Conversano to have a Mass said to St. Rita.' And they immediately did as he wished. On the evening of that day the child grew worse, and they were afraid he was dying, as the doctors had assured them. At a certain time of the night, however, he became noticeably better. When the doctors came next day to visit him they found him, to their astonishment, entirely recovered, and repeating the words, 'Blessed Rita has cured me.' Natale Esperti, a shoemaker of Conversano, had been in a deplorable state of health for a long time, for his feet and legs were swollen, and a pain in the heart deprived him of all chance of repose. The heart disease became worse, and the doctors attending him lost all hope of saving his life. On Tuesday in Holy Week, 1895, he received the last Sacraments, as he was almost on the point of death, and his end was expected every hour. His sister-in-law, who was most devoted to St. Rita, pitying his sad case, went to pray for him in the Church of St. Cosmo, and brought some candles to light before the saint's statue. Whilst all the others were weeping about the bed of the dying man she obtained a little picture of the saint, which was placed on his breast whilst they recited the invocation, 'St. Rita, pray for him.' They also gave him a little piece of the saint's blessed bread, which he tried to swallow. A wonder was instantly seen, for the swelling decreased considerably, and the pain at the heart disappeared. In three days the man who had been dying was able to rise from his bed cured, to the incredible wonder of all who had assisted him dying. Signora Antonia Bernardi of Cisternino also obtained a stupendous favour from our saint. In May, 1895, she had an attack of scarlatina, which was epidemic in that town, and had proved fatal in many cases. In her case it was so violent and so much resisted all the skill of the doctors that she was declared incurable, and she was preparing herself to receive the last Sacraments. Her parents were distracted with grief, but knowing the miracles that St. Rita works in every place, they had recourse to her patronage in their sorrow. The dying woman also recommended herself confidently to St. Rita, and joined her prayers to those of the others. Whilst she was in a paroxysm of fever, and hence could not say whether she was sleeping or waking, St. Rita appeared to her, and with her another saint whom the sick woman could not distinguish. The saint came close to her bed, and said to her, 'I have cured you; now you will be well, but mind, return me the visit at Conversano.' The saint disappeared, and the sick woman found herself instantly well. Her parents and relatives were seized with the utmost astonishment, and they took care to betake them to Conversano to return the visit of their beneficent visitor. There is no need to say that after this event the worship of St. Rita was extended to people of every rank in Cisternino. Amongst the very many places into which the worship of St. Rita has been publicly introduced in very recent years, Noci, a large town in the diocese of Conversano, is deserving of special mention. There is an altar, richly ornamented, erected in the principal church there in honour of the saint, and never a day passes that crowds of the faithful do not go there to offer their prayers or pay their vows. And Rita, looking with pleasure on the piety of the people of Noci, repays them every day with help and favour. For brevity's sake we shall mention only three examples of this, and in the first place that obtained by the priest, Don Francesco Morea, who is remarkable for promoting devotion to St. Rita. Here are his words: 'About midnight on the 10th of April, 1895, I was awakened by violent beatings of my heart, so frequent and continuous that I could not breathe. I remained a long time sitting up in bed with my hand tightly pressed over the region of the heart, in great trouble, without being able to utter a word. However, I turned to Blessed Rita in thought, placed her picture over my heart, and vowed a silver heart if she liberated me from this sudden illness. I recited three Glorias in her honour, adding, "O, Blessed Rita, pray for me." As soon as I had done this I was quite well. The beating of my heart became regular; I was able to lie down and sleep. From time to time since this nervous palpitation has returned, but never in the same form as that night, nor for so long. I redeemed my vow on the 14th of May by hanging on her picture the silver heart I promised.' The influenza, which was rife in many parts of Puglia in 1895, did not spare the town of Noci. Amongst others, Maria Luizzi, wife of Simone Sansonetti, a bleacher, was attacked by it. After struggling with the disease for several days at last it left her, and the doctor allowed her to leave her bed. Hardly, however, had she put foot on the floor than she felt entirely prostrated, and experienced such a feeling of dizziness that she fell at full length on the floor, and was with great difficulty got into bed again. On the next and three following days the same feelings of weakness and dejection continued. On the evening of the fifth day, animated with strong confidence in St. Rita, to whom, as we have said, an altar in the parish church was dedicated, she prayed in this way: 'O Blessed Rita, I promise to present you with my breloque if you allow me to remain out of bed all day to-morrow.' When the time came to get up, she left her bed and dressed herself, without the least doubt that her prayer had been heard. She tried to walk about her room, and found she could do so without difficulty, for she felt herself fortified with new strength, and all the ill-effects of the influenza vanished. She redeemed her vow to the saint on the 5th of June, 1895. The following fact that happened in Noci on the 28th of June, 1895, crowns all the wonderful works which the Saint of the Impossible performs every day. It is the case of a doctor--as pious and religious as he is skilful in the healing art--who was unexpectedly attacked by cerebral congestion and reduced to the last extremity, and even thought to be dead, who, after simply being anointed by the saint's oil moved himself, revived, and completely recovered. But let us leave it to himself to tell the story, for out of gratitude for the favour received he has written the following with his own hand: 'On the 28th of last June, in the forenoon, whilst I was making my usual round of medical visits, I began to feel unwell; and about eleven o'clock, whilst I was standing by a sick man, I could not complete my visit, for I almost fell into a swoon. The women who were standing opposite me noticed that I was ill and gave the alarm. The priest, Don Pietro Gentile, near whose house I was, was sent for and soon arrived. He asked me how I felt, and I replied, "I mistrust myself." "Do you wish to go home?" said he. "Yes," I answered, "let us go." And with the utmost difficulty I got there. I threw myself on the bed, lost all sense, was seized with epileptic convulsions of the Jacksonian type, proceeding from congestion of the brain. I had three attacks at short intervals, each more serious than the preceding one. Blood was let, leeches were applied, many mustard cataplasms were used, ice was kept constantly to my head. My colleagues who affectionately attended me already despaired of my recovery, and had the last Sacraments administered to me; the priests were reciting the prayers for the dying, and it was rumoured that I was dead. The good people poured into the church, and now had no hope except in a miracle. Ceaseless prayers were offered, especially before the altar of Blessed Rita. The oil of the saint was requisitioned. I was conscious of waking as from a calm sleep, whilst I felt a hand anointing my cheeks; I afterwards learned that the same thing had been done over my stomach and on my temples. From that moment I WAS COMPLETELY RESTORED TO HEALTH, and but for the concern of my friends I would have dressed myself and gone about my usual occupations. This event, really extraordinary, believed by all the people to have happened by the intercession of Blessed Rita, I consecrate in this account of it, as a proof of my gratitude, to the glory of the same Blessed Rita. 'PASQUALE TATEO, M.D. 'Noci, '2_nd of July_, 1895.' Since this case is so singular, and the miracle so great, we subjoin the account of it given by the zealous priest of the place, Don Francesco Morea: 'The deaths of the three ladies, Vavalle, Mansueto, and Anguilli, had impressed the town with sadness, when a new and unexpected sorrow came to disturb all the people. In less time than it takes to relate the sad tidings had passed from mouth to mouth; people of every condition were seen to stop in astonishment, to ask news of one another, and turn their steps to the house where the sick man lay. It was singular to see the stairs crowded with little children of both sexes, to see the people come out tearfully on the balconies and ask news of the passers-by, and the universal sorrow would have told you the great esteem in which he that was so near the tomb was held. The news that he had already received the last Sacraments, and that the priests, who with the doctors were about his bed, had begun the prayers for a soul departing, made it clear to all that very few hours of life remained to Doctor Pasquale Tateo. In the midst of such heartfelt sorrow there were some, however, who were offering fervent prayers for him to the Most High through the intercession of the Saint of the Impossible. There were some who, whilst they slept, felt inspired by the same blessed servant of God to light a lamp before the picture of the miracle-worker, and thus obtain for certain the favour they desired; there were some who began in secret a triduum for the sick; and by the dying man's bed were some who, provided with the miraculous oil, anointed with it, whilst reciting the usual prayers, his head, his stomach and abdomen, that were swollen to an extraordinary extent. And such great faith in the intercession of our new protectress was crowned by a most singular grace. As soon as the anointing was completed there came on a more violent fit of convulsions than any that had preceded it, and it was thought the doctor's last hour had come. But that fit was the last, and it seems that the powerful advocate wished to have it understood that she intervened on behalf of her faithful clients exactly when they were in direst peril, and when all hope of recovery by human means had been abandoned. Whilst the convulsive fit was in progress they began again to anoint him with the marvellous oil, and then he came to himself, and looked as if he were waking from a calm sleep of three hours. 'The transition from death to life was so sudden that those who were present could not but acknowledge that the recovery was a true miracle granted to the prayers of the entire town by its new protectress, Blessed Rita. Pleasant to relate, there was no time of convalescence, no getting better by degrees, no further remedy applied to him; but on the 30th the doctor, without any trace of weakness from the blood-letting, but full of energy, cheerful, and witty, as he usually had been, woke early in the morning, and, hearing the bell of the Capuchin church ringing, wanted to get up and go to Mass, as it was a feast day, but he was not allowed to do this. He rose later in the day, was able to take his meals, and returned to his house without assistance, amidst the wonder and applause of the people. The next day, early, he resumed his ordinary professional duties. These circumstances were such as would make those who did not know of the miracle believe that the occurrence must have been the result of an excited imagination rather than undeniable fact. Yet such they were, and the miracle is all the more wonderful on this account, and worthy of being published for the glory of God and Blessed Rita. To this end the doctor, out of gratitude, promises to make the altar dedicated to her in this principal church even richer than it already is, by presenting a beautiful silver lamp to be hung from the arch in front of it.' On the 20th of January, 1896, Signora Anna Gregori of Rome was seized by a violent fever, which at first was thought to be simply rheumatic fever, but which very soon developed into that terrible malady pleuro-bronchial pneumonia, which is in most cases fatal in Rome. In spite of the prompt and skilful treatment of the well-known Professor Masciarelli, the disease continued to gain force so rapidly that the patient, who was also _enciente_, received the last comforts of religion on the 25th of the month, and also the blessing of the Holy Father, and after having tearfully given her last messages to her friends, she was awaiting the call of the Lord with resignation. Meanwhile her husband, Signor Augusto Gregori, who was inconsolable at the loss that threatened him after only eight years of married life, turned with confidence to Our Lady of Pompei and to St. Rita of Cascia, that well-known sketch of whose life he had read a few days before, called 'The Saint of the Impossible.' He fervently besought her aid, promising to present a silver votive offering and to spread devotion to her. Even before midnight of that day the invalid felt relief, the fever went down, her strength came back, and after two days the doctors declared her out of all danger. She was shortly after able to rise from her bed completely recovered. The favour was a complete and perfect one, for after her serious illness there was no trace of tuberculosis, which was feared, and after less than a month she gave birth to a strong and healthy little daughter. Her husband, who quickly redeemed his vow, does not cease to give glory to the Saint of the Impossible. Simone Rotunno and his wife, Rosa Naracci, of Conversano, were overwhelmed with grief at a serious illness that threatened the life of their little daughter Maria, a child of four years. On the 27th of January, 1896, about five in the morning, they found her writhing in convulsions and almost at the point of death. Immediately they besought the help of their great patron St. Rita, and anointed the child's members with oil from the saint's lamp whilst they were offering fervent prayers. They had not long to wait, for at eleven o'clock on the same morning the child, who had hitherto shown no signs of life, stirred in bed, opened her eyes, and began to speak, and after ten days was restored to perfect health. A boy and girl, children of Doctor Vito Antonio Argenti of Polignano, on the sea-coast, caught the influenza, which was rife there in 1896. The disease took a very serious turn in the boy's case, and developed into pneumonia, accompanied by high fever and pain in the shoulder. The dangerous development of the disease caused consternation in the family. They immediately began a novena to St. Rita, to whom devotion is very generally practised in that place, and in whose honour an altar is dedicated in the Church of the Sacred Heart. They had two lamps lighted before her picture, and promised many gifts if their son should be restored to health. Their prayers were answered, for the child grew markedly better during the novena, and was completely cured by the time it was finished. The same remedy was adopted in the case of the little girl, on whom the disease had told severely. They put a picture of the saint on her breast, which she often kissed devoutly, another novena was begun for her recovery, and an improvement was soon evident, and continued till she was restored to perfect health. A woman from Casamassima, who was married at Bari, had an only son of about seventeen years of age, who was very wild and dissolute. He was for ever running away from home, getting into trouble, and giving vent to his vicious inclinations, and staying out at night more often than not. Seeing that all good advice and even threats were thrown away upon him, his afflicted parents applied to St. Rita in prayer, for they had heard of the wonderful deeds she had done. They began a novena of certain Paters and Aves as well as they could. On the third day their son appeared at home, but shortly after went off again and returned no more. Nevertheless, they still had confidence in the saint, and began a second novena after the manner directed in a little book they got from an aunt of theirs. When the novena was nearly finished the son came back quite changed from what he had been. He threw himself at his parents' feet, and with tears asked their pardon for the grief he had caused them, promising to lead a new life for the future. To remove all occasion of giving way to his vagrant propensities, he asked them to have him taught some business in which he could by his conduct give proof of his sincerity. His parents, beside themselves with joy, hastened to Conversano to return thanks to St. Rita, and as a proof of their gratitude they had a lamp lighted before her altar, which they made arrangements to keep burning on Friday in every week. The brother-in-law of a certain Sister of Charity was dangerously ill of pneumonia in February, 1896. The doctor who was called to attend him did not let his friends know how critical the case was, in order not to frighten them, but he only said to the patient's wife, 'Pray to God for your husband.' Luckily for her, she had a copy of the book 'The Saint of the Impossible,' which her sister the nun had given her, and she entrusted everything to the saint, and earnestly begged her help for the sick man. One night he almost swooned from the violence of his cough, and had to sit up in bed. About midnight he saw a nun come close to him and gaze at him fixedly without speaking. She stood by his side for half an hour and then disappeared. From that time the longed-for recovery commenced, and to the doctor's astonishment went on rapidly till he was entirely restored to health. It would be impossible to describe the joy of the family at this marvellous result. The fame of it was spread about, and devotion to the Saint of the Impossible spread to such an extent that a picture of St. Rita had to be placed in the parish church to satisfy the people's veneration. Twelve children of the house of Ventimiglia were all suffering from the measles in March, 1896, in Vatolla, which is a town of the province of Salerno, and the youngest, a little girl of two years of age, was, in addition, attacked so badly by laryngitis that it was feared she would choke every moment. Her eldest sister, beside herself with grief, took her little picture of St. Rita, and, fastening it about the little patient's neck, earnestly prayed for the grace of her recovery. Only a few minutes passed when little Teresa--for so the sick child was called--raised herself without assistance in her cot and asked for milk. That evening the fever, which had been very high, had almost disappeared, and her cough, too, had ceased to a very great extent. A few days later the child was able to get up, fully recovered. The family, out of gratitude to their great protectress, had a Mass celebrated at her altar in Conversano. In 1896 the marriage of Giuseppe Centrone to Maria Rotunno, two very good and pious young persons and fairly well off, was to have taken place. Through a slight quarrel, however, the marriage was broken off by the bridegroom. The bride, troubled at this sinister turn of events, together with her parents had recourse to St. Rita, and promised to present a golden votive offering if the groom should of himself reopen negotiations for the marriage that had been abandoned. On the vigil of her feast the saint appeared to the bridegroom in his sleep, and said: 'Beppino, your wife must be Maria and no one else.' This was enough to bring him back to his bride and to have the marriage take place, as it did, in fact. The vow to the saint was not only fulfilled, but they had a High Mass offered on her altar. One night in 1896 a young woman from Castellana was sleeping on the top of a very high rick of straw, when suddenly it gave way and fell to the ground. The young woman, who would have been crushed to death under its weight, immediately invoked St. Rita, and was rescued from danger without receiving the slightest injury. The saint appeared to her the following night whilst she was asleep, and said: 'I have saved you from death, and I want in return that new dress you have made.' The poor girl had, by dint of careful saving, made a new dress for herself, with which she wished to make an appearance on the feast days, but she made the required sacrifice to the Saint of the Impossible. She sold it and brought its price to be used in spreading the devotion to St. Rita from the church in Conversano. In 1896 there was a family in St. Vito dei Normanni which was plunged in the greatest misery owing to its head having entirely abandoned himself to a disgraceful vice, which he still continued to practise in spite of the terrible consequences it brought upon him. For although symptoms of paralysis and rheumatism showed themselves, and he was reduced to a state of the utmost weakness and almost blindness, he still went on to follow the path that ends in ruin of body and soul. His unfortunate family, having heard of the innumerable miracles of the Saint of the Impossible, had recourse to her. They made a most fervent novena in her honour, and ended it with receiving Holy Communion, and very soon the good effect of their prayers was evident. After a couple of days the man who had been brutalized by his base pursuits began to take heed for himself; the spirit of prudence awoke in him again; he abandoned his wicked practices, regained sight and strength, and recovered the health he had squandered. It is no wonder that the name of St. Rita is glorified in that family, or that the eldest daughter has made a vow to recite the prayers of St. Rita's novena every day as long as she lives. A young lady named Franceschina Gabrielli, from Noci, fell dangerously ill in 1896, whilst she was on a visit to some relatives in Rutigliano. All the doctors of the town were called in successively to prescribe for her, and others were brought from distant places, but they could not stop the progress of the disease that was killing her. The grief of her family and relatives was indescribable on being informed by the doctors after three consultations that nothing but a miracle could save her. The young lady, worn out by the disease and in her last agony, had received the last consolations of religion, and the special benediction of the Holy Father, and was preparing herself for the passage to eternity. All preparations were made for her funeral, the dress for the corpse and the coffin were got ready, and the clergy and confraternities appointed to assist in the procession to the tomb. But Franceschina had very special devotion to St. Rita, and was recommending herself to her protection with most fervent prayers. She held a picture of her in her hand, which she was kissing every minute, and although resigned to make the sacrifice of her life to God, she promised the saint to honour her by procuring a little statue of her if she should obtain the grace of recovery. One evening she was suffering a great deal, and the doctors foresaw that she would die that night. The priests were watching by her bedside and comforting her by reciting the prayers for the dying. At midnight she thought that St. Rita with St. John appeared to her, and that St. Rita said: 'Do not be afraid; you will be well.' What is certain is that just at that time she broke silence and began to sing a hymn of St. Rita. But the really astonishing fact is that all danger was at an end from that moment, and her disease disappeared as if by magic. The next morning she was convalescent, and the doctors in their astonishment had to confess that in this wonderful recovery God had intervened. The Salesian Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart amongst other occupations are employed in the religious and literary education of young girls, whom they watch over with a care that is truly maternal. Their mother-house is in Rome, and there is attached to it what is styled a providential boarding-school for young women who attend the normal schools, and at the end of their course get a Government certificate that entitles them to teach. Providential this college really is, for its pupils attend the Government schools and yet are carefully preserved from every danger. In 1896 the annual examinations at the end of the scholastic year were approaching. The students were in a state of trepidation, for with all their diligence and labour in study very little was needed to have girls make mistakes in the presence of examiners who were perhaps not too favourable to them. Having heard of the miracles of St. Rita of Cascia, they confidently turned to her, and confided to her care the result of the examinations. They had recourse to her patronage, they offered prayers in her honour, and other works of piety. Nor were their hopes frustrated. The examinations resulted most brilliantly, and to the entire satisfaction of all who took part in them. To thank her for so remarkable a favour the grateful girl students elected St. Rita their special protectress. On the 29th of May, 1897, a Calabrian gentleman arrived in Conversano on a pilgrimage, and, going into the Church of St. Cosmo, he went to the altar of St. Rita, and, prostrate before it, offered his thanks to the Saint of the Impossible. He afterwards told the nun who was promoter of the devotion that his name was Luigi Naccarato, of the province of Cosenza, and that he had come to redeem a vow made to the saint for a remarkable favour granted to him. He had been suffering for many years from a disorder of the brain that rendered him incapable of doing anything. His brother, a doctor, had used every means to eradicate his disease; he had consulted the most eminent medical men in Naples and elsewhere, but without any good effect. Having lost all hope in human means, he had recourse to the aid of Heaven by prayers to several holy patrons, but it seemed that Heaven, too, was deaf to his appeals. At last a lady in Cosenza had advised him to trust himself to the Saint of the Impossible, who had granted many extraordinary graces to those devoted to her. The young man, who was truly religious, willingly followed her advice. He began to invoke the saint, and made a vow to visit Conversano if his prayers were heard. His petition was granted; the disease that had hitherto baffled every remedy disappeared, and he felt himself free in mind and vigorous in health, as if he had never suffered from any malady. Not dissimilar from the preceding case was the disease from which the Princess Telesio Antonacci of Naples suffered, and by which she was brought to a deplorable state. Her brain was so weakened that she could not fix her mind on anything or do anything. When all the efforts of medical science had proved vain, her sorrowful sister, who had the book we have so often mentioned, wrote to Conversano to have a novena offered to the saint. The novena was made, and some of the blessed oil was also sent to have the invalid's forehead anointed with it. Instantly a wonderful change was wrought. As they anointed her forehead the disease grew less, her mind became clear, and her strength came back. The application of the oil was persevered in and so did the improvement continue, and the oil of St. Rita was recognised as the only remedy against that terrible disease. The Princess, in gratitude for so signal a favour, sent a present of a barrel of oil to Conversano, and money also to be employed in worship in honour of the saint. A little girl, the daughter of Sebastiano Giannuli, a merchant of Bari, had suffered from her earliest years from a tumour in the knee. The doctors of the town held different opinions as to the nature of her disease, and the well-known Doctor Giuseppe Luciana was consulted, who diagnosed the case as caries of the bone, and declared a surgical operation indispensable for a cure. This operation would be painful, difficult, and full of danger. The family by this opinion was reduced to a state of consternation, and had recourse to prayer, and by the suggestion of a nun made a novena to St. Rita, but the favour they prayed for was then denied them. The operation had to take place on the 22nd of July, 1897, and the tibia was almost entirely separated from the thigh-bone; the knee-pan was almost entirely removed, nearly four fingers' length of the tibia was removed, and as much of the thigh-bone, and both were united so as to form one bone only, whence all power of bending the joints was lost. Owing to the difficulty of the operation the doctors could not promise that she would surely recover; they only said the child would have to suffer a great deal. And, indeed, the poor child did suffer a great deal from high fever, excruciating pains, and a weakness so extreme that she could not even cry out. On the next day the child, who up to that time, owing to the pain she was suffering, had not even opened her mouth, asked for a picture of the saint that was hanging in the room, and began to say, 'O, Blessed Rita! oh, grant me the favour, because I am suffering very much! It is true that I have been ungrateful towards you, because when the others were saying the novena I was distracted, and I took very little care to pray to you; but now I know how wrong I was, and I ask your pardon. Oh, grant me the favour, for I think I cannot suffer any more.' And whilst the attendants were drawing close to her bed, she added: 'Make way; she is coming now.' 'Who?' they asked. 'A nun,' answered the child. 'Where is she coming from?' 'From there--from that door.' 'What is she doing?' 'She is moving about my bed--coming to sit near me.' The child then remained motionless, as if she were listening to something being said to her, and soon after said: 'With the help of the saint, doctors, how well she has settled my leg! She has put her beautiful hands on me and cured me!' and, turning to those near her who were weeping, 'Do not cry any more,' she said; 'be all very glad. Do you not see how glad I am at getting so beautiful a favour? I have no more pain. Blessed Rita has told me that all my pains will end in three days; with my injured leg I shall be able to dance, to jump, to run about without trouble.' And so it turned out. The child was able to get up after three days free entirely from all trace of disease. But the most stupendous part was that her right leg, from which half a palm's length of bone had been cut off, and which would be shortened, even supposing her cured, and quite incapable of bending, was found after the intervention of Blessed Rita to be of the same length as the left, and equally flexible and sound. Most grateful for so great a miracle, the family did not put off going to Conversano to return thanks and redeem their vow to the Saint of the Impossible, and many people took notice of the child that had been cured, how she walked without difficulty and without a halt, both her legs being precisely of the same length. The following stupendous fact that happened in the case of a person who had never even heard the name of St. Rita of Cascia shows how much God wishes glory to be given to His famous servant. To Vito Palazzi and his wife Rosina Surico of Gioia del Colle, near Bari, a child was born in 1897, who was christened Filippo. From birth the infant had one of its feet turned, so that the sole of the foot was twisted to a right angle from the place it ought to occupy. Doctors were consulted, but to no effect. They declared no care could remedy the defect, and that an operation would be dangerous and useless. The poor mother could only weep distractedly. One night, after crying excessively, she was sleeping, when a nun appeared to her in her sleep. 'Rosina,' said she, 'why do you weep? Can you not have recourse to me in your affliction?' 'And who are you, O, blessed sister?' said she. 'I am Blessed Rita of Cascia,' said the nun. 'O, Blessed Rita,' said the afflicted woman, 'cure my little Filippo for me;' and she showed the saint her infant's twisted foot. 'Have faith, Rosina,' said the saint to her; 'the defect in the child is a serious one, but God can do all things;' and so saying she made the sign of the Cross three times on the foot and disappeared. When the woman awoke on the following morning she remembered the vision, and, hurrying from her bed, she ran to the infant's cradle; she undid the bandages and looked at its feet, and found them both as they ought to be, for the deformity of the left foot had disappeared. She knelt on the floor and thanked the saint most earnestly. She then called her husband, showed him the infant's foot, and told him of the vision and miracle. She remembered St. Rita, and wrote to Conversano for a large picture of her, which she had framed, and before which she keeps a lamp burning night and day; and she likewise had a High Mass sung before the saint's altar, nor is she ever wearied in telling the miracle and giving glory to the saint to whom she owes it. CHAPTER IX HER CANONIZATION In reading the wonderful and miraculous facts of the life of St. Rita and the very many prodigious works done by God through her intercession, the reader must have asked himself more than once how it is that so grand a soul, whose heroic virtues shine so brightly, and who was, like the greatest saints of the Church, favoured by God with most singular graces and sublime privileges, should be adorned with the aureole of a saint and raised to highest honours of the altars only after more than four centuries had passed since she had gone to immortal glory in heaven. The only reasonable answer to this question, the only explanation of a delay not by any means unique in the history of the canonization of the great heroes of the Church, is that the judgments of God are incomprehensible and His ways unsearchable, and the Divine wisdom which in His own time makes each cause produce its effect, and all things regulates in number, weight, and measure, so disposes it that the exaltation of His servants on earth then takes place when it is for the greater glorification of His Church and the greater spiritual advantage of Christians. This just reflection ought to console us in the sorrow we naturally feel at the long delay that has occurred in bringing to a happy termination the process of the canonization of our heroine. After the privilege of reciting the office and celebrating Mass in honour of the saint had been granted to the Augustinian Order and the Diocese of Spoleto in 1627, as soon as the solemn festivals we have described were brought to an end, devotion to St. Rita increased to such an extent, and the desire of the faithful became so fervent to have their great advocate enrolled by the Church's supreme authority in the catalogue of the Blessed and afterwards of the Saints, that in August, 1737, her cause was resumed in the state and terms in which it was found. On the 3rd of August in that year an ordinary session of the Congregation was held to debate the point whether the case excepted in the decrees of Pope Urban VIII. was fully established, and in the result the Congregation found the answer to be in the affirmative, and Pope Clement XII., on the 13th of the same month, confirmed the finding of the Congregation. On the 25th of July in the following year remissorial letters were therefore sent to the Ecclesiastical Courts of Spoleto, in whose jurisdiction Cascia then was, authorizing them to institute an Apostolic process of inquiry regarding the virtues and miracles of Blessed Rita, it being the unbroken practice of the Holy See not to grant the supreme honours of the altars unless it be shown that the theological and moral virtues were practised in a heroic degree. But the process then begun was interrupted by various events, and was not resumed until 1851. Without further interruption it was finally perfected in 1855, and its validity was approved in 1856 in Rome by Pius IX., of happy memory. Meanwhile the fame of the extraordinary graces and miracles granted by God through the saint's intercession was everywhere increasing, but it is hard to collect the proofs and institute a process that will satisfy the rigorous requirements which the Church exacts in those matters. Nevertheless, juridical proofs of some of these miraculous occurrences were not wanting. In fact, in the years 1851 and 1852 there was held by Apostolic permission in the Ecclesiastical Courts of Nursia, under the jurisdiction of which Cascia had passed, a process of inquiry into the reported case of instantaneous curing of a girl--Elisabetta Bergamini, who had been suffering from conjunctivitis complicated with ulcerous keratitis. Owing to the efforts of the Most Rev. Mons. Casimiro Gennari, then Bishop of Conversano, and at present titular Archbishop of Lepanto and Assessor of the Inquisition, who is most zealous, as we have said, in spreading devotion to St. Rita, the authorization of the Holy See was asked for and obtained in 1887 to institute a formal Apostolic process of inquiry into the case of Cosimo Pelligrini, of the town of Conversano, who was reported to have been miraculously cured. As soon as the inquiry was perfected, it was scrutinized in an ordinary Congregation of the Rota on the 28th of June, 1892, and its validity recognised. On the 17th of the following month the Holy Father deigned to confirm the sentence of the Sacred Congregation. Almost at the same time there was held, by virtue of remissorial letters of the 18th of February, 1892, in the Ecclesiastical Courts of Nursia, a special inquiry, in which the Promoter of the Faith, Mons. Agostino Caprara, intervened, into the most sweet and miraculous odour which from time immemorial is at intervals experienced about the blessed body of St. Rita. By other remissorial letters of the 22nd of August following, the Promoter of the Faith was empowered to examine the venerable body itself, in order to make certain that it had never been embalmed, nor any odoriferous substances placed in it. When this process of inquiry into the marvellous odour was brought to an end, it was decided to join it to the process that had been executed in the courts of Spoleto by ordinary authority in 1626. On the 25th of February, 1896, the Sacred Congregation of Rites delivered its judgment that the validity of the two processes of 1626 and 1892 had been established, the reporter of the cause being his Eminence Cardinal Gaetano Aloisi-Masella, Prefect of that Congregation. As regards another process of inquiry executed in 1775, with only ordinary authority, into the instantaneous and miraculous curing of an Augustinian nun of the convent of Cascia, it was decided to supplicate the reigning Pontiff, Leo XIII., that he would deign to make good the defect of jurisdiction, and make the acts of that process valid. But the Holy Father, rather than grant the convalidation, was pleased to dispense, by most special favour, with the fourth miracle, for from time immemorial the proof of four miracles has been required for the canonization of the servants of God. Owing to the sovereign concession of the Holy Father, the promoters of the cause of canonization had high hopes of bringing it to a happy conclusion before much more time should pass. They obtained leave to introduce the Ordinary Process of 1626 as having equal value as proof with the Apostolic Process that closed in 1855; and the presence of the consulters and their voting being dispensed with, on the 6th of April, 1897, in an ordinary meeting of the Congregation, the writings of St. Rita were inquired into, and it was further debated and discussed 'Whether the virtues of Blessed Rita had been so clearly established that the discussion of her miracles might be proceeded with?' The session gave an affirmative decision, which was confirmed by the Sovereign Pontiff on the 9th of the month. The way was thus prepared for the discussion of the miracles. Information regarding them and summaries were prepared, and the opinions of two distinguished experts were added. On the 27th of June, 1899, the Congregation met under the presidency of the Most Eminent Cardinal Aloisi-Masella, reporter of the cause, to discuss the miracles, and on the 9th of January, 1900, the preparatory Congregation held its meeting in the Vatican palace, and on the following 27th of March, in the general Congregation, assembled, as is customary, in the presence of the Holy Father, the following subject was discussed: 'Whether any, and what, miracles have been conclusively proved, after veneration had been allowed to the Blessed, in case and to the effect of the present discussion?' And by a very special favour of the Holy See the following was also discussed: 'And granted the approval of the miracles, whether her canonization may safely be proceeded with?' The Most Eminent Cardinals and Most Rev. Consulters delivered their opinions on both matters, and were heard most attentively by the Sovereign Pontiff; and although he described the cause as _most rare_ and _most noble_, he nevertheless, according to the usual custom, deferred giving his definitive decision, but _redoubled his prayers to implore the help of Heaven_. On Palm Sunday, the 8th of April following, the Holy Father, after having most fervently offered to God the Eucharistic Sacrifice, had the decree of approval of the three miracles, of which we shall speak afterwards, read and published with the accustomed solemnity by Monsignor the Secretary of the Sacred Congregation of Rites. He next published the decrees, called the 'Tuto,' for the beatification of seventy-three Venerable Martyrs of China, Tonquin, and Cochin China, members of the Dominican and Franciscan Orders, the Congregations of Missionary Priests, and of Foreign Missions; and the decree of beatification of the Venerable Martyrs of the West Indies, members of the Order of Discalced Carmelites, and that of the beatification of the Venerable Servant of God, Maria Cresenzia Hoss, professed nun of the Third Order of St. Francis. His Holiness then deigned to address to the assembly a Latin allocution, in which he manifested the joy that he felt, especially for the decrees regarding Blessed Rita of Cascia, the glory and ornament of the Augustinian Order, and the jewel of the Umbrian province, which gave birth also to St. Benedict and St. Francis, and where for many years the Sovereign Pontiff himself had exercised as Bishop his pastoral ministry. All the more did he rejoice since it was a question of this most humble and most holy woman's canonization, a solemn religious ceremony, and supreme act of the Pontifical authority and of the infallible teaching of the Vicar of Jesus Christ. He added that it was desirable that the marvellous odour which is diffused and given forth from time to time near the sacred remains of the Blessed Rita, and called prodigious from the time of Urban VIII., should soon be renewed, as a happy augury of a better future in this Holy Year and in this century that is about to commence. CHAPTER X THE THREE MIRACLES APPROVED FOR HER CANONIZATION _First Miracle_.--The odour which is felt near St. Rita's body, especially when miracles are worked through her intercession, and which is diffused in a wonderful manner. As regards this miracle, we told in full everything about it in the fourth chapter of the present part. We have only to add our joy that the oracle of the Holy See has solemnly confirmed what historians have written regarding this sweet odour, and what has been alleged in the processes and confirmed by experience. _Second Miracle_.--Complete and instantaneous recovery of Elisabetta Bergamini from conjunctivitis complicated by ulcerous keratitis of the small-pox form. Elisabetta Bergamini of Terni, about seven years before the time of which we wrote, had been attacked by the small-pox in so virulent a form that it left her whole face pitted, and destroyed the sight of her eyes, so that she could hardly distinguish light from darkness. Several physicians consulted by her parents had submitted her to different forms of treatment for the recovery of her sight, but to no purpose. She was then sent as a boarder to the Augustinian convent of Cascia, where her father's sister was a nun, known as Sister Maria Maddalena, in order to pray the Lord through St. Rita's intercession either to restore her sight or else take her to Himself. She was there principally because her father's stepmother had been miraculously cured by St. Rita some years before. The girl was brought to the convent and confided to the nuns' care in 1833. Pitying the sad case of the afflicted child, they took most loving care of her. The doctor who attended the convent was called in to visit her, and he confirmed the opinions of the doctors of Terni that her disease was incurable, and that only a miracle could restore her sight. The poor child suffered great pain, and even the light caused her so much inconvenience that two patches of green silk had to be hung over her eyes. Besides, there was a constant flow of humour mixed with tears, which was so corrosive that it ate away channels on her nose and cheeks, and gave forth a nauseating and insufferable stench. To give some relief to the little patient, her aunt and the mistress of the boarders used to wash her eyes, by the doctor's directions, with a decoction of marshmallows; but even from this treatment she suffered a good deal, for in the course of it her eyelids had to be raised as much as possible, and this caused her acute pain. Elisabetta continued in this deplorable state till September of that year, when the nuns thought of getting her to wear a black votive dress in honour of St. Rita. This dress was first blessed by the confessor and touched to the receptacle in which the saint's body lies. She was dressed in that habit and her eyes touched with a little silver rod, which tradition says once touched St. Rita's forehead. The mistress noted that afterwards the flow of humour from her eyes had decreased, and this fact gave Elisabetta courage to have greater confidence in the saint's protection. That morning the nuns, according to custom, were sorting in the courtyard the corn to be employed in making the little loaves of St. Rita. The mistress brought Elisabetta to them, and she sat down near one of the nuns, and, owing to her blindness, began, instead of selecting the best, to mix what had already been sorted with the inferior corn. The nun told her to keep quiet, and the mistress then gave her a cup with some corn in it to play with. As soon as Elisabetta got the cup she began to stir the corn with her little hand, and suddenly called out that she could see, and as she did not know what corn should be rejected, she held out a grain in her hand and asked whether that should be put aside or not. At the same time she threw off the green patches, and the nuns ran in astonishment to look at the child's eyes, and saw that they were most beautiful and entirely cured. To make sure that she had recovered her sight they made her sort all the corn that she had in the cup, and she did it perfectly. Then they all went together to where the saint's body was to thank her for so great a miracle. The child then saw for the first time the body of her benefactress, and she wept with love, and with her arms crossed returned her thanks in a loud voice. When the doctor of the convent saw Elisabetta he declared that the saint had worked a great miracle, and that otherwise she never would have been able to see. The child remained in the convent for nearly three years after, and her eyes were always strong. She learned so well to read that she used to recite the office in choir with the nuns, and read instruction for the lay sisters. She also learned to write and sew, and do other feminine work that needs very acute sight. As a complement of the narration of this miracle, we judge it right to quote the words of a famous Roman physician, who was called on to give his judgment on this prodigious event. His learned opinion, delivered in writing, ends thus: 'It is a matter of conscience and of necessity to reiterate my opinion that this cure has been instantaneous, perfect, and lasting, in no way caused by art or by natural forces, impossible to take place except by miracle, which by science and by conscience must be classified with the great inexplicable portents which the Omnipotent God allows to be performed by His faithful servants, and in our case by Blessed Rita of Cascia; and this I again repeat in my deposition under my oath.' _Third Miracle_.--Instantaneous and perfect curing of Cosimo Pelligrini from chronic catarrhal gastro-enteritis, hemorrhoidal affection, and serious and permanent chronic anæmia. Cosimo Pelligrini, of the town of Conversano, in the province of Bari, a tailor by trade, and fifty years of age, broken in health by long years of labour and by troubles of mind, began to lose strength, and his eyesight became so weak that although he used very strong glasses he could distinguish only with difficulty objects a short distance away. He had, besides, grown so deaf in both ears that it was necessary to speak in a very loud voice to make him hear, and so great was his deafness that he did not even hear the strokes of a hammer with which on one occasion his cloak was nailed for a joke to a bench on which he was sitting. Besides his great loss of strength and the weakening of his organs, he also suffered from serious disorders of the stomach, pains in the abdominal region, frequent vomitings and hæmorrhoids. He, moreover, experienced frequent sudden attacks of dizziness, which were so serious as to make him fall to the ground unless he speedily retired to bed, and stupefied him for hours, during which time his sight was altogether obscured. At night he often suffered from muscular contractions, and if he spoke for long or listened to others for any length of time he was seized with shakings in all his members. His ways of curing himself made his already sufficiently deplorable state of health still worse. For, instead of consulting a doctor, following his own caprices he took frequent purgatives, and bled himself so often and to such an extent that he developed chronic anæmia, which showed its presence in his pallid, emaciated countenance. He was thus often forced to keep his bed, and his bodily weakness and mental agony made life a burden. Such for many years was Pelligrini's miserable condition. About the year 1877, on the 22nd of May, the feast of St. Rita, to whom he had great devotion, when he was entering his house after hearing Mass at the saint's altar in the church of the nuns of St. Cosmo, he fell to the ground, deprived almost entirely of sense. He was put to bed, and the doctor immediately sent for. On his arrival the doctor instantly saw the very grave state of the man, prescribed some remedies, of which, however, almost no use could be made, and ordered the last Sacraments to be administered. After being anointed, Pelligrini became so ill that he lost all strength and the use of his senses, and was hardly able to breathe; his face became corpse-like in its pallor as he lay motionless in bed. In this state he passed two days, and on the third day the doctor was of opinion that he would not live till evening. Meanwhile a lay sister of the convent, who was sister of the sick man's wife, sent to ask how he was, and in sending an answer his wife requested the nuns to light the lamp at the saint's altar and offer prayers for her husband, who was in his last agony. The request was immediately attended to by all the community. Little over an hour passed when Pelligrini, as if waking from a profound lethargy, opened his eyes, began to move his arms, and, calling his wife, said to her, 'I am cured. Blessed Rita has made me well.' He then began to tell how the saint had appeared to him, had touched him on the forehead, shoulder, and breast, and assured him that he would be cured, and that after only a day or two of weakness he would be entirely well. He also gave the same account of the vision to others who came to see him, and the fact proved that the saint had miraculously saved him from imminent death. The next day he left his bed completely cured, as Rita had told him he would be. He was able to eat and digest his food as well as any person of strong robust health, and all those chronic ills that afflicted him for so many years were instantaneously and entirely eradicated, and his deafness and lack of vision also were entirely gone. He could see as well as if he had never been shortsighted, and could detect the least noise, and although he was seventy years of age he had regained full vigour and strength. Many people went to see Pelligrini, who seemed as one raised from the dead to a new life, and who was filled with a new strength. All who saw him gave glory to God and to Rita for so wonderful and surprising a fact. After ten years, when he was eighty years old, he was examined by doctors, and found perfectly healthy and full of vigour. CONCLUSION We have now come, oh, reader, to the end of our journey, and however short it has been, you, the faithful follower of our steps, cannot fail to look back, as travellers do after a difficult passage, and consider with us the difficulty and roughness of the way that Rita traversed in order to reach her sublime goal. We are convinced that it is not simply curiosity that has moved you to follow our plain narration of facts, but the proposal to follow on the path that Rita has travelled by, and walk in her footsteps, for the lives of the saints are written and read for no other object than with the Divine assistance to cause their virtues to be imitated. And you must have remarked that Rita's virtues have this peculiar characteristic--that persons of both sexes, of all ages and conditions, may put themselves in the way of practising them and turning them to account. The young, married persons, parents, widows, persons in religious life, the troubled and afflicted of both sexes, have each in the life of this saint a bright and shining mirror wherein to behold their stains, their weakness, their imperfection, and see also how to remove these blots under Rita's care and protection. The incident of the wondrous bees flitting about her cradle, described in the first part, seems to us to symbolize the great multitude of Christian souls, each of which in its proper place may extract, like industrious bees, the honey and fragrance of virtue from this mystic, odoriferous, and precious garden. She is indeed the jewel of the Umbrian province, as the inspired Pontiff, Leo XIII., styled her in most happy phrase on April 8, 1900, whose beauty can never fade, about which thousands of souls may gather and be excited to thoughts of ineffable sweetness that will produce good fruits in time and in eternity. You young people, you parents, you religious, you troubled and afflicted, never lose sight of your model! Have recourse to her in all your trials, and even when your troubles seem irreparable, do not lose courage, for she who is commonly called the _Saint of the Impossible and of desperate cases_ will then especially guard you and bring you consolation. R. & T. WASHBOURNE, 4 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON 
9069	----	Flis, and Distributed Proofreaders SAINT AUGUSTIN BY LOUIS BERTRAND TRANSLATED BY VINCENT O'SULLIVAN TRANSLATOR'S NOTE The quotations from Saint Augustin's _Confessions_ are taken from Canon Bigg's scholarly version, which seems to me the best in English. But there are places where M. Bertrand's reading of the original text differs from Dr. Bigg's, and in such cases I have felt myself obliged to follow the author of this book. These differences never seriously affect the meaning of a passage; sometimes it is a mere matter of choice, as with the word _collactaneum_ (i, 7) which Dr. Bigg translates "twin," and M. Bertrand, like Pusey, _frère de lait_, or "foster-brother." As a rule, Dr. Bigg chooses the quietest terms, and M. Bertrand the most forcible. Those curious in such matters may like to see an instance. The original text runs:-- Avulsa a latere meo tanquam impedimento conjugii, cum quâ cubare solitus eram, cor ubi adhaerebat, concisum et vulneratum mihi erat, et trahebat sanguinem. (_Confessiones_, vi, 15.) M. Bertrand translates:-- Quand on arracha de mes flancs, sous prétexte qu'elle empêchait mon mariage, celle avec qui j'avais coutume de dormir, depuis si longtemps, là où mon coeur était attaché au sien, il se déchira, et je traînais mon sang avec ma blessure. Canon Bigg's version is:-- My mistress was torn from my side as an obstacle to my marriage, and my heart, which clung to her, was torn and wounded till it bled. In this place, it will be observed that Dr. Bigg does not emphasize the word _ubi_ which, as the reader will find on turning to page 185 of this volume, M. Bertrand thinks so significant. The remaining English versions of the writings of Saint Augustin and of the other Latin authors quoted are my own, except the passages from _The City of God_, including the verse translation of Persius, which are taken, with some necessary alterations, from the Seventeenth century translation ascribed to John Healey. V. O'S. CONTENTS CHAPTER PROLOGUE THE FIRST PART DAYS OF CHILDHOOD I. AN AFRICAN FREE-TOWN SUBJECT TO ROME II. THE FAMILY OF A SAINT III. THE COMFORT OF THE MILK IV. THE FIRST GAMES V. THE SCHOOLBOY OF MADAURA VI. THE HOLIDAYS AT THAGASTE THE SECOND PART THE ENCHANTMENT OF CARTHAGE I. CARTHAGO VENERIS II. THE AFRICAN ROME III. THE CARTHAGE STUDENT IV. THE SWEETNESS OF TEARS V. THE SILENCE OF GOD THE THIRD PART THE RETURN I. THE CITY OF GOLD II. THE FINAL DISILLUSION III. THE MEETING BETWEEN AMBROSE AND AUGUSTIN IV. PLANS OF MARRIAGE V. THE CHRIST IN THE GARDEN THE FOURTH PART THE HIDDEN LIFE I. THE LAST SMILE OF THE MUSE II. THE ECSTASY OF SAINT MONNICA III. THE MONK OF THAGASTE IV. AUGUSTIN A PRIEST THE FIFTH PART THE APOSTLE OF PEACE AND OF CATHOLIC UNITY I. THE BISHOP OF HIPPO II. WHAT WAS HEARD IN THE BASILICA OF PEACE III. THE BISHOP'S BURTHEN IV. AGAINST "THE ROARING LIONS" THE SIXTH PART FACE TO FACE WITH THE BARBARIANS I. THE SACK OF ROME II. THE CITY OF GOD III. THE BARBARIAN DESOLATION IV. SAINT AUGUSTIN INDEX SAINT AUGUSTIN PROLOGUE Inquietum est cor nostrum donec requiescat in te. "Our heart finds no rest until it rests in Thee." _Confessions_, I, i. Saint Augustin is now little more than a celebrated name. Outside of learned or theological circles people no longer read him. Such is true renown: we admire the saints, as we do great men, on trust. Even his _Confessions_ are generally spoken of only from hearsay. By this neglect, is he atoning for the renewal of glory in which he shone during the seventeenth century, when the Jansenists, in their inveterate obstinacy, identified him with the defence of their cause? The reputation of sour austerity and of argumentative and tiresome prolixity which attaches to the remembrance of all the writers of Port-Royal, save Pascal--has that affected too the work of Augustin, enlisted in spite of himself in the ranks of these pious schismatics? And yet, if there have ever been any beings who do not resemble Augustin, and whom probably he would have attacked with all his eloquence and all the force of his dialectic, they are the Jansenists. Doubtless he would have said with contempt: "The party of Jansen," even as in his own day, with his devotion to Catholic unity, he said: "The party of Donatus." It must be acknowledged also that the very sight of his works is terrifying, whether we take the enormous folios in two columns of the Benedictine edition, or the volumes, almost as compact, and much more numerous, of recent editions. Behind such a rampart of printed matter he is well defended against profane curiosity. It needs courage and perseverance to penetrate into this labyrinth of text, all bristling with theology and exegesis and metaphysics. But only cross the threshold of the repellent enclosure, grow used to the order and shape of the building, and it will not be long ere you are overcome by a warm sympathy, and then by a steadily increasing admiration for the host who dwells there. The hieratic face of the old bishop lights up, becomes strangely living, almost modern, in expression. You discover under the text one of the most passionate lives, most busy and richest in instruction, that history has to shew. What it teaches is applicable to ourselves, answers to our interests of yesterday and to-day. This existence, and the century in which it was passed, recall our own century and ourselves. The return of similar circumstances has brought similar situations and characters; it is almost our portrait. And we feel half ready to conclude that at the present moment there is no subject more actual than St. Augustin. At least he is one of the most interesting. What, indeed, is more romantic than this wandering life of rhetorician and student that the youthful Augustin led, from Thagaste to Carthage, from Carthage to Milan and to Rome--begun in the pleasures and tumult of great cities, and ending in the penitence, the silence, and recollection of a monastery? And again, what drama is more full of colour and more profitable to consider than that last agony of the Empire, of which Augustin was a spectator, and, with all his heart faithful to Rome, would have prevented if he could? And then, what tragedy more stirring and painful than the crisis of soul and conscience which tore his life? Well may it be said that, regarded as a whole, the life of Augustin was but a continual spiritual struggle, a battle of the soul. It is the battle of every moment, the never-ceasing combat of body and spirit, which the poets of that time dramatized, and which is the history of the Christian of all times. The stake of the battle is a soul. The upshot is the final triumph, the redemption of a soul. What makes the life of Augustin so complete and so truly typical is that he fought the good fight, not only against himself, but against all the enemies of the Church and the Empire. If he was a doctor and a saint, so was he too the type of the man of action in one of the most disheartened periods. That he triumphed over his passions--this, in truth, concerns only God and himself. That he preached, wrote, shook crowds, disturbed minds, may seem without importance to those who reject his doctrine. But that across the centuries his soul, afire with charity, continues to warm our own; that without our knowledge he still shapes us; and that, in a way more or less remote, he is still the master of our hearts, and, in certain aspects, of our minds--there is what touches each and all of us, without distinction. Not only has Augustin always his great place in the living communion of all christened people, but the Western soul is marked with the stamp of his soul. First of all, his fate is confused with that of the dying Empire. He witnessed, if not the utter disappearance, at least the gradual swooning away of that admirable thing called the Roman Empire, image of Catholic unity. Well, we are the wreckage of the Empire. Usually, we turn away with contempt from those wretched centuries which underwent the descents of the Barbarians. For us, that is the Lower-Empire, a time of shameful decadence which deserves nothing but our scorn. However, it is out of this chaos and this degradation that we have arisen. The wars of the Roman republic concern us less than the outlawry of the Barbarian chiefs who separated our Gaul from the Empire, and without knowing it, prepared the dawn of France. After all, what are the rivalries of Marius and Sylla to us? The victory of Aëtius over the Huns in the plains of Chalons concerns us a good deal more. Further, it is unfair to the Lower-Empire to view it only as a time of feebleness and cowardice and corruption. It was also an epoch of immense activity, prolific of daring and high-flying adventurers, some of them heroic. Even the most degenerate of the last Emperors never lost the conviction of Roman majesty and grandeur. Unto the very end, they employed all the ruses of their diplomacy to prevent the Barbarian chiefs from imagining themselves anything else but vassals of the Empire. Honorius, at bay in Ravenna, persisted in refusing Alaric the title of commander of the _Cohortes Urbanæ_, even though his refusal were to lead to the sack of Rome and imperil his own life. Simply by his fidelity to the Empire, Augustin shews himself one like ourselves--a Latin of Occitania. But still closer resemblances draw him near to us. His time was very like our own time. Upon even a slight familiarity with his books we recognize in him a brother-soul who has suffered, felt, thought, pretty nearly like us. He came into an ending world, on the eve of the great cataclysm which was going to carry away an entire civilization--a tragic turning-point of history, a time troubled and often very grievous, which was hard to live in for all, and to even the most determined minds must have appeared desperate. The peace of the Church was not yet settled; consciences were divided. People hesitated between the belief of yesterday and the belief of to-morrow. Augustin was among those who had the courage to choose, and who, having once chosen their faith, proclaimed it without weakening. The belief of a thousand years was dying out, quenched by a young belief to which was promised an eternal duration. How many delicate souls must have suffered from this division, which cut them off from their traditions and obliged them, as they thought, to be false to their dead along with the religion of their ancestors! All the irritations which the fanatics of to-day inflict upon believing souls, many must have had to suffer then. The sceptics were infused by the intolerance of the others. But the worst (even as it is to-day) was to watch the torrent of foolishness which, under cover of religion, philosophy, or miracle-working, pretended to the conquest of mind and will. Amid this mass of wildest doctrines and heresies, in this orgy of vapid intellectualism, they had indeed solid heads who were able to resist the general intoxication. And among all these people talking nonsense, Augustin appears admirable with his good sense. This "intellectual," this mystic, was not only a man of prayer and meditation. The prudence of the man of action and the administrator balanced his outbursts of dialectical subtility, often carried too far. He had that sense of realities such as we flatter ourselves that we have; he had a knowledge of life and passion. Compared to the experience of, say, Bossuet, how much wider was Augustin's! And with all that, a quivering sensitiveness which is again like our own--the sensitiveness of times of intense culture, wherein the abuse of thought has multiplied the ways of suffering in exasperating the desire for pleasure. "The soul of antiquity was rude and vain." It was, above all, limited. The soul of Augustin is tender and serious, eager for certainties and those enjoyments which do not betray. It is vast and sonorous; let it be stirred ever so little, and from it go forth deep vibrations which render the sound of the infinite. Augustin, before his conversion, had the apprehensions of our Romantics, the causeless melancholy and sadness, the immense yearnings for "anywhere but here," which overwhelmed our fathers. He is really very close to us. He has broadened our Latin souls by reconciling us with the Barbarian. The Latin, like the Greek, only understood himself. The Barbarian had not the right to express himself in the language of the Empire. The world was split into two parts which endeavoured to ignore each other, Augustin has made us conscious of the nameless regions, the vague countries of the soul, which hitherto had lain shrouded in the darkness of barbarism. By him the union of the Semitic and the Occidental genius is consummated. He has acted as our interpreter for the Bible. The harsh Hebraic words become soft to our ears by their passage through the cultivated mouth of the rhetorician. He has subjugated us with the word of God. He is a Latin who speaks to us of Jehovah. Others, no doubt, had done it before him. But none had found a similar emotion, a note of tenderness so moving. The gentle violence of his charity wins the adherence of hearts. He breathes only charity. After St. John, it is he who is the Apostle of Love. His tireless voice dominated the whole of the West. The Middle Ages still heard it. For centuries his sermons and treatises were copied over and over again; they were repeated in cathedrals, commented in abstracts of theology. People came to accept even his theory of the fine arts. All that we have inherited from the ancients reaches us through Augustin. He is the great teacher. In his hands the doctrinal demonstration of the Catholic religion takes firm shape. To indicate the three great stages of the onward march of the truth, one may say: Jesus Christ, St. Paul, St. Augustin. Nearest to our weakness is the last. He is truly our spiritual father. He has taught us the language of prayer. The words of Augustin's prayers are still upon the lips of the devout. This universal genius, who during forty years was the speaking-trumpet of Christendom, was also the man of one special century and country. Augustin of Thagaste is the great African. Well may we be proud of him and adopt him as one of our glories--we who have kept up, for now almost a century, a struggle like to that which he maintained for the unity of the Roman Empire, we who consider Africa as an extension of France. More than any other writer, he has expressed the temperament and the genius of his country. This motley Africa, with its eternal mixture of races at odds with one another, its jealous sectarianism, the variety of its scenery and climate, the violence of its sensations and passions, its seriousness of character and its quick-changing humour, its mind at once practical and frivolous, its materialism and its mysticism, its austerity and its luxury, its resignation to servitude and its instincts of independence, its hunger to rule--all that comes out with singularly vivid touches in the work of Augustin. Not only was he his country's voice, but, as far as he could, he realized its old dream of dominion. The supremacy in spiritual matters that Carthage disputed so long and bitterly with Rome, it ended by obtaining, thanks to Augustin. As long as he lived, the African Church was the mistress of the Churches of the West. As for me--if I may venture to refer to myself in such a matter--I have had the joy to recognize in him, besides the Saint and Teacher whom I revere, the ideal type of the Latin of Africa. The image of which I descried the outline long ago through the mirages of the South in following the waggons of my rugged heroes, I have seen at last become definite, grow clear, wax noble and increase to the very heaven, in following the traces of Augustin. And even supposing that the life of this child of Thagaste, the son of Monnica, were not intermingled so deeply with ours, though he were for us only a foreigner born in a far-off land, nevertheless he would still remain one of the most fascinating and luminous souls who have shone amid our darkness and warmed our sadness--one of the most human and most divine creatures who have trod our highways. THE FIRST PART DAYS OF CHILDHOOD Sed delectabat ludere. "Only, I liked to play." _Confessions_, I, 9. I AN AFRICAN FREE-TOWN SUBJECT TO ROME Little streets, quite white, which climb up to clay-formed hills deeply furrowed by the heavy winter rains; between the double row of houses, brilliant in the morning sun, glimpses of sky of a very tender blue; here and there, in the strip of deep shade which lies along the thresholds, white figures crouched upon rush-mats--indolent outlines, draped with bright colours, or muffled in rough and sombre wool-stuffs; a horseman who passes, bent almost in two in his saddle, the big hat of the South flung back over his shoulders, and encouraging with his heel the graceful trot of his horse--such is Thagaste as we see it to-day, and such undoubtedly it appeared to the traveller in the days of Augustin. Like the French town built upon its ruins, the African free-city lay in a sort of plain taken between three round hills. One of them, the highest one, which is now protected by a _bordj_, must have been defended in old days by a _castellum_. Full-flowing waters moisten the land. To those coming from the stony regions about Constantine and Setif, or the vast bare plain of the Medjerda, Thagaste gives an impression of freshness and cool. It is a laughing place, full of greenery and running water. To the Africans it offers a picture of those northern countries which they have never seen, with its wooded mountains covered by pines and cork trees and ilex. It presents itself as a land of mountain and forest--especially forest. It is a hunter's country. Game is plentiful there--boar, hare, redwing, quail, partridge. In Augustin's time, wild beasts were apparently more numerous in the district than they are to-day. When he compares his adversaries, the Donatists, to roaring lions, he speaks like a man who knows what a lion is. To the east and west, wide stretches of woodland, rounded hill-summits, streams and torrents which pour through the valleys and glens--there you have Thagaste and the country round about--the world, in fact, as it revealed itself to the eyes of the child Augustin. But towards the south the verdure grows sparse; arid mountain-tops appear, crushed down as blunted cones, or jutted in slim Tables of the Law; the sterility of the desert becomes perceptible amid the wealth of vegetation. This full-foliaged land has its harsh and stern localities. The African light, however, softens all that. The deep green of the oaks and pines runs into waves of warm and ever-altering tints which are a caress and a delight for the eye. A man has it thoroughly brought home to him that he is in a land of the sun. To say the least, it is a country of strongly marked features which affords the strangest contrast with the surrounding districts. This wooded Numidia, with its flowing brooks, its fields where the cattle graze, differs in the highest degree from the Numidia towards Setif--a wide, desolate plain, where the stubble of the wheat-fields, the sandy _steppes_, roll away in monotonous undulations to the cloudy barrier of Mount Atlas which closes the horizon. And this rough and melancholy plain in its turn offers a striking contrast with the coast region of Boujeiah and Hippo, which is not unlike the Italian Campania in its mellowness and gaiety. Such clear-cut differences between the various parts of the same province doubtless explain the essential peculiarities of the Numidian character. The bishop Augustin, who carried his pastoral cross from one end to the other of this country, and was its acting and thinking soul, may perhaps have owed to it the contrasts and many-sidedness of his own rich nature. Of course, Thagaste did not pretend to be a capital. It was a free-town of the second or third order; but its distance from the great centres gave it a certain importance. The neighbouring free-towns, Thubursicum, Thagura, were small. Madaura and Theveste, rather larger, had not perhaps the same commercial importance. Thagaste was placed at the junction of many Roman roads. There the little Augustin, with other children of his age, would have a chance to admire the out-riders and equipages of the Imperial Mail, halted before the inns of the town. What we can be sure of is that Thagaste, then as now, was a town of passage and of traffic, a half-way stopping-place for the southern and coast towns, as well as for those of the Proconsulate and Numidia. And like the present Souk-Ahras, Thagaste must have been above all a market. Bread-stuffs and Numidian wines were bartered for the flocks of the Aures, leather, dates, and the esparto basket-work of the regions of Sahara. The marbles of Simitthu, the citron-wood of which they made precious tables, were doubtless handled there. The neighbouring forests could furnish building materials to the whole country. Thagaste was the great mart of woodland Numidia, the warehouse and the bazaar, where to this day the nomad comes to lay in a stock of provisions, and stares with childish delight at the fine things produced by the inventive talent of the workers who live in towns. Thus images of plenty and joy surrounded the cradle of Augustin. The smile of Latin beauty welcomed him also from his earliest steps. It is true that Thagaste was not what is called a fine city. The fragments of antiquity which have been unearthed there are of rather inferior workmanship. But how little is needed to give wings to the imagination of an intelligent child! At all events, Thagaste had a bathing-hall paved with mosaics and perhaps ornamented with statues; Augustin used to bathe there with his father. And again, it is probable that, like the neighbouring Thubursicum and other free-cities of the same level, it had its theatre, its forum, its nymph-fountains, perhaps even its amphitheatre. Of all that nothing has been found. Certain inscribed stone tablets, capitals and shafts of columns, a stone with an inscription which belonged to a Catholic church--that is all which has been discovered up to this present time. Let us not ask for the impossible. Thagaste had columns--nay, perhaps a whole street between a double range of columns, as at Thimgad. That would be quite enough to delight the eyes of a little wondering boy. A column, even injured, or scarcely cleansed from wrack and rubbish, has about it something impressive. It is like a free melody singing among the heavy masses of the building. To this hour, in our Algerian villages, the mere sight of a broken column entrances and cheers us--a white ghost of beauty streaming up from the ruins among the modern hovels. There were columns at Thagaste. II THE FAMILY OF A SAINT It was in this pleasant little town, shaded and beautified for many years now by the arts of Rome, that the parents of Augustin lived. His father, Patricius, affords us a good enough type of the Romanized African. He belonged to the order of _Decuriones_, to the "very brilliant urban council of Thagaste" (_splendidissimus ordo Thagastensis_), as an inscription at Souk-Ahras puts it. Although these strong epithets may be said to be part of the ordinary official phraseology, they indicate, just the same, the importance which went with such a position. In his township, Patricius was a kind of personage. His son assures us that he was poor, but we may suspect the holy bishop of exaggerating through Christian humility. Patricius must certainly have owned more than twenty-five acres of land, for this was made a condition of being elected to the _curia_. He had vineyards and orchards, of which Augustin later on recalled the plentiful and sweet-tasting fruits. In short, he lived in considerable style. It is true that in Africa household expenses have never at any time been a great extravagance. Still, the sons of Patricius had a pedagogue, a slave specially engaged to keep them under his eye, like all the children of families comfortably off. It has been said that as Augustin's father was a member of the _curia_, he must have been a ruined man. The Decurions, who levied taxes and made themselves responsible for their collection, were obliged to supply any deficiency in the revenue out of their own money. Patricius, it is thought, must have been one of the numerous victims of this disastrous system. But no doubt there were a good many exceptions. Besides, there is nothing in Augustin's reminiscences which authorizes us to believe that his father ever knew embarrassment, to say nothing of actual poverty. What seems by far the most probable is that he lived as well as he could upon the income of his estate as a small country landowner. In Africa people are satisfied with very little. Save for an unusually bad year following a time of long drought, or a descent of locusts, the land always gives forth enough to feed its master. To hunt, to ride horseback, now and then to go on parade, to look after his small-holders and agricultural slaves, to drive one of those bargains in which African cunning triumphs--such were the employments of Patricius. In short, he drifted through life on his little demesne. Sometimes this indolent man was overcome by a sudden passion for work; or again he was seized by furious rages. He was violent and brutal. At such moments he struck out right and left. He would even have hit his wife or flogged the skin off her back if the quietude of this woman, her dignity and Christian mildness, had not overawed him. Let us not judge this kind of conduct by our own; we shall never understand it. The ancient customs, especially the African customs, were a disconcerting mixture of intense refinement and heedless brutality. That is why it will not do to exaggerate the outbursts of Patricius, which his son mentions discreetly. Although he may not have been very faithful to his wife, that was in those days, more than in ours, a venial sin in the eyes of the world. At heart the African has always longed for a harem in his house; he inclines naturally to the polygamy of Muslemism. In Carthage, and elsewhere, public opinion was full of indulgence for the husband who allowed himself liberties with the serving-women. People laughed at it, and excused the man. It is true they were rather harder on the matron who took the same kind of liberty with her men-slaves. However, that went on too. The Bishop of Hippo, in his sermons, strongly rebuked the Christian married couples for these frequent adulteries which were scarcely regarded as errors. Patricius was a pagan, and this partly explains his laxity. It would doubtless be going too far to say that he remained faithful to paganism all his life. It is not likely that this urban councillor of Thagaste was a particularly assured pagan. Speculative and intellectual considerations made a very moderate appeal to him. He was not an arguer like his son. He was pagan from habit, from that instinctive conservatism of the citizen and landowner who sticks obstinately to his class and family traditions. Prudence and diplomacy had also something to do with it. Many great landlords continued to defend and practise paganism, probably from motives similar to those of Patricius himself. As for him, he had no desire to get wrong with the important and influential people of the country; he might have need of their protection to save his small property from the ravenous public treasury. Moreover, the best-paid posts were still controlled by the pagan priesthood. And so Augustin's father thought himself very wise in dealing cautiously with a religion which was always so powerful, and rewarded its adherents so well. But for all that, it is undeniable that paganism about this time was in an awkward position from a political point of view. The Government eyed it with disapproval. Since the death of Constantine, the "accursed emperors" had waged against it a furious war. In 353, just before the birth of Augustin, Constantius promulgated an edict renewing the order for the closing of the temples and the abolition of sacrifices--and that too under pain of death and confiscation. But in distant provinces, such as Numidia, the action of the central power was slow and irregular. It was often represented by officials who were hostile or indifferent to Christianity. The local aristocracy and their following scoffed at it more or less openly. In their immense villas, behind the walls of their parks, the rich landowners offered sacrifices and organized processions and feasts as if there were no law at all. Patricius knew all that. And, on the other side, he could take note of the encroachments of the new religion. During the first half of the fourth century Thagaste had been conquered by the Donatists. Since the edict of Constans against these schismatics, the inhabitants of the little city had come back to Catholicism out of fear of the severity of the imperial government. But the settlement was far from being complete and final. As a consequence of the edict, the whole region of the Aures had been in revolution. The Bishop of Bagai, fortified in his episcopal city and basilica, had stood an actual siege from the Roman troops. Almost everywhere the struggle between Donatists and Catholics still went on below the surface. There cannot be the least doubt that Thagaste took its share in these quarrels. To those who urged him to be baptized, the father of Augustin might well answer with ironic politeness: "I am only waiting till you agree among yourselves, to see where the truth lies." In his heart this rather lukewarm pagan had no inveterate dislike to Christianity. What proves it at once is that he married a Christian. How did Monnica become the wife of Patricius? How did these two beings, so little alike, between whom there was such a great difference of age, not to mention all the rest, come to join their fate? Those are questions which it would never have occurred to the people of Thagaste to ask. Patricius married to be like everybody else--and also because he was well over forty, and his mother an old woman who would soon be no longer able to run his house. Monnica also had her mother. The two old women had a meeting, with many politenesses and ceremonious bowings, and because the thing appeared to them reasonable and most suitable, they settled the marriage. Had Patricius ever seen the girl that he was going to take, according to custom, so as to have a child-bearer and housewife? It is quite likely he had not. Was she pretty, rich, or poor? He considered such matters as secondary, since the marriage was not a love-match but a traditional duty to fulfil. If the union was respectable, that was quite enough. But however the matter fell out, what is certain is that Monnica was very young. She was twenty-two when Augustin was born, and he was probably not her first child. We know that she was hardly marriageable when she was handed over, as Arab parents do to-day with their adolescent or little girls, to the man who was going to marry her. Now in Africa girls become marriageable at a very early age. They are married at fourteen, sometimes even at twelve. Perhaps she was seventeen or eighteen at most when she married Patricius. She must have had first a son, Navigius, whom we shall meet later on at Milan, and also a daughter, of whom we do not even know the name, but who became a nun, and superior of a convent in the diocese of Hippo. For us the features of these two other children of Monnica and Patricius are obliterated. They are concealed by the radiance of their illustrious great brother. Monnica was fond of telling stories of her girlhood to her son. He has handed down some of them to us. She was brought up strictly, according to the system of that time. Both her parents came of families which had been Christian, and Catholic-Christian, for many generations. They had never been carried away by the Donatist schism; they were people very obstinate in their convictions--a character quite as frequent in Africa as its opposite, the kind of Numidian or Moor, who is versatile and flighty. It is not unimportant that Augustin came from this hard-headed race, for this it was, with the aid of God's grace, that saved him--the energetic temper of his will. Still, if the faith of the young Monnica was confirmed from her earliest years, it is not so much to the lessons of her mother that she owed it, as to the training of an old woman-servant of whom she always spoke with gratitude. In the family of her master, this old woman had a place like the one which to-day in a Turkish family is held by the nurse, the _dada_, who is respected by all the harem and all the household. Doubtless she herself was born in the house and had seen all the children born. She had carried Monnica's father on her back when he was little, just as the Kabylian women or the Bedouin nomads carry their babies still. She was a devoted slave, just a bit unreasonable--a veritable housedog who in the zeal of guardianship barks more than is necessary at the stranger who passes. She was like the negress in the Arab houses to-day, who is often a better Muslem, more hostile to the Christian, than her employers. The old woman in Monnica's family had witnessed the last persecutions; she had perhaps visited the confessors in prison; perhaps she had seen flow the blood of the martyrs. These exciting and terrible scenes would have been graven on her memory. What inflamed stories the old servant must have told her young mistresses, what vital lessons of constancy and heroism! Monnica listened to them eagerly. Because of her great faith, this simple slave was revered as a saint by her owners, who entrusted her with the supervision of their daughters. She proved a stern governess, who would stand no trifling with her rules. She prevented these girls from drinking even water except at meals. Cruel suffering for little Africans! Thagaste is not far from the country of thirst. But the old woman said to them: "You drink water now because you can't get at the wine. In time to come, when you are married and have bins and cellars of your own, you'll turn up your nose at water, and your habit of drinking will be too much for you." Monnica came near fulfilling the prophecy of the honest woman. It was before she was married. As she was very well-behaved and very temperate, she used to be sent to the cellar to draw the wine from the cask. Before pouring it into the flagon she would sip just a little. Being unaccustomed to wine, she was not able to drink more; it was too strong for her gullet. She did this, not because she liked the wine, but from naughtiness, to play a trick on her parents who trusted her, and also, of course, because it was prohibited. Each time she swallowed a little more, and so it went on till she ended by finding it rather nice, and came to drinking greedily one cup after another. One day a slave-girl, who went with her to the cellar, began to grumble. Monnica gave her a sharp answer. Upon this the girl called Monnica a drunkard.... Drunkard! This bitter taunt so humiliated the self-respect of the future saint, that she got the better of her taste for drink. Augustin does not say it was through piety she did this, but because she felt the ugliness of such a vice. There is a certain roughness in this story of childhood, the roughness of ancient customs, with which is always mingled some decency or dignity. Christianity did the work of polishing the soul of Monnica. At the time we are dealing with, if she was already a very devout young girl, she was far as yet from being the grand Christian that she became afterwards. When she married Patricius she was a girl very reserved and cold to all appearances (in reality, she was very passionate), precise in attending to her religious duties, even a little strict, with her exaggeration of the Christian austerity in her hate of all the brutalities and all the careless morals that paganism condoned. Nevertheless, this rigid soul knew how to bend when it was necessary. Monnica had tact, suppleness, and, when it was needed, a very acute and very reasonable practical sense of which she gave many a proof in the bringing up and management of her son Augustin. This soul, hard for herself, veiled her uncompromising religion under an unchangeable sweetness which was in her rather the work of grace than a natural gift. There can be little doubt that her behaviour and character greatly disturbed Patricius at the beginning of their married life. Perhaps he regretted the marriage. What use had he for this nun alongside of him! Both of them must have suffered the usual annoyances which always appeared before long in unions of this kind between pagan and Christian. True, it was no longer the time of Tertullian, the heroic century of persecutions, when the Christian women glided into the prisons to kiss the shackles of the martyrs. (What a revenge did woman take then for her long and enforced confinement to the women's apartments! And how outrageous such conduct must have seemed to a husband brought up in the Roman way!) But the practices of the Christian life established a kind of intermittent divorce between husbands and wives of different religion. Monnica often went out, either alone, or accompanied by a faithful bondwoman. She had to attend the services of the Church, to go about the town visiting the poor and giving alms. And there were the fast-days which occurred two or three times a week, and especially the long fast of Lent--a grievous nuisance when the husband wanted to give a dinner-party just on those particular days! On the vigil of festivals, Monnica would spend a good part of the night in the Basilica. Regularly, doubtless on Sundays, she betook herself to the cemetery, or to some chapel raised to the memory of a martyr who was often buried there--in fact, they called these chapels "Memorials" (_memoriæ_). There were many of these chapels--even too many in the opinion of austere Christians. Monnica went from one to another carrying in a large basket made of willow branches some pieces of minced meat, bread, and wine mixed with water. She met her friends in these places. They would sit down around the tombs, of which some were shaped like tables, unpack the provisions, and eat and drink piously in honour of the martyr. This was a residue of pagan superstition among the Christians. These pious _agapæ_, or love-feasts, often turned into disgusting orgies. When Augustin became Bishop of Hippo he had considerable trouble to get his people out of the habit of them. Notwithstanding his efforts, the tradition still lasts. Every Friday the Muslem women keep up the custom of visiting the cemeteries and the marabouts. Just as in the time of St. Monnica, they sit around the tombs, so cool with their casing of painted tiles, in the shade of the cypress and eucalyptus. They gobble sweetmeats, they gossip, they laugh, they enjoy themselves--the husbands are not there. Monnica made these visits in a really pious state of mind, and was far from trying to find in them opportunities for lewdness or carouse. She was content to drink a little wine very carefully--she always bore in mind her youthful sin. Besides, this wine weakened with water that she brought from the house, was tepid by the time she reached the cemetery; it would be a drink of very moderate relish, little likely to stimulate the senses. She distributed what was left of it among the needy, together with the contents of her basket, and came back modestly to her house. But however staid and reserved she might be, still these outings gave rise to scandalous talk. They annoyed a suspicious husband. All the Africans are that. Marital jealousy was not invented by Islam. Moreover, in Monnica's time men and women took part in these funeral love-feasts and mingled together disturbingly. Patricius got cross about it, and about a good many other things too. His old mother chafed his suspicions by carrying to him the ugly gossip and even the lies of the servants about his wife. By dint of patience and mildness and attentions, Monnica ended by disarming her mother-in-law and making it clear that her conduct was perfect. The old woman flew into a rage with the servants who had lied to her, and denounced them to her son. Patricius, like a good head of a household, had them whipped to teach them not to lie any more. Thanks to this exemplary punishment, and the good sense of the young wife, peace reigned once more in the family. Women, friends of Monnica, were amazed that the good understanding was not oftener upset, at least in an open manner, between husband and wife. Everybody in Thagaste knew the quick-tempered and violent character of Patricius. And yet there were no signs that he beat his wife. Nor did any one say he did. Other women who had less passionate husbands were nevertheless beaten by them. When they came to Monnica's house they shewed her the marks of the whacks they had got, their faces swollen from blows, and they burst out in abuse of men, clamouring against their lechery, which, said these matrons, was the cause of the ill-treatment they had to endure. "Blame your own tongue," retorted Monnica. According to her, women should close their eyes to the infidelities of their husbands and avoid arguing with them when they were angry. Silence, submissiveness, were the all-powerful arms. And since, as a young woman, she had a certain natural merriment, she added, laughing: "Remember what was read to you on your wedding-day. You were told that you are the handmaids of your husbands. Don't rebel against your masters!..." Possibly this was a keen criticism of the pagan code, so hard in its rules. Still, in this matter, the Roman law was in agreement with the Gospel. Sincere Christian as she was, the wife of Patricius never had any quarrel with him on account of his infidelities. So much kindness and resignation touched the dissolute and brutal husband, who besides was an excellent man and warm-hearted. The modesty of his wife, after a while, made her attractive in his eyes. He loved her, so to speak, on the strength of his respect and admiration for her. He would indeed have been a churl to find fault with a wife who interfered with him so little and who was a perfect housekeeper, as we shall see later on when we come to her life at Cassicium. In one point, where even she did not intend it, she forwarded the interests of her husband by gaining him the good-will of the Christians in Thagaste; while he, on his side, could say to the pagans who looked askance at his marriage: "Am I not one of yourselves?" In spite of all the differences between him and Monnica, Patricius was a contented husband. III THE COMFORT OF THE MILK Augustin came into this world the thirteenth of November of the year of Christ 354. It was just one little child more in this sensual and pleasure-loving Africa, land of sin and of carnal productiveness, where children are born and die like the leaves. But the son of Monnica and Patricius was predestined: he was not to die in the cradle like so many other tiny Africans. Even if he had not been intended for great things, if he had been only a head in the crowd, the arrival of this baby ought, all the same, to affect us, for to the Christian, the destiny of the obscurest and humblest of souls is a matter of importance. Forty years afterwards, Augustin, in his _Confessions_, pondered this slight ordinary fact of his birth, which happened almost unnoticed by the inhabitants of Thagaste, and in truth it seems to him a great event, not because it concerns himself, bishop and Father of the Church, but because it is a soul which at this imperceptible point of time comes into the world. Let us clearly understand Augustin's thought. Souls have been ransomed by a Victim of infinite value. They have themselves an infinite value. Nothing which goes on in them can be ignored. Their most trifling sins, their feeblest stirrings towards virtue, are vital for the eternity of their lot. All shall be attributed to them by the just Judge. The theft of an apple will weigh perhaps as heavily in the scales as the seizure of a province or a kingdom. The evil of sin is in the evil intention. Now the fate of a soul, created by God, on Him depends. Hence everything in a human life assumes an extreme seriousness and importance. In the history of a creature, all is worthy of being examined, weighed, studied, and perhaps also, for the edification of others, told. Here is an altogether new way of regarding life, and, proceeding from that, of understanding art. Even as the slaves, thanks to Christianity, came into the spiritual city, so the most minute realities by this outlook are to be included in literature. The _Confessions_ will be the first model of the art of the new era. A deep and magnificent realism, because it goes even to the very depths of the divine--utterly distinct, at any rate, from our surface realism of mere amusement--is about to arise from this new conception. Without doubt, in Augustin's eyes, beauty dwells in all things, in so far forth as beauty is a reflection of the order and the thought of the Word. But it has also a more essential character--it has a moral signification and value. Everything, in a word, can be the instrument of the loss or the redemption of a soul. The most insignificant of our actions reverberates to infinitude on our fate. Regarded from this point, both things and beings commence to live a life more closely leagued together and at the same time more private; more individual and more general. All is in the lump, and nevertheless all is separate. Our salvation concerns only ourselves, and yet through charity it becomes involved with the salvation of our fellows. In this spirit let us look at the cradle of Augustin. Let us look at it with the eyes of Augustin himself, and also, perchance, of Monnica. Bending over the frail body of the little child he once was, he puts to himself all the great desperate questions which have shaken humanity for thousands of years. The mystery of life and death rises before him, formidable. It tortures him to the point of anguish, of confusion: "Yet suffer me to speak before Thy mercy, me who am but dust and ashes. Yea, suffer me to speak, for, behold, I speak not to man who scorns me, but to Thy mercy. Even Thou perhaps dost scorn me, but Thou wilt turn and have pity. For what is it that I would say, O Lord my God, save that I know not whence I came hither into this dying life, shall I call it, or living death?... And, lo, my infancy has long been dead, and I live. But Thou, O Lord, who ever livest and in whom nothing ever dies--tell me, I beseech Thee, O God, and have mercy on my misery, tell me whether another life of mine died before my infancy began." One is reminded here of Pascal's famous prosopopoeia: "I know not who has put me into the world, nor what the world is, nor myself. I am in a terrible ignorance about everything.... All I know is that I must soon die, but what I know least of all is this very death which I cannot escape." The phrases of the _Pensées_ are only the echo of the phrases of the _Confessions_. But how different is the tone! Pascal's charge against human ignorance is merciless. The God of Port-Royal has the hard and motionless face of the ancient Destiny: He withdraws into the clouds, and only shews Himself at the end to raise up His poor creature. In Augustin the accent is tender, trusting, really like a son, and though he be harassed, one can discern the thrill of an unconquerable hope. Instead of crushing man under the iron hand of the Justice-dealer, he makes him feel the kindness of the Father who has got all ready, long before its birth, for the feeble little child: "The comforts of Thy pity received me, as I have heard from the father and mother of my flesh.... And so the comfort of woman's milk was ready for me. For my mother and my nurses did not fill their own bosoms, but Thou, O Lord, by their means gavest me the food of infancy, according to Thy ordinance...." And see! his heart overflows at this remembrance of his mother's milk. The great doctor humbles his style, makes it simple and familiar, to tell us of his first mewlings, and of his baby angers and joys. He too was a father; he knew what is a new-born child, and a young mother who gives it suck, because he had seen that with his own eyes close beside him. All the small bothers which mingle with the pleasures of fatherhood he had experienced himself. In his own son he studied himself. * * * * * This child, born of a Christian mother, and who was to become the great defender of the faith, was not christened at his birth. In the early Church, and especially in the African Church, it was not usual to do so. The baptismal day was put as far off as possible, from the conviction that the sins committed after the sacrament were much more serious than those which went before. The Africans, very practical folk, clearly foresaw that they would sin again even after baptism, but they wanted to sin at a better rate, and lessen the inflictions of penance. This penance in Augustin's time was far from being as hard as in the century before. Nevertheless, the remembrance of the old severity always remained, and the habit was taken to put off baptism so as not to discourage sinners overmuch. Monnica, always sedulous to conform with the customs of her country and the traditions of her Church, fell in with this practice. Perhaps she may have had also the opposition of her husband to face, for he being a pagan would not have cared to give too many pledges to the Christians, nor to compromise himself in the eyes of his fellow-pagans by shewing that he was so far under the control of Christian zealots as to have his child baptized out of the ordinary way. There was a middle course, and this was to inscribe the child among the catechumens. According to the rite of the first admission to the lowest order of catechumens, the sign of the cross was made on Augustin's forehead, and the symbolic salt placed between his lips. And so they did not baptize him. Possibly this affected his whole life. He lacked the baptismal modesty. Even when he was become a bishop, he never quite cast off the old man that had splashed through all the pagan uncleannesses. Some of his words are painfully broad for chaste ears. The influence of African conditions does not altogether account for this. It is only too plain that the son of Patricius had never known entire virginity of soul. They named him Aurelius Augustinus. Was Aurelius his family name? We cannot tell. The Africans always applied very fantastically the rules of Roman nomenclature. Anyhow, this name was common enough in Africa. The Bishop of Carthage, primate of the province and a friend of Augustin, was also called Aurelius. Pious commentators have sought to find in this name an omen of Augustin's future renown as an orator. They have remarked that the word _aurum_, gold, is contained in Aurelius--a prophetic indication of the golden mouth of the great preacher of Hippo. Meanwhile, he was a baby like any other baby, who only knew, as he tells us, how to take his mother's breast. However, he speaks of nurses who suckled him; no doubt these were servants or slaves of the household. They gave him their milk, like those Algerian women who, to-day, if their neighbour is called away, take her child and feed it. Besides, with them children are weaned much later than with us. You can see mothers sitting at their doors put down their work and call to a child of two or three playing in the street for him to come and take the breast. Did Augustin remember these things? At least he recalled his nurses' games, and the efforts they made to appease him, and the childish words they taught him to stammer. The first Latin words he repeated, he picked up from his mother and the servants, who must also have spoken Punic, the ordinary tongue of the populace and small trader class. He learned Punic without thinking about it, in playing with other children of Thagaste, just as the sons of our colonists learn Arab in playing with little boys who wear chechias on their heads. He is a Christian, a bishop, already a venerated Father, consulted by the whole Catholic world, and he tells us all that. He tells it in a serious and contrite way, with a manifest anxiety to attribute to God, as the sole cause, all the benefits which embellished his childhood, as well as to deplore his faults and wretchedness, fatal consequence of the original Fall. And still, we can make out clearly that these suave and far-off memories have a charm for him which he cannot quite guard himself against. The attitude of the author of the _Confessions_ is ambiguous and a little constrained. The father who has loved his child, who has joined in his games, struggles in him against the theologian who later on was to uphold the doctrine of Grace against the heretics. He feels that he must shew, not only that Grace is necessary for salvation and that little children ought to be baptized, but that they are capable of sinning. Yes, the children sin even at nurse. And Augustin relates this story of a baby that he had seen: "I know, because I have seen, jealousy in a babe. It could not speak, yet it eyed its foster-brother _with pale cheeks and looks of hate_." Children are already men. The egoism and greediness of the grown man may be already descried in the newly born. However, the theologian of Grace was not able to drive from his mind this verse of the Gospel: _Sinite ad me parvulos venire_--"Suffer little children to come unto Me." But he interprets this in a very narrow sense, luring it into an argument which furthers his case. For him, the small height of children is a symbol of the humility without which no one can enter God's kingdom. The Master, according to him, never intended us to take children as an example. They are but flesh of sin. He only drew from their littleness one of those similitudes which He, with His fondness for symbols, favoured. Well, let us dare to say it: Augustin goes wrong here. Such is the penalty of human thought, which in its justest statements always wounds some truth less clear or mutilates some tender sentiment. Radically, Augustin is right. The child is wicked as man is. We know it. But against the relentlessness of the theologian we place the divine gentleness of Christ: "Suffer little children to come unto Me, for of such is the Kingdom of God." IV THE FIRST GAMES "I loved to play," Augustin says, in telling us of those far-off years. Is it surprising if this quick and supple intelligence, who mastered without effort, and as if by instinct, the encyclopædic knowledge of his age, who found himself at his ease amidst the deepest abstractions, did, at the beginning, take life as a game? The amusements of the little Africans of to-day are not very many, nor very various either. They have no inventive imagination. In this matter their French playfellows have taught them a good deal. If they play marbles, or hopscotch, or rounders, it is in imitation of the _Roumis_. And yet they are great little players. Games of chance attract them above all. At these they spend hour after hour, stretched out flat on their stomachs in some shady corner, and they play with an astonishing intensity of passion. All their attention is absorbed in what they are about; they employ on the game all the cunning of their wits, precociously developed, and so soon stuck fast in material things. When Augustin recalls the games of his childhood, he only mentions "nuts," handball, and birds. To capture a bird, that winged, light, and brilliant thing, is what all children long to do in every country on earth. But in Africa, where there are plenty of birds, big people as well as little love them. In the Moorish cafés, in the wretchedest _gourbis_, cages made of reeds are hung on the walls, all rustling with trills and fluttering of wings. Quail, thrushes, nightingales are imprisoned in them. The nightingale, the singing-bird beyond all others, so difficult to tame, is the honoured guest, the privileged dweller in these rustic cages. With the rose, he is an essential part of Arab poetry. The woods round about Thagaste were full of nightingales. Not the least doubt that the child Augustin had felt the little musical throats of these singing-birds throb between his hands. His sermons, his heaviest treatises, have a recollection of them. He draws from them an evidence in favour of the creating Word who has put beauty and harmony everywhere. In the song of the nightingale he finds, as it were, an echo of the music of the spheres. If he loved birds, as a poet who knows not that he is a poet, did he love as well to play at "nuts"? "Nuts," or thimble-rigging, is only a graceful and crafty game, too crafty for a dreaming and careless little boy. It calls for watchfulness and presence of mind. Grown men play at it as well as children. A step of a staircase is used as a table by the players, or the pavement of a courtyard. Three shells are laid on the stone and a dried pea. Then, with rapid baffling movements, hands brown and alert fly from one shell to another, shuffle them, mix them up, juggle the dried pea sometimes under this shell, sometimes under that,--and the point is to guess which shell the pea has got under. By means of certain astute methods, an artful player can make the pea stick to his fingers, or to the inside of the shell, and the opponent loses every time. They cheat with a calm shamelessness. Augustin cheated too--which did not prevent him from bitterly denouncing the cheating of his fellow-players. The truth is, that he would not have quite belonged to his country if he had not lied and stolen now and then. He lied to his tutor and to his schoolmasters. He stole at his parents' table, in the kitchen, and in the cellar. But he stole like a man of quality, to make presents and to win over his playfellows: he ruled the other boys by his presents--a noteworthy characteristic in this future ruler of souls. Morals like these, a little rough, shape free and bold natures. Those African children were much less coddled, much less scolded, than to-day. Monnica had something else to do than to look after the boys. So for them it was a continual life in the open air, which makes the body strong and hard. Augustin and his companions should be pictured as young wild-cats. This roughness came out strong at games of ball, and generally at all the games in which there are two sides, conquerors and prisoners, or fights with sticks and stones. Stone-throwing is an incurable habit among the little Africans. Even now in the towns our police are obliged to take measures against these ferocious children. In Augustin's time, at Cherchell, which is the ancient _Cæsarea Mauretaniæ_, the childish population was split into two hostile camps which stoned each other. On certain holidays the fathers and big brothers joined the children; blood flowed, and there were deaths. The bishop Augustin recalls with severity the "superb victories" he won in jousts of this kind. But I find it hard to believe that such a delicate child (he was sickly almost all his life) could have got much pleasure out of these brutal sports. If he was drawn into them by the example of others, it must have been through the imagination they appealed to him. In these battles, wherein sides took the field as Romans against Carthaginians, Greeks against Trojans, he believed himself Scipio or Hannibal, Achilles or Hector. He experienced beforehand, as a rhetorician, the intoxication of a triumph which playfellows who were stronger and better provided with muscles gave him a hard fight for. He did not always get the upper hand, except perhaps when he bribed the enemy. But an eager young soul, such as he was, can hardly be content with half-victories; he wants to excel. Accordingly, he sought his revenge in those games wherein the mind has the chief part. He listened to stories with delight, and in his turn repeated them to his little friends, thus trying upon an audience of boys that charm of speech by which later he was to subdue crowds. They also played at acting, at gladiators, at drivers and horses. Some of Augustin's companions were sons of wealthy citizens who gave splendid entertainments to their fellow-countrymen. As these dramatic representations, or games of the arena or circus, drew near, the little child-world was overcome by a fever of imitation. All the children of Thagaste imitated the actors, the _mirmillones_, or the horsemen in the amphitheatre, just as the young Spaniards of to-day imitate the _toreros_. In the midst of these amusements Augustin fell ill; he had fever and violent pains in the stomach. They thought he was going to die. It appears that it was himself who in this extreme situation asked for baptism. Monnica was making all haste to have the sacrament administered, when suddenly, against all expectation, the child recovered. Again was baptism postponed, and from the same reason: to lessen the gravity of the sins which young Augustin was bound to commit. His mother, who no doubt foresaw some of them, again fell in with the custom. It is possible that Patricius interfered this time in a more decided way. Just at this period Catholicism was in an unfavourable situation. The short reign of Julian had started a violent pagan reaction. Everywhere the temples were reopening, the sacrifices beginning again. Moreover, the Donatists secretly aided the pagans. Their _Seids_, more or less acknowledged, the Circoncelliones, bands of fanatical peasants, scoured through the Numidian country, attacking the Catholics, ravaging and pillaging, and burning their farms and villas. Was this a good time to make a noisy profession of faith, to be enrolled among the ranks of the conquered party? Little Augustin knew nothing of all these calculations of motherly prudence and fatherly diplomacy: he begged for baptism, so he tells us. This seems very remarkable in so young a child. But he lived in a house where all the service was done by Christians. He heard the talk of Monnica's friends; perhaps, too, of his grandparents, who were Catholics faithful and austere. And then, his soul was naturally religious. That explains everything: he asked for baptism to be like grown-up people, and because he was predestined. Among children, the chosen have these sudden flashes of light. At certain moments they feel what one day they shall be. Anyhow, Monnica must have seen this sign with joy. He got well, and took up again his little boy's life, divided between play, and dawdling, and school. School! painful memory for Augustin! They sent him to the _primus magister_, the elementary teacher, a real terror, armed with a long switch which came down without pity on idle boys. Seated on benches around him, or crouched on mats, the boys sang out all together: "One and one are two, two and two are four"--horrible refrain which deafened the whole neighbourhood. The school was often a mere shed, or a _pergola_ in the fields which was protected fairly well from sun and rain by cloths stretched overhead--a hut rented for a trifle, wide open to the winds, with a mosquito-net stretched out before the entrance. All who were there must have frozen in winter and broiled in summer. Augustin remembered it as a slaves' chain-prison (_ergastulum_) of boyhood. He hated school and what they taught there--the alphabet, counting, and the rudiments of Latin and Greek grammar. He had a perfect horror of lessons--of Greek above all. This schoolboy, who became, when his turn came, a master, objected to the methods of school. His mind, which grasped things instinctively at a single bound, could not stand the gradual procedure of the teaching faculty. He either mastered difficulties at once, or gave them up. Augustin was one of the numerous victims of the everlasting mistake of schoolmasters, who do not know how to arrange their lessons to accord with various kinds of mind. Like most of those who eventually become great men, he was no good as a pupil. He was often punished, thrashed--and cruelly thrashed. The master's scourge filled him with an unspeakable terror. When he was smarting all over from cuts and came to complain to his parents, they laughed at him or made fun of him--yes, even the pious Monnica. Then the poor lad, not knowing whom to turn to, remembered hearing his mother and the servants talk of a Being, very powerful and very good, who defends the orphan and the oppressed. And he said from the depths of his heart: "O my God, please grant that I am not whipped at school." But God did not hear his prayer because he was not a good boy. Augustin was in despair. It is evident that these punishments were cruel, because forty years afterwards he denounces them with horror. In his mind, they are tortures comparable to the wooden horse or the iron pincers. Nothing is small for children, especially for a sensitive child like Augustin. Their sensitiveness and their imagination exaggerate all things out of due measure. In this matter, also, schoolmasters often go wrong. They do not know how to handle delicate organizations. They strike fiercely, when a few words said at the right moment would have much more effect on the culprit.... Monnica's son suffered as much from the rod as he took pride in his successes at games. If, as Scipio, he was filled with a sensation of glory in his battles against other boys, no doubt he pictured himself a martyr, a St. Laurence or St. Sebastian, when he was swished. He never pardoned--save as a Christian--his schoolmasters for having brutalized him. Nevertheless, despite his hatred for ill-ordered lessons, his precocious intelligence was remarked by everybody. It was clear that such lucky gifts should not be neglected. Monnica, no doubt, was the first to get this into her head, and she advised Patricius to make Augustin read for a learned profession. The business of the _curia_ was not exactly brilliant, and so he may have perceived that his son might raise their fortunes if he had definite employment. Augustin, a professor of eloquence or a celebrated pleader, might be the saviour and the benefactor of his family. The town councils, and even the Imperial treasury, paid large salaries to rhetoricians. In those days, rhetoric led to everything. Some of the professors who went from town to town giving lectures made considerable fortunes. At Thagaste they pointed with admiration to the example of the rhetorician Victorinus, an African, a fellow-countryman, who had made a big reputation over-seas, and had his statue in the Roman Forum. And many years before, had not M. Cornelius Fronto, of Cirta, another African, become the tutor of Marcus Aurelius, who covered him with honours and wealth and finally raised him to the Consulship? Pertinax himself, did he not begin as a simple teacher of grammar, and become Proconsul of Africa and then Emperor of Rome? How many stimulants for provincial ambition!... Augustin's parents reasoned as the middle-class parents of to-day. They discounted the future, and however hard up they were, they resolved to make sacrifices for his education. And as the schools of Thagaste were inadequate, it was decided to send this very promising boy to Madaura. V THE SCHOOLBOY OF MADAURA A new world opened before Augustin. It was perhaps the first time he had ever gone away from Thagaste. Of course, Madaura is not very far off; there are about thirty miles at most between the two towns. But there are no short journeys for children. This one lay along the military road which ran from Hippo to Theveste--a great Roman causeway paved with large flags on the outskirts of towns, and carefully pebbled over all the rest of the distance. Erect upon the high saddle of his horse, Augustin, who was to become a tireless traveller and move about ceaselessly over African roads during all his episcopal life--Augustin got his first glimpse of the poetry of the open road, a poetry which we have lost for ever. How amusing they were, the African roads of those days, how full of sights! Pauses were made at inns with walls thick as the ramparts of citadels, their interiors bordered by stables built in arcades, heaped up with travellers' packs and harness. In the centre were the trough and cistern; and to the little rooms opening in a circle on to the balcony, drifted up a smell of oil and fodder, and the noise of men and of beasts of burthen, and of the camels as they entered majestically, curving their long necks under the lintel of the door. Then there was talk with the merchants, just arrived from the south, who brought news of the nomad countries, and had stories to tell. And then, without hurrying, a start was made again for the next stage. Long files of chariots were encountered carrying provisions to soldiers garrisoned on the frontier, or the State-distributed corn of the Roman people to the sea-ports; or again, from time to time, the _lectica_, brought along by slaves or mules, of a bishop on a visitation; and then the litter, with close-drawn curtains, of a matron or some great personage. Of a sudden all pulled sharp to one side; the vehicles lined up on the edge of the road; and there passed at full speed, in a cloud of dust, a messenger of the Imperial Post.... Certainly this road from Hippo to Theveste was one of the busiest and most picturesque in the province: it was one of its main arteries. At first the look of the country is rather like the neighbourhood of Thagaste. The wooded and mountainous landscape still spreads out its little breast-shaped hills and its sheets of verdure. Here and there the road skirts the deeply-ravined valley of the Medjerda. At the foot of the precipitous slopes, the river can be heard brawling in a torrent over its stony bed, and there are sharp descents among thickets of juniper and the fringed roots of the dwarf-pines. Then, as the descent continues, the land becomes thinner and spaces bare of vegetation appear oftener. At last, upon a piece of tableland, Madaura comes into view, all white in the midst of the vast tawny plain, where to-day nothing is to be seen but a mausoleum in ruins, the remains of a Byzantine fortress, and vague traces vanishing away. This is the first rise of the great plain which declines towards Theveste and the group of the Aures Mountains. Coming from the woodland country of Thagaste, the nakedness of it is startling. Here and there, thin cows crop starveling shrubs which have grown on the bank of some _oued_ run dry. Little asses, turned loose, save themselves at a gallop towards the tents of the nomads, spread out, black and hairy, like immense bats on the whiteness of the land. Nearer, a woman's red _haick_ interposes, the single stain of bright colour breaking the indefinite brown and grey of the plain. Here is felt the harshness of Numidia; it is almost the stark spaces of the desert world. But on the side towards the east, the architecture of mountains, wildly sculptured, stands against the level reaches of the horizon. Upon the clear background of the sky, shew, distinctly, lateral spurs and a cone like to the mystic representation of Tanit. Towards the south, crumbling isolated crags appear, scattered about like gigantic pedestals uncrowned of their statues, or like the pipes of an organ raised there to capture and attune the cry of the great winds of the _steppe_. This country is characterized by a different kind of energy from Thagaste. There is more air and light and space. If the plantation is sparse, the beautiful shape of the land may be observed all the better. Nothing breaks or lessens the grand effects of the light.... And let no one say that Augustin's eyes cared not for all that, he who wrote after his conversion, and in all the austerity of his repentance: "If sentient things had not a soul, we should not love them so much." It is here, between Madaura and Thagaste, during the eager years of youth, that he gathered together the seeds of sensations and images which, later on, were to burst forth into fiery and boiling metaphors in the _Confessions_, and in his homilies and paraphrases of Holy Scripture. Later on, he will not have the time to observe, or he will have lost the power. Rhetoric will stretch its commonplace veil between him and the unceasing springtide of the earth. Ambition will turn him away from those sights which reveal themselves only to hearts unselfish and indifferent. Then, later on, Faith will seize hold of him to the exclusion of all else. He will no longer perceive the creation save at odd moments in a kind of metaphysical dream, and, so to speak, across the glory of the Creator. But in these youthful years all things burst upon him with extraordinary violence and ecstasy. His undulled senses swallowed greedily the whole banquet offered by this wide world to his hunger for pleasure. The fugitive beauty of things and beings, with all their charms, revealed itself to him in its newness: _novissimarum rerum fugaces pulchritudines, earumque suavitates_. This craving for sensation will still exist in the great Christian teacher, and betray itself in the warm and coloured figures of his style. Of course, he was not as a worldly describer, who studies to produce phrases which present an image, or arranges glittering pictures--all such endeavours he knew nothing about. But by instinct, and thanks to his warm African temperament, he was a kind of impressionist and metaphysical poet. If the rural landscape of Thagaste is reflected in certain passages--the pleasantest and most well known--of the _Confessions_, all the intellectual part of Augustin's work finds its symbolical commentary here in this arid and light-splashed plain of Madaura. Like it, the thought of Augustin has no shadows. Like it too, it is lightened by strange and splendid tints which seem to come from far off, from a focal fire invisible to human eyes. No modern writer has better praised the light--not only the immortal light of the blessed, but that light which rests on the African fields, and is on land and sea; and nobody has spoken of it with more amplitude and wonder. The truth is, that in no country in the world, not even in Egypt, in the rose-coloured lands of Karnak and Luxor, is the light more pure and admirable than in these great bare plains of Numidia and the region of the Sahara. Is there not enchantment for the eyes of the metaphysician in this play of light, these nameless interfulgent colours which appear flimsy as the play of thought? For the glowing floating haze is made of nothing--of lines, of gleam, of unregulated splendour. And all this triumph of fluctuating light and elusive colour is quenched with the sun, smoulders into darkness, even as ideas in the obscure depths of the intelligence which reposes.... Not less than this land, stern even to sadness, but hot and sumptuous, the town of Madaura must have impressed Augustin. It was an old Numidian city, proud of its antiquity. Long before the Roman conquest, it had been a fortress of King Syphax. Afterwards, the conquerors settled there, and in the second century of our era, Apuleius, the most famous of its children, could state before a proconsul, not without pride, that Madaura was a very prosperous colony. It is probable that this old town was not so much Romanized as its neighbours, Thimgad and Lambesa, which were of recent foundation and had been built all at once by decree of the Government. But it may well have been as Roman as Theveste, a no less ancient city, where the population was probably just as mixed. Madaura, like Theveste, had its temples with pillars and Corinthian porticoes, its triumphal arches (these were run up everywhere), its forum surrounded by a covered gallery and peopled with statues. Statues also were very liberally distributed in those days. We know of at least three at Madaura which Augustin mentions in one of his letters: A god Mars in his heroic nakedness, and another Mars armed from head to foot; opposite, the statue of a man, in realistic style, stretching out three fingers to neutralize the evil eye. These familiar figures remained very clear in the recollection of Augustin. In the evening, or at the hour of the siesta, he had stretched himself under their pedestals and played at dice or bones in the cool shade of the god Mars, or of the Man with outstretched fingers. The slabs of marble of the portico made a good place to play or sleep. Among these statues, there was one perhaps which interested the lad and stimulated all his early ambitions--that of Apuleius, the great man of Madaura, the orator, philosopher, sorcerer, who was spoken of from one end to the other of Africa. By dint of gazing at this, and listening to the praises of the great local author, did the young scholar become aware of his vocation? Did he have from this time a confused sort of wish to become one day another Apuleius, a Christian Apuleius--to surpass the reputation of this celebrated pagan? These impressions and admirations of youth have always a more or less direct influence upon what use a boy makes of his talents. Be that as it will, Augustin could not take a step in Madaura without running against the legend of Apuleius, who was become almost a divinity for his fellow-countrymen. He was looked upon not only as a sage, but as a most wily nigromancer. The pagans compared him to Christ--nay, put him higher than Christ. In their view he had worked much more astonishing miracles than those of Jesus or of Apollonius of Tyana. And people told the extravagant stories out of his _Metamorphoses_ as real, as having actually happened. Nothing was seen on all sides but wizards, men changed into animals, animals, or men and women, under some spell. In the inns, a man watched with a suspicious look the ways of the maidservant who poured out his drink or handed him a dish. Perhaps some magic potion was mingled with the cheese or bread that she was laying on the table. It was an atmosphere of feverish and delirious credulity. The pagan madness got the better of the Christians themselves. Augustin, who had lived in this atmosphere, will later find considerable trouble in maintaining his strong common sense amid such an overflow of marvels. For the moment, the fantasy of tales filled him with at least as much enthusiasm as the supernatural. At Madaura he lived in a miraculous world, where everything charmed his senses and his mind, and everything stimulated his precocious instinct for Beauty. More than Thagaste, no doubt, Madaura bore the marks of the building genius of the Romans. Even to-day their descendants, the Italians, are the masons of the world, after having been the architects. The Romans were the building nation above all others. They it was who raised and established towns upon the same model and according to the same ideal as an oration or a poem. They really invented the house, _mansio_, not only the shelter where one lives, but the building which itself lives, which triumphs over years and centuries, a huge construction ornamental and sightly, existing as much--and perhaps more--for the delight of the eyes as for usefulness. The house, the _Town-with-deep-streets_, perfectly ordered, were a great matter of amazement for the African nomad--he who passes and never settles down anywhere. He hated them, doubtless, as the haunts of the soldier and the publican, his oppressors, but he also regarded them with admiration mixed with jealousy as the true expression of a race which, when it entered a country, planted itself for eternity, and claimed to join magnificence and beauty to the manifestation of its strength. The Roman ruins which are scattered over modern Algeria humiliate ourselves by their pomp--us who flatter ourselves that we are resuming the work of the Empire and continuing its tradition. They are a permanent reproach to our mediocrity, a continual incitement to grandeur and beauty. Of course, the Roman architecture could not have had on Augustin, this still unformed young African, the same effect as it has to-day on a Frenchman or a man from Northern Europe. But it is certain that it formed, without his knowledge, his thought and his power of sensation, and extended for him the lessons of the Latin rhetoricians and grammarians. All that was not exactly very Christian. But from these early school years Augustin got further and further away from Christianity, and the examples he had under his eyes, at Madaura were hardly likely to strengthen him in his faith. It was hardly an edifying atmosphere there for a Catholic youth who had a lively imagination, a pleasure-loving temperament, and who liked pagan literature. The greatest part of the population were pagans, especially among the aristocrats. The Decurions continued to preside at festivals in honour of the old idols. These festivals were frequent. The least excuse was taken to engarland piously the doors of houses with branches, to bleed the sacrificial pig, or slaughter the lamb. In the evening, squares and street corners were illuminated. Little candles burned on all the thresholds. During the mysteries of Bacchus, the town councillors themselves headed the popular rejoicings. It was an African carnival, brutal and full of colour. People got tipsy, pretended they were mad. For the sport of the thing, they assaulted the passers and robbed them. The dull blows on tambourines, the hysterical and nasal preludes of the flutes, excited an immense elation, at once sensual and mystic. And all quieted down among the cups and leather flagons of wine, the grease and meats of banquets in the open air. Even in a country as sober as Africa, the pagan feasts were never much else than excuses for gorging and orgies. Augustin, who after his conversion had only sarcasms for the carnival of Madaura, doubtless went with the crowd, like many other Christians. Rich and influential people gave the example. There was danger of annoying them by making a group apart. And then, there was no resisting the agreeableness of such festivals. Perhaps he was even brought to these love-feasts by those in whose charge he was. For, in fact, to whom had he been entrusted? Doubtless to some host of Patricius, a pagan like himself. Or did he lodge with his master, a grammarian, who kept a boarding-house for the boys? Almost all these schoolmasters were pagan too. Is it wonderful that the Christian lessons of Monnica and the nurses at Thagaste became more and more blurred in Augustin's mind? Many years after, an old Madaura grammarian, called Maximus, wrote to him in a tone of loving reproach: "Thou hast drawn away from us"--_a secta nostra deviasti_. Did he wish to hint that at this time Augustin had glided into paganism? Nothing is more unlikely. He himself assures us that the name of Christ remained always "graven on his heart." But while he was at Madaura he lived indifferently with pagans and Christians. Besides that, the teaching he got was altogether pagan in tone. No doubt he picked out, as he always did, the subjects which suited him. Minds such as his fling themselves upon that which is likely to nourish them: they throw aside all the rest, or suffer it very unwillingly. Thus Augustin never wavered in his dislike for Greek: he was a poor Greek scholar. He detested the Greeks by instinct. According to Western prejudice, these men of the East were all rascals or amusers. Augustin, as a practical African, always regarded the Greeks as vain, discoursing wits. In a word, they were not sincere people whom it would be safe to trust. The entirely local patriotism of the classical Greek authors further annoyed this Roman citizen who was used to regard the world as his country: he thought them very narrow-minded to take so much interest in the history of some little town. As for him, he looked higher and farther. It must be remembered that in the second half of the fourth century the Greek attitude, broadened and fully conscious of itself, set itself more and more against Latinism, above all, politically. There it lay, a hostile and impenetrable block before the Western peoples. And here was a stronger reason for a Romanized African to dislike the Greeks. So he painfully construed the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_, very cross at the difficulties of a foreign language which prevented him from grasping the plots of the fine, fabulous narratives. There were, however, abridgments used in the schools, a kind of summaries of the Trojan War, written by Latin grammarians under the odd pseudonyms of Dares the Phrygian and Dictys of Crete. But these abridgments were very dry for an imagination like Augustin's. He much preferred the _Æneid_, the poem admired above all by the Africans, on account of the episode devoted to the foundation of Carthage. Virgil was his passion. He read and re-read him continually; he knew him by heart. To the end of his life, in his severest writings, he quoted verses or whole passages out of his much-loved poet. Dido's adventure moved him to tears. They had to pluck the book out of his hands. Now the reason is that there was a secret harmony between Virgil's soul and the soul of Augustin. Both were gracious and serious. One, the great poet, and one, the humble schoolboy, they both had pity on the Queen of Carthage, they would have liked to save her, or at any rate to mitigate her sadness, to alter a little the callousness of Æneas and the harshness of the Fates. But think of it! Love is a divine sickness, a chastisement sent by the gods. It is just, when all's said, that the guilty one should endure her agony to the very end. And then, such very great things are going to arise out of this poor love! Upon it depends the lot of two Empires. What counts a woman before Rome and Carthage? Besides, she was bound to perish: the gods had decreed it.... There was in all that a concentrated emotion, a depth of sentiment, a religious appeal which stirred Augustin's heart, still unaware of itself. This obedience of the Virgilian hero to the heavenly will, was already an adumbration of the humility of the future Christian. Certainly, Augustin did not perceive very plainly in these turbid years of his youth the full religious significance of Virgil's poem. Carried away by his headstrong nature, he yielded to the heart-rending charm of the romantic story: he lived it, literally, with the heroine. When his schoolmasters desired him to elaborate the lament of the dying Queen Dido in Latin prose, what he wrote had a veritable quiver of anguish. Without the least defence against lust and the delusions of the heart, he spent intellectually and in a single outburst all the strength of passion. He absorbed every love-poem with the eagerness of a participating soul. If he took pleasure in the licentiousness of Plautus and Terence, if he read delightfully those comedies wherein the worst weaknesses are excused and glorified, I believe that he took still more pleasure in the Latin Elegiacs who present without any shame the romantic madness of Alexandrine love. For what sing these poets even to weariness, unless it be that no one can resist the Cyprian goddess, that life has no other end but love? Love for itself, to love for the sake of loving--there is the constant subject of these sensualists, of Catullus, Propertius, Tibullus, Ovid. After the story of Dido, the youthful reader was ravished by the story of Ariadne, even more disturbing, because no remorse modifies the frenzy of it. He read: _Now while the careless hero flees, beating the wave with his and casting to the gales of the open sea his idle promises,--there, standing among the shingle of the beach, the daughter of Minos follows him, alas! with her beautiful sad eyes: she stares, astonied, like to a Bacchante changed into a statue. She looks forth, and her heart floats upon the great waves of her grief. She lets slip from her head her fine-spun coif, she tears away the thin veils which cover her bosom, and the smooth cincture which supports her quivering breasts. All that slips from her body into the salt foam which ripples round her feet. But little she cares for her coif or for her apparel carried away by the tide! Lost, bewildered, with all her heart and all her soul, she is clinging to thee, O Theseus._ And if Augustin, when he had read these burning verses of Catullus, looked through the Anthologies which were popular in the African schools, he would come upon "The Vigil of Venus," that eclogue which ends with such a passionate cry: _O my springtime, when wilt thou come? When shall I be as the swallow? When shall I cease to be silent?... May he love to-morrow, he has not loved yet. And he who has already loved, may he love again to-morrow._ Imagine the effect of such exhortations on a youth of fifteen! Truly, this springtide of love, which the poet cries for in his distress, the son of Monnica knew well was come for him. How he must have listened to the musical and melancholy counsellor who told his pain to the leaves of the book! What stimulant and what food for his boyish longings and dreams! And what a divine chorus of beauties the great love-heroines of ancient epic and elegy, Helen, Medea, Ariadne, Phædra, formed and re-formed continually in his dazzled memory! When we of to-day read such verses at Augustin's age, some bitterness is mixed with our delight. These heroes and heroines are too far from us. These almost chimerical beings withdraw from us into outlying lands, to a vanished world which will never come again. But for Augustin, this was the world he was born into--it was his pagan Africa where pleasure was the whole of life, and one lived only for the lusts of the flesh. And the race of fabulous princesses--they were not dead, those ladies: they were ever waiting for the well-beloved in the palaces at Carthage. Yes, the scholar of Madaura lived wonderful hours, dreaming thus of love between the pages of the poets. These young dreams before love comes are more bewitching than love itself: a whole unknown world suddenly discovered and entered with a quivering joy of discovery at each step. The unused strength of illusion appears inexhaustible, space becomes deeper and the heart more strong.... A long time afterwards, when, recovered from all that, Augustin speaks to us of the Divine love, he will know fully the infinite value of it from having gone through all the painful entrancements of the other. And he will say to us, with the sureness of experience: "The pleasure of the human heart in the light of truth and the abundance of wisdom--yea, the pleasure of the human heart, of the faithful heart, and of the heart which is holy, stands alone. You will find nothing in any voluptuousness fit to be compared to it. I say not that this other pleasure is less, for that which is called less hath only to increase to become equal. No, I shall not say that all other pleasure is less. No comparison can be made. It is another kind, it is another reality." VI THE HOLIDAYS AT THAGASTE In the city of Apuleius, the Christian Monnica's son became simply a pagan. He was near his sixteenth year: the awkward time of early virility was beginning for him. Prepared at Madaura, it suddenly burst out at Thagaste. Augustin came back to his parents, no doubt during the vacation. But this vacation lasted perhaps a whole year. He had come to the end of his juvenile studies. The grammarians at Madaura could teach him nothing more. To round off his acquirements, it would be necessary to attend the lectures of some well-known rhetorician. Now there were very good rhetoricians only at Carthage. Besides, it was a fashion, and point of honour, for Numidian families to send their sons to finish their education in the provincial capital. Patricius was most eager to do this for his son, who at Madaura had shewn himself a very brilliant pupil and ought not therefore to be pulled up half-way down the course. But the life of a student cost a good deal, and Patricius had no money. His affairs were always muddled. He was obliged to wait for the rents from his farms, to grind down his tenants, and, ultimately, despairing of any other way out of it, to ask for an advance of money from a rich patron. That needed time and diplomacy. Days and months went by, and Augustin, with nothing to do, joined in with easily-made friends and gave himself up to the pleasures of his time of life, like all the young townsmen of Thagaste--pleasures rather rough and little various, such as were to be got in a little free-town of those days, and as they have remained for the natives of to-day, whether they live a town or country life. To hunt, to ride horseback, to play at games of chance, to drink, eat, and make love--they wanted nothing beyond that. When Augustin in his _Confessions_ accuses himself of his youthful escapades he uses the most scathing language. He speaks of them with horror and disgust. Once more we are tempted to believe that he exaggerates through an excess of Christian remorse. There are even some who, put on their guard by this vehement tone, have questioned the historical value of the _Confessions_. They argue that when the Bishop of Hippo wrote these things his views and feelings had altered. He could no longer judge with the same eye and in the same spirit the happenings of his youth. All this is only too certain: when he wrote, it was as a Christian he judged himself, and not as a cold historian who refuses to go beyond the brutal fact. He tried to unravel the origin and to trace the consequences of the humblest of his actions, because this is of the highest importance for salvation. But however severe his judgment may be, it does not impair the reality of the fact itself. Moreover, in natures like his, acts which others would hardly think of have a vibration out of all proportion with the act itself. The evil of sin depends upon the consciousness of the sin and the pleasure taken in it. Augustin was very intelligent and very sensual. In any case, young Africans develop early, and the lechery of the race is proverbial. It must have been a good deal stronger at a time when Christianity still had to fight against pagan slackness in these matters, ere Islam had imposed its hypocritical austerity upon the general conduct. There is even room for wonder that in Augustin's case this crisis of development did not happen earlier than his sixteenth year. It seems that it was only more violent. In what language he describes it! "I dared to roam the woods and pursue my vagrant loves beneath the shade." But he was not yet in love--this he points out himself. In his case then it was simple lust. "From the quagmire of concupiscence, from the well of puberty, exhaled a mist which clouded and befogged my heart, so that I could not distinguish between the clear shining of affection and the darkness of lust.... I could not keep within the kingdom of light, where friendship binds soul to soul.... And so I polluted the brook of friendship with the sewage of lust." Let us not try to make it clearer than he has left it himself. When one thinks of all the African vices, one dare not dwell upon such avowals. "Lord," he says, "I was loathsome in Thy sight." And with pitiless justice he analyses the effect of the evil: "It stormed confusedly within me, whirling my thoughtless youth over the precipices of desire. And I wandered still further from Thee, and Thou didst leave me to myself; the torrent of my fornications tossed and swelled and boiled and ran over." And during this time: "Thou saidst nothing, O my God!" This silence of God is the terrible sign of hardened sin, of hopeless damnation. It meant utter depravity of the will; he did not even feel remorse any more. Here he is, then, as if unfastened from his child's soul--separated from himself. The object of his youthful faith has no more meaning for him. He understands no longer, and it is all one to him that he does not. Thus, told by himself, does this first crisis of Augustin's life emerge from the autobiography; and it takes on a general significance. Once for all, under a definite form, and to a certain degree classic, he has diagnosed with his subtle experience of doctor of souls the pubescent crisis in all young men of his age, in all the young Christians who are to come after him. For the story of Augustin is the story of each of us. The loss of faith always occurs when the senses first awaken. At this critical moment, when nature claims us for her service, the consciousness of spiritual things is, in most cases, either eclipsed or totally destroyed. The gradual usage to the brutalities of the instinct ends by killing the sensitiveness of the inward feelings. It is not reason which turns the young man from God; it is the flesh. Scepticism but provides him with excuses for the new life he is leading. Thus started, Augustin was not able to pull up half-way on the road of pleasure; he never did anything by halves. In these vulgar revels of the ordinary wild youth, he wanted again to be best, he wanted to be first as he was at school. He stirred up his companions and drew them after him. They in their turn drew him. Among them was found that Alypius, who was the friend of all his life, who shared his faults and mistakes, who followed him even in his conversion, and became Bishop of Thagaste. These two future shepherds of Christ roamed the streets with the lost sheep. They spent the nights in the open spaces of the town, playing, or wantonly dreaming before cups of cool drinks. They lounged there, stretched out on mats, with a crown of leaves on the head, a jasmine garland round the neck, a rose or marigold thrust above the ear. They never knew what to do next to kill time. So one fine evening the reckless crew took it into their heads to rifle a pear tree of one of Patricius's neighbours. This pear tree was just beyond the vineyard belonging to Augustin's father. The rascals shook down the pears. They took a few bites to find out the taste, and having decided this to be rather disappointing, they chucked all the rest to the hogs. In this theft, done merely for the pleasure of the thing, Augustin sees an evidence of diabolical mischief. Doubtless he committed many another misdeed where, like this, the whole attraction lay in the Satanic joy of breaking the law. His fury for dissolute courses knew no rest. Did Monnica observe anything of this change in Augustin? The boy, grown big, had escaped from the supervision of the women's apartments. If the mother guessed anything, she did not guess all. It fell to her husband to open her eyes. With the freedom of manners among the ancients, Augustin relates the fact quite plainly.... That took place in the bath-buildings at Thagaste. He was bathing with his father, probably in the _piscina_ of cold baths. The bathers who came out of the water with dripping limbs were printing wet marks of their feet upon the mosaic flooring, when Patricius, who was watching them, suddenly perceived that his son had about him the signs of manhood, that he was already bearing--as Augustin says himself in his picturesque language--the first signs of turbulent youth, like another _toga praetexta_. Patricius, as a good pagan, welcomed with jubilation this promise of grand-children, and rushed off joyously to brag of his discovery to Monnica. She took the news in quite another way. Frightened at the idea of the dangers to which her son's virtue was exposed, she lectured him in private. But Augustin, from the height of his sixteen years, laughed at her. "A lot of old-women's gossip! Why does she want to talk about things she can't understand!..." Tired out at last, Monnica tried to get a promise from her son that he would at least have some restraint in his dissipation--that he would avoid women of the town, and above all, that he would have nothing to do with married women. For the rest, she put him in God's hands. It may be wondered--Augustin himself wonders--that she did not think of finding him a wife. They marry early in Africa. Even now any Arab labourer buys a wife for his son, hardly turned sixteen, so that the fires of a too warm youth may be quenched in marriage. But Monnica, who was not yet a saint, acted in this matter like a foreseeing and practical woman of the prosperous class. A wife would be a drag for a young man like Augustin, who seemed likely to have such a brilliant career. A too early marriage would jeopardize his future. Before all things, it was important that he should become an illustrious rhetorician, and raise the fortunes of the family. For her, all else yielded to this consideration. But she hoped at least that the headstrong student might consent to be good into the bargain. This was also Patricius's way of looking at the matter. And so, says Augustin, "My father gave himself no concern how I grew towards Thee, or how chaste I was, provided only that I became a man of culture--however destitute of Thy culture, O God.... My mother and he slackened the curb without regard to due severity, and I was suffered to enjoy myself according to my dissolute fancy." Meanwhile, Patricius was now become (very tardily) a catechumen. The entreaties of his wife had won him to the Catholic faith. But his sentiments were not much more Christian--"He hardly thought of Thee, my God," acknowledges his son, who nevertheless was pleased at this conversion. If Patricius decided to get converted, it was probably from political reasons. Since the death of Julian the Apostate, paganism appeared finally conquered. The Emperor Valentinianus had just proclaimed heavy penalties against night-sacrifices. In Africa, the Count Romanus persecuted the Donatists. All the Christians in Thagaste were Catholic. What was the good of keeping up a useless and dangerous resistance? Perhaps the end of Patricius--which was near--was as edifying as Monnica could wish. But at all events, at the present moment, he was not the man to interfere with Augustin's pleasures: he only thought of the eventual fortune of the young man. Alone, Monnica might have had some influence on him, and she herself was fascinated by his future career in the world. Perhaps, to quiet her conscience, she said to herself that this frivolous education would be more or less of a help to her son towards bringing him back to God, that a day would come when the famous rhetorician would plead the cause of Christ?... Scandalized though she might be at his conduct, it is however apparent that it was about this time she began to get fonder of him, to worry over him as her favourite child. But it was not till much later that the union between mother and son became quite complete. Too many old customs still remained preventing close intercourse between the men and women of a family. And it will hardly do to picture such intimacy from the intimacy which may exist between a mother and son of our own time. There was none of the spoiling, or indulgence, or culpable weakness which enervates maternal tenderness and makes it injurious to the energy of a manly character. Monnica was severe and a little rough. If she let her feelings be seen, it was solely before God. And yet it is most certain that in the depth of her heart she loved Augustin, not only as a future member of Christ, but humanly, as a woman frustrated of love in a badly assorted marriage may spend her love on her child. The brutality of pagan ways revolted her, and she poured on this young head all her stored-up affection. In Augustin she loved the being she wished she could love in her husband. A number of personal considerations were no doubt involved in the deep and unselfish attachment she had for her son: instinctively, she looked for him to protect her against the father's violence. She felt that he would be the support of her old age, and also, she foresaw dimly what one day he would be. All this aided to bring about the tie, the understanding, which grew more and more close between Augustin and Monnica. And so from this time they both appear to us as they were to appear to all posterity--the pattern of the Christian Mother and Son. Thanks to them, the hard law of the ancients has been abrogated. There shall be no more barriers between the mother and her child. No longer shall it be vain exterior rites which draw together the members of the same family: they shall communicate in spirit and truth. Heart speaketh to heart. The fellowship of souls is founded, and the ties of the domestic hearth are drawn close, as they never were in antiquity. No more shall they work in concert only for material things; they will join together to love--and to love each other more. The son will belong more to his mother. At the time we have now come to, Monnica was already undertaking the conquest of Augustin's soul. She prayed for him fervently. The young man cared very little: gratitude came to him only after his conversion. At this time he was thinking of nothing but amusement. For this he even forgot his career. But Monnica and Patricius thought of it constantly--especially Patricius, who gave himself enormous trouble to enable this student on a holiday to finish his studies. Eventually he got together the necessary money, possibly borrowed enough to make up the sum from some rich landowner who was the patron of the people of small means in Thagaste--say, that gorgeous Romanianus, to whom Augustin, in acknowledgment, dedicated one of his first books. The young man could now take the road for Carthage. He left by himself, craving for knowledge and glory and pleasure, his heart full of longing for what he knew not, and melancholy without cause. What was going to become of him in the great, unknown city? THE SECOND PART THE ENCHANTMENT OF CARTHAGE Amare et amari. "To love and to be loved." _Confessions_, III, i. I CARTHAGO VENERIS "I went to Carthage, where shameful loves bubbled round me like boiling oil." This cry of repentance, uttered by the converted Augustin twenty-five years later, does not altogether stifle his words of admiration for the old capital of his country. One can see this patriotic admiration stirring between the lines. Carthage made a very strong impression on him. He gave it his heart and remained faithful to the end. His enemies, the Donatists, called him "the Carthaginian arguer." After he became Bishop of Hippo, he was continually going to Carthage to preach, or dispute, or consult his colleagues, or to ask something from men in office. When he is not there, he is ever speaking of it in his treatises and plain sermons. He takes comparisons from it: "You who have been to Carthage--" he often says to his listeners. For the boy from little Thagaste to go to Carthage, was about the same as for our youths from the provinces to go to Paris. _Veni Carthaginem_--in these simple words there is a touch of naive emphasis which reveals the bewilderment of the Numidian student just landed in the great city. And, in fact, it was one of the five great capitals of the Empire: there were Rome, Constantinople, Antioch, Alexandria--Carthage. Carthage was the sea-port capital of the whole western Mediterranean. With its large new streets, its villas, its temples, its palaces, its docks, its variously dressed cosmopolitan population, it astonished and delighted the schoolboy from Madaura. Whatever local marks were left about him, or signs of the rustic simpleton, it brushed off. At first, Augustin must have felt himself as good as lost there. There he was, his own master, with nobody to counsel and direct him. He does indeed mention his fellow-countryman, that Romanianus, the patron of his father and of other people in Thagaste, as a high and generous friend who invited him to his house when he, a poor youth, came to finish his studies in a strange city, and helped him, not only with his purse, but with his friendship. Unfortunately the allusion is not very clear. Still, it does seem to shew that Augustin, in the first days after his arrival at Carthage, stayed with Romanianus. It is not in the least improbable that Romanianus had a house at Carthage and spent the winter there: during the rest of the year he would be in his country houses round about Thagaste. This opulent benefactor might not have been satisfied with giving Augustin a good "tip" for his journey when he was leaving his native town, but may also have put him up in his own house at Carthage. Such was the atonement for those enormous fortunes of antiquity: the rich had to give freely and constantly. With the parcelling out of wealth we have become much more egoistical. In any case, Romanianus, taken up with his pleasures and business, could not have been much of a guide for Monnica's son. Augustin was therefore without control, or very nearly. No doubt he came to Carthage with a strong desire to increase his knowledge and get renown, but still more athirst for love and the emotions of sentiment. The love-prelude was deliriously prolonged for him. He was at that time so overwhelmed by it, that it is the first thing he thinks of when he relates his years at Carthage. "To love and be loved" seems to him, as to his dear Alexandrine poets, the single object of life. Yet he was not in love, "but he loved the idea of love." _Nondum amabam, et amare amabam ... amare amans...._ Truly, never a pagan poet had hitherto found such language to speak of love. These subtle phrases are not only the work of a marvellous word-smith: through their almost imperceptible shades of meaning may be descried an entirely new soul, the pleasure-loving soul of the old world awakening to spiritual life. Modern people have repeated the words more than enough, but by translating them too literally--"I loved to love"--they have perhaps distorted the sense. They have made Augustin a kind of Romantic like Alfred de Musset, a dilettante in love. Augustin is not so modern, although he often seems one of ourselves. When he wrote those words he was a bishop and a penitent. What strikes him above all in looking back upon his uneasy and feverish life as a youth and young man, is the great onrush of all his being which swept him towards love. Plainly, man is made for love, since he loves without object and without cause, since in itself alone the idea of love is already for him a beginning of love. Only he falls into error in giving to creatures a heart that the Creator alone can fill and satisfy. In this love for love's sake, Augustin discerned the sign of the predestined soul whose tenderness will find no rest but in God. That is why he repeats this word "Love" with a kind of intoxication. He knows that those who love like him cannot love long with a human love. Nor does he blush to acknowledge it:--he loved--he loved with all his soul--he loved to the point of loving the coming of love. Happy intimation for the Christian! A heart so afire is pledged to the eternal marriage. With this heat of passion, this lively sensibility, Augustin was a prey for Carthage. The voluptuous city took complete hold on him by its charm and its beauty, by all the seductions of mind and sense, by its promises of easy enjoyment. First of all, it softened this young provincial, used to the harder country life of his home; it relaxed the Numidian contracted by the roughness of his climate; it cooled his eyes burned by the sun in the full-flowing of its waters and the suavity of its horizons. It was a city of laziness, and above all, of pleasure, as well for those plunged in business as for the idlers. They called it _Carthago Veneris_--Carthage of Venus. And certainly the old Phoenician Tanit always reigned there. Since the rebuilding of her temple by the Romans, she had transformed herself into _Virgo Coelestis_. This Virgin of Heaven was the great Our Lady of unchastity, towards whom still mounted the adoration of the African land four hundred years after the birth of Christ. "Strange Virgin," Augustin was to say later, "who can only be honoured by the loss of virginity." Her dissolving influence seemed to overcome the whole region. There is no more feminine country than this Carthaginian peninsula, ravished on all sides by the caress of the waters. Stretched out between her lakes on the edge of the sea, Carthage lounged in the humid warmth of her mists, as if in the suffocating atmosphere of her vapour-baths. She stole away the energies, but she was an enchantment for the eyes. From the top of the impressive flight of steps which led up to the temple of Æsculapius on the summit of the Acropolis, Augustin could see at his feet the huge, even-planned city, with its citadel walls which spread out indefinitely, its gardens, blue waters, flaxen plains, and the mountains. Did he pause on the steps at sunset, the two harbours, rounded cup-shape, shone, rimmed by the quays, like lenses of ruby. To the left, the Lake of Tunis, stirless, without a ripple, as rich in ethereal lights as a Venetian lagoon, radiated in ever-altering sheens, delicate and splendid. In front, across the bay, dotted with the sails of ships close-hauled to the wind, beyond the wind-swept and shimmering intervals, the mountains of Rhodes raised their aerial summit-lines against the sky. What an outlook on the world for a young man dreaming of fame! And what more exhilarating spot than this Mount Byrsa, where, in deep layers, so many heroic memories were gathered and superimposed. The great dusty plains which bury themselves far off in the sands of the desert, the mountains--yes, and isles and headlands, all bowed before the Hill that Virgil sang and seemed to do her reverence. She held in awe the innumerable tribes of the barbaric continent; she was mistress of the sea. Rome herself, from the height of her Palatine, surged less imperial. More than any other of the young men seated with him on the benches of the school of rhetoric, Augustin hearkened to the dumb appeals which came from the ancient ruins and new palaces of Carthage. But the supple and treacherous city knew the secret of enchaining the will. She tempted him by the open display of her amusements. Under this sun which touches to beauty the plaster of a hut, the grossest pleasures have an attraction which men of the North cannot understand. The overflowing of lust surrounds you. This prolific swarming, all these bodies, close-pressed and soft with sweat, give forth as it were a breath of fornication which melts the will. Augustin breathed in with delight the heavy burning air, loaded with human odours, which filled the streets and squares of Carthage. To all the bold soliciting, to all the hands stretched out to detain him as he walked, he yielded. But for a mind like his Carthage had more subtle allurements in reserve. He was taken by her theatres, by the verses of her poets and the melodies of her musicians. He shed tears at the plays of Menander and Terence; he lamented upon the misfortunes of separated lovers; he shared their quarrels, rejoiced and despaired with them. And still he awaited the epiphany of Love--that Love which the performance of the actors shewed him to be so touching and fine. Such then was Augustin, given over to the irresponsibility of his eighteen years--a heart spoiled by romantic literature, a mind impatient to try every sort of intellectual adventure in the most corrupting and bewitching city known to the pagan centuries, set amidst one of the most entrancing landscapes in the world. II THE AFRICAN ROME Carthage did not offer only pleasures to Augustin; it was besides an extraordinary subject to think about for an understanding so alert and all-embracing as his. At Carthage he understood the Roman grandeur as he could not at Madaura and the Numidian towns. Here, as elsewhere, the Romans made a point of impressing the minds of conquered races by the display of their strength and magnificence. Above all, they aimed at the immense. The towns built by them offered the same decorative and monumental character of the Greek cities of the Hellenistic period, which the Romans had further exaggerated--a character not without emphasis and over-elaboration, but which was bound to astonish, and that was the main thing in their view. In short, their ideal was not perceptibly different from that of our modern town councillors. To lay out streets which intersected at right angles; to create towns cut into even blocks like chessboards; to multiply prospects and huge architectural masses--all the Roman cities of this period revealed such an aim, with an almost identical plan. Erected after this type, the new Carthage caused the old to be forgotten. Everybody agreed that it was second only to Rome. The African writers squandered the most hyperbolical praises upon it. For them it is "The splendid, the august, the sublime Carthage." Although there may well be a certain amount of triviality or of patriotic exaggeration in these praises, it is certain that the Roman capital of the Province of Africa was no less considerable than the old metropolis of the Hanno and Barcine factions. With a population almost as large as that of Rome, it had almost as great a circumference. It must further be recalled that as it had no ramparts till the Vandal invasion, the city overflowed into the country. With its gardens, villas, and burial-places of the dead, it covered nearly the entire peninsula, to-day depopulated. Carthage, as well as Rome, had her Capitol and Palatine upon Mount Byrsa, where rose no doubt a temple consecrated to the Capitolean triune deities, Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, not far from the great temple of Æsculapius, a modern transformation of the old Punic Eschmoum. Hard by these sanctuaries, the Proconsul's palace dominated Carthage from the height of the acclivity of the Acropolis. The Forum was at the foot of the hill, probably in the neighbourhood of the ports--a Forum built and arranged in the Roman way, with its shops of bankers and money-changers placed under the circular galleries, with the traditional image of Marsyas, and a number of statues of local celebrities. Apuleius no doubt had his there. Further off was the Harbour Square, where gathered foreigners recently landed and the idlers of the city in search of news, and where the booksellers offered the new books and pamphlets. There was to be seen one of the curiosities of Carthage--a mosaic representing fabulous monsters, men without heads, and men with only one leg and one foot--a huge foot under which, lying upon their backs, they sheltered from the sun, as under a parasol. On account of this feature they were called the _sciapodes_. Augustin, who like everybody else had paused before these grotesque figures, recalls them somewhere to his readers.... Beside the sea, in the lower town and upon the two near hills of the Acropolis, were a number of detached buildings that the old authors have preserved the names of and briefly described. Thanks to the zeal of archæologists, it is now become impossible to tell where they stood. The pagan sanctuaries were numerous. That of the goddess Coelestis, the great patroness of Carthage, occupied a space of five thousand feet. It comprised, besides the actual [Greek: hieron], where stood the image of the goddess, gardens, sacred groves, and courts surrounded with columns. The ancient Phoenician Moloch had also his temple under the name of Saturn. They called him _The Old One_, so Augustin tells us, and his worshippers were falling away. On the other hand, Carthage had another sanctuary which was very fashionable, a _Serapeum_ as at Alexandria, where were manifested the pomps of the Egyptian ritual, celebrated by Apuleius. Neighbouring the holy places, came the places of amusement: the theatre, the Odeum, circus, stadium, and amphitheatre--this last, of equal dimensions with the Colosseum at Rome, its gallery rising upon gallery, and its realistic sculptures of animals and artisans. Then there were the buildings for the public service: the immense cisterns of the East and the Malga, the great aqueduct, which, after being carried along a distance of fifty-five miles, emptied the water of the Zaghouan into the reservoirs at Carthage. Finally, there were the Baths, some of which we know--those of Antoninus and of Maximianus, and those of Gargilius, where one of the most important Councils known to the history of the African Church assembled. There were likewise many Christian basilicas at the time of Augustin. The authors mention seventeen: it is likely there were more. That of Damous-el-Karita, the only one of which considerable traces have been found, was vast and richly decorated, and was perhaps the cathedral of Carthage. What other buildings there were are utterly lost to history. It may be conjectured, however, that Carthage, as well as Rome, had a _septizonium_--a decorative building with peristyles one above the other which surrounded a reservoir. In fact, it is claimed that the one at Rome was copied from Carthage. Straight streets paved with large flags intersected around these buildings, forming a network of long avenues, very bright and ventilated. Some of them were celebrated in the ancient world either for their beauty or the animation of their trade: the street of the Jewellers, the street of Health, of Saturn, of Coelestis, too, or of Juno. The fig and vegetable markets and the public granaries were also some of the main centres of Carthaginian life. It is unquestionable that Carthage, with its buildings and statues, its squares, avenues and public gardens, looked like a large capital, and was a perfect example of that ideal of rather brutal magnificence and strength which the Romans obtruded everywhere. And even while it dazzled the young provincial from Thagaste, the African Rome shewed him the virtue of order--social and political order. Carthage, the metropolis of Western Africa, maintained an army of officials who handled the government in its smallest details. First of all, there were the representatives of the central power, the imperial rulers--the Proconsul, a sort of vice-emperor, who was surrounded by a full court, a civil and military staff, a privy council, an _officium_ which included a crowd of dignitaries and subaltern clerks. Then there was the Proprætor of Africa who, being in control of the government of the whole African province, had an _officium_ still larger perhaps than the Proconsul's. After them came the city magistrates, who were aided in their functions by the Council of the Decurions--the Senate of Carthage. These Carthaginian senators cut a considerable figure: for them their colleagues at Rome were full of airs and graces, and the Emperors endeavoured to keep them in a good-humour. All the details of city government came under their supervision: the slaughter-houses, buildings, the gathering of municipal taxes, and the police, which comprised even the guardians of the Forum. Then there were the army and navy. The home port of a grain-carrying fleet which conveyed the African cereals to Ostia, Carthage could starve Rome if she liked. The grain and oil of all countries lay in her docks--the storehouses of the state provisions, which were in charge of a special prefect who had under his orders a whole corporation of overseers and clerks. Augustin must have heard a good deal of grumbling at Carthage against this excess of officialism. But, all the same, so well-governed a city was a very good school for a young man who was to combine later the duties of bishop, judge, and governor. The blessings of order, of what was called "the Roman peace" no doubt impressed him the more, as he himself came from a turbulent district often turned upside down by the quarrels of religious sects and by the depredations of the nomads--a boundary-land of the Sahara regions where it was much harder to bring the central government into play than in Carthage and the coast-towns. To appreciate the beauty of government, there is nothing like living in a country where all is at the mercy of force or the first-comer's will. Such of the Barbarians who came in contact with Roman civilization were overcome with admiration for the good order that it established. But what astonished them more than anything else was that the Empire was everywhere. No man, whatever his race or country, could help feeling proud to belong to the Roman city. He was at home in all the countries in the world subject to Rome. Our Europe, split into nationalities, can hardly understand now this feeling of pride, so different from our narrow patriotisms. The way to feel something of it is to go to the colonies: out there the least of us may believe himself a sovereign, simply from the fact that he is a subject of the governing country. This feeling was very strong in the old world. Carthage, where the striking effect of the Empire appeared in all its brilliancy, would increase it in Augustin. He had only to look around him to value the extent of the privilege conferred by Rome on her citizens. Men coming from all countries, without exception of race, were, so to speak, made partners of the Empire and collaborated in the grandeur of the Roman scheme. If the Proconsul who then occupied the Byrsa palace, the celebrated Symmachus, belonged to an old Italian family, he whom he represented, the Emperor Valentinian, was the son of a Pannonian soldier. The Count Theodosius, the general who suppressed the insurrection of Firmus in Mauretania, was a Spaniard, and the army he led into Africa was made up, for the most part, of Gauls. Later on, under Arcadius, another Gaul, Rufinus, shall be master of the whole of the East. An active mind like Augustin's could not remain indifferent before this spectacle of the world thrown open by Rome to all men of talent. He had the soul of a poet, quick to enthusiasm; the sight of the Eagles planted on the Acropolis at Carthage moved him in a way he never forgot. He acquired the habit of seeing big, and began to cast off race prejudices and all the petty narrowness of a local spirit. When he became a Christian he did not close himself up, like the Donatists, within the African Church. His dream was that Christ's Empire upon earth should equal the Empire of the Cæsars. Still, it is desirable not to fall into error upon this Roman unity. Behind the imposing front it shewed from one end to the other of the Mediterranean, the variety of peoples, with their manners, traditions, special religions, was always there, and in Africa more than elsewhere. The population of Carthage was astonishingly mixed. The hybrid character of this country without unity was illustrated by the streaks found in the Carthaginian crowds. All the specimens of African races elbowed one another in the streets, from the nigger, brought from his native Soudan by the slave-merchant, to the Romanized Numidian. The inflow, continually renewed, of traffickers and cosmopolitan adventurers increased this confusion. And so Carthage was a Babel of races, of costumes, of beliefs and ideas. Augustin, who was at heart a mystic, but also a dialectician extremely fond of showy discussions, found in Carthage a lively summary of the religions and philosophies of his day. During these years of study and reflection he captured booty of knowledge and observation which he would know how to make use of in the future. In the Carthage sanctuaries and schools, in the squares and the streets, he could see pass the disciples of all the systems, the props of all the superstitions, the devotees of all the religions. He heard the shrill clamour of disputes, the tumult of fights and riots. When a man was at the end of his arguments, he knocked down his opponent. The authorities had a good deal of trouble to keep order. Augustin, who was an intrepid logician, must have longed to take his share in these rows. But one cannot exactly improvise a faith between to-day and to-morrow. While he awaited the enlightenment of the truth, he studied the Carthaginian Babel. First of all, there was the official religion, the most obvious and perhaps the most brilliant, that of the Divinity of the Emperors, which was still kept up even under the Christian Cæsars. Each year, at the end of October, the elected delegates of the entire province, having at their head the _Sacerdos province_, the provincial priest, arrived at Carthage. Their leader, clad in a robe broidered with palms, gold crown on head, made his solemn entry into the city. It was a perfect invasion, each member dragging in his wake a mob of clients and servants. The Africans, with their taste for pomp and colour, seized the chance to give themselves over to a display of ruinous sumptuosities: rich dresses, expensive horses splendidly caparisoned, processions, sacrifices, public banquets, games at the circus and amphitheatre. These strangers so overcrowded the city that the imperial Government had to forbid them, under severe penalties, to stay longer than five days. A very prudent measure! At these times, collisions were inevitable between pagans and Christians. It was desirable to scatter such crowds as soon as possible, for riots were always smouldering in their midst. No less thronged were the festivals of the Virgin of Heaven. A survival of the national religion, these feasts were dear to the hearts of the Carthaginians. Augustin went to them with his fellow-students. "We trooped there from every quarter," he says. There was a great gathering of people in the interior court which led up to the temple. The statue, taken from its sanctuary, was placed before the peristyle upon a kind of repository. Wantons, arrayed with barbarous lavishness, danced around the holy image; actors performed and sang hymns. "Our eager eyes," Augustin adds maliciously, "rested in turn on the goddess, and on the girls, her adorers." The Great Mother of the Gods, the Goddess of Mount Berecyntus, was worshipped with similar license. Every year the people of Carthage went to wash her solemnly in the sea. Her statue, carried in a splendid litter, robed with precious stuffs, curled and farded, passed through the streets of the city, with its guard of mummers and Corybants. These last, "with hair greasy from pomade, pale faces, and a loose and effeminate walk, held out bowls for alms to the onlookers." The devotion to Isis was yet another excuse for processions: the _Serapeum_ was a rival attraction to the temple of the Heavenly Maiden. If we may trust Tertullian, the Africans swore only by Serapis. Possibly Mithras had also worshippers in Carthage. Anyhow, the occult religions were fully represented there. Miracle-working was becoming more and more the basis even of paganism. Never had the soothsayers been more flourishing. Everybody, in secret, pried into the entrails of the sacrificial victims, or used magic spells. As to the wizards and astrologists, they did business openly. Augustin himself consulted them, like all the Carthaginians. The public credulity had no limits. On the opposite side from the pagan worship, the sects which had sprung from Christianity sprouted. True, Africa has given birth to but a small number of heresies: the Africans had not the subtle mind of the Orientals and they were not given to theorizing. But a good many of the Eastern heresies had got into Carthage. Augustin must have still met Arians there, although at this period Arianism was dying out in Africa. What is certain is that orthodox Catholicism was in a very critical state. The Donatists captured its congregations and churches; they were unquestionably in the majority. They raised altar against altar. If Genethlius was the Catholic bishop, the Donatist bishop was Parmenianus. And they claimed to be more Catholic than their opponents. They boasted that they were the Church, the single, the unique Church, the Church of Christ. But these schismatics themselves were already splitting up into many sects. At the time Augustin was studying at Carthage, Rogatus, Bishop of Tenes, had just broken publicly with Parmenian's party. Another Donatist, Tyconius, published books wherein he traversed many principles dear to his fellow-religionists. Doubt darkened consciences. Amid these controversies, where was the truth? Among whom did the Apostolic tradition dwell? To put the finishing touch on this anarchy, a sect which likewise derived from Christianity--Manicheeism--began to have numerous adepts in Africa. Watched with suspicion by the Government, it concealed part of its doctrine, the most scandalous and subversive. But the very mystery which enveloped it, helped it to get adherents. Among all these apostles preaching their gospel, these devotees beating the drum before their god, these theologians reciprocally insulting and excommunicating one another, Augustin brought the superficial scepticism of his eighteenth year. He wanted no more of the religion in which his mother had brought him up. He was a good talker, a clever dialectician; he was in a hurry to emancipate himself, to win freedom for his way of thinking as for his way of life; and he meant to enjoy his youth. With such gifts, and with such dispositions, he could only choose among all these doctrines that which would help most the qualities of his mind, at once flattering his intellectual pretensions, and leaving his pleasure-loving instincts a loose rein. III THE CARTHAGE STUDENT However strong were the attractions of the great city, Augustin well knew that he had not been sent there to amuse himself, or to trifle as an amateur with philosophy. He was poor, and he had to secure his future--make his fortune. His family counted on him. Neither was he ignorant of the difficult position of his parents and by what sacrifices they had supplied him with the means to finish his studies. Necessarily he was obliged to be a student who worked. With his extraordinary facility, he stood out at once among his fellow-students. In the rhetoric school, where he attended lectures, he was, he tells us, not only at the top, but he was the leader of his companions. He led in everything. At that time, rhetoric was extremely far-reaching: it had come to take in all the divisions of education, including science and philosophy. Augustin claims to have learned all that the masters of his time had to teach: rhetoric, dialectic, geometry, music, mathematics. Having gone through the whole scholastic system, he thought of studying law, and aided by his gift of words, to become a barrister. For a gifted young man it was the shortest and surest road to money and honours. Unhappily for him, hardly was he settled down at Carthage than his father died. This made his future again problematical. How was he to keep up his studies without the sums coming from his father? The affairs of Patricius must have been left in the most parlous condition. But Monnica, clinging to her ambitious plans for her son, knew how to triumph over all difficulties, and she continued to send Augustin money. Romanianus, the Mæcenas of Thagaste, who was doubtless applied to by her, came once more to the rescue of the hard-up student. The young man, set at ease about his expenses, resumed light-heartedly his studious and dissipated life. As a matter of fact, this family bereavement does not seem to have caused him much grief. In the _Confessions_ he mentions the death of his father in a few words, and, so to speak, in parenthesis, as an event long foreseen without much importance. And yet he owed him a great deal. Patricius was hard pressed, and he took immense trouble to provide the means for his son's education. But with the fine egotism of youth, Augustin perhaps thought it enough to have profited by his father's sacrifices, and dispensed himself from gratitude. In any case, his affection for his father must have been rather lukewarm; the natural differences between them ran too deep. In these years, Monnica filled all the heart of Augustin. But the influence of Monnica herself was very slight upon this grown-up youth, eighteen years old. He had forgotten her lessons, and it did not trouble him much if his conduct added to the worries of the widow, who was now struggling with her husband's creditors. At heart he was a good son and he deeply loved his mother, but inevitably the pressure of the life around him swept him along. He has pictured his companions for us, after his conversion, as terrible blackguards. No doubt he is too severe. Those young men were neither better nor worse than elsewhere. They were rowdy, as they were in the other cities of the Empire, and as one always is at that age. Imperial regulations enjoined the police to have an eye on the students, to note their conduct and what company they kept. They were not to become members of prohibited societies, not to go too often to the theatre, nor to waste their time in raking and feastings. If their conduct became too outrageous, they were to be beaten with rods and sent back to their parents. At Carthage there was a hard-living set of men who called themselves "The Wreckers." Their great pleasure was to go and make a row at a professor's lecture; they would burst noisily into the classroom and smash up anything they could lay hold of. They amused themselves also by "ragging" the freshmen, jeering at their simplicity, and playing them a thousand tricks. Things haven't much changed since then. The fellow-students of Augustin were so like students of to-day that the most modern terms suggest themselves to describe their performances. Augustin, who was on the whole well conducted, and, as behoved a future professor, had a respect for discipline, disapproved of "The Wreckers" and their violence. This did not prevent him from enjoying himself in their society. He was overcome with shame because he could not keep pace with them--we must believe it at least, since he tells us so himself. With a certain lack of assurance, blended however with much juvenile vanity, he joined the band. He listened to that counsel of vulgar wisdom which is disastrous to souls like his: "Do as others do." He accordingly did do as the others; he knew all their debauchery, or he imagined he did, for however low he went, he was never able to do anything mean. He was then so far from the faith that he arranged love-trysts in the churches. "I was not afraid to think of my lust, and plan a scheme for securing the deadly fruit of sin, even within the walls of Thy church during the celebration of Thy mysteries." We might be reading the confession of a sensualist of to-day. One grows astonished at these morals, at once so old and so modern. What, already! These young Christian basilicas, but newly sprung out of the earth, where the men were strictly separated from the women--were they already become places of assignation, where love-letters were slipped into hands, and procuresses sold their furtive services!... At length the great happiness for which Augustin had so long been sighing was granted him: he loved and he was loved. He loved as he indeed was able to love, with all the impetuosity of his nature and all the fire of his temperament, with all his heart and all his senses. "I plunged headlong into love, whose fetters I longed to wear." But as he went at once to extremes, as he meant to give himself altogether, and expected all in return, he grew irritated at not receiving this same kind of love. It was never enough love for him. Yet he was loved, and the very certainty of this love, always too poor to his mind, exasperated the violence and pertinacity of his desire. "Because I was loved, I proudly riveted round myself the chain of woe, to be soon scourged with the red-hot iron rods of jealousy, torn by suspicions, fears, anger, and quarrels." This was passion with chorus and orchestra, a little theatrical, with its violences, its alternations between fury and ecstasy, such as an African, steeped in romantic literature, would conceive it. Deceived, he flung himself in desperate pursuit of the ever-flitting love. He had certainly more than one passion. Each one left him more hungry than the last. He was sensual, and he felt each time how brief is pleasure, in what a limited circle all enjoyment turns. He was tender, eager to give himself; and he saw plainly that one never gives oneself quite altogether, that even in the maddest hours of surrender one always reserves oneself in secret, keeping for oneself something of oneself; and he felt that most of the time his tenderness got no answer. When the joyous heart brings the offering of its love, the heart of her he loves is absent. And when it is there, on the edge of the lips, decked and smiling to meet the loved one, it is the other who is absent. Almost never do they join together, and they never join together altogether. And so this Love, which claims to be constant and even eternal, ought to be, if it would prolong itself, a continual act of faith, and hope, and charity. To believe in it in spite of its darkening and falling away; to hope its return, often against all evidence; to pardon its injustices and sometimes its foul actions--how many are capable of such abnegation? Augustin went through all that. He was in despair about it. And then, the nostalgia of predestined souls took hold of him. He had an indistinct feeling that these human loves were unworthy of him, and that if he must have a master, he was born to serve another Master. He had a desire to shake off the platitude of here below, the melancholy fen where stagnated what he calls "the marsh of the flesh"; to escape, in a word, from the wretched huts wherein for a little he had sheltered his heart; to burn all behind him, and so prevent the weakness of a return; and to go and pitch his tent further, higher, he knew not where--upon some unapproachable mountain where the air is icy, but before the eyes, the vasty stretches of light and space.... These first loves of Augustin were really too fierce to last. They burned up themselves. Augustin did not keep them up long. There was in him, besides, an instinct which counteracted his exuberant, amorous sentimentality--the sense of beauty. That in itself was enough to make him pause on the downhill of riot. The anarchy and commotion of passion was repellent to a mind devoted to clearness and order. But there was still another thing--the son of the Thagaste freeholder had any amount of common sense. That at least was left to him of the paternal heritage. A youth of what we call the lower middle class, strictly brought up in the hard and frugal discipline of the provinces, he felt the effects of his training. The bohemianism in which his friends revelled could not hold him indefinitely. Besides this, the career he desired, that of a barrister or professor, had a preliminary obligation to maintain a certain outward decorum. He himself tells us so; in the midst of his most disreputable performances he aspired to be known for his fashion and wit--_elegans atque urbanus_. Politeness of speech and manners, the courteous mutual deference of the best society--such, was the ideal of this budding professor of rhetoric. Anxiety about his future, joined to his rapid disenchantments, ere long sobered the student: he just took his fling and then settled down. Love turned for him into sensual habit. His head became clear for study and meditation. The apprentice to rhetoric liked his business. Up to his last breath, despite his efforts to change, he continued, like all his contemporaries, to love rhetoric. He handled words like a worker in verbals who is aware of their price and knows all their resources. Even after his conversion, if he condemns profane literature as a poisoner of souls, he absolves the beauty of language. "I accuse not words," he says. "Words are choice and precious vessels. I accuse the wine of error that drunken doctors pour out for us into these fair goblets." At the Rhetoric School he took extreme pleasure in declaiming. He was applauded; the professor gave him as an example to the others. These scholastic triumphs foretold others more celebrated and reverberating. And so, in his heart, literary vanity and ambition disputed the ever-lively illusions of love. And then, above all! he had to live; Monnica's remittances were necessarily small; the generosity of Romanianus had its limit. So he beat about to enlarge his small student's purse. He wrote verses for poetic competitions. Perhaps already he was able to act as tutor to certain of his fellow-students, less advanced. If the need of loving tormented his sentimental heart, he tried to assuage it in friendship. He loved friendship as he loved love. He was a passionate and faithful friend up to his death. At this time of his life, he was riveting friendships which were never to be broken. He had beside him his fellow-countryman, Alypius, the future Bishop of Thagaste, who had followed him to Carthage and would, later on, follow him to Milan; Nebridius, a not less dear companion, fated to die early; Honoratus, whom he drew into his errors and later did his best to enlighten; and, finally, that mysterious young man, whose name he does not tell us, and whose loss he mourned as never any one has mourned the death of a friend. They lived in daily and hourly intimacy, in continual fervour and enthusiasm. They were great theatre-goers, where Augustin was able to satisfy his desire for tender emotions and romantic adventures. They had musical parties; they tried over again the popular airs heard at the Odeum or some other of the innumerable theatres at Carthage. All the Carthaginians, even the populace, were mad about music. The Bishop of Hippo, in his sermons, recalls a mason upon his scaffolding, or a shoemaker in his stall, singing away the tunes of well-known musicians. Then our students strolled on the quays or in the Harbour Square, contemplating the many-coloured sea, this splendour of waters at the setting sun, which Augustin will extol one day with an inspiration unknown to the ancient poets. Above all, they fell into discussions, commented what they had lately read, or built up astonishing plans for the future. So flowed by a happy and charming life, abruptly interpolated with superb anticipations. With what a full heart the Christian penitent calls it back for us!--"What delighted me in the intercourse of my friends, was the talk, the laughter, the good turns we did each other, the common study of the masters of eloquence, the comradeship, now grave now gay, the differences that left no sting, as of a man differing with himself, the spice of disagreement which seasoned the monotony of consent. Each by turns would instruct or listen; impatiently we missed the absent friend, and savoured the joy of his return. We loved each other with all our hearts, and such tokens of friendship springing from the heart and displayed by a word, a glance, an expression, by a thousand pretty complaisances, supply the heat which welds souls together, and of many make one." It is easily understood that such ties as these had given Augustin a permanent disgust for his rowdy comrades of a former time: he went no more with "The Wreckers." The small circle he took pleasure in was quiet and cheerful. Its merriment was controlled by the African gravity. He and his friends come before my eyes, a little like those students of theology, or those cultivated young Arabs, who discuss poetry, lolling indolently upon the cushions of a divan, while they roll between their fingers the amber beads of their rosary, or walking slowly under the arcades of a mosque, draped in their white-silk simars, with a serious and meditative air, gestures elegant and measured, courteous and harmonious speech, and something discreet, polite, and already clerical in their tone and manners. In fact, the life which Augustin was at that time relishing was the pagan life on its best and gentlest side. The subtle network of habits and daily occupations enveloped him little by little. There was some risk of his growing torpid in this soft kind of life, when suddenly a rude shock roused him.... It was a chance, but in his eyes a providential chance, which put the _Hortensius_ of Cicero between his hands. Augustin was about nineteen, still a student; according to the order which prevailed in the schools, the time had come for him to read and explain this philosophical dialogue. He had no curiosity about the book. He took it from his sense of duty as a student, because it figured on the schedule. He unrolled the book, and began it, doubtless with calm indifference. All of a sudden, a great unexpected light shone between the lines. His heart throbbed. His whole soul sprang towards these phrases, so dazzling and revealing. He awoke from his long drowsiness. Before him shone a marvellous vision.... As this dialogue is lost, we can hardly to-day account for such enthusiasm, and we hold that the Roman orator was a very middling philosopher. We know, however, through Augustin himself, that the book contained an eloquent praise of wisdom. And then, words are naught without the soul of the reader; all this, falling into Augustin's soul, rendered a prolonged and magnificent sound. It is evident, too, that just at the moment when he unrolled the book he was in a condition to receive this uplifting summons. In such minutes, when the heart, ignorant of itself, swells like the sea before a storm, when all the inner riches of the being overflow, the slightest glimmer is enough to reveal all these imprisoned forces, and the least shock to set them free. He has at least preserved for us, in pious and faithful gratitude, some phrases of this dialogue which moved him so deeply. Especially does he admire this passage, wherein the author, after a long discussion, ends in these terms: "If, as pretend the philosophers of old time, who are also the greatest and most illustrious, we have a soul immortal and divine, it behoves us to think, that the more it has persevered in its way, that is to say, in reason, love, and the pursuit of truth, and the less it has been intermingled and stained in human error and passion, the easier will it be for it to raise itself and soar again to the skies." Such phrases, read in a certain state of mind, might well overwhelm this young man, who was ere long to yearn for the cloister and was destined to be the founder of African monasticism. To give his whole life to the study of wisdom, to compel himself towards the contemplation of God, to live here below an almost divine life--this ideal, impossible to pagan wisdom, Augustin was called to realize in the name of Christ. That had dawned on him, all at once, while he was reading the _Hortensius_. And this ideal appeared to him so beautiful, so well worth the sacrifice of all he had hitherto loved, that nothing else counted for him any more. He despised rhetoric, the vain studies it compelled him to pursue, the honour and glory it promised him. What was all that to the prize of wisdom? For wisdom he felt himself ready to give up the world.... But these heroic outbursts do not, as a rule, keep up very long in natures so changeable and impressionable as Augustin's. Yet they are not entirely thrown away. Thus, in early youth, come dim revelations of the future. There comes a presentiment of the port to which one will some day be sailing; a glimpse of the task to fulfil, the work to build up; and all this rises before the eyes in an entrancement of the whole being. Though the bright image be eclipsed, perhaps for years, the remembrance of it persists amid the worst degradations or the worst mediocrities. He who one single time has seen it pass, can never afterwards live quite like other people. This fever calmed, Augustin set himself to reflect. The ancient philosophers promised him wisdom. But Christ also promised it! Was it not possible to reconcile them? And was not the Gospel ideal essentially more human than that of the pagan philosophers? Suppose he tried to submit to that, to bring the faith of his childhood into line with his ambitions as a young man of intellect? To be good after the manner of his mother, of his grandparents, of the good Thagaste servants, of all the humble Christian souls whose virtues he had been taught to respect, and at the same time to rival a Plato by the strength of thought--what a dream! Was it possible?... He tells us himself that the illusion was brief, and that he grew cool about the _Hortensius_ because he did not find the name of Christ in it. He deceives himself, probably. At this time he was not so Christian. He yields to the temptation of a fine phrase: when he wrote his _Confessions_ he had not yet entirely lost this habit. But what remains true is, that feeling the inadequateness of pagan philosophy, he returned for a moment towards Christianity. The Ciceronian dialogue, by disappointing his thirst for the truth, gave him the idea of knocking at the door of the Church and trying to find out if on that side there might not be a practicable road for him. This is why the reading of _Hortensius_ is in Augustin's eyes one of the great dates of his life. Although he fell back in his errors, he takes credit for his effort. He recognizes in it the first sign, and, as it were, a promise of his conversion. "Thenceforth, my God, began my upward way, and my return towards Thee." He began then to study the Holy Scriptures with a more or less serious intention to instruct himself in them. But to go to the Bible by way of Cicero was to take the worst road. Augustin got lost there. This direct popular style, which only cares about saying things, and not about how they are said, could only repel the pupil of Carthage rhetoricians, the imitator of the harmonious Ciceronian sentences. Not only had he much too spoiled a taste in literature, but there was also too much literature in this pose of a young man who starts off one fine morning to conquer wisdom. He was punished for his lack of sincerity, and especially of humility. He understood nothing of the Scripture, and "I found it," he says, "a thing not known to the proud, nor yet laid open to children, but poor in appearance, lofty in operation, and veiled in mysteries. At that time, I was not the man to bow my head so as to pass in at its door."... He grew tired very quickly. He turned his back on the Bible, as he had thrown aside _Hortensius_, and he went to find pasture elsewhere. Nevertheless, his mind had been set in motion. Nevermore was he to know repose, till he had found truth. He demanded this truth from all the sects and all the churches. So it was, that in despair he flung himself into Manicheeism. Some have professed amazement that this honest and practical mind should have stuck fast in a doctrine so tortuous, so equivocal, contaminated by fancies so grossly absurd. But perhaps it is forgotten that there was everything in Manicheeism. The leaders of the sect did not deliver the bulk of the doctrine all at once to their catechumens; the entire initiation was a matter of several degrees. Now Augustin never went higher than a simple _auditor_ in the Manichean Church. What attracted specially fine minds to the Manichees, was that they began by declaring themselves rationalists. To reconcile faith with natural science and philosophy has been the fad of heresiarchs and free-thinkers in all ages. The Manicheans bragged that they had succeeded. They went everywhere, crying out: "Truth, Truth!" That suited Augustin very well: it was just what he was looking for. He hastened to the preachings of these humbugs, impatient to receive at last this "truth," so noisily announced. From what they said, it was contained in several large books written by their prophet under the guidance of the Holy Ghost. There was quite a library of them. By way of bamboozling the crowd, they produced some of them which looked very important, ponderous as Tables of the Law, richly bound in vellum, and embellished with striking illuminations. How was it possible to doubt that the entire revelation was contained in such beautiful books? One felt at once full of respect for a religion which was able to produce in its favour the testimony of such a mass of writings. However, the priests did not open them. To allay the impatience of their hearers, they amused them by criticizing the books and dogmas of the Catholics. This preliminary criticism was the first lesson of their instruction. They pointed out any number of incoherences, absurdities, and interpolations in the Bible: according to them, a great part of the Scriptures had been foisted on the world by the Jews. But they triumphed especially in detecting the contradictions of the Gospel narratives. They sapped them with syllogisms. It is easy to understand that these exercises in logic should have at once attracted the youthful Augustin. With his extraordinary dialectical subtilty, he soon became very good at it himself--much better even than his masters. He made speeches in their assemblies, fenced against a text, peremptorily refuted it, and reduced his adversaries to silence. He was applauded, covered with praise. A religion which brought him such successes must be the true one. After he became a bishop, he tried to explain to himself how it was that he fell into Manicheeism, and could find only two reasons. "The first," he says, "was a friendship which took hold of me under I know not what appearance of kindness, and was like a cord about my neck.... The second was those unhappy victories that I almost always won in our disputes." But there is still another which he mentions elsewhere, and it had perhaps the most weight. This was the loose moral code which Manicheeism authorized. This doctrine taught that we are not responsible for the evil we do. Our sins and vices are the work of the evil Principle--the God of Darkness, enemy of the God of Light. Now at the moment when Augustin was received as _auditor_ by the Manichees, he had a special need of excusing his conduct by a moral system so convenient and indulgent. He had just formed his connection with her who was to become the mother of his child. IV THE SWEETNESS OF TEARS Augustin was nearly twenty. He had finished his studies in rhetoric within the required time. According to the notions of that age, a young man ought to have concluded his course by his twentieth year. If not, he was considered past mending and sent back there and then to his family. It may appear surprising that a gifted student like Augustin did not finish his rhetoric course sooner. But after his terms at Madaura, he had lost nearly a year at Thagaste. Besides, the life of Carthage had so many charms for him that doubtless he was in no hurry to leave. However that may be, the moment was now come for him to make up his mind about his career. The wishes of his parents, the advice of his masters, as well as his own ambitions and qualities, urged him, as we know, to become a barrister. But now, suddenly, all his projects for the future changed. Not only did he give up the law, but at the very moment when all appeared to smile on him, at the opening of his youth, he left Carthage to go and bury himself as a teacher of grammar in the little free-town his birthplace. As he has neglected to give any explanation of this sudden determination, we are reduced to conjectures. It is likely that his mother was bothered about household expenses and could no longer afford to keep him at Carthage. Besides, she had other children, a son and daughter, to start in life. Augustin was on the point of being, if not poor, at least very hard up. He must do something to earn his living, and as quickly as possible. In these conditions, the quickest way out of the difficulty was to sell to others what he had bought from his masters. To live, he would open a word-shop, as he calls it disdainfully. But as he had only just ceased to be a student, he could not dream of becoming a professor in a great city such as Carthage, and setting himself up in rivalry to so many celebrated masters. The best thing he could do, if he did not want to vegetate, was to fall back on some more modest post. Now his protector, Romanianus, wanted him to go to Thagaste. This rich man had a son almost grown up, whom it was necessary to put as soon as possible in the hands of a tutor. Augustin, so often helped by the father, was naturally thought of to look after the youth. Furthermore, Romanianus, who appreciated Augustin's talent, must have been anxious to attract him to Thagaste and keep him there. With an eye to the interests of his free-town, he desired to have such a shining light in the place. So he asked this young man, whom he patronized, to return to his native district and open a grammar school. He promised him pupils, and, above all, the support of his influence, which was considerable, Monnica, as we may conjecture, added her entreaties to those of the great head of the Thagaste municipality. Augustin yielded. Did it grieve him very much to make up his mind to this exile? It must have been extremely hard for a young man of twenty to give up Carthage and its pleasures. Moreover, it is pretty nearly certain that at this time he had already started that connection which was to last so long. To leave a mistress whom he loved, and that in all the freshness of a passion just beginning--one wonders how he was able to make up his mind to it. And yet he did leave, and spent nearly a year at Thagaste. One peculiar mark of the youth, and even of the whole life of Augustin, is the ease with which he unlearns and breaks off his habits--the sentimental as well as the intellectual. He used up a good many doctrines before resting in the Catholic truth; and even afterwards, in the course of a long life, he contradicted and corrected himself more than once in his controversies and theological writings. His _Retractations_ prove this. One might say that the accustomed weighs on him as a hindrance to his liberty; that the look of the places where he lives becomes hateful to him as a threat of servitude. He feels dimly that his true country is elsewhere, and that if he must settle anywhere it is in the house of his Heavenly Father. _Inquietum est cor nostrum, donec requiescat in te...._ "Restless are our hearts, O my God, until they rest in Thee." Long before St. Francis of Assisi, he practised the mystic rule: "As a stranger and a pilgrim." It is true that in his twentieth year he was very far from being a mystic. But he already felt that restlessness which made him cross the sea and roam Italy from Rome to Milan. He is an impulsive. He cannot resist the mirages of his heart or his imagination. He is always ready to leave. The road and its chances tempt him. He is eager for the unknown. He lets himself be carried in delight by the blowing wind. God calls him; he obeys without knowing where he goes. This unsettled young man, halting between contrary passions, who feels at home nowhere, has already the soul of an apostle. This changeableness of mood was probably the true cause of his departure for Thagaste. But other more apparent reasons, reasons more patent to a juvenile consciousness, guided him also. No doubt he was not sorry to reappear in his little town, although he was so young, with the importance and authority of a master. His former companions were going to become his pupils. And then the Manichees had fanaticized him. Carried away by the neophyte's bubbling zeal, elevated by his triumphs at the public meetings in Carthage, he meant to shine before his fellow-countrymen, and perhaps convert them. He departed with his mind made up to proselytize. Let us believe also, that in spite of his dissolute life, and the new passion that filled his heart, he did not come back to Thagaste without an affectionate thought at the back of his head for his mother. The reception that Monnica had in reserve for him was going to surprise him considerably. Since her widowhood, the wife of Patricius had singularly advanced in the way of Christian perfection. The early Church not only offered widows the moral help of its sacraments and consolations, it also granted a special dignity with certain privileges to those who made a vow to refrain from sex-intercourse. They had in the basilicas, even as the consecrated virgins, a place of honour, divided from that of the other matrons by a balustrade. They wore a special dress. They were obliged to a conduct which would shew them worthy of all the outer marks of respect which surrounded them. The austerity of Monnica had increased with the zeal of her faith. She set an example to the Church people at Thagaste. Docile to the teachings of her priests, eager to serve her brethren, multiplying alms as much as she could with her straitened means, she was unfailing at the services of the Church. Twice daily, morning and evening, she might be seen, exact to the hour of prayer and sermon. She did not go there, her son assures us, to mingle in cabals and the gossip of pious females, but to hear God's word in homily, and that God might hear her in prayer. The widow compelled all who were about her to the same severe rule which she herself observed. In this rigid atmosphere of his home, the student from Carthage, with his free, fashionable airs, must have caused a painful astonishment. Monnica felt at once that she and her son understood each other no longer. She began by remonstrating with him. Augustin rebelled. Things got worse when, with his presumption of the young professor new-enamelled by the schools, the harsh and aggressive assurance of the heresiarch, he boasted as loud as he could of being a Manichee. Monnica, deeply wounded in her piety and motherly tenderness, ordered him to give up his errors. He refused, and only replied by sarcasms to the poor woman's complaints. Then she must have believed that the separation was final, that Augustin had committed an irreparable crime. Being an African Christian, absolute in her faith and passionate for its defence, she regarded her son as a public danger. She was filled with horror at his treason. It is possible, too, that guided by the second-sight of her affection, she saw clearer into Augustin's heart than he did himself. She was plunged in sorrow that he mistook himself to this extent, and refused the Grace which desired to win him to the Catholic unity. And as he was not content with losing himself, but also drew others into peril--disputing, speech-making before his friends, abusing his power of language to throw trouble into consciences--Monnica finally made up her mind. She forbade her son to eat at her table, or to sleep under her roof. She drove him from the house. This must have been a big scandal in Thagaste. It does not appear, however, that Augustin cared much. In all the conceit of his false knowledge, he had that kind of inhumanity which drives the intellectual to make litter of the sweetest and deepest feelings as a sacrifice to his abstract idol. Not only did he not mind very much if his apostasy made his mother weep, but he did not trouble, either, to reconcile the chimeras of his brain with the living reality of his soul and the things of life. Whatever he found inconvenient, he tranquilly denied, content if he had talked well and entangled his adversary in the net of his syllogisms. Put in interdict by Monnica, he simply went and quartered himself on Romanianus. The sumptuous hospitality he received there very soon consoled him for his exile from his home. And if his self-esteem had been affronted, the pride of living familiarly with so important a personage was, for a vain young man, a very full compensation. In fact, this Romanianus roused the admiration of the whole country by his luxury and lavish expenditure. He was bound to ruin himself in the long run, or, at any rate, to raise up envious people bent upon his ruin. Being at the head of the Decurions, he was the protector, not only of Thagaste, but of the neighbouring towns. He was the great patron, the influential man, who had nearly the whole country for his dependents. The town council, through gratitude and flattery, had had his name engraved upon tables of brass, and had put up statues to him. It had even conferred powers on him wider than municipal powers. The truth is that Romanianus did not dole out his benefactions to his fellow-citizens. He gave them bear-fights and other spectacles till then unknown at Thagaste. He did not grudge public banquets, and every day a free meal was to be got at his house. The guests were served plentifully. After having eaten his dinner, they dipped in the purse of the host. Romanianus knew the art of doing an obliging thing discreetly, and even how to anticipate requests which might be painful. So he was proclaimed unanimously, "the most humane, the most liberal, the most polite and happiest of men." Generous to his dependents, he did not forget himself. He built a villa which, by the space it occupied, was a real palace, with _thermæ_ walled in precious marbles. He passed his time in the baths, or gaming, or hunting--in short, he led the life of a great landed proprietor of those days. No doubt these villas had neither the beauty nor the art-value of the great Italian villas, which were a kind of museums in a pretty, or grand, natural frame; but they did not lack charm. Some of them, like that of Romanianus, were built and decorated at lavish expense. Immensely large, they took in sometimes an entire village; and sometimes, also, the villa, properly speaking, the part of the building where the master dwelt, was fortified, closed in by walls and towers like a feudal castle. Upon the outer gates and the entrance door might be read in big letters: "The Property of So-and-so." Often, the inscription was repeated upon the walls of an enclosure or of a farm, which really belonged to a dependent of the great man. Under the shelter of the lord's name, these small-holders defended themselves better against fiscal tyranny, or were included in the immunities of their patrons. So was formed, under the cover of patronage, a sort of African feudalism. Augustin's father, who owned vineyards, was certainly a vassal of Romanianus. As the African villa was a centre of agricultural activity, it maintained on the estate a whole population of slaves, workmen, and small-holders. The chief herdsman's house neighboured that of the forester. Through deer-parks, enclosed by latticed fences, wandered gazelles. Oil factories, vats and cellars for wine, ran on from the bath-buildings and the offices. Then there was the main building with its immense doorway, its belvedere of many stories, as in the Roman villas, its interior galleries, and wings to the right and left of the _atrium_. In front lay the terraces, the gardens with straight walks formed by closely-clipped hedges of box which led to pools and jets of water, to arbours covered with ivy, to nymph-fountains ornamented with columns and statues. In these gardens was a particular place called the "philosopher's corner." The mistress of the house used to go there to read or dream. Her chair, or folding-seat, was placed under the shade of a palm tree. Her "philosopher" followed her, holding her parasol and leading her little favourite dog. It is easy to realize that Augustin managed to stand his mother's severity without overmuch distress in one of these fine country houses. To be comfortable there, he had only to follow his natural inclination, which was, he tells us, epicureanism. It is most certain that at this period the only thing he cared about and sought after was pleasure. Staying with Romanianus, he took his share in all the pleasant things of life, _suavitates illius vitæ_--shared the amusements of his host, and only bothered about his pupils when he had nothing better to do. He must have been as little of a grammarian as possible--he hadn't the time. With the tyrannical friendship of rich people, who are hard put to it to find occupation, Romanianus doubtless monopolized him from morning till night. They hunted together, or dined, or read poetry, or discussed in the evergreen alleys of the garden or "the philosopher's corner." And naturally, the recent convert to Manicheeism did his best to indoctrinate and convert his patron--so far at least as a careless man like Romanianus could be converted. Augustin accuses himself of having "flung" Romanianus into his own errors. Augustin probably was not so guilty. His wealthy friend does not seem to have had any very firm convictions. In all likelihood, he was a pagan, a sceptical or hesitating pagan, such as existed in numbers at that time. Led by Augustin, he drew near to Manicheeism. Then, when Augustin gave up Manicheeism for Platonic philosophy, we see Romanianus take the airs of a philosopher. Later, when Augustin came back to Catholicism, he drew Romanianus in his wake towards that religion. This man of fashion was one of those frivolous people who never go deep into things, for whom ideas are only a pastime, and who consider philosophers or men of letters as amusers. But it is certain that he liked to listen to Augustin, and let himself be influenced. If he trifled with Manicheeism, the reason was that Augustin dazzled him with his arguments and fine phrases. This orator of twenty had already extraordinary charm. So Augustin led a delightful life with Romanianus. Everything pleased him--his talking triumphs, the admiration of his hearers, the flattery and luxury which surrounded him. Meanwhile, Monnica was plunged in grief at his conduct, and implored God to draw him from his errors. She began to be sorry that she had sent him away, and with the clear-sightedness of the Christian, she perceived that Romanianus' house was not good for the prodigal. It would be better to have him back. Near her he would run less risk of being corrupted. Through intense praying, came to her a dream which quickened her determination. "She dreamed that she was weeping and lamenting, with her feet planted on a wooden rule, when she saw coming towards her a radiant youth who smiled upon her cheerfully. He asked the reason of her sorrow and her daily tears ... and when she told him she was bewailing my perdition, he bade her be of good comfort, look and see, for where she was, there was I also. She looked, and saw me standing by her side on the same rule." Filled with joy by this promise from on high, Monnica asked her son to come home. He did come back, but with the quibbles of the Sophist, the rhetorician cavilled against his mother. He tried to upset her happiness. He said to her: "Since, according to your dream, we are to be both standing on the same rule, that means that you are going to be a Manichean." "No," answered Monnica. "_He_ did not say, where he is you will be, but where you are he will be." Augustin confesses that this strong good sense made a certain impression on him. Nevertheless he did not change. For still nine years he remained a Manichee. As a last resource, Monnica begged a bishop she knew, a man deeply read in the Scriptures, to speak with her son and refute his errors. But so great was the reputation of Augustin as an orator and dialectician that the holy man dared not try a fall with such a vigorous jouster. He answered the mother very wisely, that a mind so subtle and acute could not long continue in such gross sophisms. And he offered his own example, for he, too, had been a Manichee. But Monnica pressed him with entreaties and tears. At last the bishop, annoyed by her persistence, but at the same time moved by her tears, answered with a roughness mingled with kindness and compassion: "Go, go! Leave me alone. Live on as you are living. It cannot be that the son of such tears should be lost." _Filius istarum lacrymarum_: the son of such tears!... Was it indeed the country bishop, or rather the rhetorician Augustin who, in a burst of gratitude, hit upon this sublime sentence? Certain it is that later on Augustin saw in his mother's tears as it were a first baptism whence he came forth regenerate. After having borne him according to the flesh, Monnica, by her tears and moans, gave him birth into the spiritual life. Monnica wept because of Augustin. Monnica wept for Augustin. This is rather astonishing in the case of so severe a mother--this African a trifle rough. The expressions--tears and moans and weeping--occur so often in her son's writings, that we are at first tempted to take them for pious metaphors--figures of a sacred rhetoric. We suspect that Monnica's tears must come from the Bible, an imitation of King David's penitential tears. But it would be quite an error to believe that. Monnica wept real tears. In her whole-hearted prayers she bedewed the pavement of the basilica; she moistened the balustrade against which she leant her forehead. This austere woman, this widow whose face nobody saw any more, whose body was shapeless by reason of the mass of stuffs, grey and black, which wrapped her from head to foot--this rigid Christian concealed a heart full of love. Love such as this was then a perfectly new thing. That an African woman should carry her piety to the point of fanaticism; that she should work to conquer her son to her faith; that, if he strayed from it, she should hate him and drive him out with curses--this has been seen in Africa at all times. But that a mother should mourn at the thought that her child is lost for another life; that she grows terror-stricken and despairing when she thinks that she may possess a happiness in which he will have no part, and walk in the gardens of Heaven while her child will not be there--no, this had never been seen before. "Where I am you will be," near me, against my heart, our two hearts meeting in the one same love--in this union of souls, continued beyond the grave, lies all the Christian sweetness and hope. Augustin was no longer, or not yet, a Christian. But in his tears he is the true son of his mother. This gift of tears that Saint Lewis of France begged God with so much earnestness and contrition to grant him, Monnica's son had to the full. "For him to weep was a pleasure." [1] He inebriated himself with his tears. Now, just while he was at Thagaste, he lost a friend whom he loved intensely. This death set free the fountain of tears. They are not yet the holy tears which he will shed later before God, but only poor human tears, more pathetic perhaps to our own weakness. [Footnote 1: Sainte-Beuve.] Who was this friend? He tells us in very vague terms. We only know that they had grown up as boys together and had gone to the same schools; that they had just passed a year together, probably at Carthage; that this young man, persuaded by him, was become a Manichee; and that, in a word, they loved passionately. Augustin, while speaking of him, recalls in a deeper sense what Horace said of his friend Virgil: _dimidium animæ_--"O thou half of my soul!" Well, this young man fell gravely sick of a fever. As all hope was at an end, they baptized him, according to the custom. He grew better, was almost cured, "As soon as I was able to talk to him," says Augustin--"and that was as soon as he could bear it, for I never left his side, and we were bound up in one another--I ventured a jest, thinking that he would jest too, about the baptism which he had received, when he could neither think nor feel. But by this time he had been told of his baptism. He shrank from me as from an enemy, and with a wonderful new-found courage, warned me never to speak so to him again, if I wished to remain his friend. I was so astounded and confused that I said no more, resolving to wait till he should regain his strength, _when I would tell him frankly what I thought_." So, at this serious moment, he whom they called "the Carthaginian disputer" was sorry not to be able to measure himself in a bout of dialectics with his half-dead friend. The intellectual poison had so perverted his mind, that it almost destroyed in him the feelings of common decency. But if his head, as he acknowledges, was very much spoiled, his heart remained intact. His friend died a few days after, and Augustin was not there. He was stunned by it. His grief wrought itself up to wildness and despair. "This sorrow fell like darkness on my heart, and wherever I looked I saw nothing but death. My country became a torture, my father's house a misery. All the pleasures that I had shared with him, turned into hideous anguish now that he was gone. My eyes sought for him everywhere, and found him not. I hated the familiar scenes because he was not there, and they could no more cry to me, 'Lo! he will come.' as they used when he was absent but alive...." Then Augustin began to weep louder, he prolonged his weeping, finding consolation only in tears. Monnica's tenderness was restrained; in him it was given full vent and exaggerated. At that time, the Christian moderation was unknown to him, as well as the measure which the good taste of the ancients prompted. He has often been compared to the most touching geniuses, to Virgil, to Racine, who had also the gift of tears. But Augustin's tenderness is more abandoned, and, so to speak, more romantic. It even works up, sometimes, into an unhealthy excitement. To be full of feeling, as Augustin was then, is not only to feel with excessive sensitiveness the least wounds, the slightest touches of love or hate, nor is it only to give oneself with transport; but it is especially to take delight in the gift of oneself, to feel at the moment of full abandonment that one is communicating with something infinitely sweet, which already has ceased to be the creature loved. It is love for love, it is to weep for the pleasure of tears, it is to mix with tenderness a kind of egoism avid of experiences. Having lost his friend, Augustin loathes all the world. He repeats: "Tears were my only comfort. I was wretched, and my wretchedness was dear to me." And accordingly, he did not want to be consoled. But as, little by little, the terrors of that parting subsided, he perceived himself that he played with grief and made a joy of his tears. "My tears," he says, "were dearer to me than my friend had been." By degrees the friend is almost forgotten. Though Augustin may hate life because his friend has gone, he confesses naively that he would not have sacrificed his existence for the sake of the dead. He surmises that what is told of Orestes and Pylades contending to die for each other is but a fable. Ultimately, he comes to write: "Perhaps I feared to die, _lest the other half of him whom I had loved so dearly, should perish_." He himself, in his _Retractations_, condemns this phrase as pure rhetoric. It remains true that what was perhaps the deepest sorrow of his life--this sorrow so sincere and painful which had "rent and bloodied his soul"--ended with a striking phrase. It should be added, that in a stormy nature like his, grief, like love, wears itself out quickly. It burns up passion and sentiment as it does ideas. When at length he regained his calm, everything appeared drab. Thagaste became intolerable. With his impulsive temperament, his changeable humour, he all at once hit upon a plan: To go back to Carthage and open a rhetoric school. Perhaps, too, the woman he loved and had abandoned there was pressing him to return. Perhaps she told him that she was about to become a mother. Always ready to go away, Augustin scarcely hesitated. It is more than likely that he did not consult Monnica. He only told Romanianus, who, as he had all kinds of reasons for wanting to keep Augustin at Thagaste, at first strongly objected. But the young man pointed to his future, his ambition to win fame. Was he going to bury all that in a little town? Romanianus yielded, and with a generosity that is no longer seen, he paid the expenses this time too. V THE SILENCE OF GOD Augustin was going to live nine years at Carthage--nine years that he squandered in obscure tasks, in disputes sterile or unfortunate for himself and others--briefly, in an utter forgetfulness of his true vocation. "And during this time Thou wert silent, O my God!" he cries, in recalling only the faults of his early youth. Now, the silence of God lay heavy. And yet even in those years his tormented soul had not ceased to appeal. "Where wert Thou then, O my God, while I looked for Thee? Thou wert before me. But I had drawn away from myself and I could not find myself. How much less, then, could I find Thee." This was certainly the most uneasy, and, at moments, the most painful time of his life. Hardly was he got back to Carthage than he had to struggle against ever-increasing money difficulties. Not only had he to get his own living, but the living of others--possibly his mother's and that of his brother and sister--at all events, he had to support his mistress and the child. It is possible that the infant was born before its father left Thagaste; if not, the birth must have occurred shortly after. The child was called Adeodatus. There is a kind of irony in this name, which was then usual, of Adeodatus--"Gift of God." This son of his sin, as Augustin calls him, this son whom he did not want, and the news of whose birth must have been a painful shock--this poor child was a gift of Heaven which the father could have well done without. And then, when he saw him, he was filled with joy, and he cherished him as a real gift from God. He accepted his fatherhood courageously, and, as it happens in such cases, he was drawn closer to his mistress, their association taking on something of conjugal dignity. Did the mother of Adeodatus justify such attachment--an attachment which was to last more than ten years? The mystery in which Augustin intended that the woman he had loved the most should remain enveloped for all time, is nearly impenetrable to us. No doubt she was of a very humble, not to say low class, since Monnica judged it impossible to bring about a marriage between the ill-assorted pair. There must have been an extreme inequality between the birth and education of the lovers. This did not prevent Augustin from loving his mistress passionately, for her beauty perhaps, or perhaps for her goodness of heart, or both. Nevertheless, it is surprising, that in view of his changing humour, and his prompt and impressionable soul, he remained faithful to her so long. What was to prevent his taking his son and going off? Ancient custom authorized such an act. But Augustin was tender-hearted. He was afraid to cause pain; he dreaded for others the wounds that caused him so much suffering himself. So he stayed on from kindness, from pity, habit too, and also because, in spite of everything, he loved the mother of his child. Up to the time of his conversion, they lived like husband and wife. So now, to keep his family, he really turns "a dealer in words." In spite of his youth (he was barely twenty) the terms he had kept at Thagaste as a teacher of grammar allowed him to take his place among the rhetoricians at Carthage. Thanks to Romanianus, he got pupils at once. His protector at Thagaste sent his son, that young Licentius whose education Augustin had already begun, with one of his brothers, doubtless younger. It seems likely that the two youths lived in Augustin's house. A small fact which their master has preserved, looks like a proof of this. A spoon having been lost in the house, Augustin, to find out where it was, told Licentius to go and consult a wizard, one Albicerius, who had, just then, a great name in Carthage. This message is scarcely to be explained unless we suppose the lad was lodging in his professor's house. Another of the pupils is known to us. This is Eulogius, who was later on a rhetorician at Carthage, and of whom Augustin relates an extraordinary dream. Finally, there was Alypius, a little younger than himself, his friend--"the brother of his heart," as he calls him. Alypius had been attending his lessons at Thagaste. When the schoolmaster abruptly threw up his employment, the father of the pupil was angry, and in sending his son to Carthage, he forbade him to go near Augustin's class. But it was difficult to keep such eager friends apart. Little by little, Alypius overcame his father's objections, and became a pupil of his friend. Augustin's knowledge, when he began to lecture, could not have been very deep, for he had only lately quitted the student's bench himself. His duties forced him to learn what he did not know. In teaching he taught himself. It was at this time that he did most of the reading which afterwards added substance to his polemics and treatises. He tells us himself that he read in those days all that he could lay hands on. He is very proud of having read by himself and understood without any assistance from a master, the _Ten Categories_ of Aristotle, which was considered one of the most abstruse works of the Stagirite. In an age when instruction was principally by word of mouth, and books comparatively rare, it is obvious that Augustin was not what we call an "all-devouring reader." We do not know if Carthage had many libraries, or what the libraries were worth. It is no less true that the author of _The City of God_ is the last of the Latin writers who had a really all-round knowledge. It is he who is the link between modern times and pagan antiquity. The Middle Age hardly knew classical literature, save by the allusions and quotations of Augustin. So in spite of family and professional cares, he did not lose his intellectual proclivities. The conquest of truth remained always his great ambition. He still hoped to find it in Manicheeism, but he began to think that it was a long time coming. The leaders of the sect could not have trusted him thoroughly. They feared his acute and subtle mind, so quick to detect the flaw in a thesis or argument. That is why they postponed his initiation into their secret doctrines. Augustin remained a simple _auditor_ in their Church. By way of appeasing the enormous activity of his intelligence, they turned him on to controversy, and the critical discussion of the Scriptures. Giving themselves out for Christians, they adopted a part of them, and flung aside as interpolated or forged all that was not in tune with their theology. Augustin, as we know, triumphed in disputes of this kind, and was vain because he excelled in them. And when he grew tired of this negative criticism and asked his evangelists to give him more substantial food, they put him on some exoteric doctrine calculated to appeal to a young imagination by its poetic or philosophical colouring. The catechumen was not satisfied, but he put up with it for lack of anything better. Very prettily he compares these enemies of the Scriptures to the snarers of birds, who defile or fill with earth all the water-places where the birds use to drink, save one mere; and about this they set their snares. The birds all fly there, not because the water is better, but because there is no other water, and they know not where else to go and drink. So Augustin, not knowing where to quench his thirst for truth, was fain to make the best of the confused pantheism of the Manichees. What remains noteworthy is, that however unstable his own convictions were, he yet converted everybody about him. It was through him that his friends became Manichees: Alypius one of the first; then Nebridius, the son of a great landowner near Carthage; Honoratius, Marcianus; perhaps, too, the youngest of his pupils, Licentius and his brother--all victims of his persuasive tongue, which he exerted later on to draw them back from their errors. So great was his charm--so deep, especially, was public credulity! This fourth century was no longer a century of strong Christian faith. On the other hand, the last agony of paganism was marked by a new attack of the lowest credulity and superstition. As the Church energetically combated both one and the other, it is not surprising that it was chiefly the pagans who were contaminated. The old religion was to end by foundering in magic. The greatest minds of the period, the neo-Platonists, the Emperor Julian himself, were miracle-workers, or at any rate, adepts in the occult sciences. Augustin, who was then separated from Christianity, followed the general impulse, together with the young men he knew. Just now we saw him sending to consult the soothsayer, Albicerius, about the loss of a spoon. And this man of intellect believed also in astrologers and nigromancers. Strips of lead have been found at Carthage upon which are written magic spells against horses entered for races in the circus. Just like the Carthaginian jockeys, Augustin had recourse to these hidden and fraudulent practices, to make sure of success. On the eve of a verse competition in the theatre, he fell in with a wizard who offered, if they could agree about the price, to sacrifice a certain number of animals to buy the victory. Upon this, Augustin, very much annoyed, declared that if the prize were a crown of immortal gold, not a fly should be sacrificed to help him win it. Really, magic was repellent to the honesty of his mind, as well as to his nerves, by reason of the suspicious and brutal part of its operations. As a rule, it was involved with haruspicy, and had a side of sacred anatomy and the kitchen which revolted the sensitive--dissection of flesh, inspection of entrails, not to mention the slaughtering and strangling of victims. Fanatics, such as Julian, gave themselves up with delight to these disgusting manipulations. What we know of Augustin's soul makes it quite clear why he recoiled with horror. Astrology, on the contrary, attracted him by its apparent science. Its adepts called themselves "mathematicians," and thus seemed to borrow from the exact sciences something of their solidity. Augustin often discussed astrology with a Carthage physician, Vindicianus, a man of great sense and wide learning, who even reached Proconsular honours. In vain did he point out to the young rhetorician that the pretended prophecies of the mathematicians were the effect of chance; in vain did Nebridius, less credulous than his friend, join his arguments to those of the crafty physician; Augustin clung obstinately to his chimera. His dialectical mind discovered ingenious justifications for what the astrologers claimed. Thus, dazzled by all the intellectual phantasms, he strayed from one science to another, repeating meanwhile in his heart the motto of his Manichean masters: "The Truth, the Truth!". But whatever might be the attractions of the speculative life, he had first to face the needs of actual life. The sight of his child called him back to a sense of his position. To get money, and for that purpose to push himself forward, put himself in evidence, increase his reputation--Augustin worked at that as hard as he could. It led him to enter for the prize of dramatic poetry. He was declared the winner. His old friend, the physician Vindicianus, who was then Proconsul, placed the crown, as he says, upon his "disordered head." The future Father of the Church writing for the theatre--and what a theatre it was then!--is not the least extraordinary thing in this life so disturbed and, at first sight, so contradictory. It was also from literary ambition that about the same time he wrote a book on æsthetics called _Upon the Beautiful and the Fit_, which he dedicated to a famous colleague, the Syrian Hierius, "orator to the City of Rome," one of the professors of the official education appointed either by the Roman municipality or the Imperial treasury. This Levantine rhetorician had an immense success in the capital of the Empire. His renown had got beyond academical and fashionable circles and crossed the sea. Augustin admired him on trust, like everybody else. It is clear that, at this time he could not imagine a more glorious fortune for himself than to become, like Hierius, orator to the City of Rome. Later in life, the Bishop of Hippo, while condemning the vanity of his youthful ambitions, must have made some extremely ironical reflections as to their modesty. How mistaken he was about himself! An Augustin had dreamed of equalling one day this obscure pedagogue, of whom nobody, save for him, would ever have spoken again. Men of instinct, like Augustin, continually go wrong in this way about their object and the means to employ. But their mistakes are only in appearance. A will stronger than their own leads them, by mysterious ways, whither they ought to go. This first book of Augustin's is lost, and we are unable to say whether there be any reason to regret it. He himself recalls it to us in a very indifferent tone and rather vague terms. It would seem, however, that his æsthetic had a basis of Manichean metaphysics. But what is significant for us, in this youthful essay, is that the first time Augustin wrote as an author it was to define and to praise Beauty. He did not yet know, at least not directly from the text, the dialogues of Plato, and he is already inclined to Platonism. He was this by nature. His Christianity will be a religion all of light and beauty. For him, the supreme Beauty is identical with the supreme Love. "Do we love anything," he used to say to his friends, "except what is beautiful?" _Num amamus aliquid, nisi pulchrum?_ Again, at the end of his life, when he strives in _The City of God_ to make clear for us the dogma of the resurrection of the body, he thinks our bodies shall rise free from all earthly flaws, in all the splendour of the perfect human type. Nothing of the body will be lost. It will keep all its limbs and all its organs _because they are beautiful_. One recognizes in this passage, not only the Platonist, but the traveller and art-lover, who had gazed upon some of the finest specimens of ancient statuary. This first book had hardly any success. Augustin does not even say whether the celebrated Hierius paid him a compliment about it, and he has an air of giving us to understand that he had no other admirer but himself. New disappointments, more serious mortifications, changed little by little his state of mind and his plans for the future. He was obliged to acknowledge that after years of effort he was scarcely more advanced than at the start. There was no chance to delude himself with vain pretences: it was quite plain to everybody that the rhetorician Augustin was not a success. Now, why was this? Was it that he lacked the gift of teaching? Perhaps he had not the knack of keeping order, which is the most indispensable of all for a schoolmaster. What suited him best no doubt was a small and select audience which he charmed rather than ruled. Large and noisy classes he could not manage. At Carthage, these rhetoric classes were particularly difficult to keep in order, because the students were more rowdy than elsewhere. At any moment "The Wreckers" might burst in and make a row. Augustin, who had not joined in these "rags" when he was a student, saw himself obliged to endure them as a professor. He had nothing worse to complain of than his fellow-professors, in whose classes the same kind of disturbance took place. That was the custom and, in a manner of speaking, the rule in the Carthage schools. For all that, a little more authoritative bearing would not have harmed him in the eyes of these disorderly boys. But he had still graver defects for a professor who wants to get on: he was not a schemer, and he could not make the most of himself. It is quite possible that he did not possess the qualities which just then pleased the pagan public in a rhetorician. The importance that the ancients attached to physical advantages in an orator is well known. Now, according to an old tradition, Augustin was a little man and not strong: till the end of his life he complained of his health. He had a weak voice, a delicate chest, and was often hoarse. Surely this injured him before audiences used to all the outward emphasis and all the studied graces of Roman eloquence. Finally, his written and spoken language had none of those brilliant and ingenious curiosities of phrase which pleased in literary and fashionable circles. This inexhaustibly prolific writer is not in the least a stylist. In this respect he is inferior to Apuleius, or Tertullian, though he leaves them far behind in the qualities of sincere and deep sentiment, poetic flow, colour, the vividness of metaphor, and, besides, the emotion, the suavity of the tone. With all that, no matter how hard he tried, he could never grasp what the rhetoricians of his time understood by style. This is why his writings, as well as his addresses, were not very much liked. Nevertheless, good judges recognized his value, and guessed the powers, lying still unformed within him, which he was misusing ere they were mature. He was received at the house of the Proconsul Vindicianus, who liked to talk with him, and treated him with quite fatherly kindness. Augustin knew people in the best society. He did all his life. His charm and captivating manners made him welcome in the most exclusive circles. But just because he was valued by fashionable society, it came home to him more painfully that he had not the position he deserved with the public at large. Little by little his humour grew bitter. In this angry state of mind he was no longer able to consider things with the same confidence and serenity. His mental disquietudes took hold of him again. His ideas were affected, first of all. He began to have doubts, more and more definite, about Manicheeism. He began by suspecting the rather theatrical austerity which the initiated of the sect made such a great parade of. Among other turpitudes, he saw one day in one of the busiest parts of Carthage "three of the Elect whinny after some women or other who were passing, and begin making such obscene signs that they surpassed the coarsest people for impudence and shamelessness." He was scandalized at that; but, after all, it was a small thing. He himself was not so very virtuous then. Generally your intellectual worries very little about squaring his conduct with his principles, and does not bother about the practical part. No; what was much worse in his eyes is that the Manichean physical science, a congeries of fables more or less symbolical, suddenly struck him as ruinous. He had just been studying astronomy, and he found that the cosmology of the Manichees--of these men who called themselves materialists--did not agree with scientific facts. Therefore Manicheeism must be wrong universally, since it ran counter to reason confirmed by experience. Augustin spoke about his doubts, not only to his friends, but to the priests of his sect. These got out of the difficulty by evasions and the most dazzling promises. A Manichee bishop, a certain Faustus, was coming to Carthage. He was a man of immense learning. Most certainly he would refute every objection without the least trouble. He would confirm the young _auditors_ in their faith.... So Augustin and his friends waited for Faustus as for a Messiah. Their disappointment was immense. The supposed doctor turned out to be an ignorant man, who possessed no tincture of science or philosophy, and whose intellectual baggage consisted of nothing but a little grammar. A delightful talker and a wit, the most he could do was to discourse pleasantly on literature. This disappointment, joined to the set-backs in his profession, brought about a crisis of soul and conscience in Augustin. So this Truth which he had sighed after so long, which had been so much promised to him, was only a decoy! One must be content not to know!... Then what was left to do since truth was unapproachable? Possibly fortune and honours would console him for it. But he was far enough from them too. He felt that he was on the wrong road, that he was getting into a rut at Carthage, as he had got into a rut at Thagaste. He must succeed, whatever the cost!... And then he gave way to one of those moments of weariness, when a man has no further hope of saving himself save by some desperate step. He was sick of where he was and of those about him. His friends, whom he knew too well, had nothing more to teach him, and could not help him in the only search which passionately interested him. And his entanglement became irksome. Here was nine years that this sharing of bed and board had lasted. His son was at that unattractive age which rather bores a young father than it revives an affection already old. No doubt he did not want to abandon him. He did not intend to break altogether with his mistress. But he felt the need of a change of air, to take himself off somewhere else, where he could breathe more freely and get fresh courage for his task. Then it dawned on him to try his fortune at Rome. It was there that literary reputations were made. He would find there, no doubt, better judges than at Carthage. He would very likely end by getting a post in the public instruction, with a steady salary--this would relieve him of present worries, at all events. Probably he had already this plan in his head when he sent his treatise _On the Beautiful_ to Hierius, orator to the City of Rome; he thought that by this politeness he might depend, later, on the backing of the well-known rhetorician. Lastly, his friends, Honoratius, Marcianus, and the others, earnestly persuaded him to go and find a stage worthy of him at Rome. Alypius, who was at this time finishing his law studies there, and must have felt their separation, pressed him to come to Rome and promised him success. Once more, Augustin was ready to go away. He was not long in making up his mind. He was going to leave all belonging to him, his mistress, his child, till the time when his new position would enable him to send for them. He himself tells us that the chief motive which led him to decide on this journey was that the Roman students were said to be better disciplined and less noisy than the students at Carthage. Evidently, that is a reason which would weigh with a professor who objected to act the policeman in his class. But besides the reasons we have given, there were others which must have influenced his decision. Theodosius had lately ordered very heavy penalties against the Manichees. Not only did he condemn them to death, but he had instituted a perfect Inquisition, with the special duty of spying upon and prosecuting these heretics. Did it occur to Augustin that he might hide better in Rome, where he was unknown, than in a city where he was a marked man on account of his proselytizing zeal? In any case, his departure gave rise to calumnies which his adversaries, the Donatists, did not fail many years later to bring up again and make worse. They accused him of having run away from prosecution; he fled the country, so they said, on account of a judgment which was out against him, pronounced by the Proconsul Messianus. Augustin had no trouble in refuting these false insinuations. But all these facts seem to prove that the most ordinary prudence warned him to cross the sea as soon as possible. Accordingly, he prepared to set sail. Let us hope that in spite of his lofty indifference to material things, he made some provision for the existence of the woman and child he left behind. As for her, she appeared to agree without over-many violent scenes to this parting, which, he said, was temporary. It was not the same with his mother. The very idea of Rome, which seemed to her another Babylon, terrified this austere African woman. What spiritual dangers lay in wait for her son there! She wanted to keep him near her, both to bring him to the faith and also to love him--this Augustin who had been her only human love. And then he was doubtless the chief support of the widow. Without him, what was going to become of her? The fugitive was forced to put a trick on Monnica so as to carry out his plan. She would not leave him a moment, folded him in her arms, implored him with tears not to go. The night he was to sail she followed him down to the dock, although Augustin, to allay her suspicions, had told her a lie. He pretended that he was only going down to the ship with a friend to see him off. But Monnica, only half believing, followed. Night fell. Meanwhile, the ship, anchored in a little bay to the north of the city, did not move. The sailors were waiting till a wind rose to slip their moorings. The weather was moist and oppressive, as it usually is in the Mediterranean in August and September. There was not a breath of air. The hours passed on. Monnica, overcome by heat and fatigue, could hardly stand. Then Augustin cunningly persuaded her to go and pass the night in a chapel hard by, since it was plain that the ship would not weigh anchor till dawn. After many remonstrances, she at length agreed to rest in this chapel--a _memoria_ consecrated to St. Cyprian, the great martyr and patron of Carthage. Like most of the African sanctuaries of those days, and the _marabouts_ of to-day, this one must have been either surrounded, or approached, by a court with a portico in arcades, where it was possible to sleep. Monnica sat down on the ground under her heap of veils among other poor people and travellers, who were come like her to try to find a little cool air on this stifling night near the relics of the blessed Cyprian. She prayed for her child, offering to God "the blood of her heart," begging God not to let him go, "for she loved to keep me with her" says Augustin, "as mothers are wont, yes, far more than most mothers." And like a true daughter of Eve, "weeping and crying, she sought again with groans the son she had brought forth with groans." She prayed for a long time; then, worn out with sorrow, she slept. The porter of the chapel, without knowing it, watched that night not only the mother of the rhetorician Augustin, but the ancestor of an innumerable line of souls; this humble woman, who slept there on the ground, on the flags of the courtyard, carried in her heart all the yearning of all the mothers of the future. While she slept, Augustin went stealthily on board. The silence and the tempered splendour of the night weighed him down. Sometimes the cry of the sailors on watch took a strange note in the lustrous vaporous spaces. The Gulf of Carthage gleamed far off under the scintillation of the stars, under the palpitating of a milky way all white like the flowers of the garden of Heaven. But Augustin's heart was heavy, heavier than the air weighted by the heat and sea-damp--heavy from the lie and the cruelty he had just committed. He saw already the awakening and sorrow of his mother. His conscience was troubled, overcome by remorse and forebodings.... Meanwhile, his friends tried to cheer him, and urged him to have courage and hope. Marcianus, while embracing him, reminded him of the verses of Terence: "This day which brings to thee another life Demands that thou another man shalt be." Augustin smiled sadly. At last the ship began to move. The wind had risen, the wind of the grand voyage which was bearing him to the unknown.... Suddenly, at the keen freshness of the open sea, he thrilled. His strength and confidence rushed back. To go away! What enchantment for all those who cannot fasten themselves to a corner of the earth, who know by instinct that they belong _elsewhere_, who always pass "as strangers and as pilgrims," and who go away with relief, as if they cast a burthen behind them. Augustin was of those people--of those who, among the fairest attractions of the Road, never cease to think of the Return. But he knew not where God was leading him. Marcianus was right: a new life was really beginning for him; only it was not the life that either of them hoped for. He who departed as a rhetorician, to sell words, was to come back as an apostle, to conquer souls. THE THIRD PART THE RETURN Et ecce ibi es in corde eorum, in corde confitentium tibi, et projicientium se in te, et plorantium in sinu tuo, post vias suas difficiles. "And behold! Thou art there in their hearts, in the hearts of that confess to Thee, and cast themselves upon Thee, and sob upon Thy breast, after their weary ways." _Confessions_, V, 2. I THE CITY OF GOLD Augustin fell ill just after he got to Rome. It would seem that he arrived there towards the end of August or beginning of September, before the students reassembled, just at the time of heat and fevers, when all Romans who could leave the city fled to the summer resorts on the coast. Like all the great cosmopolitan centres at that time, Rome was unhealthy. The diseases of the whole earth, brought by the continual inflow of foreigners, flourished there. Accordingly, the inhabitants had a panic fear of infection, like our own contemporaries. People withdrew prudently from those suffering from infectious disorders, who were left to their unhappy fate. If, from a sense of shame, they sent a slave to the patient's bedside, he was ordered to the sweating-rooms, and there disinfected from head to foot, before he could enter the house again. Augustin must have had at least the good luck to be well looked after, since he recovered. He had gone to the dwelling of one of his Manichee brethren, an _auditor_ like himself, and an excellent kind of man, whom he stayed with all the time he was in Rome. Still, he had such a bad attack of fever that he very nearly died. "I was perishing," he says; "and I was all but lost." He is frightened at the idea of having seen death so near, at a moment when he was so far from God--so far, in fact, that it never occurred to him to ask for baptism, as he had done, in like case, when he was little. What a desperate blow would that have been for Monnica! He still shudders when he recalls the danger: "Had my mother's heart been smitten with that wound, it never could have been healed. _For I cannot express her tender love towards me_, or with how far greater anguish she travailed of me now in the spirit, than when she bore me in the flesh." But Monnica prayed. Augustin was saved. He ascribes his recovery to the fervent prayers of his mother, who, in begging of God the welfare of his soul, obtained, without knowing it, the welfare of his body. As soon as he was convalescent, he had to set to work to get pupils. He was obliged to ask the favours of many an important personage, to knock at many an inhospitable door. This unfortunate beginning, the almost mortal illness which he was only just recovering from, this forced drudgery--all that did not make him very fond of Rome. It seems quite plain that he never liked it, and till the end of his life he kept a grudge against it for the sorry reception it gave him. In the whole body of his writings it is impossible to find a word of praise for the beauty of the Eternal City, while, on the contrary, one can make out through his invectives against the vices of Carthage, his secret partiality for the African Rome. The old rivalry between the two cities was not yet dead after so many centuries. In his heart, Augustin, like a good Carthaginian--and because he was a Carthaginian--did not like Rome. The most annoying things joined together as if on purpose to disgust him with it. The bad season of the year was nigh when he began to reside there. Autumn rains had started, and the mornings and evenings were cold. What with his delicate chest, and his African constitution sensitive to cold, he must have suffered from this damp cold climate. Rome seemed to him a northern city. With his eyes still full of the warm light of his country, and the joyous whiteness of the Carthage streets, he wandered as one exiled between the gloomy Roman palaces, saddened by the grey walls and muddy pavements. Comparisons, involuntary and continual, between Carthage and Rome, made him unjust to Rome. In his eyes it had a hard, self-conscious, declamatory look, and gazing at the barren Roman _campagna_, he remembered the laughing Carthage suburbs, with gardens, villas, vineyards, olivets, circled everywhere by the brilliance of the sea and the lagoons. And then, besides, Rome could not be a very delightful place to live in for a poor rhetoric master come there to better his fortune. Other strangers before him had complained of it. Always to be going up and down the flights of steps and the ascents, often very steep, of the city of the Seven Hills; to be rushing between the Aventine and Sallust's garden, and thence to the Esquiline and Janiculum! To bruise the feet on the pointed cobbles of sloping alley-ways! These walks were exhausting, and there seemed to be no end to this city. Carthage was also large--as large almost as Rome. But there Augustin was not seeking employment. When he went for a walk there, he strolled. Here, the bustle of the crowds, and the number of equipages, disturbed and exasperated the southerner with his lounging habits. Any moment there was a risk of being run over by cars tearing at full gallop through the narrow streets: men of fashion just then had a craze for driving fast. Or again, the passenger was obliged to step aside so that some lady might go by in her litter, escorted by her household, from the handicraft slaves and the kitchen staff, to the eunuchs and house-servants--all this army manoeuvring under the orders of a leader who held a rod in his hand, the sign of his office. When the street became clear once more, and at last the palace of the influential personage to whom a visit had to be paid was reached, there was no admittance without greasing the knocker. In order to be presented to the master, it was necessary to buy the good graces of the slave who took the name (_nomenclator_), and who not only introduced the suppliant, but might, with a word, recommend or injure. Even after all these precautions, one was not yet sure of the goodwill of the patron. Some of these great lords, who were not always themselves sprung from old Roman families, prided themselves upon their uncompromising nationalism, and made a point of treating foreigners with considerable haughtiness. The Africans were regarded unfavourably in Rome, especially in Catholic circles. Augustin must have had an unpleasant experience of this. Through the long streets, brilliantly lighted at evening (it would seem that the artificial lighting of Rome almost equalled the daylight), he would return tired out to the dwelling of his host, the Manichee. This dwelling, according to an old tradition, was in the Velabrum district, in a street which is still to-day called _Via Greca_, and skirts the very old church of Santa Maria-in-Cosmedina--a poor quarter where swarmed a filthy mass of Orientals, and where the immigrants from the Levantine countries, Greeks, Syrians, Armenians, Egyptians, lodged. The warehouses on the Tiber were not very far off, and no doubt there were numbers of labourers, porters, and watermen living in this neighbourhood. What a place for him who had been at Thagaste the guest of the magnificent Romanianus, and intimate with the Proconsul at Carthage! When he had climbed up the six flights of stairs to his lodging, and crouched shivering over the ill-burning movable hearth, in the parsimonious light of a small bronze or earthenware lamp, while the raw damp sweated through the walls, he felt more and more his poverty and loneliness. He hated Rome and the stupid ambition which had brought him there. And yet Rome should have made a vivid appeal to this cultured man, this æsthete so alive to beauty. Although the transfer of the Court to Milan had drawn away some of its liveliness and glitter, it was still all illuminated by its grand memories, and never had it been more beautiful. It seems impossible that Augustin should not have been struck by it, despite his African prejudices. However well built the new Carthage might be, it could not pretend to compare with a city more than a thousand years old, which at all periods of its history had maintained the princely taste for building, and which a long line of emperors had never ceased to embellish. When Augustin landed at Ostia, he saw rise before him, closing the perspective of the _Via Appia_, the Septizonium of Septimus Severus--an imitation, doubtless, on a far larger scale, of the one at Carthage. This huge construction, water-works probably of enormous size, with its ordered columns placed line above line, was, so to speak, the portico whence opened the most wonderful and colossal architectural mass known to the ancient world. Modern Rome has nothing at all to shew which comes anywhere near it. Dominating the Roman Forum, and the Fora of various Emperors--labyrinths of temples, basilicas, porticoes, and libraries--the Capitol and the Palatine rose up like two stone mountains, fashioned and sculptured, under the heap of their palaces and sanctuaries. All these blocks rooted in the soil, suspended, and towering up from the flanks of the hills, these interminable regiments of columns and pilasters, this profusion of precious marbles, metals, mosaics, statues, obelisks--in all that there was something enormous, a lack of restraint which disturbed the taste and floored the imagination. But it was, above all, the excessive use of gold and gilding that astonished the visitor. Originally indigent, Rome became noted for its greed of gold. When the gold of conquered nations began to come into its hands, it spread it all over with the rather indiscreet display of the upstart. When Nero built the Golden House he realized its dream. The Capitol had golden doors. Statues, bronzes, the roofs of temples, were all gilded. All this gold, spread over the brilliant surfaces and angles of the architecture, dazzled and tired the eyes: _Acies stupet igne metalli_, said Claudian. For the poets who have celebrated it, Rome is the city of gold--_aurata Roma_. A Greek, such as Lucian, had perhaps a right to be shocked by this architectural debauch, this beauty too crushing and too rich. A Carthage rhetorician, like Augustin, could feel at the sight of it nothing but the same irritated admiration and secret jealousy as the Emperor Constans felt when he visited his capital for the first time. Even as the Byzantine Cæsar, and all the provincials, Augustin, no doubt, examined the curiosities and celebrated works which were pointed out to strangers: the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus; the baths of Caracalla and Diocletian; the Pantheon; the temple of Roma and of Venus; the Place of Concord; the theatre of Pompey; the Odeum, and the Stadium. Though he might be stupefied by all this, he would remember, too, all that the Republic had taken from the provinces to construct these wonders, and would say to himself: "'Tis we who have paid for them." In truth, all the world had been ransacked to make Rome beautiful. For some time a muffled hostility had been brewing in provincial hearts against the tyranny of the central power, especially since it had shewn itself incapable of maintaining peace, and the Barbarians were threatening the frontiers. Worn out by so many insurrections, wars, massacres, and pillages, the provinces had come to ask if the great complicated machine of the Empire was worth all the blood and money that it cost. For Augustin, moreover, the crisis was drawing near which was to end in his return to the Catholic faith. He had been a Christian, and as such brought up in principles of humility. With these sentiments, he would perhaps decide that the pride and vanity of the creature at Rome claimed far too much attention, and was even sacrilegious. It was not only the emperors who disputed the privileges of immortality with the gods, but anybody who took it into his head, provided that he was rich or had any kind of notoriety. Amid the harsh and blinding gilt of palaces and temples, how many statues, how many inscriptions endeavoured to keep an obscure memory green, or the features of some unknown man! Of course, at Carthage too, where they copied Rome, as in all the big cities, there were statues and inscriptions in abundance upon the Forum, the squares, and in the public baths. But what had not shocked Augustin in his native land, did shock him in a strange city. His home-sick eyes opened to faults which till then had been veiled by usage. In any case, this craze for statues and inscriptions prevailed at Rome more than anywhere else. The number of statues on the Forum became so inconvenient, that on many occasions certain ones were marked for felling, and the more insignificant shifted. The men of stone drove out the living men, and forced the gods into their temples. And the inscriptions on the walls bewildered the mind with such a noise of human praise, that ambition could dream of nothing beyond. It was all a kind of idolatry which revolted the strict Christians; and in Augustin, even at this time, it must have offended the candour of a soul which detested exaggeration and bombast. The vices of the Roman people, with whom he was obliged to live cheek by jowl, galled him still more painfully. And to begin with, the natives hated strangers. At the theatres they used to shout: "Down with the foreign residents!" Acute attacks of xenophobia often caused riots in the city. Some years before Augustin arrived, a panic about the food supply led to the expulsion, as useless mouths, of all foreigners domiciled in Rome, even the professors. Famine was an endemic disease there. And then, these lazy people were always hungry. The gluttony and drunkenness of the Romans roused the wonder and also the disgust of the sober races of the Empire--of the Greeks as well as the Africans. They ate everywhere--in the streets, at the theatre, at the circus, around the temples. The sight was so ignoble, and the public intemperance so scandalous, that the Prefect, Ampelius, was obliged to issue an order prohibiting people who had any self-respect from eating in the street, the keepers of wine-shops from opening their places before ten o'clock in the morning, and the hawkers from selling cooked meat in the streets earlier than a certain hour of the day. But he might as well have saved himself the trouble. Religion itself encouraged this greediness. The pagan sacrifices were scarcely more than pretexts for stuffing. Under Julian, who carried the great public sacrifices of oxen to an abusive extent, the soldiers got drunk and gorged themselves with meat in the temples, and came out staggering. Then they would seize hold of any passers-by, whom they forced to carry them shoulder-high to their barracks. All this must be kept in mind so as to understand the strictness and unyielding attitude of the Christian reaction. This Roman people, like the pagans in general, was frightfully material and sensual. The difficulty of shaking himself free from matter and the senses is going to be the great obstacle which delays Augustin's conversion; and if it was so with him, a fastidious and intellectual man, what about the crowd? Those people thought of nothing but eating and drinking and lewdness. When they left the tavern or their squalid rooms, they had only the obscenities of mimes, or the tumbles of the drivers in the circus, or the butcheries in the amphitheatre to elevate them. They passed the night there under the awnings provided by the municipality. Their passion for horse-races and actors and actresses, curbed though it was by the Christian emperors, continued even after the sack of Rome by the Barbarians. At the time of the famine, when the strangers were expelled, they excepted from this wholesale banishment three thousand female dancers with the members of their choirs, and their leaders of orchestra. The aristocracy did not manifest tastes much superior. Save a few cultivated minds, sincerely fond of literature, the greatest number only saw in the literary pose an easy way of being fashionable. These became infatuated about an unknown author, or an ancient author whose books were not to be had. They had these books sought for and beautifully copied. They, "who hated study like poison," spoke only of their favourite author: the others did not exist for them. As a matter of fact, music had ousted literature: "the libraries were closed like sepulchres." But fashionable people were interested in an hydraulic organ, and they ordered from the lute-makers "lyres the size of chariots." Of course, this musical craze was sheer affectation. Actually, they were only interested in sports: to race, to arrange races, to breed horses, to train athletes and gladiators. As a pastime, they collected Oriental stuffs. Silk was then fashionable, and so were precious stones, enamels, heavy goldsmiths' work. Rows of rings were worn on each finger. People took the air in silk robes, held together by brooches carved in the figures of animals, a parasol in one hand, and a fan with gold fringes in the other. The costumes and fashions of Constantinople encroached upon the old Rome and the rest of the Western world. Immense fortunes, which had gathered in the hands of certain people, either through inheritance or swindling, enabled them to keep up a senseless expenditure. Like the American millionaires of to-day, who have their houses and properties in both hemispheres, these great Roman lords possessed them in every country in the Empire. Symmachus, who was Prefect of the City when Augustin was in Rome, had considerable estates not only in Italy and in Sicily, but even in Mauretania. And yet, in spite of all their wealth and all the privileges they enjoyed, these rich people were neither happy nor at ease. At the least suspicion of a despotic power, their lives and property were threatened. Accusations of magic, of disrespect to the Cæsar, of plots against the Emperor--any pretext was good to plunder them. During the preceding reign, that of the pitiless Valentinian, the Roman nobility had been literally decimated by the executioner. A certain vice-Prefect, Maximinus, had gained a sinister reputation for cleverness in the art of manufacturing suspects. By his orders, a basket at the end of a string was hung out from one of the windows of the Prætorium, into which denunciations might be cast. The basket was in use day and night. It is clear that at the time that Augustin settled in Rome this abominable system was a little moderated. But accusation by detectives was always in the air. And living in this atmosphere of mistrust, hypocrisy, bribery, and cruelty--small wonder if the Carthaginian fell into bitter reflections upon Roman corruption. However impressive from the front, the Empire was not nice to look at close at hand. But Augustin was, above all, home-sick. When he strolled tinder the shady trees of the Janiculum or Sallust's gardens, he already said to himself what he would repeat later to his listeners at Hippo: "Take an African, put him in a place cool and green, and he won't stay there. He will feel he must go away and come back to his blazing desert." As for himself, he had something better to regret than a blazing desert. In front of the City of Gold, stretched out at his feet, and the horizon of the Sabine Hills, he remembered the feminine softness of the twilights upon the Lake of Tunis, the enchantment of moonlit nights upon the Gulf of Carthage, and that astonishing landscape to be discovered from the height of the terrace of Byrsa, which all the grandeur of the Roman _campagna_ could not make him forget. II THE FINAL DISILLUSION 'The new professor had managed to secure a certain number of pupils whom he gathered together in his rooms. He could make enough to live at Rome by himself, if he could not support there the woman and child he had left behind at Carthage. In this matter of finding work, his host and his Manichee friends had done him some very good turns. Although forced to conceal their beliefs since the edict of Theodosius, there were a good many Manichees in the city. They formed an occult Church, strongly organized, and its adepts had relations with all classes of Roman society. Possibly Augustin presented himself as one driven out of Africa by the persecution. Some compensation would be owing to this young man who had suffered for the good cause. It was his friend Alypius, "the brother of his heart," who, having preceded him to Rome to study law at his parents' wishes, now was the most useful in helping Augustin to make himself known and find pupils. Himself a Manichee, converted by Augustin, and a member of one of the leading families in Thagaste, he had not long to wait for an important appointment in the Imperial administration. He was assessor to the Treasurer-General, or "Count of the Italian Bounty Office," and decided fiscal questions. Thanks to his influence, as well as to his acquaintances among the Manichees, he was a valuable friend for the new arrival, a friend who could aid him, not only with his purse, but with advice. Without much capacity for theorizing, this Alypius was a practical spirit, a straight and essentially honest soul, whose influence was excellent for his impetuous friend. Of very chaste habits, he urged Augustin to restraint. And even in abstract studies, the religious controversies which Augustin dragged him into, his strong good sense moderated the imaginative dashes, the overmuch subtilty which sometimes led the other beyond healthy reason. Unhappily they were both very busy--the judge and the rhetorician--and although their friendship became still greater during this stay in Rome, they were not able to see each other as much as they desired. Their pleasures, too, were perhaps not the same. Augustin did not in the least care about being chaste, and Alypius had a passion for the amphitheatre--a passion which his friend disapproved of. Some time earlier, at Carthage, Augustin had filled him with disgust of the circus. But hardly was Alypius arrived in Rome, than he became mad about the gladiatorial shows. Some fellow-students took him to the amphitheatre, almost by force. Thereupon, he said that he would stay, since they had dragged him there; but he bet that he would keep his eyes shut all through the fight, and that nothing could make him open them. He sat down on the benches with those who had brought him, his eyelids pressed down, refusing to look. Suddenly there was a roar of shouting, the shout of the crowd hailing the fall of the first wounded. His lids parted of themselves; he saw the flow of blood. "At the sight of the blood" says Augustin, "he drank in ruthlessness; no longer did he turn away, but fixed his gaze, and he became mad--and he knew no more.... He was fascinated by the criminal atrocity of this battle, and drunk with the pleasure of blood." These breathless phrases of the _Confessions_ seem to throb still with the wild frenzy of the crowd. They convey to us directly the kind of Sadic excitement which people went to find about the arena. Really, a wholesome sight for future Christians, for all the souls that the brutality of pagan customs revolted! The very year that Augustin was at Rome, certain prisoners of war, Sarmatian soldiers, condemned to kill each other in the amphitheatre, chose suicide rather than this shameful death. There was in this something to make him reflect--him and his friends. The fundamental injustices whereon the ancient world rested--the crushing of the slave and the conquered, the contempt for human life--these things they touched with the finger when they looked on at the butcheries in the amphitheatre. All those whose hearts sickened with disgust and horror before these slaughter-house scenes, all those who longed for a little more mildness, a little more justice, were all recruits marked out for the peaceful army of the Christ. For Alypius, especially, it was not a bad thing to have known this blood-drunkenness at first hand: he shall be only the more ashamed when he falls at the feet of the merciful God. Equally useful was it for him to have personal experience of the harshness of men's justice; and in the fulfilment of his duties as a judge to observe its errors and flaws. While he was a student at Carthage he just escaped being condemned to death upon a false accusation of theft--the theft of a piece of lead! Already they were dragging him, if not to the place of capital punishment, at least to prison, when a chance meeting with a friend of his who was a senator saved him from the threatening mob. At Rome, while Assessor to the Count of the Italian Bounty Office, he had to resist an attempt to bribe him, and by doing so risked losing his appointment, and, no doubt, something worse too. Official venality and dishonesty were evils so deeply rooted, that he himself nearly succumbed. He wanted some books copied, and he had the temptation to get this done at the charge of the Treasury. This peculation had, in his eyes, a good enough excuse, and it was certain to go undetected. Nevertheless, when he thought it over he changed his mind, and virtuously refrained from giving himself a library at the expense of the State. Augustin, who relates these anecdotes, draws the same moral from them as we do, to wit--that for a man who was going to be a bishop and, as such, administrator and judge, this time spent in the Government service was a good preparatory school. Most of the other great leaders of this generation of Christians had also been officials; before ordination, they had been mixed up in business and politics, and had lived freely the life of their century. So it was with St. Ambrose, with St. Paulinus of Nola, with Augustin himself, and Evodius and Alypius, his friends. And yet, however absorbed in their work the two Africans might be, it is pretty near certain that intellectual questions took the lead of all others. This is manifest in Augustin's case at least. He must have astonished the good Alypius when he got to Rome by acknowledging that he hardly believed in Manicheeism any longer. And he set forth his doubts about their masters' cosmogony and physical science, his suspicions touching the hidden immorality of the sect. As for himself, the controversies, which were the Manichees' strong point, did not dazzle him any longer. At Carthage, but lately, he had heard a Catholic, a certain Helpidius, oppose to them arguments from Scripture, which they were unable to refute. To make matters worse, the Manichee Bishop of Rome made a bad impression on him from the very outset. This man, he tells us, was of rough appearance, without culture or polite manners. Doubtless this unmannerly peasant, in his reception of the young professor, had not shewn himself sufficiently alive to his merits, and the professor felt aggrieved. From then, his keen dialectic and his satirical spirit (Augustin had formidable powers of ridicule all through his life) were exercised upon the backs of his fellow-religionists. Provisionally, he had admitted as indisputable the basic principles of Manicheeism: first of all, the primordial antagonism of the two substances, the God of Light and the God of Darkness; then, this other dogma, that particles of that Divine Light, which had been carried away in a temporary victory of the army of Darkness, were immersed in certain plants and liquors. Hence, the distinction they made between clean and unclean food. All those foods were pure which contained some part of the Divine Light; impure, those which did not. The purity of food became evident by certain qualities of taste, smell, and appearance. But now Augustin found a good deal of arbitrariness in these distinctions, and a good deal of simplicity in the belief that the Divine Light dwelt in a vegetable. "Are they not ashamed," he said, "to search God with their palates or with their nose? And if His presence is revealed by a special brilliancy, by the goodness of the taste or the smell, why allow that dish and condemn this, which is of equal savour, light, and perfume? "Yea, why do they look upon the golden melon as come out of God's treasure-house, and yet will have none of the golden fat of the ham or the yellow of an egg? Why does the whiteness of lettuce proclaim to them the Divinity, and the whiteness of cream nothing at all? And why this horror of meat? For, look you, roast sucking-pig offers us a brilliant colour, an agreeable smell, and an appetizing taste--sure signs, according to them, of the Divine Presence."... Once started on this topic, Augustin's vivacity has no limits. He even drops into jokes which would offend modern shamefacedness by their Aristophanic breadth. These arguments, to say the truth, did not shake the foundations of the doctrine, and if a doctrine must be judged according to its works, the Manichees might entrench themselves behind their rigid moral rules, and their conduct. Contrary to the more accommodating Catholicism, they paraded a puritan intolerance. But Augustin had found out at Carthage that this austerity was for the most part hypocrisy. At Rome he was thoroughly enlightened. The Elect of the religion made a great impression by their fasts and their abstinence from meat. Now it became clear that these devout personages, under pious pretexts, literally destroyed themselves by over-eating and indigestion. They held, in fact, that the chief work of piety consisted in setting free particles of the Divine Light, imprisoned in matter by the wiles of the God of Darkness. They being the Pure, they purified matter by absorbing it into their bodies. The faithful brought them stores of fruit and vegetables, served them with real feasts, so that by eating these things they might liberate a little of the Divine Substance. Of course, they abstained from all flesh, flesh being the dwelling-place of the Dark God, and also from fermented wine, which they called "the devil's gall." But how they made up for it over the rest! Augustin makes great fun of these people who would think it a sin if they took as a full meal a small bit of bacon and cabbage, with two or three mouthfuls of undiluted wine, and yet ordered to be served up, from three o'clock in the afternoon, all kinds of fruit and vegetables, the most exquisite too, rendered piquant by spices, the Manichees holding that spices were very full of fiery and luminous principles. Then, their palates titillating from pepper, they swallowed large draughts of mulled wine or wine and honey, and the juice of oranges, lemons, and grapes. And these junketings began over again at nightfall. They had a preference for certain cakes, and especially for truffles and mushrooms--vegetables more particularly mystic. Such a diet put human gluttony to a heavy test. Many a scandal came to light in the Roman community. The Elect made themselves sick by devouring the prodigious quantity of good cheer brought to them with a view to purification. As it was a sacrilege to let any be lost, the unhappy people forced themselves to get down the lot. There were even victims: children, gorged with delicacies, died of stuffing. For children, being innocent things, were deemed to have quite special purifying virtues. Augustin was beginning to get indignant at all this nonsense. Still, except for these extravagances, he continued to believe in the asceticism of the Elect--asceticism of such severity that the main part of the faithful found it impossible to practise. And see! just at this moment, whom should he discover very strange things about but Bishop Faustus, that Faustus whom he had looked for at Carthage as a Messiah. The holy man, while he preached renunciation, granted himself a good many indulgences: he lay, for one thing, on feathers, or upon soft goatskin rugs. And these puritans were not even honest. The Manichee Bishop of Rome, that man of rough manners who had so offended Augustin, was on the point of being convicted of stealing the general cash-box. Lastly, there were rumours in the air, accusing the Elect of giving themselves over to reprehensible practices in their private meetings. They condemned marriage and child-bearing as works of the devil, but they authorized fornication, and even, it is said, certain acts against nature. That, for Augustin, was the final disillusion. In spite of it, he did not separate openly from the sect. He kept his rank of _auditor_ in the Manichee Church. What held him to it, were some plausible considerations on the intellectual side. Manicheeism, with its distinction of two Principles, accounted conveniently for the problem of evil and human responsibility. Neither God nor man was answerable for sin and pain, since it was the other, the Dark Principle, who distributed them through the world among men. Augustin, who continued to sin, continued likewise to be very comfortable with such a system of morals and metaphysics. Besides, he was not one of those convinced, downright minds who feel the need to quarrel noisily with what they take to be error. No one has opposed heresies more powerfully, and with a more tireless patience, than he has. But he always put some consideration into the business. He knew by experience how easy it is to fall into error, and he said this charitably to those whom he wished to persuade. There was nothing about him like St. Jerome. Personal reasons, moreover, obliged him not to break with his fellow-religionists who had supported him, nursed him even, on his arrival at Rome, and who, as we shall see in a moment, might still do him services. Augustin was not, like his friend Alypius, a practical mind, but he had tact, and in spite of all the impulsiveness and mettle of his nature, a certain suppleness which enabled him to manoeuvre without too many collisions in the midst of the most embarrassing conjunctures. Through instinctive prudence he prolonged his indecision. Little by little, he who had formerly flung himself so enthusiastically in pursuit of Truth, glided into scepticism--the scepticism of the Academics in its usual form. And at the same time that he lost his taste for speculative thinking, new annoyances in his profession put the finishing touch on his discouragement. If the Roman students were less noisy than those of Carthage, they had a deplorable habit of walking off and leaving their masters unpaid. Augustin was ere long victimized in this way: he lost his time and his words. As at Carthage, so at Rome, he had to face the fact that he could not live by his profession. What was he to do? Would he have to go back home? He had fallen into despair, when an unforeseen chance turned up for him. The town council of Milan threw open a professorship of Rhetoric to public competition. It would be salvation for him if he could get appointed. For a long time he had wanted a post in the State education. In receipt of a fixed salary, he would no longer have to worry about beating up a class, or to guard against the dishonesty of his pupils. He put his name down immediately among the candidates. But no more in those days than in ours was simple merit by itself enough. It was necessary to pull strings. His friends the Manichees undertook to do this for him. They urged his claims warmly on the Prefect Symmachus, who doubtless presided at the competitive trials. By an amusing irony of fate, Augustin owed his place to people he was getting ready to separate from, whom even he was soon going to attack, and also to a man who was in a way the official enemy of Christianity. The pagan Symmachus appointing to an important post a future Catholic bishop--there is matter for surprise in that! But Symmachus, who had been Proconsul at Carthage, protected the Africans in Rome. Furthermore, it is likely that the Manichees represented their candidate to him as a man hostile to Catholics. Now in this year, A.D. 384, the Prefect had just begun an open struggle with the Catholics. He believed, therefore, that he made a good choice in appointing Augustin. So a chain of events, with which his will had hardly anything to do, was going to draw the young rhetorician to Milan--yes, and how much farther!--to where he did not want to go, to where the prayers of Monnica summoned him unceasingly: "Where I am, there shall you be also." When he was leaving Rome, he did not much expect that. What he chiefly thought of was that he had at last won an independent financial position, and that he was become an official of some importance. He had a flattering evidence of this at once: It was at the expense of the city of Milan and in the Imperial carriages that he travelled through Italy to take up his new post. III THE MEETING BETWEEN AMBROSE AND AUGUSTIN Before he left Rome, and during his journey to Milan, Augustin must have recalled more than once the verses of Terence which his friend Marcianus had quoted by way of encouragement and advice the night he set sail for Italy: "This day which brings to thee another life Demands that thou another man shalt be." He was thirty years old. The time of youthful wilfulness was over. Age, disappointments, the difficulties of life, had developed his character. He was now become a man of position, an eminent official, in a very large city which was the second capital of the Western Empire and the principal residence of the Court. If he wished to avoid further set-backs in his career, it behoved him to choose a line of conduct carefully thought out. And first of all, it was time to get rid of Manicheeism. A Manichee would have made a scandal in a city where the greatest part of the population was Christian, and the Court was Catholic, although it did not conceal its sympathy with Arianism. It was a long time now since Augustin had been a Manichee in his heart. Accordingly, he was not obliged to feign in order to re-enter a Church which already included him formally among its catechumens. Doubtless he was a very lukewarm catechumen, since at intervals he inclined to scepticism. But he thought it decent to remain, at least for the time being, in the Catholic body, in which his mother had brought him up, until the day when some sure light should arise to direct his path. Now St. Ambrose was at that time the Catholic Bishop of Milan. Augustin was very eager to gain his goodwill. Ambrose was an undoubted political power, an important personage, a celebrated orator whose renown was shed all across the Roman world. He belonged to an illustrious family. His father had been Prætorian prefect of Gaul. He himself, with the title of Consul, was governing the provinces of Emilia and Liguria when the Milanese forced him, much against his will, to become their bishop. Baptized, ordained priest, and consecrated, one on top of the other, it was only apparently that he gave up his civil functions. From the height of his episcopal throne he always personified the highest authority in the country. As soon as he arrived at Milan, Augustin hurried to call upon his bishop. Knowing him as we do, he must have approached Ambrose in a great transport of enthusiasm. His imagination, too, was kindled. In his thought this was a man of letters, an orator, a famous writer, almost a fellow-worker, that he was going to see. The young professor admired in Bishop Ambrose all the glory that he was ambitious of, and all that he already believed himself to be. He fancied, that however great might be the difference in their positions, he would find himself at once on an equal footing with this high personage, and would have a familiar talk with him, as he used to have at Carthage with the Proconsul Vindicianus. He told himself also that Ambrose was a priest, that is to say, a doctor of souls: he meant to open to him all his spiritual wretchedness, the anguish of his mind and heart. He expected consolation from him, if not cure. Well, he was mistaken. Although in all his writings he speaks of "the holy Bishop of Milan" with feelings of sincere respect and admiration, he lets it be understood that his expectations were not realized. If the Manichean bishop of Rome had offended him by his rough manners, Ambrose disconcerted him alike by his politeness, his kindliness, and by the reserve, perhaps involuntarily haughty, of his reception. "He received me," says Augustin, "like a father, and as a bishop he was pleased enough at my coming:"--_peregrinationem meam satis episcopaliter dilexit_. This _satis episcopaliter_ looks very like a sly banter at the expense of the saint. It is infinitely probable that St. Ambrose received Augustin, not exactly as a man of no account, but still, as a sheep of his flock, and not as a gifted orator, and that, in short, he shewed him the same "episcopal" benevolence as he had from a sense of duty for all his hearers. It is possible too that Ambrose was on his guard from the outset with this African, appointed a municipal professor through the good offices of the pagan Symmachus, his personal enemy. In the opinion of the Italian Catholics, nothing good came from Carthage: these Carthaginians were generally Manichees or Donatists--sectaries the more dangerous because they claimed to be orthodox, and, mingling with the faithful, hypocritically contaminated them. And then Ambrose, the great lord, the former Governor of Liguria, the counsellor of the Emperors, may not have quite concealed a certain ironic commiseration for this "dealer in words," this young rhetorician who was still puffed up with his own importance. Be this as it will, it was a lesson in humility that St. Ambrose, without intending it, gave to Augustin. The lesson was not understood. The rhetoric professor gathered only one thing from the visit, which was, that the Bishop of Milan had received him well. And as human vanity immediately lends vast significance to the least advances of distinguished or powerful persons, Augustin felt thankful for it. He began to love Ambrose almost as much as he admired him, and he admired him for reasons altogether worldly. "Ambrose I counted one of the happy ones of this world, because he was held in such honour by the great." The qualification which immediately follows shews naively enough the sensual Augustin's state of mind at that time: "Only it seemed to me that celibacy must be a heavy burthen upon him." In those years the Bishop of Milan might, indeed, pass for a happy man in the eyes of the world. He was the friend of the very glorious and very victorious Theodosius; he had been the adviser of the young Emperor Gratian, but lately assassinated; and although the Empress Justina, devoted to the Arians, plotted against him, he had still great influence in the council of Valentinian II--a little Emperor thirteen years old, whom a Court of pagans and Arians endeavoured to draw into an anti-Catholic reaction. Almost as soon as Augustin arrived in Milan, he was able to see for himself the great authority and esteem which Ambrose possessed, the occasion being a dispute which made a great noise. Two years earlier, Gratian had had the statue and altar of _Victory_ removed from the _Curia_, declaring that this pagan emblem and its accompaniments no longer served any purpose in an assembly of which the majority was Christian. By the same stroke, he suppressed the incomes of the sacerdotal colleges with all their privileges, particularly those of the Vestals; confiscated for the revenue the sums granted for the exercise of religion; seized the property of the temples; and forbade the priests to receive bequests of real estate. This meant the complete separation of the State and the ancient religion. The pagan minority in the Senate, with Symmachus, the Prefect, at its head, protested against this edict. A deputation was sent to Milan to place the pagan grievances before the Emperor. Gratian refused to receive them. It was thought that his successor, Valentinian II, being feebler, would be more obliging. A new senatorial committee presented themselves with a petition drawn up by Symmachus--a genuine piece of oratory which Ambrose himself admired, or pretended to admire. This speech made a deep impression when it was read in the Imperial Council. But Ambrose intervened with all his eloquence. He demanded that the common law should be applied equally to pagans as to Christians, and it was he who won the day. _Victory_ was not replaced in the Roman _Curia_, neither were the goods of the temples returned. Augustin must have been very much struck by this advantage which Catholicism had gained. It became clear that henceforth this was to be the State religion. And he who envied so much the fortunate of the world, might take note, besides, that the new religion brought, along with the faith, riches and honours to its adepts. At Rome he had listened to the disparaging by pagans and his Manichee friends of the popes and their clergy. They made fun of the fashionable clerics and legacy hunters. It was related that the Roman Pontiff, servant of the God of the poor, maintained a gorgeous establishment, and that his table rivalled the Imperial table in luxury. The prefect Prætextatus, a resolute pagan, said scoffingly to Pope Damasus: "Make me Bishop of Rome, and I'll become a Christian at once." Certainly, commonplace human reasons can neither bring about nor account for a sincere conversion. Conversion is a divine work. But human reasons, arranged by a mysterious Will with regard to this work, may at least prepare a soul for it. Anyhow, it cannot be neglected that Augustin, coming to Milan full of ambitious plans, there saw Catholicism treated with so much importance in the person of Ambrose. This religion, which till then he had despised, now appeared to him as a triumphant religion worth serving. But though such considerations might attract Augustin's attention, they took no hold on his conscience. It was well enough for an intriguer about the Court to get converted from self-interest. As for him, he wanted all or nothing; the chief good in his eyes was certainty and truth. He scarcely believed in this any longer, and surely had no hope of finding it among the Catholics; but still he went to hear Ambrose's sermons. He went in the first place as a critic of language, with the rather jealous curiosity of the trained man who watches how another man does it. He wanted to judge himself if the sacred orator was as good as his reputation. The firm and substantial eloquence of this former official, this statesman who was more than anything a man of action, immediately got control of the frivolous rhetorician. To be sure, he did not find in Ambrose's sermons the exhilaration or the verbal caress which had captivated him in those of Faustus the Manichean; but yet they had a persuasive grace which held him. Augustin heard the bishop with pleasure. Still, if he liked to hear him talk, he remained contemptuous of the doctrine he preached. Then, little by little, this doctrine forced itself on his meditations: he perceived that it was more serious than he had thought hitherto, or, at least, that it could be defended. Ambrose had started in Italy the exegetical methods of the Orientals. He discovered in Scripture allegorical meanings, sometimes edifying, sometimes deep, always satisfying for a reasonable mind. Augustin, who was inclined to subtilty, much relished these explanations which, if ingenious, were often forced. The Bible no longer seemed to him so absurd. Finally, the immoralities which the Manichees made such a great point of against the Holy Writ, were justified, according to Ambrose, by historical considerations: what God did not allow to-day, He allowed formerly by reason of the conditions of existence. However, though the Bible might be neither absurd nor contrary to morals, this did not prove that it was true. Augustin found no outlet for his doubts. He would have been glad to have Ambrose help him to get rid of them. Many a time he tried to have a talk with him about these things. But the Bishop of Milan was so very busy a personage! "I could not ask him," says Augustin, "what I wanted as I wanted, because the shoals of busy people who consulted him about their affairs, and to whose infirmities he ministered, came between me and his ear and lips. And in the few moments when he was not thus surrounded, he was refreshing either his body with needful food, or his mind with reading. While he read his eye wandered along the page and his heart searched out the meaning, but his voice and his tongue were at rest. Often when we attended (for the door was open to all, and no one was announced), we saw him reading silently, but never otherwise, and after sitting for some time without speaking (_for who would presume to trouble one so occupied?_) we went away again. We divined that, for the little space of time which was all that he could secure for the refreshment of his mind, he allowed himself a holiday from the distraction of other people's business, and did not wish to be interrupted; _and perhaps he was afraid lest eager listeners should invite him to explain the harder passages of his author, or to enter upon the discussion of difficult topics_, and hinder him from perusing as many volumes as he wished.... _Of course the reason that guided a man of such remarkable virtue must have been good...._" Nobody could comment more subtly--nor, be it said also, more maliciously--the attitude of St. Ambrose towards Augustin, than Augustin himself does it here. At the time he wrote this page, the events he was relating had happened a long time ago. But he is a Christian, and, in his turn, he is a bishop: he understands now what he could not understand then. He feels thoroughly at heart that if Ambrose withdrew himself, it was because the professor of rhetoric was not in a state of mind to have a profitable discussion with a believer: he lacked the necessary humility of heart and intellect. But at the moment, he must have taken things in quite another way, and have felt rather hurt, not to say more, at the bishop's apparent indifference. Just picture a young writer of to-day, pretty well convinced of his value, but uneasy about his future, coming to ask advice of an older man already famous--well, Augustin's advances to Ambrose were not unlike that, save that they had a much more serious character, since it was not a question of literature, but of the salvation of a soul. At this period, what Augustin saw in Ambrose, even when he consulted him on sacred matters, was chiefly the orator, that is to say, a rather older rival.... He enters. He is shewn into the private room of the great man, without being announced, _like any ordinary person_. The great man does not lay aside his book to greet him, does not even speak a word to him.... What would the official professor of Rhetoric to the City of Milan think of such a reception? One can make out clearly enough through the lines of the _Confessions_. He said to himself that Ambrose, being a bishop, had charge of souls, and he was surprised that the bishop, no matter how great a lord he might be, made no attempt whatever to offer him spiritual aid. And as he was still devoid of Christian charity, no doubt he thought too that Ambrose was conscious that he had not the ability to wrestle with a dialectician of Augustin's strength, and that, into the bargain, the prelate was to seek in knowledge of the Scriptures. And, in truth, Ambrose had been made a bishop so suddenly that he must have found himself obliged to improvise a hasty knowledge. Anyhow, Augustin concluded that if he refused to discuss, it was because he was afraid of being at a disadvantage. Very surely St. Ambrose had no notion of what the catechumen was thinking. He soared too high to trouble about miserable stings to self-respect. In his ministry he was for all alike, and he would have thought it against Christian equality to shew any special favour to Augustin. If, in the brief talks he had with the young rhetorician, he was able to gather anything of his character, he could not have formed a very favourable opinion of it. The high-strung temperament of the African, these vague yearnings of the spirit, these sterile melancholies, this continual temporizing before the faith--all that could only displease Ambrose, the practical Roman, the official used all his life to command. However that was, Augustin, in following years, never allowed himself the least reproach towards Ambrose. On the contrary, everywhere he loads him with praise, quotes him repeatedly in his treatises, and takes refuge on his authority. He calls him his "father." But once, when he is speaking of the spiritual desolation in which he was plunged at Milan, there does escape him something like a veiled complaint which appears to be aimed at Ambrose. After recalling the eagerness with which he sought truth in those days, he adds: "If any one could have been found then to trouble about instructing me, he would have had a most willing and docile pupil." This phrase, in such marked contrast with so many laudatory passages in the _Confessions_ about St. Ambrose, seems to be indeed a statement of the plain truth. If God made use of Ambrose to convert Augustin, it is nevertheless likely that Ambrose personally did nothing, or very little, to bring about this conversion. IV PLANS OF MARRIAGE But even as he draws nearer the goal, Augustin would appear, on the contrary, to get farther away from it. Such are God's secret paces, Who snatches souls like a thief: He drops on them without warning. Till the very eve of the day when Christ shall come to take him, Augustin will be all taken up with the world and the care of making a good figure in it. Although Ambrose's sermons stimulated him to reflect upon the great historical reality which Christianity is, he had as yet but dim glimpses of it. He had given up his superficial unbelief, and yet did not believe in anything definite. He drifted into a sort of agnosticism compounded of mental indolence and discouragement. When he scrutinized his conscience to the depths, the most he could find was a belief in the existence of God and His providence--quite abstract ideas which he was incapable of enlivening. But whatever was the use of speculating upon Truth and the Sovereign Good! The main thing to do was to live. Now that his future was certain, Augustin endeavoured to arrange his life with a view to his tranquillity. He had no longer very large ambitions. What he principally wanted to do was to create for himself a nice little existence, peaceful and agreeable, one might almost say, middle-class. His present fortune, although small, was still enough for that, and he was in a hurry to enjoy it. Accordingly, he had not been long in Milan ere he sent for his mistress and his son. He had rented an apartment in a house which gave on a garden. The owner, who did not live there, allowed him the use of the whole house. A house, the dream of the sage! And a garden in Virgil's country! Augustin, the professor, should have been wonderfully happy. His mother soon joined him. Gradually a whole tribe of Africans came down on him, and took advantage of his hospitality. Here was his brother, Navigius, his two cousins, Rusticus and Lastidianus, his friend Alypius, who could not make up his mind to part from him, and probably Nebridius, another of his Carthage friends. Nothing could be more in harmony with the customs of the time. The Rhetorician to the City of Milan had a post which would pass for superb in the eyes of his poor relations. He was acquainted with very important people, and had access to the Imperial Court, whence favours and bounties came. Immediately, the family ran to put themselves under his protection and be enrolled beneficiaries, to get what they could out of his new fortune and credit. And then these immigrations of Africans and Orientals into the northern countries always come about in the same way. It is enough if one of them gets on there: he becomes immediately the drop of ink on the blotting-paper. The most important person in this little African phalanstery was unquestionably Monnica, who had taken in hand the moral and material control of the house. She was not very old--not quite fifty-four--but she wanted to be in her own country. That she should have left it, and faced the weariness of a long journey over sea and land, she must have had very serious reasons. The poverty into which she had fallen since the death of her husband would not be an adequate explanation of her departure from her native land. She had still some small property at Thagaste; she could have lived there. The true motives of her departure were of an altogether different order. First of all, she passionately loved her son, to the point that she was not able to live away from him. Let us recall Augustin's touching words: "For she loved to keep me with her, as mothers are wont, yes, far more than most mothers." Besides that, she wanted to save him. She completely believed that this was her work in the world. Beginning from now, she is no longer the widow of Patricius: she is already Saint Monnica. Living like a nun, she fasted, prayed, mortified her body. By long meditating on the Scriptures, she had developed within her the sense of spiritual realities, so that before long she astonished Augustin himself. She had visions; perhaps she had trances. As she came over the sea from Carthage to Ostia, the ship which carried her ran into a wild gale. The danger became extreme, and the sailors themselves could no longer hide their fear. But Monnica intrepidly encouraged them. "Never you fear, we shall arrive in port safe and sound!" God, she declared, had promised her this. If, in her Christian life, she knew other minutes more divine, that was truly the most heroic. Across Augustin's calm narrative, we witness the scene. This woman lying on the deck among passengers half dead from fatigue and terror, suddenly flings back her veils, stands up before the maddened sea, and with a sudden flame gleaming over her pale face, she cries to the sailors: "What do you fear? We shall get to port. _I am sure of it!_" The glorious act of faith! At this solemn moment, when she saw death so near, she had a clear revelation of her destiny; she knew with absolute certainty that she was entrusted with a message for her son, and that her son would receive this message, in spite of all, in spite of the wildness of the sea--aye, in spite of his own heart. When this sublime emotion had subsided, it left with her the conviction that sooner or later Augustin would change his ways. He had lost himself, he was mistaken about himself. This business of rhetorician was unworthy of him. The Master of the field had chosen him to be one of the great reapers in the time of harvest. For a long while Monnica had foreseen the exceptional place that Augustin was to take in the Church. Why fritter away his talent and intelligence in selling vain words, when there were heresies to combat, the Truth to make shine forth, when the Donatists were capturing the African basilicas from the Catholics? What, in fact, was the most celebrated rhetorician compared to a bishop--protector of cities, counsellor of emperors, representative of God on earth? All this might Augustin be. And he remained stubborn in his error! Prayers and efforts must be redoubled to draw him from that. It was also for herself that she struggled, for the dearest of her hopes as a mother. To bear a soul to Jesus Christ--and a chosen soul who would save in his turn souls without number--for this only had she lived. And so it was that on the deck, tired by the rolling of the ship, drenched by the seas that were breaking on board, and hardly able to stand in the teeth of the wind, she cried out to the sailors: "What do you fear? We shall get to port. I am sure of it...." At Milan she was regarded by Bishop Ambrose as a model parishioner. She never missed his sermons and "hung upon his lips as a fountain of water springing up to eternal life." And yet it does not appear that the great bishop understood the mother any better than he did the son: he had not the time. For him Monnica was a worthy African woman, perhaps a little odd in her devotion, and given to many a superstitious practice. Thus, she continued to carry baskets of bread and wine and pulse to the tombs of the martyrs, according to the use at Carthage and Thagaste. When, carrying her basket, she came to the door of one of the Milanese basilicas, the doorkeeper forbade her to enter, saying that it was against the bishop's orders, who had solemnly condemned such practices because they smacked of idolatry. The moment she learned that this custom was prohibited by Ambrose, Monnica, very much mortified, submitted to take away her basket, for in her eyes Ambrose was the providential apostle who would lead her son to salvation. And yet it must have grieved her to give up this old custom of her country. Save for the fear of displeasing the bishop, she would have kept it up. Ambrose was gratified by her obedience, her fervour and charity. When by chance he met the son, he congratulated him on having such a mother. Augustin, who did not yet despise human praise, no doubt expected that Ambrose would in turn pay some compliments to himself. But Ambrose did not praise him at all, and perhaps he felt rather vexed. He himself, however, was always very busy; he had hardly any time to profit by the pious exhortations of the bishop. His day was filled by his work and his social duties. In the morning he lectured. The afternoon went in friendly visits, or in looking up men of position whom he applied to for himself or his relations. In the evening, he prepared to-morrow's lecture. In spite of this very full and stirring life, which would seem to satisfy all his ambitions, he could not manage to stifle the cry of his heart in distress. He did not feel really happy. In the first place, it is doubtful whether he liked Milan any better than Rome. He felt the cold there very much. The Milanese winters are very trying, especially for a southerner. Thick fogs rise from the canals and the marsh lands which surround the city. The Alpine snows are very near. This climate, damper and frostier even than at Rome, did no good to his chest. He suffered continually from hoarseness; he was obliged to interrupt his lectures--a most disastrous necessity for a man whose business it is to talk. These attacks became so frequent that he was forced to wonder if he could keep on long in this state. Already he felt that he might be obliged to give up his profession. Then, in those hours when he lost heart, he flung to the winds all his youthful ambitions. As a last resort, the voiceless rhetorician would take a post in one of the administrative departments of the Empire. The idea of being one day a provincial governor did not rouse any special repugnance. What a fall for him! "Yes, but it is the wisest, the wisest thing," retorted the ill-advising voice, the one we are tempted to listen to when we doubt ourselves. Friendship, as always with Augustin, consoled him for his hopeless thoughts. Near him was "the brother of his heart," the faithful Alypius, and also Nebridius, that young man so fond of metaphysical discussions. Nebridius had left his rich estate in the Carthaginian suburbs, and a mother who loved him, simply to live with Augustin in the pursuit of truth. Romanianus was also there, but for a less disinterested reason. The Mæcenas of Thagaste, after his ostentatious expenditure, found that his fortune was threatened. A powerful enemy, who had started a law-suit against him, worked to bring about his downfall. Romanianus had come to Milan to defend himself before the Emperor, and to win the support of influential personages about the Court. And so it came about that he saw a great deal of Augustin. Besides this little band of fellow-countrymen, the professor of rhetoric had some very distinguished friends among the aristocracy. He was especially intimate with that Manlius Theodorus whom the poet Claudian celebrates, and to whom he himself later on was to dedicate one of his books. This rich man, who had been Proconsul at Carthage, where no doubt he had met Augustin, lived at this time retired in the country, dividing his leisure hours between the study of the Greek philosophers, especially of the Platonists, and the cultivation of his vineyards and olive trees. Here, as at Thagaste, in these beautiful villas on the shores of the Italian lakes, the son of Monnica gave himself up once more to the sweetness of life. "I liked an easy life," he avows in all simplicity. He felt himself to be more Epicurean than ever. He might have chosen Epicureanism altogether, if he had not always kept a fear of what is beyond life. But when he was the guest of Manlius Theodoras, fronting the dim blue mountains of lake Como, framed in the high windows of the _triclinium_, he did not think much about what is beyond life. He said to himself: "Why desire the impossible? So very little is needed to satisfy a human soul." The enervating contact of luxury and comfort imperceptibly corrupted him. He became like those fashionable people whom he knew so well how to charm with his talk. Like the fashionable people of all times, these designated victims of the Barbarians built, with their small daily pleasures, a rampart against all offensive or saddening realities, leaving the important questions without answer, no longer even asking them. And they said: "I have beautiful books, a well-heated house, well-trained slaves, a delightfully arranged bathroom, a comfortable vehicle: life is sweet. I don't wish for a better. What's the use? This one is good enough for me." At the moment when his tired intellect gave up everything, Augustin was taken in the snare of easy enjoyment, and desired to resemble these people at all points, to be one of them. But to be one of them he must have a higher post than a rhetorician's, and chiefly it would be necessary to put all the outside forms and exterior respectability into his life that the world of fashion shews. Thus, little by little, he began to think seriously of marriage. His mistress was the only obstacle in the way of this plan. He got rid of her. That was a real domestic drama, which he has tried to hide; but it must have been extremely painful for him, to judge by the laments which he gives vent to, despite himself, in some phrases, very brief and, as it were, ashamed. In this drama Monnica was certainly the leader, though it is likely that Augustin's friends also played their parts. No doubt, they objected to the professor of rhetoric, that he was injuring his reputation as well as his future by living thus publicly with a concubine. But Monnica's reasons were more forcible and of quite another value. To begin with, it is very natural that she should have suffered in her maternal dignity, as well as in her conscience as a Christian, by having to put up with the company of a stranger who was her son's mistress. However large we may suppose the house where the African tribe dwelt, a certain clashing between the guests was unavoidable. Generally, disputes as to who shall direct the domestic arrangements divide mother-in-law and daughter-in-law who live under one roof. What could be Monnica's feelings towards a woman who was not even a daughter-in-law and was regarded by her as an intruder? She did not consider it worth while to make any attempt at regulating the entanglement of her son by marrying them: this person was of far too low a class. It is all very well to be a saint, but one does not forget that one is the widow of a man of curial rank, and that a middle-class family with self-respect does not lower itself by admitting the first-comer into its ranks by marriage. But these were secondary considerations in her eyes. The only one which could have really preyed on her mind is that this woman delayed Augustin's conversion. On account of her, as Monnica saw plainly, he put off his baptism indefinitely. She was the chain of sin, the unclean past under whose weight he stifled. He must be freed from her as soon as possible. Convinced therefore that such was her bounden duty, she worked continually to make him break off. By way of putting him in some sort face to face with a deed impossible to undo, she searched to find him a wife, with the fine eagerness that mothers usually put into this kind of hunt. She discovered a girl who filled, as they say, all the requirements, and who realized all the hopes of Augustin. She had a fortune considerable enough not to be a burthen on her husband. Her money, added to the professor's salary, would allow the pair to live in ease and comfort. So they were betrothed. In the uncertainty about all things which was Augustin's state just then, he allowed his mother to work at this marriage. No doubt he approved, and like a good official he thought it was time for him to settle down. From that moment, the separation became inevitable. How did the poor creature who had been faithful to him during so many years feel at this ignominious dismissal? What must have been the parting between the child Adeodatus and his mother? How, indeed, could Augustin consent to take him from her? Here, again, he has decided to keep silent on this painful drama, from a feeling of shame easy to understand. Of course, he was no longer strongly in love with his mistress, but he was attached to her by some remains of tenderness, and by that very strong tie of pleasure shared. He has said it in words burning with regret. "When they took from my side, as an obstacle to my marriage, her with whom I had been used for such a long time to sleep, my heart was torn at the place where it was stuck to hers, and the wound was bleeding." The phrase casts light while it burns. "At the place where my heart stuck to hers"--_cor ubi adhærebat_. He acknowledges then that the union was no longer complete, since at many points he had drawn apart. If the soul of his mistress had remained the same, his had changed: however much he might still love her, he was already far from her. Be that as it will, she behaved splendidly in the affair--this forsaken woman, this poor creature whom they deemed unworthy of Augustin. She was a Christian; perhaps she perceived (for a loving woman might well have this kind of second-sight) that it was a question not only of the salvation of a loved being, but of a divine mission to which he was predestined. She sacrificed herself that Augustin might be an apostle and a saint--a great servant of God. So she went back to her Africa, and to shew that she pardoned, if she could not forget, she vowed that she would never know any other man. "She who had slept" with Augustin could never be the wife of any one else. However low she may have been to begin with, the unhappy woman was great at this crisis. Her nobility of soul humiliated Augustin, and Monnica herself, and punishment was not slow in falling on them both--on him, for letting himself be carried away by sordid plans for success in life, and upon her, the saint, for having been too accommodating. As soon as his mistress was gone, Augustin suffered from being alone. "I thought that I should be miserable," says he, "without the embraces of a woman." Now his promised bride was too young: two years must pass before he could marry her. How could he control himself till then? Augustin did not hesitate: he found another mistress. There was Monnica's punishment, cruelly deceived in her pious intentions. In vain did she hope a great deal of good from this approaching marriage: the silence of God shewed her that she was on the wrong track. She begged for a vision, some sign which would reveal to her how this new-planned marriage would turn out. Her prayer was not heard. "Meanwhile," says Augustin, "my sins were being multiplied." But he did not limit himself to his own sins: he led others into temptation. Even in matrimonial matters, he felt the need of making proselytes. So he fell upon the worthy Alypius. He, to be sure, guarded himself chastely from women, although in the outset of his youth, to be like everybody else, he had tried pleasure with women; but he had found that it did not suit his taste. However, Augustin put conjugal delights before him with so much heat, that he too began to turn his thoughts that way, "not that he was overcome by the desire of pleasure, _but out of curiosity_." For Alypius, marriage would be a sort of philosophic and sentimental experience. Here are quite modern expressions to translate very old conditions of soul. The fact is, that these young men, Augustin's friends and Augustin himself, were startlingly like those of a generation already left behind, alas! who will probably keep in history the presumptuous name they gave themselves: _The Intellectuals_. Like us, these young Latins of Africa, pupils of the rhetoricians and the pagan philosophers, believed in hardly anything but ideas. All but ready to affirm that Truth is not to be come at, they thought, just the same, that a vain hunt after it was a glorious risk to run, or, at the very least, an exciting game. For them this game made the whole dignity and value of life. Although they had spasms of worldly ambition, they really despised whatever was not pure speculation. In their eyes, the world was ugly; action degrading. They barred themselves within the ideal garden of the sage, "the philosopher's corner," as they called it, and jealously they stopped up all the holes through which the painful reality might have crept through to them. But where they differed from us, is that they had much less dryness of soul, with every bit as much pedantry--but such ingenuous pedantry! That's what saved them--their generosity of soul, the youth of their hearts. They loved each other, and they ended by growing fond of life and getting in contact with it again. Nebridius journeyed from Carthage to Milan, abandoning his mother and family, neglecting considerable interests, not only to talk philosophy with Augustin, but to live with him as a friend. From this moment they might have been putting in practice those words of the Psalm, which Augustin ere long will be explaining to his monks with such tender eloquence: "Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity!" This is not baseless hypothesis: they had really a plan for establishing a kind of lay monastery, where the sole rule would be the search after Truth and the happy life. There would be about a dozen solitaries. They would make a common stock of what means they possessed. The richest, and among these Romanianus, promised to devote their whole fortune to the community. But the recollection of their wives brought this naive plan to nothing. They had neglected to ask the opinions of their wives, and if these, as was likely, should refuse to enter the convents with their husbands, the married men could not face the scheme of living without them. Augustin especially, who was on the point of starting a new connection, declared that he would never find the courage for it. He had also forgotten that he had many dependents: his whole family lived on him. Could he leave his mother, his son, his brother, and his cousins? In company with Alypius and Nebridius, he sincerely lamented that this fair dream of coenobite life was impracticable. "We were three famishing mouths," he says, "complaining of our distress one to another, and waiting upon Thee that Thou mightest give us our meat in due season. And in all the bitterness that Thy mercy put into our worldly pursuits, we sought the reason why we suffered; and all was darkness. Then we turned to each other shuddering, and asked: 'How much longer can this last?'..." One day, a slight commonplace fact which they happened upon brought home to them still more cruelly their intellectual poverty. Augustin, in his official position as municipal orator, had just delivered the official panegyric of the Emperor. The new year was opening: the whole city was given over to mirth. And yet he was cast down, knowing well that he had just uttered many an untruth, and chiefly because he despaired of ever being happy. His friends were walking with him. Suddenly, as they crossed the street, they came upon a beggar, quite drunk, who was indulging in the jolliest pranks. So there was a happy man! A few pence had been enough to give him perfect felicity, whereas they, the philosophers, despite the greatest efforts and all their knowledge, could not manage to win happiness. No doubt, as soon as the drunkard grew sober, he would be more wretched than before. What matters that, if this poor joy--yes, though it be an illusion--can so much cheer a poor creature, thus raise him so far above himself! That minute, at least, he shall have lived in full bliss. And to Augustin came the temptation to do as the beggar-man, to throw overboard his philosophical lumber and set himself simply to live without afterthoughts, since life is sometimes good. But an instinct, stronger than the instinct of pleasure, said to him: "_There is something else!_--Suppose that were true?--Perhaps you might be able to find out." This thought tormented him unceasingly. Now eager, now disheartened, he set about trying to find the "something else." V THE CHRIST IN THE GARDEN "I was tired of devouring time and of being devoured by it." The whole moral crisis that Augustin is about to undergo might be summed up in these few words so concentrated and so strong. No more to scatter himself among the multitude of vain things, no more to let himself flow along with the minutes as they flowed; but to pull himself together, to escape from the rout so as to establish himself upon the incorruptible and eternal, to break the chains of the old slave he continues to be so as to blossom forth in liberty, in thought, in love--that is the salvation he longs for. If it be not yet the Christian salvation, he is on the road which leads to that. One might amuse oneself by drawing a kind of ideal map-route of his conversion, and fastening into one solid chain the reasons which made him emerge at the act of faith: he himself perhaps, in his _Confessions_, has given way too much to this inclination. In reality, conversion is an interior fact, and (let us repeat it) a divine fact, which is independent of all control by the reason. Before it breaks into light, there is a long preparation in that dark region of the soul which to-day is called the subconscious. Now nobody has more _lived_ his ideas than did Augustin at this time of his life. He took them, left them, took them up again, persisted in his desperate effort. They reflect in their disorder his variable soul, and the misgivings which troubled it to its depths. And yet it cannot be that this interior fact should be in violent contradiction with logic. The head ought not to hinder the heart. With the future believer, a parallel work goes on in the feelings and in the thought. If we are not able to reproduce the marches and counter-marches, or follow their repeatedly broken line, we can at least shew the main halting-places. Let us recall Augustin's state of mind when he came to Milan. He was a sceptic, the kind of sceptic who regards as useless all speculation upon the origin of things, and for whom cognition is but an approximation of the true. Vaguely deist, he saw in Jesus Christ only a wise man among the wise. He believed in God and the providences of God, which amounts to this: That although materialist by tendency, he admitted the divine interference in human affairs--the miracle. This is an important point which differentiates him from modern materialists. Next, he listened to the preaching of Ambrose. The Bible no longer seemed to him absurd or at variance with a moral scheme. Ambrose's exegesis, half allegorical, half historic, might be accepted, taken altogether, by self-respecting minds. But what, above all, struck Augustin in the Scriptures, was the wisdom, the practical efficiency. Those who lived by the Christian rule were not only happy people, but, as Pascal would say, good sons, good husbands, good fathers, good citizens. He began to suspect that this life here below is bearable and has a meaning only when it is fastened to the life on high. Even as for nations glory is daily bread, so for the individual the sacrifice to something which is beyond the world is the only way of living in the world. So, little by little, Augustin corrected the false notions that the Manichees had filled him with about Catholicism. He acknowledged that in attacking it he had "been barking against the vain imaginations of carnal thoughts." Still, he found great difficulty in getting free of all his Manichean prejudices. The problem of Evil remained inexplicable for him, apart from Manichee teachings. God could not be the author of evil. This truth admitted, he went on from it to think, against his former masters, that nothing is bad in itself--bad because it has within it a corrupting principle. On the contrary, all things are good, though in varying degrees. The apparent defects of creation, perceived by our senses, blend into the harmony of the whole. The toad and the viper have their place in the operation of a perfectly arranged world. But physical ill is not the only ill; there is also the evil that we do and the evil that others do us. Crime and pain are terrible arguments against God. Now the Christians hold that the first is the product solely of the human will, of liberty corrupted by original sin, and that the other is permitted by God as a means of purifying souls. Of course, this was a solution, but it implied a belief in the dogmas of the Fall and of the Redemption. Augustin did not accept them yet. He was too proud to recognize an impaired will and the need of a Saviour. "My puffed-out face," he says, "closed up my eyes." Nevertheless he had taken a great step in rejecting the fundamental dogma of Manicheeism--the double Principle of good and evil. Henceforth for Augustin there exists only one Principle, unique and incorruptible--the Good, which is God. But his view of this divine substance is still quite materialistic, to such an extent is he governed by his senses. In his thought, it is corporeal, spatial, and infinite. He pictures it as a kind of limitless sea, wherein is a huge sponge bathing the world that it pervades throughout.... He was at this point, when one of his acquaintances, "a man puffed up with immense vanity," gave him some of the Dialogues of Plato, translated into Latin by the famous rhetorician Victorinus Afer. It is worth noting, as we pass, that Augustin, now thirty-two years old, a rhetorician by profession and a philosopher by taste, had not yet read Plato. This is yet another proof to what extent the instruction of the ancients was oral, resembling in this the Mussulmans' instruction of to-day. Up to now, he had only known Plato by hearsay. He read him, and it was as a revelation. He learned that a reality could exist without diffusion through space. He saw God as unextended and yet infinite. The sense of the divine Soul was given to him. Then the primordial necessity of the Mediator or Word was borne in upon his mind. It is the Word which has created the world. It is through the Word that the world, and God, and all things, including ourselves, become comprehensible to us. What an astonishment! Plato corresponded with St. John! "In the beginning was the Word"--_in principio erat verbum_--said the fourth Gospel. But it was not only an Evangelist that Augustin discovered in the Platonist dialogues, it was almost all the essential part of the doctrine of Christ. He saw plainly the profound differences, but for the moment he was struck by the resemblances, and they carried him away. What delighted him, first of all, is the beauty of the world, constructed after His own likeness by the Demiurgus. God is Beauty; the world is fair as He who made it. This metaphysical vision entranced Augustin; his whole heart leaped towards this ineffably beautiful Divinity. Carried away by enthusiasm he cries: "I marvelled to find that now I loved Thee, O my God, and not a phantasm in Thy stead. If I was not yet in a state to enjoy Thee, _I was swept up to Thee by Thy beauty_." But such an abandonment could not endure: "I was not yet in a state to enjoy Thee." There is Augustin's main objection to Platonism. He felt that instead of touching God, of enjoying Him, he would be held by purely mental conceptions, that he would be always losing his way among the phantasmagoria of idealism. What was the use of giving up the illusory realities of the senses, if it were not to get hold of more _solid_ realities? Though his intelligence, his poet's imagination, might be attracted by the glamour of Platonism, his heart was not satisfied. "It is one thing," he says, "from some wooded height to behold the land of peace, another thing to march thither along the high road." St. Paul it was who shewed him this road. He began to read the _Epistles_ carefully, and the more he read of them the more he became aware of the abyss which separates philosophy from wisdom--the one which marshals the ideas of things, the other which, ignoring ideas, leads right up to the divine realities whereon the others are suspended. The Apostle taught Augustin that it was not enough to get a glimpse of God through the crystal of concepts, but that it is necessary to be united to Him in spirit and in truth--to possess and enjoy Him. And to unite itself to this Good, the soul must get itself into a fit state for such a union, purify and cure itself of all its fleshly maladies, descry its place in the world and hold to it. Necessity of repentance, of humility, of the contrite and humble heart. Only the contrite and humble heart shall see God. "The broken heart shall be cured," says the Scripture, "but the heart of the proud man shall be shattered." So Augustin, the intellectual, had to change his methods, and he felt that this change was right. If the writer who wants to write beautiful things ought to put himself beforehand into some sort of a state of grace, wherein not only vile actions, but unworthy thoughts become impossible, the Christian, in like manner, must cleanse and prepare his inward eye to perceive the divine verities. Augustin grasped this thought in reading St. Paul. But what, above all, appealed to him in the _Epistles_, was their paternal voice, the mildness and graciousness hidden beneath the uncultivated roughness of the phrases. He was charmed by this. How different from the philosophers! "Those celebrated pages have no trace of the pious soul, the tears of repentance, nor of Thy sacrifice, O my God, nor of the troubled spirit.... No one there hearkened to the Christ that calleth, 'Come unto Me, all ye that labour!' They think it scorn to learn from Him, because He is meek and lowly of heart. For Thou hast hidden these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes." But it is not much to bend: what is, above all, requisite for him is to get rid of his passions. Now Augustin's passions were old friends. How could he part with them? He lacked courage for this heroic treatment. Just think of what a young man of thirty-two is. He is always thinking of women. Lust holds him by the entanglements of habit, and he takes pleasure in the impurity of his heart. When, yielding to the exhortations of the Apostle, he tried to shape his conduct to his new way of thinking, the old friends trooped to beg of him not to do anything of the kind. "They pulled me," he says, "by the coat of my flesh, and they murmured in my ear--What, are you leaving us? Shall we be no more with you, for ever? _Non erimus tecum ultra in aeternum?_... And from that instant, the thing you well know, and still another thing, will be forbidden you for ever--for eternity...." Eternity! Dread word. Augustin shook with fear. Then, calming himself, he said to them: "I know you; I know you too well! You are Desire without hope, the Gulf without soundings that nothing can fill up. I have suffered enough because of you." And the anguished dialogue continued: "What matters that! If the only possible happiness for you is to suffer on our account, to fling your body into the voracious gulf, without end, without hope!"--"Let cowards act so!... For me there is another happiness than yours. There is _something else_: I am certain." Then the friends, put a little out of countenance by this convinced tone, muttered in a lower voice: "Still, just suppose you are losing this wretched pleasure for a phantasm still more empty.... Besides, you are mistaken about your strength. You cannot--no, you never can exist without us." They had touched the galling spot: Augustin knew his weakness only too well. And his burning imagination presented to him with extraordinary lucidity these pleasures which he could not do without. They were not only embracements, but also those trifles, those superfluous nothings, "those light pleasantnesses which make us fond of life." The perfidious old friends continued to whisper: "Wait a bit yet! The things you despise have a charm of their own; they bring even no small sweetness. You ought not to cut yourself off light-heartedly, for it would be shameful to return to them afterwards." He passed in review all the things he was going to give up; he saw them shine before him tinted in the most alluring colours: gaming, elaborate entertainments, music, song, perfumes, books, poetry, flowers, the coolness of forests (he remembered the woods about Thagaste, and his hunting days with Romanianus)--in a word, all that he had ever cared about, even to "that freshness of the light, so kind to human eyes." Augustin was not able to decide in this conflict between temptation and the decree of his conscience, and he became desperate. His will, enfeebled by sin, was unable to struggle against itself. And so he continued to endure life and to be "devoured by time." The life of that particular period, if it was endurable for quiet folk who were careful to have nothing to do with politics--this life of the Empire near its end, could be nothing but a scandalous spectacle for an honest-minded and high-souled man such as Augustin. It ought to have disgusted him at once with remaining in the world. At Milan, connected as he was with the Court, he was in a good position to see how much baseness and ferocity may spring from human avarice and ambition. If the present was hideous, the future promised to be sinister. The Roman Empire no longer existed save in name. Foreigners, come from all the countries of the Mediterranean, plundered the provinces under its authority. The army was almost altogether in the hands of the Barbarians. They were Gothic tribunes who kept order outside the basilica where Ambrose had closed himself in with his people to withstand the order of the Empress Justina, who wished to hand over this church to the Arians. Levantine eunuchs domineered over the exchequer-clerks in the palace, and officials of all ranks. All these people plundered where they could. The Empire, even grown feeble, was always an excellent machine to rule men and extract gold from nations. Accordingly, ambitious men and adventurers, wherever they came from, tried for the Purple: it was still worth risking one's skin for. Even more than the patriots (and there were still some very energetic men of this sort who were overcome with grief at the state of things), the men of rapine and violence were interested in maintaining the Empire. The Barbarians themselves desired to be included, so that they might pillage it with more impunity. As for the emperors, even sincere Christians, they were obliged to become abominable tyrants to defend their constantly threatened lives. Never were executions more frequent or more cruel than at this time. At Milan they might have shewn Augustin, hard by the Imperial sleeping apartments, the cave where the preceding Emperor, choleric Valentinian, kept two bears, "Bit of Gold" and "Innocence," who were his rapid executioners. He fed them with the flesh of those condemned to die. Possibly "Bit of Gold" was still living. "Innocence"--observe the atrocious irony of this name--had been restored to the liberty of her native forests, as a reward for her good and loyal services. Was Augustin, who still thought of becoming an official, going to mix in with this lot of swindlers, assassins, and brute beasts? As he studied them near at hand, he felt his goodwill grow weak. Like all those who belong to worn-out generations, he must have been disgusted with action and the villainies it involves. Just before great catastrophes, or just after, there is an epidemic of black pessimism which freezes delicate souls. Besides, he was ill--a favourable circumstance for a disappointed man if he entertains thoughts of giving up the world. In the fogs of Milan his chest and throat became worse and worse. And then it is likely enough that he was not succeeding better as rhetorician than he had at Rome. It was a kind of fatality for all Africans. However great their reputation in their own country, that was the end of it as soon as they crossed the sea. Apuleius, the great man of Carthage, had tried the experiment to his cost. They had made fun of his guttural Carthaginian pronunciation. The same kind of thing happened to Augustin. The Milanese turned his African accent into ridicule. He even found among them certain purists who discovered solecisms in his phrases. But these scratches at his self-respect, this increasing disgust of men and things, were small matters compared to what was going on within him. Augustin had a sick soul. The forebodings he had always been subject to were now become the suffering of every moment. At certain times he was assailed by those great waves of sadness which unfurl all of a sudden from the depths of the unknown. In such minutes we believe that the whole world is hurling itself against us. The great wave rolled him over; he got up again all wounded. And he felt stretch forth in him a new will which was not his own, under which the other, the will to sin, struggled. It was like the approach of an invisible being whose contact overcame him with an anguish which was full of pleasure. This being wanted to open out within him, but the weight of his old sins prevented. Then his soul cried out in pain. In those moments, what a relief it was to let himself float on the canticles of the Church! The liturgical chants were then something new in the West. It was in the very year we are dealing with that St. Ambrose started the custom in the Milanese basilicas. The childhood of our hymns! One cannot think about that without being moved. One envies Augustin for having heard them in their spring freshness. These lovely musics, which were to sound during so many centuries, and still soar against the vaults of cathedrals, were leaving the nest for the first time. We cannot think that a day will come when they will fold their wings and fall silent. Since human bodies, temples of the Holy Ghost, will live again in glory, one would like to believe with Dante that the hymns, temples of the Word, are likewise immortal, and that they will still be heard in the everlasting. Doubtless in the twilight glens of Purgatory the bewailing souls continue to sing the _Te lucis ante terminum_, even as in the star-circles, where the Blessed move ever, will always leap up the triumphant notes of the _Magnificat_.... Even on those who have lost the faith, the power of these hymns is irresistible. "If you knew," said Renan, "the charm that the Barbarian magicians knew how to put into their canticles. When I remember them, my heart melts." The heart of Augustin, who had not yet the faith, melted too in hearing them: "How I have cried, my God, over the hymns and canticles when the sweet sound of the music of Thy Church thrilled my soul! As the music flowed into my ears, and Thy truth trickled into my heart, the tide of devotion swelled high within me, and the tears ran down, and there was gladness in those tears." His heart cast off its heaviness, while his mind was shaken by the heavenly music. Augustin loved music passionately. At this time he conceived God as the Great Musician of the spheres; and soon he will write that "we are a strophe in a poem." At the same time, the vivid and lightning figures of the Psalms, sweeping over the insipid metaphors of the rhetoric which encumbered his memory, awoke in the depths of him his wild African imagination and sent him soaring. And then the affectionate note, the plaint in those sacred songs: _Deus, Deus meus!_--"O God! O _my_ God!" The Divinity was no longer a cold abstraction, a phantom that withdrew into an unapproachable infinite; He became the actual possession of the loving soul. He leant over His poor scarred creature, took him in His arms, and comforted him like a kind father. Augustin wept with tenderness and ecstasy, but also with despair. He wept upon himself. He saw that he had not the courage to be happy with the only possible happiness. What, indeed, was he seeking, unless it were to capture this "blessed life" which he had pursued so long? What he had tried to get out of all his loves was the complete gift of his soul--to realize himself completely. Now, this completeness of self is only in God--_in Deo salutari meo_. The souls we have wounded are in unison with us, and with themselves, only in God.... And the sweet Christian symbolism invited him with its most enticing images: the Shades of Paradise; the Fountain of Living Water; the Repose in the Lord God; the green Branch of the Dove, harbinger of peace.... But the passions still resisted. "To-morrow! Wait a little yet! Shall we be no more with you, for ever? _Non erimus tecum ultra in aeternum?_..." What a dismal sound in these syllables, and how terrifying for a timid soul! They fell, heavy as bronze, on the soul of Augustin. An end had to be put to it somehow. What was needed was some one who would force him out of his indecision. Instinctively, led by that mysterious will which he felt had arisen within him, he went to see, and consult in his distress, an old priest named Simplicianus, who had converted or directed Bishop Ambrose in his young days. No doubt Augustin spoke to him of what he had lately been reading, and particularly of his Platonist studies, and of all the efforts he made to enter the communion of Christ. He acknowledged that he was convinced, but he could not bend to the practice of the Christian life. Then, very skilfully, as one artful in differentiating souls, perceiving that vanity was not yet dead in Augustin, Simplicianus offered him as an example the very translator of those Platonic books which he had just been reading so enthusiastically--that famous Victorinus Afer, that orator so learned and admired, who had his statue in the Roman Forum. Because of some remains of philosophical pride, and also from fear of offending his friends among the Roman aristocracy, who were still almost altogether pagan, Victorinus was a Christian only in his head. In vain Simplicianus pointed out to him how illogical his conduct was. But suddenly and unexpectedly he decided. The day of the baptism of the catechumens, this celebrated man mounted the platform set up in the basilica for the profession of faith of the newly converted, and there, like the meanest of the faithful, he delivered his profession before all the assembled people. That was a dramatic stroke. The crowd, jubilant over this fine performance, cheered the neophyte. And on all sides they shouted: "Victorinus! Victorinus!" Augustin listened to this little story, whereof all the details were so happily chosen to act on an imagination like his:--the statue in the Roman Forum; the platform from the height of which the orator had spoken a language so new and unexpected; the exulting shouts of the crowd: "Victorinus! Victorinus!" Already he saw himself in the same position. There he was in the basilica, on the platform, in presence of Bishop Ambrose; he too repeated his profession of faith, and the people of Milan clapped their hands--"Augustin! Augustin!" But can a humble and contrite heart thus take pleasure in human adulation? If Augustin did become a convert, it would be entirely for God and before God. Very quickly he put aside the temptation.... Nevertheless, this example, coming from so exalted a man, made a very deep and beneficial impression. He looked upon it as a providential sign, a lesson in courage which concerned him personally. Some time after that, he received a visit from a fellow-countryman, a certain Pontitianus, who had a high position in the Imperial household. Augustin happened to be alone in the house with his friend Alypius. They sat down to talk, and by chance the visitor noticed the Epistles of St. Paul lying on a table for playing games. This started the conversation. Pontitianus, who was a Christian, praised the ascetic life, and especially the wonders of holiness wrought by Antony and his companions in the Egyptian deserts. This subject was in the air. In Catholic circles at Rome, they spoke of little else than these Egyptian solitaries, and of the number, growing larger and larger, of those who stripped themselves of their worldly goods to live in utter renunciation. What was the good of keeping these worldly goods, that the avarice of Government taxation confiscated so easily, and that the Barbarians watched covetously from afar! The brutes who came down from Germany would get hold of them sooner or later. And even supposing one might save them, retain an ever-uncertain enjoyment of them, was the life of the time really worth the trouble of living? There was nothing more to hope for the Empire. The hour of the great desolation was at hand.... Pontitianus, observing the effect of his words on his hearers, was led to tell them a quite private adventure of his own. He was at Trèves, in attendance on the Court. Well, one afternoon while the Emperor was at the circus, he and three of his friends, like himself attached to the household, went for a stroll beyond the city walls. Two of them parted from the others and went off into the country, and there they came upon a hut where dwelt certain hermits. They went in, and found a book--_The Life of St. Antony_. They read in it; and for them that was a conversion thunder-striking, instantaneous. The two courtiers resolved to join the solitaries there and then, and they never went back to the Palace. And they were betrothed!... The tone of Pontitianus as he recalled this conscience-drama which he had witnessed, betrayed a strange emotion which gradually took hold of Augustin. His guest's words resounded in him like the blows of a clapper in a bell. He saw himself in the two courtiers of Trèves. He too was tired of the world, he too was betrothed. Was he going to do as the Emperor--remain in the circus taken up with idle pleasures, while others took the road to the sole happiness? When Pontitianus was gone, Augustin was in a desperate state. The repentant soul of the two courtiers had passed into his. His will uprose in grievous conflict and tortured itself. He seized Alypius roughly by the arm and cried out to him in extraordinary excitement: "What are we about? Yes, I say, what are we about? Did you not hear? Simple men arise and take Heaven by violence, and we with all our heartless learning--look how we are wallowing in flesh and blood!" Alypius stared at him, stupefied. "The truth is," adds Augustin, "that I scarcely knew what I said. My face, my eyes, my colour, and the change in my voice expressed my meaning much better than my words." If he guessed from this upheaval of his whole frame how close at hand was the heavenly visitation, all he felt at the moment was a great need to weep, and he wanted solitude to weep freely. He went down into the garden. Alypius, feeling uneasy, followed at a distance, and in silence sat down beside him on the bench where he had paused. Augustin did not even notice that his friend was there. His agony of spirit began again. All his faults, all his old stains came once more to his mind, and he grew furious against his cowardly feebleness as he felt how much he still clung to them. Oh, to tear himself free from all these miseries--to finish with them once for all!... Suddenly he sprang up. It was as if a gust of the tempest had struck him. He rushed to the end of the garden, flung himself on his knees under a fig-tree, and with his forehead pressed against the earth he burst into tears. Even as the olive-tree at Jerusalem which sheltered the last watch of the Divine Master, the fig-tree of Milan saw fall upon its roots a sweat of blood. Augustin, breathless in the victorious embrace of Grace, panted: "How long, how long?... To-morrow and to-morrow?... Why not now? Why not this hour make an end of my vileness?..." Now, at this very moment a child's voice from the neighbouring house began repeating in a kind of chant: "_Take and read, take and read_." Augustin shuddered. What was this refrain? Was it a nursery-rhyme that the little children of the countryside used to sing? He could not recollect it; he had never heard it before.... Immediately, as upon a divine command, he rose to his feet and ran back to the place where Alypius was sitting, for he had left St. Paul's Epistles lying there. He opened the book, and the passage on which his eyes first fell was this: _Put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh to fulfil the lusts thereof_.... The flesh!... The sacred text aimed at him directly--at him, Augustin, still so full of lust! This command was the answer from on high.... He put his finger between the leaves, closed the volume. His frenzy had passed away. A great peace was shed upon him--it was all over. With a calm face he told Alypius what had happened, and without lingering he went into Monnica's room to tell her also. The Saint was not surprised. It was long now since she had been told, "Where I am, there shalt thou be also." But she gave way to an outburst of joy. Her mission was done. Now she might sing her canticle of thanksgiving and enter into God's peace. Meanwhile, the good Alypius, always circumspect and practical, had opened the book again and shewn his friend what followed the verse, for Augustin, in his excitement, had neglected to read further. The Apostle said, "_Him that is weak in the faith receive ye_." This also applied to Augustin. That was only too certain: his new faith was still very unsteady. Let not presumption blind him! Yes, no doubt with all his soul he desired to be a Christian. It now remained for him to become one. THE FOURTH PART THE HIDDEN LIFE Fac me, Pater, quaerere te. "Cause me to seek Thee, O my Father." _Soliloquies_, I, i. I THE LAST SMILE OF THE MUSE Now that Augustin had been at last touched by grace, was he after all going to make a sensational conversion like his professional brother, the celebrated Victorinus? He knew well enough that there is a good example set by these noisy conversions which works on a vast number of people. And however "contrite and humble" his heart might be, he was quite aware that in Milan he was an important personage. What excitement, if he were to resign his professorship on the ground that he wished to spend the rest of his life in the ascetic way of the Christians!... But he preferred to avoid the scandal on one side, and the loud praise on the other. God alone and some very dear friends should witness his repentance. There were now hardly twenty days before the vacation. He would be patient till then. Thus, the parents of his pupils would not have any ground to reproach him for leaving them before the end of term, and as his health was getting worse, he would have a good excuse to give up his post. The dampness of the climate had given him a sort of chronic bronchitis which the summer had not cured. He had difficulty in breathing; his voice was muffled and thin--so much so, that he began to think his lungs were attacked. Augustin's health really needed care. This was a quite good enough reason to interrupt his lectures. Having fulfilled his professional duties to the very end--and he assures us that it took some courage--he left the professorial chair with the declared intention of never occupying it again. Here, then, he is free from all worldly ties. From now on he can prepare himself for baptism in silence and retreat. But still he must live somehow! Augustin had more souls depending on him than ever: his son, his mother, his brother, his cousins--a heavy burthen which he had been struggling under for a long time. It is probable that once more Romanianus, who was still in Milan, came to his assistance. It will be remembered that the Mæcenas of Thagaste had taken up warmly the plan of a lay monastery which Augustin and his friends had lost their heads over, and he had promised to subscribe a large sum. Augustin's retreat was a first step towards realizing this plan in a new shape. Romanianus, no doubt, approved of it. In any case, he asked Augustin to keep on giving lessons to his son Licentius. Another young man, Trygetius, begged for the same favour. Augustin therefore did not intend to give up his employment altogether. He had changed, for the present at least, from a Government professor into a private one. This meant that he had a certain living. All he wanted now was a shelter. A friend, a colleague, the grammarian Verecundus, graciously offered him this. Verecundus thus repaid a favour which Augustin had quite recently done him. It was at Augustin's request that Nebridius, who was a friend of both, agreed to take over the classes of the grammarian, who was obliged to go away. Although rich, full of talent, and very eager for peace and solitude, Nebridius, simply out of good-nature, was willing to take the place of Verecundus in his very modest employment. One cannot too much admire the generosity and kindliness of these ancient and Christian manners. In those days, friendship knew nothing of our narrow and shabby egoisms. Now Verecundus owned a country house just outside Milan, at Cassicium. He suggested to Augustin to spend the vacation there, and even to live there permanently with all his people, on condition of looking after the property and keeping it up. Attempts have been made to find traces of this hospitable dwelling where the future monk of Thagaste and Hippo bade farewell to the world. Cassicium has disappeared. The imagination is free to rebuild it fancifully in any part of the rich country which lies about Milan. Still, if the youthful Licentius has not yielded too much to metaphor in the verses wherein he recalls to Augustin "Departed suns among Italian mountain-heights," it is likely that the estate of Verecundus lay upon those first mountain-slopes which roll into the Brianza range. Even to-day, the rich Milanese have their country houses among those hills. To Augustin and his companions this flourishing Lombardy must have seemed another promised land. The country, wonderfully fertile and cultivated, is one orchard, where fruit trees cluster, and, in all ways, deep streams wind, slow-flowing and stocked with fish. Everywhere is the tremor of running water--inconceivably fresh music for African ears. A scent of mint and aniseed; fields with grass growing high and straight in which you plunge up to the knees. Here and there, deeply engulfed little valleys with their bunches of green covert, slashed with the rose plumes of the lime trees and the burnished leaves of the hazels, and where already the northern firs lift their black needles. Far off, blended in one violet mass, the Alps, peak upon peak, covered with snow; and nearer in view, sheer cliffs, jutting fastnesses, ploughed through with black gorges which make flare out plainer the bronze-gold of their slopes. Not far off, the enchanted lakes slumber. It seems that an emblazonment fluctuates from their waters, and writhing above the crags which imprison them drifts athwart a sky sometimes a little chill--Leonardo's pensive sky of shadowed amethyst--again of a flushed blue, whereupon float great clouds, silken and ruddy, as in the backgrounds of Veronese's pictures. The beauty of the light lightens and beautifies the over-heavy opulence of the land. And wherever the country house of Verecundus may be placed, some bit of this triumphal landscape will be found. As for the house itself, Augustin has said enough about it for us to see it fairly well. It was no doubt one of those old rustic buildings, inhabited only some few months of the year, in the warmest season, and for the rest of the time given over to the frolics of mice and rats. Without any pretence to architectural form, it had been enlarged and renovated simply for the greater convenience of those who lived there. There was no attempt at symmetry; the main door was not in the middle of the building, and there was another door on one of the sides. The sole luxury of this country house was perhaps the bath-houses. These baths, however simple they might be, nevertheless reminded Augustin of the decoration of gymnasiums. Does this mean that he found there rich pavements, mosaics, and statues? These were quite usual things in Roman villas. The Italians have always had, at all periods, a great fondness for statues and mosaics. Not very particular about the quality, they made up for it by the quantity. And when they could not treat themselves to the real thing, it was good enough to give themselves the make-believe in painting. I can imagine easily enough Verecundus' house, painted in fresco from top to bottom, inside and out, like those houses at Pompeii, or the modern Milanese villas. There was no attempt at ornamental gardens at Cassicium. The surroundings must have been kitchen-garden, grazing-land, or ploughed fields, as in a farm. A meadow--not in the least the lawns found in front of a large country house--lay before the dwelling, which was protected from sun and wind by clumps of chestnut trees. There, stretched on the grass under the shade of one of these spreading trees, they chatted gaily while listening to the broken song of the brook, as it flowed under the windows of the baths. They lived very close to nature, almost the life of field-tillers. The whole charm of Cassicium consisted in its silence, its peace, and, above all, its fresh air. Augustin's tired lungs breathed there a purer air than in Milan, where the humid summer heat is crushing. His soul, yearning for retirement, discovered a retreat here in harmony with his new desires, a country solitude of which the Virgilian grace still appealed to his literary imagination. The days he passed there were days of blessedness for him. Long afterwards he was deeply moved when he recalled them, and in an outburst of gratitude towards his host, he prayed God to pay him his debt. "Thou wilt recompense him, O Lord, on the day of the resurrection of the just.... For that country house at Cassicium where we found shelter in Thee from the burning summer of our time, Thou wilt repay to Verecundus the coolness and evergreen shade of Thy paradise...." That was an unequalled moment in Augustin's life. Following immediately upon the mental crisis which had even worn out his body, he seems to be experiencing the pleasure of convalescence. He slackens, and, as he says himself, he rests. His excitement is quenched, but his faith remains as firm as ever. With a cairn and supremely lucid mind he judges his condition; he sees clearly all that he has still to do ere he becomes a thorough Christian. First, he must grow familiar with the Scripture, solve certain urgent questions--that of the soul, for example, its nature and origin--which possessed him just then. Then he must change his conduct, alter his ways of thought, and, if one may so speak, disinfect his mind still all saturated with pagan influences: a delicate work--yes, and an uneasy, at times even painful, which would take more than one day. After twenty centuries of Christianity, and in spite of our claim to understand all things, we do not yet realize very well what an abyss lies between us and paganism. When by chance we come upon pagan traces in certain primitive regions of the South of Europe, we get muddled, and attribute to Catholicism what is but a survival of old abolished customs, so far from us that we cannot recognize them any more. Augustin, on the contrary, was right next to them. When he strolled over the fields and through the woods around Cassicium, the Fauns and woodland Nymphs of the old mythology haunted his memory, and all but stood before his eyes. He could not take a walk without coming upon one of their chapels, or striking against a boundary-mark still all greasy from the oil with which the superstitious peasants had drenched it. Like himself, the old pagan land had not yet quite put on the Christ of the new era. He was like that Hermes Criophorus, who awkwardly symbolized the Saviour on the walls of the Catacombs. Even as the Bearer of Rams changed little by little into the Good Shepherd, the Bishop of Hippo emerged slowly from the rhetorician Augustin. He became aware of it during that languid autumn at Cassicium--that autumn heavy with all the rotting of summer, but which already promised the great winter peace. The yellow leaves of the chestnuts were heaped by the roadside. They fell in the brook which flowed near the baths, and the slowed water ceased to sing. Augustin strained his ears for it. His soul also was blocked, choked up by all the deposit of his passions. But he knew that soon the chant of his new life would begin in triumphal fashion, and he said over to himself the words of the psalm: _Cantate mihi canticum novum_--"Sing unto me a new song." Unfortunately for Augustin, his soul and its salvation was not his only care at Cassicium: he had a thousand others. So it shall be with him throughout his life. Till the very end he will long for solitude, for the life in God, and till the end God will charge him with the care of his brethren. This great spirit shall live above all by charity. At the house of Verecundus he was not only the head, but he had a complete country estate to direct and supervise. Probably all the guests in the house helped him. They divided the duties. The good Alypius, who was used to business and versed in the twisted ways of the law, took over the foreign affairs--the buying and selling, probably the accounts also. He was continually on the road to Milan. Augustin attended to the correspondence, and every morning appointed their work to the farm-labourers. Monnica looked after the household, no easy work in a house where nine sat down to table every day. But the Saint fulfilled her humble duties with touching kindness and forgetfulness of self: "She took care of us," says Augustin, "as if we had all been her children, and she served us as if each of us had been her father." Let us look a little at these "children" of Monnica. Besides Alypius, whom we know already, there was the young Adeodatus, the child of sin--"my son Adeodatus, whose gifts gave promise of great things, unless my love for him betrays me." Thus speaks his father. This little boy was, it seems, a prodigy, as shall be the little Blaise Pascal later: "His intelligence filled me with awe"--_horrori mihi erat illud ingenium_--says the father again. What is certain is that he had a soul like an angel. Some sayings of his have been preserved by Augustin. They are fragrant as a bunch of lilies. The other members of the family are nearer the earth. Navigius, Augustin's brother, an excellent man of whom we know nothing save that he had a bad liver--the icterus of the African colonist--and that on this account he abstained from sweetmeats. Rusticus and Lastidianus, the two cousins, persons as shadowy as the "supers" in a tragedy. Finally, Augustin's pupils, Trygetius and Licentius. The first, who had lately served some time in the army, was passionately fond of history, "like a veteran." Although his master in some of his Dialogues has made him his interlocutor, his character remains for us undeveloped. With Licentius it is different. This son of Romanianus, the Mæcenas of Thagaste, was Augustin's beloved pupil. It is easy to make that out. All the phrases he devotes to Licentius have a warmth of tone, a colour and relief which thrill. This Licentius comes before us as the type of the spoiled child, the son of a wealthy family, capricious, vain, presuming, unabashed, never hesitating if he sees a chance to have a joke with his master. Forgetful, besides, prone to sudden fancies, superficial, and rather blundering. With all that, the best boy in the world--a bad head, but a good heart. He was a frank pagan, and I believe remained a pagan all his life, in spite of the remonstrances of Augustin and those of the gentle Paulinus of Nola, who lectured him in prose and verse. A great eater and a fine drinker, he found himself obliged to do penance at St. Monnica's rather frugal table. But when the fever of inspiration took hold of him, he forgot eating and drinking, and in his poetical thirst he would would have drained--so his master says--all the fountains of Helicon. Licentius had a passion for versifying: "He is an almost perfect poet," wrote Augustin to Romanianus. The former rhetorician knew the world, and the way to talk to the father of a wealthy pupil, especially if he is your benefactor. At Cassicium, under Augustin's indulgent eyes, the pupil turned into verse the romantic adventure of Pyramus and Thisbe. He declaimed bits of it to the guests in the house, for he had a fine loud voice. Then he flung aside the unfinished poem and suddenly fell in love with Greek tragedies of which, as it happened, he understood nothing at all, though this did not prevent him from boring everybody he met with them. Another day it was the Church music, then quite new, which flung him into enthusiasm. That day they heard Licentius singing canticles from morning till night. In connection with this, Augustin relates with candid freedom an anecdote which to-day needs the indulgence of the reader to make it acceptable. As it gives light upon that half-pagan, half-Christian way of life which was still Augustin's, I will repeat it in all its plainness. It happened, then, one evening after dinner, that Licentius went out and took his way to a certain mysterious retreat, and there he suddenly began singing this verse of the Psalm: "Turn us again, O Lord God of hosts, cause Thy face to shine; and we shall be saved." As a matter of fact, he had hardly sung anything else for a long time. He kept on repeating this verse over and over again, as people do with a tune they have just picked up. But the pious Monnica, who heard him, could not tolerate the singing of such holy words in such a place. She spoke sharply to the offender. Upon this the young scatter-brains answered rather flippantly: "Supposing, good mother, that an enemy had shut me up in that place--do you mean to say that God wouldn't have heard me just the same?" The next day he thought no more about it, and when Augustin reminded him, he declared that he felt no remorse. "As far as I am concerned," replied the excellent master, "I am not in the least shocked by it.... The truth is, that neither that place, which has so much scandalized my mother, nor the darkness of night, is altogether inappropriate to this canticle. For whence, think you, do we implore God to drag us, so that we may be converted and gaze upon His face? Is it not from that jakes of the senses wherein our souls are plunged, and from that darkness of which the error is around us?..." And as they were discussing that day the order established by Providence, Augustin made it a pretext to give a little edifying lecture to his pupil. Having heard the sermon to the end, the sharp Licentius put in with sly maliciousness: "I say, what a splendid arrangement of events to shew me that nothing happens except in the best way, and for our great good!" This reply gives us the tone of the conversation between Augustin and his pupils. Nevertheless, however free and merry the talks might be, the purpose was always instructive, and it was always substantial. Let us not forget that the Milanese rhetorician is still a professor. The best part of his days was devoted to these two youths who had been put under his charge. As soon as he had settled the business of the farm, talked to the peasants, and given his orders to the workmen, he fell back upon his business of rhetorician. In the morning they went over Virgil's _Eclogues_ together. At night they discussed philosophy. When the weather was fine they walked in the fields, and the discussion continued under the shade of the chestnut trees. If it rained, they took refuge in the withdrawing-room adjoining the baths. Beds were there, cushions, soft chairs convenient for talking, and the equal temperature from the vapour-baths close at hand was good for Augustin's bronchial tubes. There is no stiffness in these dialogues, nothing which smacks of the school. The discussion starts from things which they had under the eyes, often from some slight accidental happening. One night when Augustin could not sleep--he often suffered from insomnia--the dispute began in bed, for the master and his pupils slept in the same room. Lying there in the dark, he listened to the broken murmur of the stream. He was trying to think out an explanation of the pauses in the sound, when Licentius shifted under the bedclothes, and reaching out for a piece of stick lying on the floor, he rapped with it on the foot of the bed to frighten the mice. So he was not asleep either, nor Trygetius, who was stirring about in his bed. Augustin was delighted: he had two listeners. Immediately he put this question: "Why do those pauses come in the flow of the stream? Do they not follow some secret law?..." They had hit upon a subject for debate. During many days they discussed the order of the world. Another time, as they were going into the baths, they stopped to look at two cocks fighting. Augustin called the attention of the youths "to a certain order full of propriety in all the movements of these fowls deprived of reason." "Look at the conqueror," said he. "He crows triumphantly. He struts and plumes himself as a proud sign of victory. And now look at the beaten one, without voice, his neck unfeathered, a look of shame. All that has I know not what beauty, in harmony with the laws of nature...." New argument in favour of order: the debate of the night before is started rolling again. For us, too, it is well worth while to pause on this little homely scene. It reveals to us an Augustin not only very sensitive to beauty, but very attentive to the sights of the world surrounding him. Cockfights were still very popular in this Roman society at the ending of the Empire. For a long time sculptors had found many gracious subjects in the sport. Reading this passage of Augustin's, one recalls, among other similar designs, that funeral urn at the Lateran upon which are represented two little boys, one crying over his beaten cock, while the other holds his tenderly in his arms and kisses it--the cock that won, identified by the crown held in its spurs. Augustin is always very close to these humble realities. Every moment outside things start up in the dialogues between the master and his pupils.... They are in bed on a rainy night in November. Gradually, a vague gleam rests on the windows. They ask each other if that can be the moon, or the break of day.... Another time, the sun rises in all its splendour, and they decide to go into the meadow and sit on the grass. Or else, the sky darkens and lights are brought in. Or again, it is the appearance of diligent Alyphis, just come back from Milan.... In the same way as he notes these light details in passing, Augustin welcomes all his guests into his dialogues and admits them to the debate: his mother, his brother, the cousins, Alypius between his business journeys, down to the child Adeodatus. He knew the value of ordinary good sense, the second-sight of a pure heart, or of a pious soul strengthened by prayer. Monnica used often to come into the room when they were arguing, to let them know that dinner was ready, or for something of the kind. Her son asked her to remain. Modestly she shewed her astonishment at such an honour. "Mother," said Augustin, "do you not love truth? Then why should I blush to give you a place among us? Even if your love for truth were only half-hearted, I ought still to receive you and listen to you. How much more then, since you love it more than you love me, _and I know how much you love me_.... Nothing can separate you from truth, neither fear, nor pain of whatever kind it be--no, nor death itself. Do not all agree that this is the highest stage of philosophy? How can I hesitate after that to call myself your disciple?" And Monnica, utterly confused by such praise, answered with affectionate gruffness: "Stop talking! You have never told bigger lies." Most of the time these conversations were simply dialectic games in the taste of the period, games a little pedantic, and fatiguing from subtilty. The boisterous Licentius did not always enjoy himself. He was often inattentive; and his master scolded him. But all the same, the master understood how to amuse his two foster-children while he exercised their intelligence. At the end of one discussion he said to them laughing: "Just at this hour, the sun warns me to put the playthings I had brought for the children back in the basket...." Let us remark in passing that this is the last time, before those centuries which are coming of universal intellectual silence or arid scholasticism--the last time that high questions will be discussed in this graceful light way, and with the same freedom of mind. The tradition begun by Socrates under the plane-trees on the banks of the Ilissus, is ending with Augustin under the chestnuts of Cassicium. And yet, however gay and capricious the form, the substance of these dialogues, "On the Academics," "On Order," and "On the Happy Life," is serious, and even very serious. The best proof of their importance in Augustin's eyes is, that after taking care to have them reported in shorthand, he eventually published them. The _notarii_ attended these discussions and let nothing be lost. The rise of the scrivener, of the notary, dates from this period. The administration of the Lower-Empire was frightfully given to scribbling. By contact with it, the Church became so too. Let us not press our complaints about it, since this craze for writing has procured for us, with a good deal of shot-rubbish, some precious historical documents. In Augustin's case, these reports of his lectures at Cassicium have at least the value of shewing us the state of soul of the future Bishop of Hippo at a decisive moment of his life. For these _Dialogues_, although they look like school exercises, reveal the intimate thoughts of Augustin on the morrow of his conversion. While he seems to be refuting the Academics, he is fighting the errors from which he, personally, had suffered so long. He clarified his new ideal. No; the search for truth, without hope of ever reaching it, cannot give happiness. And genuine happiness is only in God. And if a rhythm is to be found in things, then it is necessary to make the soul rhythmic also and so enable it to contemplate God. It is necessary to still within it the noise of the passions. Hence, the need of inward reformation, and, at a final analysis, of asceticism. But Augustin knew full well that these truths must be adapted to the weakness of the two lads he was teaching, and also to the common run of mankind. He has not yet in these years the uncompromising attitude which ere long will give him a sterner virtue--an attitude, however, unceasingly tempered by his charity and by the persistent recollections of his reading. It was now that he shaped the rule of conduct in worldly morals and education which the Christian experience of the future will adopt: "If you have always order in your hearts," he said to his pupils, "you must return to your verses. _For a knowledge of liberal sciences, but a controlled and exact knowledge_, forms men who will love the truth.... But there are other men, or, to put it better, other souls, who, although held in the body, are sought for the eternal marriage by the best and fairest of spouses. For these souls it is not enough to live; they wish to live happy.... But as for you, go, _meanwhile_, and find your Muses!" "Go and find your Muses!" What a fine saying! How human and how wise! Here is clearly indicated the double ideal of those who continue to live in the world according to the Christian law of restraint and moderation, and of those who yearn to live in God. With Augustin the choice is made. He will never more look back. These Dialogues at Cassicium are his supreme farewell to the pagan Muse. II THE ECSTASY OF SAINT MONNICA They stayed through the winter at Cassicium. However taken up he might be by the work of the estate and the care of his pupils, Augustin devoted himself chiefly to the great business of his salvation. The _Soliloquies_, which he wrote then, render even the passionate tone of the meditations which he perpetually gave way to during his watches and nights of insomnia. He searched for God, moaning: _Fac me, Pater, quærere te_--"Cause me to seek Thee, O my Father." But still, he sought Him more as a philosopher than as a Christian. The old man in him was not dead. He had not quite stripped off the rhetorician or the intellectual. The over-tender heart remained, which had so much sacrificed to human love. In those ardent dialogues between himself and his reason, it is plain to see that reason is not quite the mistress. "I love only God and the soul," Augustin states with a touch of presumption. And his reason, which knows him well, answers: "Do you not then love your friends?"--"I love the soul; how therefore should I not love them?" What does this phrase, of such exquisite sensibility, and even already so aloof from worldly thoughts--what does it lack to give forth a sound entirely Christian? Just a slight change of accent. He himself began to see that he would do better not to philosophize so much and to draw nearer the Scripture, in listening to the wisdom of that with a contrite and humble heart. Upon the directions of Ambrose, whose advice he had asked by letter, he tried to read the prophet Isaiah, because Isaiah is the clearest foreteller of the Redemption. He found the book so difficult that he lost heart, and he put it aside till later. Meanwhile, he had forwarded his resignation as professor of Rhetoric to the Milan municipality. Then, when the time was come, he sent to Bishop Ambrose a written confession of his errors and faults, and represented to him his very firm intention to be baptized. He was quietly baptized on the twenty-fifth of April, during the Easter season of the year 387, together with his son Adeodatus, and his friend Alypius. Alypius had prepared most piously, disciplining himself with the harshest austerities, to the point of walking barefoot on the frozen soil. So now the solitaries of Cassicium are back in Milan. Augustin's two pupils were gone. Trygetius doubtless had rejoined the army. Licentius had gone to live in Rome. But another fellow-countryman, an African from Thagaste, Evodius, formerly a clerk in the Ministry of the Interior, came to join the small group of new converts. Evodius, the future Bishop of Uzalis, in Africa, and baptized before Augustin, was a man of scrupulous piety and unquestioning faith. He talked of devout subjects with his friend, who, just fresh from baptism, experienced all the quietude of grace. They spoke of the community which St. Ambrose had either founded or organized at the gates of Milan, and in comparison with a life so austere, Augustin perceived that the life he had led at Cassicium was still stained with paganism. He must carry out his conversion to the end and live as a hermit after the manner of Antony and the solitaries of the Thebaid. Then it occurred to him that he still owned a little property at Thagaste--a house and fields. There they would settle and live in self-denial like the monks. The purity of the young Adeodatus predestined him to this ascetic existence. As for Monnica, who long since had taken the widow's veil, she had to make no change in her ways to lead a saintly life in the company of her son and grandson. It was agreed among them all to go back to Africa, and to start as soon as possible. Thus, just after his baptism, Augustin shews but one desire: to bury himself in a retreat, to lead a humble and hidden life, divided between the study of the Scripture and the contemplation of God. Later on, his enemies were to accuse him of having become a convert from ambition, in view of the honours and riches of the episcopate. This is sheer calumny. His conversion could not have been more sincere, more disinterested--nor more heroic either: he was thirty-three years old. When we think of all he had loved and all he gave up, we can only bow the head and bend the knee before the lofty virtue of such an example. In the course of the summer the caravan started and crossed the Apennines to set sail at Ostia. The date of this exodus has never been made quite clear. Perhaps Augustin and his companions fled before the hordes of the usurper Maximus, who, towards the end of August, crossed the Alps and marched on Milan, while the young Valentinian with all his Court took refuge at Aquileia. In any case, it was a trying journey, especially in the hot weather. When Monnica arrived she was very enfeebled. At Ostia they had to wait till a ship was sailing for Africa. Propitious conditions did not offer every day. At this period, travellers were at the mercy of the sea, of the wind, and of a thousand other circumstances. Time did not count; it was wasted freely. The ship sailed short distances at a time, skirting the coasts, where the length of the stay at every point touched depended on the master. On board these ships--feluccas hardly decked over--if the crossing was endless and unsafe, it was, above all, most uncomfortable. People were in no hurry to undergo the tortures of it, and spaced them out as much as possible by frequent stoppages. On account of all these reasons, our Africans made a rather long stay at Ostia. They lodged, no doubt, with Christian brethren, hosts of Augustin or Monnica, in a tranquil house far out of earshot of the cosmopolitan crowd which overflowed in the hotels on the quay. Ostia, situated at the mouth of the Tiber, was both the port and bond-warehouse of Rome. The Government stores-ships landed the African oil and corn there. It was a junction for commerce, the point where immigrants from all parts of the Mediterranean disbarked. To-day there is only left a wretched little village. But at some distance from this hamlet, the excavations of archæologists have lately brought to light the remains of a large town. They have discovered at the entrance a place of burial with arcosol-tombs; and here perhaps the body of St. Monnica was laid. In this place of graves they came upon also a beautiful statue injured--a funeral Genius, or a Victory, with large folded wings like those of the Christian angels. Further on, the forum with its shops, the guard-house of the night-cohort, baths, a theatre, many large temples, arcaded streets paved with large flags, warehouses for merchandise. There may still be seen, lining the walls, the holes in which the ends of the amphoræ used to be dropped to keep them upright. All this wreckage gives an idea of a populous centre where the stir of traffic and shipping was intense. And yet in this noisy town, Augustin and his mother found means to withdraw themselves and join together in meditation and prayer. Amid this rather vulgar activity, in a noise of trade and seafaring, a mystic scene develops where the purified love of mother and son gleams upon us as in a light of apotheosis. They had at Ostia a foretaste, so to speak, of the eternal union in God. This was in the house where they had come on arrival. They talked softly, resting against a window which looked upon the garden.... But the scene has been made popular by Ary Scheffer's too well-known painting. You remember it: two faces, pale, bloodless, stripped of flesh, in which live only the burning eyes cast upward to the sky--a dense sky, baffling, heavy with all the secrets of eternity. No visible object, nothing, absolutely nothing, distracts them from their contemplation. The sea itself, although indicated by the painter, almost blends into the blue line of the horizon. Two souls and the sky--there you have the whole subject. It is living poetry congealed in abstract thought. The attitude of the characters, majestically seated, instead of leaning on the window-ledge, has, in Scheffer's picture, I know not what touch of stiffness, of slightly theatrical. And the general impression is a cold dryness which contrasts with the lyric warmth of the story in the _Confessions_. For my part, I always thought, perhaps on the testimony of the picture, that the window of the house at Ostia opened above the garden in view of the sea. The sea, symbol of the infinite, ought to be present--so it seemed to me--at the final conversation between Monnica and Augustin. At Ostia itself I was obliged to give up this too literary notion; the sea is not visible there. No doubt at that time the channel was not so silted up as it is to-day. But the coast lies so low, that just hard by the actual mouth of the Tiber, the nearness of the sea can only be guessed by the reflection of the waves in the atmosphere, a sort of pearly halo, trembling on the edge of the sky. At present I am inclined to think that the window of the house at Ostia was very likely turned towards the vast melancholy horizon of the _Agro Romano_. "We passed through, one after another," says Augustin, "all the things of a material order, unto heaven itself." Is it not natural to suppose that these things of a material order--these shapes of the earth with its plantations, its rivers, towns, and mountains--were under their eyes? The bleak spectacle which unrolled before their gaze agreed, at all events, with the disposition of their souls. This great desolate plain has nothing oppressive, nothing which retains the eyes upon details too material. The colours about it are pale and slight, as if on the point of swooning away. Immense sterile stretches, fawn-coloured throughout, with here and there shining a little pink, a little green; gorse, furze-bushes by the deep banks of the river, or a few _boschetti_ with dusty leaves, which feebly stand out upon the blondness of the soil. To the right, a pine forest. To the left, the undulations of the Roman hills expire into an emptiness infinitely sad. Afar, the violet scheme of the Alban mountains, with veiled and dream-like distances, shape indefinitely against the pearl light, limpid and serene, of the sky. Augustin and Monnica, resting on the window-ledge, looked forth. Doubtless it was towards evening, at the hour when southern windows are thrown open to the cool after a burning day. They looked forth. "We marvelled," says Augustin, "at the beauty of Thy works, O my God!..." Rome was back there beyond the hills, with its palaces, its temples, the gleam of its gilding and its marbles. But the far-off image of the imperial city could not conquer the eternal sadness which rises from the _Agro_. An air of funeral loneliness lay above this plain, ready to be engulfed by the creeping shadows. How easy it was to break free of these vain corporeal appearances which decomposed of themselves! "Then," Augustin resumes, "we soared with glowing hearts still higher." (He speaks as if he and his mother were risen with equal flight to the vision. It is more probable that he was drawn up by Monnica, long since familiar with the ways of the spirit, used to visions, and to mystic talks with God....) Where was this God? All the creatures, questioned by their anguished entreaty, answered: _Quære super nos_--"Seek above us!" They sought; they mounted higher and higher: "And so we came to our own minds, and passed beyond them into the region of unfailing plenty, where Thou feedest Israel for ever with the food of truth.... And as we talked, and we strove eagerly towards this divine region, _by a leap with the whole force of our hearts, we touched it for an instant_.... Then we sighed, we fell back, and left there fastened the first fruits of the Spirit, and heard again the babble of our own tongues, this mortal speech wherein each word has a beginning and an ending." "We fell back!" The marvellous vision had vanished. But a great silence was about them, silence of things, silence of the soul. And they said to each other: "If the tumult of the flesh were hushed; hushed these shadows of earth, sea, sky; suppose this vision endured, and all other far inferior modes of vision were taken away, and this alone were to ravish the beholder, and absorb him, and plunge him in mystic joy, so that eternal life might be like this moment of comprehension which has made us sigh with Love--might not that be the fulfilment of 'Enter thou into the joy of thy Lord'? Ah, when shall this be? Shall it not be, O my God, when we rise again among the dead...?" Little by little they came down to earth. The dying colours of the sunset-tide smouldered into the white mists of the _Agro_. The world entered into night. Then Monnica, impelled by a certain presentiment, said to Augustin: "My son, as for me, I find no further pleasure in life. What I am still to do, or why I still linger here, I know not.... There was only one thing made me want to tarry a little longer in this life, that I might see you a Christian and a Catholic before I died. My God has granted me this boon far beyond what I hoped for. So what am I doing here?" She felt it; her work was done. She had exhausted, as Augustin says, all the hope of the century--_consumpta spe sæculi_. For her the parting was near. This ecstasy was that of one dying, who has raised a corner of the veil, and who no longer belongs to this world. * * * * * And, in fact, five or six days later she fell ill. She had fever. The climate of Ostia bred fevers, as it does to-day, and it was always unsanitary on account of all the foreigners who brought in every infection of the Orient. Furthermore, the weariness of a long journey in summer had worn out this woman, old before her time. She had to go to bed. Soon she got worse, and then lost consciousness. They believed she was in the agony. They all came round her bed--Augustin, his brother Navigius, Evodius, the two cousins from Thagaste, Rusticus, and Lastidianus. But suddenly she shuddered, raised herself, and asked in a bewildered way: "Where was I?" Then, seeing the grief on their faces, she knew that she was lost, and she said in a steady voice: "You will bury your mother here." Navigius, frightened by this sight of death, protested with all his affection for her: "No. You will get well, mother. You will come home again. You won't die in a foreign land." She looked at him with sorrowful eyes, as if hurt that he spoke so little like a Christian, and turning to Augustin: "See how he talks," she said. And after a silence, she went on in a firmer voice, as if to impress on her sons her final wishes: "Lay this body where you will, and be not anxious about it. Only I beseech you, remember me at the altar of God, wherever you are." That was the supreme renunciation. How could an African woman, so much attached to her country, agree to be buried in a stranger soil? Pagan notions were still very strong in this community, and the place of burial was an important consideration. Monnica, like all other widows, had settled upon hers. At Thagaste she had had her place prepared beside her husband Patricius. And here now she appeared to give that up. Augustin's companions were astonished at such abnegation. As for himself, he marvelled at the completeness of the change worked in his mother's soul by Grace. And as he thought over all the virtues of her life, the strength of her faith--from that moment, he had no doubt that she was a saint. She still lingered for some time. Finally, on the ninth day of her illness, she died at the age of fifty-six. Augustin closed her eyes. A great sorrow surged into his heart. And yet he who was so quick to tears had the courage not to cry.... Suddenly a noise of weeping rose in the room of death: it was the young Adeodatus, who lamented at the sight of the corpse. He sobbed in such a heartbroken way that those who were there, demoralized by the distress of it, were obliged to rebuke him. This struck Augustin so deeply, that many years afterwards the broken sound of this sobbing still haunted his ears. "Methought," he says, "that it was my own childish soul which thus broke out in the weeping of my son." As for him, with the whole effort of his reason struggling against his heart, he only wanted to think of the glory which the saint had just entered into. His companions felt likewise. Evodius caught up a psalter, and before Monnica's body, not yet cold, he began to chant the Psalm, "My song shall be of mercy and judgment; unto Thee, O Lord, will I sing." All who were in the house took up the responses. In the meantime, while the layers-out were preparing the corpse for burial, the brethren drew Augustin into another room. His friends and relations stood round him. He consoled the others and himself. He spoke, as the custom was, upon the deliverance of the faithful soul and the happiness which is promised. They might have imagined that he had no sense of grief, "But in Thy hearing, O my God, where none of them could hear, I was chiding the softness of my heart, and holding back the tide of sorrow.... Alas! well did I know what I was choking down in my heart." Not even at the church, where the sacrifice was offered for Monnica's soul, nor at the cemetery before the coffin, did he weep. From a sense of Christian seemliness, he feared to scandalize his brethren by imitating the desolation of the pagans and of those who die without hope. But this very effort that he made to keep back his tears became another cause of suffering. The day ended in a black sadness, a sadness he could not shake off. It stifled him. Then he remembered the Greek proverb--"The bath drives away sorrow;" and he determined to go and bathe. He went into the _tepidarium_ and stretched himself out on the hot slab. Useless remedy! "The bitterness of my trouble was not carried from my heart with the sweat that flowed from my limbs." The attendants rolled him in warm towels and led him to the resting-couch. Worn out by tiredness and so many emotions, he fell into a heavy sleep. The next day, upon awaking, a fresh briskness was in all his being. Some verses came singing into his memory; they were the first words of the confident and joyous hymn of St. Ambrose: "Creator of the earth and sky, Ruling the firmament on high, Clothing the day with robes of light, Blessing with gracious sleep the night,-- That rest may comfort weary men To face their usual toil again, And soothe awhile the harassed mind, And sorrow's heavy load unbind." Suddenly, at the word _sorrow_, the thought of his dead mother came back to him, with the regret for that kind heart he had lost. A wave of despair overwhelmed him. He flung himself sobbing on the bed, and at last wept all the tears he had pent up so long. III THE MONK OF THAGASTE Almost a year went by before Augustin continued his journey. It is hard to account for this delay. Why should he thus put off his return to Africa, he who was so anxious to fly the world? It is likely that Monnica's illness, the arrangements about her funeral, and other matters to settle, kept him at Ostia till the beginning of winter. The weather became stormy, the sea dangerous. Navigation was regularly interrupted from November--sometimes even earlier, from the first days of October, if the tempests and the equinox were exceptionally violent. It would then be necessary to wait till spring. Besides, word came that the fleet of the usurper Maximus, then at war with Theodosius, blockaded the African coast. Travellers ran the risk of being captured by the enemy. From all these reasons, Augustin would be prevented from sailing before the end of the following summer. In the meantime, he went to live in Rome. He employed his leisure to work up a case against the Manichees, his brethren of the day before. Once he had adopted Catholicism, he must have expected passionate attacks from his former brothers in religion. To close their mouths, he gathered against them an elaborate mass of documents, bristling with the latest scandals. He busied himself also with a thorough study of their doctrines, the better to refute them: in him the dialectician never slept. Then, when he had an opportunity, he visited the Roman monasteries, studying their rule and organization, so as to decide on a model for the convent which he always intended to establish in his own country. At last, he went back to Ostia some time in August or September, 388, where he found a ship bound for Carthage. Four years earlier, about the same time of year, he had made the same voyage, coming the opposite way. He had a calm crossing; hardly could one notice the movement of the ship. It is the season of smooth seas in the Mediterranean. Never is it more etherial than in these summer months. The vague blue sky is confused with the bleached sea, spread out in a large sheet without creases--liquid and flexible silk, swept by quivering amber glow and orange saffron when the sun falls. No distinct shape, only strange suffusions of soft light, a pearl-like haze, the wistful blue reaching away indefinably. At Carthage, Augustin had grown used to the magnificence of this pageantry of the sea. Now, the sea had the same appeased and gleaming face he had seen four years sooner. But how much his soul had since been changed! Instead of the tumult and falsehood which rent his heart and filled it with darkness, the serene light of Truth, and deeper than the sea's peace, the great appeasement of Grace. Augustin dreamed. Far off the Æolian isles were gloomed in the impending shadows, the smoky crater of Stromboli was no more than a black point circled by the double blue of waves and sky. So the remembrance of his passions, of all that earlier life, sank under the triumphant uprising of heavenly peace. He believed that this blissful state was going to continue and fill all the hours of his new life, and he knew of nothing so sweet.... This time, again, he was mistaken about himself. Upon the thin plank of the boat which carried him, he did not feel the force of the immense element, asleep now under his feet, but quick to be unchained at the first gust of wind; and he did not feel either the overflowing energy swelling his heart renewed by Grace--an energy which was going to set in motion one of the most complete and strenuous existences, one of the richest in thought, charity, and works which have enlightened history. Thinking only of the cloister, amidst the friends who surrounded him, no doubt he repeated the words of the Psalm: "Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity." He pressed the hands of Alypius and Evodius, and tears came to his eyes. The sun was gone. All the cold waste of waters, forsaken by the gleam, blurred gradually in vague anguish beneath the fall of night. * * * * * After skirting the Sicilian coasts, they arrived at last at Carthage. Augustin did not linger there; he was eager to see Thagaste once more, and to retire finally from the world. Favourable omens drew him to the place, and seemed to hearten him in his resolution. A dream had foretold his return to his former pupil, Elogius, the rhetorician. He was present, too, at the miraculous cure of a Carthage lawyer, Innocentius, in whose house he dwelt with his friends. Accordingly, he left for Thagaste as soon as he could. There he made himself popular at once by giving to the poor, as the Gospel prescribed, what little remained of his father's heritage. But he does not make clear enough what this voluntary privation exactly meant. He speaks of a house and some little meadows--_paucis agellulis_--that he sequestrated. Still, he did not cease to live in the house all the time he was at Thagaste. The probability is that he did sell the few acres of land he still owned and bestowed the product of the sale on the poor. As to the house, he must have made it over with the outbuildings to the Catholic body of his native town, on condition of keeping the usufruct and of receiving for himself and his brethren the necessities of life. At this period many pious persons acted in this way when they gave their property to the Church. Church goods being unseizable, and exempt from taxation, this was a roundabout way of getting the better of fiscal extortion, whether in the shape of arbitrary confiscations, or eviction by force of arms. In any case, such souls as were tired of the world and longing for repose, found in these bequests an heroic method of saving themselves the trouble of looking after a fortune or a landed estate. When these fortunes and lands were extensive, the generous donors felt, we are told, an actual relief in getting rid of them. This financial question settled, Augustin took up the task of turning the house into a monastery, like those he had seen at Rome and Milan. His son Adeodatus, his friends Alypius and Evodius, Severus, who became Bishop of Milevia, shared his solitude. But it is certain that he had other solitaries with him whom he alludes to in his letters. Their rule was as yet a little easy, no doubt. The brothers of Thagaste were not confined in a cloister. They were simply obliged to fasts, to a special diet, to prayers and meditations in common. In this half-rustic retreat (the monastery was situated at the gates of the town) Augustin was happy: he had at last realized the project he had had so long at heart. To enter into himself, pray, above all, to study the Scripture, to fathom even its most obscure places, to comment it with the fervour and piety which the African of all times has brought to _what is written down_--it seemed to him that he had enough there to fill all the minutes of his life. But no man can teach, lecture, discuss, write, during twenty years, in vain. However much Augustin might be converted, he remembered the school at Thagaste, just as he did at Cassicium. Still, it was necessary to finish with this sort of thing once for all. The new monk made what may be called his will as a professor. He finished, at this time, or revised his school treatises, which he had begun at Milan, comprising all the liberal arts--grammar, dialectic, rhetoric, geometry, arithmetic, philosophy, music. Of all these books he only finished the first, the treatise on grammar. The others were only summaries, and are now lost. On the other hand, we have still the six books on music, likewise begun at Milan, which he finished, almost as an amusement, at Thagaste. They are dialogues between himself and his pupil, the poet Licentius, upon metre and scansion. But we know from himself that he intended to make this book longer, and to write a second part upon melody, that is to say, music, properly so called. He never found the time: "Once," he says, "the burthen of ecclesiastical affairs was placed on my shoulders, _all these pleasant things_ slipped from my hands." Thus, the monk Augustin only rests from prayer and meditation to study music and poetry. He has thought it necessary to excuse himself. "In all that," says he, "I had but one purpose. For, as I did not wish to pluck away too suddenly either young men, or those of another age, on whom God had bestowed good wits, from ideas of the senses and carnal literature, _things it is very hard for them not to be attached to_, I have tried by reasoning lessons to turn them little by little, and by the love of unchanging truth, to attach them to God, sole master of all things.... He who reads these books will see that if I have touched upon the poets and grammarians, 'twas more by the exigency of the journey than by any desire to settle among them.... Such is the life I have chosen to walk with the feeble, not being very strong myself, rather than to hurl myself out on the void with wings still half-fledged...." Here again, how human all that is, and wise--yes, and modest too. Augustin has no whit of the fanatic about him. No straighter conscience than his, or even more persistent in uprooting error. But he knows what man is, that life here below is a voyage among other men weak as himself, and he fits in with the needs of the voyage. Oh, yes, no doubt, for the Christian who has arrived at supreme renunciation--what is poetry, what is knowledge, "what is everything that is not eternal?" But this carnal literature and science are so many steps of a height proportionate to our feebleness, to lead us imperceptibly to the conceptual world. As a prudent guide of souls, Augustin did not wish to make the ascent too rapidly. As for music, he has still more indulgence for that than for any of the other arts, for "it is by sounds that we best perceive the power of numbers in every variety of movement, and their study thus leads us gradually to the closest and highest secrets of truth, and discovers to those who love and seek it the divine Wisdom and Providence in all things...." He is always coming back to it--to this music he loves so much; he comes back to it in spite of himself. Later, in great severity, he will reproach himself for the pleasure he takes in the liturgical chants, but nevertheless the old instinct will remain. He was born a musician. He will remain one to his last gasp. If he did not break completely with profane art and letters at this present moment of his life, his chief reasons were of a practical order. Still another object may be discerned in these educational treatises--namely, to prove to the pagans that one may be a Christian and yet not be a barbarian and ignorant. Augustin's position in front of his adversaries is very strong indeed. None of them can attempt to cope with him either in breadth of knowledge, or in happy versatility, or in plenitude of intellectual gifts. He had the entire heritage of the ancient world between his hands. Well might he say to the pagans: "What you admire in your orators and philosophers, I have made my own. Behold it! On my lips recognize the accent of your orators.... Well, all that, which you deem so high, I despise. The knowledge of this world is nothing without the wisdom of Christ." Of course, Augustin has paid the price of this all-round knowledge--too far-reaching, perhaps, at certain points. He has often too much paraded his knowledge, his dialectic and oratorical talents. What matters that, if even in this excess he aims solely at the welfare of souls--to edify them and set them aglow with the fire of his charity? At Thagaste, he disputes with his brethren, with his son Adeodatus. He is always the master--he knows it; but what humility he puts into this dangerous part! The conclusion of his book, _The Master_, which he wrote then, is that all the words of him who teaches are useless, if the hidden Master reveal not the truth to him who listens. So, under his ungainly monk's habit, he continues his profession of rhetorician. He has come to Thagaste with the intention of retiring from the world and living in God; and here he is disputing, lecturing, writing more than ever. The world pursues him and occupies him even in his retreat. He says to himself that down there at Rome, at Carthage, at Hippo, there are men speaking in the forums or in the basilicas, whispering in secret meetings, seducing poor souls defenceless against error. These impostors must be immediately unmasked, confounded, reduced to silence. With all his heart Augustin throws himself into this work at which he excels. Above all, he attacks his old friends the Manichees.... He wrote many tracts against them. From the animosity he put into these, may be judged to what extent Manicheeism filled his thoughts, and also the progress of the sect in Africa. This campaign was even the cause of a complete change in his way of writing. With the object of reaching the plainest sort of people, he began to employ the popular language, not recoiling before a solecism, when the solecism appeared to him indispensable to explain his thought. This must have been a cruel mortification for him. In his very latest writings he made a point of shewing that no elegance of language was unknown to him. But his real originality is not in that. When he writes the fine style, his period is heavy, entangled, often obscure. On the other hand, nothing is more lively, clear and coloured, and, as we say to-day, more direct, than the familiar language of his sermons and certain of his treatises. This language he has really created. He wanted to clarify, comment, give details, and he felt how awkward classical Latin is to decompose ideas and render shades. And so, in a popular Latin, already very close to the Romance languages, he has thrown out the plan of analytical prose, the instrument of thought of the modern West. Not only did he battle against the heretics, but his restless friendship continually scaled the walls of his cell to fly to the absent ones dear to his heart. He feels that he must expand to his friends, and make them sharers in his meditations: this nervous man, in poor health, spends a part of his nights meditating. The argument he has hit upon in last night's insomnia--his friends must be told that! He heaps his letters on them. He writes to Nebridius, to Romanianus, to Paulinus of Nola; to people unknown and celebrated, in Africa, Italy, Spain, and Palestine. A time will come when his letters will be real encyclicals, read throughout Christendom. He writes so much that he is often short of paper. He has not tablets enough to put down his notes. He asks Romanianus to give him some. His beautiful tablets, the ivory ones, are used up; he has used the last one for a ceremonial letter, and he asks his friend's pardon for writing to him on a wretched bit of vellum. Besides all that, he interests himself in the affairs of his fellow-townsmen. Augustin is a personage at Thagaste. The good folk of the free-town are well aware that he is eloquent, that he has a far-reaching acquaintance, and that he has great influence in high quarters. They ask for his protection and his interference. It is even possible that they obliged him to defend them in the courts. They were proud of their Augustin. And as they were afraid that some neighbouring town might steal away their great man, they kept a guard round his house. They prevented him from shewing himself too much in the neighbourhood. Augustin himself agreed with this, and lived retired as far as he could, for he was afraid they would make him a bishop or priest in spite of himself. In those days that was a danger incurred by all Christians who were rich or had talent. The rich gave their goods to the poor when they took orders. The men of talent defended the interests of the community, or attracted opulent benefactors. And because of all these reasons, the needy or badly managed churches stalked as a prey the celebrated Augustin. In spite of this supervision, this unremitting rush of business, the work of all kinds which he undertook, he experienced at Thagaste a peace which he was never to find again. One might say that he pauses and gathers together all his strength before the great exhausting labour of his apostolate. In this Numidian country, so verdant and cool, where a thousand memories of childhood encompassed him, where he was not able to take a step without encountering the ever-living image of his mother, he soared towards God with more confidence. He who sought in the things of sense ladder-rungs whereby to mount to spiritual realities, still turned kindly eyes on the natural scene. From the windows of his room he saw the forest pines rounding their heads, like little crystal goblets with stems slim and thin. His scarred chest breathed in deliriously the resinous breath of the fine trees. He listened like a musician to the orchestra of birds. The changing scenes of country life always attracted him. It is now that he wrote: "Tell me, does not the nightingale seem to you to modulate her voice delightfully? Is not her song, so harmonious, so suave, so well attuned to the season, the very voice of the spring?..." IV AUGUSTIN A PRIEST This halt did not last long. Soon was going to begin for Augustin the time of tribulation, that of his struggles and apostolic journeys. And first, he must mourn his son Adeodatus, that young man who seemed destined to such great things. It is indeed most probable that the young monk died at Thagaste during the three years that his father spent there. Augustin was deeply grieved; but, as in the case of his mother's death, he mastered his sorrow by all the force of his Christian hope. No doubt he loved his son as much as he was proud of him. It will be remembered what words he used to speak of this youthful genius, whose precocity frightened him. Little by little his grief quietened down, and in its place came a mild resignation. Some years later he will write about Adeodatus: "Lord, early didst Thou cut off his life from this earth, but I remember him without a shadow of misgiving. My remembrance is not mixed with any fear for his boyhood, or the youth he was, or the man he would have been." No fear! What a difference between this and the habitual feelings of the Jansenists, who believed themselves his disciples! While Augustin thinks of his son's death with a calm and grave joy which he can scarce hide, those of Port Royal could only think in trembling of the judgment of God. Their faith did not much resemble the luminous and confident faith of Augustin. For him, salvation is the conquest of joy. At Thagaste he lived in joy. Every morning in awaking before the forest pines, glistening with the dews of the morning, he might well say with a full heart: "My God, give me the grace to live here under the shades of Thy peace, while awaiting that of Thy Paradise." But the Christians continued to watch him. It was to the interest of a number of people that this light should not be hid under a bushel. Perhaps a snare was deliberately laid for him. At any rate, he was imprudent enough to come out of his retreat and travel to Hippo. He thought he might be safe there, because, as the town had a bishop already, they would not have any excuse to get him consecrated in spite of himself. An inhabitant of Hippo, a clerk of the Imperial Ministry of the Interior, begged his spiritual assistance. Doubts, he maintained, still delayed him on the way to an entire conversion. Augustin alone could help him to get clear of them. So Augustin, counting already on a new recruit for the Thagaste monastery, went over there at the request of this official. Now, if there was a bishop at Hippo (a certain Valerius), priests were lacking. Furthermore, Valerius was getting on in years. Originally Greek, he knew Latin badly, and not a word of Punic--a great hindrance for him in his duties of judge, administrator, and catechist. The knowledge of the two languages was indispensable to an ecclesiastic in such a country, where the majority of the rural population spoke only the old Carthaginian idiom. All this proves to us that Catholicism was in bad shape in the diocese of Hippo. Not only was there a lack of priests, but the bishop was a foreigner, little familiar with African customs. There was a general demand for a native to take his place--one young, active, and well enough furnished with learning to hold his own against the heretics and the schismatics of the party of Donatus, and also sufficiently able to watch over the interests of the Church at Hippo, and above all, to make it prosperous. Let us not forget that at this time, in the eyes of a crowd of poor wretches, Christianity was first and foremost the religion which gave out bread. Even in those early days, the Church did its best to solve the eternal social question. While Augustin was at Hippo, Valerius preached a sermon in the basilica in which, precisely, he deplored this lack of priests the community suffered from. Mingled with the congregation, Augustin listened, sure that he would be unrecognized. But the secret of his presence had leaked out. People pointed to him while the bishop was preaching. The next thing was that some furious enthusiasts seized hold of him and dragged him to the foot of the episcopal chair, yelling: "Augustin a priest! Augustin a priest!" Such were the democratic ways of the Church in those days. The inconveniences are plain enough. What is certain is, that if Augustin had resisted, he might have lost his life, and that the bishop would have provoked a riot in refusing him the priesthood. In Africa, religious passions are not to be trifled with, especially when they are exasperated by questions of profit or politics. In his heart, the bishop was delighted with this brutal capture which gained him the distinction of such a well-known fellow-worker. There and then he ordained the Thagaste monk. And so, as Augustin's pupil, Possidius, the future Bishop of Guelma, puts it, "This shining lamp, which sought the darkness of solitude, was placed upon the lamp-stand..." Augustin, who saw the finger of God in this adventure, submitted to the popular will. Nevertheless, he was in despair, and he wept at the change they were forcing on him. Then, some of those present, mistaking the significance of his tears, said to console him: "Yes, you are right. The priesthood is not good enough for your merits. But you may be certain that you will be our bishop." Augustin well knew all that the crowd meant by that, and what it expected of its bishop. He who only thought of leaving the world, grew frightened at the practical cares he would have to take over. And the spiritual side of his jurisdiction frightened him no less. To speak of God! Proclaim the word of God! He deemed himself unworthy of so high a privilege. He was so ill-prepared! To remedy this fault of preparation, as well as he could, he desired that he might be given a little leisure till the following Easter. In a letter addressed to Valerius, and no doubt intended to be made public, he humbly set forth the reasons why he asked for delay. They were so apposite and so creditable, that very likely the bishop yielded. The new priest received permission to retire to a country house near Hippo. His flock, who did not feel at all sure of their shepherd, would not have let him go too far off. He took up his duties as soon as possible. Little by little he became, to all intents, the coadjutor of the bishop, who charged him with the preaching and the baptism of catechumens. These were the two most important among the episcopal prerogatives. The bishops made a point of doing these things themselves. Certain colleagues of Valerius even grew scandalized that he should allow a simple priest to preach before him in his own church. But soon other bishops, struck by the advantages of this innovation, followed the example of Valerius, and allowed their clerks to preach even in their presence. The priest of Hippo did not lose his head among so many honours. He felt chiefly the perils of them, and he regarded them as a trial sent by God. "I have been forced into this," he said, "doubtless in punishment of my sins; for from what other motive can I think that the second place at the helm should be given to me--to me who do not even know how to hold an oar...." Meanwhile, he had not relinquished his purpose of monastic life. Though a priest, he meant to remain a monk. It was heart-breaking for him to be obliged to leave his monastery at Thagaste. He spoke of his regret to Valerius, who, perceiving the usefulness of a convent as a seminary for future priests, gave him an orchard belonging to the church of Hippo, that he might found a new community there. So was established the monastery which was going to supply a great number of clerks and bishops to all the African provinces. Among the ruins of Hippo, that old Roman and Phoenician city, they search for the place where Augustin's monastery stood, without much hope of ever finding it. Some have thought to locate it upon that hill where the water brought from the near mountains by an aqueduct used to pour into immense reservoirs, and where to-day rises a new basilica which attracts all eyes out at sea. Behind the basilica is a convent where the Little Sisters of the Poor lodge about a hundred old people. So is maintained among the African Mussulmans the remembrance of the grand Christian _marabout_. One might possibly wish to see there a building more in the pure and quiet taste of antiquity. But after all, the piety of the intention is enough. This hospital serves admirably to call up the memory of the illustrious bishop who was charity itself. As for the basilica, Africa has done all she can to make it worthy of him. She has given her most precious marbles, and one of her fairest landscapes as a frame. It is chiefly in the evening, in the closing dusk, that this landscape reveals all its special charm and its finer values. The roseate glow of the setting sun throws into sharp relief the black profile of the mountains, which command the Seybouse valley. Under the mustering shadows, the pallid river winds slowly to the sea. The gulf, stretching limitless, shines like a slab of salt strangely bespangled. In this atmosphere without mists, the sharp outlines of the coast, the dense movelessness of the aspect, has an indescribable effect. It is like a hitherto unknown and virginal revelation of the earth. Then the stars bloom out, with a flame, an hallucinating palpability. Charles's Wain, burning low on the gorges of the Edough, seems like a golden waggon rolling through the fields of Heaven. A deep peace settles upon farmland and meadow country, only broken by a watch-dog's bark now and then.... But it matters not which spot is chosen in the surroundings of Hippo to place Augustin's monastery, the view will be equally beautiful. From all parts of the plain, mounded by heaps of ruins, the sea can be seen--a wide bay circled in soft bland curves, like at Naples. All around, an arena of mountains--the green ravines of the Edough and its wooded slopes. Along the surbased roads rise the great sonorous pines, and through them wanders the æolian complaint of the sea-winds. Blue of the sea, blue of the sky, noble foliage of Italy's ancient groves--it is one of Lamartine's landscapes under a more burning sun. The gaiety of the mornings there is a physical luxury for heart and eyes, when the new-born light laughs upon the painted cupolas of the houses, and dark blue veils float between the walls, glaring white, of the steep streets. Among the olives and orange-trees of Hippo, Augustin must have seen happy days pass by, as at Thagaste. The rule he had given the convent, which he himself obeyed like any one else, was neither too slack nor too strict--in a word, such as it should be for men who have lived in the culture of letters and works of the mind. There was no affectation of excessive austerity. Augustin and his monks wore very simple clothes and shoes, but suitable for a bishop and his clerks. Like laymen, they wore the byrrhus, a garment with a hood, which seems very like the ancestor of the Arab burnous. To keep an even line between daintiness and negligence in costume, to have no exaggeration in anything, is what Augustin aimed at. The poet Rutilius Numatianus, who about that time was attacking the sordid and culture-hating monks with sombre irony, would have had a chance to admire a restraint and decorum in the Hippo monastery which recalled what was best in the manners of the ancient world. At table, a like moderation. Vegetables were generally provided, and sometimes meat when any one was sick, or guests arrived. They drank a little wine, contrary to the regulations of St. Jerome, who condemned wine as a drink for devils. When a monk infringed the rule, his share of the wine was stopped. Through some remains of fastidious habits in Augustin, or perhaps because he had nothing else, the table service he used himself was silver. On the other hand, the pots and dishes were of earthenware, or wood, or common alabaster. Augustin, who was very temperate in eating and drinking, seemed at table to pay attention only to what was being read or talked about. He cared very little what he ate, provided the food was not a stimulant to lubricity. He used to say to those Christians who paraded a Pharisaic severity: "It is the pure heart which makes pure food." Then, with his constant desire for charity, he prohibited all spiteful gossip in the conversation in the refectory. In those times of religious struggle, the clerics ferociously blackened each other's characters. Augustin caused to have written on the walls a distich, which ran thus: "He who takes pleasure in slandering the life of the absent, Should know he is unworthy to sit at this table." "One day," says Possidius, "some of his intimate friends, even other bishops, having forgotten this sentence, he reproached them warmly, and very much perturbed, he cried out that he was going to remove those verses from the refectory, or rise from table and withdraw to his cell. I was present with many others when this happened." It was not only slanderous talk or interior dissensions which troubled Augustin's peace of mind. He combined the duties of priest, of a head of a convent, and of an apostle. He had to preach, instruct the catechumens, battle against the disaffected. The town of Hippo was very unruly, full of heretics, schismatics, pagans. Those of the party of Donatus were triumphant, driving the Catholics from their churches and lands. When Augustin came into the country, Catholicism was very low. And then the ineradicable Manichees continued to recruit proselytes. He never stopped writing tracts, disputing against them, overwhelming them under the close logic of his arguments. At the request of the Donatists themselves, he had an argument with one of their priests, a certain Fortunatus, in the baths of Sossius at Hippo. He reduced this man to silence and to flight. Not in the least discouraged were the Manichees: they sent another priest. If the enemies of the Church shewed themselves stubborn, Augustin's own congregation were singularly turbulent, hard to manage. The weakness of old Valerius must have allowed a good many abuses to creep into the community. Ere long the priest of Hippo had a foretaste of the difficulties which awaited him as bishop. Following the example of Ambrose, he undertook to abolish the custom of feasts in the basilicas and on the tombs of the martyrs. This was a survival of paganism, of which the festivals included gluttonous eating and orgies. At every solemnity, and they were frequent, the pagans ate in the courts and under the porticoes around the temples. In Africa, above all, these public repasts gave an opportunity for repugnant scenes of stuffing and drunkenness. As a rule, the African is very sober; but when he does let himself go he is terrible. This is quite easily seen to-day, in the great Muslem feasts, when the rich distribute broken bits of meat to the poor of their district. As soon as these people, used to drink water and to eat a little boiled rice, have tasted meat, or drunk only one cup of wine, there is no holding them: there are fights, stabbing matches, a general brawl in the hovels. Just picture this popular debauch in full blast in the cemeteries and the courts of the basilicas, and it will be understood why Augustin did his best to put an end to such scandals. For this purpose, he joined hands first of all with his bishop, Valerius, and then with the Primate of Carthage, Aurelius, who shall be henceforth his firmest support in his struggle against the schismatics. During Lent, the subject fitting in naturally with the season, he spoke against these pagan orgies; and this gave rise to a good deal of discontent, outside. Easter went by without trouble. But the day after the Ascension, the people of Hippo were used to celebrate what they called "the Joy-day," by a traditional good feed and drink. The day before, which was the religious festival, Augustin intrepidly spoke against "the Joy-day." They interrupted the preacher. Some of them shouted that as much was done at Rome in St. Peter's basilica. At Carthage, they danced round the tomb of St. Cyprian. To the shrilling of flutes, amid the dull blows of the gongs, mimes gave themselves up to obscene contortions, while the spectators sang to the clapping of their hands.... Augustin knew all about that. He declared that these abominations might have been tolerated in former times so as not to discourage the pagans from becoming converts; but that henceforth the people, altogether Christian, should give them up. In the end, he spoke with such touching eloquence that the audience burst into tears. He believed he had won. The next day it was all to do over again. Agitators had worked among the crowd to such an extent that a riot was feared. Nevertheless, Augustin, preceded by his bishop, entered the basilica at the hour of service. At the same moment the Donatists were banqueting in their church, which was quite near. Through the walls of their own church the Catholics heard the noise of this carouse. It required the coadjutor's most urgent remonstrances to keep them from imitating their neighbours. The last murmurs died down, and the ceremony ended with the singing of the sacred hymns. Augustin had carried the position. But the conflict had got to the point that he had to threaten the people with his resignation, and, as he wrote to Alypius, "to shake out on them the dust from his clothes." All this promised very ill for the future. He who already considered the priesthood as a trial, saw with terror the bishopric drawing near. THE FIFTH PART THE APOSTLE OF PEACE AND OF CATHOLIC UNITY Dic eis ista, ut plorent ... et sic eos rape tecum ad Deum: quia de spiritu ejus haec dicis eis, si dicis ardens igne caritatis. "Tell them this, O my soul, that they may weep ... and thus carry them up with thyself to God; because by His Spirit thou sayest these things, if Thou speakest burning with the flame of charity." _Confessions_, IV, 12. I THE BISHOP OF HIPPO In his monastery, Augustin was still spied upon by the neighbouring Churches, who wanted him for their bishop. They would capture him on the first opportunity. The old Valerius, fearing his priest would be taken unawares, urged him to hide himself. But he knew by the very case of Augustin, forced into the priesthood in spite of himself, that the greatest precautions are useless against those determined to gain their ends by any means. It would be safest to anticipate the danger. He determined therefore to share the bishopric with Augustin, to have him consecrated during his own lifetime, and to indicate him as his successor. This was against the African usage, and what was more, against the Canons of the Council of Nice--though it is true that Valerius, like Augustin himself, was unaware of this latter point. But surely the rule could be waived in view of the exceptional merits of the priest of Hippo. The old bishop began by sounding Aurelius, the Primate of Carthage, and when he was satisfied as to the agreement and support of this high personage, he took the opportunity of a religious solemnity to make known his intentions to the people. Some of the neighbouring bishops--Megalius, Bishop of Guelma and Primate of Numidia, among them--being gathered at Hippo to consecrate a new bishop, Valerius announced publicly in the basilica that he wished Augustin to be consecrated at the same ceremony. This had been the wish of his people for a long time. Really, in demanding this honour for his priest, the old bishop did no more than follow the wish of the public. Immediately, his words were received with cheers. The faithful with loud shouts demanded Augustin's consecration. Megalius alone objected. He even made himself the voice of certain calumnies, so as to have the candidate put aside as unworthy. There is nothing astonishing in such an attitude. This Megalius was old (he died a short time after), and, like all old men, he took the gloomiest view of innovations. Already, in the face of settled custom, had Valerius granted Augustin the right to preach in his presence. And see now, by a new sinking, he was attempting to place two bishops at once in the see of Hippo! Whatever this young priest's talents might be, enough, had been done for him--a recent convert into the bargain, and, what was still more serious, a refugee from the Manicheans. What was not related about the abominations committed in the mysteries of those people? Just how far had Augustin dipped into them? They snarled against him everywhere at Hippo, and at Carthage too, where he had compromised himself by his excessive zeal; Catholics and Donatists alike gossiped. Megalius, a punctilious defender of discipline and the hierarchy, no doubt gathered up these malevolent rumours with pleasure. He used them as an excuse for making Augustin mark time, so to speak. Commonplace people always feel a secret delight in humiliating to the common rule those whom they can feel are beings of a different quality from themselves. One of the slanders set abroad about Valerius' priest, Megalius seems to have believed. He allowed himself to be persuaded that Augustin had given a philtre to a woman, one of his penitents, whom he wished to possess. It was then the fashion among the pious to exchange _eulogies_, or bits of holy bread, to signify a spiritual communion. Augustin was said to have mixed certain magic potions with some of these breads and offered them hypocritically to the woman he was in love with. This accusation started a big scandal, and the remembrance of it persisted long, because five or six years later the Donatist Petilian was still repeating it. Augustin cleared himself victoriously. Megalius avowed his mistake. He did better: not only did he apologize to him he had slandered, but he solemnly asked forgiveness from his fellow-bishops for having misled them upon false rumours. It is probable that some time during the inquiry he had got to know Valerius' coadjutor better. Augustin's charm, taken with the austerity of his life, acted upon the vexed old man and altered his views. Be that so or not, it was at any rate by Megalius, Bishop of Guelma and Primate of Numidia, that Augustin was consecrated Bishop of Hippo. He was in consternation over his rise. He has said it again and again. We may take his word for it. Yet the honours and advantages of the episcopate were then so considerable that his enemies were able to describe him as an ambitious man. Nothing could agree less with his character. In his heart, Augustin only wished to live in quiet. Since his retreat at Cassicium, fortune he had given up, as well as literary glory. His sole wish was to live in pondering the divine truths, and to draw nearer to God. _Videte et gustate quam mitis sit Dominus_--"O taste and see that the Lord is good." This perhaps, of the whole Bible, is the verse he liked best, which answered best to the close desire of his soul; and he quotes it oftenest in his sermons. Then, to study the Holy Writings, scan the least syllables of them, since all truth lies there--well, a whole life is not too much for such labour as that! And to do it, one should sever all ties with the world, take refuge forbiddingly in the cloister. But this sincere Christian analysed himself too skilfully not to perceive that he had a dangerous tendency to isolation. He took too much pleasure in cutting himself off from the society of mankind to enshroud himself in study and meditation. He who acknowledged a secret tendency to the Epicurean indolence--was he going to live a life of the dilettante and the self-indulgent under cover of holiness? Alone could action save him from selfishness. Others doubtless fulfilled the laws of charity in praying, in mortifying themselves for their brethren. But when, like him, a man has exceptional faculties of persuasion and eloquence, such vigour in dialectics, such widespread culture, such power to bring to naught the wrong--would it not be insulting to God to let such gifts lie idle, and a serious failure in charity to deprive his brethren of the support of such an engine? Besides that, he well knew that no man draws near to truth without a purified heart. Might not his passions, which were so violent, begin to torment him again after this respite with greater frenzy than before his conversion? Against that, too, action was the main antidote. In the duties of the bishopric he saw a means of asceticism--a kind of courageous purification. He would load himself of his own will with so many anxieties and so much work that he would have no time left to listen to the insidious voice of his "old friends." Could he manage to silence them at once? This unheard-of grace--would it be granted to him? Or would not rather the struggle continue in the depths of his conscience? What comes out as certain is that those terrible passions which turned his youth upside down, nevermore play any part in his life. From the moment he fell on his knees under the fig-tree at Milan, his sinful heart is a dead heart. He has been freed from almost all the weaknesses of the old nature, not only from its vices and carnal affections, but from its most pardonable lapses--save, perhaps, some old sediment of intellectual and literary vanity. His books, at the first glance, shew us him no more save as the doctor, and already the saint. What is seen at once is an entirely bare intelligence, an entirely pure heart, fired only by the divine love. And yet the affectionate and tender heart which his had been, always warms his discussions and his most abstract exegesis. It does not take long to feel the heat of them, the power of pouring forth emotion. Augustin takes no heed of that. Of himself he no longer thinks; he no longer belongs to himself. If he has accepted the episcopate, it is so as to give himself altogether to the Church, to be all things to all men. He is the man-word, the man-pen, the sounding-board of the truth. He becomes the man of the miserable crowds which the Saviour covered with His pity. He is theirs, to convince them and cure them of their errors. He is a machine which works without ever stopping for the greater glory of Christ. Bishop, pastor, leader of souls--he has no desire for anything else. But it was a heavy labour for this intellectual, who till then had lived only among books and ideas. The day after his consecration, he must have regarded it with more terror than ever. During his nights of insomnia, or at the recreation hour in the monastery garden, he thought over it with great distress. His eyes wide open in the darkness of his cell, he sought to define a theory upon the nature and origin of the soul; or else, at the fall of day, he saw between the olive branches "the sea put on fluctuating shades like veils of a thousand colours, sometimes green, a green of infinite tints; sometimes purple; blue sometimes...." And his soul, easily stirred to poetry, at once arose from these material splendours to the invisible region of ideas. Then, immediately, he caught himself up: it was not a question of all that! He said to himself that he was henceforth the bishop Augustin, that he had charge of souls, that he must work for the needs of his flock. He would have to struggle in a combat without a moment's respite. Thereupon he arranged his plans of attack and defence. With a single glance he gauged the huge work before him. A crushing work, truly! He was Bishop of Hippo, but a bishop almost without a flock, in comparison with the rival community of Donatists. The bishop of the dissentients, Proculeianus, boasted that he was the true representative of orthodoxy, and as he had on his side the advantage of numbers, he certainly cut a much greater figure in the town than the successor of Valerius, with all his knowledge and all his eloquence. The schismatics' church, as we have seen, was quite near the Catholic church. Their noise interfered with Augustin's sermons. Possibly the situation had become slightly better in Hippo since the edict of Theodosius. But it was not so long ago that those of the Donatist party had the upper hand. A little before the arrival of the new bishop, the Donatist clergy forbade their faithful to bake bread for Catholics. A fanatical baker had even refused a Catholic deacon who was his landlord. These schismatics believed themselves strong enough to put those who did not belong to them under interdict. The rout of Catholicism appeared to be an accomplished fact from one end to the other of Africa. Quite recently a mere fraction of the Donatist party had been able to send three hundred and ten bishops to the Council of Bagai, who were to judge the recalcitrants of their own sect. Among these bishops, the terrible Optatus of Thimgad became marked on account of his bloody zeal, rambling round Numidia and even the Proconsulate at the head of armed bands, burning farms and villas, rebaptizing the Catholics by main force, spreading terror on all sides. Augustin knew all this, and when he sought help from the local authorities he was obliged to acknowledge sadly that there was no support to be expected from Count Gildo, who had tyrannized over Carthage and Africa for nearly ten years. This Gildo was a native, a Moor, to whom the ministers of the young Valentinian II had thought it a good stroke of policy to confide the government of the province. Knowing the weakness of the Empire, the Moor only thought of cutting out for himself an independent principality in Africa. He openly favoured Donatism, which was the most numerous and influential party. The Bishop of Thimgad, Optatus, swore only by him, regarding him as his master and his "god." In consequence, he was called "the Gildonian." Against such enemies, the Imperial authority could only act irregularly. Augustin was well aware of it. He knew that the Western Empire was in a critical position. Theodosius had just died, in the midst of war with the usurper Eugenius. The Barbarians, who made up the greater part of the Roman armies, shewed themselves more and more threatening. Alaric, entrenched in the Peloponnesus, was getting ready to invade Italy. However, the all-powerful minister of the young Honorius, the half-Barbarian Stilicho, did his best to conciliate the Catholics, and assured them that he would continue the protection they had had from Theodosius, Augustin therefore turned to the central power. It alone could bring about a little order in the provinces--and then, besides, the new emperors were firmly attached to the defence of Catholicism. The Catholic Bishop of Hippo did his best, accordingly, to keep on good terms with the representatives of the Metropolitan Government--the proconsuls; the proprætors; the counts; and the tribunes, or the secretaries, sent by the Emperor as Government commissioners. There was no suspicion of flattery in his attitude, no idolatry of power. At Milan, Augustin had been near enough to the Court to know what the Imperial functionaries were worth. Now, he simply adapted himself as well as he could to the needs of the moment. And with all that, he could have wished in the depths of his heart that this power were stronger, so as to give the Church more effective support. This cultured man, brought up in the respect of the Roman majesty, was by instinct a faithful servant of the Cæsars. A man who held to authority and tradition, he maintained that obedience is due to princes: "There is a general agreement," he said, "of human society to obey its Kings." In one of his sermons he compares thought, which commands the body, to the Emperor seated upon his throne, and from the depths of his palace dictating orders which set the whole Empire moving--a purely ideal image of the sovereign of that time, but one which pleased his Latin imagination. Alas! Augustin had no illusions about the effect of Imperial edicts; he knew too well how little they were regarded, especially in Africa. So he could hardly count upon Government support for the defence of Catholic unity and peace. He found he must trust to himself; and all his strength was in his intelligence, in his charity, in his deeply compassionate soul. Most earnestly did he wish that Catholicism might be a religion of love, open to all the nations of the earth, even as its Divine Founder Himself had wished. A glowing and dominating intelligence, charity which never tired--those were Augustin's arms. And they were enough. These qualities gave him an overwhelming superiority over all the men of his time. Among them, pagans or Christians, he looks like a colossus. From what a height he crushes, not only the professors who had been his colleagues, such as Nectarius of Guelma or Maximus of Madaura, but the most celebrated writers of his time--Symmachus, for instance, and Ammianus Marcellinus. After reading a treatise of Augustin's, one is astounded by the intellectual meagreness of these last pagans. The narrowness of their mind and platitude of thought is a thing that leaves one aghast. Even the illustrious Apuleius, who belonged to the golden age of African literature, the author of _The Doctrine of Plato_, praises philosophy and the Supreme Being in terms which recall the professions of faith of the chemist and druggist, Homais, in _Madame Bovary_. Nor among those who surrounded Augustin, his fellow-bishops, was there one fit to be compared with him, even at a distance. Except perhaps Nebridius, his dearest friends, Alypius, Severus, or Evodius, are merely disciples, not to say servants of his thought. Aurelius, Primate of Carthage, an energetic administrator, a firm and upright character, if he is not on Augustin's level, is at any rate capable of understanding and supporting him. The others are decent men, like that Samsucius, Bishop of Tours, very nearly illiterate, but full of good sense and experience, and on this ground consulted respectfully by his colleague of Hippo. Or else they are plotters, given to debauch, engaged in business, like Paulus, Bishop of Cataqua, who became involved in risky speculations, swindled the revenue, and by his expensive way of life ruined his diocese. Others, on the Donatist side, are mere swashbucklers, half-brigands, half-fanatics, like the Gildonian Optatus, Bishop of Thimgad, a manifestation in advance of the Mussulman _marabout_ who preached the holy war against the Catholics, raiding, killing, burning, converting by sabre blows and bludgeoning. Amid these insignificant or violent men, Augustin will endeavour to realize to the full the admirable type of bishop, at once spiritual father, protector, and support of his people. He had promised himself to sacrifice no whit of his ideal of Christian perfection. As bishop, he will remain a monk, as he did during his priesthood. Beside the monastery established in Valerius' garden, where it is impossible to receive properly his guests and visitors, he will start another in the episcopal residence. He will conform to the monastic rule as far as his duties allow. He will pray, study the Scriptures, define dogmas, refute heresies. At the same time, he means to neglect nothing of his material work. He has mouths to feed, property to look after, law-cases to examine. He will labour at all that. For this mystic and theorist it means a never-ceasing immolation. First, to give the poor their daily bread. Like all the communities of that time, Hippo maintained a population of beggars. Often enough, the diocesan cash-box was empty. Augustin was obliged to hold out the hand, to deliver from the height of his pulpit pathetic appeals for charity. Then, there are hospitals to be built for the sick, a lodging-house for poor wanderers. The bishop started these institutions in houses bequeathed to the church of Hippo. For reasons of economy, he thought better not to build. That would overload his budget. Next came the greatest of all his cares--the administration of Church property. To increase this property, he stipulated that his clergy should give up all they possessed in favour of the community, thus giving the faithful an example of voluntary poverty. He also accepted gifts from private persons. But he also often refused these--for example, the bequest of a father or mother, who, in a moment of anger, disinherited their children. He did not wish to profit by the bad feelings of parents to plunder orphans. On another side, he objected to engage the Church in suits at law with the exchequer upon receiving certain heritages. When a business man at Hippo left to the diocese his share of profits in the service of boats for carrying Government stores, Augustin came to the conclusion that it would be better to refuse. In case of shipwreck, they would be obliged to make good the lost corn to the Treasury, or else to put the captain and surviving sailors to the torture to prove that the crew was not responsible for the loss of the ship. Augustin would not hear tell of it. "Is it fit," he said, "that a bishop should be a shipowner?... A bishop a torturer? Oh, no; that does not agree at all with a servant of Jesus Christ." The people of Hippo did not share his views. They blamed Augustin's scruples. They accused him of compromising the interests of the Church. One day he had to explain himself from the pulpit: "Well I know, my brothers, that you often say between yourselves: 'Why do not people give anything to the Church of Hippo? Why do not the dying make it their heir? The reason is that Bishop Augustin is too easy; he gives all back to the children; he keeps nothing!' I acknowledge it, I only accept gifts which are good and pious. Whoever disinherits his son to make the Church his heir, let him find somebody willing to accept his gifts. It is not I who will do it, and by God's grace, I hope it will not be anybody.... Yes, I have refused many legacies, but I have also accepted many. Need I name them to you? I will give only one instance. I accepted the heritage of Julian. Why? Because he died without children...." The listeners thought that their bishop really put too fine a point on things. They further reproached him with not knowing how to attract and flatter the rich benefactors. Augustin would not allow, either, that they had any right to force a passing stranger to receive the priesthood and consequently to give up his goods to the poor. All this really was very wise, not only according to the spirit of the Gospel, but according to human prudence. If Augustin, for the sake of the good fame of his Church, did not wish to incur the accusation of grasping and avarice, he dreaded nothing so much as a law-case. To accept lightly the gifts and legacies offered was to lay himself open to expensive pettifogging. Far better to refuse than to lose both his money and reputation. So were reconciled, in this man of prayer and meditation, practical good sense with the high disinterestedness of the Christian teaching. The bishop was disinterested; his people were covetous. The people of those times wished the Church to grow rich, because they were the first to profit by its riches. Now these riches were principally in houses and land. The diocese of Hippo had to deal with many houses and immense _fundi_, upon which lived an entire population of artisans and freed-men, agricultural labourers, and even art-workers--smelters, embroiderers, chisellers on metals. Upon the Church lands, these small people were protected from taxes and the extortions of the revenue officers, and no doubt they found the episcopal government more fatherly and mild than the civil. Augustin, who had made a vow of poverty and given his heritage to the poor, became by a cruel irony a great landowner as soon as he was elected Bishop of Hippo. Doubtless he had stewards under him to look after the property of the diocese. This did not save him from going into details of management and supervising his agents. He heard the complaints, not only of his own tenants, but also of those who belonged to other estates and were victimized by dishonest bailiffs. Anyhow, we have a thousand signs to shew that no detail of country life was unfamiliar to him. On horseback or muleback, he rode for miles through the country about Hippo to visit his vineyards and olivets. He examined, found out things, questioned the workmen, went into the presses and the mills. He knew the grape good to eat, and the grape to make wine with. He pointed out where the ensilage pits had been dug in too marshy land, which endangered the young corn. As a capable landowner he was abreast of the law, careful about the terms of contracts. He knew the formulas employed for sales or benefactions. He saw to it that charcoal was buried around the landmarks in the fields, so that if the post disappeared, its place could be found. And as he was a poet, he gathered on his course a whole booty of rural images which later on went to brighten his sermons. He made ingenious comparisons with the citron-tree, "which is seen to give flowers and fruits all the year if it be watered constantly," or else with the goat "who gets upon her two hind legs to crop the bitter leaves of the wild olive." These journeys in the open air, however tiring they might be, were after all a rest for his overworked brain. But there was one among his episcopal duties which wearied him to disgust. Every day he had to listen to parties in dispute and give judgment. Following recent Imperial legislation, the bishop became judge in civil cases--a tiresome and endless work in a country where tricky quibbling raged with obstinate fury. The litigants pursued Augustin, overran his house, like those fellahs in dirty burnous who block our law-courts with their rags. In the _secretarium_ of the basilica, or under the portico of the court leading to the church, Augustin sat like a Mussulman cadi in the court of the mosque. The emperors had only regulated an old custom of apostolic times in placing the Christians under the jurisdiction of their bishop. In accordance with St. Paul's advice, the priests did their utmost to settle differences among the faithful. Later, when their number had considerably increased, the Government adopted a system not unlike the "Capitulations" in countries under the Ottoman suzerainty. Lawsuits between clerics and laymen could not be equitably judged by civil servants, who were often pagans. Moreover, the parties based their claims on theological principles or religious laws that the arbitrator generally knew nothing about. In these conditions, it was natural enough that the Imperial authority should say to the disputants, "Fight it out among yourselves". And it happened, just at the moment when Augustin began to fill the see of Hippo, that Theodosius broadened still more the judicial prerogatives of the bishops. The unhappy judge was overwhelmed with law-cases. Every day he sat till the hour of his meal, and sometimes the whole day when he fasted. To those who accused him of laziness, he answered: "I can declare on my soul that if it were question of my own convenience, I should like much better to work at some manual labour at certain hours of the day, as the rule is in well-governed monasteries, and have the rest of the time free to read or pray or meditate upon the Holy Scripture, instead of being troubled with all the complications and dull talk of lawsuits." The rascality of the litigants made him indignant. From the pulpit he gave them advice full of Christian wisdom, but which could not have been much relished. A suit at law, according to him, was a loss of time and a cause of sorrow. It would be better to let the opponent have the money, than to lose time and be filled with uneasiness. Nor was this, added the preacher in all good faith, to encourage injustice; for the robber would be robbed in his turn by a greater robber than himself. These reasons seemed only moderately convincing. The pettifoggers did not get discouraged. On the contrary, they infested the bishop with their pleas. As soon as he appeared, they rushed up to him in a mob, surrounded him, kissed his hand and his shoulder, protesting their respect and obedience, urging him, constraining him to busy himself about their affairs. Augustin yielded. But the next day in a vehement sermon he cried out to them: _Discedite a me, maligni!_--"Go far from me, ye wicked ones, and let me study in peace the commandments of my God!" II WHAT WAS HEARD IN THE BASILICA OF PEACE Let us try to see Augustin in his pulpit and in his episcopal city. We cannot do much more than reconstruct them by analogy. Royal Hippo is utterly gone. Bona, which has taken its place, is about a mile and a half away, and the fragments which have been dug out of the soil of the dead city are very inadequate. But Africa is full of Christian ruins, and chiefly of basilicas. Rome has nothing equal to offer. And that is easily understood. The Roman basilicas, always living, have been changed in the course of centuries, and have put on, time after time, the garb forced upon them by the fashion. Those of Africa have remained just as they were--at least in their principal lines--on the morrow of the Arab invasion, as Augustin's eyes had seen them. They are ruins, no doubt, and some very mutilated, but ruins of which no restoration has altered the plan or changed the features. As the traces of Hippo and its church are swept away or deeply buried, we are obliged, in order to get some approximate idea, to turn towards another African town which has suffered less from time and devastation. Theveste with its basilica, the best preserved, the finest and largest in all Africa, can restore to us a little of the look and colour and atmosphere of Hippo in those final years of the fourth century. Ancient Theveste was much larger than the present town, the French Tebessa. This, even reduced to the perimeter of the Byzantine fortress built under Justinian, still surprises the traveller by its singularly original aspect. Amid the wide plains of alfa-grass which surround it, with its quadrangular enclosure, its roads on the projection of the walls behind the battlements, its squat turrets, it has a look as archaic, as strange, as our own Aigues-Mortes amid its marshy fen. Nothing can be more rich and joyous to the eye than the rust which covers its ruins--a complete gilding that one would say had been laid on by the hand of man. It has a little temple which is a wonder and has been compared to the ancient Roman temple--the _Maison Carrée_--at Nîmes. But how much warmer, more living are the stones! The shafts of the columns, and the pilasters of the peristyle, barked by time, seem as scaly and full of sap as the trunks of palm-trees. The carved acanthus-leaves in the capitals of the pillars droop like bunches of palms reddened by the summer. Quite near, at the end of a narrow street, lined with modern and squalid hovels, the triumphal arch of Septimus Severus and of Caracalla extends its luminous bow; and high above the heavy mass of architecture, resting upon slim aerial little columns, a buoyant _ædiculus_ shines like a coral tabernacle or a coffer of yellow ivory. All about, forms in long draperies are huddled. The Numidian burnous has the whiteness of the toga. It has also the same graceful folds. At the sight of them you suddenly feel yourself to be in a strange land--carried back very far across the centuries. No sooner is the vision of antiquity outlined than it grows firm. Down below there, a horseman, clad in white, is framed with his white horse in the moulded cincture of a door. He passes, and upon the white wall of the near tower his shadow rests a moment, like a bas-relief upon the marble of a frieze. Beyond the Byzantine enclosure, the basilica, with its minor buildings, forms another town almost as large as the present Theveste, and also closed in by a belt of towers and ramparts. One is immediately struck by the opulent colour of the stones--rose, grown pale and thinner in the sun; and next, by the solid workmanship and the structural finish. The stones, as in the Greek temples, are placed on top of one another in regular layers: the whole holds together by the weight of the blocks and the polish of the surfaces. The proportions are on a large scale. There was no grudging for the buildings, or the materials, or the land. In front of the basilica is a wide rectangular court bordered with terraces; a portico at the far end; and in the middle four large fountains to water the walk. A flagged avenue, closed by two gateways, divides this court from the basilica, properly so called, which is reached by a staircase between two columns. The staircase leads to the _atrium_ decorated by a Corinthian portico. In the centre is the font for purifications, a huge monolithic bason in the shape of a four-leaved clover. Three doors give entrance from the _atrium_ to the basilica, which is divided by rows of green marble columns into three aisles. The galleries spread out along the side aisles. The floor was in mosaic. In the apse, behind the altar, stood the bishop's throne. Around the main building clustered a great number of others: a baptistry; many chapels (one vaulted in the shape of a three-leaved clover) dedicated, probably, to local martyrs; a graveyard; a convent with its cells, and its windows narrow as loop-holes; stables, sheds, and barns. Sheltered within its walls and towers, amid its gardens and outbuildings, the basilica of Theveste thus early resembled one of our great monasteries of the Middle Age, and also in certain ways the great mosques of Islam--the one at Cordova, or that at Damascus, with their vestibules surrounded by arcades, their basons for purification, and their walks bordered with orange-trees. The faithful and the pilgrims were at home there. They might spend the day stretched upon the flags of the porticoes, in loafing or sleeping in the blue shade of the columns and the cool of the fountains. In the full sense of the word, the church was the House of God, open to all. Very likely the basilicas at Hippo had neither the size nor the splendour of this one. Nor were there very many. At the time Augustin was ordained priest, that is to say, when the Donatists had still a majority in the town, it seems clear that the orthodox community owned but one single church, the _Basilica major_, or Basilica of Peace. Its very name proves this. With the schismatics, "Peace" was the official name for Catholicism. "Basilica of Peace" meant simply "Catholic Basilica." Was not this as much as to say that the others belonged to the dissenters? Doubtless they restored later on, after the promulgations of Honorius, the Leontian Basilica, founded by Leontius, Bishop of Hippo, and a martyr. A third was built by Augustin during his episcopate--the Basilica of the Eight Martyrs of the White Mace. It was in the Major, or Cathedral, that Augustin generally preached. To preach was not only a duty, but one of the privileges of a bishop. As has been said, the bishop alone had the right to preach in his church. This arose from the fact that the African dioceses, although comparatively widespread, had scarcely more people than one of our large parishes to-day. The position of a bishop was like that of one of our parish priests. There were almost as many as there were villages, and they were counted by hundreds. However that may be, preaching, the real apostolic ministry, was an exhausting task. Augustin preached almost every day, and often many times a day--rough work for a man with such a fragile chest. Thus it often happened that, to save his voice, he had to ask his audience to keep still. He spoke without study, in a language very near the language of the common people. Stenographers took down his sermons as he improvised them: hence those repetitions and lengthinesses which astonish the reader who does not know the reason for them. There is no plan evident in these addresses. Sometimes the speaker has not enough time to develop his thought. Then he puts off the continuation till the next day. Sometimes he comes with a subject all prepared, and then treats of another, in obedience to a sudden inspiration which has come to him with a verse of Scripture he has just read. Other times, he comments many passages in succession, without the least care for unity or composition. Let us listen to him in this Basilica of Peace, where during thirty-five years he never failed to announce the Word of God.... The chant of the Psalms has just died away. At the far end of the apse, Augustin rises from his throne with its back to the wall, his pale face distinct against the golden hue of the mosaic. From that place, as from the height of a pulpit, he commands the congregation, looking at them above the altar, which is a plain wooden table placed at the end of the great aisle. The congregation is standing, the men on one side, the women on the other. On the other side of the balustrade which separates them from the crowd, are the widows and consecrated virgins, wrapped in their veils black or purple. Some matrons, rather overdressed, lean forward in the front rank of the galleries. Their cheeks are painted, their eyelashes and eyebrows blackened, their ears and necks overloaded with jewels. Augustin has noticed them; after a while he will read them a lesson. This audience is all alive with sympathy and curiosity before he begins. With all its faith and all its passion it collaborates with the orator. It is turbulent also. It expresses its opinions and emotions with perfect freedom. The democratic customs of those African Churches surprise us to-day. People made a noise as at the theatre or the circus. They applauded; they interrupted the preacher. Certain among them disputed what was said, quoting passages from the Bible. Augustin is thus in perpetual communication with his audience. Nobody has done less soaring than he. He keeps his eye on the facial expressions and the attitudes of his public. He talks to them familiarly. When his sermon is a little lengthy, he wants to know if his listeners are getting tired--he has kept them standing so long! The time of the morning meal draws near. Bellies are fasting, stomachs wax impatient. Then says he to them with loving good-fellowship: "Go, my very dear brothers and sisters, go and restore your strength--I do not mean that of your minds, for I see well that they are tireless, but the strength of your bodies which are the servants of your souls. Go then and restore your bodies so that they may do their work well, and when they are restored, come back here and take your spiritual food." Upon certain days, a blast of the sirocco has passed over the town. The faithful, crowded in the aisles, are stifling, covered with sweat. The preacher himself, who is very much worked up, has his face dripping, and his clothes are all wet. By this he perceives that once more he has been extremely long. He excuses himself modestly. Or again, he jokes like a rough apostle who is not repelled by the odour of a lot of human-kind gathered together. "Oh, what a smell!" says he. "I must have been speaking a long while to-day." These good-natured ways won the hearts of the simple folk who listened to him. He is aware of the charm he exerts on them, and of the sympathy they give him back in gratitude for his charity. "You have loved to come and hear me, my brothers," he said to them. "But whom have you loved? If it is me--ah, even that is good, my brothers, for I want to be loved by you, if I do not want to be loved for myself. As for me, I love you in Christ. And you too, do you love me in Him. Let our love for one another moan together up to God--and that is the moaning of the Dove spoken of in the Scripture...." Although he preaches from the height of his episcopal throne, he is anxious that his hearers should regard him, Christianly, as their equal. So he seems as little of the bishop as possible. "All Christians are servants of the same master.... I have been in the place where you are--you, my brothers, who listen to me. And now, if I give the spiritual bread from the height of this chair to the servants of the Master of us all--well, it is but a few years since I received this spiritual food with them in a lower place. A bishop, I speak to laymen, but I know to how many future bishops I speak...." So he puts himself on an equal footing with his audience by the brotherly accent in his words. It is not Christendom, the Universal Church, or I know not what abstract listener he addresses, but the Africans, the people of Hippo, the parishioners of the Basilica of Peace. He knows the allusions, the comparisons drawn from local customs, which are likely to impress their minds. The day of the festival of St. Crispina, a martyr of those parts, after he had developed his subject at very great length, he asked pardon in these terms: "Let us think, brothers, that I have invited you to celebrate the birthday of the blessed Crispina, and that I have kept up the feast a little too long. Well, might not the same thing happen if some soldier were to ask you to dinner and obliged you to drink more than is wise? Let me do as much for the Word of God, with which you should be drunk and surfeited." Marriages, as well as birthday feasts, supplied the orator with vivid allegories. Thus he says that when a marriage feast is made in a house, organs play upon the threshold, and musicians and dancers begin to sing and to act their songs. And yet how poor are these earthly enjoyments which pass away so soon!... "In the House of God, the feast has no end." Continually, through the commentaries on the Psalms, like comparisons rise to the surface--parables suited to stir the imagination of Africans. A thousand details borrowed from local habits and daily life enliven the exegesis of the Bishop of Hippo. The mules and horses that buck when one is trying to cure them, are his symbol for the recalcitrant Donatists. The little donkeys, obstinate and cunning, that trot in the narrow lanes of Algerian _casbahs_, appear here and there in his sermons. The gnats bite in them. The unendurable flies plaster themselves in buzzing patches on the tables and walls. Then there are the illnesses and drugs of that country: the ophthalmias and collyrium. What else? The tarentulas that run along the beams on the ceiling; the hares that scurry without warning between the horses' feet on the great Numidian plains. Elsewhere, he reminds his audience of those men who wear an earring as a talisman; of the dealings between traders and sailors--a comparison which would go home to this seafaring people. The events of the time, the little happenings of the moment, glide into his sermons. At the same time as the service in church to-day, there is going to be horse-racing at the circus, and fights of wild beasts or gladiators at the arena. In consequence, there will not be many people in the Basilica. "So much the better," says Augustin. "My lungs will get some rest." Another time, it is advertised through the town that most sensational attractions will be offered at the theatre--there will be a scene representing the open sea. The preacher laughs at those who have deserted the church to go and see this illusion: "They will have," says he, "the sea on the stage; but we, brothers--ah, we shall have our port in Jesus Christ." This Saturday, while he is preaching, some Jewish women set themselves to dance and sing on the terraces of the near houses, by way of celebrating the Sabbath. In the basilica, the bashing of the crotolos can be heard, and the thuds of the tambourines. "They would do better," says Augustin, "to work and spin their wool." He dwells upon the catastrophes which were then convulsing the Roman world. The news of them spread with wonderful rapidity. Alaric's Barbarians have taken Rome and put it to fire and sword. At Jerusalem has been an earthquake, and the bishop John organizes a subscription for the sufferers throughout Christendom. At Constantinople, globes of fire have been seen in the sky. The _Serapeum_ of Alexandria has just been destroyed in a riot.... All these things follow each other in lively pictures, without any apparent order, throughout Augustin's sermons. It is not he who divides his discourse into three parts, and refrains from passing to the second till he has learnedly expounded the first. Whether he comments upon the Psalms or the Gospels, his sermons are no more than explanations of the Scriptures which he interprets, sometimes in a literal sense, and sometimes in an allegoric. Let us acknowledge it--his allegoric discourses repel us by their extreme subtilty, sometimes by their bad taste; and when he confines himself to the letter of the text, he stumbles among small points of grammar which weary the attention. We follow him no longer. We think his audience was very obliging to listen so long--and on their feet--to these endless dissertations.... And then, suddenly, a great lyrical and oratorical outburst which carries us away--a wind which blows from the high mountains, and in the wink of an eye sweeps away like dust all those fine-spun reasonings. He is fond of certain commonplaces, and also of certain books of the Bible--for instance, _The Song of Songs_ and the Gospel of St. John, the one satisfying in him the intellectual, and the other the mystic of love. He confronts the verse of the Psalm: "Before the morning star have I begotten thee," with the sublime opening of the Fourth Gospel: "In the beginning was the Word." He lingers upon the beauty of Christ: _Speciosus forma præ filiis hominum_, "Thou art fairer than the children of men." This is why he is always repeating with the Psalmist: "Thy face, Lord, have I sought"--_Quæsivi vultum tuum, Domine._ And the orator, carried away by enthusiasm, adds: "Magnificent saying! Nothing more divine could be said. Those feel it who truly love." Another of his favourite subjects is the kindness of God: _Videte et gustate quam mitis sit Dominus_--"O taste and see that the Lord is good." Naught can equal the pleasure of this contemplation, of this life in God. Augustin conceives it as a musician who has fathomed the secret of numbers. "Let your life," he said, "be one prolonged song.... We do not sing only with the voice and lips when we intone a canticle, but in us is an inward singing, because there is also in us Some One who listens...." To live this rhythmic and divine life we must get free of ourselves, give ourselves up utterly in a great outburst of charity. "Why," he cries--"Oh, why do you hesitate to give yourselves lest you should lose yourselves? It is rather by not giving yourselves that you lose yourselves. Charity herself speaks to you by the mouth of Wisdom and upholds you against the terror which fills you at the sound of those words: 'Give yourself.' If some one wanted to sell you a piece of land, he would say to you: 'Give me your gold.' And for something else, he would say: 'Give me your silver, give me your money.' Listen to what Charity says to you by the mouth of Wisdom: 'My son, give me thy heart.' 'Give me,' quoth she. Give what? 'My son, give me thy heart.'... Thy heart was not happy when it was governed by thee, and was thine, for it turned this way and that way after gawds, after impure and dangerous loves. 'Tis from there thy heart must be drawn. Whither lift it up? Where to place it? 'Give me thy heart,' says Wisdom, 'let it be mine, and it will belong to thee for always.'" After the chant of love, the chant of the Resurrection. _Cantate mihi canticum novum_--"Sing to me a new song!" Augustin repeats these words over and over again. "We wish to rise from the dead," cry souls craving for eternity. And the Church answers: "Verily, I say unto you, that you shall rise from the dead. Resurrection of bodies, resurrection of souls, ye shall be altogether reborn." Augustin has explained no dogma more passionately. None was more pleasing to the faithful of those times. Ceaselessly they begged to be strengthened in the conviction of immortality and of meeting again brotherlike in God. With what intrepid delight it rose--this song of the Resurrection in those clear African basilicas swimming in light, with all their brilliant ornamentation of mosaics and marbles of a thousand colours! And what artless and confident language those symbolic figures spoke which peopled their walls--the lambs browsing among clusters of asphodels, the doves, the green trees of Paradise. As in the Gospel parables, the birds of the field and farmyard, the fruits of the earth, figured the Christian truths and virtues. Their purified forms accompanied man in his ascension towards God. Around the mystic chrisms, circled garlands of oranges and pears and pomegranates. Cocks, ducks, partridges, flamingoes, sought their pasture in the Paradisal fields painted upon the walls of churches and cemeteries. Those young basilicas were truly the temples of the Resurrection, where all the creatures of the Ark saved from the waters had found their refuge. Never more in the centuries to follow shall humanity know this frank joy at having triumphed over death--this youth of hope. III THE BISHOP'S BURTHEN Augustin is not only the most human of all the saints, he is also one of the most amiable in all the senses of that hackneyed word--amiable according to the world, amiable according to Christ. To be convinced of this, he should be observed in his dealings with his hearers, with his correspondents, even with those he attacks--with the bitterest enemies of the faith. Preaching, the administration of property, and sitting in judgment were but a part of that episcopal burthen, _Sarcina episcopatus_, under which he so often groaned. He had furthermore to catechize, baptize, direct consciences, guard the faithful against error, and dispute with all those who threatened Catholicism. Augustin was a light of the Church. He knew it. Doing his best, with admirable conscientiousness and charity he undertook these tasks. God knows what it must have cost this Intellectual to fulfil precisely all the duties of his ministry, down to the humblest. What he would have liked, above all, was to pass his life in studying the Scriptures and meditating on the dogmas--not from a love of trifling with theories, but because he believed such knowledge necessary to whoever gave forth the Word of God. Most of the priests of that age arrived at the priesthood without any previous study. They had to improvise, as quick as they could, a complete education in religious subjects. We are left astounded before the huge labour which Augustin must have given to acquire his. Before long he even dominated the whole exegetical and theological knowledge of his time. In his zeal for divine letters, he knew sleep no more. And yet he did not neglect any of his tasks. Like the least of our parish priests, he prepared the neophytes for the Sacraments. He was an incomparable catechist, so clear-sighted and scrupulous that his instructions may still be taken as models by the catechists of to-day. Neither did he, as an aristocrat of the intelligence, only trouble himself with persons of culture, and leave to his deacons the care of God's common people. All had a right to his lessons, the simple peasants as well as the rich and scholarly. One day, a farmer he was teaching walked off and left him there in the middle of his discourse. The poor man, who had fasted, and now listened to his bishop standing, was faint from hunger and felt his legs tremble under him. He thought it better to run away than to fall down exhausted at the feet of the learned preacher. With his knowledge of men, Augustin carefully studied the kind of people his catechumens were, and adapted his instructions to the character of each. If they were city folk, Carthaginians, used to spending their time in theatres and taverns, drunken and lazy, he took a different tone with them from what he used with rustics who had never left their native _gourbi_. If he were dealing with fashionable people who had a taste for literature, he did not fail to exalt the beauties of the Scripture, although, he would say, they had there a very trifling attraction compared to the truths contained in it. Of all the catechumens, the hardest to deal with, the most fearsome in his eyes, were the professors--the rhetoricians and the grammarians. These men are bloated with vanity, puffed up with intellectual pride. Augustin knew something about that. It will be necessary to rouse them violently, and before anything else, to exhort them to humility of mind. The good saint goes further. Not only is he anxious about the souls, but also about the bodies of his listeners. Are they comfortable for listening? As soon as they feel tired they must not hesitate to sit down, as is the usage in the basilicas beyond seas. "Would not our arrogance be unbearable," he asked, "if we forbade men who are our brothers to sit down in our presence, and, much more, men whom we ought to try with all possible care to make our brothers?..." If they are seen to yawn, "then things ought to be said to them to awaken their attention, or to scatter the sad thoughts which may have come into their minds." The catechist should shew, now a serene joy--the joy of certainty; now a gaiety which charms people into belief; "and always that light-heartedness we should have in teaching." Even if we ourselves are sad from this reason or that, let us remember that Jesus Christ died for those who are listening to us. Is not the thought of bringing Him disciples enough to make us joyful? Bishop Augustin set the example for his priests. It is not enough to have prepared the conversion of his catechumens with the subtlety of the psychologist, and such perfect Christian charity; but he accompanies them to the very end, and charges them once more before the baptismal piscina. How he is changed! One thinks of the boon-fellow of Romanianus and of Manlius Theodorus, of the young man who followed the hunts at Thagaste, and who held forth on literature and philosophy in a select company before the beautiful horizons of the lake of Como. Here he is now with peasants, slaves, sailors, and traders. And he takes pleasure in their society. It is his flock. He ought to love it with all his soul in Jesus Christ. What an effort and what a victory upon himself an attitude so strange reveals to us! For really this liking for mean people was not natural to him. He must have put an heroic will-power into it, helped by Grace. A like sinking of his preferences is evident in the director of consciences he became. Here he was obliged to give himself more thoroughly. He was at the mercy of the souls who questioned him, who consulted him as their physician. He spends his time in advising them, and exercises a never-failing supervision of their morals. It is an almost discouraging enterprise to bend these hardened pagans--above all, these Africans--to Christian discipline. Augustin is continually reproaching their drunkenness, gluttony, and lust. The populace were not the only ones to get drunk and over-eat themselves. The rich at their feasts literally stuffed till they choked. The Bishop of Hippo never lets a chance go by to recall them to sobriety. Oftener still, he recalls them to chastity. He writes long letters on this subject which are actual treatises. The morals of the age and country are fully disclosed in them. Husbands are found loudly claiming a right to free love for themselves, while they force their wives to conjugal fidelity. The adultery they allow themselves, they punish with death in their wives. They make an abusive practice of divorce. Upon the most futile reasons, they send the wife the _libellus repudii_--the bill repudiating the marriage--as the various peoples of Islam do still. This society in a state of transition was always creating cases of conscience for strict Christians. For example: If a man cast off his wife under pretext of adultery, might he marry again? Augustin held that no marriage can be dissolved as long as both parties are living. But may not this prohibition provoke husbands to kill their adulterous wives, so as to be free to take a new wife? Another problem: A catechumen divorced under the pagan law and since remarried, presents himself for baptism. Is he not an adulterer in the eyes of the Church? A man who lives with a woman and does not hide it, who even declares his firm intention of continuing to live with his concubine--can he be admitted to baptism? Augustin has to answer all these questions, and go into the very smallest details of casuistry. Is it forbidden to eat the meats consecrated to idols, even when a man or woman is dying of hunger? May one enter into agreements with native camel-drivers and carriers who swear by their gods to keep the bargain? May a lie be told in certain conditions?--say, so as to get among heretics in pretending to be one of themselves, and thus be able to spy on them and denounce them? May adultery be practised with a woman who promises in exchange to point out heretics?... The Bishop of Hippo severely condemns all these devious or shameful ways, all these compromises which are contrary to the pure moral teaching of the Gospel. But he does this without affecting intolerance and rigidity, and with a reminder that the evil of sin lies altogether in the intention, and in the consent of the will. In a word, one must tolerate and put up with what one is powerless to hinder. Other questions, which it is quite impossible to repeat here, give us a strange idea of the corruption of pagan morals. Augustin had all he could do to maintain the Christian rule in such surroundings, where the Christians themselves were more or less tainted with paganism. But if this troop of sinners and backsliders was hard to drive, the devout were perhaps harder. There were the _continents_--the widowers and widows who had made a vow of chastity and found this vow heavy; the consecrated virgins who lived in too worldly a fashion; the nuns who rebelled against their spiritual director or their superior; the monks, either former slaves who did not want to do another stroke of work, or charlatans who played upon public credulity in selling talismans and miraculous ointments. Then, the married women who refused themselves to their husbands; and those who gave away their goods to the poor without their husbands' consent; and also the proud virgins and widows who despised and condemned marriage. Then came the crowd of pious souls who questioned Augustin on points of dogma, who wanted to know all, to clear up everything; those who thought they should be able here below to see God face to face, to know how we shall arise, and who asked if the angels had bodies.... Augustin complains that they are annoying, when he has so many other things to trouble him, and that they take him from his studies. But he tries charitably to satisfy them all. Besides all this, he was obliged to keep up a correspondence with a great number of people. In addition to his friends and fellow-bishops, he wrote to unknown people and foreigners; to men in high place and to lowly people; to the proconsuls, the counts and the vicars of Africa; to the very mighty Olympius, Master of the Household to the Emperor Honorius; or again, "to the Right Honourable Lady Maxima," "to the Illustrious Ladies Proba and Juliana," "to the Very Holy Lady Albina"--women who belonged either to the provincial nobility, or to the highest aristocracy of Rome. To whom did he not write?... And what is admirable in these letters is that he does not answer negligently to get rid of a tiresome duty. Almost all of them are full of substantial teaching, long thought over. Many were intended to be published--they are practically charges. And yet, however grave the tone of them may be, the cultivated man of the world he had been may be traced. His correspondents, after the fashion of the time, overwhelm the bishop with the most fulsome praises. These he accepts, with much ceremony indeed, but he does accept them as evidence of the charity of his brethren. Ingenuously, he does his best to return them. Let us not grow over-scandalized because our men of letters of to-day have debased the value of complimentary language by squandering and exaggerating it. The most austere cotemporaries of Augustin, and Augustin himself, outdid them by a long way in the art and in the abuse of compliments. Paulinus of Nola, always beflowered and elegant, wrote to Augustin: "Your letters are a luminous collyrium spread over the eyes of my mind." Augustin, who remonstrated with him upon the scarcity of his own letters, replies in language which our own _Précieuses_ would not have disowned: "What! You allow me to pass two summers--and two African summers!--in such thirst?... Would to God that you would allow enter to the opulent banquet of your book, the long fast from your writings which you have put me upon during all a year! If this banquet be not ready, I shall not give over my complaints, unless, indeed, that in the time between, you send me something to keep up my strength." A certain Audax, who begged the honour of a special letter from the great man, calls him "the oracle of the Law"; protests that the whole world celebrates and admires him; and finally, at the end of his arguments, conjures him in verse to "Let fall upon me the dew of thy divine word." Augustin, with modesty and benignity, returns his compliments, but not without slipping into his reply a touch of banter: "Allow me to point out to you that your fifth line has seven feet. Has your ear betrayed you, or did you want to find out if I was still capable of judging these things?"... Truly, he is always capable of judging these things, nor is he sorry to have it known. A young Greek named Dioscorus, who is passing through Carthage, questions him upon the philosophy of Cicero. Augustin exclaims at any one daring to interrupt a bishop about such trifles. Then, little by little, he grows milder, and carried away by his old passion, he ends by sending the young man quite a dissertation on this good subject. Those are among his innocent whimsicalities. Then, alongside of letters either too literary, or erudite, or profound, there are others which are simply exquisite, such as the one he wrote to a young Carthage girl called Sapida. She had embroidered a tunic for her brother. He was dead, and she asked Augustin kindly to wear this tunic, telling him that if he would do this, it would be a great comfort for her in her grief. The bishop consented very willingly. "I accept this garment," he said to her, "and I have begun to wear it before writing to you...." Then gently he pities her sorrow, and persuades her to resignation and hope. "We should not rebuke people for weeping over the dead who are dear to them.... When we think of them, and through habit we look for them still around us, then the heart breaks, and the tears fall like the blood of our broken heart...." At the end, in magnificent words, he chants the hymn of the Resurrection: "My daughter, your brother lives in his soul, if in his body he sleeps. Does not the sleeper wake? God, who has received his soul, will put it again in the body He has taken from him, not to destroy it--oh, no, but some day to give it to him back." * * * * * This correspondence, voluminous as it is, is nothing beside his numberless treatises in dogma and polemic. These were the work of his life, and it is by these posterity has known him. The theologian and the disputer ended by hiding the man in Augustin. To-day, the man perhaps interests us more. And this is a mistake. He himself would not have allowed for a moment that his _Confessions_ should be preferred to his treatises on Grace. To study, to comment the Scriptures, to draw more exact definitions from the dogmas--he saw no higher employment for his mind, or obligation more important for a bishop. To believe so as to understand, to understand the better to believe--it is a ceaseless movement of the intelligence which goes from faith to God and from God to faith. He throws himself into this great labour without a shade of any attempt to make literature, with a complete sinking of his tastes and his personal opinions, and in it he entirely forgets himself. One single time he has thought of himself, and it is precisely in the _Confessions_, the spirit of which modern people understand so ill, and where they try to find something quite different from what the author intended. He composed them just after he was raised to the bishopric, to defend himself against the calumnies spread about his conduct. It seems as if he wanted to say to his detractors: "You believe me guilty. Well, I am so, and more perhaps than you think, but not in the way you think." A great religious idea alters this personal defence. It is less a confession, or an excuse for his faults, in the present sense of the word, than a continual glorification of the divine mercy. It is less the shame of his sins he confesses, than the glory of God. After that, he never thought again of anything but Truth and the Church, and the enemies of Truth and the Church: the Manichees, the Arians, the Pelagians--the Donatists, above all. He lets no error go by without refuting it, no libel without an answer. He is always on the breach. He might well be compared, in much of his writings, to one of our fighting journalists. He put into this generally thankless business a wonderful vigour and dialectical subtlety. Always and everywhere he had to have the last word. He brought eloquence to it, yet more charity--sometimes even wit. And lastly, he had a patience which nothing could dishearten. He repeats the same things a hundred times over. These tiresome repetitions, into which he was driven by the obstinacy of his opponents, caused him real pain. Every time it became necessary, he took up again the endless demonstration without letting himself grow tired. The moment it became a question of the Truth, Augustin could not see that he had any right to keep quiet. In Africa and elsewhere they made fun of what they called his craze for scribbling. He himself, in his _Retractations_, is startled by the number of his works. He turns over the Scripture saying which the Donatists amusingly opposed to him: _Væ mullum loquentibus_--"Woe unto them of many words." But calling God to witness, he says to Him: _Væ tacentibus de te_--"Woe unto those who keep silent upon Thee." In the eyes of Augustin, the conditions were such that silence would have been cowardly. And elsewhere he adds: "They may believe me or not as they will, but I like much better to read than to write books...." In any case, his modesty was evident. "I am myself," he acknowledges, "almost always dissatisfied with what I say." To the heretics he declares, with a glance back at his own errors, "I know by experience how easy it is to be wrong." When there is some doubt in questions of dogma, he does not force his explanations, but suggests them to his readers. How much intellectual humility is in that prayer which ends his great work on the Trinity: "Lord my God, one Trinity, if in these books I have said anything which comes from Thee, may Thou and Thy chosen receive it. But if it is from me it comes, may Thou and Thine forgive me." And again, how much tolerance and charity in those counsels to the faithful of his diocese who, having been formerly persecuted by the Donatists, now burned to get their revenge: "It is the voice of your bishop, my brothers, sounding in your ears. He implores you, all of you who are in this church, to keep yourselves from insulting those who are outside, but rather to pray that they may enter with you into communion." Elsewhere, he reminds his priests that they must preach at the Jews in a spirit of friendliness and loving-kindness, without troubling to know if they listen with gratitude or indignation. "We ought not," said he, "to bear ourselves proudly against these broken branches of Christ's tree."... This charity and moderation took nothing from the firmness of his character. This he proved in a startling way in the discussion he had with St. Jerome over a passage In the Epistle to the Galatians, and upon the new translation, of the Bible which Jerome had undertaken. The solitary of Bethlehem saw a "feint" on the part of St. Paul in the disputed passage: Augustin said, a "lie." What, then, would become of evangelic truth if in such a place the Apostle had lied? And would not this be a means of authorizing all the exegetical fantasies of heresiarchs, who already rejected as altered or forged all verses of the holy books which conflicted with their own doctrines?... As to the new translation of the Bible, it would bring about trouble in the African churches, where they were accustomed to the ancient version of the Septuagint. The mistranslations, pointed out by Jerome in the old version, would upset the faithful and lead them to suspect that the entire Scripture was false. In this double matter, Augustin defended at once orthodoxy and tradition from very praiseworthy reasons of prudence. Jerome retorted in a most aggressive and offensive tone. He flatly accused the Bishop of Hippo of being jealous of him and of wishing to cut out a reputation for learning at his expense. In front of his younger and more supple adversary, he took on the air of an old wrestler who was still capable of knocking out any one who had the audacity to attack him. He hurled at Augustin this phrase heavy with menaces: "The tired ox stands firmer than ever on his four legs." For all that, Augustin stuck to his opinion, and he confined himself to replying gently: "In anything I say, I am not only always ready to receive your observations upon what you find wounding and contrary to your feelings, but I even ask your advice as earnestly as I can."... IV AGAINST "THE ROARING LIONS" One day (this was soon after he became bishop) Augustin went to visit a Catholic farmer in the suburbs of Hippo, whose daughter had been lessoned by the Donatists, and had just enrolled herself among their consecrated virgins. The father at first had shouted at the deserter, and flogged her unmercifully by way of improving her state of mind. Augustin, when he heard of the affair, condemned the farmer's brutality and declared that he would never receive the girl back into the community unless she came of her own free will. He then went out to the place to try and settle the matter. On the way, as he was crossing an estate which belonged to a Catholic matron, he fell in with a priest of the Donatist Church at Hippo. The priest at once began to insult him and his companions, and yelled: "Down with the traitors! Down with the persecutors!" And he vomited out abominations against the matron herself who owned the land. As much from prudence as from Christian charity, Augustin did not answer. He even prevented those with him from falling upon the insulter. Incidents of this kind happened almost every day. About the same time, the Donatists of Hippo made a great noise over the rebaptizing of another apostate from the Catholic community. This was a good-for-nothing loafer who beat his old mother, and the bishop severely rebuked his monstrous conduct. "Well, as you talk in that tone of voice," said the loafer, "I'm going to be a Donatist." Through bravado, he continued to ill-treat the poor old woman, and to make the worst kind of threats. He roared in savage fury: "Yes, I'll become a Donatist, and I'll have your blood." And the young ruffian did really go over to the Donatist party. In accordance with the custom among the heretics, he was solemnly rebaptized in their basilica, and he exhibited himself on the platform clad in the white robe of the purified. People in Hippo were much shocked. Augustin, full of indignation, addressed his protests to Proculeianus, the Donatist bishop. "What! is this man, all bloody with a murder in his conscience, to walk about for eight days in white robes as a model of innocence and purity?" But Proculeianus did not condescend to reply. These cynical proceedings were trifling compared to the vexations which the Donatists daily inflicted on their opponents. Not only did they tamper with Augustin's people, but the country dwellers of the Catholic Church were continually interfered with on their lands, pillaged, ravaged, and burned out by mobs of fanatical brigands who organized a rule of terror from one end of Numidia to the other. Supported in secret by the Donatists, they called themselves "the Athletes of Christ." The Catholics had given them the contemptuous name of "Circoncelliones," or prowlers around cellars, because they generally plundered cellars and grain-houses. Troops of fanaticized and hysterical women rambled round with them, scouring the country like your true bacchantes, clawing the unfortunate wretches who fell into their hands, burning farms and harvests, broaching barrels of wine and oil, and crowning these exploits by orgies with "the Athletes of Christ." When they saw a haystack blazing in the fields, the country-folk were panic-stricken--the "Circoncelliones" were not far off. Soon they appeared, brandishing their clubs and bellowing their war cry: _Deo laudes!_--"Praise be to God." "Your shout," said Augustin to them, "is more dreaded by our people than the roaring of lions." Something had to be done to quell these furious monsters, and to resist the encroachments and forcible acts of the heretics. These, by way of frightening the Catholic bishops, told them roundly: "We don't want any of your disputes, and we are going to rebaptize just as it suits us. We are going to lay snares for your sheep and to rend them like wolves. As for you, if you are good shepherds, keep quiet!" Augustin was not a man to keep quiet, nor yet to spend his strength in small local quarrels. He saw big; he did not imprison himself within the limits of his diocese. He knew that Numidia and a good part of Africa were in the hands of the Donatists; that they had a rival primate to the Catholic primate at Carthage; that they had even sent a Pope of their community to Rome. In a word, they were in the majority. Everywhere a dissenting Church rose above the orthodox Church, when it did not succeed in stifling it altogether. At all costs the progress of this sect must be stopped. In Augustin's eyes there was no more urgent work. For him and his flock it was a question of insuring their lives, since they were attacked even in their fields and houses. From the moment he first came to Hippo, as a simple priest, he had thrown himself intrepidly into this struggle. He never ceased till Donatism was conquered and trampled underfoot. To establish peace and Catholic unity everywhere was the great labour of his episcopate. Who, then, were these terrible Donatists whom we have been continually striking against since the beginning of this history? It would soon be a century since they had been disturbing and desolating Africa. Just after the great persecution of Diocletian, the sect was born, and it increased with amazing rapidity. During this persecution, evidence had not been wanting of the moral slackness in the African Church. A large number of lay people apostatized, and a good number of bishops and priests handed over to the pagan authorities, besides the devotional objects, the Scriptures and the muniments of their communities. In Numidia, and especially at Constantine, scandalous scenes took place. The cowardice of the clergy was lamentable. Public opinion branded with the names of _traditors_, or traitors, those who had weakened and given over the sacred books to the pagans. The danger once over, the Numidians, whose behaviour had been so little brilliant, determined to redeem themselves by audacity, and to prove with superb impudence that they had been braver than the others. So they set themselves to shout _traditor_ against whoever displeased them, and particularly against those of Carthage and the Proconsulate. At bottom it was the old rivalry between the two Africas, East and West. Under the reign of Constantine a peace had been patched up, when it fell out that a new Bishop of Carthage had to be elected, and the Archdeacon Cæcilianus, whose name was put forward, was accused of preventing the faithful from visiting the martyrs in their prisons. The zealots contended that in collusion with his bishop, Mensurius, he had given up the Holy Scriptures to the Roman authorities to be burned. The election promised to be stormy. The supporters of the Archdeacon, who feared the hostility of the Numidian bishops, did not wait for their arrival. They hurried things over. Cæcilianus was elected and consecrated by three bishops of the district, of whom one was a certain Felix of Abthugni. At once the opposite clan, backed up by the Numidians, objected. At their head was a wealthy Spanish woman named Lucilla, an unbalanced devotee, who, it seemed, always carried about her person a bone of a martyr, and a doubtful one at that. She would ostentatiously kiss her relic before receiving the Eucharist. The Archdeacon Cæcilianus forbade this devotion as superstitious, and thus made a relentless enemy of the fanatical Spaniard. All the former accusations were renewed against him, and it was added that Felix of Abthugni, who had consecrated him, was a _traditor_. Hence the election was void, by the single fact of the unworthiness of the consecrating bishops. Lucilla, having bribed a section of the bishops assembled in council, Cæcilianus was deposed, and the deacon Majorinus elected in his room. He himself was soon after succeeded by Donatus, an active, clever, and energetic man, who organized resistance so ably, and who represented so well the spirit of the sect, that he left it his name. Henceforth, Donatism enters into history. But Cæcilianus had on his side the bishops overseas and the Imperial Government. The Pope of Rome and the Emperor recognized him as legitimately elected. Besides that, he cleared himself of all the grievances urged against him. Finally, an inquiry, conducted by laymen, proved that Felix of Abthugni was not a _traditor_. The Donatists appealed to Constantine, then to two Councils convoked successively at Rome and Arles. Everywhere they were condemned. Moreover, the Council of Arles declared that the character of him who confers the Sacraments has no influence whatever on their validity. Thus, baptism and ordination, even conferred by a _traditor_, were canonically sound. This decision was regarded as an abominable heresy by the Donatists. As a matter of fact, there was an old African tradition, accepted by St. Cyprian himself, that an unworthy priest could not administer the Sacraments. The local prejudice would not yield: all were rebaptized who had been baptized by the Catholics--that is to say, by the supporters of the _traditors_. The theological question was complicated with a question of property which was all but insoluble. Since the Donatist bishops were resolved to separate from the Catholic communion, did they mean to give up, with their title, their basilicas and the property belonging to their churches? Supposing that they themselves were disinterested, they had behind them the crowd of clients and land-tillers who got their living out of the Church, and dwelt on Church property. Never would these people allow a rival party to alter the direction of the charities, to plant themselves in their fields and their _gourbis_, to expel them from their cemeteries and basilicas. Other reasons, still deeper perhaps, induced the Donatists to persevere in the schism. These religious dissensions were agreeable to that old spirit of division which at all times has been the evil genius of Africa. The Africans have always felt the need of segregating themselves from one another in hostile _cofs_. They hate each other from one village to another--for nothing, just, for the pleasure of hating and felling each other to the ground. At bottom, here is what Donatism really was: It was an extra sharp attack of African individualism. These rebels brought in nothing new in dogma. They would not even have been heretics without their claim to rebaptize. They limited themselves to retain a position gained long ago; to keep their churches and properties, or to seize those of the Catholics upon the pretence that they were themselves the legitimate owners. With that, they affected a respect for tradition, an austerity in morals and discipline, which made them perfect puritans. Yes, they were the pure, the irreconcilables, who alone had not bent before the Roman officials. All this was very pleasing to the discontented and quarrelsome, and caressed the popular instinct in its tendency to particularism. That is why the sect became, little by little, mistress of almost the whole country. Then it subdivided, crumbled up into little churches which excommunicated each other. In Southern Numidia, the citadels of orthodox Donatism, so to speak, were Thimgad and Bagai. Carthage, with its primate, was the official centre. But in the Byzacena and Tripolitana Regio, there were the Maximianists, and the Rogatists in Mauretania, who had cut themselves off from the Great Church. These divisions of the schism corresponded closely enough to the natural compartments of North Africa. There must be some incompatibility of temper between these various regions. To this day, Algiers prides itself on not thinking like Constantine, which does not think like Bona or like Tunis. Are we to see in Donatism a nationalist or separatist movement directed against the Roman occupation? That would be to transport quite modern ideas into antiquity. No more in Augustin's time than in our own was there such a thing as African nationality. But if the sectaries had no least thought of separating from Rome, it is none the less true that they were in rebellion against her representatives, temporal as well as spiritual. Supposing that Rome had yielded to them--an impossible event, of course--that would have meant a surrender to the claims of Africans who wished to be masters of their property as well as of their religious beliefs in their own country. What more could they have wanted? It little mattered to them who was the nominal master, provided that they had the realities of government in their hands. Altogether, Donatism is a regionalist revindication, very strongly characterized. It is a remarkable fact that it was among the indigenous population, ignorant of Latin, that the most of its adherents were recruited. * * * * * Such was the position of the Church in Africa when Augustin was named Bishop of Hippo. He judged it at once, with his clear-sightedness, his strong good sense, his broad outlook of a Roman citizen freed from the smallnesses of a local spirit, his Christian idealism which took no heed of the accidents or considerations of worldly prosperity. What! was Catholicism to become an African religion, a restricted sect, wretchedly tied to the letter of tradition, to the exterior practices of worship? To reign in a little corner of the world--did Christ die for that? Never! Christ died for the wide world. The only limits of His Church are the limits of the universe. And besides, in this resolution to exclude, what becomes of the great principle of Charity? It is by charity, above all, that we are Christians. Faith without love is a faith stagnant and dead.... Augustin also foresaw the consequences of spiritual separation; he had them already under his eyes. The Church is the great spring, not only of love, but of intelligence. Once cut away from this reviving spring, Donatism would become dry and stunted like a branch stripped from a tree. The deep sense of its dogmas would become impoverished as its works emptied themselves of the spirit of charity. Obstinacy, narrowness, lack of understanding, fanaticism, and cruelty--there you had the inevitable fruits of schism. Augustin knew the rudeness and ignorance of his opponents, even of the most cultivated among them: he might well ask himself in anguish what would become of the African Church deprived of the benefit of Roman culture, isolated from the great intellectual current which united all the churches beyond seas. Finally, he knew his fellow-countrymen; he knew that the Donatists, even victorious, even sole masters of the land, would turn against themselves the fury they now satisfied against the Catholics, and never stop tearing each other in pieces. Here was now nearly a hundred years that they had kept Africa in fire and blood. This meant before very long a return to barbarism. Separated from Catholicism, they would really separate from the Empire and even from civilization. And so it was that in fighting for Catholic unity, Augustin fought for the Empire and for civilization. Confronted with these barbarians and sectaries, his attitude could not be doubtful for a single moment. He must do his best to bring them back to the Church. It was only a matter of hitting upon the most effectual means. Preaching, for an orator such as he was, should be an excellent weapon. His eloquence, his dialectic, his profane and sacred learning, gave him an immense superiority over the defenders of the opposite side. He certainly kept in the Church many Catholics who were ready to apostatize. But before the crowd of schismatics, all these high gifts were as good as lost. The people were in no wise anxious to know upon which side truth was to be found. They were Donatists, as they were Numidians or Carthaginians, without knowing why--because everybody about them was. Many might have answered like that grammarian of Constantine, who told the Inquisitors with astute simplicity: "I am a professor of Roman literature, a teacher of Latin grammar. My father was a decurion at Constantine; my grandfather was a soldier and had served in the guard. Our family is of Moorish blood.... As for me, I am quite ignorant about the origin of the schism: I am just one of the ordinary faithful of the people called Christians. When I was at Carthage, Bishop Secundus came there one day. I heard tell that they found out that Bishop Cæcilianus had been ordained irregularly by I don't know who, and they elected another bishop against him. That's how the schism began at Carthage. I have no means of knowing much about the origin of the schism, because there has never been more than one church in our city. If there has been a schism here, we know nothing about it." When a grammarian talked thus, what could have been the thoughts of agricultural labourers, city workmen, and slaves? They belonged to an estate, or a quarter of a town, where no other faith than theirs had ever been professed. They were Donatists like their employers, like their neighbours, like the other people of the _cof_ to which they had belonged from father to son. The theological side of the question left them absolutely indifferent. If Augustin tried to debate with them, they refused to listen and referred him to their bishops. That was the word of command. The bishops, on their side, avoided all discussion. Augustin tried in vain to arrange an argument with Proculeianus, his Donatist colleague at Hippo. And if some of them shewed themselves more obliging, the evasions and reticences of the antagonist, and sometimes outside circumstances, made the debate utterly futile. At Thubursicum the audience raised such a noise in the place where Augustin was debating with the bishop Fortunius, that they were no longer able to hear each other. At other times, the meeting sank to an oratorical joust, wherein they tired themselves out passading against words, instead of attacking the matters at issue. Augustin felt that he was losing his time. Besides, the Donatist bishops presented an obstinate front against which everything smashed. "Leave us in our errors," they said ironically. "If we are lost in your eyes, why follow us about? We don't want to be saved." And they prohibited their flocks from saluting Catholics, from speaking to them, from going into their churches or into their houses, from sitting down in the midst of them. They laid an interdict on their adversaries. Primanius, the Donatist Primate of Carthage, upon being invited to a conference, answered proudly: "The sons of the martyrs can have nothing to do with the race of traitors." This being the state of the case, no method of pacification was left but written controversy. Augustin shewed himself tireless at it. It was chiefly in these letters and treatises against the Donatists that he was not afraid to repeat himself. He knew that he was dealing with the deaf, and with the deaf who did not want to hear: he was obliged to raise his voice. With admirable self-denial he reiterated the same arguments a hundred times over, a hundred times took up the history of the quarrel from the beginning, spreading such a light over the quibbles and refinings of his contradictors, that it should have brought conviction to the bluntest minds. "No," he repeated, "Cæcilianus was not a _traditor_, nor Felix of Abthugni either who consecrated him bishop. The documents are there to prove this. And even supposing they were, can the fault of a single man be charged to the whole Church?... Then why do you baptize the Catholics under the pretence that their priests are _traditors_ and as such unworthy to administer the Sacraments? It is the sacrifice of Jesus Christ and not the virtue of the priest which renders baptism efficacious. If it were otherwise, what was the good of the Redemption? It is the fact that by the voluntary death of Christ, all men have been called to salvation. Salvation is not the privilege of Africans only. Being Catholic, the Church should take in the whole world...." In the long run, these continual repetitions end by seeming wearisome to modern readers: for us there arises out of all these discussions a dense and intolerable boredom. But let us remember that all this was singularly living for Augustin's cotemporaries, that these thankless developments were read with passion. And then, too, it was a question of the unity of the Church which involved, as we cannot too often repeat, the interest of the Empire and civilization. Against so persuasive a power the Donatists opposed a conspiracy of silence. Their bishops forbade the people to read what Augustin wrote. They did more--they concealed their own libels so that it was impossible to reply to them. But Augustin used all his skill to unearth them. He refuted them, and had his refutations recopied and posted on the walls of the basilicas. The copies circulated through the province and the whole Roman world. This would have had an excellent result if the quarrel had been entirely over questions of theory. But immense property interests came into it, and rancours and terrible hates. Augustin was forced to pass from verbal polemics to direct action--defensive action, at first, and then attack. While he and his fellow-bishops did their utmost to preach peace, the Donatist bishops urged their followers to the holy war. Augustin even received threats on his life. During one of his visitations, he was nearly assassinated. Men in ambush lay in wait for him. By a providential chance, he took the wrong road, and owed his life to this mistake. His pupil Possidius, who was then Bishop of Guelma, was not so lucky. Brought to bay in a house by the Donatist bishop Crispinus, he defended himself desperately. They set fire to the house to turn him out. When there was nothing else left but to be burned alive, he did come out. The band of Donatists seized him, and would have beaten his brains out, if Crispinus himself, fearing a prosecution for murder, had not interfered. But the assailants sacked the property and slaughtered all the horses and mules in the stables. At Bagai, Bishop Maximianus was stabbed in his basilica. A furious mob smashed the altar and began to strike the victim with the fragments, and left him for dead on the flags. The Catholics lifted up his body, but the Donatists plucked him out of their hands and flung him from the top of a tower, and he fell on a dunghill which broke the fall. The unhappy man still breathed, and by a miracle he recovered. Meanwhile, the Circoncelliones, armed with their bludgeons, continued to pillage and burn the farms. They tortured the owners to extract their money from them. They made them toil round the mill-path like beasts of burthen, while they lashed at them with whips. At their back, the Donatist priests invaded the Catholic churches and lands. There and then they rebaptized the labourers. These doings were, indeed, very like the practices of the African Mussulmans to-day, who, in like circumstances, always begin by converting the Christian farm-hands by main force. Then they purified the basilicas by scraping down the walls and washing the floors with big douches of water; and after demolishing the altar, they scattered salt where it had stood. It was a perfect disinfection. The Donatists treated the Catholics like the plague-stricken. Such acts cried out for vengeance. Augustin, who up till this time had recoiled from asking the public authorities to prosecute, who, as an observer of the apostolic tradition, did not recognize the interference of the civil power in Church matters--well, Augustin had to give way to circumstances, and also to the pressure brought to bear on him by his colleagues. Councils assembled at Carthage petitioned the Emperor to take exceptional measures against the Donatists, who laughed at all the laws directed against heretics. When they were summoned before the courts they demonstrated to the judges, who were often pagans incompetent to decide in these questions, that it was they who really belonged to the only orthodox Church. Something must be done to end this equivocal position, and to bring about once for all a categorical condemnation of the schism. Augustin, acting in concert with the primate Aurelius, was the ruling spirit of these meetings. Let us not judge his conduct by modern ideas, or be in a hurry to exclaim against his intolerance. He and the Catholic bishops, in acting thus, were complying with the old tradition which had influenced all the pagan governments. Rome, particularly, though it recognized all the local sects, all the foreign religions, never allowed any of its subjects to refuse to fall in with the official religion. The persecutions of the Christians and the Jews had no other motive. Now that it was become the State religion, Christianity, willingly or unwillingly, had to summon people to the same obedience. The Emperors made a special point of this from political reasons easy to understand--to prevent riots and maintain public order. Even if the bishops had refrained from all complaint, the Imperial Government would have acted without them and suppressed the disturbances caused by the heretics. Just look at the situation and the men as they were at that moment in Africa. It was the Catholics who were persecuted, and that with revolting fury and cruelty. They were obliged to defend themselves. In the next place, the distribution of property in those countries made conversions in batches singularly easy. Multitudes of farm tenants, workmen, and agricultural slaves, lived upon the immense estates of one owner. Without any interest in dogmatic questions, they were Donatists simply because their master was. To change these devouring wolves into tranquil sheep, it was often quite enough if the master got converted. The great blessing of peace depended upon pressure being brought to bear on certain persons. When all day and every day there was a risk of being murdered or burned out by irresponsible ruffians, the temptation was very strong to fall back on such a prompt and simple remedy. Augustin and his colleagues ended by making up their minds to do so. For that matter, they had no choice. They were bound to strike, or be themselves suppressed by their enemies. However, before resorting to rigorous measures, they resolved to send forth a supreme appeal for reconciliation. The Catholics proposed a meeting to the Donatists in which they would loyally examine one another's grievances. As personal or material questions made the great bar to an understanding, they promised that every Donatist bishop who turned convert should keep his see. In places where a schismatic and an orthodox bishop were found together, they would come to a friendly agreement to govern the diocese by turns. Where it was impossible for this to be done, it was proposed that the Catholic should resign in favour of the other. Augustin lent all his eloquence to carry this motion, which was sufficiently heroic for a good number of bishops who were not so detached as he from the goods of this world. And one must allow that it was difficult to go much further in the way of self-denial. After a good deal of skirmishing and hesitation on the side of the schismatics, the Conference met at Carthage in June of the year 411, under the presidency of an Imperial commissioner, the tribune Marcellinus. Once again, the Donatists saw themselves condemned. Upon the report of the commissioner, a decree of Honorius classed them definitely among heretics. They were forbidden to rebaptize or to assemble together, under penalties of fine and confiscation. Refractory countrymen and slaves would be liable to corporal punishment, and as for the clerics, they would be banished. The effect of these new laws was not long in appearing, and it fully answered the wishes of the orthodox bishops. Many populations returned, or pretended to return, to the Catholic communion. This result was largely the work of Augustin, who for twenty years had worked to bring it about by preaching and controversy. But, as might be expected, he did not overdo his triumph. Without delay, he set himself to preach moderation to the conquerors. Nor had he waited till the enemy was defeated to do that. Ten years before, while the Donatists were besetting the Catholics everywhere, he said to the priests of his communion: "Remember this, my brothers, so as to practise and preach it with never-varying gentleness. Love the men; kill the lie! Lean on truth without pride; fight for it without cruelty. Pray for those whom you chide, and for those to whom you shew their error." However, the victory of the party of peace was not so thorough as it had seemed at first. A good many fanatics here and there grew obstinate in their resistance. The Circoncelliones, maddened, distinguished themselves by a new outbreak of ravages and cruelties. They tortured and mutilated all the Catholics who fell into their hands. They had invented an unheard-of refinement of torture, which was to cover with lime diluted with vinegar the eyes of their victims. The priest Restitutus was assassinated in the suburbs of Hippo. A bishop had his tongue and his hand cut off. If the towns were pretty quiet, terror began to reign once more in the country places. The Roman authorities exerted themselves to put an end to these bloody scenes. They heavily chastised the offenders whenever they could catch them. In his charity, Augustin interceded for them with the judges. He wrote to the tribune Marcellinus: "We would not that the servants of God should be revenged by hurts like to those they suffered. Surely, we are not against depriving the guilty of the means to do harm, but we consider it will be enough, without taking their lives or wrenching any limb from them, to turn them from their senseless tumult by the restraining power of the laws, in bringing them back to calm and reason; or, in a last resort, to take away the opportunity for criminal actions by employing them in some useful work.... Christian judge, in this matter fulfil the duty of a father, and while repressing injustice, do not forget humanity." This compassion of Augustin was shewn particularly in his meeting with Emeritus, the Donatist Bishop of Cherchell (or as it was then called, Mauretanian Cæsarea), one of the most stubborn among the irreconcilables. His attitude in dealing with this uncompromising enemy was not only humane, but courteous, full of graciousness, and of the most sensitive charity. This fell out in the autumn of the year 418, seven years after the great Conference at Carthage. Augustin was sixty-four years old. How was it that he who had always had such feeble health undertook at this age the long journey from Hippo to Cæsarea? We know that the Pope, Zozimus, had entrusted him with a mission to the Church of that town. With his tireless zeal, always ready to march for the glory of Christ, the old bishop doubtless saw in this journey a fresh opportunity for an apostle. So he started off, in spite of the roads, which were very unsafe in those troublous times, in spite of the crushing heat of the season--the end of September. He travelled six hundred miles across the endless Numidian plain and the mountainous regions of the Atlas, preaching in the churches, halting in the towns and the hamlets to decide questions of private interest, ever pursued by a thousand business worries and by the squabbles of litigants and the discontented. At last, after many weeks of fatigue and tribulation, he reached Cherchell, where he was the guest of Deuterius, the metropolitan Bishop of Mauretania. Now Emeritus, the deposed bishop, lived mysteriously in the suburbs, in constant fear of some forcible action on the part of the authorities. When he learned the friendly intentions of Augustin, he came out of his hiding-place and shewed himself in the town. In one of the squares of Cæsarea the two prelates met. Augustin, who had formerly seen Emeritus at Carthage, recognized him, hurried over to him, saluted him, and at once suggested a friendly talk. "Let us go into the church," he said. "This square is hardly suitable for a talk between two bishops." Emeritus, flattered, agreed. The conversation continued in such a cordial tone that Augustin was already rejoicing upon having won back the schismatic. Deuterius, following the line of conduct which the Catholic bishops had adopted, spoke of resigning and handing over the see to the other. It was agreed that within two days Emeritus should come to the cathedral for a public discussion with his colleague of Hippo. At the appointed hour he appeared. A great crowd of people gathered to hear the two orators. The basilica was full. Then Augustin, turning to the impenitent Donatist, said to him mildly: "Emeritus, my brother, you are here. You were also at our Conference at Carthage. If you were beaten there, why do you come here now? If, on the other hand, you think that you were not beaten, tell us what leads you to believe that you had the advantage...." What change had Emeritus undergone in two days? Whatever it was, he disappointed the hopes of Augustin and the people of Cæsarea. He returned only ambiguous phrases to the most pressing and brotherly urging. Finally, he took refuge in an angry silence from which it was found impossible to draw him. Augustin went home without having converted the heretic. No doubt he was sorely disappointed. Nevertheless, he shewed no resentment; he even took measures to ensure the safety of the recalcitrant, in a charitable fear less the roused people might do him a bad turn. With all that, when he looked back at the results of nearly thirty years of struggle against schism, he might well say to himself that he had done good work for the Church. Donatism, in fact, was conquered, and conquered by him. Was he at last to have a chance to rest himself, with the only rest suitable to a soul like his, in a steady meditation and study of the Scriptures? Henceforth, would he be allowed to live a little less as a bishop and a little more as a monk? This was always the strong desire of his heart.... But new and worse trials awaited him at Hippo. THE SIXTH PART FACE TO FACE WITH THE BARBARIANS Et nunc veniant omnes quicumque amant Paradisum, locum quietis, locum securitatis, locum perpetuae felicitatis, locum in quo non pertimescas Barbarum. "And now let all those come who love Paradise, the place of quiet, the place of safety, the place of eternal happiness, the place where the Barbarian need be feared no more." _Sermon upon the Barbarian Persecution_, vii, 9. I THE SACK OF ROME During June of the year 403, an astonishing event convulsed the former capital of the Empire. The youthful Honorius, attended by the regent Stilicho, came there to celebrate his triumph over Alaric and the Gothic army, defeated at Pollentia. The pageantry of a triumph was indeed a very astonishing sight for the Romans of that period. They had got so unused to them! And no less wonderful was the presence of the Emperor at the Palatine. Since Constantine's reign, the Imperial palaces had been deserted. They had hardly been visited four times in a century by their master. Rome had never got reconciled to the desertion of her princes. When the Court was moved to Milan, and then to Ravenna, she felt she had been uncrowned. Time after time the Senate appealed to Honorius to shew himself, at least, to his Roman subjects, since political reasons were against his dwelling among them. This journey was always put off. The truth is, the Christian Cæsars did not like Rome, and mistrusted her still half-pagan Senate and people. It needed this unhoped-for victory to bring Honorius and his councillors to make up their minds. The feeling of a common danger had for the moment drawn the two opposing religions together, and here they were apparently making friends in the same patriotic delight. Old hates were forgotten. In fact, the pagan aristocracy had hopes of better treatment from Stilicho. On account of all these reasons, the triumphant Cæsar was received at Rome with delirious joy. The Court, upon leaving Ravenna, had crossed the Apennines. A halt was called on the banks of the Clitumnus, where in ancient times the great white herds were found which were sacrificed at the Capitol during a triumph. But the gods of the land had fallen; there would be no opiman bull this time on their altars. The pagans felt bitter about it. Thence, by Narnia and the Tiber valley, they made their way down into the plain. The measured step of the legions rang upon the large flags of the Flaminian way. They crossed the Mulvius bridge--and old Rome rose like a new city. In anticipation of a siege, the regent had repaired the Aurelian wall. The red bricks of the enclosure and the fresh mason-work of the towers gleamed in the sun. Finally, striking into the _Via lata_, the procession marched to the Palatine. The crowd was packed in this long, narrow street, and overflowed into the nearest alleys. Women, elaborately dressed, thronged the balconies, and even the terraces of the palace. All at once the people remarked that the Senate was not walking before the Imperial chariot. Stilicho, who wished to conciliate their good graces, had, contrary to custom, dispensed them from marching on foot before the conqueror. People talked with approval of this wily measure in which they saw a promise of new liberties. But applause and enthusiastic cheers greeted the young Honorius as he passed by, sharing with Stilicho the honour of the triumphal car. The unequalled splendour of his _trabea_, of which the embroideries disappeared under the number and flash of colour of the jewels, left the populace gaping. The diadem, a masterpiece of goldsmith's work, pressed heavily on his temples. Emerald pendants twinkled on each side of his neck, which, as it was rather fat, with almost feminine curves, suggested at once to the onlookers a comparison with Bacchus. They found he had an agreeable face, and even a soldierly air with his square shoulders and stocky neck. Matrons gazed with tender eyes on this Cæsar of nineteen, who had, at that time, a certain beauty, and the brilliance, so to speak, of youth. This degenerate Spaniard, who was really a crowned eunuch, and was to spend his life in the society of the palace eunuchs and die of dropsy--this son of Theodosius was just then fond of violent exercise, of hunting and horses. But he was even now becoming ponderous with unhealthy fat. His build and bloated flesh gave those who saw him at a distance a false notion of his strength. The Romans were most favourably impressed by him, especially the young men. But the army, the safeguard of the country, was perhaps even more admired than the Emperor. The legions, following the ruler, had almost deserted the capital. The flower of the troops were almost unknown there. In consequence, the march past of the cavalry was quite a new sight for the people. A great murmur of admiration sounded as the _cataphracti_ appeared, gleaming in the coats of mail which covered them from head to foot. Upon their horses, caparisoned in defensive armour, they looked like equestrian, statues--like silver horsemen on bronze horses. Childish cries greeted each _draconarius_ as he marched by carrying his ensign--a dragon embroidered on a long piece of cloth which flapped in the wind. And the crowd pointed at the crests of the helmets plumed with peacock feathers, and the scarfs of scarlet silk flowing over the camber of the gilded cuirasses.... The military show poured into the Forum, swept up the _Via Sacra_, and when it had passed under the triumphal arches of the old emperors, halted at the Palace of Septimus Severus. In the Stadium, the crowd awaited Honorius. When he appeared on the balcony of the Imperial box, wild cheering burst out on all the rows of seats. The Emperor, diadem on head, bowed to the people. Upon that the cheers became a tempest. Rome did not know how to express her happiness at having at last got her master back. On the eve of the worst catastrophes she had this supreme day of glory, of desperate pride, of unconquerable faith in her destiny. The public frenzy encouraged them in the maddest hopes. The poet Claudian, who had followed the Court, became the mouthpiece of these perilous illusions. "Arise!" he cried to Rome, "I prithee arise, O venerable queen! Trust in the goodwill of the gods. O city, fling away the mean fears of age, _thou who art immortal as the heavens_!..." For all that, the Barbarian danger continued to threaten. The victory of Pollentia, which, moreover, was not a complete victory, had settled nothing. Alaric was in flight in the Alps, but he kept his eye open for a favourable chance to fall back upon Italy and wrench concessions of money and honours from the Court of Ravenna. Supported by his army of mercenaries and adventurers in the pay of the Empire like himself, his dealings with Honorius were a kind of continual blackmail. If the Imperial Government refused to pay the sums which he protested it owed him for the maintenance of his troops, he would pay himself by force. Rome, where fabulous riches had accumulated for so many centuries, was an obvious prey for him and his men. He had coveted it for a long time; and to get up his courage for this daring exploit, as well as to work upon his soldiers, he pretended that he had a mission from Heaven to chastise and destroy the new Babylon. In his Pannonian forests it would seem he had heard mysterious voices which said to him: "Advance, and thou shalt destroy the city!" This leader of clans had nothing of the conqueror about him. He understood that he was in no wise cut out to wear the purple; he himself felt the Barbarian's cureless inferiority. But he also felt that neither was he born to obey. If he asked for the title of Prefect of the City, and if he persisted in offering his services to the Empire, it was as a means to get the upper hand of it more surely. Repulsed, disdained by the Court, he tried to raise himself in his own eyes and in the eyes of the common people by giving himself the airs of an instrument of justice, a man designed by fate, who marches blindly to a terrible purpose indicated by the divine wrath. It often happened that he was duped by his own mummery. This turbid Barbarian soul was prone to the most superstitious terrors. Notwithstanding his rodomontades, it is certain that in his heart he was scared by Rome. He hardly dared to attack it. In the first place, it was not at all a convenient operation for him. His army of mercenaries had no proper implements to undertake the siege of this huge city, of which the defence lines were thrown out in so wide a perimeter. He had to come back to it twice, before he could make up his mind to invest it seriously. The first time, in 408, he was satisfied with starving the Romans by cutting off the food supply. He had pitched his camp on the banks of the Tiber in such a way as to capture the shipping between the capital and the great store-houses built near the mouth of the river. From the ramparts, the Romans could see the Barbarian soldiers moving about, with their sheepskin coats dyed to a crude red. Panic-stricken, the aristocracy fled to its villas in Campania, or Sicily, or Africa. They took with them whatever they were able to carry. They sought refuge in the nearest islands, even in Sardinia and Corsica, despite their reputation for unhealthiness. They even hid among the rocks of the seashore. The terror was so great that the Senate agreed to everything demanded by Alaric. He was paid an enormous indemnity which he claimed as a condition of his withdrawal. The following year he used the same method of intimidation to force on the people an emperor he had chosen, and to get conferred on him the title of Prefect of the City which he had desired so long. Finally, in the year 410, he struck the supreme blow. The Barbarian knew what he was about, and that he did not risk much in blockading Rome. Famine would open the gates to him sooner or later. All who were able had left the city, especially the rich. There was no garrison to defend it. Only a lazy populace remained behind the walls, unused to arms, and still more enfeebled by long starvation. And yet this wretched and decimated population, in an outburst of patriotism, resisted with desperate energy. The siege was long. Doubtless it began before the spring; it ended only at the end of the summer. In the night of the twenty-fourth of August, 410, amid the glare of lightning and crashes of thunder, Alaric entered Rome by the Salarian gate. It is certain that he only managed it even then by treachery. The prey was handed to him. The sack of Rome seems to have lasted for three days and three nights. Part of the town was burned. The conquered people underwent all the horrors which accompany such events--violent and stupid destruction, rapes, murders of individuals, wholesale slaughter, torture, and mutilation. But in reality the Barbarians only wanted the Roman gold. They acted like perfect highway robbers. If they tortured their victims without distinction of age or sex, it was to pluck the secret of their treasure-houses out of them. It is even said that in these conditions the Roman avarice produced some admirable examples of firmness. Some let themselves be tortured to their last gasp rather than reveal where their treasures were hid. At last, when Alaric decided that his army was gorged enough with spoil, he gave the order to evacuate the city, and took to the roads with his baggage-waggons full. Let us be careful not to judge these doings after our modern notions. The capture of Rome by Alaric was not a national disaster. It was plundering on a huge scale. The Goth had no thought at all of destroying the Empire. He was only a mercenary in rebellion--an ambitious mercenary, no doubt--but, above all, a looter. As a consequence of this attack on the Eternal City, one after another caught the disease of plunder, which contaminated even the functionaries and the subjects of Rome. Amid the general anarchy, where impunity seemed certain, nobody restrained himself any longer. In Africa especially, where the old instinct of piracy is always half-awake, they applied themselves to ransack the fugitive Romans and Italians. Many rich people were come there, seeking a place of safety in the belief that they would be more secure when they had put the sea between themselves and the Barbarians. The report of their riches had preceded them, exaggerated out of all measure by popular rumour. Among them were mentioned patricians such as the Anicii, whose property was so immense and their palaces so splendid that they could not find purchasers. These multi-millionaires in flight were a miraculous windfall for the country. They were bled without mercy. Quicker than any one else, the military governor of Africa, Count Heraclianus, was on the spot to pick the pockets of the Italian immigrants. No sooner were they off the boat than he had very distinguished ladies seized, and only released them when he had extorted a large ransom. He sold those unable to pay to the Greek and Syrian slave-merchants who provided human flesh for the Oriental harems. When the example came from such a height, the subordinates doubtless said to themselves that they would be very wrong to have the least shame. From one end of the province to the other, everybody struggled to extract as much as possible from the unfortunate fugitives. Augustin's own parishioners at Hippo undertook to tear a donation from one of those gorgeous Anicii, whose lands stretched further than a kite could fly--from Pinian, the husband of St. Melania the younger. They wanted to force him to be ordained priest in spite of himself, which, as has been explained, involved the handing over of his goods to the Catholic community. Augustin, who opposed this, had to give in to the crowd. There was almost a riot in the basilica. Such were the far-off reverberations of the capture of Rome by Alaric. Carthaginians and Numidians pillaged the Romans just like the Barbarians. Now, how did it come about that this monstrous loot took on before the eyes of contemporaries the magnitude of a world-catastrophe? For really nothing was utterly lost. The Empire remained standing. After Alaric's retreat, the Romans had come back to their city and they worked to build up the ruins. Ere long, the populace were crying out loud that if the circus and amphitheatre games were given back to them, they would look upon the descent of the Goths as a bad dream. It is no less certain that this sensational occurrence had struck the whole Mediterranean world into a perfect stupor. It seized upon the imaginations of all. The idea that Rome could not be taken, that it was integral and almost sacred, had such a hold on people's minds, that they refused to credit the sinister news. Nobody reflected that the sack of Rome by the Barbarians should have been long ago foreseen--that Rome, deprived of a garrison, abandoned by the Imperial army, was bound to attract the covetousness of the Goths, and that the pillage of a place without defence, already enfeebled by famine, was not a very glorious feat, very difficult, or very extraordinary. People only saw the brutal fact: the Eternal City had been captured and burned by the mercenaries. All were under the influence of the shock caused by the narratives of the refugees. In one of his sermons, Augustin has transmitted to us an echo of the general panic: "Horrible things," said he, "have been told us. There have been ruins, and fires, and rapine, and murder, and torture. That is true; we have heard it many times; we have shuddered at all this disaster; we have often wept, and we have hardly been able to console ourselves." This capture of Rome was plainly a terrible warning for the future. But party spirit strangely exaggerated the importance and meaning of the calamity. For pagans and Christians alike it became a subject for speeches, a commonplace of religious polemic. Both saw the event as a manifestation of the wrath of Heaven. "While we sacrificed to our gods," the pagan said, "Rome was standing, Rome was happy. Now that our sacrifices are forbidden, you see what has become of Rome...." And they went about repeating that Christianism was responsible for the ruin of the Empire. On their side, the Christians answered: In the first place, Rome has not fallen: it is always standing. It has been only chastised, and this happened because it is still half pagan. By this frightful punishment (and they heightened the description of the horrors committed), God has given it a warning. Let it be converted, let it return to the virtues of its ancestors, and it will become again the mistress of nations. There is what Augustin and the bishops said. Still, the flock of the faithful were only half convinced. It was all well enough to remonstrate to them that the Christians of Rome, and even a good number of pagans, had been spared at the name of Christ, and that the Barbarian leader had bestowed a quite special protection and respect upon the basilicas of the holy apostles; it was impossible to prevent their thinking that many Christians had perished in the sack of the city, that consecrated virgins had experienced the last outrages, and that, as a matter of fact, all the inhabitants had been robbed of their property.... Was it thus that God protected His chosen? What advantage was there in being Christian if they had the same treatment as the idolaters? This state of mind became extremely favourable for paganism to come back again on the offensive. Since the very hard laws of Theodosius, which forbade the worship of the ancient gods, even within the house, the pagans had not overlooked any chance to protest against the Imperial severity. At Carthage there were always fights in the streets between pagans and Christians, not to say riots. In the colony of Suffetula, sixty Christians had been massacred. The year before the capture of Rome, there had been trouble with the pagans at Guelma. Houses belonging to the Church were burned, a monk killed in a brawl. Whenever the Government inspection relaxed, or the political situation appeared favourable, the pagans hurried to proclaim their belief. Only just lately, in Rome beleaguered by Alaric, the new consul, Tertullus, had thought fit to revive the old customs. Before assuming office, he studied gravely the sacred fowls in their cages, traced circles in the sky with the augur's wand, and marked the flight of birds. Besides, a pagan oracle circulated persistently among the people, promising that after a reign of three hundred and sixty-five years Christianity would be conquered. The centuries of the great desolation were fulfilled; the era of revenge was about to begin for the outcast gods. These warlike symptoms did not escape Augustin's vigilance. His indignation no longer arose only from the fact that paganism was so slow in dying; he was now afraid that the feebleness of the Empire might allow it to take on an appearance of life. It must be ended, as Donatism had been ended. The old apostle was summoned to a new campaign, and in it he would spend the best of his strength to the eve of his death. II THE CITY OF GOD For thirteen or fourteen years, through a thousand employments and a thousand cares, amid the panics and continual alarums which kept the Africans on the alert in those times, Augustin worked at his _City of God_, the most formidable machine of war ever directed against paganism, and also the arsenal fullest of proofs and refutations which the disputants and defenders of Catholicism have ever had at their disposal. It is not for us to examine the details of this immense work, for our sole aim is to study Augustin's soul, and we quote scarcely anything from his books save those parts wherein a little of this ardent soul pulsates--those which are still living for us of the twentieth century, which contain teachings and ways of feeling still likely to move us. Now, Augustin's attitude towards paganism is one of those which throw the greatest light on his nature and character. And it may even yet come to be our own attitude when we find opposed to us a conception of life and the world which may indeed be ruined for a time, but is reborn as soon as the sense of spirituality disappears or grows feeble. "Immortal Paganism, art thou dead? So they say. But Pan scoffs under his breath, and the Chimæra laughs." [1] [Footnote 1: Sainte-Beuve.] Like ourselves, Augustin, brought up by a Christian mother, knew it only through literature, and, so to speak, æsthetically. Recollections of school, the emotions and admirations of a cultivated man--there is what the old religion meant for him. Nevertheless, he had one great advantage over us for knowing it well: the sight of the pagan customs and superstitions was still under his eyes. That the lascivious, romantic, and poetic adventures of the ancient gods, their statues, their temples, and all the arts arising from their religion, had beguiled him and filled him with enthusiasm before his conversion, is only too certain. But all this mythology and plastic art were looked upon as secondary things then, even by pagans. The serious, the essential part of the religion was not in that. Paganism, a religion of Beauty, is an invention of our modern æsthetes; it was hardly thought of in that way in Augustin's time. Long before this, the Roman Varro, the great compiler of the religious antiquities of paganism, made a threefold distinction of the doctrine concerning the gods. The first--that of the theatre, as he calls it, or fabulous mythology, adapted to poets, dramatists, sculptors, and jesters. Invented by these, it is only a fantasy, a play of imagination, an ornament of life. The third is civil theology, serious and solid, which claims the respect and piety of all. "It is that which men in cities, and chiefly the priests, _ought to be_ cunning in. It teaches which gods to worship in public, and with what ceremonies and sacrifices each one must be served." Finally, the second, physical or metaphysical theology, is reserved for philosophers and exceptional minds; it is altogether theoretical. The only important and truly religious one, which puts an obligation on the believer, is the third--the civil theology. Now, we never take account of this. What we persist in regarding as paganism is what Varro himself called "a religion for the theatre"--matter of opera, pretext for ballets, for scenery, and for dance postures. Transposed into another key by our poets, this mythology is inflated now and then by mysticism, or by a vague symbolism. Playthings of our pretty wits! The living paganism, which Augustin struggled against, which crowds defended at the price of their blood, in which the poor believed and the wisest statesmen deemed indispensable as a safeguard of cities--that paganism is quite another matter. Like all religions which are possible, it implied and it _enforced_ not only beliefs, but ritual, sacrifices, festivals. And this is what Augustin, with the other Christians of that time, spurned with disgust and declared to be unbearable. He saw, or he had seen with his own eyes, the reality of the pagan worship, and the most repellent of all to our modern delicacy--the sacrifices. At the period when he wrote _The City of God_, private sacrifices, as well as public, were forbidden. This did not prevent the devout from breaking the law whenever a chance offered. They hid themselves more or less when they sacrificed before a temple, a chapel, or on some private estate. The rites could not be carried out according to all the minute instructions of the pontifical books. It was no more than a shadow of the ceremonies of former times. But in his childhood, in the reign of Julian, for instance, Augustin could have attended sacrifices which were celebrated with full pomp and according to all the ritual forms. They were veritable scenes of butchery. For Heaven's sake let us forget the frieze of the Parthenon, and its sacrificers with their graceful lines! If we want to have a literal translation of this sculpture, and find the modern representation of a hecatomb, we must go to the slaughter-houses at La Villette. Among the heaps of broken flesh, the puddles of blood, the mystic Julian was attacked by a kind of drunkenness. There were never enough beasts strangled or slaughtered to suit him. Nothing satisfied his fury for sacred carnage. The pagans themselves made fun of this craze for sacrificing. During the three years his reign lasted the altars streamed with blood. Oxen by hundreds were slain upon the floors of the temples, and the butchers throttled so many sheep and other domestic animals that they gave up keeping count of them. Thousands of white birds, pigeons or sea-gulls, were destroyed day by day by the piety of the prince. He was called the _Victimarius_, and when he started upon his campaign against the Persians, an epigram was circulated once more which had been formerly composed against Marcus Aurelius (the philosophic emperor!) who was equally generous of hecatombs: "To Marcus Cæsar from the white oxen. It will be all over with us if you come back a conqueror." People said that Julian, on his return, would depopulate stables and pasture-lands. The populace, who gathered their very considerable profit from these butcheries, naturally encouraged such an excess of devotion. At Rome, under Caligula, more than a hundred and sixty thousand victims were immolated in three months--nearly two thousand a day. And these massacres took place upon the approaches of the temples; in the middle of the city; on the forums; in narrow squares crowded with public buildings and statues. Just try to call up the scene in summer, between walls at a white heat, with the smells and the flies. Spectators and victims rubbed against one another, pressed close in the restricted space. One day, Caligula, while he was attending a sacrifice, was splashed all over by the blood of a flamingo as they cut its neck. But the august Cæsar was not so fastidious; he himself operated in these ceremonies armed with a mallet and clad in the short shirt of the killers. The ignominy of all this revolted the Christians, and whoever had nerves at all sensitive. The bloody mud in which passers slipped, the hissing of the fat, the heavy odour of flesh, were sickening. Tertullian held his nose before the "stinking fires" on which the victims were roasting. And St. Ambrose complained that in the Roman Curia the senators who were Christians were obliged to breathe in the smoke and receive full in the face the ashes of the altar raised before the statue of Victory. The manipulations of the _haruspicina_ seemed an even worse abomination in the eyes of the Christians. Dissection of bowels, examination of entrails, were practices very much in fashion in all classes of society. The pagans generally took more or less interest in magic. One was scarcely a philosopher without being a miracle-worker. In this there was a kind of perfidious rivalry to the Christian miracles. The ambitious or the discontented opened the bellies of animals to learn when the Emperor was going to die, and who would succeed him. But although it did not pretend to magic, the _haruspicina_ made an essential part of the sacrifices. As soon as the dismemberment was done, the diviners examined the appearance of the entrails. Consulting together, they turned them over frequently with anxious attention. This business might continue for a long time. Plutarch relates that Philip, King of Macedonia, when sacrificing an ox on the Ithomæa, with Aratus of Sicyon and Demetrius of Pharos, wished to inquire out from the entrails of the victim concerning the wisdom of a piece of strategy. The _haruspex_ put the smoking mass in his hands. The King shewed it to his companions, who derived contradictory presages from it. He listened to one side and the other, holding meanwhile the ox's entrails in his hands. Eventually, he decided for the opinion of Aratus, and then tranquilly gave the handful back to the sacrificer.... No doubt in Augustin's time these rites were no longer practised openly. For all that, they were of the first importance in the ancient religion, which desired nothing better than to restore them. It is easy to understand the repulsion they caused in the author of _The City of God_. He who would not have a fly killed to make sure of the gold crown in the contest of poets, looked with horror on these sacred butchers, and manglers, and cooks. He flung the garbage of the sacrifices into the sewer, and shewed proudly to the pagans the pure oblation of the eucharistic Bread and Wine. But what, above all, he attacked, because it was a present and permanent scandal, was the gluttony, the drunkenness, and lust of the pagans. Let us not exaggerate these vices--not the two first, at least. Augustin could not judge them as we can. It is certain that the Africans of his time--and for that matter, those of to-day--would have struck us modern people as very sober. The outbursts of intemperance which he accuses them of only happened at intervals, at times of public festivity or some family celebration. But as soon as they did begin they were terrible. When one thinks of the orgies of our Arabs behind locked doors! But it is no less true that the pagan vices spread themselves out cynically under the protecting shadow of religion. Popular souses of eating and drinking were the obligatory accompaniments of the festivals and sacrifices. A religious festival meant a carouse, loads of victuals, barrels of wine broached in the street. These were called the Dishes, _Fercula_, or else, the Rejoicing, _Lætitia_. The poor people, who knew meat only by sight, ate it on these days, and they drank wine. The effect of this unaccustomed plenty was felt at once. The whole populace were drunk. The rich in their houses possibly did it with more ceremony, but it was really the same brutishness. The elegant Ovid, who in the _Art of Love_ teaches fine manners to the beginners in love, advises them not to vomit at table, and to avoid getting drunk like the husbands of their mistresses. Plainly, religion was only an excuse for these excesses. Augustin goes too far when he makes the gods responsible for this riot of sensuality. What is true is that they did nothing to hinder it. And it is also true that the lechery, which he flings so acridly in the face of the pagans, the gross stage-plays, the songs, dances, and even prostitution, were all more or less included in the essence of paganism. The theatre, like the games of the arena and circus, was a divine institution. At certain feasts, and in certain temples, fornication became sacred. All the world knew what took place at Carthage in the courts and under the porticoes of the Celestial Virgin, and what the ears of the most chaste matrons were obliged to hear, and also what the use was of the castrated priests of the Great Mother of the gods. Augustin, who declaims against these filthy sports, has not forced the note of his denunciation to make out a good case. If anybody wants to know in more detail the sights enjoyed at the theatre, or what were the habits of certain pious confraternities, he has only to read what is told by Apuleius, the most devout of pagans. He takes evident pleasure in these stories, or, if he sometimes waxes indignant, it is the depravity of men he accuses. The gods soar at a great height above these wretched trifles. To Augustin, on the contrary, the gods are unclean devils who fill their bellies with lust and obscenities, as if they were hankering for the blood and grease of sacrifices. And so he puts his finger on the open wound of paganism--its basic immorality, or, if you like, its unmorality. Like our scientism of to-day, it was unable to lay down a system of morals. It did not even try to. What Augustin has written on this subject in _The City of God_, is perhaps the strongest argument ever objected to polytheism. Anyhow, pages like this are very timely indeed to consider: "But such friends and such worshippers of those gods, whom they rejoice to follow and imitate in all villainies and mischiefs--do they trouble themselves about the corruption and great decay of the Republic? Not so. Let it but stand, say they; let it but prosper by the number of its troops and be glorious by its victories; or, _which is best of all, let it but enjoy security and peace_, and what care we? Yes, what we care for above all is that every one may have the means to increase his wealth, to pay the expenses of his usual luxury, and that the powerful may still keep under the weak. Let the poor crouch to the rich to be fed, or to live at ease under their protection; let the rich abuse the poor as things at their service, and to shew how many they have soliciting them. Let the people applaud such as provide them with pleasures, not such as have a care for their interests. _Let naught that is hard be enjoined, nothing impure be prohibited_.... Let not subdued provinces obey their governors as supervisors of their morality, but as masters of their fortune and the procurers of their pleasures. What matters it if this submission has no sincerity, but rests upon a bad and servile fear! _Let the law protect estates rather than fair justice_. Let there be a good number of public harlots, either for all that please to enjoy themselves in their company, or for those that cannot keep private ones. Let stately and sumptuous houses be erected, so that night and day each one according to his liking or his means may gamble and drink and revel and vomit. Let the rhythmed tinkling of dances be ordinary, the cries, the uncontrolled delights, the uproar of all pleasures, even the bloodiest and most shameful in the theatres. He who shall assay to dissuade from these pleasures, let him be condemned as a public enemy. And if any one try to alter or suppress them--let the people stifle his voice, let them banish him, let them kill him. On the other hand, those that shall procure the people these pleasures, and authorize their enjoyment, let them be eternized for the true gods."... However, Augustin acknowledges a number of praiseworthy minds among pagans--those philosophers, with Plato in the first rank, who have done their best to put morality into the religion. The Christian teacher renders a magnificent tribute to Platonism. But these high doctrines have scarcely got beyond the portals of the schools, and this moral teaching which paganism vaunts of, is practically limited to the sanctuaries. "Let them not talk," says he, "of some closely muttered instructions, taught in secret, and whispered in the ear of a few adepts, which hold I know not what lessons of uprightness and virtue. But let them shew the temples ordained for such pious meetings, wherein were no sports with lascivious gestures and loose songs.... Let them shew us the places where the gods' doctrine was heard against covetousness, the suppression of ambition, the bridling of luxury, and where wretches might learn what the poet Persius thunders unto them, saying: 'Learn, wretches, and conceive the course of things, What man is, and why nature forth him brings;... How to use money; how to help a friend; What we on earth, and God in us, intend.' Let them shew where their instructing gods were used to give such lessons; and where their worshippers used to go _often_ to hear these matters. As for us, we can point to our churches, built for this sole purpose, wheresoever the religion of Christ is diffused." Can it surprise, then, if men so ignorant of high morality, and so deeply embedded in matter, were also plunged in the grossest superstitions? Materialism in morals always ends by producing a low credulity. Here Augustin triumphs. He sends marching under our eyes, in a burlesque array, the innumerable army of gods whom the Romans believed in. There are so many that he compares them to swarms of gnats. Although he explains that he is not able to mention them all, he amuses himself by stupefying us with the prodigious number of those he discovers. Dragged into open day by him, a whole divine population is brought out of the darkness and forgetfulness where it had been sleeping perhaps for centuries: the little gods who work in the fields, who make the corn grow and keep off the blight, those who watch over children, who aid women in labour, who protect the hearth, who guard the house. It was impossible to take a step among the pagans, to make a movement, without the help of a god or goddess. Men and things were as if fettered and imprisoned by the gods. "In a house," says Augustin scoffingly, "there is but one porter. He is but a mere man, yet he is sufficient for that office. But it takes three gods, Forculus for the door, Cardea for the hinge, Limentinus for the threshold. Doubtless, Forculus all alone could not possibly look after threshold, door and hinges." And if it is a case of a man and woman retiring to the bridal chamber after the wedding, a whole squadron of divinities are set in motion for an act so simple and natural. "I beseech you," cries Augustin, "leave something for the husband to do!" This African, who had such a strong sense of the unity and fathomless infinity of God, waxed indignant at this sacrilegious parcelling of the divine substance. But the pagans, following Varro, would answer that it was necessary to distinguish, among all these gods, those who were just the imagination of poets, and those who were real beings--between the gods of fable and the gods of religion. "Then," as Tertullian had said already, "if the gods be chosen as onions are roped, it is obvious that what is not chosen is condemned." "Tertullian carries his fancy too far," comments Augustin. The gods refused as fabulous are not held reprobate on that account. The truth is, they are a cut of the same piece as the admitted gods. "Have not the pontiffs, like the poets, a bearded Jupiter and a Mercury without beard?... Are the old Saturn and the young Apollo so much the property of the poets that we do not see their statues too in the temples?..." And the philosophers, in their turn, however much they may protest against the heap of fabulous gods and, like Plato and Porphyry, declare that there exists but one God, soul of the universe, yet they no less accepted the minor gods, and intermediaries or messengers betwixt gods and men, whom they called demons. These hybrid beings, who pertained to humanity by their passions, and to the divinity by the privilege of immortality, had to be appeased by sacrifices, questioned and gratified by magic spells. And there is what the highest pagan wisdom ended in--yes, in calling up spirits, and the shady operations of wizards and wonder-smiths. That is what the pagans defended, and demanded the continuation of with so much obstinacy and fanaticism. By no means, replied Augustin. It does not deserve to survive. It is not the forsaking of these beliefs and superstitious practices which has brought about the decay of the Empire. If you are asking for the temples of your gods to be opened, it is because they are easy to your passions. At heart, you scoff at them and the Empire; all you want is freedom and impunity for your vices. There we have the real cause of the decadence! Little matter the idle grimaces before altars and statues. Become chaste, sober, brave, and poor, as your ancestors were. Have children, agree to compulsory military service, and you will conquer as they did. Now, all these virtues are enjoined and encouraged by Christianity. Whatever certain heretics may say, the religion of Christ is not contrary to marriage or the soldier's profession. The Patriarchs of the old law were blest in marriage, and there are just and holy wars. And even supposing, that in spite of all efforts to save it, the Empire is condemned, must we therefore despair? We should be prepared for the end of the Roman city. Like all the things of this world, it is liable to old age and death. It will die then, one day. Far from being cast down, let us strengthen ourselves against this disaster by the realization of the eternal. Let us strengthen our hold upon that which passes not. Above the earthly city, rises the City of God, which is the communion of holy souls, the only one which gives complete and never-failing joy. Let us try to be the citizens of that city, and to live the only life worth calling life. For the life here below is but the shadow of a shadow.... The people of those times were wonderfully prepared to hearken to such exhortations. On the eve of the Barbarian invasions, these Christians, for whom the dogma of the Resurrection was perhaps the chief reason of their faith, these people, sick at heart, who looked on in torture at the ending of a world, must have considered this present life as a bad dream, from which there should be no delay in escaping. At the very moment even that Augustin began to write _The City of God_, his friend Evodius, Bishop of Uzalis, told him this story. He had as secretary a very young man, the son of a priest in the neighbourhood. This young man had begun by obtaining a post as stenographer in the office of the Proconsul of Africa. Evodius, who was alarmed at what might happen to his virtue in such surroundings, having first made certain of his absolute chastity, offered to take him into his service. In the bishop's house, where he had scarcely anything to do but read the Holy Scripture, his faith became so enthusiastic that he longed for nothing now but death. To go out of this life, "to be with Christ," was his eager wish. It was heard. After sixteen days of illness he died in the house of his parents. "Now, two days after his funeral, a virtuous woman of Figes, a servant of God, a widow for twelve years, had a dream, and in her dream she saw a deacon who had been dead some four years, together with men, and women too, virgins and widows--she saw these servants of God getting ready a palace. This dwelling was so rich that it shone with light, and you would have believed it was all made of silver. And when the widow asked whom these preparations were for, the deacon replied that they were for a young man, dead the evening before, the son of a priest. In the same palace, she saw an old man, all robed in white, and he told two other persons, also robed in white, to go to the tomb of this young man, and lift out the body, and carry it to Heaven. When the body had been drawn from the tomb and carried to Heaven, there arose (said she) out of the tomb a bush of virgin-roses, which are thus named because they never open...." So the son of the priest had chosen the better part. What was the good of remaining in this abominable world, where there was always a risk of being burned or murdered by Goths and Vandals, when, in the other world, angels were preparing for you palaces of light? III THE BARBARIAN DESOLATION Augustin was seventy-two years old when he finished the _City of God_. This was in 426. That year, an event of much importance occurred at Hippo, and the report of it was inserted in the public acts of the community. "The sixth of the calends of October," _The Acts_ set forth, "the very glorious Theodosius being consul for the twelfth time, and Valentinian Augustus for the second, Augustin the bishop, accompanied by Religianus and Martinianus, his fellow-bishops, having taken his place in the Basilica of Peace at Hippo, and the priests Saturnius, Leporius, Barnaby, Fortunatianus, Lazarus, and Heraclius, being present, with all the clergy and a vast crowd of people--Augustin the bishop said: "'Let us without delay look to the business which I declared yesterday to your charity, and for which I desired you to gather here in large numbers, as I see you have done. If I were to talk to you of anything else, you might be less attentive, seeing the expectation you are in. "'My brothers, we are all mortal in this life, and no man knows his last day. God willed that I should come to dwell in this town in the force of my age. But, as I was a young man then--see, I am old now, and as I know that at the death of bishops, peace is troubled by rivalry or ambition (this have I often seen and bewailed it)--I ought, so far as it rests with me, to turn away so great a mischief from your city.... I am going then to tell you that my will, which I believe also to be the will of God, is that I have as successor the priest Heraclius.' "At these words all the people cried out: "'Thanks be to God! Praise be to Christ!' "And this cry they repeated three-and-twenty times. "'Christ, hear us! Preserve us Augustin!' "This cry they repeated sixteen times. "'Be our father! Be our bishop!' "This cry they repeated eight times. "When the people became silent, the bishop Augustin spoke again in these words: "'There is no need for me to praise Heraclius. As much as I do justice to his wisdom, in equal measure should I spare his modesty.... As you perceive, the secretaries of the church gather up what we say and what you say. My words and your shouts do not fall to the ground. To put it briefly, these are ecclesiastical decrees that we are now drawing up, and I desire by these means, as far as it is in the power of man, to confirm what I have declared to you.' "Here the people cried out: "'Thanks be to God! Praise be to Christ!' * * * * * "'Be our father, and let Heraclius be our bishop!' "When silence was made again, Augustin the bishop thus spoke: "'I understand what you would say. But I do not wish that it happen to him as it happened to me. Many of you know what was done at that time.... I was consecrated bishop during the lifetime of my father and bishop, the aged Valerius, of blessed memory, and with him I shared the see. I was ignorant, as he was, that this was forbidden by the Council of Nice. I would not therefore that men should blame in Heraclius, my son, what they blamed in me.' "With that the people cried out thirteen times: "'Thanks be to God! Praise be to Christ!' "After a little silence, Augustin the bishop said again: "'So he will remain a priest till it shall please God for him to be a bishop. But with the aid and mercy of Christ, I shall do in future what up to now I have not been able to do.... You will remember what I wanted to do some years ago, and you have not allowed me. For a work upon the Holy Scriptures, with which my brothers and my fathers the bishops had deigned to charge me in the two Councils of Numidia and Carthage, _I was not to be disturbed by anybody during five days of the week_. That was a thing agreed upon between you and me. The act was drawn up, and you all approved of it after hearing it read. But your promise did not last long. I was soon encroached upon and overrun by you all. I am no longer free to study as I desire. Morning and afternoon, I am entangled in your worldly affairs. I beg of you and supplicate you in Christ's name to suffer me to shift the burthen of all these cares upon this young man, the priest Heraclius, whom I signal, in His name, as my successor in the bishopric.' "Upon this the people cried out six-and-twenty times: "'We thank thee for thy choice!' "And the people having become silent, Augustin the bishop said: "'I thank you for your charity and goodwill, or rather, I thank God for them. So, my brothers, you will address yourselves to Heraclius upon all the points you are used to submit to me. Whenever he needs counsel, my care and my help will not be wanting.... In this way, without any loss to you, I shall be able to devote the remainder of life which it may please God still to leave me, not to laziness and rest, but to the study of the Holy Scriptures. This work will be useful to Heraclius, and hence to yourselves. Let nobody then envy my leisure, for this leisure will be very busy.... "'It only remains for me to ask you, at least those who can, to sign these acts. Your agreement I cannot do without; so kindly let me learn it by your voices.' "At these words the people shouted: "'Let it be so! Let it be so!' * * * * * "When all there became silent, Augustin the bishop made an end, saying: "'It is well. Now let us fulfil our duty to God. While we offer Him the Sacrifice, and during this hour of supplication, I would urge of your charity to lay aside all business and personal cares, and to pray the Lord God for this church, for me, and for the priest Heraclius.'" The dryness and official wording of the document do not succeed in stifling the vividness and colour of this crowded scene. Through the piety of the formal cries, it is easy to see that Augustin's hearers were hard to manage. This flock, which he loved and scolded so much, was no easier to lead now than when he first became bishop. Truly it was no sinecure to rule and administrate the diocese of Hippo! The bishop was literally the servant of the faithful. Not only had he to feed and clothe them, to spend his time over their business and quarrels and lawsuits, but he belonged to them body and soul. They kept a jealous eye on the employment of his time; if he went away, they asked for an explanation. Whenever Augustin went to preach at Carthage or Utica, he apologized to his own people. And before he can undertake a commentary on the Scriptures, a commentary, moreover, which he has been asked by two Councils to prepare, he must get their permission, or, at any rate, their agreement. At last, at seventy-two years old, after he had been a bishop for thirty-one years, he got their leave to take a little rest. But what a rest! He himself said: "This leisure will be very busy"--this leisure which is going to fill the five holidays in the week. He intends to study and fathom the Scripture, and this, besides, to the profit of his people and clergy and the whole Church. It is the fondest dream of his life--the plan he was never able to realize. All that, at first sight, astonishes us. We ask ourselves, "What else had he been doing up to this time in his treatises and letters and sermons, in all that sea of words and writings which his enemies threw up at him, if he was not studying and explaining the Holy Scriptures?" The fact is, that in most of these writings and sermons he elucidates the truth only in part, or else he is confuting heresiarchs. What he wanted to do was to study the truth for its own sake, without having to think of and be hindered by the exposure of errors; and above all, to seize it in all its breadth and all its depths, to have done with this blighting and irritating eristic, and to reflect in a vast _Mirror_ the whole and purest light of the sacred dogmas. He never found the time for it. He had to limit himself to a handbook of practical morals, published under this title before his death, and now lost. Once more the heresiarchs prevented him from leading a life of speculation. During his last years, amid the cruellest anxieties, he had to battle with the enemies of Grace and the enemies of the Trinity, with Arius and Pelagius. Pelagius had found an able disciple in a young Italian bishop, Julian of Eclanum, who was a formidable opponent to the aged Augustin. As for Arianism, which had seemed extinguished in the West, here it was given a new life by the Barbarian invasion. It was a grave moment for Catholicism, as it was for the Empire. The Goths, the Alani, and the Vandals, after having laid waste Gaul and Spain, were taking measures to pass over into Africa. Should they renew the attempts of Alaric and Radagaisus against Italy, they would soon be masters of the entire Occident. Now these Barbarians were Arians. Supposing (and it seemed more and more likely) that Africa and Italy were vanquished after Gaul and Spain, then it was all over with Western Catholicism. For the invaders carried their religion in their baggage, and forced it on the conquered. Augustin, who had cherished the hope of equalling the earthly kingdom of Christ to that of the Cæsars, was going to see the ruin of both. His terrified imagination exaggerated still more the only too real and threatening peril. He must have lived hours of agony, expecting a disaster. If only the truth might be saved, might swim in this sea of errors which spread like a flood in the wake of the Barbarian onflow! It was from this wish, no doubt, that sprang the tireless persistence which the old bishop put into a last battle with heresy. If he selected Pelagius specially to fall upon with fury, if he forced his principles to their last consequences in his theory of Grace, the dread of the Barbarian peril had perhaps something to do with it. This soul, so mild, so moderate, so tenderly human, promulgated a pitiless doctrine which does not agree with his character. But he reasoned, no doubt, that it was impossible to drive home too hard the need of the Redemption and the divinity of the Redeemer in front of these Arians, these Pelagians, these enemies of Christ, who to-morrow perhaps would be masters of the Empire. Therefore, Augustin continued to write, and discuss, and disprove. There came a time when he had to think of fighting otherwise than with the pen. His life, the lives of his flock, were threatened. He had to see to the bodily defence of his country and city. The fact was, that some time before the great drive of the Vandals, forerunners of them, in the shape of hordes of African Barbarians, had begun to lay waste the provinces. The Circoncelliones were not dead, nor their good friends the Donatists either. These sectaries, encouraged by the widespread anarchy, came out of their hiding-places and shewed themselves more insolent and aggressive than ever. Possibly they hoped for some effective support against the Roman Church from the Arian Vandals who were drawing near, or at least a recognition of what they believed to be their rights. Day after day, bands of Barbarians were landing from Spain. In the rear of these wandering troops of brigands or irregular soldiers, the old enemies of the Roman peace and civilization, the Nomads of the South, the Moors of the Atlas, the Kabylian mountaineers, flung themselves upon country and town, pillaging, killing, and burning everything that got in their way. All was laid desolate. "Countries but lately prosperous and populated have been changed into solitudes," said Augustin. At last, in the spring of the year 429, the Vandals and the Alani, having joined forces on the Spanish coast under their King, Genseric, crossed the Straits of Gibraltar. It was devastation on a large scale this time. An army of eighty thousand men set themselves methodically to plunder the African provinces. Cherchell, which had already been sorely tried during the revolt of Firmus the Moor, was captured again and burned. All the towns and fortified places on the coast fell, one after another. Constantine alone, from the height of its rock, kept the invaders at bay. To starve out those who fled from towns and farms and took refuge in the fastnesses of the Atlas, the Barbarians destroyed the harvest, burned the grain-houses, and cut down the vines and fruit trees. And they set fire to the forests which covered the slopes of the mountains, to force the refugees out of their hiding-places. This stupid ravaging was against the interest of the Vandals themselves, because they were injuring the natural riches of Africa, the report of which had brought them there. Africa was for them the land of plenty, where people could drink more wine than they wanted and eat wheaten bread. It was the country where life was comfortable, easy, and happy. It was the granary of the Mediterranean, the great supply-store of Rome. But their senseless craving for gold led them to ruin provinces, in which, nevertheless, they counted upon settling. They behaved in Africa as they had behaved in Rome under Alaric. By way of tearing gold out of the inhabitants, they tortured them as they had tortured the wealthy Romans. They invented worse ones. Children, before their parents' eyes, were sliced in two like animals in a slaughterhouse. Or else their skulls were smashed against the pavements and walls of houses. The Church was believed to be very rich; and perhaps, as it had managed to comprise in its domains the greatest part of the landed estates, it was upon it chiefly that the Barbarians flung themselves. The priests and bishops were tortured with unheard-of improvements of cruelty. They were dragged in the rear of the army like slaves, so that heavy ransoms might be extracted from the faithful in exchange for their pastors. They were obliged to carry the baggage like the camels and mules, and when they gave out the Barbarians prodded them with lances. Many sank down beside the road and never rose more. But it is certain that fanaticism added to the covetousness and ferocity of the Vandals. These Arians bore a special grudge against Catholicism, which was, besides, in their eyes, the religion of the Roman domination. This is why they made their chief attacks on basilicas, convents, hospitals, and all the property of the Church. And throughout the country public worship was stopped. In Hippo, these atrocities were known before the Barbarians arrived. The people must have awaited them and prepared to receive them with gloomy resignation. Africa had not been tranquil for a century. After the risings of Firmus and Gildo, came the lootings of the southern Nomads and the Berber mountaineers. And it was not so long since the Circoncelliones were keeping people constantly on the alert. But this time everybody felt that the great ruin was at hand. They were stunned by the news that some town or fortified place had been captured by the Vandals, or that some farm or villa in the neighbourhood was on fire. Amid the general dismay, Augustin did his best to keep calm. He, indeed, saw beyond the material destruction, and at every new rumour of massacre or burning he would repeat to his clerics and people the words of the Wise Man: "Doth the firm of heart grieve to see fall the stones and beams, and death seize the children of men?" They accused him of being callous. They did not understand him. While all about him mourned the present misfortunes, he was already lamenting over the evil to come, and this clear-sightedness pained him more than the shock of the daily horrors committed by the Barbarians. His disciple Possidius, the Bishop of Guelma, who was with him in these sad days, naively applied to him the saying out of _Ecclesiastes_: "In much wisdom is much grief." Augustin did really suffer more than others, because he thought more profoundly on the disaster. He foresaw that Africa was going to be lost to the Empire, and consequently to the Church. They were bound together in his mind. What was there to do against brutal strength? All the eloquence and all the charity in the world would be as nothing against that unchained elemental mass of Vandals. It was as impossible to convert the Barbarians as it had been to convert the Donatists. Force was the only resource against force. Then in despair the man of God turned once more to Cæsar. The monk appealed to the soldier. He charged Boniface, Count of Africa, to save Rome and the Church. This Boniface, a rather ambiguous personage, was a fine type of the swashbuckler and official of the Lower-Empire. Thracian by origin, he joined the trickery of the Oriental to all the vices of the Barbarian. He was strong, clever in all bodily exercises like the soldiers of those days, overflowing with vigour and health, and even brave at times. In addition, he was fond of wine and women, and ate and drank like a true pagan. He was married twice, and after his second marriage he kept in the sight and knowledge of everybody a harem of concubines. He was sent, first of all, to Africa as a Tribune--that is to say, as Commissioner of the Imperial Government, probably to carry out the decrees of Honorius against the Donatists; and ere long he was made commander of the military forces of the province, with the title of Count. In reality, while seeming to protect the country, he set himself to plunder it, as the tradition was among the Roman officials. His _officium_, still more grasping than himself, persuaded him to deeds which the Bishop of Hippo, who was, however, anxious to remain on the right side of him, protested against by hints. Boniface was obliged to overlook much robbery and pillage on the part of his subordinates so as to keep them faithful. Moreover, he himself stole. He was bound to close his eyes to the depredations of others, that his own might be winked at. Once become the accomplice of this band of robbers, he had no longer the authority to control them. How did Augustin ever believe in the goodwill and good faith of this adventurer full of coarse passions, so far as to put his final hopes in him? Augustin knew men very well; he could detect low and hypocritical natures at a distance. How came it that he was taken in by Boniface? Well, Augustin wanted his support, first of all, when he came as Imperial Commissioner to Carthage to bring the Donatists into line. Generally, we see only the good points of people who do us good turns. Besides, in order to propitiate the bishop, and the devout Court at Ravenna, the Tribune advertised his great zeal in favour of Catholicism. His first wife, a very pious woman whom he seems to have loved much, encouraged him in this. When she died, he was so overcome by despair that he took refuge in the extremest practices of religion--and in this, perhaps, he was quite sincere. It is also possible that he was becoming discredited at Ravenna, where they must have known about his oppressions and suspected his ambitious intrigues. Anyhow, whether he was really disgusted with the world, or whether he deemed it prudent to throw a little oblivion over himself just then, he spoke on all hands of resigning his post and living in retreat like a monk. It was just at this moment that Augustin and Alypius begged him not to desert the African army. They met the Commander-in-Chief at Thubunæ, in Southern Numidia, where, no doubt, he was reducing the Nomads. We must remark once more Augustin's energy in travelling, to the very eve of his death. It was a long and dangerous road from Hippo to Thubunæ. Before making up his mind to so much fatigue, the old bishop must have judged the situation to be very serious. At Thubunæ, was Boniface playing a game, or was he, indeed, so crushed by his grief that the world had become unbearable and he pondered genuine thoughts of changing his way of life? What is sure is, that he gave the two prelates the most edifying talk. When they heard the Count of Africa speaking with unction of the cloister and of his desire to retire there, they were a little astonished at so much piety in a soldier. Besides, these excellent resolutions were most inconvenient for their plans. They remonstrated with him that it was quite possible to save one's soul in the army, and quoted the example of David, the warrior king. They ended by telling him all the expectations they founded upon his resource and firmness. They begged him to protect the churches and convents against fresh attacks of the Donatists, and especially against the Barbarians of Africa. These were at this moment breaking down all the old defence lines and laying waste the territories of the Empire. Boniface allowed himself to be easily convinced--promised whatever he was asked. But he never budged. From now on, his conduct becomes most singular. He is in command of all the military strength of the province, and he takes no steps to suppress the African looters. It would seem as if he only thought of filling the coffers of himself and his friends. The country was so systematically scoured by them that, as Augustin said, there was nothing more left to take. This inactivity lent colour to the rumours of treason. Nor is it impossible that he had cherished a plan from the beginning of his command to cut out an independent principality for himself in Africa. Was this the reason that he dealt softly with the native tribes, so as to make certain of their help in case of a conflict with the Imperial army? However that may be, his behaviour was not frank. Some years later, he landed on the Spanish coast to war against the Vandals under the command of the Prefect Castinus, and there he married a Barbarian princess who was by religion an Arian. It is true that the new Countess of Africa became a convert to Catholicism. But her first child was baptized by Arian priests, who rebaptized, at the same time, the Catholic slaves of Boniface's household. This marriage with a Vandal, these concessions to Arianism, gave immense scandal to the orthodox. Rumours of treason began to float about again. No doubt Boniface took great advantage of his fidelity to the Empress Placidia. But he was standing between the all-powerful Barbarians and the undermined Empire. He wanted to remain on good terms with both, and then, when the hour came, to go over to the stronger. This double-faced diplomacy caused his downfall. His rival Aëtius accused him of high treason before Placidia. The Court of Ravenna declared him an enemy of the Empire, and an army was sent against him. Boniface did not hesitate; he went into open rebellion against Rome. Augustin was thunderstruck by his desertion. But what way was there to make this violent man listen to reason, who had at least the appearances of right on his side, since there was a chance they had slandered him to the Empress, and who thought it quite natural to take vengeance on his enemies? His recent successes had still more intoxicated him. He had just defeated the two generals who had been sent to reduce him, and he was accordingly master of the situation in Africa. What was he going to do? The worst resolutions were to be feared from this conqueror, all smarting, and hungry for revenge.... Nevertheless, Augustin resolved to write to him. His letter is a masterpiece of tact, of prudence, and also of Christian and episcopal firmness. It would have been dangerous to declare to this triumphant rebel: "You are in the wrong. Your duty is to submit to the Emperor, your master." Boniface was quite capable of answering: "What are you interfering for? Politics are no business of yours. Look after your Church!" This is why Augustin very cleverly speaks to him from beginning to end of his letter simply as a bishop, eager for the salvation of a very dear son in Jesus Christ. And so, by keeping strictly to his office of spiritual director, he gained his end more surely and entirely; and, as a doctor of souls, he ventured to remind Boniface of certain truths which he would never have dared to mention as counsellor. According to Augustin, the disgrace of the Count, and the evils which this event had brought on Africa, came principally from his attachment to worldly benefits. It was the ambition and covetousness of himself and his followers which had done all the harm. Let him free himself from perishable things, let him prevent the thefts and plundering of those under him. Let him, who some time ago wished to live in perfect celibacy, now keep at least to his wife and no other. Finally, let him remember his sworn allegiance. Augustin did not mean to go into the quarrel between Boniface and Placidia, and he gave no opinion as to the grievances of either. He confined himself to saying to the general in rebellion: "If you have received so many benefits from the Roman Empire, do not render evil for good. If, on the other hand, you have received evil, do not render evil for evil." It is clear that the Bishop of Hippo could scarcely have given any other advice to the Count of Africa. To play the part of political counsellor in the very entangled state of affairs was extremely risky. How was it possible to exhort a victorious general to lay down his arms before the conquered? And yet, in estimating the situation from the Christian standpoint alone, Augustin had found a way to say everything essential, all that could profitably be said at the moment. How did Boniface take a letter which was, in the circumstances, so courageous? What we know is that he did not alter his plans. It would indeed have been very difficult for him to withdraw and yield; and more than ever since a new army under Sigisvultus had been sent against him in all haste. A real fatality compelled him to remain in revolt against Rome. Did he believe he was ruined, as has been stated, or else, through his family connections--let us remember that his wife was a Barbarian--had he been for a long time plotting with Genseric to divide Africa? He has been accused of that. What comes out is, that as soon as he heard of the arrival of Sigisvultus and the new expeditionary force, he called in the Vandals to his aid. This was the great invasion of 429. Ere long, the Barbarians entered Numidia. The borderlands about Hippo were threatened. Stricken with terror, the inhabitants in a mass fled before the enemy, leaving the towns empty. Those who were caught in them rushed into the churches, imploring the bishops and priests to help them. Or else, giving up all hope of life, they cried out to be baptized, confessed, did penance in public. The Vandals, as we have seen, aimed specially at the clergy; they believed that the Catholic priests were the soul of the resistance. Should not these priests, then, in the very interest of the Church, save themselves for quieter times, and escape the persecution by flight? Many sheltered themselves behind the words of Christ: "When they persecute you in this city, flee ye into another." But Augustin strongly condemned the cowardliness of the deserters. In a letter addressed to his fellow-bishop, Honoratus, and intended to be read by all the clergy in Africa, he declares that bishops and priests should not abandon their churches and dioceses, but stay at their post till the end--till death and till martyrdom--to fulfil the duties of their ministry. If the faithful were able to withdraw into a safe place, their pastors might accompany them; if not, they should die in the midst of them. Thus they would have at least the consolation of lending aid to the dying in their last moments, and especially of preventing the apostasies which readily took place under the shock of the terror. For Augustin, who foresaw the future, the essential thing was that later, when the Vandal wave had swept away, Catholicism might flourish again in Africa. To this end, the Catholics must be made to remain in the country, and the greatest possible number be strengthened in their faith. Otherwise, the work of three centuries would have to be done all over again. We must admire this courage and clear-mindedness in an old man of seventy-five, who was being continually harassed by the complaints and lamentations of a crowd of demoralized fugitives. The position became more and more critical. The siege lines were drawing closer. But in the midst of all this dread, Augustin was given a gleam of hope: Boniface made his peace with the Empire. Henceforward, his army, turning against the Barbarians, might protect Hippo and perhaps save Africa. Had Augustin a hand in this reconciliation? There is not the least doubt that he desired it most earnestly. In a letter to Count Darius, the special envoy sent from Ravenna to treat with the rebel general, he warmly congratulates the Imperial plenipotentiary on his mission of peace. "You are sent," he said to him, "to stop the shedding of blood. Therefore rejoice, illustrious and very dear son in Jesus Christ, rejoice in this great and real blessing, and rejoice upon it in the Lord, Who has made you what you are, and entrusted to you a task so beautiful and important. May God seal the good work He has done for us through you!" ... And Darius answered: "May you be spared to pray such prayers for the Empire and the Roman State a long time yet, my Father." But the Empire was lost in Africa. If the reconciliation of the rebellious Count had given some illusions to Augustin, they did not last long. Boniface, having failed in his endeavours to negotiate the retreat of the Vandals, was defeated by Genseric, and obliged to fall back into Hippo with an army of mercenary Goths. Thus it came about that Barbarians held against other Barbarians one of the last Roman citadels in Africa. From the end of May, 430, Hippo was blockaded on the land side and on the side of the sea. In great tribulation, Augustin resigned himself to this supreme humiliation, and to all the horrors which would have to be endured if the city were captured. As a Christian, he left all to the will of God, and he would repeat to those about him the words of the Psalm: "Righteous art Thou, O Lord, and upright are Thy judgments." A number of fugitive priests, and among them Possidius, Bishop of Guelma, had taken refuge in the episcopal residence. One day, when he lost heart, Augustin, who was at table with them, said: "In front of all these disasters, I ask God to deliver this city from the siege, or, if that be not His decree, to give His servants the necessary strength to do His will, or at least to take me from this world and receive me into His bosom." But it is more than probable that discouragement of that kind was only momentary with him, and that in his sermons, as well as in his conversations with Boniface, he did his utmost to stimulate the courage of the people and the general. His correspondence includes a series of letters written about this time to the Count of Africa, which manifest here and there a very warlike spirit. These letters are most certainly apocryphal. Yet they do reveal something of what must have been the sentiments just then of the people of Hippo and of Augustin himself. One of these letters emphatically congratulates Boniface upon an advantage gained over the Barbarians. "Your Excellency knows, I believe, that I am stretched upon my bed, and that I long for my last day to come. I am overjoyed at your victory. I urge you to save the Roman city. Rule your soldiers like a good Count. Do not trust too much to your own strength. Put your glory in Him Who gives courage, and you will never fear any enemy. Farewell!" The words do not matter much. Whatever may have been Augustin's last farewell to the defender of Hippo, it was no doubt couched in language not unlike this. In any case, posterity has wished to believe that the dying bishop maintained to the end his unyielding demeanour face to face with the Barbarians. It would be a misuse of words to represent him as a patriot in the present sense of the term. It is no less true that this African, this Christian, was an admirable servant of Rome. Until his death he kept his respect for it, because in his eyes the Empire meant order, peace, civilization, the unity of faith in the unity of rule. IV SAINT AUGUSTIN In the third month of the siege, he fell ill. He had a fever--no doubt an infectious fever. The country people, the wounded soldiers who had taken refuge in Hippo after the rout of Boniface, must have brought in the germs of disease. It was, moreover, the end of August, the season of epidemics, of damp heats and oppressive evenings, the time of the year most dangerous and trying for sick people. All at once, Augustin took to his bed. But even there, upon the bed in which he was going to die, he was not left in quiet. People came to ask his prayers for some possessed by devils. The old bishop was touched; he wept and asked God to give him this grace, and the devils went out of those poor crazy men. This cure, as may well be thought, made a great noise in the city. A man brought him another one sick to be healed. Augustin, being most weary, said to the man: "My son, you see the state I am in. If I had any power over illnesses, I should begin by curing myself." But the man had no idea of being put off: he had had a dream. A mysterious voice had said to him, "Go and see Augustin: he will put his hands on the sick person, who will rise up cured." And, in fact, he did. I think these are the only miracles the saint made in his life. But what matters that, when the continual miracle of his charity and his apostolate is considered? Soon the bishop's illness grew worse. Eventually, he succeeded in persuading them not to disturb him any more, and that they would let him prepare for death in silence and recollection. During the ten days that he still lingered, nobody entered his cell save the physicians, and the servants who brought him a little food. He availed himself of the quiet to repent of his faults. For he was used to say to his clergy that "even after baptism, Christians--nay, priests, however holy they might be, ought never go out of life without having made a general confession." And the better to rouse his contrition, he had desired them to copy out on leaves the Penitential Psalms, and to put these leaves on the wall of his room. He read them continually from his pillow. Here, then, he is alone with himself and God. A solemn moment for the great old man! He called up his past life, and what struck him most, and saddened him, was the foundering of all his human hopes. The enemies of the Church, whom he had battled with almost without ceasing for forty years, and had reason to believe conquered--all these enemies were raising their heads: Donatists, Arians, Barbarians. With the Barbarians' help, the Arians were going to be the masters of Africa. The churches, reformed at the price of such long efforts, would be once more destroyed. And see now! the authority which might have supported them, which he had perhaps too much relied upon--well, the Empire was sinking too. It was the end of order, of substantial peace, of that minimum of safety which is indispensable for all spiritual effort. From one end to the other of the Western world, Barbarism triumphed. Sometimes, amid these sad thoughts of the dying man, the clangour of clarions blared out--there was a call to arms on the ramparts. And these musics came to him in his half-delirious state very mournfully, like the trumpets proclaiming the Judgment Day. Yes, it might well be feared that the Day of Wrath was here! Was it really the end of the world, or only the end of a world?... Truly, there were then enough horrors and calamities to make people think of the morrow with dismay. Many of the signs predicted by Scripture dazed the imagination: desolations, wars, persecutions of the Church, increased with terrific steadiness and cruelty. Yet all the signs foretold were not there. How many times already had humanity been deceived in its fear and its hope! In reality, though all seemed to shew that the end of time was drawing nigh, no one could tell the day nor the hour of the Judgment. Hence, men should watch always, according to the words of Christ.... But if this trial of Barbarian war was to pass like the others, how woeful it was while it endured! How hard for Augustin, above all, who saw nearly the whole of his work thrown down. One thought at least consoled him, that since his conversion, for forty years and more, he had done all he was able--he had worked for Christ even beyond his strength. He said to himself that he left behind him the fruit of a huge labour, a whole body of doctrine and apology which would safeguard against error whatever was left of his flock and of the African Church. He himself had founded a Church which might serve as an example, his dear Church of Hippo, that he had done his best to fashion after the divine plan. And he had also founded convents, and a library full of books, which had become still larger recently through the generosity of Count Darius. He had lessoned his clergy who, once the disasters were past, would scatter the good seed of Truth. Books, monasteries, priests, a sure and solid nourishment for the mind, shelters and guides for souls--there is what he bequeathed to the workers of the future. And with a little joy mingling with his sorrow, he read on the corner of the wall where his bed was, this verse of the Psalm: _Exibit homo ad opus suum et operationem suam usque ad vesperum_--"Man goeth forth unto his work and to his labour until the evening." He, too, had worked until evening. If the earthly reward seemed to slip from him now, if all was sinking around him, if his episcopal city was beleaguered, if he himself, although still a strong man--"he had the use of all his limbs," says Possidius; "a keen ear and perfect sight"--if he himself was dying too soon, it was doubtless in expiation for the sins of his youth. At this remembrance of his disorders, the tears fell over his face.... And yet, however wild had been his conduct at that time, he could descry in it the sure marks of his vocation. He recalled the despair and tears of his mother, but also his enthusiasm when he read the _Hortensius_; his disgust for the world and all things when he lost his friend. In the old man he recognized the new. And he said to himself: "Nay! but that was myself. I have not changed. I have only found myself. I have only changed my ways. In my youth, in the strongest time of my mistakes, I had already risen to turn to Thee, my God!" His worst foolishness had been the desire to understand all things. He had failed in humility of mind. Then God had given him the grace to submit his intelligence to the faith. He had believed, and then he had understood, as well as he could, as much as he could. In the beginning, he acknowledged very plainly that he did not understand. And then faith had thrown open the roads of understanding. He had splendidly employed his reason, within the limits laid down against mortal weakness. Had that not been the proud desire of his youth? To understand! What greater destiny? To love also. After he had freed himself from carnal passions, he had much employed his heart. He thought of all the charity he had poured out upon his people and the Church, upon all he had loved in God--upon all he had done, upon all the consequence of his labour, inspired and strengthened by the divine love.... Yes, to love--all was in that! Let the Barbarians come! Had not Christ said: "Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world"? So long as there shall be two men gathered together for love of Him, the world will not be entirely lost, the Church and civilization will be saved. The religion of Christ is a leaven of action, understanding, sacrifice, and charity. If the world be not at this hour already condemned, if the Day of Judgment be still far off, it is from this religion that shall arise the new influences of the future.... And so Augustin forgot his sufferings and his human disappointments in the thought that, in spite of all, the Church is eternal. The City of God gathered in the wreckage of the earthly city: "The Goth cannot capture what Christ protects"--_Non tollit Gothus quod custodit Christus_. And as his sufferings increased, he turned all his thoughts on this unending City, "where we rest, where we see, where we love," where we find again all the beloved ones who have gone away. All--he called them all in this supreme moment: Monnica, Adeodatus, and her who had nearly lost herself for him, and all those he had held dear.... On the fifth day of the calends of September, Augustin, the bishop, was very low. They were praying for him in the churches at Hippo, and especially in the Basilica of Peace, where he had preached and worked for others so long. Possidius of Guelma was in the bishop's room, and the priests and monks. They sent up their prayers with those of the dying man. And no doubt they sang for the last time before him one of those liturgical chants which long ago at Milan had touched him even to tears, and now, since the siege, in the panic caused by the Barbarians, they dared not sing any more. Augustin, guarding himself even now against the too poignant sweetness of the melody, attended only to the sense of the words. And he said: "My soul thirsts after the living God. When shall I appear before His face?" Or again: "He Who is Life has come down into this world. He has suffered our death, and He has caused it to die by the fullness of His life.... Life has come down to you--and will you not ascend towards Him and live?..." He was passing into Life and into Glory. He was going very quietly, amid the chanting of hymns and the murmur of prayers.... Little by little his eyes were veiled, the lines of his face became rigid. His lips moved no more. Possidius, the faithful disciple, bent over him. Like a patriarch of the Scriptures, Augustin of Thagaste "slept with his fathers."... * * * * * And now, whatever may be the worth of this book, which has been planned and carried out in a spirit of veneration and love for the saint, for the great heart and the great intellect that Augustin was, for this unique type of the Christian, the most perfect and the most admirable perhaps that has ever been seen--the author can only repeat in all humility what was said fifteen hundred years ago by the Bishop of Guelma, Augustin's first biographer: "I do desire of the charity of those into whose hands this work shall fall, to join with me in thanksgiving and blessing to Our Lord, Who has inspired me to make known this life to those present and those absent, and has given me the strength to do it. Pray for me and with me, that I may try here below to follow in the steps of this peerless man, whom, by God's goodness, I have had the happiness of living with for such a long time...." THE END 
37862	----	[Frontispiece: "The seed of his teaching has spread abroad" _Page 4_] SAUL OF TARSUS _A TALE OF THE EARLY CHRISTIANS_ _By_ ELIZABETH MILLER _Author of_ The Yoke WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY ANDRÉ CASTAIGNE INDIANAPOLIS THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY PUBLISHERS COPYRIGHT 1906 THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY CONTENTS Chapter I Saul of Tarsus II A Prudent Exception III The First Martyr IV The Bankrupt V Agrippa in Repertoire VI Marsyas Assumes a Charge VII The Bondman of Hate VIII An Alexandrian Characteristic IX "--As an Army With Banners" X Flaccus Works a Complexity XI The House of Defense XII "Scattering the Flock" XIII A Trust Fulfilled XIV For a Woman's Sake XV The False Balance XVI A Matter Handled Wisely XVII A Word in Season XVIII The Ransom XIX The Deliverance XX The Feast of Flora XXI The Fining Fire XXII "In the Cloak of Two Colors" XXIII A Letter and a Loss XXIV The Digged Pit XXV The Speaking of Eutychus XXVI The Arm Made Bare XXVII The Proconsul's Deliberations XXVIII The Strange Woman XXIX In Extremis XXX The Eremite in Scarlet, and the Bankrupt in Purple XXXI The Dregs of the Cup of Trembling XXXII Sanctuary XXXIII The Dregs of the Cup of Fury XXXIV Captives of the Mighty XXXV The Approach of the Day of Visitation XXXVI On the Damascus Road XXXVII In the House of Ananias XXXVIII The Requital In Memory of My Soldier Brother Ralph Miller Lieutenant Sixth Cavalry U.S.A. SAUL OF TARSUS CHAPTER I SAUL OF TARSUS On a certain day in March of the year 36 A.D., a Levite, one of the Shoterim or Temple lictors, came down from Moriah, into the vale of Gihon, and entered the portal of the great college, builded in Jerusalem for the instruction of rabbis and doctors of Law in Judea. With foot as rapid and as noiseless as that of a fox among the tombs, the Levite crossed the threshold into the great gloom of the interior. This way and that he turned his head, watchful, furtive, catching every obscure corner in the range of his glance. He saw that three men sat within, two together, one a little apart from the others. From this to that one, the alert gaze slipped until it lighted upon a small, bowed shape in white garments. Then the Levite smiled, his lips moved and shaped a word of satisfaction, but no sound issued. Silently he flitted into an aisle which would lead him upon the two, and suddenly appeared before them. The small bent figure made a nervous start, but the Levite bowed and rubbed his hands. "Greeting, Rabbi Saul; God's peace attend thee. Be greeted, Rabbi Eleazar; peace to thee!" Rabbi Eleazar raised a great head and looked with an unfavorable eye at the Levite; in it was to be read strong dislike of the Levite's stealthy manner. "Greeting, Joel," he replied in a voice quite in keeping with his splendid bulk, "peace to thee. Yet take it not amiss if I suggest that since there is no warning in thy footfall or thy garments, thou shouldst be belled!" The other had dropped back in his seat, and the Levite bowed again to him. "I pray thy pardon, Rabbi Saul, but I came as I was sent--in haste." "It is nothing, Joel," Saul answered. "Give us news of the High Priest's health." "He continues in health, God be thanked, but his spirit was sorely tried--" He stopped abruptly to look, as if in question, at the man sitting apart in the shadows. "Who is that?" he asked suspiciously. "A pupil," was Eleazar's impatient reply. The Levite looked again, but, the twilight thwarting him, he hitched a slant shoulder and, passing to one of the windows, drew aside its heavy hanging. Instantly, a great golden beam shot into the cold chamber and illuminated it gloriously. Saul threw his hand over his eyes to shut out the blinding radiance. But the pupil, helped at his reading by the admitted light, straightened himself, glanced up a moment, and turned to his scroll without a word. "A stranger," Joel whispered, coming back to the rabbis. "What burden of mystery dost thou conceal, Joel?" Eleazar exclaimed. "Yonder man is an Essene; look about; the stones will take tongue and betray thee, sooner than he." "Let me be sure, let me be sure!" Joel insisted stubbornly. As if obedient to Eleazar, he cast an eye about the chamber. The light which came in at the west was straight from the spring sun, moted and warm with benevolence. That which entered at the east was only a quivering reflection from the marble walls and golden gates of the Temple. The chamber was immense, shadowy and draughty, the floor of stone, the walls of Hermon's rock, relieved by massive arcades supported on pilasters, and friezes of such images as were hieratically approved. The ceiling was so lost in height and cold dusk that its structure could not be defined. At the end opposite the doors was the lectern of ivory and ebony, embellished with symbolical intaglios and inlaid with gold. Beside it stood the reader's chair, across which the rug had been dropped as he had put it off his knees. Before the lectern, across and down the great chamber, were ranges of carven benches, among which were lamps of bronze, darkened and green about the reliefs and corrugations on the bowls, depending from chains or set about on tripods. But besides the three already noted, the Levite saw and expected to see no others. Eleazar regarded his ostentatious inspection of the room with disgust. "Thou hast a burden on thy soul, Joel," Saul urged mildly. "Let us bear it with thee." The Levite came close and bent over the rabbis. "Question your souls, brethren," he said. "Hath Judea more to lose than it hath lost?" he asked in a lowered tone. "Its identity," Eleazar responded shortly. But the Levite looked expectantly at Saul. "Its faith," Saul suggested quietly. The Levite nodded eagerly. "Its faith," Saul continued, as if speaking to himself, "and after that there is nothing more. Yea, restore unto it its kings and its dominions, yet withhold the faith and there is no Judea. Desolate it until the land is sown in salt and the people bound to the mills of the oppressor, so but the faith abide, Judea is Judea, glorified!" "What then, O Rabbi," the Levite persisted, "if the land be sown in salt and the people bound to the mills of the oppressor, if the faith be abandoned--what then?" "God can not perish," Eleazar put in. "Fear not; it can not come to pass." "Nay, but evil can enter the souls of men and point them after false prophets so that God is forgotten," the Levite retorted. His lean figure bent at the hips and he thrust his face forward with triumph of prophecy on it. Saul looked at him. "What hast thou to tell, Joel?" he asked with command in his voice. The Levite accepted the order as he had worked toward it--with energy. "Listen, then," he began in a whisper. "Dost thou remember Him whom they crucified at Golgotha, a Passover, four years ago?" Eleazar nodded, but Saul made no sign. "Know ye that they killed the plant after it had ripened," the Levite hastened on. "The seed of His teaching hath spread abroad and wherever it lodgeth it hath taken root and multiplied. Wherefore, there is a multitude of offspring from the single stem." Saul stood up. He did not gain much in stature by rising, but the temper of the man towered gigantic over the impatience of Eleazar and the craft of the Levite. "What accusation is this that thou levelest at Judea?" he demanded. "A truth!" Joel replied. "That Israel hath a blasphemer among them, which hath been spared, concealed and not put away?" questioned Saul. "Dare ye?" the Levite cried. "Dare ye not!" Saul answered sternly. "It is the Law!" The Levite came toward him. "Go thou unto the High Priest Jonathan," he whispered evilly; "he hath work for thee to do!" Eleazar doubled his huge hand and whirled his head away. There was tense silence for a moment. "Is there a specific transgression discovered?" Saul demanded. The Levite weighed his answer before he gave it. "Rumor hath it," he began, "that certain of the sect are in the city preaching--" "Rumor!" Saul exclaimed. "Hast rested on the testimony of rumor?" "Can ye track pestilence?" he asked craftily. "By the sick!" was the retort. "Go on!" "It is the High Priest's vow to attack it," Joel declared. "He hath no other thought. It is said that one of the disputants, who yesterday troubled them in the Cilician synagogue with an alien doctrine, preached the Nazarene's heresy." "In the Cilician--in mine own synagogue!" Saul repeated, in amazement. "In thine, in the Libertine, the Cyrenian and the Alexandrian." "And they suffered him?" Saul persisted with growing earnestness. "They did not understand him, then; he is but a new-comer from Galilee." "And I was not there; I was not there!" Saul exclaimed regretfully. "What is he called?" "Stephen." There was a sound from the direction of the silent pupil. They looked that way to see that he had dropped his scroll and had sprung to his feet. The Levite dropped his head between his shoulders and scrutinized him sharply. But the young man had fixed his eyes upon Saul, as if waiting for his answer. "Stephen of Galilee," the Levite added, watching the young man. "A Hellenist; and he wrapped his blasphemy so subtly in philosophy that none detected it until after much thought." The young man turned his face toward the speaker and a glimmer of anger showed in his black eyes. "It is bold blasphemy which ventures into a synagogue," Saul said half to himself. "Ah! thou pointest to the sign of peril," the Levite resumed. "Boldness is the banner of strength; strength is the fruit of numbers; and numbers of apostates will be the ruin of Judea and the forgetting of God!" Saul caught up his scrip which lay beside him, but Eleazar continued to gaze at the beam of light penetrating the chamber. "Wherefore the High Priest is troubled, and, laying aside all his private ambitions, henceforward he will devote himself to the preservation of the faith," the Levite continued. "Which means," Eleazar interrupted, "the persecution of the apostate." The Levite spread out his hands and lifted his shoulders. The Rabbi Eleazar forged too far ahead. "It is our duty, Eleazar," Saul said, "to discover if this Galilean preaches heresy. Let us go to the synagogue." Eleazar arose, a towering man, broad, heavy and slow, but his rising was as the rising of opposition. "I am enlisted in the teaching of the Law, not in the suppression of heresy," he said bluntly. "Furthermore, my work here is not yet complete. Wilt thou excuse me, my brother?" "Let me not keep thee from thy duty," Saul answered courteously. "Joel! Come with me," Eleazar commanded, and together the two disappeared into the interior of the college. Then the young man who had held his place came out of the shadows into the broad beam of the sun, which fell now over Saul. "Peace to thee, Saul," he said; "peace and greeting." The voice, in contrast to the tones of the men who had lately discussed, was very calm and level, restrained by cultivation, yet one which is never characteristic of an undecided nature. "Thou, Marsyas!" Saul exclaimed in sudden recognition. He extended his hands to meet the other's in a greeting that was more affectionate than conventional. The young man with sudden impulsiveness raised the hands and pressed them to his breast. "Saul! Saul!" he repeated with a quiver of emotion in his voice. "And none hath supplanted me in thy loves, Marsyas?" Saul smiled. "Art thou come hither for instruction? Am I to have thee by me now in Jerusalem?" The glow of warmth in the rabbi's manner did not contribute its confidence to the young man. He seemed not less troubled than moved. With searching eyes, he looked down from his superior height into Saul's face. As the two stood together, physical extremes could not have been more perfect. The rabbi was not well-formed, and his frame had a note of feebleness in its make-up in spite of its youth and flesh. The face was pale, the eyes so deep-set as to appear sunken, the hair, thin, curling and lightly silvered, the beard, short, full and touched with the same early frost. Though no recent alien blood ran in his veins, his features were only moderately characteristic of the sons of Jacob. He was not erect, and the stoop in his shoulders was more extreme than the mere relaxation from rigidity, yet less pronounced than actual curvature. The veins on the backs of his hands stood up from the refined whiteness of the flesh, and when his head turned, the great artery in his throat could be seen irregularly beating. It was the physique of a man not only weak but sapped by a subtle infirmity. He wore the head-dress and the voluminous white robes of a rabbi, girded with the blue and white cord of his calling. But his class as a Pharisee was marked by the heavy undulating fringes at the hem of his garment, and by the little case of calf-skin framing a parchment lettered in Hebrew which was bound across his forehead. Herein, by fringe, phylactery and the traditional colors, he published his submission to the minutiæ of the Law. In so much the rabbi could have had twenty counterparts over Judea, but his aggressive nature stamped him with an individuality which has had no equal in all time. Over his countenance was a fine assumption of humility curiously inconsistent with a consciousness of excellence which made an atmosphere about him that could be felt. Yet, holding first place over these conflicting attributes was the stamp of tremendous mental power, and a heart-whole sweetness that was irresistible. The union of these four characteristics was to produce a man that would hold fast to theory, though all fact arise and shouted it down; who would maintain form, though the spirit had in horror long since fled the shape. Thus, inflexibly fixed in his convictions, he was unlimited in his capacity for maintaining them. In short, he was a leader of men, a zealot, a formalist and an inquisitor--one of great mentality dogmatized, of great spirit prejudiced, of immense capabilities perverted. Such was Saul of Tarsus. But the other was a Jew of blood so pure, of type so pronounced, that the man of mixed races before him appeared wholly foreign. His line had descended from the persistent love of Jacob for Rachel, through the tents of them that slew the Midianitish women in the wilderness, through the households of Esdras and the camps of Judas Maccabæus. He was above average height, and built ruggedly, as were Judah the lion, and Jacob who wrestled with the angel. One of in-door habit, he was fair on the forehead, under the soft young beard and the shining black curls at his temples. But his cheeks were crimson, his eyes intensely black and sparkling, his teeth, glittering ranges of shaded ivory. And the bold strength of his profile and the brilliance of his color seemed finished by the deep cleft distinctly discernible. On his face was written an attribute common among men of a time of Messianic hopes and crises. Asceticism with its blank purity of brow set him apart from the sordid souls in his walk. Yet about him there seemed to be an atmosphere surcharged with physical radiations, with human electricity that fairly sparkled in its strength. Even Saul, his long-time friend, on this occasion of sudden meeting, remarked this equal power of body and spirit. The Pharisee glanced at the young man's garments,--simple robes without fringes, without gaud, and white as the snows of Hermon. "Strange," the Pharisee said after his peculiar manner of talking with himself, "strange that thou shouldst elect to be an Essene." A little proud surprise appeared on Marsyas' face. "I can not be anything else," the young man answered. "Thou hast not ventured. But, nevertheless, thou wilt be noted in the college. The Essenes are very few these days in Jerusalem; En-Gadi receives them all. And thou art a doctor of Laws--a master Essene. How long wilt thou study here?" "Five years, Rabbi." Yet the young man was at least twenty-five years of age. What course of instruction was it which carried a man into middle life before it was finished? What but the tremendous complexities of the Mosaic and the Oral Law. But these things had been taught the young man in the forecourt of the little synagogue in Nazareth where he was born. So, because his learning extended beyond the reach of the provincial Essenic philosopher who had taught him in his youth, the young man had quitted the little hill town in Galilee to come to the feet of the master Essene in the great college of Jerusalem. To be an Essene was to live a celibate under the regime of community laws, under a common roof, at a common board; to be bodily and spiritually spotless, to believe in the resurrection of the soul, the brotherhood of man, and the frailty and the incontinence of women; to accept no hospitality from one not an Essene and to own no possessions apart from the common ownership of the order. But to be an Essenic doctor was to be the most ascetic scholar and the most scholarly ascetic in the world, at that time. But Marsyas had no thought on Saul's contemplation of him. "I heard the talk of the Levite," he said. "Because it concerns me much, I could not shut mine ears against it. I, too, have heard the creed of the Nazarenes." "How, Marsyas? Harkened unto the heretics?" "I have heard their creed," he persisted in his calm way. "It differs little from the teachings of mine own order, the Essenes, except that they believe in the divinity of Jesus of Nazareth and the receptiveness of the Gentile." "And thou callest that a little difference?" "Not so great that one going astray after the Nazarenes could not be satisfied with the Essenes, if he were obliged to give up his apostasy. I seek a remedy." "Moses supplied the remedy," Saul averred with meaning. "The Essenes are not inflicters of punishment," was the even reply. The Pharisee made a conciliatory gesture. "It is then only a discussion of the practices of my class and of thine." But Marsyas was not satisfied. "Thou knowest Stephen?" he asked after a pause. "Stephen of Galilee? Only by report." "Perchance, then, thou knowest Galilee," the Essene resumed after a short pause. "Galilee that sitteth between Phoenicia the menace and Samaria the pollution, and is not soiled; that standeth between the Middle Sea, the power, and the Jordan, the subject, and is not humbled. She is Israel's brawn, not easily governed of the mind which is enthroned Jerusalem. "We are rustics in Galilee, tillers of the soil, mountaineers and fishers, simple rugged folk who live in the present, expecting miracles, seeing signs, discovering prophets and wonders. We are patriots, bound and hooped against an alien, but bursting wide with whatever chanceth to ferment within us. Let there but arise a Galilean who hath a gift or a grudge or a devil, and proclaim himself anointed, and he can gather unto himself a following that would assail Cæsar's stronghold, did he say the word." He paused and seemed to recall what he had said. "Yet, we are good Jews," he added hastily, "faithful followers of the Law and such as Israel might select to die singly for Israel's sake. No Galilean is ashamed of himself except when he permits himself to be led so far into folly that he can not turn back." The Pharisee foresaw intuitively the young man's climax. "The Law does not remit punishment for blasphemy, even if a soul turn back from its folly," he observed. Marsyas' face became grave and he gazed at the place on the wall where quivered the reflection from the splendors of the Temple. "Stephen is my friend," he said earnestly, "a simple soul, generous, fervid, and a true lover of God." "If he be such, he is safe," Saul replied. The young man fingered the scarf that girded him. "The brothers at En-Gadi would receive him," he said. "What need of him to retire from the world if he be a good Jew?" Saul persisted. Again the young man hesitated. Saul was driving him into a declaration that he would have led forth gradually. Then he came to the Pharisee and laid a persuading band on his arm. "Go not to the synagogue," he entreated. "Wait a little!" "Wait in the Lord's business?" Saul asked mildly. "Be not hastier than the chastening of the Lord; if He bears with Stephen, so canst thou a little longer. Give love its chance with Stephen before vengeance undoes him wholly!" "Marsyas," Saul protested in a tone of kindly remonstrance, "thou dost convict him by thy very concern." "No!" the young Essene declared, pressing upon the Pharisee in passionate earnestness. "I am only troubled for him. Let me go first and understand him, for it seems that there is doubt in the hearts of his accusers, and after that--" "Thine eye shall not pity him," Saul repeated in warning. "Saul! Saul! He is my beloved friend!" "Moses prepared us for such a sorrow as apostasy among those whom we love. What says the Lawgiver--'thy friend, which is as thine own soul, thy hand shall be the first upon him to put him to death!'" The lifted hands of the young Essene dropped as if they had been struck down. "Death!" he repeated, retreating a step. "Wilt thou kill him?" "I am more thy friend, Marsyas," the Pharisee went on, "because I am zealous for the Law. The heresy is infectious and thou art no more safe from it than any other man. And I would rather sit in judgment over Stephen, whom I do not know, than over thee, who art dear to me as a brother." The young man drew near again. "Dear as a brother!" he said. "Stephen is that to me. Even now didst thou ask if any had supplanted thee in my loves. No; yet my loves have broadened, so that I can take another into my heart. The Lord God be merciful unto me, that I may not be driven to choose one, for defense against the other! Even as ye both love me, love one another! Saul! Thou wast my earlier friend! I can no more endure Stephen's peril than I can uproot thee from my heart!" Saul flinched before the concealed intimation in the words. A wave of pallor succeeded by hardness swept over his face, and Marsyas, observing the change, seized the Tarsian's hands between his own. "Wait until I have seen him," he besought, "and if there be any taint in his fidelity to the faith, I shall stop at no sacrifice to save him. He is, if at all, only momentarily drawn aside, and as the Lord God daily forgives us our sins, let us forgive a brother--" Saul tried to draw away, but the young Essene's imploring hands held his in a desperate clasp. "I will give up mine instruction," he swept on. "I will retire into En-Gadi and take him with me! I will give over everything and become one of their husbandmen; I will have no aim for myself, but for Stephen! And if I fail I will take sentence with him! Wait! Wait! Let me return to Nazareth and get my patrimony! I will come then and take him at once to En-Gadi! Saul!" But Saul threw off the beseeching hands and stepped back from the young man. The two gazed at each other, the Pharisee to discover a crisis in the Essene's look; the Essene to see immovability in the Pharisee. Then the distress in Marsyas' face changed swiftly, and an ember burned in his black eyes. He straightened himself and stretched out a hand. "I have spoken!" he said. Turning purposefully away, he went back to his place and took up his scroll. For a moment he held it, his eyes on the pavement. Slowly his fingers unclosed and the scroll dropped--dropped as if he had done with it. Catching up his white mantle, he walked swiftly out of the chamber and Saul looked after him, yearning, wistful and sad. Joel came out of the interior of the building. "I will go with thee to the synagogue," he offered. The Pharisee looked at him with cold dislike in his eyes, and, inclining his head, led the way out. At the threshold of the porch he halted. In the street opposite two young men were walking slowly. One was slight, young, graceful and simply clad in a Jewish smock. The other was Marsyas, the Essene, who went with an arm over the shoulders of the first, and, bending, seemed to speak with passionate earnestness to his companion. The faces of the two young men thus side by side showed the same spiritual mode of living, and youthful purity of heart. But the expression of the slighter one was less ascetic than happy, less rigorous than confident. As Marsyas spoke, the other smiled; and his smile was an illumination, not entirely earthly. Joel seized Saul's arm, and held it while the two approached, unconscious of the watchers in the shadow of the porch. "That is he," he whispered avidly. "That is he! Stephen, the apostate!" Stephen turned his head casually, and, catching the Pharisee's eye, returned the gaze with a little friendly questioning; then he raised his face to Marsyas and so they passed. The pallor on Saul's face deepened. CHAPTER II A PRUDENT EXCEPTION After he had separated from Stephen, Marsyas went to the house of a resident Essene with whom he made his home, to be fed, to be washed, to offer supplication and to announce his decision to go on a journey. At the threshold of his host's house he put aside his sandals and let himself in with a murmured formula. In a little time he came forth with a wallet flung over his shoulder and took the streets toward Gennath Gate. It was not written in the laws of his order that he should make greater preparation for a journey. He had already acquainted himself with the abiding-places of Essenes in villages between Jerusalem and Nazareth and, assured of their hospitality and the provision of the Essene's God, he knew that he would fare well to the hill town of Galilee. So he passed through the city by the walk of the purified, garments well in hand lest they touch women or the wayside dust, meeting the eye of no man, proud of his humility, punctilious in his simplicity, and wearing unrest under his shell of calm. He had an unobstructed path, a path ceremonially clean. He had but to hesitate on the edge of a congestion, and the first gowned and bearded Jew that observed him signed his companions and the way was opened. For the Essenes were the best of men, the truly holy men of Israel. He went down between the fronts of featureless houses, through the golden haze of sun and dust that overhung the narrow, stony mule-ways, until the distant dream towers of Mariamne, of Phasælus and of Hippicus became imminent, brooding shapes of blackened masonry, and the wall cut off the mule-ways and the great shady arch of the gate let in a glimpse of the country without. On one hand was the Prætorium, the Roman garrison encamped in the upper palace of Herod the Great; on the other, the houses of the Sadducees, the Jewish aristocrats, covered the ridge of Akra. Marsyas came upon an obstruction. At a gate opening into the street, camels knelt, servants of diverse nationality but of one livery clustered round them, several unoccupied Jewish traveling chairs in the hands of bearers stood near. In the center of the considerable crowd, a number of Sadducees, priests of high order and Pharisees in garments characteristic of their several classes were taking ceremonious farewell of a man already seated in a howdah. No one took notice of the Essene, who stood waiting with assumed patience until he should be given room. Presently the camel-drivers cried to their beasts which arose with a lurch, priests and Sadducees hurried into their chairs, the servants fell into rank, the crowd shifted and ordered itself and a procession trailed out alongside the swaying camels toward Gennath Gate. A distinguished party was taking leave under escort. Marsyas repressed the impatient word that arose to his lips and followed after the deliberate, moving blockade. The rank of the departing strangers did not encourage the city rabble to follow, and as the escort kept close to the head of the procession the hindmost camel was directly before Marsyas and the occupant of the howdah in his view. Over head and shoulders the full skirts of a vitta fell, erasing outline, and, contrasting the stature with that of the attending servant, he concluded that the small traveler was a child. Under the dripping shade and chill of the ancient Gate they passed and out into the road worn into a trench through the rock and dry gray earth and on to the oval pool which supplied Hippicus, where a halt for a final farewell was made. Again Marsyas was delayed, and for a much longer time. He might have climbed out of the sunken roadway and passed around the obstruction, but the banks above were lined with clamoring mendicants, women and lepers, and he could not escape ceremonial defilement that might more seriously delay his journey. Meanwhile the courtly leave-taking progressed with dignified sloth. Gradually Sadducee, priest and Pharisee moved one by one from the departing aristocrat. At the hindmost camel the Pharisees stopped not at all, but saluting without looking at the traveler, the priests merely raised their hands in blessing; but the Sadducees to a man salaamed profoundly, and passed on if they were old, or lingered uncertainly if they were young. A little flicker of enlightenment showed in the young Essene's brilliant eyes, an angry tension in his lips straightened their curve and he drew himself up indignantly. The young aristocrats tarried and laughed his precious time away with a woman! That was the traveler in the last howdah! Twice and thrice the time they had spent speeding the rest of the party they consumed bidding the woman farewell, and every moment carried danger nearer to Stephen. Then an old voice, refined and delicate as the note of an ancient lyre, lifted in laughing protest from the front, the young men laughed, responding, but moved away to their chairs, the camel swung out into a rapid walk, and crying farewells the party separated. With abating irritation Marsyas moved after them. At the intersection of the first road, he would pass these travelers and hasten on. A breeze from the hills cut off the smell of the city with a full stream of country freshness. Marsyas lifted his head and drew in a long breath that was almost a sigh. His first trouble weighed heavily upon him and its triple nature of distress, heart-hurt and apprehension, sensations so new and so near to nature as to be at wide variance with anything Essenic, moved him into a mood essentially human. Then an exhalation from aft the fragrant spring-flowered groves stole into the pure air about him, bewildering, sweet, and through it, as harmoniously as if the perfume had taken tone, a distant hill bird sent a single stave of liquid notes. The small figure in the howdah at that moment turned and looked back, and Marsyas for the first time in his life gazed straight into the eyes of a beautiful girl. Spring-fragrance, bird-song and flower-face were harmony too perfect for Essenism to discountenance. Without the slightest discomposure, and absolutely unconscious of what he was doing, Marsyas gazed and listened until the vitta fell hastily over the face, the bird flew away and the garden incense died. He passed just then the intersecting road, but he continued after the last camel. He walked after that through many drifts of fragrance, and many hill birds sang, but he knew without looking that the flower face was not turned back toward him again. He halted for the night at a little village and sought the hospitality of an Essene hermit that lived on the outskirts. But in the night, terror for Stephen, of that unknown kind which is conviction without evidence and irrefutable, seized him. He endured until the early watches of the morning and took the road to Nazareth while the stars still shone. He had forgotten his fellow wayfarers of the previous afternoon until their camels, speeding like the wind, overtook him beyond Mt. Ephraim. In a vapor of flying scarves he caught again a glimpse of the flower face turned his way. Then for the first time in his life he reviled his poverty that forced him to walk when the life of the much-beloved depended upon despatch. Nazareth, clinging like a wasps' nest under the eaves of its chalky hills, was many leagues ahead, and the sun must set and rise again before he could climb up its sun-white streets. His hope was not strong. His plan had won such little respect from him that he had not ventured to propose it to Stephen. It was extreme sacrifice for him to make, a sacrifice lifelong in effect, and in that he based his single faith in its success. Stephen loved him and would not persist in the fatal apostasy, if he knew that his friend, the Essene, was to deny himself ambition and fame for Stephen's sake. He would get his patrimony of the old master Essene who held it in trust for him, formally give over his instruction, bind himself to the perpetual life of husbandry and seclusion, and then tell Stephen what he had done and why he had done it. Everything else but the appeal to Stephen's love for him had failed, and he had shrunk from forcing that trial. But Saul had meant to go to the Synagogue at once; there were innumerable chances that he was already too late. At noon he came upon the party of travelers again. A fringed tent had been pitched under a cluster of cedars and the slaves were putting away the last of the meal. He saw now as he hurried by that there was a spare and elegant old man, in magistrate's robes, reclining with singular grace on a pallet of rugs before the lifted side of the tent. The girl sat near. He noted also that the master and the slaves fell silent as he approached and looked at him with interest. But he sped on, forgetting that it was the noon and that he was hungry, heated and weary, and remembering only that the time and the distance were deadly long. There was the soft pad-pad of a camel-hoof behind him and a servant of the aristocrat that he had passed drew up at his side. With a light leap the man dropped from the beast's neck and bowed low. The ease of his salaam and the purity of his speech were strong evidences of training among the loftiest classes of the time. The attitude asked permission to address the Essene. Marsyas signed him to speak. "I pray thee accept my master's apologies," the man said, "for interrupting thy journey. He bids me say that he is a stranger and unfamiliar with the land. We have found no water for the meal. Wilt thou direct us to a pool?" Marsyas checked his impatience. "Save that I am in great haste I would tarry to direct him. But let him send hence into the country to the westward, half a league to the hill of the flat summit. There is a grove by a well of sweet water." "Nay, the country is as obscure to us as the whereabouts of the pool," the servant protested. "We are Alexandrians and as good as lost in these hills. If thou wilt speak to my master, he will understand better than his foolish servant." Irritation forced its way up through the Essenic calm. The servant salaamed again. "The Essenes are noted even in Alexandria for their charity," he said deftly. Marsyas turned with him and went back to the fringed tent. The old aristocrat still lounged gracefully, as no thirsty man does, on his pallet of rugs, but the girl had drawn farther away and her eyes were veiled. "I perceived by thy garments that thou art an Essene," the old man said, "and therefore a safe guide in this land of few milestones." Marsyas thanked him and waited restlessly on the inquiry. "We have not found a well since mid-morning and I crave fresh drink. The water we bear is brackish." "Bid thy servants go westward without deviation for less than half a league, until they come unto a hill with a flat summit, which can be seen afar off. They will find there a grove with a well." "And none is nearer?" the old man asked idly. "There is none nearer." "My servants were bred to the desert; they are ill mountaineers. Thou wilt show them the way?" "They can not lose the way," Marsyas protested; "it is the flock's well and all the hill paths lead to it. Think not ill of me, that I can not go, for I am in haste." The old man smiled a little. "An Essene, and he will not stop to give an old man water?" Marsyas frowned resentfully, but turned to the servant at hand. "Get thy fellows and the water-skins and follow!" He turned off the Roman road and struck into the hills to the west. The servitors of the Alexandrian caught up amphoras and hastened after him. In less than an hour he reappeared before the man under the fringed tent. "Thy servants are returned. Peace and farewell." "Nay, but it is the noon. Wilt thou not tarry and rest?" "I go," Marsyas said resolutely, "to save a life." "Ah, then I did wrong to delay thee! I remember that Essenes are physicians." "We can not cure the wicked of their evil intent, so I haste to save one threatened with another's malice. My friend is in peril. I must go unto Nazareth and return unto Jerusalem, before I can save him. And even now I may be too late!" The magistrate searched the young man's face and then the half-incredulous curiosity passed out of his manner. "Pardon mine idle wasting of thy precious minutes," he said soberly. "Go, and the Lord speed thee!" Marsyas bowed low, and keeping his eyes fixed on the gray earth, lest they stray in search of the flower face, he turned again toward Nazareth. He heard a very soft, very hurried and almost imperious whisper, as he moved away, but he knew that it was not for him to hear, and he did not tarry. But a word from the magistrate brought him up. "Stay! It is not customary for any outside of thine order to offer an Essene assistance, since we would spare thee the pain of refusal. But--it hath been suggested that thy haste may permit thee to waive thy scruples and accept help from me--as it hath been suggested--I filched precious time from thee. Thou canst ride with us, if thou wilt, and take my daughter's camel. She will come with me." The brilliant eyes no longer obeyed the restraint which would keep them from the flower face. He turned to the girl, shyly withdrawn under the shade of the fringed tent, and knew by the lowered eyes and the warmer flush mantling the cheek that it was she that had made these suggestions. Twenty reasons why he should accept the magistrate's offer arose to combat the single stern admonition of Custom. He was not yet under the Essenic vow to accept hospitality from none but Essenes, though he had lived in its observance all his life; he could not reach Nazareth under a day's journey and these swift beasts could carry him into the village by midnight. And Stephen's life depended on it. "We depart even now," the magistrate added, "and I promise thee no further delay." Ancient usage accused the young man on account of the woman, but by this time she had arisen and passed out of his sight, as if in good faith that he should not be troubled by her presence. "Thou yieldest me invaluable aid," he said in a lowered tone, "and since I am not an elected Essene, but a ward of the brotherhood and a postulant, I am free and most glad to have thy help. Be thou blessed." The magistrate acknowledged the young man's acceptance by a wave of a withered white hand and the slaves made the camels ready to proceed. At midnight, the rocking camels sped without apparent weariness up the uneven streets of Nazareth, white under the stars. At the lewen of the single khan, the drivers drew up and Marsyas alighted to go forward and thank his host, but the magistrate slept, even while his servants lifted him down from the howdah. As he turned away, regretfully, he confronted the veiled girl, almost childlike in stature under the protection of her tall handmaiden. She dropped her head modestly and moved aside to let him pass, but he hesitated, and stopped. Few indeed had been the words he had addressed to women in his lifetime, and now his speech was more than ever unready. "Thy father sleeps, yet I would not depart with my thanks unsaid. Be thou the messenger and give him my gratitude when he waketh." "It shall be my pleasure," she answered softly, "and may thy hopes come to pass. Farewell." "Thou hast my thanks. The peace of the Lord God attend thee. Farewell." CHAPTER III THE FIRST MARTYR Mid-March in Judea was the querulous age of the young year. It was a time of a tempered sun and intervals of long rains and chill winds. Under such persuasion, the rounded hills which upbore and encompassed Jerusalem took on a coat green as emerald and thick as civet-fur. Above it the leaning cedars, newly-tipped with verdure, spread their peculiar flat crowns like ancient hands extended in benediction over the soil. Shoals of wild flowers, or rather flowers so long in fellowship with the fields of Palestine as to become domesticated, were scarlet and gold in shallows of green. Almond orchards snowed in the valleys and every wrinkle and crevice in the hills trickled with clear cold water. The winds whimpered and had the snows of Lebanon yet in mind; the days were not long and the sun shone across vales filled with undulating vapors, smoky and illusory. The shade was not comfortable and within doors those apartments which denied entrance to the sun had to be made tenantable by braziers. Loiterers, wayfarers and outcasts betook themselves to protected angles and sat blinking and comatose in the benevolent warmth of the sun. It was late afternoon and without the cedar hedge of Gethsemane, where the ancient green wall cut off the streaming wind, was a group sitting close together on the earth. One, much covered in garments barbarously striped, and who bestirred long meager limbs now and then, was an Arab. Next to him a Jewish husbandman from Bethesda squatted awkwardly, the length of his coarse smock troubling him, while his hide sandals had been put off his hard brown feet. His neighbor was a Damascene, and two or three others sat about two who were employed in the center of this racial miscellany. One of these was a Greek, the ruin of a Greek, not yet thirty and bearing, in spite of the disfigurement of degradation, solitary evidences of blood and grace. Opposite him sat a Roman, in a scarlet tunic. The two were playing dice, but the end of the game was in sight, for the neat pile of sesterces beside the Roman was growing and the Greek had staked his last on the next throw. Presently the Greek took the tesseræ and threw them. The Roman glanced at the numbers up and smiled a little. The Greek scowled. "The old defeat," he muttered. "Fortune perches on the standards of Rome even in a game of dice. Oh, well, we have had our day!" The Roman stowed away the sesterces in a wallet and hung it again inside his tunic. "Yes, you have had your day," he replied. "Marathon, Thermopylæ and Platæa--in my philosophy you can afford to lose a game of dice to a wolf-suckled Roman!" The Greek sat still with his chin upon his breast, and the Roman, getting upon his feet, scrutinized the sluggish group of on-lookers. His interest was not idle curiosity in the men. Such as they were to be seen cumbering the markets and streets of Jerusalem by day or by night throughout the year. They were types of that which the world calls the rabble--at once a strength and a destruction, a creature or a master, as the inclination of its manipulators is or as the call of the situation may be. Individually, it has a mind; collectively, it has not; at all times it is a thing of great potentialities overworked, and of great needs habitually ignored. That the man in scarlet should scan each one of these, as one appraises another's worth in drachmæ, was a natural proceeding, old as the impulse in the shrewd to prey upon the unwary. Out of this or that one, perhaps he could turn an odd denarius at another game of dice. But when he looked reflectively at the west, where the broad brow of the hills was outlined against a great radiance, he calculated on the hour of remaining daylight and the distance from that point to another in Bezetha far across Jerusalem, and felt of his wallet. It was bulky enough for one day's winnings, and entirely too bulky to be lost to some of the criminals or vagrants that would walk the night. With a motion of his hand he saluted the defeated Greek and the gaping group which sat in its place and watched him, and turned down the Mount toward Jerusalem. To a casual observer it would appear that he was a Roman. He wore the short garments characteristic of the race, was smooth-shaven, and displayed idolatrous images on his belt, and, in disregard of Judean custom, uncovered his head. But his features under analysis were Arabic, modified, not by the solidity of Rome but by the grace of the classic Jew. He was built on long, narrow lines, spare as a spear stuck in the sand before a dowar, but Judean flesh rounded his angles and reduced the Arabian brownness of complexion. He was strikingly handsome and tall; not imposing but elegant, modeled for symmetry of his type, not for ideality, for refinement, not for strength. His hands were delicate almost to frailty, his feet slender and daintily shod. Never a Roman walked so lightly, never a Jew so jauntily. His presence was captivating. Naïveté or impudence, carelessness or recklessness, gravity or mockery were ever uncertain in their delineation on his face, and one gazed trying to decide and gazing was undone. Never did he reveal the perspective of a single avenue in his intricate and indirect disposition. He forwent the human respect that is given to the straight-forward man, for the excited interest which the populace pays to the elusive nature. It was hard to name his years. He was too well-knit to be young, too supple to be old. The only undisputed evidence that he was past middle-age was not in his person but behind the affected mood in his soft black eyes. There was another nature, literally in ambush! He had reached the gentler slopes of the Mount, when a young man dressed wholly in white approached from the north. The wayfarer walked hesitatingly, his eyes roving over the towered walls of the City of David. There were other wayfarers on Olivet besides the man in white and the man in scarlet. There were rustics and traveling Sadducees, in chairs borne by liveried servants, Pharisees with staff and scrip, marketers, shepherds, soldiers on leave and slaves on errands, men, women and children of every class or calling which might have affairs without the walls of Jerusalem. But each turned his steps in one direction, for the night was not distant and Jerusalem would shelter them all. The hill was busy, but many took time to observe the one in white. The men he met glanced critically at his fine figure and passed; the women looked up at him from under their wimples, and down again, quickly; some of the children lagged and gazed wistfully at his face as if they wanted his notice. Even the man in scarlet, attracted by the wholesome presence of the comely young man, studied him carelessly. He was a little surprised when the youth stopped before him. "Wilt thou tell me, brother, how I may reach the Gate of Hanaleel from this spot?" he asked. His manner was anxious and hurried, his eyes troubled. "Thou, a son of Israel, and a stranger in the city of thy fathers?" the other commented mildly. "The Essenes are rare visitors to Jerusalem," was the reply. "Ah!" the other said to himself, "the bleached craven of En-Gadi. Dost thou come from the community on the Dead Sea?" he asked aloud. "I journey thither," the Essene answered patiently. "I come from Galilee." The man in scarlet looked a little startled and put his slender hand up to his cheek so that a finger lay along the lips. "Now, may thy haste deaden thy powers of recognition, O white brother," he hoped in his heart, "else thou seest a familiar face in me." He lifted the other arm and pointed toward the wall of the city. "Any of these gates will lead thee within," he said. "Doubtless, but once within any but the one I seek, I am more lost than I am here. Wilt thou direct me?" The man in scarlet motioned toward a splendid mass of masonry rising many cubits above the wall toward the north. "There," he said. "Go hence over the Bridge of the Red Heifer and follow along the roadway on the other side of Kedron." As the man in white bowed his thanks, his elbow struck against an obstruction which yielded hastily. The two looked, to see the Greek who had been defeated at dice make off up the hill. The Essene caught at his pilgrim wallet which hung at his side and found it open. "Ha! a thief!" the man in scarlet cried. "Did he rob thee?" His quick eyes dropped to the wallet. There were many small round cylinders wrapped in linen within, evidently stacks of coin of various sizes from the little denarius to the large drachma; a handful of loose gold and several rolls of parchment which might have been bills of exchange. The Essene frowned and closed the mouth of the purse. "A trifle is gone," he said. "He was discovered in time." "If thou carryest this to the Temple, friend," the older man urged, "get it there to-night, else thou walkest in danger continually." "I give thee thanks; I shall be watchful; peace to thee,"--and the young man walked swiftly away. "Wary as the eyes of Juno!" the man in scarlet said to himself. "Essenes never make offering at the Temple; that treasure goes into the common fund of the order. Now, what a shame that the unsated maw of the Essenic treasury should swallow that and hold it uselessly when I need gold so much! Would that I had been born a good thief!" He sauntered after the young Essene and idly kept him in sight. "He walks like a legionary and talks like a patrician, but doubtless he hath the spirit of an ass, or he would not have let that knave of a Greek make off with so much as a lepton. I wonder if I should not seek out the thief and win his pilferings from him." The Essene in the distance, just before he reached the Bridge of the Red Heifer, unslung his wallet and resettled the strap over his shoulder, but the purse did not reappear at his side. He had concealed it within his gown. "I wish he were not in such uncommon haste; I might persuade him to loan it me. Money-lending is second nature to a Jew. There must be several thousand drachmæ in that wallet--enough to take me to Alexandria. I wonder if he sped so all the way from--_Hercle!_ What an aristocrat!"--noting the Essene draw aside his robes from contact with the unclean mob at the opposite end of the causeway. "What! do they resent it?" he exclaimed, lifting himself on tiptoe to watch the young man, who seemed suddenly pressed upon and swallowed up by rapidly assembling numbers. Distant shouts arose, the Sheep Gate choked suddenly with a mass, Kedron's banks, the tombs of Tophet and the rubbish heaps there yielded up clambering, running people. The hurry was directed along the brook outside the wall; stragglers closed up and the whole, numbering hundreds, flung itself toward the north. The man in scarlet, moved by amazement and a half-confessed interest in the man he had seen disappear, ran down the Mount and after the crowd. But a glance ahead now showed him that the Essene had not called forth this demonstration. The gate next beyond the heavy shape of Hanaleel was discharging a struggling mass that instantly expanded in the open into a great party-colored ring, dozens deep. The flying body the man in scarlet believed to encompass the young Essene swept up to the circle and melted into it. Meanwhile, around him came running eagerly the travelers, the marketers, shepherds, soldiers and slaves, and behind, the loiterers, who had watched him defeat the Greek. Focalizing at the Bridge of the Red Heifer which spanned Kedron at a leap, the mob caught and precipitated him into its heart. Rushed toward the road on the opposite side, he seized a corner of the parapet, and, holding fast, let the mass stream by him. When the rush trailed out, thinned and ceased altogether, he leisurely drew near the huge compact circle and stood on its outskirts. But he could hear and see nothing but the crowd about him. "What is it?" he asked, touching a man in front of him. The man shook his head and stood fruitlessly on tiptoe. Presently unseen authority in the hollow ring pressed the crowd back. In the ferment and resistance, he caught, through a zigzag path of daylight between many kerchiefed heads, a glimpse of a segment of the center. A young man stood there. About his forehead was bound the phylactery of a Pharisee. At his feet was a tumbled heap of white outer garments. Then the breach closed up. "A sacrifice?" the man in scarlet asked himself. But such a deduction would not answer for the behavior of the crowd. Its temper was ferocious. They howled, they spat, they shook arms and clenched hands above their heads and forward over their neighbors' shoulders; they cursed in Greek and Aramic; they twisted their faces into furious grimaces; they pressed forward and were driven back and the foremost rank which knew wherefore it raged was not more violent than the rearmost which was perfectly in the dark. It was typically the voice of the Beast in man. Some circumstance, unknown to the greater body, had waived restraint. Therefore the wolves of Perea could have come down from the bone-whited wadies of the wilderness and said to them with truth: "We be of one blood, ye and we!" Each felt the support of numbers, the momentum of unanimity, the incentive of relaxed order, and the original cause, however heinous, was forgotten in the joy of the reversion to primordial savagery. Their quiet fellow stood on the outskirts and listened to the yelp of the jackal in man. Before him was a wall of variously clad backs and upstretched heads, beside him rows of raving men in profile, with strained eyes, open mouths and working beards; and one of them was the man who had shown, when asked, that he did not understand this demonstration. The man in scarlet finally shrugged his shoulders. He had suddenly evolved an explanation--the blood of a fellow man. He turned away, not because he had revolted--he had seen too many spectacles in the Circus in Rome--but because he was disinclined to stand till he had learned the particulars of the uproar. A gnarly hummock, white, harsh and dry, as if it were a heap of disintegrated ashes, rose several rods away on the brink of Kedron. He mounted it and sat. Yes; he would wait, also, till he saw the Essene again, who, he was sure, had been buried in the ring. It would be unkind to himself to permit a chance for a loan to pass untried. The tumult continued many minutes before he noticed abatement in the forward ranks. Movement which had been general throughout the interval increased at times, but the mob showed no signs of dispersing. The western slope of Olivet was now in its own shadow, its ravines already purpling with night. Only the glory on the summit of Moriah blazed with undiminished fire, as the gold of the gates gave back the gold of the sunset. Presently a number of men, dressed alike in priestly robes, hurried back through Hanaleel into the city. Hardly had they disappeared before the gate gave up a number of radiant shapes in a column, which broke suddenly and flung itself upon the great raving circle. The flash of armor and the glitter of swords were suddenly interjected into a demoralized eddy of stampeded hundreds. Another sort of clamor arose, no less voluminous, no less fervid, but it was a howl of panic and protest against the methods of Vitellius' legionaries sent to disperse a crowd. A solid core of fugitives drove through the gate beside Hanaleel and the Sheep Gate; fragments, detachments and individuals rolled down the banks into Kedron; screaming, tumbling, falling bodies fled north and south by the roadway and wherever there was a gate or a niche or a crevice it received fugitives who appeared no more. Dust arose and obscured everything but the flash of arms and armor which rived through it like lightning in a cloud. The uproar began to subside, and presently the laughter and jests of the soldiers mounted above the protest. Fainter and fainter the cries grew, fewer the sounds of flying feet, and at last, strong, harsh and biting as the clang of a sledge upon metal, the command of the centurion to fall in settled even the shouts of the soldiers. There was the even, musical ring of whetting armor as the column filed back through Hanaleel, and silence. The man in scarlet, who had sat on his ash-heap and smiled throughout the dispersing of the mob, a royal creature enthroned and entertained by the discomfiture of the mass, suddenly realized that the obscurity, which he had expected to lift, was the shadow of night. He arose and, dusting off his scarlet skirt, moved out into the road. At that moment, a figure moving nearer the wall passed him, walking swiftly. It was the Essene. "Ho! a discreet youth! a cautious youth!" the man in scarlet said to himself; "profiting by experience, he waited in safety somewhere until this light-fingered rabble was dispersed. That must be a fat purse, a fat purse! And I am looking for such!" He quickened his pace to overtake the young man and in his interest forgot the late riot. Suddenly the young Essene stopped as if he had been commanded. The man in scarlet brought up and looked. Before them was an immense trampled dusty ring. In the falling twilight, he saw several huddled shapes, in attitudes of suffering and sorrow, kneeling together in its center over something which was stretched on the sand. A strangling gasp attracted the older man's attention once more to the Essene. His figure seemed to shrink, his cheeks fell in. Swiftly about his lips crawled the gray pallor of one physically sick from shock to the senses. His eyes flared wide and the next instant he flew at the mourning cluster about the prostrate shape in the ring. One or two fell back under his hand, and he leaned over and looked. A cry, heartrending in its agony, broke from his lips. He dropped to his knees and fell forward with his face in the dust. A murmur of compassion arose from the little group around him, and the man in scarlet lifted his shoulders and turned his back on the blighting spectacle of the young man's anguish. He walked hurriedly out of the falling night on the Mount, through Hanaleel, into the lights and noise of the City of David. Soldiers on the point of closing the great gate paused to let him through. "Comrade," he said to one, "what did they out yonder?" "They stoned a Nazarene named Stephen," was the reply. [Illustration: "They stoned a Nazarene named Stephen"] CHAPTER IV THE BANKRUPT Somewhat subdued, the man in scarlet walked through the night in the City of David. After his first sensations he was discomfited. "Now this is what comes of the irregular barbarity in Judean executions," he ruminated. "In Rome this Nazarene would have been despatched in order and his body borne away to the puticuli and no opportunity given for that painful scene outside. Doubtless I should have convinced the young man and borrowed his gold of him, by this time. Certainly, Fortune is a haughty jade when once offended. But I shall be fortunate again; by all the gods, Jewish or Gentile, I will compel her smiles! "It would be my luck never to see him again; he will probably linger only to see this dead man buried, and go on to En-Gadi, as he said he would. It would hardly be seemly to approach him about his gold, in his unhappiness, or I would waylay him, yet. A pest on the zealots! Why did they not hold off this stoning for a day?" Moodily occupied by his thoughts, he passed unconscious of the careless people about him. The huge tower of Antonia set on the brink of Mount Moriah frowned blackly over the street and in its shadow the idle life of the night laughed and reveled and sauntered. The woman of the city was there, the Roman soldier in armor, the alien that bowed to Brahm or Bel, the son of the slow Nile, of the Orontes and of the yellow Tiber. It was not the resort of the lowest classes, but of those that were at variance with the spirit of the city, or the times and their philosophies. Light streamed from open doorways, the wail of lyres and the jingle of castanets resounded within and without. Now and then belated carters, driving slow donkeys, would plod through the revelry--a note of relentless duty which would not be forgotten. Again, humbler folk would retreat into wagon-ways or hug the walls to permit the passage of a Sadducee and his retinue, or a decurion and his squad--rank and power asserting their inexorable prerogative. Presently there approached the click of hoofs upon flagging. A soldier, passing through a broad shaft of light from a booth, stopped short, drew himself up and swung his short sword at present. Up the street, from lip to lip of every arms-bearing man, ran his abrupt call to attention. A body of legionaries appeared suddenly in the ray of light--brassy shapes in burnished armor, picked for stature and bearing. Not even the plunge into blackness again broke the precision and confidence of that tread before which the world had fled as did now the mule-riders and the pedestrians of Jerusalem. After them, the beam of light projected two horsemen into sudden view. There was the rattle and ring of saluting soldiers by the way. The radiance showed up a typical Roman in the armor of a general, but in deference to Israelitish prejudice against images, the eagle was removed from his helmet, the bosses of Titan heads from breastplate and harness. This was Vitellius, Proconsul of Syria and the shrewdest general on Cæsar's list. By his side rode Herrenius Capito, Cæsar's debt-collector, a thin-faced Roman in civilian dress, and with the ashes of age sprinkled on his hair. The man in scarlet took one glance at the gray old countenance frowning under the sudden light of the lamp and slid into the obscurity of an open alley at hand. He did not emerge till the hoof-beats had died away. "So thou comest in search of me, sweet Capito," he muttered, "and I am penniless. But it is comforting to know that thou hast no more hope of getting the three hundred thousand drachmæ which I owe to Cæsar, than I have of paying it!" After a little silence, he said further to himself, with added regret: "Now, had I that young Essene's gold, Capito would not find me in Jerusalem! O Alexandria! I must reach thee, though I turn dolphin and swim!" He continued on his way to the north wall, where he found exit presently into Bezetha, the unwalled suburb of Jerusalem. Here the houses were comparatively new, less historic, less pretentious than those in the old city. Here were inns in plenty, relaxed order and a general absence of the racial characteristics and the influence of religion. The middle classes of Jerusalem dwelt here. It was dark, poorly paved, and the man in scarlet laid his hand on his purse under his tunic and walked with circumspection toward a khan. It was no surprise to him to hear the sounds of struggle and outcry. He stopped to catch the direction of the conflict that he might avoid it. It came out of a street so narrow, in a district so squalid, that happiness seemed to have fled the spot. If ever the wealthy entered the place, it was to seek out human beings hungry enough to sell themselves as slaves. The commotion centered before a hovel, a tragedy in sounds, ghastly because the night made it unembodied. The man in scarlet located it as out of his path and would have continued but for the insistent screams of a woman in the struggle. Harsh shouts attempted to cry her down, but desperation lent her strength and the suburb shuddered with her mad cries. The man in scarlet lagged, shook his shoulders as if to throw off the influence of the appeal and finally stopped. At that moment several torches of pitch, lighted at once, threw a smoky light over the scene. The passage was obstructed by a group of men uniformly dressed, and several spectators attracted by the commotion. Assured that this was arrest and not violence, the curiosity of the man in scarlet drew him that way. At a nearer view, he saw that the aggressors were Shoterim or Temple lictors, under command of a Pharisee wearing the habiliments of a rabbi. The man in scarlet identified him as the referee in the center of the ring about the stoning. The sudden lighting of the torches convinced him that the attack had its inception in secret. In the center of the fight was a middle-aged woman clinging desperately about the bodies of a young man and a young woman. It was the efforts of the Shoterim to tear her away and her resistance that had made the arrest violent. Shouts and revilings told the man in scarlet the meaning of the disturbance. The ferrets of the High Priest, Jonathan, had discovered a house of Nazarenes and were taking them. "More ill-timed zeal!" he muttered to himself. "Or let me be exact: more bloody politics!" He had turned to leave when a figure in white, directed from the city, drove past him and through to the center of the crowd, with the irresistible force of a hurled stone. Spectators fell to the right and left before it and the man in scarlet drawing in a breath of amazement turned to see what the light had to disclose. It was the young Essene, hardly recognizable for the distortion of deadly hate and passion on his face. There were dark stains on his garments and dust on his black hair. Every drop of blood had left his cheeks, but his eyes blazed with a light that was not good to see. He went straight at the Pharisee. His grasp fell upon Saul's shoulder, drove in and seized upon its sinews. The startled Tarsian turned and the young Essene with bent head gazed grimly down at him. An interested silence fell over both captor and captive. The blaze in the young man's eyes reddened and flickered. "I have been seeking thee, Saul of Tarsus," he said in a voice of deadly silkiness. "Thou hast been most zealous for the Law in Stephen's case. Look to it that thou fail not in the Law, for I shall profit by thy precept! And even as Stephen fell, so shalt thou fall; even as Stephen came unto death, so shalt thou come! Mark me, and remember!" The words were menace made audible; it was more than a threat: it was prophecy and doom. A tingle of admiration ran over the man in scarlet. He who could leave the bier of a murdered friend to visit vengeance on the head of the murderer was no weakling. "A Roman, by the gods!" he exclaimed to himself. "A noble adversary! a man, by Bacchus!" A threatening murmur arose from the spectators. But there was no responsive fury kindled in Saul's eyes. Instead he looked at Marsyas with unutterable sorrow on his face. Presently his shoulders lifted with a sigh. "The city festereth with Nazarenes as a wound with thorns," he said to himself; aloud he called, "Joel." The Levite materialized out of obscurity and bowed jerkily. "Bear witness to this young man's behavior. Lictors, take him. We shall hold him for examination as a Nazarene and an apostate." Marsyas started and his hand dropped. Plainly, he had not expected to be accused of apostasy. But the old mood asserted itself. "This for thy slander of Stephen in the college," he said with premonitory calm when the Levite approached him, and struck with terrific force. The Levite's body shot backward and dropped heavily on the earth. The rest of the lictors precipitated themselves upon the young man, and, in desperation and in fury, the one man and the numbers fought. Meanwhile the man in scarlet thought fast. His Roman love of defiance and war had roused in him a most compelling respect for the young Essene, but cupidity put forth swift and convincing argument even beyond the indorsement of admiration. If the Shoterim took the young man in ward, he would be executed and the treasure come into the hands of the state for disposition. In view of the fact that Herrenius Capito had traced the bankrupt to Jerusalem, Jerusalem was no longer tenantable for the bankrupt. He had to have money to escape to Alexandria and the Essene was too profitable a chance to be lost to the murdering hands of fanatics. Excited and bent only on preventing the arrest, the man sprang into the crowd and forced his way to the Essene's side. But the next instant he also was sent reeling by a blow delivered by Marsyas in his blind resolution not to be taken without difficulty. Before the bankrupt could recover, the united force of spectators and lictors flung itself upon Marsyas. Steadying himself, the man in scarlet urged his bruised brain to think. Half of his life for a ruse! for nothing but a ruse could save the young man, now. Then, with a half-suppressed cry of eagerness, the bankrupt took to his heels and ran toward the city as only an Arab trained in Roman gymnasia could run. The sentry at the gate passed him and he entered on the marble pavements of the streets for the finest exhibition of speed he had shown since he had carried off the laurel in Rome. He knew the city as a hare knows its runways. He cut through private passages, circled watchful constabulary, eluded congestions, and took the quick slopes of Jerusalem's hills as though the deep lungs of a youth supplied him. When the broad, marble-paved street, which let in some glimpse of the starry sky upon the passer, opened between the rich residences of the Sadducees, the white luster of many burning torches lighted an area on a distant slope at its head. The running man sped on, taking the rise of Mount Zion without slackening, until he rushed upon a sentry obscured under the brooding shadow of a heavy wall. "Halt!" The challenge of the sentry brought him up. "Without the password, comrade," he panted. "Call the officer of the guard. And by our common quarrels in Rome do thou haste, for if I see not Vitellius and Herrenius Capito this instant I expire!" The cry of the sentry passed from post to post until the centurion of the guard emerged from a small gate. "One cometh without the countersign," the sentry said. "A visitor for Vitellius and Herrenius Capito," the bankrupt explained. "The general and his guest have retired," was the blunt reply. "Hip! but thou art the same glib liar thou always wast, Aulus," the bankrupt laughed. "Take me into the light, and slap me with thy sword if I am frank beyond the privileges of mine acquaintance with thee!" The gate-keeper, in response to a short word from the dubious Aulus, let down the chains with a rattle and a small side portal swung in, revealing an interior of semi-dusk. The centurion conducted his visitor within. Torches stuck in sconces high up in the walls lighted a quadrangle of tessellated pavement, terminating distantly in banks of marble stairs of such breadth and stature that their limits were lost in the unilluminated night. After a quick glance, the centurion started and slapped his helmet in salute to the bankrupt. The other responded with a skill and grace that could not have been assumed for the moment. The dexterity of the camp was written in the movement. "I am expected of Capito," the bankrupt said, which was true only in a very limited sense. "I know, and do thou follow. Thou shalt see him. Were he dead and inurned he would arise to thee." The man in scarlet smiled a little grimly and followed his conductor out of the light up the marble heights of stairs duly set with sentinels, to a porch that even the Royal Colonnade of the Temple could not shame. A huge cresset with a jeweled hood, depending from a groining so high that its light was feeble, showed dimly the giant compound arch of the portal. An orderly, a veritable pygmy within the outline of the dark entrance, appeared and saluted. "A visitor for the proconsul and his guest," the centurion said, passing the man in scarlet to the orderly. He was led through a valve groaning on its granite hinges into the vestibule of Herod the Great's palace. It was a lofty hall, nobly vaulted, lined with costly Indian onyx and florid with pagan friezes, arabesques and frescoes. Yet, though its jeweled lamps were dark and cold, its fountains still, its hangings and its carpets gone, its bloody genius held despotic sway from a shadowy throne, over the note of brute force which the Roman garrison had infused into it. At the far end was a small carven table at which two Romans sat, a lamp and a crater of wine at their elbows, the tesseræ of a dice-game between them. Without waiting for the orderly to speak, the man in scarlet stepped forward. "Greeting, Vitellius. Capito, I salute you," he said. His voice was that of a composed man speaking with equals. Vitellius turned his head toward the speaker; Capito drew up his lids and his lower jaw relaxed. Slowly then both men got upon their feet. "By the bats of Hades--" Vitellius began. "By the nymphs of Delphi!" Capito's aged falsetto broke in. "It is the Herod himself!" "Herod Agrippa!" Vitellius exclaimed. "From the faces of you," Agrippa declared, "I might have been the shade of my grandsire. But I have been hunting you. I need help. And as thou hopest to return three hundred thousand drachmæ to Cæsar from my purse, do thou aid me in urging Vitellius to yield it, Capito." "Help," Capito repeated. "What manner of help?" Vitellius demanded, fixing Agrippa with a suspicious eye. "Arrest me an Essene from the hands of Jonathan." "Jonathan!" the proconsul exclaimed darkly. "The High Priest, the Nasi, thy sweet and valued friend!" the Agrippa explained with amiable provoke. "He has arrested an Essene on a trifling charge of apostasy and he is my voucher before the Essenic brotherhood for a loan to repay Cæsar. I left him in the hands of the Shoterim, in Bezetha. If he be not speedily rescued, they will stone him without the walls to-morrow and my debt to Cæsar--" he drew up his shoulders and spread out his hands in a gesture highly Jewish. Capito frowned and Vitellius glowered under his grizzled brow at Agrippa. "It is one to me," Agrippa continued coolly, as he noted signs of dissent in the contemplation. "I am just as happy and as like to escape Cæsar's displeasure by failing to pay it, as thou wilt be, Capito, if thou failest to collect it." Capito nervously fingered the tesseræ at his hand. "Meanwhile," added the Herod, perching himself on the edge of the table, "the youth proceeds to Jonathan's stronghold." Vitellius looked at Cæsar's debt-collector. "Dost thou see anything more in this than appears on the face of it?" he asked. Capito scratched his white head. He had learned to look for ulterior motives in every move of this slippery Herod, but he was too little informed in the matter to see more than the surface. "We--can look into it, first," he opined. "Jonathan will not await your pleasure," Agrippa put in. "He is hurried now with the responsibility of executing enough blasphemers to save himself popular favor. The Sanhedrim may sit to-morrow, the prisoner come for trial and be executed--even more expeditiously because the Nasi expects thee to interfere, Vitellius." The proconsul bit through an expletive. Jonathan was a thorn in his side. "What is it you wish me to do?" he demanded. "Arrest me this youth. The claim of the proconsul's charge will take precedence over the hieratic." "But he has not offended--" "Save the protest; he has; he struck me, a Roman citizen. But draw up the warrant, good Vitellius, and send a centurion after the young man. Thou canst make no error by so doing and thou canst save Capito the favor of his emperor." Vitellius summoned a clerk and while the warrant for Marsyas' arrest was written, despatched an orderly for an officer. One of the contubernalis to Vitellius, or one of the sons of a noble family serving his apprenticeship in warfare, appeared. "Take four," Vitellius said grimly, in compliance with Herod's demand, when the young centurion approached, "and go with this man. Arrest by superior claim the High Priest's prisoner, who shall be pointed out. Fetch him and this man back to me!" The young centurion saluted and Agrippa assented with a nod. "Thanks," he added nonchalantly. "Come, brother," he said to the young officer, "if we be late it may take the whole machinery of Rome to undo the work of Jonathan." Agrippa and the Roman legionaries passed out of the Prætorium and turned directly up the slanting street toward the palace of Jonathan, which stood a little above the camp. The Herod had lost little time and the progress of the arresting party toward the stronghold would not have been rapid with the resistance of Marsyas and the friends of the Nazarenes to retard the movement. After a quick walk of a short distance, the Roman group came upon the Temple's emissaries, entering from an intersecting street. Saul and Joel walked a little ahead of the broken-spirited prisoners who were centered in a group of armed lictors and a hooting escort of half a hundred vagrants. The flaring torch-light shone down on bowed heads and disordered garments, and showed fugitive glints of manacles and knives. Among them, unbroken and silent, was Marsyas, heavily shackled. He was marked with blows, but several besides the Levite Joel staggered as they walked, and Agrippa, lifting himself on tiptoe to point out his prisoner to the centurion, eyed the young man with approval. The officer nodded abruptly and broke through the crowd. The light dropping on his shining armor instantly displayed his authority to halt the group. His command to stop elicited almost precipitate obedience. The hooting vagrants scattered. The centurion laid his hand on Marsyas' shoulder. "Thou art a prisoner of the proconsul," he said. The halt and the dismayed silence caught Saul's attention. He turned back and pushed his way into the center of the circle. "Unhand him," he said to the centurion. "He is wanted of the Sanhedrim." The young officer smiled derisively and thrust off the hold of the apprehensive lictors. The four made way through the crowd and the officer passed Marsyas into their hands. "Make my excuses to the Sanhedrim," the officer said sarcastically. The Pharisee glanced over the Roman's party. Then he stepped without ostentation in the centurion's way--a weak, small figure in fringes and phylactery, living up to his nature as he fronted brassy Rome. "Show me thy warrant," he said quietly. The centurion drew forth the parchment and flourished it. Saul took it with a murmured courtesy, and, holding it near a torch, read it carefully. Then he passed it back. "After the proconsul hath done with this young man," he observed, "the Sanhedrim will claim him. Say this much to the proconsul. We shall wait. Peace!" He motioned his party to proceed and the crowd moved on, leaving Marsyas in the hands of new captors. "Back to the Prætorium," the centurion said to Agrippa. CHAPTER V AGRIPPA IN REPERTOIRE On the way two dark figures emerged from the shadows and halted to let the soldiers pass. Agrippa peered at them intently through the gloom, and raising his arm made a peculiar gesture. Both figures approached immediately. "Do thou fetch my civilian's dress, Silas, to the gate of the Prætorium to-morrow, early, and my umber toga broidered with silver. And thou, Eutychus, prepare our belongings so thou canst carry them and bring them also that we may proceed at once to En-Gadi. I remain at the Prætorium to-night. Be gone and fail not!" The two men bowed and disappeared. When the party reëntered the gates of the camp, Herod's vestibule was dark. The prisoner and Agrippa were led to the barracks and turned into a cubiculum, or sleeping-chamber. One of the four was manacled to Marsyas and the bolts shot upon them. The soldier immediately stretched himself on the straw and, bidding the others hold their peace, fell asleep promptly. After a long time, when the sounds from the pallet assured Agrippa that the soldier could not be easily aroused, he arose and came over to the side of the young Essene. The torch-light for the officer of the guard, flaring on the wall without, shone through the high ventilation niche in the cell and cast a faint illumination over the dusky interior. Under the half-light the face of Marsyas looked fallen and lifeless,--his dark hair in disorder on his forehead, his shadowed eyes and slight black beard making for the increase of pallor by contrast. Agrippa looked at him a moment before the young man had noticed his approach. "The medicine for thy hurts, young brother," he said to himself, "is only one--the comforting arms of a woman. I have had experience; I know! But if thou art an Essene that comfort is denied thee. Now, I wonder what demon-ridden Jew it was who first thought of an order of celibates!" He drew closer and the somber eyes of the young man lighted upon him. "So thou dost not sleep," Agrippa said in Hebrew. Marsyas' face showed a little surprise at the choice of tongue, but he answered in the same language. "Why am I here?" he asked. "Better here than there," Agrippa responded under his breath, indicating the direction of Jonathan's stronghold. "Listen," he continued, "and may Morpheus plug this soldier's ears if he knows our fathers' ancient tongue. Canst see my face, brother?" Marsyas signed his assent. "Thou sayest thou art a Galilean," Agrippa pursued. "Look now and see if thou discoverest aught familiar in me." Marsyas raised himself on an elbow and gazed into the Herod's face. Finally he said slowly: "I have seen thee in Tiberias--in power--as--as prefect! Thou art Herod Agrippa!" There was silence; the Essene's eyes filled with question and the Herod gave him time to think. "I had thee arrested," Agrippa resumed when he believed that Marsyas' ideas had reached the point of asking what the Herod had to do with him. "To-morrow thou wilt be fined for striking me and turned loose--to Jonathan--unless thou art helped to escape." "I understand," said Marsyas with growing light, but without enthusiasm. "Thou seest I am virtually a prisoner here. I became so, to save thee from Jonathan." "For me! Thou becamest a prisoner to save me?" Marsyas repeated, astounded. "Because I need thee as much as thou needest me," was the frank admission. "What can I do for thee that thou shouldst need me?" Marsyas asked softly, but still wondering. "Hast--hast thou ever lacked friends so wholly that thou wast willing to purchase one?" Agrippa asked. "I am thy grateful servant; yet I am an Essene, poor, persecuted, homeless, hungry and heartbroken. What wilt thou have of me?" In that was more earnestness than blandishment, more appeal than offering. The young man published his helplessness and asked after the other's use of him. Agrippa was silent; after a pause Marsyas put out his hand and lifting the hem of the pagan tunic pressed it to his lips. The act could not fail to reach to the innermost of the Herod's heart. His head dropped suddenly into his hands, and the young Essene's touch rested lightly on his shoulder. Finally Agrippa raised his head. "Dost thou know my history, brother?" he asked. "From the lips of others, yes; but let me hear thee." "Thou art a just youth; nothing so outrages a slandered man as to pen his defense within his lips. Hear me, then. To be a Herod once meant to be beloved by the Cæsars. In my early childhood, after the death of my young father, I was taken to Rome by my mother and reared among princes and the sons of consuls. Best of all my friends was Drusus, Cæsar's gallant son, and we studied together, raced and gambled and feasted together, loved and hated--and fought together, and never was there a difference between us except in purse! "While he lived, I lived as he lived, but when he died his sire drove me out of Rome because I had been the living Drusus' shadow and it stung the father that the shadow should live while the sweet substance perished. "When Drusus died my living died with him, and when I took ship at Puteoli for Palestine I owed three hundred thousand drachmæ to Cæsar and forty tradesmen barked about my heels. "I had a ruined castle in Idumea. I forgot that I owned it till I was in actual want of shelter. Thither I went. But I was a young man, hopeless, and young hopelessness is harder than the hopelessness of age. I should have put an end to myself, but Cypros, my princess, prevented me by the gentle force of her love and devotion. "She could not have balked me more thoroughly had she tied me hand and foot. I railed, but while I railed she wrote and sent a messenger, and in a little time an answer came. It was from my brother-in-law, Herod Antipas, who is tetrarch of Galilee. Cypros had besought him to help us. He wrote courteously, or else his scribe, for it is hard to reconcile that letter with the man I met, and begged me come and be his prefect over Tiberias. I went." The prince paused and when he went on thereafter it seemed as if his account were expurgated. "At Tyre before an hundred nobles assembled at a feast he twitted me with my poverty and boasted his charity. I tore off the prefect's badge and flung it in his face. And that same night I took the road to Antioch, my princess with me, a babe on either arm. "The proconsul of Antioch took us in, but there was treachery against me afoot in his household, and I lost his friendship through it. His was my last refuge under roof of mine own rank. I heard recently that Alexander Lysimachus, Alabarch of Alexandria, was in Jerusalem, presenting a Gate to the Temple, and sending my wife and children to Ptolemais, I hastened hither to get a loan of him. But he had departed some days before I came. So here am I as a player of dice to win me money enough to take me back to Ptolemais. But Herrenius Capito, Cæsar's debt-collector, hath found me out." He looked down at Marsyas' interested face. "Let me be truthful," he corrected. "I found him. I could have flown him successfully, but for thy close straits. All that would save thee would be the interference of Rome, and I could command it at sacrifice." Public version of Agrippa's story had enlarged much on certain phases of his adventures which he had curtailed, and these minutiæ had not been to Herod's credit. Yet, though Marsyas knew of these things, his heart stirred with great pity. His was that large nature which turns to the unfortunate whether or not his misfortune be merited. It seemed to him that the prince's fall had been too hapless for comment. But the word here and there, which suggested the prince's intercession in his behalf, stirred him. "How shall I make back to thee thy effort in my behalf?" he asked earnestly. "Thou sayest that thou needest me; what can I do?" "First let me know of thyself." Marsyas relinquished his thought on Agrippa to turn painfully to his own story. "I am Marsyas, son of Matthew, of Nazareth. He was a zealot who fought beside Judas of Galilee. I was born after his death, and at my birth my mother died, and being the last of their line, I am, and have been all my life alone. I was taken in mine infancy by the Essenic master of the school in Nazareth and reared to be an Essene. But I developed a certain aptness for learning and in later youth a certain aptness for teaching, and my master by the consent of the order, whose ward I was, designed me for the scholar-class of Essenes, which do not reside in En-Gadi but without in the world. The vows of the order were not laid upon me; they are reserved for the sober and understanding years when my instruction should be completed." Agrippa frowned. "Art thou not a member of the brotherhood, then?" he asked. "No, I am a neophyte, a postulant." The Herod ran his fingers though his hair, and Marsyas went on. "I had two friends, both older than I. One was Saul of Tarsus; one, Stephen of Galilee. Neither knew the other. Stephen was born an Hellenist, and until the coming of his Prophet, a good Jew. But when Jesus arose in Nazareth, Stephen followed Him, and, after the Nazarene was put away, he remained here in Jerusalem. When I came hither to complete mine instruction in the college, I found the synagogue aroused against him. "Chief among the zealous in behalf of the Law is Saul of Tarsus. Him I most feared, when the rumors of Stephen's apostasy spread abroad. An evil messenger finally set Saul upon Stephen, and I pleaded with him to spare Stephen, until I could win him back to the faith. But Saul would not hear me. "I meant to give over mine ambition to become a scholar and take Stephen into the refuge of En-Gadi--" He stopped for control and continued presently with difficulty. "But when I returned from Nazareth, whither I had gone to get my patrimony which the Essene master held in ward, his enemies stoned him before mine eyes!" Stephen's death and not his own peril was the climax of his story and he ceased because his heart began to shrink under its pain. "And this Saul of Tarsus, whom I heard you threaten over in Bezetha, mistaking your natural grief and hunger for vengeance as signs of apostasy, would stone you also," Agrippa remarked, filling in the rest of the narrative from surmise. Marsyas assented; it hurt him as much to think on Saul as it did to remember that Stephen was dead. "It was doubtless his intent." "Implacable enough to be Cæsar! And thou art not a member of the Essenic order--only a neophyte. That is disconcerting. Hast thou any influence with the brethren?" "None whatever." Perplexity sat dark on the Herod's brow. Marsyas, with his eyes on the prince's face, observed it. "Can I not help thee?" he asked anxiously. "I thought once that thou couldst; but thou sayest that thou hast no power with the Essenes. Now, I do not know." "What is it thou wouldst have had me do?" "I have said that I owe three hundred thousand drachmæ to Cæsar. Unless I discharge it, under the Roman law I can be required to become the slave of my creditor. That I might secure intercession in thy behalf, I had to promise Capito and Vitellius that thou couldst help me to repay this sum." "I!" Marsyas cried, sitting up. The legionary stirred and Agrippa laid a warning finger on his lip. The two sat silent until the sleeper fell again into total unconsciousness. "Three hundred thousand drachmæ!" Marsyas repeated. "I, to get that!" "I knew that the Essenic brotherhood have a common treasury and that they are believed to be rich. I thought that thou couldst persuade them to lend me the sum." Marsyas shook his head. "They are poor, poor! Their fund is not contributed in great bulk, and the little they own must be expended in hospitality and in maintaining themselves. Their treasury would be enriched by the little I bring." "O Fortune!" Agrippa groaned aloud. "I am undone and so art thou!" Marsyas lapsed into thought, while the Herod looked at the solid door that stood between him and liberty. He had set the subject aside as profitless and was a little irritated when Marsyas spoke again. "What hopes hast thou in Alexandria?" "The alabarch, Alexander Lysimachus, is my friend. He is rich; I could borrow of him." "Take thou my gold and go thither," Marsyas offered at once. "It is not so easy as it sounds, for the sound of it is most generous and kindly. How am I to get out of Capito's clutches, here?" Marsyas gazed straight at Agrippa with the set eyes of one plunged into deep speculation. Then he leaned toward the prince. "Will this gold in all truth help thee to borrow more in Alexandria?" "I know it!" "And then what?" "To Rome! To imperial favor! To suzerainty over Judea!" Marsyas laid hold on the prince's arm. "Thou art a Herod," he said intensely. "Ambition natively should be the very breath of thy nostrils. Yet swear to me that thou wilt aspire--aye, even desperately as thy grandsire! Swear to me that thou wilt not be content to be less than a king!" At another time, Agrippa might have found amusement in the young man's earnestness, but the cause was now his own. "Thou tongue of my desires!" he exclaimed. "I have sworn! Being a Herod, mine oaths are not idle. I have sworn!" "Then, let us bargain together," Marsyas said rapidly. "I have told thee my story: thou heardest my vow to-night! For my fealty, yield me thy word! As I help thee into power, help me to revenge! Promise!" "Promise! By the beard of Abraham, I will conquer or kill anything thou markest; yield thee my last crust, and carry thee upon my back, so thou help me to Alexandria!" "Swear it!" Agrippa raised his right hand and swore. The legionary roused and growled at the two to be quiet. Marsyas fell back on the straw and lay still. Agrippa made signs and urged for more discussion, but the Essene, masterful in his silence, refused to speak. Presently the Herod lay down and slept from sheer inability to engage his mind to profit otherwise. A little after dawn the following morning, the Essene and the Herod were conducted into the vestibule of Herod the Great, for a hearing before Vitellius and Herrenius Capito. But Marsyas' offense against a Roman citizen was held in abeyance; it was Agrippa's debt to Cæsar which engaged the attention of the judges. Vitellius was in a precarious temper and Capito looked as grim as querulous old age may. Agrippa's nonchalance was only a surface air overlaying doubts and no little trepidation. But Marsyas, white and sternly intent, was the most resolute of the four. Capito stirred in his chair and prepared to speak, but Vitellius cut in with a point-blank demand on the young Essene. "Dost thou know this man?" he asked, indicating Agrippa. "I do, lord," Marsyas answered, turning his somber eyes on the legate. "He owes three hundred thousand drachmæ to Cæsar; he says that thou canst help him pay it; is it so?" "It is, lord." Agrippa's eyes were perfectly steady; it would not do to show amazement now. "How?" was the next demand flung at the Essene. "I can place him in the way of certain wealth," was the assured reply. "How?" "The noble Roman's pardon, but there are certain things an Essene may not divulge." Agrippa's well-bred brows lifted. Was this evader and collected schemer the innocent Essene he had met on the slopes of Olivet the previous evening? "Answer! Dost thou promise to provide the Herod with three hundred thousand drachmæ which shall be paid unto Cæsar's treasury?" "I promise to place the prince where he will provide himself with three hundred thousand drachmæ. If he pay it not unto Cæsar, the fault shall be his, not mine." "Will the Essenes do it?" "It shall be done," Marsyas replied, his composure unshaken by the menace implied in the questioning. "Capito, what thinkest thou?" Vitellius demanded. The old collector shuffled his slippered feet, and his antique treble took on an argumentative tone. "Cæsar wants his money, not a slave; I want the emperor's commendation, not his blame. But let us bind this young Jew to this." Vitellius motioned to an orderly. "Send hither a notary; and let us take down this Jew's promise. Now, Herod, speak up. There are no rules of an order to bind you. Where shall you get this money?" "Of two sources," Agrippa declared, unblushing. "From the young man himself and from the Essenes." "If you had so many moneyers, why have you not paid your debt long ago?" "I had not the indorsement of this young Essenic doctor to validate my note, O Vitellius," the Herod responded with equanimity. The two Romans frowned; the clerk finished his transcription. "Sign!" Vitellius ordered Marsyas threateningly. Marsyas calmly wrote his name in Greek under the voucher. After him Agrippa signed the document. "Now, listen," Vitellius began conclusively. "I believe neither of you. But for the fact that Cæsar would be burdened with a useless chattel I should let Capito foreclose upon you, Agrippa. But there is a chance that this rigid youth may be telling the truth; if he is not--" the legate closed his thin lips and let the menace of his hard eyes complete the sentence. Marsyas contemplated him, unmoved, undismayed, no less inflexible and determined. "The punishment for his offense against you, Agrippa, is remitted. Get you gone. Capito! Follow them!" Totally undisturbed by this sudden entanglement in a supposedly clear skein, Agrippa waved his hand and smiled. "Many thanks, Vitellius," he said. "Would I could get my debts paid if only to deserve thy respect once more. But thy hospitality must be a little longer strained. The wolves of Jonathan wait without to lay hands on this young man. He must be passed the gates in disguise. I provided for that last night. Admit my servants, I pray thee." "Have your way, Herod, and fortune go with you, curse you for a winsome knave," Vitellius growled. Agrippa laughed, but there was no laughter in his eyes. The two were led through a second hall instinct with barbaric splendors, to a small apartment where they were presently attended by two servants. One was a slow, stolid Jew of middle-age, with stubbornness and honesty the chief characteristics of his face. The other would have won more interest from the casual observer. He was young, well-formed, but of uncertain nationality. His head was like a cocoanut set on its smaller end, and covered with thick, stiff, lusterless black hair, cut close and growing in a rounded point on his forehead. One eye was smaller than the other and the lid drooped. The fault might have given him a roguish look but for the ill-natured cut of his mouth. Both wore the brown garments of the serving-class. When Agrippa and Marsyas stood up from the ministrations of these two, they were fit figures for a procession of patricians on the Palatine Hill. Marsyas' soiled white garments had been put off for a tunic and mantle of fine umber wool, embroidered with silver. A tallith of silk of the same color was bound with a silver cord about his forehead. Agrippa's garments were only a short white tunic of extraordinary fineness belted with woven gold, and a toga of white, edged with purple. But the prince examined Marsyas with an interested eye. "By Kypris!" he said aloud, "and thou art to entomb thyself in En-Gadi!" But Marsyas did not understand. Capito awaited them when they emerged, and announced himself ready to proceed. Procedure was to be an elaborate thing. A squad of soldiery had been detailed as escort, and stood prepared in marching order; the collector's personal array of apparitors was assembled; his baggage sent forth to his pack-horses,--himself, duly arrayed after the fashion of a conventional old Roman afraid of color. Agrippa placed himself beside the collector with an equanimity that was almost disconcerting. The old man signed his apparitors to proceed and followed with his two virtual prisoners. Through the envelope of grief and rancor, the grave difficulties of his predicament reached Marsyas. Unless he could be rid of the surveillance of Capito, both he and the Herod were in sore straits. But Agrippa's amiable temper presaged something, and Marsyas merged the new distress with the burden of misery which bowed him. They passed out of the simpler portions of the royal house into the state wing and emerged in the great audience-chamber. It would have been impossible for a scion of that bloody house to pass for the first time in years through that royal chamber without comment upon it. Agrippa after crossing the threshold slackened his step and his eyes took on the luster of retrospection. "I remember it," he said in a preoccupied way, "but only as a dream. I went this way when my father and mother fared hence to Rome!" Capito lagged also, and Marsyas and the men following slackened their steps, until by the time the center of the vast hall was reached they paused as if by one accord. The hall was an octagonal, faced half its height, or to the floor of its galleries, in banded agate from the Indies; from that point upward the lining was marble panels and frescoes, alternating. The galleries were supported by a series of interlaced oriental arches, rich with tracery and filigree. With these main features as groundwork, the barbaric fancy of Herod the Great threw off all restraint and reveled in magnitude, richness and display. He did not permit Greece, the _arbiter elegantarium_, to govern his building or his garnishment. He harkened to the Arab in him and made a bacchanal of color; he remembered his one-time poverty and debased the hauteur of gold to the humility of wood and clay and stone. He imaged Life in all its forms and crowded it into mosaics on his pavement, subjected it in the decoration of his scented wood couches, tables, taborets, weighted it with the cornices of his ceilings, the rails of his balustrades, the basins of his fountains--until he seemed to shake his scepter as despot over all the beast kind. He was a hunter, a warrior and a statesman; the instincts of all three had their representation in this, his high place. He was a voluptuary, a tyrant, and a shedder of blood; his audience-chamber told it of him. Thus, though he had crumbled to ashes forty years before, and the efforts of the world to forget him had almost succeeded, he left a portrait behind him that would endure as long as his palace stood. The light of the Judean sun came in a harlequinade of twenty colors, but, where it fell and was reproduced, Nature had mastered the kaleidoscope and made it a glory. The immense space, peopled with graven images, yet animated with ghostly swaying of hangings, had its own shifting currents of air, drafts that were streaming winds, cool and scented with the aromatic woods of the furniture. The portals were closed, and there was no sound. Sun, wind and silence ennobled Herod's mistakes. The four stood longer than they knew. Then Agrippa made a little sound, a sudden in-taking of the breath. "See!" he whispered, laying a hand on Capito's shoulder and pointing with the other. "That statue!" Following his indication, their eyes rested on the sculptured figure of a woman, cut from Parian marble. It was a drowsy image, the head fallen upon a hand, the lids drooping, the relaxation of all the muscles giving softness and pliability to the pose. So perfect was the work that the marble promised to be yielding to the touch. Some imitator of Phidias had achieved his masterpiece in this. Indeed, at first glance there was startlement for the four. A warm human flush had mantled the stone, and Marsyas' brows drew together, but he could not obey the old Essenic teaching and drop his eyes. "A statue?" Capito asked, uncertainly taking his withered chin between thumb and forefinger. "A statue," Agrippa assured him. "The illumination is from the batement light above. Come nearer!" He led them to the angle in which the image stood, not more than three paces from the wall. "It is my grandsire's queen, Mariamne," he continued softly, for ordinary tones awakened ghostly echoes in the haunted hall. "Murdered Mariamne!" the old man whispered with sudden intensity. "He loved her, and killed her in the fury of his love. They said that the king was wont to come in the morning when the sun stood there, drive out the attendants so that none might hear, and cling about this fair marble's knees in such agony of passion and remorse and grief that life would desert him. They would come in time to find him there, stretched on the pavement, cold and inert, to all purposes dead! And it was said that these groins here above held echoes of his awful grief after he had been borne away." Capito shivered. "What punishment!" he exclaimed. "Punishment! They who curse Herod's memory could not, if they had their will, visit such torture upon him as he invented for himself!" But Capito was lost now in contemplation of the statue. "She was beautiful," he said after a silence. "Didst ever see her?" Agrippa asked eagerly. The collector's back was turned to the prince, that he might have the advantageous view, and he answered with rapt eyes. "Once; through an open gate which led into her own garden. So I saw her in the lightest of vestments, for the day was warm and half of her beauty usually hidden was unveiled." "Well for thee my grandsire never knew," Agrippa put in, leaning against one of the cestophori which guarded a blank panel in the wall. "He never knew; but I would have died before I would give over the memory of it. She was slight, willowy, with the eyes of an Attic antelope, yet braver and more commanding than any woman-eye that ever bewitched me. Her mouth--Praxiteles would have turned from Lais' lips to hers." Agrippa's hand slid down the side of the cestophorus and fumbled a little within the edge of the molding. "Her hair was loose," the old man went on, "the sole drapery of her bosom--a very cloud of night loomed into filaments--" An inert, moldy breath reached Marsyas. He turned his head. The panel between the cestophori was gone and a square of darkness yawned its miasma into the hall. The prince made a lightning movement; noiselessly the two servants dived into the blackness; Marsyas followed; after him, the prince. An eclipsing wall began to slide between them and the hail they had left. "Her arms were languidly lifted--arms that for whiteness shamed this marble--" the old man was saying as the panel glided back into place and shut them in darkness. "Ow!" Agrippa whispered in delight, "he tells that story better every year!" CHAPTER VI MARSYAS ASSUMES A CHARGE Agrippa crowded past the three that had preceded him into the black passage and, whispering a command to follow, led on. They kept track of him by the sound of his shoes on the stone, but the absolute darkness and the unfamiliar path made their steps uncertain and slow. Frequently the sure footfall before them receded and in fear of losing their guide they stumbled forward in nervous haste. Presently the darkness about them lifted; the sensation was not that light had entered in, but that the darkness had simply failed in strength. There was a perceptible increase in temperature and the atmosphere, changing from a chill, became muggy and oppressive. Marsyas, drawing in a full breath in search of freshness, told himself that this was the original air of chaos, penned in at the hour of creation. The floor under his feet became irregular, the instinctive realization that a roof was imminent overhead, passed, and, when the darkness became sufficiently feeble, they discovered that they were following through an immense chamber. Light came in through air-holes in the rock above. Agrippa spoke aloud. "This is a quarry-chamber. It was also my grandsire's secret stronghold, trial-chamber and tomb where many of his private grudges were satisfied. But there are no evidences, now. The place was open to the hill-jackals, by another passage which, if my memory has not failed me, shall lead us out." One of the servitors, whose teeth had been chattering, made a shuddering sound. Agrippa laughed. "Thou, Eutychus?" he said. "Comfort thee; the jackals have ceased to haunt the place since their hunger was last satisfied, thirty years ago." An irregular spot of blackness in one of the walls swallowed up the prince as he spoke. Eutychus halted at the edge and drew back with a whimper. But the second servitor, who had not spoken since Marsyas had first seen him, muttered contemptuously some inarticulate word and pushed Eutychus into the blackness. Marsyas followed. Thereafter it was only time which ensued. Sound, sight and, except for the stone under their feet, feeling were defeated. They moved interminably. Once or twice Eutychus became hysterical from the depression, but the stolid servitor smote him and bundled him on. Ahead a light laugh floated back to them in appreciation of the humor in Eutychus' predicament. In time a yellow star with ragged points appeared ahead of them, high above the level upon which they had been walking. Eutychus trembled before it, but Agrippa quickened his steps. "What a memory I have," he observed cheerfully. "Any other than myself would have been hopelessly entangled in these galleries and perished miserably some days hence." The star enlarged, lost substantiality and presently Eutychus with a gasp of joy faltered that it was daylight. Several minutes later they emerged through an open tomb into high noon over Judea. Before their blinded vision, the green hills swimming in sunlight upheaved between them and all points of the horizon. The City of David was nowhere to be seen; the sun stood directly in the zenith. Marsyas was lost; but the prince smiled in immense satisfaction and, seeking a grassy spot, sat down and breathed deeply. Presently he motioned to the others to sit. Marsyas came close to him; the others remained at a respectful distance. For a long time no one spoke. At last Agrippa fell to inspecting his delicate hands and his garments for marks of the long journey under the earth, and the embroidered shoes for evidences of contact with jagged rock. Satisfied that he was clean and intact, he laughed a little. "By the hat of Hermes, this was noble apparel to wear through the bowels of the earth. _Eheu_! I was at my best, and not so much as a she-bat saw me!" Eutychus, entirely recovered, chuckled, and a grin overspread the face of Silas; but Marsyas was plunged in his own reflections. "This is the country-side west of Jerusalem," Agrippa resumed presently, for the young Essene's information. "Yonder," pointing north, "the road runs which shall lead us hence. We are an hour's journey by daylight above ground, from the Tower of Hippicus. But we are not beyond the zone of danger yet." Marsyas did not answer. Reaction had set up within him against the foreign interest which had engaged his attention since sunrise. He had thought of himself and had been concerned for Agrippa; he had planned and had achieved ends. Entanglements straightened, immediate danger passed, the cloud of his sorrow embraced him wholly. He did not want to see that Canaan was beautiful, indeed a land of milk and honey. The wind laden with spring sweets struck a chill in his soul; the singing birds hurt him with a pain greater than he could endure. His heart was bruised, his every sensation sore and weighted with a numb consciousness that a dread thing had happened and that it was useless to pray and hope now. The presence of others was an obstacle, vaguely realized, that kept him from yielding to his desire to lie down on his face and hate everything and give himself up to whatever chose to befall him. Agrippa's hand, presently laid on his shoulder, irritated him. He had to restrain himself to keep from shaking it off. But the prince spoke, and his words were helpful. "Marsyas, I know thy pain. I, too, had a beloved friend foully murdered, and the agony of helplessness against the power that did him to death sowed ashes on my heart. But the time of the Lord God, slow as it approaches, fell at last. The only bitterness in my cup of fierce triumph was that it was another, and not I, who accomplished, at the end, the undoing of the murderer." "The Lord God forfend any such misfortune from me!" was the bitter rejoinder. "Vengeance can not be vengeance, if it fall from any hand but mine!" "Thou speakest truly: be thy requital sweeter than mine!" It was good to find the reflection of his own hurt in another's experience. It did not lessen his pain; but it gave him expression and the assurance of sympathy. Agrippa continued in his pleasant voice. "This persecution will cease ere long. It is only Jonathan's device to make him noted as one zealous for the faith. He is much disliked. It is reproach enough for a High Priest to be popular with the Sadducees: it is well-nigh unforgivable to be set up by Rome; it is an insurmountable obstacle to be other than eligible, Levitically; but this man hath been wholly undone by these and an offensive personality. Wherefore the people hate him with a fervor which Vitellius must respect. But Jonathan fancies that if he can make him a name as a defender of the faith, the rabble will applaud, and thou and I and Vitellius and the discerning Jews will achieve no more against him than flies whining about a wall! What folly! How oft we believe a thing to be so, because we wish it to be so! Vitellius does not see how the stoning of blasphemers indorses a man whom he dislikes. So Jonathan's time is short and the persecution will cease with him. His minion will be discountenanced with the master, and thine opportunity is made. Be of hope; thy day is not distant." But Marsyas' brow blackened. "A noble reflection!" he exclaimed passionately, "and one that should soothe the Tarsian's dreams! Binding and stoning and killing in his zeal for an usurper of the robes of Aaron! Shedding sweet blood--doing irreparable deeds to serve a vain end, to further a useless attempt--a thing to be given over to-morrow! O thou God of wrath! If it be not sin to pray it, let him stumble speedily in the Law!" Meanwhile Agrippa observed the sun, and after a little silence that his return to spirits seem not to grate upon the young Essene's distress, arose briskly. "Up! up!" he said. "It is not at variance with Vitellius' extreme methods to empty the whole Prætorium into the hills in search of us. Up, fellows! To Ptolemais!" Marsyas arose with the others, but he hesitated and glanced down at the fine garments that covered him. He remembered that he had not brought his soiled Essenic robes with him. He unslung his wallet and extended it to Agrippa. "Take it, and forget not that I shall ask payment from the strength of that high place to which this may help thee! The vengeful spirit is not of choice a patient thing! I shall wait--but to achieve mine ends. God prosper thee! If thy servants will lend me each a garment thou shalt have back thy dress once more and I will depart." "Whither?" asked Agrippa without taking the purse. "To En-Gadi, for the present." "But the brotherhood will then be guilty of befriending thee and thou art a living example of that which befalls him who befriends one of Saul's marked creatures." "So I am become as a pestilence," Marsyas said grimly. It was another count against the Pharisee. "Thou art much beset. Doubt not that Vitellius will seek for thee in En-Gadi, and it were better for thee and for the brotherhood that thou be not found. Thou must leave Judea, for the arm of the Sanhedrim is long." To leave Judea meant to be banished among the Gentiles, to step out of four whitewashed walls into unknown turmoil; to leave the pleasures of solitude, the peoples of parchment, the events of old history, the ambitions of the soul and go forth amid arrogant heathen godlessness to meet precarious fortunes. The whole course of his life had been entirely reversed in a few hours. Resolute and strong as the Essene was, his face contracted painfully. Agrippa laid a hand on his arm. "Remember, it is our faith that this persecution will cease and then thou canst return to thy study in safety," he said as gently as if he were speaking to a child. But in that moment, Marsyas told himself that there would be no returning to his old peace. "Come with me," Agrippa continued. "I will afford thee protection and thou shalt provide me with funds." He paused and, taking Marsyas' arm, led him down to a little meandering vale, sweet with blossoming herbs. "Look," he said, pointing back toward the east. The hills stood aside in a long, full-breasted series, and revealed through a narrow, green-walled aisle a distant view of Jerusalem, white and majestic on her heights. The morning blue that encroaches upon the noon in early spring softened the spectacle with a tender atmosphere; distance glorified its splendors, and the light upon it was other than daylight--it was a nimbus, the ineffable crown. Thus seen it was no longer the city of subjection, filled with wrongs and griefs and hopelessness. It was the Holy City, upright with the godliness of David, lawful in the government of Solomon; sacred with the presence of the Shekinah in the Holy of Holies. Here, Sheba might have stood first to be shown the glories of Solomon; here, Alexander might have drawn up his Macedonian quadriga to behold what excellence he was next to conquer. Marsyas felt emotion seize him, the mighty welling of tears in their springs. "Behold it!" Agrippa said. "We go forth beaten and ashamed, but thou shalt return to it justified; I shall return to it crowned. Believe in that as thou believest in Jehovah!" He drew the young Essene away and signed to the servitors. In the days that followed, Agrippa tactfully and little by little won Marsyas out of his brooding. Delicately, he sounded the young man's nature and discovered the channel into which his sorrowful thoughts could be diverted. Stirring incidents of the Herod's own astounding history, graphic accounts of great pageants, of contests of famous athletæ, or of gorgeous cities, vivaciously told, engaged Marsyas' attention in spite of himself. Gradually his sharpened interest began to choose for itself. Expectancy of things to come communicated by Agrippa presently possessed Marsyas. All this was a new and inviting experience for the young Essene, as well as an alleviation. He had lived a placid, passionless life with the old Essenic master and centered his broad loves on one or two. Evil happenings had wrenched these from him and his affections wandered and wavered, lost only for an hour. By the time the journey to Ptolemais was ended, Agrippa had stepped into his own place in the heart of the bereaved young man. Ptolemais was built for solidity and strength. Its houses were defenses, its public buildings were fortifications; its mole, harbor front and wall the most unassailable on the Asiatic seaboard. From the plains of Esdraelon in their dip toward the sea, the city was seen, set broadside to the waves, stanch, regular, square and bulky--embodied defiance for ever uttered to whatever sea-faring nation turned its triremes into her roadsteads. In a narrow street near the southernmost limits of the city, Agrippa stopped. A house of a single story stood before them, its roof barely higher than its door; a heavy wall before it, a narrow gate in that. "Enter," said the prince to Marsyas, "into the unctuous hospitalities of Agrippa's palace." He unlatched the gate, and, leading his companion across a small court, knocked at the door, which after a little wait swung open. An uncommonly pretty waiting-woman stepped aside to let them enter. Marsyas put off his sandals and followed the prince into a small recess cut off by curtains from the interior of the house. A bronze lamp was in a niche in the wall and a taboret stood in the corner. No other furniture was visible. The prince dismissed the two servitors and they passed behind the curtains, Eutychus stumbling as he went, because his eyes were engaged in attempting to attract the attention of the pretty waiting-woman, who seemed quite oblivious of his glances. "Send hither your mistress, Drumah," Agrippa said to her. She bowed and departed and presently one of the curtains lifted and a woman hastened into the apartment. With a low cry of joy she ran to the prince and flung herself on his breast. "Oh, that thou shouldst come and none to watch for thee!" she exclaimed. "That thou shouldst enter thy house and none but thy hireling to meet thee!" He laughed lightly and kissed her. "I have brought also a guest, Cypros," he said. For the first time her eyes lighted on Marsyas and blushing she drew away from her husband. "I pray thy pardon," she murmured. The light from the day without shone full on her through a lattice, and since his journey to Nazareth Marsyas had learned to look on women with an interested eye. She was small, but her figure showed the perfect outlines of the matron, and the Jewish dress, bound about the hips with a broad scarf, let no single grace lose itself under drapery. But it was the face that held the young Essene's attention. There, too, was the blood of the Herod, for Agrippa had married his cousin, but its attributes were refined almost to ethereal extremes. Flesh could not have been whiter nor coloring more delicate. The effect rendered was an impression of exquisite frailty, produced as much by the pathos in the over-large black eyes and the serious cut of the tender mouth as by the transparency of the exceedingly small hand which lay on her breast as if to still a fluttering heart. Her beauty was not aided by strength of character or intellectuality; it was distinctly the simple, defenseless, appealing type which is an invincible conqueror of men. "This is Marsyas of Nazareth, an Essene in distress, yet not so unfortunate that he is not willing to help us. What comfort canst thou offer him from thy housekeeping?" The Essenes were the holy men of Israel; the large eyes filled with deference and she bowed. "Welcome in God's name. My lord has bread and a roof-tree. I pray thee share them freely with us." Marsyas' formality so serviceable among the women of Nazareth suddenly seemed infelicitous here, but it was all he had for response to this different personage. "The blessing of God be with thee; I give thee thanks." She summoned the pretty waiting-woman. "Let my lord and his guest be given food and drink; set wine and such meats as we have, and let the children come and greet their father." The prince thrust the curtains aside and, motioning to Marsyas', waited until his princess and the young man had passed within. The apartment was a second recess larger than the first, shut in by hangings of sackcloth and furnished with rough seats and tables of unoiled cedar. It was a cheerless room, fit for the humblest man in Ptolemais, but the unconquered Herod and his lovely princess ennobled it. There was a scarf of damask thrown over one of the tables and two or three pieces of magnificent plate sat upon it. "That," said Agrippa, pointing to the silver, "hath been my moneyer for years. I have lived a month on a flagon." Cypros sighed, but three pretty children, a boy and two girls, rushed in from the rear of the house and engaged the prince's attention. Meanwhile, the attractive servant entered with plates for the table and Eutychus followed with a platter of food. As she passed the young Essene she tripped on an unevenness in the floor and would have fallen, but Marsyas, with a quick movement, more instinctive than gallant, threw out a hand and stayed her. She thanked him composedly and went about her work, but Marsyas, chancing to raise his eyes to Eutychus' face, caught a look from the servitor that was livid with hate. Shocked and astonished, Marsyas turned his back and wondered how he had crossed the creature. Agrippa sat at the table, and, with Cypros at his left, bade Marsyas sit beside him. The children were carried protesting away. The prince filled a goblet of silver with a pale wine, slightly effervescent and exhaling a bouquet peculiarly subtle and penetrating. He raised the frosty cup between his fingers--drink, drinker and cup of a type--and looked at the strip of sky visible through the lattice. "This to the gods," he said, "or whatever power hath fortune to give, and a heart to be won of libation. I yield you my soul for a laurel!" The princess leaned her forehead against his arm and whispered: "It is wicked--forbidden!" "I poured but one glass: I make the prayer; I have not asked thee or our young friend to pray it with me. But my devices are exhausted. I make appeal now, haphazard, for I grope!" "And didst thou fail in Jerusalem?" "As I have failed from Rome to Idumea." She drew in a little sobbing breath and hid her eyes against his sleeve. Marsyas sat silent. This first evidence of despair on the prince's part was most unwelcome. His own fortunes were too much entangled with Agrippa's for him to contemplate their fall. He felt the prince's eyes upon him. The silver cup had been refilled and was extended to him. Marsyas took it. "This to success," he said, "not fortune!" Cypros stirred. "Success is so deliberate!" she sighed. Marsyas made no answer; would it be long before he should have his bitter wish? "Thou seest Judea," Agrippa began, "thou heardest me aspire to it and thou didst abet me in mine ambition. But learn, for thy own comfort, Marsyas, the vagabond to whom thou hast attached thyself doth not grasp after another man's portion. Judea is mine! And Rome must yield me mine inheritance!" The prince's eyes glowed with youth's ambition. Marsyas listened intently. "A Herod's word is in disrepute," the prince continued. "Hence I am limited to action to prove myself. But look thou here, Marsyas. Judea is pillaged: so am I. Judea is despised: so am I! Judea weltereth in her own blood: am I not sprung from a murdered sire, who was son of a murdered mother--each dead by the same hand of father and husband? Dear Lord, I am an offspring of the shambles, mother-marked with wounds!" He shuddered and drew his hand across his forehead. "Having thus suffered the same miseries which are Judea's, is it not natural that I should relieve her when I, myself, am relieved? I should rule Judea as Judea would rule herself--" He broke off with a gesture of impatience. "How I hate the blatant vower of vows! Help me to mine opportunity, Marsyas." As between Rome and Herod the Great as sovereign, there was no choice. Though the Asmonean Slave, as the Jewish patriots named the capable fiend, gave Judea the most brilliant reign since the glories of Solomon and the most monstrous since Ahab, the nominal independence offered by his administration was absolutely submerged and lost in the terror of his absolutism and the devilish genius in him for oppression. Herod and Abaddon were names synonymous in Judea, and the mildness of his sons or their inefficiency had not been able to set the reproach aside. No able Herod had arisen since the founder of the house, except, as Marsyas hopefully believed, this man before him. Herod Agrippa was the son of Aristobolus, who was murdered in his youth before his capabilities developed. The Herods, Philip and Antipas, had been mild because they were incapable. The recurrence of mental strength in the blood was an untried contingency. All this came to Marsyas, now, suggested by the implied self-defense in the prince's words, and for a moment he wavered between concern for his people and anxiety for his own cause. Agrippa and Cypros watched him. "Thou art a just youth," the prince went on in the winning voice that had already made its conquest over the Essene. "I can not prove myself until I am given trial, and judgment without trial is an abomination even unto the tyrant Rome!" "I have not judged, lord," Marsyas protested. "And thou wilt not until I have shown myself unworthy of thy confidence. Thou hast even now bespoken God's favor for me--be then, His instrument! Thou art the first ray of light in a decade of darkness that has enveloped me and mine!" Marsyas put out his hand to the prince. The peril in the Herod blood, in his calculations, had dropped out of sight. "What dost thou say to me, my prince?" he said. "How is it that thou beseechest me--me, the suppliant, praying thy help for mine own ends? But hear me! Thou aspirest to that place of which I have no knowledge, among peoples whose paths I never cross, into the calling of the great! Yet, though most unequipped to yield thee support, I am thy substance. Use me! Thou knowest my price." Agrippa smiled. "Though I die owing even mine embalmer, I shall pay thee that debt. I have said. And now to the process. What money hast thou?" Agrippa was silent and Marsyas, watching his face, waited. "I need," the prince said slowly, "twenty thousand." Marsyas got upon his feet, and for a moment there was silence. "I will get it for thee," he said. CHAPTER VII THE BONDMAN OF HATE In a city like Ptolemais, where many pagans lived extravagantly and many Jews lived thriftily, there were, as naturally follows, many money-lenders among the sons of Abraham. "Seek them all," was Agrippa's charge, "but Peter, the usurer. Him, thou hadst better avoid." The young Essene laid aside the prince's dress, with its embroidery of precious metal, and, getting into a simpler garment affected by the stewards to men of rank, went out into the city to borrow twenty thousand drachmæ. He did not get the twenty thousand drachmæ, but he found, instead, that Herod Agrippa was the most notorious bankrupt in the world. Being a Jew and by heritage thrifty, the discovery shook him in his respect for the prince, but at the same time a resolution shaped itself in him against the usurers. But, on a certain day, he returned to the little house in the suburbs of the city to report that he had been placidly refused by every money-lending Jew or Gentile, except Peter, in the seaport. But he delivered his tidings unmoved. "Be of hope," he said to Cypros, whose head drooped at the news; "there are many untried ways." He went again into the city, and visited the khans. There might be new-comers who were money-lenders in other cities. There were such as guests in Ptolemais, but from their lips he learned that Agrippa was black-listed from the Adriatic to the Euphrates; but Marsyas did not return to the house in the suburbs that night. The weight of his obligation was too heavy to endure the added burden which the sight of Agrippa's suspense had become. He went to the rabbis of Ptolemais; they told him that they were not money-lenders. He applied to the prefect of the city, who laughed at him. Hoping that the name of Agrippa as a bankrupt had not penetrated into the fields he journeyed into the country-side of Syria and tried an oil-merchant, a rustic, rich and unlettered. But the oil-merchant came up to Ptolemais and made inquiry, shrugged his shoulders, glowered at Marsyas and went back to his groves. An Egyptian seller of purple landed at Ptolemais from Alexandria. The name of the city of hope attracted Marsyas and he met the merchant at the wharves. But the seller of purple had been to Rome and the topmost name on his list of debtors was Herod Agrippa. At the end of three days, Marsyas returned to the house in the suburbs to assure the prince that he had not deserted and went again on his search. His invariable failures began to teach him a certain shrewdness. He discovered early that Essenic frankness would not serve his ends. He found that men were approachable through certain channels; that it was better to speak advisedly than frankly; to lay plans, rather than to wait on events; to use devices rather than persuasion. These things admitted, he discovered that he had unconsciously subordinated them to his use. Though momentarily alarmed, he did not hate himself as he should. On the other hand, it was pleasurable to lay siege to men and try them at their own scheming. At night in a dutiful effort to cleanse himself of the day's accumulation of worldliness, he went to the open proseuchæ, where in the dark of the great out-of-doors, he was least likely to be noticed, to comfort himself with stolen worship, stolen profit from the Law. But the Law was not tender to those who lived as Stephen lived, and died as Stephen died. Not in all that great and holy scroll which the Reader read was there compassion for the blasphemer. Also, he heard of the great plague of persecution which Saul had loosed upon the Nazarenes in Jerusalem and how the Pharisee had become a mighty man before the Council, and an awe and a terror to the congregation. So he came away from the proseuchæ, not only unhelped but harmed, embittered, enraged, alienated from his faith, and hungering for vengeance. By day, he walked through the commercial districts of Ptolemais and pushed his almost hopeless search with an energy that did not flag at continued failure. He knew that if he obtained the twenty thousand drachmæ, he bound Agrippa the surer to his oath of allegiance to the cause against Saul. Despair, therefore, was a banished and forbidden thing. His plans, however, had been tried and proved fruitless. Typically a soldier of fortune, he was relying upon the exigencies of chance. Ptolemais was a normal town, with large interest and pleasures, and the fair day was too fleeting for one to stop and take heed of another. Passers pushed and hurried him when he came upon those more busy than he. Sailors, bronzed as Tatars, were probably the sole loiterers besides the inevitable oriental feature, the sidewalk mendicant. So it was that on a certain day when Marsyas overtook a lectica in the street, the old man within complained aloud and had no audience, except his plodding bearers, or the attention of a glance, or a slackened step now and again among the citizens. "They rob me!" he was crying when Marsyas came up with him. The young man turned quickly; the declaration was alarming. His eyes encountered the face of Peter, the usurer, a stout, gray old Jew, in the apparel of a Sadducee. Seeing that he had won the young man's notice the old usurer seized the opportunity to enlarge. "They ruin me!" he cried. Marsyas bowed gravely. "Thy pardon, sir," he said. "May I be of service?" "They sap my life!" the old man continued more violently, as if the young man's question had excited him. "They take, and demand more; they waste, and must be replenished! I drop into the grave and there will be nothing left to buy a tomb to receive me!" The words were directed to Marsyas, and the young man having halted could not go on without awkwardness. "I pray thee," he urged, "tell me who plagues thee thus." "The tradesmen! Because I am wealthy, they augment their hire; because I must buy, they increase their price; they hold necessities out of my reach! It is a conspiracy between them because I am of lowly birth, and I go from one to another and find no relief! Behold!" He shook out a shawl which had been folded across his knees. "I must have it to protect me against the cold. It is inferior; it is scant; yet it cost me fifteen pieces of silver!" Marsyas glanced at the mantle; even with his little knowledge of fabrics it appeared not worth its price. "Thou hast servants, good sir, and camels," he said, drawn into suggestion in spite of himself. "Do I overstep my privilege to suggest that thou mayest send to Anthedon or to Cæsarea and buy in other cities?" "But the hire--the hire! And how should I know that the knavery does not extend to Anthedon and Cæsarea?" "Then," said Marsyas, "establish thine own booths here and undersell the robbers." There was silence; the small eyes of the old man narrowed and ignited. "A just punishment," he muttered. "A proper punishment!" "Or this," Marsyas continued, interested in his own conspiracy. "Thou sayest they oppress thee because thou art a lowly man! They are foolish. Display them thy power and punish them. Thou art a great usurer; powerful families here are in thy debt. How strong a hand thou holdest over them! What canst thou not compel them to do! Nay, good sir; to me, it seemeth thou hast the whip-hand over these tradesmen!" The old man rubbed his hands. "An engaging picture," he said. "But unless I haste, they will ruin me yet!" Marsyas shook his head. "Not if the tales of thy famous wealth be true." The lectica had moved along beside him and he waited now to be dismissed; but, contrary to custom of that rank which is privileged to command, the old man waited for Marsyas to take his leave. "Methinks," he began, "I have seen thee--" "Doubtless," Marsyas interrupted hastily. "I am a steward here in Ptolemais. But I have an errand here, good sir; by thy leave, I shall depart." The old man made a motion of assent, but he followed the young Essene with a thoughtful eye. "If I am to know the world's way," Marsyas said to himself, "I can use it, if need be." He did not visit another usurer, but on the following day went to those places likely to be the haunts of Peter. When, presently, he discovered the old man near a fountain, Marsyas did not attempt to catch his eye. But one of Peter's servants touched him on the arm and told him that the master beckoned, and he hastened to the old man's side. "Who is thy master?" Peter asked. Marsyas winced, but restrained a declaration of his free-born state. "A Roman citizen who is preparing to return to Italy." "A Roman!" Peter repeated. "But thou art a Jew, or the blood of the race in thee lies." "A Jew without taint of other blood in all the line." "Art satisfied with thy service--serving a Roman?" was the demand. "None has a better lord!" replied Marsyas quietly, but with an inward delight in leading the old man on. "But it should be more lawful for thee to serve a Jew," Peter declared. "A Roman's slave, a slave for ever; a Jew's slave, a slave but six years--" Marsyas could rest no longer under the intimation of bondage. "Good sir, I am not a slave." "Ho! a hireling." "No; a free man, unattached and serving for love." Peter scratched his head. "For love only? Then why not come and be my steward for wages?" "Thou canst not pay my price," he said with meaning. The old man lifted his withered chin. "Thy price!" he repeated haughtily. "And pray, sirrah, what is thy price?" A figurative answer to add to his first sententious remark was on Marsyas' lips, but he halted suddenly, and a little pallor came into his face. "On another day, I shall tell thee," he said after a silence, and the old man impatiently dismissed him. Marsyas turned away from the heart of the city and went straight to the house in the suburbs. He found Agrippa stretched on a couch where the air entered through the west lattice, and the place otherwise solitary. The princess and the children with the servants had gone into the city. Marsyas came uncalled to Agrippa's side, and the prince noted the change on the young man's face. He looked expectant. "My lord," Marsyas said, "thou didst say to me several days ago that thou didst hate a vower of vows. Yet no man is chafed by a vow except him who finds it hard to keep. Wherefore, I pray thee, for the prospering of the cause and mine, assure me once more of thy good intent toward Judea." The Herod raised his fine brows. "How now, Marsyas? Has the knowledge that I am a Herod been slandering me to you?" "Nay, my lord; thou hast won me; and I shall not stop at sacrifice for thy cause, which is mine." "What canst thou do, my Marsyas?" "Get thee money." "I give thee my word, Marsyas. It has been sorely battered dodging debts, yet it is still intact enough to contain mine honor. I give thee my word." Marsyas lingered with an averted face, which Agrippa tried in vain to understand. He added nothing to emphasize his avowal; perhaps he realized at that moment, more keenly than ever afterward, how much a man wants to be believed. Presently the young man spoke in another tone. "Who is this Peter, that I may not ask him for a loan?" "I owe him a talent already," Agrippa answered with a lazy smile, "which he advanced to me while he was yet my mother's slave." "Then thou knowest him! How--how is he favored in disposition?" "How is Peter favored? Are slaves favored? Nay, they are tempered like asses, cattle and apes--like beasts. Wherefore, this Peter is voracious, balky, amiable enough if thou yieldest him provender--not bad, but, like any donkey, could be better." Marsyas' eyes fell again; it seemed that he hesitated at his next question, as though upon its answer turned a matter of great moment. "Art thou in all truth assured that this Alexandrian will lend thee money?" he asked presently, beset by the possibility of doubt. Agrippa laughed outright. "Jove, but this questioning hath a familiar ring! Surely thou wast sired of a money-lender, Marsyas, else his inquiries would not arise so naturally to thy lips! Will the Alexandrian lend? Of a surety! And even if not, then will my mother's friend, the noble Antonia, Cæsar's sister-in-law. If Cæsar had not been so precipitate and hastened me out of Rome, I should have borrowed the sum of her ten years ago. I have not borrowed of the Alexandrian ere this because I had not the money to carry me thither." After a pause, Agrippa anticipated a further question and continued. "The Alexandrian is Alexander Lysimachus, the noblest Jew a generation hath produced. Even Rome, that hath such little use for our blood, waives its ancient judgment against Lysimachus. He is alabarch of the Jews in Alexandria, able as a Roman, just as a Jew, refined as a Greek, versatile as an Alexandrian. I saw him four years ago, here, in Jerusalem, when he brought his wife's remains to bury them on sacred soil. He had with him two sons, one a man, grown, with his father's genius, but without his father's soul; the other a handsome lad of undeveloped character, and a daughter, a veritable sprite for beauty, and a sibyl for wits. I was afraid of her; I, a Herod and a married man, turning forty, was afraid of her! But get me the twenty thousand drachmæ, Marsyas, and thou shall see her--_Hercle_--a thousand pardons! I forgot that thou art an Essene!" Marsyas stood silent once more, and Agrippa waited. "And yet one other thing, my lord," the Essene said finally. "I serve thee no less for love, because I serve thee also for a purpose. Thou wilt not forget to serve me, when thou comest to thine own?" "I give thee again my much misused word, Marsyas. Believe me, thou hast forced more truths out of me than any ever achieved before. Cypros will make thee her inquisitor when next she suspects me of warmth toward a maiden!" Marsyas lifted the prince's hand and pressed it to his lips. Without further word, he went out of the chamber and returned to the city. He sought out the counting-room of Peter the usurer, and found within a commotion and a gathered crowd. The old man himself stood in a steward's place behind a grating of bronze, with lists and coffers about him. Without stood a brown woman, in a strange dress sufficiently rough to establish her state of servitude, and she bore in her hands a sheep-skin bag that seemed to be filled with coins. About her was a group of men of nationalities so diverse and so evidently perplexed that Marsyas immediately surmised that they had been summoned as interpreters for a stranger whom they could not understand. The brown woman was passive: the usurer behind his grating in such a state of great excitement and anxiety that moisture stood out on his wrinkled forehead. His eyes were on the sheep-skin bag; evidently the brown woman was bringing him money, and his fear that the treasure would escape made the old man desperate. "Have ye forgotten your mother-tongues?" he fumed at the polyglot assembly, "or are ye base-born Syrians boasting a nationality that ye can not prove? Hold! Let her not go forth, good citizens; doubtless she hath come from a foreign debtor to repay me! Close the doors without!" Marsyas pressed through the crowd to the grating, and the old man discovered him. "Hither, hither, my friend," he exclaimed. "See if thou canst tell what manner of stranger we have here." The young Essene had been examining the woman; with a quick glance, now, he inspected her face. Dark the complexion, the eyes olive-green as chrysolite, mysterious and hypnotic; the features regular as an Egyptian's, but stronger and more beautiful; the physique refined, yet hardy. The mystic air of the Ganges breathed from her scented shawl. The young man's training in languages was not overtaxed. "What is thy will?" he asked in the tongue of the Brahmins. "To exchange Hindu money for Roman coin," was the instant reply. Marsyas turned to Peter. "This is an Indian woman," he explained. "She wishes to exchange coin of her country for Roman money." "Good!" the old man cried, rubbing his hands. "We shall oblige her. Foreign coins are so much bullion; yet, we pay only its face value, in Roman moneys! Good! I shall melt it, and deliver it to the Roman mint! Good! But--but how shall I know one of these outlandish coins from another?" "I can tell you," Marsyas answered. The assembled group drifted out of the counting-room and the usurer, sighing his delight, opened a gate and bade Marsyas and the Hindu woman come into the apartment behind the screen. There the exchange was made, and the old usurer, trusting to the Hindu's ignorance of the language, permitted no moment to pass without comment on his profit. Presently, Marsyas turned to the woman. "You lose money by this traffic," he said deliberately. "Rest thee, brother," was the calm reply, "I know it. Yet I must have Roman coin to carry me to Egypt." Marsyas glanced at her apparel. In spite of its humble appearance, it was the owner of this treasure, that dwelt within it. The exchange was made, amounting to something over twenty thousand drachmæ. Marsyas, with wistful eyes, saw her put the treasure away in the sheepskin bag. He arose as she arose, and the two were conducted out by Peter. Without, it had grown dark. The woman had made no effort to hide the nature of her burden. She made an almost haughty gesture of farewell to Marsyas. "I shall serve thee, perchance, one day," she said and passed out. Marsyas followed her. At the threshold, he wavered and stepping into the street stopped. She made a small, frail, dusky apparition, under the black shadows of the bulky buildings of Ptolemais--a profitable victim for some light-footed highwayman, less sorely in need of money than he. But she evidently felt no fear. Then, he turned and went back into the counting-room. Peter was behind his grating. "Who and what art thou?" the usurer demanded, with no little admiration in his tone. "I am," Marsyas answered, "a doctor of Laws, a master of languages, a doctor of medicines, a scholar of the College at Jerusalem, a postulant Essene." The reply was intentionally full. "And a steward for love, only!" "Only for a time. When I can repay thee a debt long standing, I shall cease to serve at all." The usurer's eyes brightened. "A debt," he repeated softly. "Is this my fortunate day? Which of the bankrupts who owe me has been replenished?" "Not yet, the one of whom I speak," Marsyas replied. "Hast thou heard of Herod Agrippa?" "Herod Agrippa! Evil day that he borrowed a talent of me, never to return it!" "Perchance, some day--" "Never! Whosoever lends him money pitches it into the sea!" "Yet the sea hath given up its treasure, at times. But let me trouble thee with a question. What price did the costliest slave in thy knowledge command?" "What price? A slave? In Rome? Nay, then, let me think. A Georgian female captive of much beauty was sold to Sejanus once for six hundred thousand drachmæ--" "I speak of serving-men," Marsyas interrupted. "Nay, then: Cæsar owns a physician worth eighty thousand drachmæ." "Hath he cured any in Cæsar's house of poisoning; can he speak many languages; is he also a doctor of Laws and a good Jew?" The usurer shook his head. "What price, then, should I he worth to Cæsar?" Marsyas demanded. "Sell not thyself to Cæsar," Peter cried, flinging up his hands. "It is forbidden!" "I shall not sell myself," Marsyas said. "I have come only to find how to value my services." "Whom dost thou serve?" the old man demanded. Marsyas was not ready to disclose his identity. "A Roman. Peace and the continuance of good fortune be thine." He bowed and passed out of the counting-room. The usurer stood a moment, then summoned his servants, and, getting himself into street dress, hastened to follow the young man. Marsyas turned his steps toward the house in the suburbs. There were several torches about the painted gate in the wall and the light shone on a group alighting from a curricle. Cypros and her children had returned from the city, and Agrippa had come forth to receive them. Marsyas joined the group and Peter's lectica was borne up to the circle of radiance under the torches. The old man's eyes filled with wrath when he recognized Agrippa. He stood up and surveyed him with scorn. "A Roman!" he scoffed. "A Roman, only to add the vices of the race to the meanness of a Herod! Back to my house, slaves! We have taken profitless pains!" Agrippa's anger leaped into his face and Marsyas pursued and overtook the litter. "Thy pardon, sir," he began. "I have a right to attach thee for the talent thy master owes me," Peter stormed. "Peace, good sir! I am not a slave." Peter chewed his mustache impotently, but the young Essene dropped his Greek and spoke in Hebrew, the language of the synagogue, the true badge of Judaism. "Perchance we may bargain together. Wouldst have me for hire?" Peter smoldered in sulky silence. "I can not serve longer without compensation," Marsyas pursued. "What sum in hire?" Peter demanded. "Twenty thousand drachmæ--" Peter blazed, but Marsyas stopped his invective with a motion. "Nay, peace! I have not finished. Twenty thousand drachmæ in loan to Agrippa, and I will serve thee gratis till he redeems me by paying the principal and the talent he owes." The usurer, with a snort, abruptly ordered the slaves to proceed. The next day, Marsyas, loitering on purpose near the usurer's, was approached by a servant and sent into the presence of Peter. "Hath the bankrupt any hopes?" the money-lender demanded without preliminary. "He goes to Alexandria, for money, and thence to imperial favor in Rome. There is Antonia who will aid him, as thou knowest. Unless thou helpest him to reach either of these two places, he is of a surety bankrupt; wherefore he can never pay thee the talent or even the interest." Peter dismissed him moodily and Marsyas returned to the prince. But the next day Peter appeared at Agrippa's door and was conducted to the prince's presence, where Cypros sat with him and Marsyas waited. The old man made no greeting. "Thou knowest me, Agrippa," he began at once. "For thy mother's sake, whose happy slave I was, I will take thine Essene at his terms, less the interest on the twenty thousand drachmæ." "My Essene at his terms," Agrippa repeated in perplexity. But Marsyas, with a movement of command, broke in. "The bargain is at first hand between thee and me, good sir," he said to Peter. "The second contract shall be between the prince and myself. Bring the money here at sunset and the writings shall be ready for thee." "Twenty thousand drachmæ, less mine interest on the sum," Peter insisted. "Less thine interest," Marsyas assented, and Peter went out. Agrippa got upon his feet and gazed gravely at Marsyas. "What is this?" he asked. "I have bound thee to my cause," the young man answered. "How? Nay, answer me, Marsyas. What hast thou done?" the prince urged, impelled by affection as well as wonder. "I have bought my revenge, and have paid for it with a season of bondage." "Hast thou given thyself in hostage for us?" Cypros cried, springing up. Marsyas, without reply, moved to leave the room. But Agrippa planted himself in the young man's way, and Cypros in tears slipped down on her knees at his side, and, raising his hand, kissed it. "We shall not forget," she whispered to him. "I shall not know peace till I have redeemed thee," Agrippa declared with misted eyes. Great haste to get away from the overwhelmed pair seized the Essene. Trembling he shook off their hold and hurried out into the air. He had to quiet a great amazement in him at the thing he had planned for so many days to do. After a long agitated tramp in search of composure, he began to see more clearly the results of his extreme act. He had fixed himself within reach of Vitellius and the Sanhedrim: unless the ill fortune of the luckless prince improved, he had bound himself to servitude for a lifetime. But he drew his hand across his troubled forehead and smiled grimly. He had made his first decisive step against Saul! CHAPTER VIII AN ALEXANDRIAN CHARACTERISTIC Nothing but prescience could have inspired Alexander, the young Macedonian conqueror, to decide to plant a city on the sandy peninsula which lay hot, flat, low and unproductive between the glassy waters of Lake Mareotis and the tumble of the Mediterranean. For a century previous, a straggling Egyptian village, called Rhacotis, eked out a precarious existence by fisheries; the port was filled with shoals or clogged with water-growth, and the voluptuous fertility of the Nile margin followed the slow sweep of the great river into the sea twelve miles farther to the east. No other port along the coast presented a more unattractive appearance. But Alexander, having no more worlds to conquer, turned his opposition upon adverse conditions. So he struck his spear into the sand, and there arose at the blow a city having the spirit of its founder--great, splendid, contentious, contradictory, impetuous and finally self-destructive through its excesses. He enlarged and embellished Rhacotis, which lay to the west of the new city and left it to the tenantry of the Egyptians, poor remnants of that haughty race which had been aristocrats of the world before Troy. In its center arose that solemn triumph of Pharaonic architecture, the Serapeum. But it was they who approached from the south, with the sand of the Libyan desert in their locks, who saw noble Alexandria. Between them and the city was first the strength of its fortifications, prodigious lengths of wall, beautiful with citadels and towers. Within was the Brucheum, with the splendor of the Library, for the Alexandrian spirit of contentiousness sharpened and forced the intellect of her disputants, till her learning was the most faultless of the time and its house a fit shape for its contents. After the Library the pillared façade of the Court of Justice; next the unparalleled Museum, and, interspersed between, were the glories of four hundred theaters, four thousand palaces, four thousand baths. Against the intense blue of the rainless Egyptian sky were imprinted the sun-white towers, pillars, arches and statues of the most comely city ever builded in Africa. Memphis, lost and buried in the sand, and Thebes, an echoing nave of roofless columns, were never so instinct with glory as Egypt's splendid recrudescence on the coast of the Middle Sea. To the northeast, there was abatement of pagan grandeur. Here were quaint solid masses of Syriac architecture, with gowned and bearded dwellers and a general air of oriental decorum and religious rigor which did not mark the other quarters of the city. In this spot the Jews of the Diaspora had been planted, had multiplied and strengthened until there were forty thousand in the district. Those turning the beaks of their galleys into the Alexandrian roadstead saw first the Pharos, a mist-embraced and phantom tower, rising out of the waves; after it, the Lochias, wading out into the sea that the palaces of the Ptolemies might hold in mortmain their double empire of land and water; on the other hand the trisected Heptistadium; between, the acreage of docking and out of the amphitheatrical sweep of the great city behind, standing huge, white and majestic, the grandest Jewish structure, next to Herod's Temple, that the world has ever known--the Synagogue. The Jews of Alexandria; as a class of peculiar and emphatic characteristics, a class toward which consideration was due in deference to its numbers, its wealth and its sensitiveness, were necessarily the object of particular provision. Therefore, that they might be intelligently handled as to their prejudices, they were provided with a special governor from among their own--an alabarch; permitted to erect their own sanctuaries and to practise the customs of race and the rites of religion in so far as they did not interfere with the government's interests. Thus much their privileges; their oppressions were another story. Peopled by three of the most aggressive nations on the globe, the Greek, the Roman and the Jew, Alexandria seemed likewise to attract representatives of every country that had a son to fare beyond its borders. Drift from the dry lands of all the world was brought down and beached at the great seaport. It ranged in type from the fair-haired Norseman to the sinewy Mede on the east, from the Gaul on the west to the huge Ethiopian with sooty shining face who came from the mysterious and ancient land south of the First Cataract. It followed that such a heterogeneous mass did not effect union and amity. That was a spiritual fusion which had to await a perfect conception of liberty and the brotherhood of man. The racial mixture in Alexandria was, therefore, a prematurity, subject to disorder. So long as a Jew may have his life, his faith and his chance at bread-winning, he does not call himself abused. These things the Roman state yielded the Jew in Alexandria. But he was haughty, refined, rich, religious, exclusive, intelligent and otherwise obnoxious to the Alexandrians, and, being also a non-combatant, the Jew was the common victim of each and all of the mongrel races which peopled the city. The common port of entry was an interesting spot. The prodigious stretches of wharf were fronted by packs of fleets, ranging in class from the visiting warrior trireme from Ravenna or Misenum, to the squat and blackened dhow from up the Nile or the lateen-sailed fishing-smack from Algeria to the papyrus punt of home waters. Its population was the waste of society, fishers, porters, vagabonds, criminals, ruffian sea-faring men, dockmen, laborers of all sorts, men, women and children--the pariahs even of the rabble and typically the Voice of Revilement. Agrippa, landing with his party, attracted no more attention than any other new-comer would have done, until Silas gravely inquired the way into the Regio Judæorum. "Jupiter strike you!" roared the man whom the sober Silas had addressed. "Do I look like a barbarian Jew that I should know anything about the Regio Judæorum!" His words, purposely loud, did not fail to excite the interest he meant they should. "Regio Judæorum!" cried a woman under foot, filling her basket with fish entrails. "What say you, Gesius? Who, these? Look, Alexandrians, what tinsel and airs are hunting the Regio Judæorum!" "Purple, by my head!" the man exclaimed. "Roman citizens with the bent nose of Jerusalem!" "Agrippa, or I am a landsman!" a sailor shouted. "Fugitive from debtors, or I am a pirate!" "Jews!" another woman screamed; "coming to collect usury!" A howl of rage, threatening and lawless, greeted this cry, out of which rose the sailor's voice with a shout of laughter. "Usury! Ha, ha! He has not a denarius on him that is not borrowed!" The Jewish prince had lived a life of diverse fortune, but never until then had he been the object of popular scorn. A surprise was aroused in him as great as his indignation; he stood transfixed with emotion. Cypros, thoroughly terrified, came out from among her servants and clung to his arm. On her the eyes of the fishwives alighted. [Illustration: Cypros, thoroughly terrified, clung to his arm (missing from book)] "Look! Look!" they cried. "Sparing us our husbands by hiding her beauty! The rag over her face! Bah! for a plaster of mud!" "Fish-scales will serve as well," another cried, snatching up a handful and throwing it at the princess. "Have mine, too, Bassia! Thou art a better thrower than I!" a third shouted, handing up her basket. "Be sure of your aim, Bassia!" The uproar became general. "A handful for the simpering hand-maid, too!" "Don't miss the she-Herod!" "Fall to, wives; don't leave it all to Bassia!" "'Way for the proconsul!"--a distant roar came up from the water's edge. "Bilge-water in my jar, there, mate; it will mix their perfumes!" "'Way for the proconsul!" the distant roar insisted. "Don't soil the proconsul, women!" "'Ware, Bassia! The proconsul is coming!" "Perpol! he will not see! He is the best Jew-baiter in all Alexandria! Sure aim, O Phoebus of the bow!" "'Way for the proconsul!" "Pluto take the legionaries; here they come!" "One more pitch at them, though Cæsar were coming!" "No privileges exclusive for thyself, Bassia! _Habet_! More scales!" "Scales; shells; water! Scales; sh--" "Fish-heads! _Habet_!" "Entrails--" "'Way for the proconsul!" "Directly, comrades! Shells, water!" "Ow! You hit a soldier!" "Bad aim, Bassia!" "The legionaries! Scatter!" The centurion at the head of a column now appeared, with his brasses dripping with dirty water, threw up his sword and shouted. The column flung itself out of line and went into the mob with pilum butt or point as the spirit urged. Pell-mell, tumbling, screaming, scrambling, the wharf-litter fled, parting in two bodies as it passed Agrippa's demoralized group, one half plunging off the masonry on the sands or into the water, the other scattering out over the great expanse of dock. The soldiers pressed after, and, following in the space they had cleared, came a chariot, a legate in full armor driving, his charioteer crouching on his haunches in the rear of the car. His apparitors brought up against Agrippa's party. They did not hesitate at the rank of the strangers; it was part of the blockade. Eutychus took to his heels and Silas went down under a blow from a reversed javelin. Agrippa, besmirched with the missiles of his late assailants and blazing with fury, breasted the soldiers and cursed them fervently. Two of them sprang upon him, and Cypros, screaming wildly, threw off her veil and seized the foremost legionary. The legate pulled up his horses and looked at the struggle. Cypros' bared face was presented to him. With a cry of astonishment, he threw down the lines and leaped from the chariot. "Back, comrades!" he shouted, running toward them. "Touch her not! Unhand the man! Ho! Domitius, call off your tigers!" "How now, Flaccus!" Agrippa raged. "Is this how you receive Roman citizens in Alexandria?" The legate stopped short and his face blackened. "Agrippa, by the furies! I knew the lady, but--" with a motion of his hand he seemed to put off his temper and to recover himself. "Tut, tut! Herod, you will not waste good serviceable wrath on an Alexandrian uproar when you have lived among them a space. They are no more to be curbed than the Nile overflow, and are as natural to the place. But curse them, they shall answer for this! Welcome to Alexandria! Beshrew me, but the sight of your lady's face makes me young again! Come, come; bear me no ill will. Be our guest, Herod, and we shall make back to you for all this mob's inhospitality. Ah, my lady, what say you? Urge my pardon for old time's sake!" He turned his face, which filled with more sincerity toward Cypros than was visible in his voluble cordiality to Agrippa. Cypros, supported by the trembling Drumah, put her hand to her forehead and tried to smile bravely. "But thou hast saved us, noble Flaccus; why should we bear thee ill will? Blessed be thou for thy timely coming, else we had been killed!" Agrippa, still smoldering, with Silas at his feet, alternately brushing the prince's dress and rubbing his bruises, took the word from Cypros. "What do Roman citizens, arriving in Alexandria, and no proconsul to meet them? Perchance Rome's sundry long missing citizens have been lost here!" intimated Agrippa. "Ho, no! They never kill except under provocation. Yet I shall have a word with the wharf-master and the prætor. But come, have my chariot, lady. Apparitor," addressing one of his guards, "send hither conveyance for my guests!" "Thy pardon and thanks, Flaccus," Agrippa objected shortly, "we are expected by the alabarch." "Then, by the Horæ, he should have been here to meet you. Forget him for his discourtesy and come with me. Beseech your husband, sweet lady; you were my confederate in the old days." She smiled, in a pleased way. "But we did not inform the alabarch when we expected to arrive," she answered. "He hath not failed us." "And perchance," Agrippa broke in, "it might disturb Alexandria again to know that the proconsul had entertained Jews!" "Still furious!" Flaccus cried jocosely. "Oh, where is that elastic temper which made thee famous in youth, Herod? But here are our curricles; at least thou wilt permit me to conduct thy party to the alabarch's." It was the bluff courtesy of a man who assumes polish for necessity's sake, and suddenly envelopes himself with it, momentarily for a purpose. Agrippa, looking up from under his brows, glanced critically at the proconsul's face for some light on his unwonted amiability, but, failing to discover it, submitted with better grace to the Roman's offers. The proconsul was near Agrippa's age, and on his face and figure was the stamp of unalloyed Roman blood. He was of average height, but so solidly built as to appear short. His head was round and covered with close, black curls; his brows were straight thick lines which met over his nose, and his beardless face was molded with strong muscles on the purple cheek and chin. He was powerful in neck and arm and leg, and prominent in chest and under-jaw. Yet the brute force that published itself in all his atmosphere was dominated by intellect and giant capabilities. He was Flaccus Avillus, Proconsul of Egypt, finishing now his fourth year as viceroy over the Nile valley. One of the few who stood in the wintry favor of Tiberius, the imperial misanthrope of Capri, his was the weightiest portfolio in all colonial affairs; his state little less than Cæsar's. Wherever he walked, industry, pleasure and humankind, low or lofty, stood still to do him honor. So, when he headed a procession of curricles and chariots up from the wharves of Alexandria, he did not go unseen. Many of the late disturbers watched with strained eyes and gaping mouths and saw him turn his horses into the street which was the first in the Regio Judæorum, and not a few stared at one another and babbled, or pointed taut or shaking fingers at the prodigy. Flaccus, the most notorious persecutor of the Jews among the long list of Egyptian governors, was visiting the Regio Judæorum escorting Jews! The sight created no less wonder and astonishment under the eaves of the Jewish houses, and throughout their narrow passages, but there was no demonstration. Each retired quietly to his family, or to his neighbor, and gravely asked what new trickery was this. But Agrippa's party, following their conductor, proceeded through the less densely settled portion of the quarter into a district where the streets opened up into a stately avenue, lined by the palaces of the aristocratic Jews of Alexandria. Before one, not in the least different from half a dozen surrounding it, their guide halted. The residence was square, with an unbroken front, except for a porch, the single attribute characteristic of Egypt, and the window arches and parapet relieved the somber masonry with checkered stone. The flight of steps leading up to the porch was of white marble. One of the proconsul's apparitors knocked and stiffly announced his mission to the Jewish porter that answered. Immediately the master of the house came forth, followed by a number of servants to take charge of the prince's effects. The master of the house, Alexander Lysimachus, alabarch of Alexandria, was a Jew by feature and by dress, but sufficiently Romanized in disposition to propitiate Rome. He wore a cloak, richly embroidered, over a long white under-robe; and the magisterial tarboosh, with a bandeau of gold braid, was set down over his fine white hair. His figure was lean and aged, a little bent, but every motion was as steady as that of a young man, and his air had that certain ease and grace which mark the courtier. His first quick glance sought Flaccus, for the visit was without precedent and highly significant. But there was neither hauteur nor suspicion in his manner. The bluff countenance of the proconsul showed a little expectancy, but there was even less to be seen on the Jew's face that should betray his interpretation of the visit. The magistrates bowed, each after his own manner of salutation--the Jew with oriental grace, the Roman with an offhand upward jerk of his head and a gesture of his mailed hand. "Behold your guests, Lysimachus," Flaccus said, "or what is left of them after an encounter with the rabble at the wharf. You should have been there to meet them." "So I should, had I been forewarned," the alabarch explained, the peculiar music of the Jewish intonation showing in mellow contrast to the Roman's blunt voice. "What! Is this how the accursed vermin have used you!" He put out his old waxen hands to the prince and searched his face. "O thou son of Berenice!" he said softly. "Welcome to the worshiping hearts of Jews, once more." "Thanks," replied Agrippa, embracing the old man. "My latest adventure with Gentiles has well-nigh persuaded me to remain there!" "God grant it; God grant it! And thy princess?" Cypros had uncovered her face and was reaching him her hands. "Mariamne!" he exclaimed in a startled way. "Mariamne, as I live!" Flaccus, who had fixed his eyes on Cypros the instant her veil was lifted, started. "Mariamne! The murdered Mariamne!" he repeated. "Ah, sir!" the alabarch protested, smiling. "Thou wast not born then. But I knew her: as a young man I knew her! But enter, enter! Pray favor us with thy presence at supper, noble Flaccus. It shall be an evening of festivity." He led them through a hall so dimly lighted as to appear dark after the daylight without, and into one of the noble chambers characteristic of the opulent Orient. The whole interior was lined with yellow marble, and the polish of the pavement was mirror-like. The lattice of the windows, the lamps, the coffers of the alabarch's records, the layers for the palms and plantain, the clawed feet of the great divan were all of hammered brass. The drapery at arch and casement, the cushions and covering of the divan were white and yellow silk, and, besides a sprawling tiger skin on the floor, the alabarch's chair of authority, and a table of white wood, there was no other furniture. The alabarch gave Flaccus his magistrate's chair, and, seating his two noble guests and their children, clapped his hands in summons. A brown woman, with eyes like chrysolite and the lithe movements of a panther, was instantly at his elbow. The alabarch spoke to her in a strange tongue, and the servant disappeared. "I send for my daughter," he explained to his guests. "The waiting-woman does not understand our tongue. My daughter--the only one I have, and unmarried!" "I remember her," Agrippa said with a smile. At that moment in the archway leading into the interior of the house a girl appeared. She lifted her eyes to her father's face, and between them passed the mute evidence of dependence and vital attachment. She wore the classic Greek chiton of white wool without relief of color or ornament, a garb which, by its simplicity, intensified the first impression that it was a child that stood in the archway. She was a little below average height, with almost infantile shortening of curves in her pretty, stanch outlines. But the suppleness of waist and the exquisite modeling of throat and wrist were signs that proved her to be of mature years. Her hair was of that intermediate tint of yellow-brown which in adult years would be dark. It fell in girlish freedom, rough with curls, a little below her shoulders. There was a boyishness in the noble breadth of her forehead, full of front, serene almost to seriousness, and marked by delicate black brows too level to be ideally feminine. Her eyes were not prominent but finely set under the shading brow, large of iris, like a child's, and fair brown in color. In their scrutiny was not only the wisdom of years but the penetration of a sage. Though her tips were not full they were perfectly cut, and redder than the heart of any pomegranate that grew in the alabarch's garden. But it was not these certain signs of strength which engaged Agrippa. Beyond the single glance to note how much the girl had developed in four years he gave his attention to certain physical characteristics which called upon his long experience with women to catalogue. As she stood in the archway, the prince had let his glance slip down to her feet, shod in white sandals, and her ankles laced about with white ribbon. One small foot upbore her weight, the other unconsciously, but most daintily, poised on a toe. She swayed once with indescribable lightness, but afterward stood balanced with such preparedness of young sinew that at a motion she could have moved in any direction. Foremost in summing these things, Agrippa observed that she was wholly unconscious of how she stood. "Terpsichore!" he said to himself, "or else the goddess hath withdrawn the gift of dancing from the earth!" "Enter, Lydia, and know the proconsul, the noble Flaccus," the alabarch said. The girl raised her eyes to the proconsul's face and salaamed with enchanting grace. Flaccus checked a fatherly smile. He would wait before he patronized a girl-child of uncertain age. "And this," the alabarch went on, "thou wilt remember as our prince, Herod Agrippa." "Alas! sweet Lydia," Agrippa said, fixing soft eyes upon her. "Must I be introduced? Am I in four years forgotten?" "No, good my lord," she answered in a voice that was mellow with the music of womanhood--a voice that almost startled with its abated strength and richness, since the illusion of her youth was hard to shake off, "thou art identified by thy sweet lady!" Agrippa stroked his smooth chin and Flaccus shot an amused glance at him. Meanwhile the girl had opened her arms to Cypros. The children, one by one, greeted her. The alabarch went on. "My sons are no longer with us," he said. "They are abroad in the world, preparing themselves to be greater men than their father. But go, be refreshed; it shall be an evening of rejoicing. Lydia, be my right hand and give my guests comfort." He bowed the Herod and his family out of the chamber and they followed the girl to various apartments for rest and change of raiment. The alabarch turned to the proconsul. "If thou wilt follow me, sir--" "No; I thank thee; I shall return to my house and prepare for thy hospitality. But tell me this: what does Agrippa here?" "He comes to borrow money, I believe." "Of you?" "Doubtless." "Put him off until you have consulted me. He is not a safe borrower." CHAPTER IX "--AS AN ARMY WITH BANNERS!" Agrippa emerged at sunset from his apartment and descended to the first floor of the alabarch's mansion. The hall was vacant and each of the chambers opening off it was silent, so he wandered through the whole length of the corridor, composedly as a master in his own house. No one did he see until he reached the end of the hall, when there appeared suddenly, as if materialized out of the gloom, the brown serving-woman. The olive-green of her immense eyes glittered in the light of a reed taper she bore. She stepped aside to let him pass and proceeded to light the lamps. Agrippa stopped to look at her, simply because she was lithe and unusual, but she continued without heeding him. On one of the lamp-bowls the palm-oil had run over and the reed ignited it; but with her bare hand the woman damped it and went her way with a running flame flickering out on the back of her hand. "Perpol!" the prince exclaimed to himself as he rambled on. "No wonder the phenix comes to Egypt to be born." At the end of a corridor he passed through an open door into a colonnade fronting a court-garden of extraordinary beauty. It was carpeted with sod, interlined with walks of white stone which led at every divergence to a classic Roman exedra. The awning which usually sheltered the inclosure from the sun had been rolled up and the cooling sky bent loftily over it. The inert summer airs were heavy with the scent of lotus, red lilies and spice roses which were massed in an oval bed in the center. At that moment he caught sight of an indolent figure, half sitting, half lying in one of the sections of the exedra. He knew at first glance that it was not the alabarch's daughter, and, remembering that his last glance in the mirror after his servant had done with him had shown him at his best, he moved without hesitation toward the unknown. As he approached she raised her eyes and coolly scrutinized him. Her face, thus lifted for inspection, showed him a woman in the later twenties, and of that type which since the beginning could look men between the eyes. She was a Roman, but never in all the Empire were other eyes so black and luminous, or hair so glossy, or cheek so radiant. Her face was an elongated oval, topping a long round neck, which broadened at the base into a sudden and exaggerated slope of marble-white shoulders. The low sweep of the bosom, the girdle just beneath it, shortening the lithe waist, the slender hips, the long lazy limbs completed a perfect type, distinct and unlimited in its powers. For a fraction of a second the two contemplated each other; perhaps only long enough for each to confess to himself that he had met his like. Then Agrippa came and sat down beside her, and she did not stir from her careless posture. So many, many of the kind had each met and known that they could not be strangers. "The alabarch should turn his prospective son-in-law into his garden if he would speed the marrying of his daughter," the prince observed. "He hath the daughter, the garden, and the notion to dispose of her," she answered, "but it is the son-in-law that is wanting." "But in my long experience with womankind," he replied, "it would not seem improbable to believe that it is the lady and not the lover that makes the witchery of the garden a wasted thing. I have heard of unwilling maids." "Unwilling in directions," she replied with a smile, "and under certain influences. For if there were any to withstand my conviction, I am ready to wager that there never lived a woman before whom all the world of men could pass without making her choice." "And perchance," he said promptly, "if there were any to withstand my conviction, I would wager that there never lived a man before whom the world of women could pass without making his choice,--again and again!" "Which declaration," she responded evenly, "publishes thee a married man; the single gallant declares only for one." "O deft reasoning! it establishes thee a Roman. What dost thou here, in Alexandria where there is no court, no games, no senators, no Cæsar--naught but riots and Jews?" "Jews," she said, scanning a rounded arm to see if its rest on the back of the exedra had left a mark on it, "Jews are red-lipped, and eyed like heifers. Sometimes brawn and force weary us in Rome; wherefore we go into Egypt or the East to seek silky and subtle devilishness." Agrippa moved along the exedra and looked into her eyes. He saw there that peculiar expression which he had expected to find. It was a set questioning, one that runs the scale from appeal to demand--the asking eye, the sign of continual consciousness of the woman-self and her charms. "Why make the effort? Only tell us of the East that you want us and the East will come to you." "What? Oriental love-philters, simitars, poisoning, silks and mysticism in the shadow of the Fora and within sound of the Senate-chamber? No, my friend; we must hear the lapping of the Nile or the flow of the Abana, behold camels and priests, and the far level line of the desert, while we languish on bronze bosoms and breathe musks from oriental lips." "It is not then the Jews," he objected. "They are a temperate, a passionless lot, that carry the Torah like hair-balances in their hearts to discover if any deed they do weighs according to the Law. No, Jews are a straight people. Thou speakest of the--Arab!" She turned her eyes toward him and measured his length, surveyed his slender hands, and glanced at the warm brown of his complexion. "So?" she asked with meaning. "An Arab?" He continued to smile at her. "And every Jew is thus minded?" she asked, observing later the unmistakable signs of Jewish blood in his profile. "Unless he is tinctured with the lawlessness of Arabia." "Ah!" She moved her fan idly and looked up at the sky. "It is then, of a truth, the Arab, we seek," she added presently. "The Arab that knows no manners but his fathers' manners; who eats, drinks, loves, hates and conquers after his own fashion." "Without having seen Jerusalem, or Rome?" he asked. "Rome!" she repeated, looking at him again. "Yes, without having seen Rome or Jerusalem or Alexandria." Agrippa tilted his head thoughtfully. "Then, it is good only for a time--for as long as the surfeit of civilization lasts--which lasts no longer the moment one realizes the Arab is not devoted to the bath and that he counts his women among his cattle!" She laughed outright. "I remember thou didst indorse him not a moment since! Wherefore the change?" "Refinement in all things! To get it into an Arab, he has to be modified by alien blood." "A truce! I am in Alexandria; her poetic wickedness has not been entirely exhausted. I--meet new, desirable things--daily!" Her fan was between them as she spoke and he took the stick of it just above where she held it and was putting it aside when the proconsul, resplendent in a tunic of white and purple, appeared in the colonnade. Beside him was Cypros in her Jewish matron's dress. Agrippa put the fan out of the way and made his answer. "Forget not that the East, whether Arab or Alexandrian, is intense--once won. It might harass thee, if thou weariest of it, before it wearies of thee--even to the extreme of pursuing thee to Rome." The proconsul and the princess approached. The deep-set eyes of the Roman wore a peculiarly satisfied look. "Men seek for stray cattle in the fields of sweet grass, look for lost jewels in the wallets of thieves, and missing Herods in the company of beautiful women," he observed. "It is good to have an established reputation, whether we be cattle or jewels or Herods," Agrippa laughed; "for, thou seest, we are disjointed and unsettled, seeing Flaccus now enduring a Jew, again attending a lady. "Again," said the beauty, "we mark the work of circumstances, which led us into difference just now, O thou disputatious." "Well said, Junia," the proconsul declared; "some ladies would make gallants out of the fiends! Know ye all one another?" the proconsul continued. "Except my lovely neighbor," Agrippa replied. "The Lady Junia, daughter of Euodus, who with her father hath been transplanted here from Rome." In the colonnade Lydia, the daughter, appeared and beside her a man, by certain of the more obvious signs, of middle-age. But when he drew closer the more obvious gave way to the indisputable testimony of smooth elastic skin, long lashes and strong, white, unworn teeth that the man was not yet thirty. He was a little above medium height, spare, yet well-built except for a slight lift in the shoulders, beardless, colorless, with straight dark hair, bound with a classic fillet. His general lack of tone brought into noticeable prominence the amiability and luster of his fine brown eyes. That he was a Jew was apparent no less by dress than by feature. His Jewish garments differed only in color and texture from those worn by his fathers in Judea. The outer gown was of light green scantly shot with points of gold. The pair walked slowly as if unconscious of the presence of others, and the attitude of the man, bending to look into Lydia's face as she walked, was clearly more attentive than ordinary courtesy demanded. "Approacheth Justin Classicus," said Flaccus. "In that garment he looks much like a chameleon that has strayed across an Attic meadow in spring." "Behold, already the witchery of the garden!" Agrippa said softly to Junia. "This," added the proconsul, introducing the new-comer, "is Justin Classicus, the latest fashion in philosophers, the most popular Jew in Alexandria." Classicus bowed, glanced at Junia and again at Agrippa, and made a place for Lydia on the exedra, so that he might sit on a taboret at her feet. "What news, good sir," Agrippa asked, "among the schools over the world?" "News?" Classicus repeated. "Nothing. Philo is silent; Petronius is mersed in affairs in Bithynia; Rome's gone a-frolicking, scholars and all, to Capri." "Alas!" said Flaccus; "nothing happens now but scandal; even the ancient miracles of divine visitations, phenixes, comets and monsters have ceased." "But you say nothing of religion," said Classicus. "Yet possibly it follows, now, in order." "After monsters, phenixes and the rest," put in Agrippa. "What is it?" Flaccus asked. "Perchance thou hast heard," Classicus responded. "It issues out of Judea, which adds to its interest, since we are accustomed to nothing but sobriety from Palestine." "What is it?" Flaccus insisted. "A new Messiah!" "Oh," Agrippa cried wearily, "a new Messiah! How many in the past generation, Cypros? Ten, twenty, a hundred? Alas! Classicus, that thou shouldst serve up as new something which every Jew hath expected and discovered and rejected for the last three thousand years." "O happy race!" Junia exclaimed; "which hath something to which to look forward! But what is a Messiah?" "A god," said Agrippa. "The anointed king," Cypros corrected hastily, "of godly origin that shall restore the Jews to dominion over the world!" "_Mirabile dictu!_" Junia cried. "Olympian Jove!" Flaccus exclaimed, smiting his muscular leg. "What a task, what an ambition, what an achievement! I behold Cæsar's dudgeon. Go on, Classicus; though it be old to thy remarkable race, used to aspiring to the scope of Olympus, let us hear, who have never wished to be more than Cæsar!" "It is not so much of the Messiah," Classicus responded, smiling, "as his--school, if it may be so called. One of the followers appeared at the Library some time ago, perchance as long as three years ago--an Egyptian of the upper classes, much traveled, and told such a remarkable tale of the Messiah's birth and death that he instantly lost caste for truthfulness." "Alas!" Lydia exclaimed in a tone of disappointment. "Why will they insist that the Messiah must be a miraculous creature, demeanored like the pagan gods and proceeding through the uproar of tumbling satrapies to the high place of Supreme Necromancer of the Universe!" "Sweet Lydia!" Agrippa protested. "Roman hard-headedness hath turned thee against our traditions!" "But the Egyptian did not picture such a man," Classicus said very gently. "He went to the other extreme, so far that his hearers had to contemplate an image of a carpenter's son, elected to a leadership over a horde of slaves and outcasts and visionary aristocrats; who taught a doctrine of submission, poverty and love, and who finally was crucified for blasphemy during a popular uproar." "It hath the recommendation of being different!" Lydia declared frankly. "Tell me more." "There is no more." "What! Is it dead?" she insisted. "Dead as all the others? Then it is different only in its inception." "No," said Agrippa thoughtfully; "it is not dead, but dying hard. The Sanhedrim is punishing its followers in Jerusalem at present. Thou rememberest, Cypros; Marsyas was charged with the apostasy." "So material as to engage the Sanhedrim?" Lydia pursued. "We hear," responded Classicus, "that Jerusalem and even Judea are unsafe for them, and numbers have appeared in the city of late--" "Among us?" Lydia asked. "No; in Rhacotis," replied Classicus; whereupon Flaccus raised an inquiring eye. "Is that the sect that the prefect has been warned to observe?" he demanded. "Doubtless; it seems that their foremost fault is rebellion against authority," Classicus made answer. "So much for their doctrine of submission." "Tell us that," Lydia urged. "Apostasy," Agrippa answered for Classicus, "flagrant apostasy; for the Sanhedrim came out of the hall of judgment to stone an offender, for the first time in seven years. I saw the execution; in fact, in a way I was brought close to the circumstances by a friend of the apostate who was attached to my household." "Is he with thee?" Flaccus asked pointedly. "No, we left him in Ptolemais. But the note of their presence in Alexandria must have been sounded early, directly they arrived, for I departed from Jerusalem the day following the first movement against the sect, and thence to Ptolemais and Alexandria with ordinary despatch." "They did not announce themselves," Flaccus replied. "Vitellius announced them. He wants an Essene who is believed to be among them." Agrippa raised his head and looked straight at Flaccus. He remembered that he had betrayed Marsyas' refuge. Cypros drew in a breath of alarm. "That was simply done, Flaccus," Agrippa remarked coolly. The princess laid her hand on the ruddy flesh of the proconsul's arm. "We have been frank with thee, my lord," she said, "and thou art a noble Roman--therefore a safe guardian of our unguarded words." The others maintained a wondering silence. Flaccus smiled. "Vitellius hath bidden me to look for him, adding with certain fervid embellishments that he hath sought everywhere but in Egypt and Hades. Vitellius is no diplomat. Whistling finds the lost hound sooner than search." "But thou wilt not find him, noble Flaccus," Cypros besought in a lowered tone. "Yield us thy promise that thou wilt not betray him!" "My promise, lady! Indeed, I gave it in my heart a moment since. Hear it now. Alexandria is subject to thee. Let him come and be our ward." "I shall depend on that," Agrippa said decidedly. "For I shall despatch a servant for the man, the instant I can so do!" "And yet," Cypros insisted, still distressed, "if Vitellius requires him at thy hands, how shalt thou avoid giving him up?" Flaccus smiled at her with softened eyes. "O gentle lady, the day the young man should arrive, I shall set the prefect on the Nazarenes in Rhacotis. If he be not found, none without this trustworthy circle shall have cause to believe that I am not in all conscience striving to help a brother proconsul run down a fugitive." "A shrewd strategy," Lydia said dryly, "but one rather costly for the Nazarenes." "The Nazarenes! Who wastes tears over them? Thine own straight people condemn them, lady." "An exhilarating recreation, indeed," she repeated as if to herself, "for the prefect, the rabble Alexandrians and the Nazarenes! O seekers of esthetic sport, that will be a rare occasion! Yield me thy promise, my Lord Agrippa, that thou wilt tell us the day the young man arrives!" Flaccus' face darkened for a moment, but at that moment the alabarch appeared in the colonnade. "Here comes our host," said Agrippa. "Hast ordered the garlands, Lysimachus?" "The feast is prepared," Lysimachus replied, and, turning to Flaccus, continued: "Thou shalt see, now, good sir, how Jews feast. In all thine experiences, thou hast never broken bread with a Jew." "Not so!" Flaccus retorted, "for I was present at the Lady Cypros' wedding-feast!" "Ho! Flaccus remembering a wedding-feast!" Agrippa laughed, as he arose, taking Junia's hand. "Mars, cherishing a confection!" "Perchance," Cypros ventured, pleased and coloring, "if Mars' confections were more plentiful and the noble Flaccus' wedding-feasts less rare, they both might forget the one!" "Never!" Flaccus declared, "though I were Hymen himself!" As they proceeded toward the colonnade, Cypros drew closer to him. "Thou canst not know what service thou hast done us by that promise," she said. "It is more than the youth's security; it means my husband's success. For in this young man, we have found Fortune itself!" The proconsul made no answer, for his gray-brown eyes flickered suddenly as if a candle had been moved close by them. CHAPTER X FLACCUS WORKS A COMPLEXITY Near sunset the following day the alabarch appeared in the porch of the proconsul's mansion,--an incident which would speedily have spread wildly over the Brucheum had not the shrewd Lysimachus come in Roman dress, unostentatiously and hidden by the dusk. The slave who conducted the visitor to the master's presence was suspicious, but he did not lapse from courtesy. If he had prejudices they had to await a popular uproar for expression, and popular uproars at present against the Jews were manifestly in disfavor with the proconsul. Flaccus received the alabarch in the great gloom of his atrium. The torches had not been lighted, the cancelli admitted only dusk. The shadowy shape of the proconsul, relaxed in his curule, alone and immovable, thus surrounded by meditative atmosphere, suddenly appealed to the alabarch as out of harmony with the legate's blunt nature. As the Jew drew near, he saw rolls and parcels of linen and parchment, petitions and memorials, scattered about on the pavement, as if the Roman had let them roll off his table or drop from his hand unconsciously. His elbow rested on the ivory arm of his curule, his cheek on his clenched hand. The undimmed gaze of the Jewish magistrate detected lines in the hard face that he had never seen before. But Flaccus stirred and drew himself up to attention. "Come up, Lysimachus," he said. "There is a chair here, for thee." The alabarch advanced and dropped into the seat that Flaccus had indicated. "This," he observed, nodding toward the dark torch at the proconsul's side, "would lead me to believe thou art inventing rhymes." "Or conspiracies. Plots and poetry demand the same exciting dusk. Well, has the Herod sued?" "Not he, but his lady." "His lady! By Hecate, the mystery is solved. Thus it is that he hath been able to borrow every usurer poor from Rome to Damascus!" "He wins upon her virtue; but withhold thy interpretation of my words until I show thee what they mean. She is beautiful and virtuous; a Herod and married--a conjunction of circumstances in these days so rare as to be out of nature--therefore, phenomenal. So we toss our yellow gold into her lap in recognition of the entertainment she hath afforded--being unusual." "Virtuous; that means, faithful to the man she married. No woman is faithful except she loves her love. A just procession in the order of the Furies' reign. The warm of heart, unrewarded; the unworthy, anointed and worshiped." "This melancholy twilight hath made thee morbid, Avillus. You Romans take womankind too seriously." "When womankind or a kind of woman can drain the world's purse, methinks she is a serious matter. What sum does she want?" "Three hundred thousand drachmæ." "O Midas; give her the touch! Let all her possessions be gold! Didst advance it to her?" "If thou wilt remember, it was thy command that I consult thee, first." "Temperate Jew! To remember a consular suggestion, while a lovely woman, and a Herod at that, besought thee for the contents of thy purse. Oh, thou art an old, old man, Lysimachus!" The alabarch laughed and frowned the next moment. "Beshrew the jest! Men who make light of virtue deserve incontinent wives. And there is this one thing apparent, which should make me serious. The Herod is absolutely penniless, and I can not turn that tender woman and her babes out of doors to take the roads of Egypt." "Rest thee in that small matter. Thou and I can spare her sesterces enough to ship her back to Judea." Lysimachus was silent for a moment. "She would not be satisfied," he said at last. "She wants three talents, though she never had afterward a crust of bread. It seems that they permitted a free-born man to pawn himself for that sum in Ptolemais and accepted the money from him!" "Shade of Herod!" the proconsul exclaimed. "It seems also that the man is in peril of the authorities, having placed himself in jeopardy to save Agrippa from Herrenius Capito, who had run Agrippa to earth for a debt he owes to Cæsar--" "O, that is the way of it! I know of that man! Well, then, perchance it is not so much because she loves her husband as because the debt to the pawned one chafes. I hear that he is young and comely." "Forget the slanderous jest, Flaccus; I am ashamed of it. What shall I do in this matter?" "Lend her three talents." "She would buy the man's freedom, but what then? She would still be here in Alexandria as penniless as ever." "The consular suggestion, it seems, only held thee a moment in abeyance," the proconsul said slyly. "She will get the three hundred thousand drachmæ, yet!" "She will not," the alabarch declared, "First, because I have it not; next, because I am not eager to pay a Herod's debts." "Or, chiefly, because thou shouldst never see it again." The alabarch tapped the pavement with his foot and looked away. The attitude was confession to a belief in the proconsul's convictions. "What sum couldst thou lend by pinching thyself?" Flaccus asked presently. "Two hundred thousand drachmæ--but not to a Herod. I could lose five talents without ruin." "Give her five talents, then; give it--do not slander a gift by calling it a loan." "What! Toss an alms to a Herod? They would throw it in my face!" "Jupiter! but they are haughty!" The alabarch made no answer and Flaccus looked out at the night dropping over his garden. "Why not hold the lady in hostage, here, for five talents?" he asked after a while. The alabarch looked startled; it was Roman extremes, a trifle too brutal for him to dress in diplomacy. He demurred. "Not brutal, Lysimachus," Flaccus said earnestly. "Herod can not use her well; it will be a respite from her long wandering and poverty. Thou canst say to her that the five talents are all thou canst afford. Tell her that it will do no more than beach them penniless in Italy; that thou hast a crust for Agrippa--will she starve him by eating half of it, herself?" Flaccus laughed at his own words, but perplexity came into the alabarch's face. "But why?" he asked. "Why? Is it not plain to you? Keep her so that Agrippa will in honor have to redeem her if ever he become possessed of five talents!" Now the alabarch laughed. "I am not so sure. Is it native in a Herod to love his wife so well? It would be a bad mortgage for me to foreclose--one cast-off female whose chief uses are for tears!" "No, by Venus! She is too comely to play Dido. But try my plan, Alexander. It is well worth the experiment." The alabarch arose and stepped down from the rostrum. "It--it is--" he hesitated. "But then, I should have them on my hands, under any circumstances." He took a few more steps, and paused for thought. "Well enough," he said finally, "we shall see." With a motion of farewell to the proconsul, he passed out and disappeared. Flaccus dropped back into his curule, and lapsed again into gloomy meditation. The night fell and obscured him. He seemed to be waiting, but not with marked impatience. Again the atriensis bowed before him. "A lady who says she was summoned," he said. "Let her enter. And bid the lampadary light the torch, yonder, not here--and only one." The atriensis disappeared, and presently a slave with a burning reed set fire to the wick in one of the brass bowls by the arch into the vestibule, and Junia appeared. "Hither, and sit beside me, Junia," Flaccus called to her. He drew the chair closer, which the alabarch had occupied, and Junia, dropping off her mantle and vitta, sat down in it. "What a despot one's living is!" she exclaimed. "But for the fact I owe my meat and wine to thy favor, thou shouldst have come to me, to-night, not I to thee!" "I came often enough at thy beck, Junia! It were time I was visited!" "Thou ill-timed tyrant! I am expected at a feast to-night, and my young gallant doubtless waits and wonders, at my house." "Let him wait! I was his predecessor, and his better. Methinks thou hast reduced thy standard of lovers of late." "No longer the man but the substance," she answered. "In the old days it was muscle and front; now it is purse and position." "The first was love; the second calculation. Why wilt thou marry this obscure young Alexandrian--whoever he be?" "To be assured of a living--to cast off the hand thou hast had upon me, thus long." He leaned nearer that he might look into her face. "So!" he exclaimed. "Does it chafe, in truth?" She laughed. "No," she said. "Why should I prefer the provision of one man above another's? Young Obscurity's authority over me, his wife, would be no less tyrannical than Flaccus'--my one-time dear." Flaccus took her hand and run his palm over her small knuckles. "_Eheu!_" he said. "I shall not be happy to see thee wedded--" "Nor shall I; like the fabulous maiden who weeps on the eve of her marriage, I shall in good earnest heave a sigh over the days of my freedom. Alas! the mind grows old young, that learns the fullness of life early. There are as many ashes on my heart as there are in this bulging temple of thine, Avillus." "Dost thou love this--boy? Beshrew him, let him have no name!" "How? Dost thou love the usurer that lends thee money, Flaccus?" "What dost thou love, at all?" he asked. "Sundry old memories; perchance the image of a consul, less portly, less purple, less stiff--and less imposing!" "Pluto! am I like that?" he demanded. "To one that was thy dear in younger days. To one who does not remember the sprightlier man, thou couldst be less charming." "Younger? Now, how much younger? Six years at most! Thou hast not changed in that time; why should I?" "O Avillus; between the stage of the sun at noon and the previous hour, there is no appreciable change. But mark the difference an hour makes at sunset. But why this inquisition? Has Eros pierced thee in a new spot?" "Pierced me twenty years ago and his arrow sticketh yet in the wound it made!" "What! Spitted on an arrow during all those days thou didst love me?" "But Eros has arrows and arrows, of many kinds, and two diverse barbs may with all consistency find lodgment at once in a heart. But of myself we may speak later; at present, I am moved to labor with thee for thine own welfare. Why wilt thou marry this boy, for his purse, when there are men in pain for thy favor?" She studied him a moment. "I can not take thee back, Flaccus; love's ashes can not be refired though the breath of Eros himself blew upon them." "Impetuous conclusion; hast thou forgotten the twenty-year-old wound which I confessed just now? I am this moment only an arbiter for my better--my betters--" "I shall keep the twenty-year-old barb in mind," she said. "Methinks it is that which pricks thee into activity for me." "A wiser surmise than the first. But curb thy frivolous spirit; I am weighted with the business of the great. What dost thou here, O divinity, away from Rome and the arms of Cæsar?" "Dost thou forget that we were invited away, because of my father's unfortunate preference of Sejanus, during the days of Sejanus' greatness?" "O Venus, can not the ban be lifted? Behold,"--stretching out his muscular arm, "Flaccus is a strong man." "Even then, is Tiberius thy better in comeliness? Perchance he would not please me." "I speak, now, to thy sordid self; but if thy maiden love of grace still lives in thee, there shall another serve thee. Have I not said I indorse two?" "Two!" "Two. Of Cæsar first. His part in the bargain is really the smaller thing. Thou, who couldst dint Flaccus' heart in Flaccus' stonier days, who upset Caligula's domestic peace, put gray hairs in Macro's forelock--all these in their doughty prime, methinks my poor doting ancient in Capri will fall like a city with a thousand breaches in its wall." "Oh, doubtless," she admitted; "but what of myself? If thine impurpled countenance--for all it is as firm as cocoanut flesh--if thine impurpled countenance does not suit my Epicurean tastes, how shall I content myself with the toothless love-making of a mumbling Boeotian?" "Thou canst comfort thyself with a comely bankrupt on the gold of the toothless one." "It is complicated; too much duplication and detail," she objected. "Thou hast done it before," he declared. "Thou art right expert." She laughed and leaned back in her chair. "Name me the comely one," she commanded. "Agrippa." There was silence, in which she lifted her lowered eyes very slowly and faced him. Amusement made small lines about her eyes, and in her face was worldly wisdom mingled with a sort of friendliness. "And now," she said in a quiet tone, "for the twenty-year-old wound. Is it the Lady Herod?" His gaze dropped; emotion put out the half-humor which had enlivened his face. Presently he scowled. "I have twitched the barb," she opined; "the wound is sore." "Sore!" he brought out between clenched teeth. "Sore! I tell thee, that though it is twenty years since I stood and saw her bound to him by the flamens, I have not ceased day or night to suffer!" Junia looked at him with frank amazement on her face; the proconsul was declaring, with passion, a thing which she could not believe possible. Such love as she knew, by the carefulest tendance, would have burnt out and resolved into cold ashes in half that time. That it should endure years, suffer discouragement, bridge distances and surmount obstacles, all uncherished and unrequited, was fiction, pure and simple. Yet to reconcile this conviction with the honest suffering of the bluff man at her side was a task she could not attempt. "Flaccus, I never pained thee so," she murmured. "Perchance the Jewess dropped madness from a philter in thy wine. And for simple cruelty, too, for she is fond of her graceful Arab." The proconsul raised his head and looked at her with such speechless ferocity, that she shrank away from him, remembering former experiences. But he dropped his head into his hands and did nothing. She watched him for a moment then ventured discreetly: "Is it thy wish to win him from her, or her from him?" "Both!" he answered. "The one accomplished, the other follows!" With a sudden accession of emotion, he laid his short, powerful fingers about her smooth wrist and bent over her. "Help me, Junia!" he besought. "Weigh what I offer against the portion of any Alexandrian. By the lips of Lysimachus, the richest man in the city, I know how little even he may waste--two hundred thousand drachmæ--the cost of a single necklace Cæsar might put about thy throat. I never failed Tiberius; his esteem of me is great. I have only to ask and the decree of banishment, or the sentence against thy father, shall be lifted. Thou shalt return in honor to Rome; thy father shall be one of Cæsar's ministers, and thou shalt take thy place among the first of the patricians. And Tiberius lays no bond of fidelity upon his ladies. I saw thee, last night! I saw thee run thine eyes along the Herod's sleek length--curse him, it was that which undid me! I saw thy fancy incline toward him. It will be a new and pleasant game for thee, Junia--a game in which thou art skilled--but it is my life--my very life to me!" She frowned at the jewels on her fingers. There was no reason why she should not lend herself to Flaccus' schemes when her enlistment in his cause assured to her the realization of the highest ambitions of her kind. But enough of the creature impulse toward perversity, admitting that his gain would be as great as hers, restrained her. She was uncomfortable, uncertain, peevish. Meanwhile, the proconsul's gray-brown eyes, large, intense, demanded of her. "Wait!" she fretted at last. "Thou art hasty! And perchance thou dost only make place for this mysterious fugitive for whom she was so solicitous last night!" He remembered his own jest with the alabarch, and added thereto the impatient surmise of this penetrative woman. Could such a thing be possible? He sprang to his feet, all the intensity of his emotion concentrated in a spasm of fury and menace. "Let him come!" he said between his teeth. "Let him come!" She worked her hand loose from him. "Wait," she repeated. "Thou hast built gigantically on no foundation. Let something happen. And if I am pleased to follow thy plans, I may; but be assured if I am not, I will not. My debt to thee is less than thy demands, Avillus." She arose and put on her mantle, while he stood watching her every movement. "I shall wait," he said presently, "only a little time." She made a motion of impatience and withdrew from the atrium. He stood motionless for a long time; then he called his atriensis. "Send hither the chief apparitor," he said. The captain of the proconsul's personal guard appeared and saluted. Flaccus, in the meantime, had searched through the documents on the floor and by the dim light identified one. "Take this," he said, handing the apparitor the parchment, "and make search for the man herein described. Seek him in Ptolemais, wherever a Nazarene warren hides, in Jerusalem, in Alexandria--meet every incoming ship, spend the half of my fortune, wear out my army--but find him, or lose thy life!" The chief apparitor looked unflinching into the proconsul's gray-brown eyes. "I hear," he said. The proconsul waved his hand and the soldier withdrew. CHAPTER XI THE HOUSE OF DEFENSE Meanwhile Marsyas lay on his straw pallet at the house of Peter, the usurer, in Ptolemais, night after night and made calculation. By fair winds, Agrippa should reach Alexandria in so many days. Allowing time to begin and complete the negotiations for a loan, so many more days should elapse. Then the same number with a few allowed for foul weather would be required to return to Ptolemais. About such a day, so many weeks hence, he told himself he should be ransomed. Six weeks is a long time for a free man to be enslaved. He sighed and turned again on his pallet and trusted in the God who does not forget prayers. It was a strange, sordid biding of time for Marsyas. The man he served was the first of the kind he had ever known. The ascetic refinement of the white old Essene, the simple purity of Stephen, the polished rigor of the Pharisee Saul, the naïve sophistication of the Romanized Herod had constituted his social horizon, and he had come to believe that the world's manner was either cultured or simple. But he went into the usurer's counting-room to meet the borrowing world, to be amazed and shocked and finally to fortify himself to control it. It was not to change his nature; it was to develop latent powers in him that were the fruit of long generations of Judaism. At night his fingers were soiled by contact with the coins, the counting-room had become noisome with the day's heat and the unhappy humanity that had come and gone through the busy hours. But he summed up, not what he had sacrificed in soul-sweetness and optimism, for that was a loss he did not realize, but his triumphs in achieving whatever he had been bidden to do, in his mastery of men and things and in the thoroughness of his workmanship. However loudly his mind declared that he was out of place, he felt no great repugnance to his duty. After the newness of his experience wore off, as it did in a very short time, the days began to go with wearing deliberation, as all days go that are counted impatiently. His sorrow and his wrongs were his only companions; as his anxiety for his liberty and Agrippa's success increased, his healthy indifference to his unwholesome atmosphere began to decline rapidly, his resentment against his oppression to grow. The six weeks ebbed out and passed. His anxiety flowed into his bitterness and his bitterness into his anxiety until they were one. Troubled about his liberty, he clenched his teeth and thought on Saul; thinking of his impotent position against the powerful Pharisee, he watched the harbor from the counting-room and trembled whenever a sail crossed it. Inactivity became eventually unbearable, for an unemployed moment was a miserable moment. He could not devise a way to liberty, nor further aid his one ally into power, so he turned to his own resources against Saul. Continuing cautiously to visit the proseuchæ by night, he learned something, which he heard casually at the time, but which eventually developed into a matter of importance. He heard that the Nazarenes were flying from Jerusalem in great numbers, scattering in bodies from Damascus to Alexandria, and from Jerusalem to Rome. The rabbis of Ptolemais were concerned to discover that there was a community hiding in the city, because they feared the evils of a persecution, established in Ptolemais, as much as the influence of the apostasy upon the faithful. When Marsyas admitted casually to himself, after he had heard the tidings, that the apostasy must have numbers of followers, he was carried in his thinking to the realization that numbers meant strength and strength meant resistance. Why, then, should not these people turn on the Pharisee? Here, in a twinkling, he believed that he had discovered abettors, allies whom he could instantly enlist in his own cause. But before he could deduce resolution from this electrifying admission, events began to mark his days. Late one afternoon, after the time for his ransoming was out, a man approached the opening in the grating. The shadows in the badly-lighted chamber made client and steward and all the appointments in the dingy counting-room imperfect shapes to the eye. The new-comer leaned down to the opening and peered at Marsyas as he pushed a fibula of gold through the opening. "I am in need," the man said. "Canst thou not give me the value of this in money?" The voice was resonant and strangely familiar to Marsyas. In the gloom the great lifted shoulders of the man, bending from his height, brought back on a sudden the chamber in the college at Jerusalem. The young Essene came closer to the grating and looked at the applicant. There was a mutual start of recognition; in Marsyas perhaps the chill that a fugitive feels who finds himself detected. The man was the Rabbi Eleazar. "Thou! Here, with them?" the rabbi exclaimed in a suppressed whisper. "I am here, Rabbi," Marsyas replied, "but alone." Eleazar looked at him, but the examination under the difficulty of the gloom was not satisfactory; besides, there was the stir of others who had come in behind him and were able to listen. Marsyas swept the fibula into one of the coin-baskets and passed a handful of silver to the rabbi. "Meet me without at the end of the first watch to-night," the rabbi added, as he thanked Marsyas. "Do not fear me, for I am also a victim of thine enemy." Marsyas saluted him, and the rabbi disappeared. A figure in armor stepped up to the place where Eleazar had stood. He was helmeted and greaved and had a line of purple about the hem of his short tunic. He applied for a loan and yielded as indorsement the favor of Cæsar and the family name of Aulus. Marsyas withdrew hastily into the overhanging shadow of the grating, received the officer's note, counted out the gold and drew in a free breath when another stepped into his place. It was Vitellius' legionary. "Am I run to earth?" Marsyas asked himself. At the end of the first watch that night he prepared to follow Eleazar's suggestion, if only to discover what to expect. That he was not filled with confidence nor resigned to suffer what might befall him was evident by his slipping a knife into his belt when he made himself ready. He went out into the unlighted street and looked about him for Eleazar. The tall figure of the rabbi emerged from the darkness a moment after Marsyas appeared and approached the young man. "Have no fear," the rabbi said. "We are common victims of the same unjust suspicion; let us not be suspicious of each other." "Thy words are fair, Rabbi, but I do not know thee. Whom I most trusted hath failed me of late; it must follow then that I am not sure of strangers. Tell me first thy business with me." "I am Eleazar, the rabbi, who sat with Saul in the college that day when Joel, the Levite, came with news of Stephen of Galilee." "I know that; also that thou knowest that Saul oppresses me. Thou art a rabbi and zealous for the Law. Art thou sent for me on Saul's mission?" "No, brother." "Or the proconsul's?" "I know nothing of the proconsul; I am here, driven from Jerusalem by Saul who charged me with apostasy because I would not aid him in his oppression." For a moment Marsyas was dumb with amazement. "He is mad!" he cried when speech came to him. "Is it madness when he persecutes others, but villainy when he oppresses thee?" Eleazar demanded. "I pray thy pardon," Marsyas said quickly, "if I seem to miscall his work. It might follow in reason that he should accuse me, but thou--thou a rabbi, accepted before the Law and clean-skirted before all Judea--that he should accuse thee of apostasy seems to be the work of no sane man." "But it is! He layeth plans keen as Joshua's who warred under God's banner, and he striketh with the strength of an army. Unless he is stayed he will devastate to the end!" Marsyas came close and laid a hand on the rabbi's shoulder. "What of Stephen?" he asked with stiffened lips. "How did it come to pass?" For a moment there was silence, and then the rabbi drew up and shook himself. "It will not help thee, young brother," he said, with an impatience which was only fortification against feeling. "It is ill enough to take a blasphemer and deliver him up to punishment; ask no more, for it wrenches me to think of it." Marsyas stood frozen; he did not want to hear more, after the rabbi had spoken, but when the reviving current of life stirred in his veins, it was turned to a fever for vengeance. Now! Not to wait for safety, or for circumstances or for men or things. It seemed that he should not eat or sleep till his work was done. Eleazar, seeking to turn the current of the young man's thoughts, which he believed, being unable to see his face, must be sorrowfully retrospective, asked presently: "Art thou here with--them?" "With whom?" "The Nazarenes." Marsyas seized the rabbi's shoulder with a fresh grasp. "Where are they?" he demanded. "Dost thou--in truth, dost thou not know?" he demanded. "Accused though I am, I am a good Jew, Rabbi. Never until now have I wished to know where they house themselves. But even were it the powers of darkness which alone could help me, now, I should not hesitate! Where are these apostates?" "Here, in Ptolemais. What wilt thou have of them, Marsyas?" "Were not heathen and idolaters instruments for the Lord's work? Have not even the beasts of the fields served His ends?" "What dost thou meditate?" "Saul's undoing!" Eleazar heard him thoughtfully and answered after a silence. "So be it, then; if thou choosest that spirit, it must serve. Thou hast a dead friend to avenge and I, the guiltless oppressed to justify. So the one end, the prevention of Saul's work, be attained, what matter if the spirit be mine or thine!" "Well enough; the means, then! Where are these Nazarenes?" "They--they meet on the water-front, nightly, since the oppression hath been instituted against them," Eleazar answered reluctantly, as if he doubted the propriety of betraying a knowledge of the apostates' habits. "Nightly!" Marsyas repeated. "So then to-night! Where is the place? We will go there!" Eleazar stood undecided and debated with himself. But the pressure of the young man's impelling firmness assumed material force against him and he yielded doubtfully. "Come, then," he said, and his hesitation melted in the face of the other's decision. Marsyas put himself at the rabbi's side and together they tramped through the dark streets toward the poorer districts of Ptolemais, along the harbor. It was poor indeed; the houses were the smallest in the city, low, square boxes of sun-dried earth little higher than a man's head and mere stalls for space and comfort. Each, however, had a numerous tenantry, and wherever doors were opened the two men saw within, now Jews, now Greeks or Romans. Although uproar and disorder common in the lower walks of the city went on in the environments, the particular passage Marsyas and the rabbi walked was quiet though not deserted. But it was a veritable black well, that maintained a swift slope for many rods and indicated the proximity to the water. "How found you them, in this hole?" Marsyas asked, astonished, in spite of his intent thoughts, at the black labyrinth. "I, too, was in hiding for my life's sake," Eleazar answered. The brooding cornices of the houses, visible against the strip of starry sky, rounded suddenly and closed in upon the passage. Marsyas saw that they were nearing a blind end, when a door opened in the cul-de-sac, disclosing several other men preceding Marsyas and the rabbi. "Haste!" Eleazar whispered, and, seizing Marsyas' hand, ran so that they reached the lighted doorway before it closed again. They entered with the others, and the bolts were shot behind them. CHAPTER XII SCATTERING THE FLOCK They were in a single large chamber, rough, barren and barn-like. The gray drapery of cob-webs was sown with chaff; there was the fresh smell of grain with the mustiness of dust contending for prominence; the floor was dry packed earth that had not tasted rain for a century. High above the few resin torches burning on the walls, huge cedar beams traversed the ceiling which was tight, that no moisture nor the consuming rays of the sun should enter. It was an abandoned grain house, builded just without the reach of the highest storm-wave on the water-front. There were two or three benches, but not seating capacity for the number gathered there. So the youths, women and children sat on the earth along the walls and left the benches to the older men of the assembly. Marsyas glanced at the gathering. He saw there not one, but many races, however Jewish in predominance. In most of the number he found a common expression, which made him think. It was a certain delineation of fortitude, a brave patience that does not forswear persistence, however seriously the heart fears. In others, there were curiosity and expectation; in still others, apprehension and suspicion. These, he noted, seemed not to wear that look of uplift; intuitively, he knew them to be investigators, more or less convinced, at the moment. Others, he saw, came with bundles of belongings as if prepared for a journey. Eleazar selected a place by the door and signing to Marsyas that he would sit and await the young Essene's will, dropped down on the packed earth, and, drawing up his powerful limbs, clasped his arms around them. The torch above his head threw the shadow of his projecting kerchief over his face and hid his features. There was space between him and the next sitter, a young woman wearing the dress of a Jewish matron. She glanced uneasily at the huge stranger and drew closer to a man of her own age, on the other side. Marsyas, seized with a new interest, sat down between the rabbi and the woman. At the farther end of the building a man arose. He had a pilgrim's scrip at his side; he put away a staff as he gained his feet, and the heightened color of the brown on his cheek-bones and his nose showed that he had but recently come from a long journey. He raised his arms over the assembly, and each of those gathered there bowed his head and clasped his hands. "O patient Bearer of the Cross," he prayed, "let us not faint thus soon--we who are driven on! Let Thy footsteps be illumined that we may go Thy way, even though they lead unto Calvary! Teach us Thy submission, quicken us with Thy love, clothe us with Thy charity, that they who oppress us may see that submission is stronger than rebellion, that love is more enduring than hate, that charity is broad enough for our enemies. And if it be Thy will that we should love the spoiler of Thy Church and the destroyer of Thy saints, teach us then to love that enemy!" This of a surety was not what Marsyas had expected to hear. Undoubtedly the praying man spoke of Saul. The prayer continued. "Lo, Thou hast tarried thus long away from us, and evil already gathereth thick about Thy people. In those days, when we asked and were answered, voice unto voice, we did not grope. Now, O Lord, we ask and there answers but the speech of faith left in us, and that in grievous hours--doth not bid the cup to pass from us!" Marsyas' chin sank on his breast; somehow the faltering sentences fell on some keenly sensitive spot in his soul, for in spirit he winced, and listened intently, in spite of himself. "Yet, judge us not as wavering, O Lord; we but miss Thee from our side, who loved Thee, O Christ!" The sentence ceased suddenly at the edge of a break in the voice. It seemed that human sorrow had broken in on an inspiration, and the sound of a sob arose here and there from the bowed circle of Nazarenes. Marsyas suddenly saw the dark trampled space without Hanaleel, the falling night, the still figure of Stephen stretched on the sand, the three humble mourners who of all Jerusalem were not afraid to sorrow for him, and the young Essene choked back a cry to the praying man, "I know thy pain, brother!" For that instant bond of sorrow it did not matter that, according to Marsyas' lights, the praying man blasphemed and besought another than the one Lord God as divinity. The Nazarene had loved a friend and lost him from his side; the voice had ceased and, in place of the warm content, only agony and emptiness abode in the heart. "Show us Thy will; let us see and we shall follow; above all things quicken our ears that Thy loved voice may still be sweet in them across the boundaries of Death and through the darkness which embraceth our heads. Lo, Thou art with us alway even unto the end, we believe, we believe!" There was too much human suffering, self-examination and beseeching in the prayer for it to help any who heard it. It was not like Stephen's prayers, which had seized upon Marsyas' spirit because of their unshaken confidence and beatification, and had terrified him, as assaults upon his steadfastness. In those moments, he had been afraid of the Nazarene heresy; now, he was stirred to pity for the heretics. The sensation added to his resolution against Saul. Another voice roused him, by reason of its difference from that of the first speaker. It was not loud, but it carried and penetrated every dusty corner of the great space, with the strength and evenness of a sounded horn. The temper as well as the quality was different; it was triumphant, eager, glad. "It is the hour of fulfilment, beloved; the accomplishment of the prophecy, for by persecution shall we who are witnesses to the truth be scattered into all the world that the gospel may come unto every creature. The flesh in us which crieth out and feareth death shall be the instrument whereby fleeing to save ourselves we shall go quickened into distant lands and testify. Wherefore let not any soul lament this day nor denounce the circumstance which sendeth him into strange places and unto the Gentile. Ye were not charged to save your flesh but to save your souls. And whosoever saveth his soul hath Christ in his bosom and Christ on his tongue; wherefore the Redeemer is not dead and buried, nor even passed from among you, but living and preaching numerously, by many tongues. Doubt not ye shall have your Gethsemane and your Calvary, yet likewise ye shall arise from the dead and enter into Paradise. The oppressor shall persecute, the rod hang over you, the Cross be set up, but though ye go forth unweaponed ye shall level walls and throw down tyrants by the power of love; ye shall conduct peace and mercy through the flights ye make from oppression, and Life everlasting shall begin where your hour is accomplished and ye die. "If there be any among you who are timid in flesh that say in their souls, 'Let us find a secure place and live secretly and in godliness away from the abominations of the wicked,' verily I say unto such, if the world were precious enough unto the Son of God that He suffered death to save it, it is not too evil for the habitation of them who were in sin and ransomed by His sacrifice. "If there be those among you given to wrath and vengeance who shall say, 'Let us fall upon the oppressor and put him to death,' verily I say unto such if the Son of God, who was despised and rejected of men, who raised the dead and cleansed lepers, directed not His powers to punishment and havoc, how shall ye, who are but lately lifted out of sin and damnation? "Ye are ministers of peace and love and humility. Go forth and testify to these things in His name, and I who stand before you, elected of Him whom ye follow to speak His word, I say unto you that if ye testify faithfully, no persecutor shall triumph over you, no power shall overthrow you, no evil shall prevail against your souls!" This was not the spirit Marsyas would select to aid him in his punishment of Saul; it was an alien doctrine opposed to nature; but he did not doubt the preacher's sincerity. His utterances were not strange to the ears that had listened with such fear to Stephen. But it seemed that one in the assembly was not satisfied. "Yet the saints perish by the persecutor," the man spoke. "Behold Stephen is martyred already in Jesus' name." Marsyas' eyes sought out the speaker; he was one of the unconvinced who sat apart and had become perplexed. "O my brother, when was it said unto thee by the teachers of Christ that death is the end? I saw Christ on the cross; on the third day I saw Him living in the council of the apostles. The powers of evil pursued Him only to the tomb; there began the dominion of God, and He ascended unto Heaven and to eternal life. Believest thou this? Thy face sayeth me 'yea'; is it not written that they who believe on Him shall share each and all of His blessings? Wherefore, though Stephen died, he liveth triumphant over his enemies; so shall ye, who are faithful unto the end." "But--but," the man objected, troubled, "is the Church to perish, thus, one by one? If we die in this generation, who shall gather the harvest of the Lord?" "'Whoso would save his life shall lose it,' said the Master. Is it part of faith to fear that evil will triumph? Wilt thou hold off Life eternal that thou mayest bide a little longer in such insecurity as this life? And I tell thee that the fear of the adversary is awakened, and the strength of his forces is aroused. We measure by his rage against the elect his fear of Christ prevailing. No man leadeth forth an army with banners against that which is weak and which he fears not. Jesus, on whom thou believest, said, 'I have overcome the world.' Know then that the Church can not perish; that the persecutor rageth futilely; that the oppressor fighteth against the Lord. Doubt no longer, lest thy doubt become a fear that an enemy shall overthrow God!" The young man who sat by the woman at Marsyas' side spoke next. "I am submissive, Rabbi; yet, how far shall we fly? I am the bridegroom of Cana at whose marriage the Lamb was. When He changed water into wine He turned my heart into wondering, and from wondering into belief. But the sentence of wandering hath driven me out of Cana, out of Galilee, out of Judea into Syria. How far shall we flee, Rabbi?" "We, too, are driven," many broke in at once. "Few here are citizens of Ptolemais; we have left our homes and have fled far. How long must we go on?" "As far as God's creatures fare; as far as the Word hath not penetrated," was the answer. The faces of many fell, tears stood in the eyes of others, and still others murmured wearily. The sun-browned pilgrim who had prayed and who had leaned with a shoulder and his head against the wall, while the teacher spoke, raised himself. "My heart goeth out in pity for you," he said sorrowfully. "Behind you the consuming fire, before you the overwhelming sea. I am newly come from Jerusalem; I know what awaits you if ye fly not. Even the Gentile can not be worse than he who breathes out threatenings and slaughter against you, in the name of the Law. Fare forth; the world can not be worse; it may be kindlier." Marsyas observed this man; in him was more promising material for his work than in the preacher. But the preacher looked over the congregation, by this time bowed and filled with distress. "It is your Gethsemane," he said, turning the pilgrim's declaration into comfort, "but He sleepeth not while ye pray." Marsyas looked over the congregation and saw here and there strong faces and bold, to whom the ordinance of submission must have been a bitter ordinance. He arose. "I behold that this is a council, in which men may speak," he said. "I take unto myself the privilege, as one akin to you in suffering if not in faith." His voice commanded by its Essenic calmness. Every eye turned toward him. They saw the habiliments of a slave covering the stature and dignity of a doctor of Laws. The preacher looked interested, and the congregation stirred toward the young man. "By the words of your teacher," he continued, "I see that ye are summoned here to be banished. I see your reluctance; I know your sorrow, for I, too, have been driven on, even by your enemy." "Who art thou, young friend?" the preacher asked. "I am an Essene." "An Essene!" many repeated, stirred into wonder at knowledge of the new apostleship. "As was John the Baptist!" one declared. "Nay, then;" a voice rose out of the comment, "thou shalt be kin to us in faith so thou acceptest Jesus of Nazareth." "Let us lay aside the discussion of doctrine, in which we can not agree," the young man went on, "and unite in our cause against Saul of Tarsus." The kindly eyes of the preacher became paternal as he gazed at the hardness growing in the young man's face. "Our cause," he said gently, "is not Saul of Tarsus, but Jesus Christ." "Are ye sincere in your boast that ye will not defend yourselves?" Marsyas demanded. "What need, young brother? God defends us." "Well enough; but what of the persecutor?" "God will overtake him." "When? When he hath desolated Israel, stained the holy judgment hall with tortured perjury, slandered the Jews before the world as slayers of the innocent? Your talk is all of the life hereafter; I, too, expect to live again; yet I am here to come and go at God's will, not Saul's! Even ye, in all your infatuation, will not call Saul's work God's work! I will not be driven and desolated by Abaddon!" He did not wait for the preacher, who seemed prepared to speak. "I was the friend of Stephen, of whom ye spoke with love to-night. Saul consented unto his death in spite of my prayers for him, and before I could save him. When I rebuked Saul for his bloody zeal he denounced me as an apostate and set the Shoterim upon me so that I am obliged to flee for my life. For mine own wrongs I do not care, but the blood of Stephen cries out to me, the spectacle of his death rises to me in my dreams, and the infamy of it fills my hours with anguish. Ye say he was one of your saints, a martyr in the name of your Prophet, a teacher and a power in your church. Ye claim that ye loved him. Yet ye make timid preparation to flee before the oppressor who brought him low, and lift no hand to avenge his death! Are ye men? Have ye loves and hearts? Do ye miss him--" The pilgrim pressed his palms together and looked at the young man with passionate grief in his eyes. Marsyas turned his words to him. "Was ever his touch laid upon you, warm with life and tender with good will? Did ever his eyes bless you with their light? Can ye take it idly that his hands grasp the dust and the tomb hath hidden his smile?" The pilgrim covered his face with his hands. "These be things that philosophy can not return to me!" Marsyas drove on. "I can not pray Stephen back to my side; I can not hope till his voice returns to my ear; I can not flee till I find him! And by the holy and the pure who have gone down into the grave before him, I know that ye can not! Is it no matter to you that his memory is held in scorn? Are ye not stabbed with doubts that he died in vain--even ye who believe thus firmly that he was right? And I, being a Jew and an upholder of the Law, can I be content, knowing he was cut off in heresy?" The congregation began to move as he went on; men rose from sitting to their knees, as if prepared to spring to their feet. The preacher circled the room with a glance, but the eyes of the people were upon the young man. "Your Prophet and my Stephen! And ye fly! There are certain of you that are strong men, and Stephen was as delicate as a child. There is blood and temper and strength and numbers of you, but Stephen went forth alone--and died! Where were ye? What of yourselves, now? Are ye afraid of the weakling Pharisee?" There was a low murmur and men sprang to their feet, with flashing eyes and clenched hands. The pilgrim flung up his head and drew in his breath till it hissed over his bared teeth. Eleazar stood up by the young Essene and gazed straight at the preacher, as if holding himself in check until the leader declared himself. But the preacher put up his hands and hurried into the center of the building. "Peace, children!" he said kindly but firmly. His hands lifted higher as the stature of his authority seemed to tower over the people. In the sudden silence those that had stood up sank down again, the pilgrim lowered his head and only Marsyas and the rabbi at his side seemed to resist the quieting influence of the pastor. The extended palms dropped and the Nazarene looked at the young Essene. "Vengeance is mine and I will repay, saith the Lord. Eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth is of the old Law and is passed away!" "There, O strange pastor of a human flock, our ways part. I am a Jew, thou a Nazarene--our laws differ. Yet if, as ye preach, the God of Moses is also the God of your Prophet, ye are delivered sentences and punishments for evil-doing. Wherefore, if ye evade them, ye evade a divine command!" "We do not punish; we correct. Punishment is God's portion." "Are ye not instruments?" the young man persisted. The preacher did not answer at once; his eyes searched Marsyas' face for some expression by which he might select his line of argument. "Bethink thee, young brother," he said finally. "How would Stephen answer thee in this?" Marsyas' demanding eyes wavered and fell; his lips parted and closed again; he frowned. "Whom then wouldst thou please in this vengeance? Not Stephen! Then wilt thou comfort thyself with bloody work, while the tomb stands between thee and Stephen's restraining hands?" Marsyas threw up his head defiantly, shaking off the influence of the argument. "Do ye in all truth follow the doctrine that bids you suffer without requital?" he demanded, even while feeling that his logic was impotent. "God directs all things; if it be His will that we shall suffer or escape, God's will be done!" "It is cowardly!" Marsyas declared with flashing eyes. The preacher came closer. "I believe that thou art determined and sincere. Suppose Saul fell into thy hands, as an evil-doer, and the Law was ready for his blood, and God bade thee withhold thy hand. Would it be easy?" "No, by my soul!" "Look then at me and answer. Is it easy for me, who hath suffered exactly thy sorrows, to stand still and wait on God?" Marsyas looked at the preacher. He was tall, spare and old, his hair and his beard were so white that they shone in the torch-light, and his face was so thin and colorless that he seemed already to have put off the flesh. But his eyes glowed with fire and youth. Here of a surety was no weakness to call into account. "No," he answered again. "Then, O my son, which of us is truly subject to the Lord?" "Ye crucify yourselves to an unnatural doctrine! It is not human to bow to it!" "When thou canst do as we strive to do, my son, thou shall know that it is divine." Marsyas looked at Eleazar, and the rabbi, who had his eyes fastened on the preacher, spoke for the first time. "That is sweet humility, while ye are oppressed," he said, in a voice almost prophetic. "But will ye remember it, when ye come into power?" Power! Had any of that congregation a hope for power? The word startled them. They looked at the rabbi's garments, clothing a huge frame, the strength of the Law typified, and wondered at his words. Even the preacher had no ready answer. The intimation of the Nazarenes in power on the lips of an expounder of the Law was not conducive to instant comment. "So ye were in the Jews' place, what would ye do?" he asked again. Marsyas looked at the rabbi in surprise, but meanwhile the preacher answered. "Christ's doctrine suffereth no change for rank or power." "Watch; forget it not!" Eleazar turned to Marsyas. "I have seen, my brother," he said. "This is not the method. Let us wait; our time will come." Contented to go, Marsyas turned with the rabbi and together they passed through the gathering to the door. But before they went out, Marsyas spoke again to the silent congregation. "Rest ye," he said, "we are not informers." They went forth. CHAPTER XIII A TRUST FULFILLED Marsyas came forth moodily convinced by Eleazar's words. No; it was not the method. Revenge would have to come through another medium than the Nazarenes. Stephen had told him before that the privilege of taking vengeance had been removed from the followers of Jesus of Nazareth. At that time Marsyas had not believed it of the whole sect; but now he was not too much irritated to be convinced. "Is there any doctrine too mad to get it followers?" he said. "O brother," Eleazar said, with his chin on his breast, "it is a period of change. The world wearies of its manner from time to time. Surfeit of good is not less common than surfeit of evil, but it is deadlier. Men tire of their gods as they do of their women, and thou, being an eremite and unfamiliar, may not know that death is much more desirable than enforced toleration of satiety." Marsyas heard; satiety was only a word to him and the rabbi's earnestness carried no conviction for him. "It is the time for change; rest under old usages is no longer possible. But Israel hath endured a long, long time in one habit." "Give me thy meaning, Rabbi." "Thou and I are good Jews, Marsyas, yet I can not say that of a surety of any other man in Judea. I have come from Jerusalem, David's City, the rock of Israel, but the hosts of schism possess it from the Ophlas to the uttermost limits of Bezetha!" "Rabbi!" "I have seen; I have seen. Saul hath set for himself a task of emptying the sea. In Jerusalem they come singing to torture and death, but armies of them go fleeing into the rest of Judea and all the world. And, hear me, thou true son of Israel, the pastor of the apostates we heard this night declared at least one truth. The Pharisee hath diffused an influence; he hath scattered a pestilence." Because it was a new charge against Saul, Marsyas accepted it. "Is there no help against him?" he exclaimed. "Marsyas, there stirreth a dread fear in me that he is the instrument of the time. If not he, then another would have been called by the spirit of change--" "There is no such extenuation in me!" Marsyas broke in. "Might promises no allegiance to its ministers," the rabbi replied. Marsyas recalled his history for evidence to corroborate this hope that Saul's calamitous work might recoil upon him. From Prometheus to Augustus, the declaration was sustained. He lost sight of the rabbi's actual concern. Saul covered his horizon; he could not know that Eleazar looked upon the Pharisee as only a detail in an immense stretch of grave possibilities. The young man made no reply. A hope had been snatched from him that night before his sense could grasp its reality, but the disappointment had not weakened his intent. His hope, for the moment centered upon the Nazarenes, turned again upon Agrippa. He did not permit himself to speculate on the prince's possible failure. At an intersecting street they parted, without further plan than that they should meet again. But the next morning when Marsyas came with little spirit into the sunless counting-room, his first visitor was Agrippa's lugubrious old courier, Silas. With a cry, Marsyas wrenched open the wicket and seized the old man's shoulders. "Dost thou bring good or evil news?" he cried, unable to wait on the slow servant's deliberate speech. "Perchance either, or both," the courier answered, fumbling in the wallet for his written instructions. "Perchance that which thou already knowest, and that which may be news. At least, I fetch thee a ransom." "God reward thee for thy fidelity," Marsyas replied, "and forget thy sloth! Here, let me help thee to thy message." He put away the servant's inflexible fingers and wrested the parchment from the wallet. It was wrapped in silk and sealed with wax. It was directed to Marsyas. He ripped it open hastily and read: "To Marsyas, the Essene, to whom Cypros the Herod would owe a greater debt, greeting and these: "It hath come to us here in Alexandria that Vitellius pursues thee with a mind to punish thee for helping my lord away from his difficulty in Judea. The legate hath sent couriers broadcast over the Empire to seek thee out, but the noble Flaccus, Proconsul of Egypt, though forewarned and required to deliver thee up, hath promised thee asylum in Alexandria. Wherefore, if it please God that thou art preserved until my servant Silas reaches thee, do thou return to this city, secretly and with all speed. "That thou care for thyself and that thy despatch be assured, I add further that there is much thou canst do for me. Delay not if the same good heart which suffered for us in Ptolemais still beats within thee. "Thy friend, "CYPROS." Within were three notes of a talent each, signed by Alexander Lysimachus, the Alabarch of Alexandria. Six weeks before, they would have been mere strips of parchment to Marsyas; to-day, with the commercial knowledge of a steward, Cæsar's gold would not have commanded more respect in him. But he crushed them in his hand and turned his face, suddenly grown pale and tense, toward the east and Jerusalem. They meant the beginning of the destruction of Saul! Presently he signed to Silas to follow and led the way to old Peter, who sipped his wine in his sleeping apartment. On the way, they met a slave whom Marsyas despatched to the khan for Eleazar. "But," objected Peter, with the querulousness of an old man, after the first flush of satisfaction over the return of his three talents, "I took thee in hostage, young man, because I wanted thy service as steward, not because I wished to please Agrippa." "But I have summoned my better to take my place," Marsyas assured him. "Thou shall not be without an able steward, who will serve thee for hire." And thus it was arranged when Eleazar arrived, that the rabbi should take Marsyas' place as steward and Peter, grumbling, but no less mollified, put on his cloak and repaired to the authorities to make the young Essene's manumission a matter of record. By sunset all the negotiations were completed and Marsyas, with Silas, passed out into the twilight and proceeded toward the mole. As they went, others were going; the freighter which was the first to sail for Alexandria bade fair to be crowded with passengers. Curious that so many wished to depart, Marsyas looked critically at the people as they moved toward the water-front. He saw that many of them had been with him in the Nazarene meeting the night before. They were obeying the command to move on. Suddenly one of them, a young man in advance of two, old enough to be his parents, stopped and pointed with an outstretched arm. Marsyas glanced in the direction the youth indicated. The lower slopes of the immense western sky over the placid sea were delicate with the pale shades of a clear, cold, spring sunset. The point where the sun had sunk, alone glowed with a sparkling, golden brilliance. And set against that, far out in the bay, was a frail dark mast, crossed by a faint yard--a fragile crucifix sunk in a glory! The elder man did not speak; the younger looked at the thing he had discovered, but as Marsyas hurried in agitation by the woman, he heard her speak softly: "But it is bright--beyond!" CHAPTER XIV FOB A WOMAN'S SAKE The sails of the freighter had fallen slack in the breathless shelter of the Alexandrian harbor. It was night, and only by daylight could the seamen pull the vessel by oar through the devious, perilous lanes between the fleets and navies packed in the greatest port in the world. The freighter would lie to until morning. The passengers would land in boats. Its anchor rumbled down and plunged into a sea of stars. It had been a ship of silence, manned by barefoot, cowed slaves, captained by a surly, weather-beaten Roman and freighted with a strange, sorrowful company. Now that the journey was at an end, there were no shouts, no noisy haste, no excited preparation. When the wash of the disturbed bay settled over the anchor and the reflected stars grew steady again, there was silence. Marsyas stood in the bow and looked ashore. Over the whole arc of the southern heavens, he saw long, beaded strands of infinitesimal points of fire, tangles, cross-hatchings, eddies and jottings of light--the lamps of Alexandria. Right and left of him and embracing much of the bay, the confusion of stars swept, culminating in the towering flame surmounting the Pharos to the east, and failing in featureless obscurity to the west. It might have been a congress of fireflies tranced in space. But there came across the waters, not appreciable sound, but the mysterious telepathic communication of animate life. Marsyas sensed the heart-beat of the great invisible city under the _ignes fatui_ swung in the purple night. He did not contemplate it calmly. The mystery of impending destiny was written over it all. The silent company of Nazarenes was put ashore an hour later at the wharf of the Egyptian suburb, Rhacotis, and together Silas and Marsyas passed up through the easternmost limits of the settlement toward the Regio Judæorum. They had not progressed beyond sight of their former traveling companions, before the cluster of Nazarenes seemed to huddle and recoil, and presently turn back and flee over their tracks. As they rushed down upon the two Jews, the body seemed to have increased greatly in number. The accessions were men, women and children; some were very old, all apparently very poor, so that the one small, female figure, in fine white garments showing under a coarse mantle, was conspicuous among the rough dark habits. Marsyas had time to note this one out of the many when the flying company rushed about him; after it a body of city constabulary, at the heels of which followed a howling mob of rabid Alexandrians. In an instant, Marsyas and Silas were in the thick of the tumult. The fugitives, demoralized by the attack of the constabulary, rushed hither and thither; the mob closed in upon them and a moving battle raged in the night on the square. Events followed too swiftly for Marsyas to grasp them as they happened. He had a heated sensation that he defended himself, defended others, struck gallantly, received blows, snatched up a small figure in white from the attack of a vindictive assailant, and then the running fight swept by and away in dust. He came to himself, panting and enraged, under a lamp, with a girl in his arms. Confronting him with a stone in his hand was Eutychus, petrified with amazement and apprehension. At one side, groaning and bent double with kicks and blows, was Silas. At the other, a silent, brown woman peered at the insensible girl. Up the street receded the sounds of riot. Marsyas permitted his angry gaze to fall from Eutychus' face to the stone the servitor held. The fingers unclosed and the missile dropped. Then Marsyas looked down at the girl in his arms. He drew in a full breath. The hill bird in the broken wilds of Judea whistled again; the incense from the blooming orchards breathed about him, and the flower face that had looked back at him from the howdah rested now, white and peaceful against his breast. Her long lashes lay on her cheeks, the pretty disorder of her yellow-brown curls was tossed over his arm. He was strangely untroubled for all that. The brown woman watched him from the gloom. Silas meanwhile had straightened himself and was gazing with stupefaction at the insensible face on the Essene's breast. "It--it--" he began, stammering before the rush of recognition and astonishment. "It is the alabarch's daughter--hither, fellow!" to Eutychus; "see this face! See whom thou wast pursuing." Eutychus looked and fell immediately into a panic. "I did not know her!" he cried. "By my soul, I did not know her! I was only visiting vengeance on the apostates, with the people! How should I expect to find her here!" Marsyas broke in on his avowal. "Do we go now to her father's house?" he asked of Silas. "Even now!" "Lead on, then. Eutychus! Follow!" Silas looked at the brown woman in the shadows, who beckoned and, turning, took roundabout and deserted passages toward the Jewish quarter, so that the extraordinary party proceeded unseen to the house of the alabarch. Once or twice, Eutychus attempted to press up beside Marsyas and excuse himself, but he was bidden to be silent. Then, on missing the charioteer's footfall, Marsyas turned to see him slipping away. Immediately Silas was despatched to bring him back; and so, placed between the two, he was dragged on to the house he had attempted to injure. Remembering Eleazar's statement concerning the breadth of the schism, Marsyas was prepared to discover the alabarch a Nazarene. "O Israel! after triumph over the oppression of the mighty, is this your overthrow?" he said bitterly to himself. Long before he reached the alabarch's house, the figure in his arms stirred and made a little questioning sound. But against her manifest wish, the promptings of his Essenic training and the admission that she had been overtaken among apostates, something in him locked his arms about her and brought a single word to his lips. The gentleness of his voice surprised him. "Peace," he said, and she lay still. After he had said it, a sudden rage against Eutychus seized him. The charioteer's part in the pursuit of the fugitive apostates assumed a brutality and an enormity many times greater than it had originally seemed. He took savage pleasure in anticipating turning over the culprit to Agrippa for justice. He was led presently into a dark porch and admitted into a hall. The startled porter glanced at him, and, seeing Lydia in the stranger's arms, the serving-man cried out. The brown woman answered with a guttural sentence or two, and by the time Marsyas, following the lead of the agitated porter, entered a beautiful chamber, people were running in from brilliantly-lighted apartments beyond. The spare and elegant old figure in the embroidered robes and cap of a Jewish magistrate hurried toward him with terror written on his face. "Lydia! What hath befallen thee? Is she dead?" he cried. Back of him came a rush of people. Foremost was Herod Agrippa; behind him, Cypros. With the growing group, Marsyas ceased to note the details of their identity and remarked at random that one was a man who wore a fillet and that the other was a woman and beautiful. The number of servants increasing, the babble of questions and exclamations creating a great confusion, none who made answer was heard. But Marsyas looked at the master of the house. He saw this time, not the magistrate's alarm, but his character, his nationality, his religion. In that aristocratic old countenance there was nothing of the Nazarene. Marsyas let his eyes fall on the face against his breast. By the brighter light, he saw now that which he had not seen under the smoky street-torch. In the folds of her white dress, beautiful and rich enough for a feast, reposed a small cedar cross, depending from a scarlet cord. The young Jew with the fillet about his forehead sprang forward to take Lydia from Marsyas' arms. But with the instinctive feeling that none must see but himself, he disengaged one hand and stopped the Jew with a motion. "I will put her down," he said calmly. Classicus drew himself up to his full height, but Marsyas had already turned toward the divan. With a quick movement, he slipped the crucifix from about the girl's neck and thrust it into his tunic. Out of the babble about him he learned that the girl had supposedly gone to attend a maiden gathering in the Regio Judæorum with the brown woman as an attendant. Catching with relief at this bit of foundation for a story, he stood up prepared to tell anything but the truth. Meantime, attendants and a house physician bent over the girl with wine and restoratives, and the company's attention was directed toward her recovery. Presently she put aside her waiting-women and sat up. Marsyas glanced from her to the brown woman, who hovered on the outskirts. The handmaiden's great, mysterious, olive-green eyes were fixed upon him, half in appeal, half in command. Before he could understand the look the Jew in the fillet turned upon him. "Come, we are learning nothing," he said in a voice that silenced the group. "Thou," indicating Marsyas with an imperious motion, "seemest to show the marks of experience. Tell us what happened." Marsyas' mind went through prodigious calculation. If he frankly told the truth, he betrayed the girl to much misery and peril. If he evaded, Eutychus, wishing to justify himself and to escape punishment, might wreck a fabrication by a word. But the young man made no appreciable hesitation in answering. He caught the charioteer's eye and held it fixedly while he spoke. "I know little," he said. "From the ship we came up a certain street, where we met tumult between fugitives and pursuers. So disorderly the crowd and so extensive its violence that whosoever met it on the street was instantly caught in its center and mistreated as much as the guiltiest one. Thus I and Prince Agrippa's servant were caught; thus, the lady. "We defended ourselves and should have escaped scathless, but that we stayed to save the lady from the rioters. This done we came hither. That is all." "Who were the fugitives?" the Jew in the fillet demanded. The thick lips of Eutychus parted and he drew in breath, but the lower lids of the black eyes fixed upon him lifted a little and he subsided. "Sir, one does not stop to identify passing strangers when one fights for his life," Marsyas explained calmly. Eutychus lost his air of trepidation, and his taut figure relaxed. "Where was it?" the beautiful woman asked of the charioteer. Marsyas answered directly. "Lady, one does not locate himself in the midst of turbulence." Lysimachus came closer to Marsyas. "Who art thou?" he asked. "I met thee once, it seems." "That," Agrippa broke in, "by every act he hath done since I knew him, is the most generous of Jews, Marsyas, an Essene, by his permission, my friend and companion. Know him, Alexander; it is a profitable acquaintance." Marsyas flushed under the prince's praise, and Cypros, drawing closer, took his arm and pressed her cheek against it. "Thrice welcome to my house," the alabarch said with emotion. "Blessed be thy coming and thy going; may safety be thy shadow!" Marsyas, coloring more under the comment, thanked the alabarch and cast a beseeching look at the prince. The prince smiled. "Let us supplement blessings with raiment and thanks with wine," he said to the alabarch. "This is an Essene to whom uncleanliness is as great a crime as a love affair." "Thou recallest me to my duty," the alabarch returned, at once. "Stephanos,"--signing to a servitor,--"thou wilt take this young man to the room which hath been prepared for him and give him comfort. If he hath any hurts, the physician will wait on him. Remember, brother, I am at thy command." With these words, he bowed to Marsyas, who inclined his head to the company and followed Stephanos. But at the arch leading into the corridor, there was a low word at his hand. Lydia, with the rough mantle dropped from her, stood there in her rich white garments. "I owe thee my life," she said, in a little more than a whisper. "Aye, even more--a greater debt which I can not make clear to thee now." He looked down into her lifted eyes, pleading for pity and forgiveness. "I made thee traffic with the truth," they said. "Thou who art an Essene and a holy man!" Something happened in Marsyas; a quickening rush of rare emotion swept over him. He took her small hand and held it, until, shyly and reluctantly, she drew it away. He went then through broad halls, flooded with lights from costly lamps, past whispering fountains and motionless potted plants, through arches relieved by silken draperies which adorned without screening, up a broad flight of stairs to his own chamber. This was all very beautiful and restful with its occasional whiffs of incense, or the musical drip of the waterfall or the soft murmur of distant voices. His lot had fallen in splendid places, he told himself, and, though opposed, by teaching, to the difference men make in each other, he was glad that he was not to live as a manumitted slave under the roof of the alabarch's house. As he stepped into the chamber which Stephanos told him was his own, Drumah appeared. Startled at first sight of a man bearing marks of ill-usage, she stopped and cried out as she recognized him. "I am not hurt, Drumah," he said, to quiet the rush of questions on her lips. "I was caught in a riot. It is nothing." "But I see marks on thy face," she persisted, coming near him; "and thy garments have bloodstains on them. Thou dost not know that thou art hurt. O Stephanos," she cried to the servitor, "fetch balsam and volatile ointment. Eutychus, art thou there? Run to the culina and get wine! Where is the physician?" The charioteer, who had appeared in the upper story for the express purpose of seeking Drumah to tell the details of the day's excitement, stopped short and scowled. "I thank thee," Marsyas said to her. "I am not in need of assistance. The physician is with the master's daughter. I can care for myself. Pray, do not give thyself trouble." He stepped into the apartment and dropped the curtain upon himself and Stephanos. He had given himself up to the servitor's attentions, when it occurred to him that he had let slip a chance to deliver a telling and a much-needed warning to Eutychus. The more he considered his neglect, the more serious it seemed. At last he hurried his attendant, and, getting into fresh garments, descended again to the first floor. He despatched Stephanos in search of Eutychus and stopped by the newel to await the charioteer's coming. As he stood, the brown waiting-woman came to him, gliding like a sand column across the desert. Coming quite close to him, she dropped on her knees at his side and touched her forehead to the ground. "I am a Brahmin," she said in Hindu, "and I owe thee a debt. I shall not forget!" Rising, she flitted away. Marsyas looked after her in amazement. It was the same slave-woman whom he had helped at Peter the usurer's. Cypros, with her head drooping, a delicate forefinger on her chin, came slowly and sorrowfully into the hall. As Marsyas looked at her, she seemed to him to be half-woman, half-child. But when she saw him, her face lighted, her eyes glowed. With extended hands she came toward him. "Nay, nay," she said, seeing that thanks were on his lips. "Do not shame me with thy thanks, Marsyas, for I had a selfish use in releasing thee." "But I know, nevertheless, that I should have had freedom at thy hands though I never saw thee again." "Oh, be not so filled with confidence and sweet believing, else I fear for myself," she said earnestly. "Nay, if I were wholly unselfish, I should come to thee, this hour of thy honor, to bring thee praise. Yet I come with mine own interest, to charge thee anew!" "Command me; thou hast purchased me!" "Not so; but thou hast purchased my husband, with the extreme of thy sacrifice for his sake!" "Lady, I did that thing for myself--for mine own ends!" "Nevertheless, it was my husband who profited. Thou must learn that much hath transpired here in Alexandria. The alabarch had not the three hundred thousand drachmæ to lend--" Marsyas' forehead contracted; was not his work against Saul of Tarsus progressing? "--but he gave my lord in all readiness five talents, with which we ransomed thee. It was all the good alabarch could afford, but it is not enough for me and my babes. Wherefore Agrippa goes to Rome without us. There, infallibly he will obtain money from Antonia, discharge his debt to Cæsar and settle Vitellius' vengeful search after thee. There, he shall be restored to favor with Cæsar and come into possession of his kingdom!" "How thou liftest my bitter heart!" Marsyas exclaimed. "Go yet further and say that, thereafter, I shall have my requital, my hunger after vengeance satisfied!" "All that shall be," she said with gravity, "on one condition!" "What?" he besought earnestly. "That he who hath Agrippa's welfare deepest in his heart shall ever be near my lord to protect him against himself!" "O lady, even thou canst not wish thy husband successful with greater yearning than I!" "So I do believe! But hear me. Thou seest my husband; thou knowest that he plans only for the moment, risks too much, is over-confident and too little cautious! In the beginning he believes that he is right, and thereafter and on to the end he acts, chooses friends, and makes enemies as his conviction directs him. Thus he ruined himself thrice over from Rome to Idumea. None but one so eager for his success as I, but abler than I, can govern him! And thou must be his keeper, Marsyas!" "Thou yieldest me a welcome charge, lady," he said quickly. "Thou knowest that I would not have him fail; wherefore, I yield thee my word!" "Be thou blessed! Yet there is more!" In spite of her preparation, her face flushed, and she hesitated. Then as if forcing herself to speak, she said: "Thou--thou wilt keep my lord's love for me, Marsyas?" "I do not understand," he said kindly. "Thou didst not say such a thing when my lord asked thee for twenty thousand drachmæ. Thou didst get the drachmæ; keep now my husband's love for me. As thou didst offer thyself for his purse, offer thyself for his soul--if need be!" He frowned at the pavement and then at her. He had evolved enough from her words to believe that her call aimed at his spiritual welfare and he remembered that he was an Essene. "Be his companion," she hurried on, "be more; be his comrade, his abettor, even; sacrifice much; thy prejudices, even some of thy spotlessness, but make thyself desirable to him. Then thou canst control him. Promise, Marsyas! Oh, thy hope to overthrow Saul is not dearer to thee than this thing is to me! Promise!" "Be comforted," he said hurriedly, for there were steps approaching from the inner room. "I shall do all that I can. More than that, one less than an angel can not promise!" She, too, heard the footsteps and passed up the stairs. Looking up from his disturbed contemplation of the pavement, Marsyas saw Classicus in the arch leading into the hall. If the young Essene had been a cestophorus upholding the ceiling, the philosopher's gaze could not have been more indifferent. He passed on and disappeared into the vestibule. Hardly had he passed, before the dark end of the corridor leading in from the garden gave up the stealthy figure of Eutychus, running, bent, purposeful and a-tiptoe, to overtake Classicus. Evidently he had not seen Marsyas, for he passed without faltering and disappeared the way Classicus had taken. Instantly and as silently Marsyas followed. At the porch, the alabarch bade his guests good night, and when Marsyas brought up, he found Classicus just departing and Eutychus nowhere to be seen. Surmising that there was a humbler exit for the servants, out of which the charioteer had taken himself, Marsyas passed out directly after the philosopher. His surmises were not wrong, for the instant Classicus planted foot on the earth without, Eutychus came out of the darkness and bowed. "Good my lord," he began, "the story truly told is this--" but his words babbled off into stammers and inarticulate sound, for Marsyas, large in the gloom, stood over him. "Thy master hath need of thee, Eutychus," he said in a soft voice. The charioteer gulped and slid back into the door that had given him exit. "Peace to thee, sir," the Essene said to Classicus, and bowing, returned into the house. "The truth of the story is this," said Classicus as he stepped into his chair and was borne away, "the Essene is no Essene!" At the farther end of the corridor within, Marsyas saw Eutychus lurking. Silent and swift the young Essene went after him. The charioteer, fearing for cause, fled and Marsyas followed. Agrippa, on the point of ascending to his chamber, saw them flit noiselessly into the dusk. His wonder was awakened. Drumah, with a laver under her arm, was emerging from the kitchens when she caught a glimpse of them. The prince stepped down and followed; Drumah slipped after. At the door leading into the colonnade of the garden, Marsyas seized Eutychus. "Thou insufferable coward!" he brought out. "Thou blight and peril under a hospitable roof! I know what thou wouldst have said to the master's guest!" Eutychus paled and struggled to free himself, but Marsyas forced him against the wall and pinned him there. "If so much as a word escape thee, concerning the alabarch's daughter, if by a quiver of thy lashes thou dost betray aught that thou knowest to any living being, or dead post, or empty space, I shall kill thee and feed the eels of the sea with thy carcass!" Fixing the charioteer with a menacing eye he held him until he was sure his words had conveyed their full meaning. "I have spoken!" he added. Then he threw the man aside and turned to go back to his room. But in his path, though happily out of earshot of his low-spoken words, stood Agrippa; behind him, Drumah. Not a little disturbed, Marsyas stopped. Eutychus saw the prince and expected partizanship. "Seest thou how thy servant is used by this vagrant?" he demanded. But Agrippa laid his hand on Marsyas' arm. "I do not know thy provocation," he said, "but I know it was just. Go back! It is not enough. Teach him to respect thy strength. Thou hast merely made him dangerous!" But Marsyas begged Agrippa's permission to go on and the prince, still declaring that the Essene had made a mistake, turned and went with him. Drumah, with her head in the air, passed Eutychus without casting a look upon him. CHAPTER XV THE FALSE BALANCE Marsyas did not sleep the sleep of a man worn with exertion and excitement. Instead he lay far into the night with his wide eyes fixed on the soft gloom above him. He had many diverse thoughts, none wholly contented, many most unhappy. The instance of apostasy under the roof troubled him; not as apostasy should trouble one of the faithful, but as an impending calamity. He had strange, terrifying, commingling pictures of Stephen's dark locks in the dust of the stoning-place, and the pretty disorder of yellow-brown curls thrown over his arm. His purpose against Saul of Tarsus seemed to magnify in importance, by each succeeding momentous event. He remembered Cypros' charge and bound himself to keep it, again and again through the dark troubled hours. It was a long way yet until he could triumph over the powerful Pharisee, and the stretches of misfortune that could ensue, in the time, were things he drove out of his thoughts. When at last he fell asleep, he dreamed that he stood on Olivet and watched Saul and Lydia seeking for him in the trampled space without Hanaleel, while a crucifix, instead of the moon, arose in the east. The old Essenic habit was strong in Marsyas. In spite of his long wakefulness, the dark red color in the east which announced the sunrise yet an hour to come was as a call in his ear. He arose while yet the night was heavy in the halls of the alabarch's house and the whisper of the sand lifting before the sea-wind was the only sound in the Alexandrian streets. The stairway was intensely quiet and he hesitated to descend. But at the end of the upper corridor a slight dilution in the gloom showed him a loft let into the ceiling. He went that way and came upon another stairway leading up and out into the open. He mounted it and found himself on the roof of the house. At the rear was a double row of columns, roofed, and hung with matting which inclosed an airy pavilion where the dwellers of the alabarch's house could flee from the heat closer the earth. It was furnished with antique Egyptian furniture, taborets of acacia, seated with pigskin, a diphros and divan, built of spongy palm-wood, but seasoned and hardened by great age, and grotesquely carved by old hands, dead a century. The young man entered and, seating himself, awaited the day and the arousing of the alabarch's household. The Jewish housetops toward the east made an angular sea, broken by parapets and summer-houses in relief against the red sky, and the pavements in gloom. Strips of darker vapor meandering among them showed the course of passages leading with many detours into the great open, where was builded the Synagogue of Alexandria. It was of tremendous dimensions, yet so majestically proportioned as to attain grace, that most difficult thing to reconcile with great size. The type of architecture was Egypto-Grecian,--repose and refinement, antiquity and civilization conjoined to make a sanctuary that was a citadel. Here, the forty thousand Jews of Alexandria could gather, nor one rub shoulder against his neighbor. Marsyas looked with no little pride at the triumph of the God of Israel in this stronghold of paganism. What a reproach it must be to them that had departed from the rigor of the Law! He became conscious of the little cross. He drew it forth from its hiding-place and looked at it. It was made of red cedar, slightly elaborated, and the cord passed through a small copper eyelet at the head. To his unfamiliar eye, it was a dread image, at once a suggestion of suffering and retributive justice. He had not seen one since his last talk with Stephen. The acute wrench the reflection gave him now incorporated a fear for Lydia. Saul of Tarsus should not lay her fair head low! He braced his fingers against the head and foot of the emblem to break it, when suddenly a bewildering reluctance seized his hand. At the moment of destruction, his hand was stayed. Stephen had loved it and died for its sake, and Lydia-- His resolution dissolved; slowly and unreadily he put the crucifix back in his bosom, over his heart. At that moment, a little figure, on the brink of the housetop, was projected against the glowing sky. It was firmly knit and outlined like an infant love. The apparition brought, besides startlement, a prescient significance that made his heart beat. Synagogue and Alexandria dropped out of sight. He saw only the rosy heavens with a beautiful girl marked on them. He arose, and the new-comer turned toward him and approached. And Marsyas watching her, in a breathless, half-guilty moment, told himself that never before had the fall of a woman's foot been a caress to the earth. He saw that she carried over her arm a many-folded length of silk, in the half-dusk, like a silvery mist, very sheeny and firm. Here and there he discovered flame-colored streaks in it. One of the morning-touched vapors in the east, pulled down and folded over the girl's arm, would have looked like it. At the threshold of the summer-house, she let the arm fall which carried it, dropped the many folds and with a sudden uplift and deft circle of her hand, partly cocooned herself in the silken vapor. Her eyes, lifted in the movement, fell on Marsyas. With a little start, she unfurled the wrapping and doubled it over her arm. "I pray thy pardon," he said, with a sincerity beyond the formality of his words. "I am an intruder. But--the Essenes do not keep their beds long." "Neither do all Alexandrians," she said, recovering herself. "Thou art welcome, for I would speak with thee." She put up one of the mattings by a pull at a cord, and sat down on a taboret. She laid the silk across her lap and folded her hands upon it. "I pray thee, be seated. I have not said all that I would say concerning last night. Art thou well--unhurt?" The morning lay faintly on her face and he saw that she was paler and sadder of eye than was natural for one so young and so round of cheek. He was touched, and his answer was a tender surprise to him. "Thou seest me," he said, making a motion with his hands, "but thou--I would there were less of last night in thy face!" "I am well," she said, as her eyes fell. "For that I give thee thanks, and for the security of my fame among my friends--and--the sacrifice thou madest to preserve it!" She meant his evasions that had kept the true story of her rescue secret. He was glad she touched so readily upon the subject. It gave him opportunity to relieve his soul of part of its burden. "I was glad," he assured her. "Now, that thou art still safe, I pray thee, lady, preserve thyself. None in all the world is so able to understand thy peril as I!" She looked at him, remembering that Agrippa had told them that he had been accused of apostasy. "Are--are these--thy people?" she asked in a whisper. "No; but dost thou remember why I went with such haste to Nazareth?" he asked. "To save a life, thou saidst." "Even so, I failed." She caught her breath and her eyes grew large with sympathy. "I failed," he continued. "I went to save a friend who had gone astray after the Nazarene Prophet. But they stoned him before mine eyes." Her lips moved with a compassionate word, more plainly expressed in all her atmosphere. "They cast me out of Judea," he went on, "because I was his friend. Wherefore I have tasted the death and have died not; I have suffered for their sin, yet sinned not!" He had never told more of his story than that, but her eyes, filled with interest, fixed upon him, urged him to go on. Believing that he might deliver her if he told more, he proceeded, but the sense of relief, the lifting of his load that followed upon the course of his narrative were results that he had not expected in confiding to this understanding woman. At first he felt a little of the embarrassment that attends the unfolding of a personal history, but ere long the fair-brown eyes urged him, with their sympathy, and consoled him with their comprehension. He left the outline and plunged into detail, and when he had made an end, the glory of the Egyptian sunshine was flooding Alexandria. At the end of the story, Lydia's eyes fell slowly, and the interest that had enlivened her face relaxed into pensiveness. She was oppressed and sorrowful, almost ready to be directed by this man of many sorrows. But he leaned toward her. "Henceforth, therefore," he said, "I am not a man of peace, but one burdened with rancor and vengeful intent. I go not into En-Gadi, but into the evil world to use the world's evil to work evil. I am despoiled and blighted and without hope. Is that the inheritance which thou wouldst leave to them who love thee?" She drew away from him, half alarmed. "I--I am not a Nazarene," she faltered. "Do not go to them, then!" he urged eagerly. "Do not listen to their teachings; for whosoever listens must die!" "I went yesterday for a different cause," she said finally, "but before, of interest." "But thou art a faithful daughter of Abraham; be not led of any cause. Remember yesterday!" "Yesterday?" she repeated quietly. "Why yesterday? Only the faith of the oppressed was different. We of Israel's faith in Alexandria know many of yesterday's like, and worse!" "Suffer, then, the sufferings of the righteous! Be not cut off for a folly!" She fell silent again, and smoothed the silk on her lap. "Justin Classicus told me of them," she began finally, "and their very difference from other philosophies, new or old, the simple history of their Prophet attracted me. I sought them out, and learned that an Egyptian merchant who traded in Syria had passed through Jerusalem at the time of the Nazarene Prophet's sojourn in the city, and had become converted to His teaching. He returned to Egypt and planted the seed of the sect in Rhacotis. And of power and attraction, he gathered unto him men of his like. Finally he carried his teaching into the lecture-rooms of the Library and all Alexandria heard of the Nazarenes. Reduced in its frenzy, his faith had a burning and unconsumed heart to it. Many searched and many accepted it. I went once--with my handmaiden--and heard his preaching. And I saw in it a remedy for the sick world." Marsyas looked away toward the Synagogue, glittering purely against the dark blue waters of the bay. He felt a recurrence of the old chill that possessed him, when he had failed to shake Stephen in his apostasy. But she went on. "Since there is but one God there can be but one religion. I do not expect a new godhead, but a new interpretation of the ancient one. Bethink thee; all the world was not Rome, in the days of Abraham or Moses or Solomon or David. This is the hour of the supremacy of one will, one race. Man does not fear God so much when he does not respect his neighbor at all. Therefore, Rome, being autocrat of the earth, is an atheist. She hath set up her mace and called it God. There is no hope against Rome unless we hurl another Rome against it. That we can not do, for there is only one world. Sheol will not prevail against Rome, for Rome is Sheol. Only Heaven is left and Heaven does not proceed against nations with an army and banners. There is only one untried power in the list of forces, and the Nazarene hath it in His creed." Marsyas knew what it was; Stephen was full of it. "It is a difficult vision to summon," she continued, "but it may fall that a dove and not an eagle shall sit on the standards of Rome and that the dominion of God and not of Cæsar shall prevail on the Capitoline Hill." She paused, and Marsyas, waiting until he might speak, put out his hand to her. "I heard another building such fair structures of his fancy and his hopes," he said, with pain on his face. "Even though they were realized to-morrow, he can not see it; I, being broken of heart, could not rejoice. And Lydia--for they call thee by that name--I can not see another in the dust of the stoning-place!" Her face flushed and paled and he let his hand drop on hers, by way of apology. "Then, thou wilt give over the companionship of these people?" he persisted gently. She hesitated, and finally said in a halting voice: "I--went--I knew that--by thy leave, sir, thou camest to them as a peril. Thou wast expected of the authorities, being doubly charged with apostasy and an offense against Rome, and they were permitted to go thither, by the legate, even by this household, in search of thee, when I and all under this roof knew that thou wast not among them. I--went to give them--warning--" "Then, the call hath been obeyed," he said kindly. "Shut thy hearing against another. I thank thee, for the Nazarenes. Thou art good and wise and most generous--too rare a woman for Israel to surrender." She arose, for sounds were coming up the well of the stair, which told of the awakening of the alabarch's household. She wrapped the silk in a closer roll and let the folds of her full habit fall over it. After a little hesitation, she extended her hand to him, and he took it. Under its touch, he felt that his hour of mastery had passed. The gentle, thankful pressure had put him under her command. When she disappeared into the well of the stairs, Marsyas, glancing about him, saw on the housetop next to him Justin Classicus. The philosopher was choicely clad in a synthesis to cover him completely from the chill of the morning air, while yet the warmth of his bath was upon him. His locks were anointed, his fillet in place. Even in undress, he was elegant. He rested in a cathedra, and contemplated his neighbor as distantly as he had the night before. Not until after he had broken his fast with the alabarch and his daughter and returned again to the housetop did he see any other of the magistrate's guests. Junia's litter brought up at the alabarch's porch, and presently Agrippa came up on the housetop. "How now?" he exclaimed, seeing Marsyas. "Is it the air or the sense of superiority over the sluggard that invites thee up at unsunned hours?" "Both," Marsyas replied, giving up the diphros to the prince, "and the further urging of an old unsettled grudge. My lord, when dost thou proceed to Rome?" "Shortly; after the Feast of Flora, which is to be celebrated soon." "Nay; I pray thee, let it be directly," Marsyas urged; "for my bitterness unspent bids fair to rise in my throat and choke me!" "_Proh pudor_! Cherishing a pulseless rancor with all fervor, when thou art here, in arm's reach and in high favor with that which should make back to thee all thou hast ever lost in the world! Oh, what a placid vegetable of an Essene thou art,--in all save hate!" "I am to go to Rome with thee, my lord." "Of a surety! My wife sees in thee a kind of talisman which will insure me favor with emperors and usurers, ward off the influence of beautiful women and give me success at dice!" Marsyas glanced away from Agrippa and his face settled into uncompromising lines. Agrippa continued. "Nay, thou goest to see that I make no misstep toward getting a kingdom. Welcome! Be thou hawk-eyed vigilance itself. But my pleasure might be more perfect did I know that thine and our lady's determination to crown me were less selfish!" "Thou shalt not complain of more than selfishness in me," Marsyas answered calmly. "But by my dearest hope, thou shalt live a different life than that which hath ruined thee of late. I know that thou canst win a kingdom by a word; but thou shalt not lose it by a smile. For, by the Lord God that made us, thou shalt not fail!" Agrippa turned half angrily upon the young Essene, but the imperfectly formulated retort died on his lips. He met in the resolute eyes fixed upon him command and mastery. Words could not have delivered such a certainty of control. In that moment of silent contemplation the contest for future supremacy was decided. Agrippa frowned, looked away and smiled foolishly. "Perpol! Did I ever think to lose patience with a man for swearing to make me a king? But mend thy manner, Marsyas. Thou'lt never please the ladies if thou goest wooing with this rattle and clang of siege-engines!" Junia appeared on the housetop. She came with lagging steps and sank upon the divan, gazing with sleepy eyes at Marsyas. "I emancipated myself," she said, "from the study of new stitches, the neighbor's dress and the fashion in perfumes. A pest on your rustic habit of early rising! Here we are aroused in the unlovely hours of the raw dawn to achieve business, ere the sun bakes us into stupidity at midday!" "A needless sacrifice to these Egyptians," Agrippa declared. "They are all salamanders. I saw a serving-woman in this house pick up a flame on her bare palm and carry it off as one would bear a vase." "Vasti? Nay, but she comes from India; fled from servitude to the Brahmin priesthood to take service with the man who had pitied her once." "The alabarch?" "Even so. He bought the gold and onyx plates that he put on the Temple gates, in India, where he saw her and pitied her. So, she fled her owner and sought the world over till she found the alabarch to enslave herself anew." "So! Small wonder, then, she is annealed like an amphora. Yet I had believed she was a bayadere." "A bayadere?" Junia repeated. "A Brahmin dancer, having the peculiarities of an Egyptian almah, a Greek hetæra, and a Pythian priestess, all fused in one. But now that she hath repented, she is rigidly upright and a relentless pursuer of evil-doers." "Alas!" sighed Junia, still watching Marsyas, "is it not enough to grow old without having to become virtuous?" Agrippa lifted his eyes to her face, and the look was sufficient comment. But Marsyas had been plunged in his own thoughts and did not hear. "What is the Feast of Flora?" he asked. The Roman woman smiled and answered. "A popular expression of the world's joy over the summer. That was its original motive, but it has been conventionalized into a feast formally celebrating the reign of Flora. It was pastoral, but the poor cities walled away from the wheat and the pastures adopted it, in very hunger for the feel of the earth. It falls in the spring under the revivifying influence of awakening life and the loosed spirit of the populace grows boisterous. We become a city of rustics and hoidens. Pleasure is the purpose and love the largess of the occasion." Agrippa smiled absently. These two remarks of diverse character were tentative. She was sounding Marsyas' nature. "I shall not sail till it is done," Agrippa declared. "A rare diversion to tempt a man from his ambitions," the young Essene retorted quickly. Junia had made her sounding. She persisted in her latter rôle. "It is," she averred. "Flora is elected among the beautiful girls of the theaters; she typifies universal love; she runs, leaving a trail of yellow roses behind her, which lead the multitude on to the delight she means to take for herself--and that is all. It is merely a pretty feast, but the world is made of many well-meaning though blundering natures; and the revel does not always reach the high mark of refinement at its highest." Agrippa's eyes on the Roman woman expressed intensest amusement and admiration, though they lost nothing of their cool self-possession. "My lord," Marsyas observed coldly, "there are as choice evils in Rome." Junia laughed. "Evil! Tut, tut! How monstrous serious the little world takes itself! How great is its problems, how towering its philosophies, how bad its badness! See us wrinkle our little old brows and smile agedly over the creature impulses of children and forget that the gods sit on the brink of Olympus and smile at us. How we deplore the Feast of Flora--and out upon us! None--save perchance thyself, good sir, and thy rigid order--but goes reveling after pleasure and chooses a love or casts a stone at an offender--and soberly calls it a crisis or a principle! Philosophy! Discovering the obvious! Badness! Only nature, more or less emphatic! All a matter of meat and drink, shelter and apparel and the recreation of ourselves! Everything else is merely an attribute of the simple essentials. Is it not so, good sir?" Marsyas shook his head. For the first time in his life he had heard the world forgiven and the sound of it was good. He could not help remembering Lydia's words, in contrast. But he was not convinced. "It is not from the place of the gods that we feel, do and believe," he said. "The child's difficulties are heavy to it; it can not imagine them to be greater. So if thy reasoning hold, lady, perhaps the higher God smiles at the rage of Jove and the threats of Mars and the loves and pains of Venus. But Jove and Mars and Venus do not smile at them; nor does the child at his fallen sand-house or his ruined bauble. It is therefore a serious world for worldlings." Junia lifted her white arms, and, dropping her head back between them against the divan, smiled up at the roof of the pavilion. "I thought thee to be large and far-seeing," she said. "But go follow Flora, and thou shall either be driven mad with astonishment, or persuaded to look upon the world henceforward with mine eyes!" CHAPTER XVI A MATTER HANDLED WISELY Flaccus Avillus, Proconsul of Egypt, held audience in his atrium. He received a commission of three from the Jews of Alexandria. One was Alexander Lysimachus, who came with a civil petition; the other two were despatched from the congregation with a hieratic memorial. The three were stately and deliberate in manner, handsome even for their years, and as courtly as Jews can be when they bring up their native grace to the highest standard of culture. They were bearded, gowned in linen, covered with tarbooshes, and as they walked their indoor sandals made no sound upon the polished pavement of the atrium. One wore on his left arm a phylactery, the last clinging to the old formality which had separated his fathers' class in Judea from the others, as a Pharisee. The second was an Alexandrian Sadducee. The third had over his shoulders the cloak of a magistrate. Flaccus did not rise from his curule as they approached, but he returned their greetings with better grace than they had formerly expected of a Roman governor. "Be greeted," he said bluntly. "And sit; ye are elderly men!" Lysimachus took the nearest chair and the others retired a little way to an indoor exedra. Flaccus thrust away parchments and writings to let his elbow rest on his table, ordered the bearers of the fasces to withdraw to a less conspicuous position, and looked at Lysimachus. "Thou lookest grave, Alexander," he said. "Art thou commissioned with a perplexity?" The alabarch, being a magistrate and therefore recognized by Rome before the synagogue, answered readily. "Not so much perplexed, good sir, as troubled. I come with a petition, not in writing, but nevertheless most urgent." "Let me hear it," Flaccus said. "Nay, then; thou knowest that a certain celebration of the Gentiles in this city is approaching. It is a feast of much magnitude and of much lawlessness. Thou knowest the temper of the city toward my people, and after three days of drunkenness, Alexandria will love the Jew no more, but much less. Thou rememberest, as I and my people remember with mourning, that last year, the excited multitude, that followed Flora's trail of yellow roses through the Regio Judæorum, fell upon the Jews by the way and slaughtered and sacked as if it had been warfare instead of festivity. It was a new diversion for the multitude, and one like to be repeated. But we, who are led to believe by thy recent good will that thou dost not cherish Rome's ancient prejudice against our race, come unto thee and hopefully beseech thee to forbid the Flora to lead her rioters upon our peaceful community." "I have already warned the prætor," Flaccus responded, "that Flora is not to run through the Regio Judæorum this year." "The prætor dare not disobey thee," Lysimachus said, with a tone of finality in his voice. Flaccus smiled grimly. "Nor Flora," he added. "Thou hast our people's gratitude and allegiance; mine own thankfulness and blessings," Lysimachus responded heartily. Flaccus waved his hand, and glanced at the other two, sitting aside. "And ye?" he said. "Are ye but a portion of the alabarch's commission?" "Nay, good sir," the Sadducee answered, "we come upon a mission for the congregation." Lysimachus arose, but the Sadducee turned to him with a bow. "Pray thee, sir, it concerns thee as well. Wilt thou abide longer and hear us?" The alabarch inclined his head and sat down. Flaccus signified that he was ready to hear them. "Thou didst ask our brother, the alabarch, if he were commissioned with a perplexity," the Sadducee continued. "Not he, but we come perplexed. Were we Jews in Judea, the method would be laid down to us by Law. But in Alexandria we have grown away from the method, while yet we have the same object to achieve." "We lose in guidance what we gain in freedom," the Pharisee added. "In Judea," the Sadducee continued, "they are still bound by the usages of the Mosaic Law. An offender against the Law is stoned. We do not stone in Alexandria; yet we have the offender, and suffer the offense. What, then, shall we do to cleanse our skirt and yet offer no violence to our advanced thinking?" "Give me thy meaning," the proconsul said impatiently. "Perchance it hath come to thee that there is a sect known as the Nazarenes, followers of Jesus of Nazareth, which are spreading like a pestilence on the wind over the world. So full of them is Judea, even David's City, that the Sanhedrim, in alliance with the Roman legate, is proceeding against them with extreme punishment." "I have heard," Flaccus assented. "But the numbers have grown so great and so far-reaching that the Sanhedrim hath achieved little more than to drive them abroad into the world." "So the legate informs me," Flaccus added. "Perchance then thou knowest that Alexandria hath its share." "I do." "Even the Regio Judæorum." "Strange," Lysimachus broke in. "Strange, if they be such law-breakers, as they are reputed to be, that they have not been brought before me for rebellion and violence, ere this!" The Pharisee put his plump white hands together. "Thou touchest upon the perplexity, brother," he said, addressing himself to Lysimachus. "We are warned by the scribe of Saul of Tarsus, who leadeth the war against the heretics, that they are invidious workers of sedition; whisperers of false doctrines and pretenders of love and humility. They do not persuade the rich man nor the powerful man nor the learned man. They labor among the poor and the despised and the ignorant. Saul, himself, though first to be awakened to the peril of the heresy, did not dream how immense an evil he had attacked until he found the half of Jerusalem fleeing from him. Wherefore, brother, we may be built upon the sliding sands of an evil doctrine; the whole Regio Judæorum may be going astray after this apostasy ere the powers know it." Lysimachus stroked his white beard and looked incredulous. "The Jews of Alexandria will not tolerate a persecution," he said emphatically. "So thou dost grasp the perplexity wholly," the Sadducee said. "What shall we do?" he turned to the proconsul. "I am to advise, then?" Flaccus asked indifferently. "Thou wilt not suffer them to lead our men-servants and our maid-servants and our artisans into heresy?" the Pharisee asked. "We do not persecute in Alexandria, thou saidst," Flaccus observed. "No," declared Lysimachus. "If all the Regio Judæorum were as we three, the apostates might come and go, strive their best and die of their own misdeeds, unincreased in number or in goods. But the clamoring voice of the mass--nay, even Cæsar hath harkened to it! Those that have not followed the Nazarenes demand that they be cut off from us. But we can not kill, and not even death daunts a Nazarene. Commend thyself, Flaccus, that thou didst call my brothers' mission a perplexity." "So you have come formally to me with your people's plaint and expect me to solve a question that you yourselves can not solve," Flaccus said. "_Poena_! But you are a helpless lot! I shall pen the heretics in Rhacotis forthwith, and command them neither to visit nor to be visited! Is it enough?" The three Jews arose. "It is wisdom," said the Sadducee. "It will serve," the Pharisee observed. "I shall ferret them out," Lysimachus said. "Thanks," the three observed at once. "Peace to all this house." Flaccus waved his hand and the three passed out. CHAPTER XVII A WORD IN SEASON The summer waxed over Egypt. The Delta, back from the yellow plain which fronted the sea, was in full flower of the wheat. The happy fellahs lay under the shade of dom-palms and drowsed the morning in and the sunset out, for there was nothing to do since Rannu of the Harvests had laid her beneficent hand upon the fields. Across the Mediterranean, nearer the snows, the wheat flowered later and the Feast of Flora held in celebration of the blossoming fields would arrive with the new moon. Egypt could have given her celebration in honor of Flora weeks earlier, but she preferred to wait for Rome. These were not uneventful days in the alabarch's house, for Cypros, with Drumah at her feet, fashioned with her own hands Agrippa's wardrobe and prepared for his departure, while the prince idled about the alabarch's garden, apparently oblivious to the call of his need to go to Rome, in his enjoyment of Junia's fellowship. And Marsyas, daily more grave, gazed at him askance and furthered the plans for the trip, tirelessly. His patience might have continued unworn, but for a single incident. Late one night, when oppressed by the crowding of his unhappy thoughts, he arose from his bed to walk the streets in search of composure, and, descending into the darkness of the alabarch's house, he heard the doors swing in softly. Expecting robbers, or at least a servant returning by stealth from a night's revel, he stepped down into the gloom and waited till the intruder should pass. Softly the unknown approached and laid hand on the stair-rail to ascend. At the second step the figure was between him and the window lighting the stairs. Against the lesser darkness and the stars without, he saw Lydia's outlines etched. Noiselessly, she passed up and out of hearing. In his soul, he knew that she had been to the Nazarenes! "To-morrow," he said grimly to himself, "I prepare the prince's ship! There passes a stiff-necked sacrifice to Saul of Tarsus, unless I can bring him low!" The next morning, Justin Classicus received a letter, by a merchant ship from Syria. He retired into his chamber and read it: "O Brother," it said, "that dwelleth among the heathen, this from thy friend who envieth thy banishment: "I delayed opening thy letter three days, believing it to come from him who lined my threadbare purse while in Alexandria, asking usury, long since due, but at the end of that time, I received his letter of a surety. So I made haste to open thy slandered missive, and greater haste to answer it by way of propitiation. "I read much of thy letter with astonishment, some of it with rancor, some with congratulation. By Abraham's beard, it is almost as good to be fortunate as it is to be single; wherefore in answer to thine only question, I say that I am neither. Thus, am I led up to comment on the facts thou offerest me. "I remember the little Lysimachus, a bit of Ephesian ivory-work, that I augured would go unmarried, seeing that she was so hindered with brains. But naught so good as a dowry to offset the embarrassment of sense in a woman. Prosper, my Classicus! For if thou art the same elegant paganized son of Abraham thou wast in thine old days, thy debts are as many as thy usurers are scarce. Half a million drachmæ; demand no less a dowry than that, my Classicus! "But here, below, thou writest that which hath cut my limbs from under me and set me heavily and helpless on the carpet! A manumitted slave, a cumbrous yokel of an Essene, hath given thee troublous nights, because the lady's eyes soften in his presence! Thou scented son of Daphne; Athene's darling; Venus' latest joy! To let a Phidian colossus, with a face high-colored like a comic mask, outstrip thee! "Thou camest upon them once, the lady's hand in his! Again, she stammered under his look! And yet a third time, he wrapped a cloak about her, and lingered getting his arm away! And all these things thou didst suffer and didst take no more revenge than to write thy plaint to me, eight hundred miles away! "By the philippics of Jeremiah, thou deservest a wife with a figure like a durra loaf, and dowered with nine sisters for thy support! "Thou opinest in a lady-like way, that he is a Nazarene! Thou addest, with a flurry of spleen, that the proconsul of Egypt hateth him! Thou offerest a womanish suspicion that he fled from difficulty here in Judea! Now, any blind dolt could see substance in this for the overthrow of a rival. Lackest thou courage, Classicus, or hast thou money enough to last thee till thou findest another lady? "Is it not a sufficient cause against him that he is a Nazarene? Or perchance thou dost not know of them, which astonishes me more, since Pharaoh in the plagues was not more cumbered with flies than the earth is of Nazarenes. But read herein hope, then, against thy suspected rival. "These heretics are persistent offenders against law and order, rebellious and otherwise unruly. One Pharisee, Saul of Tarsus, proceedeth against them, for the Sanhedrim. Whether he is an instrument of a political party or an immoderate zealot, is not for me to say; perchance he is both. At any rate he rages against the iniquity of the apostasy as a continuing whirlwind. He is not applying his methods locally, only. He reaches into neighboring provinces, and it is his oath to pursue the heresy unto the end of the world and bring back the last to judgment. Vitellius is assisting him in Judea, Herod Antipas in Galilee and Aretas in Syria. I expect hourly to hear that Cæsar hath lent him a strong arm, because the rebels are particularly rabid against Rome. "Of course, the members of the congregation are divided, but thou knowest that even a small number of zealous defenders of the faith can set a whole Synagogue by the ears. Even so tepid a Jew as I should not care to rub shoulders with a Nazarene. "Do I give thee life, O languid lover? "Of thyself, I would hear more and oftener. Await not the rising of a new rival to write to me. Fear not; I shall not ask to borrow money of thee--until thou hast wedded the Lysimachus. "All thy friends in Jerusalem greet thee. Be happy and be fortunate. Thy friend, "PHILIP OF JERUSALEM." At this point Classicus composedly doubled the parchment, broke it lengthwise and cross-wise and clapped his hands for a slave. A Hebrew bondman appeared. "This for the ovens," said Classicus, handing it to him. When the servant disappeared, the philosopher descended into his house and was dressed for a visit. An hour before the noon rest, he appeared in the garden of the alabarch. There he found Lydia and Junia, Agrippa, Cypros, the alabarch and Flaccus, idly discussing the day's opening of the Feast of Flora. He had given and received greetings and merged his interests in the subject, when Marsyas appeared in the colonnade. He had taken off the kerchief usually worn about the head, and carried it on his arm. As he passed the spare old alabarch, the heavy purple proconsul and the exquisite Herod, not one of the guests there gathered but made successive comparisons between him and the others. Junia gazed at him steadily, under half-closed lids, but Lydia followed him with a look, half-sorrowful, half-happy, and wholly involuntary. Cypros glanced at his flushed forehead and damp hair. "Hast thou been into the city?" she asked with sweet solicitude. "To the harbor-master," he answered, "I have been making ready thy lord's ship." Agrippa overheard the low answer, and turned upon him irritably. "I have said that I do not depart until after the Feast of Flora," he remarked. "The men of the sea do not expect fair winds before three days," Marsyas replied, "wherefore we must abide until after the Feast." "But my raiment is not prepared," Agrippa protested. "Thou goest hence, my lord, to Rome, to be dressed by the masters of the science of raiment," Marsyas assured him. Classicus raised his head and addressed to the Essene the first remark since the memorable night of Marsyas' arrival in Alexandria. "What a game it is," he opined amiably, "to see thee managing this slippery Herod!" Agrippa flushed angrily, but Marsyas did not await the retort. "My brother's pardon," he said, "but the Herod has fine discrimination between cares becoming his exalted place, and the labors of a steward." Agrippa's face relaxed, but Classicus broke off the swinging end of a vine that reached over his shoulder and slowly pulled it to pieces. Junia sitting next to Marsyas turned to him. "So thou wilt follow Flora?" she asked. "No." "Why?" she insisted, smiling. "Thou must go to Rome, where Flora runs every day. Wilt thou turn thy back upon Egypt's joy and see only Italy's?" "Is Rome so much worse than Alexandria?" "Not worse; only more pronounced. There is more of Rome; the world gets its impulse there. So much is done; so many are doing. And, by the caprice of the Destinies, thou art to see Rome more than commonly employed." "How?" he asked. By this time, the others were talking and the two spoke unheard together. "Hist! I tell it under my breath, because the noble proconsul is burdened with the great responsibility of declaring the emperor's deathlessness, and I would not contradict him aloud. But Tiberius is old, old--and Rome casts about for his successor. But chance hath it that interest hath uncoupled the two eyes so that the singleness of sight is divided. 'Look right,' saith one; 'look left,' saith the other, and each looking his own way reviles his fellow and creates disturbance in the head. But it behooves thee, gentle Jew, to bid thine eyes contemplate Tiberius, to do oriental obeisance and say as the Persians say; 'O King, live for ever!" "But yesterday, thou didst cast a kindly light over the world's hardness. Tear it not away thus soon and frighten me with the fierce power against which I must shortly go and demand tribute," he protested lightly. She took down her arms, clasped back of her head, to look at him. "Light-hearted eremite!" she chid. "Never a Jew but believed that all the happenings in the world happen in Jerusalem--that there is nothing else to come to pass after Jerusalem's full catalogue of possibilities is exhausted. But I tell thee that, compared to Rome, Jerusalem is an unwatered spot in the desert where once in a century a loping jackal passes by to break its eventlessness." "Lady," he said with his old gravity, "Judea is a Roman province. Is Rome harsher to her citizens than she is with her subjugated peoples?" "Thou art nearer the executive seat; under the eye of Power itself. Icarus, on his waxen wings, was unsafe enough in the daylight; but he was undone by soaring too close to the sun!" "What shall I do, then?" he asked. "Attach thyself to a power; get behind the buckler of another's strength!" "Power is not offering its protection for nothing; what have I to give in exchange for it?" Almost inadvertently, she let her eyes run over him, and seemed impelled to say the words that leaped to her lips. But she recovered herself in time. "It is a generous world," she said, "and such as thou shall not go friendless; depend upon it!" When Marsyas glanced up, his eyes rested on Lydia's, and for a moment he was held in silence by the faint darkening of distress that he saw there. Something wild and sweet and painful struggled in his breast and fell quiet so quickly that he sat with his lips parted and his gaze fixed until the alabarch's daughter dropped her eyes. "I heard thee speak of Rome," she said. "After thy labor is done, wilt thou remain there?" "No," he answered slowly, "I return to En-Gadi." "En-Gadi," Junia repeated. "Where is that and why shouldst thou go there?" "It is the city of the Essenes, a city of retreat. It is in the Judean desert on the margin of the Dead Sea." "After Rome, that!" Junia cried. But Lydia said nothing and Marsyas, gazing at her in hope of discovering some little deprecation, some little invitation to remain in the world, forgot that the Roman woman had spoken. Classicus, who had been a quiet observer of the few words spoken between the Essene and the alabarch's daughter, drew himself up from his lounging attitude. "To En-Gadi?" he repeated, attracting the attention of the others, who had not failed to note his sudden interest in Marsyas. "Why?" "I am an Essene fallen into misfortune; but once an Essene, an Essene always," Marsyas answered. "An Essene?" the philosopher observed. Then after a little silence he began again. "In Alexandria, we live less rigorously than in Judea, even too little so, we discover at times. Wherefore it is needful that we watch that no further lapse is made, which will carry us into lawlessness." "Ye are lax, yet wary that ye be not more lax?" Marsyas commented perfunctorily. "Even so. From Agrippa's lips, we learn that thou hast led a precarious life of late; an eventful, even adventurous life: that thou hast been accused and hast escaped arrest. Thou wilt pardon my familiarity with thine own affairs." "Go on," said Marsyas. "In Alexandria--even in Alexandria, of late, the Jews have resolved not to entertain heretics--" "In Alexandria, the extreme ye will risk in hospitality is one simply accused." "I commend thy discernment. But we separate ourselves from the convicted." "So it is done in Judea. But continue." Classicus waited for an expectant silence. "Thou carryest about thee," he said, "an emblem which none but a Nazarene owns." Marsyas contemplated Classicus very calmly. He had been accused of apostasy before, but by one whose every impulse had root in irrational fanaticism. He had not expected this Romanized Jew to become zealous for the faith; instead, he knew that Classicus would have pursued none other for suspicion, but himself. Why? He glanced at Lydia. Alarm and protest were written on every feature. Classicus saw that she was prepared to defend Marsyas and his face hardened. Then the Essene understood! A flush of warm color swept over his face. Without a word he put his hand into his robes and drew forth and laid upon his palm the little cedar crucifix. Cypros uttered a little sound of fright; Agrippa whirled upon Marsyas with frank amazement on his face. After a moment's intent contemplation of the Essene's face, Junia settled back into her easy attitude and smiled. Lydia sprang up; yet before the rush of precipitate speech reached her lips, there came, imperative and distinct, Marsyas' telepathic demand on her attention. Tender but commanding, his dark eyes rested upon her. "Thou shall not betray thyself for me!" they said. "Thou shalt not bring sorrow to thy father's heart and disaster upon thy head! Thou shalt keep silence, and permit me to defend thee! I command thee; thou canst do naught else but obey!" She wavered, her cheeks suffused, and her eyes fell. When she lifted them again, they were flashing with tears. A moment, and she slipped past her guests into the house. The alabarch broke the startled silence; he had turned almost wrathfully upon Classicus. "It seems," he exclaimed, "that thou hast needlessly broadened thine interests into matters which once did not concern thee!" "Good my father," Classicus responded, "thou hast lost two sons already to idolatry and false doctrines. And thy lovely daughter, thou seest, is no more secure from the seductions of an attractive apostasy than were they!" "Well?" Marsyas asked quietly. "It is not needful to point the man of discernment to his duty," Classicus returned. "Methinks," said Marsyas, rising, "that the sharp point of a pretext urges me out of Alexandria, as it did in Judea. Thou hast had no scruples," he continued, turning to Agrippa, "thus far in accepting the companionship of an accused man, so I do not expect to be cast off now." "But," Agrippa protested, stammering in his surprise and perplexity, "acquit thyself, Marsyas. Thou art no Nazarene!" "No charge so light to lift as this, my lord," Marsyas answered. "Yet even for thy favor I will not do it!" Agrippa looked doubtful, and the alabarch exclaimed with deep regret: "What difficulty thou settest in the way of my debt to thee! Thou, to whom I owe my daughter's life!" "Yet have a little faith in me," Marsyas said to him. "And for more than I am given lief to recount, I am thy debtor!" He put the crucifix into the folds of his garments. "I am prepared to go to Rome, even now," he added to Agrippa. "But--I would stay until after the Feast of Flora," the prince objected stubbornly. Cypros was breaking in, affrightedly, when Flaccus interrupted. "Come! come!" he said, with a bluff assumption of good nature. "Thou art not banished from the city, young man! I am legate over Alexandria, and a conscienceless pagan, wherefore thou hast not offended my gods nor done aught to deserve my disfavor. Get thee down to Rhacotis among thy friends--or thine enemies--till the Herod hath diverted himself with Flora, and go thy way to Rome! What a tragedy thou makest of nothing tragic!" "O son of Mars," Marsyas said to himself, "I do not build on finding asylum there. Never a pitfall but is baited with invitation!" But Cypros turned to the proconsul, her face glowing with thankfulness under her tears. "Is it pleasing to thee, lady?" the proconsul asked jovially. "Twice, thrice thou hast been my friend!" she cried. "I shall go," said Marsyas. "Remember, my lord prince, these many things which I and others suffer add to the certainty that thou shalt be called to pay my debt against Saul of Tarsus, one day! Three days hence, thou and I shall sail for Rome!" He saluted the company and passed out of the garden. "Perchance," said Flaccus dryly, with his peculiar aptitude for insinuation, "an officer should conduct him to this nest of apostates." "He will go, never fear!" Cypros declared, brushing away tears. "By Ate! the boy is spectacular," Agrippa vowed suddenly. "He is no Nazarene! I know how he came by that unholy amulet. It is a relic of that young heretic friend of his, whom they stoned in Jerusalem!" But Junia found immense amusement in that surmise. Presently, she laughed outright. "O Classicus, what a blunderer thou art! Right or wrong, thou hast brought down the ladies' wrath, not upon the comely Essene, but upon thine own head for abusing him!" CHAPTER XVIII THE RANSOM Marsyas passed up to his room to put his belongings together. The sound of his movements within reached Lydia in her refuge, and, when he came forth, she stood in the gloom of the hall without, awaiting him. Moved with a little fear of her reproach, he went to her, with extended hands. "What have I done?" she whispered. "Thou hast done nothing," he said quickly. "I blame myself for keeping the amulet about me, when I should have destroyed it. But I could not--I have not yet; because--it is thine!" "But I kept silence--I who owned the crucifix--" "I made thee keep silence!" "But what have they said to thee; what wilt thou do?" she insisted. "I go without more obloquy than I brought hither with me; I was accused, before; I could stand further accusation, for thy sake! They have said nothing; done nothing--I go to Rhacotis, to await the departure of Agrippa, who goes to Rome at the end of three days--nay; peace!" he broke off, as a momentous resolution gathered in her pale face. "Thou wilt keep silence, else I do this thing in vain!" "I will not slander myself!" she cried. "I am not afraid to confess my fault--" "But thou shall not do it!" he declared. "The punishment for it would not be alone for thyself! Choose between the quiet of thy conscience and the peace and pride of thy father! Bethink thee, the inestimable harm thou canst do by this thing! Be not deceived that the story of thy lapse would be kept under thy father's roof. That ignoble pagan governor below has no care for thy sweet fame! He would tell it; thy maidens would hear of it and fear thee or follow thee! Thy father's government over his people would be weakened; the elders of the Synagogue would question him--Lydia, suffer the little hurt of conscience for thine own account, rather than afflict many for thy pride's sake!" Her small hands, white in the darkness of the corridor, were twisted about each other in distress. Marsyas' pity was stirred to the deepest. "How unhappy thou hast been!" he said, touching upon her apostasy. "Give over thy wavering and be the true daughter of God, once more! Let us destroy this evil amulet!" He plucked the crucifix from his tunic and caught it between his hands to break it, when she sprang toward him and seized his wrists. "Do not so!" she besought, her eyes large with fright. He had forced her to defend it, and she had stood to the breach; he had proved the gravity of her disaffection for the faith of Abraham. "Why wilt thou endanger thyself for this social drift?" he demanded passionately. "Lydia! How canst thou turn from the faith of thy fathers?" "I--I am not worthy to be a Nazarene!" she answered. "They are forbidden to enact a falsehood!" "Let be; I do not care for their philosophy; it is like the Law of Rome.--an empty armor that any knave can wear. But I urge thee to behold what misery thou invitest upon thyself! What will come of it? Immortal as thou art in soul, thou canst not keep alive the single spark of wisdom in the ashes of their folly; thou canst not save them against the combined vengeance of the whole world! But thou canst be disgraced with them, persecuted with them, and die with them! Unhallowed the day that ever Classicus spoke their name to thee! Cursed be his words! May the Lord treasure them up against him--!" "Hush! hush!" she whispered. He became calm with an effort. "Lydia," he began after a pause, "it is a poor intelligence that can not foresee as ably as the augurs. One successful life gives opportunity, to all that spring from it, to be successful; a failure scatters the seed of misfortune through all its blood. Choose thou for thyself and thou choosest for a nation which comes after thee. I see thee radiant, crowned, worshiped; and if they who come up under thy guidance walk as thou dost walk, Lydia shall give queens unto principalities and rulers unto satrapies. These be days when women of virtue and women of remark; women of wisdom are remembered women. And thou, virtuous, wise and noble--the empresses of coming Cæsars will assume thy name to conceal their tarnishment under a badge of luster! This on one hand. On the other thou shalt flee from the stones of the rabble, come unto the humiliation of thy womanhood and the agony of thy body in the torture-cell, and die like a criminal!" She shrank away with a quivering sound and flung her hands over her ears. He caught her and drew her close, until she all but rested on his breast. "Lydia, naught but mine extremity could make me speak thus to thee," he said tremulously and in a passion of appeal. "If the words be hideous, let the actualities that they mean warn thee in time!" "But--thou dost not understand," she faltered, drawing away from him. "I do understand; through anguish and rancor and suffering, I have learned. Must I give all to the vengeance of God, who visiteth apostates for their iniquity? Lydia, depart not from the righteous religion, I implore thee. Behold its great age," he went on, speaking rapidly and with quickened breath, "behold its history, its monuments, its achievements, its great exponents, its infallibility! The rest of the world was an unimagined futurity when an able son of thy race was minister to Pharaoh and lord over the whole land of Egypt. The godly kings of thy people were poets and musicians when Pindar's and Homer's ancestors were still Peloponnesian fauns with horns in their hair. Before Isis and Osiris, before Bel and Astarte, thy God was molding universes and hanging stars in the sky. And lo! the sons of the Pharaohs are wasted weaklings, fit only for slaves; the Chaldees are dust in the dust of their cities; Babylonia is hunting-ground for jackals and the perch of bats; Rome--even Rome's greatness hath returned into the sinews of her hills, but there is no decadence in Israel, no weakness in her God! Aid not in the perversion of her ancient faith--thou who art the incarnation of her queens--" He halted, but only for an instant, in which he seemed to throw off recurring restraint and drove on: "David did not seek for one more lovely, nor Solomon for one more wise! Truth, even Truth demands dear tribute when it takes a life. For a mere scintillation of verity, wilt thou die?" "I--I fear not," she answered painfully. "I--who could be affrighted out of telling a truth!" Not his prayer, but the Nazarene's teaching had weight with her, at that moment! "All thy hazard of life and fame for their vague philosophy," he cried, "and not one stir of pity for me!" There was a moment of complete silence; then she lifted her face. "Thou knowest better," she said, "thou, who labored in vain with Stephen, who loved thee!" His heart contracted; for a moment he entertained as practicable a resolve to stay stubbornly under the alabarch's roof until he had broken the determination of this sweet erring girl to destroy herself. He drew in his breath to speak, but the futileness of his words occurred to him. Again, he had a thought of telling the alabarch privately of his daughter's peril, but instantly doubted that the good old Jew could move her. While he debated desperately with himself, she drew, nearer to him. "Be not angry with me! If thou leavest Alexandria in three days, it may be that I--shall not see thee again--" "So I am dismissed to know no rest until I have brought Saul of Tarsus low, for thy sake, as well as for Stephen's!" He knew at the next breath that he had hurt her, and repented. "I shall see thee once more," he said hurriedly, feeling that he dared not make retraction. He took up the pilgrim's wallet containing his belongings, and put out his hand to her. She took it, so wistfully, so sorrowfully, that a wave of compunction swept over him. Bending low, he pressed his lips to her palm, and hastened, full of agitation, out of the alabarch's house. The preparations for the Feast of Flora had been brought to completeness. The funds for the lavish display had come out of the taxes upon provinces, the flamens managed it, the patricians and the rich patronized it and all Alexandria, whether rich or poor, free or enslaved, plunged into its celebration with recklessness and relish. The dwellers of the Regio Judæorum took no part in the celebration, but Marsyas saw that a spirit of interest invaded the district, even to the doors of the great Synagogue. Mothers in Israel put aside the wimples over their faces when they met in the narrow passages or the market-places to talk of the recurring abomination in lowered voices and with sidelong glances to see if the velvet-eyed children, who clung to their garments, heard. Fathers in Israel, rabbis and constabularies were abroad to make preparation against the local characteristic which tended to turn every popular gathering into a demonstration against the Jews. The bloody uproar of the preceding year was fresh in the fear of the people, and though Lysimachus had spread abroad the promise of the proconsul, the Regio Judæorum had cause to be doubtful of the favor of a former persecutor. But as the young man entered the Gentile portion of the city, he saw that, from the Lochias to the Gate of the Necropolis, Alexandria was no longer a city of normal life and labor but a play-ground for revel and lawlessness. The two main avenues which crossed the city toward the four cardinal points were cleared of traffic and the marks of wheel and hoof were stamped out by crowds that filled the roadways. The crowding glories of Alexandrian architecture which lined these noble highways--temples, palaces, theaters, baths, gymnasia, stadia and fora, high marks of both Greek and Roman society--were wreathed, pillar and plinth, with laurel and roses, lilies and myrtle, nelumbo and lotus. Fountains gave up perfumed water; aromatic gums in bowls set upon staves fumed and burned and were filling the dead airs of the Alexandrian calm with oriental musks; everywhere were the reedy shrilling of pipe, the tinkle of castanet, the mellow notes of flutes and the muttering of drums. Wine was flowing like water; immense public feasts were in progress, at which droves of sheep and oxen were served to gathered multitudes, which were never full-fed except at Flora's bounty. Processions were streaming along the streets, meeting at intersections to romp, break up in revel and end in excess. Tens of thousands with one impulse, one law, frolicked, fought, drank, danced, sang, piped, wooed, forgot everything, grudges and all, except Flora and her license and bounty. The citizens were no longer the descendants of Quirites, remnant of the Pharaohs or the Macedonian kings, but satyrs, fauns, bacchantes, nymphs, mimes and harlequins. Marsyas kept away from the crowds and went by deserted paths toward Rhacotis. He knew without inquiry where to find the Nazarene quarter. It was marked by the strange, strained silence that hovers over houses where life is not secure, by poverty, by orderliness, by the patient faces of the humble dwellers, by the brotherly greeting that the few citizens gave him as he approached. He saw many of the garrison loitering about, but they permitted him to pass without notice. The roar of the merrymaking without swept into the quiet passages like a titanic purr of satisfaction. The young man had grown away from his toleration of solitude. His Essenic training had suffered change; its usages, at variance with his nature, had become difficult as soon as the opportunity for more congenial habits had presented itself. Only a few weeks before, he could voyage the giant breadth of the Mediterranean, excluding himself from the contaminating Nazarenes, without effort. Now, he asked himself how he was to live among these people for three days. He found the quarter absolutely packed with people, and realized then how many followers of Jesus of Nazareth there were in Alexandria, and how thoroughly Flaccus had weeded them out of the rest of the city. He looked about him, grew impatient, and, with the ready invention of a man who has lived only by devices for the past many months, made up his mind to house himself elsewhere than in the crowded Nazarene quarter. "I will go to the ship," he said to himself. "It is victualed and ready for the prince's arrival to weigh anchor. No one but my seamen need know that I am there, and they will be too intent on Flora to speak of me abroad in the city!" He turned promptly and made his way down the quarter toward the harbor. Within sound of the waters lapping on the wharf piling, a soldier of the city garrison stepped into his way. "Back!" he said harshly. Marsyas stopped. "Why may I not pass?" he demanded. "None passes from this rebel's nest hereafter!" CHAPTER XIX THE DELIVERANCE There followed time for diverse and earnest meditation for Marsyas: He criticized himself sarcastically, for permitting himself to be so easily entrapped, and cast about him for means of escape. He found by successive trials that the siege was perfect. Half of Alexandria's garrison had been posted about the district. The more he considered his predicament, the more an atmosphere of impending danger weighted the air of the Nazarene community. He did not seek the hospitality of the Nazarenes, because he had not come to the point of admitting that he was to remain among them. At nightfall, while the roar of the reveling city without swept over the community, he hoped to find some unguarded spot in the Roman lines, but his hope was vain. With his attention thus forced upon the people penned in with him, he began to wonder if there might not yet be some profit in counsel with his fellows, hemmed in for some purpose by Flaccus. He found the inhabitants gathered in a broad space in one of the streets, where at one time a statue or a fountain might have stood, but after a few minutes' listening, he heard only prayers and words of submission to the unknown peril threatening them. Angry and disappointed he flung himself away from the gathering, to spend the night in the streets. But after the first gust of his anger, it was brought home to him very strongly, that these people were gifted with a new courage, the courage of submission--to him the most mysterious and impossible of powers. Led from this idle conclusion into yet deeper contemplation of the Nazarene character, he found himself admitting astonishing evidences in their favor. He had known not a few of them. Stephen had been beatified, the most exalted, yet the sweetest character that he had ever known. Lydia, wavering and hesitating between Judaism and the faith of Jesus of Nazareth, struggled with fine points of conscience, and persisted, in the face of terror,--the most potent controlling agent, Marsyas had believed, over the spirit of womanhood. The Nazarene body at Ptolemais had displayed before him a humanness in subjection, that, in spite of his own resolute disposition, seemed triumphant, after all. They had preached peace, and had maintained it in the face of the most trying circumstances. On ship-board, he had been shown that they were long-suffering. About him now, while Alexandria rioted and reveled in excess, their order and decorum were highly attractive. These were excellences that he did not willingly see; circumstances and environment had forced their recognition upon him. At a late hour, he was sought and found by their pastor, the tall old teacher, whom he had come to consider as a man whom, for his own spiritual welfare, he should shun. "Young brother," the pastor said, "thou art without shelter here, and imprisoned among us. I respect thy wish to be left to thyself, yet we can not see thee unhoused. I have a cell in yonder ruined wall; it is solitary and secluded. Do thou take it, and I shall find shelter among my people." Marsyas felt his cheeks grow hot, under the cover of the night. "I thank thee," he responded, "but I am here only for a little time. I am young and hardy; I will not turn thee out of thy shelter." "If thy time with us is stated, thou art fortunate. Alexandria hath not set her limit upon our imprisonment. Yet, I shall find a niche in the house of one of my people; be not ashamed to take my place." Without waiting for the young man to protest, the Nazarene signed him to follow, and led on through the dark to the place indicated--the remnant of an ancient house--a single standing wall of earth, sufficiently thick to be excavated to form a shallow cave. There was room enough for a pallet of straw within, and a reed matting hung before the opening. The pastor bade the young man enter, blessed him and disappeared. Marsyas sat down in the cramped burrow, and, resting his head on his hands and his elbows on his knees, said to himself, in discomfiture: "Beshrew the enemy that permits you to find no fault in him!" It was not the last time in the memorable three days of imprisonment that he frowned and deprecated the excellence of his hosts. He accepted their simple hospitality in moody helplessness, and spent his time either hovering on the outskirts of their nightly meetings, or vainly searching for a plan to escape. He noted finally that they stinted themselves food, but gave him his usual share; water appeared less often and less plentiful. The pastor was not less confident, but more withdrawn within himself: the elders became more grave, the people, oppressed and prayerful. At times, when the gradual growth of distress became more apparent, Marsyas walked apart and chid himself for his resourcelessness. "I am another mouth to feed, among these people," he declared. "And by the testimony of mine own instinct, I am not the least cause of that which hath thrown this siege about them! I will get out!" He began at sunset the second day to discover the extent of the besieged quarter and sound every point for the strength of its particular blockade. He found that the Nazarene portion of Rhacotis stretched from the landings of the bay inland to a series of granaries where Rhacotis, in its smaller days, had built receptacles for the wheat which the rustics brought for shipping. To the west it ended against a stockade for cattle, upon which mounted sentries could overlook a great deal of the quarter. To the east, the limit was a compact row of well-built houses, remnants of the Egyptian aristocratic portion in Alexander's time. The streets intersecting the row and leading into pagan Rhacotis were each closed by a sentry. After his investigations, Marsyas felt that here was the weakest spot in the siege. Central in the row was a tall structure, with ruined clay pylons, blank of wall and, except for supporting beams, roofless. It had been a temple, but was now a dwelling, a veritable warren since the Nazarenes were all driven to occupy a portion which could shelter only a fifth of the number comfortably. Upon this structure, Marsyas' eye rested. Either it would be closely watched from without or not at all. It depended upon the features of the wall fronting on the street at the rear, in which the sentries were posted. For once he blessed a Nazarene night-gathering, when he saw family after family emerge from the tunnel-like doors of the temple-house and proceed silently toward the meeting of their brethren in the street below. A long time after the last emerged and disappeared into the dark, Marsyas crossed to the doors and knocked. For a moment after his first trial, he listened lest there be an answer. He knocked more loudly a second time, and, after the third, he opened the unlocked doors, and, putting in his head, called. The heated interior was totally dark and silent. He stepped in and closed the doors behind him. When at last his eyes became accustomed to the darkness, he saw that he was in a single immense chamber; the entire interior of the old temple was unbroken by partition of any kind. Above him, he saw the crossing of great palm-trunks, bracing the walls, and over them the blue arch of the night. At the rear, the starlight showed him the wall abutting the street of the sentries. It was absolutely blank and fully thirty feet in height. Marsyas sighed and shook his head. Though he made the leap in safety, he could not alight without noise enough to attract the whole garrison to the spot. But, determined to make his investigation thorough before he surrendered the scheme as hopeless, he felt about the great chamber and stumbled on a rude ladder leaning against a side-wall. He climbed it, to find that it reached to a ledge, where the deeper lower half of the wall was surmounted by a clerestory just half its thickness. He found here rows of straw pallets where the overflow of Nazarenes took refuge by night. He pulled up his ladder, set it on the ledge and climbed again, finding himself at the uppermost rung within reach of one of the palm-trunks. He seized it, tried it for solidity and drew himself up on the top of the wall. Fearing detection by the sentries more than the return of the householders, he crept with caution to the angle at the rear, and looked down into the street. He located two sentries, but no nearer the back of the temple than the two streets opening into the other several yards away to the north and south. He lay still to note the direction of their post and found that, in truth, they turned just under him. At a point half-way between either end of their walk, they were more than two hundred paces apart. But Marsyas looked down the sheer wall. He could not possibly accomplish it without injury or discovery or both. With a heavy heart he retraced his steps, descended into the old temple and made his way toward the doors. Before he reached them, he frightened himself by stumbling upon a huge light object that rolled away toward the entrance. He followed cautiously, and touched it again while fumbling for the latch. He felt of it, and finally, swinging the door open, saw by the starlight that it was a huge hamper of twisted palm-fiber, tall enough to contain a man and wide enough for two. He set the thing aside and went out into the night. To-morrow was the last day of his confinement, but he did not expect liberty. He did not doubt that the city meditated the destruction of the Nazarenes, nor that Flaccus would permit him to be overlooked in the general slaughter. Not the least of his fears was that Lydia might be thrust among them at any moment, to share the fate he had striven so hard to avert from her. He returned to his cave in the ruined wall, and lay down on his matting, not to sleep, nor even to plan intelligently, but to submit to his distress. At high noon the third day, on the summit of the Serapeum in Egyptian Rhacotis, there appeared a slender figure in the burnoose of an Arab. Five hundred feet distant, in the beleaguered Nazarene settlement, a woman stood in her doorway to pray, that the earthen roof might not be between her supplication and the Master in Heaven. She saw the microscopic figure on the pylon of the Temple, but daily a priest came there to worship the sun. She saw the figure lift and extend its arms, presently, but that was part of the idolatrous ritual, she thought. She dropped her eyes to the crucifix in her hands and her lips moved slowly. At that instant, at her feet, as a thunderbolt strikes from the clouds, an arrow plunged half its length into the hard sand, and leaned, quivering strongly toward the tiny shape on the summit of the pylon. The Nazarene woman dropped her crucifix and shrieked. The slow fisher-husband appeared beside her, and, seeing the fallen cross, picked it up with fumbling fingers, muttering an exclamation of remonstrance. "Look!" the Nazarene woman cried, pointing to the half-buried bolt, still quivering. The fisherman gazed at it. "Whence came it?" he asked. The trembling woman shook her head and clasped and unclasped her hands. "An affront from the heathen," the man said. "It was despatched to murder thee. The Lord's hand stayed it; blessed be His name!" He plucked the arrow with an effort from the sand, and looked at it. "It is a witness of the Master's care; let us take it to the pastor," he suggested. The trembling woman followed her husband as he stepped into the street and raised her eyes to give thanks. She saw that the figure on the summit of the pylon was gone. The two found the leader of their flock, sitting outside an overcrowded house, bending over a half-finished basket of reeds. Beside him was one complete; at the other hand were his working materials. "Greeting, children, in Christ's name," he said. "Greeting, lord; praise to God in the highest!" The Nazarene woman dropped to her knees, and her husband, extending the arrow in agitation, stumbled through their story. "May His name be glorified for ever," the woman murmured at the end. But the pastor took the arrow and examined it. It was uncommon; the story was uncommon, and he believed that there was more than a wanton attempt at murder in its coming. The bolt was tipped with a pointed flint, and feathered with three long, delicate papyrus cases, one dark, two white. The pastor felt of one of the white feathers, and presently ripped it off the shaft. It opened in his hand. Within was lettering. After a little puzzled study of it, he shook his head and put it down. He loosened the other from the transparent gum and opened it. Written in another hand were the following words in Greek: "To the Nazarene to whom this cometh: "Deliver the arrow unto the young Jew, Marsyas, who dwells among you, but is not of your number." The pastor took up the arrow and the papyrus and arose at once. "Verily, a sending, but it is not for us. Abide here until I deliver it to him that expects it." He turned toward the ruined wall where Marsyas secluded himself. The pastor knocked on the dried earth wall without the cave, and the matting was thrust aside. The young Jew stood there. "I bring thee a message from without," the pastor said at once. "Peace and the love of Christ enter thy heart and uphold thee." He put the arrow into the young man's hand and saluting him with the sign of the cross, went his way. "What blind incaution," Marsyas said, after he had stared in astonishment at the things delivered him. "A message! How does he know that he does not bear to me treachery against his people, and his undoing!" But he sat down and undid the white case. "That is Agrippa's writing!" he declared after he had read it. He took up the other. The writing was in Sanskrit. "O white Brother:" it ran; "this by an arrow from the strong bow of thy lord Prince. Him I compelled. Come forth from among the Nazarenes! Deliver thyself, by nightfall, in the pure name of her whom thou lovest! Come ere that time, if thou canst, but fail not, otherwise, to be in the forefront of Flora's followers! Be prepared to possess her! "Fail not, by all the gods! "Vasti, by the hand of Khosru, priest to Siva." Marsyas seized the writing with both hands and sprang up; reread it with straining eyes; walked the two steps permitted him in his cave over and over again; or leaned against the earthen wall to think. In the pure name of her whom he loved! Lydia? He felt his Essenic self dissolve in a flood of glad confusion, for the moment; instead of self-reproach, he felt more joy than he ever hoped to know in a life devoted to vengeance; instead of guilt, an uplift that separated him for an instant from even his terror for the rapture of contemplating Lydia. Then the grave alarm that the bayadere's letter aroused possessed him. A rereading filled him with consternation. The unrevealed peril that he was to avert, the intimation that Lydia was endangered, the practically insurmountable obstacles in the way of his escape, shook him strongly in his self-control. He made no plans, for desperate conditions did not admit of formulated action. To pass outposts of half a cohort of brawny guards offered success only by a miracle, and the miraculous is not methodical. Presently, he burst out of his burrow and tramped through the bright hours of the afternoon, cursing the sun for its deadly haste to get under the rim of the world, and dizzy with the pressure of terror and anxiety. Near the softening hours of the latter part of the day, while the awakening revel roared louder in the distance, he stopped before the ancient temple. The great hamper stood without the heavy entrance with three little Nazarene children tying ropes to the interstices between the fibers to pull it after them like a wagon. Marsyas looked at the hamper, glanced with intent eyes at the front wall,--a duplicate, except for the entrance, of the rear one,--and then rushed away in search of Ananias, the pastor. He found the pastor sitting outside the house that had given him refuge, cutting soles for sandals from a hide that lay by his side. The Nazarene raised a face so kindly and interested that the young man dropped down beside him and blundered through his story, in his haste to lay the plan for escape before the old man. "At sunset," he hurried on, "or when the night is sufficiently heavy to hide us, I can be let down in the hamper by the rear wall of the old temple--if thou wilt bid some of thy congregation to help me! I pray thee--let not thy belief deny me this help, for the life of my beloved, or mayhap her sweet womanhood, dependeth upon my escape!" He clasped his hands, and gazed with beseeching eyes into the pastor's face. He did not permit himself to think what he would do if the old man denied him. "It is manifest," Ananias said, after a pause for thought, "that only Nazarenes are to be confined herein. And thou, being a Jew, art here under false imprisonment. We shall not be glad to have thee suffer with us." "Yes, yes!" Marsyas cried. "I am falsely accused, and thou wilt avert an injustice--nay, by the holy death of the prophets!" he broke off, "if I could bear you all to refuge after me, I would do it!" "It is the spirit of Christ in thee, my son; nourish it! Yet be not distressed for our sake; He who holdeth the world in the hollow of His hand is with us." Marsyas awaited anxiously the old man's further speech, when he lapsed into silence after his confident claim of divine protection. "Give us the plan, my son, and we will help thee," he said at last. Marsyas took the old man's hand and lifted it impulsively to his lips. While yet the Serapeum was crowned with pale light, but the more squalid streets were blackening, Marsyas, led by Ananias, came to the old temple-house, and briefly unfolded his plan to three stalwart young Gentiles, who had turned their backs upon Jove and assumed the grace of Jesus in their hearts. The hamper with which the children had played all day was brought. Three troll-lines, each forty feet in length and borrowed from the fisher Nazarenes who lived along the bay, were securely knotted in three slits about the rim of the basket. Then, waiting only for the rapidly rising dusk, Marsyas, the three young Gentiles and the pastor climbed cautiously to the top of the side-wall of the old structure, and pulled up the hamper after them. At the angle in the rear, Marsyas, who led the way, stopped. Below it was already night, and he could hear the steps of the sentries in the echoing passage. He had not planned how he should pass them after his descent, but the houses opposite were dark and he did not look for interference, if he took refuge among them. He stepped into the hamper, and the three young men laid hold on the ropes. The pastor spread his hands in blessing over Marsyas' head, and when the sound of the sentries' footsteps was faintest, the hamper, with little sound and at cautious speed, was let down the steep wall. It touched the sand with a grinding sound. Marsyas leaped out, jerked one of the ropes in signal and the hamper sprang aloft. With a muttered blessing on the heads of the apostates, Marsyas leaped across the narrow street, to the shadows of the other houses. Creeping from porch to porch with the sheltering shade of overhanging roofs upon him, he passed guard after guard, until the row finally ended and the open space between him and safety on the bay showed up a line of soldiers guarding the water-front. The distance was not great, and success thus far had made Marsyas strong. With a prayer to the God of those who help themselves, he burst from the passage into the great open of the docking and sped straight for the bay. Instantly a howl went up, a pilum launched after him, shot over his shoulder, the rush of twenty mailed feet came in pursuit, swords, spears and axes flew and fell behind him, but panting and unfaltering he rushed straight to the edge of the wharf and dropped out of sight into the bay. The guards came after him, and hanging over the wharf looked down for him to come up. They saw the circles of water widen and widen, grow stiller and stiller, and finally cease to move, but the head for which they looked did not rise. Meanwhile Marsyas, native of Galilee and lover of her blue sea, arose between sleeping boats far out into the bay. He caught a chain and clung while he drew breath and rested. Not a vessel was manned; every seaman, officer and passenger had gone ashore to follow Flora. Presently, he looked about and took his bearings. There through a darkening lane of water, a hundred feet long, he made out the ornate aplustre of Agrippa's ship. He let himself down into the water again, and, swimming around to port, away from land, climbed by her anchor-chains and got upon deck. The ship was wholly silent and deserted. None was there to ask why he came so unconventionally aboard. He went to the cabin prepared for the prince's reception, and with steward keys still fast to his belt let himself in and prepared to return to Alexandria. CHAPTER XX THE FEAST OF FLORA Marsyas had assumed pagan dress, bound a scarlet ribbon for a fillet about his head, and flung a scarlet cloak over his tunic, and so, identified with the revelers, he safely entered the city. Of the first he met on the brilliantly lighted wharves, he inquired, as a stranger, where he should find the night's celebration. The citizens he addressed, intoxicated with revel, smote him with palm-leaves or thyrsi and haled him with them, as their fellow, seeking Flora. They skirted the Regio Judæorum toward the northwest and swept him along toward the Serapeum. Ever the streets opened up, more brilliantly lighted, more thickly crowded, more boisterously noisy; ever the nucleus of the crowd that had encompassed him increased and thickened and spread, until he was in the heart of a hurrying multitude. Ever they shouted their indefinite anticipations, boasts of their favor with Flora, hopes that the run would be diverting, threats that were half-jocular, half in earnest. And some of them, drunk with anarchy, made hysterical, inarticulate, yelping cries, like dogs on a heated trail. And so, with their silent fellow among them, they went, started into an easy trot, and unhindered, like waters turning over a fall. The strange, half-mad revelry did not make for reassurance in Marsyas. His unexplained fears swept over him from time to time like a chill, and an unspeakable hatred for the unwieldy host about him, as well as the protest of his caution against the quick pace they had set, moved him to separate himself from them as soon as he might. Flora was to begin her flight from the Serapeum, but because the grove was most beautiful and the Temple most rich, the aristocrats of the city had repaired thither to separate themselves from _hoi polloi_, and had builded for themselves the City of Love. Marsyas knew that superior advantages were always for the rich man, and he, who had to be in the forefront of Flora's van, had to gather unto himself the most propitious opportunities. So while the riot of plebeians into which he had been absorbed streamed contentedly on to its own lowly place, Marsyas worked his way out of the crowd and approached the City of Love. The glow of its lights, breaking through low-hanging branches and pillared avenues of tree-trunks, reached Marsyas with its music, its shouts and its tumult, but its inhabitants were shut away behind foliage, that their doings might be screened from the unqualified. The young man looked here and there for a way to enter, but the cunningly extended grove reached from street to street and blocked his passage. Drawing closer he saw that a cordon of soldiers from the city garrison had been thrown around the grove for protection during revels. At that moment, some one whispered in his ear. "Thou art in time, white brother. Continue and fail not!" He looked to catch a glimpse of Vasti, the bayadere, at his side. She was wrapped from head to heel in a murky red silk, like a fire-illumined tissue of smoke. He exclaimed to himself that this was no old woman, nor yet one young. There was too much lissome grace in the sinuous figure, and too much unearthly wisdom in the dark mysterious face. An instant and she had disappeared like a spirit. A little dazed he turned to follow his approved course, but stopped, seeing that many humbler folk who had preceded him were halted and driven away. The benefits of the grove were distinctly for those who came with a following and in chariots. The cars of the rich were constantly passing through the line of guards; the numbers were greatly increasing, and presently became congested. The shouts of the impatient waiting ones, the pawing of the horses and the calls of the slaves running hither and thither, added uproar to the lines which closed in around him, until finally he could go neither forward nor backward. While he turned this way and that for an avenue of escape, he found that he stood beside a shell of a chariot, with Junia and Justin Classicus seated within. Classicus was not given readily to seeing people afoot, and Marsyas stepped hastily out of view. But the Roman woman had already discovered him. He saw her speak to Classicus, and, while he waited in resentment to be pointed out, Classicus leaped lightly out of the car, and, forcing his way through a crush of slaves, got up beside another, whom Marsyas saw to be Agrippa. Then Junia leaned down to him. "Come up; thou art safe," she said. "I will not betray thee. What was it, reason or repentance that freed thee?" Her eyes sparkled and her breath came and went quickly between her parted lips. "An errand," he answered, "and the soldiers will not let me pass." "An errand? Flora's errand? Nay, but thou art an Essene. Come up, I say. The soldiers must pass thee if I bid them." With thanks on his lips he stepped in beside her and was presently driven without further interruption through the line of sentries, to the circle of abandoned chariots within. There, alighting, the young man found himself deftly thrust into the crowd by Junia to avoid meeting the proconsul or Justin Classicus. She lost herself with him, and entirely obscured from any he had ever seen before, they proceeded. "I have delivered thee an evil charge," she said, and there was a note of regret in her voice. "Yesterday and the day before they would have been less objectionable, and seeing them hour by hour thou shouldst have become gradually accustomed to their aberration. But suddenly exposed to this night's work, thy soul will be covered with confusion." Marsyas smiled awkwardly. The woman could not understand that nothing short of the motive that had actuated him could have moved him to follow Flora; neither did he wish her to rest under the self-blame that she had urged him. "I do not go of mine own will, nor even thine," he answered. "I was summoned." "What! has Flora summoned thee?" she cried, gazing at him in unfeigned astonishment. "Fie on her boldness! Only the Floras of Rome do such a thing!" "A new evil in Rome?" he responded, smiling. "O lady, I can not go thither unless thou promise me protection!" She laughed and waved him a warning hand. "Behold how thou acceptest my counsel here in Alexandria! What obedience need I expect in Rome?" Without waiting for his answer, she turned him out of the open into the grove. No extensive vista greeted him. No lamps, only their lights were visible. No green-and-gold walled aisle led far in a straight line. The woodland screening of leaf and branch prevailed everywhere. The music, the shouts, the tumult seemed to be in another direction than the one toward which they were tending. Marsyas went uncertainly; he had been bidden to be in the forefront of Flora's van, and ahead of him was falling silence. The splendid creature at his side held her peace, and moved rapidly. Gradually, the people thinned out, and when Junia turned him into another aisle they were alone. She seemed to be conducting him away from the music and noise. Only for a moment, he hesitated at a loss, and then with an apologetic smile, he said to her: "We will go this way,"--and, turning at right angles, led back toward the tumult. "Marsyas," she said, with more impatience than reproach, "and thou art an Essene! How I reproach myself!" But he smiled uncomfortably, and kept on. The wail of instruments, wild and discordant, the blowing of horns, the pulsation of drums, seemed suddenly to unite as they approached. Above the clamor and squeal of cymbals and pipes, voices were lifted, loud and strained as if striving to be heard above the uproar. Some of them merely shouted, most of them were singing, not one but many songs; shrieks and laughter shrilled through it all, and once in a while the musical tone of a rich throat triumphant above the noise bespoke the presence of gift with frenzy. The tumult was not now distant, and Marsyas did not wish Junia's further aid. His search after Flora was not a thing to be published abroad. He glanced at the lights, looked about for a less circuitous route, and, with a word to her, plunged through the brake toward the revel. Before she had thought to protest, the forefront of a procession penetrated from the side of the aisle and, streaming across, broke through the green on the other side. The first were flamens, Greek, Roman and Egyptian, robed in the pallium and carrying the lituus--first, if the order of procession had been observed, but before them, and about them bounded a harlequinade of baboons, centaurs, goats, swine--loose, ill-fashioned disguises that only robbed their wearers of human form and did not achieve the animal semblance. Among them were slighter figures of lizards, snails on active pretty limbs, toads, beetles--glittering, sinuous things that surpassed the heavier figures in agility and boldness. After them came a great cornucopia of gold, banded with spiral garlands of roses, studded with jewels and drawn on low ivory wheels by snow-white mule-colts. Out of the shell-tinted mouth of the great horn, and luxuriously bedded on a gauze of gold cast over the flowers and fruits, was the rosy figure of a little boy, with pearly wings bound to his shoulders. Thus Eros proceeded to Flora. Only thus far was any semblance of order distinguishable in the procession. The wave of uproar suddenly assumed overwhelming proportions; the aisle was inundated with frenzy. Marsyas moved forward, Junia moving with him, and the tumult drawing its bulky length across the aisle swept in now by multitudes. He was caught; Junia clung to him determinedly for a moment, but was torn away; he permitted himself to be swallowed up and pitched along by the flood. He attracted no consecutive attention. Mænads flung themselves upon him because his cheeks were crimson and his figure notable, but other youths with glowing cheeks drew the mænads away, now and again. Satyrs, fauns and bacchantes saluted him, tumbled him, buffeted him: one snatched off his scarlet fillet and crowned him with a wreath of grape-leaves, while a second thrust a thyrsus into his hand. Some clung about his shoulders and bawled into his ear; others reached him flagons of wine and did not notice that others snatched the drink away. These things were single events that stood up out of the daze of astonishment and shock that confounded him. The noise roared louder at every step: the thousands about him augmented. The grove opened more; the lights became more scattering and presently he found that he had been swept through another circle of chariots and outpost of soldiery into the city again. Hurriedly glancing at the buildings on each side of the street into which the procession poured, he saw a sufficient number of familiar marks to inform him that he had been borne out on the Rhacotis side of the city. Then the blood within him chilled. This half-maddened, half-murderous multitude was upon the trail of Flora, and was driving toward the settlement of the Nazarenes! An unshakable conviction possessed him, that Lydia stood between! Meanwhile the army of rabble joined the procession of aristocrats. From every avenue fresh multitudes poured in and added to the thousands. Except for the bounding mimes about them the flamens kept the front of the horde, following with downcast eyes the trail of yellow roses which, Marsyas now knew, led the procession. In the midst of the gigantic hurly-burly he saw with strained eyes and a laboring heart that the light-footed goddess had made a long, deviating flight: that over and over again she doubled on her tracks, but that the detours led with deadly sureness toward the Nazarenes. Impelled now by desperation, he began to work his way toward the front. But he had not reckoned on the immense length of the procession, nor how far he had been absorbed into the heart of it. Only when he was rushed over a slight rise in the street did he know that ahead of him for a great distance was a sea of tossing heads and moving shoulders, and on either side a compact wave wholly filled the two hundred feet of street and washed up against the walls of the houses. The street opened up into an immense square, the last stadium which marked the limit of the Roman influence in the Egyptian settlement. Beyond that, on the water-front, were the streets of the Nazarenes! Praying and struggling, Marsyas hardly noticed the increase of noise beginning at the front and extending back to him and passing until the wild clamor resolved itself into a stunning shout that shook Alexandria and rippled the face of the bay. "Flora! _Dea maxima_! _Solis filia_! Give us joy; give us joy!" The trail of roses had been broken off. Flora had been found. But another roar went up, here and there from the great body there were cries of protest and disappointment: the voice of looters and brawlers that had been deprived of sacrificial blood. There were hisses, shouts of derision and cries to the populace to press on. But the flamens stopped; the great concourse halted by rank and rank until the slackening and final cessation of movement imprisoned the dissenters that were resolved to go on. The main body continued its greetings to the goddess, above the cry of the dissatisfied. At the far side of the open was a tiny squat temple, hardly more than a shrine, to Rannu, the Egyptian goddess of the harvests. On the top of the cornice with the blush lights of the City of Love upon her, stood a girl. Thus lifted into the night sky, her features could not be distinguished, and Marsyas believed that she was mummied, face and figure, in wrappings. He continued to press forward. The small figure on the summit of the Temple stirred, turned half about and slowly raised her arms with a motion that seemed half-command, half-salute to the great expectant crowd below. Then wing-like mists, taking into themselves the sunset flush of the fires of the City of Love, rose up and fluttered about her. Long, flaming, melon-colored tongues licked in and out of the illusion: distended convolutions of tissue tinged with rose floated and drifted above her, beside her, before her; shivering streamers of silver reached up and failed and dissolved; jagged streaks and reduplications of fiery jets stood out and up and all about her. When the clouds of pearly vapor lifted and eddied about her head, girdled her with circles or framed her with rosy wheels, the center of all this motion was distinguishable only as a snow-white spindle that whirled with dizzy rapidity. And presently it was noted that the shape was losing the mummy form, that more and more the outlines of a beautiful body were blossoming out of the impearled mists: that petaline wings opened out, fold on fold, as a rose-bud would blow, and each successive disclosure gave the entranced vision a clearer image of the dancer at the heart. Ever the motion seemed slow and stately as do all great and graceful things maintaining splendid speed; ever the crimson light from the City of Love lent its illimitable range of shade to the motion of the mists. Below the great multitude, with its face lifted to the midnight sky, passed from uproar into silence and from silence into thunders of applause. The immense voice was the voice of admiration, for the cooling hand of wonder pressed back the crowd's passion for a let to its reason. They forgot their disappointment, their bloodthirst, their hate of the Nazarenes, and stood to marvel that the goddess burned but was not consumed. But Marsyas, patiently working his way forward, pressed by a tall black man who was saying over and over to himself in Hindu: "It is the bayadere dance, for the glory of Brahma! A sacrilege!" The rest of Flora's program meanwhile was proceeding. Slowly and mightily, magnificent young athletes, for only such could drive their way through so solid a pack of humanity, were working toward the portico of the Temple. These were candidates for Flora's favor. Among them were black-eyed Roman youths with laurel around their heads; golden-haired Greeks, crowned with stephanes; lithe, bronze Egyptians with ribboned locks at the temple which were the badge of princehood. And after them came one, crowned with grape-leaves, with a thyrsus in his hand, but he had shining black curls, the silken beard and the crimson cheeks of a Jew. The eyes of this one glittered, not from excitement of fancy, but from desperate resolution and astounded recognition. The pagans were far in advance of him. Now the crowd understood where they were bound and shouted to them; now the youths forced themselves past the cornucopia, the mimes, the flamens, and ran into the open space before the Temple. In poses characteristic of their captivation and intent, they looked up at the dancing fires and cried aloud to the goddess. Meanwhile the morning-tinted mists whirled in a circular plane about the girl; suddenly they began to tremble and rise,--up, up until the ripple and shiver of the shaken silk took on the action and appearance of an illuminated cataract. Through it, the beautiful outlines of the dancer were distinguished, veiled as a Nereid beneath waters, leaping, running. Thousands below instinctively raised their arms to catch the figure which inevitably must leap through the inspirited cataract and over the parapet of the Temple unless the rosy element pent her within its bosom. The flight gradually changed from a simple step into the entanglement and intricacy of a dance. No gossamer adrift on the wind was more a creature of the air, no tranced ephemera more the genius of motion. The roar of the multitude failed in a vast suspiration of surprise and bewildered delight. Flora had invented, not a new wantonness, but a new grace. But the young men shouted: each sprang to a column which upheld the portico upon which Flora danced, and began to climb, helping themselves by the incrusted garlands of stone which ran up the pillars from base to capital. It was a contest in climbing, and the best of the contestants was not long in proving himself. He was one of the golden-haired Greeks and the multitude, for ever partizan to the strongest man, roared and thundered its encouragement to him. He went up with an ease and swiftness almost superhuman; now, he drew himself across the outstanding corner of the architrave, and stood with delicate foothold on its molding while he reached up past the frieze and caught the cornice with his hands. The dancer caught the flash of light on his golden stephane and wavered. "_Habet_! _Habet_!" roared the multitude. "Evoe, Ionides!" And Ionides, lazily lifting himself to the top of the portico, lingered a moment on one hand and knee to contemplate his prize. The cataract sank; the flying feet halted, the glory of fire and motion was lost in lengths of silk which the dancer began hastily to wind about her head and body. Sufficiently covered to hide her face, she paused and looked to see his further move. The Greek, with shining eyes and smiling lips, began slowly to raise himself. Then the one with the black curls and silken beard tore himself from the foremost of the crowd and rushed toward the portico. The dancer saw him come. She moved toward the edge of the cornice. The Greek leaped: the other below flung up his arms, but the roar of the multitude swept away the cry that came from his lips. The dancer, eluding the triumphant Greek, rushed over the brink of the portico and dropped like a plummet entangled in gossamer into the upreached arms of Marsyas below. Both fell like stones. But Marsyas sprang up with his prize in his arms, and fled up the steps through the black porch and the stone valves into the Temple of Rannu. [Illustration: Marsyas sprang up with his prize in his arms (missing from book)] Outside, the multitude, having seen Flora flout her rightful possessor, fell for a moment silent. Then, a part having but one desire to choose for itself, fell to its own choosing; but the rest, already cheated of blood and spoil, howled their disapproval, fought their way through disinterested masses in order to reach the refuge of the capricious Flora, met resistance and precipitated warfare, and in an incredibly short time, bedlam reigned in the square before the Temple of Rannu. The public celebration of the Feast of Flora was at an end. Meanwhile there was a trail of yellow roses, beginning abruptly in the Nazarene community and leading around every household and out and on toward the west. The roses lay untouched and wilting through the night and were shoveled up and carted away by the street-cleaners the next morning. And on the summit of the Gate of the Necropolis, a painted beauty sat in jewels and flowers and little raiment, and wondered why she was not sought and found and why her followers stayed and roared before the Temple of Rannu. CHAPTER XXI THE FINING FIRE As Marsyas leaped into the Temple of Rannu, a figure started up beside him. He sprang away from it in alarm, but a word in Hindu reassured him. "It is I, Vasti." With the bayadere following he raced through the cloyed musk of the temple toward the square of lesser darkness at the rear, which showed the exit into the court. He flung himself across the pavement of the inner inclosure and down its aisle of sphinxes, through the gate in the rear wall and out into a black passage. Behind, the roar of the contending host of Flora followed him. Though, for a second time this day he had run with peril on his track, the threatened identification of the precious burden he bore was more terrifying than death had been at sunset. It was a long alley, the single outlet for a jam of humble houses surrounding the temple, and it opened into a street deep in the Egyptian quarter. Though Marsyas ran splendidly, he carried no little burden, and the way was black, unpaved and treacherous. He had begun to fear that he could not reach the end before pursuers, so minded, could hem him in, when almost as if the thought had invited the actuality, he saw a figure appear at the mouth of the alley. With a furious but repressed exclamation, the unknown plunged at the Essene. Determined to defend Lydia's identity as long as he might, Marsyas swung her behind him, and with a whisper to Vasti to hide Lydia, made ready to fight fast. With the dim illumination of the city behind him, Marsyas was better able to see his antagonist. As the solid body projected itself at him, like a springing beast, he met it with a raised left arm and a ready right hand. Instantly the two closed and for a brief, fierce moment, fought savagely. But Marsyas discovered that he was far more agile, taller and apparently younger than his assailant, and for a space he had only to fight away the knife that glinted and darted hungrily at his throat. Then, seizing upon his antagonist's first imperfect guard, he delivered a stunning blow over the heart. The heavy body staggered, quivered and collapsed. Expecting to find the passage before him filling with ruffians, Marsyas was astonished to see the way clear and vacant. Without waiting to catch breath Marsyas sprang back in the alley, and, whispering the bayadere's name, found Lydia and the serving-woman only a pace from the spot. Catching Lydia up again, in spite of her protests, he was about to spring over the prostrate body that all but blocked the passage, when his eye fell upon the upturned face. The dim light of the city fell on it. It was Flaccus! For a single moment of surprise and bewilderment, Marsyas stood still. Then very surely it penetrated through his brain that the proconsul had recognized him at the moment of Flora's drop into his arms, and had come to capture him--or to identify the Dancing Flora! He knew that he had not struck a fatal blow and the proconsul's knife lay near. He picked it up. It was bloody. Startled and aghast, he flung the weapon away, and, leaping over the unconscious Roman, fled out of the alley. A torch of pitch, burnt down to a charred knot, with a feeble flame playing over it, was set upon a staff hardly ten paces from the mouth of the passage. It was a dark street, and deserted. The roar of the populace still centered about the square of the Temple of Rannu. Marsyas turned toward the torch, and, as he ran, he saw under its sickly light the figure of a man stretched on the earth. At another step, he tripped over a second fallen body. It moved and groaned. Marsyas put Lydia down. Carrying her through a street cumbered with prostrate men might mean bodily injury for both of them. With a reassuring word, he led her between the head of the obscured man and the feet of the one under the torch, and stumbled at his second step on a contorted shape. Marsyas stopped, to ask himself if the deadly hand that had brought these men low might not await him and his dear charge farther on. Vasti leaned over the one under the torch. Then she sprang up. "Come! Look!" she whispered in excitement. Marsyas hurried to the man, and met at that instant the last conscious light in the eyes of Agrippa. The young Essene dropped to his knees without a word, thrust his hand into the embroidered tunic and felt for the prince's heart. It beat but slowly. Vasti, meanwhile, snatched the torch from the staff and beat the charred pitch knot on the ground till the still inflammable heart broke open and ignited afresh. By its light Marsyas examined Agrippa. Between the prince's shoulders, his hand touched chilling blood. "Ambushed!" he said grimly. "Stabbed in the back!" Marsyas looked at the prince's right hand. It was still clenched, and the flesh on the knuckles was abraded, the second joints swelling fast. Vasti, with suspicion in her olive eyes, carried the torch over to the contorted shape. Then she made a sign to Marsyas. He looked. It was an Egyptian wearing the livery of Flaccus. The prince's Arabic dagger was neatly buried to the hilt in the servitor's breast. Vasti examined the second prostrate form. By her torch Marsyas saw that it was Eutychus, conscious but benumbed. His left ear, cheek and eye were swollen and black. "It seems," said Marsyas, stanching Agrippa's wound, "that the prince disabled his own support!" But Vasti, by deft twitches of ear and hair and threats in Hindu, significant in tone if not in speech to the charioteer, finally got Eutychus upon his feet. "Take up the prince," she said to Marsyas. "The slave may follow or lie as he chooses. I shall attend my mistress." Marsyas lifted the Herod and, following Vasti, hurried on again into the darkness. The bayadere made toward the sea-front, not many yards distant, sped across the wharf and over the edge apparently into the water. Marsyas, by this time ready to follow the brown woman into any extreme, plunged after her. He landed abruptly in the bottom of a punt. Lydia followed, and Eutychus, with an alacrity not expected of one who groaned so helplessly. Vasti severed the rope that tied up the boat, and, with a strong thrust of her hands against the piling, pushed the boat away from the wharf. But she did not take up the oars. She left them to Marsyas, trained on the blue waters of Galilee. In a moment he had pulled out into the black expanse of the bay, and, with the prince's ship in mind, rowed among the sleeping shipping. "How came the prince in this plight?" Marsyas demanded of Eutychus. The charioteer, with his head in his hands, groaned and murmured unintelligibly. Lydia dipped an end of the wonderful silk that enveloped her into the water and pressed the wet corner to the charioteer's temples. Marsyas frowned blackly. "Nay, but thou canst answer, Eutychus," he said shortly. After further murmurings, the charioteer brought out between groans an avowal that he was completely mystified. "How came Agrippa in the street?" Marsyas insisted. "He was with Justin Classicus; I attended him. When Flora danced and chose her lover, and the two fled into the Temple of Rannu, the Alexandrian cried to my lord that there was another passage into the Temple, by which they could go in, or the Flora and her lover come out. And he proposed for a prank that he and the prince go thither and discover Flora and her lover. We were on the roof of a bath and could get down at once, so we ran through private passages, my lord and I, outstripping Classicus, whom the crowd swallowed. And when we got into this dark street, two fell upon us without warning and killed us both!" "But it was Agrippa who struck that blow," Marsyas declared. The man murmured again. "Some one struck me," he said finally; "mayhap the prince, not knowing friend from foe in the street." "Of a surety, this stiff old Roman took chances," Marsyas averred after thought, "with but one apparitor to aid him against Agrippa, palestræ-trained and this young charioteer! Art sure thou didst not play the craven, Eutychus?" he demanded. "Or should I be blamed," Eutychus groaned, "when it was three against me, with the prince striking at his single defender?" Marsyas fell silent. It was not like Agrippa to be confused under any circumstances. He pulled up beside Agrippa's vessel, roused the watchman and had the prince and Eutychus taken aboard; but Vasti and Lydia he left in the borrowed punt, out of sight of the crew that had returned. He followed the injured men on deck and hurriedly dressed Agrippa's wound, restored him to consciousness and left him in the charge of the captain of the vessel. He ordered one of the skilled seamen to attend Eutychus and hurried back to the women in the boat under the black shadow of the ship. He pulled straight for the sea, rounded Eunostos point and skirting the tiny archipelagoes in the broad light of the Pharos, brought up at a small indented coast between two sandy peninsulas. Here the residence portion of Alexandria came down to the ocean. The locality was dark and wrapped in sleep. As he lifted Lydia from the boat, Marsyas turned to Vasti. "Why didst thou not prevent her in this thing?" he asked in Hindu. "The white brother forgets that I am a handmaiden," she replied. "But what if I had not come?" he persisted, growing more troubled by his perplexities. "I had prepared a path for escape; I was armed, and watching!" "Did--did she expect me?" he asked after silence. "No." Then she had done this thing for him. Oh, for the safe refuge of the alabarch's musky halls that he might harken to the sweet distress in his soul and tell her of it! Without further event, they reached the alabarch's house and the bayadere, producing keys, let her charges into the servant's entry beneath the porch. Lydia instantly disappeared, but Vasti in obedience to a word from Marsyas conducted him through the well-beloved chambers to the corridor lined by the sleeping-rooms of the servants. Before one, she stopped. "Herein is the prince's other servant," she said, and quickly disappeared. Marsyas opened the door and entering aroused Silas. With a bare explanation that the prince would sail the instant the courier got aboard, he urged the grumbling old man into activity, and went back to the alabarch's presiding-room. He had a moment of waiting--at last a moment to think! He realized that an extreme of some nature had been reached; all his purposes had been brought up to a climax. There was no lingering in Alexandria possible for Agrippa, wounded or well, for Marsyas knew that Flaccus had the Herod's undoing in mind. If Lydia were a Nazarene, Marsyas had now, of a surety, though all Heaven and earth intervened, to bring Saul of Tarsus to death before the Pharisee's dread hand fell upon Lydia for apostasy! For that purpose, he must go to Rome--and leave Alexandria--to return? For his love's sake? He, an Essene? Silas came, bowed, and was dismissed to wait in the street for the moment. And still Marsyas stood. The house was silent and dark. The slumber that overtakes those relieved from a three days' strain enwrapped all under the alabarch's roof. Presently he thought of Cypros, in his search for an excuse for lingering. A lamp on the alabarch's table was ready to be lighted, and, finding the materials for fire-making in the drawer, he lighted it. "Sweet lady," he wrote on a parchment at hand, "the winds favorable to thy lord's departure blow, and he will not awaken thee to the pain of a farewell. Be comforted, be brave, be hopeful; for when he returneth, he bringeth thee a crown. I remember my pledge to thee. "Be thou blessed. "MARSYAS." It was the first letter he had ever written to a woman; he did not dream that he had written so tenderly. He rolled the parchment and addressed it to the princess. There was nothing more to be done. Was he not to see Lydia again? Filled with rebellion and fear, he hurried toward the hall; in the semi-dark, cast by the lamp within the larger room, he saw a small figure slip quickly behind a hanging. She had been waiting to have a stolen look upon him as he went! He caught her in his arms and drew her out into the light. Under its revealing ray, he saw her lovely face smitten down with shame, but he lifted it, to kiss her eyes, her temples and her lips. "Lydia! Lydia! I fear to leave thee!" he whispered. She let her eyes light upon him, to catch his meaning, and when she saw terror for her apostasy and amazement for the thing she had done for the Nazarenes, a sudden misery leaped into her face. She tried to put him back. "Lydia, Lydia!" he begged, feeling the repulse, "dost thou not love me, then?" His tone urged, his eyes pleaded. For a moment, she was silent; then she said, with infinite pain: "Marsyas, I broke off the trail of roses through Rhacotis, and held back the multitude from the Nazarenes. But thou art an Essene, and a Jew; wherefore, in thy sight I can not be justified. Forget not these things for my sake! Go, ere thy teaching hath cause to reproach thee." "No, no!" he agonized. "Do not say that to me! Say rather that thou wilt turn away from this heresy and be led no more by it into transgression! Better thy sweet life and thy sweet fame than all the truth in the world!" The word he used caught her. She waited and seemed not to breathe. He swept on. "Art thou, beyond saving, a Nazarene?" Her face fell, and her soft red lips were parted with a heavy sigh. "From this night henceforward, Marsyas! I have purchased the blessing dearly." She took the hands about her and undid them. "Go!" she whispered. "Farewell, and the one God, that loves us all, shield thee from harm all the days of thy life!" A moment and she was gone. After a while he turned and walked with stumbling feet into the new dawn on Alexandria. CHAPTER XXII "IN THE CLOAK OF TWO COLORS" Marsyas turned on the gilded couch, threw off the light covering and sat up. A Syrian slave thrust aside the heavy drapery over the cancelli, which had been drawn in the atrium while the young man slept. In the brilliant light of the Roman mid-afternoon, Marsyas looked sleepily at the slave that bowed beside him, and the courier that stood near by. "A message for thee," the slave said. Marsyas put out his hand and the courier laid in it a package wrapped in silk. Marsyas broke the seal and read the contents. "O MARSYAS: "Gossip hath it now that thou art no longer confused when a woman addresses thee: wherefore I write with less trepidation and more confidence. "I am in Rome these seven days, under my father's roof, for a little space before we are commanded to join Cæsar in Capri. In this time I have not seen thee nor thy lord. "If not myself, then perchance the news I bring from Alexandria may urge thee to accept the invitation I extend. "There exists no greater claim than thine upon my hospitality. "Come thou, and make me welcome in mine own city. "JUNIA." Marsyas sprang up, the last of the languor gone from his face. "Thou shalt conduct me," he said to the messenger. He disappeared in the direction of his cubiculum. In a time longer than he had consumed in his old Essenic days to prepare himself for the streets he came again into Agrippa's atrium. It was hard to recognize in him the picturesque Jewish ascetic that had bent over the scroll in the great college of Jerusalem. He had permitted the blade to come at his hair and beard; the kerchief had been replaced by the fillet; the cloak and gown by the scarlet tunic and mantle, the daylight had been let in on his fine limbs, and there was the fugitive glitter of jewels on his fingers and arms. He had assumed perfumes and polishes, had laid aside all his oriental habit and had become not only a Roman but an exquisite. The change was not all in his dress; the indefinable something that marks the man of experience was upon him and the ascetic blankness was gone from his brow. He signed to the messenger to follow, and passing out of the house and down the long banks of marble steps which led up to Agrippa's magnificent eyrie on the brink of the Quirinal, entered a lectica that awaited him in the streets. Years are not time enough to weary one of Rome. Marsyas had come into the capital with a spirit benumbed by a great shock, so that the first day he walked the imperial streets he was less conscious of their wonders than he was at this hour. He was borne through narrow lanes that were like clefts between heights of marble, under arches, chronicling the solemn consummation of triumph, along crowding pillars that arose out of the ravines between the seven hills, and, catching the sunlight on their white capitals, cast it down in the gloom of the depressions. Glories clambered up the bosom of the Esquiline; templed sanctity crowned the Aventine, and might in marble and gold sat on the Palatine. Between were splendor and squalor, confused, for only beauty stood up above the miseries and defilement that made Rome hateful in its unsunned ways. The feebleness of unwieldy and disunited multitudes cumbered the Carinæ, along which he passed. Starvation and the excess of plenty, power and abject subjection, unspeakable depravity and innocence met and passed. The slaves preceding the young man's litter made way for it with staff and pilum, or again it made way for slaves bearing fasces and maces. He did not proceed unnoticed. Albucilla, widow of Satrius Secundus, in a litter with Cneius Domitius, turned from the languid senator at her side to cast a bewitching smile at the young Essene; Ennia, wife of Macro, the prætorian prefect, leaned from her litter to cry him an invitation. "To Tusculum! Come with us!" "Many thanks: yet I would the invitation came to-morrow!" "It shall," she said in answer and was borne on. Running slaves pushed by him to overtake her chair, and Marsyas knew without looking that the lectica they bore contained Caligula, Cæsar's grand-nephew. Agrippina, a young matron in a chair, with a month-old babe in her arms, cast a sidelong glance out of her black eyes at the young man as he approached. Stupid old Claudius, clad in a purple-edged toga and stumbling as he walked, acknowledged the precedence Marsyas gave him with a smile and a greeting. As the young Jew was borne on he did not realize that he had made room for three coming Cæsars in the Carinæ. After them streamed a great number of patricians in chairs, all proceeding to the races at Tusculum, but Marsyas' bearers turned off the Carinæ and began to mount the Esquiline. In a few minutes he was set down before a small, newly-erected house as classic as a Greek temple, as compact as a fortification. The messenger bowed him into the hands of the atriensis, who led him into the vestibule and left him for a moment. Presently, a soft-footed, scantily-clad boy bowed gracefully beside him and begged him to follow. He was led into Junia's atrium. The Roman woman, who had been lounging in a chair at the cancelli, turned languidly, and sprang up in feigned surprise. But honest feeling came into her face as she looked at the changed man that stood before her. "Welcome!" she cried, hastening to meet him. "Would thou wast a god! Perchance there would be despatch about answering prayers!" "Give the gods as welcome a supplication, and the answer would come riding upon Jupiter's thunderbolts!" he responded. She laughed and shook her finger at him. "How hopeless a ruin thou art! A Jew speaking of the gods!" He led her to a chair, and, drawing one up beside her, sat. With bright eyes and a little changing smile she inspected him for a moment. "It is true!" she cried at last. "And I do not like to see it! Thou art indeed changed; no longer the sincere Jew that I met in Alexandria." "A Jew, lady, nevertheless," he answered. "But tell me of thyself, and after that of them that remain in Alexandria." "No: thou canst not avert the preachment I have ready for thee. All thy misdeeds are known to me. When I forewarned thee of the various attributes of Rome, I did not add that Rome talks! I have heard how thou hast put chaplets on thy head, reclined at feasts and upset half a score of merry running courtships in the capital. I see thee, how thou hast put off thy sober habit and got into raiment that makes thee thrice and four times more deadly to the hearts of women. And thou an Essene! Prayerfully hoping to return into the peace and inertia of the salty desert of En-Gadi--some time! Overshadowing the Herod till in very despair he hath taken to racing and left the triclinia and the atria to thee! Fie and for shame, Marsyas!" The young man smiled a little bitterly. Cypros' charge had not been difficult, since his Essenism had been the obstacle which lay between him and that love he would have, though it cost him his soul! "But Rome enlarges," he protested. "Agrippa chaseth the elusive bubble of Fortune: and I--having a purpose to be achieved in his success--I speed him--in mine own way. But enough of ourselves. Tell me of Alexandria!" "But wait! I have not done. The charm of beauty hath lost its potency here in Rome, where it is the business of every one to be beautiful. The charm of riches is debased because of its great prevalence, since every one hath his honor to sell, and honor commands the highest price. The charm of rank is dissolved, for there is no rank with a centurion's son bearing the ægis, and freedmen dispensing hospitality in the mansions of the ancient Quirites! Wherefore there is only one rare, unpurchasable charm--newness--and Roman society speedily dulls the luster of that, if one stoops to flourishing socially. Beware, my Marsyas!" He remembered that she had always been concerned for his uprightness, in a strangely unspiritual way. He had heard of upright atheists; somehow she seemed to belong in that category with her moral, but irreligious chidings. Now, she was bearing him welcome testimony that he had changed. "Be neither frequent nor democratic. Saith Agricola, the pleb, 'Brutus, the senator, is nobody; he speaks to me!' By Castor! I had rather endure the contempt of the great than the approval of the small. Wherefore, save thyself, as a rare wine, fit for only imperial feasts. And lest thou be lonely meantime, let me amuse thee." "How can I expect it, when thou wilt not tell me now what I wish?" he complained. "But this is trial of thy gallantry: I have as great a curiosity as thine. So thou wilt wait for me. Thou hast been in Rome four months. Tell me what happened in that time." Marsyas slipped down in his chair and clasped his hands back of his head. "None leads a droning life who associates with Agrippa," he said. "I have not seen a restful hour since I met him in Judea. Nay, then; hear me. He landed at Capri, on the invitation of the emperor, and repaired to the palace where, with the same grace that hath made me and others his slaves, he won back in a single audience all the favor that he had forfeited in twenty years. He came away radiant and under promise to return the following night, and dine with the emperor. But the next morning, who should drop anchor in the bay but Herrenius Capito, livid with wrath because he had been outwitted at every turn by Agrippa. One would think it were he whom Agrippa owed, so indecent his fervor in reporting him. What followed but that the same imperial hand which had been stretched in welcome to the prince one day, was, the next, extended in banishment over him." "What misfortune!" Junia exclaimed, half in sympathy, half in irony. "Ate, herself, must be the patron genius of the Herod." "Hot upon Herrenius' heels came Vitellius' contubernalis, with a warrant for me, but we, meanwhile, had taken ship and sailed for Ostia. And hear me, when I say, that some rabid foe had dropped the information of our whereabouts, in Judea! I repaired to Rome, borrowed three hundred thousand drachmæ of Antonia, the _univira_, and despatched messengers to Cæsar and Herrenius Capito telling that the debt so long overlooked had been paid, before my pursuer reached Rome. So we laid the ghost of our debts. But feeling unhappy owing no man, I immediately borrowed a million drachmæ of Thallus, Cæsar's freedman, repaid Antonia, and established ourselves magnificently on the Quirinal. Hence, being in debt and in favor again, we have nothing to trouble us but the serious pursuit of our respective ambitions. But--!" He stopped abruptly. "O prescient contingent!" she said softly. "Does the Herod dally with his opportunities?" "Worse: he affronts them! Worse: those opportunities are not alone for him! Part of them are mine!" Her lips shaped an exclamation, but he went on. "Listen; it is a proper sending on thee, for insisting on plunging me into narrative. An oriental story-teller and a circle make no end. Even as thou saidst to me in Alexandria so many weeks ago, Rome looketh two ways for a new Emperor. Here is the little Tiberius, Drusus' son, and there is Caligula, Cæsar's grandnephew. Now Cæsar seeth in the little Tiberius a successor. Fatuous dotage! The prætorians are stubbornly attached to Caligula, because forsooth he wore miniature boots like theirs when he tumbled about in the peplus of an infant. The reason is good enough to be a woman's! Be it as it may, that lean, sallow, gluttonous Caligula is brow-marked for the crown!" "_Hercle_! but thou art as good an image-maker with words as Phidias was with a stone!" "Patience! On a certain day, Agrippa and I went without the Porta Esquilina to get into our chariots and drive to Tusculum. Many were going, as many go every day. We had mounted our car, with Eutychus--would he were at the bottom of the Tiber!--as charioteer, when young Tiberius came and mounted his, and Caligula came and mounted his. After them directly followed a cohort of prætorians. Their bright armor, their noise, their steady undeviating advance, frightened little Tiberius' horses, which backed into Caligula's chariot and frightened his pair. The four bolted at once; the chariots upset and both princes were spilled on the ground directly in front of the advancing cohort. "The tribune hastily brought up the column and Tiberius and Caligula were helped to their feet. The lad withdrew to the roadside, but Caligula turned upon the soldiers and flung camp-jokes at them, so broad, so bold, so rough, that, at first chuckling, then roaring, the whole cohort burst into a great shout in honor of their favorite. "Meanwhile, Eutychus had permitted his horses by bad management to become unruly. Agrippa seized the lines away from him and lashed him across the shoulders once or twice, to the great rage of the charioteer. I had in the meanwhile to alight and quiet the animals. Agrippa then drove toward Tiberius to offer him the hospitality of his chariot, while the slaves were pursuing the runaways. The boy saw him coming, understood the prince's intent and handed his cloak to a slave preparatory to mounting Agrippa's car, when the cohort began to cheer Caligula. "What did Agrippa, then, but wheel his horses, drive over to the soldiers' favorite and take him into the car!" "What! Did that thing openly?" "Deliberately! The boy paled, flushed, and whirling about, stalked back inside of the walls, before I could invent an excuse to cover Agrippa's slight. And after him rushed a crowd of senators and ædiles--his umbræ--to feed his hate of the Herod!" "What did Agrippa, then?" Junia asked after a dismayed silence. "He was long gone up the road to Tusculum with Caligula by that time." "It is not hard to guess how he lost Fortune before," Junia declared. "He plays at legerdemain with Cæsar's favor," Marsyas said, annoyed at his own narrative. "Tiberius, most solemnly commended the boy Tiberius to Agrippa's care and companionship. Cæsar will hear of this!" "Inevitably! Tale-bearing is a fine art in Rome and Tiberius is its patron. And thus he conducts himself in the face of Cypros' peril, who gave herself in hostage for him that he might succeed!" "Cypros' peril!" Marsyas repeated, with startled eyes. "Of Flaccus!" Marsyas' astonishment was not pleasant. "Why of Flaccus?" he asked. "What! Hath Agrippa kept his counsel, thus long? Dost thou not know that Flaccus hath an eye to the timid Cypros and Agrippa, discovering it, all but killed Flaccus in a passage back of the temple, on the night of the Dance of Flora?" Marsyas looked at her steadily. "How much dost thou know of this thing?" he demanded. "Can I know too much of it?" she asked plaintively. "No!" he answered penitently. "Then I know all of it, cause, process and result," she declared. "Tell it me, then!" "Nay, then; Flaccus was in love with Cypros in Rome, when she was sent here twenty years ago to marry Agrippa. So much he loved her, that twenty years after, when next he met her, his old passion was revived--stronger, less submissive and more dangerous than that of his youth. Whether or not he spoke of it to Agrippa, or simply betrayed himself, the night of the Feast, is not patent; nevertheless the proconsul was discovered half-killed, in an alley back of the Temple of Rannu, and the Herod had sailed suddenly and without farewell to Cypros, in the night." "How didst thou learn of this?" "O simple youth! Is it then so common in Judea for powers to be discovered with their hearts stunned, that no comment is made upon it? Or perchance thou givest Flaccus credit for suffering in silence? That is better. Know, however, that he was discovered by the constabulary, and straightway such an outcry was never heard in Alexandria. But the proconsul aroused and cut it off in full voice. And there he made an error. He was made to be a straightforward man; he is too cumbrous to be a knave. So speculation ran abroad in whispers, till the true cause was unearthed." "And Cypros?" "Cypros? Now canst thou, knowing Cypros, ask of her expecting any change? Beautiful statues do not change. What they express when they are finished they express until they are broken. When she came from under the sculptor's chisel, she was made to love her husband, and her babes, to believe whatever is told her, be beautiful, simple and good." "So much the more Flaccus must have distressed her!" "She does not suspect him!" "What!" "Amazement, at times, gentle sir, is reproach; wherefore since I am the author of this device, thou wilt be less astounded and, so, more complimentary. I knew that Cypros, being sweet, simple and guileless, would do no more than treat the proconsul with bitter disdain thereafter, and precipitate a climax, which in my opinion would entail twenty diverse calamities. I know Flaccus, I have sent the plummet to the bottom of his oceanic nature. I also know that the Lady Herod is an anomaly in her family, clean, faithful and loving. So with Agrippa out of reach, the proconsul may conspire all he pleases to alienate the princess from her Arab, in vain. Wherefore I permitted the good alabarch in all innocence to go in his magisterial robes to the proconsul's mansion and express his indignation, concern and anxious hopes, and to say that Agrippa had taken advantage of favorable winds to depart for Rome. I can see the smoldering eyes of the proconsul study the white old face of that perfect diplomat and discover no guile thereon. So apparent the alabarch's sincerity, that after due lapse of time in which the proconsul plucked up courage and front, Flaccus resumed his visits to the alabarch's house. And for all outward signs, it was another and not Agrippa that dinted the Roman's chest!" Marsyas leaned his elbows on his knees and a line appeared between his level brows, marking the growing change from the thought of youth to the thought of man. "Lady," he said gravely, after a pause, "it was Flaccus and not Agrippa that did the bloodthirsty deeds back of the Temple of Rannu; and it was I--and not Agrippa, that dinted the Roman's chest!" "What?" she ejaculated, springing up to lay hand on his arm. "Thou!" "Flaccus led Agrippa into a trap and stabbed him in the back," he went on, "and I struck the blow that laid Flaccus low. And Agrippa was taken aboard his ship that night, with a knife wound between his shoulders, wholly ignorant of the identity of his assailant--until I told him--three days out at sea!" After a long silence, she said softly: "And that was thine errand--for Flora!" Without a tremor he inclined his head in assent. "Nay, then," she began again, after another pause, "what more dost thou know? How much of this tale thou heardest so deceitfully is incorrect history?" "Enough of Flaccus," he parried, smiling. "Tell me of--Classicus." Junia leaned back in her chair and laughed a little at his evasion. "Classicus? Classicus is a knave, one lacking invention, but not executive ability--wanting cunning, not courage. Now he leads us to believe that he examines a new religion--that same heresy for which he plunged thee into the Rhacotis peril. Some one put him up to it--mark me. Thus, he hopes to recant his fault against thee, for which the little Lysimachus was most unbending to him!" "And Lydia?" he asked in a low tone. Her softened eyes, steadily contemplating the yellow light on the leaves of a huge plantain growing near her, narrowed. "Lydia?" she repeated thoughtfully. "Oh, Lydia dances and studies and makes ready for her marriage with Classicus." One of those utter silences fell, which mark the announcement of critical news. After it, Marsyas arose. "I have profited by my visit," he said, in that soft and silken voice which she had never heard before and did not understand. "I thank thee for thy counsel--and thy news." He extended her his hand, and she looked at him, feeling that it was not steady. "And thou wilt come again before I go?" she went on. "We are summoned to Capri where my father hath been recently made a minister to Tiberius. Come again, and let me lead thee back to thine old self." "Perchance," he said evenly, "I have uselessly troubled myself to change." He pressed her hand and passed out. At the threshold of her portals, he met Agrippa. "Perpol!" the prince cried. "Hast thou supplanted me here, too?" But Marsyas smiled painfully and went on. Agrippa looked after him. "Nay, now: the boy is as pale as ivory!" he ruminated. "That is an honest youth, and Junia must let him alone." CHAPTER XXIII A LETTER AND A LOSS When Agrippa returned to his house that night, he found old Silas sitting in the vestibule, opposite the place of the atriensis, his hands on his knees, his dull face uncommonly animated and expressive. It was long past the hour when the household servants had retired, and the porter at the door was drowsy, but the instant Agrippa set foot on his threshhold Silas started up and bowed in excitement. "An evil day," he said. "Thy wardrobe hath been entered and much fine raiment is gone." "But thou hast made an evil night of it, Silas: thou shouldst have withheld thy calamitous recital until the morning. Hast discovered the thief?" Silas bowed again. "I have: yet, I have been restrained from taking him." "O pliable Jew! None but Cæsar can steal my wardrobe unmolested. Who protects the thief?" "Marsyas." "What! Marsyas? Save thou art too unimaginative to be a fictionist I should say thou makest thy story. Why does Marsyas protect my pillager?" "He says we are well rid of the knave." "Not if he carried off so much as a sandal-lace. I am a Jew and therefore jealous for my own property. Marsyas, as an Essene, is given to dividing without protest with thieves. I remember the Greek who helped himself to Marsyas' patrimony on Olivet. But who is the thief?" "Eutychus." "Eutychus! By Hermes, he could not help it with that face! But go on; what is the circumstance?" "He took," Silas continued, "the umber toga, embroidered with silver, much of thy Jewish vestments, the gazelle wallet which contained thy amulet, and drachmæ and bracelets of gold. He is rich!" "Of a surety: the knave hath only the more attached himself to me. What a pity! Otherwise we were well rid of him. And Marsyas bade thee let him go?" "The young man was disturbed. According to instructions, he sent a messenger to thy stables, without the walls, to bid Eutychus have thy car ready to-morrow for thy visit to Tusculum. But the messenger presently returned with the information that Eutychus had not been seen about the stables that day. At the same moment, I discovered the losses among thy apparel. And Marsyas instantly suspected Eutychus. He sent two slaves in search of him. They returned in an hour saying that he had been discovered in Janiculum in a wine-shop, robed like an Augustan in thy umber toga, and making merry with wine that could only tickle a Samaritan's throat. When they tried to bring him, he objected, saying thou shouldst not miss him, seeing that thou hadst learned the pleasure of walking in thy less fortunate days." Agrippa's forehead darkened. "Even for that I should hand him over to the lictors!" he exclaimed. "It is not all. When the two slaves then tried to fetch him by force, they were attacked by him and the wine-shop keeper and others, and obliged to flee for their lives. I besought Marsyas, then, to permit me to inform the authorities and have him taken, but he opined that the charioteer's insolence was new and sudden, wherefore full of meaning. Seeing that it was Eutychus' intent to enrage thee, thou wast better not enraged; to wash thy hands of him and bless the day that he departed." Agrippa yawned. "To-morrow we shall search for him and have him taken. It is improvident to have so much philosophy as Marsyas. But what had the knave of a charioteer against me? It is Marsyas who hath enchanted Drumah, and who took him by the throat in the alabarch's house. I shall speak with Marsyas to-morrow." He took himself with increasing effort up the stairs along the corridor toward his rest. With the facility which characterized many of Agrippa's troubles, the offender had already dropped out of his mind. He had fenced with Caligula that morning, he had feasted with Macro that night. At midday he had slighted Piso, the enemy of both. Caligula had had him draw a sketch of Judea on the wax of the gymnasium floor and designate the possessions of the old Herod; Macro, in his cups, had asked confidentially if Caligula approved him. Altogether the day had been filled with tokens presaging success. He smiled sleepily, remembering Silas' extravagant concern over the robbery. "Calamity is all in the mark on the scale of Fortune," he opined. "A year ago to lose a handful of drachmæ would have ruined me." As he passed Marsyas' door, he stepped back suddenly and stopped. The long curtain dragged on the floor at one side had given him an interesting glimpse of the lighted interior. Within, Marsyas, seated at a table, had at that moment flung away his stylus and dropped his head on the writing. Almost immediately he sprang up, and, seizing the parchment, thrust it into the blaze of the lamp at his hand. Astonishment gathered on the Herod's face. In the blaze the writing curled, the flame eating into the slow-burning parchment, burned low, but surely, reaching toward the fingers that grasped it. Presently Marsyas dropped it. Then the night-wind, rising from the sea, swept in through the cancelli with a shriek, put out the lamp instantly and swept the long dragging curtain against the Herod standing in the dimly-illuminated corridor. He got out of sight hurriedly. After the first gust, the wind dropped, sending long streams of impelling draft through cancelli, doorway and hall. Before it, along the pavement, something came skittering out of Marsyas' cubiculum. Agrippa looked at it. It was a roll of parchment, charred and crushed by the tense grip of fingers. Agrippa waited. After a slight movement within, silence fell again, and was not thereafter broken. The prince's eyes fell on the charred writing. It was almost at his feet. His fine head dropped to one side, then to the other; he put his fingers into his hair, smiled a little and picked up the parchment. A moment later, in his own apartment, he unrolled it by his lamp. Only a word here and there, at the end held in Marsyas' fingers, was legible, but Agrippa gathered from these the tone, the purpose and the identity, as he thought, of the one addressed. "-- me for loving thee -- my punishment --. Yet ---- sin against my teachi ---- Willingly for thy sake ------ but to pretend ---- continue my ---- against ---- which threatens thee. Have I lost -- soul for a caprice ---- and beseech levity -- to lov -- me? the pointing finger ---- of sel -- scorn! An outcast from Heaven ---- truant from hell, haunting earth in search of thee for ever!--SYAS." Agrippa's eyes sobered. "Junia is a brand of fire," he said to himself. "I shall make an end of this!" CHAPTER XXIV THE DIGGED PIT Junia raised herself hastily. "Call the slaves," she commanded the servant who had announced Marsyas, and, in a moment, half a score of house-slaves rushed in from various openings leading into the atrium. "Away with this and that and that," she exclaimed pointing to the statue of a bacchante, that had not been visible in the chamber on the occasion of Marsyas' expected calls; a tray of wine and a tablet with a list of charms and philters sent recently from a haruspex. "Bring me a shawl--close around my neck: curse thee for a blunderer, Iste; thou shalt pay for that scratch! Here, unwind the scarf about my hips and fold it less closely; the amulet, take it off! By Ate! Here: Caligula's note, spread open! Into the brazier with it. Do I smell of wine? Fetch hither--that fresco! The Pursuit of Daphne! Draw the arras over it! Quick! The unguentarium, I said, snail! The one with the attar. Now, look about. Is there anything in sight to disturb a vestal? If I find it afterward, twenty lashes for you all!" Mistress and slave looked anxiously over the chamber, but nothing unseemly greeted their eyes. Junia sank back on her couch, not now so recumbent, but at ease. "Go fetch the Jew," she said, the languor of her manner combatted by the fire in her eyes. A moment later Marsyas appeared in the archway. She arose and came to meet him. When he took her extended hands, she led him to the light of the cancelli and inspected him. "Sit," she said, drawing him down on the divan under the casement. "And speak first. Only a word, so I may see if the prologue is indeed as tragic as the mask." "Let the mask suffice," he answered, "the prologue might be insufferable." "_Proh pudor_! Thy friend the Herod hath just been here with pagan oaths upon his lips about thy dullness. I tell thee it is hard enough to make him walk as he should, but a groaning comrade is a gravel in his shoe. If thou wouldst manage him, be merry. Remember we have this Herod to crown, though he stood on the Tarpeian Rock and sang sonnets in dishonor of Cæsar." "By the certainty of Death, I have," he said sententiously. She looked at him and waited for him to go on, but he seemed to forget her, in his preoccupation. "I am a generous woman, Marsyas," she said softly. "I do not resent thy lack of confidence in me!" "Nay!" he exclaimed. "My lack of confidence, lady? What meanest thou?" "In thy bosom, gentle sir, thou keepest thine own counsel, and wearest signals of thy self-containment on thy brow. Wherefore, I am informed thou hast thoughts that I may not know!" "But I spare thee my sorrows, my cynicism, my hopelessness," he protested earnestly, "my disbelief in humankind." "O Marsyas, wert thou not Jewish, I should call thee unmanly. Listen!" She laid a warm hand, colored like a primrose, upon his. "Thou wast an anchorite; thou didst attain manhood's stature and mind as an anchorite; into the world thou camest with all an anchorite's slander of the poor world in thee. The eye is a spaniel; the tyrant Prejudice controls even its images. I warned thee in Alexandria. I confess that there is evil in the world, but it is more the work of an elementary impulse rather than calculation. Flaccus is bad, but because he is in love. Agrippa does foolhardy things, because he is ambitious. What? Did the preachment afflict thee which I delivered the other day upon thy levity and riotous living?" He shook his head. "Nay, but this moment's preachment crosses me," he said. "Thou offerest pardon for all the wickedness in the world, and I, sworn to punish one evil deed, am thus constrained, if I harken unto thee, to hold off my hand." "Now, thou approachest the deep-hidden secret which I may not know. Whom wilt thou punish? Flaccus or Classicus?" He hesitated. His vital hate of Saul of Tarsus, his fear for Lydia, his love and its deep wound, were things too close to the soul for him willingly to bring forth and display to this woman who acknowledged only a mind, and not a spirit. Yet it seemed unfair to withhold anything, however sacred, from one who had unbosomed so much to him. "I lead a selfish life and an unhappy one. I am stricken in my loves; one dead, one a murderer, a third faithless; a fourth I use to speed me in mine intents concerning the other two. If I avenge the death of one, I displease his spirit! If I visit punishment on his murderer, I make it possible for the destroyer of my love-story to go on. If I withhold my hand, I give another, much beloved, unto death. And him I help, I help for mine own use. My life is at cross purposes; my right hand worketh against the left!" "Thy love?" she repeated softly, with a question in her tone. But he did not answer it. "A hopeless tangle," she said at last, "from which our ruling philosophers, degenerate imitators of Pyrrho, offer but one escape. Turn from it, cease to trouble over it, leave it, cast off all thought and memory of it--and begin anew!" He shook his head, his eyes on the pavement, his hands clasped before him. But the primrose hand found his again. "Thou canst not, by the choicest revenge, force Thanatos to yield up thy dead; thou confessest the evil thou workest in revenge as equal to the satisfaction; thou complainest that thy love is faithless--what else? So many thy pains, I can not remember them all; but in them all there is not the worth of one of thy sleepless nights. If thou canst not be a Spartan, be a Stoic; if not an avenger, then a forgetter; if not a lover, then a gallant! Above all things, harken unto a pagan truth: love's a lusty wight and can suffer forty mortal wounds and love again. None but an ostrich loves but once! Perchance I was right at first; thou shouldst have begun thine education in the first of Flora's celebration." He winced, but presently raised his head. "What didst thou when the procession carried me away that night?" he demanded, searching her face. "When thou didst go away with the procession?" she laughed. "I went with them--of a necessity." "And how didst thou escape?" "When they all departed after Flora danced." Thus beyond doubt assured that she had witnessed the dance of Flora, he was afraid to inquire further, lest he betray Lydia. But he wanted mightily to know if she had recognized the alabarch's daughter. The disturbing reflection diverted his line of thought. Many of the night's events which the greater one had overshadowed came back to him. He saw again the miraculous dance of Brahma on the roof of the Temple of Rannu, fled again with Lydia in his arms into the musky shrine and thence into the city; strove hard to convince himself that if he, sharpened of sight by love, had not recognized Lydia except for the bayadere's note and his acquaintance with Lydia's apostasy and her former defense of the Nazarenes, others could not have done so. Again he fought with Flaccus and discovered Agrippa in the dark and abandoned street in Alexandria. And now the image of Eutychus became particularly distinct. His brow blackened suddenly and he sprang to his feet. "It is solved!" he cried, striking the palm of one hand with the other. "By the wrath of God, he is Flaccus' emissary. He turned on Agrippa in Alexandria when Flaccus ambushed the prince! He was part of the conspiracy! It was no blind blow that Agrippa struck. And the soul in me nourishes a lie or he meditates more work for the proconsul in this!" Throughout his intensely confident accusation, Junia had watched him with changing eyes. She had had to feel her way frequently in this last hour. "What?" she asked finally. In a few and rapid words, Marsyas told her of Eutychus' theft and flight, but his ideas hasted from his narrative to more testimony in favor of his conclusion. He remembered Eutychus' jealousy of Drumah, his ruffian mistreatment of Lydia when the prætor moved against the Nazarenes, his attempt to expose her to Justin Classicus because, his jealousy of Marsyas revived, he had no other way of retaliating; and finally of his humiliation at Marsyas' hands before Agrippa and Drumah. "Bitter fool that I was not to understand him in time!" he cried. "In my soul, I know that we follow him to a pitfall in this matter!" Junia slipped her fingers along the gilt grooves in the arm of the divan. Flaccus was a clumsy villain, of a surety! What overt conspiracies he evolved! A wild boar of the German forests would not make more clamor at its attacks! A wonder he had not exposed her, ere this. But for his influence, which made her a place in Cæsar's house, she had given up his service long ago. Her lips curled with disgust and perplexity. "Forewarning," she said gloomily, "is a torture when forearming avails naught." He caught the depression in her tone and turned to her quickly. "Agrippa hath been here, Marsyas," she continued. "Yet he was not to be stopped, I thought, then, that it was only the knave's playing for time!" "What dost thou mean?" he demanded. "Tell me!" "Agrippa was here. Eutychus hath been caught, but Piso notifies the Herod that the prisoner hath appealed to Cæsar, claiming to have information against Agrippa which concerns Cæsar's life and welfare!" Marsyas seized her arm. "What sayest thou?" he cried. "And since thou hast uncovered Flaccus' hand supporting the villain, Agrippa is in greater peril than I had supposed!" For a moment the two looked at each other: Junia with uneasiness on her face, and Marsyas transfixed. He saw his plans against Saul of Tarsus tumbling; he saw the Pharisee triumphing over Lydia! "It may still be hoped," she ventured, "that the knave lies!" "Junia, thou knowest Agrippa! It is my terror lest the knave be armed with a truth!" "Out with it all," she went on desperately. "The Herod is convinced that he is innocent--this time--of any ill-will against Cæsar, and he came here and spent the greater part of an hour, beseeching me to use my influence to hasten Cæsar's hearing of Eutychus!" "In God's name, answer! Did you refuse him?" "I did! I besought him to let Cæsar follow his own way, since the emperor is notedly slow in hearing charges in these later years. I assured him that Cæsar might be more displeased, urged against his inclination to hear a stupid slave, than the slave's charge could make him. But the Herod is more stubborn than the classic steed of Judea. He demanded haughtily of me, if I expected him to treat with a slanderer or beg a truce with a lie. Then I refused him my offices. Wherefore he hath posted off to Antonia!" "She will not harken to him--!" he cried with sudden desperation. "O Marsyas, this day I should be exorcised as a fury, bringing evil happenings. But better the sorry truth than a fair lie. Antonia hath lived out of the world for the last decade, as hast thou. But her seclusion hath achieved the opposite harm, that is hatched by solitariness. She retired, full of years and honor; the world, approaching her door, comes in fair garments, bringing tokens of esteem, talks of ancient triumphs, the virtues of Antonia and the great respect Cæsar hath for her. Wherefore, kindly treated by the world, remembering nothing but the good of the old days and believing in her sweet dotage that she crushed evil when she crushed Sejanus, her natural strategic sense hath been lost in a great, all-enveloping charity. Her natural nobility hath outgrown the wariness which aids youth, and her dimmed sight sees things of stature, only, or of high relief. She will see in the prince's desire only a desire to clear himself of a charge and she will honor him for it! She will do his bidding!" Marsyas snatched up his cloak and sprang toward the archway. "Let me to her!" he cried. "Wait!" Junia cried. "Be prepared against defeat, though it never come! What wilt thou do, if she be immovable, or already gone--for Cæsar is in Tusculum to-day?" Marsyas stopped and his face grew ashen. He saw Lydia again, among the stones of the rabble, and murder leaped into his heart. "Kill Eutychus!" he declared desperately. "It would be fatal for Agrippa," she protested. His hunted ideas turned then upon Cæsar. Suddenly he rushed back to Junia and seized her hands. "Thou art close to Cæsar," he said rapidly and with great supplication in his voice, "and thou art in Cæsar's favor! Beseech him and right Agrippa's mistakes, I implore thee! Help me, Junia! Be my right arm! Promise me thine intercession!" Her face suffused, and she waited a moment before she could trust her voice. "For thy sake, Marsyas," she answered. "I give thee my word!" He pressed her hands to his lips and ran out of the house. She dropped back on her couch and put her fingers to her temples. "Save Agrippa, to kill Saul, to save Lydia, for this Judean vestal's sake?" she speculated to herself. "And where doth Junia profit? Ah! I shall get him in debt, and extort mine own price! Jew or Gentile, he will not think it exorbitant, for under it all, he is a man! But to Tusculum!" She clapped her hands and ordered her litter. CHAPTER XXV THE SPEAKING OF EUTYCHUS The imperial ruin drooped in the gilded lectica, now comatose, now animate. Under the purple robe the long, old, wasted limbs vibrated and the gems, quivering on the gnarled fingers, scintillated incessantly. Now that the rich winds from the gardens of Tusculum breathed on him, he cursed and groped for his mantle; again, when the inimitable sun of the Alban Hills smiled on him, his face purpled with suffusions of heat. Now that his wrinkled blue lids drooped half-way, Euodus, who walked by his side, told himself that he looked on death; but when the sunken eyes unclosed, he had to say that the will therein was immortal. It was a great, withered, tall, old frame, diseased and fallen into decay. Life seldom of its own accord clings with tenacity to so ancient and utter a ruin. Mind stood in the way of the soul's egress and penned it into its dilapidated shell. It was a habit Cæsar's mind had of blocking people, things and himself. A creature of contradicting impulses, affectionate, sensitive, soldierly, immeasurably capable, with harsh standards of uprightness for others, stoic, enduring, ruggedly simple for the time, he was on the other hand one of the bloodiest and most unnatural monsters that ever disgraced the throne of the Cæsars. Moody, taciturn, perverse, superstitious, unspeakably sensual and cruel, yet withal an admirer of honor, the inalienable friend of the inalienable servant, he was a Roman emperor in every phase of his many-sided nature. It is not recorded that any ever loved Tiberius; neither is it recorded that any ever failed to respect him. He was finishing his twenty-fifth year as Emperor of the World, but of late, Macro's capacities as prætorian prefect had been enlarged to those of vice-regent, and Cæsar returned from Capri, his retreat from the trying climate of Rome, only on occasions. Beside him walked eight prætorian guards, picked, not for appearance but for age and integrity. There walked Gallus who had followed Augustus, thirty years before; Attius Paulus, who had one hundred and thirty-nine wounds on his huge hulk; Severus Vespasian, who had been a soldier forty years and had twice refused to be retired; Plautius Asper who had been surnamed Leonidas, because he and a handful had held a German defile in the face of a whole barbarian army--and lived to refuse to be knighted. If Cæsar spoke to one, the answer came in monosyllables and with a touch of the helmet. Flattery never passed their lips, but if one lent his arm to the tall old emperor it was done with a rude tenderness that even the most polished courtier could not have improved. And Tiberius, being blunt and impatient of pretenses, walled himself away from the rest of his following with this bulwark of dependable ruggedness. After his lectica came another, borne by four Georgian youths. Within lounged the latest of Tiberius' favorite ladies, Euodus' daughter, the Lady Junia. They had passed the corner of Cicero's villa when a litter approached from an intersecting avenue and was set down. A woman stepped out. White her hair, her dress the ancient palla and stola of white and purple, her jewels, amethysts. The rheumy emperor saw her imperfectly. "Stop!" he ordered his bearers. The woman approached and made obeisance. "Humph! Antonia," he muttered in some disappointment. But he drew his old frame together and inclined his head respectfully. "Greeting, sister," he said. "The gods attend thee." "Thou art good, Augustus. Welcome to Tusculum once more," she replied. She took the hand he extended and raised it to her lips. The old man gazed at her with a wavering eye. "Come closer. Art so gray?" he asked. "White, Cæsar." He took the hand from hers and put back the vitta that covered her hair. There were the sorrows of seventy years, in its absolute whiteness, and the Roman duskiness of skin was brought out very strongly in contrast. But her eyes were still full and bright, even tender, her thin lips lacking nothing of the color of her youth. Age had not laid its withering touch on her stature or even on the fullness of her frame, but the hand, Time's infallible tally, was the worn-out hand of seventy years. She was the noblest woman of her age, _univira_,--the widow of one husband, dead in her youth, the mother of statesmen, generals and emperors, a scholar and at one time a diplomat,--in all things, the ancient spirit of the First Republic, solitary, rugged, irreproachable in the vicious age of the Cæsars. "Eh! White, wholly white," he assented, running his fingers through her locks with a movement that was almost tender. "And I am thine elder. Yet," he drew himself up and defiance hardened his face, "I am not a dead man, Antonia!" "Nay, who says it, Cæsar? And it is not age that hath blanched me. I was gray at forty--much more gray than thou art now." "No, no! Not age! Truly a woman's protest. But then, perchance not. Thy husband's death undid thee. How thou didst love him! Save for thine example I should say that Eros himself is dead!" After a little he muttered to himself: "Alas! What a name to conjure death! My son Drusus, thy spouse Drusus, and thy son Drusus, the Germanicus. Dead! All! and in their youth. The very name hath a sinister look." The old man shook his unsteady head and knuckled his sunken cheek. The widow's saddened face wore also some surprise. "Canst thou speak of thy son Drusus, now?" she asked. "Not in these many years have I heard thee name him." "No!" he answered shortly. "I speak of dreams; new dreams, which I mean to have the soothsayers interpret." "Tell me of them, Augustus," she urged. "There is one, and it comes nightly. It is a Shade from Thanatos, which approacheth. I put the ægis into its dead hands, crown its death-dewed brow, do obeisance before a pale ghost that melts again into the Shades--and after it passes all Rome, and the Empire of the Cæsars." The widow's eyes showed unutterable sadness, which was unrelieved by tears. The unanointed Cæsars that had passed into the Shades had gathered unto their number no nobler one than the gallant young Germanicus, and the last remnant of the ancient glory of Rome had passed with him. But she put off the encroaching lapse into retrospection. "One of the departed cometh to ask that his offspring be thine heir," she suggested. The old emperor nodded eagerly. "It may be, it may be," he assented. "I have been pondering long upon the matter." A silence fell and the two gazed absently across the shimmering vision of Rome, below them, three leagues to the west. About them were spread the villas of the rich in retreat, the very essence of repose, the birdsong and the murmur of laurels in the breeze; in the distance was the apotheosis of power, but their thoughts overreached the things seen and questioned after things unknown. In their philosophy, life was all. After it was Shadow, an inevitable obliteration in which the just and the unjust were immersed eternally. But no youth, looking forward to the long, eventful days to come, experienced the grave wonder that these expended on the time after things were expected to end. The awe of the unexplored Hereafter--what a waste of universal, earth-old, intuitive awe, if there be no Hereafter! Tiberius muttered, as if to himself: "There is another--yet another dream. I cast dice with Three; three grisly hags, and I lose, though the tesseræ were cogged. But let be, let be; the soothsayers shall read me that one!" He sat up. "Came you of a purpose to speak with me, Antonia?" he asked. "I did," she said, "but it seems that the time is not propitious." "Any hour is propitious for thee, Antonia." "Thou art a kind man, Cæsar. I came to speak of Agrippa." "Agrippa!" the emperor exclaimed, a sudden transformation showing in his voice and manner. The woman in the litter behind stepped out, but paused without advancing. She made no attempt to conceal her attention to the talk between the widow and the emperor. Antonia studied the face of the old man; it was significant, when, after his lapse into the softened mood of retrospection, he should return to his old manner. She felt her way. "Agrippa ceases not to be interesting. Thou and I remember him as the faithfulest friend thy son Drusus had; to this day of all who knew Drusus it is only Agrippa who still hath tears for his name." The emperor's wrinkled mouth was set, his face absolutely without telling expression. "He hath had years of want and humiliation," she continued. "He hath walked under clouds and suffered from ill report, until he is soulsick of it. Now, the favor of his emperor and the peace of good repute restored to him, are things that he would not willingly let go from him again. The inventions of an enemy have risen against him in Rome; even hath the ill-favored sire of the story been discovered, and Agrippa, conscious of his integrity toward thee, is restive. He wants to be examined; his innocence proven and thy good will toward him firmly established." "Well, well!" Tiberius said. "I shall await your happier mood," she said, gathering her robes about her. "Any mood is happy enough for the Jew," was the retort. Antonia unmistakably eyed the old man. "Say on, good Antonia," he urged uncomfortably. "I have not forsworn justice." "Agrippa asks nothing more. His charioteer robbed him, and when he was captured and in danger of punishment, he claimed that he had information against Agrippa which concerns thy welfare. It is simply a device to put off punishment. He hath appealed to thee and thou hast not yet heard him. The Herod is eager that the matter be settled and begs that the slave be heard at once." "Eh! what a fanfare of probity!" the emperor mumbled. "Leave it to a Jew to flourish his righteousness. If he is innocent, he can wait; if he is guilty, we shall overtake him soon enough. I owe him a sentence of uncertainty for his slights to my grandson, the little Tiberius." "And thou hast but this moment said that thou hadst not forsworn justice!" Antonia exclaimed. "Jupiter, but thou art provoking!" he fumed. "Hither, Euodus!" Junia made a slight movement as if she meant to step between her father and the emperor, but was suddenly reminded of her part. She stopped again. "How my sentimental heart cries out against my obligation to Flaccus!" she said to herself. "Here must I stand idly by, while this new Penelope to a dead Ulysses works the Herod's ruin!" Euodus bowed beside Cæsar. "Bring me the Jew's slave that hath a charge for me to hear. Bring him hither, and haste!" The old man turned to Antonia. "Go tell thy valiant Herod that he shall have justice. Justice! Say that. It may not please him so much to have that message." The gilded lectica moved on. The widow went back to her litter and was borne away. Junia remounted her chair and followed the emperor. "O lady," she said, looking after Antonia's litter, "it may be very superior to live aloof from the world, and ignorant of its intrigues, but it is fatal for thy friends, I observe." At the brink of a precipitous descent into the valley west of Tusculum, Euodus returned with Eutychus, whom Piso, at Agrippa's defiant instigation, had been forced to send to Tusculum to be available in event of Cæsar's summons. Junia looked at Eutychus, livid with fear in the presence of the unspeakable might of the emperor, and held debate with herself. She had not agreed that Agrippa should be other than alienated from his wife. She was human enough not to wish the death of any man to whom she was indifferent, and for a moment she seemed about to alight from her chair. Even Flaccus' power over her for the time seemed to lose its effect, for a picture of Marsyas' suffering was a more distinct image. But one of the causes of Marsyas' concern, nay, the chief cause--the protection of Lydia to be achieved by the Herod's success--occurred to her in an evil moment. She turned her face away from the colloquy between Cæsar and the charioteer and studied the summer-green Alban Hills that shouldered the sky behind her. Eutychus collapsed to his knees at sight of the emperor. "Speak, slave," Euodus ordered. "O Cæsar," the charioteer panted when his voice would obey him, "once I drove the Herod and Caligula, the Roman prince, to the Hippodrome in this place and they talked of the succession. And Herod said that he wished that thou wast dead and Caligula emperor in thy stead." The emperor's eyes glittered. "What else?" Euodus demanded. "Somewhat about the young Prince Tiberius which I did not hear," Eutychus trembled. "And what said Caligula to that?" "That the Herod had his own making and not Caligula's to achieve!" "A Roman's answer," Junia said to herself. "Is there nothing more?" the questioner insisted. "Nothing, lord!" Euodus bowed to the emperor and waited. "Give him ten stripes and turn him loose," Tiberius said. Two of the prætorians led Eutychus away. "_Eheu_!" Junia sighed. "I could have stared the knave between the eyes and made him discredit himself in a breath! Ai! Owl-faced Lydia! thou art a destroyed peril, but at what a price!" The bearers stood patiently under the glow of the morning sun, waiting their royal burden's humor to go on. But Tiberius shrank into the relaxation of thought. He had outlived every plot to assassinate him; he held in his hands consummate might; he was surely approaching the Shades; but the example of his infallible fortune, the fear of his merciless hand and the fact that he would not stand long in the way of ambitions, had not quieted the fatal tongue which bespoke him evil! He was sick of blood and torture, tale-bearing and intrigue, because he was surfeited with it all. But here, now, was this precarious Herod, barely escaping disaster which had pursued him for twenty years, wishing brutally and incautiously that he might die! Tiberius was at a loss to know what to do with the man. The thought wearied him. He wished now that he had ordered a hundred stripes for Eutychus instead of ten. What an officious creature Antonia had become! Euodus folded his arms and waited; the patricians, approaching in chairs of their own, alighted, bowed, passed out of the path and went around, remounted their chairs and disappeared. The birds in the trees about, hushed by the talk below them, twittered and flew again. Euodus, casting a sidelong glance at the emperor, nodded at the nearest bearer. "To the palace," he said. The slaves turned back up the slanting street and the motion of the lectica aroused Tiberius. "Whither?" he demanded irritably. "To the palace, Cæsar," Euodus answered. "Did I command thee? To the Hippodrome, slaves!" The bearers turned once more and began the ticklish descent of the paved roadway to the valley below, where the Circus of Tusculum was built. The huge elliptical structure stood out in the plain, alone and solid except for the low, heavy arch of the vomitoria which broke the round of masonry. The trees about it were dwarfed in contrast, the columns shrunken, the viæ, approaching it from all directions straight as arrows fly, curbed and paved with stone, were as mere taut ribbons. But in the great slope of the Campagna, under the immense and sparkling blue of the Italian sky, it was only a detail in rock. Rome had long since outgrown her walls and ceased to contemplate them except as landmarks and conventionalities, useless but as significant as Cæsar's paludamentum. Inns and mile-stones along the viæ proved them once to have been things distinctly suburban, but the city crying for room had passed the walls and built its own characteristics--temples, tombs, villas, circuses, fora and arches as far as Tusculum along the roads. Lovelier beyond comparison than Rome's loveliest spots, it was small wonder that to fill their Augustan lungs with the freshness of the Campagna, the idle were borne out of the contained airs of the city, which were of such seasonal peculiarities that temples in propitiation of Mephitis and the goddess Febris had been erected. So daily groups of patricians collected at the Hippodrome of Tusculum, with laughter and badinage, the flashing of jewels and the glittering of cars, the flutter of lustrous silks and the tossing of feathers, to spend the bright hours of the day watching the races that proceeded in the arena below. The races had not begun, the crowds had not assembled. The gilded lectica was borne through the tunnel-like entrance up the stairs, not to the amphitheater but to the arena. Slaves with blanketed horses and clusters of betting patricians were here and there over the sanded ellipse within. The bustle of preparation slackened at the approach of the august visitor. The eyes of the emperor opened and closed dully. Nothing was here to interest a man worn out with seventy years of change and excitement. Nothing new could have aroused him, for his attention rebelled against the call. Presently, during one of the intervals that his eyes were open, he saw, within touch of his hand, Agrippa and Caligula side by side, talking to a gladiator. The emperor scowled and looked away. The bearers plodded on, rounded the upper end of the ellipse and, passing down the side, neared the mouth of the cunicula. Agrippa and Caligula had moved from their position and were there, with a notary taking down the terms of a wager. Apart from them stood a small but important man, frowning over a waxen tablet which a slave had cringingly handed him. Tiberius looked at him, then at Agrippa. His brows lowered more, this time with irritation. It seemed that action had been formulated by circumstance and that the emperor was not to avoid a tiresome prosecution. He put out his hand as the bearers bore him by and it touched the Roman on the shoulder. The man turned on his heel, but seeing who was near bowed profoundly. If he meant to speak to the emperor he was not given opportunity. "Bind that man, Macro," Cæsar said, nodding at Agrippa. The lectica moved on. As it passed up the opposite side Macro crossed to it and, puzzled and disturbed, bowed again. "Cæsar's pardon, but whom am I to bind?" he questioned. "That man," Tiberius replied irritably, pointing to the Herod. "Agrippa!" the astonished prefect exclaimed. "I have said." The lectica went on, up and around the curve of the ellipse, and back again to the cunicula. The few within the walls of the Hippodrome had gathered there in an interested and excited group. In the center stood Agrippa with manacles on his wrists and ankles. The charm and sparkle in his atmosphere were gone; even as Tiberius looked, he saw the cold, evil, vengeful countenance of the Asmonean Slave, the Terror of the Orient, Herod the Great, appear, like a face putting off a mask, behind the graceful features of his grandson. Tiberius was grimly satisfied; he felt the first interest in the arrest; he was always by choice a preferrer of noble game. On either side of the prisoner stood a Roman soldier; aloof and passive was Macro, but the earth had apparently opened and swallowed Caligula. As the lectica approached, the crowd gave way and his captors permitted Agrippa to come nearer the emperor. "At Cæsar's command, I am arrested," he said evenly. "Will Cæsar grant me the prisoner's privilege and tell me why?" "Thy charioteer hath spoken, Agrippa," was the response. "The slave swears that on such and such a day he drove thee and Caligula to this place. Instead of horses you talked of kings, instead of bets, the succession. And thou madest moan that I was not dead so that Caligula could reign in my place!" The jaws of many round about relaxed in horror. Agrippa's muscles made an involuntary start, but his face retained its calm. But the emperor caught the start. "Forgot that unctuous bit of tittle-tattle when thou didst make Antonia bearer of thy boasts, eh?" he piped. "My words have been distorted," Agrippa spoke, though he seemed to hate himself for offering a defense. "Ah-r-r! Wilt thou snivel and deny?" Tiberius snarled. The prince's manacled hands clenched and a glimmer of hate showed in his eyes. Cæsar nodded; that was better. [Illustration: The prince's manacled hands clenched] "Agrippa, the king-maker!" he went on, "late mendicant from Judea; heir presumptive to the ax! Eh? Take him away! Macro, come thou to the palace to-night, and I'll deliver sentence!" The gilded lectica moved on. Twenty minutes later, Marsyas, white to the lips, his eyes enlarged and dangerous, sprang from a clump of myrtle by the roadside, after the litter had passed up toward Tusculum and, thrusting a hand into Junia's chair, seized her arm. "See that Tiberius forgets his audience with Macro to-night," he said to her. "See that he yearns after Capri, and returns to-morrow--or thou bringest upon me the pain of killing." Terrified for the first time in her life, Junia shrank under the crushing grip. "Him or me!" she told herself. "I promise!" she whispered to Marsyas. "But acquit me of blame. What could I do?" "I have shown thee, now!" he said intensely, and was gone. CHAPTER XXVI THE ARM MADE BARE Lydia went up on the housetop into the shade of the pavilion with the writing her father had put into her hand, and drawing the hangings on the east side of the pavilion to shut out the morning sun, sat down to read how Marsyas had revealed the evil tidings to the alabarch. It was the first moment of rest she had had since the messenger had arrived at daybreak with the letter which had flung Cypros into paroxysms of suffering and desperation. Now that the unhappy princess had yielded to the benign influence of a narcotic simple, Lydia had time for her own thoughts. It was not the same Lydia that had danced on the Temple of Rannu. Spiritual change as infallibly marks the countenance as physical change. The last of the half-skeptical, half-philosophical tolerant equanimity was gone from her face; the self-reliance had been transformed into a look of faith and believing, and a certain tranquillity, no less sweet and unshaken because it was sorrowful, no less patient because its hope was faint, made her forehead placid. She read: ROME, Kal. Jul. X, 790. "TO THE MOST EXCELLENT ALABARCH, ALEXANDER LYSIMACHUS, GOVERNOR OF THE JEWS OF ALEXANDRIA, GREETING: "It is my grief to inform thee that at the command of Cæsar, my lord and patron, Herod Agrippa, hath been confined in the Prætorian Camp awaiting sentence for utterances pronounced treasonous to Cæsar. "Immediately after the prince's arrest, one of the ladies of Cæsar's train was stricken by an illness, resulting from the malarious airs of the Campagna, and the emperor ordered the immediate return to Capri. "Inquiry among the emperor's ministers discloses the fact that he left no explicit instructions concerning the execution of a sentence upon Agrippa. It is noted in Rome that, owing to the multiplicity of his duties and the weariness of his mind, the emperor forgets readily, and is not pleased to be reminded of that which he hath forgotten to perform. Wherefore, if it please God to erase Agrippa from his mind, it shall be seen to, here in Rome, that no one recall the unfortunate prince to Cæsar's attention. "Canvass among the fellows of Agrippa conducted by certain powers in the state reveals that the movement against the prince did not have its inception in Rome; however, many were not unwilling to have it come to pass because of the prince's aggressive political preferences. But now that he is at the edge of ruin, the insignificant activity in the capital hath fallen inert; those who contributed to it are alarmed, for the accomplishment of Agrippa's death will inevitably revert upon the heads of them who endangered him, should Caius Caligula be crowned. "The movement against the prince, consummated by the charioteer Eutychus, had its inception, as I have said, not in Rome. The man stole of his master's wardrobe and ran away. When he was apprehended he claimed that he had information against Agrippa which concerned the life and welfare of Cæsar. Piso, city prefect, bound the man and sent him to Tusculum, where, by the solicitations of Antonia, who was commanded by Agrippa, the emperor heard the charioteer's charge. "Thou and I know, good my lord, that Eutychus is too clumsy a villain, too much of a coward, to invent and push this bold work himself, without support. Wherefore, I and others are convinced that he must have been inspired and aided by some secret and shrewd enemy outside of Rome. If the proconsul of Egypt is not yet informed of this disaster, do not trouble him with the information! "It may assist thee to know that Eutychus, given ten stripes as earnest of Cæsar's respect for him, and turned loose, eluded mine and Caligula's vengeance and immediately took ship for Alexandria. Expect him in the Brucheum. "Know this, also. If Cæsar forget and Agrippa live on, this enemy will grow restive and bestir himself again, wherefore it is the duty of them who love the prince to watch for any coiling which prepares for the stroke. "For thine own comfort and for the comfort of his unhappy princess, I add here, though in peril to the prince's benefactor and to myself, that Agrippa's prison discomforts are alleviated, and kind usage secured him by the generous distribution of gold among them who surround him. It is not a difficult matter to secure him comparative comfort. "Silas and I daily come to him with fresh clothing, and abundant food: he hath his own bedding and his daily bath. Through the influence of the prætorian prefect, obtained at great price by Antonia, none is permitted to pronounce Agrippa's name outside the camp, on pain of extreme punishment--a clever pretense at abhorring a traitor which aims only at his defense. "Thy part is to quiet, within thy powers, any work in Alexandria which may lead to Cæsar's remembering Agrippa. "I have closed the prince's residence, dispersed his slaves among the families of his friends, and with Silas I am living under the roof of Antonia, in whose care I am permitted to receive letters. The Lady Junia is at Capri at my solicitation, pledged to do a woman's part in the protection of Agrippa. "May the God of our fathers arm thee. "Peace to thee and thine. "MARSYAS." Lydia sighed and let the writing drop into her lap. "I can not hope, my Marsyas," she said to herself, "if thou art schooled in the understanding of women by Junia!" The Roman tincture was patent in the letter, but the Jewish manner, Jewish penetration, and the Essenic coldness were strong and unaltered. His well-beloved and unchanged hand had pressed all the surface of the parchment, but she did not lift it to her lips. There had been no word beyond the general greeting to her as the family of the alabarch, and proud, even in her sorrow and the new-found humility, she saved her endearments. After a moment of further thought, she was aroused by the rattle of wheels which came to an end before the porch of her father's house. She arose and going to the parapet looked over. Justin Classicus' chariot stood there. She caught the last flutter of his garments as he disappeared under the roof of the porch. She went back to her place and waited for a servant to announce the guest. But Classicus lingered. The alabarch was not like to be telling him the account of Agrippa's latest misfortune. She put away Marsyas' letter and gazed at the Synagogue immersed in the golden flood of Egyptian sunshine. She had not ceased to love it, nor to attend it with all maiden fidelity since she had followed Jesus of Nazareth, but it seemed to love her less, to throw a shadow darker, but less benign, over her, as she approached its giant gates. Saul of Tarsus whom she had feared for Marsyas' sake was a hidden menace now in its great angles, a threat in its rituals, a brooding danger held up only so long as she hid in deceit. She felt unutterably lonely and friendless. Presently Classicus came up unannounced. She knew at a glance that he had learned from some source of Agrippa's misfortune, and wondered for a moment if her father had forgotten Marsyas' charge. "Alexandria hath heard of Agrippa's disaster," he began, as he seated himself beside her, "and I came to offer my consolation and my aid." Then Flaccus already had the news! "I would thou couldst aid us, Justin. Not now is anything more precious than help, and nothing less possible." "And to say lastly," he continued, looking into her face, "that I deplore that haunted look in thine eyes, Lydia. What does it mean?" "That I grow older, wiser, sadder--and less fortunate." "Thou shouldst study the philosophy of the Nazarenes," he declared. "I find that much of their teaching, stripped of its frenzy and reduced to the dignity of pure language, hath much comfort in it." "Does it promise that sorrow will not come to them who espouse it?" she asked, looking away. "Nay, but it preaches universal love. Could I teach thee that, sorrow should never approach thee or me henceforth!" "I fear thou dost not understand them," she said dubiously. "Not wholly," he admitted. "I have not yet been able to agree with them, that I, Justin Classicus, scholar and Sadducee, should find it in my heart to love a crook-back shepherd that speaks Aramaic, rejoices on conchs, relishes onions and is washed only when the rains wet him." He smiled, and Justin Classicus' face was helped by a smile. Mirth possessed him entirely, cast up a transitory flush in his cheeks and lighted torches in his eyes. But Lydia looked across the Alexandrian housetops. "Why dost thou seek this new philosophy, Justin?" she asked. "To see if it be safe enough heresy to teach thee," he returned. "If it be, thou shall learn it, for in its creed of universal love, I put mine only hope that thou shalt come to love me!" "Learn the universal love for thyself, Justin: learn to love the shepherd and thine enemy--learn it in all truth, and thou mayest be content with that, and no more!" "The Lord forbid!" he cried. "If that should come to pass, learning this new philosophy, I pause, even now!" "Enemy?" he repeated, after a little in a gentler tone. "Save another hath possessed thy heart, I have no enemy--the Nazarenes recommending that one leave them out of one's catalogue of fellows!" "Canst thou not hold off thy hand, even from an enemy? Hath thy search after their philosophy taught thee so much?" He looked at her face, and saw thereon something to follow. "I can--be bought," he answered softly. She remembered his part in the ambuscade the night of the Dance of Flora, and her face paled a little. "It is not the Nazarene way," she replied unreadily. "Nay, but if the demand be great enough, any method must serve. Shall I name my price?" His voice was clear and illuminating. She arose and moved over to one of the columns, and leaning against it gazed across toward the blue sparkle of the New Port. She felt the strength of his fortification, the extent of his power over her. Not any of the many things she had hidden from all but Marsyas were unknown to him! She turned to him with appeal in her eyes, but he laughed very softly, and wrapped the kerchief skilfully about his head. His composure terrified her. He held out his hand. "Think," he said, "and to-morrow or the next to-morrow, but soon, thou wilt tell me. Meanwhile I shall tell thy father that I have spoken with thee." He took her fingers and kissed them. "Farewell. And let the Nazarenes persuade thee, if I can not!" A long time after she heard the wheels of his chariot roll away from before the alabarch's porch. Then with slow, weary steps she went down into the house. She would seek out her father, and discover what to expect from Flaccus and if disaster could be averted from the beloved head of Marsyas and the unhappy Herod. Not until then would she entertain the suggested sacrifice which Classicus had so deftly demanded. But when she reached the inner chamber, with the arch opening into the alabarch's presiding room, she saw within the proconsul. She hesitated, surprised and alarmed, but presently her father, raising his eyes, saw her and signed to her to enter. The proconsul stopped in the middle of a sentence to greet her, not from courtesy, but because she was a consideration. She took her place on an ivory footstool at the foot of the alabarch's chair and seemed to efface herself. Lysimachus trifled with a stick of wax and heard Flaccus to the end of the sentence. The old tone of assumed cordiality was gone. Flaccus had ascended again to the plane of a legate speaking with a Jew. "So I shall pay thee thy five talents and release the lady, that she may be sent to Rome," he concluded. "The gossip of the lady's arrival in Rome would work havoc, sir. She would be there engaging Antonia's attention, which should be devoted without lapse, in other directions." "The Herod's lady need not arrive with the blare of trumpets," was the cool retort, "and since thy talents are returned to thee, Lysimachus, thou art not asked to carry thy concern into Rome." The thin cheeks of the alabarch grew pink and Lydia raised a pair of somber eyes to the proconsul's face. "It is not a matter of my loan," the alabarch answered without a tremor in his melodious voice, "but it is that I held her in hostage in the beginning." "At my suggestion. Then thou canst release her at my suggestion--and if the loan sits roughly on thy conscience we shall call it a gift at this late day." "If it please thee, good sir, we have left the discussion of the talents. It is the lady who concerns us now. I would be plain with thee; I should reproach myself did I let her proceed out of my house." "Call the lady," Flaccus commanded. "We will lay the matter before her." "She sleeps," Lydia said. "I bring her more relief than sleep," was the blunt reply. "Bring her hither." "On one promise," Lydia said. "What?" "That I and my servants alone shall accompany her to Rome." Flaccus gazed straight at the alabarch's daughter. Lysimachus sat without movement. He knew that his daughter had seen at once that which he had instantly divined--that Flaccus had no intention of sending Cypros to Rome. "Bring the lady," Flaccus insisted, "and we shall lay our plans thereafter." Lydia sat still; she knew Cypros' believing nature; that she would see nothing but a generous offer in the proconsul's intent; that to prevent the simple woman from consenting to destroy herself the whole villainy of the proconsul would have to be uncovered to her--doubtless before Flaccus, with unimaginable results. The alabarch looked down on his daughter's fair head, away from Flaccus' threatening gaze and waited for her answer. "My lord," she said composedly, "we have complicated our associations with thee and this unfortunate family long enough. Perchance we erred. At best it may no longer be maintained. Though the Lady Cypros is uninformed, I and others know why thou hast been tolerant of our people of late; what deed thou didst attempt in the passage back of Rannu's Temple on the closing night of Flora's feast; what disaster overtook thee there; why Agrippa, now, is undone and what thou meanest in truth to do with his princess." There was silence. Then the alabarch's hand dropped down on Lydia's curls. "Daughter, thou art weaponed with testimony new to thy father; thou hast kept thy arms concealed. Yet I will take them up, now." He raised his eyes to Flaccus. "Perchance thou wouldst explain to me my daughter's meaning?" After a dangerous dilation of his gray-brown eyes, Flaccus seemed more than ever composed. "Is my favor worth aught to the Jews?" he asked. "Jews," the alabarch replied, "do not purchase immunity at sacrifice of the honor of their women." "I am not enraged, Alexander," was the reply. "I am only diverted. But the Herod under sentence of death and the Alexandrians loosed upon the Regio Judæorum, it seems that the Lady Herod will soon be without a protector or a roof-tree. She had much better go--to Rome!" He strode out of the presiding-room and into the street before the alabarch could conduct him to the door. Lysimachus and his daughter looked at each other. Their thoughts reached out and gathered in for contemplation all the details and the results of the climax. Then the alabarch opened his arms to his daughter and she slipped down on his breast. "Tell me what thou knowest against Flaccus, and why I have not learned of this?" he urged. It was a sore trial to Lydia's conscience to leave out her own part in the story she told, but the alabarch was less attentive to the source of her information than to the information itself. "I did not tell it sooner, because, in ignorance thou wouldst not be constantly hiding from Flaccus a distaste, distrust and watchfulness that infallibly would have controlled thee hadst thou known his hands were red with the blood of a man of whom he spoke fair and whom he pretended to love, before the world!" "What shall we do?" she asked after a long silence, for the press of many evils had stunned her resourcefulness. "Tell the princess first," the alabarch responded. "And then?" "Fight! He can invent twenty excuses to take Cypros from me by law and against her will." "Then we must hide her and speedily!" The alabarch thrust his old waxen fingers into his white locks. "Now who will imperil himself by giving her asylum?" he pondered. Lydia looked up after a little thought. "The Nazarenes," she ventured timidly. "What! The apostates! The community is the most perilous spot in Egypt!" "Here in Alexandria, of a truth," Lydia hurried on eagerly, "but thou knowest by report that they have spread abroad among rustics and shepherds as a running vine. Many are living about over the Delta. One of them will shelter her, I know. She will go when we have told her what threatens, nor fail to flourish on their rough fare, since she hath made her bed by the roadways, and had her bread from the hands of wayside mendicants!" The alabarch arose and set her on her feet. "Haste, then, Lydia; no time is to be lost!" But before she reached the threshold of the archway she turned back and came slowly to him, closer and closer, until she raised her arms and put them about his neck. "Father!" she whispered, "we need have fear of Classicus." The pallor on the old man's face quivered like the reflection of a shaken light. "He is jealous," he answered, "of Marsyas! Hath he cause, my daughter?" Lydia dropped her head on the alabarch's breast. "Marsyas is an Essene!" she whispered, and the alabarch smoothed her curls and was filled with pity. CHAPTER XXVII THE PROCONSUL'S DELIBERATIONS Before sunset that day, Flaccus had received two messages. One was brought by a Jewish slave. It read: "TO FLACCUS AVILLUS, PROCONSUL OF EGYPT, GREETING: "I have departed. "CYPROS." The other came by a Roman courier, who had landed an hour before from one of the swift-going triremes which had left Ravenna three days later than the passenger boat that had brought Marsyas' tidings. The message also was written in a woman's hand and was no less enraging than the other: "ROME, Kal. Jul. X, 790. "This bulletin to tell thee, O my raging corybant, that thy cause hath ceased to prosper for the past three days. Mine own part was well performed as was thine other minion's, the bewitching Eutychus, but desperate work hath been done which bids fair to upset thee and me and preserve thine enemies. "First and above all things, thou wilt remember that it was not in the pact that I should do more than lead the Herod out of the path of domestic uprightness and hold off my hands. This hath been already done, but the Parcæ have grown weary of yielding thee favor, so read, here, following, disaster! "Herod and his friend, the Essene Marsyas, who had become a dangerous Roman, filled with a Jew's cunning and the boldness of a wolf-suckled Romulus, till misfortune cut him down--this same fallen Herod and his friend have dropped out of sight, except as Death may bare its arm and reach down to cut off the head of the one and the income of the other. This much in three days; but Rome hath taught herself to forget in a twinkling. "But Cæsar hath been for many days troubled of a dream. He telleth it thus, in no more words, no fewer: 'I cast dice with Three; three grisly hags, and I lose, though the tesseræ were cogged!' His collection of soothsayers, the completest in the world, offered as many readings as there are numbers of them in the court. But Tiberius drew his lip and bared his teeth at them and called them pea-hens and cockchafers. Even Thrasullus, he lampooned--Thrasullus, whom once he feared. "Whereupon, the store of haruspices and augurs that feed upon superstitious Rome were brought in--only to furnish mirth for the court and victims for Tiberius. "Then Macro, rummaging about in musty and alien-peopled corners of the Imperial City, brought forth a wonder! "It--and would I could call the sex of the creature--came hither from the Orient. On that naked fact, Rome is left to build its biography, describe its looks and fathom its purpose. For it came before Cæsar, and stood, a column in white--hooded, mummied, shawled, veiled in white! The court hath had spasms, since, fearing that it might have been a leper, but I say that there was no sick frame within those cerements! It had the stature and brawn of a man, but it managed its garments with the skill of a woman. It came, heard Cæsar's dream, plucked off a husk of its wrappings, produced pigment and stylus and wrote thereon. "Then it vanished quite away. "A hundred courtiers rushed upon the wrapping that it left, and Cæsar, pallid even under his wrinkles, screamed to them to pursue the Thing and fetch it back. But it was gone; vanished into thin air. "Then Macro plucked up courage and, taking up the cloth, fetched it to Cæsar to read. "And Cæsar, ashamed to show fear in the face of his court, snatched the linen away and read--to himself! "Now, whether the writing assured Tiberius that he was the comeliest monarch on the earth, or unfolded this scheme which is to follow, no man knows. But that which was written contained persuasion which worked on Cæsar's mirth, for he smiled, as he hath not smiled since Sejanus tasted death. "'Go forth and search out that soothsayer,' he commanded Macro, 'that I may give him whatsoever thing he would have!' But Macro hath not discovered the soothsayer unto this day. "Meantime Cæsar cleared his audience-chamber, but despatched a slave to bring me back to him. "And when I came I was bidden in whispers to take Caligula to the deepest hidden villa on Capri, and entertain him until I was bidden to return. "An hour later, I met my father, the simple Euodus, who told me after many charges to keep it secret, that he had been bidden to fetch at daybreak the coming morning, whichever prince, Caligula or Tiberius, who stood without the emperor's door to give him greeting. "And yet another hour later, the little Tiberius' tutor was summoned to the imperial bed-chamber and came forth some minutes later with a face as blank as a Tuscan sherd. "Now, though I saw not the cloth of revelation, nor heard the emperor's plans, I knew then, as I know now, that the mysterious soothsayer wrote that the dream meant that Cæsar and the Destinies should choose the coming emperor, and bade him proceed by these means. "And I, dutiful lady to an engaging prince, took Caligula, nothing loath, and went privately into the interior of the island to that small wasp-nest palace clinging to the side of the cruelest precipice in these bad hills of Capri. "But in the night, while yet Caligula lingered at the board, because forsooth the slaves had carried me away first, there came the thunder of hoofs without, sentries and servants, asleep or drunken or afraid, fell right and left, flying feet rang upon the pavement, and before any could resist, Caligula was snatched up, rushed out and away into the night--and not any one saw the face of his abductor. "But when my father duly emerged from the emperor's bed-chamber there stood without, not little Tiberius, but Caligula, drenched as if he had been soused in a horse-trough to sober him, with immense dazed eyes and trembling like an aspen. "When he was led within, Cæsar started up and glared at him with baleful eyes. "'I was sent by a Dream,' Caligula whispered. 'What wilt thou have of me?' "And Tiberius, struggling with an apoplexy, fell back and made no instant answer. But presently he said, "'Perpol! I cogged the dice for myself, but it was the Destinies who threw them! Oh, well, it was written, and had to come to pass!' "Where was the little Tiberius? Being assured that naught should prevent his election, he lingered for his breakfast. O fatal appetite of lusty youth! He lost an empire by it. For Cæsar, still afraid of the mysterious Thing from the Orient, ratified the choke of the Destinies. "But Caligula hath discovered the identity of the Dream that fetched him; which being very substantial and human stands in high favor with the prince imperial. And so, through him as well as through the Herod's own claim on Caligula, Agrippa's hopes are brighter. "Wherefore thy campaign against the obstacle between thee and the maker of that twenty-year old wound in thy heart must be cautious, no longer overt, and above all things not of such nature as may recoil upon thee. Hear for once a woman's reason. If thou accomplish the Herod's end, remember that Caligula succeeds Tiberius and will not fail to visit vengeance on those who ruined his friend! "Be wise, be covert, be wary! If thou hast made mistakes, correct them! Make no new enemies, and turn old ones into friends. I will help thee, here, in Rome, except to the point of exposing myself. "If thou wilt work, be rapid, for Cæsar declines. We go hence as soon as he may be removed, to Misenum. But it is only animal flight from death; he seems to turn like a wounded jackal and snap at his heels. Matters of state, beyond the satisfying of a multitude of grudges, are entirely given up to Macro. But daily the dullness on his brain shifts a little, so that the light of recollection penetrates to it, and he remembers forgotten animosities. Herein lies thy hope. I will not suggest Agrippa to him; Caligula would cut my throat before daybreak, for the eaves-dropping Macro would know what I did. "Calculate for thyself; get others to do thy work and to shoulder the peril. "Meanwhile Venus prosper thee, and may the Parcæ repent. "JUNIA." "Oh, well I know that mummied mystery, that Dream, that unseen abductor!" Flaccus raged, gnawing his nails. "It is that villain Essene to whom I owe torture and death! He, to direct the imperial succession!" Then he fell to considering his obstacles. Caligula as prince imperial and friend to the Herod would permit no persecution of the Jews. That method of coercing the alabarch had to be abandoned. Next, he re-read the single line from Cypros. She had not gone to Rome; she had hidden herself. That was what the line meant. They had told her, so she hated him. But he did not wince so much under her hate, as he raged over his bafflement. Then he thought of Classicus, and with the thought his hope revived. Finally he sprang up, and, summoning slaves, scattered them broadcast over Alexandria in search of the philosopher. He would go to Rome! He would bear to Cæsar an appeal from Flaccus to command the alabarch to produce Cypros, Herod Agrippa's wife, who had been abducted. The plan unfolded itself so readily and so helpfully, that the proconsul's face grew radiant with anticipated triumph. In an hour, a slave returned with Justin Classicus. CHAPTER XXVIII THE STRANGE WOMAN Cæsar left Capri and roved along the Italian coast in his splendid barges, or approached by land close to Rome, even to spend the night just without her walls, or in Tusculum, Ostia, Antium or Baiæ. He dragged his court with him, by this time deserted of all upright men, and circling, slinking, making sorties and retiring, he brought up at last in the villa of Lucullus on Misenum with all his unclean party. Macro in attendance upon Cæsar had left a tribune in Rome as a post of despatch from which necessary information could be communicated to the prefect in Misenum. The tribune, a sour old prætorian, with more integrity than graciousness, charged to protect Agrippa's interests for Macro's sake, now that Caligula was prince imperial, was empowered with not a little of the prefect's authority, which he administered with a kind of slavish awe of it. So, when a young Alexandrian Jew, giving the name of Justin Classicus, bearing a letter of introduction from the Proconsul of Egypt, applied for a tessera which would give him admission to Misenum, the tribune refused, declaring that the visitor must be indorsed by a Roman of rank and in good odor with the emperor. Classicus took his departure, assuring the tribune that he would go to Baiæ where young Tiberius lived in his father's villa, and get the indorsement of the lad, to whom Flaccus was notedly a partizan. As soon as Classicus had departed, the tribune rushed a messenger to Marsyas, with Macro's signet which would command horses at posts between Rome and Misenum, and informed the young man what menaced the Herod. Marsyas did not tarry for preparation. He knew that Classicus would go by the common route, by sea from Ostia, and that the overland route was only, by the luckiest of circumstances, the speedier. Before the messenger had returned to the tribune, Marsyas was on the road to Misenum. A day later, he passed the picket thrown out a hundred paces from the actual precincts of the villa of Lucullus, but when he offered his tessera to the prætorian posted at its inner walls, the soldier did not lower his short sword. Marsyas, who had come to know many of the prætorians, looked in surprise at the man. "Turn back, good sir," the man said. "None enters the lines to-day." While he knew that it was useless to ask the sentinel why the arbitrary order was in force, the question leaped to his lips before he could stop it. His voice was eager. "What passeth within?" The soldier shook his head. Marsyas drew away a space and thought. He knew that the little Tiberius was an exception to every law laid down by Cæsar; Classicus could not have armed himself with a more potent name. Caligula's friends, even Macro's friends, might be barred, not the friends of the little beloved Tiberius. The obstruction was dangerous. He knew that he had to deal with Classicus. The bitterness in his heart rose up and smothered his distress: for the moment he lost sight of Agrippa's peril, his hope against Saul of Tarsus and his fear for Lydia, in the all-overwhelming rancor against the man who was setting foot upon all the purposes in the young Essene's life. While he stood wrestling with a mighty impulse to kill Classicus, a courier in a well-known livery bowed beside him. "The Lady Junia sends thee greeting and would see thee in her father's house." Marsyas turned readily and followed the servant. He had come to look upon the Roman woman as a counselor, of whom he had some serviceable ideas out of the many he had not adopted. He knew that if he crossed her threshold to find distressing tidings within, he was sure of finding an attempt at alleviation at the same time. He might come forth vexed with all his friends, hating more hotly his enemies, but less amazed at sin in general. He had not learned to apologize for the world, nor even to believe in it; he had simply come to accept it as a necessary and irremediable evil. The general condemnation of his skepticism had not left her untouched, but he felt, nevertheless, that no one was so bad that another much worse could not be found. Junia, therefore, occupied a position of lesser blame. She was charitable and amiable, and whatever she had done that failed to measure up to his Jewish standard of virtue had been overshadowed by her usefulness. He was led toward a little inclosure of lattice-work and vines on the summit of a knoll, from which the imperial demesnes were visible. Between the screen and the brink of the eminence was earth enough for the foothold of an olive, and its dark crown reached over and shaded the space within. There was a single marble exedra with feet and arms of carven claws, and through the interstices of the vinery and the farther shade and foliage of the new spring, the insula of Euodus arose white and graceful. The sunshine lay in brilliant mosaics over the thick sod, and above, lozenges of blue showed where the light had entrance. The breeze from the warm bay went soft-footed through the trees, and for the moment Marsyas felt that all the friendliness which the world held for him had been caught and pent in the little garden. Junia was there, luxuriously bestowed in the cushions of the stone seat. She made room for him beside her, but he took one of the pillows and, dropping it on the grass, sat at her feet. He looked at her with expectancy in his eyes. "O my Junia," he said, "why dost thou wear that eager, uninformed look, as if thou wouldst say, 'Tell me quickly what news thou hast!' when thou knowest invariably I bring no cheer!" "Hear him!" she cried. "Shall I look thus: 'Here comes Marsyas, bearing evil tidings and craving comfort, for he does not care for me except when I may do something for him?'" "Of a truth, dost thou not say that in thy heart?" he insisted. "No! I say this: 'Yonder young man is much in debt to me, but my requital when I ask it will be equal to his debt.' Wherefore, I shall serve on till the sum is equal." "Thou speakest truly when thou sayest I am in debt to thee, but if thou hast in thy heart something which thou wouldst have me do, command me now!" "Perchance when I see what brought thee to Misenum, to-day," she smiled. "If thou canst help me, Junia, I shall owe thee a life!" "Thy life, Marsyas?" "No; Agrippa's--or the life of Justin Classicus!" "How now!" she cried, and there was more genuine interest in her soft voice than she had previously shown. "What hath stirred thee against Classicus?" At that moment an indistinct shout of great volume, as of many men cheering behind walls, interrupted him. He turned his head quickly in the direction of the palace. "What passeth within?" he asked; "why will they not admit me?" "Nothing, nothing," she said hurriedly, "or at least only an important ceremony which none but Cæsar can perform; Macro does not wish him to be interrupted. Go on with thy story!" "Flaccus hath sent a messenger to the emperor--a messenger that commands the favor of the little Prince Tiberius." "Who told thee?" she asked. "Well?" she inquired. He studied the look on her face and felt that it was strangely composed for the assumed eagerness in her voice. "The tribune refused him the tessera which he must have to approach the emperor's abode, and required that he produce the indorsement of some notable Roman before he return again. The messenger went away boasting that he would get it of the little Tiberius." "He will!" she assented, "for little Tiberius is not on the promontory to-day, and the sentries without dare not refuse the lad's signet!" Marsyas frowned and looked down: he was perplexed that she did not help. "Is there no way to shut him out of Misenum?" he asked. "Cæsar's passport is as much a command as Cæsar's denial--when the little Tiberius delivers it," she repeated. "But can I not reach Macro?" "No," she said decisively. "Macro's powers pale before the lad's." Was she at the end of her ingenuity, or her willingness, he asked himself. "He will get to the emperor, then, if he start?" His desperation grew under the lady's easy irony. "Unless thou or some other of Agrippa's friends disable him permanently with a bodkin, or a storm deliver him up to the Nereids." Marsyas' hands clenched: he moved as if to rise, but she slipped her hands through the bend of his elbow and let them retard him, more by their presence than by actual strength. "Is there something thou canst do?" he asked. She hesitated; something seemed to fill her eyes; her lids quivered and dropped; speech trembled on her lips, but the momentary impulse passed. After a little silence, she lifted her eyes, composed once more. "I told thee, once upon a time," she said, "of the world. I have counseled with thee for thine own good, and sometimes thou didst heed me, but on the greater number of occasions thou hast chosen for thyself. What hast thou won from thy long battle for the stern purposes which have engaged thee? What hast thou achieved in controlling this Herod, or in working against Saul of Tarsus? What?" He frowned and looked away. "Nothing," she answered, "save thou hast gathered perils around thee, forced thyself into sterner deeds, and there--" She laid a pink finger-tip between his eyes. "--there is a blight on thy comeliness." "Dost thou urge me to give over mine efforts? If so, speak, that I may tell thee I can not obey!" he declared. "No? Not even if thy work maketh another unhappy--whom thou wouldst not have to be unhappy?" He looked at her: did she mean Lydia? Or was she concerned for Classicus? "Art thou defending Classicus?" he asked. "Nay," she smiled, "but I defend myself!" This was puzzling, and at best irrelevant. He had come, burdened with trouble and concern for Agrippa's life, and she was leading away into less serious things. It was not like her to be capricious. Perhaps there was more in her meaning than he had grasped. "I pray thee," she continued, "mingle a little sweet with thy toil!" He arose and moved away from her. "O Junia, how can I?" he demanded impatiently. "Nay, but I am asking payment of the debt thou confessest to me!" "Help me yet in this danger of Classicus, and I shall be thy slave!" She arose and approached very close to him. Her face was flushing, her hands were outstretched. He took them because they were offered. "Marsyas," she whispered, her brilliant eyes searching his face, "I shall not cease to be thy confederate, but I would be more!" With a little wrench she freed her hands from his and drew a packet from the folds of silk over her breast. "See! I have here thy letter, which Herod brought and bitterly reproached me for mine enchantment of thee. And I kept it, till this hour!" She put into his hands the scorched and broken letter that he had written to Lydia and had believed that he had destroyed so long before. While he looked at it, stupefied with astonishment, she slipped her arms about his neck. "I do not ask thee to marry me," she whispered, a little laugh rippling her breath. "Eros does not summon the law to make his sway effective. For thou art an Essene, by repute, and no man need surrender his reputation for his character. Wherefore, though ten thousand dread penalties bound thee to celibacy, they do not dull thine eyes nor make thy cheeks less crimson! Be an Essene, or a Jew, Cæsar or a slave--that can not alter thy charm! And I shall not quibble, so thou lovest me!" Marsyas stood still while he searched her changing face. It was not a new experience for him who had brought picturesque beauty into Rome, but the source was different, the result more grave. On this occasion the seductive enumeration of his good looks awakened in him something which was affronted; whatever thing it was, it possessed an intelligence which comprehended before his brain grew furious, and, flinging itself upon his soul, buffeted it into sensitiveness. With a rush of rage, he understood all that her act had accomplished for him. The world of helplessly-impelled children that she had pictured to him, the world of innocence and forgivable inclinations, little warfares and artless badness, play or the feeding of primitive hungers, or of building of roof-trees--all that with which she had partly enchanted him was suddenly stripped of its atmosphere, and the glare of realities, fierce passions, deadly hates, shamelessness and blood stood before him. In short, he had been instantly precipitated into his old Essenic misanthropy now directly imposed upon the heads of individuals, which before in his solitary days had been heaped without understanding upon the heads of strangers. He did care because that the creature had simply betrayed her true self; more dreadful than that, she had wrested from him the charity his experience in the world had yielded him--for Lydia! Blind fury maddened him; her offense called for a fiercer response than a blush; she had robbed his heart wholly and was burning its empty house. He put forth his strength, undid her arms and flung her from him. For a moment he felt a bloodthirsty desire to follow her up and break her over the stone exedra, but remnants of reason prevailed. Springing through the exit, he was gone without uttering a word in answer to her. Junia heard the last of his footsteps on the flagging leading out of her father's grounds, and for a moment wavered between screaming for her own slaves to pursue him, or delivering him up to the prætorian guards. "For what?" Discretion asked. "To have him tell, under torture, thy part in sheltering Agrippa? At thy peril!" But he had flung her away; he had rejected her; he had escaped after all her pains, her pretensions, her plans! For him, she had left Alexandria and endured Cæsar. For him, she had forgone seasons of conquest in Rome! For him, she had neglected Caligula, and now Caligula would be emperor. For him she had sacrificed everything and had lost, at last. He, a Jew, a manumitted slave, a barbarian! She, a favorite of emperors and consuls, a manipulator of affairs, fortunes and families! And he had rejected her! There were muffled flying footsteps on the sod without, and Caligula, pallid and moist with terrified perspiration, dashed into the inclosure as if seeking a place to hide. When he saw her, he sprang back, but halted, on recognizing her. "Ate and the Furies!" he said in a strained whisper. "What hath happened but that Cæsar revived while the guards were hailing me as Imperator!" A hater of pork, a wearer of gowns, a mutterer of prayers, a bearded clown of a rustic! And she, it was, whom he had rejected! "Stand like a frozen pigeon!" Caligula hissed, "while I tell thee of my death! He knew what the shouts meant! He showed his teeth like a panther, transfixed me with his dead eyes and signed for wine! When he hath strength enough to order it, and breath enough to form the words--" And she had not urged the Herod's death for his sake, and thereby imperiled her own living with Flaccus; she had sent him a passport to Capri and one to Misenum, and rescued him from the admiring eyes of other women, to make sure of him--and he had flung her away, at last! "He will starve me to death: drown me in the Mamertine!" Caligula raged under his breath. "Starve me, I say! Speak, corpse! What shall I do!" Her rage by this time had so filled her that it meant to have expression or have her life. "Kill him!" she hissed through her teeth. It was Marsyas' sentence, but it fell upon Tiberius. Caligula ceased to tremble and stared at her with a strange look in his bird-like eyes. "How?" he asked. She seized one of the pillows and brought it down over the seat of the divan, and held it firmly as if to prevent it from being thrown off. "Thus!" she said venomously. "But the nurses and Charicles, the physician," Caligula protested, fearing nevertheless that his protest might hold good. "Put them out! Will they dare resist the coming emperor? Have Macro aid thee, so he dare not tell upon thee." She was becoming cool. It would be good to vent her murderous impulses on something. Caligula gazed at her with fascination in his face. "Come, then, thou, and see it done! Neither shalt thou talk," he said suddenly. She stepped to his side, but before she reached the exit of the inclosure, she stopped and looked squarely into his eyes. "Herod hath a slave who hath wronged me," she said. "Which one?" he demanded. "The Essene!" "Nay, take vengeance on some other, then, for He is my friend! I have vowed him favor!" "Why?" she demanded. "Nay; do not stop--thou art to see this thing done! Why do I promise the Essene favor? Because, forsooth, he made an emperor of me! Come!" CHAPTER XXIX IN EXTREMIS Marsyas left the promontory at once. He had hired one of the public passenger boats to cross from Baiæ to Misenum and the boatman had waited for the return of his fare. Many went as he was going, but they were patricians singly and in groups that passed him, with sober faces and without a word to each other. He recognized senators, ædiles, consuls, duumvirs, prætors, legates all hurrying toward the landing. All noble Misenum seemed suddenly to have determined on an exodus. An anxious and distressed company they were, and had Marsyas' own brain been less hot with anger, he might have meditated on the meaning of it all. By the time he reached the bay, the sunset-reddened water was covered with light-running coasters, by the signs on aplustre or vexillum, a fleet of patrician craft making across the bay to Neapolis, or scudding for the open sea and Ostia. He saw one or two vessels approaching Misenum, hailed by departing ones, and, after a colloquy, turned back. Vaguely wondering whether Cæsar's latest whim was to drive his court from him, Marsyas got into his own highly-painted shell and told his oarsman to take him across to Baiæ. As he sat at the tiller and moodily watched the Italian night come up over the sea, the capes, the hill-slopes and finally cover the somber head of the unsuspected Vesuvius, he was afraid that his long ignored Essenic rigor would assert itself. He was ashamed of himself, and for the moment looked upon the life he had led in Rome with revulsion. But he put off his self-examination with a kind of terror. There was yet much that was harsh and unlawful to be done, and he dared not hold off his hand. Lydia's life and good name, the avenging of Stephen, Agrippa's life and Cypros' happiness were weighed against Classicus and his own soul in the other balance. He could not hesitate now. When he set foot in opulent Baiæ the night had fallen and with his return to the city, which he knew sheltered Agrippa's most active enemy at that hour, all his energies turned toward the purpose that had originally brought him to Misenum. He believed that if Classicus had insinuated himself into young Tiberius' favor, doubtless the prince's hospitality had been extended to him. He turned his steps toward the range of villas built between Baiæ and Puteoli, overlooking the bay. He had in mind the method of his last resort, and he went as one goes when desperation carries him forward--swiftly and relentlessly. But, crossing the town by the water-front, he met a handful of slaves bearing baggage toward the wharves. With his old Essenic thoroughness he halted to examine them to make sure that Classicus had not outstripped him finally. By their particularly fine physique and diverse nationality Marsyas knew them to be costly slaves of the familia of no small patrician. He heard the ramble of chariot-wheels on the lava-paved streets; the master was following. As the vehicle passed under a lamp a few paces away, Marsyas distinguished the occupants as Classicus and the young Tiberius. He felt a chill creep over his heart; the hour had come. He moved after the slaves toward the wharf. Baiæ's beauties extended out and waded into the waves. The landings of marble had to be fit masonry for the feet of the Cæsars and their train when they asked the hospitality of the sea. Luxury, not commerce, came down to the water's edge and gazed Narcissus-like at its lovely image in the quiet bay. Here were no Algerian hulks with their lateen sails, no evil-smelling fishing fleets, or docks or warehouses, or city cloacas. Baiæ was a city of dreams and warm baths, of idleness and temples and villas, of gardens and fragrance and beauty and repose. Now, the velvet winds of the starry Italian night rippled the face of the bay; the last faint luster of a set moon showed a bar of white light, low down in the southwest, and against that, blackly outlined, a splendid galley was driving like the wind into port. A dozen yards from the end of the pier lay a passage-boat, with a light on its mast and a soft glow in its curtained cabin, Marsyas wondered if Tiberius meant to accompany his guest to Misenum. But while he thought, Tiberius set Classicus down, took leave with an apology and a reminder that guests awaited him at home, and drove rapidly back into Baiæ. A small rowboat lay under shadow at the side of the landing and the two couriers loading the baggage awaited now their passenger. But Marsyas emerged from the dark and stepped before Classicus. A glance at the tidy countenance of the philosopher sent a rush of heat through Marsyas' veins. Classicus was not feeling the spiritual combat within him, for the work he meditated, that racked the young Essene. That fact acknowledged helped Marsyas in his intent. "A word," Marsyas said. Classicus stopped, a little startled. "Who art thou?" "Marsyas, the Essene." The young man had not helped his cause by the introduction. "Out of my path," Classicus said coldly. "I have nothing to say to thee!" "I have somewhat to say to thee, Classicus. If thou must be hard of heart, be not foolish and injurious to thyself." "Suffer no pangs of concern for my welfare," the philosopher said. "Preserve them, lest thine own cause find thee bankrupt in tears!" "My cause will not need them: thou mayest. I know why thou art here and whither thou art going and for what purpose. I know who sent thee, why and what thou wilt accomplish. I know how feebly thou art aided and how much imperiled. Above all things I know what will happen to thee unless thou hearest me!" "What a number of door-cracks hath yielded thee information! Stand aside before I call my servants to thee!" Marsyas folded his arms. The green blackness of the bay threw his solid outlines into relief. The threat he had made suddenly appealed to Classicus as ill-advised. "Jewish brethren," Marsyas answered, his voice dropping into the softness which was premonitory, "do not speak thus with each other. This was taught thee in the Synagogue. If thy lapse into evil hath let thee forget it, I care enough for thy manner to recall it to thee. "First and above all things, know thou that I am not here to satisfy the hate of thee because thou hast wrested from me my beloved! Next, that I am here to stop thee in order to save her life, more than any other's. Now, for thyself. Thou goest to accomplish a deed that would recoil upon thine own head. If thou be tired of living, Classicus, choose another way than to perish for the entertainment of him who duped thee." "For thy peace of mind, O sage fool," Classicus observed, "know that I come bearing a petition to the emperor to seek for Agrippa's wife, who hath been abducted!" "If thou present a petition which in any way favors Agrippa or his wife, Tiberius will test the cord on thee to be sure it is strong enough to strangle Agrippa. And I tell thee, Classicus, the Charon of the heathen Shades will not push off with the Herod; he will save himself a journey and await thy arrival!" "Still threatening, still trembling for me! If I call these slaves to remove thee thou mayest tremble for thyself!" "I am large, Classicus, strong and determined. I could kill thee before thy stupid slaves ran three paces!" Classicus turned his eyes to the level line to the southwest. The luster on the horizon was gone. The great galley, broadside now as she hunted her channel, loomed large on the outskirts of the sheltered water. Once, the deck-lights flashed on a bank of her oars, rising wet and slippery from the sea. "Listen, brother," Marsyas continued. "Thou shall proceed with me to the maritime harbor at Puteoli, and get aboard the vessel there which sails for Alexandria. Thou shall leave Italy: thou shalt discontinue thy work against Agrippa--or have the knife, now! Decide!" The hiss and protest of plowing waters came now on the breeze; the regular beat of many oars, working as one, broke the hiss into rhythmical bars: an invisible pennant, high up in the helpless shrouds where night covered canvas and mast, was caught suddenly by a vagrant current of wind and fluttered with rapid pulsations of sound. Long lances of light reached out on the water and began to stretch broadening fingers toward the pier. Humming noises like blended voices came with the rattle of chains. Marsyas knew that Classicus was awaiting the arrival of the galley for the advantages of the interruption and to secure Marsyas' arrest. The young Essene stepped close to Classicus. "I shall wait no longer for thy answer," he said softly. The philosopher's voice rang out, clear and unafraid. "Hither, slaves!" Marsyas was not unprepared. He seized Classicus and forced him back into the black shadows of the clustered columns with which the inner edge of the landing was ornamented. The two couriers came running, but Marsyas spoke authoritatively. "Good slaves, if ye come at me ye will force me to kill this young man!" he said. "Take him!" Classicus cried. The two servants sprang forward, but Marsyas, seizing Classicus by the hair, thrust his head back and put the point of the knife at his throat. The two halted, tautly drawn up as if the point of the blade touched their own flesh. Instinctively they knew that the silky quiet in the voice was deadly; Marsyas had them. Meanwhile the galley was delivering up her passengers to the land. The first ship's boat that touched the landing carried four patricians. The soft sound of heelless sandals on the pavement drifted down from Babe. Some one of the citizens was coming to meet the arrivals. The four stepped out, and the ship's boat shot back into the darkness. "Ho! Regulus," one of the four cried. "Coming!" the citizen answered from the street. "What news?" "Cæsar is dead!" Classicus relaxed in Marsyas' grip; the slaves stood transfixed; the young Essene, holding fast, stilled his loud heart and listened. "Old age?" the citizen ventured. "Perchance; yes, doubtless," one of the four answered in a lower tone, for the citizen had come close and was taking their hands. "Smothered in his silken cushions--died of too much comfort! Dost understand? Well enough!" Marsyas' hands dropped from Classicus. By the time the Alexandrian aroused to his opportunity, Marsyas had disappeared like a spirit into the night. CHAPTER XXX THE EREMITE IN SCARLET, AND THE BANKRUPT IN PURPLE Lydia came upon Vasti, the bayadere, returning to the culina with a flaring taper in her hand. The brown woman's eyes were fixed on the flame and she whispered under her breath, till the licking red tongue of the taper flickered and wavered back at her as if speaking in signs. "What saith the Red Brother?" Lydia asked, in halting Hindu, for she had begun to learn her waiting-woman's tongue. "He keeps his own counsel, who is fellow to the Fire," was the answer. "Thy neighbor, the philosopher, awaits thee within." Lydia went slowly on. When she entered the alabarch's presiding-room, Classicus arose from a seat beside a cluster of lamps and came toward her. "Thy servant at the door tells me that thy father is not in," he said. "I came to speak with him of thee: but perchance it is better that I tell thee that which I have to tell, before any other." Lydia sat down on the divan, and Classicus sat beside her. "I come to submit to thy scorn or thy pity," he said, "either of which I deserve!" "What hast thou done?" she asked, feeling a vague sense of fear. "I have been Flaccus' fool!" he vowed. Lydia's eyes grew troubled. "What didst thou for him?" she asked in a lowered tone. "I permitted him to catch me up in the city and rush me to Rome with a memorial to Cæsar, beseeching the emperor's aid in seeking the Lady Cypros, who had been abducted." Lydia's level brows dropped. "Charging us with abduction?" she remarked. "Charging no man with abduction, but declaring that she was missing from thy father's roof!" Classicus' face filled with contrite humiliation under her gaze. "Why so late with the story?" she asked. "Why didst thou not come to us before thou wast persuaded to go!" "Charge me not with more folly than I did commit!" he besought. "I was caught by his servants in the Brucheum and haled before him, where, in all excitement, he told that the Lady Cypros was missing, and that I, as the safe friend of the alabarch and the proconsul, had been commissioned to enlist Cæsar's interest in her cause! The vessel ready for Puteoli waited only on the night-winds to sail! I was not given time to change my raiment, or to fill my purse from mine own treasure, much less to take counsel with thy father and learn the truth!" "And besides Flaccus, we must now take Cæsar into consideration in protecting this unhappy woman!" she exclaimed. "No!" he cried. "A friend of Agrippa's, whom I met in Rome, stopped me in time!" She looked away from him and he took her hand. "Am I pardoned?" he asked plaintively. "Thou didst no harm; but it should serve to awaken thee to the evil in this dangerous Roman! If only Agrippa would return, how readily the skies would brighten for us all!" "What wilt thou do if the Herod returns not?" he asked after a little silence. "Do not speak of it, Classicus," she said hurriedly. "Flaccus is desperate." "If Agrippa abandon Cypros," he offered, "she can divorce him, and simplify the tangle." "Oh, no, Justin! Cypros is bound heart and soul to Agrippa. Even if he died, she would not turn to Flaccus! The dear Lord be thanked that we have a virtuous woman to defend!" "Nay, then, thou strict little rabbin, what shall we do?" "How slow these ships! The last letter we sent to him can hardly have reached Sicily!" "He hath had a sufficiency of letters by this time! What was it he wrote thy father, last: 'I come with all speed; but reflect that Cæsar is master over me: his consent is needful!' Ha! ha! Caligula would give Agrippa half his Empire did he ask for it!" She leaned her cheek in her hand, turning her face away from Classicus. "Alas! I know why he lingers," she said to herself. "Marsyas hath departed unto Judea, and Agrippa lacks his controlling hand!" "I appreciate the peril threatening thy father's house," the philosopher added after her continued silence, "and thou knowest thou shall have my help--blundering as it may be!" There were footsteps in the vestibule, and the alabarch stood in the archway. Lydia sprang up. "What," she cried, unable to wait for his report, "what said the proconsul?" The alabarch came into his presiding-room with a slow step; he let his cloak fall on his chair, and stood in the lamplight worn and troubled. Seeing Classicus, he greeted the visitor before he answered Lydia. "Evil, evil; naught but evil," he sighed, "and threats. And the proconsul's threats are never empty!" "What does he threaten?" Classicus asked. "Me--and mine." "Alas! our people!" Lydia sighed. "No, daughter! Thee!" "Lydia!" Classicus exclaimed. "Why does he threaten me?" Lydia cried. The alabarch shook his head. "Flaccus betrayed only enough to show that he will concentrate his vengeance against me and thee, or me through thee, but thee of a surety, my Lydia! Yet, he was as dark and ominous as the wrath of God!" Lydia came close to her father and he laid his arm about her shoulders. "Lydia, that bat escaped from Sheol, Eutychus, is openly attached to Flaccus' train; once, he abode under my roof, where he could learn many things. Has he any information against thee which Flaccus could use?" Lydia's answer was not ready. It meant too much to tell that which the alabarch groped after. Already she had surrendered until she was stripped of all but her father's confidence, and her people's respect. She could not cast off these ties to all that was desirable on earth. And Classicus, silent and smug behind her, seemed to be a prepared witness awaiting a confession. Conscience and human nature had the usual struggle, and when she replied she did not raise her head. "My father, Eutychus will never be at a loss for information. What actualities he can not furnish, he may have from his imagination." "Alexandria does not wait for charges against the Jews," the alabarch said. "But what says Flaccus?" Classicus urged after a silence. "That I have abducted Agrippa's wife; that I have been guilty of insubordination to him, my superior; that thou, my Lydia, art amenable to him and all the people of Alexandria, and that he will proceed as his information warrants, unless I produce Cypros--between sunrise and sunset, to-morrow!" There was silence. "What wilt thou do?" Lydia asked in a suppressed voice. "I can produce Cypros," he answered, torn by the inevitable. "No!" Lydia cried. "If Agrippa cares so little for her--" the alabarch began, but Lydia put off his arm and stood away from him. "This matter is neither thine nor Agrippa's to decide! Cypros is a good woman and she shall be kept secure--even against herself, if need be! Thou shalt not bring her before Flaccus!" "Lydia, I am brought to decide between her and thee!" "Thou canst suffer dishonor and peril, even as Cypros," Classicus put in, to Lydia. "We are no less unwilling to surrender thee to the unknown charges Flaccus brings against thee, than thou art to give up Cypros!" "Flaccus is no arbiter of the virtue of women! He is not Cæsar, beyond whom there is no human appeal! Let him remember that it is no longer the old man Tiberius who is emperor of the world, but the young man Caligula, whose warmest friend is a Jew! Let him touch Cypros at his peril!" "Daughter, why should Cæsar defend a woman for whom not even her husband cares?" There was no ready reply to this, and Lydia's face grew white. "Is it like thee, my father, to abandon the wholly undefended?" she asked. The alabarch bit his lip and turned his head away. "Granted, then," put in Classicus in his even voice, "that we shall keep the lady in hiding and treat her to no ungentle usage! Now, what will become of Lydia?" The alabarch raised his eyes, filled with fire and desperation. Lydia drooped more and more, and presently she put her hand to her forehead. "Is there nothing to be done?" Classicus persisted calmly. The silence became strained and lengthened to the space of many heart-beats before he spoke again. "Lydia can be hidden, with the princess," he offered finally. Lydia raised her head, and looked at Classicus. Not for her the refuge that was Cypros', for if Flaccus held in truth the secret of her conversion to the Nazarene faith, she would only lead his officers straight upon the Nazarenes all over Egypt. Whatever people sheltered her, she would bring disaster and death on their heads. As Marsyas had been under the oppression of Saul of Tarsus, she had become as a pestilence! She wondered if Classicus realized how thoroughly she understood him. His face did not wear an air of respect for his plan. "It can not be," she said quietly, and the alabarch looked startled at her words. Classicus submitted to her objection at once. "Then," he said, "there is but one other way that I can invent--and this I offer last, because it is dearest to me. I have lands in Greece and favor with the legate there. Flaccus' power can not extend beyond his own dominions. Wilt thou not come to Greece--with me, my Lydia?" Lydia's gaze did not falter throughout this speech; she had expected, long ago, that when Classicus had hedged her about, he would offer his hand as her one escape. Drop by drop the color left her face; her lips grew pale, and took on a curve of mute appeal; her eyes were the eyes of suffering, but not the eyes of a vanquished woman. The alabarch had turned hurriedly away. But Classicus gazed, as if awaiting her reply, at his smooth, thin hands, now stripped of their jewels, incident to the shrinkage in his purse. The drip of the waterfall in the garden within came very distinctly upon the silence in the room. A cry from the porter, speaking in the vestibule, brought the alabarch up quickly. "Master! master! The prince! The prince!" "The king, thou untaught rustic!" Agrippa's tones, subdued but mirthful, followed upon the porter's cry. Lysimachus sprang toward the vestibule, but Lydia, transfixed by reactionary emotions, did not move. But before the alabarch reached the arch, two men appeared in the opening. Except for the fillet of gold set so low on his head that it passed around his forehead just above the brows, Agrippa might have been the same nonchalant bankrupt gambling with loaded tesseræ or hunting loans on bad security. The other was Marsyas. Classicus lifted his brows and arose to the proper spirit in which to greet a king. "Count it not flattery, lord," the alabarch cried, extending his hands toward the new-comers, "that I say that Abraham's radiant visitors were not more welcome than thou!" "Better the unprepared alabarch," said Marsyas, "than any host who hath expected his guests!" The prince laughed, and discovering Lydia, bowed low to her. "No change in thee, sweet Lydia," he exclaimed as she bent in obeisance to the fillet of gold about his forehead. Marsyas stood a moment aside, his glance roving quickly from her to Classicus. With an effort he put back the rush of feeling that crowded upon his composure and came to her. "Hast thou not changed, Lydia?" he asked. The hand closing over his did not belie the tremor in her voice. "A blessing on you both," she said. "You are the redemption of this house of trouble!" "We have been everything but heroes in our days," Marsyas said. "Welcome the opportunity!" "Ho! Classicus!" Agrippa cried jovially, "hast thou failed to overthrow the tribute-demanding Sphinx or the Dragon?" Marsyas gazed at the philosopher standing with inclined head, while he made felicitous answers to the prince, and said to himself: "Happy phrase, my lord King! There standeth the tribute-demanding Sphinx, even now!" Agrippa addressed himself to the alabarch, and between Marsyas and Classicus there stood no saving obstruction. Marsyas' nostrils quivered; he had fleeting but perfect summaries of the wrongs the man had worked against him. To find him now a guest entertained under the roof he had striven to injure, brought the Essene's temper up to a climacteric point. But he felt Lydia's presence, pacific, temperate and persuasive, restraining him. Of all the many deceits he had used throughout his precarious life of late, none seemed so impossible of practice as to offer a dispassionate word to Classicus. He was saved for the moment by an exclamation from the alabarch. "In all truth, that manifestation of Cæsar's favor?" he cried eagerly. "A truth!" Agrippa declared. "Rome made a dandy out of Marsyas. Twelve legionaries, before he would stir a step to Egypt! Twelve! All armed; brasses so polished that one looks into the sun who looks at one. None short of three cubits in stature and visaged like Mars!" Marsyas cut off the prince's raillery with a direct and serious query. "How is it with our lady?" "Still in hiding from Flaccus," the alabarch replied. Agrippa looked in astonishment from one to another. "Surely," he said earnestly, "you have not carried this delusion to such an extreme!" "Delusion, lord," Marsyas repeated, facing him. "Let those first speak who are not deluded. Then thou shall apply the word to him it fits." "Good friends," the Herod protested, "all wise men cherish a folly. Marsyas, being the wisest of my knowing, hath his own. He hath held fast against flawless argument and solid truth to the delusion that my honest, timid wife hath awakened passion in the heart of this proconsul, who hath all the beauty and wit of Egypt and Rome from which to choose." "Wilt thou continue further, lord," Marsyas said, "and tell them how thou hast explained this mystery to thyself?" "What, Marsyas! Make confession here, openly, of a thing which I blush to confess to myself?" the Herod laughed. "Never fear; thy audience hath already acquitted thee of blame!" "Nay, then; so assured of clemency, I tell this behind my palms and with the prayer that the walls do not repeat it to my lady's ears! Learn, then, for the first time, that Junia is the cause of my disaster, because, forsooth, she is as fickle and capricious a woman as she is bad. Until the unhappy Herod was blown of ill winds to Alexandria, his single haven, she was Flaccus' mistress. When I appeared, for no other cause than the Mightiness of her fancy, she dropped Flaccus and precipitated all manner of disaster upon my head. There is the true story! Cypros, forsooth! Cypros is an upright Arab, twenty years married and mother of three!" "Junia!" the alabarch repeated irritably. "Junia constructed more of Flaccus' villainies than Flaccus himself!" "And will nothing dislodge this wild thing from your brain?" Agrippa cried. "Name it what you will, lord," the alabarch answered, "but I have a further story to tell than all my fruitless letters told, when I stood in fear of their interception! Thou hast not forgotten the attack on thee on the night of Flora's feast; that, thou canst ascribe to Flaccus' jealousy, but how wilt thou explain that when the news of thy disaster reached Alexandria, Flaccus put off his amiable front and commanded me to deliver Cypros to him--" "Commanded you to deliver Cypros to him!" Agrippa cried, the fires of anger igniting in his eyes. "What had she to do with this?" The alabarch drew himself up, ready in his dignity and authority to justify his deeds. "If it proceedeth to an accounting, I and mine will bear witness to her innocence and loving fidelity to thee! Yet, remember, lord, she hath the first right to ask why she hath been left without thy care thus long!" Agrippa flushed darkly, but Marsyas stopped the retort on his lips. "Let us not try each other! Go on, good sir," he pleaded. "I refused, and he threatened to hurl the Alexandrians on the Regio Judæorum. But in the meantime, fate or fortune, God knows which, ordered that Tiberius should choose Caligula to succeed him. The news reached Alexandria and stayed Flaccus' hand, for then he stood in wholesome fear of thy friend, the prince imperial. But thou didst tarry and tarry, and the more thou didst tarry, the more his hopes and his desires grew. No longer the Regio Judæorum dared he threaten, but me and mine--Lydia, above all!" "Lydia!" Marsyas exclaimed. "And I tell thee, my Lord Agrippa," the alabarch continued, by this time a picture of refined indignation, "at this very hour I was brought face to face with a hard decision between my daughter and thy wife!" Marsyas turned toward Classicus, but the storm of denunciation that leaped to his lips was checked. What should he win for his exposure of Classicus, but scorn from Lydia, and a misconstruction of his motive? Atavistic ferocity glittered in Agrippa's eyes. "It is my turn!" he brought out between clenched teeth, "and I have a long score, a long score with Flaccus! Where is my lady? Let her be brought!" Lydia broke in before the alabarch could answer. "In hiding!" she answered quickly, and Marsyas fancied that she feared a too explicit answer from her father. Before whom was she afraid to disclose the princess' refuge, if not Classicus? "Take four of my prætorians, then," Agrippa commanded, "and lead me to her hiding-place!" The alabarch bowed and summoned servants. "Have we, then, delivered this house of peril?" Marsyas asked of Agrippa. "Flaccus," said Classicus, speaking for the first time, "may feed his thirst for revenge!" "Get but my lady, first!" Agrippa insisted. "Flaccus hath played and lost! He shall pay his forfeit!" The servants were ready with the alabarch's cloak; the porter announced chariots waiting, and in an incredibly short time, Marsyas was alone with Lydia and Classicus, in the presiding-room. "I shall return to the ship and prepare it for voyage," Marsyas said, in the silence that instantly fell. "Since I return to Judea with the King, perchance I should say farewell!" Lydia's lips parted, and her miserable eyes turned away from him. "Await my father's return," she said in a low voice, "Hath he far to go?" he asked. "Yes--far!" Classicus waited serenely for Marsyas' answer. In that composure Marsyas read unconcern, which the Essene interpreted as hopelessness for his own cause. "So long as we abide in Egypt, we are a peril," he replied. "Even now we have delayed too long!" He extended his hand to Lydia, and slowly, she put her own into it. The touch of the small fingers played too strongly upon his self-control. He released them hurriedly and strode toward the vestibule. But at the threshold, indecision and astonishment and acute realization of the meaning of the thing he was doing seized him. He whirled about. Classicus stood beneath the cluster of lamps, his face alight with triumphant superciliousness. Even under Marsyas' eye the expression did not alter. Lydia seemed to have shrunk; her hands clasped before her were wrung about each other in an agony of restraint, but the pitiful appeal in her eyes was all that Marsyas saw. In an instant he was again at her side, his heart speaking in his face. "Thou wearest yet the free locks of maidenhood," he said, in a voice so smooth and low that it chilled her, "perchance thou wilt tell me ere I depart if thou art to marry--this man?" For a moment there was silence; Marsyas heard his mad heart beating, but if Classicus felt apprehension, there was no display of it on his face. Then Lydia raised her head. "No," she said, in a voice barely audible. Marsyas turned upon Classicus, and between the two there passed the silent communication of men who wholly understand each other. Then Classicus took up his kerchief, and, with a smile and a wave of his hand, walked out of the presiding-room. But Lydia was out of reach of Marsyas' arms when he turned to her. Crying and afraid, she motioned him back as he pressed toward her. He stopped. "Am I still unacceptable to thee, Lydia?" he asked. "O Marsyas, thou returnest in the same spirit as thou didst depart from me--unchanged, unchanged! But striving to change--for my sake! Do not so, for me! Not for me!" The grief and pleading in the black eyes that rested upon her changed slowly. Rebuffed and stung he threw up his head. "Better the old Essenic shape in which I was bound against thee and thou against me?" he said bitterly. "So! The Essenes seem not to be wrong in their teaching of distrust in women!" If he expected her to retort, the compassion and gentleness in her answer surprised him. "Not that, my Marsyas," she said, coming nearer to him in her earnestness. "But change does not consist in the raiment thou wearest, nor in the claim to be altered. Thou canst not in truth believe that I have done right! Thou forgivest me for thy love's sake, but thy intelligence is no less critical! I can not, will not put away the faith of the Master; I can not regret the spirit of the deed I did for their sake. And between us it is as it was the night I sent thee from me, so long ago!" "But I have changed," he protested hastily. "The world hath taught me much: I can understand; I can extenuate greater errors--I have done so; believe me, it is only for thy sake--" "But canst thou wholly acquit me--wholly justify me, Marsyas?" He looked at her with pleading in his eyes, and made no answer. "No man should wed or worship with a single doubt," she said. Fearing more than he dared confess to himself, he caught her hands and would not let her leave him. "Lydia, I have not had the portion which God and women allot to most men," he said almost piteously. "There are delights that should be mine by right, but they are denied me! Other men have their dreams, their moments of tender preoccupation. They can live again through hours between only themselves and one other. They can feel again the touches of a woman's hand upon them, the warmth of her cheek and the love in her kiss. No matter the evil, the sorrows that follow, these things are theirs, to hold in memory! No matter the time or the place, they can summon it all from a song, drink it from a goblet of wine, or breathe it in from a flower! It is twice living it; once, in the actuality; again, in the dream! But I--I have nothing! My teaching did not permit me to look forward to such a thing--and thou, Lydia--Lydia, thou dost not permit me to look back upon it!" Her eyes filled with tears, and a rush of tender words trembled on her lips. His gaze, quickened by longing for the thing these signs typified, caught the softening in her young face. He seized upon the hope that it gave him. "Dost thou love me, Lydia?" he asked. "I love thee, Marsyas." He drew her to him, put his arms about her and pressed her to his breast. She did not resist him, for she was tired of contention with herself, tired of distress, afraid of the menace the future showed her, and withal fainting in hope. She dropped her head on his shoulder, with her face turned up to him. Marsyas' soul filled to the full with subdued, bewildering emotions. It was not the first time he had held this sweet child-woman in his arms, but fear, tumult, impetuousness and protest had claimed preëminence in his thoughts before. Now in the quiet and shelter of the alabarch's deserted presiding-room, he found new experience, new feelings. Under the low light of the clustered lamp, he looked down on the face turned to him, smoothed with soft touches the long, delicate black brows; passed light fingers over the bloom of her cheek and saw the faint rose color come again in the white lines the little pressure made; put back the loose curl fallen before her perfect ear and marveled at its silkiness; watched the quiet palpitation in the milk-white throat--sensed, somehow, the repose in herself, the command, even in this momentary surrender, the divinity in her womanliness. He was ashamed of his distrust, startled at his new sensations. Perhaps she saw the passing of feeling over his face, for she stirred and would have raised herself, but the movement brought him back to reality, and a fiercer rebellion against it. "Nay, nay, Lydia; I love thee! It is my one virtue; my sinful soul hath been married to thee these many strange months. Thou art become a necessity to my life, as needful as bread and drink, as blood and breath! Thou art the essential salt in my veins--the world to me! Nay, more! Thou art love, for world is a word with boundaries! I have striven for thy sake and I have not failed. I am able now to obtain the quieting of thy chief enemy, the refreshment of the starved heart in me, thirsting for revenge, and of our own security henceforward in the world. Yet, I am not going to Judea with Agrippa. I abide here with thee in Alexandria, until I have won the immediate safety of thy body and thy soul!" She strove to stop him in his resolution, but he kissed her, and, leading her to the foot of the well-remembered stairs, whispered his good night. CHAPTER XXXI THE DREGS OF THE CUP OF TREMBLING By noon the following day, all Alexandria roared with the news that Agrippa had returned a king! The Regio Judæorum lost its repose. Certain irrational of the inhabitants displayed carpeting and garlands in honor of the Jewish potentate, within their boundaries. But others, instructed by instinct, closed the fronts of the houses and laid their treasure within grasp. By the advice of Marsyas, Agrippa had caused his ship to bring to, outside the harbor, and await the dropping of darkness before he came ashore. The few hours he spent in Alexandria had been passed under cover, and none without the alabarch's household was aware of his presence in the city. The newly-crowned Judean king found it difficult to repress his desire for ostentation, and when Marsyas' plan for secrecy miscarried at last, Agrippa was irritated because he had been deprived of a longed-for opportunity to astonish the Alexandrians. "But who could have told it?" he asked, with ill-concealed satisfaction. Marsyas' lips curled. "Classicus," he said. Before the porch of the alabarch's house groups of people came to stand and discuss the fortunes of the Herod. The sounds, never congratulatory, began to change in temper. As the day grew, numbers began to accumulate and hang like sullen bees buzzing insurrection. Though they themselves were mongrels cast out of twenty subjugated kingdoms and bullied into unspeakable servitude by the tyrant Rome, Prejudice, unarmed with argument and speaking in dialect, arose and rebelled at Alexandria entertaining a Jewish king. Toward sunset a group of empty curricles and chariots came and stood before a certain house, the last in the Jewish district, facing the Gentile environs of the water-front. Had any cared to remark, it might have been observed that this house could be reached from the alabarch's by abandoned passages and private walks, a series of Jewish courts and stable-yards, without exposing any who went that way to the Gentile eye. After a while, a body of Roman guards emerged from nowhere and arrayed themselves alongside the vehicles. Presently, groups of slaves bearing burdens, followed by a party of high-class Egyptians, mounted the chariots and without hesitation the procession took up movement toward the harbor. But an angle in the streets brought them upon the Gymnasium. It was built in a square of sufficient size to receive the crowds that usually attended the contests of the athletæ, and there thousands were assembled to do Alexandrian honor to a Jew. The daylight was still on the streets, and Marsyas, in the guise of a charioteer, driving the horses of the foremost car, observed that each of the mass was busy with his own noise, and apparently unsuspecting the coming of Agrippa. So he signed to the centurion in charge of the prætorian squad to make way with as little ostentation as possible. At the porch before the Gymnasium, the crowd was most packed, loudest and most entertained. A naked, deformed, apish figure stood on a pedestal from which a statue had fallen and had not been replaced. A wreath of rushes had been twisted about the degenerate forehead, a strip of matting had been bound with a tow-cord about his middle; in his hand was a stalk of papyrus with the head broken and hanging down. On their knees about the base of the plinth were half a score of youths from the Gymnasium, groaning in tragic chorus, the single Syriac word: "_Maris_! _Maris_! Lord! Lord!" Loudly the crowd roared its part, with voices raucous and hoarse from much abuse: "Hail, Agrippa! King of the Jews!" Agrippa's chariot, following the way the centurion had quietly opened through the crowd, attracted little attention and the half-light of the twilight did not reveal his features, which he had been led further to conceal by an Egyptian cowl. A long white kamis covered his dress. But his eyes fell upon the idiot; he caught the mockery and its meaning from the crowd. A quiver of rage ran through his frame. Laying hold of the Egyptian smock, he tore it off and threw it fairly into the faces of those nearest him; the white cowl followed, and he stood forth like a new-risen sun in a tissue of silver, mantled with purple, his fillet replaced by a tarboosh sewn with immense gems. Defiance and insult and daring could not have been embodied in a more effective act. The continuous tumult burst into a yell of fury. In a twinkling his chariot was hemmed in and blocked and the raving rabble reached out to lay hands on him. Marsyas, seeing destruction in Agrippa's recklessness, shouted to the centurion, who responded by hurling his prætorians, with broadsword and spear into the mob. The protection of Cæsar, thus evidenced, beat back the astonished herd as a charge of cavalry might have done, but it fringed the lane opened before the royal Jew and raged. Thereafter every inch of the way was contested. Not even a show of interference was made by municipal authorities. Instead, here and there, soldiers of the city garrison could be seen, singly or in groups, as spectators and applauding. The riot began to take on the appearance of a holiday, for groups of upper classes began to appear on housetops, stairs and porches of houses, where they made themselves comfortable and listened to the demonstration as they were accustomed to watch contests in the stadia. Below in the long way toward the harbor-front, the lawless of any class indulged their love of disorder and amused the aristocrats. The fugitives were almost in sight of the forest of masts which marked the wharves, when Marsyas detected a change in the tone of the tumult. Derision and revilement began to lose impetus, flagging in the face of a freshened uproar of another temper, beginning far behind and sweeping down the street after the fugitives. It was savage, bloodthirsty and menacing. Out of the inarticulate volume he caught finally shouts about the Jews and Flora; next, about the dance of Flora; after that the whole declaration, sent thundering, like a sea over winter capes, that the dancing Flora was a Nazarene and the daughter of the alabarch! Marsyas' face, turned toward Agrippa, was ghastly. The Herod felt the first quiver of terror he had experienced in years. He reached toward the lines, meaning to give Marsyas opportunity to return to the Regio Judæorum. But Marsyas was shouting mightily to the centurion to charge the crowds before them. The prætorian heard and his men presented a double row of spears and rushed. The lesser mob ahead broke, and Marsyas cried back to Cypros' charioteer. The next minute with desperate mercilessness he had loosed a long plaited whip like a crackling flame upon the necks of his horses. The terrified beasts leaped; the car lurched and headlong they plunged into the mass before them. Right and left the rawhide played, over faces, shoulders and lifted arms, searing and scarring wherever it touched. With grim satisfaction, the two within the chariot felt at times that the car mounted and toppled over prostrate rioters, like sticks in the roadway. The jam became panic and flight, and the horses took the free passage, mad with desire to get away from the stinging torment that harassed them. The driver of Cypros' car closed in quickly with its following of curricles, and kept close behind the flying chariot, but the prætorians, out-distanced, contented themselves by following through short ways, and the riot was left behind. At the wharf the maddened animals could not be stopped until they had been circled again and again. But hardly had the wheels ceased to move, when Marsyas leaped to the ground, and, flinging the lines to a slave, put up his hands to Agrippa. "As the first debt to thy manhood and to the alabarch forget not this opportunity to help him! Hear them! They want Jewish blood; Lydia's blood! There is none in Alexandria to stay them! Help, my lord! Beseech Cæsar in thy people's behalf, as I beseech thee now! Answer, answer!" "I hear, Marsyas," Agrippa responded, "and by all that I hold sacred, I promise thee Flaccus' end! God help thee! Farewell!" Pausing only for the word, Marsyas turned and ran with frantic speed back into the city. He saw, at every step, that which made his heart chill in his bosom. The tide of the riot had turned, and that which was not already pouring in upon the Nazarenes, was rushing into the Regio Judæorum. CHAPTER XXXII SANCTUARY The cluster of vagabonds hanging before the alabarch's mansion stayed no longer after the breezes brought the first sound of tumult which announced a rarer sport elsewhere. In a twinkling the Regio Judæorum was silent and deserted. Except for the gusts of far-off turmoil, the cooing of pigeons in towers, the clashing of palm-leaves, the creak of crazy gates in the wind, the casual calling of Numidian cranes or the crowing of poultry were the only sounds in the quarter--lonesome, nature sounds, signals of a householder's absence. But it seemed as if the Regio Judæorum listened and waited. After Agrippa's departure, the alabarch came into his presiding-room, without purpose and visibly uneasy. Lydia followed him, and, at a look from her father, came close to his chair and mingled her yellow-brown curls with his white locks. The silence over the quarter had become oppressive and the slightest break would have been no less grateful than distinct, when it seemed that cautious footsteps pattered by without. The two stirred and listened. After a moment, they heard others, very swift and soft, as if many were running by a-tiptoe. There were whispers and rustlings, excited words cried under the breath. The two in the presiding-room looked at each other. Had the vagabonds returned to their place for mischief, outside the alabarch's mansion? Lysimachus stepped to the windows and listened. But Lydia stood still, dreading without understanding that which he might hear. East and west, far and near, sounds were drifting in and passing toward the New Port, sounds as if a multitude hastened in one direction. Above these stealthy, fugitive, whispered noises, there came freshened uproar from pagan Alexandria, swift, high, relentless and carrying like fire on a wind. As they stood thus, perplexed and alarmed, Vasti appeared like a shadow out of the dusk and caught the alabarch's arm. "It is come!" she hissed with compelling vehemence. "To the Synagogue! Fly! For the hosts of Siva are upon you even now!" Lysimachus grasped the grill of the window, and turned slowly toward his daughter. "Lydia?" he asked helplessly. The girl came to him, and Vasti began to motion her toward the street. "What is it? What passeth?" the alabarch insisted, unable to act without perfect conception of the conditions he had to fight. Lydia's eyes, fixed on her father's face, deepened with misery and widened with suffering. The hour had fallen! She was to be the outcast and the abomination at last. "They accuse me," she said, "of being a Nazarene; that I committed sacrilege, to hold off the mob from Rhacotis--that I was the Dancing Flora!" The alabarch put his thin hands to his forehead, as if to ward off the conviction, which all the fragmentary intimation against Lydia, and her own words conjoined, threatened to establish in him. "Is it so, my daughter?" he asked in a benumbed voice. Cause was submerged in effect; she felt less fear of the confession than of her father's suffering. In the appreciable interval his figure shriveled; age and the encroachment of death showed upon him. The atmosphere of the magistrate, the courtier and the aristocrat dissolved under the anguish of a father and the horror of a Jew. He had surrendered his two sons, Tiberius and Marcus, to paganism; in Lydia, he had reposed the unwatchful faith, that had permitted his other children to apostasize under his roof. He had believed the more in her, and the shock was the greater, therefore. "Let it be the measure of my conviction, my father," she said sadly, "that I did this thing in the knowledge that I might forfeit thy love!" He made no movement; his face did not relax from its stunned agony. Lydia awaited its change with flagging heart-beat. But the thunder of menace from the Gymnasium square rolled in again through the streets of the Regio Judæorum. The alabarch heard it. Up through the mask there struggled not rebuke and condemnation, but the terror of love fearing for its own. He caught Lydia in his arms and turned his straining eyes toward the windows. But the bayadere waited no longer for the arousing of his faculties. She seized his arm and thrust him toward the vestibule. "Awake! Get you up and be gone! Will you wait to see her perish?" She did not stop until she had pushed them through the porch into the streets. "To the Synagogue!" she commanded last, and disappeared as she had come. All the Regio Judæorum, as far as the Brucheum on the south and the tumble and wash of the Mediterranean on the north, was pouring through the streets toward the New Port. The alabarch's own servants went hither and thither, knocking at doors, from which other servants presently issued to speed with the alarm over the yet unwarned sections nearer the Synagogue. After a moment's waiting until the light airs cleared the daze that enmeshed his brain, the alabarch took Lydia under his cloak and fled with his people toward their refuge. As he went, doorways about them were giving up households, bazaars and booths were emptying of their patrons and proprietors; workshops, their artisans and apprentices; schools, their readers and pupils; the counting-room, the rich men and the borrowers; the squalid angles, the outcast and the beggar. The oppression of terror and the instinct for silence weighted the darkening air; the twilight covered them, and hostile attention was yet far behind them. So they came: the slaves with marks of perpetual servitude in their ears, and ladies of the Sadducees that had rarely set foot upon the harsh earth; figures in Indian silks and figures in sackcloth; fugitives to whom fear lent wings and fugitives to whom flight was bitterer than death; families and guilds by the hundreds, hurrying together; companies of diverse people separated from their own; sons carrying parents and neighbors bearing the sick; friends forgetting attachments and foes forgetting feuds--until the streets became veritable rivers of running people. And so they went, crowding, pressing, contending, but passing as silently as forty thousand may pass, toward the Synagogue, which was sanctuary and stronghold for them all. The keepers of the great gates were there, and the huge valves stood wide. The alabarch's old composure reasserted itself, as, amid the panic of his people, he realized their want of leadership. He stepped to one side of the nearest gate, and stood while he watched each and every Jew rush into the darkness and disappear under the great pylons of the Synagogue. Lydia, whom he would have sent in at once, clung to him, and together they stood without. Meanwhile, out of the distant Brucheum, there came a snarl of monstrous and terrifying proportions. The mob was gaining strength. The last of the Jews fled praying through the giant gates and pressed themselves into the shelter of the Synagogue. The keeper looked at the alabarch. He lifted his arm, and Lydia and the keeper and he, shutting away, as best they might, the noise of the threatening city, listened, if any belated fugitive came through the dark. The sound of footsteps approached; a body of people, strangers to the alabarch, appeared; Lydia made a little sound, and moved toward them. "We also are beset," the foremost said, "can we enter into the protection of the Synagogue?" "Haste ye, and enter!" the alabarch answered. And after the hindmost, he and Lydia passed into the sanctuary. The keepers swung the great valves shut, and the last sound they admitted was a ravening howl, as Alexandria hurled itself into the empty streets of the Regio Judæorum. Until this time, Lydia had been a part of the unit of terror and self-preservation, but the hurry of the flight had ceased and the wait for events had begun. Then ensued moments for individual ideas. Thus far she had heard no murmur against her. Fear of the Alexandrians had outmeasured the Jews' indignation, or else they had believed the informer to be the father of lies. There was the never-failing lamp on the lectern, but its light penetrated no farther than the immediate precincts of darkness. The interior was so vast that its great angles melted into shadow. The immense area of marble pavement was cumbered with an army of huddled shapes, and when portentous red light began to sift down through the open roof it fell upon uplifted faces, ghastly with fear, upon bare arms, white and soft or lean and brown, upstretched in supplication. But neither moan nor murmur arose among them who waited upon siege. Meanwhile the roar of violence encompassed and penetrated all portions of the quarter. Great lights began to mount and redden the sky as torches were applied to houses looted of their riches. The invasion had met no obstacle and the whole region was a-swarm. Presently, close at hand, the full bellow of freshly-discovered incentive arose, mounting above all other noises until even the Jews, imprisoned within walls of granite, heard it. "The Jews! the Jews! The Synagogue!" Involuntarily there arose from the lips of the forty thousand a great moan, muffled, unechoing and filled with terror. The alabarch stood by Lydia, with his thoughts upon the strength of the Synagogue and the hardihood of the prisoners. But the weight of culpability was heavy upon Lydia; in her great need and longing for the comfort of his confidence, she crept closer to her father and clung to his arm. "Naught but a ram or ballista can force these gates!" he said. "And we are forty thousand. Alas, that the spirit of Joshua the warrior was not mixed with the spirit of Moses, who gave us the Law!" The mob came on, now in distinct hearing of the imprisoned Jews. Tremendous trampling without on the stone flagging and dull, fruitless hammering on the valves announced the assault. The Jews nearer the gates pressed away. Without, indecision and tumult wrangled among innumerable voices. Great bodies began to shout as one, with mighty lungs: "Bring out the woman! Give up the Dancing Flora!" Lydia felt the alabarch tremble and presently the arm to which she clung withdrew from her clasp and passed around her, drawing her close. "_Impius_! _Insidiis_! _Succuba_! _O dea certe_!" roared the mob. But work was doing at the gates. There arose blunt pounding, slowly and heavily delivered as if a multitude wielded a ram. But the reports were too solid to indicate any weakness in the gates, and the keeper of the one attacked watched the sacred stone with a glitter of pride in his eyes. Presently the hammering ceased. "Yield us the woman!" the mob roared in the interval. "Give us the woman and save yourselves!" Those about the alabarch, hearing the demand of the mob, turned great terror-strained eyes upon Lydia, and she hid her face in her father's shoulder. The smell of burning pitch penetrated the interior; pungent smoke assailed the nostrils of the keeper, who smiled grimly, assuming that the mob hoped to burn the Synagogue. But there followed an explosion of steam, split by a sharp report, and followed by a howl of exultation. The keeper with wild eyes sprang at the valve. Immediately the hammering of the ram reverberated through the gloom. The alabarch understood. They were cracking the stone with fire and water and beating in the fractures with a ram. Then the forty thousand within realized their extremity. The murmur increased to an even groan of terror, and here and there, as some more acutely realized the desperate straits, frantic screams would rive through the drone of misery. Above it all the ram beat its sentence of doom upon the gate. Splintering rock began to fall on the inner side of the assaulted portal. The keeper put his hands over his ears and turned away from the sight. Let but a breach be made wide enough to admit a hand to undo the bolts and hideous death would pour in upon the shuddering captives within. Without, above the noise of the ram, the roar of the multitude continued: "Give up the woman ere it is too late!" Under the light of fires falling from above, hundreds of white faces in the mad mass turned toward Lydia. A lozenge of stone large enough to admit a man's body shaped itself in the gate under the ram, and the next instant shot out and fell near the keeper. With it came a hoarse roar of triumph, drowning a scream of despair. A dozen arms came through the opening and fumbled for the bolts. The keeper seized the fragment of stone and hurled it at the intruding arms. It struck fair and with vicious force. Howls of pain went up. The limp arms were dragged out and as others came in the keeper bounded to the gate and catching up his missile beat madly upon flesh and bone until the besiegers abandoned their search for the bolts. The thunder of assault began again, for the gate could not hold long. The trapped victims shrieked and out of the mass fingers pointed at Lydia. Suddenly, she stood away from her father's arm. Walking to one of the keepers of the unassaulted gates, she said to him: "I am she whom they want without! Let me forth!" A tall spare old man, one of the strangers who had entered last, approached her. But the girl motioned him aside and he made the sign of the cross over her. Her father, watching her, did not realize until the keeper undid the bolts which held the wicket, or subsidiary gate in the large one, that Lydia meant to pass out into the night. With a cry, he sprang after her. A hush fell in the Synagogue. CHAPTER XXXIII THE DREGS OF THE CUP OF FURY The great stars were further withdrawn into the immeasurable arch of blue night; the winds had fled away into the ocean; the bay was angry with fire for leagues. The space before Lydia was open as far as the reader's stone of the proseucha, for the attacking party had demanded room for their proceedings. Beyond that was the front of the besiegers, a sea of bodies lighted by torches, tunics bloody with murder which had been done, mouths open, teeth shining, and eyes filled with the fury of bloodthirst. As yet she was unnoticed, because the attention of the multitude was engaged with the assault upon the easternmost gate. Lydia's mind did not direct her. It had sunk long ago under the stress of womanly terror. Only an involuntary obedience to an impulse conceived during the last conscious suggestions of her Nazarene faith, moved her toward the reader's stone, straight in the face of the multitude. She went as all young and tender martyrs have gone, with the spirit already lifted out of the body. She mounted the rock; the alabarch, unable to reach her in time, unable to make her hear him, gave up with a groan of despair, and followed her. Then the multitude saw and understood. A yell of fury went up; a mass of innumerable heads and shoulders lurched toward her. Even the assailants at the gate dropped their ram to come. Then up and out of it Marsyas leaped! Lydia saw him, and a great light swept over her face. He had come to die with her, to sweeten the bitter martyrdom with the faithfulness of his love. After Marsyas, the bayadere bounded, as if pitched from the front of the wave. Between the murdering front and the three on the stone she interposed herself, a creature of primal fury, terrible and ferocious. A torch was in her hand, the badge of eligibility, which had let her to the forefront of this mob, that received none but destroyers. But the sibilant utterance of the crimson flame, raking the air, and taller by half than the screaming fury that whipped it before her, was turned upon them that had kindled it. She carried by its bail a great copper kettle filled with bitumen, but, as she planted feet upon the stone, she dropped her torch and, whirling upon the wave of fury, swept the full contents of the giant pot over every face and garment for yards about her. She caught up her torch; the looping flame uncoiled itself like a springing snake and shot down into the pack. Instantly there was a running flash, the rip of explosive ignition, and the breast of the riot turned, each a great towering flame, and drove itself into the heart of the oncoming thousands behind! The rabble in cotton tunics had absolutely no defense against one another. The riot of bloodthirst turned instantly into panic and a revel of terrible death. The sound, the scene were indescribably awful. In the hideous uproar that ensued, events followed swiftly. Vasti and her tall torch, in fearful fellowship, shrilled and spun on the rock in a frenzy of heathen triumph. Marsyas, for the instant stunned and scorched, flung his arm over his face, to shut out the horror. But the Jews, the instant the ram was dropped, realizing that their citadel was hopeless with breaches in its gate, and seeing a respite in the riot's attention upon Lydia, broke from the sanctuary and poured like a sea in flight into the open. The miraculous intervention of the bayadere gave them the opportunity to save themselves. But when Marsyas came to himself and sprang to take up Lydia, the inundation of fleeing Jews had swept over the reader's stone behind him, and Lydia was gone! CHAPTER XXXIV CAPTIVES OF THE MIGHTY The second night after the riot about the Synagogue, one of Flaccus' sentries, posted about the small cramped portion of the Regio Judæorum, into which the forty thousand Jews had been driven, brought his spear at guard and called "Halt!" But the object approaching spun on toward him noiselessly, passed the lines, and disappeared up the dark, sandy roadway, into the night on the beleaguered quarter. "Ha, ha! Ho, ho!" roared the next post, who had heard his challenge, "challenging sand-columns, Sergius? Flaccus should know of thy thoroughness!" The discomfited sentry muttered and shouldered his weapon. But the column of sand disintegrated before a hovel, and became a snaky woman-shape that disappeared into the dark door of the house. Within, she stumbled over prostrate bodies, sleeping on the earthen floor, and, muttering in Hindu against the darkness, stopped finally. "Master!" she called softly, in her native tongue. There was instant reply. "Thou, Vasti! The Lord God be praised! What news?" The woman felt her way to the voice, and, encountering the alabarch's outstretched hands, began at once, in a whisper: "I have come, but not to abide," she said. "The Nazarenes took Lydia, and fled with her unto Judea!" "Unto Judea! Away from me?" the alabarch said piteously. "Nay, but Egypt hath risen against her. The Roman hath put forth all his soldiery to look for her. If she remained in Alexandria she would surely die!" The alabarch moaned. The last of his fortitude had gone with Lydia, and helpless, disgraced and old, he was beginning to surrender. The bayadere put her hands on him. "Be of hope," she insisted, "for the white brother departed at sunset to seek for her, and to get protection from the Herod!" "Judea!" the alabarch repeated miserably. "There she entereth into equal danger, for there it is death to be a Nazarene!" "But the white brother is sworn to kill the leader of the persecution," she said grimly. "Speed him with thy prayers, for he is weighted with no little mission. I come unto thee with cheer. Listen, and be of hope! The city of the Jews, here, is all but destroyed, but I buried thy moneys, thy drafts, thy money-papers and thy jewels. Though they burn thy house, thou art still rich!" "Buried them?" he repeated. "In the earth of thy court-yard, ere the Herod departed, for the flame on the altar of Mahadeva burned crimson and murky! And I took certain of thy moneys and gave them to certain of the Nazarenes and bade them be prepared to care for her, who had cared for them! They went unto the Synagogue! They rescued her from the stone, after the sending of Vishnu upon the rabble! They went unto Judea with her--and I, Vasti, I did it, as Khosru, the Mahatma, bade!" "Be thou blessed, Vasti; blessed be the day that I held up the hand that would have fallen on thee, in the markets of Sind! But--but--Marsyas--what manner of vessel carryeth him? How long! Alas, how wide the sea!" "But the vengeance of the Divine hand is loosed! Sawest thou the destruction of the host, before thy people's Temple? The bay was black with them this morning and the vultures come even from Libya. Knowest thou the evil mouth that spread sayings against Lydia? I was in the city and beheld it! It was the charioteer, Eutychus! Him I kept in my sight, while I ran at the forefront of the riot with the white brother, and when we stood upon the rock, I saw him! This morning, I sought for him before the Synagogue, and I found him!" She brought her teeth together with a click. "I burned incense for the purification of the fire, straightway," she said sententiously. "Canst thou endure?" she asked after a silence. "All--so that Lydia be saved!" "Thy spirit may be tried," she said. "The Roman hath commanded that ye be pent here until Lydia is found, believing that imprisonment and hunger and torture may persuade the Jews to give her up if she be hid among them. But I shall come to thee with comforts and such tidings as I may learn." She touched his hands to her forehead and moved away, calling back: "The time is not long; the Jewish king will not lag in his own requital! Be assured! I abide without these lines, since I can not help thee within! Farewell!" At the door she stopped, but, reconsidering her impulse, went out without speaking. "It would not be seemly to tell, now, that I saw Classicus' green and gold garment exposed in a usurer's shop." A sand-column passed before the wind, by the sentry at the upper end of the street; but he did not attempt to halt it. CHAPTER XXXV THE APPROACH OF THE DAY OF VISITATION Marsyas sought through the Nazarene settlements in Joppa, Anthedon and Cæsarea, but the people could not tell him of fugitive Alexandrians, who had with them a maid with yellow-brown hair. He went then to Ptolemais, and there, after days of patient search, discovered that three strange women, two men and a maiden of gentle blood, who were children in Christ, has passed through the city, from Alexandria to Jerusalem. He did not pause to inquire after his former master, Peter the usurer, nor Eleazar, his steward. Instead he took the road, over which he and Agrippa had come long before, and hastened toward the City of David. Within sight of the Tower of Hippicus, and the glittering Glory on the summit of Moriah, he came upon a group, in abas and talliths, sitting on the soil while they ate. He would have passed around them, without speaking, had he not seen the elder among them lift his hands and beseech the blessing of Christ upon the bread and water set before them. Marsyas stopped, and waited with as much grace as possible until the meal was finished and the Nazarene thanks returned, before he approached. "I behold that ye offer supplication to the Nazarene Prophet," he said to the elder, "and though I come unto you a faithful follower of the God of Abraham, I pray you, remember the charity ye assume, and give me aid!" "We are children of Christ," the elder responded, "and brethren to all; wherefore speak, and if we can help thee, we dare not deny thee." "I perceive that a bond of common acquaintance unites all of your belief; perchance certain Alexandrian Nazarenes with a maiden, who fled hither from the wrath of the Proconsul of Egypt, have come unto you for hospitality in Jerusalem." "Save for the few apostles of the Church in Christ, who have hidden themselves, there are no Nazarenes in Jerusalem," the elder answered. "No Nazarenes in Jerusalem!" Marsyas exclaimed, remembering Eleazar's estimation of the host of schism in the Holy City. "Yet, two years ago, they possessed the city from Ophlas to Bezetha." "They have been scattered into far cities by the oppressor, or have passed through the dust of the stoning-place into the Kingdom of God!" he answered in awed tones. The young man made a gesture as if he drew his hands quickly away from blood-stains, and a look of intense horror passed over his face. "And Saul continueth to rage, unchecked?" he exclaimed, his old impatience with the passivity of the Nazarenes making itself felt once more. "In the Lord's time, in the Lord's time, my son," the elder said mildly. "I can not wait upon the Lord!" Marsyas cried. "The Lord gave me heart, feeling, intelligence and invention, for me to use to mine own aid! I have labored for two years to this end, and Herod, the king, will help me!" "Not so, my son!" the Nazarene said gravely. "Build no hope for us, upon Herod the king, for he hath joined himself with the Pharisees, and he will not hinder the oppressor!" "What?" Marsyas cried, growing black. "A truth, my son!" "But I crowned him!" Marsyas cried, clenching his hands. "I held off the hand of death from him, and despoiled my soul for his sake! I sold myself for him! By the Lord, if he help me not, I shall have back the life that I preserved to him!" The Nazarene crossed himself quickly, and shook his head. "Peace! Peace! young brother. Even the Law, for which thou art zealous, forbids thee to kill! Behold the vanity of laying up confidence in man! If thou hadst so built for the Master's favor, thou hadst not been forsaken, to-day!" "Neither the God of Abraham, nor thy Prophet has shielded thee from the oppressor," he declared passionately. "Remember thy own words. But I will bring him down!" "Build no hope upon Herod," the Nazarene continued, as if eager to stay Marsyas. "Whatever he promised thee, he knows that Saul standeth high among the Pharisees, whom the king would propitiate! He hath difficulty and prejudice to overcome, this grandson of an execrated grandsire--so build nothing upon the Herod!" Was it possible that, after all his months of patient work and long-suffering, he had brought up at the point at which he had left off two years before? Was his punishment of Saul to be done, at his own risk, at last? He would see this altered Agrippa and learn for himself! "I shall see this king and discover!" he declared. "The king is not in Jerusalem," the Nazarene said. "He hath continued unto Antioch to despatch a petition to Cæsar!" The young man's rage changed into dismay, but he made a last appeal. "I seek my beloved," he said finally, in a helpless way. "She is a Nazarene and pursued by the powers of Rome! Even besides her peril of Saul, she is sought after by the mighty who would destroy her. If thou knowest of her--even where she might be in hiding, I pray thee, tell me, in the name of thy Prophet!" "Who is she?" the Nazarene asked at once. "She is Lydia Lysimachus, daughter to the alabarch in Alexandria." "I turned such a maiden, and her protectors, away from the gates of Jerusalem, seven days ago. They were bidden to go to Damascus." Marsyas pressed the Nazarene's hand to his lips, because his gratitude would not be expressed otherwise. Safe, then, for the moment, and out of reach of Saul of Tarsus! "Do ye fare thither? even now?" Marsyas asked, eager to attach himself to the body of apostates, if they led him on to Lydia. "Nay, we are certain of the faith on watch, lest any ignorant of the peril besetting the brethren should approach the city." "Ye are close unto the oppressor," Marsyas said seriously. "We abide in the will of the Lord." Marsyas sighed. He had seen another, believing in the promise of the Lamb, go down unto death. The recurring thought of Stephen, never wholly forgotten, awakened in him another impulse. He would not go straightway to Damascus, and continue to retreat from Saul. The hand of the Lord had led him unto the Pharisee, and he would do that which lay nearest him. "And when I come unto Damascus, how shall I find her?" he asked of the Nazarene. "Go unto Ananias, a brother in the Lord, and tell him thy story. Lo, he is keeper of the Lord's flock, and filled with the Spirit. Thou wilt not ask in vain!" "Thou hast my thanks, and my blessing!" Marsyas said. "And the forgiveness of the Lord cover you all!" "Peace, young brother, and the love of Christ be with thee ever more!" Marsyas went through the amber light of the late afternoon, toward the might of Hippicus and the majesty of the City of David. He found, by inquiry among the Jews, that Agrippa had not lingered in Judea, having passed through Jerusalem to give commands concerning the preparation of his palace, to receive the homage of the people and to propitiate the Pharisees, before he went on to Antioch. It was readily told that the king was despatching messages to Caligula craving the punishment of Flaccus. "But could not the king have despatched these messages from Jerusalem?" Marsyas asked. The Jews smiled and laid fingers alongside their noses. "He is a Herod, and not ashamed of display. He was ill-treated in Antioch, by the proconsul, there, in the days of adversity. Wherefore, in his purple and gold, with the favor of Cæsar behind him, he taketh advantage of an excuse to abash his old insulters!" It was like Agrippa! But Marsyas was glad, even in the tumult of his sensations, that the Herod was pushing his work against Flaccus! At least, Alexandria should be safe for the alabarch. But to his mission! It was still night in the City of David and the watcher on the pinnacle of the Temple had long to wait before the morning shone and the sky was lighted even unto Hebron. The greater stars sparkled like jewels in the cold heavens, and there were already many people in the blue-misted streets below. They were of all classes, but of one nation, one direction. Straggling numbers joined the main body from each narrow passage which intersected the marble-paved roadway leading toward the splendid Tyropean bridge. It was a host, an army numbering thousands. But, foot planted on the solid masonry that accomplished the ravine by flying arches two hundred feet above the dark abyss, conversation left off. The company passed silent, except for the multitudinous and soft rustlings of garments and the chafing of feet upon rock. Far ahead the foremost were rising, an undulating sea of heads and shoulders, as the cyclopean stairs, a cold bank of white marble, broad and gentle of slope, climbed toward the Royal Porch. As soon as the Tyropean bridge was passed, the Temple was shut off from view by the intervening cornices of the porch; and when the gate was reached, the stream of worshipers entered into the demesnes of the Holy House. Tunnel-like and drafty, the open gate revealed an immense length of gloom, raftered and roofed with beams and vaults of darkness, upheld by double rows of dim columns of enormous girth. This, the Royal Colonnade, cloistered the Court of the Gentiles, through which the worshipers fared next. It was a great quadrangle, paved with sun-colored marbles, open to the sky and having about it the characteristic exhilarating airs which inhabit the heights. Herod the Great spent princely sums upon this portion allotted to the Gentiles, for the simple purpose of flattering the pagan. Perhaps for no other reason than an expression of their displeasure did the Jews commit the sacrilege of commercialism in this spot. Here the money-changer, vender of sacrificial beasts, birds and wines made a busy market daily, for the indignation of the Nazarene Rabbi had driven them away for only so long as He watched. They returned when He had vanished, like flies to a honey-pot. Here also awaited the Temple servitors to receive the unblemished offerings, the Shoterim to preserve order, the Levites of the gates and perchance the priests of the killing-pens and of the wood-chambers. Through the throng of attendants or venders, the worshipers continued, an uninterrupted stream of pilgrims, souls in distress, Pharisees and souls under vows, and all the class and kind that would be diligent for the Lord in the restful hours before daybreak. And the number was not large, in comparison to the host of Israel, for the Temple was builded to contain the voice of two hundred and ten thousand. North of the center of the Court of Gentiles, the Temple stood. A rail set it off austerely from contact with the uncircumcised. Its relentless command of exclusion and its threat were set forth on stone, forbidding the admission of a Gentile on pain of death. But beyond, in mockery, rose the black bulk of Roman Antonia, the majesty of masonry upreared and prostituted to eavesdropping and espionage. Yet none who visited the Temple was instantly to be led away from its glory to meditate on its humiliation. The worshipers passed around the angle of the structure to the east where the Gate Beautiful was hung. There was a momentary slackening in the movement, for the gate was yet to be opened. But, preceding the foremost, twenty Levites passed up the flight of steps, and under the direction of a captain, laid shoulder to the valves and threw all their strength against them. There was a flash as the light of the coming dawn, concentrated and intensified, shifted across the Corinthian brass, and the Gate Beautiful swung inward. At the head of the column a young man, in ample robes, with his kerchief skirts hanging close about his face, stepped aside from the line of advance. The crowd took up motion and went on. Marsyas had washed himself in obedience to the Law; he had brought in his hand his trespass offering, and in his soul he was a Jew. But he stood now, and watched the fours of people climb the steps abreast, with no mood in his heart that a man should carry into a sanctuary. Series after series passed under his sharp scrutiny--extremes of rank, of reputation, of calling and of kind. Minute after minute the long, silent procession tramped by him and was swallowed up in the gigantic gloom within. Ever the alert gaze, bright even under the obscuring shadow of the kerchief, slipped from rank to rank, and never once lingered in doubt. No one looked at him; every eye was down, for though, since the eighth day after his birth, no man in the long stream of worshipers had been ignorant of the Temple, it never failed to be a place of awe, half-love, half-terror. The hindmost appeared at the angle of the Temple, moved in turn after their fellows, climbed the steps and disappeared. Stragglers followed, in groups and singly, and finally Marsyas turned up the steps and followed the last within. Saul of Tarsus, a Pharisee, would have been among the earliest to arrive. Perhaps by special dispensation he had entered before the multitude and by another gate. The keeper at the Gate Beautiful glanced at the young man's snow-white Essenic garments and at the stamp of Jewish blood on his face, and passed him without a word. The Temple from the city had been a great glittering unit. But on approaching its details, they became bewildering. Within was a tremendous inclosure, floored with agate, galleried with immense chambers which were screened with grills of beaten brass. The army of worshipers was reduced, in comparison to the space they entered, to a mere handful of pygmy, indistinct shapes, prostrate, kneeling, upright, silent, infinitesimal, moveless. At the extreme inner end of the men's court was a flight of fifteen semicircular steps which led up to the Gate Nicanor, now wide. It was hung in the middle of an open arcade--an altar screen no less a grace to the Temple because it might have embattled a fortress. Beyond it as the eye pierced the holy gloom, was a second tier of courts, less spacious than the first, but no less magnificent; after it, yet a third, and then a massive pile of ancient brass, stained and smoked, arose above all else before it. A tongue of clean blue unilluminating flame wavered in the center of its summit. Beyond that, Marsyas' gaze did not travel. Spiritual subjection surrounded him; from behind the lattice which screened the women's court in the lofty galleries, there came no sound. The twilight of early morning and the hush of a sanctity were supreme. He crossed his hands upon his breast and let his head fall as the elders had taught him. Others came to stand beside him, the order of worship proceeded, and the singing Levites ranged themselves on the steps before Nicanor, but he was plunged in his spiritual difficulty and oppressed by the care for himself and his own. Finally there came a long, rich trumpet note above middle register; the voice of a brazen tongue singing through a horn of silver. It was not sudden. Beginning as the sound of wind on a fine wire, it ripened in tone as it grew in volume till it achieved the color, the shape of harmony, the very fragrance of music. As it diminished, those who listened caught the sound of a second note--the voice of a twin trumpet, save that the tones issued in the molds of enunciation. It was one singing among the Levites, as impossible to discover as to pick out the inspirited pipe in an organ. "The earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof; the world and they that dwell therein--" It was the voice of a young enthusiast, with the faith and spiritual uplift of patriarchal years, housed in a frame of youth--the voice of a creature of trance and frenzy, a martyr-elect from birth. But as he clung to his final syllable in a vibrato of fervor, a second singer, duplicating the note in barytone, took up the second verse, and carried it with the ease and repose of one filled with content, health and the ripeness of years, of one who is the founder of a house, the possessor of goods and a power among his fellow men. And his voice was rich, level as the note of a 'cello, tender because it was strong, persuasive because it was believing: "For he hath founded it upon the seas and established it upon the floods--" Wresting the word from him, the tenor again on his altitudes of ecstasy flung out the inquisition: "Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? or who shall stand in his holy place?--" He made answer to himself with the barytone, but there was a third now singing, and his voice arose out of their attendance as a great, white, solemn, night-blooming flower might rise out of leafage. "He that hath clean hands and a pure heart; who hath not lifted up his soul unto vanity, nor sworn deceitfully." The young fanatic might sing with the fervor of his bigotry, the contented man from the comfort in his heart, but this one, making answer, now, sang as one who was experienced and understood as the others could not. It was deep bass, too deliberate to be flexible, too profound to be hurried, and withal a great bell booming in a dome. And like a bell in travail under each stroke of its hammer, each word, in the full poignancy of its meaning, fell from the lips of him who had been tried by fire. The voice of the one hundred and fifty on the steps of Nicanor, picked for beauty from a singing nation, burst about the trio, an eruption of great harmony, overwhelming the echoes of the Temple, flooding the purlieus of the Holy Hill, mounting the morning winds to float across the hollow, reverberating ravines, to resound on the bosom of Zion, to penetrate the dark vale of Kedron, and to fail and be one with the reedy rushing of airs through the cedars of Olivet. "He that hath clean hands and a pure heart; who hath not lifted up his soul unto vanity nor sworn deceitfully; "He shall receive the blessing from the Lord, and righteousness from the God of his salvation!" Marsyas found himself coming under the influence of the psalm. It seemed that the modifiers, describing the elect, had become lofty, solemn attributes not to be assumed by a simple claim to them, not to be had after the commission of deeds not specifically interdicted, not to be obtained by the harkening to one's own will; nor yet to be had did one fix himself in a chrysalis of form, wrap his soul in clean linen, and bury it in a remote spot, and keep hourly watch over it to keep it white--white but wizened. He seemed to understand that he had not understood these things in the days of his Essenism, nor in the days of his worldliness. And, remembering the meaning of his presence in the Temple, he felt peculiarly accused in his soul. What right had he, who had brought with him the spirit of murder, in the Holy Hill? He could not shake off the self-accusation, but his resolution was unweakened. He would depart! The hand of one who stood beside him dropped upon his shoulder and lingered. He looked and saw beside him a great man, in the garments of an artisan, that covered him, figure, head and face against identification. But Marsyas had known Eleazar under more effective disguise; the rabbi was not concealed from him now. Perhaps he could learn from Eleazar the whereabouts of Saul of Tarsus, so he dropped his head again, and stayed. The sun blazed on the spear-points, finishing the pinnacle of the Temple with glowing embers; the variegated marble of the Court of Gentiles was yellow as the gold of Ophir, and the morning radiance trembled over the City of David, lying in the valley two hundred feet below or rising up the slopes beyond the ravine. The long winding stream of worshipers flowed from the Gate Beautiful, left, through the well of the stairs to the level where entered the Gate of Akra, down the long flight of steps into the vale of Gihon, and, dispersing, lost itself in the crowded passages of the Lower City. Before they were out of the morning shadow of the giant retaining-wall, Marsyas spoke. "Where is our enemy?" "He is for a time gone hence, and my soul is escaped as a bird out of a snare of the fowlers. I can come now without much fear unto the Holy House." "Hence?" Marsyas asked uneasily. "Whither?" "I shall tell thee. Know thou, first, that I am here, since several weeks, abiding among the weavers of Bezetha, and laboring with them; for Peter, the usurer of Ptolemais, is dead and his servants scattered abroad. Since Jerusalem hath been purified of the heresy, there is little search after the Nazarenes, so, as the robbed house is more secure than the one as yet unentered by thieves, I am unmolested in Bezetha. Yet, until this morning, I have not dared venture into the Temple." "But Saul?" Marsyas urged impatiently. "I am coming unto Saul. Jonathan, the High Priest, exhausted the patience of Vitellius in ten months. The Roman's endurance wore through and snapped on a sudden like an overstrained cord. On a certain day, in the Feast of Tabernacles, Jonathan was High Priest; ere nightfall some respected Jew complained to the legate; the next day, Theophilus, brother to Jonathan, was clothed in the robes of Aaron. "Saul was brought up for the instant, but thou knowest that he is no cautious weigher of conditions. He did that which hath proven him not the unforeseeing time-server of a bloodthirsty man, but a follower of his own conscience and the servant of his own zeal. He went to the new High Priest while yet the robes retained the shape of Jonathan, and spake unto him: 'O ruler of my people, is the purification of the faith to be given over, seeing that it was the way of thy brother and abhorred of the Roman? Servest thou Vitellius or Jehovah?' It is not told abroad among the people what answer was given, what further asked, except that the chastening of the heretics was continued unabated, until all Judea was cleansed. And yesterday, Saul was given letters to Jews in Syria, permitting him to carry his examinations into Damascus and--" "Damascus!" Marsyas cried, seizing the rabbi's arm. "Yes; and to bring the offenders to Jerusalem for trial." "Is he gone?" Marsyas demanded in a terrible voice. "He passed out of the Damascus Gate at sunset last night." "Come! Go with me! Let us overtake him! He shall not go on!" "For revenge, Marsyas?" Eleazar asked mildly, but with reproof in his eyes. "To cut him off from desolating me wholly!" Marsyas declared. Eleazar looked away over the hollows and gentler hills covered with houses, toward the summit of Olivet, golden in the sun. "Then I shall not dissuade thee, Marsyas; but I can not go with thee," he said. "Why?" Marsyas demanded, with a flush of feeling. "I have suffered from oppression in the name of the Lord; it is the Lord's will. I have changed in the days of my misfortunes." Marsyas came close to him. "Art thou a Nazarene, Eleazar?" he asked in a low tone. "Nay, I am a good Jew, a better Jew, for I have become a Jew, again, through understanding." But Marsyas was not willing to wait for the rabbi's philosophy; he moved restlessly as he stood, and finally put forth his hand to say farewell, but Eleazar held it. "Wait, but a moment," he said, "and let me speak. Thou sayest thou wouldst secure thyself from devastation at the Pharisee's hands; since nothing can stop Saul, and nothing stop thee, there is death at the end of thy doing. I do not know what moves thee now; perchance it is more than the vow sworn to avenge Stephen. But thou goest to help thyself; and--to assist in convincing the heathen that Israel is an oppressor in the name of God!" "It is!" Marsyas cried passionately. But the rabbi went on patiently. "I did not go out after Stephen," he continued. "I was not seen at the crucifixion of his Prophet. I do not urge bloodshed or urge on the work of Saul of Tarsus. So, who is Israel, O son of a shut house and of a hermit brotherhood? Saul, who knoweth no moderation? Certain feeble and forward speakers in the synagogues, whom even an apostate could overthrow in argument? Or the witnesses whom they suborned in revenge? Say, be these Israel, or Gamaliel who discountenanced the persecution? Or the people among whom the minions of the High Priest Jonathan went cautiously to arrest the fathers of the Nazarene faith, lest the people stone the Shoterim? Forget not, brother, that our lofty are the friends of Rome; our lowly, tributaries of Rome; our chief priests, dependent upon Rome--and the greater Israel is the unheard, the unrecorded, the unpampered, the innocent!" "But is it not just, then, that Saul be overtaken, who hath cast obloquy on Israel, having shed innocent blood and made Judea to be fled by the righteous?" "Defendest thou the innocent of Israel, Marsyas?" "By the Lord, the innocent!" "Wouldst trouble thyself, had the doom fallen on others, instead of thine own, Marsyas?" The young man frowned and made no answer. "I shall not answer for thee," Eleazar went on, "but thou and the world accuse the innocent of Israel, when contempt is cast upon the race, as an entirety. But the slander of Israel hath been accomplished, even before Saul, and ye may not run down a lie. So thou and I and our kind have the hard task of upholding the glory of the people, a labor from which there can be no let nor easement! The multitude which crowns to-day and crucifies to-morrow establishes no standard. But they are witnesses to the evil-speaking of the enemy; they are a slander which may not be denied. If thou join thyself with them, Marsyas, for thine own ends, in that much thou ungirdest Israel!" "Brother, Saul of Tarsus consented unto the death of Stephen, and despoiled me of my one love, as an Essene; he proceedeth, now, against my beloved, as a man of the world! I can not wait on conscience and the welfare of Judea. She will not defend mine own; wherefore I must defend them, at whatever cost!" Eleazar's face had grown inexpressibly sad during Marsyas' words. His heavily-shaded eyes turned absently away from the speaker. He seemed to see beyond the invincible walls and towers of the Holy City, even beyond the olive-orchards and the meeting of the earth and sky, into the time which would come out of the east. Perhaps he saw waste and desolate places, lands of destruction and captives of the mighty, dregs of the cup of trembling and dregs of the cup of fury and the hostility of all nations. The sadness in his eyes became fixed. "Verily," he said, as if speaking of his own visions, "thou art a God that hidest thyself, O God of Israel!" Marsyas heard him with a stir of emotion in his soul. He put out his hand to the rabbi. "If I and my like be wrong, thou shall prevail, when the day of the just man comes, in the Lord's time!" "He called us His chosen people," Eleazar continued, suffering Marsyas to take his hand unnoticed, "even the appointed people, the marked people! Marked for His own purposes, how hidden! But what knows the clay of the potter's intent that passes it through fire? Chastening or vengeance, woe, woe unto them, by whom it cometh!" He turned away, and Marsyas looked after him until the narrow winding streets had obscured him. Quickly then Marsyas continued toward the Gennath Gate; reared to the Essenic habit of traveling without preparation, he was ready to journey from city to city in the dress he wore on the streets. He went by the cenotaph of Mariamne, past Phasælus, past the Prætorium, out of the gate, past the might of Hippicus, and on to the parting of the road, where he took the way to Damascus. Presently he met a horseman and, stopping the traveler, bought without parley the beast, and mounted it. He knew that Saul would proceed by the slow mule, and the forbidden, nobler animal, the horse, would soon make up the distance the Pharisee had gained. So, without relaxing from his fever of determination, Marsyas sped on toward Damascus. He knew that the hour had come! CHAPTER XXXVI ON THE DAMASCUS ROAD With the solid soil of the ancient Roman road beneath his horse's feet, Marsyas rode north, between the hills of Judea, with the head of Mt. Ephraim before him. The early morning of the second day broke over him, fresh on the long straight road, leading over the border into Samaria, past the Well of Jacob, and through the city of Samaria. At noon the third day he turned at the parting of the ways, and rode east, along the southern edge of the Plains of Esdraelon, until, through a crevice in the hills, he saw the Jordan sparkling in its valley below. It was an old familiar way, thence, north once more, fording a hundred mountain brooks that fed the river of the Holy Land. The narrow fertile strip that lay between the hills and waters of the Sea of Galilee, unto Tiberias, he accomplished after night. At dawn he entered Magdala, at mid-morning Capernaum, and, leaving the margin of the beautiful lake, he passed north into the rocks, ridges and forests once more. Through marshes and sedge, with the waters of the Jordan in the heart of it, he forded the south arm of Lake Huleh and entered Itrurea. The country changed but the road did not. It was still the same compact ribbon of stone and soil in the marsh as it was in the hills, as it was in the fertile lowlands. Ahead of him, through the hills it stretched, through the oaks of Bashan, under cliffs surmounted by castles, or hillsides marked by temples. And when the oaks left off, and the hills fell back and the streams dried into dead, sapless beds watered only by infrequent rains, the road continued on. The fifth dawn, he rode down a pass, through a rocky defile, and the Syrian desert was before him. He had bought provisions for two days' journey at the last village in the fertile lands; his horse was freshened after a night's feeding on the herbage in the hills, and Marsyas' heart was resolute. Even the road no longer led him on, but he touched his horse with his hand and passed into the wilderness. At a huddle of huts for goat-tenders, he found that Saul and his party had passed at noon the day previous. The Arabs there besought him to remain until the evening, for none traveled under a Syrian noonday and escaped evil consequences. But Marsyas wrapped his head in his mantle, watered his horse and pressed on. He had no time to lose. The Antilibanus, a glaring ridge of chalk, heightened at intervals into peaks that held up their blistering cold winds from the heat-blasted day, and swept them down by night to confound the stunned earth with ice. The shale from their easternmost slopes sprawled out on the desert and scarred it with rock and gravel until the blowing sands buried it. Far to the east, the lap of the desert dropped down into emptiness, marked by a level of intervening atmosphere. Beyond that were bald hills outlined against the horizon. Between was a cruel waste, tufted here and there by gray-green, scrubby growth, half-buried in sand and rooted in gravel. There was color, but it was the dye of chemicals, not refractions; chalks, not rainbows. The drop of water has only the true range of the spectrum and its merging grades, but sands may be erratic, chaotic. Thus, the wadies, sallow meanderings in the trembling distance, were bordered with dull fawn and dull lavender--ashes of scarlet and purple; wherever hummocks arose there were ground-swells of lifeless gray and saffron--burned-out blue and gold. Over it all were sown burnished fleckings of myriads of mica particles, like white-hot motes from the face of the sun itself. The air was flame; the sky a livid arch that no man dared look upon. At high noon, Marsyas hid from the deadly sun in a crevice in a narrow canyon; but pressed on while yet the scorching air burned his nostrils. At night, he rode through bitter winds, or broke his fast with the inky outlines of jackals squatting about the rim of the immediate landscape. He met no man, and had no desire for companionship with the burden of his stern thoughts to attend him. He did not have the murderer's heart in him; he did not go forward in a whirl of passion and fury; it did not once occur to him to ambush the Tarsian; he did not ponder on a plan of action when the moment should arrive; not once did he strike the fatal blow, in his imagination, nor speak with Saul, nor follow himself after the deed was done. His ideas were largely in retrospect, or centered upon the necessity of his work. His love of Lydia, his love of life, his natural impulses toward generous things were put away from him with firmness, as things which had no place at such a time. His composure was almost resignation. He knew then, that which he had never been able to understand,--how men of great souls and previous noble lives could in all calmness kill another by design. A glittering white ridge had shaped itself out of the pale blue sky of an early morning, while yet he rode in the hills. It was Hermon, with the unmelted snows of the winter covering its crown. Opposite it, he came upon another miserable cluster of hovels, the abode of pestilence, want and superstition, and there found that Saul had passed through the village at high noon that day. Marsyas purchased water for his horse and rode on. Saul was now only a half-day's journey ahead of him. He had come far, without rest. Even now, with the crisis of his long journey at hand, he labored under prostrating weariness and a torturing desire to sleep. He had periods of mental blankness from which he aroused with a start. But as the night's cold deepened, after the day of withering heat, the sharp change added to the weakening influences. He meditated on the Feast of Junia and the succession of Classicus, until his body became a column finishing the front of Agrippa's palace, at which a mob at Baiæ threw stones. He flinched, and the night on the desert of Syria passed across his vision once more. But it was good to lie down on the couch at the triclinum of Caligula, restful, indeed, if it were sinful. But not for long, because Lydia was beside him, and he spent hours imploring her to give up Jove and pour libations to Jehovah instead, for since Saul of Tarsus was Cæsar, she would be chained to a soldier under sentence in the Prætorium. Even now there approached a decurion with manacles thrown over his shoulder! Again, he saw the drooping head of his horse before him in the dark, the pallid stretch of sand, and felt the sweep of harsh winds on his face. But Lollia Paulina had laid her sesterces on this worn-out animal, when she knew that Cneius Domitius' horses were the best in the Circus! Why did the woman insist on sitting with him, when she wanted so much to be with the Roman? But nobody was good. Even Stephen had died in heresy, and Lydia, for whom he had lost his soul, was an apostate! The multitude had her! Classicus turned his back upon her! Flaccus stood within twenty paces of her and leveled a pilum at her breast! And Saul bound his arms! Help! Mercy-- But a brambly desert shrub had caught at his garments, and its sharp dead thorns had pierced him. The next mid-morning he rode up a chalky ridge and saw the picture that had brought praise to the lips of the prophets of despair, when Israel was a captive with no hope. It was a vale so enchanting, so perfect, so golden that he doubted his eyes and feared that it was an unreality the desert had fashioned to lure him on to destruction--or another but kindlier dream. Yellow roadways, slender and winding, wandered hither and thither through emerald oceans of young grain, past ancient vineyards and orchards of olives, and citrons, and groves of walnuts. Yonder was a cluster of palms, pilasters of silver with feathery capitals, and under it was builded a little town--a hive of soft-colored houses, half smothered in delicate green. Beyond, the roads spread out again, from their convergence in the little settlement, and ran abroad once more between hedges of roses and oleanders, across the River Pharbar, curving midway across the vale like a simitar dropped in the green, through crowding gardens, among low-lying roofs, past spreading villas of the rich, on to a glittering vision of towers, walls, cupolas, white as frost on the head of Mount Tabor in the morning. At his feet was Caucabe the Star; in the distance was Damascus. Marsyas drew up his jaded horse and looked, not at the beauty of the scene, for he did not wish to see it now, but down the roads. Over every yellow ribbon his gaze passed until, beyond the limits of the white-towered town, he saw a cluster of small moving figures. "O rememberer of no wrongs," he said to his horse, "only a little way and thou shall rest and I shall rest!" He pressed on, past Caucabe the Star, down the hedges of roses between the emerald oceans of young grain and the odorous shade of orchards. The sun climbed higher, more heated, more merciless; the oleanders gave up their fast fragrance until the night fell again; the vineyards curled, leaf by leaf, the young grain drooped and wilted, the orchards pent in the heat under their boughs, the yellow roads became streaks of brass and the tyrant of the desert stood at its meridian. Another stadium, and Marsyas drew up his horse sharply. Sixty paces ahead was a wayside pool, overshadowed by tall trees--an irresistible invitation to the traveler seeking refuge from the sun. A lean, bowed figure in rabbinical robes stood beside a mule that drank of the spring. Half a dozen men in the garments of Levites stood by their own beasts with rein in hand while they drank. Marsyas felt in his belt for his knife, and curbing his thirsty horse lowered down on Saul of Tarsus. In his association with hardy pagans, athletæ and the exquisite Herod, he had in a measure forgotten the feebleness of Saul. "He is weak!" he said to himself. "But what mercy hath he shown the weak?" He recalled the terrible desert, remembered that Saul had sworn to bring back the Nazarenes to Jerusalem for trial--back across that empire of death! And Lydia, gentle and without hardihood, against whom he could not bear to think of the wind blowing strongly, was to go that way! The Levites watched the Pharisee narrowly; one of them, whom Marsyas recognized as Joel, made tentative movements toward unpacking the supplies from one of the burden-bearing beasts. But the Pharisee drew up the bridle of his mule and led it to the roadside toward a stone by which he could mount. The eyes of the Levites followed him in a troubled manner, and Joel sat down as if to show that he believed the rabbi would not proceed in the noon. "Up!" said Saul calmly, "we shall continue to Damascus." The troubled Levites stared at him, and Joel presently objected: "But--but it is the noon! And the heat is cruel!" "We can proceed, nevertheless," was the reply. The stupefied Levite stumbled to his feet, and the party led their beasts out into the sun. Marsyas with a fierce word dismounted and strode toward them. At his second step he faltered. Silence dropped upon the blazing plain of Damascus--silence so sudden, so absolute that his footfall startled him. He saw that the movement of Saul's party had been arrested. Arm lifted, or foot put forward, stayed in the attitude. The utter stillness seized them as a commanding hand. Then all the noon grew dim, not from the abatement of the sun's light, but by the coming of a radiance infinitely brighter. Descending from above, instantly intensifying as if the source that shed it approached as fast as stars move, a single ray, purer than the glitter on Mount Hermon, and more inscrutable than the face of the Syrian sun, stood among them. Its presence was not violent but all-compelling. The group at the pool fell down in the dust and lay still. Silence such as never before and never again lay on the plain of Damascus, brooded about them. Out of it a single voice issued, low, trembling, filled with fear and reverence. It was Saul of Tarsus, speaking: "Who art Thou, Lord?" Presently he spoke again, eagerly, humbly, and still afraid: "Lord, what wilt Thou have me to do?" [Illustration: "Lord, what wilt Thou have me to do?" (missing from book)] After a long time, the hot breeze made a whispering sound in the sand of the roadway; the leaves in the hedge at hand stirred and fluttered. Joel, the boldest of the Levites, cautiously raised his head, and presently got upon his feet. His fellows, taking heart, rose, one by one. A young stranger in the robes of an Essene was kneeling among them with large dark eyes fixed in pity upon Saul. The rabbi had made an attempt to raise himself, but had paused transfixed. Humility made an actual light on his forehead; his pinched features were stunned with helplessness. The terrified Levites crept closer to one another, but Joel finally wet his dry lips and spoke in a half-whisper: "Rabbi?" There was no answer in words, but slow tears rose, brimmed over the lids and crept down the sun-burned hollow cheeks. The young stranger came quickly and knelt beside the rabbi and laid a kindly hand on his shoulder. "Brother Saul?" he whispered. The face of the rabbi came round, but the gaze missed its mark and wandered over the men about him. There was no vision in the eyes. "He is blind!" a Levite whispered. The young stranger slipped the hand from the shoulder around the bowed figure, and, supporting Saul in his arm, looked down with infinite sorrow and concern at the darkened eyes. "We will abide here," he said at last, to the Levites, "until the noon passeth." The Levites looked in a little fear at the spot where they had been so mysteriously overwhelmed, but Marsyas lifted Saul and bore him back into the shade he had left to continue unto Damascus. All of his own passion and purpose had been swept away, leaving his mind to the tenantry of the sweetest content he had ever known. Though he had seen no man nor heard a voice, he knew that the Lord had visited Saul, and that the eye of the Lord beheld Saul's work. After that reverent translation of the supernatural event, he troubled himself no more concerning the vision. Absolute relief possessed his soul; rest of spirit so all-comprehensive that it strengthened his body, peace so whole that it bordered on gladness, and confidence, new, delicious and simple, embraced all his being. The old restless ambition was so stilled and soothed that it seemed to have been fulfilled; the old Essenic cynicism that had slandered all the world, tinctured his friendships with distrust and his love with fear, was dissipated like a distorting illusion; his hates, his thirst for revenge, his impatience with the deliberation of God, and his self-dependence were things unremembered. He did not understand his change and did not seek after its meaning; his feelings did not even hark back to the old love for Saul. Pity and filial solicitude, sensations that on a time he could not have believed possible as shown to Saul, made the strength of his arm gentle and his service reverential. He thought now of Lydia, with worshipful, marvelous homage, as if his soul knelt to her. He had ceased to be afraid for her or to fear that he would not find her. Everything good became possible; the prospering of virtue, the fidelity of Agrippa, the prevention of Flaccus and the favor of Cæsar, even the restoration of his beloved, seemed to be things absolutely assured. He did not say these things to himself; they were simple convictions that made themselves felt in a tender blending which amounted to perfect waiting on the Lord. He did not know that his face had become beautiful, or that Joel looked askance at him or that the other Levites wondered if he had come to them in the great light. So when the sun stood three hours above the horizon, he raised Saul from the shade of the walnut grove and passed on to Damascus. The golden haze reddened over the glorious Damascene plain, the distance became obscured; the purple triumphed; then the royal color over the world began to run out into plum shades, and the sudden night came up from the east. But before this hour at one of the north gates of Damascus, the halting group of Levites, the stricken man among them, and the silent, kindly young stranger appeared before Aretas' wiry black Arab sentry that held that post. They did not know the ways of the Pearl of the Orient, and they wished to find Via Recta--Straight Street. There Judas, a Pharisee of wealth and power, expected to entertain Saul. Though the Cæsars possessed the city's fealty, exacted tribute, installed Jupiter in the temples and the eagle on its standard, it was still the dominion of Rimmon, vassal of Nimrud, high place of the sons of Uz. It had submitted to Alexander of Macedon as placidly as it suffered the wolfish Roman, who would pass, likewise. It notched its calendar by the rise and fall of nations, and marked its days by the sway of kings. It had propitiated Time, hence there was no death for Damascus; it steeped itself in the oils of the Orient and so was spiced against decay. There were Romanized colonnades along the streets, but the winged bulls of the dromoes, the stucco-work and the tiles, the swaying of carpets from balconies obscured their influence. Architects of Cæsar's extravagances scowled at the giant structures that were old in Baalbec's time and looked their defeat; Chaldean philosophers contemplated the trenches worn in the rock pavements by the feet of men and held their peace; olives, as old as Troy, cast their leaves down on the heads of Greeks who shook them off impatiently, but the sons of Abraham could point to a mound of clay and say: "This was a temple which our father builded unto God, before you all!" The Jewish tincture had never been abated even, much less worked out. Therefore, as the agitated travelers from Jerusalem passed through the gate they went with their own kind by legions. The slow mule was there, outnumbering the Arab's troops of horses, which were mettled, nervous creatures, caparisoned like kings; there were Israel's camels, bearing howdahs, rich as thrones; tall stalking dromedaries in tasseled housings and tinkling harnesses, passing as ships pass over ground-swells, with undulations dizzying in their ease; and these, mounted by the sons of Abraham, were more in number than the Hindu palanquins, Roman lecticæ, Greek litters, and Gentiles afoot. Marsyas glanced about for the eye of a citizen whom he might approach and ask his way, but the turmoil for the moment confused him. Into the gate or out of it passed wealthy travelers, faring in state; itinerant merchants; squads of Aretas' soldiery, and through and among these, eddying and swarming, shouting, hurrying and trading were venders, beggars, carriers, slaves, citizens, Jews in gowns, Arabs in burnooses, Greeks in chitons, Romans in tunics, idlers, actors, scribes, notaries, priests and magistrates--of twenty nationalities, of every rank and age. Marsyas met face to face a Pharisee of erect and imposing figure, with flowing beard and aggressive features, who drew his spotless linen draperies away from contact with the ceremonially unclean horde at the gate. The man had stopped and was gazing from his commanding height over the rush of pilgrims flowing into the walls of Damascus. Marsyas approached him. "I seek Judas, a Pharisee, which dwelleth in Straight Street!" "I am he," the Pharisee interrupted, examining the young man for some familiar feature which might justify the Essene's initiatory. "Thou art well-met, sir; we bring unto thee, thy guest, Saul of Tarsus, stricken by a vision on the roads and blind!" "Even am I here, awaiting him," the Pharisee exclaimed. "Thou bringest me evil tidings! Lead me to him, I pray thee." The Levites stood with Saul outside the path of the exit to the gateway, and Marsyas led Judas to the stricken rabbi. Hebrew servants followed respectfully after their master. "Brother Saul," Marsyas said, "I bring thee thy host; he will care for thee." The sightless eyes of the rabbi turned toward the speaker, and Marsyas thought that a shadow crossed the forehead. "Woe is me!" Judas exclaimed, "that thou shouldst come thus afflicted, brother! But perchance the vision was a blessing on thee!" "He does not speak," Marsyas explained. "I do not belong to his party. I joined them to offer aid." "Then the God of Abraham and of Isaac and of Jacob reward thee," Judas said. He signed to his servants, who brought forward a litter in which Judas had meant his guest should proceed to Straight Street. Saul was lifted into it; Judas climbed in beside him; the servants shouldered the litter, and, with the Levites following, bore it away into the city. Marsyas looked after it until the narrow ways between the high unsightly mud walls hid it. Then he put his hands together and smiled. "The Nazarene bade me ask for Ananias!" he whispered. CHAPTER XXXVII IN THE HOUSE OF ANANIAS But Ananias was a favorite name among the Jews of Damascus. Weariness and the desire for slumber after inquiries which brought him twenty diverse directions, sent Marsyas to a khan when the night was old, and Lydia still unfound. The next morning after refreshing and untroubled sleep, he began to search for Ananias, carefully withholding the explanation that the Ananias he sought was a Nazarene, out of an impulse to protect the protector of his beloved. He found Ananias, the wine-merchant, and Ananias, the tanner, banished to the outskirts of the city, because of his unclean trade; and Ananias, the priest; and Ananias who was a native of Antioch and of mixed blood, but unalterably a Jew; and Ananias, who was a soldier, drafted into garrison service by Aretas, who had taken the city from Antipas; and Ananias, the steward of Sidon who had robbed his master and was now too rich and powerful to be punished; and Ananias, who was a reader in the Synagogue. And for two other days, he sought Ananiases patiently and with pathetic hope. At sunset on the fourth day, he saw a woman meet another woman in the street, and between the two there passed a communication with the fingers. To others, not associated with Nazarenes, the sign meant nothing, but Marsyas caught the motion and his heart leaped. It was the sign of the cross! He overtook the woman who had passed him. "I pray thee, friend," he said in a low voice, "canst thou tell me where Ananias, the Nazarene, dwelleth?" The woman raised, a pair of calm gray eyes to his face. She was a Greek and fair, and her forehead was as placid as a lake in a calm. "Art thou his friend?" she asked, with a touch of the caution acquired by the unhappy. "I am a friend to many who have departed into the Nazarene way," he said. "I shall not betray him." "Seest the house built upon the wall," she said simply, "that hath the white gate, at the end of the street?" Marsyas assented. "Knock," she said. He blessed her with a look and hurried down the darkening passage. With trembling hands, he rapped on the whitewashed gate, set deep in the thick clay wall, and presently the door swung open. A woman in the house-dress of a servant stood there; behind her was a walk lined with white stones; cooing pigeons were disappearing into a cupola on the house within; an ipomoea, pallid with bloom, shaded the step; irises were pushing through the rich mold just inside the gate. There was the rainy rustling of leaves from the olive trees at the property wall on each side. And there was a seat of tamarind with fallen leaves upon it. "Does Ananias, the Nazarene, dwell here?" Marsyas asked with a tremor in his voice. Whither had his courage departed? "Enter," the woman said. Marsyas stepped over the threshold of the white gate, that was latched behind him against opening from the outside, and followed the woman toward the bower of ipomoea. Within a hall, lighted by a single taper, she gave him a seat, and disappeared through a door at the end of the room. A moment later, the tall spare figure of the pastor of Ptolemais and of Rhacotis emerged from the interior. Marsyas sprang up, but no sound came to his lips. He clasped his hands and gazed with pitiful eyes upon the Nazarene. Without pausing for the formality of a greeting, after the first movement of surprise, Ananias reopened the door that he had closed behind him and signed to the young man to pass in. Marsyas stood in a large chamber, with a spot of light in its center under a hanging lamp. There, with her head bright under the rays, sat Lydia. Her face was toward him when he entered. She flung down the skein of wool she was winding and sprang up. But the look on Marsyas' face arrested her cry. One glance of supreme examination and her large eyes kindled with sudden triumph. She came to him as if more than distance between them and danger had been overcome. Marsyas swept her into his arms and folded her to his heart. "No more, no more!" he was saying, "from this time for ever more mine own!" Trembling and smiling, while tears perfect as pearls glittered on her lashes, she put her arms about his neck and drew his head down to her. "O my Marsyas," she cried, "better to die in the light of thy trust than to live in thy love without it! Blessed, thrice blessed the hour which gave me both!" "O my Lydia, thou anointest me with thy forgiveness, and clothest me in the holy garment of thy love! Blessed am I and consecrated!" "I believed in thy wisdom, love!" "I had no wisdom but love!" "The Lord heard me, my Marsyas, for I was near mine extremity, and I could not have endured much longer!" "I had reached my extremity, Lydia, and then the Lord gave me His hand." She turned him toward the light, and gazed up at his eyes with such earnestness, such penetration on her almost infantile face, that he pressed her closer to him and laughed a low laugh. Her eyes flashed on him a light of new interest. "I never heard thee laugh till now!" she exclaimed. "I never was happy till now!" "Why now, and not before?" she asked. There was silence; he could not tell her why he had changed, but he could tell what had marked it. He led her to the chair she had left, and when she had sat, dropped at her feet and crossed his arms upon her lap. "Listen, and when I have done, know that the Lord loved us, and hath joined us with His own hands." Beginning at the time when he turned to find her gone from the reader's stone before the Synagogue in Alexandria, he told with simple directness of his wanderings, of his disappointments, of his growing fear that he would not save her from Saul. He had her follow him to the Temple, where he met Eleazar and received the dire news that Saul had departed for Damascus; and thence along the old Roman road through the length of the Holy Land, up past his native hills and the waters of the Sea of Galilee, and the marshes of Lake Huleh, into the desert, and on to the beginning of the beneficence of the Pharbar and the Abana, until he brought up within sixty paces of Saul at the wayside pool. All these things she heard with the sympathetic interest which had won him to her from the talk in the dawn on the housetop in Alexandria. But when he came to the supernatural visit of the great light, and the prostration of Saul and his own arising a man of subdued and sweetened nature, her eyes shone with a repressed excitement that was not usual in her. "Naught but a miracle could have stopped me then; naught but the same interference could turn me again into the old way!" She lifted his face and spoke to him with deep seriousness. "Didst thou hear what the Spirit said?" she asked. "We heard nothing, except Saul's words, which I told thee." "And did Saul make thee a promise that he would persecute no more, or beg thy compassion or thy forgiveness for his work against thy Stephen?" "He did not speak; he did not know me, for he was blind, and as one in a trance!" "And thou hast withdrawn thy hand from him, and forsworn thine oath against him?" "I have done that thing, Lydia." She held fast to her composure, but her face was transfigured. "Wherein art thou different, then, from the Nazarenes of Ptolemais who showed thee their doctrine of peace, and refused thee when thou wouldst have hurled them against Saul?" she asked. For a moment there was silence. Then he arose on his knees and raising his hands clasped them on his breast, while the splendor of a divine enlightenment shone in his eyes. "I know who came unto us there," he whispered. "It was the Christ!" She laid her fluttering palms over his clasped hands and held them there, while each in his heart kept the silence, which, in such a moment, is prayer. Then Marsyas withdrew a hand and took from the folds of his garment the little red cedar crucifix, and, kissing it, put it into her hands. The red cord was still attached to it, and, with solemnity on her face, she laid it about his neck and blessed him. When the ecstasy of exaltation had passed away, for they were young and the spirit of human love was strong between them, Lydia bade him listen, while she told him one other surprising thing. "At the command of a heavenly vision, Ananias went this day unto the house of Judas the Pharisee, and into the darkened chamber, where Saul lay, blind and dumb. And by the gift of the Lord Jesus, Ananias laid his hands on Saul's head, and the blind man straightway had his sight. So he arose and followed Ananias unto this house--" "Here?" Marsyas cried. "Unto this house, where, when he had broken fast and taken strength, he stood up and glorified Jesus of Nazareth, and received baptism unto the Church of the Nazarenes whom he persecuted hitherto unto death!" Marsyas was silent. More than wonder filled his heart. Presently he said, as if speaking to himself: "Is this thine hour, O my martyred Stephen? Art thou content? Sleepest thou the better, knowing that I have followed thy testament for Saul, rather than mine own oath against him?" Lydia left his communings unanswered, but when he put his hands over his face and laid his head in her lap, her own tears fell with his. Feeling presently her touch on his hair, he raised his head to take the hand. "Give it to me, my love," he said, "for it hath shaped my life anew, pointed me to the way that even the sacred dead would have me walk, and the joy and the comfort of all time to come lieth in the hollow of it! Let me serve it, now!" "And thou wilt not regret the peace of En-Gadi, in the world that can not fail to be troublous, some time?" she asked, but with the smile of one who does not fear the answer. "I owe En-Gadi a debt," he said, "for the brethren were as father and mother to me when I had neither. Its teaching and its practices are pure, and its peace is good for them who fear the world. But with the help of Him who made thee strong and Stephen fearless, I shall not want pent-in walls to be happy and upright." "Let Ananias teach thee, my love; let Saul show thee his heart; and then--" "Send us back unto Alexandria, with the faith of Christ on our lips and the peace of His love in our hearts. Tell me that I may go with thee, Lydia!" "I have been waiting for thee since the day we met in the Judean hills." CHAPTER XXXVIII THE REQUITAL On the third day after his arrival in Jerusalem, Herod the king was in his privy cabinet arranging, with his own hands, the graven gems and articles of virtu, prizes brought from his trip to Antioch. The door was dubiously opened, and Agrippa, without turning his head, knew who stood there, for only one in the palace had been commanded to enter the king's presence without announcement. "Well, Silas?" Agrippa said, contemplating the elusive tints of a jade goblet. The old man pulled at the gorgeous uniform of master of horse, that hung from the peasant shoulders and answered: "A friend of thy unfortunate days is without." Agrippa's brows lifted and drew toward each other in a manner half-amused, half-vexed. "The friends of my unfortunate days are the friends of my fortunate days; wherefore, they would liefer be known as friends of Agrippa the king, than of Agrippa the bankrupt. Give them their due and call them the king's companions. And Silas?" "Yes, lord." "The king would as lief forget that he ever had a misfortune." Silas looked perplexed and rubbed his forehead. "But who is it that stands without?" Agrippa continued. "The Essene." "What! Marsyas? By the Nymphae--beshrew me! By the beard of Balaam, I shall be glad to see him! Fetch him hither!" Silas nodded in lieu of a bow. "Lord, there is one with him; shall she enter also?" "Who?" "The alabarch's daughter." "Nay! The little Athene! Terpsichore's best! Not so; though, by Bacch--Balaam! she would be a fit jewel for this place. It shall be an audience hour. Go, summon the queen, and have the Essene and his priestess come to us in our hall!" The master of horse backed away, but, catching Agrippa's smiling eye, turned his back, remembering his privilege, and hurried out, as if he expected an arrow between his shoulders. The king shut down the lid of the shittim-wood chest upon the priceless trifles still unpacked, locked it, and said the while to himself: "The Essene hath heard of the Pharisee Saul's apostasy and hath come to demand his punishment of me. Behold me grant it, with kingly gravity. It will attach the extremists to me all the more, for I hear the Sicarii are wanting the heretic's blood! And he fetches the little Lysimachus with him! Aha! En-Gadi hath lost--that which it never had, in truth." He looked at his hands and at his garments. "Nay, it will be just as well if the lady sees me looking my best!" He slammed the door of his cabinet behind him, locked it and hurried away in the direction of the royal wardrobe. In an hour he ascended the dais in robes of purple velvet with the Pharisee fringes in gold. Cypros, filled with pleasurable anticipations, was beside him in the garments that Mariamne had worn. The king cast an eye over the carpeting, the canopy and the gorgeous dressing of his throne and said to Cypros: "Perpol! the place reeks with the smell of newness! But be not conscious of it! Perchance none will guess that the hands of the upholsterers are still warm on the fabric." The genuflexions of the series of attendants at the archway and beyond marked the coming of Marsyas and Lydia. A Jewish chamberlain within the hall bent to the pavement and announced to the king that his visitors approached. Agrippa relaxed even more comfortably in his throne and let his scepter fall into his lap. But Cypros, more conscious of her debt to those who visited her now than of her state, smiled and moved forward and looked down the long chamber for the first glimpse of them. But it was not the Marsyas and the Lydia she had expected to see. Even to one of her unready perceptions, the change upon the two was strangely marked. They came side by side, both in the simple white garments of the ceremonially clean, but Marsyas' head was uncovered and Lydia's locks were wholly unbound, after the custom of Jewish brides. Within a few paces of the throne-dais they stopped. With all her former grace, Lydia sank to her knees, but Marsyas, after the oriental salaam, stood beside her. Cypros, with her eyes shining, and after an eager glance at her lord, arose and stepped to the edge of the dais. Then Agrippa got up, with his purple trailing effectively, and came down from his high seat, and approached his guests. "It is the one pain of mine exaltation," he said as he extended his arms to Marsyas, "that mine old loves believe that they must approach me now with humility." "Yet they no less expect that thou wilt raise them," Marsyas said, returning the king's embrace. Agrippa lifted Lydia to her feet and kissed her. "There, by my kingdom!" he exclaimed. "I rejoice at thy wedding for the privilege it gives me! May joy be thy portion, and peace and abundance and years be multiplied unto you both! Evoe! as the heathen say! But for your sanctified atmosphere, I would have the trumpeters blow you a fan-fare!" He handed Lydia to Cypros, who waited almost tearfully. "Go, let the queen congratulate thee that thou hast wedded an upright man in the beginning and saved thyself of the pain of making him one--as she had to do! Come up," he continued to Marsyas, "and sit at our feet. And tell us of yourselves." With his arm over Marsyas' shoulder, he went back to his dais, and sitting, had Marsyas take the guest's chair at his side, while Cypros bestowed Lydia on a velvet cushion at her feet. "So much, so long my story, that I falter at its beginning, as one beginning a day's journey at sunset," said Marsyas. "Thou needest but to essay a beginning; let me lead thee," Agrippa observed. "Let me satisfy the questions in thee, ere I be entertained. First, of Flaccus. I sent messengers to Cæsar from Antioch detailing the high offenses of the proconsul, hinting treason against the government of the emperor and other charges which excite Caligula most, and ere I departed I had from Cæsar's own hand the tidings that a centurion had been despatched to Alexandria to arrest Flaccus and bring him to Rome for trial. And the further news, which will raise thee, sweet Lydia, to calm content. The Jews are to be restored their rights, the prisoners freed, and better times assured to thy people." Lydia clasped her hands, and her eyes filled with relief. "And my father?" she asked in a low voice. "Especially commended to Cæsar's favor! The black days for the Alexandrian Jews are over, unless Caligula force upon them his pet madness that he is a god and amenable to worship." "Mad, at last!" Marsyas exclaimed. "Never otherwise," Agrippa answered. "I hear that he has proclaimed Junia to be Athor, and hath set up a white cow in a temple to be propitiated in the wanton's name!" Marsyas looked at the downcast lashes of Lydia and loved her for the silence she kept. "Will she--be--empress?" Cypros faltered, in womanly fear of some unknown evil. Agrippa laughed and dropped his hand meaningly on Marsyas' arm. "If she should be, here is Marsyas yet to protect me!" he said. But Marsyas did not smile. "What!" Agrippa cried; "still an Essene?" "No," said Marsyas, "but the Lord forfend that the woman should ever become Augusta!" "Never fear! She is too poor. Caligula, like any other mortal god, would prefer a dowry with his consort! And that, by Janus--ah--er--Jacob! brings me up to somewhat relative to our old fortune-seeking friend, Classicus." "But," Marsyas protested with a show of his old-time spirit, "I shall not agree that Classicus sought Lydia for her riches alone!" "The unhappiest remark, the crudest accusation thou didst ever force me to defend!" Agrippa exclaimed, glowering at Marsyas. "Now, how shall I convince thy sweet bride that I had not meant that any man could love her less than her dowry!" But Lydia smiled, first at Marsyas and then at the king, and said: "Let us hear of Classicus." The king clapped his hands, and an attendant bowed to the floor in the archway. "Bring hither the letter from Alexandria, which my scribe answereth," Agrippa said. In a moment a package was put into the king's hands. He unfolded it carefully. "It is fragile," he said, "reed paper--papyrus, of his own curing, and written with a quill. Evil days for Classicus; but observe, he hath not forgotten the latest fashion in folding it. Listen: "To the Most High and Gracious Prince, Herod Agrippa, King of Judea, from his servant and subject, Justin Classicus, the Alexandrian, greeting: "That thou hast come unto thine own, that thou hast triumphed and the day of fulfillment hath dawned, that the Jews of the hallowed soil of Canaan have again a king from among them, I give thee congratulations and God-speed, and offer thanks to the God of our fathers. "Would to that same God who hath magnified thee, that the sway of thy scepter extended unto us, here, in Alexandria. "Our misfortunes are beyond words. Particularly am I most unfortunate. Because of my friendliness to the alabarch, and subsequent turning upon Flaccus in thine own extremity, I am reduced to the utmost poverty, having neither food nor raiment beyond that which a faithful freedman supplies me out of his own little store. "Since mine own people are imprisoned within a fourth of their territory, nor one permitted to come forth upon pain of dreadful death, I can not hope for help from them, much less from the Gentiles, who take particular delight in my humiliation. "In thee I have hope. I pray thee number me among thy helpless ones and give me of thy bounty something to do to clothe and feed me, and sufficiently gentle that I may not be proscribed among my kind--" Agrippa broke off and laughed aloud. "Why read more? Is it not enough?" "Enough," Marsyas said slowly. "But by thy leave, lord, we would know what thou wilt say to him." "A just demand; for thou and not I didst suffer at his hands. I shall tell him that I laid the matter before thee and that thou---" "Nay, then, lord," Marsyas broke in earnestly, "if thou carest in all earnestness for my suggestion, pray let me make it!" "But I believe that I anticipated it and commanded the answer so to be written." There was a little regretful silence, and Agrippa leaned toward Marsyas. "What abideth there, Marsyas?" he asked, touching the young man's forehead. After a pause, Marsyas raised his head. "The full length of mine own story leadeth up to the answer," he said. "Nay, then, speak!" Asking permission of Cypros with her eyes, Lydia arose from her place on her cushion, and came to Marsyas' side. He put his arm about her and held her hand, and so she stood while he told his story. Agrippa and Cypros listened with ordinary interest until he began to tell of his ride across the desert in pursuit of Saul. Then Agrippa's excitement-loving instincts stirred, and he sat up and contemplated Marsyas with arrested attention. At the sighting of the Pharisee far down the road beyond Caucabe, the king's eyes sparkled; when Marsyas rode upon the party at the pool, Agrippa's hand on the arm of his throne had clenched. At Marsyas' dismounting and approach, the king muttered under his breath. "But at that instant," the narrator went on, showing the effects of his own story, "a light, such as never before descended upon the earth and will not come again until the Prince of Light cometh, stood among us; at which we all fell to the ground as though stricken by a thunderbolt!" Agrippa's brows knitted. "While we lay, thus unable to move or cry out, Saul spoke and said unto the Presence: 'Who art Thou, Lord!' but we heard no answer. And again Saul spoke, as if he had been answered, saying: 'Lord, what is it that Thou wouldst have me to do?' And yet there was silence. But when we took courage and arose, Saul lay on the ground, helpless, blind and bereft of speech!" Agrippa's face showed impatience and astonishment. This, from the lips of so sane a Jew as Marsyas! "We took him up," Marsyas continued, after a moment's reflection, "and led him unto Damascus, and to Judas, the Pharisee, who dwelleth in Straight Street. And there Saul lay for three days. Throughout that time, I sought for Lydia, and at the end of the third day, I found her." He touched his lips to Lydia's hand. "Under the same roof with her I found Saul of Tarsus, broken and supplicating, changed, heart and soul, as was I. But he was not in ignorance of the fount of our transfiguration as I was. From Lydia's lips, I learned that he had been visited by the Lord; but from Saul, I learned its meaning. If there is change upon my face, lord, I have told thee whence came it!" Agrippa's eyes were no longer on Marsyas; he had turned his head and was looking at Cypros, as if curious to see if so impossible a tale would find credence in the mind of the simple queen. She looked disturbed and awe-struck, and Agrippa's nostrils fluttered with a soundless laugh. "_Quantum mutatus ab illo!_" he said, turning to Marsyas. "That I can swear under a dread oath. And perchance, were I an Essene and more than an adopted Pharisee, I could have been visited and borne witness to miracles, also. But thou'lt remember, Marsyas, that this Saul consented unto the death of thy Stephen?" "I remember, lord; neither hath he forgotten!" answered Marsyas. "And that through him, great numbers of innocent people fled Judea, among them one Marsyas, that this same Saul might not have their lives; that he pursued thee even unto thy refuge, put thy sweet bride in jeopardy, stained the whole world with persecution, and made an end by bringing up in heresy, after he had begun a journey to Damascus with the avowed purpose of extending his persecutions--even unto the death of thy Lydia! Thou hast not forgotten these things?" "They are not to be forgotten!" "And on a certain night, while yet Stephen was unburied, thou camest upon this Saul of Tarsus in Bezetha, and swore to accomplish vengeance upon him; and that same night in the cubiculum in the Prætorium thou didst make me swear to help thee to that revenge, if he should stumble in the Law!" Marsyas took his arm from about Lydia and arose. "I am here, O King," he said, "to crave the fulfilment of that oath." Agrippa smiled, in spite of the serene gravity on Marsyas' face. "Ask thy boon, Marsyas," he answered. Marsyas knelt at the king's footstool, and put up his hands as supplicants do before a throne. "Thou hast remembered thine oath unto me, my King; thou hast published thyself as ready to fulfil thy promise, and hast yielded unto me the choice of the manner of my requital! Thus assured and believing I make my prayer. Lift not thy hand against Saul of Tarsus!" Agrippa's brows dropped suddenly; his face was no less displeased than startled. He had meant to have a jest at Marsyas' expense, to try the young man's claim to a change in heart, to bring to the surface human nature through its envelope of religion; but he had not looked for this thing! To behold so strange a perversion of the ancient spirit in a man like Marsyas, and to submit to its demands against his own inclinations weighed heavily on Agrippa's patience. Saul's lapse into apostasy gave him an opportunity to attach to him the loyalty of that fierce party in Judea, which were better propitiated than fought--the Sicarii, anarchists, who would demand the putting away of the heretic. Marsyas had asked him to sacrifice a potent piece of state-craft. He glanced at Cypros, and saw resentfully that she was urging him with her eyes to submit. Marsyas' face began to show an expression that compelled him, while it irritated the more. The young man wore the face of one who does not expect defeat, denies it so confidently that it hesitates to exist. Agrippa shifted in his throne, frowned more, wavered, and finally said shortly: "As Cæsar forgot me to mine own safety, I will forget Saul!" Marsyas' hands dropped softly on the king's, a token of brotherhood. "Death intervened," he whispered, "to save thee from Cæsar!" Agrippa started and drew his hands away with a prescient terror in the movement. "I will not pursue the man," he said; "I will not search for him!" "Thou hast kept thy word, lord," Marsyas said, "and I go hence carrying trust in one more fellow man in my heart. May my God supply all thy need according to His riches in glory, by Jesus Christ!" Agrippa's eyes which had all this time rested in fascination on Marsyas' face, flashed now with understanding. Marsyas was a Nazarene! The admission reassured him; set aside the astonishment at the young man's unusual behavior; and lessened the fear he had felt in the suggestion that drew a parallel between Cæsar's end and his own, to come. But Lydia was now kneeling before him, with glistening eyes, to kiss his hand, and Cypros was speaking. "But thou gatherest peril yet about thee, Marsyas," she insisted. "Is the hazardous life, then, so inviting that thou hadst liefer be wrong than be safe?" "No, lady; peace is no sweeter to my brethren, the Essenes, than it is to me. So I have put out my hand and possessed it. Think of us, henceforth, as the children of peace, not peril." Agrippa shook his head. "It hath consumed two years to establish it," he said conclusively, "and not until the last moment is it revealed that thou art a dreamer, Marsyas. Thou hast been an Essene, which is too strait an ambition to be practicable; thou didst cherish a love for a man, so deep that its bereavement engendered a hate that no man should feel, unless a woman were won from him or a fortune destroyed; thou wast urged by it into extreme acts--into selling thyself, into following me to the end of the world, into putting thyself between me and death--that I might help thee satisfy that hate! And now, the hour fallen, a new fancy hath engulfed thee, heart, head and soul--which bids thee forget thy rancor, defend thine enemy, and live in perpetual peril of destruction! Thou art a dreamer--though thy front be Jovian and thy steps like Mars!" Marsyas laid his hand on Lydia's head, as she still knelt beside him. "In substance, I so accused her once, and Stephen. Perhaps, if thou followest me insomuch, my King, thou wilt walk even as I have walked--into the light at last!" Agrippa made a motion of dissent. "I doubt, now, that thou couldst safely govern that pretty little city I had meant to make thee prefect over, here in Judea," he declared. "Thou hast said! For me there is a new earth, and a new Law, and I go hence to Alexandria to begin a new life, which will make me a lover of all mankind." "Nay, sweet Lydia!" Herod exclaimed, once more restored to himself. "Thou shouldst demand that he be less indiscriminate with his loves! But put off thy travel a space, and let us celebrate thy marriage with festivity!" "Thou art most kind to us, King Agrippa," Lydia answered. "But my father is alone and uncomforted in Alexandria; even thou canst not tell me of a surety that evil hath not befallen him ere thy punishment of Flaccus could intervene. My heart is consumed with impatience and suspense. We can not tarry, though thy hospitality be most grateful--to us--who have found the world of late an untender place!" So, since they would not be stayed, Agrippa summoned two stalwart palace servants to go with them, and calling his treasurer, ordered him to give into the hands of the servants six talents, five of which he owed to Lysimachus for Cypros, and one as a marriage largess. And when Marsyas and Lydia had kissed the hands of the royal pair, they went out and found, at the palace wall, a camel which should bear them in a white howdah to Ptolemais. Marsyas lifted Lydia and set her under the canopy, but, before he went up himself, he saw borne past him, in a chair, a rabbi. He was a great man, grave, calm and preoccupied. Three students of the College attended him reverently. Marsyas caught his eye, and between the two passed a flash that was both understanding and congratulatory. But they saluted each other gravely, and Eleazer passed on to his own place. Before they departed Herod sent out a chamberlain, who bowed low and handed a wax tablet to Marsyas, on which was written: "Since Classicus would be in Alexandria to harass thee, and thy wits are meshed in love and religion, I have bidden my scribe write him to come hither, where I can kill him conveniently, if he need it. If thou have any enemies here in Jerusalem thou hast forgotten to bless, thou canst perhaps repair the misfortune by naming thy sons after them. "My love goes with thee--mine and the queen's, "HEROD." So, with their faces alight with content and love and hopefulness, Marsyas and Lydia took up the long journey unto Alexandria. 
20450	----	{000} {Transcriber's notes: 1) Page numbers in the main text have been retained in {braces}. Page breaks within long footnotes are not marked. 2) The original of this work is printed very badly. In most cases, the original text is obvious and has been restored without any special notations in the transcription. In those cases where it was not possible to determine the original text with much certainty (usually numbers and rare proper nouns which cannot be deduced from context) a pair of braces {} indicates where the illegible text was. Sometimes the braces contains text {like this}, indicating a possible but not certain reconstruction. 3) The original had both numbered footnotes, used for references, and footnotes with symbols, used for extended comments. This transcription does not preserve that distinction; all the notes have been numbered or renumbered as needed. 4) In a few cases, footnotes appear on the bottom of the page that do not appear in the text (presumably because of the poor printing noted above). In this case, the footnote is marked in the text at a likely location, and the footnote begins {Footnote not in text} to indicate that this was done.} {006} ARCHBISHOP'S HOUSE, 452 MADISON AVENUE. Imprimatur {Michael Augustinus Archeispo Neo} June 28th, 1895. ADVERTISEMENT. NOTWITHSTANDING that several editions of Butler's Lives of the Saints have been issued from the American press, and circulated extensively throughout the United States, yet the publishers of the present one are led to believe that there are vast numbers of persons still unsupplied, and desirous of possessing a work so replete with instruction and edification for Christian families. This edition is reprinted from the best London edition, without the omission of a single line or citation from the original. To render the work as complete as possible, we have added the Lives of St. Alphonsus Liguori, and other Saints canonized since the death of the venerable author, and not included in any former edition. This edition also contains the complete notes of the author, which have been shamefully omitted in an edition published by a Protestant firm of this city. The present edition is illustrated with fine steel engravings of many of the Saints, and when bound will form four very handsome volumes, uniform with the Life of Christ, and the Life of the Blessed Virgin. THE PUBLISHER NEW YORK, _Sept._, 1895. {007} PREFACE "THE LIVES OF THE SAINTS" is republished. This work--this inestimable work, is at length given to the public. Hitherto the circulation of it was confined to those who could afford to purchase it in TWELVE volumes, and at a proportionate price. It is now stereotyped, printed in good character, on fine paper, and published at a price not only below its value, but below the hopes of the publisher. It is therefore now, and for the first time, that "THE LIVES OF THE SAINTS" are, properly speaking, given to the public. And what is the nature and character of this work, which is thus placed within the reach of almost every family in Ireland? We presume to say, that "The Lives of the Saints" is an historical supplement to the Old and New Testaments; an illustration of all that God has revealed, and of all the sanctity which his divine grace has produced among the children of men. It is a history, not so much of men, as of all ages and nations; of their manners, customs, laws, usages, and creeds. It is a succinct, but most accurate and satisfactory account of all that the Church of God has done or suffered in this world from the creation to almost our own days: an account not extracted from authentic records only, but one which exhibits at every page the living examples, the speaking proofs, of whatever it sets forth or asserts. As drawings taken by an artist, and afterwards carved on plates of steel or copper, present to us views of a country, or of the productions of the earth and sea, so "The Lives of the Saints" exhibit to the reader images the most perfect of whatever the human race, in times past, has yielded to God in return for his countless mercies. But "The Lives of the Saints" are not confined to history, though they embrace whatever is most valuable in history, whether sacred, ecclesiastical, or profane. No! This work extends farther; it presents to the reader a mass of general information, digested and arranged with an ability and a candor never surpassed. Here, no art, no science, is left unnoticed. Chronology, criticism, eloquence, painting, sculpture, architecture--in a word, whatever has occupied or distinguished man in {008} times of barbarism or of civilization; in peace or in war; in the countries which surround us, or in those which are far remote; in these later ages, or in times over which centuries upon centuries have revolved; all, all of these are treated of, not flippantly nor ostentatiously, but with a sobriety and solidity peculiar to the writer of this work. But there is one quality which may be said to characterize "The Lives of the Saints." It is this: that here the doctrines of the Catholic Church are presented to us passing through the ordeal of time unchanged and unchangeable, while her discipline is seen to vary from age to age; like as a city fixed and immoveable, but whose walls, ramparts, and outworks, undergo, from one period to another, the necessary changes, alterations, or repairs. Here are pointed out the persecutions which the Saints endured,--persecutions which patience overcame, which the power of God subdued. Here are traced the causes of dissension in the Church; the schisms and heresies which arose; the errors which the pride and passions of bad men gave birth to; the obstinacy of the wicked,--the seduction of the innocent,--the labors and sufferings of the just; the conflicts which took place between light and darkness,--between truth and error; the triumph, at one time of the city of God, at another, the temporary exaltation of the empire of Satan. In this work, we see the great and powerful leaders of God's people, the pastors and doctors of the Church, displaying lights gives them from heaven, and exercising a courage all-divine; while crowds of the elect are presented to us in every age retiring from the world, hiding their lives with Christ in God, and deserving, by their innocence and sanctity, to be received into heaven until Christ, who was their life, will again appear, when they also will appear along with him in glory. Here we behold the Apostles, and their successors in the several ages, calling out to the nations who sat in darkness and in the shadow of death, "Arise, thou who sleep eat, and Christ will enlighten thee!"--men of God, and gifted with his power, who, by preaching peace, enduring wrongs, and pardoning injuries, subdued the power of tyrants, stopped the mouths of lions, upturned paganism, demolished idols, planted everywhere the standard of the cross, and left to us the whole world illuminated by the rays of divine truth. Here is seen the meek martyr who possessed his soul in patience,--who, having suffered the two of goods, the loss of kindred, the lose of fame, bowed down his head beneath the axe, and sealed, by the plentiful effusion of his blood, the testimony which he bore to virtue and to truth. Here the youthful virgin, robed in innocence and sanctity, clothed with the visible protection of God, is seen at one time to yield up her frame, unfit, as yet, for torments, to the power of the executioner; while her spirit, ascending {009} like the smoke of incense, passed from earth to heaven. At another time we behold her conducted, as it were, into the wilderness by the Spirit; where, having left the house of her father, the allurements of the world, and the endearments of life, she dedicates her whole being to the service of God, and to the contemplation of those invisible goods which he has reserved for those who love him. In "The Lives of the Saints" we behold the prince and the peasant, the warrior and the sage, the rich and the poor, the old and the young, the peasant and the mechanic, the shepherd and the statesman, the wife and the widow, the prelate, the priest, and the recluse,--men and women of every class, and age, and degree, and condition, and country, sanctified by the grace of God, exhibiting to the faithful reader models for his imitation, and saying to him, in a voice which he cannot fail to understand, "Go thou and do likewise." It is on this account we have ventured to designate "The Lives of the Saints" an historical supplement to the Old and New Testaments. We think this work deserves to be so considered, on account of the close resemblance it bears to the historical portions of holy writ. Let the divine economy, in this respect, be for a moment the subject of the reader's consideration. When God was pleased to instruct men unto righteousness, he did so, as the whole series of revelation proves, by raising up from among the fallen children of Adam men and women of superior virtue,--men and women whose lives, like shining lights, could direct in the ways of peace and justice the footsteps of those who looked towards them. He did more: he caused the lives of those his servants whom he sanctified and almost glorified in this world, to be recorded by their followers; and his own Spirit did not disdain to inspire the men who executed a work so salutary to mankind. From Adam to Noe, from Noe to Abraham, from Abraham to the days of Christ, what period is not marked by the life of some eminent saint; and what portion of the Old Testament has always been and still is most interesting to true believers? Is it not that which instructs us as to the life and manners of those patriarchs, prophets, and other holy persons of whom we ourselves are, according to the promise, the seed and the descendants? The innocence of Abel, the cruel deed of Cain, the piety of Seth, the fidelity and industry of Noe, furnish to us the finest moral instruction derived from the primeval times. The life of Abraham is perhaps the most precious record in the Old Testament! Who even now can read it, and not repose with more devotion on the providence of God? Who can contrast his life and conduct with that of all the sages of paganism, and not confess there is a God; yea! a God who not only upholds this {010} world, and fills every creature in it with his benediction, but who also conducts by a special providence all those who put their trust in him,--a God who teaches his elect, by the unction of his Spirit, truths inaccessible to the wise of this world; and who makes them, by his grace, to practise a degree of virtue to which human nature unassisted is totally unable to attain? The God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob, is exceedingly glorified by the virtues of those great men; and that glory is exalted, and we are led to adore it, because the lives of those men have been written for our instruction. Is not Moses the keystone, as it were, of the Jewish covenant? Are they not his trials, his meekness, his attachment to God and to God's people, his incessant toils, and patience, and long-suffering, even more than the miracles wrought by his interposition, which render the law published by him, and the ministry established by him, worthy of all acceptation in our eyes? Who can contemplate the rejection of Saul, and the election of David,--the wisdom of Solomon in early life, and his utter abandonment in his latter days,--and not be stricken with a salutary dread of the inscrutable judgments of a just God? Who can read the life of Judith, and not wonder?--of Susanna, and not love chastity and confide in God? Who has read the prophecies of Isaiah, and not believed the gospel which he foretold? And what example of a suffering Saviour so full, so perfect, and expressive, as that exhibited in the life of Jeremiah? If thus, then, from the beginning to the day of Christ, the Spirit of God instructed mankind in truth and virtue, by writing for their instruction "the Lives of the Saints," what can better agree with the ways of that God, than to continue the record--to prolong the narrative? If this mode of instruction has been adopted by the master, should it not be continued by the servant?--if employed when the people of God were only one family, should it not be resorted to when all nations were enrolled with that people? if this mode of instruction was found useful when the knowledge of the Lord was confined to one province, should it not be preserved when that knowledge covered the whole earth even as the waters cover the sea? And is it not therefore with justice we have said that "The Lives of the Saints" might not improperly be designated "an historical supplement to the Old and New Testaments?" And in good truth, who can peruse the life of Peter, and not be animated with a more lively faith? Who can read of the conversion of Paul, of his zeal and labor, and unbounded love,--who can enter with him into the depths of those mysterious truths which he has revealed, and contemplate along with him the riches of the glory of the grace of God, and not esteem this world as dung; or experience some throes of those heavenly desires, which urged him so pathetically to exclaim, "I {011} wish to be dissolved, and to be with Christ?" Who can read the life of the evangelist John, and not feel the impulse of that subdued spirit, of that meek and humble charity, which so eminently distinguished him as the "beloved disciple of the Lord?" And if we advance through the several ages that have elapsed since our Saviour ascended into heaven, we shall find each and all of them instructing us by examples of the most heroic virtue. The age of the martyrs ended, only to make room for that of the doctors and ascetics; so that each succeeding generation of the children of God presents to us the active and contemplative life equally fruitful in works of sanctification. An Athanasius, a Jerom, a Chrysostom, or an Augustin, are scarcely more precious as models in the house of God, than an Anthony, a Benedict, an Arseneus, or a Paul. Nor has the Almighty limited his gifts, or confined the mode of instruction to those primitive times when the blood of the Mediator was as yet warm upon the earth, and the believers in him filled more abundantly with the first-fruits of the Spirit. No; he has extended his grace to every age! Only take up the history of those holy persons, men and women, whose lives shed a lustre upon the Church within these last few centuries, and you will acknowledge that the arm of the Lord is not shortened, and, to use the words of the Psalmist, that "_Sanctity becometh the house of the Lord unto length of days,_" or to the end of time. As therefore it hath pleased God to raise up for our help and edification so many and so perfect models of Christian perfection, and disposed by his all wise providence that their lives should have been written for our instruction, we should not be faithful co-operators with the grace given to us, if we did not use our best efforts to learn and to imitate what our Father in heaven has designed for our use. But "The Lives of the Saints" are a history, not so much of men, as of all ages and nations,--of their manners, customs, laws, usages, and creeds. And in this licentious age, an age of corrupted literature, when that worldly wisdom or vain philosophy which God has declared to be folly, is again revived; in this age, when history has failed to represent the truth, and is only written for base lucre's sake, or to serve a sect or party, what can be so desirable to a Christian community, as to have placed in their hands a sincere and dispassionate account of the nations which surround us, and of the laws and manners and usages, whether civil or religious, which have passed, or are passing into the abyss of time? If the wisdom of God warns us "to train up youth in the way in which they should walk," and promises that "even when old they will not depart from it," there is no duty more sacred, or more imperative or parents and pastors, than to remove from their reach such {012} books as are irreligious, immoral, or untrue, and to place in their hands such works only as may serve to train their minds and affections to the knowledge of truth and to the love of virtue. History is, of its nature, pleasing and instructive; it leaves after it the most lasting impressions; and when youth, as at present, is almost universally taught to read, and works of fiction or lying histories placed constantly in their way, is it not obvious that every parent and every pastor should be careful not only to exclude from their flocks and families such impious productions, but also to provide the youth committed to their care with works of an opposite description? But we make bold to say, that in no work now extant can there be found condensed so vast a quantity of historical information as is contained in "THE LIVES OF THE SAINTS:" nor is it the store of knowledge here amassed which renders the work, as a history, of so much value; but it is the judicious arrangement, the undoubted candor, the dispassionate judgment of men, manners, and things, which the venerable historian everywhere displays. He has been able to trace events to their true causes; to point out the influence of religion upon human policy, and of that policy on the Church of God; to exhibit the rise and fall of states and empires,--the advancement or declension of knowledge,--the state of barbarism or civilization which prevailed in the several countries of the world,--the laws, the manners, the institutions, which arose, were changed, improved, or deteriorated, in the kingdoms and empires which brought forth the elect of God in every age: but in his narration there is always found to prevail a spirit, wanted in almost every history written in our times--a spirit which assigns to the power and providence of God the first place in the conduct of human events, and which makes manifest to the unbiased reader the great and fundamental truth of the Christian Religion, that "all things work together to the good of those who, according to the purpose or design of God, are called to be Saints." The great characteristic, however, of this work, and that which, perhaps, in these times and in this country, constitutes its chief excellence, is, that it exhibits to the reader the doctrine and discipline of the Catholic Church,--the former always the same, "yesterday, to-day, and forever"--the latter receiving impressions from abroad, and moulding itself to the places, times, and circumstances, in which the Church herself was placed. In other works may be found arguments and proofs in support of the dogmas of faith and the doctrines of the Catholic Church, set forth in due order and becoming force; but such works are of a controversial nature, and not always suited to the taste or capacity of every class of readers: not so "The Lives of the Saints." This work presents to us the religion of Christ as it was first planted, as it grew {013} up, and flourished, and covered with its shade all tribes, and tongues, and peoples, and nations. The trunk of this mighty tree is placed before our eyes, standing in the midst of time, with ages and empires revolving about it, its roots binding and embracing the earth, its top touching the heavens, its branches strong and healthful--bearing foliage and fruits in abundance. But to drop this allegory. "The Lives of the Saints" demonstrate the doctrines of the Church, by laying before us the history of the most precious portion of her children: of her martyrs, her doctors, her bishops; of holy and devout persons of all ranks and conditions; of what they believed, and taught, and practised, in each and every age: so that if no Gospel had been written, or liturgy preserved, or decree recorded, we should find in "The Lives of the Saints" sufficient proofs of what has always, and in every place, and by all true believers, been held and practised to the Church of God. In this work there is no cavilling about texts, no disputes about jurisdiction, no sophisms to delude, no imputations to irritate, no contradictions to confound the reader; but in place of all these there is found in it a simple detail of the truths professed, and of the virtues practised by men and women, who were not only the hearers of the law but the doers thereof. Whosoever seeks for wisdom as men seek for gold, will find it in the perusal of "The Lives of the Saints:" for here not theory or speculation, but living examples, make truth manifest, and exhibit at once and together all the marks of the Church of God in the life and conduct of her children. These children will all be found to have denied themselves, to have taken up the cross, to have followed Christ, and to have convinced the world by their sanctity that they were the children of God--that they were perfect even as their heavenly Father was perfect. These children of the Church will be found a Catholic or universal people, collected from all ages and nations, offering the same sacrifice, administering or receiving the same sacraments, and yielding to the same authority a reasonable obedience. Finally, there will be found included in this great family the Apostles and their disciples, and the descendants of those disciples,--faithful men keeping the deposit of the faith, or transmitting it to others through all the vicissitudes to which this world is a prey, even to that hour when the dead will arise and come to judgment. Thus it is that "The Lives of the Saints" put to silence the gainsayers, and convince, not by argument, but by historical and incontrovertible details of facts and of the lives of men, that the Church of God is _one_, that she is _holy_, that she, though universal, is not divided, that she is built upon the Apostles, as upon an immoveable {014} foundation, Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner-stone. This work strips schism of her mask, and stops the mouth of heresy. It points out, with an evidence not to be impeached, the day of separation,--when schism commenced, and the hour of revolt and rebellion, when the heretic said, like Lucifer, in the pride of his heart, "I WILL NOT SERVE." If ever there was a work which rendered almost visible and tangible to the sight and touch of men that promise of the Redeemer to his Church, "_And the gates of hell shall not prevail against her,_" surely this work is "THE LIVES OF THE SAINTS." Who, therefore, is a Catholic, and would not possess such a treasure? How great is the benefit derived to the public from the low price and convenient form in which this work is given to them! If infidelity, and immorality, and heresy have opened wide their mouths, and are everywhere devouring their victims, is it not a blessing from God that the children of the Church should be preserved from them, and fed with the wholesome food of pious reading? If the spirit of error or of that worldly wisdom which is folly with God, has filled our shops and streets with circulating poison in the shape of books, is not the Spirit of truth, and of Him who has overcome the world, to have also such means of instruction as may save and strengthen those whom God, by his grace, has translated into the kingdom of his beloved Son? Accept, therefore gentle reader, of "The Lives of the Saints;" Which, for their own worth's sake, and for your good, we have endeavored to recommend. And with it permit us also to recommend to your pious prayers the spiritual wants of him who has thus addressed you. +JAMES DOYLE {015} AN ACCOUNT OF THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF THE REV. ALBAN BUTLER; INTERSPERSED WITH OBSERVATIONS ON SOME SUBJECTS OF SACRED AND PROFANE LITERATURE MENTIONED IN HIS WRITINGS. BY CHARLES BUTLER, ESQ. BARRISTER AT LAW. Quare quis tandem me reprehendat, si quantum ad cæteris festos dies ludorum celebrandos, quantum ad alias voluptates, et ad ipsam requiem animi et corporis conceditur temporis: Quantum alii tempestivis conviviis, quantum aleæ, quantum pilæ, tantum mihi egomet ad hæc studia recolenda, sumpsero. CIC. PRO ARCHIA 1. THE Reverend Alban Butler was the second son of Simon Butler, Esq., of Appletree, in the county of Northampton, by Miss Ann Birch, daughter of Thomas Birch, Esq., of Gorscot, in the county of Stafford. His family, for amplitude of possessions, and splendor of descent and alliances, had vied with the noblest and wealthiest of this kingdom, but was reduced to slender circumstances at the time of his birth. A tradition in his family mentions, that Mr. Simon Butler (our author's grandfather) was the person confidently employed by the duke of Devonshire and the earl of Warrington, in inviting the prince of Orange over to England; that he professed the protestant religion, and that his great zeal for it was his motive for embarking so warmly in that measure; but that he never thought it would be attended with the political consequences which followed from it; that, when they happened, they preyed greatly on his mind; that to fly from his remorse, he gave himself up to pleasure: and that in a few years he dissipated a considerable proportion of the remaining part of the family estate, and left what he did not sell of it heavily encumbered. At a very early age our author was sent to a school in Lancashire, and there applied himself to his studies with that unremitted application which, in every part of his life, he gave to literature. Sacred biography was even then his favorite pursuit. A gentleman, lately deceased, mentioned to the editor that he remembered him at this school, and frequently heard him repeat, with a surprising minuteness of fact, and precision of chronology, to a numerous and wondering audience of little boys, the history of the chiefs and saints of the Saxon æra of our history. He then also was distinguished for his piety, and a punctual discharge of his religious duties. About the age of eight years he was sent to the English college at Douay. It appears, from the diary of that college, that Mr. Holman, of Warkworth, (whose memory, for his extensive charities, is still in benediction in Oxfordshire and Northamptonshire,) became security for the expenses of his education. About this time he lost his father and mother. The latter, just before she died, wrote to him and his two brothers the following beautiful letter: "MY DEAR CHILDREN. "Since it pleases Almighty God to take me out of this world, as no doubt wisely foreseeing I am no longer a useful parent to you, (for no person ought to be thought necessary in this world when God thinks proper to take them out;) so I hope you will offer the loss of me with a resignation suitable to the religion you are of, and offer {016} yourselves. He who makes you orphans so young, without a parent to take care of you, will take you into his protection and fatherly care, if you do love and serve him who is the author of all goodness. Above all things, prepare yourselves while you are young to offer patiently what afflictions he shall think proper to lay upon you, for it is by this he trieth his best servants. In the first place, give him thanks for your education in the true faith, (which many thousands want;) and then I beg of you earnestly to petition his direction what state of life you shall undertake, whether be for religion, or to get your livings in the world. No doubt but you may be saved either way, if you do your duty to God, your neighbor, and yourselves. And I beg of you to make constant resolutions rather to die a thousand times, if possible, than quit your faith; and always have in your thoughts what you would think of were you as nigh death as I now think myself. There is no preparation for a good death but a good life. Do not omit your prayers, and to make an act of contrition and examen of conscience every night, and frequent the blessed sacraments of the church. I am so weak I can say no more to you, but I pray God bless and direct you, and your friends to take care of you. Lastly, I beg of you never to forget to pray for your poor father and mother when they are not capable of helping themselves: so I take leave of you, hoping to meet you in heaven, to be happy for all eternity. "Your affectionate mother, "ANN BUTLER." Though our author's memory for the recollection of dates was, in his very earliest years, remarkable, he found, when he first came to the college, great difficulty in learning his lessons by heart; so that, to enable him to repeat them in the school as well as the other boys, he was obliged to rise long before the college hour. By perseverance, however, he overcame this disheartening difficulty. Even while he was in the lowest schools, he was respected for his virtue and learning. One of his school-fellows writes thus of him: "The year after Mr. Alban Butler's arrival at Douay, I was placed in the same school, under the same master, he being in the first class of rudiments, as it is there called, and I in the lowest. My youth and sickly constitution moved his innate goodness to pay me every attention in his power; and we soon contracted an intimacy that gave me every opportunity of observing his conduct, and of being fully acquainted with his sentiments. No one student in the college was more humble, more devout, more exact in every duty, more obedient or mortified. He was never reproved or punished but once; and then for a fault of which he was not guilty. This undeserved treatment he received with silence, patience, and humility. In the hours alloted to play he rejoiced in the meanest employments assigned to him by his companions, as to fetch their balls, run on their errands, &c. &c. Though often treated with many indignities by his thoughtless companions, on purpose to try his patience, he never was observed to show the lest resentment, but bore all with meekness and patience. By the frequent practice of these virtues he had attained so perfect evenness of temper, that his mind seemed never ruffled with the least emotion of anger. He restricted himself in every thing to the strictest bounds of necessity. Great part of his monthly allowance of pocket-money, and frequently of his daily food, went to the poor. So perfectly had he subjected the flesh to the spirit, that he seemed to feel no resistance from his senses in the service of God and his neighbor." As he advanced in age his learning and virtue became more and more conspicuous. Monsieur Pellison,[1] in his life of the famous Huet, bishop of Avranches, observes, that "from his tenderest youth he gave himself to study; that at his rising, his going to bed, and during his meal, he was reading, or had others to read to him; that neither the fire of youth, the interruption of business, the variety of his employments, the society of his friends, nor the bustle of the world, could ever moderate his ardor of study." The same may be said of our author. He generally allowed himself no more than four hours sleep, and often passed whole nights in study and prayer. All his day was spent in reading. When he was alone, he read; when he was in company, he read; at his meals, he read; in his walks, he read; when he was in a carriage, he read; when he was on horseback, he read; whatever he did, he read. It was his custom to make abridgments of the principal works he perused, and to copy large extracts from them; several bulky volumes {017} of them have fallen into the hands of the editor. Many were surprised to see the rapidity with which he read, or rather ran through books, and at the same time acquired a full and accurate knowledge of their contents. Footnotes: 1. Histoire de l'Académie, 1 vol. 102. II After our author had completed the usual course of study, he was admitted as alumnus of Douay college, and appointed _professor of philosophy_. The Newtonian system of philosophy was about that time gaining ground in the foreign universities. He adopted it, in part, into the course of philosophy which he dictated to the students. He read and considered with great attention the metaphysical works of Woolfe and Leibnitz. He did not admire them, and thought the system of pre-established harmony laid down in them irreconcilable with the received belief or opinions of the Roman Catholic church on the soul; and that much of their language, though susceptible of a fair interpretation, conveyed improper notions, or, at least, sounded offensively to Catholic ears. The late Mr. John Dunn, his contemporary at the college, frequently mentioned to the editor the extreme caution which our author used in inserting any thing new in his dictates, particularly on any subject connected with any tenet of religion. After teaching a course of philosophy, he was appointed _professor of divinity_. On this part of his life the editor has been favored by a gentleman deservedly damed for his erudition and piety, the reverend Robert Bannister, with a long letter, of which the reader is presented with an extract. "I was contemporary with Mr. Alban Butler in Douay college eight years; viz. from October, 1741 to October, 1749. But as I was but a boy the greater part of that time, I had not any intimacy with him, nor was I capable of knowing any thing concerning his interior, the manner of his prayer, or the degrees to which he ascended in it, or any extraordinary communications or elevations to which the Holy Ghost, the great master and teacher of contemplation, might raise him. All that I can say is, that he opened Douay college great door to me and a gentleman whom I knew not, but who was so good as to bring me from Lisle in his coach, on Sunday between ten and eleven, the 15th of October, 1741; and the first sight of him appeared to me then so meek and so amiable, that I thought I would choose him for my ghostly father; but another, I suppose in rotation, adopted me. Mr. Alban was my sole master in my first year of divinity in 1749, and dictated the two treatises _De Decalogo et De Incarnatione_; he also presided over my defensions upon those two treatises, and over Mr. James Talbot's (the late bishop of London) upon universal divinity. As to heroic acts of virtue, which strike with admiration all that see or hear of them, I cannot recollect more than a uniform, constant observance of all the duties of a priest, professor, and confessarius. He was always at morning meditations, seldom omitted the celebration of the holy sacrifice of the mass, which he said with a heavenly composure, sweetness, and recollection; studying and teaching assiduously, dictating with an unwearied patience so equally and leisurely, that every one could, if he wished to do it, write his dictates in a clear and legible hand; nor do I remember that he ever sent a substitute to dictate for him; so exact and punctual he was in his duty as a professor. I never knew one more ready to go to the confession-seat, at the first intimation of any, even the least or youngest boy. He heard his penitents with wonderful meekness; and his penetration, learning, judgment, and piety, were such as to move them to place in him a singular confidence. He frequently visited the military hospital, to instruct, exhort, and hear the confessions of Irish soldiers. He sometimes assembled a number of them (when they happened to be quartered in Douay) in the college-church of St. Thomas of Canterbury, and preached to them. In one of his sermons I remember he told them, for their example and encouragement, that there are more soldiers saints than of any other vocation, or state, or condition. As poor, and often distressed, Irish men and women frequently came to Douay, he was always ready to relieve them, and administer both corporal and spiritual succors. It can never be forgotten what attention, solicitude, and care he had, in the year 1745, of our English soldiers, wounded and maimed, who were brought prisoners to Douay, and quartered in the barracks, in great numbers, after the battle of Fontenoy. He animated both by words and example all the young priests, and all in holy orders at the college, to visit them, to instruct and instil into them serious thoughts of saving their souls by embracing the only saving faith, and by true repentance.{018} He also procured for them temporal succor and relief so beneficently, that the duke of Cumberland, then generalissimo of the British and allied armies, being informed of it, promised him a special protection whensoever he came over into England. Scarce any thing affords one a better proof of Mr. Alban's eminent spirit of piety and great understanding, discretion, and light in spiritual matters, than his familiarity and friendship with M. Jean Baptiste de Villérs, president of the seminary des Evéques in the university of Douay, who died October the 7th, 1746, the death of a saint, after having lived the life of one for seventy-eight years. This M. de Villérs was eminent in all supernatural and moral virtues, but he concealed them under an amiable simplicity, and a plain unaffected behavior or exterior, unless charity and zeal for the glory of God and salvation of souls required their open and full exertion; and, notwithstanding his great learning, (which he had acquired by an excellent genius and diligent application to sacred studies,) and his great and solid fund of piety, he was as docile as an infant; so timorous and diffident of his own judgment, that he would neither do nor decide any thing without counsel. With this sentiment of diffidence and humility, he often visited (says M. Leroy, the faithful imitator and writer of the history of his life) a young professor, a foreigner, (that is, Alban Butler,) and passed an hour or two in his company in the afternoon, once every week, and sometimes twice, several years, until his edifying death. Their conversation together was solely about various points of morality; about the direction of souls, and the method of arriving at perfection in every action and intention; how to teach devout persons a habit of making continual aspirations to God, by acts of love, oblation, entire sacrifice of their hearts, of humility, &c. M. de Villérs would not suffer more than half a small fagot to be kindled for him in the severest weather, saying to Mr. Alban, 'the other part may serve some poor person.' As to wine, or any other liquor, he never drank any but at meal-time. I remember to have heard an instance of Mr. Alban's meekness, for I am not a witness of it. When he was presiding over one of his students in divinity in the public hall of Douay college, a disputant, who was probably much offended at some proposition in the thesis, as being opposite to some favorite opinion of his school or religious family, said to him with intolerable rudeness, _habes mel in ore, sed fel in corde_: to which he made no reply, nor showed the least resentment. Mr. Alban Butler was totally averse to the system of probabilism, and to all assertions that favor laxity in morale. This is evident from the dictates which he delivered to us, from his treatise _De Decalogo, de actibus humanis_, in his _Epitome moralis sacramentorum_, &c. It is still more evident from his _Epitome de sex prioribus conciliis [oe]cumenicis in calce tractanus de Incarnatione_, that he had the highest veneration for the holy see, and for him who sits in the chair of St. Peter; that he constantly held and maintained the rights and singular prerogatives of St. Peter and his successors, in calling, presiding over, and confirming general or [oe]cumenical councils; the pope's superiority over the whole church, and over the whole college of bishops, and over a general council; the irreformability of his doctrinal decisions in points of faith and morale; his supreme power to dispense (when there is cause) in the canons of general councils; in short, the plenitude of his authority over the whole chorus, without exception or limitation, _Nihil excipitur ubi distinguitur nihil_." III. From the letter of which we have presented the reader with an extract, it appears what our author's sentiments were on the nature and extent of the spiritual power of the see of Rome. It has frequently been said that he was the editor of doctor Hulden's _Analysis Fidei_: had this been the fact, it would have been a strong proof of an alteration of his sentiments on those points; but, after particular inquiry, the editor finds the assertion to be wholly unfounded. On the celebrated questions, _Of the infallibility of the Pope, and his right to the deposing power_, our author thus expresses himself in one of his letters on Mr. Bower's History of the Popes; "Mr. Bower having been educated in the Catholic schools, could not but know that, though some private divine think that the pope, by the assistance of some special providence, cannot err in the decisions of faith solemnly published by him, with the mature advice of his council, or of the clergy or divines of his church, yet that this is denied by others; and that the learned Bossuet, and many others, especially of the school of Sorbon, have written warmly {019} against that opinion; and that no Catholic looks upon it as an article or term of communion. It is the infallibility of the whole church, whether assembled in a general council, or dispersed over the world, of which they speak in their controversial disputations. Yet this writer, at every turn, confounds these two things together only to calumniate and impose on the public. If he had proved that some popes had erred in faith, he would have no more defeated the article of supremacy, than he would disinherit a king by arraigning him of bad policy. The Catholic faith teaches the pope to be the supreme pastor of the church established by Christ, and that this church, founded by Christ on a rock, shall never be overcome by hell, or cease to be his true spouse. For he has promised that his true Spirit shall direct it in all truth to the end of the world. But Mr. Bower never found the infallibility of the pope in our creed; and knows very well that no such article is proposed by the church, or required of any one. Therefore the whole chain of his boastings which is conducted through the work falls to the ground. "What he writes against the deposing power in popes, certainly cannot be made a reproach against the Catholics of England, France, Spain, &c. It is a doctrine neither taught nor tolerated in any Catholic kingdom that I know of, and which many Catholics write as warmly against as Mr. Bower could wish." IV. While our author continued at the college of Douay, his first publication made its appearance: this was his _Letters on the History of the Popes, published by Mr. Archibald Bower_. That gentleman had entered into the society of Jesus, and acquired a reputation for learning and talents. He came into England, embraced the religion of the established church, and endeavored to recommend himself to the favor of his new friends by his History of the Lives of the Popes. He also published an account of his escape from Italy, and of his motives for quitting it. The truth of the account became a subject of controversy. It was disbelieved, not only by Catholics but by Protestants. Dr. Douglas, the present bishop of Salisbury, wrote an excellent pamphlet to expose its falsehood and absurdity. It carried great improbability on the face of it. Mr. Bower was a lively writer, and defended himself with adroitness; but he was not equal to the composition of the history which he undertook to write. He was of the numerous list of authors who, when they sit down to write, have to learn what they shall write, rather than to write what they have already learned. The errors which our author exposes in his letters are sometimes the errors of a very young writer. The letters are written with ease and good-humor; they show various and extensive learning, a vigorous and candid mind. They met with universal applause. V. In the year 1745, our author accompanied the late earl of Shrewsbury and the honorable James Talbot and Thomas Talbot on their travels through France and Italy. He wrote a full, entertaining, and interesting account of them. As it will be published, the editor makes no extracts from it in this place. He was always solicitous that the noble personages committed to his care should see whatever deserved attention, and be introduced to persons distinguished by their rank, talents, or virtue. He drew out for them a comparative view of the Greek, Roman, and Gothic architecture; an account of the different schools of painting; and an abridgment of the lives, and remarks on the different characters, of the most eminent painters. These will be found in his travels. He kept them from all stage entertainments: "The stage entertainments," he says, in one of his letters, "I can give no account of, as we never would see any; they being certainly very dangerous, and the school of the passions and sin, most justly abhorred by the church and the fathers. Among us, Collier, Law, &c.; among the French, the late prince of Condi, Doctor Voisin, Nicole, &c., have said enough to satisfy any Christian; though Tertullian, St. Cyprian, St. Chrysostom, are still more implacable enemies of the stage. However, we saw the stages for their architecture, where this was curious." His opinion of the evil tendency of stage entertainments continued with him through life. VI. On his return from his travels _our author was sent on the English mission._ He {020} had long been engaged in his great work of the _Lives of the Saints_, and was then bringing it to a conclusion. He naturally, therefore, wished to be settled in London, for the convenience of its public libraries, and the opportunities it affords of intercourse with men of letters. But the vicar-apostolic of the middle district claimed him as belonging to that district, and appointed him to a mission in Staffordshire. This was a severe mortification to our author; he respectfully remonstrated; but the vicar-apostolic was inexorable, and required his immediate obedience. A gentleman who lived in the same house with him at the time, has mentioned to the editor, that he was with him when the summons came; and that on receiving it, he appeared much hurt, retired for half an hour to his oratory, and soon after set off for his country mission. From Staffordshire he removed to Warkworth, the seat of Francis Eyre, esquire, to whom these sheets are dedicated. He had the highest opinion of a good missioner, and frequently declared that he knew of no situation so much to be envied, while the missioner had a love of his duties, and confined himself to them: none so miserable, when the missioner had lost the love of them, and was fond of the pleasures of life. "Such a one," he used to say, "would seldom have the means of gratifying his taste for pleasure; he would frequently find that, in company, if he met with outward civility, he was the object of silent blame; and that if he gave pleasure as a companion, no one would resort to him as a priest." He had a manuscript written by a Mr. Cox, an English missioner, who lived in the beginning of the present century, in which these sentiments were expressed forcibly and with great feeling: he often mentioned it. But no person was less critical on the conduct of others, none exacted less from them, than our author. He was always at the command of a fellow-clergyman, and ready to do him every kind of good office. To the poor, his door was always open. When he resided in London, in quality of chaplain to the duke of Norfolk, he was under no obligation, strictly speaking, of attending to any person except the duke himself and his family; but he was at the call of every one who wanted any spiritual or temporal assistance which it was in his power to afford. The poor, at length, flocked to him in such numbers that, much in opposition to his wishes, his brother, with whom he then lived, was obliged to give general orders that none of them should be admitted to him. He was ever ready to oblige. Moss. Olivet relates of Huet, the bishop of Avranches, that he was so absorbed in his studies as sometimes to neglect his pastoral duties; that once a poor peasant waited on him respecting some matter of importance, and was refused admittance, "his lordship being at his studies:" upon which the peasant retired, muttering, with great indignation, "that he hoped they should ever have another bishop who had not finished his studies before he came among them;" but our author's "being at his studies," was never a reason with him for refusing to see any one. It was often unpleasant to observe how much his good-humor, in this respect, was abused. VII. Our author did not remain long in Staffordshire. Edward, duke of Norfolk, (to whom the present duke is second in succession,) applied to the late Mr. Challoner for a person to be his chaplain, and to _superintend the education of Mr. Edward Howard_, his nephew and presumptive heir. Mr. Challoner fixed upon our author to fill that situation. His first residence, after he was appointed to it, was at Norwich in a house generally called the duke's palace. Thither some large boxes of books belonging to him were directed, but by mistake were sent to the bishop's palace. The bishop opened them, and finding them fall of Roman Catholic books, refused to deliver them. It has been mentioned, that after the battle of Fontenoy, our author was very active in serving the English prisoners, and that the duke of Cumberland returned him thanks for his conduct, and made him an offer of his services, if he should have occasion for them after his return to England. On this seizure of his books, our author applied to the duke; his highness immediately wrote to the bishop, and soon after the books were sent to their owner. Mr. Edward Howard, by our author's advice, was first sent to the School of the English clergy, at a small village near Douay, called Esquerchin, of which the most pious and respectable Mr. Tichborne Blunt was president. After some years he was sent to complete his education at Paris; and thither our author accompanied him. Mr. Edward Howard was the Marcellus of the English Catholics; {021} never did a noble youth raise greater expectations; but he was suddenly taken ill and died after an illness of a few days. On that melancholy occasion the family expressed great pleasure in the recollection of the religious education he had received from our author. VIII. During our author's stay at Paris he finally completed and sent to the press his great work on the _Lives of the Saints_. We have seen that, from his tenderest years, he had discovered his turn for sacred biography. At a very early period of his life he conceived the plan of his work; and from that time pursued it with undeviating attention. He qualified himself for an able execution of it, by unremitted application to every branch of profane or sacred literature connected with it. He was, a perfect master of the Italian, Spanish, and French languages. The last he spoke and wrote with fluency and purity. He was also perfect master of the Latin and Greek languages. At an advanced period of his life he mentioned to the editor that he could then understand the works of St. John Chrysostom as easily in the original as in the Latin interpretation; but that the Greek of Saint Gregory Nazianzen was too difficult for him. A few years before he died he amused himself with an inquiry into the true pronunciation of tee Greek language, and in preparing for the press some sheets of an intended Greek grammar. To attain that degree of knowledge of the Greek language is given to few: Menage mentions that he was acquainted with three persons only who could read a Greek writer without an interpreter. Our author had also some skill in the oriental languages. In biblical reading, in positive divinity, in canon law, in the writings of the fathers, in ecclesiastical antiquities, and in modern controversy, the depth and extent of his erudition are unquestionable. He was also skilled in heraldry: every part of ancient and modern geography was familiar to him. He had advanced tar beyond the common learning of the schools in the different branches of philosophy; and even in botany and medicine he was deeply read. In this manner he had qualified himself to execute the work he undertook. IX. The present section is intended to give _An account of some of the principal works he consulted in the composition of it_. It will contain, 1st, some remarks on the attention of the church, during the early ages of Christianity, to preserve the memory of the martyrs and saints: 2dly, some account of the acts of the martyrs; 3dly, some account of the sacred calendars: 4thly, some account of the Martyrologies: 5thly, some account of the Menæon and Menologies of the Greek church; 6thly, some account of the early Agiographists: 7thly, some account of the Bollandists: and, 8thly, some account of the process of the beatification and canonization of saints. IX. 1. The Roman Catholic church has ever been solicitous _that the lives and miracles of those who have been eminent for their sanctify should be recorded for the edification of the faithful_. St. Clement the Second, successor of St. Peter in the see of Rome, is said to have divided the fourteen districts of that city among seven notaries, assigning two districts to each of them, with directions to form a minute and accurate account of the martyrs who suffered within them. About one hundred and fifty years from that time, pope Fabian put the notaries under the care of deacons and subdeacons. The same attention to the actions and sufferings of the martyrs was shown in the provinces. Of this, the letter of the church of Smyrna, giving an account of the martyrdom of St. Polycarp, the letter of the churches of Lyons and Vienne, giving an account of the martyrs who suffered in those cities; and the letter of St. Dionysius, the bishop of Alexandra, to Fabius, the bishop of Antioch, on the martyrs who suffered under the emperor Decius, are remarkable instances. "Our ancestors," says Pontius, in the beginning of the acts of St. Cyprian, "held those who suffered martyrdom, though only catechumens, or of the lowest rank, in such veneration, as to commit to writing almost every thing that related to them." Nor was this attention confined to those who obtained the crown of martyrdom. Care was taken that the lives of all should be written who were distinguished by their virtues, particularly if they had been favored with the gift of miracles. IX. 2. The lives of the martyrs and saints, written in this manner, were called _their acts_. They were often collected into volumes. One of the earliest of these {022} collections was made by Eusebius, the father of church history. Some of the lives he inserted in the body of his great historical work: he also published a separate collection of them; it was greatly esteemed, but has not reached our time: many others were published. These accounts of the virtues and sufferings of the martyrs were received by the faithful with the highest respect. They considered them to afford a glorious proof of the truth of the Christian faith, and of the holiness and sublimity of its doctrines. They felt themselves stimulated by them to imitate the heroic acts of virtue and constancy which they placed before their eyes, and to rely on the assistance of heaven when their own hour of trial should arrive. Thus the vocal blood of the martyrs was a powerful exhortation, both to induce the infidel to embrace the faith of Christ, and to incite the faithful to the practice of its precepts. The church, therefore, always recommended the frequent reading of the acts of the martyrs, and inserted the mention of them in her liturgy. This Ruinart proves by many examples: he also shows that the greatest care was taken to procure the genuine acts of the martyrs; or, when they could not be had, to procure exact accounts of their trials and sufferings. By this means the church was in possession of authentic histories of the persecutions she had suffered, and through which she had finally triumphed over paganism, and of particular accounts of the principal sufferers. The greatest part of them was lost in the general wreck which sacred and profane literature suffered from the barbarians who overturned the Roman empire. In every age, however, some were found who carefully preserved whatever they could save of those sacred treasures. Copies were frequently made of them; and this in this, as in every other important branch of Christian learning, the chain of tradition has been left unbroken. Much, however, of these sacred documents of church history has been irretrievably lost; and, speaking generally, the remaining part came down to us in an imperfect state. Hence Vives, at the end of the fifteenth century, exclaimed, "What a shame it is to the Christian world, that the acts of our martyrs have not been published with greater truth and accuracy!" The important task of publishing them in that manner was at length undertaken by Dom Ruinart, a Maurist monk, in his _Acta primorum martyrum sincera et selecta_. He executed it in a manner that gained him universal applause. His prefatory discourse, respecting the number of martyrs, has been generally admired. An invaluable accession to this branch of sacred literature was published by Stephen Evodius Assemani, in two volumes folio, at Rome in 1748. The title of the work expresses its contents: "_Acta Sanctorum Martyrum orientalium et occidentalium editore Stephano Evodio Assemano, que textum Chaldaicum recensuit, notis vocalibus animavit, Latine vertit, et annotationibus illustravit_." It is to be observed, that the eastern and western martyrs mentioned in this place, are not the martyrs of the eastern of Greek church, and the martyrs of the Latin or western church, in which sense the words eastern and western are generally used by ecclesiastical writers. By the eastern martyrs, Assemani denotes the martyrs who suffered in the countries which extend from the eastern bank of the Euphrates, over Mesopotamia and Chaldea to the Tigris and the parts beyond it; by the western, he denotes the martyrs who suffered in Syria, Palestine, and Egypt. Stephen Assemani was the nephew of Joseph Assemani, whose Kalendaria will be mentioned in another place. Joseph was first præfect of the Vatican library; Stephen was archbishop of Apamea; both of them were Maronite monks, and sent into the east by pope Clement XII. to purchase manuscripts. IX. 3. It was the pious custom of the early Christians to celebrate yearly the memory of the martyrs, on the days on which they suffered. On that day the martyr was considered to be born to a life of glory and immortality, and, with respect to that second life, it was called the day of his birth. The different churches, therefore, were careful to preserve an exact account of the particular days on which the martyrs obtained the crown of martyrdom. The book which contained this account was called a _Calendar_. At first the calendar contained the mention of the martyrs only; but, in the course of time, the confessors, or those who, without arriving at the glory of martyrdom, had confessed their faith in Christ by their heroic virtues, were admitted to the same honor. The calendars were preserved in the churches; a calendar of the Church of Rome was published by Boucher; another by Leo Alatius; a third by Joannes Fronto, chancellor of Paris, and canon regular of the church of St. Genevieve at Paris. A most ancient calendar of the church of Carthage was published by Mabillon. But under this head no publication is more respectable than Joseph Assemani's _Kalendaria Ecclesiæ universæ notis illustrata._ {023} IX. 4. The calendars gave rise to the _Martyrologies_; the object of them was to collect, in one volume, from the calendars of the different churches, the names of the martyrs and confessors throughout the world, with a brief mention of the day of their decease, and the place in which they suffered, or which they had illustrated by their birth, their residence, their rank, or their virtues. The Roman Martyrology is mentioned in the following terms by St. Gregory, (Lib. 8. Epist. Indict. 1.) in a letter to Eulogius, the bishop of Alexandria: "We," says his holiness, "have the names of almost all the martyrs collected into one volume, and referred to the days on which they suffered; and we celebrate the solemn sacrifice of the mass daily in their honor. But our calendar does not contain the particulars of their sufferings; it only mentions their names, and the place and time of their martyrdom." The Roman calendar seems to have been adopted generally through the western church. It certainly was received in England. At the council held at Shovesham in 747, by Cuthbert, the archbishop of Canterbury, it was ordered, "That throughout the year, the feasts of the saints should be celebrated on the days appointed by the Martyrology of the church of Rome, with the proper psalms." It was once generally believed to have been composed by St. Jerom; but this opinion is now universally rejected. It suffered much in the middle ages. Pope Gregory XIII., immediately after he had completed the great work of reforming the calendar, used the most earnest endeavors to procure a correct edition of the Roman Martyrology. He committed the care of it to some of the most distinguished writers of his time on ecclesiastical subjects. Among them, Bellarmin, Baronius, and Gavant deserve particular mention. With this edition Baronius himself was not satisfied. He published another edition in 1586: and afterwards, at the instigation of cardinal Sirlet, published a still more correct edition, with notes, in 1598. He prefixed to his edition a dissertation, in which he appears to have exhausted the subject. A further correction of the Roman Martyrology was made by pope Urban VIII. They were all surpassed by that published by pope Benedict XIV., at Cologne, in 1751. But the most useful edition is that published at Paris, in 1661, by father Lubin, an Augustinian friar. It is accompanied with excellent notes and geographical tables. Politus, an Italian divine, published, in 1751, the first volume of a new edition of the Roman Martyrology. It comprises the month of January, but the plan of annotation is so extended, that it fills five hundred folio pages of the smallest print; from the time of Drackenborch's edition of Livy, so prolix a commentary had not been seen. Among other principal Martyrologies, is that of the _Venerable Bede_. After several faulty editions of it had appeared, it was correctly published by Henschenius and Papebroke, and afterwards by Smith, at the end of his edition of Bede's Ecclesiastical History. Notwithstanding Bede's great and deserved celebrity, the Martyrology of _Usuard_, a Benedictine monk, was in more general use; he dedicated it to Charles the Bald, and died about 875. It was published by Solerius at Antwerp, in 1714, and by Dom Bouillard, in 1718; but the curious still seek for the earlier edition by Molanus, in 1568, as, in the subsequent editions, some parts of it were omitted. Another Martyrology of renown is that of _Ado_; he was archbishop of Vienne, in Dauphiné, and died in 875. The best edition of it is that by Roswede, in 1613, published at Rome in 1745.--Such have been the exertions of the church of Rome, to perpetuate the memory of those who have illustrated her by their virtues. During the most severe persecutions, in the general wreck of the arts and sciences, in the midst of the public and private calamities which attended the destruction of the Roman empire, the providence of God always raised some pious and enlightened men, who preserved the deposit of faith, sod transmitted to future times the memory of whatever had been most virtuous in former ages or their own. IX. 5. The Greek church has also shown great attention to preserve the memory of the holy martyrs and saints. This appears from her Menæon and Monologue. The Menæon is divided into twelve months, and each month is contained in a volume. All the saints, whose festivals occur in that month, have their proper day assigned to them in it: the rubric of the divine office, to be performed on that day, is mentioned; the particulars of the office follow; an account of the life and actions of the saint is inserted; and sometimes an engraving of him is added. If it happen that the saint has not his peculiar office, a prose or hymn in his praise in generally introduced. The greater solemnities have an appropriate office. From this the intelligent reader will observe that the Menæon of the Greeks is {024} nearly the same as a work would be, which should unite in itself the Missal and Breviary of the Roman Catholic church. It was printed in twelve volumes in folio at Venice. Bollandus mentions that Raderus, a Tyrolese Jesuit, had translated the whole of the Menæon, and pronounced it to be free from schism or heresy. _The Menologium_ answers to the Latin Martyrology. There are several Menologia, as, at different times, great alterations have been made in them. But the ground-word of them all is the same, so that they are neither wholly alike nor wholly different. A translation of a Menologium into Latin by cardinal Sirlet, was published by Henry Canisius, in the third volume of his _Lectiones Antiquæ_. The Greek original, with a new version, was published by Annibal Albani, at Urbino, in 1727. From these works it is most clear that the Greek church invokes the saints, and implores their intercession with God: "_Haud obscure ostendit_," says Walchius, "_Græcos eo cultu prosequi homines in sanctorum ordinem ascriptos, ut ilios incocent_." Bib. Theologica, vol. iii. 668. From the Menæon, and the Menologium, Raderus published a collection of pious and entertaining narratives, under the title of _Viridarum Sanctorum_. It is to be wished that some gentleman would employ his leisure in a translation of it. We should then be furnished, from the works of the Agiographists of the eastern church, with a collection of pious and instructing narratives, similar to those in the well-known _Histoires Choisies_. One of the most curious articles inserted in the _Acta Sanctorum_ of the Bollandists, is the _Muscovite or Russian Calendar_, with the engravings of the saints. It was first published by father Possevin. He praises the Russians for the great attention to decency which they observe in their pictures and engravings of holy subjects. He mentions that the Russians, who accompanies him in his return to Rome, observed with surprise in the Italian paintings of saints, a want of the like attention. Father Papebroke, when he cites this passage, adopts the remark, and loudly calls on Innocent XII. to attend to the general decency of all public paintings and statues. _A Greek Calendar of the Saints_ in hexameter verse accompanies the Russian Calendar, in the _Acta Sanctorum_; both are illustrated with notes by father Pane broke. IX. 6. We proceed to the _Lives of the Saints_, written by individuals. For these our attention must be first directed to the Agiographists of the Greek church. The eighth century may be considered as the period when Grecian literature had reached its lowest state of depression; in the ninth, Bardas Cæsar, the brother of the empress Theodora, protected letters; from that time they were constantly cultivated by the Greeks; so that Constantinople, utile it was taken by Mahomet, was never without its historians, poets, or philosophers. Compared with the writings of the ancients, their compositions seem lifeless and unnatural; we look among them in vain either for original genius or successful imitation. Still they are entitled to our gratitude; many of the precious remains of antiquity have come down to us only in their extracts and abridgments; and their voluminous compilations have transmitted to us much useful information which has no other existence. Sacred biography, in particular, has great obligations to them. The earliest work on that subject we owe to the care which the emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus bestowed on the literary education of his son; an example which, at the distance of about six hundred years, was successfully rivalled by the elegant edition of the Delphin Classics, published under the aspics of Lewis XIV. But the Greek emperor had this advantage over the French monarch, that he himself was the author of some of the works published for the use of his son. In the first (published by Lerch and Reisch at Leipsic, in 1751) he described the ceremonial of the Byzantine court; the second (published by Banduri, in his _Imperium Orientale_) is a geographical survey of the provinces, or, as he calls them, the _Themata_ of the empire; the third, which some ascribe to the emperor Leo, his father, describes the prevailing system of military tactics; the forth delineates the political relations and intercourse of the court of Byzantium with the other states. His Geoponics (published by Nicholas Niclas at Leipsic, in 1731, in two volumes, 8vo.) were written with a view of instructing his subjects in agriculture. By his direction, a collection of historical examples of vice and virtue was compiled in fifty-three books, and _Simeon Metaphrastes_, the great logothete, or chancellor of the empire, composed his Lives of the Saints. Several of them were published, with a Latin translation, by the care of Lipoman, the bishop of Verona. Cardinal Bellarmin accuses Metaphrastes of giving too much loose to his imagination. "He inserts," {025} says the cardinal, "such accounts of conversations of the martyrs with their persecutors, and such accounts of conversions of bystanders, as exceed belief. He mentions many and most wonderful miracles on the destruction of the temples and idols, and on the death of the persecutors, of which nothing is said by the ancient historians." We next come to _Jacobus de Voragine_, a Dominican friar and archbishop of Genoa, in 1292. His _Golden Legend_ was the delight of our ancestors during the ages which preceded the revival of letters. The library of no monastery was without it. Like the essays of Montaigne, it was to be found on the shelf of every private person; and, for a long time after the invention of printing, no work more often issued from the press. After enjoying the highest degree of reputation, it lost much of its celebrity, in consequence of the Lives of Saints published by _Mombritius_ in two immense volumes, in folio, about the year 1480, from manuscripts in the library of the church of St. John of Lateran and in consequence of the Lives of Saints published by _Surius_, a Carthusian monk. The first edition of Surius's work was published in 1570-75, in six volumes; the second appeared in 1578, the third and most complete was published, in twelve volumes, in 1615. That he frequently shows too much credulity, and betrays a want of taste, must be admitted; but his works are allowed to breathe a spirit of piety; his candor, and desire to be accurate, are discernible in every part of his writings; and his learning, for the age in which he lived, was considerable. In _Ribadeneira_ the line of ancient Agiographists respectably finishes. While candor and good taste must allow that, even in the Lest of the compilations we have mentioned, there is a great want of critical discernment, and that they are wholly deficient in elegance, and the artificial beauties of composition, justice requires that their defects should not be exaggerated. Still less should an intention to deceive, even on the pretence of edification, be imputed to them. Whatever may have been either the error or the criminality of some of her members, the church herself, in this, as in every other instance, has always inculcated the duty of sincerity and truth, and reprobated a deviation from them, even on the specious pretence of producing good. On this subject our author thus forcibly expresses himself, in one of his letters on Mr. Bower's History of the Lives of the Popes: "It is very unjust to charge the popes or the Catholic church with countenancing knowingly false legends; seeing all the divines of that communion unanimously condemn all such forgeries as lies in things of great moment, and grievous sins; and all the councils, popes, and other bishops, have always expressed the greatest horror of such villanies; which no cause or circumstances whatever can authorize, and which, in all things relating to religion, are always of the most heinous nature. Hence the authors, when detected, have been always punished with the utmost severity. Dr. Burnet himself says, that those who feigned a revelation at Basil, of which he gives a long detail, with false circumstances, in his letters on his travels, were all burnt at stakes for it, which we read more exactly related by Surius in his Commentary on his own times. The truth is, that many false legends of true martyrs were forged by heretics, as were those of St. George, condemned by pope Gelasius, as many false gospels were soon after the birth of Christianity, of which we have the names of near fifty extant. Other wicked or mistaken persons have sometimes been guilty of a like imposture. A priest at Ephesus forged acts of St. Paul's voyages, out of veneration for that apostle, and was deposed for it by St. John the evangelist, as we learn from Tertullian. To instance examples of this nature would form a complete history; for the church has always most severely condemned all manner of forgeries. Sometimes the more virtuous and remote from fraud a person is, the more unwilling he is to suspect an imposture in others. Some great and good men have been imposed upon by lies, and have given credit to false histories, but without being privy to the forgery; and nothing erroneous, dangerous, or prejudicial was contained in what they unwarily admitted. However, if credulity in private histories was too easy in any former age, certainly skepticism and infidelity are the characters of this in which we live. No histories, except those of holy scripture, are proposed as parts of divine revelation or articles of faith; all others rest upon their bare historical authority. They who do not think this good and sufficient in any narrations, do well to suggest modestly their reasons; yet may look upon them at least as parables, and leave others the liberty of judging for themselves without offence. But Mr. Bower says, p. 177, 'The Roman Breviary is the most authentic book the {026} church of Rome has, after the scripture; it would be less dangerous, at least in Italy, to deny any truth revealed in the scripture, than to question any fable related in the Breviary.' Catholic divines teach that every tittle in the holy scriptures is sacred, divinely inspired, and the word of God dictated by the Holy Ghost. Even the definitions of general councils do not enjoy an equal privilege; they are indeed the oracles of an unerring guide in the doctrine of faith; which guide received, together with the scriptures, the true sense and meaning of the articles of faith contained in them; and, by the special protection of the Holy Ghost, invariably preserves the same by tradition from father to son, according to the promises of Christ. But the church receives no new revelation of faith, and adds nothing to that which was taught by the apostles: 2dly, Its decisions are not supernaturally infallible in matters of fact, as scripture histories are, but only in matters of faith. Nor do Catholics say that its expressions, even in decisions of faith, are strictly dictated by the Holy Ghost, or suggested from him, by any immediate revelation or inspiration; but only that the church is directed by his particular guidance, according to his divine truths, revealed and delivered to his church by his apostles. As to the Roman Breviary, the prayers consist, for the greatest part, of the psalms, and other parts of the holy scriptures, to which the same respect is due which we pay to the divine books. The short lessons from the Homilies, or other works of approved fathers, especially those fathers who are mentioned by Gelasius I. in his decree, carry with them the authority of their venerable authors. As it was the custom in the primitive ages to read, in the churches or assemblies, the acts of the most illustrious martyrs, of which frequent mention is made in those of St. Polycarp, &c., some short histories of the martyrs and other saints have been always inserted in the Breviary, to which only an historical assent is due, whence they have been sometimes altered and amended. These are chiefly such as are judged authentic and probable by the cardinals Baronius and Bellarmin, who revised those lessons, in the last correction under Clement VIII. Gavant, who was himself one of the revisers of the Breviary, and secretary to the congregation, writes thus, (in Breviar. sect. 5, c. 12, n. 15, p. 18:) 'The second lessons from the histories of the saints were revised by Bellarmin and Baronius, who rejected what could be justly called in question: in which difficult task they thought it best to restore the truth of history with the least change possible, and to retain those things which had a certain degree of probability, and had the authority of some grave voucher, though the contrary sentiment had perhaps more patrons.' In computing the years of the popes, the chronology of Baronius was judged the most exact, and retained. Historical facts, nowise revealed or contained in scripture, cannot be made an object of divine faith. If edifying histories are inserted in the church-office, they stand upon their own credit. Such only ought to be chosen which are esteemed authentic. This rule has been always followed when any were compiled. If the compilers are found afterwards to have been mistaken, it is nowhere forbid to correct them.[1] This has been often done by the order of several popes." Footnotes: 1. Nimia profecto almplicitate peccant qui scandalizantur quoties audiunt aliquid ex jam olim creditia et juxta breviarii prescriptum hodiedum recitandis, in disputationem adduci.--_Diss. Ballandic{e}._ vol. 2, p. 140. IX. 7. Among the _modern collections of the Lives of Saints_, of which our authors availed himself, in the work we are speaking of, the histories which different religious have written of their own orders, hold a distinguished place. But he was indebted to no work so much as the _Acta sanctorum of the Bollandists_. That noble collection was first projected by Father Roswede of the society of Jesus. He died before he had completely digested his plan. Fortunately for the lovers either of sacred history or sacred literature, it mm taken up by father Bollandus of the same society, and has been carried down to the eleventh day of October inclusive. Those who, after Bollandus's decease, succeeded him in his undertaking, were from him called Bollandists. As far as the editor has been able to learn, the work was composed by the following authors, and published in the number of volumes and years following: No. of Vols. Years of their Months. all in folio. appearance. Authors. January Two, 1643 ........... Bollandus and Henschenius February Three, 1658 ........... Bollandus and Henschenius March Three, 1668 ........... Henschenius and Papebrochius April Three, 1675 ........... Henschenius and Papebrochius May Seven, 1680-1688....... Henschenius, Papebrochius, Baertius, and Janningus {027} June Six, 1695--1715...... Henschenius, Papebrochius, Baertius, Janningus, and Sollerius July Seven, 1719--1731...... Janningus, Sollerius, Pinius, Cuperius, and Boschinus. August Six, 1733--1743...... Sollerius, Pinius, Cuperius, Boschius, and Stiltingus September Eight, 1746--1762...... Pinius, Stiltingus, Limpenus, Veldius, Suyskenius, Pericrius, and Cleus. October Five 1765--1786...... Stiltingus, Suyskenius, Perierius, Byeus, Boæus, Gnesquierus, Hubenus, and Fronsonus. Antwerp was the scene of the labors of the Bollandists. They were engaged on them, when the enemies of every thing sacred arrived there under Pichegrû. The most eminent of the Bollandists was Father Papebroke, a rival of the Petaviuses, the Sirmonds, and Mabillons: one of those men who exalt the character of the society to which they belong, and the age in which they live. The Spanish Inquisition condemned some of the volumes in which he was concerned, but afterwards retracted the censure. Several dissertations, replete with various and profound erudition, are interspersed in the body of the work; they are equally distinguished by the learning, and the soundness and sobriety of criticism which appear in them. It would be an irreparable loss to the Christian world that the work should not be completed. The principal dissertations have been printed, in three volumes folio, at Venice, in 1749-59. Those who wish to see an account of the controversy which produced or was occasioned by the sentence of the Inquisition, may consult the _Acta Eruditorum_, 1696, p. 132-500. IX. 8. Another source of information, of which our author availed himself in the composition of his work, was the _Acts of the Beatification and Canonization of the Saints_. The name of _Martyr_ was given by the ancient church to those who had suffered death for the faith of Christ; the name of _Confessor_ was applied to those who had made a public profession of their faith before the persecutors. It was afterwards extended to those who had edified the church by their heroic virtues. St. Martin of Tours is generally supposed to have been the first saint to whom the title of confessor was applied in the last sense. Originally, every bishop had the privilege of canonizing saints, or declaring them entitled to the honors which the Catholic church bestows on her saints. The council of Cologne, cited by Ivo of Chartres, forbids the faithful to show any public mark of veneration to any modern saint, without the permission of the diocesan. A capitulary of Charlemagne in 801 is to the same effect. Pope Alexander III. is supposed to have been the first pope who reserved the exclusive privilege of canonizing saints to the holy see. It was recognised by the church of France at a council at Vienne, in which the bishops, addressing themselves to pope Gregory IX., expressly say, "that no sanctity, however eminent, authorizes the faithful to honor the memory of a saint, without the permission of the holy see." The present mode of proceeding in the canonization of saints, principally takes its rise from the decree of pope Urban VIII., dated the 13th of March, 1625. By that he forbade the public veneration of every new saint, not beatified or baptized; and particularly ordered that no one, even in private, should paint the image of any person, whatever might be his reputation for sanctity, with a crown or {}e of light round his head; or expose his picture in any sacred place, or publish a history of his life, or a relation of his virtues and miracles, without the approbation of his diocesan: that if, in a work so approved of, the person were called saint, or blessed, those words should only be used to denote the general holiness of his life, but not to anticipate the general judgment of the church. His holiness adds a form of protestation to that effect, which he requires the authors to sign, at the beginning and end of their works. This regulation of pope Urban is so strictly attended to, that a single proof of the infraction of it, and even the omission of a definite sentence that there has been no infraction of it, makes the canonization of the saint impossible, and invalidates the whole of the proceedings. The only exception is, in favor of those saints who are proved to have been immemorially venerated for a hundred years and upwards, before 1634, the year in which pope Urban's bull was confirmed. The beatification of a saint is generally considered as a preliminary to his canonization. It is a kind of provisional permission, authorizing the faithful to honor {028} the memory of the person beatified; but qualified as to the place or manner. A decree of pope Alexander VIII. in 1659, prohibits the faithful from carrying those honors farther than the bull of beatification expressly permits. The proceedings of beatification or canonization are long, rigorous, and expensive. 1st, The bishop of the diocese institutes a process, in the nature of an information, to inquire into the public belief of the virtues and miracles of the proposed, and to ascertain that the decree we have mentioned of pope Urban VIII. has been complied with: this proceeding begins and ends with the bishop, his sentence being conclusive. 2dly, The acts of this proceeding, with the bishop's sentence, are sealed up, then taken to the congregation of rites: and deposited with the notary. 3dly, The solicitors for the congregation petition for publication of the proceedings. 4thly, This is granted; and the proceedings, being first legally verified, are opened before the cardinal-president of the congregation, 5thly, The pope is then requested to refer the business to a particular cardinal to report upon it. 6thly, This being granted, the writings of the proposed, if he be the author of any, are laid before the cardinal-reporter. 7thly, He appoints a commission to assist him, and, with their assistance, makes his report. If one formal error against faith, one direct opinion contrary to morals, be round in them, it puts a total end to the proceedings, unless the author, in his life, expressly retracted it. "A general protestation;" says Benedict XIV., "the most sincere submission of all opinions to the authority of the Catholic church, saves the author from criminality, but does not prevent the effect of this rigorous escalation." 8thly, Hitherto the proceedings are not in strictness before the pope; but, from this sage of the business, the affair wholly devolves on his holiness. He signs a commission to the congregation of rites to institute and prosecute the process of beatification; but, before this commission is granted, ten years must have expired, from the time when the acts of the diocesan were first lodged with the congregation of rites. 9thly; The congregation of rites appoints commissaries, whom the pope delegates, to inform themselves of the virtues and miracles are the proposed. The commissaries usually are bishops, and the bishop of the diocese where the proposed is buried is usually one of them; but laymen are never employed. The proceedings of the commissaries are secret, and carried on and subscribed with the strictest order and regularity, and in great form; the last step in their proceedings is to visit the tomb of the deceased, and to draw out a verbal process of the state in which his remains are found. The original of the proceedings is left with the bishops; a legalized copy is taken of them, and returned by a sworn courier to the congregation of rites. 10thly, The solicitors for the congregation then pray for what is called a decree of attribution, or that an inquiry may be made into each particular virtue and miracle attributed to the proposed: 11thly, Upon this, they proceed to make the inquiry, beginning with the virtues and ending with the miracles; but of the former they can take on notice in this stage of the business, till fifty years from the time of the proposed's decease: in the case of a martyr, his martyrdom alone, with proof both of the heroism with which it was suffered, and of its having been suffered purely and absolutely in the cause of Christ, is supposed to make an inquiry into his virtues unnecessary. 12thly, The final determination of the cause is settled in three extraordinary congregations, called the antepreparatory, the preparatory, and the general. The virtues to be approved of must be of the most heroic kind: the number of miracles is, in strictness, limited to two. The pope collects the vows of the assembly; and two-thirds of it, at least, must agree in opinion, before they come to a resolution. He then pronounces what is called a private sentence, before the promoter and the secretary of the congregation of St. Peter. 13thly, A general congregation is then held, to determine whether it be advisable to proceed to the beatification of the proposed. 14thly, Three consistories are afterwards held. l5thly, The pope then signs the brief of beatification. The publication of it is performed in the church of the Vatican. The solicitor for the beatification presents the brief to the cardinal-prefect; he remits it to the cardinal-archpriest of the church where the ceremony is held. The cardinal-archpriest reads it aloud; the Te Deum is sung, a collect in honor of the beatified is read, and mass is solemnized in his honor. 16thly, When the proceedings for the beatification are completed, the proceedings for the canonization begin. But it is necessary that, before any thing be done in them, new miracles should be wrought. When the solicitor for the canonization is satisfied that he can prove by judicial evidence the existence of these miracles, he presents a petition for resuming the {029} cause. 17thly, Three congregations extraordinary, a general assembly, and three consistories, are held for the purpose of pronouncing on the new miracles, and determining whether it be prudent to proceed to canonization. 18thly, This being determined upon, the pope issues the brief of canonization, and, soon after, the ceremonial follows. It begins by a solemn procession: an image of the saint is painted on several banners. When the procession arrives at the church where the ceremony is performed, the pope seats himself on his throne, and receives the usual homage of the court. The solicitor for the cause and the consistorial advocate place themselves at the feet of his holiness, and request the canonization; the litanies are sung; the request is made a second time; the _Veni Creator_ is sung; the request is made a third time; the secretary announces that it is the will of the pope to proceed immediately upon the canonization; the solicitor requests that the letters of canonization may be delivered in due form; his holiness delivers them, and the first prothonotary calls on all the assembly to witness the delivery. The _Te Deum_ is sung, and high mass is solemnized. The decree of canonization is usually worded in these terms: "To the glory of the Holy Trinity, for the exaltation of the Catholic faith, and the increase of the Christian religion: In virtue of the authority of Jesus Christ, of the holy apostles St. Peter and St. Paul, and our own, after due deliberation and frequent invocations of the heavenly light, with consent of our venerable brethren, the cardinals, patriarchs, archbishops, and bishops, present at Rome, we declare the blessed N. to be a saint, and we inscribe him as such in the catalogue of the saints. In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Amen." Such is the outline of the process of canonization. It must be added, that the strictest evidence is required of every thing offered in proof. It is laid down as a universal rule, which admits of no exception, that the same evidence shall be required, through the whole of the process, as in criminal cases is required to convict an offender of a capital crime; and that no evidence of any fact shall be received, if a higher degree of evidence of the same fact can possibly be obtained. Hence, a copy of no instrument is admitted, if the original be in existence; no hearsay witness is received, if ocular testimony can be produced. The rigorous examination of every circumstance offered to be proved has excited the surprise of intelligent Protestants. Miracles, which to them seemed proved to the utmost degree of demonstration, have, to their surprise, been rejected. Whatever there is most awful in religion, most sacred in an oath, or most tremendous in the censures of the church, is employed in the process of canonization to elicit truth and detect falsehood. Every check and countercheck is used, which slowness of proceeding, or a repetition of it in other stages and under different forms, can effect. The persons employed in it are the members of the Roman Catholic church, the most exalted by their rank, and the most renowned for their virtues and talents. When the proceedings are concluded, they are printed and exposed to the examination of the whole world. The sixth volume of the celebrated treatise of Benedict XIV. on the beatification and canonization of saints, contains the acts of the saints canonized by himself. X. With these helps our author sat down to his work. We may suppose him addressing to the saints, whose lives he was about to write, a prayer similar to the beautiful prayer addressed to them by Bollandus at the end of his general preface, and which may be thus abridged: "Hail, ye citizens of heaven! courageous warriors! triumphant over the world! from the blessed scenes of your everlasting glory, look on a low mortal, who searches everywhere for the memorials of your virtues and triumphs. Show your favor to him; give him to discover the valuable monuments of former times; to distinguish the spurious from the legitimate; to digest his work in proper order and method; to explain and illustrate whatever is obscure. Take under your protection all who have patronized or assisted him in his undertakings: obtain for all who read his work, that they imitate the examples of virtue which it places before their eyes; and that they experience how sweet, how useful, and how glorious it is to walk in your steps." In the preface to the French translation, the work is said to have cost our author the labor of thirty years. It was his practice, when he began to write the life of any saint, to read over and digest the whole of his materials, before he committed any thing to paper. His work evidently shows, that his mind was full of its subject, {030} and that what he wrote was the result of much previous information and reflection. On many occasions he must have written on subjects which were new to him; but, such is the mutual connection and dependence of every branch of literature, that a mind stored like his was already in possession of that kind of knowledge, which would make him apprehend, with great ease, whatever he had to learn; and would instruct him, though the subject were new to him, where he might express himself decisively, and where he should doubt. How extensive and profound his general knowledge was, appears from this, that a person who happens to have made any subject, treated of by him, his particular study, will seldom read what our author has written upon it without finding in it something original, or, at least, so happily expressed or illustrated as to have the merit of originality. In some instances, as in his account of the Manichæns, in the life of St. Augustine, and of the crusades, in the life of St. Lewis, he shows such extent and minuteness of investigation, as could only be required from works confined to those subjects. In other instances, where his materials are scanty, so that he writes chiefly from his own mind, as in the lives of St. Zita or St. Isidore of Pelusium, he pours an unpremeditated stream of piety, which nothing but an intimate acquaintance with the best spiritual writers could produce. The sameness of a great number of the most edifying actions which our author had to relate, made it difficult for him to avoid a tiresome uniformity of narrative: but he has happily surmounted this difficulty. Another difficulty he met with, was the flat and inanimate style of the generality of the writers from whom his work was composed. Happy he must have been, when the authors he had to consult were St. Jerome, Scipio, Maffei, Bouhours, or Marsollier. But most commonly they were such as might edify but could not delight. He had then to trust to his own resources for that style, that arrangement, those reflections, which were to engage his reader's attention. In this he has certainly succeeded. Few authors on holy subject have possessed, in a higher degree, that indescribable charm of style which rivets the reader's attention to the book, which never places the writer between the book and the reader, but insensibly leads him to the conclusion, sometimes delighted, but always attentive and always pleased. His style is peculiar to himself; it partakes more of the style of the writers of the last century than of the style of the present age. It possesses great merit, but sometimes is negligent and loose. Mr. Gibbon mentioned it to the editor in warm terms of commendation; and was astonished when he heard how much of our author's life had been spent abroad. Speaking of our author's Lives of the Saints, (vol. iv. 457,) he calls it "a work of merit,--the sense and learning belong to the author--his prejudices are those of his profession." As it is known what prejudice means in Mr. Gibbon's vocabulary, our author's relatives accept the character. Having lived so long in the schools, he must have had a strong predilection for some of the opinions agitated in them; and frequent opportunities of expressing it occurred in his work. He seems to have cautiously avoided them: a single instance, perhaps, is not to be found, where any thing of the kind is discoverable in any of his writings. He has carefully brought before the reader every circumstance arising from his subject, that could be offered in proof or illustration of the particular tenets of the Roman Catholic church; but he does it without affectation, and rather leaves the reader to draw his own conclusions, than suggests them to him. Those expressions which good manners and good taste reject, are never to be found in his works. But the chief merit of his works is, that they make virtue and devotion amiable: he preaches penance, but he shows its rewards; he exhorts to compunction, but he shows the sweetness of pious sorrow; he enforces humility, but he shows the blessedness of a humble heart; he recommends solitude, but he shows that God _is_ where the world is not. No one reads his work who does not perceive the happiness, even in this world, of a holy life, or who does not wish to die the death of a saint. Most readers of it will acknowledge that, sometimes at least, when they have read it, every worldly emotion has died within them, and they have felt themselves in a disposition of mind suited to receive the finest impressions of religion. At the finishing of his work he gave a very edifying instance of humility. The manuscript of the first volume having been submitted to Mr. Challoner, the vicar-apostolic of the London district, he recommended the omission of all the notes, not {031} excepting that beautiful note which gave an account of the writings of St. John Chrysostom. His motive was, that, by being made less bulky, the work might be made less expensive, and, consequently, more generally useful. It is easy to suppose what it must have cost our author to consign to oblivion the fruit of so much labor and so many vigils. He obeyed, however, and to this circumstance it is owing that, in the first edition, the notes in question were omitted. XI. XI. 1. It has been objected to our author's work on the Lives of the Saints, _that the system of devotion which is recommended by it, is, at best, suited to the cloister_. But no work has ever appeared, in which the difference between the duties of a man of the world and the duties of a religious is more strongly pointed out. Whenever the author has occasion to mention any action of any saint, which is extraordinary or singular in its nature he always observes, that it is of a kind rather to be admired than imitated. XI. 2. It has been objected, _that the piety which it inculcates is of the ascetic kind_, and that the spirit of penance, voluntary mortification, and contempt of the world, which it breathes everywhere, is neither required nor recommended by the gospel. But no difference can be found between the spirit of piety inculcated by our author, and that inculcated by the most approved authors of the Roman Catholic church. Less of penance, of voluntary mortification, or of contempt of the world, is not recommended by Rodriguez, by Thomas of Kempis, by St. Francis of Sales, by Bourdaloue, or Massillon, than is recommended by our author. Speaking of those "who confound nature with grace, and who look on the cross of Jesus Christ as an object foreign to faith and piety;--It was not thus," says Massillon, in his sermon on the Incarnation, "it was not thus that the apostles announced the gospel to our ancestors. _The spirit of the gospel is a holy eagerness of suffering, an incessant attention to mortify self-love, to do violence to the will, to restrain the desires, to deprive the senses of useless gratifications; this is the essence of Christianity, the soul of piety_. If you have not this spirit, you belong not, says the apostle, to Jesus Christ; it is of no consequence that you are not of the number of the impure or sacrilegious of whom the apostle speaks, and who will not be admitted into the kingdom of Christ. You are equally strangers to him; your sentiments are not his; you still live according to nature; you belong not to the grace of our Saviour; you will therefore perish, for it is on him alone, says the apostle, that the Father has placed our salvation. A complaint is sometimes made that we render piety disgusting and impracticable, by prohibiting many pleasures which the world authorizes. But, my brethren, what is it we tell you? allow yourselves all the pleasures which Christ would have allowed himself; faith allows you no other; mix with your piety all the gratifications which Jesus Christ would have mixed in his; the gospel allows no greater indulgence--O my God, how the decisions of the world will one day be strangely reversed! when worldly probity and worldly regularity, which, by a false appearance of virtue, give a deceitful confidence to so many souls, will be placed by the side of the crucified Jesus, and will be judged by that model! To be always renouncing yourselves, rejecting what pleases, regulating the most innocent wishes of the heart by the rigorous rules of the spirit of the gospel, is difficult, is a state of violence. But if the pleasures of the senses leave the soul sorrowful, empty, and uneasy, the rigors of the cross make her happy. Penance heals the wounds made by herself; like the mysterious bush in the scripture, while man sees only its thorns and briers, the glory of the Lord is within it, and the soul that possesses him possesses all. Sweet tears of penance! divine secret of grace! O that you were better known to the sinner!" "The pretended esprits forts," says Bourdaloue, in his sermon on the scandal of the cross, and the humiliations of Jesus Christ, the noblest of all his sermons, in the opinion of the cardinal de Maury, "do not relish the rigorous doctrines announced by the Son of God in his gospel; self-hatred, self-denial, severity to one's self. But when Christ established a religion for men, who were to acknowledge themselves sinners and criminals, ought he, as St. Jerome asks, to have published other laws? What is so proper for sin as penance? what is more of the nature of penance, than the sinner's harshness and severity to himself? Is there any thing in this contrary to reason? They are astonished at his ranking poverty among the beatitudes; that he held up the cross as an attraction to his disciples to follow him; that he declared a love of {032} contempt was preferable to the honors of the world. In all this I see the depth of his divine counsels." Such is the language of Bourdaloue and Massillon, preaching before a luxurious court, to the best-informed and most polished audience in the Christian world. It is apprehended that no other language is found in our author's Lives of the Saints. XI. 3. Some (but their number is small) have imputed to our author _too much credulity respecting miracles_. A chain of agiographists might be supposed: on the first link of it we might place Surius, as possessing the utmost degree of the belief of miracles, consistent with any degree of judgment; on the last we might place Baillet and Launoy, as possessing the utmost degree of the belief of miracles, consistent with any degree of deference to the general opinions of pious Catholics. Between them we might place in succession, according to their respective degrees of supposed belief, Ribadeneira, Baronius, the Bollandists, Tillemont, and Fleury. With which of these writers shall we class our author? certainly neither with Surius, nor with Baillet or Launoy. The middle links represent those to whom the most liberal Roman Catholic will not impute too much credulity, or the most credulous too much freedom. Perhaps our author should rank with the Bollandists, the first of this middle class; and generally he who thinks with father Papebroke on any subject of ecclesiastical literature, may be sure of thinking right. To those who wholly deny the existence of miracles these sheets are not addressed; but the Roman Catholic may be asked on what principle he admits the evidence for the miracles of the three first centuries, and rejects the evidence for the miracles of the middle age; why he denies to St. Austin, St. Gregory, the venerable Bede, or St. Bernard, the confidence he places in St. Justin, St. Irenæus, or Eusebius. XII. Some years after our author had published the Lives of the Saints, he published the _Life of Mary of the Cross_; a nun in the English convent of the Poor Clares at Rouen. It is rather a vehicle to convey instruction on various important duties of a religious life, and on sublime prayer, than a minute account of the life and actions of the nun. It was objected to this work, as it had been to the Saints' Lives, that it inculcated a spirit of mystic prayer, the excesses of which had been formally condemned, and the propriety of which, even in a very qualified view of it, was doubtful. It must be admitted by those who urge this objection, that, both in the Saints Lives and in the work of which we are speaking, our author uses very guarded expressions. He always takes care to mention that, in the practices of devotion, as in every other practice, the common is the safest road: that many of the greatest saints have, through the whole of their lives, confined themselves to the usual modes of prayer and meditation; that the gift of contemplation is given to few; that, like every other practice of devotion, contemplation has its dangers; and that, without a perfect spirit of humility, it is much exposed to illusion; but he delivers, at the same time, an explicit opinion, that contemplation is a gift of heaven; that the happiness of a soul on whom God bestows it, is above description; and that every joy which this life affords is contemptible in comparison of it. This certainly is catholic doctrine. It is natural to suppose that, at a time when every art and science was deluged in a quantity of barbarous words, and metaphysics were carried into every subject, the doctrine of prayer would often be involved in similar intricacies and refinements. The fact certainly is, that many writers of the middle age, on the subject of prayer, introduced into their writings a wonderful degree of metaphysical subtilty. But, if their doctrine be divested of those subtilties, and expressed in plain language, it will be found that nothing in what our author, with other spiritualists, calls mystical theology, contradicts common sense. With them he divides the progress of a Christian, in his advances towards perfection, into three stages, the purgative, the contemplative, and the unitive. In the first stage he places sinners on their first entrance, after their conversion into a spiritual life; who bewail their sins, are careful to avoid relapsing into them, endeavor to destroy their had habits, to extinguish their passions; who fast, watch, prey, chastise the flesh, mourn, and are blessed with a contrite and humble heart. In the second stage he places those who divest themselves of earthly affections, study to acquire purity of heart, and a constant habit of virtue, the true light of the soul; who {033} meditate incessantly on the virtues and doctrines of Christ, and thereby inflame themselves to the imitation of him. Those he supposes to be arrived at the third stage whose souls, being thus illuminated, are united to God, and enjoy his peace which passeth understanding. According to our author, the prayer of a person who is arrived at the last stage, is very different from that of a beginner in spiritual life. To present a pious subject to his mind, to place it in the various points of view in which it should be considered, to raise the devout sentiments which the consideration of it should produce, and to form the resolutions which those sentiments should inspire, must, our author observes, be a work of exertion to a beginner. But when once he has arrived at that state of perfection as to have detached himself from those objects which are the usual incitements to sin, and to which, from the natural propensity of the human heart, the imaginations of man forcibly lead, and when an ardent love of virtue, piety, and whatever relates to them, is habitual in her; then, our author supposes, that what before was exertion becomes the usual state of the soul; a thousand causes of distraction cease to exist, and all the powers of the mind and affections of the heart rest with ease and pleasure on the subject of her meditation; God communicates to her his perfections; he enlightens her in the mysteries of religion, and raises in her admirable sentiments of wonder and love. This our author calls the prayer of contemplation. In process of time, he supposes that the habit of devotion increases: that the soul acquires a stronger aversion from every thing that withholds her from God, and a more ardent desire of being united to him; and that, by continually meditating on the sublime truths and mysteries of Christianity, she is disengaged from earthly affections, is always turned to God, and obtains a clearer view of his perfections, of her obligations to him, and of the motives which entitle him to her love. Then, according to our author, every thing which is not God becomes irksome to her, and she is united to him in every action and every thought. At first, the soul, by our author's description, calls to her mind the presence of God; afterwards she habitually recollects it; at length every thing else disappears, and she lives in him. Even in the first stage, when the sinner first turns from vice, and determinately engages in the practice of a virtuous life, our author pronounces that the comforts which she experiences in reflecting on the happiness of the change, exceed the joys of this world: he supposes her to say, in the words of Bourdaloue, (_Sur la Choix mutuel de Dieu et de l'Ame Religieuse_,) "I have chosen God, and God has chosen me; this reflection is my support and my strength, it will enable me to surmount every difficulty, to resist every temptation, to rise above every chagrin and every disgust." From the moment this choice is made, he supposes, with the same eloquent preacher, in his sermon for the feast of St. Mary Magdalen, "that the soul, exposed till then to all the vexations which the love of the world inevitably occasions, begins to enjoy a sweet tranquillity; conscience begins to experience the interior joy of pious hope and confidence in the mercies of God, and to feel the holy unction of grace; in the midst of her penitential austerities she comforts and strengthens herself by the thought, that she is making some satisfaction and atonement to God for her sins, that she is purifying her heart, and disposing it to receive the communications of heaven." This comfort and sensation of happiness, he observes, must necessarily increase as the charms of virtue are unveiled to the soul, and she acquires a continual habit of thinking on God. "Who can express," he makes the soul exclaim with the same author, "the secret delights which God bestows on a heart thus purified and prepared? how he enlightens her! how he inflames her with divine love! with what visitations he favors her! what holy sentiments and transports he excites in her!" but, when she lives for God alone, then, in our author's language, God communicates himself with her, and her happiness, as far as happiness is attainable in this life, is complete. Here, according to Thomas of Kempis, (and what Catholic recuses his authority?) begins the _familiaritas stupenda nimis_. "What is the hundred-fold of reward," cries Bourdaloue, (_Sermon sur le Renoncement Religieuse_,) "that thou, O God, hast promised to the soul which has left every thing for thee? It is something more than I have said upon it: it is something that I cannot express; but it is something with which, sinful and weak as I am, God has more than once favored me."--"Thou promisedst me a hundred-fold," says St. Bernard: "I feel it; thou hast more than performed thy promise." _Necessitas good cogit, defendit_. In defence of our author, this short exposition of his doctrine seemed necessary: and it may be confidently asked {034} in what it differs from the doctrine of Rodriguez, of St. Francis de Sales, of Bourdaloue, or of many other authors, in whom the universal opinion of the Catholic world recognises, not only true devotion and piety, but extreme good sense and moderation. Nor should it be forgotten that, if the prelates assembled at Issy, in 1695, declared, (Art. 22,) "that, without any extraordinary degrees of prayer, a person may become a very great saint," they had previously declared, (Art. 21,) "that even those which are passive, and approved of by St. Francis of Sales and other spiritualists, cannot be rejected." The authors on these subjects, whom our author particularly recommended, were Balthazar, Alvarez de Paz, and St. Jure. The latter was one of the Jesuits who came into England during the reign of Charles the First. His most celebrated work is, a Treatise on the Knowledge and Love of God, in five volumes,--a noble effusion of the sublimest piety. The only work by which he is known in this country is, his Life of the Baron de Renty: our author esteemed it much, but thought it censurable for mentioning, in terms of commendation, the mode in which the baron, to save his honor, indirectly put himself in the way of fighting a duel. Another spiritualist, whom our author greatly admired, was the celebrated Henry Marie de Boudon. He frequently mentioned, in terms of the highest admiration, the humility and resignation with which Boudon bore the calumnies of his prelate and fellow-clergy. He often related that part of his life, when, being abandoned by the whole world, a poor convent of religious received him into their house, and he knelt down to thank God that one human being still existed who was kindly disposed to him. His writings are numerous: the style of them is not elegant, and they abound with low expressions; but they contain many passages of original and sublime eloquence. Our author was also a great admirer of the works of Father Surin, particularly his _Fondemens de la Vie Spirituelle_, edited by Father Bignon. In this species of writing, few works, perhaps, will give the reader so much pleasure as the _Morale de l'Evangile_, in 4 vols. 8vo., by Father Neuvile, brother to the celebrated preacher of that name. It is to be hoped that it will be translated into English.[1] Our author greatly lamented the consequences of the altercation between Fenelon and Bossuet. He thought the condemnation which had been passed {035} on it on the abuses of devotion, had brought devotion itself into discredit, and thrown a ridicule on the holiness of an interior life. Of Fenelon he always spoke with the highest respect. One of the editors of the last edition of his works is now in England: he has declared that it appeared from Fenelon's papers, that his exertions, to the very last, to ward off the sentence of the condemnation of his works, were most active. This enhanced the value of his sacrifice. Our author thought that Valart had abundantly proved that Thomas of Kempis was not the author of the Imitation of Christ; but that he had not proved it to be written by Gersen, the abbot of Vercelli: he also differed from Valart in his opinion of the general merit of the works of Thomas of Kempis; his treatises _De Tribus Tabernaculis_ and _De Verâ Compunctione_ (the latter particularly) he thought excellent.[2] Footnotes: 1. For this and many other valuable works we naturally look to Stonyhurst. If the Musæ Exulantes,[The title assumed by them, in the preface to the Latin translation of Cato.] in the swamps of Bruges, could produce an elegant and nervous translation of Cato, will their notes be less strong or less sweet in their native land? May we not expect from Stonyhurst other Petaviuses, other Sirmonds, other Porées, future Strachans, future Stanleys, future Heskeys, future Stricklands. If any of them would favor us with a translation of Father Montreuil's _Vie de Jésus Christ_, he would supply the English Catholic with the present desideratum of his library, an interesting and accurate life of Christ. A literary history of the gospels, showing the state of the text, and the grammatical peculiarities of their idiom, and containing a short account of the early versions, would be an invaluable work. The excellent translation by Mr. Combes, the professor of divinity in St. Edmund's College, of selected parts of St. Basil and St. John Chrysostom, shows his ability to execute such a work, and leads us to hope it for him. The mention of these gentlemen naturally makes us reflect on the singular kindness shown by this country to the foreign exiles. The editor begs leave to copy what has been said by him on this subject in a small work entitled _Hors Biblicæ_. After mentioning some of the most splendid of the biblical exertions of the English, the compiler of that work says, "Yet, useful and magnificent as these exertions have been, an edition of the New Testament has lately appeared in this country, which, in one point of view, eclipses them all. It has been our lot to be witnesses of the most tremendous revolution that Christian Europe has known: a new race of enemies to the Christian religion has arisen, and, from Rome to Hungary, has struck at every altar and shaken every throne. One of their first enormities was, the murder of a large proportion of their clergy, and the banishment of almost the whole of the remaining part. Some thousands of those respectable exiles found refuge in England. A private subscription of 33,775_l_, 15_s_. 9-1/2_d_. was immediately made for them. When it was exhausted, a second was collected, under the auspices of his majesty, and produced 41,304_l_. 12_s_. 6-1/4_d_. Nor is it too much to say, that the beneficence of individuals, whose charities on this occasion are known to God alone, raised for the sufferers a sum much exceeding the amount of the larger of the two subscriptions. When at length the wants of the sufferers exceeded the measure of private charity, government took them under its protection, and, though engaged to a war exceeding all former wars in expense, appropriated, with the approbation of the whole kingdom, a monthly allowance of about 8000_l_. for their support; an instance of splendid munificence and systematic liberality, of which the annals of the world do not furnish another example. The management of the contributions was intrusted to a committee, of whom Mr. Wilmot, then one of the members of parliament for the city of Coventry, was president: on him the burden of the trust almost wholly fell, and his humanity, judgment, and perseverance, in discharge of it, did honor to himself and his country. "It should be observed, that the contributions we have mentioned are exclusive of those which were granted for the relief of the lay emigrants. "So suddenly had the unhappy sufferers been driven from their country, that few of them had brought with them any of those books of religion or devotion which their clerical character and habits of prayer had made the companions of their past life, and which were to become almost the chief comfort of their future years. To relieve them from this misfortune, the University of Oxford, at her sole expense, printed for them, at the Clarendon Press, two thousand copies of the Latin Vulgate of the New Testament, from an edition of Barbou, but this number not being deemed sufficient to satisfy the demand, two thousand more copies were added, at the expense of the marquess of Buckingham. Few will forget the piety, the blameless demeanor, the long, patient suffering of these respectable men. Thrown on a sudden into a foreign country, differing from theirs in religion, language, manners, and habits, the uniform tenor of their pious and unoffending lives procured them universal respect and good-will. The country that received them has been favored. In the midst of the public and private calamity which almost every nation has experienced, Providence has crowned her with glory and honor; peace has dwelt in her palaces, plenty within her wells; every climate has been tributary to her commerce, every sea has been witness of her victories." 2. Our author was a great admirer of the writings of Abraham Woodhead: he purchased his manuscripts, and, by his will, bequeathed them to the English College at Douay. Mr. Woodhead is one of the writers to whom the celebrated _Whole Duty of Man_ has been attributed. On that subject the editor is in possession of the following note in our author's handwriting: "Mr. Simon Berrington, who died in 1758, endeavored to give Mr. Woodhead the honor of being the author of the Whole Duty of Man, and other works of the same kind; but there is a difference of style between them,--there occurring in the Whole Duty of Man, and the other works of that author, scarce any parentheses, with which all Mr. Woodhead's works abound. Nevertheless, certain it is that Dr. John Pell, dean of Christ Church, (afterwards bishop of Oxford,) who published the other works of the author of the Whole Duty of Man, namely, the Ladies' Calling, the Art of Contentment, the Government of the Tongue, the Lively Oracles given unto us, &c., in folio, at Oxford, in 1675-78, and wrote the preface which he prefixed to this edition, and who was the only person then living who knew the author of the Whole Duty of Man, gave this book of the Whole Duty of Man to his bookbinder, and Hawkins, his bookseller in London, with other pieces of Mr. Woodhead's, and ordered Mr. Woodhead's name to be added to the title of this, as well as of the other works which he gave to be bound. If Mr. Woodhead wrote that celebrated work, it was before he travelled abroad, or had any thoughts of embracing the Catholic faith." The same anecdote has been mentioned to the editor by the late Mr. Challoner. XIII. Some time after our author's return to England, from his travels with Mr. Edward Howard, he was chosen president of the English College at St. Omer's. That college was originally founded by the English Jesuits. On the expulsion of the society from France, the English Jesuits shared the fate of their brethren. On his being named to the presidency of the English college at St. Omer's, doubts were suggested to him on the justice or propriety of his accepting the presidency of a college which, in fact, belonged to others. He advised with the bishop of Amiens and the bishop of Boulogne upon this point, and they both agreed in opinion that he might safely accept it. He continued president of the college of St. Omer's till his decease. It was expected by his friends, that his office of president would leave him much time for his studies; but these expectations wholly failed. He was immediately appointed vicar-general to the bishops of Arras, St. Omer's, Ipres, and Boulogne. This involved him in an immensity of business; and, his reputation continually increasing, he was consulted from every part of France on affairs of the highest moment. The consequence was, that, contrary to the wishes and expectations of his friends, he never was so little master of his time as he was during his residence at St. Omer's. The editor has been favored with the following letter, which will show the esteem in which our author was held by those who, at the time we speak of, lived in habits of intimacy with him. "You have occasioned me, sir, to experience a heartfelt satisfaction in allowing me an intercourse with you on the subject of the late Mr. Butler, your uncle; and to communicate to you the particulars within my knowledge, concerning the life, the eminent virtues, and uncommon abilities of that celebrated gentleman. Never was I acquainted with any of my contemporaries who was at once so learned, so pious, so gentle, so modest; and, whatever high opinion might be conceived of him from a perusal of his immortal work on the Lives of the Saints,--that masterpiece of the most extensive erudition, of the most enlightened criticism, and of that unction which commands the affections,--such an opinion is greatly inferior to the admiration which he inspired in those persons who, like myself, had the happiness to live in intimate connection with him. The paternal kindness, and, I am bold {036} say it, the tender friendship with which he honored my youth, have indelibly engraved on my heart the facts I am about to relate to you with the most scrupulous exactness. Monsieur de Conzie, now bishop of Arras, having been raised to the see of St. Omer's in 1766, caused me to be elected a canon in his cathedral church: he nominated me one of his vicars-general, and I repaired thither on the 5th of October, 1767. "That prelate, whose high reputation dispenses with my encomiums, mentioned your uncle to me on the very day of my arrival. 'I am here possessed,' said he; 'of a hidden treasure; and that is Mr. Butler, the president of the English college. I for the first time saw him,' added he, 'during the ceremony of my installation. He was kneeling on the pavement in the midst of the crowd; his countenance and deportment had something heavenly in them: I inquired who he was, and upon his being named to me, I caused him, though reluctant, to be conducted to one of the first stalls in the choir. I will entreat him,' said moreover the prelate, 'to favor you with his friendship: he shall be your counsel; you cannot have a better.' I made answer, that Monsieur de Beaumont, the illustrious archbishop of Paris, in whose palace I had enjoyed the invaluable benefit of passing two years, had often spoken of him to me in the most honorable terms; that he had commissioned me, at my departure, to renew to him the assurance of his particular esteem; and that I would neglect nothing to be thought worthy of his benevolence. "I was so happy as to succeed in it within a short time. His lordship, the bishop, condescended to wish the joy of it, and intrusted me with the design he had formed of honoring the assembly of his vicars-general, by making him our colleague. I was present when he delivered to him his credentials; which moment will never forsake my remembrance. I beheld your dear uncle suddenly casting himself at the prelate's knees, and beseeching him, with tears in his eyes, not to lay that burden upon him. _Ah! my lord_, said he to him, _I am unable to fill so important a place_; nor did he yield but upon an express command: _Since you require it shall be so_, said he, _I will obey; that is the first of my duties_. What an abundant source of reflections was this for me, who was then but twenty-six years of age. It was then especially that I resolved to make up for my inexperience, by taking him for my guide who had been giving me that great example of Christian humility. "The bishop had already showed him his confidence, by placing his own nephew in the English college, as also that of the bishop of Senlis, his friend, and the son of one of his countrymen. I had the charge of visiting them frequently. I used to send for them to dine with me on every school holiday. If one of them had been guilty of a fault, the punishment I inflicted was, that he should desire Mr. Butler to keep him at home. But it almost always proved useless; he would himself bring me the delinquent, and earnestly solicit his pardon; _Depend upon it_, said he to me one day, _he will behave better for the future_. I asked him what proof he had of it. _Sir_, answered he, in the presence of the lad, _he has told me so_. I could not forbear smiling at such confidence in the promises of a school-boy of ten years old; but was not long before I repented. In a private conversation he observed to me, that one of the most important rules in education is to impress children with a persuasion that the vices we would keep them from, such as lying and breaking one's word, are too shocking to be thought possible. A maxim this worthy of the great Fenelon, his beloved model, and which common tutors do not so much as surmise. "Those three youths, our common functions of vicars-general, the delightful company of your uncle, and the frequent need I had of drawing from that source of light, carried me almost every day to the English college. I could delineate to you, sir, his ordinary course of life in the inward administration of that house; I could tell you of his assiduousness at all the exercises; of his constant watchfulness; of the public and private exhortations he made to his pupils, with that persuasive eloquence we meet with in his writings; of his pious solicitude for all their wants; and of their tender attachment to him. His room was continually filled with them. He never put on the harsh end threatening magisterial look: he was like a fond mother surrounded by her children; or he was rather, according to the expression, the eagle not disdaining to teach her young ones to soar, and carrying {037} them on her expanded wings, to save them from a fatal fall. But I leave to his worthy co-operators the satisfaction of detailing to you those particulars, which I only transiently beheld, and which I never saw without being affected. How many interesting anecdotes will they have to acquaint you with! "Every instant that Mr. Butler did not dedicate to the government of his college he employed in study; and, when obliged to go abroad, he would read as he walked along the streets. I have met him with a book under each arm, and a third in his hands, and have been told that, travelling one day on horseback, he fell a reading, giving the horse his full liberty. The creature used it to eat a few ears of corn that grew on the road-side. The owner came in haste, swearing he would be indemnified. Mr. Butler, who knew nothing of the damage done, no sooner perceived it, than, blushing, he said to the countryman, with his usual mildness, that his demand was just; he then draws out a louis d'or, and gives it to the fellow, who would have been very well satisfied with a few pence, makes repeated apologies to him, easily obtains forgiveness, and goes on his way. "Notwithstanding such constant application, the extensiveness of his knowledge was next to a prodigy. Whenever I happened to consult him on any extraordinary question, upon which the authors most familiar to us were silent, he would take me to the library of the abbey of St. Bertin, would ask for old writers, whose names I was scarce acquainted with, and point out to me, even before I had opened them, the section and chapter in which I should find my difficulty solved. "Nor would I have you think, sir, that the ecclesiastical sciences were the only that he had applied to. A couple of anecdotes I am going to relate, and which I could hardly have believed had I not been witness to them, will prove to you that every kind of information was reunited in his intellect, without the smallest confusion. "Monsieur de Conzie, after his translation from the bishopric of St. Omer's to that of Arras, invited him to come and see him there. My brother vicars and myself sought one day for a question which he should not be able to answer, and thought we had found one. Accordingly, we asked him what was the name of a pear called, in French, _bon Chrétien_, before the coming of Christ, and Christianity. _There are_, answered he, _two systems on that point_; and then quotes as two modern naturalists, sets forth their opinions, and unfolds to us the authorities with which they backed them. I had the curiosity to ascertain one of those quotations, and found it accurate to a tittle. "A few days after, the bishop of Arras, having his drawing-room filled with company, Mr. President was announced. The bystanders thinking it to be the first president of the council d'Artois, opened him a gangway to come at the prelate; they behold a priest enter, whom, by his bashful and modest looks, they take for some country curate, and, by a simultaneous motion, they close up the passage which they had made. The bishop, who had already descried his dear president of the English college, perceived also the motion and resolved to put the authors of it to the blush. He observed in one corner of the room a group of military men; he goes up to them, and, finding they were conversing upon the question keenly debated at that time, whether in battle the _thin order_, observed in our days, be preferable to the _deep_ order of the ancients; he called to Mr. Butler, and asked him what he thought of it. I then heard that amazing man talk on the art of war with the modest tone of a school-boy, and the depth of the most consummate military man. I observed admiration in the countenance of all those officers; and saw several of them, who, being too far off, stood up upon chairs to hear and see him. They altogether put to him questions upon questions, and each of his answers caused fresh applause. "His lordship left us to go and join another group, consisting of magistrates, who were discussing a point of common law; and, in like manner, called upon his oracle, who, by the sagacity of his reflections, bore away all suffrages, and united their several opinions. "The prelate, next, taking him by the hand, presented him to the ladies, seated round the fireplace, and asked him, whether the women in ancient times wore their head-dresses as high as ours then did. _Fashions_, answered he, _like the spokes of a wheel turning on its axis, are always replaced by those very ones which they have set aside_. He then described to us the dresses, both of the men and women, in the various ages of our monarchy: _and, to go still further back_, added he, _the {038} statue of a female Druid has been found, whose head-dress measured half a yard to height; I have been myself to see it, and have measured it._ "What astonished me most was, that studies so foreign to the supernatural objects of piety, shed over his soul neither aridity nor lukewarmness. He referred all things to God, and his discourse always concluded by some Christian reflections, which he skilfully drew from the topic of the conversation. His virtue was neither minute nor pusillanimous: religion had, in his discourse as well as in his conduct, that solemn gravity which can alone make it worthy of the Supreme Being. Ever composed, he feared neither contradictions nor adversities: he dreaded nothing but praises. He never allowed himself a word that could injure any one's reputation; his noble generosity was such, that, as often as I happened to prize in his presence any one of his books, or of the things belonging to him, I the same day found them in my possession. In short, I will confess it, to my confusion, that for a long time I sought to discover a failing in him; and I protest, by all that is most sacred, that I never knew one in him. These are the facts, sir, you were desirous of knowing; in the relation of which I have used no exaggeration, nor have had anything to dissemble. I have often related these facts to my wondering friends, as a relief to my heart; and indeed, notwithstanding the distance of time, they recur as fresh to my remembrance as if just transacted before my eyes. "I was at a distance from St. Omer's when death robbed me of my respectable friend. Time has not alleviated the sorrow which the loss of him fixed deeply in my breast. I have preciously preserved some of his presents, and carefully concealed them at my leaving France. May I one day find again those dear pledges of a friendship, the recollection of which is, in our calamities, the sweetest of my consolations. I have the honor to be, with the highest regard, sir, your most obedient, &c. "L'Abbé de la SEPOUZE. "_At the Hague, December_ 30, 1794." During our author's stay at St. Omer's, a thesis was printed and publicly defended, in a neighboring university, which excited his attention. Mr. Joseph Berington presided at the defensions of it. It certainly contained many propositions which were offensive to pious ears; but respectable persons are said to have declared, that it contained nothing materially contrary to the faith of the Roman Catholic church; and the editor feels it a duty incumbent on him to add, that one of the bishops, to whom our author was grand-vicar, mentioned to the editor, that he thought his vicar had shown too much vivacity on that occasion. Footnotes: 1. Sieni aquila provocans ad volandam pullos suos et super eos volians expandit alas suas--_Deuteron_. cap. 22. XIV. Both from our author's letters, and from what is recollected of his conversations, it appears that he often explicitly declared that, if powerful measures were not adopted to prevent it, a _revolution in France_ would take place, both in church and state. He thought irreligion, and a general corruption of manners, gained ground everywhere. On the decay of piety in France, he once mentioned in confidence to the editor a circumstance so shocking, that even after what has publicly happened, the editor does not think himself justifiable in mentioning it in this place. He seems to have augured well on the change of ministry which took place on the expulsion of the Choiseuls. He was particularly acquainted with the cardinal de Bernis, and the mareschal de Muy. Of the latter he writes thus in one of his letters. "Mr. de Muy, who has sometimes called upon me, and often writes to me, as the most affectionate of friends, is unanimously called the most virtuous and upright nobleman in the kingdom. The late dauphin's projects in favor of religion he will endeavor to execute. He is minister of war. The most heroic piety will be promoted by him by every method: if I gave you an account of his life, you would be charmed by so bright a virtue." XV. Our author had _projected many works_ besides those which we have mentioned. Among them his Treatise on the _Moveable Feasts_ may be reckoned. He very much lamented that he had not time to complete: what he had prepared of it, he thought too prolix, and, if he had lived to revise it, he would have made great alterations in it. Some time after his decease, it was published under the inspection of Mr. Challoner. He proposed writing the lives of bishop Fisher and sir Thomas {039} More, and had made great collections, with a view to such a work: some of them are in the hands of the editor, and are at the command of any person to whom they can be of use. He had begun a treatise to explain and establish the truths of _natural and revealed religion_; he was dissatisfied with what Bergier had published on those subjects. He composed many _sermons_, and an immense number of _pious discourses_. From what remained of the three last articles, _the three volumes of his discourses_, which have appeared since his decease, were collected. The editor is happy in this opportunity of mentioning his obligations to the Rev. Mr. Jones, for revising and superintending the publication of them. They are acknowledged to possess great merit; the morality of them is entitled to great praise; the discourse on conversation shows a considerable knowledge of life and manners. Having mentioned his sermons, it is proper to add, that as a preacher he almost wholly failed. His sermons were sometimes interesting and pathetic; but they were always desultory, and almost always immeasurably long. The editor has lately published his _Short Life of Sir Toby Matthews_. He was very communicative of his manuscripts, and consequently many of them were lost; so that, on an attentive examination of them, after his decease, none but those we have mentioned were thought fit for the press. XVI. The number of _letters_ written by our author exceeds belief; if they could be collected, they would be found to contain an immense mass of interesting matter on many important topics of religion and literature. He corresponded with many persons of distinction, both among the communicants with the see of Rome, and the separatists from her. Among the former may be reckoned the learned and elegant Lambertini, who afterwards, under the name of Benedict XIV., was honored with the papal crown: among the latter may be reckoned Dr. Louth, the bishop first of Oxford, afterwards of London, the celebrated translator of Isaiah. In a Latin note on Michaelis, our author speaks of that prelate as his intimate acquaintance, "_necessitate conjunctissimus_." He had the happiness to enjoy the friendship and esteem of many persons distinguished by rank, talents, or virtue. The holy bishop of Amiens spoke of him in the highest terms of admiration and regard. In the life written in French of that excellent prelate, he is mentioned "as the most learned man in Europe." He is styled by father Brotier, in his preface to his edition of Tacitus, "sacrâ eruditione perceleber." The late Mr. Philips, in the preface to his life of cardinal Pole, mentioning the edition of his letters by cardinal Quirini, expresses himself thus: "They were procured for the author by Mr. Alban Butler, to whom the public is indebted for the most useful and valuable work which has appeared in the English language on the Lives of the Saints, and which has been so much esteemed in France, that it is now translating into the language of a country celebrated for biography, with large additions by the author. This gentleman's readiness on all occasions to assist the author in his undertaking, was answerable to his extensive knowledge and general acquaintance with whatever has any relation to erudition." Our author was not satisfied with the French translation of his work: the writers professed to translate it freely; but he thought that they abused the privilege of free translation, that they misrepresented his meaning, that their style was affected, and that the devotional cast which he had labored to give the original, was wholly lost in their translation. The editor has heard that a translation of it was begun in the Spanish and Italian languages, but he has seen no such translation. Dr. Kennicot spoke loudly of our author's readiness and disinterested zeal to oblige. Even the stern Mr. Hollis mentions him in his memoirs with some degree of kindness. No person was more warmly attached to his friends. With his affectionate and generous disposition, no one was more sensible of unkindness than he was; but none forgave it more readily. It was his rule to cultivate those who were inimical to him by every mark of attention and act of kindness; and rather to seek than avoid an intercourse with them. His incessant attention to his studies frequently made him absent in society: this sometimes produced whimsical incidents. Whatever delight he found in his literary pursuits, he never sacrificed his religious duties to them, or permitted them to trespass on _his exercises of devotion_. Huet, whom, from his resemblance to our author in unremitted application to study, the editor has often had occasion to mention, laments his own contrary conduct in {040} very feeling terms: "I was entirely carried," says he, (_De Rebus ad eum Pertinentibus_, 174,) "by the pleasure found in learning: the endless variety which it affords had taken up my thoughts, and seized all the avenues of my mind, that I was altogether incapable of any sweet and intimate communication with God. When I withdrew into religious retirement, in order to recollect my scattered thoughts, and fix them on heavenly things, I experienced a dryness and insensibility of soul by which the Holy Spirit seemed to punish this excessive bent to learning." This misfortune our author never experienced. A considerable portion of his time was devoted to prayer. When it was in his power, he said mass every day; when he travelled, he rose at a very early hour, that he might hear it: he never neglected the prayer of the _Angelus_, and, when he was not in the company of strangers, he said it on his knees. He recommended a frequent approach to the sacrament of the altar: some, under his spiritual direction, communicated almost every day. The _morale sevère_ of the Jansenists he strongly reprobated in discourse, and no person receded further from it in practice: but he was an admirer of the style of the gentlemen of Port Royal, and spoke with praise of their general practice of avoiding the insertion of the pronoun _I_ in their writings. He thought the Bible should not be read by very young persons, or by those who were wholly uninformed: even the translation of the whole divine office of the church he thought should not be given to the faithful promiscuously. In the printed correspondence of Fenelon, a long letter by him on frequent communion, and one on reading the Bible, (they deserve to be translated and generally read,) express exactly our author's sentiments on those subjects. All singularity in devotion was offensive to him. He exhorted every one to a perfect discharge of the ordinary duties of his situation, to a conformity to the divine will, both in great and little occasions, to good temper and mildness in his intercourse with his neighbor, to an habitual recollection of the divine presence, to a scrupulous attachment to truth, to retirement, to extreme sobriety. These, he used to say, were the virtues of the primitive Christians, and among them, he said, we should always look for perfect models of Christian virtue. Fleury's account of them, in his _Manners of the Christians_, he thought excellent, and frequently recommended the perusal of it. He exhorted all to devotion to the Mother of God; many, under his care, said her office every day. The advantage of mental prayer he warmly inculcated. In the conduct of souls he was all mildness and patience: motives of love were oftener in his mouth than motives of fear: "for to him that loves, nothing," he used to say, with the author of the Imitation of Christ, "is difficult." He often sacrificed his studies and private devotions to the wants of his neighbor. When it was in his power he attended the ceremony of the _salut_ at the parish church; and on festivals particularly solemnized by any community of the towns in which he resided, he usually assisted at the divine service in their churches. He was very abstemious in his diet; and considered systematic sensuality as the ultimate degradation of human nature. He never was heard to express so much disgust, as at conversations where, for a great length of time, the pleasures of the table, or the comparative excellence of dishes, had been the sole topic of conversation; yet he was very far from being an enemy to rational mirth, and he always exerted himself to entertain and promote the pleasures of his friends. In all his proceedings he was most open and unreserved: from selfishness none could be more free. Dr. Kennicot often said that, of the many he had employed in his great biblical undertaking, none had shown more activity or more disinterestedness than our author. He was zealous in the cause of religion, but his zeal was without bitterness or animosity: polemic acrimony was unknown to him. He never forgot that in every heretic he saw a brother Christian; in every infidel he saw a brother man. He greatly admired _Drouen de Sacramentis_, and _Boranga's Theology_. _Tournely_ he preferred much to his antagonist _Billouart_. He thought _Houbigant_ too bold a critic, and objected some novelties to the _Hebraizing friars of the Rue St. Honoré_. He believed the letters of Ganganelli, with the exception of two or three at most, to be spurious. Their spuriousness has been since placed beyond controversy by the _Diatribe Clementine_, polished in 1777. _Caraccioli_, the editor of them, in his _Remerciement à l'Auteur de l'Année Littéraire de la part de l'Editeur des Lettres du Pape Ganganelli_, acknowledges that he filled sixty pages at least of them with thoughts and insertions of his own compositions. In the handwriting of a gentleman, remarkable for his great accuracy, the editor has before him the following {041} account of our author's sentiments on usury: "Mr. Alban Butler's opinion of receiving interest for money, in a letter dated the 20th of June, 1735, but copied anno 1738.--In England, and in some other countries, the laws allow of five per cent., and even an action at law for the payment of it. This is often allowable in a trading country; and, as it is the common practice in England, I shall not blame any one for taking or even exacting interest-money; therefore will say nothing against it in general: but, in my own regard, I am persuaded it is not warrantable in conscience, but in three cases; viz. either for a gain ceasing, as merchants lend money which they would otherwise employ in trade, _lucrum cessans_: or, secondly, some detriment the lender suffers by it, _damnum emergens_: or, thirdly, some hazard in the principal money, by its being exposed to some more than ordinary danger in being recovered safely. Some time afterwards the said Alban Butler was convinced there was no occasion of scruple in receiving interest for money, so that it was at a moderate or low rate of interest; and that there was reason to believe the borrower made full the advantage of the money that he paid for it by the interest." Our author's love of learning continued with him to the last. Literary topics were frequently the subject of his familiar conversation. He was a great admirer of what is called the simple style of writing; and once mentioned that, if he could acquire a style by wishing for it, he should wish for that of Herodotus. He thought the orator appeared too much in Cicero's philosophical works, except his Offices; that work he considered to be one of the most perfect models of writing which have come down to us from antiquity. He professed to discover the man of high breeding and elegant society in the commentaries of Cæsar; and to find expressions in the writings of Cicero which showed a person accustomed to address a mob, the _foex Romani populi_. He believed the works of Plato had been much interpolated; and once mentioned, without blame, father Hardouin's opinion that they were wholly a fabrication of the middle age. Of the modern Latin poets, he most admired Wallius, and in an illness desired his poems to be read to him. He himself sometimes composed Latin poetry. He preferred the _Paradisus Animæ_ to its rival prayer-book, the _Coeleste Palmetum_. Of the last he spoke with great contempt. The little rhyming offices, which fill a great part of it, are not very interesting; but the explanation in it of the psalms in our Lady's office, of the psalms in the office for the dead, of the gradual and seven penitential psalms, and of the psalms sung at vespers and complin, is excellent. A person would deserve well of the English Catholics who should translate it into English. The Coeleste Palmetum was the favorite prayer-book of the Low Countries. By Foppen's _Bibliotheca Belgica_, it appears that the first edition of it was printed at Cologne, in 1660, and that, during the first eight years after its publication, more than 14,000 copies of it were sold. Most readers will be surprised, when they are informed that our author preferred the sermons of Bossuet to those of Bourdaloue but in this he has not been absolutely singular; the celebrated cardinal de Maury has avowed the same opinion; and, what is still more extraordinary, it has also been avowed by father Neuville. Bossuet's Discourse upon Universal History may be ranked among the noblest efforts of human genius that ever issued from the press. In the chronological part of it, the scenes pass rapidly but distinctly; almost every word is a sentence, and every sentence presents an idea, or excites a sentiment of the sublimest kind. The third part of it, containing his reflections on the events which produced the rise and fall of the ancient empires of the earth, is not inferior to the celebrated work of Montesquieu on the greatness and fall of the Roman empire; but, in the second part, the genius of Bossuet appears in its full strength. He does not lead his reader through a maze of argumentation; he never appears in a stretch of exertion; but, with a continued splendor of imagery, magnificence of language, and vehemence of argument, which nothing can withstand, he announces the sublime truths of the Christian religion, and the sublime evidence that supports them, with a grandeur and force that overpower and disarm resistance. Something of this is to be found in many passages of his sermons; but, in general, both the language and the arguments of them are forced and unnatural. His letters to the nuns are very interesting. Let those who affect to talk slightingly of the devotions of the religious, recollect that the sublime Bossuet bestowed a considerable portion of his time upon them. The same pen that wrote the discourse on universal history, the funeral oration of the prince of Condé, and the History of the Variations, was at the command of every religious who requested {042} from Bossuet a letter of advice or consolation. "Was he at Versailles, was he engaged on any literary work of importance, was he employed on a pastoral visit of his diocese, still," say the Benedictine editors of his works, "he always found time to write to his correspondents on spiritual concerns." In this he had a faithful imitator in our author. No religious community addressed themselves to him who did not find in him a zealous director, an affectionate and steady friend. For several among the religious he had the highest personal esteem. Those who remember him during his residence at St. Omer's, will recollect his singular respect for Mrs. More, the superior of the English convent of Austins at Bruges. He was, in general, an enemy to the private pensions of nuns; (see Boudon's Letter _Sur le Relâchement qui s'est introduit dans l'Observation du Voeu de Pauvreté_, Lettres de Boudon, vol. 1, p. 500;) but in this, as in every other instance, he wished the reform, when determined upon, to proceed gently and gradually. All who leave had an opportunity of observing the English communities since their arrival in this country, have been edified by their amiable and heroic virtues. Their resignation to the persecution which they have so undeservedly suffered, their patience, their cheerfulness, their regular discharge of their religious observances, and, above all, their noble confidence in Divine Providence, have gained them the esteem of all who know them. At a village near London, a small community of Carmelites lived for several months, almost without the elements of fire, water, or air. The two first (for water, unfortunately, was there a vendible commodity) they could little afford to buy; and from the last (their dress confining them to their shed) they were excluded. In the midst of this severe distress, which no spectator could behold unmoved, they were happy. Submission to the will of God, fortitude, and cheerfulness, never deserted them. A few human tears would fall from them when they thought of their convent; and with gratitude, the finest of human feelings, they abounded; in other respects they seemed of another world. "Whatever," says Dr. Johnson, "withdraws us from the power of our senses; whatever makes the past, the distant, or the future, predominate over the present, advances us in the dignity of human beings." It would be difficult to point out persons to whom this can be better applied than these venerable ladies, whose lives are more influenced by the past, the distant, or the future, or so little influenced by the present. Our author was not so warm on any subject as the calumnies against the religious of the middle age: he considered the civilization of Europe to be owing to them. When they were charged with idleness, he used to remark the immense tracts of land, which, from the rudest state of nature, they converted to a high state of husbandry in the Hercynian wood, the forests of Champagne and Burgundy, the morasses of Holland, and the fens of Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire. When ignorance was imputed to them, he used to ask, what author of antiquity had reached us, for whose works we were not indebted to the monks. He could less endure that they should be considered as instruments of absolute power to enslave the people: when this was intimated, he observed that, during the period which immediately followed the extinction of the Carlovingian dynasty, when the feudal law absolutely triumphed over monarchy, the people were wholly left to themselves, and must have sunk into an absolute state of barbarism, if it had not been for the religious establishments. Those, he said, softened the manners of the conquerors, afforded refuge to the vanquished, preserved an intercourse between nations: and, when the feudal chiefs rose to the rank of monarchs, stood as a rampart between them and the people. He thought St. Thomas of Canterbury a much injured character. He often pointed out that rich tract of country, which extends from St. Omer's to Liege, as a standing refutation of those who asserted that convents and monasteries were inimical to the populousness of a country: he observed, that the whole income of the smaller houses, and two-thirds of the revenues of the greater houses, were constantly spent within twenty miles round their precincts; that their lands were universally let at low rents; that every abbey had a school for the instruction of its tenants, and that no human institution was so well calculated to promote the arts of painting, architecture, and sculpture, works in iron and bronze, and every other species of workmanship, as abbeys or monasteries, and their appendages. "Thus," he used to say, "though the country in view was originally a marsh, and has for more than a century wholly survived its commerce, it is the most populous country in Europe; and presents on the face of it as great a display {043} of public and private strength, wealth, and affluence, as can be found in any other part of the world." Fortunately for him, he did not live to be witness to the domiciliary visit which, in our times, it has received from France. What would he have thought, if any person had told him, that, before the expiration of the century in which he lived, the French themselves would, in perfect hatred of Christ, destroy the finest churches of France? At their profanation of his favorite church of St. Bertin, in the town of St. Omer's, that is said to have happened which Victor Vitensis relates to have happened in the persecution of the Vandals, (Hist. Pers. Van. 31:) "Introeuntes maximo cum furore, corpus Christi et sanguinem pavimento sparserunt, et illud pollutis pedibus calcaverunt." XVII. Our author enjoyed through life a good state of health, but somewhat impaired it by intense application to study. Some years before his decease he had a slight stroke of the palsy, which affected his speech. He died on the 15th of May, 1773, in the sixty-third year of his age. A decent monument of marble was raised to his memory in the chapel of the English college at St. Omer's, with the following inscription upon it, composed by Mr. Bannister: Hic jacet R. D. Albanus Butler (Bouteillier) Prænobilis Angius. Sacerdos et Alumnus Collegii Anglorum Duaci. Ibidem S. T. Professor, Postmodum Missionarius in Patria. Præses II. Collegii Regii Anglorum Audomari. Vicarius Generalis Illustrissimorum Philomelien. Deboren. Atrebaten. Audomarea Ex vetustâ Ortus prosapiâ In utrisque Angliæ et Galliæ Regnis Amplâ et Florente. Suavissimis Moribus, Summis acceptissimus, Infimis benignus, Omnium necessitatibus inserviens, Pro Deo. Propter Doctrinam et Ingenium, Doctissimis, Propter Pietatem, Bonis omnibus, Percharus. Nobilissimæe Juventutis Institutionem, Sacrarum Virginum curam, Reverendissimorum Antistitum negotia, Suscepit, promovit, expedivit, Opera, Scriptis, Hortatubus. Sanctorum rebus gestis a Puentiâ inhærens, Acta omnia pernoscens, Mentem et Sapientiam altê imbibens. Multa scripsit de Sanctorum vitis, Plena Sanctorum Spiritu, librata judicio, polita stylo, Summæ ubertatis et omnigenæ eruditiouis. Apastolicæ sedis et omnis officii semper observantissimus. Pie obiit 15 Mensis Maii 1773. Natus annis 63. Sacerdos 39. Præses 7 Hoc m[oe]rens posuit Carolus Butler Monumentum Pietatis sum in Patruum Amantissimum. {044 blank} {045} PREFACE As in corporal distempers a total loss of appetite, which no medicines can restore, forebodes certain decay and death; so in the spiritual life of the soul, a neglect or disrelish of pious reading and instruction is a most fatal symptom. What hopes can we entertain of a person to whom the science of virtue and of eternal salvation doth not seem interesting, or worth his application? "It is impossible," says St. Chrysostom,[1] "that a man should be saved, who neglects assiduous pious reading or consideration. Handicraftsmen will rather suffer hunger and all other hardships than lose the instruments of their trade, knowing them to be the means of their subsistence." No less criminal and dangerous is the disposition of those who misspend their precious moments in reading romances and play-books, which fill the mind with a worldly spirit, with a love of vanity, pleasure, idleness, and trifling; which destroy and lay waste all the generous sentiments of virtue in the heart, and sow there the seeds of every vice, which extend their baneful roots over the whole soil. Who seeks nourishment from poisons? What food is to the body, that our thoughts and reflections are to the mind: by them the affections of the soul are nourished. The chameleon changes its color as it is affected by sadness, anger, or joy; or by the color upon which it sits: and we see an insect borrow its lustre and hue from the plant or leaf upon which it feeds. In like manner, what our meditations and affections are, such will our souls become, either holy and spiritual or earthly and carnal. By pious reading the mind is instructed and enlightened, and the affections of the heart are purified and inflamed. It is recommended by St. Paul as the summary of spiritual advice.[2] Devout persons never want a spur to assiduous reading or meditation. They are insatiable in this exercise, and, according to the golden motto of Thomas à Kempis, they find their chief delight _in a closet, with a good book_.[3] Worldly and tepid Christians stand certainly in the utmost need of this help to virtue. The world is a whirlpool of business, pleasure, and sin. Its torrent is always beating upon their hearts, ready to break in and bury them under its flood, unless frequent pious reading and consideration oppose a strong fence to its waves. The more deeply a person is immersed in its tumultuous cares, so much the greater ought to be his solicitude to find leisure to breathe, after the fatigues and dissipation of business and company; to plunge his heart, by secret prayer, in the ocean of the divine immensity, and, by pious reading, to afford his soul some spiritual refection; as the wearied husbandman, returning from his labor, recruits his spent vigor and exhausted strength, by allowing his body necessary refreshment and repose. The lives of the saints furnish the Christian with a daily spiritual entertainment, {046} which is not less agreeable than affecting and instructive. For in sacred biography the advantages of devotion and piety are joined with the most attractive charms of history. The method of forming men to virtue by example, is, of all others, the shortest, the most easy, and the best adapted to all circumstances and dispositions. Pride recoils at precepts, but example instructs without usurping the authoritative air of a master; for, by example, a man seems to advise and teach himself. It does its work unperceived, and therefore with less opposition from the passions, which take not the alarm. Its influence is communicated with pleasure. Nor does virtue here appear barren and dry as in discourses, but animated and living, arrayed with all her charms, exerting all her powers, and secretly obviating the pretences, and removing the difficulties which self-love never fails to raise. In the lives of the saints we see the most perfect maxims of the gospel reduced to practice, and the most heroic virtue made the object of our senses, clothed as it were with a body, and exhibited to view in its most attractive dress. Here, moreover, we are taught the means by which virtue is obtained, and learn the precipices and snares which we are to shun, and the blinds and by-ways in which many are bewildered and misled in its pursuit. The example of the servants of God points out to us the true path, and leads us as it were by the hand into it, sweetly inviting and encouraging us to walk cheerfully in the steps of those that are gone before us. Neither is it a small advantage that, by reading the history of the saints, we are introduced into the acquaintance of the greatest personages who have ever adorned the world, the brightest ornaments of the church militant, and the shining stars and suns of the triumphant, our future companions in eternal glory. While we admire the wonders of grace and mercy, which God hath displayed in their favor, we are strongly moved to praise his adorable goodness. And, in their penitential lives and holy maxims, we learn the sublime lessons of practical virtue, which their assiduous meditation on the divine word, the most consummate experience in their deserts, watchings, and commerce with heaven, and the lights of the Holy Ghost, their interior Master, discovered to them. But it is superfluous to show from reason the eminent usefulness of the example, and the history of the saints, which the most sacred authority recommends to us as one of the most powerful helps to virtue. It is the admonition of St. Paul, that we remember our holy teachers, and that, having the end of their conversation before our eyes, we imitate their faith.[4] For our instruction the Holy Ghost himself inspired the prophets to record the lives and actions of many illustrious saints in the holy scriptures. The church could not, in a more solemn manner, recommend to us to have these great models often before our eyes, than by inserting in her daily office an abstract of the lives of the martyrs and other saints; which constant sacred custom is derived from the primitive ages, in which the histories of the martyrs were publicly read at the divine office, in the assemblies of the faithful, on their annual festivals. This is testified of the acts of St. Polycarp in the life of St. Pionius, and, by St. Austin,[5] of those of SS. Perpetua and Felicitas, &c. The council of Africa, under Aurelius, archbishop of Carthage, in 397, mentions the acts of the martyrs being allowed to be read in the church on their anniversary days.[6] St. Cæsarius permitted persons that were sick and weak, to hear the histories of the martyrs sitting, when they were of an uncommon length; but complained that some who were healthful unreasonably took the same liberty.[7] {047} All great masters of a spiritual life exceedingly extol the advantages which accrue to souls from the devout reading of the lives of eminent saints; witness St. Nilus,[8] St. Chrysostom, and others. Many fathers have employed their pens in transmitting down to posterity the actions of holy men. And the histories of saints were the frequent entertainment and delight of all pious persons, who ever found in them a most powerful means of their encouragement and advancement in virtue, as St. Bonaventure writes of St. Francis of Assisium. "By the remembrance of the saints, as by the touch of glowing stones of fire, he was himself enkindled, and converted into a divine flame." St. Stephen of Grandmont read their lives every day, and often on his knees. The abbot St. Junian, St. Antoninus, St. Thomas, and other holy men are recorded to have read assiduously the lives of the saints, and by their example to have daily inflamed themselves with fervor in all virtues. St. Boniface of Mentz sent over to England for books of the lives of saints,[9] and, by reading the acts of the martyrs, animated himself with the spirit of martyrdom. This great apostle of Germany, St. Sigiran and others, always carried with them in their journeys the acts of the martyrs, that they might read them wherever they travelled. It is related of St. Anastasius the martyr, that "while he read the conflicts and victories of the martyrs, he watered the book with his tears, and prayed that he might suffer the like for Christ. And so much was he delighted with this exercise that he employed in it all his leisure hours." St. Teresa declares how much the love of virtue was kindled in her breast by this reading, even when she was a child. Joseph Scaliger, a rigid Calvinist critic, writes as follows on the acts of certain primitive martyrs:[10] "The souls of pious persons are so strongly affected in reading them, that they always lay down the book with regret. This every one may experience in himself. I with truth aver, that there is nothing in the whole history of the church with which I am so much moved: when I read them I seem no longer to possess myself." It would be very easy to compile a volume of the remarkable testimonies of eminent and holy men concerning this most powerful help to virtue, and to produce many examples of sinners, who have been converted by it to an heroic practice of piety. St. Austin mentions two courtiers who were moved on the spot to forsake the world, and became fervent monks, by accidentally reading the life of St. Antony.[11] St. John Columbin, from a rich, covetous, and passionate nobleman, was changed into a saint, by casually reading the life of St. Mary of Egypt.[12] The duke of Joyeuse, marshal of France, owed his perfect conversion to the reading of the life of St. Francis Borgia, which his servant had one evening laid on the table. To these the example of St. Ignatius of Loyola, and innumerable others might be added. Dr. Palafox, the pious Binni of Osma, in his preface to the fourth tome of the letters of St. Teresa, relates, that an eminent Lutheran minister at Bremen, famous for several works which he had printed against the Catholic church, purchased the life of St. Teresa, written by herself, with a view of attempting to confute it; but, by attentively reading it over, was converted to the Catholic faith, and from that time led a most edifying life. The examples of Mr. Abraham Woodhead and others were not less illustrious. But, to appeal to our own experience--who is not awakened from his spiritual lethargy, and confounded at his own cowardice, when he considers the fervor and courage of the saints? All our pretences and foolish objections are silenced, when we see the most perfect maxims of the gospel {048} demonstrated to be easy by example. When we read how many young noblemen and tender virgins have despised the world, and joyfully embraced the cross and the labors of penance, we feel a glowing flame kindled in our own breasts, and are encouraged to suffer afflictions with patience, and cheerfully to undertake suitable practices of penance. While we see many sanctifying themselves in all states, and making the very circumstances of their condition, whether on the throne, in the army, in the state of marriage, or in the deserts, the means of their virtue and penance, we are persuaded that the practice of perfection is possible also to us, in every lawful profession, and that we need only sanctify our employments by a perfect spirit, and the fervent exercises of religion, to become saints ourselves, without quitting our state in the world. When we behold others, framed of the same frail mould with ourselves, many in age or other circumstances weaker than ourselves, and struggling with greater difficulties, yet courageously surmounting, and trampling upon all the obstacles by which the world endeavored to obstruct their virtuous choice, we are secretly stung within our breasts, feel the reproaches of our sloth, are roused from our state of insensibility, and are forced to cry out, "Cannot you do what such and such have done?" But to wind up this discourse, and draw to a conclusion; whether we consult reason, authority, or experience, we may boldly affirm that, except the sacred writings, no book has reclaimed so many sinners, or formed so many holy men to perfect virtue, as that of _The Lives of Saints_. If we would read to the spiritual profit of our souls, our motive must be a sincere desire of improving ourselves in divine love, in humility, meekness, and other virtues. Curiosity or vanity shuts the door of the heart to the Holy Ghost, and stifles in it all affections of piety. A short and humble petition of the divine light ought to be our preparation; for which we may say with the prophet, "Open thou mine eyes, and I will consider the wonderful things of thy law."[13] We must make the application of what we read to ourselves, entertain pious affections, and form particular resolutions for the practice of virtue. It is the admonition of a great servant of God,[14] "Whatever good instructions you read, unless you resolve and effectually endeavor to practise them with your whole heart, you have not read to the benefit of your soul. For knowledge without works only accuseth and condemneth." Though we cannot imitate all the actions of the saints, we can learn from them to practise humility, patience, and other virtues in a manner suiting our circumstances and state of life; and can pray that we may receive a share in the benedictions and glory of the saints. As they who have seen a beautiful flower-garden, gather a nosegay to smell at the whole day; so ought we, in reading, to cull out some flowers, by selecting certain pious reflections and sentiments with which we are most affected; and these we should often renew during the day; lest we resemble a man who, having looked at him self in the glass, goeth away, and forgetteth what he had seen of himself. Footnotes: 1. St. Chrys. Conc. 3, de Lazaro. t. 1, p. 738, ed. Montfauc. 2. 1 Tim. iv. 13. 3. In angelo cum libello. 4. Heb. xii. 5. St. Aug. Serm. 280, t. 5, p. 1134. 6. Can. 47, Conc. t. 2, p. 1072. 7. St. Cæsar. Serm. 95, vel apud St. Aug. t. 5, Append. Serm. 300. 8. St. Nilius, l. 4, ep. 1, Discipulo suo, p. 458. Item, Tr. e Monasticâ Exercitatione, c. 34 et c. 43, p. 40 et Peristeria, sect. 4, p. 99. 9. St. Bonif. ep. 35, Bibl. Patr. 10. Animadv. in Chronic. Eus. ad ann 2187. 11. Conf. l. 8, c. 6. 12. Fleury, l. 97, n. 2, t. 20. 13. Ps. cviii. 18. 14. Lansperg. Enchir. c. 11. {049} AN INTRODUCTORY DISCOURSE. THE lives of the principal martyrs, fathers, and other more illustrious saints, whose memory is revered in the Catholic church, are here presented to the public. An undertaking of this kind seems not to stand in need of an apology. For such are the advantages and so great the charms of history, that, on every subject, and whatever dress it wears, it always pleases and finds readers. So instructive it is, that it is styled by Cicero, "The mistress of life,"[1] and is called by others, "Moral philosophy exemplified in the lives and actions of mankind."[2] But, of all the parts of history, biography, which describes the lives of great men, seems both the most entertaining, and the most instructive and improving. By a judicious choice and detail of their particular actions, it sets before our eyes a living image of those heroes who have been the object of the admiration of past ages; it exhibits to us a portraiture of their interior virtues and spirit, and gives the most useful and enlarged view of human nature. From the wise maxims, experience, and even mistakes of great men, we learn the most refined lessons of prudence, and are furnished with models for our imitation. Neither is the narration here interrupted, nor the attention of the reader hurried from one object to another, as frequently happens in general history. On these and other accounts are the lives of eminent personages the most agreeable and valuable part of history. But, in the lives of the saints, other great advantages occur. Here are incidentally related the triumphs of the church, the trophies of the most exalted virtue, and the conversion of nations. What are profane histories better than records of scandals? What are the boasted triumphs of an Alexander or a Cæsar but a series of successful plunders, murders, and other crimes? It was the remark of the historian Socrates, that if princes were all lovers of peace and fathers of their people, and if the lives of men were a uniform and steady practice of piety, civil history would be almost reduced to empty dates. This reflection extorted from the pen of a famous wit of our age, in his history of the empire of the West since Charlemagne, the following confession: "This history is scarcely any more than a vast scene of weaknesses, faults, crimes, and misfortunes; among which we find some virtues, and some successful exploits, as fertile valleys are often seen among chains of rocks and precipices. This is likewise the case with other histories."[3] But the lives of the saints are the history of the most exemplary and perfect virtue and prowess. While therefore all other branches of history employ daily so many pens, shall this, which above all others deserves our attention, be alone forgotten? While every other part of the soil is daily raked up, shall the finest spot be left uncultivated? Our antiquaries must think themselves obliged by this essay, as the greatest part of these saints have been the objects of the veneration of the whole Christian world during several ages. Their names stand recorded in the titles of our churches, in our towns, estates, writings, and {050} almost every other monument of our Christian ancestors. If the late learned bishop Tanner, by his _Notitia Monastica_, deserved the thanks of all lovers of antiquity, will they not receive favorably the history of those eminent persons of whom we meet so frequent memorials? Besides the principal saint for each day, in this collection is added a short account of some others who were very remarkable in history, or famous among our ancestors. The English and Scottish churches had, by the mutual intercourse and neighborhood of the nations, a particular devotion to several French saints, as appears from all their ancient breviaries, from a complete English manuscript calendar, written in the reign of Edward IV., now in my hands, and from the titular saints of many monasteries and parishes. Our Norman kings and bishops honored several saints of Aquitain and Normandy by pious foundations which bear their names among us: and portions of the relics of some French saints, as of St. Salvius, kept in the cathedral of Canterbury, have rendered their names illustrious in this kingdom. The mention of such, were it but for the satisfaction of our antiquaries, &c., will, it is to be hoped, be pardoned. Though the limits of this work would not allow long abstracts of these secondary lives, yet some characteristical circumstances are inserted, that these memoirs might not sink into a bare _necrology_, or barren list of dates and names. For, unless a narration be supported with some degree of dignity and spirit, and diversified by the intermixture of various events, it deserves not the name of history; no more than a plot of ground can be called a garden, which is neither variegated with parterres of flowers, nor checkered with walks and beds of useful herbs or shrubs. To answer the title and design of this work, a short account is given of those fathers whose names are famous in the history of the church, and in the schools, but who have never been honored among the saints. But such fathers or other eminent persons are spoken of only in notes upon the lives of certain saints, with which they seem to have some connection. It was the compiler's intention to insert among the lives of the saints an account of none to whom public veneration has not been decreed by the authority of the Holy See, or at least of some particular churches, before this, on many just accounts, was reserved to the chief pastor of the church. The compiler declares that the epithets of Saint and Blessed are never employed in this work, but with entire submission to the decrees of Urban VIII. on this subject; and that if they are anywhere given to persons to whom the supreme pastors of the church have never juridically granted this privilege, no more is meant by them, than such persons are esteemed holy and venerable for the reputation of their virtue; not that they are publicly honored among the saints. The same is to be understood of miracles here related, which have not been judicially examined and approved, the part of an historian differing entirely from an authentic decision of the supreme judge. The actions of several apostles and other illustrious saints were never committed to writing: and, with regard to some others, the records of their transactions, by falling a prey to the moths or flames, have perished in the general wreck: yet their names could not be omitted. If their history affords little to gratify vain curiosity, at least a heart which seeks and loves God will find, even in these scanty memoirs, every thing interesting and entertaining. If the names of some saints have been transmitted down to us without particular accounts of their lives,[4] their virtues shine with no {051} less lustre in heaven; and this very circumstance is pleasing and favorable to humility, which studies and loves to lie concealed and unknown; and it was pointed out by the hidden life of Christ. It is also objected, that certain actions of some saints, which were performed by a special instinct of the Holy Ghost, are to us rather objects of admiration than imitation; but even in these we read lessons of perfect virtue, and a reproach of our own sloth, who dare undertake nothing for God. But some may say, What edification can persons in the world reap from the lives of apostles, bishops, or recluses? To this it may be answered, that though the functions of their state differ from ours, yet patience, humility, penance, zeal, and charity, which all their actions breathe, are necessary virtues in all persons. Christian perfection is in its spirit and essence everywhere the same, how much soever the means or exercises may vary. Though edification be the primary view in works of this nature, the other ends of history are not neglected, as it becomes more entertaining and useful in proportion as it is more clear, complete, and important. This, it is hoped, will excuse certain short digressions which are sometimes inserted, and which the laws of correct writing allow when not too long, frequent, or foreign, when they have a natural connection with the subject, and when the want of regularity is compensated by greater perspicuity and utility. This liberty is more freely taken in parts which would have otherwise seemed barren. Notes are added, which seemed useful to the bulk of those for whom this work was designed, or likely to attract the curiosity of some to whom these lives would otherwise have seemed obscure, or not sufficiently interesting. This method renders sacred biography a more universal improvement in useful knowledge, and by enlarging the view, becomes more satisfactory and engaging. Certain critics of this age, as they style themselves, are displeased with all histories of miracles, not considering that these wonders are, in a particular manner, the works of God, intended to raise our attention to his holy providence, and to awake our souls to praise his goodness and power, often also to bear testimony to his truth. Entirely to omit the mention of them would be an infidelity in history, and would tend, in some measure, to obstruct the great and holy purposes for which they were effected. Yet a detail of all miracles, though authentically attested, is not the design of this work. Wherefore, in such facts, it seemed often sufficient to refer the reader to the original records. But miracles may be the subject of a particular disquisition. A tedious sameness in the narration hath been carefully avoided, and in relating general virtues, it is hoped that the manner, diction, and thoughts will be found new. Where memoirs allowed it, such a collection of remarkable actions and sayings of the saints hath been selected as seems neither trifling nor redundant; and may serve to express their character and spirit. In this consists the chief advantage of biography, as in painting, a portraiture draws its life from the strength of the features. By thus singular excellency doth Plutarch charm his readers, cover, or at least compensate for, his neglect of style and method, and other essential blemishes, and make even the most elegant writers who have attempted a supplement to his {052} lives,[5] to appear tedious and dull to one who hath first read his work. What eloquence could furnish so fine a description, or convey so strong a idea of the pride of Alexander, as the short answers of that prince to the Cynic philosopher, or to Darius? or of the modesty of Phocion, as the well-chosen circumstances of his disinterestedness and private life?[6] In these lives of the saints pious reflections are sometimes interspersed, though in general sparingly, not to swell the volume, or seem to suspect the judgment of the reader, or to forestall the pleasure of his own reflections. The study and exercise of virtue being the principal end which every good Christian ought to propose to himself in all his actions and undertakings, and which religious persons have particularly in view in reading the lives of saints, in favor of those who are slow in forming suitable reflections in the reading, a short instruction, consisting of maxims drawn from the writing or example of each saint, is subjoined to the principal life for each day, which may be omitted at discretion. A succinct account of the writings of the fathers is given in marginal notes, as a key to young theologians in studying their works: their ascetical lucubrations are principally pointed out, in which their spirit is often discovered, even to better advantage than in the best histories which are left us of their actions. The compiler's first care in this work, hath been a most scrupulous attachment to truth, the foundation, or rather the soul of all history, especially of that which tends to the advancement of piety and religion. The indagation is often a task both nice and laborious. If we weigh the merit of original authors, some we shall find careless and injudicious, and many write under the bias of party prejudice, which strangely perverts the judgment. By this, James Basnage could, in his History of the Jews, (b. 6,) notoriously mistake and misrepresent, by wholesale, the clearest authorities, to gratify his prepossession against an incontestable miracle, as the most learned Mr. Warburton hath demonstrated in his Julian, (b. 2, ch. 4.) Some write history as they would a tragedy or a romance; and, seeking at any rate to please the reader, or display their art, often sacrifice the truth for the sake of a fine conceit, of a glittering thought, or a point of wit.[7] Another difficulty is, that ancient writings have sometimes suffered much by the bold rashness of modern critics, or in the manuscripts, by the slips of careless copiers.[8] Again, authors who polish the style, or abridge the histories of others, are seldom to be trusted; and experience will show us the same of translations. Even Henry Valois, the most learned and celebrated Greek interpreter, is accused of having sometimes so far mistaken the sense of Eusebius, as to have given in his translation the contradictory of the meaning of his author. A greater mischief than all these have been the forgeries of impostors, especially heretics. Indeed, if the father of lies, by the like instruments, {053} found means to counterfeit forty-eight or fifty false gospels, of which a list is given by Calmet,[9] is it surprising that, from the same forge, he should have attempted to adulterate the histories of certain saints? But the vigilance of zealous pastors, and the repeated canons of the church, show, through every age, how much all forgeries and imposture were always the object of their abhorrence. Pope Adrian I., in an epistle to Charlemagne, mentions this constant severe law of the church, and says, that no acts of martyrs are suffered to be read which are not supported by good vouchers.[10] The council in Trullo,[11] and many others down to the present age, have framed canons for this purpose, as F. Honoratus of St. Mary shows.[12] Pope Gelasius I., in his famous Roman council in 494, condemns the false acts of St. George, which the Arians had forged,[13] &c. Tertullian[14] and St. Jerom[15] inform us, that, in the time of the apostles, a certain priest of Asia, out of veneration for St. Paul and St. Thecla, forged false acts of their peregrinations and sufferings; but for this crime he was deposed from the priesthood by St. John the Evangelist. No good end can, on any account, excuse the least lie; and to advance that pious frauds, as some improperly call them, can ever be lawfully used, is no better than blasphemy. All wilful lying is essentially a sin, as Catholic divines unanimously teach, with St. Austin, against the Prisciallianists. It is contrary and most hateful to the God of truth, and a heinous affront and injury offered to our neighbor: it destroys the very end and use of speech, and the sacred bond of society, and all commerce among men; for it would be better to live among dumb persons, than to converse with liars. To tell any lie whatsoever in the least point relating to religion, is always to lie in a matter of moment, and can never be excused from a mortal sin, as Catholic divines teach.[16] Grotius, the Protestant critic, takes notice that forgeries cannot be charged upon the popes, who, by the most severe canons, forbid them, punish the authors if detected, and give all possible encouragement to judicious critics.[17] This also appears from the works of innumerable learned men among the Catholics, and from the unwearied labors with which they have given to the public the most correct editions of the ancient fathers and historians. Good men may sometimes be too credulous in things in which there appears no harm. Nay, Gerson observes,[18] that sometimes the more averse a person is from fraud himself, the more unwilling he is to suspect imposture in others. But no good man can countenance and abet a known fraud for any purpose whatever. The pretence of religion would exceedingly aggravate the crime. If any particular persons among the monks could be convicted of having attempted to palm any false writing or lie on the world, the obligations of their profession would render their crime the more odious and enormous. But to make this a charge upon that venerable order of men in any age, is a most unjust and a notorious slander. Melchior Cano, who complains of interpolations which have crept into some parts of sacred biography, justifies the monks from the infamous imputation which some, through ignorance or malice, affect to cast upon them;[19] and Mabillon has vindicated them more at large.[20] On their diligence and scrupulosity in general, in correctly copying the manuscripts, see Dom. Coutant,[21] and the authors of the new {054} French Diplomatique.[22] In the Penitentia of St. Theodore the Studite, a penance is prescribed for a monk who had made any mistake in copying a manuscript. In 1196, in the general chapter of the Cistercians, it was ordered that the church of Lyons and the monastery of Cluni should be consulted about the true reading of a passage in a book to be copied. Anciently, books were chiefly copied and preserved in monasteries, which for several ages were the depositories of learning. Mr. Gurdon[23] and Bishop Tanner[24] take notice, that in England the great abbeys were even the repositories of the laws, edicts of kings, and acts of parliament. The history of Wales was compiled and kept through every age, by public authority, in the monastery of Ystratflur for South Wales, where the princes and noblemen of that country were interred; and in the abbey of Conwey for North Wales, which was the burying-place of the princes of that part. Conringius,[25] a German Protestant, writes, "In the sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries there is scarce to be found, in the whole Western church, the name of a person who had written a book, but what dwelt, or at least was educated in a monastery." Before universities were erected, monasteries, and often the palaces of bishops, were the seminaries of the clergy, the nurseries for the education of young noblemen, and the great schools of all the sciences. To the libraries and industry of the monks we are principally indebted for the works of the ancients which we possess. Grateful for this benefit, we ought not to condemn them because, by a fatality incident to human things, some works are come down to us interpolated or imperfect.[26] Accidental causes have given frequent occasions to mistakes, which, when we consider, we cannot be surprised if sometimes good men have been deceived by false memoirs. As to authors of wilful forgeries, we have no name harsh enough to express, nor punishment equal to their crime. But the integrity even of Geoffry of Monmouth is no longer impeached, since it hath been proved that in his British history he was not the author of the fables which he published upon the credit of other vouchers. Nevertheless, upon these, and the like accounts, history calls aloud for the discernment of criticism. And many learned men, especially of the monastic order, have, for our assistance, with no less industry than success, separated in ancient writings the sterling from the counterfeit, and by collating manuscripts, and by clearing difficult points, have rendered the path in this kind of literature smooth and secure. The merit of original authors hath been weighed; we have the advantage of most correct editions of their works; rash and groundless alterations of some modern critics, and the blunders of careless copiers or editors are redressed; interpolations foisted into the original writings are retrenched; and a mark hath been set on memoirs of inferior authority. Moreover, the value of ancient manuscripts, being known, ample repositories of such monuments have been made, curious lists of which are communicated to the public, that any persons may know and have recourse to them. It must also be added, that the laborious task of making the researches necessary for this complicated work, hath been rendered lighter by the care with which several judicious and learned men have compiled the lives of many particular saints. Thus have Mabillon and {055} Bulteau writ the lives of the saints of the order of St. Benedict; the elegant Touron of that of St. Dominick; Le Nain, of the Cistercian order; Tillemont, the Maurist Benedictin monks, and Orsi, these of the principal fathers of the church, &c.[27] The genuine acts of the primitive martyrs, the most valuable monument of ecclesiastical history, have been carefully published by Ruinart. Some of them are presidial acts, _i.e._ extracted from the court registers; others were written from the relations of eye-witnesses of undoubted veracity. To this treasure an accession, which the learned Orsi and others doubt not to call of equal value, hath been lately made by the publication of the genuine acts of the martyrs of the East, or of Persia, and of the West, or Palestine, in two volumes, folio, at Rome. Those of the East were written chiefly by St. Maruthus, a neighboring bishop of Mesopotamia: the others seem to contain the entire work of Eusebius on the martyrs of Palestine, which he abridged in the eighth book of his history. Both parts were found in a Chaldaic manuscript, in a monastery of Upper Egypt, and purchased by Stephen Evodius Assemani, archbishop of Apamea, and his uncle Joseph Simonius Assemani, first prefect of the Vatican library, at the charges of pope Clement XII., who had sent the former into the East on that errand. The manuscripts are deposited in the Vatican library. Joseph Assemani is known in the republic of letters by his invaluable Oriental library, his _Italicæ Historiæ Scriptores_, his _Kalendaria Ecclesiæ Universæ notis Ilustrata_, &c., and Stephen, by his share in the publication of the works of St. Ephrem, and by the _Acta Martyrum Orientalium et Occidentalium_. The learned Jesuits at Antwerp, Bollandus and his continuators, have given us the _Acta Sanctorum_, enriched with curious remarks and dissertations, in forty-one large volumes in folio, to the 5th day of September. To mention other monuments and writers here made use of, would be tedious and superfluous. The authorities produced throughout the work speak for themselves: the veracity of writers who cannot pretend to pass for inspired, ought to be supported by competent vouchers. The original authors are chiefly our guides. The stream runs clear and pure from the source, which in a long course often contracts a foreign mixture; but the lucubrations of many judicious modern critics have cast a great light upon ancient historians: these, therefore, have been also consulted and compared, and their labors freely made use of. Footnotes: 1. Cicero, l. 2, de Orat. c. 9. 2. Voss. Ars Hist. cap. 5. 3. Voltaire's Annals of the Empire of Germany. 4. Some call in question the existence of certain saints, as SS. Bacchus, Quirinus, Mercurius, Nilammon, Hippolytus, &c., because these names are of pagan original. But that Christians often retained those names is evident, not only from the oldest Martyrologies, but from Eusebius, Theodoret, and other ancient writers, who often mention Christians named Apollonius and Apollinerius, from Apollo &c., and St. Paul speaks of a disciple called Hermes, or Mercurius; and had another named Dionysius, or Bacchus. Dr. Geddes and others object to the existence of St. Almnachius, St. George, St. Wenefred, &c., but we shall find their honor supported in this work by irrefregable authorities. Longinus not only signifies a spear, but was a Roman name, and that of a soldier and martyr, on the 15th of March: whether he be the person who opened the side of Christ with a spear or no, is a point of less importance. Mr. Addison and Dr. Middleton thought they had hit on a great discovery when they transformed Mount Soracte into St. Orestes. But that mountain is commonly called, not St. Orestes, but San Sylvestro, together with the monastery on its summit. Moreover, we find both in the Roman Martyrology and Greek Menæa two saints of the name of Orestes recorded, the one on the 9th of November, the other on the 19th of December, who both suffered under Dioclesian, one in Armenia, the other in Cappadocia. The latter is also named by St. Gregory Nazianzen, in his oration on St. Basil. If, by slips of copiers, mistakes have happened to some names, of accidental circumstances; or if certain private persons should be convicted of having been any time deceived in some saint, this would not affect the credit of authentic general Martyrologies. 5. Mrs. Dacier, Mr. Rowe. 6. This made Theodorus Gaza say, that if learning must suffer a general shipwreck, and he had only his choice left him of preserving one author, Plutarch should be the man. 7. With this fault the famous king of Prussia, who is perfectly acquainted with the affairs of the North, charged the florid author of the history of Charles XII. of Sweden. Nor could this historian, as it is said, give any other answer to the complaint of the Hamburghers, that he had notoriously slandered them with regard to their conduct towards the citizens of Altena, than that his fiction was plausible and ingenious, founded in their mutual jealousy, according to the maxim of dramatic writers, _Feign with probability_. Of this cast, indeed, though we have many modern examples, we know, perhaps, none among the authors of antiquity. 8. Thirty thousand various readings were found by Mr. Mills in the Greek New Testament; Dr. Bentley reckoned twenty thousand in Terence, and twice as many as there are verses in the poet Manilius. Even the most valuable Vatican and Alexandrian manuscripts of the Bible abound in faults of the copiers; and editions of works made from single manuscripts are always very defective.--witness those of Cornelius Nepos, and the Greek Hesychius. Patrick Young, (called in Latin, Patricius Junius,) when keeper of the king's library at London, scrupled not to erase and alter several words in the most valuable Alexandrian Greek manuscript copy of the Bible, as is visible to this day. What wonder, then, (how intolerable such liberties are,) if the like has been sometimes done by others in books of less note, with a presumption like that of Dr. Bentley in his amendments of Horace. 9. Prelim Dissert. on St. Matthew. 10. Sine probabilibus autoribus, Conc. t. 7, 954. 11. Can. 62. 12. Règies de la Critique, t. 2, p. 12, 20, et Diss. 3, p. 134. 13. See Mabillon, Disquis. de Cursu Gallic. §1. 14. Tert. l. de Bapt. c. 17. 15. Catal. Vir Illustr. c. 7. 16. See Nat. Alexander, Collet, Henno, &c., in Decalogum de Mendacio. 17. Grot. l. de Antichr. t. 3, Op. Theolog. 18. Gerson, ep. ad Morel. 19. De Loc. Theol. l. 11, c. 5. 20. Diplomat. l. 3, c. 3. 21. Coutant, Vindic. veter. Cod. Confirm. p. 32, 550, &c. 22. Diplom. t. 4, p. 452, &c. 23. Gurdon, Hist. of Parliament, t. 1. 24. Pref. to Notitia Monastica, in folio. 25. Dissert. 3, de Antiq. Acad. 26. How easy was the mistake of a copyist or bookseller, who ascribed the works of some modern Austin to the great doctor of that name? or who, finding several sermons of St. Cæsarius annexed in the same copy to those of St. Austin, imagined them all to belong to one title? Several disciples published, under the names of St. Austin, St. Gregory, or St. Zeno, sermons or comments which they had heard from their mouths: by the same means we have three different editions of the confession of St. Ephrem. We have already seen many works falsely published under the name of Boerhaave, which never came from his pen; as, The Method of Studying Physic, Materia Medica, Praxis Medica, and a spurious edition of his Chemistry, which seem all to come from the pens of his scholars. 27. Among the compilers of the lives of saints, some wanted the discernment of criticism. Simeon Metaphrastes, patrician, first secretary and chancellor to the emperors Leo the Wise, and Constantine Porphyrogenitus, in 912, (of whose collection one hundred and twenty-two lives are still extant,) sometimes altered the style of his authors where it appeared flat or barbarous, and sometimes inserted later additions and interpolations, often not sufficiently warranted, though not by him forged; for Psellus, in his panegyric, furnishes us with many proofs of his piety. See Cave, (Hist. Litér. t. 2, p. 88,) who, with other judicious critics, entertains a much more favorable opinion of Metaphrastes than Baillet. See Metaphrastes vindicated by Leo Allatius. (Diatr. de Nilis, p. 24.) James de Voragine, of the order of St. Dominick, and archbishop of Genoa, author of the _Golden Legend_, in 1290, wrote still with less judgment, and, in imitation of Livy, often made the martyrs speak his own language. Lippoman, bishop of Verona in 1550, and Laurence Surius, a Carthusian monk of Cologne in 1570, sometimes wanted the necessary helps for discernment in the choice of materials. The same is to be said of Ribadeneira, except in the lives of saints who lived near his own time, though a person otherwise well qualified for a writer of sacred biography. Several who have augmented his works in France, Spain, or Italy, labored under the same misfortune and often gathered together whatever the drag-net of time had amassed. John Capgrave, an Austin friar, some time confessor to the duke of Gloucester, who died at Lynn in Norfolk, in 1484, compiled the legend of the saints of England, from a more ancient collection, the Sanctilogium of John of Tinmouth, a monk of St. Alban's, in 1366, of which a very fair manuscript copy was, before the last fire, extant in the Cottonian library. By the melting of the glue and warping of the leaves, this book is no longer legible unless some such method be used as that which is employed in unfolding the parched and mouldering manuscripts found in the ruins of Herculaneum. On the other hand, some French critics in sacred biography have tinctured their works with a false and pernicious leaven, and, under the name of criticism, established skepticism. {056 blank page} {057} CONTENTS. JANUARY. 1. THE Circumcision of our Lord..................... 59 St. Fulgentius, Bishop and Confessor............. 63 St. Odilo, or Olon, Sixth Abbot of Cluni......... 69 St. Almachus, or Telemachus, Martyr.............. 71 St. Eugendus, Abbot.............................. 71 St. Fanchea, or Faine, Virgin, of Ireland........ 72 St. Mochua, or Moncain, alias Claunus, Abbot in Ireland..................................... 72 St. Mochua, alias Cronan, of Bella, Abbot in Ireland........................................ 72 2. St. Macarius, of Alexandria, Anchoret............ 73 SS. Martyrs for the Holy Scriptures.............. 76 St. Concordius, Martyr........................... 77 St. Adalard, or Alard, Abbot and Confessor....... 77 3. St. Peter Balsam, Martyr......................... 80 St. Anterus, Pope................................ 81 St. Gordius, Martyr.............................. 81 St. Genevieve, or Genovefa, Virgin, Patroness of Paris.......................................... 82 4. St. Titus, Disciple of St. Paul, Bishop.......... 86 St. Gregory, Bishop of Langres................... 88 St. Rigobert, or Robert, Bishop.................. 88 St. Rumon, Bishop in England..................... 88 5. St. Simon Stylites, Confessor.................... 89 St. Telesphorus, Pope and Martyr ................ 93 St. Syncletica, Virgin .......................... 93 6. The Epiphany of our Lord......................... 95 St. Melanius, Bishop and Confessor............... 100 St. Nilammon, Hermit............................. 100 St. Peter, Abbot in England...................... 100 7. St. Lucian, Priest and Martyr.................... 101 St. Cedd, Bishop of London....................... 103 St. Kentigerna, Widow, of Ireland................ 105 St. Aldric, Bishop of Mans, Confessor............ 105 St. Thillo, Recluse.............................. 106 St. Canut........................................ 107 8. St. Apollinaris, the Apologist, Bishop........... 108 St. Severinus, Abbot, and Apostle of Noricum, or Austria .................................... 110 St. Lucian, Apostle of Beauvais, in France, Martyr......................................... 112 St. Pega, Virgin, of England..................... 112 St. Vulsin, Bishop in England.................... 112 St. Gudula, Virgin, Patroness of Brussels........ 113 St. Nathalan, Bishop of Aberdeen, Confessor...... 113 9. St. Peter of Sebaste, Bishop and Confessor....... 114 St. Julian and St. Basilissa, Martyrs............ 114 St. Marciana, Virgin and Martyr.................. 116 St. Brithwald, Archbishop of Canterbury.......... 117 St. Felan, or Foelan, Abbot in Ireland .......... 117 St. Adrian, Abbot at Canterbury.................. 118 St. Vaneng, Confessor............................ 118 St. William, Confessor, Archbishop of Bourges.... 120 St. Agatho, Pope................................. 122 St. Marcian, Priest.............................. 123 11. St. Theodosius the Cenobiarch, Abbot............. 124 St. Hyginus, Pope and Martyr..................... 127 St. Egwin, Bishop in England, Confessor.......... 128 St. Salvius, or Sauve, Bishop of Amiens.......... 128 12. St. Arcadius, Martyr............................. 129 St. Benedict Bishop, Abbot....................... 131 St. Tygrius and St. Eutropius, Martyrs........... 133 St. Aelred, Abbot in England..................... 133 13. St. Veronica, Virgin, of Milan................... 135 St. Kentigern, Bishop of Glasco, Confessor....... 137 The Octave of the Epiphany....................... 139 14. St. Hilary, Bishop............................... 140 St. Felix, Priest and Confessor.................. 147 St. Isaias, St. Sabbas, &c. Martyrs of Sinai..... 149 St. Barbasceminus, &c. Martyrs .................. 150 15. St. Paul, the First Hermit....................... 151 St. Maurus, Abbot................................ 154 St. Main, Abbot, Native of England............... 155 St. John Calybite, Recluse....................... 155 St. Isidore of Alexandria, Priest and Hospitaller 156 St. Isidore of Sceté, Priest and Hermit.......... 157 St. Bonitus, Bishop of Auvergne, Confessor....... 157 St. Ita, or Mida, Virgin of Ireland, Abbess...... 158 16. St. Marcellus, Pope and Martyr................... 158 St. Macarius the Elder, of Egypt................. 159 St. Honoratus, Archbishop of Arles, Abbot........ 162 St. Fursey, Abbot In Ireland..................... 163 SS. Five Friars, Minors, Martyrs................. 164 St. Henry, Hermit................................ 164 17. St. Antony, Abbot, Patriarch of Monks............ 165 SS. Speusippus, Eleusippus, and Meleusippus, Martyrs........................................ 172 {058} St. Sulpicius the Pious, Archbishop of Bourges... 173 St. Sulpicius de Débonnaire, Archbishop of Bourges..................................... 173 St. Milgithe, Virgin, of England................. 174 St. Nennius, or Nennidhius, Abbot In Ireland..... 174 18. St. Peter's Chair at Rome........................ 175 St. Paul and Thirty-six Companions in Egypt, Martyrs........................................ 176 St. Prisca, Virgin and Martyr.................... 176 St. Deicolus, Abbot, Native of Ireland .......... 177 St. Ulfrid, or Wolfred, Bishop and Martyr........ 177 19. St. Maris, St. Martha, St. Audifax, and St Abachum, Martyrs............................... 178 St. Canutus, King of Denmark, Martyr............. 179 St. Henry, Archbishop of Upsal, Martyr........... 180 St. Wulstan, Bishop of Worcester, Confessor...... 181 St. Blaithmaic, Native of Ireland, Abbot of Hij in Scotland....................................... 182 St. Lomer, or Laudomarus, Abbot.................. 182 20. St. Fabian, Pope and Martyr...................... 183 St. Sebastian, Martyr............................ 183 St. Euthymius, Abbot............................. 185 St. Fechin, Abbot in Ireland..................... 187 21. St. Agnes, Virgin and Martyr..................... 188 St. Fructuosus, Bishop of Tarragon, and his Companions, Martyrs............................ 190 St. Vimin, or Vivian, Bishop and Confessor, in Scotland....................................... 192 St. Publius, Bishop and Martyr................... 192 St. Epiphanius, Bishop of Pavia.................. 192 22. St. Vincent, Martyr.............................. 193 St. Anastasius, Martyr........................... 196 23. St. Raymund of Pennafort, Confessor.............. 200 St. John the Almoner, Confessor, Patriarch of Alexandria..................................... 203 St. Emerentia, Virgin and Martyr................. 206 St. Clement of Ancyra, Bishop and Martyr......... 207 St. Agathangelus, Martyr......................... 207 St. Ildelfonsus, Archbishop...................... 207 St. Eusebius, Abbot.............................. 208 24. St. Timothy, Bishop and Martyr................... 208 St. Babylas, Bishop of Antioch, Martyr .......... 211 St. Suranus, Abbot in Umbria..................... 213 St. Macedonius, Anchoret In Syria................ 213 On the life and Writings of Theodoret, Bishop of Cyrus.......................................... 213 25. The Conversion of St. Paul....................... 216 St. Juventius and St. Maximinus, Martyrs......... 219 On the Life and Writings of Julian the Apostate.. 219 St. Projectus, Bishop of Clermont, Martyr........ 220 St. Poppo, Abbot of Stavello..................... 221 St. Apollo, Abbot in Thebais..................... 222 St. Publius, Abbot near Zeugma, upon the Euphrates...................................... 222 26. St. Polycarp, Bishop of Smyrna, Martyr........... 223 St. Paula, Widow................................. 229 St. Conon, Bishop of the Isle of Man............. 232 27. St. John Chrysostom, Archbishop of Constantinople.................................. 233 On the Writings of that Father................... 252 St. Julian, First Bishop of Mans, Confessor...... 275 St. Marius, Abbot................................ 275 28. Commemoration of St. Agnes....................... 276 St. Cyril, Patriarch of Alexandria............... 276 On the Writings of that Father................... 279 St. Thyrsus, St. Leucius, and St. Callinicus, Martyrs........................................ 283 St. John of Reomay, Abbot........................ 283 B. Margaret, Princess of Hungary, Virgin......... 284 St. Paulinus, Patriarch of Aquileia, Confessor... 284 B. Charlemagne, Emperor.......................... 287 St. Glastian, Bishop and Confessor in Scotland... 289 29. St. Francis of Sales, Bishop and Confessor....... 289 St. Sulpicius Severus............................ 303 On the Writings of that Saint.................... 305 St. Gildas the Wise, or Badonicus, Abbot, Native of England ............................ 306 St. Gildas the Albanian, or the Scot, Confessor.. 310 30. St. Bathildes, Queen of France................... 310 St. Martina, Virgin and Martyr................... 312 St. Aldegondes, Virgin and Abbess................ 313 St. Barsimæus, Bishop and Martyr................. 313 31. St. Peter Nolasco, Confessor..................... 314 St. Serapion, Martyr in England.................. 317 St. Cyrus and St. John, Martyrs.................. 317 St. Marcella, Widow.............................. 318 St. Maidoc, or Maodhog, Bishop of Ferns in Ireland........................................ 318 {059} JANUARY I. THE CIRCUMCISION OF OUR LORD[1] CIRCUMCISION was a sacrament of the Old Law, and the first legal observance required by Almighty God of that people, which he had chosen preferably to all the nations of the earth to be the depositary of his revealed truths.--These were the descendants of Abraham, whom he had enjoined it, under the strictest penalties,[2] several hundred years before the giving of the law to Moses on Mount Sinai; and this on two several accounts: First, as a distinguishing mark between them and the rest of mankind. Secondly, as a seal to a covenant between God and that patriarch: whereby it was stipulated on God's part to bless Abraham and his posterity; while on their part it implied a holy engagement to be his people, by a strict conformity to his laws. It was, therefore, a sacrament of initiation in the service of God, and a promise and engagement to believe and act as he had revealed and directed. Circumcision is also looked upon by St. Austin, and by several eminent modern divines,[3] to have been the expedient, in the male posterity of Abraham, for removing the guilt of original sin, which in those who did not belong to the covenant of Abraham, nor fall under this law was remitted by other means, probably by some external act of faith. This law of circumcision continued in force till the death of Christ: hence our Saviour being born under the law, it _became him_, who came to teach mankind obedience to the laws of God; to _fulfil all justice_, and to submit to it. Therefore, he was _made under the law_, that is, was circumcised, that he might redeem them that were under the law, by freeing them from the servitude of it; and that those, who were in the condition of servants before, might be set at liberty, and _receive the adoption of sons_ in baptism; which by Christ's institution, succeeded to circumcision. On the {060} day he was circumcised he received the name of JESUS, the same which had been appointed him by the angel before he was conceived.[4] The reason of his being called JESUS is mentioned in the gospel:[5] _For he shall save his people from their sins_. This he effected by the greatest sufferings and humiliations; _having humbled himself_, as St. Paul says,[6] not only unto death, but even _to the death of the cross; for which cause God hath exalted him, and hath given him a name which is above all names; that at the name of JESUS every knee should bow_: agreeably to what Christ says of himself,[7] _All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth_.[8] Christ being not only innocent, but incapable of sin, could stand in no need of circumcision, as an expedient then in use for the remission of sin. He was pleased, however, to subject himself to this humbling and painful rite of the Mosaic dispensation for several reasons: as, First, to put an end in an honorable manner to a divine, but temporary, institution, by taking it upon his own person. Secondly, to prove the reality of his human body; which, however evident from this and so many other actions and sufferings of his life, was denied by several ancient heretics. Thirdly, to prove himself not only the son of man, but of that man in particular of whose seed the Messiah was promised to come: thus precluding any future objection that might be raised by the Jews against his divine mission in quality of Messiah, under the pretence of his being an alien; and hereby qualifying himself for free conversation with them for their own spiritual advantage: setting us all a pattern of undergoing voluntarily several hardships and restraints, which, though not necessary on our own account, may be of great use to promote the good of others. Christ not being like other Jewish children, who could not know or fear the pain of circumcision, when they were going to suffer the operation, was perfectly sensible of it beforehand, and with calmness and intrepidity offered himself willingly to suffer the knife, and shed the first-fruits of his sacred blood in this painful manner. Under the smart this divine infant shed tears, but not as other children; for by them, with the most tender love and compassion, he bewailed chiefly our spiritual miseries, and at the same time presented with joy his blood as the price of our redemption to his Father. Fourthly, by thus humbling himself under this painful operation, he would give us an early pledge and earnest of his love for us, of his compassion for our miseries, and of his utter detestation of sin. The charity and zeal which glowed in his divine breast, impatient, as it were, of delay, delighted themselves in these first-fruits of humiliation and suffering for our sakes, till they could fully satiate their thirst by that superabundance of both, in his passion and death. With infinite zeal for his Father's honor, and charity for us sinners, with invincible patience, and the most profound humility, he now offered himself most cheerfully to his Father to undergo whatever he was pleased to enjoin him. Fifthly, he teaches us by the example of voluntary obedience to a law that could not oblige him, to submit with great punctuality and exactness to laws of divine appointment; and how very far we ought to be from sheltering our {061} disobedience under lame excuses and frivolous pretexts. Sixthly, by this ceremony, he humbled himself to satisfy for our pride, and to teach us the sincere spirit of humility. What greater humiliation can be imagined than for Him who is the eternal Son of God, in all things equal to his Father, to conceal these glorious titles under the appearance of a sinner? What a subject of confusion to us, who, being abominable criminals, are ashamed to pass for what we are, and desire to appear and be esteemed what we are not! Shall we not learn from this example of Christ to love humiliations, especially as we cannot but acknowledge that we deserve every reproach and all manner of contempt from all creatures? Seventhly, by beginning the great work of our salvation in the manner he was one day to finish it; suffering in his own person the punishment of sin, to deliver us from both sin and its punishment, he confounds the impenitence of sinners who will suffer nothing for their own sins; and inculcates the necessity of a spiritual circumcision, whereof the external was but the type and figure, as the apostle puts us in mind.[9] It is manifest, beyond all contradiction, from several texts of the Old Testament,[10] that men under that dispensation ought not to have rested in the external act alone, but should have aspired from the letter to the spirit, from the carnal to a spiritual circumcision. These texts, at the same time that they set forth its necessity, describe it as consisting in a readiness and willing disposition to conform to the will of God, and submit to it when known, in every particular. They in consequence require a retrenchment of all inordinate and superfluous desires of the soul, the keeping a strict guard and government over ourselves, a total abstinence from criminal, and a prudent reserve even in the lawful gratifications of sense and appetite. If such instances of spiritual circumcision were required of those under the Old Law, to qualify them for acceptance with God, can any thing less than the same entitle us Christians to the claim of spiritual kindred with faithful Abraham, and to share of that redemption which Christ began this day to purchase for us at the expense of his blood? We must cut off whatever inordinate or superfluous desires of riches, honors, or pleasures reign in our hearts, and renounce whatever holds us wedded to our senses or the world. Though this sacrifice required the last drop of our blood, we ought cheerfully to make it. The example of Christ powerfully excites us not to spare ourselves. A thousand irregular affections reign in our souls, and self-love is master there. This enemy is only to be expelled by compunction, watchfulness over ourselves, perfect obedience, humble submission to correction, voluntary self-denials, and patience under crosses. To these endeavors we must join earnest prayer for the necessary grace to discover, and courageously crucify whatever opposes the reign of the pure love of God in our affections. If we are conscious to ourselves of having taken a contrary course, and are of the unhappy number of the _uncircumcised to heart_; what more proper time to set about a thorough reformation, by cutting off whatever is inconsistent with or prejudicial to the true Christian spirit, than this very day, the first of the new year? that so it may be a _new_ year to us in the most Christian and beneficial sense of the word.[11] {062} Wherefore, after having consecrated its first-fruits to God, by the most sincere and fervent homage of praise and adoration; after having paid him the just tribute of thanksgiving for all his benefits, and in particular for the mercy by which he vouchsafes us still time to appease his anger, and serve him; it becomes us to allot some part of this day to tears of compunction for our past offences, and to the diving into the source of our spiritual sloth and other irregularities, with a view to the amendment of our lives, and the preventing of relapses: not contenting ourselves with general purposes, which cost self-love so little, the insufficiency of which our own experience has convinced us of; we must lay the axe to the root, and seriously resolve to decline, to the best of our power, the particular occasions which have betrayed us into sin, and embrace the most effectual means of reformation of life and improvement in virtue. Every year ought to find us more fervent in charity; every day ought our soul to augment in strength, and be decked with new flowers of virtue and good works. If the plant ceases to grow, or the fruit to ripen, they decay of course, and are in danger of perishing. By a rule far more sacred, the soul, which makes not a daily progress in virtue loses ground: a dreadful symptom in the spiritual life. The more intense ought our fervor to be, as we draw the nearer to the end of our course: _So much the more_, says the apostle, _as you perceive the day to approach_,[12] the day of _retribution_ to each according to his works, which will be that of our death, which may be much nearer than we are willing to imagine. Perhaps we may not live to the end of this very year: it will be the case of thousands, who at this time are as regardless of it as we can be. What security can we have against a surprise, the consequences whereof are infinite and irretrievable, except that of a sincere and speedy conversion, of being upon our guard against temptations, of dedicating effectually this ensuing year and the remainder of our short lives to God, our last end and only good, and frequently imploring his grace and mercy. It is our blessed Saviour's advice and injunction: _Watch ye therefore; praying at all times {063} ... that you may be accounted worthy ... to stand before the Son of man_.[13] The Christian's devotion on this day ought to consist, first, in the solemn consecration of the first-fruits of the year to God; and secondly, in honoring the mystery of the Incarnation of the Son of God, particularly his birth and circumcision. The church invites us on this day to unite our homage with the seraphic ardors and transports of devotion with which the glorious Mother of God assisted at these wonderful mysteries which we commemorate, but in which she acted herself so great a part. With what sentiments did Mary bear in her womb, bring forth, and serve her adorable son, who was also her God? with what love and awe did she fix her eyes upon him particularly at his circumcision, who can express in what manner she was affected when she saw him subjected to this painful and humbling ceremony? Filled with astonishment, and teeming affections of love and gratitude, by profound adorations and praise she endeavored to make him all the amends in her power, and the best return and acknowledgment she was able. In amorous complaints that he would begin, in the excess of his love, to suffer for us in so tender an age, and to give this earnest of our redemption, she might say to him: _Truly than art to me a spouse of blood._[14] With the early sacrifice Christ here made of himself to his Father, she joined her own offering her divine son, and with and through him herself, to be an eternal victim to his honor and love, with the most ardent desire to suffer all things, even to blood, for the accomplishment of his will. Under her mediation we ought to make him the tender of our homages, and with and through this holy Redeemer, consecrate ourselves to God without reserve. Footnotes: 1. In the ancient sacramentary of the Roman church, published by cardinal Thomasius, (the finishing of which some ascribe to Pope Gelasius I., others more probably to Leo I., though the ground was doubtless the work of their predecessors,) this festival is called the Octave of our Lord's Nativity. The same title is given to it in the Latin calendar (or rather collection of the gospels read at Mass throughout the year) written above 900 years ago, presented to the public by F. John Fronteau, regular canon of saint Genevieve's at Paris, and by Leo Allatius. The inference which Baillet draws from thence that the mystery of our Lord's circumcision was not then commemorated in the office of this day, is a notorious mistake. For Thomassin takes notice from Ivo of Chartres, that the word Octave here implies the circumcision of our Lord, which was performed on the eighth day after his birth; and in the above mentioned Sacramentary express mention is made of the circumcision in the Secret of the Mass. In F. Froubeau's calendar the gospel read on this day is the history of the circumcision given, by St. Luke. An old Vatican MS. copy of St. Gregory's Sacramentary and that of Usuard's Martyrology kept at St. Germain des-Près, express both the titles of the Octave day and of the circumcision. Durandus in the 13th century, (Ration. offic. l. 6, c. 15,) John Beleth, a theologian of Paris, (c. 71,) and several missals of the middle ages prescribe two masses to be said on this day, one on the circumcision, the other on the B. Virgin Mary. Micrologus (c. 39) assigns this reason, that as the B. Virgin, who had so great a share in the birth of Christ, could not be mentioned in that solemn office, therefore a commemoration of her is deferred to the Octave day. The second Mass is now abolished: but in a great part of the office a regard is had to the B. Virgin. In F. Fronteau's Roman calendar, after the title of the Octave is added, _Natale S. Mariæ_ for which Dom Martenne would have us read _S. Martinæ_; but without grounds. For, as Pope Benedict XIV. observes, (Comment. de Festis Domini, c. 1,) the original unquestionably means a festival of the B. Virgin Mary. The word _Natale_, which was used originally for the birth-day of the emperors, was afterwards taken for any annual feast. 2. Gen. xvii. 3. Grounding their opinion on Gen. xvii. 14, &c. 4. Luke i. 31. 5. Matt. i. 21. 6. Phil. ii. 8, 9, 10. 7. Matt. xxviii. 18. 8. The Jews generally named their children on the day of their circumcision, but this was not of precept. There are several instances of children named on the day of their birth, (Gen. xxx.) which could not be that of their circumcision by an express law requiring the interval of eight days from their birth; the child being presumed too weak and delicate to undergo the operation sooner, without danger of its life. It seems to have been the practice among the Jews for children to be circumcised at home; nor was a priest the necessary or ordinary minister, but the father, mother, or any other person could perform the ceremony, as we see in the time of Abraham, (Gen. xvii.; Acts vii.) and of the Maccabees, (1 Mac. 1.) St. Epiphanius, (Hær. 20.) Whence F. Avala, in his curious work entitled _Pietor Christianus_, printed at Madrid in 1730, shows that it is a vulgar error of painters who represent Christ circumcised by a priest in the temple. The instrument was sometimes a sharp stone, (Exod. iv. Jos. v.,) but doubtless most frequently of iron or steel. 9. Rom. ii. 29. 10. Deut. x. 16; xxx. 6; Jer. iv. 4. 11. The pagan Romans celebrated the _Saturnalia_, or feast of Saturn, from the 17th of December during seven days: at which time slaves dined with their masters, and were allowed an entire liberty of speech, in the superstitious remembrance of the golden age of the world, in which no distinction of ranks was yet known among men. (Macrob {}, 10. Horat. &c.) The calends also of January were solemnized with licentious shows in honor of Janus and the goddess Strenia: and it is from those infamous diversions that among Christians, are derived the profane riots of new year's day, twelfthtide, and shrovetide, by which many pervert these times into days of sin and intemperance. Several councils severely condemn these abuses; and the better to prevent them, some churches formerly kept the 1st of January a fast-day, as it is mentioned by St. Isidore of Seville (lib. 2 offic c. 40) Alcuin (lib. de div offic) &c. Dom Martenne observes, (lib. de antiquis ritibus in celebr. div. offic. c. 13,) that on this account the second council of Tours in 567 ordered that on the calends of the circumcision the litany be sung, and high mass begun only at the eighth hour, that is, two in the afternoon, that it might be finished by three, the hour at which it was allowed to eat on the fasts of the stations. We have among the works of the fathers many severe invectives against the superstitions and excesses of this time. See St. Austin, (serm. 198, in hunc diem,) St. Peter Chrysologus, (serm. in calendas,) St. Maximus of Turin, (Hom. 5, apud Mabill. in Musæo Italico,) Faustinus the Bishop, (apud Bolland. hac die. p. 3,) &c. The French name Etrennes is pagan, from _strenæ_, or new-year gifts, in honor of the goddess Strenia. The same in Poitou and Perche, anciently the country of the Druids, is derived from their rites. For the Poitevins for Etrennes use the word Auguislanneuf, and the Percherons, Equilans, from the ancient cry of the Druids, _Au guy l'an neuf_, i.e. _Ad Viscum, annul novus_, or to the mistletoe the new-year, when on new-year's day the Pagans went into the forests to seek the mistletoe on the oaks. See Chatelain, notes on the Martyr. Jan. 1, p. 7. The ancients began the year, some from the autumnal, others from the vernal equinox. The primitive patriarchs from that of autumn, that is, from the month called by the Hebrews Tisri, which coincides with part of our September and October. Hence it seems probable, that the world was created about that season; the earth, as appears from Gen. iii. 2, being then covered with trees, plants, fruits, seeds, and all other things in the state of their natural maturity and perfection. The Jews retained this commencement of the year, as a date for contracts and other civil purposes; as also for their sabbatical year and jubilee. But God commanded them to begin their ecclesiastical year, or that by which their religious festivals were regulated, from the spring equinox, or the Hebrew month Nisan, the same with part of our March and April, Exod. xii. 2. Christian nations commenced the year, some from the 25th of March, the feast of the Annunciation, and bordering upon the spring equinox; others from Christmas; others from its octave day, the first of January, in which our ancestors have often varied their practice. Europe is now agreed in fixing the first of January for this epoch. The Julian year, so called from Julius Cæsar, from whom the Roman calendar received its last reformation, consisted of 365 days and 6 hours, which exceed the true solar year by 11 minutes, for astronomers compute the yearly revolution of the sun not to exceed 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, and 37 seconds, according to Cassini, but according to Keil 57 seconds, or almost 49 minutes. This error, becoming daily more sensible, would have occasioned the autumnal equinox to have at length fallen on the day reckoned the solstice, and in process of time, on that held for the vernal equinox. The Golden number, or Grecian cycle of the lunar years, was likewise defective. The remedy both which, pope Gregory XIII., in 1585, established the new style. Scaliger, Tachet, and Cassini have demonstrated that cycles might be chosen still more exact by some few seconds: however, this adopted by pope Gregory, besides being the easiest in the execution, admits of no material error, or sensible inconveniency. This correction of the style was received by act of Parliament, in Great Britain, in 1752; for the promoting of which, great praise is due to the two illustrious ornaments of the republic of letters, the earls of Chesterfield and Macclesfield. 12. Heb. x. 25. 13. Luke xxi. 36. 14. Exod. v. 25. THE LIFE OF S. FULGENTIUS, B.C. Extracted from his works, and from his life, accurately written by a disciple of great abilities, the companion of his exile: and dedicated to Felician, his successor in the see of Ruspa. The author declares himself a monk: consequently was not the deacon Ferrandus, as some critics imagine. A.D. 533. FABIUS CLAUDIUS GORDIANUS FULGENTIUS was the descendant of a noble senatorian family of Carthage: but much decayed in its splendor by the invasion of the Vandals. His father Claudius, being unjustly deprived of his house in Carthage, which was made over to the Arian priests, settled at an estate belonging to him at Telepte, the capital city of the province of Byzacena. Our saint was born in 468, about thirty years after the Barbarians had dismembered Africa from the Roman empire. He was educated in sentiments of piety with his younger brother, under the care of his mother Mariana, who was left a young widow. Being, by her particular direction, taught the Greek very young, he spoke it with as proper and exact an accent as if it had been his native language. He also applied himself to Latin, and all the useful parts of human literature, under masters distinguished for consummate abilities: yet he knew how to mingle business with study; for he took upon himself the regulation of the family concerns, in order to ease his mother of the burden. His prudent circumspection in all the affairs he transacted, his virtuous conduct, his mild carriage to all, and more especially his deference for his mother, without whose express orders or approbation he never did any thing, caused him to be beloved and admired wherever his name was known. He was chosen procurator, that is, lieutenant-governor, and general receiver of the taxes of Byzacena. But it was not long before {064} he grew disgusted with the world; and being justly alarmed at its dangers he armed himself against them by pious reading, assiduous prayer, and rigorous fasting. His visits to monasteries were frequent; and happening among other books of spiritual entertainment, to read a sermon of St. Austin on the thirty-sixth psalm, in which that father treats of the world and the short duration of human life, he felt within him strong desires of embracing the monastic state. Huneric, the Arian king, had driven most of the orthodox bishops from their sees. One of these, named Faustus, had erected a monastery in Byzacena. It was to him that the young nobleman addressed himself for admittance; but Faustus immediately objecting the tenderness of his constitution, discouraged his desires with words of some harshness; "Go," said he, "and first learn to live in the world abstracted from its pleasures. Who can well suppose, that you on a sudden, relinquishing a life of softness and ease, can take up with our coarse diet and clothing and can inure yourself to our watchings and fastings?" The saint, with downcast eyes, modestly replied: "He, who hath inspired me with the will to serve him, can also furnish me with courage and strength." This humble, yet resolute answer, induced Faustus to admit him on trial. The saint was then in the twenty-second year of his age. The news of so unthought of an event both surprised and edified the whole country; many even imitated the example of the governor. But Mariana his mother, in transports of grief, ran to the monastery, crying out at the gates: "Faustus! restore to me my son; to the people, their governor: the church always protects widows; why then rob you me, a desolate widow, of my son?" She persisted several days in the same tears and cries. Nothing that Faustus could urge was sufficient to calm her, or prevail with her to depart without her son. This was certainly as great a trial of Fulgentius's resolution as it could well be put to; but the love of God, having the ascendant in his breast, gave him a complete victory over all the suggestions of nature: Faustus approved his vocation, and accordingly recommended him to the brethren. The saint having now obtained all he wished for in this world, made over his estate to his mother, to be discretionally disposed of by her in favor of his brother, as soon as he should be arrived at a proper age. He totally abstained from oil and every thing savory; from wine also, drinking only water. His mortifications brought on him a dangerous illness; yet after recovery he abated nothing in them. The persecution breaking out anew, Faustus was obliged to withdraw; and our saint, with his consent, repaired to a neighboring monastery, of which Felix, the abbot, would fain resign to him the government. Fulgentius was much startled at the proposal, but at length was prevailed upon to consent that they should jointly execute the functions. It was admirable to observe with what harmony these two holy abbots for six years governed the house. No contradiction ever took place between them; each always contended to comply with the will of his colleague. Felix undertook the management of the temporal concerns; Fulgentius's province was to preach and instruct. In the year 499, the country being ravaged by an irruption of the Numidians, the two abbots were necessitated to fly to Sicca Veneria, a city of the proconsular province of Africa. Here it was, that an Arian priest ordered them to be apprehended and scourged on account of their preaching the consubstantiality of the Son of God. Felix, seeing the executioners seize first on Fulgentius, cried out: "Spare that poor brother of mine, whose delicate complexion cannot bear torments; let them rather be my portion who am strong of body." They accordingly, at the instigation of this wicked priest, fell on Felix first, and the old man endured their stripes {065} with the greatest alacrity. When it was Fulgentius's turn to experience the same rigorous treatment, he bore the lashes with great patience; but feeling the pain excessive, that he might gain a little respite and recruit his spirits, he requested his judge to give ear to something he had to impart to him. The executioners thereupon being commanded to desist, he began to entertain him with an account of his travels. This savage monster expected nothing more than some overtures to be proposed to him of an intention to yield; but finding himself disappointed, in the utmost rage, ordered his torments to be redoubled. At length having glutted his barbarity, the confessors were dismissed, their clothes rent, their bodies inhumanly torn, and their beards and hair plucked off. The very Arians were ashamed of such cruelty, and their bishop offered to punish the priest, if Fulgentius would but undertake his prosecution. His answer was, that a Christian is never allowed to seek revenge; and for their parts it was incumbent on them not to lose the advantage of patience, and the blessings accruing from the forgiving of injuries. The two abbots, to avoid an additional effort of the fury of these heretics, travelled to Ididi, on the confines of Mauritania. Here Fulgentius went aboard a ship for Alexandria, being desirous, for the sake of greater perfection, to visit the deserts of Egypt, renowned for the sanctity of the solitaries who dwelt there. But the vessel touching at Sicily, St. Eulalius, abbot at Syracuse, diverted him from his intended voyage, on assuring him, that "a perfidious dissension had severed this country from the communion of Peter,"[1] meaning that Egypt was full of heretics, with whom those that dwelt there were obliged either to join in communion, or be deprived of the sacraments. The liberality and hospitality of Fulgentius to the poor, out of the small pittance he received for his particular subsistence, made Eulalius condemn himself of remissness in those virtues, and for the future imitate so laudable an example. Our saint having laid aside the thoughts of pursuing his voyage to Alexandria, embarked for Rome, to offer up his prayers at the tombs of the apostles. One day passing through a square called Palma Aurea, he saw Theodoric, the king of Italy, seated on an exalted throne, adorned with pompous state, surrounded by the senate, and his court, with all the grandeur of the city displayed in the greatest magnificence: "Ah!" said Fulgentius, "how beautiful must the heavenly Jerusalem be, if earthly Rome be so glorious! What honor, glory, and joy will God bestow on the saints in heaven, since here in this perishable life he clothes with such splendor the lovers and admirers of vanity!" This happened towards the latter part of the year 500, when that king made his first entry into Rome. Fulgentius returned home in a short time after, and was received with incredible joy. He built a spacious monastery in Byzacena, but retired to a cell himself, which was situate on the sea-shore. Here his time was employed in writing, reading, prayer, mortification, and the manual labor of making mats and umbrellas of palm-tree leaves. Faustus, who was his bishop, obliged him to resume the government of his monastery; and many places at the same time sought him for their bishop. King Thrasimund having prohibited by edict the ordination of orthodox bishops, several sees by this means had been long vacant and destitute of pastors. The orthodox prelates resolved to remedy this inconveniency, as they effectually did; but the king receiving intelligence of the matter, caused Victor, the primate of Carthage, to be apprehended. All this time our saint lay concealed, though sought after eagerly by many citizens for their bishop. Thinking the danger over, he appeared again: but Ruspa, now a little town called {066} Alfaques, in the district of Tunis, still remained without a pastor; and by the consent of the primate, while detained in the custody of the king's messengers, Fulgentius was forcibly taken out of his cell, and consecrated bishop in 508. His new dignity made no alteration in his manners. He never wore the _orarium_, a kind of stole then used by bishops, nor other clothes than his usual coarse garb, which was the same in winter and summer. He went sometimes barefoot: he never undressed to take rest, and always rose to prayer before the midnight office. His diet chiefly consisted of pulse and herbs, with which he contented himself, without consulting the palate's gratification by borrowed tastes: but in more advanced years, finding his sight impaired by such a regimen, he admitted the use of a little oil. It was only in very considerable bodily indispositions, that he suffered a drop or two of wine to be mingled with the water which he drank; and he never could be prevailed upon in any seeming necessity to use the least quantity of flesh-meat, from the time of his monastic profession till his death. His modesty, meekness, and humility, gained him the affection of all, even of the ambitious deacon Felix, who had opposed his election, and whom the saint received and treated with the most cordial charity. His great love for a recluse life induced him to build a monastery near his own house at Ruspa, which he designed to put under the direction of his ancient friend Felix; but before the building could be completed, or he acquit himself to his wish of his episcopal duties, orders were issued from King Thrasimund, for his banishment to Sardinia, with others to the number of sixty orthodox bishops. Fulgentius, though the youngest of this venerable body, who were transported from Carthage to Sardinia, was notwithstanding their sole oracle in all doubts, and their tongue and pen upon all occasions; and not only of them, but even of the whole church of Africa. What spread a brighter lustre on these amiable qualities, were the humility and modesty with which he always declared his sentiments: he never preferred his counsel to that of another, his opinion he never intruded. Pope Symmachus, out of his pastoral care and charity, sent every year provisions in money and clothes to these champions of Christ.[2] A letter of this pope to them is still extant,[3] in which he encourages and comforts them; and it was at the same time that he sent them certain relics of SS. Nazarius and Romanus, "that the example and _patronage_,"[4] as he expresses it, "of those generous soldiers of Christ, might animate the confessors to fight valiantly the battles of the Lord." Saint Fulgentius, with some companions, converted his house at Cagliari into a monastery; which immediately became the comfort of all in affliction, the refuge of the poor, and the oracle to which the whole country resorted for deciding their controversies without appeal. In this retirement the saint composed many learned treatises for confirming and instructing the faithful in Africa. King Thrasimund, hearing that he was their principal support, and their invincible advocate, was desirous of seeing him; and having accordingly sent for him, appointed him lodgings in Carthage. The king then drew up a set of objections, to which he required his immediate answer: the saint without hesitation complied with, and discharged the injunction; and this is supposed to be his book, entitled, An Answer to Ten Objections. The king equally admired his humility and learning, and the orthodox triumphed exceedingly in the advantage their cause gained by this piece. To prevent a second time the same effect, the king, when he sent him new objections, ordered them to be only read to him. Fulgentius refused to give an answer in writing, unless he was allowed {067} to take a copy of them. He addressed, however, to the king an ample and modest confutation of Arianism, which we have under the title of his Three Books to King Thrasimund. The prince was pleased with the work, and granted him permission to reside at Carthage; till upon repeated complaints from the Arian bishops of the success of his preaching, which threatened they said, a total extinction of their sect in Carthage, he was sent back to Sardinia in 520. Being ready to go aboard the ship, he said to a catholic, whom he saw weeping: "Grieve not, Juliatus!" for that was his name, "I shall shortly return, and we shall see the true faith of Christ flourish again in this kingdom, with full liberty to profess it; but divulge not this secret to any." The event confirmed the truth of the prediction. His humility concealed the multiplicity of miracles which he wrought, and he was wont to say: "A person may be endowed with the gift of miracles, and yet may lose his soul: miracles ensure not salvation; they may indeed procure esteem and applause; but what will it avail a man to be esteemed on earth, and afterwards be delivered up to hell torments?" If the sick, for whom he prayed, recovered, to avoid being puffed up with vain-glory, he ascribed it wholly to the divine mercy. Being returned to Cagliari, he erected a new monastery near that city, and was exceedingly careful to supply his monks with all necessaries, especially in sickness; but would not suffer them to ask for any thing, alleging, "That we ought to receive all things as from the hand of God, with resignation and gratitude." Thus he was sensible how conducive the unreserved denial of the will is for perfecting ourselves in the paths of virtue. King Thrasimund died in 523, having nominated Hilderic his successor. Knowing him inclined to favor the orthodox, he exacted from him an oath, that he would never restore their profession. To evade this, Hilderic, before the death of his predecessor, signed an order for the liberty of the orthodox churches, but never had the courage to declare himself of the same belief; his lenity having quite degenerated into softness and indolence. However, the professors of the true faith called home their pastors. The ship which brought them back, was received at Carthage with the greatest demonstrations of joy: the shore echoed far and near with repeated acclamations, more particularly when Fulgentius appeared on the upper deck of the vessel. The confessors went straight to the church of St. Agileus, to return thanks to God, and were accompanied by thousands; but on their way, being surprised with a sudden storm, the people, to show their singular regard for Fulgentius, made a kind of umbrella over his head with their cloaks to defend him from the inclemency of the storm. The saint hastened to his own church, and immediately set about the reformation of the abuses that had crept in during the persecution, which had now continued seventy years; but this reformation was carried on with a sweetness that won, sooner or later, the hearts of the most vicious. In a council held at Junque, in 524, a certain bishop, named Quodvultdeus, disputed the precedency with our saint, who made no reply, though he would not oppose the council, which ordered him to take the first place. The other resented this as an injury offered to the dignity of his see; and St. Fulgentius, in another council soon after, publicly requested that Quodvultdeus might be allowed the precedency. His talents for preaching were singular; and Boniface, the archbishop of Carthage, never heard him without watering, all the time, the ground with his tears, thanking God for having given so great a pastor to his church.[5] {068} About a year before his death, he secretly retired from all business into a monastery on the little island, of rock, called Circinia, in order to prepare {069} himself for his passage to eternity, which he did with extraordinary fervor. The necessities and importunities of his flock recalled him to Ruspa a little before his exit. He bore the violent pains of his last illness for seventy days with admirable patience, having this prayer almost always in his mouth:[6] "Lord, grant me patience now, and hereafter mercy and pardon." The physicians advised him the use of baths; to whom he answered "Can baths make a mortal man escape death, when his life is arrived at its final period?" He would abate nothing of his usual austerities without an absolute necessity. In his agony, calling for his clergy and monks, who were all in tears, he begged pardon if he had ever offended any one of them; he comforted them, gave them some short, moving instructions, and calmly breathed forth his pious soul in the year 533, and of his age the 65th, on the 1st of January, on which day his name occurs in many calendars soon after his death, and in the Roman; but in some few on the 16th of May,--perhaps the day on which his relics were translated to Bourges, in France, about the year 714, where they still remain deposited.[7] His disciple relates, that Pontian, a neighboring bishop, was assured in a vision of his glorious immortality. The veneration for his virtues was such, that he was interred within the church, contrary to the law and custom of that age, as is remarked by the author of his life. St. Fulgentius proposed to himself St. Austin for a model; and, as a true disciple, imitated him in his conduct, faithfully expounding his doctrine, and imbibing his spirit. Footnotes: 1. A comumnione Petri perfida dissentio separavit. Vit S. Fulg. c. 12. 2. Anastas. in Symmacho. Bar. ad ann. 504. Fleury, Liv. 31. 3. Inter opera Ennodii. t. 4. Conc. Labb. col. 1300. 4. Patrocinia. 5. S. Fulgentius, in his first letter, to a gentleman whose wife in a violent sickness had made a vow of continency, proves that a vow of chastity ought not to be made by a person engaged in a married state, without the free consent of the husband. In his second, to Galla, a most virtuous Roman lady, he comforts her upon the death of her husband, who, he says, was only gone a little before her to glory; and he sets before her the divine mercy, which by this means calls her to a more heroic practice of all virtues in the state of widowhood,--especially continence, plainness in dress, furniture, and diet, profuse alms-deeds, and holy prayer, the exercise whereof ought to be her most assiduous employment. Herein he warns her that vanity and pride are our most dangerous enemies, against which we must diligently watch and arm ourselves. In his third letter, addressed to the holy lady Proba, sister to Galla, consecrated to God by a vow of virginity, he shows the excellency of that virtue, and recommends, at length, temperance, penance, and perfect humility, as its essential attendants, without which it cannot render a soul the spouse of Christ, who chose her poor, and bestowed on her all she had. In his fourth letter, to the same lady, he again puts her in mind of the extreme danger of pride and vain-glory, and lays down excellent precepts concerning the necessity of assiduous prayer and compunction; in which spirit we are bound to weep continually before God, imploring his mercy and succor under the weight of our miseries, and to pay him the constant tribute of praise and thanksgiving for all his benefits and gratuitous favors. His letter to the abbot Eugypius, is a commendation of fraternal charity, a principal fruit of which is, to pray for one another. In the sixth letter, he congratulates with Theodorus, a senator, upon his conversion from the world, promising himself that such an example would have great influence over many: for "those who are raised above others by their rank in the world, either draw many with themselves into eternal damnation, or are to many an occasion of salvation." The saint strenuously exhorts him to the study of the most profound humility, which is the only greatness of a Christian, and is always attended with its sister virtue, meekness. The seventh letter of this father is addressed to the illustrious and venerable lady Venantia, and contains a strong exhortation to the spirit and practice of penance, with advice against despair. The sermons and homilies of S. Fulgentius are usually short: we have near one hundred extant which bear his name, but some of these belong to S. Austin. The danger and evil of presumption and pride, are points which he takes every occasion to inculcate: he teaches that it is impossible to know God, and his benefits and goodness, unless we have a true knowledge of ourselves, and our own frailty and miseries. (Hom. 14, p. 123. Bibl. Patr. Lugdun. T. 9, part 1.) In his sermons and letters, he frequently enforces the obligation of alms-deeds. His other works are chiefly polemical, against the Arians, Pelagians, and Nestorians. In his books against the Sermon of Fastidiosus, (an Arian priest,) to Felix the Notary; On the Orthodox Faith, to Donatus, against Fabian; Three Books to King Thrasimund; Ten Answers to Ten Objections of the Arians, &c., he explains the trinity of persons in one divine nature, solidly answers the objections of the Arians, and frequently shows that prayers which are addressed to the Father, or to the Son, or to the Holy Ghost, are addressed to the whole Blessed Trinity. (Lib. 9, contra Fabium, p. 620, &c.) Showing that the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are equally to be adored, he distinguishes the worship of _Latria_, or adoration, which is due to God alone, and that of _Dulia_, which is given to creatures. (Ib. lib. 4, p. 592.) Pinta, an Arian bishop, having published a treatise against our saint's books to King Thrasimund, St. Fulgentius answered him by a work which is lost. For that which we have among his writings, is the performance of some other Catholic controvertist of the same age, as the learned agree. This author's style falls short of St. Fulgentius's: he quotes the Scripture according to the Old Italic Version; our saint always makes use of the Vulgate. He understood not the Greek tongue, in which St. Fulgentius was well skilled. And the author of our saint's life mentions, that in his book against Pinta he referred to his books to King Thrasimund, which is not found in this work. One of the most famous among the writings of St. Fulgentius, is that entitled, On the Two-fold Predestination, to Monimus, in answer to certain difficulties proposed to him by a friend of that name. In the first book he shows, that though God foresees sin, he predestinates no one to evil, but only to good, or to grace and glory. In the second book he proves, that the sacrifice of Christ's body and blood is offered not to the Father alone, as the Arians pretended, but to the whole Blessed Trinity. In this and the third book he answers certain other difficulties. In his two books, On the Remission of Sins, to Euthymius, he proves that sins can never be forgiven without sincere repentance, or out of the pale of the true church. When Peter, a deacon, and three other deputies from the Scythian monks in the East, arrived at Rome, to be informed of the sentiments of the western churches concerning the late errors advanced in the East, against the mystery of the Incarnation, and in the West, by the Semipelagians against the necessity of divine grace, they consulted the sixty African bishops who were at that time in banishment, in Sardinia. St. Fulgentius was pitched upon to send an answer in the name of this venerable company of Confessors. This produced his book, On the Incarnation and Grace, in the first part of which he confutes the Nestorians and Eutychians, and in the second the Semipelagians. His three books, On the Truth of Predestination and Grace, addressed to John the Archimandrite, and Venerius, deacon of Constantinople, are another fruit of the leisure which his exile gave him. In the first part he shows, that grace is the pure effect of the divine goodness and mercy; in the second, that it destroys not free-will; and in the third, that the Divine election both to grace and glory is purely gratuitous. In another treatise or letter, to the same John and Venerius, who had consulted the Confessors in Sardinia about the doctrine of Faustus of Riez, he confutes Semipelagianism. In the treatise, On the Incarnation, to Scarilas, he explains that mystery, showing that the Son became man,--not the Father, or the Holy Ghost; and that in God the trinity destroys not the unity of the nature. Ferrand, the learned deacon of Carthage, consulted St. Fulgentius about the baptism of a certain Ethiopian, who had desired that sacrament, but was speechless and senseless when it was administered to him. Our saint, in a short treatise on this subject, demonstrates this baptism to have been both necessary and valid. By another treatise, addressed to this Ferrand, he answers five questions proposed by him, concerning the Trinity and Incarnation. Count Reginus consulted him, whether the body of Christ was corruptible, and begged certain rules for leading a Christian life in a military state. St. Fulgentius answered the first point, proving that Christ's mortal body was liable to hunger, thirst, pain, and corruption. The second part of moral instructions, which he lived not to finish, was added by Ferrand the deacon. St. Fulgentius's book, On Faith, to Peter, is concise and most useful. It was drawn up after the year 523, about the time of his return from Sardinia. One Peter, designing to go to Jerusalem, requested the saint to give him in writing a compendious rule of faith, by studying which he might be put upon his guard against the heresies of that age. St. Fulgentius executed this in forty articles, some copies and forty-one. In these he explains, under anathemas, the chief mysteries of our faith: especially the Trinity. Incarnation, sacrifice of the altar, (cap. 19. p. 475,) absolute necessity of the true faith, and of living in the true church, to steadfastness, in which he strongly and pathetically exhorts all Christians in the close of the work, (c. 44, 45.) For if we owe fidelity to our temporal prince, much more to Christ who redeemed our souls, and whose anger we are bound to fear above all things, nay, as the only evil truly to be dreaded. The writings of this father discover a deep penetration and clear conception, with an admirable perspicuity in the diction; but seeming apprehensive of not having sufficiently inculcated his matter, he is diffusive, end runs into repetitions. His reasoning is just and close, corroborated by Scripture and tradition. The accurate F. Sirmond published part of his writings, but the most complete edition of them was given at Paris, in 4vo., 1584. 6. Domine, da mihi modo patientiam, et postea indulgentiam. 7. See Gall. Christ. Nov. T. l, p. 121. and Baillet, p. 16. The written relation of this translation is a production of the tenth century, and deserves no regard; but the constant tradition of the church and country proves the translation to have been made (See Hist. Liter. de la France, T. 6, p. 265.) The hutch in which these relics are venerated at Bourget, is called S. Fulgentius's. The saint's head is in the church of the archbishop's seminary, which was anciently an abbey, and named Monte-maven. ST. ODILO, OR OLON, SIXTH ABBOT OF CLUNI HIS family was that of the lords of Mercteur, one of the most illustrious of Auvergne. Divine grace inclined him from his infancy to devote himself to God with his whole heart. He was very young when he received the monastic habit at Cluni, from the hands of S. Mayeul, by whose appointment he was made his coadjutor in 991, though only twenty-nine years of age, and from the death of S. Mayeul in 994, our saint was charged with the entire government of that great abbey. He labored to subdue his carnal appetites by rigorous fasting, wearing hair-cloth next his skin, and studded iron chains. Notwithstanding those austerities practised on himself, his carriage to others was most mild and humane. It was usual with him to say, that of two extremes, he chose rather to offend by tenderness, than a too rigid severity. In a great famine in 1006, his liberality to the poor was by many censured as profuse; for he melted down the sacred vessels and ornaments, and sold the gold crown S. Henry made a present of to that abbey, to relieve their necessities. He accompanied that prince in his journey to Rome when he was crowned emperor, in 1014. This was his second journey thither; he made a third in 1017, and a fourth in 1022. Out of devotion to S. Bennet he paid a visit to Mount Cassino, where he begged leave, with the greatest earnestness, to kiss the feet of all the monks, which was granted him with great difficulty. Besides the journeys which the reformation he established in many monasteries obliged him to undertake, he made one to Orbe, to wait on the empress Alice. That pious princess burst into tears upon seeing him, and taking hold of his habit, kissed it, and applied it to her eyes, and declared to him she should die in a {070} very short time. This was in 999, and she died on the 16th of December the same year. Massacres and plunders were so common in that age, by the right which every petty lord pretended of revenging his own injuries and quarrels by private wars, that the treaty called the truce of God was set on foot. By this, among other articles, it was agreed, that churches should be sanctuaries to all sorts of persons, except those that violated this truce; and that from Wednesday till Monday morning no one should offer violence to any one, not even by way of satisfaction for any injustice he had received. This truce met with the greatest difficulties among the Neustrians, but was at length received and observed in most provinces of France, through the exhortations and endeavors of St. Odilo, and B. Richard, abbot of St. Vanne's, who were charged with this commission.[1] Prince Casimir, son of Miceslaw, king of Poland, retired to Cluni, where he professed the monastic state, and was ordained deacon. He was afterwards, by a solemn deputation of the nobility, called to the crown. St. Odilo referred the matter to pope Benedict IX., with whose dispensation Casimir mounted the throne in 1041, married, had several children, and reigned till his death in 1058.[2] St. Odilo being moved by several visions, instituted the annual commemoration of all the faithful departed, to be observed by the members of his community with alms, prayers, and sacrifices, for the relief of the suffering souls in purgatory; and this charitable devotion he often much recommended. He was very devout to the Blessed Virgin; and above all sacred mysteries, that of the divine Incarnation employed his particular attention. As the monks were singing that verse in the church, "thou being to take upon thee to deliver man, didst not abhor the womb of a virgin;" melting away with the tenderest emotions of love, he fell to the ground; the ecstatic agitations of his body bearing evidence to that heavenly fire which glowed in his soul. Most of his sermons and little poems extant, treat of the mysteries of our redemption, or of the Blessed Virgin.[3] He excelled in an eminent spirit of compunction, and contemplation. While he was at prayer, trickling tears often watered his cheeks. Neither importunities nor compulsion could prevail upon him to submit to his being elected archbishop of Lyons in 1031. Having patiently suffered during five years the most painful diseases, he died of the cholic, at Souvigny, a priory in Bourbonnois, while employed in the visitation of his monasteries, January 1, 1049, being then eighty-seven years old, and having been fifty-six years abbot. He would be carried to the church, to assist at the divine office, even in his agony; and having received the viaticum and extreme-unction the day before, he expired on sackcloth strewed with ashes on the ground. See his life, by his disciple Lotsald, as also, by St. Peter Damian, who wrote it soon after the saint's death, at the request of St. Hugh of Cluni, his successor, in Bollandus, and Bibliotheca Cluniacensis by Dom Marrier, and in Andrew Duchesne, fol. Paris, 1614. See likewise certain epistles of St. Odilo, ib., and fourteen Sermons on the festivals of our Lord, the B. Virgin, &c., in Bibl. Patr. Lugdun. an. 1677, T. 17, p. 653. Footnotes: 1. Glaber, monk of Cluni, in his history which he dedicated to St. Odilo, l. 4, c. 5, l. 5, c. 1. 2. Mab. Annal. l. 57, n. 45. Solignac, Hist. de Pologne, t. 1. 3. Ceillier demonstrates, (T. 20, p. 258,) against Basnage, (observ. in vit. Adelaid. T. 3, le t. Canis, p. 71,) that the life of St. Alice the empress is the work of St. Odilo, no less than the life of St. Mayeul. We have four letters, some poems, and several sermons of this saint in the library of Cluni, (p. 370,) and in that of the Fathers, (T. 17, p. 653.) Two other sermons hear his name in Martenn{} (Anned. T. 5.) {071} ST. ALMACHUS, OR TELEMACHUS, M. WAS a holy solitary of the East, but being excited by the ardors of a pious zeal in his desert, and pierced with grief that the impious diversion of gladiators should cause the damnation of so many unhappy souls, and involve whole cities and provinces in sin; he travelled to Rome, resolved, as far as in him lay, to put a stop to this crying evil. While the gladiators were massacring each other in the amphitheatre, he ran in among them; but as a recompense for his kind remonstrance, and entreating them to desist, he was beaten down to the ground, and torn in pieces, on the 1st of January, 404. His zeal had its desired success; for the effusion of his blood effected what till that time many emperors had found impracticable. Constantine, Constantius, Julian, and Theodosius the elder, had, to no purpose, published several edicts against those impious scenes of blood. But Honorius took occasion from the martyrdom of this saint, to enforce their entire abolition. His name occurs in the true martyrology of Bede, in the Roman and others. See Theodoret, Hist. l. 5, c. 62, t. 3, p. 740.[1] Footnotes: 1. The martyrologies of Bede, Ado, Usuard, &c. mention St. Almachus, M. put to death at Rome, for boldly opposing the heathenish superstitions on the octave of our Lord's nativity. Ado adds, that he was slain by the gladiators at the command of Alypius, prefect of Rome. A prefect of this name is mentioned in the reign of Theodosius, the father of Honorius. This name, the place, day, and cause seeming to agree, Baronius, (Annot. In Martyr. Rom.) Bolland, and Baillet, doubt not but this martyr is the same with St. Telemachus, mentioned by Theodoret. Chatelain, canon of the cathedral at Paris, (Notes sur le Martyr. Rom. p. 8,) and Benedict XIV., (in Festo Circumcis. T. 10, p. 18.) think they ought to be distinguished, and that Almachus suffered long before Telemachus. Wake, (on Enthusiasm,) Geddes, &c. pretend the name to have been a mistake for Almanachum; but are convicted by Chatelain of several unpardonable blunders, and of being utterly unacquainted with ancient MSS. of this kind, and the manner of writing them. Scaliger and Salmasius tell us that the word Almanach is of Arabic extraction. La Crosse observes, (Bibl. Univ. T. 11,) that it occurs in Porphyry, (apud Eus. Præf. Evang. l. 3, c. 4,) who says that horoscopes are found [Greek: en tois almenichiaxois], where it seems of Egyptian origin. But whatever be the meaning of that term in Porphyry, Du Cange, after the strictest search, assures us that the barbarous word Almanach is never met with in any MS. Calendars or Ephemerides. Menage (Origine de la Langue Françoise V. Almanach) shows most probably that the word is originally Persian, with the Arabic article prefixed. It seems to have been first used by the Armenians to signify a calendar, ib. ST. EUGENDUS, IN FRENCH OYEND, A. AFTER the death of the two brothers, St. Romanus and St. Lupicinus, the holy founders of the abbey of Condate, under whose discipline he had been educated from seven years of age, he was first coadjutor to Minausius, their immediate successor, and soon after, upon his demise, abbot of that famous monastery. His life was most austere, his clothes being sackcloth, and the same in summer as in winter. He took only one small refection in the day, which was usually after sunset. He inured himself to cold and all mortifications; and was so dead to himself, as to seem incapable of betraying the least emotion of anger. His countenance was always cheerful; yet he never laughed. By meekness he overcame all injuries, was well skilled in Greek and Latin, and in the holy scriptures, and a great promoter of the sacred studies in his monastery. No importunities could prevail upon him to consent to be ordained priest. In the lives of the first abbots of Condate, of which a MS. copy is preserved in the Jesuit's library in the college of Clermont, at Paris, enriched with MS. notes by F. Chifflet, it is mentioned, that the monastery which was built by St. Romanus, of timber, being consumed by fire, St. Eugendus rebuilt it of stone; and also near the oratory, which St. Romanus had built, erected a handsome church in honor of SS. Peter, Paul, and Andrew, enriched with precious relics. His prayer was almost continual, and his devotion so tender, that the hearing {072} of a pious word was sufficient visibly to inflame his soil, and to throw him sometimes into raptures even in public, and at table. His ardent sighs to be united with his God, were most vehement during his last illness. Having called the priest among his brethren, to whom he had enjoined the office of anointing the sick, he caused him to anoint his breast according to the custom, says the author of his life, and he breathed forth his happy soul five days after, about the year 510, and of his age sixty-one.[1] The great abbey of Condate, in Franche-comté, seven leagues from Geneva, on mount Jura, or Mont-jou, received from this saint the name of St. Oyend; till in the thirteenth century it exchanged it for that of St. Claude; who having resigned the bishopric of Besanzon, which see he had governed seven years in great sanctity, lived fifty-five years abbot of this house, a perfect copy of the virtues of St. Oyend, and died in 581. He is honored on the 6th of June. His body remains entire to this day; and his shrine is the most celebrated place of resort for pilgrims in all France.[2] See the life of St. Oyend by a disciple, in Bollandus and Mabillon. Add the remarks of Rivet. His. Liter. T. 3, p. 60. Footnotes: 1. The history of the first Abbots of Condate, compiled, according to F. Chifflet, in 1252, mentions translation of the relics of St. Eugendus, when they were enshrined in the same Church of St. Peter, which had been made with great solemnity, at which this author had assisted, and of which he testifies that he had already wrote the history here quoted. F. Chifflet regrets the loss of this piece, and adds that the girdle of St. Eugendus, made of white leather, two fingers broad, has been the instrument of miraculous cures, and that in 1601 Petronilla Birod, a Calvinist woman in that neighborhood, was converted to the Catholic faith, with her husband and whole family, having been suddenly freed from imminent danger of death and child-bearing, and safely delivered by the application of this relic. 2. The rich abbey of St. Claude gave rise to a considerable town built about it, which was made an episcopal see by pope Benedict XIV., in 1743: who, secularizing the monastery, converted it into a cathedral. The canons, to gain admittance, must give proof of their nobility for sixteen degrees, eight paternal and as many maternal. St. Romanus was buried at Beaume, St. Lucinius at Leu{}nne, and St. Oyend at Condate: whence this last place for several ages bore his name. S. FANCHEA, OR FAINE, V. HER feast has been kept for time immemorial in the parish church of Rosairthir, in the diocese of Clogher, in Ulster: and at Kilhaine near mount Bregh, on the borders of Meath, where her relics have been in veneration. She seems to have been an abbess, and is thought to have flourished in the sixth century, when many eminent saints flourished in Ireland. Her name was not known to Bollandus or Sir James Ware. See Chatelain. S. MOCHUA, OR MONCAIN, ABBOT, OTHERWISE CALLED CLAUNUS. HAVING served his prince in the army, he renounced the world, and devoted himself to God in a monastic state, with so much fervor as to become a model of perfection to others. He is said to have founded thirty churches, and one hundred and twenty cells, and passed thirty years at one of these churches, which is called from him Teach Mochua, but died at Dayrinis on the 1st of January, in the ninety-ninth year of his age, about the sixth century. See his life in Bollandus, p. 45. SAINT MOCHUA OF BELLA, OTHERWISE CALLED CRONAN, WAS contemporary to S. Congal, and founded the monastery (now a town) named Balla, in Connaught. He departed to our Lord in the fifty-sixth year of his age. See Bollandus, p. 49. {073} JANUARY II. S. MACARIUS OF ALEXANDRIA, ANCHORET. From Palladius, bishop of Helenopolis, who had been his disciple, c. 20. Rufin, Socrates, and others in Rosweide, D'Andilly, Cotelier, and Bollandus, p. 85 See Tillemont, t. 8, p. 626. Bulteau, Hist. Mon. d'Orient, l. 1, c. 9, p. 128. A.D. 394. ST. MACARIUS the younger, a citizen of Alexandria, followed the business of a confectioner. Desirous to serve God with his whole heart, he forsook the world in the flower of his age, and spent upwards of sixty years in the deserts in the exercise of fervent penance and contemplation. He first retired into Thebais, or Upper Egypt, about the year 335.[1] Having learned the maxims, and being versed in the practice of the most perfect virtue, under masters renowned for their sanctity; still aiming, if possible, at greater perfection, he quitted the Upper Egypt, and came to the Lower, before the year 373. In this part were three deserts almost adjoining to each other; that of Sceté, so called from a town of the same name on the borders of Lybia; that of the Cells, contiguous to the former, this name being given to it on account of the multitude of hermit-cells with which it abounded; and a third, which reached to the western branch of the Nile, called, from a great mountain, the desert of Nitria. St. Macarius had a cell in each of these deserts. When he dwelt in that of Nitria, it was his custom to give advice to strangers, but his chief residence was in that of the Cells. Each anchoret had here his separate cell, which he made his continued abode, except on Saturday and Sunday, when all assembled in one church to celebrate the divine mysteries, and partake of the holy communion. If any one was absent, he was concluded to be sick, and was visited by the rest. When a stranger came to live among them, every one offered him his cell, and was ready to build another for himself. Their cells were not within sight of each other. Their manual labor, which was that of making baskets or mats, did not interrupt the prayer of the heart. A profound silence reigned throughout the whole desert. Our saint received here the dignity of priesthood, and shone as a bright sun influencing this holy company, while St. Macarius the elder lived no less eminent in the wilderness of Sceté, forty miles distant. Palladius has recorded[2] a memorable instance of the great self-denial professed and observed by these holy hermits. A present was made of a newly-gathered bunch of grapes to St. Macarius: the holy man carried it to a neighboring monk who was sick; he sent it to another: it passed in like manner to all the cells in the desert, and was brought back to Macarius, who was exceedingly rejoiced to perceive the abstinence of his brethren, but would not eat of the grapes himself. The austerities of all the inhabitants of that desert were extraordinary; but St. Macarius, in this regard, far surpasses the rest. For seven years {074} together he lived only on raw herbs and pulse, and for the three following years contented himself with four or five ounces of bread a day, and consumed only one little vessel of oil in a year; as Palladius assures us. His watchings were not less surprising, as the same author informs us. God had given him a body capable of bearing the greatest rigors; and his fervor was so intense, that whatever spiritual exercise be heard of, or saw practised by others, be resolved to copy the same. The reputation of the monastery of Tabenna, under St. Pachomius, drew him to this place in disguise, some time before the year 349. St. Pachomius told him that he seemed too far advanced in years to begin to accustom himself to their fastings and watchings; but at length admitted him, on condition he would observe all the rules and mortifications of the house. Lent approaching soon after, the monks were assiduous in preparations to pass that holy time in austerities, each according to his strength and fervor; some by fasting one, others two, three, or four days, without any kind of nourishment; some standing all day, others only sitting at their work. Macarius took some palm-tree leaves steeped in water, as materials for his work, and standing in a private corner, passed the whole time without eating, except a few green cabbage leaves on Sundays. His hands were employed in almost continual labor, and his heart conversed with God by prayer. If he left his station on any pressing occasion, he never stayed one moment longer than necessity required. Such a prodigy astonished the monks, who even remonstrated to the abbot at Easter against a singularity of this nature, which, if tolerated, might on several accounts be prejudicial to their community. St. Pachomius entreated God to know who this stranger was; and learning by revelation that he was the great Macarius, embraced him, thanked him for his edifying visit, and desired him to return to his desert, and there offer up his prayers for them.[3] Our saint happened one day inadvertently to kill a gnat that was biting him in his cell; reflecting that he had lost the opportunity of suffering that mortification, he hastened from his cell for the marshes of Sceté, which abound with great flies, whose stings pierce even boars. There he continued six months exposed to those ravaging insects; and to such a degree was his whole body disfigured by them with sores and swellings, that when he returned he was only to be known by his voice.[4] Some authors relate[5] that he did this to overcome a temptation of the flesh. The virtue of this great saint was often exercised with temptations. One was a suggestion to quit his desert and go to Rome, to serve the sick in the hospitals; which, by due reflection, he discovered to be a secret artifice of vain-glory inciting him to attract the eyes and esteem of the world. True humility alone could discover the snare which lurked under the specious gloss of holy charity. Finding this enemy extremely importunate, he threw himself on the ground in his cell, and cried out to the fiends: "Drag me hence if you can by force, for I will not stir." Thus he lay till night, and by this vigorous resistance they were quite disarmed.[6] As soon as he arose they renewed the assault; and he, to stand firm against them, filled two great baskets with sand, and laying them on his shoulders, travelled along the wilderness. A person of his acquaintance meeting him, asked him what he meant, and made an offer of easing him of his burden; but the saint made no other reply than this: "I am tormenting my tormentor." He returned home in the evening, much fatigued in body, but freed from the temptation. Palladius informs us, that St. Macarius, desiring to enjoy more perfectly the sweets of heavenly contemplation, at least for five days without interruption, {075} immured himself within his cell for this purpose, and said to his soul: "Having taken up thy abode in heaven, where thou hast God and the holy angels to converse with, see that thou descend not thence: regard not earthly things." The two first days his heart overflowed with divine delights; but on the third he met with so violent a disturbance from the devil, that he was obliged to stop short of his design, and to return to his usual manner of life. Contemplative souls often desire, in times of heavenly consolation, never to be interrupted in the glorious employment of love and praise: but the functions of Martha, the frailty and necessities of the human frame, and the temptations of the devil, force them, though reluctant, from their beloved object. Nay, God oftentimes withdraws himself, as the saint observed on this occasion, to make them sensible of their own weakness, and that this life is a state of trial. St. Macarius once saw, in a vision, devils closing the eyes of the monks to drowsiness, and tempting them by diverse methods to distractions, during the time of public prayer. Some, as often as they approached, chased them away by a secret supernatural force, while others were in dalliance with their suggestions. The saint burst into sighs and tears; and, when prayer was ended, admonished every one of his distractions, and of the snares of the enemy, with an earnest exhortation to employ, in that sacred duty, a more than ordinary watchfulness against his attacks.[7] St. Jerom[8] and others relate, that a certain anchoret in Nitria, having left one hundred crowns at his death, which he had acquired by weaving cloth, the monks of that desert met to deliberate what should be done with that money. Some were for having it given to the poor, others to the church: but Macarius, Pambo, Isidore, and others, who were called the fathers, ordained that the one hundred crowns should be thrown into the grave and buried with the corpse of the deceased, and that at the same time the following words should be pronounced: "_May thy money be with thee to perdition_."[9] This example struck such a terror into all the monks, that no one durst lay up any money by him. Palladius, who, from 391, lived three years under our saint, was eye-witness to several miracles wrought by him. He relates, that a certain priest, whose head, in a manner shocking to behold, was consumed by a cancerous sore, came to his cell, but was refused admittance; nay, the saint at first would not even speak to him. Palladius, by earnest entreaties, strove to prevail upon him to give at least some answer to so great an object of compassion. Macarius, on the contrary, urged that he was unworthy, and that God, to punish him for a sin of the flesh he was addicted to, had afflicted him with this disorder: however, that upon his sincere repentance, and promise never more during his life to presume to celebrate the divine mysteries, he would intercede for his cure. The priest confessed his sin with a promise, pursuant to the ancient canonical discipline, never after to perform any priestly function. The saint thereupon absolved him by the imposition of hands; and a few days after the priest came back perfectly healed, glorifying God, and giving thanks to his servant. Palladius found himself tempted to sadness, on a suggestion from the devil, that he made no progress in virtue, and that it was to no purpose for him to remain in the desert. He consulted his master, who bade him persevere with fervor, never dwell on the temptation, and always answer instantly the fiend: "My love for Jesus Christ will not suffer me to quit my cell, where I am determined to abide in order to please and serve him agreeably to his will." The two saints of the name of Macarius happened one day to cross the {076} Nile together in a boat, when certain tribunes, or principal officers, who were there with their numerous trains, could not help observing to each other, that those men, from the cheerfulness of their aspect, must be exceeding happy in their poverty. Macarius of Alexandria, alluding to their name, which in Greek signifies _happy_, made this answer: "You have reason to call us happy, for this is our name. But if we are happy in despising the world, are not you miserable who live slaves to it?" These words, uttered with a tone of voice expressive of an interior conviction of their truth, had such an effect on the tribune who first spoke, that, hastening home, he distributed his fortune among the poor, and embraced an eremitical life. In 375, both these saints were banished for the catholic faith, at the instigation of Lacius, the Arian patriarch of Alexandria. Our saint died in the year 394, as Tillemont shows from Palladius. The Latins commemorate him on the 2d, the Greeks with the elder Macarius, on the 19th of January. In the desert of Nitria there subsists at this day a monastery which bears the name of St. Macarius. The monastic rule called St. Macarius's, in the code of rules, is ascribed to this of Alexandria. St. Jerom seems to have copied some things from it in his letter to Rusticus. The concord, or collection of rules, gives us another, under the names of the two SS. Macariuses; Serapion (of Arsinoe, or the other of Nitria;) Paphnutius (of Becbale, priest of Sceté;) and thirty-four other abbots.[10] It was probably collected from their discipline, or regulations and example. According to this latter, the monks fasted the whole year, except on Sundays, and the time from Easter to Whitsuntide; they observed the strictest poverty, and divided the day between manual labor and hours of prayer; hospitality was much recommended in this rule, but, for the sake of recollection, it was strictly forbid for any monk, except one who was deputed to entertain guests, ever to speak to any stranger without particular leave.[11] The definition of a monk or anchoret, given by the abbot Rancè of la Trappe, is a lively portraiture of the great Macarius in the desert when, says he, a soul relishes God in solitude, she thinks no more of any thing but heaven, and forgets the earth, which has nothing in it that can now please her; she burns with the fire of divine love, and sighs only after God, regarding death as her greatest advantage; nevertheless they will find themselves much mistaken, who, leaving the world, imagine they shall go to God by straight paths, by roads sown with lilies and roses, in which they will have no difficulties to conquer, but that the hand of God will turn aside whatever could raise any in their way, or disturb the tranquillity of their retreat: on the contrary, they must be persuaded that temptations will everywhere follow them, that there is neither state nor place in which they can be exempt, that the peace which God promises is procured amidst tribulations, as the rose-bud amidst thorns; God has not promised his servants that they shall not meet with trials, but that with the temptation, he will give them grace to be able to bear it:[12] heaven is offered to us on no other conditions; it is a kingdom of conquest, the prize of victory--but, O God, what a prize! Footnotes: 1. Some confound our saint with Macarius of Pisper, or the disciple of Saint Antony. But the best critics distinguish them. The latter, with his fellow-disciple Amathas, buried St. Antony, who left him his staff, as Cronius, the Priest of Nitria, related to Palladius. To this Macarius of Pisper St. Antony committed the government of almost five thousand monks as appears from the life of saint Posthumias. 2. Hist. Lausiac, c. 20. 3. Pallad. Laus. c. 20. 4. Ib. 5. Rosweide b. 8, c. 20, p. 722. 6. Pallad. Laus. c. 20. 7. Rosweide, Vit. Patr. l. 2, c. 29, p. 481. 8. S. Hier. ep. 18 (ol. 22) ad. Eustoch. T. 4, par. 2, p. 44, ed. Ben. et Rosw. Vit. Patr. l. 3, c. 319 9. Acts viii. 20. 10. Concordia Regularum, autore S. Benedicto Ananiæ Abbate, edita ab Hugone Menardo, O.S.B. in 4to Parisiis, 1638. Item, Codex Regularum collectus a S. Benedicto Ananiæ, auctus a Luca Holstenio, two vols. 4to. Romæ, 1661. 11. C. 60, p. 809 edit. Mena{}. 12. 1 Cor. x. 13. _On the same day_ Are commemorated many holy martyrs throughout the provinces of the Roman empire; who, when Dioclesian, in 303, commanded the holy scriptures, {077} wherever found, to be burnt, chose rather to suffer torments and death than to be accessary {sic.} to their being destroyed by surrendering them into the hands of the professed enemies of their Author.[1] Footnotes: 1. See Baron. n. annal. et annot. in Martyr. Rom. Eus. l. 8, c. 2. H. Vales. not. ib. p. 163. Ruinart, in Acta SS Saturn &c. and S. Felicis. Fleury. Moeurs des Chrét. p. 45. Tillem. Pers. de. Dicol. art. 10, t. 5. Lactant. de mort. Pers. c. 15 et 18, cum not. Baluz. &c. _Also_, ST. CONCORDIUS, M. A HOLY subdeacon, who in the reign of Marcus Antoninus, was apprehended in a desert, and brought before Torquatus, governor of Umbria, then residing at Spoletto, about the year 178. The martyr, paying no regard to his promises or threats, in the first interrogatory was beaten with clubs, and in the second was hung on the rack, but in the height of his torments he cheerfully sang: "Glory be to thee, Lord Jesus!" Three days after, two soldiers were sent by Torquatus, to behead him in the dungeon, unless he would offer sacrifice to an idol, which a priest who accompanied them carried with him for this purpose. The saint showed his indignation by spitting upon the idol, upon which one of the soldiers struck off his head. In the Roman Martyrology his name occurs on the 1st, in some others on the 2d of January. See his genuine acts in Bollandus, p. 9, and Tillemont, t. 2, p. 439. _Also_, ST. ADALARD, OR ADALARD. A.C. Pronounced ALARD.[1] THE birth of this holy monk was most illustrious, his father Bernard being son of Charles Martel, and brother of king Pepin, so that Adalard was cousin-german to Charlemagne, by whom he was called in his youth to the court, and created count of his palace. A fear of offending God made him tremble at the sight of the dangers of forfeiting his grace, with which he was surrounded, and of the disorders which reigned in the world. Lest he should be engaged to entangle his conscience, by seeming to approve of things which he thought would endanger his salvation, he determined to forsake at once both the court and the world. His sacrifice was the more perfect and edifying, as he was endowed with the greatest personal accomplishments of mind and body for the world, and in the flower of his age; for he was only twenty years old, when, in 773, he took the monastic habit at Corbie in Picardy, a monastery that had been founded by queen Bathildes, in 662. After he had passed a year in the fervent exercises of his novitiate, he made his vows; the first employment assigned him in the monastery was that of gardener, in which, while his hands were employed in the business of his calling, his thoughts were on God and heavenly things. Out of humility, and a desire of closer retirement, he obtained leave to be removed to mount Cassino, where he hoped he should be concealed from the world; but his eminent qualifications, and the great example of his virtue, betrayed and defeated all the projects of his humility, and did not suffer him to live long unknown; he was brought back to Corbie, and some years after chosen abbot. Being obliged by Charlemagne often to attend at court, he appeared there as the first among the king's counsellors, as he is styled by Hincmar,[2] who had seen him there in 796. He was compelled by Charlemagne {078} entirely to quit his monastery, and take upon him the charge of chief minister to that prince's eldest son Pepin, who, at his death at Milan in 810, appointed the saint tutor to his son Bernard, then but twelve years of age. In this exalted and distracting station, Adalard appeared even in council recollected and attentive to God, and from his employments would hasten to his chamber, or the chapel, there to plunge his heart in the centre of its happiness. During the time of his prayers, tears usually flowed from his eyes in great abundance, especially on considering his own miseries, and his distance from God. The emperor recalled him from Milan, and deputed him to pope Leo III. to assist at the discussion of certain difficulties started relating to the clause inserted in the creed, concerning the procession of the Holy Ghost from the Father and the Son. Charlemagne died in 814, on the 28th of January, having associated his son, Lewis le Débonnaire, in the empire in the foregoing September. While our saint lived in his monastery, dead to the world, intent only on heavenly things, instructing the ignorant, and feeding the poor, on whom he always exhausted his whole revenue, Lewis declared his son, Lothaire, his partner and successor in the empire, in 817: Bernard, who looked upon that dignity as his right, his father Pepin having been eldest brother to Lewis, rebelled, but lost both his kingdom and his life. Lewis was prevailed upon, by certain flatterers, to suspect our saint to have been no enemy to Bernard's pretensions, and banished him to a monastery, situated in the little island Heri, called afterwards Hermoutier, and St. Philebert's, on the coast of Aquitain. The saint's brother Wala (one of the greatest men of that age, as appears from his curious life, published by Mabillon) he obliged to become a monk at Lerins. His sister Gondrada he confined in the monastery of the Holy Cross, at Poitiers; and left only his other sister Theodrada, who was a nun, at liberty in her convent at Soissons. This exile St. Adalard regarded as his gain, and in it his tranquillity and gladness of soul met with no interruptions. The emperor at length was made sensible of his innocence, and, after five years' banishment, called him to his court towards the close of the year 821; and, by the greatest honors and favors, endeavored to make amends for the injustice he had done him. Adalard (whose soul, fixed wholly on God, was raised above all earthly things) was the same person in prosperity and adversity, in the palace as in the cell, and in every station: the distinguishing parts of his character were, an extraordinary gift of compunction and tears, the most tender charity for all men, and an undaunted zeal for the relief and protection of all the distressed. In 823, he obtained leave to return to the government of his abbey of Corbie, where he with joy frequently took upon himself the most humbling and mortifying employments of the house. By his solicitude, earnest endeavors, and powerful example, his spiritual children grew daily in fervor and divine love; and such was his zeal for their continual advancement, that he passed no week without speaking to every one of them in particular, and no day without exhorting them all in general, by pathetic and instructive discourses. The inhabitants of the country round his monastery had also a share in his pious labors, and he exhausted on the poor the revenue of his monastery, and whatever other temporal goods came to his hands, with a profusion which many condemned as excessive, but which heaven, on urgent occasions, sometimes approved by sensible miracles. The good old man would receive advice from the meanest of his monks, with an astonishing humility; when entreated by any to moderate his austerities, he frequently answered, "I will take care of your servant, that he may serve you the longer;" meaning himself. Several hospitals were erected by him. During his banishment, another Adalard, who governed the monastery by his appointment, began, upon our saint's project, to {079} prepare the foundation of the monastery of New Corbie, vulgarly called Corwey, in the diocese of Paderborn, nine leagues from that city, upon the Weser, that it might be a nursery of evangelical laborers, to the conversion and instruction of the northern nations. St. Adalard, after his return to Corbie, completed this great undertaking in 822, for which he went twice thither, and made a long stay, to settle the discipline of his colony. Corwey is an imperial abbey; its territory reaches from the bishopric of Paderborn to the duchy of Brunswick, and the abbot is one of the eleven abbots, who sit with twenty-one bishops, in the imperial diet at Ratisbon: but the chief glory of this house is derived from the learning and zeal of St. Anscharius, and many others, who erected illustrious trophies of religion in many barbarous countries. To perpetuate the regularity which he established in his two monasteries, he compiled a book of statutes for their use, of which considerable fragments are extant:[3] for the direction of courtiers in their whole conduct, he wrote an excellent book, On the Order of the Court; of which work we have only the large extracts, which Hincmar has inserted in his Instructions of king Carloman, the master-piece of that prelate's writings, for which he is indebted to our saint. A treatise on the Paschal Moon, and other works of St. Adalard, are lost. By those which we have, also by his disciples, St. Paschasius Radbertus, St. Anscharius, and others, and by the testimony of the former in his life, it is clear that our saint was an elegant and zealous promoter of literature in his monasteries: the same author assures us, that he was well skilled, and instructed the people not only in the Latin, but also in the Tudesque and vulgar French languages.[4] St. Adalard, for his eminent learning, and extraordinary spirit of prayer and compunction, was styled the Austin, the Antony, and the Jeremy of his age. Alcuin, in a letter addressed to him under the name of Antony, calls him his son;[5] whence many infer that he had been scholar to that great man. St. Adalard was returned out of Germany to Old Corbie, when he fell sick three days before Christmas: he received extreme unction some days after, which was administered by Hildemar, bishop of Beauvais, who had formerly been his disciple; the viaticum he received on the day after the feast of our Lord's circumcision, about seven o'clock in the morning, and expired the same day about three in the afternoon, in the year 827, of his age seventy-three. Upon proof of several miracles, by virtue of a commission granted by pope John XIX. (called by some XX.) the body of the saint was enshrined, and translated with great solemnity in 1040; of which ceremony we have a particular history written by St. Gerard, who also composed an office in his honor, in gratitude for having been cured of a violent headache through his intercession: the same author relates seven other miracles performed by the same means.[6] The relics of St. Adalard, except a small portion given to the abbey of Chelles, are still preserved at Corbie, in a rich shrine and two smaller cases. His name has never been inserted in the Roman Martyrology, though he is honored as principal patron in many parish churches, and by several towns on the banks of the Rhine and in the Low Countries. See his life, compiled with accuracy, in a very florid pathetic style, by way of panegyric, by his disciple Paschasius Radbertus, {080} extant in Bollandus, and more correctly in Mabillon, (Act. Ben. t. 5, p. 306, also the same abridged in a more historical style, by St. Gerard, first monk of Corbie, afterwards first abbot of Seauve-majeur in Guienne, founder by William, duke of Aquitain and count of Poitiers, in 1080. The history of the translation of the saint's body, with an account of eight miracles by the same St. Gerard, is also given us by Bollandus.) Footnotes: 1. It was usual among the ancient French, to add to certain words, syllables, or letters which they did not pronounce; as Chrodobert, or Rigobert, for Robert: Cloves for Louis; Clothaire for Lotharie, &c. 2. Hinc. l. Inst. Regis, c. 12. 3. Published by D'Achery, Spicil. tom. 4, p. 1, 20. 4. From this testimony it is clear, that the French language, used by the common people, had then so much deviated from the Latin as to be esteemed a different tongue; which is also evident from Nithard, an officer in the army of Lewis le Débonnaire, who, in his history of the divisions between the sons of Lewis le Débonnaire, (published among the French historians by du Chesne,) gives us the original act of the agreement between the two brothers, Charles the Bald, and Lewis of Germany, at Strasburg, in 842. 5. Alcuin, Ep. 107. 6. St. Gerard, of Seauve-majeur, died on the 5th of April, 1095, and was canonized by C[oe]lestine III. in 1197. See his life, with an account of the foundation of his monastery, in Mabillon, Acts, Sanctorum ad S. Benedict. t. 9, p. 841. JANUARY III. ST. PETER BALSAM, M. From his valuable acts in Ruinart, p. 501. Bollandus, p. 128. See Tillemont, T. 5. Assemani, Act Mart. Occid. T. 2, p. 106. A.D. 311. PETER BALSAM, a native of the territory of Eleutheropolis, in Palestine, was apprehended at Aulane, in the persecution of Maximinus. Being brought before Severus, governor of the province, the interrogatory began by asking him his name. Peter answered: "Balsam is the name of my family, but I received that of Peter in baptism." SEVERUS. "Of what family, and of what country are you?" PETER. "I am a Christian." SEVERUS. "What is your employ?" PETER. "What employ can I have more honorable, or what better thing can I do in the world, than to live a Christian?" SEVERUS. "Do you know the imperial edicts?" PETER. "I know the laws of God, the sovereign of the universe." SEVERUS. "You shall quickly know that there is an edict of the most clement emperors, commanding all to sacrifice to the gods, or be put to death." PETER. "You will also know one day that there is a law of the eternal king, proclaiming that every one shall perish, who offers sacrifice to devils: which do you counsel me to obey, and which, do you think, should be my option; to die by your sword, or to be condemned to everlasting misery, by the sentence of the great king, the true God?" SEVERUS. "Seeing you ask my advice, it is then that you obey the edict, and sacrifice to the gods." PETER. "I can never be prevailed upon to sacrifice to gods of wood and stone, as those are which you adore." SEVERUS. "I would have you know, that it is in my power to revenge these affronts by your death." PETER. "I had no intention to affront you. I only expressed what is written in the divine law." SEVERUS. "Have compassion on yourself, and sacrifice." PETER. "If I am truly compassionate to myself, I ought not to sacrifice." SEVERUS. "My desire is to use lenity; I therefore still do allow you time to consider with yourself, that you may save your life." PETER. "This delay will be to no purpose, for I shall not alter my mind; do now what you will be obliged to do soon, and complete the work, which the devil, your father, has begun; for I will never do what Jesus Christ forbids me." Severus, on hearing these words, ordered him to be hoisted on the rack, and while he was suspended in the air, said to him scoffing: "What say you now, Peter; do you begin to know what the rack is? Are you yet willing to sacrifice?" Peter answered: "Tear me with iron hooks, and talk not of my sacrificing to your devils: I have already told you, that I will sacrifice to that God alone for whom I suffer." Hereupon the governor {081} commanded his tortures to be redoubled. The martyr, far from fetching the least sigh, sung with alacrity those verses of the royal prophet: _One thing I have asked of the Lord; this will I seek after: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life_.[1] _I will take the chalice of salvation, and will call upon the name of the Lord_.[2] The governor called forth fresh executioners to relieve the first, now fatigued. The spectators, seeing the martyr's blood run down in streams, cried out to him: "Obey the emperors: sacrifice, and rescue yourself from these torments." Peter replied: "Do you call these torments? I, for my part, feel no pain: but this I know, that if I am not faithful to my God, I must expect real pains, such as cannot be conceived." The judge also said: "Sacrifice, Peter Balsam, or you will repent it." PETER. "Neither will I sacrifice, nor shall I repent it." SEVERUS. "I am just ready to pronounce sentence." PETER. "It is what I most earnestly desire." Severus then dictated the sentence in this manner: "It is our order, that Peter Balsam, for having refused to obey the edict of the invincible emperors, and having contemned our commands, after obstinately defending the law of a man crucified, be himself nailed to a cross." Thus it was that this glorious martyr finished his triumph, at Aulane, on the 3d of January, which day he is honored in the Roman Martyrology, and that of Bede. * * * * * In the example of the martyrs we see, that religion alone inspires true constancy and heroism, and affords solid comfort and joy amidst the most terrifying dangers, calamities, and torments. It spreads a calm throughout a man's whole life, and consoles at all times. He that is united to God, rests in omnipotence, and in wisdom and goodness; he is reconciled with the world whether it frowns or flatters, and with himself. The interior peace which he enjoys, is the foundation of happiness, and the delights which innocence and virtue bring, abundantly compensate the loss of the base pleasures of vice. Death itself, so terrible to the worldly man, is the saint's crown, and completes his joy and his bliss. Footnotes: 1. Ps. xxvi. 4. 2. Ps. cxv. 4. ST. ANTERUS, POPE. HE succeeded St. Pontianus in 235. He sat only one month and ten days, and is styled a martyr by Bede, Ado, and the present Roman Martyrology. See Card. d'Aguirre, Conc. Hispan. T. 3. In the martyrology called S. Jerom's, kept at S. Cyriacus's, it is said that he was buried on the Appian road, in the Paraphagene, where the cemetery of Calixtus was afterwards erected. ST. GORDIUS. MARTYRED at Cæsarea, in Cappadocia, was a centurion to the army, but retired to the deserts when the persecution was first raised by Dioclesian. The desire of shedding his blood for Christ made him quit his solitude, while the people of that city were assembled to the Circus[1] to solemnize public games in honor of Mars. His attenuated body, long beard and hair and ragged clothes, drew on him the eyes of the whole assembly; yet, with this strange garb and mien, the graceful air of majesty that appeared in his {082} countenance commanded veneration. Being examined by the governor, and loudly confessing his faith, he was condemned to be beheaded. Having fortified himself by the sign of the cross,[2] he joyfully received the deadly blow. St. Basil, on this festival, pronounced his panegyric at Cæsarea, in which he says, several of his audience had been eye-witnesses of the martyr's triumph. Hom. 17, t. 1. Footnotes: 1. The _Circus_ was a ring, or large place, wherein the people sat and saw the public games. 2. [Greek: Heautou ton tupon tou staurou perigrapsas.] St. Basil, t. 1, p. 452. ST. GENEVIEVE, OR GENOVEFA, V. CHIEF PATRONESS OF THE CITY OF PARIS. HER father's name was Severus, and her mother's Gerontia: she was born about the year 422, at Nanterre, a small village four miles from Paris, near the famous modern stations, or Calvary, adorned with excellent sculptures, representing our Lord's Passion, on Mount Valerien. When St. Germanus, bishop of Auxerre, went with St. Lupus into Britain to oppose the Pelagian heresy, he lay at Nanterre in his way. The inhabitants flocked about them to receive their blessing, and St. Germanus made them an exhortation, during which he took particular notice of Genevieve, though only seven years of age. After his discourse he inquired for her parents, and addressing himself to them, foretold their daughter's future sanctity, and said that she would perfectly accomplish the resolution she had taken of serving God, and that others would imitate her example. He then asked Genevieve whether it was not her desire to serve God in a state of perpetual virginity, and to bear no other title than that of a spouse of Jesus Christ. The virgin answered, that this was what she had long desired, and begged that by his blessing she might be from that moment consecrated to God. The holy prelate went to the church of the place, followed by the people, and, during long singing of psalms and prayers, says Constantius,[1]--that is, during the recital of None and Vespers,[2] as the author of the life of St. Genevieve expresses it,[3] he held his hand upon the virgin's head. After he had supped, he dismissed her, giving a strict charge to her parents to bring her again to him very early the next morning. The father complied with the commission, and St. Germanus asked Genevieve whether she remembered the promise she had made to God. She said she did, and declared she would, by the divine assistance, faithfully perform it. The bishop gave her a brass medal, on which a cross was engraved, to wear always about her neck, to put her in mind of the consecration she had made of herself to God; and at the same time, he charged her never to wear bracelets, or necklaces of pearls, gold, or silver, or any other ornaments of vanity. All this she most religiously observed, and considering herself as the spouse of Christ, gave herself up to the most fervent practices of devotion and penance. From the words of St. Germanus, in his exhortation to St. Genevieve never to wear jewels, Baillet and some others infer, that she must have been a person of quality and fortune; but the ancient Breviary and constant tradition of the place assure us, that her father was a poor shepherd. Adrian, Valois, and Baluze, observe, that her most ancient life ought not to be esteemed of irrefragable authority, and that the words of St. Germanus are {083} not perhaps related with a scrupulous fidelity.[4] The author of her life tells us, that the holy virgin begging one day with great importunity that she might go to the church, her mother struck her on the face, but in punishment lost her sight, which she only recovered, two months after, by washing her eyes twice or thrice with water which her daughter fetched from the well, and upon which she had made the sign of the cross. Hence the people look upon the well at Nanterre as having been blessed by the saint. About fifteen years of age, she was presented to the bishop of Paris to receive the religious veil at his hands, together with two other persons of the same sex. Though she was the youngest of the three, the bishop placed her the first, saying, that heaven had already sanctified her; by which he seems to have alluded to the promise she had already made, in the presence of SS. Germanus and Lupus, of consecrating herself to God. From that time she frequently ate only twice in the week, on Sundays and Thursdays. Her food was barley bread with a few beans. At the age of fifty, by the command of certain bishops, she mitigated this austerity, so far as to allow herself a moderate use of fish and milk. Her prayer was almost continual, and generally attended with a large flow of tears. After the death of her parents she left Nanterre, and settled with her god-mother at Paris; but sometimes undertook journeys upon motives of charity, and illustrated the cities of Meaux, Leon, Tours, Orleans, and all other places wherever she went, with miracles and remarkable predictions. God permitted her to meet with some severe trials; for at a certain time all persons indiscriminately seemed to be in a combination against her, and persecuted her under the opprobrious names of visionary, hypocrite, and the like imputations, all tending to asperse her innocency. The arrival of St. Germanus at Paris, probably on his second journey to Britain, for some time silenced her calumniators; but it was not long ere the storm broke out anew. Her enemies were fully determined to drown her, when the archdeacon of Auxerre arrived with _Eulogies_, or blessed bread, sent her by St. Germanus, as a testimony of his particular esteem for her virtues, and a token of communion. This seems to have happened while St. Germanus was absent in Italy in 449, a little before his death. This circumstance, so providentially opportune, converted the prejudices of her calumniators into a singular veneration for her during the remainder of her life. The Franks or French had then possessed themselves of the better part of Gaul; and Childeric, their king, took Paris.[5] During the long blockade of that city, the citizens being extremely distressed by famine, St. Genevieve, as the author of her life relates, went out at the head of a company who were sent to procure provisions, and brought back from Arcis-sur-Aube and Troyes several boats laden with corn. Nevertheless, Childeric, when he had made himself master of Paris, though always a pagan, respected St. Genevieve, and, upon her intercession, spared the lives of many prisoners, and did several other acts of clemency and bounty. Our saint, out of her singular devotion to St. Dionysius and his companions, the apostles of the country, frequently visited their tombs at the borough of Catulliacum, which many think the borough since called Saint Denys's. She also excited the zeal of many pious persons to build there a church in {084} honor of St. Dionysius, which King Dagobert I. afterwards rebuilt with a stately monastery in 629.[6] Saint Genevieve likewise performed several pilgrimages, in company with other holy virgins, to the shrine of St. Martin at Tours. These journeys of devotion she sanctified by the exercise of holy recollection and austere penance. King Clovis, who embraced the faith in 496, listened often with deference to the advice of St. Genevieve, and granted liberty to several captives at her request. Upon the report of the march of Attila with his army of Huns, the Parisians were preparing to abandon their city, but St. Genevieve persuaded them, in imitation of Judith and Hester, to endeavor to avert the scourge, by fasting, watching, and prayer. Many devout persons of her sex passed many days with her in prayer in the baptistery; from whence the particular devotion to St. Genevieve, which is practised at St. John-le-rond, the ancient public baptistery of the church of Paris, seems to have taken rise. She assured the people of the protection of heaven, and their deliverance; and though she was long treated by many as an impostor, the event verified the prediction, that barbarian suddenly changing the course of his march, probably by directing it towards Orleans. Our author attributes to St. Genevieve the first design of the magnificent church which Clovis began to build in honor of SS. Peter and Paul, by the pious counsel of his wife Saint Clotilda, by whom it was finished several years after; for he only laid the foundation a little before his death, which happened in 511.[7] St. Genevieve died about the same year, probably five weeks after that prince, on the 3d of January, 512, being eighty-nine years old. Some think she died before King Clovis. Prudentius, bishop of Paris, had been buried about the year 409, on the spot where this church was built. Clovis was interred in it: his remains were afterwards removed into the middle of the choir, where they are covered with a modern monument of white marble, with an inscription. St. Clotilda was buried near the steps of the high altar in 545; but her name having been enrolled among the saints, her relics were enshrined, and are placed behind the high altar. Those of St. Alda, the companion of St. Genevieve, and of St. Ceraunus, bishop of Paris, are placed in silver shrines on the altar of S. Clotilda. The tombs of St. Genevieve and King Clovis were near together. Immediately after the saint was buried, the people raised an oratory of wood over her tomb, as her historian assures us, and this was soon changed into the stately church built under the invocation of SS. Peter and Paul. From this circumstance, we gather that her tomb was situated in a part of this church, which was only built after her death. Her tomb, though empty, is still shown in the subterraneous church, or vault, betwixt those of Prudentius, and St. Ceraunus, bishop of Paris. But her relics were enclosed, by St. {085} Eligius, in a costly shrine, adorned with gold and silver, which he made with his own hands about the year 630, as St. Owen relates in his life. In 845 these relics, for fear of the Normans, were removed to Atis, and thence to Dravel, where the abbot of the canons kept a tooth for his own church. In 850 they were carried to Marisy, near Ferté-Milon, and five years after brought back to Paris. The author of the original life of St. Genevieve concludes it by a description of the Basilick which Clovis and St. Clotilda erected, adorned with a triple portico, in which were painted the histories of the patriarchs, prophets, martyrs, and confessors. This church was several times plundered, and at length burnt, by the Normans. When it was rebuilt, soon after the year 856, the relics of St. Genevieve were brought back. The miracles which were performed there from the time of her burial, rendered this church famous over all France, so that at length it began to be known only by her name. The city of Paris has frequently received sensible proofs of the divine protection, through her intercession. The most famous instance is that called the miracle of _Des Ardens_, or of the burning fever. In 1129, in the reign of Louis VI., a pestilential fever, with a violent inward heat, and pains in the bowels, swept off, in a short time, fourteen thousand persons; nor could the art of physicians afford any relief. Stephen, bishop of Paris, with the clergy and people, implored the divine mercy, by fasting and supplications. Yet the distemper began not to abate till the shrine of St. Genevieve was carried in a solemn procession to the cathedral. During that ceremony many sick persons were cured by touching the shrine; and of all that then lay ill of that distemper in the whole town, only three died, the rest recovered, and no others fell ill. Pope Innocent II. coming to Paris the year following, after having passed a careful scrutiny on the miracle, ordered an annual festival in commemoration of it on the 26th of November, which is still kept at Paris. A chapel near the cathedral, called anciently St. Genevieve's the Little, erected near the house in which she died, afterward, from this miracle, (though it was wrought not at this chapel, but chiefly at the cathedral, as Le Beuf demonstrates,) was called St. Genevieve des Ardens, which was demolished in 1747, to make place for the Foundling Hospital.[8] Both before and since that time, it is the custom, in extraordinary public calamities, to carry the shrine of St. Genevieve, accompanied with those of St. Marcel, St. Aurea, St. Lucan, martyr, St. Landry, St. Merry, St. Paxentius, St. Magloire, and others, in a solemn procession to the cathedral; on which occasion the regular canons of St. Genevieve walk barefoot, and at the right hand of the chapter of the cathedral, and the abbot walks on the right hand of the archbishop. The present rich shrine of St. Genevieve was made by the abbot, and the relics enclosed in it in 1242. It is said that one hundred and ninety-three marks of silver, and eight of gold, were used in making it; and it is almost covered with precious stones, most of which are the presents of several kings and queens. The crown or cluster of diamonds which glitters on the top, was given by Queen Mary of Medicis. The shrine is placed behind the choir, upon a fine piece of architecture, supported by four high pillars, two of marble, and two of jaspis.[9] See the Ancient Life of St. Genevieve, written by an anonymous author, eighteen years after her death, of which the best edition is given by F. Charpentier, a Genevevan regular canon, in octavo, in 1697. It is interpolated in several editions. Bollandus has added another more modern life; see also Tillemont, t. 16, p. 621, and notes, ib. p. 802. Likewise, Gallia Christiana Nova, t. 7, p. 700. Footnotes: 1. Constant. in vit. S. Germani. Altiss. l. 1, c. 20. 2. _Nonam atque duodecim_. It deserves the attention of clergymen, that though anciently the canonical hours were punctually observed in the divine office, SS. Germanus and Lupus deferred None beyond the hour, that they might recite it in the church, rather than on the road. The word _duodecima_ used for Vespers, is a clear demonstration that the canonical hour of Vespers was not five, but six o'clock,--which, about the _equinox_, was the twelfth hour of the natural day: which is also proved from the name of the Ferial hymn at Vespers, _Jam ter quaternis_, &c. See Card. Bona, de div. Psalmodia, &c. 3. Apud Bolland. 4. See Piganiol, Descrip. de Paris, t. 8, v. Nanterre. 5. Paris was called by the Romans the castle of the Parisians, being by its situation one of the strongest fortresses in Gaul; for at that time it was confined to the island of the river Seine, now called the Isle _du Palais_, and the _City_: though the limits of the city are now extended somewhat beyond that island, it is the smallest part of the town. This isle was only accessible over two wooden bridges, each of which was defended by a castle, which were afterwards called the _Great_ and _Little_ Chatelet. (See Lobineau. Hist. de la Ville de Paris, t. l, l. 1.) The greatest part of the neighboring country was covered with thick woods. The Roman governors built a palace without the island, (now in Rue de l'Harpe,) which Julian, the Apostate, while he commanded in Gaul, exceedingly embellished, furnished with water by a curious aqueduct, and, for the security of his own person, contrived a subterraneous passage from the palace to the castle or Great Chatelet; of all which works certain vestiges are to be seen at this day. 6. Some think that Catualliacum was rather Montmartre than St. Denys's, and that the church built there in the time of St. Genevieve stood near the bottom of the mountain, because it is said in her life to have been at the place where St. Dionysius suffered martyrdom; and it is added, that she often visited the place, attended by many virgins, watched there every Saturday night in prayer, and that one night when she was going thither with her companions in the rain, and through very dirty roads, the lamp that was carried before her was extinguished, but lighted again upon her taking it into her own hands: all which circumstances seem not to agree to a place two leagues distant, like St. Denys's. 7. The author of the life of St. Bathildes testifies, that Clovis built this church for the use of monks; which Mabillon confirms by other proofs, (Op. Posth. t. 2, p. 356.) He doubts not but it continued in their hands, till being burnt by the Normans in 856 (as appears from Stephen of Tournay, ep. 146,) it was soon after rebuilt, and given to secular canons. These, in punishment of a sedition, were expelled by the authority of Eugenius III., and Suger, abbot of St. Denys's, and prime minister to Lewis VII., or the Young, in 1148, who introduced into this church twelve regular canons of the order of St. Austin, chosen out of St. Victor's abbey, which had been erected about forty years before, and was then most famous for many great men, the austerity of its rule, and the piety and learning which flourished in it. Cardinal Francis Rochefoucault, the history of whose most edifying life and great actions will be a model of all pastoral virtues to all ages to come, having established an excellent reformation in the abbey of St. Vincent, at regular canons, at Senlis, when he was bishop of that see, being nominated abbot of St. Genevieve's by Lewis XIII., called from St. Vincent's F. Charles Faure, and twelve others, in 1624, and by their means introduced the same reformation in this monastery, which was confirmed in 1634, when F. Faure was chosen abbot coadjutor to the cardinal. He died in odor of sanctity in 667, the good cardinal having passed to a better life in 1645. 8. _De Miraculo Ardentium_. See Anonym. ap. Bolland. et Brev. Paris. ad 26 Nov. 9. See Piganiol, Descr. de Paris, t. 5, p. 238, et Le Fevre Calendrier Hist. de l'Eglise de Paris, Nov 26, et Jan. 3. Gallia Christian. Nova, t. 7, p. 700. Le Beuf l. 2, p. 95, et l. 1, p. 387. {086} JANUARY IV. ST. TITUS, DISCIPLE OF ST. PAUL, B. See St. Paul, ep. ad Tit. and 1 and 2 ad Cor.; also, Tillemont T. 2, Calmet, T. 8, Le Quien Oriens Christianus, T. 2, p. 256. F. Farlat Illyrici sacri. T. 1, p. 354 ad 392. ST. TITUS was born a Gentile, and seems to have been converted by St. Paul, who calls him his son in Christ. His extraordinary virtue and merit gained him the particular esteem and affection of this apostle; for we find him employed as his secretary and interpreter; and he styles him his brother, and copartner in his labors; commends exceedingly his solicitude and zeal for the salvation of his brethren,[1] and in the tenderest manner expresses the comfort and support he found in him,[2] insomuch, that, on a certain occasion, he declared that he found no rest in his spirit, because at Troas he had not met Titus.[3] In the year 51, he accompanied him to the council that was held at Jerusalem, on the subject of the Mosaic rites. Though the apostle had consented to the circumcision of Timothy, in order to render his ministry acceptable among the Jews, he would not allow the same in Titus, apprehensive of giving thereby a sanction to the error of certain false brethren, who contended that the ceremonial institutes of the Mosaic law were not abolished by the law of grace. Towards the close of the year 56, St. Paul sent Titus from Ephesus to Corinth, with full commission to remedy the several subjects of scandal, as also to allay the dissensions in that church. He was there received with great testimonies of respect, and was perfectly satisfied with regard to the penance and submission of the offenders; but could not be prevailed upon to accept from them any present, not even so much as his own maintenance. His love for that church was very considerable, and at their request he interceded with St. Paul for the pardon of the incestuous man. He was sent the same year by the apostle a second time to Corinth, to prepare the alms that church designed for the poor Christians at Jerusalem. All these particulars we learn from St. Paul's two epistles to the Corinthians. St. Paul, after his first imprisonment, returning from Rome into the east, made some stay in the island of Crete, to preach there the faith of Jesus Christ: but the necessities of other churches requiring his presence elsewhere, he ordained his beloved disciple Titus bishop of that island, and left him to finish the work he had successfully begun. "We may form a judgment," says St. Chrysostom,[4] "from the importance of the charge, how great the esteem of St. Paul was for his disciple." But finding the loss of such a companion too material, at his return into Europe the year after, the apostle ordered him to meet him at Nicopolis in Epirus, where he intended to pass the winter, and to set out for that place as soon as either Tychichus, or Arthemas, whom he had sent to supply his place during his absence, should arrive in Crete. St. Paul sent these instructions to Titus, in the canonical epistle addressed to him, when on his Journey to Nicopolis, in autumn, in the year 64. He ordered him to establish Priests,[5] that is, {087} bishops, as St. Jerom, St. Chrysostom, and Theodoret expound it, in all the cities of the island. He sums up the principal qualities necessary for a bishop, and gives him particular advice touching his own conduct to his flock, exhorting him to hold to strictness of discipline, but seasoned with lenity. This epistle contains the rule of episcopal life, and as such, we may regard it as faithfully copied in the life of this disciple. In the year 65, we find him sent by St. Paul to preach in Dalmatia.[6] He again returned to Crete, and settled the faith in that and the adjacent little island. All that can be affirmed further of him is, that he finished a laborious and holy life by a happy death in Crete, in a very advanced old age, some affirm in the ninety-fourth year of his age. The body of St. Titus was kept with great veneration in the cathedral of Gortyna, the ruins of which city, the ancient metropolis of the island, situated six miles from mount Ida, are still very remarkable. This city being destroyed by the Saracens in 823, these relics could never since be discovered: only the head of our saint was conveyed safe to Venice, and is venerated in the Ducal basilica of St. Mark (See Creta Sacra, Auctore Flaminio Cornelio, Senatore Veneto. Venetiis, anno 1755, de S. Tito, T. 1, p. 189, 195.) St. Titus has been looked upon in Crete as the first archbishop of Gortyna, which metropolitical see is fixed at Candia, since this new metropolis was built by the Saracens. The cathedral of the city of Candia, which now gives its name to the whole island, bears his name. The Turks leave this church in the hands of the Christians. The city of Candia was built in the ninth century, seventeen miles from the ancient Gortyn or Gortyna. Under the metropolitan of Candia, there are at present in this island eleven suffragan bishops of the Greek communion. When St. Paul assumed Titus to the ministry, this disciple was already a saint, and the apostle found in him all the conditions which he charged him so severely to require in those whom he should honor with the pastoral charge. It is an illusion of false zeal, and a temptation of the enemy, for young novices to begin to teach before they have learned themselves how to practise. Young birds, which leave their nests before they are able to fly, are sure to perish. Trees which push forth their buds before the season, yield no fruit, the flowers being either nipped by the frost, or destroyed by the sun. So those who give themselves up to the exterior employments of the ministry, before they are thoroughly grounded in the spirit of the gospel, strain their tender interior virtue, and produce only unclean or tainted fruit. All who undertake the pastoral charge, besides a thorough acquaintance with the divine law, and the maxims and spirit of the gospel, and experience, discretion, and a knowledge of the heart of man, or his passions, must have seriously endeavored to die to themselves by the habitual practice of self-denial, and a rooted humility; and must have been so well exercised in holy contemplation, as to retain that habitual disposition of soul amidst exterior employments, and in them to be able still to say, _I sleep, and my heart watches_;[7] that is, I sleep to all earthly things, and am awake only to my heavenly friend and spouse, being absorbed in the thoughts and desires of the most ardent love. Footnotes: 1. 2 Cor. viii. 16, xii. 18. 2. 2 Cor. vii. 6, 7. 3. 2 Cor. xi. 13. 4. Hom. i. in Tit. 5. [Greek: Presbuterous], Tit. i. 5. See the learned Dr. Hammond's dissertation on this subject. From the words of St. Paul, Tit. i. De Marca de Concord. l. 1, c. 3, n. 2. and Schelstrate, T. 2, Ant. Eccl. Diss. 4, c. 2 prove archbishops to be of apostolic institution. 6. St. Titus certainly preached in Dalmatia, 2 Tim. iv. 10, &c. He is honored in that country as its principal apostle, on which see the learned Jesuit F. Fariat, Illyrici Sacr. T. i. p. 355. Saint Domnius, who is honored among the saints on the 7th of May, is said to have been ordained by him first bishop of Salona, then the metropolis, which see was afterwards translated to Spalatro. 7. Cant. v. {088} ST. GREGORY, B. HE was one of the principal senators of Autun, and continued from the death of his wife a widower till the age of fifty-seven, at which time, for his singular virtues, he was compelled from his private penitential life, and consecrated bishop of Langres, which see he governed with admirable prudence and zeal thirty-three years, sanctifying his pastoral labors by the most profound humility, assiduous prayer, and extraordinary abstinence and mortification. An incredible number of infidels were converted by him from idolatry, and worldly Christians from their disorders. He died about the beginning of the year 541, but some days after the Epiphany. Out of devotion to St. Benignus, he desired to be buried near that saint's tomb at Dijon, which town was then in the diocese of Langres, and had often been the place of his residence. This was executed by his virtuous son Tetricus--who succeeded him in his bishopric. The 4th of January seems to have been the day of the translation of his relics. He is mentioned in the Roman Martyrology. See his miracles recorded by St. Gregory of Tours. Vit. Patr. c. 7. Hist. Franc. l. 3, c. 15, 19. Cointe Annal. et Gall. Christ. ST. RIGOBERT, OR ROBERT. HE was abbot of Orbais, afterwards bishop of Rheims, was favored with the gift of miracles, and suffered an unjust banishment under Charles Martel. He was recalled by Pepin, but finding Milo in possession of his see, retired to Gernicour, a village four or five leagues from Rheims, where he led a retired life in the exercises of penance and prayer. He died about the year 750, and was buried in the church of St. Peter at Gernicour, which he had built. Hincmar, the fifth bishop from him, translated his relics to the abbey of St. Theodoric, and nine years after, to the church of St. Dionysius at Rheims. Fulco, Hincmar's successor, removed them into the metropolitan church of our lady, in which the greater part is preserved in a rich shrine; but a portion is kept in the church of St. Dionysius there, and another portion in the cathedral of Paris, where a chapel bears his name. See his anonymous life in Bollandus; also Flodoard, l. 2. Hist. Rhemens. &c. ST. RUMON, B.C. WILLIAM of Malmesbury informs us, that the history of his life was destroyed by the wars, which has also happened in other parts of England. He was a bishop, though it is not known of what see. His veneration was famous at Tavistock, in Devonshire, where Ordulf, earl of Devonshire, built a church under his invocation, before the year 960. Wilson, upon informations given him by certain persons of that country, inserted his name on this day; in the second edition of his English Martyrology. See Malmesb. l. 2. De gestis Pont. Angl. in Cridiensibus. {089} JANUARY V. ST. SIMEON STYLITES, C. From the account given of him by Theodoret, one of the most judicious and most learned prelates of the church, who lived in the same country, and often visited him; this account was written sixteen years before the saint's death. Also from St. Simeon's life written by Antony, his disciple, published genuine in Bollandus, and the same in Chaldaic by Cosmas, a priest; all three contemporaries and eye-witnesses. This work of Cosmas has been lately published by Monsignor Stephen Assemani,[1] from a Chaldaic MS, which he proves to have been written in the year 474, fifteen years only after the death of St. Simeon. Also from the ancient lives of SS. Euthyinius, Theodosius, Auxentius, and Daniel Stylites. Evagrius, Theodorus Lector, and other most faithful writers of that and the following age, mention the most wonderful actions of this saint. The severest critics do not object to this history, in which so many contemporary writers, several of them eye-witnesses, agree; persons of undoubted veracity, virtue, and sagacity, who could not have conspired in a falsehood, nor could have imposed upon the world facts, which were of their own nature public and notorious. See Tillemont, T. 14. A.D. 459. ST. SIMEON was, in his life and conduct, a subject of astonishment, not only to the whole Roman empire, but also to many barbarous and infidel nations. The Persians, Medes, Saracens, Ethiopians, Iberians, and Scythians, had the highest veneration for him. The kings of Persia thought his benediction a great happiness. The Roman emperors solicited his prayers, and consulted him on matters of the greatest importance. It must, nevertheless, be acknowledged, that his most remarkable actions, how instrumental soever they might be to this universal veneration and regard for him, are a subject of admiration, not of imitation. They may serve, notwithstanding, to our spiritual edification and improvement in virtue; as we cannot well reflect on his fervor, without condemning and being confounded at our own indolence in the service of God. St. Simeon was son to a poor shepherd in Cilicia, on the borders of Syria, and at first kept his father's sheep. Being only thirteen years of age, he was much moved by hearing the beatitudes one day read in the church, particularly these: _Blessed are they that mourn; blessed are the clean of heart_. The youth addressed himself to a certain old man, to learn the meaning of those words; and begged to know how the happiness they promised was to be obtained. He told him that continual prayer, watching, fasting, weeping, humiliation, and patient suffering of persecutions, were pointed out by those texts as the road to _true happiness_; and that a solitary life afforded the best opportunities for enforcing the practice of these good works, and establishing a man in solid virtue. Simeon, upon this, withdrew to a small distance, where, falling prostrate upon the ground, he besought Him, who desires all may be saved, to conduct him in the paths which lead to happiness and perfection; to the pursuit of which, under the help of his divine grace, he unreservedly from that moment devoted himself. At length, falling into a slumber, he was favored with a vision, which it was usual with him afterward to relate.. He seemed to himself to be digging a pit for the foundation of a house, and that, as often as he stopped for taking a little breath, which was four times, he was commanded each time to dig deeper, till at length he was told he might desist, the pit being deep enough to receive the intended foundation, on which he would be able to raise a superstructure of what kind, and to what height he pleased. "The event," says Theodoret, "verified the prediction; the actions of this wonderful man were so superior {090} to nature, that they might well require the deepest foundation of humility and fervor whereon to raise and establish them." Rising from the ground, he repaired {"here paired" in the original text} to a monastery in that neighborhood under the direction of a holy abbot, called Timothy, and lay prostrate at the gate for several days, without either eating or drinking; begging to be admitted on the footing of the lowest servant in the house, and as a general drudge. His petition was granted, and he complied with the terms of it with great fervor and affection for four months. During this time he learned the Psalter by heart, the first task enjoined the novices; and his familiarity with the sacred oracles it contains, greatly helped to nourish his soul in a spiritual life. Though yet in his tender youth, he practised all the austerities of the house; and, by his humility and charity, gained the good-will of all the monks. Having here spent two years, he removed to the monastery of Heliodorus, a person endowed with an admirable spirit of prayer; and who, being then sixty-five years of age, had spent sixty-two of them in that community, so abstracted from the world, as to be utterly ignorant of the most obvious things in it, as Theodoret relates, who was intimately acquainted with him. Here Simeon much increased his mortifications; for whereas those monks ate but once a day, which was towards night, he, for his part, made but one meal a week, which was on Sundays. These rigors, however, he moderated at the interposition of his superior's authority, and from that time was more private in his mortifications. With this view, judging the rough rope of the well, made of twisted palm-tree leaves, a proper instrument of penance, he tied it close about his naked body, where it remained unknown both to the community and his superior, till such time as it having eat into his flesh, what he had privately done was discovered by the stench proceeding from the wound. Three days successively his clothes, which clung to it, were to be softened with liquids, to disengage them; and the incisions of the physician, to cut the cord out of his body, were attended with such anguish and pain, that he lay for some time as dead. On his recovery, the abbot, to prevent the ill consequences such a dangerous singularity might occasion, to the prejudice of uniformity in monastic discipline, dismissed him. After this he repaired to a hermitage, at the foot of mount Telnescin, or Thelanissa, where he came to a resolution of passing the whole forty days of Lent in a total abstinence, after the example of Christ, without either eating or drinking. Bassus, a holy priest, and abbot of two hundred monks, who was his director, and to whom he had communicated his design, had left with him ten loaves and water, that he might eat if he found it necessary. At the expiration of the forty days he came to visit him, and found the loaves and water untouched, but Simeon stretched out on the ground, almost without any signs of life. Taking a sponge, he moistened his lips with water, then gave him the blessed Eucharist. Simeon, having recovered a little, rose up, and chewed and swallowed by degrees a few lettuce-leaves, and other herbs. This was his method of keeping Lent during the remainder of his life; and he had actually passed twenty-six Lents after this manner, when Theodoret wrote his account of him; in which are these other particulars, that he spent the first part of Lent in praising God standing; growing weaker, he continued his prayer sitting; and towards the end, finding his spirits almost quite exhausted, not able to support himself in any other posture, he lay on the ground. However, it is probable, that in his advanced years he admitted some mitigation of this wonderful austerity. When on his pillar, he kept himself, during this fast, tied to a pole; but at length was able to fast the whole term, without any support. Many attribute this to the strength of his constitution, which was naturally very {091} robust, and had been gradually habituated to such an extraordinary abstinence. It is well known that the hot eastern climates afford surprising instances of long abstinence among the Indians.[2] A native of France has, within our memory, fasted the forty days of Lent almost in that manner.[3] But few examples occur of persons fasting upwards of three or six days, unless prepared and inured by habit. After three years spent in this hermitage, the saint removed to the top of the same mountain, where, throwing together some loose stones, in the form of a wall, he made for himself an enclosure, but without any roof or shelter to protect him from the inclemencies of the weather; and to confirm his resolution of pursuing this manner of life, he fastened his right leg to a rock with a great iron chain. Meletius, vicar to the patriarch of Antioch, told him, that a firm will, supported by God's grace, was sufficient to make him abide in his solitary enclosure, without having recourse to any bodily restraint: hereupon the obedient servant of God sent for a smith, and had his chain knocked off. The mountain began to be continually thronged, and the retreat his soul so much sighed after, to be interrupted by the multitudes that flocked, even from remote and infidel countries, to receive his benediction; by which many sick recovered their health. Some were not satisfied unless they also touched him. The saint, to remove these causes of distraction, projected for himself a new and unprecedented manner of life. In 423, he erected a pillar six cubits high, and on it he dwelt four years; on a second twelve cubits high, he lived three years; on a third, twenty-two cubits high, ten years: and on a fourth, forty cubits high, built for him by the people, he spent the last twenty years of his life. Thus he lived thirty-seven years on pillars, and was called Stylites, from the Greek word _Stylos_, which signifies a pillar. This singularity was at first censured by all, as a mark of vanity or extravagance. To make trial of his humility, an order was sent him, in the name of the neighboring bishops and abbots, to quit his pillar and new manner of life. The saint, ready to obey the summons, was for stepping down: which the messenger seeing, said, that as he had shown a willingness to obey, it was their desire that he might follow his vocation in God. His pillar exceeded not three feet in diameter on the top, which made it impossible for him to lie extended on it; neither would he allow a seat. He only stooped, or leaned, to take a little rest, and often in the day bowed his body in prayer. A certain person once reckoned one thousand two hundred and forty-four such reverences of adoration made by him in one day. He made exhortations to the people twice a day. His garments were the skins of beasts, and he wore an iron collar about his neck. He never suffered any woman to come within the enclosure where his pillar stood. His disciple Antony mentions, that he prayed most fervently for the soul of his mother after her decease. God is sometimes pleased to conduct certain fervent souls through extraordinary paths, in which others would find only dangers of illusion, vanity, and self-will, which we cannot sufficiently guard ourselves against. We should notwithstanding consider, that the sanctity of these fervent souls does not consist in such wonderful actions, or miracles, but in the perfection of their unfeigned charity, patience, and humility; and it was the exercise {092} of these solid virtues that rendered so conspicuous the life of this saint; these virtues he nourished and greatly increased, by fervent and assiduous prayer. He exhorted people vehemently against the horrible custom of swearing, as also, to observe strict justice, to take no usury, to be assiduous at church and in holy prayer, and to pray for the salvation of souls. The great deference paid to his instructions, even by barbarians, is not to be expressed. Many Persians, Armenians, and Iberians, with the entire nation of the Lazi in Colchis, were converted by his miracles and discourses, which they crowded to hear. Princes and queens of the Arabians came to receive his blessing. Vararanes V. king of Persia, though a cruel persecutor, respected him. The emperors Theodosius the younger, and Leo, often consulted him, and desired his prayers. The emperor Marcian visited him, disguised in the dress of a private man. By his advice the empress Eudoxia abandoned the Eutychian party a little before her death. His miracles and predictions are mentioned at large in Theodoret and others. By an invincible patience he bore all afflictions, austerities, and rebukes, without ever mentioning them. He long concealed a horrible ulcer in his foot, swarming with maggots. He always sincerely looked upon, and treated himself, as the outcast of the world, and the last of sinners; and he spoke to all with the most engaging sweetness and charity. Domnus, patriarch of Antioch, administered unto him the holy communion on his pillar: undoubtedly he often received that benefit from others. In 459, according to Cosmas, on a Wednesday, the 2d of September, this incomparable penitent, bowing on a pillar, as if intent on prayer, gave up the ghost, in the sixty-ninth year of his age. On the Friday following his corpse was conveyed to Antioch, attended by the bishops and the whole country. Many miracles, related by Evagrius,[4] Antony, and Cosmas, were wrought on occasion; and the people immediately, over all the East, kept his festival with great solemnity.[5] The extraordinary manner of life which this saint led, is a proof of the fervor with which he sought to live in the most perfect sequestration from creatures, and union with God and heaven. The most perfect accomplishment of the Divine Will was his only view, and the sole object of his desires; whence upon the least intimation of an order from a superior, he was ready to leave his pillar; nor did he consider this undertaking as any thing great or singular, by which he should appear distinguished from others. By humility he looked upon himself as justly banished from among men and hidden from the world in Christ. No one is to practise or aspire after virtue or perfection upon a motive of greatness, or of being exalted by it. This would be to fall into the snare of pride, which is to be feared under the cloak of sanctity itself. The foundation of Christian perfection is a love of humiliation, a sincere spirit of humility. The heroic practice of virtue must be undertaken, not because it is a sublime and elevated state, but because God calls us to it, and by it we do his will, and become pleasing to him. The path of the cross, or of contempt, poverty, and sufferings, was chosen {093} by the Father for his divine Son, to repair his glory, and restore to man the spiritual advantages of which sin had robbed him. And the more perfectly we walk in his spirit, by the love and esteem of his cross, the greater share shall we possess in its incomparable advantages. Those who in the practice of virtue prefer great or singular actions, because they appear more shining, whatever pretexts of a more heroic virtue, or of greater utility to others they allege, are the dupes of a secret pride, and follow the corrupt inclinations of their own heart, while they affect the language of the saints. We are called to follow Christ by bearing our crosses after him, leading at least in spirit a hidden life, always trembling in a deep sense of our frailty, and humbled in the centre of our nothingness, as being of ourselves the very abstract of weakness, and an unfathomed abyss of corruption. Footnotes: 1. Act. Mart. T. 2, app {}. 2. Lettres édifiantes et curieuses. 3. Don Claude Leauté, a Benedictin monk of the congregation of St. Maur, in 1731, when he was about fifty-one years of age, had fasted eleven years, without taking any food the whole forty days, except what he daily took at mass; and what added to the wonder is, that during Lent he did not properly sleep, but only dozed. He could not bear the open air; and towards the end of Lent he was excessively pale and wasted. This fact is attested by his brethren and superiors, in a relation printed at Sens, in 1731; and recorded by Dom L'Isle, in his History of Fasting; and by Feyjoo, in his Theatro Critico Universal. 4. Evagrius, l. 1, c. 13, 14. 5. Monsignor Majelli, a domestic prelate to pope Benedict XIV., in his dissertation on the _Stylites_, or religious men living on pillars, represents the pillar of St. Simeon enclosed with rails around the top. Whenever he slept a little he leaned on them, or his staff. This author shows the order of the Stylites to have been propagated in the East from saint Simeon, down to the Saracen and Turkish empires. The inclemency of the air makes that manner of life impracticable to the West. However, St. Gregory of Tours mentions one (l. 8. c. 15) V{}filaick, a Lombard, and disciple of the abbot St. Yrier, who leaving Limousin went to Triers, and lived some time on a pillar in that neighborhood. He engaged the people of the villages to renounce the worship of idols, and to hew down the great statue of Diana at Ardens, that had been famous from the time of Domitian. The bishop ordered him to quit a manner of life too severe for the cold climate. He instantly obeyed, and lived afterwards in a neighboring monastery. He seems to have been the only _Stylite_ of the West. See Fleury, l. 35, T. 8, p. 54. ST. TELESPHORUS, P.M. HE was a Grecian by birth, and the seventh bishop of Rome. Towards the end of the year 128, he succeeded Saint Sixtus I., sat eleven years, and saw the havoc which the persecution of Adrian made in the church. "He ended his life by an illustrious martyrdom," says Eusebius;[1] which is also confirmed by St. Irenæus.[2] Footnotes: 1. Hist. l. 4, c. 10. 2. L. 3, c. 3. ST. SYNCLETICA, V. SHE was born at Alexandria in Egypt, of wealthy Macedonian parents. From her infancy she had imbibed the love of virtue, and in her tender years she consecrated her virginity to God. Her great fortune and beauty induced many young noblemen to become her suitors for marriage, but she had already bestowed her heart on her heavenly spouse. Flight was her refuge against exterior assaults, and, regarding herself as her own most dangerous enemy, she began early to subdue her flesh by austere fasts and other mortifications. She never seemed to suffer more than when obliged to eat oftener than she desired. Her parents, at their death, left her heiress to their opulent estate; for the two brothers she had died before them; and her sister being blind, was committed entirely to her guardianship. Syncletica, having soon distributed her fortune among the poor, retired with her sister into a lonesome monument, on a relation's estate; where, having sent for a priest, she cut off her hair in his presence, as a sign whereby she renounced the world, and renewed the consecration of herself to God. Mortification and prayer were from that time her principal employment; but her close solitude, by concealing her pious exercises from the eyes of the world, has deprived us in a great measure of the knowledge of them. The fame of her virtue being spread abroad, many women resorted to her abode to confer with bet upon spiritual matters. Her humility made her unwilling to take upon herself the task of instructing, but charity, on the other side, opened her mouth. Her pious discourses were inflamed with so much zeal, and accompanied with such an unfeigned humility, and with so many tears, that it cannot be expressed what deep impressions they made on her hearers. "Oh," said the saint, "how happy should we be, did we but take as much pains to gain heaven and please God, as worldlings do to heap up riches and perishable goods! by land they venture among thieves and robbers; at sea they expose themselves to the fury of winds and storms; {094} they suffer shipwrecks, and all perils; they attempt all, try all, hazard all; but we, in serving so great a master, for so immense a good, are afraid of every contradiction." At other times, admonishing them of the dangers of this life, she was accustomed to say, "We must be continually upon our guard, for we are engaged in a perpetual war; unless we take care, the enemy will surprise us, when we are least aware of him. A ship sometimes passes safe through hurricanes and tempests, yet, if the pilot, even in a calm, has not a great care of it, a single wave, raised by a sudden gust, may sink her. It does not signify whether the enemy clambers in by the window, or whether all at once he shakes the foundation, if at last he destroys the house. In this life we sail, as it were, in all unknown sea. We meet with rocks, shelves, and sands; sometimes we are becalmed, and at other times we find ourselves tossed and buffeted by a storm. Thus we are never secure, never out of danger; and, if we fall asleep, are sure to perish. We have a most intelligent and experienced pilot at the helm of our vessel, even Jesus Christ himself, who will conduct us safe into the haven of salvation, if, by our supineness, we cause not our own perdition." She frequently inculcated the virtue of humility, in the following words: "A treasure is secure so long as it remains concealed; but when once disclosed, and laid open to every bold invader, it is presently rifled; so virtue is safe so long as secret, but, if rashly exposed, it but too often evaporates into smoke. By humility, and contempt of the world, the soul, like an eagle, soars on high, above all transitory things, and tramples on the backs of lions and dragons." By these, and the like discourses, did this devout virgin excite others to charity, humility, vigilance, and every other virtue. The devil, enraged to behold so much good, which all his machinations were not capable to prevent, obtained permission of God, for her trial, to afflict this his faithful servant, like another Job: but even this served only to render her virtue the more illustrious. In the eightieth year of her age she was seized with an inward burning fever, which wasted her insensibly by its intense heat; at the same time an imposthume was formed in her lungs; and a violent and most tormenting scurvy, attended with a corroding hideous stinking ulcer, ate away her jaws and mouth, and deprived her of her speech. She bore all with incredible patience and resignation to God's holy will; and with such a desire of an addition to her sufferings, that she greatly dreaded the physicians would alleviate her pains. It was with difficulty that she permitted them to pare away or embalm the parts already dead. During the three last months of her life, she found no repose. Though the cancer had robbed her of her speech, her wonderful patience served to preach to others more movingly than words could have done. Three days before her death she foresaw, that in the third day she should be released from the prison of her body; and on it, surrounded by a heavenly light, and ravished by consolatory visions, she surrendered her pure soul into the hands of her Creator, in the eighty-fourth year of her age. The Greeks keep her festival on the 4th, the Roman Martyrology mentions her on the 5th of January.[1] The ancient beautiful life of S. Syncletica is quoted in the old lives of the fathers published by Rosweide, l. 6, and in the ancient notes of St. John Climacus. It appears, from the work itself, that the author was personally acquainted with the saint. It has been ascribe to St. Athanasius, but without sufficient grounds. It was translated into {095} French, though not scrupulously, by d'Andilly, Vies des SS. Pères des Dé certs, T. 3, p. 91. The antiquity of this piece is confirmed by Montfaucon, Catal. Bibl. Coislianæ, p. 417. Footnotes: 1. She must not have lived later than the fourth century, for we find her life quoted in the fifth and sixth; and as she lived eighty-four years, she could not at least be much younger than St. Athanasius. From the age in which she lived, she is thought by some to have been the first foundress of nunneries, of religious women living in community, as St. Antony was of men. On this head consult Helyott, Hist. des Ord., and Mr. Stevens in his English Monasticon, c. 1, p. 16. However, St. Antony's sister found a nunnery erected when she was but young, and this was prior to the time of Constantine the Great. JANUARY VI. THE EPIPHANY OF OUR LORD. EPIPHANY, which in the original Greek signifies appearance or manifestation, as St. Austin observes,[1] is a festival principally solemnized in honor of the discovery Jesus Christ made of himself to the Magi, or wise men; who, soon after his birth, by a particular inspiration of Almighty God, came to adore him and bring him presents.[2] Two other manifestations of our Lord are jointly commemorated on this day in the office of the church; that at his baptism, when the Holy Ghost descended on him in the visible form of a dove, and a voice from heaven was heard at the same time: _This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased_.[3] The third manifestation was that of his divine power at the performance of his first miracle, the changing of water into wine, at the marriage at Cana,[4] _by which he manifested his glory, and his disciples believed in him_.[5] Upon so many accounts ought this festival to challenge a more than ordinary regard and veneration; but from none more than us Gentiles, who, in the persons of the wise men, our first-fruits and forerunners, were on this day called to the faith and worship of the true God. Nothing so much illustrates this mercy as the wretched degeneracy into which the subjects of it were fallen. So great this, that there was no object so despicable as not to be thought worthy of divine honors, no vice so detestable as not to be enforced by the religion of those _times of ignorance_,[6] as the scripture emphatically calls them. God had, in punishment of their apostasy from him by idolatry, given them over to the most shameful passions, as described at large by the apostle: _Filled with all iniquity, fornication, covetousness, maliciousness, envy, murder, contention, deceit, whisperers, detracters, proud, haughty, disobedient, without fidelity, without affection, without mercy, &c._[7] Such were the generality of our pagan ancestors, and such should we ourselves have been, but for God's gracious and effectual call to the true faith. The call of the Gentiles had been foretold for many ages before in the clearest terms. David and Isaias abound with predictions of this import; the like is found in the other prophets; but their completion was a mercy reserved for the times of the Messiah. It was to him, who was also the consubstantial Son of God, that the eternal Father had made the promise of all _nations for his inheritance_;[8] who being born the spiritual king of the {096} whole world, for the salvation of _all men_,[9] would therefore manifest his coming both to those that _were near, and those that were afar off_;[10] that is, both to Jew and Gentile. Upon his birth, angels[11] were dispatched ambassadors to the Jews, in the persons of the poor shepherds, and a star[12] was the divine messenger on this important errand to the Gentiles of the East;[13] conformably to Balaam's prophecy,[14] who foretold the coming of the Messias by that sign. The summons of the Gentiles to Bethlehem to pay homage to the world's Redeemer was obeyed by several whom the scripture mentions under the name and title of _Magi_,[15] or wise men; but is silent as to their number. The general opinion, supported by the authority of St. Leo, Cæsarius, Bede, and others, declares for three.[16] However, the number was small, comparatively to those many others that saw that star, no less than the wise men, but paid no regard to this voice of heaven: admiring, no doubt, its uncommon brightness, but culpably ignorant of the divine call in it, or hardening their hearts against its salutary impressions, overcome by their passions, and the dictates of self-love. In like manner do Christians, from the same causes, turn a deaf ear to the voice of divine grace in their souls, and harden their hearts against it in such numbers, that, notwithstanding their call, their graces, and the mysteries wrought in their favor, it is to be feared, that even among _them_ many _are called, but few are chosen_. It was the case with the Jews, _with the most of whom_, St. Paul says, _God was not well pleased_.[17] How opposite was the conduct of the wise men! Instead of being swayed by the dictates of self-love, by the example of the crowd, and of many reputed moral men among them, they no sooner discovered the heavenly messenger, but, without the least demur, set out on their journey to find the Redeemer of their souls. Convinced that they had a call from heaven by the star, which spoke to their eyes, and by an inward grace, that spoke to their hearts, they cut off all worldly consultations, human reasonings, and delays, and postponed every thing of this kind to the will of God. Neither any affairs to be left unfinished, nor the care of their provinces or families, nor the difficulties and dangers of a long and tedious journey through deserts and mountains almost unpassable, and this in the worst season of the year, and through a country which in all ages had been notoriously {097} infested with robbers: nothing of all this, or the many other false lights of worldly prudence and policy, made use of, no doubt, by their counsellors and dependents, and magnified by the enemy of souls, could prevail with them to set aside or defer their journey; or be thought deserving the least attention, when God called. They well know that so great a grace, if slighted, might perhaps have been lost forever. With what confusion must not this their active and undaunted zeal cover our sloth and cowardice! The wise men being come, by the guidance of the star, into Jerusalem, or near, it, it there disappears: whereupon they reasonably suppose they are come to their journey's end, and upon the point of being blessed with the sight of the new-born king: that, on their entering the royal city, they shall in every street and corner hear the acclamations of a happy people, and learn with ease the way to the royal palace, made famous to all posterity by the birth of their king and Saviour. But to their great surprise there appears not the least sign of any such solemnity. The court and city go quietly on in seeking their pleasure and profit! and in this unexpected juncture what shall these weary travellers to? Were they governed by human prudence, this disappointment is enough to make them abandon their design, and retreat as privately as they can to screen their reputation, and avoid the raillery of the populace, as well as to prevent the resentment of the most jealous of tyrants, already infamous for blood. But true virtue makes trials the matter and occasion of its most glorious triumphs. Seeming to be forsaken by God, on their being deprived of extraordinary, they have recourse to the ordinary means of information. Steady in the resolution of following the divine call, and fearless of danger, they inquire in the city with equal confidence and humility, and pursue their inquiry in the very court of Herod himself: _Where is he that is born king of the Jews?_ And does not their conduct teach us, under all difficulties of the spiritual kind, to have recourse to those God has appointed to be our spiritual guides, for their advice and direction? To _obey and be subject to them_,[18] that so God may lead us to himself, as he guided the wise men to Bethlehem by the directions of the priests of the Jewish church. The whole nation of the Jews, on account of Jacob's and Daniel's prophecies, were then in the highest expectation of the Messiah's appearance among them; the place of whose birth having been also foretold, the wise men, by the interposition of Herod's authority, quickly learned, from the unanimous voice of the Sanhedrim, or great council of the Jews,[19] that Bethlehem was the place which was to be honored with his birth; as having been pointed out by the prophet Micheas,[20] several ages before. How sweet and adorable is the conduct of divine providence! He teaches saints his will by the mouths of impious ministers, and furnishes Gentiles with the means of admonishing and confounding the blindness of the Jews. But graces are lost on carnal and hardened souls. Herod had then reigned upwards of thirty years; a monster of cruelty, ambition, craft, and dissimulation; old age and sickness had at that time exasperated his jealous mind in an unusual manner. He dreaded nothing so much as the appearance of the Messiah, whom the generality then expected under the notion of a temporal prince, and whom he could consider in no other light than that of a rival and pretender to his crown; so no wonder that he was startled at the news of his birth. All Jerusalem, likewise, instead of rejoicing at such happy tidings, were alarmed and disturbed together with him. We {098} abhor their baseness; but do not we, at a distance from courts, betray several symptoms of the baneful influence of human respects running counter to our duty? Likewise in Herod we see how extravagantly blind and foolish ambition is. The divine infant came not to deprive Herod of his earthly kingdom, but to offer him one that is eternal; and to teach him a holy contempt of all worldly pomp and grandeur. Again, how senseless and extravagant a folly was it to form designs against those of God himself! who confounds the wisdom of the world, baffles the vain projects of men, and laughs their policy to scorn. Are there no Herods now-a-days; persons who are enemies to the spiritual kingdom of Christ in their hearts? The tyrant, to ward off the blow he seemed threatened with, has recourse to his usual arts of craft and dissimulation. He pretends a no less ardent desire of paying homage to the new-born king, and covers his impious design of taking away his life, under the specious pretext of going himself in person to adore him. Wherefore, after particular examination about the time when the wise men first saw this star, and a strict charge to come back and inform him where the child was to be found, he dismisses them to the place determined by the chief priests and scribes. Herod was then near his death; but as a man lives, such does he usually die. The near prospect of eternity seldom operates in so salutary a manner on habitual sinners, as to produce in them a true and sincere change of heart. The wise men readily comply with the voice of the Sanhedrim, notwithstanding the little encouragement these Jewish leaders afford them from their own example to persist in their search; for not one single priest or scribe is disposed to bear them company, in seeking after, and paying due homage to their own king. The truths and maxims of religion depend not on the morals of those that preach them; they spring from a higher source, the wisdom and veracity of God himself. When therefore a message comes undoubtedly from God, the misdemeanors of him that immediately conveys it to us can be no just plea or excuse for our failing to comply with it. As, on the other side, an exact and ready compliance will then be a better proof of our faith and confidence in God, and so much the more recommend us to his special conduct and protection, as it did the wise men. For no sooner had they left Jerusalem, but, to encourage their faith and zeal, and to direct their travels, God was pleased to show them the star again, which they had seen in the East, and which continued to go before them till it conducted them to the very place where they were to see and adore their God and Saviour. Here its ceasing to advance, and probably sinking lower in the air tells them in its mute language: "Here shall you find the new-born king." The holy men, with an unshaken and steady faith, and in transports of spiritual joy, entered the poor cottage, rendered more glorious by this birth than the most sumptuous stately palace in the universe, and finding the child with his mother, they prostrate themselves, they adore him, they pour forth their souls in his presence in the deepest sentiments of praise, thanksgiving, and a total sacrifice of themselves. So far from being shocked at the poverty of the place, and at his unkingly appearance, their faith rises and gathers strength on the sight of obstacles which, humanly speaking, should extinguish it. It captivates their understanding; it penetrates these curtains of poverty, infancy, weakness, and abjection; it casts them on their faces, as unworthy to look up to this star, this God of Jacob: they confess him under this disguise to be the only and eternal God: they own the excess of his goodness in becoming man, and the excess of human misery, which requires for its relief so great a humiliation of the Lord of glory. St. Leo thus extols their faith and devotion: "When a star had conducted them to adore Jesus, they did not find him commanding devils, or raising the dead, {099} or restoring sight to the blind, or speech to the dumb, or employed in any divine actions; but a silent babe, under the care of a solicitous mother, giving no sign of power, but exhibiting a miracle of humility."[21] Where shall we find such a faith in Israel? I mean among the Christians of our days. The wise men knew by the light of faith that he came not to bestow on us earthly riches, but to banish our love and fondness for them, and to subdue our pride. They had already learned the maxims of Christ, and had imbibed his spirit: whereas Christians are for the greatest part such strangers to it, and so devoted to the world, and its corrupt maxims, that they blush at poverty and humiliation, and will give no admittance in their hearts to the humility and the cross of Jesus Christ. Such by their actions cry out with those men in the gospel: _We will not have this man to reign over us_.[22] This their opposite conduct shows what they would have thought of Christ and his humble appearance at Bethlehem. The Magi, pursuant to the custom of the eastern nations, where the persons of great princes are not to be approached without presents, present to Jesus, as a token of homage, the richest produce their countries afforded, gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Gold, as an acknowledgment of his regal power: incense, as a confession of his Godhead: and myrrh, as a testimony that he was become man for the redemption of the world. But their far more acceptable presents were the holy sentiments and affections of their souls; their fervent charity, signified by gold; their devotion, figured by frankincense; and the unreserved sacrifice of themselves by mortification, represented by myrrh.[23] The divine king, no doubt, richly repaid their generosity by favors of a much greater excellency, the spiritual gifts of his grace. It is with the like sentiments and affections of love, praise, gratitude, compunction, and humility, that we ought frequently, and particularly on this solemnity, to draw near, in spirit, to the infant Jesus; making him an affectionate tender of our hearts, but first cleansed by tears of sincere repentance. The holy kings being about to return home, God, who saw the hypocrisy and malicious designs of Herod, by a particular intimation diverted them from their purpose of carrying back word to Jerusalem, where the child was to be found. So, to complete their fidelity and grace, they returned not to Herod's court; but, leaving their hearts with their infant Saviour, took another road back into their own country. In like manner, if we would persevere in the possession of the graces bestowed on us, we must resolve from this day to hold no correspondence with a sinful world, the irreconcilable enemy to Jesus Christ; but to take a way that lies at a distance from it, I mean that which is marked out to us by the saving maxims of the gospel. And pursuing this with an unshaken confidence in his grace and merits, we shall safely arrive at our heavenly country. It has never been questioned but that the holy Magi spent the rest of their lives in the fervent service of God. The ancient author of the imperfect comment on St. Matthew, among the works of St. Chrysostom, says, they were afterwards baptized in Persia, by St. Thomas the apostle, and became themselves preachers of the gospel. Their bodies were said to have been translated to Constantinople under the first Christian emperors. From thence they were conveyed to Milan, where the place in which they were deposited is still shown in the Dominicans' church of that city. The emperor Frederick Barbarossa having taken Milan, caused them to be translated to Cologne in Germany, in the twelfth century. Footnotes: 1. St. Aug. Serm. 203, ol. 64, de div. 2. According to Papebroch, it was pope Julius the First, in the fourth century, by whom the celebration of these two mysteries, the nativity and manifestation of Christ to the Magi, was first established in the western church on distinct days. The Greeks still keep the Epiphany with the birth of Christ on Christmas-day, which they call _Theophany_, or the manifestation of God, which is the ancient name for the Epiphany in St. Isidore of Pelusium, St. Gregory Nazianzen, Eusebius, &c. See Thomassi Tr. des Fôtes, Martenne Anecd. T. 5, p. 206, B. et in Nota, ib. 3. Matt. iii. 17. 4. Footnote: Jo. ii. 11. 5. Bollandus (Pref. gen. c. 4) and Ruinart (in Cal. in calce. act. Mart.) quote a fragment of Polemeus Sylvius written in 448, in which is said that all these three manifestations of Christ happened on this day, though S. Maximus of Turin was uncertain. 6. Acts xvii. 30. 7. Rom. i. 8. Ps. ii. 8. 9. 1 Tim. ii. 4. 10. Eph. ii. 17. 11. Luke ii. 10, 11. 12. This phenomenon could not have been a real star, that is, one of the fixed, the least or nearest of which is for distance too remote, and for bulk too enormous, to point out any particular house or city like Bethlehem, as St. Chrysostom well observes; who supposes it to have been an angel assuming that form. If of a corporeal nature, it was a miraculous shining meteor, resembling a star, but placed in the lower region of our atmosphere; its motion, contrary to the ordinary course of the stars, performing likewise the part of a guide to these travellers; accommodating itself to their necessities, disappearing or returning as they could best or least dispense with its guidance. See S. Thomas, p. 3, quæst 36, a. 7. Federicus Miegius Diss. _De Stellá à Magis conspectâ_ in Thesauro Dissertationum in Nov. Testament. Amstelodami. An. 1702, T. 1, Benedictus XIV. de Canoniz. l. 4, part 1, c. 25. 13. What and where this East was, is a question about which interpreters have been much divided. The controverted places are Persia, Chaldea, Mesopotamia, and Arabia Felix. As they lay all more or less eastward from Palestine, so, in each of these countries, some antecedent notions of a Messias may be accounted for. In Persia and Chaldea, by the Jewish captivity and subsequent dispersion; also the prophecies of Daniel. In Arabia, by the proximity of situation and frequent commerce. In Mesopotamia, besides these, the aforesaid prophecy of Balaam, a native of that country. 14. Num. xxiv. 17. 15. In the eastern parts, particularly in Persia,_Magi_ was the title they gave to their wise men and philosophers. In what veneration they were there held appears from the most important affairs, sacred and civil, being committed to their administration. They were deemed the oracles of the eastern countries. These that came to Bethlehem on this solemn occasion are vulgarly called kings, as they very likely were at least of an inferior and subordinate rank. They are called princes by Tertullian, (L. contra Judæos, c. 9, L. 5, contra Marcion.) See Gretser, l. 1. de Festis, c. 30, (T. 5, Op. nup. ad. Ratisp.) Baronius ad ann. l, n. 30, and the learned author Annot. ad histor. vitæ Christi, Urbini, anno 1730, c. 7, who all agree that the Magi seem to have been governors, or petty princes, such anciently being often styled kings. See a full account of the Magi, or Magians, in Prideaux's Connexion, p. 1, b. 4. 16. St. Leo, Serm. 30, &c. St. Cæsar. Serm. 139, &c. See Maldonat. on Saint Matt. ii. for the grounds of this opinion. Honoratus of St. Mary, Règles de la Critique, l. 3, diss. 4, a. 2, F. Ayala in Pictor Christian. l. 3, c. 3, and Benedict XIV. de Festis Christi. l. 1, c. 2, de Epiph. n. 7, p. 22. This last great author quotes a picture older than St. Leo, found in an ancient Roman cemetery, of which a type was published at Rome in a collection of such monuments printed at Rome in 1737. T. 1., Tab. 22. 17. 1 Cor. x. 5. 18. Heb. xiii. 17. 19. This consisted principally of the chief priests and scribes or doctors of the law. 20. Ch. v. 2. 21. Ser. 36, in Epiph. 7, n. 2. 22. Luke xix. 14. 23. Myrrh was anciently made use of in embalming dead bodies: a fit emblem of mortification, because this virtue preserves the soul from the corruption of sin. {100} S. MELANIUS, B.C. HE was a native of Placs or Plets, in the diocese of Vannes in Brittany and had served God with great fervor in a monastery for some years, when Noon the death of St. Amandus, bishop of Rennes, he was compelled by the clergy and people to fill that see, though his humility made great opposition. His virtue was chiefly enhanced by a sincere humility, and a spirit of continual prayer. The author of his life tells us, that he raised one that was dead to life, and performed many other miracles. King Clovis after his conversion held him in great veneration. The almost entire extirpation of idolatry in the diocese of Rennes was the fruit of our saint's zeal. He died in a monastery which he had built at Placs, the place of his nativity, according to Dom Morice, in 490. He was buried at Rennes, where his feast is kept on the 6th of November. In the Roman Martyrology he is commemorated on the 6th of January. St. Gregory, of Tours, mentions a stately church erected over his tomb. Solomon, sovereign prince of Brittany, in 840, founded a monastery under his invocation, which still subsists in the suburbs of Rennes, of the Benedictin order. See the anonymous ancient life of St. Melanius in Bollandus; also St. Greg. Tour. l. de glor. Conf. c. 55. Argentre, Hist. de Bretagne. Lobineau, Vies des Saints de Bretagne, p.32 Morice, Hist. de Bretagne, note 28, p. 932. SAINT NILAMMON, A HERMIT, NEAR PELUSIUM, IN EGYPT, WHO being chosen bishop of Geres, and finding the patriarch Theophilus deaf to his tears and excuses, prayed that God would rather take him out of the world than permit him to be consecrated bishop of the place, for which he was intended. His prayer was heard, for he died before he had finished it.[1] His name occurs in the modern Roman Martyrology on this day. See Sozomen, Hist. l. 8, c. 19. Footnotes: 1. A like example is recorded in the life of brother Columban, published in Italian and French, in 1755, and abridged in the Relation de la Mort do quelques religieux de la Trappe, T. 4. p. 334, 342. The life of this holy man from his childhood at Abbeville, the place of his birth, and afterwards at Marseilles, was a model of innocence, alms-deeds, and devotion. In 1710 he took the Cistercian habit, according to the reformation of la Trappe, at Buon Solazzo in Tuscany, the only filiation of that Institute. In this most rigorous penitential institute his whole comportment inspired with humility and devotion all who beheld him. He bore a holy envy to those whom he ever saw rebuked by the Abbot, and his compunction, charity, wonderful humility, and spirit of prayer, had long been the admiration of that fervent house, when he was ordered to prepare himself to receive holy orders, a thing not usually done in that penitential institute. The abbot had herein a private view of advancing him to the coadjutorship in the abbacy for the easing of his own shoulders in bearing the burden of the government of the house. Columban, who, to all the orders of his superior, had never before made any reply, on this occasion made use of the strongest remonstrances and entreaties, and would have had recourse to flight, had not his vow of stability cut off all possibility. Being by compulsion promoted gradually to the orders of deacon, he most earnestly prayed that God would by some means prevent his being advanced to the priesthood; soon after he was seized with a lameness in his hands, 1714, and some time after taken happily out of this world. These simples are most edifying in such persons who were called to a retired penitential life. In the clergy all promotion to ecclesiastical honors ought to be dreaded, and generally only submitted to by compulsion; which Stephen, the learned bishop of Tourney, in 1179, observes to be the spirit and rule of the primitive church of Christ, (ser. 2.) Yet too obstinate a resistance may become a disobedience, an infraction of order and peace, a criminal pusillanimity, according to the just remark of St. Basil, Reg. disput. c. 21 Innocent III. ep. ad Episc. Calarit. Decret. l. 2, tit. 9, de Renunciatione. SAINT PETER, DISCIPLE of St. Gregory the Great, and first abbot of St. Austin's, in Canterbury, then called St. Peter's. Going to France in 608, he was drowned near the harbor of Ambleteuse, between Calais and Bologne, and is named in the English and Gallican Martyrologies. See Bede, Hist. l. 1, c. 33. {101} JANUARY VII. ST. LUCIAN, PRIEST AND MARTYR. From his panegyric by St. Chrysostom, at Antioch, in 387, and pronounced on his festival, T. 2, p. 524. And also from St. Jerom de script c. 77. Eusebius, l. 8, c. 12, l. 9, c. 6, and Rufinus. See Tillemont T. 5, p. 474. Pagi, an. 311. A.D. 312. ST. LUCIAN, surnamed of Antioch, was born at Samosata, in Syria. He lost his parents while very young; and being come to the possession of his estate, which was very considerable, he distributed all among the poor. He became a great proficient in rhetoric and philosophy, and applied himself to the study of the holy scriptures under one Macarius at Edessa. Convinced of the obligation annexed to the character of priesthood, which was that of devoting himself entirely to the service of God and the good of his neighbor, he did not content himself with inculcating the practice of virtue both by word and example; he also undertook to purge the scriptures, that is, both the Old and New Testament, from the several faults that had crept into them, either by reason of the inaccuracy of transcribers, or the malice of heretics. Some are of opinion, that as to the Old Testament, he only revised it, by comparing different editions of the Septuagint: others contend, that he corrected it upon the Hebrew text, being well versed in that language. Certain, however, it is that St. Lucian's edition of the scriptures was much esteemed, and was of great use to St. Jerom.[1][2] {102} S. Alexander, bishop of Alexandria, says that Lucian remained some years separated from the catholic communion,[3] at Antioch, under three successive bishops, namely, Domnus, Timæus, and Cyril. If it was for too much favoring Paul of Samosata, condemned at Antioch in the year 269, he must have been deceived, for want of a sufficient penetration into the impiety of that dissembling heretic. It is certain, at least, that he died in the catholic communion; which also appears from a fragment of a letter written by him to the church of Antioch, and still extant in the Alexandrian Chronicle. Though a priest of Antioch, we find him at Nicomedia, in the year 303, when Dioclesian first published his edicts against the Christians. He there suffered a long imprisonment for the faith; for the Paschal Chronicle quotes these words from a letter which he wrote out of his dungeon to Antioch, "All the martyrs salute you. I inform you that the pope Anthimus (bishop of Nicomedia) has finished his course by martyrdom." This happened in 303. Yet Eusebius informs us, that St. Lucian did not arrive himself at the crown of martyrdom till after the death of St. Peter of Alexandria, in 311, so that he seems to have continued nine years in prison. At length he was brought before the governor, or, as the acts intimate, the emperor himself, for the word[4] which Eusebius uses may imply either. On his trial, he presented to the judge an excellent apology for the Christian faith. Being remanded to prison, an order was given that no food should be allowed him; but, when almost dead with hunger, dainty meats that had been offered to idols were set before him, which he would not touch. It was not in itself unlawful to eat of such meats, as St. Paul teaches, except where it would give scandal to the weak, or when it was exacted as an action of idolatrous superstition, as was the case here. Being brought a second time before the tribunal, he would give no other answer to all the questions put to him, but this: "I am a Christian." He repeated the same while on the rack, and he finished his glorious course in prison, either by famine, or, according to St. Chrysostom, by the sword. His acts relate many of his miracles, with other particulars; as that, when bound and chained down on his back in prison, he consecrated the divine mysteries upon his own breast, and communicated the faithful that were present: this we also read in Philostorgius,[5] the Arian historian. St. Lucian suffered at Nicomedia, where Maximinus II. resided. His body was interred at Drepanum, in Bithynia, which, in honor of him, Constantine the Great soon after made a large city, which he exempted from all taxes, and honored with the name of Helenopolis, from his mother. St. Lucian was crowned in 312, on the 7th of January, on which day his festival was kept at Antioch immediately after his death, as appears from St. Chrysostom.[6] It is the tradition of the church of Arles, that the body of St. {103} Lucian was sent out of the East to Charlemagne, who built a church under his invocation at Arles, in which his relics are preserved.[7] * * * * * The first thing that is necessary in the service of God, is earnestly to search his holy will, by devoutly reading, listening to, and meditating on his eternal truths. This will set the divine law in a clear and full light, and conduct us, by unerring rules, to discover and accomplish every duty. It will awake and continually increase a necessary tenderness of conscience, which will add light and life to its convictions, oblige us to a more careful trial and examination of all our actions, keep us not only from evil, but from every appearance of it, render us steadfast and immoveable in every virtuous practice, and always preserve a quick and nice sense of good and evil. For this reason, the word of God is called in holy scripture, _Light_, because it distinguisheth between good and evil, and, like a lamp, manifesteth the path which we are to choose, and disperseth that mist with which the subtilty of our enemy and the lusts of our heart have covered it. At the same time, a daily repetition of contrition and compunction washes off the stains which we discover in our souls, and strongly incites us, by the fervor and fruitfulness of our following life, to repair the sloth and barrenness of the past. Prayer must be made our main assistant in every step of this spiritual progress. We must pray that God would enable us to search out and discover our own hearts, and reform whatever is amiss in them. If we do this sincerely, God will undoubtedly grant our requests; will lay open to us all our defects and infirmities, and, showing us how far short we come of the perfection of true holiness of life, will not suffer any latent corruptions in our affections to continue undiscovered, nor permit us to forget the stains and ruins which the sins of our life past have left behind them. Footnotes: 1. St. Hier. Catal. Vir. illustr. c. 77, Ep. 107, et Præf. in Paralip. Item Synopsis ap. St. Athan. ad fin. 2. The Greek translation of the Old Testament, commonly called of the seventy, was made by the Jews living at Alexandria, and used by all the Hellenist Jews. This version of the Pentateuch appeared about two hundred and eighty-five years before Christ, according to Dr. Hody, (_de Bibliorum Textibus, Original. et Versionibus_, p. 570, &c.) that of the other parts somewhat later, and at different times, as the style seems to prove. The Jews even of Palestine at first gloried in this translation, as Philo testifies; but it being employed by the Christians against them, they began, soon after the beginning of the second century, to condemn it, alleging that it was not always conformable to the Hebrew original. This text had then suffered several alterations by the blunders, and, according to Kennicott, some few by the wilful malice of transcribers; though these differences are chiefly ascribed by Origen to alterations of the Hebrew text, introduced after the version was made. The seventy being exploded by the Jews, three new versions were set on foot among them. The first was formed in 129, by Aquila, of Sinope, in Pontus, whom the emperor Adrian, when he built Jerusalem, under the name of �lia, appointed overseer of that undertaking. He had been baptized, but for his conduct being expelled from among the Christians, became a Jew, and gave his new translation out of hatred to the Christians. A second was published about the year 175, by Theodotion, a native of Ephesus, some time a Christian, but a disciple first of the heretic Tatian, then of Marcion. At length he fell into Judaism, or at least connected obedience to the Ritual Law of Moses with a certain belief in Christ. His translation, which made its appearance in the reign of Commodus, was bolder than that of Aquila. The third version was formed about the year 200, by Symmachus, who having been first a Samaritan, afterwards, upon some disgust turned Jew. In this translation he had a double view of thwarting both the Jews and Christians. St. Jerom extols the elegance of his style, but says he walked in the steps of Theodotion; with the two former translators he substituted [Greek: neanis] for [Greek: parthenos] in the famous prophecy of Isaiah, (c. vii. v. 14,) and in that of Jacob, (Gen. xlix. 10,) [Greek: ta apokeimena autôi] for [Greek: ôi apokeitai] Both which falsifications St. Justin Martyr charges upon Aquila, (Dial. cum Tryphon. p. 224, 395, 284, ed. Thirlbii.) and St. Irenæus reproaches Aquila and Theodotion with the former, (p. 253, ed. Grebe.) Many additions from these versions, and several various readings daily creeping into the copies of the seventy, which were transcribed, to apply a remedy to this danger, Origen compiled his Hexapla, &c., of which see some account in the appendix to April 21. Before the year 300 three other corrected editions of the old Greek version were published, the first by Lucian, the second by Hesychius, and the third by Pamphilus the martyr. The first was made use of in the churches, from Constantinople to Antioch; that of Hesychius was received at Alexandria, and in the rest of Egypt; and the third in the intermediate country of Palestine, as we are informed by St Jerom, (_Præf. in Paralip. et Præf. in Explic. Daniel_.) The edition of Lucian came nearest to the [Greek: koine] or common edition of the seventy, and was the purest as St. Jerom (ep. ad Suniam et Fretel. T. 2, col. 627,) and Euthymius affirm, and is generally allowed by modern critics, says Mr. Kennicott, (diss. 2, p. 397.) The excellent Vatican MS. of the seventy, published (though with some amendments from other MSS.) by Cardinal Carafa, at the command of Sixtus V., in 1587, is said in the preface to have been written before the year 390; but Blanchini (Vindiciæ vet. Cod. p. 34) supposes it somewhat later. It is proved from St. Jerom's letter to Sunia and Fretela, and several instances, that this Vatican MS. comes nearest to the [Greek: koine], and to Lucian's edition, as Grabe, (See Annot. in ep. ad Sun. et Fretel. T. 2, col. 671,) Blanchini, (Vindiciæ, p. 256) and Kennicott (diss. 2, p. 416) take notice: the old Alexandrian MS. kept in the British Museum at London, is thought by Grabe to have been written about the year 396; by Mills and Wetstein, (in their _Prolegom. in Nov. Test. Gr._) about one hundred years later. It was published by Grabe, though not pure; for in some places he gives the reading of this MS. in the margin, and prefers some other in the text. Though none of Origen's Asterics are retained, it comes nearest to his edition in the Hexapla, as Grabe, Montfaucon, and Kennicott agree: in some places it is conformable to Theodotion, or Symmachus, and seems mostly the Hesychian edition. See Montfaucon, Prælim. in Hexapla; Kennicott, diss. 2. 3. [Greek: Aposunagwgos emo ne.] 4. [Greek: Arxontos] 5. 2 B. 2, c. 12, 13. 6. The Arians boasted that Arius had received his impious doctrine from St. Lucian: but he is justified with regard to that calumny by the silence of Saint Athanasius; the panegyrics of St. Chrysostom and St. Jerom; the express testimony of the ancient book, On the Trinity, among the works of St. Athanasius, Dial. 3, tom. 2, p. 179; his orthodox confession of faith in Sozomen, l. 3, c. 5, p. 502; and the authority of the church, which from his death has always ranked him among her illustrious martyrs. 7. Saussaye Mart. Gallic. t. 1, p. 17. Chatelain, p. 114. ST. CEDD, BISHOP OF LONDON. HE was brother to St. Chad, bishop of Litchfield, and to St. Celin, and Cimbert, apostolic priests, who all labored zealously in the conversion of the English Saxons, their countrymen. St. Cedd long served God in the monastery of Lindisfarne, founded by St. Aidan, and for his great sanctity was promoted to the priesthood. Peada, the son of Penda, king of Mercia, was appointed by his father king of the midland English; by which name Bede distinguishes the inhabitants of Leicestershire, and part of Lincolnshire and Derbyshire, from the rest of the Mercians. The young king, with a great number of noblemen, servants, and soldiers, went to Atwall, or Walton, the seat of Oswy, king of the Northumbers, and was there baptized with all his attendants, by Finan, bishop of Lindisfarne. Four priests, Saint Cedd, Adda, Betta, and Diuma, the last a Scot, the rest English, were sent to preach the gospel to his people, the midland English; among whom great multitudes received the word of life with joy. King Penda himself obstructed not these missionaries in preaching the faith in other parts of Mercia, but hated and despised such as embraced the gospel, yet lived not up to it, saying, "Such wretches deserved the utmost contempt, who would not obey the God in whom they believed." St. Cedd, after laboring there some time with great success, was called from this mission to a new harvest. Sigbercht, or Sigebert, king of the East-Saxons, paying a visit to Oswy, in {104} Northumberland, was persuaded by that prince to forsake his idols, and was baptized by bishop Finan. When he was returned to his own kingdom, he entreated king Oswy to send him some teachers, who might instruct his people in the faith of Christ. Oswy called St. Cedd out of the province of the midland English, and sent him with another priest to the nation of the East-Saxons. When they had travelled over that whole province, and gathered numerous churches to our Lord, St. Cedd returned to Lindisfarne, to confer with bishop Finan about certain matters of importance. That prelate ordained him bishop of the East-Saxons, having called two other bishops to assist at his consecration. St. Cedd going back to his province, pursued the work he had begun, built churches, and ordained priests and deacons. Two monasteries were erected by him in those parts, which seem afterwards to have been destroyed by the Danes, and never restored. The first, he founded near a city, called by the English Saxons, Ythancester, formerly Othona, seated upon the bank of the river Pante, (now Froshwell,) which town was afterwards swallowed up by the gradual encroaching of the sea. St. Cedd's other monastery was built at another city called Tillaburg, now Tilbury, near the river Thames, and here Camden supposes the saint chiefly to have resided, as the first English bishops often chose to live in monasteries. But others generally imagine, that London, then the seat of the king, was the ordinary place of his residence, as it was of the ancient bishops of that province, and of all his successors. In a journey which St. Cedd made to his own country, Edilwald, the son of Oswald, who reigned among the Deiri, in Yorkshire, finding him to be a wise and holy man, desired him to accept of some possessions of land to build a monastery, to which the king might resort to offer his prayers with those who should attend the divine service without intermission, and where he might be buried when he died. The king had before with him a brother of our saint, called Celin, a priest of great piety, who administered the divine word, and the sacraments, to him and his family. St. Cedd pitched upon a place amidst craggy and remote mountains, which seemed fitter to be a retreat for robbers, or a lurking place for wild beasts, than a habitation for men. Here he resolved first to spend forty days in fasting and prayer, to consecrate the place to God. For this purpose he retired thither in the beginning of Lent. He ate only in the evening, except on Sundays, and his meal consisted of an egg, and a little milk mingled with water, with a small portion of bread, according to the custom of Lindisfarne, derived from that of St. Columba, by which it appears that, for want of legumes so early in the year, milk and eggs were allowed in that northern climate, which the canons forbade in Lent. Ten days before the end of Lent, the bishop was called to the king for certain pressing affairs, so that he was obliged to commission his priest, Cynibil, who was his brother, to complete it. This monastery being founded in 658, was called Lestingay. St. Cedd placed in it monks, with a superior from Lindisfarne; but continued to superintend the same, and afterwards made several visits thither from London. Our saint excommunicated a certain nobleman among the East-Saxons, for an incestuous marriage; forbidding any Christian to enter his house, or eat with him. Notwithstanding this prohibition, the king went to a banquet at his house. Upon his return, the holy bishop met him, whom, as soon as the king saw, he began to tremble, and lighting from his horse, prostrated himself at his feet, begging pardon for his offence. The bishop touched him with the rod which he held in his hand, and said, "O king, because thou wouldst not refrain from the house of that wicked excommunicated person, thou thyself shalt die in that very house." Accordingly, some time after, the king was basely murdered, in 661. by this nobleman and another, {105} both his own kinsmen, who alleged no other reason for their crime, than that he was too easy in forgiving his enemies. This king was succeeded by Suidhelm, the son of Sexbald, whom St. Cedd regenerated to Christ by baptism. In 664, St. Cedd was present at the conference, or synod, of Streneshalch, in which he forsook the Scottish custom, and agreed to receive the canonical observance of the time of Easter. Soon after, a great pestilence breaking out in England, St. Cedd died of it, in his beloved monastery of Lestingay, in the mountainous part of Yorkshire, since destroyed by the Danes, so that its exact situation is not known. He was first buried in the open cemetery, but, not long after, a church of stone being built in the same monastery, under the invocation of the Blessed Virgin, the mother of our Lord, his body was removed, and laid at the right hand of the altar. Thirty of the saint's religious brethren in Essex, upon the news of his death, came to Lestingay, in the resolution to live and die where their holy father had ended his life. They were willingly received by their brethren, but were all carried off by the same pestilence, except a little boy, who was afterwards found not to have been then baptized, and being in process of time advanced to the priesthood, lived to gain many souls to God. St. Cedd died on the 26th of October, but is commemorated in the English Martyrology on the 7th of January. See Bede, Hist. l. 3, c. 21, 22, 23. Wharton Hist. Episc. Lond. &c. ST. KENTIGERNA, WIDOW. SHE is commemorated on the 7th of January, in the Aberdeen Breviary, from which we learn, that she was of royal blood, daughter of Kelly, prince of Leinster in Ireland, as Colgan proves from ancient monuments. She was mother of the holy abbot St. Foelan, or Felan. After the death of her husband, she left Ireland, and consecrated her to God in a religious state, and lived in great austerity and humility, and died on the 7th of January, in the year 728. Adam King informs us that a famous parish church bears her name at Locloumont, in Inchelroch, a small island into which she retired some time before her death, that she might with greater liberty give herself up to heavenly meditation. See Brev. Aberden. et Colgan ad 7 Jan. p. 23. ST. ALDRIC, BISHOP OF MANS, C. THIS saint was born of a noble family, of partly Saxon and partly Bavarian extraction, about the year 800. At twelve years of age he was placed by his father in the court of Charlemagne, in the family of Lewis le Débonnaire, where, by his application to the exercises of devotion, and to serious studies, and by his eminent virtue, he gained the esteem of the whole court. But the false lustre of worldly honors had no charms to one who, from his infancy, had entertained no other desire than that of consecrating himself to the divine service. About the year 821, bidding adieu to the court, he retired from Aix-la-chapelle to Metz, where he entered himself amongst the clergy, in the bishop's seminary, and received the clerical tonsure. Two years after, he was promoted to the holy orders of deacon, and, after three years more, to the priesthood. The emperor Lewis le Débonnaire called him again to court, and made him his first chaplain and his confessor. In 832, St. Aldric was chosen bishop of Mans, and consecrated on the 22d of December. The emperor arrived at Mans three days after, and kept the {106} Christmas holydays with him. The holy pastor was humble, patient, severe towards himself, and mild and charitable to all others. He employed both his patrimony and his whole interest and credit in relieving the poor, redeeming captives, establishing churches and monasteries, and promoting piety and religion. In the civil wars which divided the French monarchy, his fidelity to his prince, and to his successor Charles the Bald, was inviolable, for which he was for almost a year expelled, by the factious, from his see; though it is a subject of dispute whether this happened in the former or in the latter reign. It was a principal part of his care, to maintain an exact discipline in his clergy; for whose use he drew up a collection of canons, of councils, and decretals of popes, called his Capitulars, which seems to have been the most learned and judicious work of that kind which that age produced, so that the loss of it is much regretted.[1] Some fragments have reached us of the excellent regulations which he made for the celebration of the divine service, in which he orders ten wax candles, and ninety lamps with oil, to be lighted up in his cathedral on all great festivals.[2] We have three testaments of this holy prelate extant.[3] The last is an edifying monument of his sincere piety: in the two first, he bequeaths several lands and possessions to many churches of his diocese, adding prudent advice and regulations for maintaining good order, and a spirit of charity, between the clergy and monks. In 836, he was deputed by the council of Aix-la-chapelle, with Erchenrad, bishop of Paris, to Pepin, king of Aquitain, who was then reconciled with the emperor his father; and that prince was prevailed on by them to cause all the possessions of churches, which had been seized by those of his party, to be restored. Our saint assisted at the eighth council of Paris, in 846, and at the council of Tours, in 849. The two last years of his life he was confined to his bed by a palsy, during which time he redoubled his fervor and assiduity in holy prayer, for which he had from his infancy an extraordinary ardor. He died the 7th of January, 856, having been bishop almost twenty-four years. He was buried in the church of St. Vincent, to which, and the monastery to which it belongs, he had been a great benefactor. His relics are honorably preserved there at this day, and his festival has been kept at Mans from time immemorial. See his life published by Baluze, T. 3, Miscell. from an ancient MS. belonging to his church. The author produces many original public instruments, and seems to have been contemporary. (See Hist Lit. de la France, T. 5, p. 145.) Another life, probably compiled by a canon of the cathedral of Mans, in the time of Robert, successor to Saint Aldric, is given us by Mabillon, Annal. T. 3, p. 46, 246, 397, &c., but inserts some false pieces. (See Hist. Lit. ib. p. 148.) The life of St. Aldric, which we find in Bollandus, is a modern piece composed by John Moreau, canon of Mans. Footnotes: 1. See Baluze, Capitul. Regnum Fr. T. 2, p. 44. 2. Ibid. p. 143. 3. Ib. p. 63, 70, 72, 80. SAINT THILLO, CALLED IN FRANCE THEAU, IN FLANDERS TILLOINE, OR TILMAN, C. HE was by birth a Saxon, and being made captive, was carried into the Low Countries, where he was ransomed and baptized by St. Eligius. That apostolical man sent him to his abbey of Solignac, in Limousin. St. Thillo was called thence by St. Eligius, ordained priest, and employed by him some time at Tournay, and in other parts of the Low Countries. The inhabitants of the country of Isengihen, near Courtray, regard him as their apostle. Some years after the death of St. Eligius, St. Thillo returned to Solignac, {107} and lived a recluse near that abbey, in simplicity, devotion, and austerities, imitating the Antonies and Macariuses. He died in his solitude, about the year 702, of his age ninety-four, and was honored with miracles. His name is famous in the French and Belgic calendars, though it occurs not in the Roman. St. Owen, in his life of St. Eligius, names Thillo first among the seven disciples of that saint, who worked with him at his trade of goldsmith, and imitated him in all his religious exercises, before that holy man was engaged in the ministry of the church. Many churches in Flanders, Auvergne, Limousin, and other places, are dedicated to God, under his invocation. The anonymous life of St. Thillo, in Bollandus, is not altogether authentic; the history which Mabillon gives of him from the Breviary of Solignac, is of more authority, (Mab. Sæc. 2, Ben. p. 996.) See also Bulteau, Hist. Ben. T. i. l. 3, c. 16. Molanus in Natal. Sanct. Belgii, &c. ST. CANUT, SECOND son of Eric the Good, king of Denmark, was made duke of Sleswig, his elder brother Nicholas being king of Denmark. Their father, who lived with his people as a father with his children, and no one ever left him without comfort, says the ancient chronicle Knytling-Saga, p. 71, died in Cyprus, going on a pilgrimage to the holy land, in which he had been received by Alexius Comnenus, emperor, at Constantinople, with the greatest honor, and had founded an hospital at Lucca for Danish pilgrims. He died in 1103, on the 11th of July. Mallet, 1. 2, p. 112. Canut set himself to make justice and peace reign in his principality: those warriors could not easily be restrained from plundering. One day, when he had condemned several together to be hanged for piracies, one cried out, that he was of blood royal, and related to Canut. The prince answered, that to honor his extraction, he should be hanged on the top of the highest mast of his ship, which was executed. (Helmold, l. 6, c. 49) Henry, king of the Sclavi, being dead, and his two sons, St. Canut his nephew succeeded, paid homage to the emperor Lothaire II. and was crowned by him king of the Obotrites, or western Sclavi. St. Canut was much honored by that emperor, in whose court he had spent part of his youth. Valor, prudence, zeal, and goodness, endeared him to all. He was slain by conspiracy of the jealous Danes, the 7th of January, 1130, and canonized in 1171. His son became duke of Sleswig, and in 1158 king of Denmark, called Valdemar I. and the Great, from his virtuous and glorious actions. {108} JANUARY VIII. ST. APOLLINARIS, THE APOLOGIST, BISHOP From Eusebius, Theodoret, St. Jerom, &c. See Tillemont, Mem. t. 2, p. 492, and Hist des Emp. t. 2, p. 309. A.D. 175. CLAUDIUS APOLLINARIS, bishop of Hierapolis, in Phrygia, was one of the most illustrious prelates of the second age. Notwithstanding the great encomiums bestowed on him by Eusebius, St. Jerom, Theodoret, and others, we know but very little of his actions; and his writings, which then were held in great esteem, seem now to be all lost. Photius,[1] who had read them, and who was a very good judge, commends them both for their style and matter. He wrote against the Encratites, and other heretics, and pointed out, as St. Jerom testifies,[2] from what philosophical sect each heresy derived its errors. The last of these works was against the Montanists and their pretended prophets, who began to appear in Phrygia about the year 171. But nothing rendered his name so illustrious, as his noble apology for the Christian religion, which he addressed to the emperor Marcus Aurelius, about the year 175, soon after the miraculous victory that prince had obtained over the Quadi by the prayers of the Christians, of which the saint made mention. Marcus Aurelius having long attempted, without success, to subdue the Germans by his generals, resolved in the thirteenth year of his reign, and of Christ 171, to lead a powerful army against them. He was beyond the Danube, (for Germany was extended much further eastward than it is at present,) when the Quadi, a people inhabiting that tract now called Moravia, surrounded him in a very disadvantageous situation, so that there was no possibility that either he or his army could escape out of their hands, or subsist long where they were, for want of water. The twelfth legion, called the Melitine, from a town of that name in Armenia, where it had been quartered a long time, was chiefly composed of Christians. These, when the army was drawn up, but languid and perishing with thirst, fell upon their knees, "as we are accustomed to do at prayer," says Eusebius, and poured forth earnest supplications to God in this public extremity of their state and emperor, though hitherto he had been a persecutor of their religion. The strangeness of the sight surprised the enemies, who had more reason to be astonished at the event; for all on a sudden the sky was darkened with clouds, and a thick rain showered down with impetuosity just as the Barbarians had assailed the Roman camp. The Romans fought and drank at the same time, catching the rain, as it fell, in their helmets, and often swallowing it mingled with blood. Though by this means exceedingly refreshed, the Germans were much too strong for them; but the storm being driven by a violent wind upon their faces, and accompanied with dreadful flashes of lightning, and loud thunder, the Germans were deprived of their sight, beaten down to the ground, and terrified to such a degree, that they were entirely routed and put to flight. Both heathen and Christian writers give this account of the victory. The heathens ascribe it, some to the power of {109} magic, others to their gods, as Dio Cassius;[3] but the Christians unanimously recount it as a miracle obtained by the prayers of this legion, as St. Apollinaris in his apology to this very emperor, who adds, that as an acknowledgment, the emperor immediately gave it the name of the Thundering Legion, and from him it is so called by Eusebius,[4] Tertullian,[5] St. Jerom,[6] and St. Gregory of Nyssa.[7] The Quadi and Sarmatians brought back thirteen thousand prisoners, whom they had taken, and begged for peace on whatever conditions it should please the emperor to grant it them. Marcus Aurelius hereupon took the title of the _seventh time emperor_, contrary to custom, and without the consent of the senate, regarding it as given him by heaven. Out of gratitude to his Christian soldiers, he published an edict, in which he confessed himself indebted for his delivery _to the shower obtained_, PERHAPS, _by the prayers of the Christians_;[8] and more he could not say without danger of exasperating the pagans. In it he forbade, under pain of death, any one to accuse a Christian on account of his religion; yet, by a strange inconsistency, especially in so wise a prince, being overawed by the opposition of the senate, he had not the courage to abolish the laws already made and in force against Christians. Hence, even after this, in the same reign, many suffered martyrdom, though their accusers were also put to death; as in the case of St. Apollonius and of the martyrs of Lyons. Trajan had in like manner forbid Christians to be accused, yet commanded them to be punished with death if accused, as may be seen declared by him in his famous letter to Pliny the Younger. The glaring injustice of which law Tertullian demonstrates by an unanswerable dilemma. St. Apollinaris, who could not see his flock torn in pieces and be silent, penned his apology to the emperor, about the year 172, to remind him of the benefit he had received from God by the prayers of the Christians, and to implore his protection. We have no account of the time of this holy man's death, which probably happened before that of Marcus Aurelius. The Roman Martyrology mentions him on the 8th of January. * * * * * We believe the same great truths, and divine mysteries,--we profess the same faith which produced such wonderful fruits in the souls of the saints. Whence comes it that it has not the like effects in us?--that though we acknowledge virtue to be the richest treasure of the soul of man, we take little pains about it, passionately seek the things of this world, are cast down and broken under every adversity, and curb and restrain our passions only by halves?--that the most glorious objects, God and heaven, and the amazing and dreadful truths, a judgment to come, hell, and eternity, strike us so feebly, and operate so little in us? The reason is plain: because we meditate not sufficiently on these great truths. Our notions of them are dim and imperfect; our thoughts pass so slightly over them, that they scarce retain any print or traces of them. Otherwise it is impossible that things {110} so great and terrible should excite in us no fear, or that things in their own nature infinitely amiable, should enkindle in us no desire. Slight and faint images of things move our minds very weakly, and affect them very coldly, especially in such matters as are not subject to our senses. We therefore grossly deceive ourselves in not allotting more time to the study of divine truths. It is not enough barely to believe them, and let our thoughts now and then glance upon them: that knowledge which shows us heaven, will not bring us to the possession of it, and will deserve punishments, not rewards, if it remain slight, weak, and superficial. By serious and frequent meditation it must be concocted, digested, and turned into the nourishment of our affections, before it can be powerful and operative enough to change them, and produce the necessary fruit in our lives. For this all the saints affected solitude and retreats from the noise and hurry of the world, as much as their circumstances allowed them. Footnotes: 1. {} 2. Ep. 83, ad Magn. 3. B. 71. 4. Hist. B. 5, c. 5. 5. Apol. c. 5. L. ad Scap. c. 4. 6. Chron. 7. Or. 2, de 40 mart. 8. _Christianorum_ FORTE _militum precationibus impetrato imbri_. Tertull. Apolog. c. 5. Euseb. l. 5, c. 5. Some take the word _forte_ here to signify, _casually, accidentally, as hap was_. Several learned Protestants have written in defence of this miracle: see Mr. Weston's dissertation in 1748. The exceptions of Le Clerc, Hist. Eccl. p. 744, and of Moyle, in his essay on the Thundering Legion, deserve no notice. The deliverance of the emperor is represented on the _Columna Antoniniana_, in Rome, by the figure of a Jupiter Pluvius, being that of an old man flying in the air, with his arms expanded, and a long beard which seems to waste away in rain. The soldiers are there represented as relieved by this sudden tempest, and in a posture, partly drinking of the rain-water, and partly fighting against the enemy; who, on the contrary are represented as stretched out on the ground with their horses, and upon them only the dreadful part of the storm descending. The original letter of Marcus Aurelius concerning this matter, was extant when Tertullian and St. Jerom wrote. See Hier. in Chron. Euseb. ad annum 176. Tert. Apol. c. 5, et lib. ad Scapul. The letter of Marcus Aurelius to the senate now extant, is rejected as supposititious by Scaliger, (Animadv. In Eus. ad an. 189.).It is published in the new edition of the works of Marcus Aurelius, printed by Robert Fowlis in 1748, t. 1, p. 127, in Greek, t. 2, p. 126, in Latin, with notes, ib. p. 212. Mamachi, t. 1, p 366. ST. SEVERINUS, ABBOT, AND APOSTLE OF NORICUM, OR AUSTRIA. From his life, by Eugippius his disciple, who was present at his death. See Tillemont, t. 16, p. 168. Lambecius Bibl. Vend. t. 1, p. 28, and Bollandus, p. 497. A.D. 482. WE know nothing of the birth or country of this saint. From the purity of his Latin, he was generally supposed to be a Roman; and his care to conceal what he was according to the world, was taken for a proof of his humility, and a presumption that he was a person of birth. He spent the first part of his life in the deserts of the East; but, inflamed with an ardent zeal for the glory of God, he left his retreat to preach the gospel in the North. At first he came to Astures, now Stokeraw, situate above Vienna; but finding the people hardened in vice, he foretold the punishment God had prepared for them, and repaired to Comagenes, now Haynburg on the Danube, eight leagues westward of Vienna. It was not long ere his prophecy was verified; for Astures was laid waste, and the inhabitants destroyed by the sword of the Huns, soon after the death of Attila. St. Severinus's ancient host with great danger made his escape to him at Comagenes. By the accomplishment of this prophecy, and by several miracles he wrought, the name of the saint became famous. Favianes, a city on the Danube, twenty leagues from Vienna, distressed by a terrible famine, implored his assistance. St. Severinus preached penance among them with great fruit; and he so effectually threatened with the divine vengeance a certain rich woman, who had hoarded up a great quantity of provisions, that she distributed all her stores among the poor. Soon after his arrival, the ice of the Danube and the Ins breaking, the country was abundantly supplied by barges up the rivers. Another time by his prayers he chased away the locusts, which by their swarms had threatened with devastation the whole produce of the year. He wrought many miracles; yet never healed the sore eyes of Bonosus, the dearest to him of his disciples, who spent forty years in almost continual prayer, without any abatement of his fervor. The holy man never ceased to exhort all to repentance and piety: he redeemed captives, relieved the oppressed, was a father to the poor, cured the sick, mitigated or averted public calamities, and brought a blessing wherever he came. Many cities desired him for their bishop; but he withstood their importunities by urging, that it was sufficient he had relinquished his dear solitude for their instruction and comfort. {111} He established many monasteries, of which the most considerable was one on the banks of the Danube, near Vienna; but he made none of them the place of his constant abode, often shutting himself up in a hermitage four leagues from his community, where be wholly devoted himself to contemplation. He never ate till after sunset, unless on great festivals. In Lent he ate only once a week. His bed was sackcloth spread on the floor in his oratory. He always walked barefoot, even when the Danube was frozen. Many kings and princes of the Barbarians came to visit him, and among them Odoacer, king of the Heruli, then on his march for Italy. The saint's cell was so low that Odoacer could not stand upright in it. St. Severinus told him that the kingdom he was going to conquer would shortly be his; and Odoacer seeing himself, soon after, master of Italy, sent honorable letters to the saint, promising him all he was pleased to ask; but Severinus only desired of him the restoration of a certain banished man. Having foretold his death long before it happened, he fell ill of a pleurisy on the 5th of January, and on the fourth day of his illness, having received the viaticum, and arming his whole body with the sign of the cross, and repeating that verse of the psalmist, _Let every spirit praise the Lord_,[1] he closed his eyes, and expired in the year 482. Six years after, his disciples, obliged by the incursions of Barbarians, retired with his relics into Italy, and deposited them at Luculano, near Naples, where a great monastery was built, of which Eugippius, his disciple, and author of his life, was soon after made the second abbot. In the year 910 they were translated to Naples, where to this day they are honored in a Benedictin abbey, which bears his name. The Roman and other Martyrologies place his festival on this day, as being that of his death. * * * * * A perfect spirit of sincere humility is the spirit of the most sublime and heroic degree of Christian virtue and perfection. As the great work of the sanctification of our souls is to be begun by humility, so must it be completed by the same. Humility invites the Holy Ghost into the soul, and prepares her to receive his graces; and from the most perfect charity, which he infuses, she derives a new interior light, and an experimental knowledge of God and herself, with an _infused_ humility far clearer in the light of the understanding, in which she sees God's infinite greatness, and her own total insufficiency, baseness, and nothingness, after a quite new manner; and in which she conceives a relish of contempt and humiliations as her due, feels a secret sentiment of joy in suffering them, sincerely loves her own abjection, dependence, and correction, dreads the esteem and praises of others, as snares by which a mortal poison may imperceptibly insinuate itself into her affections, and deprive her of the divine grace; is so far from preferring herself to any one, that she always places herself below all creatures, is almost sunk in the deep abyss of her own nothingness, never speaks of herself to her own advantage, or affects a show of modesty in order to appear humble before men, in all good, gives the _entire_ glory to God alone, and as to herself, glories only in her infirmities, pleasing herself in her own weakness and nothingness, rejoicing that God is the great _all_ in her and in all creatures. Footnotes: 1. Ps. 150. {112} ST. LUCIAN, APOSTLE OF BEAUVAIS, IN FRANCE. HE preached the gospel in Gaul, in the third century; came from Rome, and was probably one of the companions of St. Dionysius, of Paris, or at least of St. Quintin. He sealed his mission with his blood at Beauvais, under Julian, vicar or successor to the bloody persecutor Rictius Varus, in the government of Gaul, about the year 290. Maximian, called by the common people Messien, and Julian, the companions of his labors, were crowned with martyrdom at the same place a little before him. His relics, with those of his two colleagues, were discovered in the seventh age, as St. Owen informs us in his life of St. Eligius. They are shown in three gilt shrines, in the abbey which bears his name, and was founded in the eighth century. Rabanus Maurus says, that these relics were famous for miracles in the ninth century. St. Lucian is styled only martyr, in most calendars down to the sixteenth century, and in the Roman Martyrology, and the calendar of the English Protestants, in all which it is presumed that he was only priest; but a calendar compiled in the reign of Lewis le Débonnaire,[1] gives him the title of bishop, and he is honored in that quality at Beauvias. See Bollandus, p. 540; though the two lives of this saint, published by him, and thought to be one of the ninth, the other of the tenth age, are of little or no authority. Tillemont, T. 4, p. 537. Loisel and Louvet, Hist. de Beauvais, p. 76. Footnotes: 1. Spicileg. T. 10, p. 130. ST. PEGA, V. SHE was sister to St. Guthlack, the famous hermit of Croyland, and though of the royal blood of the Mercian kings, forsook the world, and led an austere retired life in the country which afterwards bore her name, in Northamptonshire, at a distance from her holy brother. Some time after his death she went to Rome, and there slept in the Lord, about the year 719. Ordericus Vitalis says, her relics were honored with miracles, and kept in a church which bore her name at Rome, but this church is not now known. From one in Northamptonshire, a village still retains the name of Peagkirk, vulgarly Pequirk; she was also titular saint of a church and monastery in Pegeland, which St. Edward the Confessor united to Croyland. She is called St. Pee in Northamptonshire, and St. Pege at Croyland. See Ingulph. et Ord. Vitalis, l. 4. Florence of Worcester, ad ann. 714. Harpsfield, sec. 8, c. 19. ST. VULSIN, BISHOP OF SHIREBURN, C. WILLIAM of Malmesbury informs us, that St. Dunstan, when bishop of London, appointed him abbot of twelve monks at Thorney, since called Westminster, where Saint Mellitus had built a church in honor of St. Peter. Vulsin was afterwards chosen bishop of Shireburn; his holy life was crowned with a happy death in 973. He is called Ultius by Matthew of Westminster, {113} but his true ancient name, given by Capgrave, is Vulsin. See Malmesbury de Pontif. Angl. l. 2. Capgrave and Harpsfield, sæc. 10, c. 9, sæc. 11, c. 16. ST. GUDULA, V. CALLED IN BRABANT GOULE, OR ERGOULE, IN FLEMISH SINTE-R-GOELEN, PATRONESS OF BRUSSELS. ST. AMALBERGE, mother of this saint, was niece to Pepin, mayor of the palace. Gudula was educated at Nivelle, under the care of St. Gertrude, her cousin and god-mother; after whose death, in 664, she returned to the house of count Witger, her father, and having by vow consecrated her virginity to God, led there a most austere and holy life, in watching, fasting, and prayer. By her profuse alms, in which she bestowed her whole revenue on the poor, she was truly the mother of all the distressed; though her father's castle was two miles from the church of our Saviour at Morzelle, she went thither early every morning, with a maid to carry a lantern before her; and the wax taper being once put out, is said to have miraculously lighted again at her prayers, whence she is usually represented in pictures with a lantern. She died on the 8th of January, not in 670, as Miræus says, but in 712, and was buried at Ham, near Villevord. In the reign of Charlemagne, her body was removed to the church of our Saviour at Morzelle, and placed behind the high altar; this emperor, out of veneration of her memory, often resorted thither to pray, and founded there a nunnery, which soon after changed its name of St. Saviour for that of St. Goule: this house was destroyed in the irruptions of the Normans. The relics of St. Gudula, by the care of Charles, duke of Lorrain, (in which Brabant was then comprised,) were translated to Brussels, in 978, where they were first deposited to the church of St. Gery, but in 1047, removed into the great collegiate church of St. Michael, since called from her St. Gudula's. See her life wrote by Hubert of Brabant, in the eleventh century, soon after this translation of her relics to St. Michael's, who assures us that he took the whole relation from an ancient life of this saint, having only changed the order and style. ST. NATHALAN, BISHOP OF ABERDEEN, C. HE possessed a large estate, which he distributed among the poor; and seeing that agriculture is an employment best suiting a life of contemplation, he made this an exercise of penance, joining with the same assiduous prayer. He was a proficient in profane and sacred learning, and being made bishop, (to which dignity he was raised by the pope, in a journey of devotion which he made to Rome,) he continued to employ his revenues in charities as before, living himself in great austerity by the labor of his hands, and at the same time preaching the gospel to the people. By his means Scotland was preserved from the Pelagian heresy. He was one of the apostles of that country, and died in 452. He resided at Tullicht, now in the diocese of Aberdeen, and built the churches of Tullicht Bothelim, and of the Hill; in the former of these he was buried, and it long continued famous for miracles wrought by his relics, which were preserved there till the change of religion. See King, the Chronicles of Dumferling, and the lessons of the Aberdeen Breviary on this day. The see of Aberdeen was {114} not then regularly established; it was first erected at Murthlac by St. Bean, in the beginning of the eleventh century, and translated thence to Aberdeen by Nectan, the fourth bishop, in the reign of king David.[2] See Hector Boetius in the lives of the bishops of Aberdeen,[3] and Spotswood, b. 2, p. 101. Footnotes: 1. The Aberdeen Breviary resembles that called _of Sarum_, and contains the feasts of many French saints. It was printed at Edinburg, by Walter Chapman, in 1509. 2. Few authentic memoirs of the ancient Scotch church, or history, have been handed down to us, except those of certain noble families. A catalogue of the bishops of Galloway, from St. Ninianus, in 450; of the archbishops of Glascow, from St. Kentigern; of St. Andrew's, from the year 840; and of the bishops of the other sees, from the twelfth century, is printed at the end of an old edition of Spotsword in 166{} and reprinted by bishop Burnet, in an appendix to his memoirs of the house of Hamilton. 3. De vitis episcopor. Aberd. Prælo. Afrensiano, anno 1522. JANUARY IX. ST. PETER OF SEBASTE, B.C. From the life of his sister St. Macrina, composed by their brother St. Gregory of Nyssa; and from St. Gregory Naz. Or. 20. See also Theodoret, Hist. Eccl. l. 4, c. 30. Rufin, l. 2., c. 9, and the judicious compilation of Tillemont, in his life of St. Gregory of Nyssa, art. 6, t. 9, p. 572. About the year 387. THE family of which St. Peter descended, was very ancient and illustrious; St. Gregory Nazianzen tells us, that his pedigree was made up of a list of celebrated heroes; but their names are long since buried in oblivion, while those of the saints which it gave to the church, and who despised the world and its honors, are immortal in the records of the church, and are written in the book of life; for the light of faith, and the grace of the Almighty, extinguishing in their breasts the sparks of worldly ambition, inspired them with a most vehement ardor to attain the perfection of Christian virtue, and changed their family into a house of saints; three brothers were at the same time eminently holy bishops, St. Basil, St. Gregory of Nyssa, and St. Peter of Sebaste; and their eldest sister, St. Macrina, was the spiritual mother of many saints and excellent doctors; their father and mother, St. Basil the Elder, and St. Emolia, were banished for their faith in the reign of the emperor Galerius Maximian, and fled into the deserts of Pontus; they are recorded together in the Roman Martyrology, on the 30th of May: the grandmother of our pious and fruitful family of saints, was the celebrated St. Macrina the Elder, who was instructed in the science of salvation, by St. Gregory Thaumaturgus. St. Peter of Sebaste was the youngest of ten children, and lost his father in his cradle, some think before he was born; and his eldest sister, Macrina, took care of his education, in which it was her only aim to instruct him in the maxims of religion, and form him to perfect piety; profane studies she thought of little use, to one who designed to make salvation the sole end of all his inquiries and pursuits, nor did he ever make them any part of his employment, confining his views to a monastic state. His mother had founded two monasteries, one for men, the other for women; the former she put under the direction of her son Basil, the latter under that of her daughter Macrina. Peter, whose thoughts were wholly bent on cultivating the seeds of piety that had been sown in him, retired into the house governed by his brother, situated on the bank of the river Iris; when St. Basil was obliged to quit that post, in 362, he left the abbacy in the hands of St. Peter, who discharged this office for {115} several years with great prudence and virtue. When the provinces of Pontus and Cappadocia were visited by a severe famine, he gave a remarkable proof of his charity; human prudence would have advised him to be frugal in the relief of others, till his own family should be secured against that calamity; but Peter had studied the principles of Christian charity in another school, and liberally disposed of all that belonged to his monastery, and whatever he could raise, to supply with necessaries the numerous crowds that daily resorted to him, in that time of distress. Soon after St. Basil was made bishop of Cæsarea in Cappadocia, in 370, he promoted his brother Peter to the priesthood; the holy abbot looked on the holy orders he had received as a fresh engagement to perfection. His brother St. Basil died on the 1st of January, in 379, and his sister Macrina in November, the same year. Eustathius, bishop of Sebaste, in Armenia, a violent Arian, and a furious persecutor of St. Basil, seems to have died soon after them, for St. Peter was consecrated bishop of Sebaste in 380, to root out the Arian heresy in that diocese, where it had taken deep root; the zeal of a saint was necessary, nor can we doubt but God placed our saint in that dignity for this purpose. A letter which St. Peter wrote, and which is prefixed to St. Gregory of Nyssa's books against Eunomius, has entitled him to a rank among the ecclesiastical writers, and is a standing proof, that though he had confined himself to sacred studies, yet by good conversation and reading, and by the dint of genius, and an excellent understanding, he was inferior to none but his incomparable brother Basil, and his colleague Nazianzen, in solid eloquence. In 381, he attended the general council held at Constantinople, and joined the other bishops in condemning the Macedonian heretics. Not only his brother St. Gregory, but also Theodoret, and all antiquity, bear testimony to his extraordinary sanctity, prudence, and zeal. His death happened in summer, about the year 387, and his brother of Nyssa mentions, that his memory was honored at Sebaste (probably the very year after his death) by an anniversary solemnity, with several martyrs of that city.[1] His name occurs in the Roman Martyrology, on the 9th of January. * * * * * We admire to see a whole family of saints! This prodigy of grace, under God, was owing to the example, prayers, and exhortations of the elder St. Macrina, which had this wonderful influence and effect; from her they learned most heartily and deeply to imbibe the true spirit of self-denial and humility, which all Christians confess to be the fundamental maxim of the gospel; but this they generally acknowledge in speculation only, whereas it is in the heart that this foundation is to be laid: we must entertain no attachment, says St. Gregory of Nyssa,[2] to any thing, especially where there is most danger of passion, by some sensual pleasure annexed; and we must begin by being upon our guard against sensuality in eating, which is the most ancient enemy, and the father of vice: we must observe in our whole life the most exact rule of temperance, never making the pleasure of sense our end, but only the necessity of the use we make of things, even those in which a pleasure is taken. In another treatise he says,[3] he who despises the world, must also renounce himself, so as never to follow his own will, but purely to seek in all things the will of God; we are his in justice, his will must be the law and rule of our whole life. This precept of dying to ourselves, that Christ may live in us, and all our affections and actions governed by his spirit, is excellently inculcated by St. Basil the Great.[4] Footnotes: 1. St. Gr. Nyss. ep. ad Flav. t. 3, p. 645. 2. St. Gr. Nyss. de Virg. c. 9. 3. St. Basil, in Ps. 34, de Bapt. l. 1, et interr. 237. 4. Id. de perfectâ Christi formâ. {116} SS. JULIAN AND BASILISSA, MM. ACCORDING to their acts, and the ancient Martyrologies, though engaged in a married state, they by mutual consent lived in perpetual chastity, sanctified themselves by the most perfect exercises of an ascetic life, and employed their revenues in relieving the poor and the sick; for this purpose they converted their house into a kind of hospital, in which, if we may credit their acts, they sometimes entertained a thousand indigent persons. Basilissa attended those of her sex, in separate lodgings from the men, of whom Julian took care, who from his charity is surnamed the Hospitalarian. Egypt, where they lived, had then begun to abound with examples of persons, who, either in cities or in deserts, devoted themselves to the most perfect exercises of charity, penance, and contemplation. Basilissa, after having stood severe persecutions, died in peace; Julian survived her many years, and received the crown of a glorious martyrdom, together with Celsus a youth, Antony a priest, Anastatius, and Marcianilla the mother of Celsus. They seem to have suffered in the reign of Maximin II., in 313, on the 6th of January; for, in the most ancient lectionary used in the church of Paris, under the first race of the French kings, quoted by Chatelain,[1] and several ancient calendars, their festival is marked on that day, or on the eve. On account of the concurrence of the Epiphany, it was deferred in different churches to the 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 17, 27, 28, or 29th, of January; 12, 13, 14, 17, 19, 24, or 27th, of February; 20, 21, or 22d of June; or 31st of August. The menology, published by Canisius, places the martyrdom of St. Julian and his companions, at Antinopolis in Egypt; certain ancient MS. copies of the Martyrology, which bear the name of St. Jerom, say more correctly Antinous: by mistaking the abbreviation of this name in some MS. copies, several Latins have read it Antioch;[2] and the Latin acts say these martyrs suffered at Antioch in Egypt: but no town of that name is ever mentioned in that country; though Seleucus, the son of Antiochus, gave it to sixteen cities which he built in Asia, as Appian takes notice. Many churches and hospitals in the east, and especially in the west, bear the name of one or other of these martyrs: at Antioch, in Syria, our St. Julian was titular saint of a famous church and St. Julian of Anazarbus, of two others. Chatelain[3] proves from ancient images and other monuments, that four churches at home, and three out of five at Paris, which bear the name of St. Julian, were originally dedicated under the name of St. Julian the hospitalarian and martyr; though some of these latter afterward took either St. Julian bishop of Mans, confessor, or St. Julian of Brioude, martyr, for patron. The same has happened to some, out of the great number of churches and hospitals in the Low Countries, erected under his invocation; but the hospitalarian and martyr is still retained in the office of the greatest part, especially at Brussels, Antwerp, Tournay, Douay, &c. In the time of St. Gregory the Great, the skull of St. Julian, husband of St. Basilissa, was brought out of the east into France, and given to queen Brunehault; she gave it to the nunnery which she founded at Etampes; part of it is at present in the {117} monastery of Morigny, near Etampes, and part in the church of the regular canonesses of St. Basilissa, at Paris.[4] Footnotes: 1. Notes sur le Martyrol. 6 Jan., p. 106. Mabill. Lit. Gallic. l. 2, pp. 115, 116. 2. The abbreviation _Antio_ for Antinous, found in a MS. copy mentioned by Chatelain, p. 106, was probably mistaken for Antioch, a name better known. Certain circumstances related from the false acts of these martyrs, by St. Antoninus, gave occasion to the painters in Italy to represent St. Julian as a sportsman with a hawk on his hand; and in France, as a boatsman, in a barge; and the postilions and bargemen keep his feast, as of their principal patron. 3. Notes on Jan. 6, p. 109. 4. See Chatelain, notes on Jan. 6, p. 110, from a MS. at Morigny. ST. MARCIANA, V.M. SHE was a native of Rusuccur in Mauritania, and courageously despising all worldly advantages, to secure to herself the possession of the precious jewel of heavenly grace, she was called to the trial in the persecution of Dioclesian, which was continued in Africa under his successors, till the death of Severus, who was declared Cæsar in 305, and slain in 309. St. Marciana was beaten with clubs, and her chastity exposed to the rude attempts of pagan gladiators, in which danger God miraculously preserved her, and she became the happy instrument of the conversion of one of them to the faith: at length she was torn in pieces by a wild bull and a leopard, in the amphitheatre at Cæsarea in Mauritania. She is the same who is commemorated on the 12th of July, in the ancient breviary of Toledo; and in the Roman, and some other Martyrologies, both on the 9th of July, and on the 9th of January. See a beautiful ancient hymn in her praise, in the Mozarabic breviary, and her acts in Bollandus, though their authority is not altogether certain. Consult Tillemont, t. 5, p. 263. Chatelain, notes on the 9th of January p. 146. ST. BRITHWALD, ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY. HE was abbot of Glastenbury, but resigning that dignity, came to the little monastery of Riculf, or Riculver, near the isle of Thanet, in Kent, that he might improve himself in the study of the Holy Scriptures, in the neighborhood of St. Theodorus; after whose death he was promoted to the see of Canterbury, in 692, in which he sat thirty-seven years and six months, a living {icon} of perfection to this church. He died in 731. See John of Glastenbury, published by Hearne; William of Malmesbury, in the antiquities of Glastenbury, published by Thomas Gale; and Bede, l. 5, c. 9, and 24. ST. FELAN, OR FOELAN, ABBOT HIS name is famous in the ancient Scottish and Irish Calendars. The example and instructions of his pious parents, Feriach and St. Kentigerna, inspired him from the cradle with the most ardent love of virtue. In his youth, despising the flattering worldly advantages to which high birth and a great fortune entitled him, he received the monastic habit from a holy abbot named Mundus, and passed many years in a cell at some distance from the monastery, not far from St. Andrew's. He was by compulsion drawn from this close solitude, being chosen abbot. His sanctity in this public station shone forth with a bright light. After some years he resigned this charge, and retired to his uncle Congan, brother to his mother, in a place called Siracht, a mountainous part of Glendarchy, now in Fifeshire, where, with the assistance of seven others, he built a church, near which he served for several years. God glorified him by a wonderful gift of miracles; and called him to the reward of his labors on the 9th of January, in the seventh century. {118} He was buried in Straphilline, and his relics were long preserved there with honor. This account is given us of him in the lessons of the Aberdeen Breviary.[1] The Scottish historians[2] attribute to the intercession of St. Felan a memorable victory obtained by king Robert Bruce, in 1314, over a numerous army of English, at Bannocburn, not far from Sterling, in the reign of Edward II. of England, who narrowly escaped, being obliged to pass the Tweed in a boat, with only one companion. See Lesley, l. 17; Boetius, l. 14. Chatelain certainly mistakes in confounding this saint with St. Finan, bishop of Lindisfarne.[3] Footnotes: 1. T. 1, part 2, fol. 28. 2. Hector Boetius, l. 14, &c. 3. St. Felan flourished in the county of Fife, and probably in the monastery of Pettinuime, where his memory was famous, as is testified by the author of MS. memoirs on the Scottish saints, preserved in the college of the Scots at Paris, who declares himself to have been a missionary priest in Scotland to 1609. The county of Fife was famous for the rich and most ancient monasteries of Dumferling, Lindore, St. Andrew's, or Colrosse, or Courose, Pettinuime, Balmure, and Petmoace; and two stately nunneries: Aberdaure and Elcho. All these noble buildings they levelled to the ground with incredible fury, crying, "Pull down, pull down: the crows' nest must be utterly exterminated, lest they should return and attempt again to renew their settlement." Ib. MS. fol. 7. ST. ADRIAN, ABBOT AT CANTERBURY DIVINE Providence conducted this holy man to Britain, in order to make him an instructor of innumerable saints. Adrian was an African by birth, and was abbot of Nerida, not far from Naples, when pope Vitalian, upon the death of St. Deusdedit the archbishop of Canterbury, judged him, for his skill in sacred learning, and experience in the paths of true interior virtue, to be of all others the most proper person to be the doctor of a nation, zealous in the pursuit of virtue, but as yet ignorant in the sciences, and in the canons of the church. The humble servant of God found means to decline that dignity, by recommending St. Theodorus as most capable, but refused not to share in the laborious part of the ministry. The pope therefore enjoined him to be the companion, assistant, and adviser of the apostolic archbishop, which charge Adrian willingly took upon himself. In travelling through France with St. Theodorus, he was stopped by Ebroin, the jealous mayor of the palace, who feared lest the emperor of the East had given these two persons, who were his born subjects, some commission in favor of his pretensions to the western kingdoms. Adrian stayed a long time in France, at Meaux, and in other places, before he was allowed to pursue his journey. St. Theodorus established him abbot of the monastery of SS. Peter and Paul, afterward called St. Austin, near Canterbury, where he taught the learned languages and the sciences, and principally the precepts and maxims of our divine religion. He had illustrated this island by his heavenly doctrine, and the bright example of his virtues, for the space of thirty-nine years, when he departed to our Lord on the 9th of January, in the year 710. His tomb was famed for miracles, as we are assured by Joscelin the Monk, quoted by William of Malmesbury and Capgrave; and his name is inserted in the English calendars. See Bede, l. 4, c. 1, l. 5, c. 21. Malmesb. de Pontif. Angl. and Capgrave. ST. VANENG, C. FROM various fragments of ancient histories of his life, the most modern of which was compiled in the twelfth century, it appears that Vaneng was made by Clotaire III. governor of that part of Neustria, or Normandy, which was anciently inhabited by the Caletes, and is called Pais de Caux, {119} at which time he took great pleasure in hunting. Nevertheless, he was very pious, and particularly devout to St. Eulalia of Barcelona, called in Guienne, St. Aulaire. One night be seemed, in a dream, to hear that holy Virgin and Martyr repeat to him those words of our blessed Redeemer in the gospel, that "it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to be saved." Soon after this he quitted the world, assisted St. Vandrille in building the churches of SS. Peter and Paul at Fontenelles, and founded in the valley of Fécam[1] a church in honor of the holy Trinity, with a great nunnery adjoining, under the direction of St. Owes and St. Vandrille. Hildemarca, a very virtuous nun, was called from Bourdeaux, and appointed the first abbess. Under her, three hundred and sixty nuns served God in this house, and were divided into as many choirs as were sufficient, by succeeding one another, to continue the divine office night and day without interruption. St. Vaneng died about the year 688, and is honored, in the Gallican and Benedictin Martyrologies, on the 9th of January; but at St. Vandrille's, and in other monasteries in Normandy, on the 31st of January. This saint is titular patron of several churches in Aquitain and Normandy; one near Touars in Poictou has given its name to the village of St. Vaneng. His body is possessed in a rich shrine, in the abbatial church of Our Lady at Ham, in Picardy, belonging to the regular canons of St. Genevieve. See Mabillon, t. 2, p. 972; Bollandus, and chiefly the life of St. Vaneng, judiciously collected and printed at Paris in 1700;[2] also, the breviary of the abbey of Fontenelle, now St. Vandrille's. The abbeys of Fécam, St. Vandrille, Jumiege, Bec, St. Stephen's at Caen, Cerisy, &c., are now of the reformed congregation of St. Maur, abbot of St. Benignus, at Dijon, whose life Bollandus has given us among the saints, January 1. Fécam, honored by the dukes of Normandy above all their other monasteries, is the richest and most magnificent abbey in Normandy. Footnotes: 1. The monastery of Fécam was ruined in the invasion of the Normans. Rollo, who came into France in 876, was baptized, and, after having founded the duchy of Normandy, died in 917. His sepulchral monument is shown in one of the chapels near the door in the cathedral at Rouen. His son William built a palace at Fécam, where his son Richard was born. The church of the Holy Trinity being re-established, this Richard placed in it secular canons; but, on his death-bed, ordered it to be put into the hands of the monks. This was executed by his successor, the monks being sent by William the most holy abbot. 2. Ferrarius, an Italian servite, Du-Saussayè, Bollandus, and F. Giry, place among the saints of this day, Sithride, or Sedredo, an English virgin, and second abbess of Farmoutiers. Bede tells us (l. 3, c. 8) that she was daughter of St. Hereswide, by a former husband, before she married Annas, king of the East Angles, and that going to the monastery of Briè, (now Farmoutiers,) she was second abbess between St. Fara and St. Aubierge, King Annas's own daughter. But though St. Aubierge be honored at Farmoutiers in July, with great solemnity, and St. Arthongate in February, the name of Sedredo is not found in the calendar of any church, nor are any of her relics enshrined like the others, unless she be the same with St. Sissetrudis, who in some calendars is named on the 6th, in others on the 7th of May. But St. Sissetrude is called by Jonas of Bobio, cellerer, not abbess. See Chatelain, &c. 3. {120} JANUARY X. SAINT WILLIAM, CONFESSOR, ARCHBISHOP OF BOURGES. From his life written by a faithful acquaintance at Bourges, (abridged by Surius,) and again by Peter, a monk of Chaalis, both soon after his death: collected by Dom le Nain, in his history of the Cistercians, t. 7. See also the notes of Bollandus, with a fragment of a third life, and Gallia Christ. Nov. t. 2. p. 63. A.D. 1209. WILLIAM BERRUYER, of the illustrious family of the ancient counts of Nevers, was educated by Peter the Hermit, archdeacon of Soissons, his uncle by the mother's side. He learned from his infancy to despise the folly and emptiness of the riches and grandeur of the world, to abhor its pleasures, and to tremble at its dangers. His only delight was in exercises of piety and in his studies, in which he employed his whole time with indefatigable application. He was made canon, first of Soissons, and afterwards of Paris; but he soon took the resolution of abandoning all commerce with the world, and retired into the solitude of Grandmont, where he lived with great regularity in that austere order, till seeing its peace disturbed by a contest which arose between the fathers and lay-brothers, he passed into the Cistercian, then in wonderful odor of sanctity. He took the habit in the abbey of Pontigny, and shining as a perfect model of monastic perfection, was after some time chosen prior of that house, and afterwards abbot, first of Fountaine-Jean, in the diocese of Sens, (a filiation of Pontigny, founded in 1124, by Peter de Courtenay, son of king Louis the Fat,) and some time after, of Chaalis, near Senlis, a much more numerous monastery, also a filiation of Pontigny, built by Louis the Fat in 1136, a little before his death. St. William always reputed himself the last among his brethren. The universal mortification of his senses and passions, laid in him the foundation of an admirable purity of heart, and an extraordinary gift of prayer; in which he received great heavenly lights, and tasted of the sweets which God has reserved for those to whom he is pleased to communicate himself. The sweetness and cheerfulness of his countenance testified the uninterrupted joy and peace that overflowed his soul, and made virtue appear with the most engaging charms in the midst of austerities. On the death of Henry de Sully, archbishop of Bourges, the clergy of that church requested his brother Endo, bishop of Paris, to come and assist them in the election of a pastor. Desirous to choose some abbot of the Cistercian Order, then renowned for holy men, they put on the altar the names of three, written on as many billets. This manner of election by lots would have been superstitious, and a tempting of God, had it been done relying on a miracle without the warrant of divine inspiration. But it deserved not this censure when all the persons proposed seemed equally worthy and fit, as the choice was only recommended to God, and left to this issue by following the rules of his ordinary providence, and imploring his light, without rashness, or a neglect of the usual means of scrutiny: prudence might sometimes even recommend such a method, in order to terminate a debate when the candidates seemed equally qualified. God, in such cases is said sometimes to have miraculously interposed. {121} Eudo, accordingly, having written three billets, laid them on the altar, and having made his prayer drew first the name of the abbot William, on whom, at the same time, the majority of the votes of the clergy had made the election fall, the 23d of November, 1200. This news overwhelmed William, with grief. He never would have acquiesced, had he not received a double command in virtue of obedience, from the pope, and from his general the abbot of Citeaux. He left his clear solitude with many tears, and was received at Bourges as one sent by heaven, and soon after was consecrated. In this new dignity his first care was to conform both his exterior and interior to the most perfect rules of sanctity; being very sensible that a man's first task is to honor God perfectly in his own soul. He redoubled all his austerities, saying, it was now incumbent on him to do penance for others, as well as for himself. He always wore a hair-shirt under his religious habit, and never added, nor diminished, any thing in his clothes, either winter or summer. He never ate any flesh-meat, though he had it at his table for strangers. His attention to feed his flock was no less remarkable, especially in assisting the poor both spiritually and corporally, saying, that he was chiefly sent for them. He was most mild to penitent sinners; but inflexible towards the impenitent, though he refused to have recourse to the civil power against them, the usual remedy of that age. Many such he at last reclaimed by his sweetness and charity. Certain great men, abusing his lenity, usurped the rights of his church; but the saint strenuously defended them even against the king himself, notwithstanding his threats to confiscate his lands. By humility and resolution he overcame several contradictions of his chapter and other clergy. By his zeal he converted many of the Albigenses, contemporary heretics, and was preparing himself for a mission among them, at the time he was seized with his last illness. He would, notwithstanding, preach a farewell sermon to his people, which increased his fever to such a degree that he was obliged to set aside his journey, and take to his bed. Drawing near his end, he received first extreme unction, according to the discipline of that age;[1] then, in order to receive the viaticum, he rose out of bed, fell on his knees melting in tears, and prayed long prostrate with his arms stretched out in the form of a cross. The night following, perceiving his last hour approach, he desired to anticipate the nocturns, which are said at midnight; but having made the sign of the cross on his lips and breast, was able to pronounce no more than the two first words. Then, according to a sign made by him, he was laid on ashes in the hair-cloth which he always privately wore. In this posture he soon after expired, a little past midnight, on the morning of the 10th of January, in 1209. His body was interred in his cathedral; and being honored by many miracles, was taken up in 1217; and in the year following he was canonized by pope Honorius III. His relics were kept with great veneration till 1562, when they were burnt, and scattered in the winds by the Huguenots, on occasion of their plundering the cathedral of Bourges, as Baillet and Bollandus mention. A bone of his arm is shown with veneration at Chaalis, whither it had been sent soon after the saint's body was taken up; and a rib is preserved in the church of the college of Navarre, at Paris, on which the canons of St. Bourges bestowed it in 1399.[2] His festival is kept in that church with great, solemnity, and a great concourse of devout persons; St. William being regarded in several parts of France as one of the patrons of the nation, though his name is not mentioned in the Roman Martyrology. The celebrated countess Maud, his niece, out of veneration for his memory, bestowed certain lands in the {122} Nivernois, on the church of Bourges.[3] B. Philip Berruyer, a nephew of St. William, was archbishop of Bourges from the year 1236 to 1260, in which he died in the odor of sanctity. Nangi ascribes to him many miracles, and other historians bear testimony to his eminent virtue.[4] Dom Martenne has published his edifying original life.[5] * * * * * If we look into the lives of all the saints, we shall find that it was by a spirit and gift of prayer that the Holy Ghost formed in their hearts the most perfect sentiments of all virtues. It is this which enlightens the understanding, and infuses a spiritual knowledge, and a heavenly wisdom, which is incomparably more excellent than that in which philosophers pride themselves. The same purifies the affections, sanctifies the soul, adorns it with virtues, and enriches it with every gift of heaven. Christ, who is the eternal wisdom, came down among us on earth to teach us more perfectly this heavenly language, and he alone is our master in it. He vouchsafed also to be our model. In the first moment in which his holy soul began to exist, it exerted all its powers in contemplating and adorning the divine Trinity, and employed his affections in the most ardent acts of praise, love, thanksgiving, oblation, and the like. His whole moral life was an uninterrupted prayer; more freely to apply himself to this exercise, and to set us an example, he often retired into mountains and deserts, and spent whole nights in prayer; and to this employment he consecrated his last breath upon the cross. By him the saints were inspired to conceive an infinite esteem for holy prayer, and such a wonderful assiduity and ardor in this exercise, that many renounced altogether the commerce of men to only that of God, and his angels; and the rest learned the art of conversing secretly with heaven even amidst their exterior employments, which they only undertook for God. Holy pastors have always made retirement and a life of prayer their apprenticeship or preparation for the ministry, and afterward, amidst its functions were still men of prayer in them, having God always present to their mind, and setting apart intervals in the day, and a considerable part of the nights, to apply themselves with their whole attention to this exercise, in the silence of all creatures. Footnotes: 1. See Bellarmin, de Arte moriendi. Iuenin, de Sacram. t. 2, et Hist. des Sacr. t. 7. 2. See Chatelain. Not. p. 161, Brev. Paris. 3. Gallia Christ. Nov. t. 2, p. 63{?}. 4. Ib. p. 69. 5. Martenne Anecdot. t. 3, p. 1927. ST. AGATHO, POPE. AGATHO, a Sicilian by birth, was remarkable for his charity and benevolence, a profound humility, and an engaging sweetness of temper. Having been several years treasurer of the church of Rome, he succeeded Domnus in the pontificate in 679. He presided by his three legates in the sixth general council, and third of Constantinople, in 680, in the reign of the pious emperor Constantine Pogonatus, against the Monothelite heresy, which he confuted in a learned letter to that emperor, by the tradition of the apostolic church of Rome: "Acknowledged," says he, "by the whole Catholic church, to be the mother and mistress of all other churches, and to derive her superior authority from St. Peter, the prince of the apostles, to whom Christ committed his whole flock, with a promise that his faith should never fail." This epistle was approved as a rule of faith by the same council, which declared, _that Peter spoke by Agatho_. This pope restored St. Wilfrid to the see of York, and was a great benefactor to the Roman clergy and to the churches. Anastatius says, that the number of his miracles procured him the title of Thaumaturgus. He died in 682, having held the pontificate {123} two years and a half. His feast is kept both by the Latins and Greeks. See Anastatius published by Bianchini; also Muratori and Labbé, Conc. t. 6, p. 1109. * * * * * The style of this pope's letters is inferior to that both of his predecessors and successors. The reason he alleges in excusing the legates whom he sent to Constantinople for their want of eloquence, because the graces of speech could not be cultivated amidst the incursions of barbarians, while with much difficulty they earned Thor daily subsistence by manual labor; "But we preserve," said he, with simplicity of heart, "the faith, which our fathers have handed down to us." The bishops, his legates, say the same thing: "Our countries are harassed by the fury of barbarous nations. We live in the midst of battles, inroads, and devastations; our lives pass in continual alarms and anxiety, and we subsist by the labor of our hands." ST. MARCIAN, PRIEST, AND TREASURER OF THE CHURCH OF CONSTANTINOPLE, IN THE FIFTH AGE, WAS born at Constantinople, though of a Roman family related to the imperial house of the Theodosiuses. From his childhood he served God in continual watching, fasting, and prayer, in imitation of St. John the Baptist; and for the relief of the necessitous he gave away immense occult alms. The time which was not employed in these charities, he spent in holy retirement and prayer. In the reign of the emperor Marcian, Anatolius the archbishop, offering violence to the saint's humility, ordained him priest. In this new state the saint saw himself under a stricter obligation than before of laboring to attain to the summit of Christian perfection; and while he made the instruction of the poor his principal and favorite employment, he redoubled his earnestness in providing for their corporal necessities, and was careful never to relax any part of his austerities. The severity of his morals was made a handle, by those who feared the example of his virtue, as a tacit censure of their sloth, avarice, and irregularities, to fasten upon him a suspicion of Novatianism; but his meekness and silence at length triumphed over the slander. This persecution served more and more to purify his soul, and exceedingly improve his virtue. This shone forth with greater lustre than ever, when the cloud was dispersed; and the patriarch Gennadius, with the great applause of the whole body of the clergy and people, conferred on him the dignity of treasurer, which was the second in that church. St. Marcian built or repaired in a stately manner a great number of churches in Constantinople, confounded the Arians and other heretics, and was famous for miracles both before and after his happy death, which happened towards the end of the fifth century. He is honored both in the Greek Menæa, and Roman Martyrology, on the 10th of January. See his ancient anonymous life in Surius, and Bollandus; also Cedrenus, Sozomen, and Theodorus Lector, l. 1. Codinus Orig. Constant. p. 60. See Tillemont, t. 16, p. 161. {124} JANUARY XI. ST. THEODOSIUS, THE CENOBIARCH. From his life by Theodorus, bishop of Petra, some time his disciple, in Surius and Bollandus, and commended by Fleury, Baillet, &c. A.D. 529. ST. THEODOSIUS was born at Mogariassus, called in latter ages Marissa, in Cappadocia, in 423. He imbibed the first tincture of virtue from the fervent example and pious instructions of his virtuous parents. He was ordained reader, but some time after being moved by Abraham's example to quit his country and friends, he resolved to put this motion in execution. He accordingly set out for Jerusalem, but went purposely out of his road, to visit the famous St. Simeon Stylites on his pillar, who foretold him several circumstances of his life, and gave him proper instructions for his behavior in each. Having satisfied his devotion in visiting the holy places in Jerusalem, he began to consider in what manner he should dedicate himself to God in a religious state. The dangers of living without a guide, made him prefer a monastery to a hermitage; and he therefore put himself under the direction of a holy man named Longinus, to whom his virtue soon endeared him in a very particular manner. A pious lady having built a church under the invocation of the Blessed Virgin, on the high road to Bethlehem, Longinus could not well refuse her request, that his pupil should undertake the charge of it; but Theodosius, who loved only to obey, could not be induced by any entreaties to consent to this proposal: absolute commands were necessary to force him to a compliance. Nor did he govern long; for dreading the poison of vanity from the esteem of men, he retired into a cave at the top of a neighboring desert mountain, and employed his time in fasting, watching, prayers, and tears, which almost continually flowed from his eyes. His food was coarse pulse and wild herbs: for thirty years he never tasted so much as a morsel of bread. Many desired to serve God under his direction: he at first determined only to admit six or seven, but was soon obliged to receive a greater number, and at length came to a resolution, which charity extorted from him, never to reject any that presented themselves with dispositions that seemed sincere. The first lesson which he taught his monks was, that the continual remembrance of death is the foundation of religious perfection; to imprint this more deeply in their minds, he caused a great grave or pit to be dug, which might serve for the common burial-place of the whole community, that by the presence of this memorial of death, and by continually meditating on that object, they might more perfectly learn to die daily. The burial-place being made, the abbot one day, when he had led his monks to it, said, "The grave is made, who will first perform the dedication?" Basil, a priest, who was one of the number, falling on his knees, said to St. Theodosius, "I am the person, be pleased to give me your blessing." The abbot ordered the prayers of the church for the dead to be offered up for him, and on the fortieth day, Basil wonderfully departed to our Lord in peace, without any apparent sickness. When the holy company of disciples were twelve in number, it happened that at the great feast of Easter they had nothing to eat; they had not even bread for the sacrifice: some murmured; the saint bid them trust {125} in God and he would provide: which was soon remarkably verified, by the arrival of certain mules loaded with provisions. The lustre of the sanctity and miracles of St. Theodosius, drawing great numbers to him who desired to serve God under his direction, his cave was too little for their reception; therefore, having consulted heaven by prayer, he, by its particular direction, built a spacious monastery at a place called Cathismus, not far from Bethlehem, at a small distance from his cave, and it was soon filled with holy monks. To this monastery were annexed three infirmaries; one for the sick, the gift of a pious lady in that neighborhood; the two others St. Theodosius built himself, one for the aged and feeble, the other for such as had been punished with the loss of their senses, or by falling under the power of the devil, for rashly engaging in a religious state through pride, and without a due dependence on the grace of God to carry them through it. All succors, spiritual and temporal, were afforded in these infirmaries, with admirable order, care, and affection. He erected also several buildings for the reception of strangers, in which he exercised an unbounded hospitality, entertaining all that came, for whose use there were one day above a hundred tables served with provisions: these, when insufficient for the number of guests, were more than once miraculously multiplied by his prayers. The monastery itself was like a city of saints in the midst of a desert, and in it reigned regularity, silence, charity, and peace. There were four churches belonging to it, one for each of the three several nations of which his community was chiefly composed, each speaking a different language; the fourth was for the use of such as were in a state of penance, which those that recovered from their lunatic or possessed condition before, mentioned, were put into, and detained till they had expiated their fault. The nations into which his community was divided, were the Greeks, which were far the most numerous, and consisted of all those that came from any provinces of the empire; the Armenians, with whom were joined the Arabians and Persians; and, thirdly, the Bessi, who comprehended all the northern nations below Thrace, or all who used the Runic or Sclavonian tongue. Each nation sung the first part of the mass to the end of the gospel, in their own church, but after the gospel, all met in the church of the Greeks, where they celebrated the essential part of the sacrifice in Greek and communicated all together.[1] The monks passed a considerable part of the day and night at their devotions in the church, and at the times not set apart for public prayer and necessary rest, every one was obliged to apply himself to some trade, of manual labor, not incompatible with recollection, that the house might be supplied with conveniences. Sallust, bishop of Jerusalem, appointed St. Sabas superior general of the hermits, and our saint of the Cenobites, or religious men living in community throughout all Palestine, whence he was styled the Cenobiarch. These two great servants of God lived in strict friendship, and had frequent spiritual conferences together; they were also united in their zeal and sufferings for the church. The emperor Anastasius patronized the Eutychian heresy, and used all possible means to engage our saint in his party. In 513 he deposed Elias, patriarch of Jerusalem, as he had banished Flavian II., patriarch of Antioch, and intruded Severus, an impious heretic, into that see, commanding the Syrians to obey and hold communion with him. SS. Theodosius and Sabas maintained boldly the right of Elias, and of John his successor; whereupon the imperial officers thought it most advisable to connive at their proceedings, considering the great authority they had acquired by {126} their sanctity. Soon after, the emperor sent Theodosius a considerable sum of money, for charitable uses in appearance, but in reality to engage him in his interest. The saint accepted of it, and distributed it all among the poor. Anastasius now persuading himself that he was as good as gained over to his cause, sent him an heretical profession of faith, in which the divine and human natures in Christ were confounded into one, and desired him to sign it. The saint wrote him an answer full of apostolic spirit; in which, besides solidly confuting the Eutychian error, he added, that he was ready to lay down his life for the faith of the church. The emperor admired his courage and the strength of his reasoning, and returning him a respectful answer, highly commended his generous zeal, made some apology for his own inconsiderateness, and protested that he only desired the peace of the church. But it was not long ere he relapsed into his former impiety and renewed his bloody edicts against the orthodox, dispatching troops everywhere to have them put in execution. On the first intelligence of this, Theodosius went over all the deserts and country of Palestine, exhorting every one to be firm in the faith of the four general councils. At Jerusalem, having assembled the people together, he from the pulpit cried out with a loud voice: "If any one receives not the four general councils as the four gospels, let him be anathema." So bold an action in a man of his years, inspired with courage those whom the edicts had terrified. His discourses had a wonderful effect on the people, and God gave a sanction up his zeal by miracles: one of these was, that on his going out of the church at Jerusalem, a woman was healed of a cancer on the spot, by only touching his garments. The emperor sent an order for his banishment, which was executed; but dying soon after, Theodosius was recalled by his Catholic successor, Justin; who, from a common soldier, had gradually ascended the imperial throne. Our saint survived his return eleven years, never admitting the least relaxation in his former austerities. Such was his humility, that seeing two monks at variance with each other, he threw himself at their feet, and could not rise till they were perfectly reconciled; and once having excommunicated one of his subjects for a crime, who contumaciously pretended to excommunicate him in his turn, the saint behaved as if he had been really excommunicated, to gain the sinner's soul by this unprecedented example of submission, which had the desired effect. During the last year of his life he was afflicted with a painful distemper, in which he gave proof of an heroic patience, and an entire submission to the will of God; for being advised by one that was an eye-witness of his great sufferings, to pray that God would be pleased to grant him some ease, he would give no ear to it, alleging that such thoughts were impatience, and would rob him of his crown. Perceiving the hour of his dissolution at hand, he gave his last exhortation to his disciples, and foretold many things, which accordingly came to pass after his death: this happened in the one hundred and fifth year of his age, and of our Lord 529. Peter, patriarch of Jerusalem, and the whole country, assisted with the deepest sentiments of respect at the solemnity of his interment, which was honored by miracles. He was buried in his first cell, called the cave of the magi, because the wise men, who came to adore Christ soon after his birth, were said to have lodged in it. A certain count being on his march against the Persians, begged the hair shirt which the saint used to wear next his skin, and believed that he owed the victory which he obtained over them, to the saint's protection through the pledge of that relic. Both the Roman and Greek calendars mention his festival on the 11th of January. {127} * * * * * The examples of the Nazarites and Essenes among the Jews, and of many excellent and holy persons among the Christians through every age, demonstrate that many are called by God to serve him in a retired contemplative life; nay, it is the opinion of St. Gregory the Great, that the world is to some persons so full of ambushes and snares, or dangerous occasions of sin, that they cannot be saved but by choosing a safe retreat. Those who from experience are conscious of their own weakness, and find themselves to be no match for the world, unable to countermine its policies, and oppose its power, ought to retire as from the face of too potent an enemy; and prefer a contemplative state to a busy and active life: not to indulge sloth, or to decline the service of God and his neighbor, but to consult his own security, and to fly from dangers of sin and vanity. Yet there are some who find the greatest dangers in solitude itself; so that it is necessary for every one to sound his own heart, take a survey of his own forces and abilities, and consult God, that he may best he able to learn the designs of his providence with regard to his soul; in doing which, a great purity of intention is the first requisite. Ease and enjoyment must not be the end of Christian retirement, but penance, labor, and assiduous contemplation; without great fervor and constancy in which, close solitude is the road to perdition. If greater safety, or an unfitness for a public station, or a life of much business (in which several are only public nuisances) may be just motives to some for embracing a life of retirement, the means of more easily attaining to perfect virtue may be such to many. Nor do true contemplatives bury their talents, or cease either to be members of the republic of mankind, or to throw in their mite towards its welfare. From the prayers and thanksgivings which they daily offer to God for the peace of the world, the preservation of the church, the conversion of sinners, and the salvation of all men, doubtless more valuable benefits often accrue to mankind, than from the alms of the rich, or the labors of the learned. Nor is it to be imagined, how far and how powerfully their spirit, and the example of their innocence and perfect virtue, often spread their influence; and how serviceable persons who lead a holy and sequestered life may be to the good of the world; nor how great glory redounds to God, by the perfect purity of heart and charity to which many souls are thus raised. Footnotes: 1. See Le Brun, Explic. des Cérèmonies de la Messe, t. 4, pp. 234-235, dissert. l. 4, art. 2. ST. HYGINUS, P. AND M. HE was placed in the chair of St. Peter after the martyrdom of St. Telesphorus, in the year 139. Eusebius informs us,[1] that he sat four years. The church then enjoyed some sort of calm, under the mild reign of the emperor Antoninus Pius; though several martyrs suffered in his time by the fury of the populace, or the cruelty of certain magistrates. The emperor himself never consented to such proceedings; and when informed of them by the governors of Asia, Athens, Thessalonica, and Larissea, he wrote to them in favor of the Christians, as is recorded by St. Justin and Eusebius.[2] But the devil had recourse to other arts to disturb the peace of God's church. Cerdo, a wolf in sheep's clothing, in the year 140, came from Syria to Rome, and began to teach the false principles which Marcion adopted afterward with more success. He impiously affirmed that there were two Gods; the one rigorous and severe, the author of the Old Testament; the other merciful and good, the author of the New, and the father of Christ, sent by him to redeem man from the tyranny of the former; and that Christ was not really born of the Virgin Mary, or true man, but such {128} in shadow only and appearance. Our holy pope, by his pastoral vigilance detected that monster, and cut him off from the communion of the church. The heresiarch, imposing upon him by a false repentance, was again received; but the zealous pastor having discovered that he secretly preached this old opinions, excommunicated him a second time.[3] Another minister of Satan was Valentine, who being a Platonic philosopher, puffed up with the vain opinion of his learning, and full of resentment for another's being preferred to him in an election to a certain bishopric in Egypt, as Tertullian relates,[4] revived the errors of Simon Magus, and added to them many other absurd fictions, as of thirty �ones or ages, a kind of inferior deities, with whimsical histories of their several pedigrees. Having broached these opinions at Alexandria, he left Egypt for Rome. At first he dissembled his heresies, but by degrees his extravagant doctrines came to light. Hyginus, being the mildest of men, endeavored to reclaim him without proceeding to extremities; so that Valentine was not excommunicated before the first year of St. Pius his immediate successor. St. Hyginus did not sit quite four years, dying in 142. We do not find that he ended his life by martyrdom, yet he is styled a martyr in some ancient calendars, as well as in the present Roman Martyrology; undoubtedly on account of the various persecutions which he suffered, and to which his high station in the church exposed him in those perilous times. See Tillemont, t. 2, p. 252. Footnotes: 1. Eus. l. 4, c. 11. 2. Eus. l. 4, c. 30. 3. St. Epiph. hom. 41; Iren. l. 3, c. 4; Euseb. &c. 4. Tertull. l. contra Valent. c. 4. ST. EGWIN, B.C. HE was of the royal blood of the Mercian kings, devoted himself to the divine service in his youth, and succeeded O{}or in the episcopal see of Worcester, in 692. by his zeal and severity in reproving vice, he stirred up some of his own flock to persecute him, which gave him an opportunity of performing a penitential pilgrimage Rome. Some legends tell us, that setting out he put on his legs iron shackles, and threw the key into the river Severn, others say the Avon; but found it in the belly of a fish, some say at Rome, others in his passage from France to England. After his return, with the assistance of Coenred or Kenred, king of Mercia, he founded the famous abbey of Evesham, under the invocation of the Blessed Virgin. After this he undertook a second journey to Rome, in the company of Coenred, king of the Mercians, and of Offa, of the East Saxons, who gave up their temporal principalities to labor with greater earnestness to secure an eternal crown. St. Egwin died on the 30th of December, in 717, and was buried in the monastery of Evesham. His body was translated to a more honorable place in 1183, probably on the 11th of January, on which day many English Martyrologies mark his festival. See his life in Capgrave, the Annals of Worcester, in Wharton's Anglia Sacra; Malmesbury, l. 4, de Pontif. Ang. Harpsfield. Sæc. 8, c. 15, 18, and Dr. Thomas in his History the Cathedral of Worcester. Monast. Anglic. vol. 1, p. 144, and vol. 2, p. 851. Leland's Collections, vol. 1, pp. 240 and 298; vol. 3, p. 160. Dr. Brown Willis, History of Abbeys, t. 1, p. 90. ST. SALVIUS, OR SAUVE, BISHOP OF AMIENS, FAMOUS for miracles, succeeded Ado in 672, and flourished in the reign of Theodoric III. His relics rest at Montreuil, in Picardy, in the Benedictin {129} Abbey which bears his name, whither they were translated from the cathedral of Amiens, several years after his death, as is related in his anonymous life, a piece of uncertain authority with regard to his actions. A relic of this saint was formerly kept with great veneration in the cathedral of Canterbury, mentioned in the history of that church, &c. This saint must not be confounded with St. Salvius of Alby, nor with the martyr of this name in Africa, on whose festival St. Austin made a sermon. See his anonymous life in Bollandus; also Baillet. Gall. Christ. Nova, t. 10, p. 1154. This seems the day of his translation, and the 28th of October that of his death. JANUARY XII. ST. ARCADIUS, MARTYR. From his ancient acts, much esteemed by Baronius, and inserted by Ruinart in his authentic collection. St. Zeno of Verona made use of them in his forty-ninth sermon on this martyr. See Tillemont. t. 5 p. 557. THE time of this saint's martyrdom is not mentioned in his acts; some place it under Valerian, others under Dioclesian: he seems to have suffered in some city of Mauritania, probably the capital, Cæsarea. The fury of the tyrants raged violently, and the devil had instigated his soldiers to wage, like so many wolves, a bloody war against the servants of Jesus. Upon the least suspicion they broke into houses, made rigorous searches, and if they found a Christian, they treated him upon the spot with the greatest cruelty, their impatience not suffering them to wait the bringing him before a judge. Every day new sacrileges were committed; the faithful were compelled to assist at superstitious sacrifices, to lead victims crowned with flowers through the streets, to burn incense before idols, and to celebrate the enthusiastic feasts of Bacchus. Arcadius, seeing his city in great confusion, left his estate and withdrew to a solitary place in the neighboring country, serving Jesus Christ in watching, prayer, and other exercises of a penitential life. His flight could not be long a secret; for his not appearing at the public sacrifices made the governor send soldiers to his house; who surrounded it, forced open the doors, and finding one of his relations in it, who said all he could to justify his kinsman's absence; they seized him, and the governor ordered him to be kept in close custody till Arcadius should be taken. The martyr, informed of his friend's danger, and burning with a desire to suffer for Christ, went into the city, and presenting himself to the judge, said: "If on my account you detain my innocent relation in chains, release him; I, Arcadius, am come in person to give an account of myself, and to declare to you, that he knew not where I was." "I am willing," answered the judge, "to pardon not only him, but you also, on condition that you will sacrifice to the gods." Arcadius replied, "How can you propose to me such a thing? Do you not know the Christians, or do you believe that the fear of death will ever make me swerve from my duty? Jesus Christ is my life, and death is my gain. Invent what torments you please; but know that nothing shall make me a traitor to my God." The governor, in a rage, paused to devise some unheard-of torment for him. Iron hooks seemed too easy; neither plummets of lead, nor cudgels could satisfy his fury; the very rack he thought by much too gentle. At last {130} imagining he had found a manner of death suitable to his purpose, he said to the ministers of his cruelty, "Take him, and let him see and desire death, without being able to obtain it. Cut off his limbs joint by joint, and execute this so slowly, that the wretch may know what it is to abandon the gods of his ancestors for an unknown deity." The executioners dragged Arcadius to the place, where many other victims of Christ had already suffered; a place dear and sweet to all who sigh after eternal life. Here the martyr lifts up his eyes to heaven, and implores strength from above; then stretches out his neck, expecting to have his head cut off; but the executioner bid him hold out his hand, and joint after joint chopped off his fingers, arms, and shoulders. Laying the saint afterward on his back, he in the same barbarous manner cut off his toes, feet, legs, and thighs. The holy martyr held out his limbs and joints, one after another, with invincible patience and courage, repeating these words, "Lord, teach me thy wisdom:" for the tyrants had forgot to cut out his tongue. After so many martyrdoms, his body lay a mere trunk weltering in its own blood. The executioners themselves, as well as the multitude, were moved to tears and admiration at this spectacle, and at such an heroic patience. But Arcadius, with a joyful countenance, surveying his scattered limbs all around him, and offering them to God, said, "Happy members, now dear to me, as you at last truly belong to God, being all made a sacrifice to him!" Then turning to the people, he said, "You who have been present at this bloody tragedy, learn that all torments seem as nothing to one who has an everlasting crown before his eyes. Your gods are not gods; renounce their worship. He alone for whom I suffer and die, is the true God. He comforts and upholds me in the condition you see me. To die for him is to live; to suffer for him is to enjoy the greatest delights." Discoursing in this manner to those about him, he expired on the 12th of January, the pagans being struck with astonishment at such a miracle of patience. The Christians gathered together his scattered limbs, and laid them in one tomb. The Roman and other Martyrologies make honorable mention of him on this day. * * * * * We belong to God by numberless essential titles of interest, gratitude, and justice, and are bound to be altogether his, and every moment to live to him alone, with all our powers and all our strength: whatever it may cost us to make this sacrifice perfect and complete, if we truly love him, we shall embrace it with joy and inexpressible ardor. In these sentiments we ought, by frequent express acts, and by the uninterrupted habitual disposition of our souls, to give all we are and have to God, all the powers of our souls, all the senses and organs of our bodies, all our actions, thoughts, and affections. This oblation we may excellently comprise in any of the first petitions of our Lord's prayer: the following is a form of an oblation to our divine Redeemer, which St. Ignatius of Loyola drew up and used to repeat: "O sovereign king, and absolute Lord of all things, though I am most unworthy to serve you, nevertheless, relying on your grace and boundless mercy, I offer myself up entire to you, and subject whatever belongs to me to your most holy will; and I protest, in presence of your infinite goodness, and in presence of the glorious Virgin your mother, and your whole heavenly court, that it is my most earnest desire, and unshaken resolution, to follow and imitate you the nearest I am able, in bearing all injuries and crosses with meekness and patience, and in laboring to die to the world and myself in a perfect spirit of humility and poverty, that I may be wholly yours and you may reign in me in time and eternity." {131} SAINT BENEDICT BISCOP, COMMONLY CALLED BENNET. HE was nobly descended, and one of the great officers of the court of Oswi, the religious king of the Northumbers: he was very dear to his prince, and was beholden to his bounty for many fair estates, and great honors; but neither the favors of so good and gracious a king, nor the allurements of power, riches, and pleasures, were of force to captivate his heart, who could see nothing in them but dangers, and snares so much the more to be dreaded, as fraught with the power of charming. At the age therefore of twenty-five, an age that affords the greatest relish for pleasure, he bid adieu to the world, made a journey of devotion to Rome, and at his return devoted him wholly to the studies of the scriptures and other holy exercises. Some time after his return to England, Alcfrid, son of king Oswi, being desirous to make a pilgrimage to the shrines of the apostles, engaged Biscop to bear him company to Rome. The king prevented his son's journey; nevertheless our saint travelled thither a second time, burning with an earnest desire of improving himself in the knowledge of divine things, and in the love of God. From Rome he went to the great monastery of Lerins, then renowned for its regular discipline; there he took the monastic habit, and spent two years in the most exact observance of the rule, and penetrated in every exercise with its true spirit: after this he returned to Rome, where he received an order of pope Vitalian to accompany St. Theodorus, archbishop of Canterbury, and St. Adrian, to England. When he arrived at Canterbury, St. Theodorus committed to him the care of the monastery of SS. Peter and Paul, near that city, which abbacy he resigned to St. Adrian upon his arrival in England. St. Bennet stayed about two years in Kent, giving himself up to religious exercises and sacred studies, under the discipline of those two excellent persons. Then he took a fourth journey to Rome, with a view of perfecting himself in ecclesiastical discipline, and the rules and practice of a monastic life; for which purpose he made a considerable stay at Rome and other places: he brought home with him a choice library, relics and pictures of Christ, the Blessed Virgin, and other saints. When he returned to Northumberland, king Egfrid (in whose father's court St. Bennet had formerly lived) bestowed on him seventy ploughs or families of land for building a monastery;[1] this the saint founded on the mouth of the river Were, whence it was called Weremouth. When the monastery was built, St. Bennet went over to France, and brought back with him skilful masons, who built the church for this monastery of stone, and after the Roman fashion; for till that time stone buildings were very rare in Britain, even the church of Lindisfarne was of wood, and covered over with a thatch of straw and reeds, till bishop Eadbert procured both the roof and the walls to be covered with sheets of lead, as Bede mentions.[2] St. Bennet also brought over glaziers from France, for the art of making glass was then unknown in Britain. In a fifth journey to Rome, St. Bennet furnished himself with a larger stock of good books, especially the writings of the fathers, also of relics and holy pictures, with which he enriched his own country. His first monastery of Weremouth was entitled from Saint Peter, prince of the apostles; and such was the edification which it gave, that the same {132} king added to the saint a second donation of lands, consisting of forty ploughs; on which Biscop built another monastery, at a place called Girwy, now Jarrow, on the Tine, six miles distant from the former, and this latter was called St. Paul's; these two monasteries were almost looked upon as one; and St. Bennet governed them both, though he placed in each a superior or abbot, who continued subject to him, his long journey to Rome and other avocations making this substitution necessary.[3] In the church of St. Peter at Weremouth he placed the pictures of the Blessed Virgin, the twelve apostles, the history of the gospel, and the visions in the revelation of St. John: that of St. Paul's at Jarrow, he adorned with other pictures, disposed in such manner as to represent the harmony between the Old and New Testament, and the conformity of the figures in one to the reality in the other. Thus Isaac carrying the wood which was to be employed in the sacrifice of himself, was explained by Jesus Christ carrying his cross, on which he was to finish his sacrifice; and the brazen serpent was illustrated by our Saviour's crucifixion. With these pictures, and many books and relics, St. Bennet brought from Rome in his last voyage, John, abbot of St. Martin's, precentor in St. Peter's church, whom he prevailed with pope Agatho to send with him, and whom he placed at Weremouth to instruct perfectly his monks in the Gregorian notes, and Roman ceremonies for singing the divine office. Easterwin, a kinsman of St. Bennet, and formerly an officer in the king's court, before he became a monk, was chosen abbot before our saint set out for Rome, and in that station behaved always as the meanest person in the house; for though he was eminently adorned with all virtues, humility, mildness, and devotion seemed always the most eminent part of his character. This holy man died on the 6th of March, when he was but thirty-six years old, and had been four years abbot, while St. Bennet was absent in the last journey to Rome. The monks chose in his place St. Sigfrid, a deacon, a man of equal gravity and meekness, who soon after fell into a lingering decay, under which he suffered violent pains in his lungs and bowels. He died four months before our saint. With his advice, two months before his death, St. Bennet appointed St. Ceolfrid abbot of both his monasteries, being himself struck with a dead palsy, by which all the lower parts of his body were without life; he lay sick of this distemper three years, and for a considerable time was entirely confined to his bed. During this long illness, not being able to raise his voice to the usual course of singing the divine office, at every canonical hour he sent for some of his monks and while they, being divided into two choirs, sung the psalms proper for the hour of the day or night, he endeavored as well as he could to join not only his heart, but also his voice, with theirs. His attention to God he seemed never to relax, and frequently and earnestly exhorted his monks to a constant observance of the rule he had given them. "You must not think," said he, "that the constitutions which you have received from me were my own invention, for, having in my frequent journeys visited seventeen well-ordered monasteries, I informed myself of all their laws and rules, and picking out the best among them, these I have recommended to you." The saint expired soon after, having received the viaticum on the 12th of January, in 690. His relics, according to Malmesbury,[4] were translated to Thorney abbey, in 970, but the monks of Glastenbury thought themselves possessed at least of part of that treasure.[5] The true name of our saint was Biscop {133} Baducing, as appears from Eddius-Stephen, in his life of St. Wilfrid. The English Benedictins honor him as one of the patrons of their congregation, and he is mentioned in the Roman Martyrology on this day. See his life in Bede's history of the first abbots of Weremouth, published by Sir James Ware, at Dublin, in 1664. Footnotes: 1. A plough, or family of land, was as much as one plough, or one yoke of oxen could throw up in a year, or as sufficed for the maintenance of a family. 2. Hist. l. 3, c. 25. 3. The abbeys of Weremouth and Jarrow were destroyed by the Danes. Both were rebuilt in part, and from the year 1083 were small priories or cells dependent on the abbey of Durham, till their dissolution {}th of Henry VIII. 4. Malmes. l. 4, de Pontif. 5. See Monast. Ang. t. 1, p. 4, and John of Glastenbury, Hist. Glasten. TYGRIUS, A PRIEST, WHO was scourged, tormented with the disjointing of his bones, stripped of all his goods, and sent into banishment; and EUTROPIUS, lector, and precentor of the church of Constantinople, who died in prison of his torments, having been scourged, his cheeks torn with iron hooks, and his sides burnt with torches; are honored in the Roman Martyrology with the title of martyrs on the 12th of January. ST. AELRED, ABBOT OF RIEVAL, OR RIDAL, IN YORKSHIRE. HE was of noble descent, and was born in the north of England, in 1109. Being educated in learning and piety, he was invited by David, the pious king of Scotland, to his court, made master of his household, and highly esteemed both by him and the courtiers. His virtue shone with bright lustre in the world, particularly his meekness, which Christ declared to be his favorite virtue, and the distinguishing mark of his true disciples. The following is a memorable instance to what a degree he possessed this virtue: a certain person of quality having insulted and reproached him in the presence of the king, Aelred heard him out with patience, and thanked him for his charity and sincerity, in telling him his faults. This behavior had such an influence on his adversary as made him ask his pardon on the spot. Another time, while he was speaking on a certain matter, one interrupted him with very harsh, reviling expressions: the servant of God heard him with tranquillity, and afterwards resumed his discourse with the same calmness and presence of mind as before. His desires were ardent to devote himself entirely to God, by forsaking the world; but the charms of friendship detained him some time longer in it, and were fetters to his soul; reflecting, notwithstanding, that he must sooner or later be separated by death from those he loved most, he condemned his own cowardice, and broke at once those bands of friendship, which were more agreeable to him than all other sweets of life. He describes the situation of his soul under this struggle, and says, "Those who saw me, judging by the gaudy show which surrounded me, and not knowing what passed within my soul, said, speaking of me: Oh, how well is it with him! how happy is he! But they knew not the anguish of my mind; for the deep wound in my heart gave me a thousand tortures, and I was not able to bear the intolerable stench of my sins." But after he had taken his resolution, he says, "I began then to know, by a little experience, what immense pleasure is found in thy service, and how sweet that peace is, which is its inseparable companion."[1] To relinquish entirely all his worldly engagements, he left Scotland, and embraced the austere Cistercian order, at Rieval, in a valley upon the hanks of the Rie, in Yorkshire, where a noble lord, called Walter {134} Especke, had founded a monastery in 1122. At the age of twenty-four, in 1133, he became a monk under the first abbot, William, a disciple of St. Bernard. Fervor adding strength to his tender delicate body, he set himself cheerfully about practising the greatest austerities, and employed much of his time in prayer and the reading of pious books. He converted his heart with great ardor to the love of God, and by this means finding all his mortifications sweet and light, he cried out,[2] "That yoke doth not oppress, but raiseth the soul; that burden hath-wings, not weight." He speaks of divine charity always in raptures, and by his frequent ejaculations on the subject, it seems to have been the most agreeable occupation of his soul. "May thy voice (says he) sound in my ears, O good Jesus, that my heart may learn how to love thee, that my mind may love thee, that the interior powers, and, as it were, bowels of my soul, and very marrow of my heart, may love thee, and that my affections may embrace thee, my only true good, my sweet and delightful joy! What is love? my God! If I mistake not, it is the wonderful delight of the soul, so much the more sweet as more pure, so much the more overflowing and inebriating as more ardent. He who loves thee, possesses thee; and he possesses thee in proportion as he loves, because thou art love. This is that abundance with which thy beloved are inebriated, melting away from themselves, that they may pass into thee, by loving thee."[3] He had been much delighted in his youth with reading Tully; but after his conversion, found that author, and all other reading, tedious and bitter, which was not sweetened with the honey of the holy name of Jesus, and seasoned with the word of God, as he says in the preface to his book, _On spiritual friendship_. He was much edified with the very looks of a holy monk, called Simon, who had despised high birth, an ample fortune, and all the advantages of mind and body, to serve God in that penitential state. This monk went and came as one deaf and dumb, always recollected in God; and was such a lover of silence, that he would scarce speak a few words to the prior on necessary occasions. His silence, however, was sweet, agreeable, and full of edification. Our saint says of him, "The very sight of his humility stifled my pride, and made me blush at the immortification of my looks. The law of silence practised among us, prevented my ever speaking to him deliberately; but, one day, on my speaking a word to him inadvertently, his displeasure appeared in his looks for my infraction of the rule of silence; and he suffered me to lie some time prostrate before him to expiate my fault; for which I grieved bitterly, and which I never could forgive myself."[4] This holy monk, having served God eight years in perfect fidelity, died in 1142, in wonderful peace, repeating with his last breath, "I will sing eternally, O Lord, thy mercy, thy mercy, thy mercy!" St. Aelred, much against his inclination, was made abbot of a new monastery of his order, founded by William, Earl of Lincoln, at Revesby, in Lincolnshire, in 1142, and of Rieval, over three hundred monks, in 1143. Describing their life, he says, that they drank nothing but water; ate little, and that coarse; labored hard, slept little, and on hard boards; never spoke, except to their superiors on necessary occasions; carried the burdens that were laid on them without refusing any; went wherever they were led; had not a moment for sloth, or amusements of any kind, and never had any lawsuit or dispute.[5] St. Aelred also mentions their mutual charity and peace in the most affecting manner, and is not able to find words to express the joy he felt at the sight of every one of them. His humility and love of solitude made him constantly refuse many bishoprics which were pressed {135} upon him. Pious reading and prayer were his delight. Even in times of spiritual dryness, if he opened the divine books, he suddenly found his soul pierced with the light of the Holy Ghost. His eyes, though before as dry as marble, flowed with tears, and his heart abandoned itself to sighs accompanied with a heavenly pleasure, by which he was ravished in God. He died in 1166, and the fifty-seventh of his age, having been twenty-two years abbot. See his works published at Douay in 1625, and in Bibl. Cisterc. t. 5, particularly his _Mirrour of Charity_; Hearne's Notes on Gulielmus Neubrigensis, who dedicated to our saint the first book of his history, t. 3, p. 1: likewise his life in Capgrave, and the annals of his order. The general chapter held at Citeaux in 1250, declared him to be ranked among the saints of their order; as Henriquez and the additions to the Cistercian Martyrology testify. In the new Martyrology published by Benedict XIV. for the use of this order, the feast of St. Aelred is marked on the 2d of March,[6] with a great eulogium of his learning, innocence of life, wonderful humility, patience, heavenly conversation, gift of prophecy, and miracles. Footnotes: 1. Spec. {} 1, c. 28. 2. Spec. l. 1, c. 5. 3. Ibid. l. 1, c. 1. 4. Ibid. l. 1, c. ult. 5. L. 2, c. 2. 6. P. 304 JANUARY XIII. ST. VERONICA, OF MILAN. From her life, in Bollandus, t. 1, p. 890. A.D. 1497. ALL states furnish abundant means for attaining to sanctity and Christian perfection, and it is only, owing to our sloth and tepidity that we neglect to make use of them. This saint could boast of no worldly advantages either by birth or fortune.[1] Her parents maintained their family by hard labor in a village near Milan, and were both very pious; her father never sold a horse, or any thing else he dealt in, without being more careful to acquaint the purchaser with all that was secretly faulty in it, than to recommend its good qualities. His narrow circumstances prevented his giving his daughter any schooling, so that she never learned to read; but his own, and his devout wife's example, and fervent though simple instructions, filled her tender heart from the cradle with lively sentiments of virtue. The pious {136} maid from her infancy applied herself to continual prayer, was very attentive to the instructions given in the catechism; and the uninterrupted consideration of the holy mysteries, and the important truths of religion, engrossed her whole soul to themselves. She was, notwithstanding, of all others, the most diligent and indefatigable in labor; and so obedient to her parents and masters, even in the smallest trifles, so humble and submissive to her equals, that she seemed to have no will of her own. Her food was coarse and very sparing, and her drink the same which the poorer sort of people used in that country, water, except sometimes whey, or a little milk. At her work she continually conversed in her heart with God; insomuch that in company she seemed deaf to their discourses, mirth, and music. When she was weeding, reaping, or at any other labor in the fields, she strove to work at a distance from her companions, to entertain herself the more freely with her heavenly spouse. The rest admired her love of solitude, and on coming to her, always found her countenance cheerful, yet often bathed in tears, which they sometimes perceived to flow in great abundance; though they did not know the source to be devotion: so carefully did Veronica conceal what passed in her soul between her and God. Through a divine call to a religious and conventual state of life, she conceived a great desire to become a nun, in the poor, austere, and edifying convent of St. Martha, of the order of St. Austin in Milan. To qualify herself for this state, being busied the whole day at work, she sat up at night to learn to read and write, which the want of an instructor made a great fatigue to her. One day being in great anxiety about her learning, the Mother of God, to whom she had always recommended herself, in a comfortable vision bade her banish that anxiety; for it was enough if she knew three letters: The first, purity of the affections, by placing her whole heart on God alone, loving no creature, but in him and for him; the second, never to murmur, or be impatient at the sins, or any behavior of others, but to bear them with interior peace and patience, and humbly to pray for them; the third, to set apart some time every day to meditate on the passion of Christ. After three years' preparation, she was admitted to the religious habit in St. Martha's. Her life was entirely uniform, perfect, and fervent in every action, no other than a living copy of her rule, which consisted in the practice of evangelical perfection reduced to certain holy exercises. Every moment of her life she studied to accomplish it to the least tittle, and was no less exact in obeying the order or direction of any superior's will. When she could not obtain leave to watch in the church so long as she desired, by readily complying, she deserved to hear from Christ, that obedience was a sacrifice the most dear to him, who, to obey his Father's will, came down from heaven, _becoming obedient even unto death_.[2] She lay three years under a lingering illness, all which time she would never be exempted from any duty of the house, or part of her work, or make use of the least indulgence, though she had leave; her answer always was, "I must work while I can, while I have time." It was her delight to help and serve every one. She always sought with admirable humility the last place, and the greatest drudgery. It was her desire to live always on bread and water. Her silence was a sign of her recollection and continual prayer, in which her gift of abundant and almost continual tears was most wonderful. She nourished them by constant meditation on her own miseries, on the love of God, the joys of heaven, and the sacred passion of Christ. She always spoke of her own sinful life, as she called it, though it was most innocent, with the most feeling sentiments of compunction. She was favored by God with many extraordinary visits and {137} comforts. By moving exhortations to virtue, she softened and converted several obdurate sinners. She died at the hour which she had foretold, in the year 1497, and the fifty-second of her age. Her sanctity was confirmed by miracles. Pope Leo X., by a bull in 1517, permitted her to be honored in her monastery in the same manner as if she had been beatified according to the usual form. The bull may be seen in Bollandus.[3] Her name is inserted on this day in the Roman Martyrology, published by Benedict XIV., in the year 1749; but on the 28th of this month, in that of the Austin friars, approved by the same pope. * * * * * Christian perfection consists very much in the performance of our ordinary actions, and the particular duties of our respective stations. God, as the good father and great master of the family of the world, allots to every one his proper place and office in it; and it is in this variety of states by which it subsists; and in their mutual dependence upon each other, that its good order and beauty consist. It is the most holy and wise appointment of providence and the order of nature, that the different stations in the world be filled. Kings and subjects, rich and poor, reciprocally depend upon each other; and it is the command of God that every one perform well the part which is assigned him. It is, then, by the constant attendance on all the duties of his state, that a person is to be sanctified. By this all his ordinary actions will be agreeable sacrifices to God, and his whole life a continued chain of good works. It is not only in great actions, or by fits and starts, but in all that we do, and in every moment, that we are bound to live to God. The regulation of this point is of essential importance in a virtuous life, that every action may be performed with regularity, exactitude in all its circumstances, and the utmost fervor, and by the most pure motive, referred solely to divine honor, in union with the most holy actions and infinite merits of Christ. Hence St. Hilary says,[4] "When the just man performs all his actions, with a pure and simple view to the divine honor and glory, as the apostle admonishes us,[5] his whole life becomes an uninterrupted prayer; and as he passes his days and nights in the accomplishment of the divine will, it is true to say, that the whole course of a holy life is a constant meditation on the law of God." Nevertheless this axiom, that the best devotion is the constant practice of a person's ordinary duties, is abused by some, to excuse a life of dissipation. Every one is bound to live to himself in the first place, and to reserve leisure for frequent exercises of devotion; and it is only by a spirit of perfect self-denial, humility, compunction, and prayer, and by an assiduous attention of the soul to God, that our exterior ordinary actions will be animated by the motives of divine faith and charity, and the spirit of true piety nourished in our breasts; in this consists the secret of a Christian life in all states. Footnotes: 1. The print of the holy face of our Saviour on a linen cloth, is kept in Saint Peter's church at Rome, with singular veneration. It is mentioned in an ancient ceremonial of that church, dedicated to Celestin II. in 1143, published by Mabillon, (Museum Ital. t 2 p. 122;) also in Matthew of Westminster, Flores Hist. under Innocent III. who died in 1216; and in a Bull of Nicholas IV. in 1290. It was called Veronica, or true image of our Lord's face, from Vera and Iconica, a word used by St. Gregory of Tours. (Vit. Patr. c, 12.) for an image, from the Greek word Icon. Some moderns imagine that it served at the burial of out Lord; others say, that a devout woman wiped his face with it, when he was fainting under the load of his cross, going to mount Calvary. In some particular missals, as in that of Mentz in 1493, among the votive masses, is one "de Sancta Veronica sei vultu Domini," in the same manner as there is a mass, "On the cross." Such devotions are directed to honor our Lord, with a remembrance of this relic, memorial, or pledge. From this office of the Veronica is taken an Anthem and Prayer which are said in some private churches, as a commemoration of the holy face of Lucca, which is a very ancient and miraculous crucifix, in the chapel of the Holy Cross, in the cathedral dedicated to St. Martin at Lucca. A copy of the true Veronica is kept in the Cistercian nunnery at Montreuil, a present of Urban IV. to this house, his sister being a nun there. See his letter to them in Chiffleter, "de Linteis sepulchralibus Domini." This letter was dated in 1249, when the author was archdeacon and chaplain to Innocent IV. Some private writers and churches have given the name of St. Veronica to the devout woman who is said to have presented this linen cloth to our divine Redeemer; but without sufficient warrant. See Rapebroch Matt. t. 7, p. 356, n. 126, and Chatelain. Notes on the Martyr, on Jan. 13, pp. 201, 222. 2. Phil. ii. 8. 3. T. 1, p. 889. 4. S. Hilar. in Ps. i. p. 20. 5. 1 Cor. x. 31. ST. KENTIGERN, BISHOP OF GLASCO, C. IN ANCIENT BRITISH, KYNDEYRN; SURNAMED MUNGHO, OR MUNGHU. THIS eminent saint of the ancient church of North Britain, was of royal blood among the Picts, or original inhabitants of that country, and born about the year 516. He was placed very young under the discipline of St. Servanus, bishop and abbot of Culros, a monastery, situated upon the frith which divides Lothian from Fife. By this holy prelate he was trained up in the perfect spirit of Christian meekness and piety. For his innocence and great virtues he was beloved by his master, and all who were acquainted {138} with that religious family, above all his fellow-disciples, for which reason he was called Munghu, or Mungho, which in the language of that country signified "one dearly beloved;" and this is the name which the Scots usually give him to this day. When he was grown up, by the direction of St. Servanus, he retired to a place called Glasghu, where he led a solitary life in great abstinence, till the clergy and people earnestly demanded him for their bishop. He was consecrated by an Irish bishop, invited over for that purpose, and fixed his see at Glasghu, or Glasco, where he assembled a numerous company of religious brethren, who formed their rule of life upon the model of the primitive Christians at Jerusalem. The saint's diocese was of vast extent, reaching from sea to sea, and being wild and uncultivated, afforded continual exercise for his zeal and patience; he travelled always on foot, sparing no pains to spread the light of the gospel among the unbelievers, of whom he converted and baptized great numbers. The Pelagian heresy having taken deep root among the Christians in those parts, he so vigorously opposed that fatal, growing evil, as entirely to banish that hydra out of the church of the Picts. Besides the recital of the whole Psalter, he performed every day several other exercises of devotion; lived in a constant union of his soul with God, and by perpetual abstinence, rigorous fasts, and other extraordinary austerities, he made his whole life an uninterrupted course of penance. Every Lent he retired from the sight and conversation of men, into some desert, to hold a close communication with God in solitude. As both in his virtues and labors he imitated the apostles, so God was pleased to authorize his preaching, by conferring on him an apostolic grace of the miraculous powers. Out of his monks and disciples, he sent many missionaries to preach the faith in the north of Scotland, in the isles of Orkney, in Norway, and Iceland. The form of government among the Straith-Cluid Britons and the Cumbrians, the latter inhabiting the country from the Picts' wall, to the Ribble in Lancashire, was in part aristocratical; for many petty lords or princes enjoyed so great authority in their respective territories, as often to wage war among themselves: yet they all obeyed one monarch, who usually resided at Alcluyd, or Dunbritton. Besides the feuds and quarrels of particular chieftains and their clans, there happened about that time several revolutions in the monarchy. We learn from the book entitled the Triades, that when St. Kentigern was made bishop of Glasco, Gurthmel Wledig was king of the North Britons, and contemporary with Arthur. He was succeeded by Rydderch, surnamed Hael, i.e. _The Liberal_, who vanquished his enemies and rivals in war, especially by the great victory of Arderyth, in 577.[1] He was a religious and deserving prince, and his magnificence, generosity, and other virtues, are extolled by the ancient author of the Triades, by Merlin, Taliessin, the old laws of the Britons, and the authors of the lives of St. Kentigern and St. Asaph. This prince, however, was afterwards obliged by rebellious subjects, under Morcant Mawr, and Aeddon, surnamed Uraydog, or _The Treacherous_, to fly into Ireland. The impious Morcant (as he is styled in the fragment of St. Asaph's life, extant in Coch-Asaph) usurped the throne of the Straith-Cluid Britons; but the Cumbrians, who dwelt on the south side of the wall, were protected by Urien, lord of Rheged, a nobleman who had lived at the court of king Arthur, and whose great qualities are celebrated by the pens of Lhowarch-Hen, (his cousin-german,) Taliessin, and the author of the Triades. In the beginning of the usurpation of Morcant Mawr, St. Kentigern was obliged to fly into Wales, where he stayed some time with St. David, at Menevia, {139} till Cathwallain, (uncle to king Maelgun Gwynedh,[2]) a religious prince of part of Denbighshire, bestowed on him the land at the meeting of the rivers Elwy and Cluid, on which he built a famous monastery and school, called from the river Elwy, Llan-Elwy, or absolutely Elgwy, where a great number of disciples and scholars soon put themselves under his direction. St. Kentigern was here when St. David died, in 546, or rather in 544, when the first of March fell on a Tuesday.[3] After the death of the usurper Morcant, Rydderch returned from Ireland, and recovered his crown, and St. Kentigern, leaving his school to the care of St. Asaph, (whose name the town, which was raised at Elgwy, bears to this day,) went back to Glasco, taking with him several hundreds of his scholars; their number having probably been much increased after the death of Daniel, bishop of Bangor, which happened between the years 542 and 545. The return of St. Kentigern to his see, is generally placed about the year 560, nor can it be placed later, since in 565 he had a conference with St. Columbo, when that holy man came over to Scotland, in order to convert the northern Picts, to whom St. Kentigern had already sent missionaries.[4] Wharton therefore justly places the residence of St. Kentigern in Wales, from the year 543 to 560.[5] King Rydderch powerfully seconded the zeal of our saint in all his undertakings, being his constant friend and protector; as were the two princes who afterward succeeded him, Guallauc, (who seems to have been his son,) and Morcant Mwynfawn, (who was certainly his brother.) The valor of Rydderch, and these two successors, which is highly commended by an ancient author in Nennius, and other British historians, was the bulwark of their dominions against the inroads of the Saxons. St. Kentigern employed his zeal all this time, with wonderful success, in correcting abuses, reforming the manners of his flock, and propagating the faith; was favored with a wonderful gift of miracles, and died in 601, aged eighty-five years. His tomb, in his titular church at Glasco, was famous for miracles, and his name was always most illustrious in the Scottish calendars. See his ancient life, Leland de Scriptor. Usher, Ant. c. 15. Hector Boetius, Leslie, &c. Footnotes: 1. Vaughn's Dissert. on the British Chron. Carte. t. 1, p. 211. 2. See Notes on St. Gildas and St. David. 3. Usher, Ant. Brit. c. 14. 4. Vit. S. Kentigerni. Usher, Antiqu. c. 15, p. 358. 5. Wharton de Episcopis Asaphensibus, pp. 300, 302. This is also the Octave of the Epiphany.[1] The principal object of the devotion of the church on this day is the baptism of our Saviour by St. John in the Jordan. We learn from the great council of Oxford, in 1222,[2] that it was then kept a holyday of the third class; on which all were obliged to hear mass, though they might work afterwards. In France and Germany all servile work was forbidden on it, by the capitulars of Lewis le Débonnaire.[3] The emperor Theodosius II. forbids all civil courts and transactions during eight days before the festival of the Epiphany, and as many after it. Footnotes: 1. The church prolongs more solemn festivals during eight days, with a daily continuation of the sacred office proper to each such festival. This term is called its octave, and the eighth day is called the octave-day. 2. Can. 8. 3. L. 2, de feriis. {140} JANUARY XIV. ST. HILARY, BISHOP. From his own writings, and the histories of that age, which furnish the most authentic memoirs of his life. See what Dom Coutant, the Benedictin monk, has recorded of him in his excellent edition of his works; as also Tillemont, t. 7, Ceillier, t. 5, and Rivet, Hiss. Lit. t. 1, part 2, p. 139. The two books, the one of his life, the other of his miracles, by Fortunatus of Poictiers, 600, are inaccurate. Both the Fortunatases were from Italy; and probably one was the author of the first, and the other of the second book. A.D. 368. ST. AUSTIN, who often urges the authority of St. Hilary against the Pelagians, styles him _the illustrious doctor of the churches_.[1] St. Jerom says[2] that he was a _most eloquent man, and the trumpet of the Latins against the Arians_; and in another place, that in _St. Cyprian_ and _St. Hilary_, God had transplanted two _fair cedars_ out of the world into his church.[3] St. Hilary was born at Poictiers, and his family one of the most illustrious in Gaul.[4] He spent his youth in the study of eloquence. He himself testifies that he was brought up in idolatry, and gives us a particular account of the steps by which God conducted him to the knowledge of his saving faith.[5] He considered by the glimmering or faint light of reason, that man, who is created a moral and free agent, is placed in this world for the exercise of patience, temperance, and other virtues, which he saw must receive from God a recompense after this life. He ardently set about learning what God is; and after some researches into the nature of the Supreme Being, quickly discovered the absurdity of polytheism, or a plurality of gods; and was convinced that there can be only one God, and that the same is eternal, unchangeable, all-powerful, the first cause and author of all things. Full of these reflections, he met with the holy scriptures, and was wonderfully affected with that just and sublime description Moses gives of God in those words, so expressive of his self-existence,[6] I AM WHO AM: and was no less struck with the idea of his immensity and supreme dominion, illustrated by the most lively images in the inspired language of the prophets. The reading of the New Testament put an end to, and completed his inquiries; and he learned from the first chapter of St. John, that the Divine Word, God the Son, is coeternal and consubstantial with the Father. Here he checked his natural curiosity, avoided subtilties, and submitted his understanding to divine revelation, resolving what seemed incomprehensible into the veracity and power of God; and not presuming to measure divine mysteries by his shallow capacity. Being thus brought to the knowledge of faith, he received the heavenly regeneration by baptism. From that time forth he so squared his whole life by the rules of piety, and so zealous were his endeavors to confirm others in the faith of the holy Trinity, and to encourage all to virtue, that he seemed, though a layman, already to possess the grace of the priesthood. He was married before his conversion to the faith; and his wife, by whom he had a daughter named Apra, or Abram, was yet living, when he was chosen bishop of Poictiers, about the year 353; but from the time of {141} his ordination he lived in perpetual continency.[7] He omitted no endeavors to escape this promotion: but his humility only made the people the more earnest to see him vested with that dignity; and indeed their expectations were not frustrated in him, for his eminent virtue and capacity shone forth with such a lustre, as soon drew upon him the attention, not only of all Gaul, but of the whole church. Soon after he was raised to the episcopal dignity, he composed, before his exile, elegant comments on the gospel of Saint Matthew, which are still extant. Those on the Psalms he compiled after his banishment.[8] Of these comments on the Psalms, and on St. Matthew, we are chiefly to understand St. Jerom, when he recommends, in a particular manner, the reading of the works of St. Hilary to virgins and devout persons.[9] From that time the Arian controversy chiefly employed his pen. He was an excellent orator and poet. His style is lofty and noble, beautified with rhetorical ornaments and figures, but somewhat studied; and the length of his periods renders him sometimes obscure to the unlearned,[10] as St. Jerom takes notice.[11] It is observed by Dr. Cave, that all his writings breathe an extraordinary vein of piety. Saint Hilary solemnly appeals to God,[12] that he held it as the great work of his life, to employ all his faculties to announce God to the world, and to excite all men to the love of him. He earnestly recommends the practice of beginning every action and discourse by prayer,[13] and some act of divine praise;[14] as also to meditate on {142} the law of God day and night, to pray without ceasing, by performing all our actions with a view to God their ultimate end, and to his glory.[15] He breathes a sincere and ardent desire of martyrdom, and discovers a soul {143} fearless of death and torments. He had the greatest veneration for truth, sparing no pains in its pursuit, and dreading no dangers in its defence. The emperor Constantius, having labored for several years to compel the eastern churches to embrace Arianism, came into the West: and after the overthrow of the tyrant Magnentius, made some stay at Arles, while his Arian bishops held a council there, in which they engaged Saturninus, the impious bishop of that city, in their party, in 353. A bolder Arian council at Milan, in 355, held during the residence of the emperor in that city, required all to sign the condemnation of St. Athanasius. Such as refused to comply were banished; among whom were St. Eusebius of Vercelli, Lucifer of Cagliari, and St. Dionysius of Milan, into whose see Auxentius, the Arian, was intruded. St. Hilary wrote on that occasion his first book to Constantius, in which he mildly entreated him to restore peace to the church. He separated himself from the three Arian bishops in the West, Ursacius, Valens, and Saturninus, and exhibited an accusation against the last in a synod at Beziers. But the emperor, who had information of the matter from Saturninus, sent an order to Julian, then Cæsar, and surnamed afterwards the Apostate, who at that time commanded in Gaul, for St. Hilary's immediate banishment into Phrygia, together with St. Rhodanius, bishop of Toulouse. The bishops in Gaul being almost all orthodox, remained in communion with St. Hilary, and would not suffer the intrusion of any one into his see, which in his absence he continued to govern by his priests. The saint went into banishment about the middle of the year 356, with as great alacrity as another would take a journey of pleasure, and never entertained the least disquieting thought of hardships, dangers, or enemies, having a soul above both the smiles and frowns of the world, and fixed only on God. He remained in exile somewhat upwards of three years, which time he employed in composing several learned works. The principal and most esteemed of these is that _On the Trinity, against the Arians_, in twelve {144} books. In them he proves the consubstantiality of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. He teaches that the church is one, out of which all heresies spring; not that by this she is distinguished, as standing always one, always alone against them all, and confounding them all: whereas they by perpetual divisions tear each other in pieces, and so become the subject of her triumph.[16] He proves that Arianism cannot be the faith of Christ, because not revealed to St. Peter, upon whom the church was built and secured forever; for whose faith Christ prayed, that it might never fail; who received the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whose judiciary sentence on earth is that of heaven:[17] all which arguments he frequently urges.[18] He proves the divinity of Christ by the miracles wrought at the sepulchres of the apostles and martyrs, and by their relics: for the devils themselves confess Christ's godhead, and roar and flee at the presence of the venerable bones of his servants,[19] which he also mentions and urges in his invective against Constantius.[20] In 358, he wrote his book _On Synods_, or _On the Faith of the Orientals_, to explain the terms and variation of the eastern Arians in their synods. In his exile he was informed that his daughter Apra, whom he had left in Gaul, had thoughts of embracing the married state; upon which he implored Christ, with many tears, to bestow on her the precious jewel of virginity. He sent her a letter that is still extant, in which he acquaints her, that if she contemned all earthly things, spouse, sumptuous garments, and riches, Christ had prepared for her, and had shown unto him, at his prayers and tears, an inestimable never-falling diamond, infinitely more precious than she was able to frame to herself an idea of. He conjures her by the God of heaven, and entreats her not to make void his anxiety for her, nor to deprive herself of so incomparable a good. Fortunatus assures us that the original letter was kept with veneration in the church of Poictiers, in the sixth century, when he wrote, and that Apra followed his advice, and died happily at his feet after his return.[21] St. Hilary sent to her with this letter two hymns, composed by himself; one for the evening, which does not seem to have reached our times; the other for the morning, which is the hymn _Lucis largitor splendide_. The emperor, by an unjust usurpation in the affairs of the Church, assembled a council of Arians at Seleucia, in Isauria, to undermine the great council of Nice. St. Hilary, who had then passed four years in banishment, in Phrygia, was invited thither by the Semi-Arians, who hoped from his lenity that he would be useful to their party in crushing the staunch Arians, that is, those who adhered strictly to the doctrine of Arius. But no human considerations could daunt his courage. He boldly defended the decrees of Nice, till at last, tired out with hearing the blasphemies of the heretics, he withdrew to Constantinople. The weak emperor was the dupe sometimes of the Arians, and at other times of the Semi-Arians. These last prevailed at Seleucia, in September, 359, as the former did in a council held at Constantinople in the following year, 360, where having the advantage, they procured the banishment of the Semi-Arians, less wicked than themselves. St. Hilary, who had withdrawn from Seleucia to Constantinople, presented to the emperor a request, called his second book to Constantius, begging the liberty of holding a public disputation about religion with {145} Saturninus, the author of his banishment. He presses him to receive the unchangeable apostolic faith, injured by the late innovations, and smartly rallies the fickle humor of the heretics, who were perpetually making new creeds, and condemning their old ones, having made four within the compass of the foregoing year; so that faith was become that of the times, not that of the gospels, and that there were as many faiths as men, as great a variety of doctrine as of manners, as many blasphemies as vices.[22] He complains that they had their yearly and monthly faiths; that they made creeds to condemn and repent of them; and that they formed new ones to anathematize those that adhered to their old ones. He adds, that every one had scripture texts, and the words _Apostolic Faith_, in their mouths, for no other end than to impose on weak minds: for by attempting to change faith, which is unchangeable, faith is lost; they correct and amend, till weary of all, they condemn all. He therefore exhorts them to return to the haven from which the gusts of their party spirit and prejudice had driven them, as the only means to be delivered out of their tempestuous and perilous confusion. The issue of this challenge was, that the Arians, dreading such a trial, persuaded the emperor to rid the East of a man that never ceased to disturb its peace, by sending him back into Gaul; which he did, but without reversing the sentence of his banishment, in 360. St. Hilary returned through Illyricum and Italy to confirm the weak. He was received at Poictiers with the greatest demonstrations of joy and triumph, where his old disciple, St. Martin, rejoined him, to pursue the exercises of piety under his direction. A synod in Gaul, convoked at the instance of St. Hilary, condemned that of Rimini, which, in 359, had omitted the word _Consubstantial_. Saturninus, proving obstinate, was excommunicated and deposed for his heresy and other crimes. Scandals were removed, discipline, peace, and purity of faith were restored, and piety flourished. The death of Constantius put an end to the Arian persecution. St. Hilary was the mildest of men, full of condescension and affability to all: yet seeing this behavior ineffectual, he composed an invective against Constantius, in which he employed severity, and the harshest terms; and for which undoubtedly he had reasons that are unknown to us. This piece did not appear abroad till after the death of that emperor. Our saint undertook a journey to Milan, in 364, against Auxentius, the Arian usurper of that see, and in a public disputation obliged him to confess Christ to be true God, of the same substance and divinity with the Father. St. Hilary indeed saw through his hypocrisy; but this dissembling heretic imposed so far on the emperor Valentinian, as to pass for orthodox. Our saint died at Poictiers, in the year 368, on the thirteenth of January, or on the first of November, for his name occurs in very ancient Martyrologies on both these days. In the Roman breviary his office is celebrated on the fourteenth of January. The one is probably that of some translation of his relics. The first was made at Poictiers in the reign of Clovis I., on which see Cointe.[23] From St. Gregory of Tours, it appears that before his time some part of St. Hilary's relics was honored in a church in Limousin.[24] Alcuin mentions the veneration of the same at Poictiers;[25] and it is related that his relics were burned by the Huguenots at Poictiers.[26] But this we must understand of some small portion, or of the dust remaining in his tomb. For his remains were translated from Poictiers to the abbey of St. Denys, near Paris, as is proved by the tradition of that abbey, a writer of the abbey of Richenow, in {146} the ninth century,[27] and other monuments.[28] Many miracles performed by St. Hilary are related by Venantius Fortunatus, bishop of Poictiers, and are the subject of a whole book added to his life, which seems to have been written by another Fortunatus. St. Gregory of Tours, Flodoard, and others, have mentioned several wrought at his tomb. Dom Coutant, the most judicious and learned Maurist monk, has given an accurate edition of his works, in one volume in folio, at Paris, in 1693, which was reprinted at Verona by the Marquis Scipio Maffei, in 1730, together with additional comments on several Psalms. * * * * * St. Hilary observes, that singleness of heart is the most necessary condition of faith and true virtue, "For Christ teaches that only those who become again as it were little children, and by the simplicity of that age cut off the inordinate affections of vice, can enter the kingdom of heaven. These follow and obey their father, love their mother; are strangers to covetousness, ill-will, hatred, arrogance, and lying, and are inclined easily to believe what they hear. This disposition of affections opens the way to heaven. We must therefore return to the simplicity of little children, in which we shall bear some resemblance to our Lord's humility."[29] This, in the language of the Holy Ghost, is called the foolishness of the cross of Christ,[30] in which consists true wisdom. That prudence of the flesh and worldly wisdom, which is the mother of self-sufficiency, pride, avarice, and vicious curiosity, the source of infidelity, and the declared enemy of the spirit of Christ, is banished by this holy simplicity; and in its stead are obtained true wisdom, which can only be found in a heart freed from the clouds of the passions, perfect prudence, which, as St. Thomas shows, is the fruit of the assemblage of all virtues, and a divine light which grace fails not to infuse. This simplicity, which is the mother of Christian discretion, is a stranger to all artifice, design, and dissimulation, to all views or desires of self-interest, and to all undue respect or consideration of creatures. All its desires and views are reduced to this alone, of attaining to the perfect union with God. Unfeignedly to desire this one thing, to belong to God alone, to arrive at his pure love, and to do his will in all things, is that simplicity or singleness of heart of which we speak, and which banishes all inordinate affections of the heart, from which arise the most dangerous errors of the understanding. This is the essential disposition of every one who sincerely desires to live by the spirit of Christ. That divine spouse of souls, loves to communicate himself to such.[31] His conversation (or as another version has it, his secret) is with the simple.[32] His delight is in those who walk with simplicity.[33] This is the characteristic of all the saints:[34] whence the Holy Ghost cries out, Approach him not with a double heart.[35] That worldly wisdom is not subject to the law of God, neither can it be.[36] Its intoxication blinds men, and shuts their eyes to the light of divine revelation. They arrogate to themselves the exclusive privilege of learning and clear understanding: but the skepticism, the pitiful inconsistencies, and monstrous extravagances, which characterize their writings and discourses, make us blush to see so strong an alliance of ignorance and presumption; and lament that the human mind should be capable of falling into a state of so deplorable degeneracy. Among the fathers of the church we admire men the most learned of their age, the most penetrating and most judicious, and at the same time {147} the most holy and sincere; who, being endowed with true simplicity of heart, discovered in the mysteries of the cross the secrets of infinite wisdom, which they made their study, and the rule of their actions. Footnotes: 1. L. 2, adv. Julian, c. 8. 2. L. 2, adv. Rufin. p. 415. 3. In Isa. c. 60. 4. S. Hieron. in Catal. 5. L. 1, de Trin. p. 1-10. 6. Exod. iii. 14. 7. The contrary is certainly a mistake in Dr. Cave; for St. Jerom, writing against Jovinian, says, in {} p. 175, that though the church was sometimes obliged to make choice of married men for the priesthood, because virgins, or unmarried, could not always be found, they notwithstanding lived ever after continent. _Certe confiteris, non posse esse episcopum qui in episcopatu filios faciat: alioqui si deprehensus fuerit non quasi vir tenebitur, sed quasi adulter condemnabitur, ib_. And in his book against Vigilantius, p. 28, he observes, that in the churches of the East, in Egypt, and in the apostolic see of Rome, those only were made clergymen, who were virgins, or single; or if they were married, they ceased to live as husbands. _Aut virgines clericos accipiunt, aut contintes; aut si uxores habuerint, mariti esse desinunt_, p. 281. 8. S. Hilar. in Ps. 53, n. 8, in Ps. 67, p. 15, and Contant, Armon. in S. Hilar. in Psalmos, p. 165. 9. Ep. ad Lætam. 10. On the interpretation of certain obscure passages of the works of St. Hilary, see Dom Coutant, in an excellent preface to his edition of this father's works; also Witasse de Incarn. t. 2, &c. 11. Ep. 49, ad Paulinum, t. 4, p. 567. 12. Lib. 1, de Trinit. 13. Doubtless his love of prayer, and the assiduous application of his mind to that holy exercise, moved him to make the Psalms a main object of his sacred studies and meditation. His comments are elegant; though in them he dwells much on the literal sense, he neglects not the mystical and allegorical, every thing in these divine oracles being prophetic, as he takes notice, (in Ps. 142, n. 1.) Often he finds the immediate literal sense clear; in other passages, he shows Christ and his Church to be pointed out. The true sense of the holy scriptures he teaches, only to be opened to us by the spirit of assiduous prayer, (in Ps. 125, n. 2, &c.) The fatal and opposite errors, which the overweening spirit and study of a false criticism have produced in every age, justify this general remark of the fathers, that though the succor of reasonable criticism ought by no means to be neglected, a spirit of prayer is the only key which can open to us the sacred treasures of the divine truths, by the light which it obtains of the Holy Ghost, and the spirit of simplicity, piety, and humility, which it infuses. In this disposition, the holy doctors of the Church discovered in the divine oracles that spirit of perfect virtue, which they imbibed and improved from their assiduous meditation. St. Hilary remarks, that the first lesson we are to study in them is, that of humility, in which "Christ has taught, that all the titles and prizes of our faith are comprised:" In humilitate docuit omnia fidei nomina et præmia contineri, (in Ps. 118, l. 20, n. 1, p. 358.) Whence the royal prophet entreats God, to consider nothing in him but his lowliness of heart, (v. 153, ibid.) This holy father sticks not to say, humility is the greatest work of our faith, our best sacrifice to God, (in Ps. 1311, n. 1. p. 442;) but true humility is accompanied with an invincible courage, and a firmness and constancy in virtue, which no fear of worldly powers is ever able to shake, (in Ps. xiv. p. 66.) St. Hilary laments, that even several pastors of the church thought it a part of piety to flatter princes. But true religion teaches us (Matt. x. 28) only to fear things which are justly to be feared, that is, to fear God, to fear sin, or what can hurt our souls: for what threatens only our bodies, this is to be despised, when the interest of God and our souls is concerned. We indeed study out of charity to give offence to no one, (1 Cor. x. 32, 33;) but desire only to please men for God, not by contemning him, (in Ps. 52, p. 89, 90.) Prayer is the great Christian duty, which this holy doctor was particularly solicitous to inculcate, teaching that it consists in the cry of the heart; not in the lips, as David cried to God in his whole heart, Ps. cxviii. v. 145, (in Ps. cxviii. l. 19, p. 352.) We are to pour forth our souls before God, with earnestness, and with abundance of tears, (in Ps. 41, apud Marten. t. 9, p. 71.) Amidst the dangers and evils of this life, our only comfort ought to be in God, in the assured hope of his promises, and in prayer. (Ib.) That prayer is despised by God, which is slothful and lukewarm, accompanied with distrust, distracted with unprofitable thoughts, weakened by worldly anxiety and desires of earthly goods, or fruitless, for want of the support of good works, (in Ps. liv. p. 104.) All our actions and discourses ought to be begin by prayer, and the divine praise, (in Ps. lxiv. p. 162.) The day among Christians is always begun by prayer, and ended by hymns to God, (ib. n. 12, p. 169.) By this public homage of the church, and of every faithful soul in it, God is particularly honored, and he delights in it. (St. Jerom. in eund. Ps.) St. Hilary takes notice, that the night is of all others the most proper time for prayer; as the example of Christ, David, and other saints, demonstrates, (in Ps. cxviii. l. 8, p. 292.) He observes, that it cannot be doubted, but among all the acts of prayer, that of the divine praise is in general the most noble and most excellent: and that it is for his infinite goodness and mercy, in the first place, that we are bound to praise him, (in Ps. cxxxiv p. 469.) Next to this, he places the duty of thanksgiving. (Ib.) To be silent in the divine praises, he calls the greatest of all punishments; and takes notice, that every one makes what he loves the chiefest object of his joy: as we see in the drunkard, the covetous, or the ambitious man: thus the prophet makes the heavenly Jerusalem the beginning of his joy; always bearing in mind, that this is his eternal country, in which he will be associated with the troops of angels, be received into the kingdom of God, and put in possession of its glory; he therefore finds all other things insipid, and knows no other comfort or joy but in this hope, bearing always in mind, that the glorious inhabitants of that kingdom never cease singing the divine praises, saying, Holy, holy, holy, &c. (in Ps. cxxxvi. n. 11, p. 494.) In another place he tells us, that the prophet bears not the delays of his body, (moras corporis sui non patitur,) sighing with the apostle to be dissolved and clothed with immortality: but earnestly praying, that he may find mercy, and be delivered from falling into the lake of torments, (in Ps. cxlii. n. 8, 9, p. 549.) During this exile to meditate on eternity, and on the divine law and judgments, ought to be our assiduous occupation, (in Ps. cxlii. n. 6, p. 548,) especially in time of tribulations and temptations, (in Ps. cxviii. l. 12, n. 10, p. 313.) The world is to be shunned, at least in spirit; first, because it is filled on every side with snares and dangers, secondly, that our souls may more freely soar above it, always thinking on God; hence, he says, our souls must be, as it were, spiritual birds of heaven, always raised high on the wing; and he cries out, "Thou art instructed in heavenly science: what hast thou to do with anxious worldly cares? Thou hast renounced the world; what hast thou to do with its superfluous concerns? Why dost thou complain if thou art taken in a snare, by wandering in a strange land, who oughtest to restrain thy affections from straying from home? Say rather, Who will give me wings as of a dove, and I will fly, and will be at rest?" Ps. liv. 7, (in Ps. cxviii. l. 14, p. 328.) To build a house for God, that is, to prepare a dwelling for him in our souls, we must begin by banishing sin, and all earthly affections, (in Ps. xxxi. p. 73;) for Christ, who is wisdom, sanctity, and truth, cannot establish his reign in the breast of a fool, hypocrite, or sinner, (in Ps. xli. p. 60, ap. Marten. t. 9.) It is easy for God, by penance, to repair his work, howsoever it may have been defaced by vice, as a potter can restore or improve the form of a vessel, while the clay is yet moist, (in Ps. ii. p. 47:) but he often inculcates that repentance, or the confession of sin, is a solemn profession of sinning no more, (in Ps. cxxxvii. p. 498, in Ps. li. and cxviii. p. 263, &c.) Every thing that is inordinate in the affections must be cut off. "The prophet gave himself entire to God, according to the tenor of his consecration of himself. Whatever lives in him, lives to God. His whole heart, his whole soul is fixed on God alone, and occupied in him, and he never loses sight of him. In all his works and thoughts God is before his eyes." Totum quod vivit, Deo vivit. (Ps. cxviii. l. 14, n. 16, p. 327.) Upon these words, _I am thy servant_, Ps. cxviii. v. 125, he observes, that every Christian frequently repeats this, but most deny by their actions what they profess in words, "It is the privilege of the prophet to call himself the servant of God in every affection of his heart, in every circumstance and action of his life," &c. (in Ps. cxviii. l. 17, p. 339.) He teaches that the angels, patriarchs, and prophets are as it were mountains protecting the church, (in Ps. cxxiv. n. 6, p. 404;) and that holy angels attend and succor the faithful, (in Ps. cxxxvii. p. 499;) assist them in time of combat against the devils, (in Ps. lxv. p. 178, and in Ps. cxxxiv. p. 475;) carry up their prayers to their heavenly Father with an eager zeal; and looking upon this ministry as an honor, (in Matt. c. 18, p. 699.) That the church of Christ is one, out of which, as out of the ark of Noah, no one man be saved, (in Ps. cxlvi., xiv., lxiv., cxxviii., and cxvvii. in Matt. c. 4, and 7 De Trinit. l. 7, p. 917.) He mentions fast days of precept, the violation of which renders a Christian a slave of the devil, a vessel of death, and fuel of hell, (in Ps. cxviii. l. 18, p. 349.) This crime he joins with pride and fornication, as sins at the sight of which every good Christian ought to pine away with grief and zeal, according to the words of Ps. cxviii. v. 139. Saint Hilary seems to have explained the whole Psalter, though only part is recovered by the editors of his works. To the comments published by Dom Coutant at Paris, in 1693, the marquis Scipio Maffei added some others on several other Psalms, in his edition at Verona, in 1730. Dom Martenne, in 1733, published others on certain other Psalms, which he had discovered in a manuscript at Anchin, in his Amplissima Monumentorum Collectio, t. 9, p. 55. These comments on the Psalms, St. Hilary compiled after his exile, as appears from certain allusions to his books on the Trinity, and from his frequent reflections against the Arians. Nothing of this is found in his commentary on St. Matthew, which Dom Coutant shows to have been the first of his works in the order of time, composed soon after he was raised to the episcopal dignity. He here and there borrows short passages from Origen, but sticks closer to the literal sense, though he sometimes has recourse to the allegorical, for the sake of some moral instruction. St. Hilary is one of the first who published any Latin comments in the holy scriptures. Rheticius, bishop of Autun, and St. Victorinus of Passaw, though the latter wrote in Greek, had opened the way in the West in the beginning of the same century. St. Hilary, in this commentary on St. Matthew, excellently inculcates in few words the maxims of Christian virtue, especially fraternal charity and meekness, by which our souls pass to divine charity and peace, (in Matt. c. 4, v. 18, 19, p. 626:) and the conditions of fasting and prayer, though for the exposition of our Lord's prayer, he refers to that of St. Cyprian; adding that Tertullian has left us also a very suitable work upon it; but that his subsequent error has weakened the authority of his former writings which may deserve approbation, (in c. 5, p. 630.) The road to heaven he shows to be exceeding narrow, because even among Christians very few sincerely despise the world, and labor strenuously to subdue their flesh and all their passions, and to shun all the incentives of vice, (in c. 6, p. 368.) St. Peter he calls the Prince of the College of the Apostles, and the Porter of Heaven, and extols the authority of the keys conferred upon him, (in Matt. c. 7, p. 642, in c. 16, p. 690. Also 1. 6. de Trin. p. 891, 903, 9114.) He proves that Christ, in his bloody sweat, grieved more for the danger of his disciples and other causes, than for his own death; because he had in his last supper already consecrated his blood to be poured forth for the remission of sin. Numquid pati ipse nolebat. Atquin superius fundendum in remissionem peccatorum corporis sui sanguinem consecraverat, (S. Hilar. in Matt. c. 31, p. 743.) His twelve books on the Trinity he compiled during his banishment in Phrygia, between the years 356 and 359, as is clear from his own express testimony, and that of St. Jerom. In the first book of this immortal monument of his admirable genius and piety, he beautifully shows that man's felicity is only to be found in God; and that the light of reason suffices to demonstrate this, which he illustrates by an account of his own conversion to the faith. After this he takes notice, that we can learn only by God's revelation, his nature, or what he is, he being the competent witness of himself, who it known only by himself, (n. 18, p. 777.) In the second book he explains the Trinity, which we profess in the form of baptism, and says, that faith alone in believing, and sincerity and devotion in adoring, this mystery ought to suffice without disputing or prying, and laments, that by the blasphemies of the Sabellians and Arians, who perverted the true sense of the scriptures, he was compelled to dispute of things ineffable and incomprehensible which only necessity can excuse, (n. 25.) He then proves the eternal generation of the Son, the procession of the Holy Ghost, and their consubstantiality in one nature, (l. 2 and 3.) He checks their presumption in pretending to fathom the Trinity, by showing that they cannot understand many miracles of Christ or corporeal things, which yet they confess to be most certain, (l. 3, n. 19, 20, 24.) He detects and confutes the subtilties of the Arians, in their various confessions of faith, (l. 4, 5, 6,) also of the Sabellians and Photinians, (l. 7;) and demonstrates the divinity of Christ, from the confession of St. Peter, &c., (l. 6,) and of the very Jews, who were more sincere than the Arians, acknowledging that Christ called himself the natural Son of God. (John x. 31, &c. l. 7, n. 2, 3, p. 931.) The natural unity of the Father and Son, he demonstrates from that text, "I and my Father are one," and others, (l. 8,) and observes that both from the testimony of Christ in the holy scriptures, and from the faith of the church, we believe without doubting the Eucharist to be the true body and blood of Christ, (l. 8, n. 14, p. 955, 956.) He answers several objections from scripture, (l. 9,) and shows there was something in Christ (viz. the divine person, &c.) which did not suffer in his passion, (l. 10.) Other objections he confutes, (l. 11,) and in his last book defends the eternity of the Son of God. Between August in 358, and May in 359, St. Hilary, after he had been three years in banishment, and was still in Asia, published his book On Synods, to inform the Catholics in Gaul, Britain, and Germany, what judgment they ought to form of several synods, held lately in the East, chiefly by the Arians and Semi-Arians: a work of great use in the history of those times, and in which St. Hilary's prudence, humility, modesty, greatness of soul, constancy, invincible meekness, and love of peace, shine forth. In this work he mollifies certain expressions of the Semi-Arians in their councils, because writing before the council of Rimini, he endeavored to gain them by this method, whereas he at other times severely condemned the same; as did also St. Athanasius, in his book on the same subject, and under the same title, which he composed after the council of Rimini; and expressly to show the variations of those heretics. (See Coutant, vit. S. Hilar. p. c. ci. et præf. in S. Hilar. de Synodis, p. 1147.) Fifteen fragments of St. Hilary's history of the councils of Rimini and Seleucia furnish important materials for the history of Arianism, particularly of the council of Rimini. In his first book to the emperor Constantius, which he wrote in 355 or 356, he conjures that prince with tears to restore peace to the church, and leave the decision of ecclesiastical causes to its pastors. The excellent request which he presented to Constantius at Constantinople, in 360, is called his second book to that prince. The third book ought to be styled, with Coutant, Against Constantius: for in it St. Hilary directs it to the Catholics, (n. 2 and 12) though he often uses an apostrophe to Constantius. The saint wrote it five years after the council of Milan, in 355, as he testifies; consequently in 360, after that prince had rejected his second request; but it was only published after the death of that emperor, in the following year, as is clear from St. Jerom: He says Constantius, by artifices and flattery, was a more dangerous persecutor than Nero and Decius: he tells him, "Thou receivest the priests with a kiss, as Christ was betrayed by one: thou bowest thy head to receive their blessing, that thou mayest trample on their faith: thou entertainest them at thy table, as Judas went from table to betray his master." Fleury (l. 14, n. 26) bids us observe, in these words, with what respect emperors then treated bishops. St. Hilary in his elegant book against Auxentius, gives the catholics an account of his conferences with that heretic at Milan in 364. 14. In Ps. 64. 15. In Ps. 1, p. 19, 20. 16. Lib. 7, de Trinit. n. 4, p. 917. 17. Lib. 6, n. 37, 38, p. 904. 18. In Ps. 131, n. 4, p. 447, in cap. 16, Matt. n. 7, p. 690. 19. Lib. 11, de Trinit. n. 3. 20. Lib. 3, adv. Constant. n. 8, p. 1243, Ed. Ben. 21. This letter is commended by the most judicious critics, Baronius, Tillemont, Fleury, and Coutant, a monk of the congregation of St. Maur, in his edition of the works of St. Hilary, and others. The style is not pompous, but adapted to the capacity of a girl of thirteen years of age. 22. Facta est fides temporum, potius quam evangellorum, l. 2, ad Const. p. 1227. Tot nunc fides existere, quot voluntates, ib. Annuas atque menstruas de Deo fides decernimus, decretis poenitimusm poenitentes defendimus, defensos anathematizamus. ib. p. 1228. 23. Cointe Annal. Fr. ad ann. 538, n. 41, 42, 43. 24. L. de Gl. Conf. c. 2. 25. Alcuin, Hom. de S. Willibrodo. 26. Baillet, Vie de S. Hilaire. 27. Ap. Mab. anal. t. 4, p. 644. 28. Aimion. l. 4, c. 17 & 33. Coutant, Vit. S. Hilar. p. cxxiv, cxxv, cxxix. 29. S. Hilar. in Matt. c. 18, v. i. p. 698. 30. 1 Cor. i. 17, & iii. 18. S. Hilar. l. 3, de Trin. n. 24, 25, pp. 822, 823. 31. 1 Par. xxix. 17. 32. Prov. iii. 32. 33. Prov. xi. 20. 34. 2 Cor. i. 12. 35. Eccles. i. 39. 36. Rom. viii. 7. ST. FELIX OF NOLA, P. AND C. IT is observed by the judicious Tillemont, with regard to the life of this saint, that we might doubt of its wonderful circumstances, were they not supported by the authority of a Paulinus; but that great miracles ought to be received with the greater veneration, when authorized by incontestable vouchers. St. Felix was a native of Nola, a Roman colony in Campania, fourteen miles from Naples, where his father Hermias, who was by birth a Syrian, and had served in the army, had purchased an estate and settled himself. He had two sons, Felix and Hermias, to whom at his death he left his patrimony. The younger sought preferment in the world among the lovers of vanity, by following the profession of arms, which at that time was the surest road to riches and honors. Felix, to become in effect what his name in Latin imported, that is, _happy_, resolved to follow no other standard than that of the king of kings, Jesus Christ. For this purpose, despising all earthly things, lest the love of them might entangle his soul, he distributed the better part of his substance among the poor, and was ordained Reader, Exorcist, and, lastly, Priest, by Maximus, the holy bishop of Nola; who, charmed with his sanctity and prudence, made him his principal support in these times of trouble, and designed him for his successor.[1] In the year 250, the emperor Decius raised a bloody persecution against the church. Maximus, seeing himself principally aimed at, retired into the deserts, not through the fear of death, which he desired, but rather not to tempt God by seeking it, and to preserve himself for the service of his flock. The persecutors not finding him, seized on Felix, who, in his absence, was very vigilant in the discharge of all his pastoral duties. The governor caused him to be scourged; then loaded with bolts and chains about his neck, hands, and legs, and cast into a dungeon, in which, as St. Prudentius informs us,[2] the floor was spread all over with potsherds and pieces of broken glass, so that there was no place free from them, on which the saint could either stand or lie. One night an angel appearing in great glory, filled the prison with a bright light, and bade St. Felix go and assist his bishop, who was in great distress. The confessor, seeing his chains fall off, and the doors open, followed his guide, and was conducted by heaven to the place where Maximus lay, almost perished with hunger and cold, speechless, and without sense: for, through anxiety for his flock, and the hardships of his solitary retreat, he had suffered more than a martyrdom. Felix, not being able to bring him to himself, had recourse to prayer; and discovering thereupon a bunch of grapes within reach, he squeezed some of the juice into his mouth, which had the desired effect. The good bishop no sooner beheld his friend Felix, but he embraced him, and begged to be conveyed back to his church. The saint, taking him on his shoulders, carried him to his episcopal house in the city, before day appeared, where a pious ancient woman took care of him.[3] Felix, with the blessing of his pastor, repaired secretly to his own lodgings, and there kept himself concealed, praying for the church without ceasing till peace was restored to it by the death of Decius, in the year 251. {148} He no sooner appeared again in public, but his zeal so exasperated the pagans that they came armed to apprehend him; but though they met him, they knew him not; they even asked him where Felix was, a question he did not think proper to give a direct answer to. The persecutors going a little further, perceived their mistake, and returned; but the saint in the mean time had stepped a little out of the way, and crept through a hole in a ruinous old wall, which was instantly closed up by spiders' webs. His enemies never imagining any thing could have lately passed where they saw so close a spider's web, after a fruitless search elsewhere, returned in the evening without their prey. Felix finding among the ruins, between two houses, an old well half dry, hid himself in it for six months; and received during that time wherewithal to subsist by means of a devout Christian woman. Peace being restored to the church by the death of the emperor, the saint quitted his retreat, and was received in the city as an angel sent from heaven. Soon after, St. Maximus' dying, all were unanimous for electing Felix bishop; but he persuaded the people to make choice of Quintus, because the older priest of the two, having been ordained seven days before him. Quintus, when bishop, always respected St. Felix as his father, and followed his advice in every particular. The remainder of the saint's estate having been confiscated in the persecution, he was advised to lay claim to it, as others had done, who thereby recovered what had been taken from them. His answer was, that in poverty he should be the more secure of possessing Christ.[4] He could not even be prevailed upon to accept what the rich offered him. He rented a little spot of barren land, not exceeding three acres, which he tilled with his own hands, in such manner as to receive his subsistence from it, and to have something left for alms. Whatever was bestowed on him, he gave it immediately to the poor. If he had two coats, he was sure to give them the better; and often exchanged his only one for the rags of some beggar. He died in a good old age, on the fourteenth of January, on which day the Martyrology, under the name of St. Jerom, and all others of later date mention him. Five churches have been built at, or near the place where he was first interred, which was without the precinct of the city of Nola. His precious remains are at present kept in the cathedral; but certain portions are at Rome, Benevento, and some other places. Pope Damasus, in a pilgrimage which he made from Rome to Nola, to the shrine of this saint, professes, in a short poem which he composed in acknowledgment, that he was miraculously cured of a distemper through his intercession. St. Paulinus, a Roman senator in the fifth age, forty-six years after the death of St. Damasus, came from Spain to Nola, desirous of being porter in the church of St. Felix. He testifies that crowds of pilgrims came from Rome, from all other parts of Italy, and more distant countries, to visit his sepulchre on his festival: he adds, that all brought some present or other to his church, as wax-candles to burn at his tomb, precious ointments, costly ornaments, and such like; but that for his part, he offered to him the homage of his tongue, and himself, though an unworthy victim. [5] He everywhere expresses his devotion to this saint in the warmest and strongest terms, and believes that all the graces he received from heaven were conferred on him through the intercession of St. Felix. To him he addressed himself in all his necessities; by his prayers he begged grace in this life, and glory after {149} death.[6] He describes at large the holy pictures of the whole history of the Old Testament, which were hung up in the church of St. Felix, and which inflamed all who beheld them, and were as so many books that instructed the ignorant. We may read with pleasure the pious sentiments the sight of each gave St. Paulinus.[7] He relates a great number of miracles that were wrought at his tomb, as of persons cured of various distempers and delivered from dangers by his intercession, to several of which he was an eye-witness. He testifies that he himself had frequently experienced the most sensible effects of his patronage, and, by having recourse to him, had been speedily succored.[8] St. Austin also has given an account of many miracles performed at his shrine.[9] It was not formerly allowed to bury any corpse within the walls of cities. The church of St. Felix, out of the walls of Nola, not being comprised under this prohibition, many devout Christians sought to be buried in it, that their faith and devotion might recommend them after death to the patronage of this holy confessor, upon which head St. Paulinus consulted St. Austin. The holy doctor answered him by his book, _On the care for the dead_: in which he shows that the faith and devotion of such persons would be available to them after death, as the suffrages and good works of the living in behalf of the faithful departed are profitable to the latter. See the poems of St. Paulinus on his life, confirmed by other authentic ancient records, quoted by Tillemont, t. 4, p. 226, and Ruinart, Acta Sincera, p. 256; Muratori, Anecd. Lat. Footnotes: 1. S. Paulin. Carm. 19, 20. Seu Natali, 4. 2. De Cor. hymn 5. 3. Paulin. Carm. 19. 4. _Dives egebo Deo; nam Christum pauper habebo_. Paulin. Carm. 2. Natali S. Felicia 5. 5. ________________ _Ego munere linguæ, Nudus opum, famulor, de me mea debita solvens Meque ipsum pro me, vilis licet hostia pendam._ Natal. 6 6. Nat. 1, 2, &c. 7. Nat. 9, 10. 8. St. Paulin. Ep. 28 & 36. Carm. 13, 18, 21, 22, 23, 29, &c. 9. St. August. Ep. 78, olim 137, lib. De curâ pro moritus, c. 16. SS. ISAIAS, SABBAS, AND thirty-eight other holy solitaries on mount Sinai, martyred by a troop of Arabians in 273; likewise Paul, the abbot; Moses, who by his preaching and miracles had converted to the faith the Ishmaelites of Pharan; Psaes, a prodigy of austerity, and many other hermits in the desert of Raithe, two days' journey from Sinai, near the Red Sea, were massacred the same year by the Blemmyans, a savage infidel nation of Ethiopia. All these anchorets lived on dates, or other fruits, never tasted bread, worked at making baskets in cells at a considerable distance from each other, and met on Saturdays, in the evening, in one common church, where they watched and said the night office, and on the Sunday received together the holy eucharist. They were remarkable for their assiduity in praying and fasting. See their acts by Ammonius, an eye-witness, published by F. Combefis; also Bulteau, Hist. Mon. d'Orient, l. 2, c. 1, p. 209. Also, many holy anchorets on mount Sinai, whose lives were faithful copies of Christian perfection, and who met on Sundays to receive the holy eucharist, were martyred by a band of Saracens in the fifth century. A boy of fourteen years of age led among them an ascetic life of great perfection. The Saracens threatened to kill him, if he did not discover where the ancient monks had concealed themselves. He answered, that death did not terrify him, and that he could not ransom his life by a sin in betraying his fathers. They bade him put off his clothes: "After you have killed me," said the modest youth, "take my clothes and welcome: but as I never saw my body naked, have so much compassion and regard for my shamefacedness, as to let me die covered." The barbarians, enraged at this answer, fell on him with all their weapons at once, and the pious youth died by as many martyrdoms as he had executioners. St. Nilus, who had been formerly governor {150} of Constantinople, has left us an account of this massacre in seven narratives: at that time he led an eremitical life in those deserts, and had placed his son Theodulus in this holy company. He was carried away captive, but redeemed after many dangers. See S. Nili, Septem Narrationes; also, Bulteau, Hist. Mon. d'Orient, l. 2, c. 2, p. 220. S. BARBASCEMINUS, AND SIXTEEN OF HIS CLERGY, MM. HE succeeded his brother St. Sadoth in the metropolitical see of Seleucia and Ctesiphon, in 342, which he held six years. Being accused as an enemy to the Persian religion, and as one who spoke against the Persian divinities, _Fire_ and _Water_, he was apprehended, with sixteen of his clergy, by the orders of king Sapor II. The king seeing his threats lost upon him, confined him almost a year in a loathsome dungeon, in which he was often tormented by the Magians with scourges, clubs, and tortures, besides the continual annoyance of stench, filth, hunger, and thirst. After eleven months the prisoners were again brought before the king. Their bodies were disfigured by their torments, and their faces discolored by a blackish hue which they had contracted. Sapor held out to the bishop a golden cup as a present, in which were a thousand sineas of gold, a coin still in use among the Persians. Besides this he promised him a government, and other great offices, if he would suffer himself to be initiated in the rites of the sun. The saint replied that he could not answer the reproaches of Christ at the last day, if he should prefer gold, or a whole empire, to his holy law; and that he was ready to die. He received his crown by the sword, with his companions, on the 14th of January, in the year 346, and of the reign of king Sapor II. the thirty-seventh, at Ledan, in the province of the Huzites. St. Maruthas, the author of his acts, adds, that Sapor, resolving to extinguish utterly the Christian name in his empire, published a new terrible edict, whereby he commanded every one to be tortured and put to death who should refuse to adore the sun, to worship fire and water, and to feed on the blood of living creatures.[1] The see of Seleucia remained vacant twenty years, and innumerable martyrs watered all the provinces of Persia with their blood. St. Maruthas was not able to recover their names, but has left us a copious panegyric on then heroic deeds, accompanied with the warmest sentiments of devotion, and desires to be speedily united with them in glory. See Acta Mart. Orient. per Steph. Assemani, t. 1, p. 3. Footnotes: 1. The Christians observed for several ages, especially in the East, the apostolic temporary precept of abstaining from blood. Acts, xv. 20. See Nat. Alexander Hist. Sæc. 1, dissert 9. {151} JANUARY XV. ST. PAUL, THE FIRST HERMIT. From his life, compiled by St. Jerom, in 365. Pope Gelasius I., in his learned Roman council, in 494, commends this authentic history. St. Paul is also mentioned by Cassian, St. Fulgentius, Sulpitius Severus, Sidonius, Paulinus, in the life of St. Ambrose, &c. St. Jerom received this account from two disciples of St. Antony, Amathas and Macariux. St. Athanasius says, that he only wrote what he had heard from St. Antony's own mouth, or from his disciples; and desires others to add what they know concerning his actions. On the various readings and MS. copies of this life, see the disquisition of P. Jem{} de Prato, an oratorian of Verona, in his new edition of the works of Sulpitius Severus, t. l, app. 2, p. 403. The Greek history of St. Paul the hermit, which Bollandus imagines St. Jerom to have followed, is evidently posterior; and borrows from him, as Jos. Assemani shows. Comm. In Calend. Univ. t. 6, p. 92. See Gudij Epistolæ, p. 278. A.D. 342. ELIAS and St. John the Baptist sanctified the deserts, and Jesus Christ himself was a model of the eremitical state during his forty days' fast in the wilderness; neither is it to be questioned but the Holy Ghost conducted the saint of this day, though young, into the desert, and was to him an instructor there; but it is no less certain, that an entire solitude and total sequestration of one's self from human society, is one of those extraordinary ways by which God leads souls to himself, and is more worthy of our admiration, than calculated for imitation and practice: it is a state which ought only to be embraced by such as are already well experienced in the practices of virtue and contemplation, and who can resist sloth and other temptations, lest, instead of being a help, it prove a snare and stumbling-block in their way to heaven. This saint was a native of the Lower Thebais, in Egypt, and had lost both his parents when he was but fifteen years of age: nevertheless, he was a great proficient in the Greek and Egyptian learning, was mild and modest, and feared God from his earliest youth. The bloody persecution of Decius disturbed the peace of the church in 250; and what was most dreadful, Satan, by his ministers, sought not so much to kill the bodies, as by subtle artifices and tedious tortures to destroy the souls of men. Two instances are sufficient to show his malice in this respect: A soldier of Christ, who had already triumphed over the racks and tortures, had his whole body rubbed over with honey, and was then laid on his back in the sun, with his hands tied behind him, that the flies and wasps, which are quite intolerable in hot countries, might torment and gall him with their stings. Another was bound with silk cords on a bed of down, in a delightful garden, where a lascivious woman was employed to entice him to sin; the martyr, sensible of his danger, bit off part of his tongue and spit it in her face, that the horror of such an action might put her to flight, and the smart occasioned by it be a means to prevent, in his own heart, any manner of consent to carnal pleasure. During these times of danger, Paul kept himself concealed in the house of another; but finding that a brother-in-law was inclined to betray him, that he might enjoy his estate, he fled into the deserts. There he found many spacious caverns in a rock, which were said to have been the retreat of money-coiners in the days of Cleopatra, queen of Egypt. He chose for his dwelling a cat; in this place, near which were a palm-tree[1] and a clear spring: the former by its leaves furnished him with raiment, and by its fruit with food; and the latter supplied him with water for his drink. {152} Paul was twenty-two years old when he entered the desert. His first intention was to enjoy the liberty of serving God till the persecution should cease; but relishing the sweets of heavenly contemplation and penance, and learning the spiritual advantages of holy solitude, he resolved to return no more among men, or concern himself in the least with human affairs, and what passed in the world: it was enough for him to know that there was a world, and to pray that it might be improved in goodness. The saint lived on the fruit of his tree till he was forty-three years of age, and from that time till his death, like Elias, he was miraculously fed with bread brought him every day by a raven. His method of life, and what he did in this place during ninety years, is unknown to us: but God was pleased to make his servant known a little before his death. The great St. Antony, who was then ninety years of age, was tempted to vanity, as if no one had served God so long in the wilderness as he had done, imagining himself also to be the first example of a life so recluse from human conversation: but the contrary was discovered to him in a dream the night following, and the saint was at the same time commanded, by Almighty God, to set out forthwith in quest of a perfect servant of his, concealed in the more remote parts of those deserts. The holy old man set out the next morning in search of the unknown hermit. St. Jerom relates from his authors, that he met a centaur, or creature not with the nature and properties, but with something of the mixed shape of man and horse,[2] and that this monster, or phantom of the devil, (St. Jerom pretends not to determine which it was,) upon his making the sign of the cross, fled away, after having pointed out the way to the saint. Our author adds, that St. Antony soon after met a satyr,[3] who gave him to understand that he was an inhabitant of those deserts, and one of that sort whom the deluded Gentiles adored for gods. St. Antony, after two days and a night spent in the search, discovered the saint's abode by a light that was in it, which he made up to. Having long begged admittance at the door of his cell, St. Paul at last opened it with a smile: they embraced, called each other by their names, which they knew by divine revelation. St. Paul then inquired whether idolatry still reigned in the world. While they were discoursing together, a raven flew towards them, and dropped a loaf of bread before them. Upon which St. Paul said, "Our good God has sent us a dinner. In this manner have I received half a loaf every day these sixty years past; now you are come to see me, Christ has doubled his provision for his servants." Having given thanks to God they both sat down by the fountain; but a little contest arose between them who should break the bread; St. Antony alleged St. Paul's greater age, and St. Paul pleaded that Antony was the stranger: both agreed at last to take up their parts together. Having refreshed themselves at the spring, they spent the night in prayer. The next morning St. Paul told his guest that the time of his death approached, and that he was sent to bury him; adding, "Go and fetch the cloak given you by St. Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, in which I desire you to wrap my body." This he might say with the intent of being left alone in prayer, while he expected to be called out of this world; as also that he might testify his veneration for St. Athanasius, and his high regard for the faith and communion of the Catholic church, on account of which that holy bishop was then a great sufferer. St. Antony was surprised to hear him mention the cloak, which he could not have known but by divine revelation. Whatever was his motive for desiring to be buried {153} in it, St. Antony acquiesced to what was asked of him: so, after mutual embraces, he hastened to his monastery to comply with St. Paul's request. He told his monks that he, a sinner, falsely bore the name of a servant of God, but that he had seen Elias and John the Baptist in the wilderness, even Paul in Paradise. Having taken the cloak, he returned with it in all haste, fearing lest the holy hermit might be dead, as it happened. While on his road, he saw his happy soul carried up to heaven, attended by choirs of angels, prophets, and apostles. St. Antony, though he rejoiced on St. Paul's account, could not help lamenting on his own, for having lost a treasure so lately discovered. As soon as his sorrow would permit, he arose, pursued his journey, and came to the cave. Going in, he found the body kneeling, and the hands stretched out. Full of joy, and supposing him yet alive, he knelt down to pray with him, but by his silence soon perceived he was dead. Having paid his last respects to the holy corpse, he carried it out of the cave. While he stood perplexed how to dig a grave, two lions came up quietly, and, as it were, mourning; and tearing up the ground, made a hole large enough for the reception of a human body. St. Antony then buried the corpse, singing hymns and psalms, according to what was usual and appointed by the church on that occasion. After this he returned home praising God, and related to his monks what he had seen and done. He always kept as a great treasure, and wore himself on great festivals, the garment of St. Paul, of palm-tree leaves patched together. St. Paul died in the year of our Lord 342, the hundred and thirteenth year of his age, and the ninetieth of his solitude, and is usually called the _first hermit_, to distinguish him from others of that name. The body of this saint is said to have been conveyed to Constantinople, by the emperor Michael Comnenus, in the twelfth century, and from thence to Venice in 1240.[4] Lewis I., king of Hungary, procured it from that republic, and deposited it at Buda, where a congregation of hermits under his name, which still subsists in Hungary, Poland, and Austria, was instituted by blessed Eusebius of Strigonium, a nobleman, who, having distributed his whole estate among the poor, retired into the forests; and being followed by others, built the monastery of Pisilia, under the rule of the regular canons of St. Austin. He died in that house, January the 20th, 1270. St. Paul, the hermit, is commemorated in several ancient western Martyrologies on the 10th of January, but in the Roman on the 15th, on which he is honored in the anthologium of the Greeks. * * * * * An eminent contemplative draws the following portraiture of this great model of an eremitical life:[5] St. Paul, the hermit, not being called by God to the external duties of an active life, remained alone, conversing only with God, in a vast wilderness, for the space of near a hundred years, ignorant of all that passed in the world, both the progress of sciences, the establishment of religion, and the revolutions of states and empires; indifferent even as to those things without which he could not live, as the air which he breathed, the water he drank, and the miraculous bread with which he supported life. What did he do? say the inhabitants of this busy world, who think they could not live without being in a perpetual hurry of restless projects; what was his employment all this while? Alas! ought we not rather to put this question to them; what are you doing while you are not taken up in doing the will of God, which occupies the heavens and the earth in all their motions? Do you call that doing nothing which is the great end God {154} proposed to himself in giving us a being, that is, to be employed in contemplating, adoring, and praising him? Is it to be idle and useless in the world to be entirely taken up in that which is the eternal occupation of God himself, and of the blessed inhabitants of heaven? What employment is better, more just, more sublime, or more advantageous than this, when done in suitable circumstances? To be employed in any thing else, how great or noble soever it may appear in the eyes of men, unless it be referred to God, and be the accomplishment of his holy will, who in all our actions demands our heart more than our hand, what is it, but to turn ourselves away from our end, to lose our time, and voluntarily to return again to that state of nothing out of which we were formed, or rather into a far worse state? Footnotes: 1. Pliny recounts thirty-nine different sorts of palm-trees, and says that the best grow in Egypt, which are ever green, have leaves thick enough to make ropes and a fruit which serves in some places to make bread. 2. Pliny, l. 7, c. 3, and others, assure us that such monsters have been seen. Consult the note of Rosweide. 3. The heathens might feign their gods of the woods, from certain monsters sometimes seen. Plutarch, in his life of Sylla, says, that a satyr was brought to that general at Athens; and St. Jerom tells us, that one was shown alive at Alexandria, and after its death was salted and embalmed, and sent to Antioch that Constantine the Great might see it. 4. See the whole history of this translation, published from an original MS. by F. Gamans, a Jesuit, inserted by Bollandus in his collection. 5. F. Ambrose de Lombez, Capucin, Tr. de la Paix Intérieure, (Paris, 1758,) p. 372. ST. MAURUS, ABBOT AMONG the several noblemen who placed their sons under the care of St. Benedict, to be brought up in piety and learning, Equitius, one of that rank, left with him his son Maurus, then but twelve years old, in 522. The youth surpassed all his fellow monks in the discharge of monastic duties, and when he was grown up, St. Benedict made him his coadjutor in the government of Sublaco. Maurus, by his singleness of heart and profound humility, was a model of perfection to all the brethren, and was favored by God with the gift of miracles. St. Placidus, a fellow monk, the son of the senator Tertullus, going one day to fetch water, fell into the lake, and was carried the distance of a bow-shot from the bank. St. Benedict saw this in spirit in his cell, and bid Maurus run and draw him out. Maurus obeyed, walked upon the waters without perceiving it, and dragged out Placidus by the hair, without sinking in the least himself. He attributed the miracle to the prayers of St. Benedict; but the holy abbot, to the obedience of the disciple. Soon after that holy patriarch had retired to Cassino, he called St. Maurus thither, in the year 528. Thus far St. Gregory, Dial. l. 2, c. 3, 4, 6. St. Maurus coming to France in 543, founded, by the liberality of king Theodebert, the great abbey of Glanfeuil, now called St. Maur-sur-Loire, which he governed several years. In 581 he resigned the abbacy to Bertulf, and passed the remainder of his life in close solitude, in the uninterrupted contemplation of heavenly things, in order to prepare himself for his passage to eternity. After two years thus employed, he fell sick of a fever, with a pain in his side: he received the sacraments of the church, lying on sackcloth before the altar of St. Martin, and in the same posture expired on the 15th of January, in the year 584. He was buried on the right side of the altar in the same church,[1] and on a roll of parchment laid in his tomb was inscribed this epitaph: "Maurus, a monk and deacon, who came into France in the days of king Theodebert, and died the eighteenth day before the month of February."[2] St. Maurus is named in the ancient French litany composed by Alcuin, and in the Martyrologies of Florus, Usuard, and others. {155} For fear of the Normans, in the ninth century, his body was translated to several places; lastly, in 868, to St. Peter's des Fusses, then a Benedictin abbey, near Paris,[3] where it was received with great solemnity by �neas, bishop of Paris. A history of this translation, written by Eudo, at that time abbot of St. Peter's des Fusses, is still extant. This abbey des Fusses was founded by Blidegisilus, deacon of the church of Paris, in the time of king Clovis II. and of Audebert, bishop of Paris: St. Babolen was the first abbot. This monastery was reformed by St. Mayeul, abbot of Cluni, in 988: in 1533 it was secularized by Clement VII. at the request of Francis I., and the deanery united to the bishopric of Paris; but the church and village have for several ages borne the name of St. Maur. The abbey of Glanfeuil, now called St. Maur-sur-Loire, was subjected to this des Fosses from the reign of Charles the Bald to the year 1096, in which Urban II., at the solicitation of the count of Anjou, re-established its primitive independence. Our ancestors had a particular veneration for St. Maurus, under the Norman kings; and the noble family of Seymour (from the French _Saint Maur_) borrow from him its name, as Camden observes in his _Remains_. The church of St. Peter's des Fusses, two leagues from Paris, now called St. Maurus's, was secularized, and made a collegiate, in 1533; and the canons removed to St. Louis, formerly called St. Thomas of Canterbury's, at the Louvre in Paris, in 1750. The same year the relics of St. Maurus were translated thence to the abbey of St. Germain-des-Prez, where they are preserved in a rich shrine.[4] An arm of this saint was with great devotion translated to mount Cassino, in the eleventh century,[5] and by its touch a demoniac was afterwards delivered, as is related by Desiderius at that time abbot of mount Cassino,[6] who was afterwards pope, under the name of Victor III. See Mabill. Annal. Bened. t. 1, l. 3 and 4; and the genuine history of the translation of the body of St. Maurus to the monastery des Fosses, by Endo, at that time abbot of this house. The life of St. Maurus, and history of his translation, under the pretended name of Faustus, is demonstrated by Cointe and others to be a notorious forgery, with several instruments belonging to the same.[7] Footnotes: 1. Mab. Annal. Ben. t. 1, l. 7, ad annos 581, 584. 2. All writers, at least from the ninth century, are unanimous in affirming with Amalarius, that St. Maurus of Anjou, the French abbot, was the same Maurus that was the disciple of St. Benedict; which is also proved against certain modern critics, by Dom Ruinart in his Apologia Missionis St. Mauri, in append. 1. annal. Bened. per Mabill. t. 1, p. 630. The arguments which are alleged by some for distinguishing them, may be seen in Chatelain's notes on the Martyrol. p. 253. In imitation of the congregation of SS. Vane and Hydulphus, then lately established in Lorraine, certain French Benedictin monks instituted a like reformation of their order, under the title of the congregation of St. Maurus, in 1621, which was approved of by Gregory XV. and Urban VIII. It is divided into six provinces, under its own general, who usually resides at St. Germain-des-Prez, at Paris. These monks live in strict retirement, and constantly abstain from flesh meat, except in the infirmary. Their chief houses are, St. Maur-sur-Loire, St. Germain-des Prez, Fleury, or St. Benoit-sur-Loire, Marmoutier at Tours, Vendome, St. Remigius at Rheims, St. Peter of Corbie, Fecan &c. 3. Ib. l. 15, p. 465, l. 36, p. 82. See Dom Beaunier, Recueil Historique des Evech. et Abbayes, t. 1, p. 17. 4. Dom Vaissette, Géographie Histor. t. 6, p. 515, and Le Beuf, Hist. du Diocèse de Paris, t. 5, p. 17. Piganiol, Descrip. of Paris, t. 8, p. 165, t. 3, p. 114, t. 7, p. 79. 5. S. Odilo in vitâ S. Majoli; et Leo Ostiens in chron. Casin. l. 2, c. 55. 6. Victor III. Dial. l. 2. Ruinart, Apol. Miss. S. Mauri, p. 632. Mabill. Annal. Bened. l. 56, c. 73. 7. Dom Freville, the Maurist monk, and curate of St. Symphorian's, at the abbey of St. Germain-des-Prez, has nevertheless made use of these pieces in a MS. history of the life and translations of this saint, which he has compiled, and of which he allowed me the perusal. When the relics of St. Maurus were translated to St. Germain-des-Prez, those of St. Babolen, who died about the year 671, and is honored is the Paris breviary on the 28th of June, and several others which had enriched the monastery des Fosses were conveyed to the church of St. Louis, at the Louvre. ST. MAIN, ABBOT THIS saint was a British bishop, who, passing into Little Britain in France, there founded an abbey in which he ended his days. ST. JOHN CALYBITE, RECLUSE. HE was the son of Eutropius, a rich nobleman in Constantinople. He secretly left home to become a monk among the Acæmetes.[1] After six {156} years he returned disguised in the rags of a beggar, and subsisted by the charity of his parents, as a stranger, in a little hut near their house; hence he was called the Calybite.[2] He sanctified his soul by wonderful patience, meekness, humility, mortification, and prayer. He discovered himself to his mother, in his agony, in the year 450, and, according to his request, was buried under his hut; but his parents built over his tomb a stately church, as the author of his life mentions. Cedrenus, who says it stood in the western quarter of the city, calls it _the church of poor John_;[3] Zonaras, the church of St. John Calybite.[4] An old church standing near the bridge of the isle of the Tiber in Rome, which bore his name, according to an inscription there, was built by pope Formosus, (who died in 896,) together with an hospital. From which circumstance Du Cange[5] infers that the body of our saint, which is preserved in this church, was conveyed from Constantinople to Rome, before the broaching of the Iconoclast heresy under Leo the Isarian, in 706: but his head remained at Constantinople till after that city fell into the hands of the Latins, in 1204; soon after which it was brought to Besanzon in Burgundy, where it is kept in St. Stephen's church, with a Greek inscription round the case. The church which bears the name of Saint John Calybite, at Rome, with the hospital, is now in the hands of religious men of the order of St. John of God. According to a MS. life, commended by Baronius, St. John Calybite flourished under Theodosius the Younger, who died in 450: Nicephorus says, under Leo, who was proclaimed emperor in 457; so that both accounts may be true. On his genuine Greek acts, see Lambecius, Bibl. Vind. t. 8, pp. 228, 395; Bollandus, p. 1035, gives his Latin acts the same which we find in Greek at St. Germain-des-Prez. See Montfaucon, Bibl. Coislianæ, p. 196. Bollandus adds other Latin acts, to which he gives the preference. See also Papebroch, Comm. ad Januarium Græcum metricum, t. 1. Maij. Jos. Assemani, in Calendaria Univ. ad 15 Jan. t. 6, p. 76. Chatelain, p. 283, &c. Footnotes: 1. Papebroch supposes St. John Calybite to have made a long voyage at sea; but this circumstance seems to have no other foundation than the mistake of those who place his birth at Rome, forgetting that Constantinople was then called New Rome. No mention is made of any long voyage in his genuine Greek acts, nor in the interpolated Latin. He sailed only threescore furlongs from Constantinople to the place called [Greek: Gomôn], and from the peaceful abode of the Acæmetes' monk, ([Greek: Eirênaion], or dwelling of peace,) opposite to Sosthenium on the Thrancian shore, where the monastery of the Acæmetes stood. 2. From [Greek: kalubê], a cottage, a hut. 3. Cedr. ad an. 461. 4. Zonaras, p. 41. 5. Du Cange, Constantinop. Christiana, l. 4, c. 6, n. 51. ST. ISIDORE, PRIEST AND HOSPITALLER, OF ALEXANDRIA.[1] HE was taken from his cell where he had passed many years in the deserts, ordained Priest, and placed in the dignity of hospitaller, by St. Athanasius. He lived in that great city a perfect model of meekness, patience, mortification, and prayer. He frequently burst into tears at table, saying: "I who am a rational creature, and made to enjoy God, eat the food of brutes, instead of feeding on the bread of angels." Palladius, afterwards bishop of Helenopolis, on going to Egypt to embrace an ascetic life, addressed himself first to our saint for advice: the skilful director bade him go and exercise himself for some time in mortification and self-denial, and then return for further instructions. St. Isidore suffered many persecutions, first from Lucius the Arian intruder, and afterwards from Theophilus, who unjustly accused him of Origenism.[2] He publicly condemned that heresy at {157} Constantinople, where he died in 403, under the protection of St. Chrysostom. See Palladius in Lausiac, c. 1 and 2. Socrates, l. 6, c. 9. Sozomen, c. 3 and 12. St. Jerom, Ep. 61, c. 15, ad Princip. Theodoret. l. 4, c. 21. Pallad. de Vitâ S. Chrys. Bulteau, Hist. Mon. d'Orient. l. 1, c. 15 Footnotes: 1. A hospitaller is one residing in an hospital, in order to receive the poor and strangers. 2. St. Jerom's zeal against the Origenists was very serviceable to the church; yet his translation of Theophilus's book against the memory of St. Chrysostom, (ap. Fac. herm. l. 6, c. 4,) is a proof that it sometimes carried him too far. This weakens his charge against the holy hospitaller of Alexandria, whom Theophilus expelled Egypt, with the four long brothers, (Dioscorus, Ammonias, Eusebius, and Euthymius,) and about three hundred other monks. Some accuse Theophilus of proceeding against them out of mere jealousy. It is at least certain, that St. Isidore and the four long brothers anathematized Origenism at Constantinople, before St. Chrysostom received them to his communion, and that Theophilus himself was reconciled to them at Chalcedon, in the council at the Oak, without requiring of them any confession of faith, or making mention of Origen. (Sozom. l. 8, c. 17.) Many take the St. Isidore, mentioned in the Roman Martyrology, for the hospitaller; but Bulteau observes, that St. Isidore of Scété is rather meant; at least the former is honored by the Greeks. ST. ISIDORE, P.H. HE was priest of Scété, and hermit in that vast desert. He excelled in an unparalleled gift of meekness, continency, prayer, and recollection. Once perceiving in himself some motions of anger to rise, he that instant threw down certain baskets he was carrying to market, and ran away to avoid the occasion.[1] When, in his old age, others persuaded him to abate something in his labor, he answered: "If we consider what the Son of God hath done for us, we can never allow ourselves any indulgence in sloth. Were my body burnt, and my ashes scattered in the air, it would be nothing."[2] Whenever the enemy tempted him to despair, he said, "Were I to be damned, thou wouldest yet be below me in hell; nor would I cease to labor in the service of God, though assured that this was to be my lot." If he was tempted to vain-glory, he reproached and confounded himself with the thought, how far even in his exterior exercises he fell short of the servants of God, Antony, Pambo, and others.[3] Being asked the reason of his abundant tears, he answered: "I weep for my sins: if we had only once offended God, we could never sufficiently bewail this misfortune." He died a little before the year 391. His name stands in the Roman Martyrology, on the fifteenth of January. See Cassian. coll. 18, c. 15 and 16. Tillem. t. 8, p. 440. Footnotes: 1. Cotellier, Mon. Gr. t. 1, p. 487. 2. Ib. p. 686. Rosweide, l. 5, c. 7 3. Cotel. ib. t. 2, p. 48. Rosweide, l. 3, c. 101, l. 7, c. 11. SAINT BONITUS, BISHOP OF AUVERGNE, C. (COMMONLY, IN AUVERGNE, BONET; AT PARIS, BONT.) ST. BONET was referendary or chancellor, to Sigebert III., the holy king of Austrasia; and by his zeal, religion, and justice, flourished in that kingdom under four kings. After the death of Dagobert II., Thierry III. made him governor of Marseilles and all Provence, in 680. His elder brother St. Avitus II., bishop of Clermont, in Auvergne, having recommended him for his successor, died in 689, and Bonet was consecrated. But after having governed that see ten years, with the most exemplary piety, he had a scruple whether his election had been perfectly canonical; and having consulted St. Tilo, or Theau, then leading an eremitical life at Solignac, resigned his dignity, led for four years a most penitential life in the abbey of Manlieu, now of the order of St. Bennet, and after having made a pilgrimage to Rome, died of the gout at Lyons on the fifteenth of January in 710, being eighty-six years old. His relics were enshrined in the cathedral at Clermont; but some small portions are kept at Paris, in the churches of St. Germain l'Auxerrois, and St. Bont, near that of St. Merry. See his life, {158} written by a monk of Sommon in Auvergne, in the same century, published by Bollandus, also le Cointe, an. 699. Gallia Christiana Nova, &c. ST. ITA, OR MIDA, V. ABBESS SHE was a native of Nandesi, now the barony of Dessee in the county of Waterford, and descended from the royal family. Having consecrated her virginity to God, she led an austere retired life at the foot of the mountain Luach, in the diocese of Limerick, and founded there a famous monastery of holy virgins, called Cluain-cred-hail. By the mortification of her senses and passions, and by her constant attention to God and his divine love, she was enriched with many extraordinary graces. The lesson she principally inculcated to others was, that to be perpetually recollected in God is the great means of attaining to perfection. She died January 15, in 569. Her feast was solemnized in her church of Cluain-cred-hail; in the whole territory of Hua-Conail, and at Rosmide, in the territory of Nandesi. See her ancient life in Bollandus, Jan. xvi., and Colgan, t. 1, p. 72, who calls her the second St. Bridget of Ireland. JANUARY XVI. ST. MARCELLUS, POPE, M. See the epitaph of eight verses, composed for this Pope, by St. Damasus, carm. 48, and Tillemont, t. 5. A.D. 310. ST. MARCELLUS was priest under pope Marcellinus. whom he succeeded in 308, after that see had been vacant for three years and a half. An epitaph written on him by pope Damasus, who also mentions himself in it, says, that by enforcing the canons of holy penance, he drew upon himself the contradictions and persecutions of many tepid and refractory Christians, and that for his severity against a certain apostate, he was banished by the tyrant Maxentius.[1] He died in 310, having sat one year, seven months, and twenty days. Anastatius writes, that Lucina, a devout widow of one Pinianus, who lodged St. Marcellus when he lived in Rome, after his death converted her house into a church, which she called by his name. His false acts relate, that among his other sufferings, he was condemned by the tyrant to keep cattle in this place. He is styled a martyr in the sacramentaries of Gelasius I. and St. Gregory, and in the Martyrologies ascribed to St. Jerom and Bede, which, with the rest of the Western calendars, mention his feast on the sixteenth of January. His body lies under the high altar in the ancient church, which bears his name, and gives title to a cardinal in Rome; but certain portions of his relics are honored at Cluni, Namur, Mons, &c. * * * * * God is most wonderful in the whole economy of his holy providence over his elect: his power and wisdom are exalted infinitely above the understanding {159} of creatures, and we are obliged to cry out, "Who can search his ways?"[2] We have not penetration to discover all the causes and ends of exterior things which we see or feel. How much less can we understand this in secret and interior things, which fall not under our senses? "Remember that thou knowest not his work. Behold he is a great God, surpassing our understanding."[3] How does he make every thing serve his purposes for the sanctification of his servants! By how many ways does he conduct them to eternal glory! Some he sanctifies on thrones; others in cottages; others in retired cells and deserts; others in the various functions of an apostolic life, and in the government of his church. And how wonderfully does he ordain and direct all human events to their spiritual advancement, both in prosperity and in adversity! In their persecutions and trials, especially, we shall discover at the last day, when the secrets of his providence will be manifested to us, the tenderness of his infinite love, the depth of his unsearchable wisdom, and the extent of his omnipotent power. In all his appointments let us adore these his attributes, earnestly imploring his grace, that according to the designs of his mercy, we may make every thing, especially all afflictions, serve for the exercise and improvement of our virtue. Footnotes: 1. Damasus, carm. 26. 2. Job xxxvi, 23. 3. Ib. ST. MACARIUS, THE ELDER, OF EGYPT From the original authors of the lives of the fathers of the deserts, in Rosweide, d'Andilly, Bollandus, 15 Jan., Tillemont, t. 13, p. 576, collated with a very ancient manuscript of the lives of the Fathers, published by Rosweide, &c., in the hands of Mr. Martin, of Palgrave, in Suffolk. A.D. 390. ST. MACARIUS, the Elder, was born in Upper Egypt, about the year 300, and brought up in the country in tending cattle. In his childhood, in company with some others, he once stole a few figs, and ate one of them: but from his conversion to his death, he never ceased to weep bitterly for this sin.[1] By a powerful call of divine grace, he retired from the world in his youth, and dwelling in a little cell in a village, made mats, in continual prayer and great austerities. A wicked woman falsely accused him of having defloured her; for which supposed crime he was dragged through the streets, beaten, and insulted, as a base hypocrite, under the garb of a monk. He suffered all with patience, and sent the woman what he earned by his work, saying to himself: "Well, Macarius! having now another to provide for, thou must work the harder." But God discovered his innocency; for the woman falling in labor, lay in extreme anguish, and could not be delivered till she had named the true father of her child. The people converted their rage into the greatest admiration of the humility and patience of the saint.[2] To shun the esteem of men, he fled into the vast hideous desert of Scété,[3] being then about thirty years of age. In this solitude he lived sixty years, and became the spiritual parent of innumerable holy persons, who put themselves under his direction, and were governed by the rules he prescribed them; but all dwelt in separate hermitages. St. Macarius admitted only one disciple with him, to entertain strangers. He was {160} compelled by an Egyptian bishop to receive the order of priesthood, about the year 340, the fortieth of his age, that he might celebrate the divine mysteries for the convenience of this holy colony. When the desert became better peopled, there were four churches built in it, which were served by so many priests. The austerities of St. Macarius were excessive; he usually ate but once a week. Evagrius, his disciple, once asked him leave to drink a little water, under a parching thirst; but Macarius bade him content himself with reposing a little in the shade, saying: "For these twenty years, I have never once ate, drunk, or slept, as much as nature required."[4] His face was very pale, and his body weak and parched up. To deny his own will, he did not refuse to drink a little wine when others desired him; but then he would punish himself for this indulgence, by abstaining two or three days from all manner of drink; and it was for this reason, that his disciple desired strangers never to tender unto him a drop of wine.[5] He delivered his instructions in few words, and principally inculcated silence, humility, mortification, retirement, and continual prayer, especially the last, to all sorts of people. He used to say, "In prayer, you need not use many or lofty words. You can often repeat with a sincere heart, Lord, show me mercy as thou knowest best. Or, assist me, O God!"[6] He was much delighted with this ejaculation of perfect resignation and love: "O Lord, have mercy on me, as thou pleasest, and knowest best in thy goodness!"[7] His mildness and patience were invincible, and occasioned the conversion of a heathen priest, and many others.[8] The devil told him one day, "I can surpass thee in watching, fasting, and many other things; but humility conquers and disarms me."[9] A young man applying to St. Macarius for spiritual advice, he directed him to go to a burying-place, and upbraid the dead; and after to go and flatter them. When he came back, the saint asked him what answer the dead had made: "None at all," said the other, "either to reproaches or praises." "Then," replied Macarius, "go, and learn neither to be moved with injuries nor flatteries. If you die to the world and to yourself, you will begin to live to Christ." He said to another: "Receive, from the hand of God, poverty as cheerfully as riches, hunger and want as plenty, and you will conquer the devil, and subdue all your passions."[10] A certain monk complained to him, that in solitude he was always tempted to break his fast, whereas in the monastery, he could fast the whole week cheerfully. "Vain-glory is the reason," replied the saint; "fasting pleases, when men see you; but seems intolerable when that passion is not gratified."[11] One came to consult him, who was molested with temptations to impurity: the saint, examining into the source, found it to be sloth, and advised him never to eat before sunset, to meditate fervently at his work, and to labor vigorously, without sloth, the whole day. The other faithfully complied, and was freed from his enemy. God revealed to St. Macarius, that he had not attained the perfection of two married women, who lived in a certain town: he made them a visit, and learned the means by which they sanctified themselves. They were extremely careful never to speak any idle or rash words: they lived in the constant practice of humility, patience, meekness, charity, resignation, mortification of their own will, and conformity to the humors of their husbands and others, where the divine law did not interpose: in a spirit of recollection they sanctified all their actions by {161} ardent ejaculations, by which they strove to praise God, and most fervently to consecrate to the divine glory all the powers of their soul and body.[12] A subtle heretic of the sect of the Hieracites, called so from Hierax, who in the reign of Dioclesian denied the resurrection of the dead, had, by his sophisms, caused some to stagger in their faith. St. Macarius, to confirm them in the truth, raised a dead man to life, as Socrates, Sozomen, Palladius, and Rufinus relate. Cassian says, that he only made a dead corpse to speak for that purpose; then bade it rest till the resurrection. Lucius, the Arian usurper of the see of Alexandria, who had expelled Peter, the successor of St. Athanasius, in 376 sent troops into the deserts to disperse the zealous monks, several of whom sealed their faith with their blood: the chiefs, namely, the two Macariuses, Isidore, Pambo, and some others, by the authority of the emperor Valens, were banished into a little isle of Egypt, surrounded with great marshes. The inhabitants, who were Pagans, were all converted to the faith by the confessors.[13] The public indignation of the whole empire, obliged Lucius to suffer them to return to their cells. Our saint, knowing that his end drew near, made a visit to the monks of Nitria, and exhorted them to compunction and tears so pathetically, that they all fell weeping at his feet. "Let us weep, brethren," said he, "and let our eyes pour forth floods of tears before we go hence, lest we fall into that place where tears will only increase the flames in which we shall burn."[14] He went to receive the reward of his labors in the year 390, and of his age the ninetieth, having spent sixty years in the desert of Scété.[15] He seems to have been the first anchoret who inhabited this vast wilderness; and this Cassian affirms.[16] Some style him a disciple of St. Antony; but that quality rather suits St. Macarius of Alexandria; for, by the history of our saint's life, it appears that he could not have lived under the direction of St. Antony before he retired into the desert of Scété. But he afterwards paid a visit, if not several, to that holy patriarch of monks, whose dwelling was fifteen days' journey distant.[17] This glorious saint is honored in the Roman Martyrology on the 15th of January; in the Greek Menæa on the 19th. An ancient monastic rule, and an epistle addressed to monks, written in sentences, like the book of Proverbs, are ascribed to St. Macarius. Tillemont thinks them more probably the works of St. Macarius of Alexandria, who had under his inspection at Nitria five thousand monks.[18] Gennadius[19] says that St. Macarius wrote nothing but this letter. This may be understood of St. Macarius of Alexandria, though one who wrote in Gaul might not have seen all the works of an author whose country was so remote, and language different. Fifty spiritual homilies are ascribed, in the first edition, and in some manuscripts, to St. Macarius of Egypt: yet F. Possin[20] thinks they rather belong to Macarius of Pispir, who attended St. Antony at his death, and seems to have been some years older than the two great Macariuses, though some have thought him the same with the Alexandrian.[21] Footnotes: 1. Bolland. 15. Jan. p. 1011, §39. Cotel. Mon. Gr{}t, l. 1, p. 546. 2. Cotel. ib. p. 525. Rosweide, Vit. Patr. l. 3, c. 99, l. 5, c. 15, §25, p. 623. 3. Mount Nitria was above forty miles from Alexandria, towards the Southwest. The desert of Scété lay eighty miles beyond Nitria, and was rather in Lybia than in Egypt. It was of a vast extent, and then were no roads thereabouts, so that men were guided only by the stars in travelling in those parts. See Tillemont on St. Amon and this Macarius. 4. Socrates, l. 4, c. 23. 5. Rosweide, Vit. Patr. l. 3, §3, p. 505, l. 5, c. 4, §26, p. 569. 6. Rosweide, l. 3, c. 20, l. 5, c. 12. Cotel. p. 537. 7. Domine, sicut scis et vis, miserere me! 8. Rosweide, l. 3, c. 127. Cotel. t. 1, p. 547. 9. Rosweide, l. 5, c. 15. 10. Rosweide, l. 7, c. 48. Cotel. t. 1, p. 537. Rosweide, ib. §9. 11. Cassian Collat. 5, c. 32. 12. Rosweide, l. 3, c. 97, l. 6, c. 3, §17, p. 657. 13. Theodoret, l. 4, c. 18, 19. Socr. l. 4, c. 22. Sozom. l. 6, c. 19, 20. Rufin. l. 2, c. 3. S. Hier. in Chrom. Oros. l. 7, c. 33. Pallad. Lausiac. c. 117. 14. Rosw. Vit. Part. l. 5, c. 3, §9. Cotel. Mon. Gr. p. 545. 15. Pallad. Lausiac. c. 19. 16. Cassian. Collat. 15, c. 13. Tillem. Note 3, p. 806. 17. Rosw. Vit. Patr. l. 5, c. 7, §9. Cotel. Apothegm. Patr. 530. Tillem. art. 4, p. 581, and Note 4, p. 80{}. 18. See Tillem. Note 3, p. 806. 19. Gennad. Cat. c. 10. 20. Possin. Ascet. pr. p. 17. 21. Du Pin allows these fifty homilies to be undoubtedly very ancient: in which judgment others agree, and the discourses themselves bear evident marks. Du Pin and Tillemont leave them to St. Macarius of Egypt; and his claim to them is very well supported by the learned English translator, who published them with an introduction, at London, in 1721, in octavo. The censure of Ceillier upon them seems too severe. Certain passages, which seem to favor Pelagianism, ought to be explained by others, which clearly condemn that heresy; or it must be granted that they have suffered some alteration. The composition is not very methodical, these homilies being addressed to monks, in answer to particular queries. The author exceedingly extols the peace and sweetness which a soul, crucified to the world, enjoys with the consolations of the Holy Ghost, who resides in her. But he says that the very angels deplore, as much as their state will permit, those unhappy souls which taste not these heavenly delights, as men weep over a dear friend who lies sick in his agony, and receives all nourishment from their hands. (St. Macar., hom. 1 & 15.) Prayer, without which no one can be free from sin, is a duty which he strongly inculcates, (Hom. 2,) with perfect concord, by which we love, and are inclined to condescend to indifferent things, and to judge well of all men, so as to say, when we see one pray, that he prays for us; if he read, that he reads for us, and for the divine honor; if he rest or work, that he is employed for the advancement of the common good. (Hom. 3.) The practice of keeping ourselves constantly in the divine presence, he calls a principal duty, by which we learn to triumph over our enemies, and refer to the divine honor all we do; "for this one thing is necessary, that whether we work, read, or pray, we always entertain this life and treasure in our souls; having God constantly in our thoughts, and the Holy Ghost in our breasts." (Hom. 3.) A continual watchfulness, and strict guard upon all our senses, and in all our actions, is necessary, especially against vanity, concupiscence, and gluttony; without which, failings will be multiplied; pure and faithful souls God makes his chaste spouses; they always think on him, and place all their desires on him; but those who love the earth are earthly in their thoughts and affections, their corrupt inclinations gain such a mastery, that they seem natural to them. Vigilance is absolutely necessary to remove this insinuating enemy; and purity of conscience begets prudence, which can never be found under the tyranny of the passions, and which is the eye that guides the soul through the craggy paths of this life. Pure souls are raised by divine grace to dwell with God on earth by holy contemplation, and are fitted for eternal bliss, (Hom. 4;) true Christians differ in their desires and actions from other men. The wicked burn with lawless passions, and are disturbed with anxious desires and vain wishes, hunt after, and think of nothing but earthly pleasures; but the true Christian enjoys an uninterrupted tranquillity of mind and joy, even amidst crosses, and rejoices in sufferings and temptations, hope and divine grace sweetening their severest trials. The love of God with which they burn, makes them rejoice in all they suffer for his sake, and by his appointment. It is their most ardent desire to behold God in his glory, and to be themselves transformed into him. (2 Cor. iii.) Even now the sweetness with which God overwhelms them, renders them already, in some measure, partakers of his glory; which will be completed in them in heaven. (Hom. 5.) In prayer we must be freed from all anxious care, trouble of mind, and foreign thoughts; and must cry out to God with our whole hearts in tranquillity and silence; for God descends only in peace and repose, not amidst tumult and clamors. (Hom. 6.) A soul astonished to see God, who is crowned with infinite glory, visit her with so much sweetness, absorbed in hi, sovereignly despises all earthly things, and cries out to his in strains of admiration at his condescension and goodness. (Hom. 7) When a person, endowed with the gift of supernatural prayer, falls on his knees to pray, his heart is straight filled with the divine sweetness, and his soul exults in God as a spouse with her beloved. This joy in one hour of prayer in the silence of the night, makes a soul forget all the labors of the day; being wrapt in God, she expatiates in the depth of his immensity, and is raised above all the toys of this world to heavenly joys, which no tongue can express. Then she cries out, "Oh! that my soul could now ascend with my prayer out high, to be for evermore united with God!" But this grace is not always equal; and this light is sometimes stronger, and this ardor is sometimes more vehement, sometimes more gentle; sometimes the soul seems to herself to behold a cross shining with a dazzling brightness, wherewith her interior man is penetrated. Sometimes in a rapture she seems clothed with glory, in some measure as Christ appeared in his transfiguration. At other times, overwhelmed with a divine light, and drowned in the ocean of divine sweetness, she scarce remains herself, and becomes a stranger, and, as it were, foolish to this world, through the excess of heavenly sweetness, and relish of divine mysteries. A perfect state of contemplation is granted to no one in this life; yet when we go to pray, after making the sign of the cross, often grace so overwhelms the heart, and the whole man, filling every power with perfect tranquillity, that the soul, through excess of overflowing joy, becomes like a little child, which knows no evil, condemns no man, but loves all the world. At other times she seems as a child of God, to confide in him as in her father, to penetrate the heavenly mansions which are opened to her, and to discover mysteries which no man can express. (Hom. 8.) These interior delights can only be purchased by many trials; for a soul must be dead to the world, and burn with a vehement love of God alone, so that no creature can separate her from him, and she dedicate herself and all her actions to him, without reserve. (Hom. 9.) For this, a most profound humility, cheerfulness, and courage are necessary; sloth, tepidity, and sadness being incompatible with spiritual progress. (Hom. 10.) The Holy Ghost is a violent fire in our breasts, which makes us always active, and spurs us on continually to aspire more and more vehemently towards God. (Hom. 11.) The mark of a true Christian is, that he studies to conceal from the eyes of men all the good he receives from God. Those who taste how sweet God is, and know no satiety in his love, in proportion as they advance in contemplation, the more perfectly they see their own wants and nothingness: and always cry out, "I am most unworthy that this sun sheds its beams upon me." (Hom. 15.) In the following homilies, the author delivers many excellent maxims on humility and prayer, and tells us, that a certain monk, after having been favored with a wonderful rapture, and many great graces, fell by pride into several grievous sins. (Hom. 17.) A certain rich nobleman gave his estate to the poor, and set his slaves at liberty; yet afterwards fell into pride, and many enormous crimes. Another, who in the persecution had suffered torments with great constancy for the faith, afterwards, intoxicated with self-conceit, gave great scandal by his disorders. He mentions one who had formerly lived a long time with him in the desert, prayed often with him, and was favored with an extraordinary gift of compunction, and a miraculous power of curing many sick persons, was delighted with glory and applause of men, and drawn into the sink of vice. (Hom. 27.) To preserve the unction of the Holy Ghost, a person must live in constant fear, humility, and compunction. (Hom. 17.) Without Christ and his grace we can do nothing; but by the Holy Ghost dwelling in her, a soul becomes all light, all spirit, as joy, all love, all compassion. Unless a person be animated by divine grace, and replenished with all virtues, the best instructions and exhortations in their mouths produce very little good. (Hom 18.) The servant of God never bears in mind the good works he has done, but, after all his labors, sees how much is wanting to him; and how much he falls short of his duty, and of the perfection of virtue, and says every day to himself, that now he ought to begin, and that to-morrow perhaps God will call him to himself, and deliver him from his labors and dangers (Hom. 26.) The absolute necessity of divine grace he teaches in many places; also the fundamental article of original sin, (Hom. 48. pag. 101, t. 4, Bibl. Patr. Colon. an. {}6{}) which the Pelagians denied. {162} ST. HONORATUS, ARCHBISHOP OF ARLES. He was of a consular Roman family, then settled in Gaul, and was well versed in the liberal arts. In his youth he renounced the worship of idols, and gained his elder brother, Venantius, to Christ, whom he also inspired with a contempt of the world. They desired to renounce it entirely, but a {163} fond Pagan father put continual obstacles in their way: at length they took with them St. Caprais, a holy hermit, for their director, and sailed from Marseilles to Greece, with the design to live there unknown, in some desert. Venantius soon died happily at Methone; and Honoratus, being also sick, was obliged to return with his conductor. He first led an eremitical life in the mountains, near Frejus. Two small islands lie in the sea near that coast, one larger, at a nearer distance from the continent, called Lero, now St. Margaret's; the other smaller and more remote, two leagues from Antibes, named Lerins, at present St. Honoré, from our saint, where he settled; and being followed by others, he there founded the famous monastery of Lerins, about the year 400. Some he appointed to live in community; others, who seemed more perfect, in separate cells, as anchorets. His rule was chiefly borrowed from that of St. Pachomius. Nothing can be more amiable than the description St. Hilary has given of the excellent virtues of this company of saints, especially of the charity, concord, humility, compunction, and devotion which reigned among them, under the conduct of our holy abbot. He was, by compulsion, consecrated archbishop of Arles in 426, and died, exhausted with austerities and apostolical labors, in 429. The style of his letters was clear and affecting: they were penned with an admirable delicacy, elegance, and sweetness, as St. Hilary assures. The loss of all these precious monuments is much regretted. His tomb is shown empty under the high altar of the church which bears his name at Arles; his body having been translated to Lerins in 1391, where the greatest part remains. See his panegyric by his disciple, kinsman, and successor, St. Hilary of Arles; one of the most finished pieces extant in this kind. Dom Rivet, Hist. Lit. t. 2, p. 156. ST. FURSEY, SON OF FINTAN, KING OF PART OF IRELAND, WAS abbot first of a monastery in his own country, in the diocese of Tuam, near the lake of Orbsen, where now stands the church of Kill-fursa, says Colgan. Afterwards, travelling with two of his brothers, St. Foilan and St. Ultan, through England, he founded, by the liberality of king Sigibert, the abbey of Cnobbersburg, now Burg-castle in Suffolk. Saint Ultan retired into a desert, and St. Fursey, after some time, followed him thither, leaving the government of his monastery to St. Foilan. Being driven thence by the irruptions of king Penda, he went into France, and, by the munificence of king Clovis II. and Erconwald, the pious mayor of his palace, built the great monastery of Latiniac, or Lagny, six leagues from Paris, on the Marne. He was deputed by the bishop of Paris to govern that diocese in quality of his vicar; on which account some have styled him bishop. He died in 650 at Froheins, that is, Fursei-domus, in the diocese of Amiens, while he was building another monastery at Peronne, to which church Erconwald removed his body. His relics have been famous for miracles, and are still preserved in the great church at Peronne, which was founded by Erconwald to be served by a certain number of priests, and made a royal collegiate church of canons by Lewis XI. Saint Fursey is honored as {164} patron of that town. See his ancient life in Bollandus, from which Bede extracted an account of his visions in a sickness in Ireland, l. 3, hist. c. 19. See also his life by Bede in MS. in the king's library at the British Museum, and Colgan, Jan. 16, p. 75, and Feb. 9, p. 282. FIVE FRIARS, MINORS, MARTYRS. BERARDUS, PETER, ACURSIUS, ADJUTUS, AND OTTO, WERE sent by St. Francis to preach to the Mahometans of the West, while he went in person to those of the East. They preached first to the Moors of Seville, where they suffered much for their zeal, and were banished. Passing thence into Morocco, they began there to preach Christ, and being banished, returned again. The infidel judge caused them twice to be scourged till their ribs appeared bare; he then ordered burning oil and vinegar to be poured into their wounds, and their bodies to be rolled over sharp stones and potsherds. At length the king caused them to be brought before him, and taking his cimeter, clove their heads asunder in the middle of their foreheads, on the 16th of January, 1220. Their relics were ransomed, and are preserved in the monastery of the holy cross in Coimbra. Their names stand in the Roman Martyrology, and they were canonized by Sixtus IV. in 1481. See their acts in Bollandus and Wading; also Chalippe, Vie de S. François, l. 3, t. 1, p. 275. ST. HENRY, HERMIT. THE Danes were indebted in part for the light of faith, under God, to the bright example and zealous labors of English missionaries. Henry was born in that country, of honorable parentage, and from his infancy gave himself to the divine service with his whole heart. When he came to man's estate he was solicited by his friends to marry, but having a strong call from God to forsake the world, he sailed to the north of England. The little island of Cocket, which lies on the coast of Northumberland, near the mouth of the river of the same name, was inhabited by many holy anchorets in St. Bede's time, as appears from his life of St. Cuthbert.[1] This island belonged to the monastery of Tinmouth, and, with the leave of the prior of that house, St. Henry undertook to lead in it an eremitical life. He fasted every day, and his refection, which he took at most only once in twenty-four hours, after sunset, was only bread and water: and this bread he earned by tilling a little garden near his cell. He suffered many assaults both from devils and men; but by those very trials improved his soul in the perfect spirit of patience, meekness, humility, and charity. He died in his hermitage in 1127, on the 16th of January, and was buried by the monks of Tinmouth, in the church of the Blessed Virgin, near the body of St. Oswin, king and martyr. See his life in Capgrave and Bollandus. Footnotes: 1. Bede, Vit. S. Cuthberti, c. 24. {165} JANUARY XVII. ST. ANTONY, ABBOT, PATRIARCH OF MONKS. From his life, compiled by the great St. Athanasius, vol. 2, p. 743, a work much commended by St. Gregory Nazianzen, St. Jerom, St. Austin, Rufinus, Palladius, &c. St. Chrysostom recommends to all persons the reading of this pious history, as full of instruction and edification. Hom. 8, in Matt t. 7. p. 128. It contributed to the conversion of St. Austin. Confess. l. 8, c. 6 and 28. See Tillemont, t. 7, Helyot, t. 1, Stevens, Addit. Mon. Anglic. t. 1, Ceillier, &c. A.D. 356. ST. ANTONY was born at Coma, a village near Heraclea, or Great Heracleopolis, in Upper Egypt, on the borders of Arcadia, or Middle Egypt, in 251. His parents, who were Christians, and rich, to prevent his being tainted by bad example and vicious conversation, kept him always at home; so that he grew up unacquainted with any branch of human literature, and could read no language but his own.[1] He was remarkable from his childhood for his temperance, a close attendance on church duties, and a punctual obedience to his parents. By their death he found himself possessed of a very considerable estate, and charged with the care of a younger sister, before he was twenty years of age. Near six months after, he heard read in the church those words of Christ to the rich young man: _Go sell what thou hast, and give it to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven._[2] He considered these words as addressed to himself; going home, he made over to his neighbors three hundred _aruras_,[3] that is, above one hundred and twenty acres of good land, that he and his sister might be free forever from all public taxes and burdens. The rest of his estate he sold, and gave the price to the poor, except what he thought necessary for himself and his sister. Soon after, hearing in the church those other words of Christ; _Be not solicitous for to-morrow_;[4] he also distributed in alms the moveables which he had reserved; and placed his sister in a house of virgins,[5] which most moderns take to be the first instance mentioned in history of a nunnery. She was afterwards intrusted with the care and direction of tethers in that holy way of life. Antony himself retired into a solitude, near his village, in imitation of a certain old man, who led the life of a hermit in the neighborhood of Coma. Manual labor, prayer, and pious reading, were his whole occupation: and such was his fervor, that if he heard of any virtuous recluse, he sought him out, and endeavored to make the best advantage of his {166} example and instructions. He saw nothing practised by any other in this service of God, which he did not imitate: thus he soon became a perfect model of humility, Christian condescension, charity, prayer, and all virtues. The devil assailed him by various temptations; first, he represented to him divers good works he might have been able to do with his estate in the world, and the difficulties of his present condition: a common artifice of the enemy, whereby he strives to make a soul slothful or dissatisfied in her vocation, in which God expects to be glorified by her. Being discovered and repulsed by the young novice, he varied his method of attack, and annoyed him night and day with filthy thoughts and obscene imaginations. Antony opposed to his assaults the strictest watchfulness over his senses, austere fasts, humility, and prayer, till Satan, appearing in a visible form, first of a woman coming to seduce him, then of a black boy to terrify him, at length confessed himself vanquished. The saint's food was only bread, with a little salt, and he drank nothing but water; he never ate before sunset, and sometimes only once in two, or four days: he lay on a rush mat, or on the bare floor. In quest of a more remote solitude he withdrew further from Coma, and hid himself in an old sepulchre; whither a friend brought him from time to time a little bread. Satan was here again permitted to assault him in a visible manner, to terrify him with dismal noises; and once he so grievously beat him, that he lay almost dead, covered with bruises and wounds; and in this condition he was one day found by his friend, who visited him from time to time to supply him with bread, during all the time he lived in the ruinous sepulchre. When he began to come to himself, though not yet able to stand, he cried out to the devils, while he yet lay on the floor, "Behold! here I am; do all you are able against me: nothing shall ever separate me from Christ my Lord." Hereupon the fiends appearing again, renewed the attack, and alarmed him with terrible clamors, and a variety of spectres, in hideous shapes of the most frightful wild beasts, which they assumed to dismay and terrify him; till a ray of heavenly light breaking in upon him, chased them away, and caused him to cry out: "Where wast thou, my Lord and my Master? Why wast thou not here, from the beginning of my conflict, to assuage my pains!" A voice answered: "Antony, I was here the whole time; I stood by thee, and beheld thy combat: and because thou hast manfully withstood thine enemies, I will always protect thee, and will render thy name famous throughout the earth." At these words the saint arose, much cheered, and strengthened, to pray and return thanks to his deliverer. Hitherto the saint, ever since his retreat, in 272, had lived in solitary places not very far from his village; and St. Athanasius observes, that before him many fervent persons led retired lives in penance and contemplation, near the towns; others remaining in the towns imitated the same manner of life. Both were called ascetics, from their being entirely devoted to the most perfect exercises of mortification and prayer, according to the import of the Greek word. Before St. Athanasius, we find frequent mention made of such ascetics: and Origen, about the year 219,[6] says they always abstained from flesh, no less than the disciples of Pythagoras. Eusebius tells us that St. Peter of Alexandria practised austerities equal to those of the ascetics; he says the same of Pamphilus; and St. Jerom uses the same expression of Pierius. St. Antony had led this manner of life near Coma, till resolving to withdraw into the deserts about the year 285, the thirty-fifth of his age, he crossed the eastern branch of the Nile, and took up his abode in the ruins of an old castle on the top of the mountains; in which close solitude he lived almost twenty years, very {167} rarely seeing any man, except one who brought him bread every six months. To satisfy the importunities of others, about the year 305, the fifty-fifty of his age, he came down from his mountain, and founded his first monastery at Phaium.[7] The dissipation occasioned by this undertaking led him into a temptation of despair, which he overcame by prayer and hard manual labor. In this new manner of life his daily refection was six ounces of bread soaked in water, with a little salt; to which he sometimes added a few dates. He took it generally after sunset, but on some days at three o'clock; and in his old age he added a little oil. Sometimes he ate only once in three or four days, yet appeared vigorous, and always cheerful: strangers knew him from among his disciples by the joy which was always painted on his countenance, resulting from the inward peace and composure of his soul. Retirement in his cell was his delight, and divine contemplation and prayer his perpetual occupation. Coming to take his refection, he often burst into tears, and was obliged to leave his brethren and the table without touching any nourishment, reflecting on the employment of the blessed spirits in heaven, who praise God without ceasing.[8] He exhorted his brethren to allot the least time they possibly could to the care of the body. Notwithstanding which, he was very careful never to place perfection in mortification, as Cassian observes, but in charity, in which it was his whole study continually to improve his soul. His under garment was sackcloth over which he wore a white coat of sheep-skin, with a girdle. He instructed his monks to have eternity always present to their minds, and to reflect every morning that perhaps they might not live till night, and every evening that perhaps they might never see the morning; and to perform every action, as if it were the last of their lives, with all the fervor of their souls to please God. He often exhorted them to watch against temptations, and to resist the devil with vigor: and spoke admirably of his weakness, saying: "He dreads fasting, prayer, humility, and good works: he is not able even to stop my mouth who speak against him. The illusions of the devil soon vanish, especially if a man arms himself with the sign of the cross.[9] The devils {168} tremble at the sign of the cross of our Lord, by which he triumphed over and disarmed them."[10] He told them in what manner the fiend in his rage had assaulted him by visible phantoms, but that these disappeared while he persevered in prayer. He told them, that once when the devil appeared to him in glory, and said, "Ask what you please; I am the power of God:" he invoked the holy name of Jesus, and he vanished. Maximinus renewed the persecution in 311; St. Antony, hoping to receive the crown of martyrdom, went to Alexandria, served and encouraged the martyrs in the mines and dungeons, before the tribunals, and at the places of execution. He publicly wore his white monastic habit, and appeared in the sight of the governor; yet took care never presumptuously to provoke the judges, or impeach himself, as some rashly did. In 312 the persecution being abated, he returned to his monastery, and immured himself in his cell. Some time after he built another monastery, called Pispir, near the Nile; but he chose, for the most part, to shut himself up in a remote cell upon a mountain of difficult access, with Macarius, a disciple, who entertained strangers. If he found them to be _Hierosolymites_, or spiritual men, St. Antony himself sat with them in discourse; if Egyptians, (by which name they meant worldly persons,) then Macarius entertained them, and St. Antony only appeared to give them a short exhortation. Once the saint saw in a vision the whole earth covered so thick with snares, that it seemed scarce possible to set down a foot without falling into them. At this sight he cried out, trembling: "Who, O Lord, can escape them all?" A voice answered him "Humility, O Antony!"[11] St. Antony always looked upon himself as the least and the very outcast of mankind; he listened to the advice of every one, and professed that he received benefit from that of the meanest person. He cultivated and pruned a little garden on his desert mountain, that he might have herbs always at hand to present a refreshment to those who, on coming to see him, were always weary by travelling over a vast wilderness and inhospitable mountain, as St. Athanasius mentions. This tillage was not the only manual labor in which St. Antony employed himself. The same venerable author speaks of his making mats as an ordinary occupation. We are told that he once fell into dejection, finding uninterrupted contemplation above his strength; but was taught to apply himself at intervals to manual labor, by a vision of an angel who appeared platting mats of palm-tree leaves, then rising to pray, and after some time sitting down again to work; and who at length said to him, "Do thus, and thou shalt be saved."[12] But St. Athanasius informs us, that our saint continued in some degree to pray while he was at work. He watched great part of the nights in heavenly contemplation; and sometimes, when the rising sun called him to his daily tasks, he complained that its visible light robbed him of the greater interior light which he enjoyed, and interrupted his close application and solitude.[13] He always rose after a short sleep at midnight, and continued in prayer, on his knees with his hands lifted up to heaven till sunrise, and sometimes till three in the afternoon, as Palladius relates in his Lausiac history. St. Antony; in the year 339, saw in a vision, under the figure of mules kicking down the altar, the havoc which the Arian persecution made two years after in Alexandria, and clearly foretold it, as St. Athanasius, St. Jerom, and St. Chrysostom assure us.[14] He would not speak to a heretic, unless to exhort him to the true faith; and he drove all such from his mountain, calling them venomous serpents.[15] At the request of the bishops, about {169} the year 355, he, took a journey to Alexandria, to confound the Arians, preaching aloud in that city, that God the Son is not a creature, but of the same substance with the Father; and that the impious Arians, who called him a creature, did not differ from the heathens themselves, _who worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator_. All the people ran to see him, and rejoiced to hear him; even the pagans, struck with the dignity of his character, flocked to him; saying, "We desire to see the man of God." He converted many, and wrought several miracles: St. Athanasius conducted him back as far as the gates of the city, where he cured a girl possessed by the devil. Being desired by the duke or general of Egypt, to make a longer stay in the city than he had proposed, he answered: "As fish die if they leave the water, so does a monk if he forsakes his solitude."[16] St. Jerom and Rufin relate, that at Alexandria he met with the famous Didymus, and told him that he ought not to regret much the loss of eyes. which were common to ants and flies, but to rejoice in the treasure of that interior light which the apostles enjoyed, and by which we see God, and kindle the fire of his love in our souls. Heathen philosophers, and others, often went to dispute with him, and always returned much astonished at his humility, meekness, sanctity, and extraordinary wisdom. He admirably proved to them the truth and security of the Christian religion, and confirmed it by miracles. "We," said he, "only by naming Jesus Christ crucified, put to flight those devils which you adore as gods; and where the sign of the cross is formed, magic and charms lose their power." At the end of this discourse he invoked Christ, and signed with the cross twice or thrice several persons possessed with devils; in the same moment they stood up sound, and in their senses, giving thanks to God for his mercy in their regard.[17] When certain philosophers asked him how he could spend his time in solitude, without the pleasure of reading books, he replied, that nature was his great book, and amply supplied the want of others. When others, despising him as an illiterate man, came with the design to ridicule his ignorance, he asked them with great simplicity, which was first, reason or learning, and which had produced the other? The philosophers answered, "Reason, or good sense." "This, then," said Antony, "suffices." The philosophers went away astonished at the wisdom and dignity with which he prevented their objections. Some others demanding a reason of his faith in Christ, on purpose to insult it, he put them to silence by showing that they degraded the notion of the divinity, by ascribing to it infamous human passions, but that the humiliation of the cross is the greatest demonstration of infinite goodness, and its ignominy appears the highest glory, by the triumphant resurrection, the miraculous raising of the dead, and curing of the blind and the sick. He then admirably proved, that faith in God and his works is more clear and satisfactory than the sophistry of the Greeks. St. Athanasius mentions that he disputed with these Greeks by an interpreter.[18] Our holy author assures us, that no one visited St. Antony under any affliction and sadness, who did not return home full of comfort and joy; and he relates many miraculous cures wrought by him, also several heavenly visions and revelations with which he was favored. Belacius, the duke or general of Egypt, persecuting the Catholics with extreme fury, St. Antony, by a letter, exhorted him to leave the servants of Christ in peace. Belacius tore the letter, then spit and trampled upon it, and threatened to make the abbot the next victim of his fury; but five days after, as he was riding with Nestorius, governor of Egypt, their horses began to play and prance, and the governor's horse, though otherwise remarkably tame, by {170} justling, threw Belacius from his horse, and by biting his thigh, tore it in such a manner that the general died miserably on the third day.[19] About the year 337, Constantine the Great, and his two sons, Constantius and Constans, wrote a joint letter to the saint; recommending themselves to his prayers, and desiring an answer. St. Antony seeing his monks surprised, said, without being moved: "Do not wonder that the emperor writes to us, one man to another; rather admire that God should have wrote to us, and that he has spoken to us by his Son." He said he knew not how to answer it: at last, through the importunity of his disciples, he penned a letter to the emperor and his sons, which St. Athanasius has preserved; and in which he exhorts them to the contempt of the world, and the constant remembrance of the judgment to come. St. Jerom mentions seven other letters of St. Antony, to divers monasteries, written in the style of the apostles, and filled with their maxims: several monasteries of Egypt possess them in the original Egyptian language. We have them in an obscure, imperfect, Latin translation from the Greek.[20] He inculcates perpetual watchfulness against temptations, prayer, mortification, and humility.[21] He observes, that as the devil fell by pride, so he assaults virtue in us principally by that temptation.[22] A maxim which he frequently repeats is, that the knowledge of ourselves is the necessary and only step by which we call ascend to the knowledge and love of God. The Bollandists[23] give us a short letter of St. Antony to St. Theodorus, abbot of Tabenna, in which he says that God had assured him in a revelation, that he showed mercy to all true adorers of Jesus Christ, though they should have fallen, if they sincerely repented of their sin. No ancients mention any monastic rule written by St. Antony.[24] His example and instructions have been the most perfect rule for the monastic life to all succeeding ages. It is related[25] that St. Antony, hearing his disciples express their surprise at the great multitudes who embraced a monastic life, and applied themselves with incredible ardor to the most austere practices of virtue, told them with tears, that the time would come when monks would be fond of living in cities and stately buildings, and of eating at dainty tables, and be only distinguished from persons of the world by their habit; but that still, some among them would arise to the spirit of true perfection, whose crown would be so much the greater, as their virtue would be more difficult, amid the contagion of bad example. In the discourses which this saint made to his monks, a rigorous self-examination upon all their actions, every evening, was a practice which he strongly inculcated.[26] In an excellent sermon which he made to his disciples, recorded by St. Athanasius,[27] he pathetically exhorts them to contemn the whole world for heaven, to spend every day as if they knew it to be the last of their lives, having death always before their eyes, continually to advance in fervor, and to be always armed against the assaults of Satan, whose weakness he shows at length. He extols the efficacy of the sign of the cross in chasing him, and dissipating his illusions, and lays down rules for the discernment of spirits, the first of which is, that the devil leaves in the soul impressions of fear, sadness, confusion, and disturbance. {171} St. Antony performed the visitation of his monks a little before his death, which he foretold them with his last instructions, but no tears could move him to die among them. It appears from St. Athanasius, that the Christians had learned from the pagans their custom of embalming the bodies of the dead, which abuse, as proceeding from vanity and sometimes superstition, St. Antony had often condemned: this he would prevent, and ordered that his body should be buried in the earth, as the patriarchs were, and privately, on his mountain, by his two disciples Diacarius and Amathas, who had remained with him the last fifteen years, to serve him in his remote cell in his old age. He hastened back to that solitude, and some time after fell sick: he repeated to these two disciples his orders for their burying his body secretly in that place, adding; "In the day of the resurrection, I shall receive it incorruptible from the hand of Christ." He ordered them to give one of his sheep-skins, with a cloak[28] in which he lay, to the bishop Athanasius, as a public testimony of his being united in faith and communion with that holy prelate; to give his other sheep-skin to the bishop Serapion; and to keep for themselves his sackcloth. He added; "Farewell, my children, Antony is departing, and will be no longer with you." At these words they embraced him, and he, stretching out his feet, without any other sign calmly ceased to breathe. His death happened in the year 355, probably on the 17th of January, on which the most ancient Martyrologies name him, and which the Greek empire kept as a holyday soon after his death. He was one hundred and five years old. From his youth to that extreme old age, he always maintained the same fervor in his holy exercises: age to the last never made him change his diet (except in the use of a little oil) nor his manner of clothing; yet he lived without sickness, his sight was not impaired, his teeth were only worn, and not one was lost or loosened. The two disciples interred him according to his directions. About the year 561, his body[29] was discovered, in the reign of Justinian, and with great solemnity translated to Alexandria, thence it was removed to Constantinople, and is now at Vienne in France. Bollandus gives us an account of many miracles wrought by his intercession; particularly in what manner the distemper called the Sacred Fire, since that time St. Antony's Fire, miraculously ceased through his patronage, when it raged violently in many parts of Europe, in the eleventh century. {172} A most sublime gift of heavenly contemplation and prayer was the fruit of this great saint's holy retirement. Whole nights seemed to him short in those exercises, and when the rising sun in the morning seemed to him too soon to call him from his knees to his manual labor, or other employments, he would lament that the incomparable sweetness which he enjoyed, in the more perfect freedom with which his heart was taken up in heavenly contemplation in the silent watching of the night, should be interrupted or abated. But the foundation of his most ardent charity, and that sublime contemplation by which his soul soared in noble and lofty flights above all earthly things, was laid in the purity and disengagement of his affections, the contempt of the world, a most profound humility, and the universal mortification of his senses and of the powers of his soul. Hence flowed that constant tranquillity and serenity of his mind, which was the best proof of a perfect mastery of his passions. St. Athanasius observes of him, that after thirty years spent in the closest solitude, "he appeared not to others with a sullen or savage, but with a most obliging sociable air."[30] A heart that is filled with inward peace, simplicity, goodness, and charity, is a stranger to a lowering or contracted look. The main point in Christian mortification is the humiliation of the heart, one of its principal ends being the subduing of the passions. Hence, true virtue always increases the sweetness and gentleness of the mind, though this is attended with an invincible constancy, and an inflexible firmness in every point of duty. That devotion or self-denial is false or defective which betrays us into pride or uncharitableness; and whatever makes us sour, morose, or peevish, makes us certainly worse, and instead of begetting in us a nearer resemblance of the divine nature, gives us a strong tincture of the temper of devils. Footnotes: 1. St. Athanasius commends St. Antony's love of reading, both when he lived with his father, (p. 795, B.) and afterwards when he lived alone, (p. 797, C.) which we cannot naturally understand of his hearing others read, especially when he was alone; therefore, when St. Athanasius says, (p. 795, A.) that in his childhood he never applied himself to the study of letters, [Greek: grammata mathein], fearing the danger of falling into had company at school, he seems to mean only Greek letters, then the language of all the learned; for he must have learned at home the Egyptian alphabet. In the same manner we are to understand Evagrius and others, who relate, that a certain philosopher expressing his surprise how St. Antony could employ his time, being deprived of the pleasure of reading, the saint told him that the universe was his book. (Socr. l. 4, c. 23, Rosweide, Vit. Patr. l. 6, c. 4, St. Nilus, l. 4, p. 60.) Nevertheless, St. Austin imagined that St. Antony could read no alphabet, and learned by heart and meditated on the scriptures only by hearing them read by others (S. Aug. de Doctr. Chr. pr. p. 3, t. 3.) See Rosweide, Not. in Vit. S. Antonii. Bolland. 17 Jan. p. 119, §64, Tillem. note 1, p. 666. 2. Matt. xix. 21. 3. An aura was one hundred cubits of land. See Lexicon Constantini. Fleury, l. 8, p. 418. 4. Ibid. vi. 34. 5. [Greek: Parthenôn], as St. Athanasius calls it, t. 2, p. 796, ed. Ben. He mentions that St. Antony, long after, paid her a visit, when she was very old, and superior or mistress of many virgins, [Greek: hathêgoumenên allôs parthenôn], n. 54. p. 837. 6. Orig. lib. 5, p. 264. 7. His first monastery was situated near the confines of Upper and Middle Egypt: it at first consisted of scattered cells. To visit some of these brethren, he is mentioned by St. Athanasius (Vit. p. 461) to have crossed the Arsinotic canal, extremely infested with crocodiles. This is sometimes called his monastery near the river, and was situated not far from Aphroditopolis, the lower and more ancient city of that name, in Heptanomis, or Middle Egypt. St. Athanasius seems to place it in Thebais, or Upper Egypt, because it was near the borders, and the boundaries of Upper Egypt were extended much lower by those who divided Egypt only into two parts, the Upper and the Lower; as Sozomen, l. 2, c. 23, and others, frequently did. St. Antony, finding this solitude grow too public, and not bearing the distraction of continual visits, he travelled up the river to seek a more remote wilderness; but after mounting a little way, while he sat on the bank waiting to see a boat pass by, he changed his design, and instead of advancing southward, he went with certain Saracen merchants to the East, and in three days, doubtless on a camel, arrived at the great mountain towards the Red Sea, where he spent the latter years of his life; yet he frequently visited his first monastery, near Aphroditopolis. St. Hilarion going from this latter to St. Antony's great monastery on the mountain, performed that journey in three days, on camels, which a deacon, named Baisan, let to those who desired to visit St. Antony. This latter, near which the saint died, always continued a famous pilgrimage. Pispir was the monastery of St. Macarius, but is sometimes called St. Antony's, who often visited it. This was situated on the Nile, in Thebais, thirty measures or [Greek: sêmeia] from St. Antony's mountain, according to Palladius, (Laus. c. 63.) This some understand of Roman miles, others of Egyptian schæni of thirty furlongs each; thirty schæni are nine hundred stadia, or one hundred and thirteen miles. Pispir therefore seems not to have been very far from Aphroditopolis. See Kocher, (comment. In fastos Abyssinorum,) in the journal of Bern, ad an. 1761, t. 1, p. 160 and 169. A monastery, of which St. Antony is titular saint, still subsists a little above the ancient city of Aphroditon on the Nile. It is now called Der-mar-Antinious-el-Bahr, that is, The monastery of Antony at the river. See Pocock, p. 70, and the map prefixed to that part of his travels. Travelling from hence one day's journey up the river, then turning from the south towards the east, over sandy deserts, and a chain of high mountains, in which springs of water, in other parts very rare, are here and there found, and camels travel for one hundred miles, we arrive at St. Antony's great monastery, about six or seven hours journey from the Red Sea. See Pocock, ib. p. 128. Granger, Relation du Voyage, &c., p. 107. Nouv. Memoires des Missions, t. 5, p. 136. Vanslebius, Nouv. Relat. pp. 299 and 309; and Maillet. Descr. de 'Egypte, p. 320. The Grotto of St. Paul is shown not very far from this great monastery; yet the road wing [sic] round the mountains, and a great way about it, seems to travellers as a great distance from it. 8. St. Athan. Vit. Anton. n. 45, p. 830. 9. P. 814. 10. P. 823, ed. Ben. 11. Rosweide, l. 3, c. 129. Cotelier, &c. 12. S. Nilus, ep. 24. Cotelier, Apoth. Patr. p. 340. Rosweide, Vit. Patr. l. 3, c. 105, l. 5, c. 7. 13. Cassian, Collat. c. 31. 14. S. Athan. n. 82, p. 857. S. Chrys. Hom. 8, in Matt. S. Hier. ep. {}6. Sozom. l. 6, c. 5. 15. S. Athan. n. 68, 69, p. 847. 16. Ibid. n. 85. p. 859. 17. Ibid. n. 80, p. 855. 18. N. 77, p. 858. 19. N. 86, p. 860. 20. Bibl. Patr. Colon. t. 4, p. 26. See S. Antonii. M. Epistolæ 20. curâ Abr. Eckellens. Paris, 1641. But only the above-mentioned seven letters can be regarded as genuine, except the discourses preserved by St. Athanasius in his life. 21. Ep. 2, ad Arsinoitas. 22. Ib. 23. Maij. t. 3, p. 355. 24. That under his name in Abraham Eckellensis is not of so high a pedigree. A large body of the monks of St. Basil in the East, since the seventh century, take the name of the Order of St. Antony, but retain the rule of St. Basil, comprised in his ascetic writings; and observe the same fasts, and other exercises, with all the other monks of the East, who are called of the order of St. Basil; which even the Maronites follow; though Tillemont denies it by mistake. 25. Rosweide, Vit. Patr. l. 5, c. 8. Abr. Eckellens. in Vit. S. Ant. p. 106. Cotel. p. 344. Mart. Coptor. 26. S. Athan. n. 55, p. 858. 27. N. 16 & 43. 28. The Ependytes of St. Antony, mentioned by St. Athanasius, n. 46, p. 831, has much embarrassed the critics: it seems to have been a cloak of white wool. It is clear, from St. Athanasius, that St. Antony's inner garment was a hair-cloth, over which he wore a cloak made of sheep-skin. 29. This translation of his relics to Alexandria, though doubted of by some Protestants, is incontestably confirmed by Victor of Tunone, (Chron. p. 11, in Scalig. Thesauro,) who lived then in banishment at Canope, only twelve miles from Alexandria; also, by St. Isidore of Seville, in the same age, Bede. Usuard, &c. They were removed to Constantinople when the Saracens made themselves masters of Egypt, about the year 635. (pee Bollandus, pp. 162, 1134.) They were brought to Vienne in Dauphine, by Joselin, a nobleman of that country, whom the emperor of Constantinople had gratified with that rich present, about the year 1070. These relics were deposited in the church of La Motte S. Didier, not far from Vienne, then a Benedictin priory belonging to the abbey of Mont-Majour near Arles, but now an independent abbey of regular canons of St. Antony. In 1089, a pestilential erysipelas distemper, called the Sacred Fire, swept off great numbers in most provinces of France; public prayers and processions were ordered against this scourge; at length it pleased God to grant many miraculous cures of this dreadful distemper, to those who implored his mercy trough the intercession of St. Antony, especially before his relics; the church in which they were deposited was resorted to by great numbers of pilgrims, and his patronage was implored over the whole kingdom against this disease. A nobleman near Vienne, named Gaston, and his son Girond, devoted themselves and their estate to found and serve an hospital near this priory, for the benefit of the poor that were afflicted with this distemper: seven others joined them in their charitable attendance on the sick, whence a confraternity of laymen who served this hospital took its rise, and continued till Boniface VIII. converted the Benedictin priory into an abbey, which he bestowed on those hospitaller brothers, and giving them the religious rule of regular canons of St. Austin, declared the abbot general of this new order, called Regular Canons of St. Antony. An abbey in Paris, which belongs to this order, is called Little St. Antony's, by which name it is distinguished from the great Cistercian nunnery of St. Antony. The general or abbot of St. Antony's, in Viennois, enjoys a yearly revenue of about forty thousand livres according to Piganiol, Descr. de la Fr. t. 4, p. 249, and Dom Beaunier, Rec. Abbayes de Fr. p. 982. The superiors of other houses of this order retain the name of commanders, and the houses are called commaranderies, as when they were hospitallers; so that the general is the only abbot. See Bollandus, Beaunict, F. Longueval, Hist. de l'Eglise de France, l. 22, t. 8, p. 16, and Drouet, in the late edition of Moreri's Hist. Diction V Antoine, from memoirs communicated by M. Bordet, superior of the convent of this order at Paris. 30. S. Athan. n. 67, p. 847, & n. 73, p. 850. SS. SPEUSIPPUS, ELEUSIPPUS, AND MELEUSIPPUS, MARTYRS. THEY were three twin brothers, who, with Leonilla their grandmother, glorified God by an illustrious martyrdom in Cappadocia, probably in the reign of Marcus Aurelius. The most ancient acts of their martyrdom, published by Rosweide and Bollandus, place it in that country, and their relics were brought from the East to Langres in France, while the first race of French kings filled the throne. A copy of the acts of their martyrdom, which was sent from Langres by one Varnahair, to St. Ceraunus, bishop of Paris, in the beginning of the seventh century, by an evident mistake or falsification, affirms their martyrdom to have happened at Langres; by which false edition, Ado, and many others, were led into the same mistake. From certain ancient writings kept at Langres, mentioned by Gualtherot in his Anastasius of Langres, Chatelain proves that these relics, with the head of St. Mammes, a martyr, also of Cappadocia, were given by the emperor Zeno to a nobleman of Langres, who had served him in his wars. By him this sacred treasure was deposited in the church of Langres, in the time of the bishop Aprunculus, in 490, to be a protection against devils. The cathedral of Langres, which bears the title of Saint Mammes, is possessed of the head of that martyr in a rich shrine. A brass tomb before the high altar, is said to have contained the bodies of the three children who were thrown into the furnace at Babylon, mentioned in the book of Daniel: but Chatelain thinks it belonged to the three martyrs whose bodies were given by the emperor Zeno to the count of Langres. The church called of St. {173} Geome, or Sancti Gemini, that is, the twins, situated two miles from Langres, belongs to a priory of regular canons, and is famous out of devotion to those saints, though great part of their relics was translated by Hariolf, duke of Burgundy, and his brother Erlolf, bishop of Langres, into Suabia, and remains in the noble collegiate church of St. Guy, or St. Vitus, at El{}ange. These holy martyrs are secondary patrons of the diocese of Langres, and titular saints of many churches in France and Germany. See Chatelain Notes on Jan. 17, p. 313. ST. SULPICIUS THE PIOUS, B. ARCHBISHOP OF BOURGES. THE church of Bourges in France was founded by St. Ursin, who was sent from Rome to preach the faith in Gaul. St. Gregory of Tours, in his history, places his mission in the middle of the third century,[1] yet in his book on the Glory of Confessors,[2] he tells us that he was ordained by the disciples of the apostles, and governed many years the church of Bourges, which he had planted. He was interred in a common burial-place in a field without the city; but his remains were translated thence by St. Germanus, bishop of Paris, and abbot of St. Symphorian's,[3] and by Probianus, bishop of Bourges, and deposited in the church of St. Symphorian, now called St. Ursin's.[4] This saint is honored in the Roman Martyrology on the 9th of November; at Lisieux, and some other places, on the 29th of December. Among the most eminent of his successors, two are called Sulpicius, and both surnamed Pious; the first, who is sometimes called the Severe, sat from the year 584 to 591, and his relics are enshrined in the church of St. Ursin.[5] His name was inserted in the Roman Martyrology by Baronius, on the 29th of January, and occurs in other more ancient calendars.[6] Footnotes: 1. S. Gr. Tur. Hist. l. 1, c. 28. 2. L. de Gl. Conf. c. 80. 3. Fortunat. in Vitâ S. German Paris 4. Gallia Christ. nova, t. 2, p. 4. 5. See St. Greg. Turon. and Gallia Christ. nov. t. 2, p. 15. 6. See Benedict XIV. Litter. Apost. præfix. Martyr. Rom. §46, p. 33. ST. SULPICIUS II., ARCHBISHOP OF BOURGES, SURNAMED LE DEBONNAIRE, IS commemorated on this day in the Roman Martyrology. He was descended of a noble family in Berry, and educated in learning and piety. His large patrimony he gave to the church and poor; and being ordained priest, served king Clothaire II. in quality of almoner and chaplain in his armies; and on a time when he lay dangerously ill, restored him to his health by prayer and fasting. In 624 he succeeded St. Austregesilus, commonly called St. Outrille, in the see of Bourges. He reformed discipline, converted all the Jews in his diocese, and employed his whole time in prayer and laborious functions, chiefly in the instruction of the poor. He died in 644. Among the letters of St. Desiderius of Cahors, we have one which he sent to our saint with this title, "To the holy patriarch, Sulpicius;"[1] and several of our saint to him.[2] The famous monastery which bears his name at Bourges, is said to have been founded by him under the invocation of the Blessed Virgin; it now belongs to the congregation of St. Maur, and is enriched with part of his relics, and with a portion of the blood of St. Stephen, who is the titular saint of the stately cathedral. A bone of one of the arms {174} of our saint, is kept in the famous parochial church in Paris, which is dedicated to God under his invocation. See his ancient life in Bolland. and Mab. sæc. 2, Ben. Gallia Christ. nova, t. 2, p. 18. Footnotes: 1. Apud Canis. Lect. Ant. t. 5, & Bibl. Patr. t. 8, l. 1, ep. 12. 2. Ib. l. 2. ST. MILGITHE, V. THUS Dom Menard writes the name of this saint, who by Capgrave is called Mildgyda, by Josselin, Milvida, and by Thomas of Ely, in a fragment of the life of St. Andry, quoted by Mabillon, Milgrida. Wilson testifies that her feast is mentioned on this day, in an ancient MS. English Martyrology; though Menard places it on the 26th of February. Her father, Merowald, was son of Penda, and brother of Peoda, Wulfher, and Ethelred, kings of Mercia. Her mother, Domneva, was daughter of Ermenred, who was brother to Erconbert, king of Kent, father of St. Ercongata, who died a nun at Farmoutier, in France, under the discipline of St. Aubierge, her aunt. Her brother Meresin died young, in the odor of sanctity. Her elder sisters, SS. Mildred and Milburge, are very famous in the English calendars. St. Milgithe imitated their illustrious example, and contemning the fading pleasures and delights of the world, retired into the monastery of Estrey, built by Egbert, king of Kent, not far from Canterbury, and having served God in the heroic practice of all Christian virtues, died happily about the close of the seventh century. See Menard in Martyrol. Bened. Wilson's English Martyr. Capgrave and Bolland. t. 2, p. 176. ST. NENNIUS, OR NENNIDHIUS, ABBOT. DESPISING the vanities of the world, though of the race of the monarchs of Ireland, from his youth he made the science of the cross of Christ the sole object of his ambition; and to engrave in his heart the lessons which our divine Redeemer taught by that adorable mystery, was the centre of all his desires. Having passed many years, first in the school of St. Fiechus, archbishop of Leinster, and afterwards in the celebrated monastery of Clonard, in the province of Meath, under its holy founder St Finian, he retired into the isle of Inis-muighesamb, in the lake of Erne, in the province of Ulster. Here, in process of time, he became the director of many souls in the paths of Christian perfection, founded a great monastery, and, on account of his eminent sanctity, and the number of illustrious disciples whom he left behind him, is called one of the twelve apostles of Ireland. He flourished in the sixth century, and has been honored in Ireland among the saints. F. Colgan was not able to meet with any acts of his life, though he is mentioned in the lives of several other Irish saints. A church in the isle of the lake, formed by the river Erne, is dedicated to God under his invocation. {175} JANUARY XVIII. ST. PETER'S CHAIR AT ROME. See Phæbeus, de Cathedrâ in quâ S. Petrus Romæ sedit, et de antiquitate et præstantiâ solemnitatis Cathedræ Romanæ. Romæ, 1666, 8vo.; also Chatelain, Notes on the Martyrology, p. 326. ST. PETER having triumphed over the devil in the East, pursued him to Rome in the person of Simon Magus. He who had formerly trembled at the voice of a poor maid, now feared not the very throne of idolatry and superstition. The capital of the empire of the world, and the centre of impiety, called for the zeal of the prince of the apostles. God had established the Roman empire, and extended its dominion beyond that of any former monarchy, for the more easy propagation of his gospel. Its metropolis was of the greatest importance for this enterprise. St. Peter took that province upon himself; and, repairing to Rome, there preached the faith and established his Episcopal chair, whose _successors_ the bishops of Rome have been accounted in all ages. That St. Peter founded that church by his _preaching_, is expressly asserted by Caius,[1] a priest of Rome under pope Zephyrinus; who relates also that his body was then on the Vatican-hill, and that of his fellow-laborer, St. Paul, on the Ostian road. That he and St. Paul planted the faith at Rome, and were both crowned with martyrdom at the same time, is affirmed by Dionysius,[2] bishop of Corinth, in the second age. St. Irenæus,[3] who lived in the same age, calls the church at Rome "The greatest and most ancient church, founded by the two glorious apostles, Peter and Paul." Eusebius, in several places,[4] mentions St. Peter's being at Rome, and the several important transactions of this apostle in that city. Not to mention Origen,[5] Hegesippus,[6] Arnobius,[7] St. Ambrose,[8], St. Austin,[9] St. Jerom,[10] St. Optatus,[11] Orosius,[12] and others on the same subject.[13] St. Cyprian[14] calls Rome the _chair_ of St. Peter, (as Theodoret[15] calls it his _throne_,) which the general councils and ecclesiastical writers, through every age, and on every occasion, repeat. That St. Peter at least preached in Rome, founded that church, and died there by martyrdom under Nero, are facts the most incontestable by the testimony of all writers of different countries, who lived near that time; persons of unquestionable veracity, and who could not but be informed of the truth, in a point so interesting, and of its own nature so public and notorious, as to leave them no possibility of a mistake. This is also attested by monuments of every kind; also by the prerogatives, rights, and privileges, which that church enjoyed from those early ages; in consequence of this title. It was an ancient custom, as cardinal Baronius[16] and Thomassin[17] show by many examples, observed by churches, to keep an annual festival of the {176} consecration of their bishops. The feast of the chair of St. Peter is found in ancient Martyrologies, as in one under the name of St. Jerom, at Esternach, copied in the time of St. Willibrord, in 720. Christians justly celebrate the founding of this mother-church, the centre of Catholic communion, in thanksgiving to God for his mercies on his church, and to implore his future blessings. * * * * * Christ has taught us {by} the divine model of prayer which he has delivered to us, that we are bound to recommend to him, before all other things, the exaltation of his own honor and glory, and to beg that the kingdom of his holy grace and love be planted in all hearts. If we love God above all things, and with our whole hearts, or have any true charity for our neighbor, this will be the centre of all our desires, that God be loved and served by all his creatures, and that he be glorified in the most perfect manner, in our own souls. By placing this at the head of our requests, we shall most strongly engage God to crown all our just and holy desires. As one of his greatest mercies to his church, we must earnestly beseech him to raise up in it zealous pastors, eminently replenished with his Spirit, with which he animated his apostles. Footnotes: 1. Apud Eus. l. 2, c. 24, alias 25. 2. Ibid. 3. L. 3, c. 3. 4. L. 2, c. 13 & 15, &c. 5. Ib. l. 3, c. 1. 6. L. de. Excid. Hier. {}. 7. L. 3. 8. Ser. de Basilicis. 9. L. de Hæres. c. 1, &c. 10. L. 17, ad Marcell. 11. Adv. Parm. 12. L. 7, c. 1. 13. The general opinion with Eusebius, St. Jerom, and the Roman calendar, fixes the first arrival of St. Peter at Rome in the second year of Claudius. If this date be true, the apostle returned into the East soon after; for he was imprisoned in Judæa, by Agrippa, in the year of Christ 43. Lactantius does not mention this first coming of St. Peter to Rome, but only the second, saying, that he came to Rome in the reign of Nero, who put him and St. Paul to death. L. de Mort. Persec. n. 2. 14. Ep. 55, ad. Cornel. pap. 15. L. 2, c. 17. 16. Notæ in Martyr. 17. Tr. des Fêtes, l. 2, c. 10. SS. PAUL, AND THIRTY-SIX COMPANIONS, MM. IN EGYPT. From their authentic acts in Ruinart, p. 624. IN Egypt, thirty-seven Christian noblemen, all persons of high birth and plentiful fortunes, but richer in the gifts of grace, entered into a zealous confederacy to propagate the gospel throughout the country. Their leader and head was one Paul, a true imitator of the great apostle whose name he bore. They divided themselves into four several bands: Paul and nine others went eastward: Recombus, with eight more, towards the north: Thoonas, with the like number, to the south: and Papias, with the remaining eight, to the west. They labored zealously in extending the kingdom of Christ on every side, planting the faith, instructing the docile, and purifying the souls of penitents who confessed their sins. But the greatest part of the inhabitants of that great kingdom loved darkness rather than light. The servants of God were treated with all manner of injuries, apprehended, and laid in irons. The governor, alarmed at the news of their enterprise, sent orders for their being brought before him from different parts of the kingdom. He employed both promises and threats to compel them to sacrifice. Paul answered, in the name of them all, that it was better for them to die, saying: "Do not spare us." The judge condemned them all to death: those who went to the east and south, to be burned; those from the north, to be beheaded; and those from the west to be crucified. But he was affrighted and surprised beyond expression to see with what joy and courage this brave army marched out, and bowed their heads to death. They suffered on the 18th of January, but in what year it is not mentioned in their acts. ST. PRISCA, V.M. SHE was a noble Roman lady, and after many torments finished her triumph by the sword, about the year 275. Her relics are preserved in the ancient church which bears her name in Rome, and gives title in a cardinal. {177} She is mentioned in the sacramentary of St. Gregory, and in almost all western Martyrologies. The acts of her martyrdom deserve no regard: St. Paul, in the last chapter of his epistle to the Romans, salutes Aquila, a person of Pontus, of Jewish extraction, and Priscilla, whom he and all churches thanked, because they had exposed themselves for his sake. He mentions the church which assembled in their house, which he attributes to no other among the twenty-five Christians whom he saluted, and were then at Rome. This agrees with the immemorial tradition at Rome, that St. Peter consecrated an altar, and baptized there in an urn of stone, which is now kept in the church of St. Prisca. Aquila and Priscilla are still honored in this church, as titular patrons with our saint, and a considerable part of their relics lies under the altar. Aquila and Priscilla were tent-makers, and lived at Corinth when they were banished from Rome under Claudius: she who is called Priscilla in the Acts of the Apostles, and Epistles to the Roman, and first to the Corinthians, is named Prisca in the second to Timothy. See the Roman Martyrology on the 18th of January and the 8th of July; also Chatelain, not. p. 333. ST. DEICOLUS, ABBOT. IN IRISH DICHUL, CALLED BY THE FRENCH, ST. DEEL, OR DIEY HE quitted Ireland, his native country, with St. Columban, and lived with him, first in the kingdom of the East Angles, and afterwards at Luxeu; but when his master quitted France, he founded the abbey of Lutra, or Lure, in the diocese of Besanzon, which was much enriched by king Clothaire II.[1] Amidst his austerities, the joy and peace of his soul appeared in his countenance. St. Columban once said to him in his youth: "Deicolus, why are you always smiling?" He answered in simplicity: "Because no one can take my God from me." He died in the seventh century. See his life and the history of his miracles in F. Chifflet, and Mabillon, Acta Bened. t. 2, p. 103, both written by a monk of Lure in the tenth century, as the authors of l'Hist. Lit. de la France take notice, t. 6, p. 410. By moderns, this saint is called Deicola; but in ancient MSS. Deicolus. In Franche-comté his name Deel is frequently given in baptism, and Deele to persons of the female sex. Footnotes: 1. The abbot of Lure was formerly a prince of the empire. At present the abbey is united to that of Morbac in Alsace. Lure is situated three leagues from Laxeu, which stands near mount Vosge, two leagues from Lorraine towards the south. ST. ULFRID, OR WOLFRED, BISHOP AND MARTYR. HE was an Englishman of great learning and virtue; and preached the faith, first in Germany; afterwards in Sweden, under the pious king Olas II., who first took the title of king of Sweden; for his predecessors had only been styled kings of Upsal. The good bishop converted many to Christ; till in the year 1028, while he was preaching against the idol Tarstans or Thor, and hewing it down with a hatchet, he was slain by the pagans. See Adam of Bremen, who wrote his most faithful History of the Church in the North, in 1080, l. 2 c. 44. Albert Kranxius, l. 4. Metrop. c. 8. Baron. ad an. 1028, n. 10. {178} JANUARY XIX. SS. MARIS, MARTHA, AUDIFAX, AND ABACHUM MM. Abridged from their acts, concerning which see Bollandus, who allows them, Tillem. t. 4, p. 673; and Chatelain, notes, p. 339. A.D. 270. MARIS, a nobleman of Persia, with his wife Martha, and two sons, Audifax and Abachum, being converted to the faith, distributed his fortune among the poor, as the primitive Christians did at Jerusalem, and came to Rome to visit the tombs of the apostles. The emperor Aurelian then persecuted the church, and by his order a great number of Christians were shut up in the amphitheatre, and shot to death with arrows, and their bodies burnt. Our saints gathered and buried their ashes with respect; for which they were apprehended, and after many torments under the governor Marcianus, Maris and his two sons were beheaded; and Martha drowned, thirteen miles from Rome, at a place now called Santa Ninfa.[1] Their relics were found at Rome in 1590. They are mentioned with distinction in all the western Martyrologies from the sacramentary of St. Gregory. Their relics are kept principally at Rome; part in the church of St. Adrian, part in that of St. Charles, and in that of St. John of Calybite. Eginhart, sole-in-law and secretary of Charlemagne, deposited a portion of these relics, which had been sent him from Rome, in the abbey of Selghenstadt, of which he was the founder, in the diocese of Mentz. * * * * * The martyrs and confessors triumphed over the devil by prayer; by this, poor and weak as they were, they were rendered invincible, by engaging Omnipotence itself to be their comfort, strength, and protection. If the art of praying well be the art of living well, according to the received maxim of the fathers and masters of a spiritual life,[2] nothing is certainly of greater importance, than for us to learn this heavenly art of conversing with God in the manner we ought. We admire the wonderful effects which this exercise produced in the saints, who by it were disengaged from earthly ties and made spiritual and heavenly, perfect angels on earth; but we experience nothing of this in ourselves. Prayer was in them the channel of all graces, the means of attaining all virtues, and all the treasures of heaven. In us it is fruitless: the reason is plain; for the promises of Christ cannot fail: we ask, and receive not, because we ask amiss. Footnotes: 1. Ninfa, or Nympha, in the corrupted ages of the Latin tongue, signifies water. In this place are several pools called by the Italians from these martyrs, Santa Ninfa. See Chatelain, p. 340, and Du Cange. 2. Vere novit recta vivere, qui recti novit orare. Inter Serm. S. Augustini, Sermon 55, in Appendix, ed. Ben. t. 5, p. 101. {179} ST. CANUTUS, KING OF DENMARK, M. From his life, faithfully written by �lnoth, a monk of Canterbury, who had lived twenty-four years in Denmark, and wrote in 1105. It was printed at Copenhagen, in 1602. See also Saxo Grammaticus, the most elegant and judicious of the Danish historians. A.D. 1086. ST. CANUTUS, or KNUT, the fourth of that name, king of Denmark, was natural son of Swein III., whose great uncle Canutus had reigned in England. Swein having no lawful issue, took care of the education of Canutus, who being endowed with excellent qualities both of mind and body, answered perfectly well the care of his preceptors and governors. It is hard to say, whether he excelled more in courage, or in conduct and skill in war; but his singular piety perfectly eclipsed all his other endowments. He scoured the seas of pirates, and subdued several neighboring provinces which infested Denmark with their incursions. The kingdom of Denmark was elective till the year 1660; wherefore, when Swein died, many pitched upon our saint, whose eminent virtues best qualified him for the throne; but the majority, fearing his martial spirit, preferred his eldest natural brother Harald, the seventh king of that name, who, for his stupidity and vices, was commonly called the Slothful. Canutus retired into Sweden to king Halstan, who received him with the greatest marks of kindness and esteem; but the king could never induce him to undertake any expedition against Denmark; on the contrary, the Christian hero employed all his power and interest in the service of his country. Harald dying after two years' reign, Canutus was called to succeed him. Denmark had received the Christian faith long before; some say in 826, but wanted a zealous hand at the helm, to put the finishing stroke to that good work. St. Canutus seems to have been pitched upon by providence for this purpose. He began his reign by a successful war against the troublesome barbarous enemies of the state, and by planting the faith in the conquered provinces of Courland, Samogitia, and Livonia. Amidst the glory of his victories, he humbly prostrated himself at the foot of the crucifix, laying there his diadem, and offering himself and his kingdom to the King of kings. After having provided for its peace and safety, and enlarged its territories, he married Eltha, or Alice, daughter of Robert, earl of Flanders, by whom he had a pious son, St. Charles, surnamed the Good, afterwards also earl of Flanders. His next concern was to reform abuses at home. For this purpose, he enacted severe, but necessary laws, for the strict administration of justice, and repressed the violence and tyranny of the great, without respect of persons. He countenanced and honored holy men, granted many privileges and immunities to the clergy, to enhance the people's esteem of them; and omitted nothing to convince them of their obligation to provide for their subsistence by the payment of tithes. His charity and tenderness towards his subjects made him study by all possible ways to ease them of their burdens, and make them a happy people. He showed a royal magnificence in building and adorning churches, and gave the crown which he wore, of exceeding great value, to the church of Roschild, in Zealand, his capital city, and the place of his residence, where the kings of Denmark are yet buried. He chastised his body with fasting, discipline, and hair-cloths. Prayer was his assiduous exercise. When William the Conqueror had made himself master of England, Canutus sent forces to assist the vanquished; but these troops finding no one willing to {180} join them, were easily defeated in the year 1069. Some time after, being invited by the conquered English, he raised an army to invade this island, and expel the Normans; but through the treacherous practices of his brother Olas, or Olaus, was obliged to wait so long on the coast, that his troops deserted him. The pious king, having always in view the service of God, and judging this a proper occasion to induce his people to pay tithes to their pastors, he proposed to them either to pay a heavy fine, by way of punishment for their desertion, or submit to the law of tithes for the pastors of the church. Their aversion to the latter made them choose the tax, to the great mortification of the king, who, hoping they would change their resolution, ordered it to be levied with rigor. But they, being incensed at the severity of the collectors, rebelled. St. Canutus retired for safety into the isle of Fionia, and was hindered from joining his loyal troops by the treachery of Blanco, an officer, who, to deceive him, assured his majesty that the rebels were returned to their duty. The king went to the church of St. Alban, the martyr, to perform his devotions, and return God thanks for that happy event. This the rebels being informed of by Blanco, they surrounded the church with him at their head. In the mean time the holy king, perceiving the danger that threatened his life, confessed his sins at the foot of the altar, with great tranquillity and resignation, and received the holy communion. His guards defended the church doors, and Blanco was slain by them. The rebels threw in bricks and stones, through the windows, by which they beat down the shrines of certain relics of St. Alban and St. Oswald, which St. Canutus had brought over from England. The saint, stretching out his arms before the altar, fervently recommended his soul into the hands of his Creator: in which posture he was wounded with a javelin, darted through the window, and fell a victim to Christ. His brother Benedict, and seventeen others, were slain with him, on the 10th of July, 1086, as �lnoth, a contemporary author, testifies, who has specified the date of all the events with the utmost exactness. His wicked brother Olas succeeded him in the kingdom. God punished the people during eight years and three months of his reign with a dreadful famine, and other calamities; and attested the sanctity of the martyr, by many miraculous cures of the sick at his tomb. For which reason his relics were taken up out of their obscure sepulchre, and honorably entombed towards the end of the reign of Olas. His successor, Eric III., a most religious prince, restored piety and religion, with equal courage and success, and sent ambassadors to Rome, with proofs of the miracles performed, and obtained from the pope a declaration authorizing the veneration of St. Canutus, the proto-martyr of Denmark. Upon this occasion a most solemn translation of his relics, which were put in a most costly shrine, was performed, at which �lnoth, our historian, was present. He adds, that the first preachers of the faith in Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, were English priests; that the Danes then zealously embraced the Christian religion, but that the Swedes still continued more obstinate, among whom Eschil, an Englishman, received the crown of martyrdom, while he was preaching Christ to certain savage tribes. ST. HENRY, ARCHBISHOP OF UPSAL, M. HE was an Englishman, and preached the faith in the North with his countryman, cardinal Nicholas Breakspear, the apostle of Norway, and legate of the holy see, afterwards pope Adrian IV., by whom he was raised to this see, in 1148. St. Eric, or Henry, (for it is the same name,) was {181} then the holy king of Sweden.[1] Our saint, after having converted several provinces, went to preach in Finland, which that king had lately conquered. He deserved to be styled the apostle of that country, but fell a martyr in it, being stoned to death at the instigation of a barbarous murderer, whom he endeavored to reclaim by censures, in 1151. His tomb was in great veneration at Upsal, till his ashes were scattered on the change of religion, in the sixteenth century. See John Magnus, l. 1, Vit. Pout. Upsal. Olaus Magnus, l. 4. Bollandus, and chiefly his life published by Benzelius. Monum. Suec. p. 33. Footnotes: 1. Stiernman, in his discourse, "On the State of Learning among the ancient Swedes," observes, that Sweden was chiefly converted to Christianity by English Saxon missionaries. The principal among these were Ansgar, Sigfrid, Roduard, Richolf, Edward, Eskil, David, and Henric, as he gives their names. In the history of the bishops and archbishops of Upsal, published by Benzelius in his Monum. Suec. p 37, the first whose name is recorded is Everin, whom Benzelius supposes to be the person whom St. Sigfrid consecrated to this see. He seems to have been one of his English colleagues. Stephen, the sixth bishop of Upsal, was the first archbishop. See the life of St. Sigfrid, and Benzelius's notes on the catalogue of the bishops of Upsol, p. 186. ST. WULSTAN, BISHOP OF WORCESTER, C. HE was a native of Icentum, in Warwickshire. In his youth, perceiving himself somewhat touched with wanton love on seeing a woman dance, he withdrew into a thicket hard by, and, lying prostrate, bewailed his fault before God, with very great contrition. And he was endowed from that time, by Almighty God, with the gift of such a constant watchfulness over his senses, as prevented his being ever more annoyed with the like temptations. He laid the foundation of his studies and education in the monastery of Evesham, but completed the same at Peterborough. His parents having by mutual consent taken the monastic habit at Worcester; his father, Athelstan, in the great monastery of men, and his mother, Wulfgeva, in a nunnery; St. Wulstan put himself under the direction of Brithege, bishop of Worcester, by whom he was advanced to the holy orders of priesthood. In this station he redoubled his ardor for prayer, and practised greater austerities in the world, than monks in their convents. At first, he allowed himself the use of flesh; but being one day distracted in saying mass, by the smell of meat that was roasting in the kitchen, he bound himself by vow never more to eat any flesh. Not long after he entered himself a novice in the great abbey at Worcester, where he was remarkable for the innocence and sanctity of his life. The first charge with which he was intrusted in the monastery, was the care of instructing the children. He was afterwards made preceptor, and then treasurer of the church. In these two last stations he devoted himself totally to prayer, and watched whole nights in the church. As the meanest employments were always the object of his love and choice, it was contrary to his inclination that he was made prior of Worcester, and, in 1062, bishop of that see, when Aldred was translated to that of York. Though not very learned, he delivered the word of God with so much dignity and unction, as often to move his whole audience to tears. He always recited the psalter while he travelled, and never passed by any church or chapel without going in, to pour forth his soul before the altar with tears, which seemed to stand always ready in his eyes for prayer. When the conqueror had deprived the English, both nobility and clergy, of the posts of honor they possessed in the church and state, in favor of his Normans, on whose fidelity he could depend, Wulstan kept his see, though not without a miracle, as St. Aelred, Florentius, and Capgrave relate, as follows: In a synod, held at Westminster, in which archbishop Lanfranc {182} presided, Wulstan was called upon to give up his crosier and ring, upon pretext of his simplicity and unfitness for business. The saint confessed himself unfit for the charge, but said, that king Edward, with the concurrence of the apostolic see, had compelled him to take it upon him, and that he would deliver his crosier to him. Then going to the king's monument, he fixed his crosier to the stone; then went and sat down among the monks. No one was able to draw out the crosier till the saint was ordered to take it again, and it followed his hand with ease. From this time the conqueror treated him with honor. Lanfranc even commissioned him to perform the visitation of the diocese of Chester for himself. When any English complained of the oppression of the Normans, he used to tell them, "This is a scourge of God for your sins, which you must bear with patience." The saint caused young gentlemen who were brought up under his care, to carry in the dishes and wait on the poor at table, to teach them the practice of humiliation, in which he set the most edifying example. He showed the most tender charity for penitents, and often wept over them, while they confessed their sins to-him. He died in 1095, having sat thirty-two years, and lived about eighty-seven. He was canonized in 1203. See his life by William of Malmesbury, in Wharton, t. 2, p. 244. Also, a second, by Florence of Worcester, and a third in Capgrave; and his history, at length, by Dr. Thomas, in his History of the Cathedral of Worcester. ST. BLAITHMAIC, SON of an Irish king, and abbot in the isle of Hij, in Scotland. He was martyred by Danish pirates, to whom he refused to betray the treasures of the church, in 793. See his life, by Wilfridus Strabo, in Canisius Antiq. {} &c. ST. LOMER, OR LAUDOMARUS, ABBOT. IN his childhood he kept his father's sheep; in which employment he macerated his body by regular fasts, and spent his time in studies and prayer, under the direction of a certain holy priest. Being afterwards, by compulsion, ordained priest, he was made canon and cellerer (some moderns say provost) of the church of Chartres. After some years he retired into a neighboring forest: Mabillon thinks at the place where now stands Bellomer, a monastery of the order of Fontevrald. Many disciples being assembled near his hermitage, he removed with them into another desert, where he built the monastery of Corbion, (at present a priory called Moutier-au-Perche, six leagues from Chartres,) about the year 575. A wonderful spirit of prayer, and gift of miracles, rendered his name famous. He died on the 19th of January, in 593, at Chartres, in the house of the bishop, who had called him thither some time before. In the incursions of the Normans, his remains were removed from place to place, till they were lodged at Perly, in Auvergne. His head is now kept in the priory of Maissac, called St. Laumer's, in Auvergne; the rest of his relics were removed to Blois, where an abbey was built which bears his name. Set his anonymous life, written by one who knew him, in Bollandus and Mabillon; also Chatelain and the Paris Breviary. {183} JANUARY XX. ST. FABIAN, POPE, M. See Tillemont, t. 3, p. 362. A.D. 250. HE succeeded St. Anterus in the pontificate, in the year 236. Eusebius relates,[1] that in an assembly of the people and clergy, held for the election of a pastor in his room, a dove, unexpectedly appearing, settled, to the great surprise of all present, on the head of St. Fabian; and that this miraculous sign united the votes of the clergy and people in promoting him, though not thought of before, as being a layman and a stranger. He governed the church sixteen years, sent St. Dionysius and other preachers into Gaul, and condemned Privatus, a broacher of a new heresy in Africa, as appears from St. Cyprian.[2] St. Fabian died a glorious martyr in the persecution of Decius, in 250, as St. Cyprian and St. Jerom witness. The former, writing to his successor, St. Cornelius, calls him an incomparable man; and says, that the glory of his death had answered the purity and holiness of his life.[3] * * * * * The saints made God, and the accomplishment of his holy will, the great object of all their petitions to their prayers, and their only aim in all their actions. "God," says St. Austin,[4] "in his promises to hear our prayers, is desirous to bestow himself upon us; if you find any thing better than him, ask it, but if you ask any thing beneath him, you put an affront upon him, and hurt yourself by preferring to him a creature which he framed: pray in the spirit and sentiment of love, in which the royal prophet said to him, 'Thou, O Lord, art my portion.'[5] Let others choose to themselves portions among creatures, for my part, Thou art my portion, Thee alone have I chosen for my whole inheritance." Footnotes: 1. Hist. l. 6, c. 29. 2. Cypr. Ep. 30. Ed. Pam. 3. Ep. 44 ad. Corn. 4. S. Aug. Conc. 1, in Ps. 34. 5. Ps. lxxii. 26. ST. SEBASTIAN, M. From his acts, written before the end of the fourth age. The gladiators, who were abolished by Honorius, in 403, subsisted when these acts were compiled. See Bollandus, who thinks St. Ambrose wrote them, also Tillemont, t. 1, p. 551. A.D. 288. ST. SEBASTIAN was born at Narbonne, in Gaul, but his parents were of Milan, in Italy, and he was brought up in that city. He was a fervent servant of Christ, and though his natural inclinations gave him an aversion to a military life, yet to be better able, without suspicion, to assist the confessors and martyrs in their sufferings, he went to Rome, and entered the army under the emperor Carinus, about the year 283. It happened that the martyrs, Marcus and Marcellianus, under sentence of death, appeared in danger of being shaken in their faith by the tears of their friends: Sebastian seeing this, stepped in, and made them a long exhortation to constancy, which {184} he delivered with the holy fire, that strongly affected all his hearers. Zoë, the wife of Nicostratus, having for six years lost the use of speech by a palsy in her tongue, fell at his feet, and spoke distinctly, by the saint's making the sign of the cross on her mouth. She, with her husband Nicostratus, who was master of the rolls,[1] the parents of Marcus and Marcellianus, the jailor Claudius, and sixteen other prisoners, were converted; and Nicostratus, who had charge of the prisoners, took them to his own house, where Polycarp, a holy priest, instructed and baptized them. Chromatius, governor of Rome, being informed of this, and that Tranquillinus, the father of Saints Marcus and Marcellianus, had been cured of the gout by receiving baptism, desired to be instructed in the faith, being himself grievously afflicted with the same distemper. Accordingly, having sent for Sebastian, he was cured by him, and baptized, with his son Tiburtius. He then enlarged the converted prisoners, made his slaves free, and resigned his prefectship. Not long after, in the year 285, Carinus was defeated and slain in Illyricum by Dioclesian, who, the year following, made Maximian his colleague in the empire. The persecution was still carried on by the magistrates, in the same manner as under Carinus, without any new edicts. Dioclesian, admiring the courage and virtue of St. Sebastian, who concealed his religion, would fain have him near his person, and created him captain of a company of the pretorian guards, which was a considerable dignity. When Dioclesian went into the East, Maximian, who remained in the West, honored our saint with the same distinction and respect. Chromatius, with the emperor's consent, retired into the country in Campania, taking many new converts along with him. It was a contest of zeal, out of a mutual desire of martyrdom, between St. Sebastian and the priest Polycarp, which of them should accompany this troop, to complete their instruction, and which should remain in the city, to encourage and assist the martyrs, which latter was the more dangerous province. St. Austin wished to see such contests of charity among the ministers of the church.[2] Pope Caius, who was appealed to, judged it most proper that Sebastian should stay in Rome, as a defender of the church. In the year 286, the persecution growing hot, the pope and others concealed themselves in the imperial palace, as a place of the greatest safety, in the apartments of one Castulus, a Christian officer of the court. St. Zoë was first apprehended, praying at St. Peter's tomb on the feast of the apostles. She was stifled with smoke, being hung by the heels over a fire. Tranquillinus, ashamed to be less courageous than a woman, went to pray at the tomb of St. Paul, and was seized by the populace, and stoned to death. Nicostratus, Claudius, Castorius, and Victorinus were taken, and after being thrice tortured, were thrown into the sea. Tiburtius, betrayed by a false brother, was beheaded. Castulus, accused by the same wretch, was thrice put on the rack, and afterwards buried alive. Marcus and Marcellianus were nailed by the feet to a post, and having remained in that torment twenty-four hours, were shot to death with arrows. St. Sebastian, having sent so many martyrs to heaven before him, was himself impeached before the emperor Dioclesian; who, having grievously reproached him with ingratitude, delivered him over to certain archers of Mauritania, to be shot to death. His body was covered with arrows, and he left for dead. Irene, the widow of St. Castulus, going to bury him, found him still alive, and took him to her lodgings, where, by care, he recovered of his wounds, but refused to fly, and even placed himself one day by a staircase where the emperor was to pass, whom he first accosted, reproaching {185} him for his unjust cruelties against the Christians. This freedom of speech, and from a person, too, whom he supposed to have been dead, greatly astonished the emperor; but recovering from his surprise, he gave orders for his being seized and beat to death with cudgels, and his body thrown into the common sewer. A pious lady called Lucina, admonished by the martyr in a vision, got it privately removed, and buried it in the catacombs,[3] at the entrance of the cemetery of Calixtus. A church was afterwards built over his relies by pope Damasus, which is one of the seven ancient stationary churches at Rome, but not one of the seven principal churches of that city, as some moderns mistake; it neither being one of the five patriarchal churches, nor one of the seventy-two old churches which give titles to cardinals. Vandelbert, St. Ado, Eginard, Sigebert, and other contemporary authors relate, that in the reign of Louis Débonnaire, pope Eugenius II. gave the body of St. Sebastian to Hilduin, abbot of St. Denys, who brought it into France, and it was deposited at St. Medard's, at Soissons, on the 9th of December, in 826; with it is said to have been brought a considerable portion of the relics of St. Gregory the Great. The rich shrines of SS. Sebastian, Gregory, and Medard, were plundered by the Calvinists, in 1564, and the sacred bones thrown into a ditch, in which there was water. Upon the declaration of two eye-witnesses, they were afterwards found by the Catholics; and in 1578, enclosed in three new shrines, though the bones of the three saints could not be distinguished from each other.[4] The head of this martyr, which was given to St. Willibrord by pope Sergius, is kept at Esternach, in the duchy of Luxemburg. Portions of his relics are shown in the cathedral at St. Victor's; the Theatins and Minims at Paris; in four churches at Mantua; at Malaca, Seville, Toulouse, Munich in the ducal palace, Tournay in the cathedral, Antwerp in the church of the Jesuits, and at Brussels, in the chapel of the court, not at St. Gudula's, as some have mistaken.[5] St. Sebastian has been always honored by the church, as one of her most illustrious martyrs. We read in Paul the deacon, in what manner, in the year 680, Rome was freed from a raging pestilence, by the patronage of this saint. Milan, in 1575, Lisbon, in 1599, and other places, have experienced, in like calamities, the miraculous effects of his intercession with God in their behalf. Footnotes: 1. Primiscrinius. 2. Ep. 180. 3. On Catacombs, see in St. Calixtus, Oct. 14. 4. Chatelain, notes, p. 355. Baillet. 5. Bollandus, Chatel. ib. ST. EUTHYMIUS, ABBOT. From his life, faithfully written forty years after his death, by Cyril of Scythopolis, a monk of his monastery, one of the best writers of antiquity, and author of the life of St. Sabas. See it accurately published by Dom Lottin, Annal. Græc. t. 1, and Cotelier, Mon. Græc. t. 2, p. 200. A.D. 473. THE birth of this saint was the fruit of the prayers of his pious parents, through the intercession of the martyr Polyeuctus. His father was a noble and wealthy citizen of Melitene in Armenia. Euthymius was educated in sacred learning, and in the fervent practice of prayer, silence, humility, and mortification, under the care of the holy bishop of that city, who ordained him priest, and constituted him his vicar and general-overseer of the monasteries. The saint often visited that of St. Polyeuctus, and spent whole nights in prayer on a neighboring mountain; as he also did all the time from the octave of the Epiphany till towards the end of Lent. The love of solitude daily growing stronger in his breast, he secretly left his own country,{186} at twenty-nine years of age: and, after offering up his prayers at the holy places in Jerusalem, chose a cell six miles from that city, near the Laura[1] of Pharan. He made baskets, and procured, by selling them, both his own subsistence and alms for the poor. Constant prayer was the employment of his soul. After five years he retired with one Theoctistus, a holy hermit, ten miles further towards Jericho, where they lived together on raw herbs in a cave. In this place he began to receive disciples, about the year 411. He committed the care of his monastery to Theoctistus, and continued himself in a remote hermitage, only giving audience on Saturdays and Sundays, to those who desired spiritual advice. He taught all his monks never to eat so much as to satisfy their hunger, but strictly forbade among them all singularity in fasts, or any other common observances, as savoring of vanity and self-will. According to his example, they all retired into the deserts from the octave of the feast of the Epiphany till the week before Easter, when they met again in their monastery, to celebrate the office peculiar to Holy Week. He enjoined them constant silence and manual labors: they gained their own subsistence, and a surplus, which they devoted as first-fruits to God in the relief of the poor. St. Euthymius cured, by the sign of the cross and a short prayer, Terebon, one half of whose body had been struck dead with a palsy. His father, who was an Arabian prince, named Aspebetes, an idolater, had exhausted on his cure, but to no purpose, the much-boasted arts of physic and magic among the Persians, to procure some relief for his son. At the sight of this miracle Aspebetes desired baptism, and took the name of Peter. Such multitudes of Arabians followed his example, that Juvenal, patriarch of Jerusalem, ordained him their bishop, and he assisted at the council of Ephesus against Nestorius in 431. He built St. Euthymius a Laura on the right hand of the road from Jerusalem to Jericho, in the year 420. Euthymius could never be prevailed upon to depart from his rules of strict solitude; but governed his monks by proper superiors, to whom he gave his directions on Sundays. His humility and charity won the hearts of all who spoke to him. He seemed to surpass the great Arsenius in the gift of perpetual tears. Cyril relates many miracles which he wrought, usually by the sign of the cross. In the time of a great drought, he exhorted the people to penance, to avert this scourge of heaven. Great numbers came in procession to his cell, carrying crosses, singing Kyrie eleison, and begging him to offer up his prayers to God for them. He said to them: "I am a sinner, how can I presume to appear before God, who is angry at our sins? Let us prostrate ourselves all together before him, and he will hear us." They obeyed; and the saint going into his chapel with some of his monks, prayed prostrate on the ground. The sky grew dark on a sudden, rain fell in abundance, and the year proved remarkably fruitful. St. Euthymius showed great zeal against the Nestorian and Eutychian heretics. The turbulent empress Eudocia, after the death of her husband Theodosius, retired into Palestine, and there continued to favor the latter with her protection. Awaked by the afflictions of her family, particularly in the plunder of Rome, and the captivity of her daughter Eudocia, and her two granddaughters, carried by the Vandals into Africa, she sent to beg the advice of St. Simeon Stylites. He answered, that her misfortunes were the punishment of her sin, in forsaking and persecuting the orthodox faith; and ordered her to follow the direction of Euthymius. She knew that our saint admitted no woman within the precinct of his Laura, no more than St. Simeon suffered them to step within the enclosure of the mandra or lodge {187} about his pillar. She therefore built a tower on the east side of the desert, thirty furlongs from the Laura, and prayed St. Euthymius to meet her there. His advice to her was to forsake the Eutychians and their impious patriarch Theodosius, and to receive the council of Chalcedon. She followed his advice as the command of God, and returning to Jerusalem, embraced the Catholic communion with the orthodox patriarch Juvenal; and an incredible number followed her example. She spent the rest of her life in works of penance and piety. In 459, she desired St. Euthymius to meet her at her tower, designing to settle on his Laura sufficient revenues for its subsistence. He sent her word to spare herself the trouble, and to prepare herself for death; for God summoned her before his tribunal. She admired his disinterestedness, returned to Jerusalem, and died shortly after. One of the latest disciples of our saint was the young St. Sabas, whom he tenderly loved. In the year 473, on the 13th of January, Martyrius and Elias, to both whom St. Euthymius had foretold the patriarchate of Jerusalem, came with several others to visit him, and to conduct him into his Lent-retreat. But he said he would stay with them all that week, and leave them on the Saturday following, meaning, by death. Three days after he gave orders that a general watching should be observed on the eve of St. Antony's festival, on which he made a discourse to his spiritual children, exhorting them to humility and charity. He appointed Elias his successor, and foretold Domitian, a beloved disciple, that he would follow him out of this world, on the seventh day, which happened accordingly. Euthymius died on Saturday the 28th day of January, being ninety-five years old, of which he had spent sixty-eight in the deserts. Cyril relates his having appeared several times after his death, and the many miracles that were wrought by his intercession; to several of which he declares himself an eye-witness. St. Sabas kept his festival immediately after his death; which is observed both by the Latins and Greeks. The latter always style him the Great. It appears from his life that he was ordained priest before he embraced an eremitical state, and that he founded two monasteries, besides a Laura, which was also converted into a monastery after his death. Footnotes: 1. A Laura consisted of cells at a little distance from one another, and not under the same roof, as a monastery. ST. FECHIN, ABBOT. AN ancient hymn on this saint is published by Bollandus. He is honored with singular devotion at Foure, anciently called Fobhar, a village in West-Meath, where he governed a monastery with great sanctity; and happily departed to our Lord in the year 664, being carried off in the great pestilence which swept off four kings in Ireland; and which scarce a third part of the inhabitants survived. See his life in Bollandus; also Giraldus Cambr. Topog. Hibern. dist. 2, c. 52, and Colgan. Giraldus mentions St. Fechin's mill at Foure, which out of respect it is forbid for any woman ever to enter. Several churches, and some villages in Ireland, take their name from this saint. {188} JANUARY XXI. SAINT AGNES, V.M. The following relation is taken from Prudentius, de Coron. hym. 14, St. Ambrose, l. 1, de Virgin. & Offic. t. 1, c. 41, and other fathers. Her acts are as ancient as the seventh century; but not sufficiently authentic: nor are those given us in Chaldaic by Stephen Assemani of a better stamp. They contradict St. Ambrose and Prudentius in supposing that she finished her martyrdom by fire. See Tillemont, t. 5. A.D. 304, or 305. ST. JEROM says,[1] that the tongues and pens of all nations are employed in the praises of this saint, who overcame both the cruelty of the tyrant and the tenderness of her age, and crowned the glory of chastity with that of martyrdom. St. Austin observes,[2] that her name signifies chaste in Greek, and lamb in Latin. She has been always looked upon in the church as a special patroness of purity, with the immaculate Mother of God and St. Thecla. Rome was the theatre of the triumph of St. Agnes; and Prudentius says, that her tomb was shown within sight of that city. She suffered not long after the beginning of the persecution of Dioclesian, whose bloody edicts appeared in March in the year of our Lord 303. We learn from St. Ambrose and St. Austin, that she was only thirteen years of age at the time of her glorious death. Her riches and beauty excited the young noblemen of the first families of Rome, to vie with one another in their addresses, who should gain her in marriage.[3] Agnes answered them all, that she had consecrated her virginity to a heavenly spouse, who could not be beheld by mortal eyes. Her suitors finding her resolution impregnable to all their arts and importunities, accused her to the governor as a Christian; not doubting but threats and torments would overcome her tender mind, on which allurements could make no impression. The judge at first employed the mildest expressions and most inviting promises; to which Agnes paid no regard, repeating always, that she could have no other spouse than Jesus Christ. He then made use of threats, but found her soul endowed with a masculine courage, and even desirous of racks and death. At last, terrible fires were made, and iron hooks, racks, and other instruments of torture displayed before her, with threats of immediate execution. The young virgin surveyed them all with an undaunted eye; and with a cheerful countenance beheld the fierce and cruel executioners surrounding her, and ready to dispatch her at the word of command. She was so far from betraying the least symptom of fear, that she even expressed her joy at the sight, and offered herself to the rack. She was then dragged before the idols, and commanded to offer incense: "but could by no means be compelled to move her hand, except to make the sign of the cross," says St. Ambrose. The governor seeing his measures ineffectual, said he would send her to a house of prostitution, where what she prized so highly should be exposed to the insults of the debauchees.[4] Agnes answered that Jesus Christ was too jealous of the purity of his spouses, to suffer it to be violated in such a manner; for he was their defender and protector. "You may," said she, "stain your sword with my blood, but will never be able to profane my body, consecrated to Christ." The governor was so incensed at this, that he {189} ordered her to be immediately led to the public brothel, with liberty to all persons to abuse her person at pleasure. Many young profligates ran thither, full of the wicked desire of gratifying their lust; but were seized with such awe at the sight of the saint, that they durst not approach her; one only excepted, who, attempting to be rude to her, was that very instant, by a flash, as it were, of lightning from heaven, struck blind, and fell trembling to the ground. His companions, terrified, took him up, and carried him to Agnes, who was at a distance, singing hymns of praise to Christ, her protector. The virgin by prayer restored him to his sight and health.[5] The chief prosecutor of the saint, who at first sought to gratify his lust and avarice, now labored to satiate his revenge, by incensing the judge against her; his passionate fondness being changed into anger and rage. The governor wanted not others to spur him on; for he was highly exasperated to see himself baffled, and set at defiance by one of her tender age and sex. Therefore, resolved upon her death, he condemned her to be beheaded. Agnes, transported with joy on hearing this sentence, and still more at the sight of the executioner, "went to the place of execution more cheerfully," says St. Ambrose, "than others go to their wedding." The executioner had secret instructions to use all means to induce her to a compliance: but Agnes always answered she could never offer so great an injury to her heavenly spouse; and having made a short prayer, bowed down her neck to adore God, and receive the stroke of death. The spectators wept to see so beautiful and tender a virgin loaded with fetters, and to behold her fearless under the very sword of the executioner, who with a trembling hand cut off her head at one stroke. Her body was buried at a small distance from Rome, near the Nomentan road. A church was built on the spot in the time of Constantine the Great, and was repaired by pope Honorius in the seventh century. It is now in the hands of Canon-Regulars, standing without the walls of Rome; and is honored with her relics in a very rich silver shrine, the gift of pope Paul V., in whose time they were found in this church, together with those of St. Emerentiana.[6] The other beautiful rich church of St. Agnes within the city, built by pope Innocent X., (the right of patronage being vested in the family of Pamphili,) stands on the place where her chastity was exposed. The feast of St. Agnes is mentioned in all Martyrologies, both of the East and West, though on different days. It was formerly a holyday for the women in England, as appears from the council of Worcester, held in the year 1240. St. Ambrose, St. Austin, and other fathers have wrote her panegyric. St. Martin of Tours was singularly devout to her. Thomas à Kempis honored her as his special patroness, as his works declare in many places. He relates many miracles wrought, and graces received through her intercession. * * * * * Marriage is a holy state, instituted by God, and in the order of providence and nature the general or most ordinary state of those who live in the world. Those, therefore, who upon motives of virtue, and in a Christian and holy manner engage in this state, do well. Those, nevertheless, who for the sake of practising more perfect virtue, by a divine call, prefer a state of perpetual {190} virginity, embrace that which is more perfect and more excellent. Dr. Wells, a learned Protestant, confesses that Christ[7] declares voluntary chastity, for the kingdom of heaven's sake, to be an excellency, and an excellent state of life.[8] This is also the manifest inspired doctrine of St. Paul,[9] and in the revelations of St. John,[10] spotless virgins are called, in a particular manner, the companions of the Lamb, and are said to enjoy the singular privilege of following him wherever he goes. The tradition of the church has always been unanimous in this point; and among the Romans, Greeks Syrians, and Barbarians, many holy virgins joyfully preferred torments and death to the violation of their integrity, which they bound themselves by vow to preserve without defilement, in mind or body. The fathers, from the very disciples of the apostles, are all profuse in extolling the excellency of holy virginity, as a special fruit of the incarnation of Christ, his divine institution, and a virtue which has particular charms in the eyes of God, who delights in chaste minds, and chooses to dwell singularly in them. They often repeat that purity raises men, even in this mortal life, to the dignity of angels; purifies the soul, fits it for a more perfect love of God and a closer application to heavenly things, and disengages the mind and heart from worldly thoughts and affections. It produces in the soul the clearest resemblance to God. Chastity is threefold; that of virgins, that of widows, and that of married persons; in each state it will receive its crown, as St. Ambrose observes,[11] but in the first is most perfect, so that St. Austin calls its fruit an hundred fold, and that of marriage sixty fold; but the more excellent this virtue is, and the higher its glory and reward, the more heroic and the more difficult is its victory; nor is it perfect unless it be embellished with all other virtues in an heroic degree, especially divine charity and the most profound humility. Footnotes: 1. Ep. 8. 2. Serm. 274. 3. Footnote: S. Ambrose, l. 1, Virgin. 4. Prudent. S. Ambrose. 5. St. Basil witnesses, (l. de verâ Virgin.,) that when virgins were exposed by the persecutors to the attempts of lewd men, Christ wonderfully interposed in defence of their chastity. Tertullian reproached the heathens with this impiety, in these words: Apolog. "By condemning the Christian maid rather to the lewd youth than to the lion, you have acknowledged that a stain of purity is more dreaded by us than any torments or death. Yet your crafty cruelty avails you not: it rather serves to gain men over to our holy religion." 6. This church gives title to a cardinal, and every year on her feast the abbot of St. Peter's ad Vincula blesses in it, at high mass, two lambs, which are thence carried to the pope, by whom they are again blessed. After which they are sent to the nuns of St. Laurence's in Panisperna, or sometimes to the Capucinesses, who make of their wool palliums, which his holiness blesses, and sends to archbishops as emblem of meekness and spotless purity. 7. Matt. xix. 11. 8. Wells, Paraph. on S. Matt. p. 185. 9. 1 Cor. vii. 7, 8, 25, 27, 32, 38. 10. Apoc. xiv. 1, 3, 4, 5. 11. S. Ambr. l. de Viduis, t. 5, p. 635. SAINT FRUCTUOSUS, BISHOP OF TARRAGON, AND HIS COMPANIONS, MARTYRS From his most valuable acts in Ruinart, quoted by St. Austin, Serm. 273, and transcribed by Prudentius, hymno 6. A.D. 259. ST. FRUCTUOSUS was the zealous and truly apostolical bishop of Tarragon, then the capital city of Spain. The persecution of Valerian and Gallien raging in the year 259, he was apprehended by an order of Emilian the governor, who sent the soldiers, called Beneficiarii,[1] for that purpose. They seized the good bishop in his lodgings, with two deacons, Augurius and Eulogius, on Sunday the 16th of January. He was then laid down on his bed, and only asked leave to put on his shoes; after which he cheerfully followed the guards, who committed him and his two companions to close prison, where he spent his time with them in fervent prayer, full of joy at the prospect of the crown prepared for them. He gave his benediction to the faithful who visited him, and recommended themselves to his prayers. On Monday he baptized in jail a catechumen named Rogatianus. On Wednesday he kept the usual fast of the stations[2] till none, or three o'clock in {191} the afternoon. On Friday, the sixth day after their commitment, the 21st of January, the governor ordered them to be brought before him, and asked Fructuosus if he knew the contents of the late edict of the emperors. The saint answered that he did not, but that whatever they were, he was a Christian. "The emperors," said Emilian, "command all to sacrifice to the gods." Fructuosus answered, "I adore one God, who made heaven and earth and all things therein." Emilian said, "Do you not know that there are gods?" "No," replied the saint. The proconsul said, "I will make you know it shortly." St. Fructuosus then lifted up his eyes to heaven, and began to pray in private. The proconsul broke out into this exclamation: "What will any man fear or adore on earth, if he contemns the worship of the immortal gods, and of the emperors?" Then turning to the deacon Angurius, he bade him not regard what Fructuosus had said: but he satisfied him in a few words that he adored the same almighty God. Emilian lastly addressed himself to the other deacon, Eulogius, asking him if he did not adore Fructuosus. The holy man answered, "I adore not Fructuosus, but the same God whom he adores." Emilian asked Fructuosus if he was a bishop; and added, upon his confessing it, "say you have been one;" meaning that he was going to lose his dignity with his life: and immediately condemned them to be burnt alive. The pagans themselves could not refrain from tears, on seeing them led to the amphitheatre; for they loved Fructuosus on account of his rare virtues. The Christians accompanied them with a sorrow mixed with joy. The martyrs exulted to behold themselves on the verge of a glorious eternity. The faithful offered St. Fructuosus a cup of wine, but he would not taste it, saying, it was not yet the hour of breaking the fast, which was observed on Fridays till three o'clock, and it was then only ten in the morning. The holy man hoped to end the station, or fast of that day, with the patriarchs and prophets in heaven. When they were come into the amphitheatre, Augustalis, the bishop's lector, came to him weeping, and begged he would permit him to pull off his shoes. The martyr said he could easily put them off himself, which he did. Felix, a Christian soldier, stepped in, and desired he would remember him in his prayers. Fructuosus said aloud: "I am bound to pray for the whole Catholic church spread over the world from the east to the west;" as if he had said, as St. Austin observes, who much applauds this sentence:[3] "Remain always in the bosom of the Catholic church, and you will have a share in my prayers." Martial, one of his flock, desired him to speak some words of comfort to his desolate church. The bishop, turning to the Christians, said, "My brethren, the Lord will not leave you a flock without a pastor. He is faithful to his promises. Do not grieve for me. The hour of my suffering is short." The martyrs were fastened to wooden stakes to be burnt; but the flame seemed at first to respect their bodies, having consumed only the bands with which their hands were tied, giving them liberty to stretch out their arms in the form of a cross in prayer, in which posture they gave up their souls to God before the fire had touched them. Babylas and Mygdone, two Christian servants of the governor, saw the heavens open, and the saints carried up with crowns on their heads. The faithful came in the night, extinguished the fire, and took out the half-burnt bodies. Every one carried some part of their remains home with them; but being admonished from heaven, brought them back and laid them in the same monument. St. Austin has left us a panegyric on St. Fructuosus, pronounced on the anniversary day of his martyrdom, on which his name has been always famous in the western church, especially in Spain and Africa. Footnotes: 1. Beneficiarii were soldiers distinguished by certain privileges, and who stood for promotion, as Vege{tius} informs us, l. 2, c. 7. 2. Wednesdays and Fridays were fast-days at that time; but only till none, that is, three in the afternoon, and called the fast of the stations. 3. Serm. 273. {192} ST. VIMIN, OR VIVIAN, B.C., IN SCOTLAND. BY the fervent practices of the most perfect monastic discipline in one of the famous abbeys in Fifeshire, he qualified himself to become, by word and example, a guide and director to many chosen souls in the paths of evangelical perfection. This appeared in the fruits of his zealous preaching and labors, when he was raised to the abbatial, and soon after to the episcopal dignity; for at that time, very few bishoprics being erected in Scotland, it was customary for learned and holy abbots of great monasteries to be often consecrated bishops, and to be attended by their monks in performing their functions; as venerable Bede informs us, speaking of St. Aidan.[1] St. Vimin, to shun the danger of vain-glory, to which the reputation of many miracles which he had wrought exposed him, removed to a more solitary place, and there founded the abbey of Holywood, called in Latin Sacrum-boscum, in succeeding ages famous for many learned men; particularly the great mathematician, John à Sacro-bosco, in the thirteenth century. King places the death of St. Vimin in 615, but brings no proofs for dating it so high. The noble and very ancient family of Wemse, in Fifeshire, is said in Scotland to be of the same lineage with this saint. The ancient prayer in the Aberdeen breviary on his festival, and other monuments, bear evidence to the great devotion of the ancient Scottish church to his memory. See Breviarium Aberdonense of Chronicou Skonense. Footnotes: 1. Bede, Hist. l. 4, c. 17, &c. ST. PUBLIUS, B.M. HE succeeded St. Dionysius the Areopagite in the see of Athens, as we are assured by St. Dionysius of Corinth, quoted by Eusebius.[1] He went to God by martyrdom, and St. Quadratus was chosen third bishop of that city. See Le Quien, Or. Christ. t. 2, p. 169. Footnotes: 1. Euseb. l. 4, c. 22. ST. EPIPHANIUS, BISHOP OF PAVIA, FROM 467 TO 497. THE reputation of Epiphanius for sanctity and miracles, gave him the highest credit with all the last weak Roman emperors, and with the kings Odoacer and Theodoric, though all of opposite interests. By his admirable eloquence and charity he often disarmed the most savage barbarians, obtained the lives and liberty of whole armies of captives, the abolition of several oppressive laws, and the mitigation of heavy public imposts and taxes. By his profuse charities he preserved an incredible number of distressed persons from perishing, and by his zeal he stemmed the torrent of iniquity in times of universal disorder and calamity. He performed an embassy to the emperor Anthemius, and another to king Euric at Toulouse; both to avert the dangers of war. He rebuilt Pavia, which had been destroyed by Odoacer, and mitigated the fury of Theodoric in the heat of his victories. He undertook a journey into Burgundy, to redeem captives detained by the kings Gondebald and Godegisile, and died of a cold and fever at Pavia, in the fifty-eighth year of his age. His body was translated to Hildesheim in Lower {193} Saxony, in 963. Brower thinks it lies in a silver coffin near the high altar. His name is inserted in the Roman Martyrology. See his panegyric in verse, by Ennodius, his successor, the master-piece of that author, published by Bollandus and F. Sirmond. Consult also Marroni, of the Schola Pia Comment. de Ecclesià & Episcopis Papiensibus. Romæ. An. 1758. Footnotes: 1. B. MACELAIN, A. His name in Irish signifies the son of Chilian. Passing into Belgic Gaul, in order to lead there an anchoretical life, he was appointed abbot of St. Michael's on the borders of Hainault, and of Vasour, or Vasencour, on the Meuse, in the diocese of Namur: monasteries which were just founded. He appointed St. Cadroe, who had accompanied him from Ireland, provost of the latter in 946, and died in 978. Ferrarius, Saussaye, and Wilson, falsely place this monastery of St. Michael's at Virdun, mistaking the epithet Vir Dni, which is given him in the chronicle of Flodoard, for the name of that town. Though he is styled saint in the catalogue of the abbots of Vasour, and by several martyrologists on this day, he never was honored in any public office even in either of his monasteries, as Bollandus observes; who makes the same remark of his two companions, B. Forannand and B. Cadroe. This latter was called from Vasour, and made abbot of St. Clement's, at Metz, where he died in 975. See Bolland. t. 2, p. 386. Chatelain, p. 371. Gallia Christ. Nova, t. 3, p. 570. B. FORANNAND, B.C. This saint is styled in ancient chronicles, Archbishop of Domnachmor, in Ireland. Domnach signifying church, and mor, the greater, says Mabillon: by which epithet many understand Armagh. Resigning his see, he travelled into Belgic Gaul, with twelve companions, among whom were B. Macelain, and B. Cadroe. After leading for some time an eremitical life, he was commanded by pope Benedict VII. to take upon him the charge of the government of Vasour, in which employment he died on the last day of April, in 982. See Gallia Christ. Nova, t. 3. p. 571. JANUARY XXII. ST. VINCENT, MARTYR. From Prudentius, hymn 5, and St. Austin, serm, 274, 275, 276, 277, all four preached on his festivals. His ancient acts in Bollandus are also authentic, but not those in Metaphrastes and Surius. See Tillemont t. 5, p. 217. A.D. 399. THE most glorious martyr St. Vincent was born, some say at Saragossa, others at Valentia, but most authors, and most probably, at Osca, now Huesca, in Granada. He was instructed in the sacred sciences and in Christian piety by Valerius, the bishop of that city, who ordained him his deacon, and appointed him, though very young, to preach and instruct the people. Dacian, a most bloody persecutor, was then governor of Spain. The emperors Dioclesian and Maximian published their second and third bloody edicts against the Christian clergy in the year 303, which in the following year were put in force against the laity. It seems to have been before these last that Dacian put to death eighteen martyrs at Saragossa, who are mentioned by Prudentius, and in the Roman Martyrology, January the 16th, and that he apprehended Valerius and Vincent. They spilt some of their blood at Saragossa, but were thence conducted to Valentia, where the governor let them lie long in prison, suffering extreme famine and other miseries. The proconsul hoped that this lingering torture would shake their constancy; but when they were brought out before him, he was surprised to see them still intrepid in mind, and vigorous in body, and reprimanded his officers, as if they had not treated the prisoners according to his orders. Then, turning to the champions of Christ, he employed alternately threats and promises to induce them to sacrifice. Valerius, who had an impediment in his speech, making no answer, Vincent said to him "Father, if you order me, I will speak." "Son," said Valerius, "as I committed to you the dispensation of the word of God, so I now charge you to answer in vindication of the faith which we defend." The holy deacon then acquainted the judge that they were ready to suffer every thing for the {194} true God, and little regarded either his threats or promises in such a cause. Dacian contented himself with banishing Valerius.[1] As for St. Vincent, he was determined to assail his resolution by every torture his cruel temper could suggest. St. Austin assures us, that he suffered torments far beyond what any man could possibly have endured, unless supported by a supernatural strength; and that he preserved such a peace and tranquillity in his words, countenance, and gestures in the midst of them, as astonished his very persecutors, and visibly appeared as something divine; while the rage and distraction of Dacian's soul was as visible in the violent agitations of his body, by his eyes sparkling with fury, and his faltering voice. The martyr was first stretched on the rack by his hands and feet, drawn by cords and pulleys, till his joints were almost torn asunder: while he hung in this posture, his flesh was unmercifully torn off with iron hooks. Vincent, smiling, called the executioners weak and faint-hearted. Dacian thought they spared him, and caused them to be beaten, which afforded the champion an interval of rest: but they soon returned to him, resolved fully to satisfy the cruelty of their master, who excited them all the while to exert their utmost strength. They twice stayed their hands to take breath, and let his wounds grow cold; then began with fresh vigor to rend and tear his body, which they did in all its limbs and parts with such cruelty, that his bones and bowels were in most places exposed bare to sight. The more his body was mangled, the more did the divine presence cherish and comfort his soul, and spread a greater joy on his countenance. The judge, seeing the streams of blood which flowed from all the parts of his body, and the frightful condition to which it was reduced, was obliged to confess, with astonishment, that the courage of the young nobleman had vanquished him; and his rage seemed somewhat abated. Hereupon he ordered a cessation of his torments, begging of the saint for his own sake, that if he could not be prevailed upon to offer sacrifice to the gods, he would at least give up the sacred books to be burnt, according to the order of the late edicts. The martyr answered, that he feared his torments less than that false compassion which he testified. Dacian, more incensed than ever, condemned him to the most cruel of tortures, that of fire upon a kind of gridiron, called by the acts the legal torture.[2] The saint walked with joy to the frightful engine, so as almost to get the start of his executioners, such was his desire to suffer. He mounted cheerfully the iron bed, in which the bars were framed like scythes, full of sharp spikes made red-hot by the fire underneath. On this dreadful gridiron, the martyr was stretched out at length, and bound fast down. He was not only scourged thereon, but, while one part of his body was broiling next the fire, the other was tortured by the application of red-hot plates of iron. His wounds were rubbed with salt, which the activity of the fire forced the deeper into his flesh and bowels. All the parts of his body were tormented in this manner, one after the other, and each several times over. The melted fat dropping from the flesh, nourished and increased the flames; which, instead of tormenting, seemed, as St. Austin says, to give the martyr new vigor and courage; for the more he suffered, the greater seemed to be the inward joy and consolation of his soul. The rage and confusion of the tyrant exceeded all bounds: he appeared not able to contain himself, and was continually inquiring what Vincent did and what he said; but was always answered, that he suffered with joy in his countenance, and seemed every moment to acquire new strength and resolution. {195} He lay unmoved, his eyes turned towards heaven, his mind calm, and his heart fixed on God in continual prayer. At last, by the command of the proconsul, he was thrown into a dungeon and his wounded body laid on the floor strewed with broken potsherds, which opened afresh his ghastly wounds, and cut his bare flesh. His legs were set in wooden stocks, stretched very wide, and strict orders were given that he should be left without provisions, and that no one should be admitted to see or speak to him. But God sent his angels to comfort him, with whom he sung the praises of his protector. The jailer observing through the chinks the prison filled with light, and the saint walking and praising God, was converted upon the spot to the Christian faith, and afterwards baptized. At this news Dacian chafed, and even wept through rage, but ordered some repose should be allowed the prisoner. The faithful were then permitted to see him, and coming in troops wiped and kissed his wounds, and dipped cloths in his blood, which they kept as an assured protection for themselves and their posterity. After this a soft bed was prepared for him, on which he was no sooner laid but he expired, the happy moment he had not ceased to pray for ever since his torments, and his first call to martyrdom. Dacian commanded his body to be thrown on a marshy field among rushes; but a crow defended it from wild beasts and birds of prey. The acts in Ruinart and Bollandus, and the sermon attributed to St. Leo, add, that it was then tied to a great stone and cast into the sea in a sack, but miraculously carried to the shore, and revealed to two Christians. They laid it in a little chapel out of the walls of Valentia, where God honored these relics with many miracles, as the acts and St. Austin witness. Prudentius informs us, that the iron on which he lay, and other instruments of his passion, were likewise preserved with veneration. Childebert, king of France, or rather of Paris, besieging Saragossa, wondered to see the inhabitants busied continually in making processions. Being informed they carried the stole of St. Vincent about the walls in devout prayer, and had been miraculously protected by that martyr's intercession, he raised the siege upon condition that relic should be given him. This he with great solemnity brought to Paris, and enriched with it the magnificent church and abbey of St. Vincent, now called St. Germain-des-Prés, which he built in 559, and which his successor Clotaire caused to be dedicated.[3] In the year 855, his sacred bones were discovered at Valentia, and conveyed into France, and deposited in the abbey of Castres, now an episcopal see in Languedoc, where they remain; but several portions have been given to the abbey of St. Germain-des-Prés at Paris, and other churches; and part was burnt at Castres by the Huguenots about the end of the sixteenth century.[4] Aimoinus, a contemporary monk, wrote the history of this translation, with an account of many miracles which attended it.[5] St. Gregory of Tours mentions a portion of his relics to have been famous for miracles, in a village church near Poictiers.[6] In the life of St. Domnolus, mention is made of a portion placed by him in a great monastery in the suburb of the city of Mans. But it is certain that the chief part of this martyr's body was conveyed to Lisbon. To escape the cruel persecution of the Saracen king Abderamene, at Valentia, many Christians privately withdrew themselves, and, carrying with them the body of St. Vincent, took shelter on the southwest cape, called {196} the Sacred Promontory, and from these relics St. Vincent's, in the kingdom of Algarb, then under the Saracens. Alphonsus Henry, the most pious first king of Portugal, son of count Henry, having defeated five Moorish kings, at Ourique, in the year 1139, received from those faithful keepers the body of St. Vincent, sent it by sea to Lisbon, and built the royal monastery of the Cross of regular canons of St. Austin, in which he most religiously deposited this treasure, rendered more famous by miracles, in the year 1148. This account is recorded by contemporary unexceptionable vouchers in Bollandus, p. 406. Mariana, and especially Thomas ab Incarnatione, a regular canon, in his Historiâ Ecclesiæ Lusitanæ, printed at Lisbon, A.D. 1759, Sæc. 4, c. 6, t. 1, p. 215. The Portuguese, ever since the year 1173, keep an annual commemoration of this translation on the 15th of September, which feast was confirmed by Sixtus V. Prudentius finishes his hymn on this holy martyr by a prayer to him, that he would present the marks of his sufferings to Christ, to move him to compassion in his behalf. * * * * * God never more visibly manifested his power, nor gave stronger or more wonderful proofs of his tenderness and love for his church, than when he suffered it to groan under the most violent oppression and persecution; nor does his grace anywhere appear more triumphant than in the victories of his martyrs under the severest trials, and in the heroic virtues which they displayed amidst torments and insults. Under the slightest disappointments and afflictions we are apt to fall into discouragement, and to imagine, by our sloth and impatience, that our situation is of all others the most unhappy and intolerable. If nature feels, and we implore the divine mercy, and a deliverance, if this may be conducive to God's honor, we must be careful never to sink under the trials, or consent to the least secret murmuring: we must bear them if not with joy, at least with perfect submission; and remain assured that God only seems to withdraw himself from us, that we may follow him more earnestly, and unite ourselves more closely to him. Footnotes: 1. He is named in the Roman Martyrology, January the 28th, and his relics are kept with veneration at Saragossa, famous for miracles wrought by them even in the last age. See Bollandus, January the 28th, p. 838. 2. Quæstio legitima. 3. S. Greg. Tur. Hist. Franc. l. 3, c. 29. Aimoin. de Gestis Franc. l. 2, c. 19 and 20. Ade In Chron. &c. 4. See Chatelain, Notes on the Martyrol. p. 378. 5. This Aimoinus is something more ancient than another monk of the same name, who has left a history of France. His relation depends upon the authority of Audald, a monk of Conques in the diocese of Rhodes, who brought them from Valentia into Languedoc. See his account in Bollandus, which yet the Spaniards deny, and say it could only be a small part of these bones: or the body of another martyr of the same name. 6. De Gk. Mart. l. 1, c. 90. ST. ANASTASIUS, MARTYR. From his genuine acts, which are commended in the seventh general council, abut one hundred and sixty years after his death. A.D. 628. ST. ANASTASIUS was a trophy of the holy cross of Christ, when it was carried away into Persia by Chosroës, in the year 614, after he had taken and plundered Jerusalem. The martyr was a Persian, son of a Magian, instructed in the sciences of that sect, and a young soldier in the Persian troops. Upon hearing the news of the taking of the cross by his king, he became very inquisitive concerning the Christian religion: and its sublime truths made such an impression on his mind, that being returned into Persia from an expedition into the Roman empire, he left the army with his brother, who also served in it, and retired to Hierapolis. In that city he lodged with a devout Persian Christian, a silversmith, with whom he went often to prayer. The holy pictures which he saw, moved him exceedingly, and gave him occasion to inquire daily more into our faith, and to admire the courage of the martyrs whose glorious sufferings were painted in the churches. At length, desirous of baptism, he left Hierapolis, which city was subject to the Persians, and went to Jerusalem, where he received that sacrament by the hands of Modestus who governed that church as vicar during the absence {197} of the patriarch Zachary, whom Chosroës had led away captive into Persia. In baptism he changed his Persian name Magundat, into that of Anastasius, meaning, according to the signification of that Greek word, that he was risen from death to a new and spiritual life. He had prepared himself with wonderful devotion for that sacrament while a catechumen, and he spent in no less fervor the several days after it, which persons baptized passed in white garments, in prayer, and in receiving more perfect instructions in the faith. At the end of this term, Anastasius, the more easily and more perfectly to keep inviolably his sacred baptismal vows and obligations, desired to become a monk in a monastery five miles distant from Jerusalem. Justin, the abbot, made him first learn the Greek tongue and the psalter; then cutting off his hair, gave him the monastic habit, in the year 621. Anastasius was always the first at all spiritual duties, especially in assisting at the celebration of the divine mysteries. His attention to pious discourse testified the earnest thirst of his soul; nor was he less fervent in practice. He never read the triumphs of the martyrs without abundance of tears, and burned with an ardent desire of the like happiness. Being molested beyond measure with blasphemous thoughts of magic and superstitions, which his father had taught him, he was delivered from that troublesome temptation by discovering it to his director, and by his advice and prayers. After seven years spent in great perfection in this monastery, his desire of martyrdom daily increasing, and having been assured by a revelation, that his prayers for that grace were heard, he left that house, and visited the places of devotion in Palestine, at Diospolis, Garizim, and our Lady's church at Cæsarea, where he stayed two days. This city, with the greatest part of Syria, was then subject to the Persians. The saint seeing certain Persian soothsayers of the garrison occupied in their abominable superstitions in the streets, boldly spoke to them, remonstrating against the impiety of such practices. The Persian magistrates apprehended him as a suspected spy; but he informed them that he once enjoyed the dignity of Magian with them, and had renounced it to become a humble follower of Christ. Upon this confession he was thrown into a dungeon, where he lay three days without eating of drinking, till the return of Marzabanes, the governor, to the city. Being interrogated by him, he confessed his conversion to the faith, and equally despised his offers of great preferments, and his threats of crucifying him. Marzabanes commanded him to be chained by the foot to another criminal, and his neck and one foot to be also linked together by a heavy chain, and condemned him in this condition to carry stones. The Persians, especially those of his own province of Rasech, and his former acquaintance, upbraided him as the disgrace of his country, kicked and beat him, plucked his beard, and loaded him with burdens above his strength. The governor sent for him a second time, but could by no means prevail with him to pronounce the impious words which the Magians used in their superstitions: he said, "That the wilful calling them to remembrance would defile the heart." The judge then threatened he would write immediately to the king against him, if he did not comply. "Write what you please," said the saint, "I am a Christian: I repeat it again, I am a Christian." Marzabanes commanded him to be forthwith beaten with knotty clubs. The executioners were preparing themselves to bind him fast on the ground; but the saint told him it was unnecessary, for he had courage enough to lie down under the punishment without moving, and he regarded it as his greatest happiness and pleasure to suffer for Christ. He only begged leave to put off his monk's habit, lest it should be treated with contempt, which only his body deserved. He therefore laid it aside in a respectful manner, and then stretched himself on the ground, and without {198} being bound did not stir all the time of the cruel torment, bearing it without changing his posture. The governor again threatened him to acquaint the king of his obstinacy: "Whom ought we rather to fear," said Anastasius, "a mortal man, or God, who made all things out of nothing?" The judge pressed him to sacrifice to fire, and to the sun and moon. The saint answered, he could never acknowledge as gods, creatures which God had made only for our use; upon which he was remanded to prison. His old abbot hearing of his sufferings, sent two monks to assist him, and ordered prayers for him. The confessor, after carrying stones all the day, spent the greatest part of the night in prayer, to the surprise of his companions: one of whom, a Jew, saw and showed him to others at prayer in the night, shining in brightness and glory like a blessed spirit, and angels praying with him. As the confessor was chained to a man condemned for a public crime, he prayed always with his neck bowed downwards, keeping his chained foot near his companion not to disturb him. Marzabanes in the mean time having informed Chosroës, and received his orders, acquainted the martyr by a messenger, without seeing him, that the king would be satisfied on condition he would only by word of mouth abjure the Christian faith: after which he might choose whether he would be an officer in the king's service, or still remain a Christian and a monk; adding, he might in his heart always adhere to Christ, provided he would but for once renounce him in words privately, in his presence, "in which there could be no harm, nor any great injury to his Christ," as he said. Anastasius answered firmly, that he would never even seem to dissemble, or to deny his God. Then the governor told him, that he had orders to send him bound into Persia to the king. "There is no need of binding me," said the saint: "I go willingly and cheerfully to suffer for Christ." The governor put on him and on two other prisoners the mark, and gave orders that they should set out after five days. In the mean time, on the feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, the 14th of September, at the request of the Comerciarius, or tax-gatherer for the king, who was a Christian of distinction, Anastasius had leave to go to the church and assist at the divine service. His presence and exhortations encouraged the faithful, excited the tepid to fervor, and moved all to tears. He dined that day with the Comerciarius, and then returned with joy to his prison. On the day appointed, the martyr left Cæsarea, in Palestine, with two other Christian prisoners, under a strict guard, and was followed by one of the monks whom the abbot had sent to assist and encourage him. The acts of his martyrdom were written by this monk, or at least from what be related by word of mouth. The saint received great marks of honor, much against his inclination, from the Christians wherever he came. This made him fear lest human applause should rob trim of his crown by infecting his heart with pride. He wrote from Hierapolis, and again from the river Tigris, to his abbot, begging the prayers of his brethren. Being arrived at Barsaloe in Assyria, six miles from Discartha, or Dastagerde, near the Euphrates, where the king then was, the prisoners were thrown into a dungeon till his pleasure was known. An officer came from Chosroës to interrogate the saint, who made answer, with regard to his magnificent promises, in these words: "My religious habit and poor clothes show that I despise from my heart the gaudy pomp of the world. The honors and riches of a king, who must shortly die himself, are no temptation to me." Next day the officer returned to the prison, and endeavored to intimidate him by blustering threats and reproaches. But the saint said calmly: "My lord judge, do not give yourself so much trouble about me. By the grace of Christ I am not to be moved: so execute your pleasure without more ado." The officer caused him to be unmercifully beaten with staves, after {199} the Persian manner, insulting him all the time, and often repeating, that because he contemned the king's bounty, he should be treated in that manner every day as long as he lived. This punishment was inflicted on him three days; on the third the judge commanded him to be laid on his back, and a heavy beam pressed down by the weight of two men on his legs, crushing the flesh to the very bone. The martyr's tranquillity and patience astonished the officer, who went again to acquaint the king of his behavior. In his absence the jailer, being a Christian by profession, though too weak to resign his place rather than detain such a prisoner, gave every one free access to the martyr. The Christians immediately filled the prison; every one sought to kiss his feet or chains, and kept as relics whatever had been sanctified by their touch: they also overlaid his fetters with wax, in order to receive their impression. The saint, with confusion and indignation, strove to hinder them, and expressed how extremely dissatisfied he was with such actions. The officer returning from the king caused him to be beaten again, which the confessor bore rather as a statue, than as flesh and blood. Then he was hung up for two hours by one hand, with a great weight at his feet, and tampered with by threats and promises. The judge despairing to overcome him, went back to the king; for his last orders, which were, that he and all the Christian captives should be put to death. He returned speedily to put them in execution, and caused Anastasius's two companions, with threescore and six other Christians, to be strangled one after another on the banks of the river, before his face, whom the judge all the time pressed to return to the Persian worship, and to escape so disgraceful a death, promising, in case of compliance, that he should be made one of the greatest men in the court. Anastasius, with his eyes lifted up to heaven, gave thanks to God for bringing his life to so happy a conclusion; and said he expected that he should have met with a more cruel death in the torture of all his members: but seeing God granted him one so easy, he embraced with joy that end of a life which he otherwise must shortly have lost in a more painful manner. He was accordingly strangled, and after his death his head was cut off. This was in the year 628, the seventeenth of the emperor Heraclius, on the 22d of January, on which day both the Latins and Greeks keep his festival. His body, among the other dead, was exposed to be devoured by dogs, but it was the only one they left untouched. It was afterwards redeemed by the Christians, who laid it in the monastery of St. Sergius, a mile from the place of his triumph, in the city Barsaloe, called afterwards from that monastery, Sergiopolis. The monk that attended him brought back his Colobium, or liners tunic without sleeves. The saint's body was afterwards brought into Palestine. Some years after, it was removed to Constantinople, and lastly to Rome. The seventh general council[1] proves the use of pious pictures from the head of this holy martyr, and his miraculous image, then kept at Rome with great veneration: where it is still preserved in the church belonging to the monastery of our Lady ad Aquas Sylvias, which now bears the name of SS. Vincent and Anastasius.[2] The rest of his relics are reposited in the holy chapel ad Scalas Sanctas, near St. John Lateran. See the history of many miracles wrought by them in Bollandus. St. Anastasius foretold the speedy fall of the tyrant Chosroës: and ten days after his martyrdom the emperor Heraclius entered Persia. Footnotes: 1. Act. 4. 2. Mabill. Iter. Ital. p. 141. {200} JANUARY XXIII. ST. RAYMUND, OF PENNAFORT, C. From the bull of his canonization, by Clement VIII. in 1601, and his life, written by several Spanish, Italian, and French authors. See Fleury, b. 78, n. 55, 84, and chiefly Touron, Hommes Illustres de l'Ordre de S. Domin. t. 1, p. 1. A.D. 1275. THE house of Pegnafort, or, as it is pronounced, Pennafort, was descended from the counts of Barcelona, and nearly allied to the kings of Aragon. Raymund was born in 1175, at Pennafort, a castle in Catalonia, which in the fifteenth century was changed into a convent of the order of St. Dominick. Such was his rapid progress in his studies, that at the age of twenty he taught philosophy at Barcelona, which he did gratis, and with so great reputation, that he began then to be consulted by the ablest masters. His principal care was to instil into his scholars the most perfect maxims of a solid piety and devotion, to compose all differences among the citizens, and to relieve the distressed. He was about thirty years of age when he went to Bologna, in Italy, to perfect himself in the study of the canon and civil law, commenced Doctor in that faculty, and taught with the same disinterestedness and charity as he had done in his own country. In 1219 Berengarius, bishop of Barcelona, who had been at Rome, took Raymund home with him, to the great regret of the university and senate of Bologna; and, not content with giving him a canonry in his church, made him his archdeacon, grand vicar, and official. He was a perfect model to the clergy, by his innocence, zeal, devotion, and boundless liberalities to the poor, whom he called his creditors. In 1222 he took the religious habit of St. Dominick at Barcelona, eight months after the death of the holy founder, and in the forty-seventh year of his age. No person was ever seen among the young novices more humble, more obedient, or more fervent. To imitate the obedience of a Man-God, who reduced himself to a state of subjection to his own creatures, to teach us the dangers and deep wound of self-will, and to point out to us the remedy, the saint would depend absolutely on the lights of his director in all things. And it was upon the most perfect self-denial that he laid the foundation of that high sanctity which he made the object of his most earnest desires. The grace of prayer perfected the work which mortification had begun. In a spirit of compunction he begged of his superiors that they would enjoin him some severe penance, to expiate the vain satisfaction and complacency which he said he had sometimes taken in teaching. They indeed imposed on him a penance, but not such a one as be expected. It was to write a collection of cases of conscience for the instruction and conveniency of confessors and moralists. This produced his Sum, the first work of that kind. Had his method and decisions been better followed by some later authors of the like works, the holy maxims of Christian morality had been treated with more respect by some moderns than they have been, to our grief and confusion. Raymund joined to the exercises of his solitude the functions of an apostolical life, by laboring without intermission in preaching, instructing, hearing confessions with wonderful fruit, and converting heretics, Jews, and Moors. Among his penitents were James, king of Aragon, and St. Peter Nolasco, {201} with whom he concerted the foundation of the Order of the B. Virgin of mercy for the redemption of captives. James, the young king of Aragon, had married Eleonora of Castile within the prohibited degrees, without a dispensation. A legate was sent by pope Gregory IX. to examine and judge the case. In a council of bishops of the two kingdoms, held at Tarragon, he declared the marriage null, but that their son Don Alphonso should be reputed lawfully born, and heir to his father's crown. The king had taken his confessor with him to the council, and the cardinal legate was so charmed with his talents and virtue, that he associated him in his legation, and gave him a commission to preach the holy war against the Moors. The servant of God acquitted himself of that function with so much prudence, zeal, and charity, that he sowed the seeds of the total overthrow of those infidels in Spain. His labors were no less successful in the reformation of the manners of the Christians detained in servitude under the Moors, which were extremely corrupted by their long slavery or commerce with these infidels. Raymund showed them, by words full of heavenly unction and fire, that, to triumph over their bodily, they must first conquer their spiritual enemies, and subdue sin in themselves, which made God their enemy. Inculcating these and the like spiritual lessons, he ran over Catalonia, Aragon, Castile, and other countries. So general a change was wrought hereby in the manners of the people, as seemed incredible to all but those who were witnesses of it. By their conversion the anger of God was appeased, and the arms of the faithful became terrible to their enemies. The kings of Castile and Leon freed many places from the Moorish yoke. Don James, king of Aragon, drove them out of the islands of Majorca and Minorca, and soon after, in 1237, out of the whole kingdom of Valentia. Pope Gregory IX. having called St. Raymund to Rome in 1230, nominated him his chaplain, (which was the title of the Auditor of the causes of the apostolic palace,) as also grand penitentiary. He made him likewise his own confessarius, and in difficult affairs came to no decision but by his advice. The saint still reserved himself for the poor, and was so solicitous for them that his Holiness called him their father. He enjoined the pope, for a penance, to receive, hear, and expedite immediately all petitions presented by them. The pope, who was well versed in the canon law, ordered the saint to gather into one body all the scattered decree, of popes and councils, since the collection made by Gratian in 1150. Raymund compiled this work in three years, in five books, commonly called the Decretals, which the same pope Gregory confirmed in 1234. It is looked upon as the best finished part of the body of the canon law; on which account the canonists have usually chosen it for the texts of their comments. In 1235, the pope named St. Raymund to the archbishopric of Tarragon, the capital of Aragon: the humble religious man was not able to avert the storm, as he called it, by tears and entreaties; but at length fell sick through anxiety and fear. To restore him to his health, his Holiness was obliged to consent to excuse him, but required that he should recommend a proper person. The saint named a pious and learned canon of Gironne. He refused other dignities with the like constancy. For the recovery of his health he returned to his native country, and was received with as much joy as if the safety of the whole kingdom, and of every particular person, had depended on his presence. Being restored again to his dear solitude at Barcelona, he continued his former exercises of contemplation, preaching, and administering the sacrament of penance. Except on Sundays, he never took more than one very small refection in the day. Amidst honors and applause he was ever little in his own eyes. He appeared in the schools like a scholar, and in his convent begged the {202} superior to instruct him in the rules of religious perfection, with the humility and docility of a novice. Whether he sung the divine praises with his brethren, or prayed alone in his cell, or some corner of the church, he poured forth an abundance of tears; and often was not able to contain within himself the ardor of his soul. His mildness and sweetness were unalterable. The incredible number of conversions of which he was the instrument, is known only to Him who, by his grace, was the author of them. He was employed frequently in most important commissions, both by the holy see and by the king. But he was thunderstruck by the arrival of four deputies from the general chapter of his order at Bologna, in 1238, with the news that he was chosen third general, Jordan of Saxony being lately dead. He wept and entreated, but at length acquiesced in obedience. He made the visitation of his order on foot, without discontinuing any of his penitential austerities, or rather exercises. He instilled into his spiritual children a love of regularity, solitude, mortification, prayer, sacred studies, and the apostolical functions, especially preaching. He reduced the constitutions of the order into a clearer method, with notes on the doubtful passages. Thus his code of rules was approved in three general chapters. In one held at Paris in 1239, he procured the establishment of this regulation, that a voluntary demission of a superior, founded upon just reasons, should be accepted. This he contrived in his own favor; for, to the extreme regret of the order, he in the year following resigned the generalship, which he had held only two years. He alleged for his reason his age of sixty-five years. Rejoicing to see himself again a private religious man, he applied himself with fresh vigor to the exercises and functions of an apostolical life, especially the conversion of the Saracens. Having this end in view, he engaged St. Thomas to write his work 'Against the Gentiles;' procured the Arabic and Hebrew tongues to be taught in several convents of his order; and erected convents, one at Tunis, and another at Murcia, among the Moors. In 1256, he wrote to his general that ten thousand Saracens had received baptism. King James took him into the island of Majorca. The saint embraced that opportunity of cultivating that infant church. This prince was an accomplished soldier and statesman, and a sincere lover of religion, but his great qualities were sullied by a base passion for women. He received the admonitions of the saint with respect, and promised amendment of life, and a faithful compliance with the saint's injunctions in every particular; but without effect. St. Raymund, upon discovering that he entertained a lady at his court with whom he was suspected to have criminal conversation, made the strongest instances to have her dismissed, which the king promised should be done, but postponed the execution. The saint, dissatisfied with the delay, begged leave to retire to his convent at Barcelona. The king not only refused him leave, but threatened to punish with death any person that should undertake to convey him out of the island. The saint, full of confidence in God, said to his companion, "A king of the earth endeavors to deprive us of the means of retiring; but the King of heaven will supply them." He then walked boldly to the waters, spread his cloak upon them, tied up one corner of it to a staff for a sail, and having made the sign of the cross, stepped upon it without fear, while his timorous companion stood trembling and wondering on the shore. On this new kind of vessel the saint was wafted with such rapidity, that in six hours he reached the harbor of Barcelona, sixty leagues distant from Majorca. Those who saw him arrive in this manner met him with acclamations. But he, gathering up his cloak dry, put it on, stole through the crowd, and entered his monastery. A chapel and a tower, built on the place where he landed, have transmitted the memory of this miracle to posterity. {203} This relation is taken from the bull of his canonization, and the earliest historians of his life. The king became a sincere convert, and governed his conscience, and even his kingdoms, by the advice of St. Raymund from that time till the death of the saint. The holy man prepared himself for his passage to eternity, by employing days and nights in penance and prayer. During his last illness, Alphonsus, king of Castile, with his queen, sons, and brother; and James, king of Aragon, with his court, visited him, and received his last benediction. He armed himself with the last sacraments; and, in languishing sighs of divine love, gave up his soul to God, on the 6th of January, in the year 1275, and the hundredth of his age. The two kings, with all the princes and princesses of their royal families, honored his funeral with their presence: but his tomb was rendered far more illustrious by miracles. Several are recorded in the bull of his canonization, published by Clement VIII. in 1601. Bollandus has filled fifteen pages in folio with an account of them. His office is fixed by Clement X. to the 23d of January. * * * * * The saints first learned in solitude to die to the world and themselves, to put on the spirit of Christ, and ground themselves in a habit of recollection and a relish only for heavenly things, before they entered upon the exterior functions even of a spiritual ministry. Amidst these weighty employments, not content with reserving always the time and means of frequent retirement for conversing with God and themselves, in their exterior functions by raising their minds to heaven with holy sighs and desires, they made all their actions in some measure an uninterrupted prayer and exercise of divine love and praise. St. Bonaventure reckons it among the general exercises of every religious or spiritual man,[1] "That he keep his mind always raised, at least virtually, to God: hence, whensoever a servant of God has been distracted from attending to him for ever so short a space, he grieves and is afflicted, as if he was fallen into some misfortune, by having been deprived of the presence of such a friend who never forgets us. Seeing that our supreme felicity and glory consists in the eternal vision of God, the constant remembrance of him is a kind of imitation of that happy state: _this_ the reward, _that_ the virtue which entitles us to it. Till we are admitted to his presence, let us in our exile always bear him in mind: every one will behold him in heaven with so much the greater joy, and so much the more perfectly, as he shall more assiduously and more devoutly have remembered him on earth. Nor is it only in our repose, but also in the midst of our employments, that we ought to have him present to our minds, in imitation of the holy angels, who, when they are sent to attend on us, so acquit themselves of the functions of this exterior ministry as never to be drawn from their interior attention to God. As much as the heavens exceed the earth, so much larger is the field of spiritual meditation than that of all terrestrial concerns." Footnotes: 1. S. Bonav. de Profectu Religios. l. 2, c. 20. p. 604. ST. JOHN THE ALMONER, C. PATRIARCH OF ALEXANDRIA. HE received his surname from his profuse alms-deeds; was nobly descended, very rich, and a widower, at Amathus in Cyprus, where, having buried all his children, he employed the whole income of his estate in the {204} relief of the poor, and was no less remarkable for his great piety. The reputation of his sanctity raised him to the patriarchal chair of Alexandria about the year 605, at which time he was upwards of fifty years of age. On his arrival in that city, he ordered an exact list to be taken of his Masters. Being asked who these were, his answer was, "The poor;" namely, on account of their great interest in the court of heaven in behalf of their benefactors. Their number amounted to seven thousand five hundred, whom he took under his special protection, and furnished with all necessaries. He prepared himself, by this action, to receive the fulness of grace in his consecration. On the same day he published severe ordinances, but in the most humble terms, conjuring and commanding all to use just weights and measures, in order to prevent injustices and oppressions of the poor. He most rigorously forbade all his officers and servants ever to receive the least presents, which are no better than bribes, and bias the most impartial. Every Wednesday and Friday he sat the whole day on a bench before the church, that all might have free access to him to lay their grievances before him, and make known their necessities. He composed all differences, comforted the afflicted, and relieved the distressed. One of his first actions at Alexandria was to distribute the eighty thousand pieces of gold which he found in the treasury of his church, among hospitals and monasteries. He consecrated to the service of the poor the great revenues of his see, then the first in all the East, both in riches and rank. Besides these, incredible charities flowed through his hands in continual streams, which his example excited every one to contribute according to their abilities. When his stewards complained that he impoverished his church, his answer was, that God would provide for them. To vindicate his conduct, and silence their complaints, he recounted to them a vision he had in his youth, of a beautiful woman, brighter than the sun, with an olive garland on her head, whom he understood to be Charity, or compassion for the miserable; who said to him "I am the eldest daughter of the great King. If you enjoy my favor, I will introduce you to the great monarch of the universe. No one has so great an interest with him as myself, who was the occasion of his coming down from heaven to become man for the redemption of mankind." When the Persians had plundered the East, and sacked Jerusalem, St. John entertained all that fled from their swords into Egypt; and sent to Jerusalem, for the use of the poor there, besides a large sum of money, one thousand sacks of corn, as many of pulse, one thousand pounds of iron, one thousand loads of fish, one thousand barrels of wine, and one thousand Egyptian workmen to assist in rebuilding the churches; adding, in his letter to Modestus, the bishop, that he wished it had been in his power to have gone in person, and contributed the labor of his hands towards carrying on that holy work. He also sent two bishops and an abbot to ransom captives. No number of necessitous objects, no losses, no straits to which he saw himself often reduced, discouraged him, or made him lose his confidence in divine providence, and resources never failed him in the end. When a certain person, whom he had privately relieved with a most bountiful alms, expressed his gratitude in the strongest terms, the saint cut him short, saying, "Brother, I have not yet spilt my blood for you, as Jesus Christ, my master and my God, commands me." A certain merchant, who had been thrice ruined by shipwrecks, had as often found relief from the good patriarch, who the third time gave him a ship belonging to the church, laden with twenty thousand measures of corn. This vessel was driven by a storm to the British Islands, and a famine raging there, the owners sold their cargo to great advantage, {205} and brought back a considerable value in exchange, one half in money, the other in pewter. The patriarch lived himself in the greatest austerity and poverty, as to diet, apparel, and furniture. A person of distinction in the city, being informed that our saint had but one blanket on his bed, and this a very sorry one, sent him one of value, begging his acceptance of it, and that he would make use of it for the sake of the donor. He accepted of it, and put it to the intended use, but it was only for one night; and this he passed in great uneasiness, with severe self-reproaches for being so richly covered, while so many of his masters (his familiar term for the poor) were so ill accommodated. The next morning he sold it, and gave the price to the poor. The friend being informed of it, bought it for thirty-six pieces, and gave it him a second, and a third time; for the saint always disposed of it in the same way, saying facetiously, "We shall see who will be tired first." He was well versed in the scriptures, though a stranger to the pomp of profane eloquence. The functions of his ministry, prayer, and pious reading, employed his whole time. He studied with great circumspection to avoid the least idle word, and never chose to speak about temporal affairs, unless compelled by necessity, and then only in very few words. If he heard any detract from the reputation of their neighbor, he was ingenious in turning the discourse to some other subject, and he forbade them his house, to deter others from that vice. Hearing that when an emperor was chosen, it was customary for certain carvers to present to him four or five blocks of marble, to choose one out of them for his tomb, he caused his grave to be half dug, and appointed a man to come to him on all occasions of pomp, and say, "My lord, your tomb is unfinished; be pleased to give your orders to have it completed, for you know not the hour when death will seize you." The remembrance of the rigorous account which we are to give to God, made him often burst into the most pathetic expressions of holy fear. But humility was his distinguishing virtue, and he always expressed, both in words and actions, the deepest sentiments of his own nothingness, sinfulness, miseries, and pride. He often admired how perfectly the saints saw their own imperfections, and that they were dust, worms, and unworthy to be ranked among men. The saint regarded injuries as his greatest gain and happiness. He always disarmed his enemies of their rancor by meekness, and frequently fell at the feet of those who insulted him, to beg their pardon. Nicetas, the governor, had formed a project of a new tax, very prejudicial to the poor. The patriarch modestly spoke in their defence. The governor in a passion left him abruptly. St. John sent him this message towards evening: "The sun is going to set:" putting him in mind of the advice of the apostle: _Let not the sun go down upon your anger_. This admonition had its intended effect on the governor, and pierced him to the quick. He arose, and went to the patriarch, bathed in tears, asked his pardon, and by way of atonement, promised never more to give ear to informers and tale-bearers. St. John confirmed him in that resolution, adding, that he never believed any man whatever against another, till he himself had examined the party accused; and that he punished all calumniators and tale-bearers in a manner which might deter others from so fatal a vice. Having in vain exhorted a certain nobleman to forgive one with whom he was at variance, he soon after invited him to his private chapel to assist at his mass, and there desired him to recite with him the Lord's prayer. The saint stopped at that petition; _Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those that trespass against us_. When the nobleman had recited it alone, he conjured him to reflect on what he had been saying to God at the hour of the tremendous mysteries, {206} begging to be pardoned in the same manner as he forgave others. The other, feeling himself struck to the heart, fell at his feet, and from that moment was sincerely reconciled with his adversary. The saint often exhorted men against rash judgment, saying, "Circumstances easily deceive us; magistrates are bound to examine and judge criminals; but what have private persons to do with others, unless it be to vindicate them?" He used to relate many examples of persons who were found innocent and eminent saints, though they had been condemned by the world upon circumstances; as that of a certain monk, who brought to that city a Jewess whom he had converted, but was accused as guilty of lewdness with her, and cruelly scourged; for he said nothing to justify himself, out of a desire of humiliation and suffering. But his innocence and sanctity were soon after brought to light. St. John employed Sophronius and John Moschus in reducing to the faith the Severians and other heretics. Observing that many amused themselves without the church, during part of the divine office, which was then of a very considerable length, he followed them out, and seated himself among them, saying, "My children, the shepherd must be with his flock." This action, which covered them with confusion, prevented their being guilty of that irreverence any more. As he was one day going to church, he was accosted on the way by a woman who demanded justice against her son-in-law that had injured her. The woman being ordered by some standers-by to wait the patriarch's return from church, he overhearing them, said, "How can I hope that God will hear my prayer, if I put off the petition of this woman?" Nor did he stir from the place till he had redressed the grievance complained of. Nicetas, the governor, persuaded the saint to accompany him to Constantinople, to pay a visit to the emperor. St. John was admonished from heaven, while he was on his way, at Rhodes, that his death drew near, and said to Nicetas, "You invite me to the emperor of the earth; but the King of heaven calls me to himself." He therefore sailed for Cyprus, and soon after died happily at Amathus, about the year of our Lord 619, in the sixty-fourth of his age, and tenth of his patriarchal dignity. His body was afterwards carried to Constantinople, where it was kept a long time. The Turkish emperor made a present of it to Matthias, king of Hungary, which he deposited in his chapel at Buda. In 1530 it was translated to Tall, near Presbourg; and, in 1632, to the cathedral itself of Presbourg, where, according to Bollandus, it still remains. The Greeks honor this saint on the 11th of November, the day of his death; but the Roman Martyrology on the 23d of January, the day marked for the translation of his relics. His life, written by his two vicars, Sophronius and Moschus, is lost; but we have that by Leontius, bishop of Naplouse in Cyprus, from the relation of the saint's clergy, commended in the seventh general council. It is published more correct by Rosweide and Bollandus. We have another life of this saint, conformable to the former, given us by Metaphrastes. See Le Quien, Oriens Christi, t. 2, p. 446. ST. EMERENTIA, V.M. SHE suffered about the year 304, and is named in the Martyrologies under the name of St. Jerom, Bede, and others. She is said in her acts to have been stoned to death, while only a catechumen, praying at the tomb of St. Agnes. {207} ST. CLEMENT OF ANCYRA, B.M. HE suffered under Dioclesian, and is ranked by the Greeks among the great martyrs. His modern Greek acts say, his lingering martyrdom was continued by divers torments during twenty-eight years; but are demonstrated by Baronius and others to be of no authority. Two churches at Constantinople were dedicated to God under the invocation of St. Clement of Ancyra; one called of the Palace, the other now in Pera, a suburb of that city. Several parts of his relics were kept with great devotion at Constantinople. His skull, which was brought thence to Paris when Constantinople was taken by the Latins, in the thirteenth century, was given by queen Anne of Austria to the abbey of Val de Grace. See Chatelain, p. 386. Le Quien, Oriens Chr. t. 1, p. 457. ST. AGATHANGELUS, THE fellow-martyr of St. Clement, bishop of Ancyra. His relics, with those of St. Clement, lay in a church in the suburbs of Constantinople, now called Pera; but were brought into the West when that city was taken by the Latins. ST. ILDEFONSUS, B. HE was a learned Benedictin abbot of a monastery called Agaliense, in a suburb of Toledo, promoted to the archbishopric of that city after the death of Eugenius, in December, 657, according to F. Flores; sat nine years and two months, and died on the 23d of January, 667, according to the same learned author, in the eighteenth year of king Rescisvintho. His most celebrated work is a book On the spotless virginity of the Virgin Mary, against Helvidius, Jovinian, and a certain Jew: he breathes in it the most tender devotion to her, and confidence in her intercession with her Son. He had a singular devotion to St. Leocadia, patroness of Toledo. Certain sermons of St. Ildefonsus on the B. Virgin Mary, and some letters, are published by Flores.[1] Some of his letters, which were first given us by D'Achery, were reprinted by cardinal D'Aguirre.[2] In Spanish this saint is called Ildefonso, and by the common people Alanso, for Alphonsus, which is an abbreviation of Ildefonsus. See his short life by St. Julian, bishop of Toledo, twenty-three years after his death. In Mabillon, sæc. 2. Fleury, b. 39, n. 40. That by Cixila is not authentic. See especially the remarks of the learned F. Flores on these two lives, &c., in his Spana Sagrada, t. 5, tr. 5, c. 3, n. 31, p. 275, and app. 9, ib. p. 522. F. Flores reckons St. Ildefonsus the thirty-first bishop of Toledo, from St. Eugenius, the disciple of St. Dionysius of Paris, whom, with the writers of his country, he counts the first, in the year 112. Footnotes: 1. F. Flores. Spana Sagrada, t. 5, append. 7, p. 490. 2. Card. D'Aguirre, Conc. Hispan. t. 2, p. 534. {208} ST. EUSEBIUS, AN ABBOT BETWEEN ANTIOCH AND BER[OE]A HIS example was a perpetual and a most moving sermon, and his very countenance inspired all who beheld him with the love of virtue. He took nourishment but once in four days, but would not allow any of his monks to pass above two days without eating. He prescribed them mortifications of each sense in particular, but made perpetual prayer his chief rule, ordering them to implore the divine mercy in their hearts, in whatever labor their hands were employed. While Ammianus, who had resigned to him the government of the abbey, was one day reading aloud, out of the scriptures, for their mutual edification, Eusebius happened to cast his eye on certain laborers in the field where they sat, so as not to give due attention to the lecture: to punish himself for this slight fault, he put on, and wore till his death, for above forty years, a heavy iron collar about his neck, fastened by a stiff chain to a great iron girdle about his middle, so that he could only look downwards under his feet: and he never afterwards stirred out of his cell but by a narrow passage from his cell to the chapel. His sanctity drew many disciples to him. He flourished in the fourth century. See Theodoret Philoth. c. 4. Item Hist. Eccles. l. 4, c. 28. JANUARY XXIV. ST. TIMOTHY, B. AND M. See Tillemont, t. 2, p. 142. ST. TIMOTHY, the beloved disciple of St. Paul, was of Lycaonia, and probably of the city Lystra. His father was a Gentile, but his mother Eunice a Jewess. She, with Lois his grandmother, embraced the Christian religion, and St. Paul commends their faith. Timothy had made the holy scriptures his study from his infancy.[1] When St. Paul preached in Lycaonia, in the year 51, the brethren of Iconium and Lystra gave him so advantageous a character of the young man, that the apostle, being deprived of St. Barnaby, took him for the companion of his labors, but first circumcised him at Lystra. For though the Jewish ceremonies ceased to be obligatory from the death of Christ, it was still lawful to use them (but not as of precept and obligation) till about the time of the destruction of Jerusalem with the temple, that the synagogue might be buried with honor. Therefore St. Paul refused to circumcise Titus, born of Gentile parents, to assert the liberty of the gospel, and to condemn those who erroneously affirmed circumcision to be still of precept in the New Law. On the other side, he circumcised Timothy, born of a Jewess, by that condescension to render him the more acceptable to the Jews, and to make it appear that himself was no enemy to their law. St. Chrysostom[2] here admires the prudence, steadiness, {209} and charity of St. Paul; and we may add, the voluntary obedience of the disciple. St. Austin[3] extols his zeal and disinterestedness in immediately forsaking his country, his house, and his parents, to follow this apostle, to share in his poverty and sufferings. After he was circumcised, St. Paul, by the imposition of hands, committed to him the ministry of preaching, his rare virtue making ample amends for his want of age. From that time the apostle regarded him not only as his disciple and most dear son, but as his brother, and the companion of his labors.[4] He calls him a man of God,[5] and tells the Philippians, that he found no one so truly united to him in heart and sentiments, as Timothy.[6] This esteem of the apostle is a sufficient testimony of the extraordinary merit of the disciple, whose vocation and entrance into the ministry was accompanied with prophecies in his behalf.[7] St. Paul travelled from Lystra over the rest of Asia, sailed into Macedon, and preached at Philippi, Thessalonica, and Ber[oe]a, in the year 52. Being compelled to quit this last city by the fury of the Jews, he left Timothy behind him, to confirm the new converts there. On St. Paul's arrival at Athens he sent for him, but being informed that the Christians of Thessalonica lay under a very heavy persecution for the faith, he soon after deputed him to go thither, to comfort and encourage them under it; and he returned to St. Paul, then at Corinth, to give him an account of his success in that commission.[8] Upon this the apostle wrote his first epistle to the Thessalonians. From Corinth St. Paul went to Jerusalem, and thence to Ephesus, where he spent two years. Here he formed a resolution of returning into Greece, and sent Timothy and Erastus before him through Macedon, to apprize the faithful in those parts of his intention, and to prepare the alms intended to be sent the Christians of Jerusalem. Timothy had a particular order to go afterwards to Corinth, to correct certain abuses, and to revive in the minds of the faithful there the doctrine which the apostle had taught them; who, writing soon after to the Corinthians, earnestly recommended this disciple to them.[9] St. Paul waited in Asia for his return, and then went with him into Macedon and Achaia. St. Timothy left him at Philippi, but rejoined him at Troas. The apostle on his return to Palestine was imprisoned, and after two years custody at Cæsarea, was sent to Rome. Timothy seems to have been with him all or most of this time, and is named by him in the titles of his epistles to Philemon, and to the Philippians and Thessalonians, in the years 61 and 62. St. Timothy himself suffered imprisonment for Christ, and gloriously confessed his name, in the presence of many witnesses; but was set at liberty.[10] He was ordained bishop by a prophecy, and a particular order of the Holy Ghost.[11] He received by this imposition of hands, not only the grace of the sacrament, and the authority to govern the church, but also the power of miracles, and the other exterior gifts of the Holy Ghost. St. Paul being returned from Rome into the East, in the year 64, left St. Timothy at Ephesus, to govern that church, to oppose false teachers, and to ordain priests, deacons, and even bishops.[12] For St. Chrysostom[13] and other fathers observe, that he committed to him the care of all the churches of Asia: and St. Timothy is always named the first bishop of Ephesus.[14] St. Paul wrote his first epistle to Timothy from Macedon, in 64; and his second, in 65, from Rome, while there in chains, to press him to come to Rome, that he might see him again before he died. It is an effusion of his heart, full of tenderness towards this his dearest son. In it he encourages {210} him, endeavors to renew and stir up in his soul that spirit of intrepidity, and that fire of the Holy Ghost, with which he was filled at his ordination; gives him instructions concerning the heretics of that time, and adds a lively description of such as would afterwards arise.[15] We learn[16] that St. Timothy drank only water: but his austerities having prejudiced his health, on account of his weak stomach and frequent infirmities, St. Paul ordered him to use a little wine. The fathers observe that he only says a little, even in that necessity, because the flesh is to be kept weak, that the spirit may be vigorous and strong. St. Timothy was then young: perhaps about forty. It is not improbable that he went to Rome to confer with his master. In the year 64 he was made by St. Paul bishop of Ephesus, before St. John arrived there, who resided also in that city as an apostle, and exercising a general inspection over all the churches of Asia.[17] St. Timothy is styled a martyr in the ancient martyrologies. His acts, in some copies ascribed to the famous Polycrates, bishop of Ephesus, but which seem to have been written at Ephesus, in the fifth or sixth age, and abridged by Photius, relate, that under the emperor Nerva, in the year 97, St. John being still in the isle of Patmos, St. Timothy was slain with stones and clubs by the heathens, while he was endeavoring to oppose their idolatrous ceremonies on one of their festivals called Catagogia, kept on the 22d of January, on which the idolaters walked in troops, every one carrying in one hand an idol, and in the other a club. St. Paulinus,[18] Theodorus Lector, and Philostorgius,[19] inform us, that his relics were with great pomp translated to Constantinople in the year 356, in the reign of Constantius. St. Paulinus witnesses, that the least portion of them wrought many miracles wherever they were distributed. These precious remains, with those of St. Andrew. and St. Luke, were deposited under the altar, in the church of the apostles in that city, where the devils, by their howlings, testified how much they felt their presence, says St. Jerom;[20] which St. Chrysostom also confirms.[21] * * * * * Pious reading was the means by which St. Timothy, encouraged by the example and exhortations of his virtuous grandmother and mother, imbibed in his tender years, and nourished during the whole course of his life, the most fervent spirit of religion and all virtues; and his ardor for holy reading and meditation is commended by St. Paul, as the proof of his devotion and earliest desire of advancing in divine charity. When this saint was wholly taken up in the most laborious and holy functions of the apostolic ministry, that great apostle strongly recommends to him always to be assiduous in the same practice,[22] and in all exercises of devotion. A minister of the gospel who neglects regular exercises of retirement, especially self-examination, reading, meditation, and private devotion, forgets his first and most essential duty, the care he owes to his own soul. Neither can he hope to kindle the fire of charity in others, if he suffer it to be extinguished {211} in his own breast. These exercises are also indispensably necessary in a certain degree, in all states and circumstances of life; nor is it possible for a Christian otherwise to maintain a spirit of true piety, which ought to animate the whole body of all his actions, and without which even spiritual functions want as it were their soul. Footnotes: 1. 2 Tim. iii. 15. 2. Præf. in 1 Tim. 3. Serm. 177, n. 7. 4. 1 Thess. iii. 2. 1 Cor. iv. 17. 5. 1 Tim. vi. 11. 6. Phil. ii. 20. 7. 1 Tim. i. 18. 8. Acts xviii. 9. 1 Cor. xvi. 10. 10. Heb. xiii. 23. 11. 1 Tim. iv. 14. 12. 1 Tim. {}. 13. Hom. 15, in 1 Tim. 14. Eus. l. 3, c. {} Conc. t. 4, p. 699. 15. 2 Tim. iii. 1, 2. 16. 1 Tim. v. 23. 17. In the Apocalypse, which was written in the year 95, Christ threatens the bishop of Ephesus, because he was fallen from his first charity, and exhorts him to do penance and return to his first works. (Apoc. xi. 4.) Calmet says, that this bishop could be no other than St. Timothy; Pererius, Cornelieus à Lapide, Grotius, Alcazar, Bossuet, and other learned men, agree in this point; also Tillemont, t. 2, p. 147, and Bollandus ad 21 Jan. pp. 563 & 564. Nicholas à Lyra and Ribera cannot be persuaded that St. Timothy ever deserved such a censure, unless we understand it only of his flock. The others say, he might have fallen into some venial remissness in not reprehending the vices of others with sufficient vigor; which fault he repaired, upon this admonition, with such earnestness, as to have given occasion to his martyrdom, in 97. He was succeeded in the see of Ephesus by John I., who was consecrated by St. John Evangelist. (See Consitut. Apostol. l. 8, c. 46.) Onesiumus was third bishop of Ephesus. See Le Quien Oriens. Chris. t. 1, p. 672. 18. Carm. 26. 19. L. 3, c. 2. 20. In Vigilant. c. 2. 21. Hom. 1, ad Pop. Antioch. 22. 1 Tim. iv. 7 and 13. ST. BABYLAS, BISHOP OF ANTIOCH AND MARTYR. From St. Chrysostom, l. contra Gentiles de S. Babylâ, and hom. de S. Babylâ, t. 2, ed. Ben. p. 531. He wrote the first discourse against the Gentiles, expressly to confound them by the miracles of this saint. He spoke the second five years after, in 3871 on St. Babylas's feast, before a numerous auditory, and mentions Flavian, the bishop of Antioch, and others, who were to speak after him on the same subject. The miracles were recent, performed before the eyes of many then present. Nome of the three acts of this saint in Bollandus can be authentic. See Tillemont, Mem. t. 3, p. 400, and Hist. des Empereurs, t. 3, and F. Merlin. Dissertation contre M. Bayle sur ce que rapporte S. Chrysostome du Martyre de S. Babylas, Mem. de Trevoux, Juin 1737, p. 1051. Also Stilting, the Bollandist, in Vit. S. Chrysost. §15. p 439, ad 14 Septemb. t. 4. About the year 250. THE most celebrated of the ancient bishops of Antioch, after St. Ignatius, was St. Babylas, who succeeded Zebinus in the year 237, and governed that church with great zeal and virtue, about thirteen years, under the emperors Gordian, Philip, and Decius. Philip, an Arabian by birth, and of mean extraction, raised by the young emperor Gordian to be prefect of the prætorian guards, perfidiously murdered his master at the head of his victorious army in Persia, and caused himself to be acknowledged emperor by the senate and people of Rome, in the year 244. We have very imperfect histories of his reign. Eusebius says that he abolished the public stews and promiscuous bathing in Rome, which Alexander Severus, the most virtuous of the heathen emperors, had in vain attempted to do. The same historian adds, it was averred[1] that Philip, being a Christian, subjected himself to canonical penance at Antioch, where being arrived on the eve of a great festival, as the chronicle of Alexandria relates, he presented himself at the Christian oratory, with his wife; but being excluded by the bishop, with a meek rebuke for his crimes, he made his exomologesis, or confession, and ranked himself among the penitents without doors. St. Jerom, Vincent of Lerins, Orosius, and others, positively affirm that this emperor was a Christian: and Eusebius, Rufinus, St. Jerom, Vincent of Lerins, and Syncellus say, that Origen wrote two letters, one to the emperor Philip, another to his wife, with an authority which the Christian priesthood gave him over emperors. Philip assisted at the heathenish solemnity of the thousandth year of Rome; but his presence was necessary on that occasion, nor is he said to have offered sacrifice. He was indeed a bad Christian, and probably only a catechumen, an ambitious and cruel tyrant, who procured the death of Misitheus, father-in-law of Gordian, murdered Gordian himself to usurp his empire, and put to death the young prince, son of the king of Persia, of the Parthians, left a hostage in his hands: circumstances mentioned by St. Chrysostom. Having reigned something upwards of five years, he was slain with his son Philip, his colleague in the empire, by Decius, about the middle of the year 249. The peace and favor which the church had enjoyed during his reign, had much increased her numbers, but had relaxed the fervor of many, as we see in St. Cyprian's works, and in the life of St. Gregory Thaumaturgus. Whole cities had embraced the faith, and public {212} churches were erected. Decius equally hated the Philips and the Christian religion, against which he published the most cruel edicts in the year 250; which caused the seventh general persecution, permitted by God to purge away the dross to his flock, and to awake them to fervor. St. Chrysostom extols the courage and zeal of St. Babylas, in shutting the church-doors against an emperor and a barbarous tyrant, then at the head of a victorious army. We find Philip styled conqueror of the Parthians, in an inscription in Gruter,[2] by which he seems to have returned triumphant, though Zonoras pretends he had bought a peace. Eusebius mentions it as a report, that the emperor received the bishop's rebuke with meekness, and submitted to public penance: but St. Chrysostom insinuates, that the same tyrant, in a rage for being refused admittance, threw St. Babylas into a dungeon, where he soon died. St. Jerom says that Decius imprisoned him, which seems the true account. F. Stilting thinks that Decius, after being proclaimed emperor in Pannonia, marched first against Philip, and when he was slain, led his army into Syria, where Priscus, Philip's brother, commanded the troops of those parts, and Jotapian about that time assumed the purple, but was soon crushed. At this time he doubts not but Decius was forbid by St. Babylas to enter the church, because he was an idolater, and had perfidiously murdered a prince who was the son of some king of a nation of barbarians, who had sent him as a hostage to that tyrant. For many transactions of that time are not recorded by the Roman historians. At least it seems to have been under Decius that St. Babylas consummated his martyrdom by the hardships of his prison: and when dying, ordered his chains to be buried with him, as the happy instruments and marks of his triumph. The Christians built a church over his tomb. His body rested here about one hundred years, till 351, when Gallus Cæsar translated it to Daphne, five miles from Antioch, to oppose the worship of a famous idol of Apollo, which gave oracles in that place. Gallus erected a church, sacred to the name of St. Babylas, near the profane temple, and placed in it his venerable ashes in a shrine above ground. The neighborhood of the martyr's relics struck the devil dumb, as is averred by St. Chrysostom. Theodoret,[3] Sozomen, and others, who triumph over the pagans on this account.[4] Eleven years after, Julian the Apostate came to Antioch, in the year 362, and by a multitude of sacrifices endeavored to learn of the idol the cause of his silence. At length the fiend gave him to understand, that the neighborhood was full of dead bones, which must be removed before he could be at rest and disposed to give answers. Julian understood this of the body of St. Babylas, and commanded that the Christians should immediately remove his shrine to some distant place; but not touch the other dead bodies. Thus do the fathers and Christian historians of that age relate this miracle.[5] The Christians obeyed the order, and with great solemnity carried back in procession the sacred relics to Antioch, singing on this occasion the psalms which ridicule the vanity and feebleness of idols, repeating after every verse: "May they who adore idols and glory in false gods, blush with shame and be covered with confusion." The following evening, lightning fell on the temple of Apollo, and reduced to ashes all the rich and magnificent ornaments with which it was embellished, and the idol itself, leaving only the walls standing. Julian, the emperor's uncle, {213} and governor of the East, upon this news hastened to Daphne, and endeavored by tortures to compel the priests to confess if the accident had happened by any negligence, or by the interposition of the Christians: but it was clearly proved by the testimony of these very priests, and also by that of several peasants who saw the fire fall from heaven, that lightning was the cause. The Apostate durst not restore the idol lest the like thunder should fall on his own head: but he breathed nothing but fury against the Christians in general, more especially against those of Antioch, the fatal effects of which he intended they should feel at his return from the Persian war. Vain projects against God, who defeated them by his unhappy death in that expedition! The ruins of this temple remained in the same condition above twenty years after. The Roman Martyrology, with that of St. Jerom and others of the West, celebrate the memory of St. Babylas on the 24th of January, but the Greeks on the 4th of September, together with three children martyred with him, as St. Chrysostom and others mention. His body is said to be now at Cremona, brought from the East in the crusades. St. Babylas is the titular saint of many churches in Italy, France, and Spain. Footnotes: 1. [Greek: Touton katexei xristianon honta] Eus. l. 6, c. 3. 2. P. 273. 3. Theodoret l. 3. Hist. c. 6, and de Græcor. Affect. l. 10. Rufin. Chrys. 4. St. Chrysostom has given us the lamentation of Libanius, the celebrated heathen sophist, bewailing the silence of Apollo at Daphne; adding that Julian had delivered him from the neighborhood of a dead man, which was troublesome to him. 5. Ammianus Marcellinus, a heathen, and Julian's own historian, says b. 2, p. 225, that he caused all the bones of dead men to be taken away to purify the place. ST. SURANUS, ABBOT IN UMBRIA, WHO gave all things, even the herbs out of his garden, to the poor. He was martyred by the Lombards in the seventh century, and his relics were famed for miracles.[1] Footnotes: 1. St. Greg. Dial. l. 4, c. 22. ST. MACEDONIUS, ANCHORET IN SYRIA. HE lived forty years on barley moistened in water, till finding his health impaired, he ate bread, reflecting that it was not lawful for him to shorten his life to shun labors and conflicts, as he told the mother of Theodoret; persuading her, when in a bad state of health, to use a proper food, which he said was physic to her. Theodoret relates many miraculous cures of sick persons, and of his own mother among them, by water on which he had made the sign of the cross, and that his own birth was the effect of his prayers, after his mother had lived childless in marriage thirteen years.[1] {214} The saint died, ninety years old, and is named in the Greek menologies. See Theodoret, Hist. Eccles. l. 5, c. 19, and Philotheæ, c. 13. St. Chrysost. hom. 17, ad Pop. Antioch. Footnotes: 1. The great Theodoret was dedicated to God by his parents before he was born, and was educated in the study of every true branch of Syriac, Greek, and Hebrew learning. He gave a large estate to the poor, and entered a monastery near Apamea, but was taken out of it against his will, and consecrated bishop of Cyrus in 423, being very young. He converted all the Marcionites, Arians, and other heretics in his diocese, in which he reckons eight hundred churches, or parishes. (Ep. 113, p. 987.) Cyrus was a very small poor town in a desert country, eighty miles from Antioch, one hundred and twenty from Apamea, and one hundred and seventeen from Samosata. Though Theodoret lived in great poverty, he enriched the poor and the churches, and built for his city an aqueduct, two large bridges, porticoes, and baths. In 430 pope Celestin and St. Cyril of Alexandria wrote to John, patriarch of Antioch, against Nestorius, who on his side sent an orthodox letter to the same prelate: soon after St. Cyril wrote his third letter to Nestorius, to which he subjoined twelve anathematisms against the errors of Nestorius. In this writing certain obscure phrases occur, which John of Antioch thought favorable to the heresy of Apollinaris: whereupon he engaged Theodoret to undertake a confutation of them. Theodoret carried on this contest with great warmth in several writings, and when the ecumenical council of Ephesus was assembled in 431, refused, with John of Antioch, and the rest of the forty Oriental bishops, to enter it, because Nestorius had been condemned in it on the 21st of June, before they arrived at Ephesus on the 27th. They even went so far as to pretend to excommunicate St. Cyril, and form a schism in the church. F. Garnier, the most declared enemy to Theodoret among the moderns, lays to his charge several things, of which Tillemont and others clear him. It is certain that he wrote with great bitterness against St. Cyril, and his anathematisms, as appears from the works which he wrote upon that occasion, especially certain letters and fragments of his Pentalogus, (or work in five books, against St. Cyril,) still extant. But St. Cyril having made a clear confession of his faith in a letter to Acacius of Ber[oe]a, Theodoret loudly declared him orthodox, and this he proved even in letters which he wrote to Nestorius himself, and to Alexander of Hierapolis, his own metropolitan, the warmest of all St. Cyril's enemies. John of Antioch and many others made their peace with St. Cyril, about the month of April. In 433, Theodoret stood out some time longer, by refusing to condemn the person of Nestorius. St. Cyril and John of Antioch afterwards admitted him to their communion without requiring that condition, and Theodoret labored to gain over Alexander of Hierapolis; but in vain, so that this prelate was banished by the emperor; Theodoret himself, though he enjoyed the communion of St. Cyril, and of John of Antioch, was often accused, because he persisted to defend the person of Nestorius. The persecution was often renewed against Theodoret, so long as he adhered to Nestorius, especially after St. Cyril, St. Proclus, and all the western prelates condemned the writings of Theodorus of Mopsuestia, as the master of the heresiarch Nestorius in his capital error. The Orientals defended Theodorus, and Theodoret endeavored to justify him by several writings against St. Cyril, of which only fragments quoted in the fifth council are extant. St. Cyril, by his silence and moderation, calmed this dispute, and always maintained peace with the Orientals from the time it was settled between them. His death happened in June, 444, and Dioscorus, the impious Eutychian, was his successor. Theodorus, bishop of Mopsuestia, in Cilicia, who died in 428, in his erroneous writings laid the foundation both of the Pelagian and Nestorian heresies. Theodoret, in his writings against St. Cyril, adopts certain expressions which favored Nestorianism, and were condemned in the fifth general council; nevertheless, his sentiments were always orthodox, as is proved by Tillemont, (Art. 20, t. 15, p. 253,) Natalis Alexander, Graveson, &c. By exerting his zeal against Eutyches and Dioscorus, he incurred the indignation of their sect, and the false council of Ephesus pronounced a pretended sentence of deposition against him. Theodosius the younger first forbade him to stir out of his diocese, and when he desired to go to Rome to justify himself, in 450, banished him to his monastery near Apamea. The emperor Marcian put an end to the persecution raised by the Eutychians under his predecessor; yet Theodoret chose to continue in his monastery till he was called by pope Leo to assist at the council of Chalcedon. He had received, with great applause, the excellent letter of that pope to Flavian, and St. Leo declared null all the proceedings of Dioscorus against him at Ephesus, and restored him to his see, (Conc. t. 4, p. 622.) The council of Chalcedon met in 451, and in the seventh session, held on the 26th of October, Theodoret presented his request that his writings and faith might be examined. Those who were prepossessed against him would not allow any such examination, but required that he should anathematize Nestorius, which he at length did; and the council, with high commendations, declared him orthodox, and worthy of his see. Marcian, by a law published the following year, annulled the edict of Theodosius against him and Flavian. He died at Cyrus, about the year 458. The heresy of Nestorius he had clearly condemned from the beginning, with John of Antioch, in their exhortatory letter to Nestorius, (Conc. t. 3, p. 394). What mistakes and faults he fell into he cancelled by his edifying repentance; and the great virtues which he practised even under his disgrace, the extent of his learning, and the sublimity and acuteness of his genius, have established his reputation in all succeeding ages, and he is deservedly ranked among the must illustrious fathers of the church. His excellent writings are the most authentic monuments of his extraordinary learning and piety. He modestly compares himself (Proleg. in Osee. t. 2, p. 700) to the Jewish poor women, who in the building of the tabernacle, having neither gold nor silver to give to God towards this work, picked and gathered together the hair, thread, or cloths, contributed by others, or spun, or sewed something, not to be found quite empty-handed. St. Chrysostom was taken away from Antioch in 397, and Theodoret was only born about the year 393: but though he had not the happiness of hearing his divine discourses, he took him for his principal model, and especially in his comments on the scriptures usually adhered to those of that incomparable doctor. His works were printed at Paris, in 1642, in four volumes in folio, to which F. Garnier, a learned Jesuit, in 1684, added a fifth under the title of an Auctarium, containing certain letters and discourses of this father, with several prolix historical dissertations on the Nestorian heresy. The judicious F. Sirmond, far more equitable than F. Garnier. admires Theodoret's brevity, joined with great perspicuity, especially in his commentaries, and commends the pleasing beauty and attic elegance of his style. Photius praises his fruitfulness of invention, the purity of his language, the choice of his words, and the smoothness and neatness of his style, in which he finds everywhere a decent and noble elevation, though he thinks his metaphors sometimes too bold. This great critic calls his method of short notes the most accomplished model for interpreting the holy scriptures, and mentions, as an instance of his sincere humility, that he never employs a single word, or produces a quotation for ostentation, never falling into digressions foreign to his purpose; we may almost say, that a superfluous word scarce ever escapes him. (Phot. Cod. 203, p. 526. Cod. 31, 46, 56.) His comments on St. Paul, and on most of the books of the old Testament, are concise literal, and solid, but contain not that inexhausted and excellent treasure of morality which we find in St. Chrysostom, whose commentaries Theodoret had always before him: this latter excels chiefly on the prophets. His church history, in five books, from the close of that of Eusebius in 324 to 429, is a valuable compilation. Photius justly prefers his style to that of Eusebius, Evagrius, Socrates, and Sozomen, as more historical, clear, and lofty, without any redundancy. (Cod. 31) His religious history, or Philothea, (_i.e._ History of the Friends of God,) contains the lives of thirty monks and anchorets of his time. He was himself an eye-witness to several of the miracles which he relates to have been wrought by the sign of the cross, holy water, and blessed oil. Of some other miracles which he mentions, he tells us that they were so authentic and notorious that no one who believes those of Moses, Elias, and the Apostles, could deny them. The five books, Of Heretical Fables, are a history of ancient heresies which he wrote at the request of Sporacius, one of the imperial commissaries at the council of Chalcedon, who was consul in 452. In the fourth book, he inveighs most bitterly against Nestorius, whom he had for some time unwarily favored. The letters of Theodoret which are extant, amount to the number of 146. His book Against the twelve Anthematisms of St. Cyril, he tacitly recalled by his condemnation of Nestorius; also his Pentalogus on the same subject, which is now lost, except some fragments preserved by Marius Mercator. His three dialogues against the Eutychians, he entitled Polymorphus, (_i.e._ of many shapes,) and Eranistes, that is, the Beggar, because the Eutychian error was gathered from the various heresies of Marcian, Valentin, Arius, and Apollinaris. The first dialogue he calls the Unchangeable, because in it he shows that the divine Word suffered no change by becoming man. The second is entitled The Inconfused, from the subject, which is to prove that in Christ, after the Incarnation, the divine and human nature remain really distinct. The third is called, The Impassible, because in it the author demonstrates that the divinity neither did nor could suffer; the same is the purport of his Demonstration by syllogisms. The dialogues were written about the year 447; for the author clearly confutes Eutyches, though he never names him; and it appears that St. Cyril was then dead, the author reckoning him in the end among the Catholic doctors, who had formerly flourished in the church, and among the stars which had enlightened the world. (Dial. 2. p. 86, and 111.) Theodoret's ten sermons On Providence, is a work never yet paralleled by any other writer, ancient or modern, on that sublime subject; whether we consider the matter and the choice of thoughts, or the author's sincere piety, or his extensive knowledge, and the depth of his philosophical inquiries, or the strength and solidity of his reasoning, or the noble sublimity of the expression, and the elegance and perspicuity of the diction. It was the love of God which engaged him to undertake, in this task, the defence of the cause of our best Father and supreme Lord, as he modestly assures us, (p. 320,) and this motive animated him with fresh life and uncommon vigor in exerting and displaying the strength and beauty of his genius on so great a subject. His twelve discourses On healing the Prejudices of the Greeks, are an excellent apology for our faith against the pagans; a performance which falls little short of the former. In it we meet with many curious anecdotes relating to the heathenish theology of the ancients, and the impiety and vices with which their philosophers disgraced their profession. In the eighth of these discourses, which is entitled, On the Martyrs, he clearly demonstrates that the veneration which Christians pay to the saints in heaven, is entirely different from the worship which the heathens give to their false gods, and elegantly explains (pp. 591, 660, 606) in what manner the souls of the martyrs now in heaven, with the choirs of angels, are our protectors and mediators with God, the physicians of our bodies, and savers of our souls: the portions of their divided relics are the guard and protection of our cities, which through their intercession with God obtain divine gifts: Christians give their names to their children to put these under their patronage: it was a custom to hang up before their shrines, gold or silver images of eyes, feet, or hands, as tokens or memorials of health, or other benefits received by their means: they keep their festivals, as those of Peter, Paul, Thomas, Sergius, Marcellus, Leontius, Panteleemon, Antoninus, Mauritius, and others, in prayer, divine canticles, and holy sermons. The same he testifies in his other works. Almost every life of holy monks which he wrote, he closes by imploring their intercession, and mentions that as far as Rome, handicraftsman hang up in their shops the picture of St. Simeon Stylites, hoping by their devotion to share in the protection of his prayers. (Philoth. c. 26, p. 862.) We learn from, him, that Christians were always accustomed to make the sign of the cross on the cup before they drank. (Hist. Eccl. l. 3, c. 13.) He often extols the virtues of that holy sign, honored, as he says, by all Christians, whether Greeks, Romans, or Barbarians, (Serm. 6, de Prov. p. 580, t. 4,) and he relates, (Hist. Eccl. l. 3. c. 1,) that Julian the Apostate, by making it in a fright, drove away the devils which one of his enchanters was invoking. His book in praise of virginity, to which he refers us, (on 1 Cor. vii. 33.) is lost; also the book in which he confuted both Eutyches and Nestorius, which is mentioned by Gennadius (c. 89) and Marcellinus. (ad an. 466.) His book Against the Jews, and several others, have not reached us. Among those which are extant his Octateuch, (or comments on the five books of Moses, and those of Joshua, Judges, and Ruth,) to which he added comments on the books of Kings and Paralipomenon, much commended by Photius, seems to be the last work which he wrote. See Tillem. t. 15. Ceillier. {215} ST. CADOCUS, OR CADOC, ABBOT IN WALES. CADOC was son to Gundleus, a prince of South Wales, by his wife Gladusa, daughter of Braghan, whose name wax given to the province now called Brecknockshire. His parents were not less ennobled by their virtues than by their blood, and his father, who some years before his death renouncing the world, led an eremitical life near a country church which he had built, was honored in Wales among the saints. Cadoc, who was his eldest son, succeeded in the government, but not long after followed his father's example; and embracing a religious life, put himself under the direction of St. Tathai, an Irish monk, who had opened a famous school at Gwen{t}, the ancient Venta Silurum of the Romans, afterwards a bishop's see, now in ruins in Monmouthshire. Our saint made such progress both in learning and virtue, that when he returned into Glamorganshire, his own country, he spread on every side the rays of his wisdom and sanctity. Here, three miles from Cowbridge, he built a church and a monastery, which was called Llan-carvan, or the Church of Stags, and sometimes Nancarvan, that is, the Vale of Stags. The school which he established in this place became most illustrious, and fruitful in great and holy men. By our saint's persuasion St. Iltut renounced the court and the world, and learned at Llan-carvan that science which he preferred to all worldly treasures. He afterwards founded the great monastery of Llan-Iltut. These two monasteries and that of St. Docuinus, all situated in the diocese of Landaff, were very famous for many ages, and were often governed by abbots of great eminence. St. Gildas, after his return from Ireland, entered the monastery of St. Cadoc, where he taught for one year, and copied a book of the gospels, which was long preserved with great care in the church of St. Cadoc, and highly reverenced by the Welsh, who used it in their most solemn oaths and covenants. After spending there one year, St. Gildas and St. Cadoc left Llan-carvan, being desirous to live in closer retirement. They hid themselves first in the islands of Ronech and Echni. An ancient life of St. Cadoc tells us, that he died at Benevenna, which is the {216} Roman name of a place now called Wedon, in Northamptonshire. Some moderns take it for Benevento, in Italy, where they suppose him to have died. Chatelain imagines this St. Cadoc to be the same who is honored at Rennes, under the name of Cadoc, or Caduad, and from whom a small island on the coast of Vennes is called Enes-Caduad. St. Cadoc flourished in the beginning of the sixth century, and was succeeded in the abbacy of Llan-carvan, by Ellenius, "an excellent disciple of an excellent master," says Leland. See the Acts of St. Cadoc, in Capgrave; Usher's Antiquities, c. 13, p. 252. Chatelain's Notes on the. Martyr. p. 399. JANUARY XXV. THE CONVERSION OF ST. PAUL. See Tillemont, t. 1, p. 192. THIS great apostle was a Jew, of the tribe of Benjamin. At his circumcision, on the eighth day after his birth, he received the name of Saul. His father was by sect a Pharisee, and a denizen of Tarsus, the capital of Cilicia: which city had shown a particular regard for the cause of the Cæsars; on which account Cassius deprived it of its privileges and lands; but Augustus, when conqueror, made it ample amends by honoring it with many new privileges, and with the freedom of Rome, as we read in the two Dions and Appian. Hence St. Paul, being born at Tarsus, was by privilege a Roman citizen, to which quality a great distinction and several exemptions were granted by the laws of the empire.[1] His parents sent him young to Jerusalem, where he was educated and instructed in the strictest observance of the law of Moses, by Gamaliel,[2] a learned and noble Jew, and probably a member of the Sanhedrim; and was a most scrupulous observer of it in every point. He appeals even to his enemies to bear evidence how conformable to it his life had been in every respect.[3] He embraced the sect of the Pharisees, which was of all others the most severe, though by its pride the most opposite to the humility of the gospel.[4] It was a rule among the Jews that all their children were to learn some trade with their studies, were it but to avoid idleness, and to exercise the body, as well as the mind, in something serious.[5] It is therefore probable that Saul learned in his youth the trade which he exercised even after his apostleship, of making tents.[6] Saul, surpassing all his equals in zeal for the Jewish law and their traditions, which he thought the cause of God, became thereby a, blasphemer, a persecutor, and the most outrageous enemy of Christ.[7] He was one of those who combined to murder St. Stephen, and by keeping the garments of all who stoned that holy martyr, he is said by St. Austin to have stoned him by the hands of all the rest;[8] to whose prayers for his enemies he ascribes {217} the conversion of St. Paul:[9] "If Stephen," said he, "had not prayed, the church would never have had St. Paul." After the martyrdom of the holy deacon, the priests and magistrates of the Jews raised a violent persecution against the church at Jerusalem, in which Saul signalized himself above others. By virtue of the power he had received from the high priest, he dragged the Christians out of their houses, loaded them with chains, and thrust them into prison.[10] He procured them to be scourged in the synagogues, and endeavored by torments to compel them to blaspheme the name of Christ. And as our Saviour had always been represented by the leading men of the Jews as an enemy to their law, it was no wonder that this rigorous Pharisee fully persuaded himself that _he ought to do many things contrary to the name of Jesus of Nazareth_.[11] By the violences he committed, his name became everywhere a terror to the faithful. The persecutors not only raged against their persons, but also seized their estates and what they possessed in common,[12] and left them in such extreme necessity, that the remotest churches afterwards thought it incumbent on them to join in charitable contributions to their relief. All this could not satisfy the fury of Saul; he breathed nothing but threats and the slaughter of the other disciples.[13] Wherefore, in the fury of his zeal, he applied to the high priest and Sanhedrim for a commission to take up all Jews at Damascus who confessed Jesus Christ, and bring them bound to Jerusalem, that they might serve as public examples for the terror of others. But God was pleased to show forth in him his patience and mercy; and, moved by the prayers of St. Stephen and his other persecuted servants, for their enemies, changed him, in the very heat of his fury, into a vessel of election, and made him a greater man in his church by the grace of the apostleship, than St. Stephen had ever been, and a more illustrious instrument of his glory. He was almost at the end of his journey to Damascus, when about noon, he and his company were on a sudden surrounded by a great light from heaven, brighter than the sun.[14] They all saw the light, and being struck with amazement, fell to the ground. Then Saul heard a voice, which to him was articulate and distinct; but not understood, though heard by the rest:[15] _Saul, Saul, why dost thou persecute me?_ Christ said not: Why dost thou persecute my disciples? but me: for it is he, their head, who is chiefly persecuted in his servants. Saul answered: _Who art thou, Lord?_ Christ said: _Jesus of Nazareth, whom thou persecutest. It is hard for thee to kick against the goad:_ "to contend with one so much mightier than thyself. By persecuting my church you make it flourish, and only prick and hurt yourself." This mild expostulation of our Redeemer, accompanied with a powerful interior grace, strongly affecting his soul, cured his pride, assuaged his rage, and wrought at once a total change in him. Wherefore, trembling and astonished, he cried out: _Lord, what wilt thou have me to do?_ What to repair the past? What to promote your glory? I make a joyful oblation of myself to execute your will in every thing, and to suffer for your sake afflictions, disgraces, persecutions, torments, and every sort of death. The true convert expressed this, not in a bare form of words, nor with faint languid desires, nor with any exception lurking in the secret recesses of his heart; but with an entire sacrifice of himself, and an heroic victory over the world with its frowns and charms, over the devils with their snares and threats, and over himself and all inclinations of self-love; devoting himself totally to God. A {218} perfect model of a true conversion, the greatest work of almighty grace! Christ ordered him to arise and proceed on his journey to the city, where he should be informed of what he expected from him. Christ would not instruct him immediately by himself, but, St. Austin observes,[16] sent him to the ministry[17] which he had established in the church, to be directed in the way of salvation by those whom he had appointed for that purpose. He would not finish the conversion and instruction of this great apostle, whom he was pleased to call in so wonderful a manner, but by remitting him to the guidance of his ministers; showing us thereby that his holy providence has so ordered it, that all who desire to serve him, should seek his will by listening to those whom he has commanded us to hear, and whom he has sent in his own name and appointed to be our guides. So perfectly would he abolish in his servants all self-confidence and presumption, the source of error and illusion. The convert, rising from the ground, found that, though his eyes were open, he saw nothing. Providence sent this corporal blindness to be an emblem of the spiritual blindness in which he had lived, and to signify to him that he was henceforward to die to the world, and learn to apply his mind totally to the contemplation of heavenly things. He was led by the hand into Damascus, whither Christ seemed to conduct him in triumph. He was lodged in the house of a Jew named Judas, where he remained three days blind, and without eating or drinking. He doubtless spent his time in great bitterness of soul, not yet knowing what God required of him. With what anguish he bewailed his past blindness and false zeal against the church, we may conjecture both from his taking no nourishment during those three days, and from the manner in which he ever after remembered and spoke of his having been a blasphemer and a persecutor. Though the entire reformation of his heart was not gradual, as in ordinary conversions, but miraculous in the order of grace, and perfect in a moment; yet a time of probation and a severe interior trial (for such we cannot doubt but he went through on this occasion) was necessary to crucify the old man and all other earthly sentiments in his heart, and to prepare it to receive the extraordinary graces which God designed him. There was a Christian of distinction in Damascus, much respected by the Jews for his irreproachable life and great virtue; his name was Ananias. Christ appeared to this holy disciple; and commanded him to go to Saul, who was then in the house of Judas at prayer: Ananias trembled at the name of Saul, being no stranger to the mischief he had done in Jerusalem, or to the errand on which he was set out to Damascus. But our Redeemer overruled his fears, and charged him a second time to go to him, saying: _Go, for he is a vessel of election to carry my name before Gentiles and kings, and the children of Israel: and I will show him how much he has to suffer for my name_. For tribulation is the test and portion of all the true servants of Christ. Saul in the mean time saw in a vision a man entering, and laying his hands upon him, to restore his sight. Ananias, obeying the divine order, arose, went to Saul, and laying his hands upon him, said: _Brother Saul, the Lord Jesus who appeared to thee on thy journey, hath sent me that thou mayest receive thy sight, and be filled with the Holy Ghost._ Immediately something like scales fell from his eyes, and he recovered his eyesight. Ananias added: _The God of our fathers hath chosen thee that thou shouldst know his will and see the just one, and shouldst hear the voice from his mouth: and thou shalt be his witness unto all men to publish what thou hast seen and heard. Arise, therefore, be baptized and washed from thy sins, invoking the name of the Lord._ Saul then arose, was baptized,{219} and took some refreshment. He stayed some few days with the disciples at Damascus, and began immediately to preach in the synagogues, that Jesus was the Son of God, to the great astonishment of all that heard him, who said: _Is not this he who persecuted at Jerusalem those who invoked the name of Jesus, and who is come hither to carry them away prisoners?_ Thus a blasphemer and a persecutor was made an apostle, and chosen to be one of the principal instruments of God in the conversion of the world. * * * * * St. Paul never recalled to mind this his wonderful conversion, without raptures of gratitude and praise to the divine mercy. The church, in thanksgiving to God for such a miracle of his grace, from which it has derived such great blessings, and to commemorate so miraculous an instance of his almighty power, and to propose to penitents a perfect model of a true conversion, has instituted this festival, which we find mentioned in several calendars and missals of the eighth and ninth centuries, and which pope Innocent III. commanded to be observed with great solemnity. It was for some time kept a holy day of obligation in most churches in the West; and we read it mentioned as such in England in the council of Oxford in 1222, in the reign of king Henry III.[18] Footnotes: 1. Acts, xxi. 29, xxii. 3. 2. Ibid. xxii. 3. 3. Ibid. xxvi. 4. 4. Ibid. xxvi. 5. 5. Rabbi Juda says, "That a parent, who neglects his duty, is as criminal as if he taught his son to steal." See Grotius and Sanctius on Acts xviii. 3. 6. These tents were for the use of soldiers and mariners, and were made of skins sewn together. {} think that his business was that of making tapestry and hangings for theatres. 7. Gal. i. 14. 8. Serm. 301. 9. Ibid. l. 16, c. 4. Acts, vi. 10. Acts, viii. 3, xxii. 4, xxvi. 10. 11. Acts, xxvi. 9. 12. Heb. x. 32. 13. Acts, x. 1. 14. Acts, ix. xiii. xxvi. 15. So the Greek word [Greek: akoein] is often used in scripture, as in J{} xiv. 2. And thus the text is very reconcilable with Acts. xxii. 9. 16. Qu. Evang. l. 2, c. 40, et præf. 1, de doctr. Christ. p. 32. 17. St. Austin doubts not but Ananias was a bishop, or at least a priest. The Greeks give him a place in their calendar on the 1st of October, and style him bishop of Damascus and martyr. 18. Conc. Labbe, t. xi. p. 274. SS. JUVENTINUS AND MAXIMINUS, MARTYRS. From the elegant panegyric of St. Chrysostom, t. 2, p. 578, ed. Montf., and from Theodoret, Hist. l. 3, c. 11. A.D. 363. THESE martyrs were two officers of distinction in the foot-guards of Julian the Apostate.[1] When that tyrant was on his march against the Persians, they let fall at table certain free reflections on his impious laws against the Christians, wishing rather for death than to see the profanation {220} of holy things. The emperor, being informed of this, sent for them, and finding that they could not be prevailed upon by any means to retract what they had said, nor to sacrifice to idols, he confiscated their estates, caused them to be cruelly scourged, and, some days after, to be beheaded in prison at Antioch, January the 25th, 363. The Christians, with the hazard of their lives, stole away their bodies, and after the death of Julian, who was slain in Persia on the 26th of June following, erected for them a magnificent tomb. On their festival St. Chrysostom pronounced their panegyric, in which he says of these martyrs: "They support the church as pillars, defend it as towers, and repel all assaults as rocks. Let us visit them frequently, let us touch their shrine, and embrace their relics with confidence, that we may obtain from thence some benediction. For as soldiers, showing to the king the wounds which they have received in his battles, speak with confidence, so they, by an humble representation of their past sufferings for Christ, obtain whatever they ask of the King of heaven."[2] Footnotes: 1. Julian, surnamed the Apostate, rebelled against Constantius, his cousin-german, in the spring, in 360, and by his death, in November, 361, obtained the empire. He was one of the most infamous dissemblers that ever lived. Craft, levity, inconstancy, falsehood, want of judgment, and an excessive vanity, discovered themselves in all his actions, and appear in his writings, namely, his epistles, his satire called Misopogon, and his lives of the Cæsars. He wrote the last work to censure all the former emperors, that he might appear the only great prince: for a censorious turn is an effect of vanity and pride. He was most foolishly superstitious, and exceedingly fond of soothsayers and magicians. After the death of Constantius, he openly professed idolatry, and by besmearing himself with the blood of impious victims, pretended to efface the character of baptism. He was deceived in almost every step by ridiculous omens, oracles, and augurs, as may be seen in his heathen historian, Ammianus Marcellinus, (b. 22.) Maximus, the magician, and others of that character, were his chief confidants. He endeavored, by the black art, to rival the miracles of Christ, though he effected nothing. He disqualified Christians from bearing offices in the state; he forbade them to teach either rhetoric of philosophy, that he might deprive them of the advantages of human literature, a thing condemned by Ammianus himself. He commanded, by an edict, that they should be no longer called Christians, but Galileans, and though he pretended to toleration, he destroyed more souls by recompenses, caresses, and strategems, than he could have done by cruelties. He levied heavy fines and seized the estates of Christians, saying, in raillery, that he did it to oblige them to follow the gospel, which recommends poverty. He often put them to death, but secretly, and on other pretences, that he might deprive them of the honor of martyrdom: which artifice might have its influence on philosophers, the lovers of vanity; but not on the servants of God, who desired to be known to him alone, and to suffer, regardless of the applause of men, as St. Gregory Nazianzen observes. (Or. 3, in Julian.) That father, when he knew him a student at Athens, in 355, prognosticated (Or. 4, in Julian, p. 122) from his light carriage, wandering eye, haughty look, impertinent questions, and foolish answers, what a monster the Roman empire was fostering and breeding up. In his march to his Persian expedition, he was made a subject of mockery and ridicule at Antioch, on account of his low stature, gigantic gait, great goat's beard, and bloody sacrifices. In answer to which, he wrote his Misopogon, or Beardhater, a low and insipid satire. He everywhere threatened the Christians upon his return from the Persian war. The oracles of Delos, Delphos, Dodona, and others, promised him victories, as Theodoret, St. Gregory Nazianzen, Philostorgius, and Libanius himself, (Libanius, Or. 12,) a heath, and the chief favorite of Julian, testify: all the pagan deities wherever he passed, gave him the like assurances, as he himself writes (Julian, ep. 2.) But in Persia he rashly ventured into wilds and deserts, with an army of sixty-five thousand men, where he was defeated and slain in June, 363. Ammianus, who was then in the army, only says that he was mortally wounded in the battle, and died in his tent the same day, before noon. Theodoret, Sozomen, and the acts of St. Theodoret the martyr, say, that finding himself wounded, he threw up a handful of blood towards heaven, crying out: "Thou hast conquered, O Galilean, thou hast conquered." It was revealed to many holy hermits, that God cut him off to give peace to his church. 2. Hom. in SS. Juv. et Max. t. 2, p. 583. ST. PROJECTUS, BISHOP OF CLERMONT, M. CALLED AT LYONS ST. PRIEST, AT SENS ST. PREST, IN SAINT-ONGE ST. PREILS, AT PARIS AND IN PICARDY ST. PRIX. THE episcopal see of Auvergne, which was founded by St. Austremonius, in the middle of the third century, has been honored with many holy bishops, of whom twenty-six are ranked among the saints. Of these the most eminent are St. Alidius, called in French Allyre, the fourth bishop, in 380, St. Sidonius Apollinaris in 482, St. Gallus in 656, St. Prix in 674, and St. Bont in 710. About the year 1160, the title of bishops of Auvergne was changed into that of Clermont, from the city of this name. St. Prix was a native of Auvergne, and trained up in the service of the church, under the care of St. Genesius, first archdeacon, afterwards bishop of Auvergne, and was well skilled in plain song, (which was esteemed in that age the first part of the science of a clergyman,) and in holy scriptures and church history. The parish of Issoire, and afterwards the nunnery, of Candedin, (now probably Chantoen, a convent of barefooted Carms,) were the chief theatres of his zeal, till about the year 666 he was called by the voice of the people, seconded by Childeric II., king of Austrasia, to the episcopal dignity, upon the death of Felix, bishop of Auvergne. Partly by his own ample patrimony, and partly by the great liberalities of Genesius, the holy count of Auvergne, he was enabled to found several monasteries, churches, and hospitals; so that all distressed persons in his extensive diocese were provided for, and a spirit of fervor in the exercises of religion, and all Christian virtues, reigned in all parts. This was the fruit of the unwearied and undaunted zeal, assiduous sermons and exhortations, and the admirable example and sanctity of the holy prelate; whose learning, eloquence, and piety, are exceedingly extolled by the two historians of his life. The saint, on his road to the court of king Childeric, whither he was going for the affairs of his diocese, restored to health St. Damarin, or Amarin, a holy abbot of a monastery in the mountains of Voge, who was afterwards martyred with him. This king caused Hector, the patrician of Marseilles, whom the saint had severely rebuked for having ravished a young lady of Auvergne, a rich heiress, and having unjustly usurped considerable estates belonging to his church, to be put to death for this rape and other crimes. One Agritius, imputing his death to the complaints carried to the king by St. Prix, in revenge {221} stirred up many persons against the holy prelate, and with twenty armed men met the bishop as he returned from court, at Volvic, two leagues from Clermont, and first slew the abbot St. Damarin, whom the ruffians mistook for the bishop. St. Prix, perceiving their design, courageously presented himself to them, and was stabbed in the body by a Saxon named Radbert. The saint, receiving this wound, said, "Lord, lay not this sin to their charge, for they know not what they do." Another of the assassins clove his head with a back-sword, and scattered his brains. This happened in 674, on the 25th of January. The veneration which the Gallican churches paid to the memory of this martyr began from the time of his death. His name was added to the calendar in the copies of the Sacramentary of St. Gregory, which were transcribed in France, and churches were erected under his invocation in almost every province of that kingdom. The principal part of his relics remain in the abbey of Flavigny, whither they were carried about the year 760. Some portions are kept in the abbey of St. Prix at St. Quintin's, of the congregation of Cluni; another in the priory of St. Prix near Bethune, and in certain other places. See the two lives of St. Prix, the first written by one who was acquainted with him, the other by one of the same age, both extant in Bollandus, pp. 628, 636, and in Mabillon Act. Ben. t. 1, pp. 642, 650. ST. POPPO, ABBOT OF STAVELO ST. POPPO was born in Flanders in 978, and received a pious education, under the care of a most virtuous mother, who died a nun at Verdun. In his youth he served for some time in the army, but even while he lived in the world, he found the spiritual food of heavenly meditation and prayer, with which the affections of the soul are nourished,[St. Aug. Tr. 26. in Joan.] to be incomparably sweeter than all the delights of the senses, and to give himself up entirely to these holy exercises, he renounced his profession and the world. In a visit which he made by a penitential pilgrimage to the holy places at Jerusalem, he brought thence many precious relics, with which he enriched the church of our Lady at Deisne, now a marquisate between Ghent and Courtray. He made also a pilgrimage to the shrines of the apostles at Rome, and, some time after his return, took the monastic habit at St. Thierry's, near Rheims. Richard, abbot of Verdun, becoming acquainted with his eminent virtue, obtained with great difficulty his abbot's consent to remove him thither; and being made abbot of St. Vedast's, at Arras, upon the deposition of Folrad, who had filled that house with scandalous disorders, he appointed Poppo procurator. In a journey which our saint was obliged to make to the court of St. Henry, he prevailed with that religious prince to abolish the combats of men and bears. St. Poppo was chosen successively prior of St. Vedast's, provost of St. Vennes, and abbot of Beaulieu, which last he rebuilt. He was afterwards chosen abbot of St. Vedast's, and some time later of the two united abbeys of Stavelo and Malmedy, about a league asunder, in the diocese of Liege; also, two years after this, of St. Maximin's at Triers. Those of Arms and Marchiennes were also committed to his care: in all which houses he settled the most exact discipline. He died at Marchiennes, on the 25th of January, in 1048, being seventy years of age. St. Poppo received extreme unction at the hands of Everhelm, abbot of Hautmont, afterwards of Blandinberg at Ghent, who afterwards wrote his life, in which he gives a particular account of his great {222} virtues. The body of St. Poppo was carried to Stavelo, and there interred: his remains were taken up and enshrined in 1624, after Baronius had inserted his name in the Roman Martyrology; for Molanus, in his Indiculus, and Miræus observe that he was never canonized. Chatelain denies against Trithemius that any commemoration was ever made of him in the public office in any of the abbeys which he governed. But Martenne assures us that he was honored among the saints at Stavelo, in the year 1624. See his life written by the monk Onulf, and abridged by Everhelm, abbot of Hautmont, in Bollandus, p. 673, and Martenne, Amplis. Collectio, t. 2, Præf. p. 17. ST. APOLLO, ABBOT IN THEBAIS. AFTER passing many years in a hermitage, he formed and governed a community of five hundred monks, near Heliopolis. They all wore the same coarse white habit, all received the holy communion every day, and the holy abbot made them also a daily exhortation with admirable unction. He entertained them often on the evils of melancholy and sadness, saying, that spiritual joy and cheerfulness of heart are necessary amid our tears of penance; as being the fruit of charity, and requisite to support the fervor of the soul. He was known to strangers by the joy of his countenance. By humility he ranked himself among the goats, unworthy to be numbered among the sheep. He made it his constant and earnest petition to God, that he might know himself, and be preserved from the subtile snares and illusions of pride. It is said that the devil left a possessed person at his command, crying out that he was not able to withstand his humility. The saint received a visit from St. Petronius, afterwards bishop of Bologna, in 393, being then near eighty years old, which he did not long survive. See Sozom. l. 6, c. 29. Rufin. l. 2. Tillem. t. 10, p. 35. The Greek menæa and Bollandus on this day. ST. PUBLIUS, ABBOT NEAR ZEUGMA, UPON THE EUPHRATES, IS honored by the Greeks. He was the son of a senator in that city, and sold his estate, plate, and furniture, for the benefit of the poor; and lived first a hermit, afterwards governed a numerous community in the fourth age. He allowed his monks no other food than herbs and pulse, and very coarse bread; no drink but water: he forbade milk, cheese, grapes, and even vinegar, also oil, except from Easter to Whitsuntide. To put himself always in mind of advancing continually in fervor and charity, he added every day something to his exercises of penance and devotion: he was remarkably solicitous to avoid sloth, being sensible of the inestimable value of time. Alas! what would not a damned soul, what would not a suffering soul in purgatory give, for one of those moments which we unthinkingly throw away. As far as the state of the blessed in heaven can admit of regret, they eternally condemn their insensibility as having lost every moment of their mortal life, which they did not improve to the utmost advantage. Theodoret tells us that the holy abbot Publius founded two congregations, the one of Greeks, the other of Syrians, each using their own tongue in the divine office: for the Greek and Chaldean were from the beginning {223} sacred languages, or consecrated by the church in her public prayers. St. Publius flourished about the year 369. See Theodoret, Philoth. c. 5. Rosweide, l. 6, c. 7. Chatel. Mart. Univ. p. 886, among the Aemeres, or saints who are not commemorated on any particular day. JANUARY XXVI. ST. POLYCARP, BISHOP OF SMYRNA, M. From his acts, written by the church of Smyrna in an excellent circular letter to the churches of Pontus, immediately after his martyrdom: a piece abridged by Eusebius, b. 4, c. 14, highly esteemed by the ancients. Joseph Scaliger, a supercilious critic, says that nothing in the whole course of church history so strongly affected him, as the perusal of these acts, and those relating to the martyrs of Lyons: that he never read them but they gave him extraordinary emotions. Animad. in Chron. Eusebii, n. 2183, &c. They are certainly most valuable pieces of Christian antiquity. See Eusebius, St. Jerom, and St. Irenæus. Also Tillemont, t. 2, p. 327. Dom Ceillier, t. 1. Dom Marechal, Concordance des Peres Grecs et Latins, t. 1. A.D. 166. ST. POLYCARP was one of the most illustrious of the apostolic fathers, who, being the immediate disciples of the apostles, received instructions from their mouths, and inherited of them the spirit of Christ, in a degree so much the more eminent, as they lived nearer the fountain head. He embraced Christianity very young, about the year 80; was a disciple of the apostles, in particular of St. John the Evangelist, and was constituted by him bishop of Smyrna, probably before his banishment to Patmos, in 96: so that he governed that important see seventy years. He seems to have been the angel or bishop of Smyrna, who was commended above all the bishops of Asia by Christ himself in the Apocalypse,[1] and the only one without a reproach. Our Saviour encouraged him under his poverty, tribulation, and persecutions, especially the calumnies of the Jews, called him rich in grace, and promised him the crown of life by martyrdom. This saint was respected by the faithful to a degree of veneration. He formed many holy disciples, among whom were St. Irenæus and Papias. When Florinus, who had often visited St. Polycarp, had broached certain heresies, St. Irenæus wrote to him as follows:[2] "These things were not taught you by the bishops who preceded us. I could tell you the place where the blessed Polycarp sat to preach the word of God. It is yet present to my mind with what gravity he everywhere came in and went out: what was the sanctity of his deportment, the majesty of his countenance and of his whole exterior, and what were his holy exhortations to the people. I seem to hear him now relate how he conversed with John and many others, who had seen Jesus Christ; the words he had heard from their mouths. I can protest before God, that if this holy bishop had heard of any error like yours, he would have immediately stopped his ears, and cried out, according to his custom: Good God! that I should be reserved to these times to hear such things! That very instant he would have fled out of the place in which he had heard such doctrine." St. Jerom[3] mentions, that St. Polycarp met at Rome the heretic Marcion, in the streets, who resenting that the holy bishop did not take that notice of him which he expected, said to him: "Do not you {224} know me, Polycarp?" "Yes," answered the saint, "I know you to be the first-born of Satan." He had learned this abhorrence of the authors of heresy, who knowingly and willingly adulterate the divine truths, from his master St. John, who fled out of the bath in which he saw Cerinthus.[4] St. Polycarp kissed with respect the chains of St. Ignatius, who passed by Smyrna on the road to his martyrdom, and who recommended to our saint the care and comfort of his distant church of Antioch; which he repeated to him in a letter from Troas, desiring him to write in his name to those churches of Asia to which he had not leisure to write himself.[5] St. Polycarp {225} wrote a letter to the Philippians shortly after, which is highly commended by St. Irenæus, St. Jerom, Eusebius, Photius, and others, and is still extant. It is justly admired both for the excellent instructions it contains, and for the simplicity and perspicuity of the style; and was publicly read in the church in Asia, in St. Jerom's time. In it he calls a heretic, as above, the eldest son of Satan. About the year 158, he undertook a journey of charity to Rome, to confer with pope Anicetus about certain points of discipline, especially about the time of keeping Easter, for the Asiatic churches kept it on the fourteenth day of the vernal equinoctial moon, as the Jews did, on whatever day of the week it fell; whereas Rome, Egypt, and all the West, observed it on the Sunday following. It was agreed that both might follow their custom without breaking the bands of charity. St. Anicetus, to testify his respect, yielded to him the honor of celebrating the Eucharist in his own church.[6] We find no further particulars concerning our saint recorded before the acts of his martyrdom. In the sixth year of Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus, Statius Quadrates being proconsul of Asia, a violent persecution broke out in that country, in which the faithful gave heroic proofs of their courage and love of God, to the astonishment of the infidels. When they were torn to pieces with scourges till their very bowels were laid bare, amidst the moans and tears of the spectators, who were moved with pity at the sight of their torments, not one of them gave so much as a single groan: so little regard had they for their own flesh in the cause of God. No kinds of torture, no inventions of cruelty were forborne to force them to a conformity to the pagan worship of the times. Germanicus, who had been brought to Smyrna with eleven or twelve other Christians, signalized himself above the rest, and animated the most timorous to suffer. The proconsul in the amphitheatre called upon him with tenderness, entreating him to have some regard for his youth, and to value at least his life: but he, with a holy impatience, provoked the beasts to devour him, to leave this wicked world. One Quintus, a Phrygian, who had presented himself to the judge, yielded at the sight of the beast let out upon him, and sacrificed. The authors of these acts justly condemn the presumption of those who offered themselves to suffer,[7] and says that the martyrdom of St. Polycarp was conformable to the gospel, because he exposed not himself to the temptation, but waited till the persecutors laid hands on him, as Christ our Lord taught us by his own example. The same venerable authors observe, that the martyrs by their patience and constancy demonstrated to all men, that, while their bodies were tormented, they were in spirit estranged from the flesh, and already in heaven; or rather that our Lord was present with them and assisted them; for the fire of the barbarous executioners seemed as if it had been a cooling refreshment to them.[8] The spectators, seeing the courage of Germanicus and his companions, and being fond of their impious bloody diversions, cried out: "Away with the impious; let Polycarp be sought for." The holy man, though fearless, had been prevailed upon by his friends to withdraw and conceal himself in a neighboring village during the storm, spending most of his time in prayer. Three days before his martyrdom, he in a vision saw his pillow on fire; from which he understood by revelation, and {226} foretold his companions, that he should be burnt alive. When the persecutors were in quest of him he changed his retreat, but was betrayed by a boy, who was threatened with the rack unless he discovered him. Herod, the Irenarch, or keeper of the peace, whose office it was to prevent misdemeanors and apprehend malefactors, sent horsemen by night to beset his lodgings. The saint was above stairs in bed, but refused to make his escape, saying: "God's will be done." He went down, met them at the door, ordered them a handsome supper, and desired only some time for prayer before he went with them. This granted, he began his prayer standing, which he continued in that posture for two hours, recommending to God his own flock and the whole church with so much earnestness and devotion, that several of those that were come to seize him repented they had undertaken the commission. They set him on an ass, and were conducting him towards the city, when he was met on the road by Herod and his father Nicetes, who took him into their chariot, and endeavored to persuade him to a little compliance, saying: "What harm is there in saying Lord Cæsar, or even in sacrificing, to escape death?" By the word Lord was meant nothing less than a kind of deity or godhead. The bishop at first was silent, in imitation of our Saviour: but being pressed, he gave them this resolute answer: "I shall never do what you desire of me." At these words, taking off the mask of friendship and compassion, they treated him with scorn and reproaches, and thrust him out of the chariot with such violence, that his leg was bruised by the fall. The holy man went forward cheerfully to the place where the people were assembled. Upon his entering it, a voice from heaven was heard by many: "Polycarp, be courageous, and act manfully."[9] He was led directly to the tribunal of the proconsul, who exhorted him to respect his own age, to swear by the genius of Cæsar, and to say: "Take away the impious," meaning the Christians. The saint turning towards the people in the pit, said, with a stern countenance: "Exterminate the wicked," meaning by this expression either a wish that they might cease to be wicked by their conversion to the faith of Christ: or this was a prediction of the calamity which befell their city in 177, when Smyrna was overturned by an earthquake, as we read in Dion[10] and Aristides.[11] The proconsul repeated: "Swear by the genius of Cæsar, and I discharge you; blaspheme Christ." Polycarp replied: "I have served him these fourscore and six years, and he never did me any harm, but much good; and how can I blaspheme my King and my Saviour? If you require of me to swear by the genius of Cæsar, as you call it, hear my free confession: I am a Christian; but if you desire to learn the Christian religion, appoint a time, and hear me." The proconsul said: "Persuade the people." The martyr replied: "I addressed my discourse to you; for we are taught to give due honor to princes as far as is consistent with religion. But the populace is an incompetent judge to justify myself before." Indeed, rage rendered them incapable of hearing him. The proconsul then assuming a tone of severity, said: "I have wild beasts:" "Call for them," replied the saint: "for we are unalterably resolved not to change from good to evil. It is only good to pass from evil to good." The proconsul said: "If you contemn the beasts, I will cause you to be burnt to ashes." Polycarp answered: "You threaten me with a fire which burns for a short time, and then goes out; but are yourself ignorant of the {227} judgment to come, and of the fire of everlasting torments which is prepared for the wicked. Why do you delay? Bring against me what you please." While he said thus and many other things, he appeared in a transport of joy and confidence, and his countenance shone with a certain heavenly grace, and pleasant cheerfulness, insomuch that the proconsul himself was struck with admiration. However, he ordered a crier to make public proclamation three times it the middle of the Stadium, (as was the Roman custom in capital cases:) "Polycarp hath confessed himself a Christian."[12] At this proclamation the whole multitude of Jews and Gentiles gave a great shout, the latter crying out: "This is the great teacher of Asia; the father of the Christians; the destroyer of our gods, who preaches to men not to sacrifice to or adore them." They applied to Philip the Asiarch,[13] to let loose a lion upon Polycarp. He told them that it was not in his power, because those shows had been closed. Then they unanimously demanded that he should be burnt alive. Their request was no sooner granted, but every one ran with all speed to fetch wood from the baths and shops. The Jews were particularly active and busy on this occasion. The pile being prepared, Polycarp put off his garments, untied his girdle, and began to take off his shoes; an office he had not been accustomed to, the Christians having always striven who should do these things for him, regarding it as a happiness to be admitted to touch him. The wood and other combustibles were heaped all round him. The executioners would have nailed him to the stake; but he said to them: "Suffer me to be as I am. He who gives me grace to undergo this fire, will enable me to stand still without that precaution." They therefore contented themselves with tying his hands behind his back, and in this posture, looking up towards heaven, he prayed as follows: "O Almighty Lord God, Father of thy beloved and blessed Son Jesus Christ, by whom we have received the knowledge of thee, God of angels, powers, and every creature, and of all the race of the just that live in thy presence! I bless thee for having been pleased in thy goodness to bring me to this hour, that I may receive a portion in the number of thy martyrs, and partake of the chalice of thy Christ, for the resurrection to eternal life, in the incorruptibleness of the holy Spirit. Amongst whom grant me to be received this day as a pleasing sacrifice, such an one as thou thyself hast prepared, that so thou mayest accomplish what thou, O true and faithful God! hast foreshown. Wherefore, for all things I praise, bless, and glorify thee, through the eternal high priest Jesus Christ thy beloved Son, with whom, to Thee and the Holy Ghost be glory now and for ever. Amen." He had scarce said Amen, when fire was set to the pile, which increased to a mighty flame. But behold a wonder, say the authors of these acts, seen by us, reserved to attest it to others; the flames forming themselves into an arch, like the sails of a ship swelled with the wind, gently encircled the body of the martyr, which stood in the middle, resembling not roasted flesh, but purified gold or silver, appearing bright through the flames; and his body sending forth such a fragrancy, that we seemed to smell precious spices. The blind infidels were only exasperated to see his body could not be consumed, and ordered a spearman to pierce him through, which he did, and such a quantity of blood issued out of his left side as to quench the fire.[14] The malice of the devil ended not here: {228} he endeavored to obstruct the relics of the martyr being carried off by the Christians; for many desired to do it, to show their respect to his body. Therefore, by the suggestion of Satan, Nicetes advised the proconsul not to bestow it on the Christians, lest, said he, abandoning the crucified man, they should adore Polycarp: the Jews suggested this, "Not knowing," say the authors of the acts, "that we can never forsake Christ, nor adore any other, though we love the martyrs, as his disciples and imitators, for the great love they bore their king and master." The centurion, seeing a contest raised by the Jews, placed the body in the middle, and burnt it to ashes. "We afterwards took up the bones," say they, "more precious than the richest jewels or gold, and deposited them decently in a place at which may God grant us to assemble with joy, to celebrate the birth-day of the martyr." Thus these disciples and eye-witnesses. It was at two o'clock in the afternoon, which the authors of the acts call the eighth hour, in the year 166, that St. Polycarp received his crown, according to Tillemont; but, in 169, according to Basnage.[15] His tomb is still shown with great veneration at Smyrna, in a small chapel. St. Irenæus speaks of St. Polycarp as being of an uncommon age. * * * * * The epistle of St. Polycarp to the Philippians, which is the only one among those which he wrote that has been preserved, is, even in the dead letter, a standing proof of the apostolic spirit with which he was animated, and of that profound humility, perfect meekness, burning charity, and holy zeal, of which his life was so admirable an example. The beginning is an effusion of spiritual joy and charity with which he was transported at the happiness of their conversion to God, and their fervor in divine love. His extreme abhorrence of heresy makes him immediately fall upon that of the Docætæ, against which he arms the faithful, by clearly demonstrating that Christ was truly made man, died, and rose again: in which his terms admirably express his most humble and affectionate devotion to our divine Redeemer, under these great mysteries of love. Besides walking in truth, he takes notice, that to be raised with Christ in glory, we must also do his will, keep all his commandments, and love whatever he loved; refraining from all fraud, avarice, detraction, and rash judgment; repaying evil with good, forgiving and showing mercy to others that we ourselves may find mercy. "These things," says he, "I write to you on justice, because you incited me; for neither I, nor any other like me, can attain to the wisdom of the blessed and glorious Paul, into whose epistles if you look, you may raise your spiritual fabric by strengthening faith, which is our mother, hope following, and charity towards God, Christ, and our neighbor preceding us. He who has charity is far from all sin." The saint gives short instructions to every particular state, then adds; "Every one who hath not confessed that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh, is antichrist;[16] and who hath not confessed the suffering of the cross, is of the devil; and who hath drawn the oracles of the Lord to his passions, and hath said that there is no resurrection nor judgment, he is the oldest son of Satan." He exhorts to watching always in prayer, lest we be led into temptation; to be constant in fasting, persevering, joyful in hope, and in the pledge of our justice, which is Christ {229} Jesus, imitating his patience; for, by suffering for his name, we glorify him. To encourage them to suffer, he reminds them of those who had suffered before their eyes: Ignatius, Zozimus, and Rufus, and some of their own congregation,[17] "who are now," says our saint, "in the place which is due to them with the Lord, with whom they also suffered." Footnotes: 1. Ch. ii. v. 9. 2. Eus. Hist. l. 5, c. 20, p. 188. 3. Cat. vir. illustr. c. 17. 4. See also 1 John ii. 18, 22, and 2 John 10. 5. St. Ignatius begins his letter to the faithful at Smyrna, by glorifying God for their great spiritual wisdom, saying he knew them to be perfect in their unshaken faith, as men crucified with our Lord Jesus in flesh and in spirit, and deeply grounded in charity by the blood of Christ. He then solidly confutes the Docætæ, heretics who imagined that Christ was not incarnate, and died only in appearance; whom he calls demoniacs. He adds: "I give you this caution, knowing that you hold the true faith, but that you may stand upon your guard against these wild beasts in human shape, whom you ought not to receive under your roof, nor even meet if possible; and be content only to pray for them that they may be converted, if it be possible; for it is very difficult; though it is in the power of Jesus Christ, our true life. If Jesus Christ did all this in appearance only, then I am only chained in imagination; and why have I delivered myself up to death, to fire, to the sword, to beasts? but who is near the sword, is near God; he who is among beasts is with God. I suffer all things only in the name of Jesus Christ, that I may suffer with him, he giving me strength, who was made perfectly man. What does it avail me to be commended by any one, if he blasphemes our Lord, not confessing him to have flesh? The whole consists in faith and charity; nothing can take place before these. Now consider those who maintain a false opinion of the grace of Jesus Christ, how they also oppose charity; they take no care of the widow, or orphan, or him who is afflicted, or pining with hunger or thirst. _They abstain from the Eucharist and prayer, (says he,) because they confess not the Eucharist to be the flesh of our Saviour Jesus Christ, which was crucified for our sins, and which the Father, by his goodness, raised again._ It is advisable for you to separate yourselves from them, and neither to speak to them in public or in private. Shun schisms and all discord, as the source of evils. Follow your bishop as Christ his Father, and the college of priests as the apostles; respect the deacons as the precept of God. Let no one do any thing that belongs to the church without the bishop. Let that Eucharist be regarded as lawful which is celebrated by the bishop, or one commissioned by him. Wherever the bishop makes his appearance, there let the people be assembled, as wherever Christ Jesus is, there is the Catholic church. It is not lawful to baptize or celebrate the Agape without the bishop or his authority. What he approves of is acceptable to God. He who does any thing without the bishop's knowledge, serves the devil." The saint most affectionately thanks them for the kindness they had shown him and his followers; begs they will depute some person to his church in Syria, to congratulate with his flock for the peace which God had restored to them, adding that he was unworthy to be called a member of that church of which he was the last. He asks the succor of their prayers, that by them he might enjoy God. "Seeing," says he, "that you are perfect, entertain perfect sentiments of virtue: for God is ready to bestow on you who desire to do well." After the most tender salutations of many in particular, and of all in general, especially the virgins who were called widows, (_i.e._ the deaconesses, who were called widows, because they were often such, though these were virgins,) he closes his letter by praying for their advancement in all charity, grace, mercy, peace, and patience. St. Ign. ep. ad Smyrnæos, p. 872, ed. Cotel. The apostolic St. Ignatius writes as follows, in his letter to St. Polycarp. "Thy resolution in God, founded as it were upon an unshaken rock, I exceedingly commend, having been made worthy of thy holy face, which I pray I may enjoy in God. I conjure thee in the grace with which thou art enriched, to increase thy stock in thy course, and to exhort all that they may be saved. Have great care of unity and concord, than which nothing is better. Bear with all men, that God may bear with thee; bear all men by charity, as thou dost apply thyself to prayer without interruption. Ask more perfect understanding than thou hast. Watch, seeing that the spirit which sleepeth not, dwelleth within thee. Speak to every one according to the grace which God giveth thee. Bear the weaknesses and distemper of all as a stout champion. Where the labor is greater, the gain is exceeding great. If thou lovest the disciples that are good, thou deservest not thanks; strive rather to subdue the wicked by meekness. Every wound is not healed by the same plaster; assuage inflammations by lenitives. Be not intimidated by those who seem worthy of faith, yet teach things that are foreign. Stand firm, as an anvil which is beaten: it is the property of a true champion to be struck and to conquer. Let not the widows be neglected. Let religious assemblies be most frequent. Seek out every one in them by name. Despise not the slaves, neither suffer them to be puffed up; but to the glory of God let them serve with greater diligence, that they may obtain of God a better liberty. Let them not desire that their liberty be purchased or procured for them by the congregation, lest they fall under the slavery of their own passions. Fly evil artifices; let them not be so much as named. Engage my sisters to love the Lord, and never entertain a thought of any man but their husbands. In like manner enjoin my brethren, in the name of Jesus Christ, to love their wives as Christ loveth his church. If any one is able to remain in a state of continency, in honor of our Lord's flesh, let him be constantly humble: if he boasts, or is puffed up, he is lost. Let all marriages be made by the authority of the bishop, that they may be made in the Lord, not by the passions of men. Let all things be done to the honor of God." Then addressing himself to all the faithful at Smyrna, he writes: "Listen to your bishop, that God may also hearken to you. With joy I would lay down my life for those who are subject to the bishop, priests, and deacons. May my portion be with them in God. Let all things be in common among you: your labor, your warfare, your sufferings, your rest, and your watching, as becomes the dispensers, the assessors, and the servants of God. Please hi, in whose service you fight, and from whom you receive your salary. Let your baptism be always your weapons, faith your helmet, charity your spear, and patience your complete armor. Let your good works the the treasure which you lay up, that you may receive the fruit which is worthy. Bear with each other in all meekness, as God bears with you. I pray that I may always enjoy and rejoice in you. Because the church of Antioch by our prayers now enjoys peace, I am in mind secure in God; provided still that by suffering I may go to God, and be found in the resurrection your servant. You will do well, O Polycarp, most blessed in God, to hold an assembly, and choose a very dear person fit for dispatch in a journey, who may be styled the divine messenger; him honor with a commission to go to Antioch, and there bear witness of the fervor of your charity. A Christian lives not for himself alone, but belongs to God." The holy martyr concludes by desiring St. Polycarp to write for him to the other churches of Asia, he being at that moment called on board by his guards to sail from Troas to Naples. 6. St. Iren. b. 3, c. 3. Euseb. b. 5, c. 24. S. Hieron. c. 17. 7. N. 1, and 4. 8. [Greek: To tur hên autois psuxron to tôn apathôn basanitzôn.] Frigidis ipsis videbatur immanium carnificum ignis. n. 2, p. 1020. 9. Dr. Middleton pretends, that this voice was only heard by some few; but the acts in Ruinart say, by those who were present, [Greek: hoi parontes]: Eusebius says, [Greek: polloi]: Rufinus _plurimi_, very many. A voice from heaven must certainly be sensibly discerned to be more than human, and manifest itself sufficiently, to be perceived that it could not come from the crowd. 10. L. 71. 11. Or. 20, 21, 22, 41. 12. The great council of Asia seems to have been held at that time in Smyrna, instead of Ephesus, which the Arundelian marbles show sometimes to have been done. 13. Or president of the public games, chosen yearly by the common-council of Asia. 14. Dr. Middleton ridicules the mention of a dove issuing out of the wound of the side; but this is only found in some modern MSS. by the blunder of a transcriber: it is not in Eusebius, Rufinus, Nicephorus, or the Greek Menæa; though the last two would have magnified a prodigy if they had found the least authority for any. According to Le Moyen, (Proleg. ad varia sacra.) Ceillier, &c., the true reading is [Greek: ep apisera], on the left side; which some transcriber blundered into [Greek: perisera], a dove. As to the foregoing miracle, that a wind should naturally divest the fire of its property of burning, and form it into an arch about the body, is a much more wonderful supposition of the doctor's than any miracle. 15. St. Polycarp says himself, "That he had served Christ eighty-six years." Basnage thinks he had been bishop so long, and was a hundred and twenty years old when he suffered: but it is far more probable that this is the term he had been a Christian, having been converted in his youth, and dying about one hundred years old or upwards, as Tillemont understands it. 16. 1 John iv. 3. 17. Some of the Philippians had seen St. Ignatius in chains, and perhaps at Rome. The primitive martyrs, Zozimus and Rufus, are commemorated in the Martyrologies on the 18th of December. ST. PAULA, WIDOW. This illustrious pattern of widows surpassed all other Roman ladies in riches, birth, and the endowments of mind. She was born on the 5th of May, in 347. The blood of the Scipios, the Gracchi, and Paulus �milius, was centred in her by her mother Blesilla. Her father derived his pedigree from Agamemnon, and her husband Toxotius his from Iulus and �neas. By him she had a son called also Toxotius, and four daughters, namely, Blesilla, Paulina, Eustochium, and Rufina. She shone a bright pattern of virtue in the married state, and both she and her husband edified Rome by their good example; but her virtue was not without its alloy; a certain degree of the love of the world being almost inseparable from honors and high life. She did not discern the secret attachments of her heart, nor feel the weight of her own chains: she had neither courage to break them, nor light whereby to take a clear and distinct view of her spiritual poverty and misery. God, compassionating her weakness, was pleased in his mercy to open her eyes by violence, and sent her the greatest affliction that could befall her in the death of her husband, when she was only thirty-two years of age. Her grief was immoderate till such time as she was encouraged to devote herself totally to God, by the exhortations of her friend St. Marcella, a holy widow, who then edified Rome by her penitential life. Paula, thus excited to set aside her sorrow, erected in her heart the standard of the cross of Jesus Christ, and courageously resolved to walk after it. From that time, she never sat at table with any man, not even with any of the holy bishops and saints whom she entertained. She abstained from all flesh meat, fish, eggs, honey, and wine; used oil only on holydays; lay on a stone floor covered with sackcloth; renounced all visits and worldly amusements, laid aside all costly garments, and gave every thing to the poor which it was in her power to dispose of. She was careful in inquiring after the necessitous, and deemed it a loss on her side if any other hands than her own administered relief to them. It was usual with her to say, that she could not make a better provision for her children, than to secure for them by alms the blessings of heaven. Her occupation was prayer, pious reading, and fasting. She could not bear the distraction of company, which interrupted her commerce with God; and, if ever she sought conversation, it was with the servants of God for her own edification. She lodged St. Epiphanius and St. Paulinus of Antioch, when they came to Rome; and St. Jerom was her director in the service of God, during his stay in that city for two years and a half, under pope Damasus. Her eldest daughter Blesilla, having, in a short time after marriage, lost her husband, came to a resolution of forsaking the world, but died before she could compass her pious design. The mother felt this affliction too sensibly. St. Jerom, who at that time was newly arrived at Bethlehem, in 384, wrote to her both to comfort and reprove her.[1] He first condoles their common loss; but adds {230} that God is master, that we are bound to rejoice in his will, always holy and just, to thank and praise him for all things; and, above all, not to mourn for a death at which the angels attend, and for one who by it departs to enjoy Christ: and that it is only the continuation of our banishment which we ought to lament. "Blesilla," says he, "has received her crown, dying in the fervor of her resolution, in which she had purified her soul near four months." He adds, that Christ seemed to reproach her grief in these terms: "Art thou angry, O Paula! that thy daughter is made mine? Thou art offended at my providence, and by thy rebellious tears, thou dost offer an injury to me who possess her."[2] He pardons some tears in a mother, occasioned by the involuntary sensibility of nature; but calls her excess in them a scandal to religion, abounding with sacrilege and infidelity: adding, that Blesilla herself mourned, as far as her happy state would allow, to see her offend Christ, and cried out to her; "Envy not my glory: commit not what may forever separate us. I am not alone. Instead of you I have the mother of God, I have many companions whom I never knew before. You mourn for me because I have left the world; and I pity your prison and dangers in it." Paula afterwards, completing the victory over herself, showed herself greatly superior to this weakness. Her second daughter Paulina was married to St. Pammachius, and died in 397. Eustochium, the third, was her individual companion. Rufina died young. The greater progress Paula made in spiritual exercises, and in the relish of heavenly things, the more insupportable to her was the tumultuous life of the city. She sighed after the deserts, longed to be disincumbered of attendants, and to live in a hermitage, where her heart would have no other occupation than on God. The thirst after so great a happiness made her ready to forget her house, family, riches, and friends; yet never did mother love her children more tenderly.[3] At the thought of leaving them her bowels yearned, and being in an agony of grief, she seemed as if she had been torn from herself. But in this she was the most wonderful of mothers, that while she felt in her soul the greatest emotions of tenderness, she knew how to keep them within due bounds. The strength of her faith gave her an ascendant over the sentiments of nature, and she even desired this cruel separation, bearing it with joy, out of a pure and heroic love of God. She had indeed taken a previous care to have all her children brought up saints; otherwise her design would have been unjustifiable. Being therefore fixed in her resolution, and having settled her affairs, she went to the water side, attended by her brother, relations, friends, and children, who all strove by their tears to overcome her constancy. Even when the vessel was ready to sail, her little son Toxotius, with uplifted hands on the shore, and bitterly weeping, begged her not to leave him. The rest, who were not able to speak with gushing tears, prayed her to defer at least her voluntary banishment. But Paula, raising her dry eyes to heaven, turned her face from the shore, lest she should discover what she could not behold without feeling the most sensible pangs of sorrow. She sailed first to Cyprus, where she was detained ten days by St. Epiphanius; and from thence to Syria. Her long journeys by land she performed on the backs of asses; she, who till then had been accustomed to be carried about by eunuchs in litters. She visited with great devotion all the principal places which we read to have been consecrated by the mysteries of the life of our divine Redeemer, as also the respective abodes of all the principal anchorets and holy solitaries of Egypt and Syria. At Jerusalem the proconsul had prepared a stately palace richly furnished for her reception; but excusing herself with regard {231} to the proffered favor, she chose to lodge in an humble cell. In this holy place her fervor was redoubled at the sight of each sacred monument, as St. Jerom describes. She prostrated herself before the holy cross, pouring forth her soul in love and adoration, as if she had beheld our Saviour still bleeding upon it. On entering the sepulchre, she kissed the stone which she angel removed on the occasion of our Lord's resurrection, and imparted many kisses full of faith and devotion to the place where the body of Christ had been laid. On her arrival at Bethlehem, she entered the cave or stable in which the Saviour of the world was born, and she saluted the crib with tears of joy, crying out; "I, a miserable sinner, am made worthy to kiss the manger, in which my Lord was pleased to be laid an infant babe weeping for me! This is my dwelling-place, because it was the country chosen by my Lord for himself." After her journeys of devotion, in which she distributed immense alms, she settled at Bethlehem with her daughter Eustochium, under the direction of St. Jerom. The three first years she spent there in a poor little house; but in the mean time she took care to have a hospital built on the road to Jerusalem, as also a monastery for St. Jerom and his monks, whom she maintained; besides three monasteries for women, which properly made but one house, for all assembled in the same chapel to perform together the divine service day and night; and on Sundays in the church that was adjoining. At prime, tierce, sext, none, vespers, complin, and the midnight office, they daily sung the whole psalter, which every sister was obliged to know by heart. Their food was very coarse and temperate, their fasts frequent and austere. All the sisters worked with their hands, and made clothes for themselves and others. All wore the same uniform poor habit, and used no linen except for the wiping of their hands. No man was ever suffered to set a foot within their doors. Paula governed them with a charity full of discretion, animating them in the practice of every virtue by her own example and instructions, being always the first, or among the first, in every duty; sharing with her daughter Eustochium in all the drudgery and meanest offices of the house, and appearing everywhere as the last of her sisters. She severely reprimanded a studied neatness in dress, which she called an uncleanness of the mind. If any one was found talkative, or angry, she was separated from the rest, ordered to walk the last in order, to pray at the outside of the door, and for some time to eat alone. The holy abbess was so tender of the sick, that she sometimes allowed them to eat flesh-meat, but would not admit of the same indulgence in her own ailments, nor even allow herself a drop of wine in the water she drank. She extended her love of poverty to her buildings and churches, ordering them all to be built low, and without any thing costly or magnificent; she said that money is better laid out on the poor, who are the living members of Christ. She wept so bitterly for the smallest faults, that others would have thought her guilty of grievous crimes. Under an overflow of natural grief for the death of her children, she made frequent signs of the cross on her mouth and breast to overcome nature, and remained always perfectly resigned in her soul to the will of God. Her son Toxotius married Læta, daughter to a priest of the idols, but, as to herself, she was a most virtuous Christian. Both were faithful imitators of the sanctity of our saint. Their daughter, Paula the younger, was sent to Bethlehem. to be under the care of her grandmother, whom she afterwards succeeded in the government of that monastery. St. Jerom wrote to Læta some excellent lessons[4] for the education of this girl, which parents can never read too often. Our saint lived {232} fifty-six years and eight months, of which she had spent in her widowhood five at Rome, and almost twenty at Bethlehem. In her last illness, but especially in her agony, she repeated almost without intermission certain verses of the psalms, which express an ardent desire of the heavenly Jerusalem, and of being united to God. When she was no longer able to speak, she formed the sign of the cross on her lips, and expired in the most profound peace, on the 26th of January, 404. Her corpse, carried by bishops, and attended with lighted wax torches, was interred on the 28th of the same month, in the midst of the church of the holy manger. Her tomb is still shown in the same place, near that of St. Jerom, but empty: even the Latin epitaph which St. Jerom composed in verse, and caused to be engraved on her tomb, is erased or removed, though extant in the end of this letter which he addressed to her daughter. Her relics are said to be in the possession of the metropolitical church at Sens, and the feast of St. Paula is kept a holiday of precept in that city on the 27th of January; on which day her name is placed by Ado, Usuard, &c., because she died on the 26th, after sunset, and the Jews in Palestine began the day from sunset: but her name occurs on the 26th in the Roman Martyrology, &c. See her life in St. Jerom's letter to her daughter, called her epitaph, ep. 86, &c. Footnotes: 1. Ep. 22, ol. 54. 2. Rebellibus lachrymis injurian facis possidenti. 3. Nulla sic amabat filios, &c. St. Heir {} epitaph. Paulæ. 4. Ep. 57, ol. 7. ST. CONON, BISHOP OF THE ISLE OF MAN. IF we can give credit to some lives of St. Fiaker, and the old breviary of Limoges, that saint was son of Eusenius, king of Scotland, and by his father committed in his childhood, with his two brothers, to the care of St. Conon, from which saintly education he received that ardent love and perfect spirit of piety, by which he was distinguished during the whole course of his life. Conon, by the purity and fervor in which he served God, was a saint from his infancy. The Isle of Man, which was a famous ancient seat of the Druids, is said to have received the seeds of the Christian faith by the zeal of St. Patrick. St. Conon, passing thither from Scotland, completed that great work, and is said to have been made bishop of Man, or of Sodor, supposed by these authors to have been anciently, a town in this island. This bishopric was soon after united with that of the Hebrides or the Western islands, which see was fixed in the isle of Hi, Iona or Y-colmkille. St. Conon died in the isle of Man, about the year 648. His name continued, to the change of religion, in great veneration throughout the Hebrides, or islands on the West of Scotland.[1] On St. Conon, see Leslie, Hist. of Scotland, &c. Footnotes: 1. In some few of these islands, the laird and all the inhabitants remain still Catholics; as Banbecuis, under Ranal Mac Donald; South-Vist, under Alan Mac Donald of Moydart, whose ancestors were once kings of these islands; Barry under Mac Neil; Canny, and Egg, and some others. In many others there are long since no Catholics, as in Lewis, North-Vist, Harries, St. Kilda, &c. See the latest edition of the Present State of England and bishop Leslie's nephew, in his MS. account, &c. {233} JANUARY XXVII. ST. JOHN CHRYSOSTOM, ARCHBISHOP OF CONSTANTINOPLE, AND DOCTOR OF THE CHURCH. From Socrates, Theodoret, and other historians: as also from the saint's works; and his life, written by way of dialogue, with great fidelity, by his friend and strenuous advocate Palladius, a holy bishop, but a distinct person from Palladius the bishop of Helenopolis and author of the Lausiac history, who was then young, and is evidently distinguished by this writer in many places, as Tillemont, Montfaucon, and Stilting show against Baillet and others; though also Palladius, bishop of Helenopolis, exerted himself in defence of St. Chrysostom. Palladius, author of the Dialogue on the life of St. Chrysostom, was never accused of Origenism except by those who, at least in the proofs alleged for this charge, confounded him with the bishop of Helenopolis. F. Stilting clears also the latter from the charge of Origenism, and answers the arguments produced by Baronius against him. Comm. Hist. §1, p. 404. The later Greek panegyrists, George, patriarch of Alexandria, in 620, the emperor Leo the Wise, in 890, &c., deserve very little notice. See the life of our saint compiled by Dom Montfaucon. Op. t. 13. And lastly, the accurate commentary on his life given by F. Stilting the Bollandist, on the 14th of September, from p. 401 to 709, t. 4. A.D. 407. THIS incomparable doctor, on account of the fluency and sweetness of his eloquence, obtained soon after his death the surname of Chrysostom, or Golden Mouth, which we find given him by St. Ephrem of Antioch, Theodoret, and Cassiodorus. But his tender piety, and his undaunted courage and zeal in the cause of virtue, are titles far more glorious, by which he holds an eminent place among the greatest pastors and saints of the church. About the year 344, according to F. Stilting, Antioch, the capital city of the East, was ennobled by his illustrious birth. He had one elder sister, and was the only son and heir of Secundus, master of the horse, that is, chief commander of the imperial troops in Syria. His mother, Anthusa, left a widow at twenty years of age, continued such the remainder of her life, dividing her time between the care of her family and the exercises of devotion. Her example in this respect made such an impression on our saint's master, a celebrated pagan sophist, that he could not forbear crying out, "What wonderful women have the Christians!"[1] She managed the estate of her children with great prudence and frugality, knowing this to be part of her duty to God, but she was sensible that their spiritual instruction in virtue was of infinitely greater importance. From their cradle she instilled into them the most perfect maxims of piety, and contempt of the world. The ancient Romans dreaded nothing more in the education of youth, than their being ill taught the first principles of the sciences; it being more difficult to unlearn the errors then imbibed, than to begin on a mere tabula rasa, or blank paper. Wherefore Anthusa provided her son the ablest masters in every branch of literature, which the empire at that time afforded. Eloquence was esteemed the highest accomplishment, especially among the nobility, and was the surest means of raising men to the first dignities in the state. John studied that art under Libanius, the most famous orator of that age; and such was his proficiency, that even in his youth he excelled his masters. Libanius being asked by his pagan friends on his death-bed, about the year 390, who should succeed him in his school: "John," said he, "had not the Christians stolen him from us."[2] Our saint was then priest. While he was only a scholar, that sophist one day read to an assembly of orators a declamation composed by him, and it was received with unusual tokens {234} of admiration and applause. Libanius pronounced the young orator happy, "as were also the emperors," he said, "who reigned at a time when the world was possessed of so great a treasure."[3] The progress of the young scholar in philosophy, under Andragatius, was no less rapid and surprising; his genius shone in every disputation. All this time his principal care was to study Christ, and to learn his spirit. He laid a solid foundation of virtue, by a perfect humility, self-denial, and a complete victory over himself. Though naturally hot and inclined to anger, he had extinguished all emotions of passion in his breast.[4] His modesty, meekness, tender charity, and singular discretion, rendered him the delight of all he conversed with. The first dignities of the empire were open to John. But his principal desire was to dedicate himself to God, without reserve, in holy solitude. However, not being yet twenty years of age, he for some time pleaded at the bar. In that employment he was drawn by company into the diversions of the world, and sometimes assisted at the entertainments of the stage. His virtue was in imminent danger of splitting against that fatal rock, when God opened his eyes. He was struck with horror at the sight of the precipice upon the brink of which he stood; and not content to flee from it himself, he never ceased to bewail his blindness, and took every occasion to caution the faithful against that lurking place of hellish sirens, but more particularly in his vehement sermons against the stage. Alarmed at the danger he had narrowly escaped, full of gratitude to God his deliverer, and to prevent the like danger for the time to come, he was determined to carry his resolution of renouncing the world into immediate execution. He began by the change of his garb, to rid himself the more easily of the importunities of friends: for a penitential habit is not only a means for preserving a spirit of mortification and humility, but is also a public sign and declaration to the world, that a person has turned his back on its vanities, and is engaged in an irreconcilable war against them. His clothing was a coarse gray coat: he watched much, fasted every day, and spent the greater part of his time in prayer and meditation on the holy scriptures: his bed was no other than the hard floor. In subduing his passions, he found none of so difficult a conquest as vain-glory;[5] this enemy he disarmed by embracing every kind of public humiliation. The clamors of his old friends and admirers, who were incensed at his leaving them, and pursued him with their invectives and censures, were as arrows shot at random. John took no manner of notice of them: he rejoiced in contempt, and despised the frowns of a world whose flatteries he dreaded: Christ crucified was the only object of his heart, and nothing could make him look back after he had put his hand to the plough. And his progress in virtue was answerable to his zealous endeavors. St. Meletius, bishop of Antioch, called the young ascetic to the service of the church, gave him suitable instructions, during three years, in his own palace, and ordained him Reader. John had learned the art of silence, in his retirement, with far greater application than he had before studied that of speaking. This he discovered when he appeared again in the world, though no man ever possessed a greater fluency of speech, or a more ready and enchanting eloquence, joined with the most solid judgment and a rich fund of knowledge and good sense; yet in company he observed a modest silence, and regarded talkativeness as an enemy to the interior recollection of the heart, as a source of many sins and indiscretions, and as a mark of vanity and self-conceit. He heard the words of the wise with the humble docility of a scholar, and he bore the impertinence, trifles, and blunders of {235} fools in discourse, not to interrupt the attention of his soul to God, or to make an ostentatious show of his eloquence or science: yet with spiritual persons he conversed freely on heavenly things, especially with a pious friend named Basil, one of the same age and inclinations with himself, who had been his most beloved school-fellow, and who forsook the world to embrace a monastic life, a little before our saint. After three years, he left the bishop's house to satisfy the importunities of his mother, but continued the same manner of life in her house, during the space of two years. He still saw frequently his friend Basil, and he prevailed on two of his school-fellows under Libanius to embrace an ascetic life; Theodorus, afterwards bishop of Mopsuestia, and Maximus, bishop of Seleucia. The former returned in a short time to the bar, and fell in love with a young lady called Hermione. John lamented his fall with bitter tears before God, and brought him back to his holy institute by two tender and pathetic exhortations to penance, "which breathe an eloquence above the power of what seems merely human," says Sozomen. Not long after, hearing that the bishops of the province were assembled at Antioch, and deliberated to raise him and Basil to the episcopal dignity, he privately withdrew, and lay hid till the vacant sees were filled. Basil was made bishop of Raphanæa near Antioch; and had no other resource in his grief for his promotion, but in tears and complaints against his friend who had betrayed him into so perilous a charge. John, being then twenty-six years old, wrote to him in his own justification six incomparable books, Of the Priesthood. Four years after, in 374, he retired into the mountains near Antioch, among certain holy anchorets who peopled them, and whose manner of life is thus described by our saint:[6] They devoted all the morning to prayer, pious reading, and meditating on the holy scriptures. Their food was bread with a little salt; some added oil, and those who were very weak, a few herbs or pulse; no one ever ate before sunset. After the refection it was allowed to converse with one another, but only on heavenly things. They always closed their night-prayers with the remembrance of the last judgment, to excite themselves to a constant watchfulness and preparation; which practice St. Chrysostom earnestly recommends to all Christians with the evening examination.[7] These monks had no other bed than a mat spread on the bare ground. Their garments were made of the rough hair of goats or camels, or of old skins, and such as the poorest beggars would not wear, though some of them were of the richest families, and had been tenderly brought up. They wore no shoes; no one possessed any thing as his own; even their poor necessaries were all in common. They inherited their estates only to distribute them among the poor; and on them, and in hospitality to strangers, they bestowed all the spare profits of their work. They all used the same food, wore a uniform habit, and by charity were all one heart. The cold words mine and thine, the baneful source of lawsuits and animosities among men, were banished from their cells. They rose at the first crowing of the cock, that is, at midnight, being called up by the superior; and after the morning hymns and psalms, that is, matins and lauds, all remained in their private cells, where they read the holy scriptures, and some copied books. All met in the church at the canonical hours of tierce, sext, none, and vespers, but returned to their cells, none being allowed to speak, to jest, or to be one moment idle. The time which others spend a table, or in diversions, they employed in honoring God; even their meal took up very little time, and after a short sleep, (according to the custom of hot countries,) {236} they resumed their exercises, conversing not with men but with God, with the prophets and apostles in their writings and pious meditation; and spiritual things were the only subject of their entertainment. For corporal exercise they employed themselves in some mean manual labor, such as entertained them in humility, and could not inspire vanity or pride: they made baskets, tilled and watered the earth, hewed wood, attended the kitchen, washed the feet of all strangers, and waited on them without distinction, whether they were rich or poor. The saint adds, that anger, jealousy, envy, grief, and anxiety for worldly goods and concerns, were unknown in these poor cells; and he assures us, that the constant peace, joy, and pleasure which reigned in them, were as different from the bitterness and tumultuous scenes of the most brilliant worldly felicity, as the security and calmness of the most agreeable harbor are, from the dangers and agitation of the most tempestuous ocean. Such was the rule of these cenobites, or monks who lived in community. There were also hermits on the same mountains who lay on ashes, wore sackcloth, and shut themselves up in frightful caverns, practising more extraordinary austerities. Our saint was at first apprehensive that he should find it an insupportable difficulty to live without fresh bread, use the same stinking oil for his food and for his lamp, and inure his body to hard labor under so great austerities.[8] But by courageously despising this apprehension, in consequence of a resolution to spare nothing by which he might learn perfectly to die to himself; he found the difficulty entirely to vanish in the execution. Experience shows that in such undertakings, the imagination is alarmed not so much by realities as phantoms, which vanish before a courageous heart which can look them in the face with contempt. Abbot Rancé, the reformer of la Trappe, found more difficulty in the thought of rising without a fire in winter, in the beginning of his conversion, than he did in the greatest severities which he afterwards practised. St. Chrysostom passed four years under the conduct of a veteran Syrian monk, and afterwards two years in a cave as a hermit. The dampness of this abode brought on him a dangerous distemper, and for the recovery of his health he was obliged to return into the city. By this means he was restored to the service of the church in 381, for the benefit of innumerable souls. He was ordained deacon by St. Meletius that very year, and priest by Flavian in 386, who at the same time constituted him his vicar and preacher, our saint being then in the forty-third year of his age.[9] He discharged all the duties of that arduous station during twelve {237} years, being the hand and the eye of his bishop, and his mouth to his flock. The instruction and care of the poor he regarded as his first obligation: this he always made his favorite employment and his delight. He never ceased in his sermons to recommend their cause and the precept of alms deeds to the people. Antioch, he supposed, contained at that time one hundred thousand Christian souls: all these he fed with the word of God, preaching several days in the week, and frequently several times on the same day. He confounded the Jews and Pagans, also the Anomæans, and other heretics. He abolished the most inveterate abuses, repressed vice, and changed the whole face of that great city. It seemed as if nothing could withstand the united power of his eloquence, zeal, and piety. Theodosius I., finding himself obliged to levy a new tax on his subjects, on occasion of his war with Maximus, who had usurped the Western empire in 387, the populace of Antioch, provoked at the demand, mutinied, and discharged their rage on the emperor's statue, those of his father, his two sons, and his late consort, Flavilla, dragged them with ropes through the streets, and then broke them to pieces. The magistrates durst not oppose the rabble in their excesses. But as soon as their fury was over, and that they began to reflect on what they had been guilty of, and the natural consequences of their extravagances, they were all seized with such terror and consternation, that many abandoned the city, others absconded, and scarce any durst appear publicly in the streets. The magistrates in the mean time were filling the prisons with citizens, in order to their trials, on account of their respective share in the combustion. Their fears were heightened on the arrival of two officers dispatched from Constantinople to execute the emperor's orders with regard to the punishment of the rioters. The reports which were spread abroad on this occasion imported, that the emperor would cause the guilty to be burned alive, would confiscate their estates, and level the city with the ground. The consternation alone was a greater torment than the execution itself could have been. Flavian, notwithstanding his very advanced age, and though his sister was dying when he left her, set out without delay in a very severe season of the year, to implore {238} the emperor's clemency in favor of his flock. Being come to the palace, and admitted into the emperor's presence, he no sooner perceived that prince but he stopped at a distance, holding down his head, covering his face, and speaking only by his tears, as though himself had been guilty. Thus he remained for some time. The emperor seeing him in this condition, carrying, as it were, the weight of the public guilt in his breast, instead of employing harsh reproaches, as Flavian might naturally have expected, summed up the many favors he had conferred on that city, and said at the conclusion of each article: "Is this the acknowledgment I had reason to expect? Is this their return for my love? What cause of complaint had they against me? Had I ever injured them? But granting that I had, what can they allege for extending their insolence even to the dead? Had they received any wrong from them? Why were they to be insulted too? What tenderness have I not shown on all occasions for their city? Is it not notorious that I have given it the preference in my love and esteem to all others, even to that which gave me birth? Did not I always express a longing desire to see it, and that it gave the highest satisfaction to think I should soon be in a condition of taking a journey for this purpose?" Then the holy bishop, being unable to bear such stinging reproaches or vindicate their conduct, made answer: "We acknowledge, Sir, that you have on all occasions favored us with the greatest demonstrations of your singular affection; and this it is that enhances both our crime and our grief, that we should have carried our ingratitude to such a pitch as to have offended our best friend and greatest benefactor: hence, whatever punishment you may inflict upon us, it will still fall short of what we deserve. But alas! the evil we have done ourselves is worse than innumerable deaths: for what can be more afflicting than to live, in the judgment of all mankind, guilty of the blackest ingratitude, and to see ourselves deprived of your sweet and gracious protection, which was our bulwark. We dare not look any man in the face; no, not the sun itself. But as great as our misery is, it is not irremediable; for it is in your power to remove it. Great affronts among private men have often been the occasion of great charity. When the devil's envy had destroyed man, God's mercy restored him. That wicked spirit, jealous of our city's happiness, has plunged her into this abyss of evils, out of which you alone can rescue her. It is your affection, I dare say it, which has brought them upon us, by exciting the jealousy of the wicked spirits against us. But, like God himself, you may draw infinite good out of the evil which they intended us. If you spare us, you are revenged on them. "Your clemency on this occasion will be more honorable to you than your most celebrated victories. It will adorn your head with a far brighter diadem than that which you wear, as it will be the fruit only of your own virtue. Your statues have been thrown down: if you pardon this insult, you will raise yourself others, not of marble or brass, which time destroys, but such as will exist eternally in the hearts of all those who will hear of this action. Your predecessor, Constantine the Great, when importuned by his courtiers to exert his vengeance on some seditious people that had disfigured his statues by throwing stones at them, did nothing more than stroke his face with his hand, and told them, smiling, that he did not feel himself hurt. This his saying is yet in the mouths of all men, and a more illustrious trophy to his memory than all the cities which he built, than all the barbarous nations which he subdued. Remember your own memorable saying, when you ordered the prisons to be opened, and the criminals to be pardoned at the feast of Easter: 'Would to God I were able in the same manner to open the graves, and restore the dead to life!' That time is now come. {239} Here is a city whose inhabitants are already dead; and is, as it were, at the gates of its sepulchre. Raise it then, as it is in your power to do, without cost or labor. A word will suffice. Suffer it by your clemency to be still named among the living cities. It will then owe more to you than to its very founder. He built it small, you will raise it great and populous. To have preserved it from being destroyed by barbarians would not have been so great an exploit, as to spare it on such an occasion as now offers. "Neither is the preservation of an illustrious city the only thing to be considered; your own glory, and, above all, the honor of the Christian religion, are highly interested in this affair. The Jews and Pagans, all barbarous nations, nay, the whole world, have their eyes fixed on you at this critical juncture; all are waiting for the judgment you will pronounce. If it be favorable, they will be filled with admiration, and will agree to praise and worship that God, who checks the anger of those who acknowledge no master upon earth, and who can transform men into angels; they will embrace that religion which teaches such sublime morality. Listen not to those who will object that your clemency on this occasion may be attended with, and give encouragement to the like disorders in other cities. That could only happen, if you spared for want of a power to chastise: but whereas you do not divest yourself, by such an act of clemency, of this power, and as by it you endear and rivet yourself the more in the affections of your subjects, this, instead of encouraging such insults and disorders, will rather the more effectually prevent them. Neither immense sums of money, nor innumerable armies, could ever have gained you so much the hearts of your subjects and their prayers for your person and empire, as will this single action. And if you stand fair for being such a gainer from men, what rewards may you not reasonably expect from God? It is easy for a master to punish, but rare and difficult to pardon. "It will be extremely glorious to you to have granted this pardon at the request of a minister of the Lord, and it will convince the world of your piety, in that you overlooked the unworthiness of his person, and respected only the power and authority of that Master who sent him. For though deputed immediately by the inhabitants of Antioch to deprecate your just displeasure on this occasion, it is not only in their name that I appear in this place, for I am come from the sovereign Lord of men and angels to declare to you in his name, that, if you pardon men their faults, he will forgive you your sins. Call to mind then that dreadful day on which we shall all be summoned to give in an account of all our actions. Reflect on your having it now in your power, without pain or labor, to efface your sins, and to find mercy at that terrible tribunal. You are about to pronounce your own sentence. Other ambassadors bring gold, silver, and other like presents, but as for me, I offer nothing but the law of God, and entreat you to imitate his example on the cross." He concluded his harangue by assuring the emperor that if he refused to pardon the city, he would never more return to it, nor look upon that city as his country, which a prince of his humane disposition could not prevail upon himself to pardon. This discourse had its desired effect on the emperor, who with much difficulty suppressed his tears while the bishop spoke, whom he answered in these few words: "If Jesus Christ, the Lord of all things, vouchsafed to pardon and pray for those very men that crucified him, ought I to hesitate to pardon them who have offended me? I, who am but a mortal man like them, and a servant of the same Master." The patriarch, overjoyed at his success, prostrated himself at the emperor's feet, wishing him a reward for such an action suitable to its merit. And whereas the prelate made an offer of passing the feast of Easter with the emperor at Constantinople, he, to {240} testify how sincerely he was reconciled to the city of Antioch, urged his immediate return, saying: "Go, Father, delay not a moment the consolation your people will receive at your return, by communicating to them the assurances of the pardon I grant them; I know they must be in great affliction." The bishop set out accordingly; but, to delay as little as possible the joy of the citizens, he dispatched a courier before him with the emperor's letter of pardon, which produced a comfortable change in the face of affairs. The bishop himself arrived time enough before Easter to keep that solemnity with his people. The joy and triumph of that city could not be greater; it is elegantly described by St. Chrysostom, extolling above all things the humility and modesty of Flavian, who attributed the whole change of Theodosius's mind, and all the glory of the action, to God alone. The discourse which Flavian addressed to the emperor, except the introduction, had been composed by St. Chrysostom, who recited it to the people to comfort them, and ceased not strongly to exhort them to penance, and the fervent exercise of good works, during the whole time of their bishop's absence.[10] After this storm our saint continued his labors with unwearied zeal, and was the honor, the delight, and the darling not of Antioch only but of all the East, and his reputation spread itself over the whole empire.[11] But God was pleased to call him to glorify his name on a new theatre, where he prepared for his virtue other trials, and other crowns. St. Chrysostom had been five years deacon, and twelve years priest, when Nectarius, bishop of Constantinople, dying in 397, the emperor Arcadius, at the suggestion of Eutropius the eunuch, his chamberlain, resolved to procure the election of our saint to the patriarchate of that city. He therefore dispatched a secret order to the count of the East, enjoining him to send John to Constantinople, but by some stratagem; lest his intended removal, if known at Antioch, should cause a sedition, and be rendered impracticable. The count repaired to Antioch, and desiring the saint to accompany him out of the city to the tombs of the martyrs, on the pretence of devotion, he there delivered him into the hands of an officer sent on purpose, who, taking him into his chariot, conveyed him with all possible speed to the imperial city. Theophilus, patriarch of Alexandria, a man of a proud and turbulent spirit, was come thither to recommend a creature of his own to that dignity. He endeavored by illegal practices secretly to traverse the canonical promotion of our saint; but was detected, and threatened to be accused in a synod. Whereupon he was glad to desist from his intrigues, and thus John was consecrated by him on the 26th of February, in 398.[12] In regulating his own conduct and his domestic concerns, he retrenched all the great expenses which his predecessors had entailed on their dignity, which he looked upon as superfluous, and an excessive prodigality, and these sums he applied to the relief of the poor, especially of the sick. For this purpose he erected and maintained several numerous hospitals, under the government of holy and charitable priests, and was very careful that all the servants and attendants were persons of great virtue, tenderness, compassion, and prudence. His own family being settled in good order, the next thing he took in hand after his promotion was the reformation of his clergy. This he forwarded by zealous exhortations and proper rules for their conduct, tending both to their sanctification and exemplarity. And to give these his endeavors their due force, he lived an exact model of what he inculcated to others: but his zeal exasperated the tepid part of that order, and raised a storm against himself. The immodesty {241} of women in their dress in that gay capital excited in him sentiments of the most just abhorrence and indignation. Some young ladies seemed to have forgot that clothing is the covering of the ignominy of sin, and ought to be an instrument of penance, and a motive of confusion and tears, not of vanity. But the exhortations of St. Chrysostom moved many to despise and lay aside the use of purple, silks, and jewels. It was a far more intolerable scandal that some neglected to cover their necks, or used such thin veils as served only to invite the eyes of others more boldly. Our saint represented to such persons that they were in some respects worse than public prostitutes: for these hide their baits at home only for the wicked: "but you," said he, "carry your snare everywhere, and spread your nets publicly in all places. You allege, that you never invited others to sin. You did not by your tongue, but you have done it by your dress and deportment more effectually than you could by your voice: when you have made another to sin in his heart, how can you be innocent? You sharpened and drew the sword: you gave the thrust by which the soul is wounded.[13] Tell me, whom does the world condemn? whom do judges punish? Those who drink the poison, or those who prepare and give the fatal draught? You have mingled the execrable cup; you have administered the potion of death: you are so much more criminal than poisoners, as the death which you cause is the more terrible; for you murder not the body, but the soul. Nor do you do this to enemies; nor compelled by necessity, nor provoked by any injury; but out of a foolish vanity and pride. You sport yourselves in the ruin of the souls of others, and make their spiritual death your pastime." Hence he infers, how false and absurd their excuse is in saying, they mean no harm. These and many other scandals he abolished. He suppressed the wicked custom of swearing, first at Antioch, then at Constantinople. By the invincible power of his eloquence and zeal he tamed the fiercest sinners, and changed them into meek lambs: he converted an incredible number of idolaters and heretics.[14] His mildness towards sinners was censured by the Novatians; he invited them to repentance with the compassion of the most tender father, and was accustomed to cry out: "If you are fallen a second time, or even a thousand times into sin, come to me and you shall be healed."[15] But he was firm and severe in maintaining discipline, though without harshness; to impenitent sinners he was inflexible. To mention one instance of the success of his holy zeal out of the many which his sermons furnish; in the year 399, the second of his episcopacy, on Wednesday in Holy Week, so violent a rain fell as to endanger the corn, and threaten the whole produce of the country. Hereupon public processions were made to the church of the apostles by the bishop and people, to avert the scourge by imploring the intercession chiefly of St. Peter, St. Andrew, (who is regarded as the founder of the church of Byzantium,) St. Paul, and St. Timothy.[16] The rain ceased, but not their fears. Therefore they all crossed the Bosphorus to the church of SS. Peter and Paul, on the opposite side of the water. This danger was scarce over, when on the Friday following many ran to see certain horse-races, and on Holy Saturday to games exhibited at the theatre. The good bishop was pierced to the quick with grief, and on the next day, Easter-Sunday, preached a most zealous and eloquent sermon, Against the Games and Shows of the Theatre and Circus. Indignation made him not so much as mention the paschal solemnity;{242} but by an abrupt exordium he burst into the most vehement pathos, as follows: "Are these things to be borne? Can they be tolerated? I appeal to yourselves, be you your own judges. Thus did God expostulate with the Jews."[17] This exclamation he often repeated to assuage his grief. He put the people in mind of the sanctity of our faith; of the rigorous account we must give to God of all our moments, and the obligation of serving him incumbent on us from his benefits, who has made for us the heaven and earth, the sun, light, rivers, &c. The saint grieved the more, because, after all, they said they had done no harm, though they had murdered not only their own souls, but also those of their children. "And how will you," said he, "after this approach the holy place? How will you touch the heavenly food? Even now do I see you overwhelmed with grief, and covered with confusion. I see some striking their foreheads, perhaps those who have not sinned, but are moved with compassion for their brethren. On this account do I grieve and suffer, that the devil should make such a havoc in such a flock. But if you join with me, we will shut him out. By what means? If we seek out the wounded, and snatch them out of his jaws. Do not tell me their number is but small: though they are but ten, this is a great loss: though but five, but two, or only one. The shepherd leaving ninety-nine, did not return till he had completed his number by recovering that sheep which was lost. Do not say, it is only one; but remember that it is a soul for which all things visible were made; for which laws were given, miracles wrought, and mysteries effected: for which God spared not his only Son. Think how great a price hath been paid for this one sheep, and bring him back to the fold. If he neither hears your persuasions nor my exhortations, I will employ the authority with which God hath invested me." He proceeds to declare such excommunicated. The consternation and penance of the city made the holy pastor forbear any further censure, and to commend their conversion. Palladius writes that he had the satisfaction to see those who had been the most passionately fond of the entertainments of the stage and circus, moved by his sermons on that subject, entirely renounce those schools of the devil. God is more glorified by one perfect soul than by many who serve him with tepidity. Therefore, though every individual of his large flock was an object of his most tender affection and pastoral concern, those were particularly so, who had secluded themselves from the world by embracing a religious state of life, the holy virgins and nuns. Describing their method of life, he says:[18] Their clothing was sackcloth, and their beds only mats spread on the floor; that they watched part of the night in prayer, walked barefoot, never ate before evening, and never touched so much as bread, using no other food than pulse and herbs, and that they were always occupied in prayer, manual labor, or serving the sick of their own sex. The spiritual mother, and the sun of this holy company, St. Nicareta, is honored December the 27th. Among the holy widows who dedicated themselves to God under the direction of this great master of saints, the most illustrious were the truly noble ladies St. Olympias, Salvina, Procula, and Pantadia. This last (who was the widow of Timasus, formerly the first minister to the emperor) was constituted by him deaconess of the church of Constantinople. Widows he considered as by their state called to a life of penance, retirement, and devotion; and he spared no exhortations or endeavors to engage them faithfully to correspond to the divine grace, according to the advice which St. Paul gives them.[19] St. Olympias claimed the privilege of furnishing the expenses of the saint's {243} frugal table. He usually ate alone: few would have been willing to dine so late, or so coarsely and sparingly as he did; and he chose this to save both time and expenses: but he kept another table in a house near his palace, for the entertainment of strangers, which he took care should be decently supplied. He inveighed exceedingly against sumptuous banquets. All his revenues he laid out on the poor; for whose relief he sold the rich furniture which Nectarius had left; and once, in a great dearth, he caused some of the sacred vessels to be melted down for that purpose. This action was condemned by Theophilus, but is justly regarded by St. Austin as a high commendation of our holy prelate. Besides the public hospital near his cathedral, and several others which he founded and maintained, he erected two for strangers. His own patrimony he had given to the poor long before, at Antioch. His extraordinary charities obtained him the name of John of alms-deeds.[20] The spiritual necessities of his neighbor were objects of far greater compassion to his tender charity. His diocese, nay, the whole world, he considered as a great hospital of souls, spiritually blind, deaf, sick, and in danger of perishing eternally; many standing on the brink, many daily falling from the frightful precipice into the unquenchable lake. Not content with tears and supplications to the Father of mercies for their salvation, he was indefatigable in labors and in every endeavor to open their eyes; feared no dangers, no not death itself in its most frightful shapes, to succor them in their spiritual necessities, and prevent their fall. Neither was this pastoral care confined to his own flock or nation: he extended it to the remotest countries. He sent a bishop to instruct the Nomades or wandering Scythians: another, an admirable man, to the Goths. Palestine, Persia, and many other distant provinces felt the most beneficent influence of his zeal. He was himself endued with an eminent spirit of prayer: this he knew to be the great channel of heavenly graces, the cleanser of the affections of the soul from earthly dross, and the means which renders them spiritual and heavenly, and makes men angels, even in their mortal body. He was therefore particularly earnest in inculcating this duty, and in instructing others in the manner of performing it. He warmly exhorted the laity to rise to the midnight office of matins together with the clergy: "Many artisans," said he, "watch to labor, and soldiers watch as sentries; and cannot you do as much to praise God?"[21] He observes, that the silence of the night is peculiarly adapted to devout prayer, and the sighs of compunction: which exercise we ought never to interrupt too long; and by watching, prayer becomes more earnest and powerful. Women he will not have to go easily abroad to church in the night-time; but advises that even children rise in the night to say a short prayer, and as they cannot watch long be put to bed again: for thus they will contract from their infancy a habit of watching, and a Christian's whole house will be converted into a church. The advantages and necessity of assiduous prayer he often recommends with singular energy; but he expresses himself on no subject with greater tenderness and force than on the excess of the divine love, which is displayed in the holy Eucharist, and in exhorting the faithful to the frequent use of that heavenly sacrament. St. Proclus says,[22] that he abridged the liturgy of his church. St. Nilus[23] assures us that he was often favored with visions of angels in the church during the canonical hours, surrounding the altars in troops during the celebration of the divine mysteries, and at the communion of the people. The saint himself confidently avers {244} that this happens at those times,[24] which he confirms by the visions of several hermits. The public concerns of the state often called on the saint to afford the spiritual succors of his zeal and charity. Eutropius was then at the head of affairs. He was a eunuch, and originally a slave, but had worked himself into favor with the emperor Arcadius. In 395 he was instrumental in cutting off Rufinus, the chief minister, who had broke out into an open rebellion, and he succeeded the traitor in all his honors: golden statues were erected to him in several parts of the city, and what Claudian, Marcellinus in his chronicle, Suidas, and others, represent as the most monstrous event that occurs in the Roman Fasti, was declared consul, though a eunuch. Being placed on so high a pinnacle, a situation but too apt to turn the strongest head, forgetful of himself and the indispensable rules of decency and prudence, it was not long before he surpassed his predecessor in insolence, ambition, and covetousness. Wholesome advice, even from a Chrysostom, served only to exasperate a heart devoted to the world, and open to flatterers, who added continually new flames to its passions. In the mean time, the murmurs and indignation of the whole empire at the pride and avarice of Eutropius were a secret to him, till the pit was prepared for his fall. Gainas, general of the auxiliary Goths in the imperial army, was stirred up to revenge an affront which his cousin Trigibildus, a tribune, had received from the haughty minister. At the same time the empress Eudoxia, having been insulted by him, ran to the emperor, carrying her two little babes in her arms, and cried out for justice against the insolent servant. Arcadius, who was as weak in abandoning, as he was imprudent in choosing favorites, gave orders that the minister should be driven out of the court, and his estates confiscated. Eutropius found himself in a moment forsaken by all the herds of his admirers and flatterers, without one single friend, and fled for protection to the church, and to those very altars whose immunities he had infringed and violated. The whole city was in an uproar against him; the army called aloud for his death, and a troop of soldiers surrounded the church with naked swords in their hands, and fire in their eyes. St. Chrysostom went to the emperor, and easily obtained of him that the unhappy criminal might be allowed to enjoy the benefit of sanctuary; and the soldiers were prevailed upon, by the tears of the emperor and the remonstrances of the bishop, to withdraw. The next day the people flocked to behold a man whose frown two days before made the whole world to tremble, now laying hold of the altar, gnashing his teeth, trembling and shuddering, having nothing before his eyes but drawn swords, dungeons, and executioners. St. Chrysostom on this occasion made a pathetic discourse on the vanity and treachery of human things, the emptiness and falsehood of which he could not find a word emphatical enough to express. The poor Eutropius could not relish such truths a few days ago, but now found his very riches destructive. The saint entreated the people to forgive him whom the emperor, the chief person injured, was desirous to forgive: he asked them how they could beg of God the pardon of their own sins if they did not pardon a man who then, by repentance, was perhaps a saint in the eyes of God. At this discourse not a single person in the church was able to refrain from tears, and all things seemed in a state of tranquillity.[25] Some days after, Eutropius left the church, hoping to escape privately out of the city, but was seized, and banished into Cyprus.[26] He was recalled a few months after, and being impeached {245} of high-treason was condemned and beheaded, chiefly at the instigation of Gainas; in compliance with whose unjust demands the weak emperor consented to the death of Aurelianus and Saturninus, two principal lords of his court. But St. Chrysostom, by several journeys, prevailed with the barbarian to content himself with their banishment, which they underwent, but were soon after recalled. As unjust concessions usually make rebels the more insolent, Gainas hereupon obliged the emperor to declare him commander-in-chief of all his troops. Yet even when his pride and power were at the highest, St. Chrysostom refused him the use of any Catholic church in Constantinople for the Arian worship. And when, some time after, he laid siege to that capital, the saint went out to him, and by kind expostulations prevailed on him to withhold his design and draw off his army. He was afterwards defeated in passing the Hellespont; and fleeing through the country of the Huns, was overthrown, and slain by them in 400. This same year, 400, St. Chrysostom held a council of bishops in Constantinople; one of whom had preferred a complaint against his metropolitan Antoninus, the archbishop of Ephesus, which consisted of several heads, but that chiefly insisted on was simony.[27] All our saint's endeavors to discuss this affair being frustrated by the distance of places, he found it necessary, at the solicitation of the clergy and people of Ephesus, to go in person to that city, though the severity of the winter season, and the ill state of health he was then in, might be sufficient motives for retarding this journey. In this and the neighboring cities several councils were held, in which the archbishop of Ephesus and several other bishops in Asia, Lycia, and Phrygia, were deposed for simony. Upon his return after Easter, in 401, having been absent a hundred days, he preached the next morning,[28] calling his people, in the transports of tender joy, his crown, his glory, his paradise planted with flourishing trees; but if any bad shrubs should be found in it, he promised that no pains should be spared to change them into good. He bid them consider if they rejoiced so much as they testified, to see him again who was only one, how great his joy must be which was multiplied in every one of them: he calls himself their bond-slave, chained to their service, but says, that slavery was his delight, and that during his absence he ever had them present to his mind, offering up his prayers for their temporal and spiritual welfare. It remained that our saint should glorify God by his sufferings, as he had already done by his labors: and if we contemplate the mystery of the cross with the eyes of faith, we shall find him greater in the persecutions he sustained than in all the other occurrences of his life. At the same time we cannot sufficiently deplore the blindness of envy and pride in his enemies, as in the Pharisees against Christ himself. We ought to tremble for ourselves: if that passion does not make us persecute a Chrysostom, it may often betray us into rash judgments, aversions, and other sins, even under a cloak of virtue. The first open adversary of our saint was Severianus, bishop of Gabala, in Syria, to whom the saint had left the care of his church during his absence. This mart had acquired the reputation of a preacher, was a favorite of the empress Eudoxia, and had employed all his talents and dexterity to establish himself in the good opinion of the court and people, to the prejudice of the saint, against whom he had preached in his own city. Severianus being obliged to leave Constantinople at the saint's return, he made an excellent discourse to his flock on the peace Christ came to establish on earth, and begged they would receive again Severianus, whom they {246} had expelled the city. Another enemy of the saint was Theophilus, patriarch of Alexandria, whom Sozomen, Socrates, Palladius, St. Isidore of Pelusium, and Synesius, accuse of avarice and oppressions to gratify his vanity in building stately churches; of pride, envy, revenge, dissimulation, and an incontrollable love of power and rule, by which he treated other bishops as his slaves, and made his will the rule of justice. His three paschal letters, which have reached us, show that he wrote without method, and that his reflections and reasonings were neither just nor apposite: whence the loss of his other writings is not much to be regretted. These spiritual vices sullied his zeal against the Anthropomorphites, and his other virtues. He died in 412, wishing that he had lived always in a desert, honoring the name of the holy Chrysostom, whose picture he caused to be brought to his bedside, and by reverencing it, showed his desire to make atonement for his past ill conduct towards our saint.[29] This turbulent man had driven from their retreat four abbots of Nitria, called the tall brothers, on a groundless suspicion of Origenism, as appears from Palladius, though it was believed by St. Jerom, which is maintained by Baronius. St. Chrysostom admitted them to communion, but not till they had juridically cleared themselves of it in an ample manner.[30] This however was grievously resented by Theophilus: but the empress Eudoxia, who, after the disgrace of Eutropius, governed her husband and the empire, was the main spring which moved the whole conspiracy against the saint. Zozimus, a heathen historian, says, that her flagrant avarice, her extortions and injustices, knew no bounds, and that the court was filled with informers, calumniators, and harpies, who, being always on the watch for prey, found means to seize the estates of such as died rich, and to disinherit their children or other heirs. No wonder that a saint should displease such a court while he discharged his duty to God. He had preached a sermon against the extravagance and vanity of women in dress and pomp. This was pretended by some to have been levelled at the empress; and Severianus was not wanting to blow the coals. Knowing Theophilus was no friend to the saint, the empress, to be revenged of the supposed affront, sent to desire his presence at Constantinople, in order to depose him. He obeyed the summons with pleasure, and landed at Constantinople in June, 403, with several Egyptian bishops his creatures, refused to see or lodge with John, and got together a packed cabal of thirty-six bishops, the saint's enemies, in a church at Chalcedon, calling themselves the synod at the Oak, from a great tree which gave name to that quarter of the town. The heads of the impeachment drawn up against the holy bishop were: that he had deposed a deacon for beating a servant; that he had called several of his clergy base men; had deposed bishops out of his province; had ordained priests in his domestic chapel, instead of the cathedral; had sold things belonging to the church; that nobody knew what became of his revenues; that he ate alone; and that he gave the holy communion to persons who were not fasting: all which were false or frivolous. The saint held a legal council of forty bishops in the city at the same time; and refused to appear before that at the Oak, alleging most notorious infractions of the canons in their pretended council. The cabal proceeded to a sentence of deposition, which they sent to the city and to the emperor, to whom they also accused him of treason, for having called the empress Jezabel, a false assertion, as Palladius testifies. The emperor hereupon issued out an order for his banishment, but the execution of it was opposed by the people, who assembled about the great church to guard their pastor. {247} He made them a farewell sermon,[31] in which he spoke as follows: "Violent storms encompass me on all sides; yet I am without fear, because I stand upon a rock. Though the sea roar, and the waves rise high, they cannot sink the vessel of Jesus. I fear not death, which is my gain: not banishment, for the whole earth is the Lord's: nor the loss of goods; for I came naked into the world, and must leave it in the same condition. I despise all the terrors of the world and trample upon its smiles and favor. Nor do I desire to live unless for your service. Christ is with me: whom shall I fear? Though waves rise against me: though the sea, though the fury of princes threaten me, all these are to me more contemptible than a spider's web. I always say: O Lord, may thy will be done: not what this or that creature wills, but what it shall please thee to appoint, that shall I do and suffer with joy. This is my strong tower: this is my unshaken rock: this is my staff that can never fail. If God be pleased that it be done, let it be so. Wheresoever his will is that I be, I return him thanks." He declared that he was ready to lay down a thousand lives for them, if at his disposal, and that he suffered only because he had neglected nothing to save their souls. On the third day after the unjust sentence given against him, having received repeated orders from the emperor to go into banishment, and taking all possible care to prevent a sedition, he surrendered himself, unknown to the people, to the count, who conducted him to Prænetum in Bithynia. After his departure his enemies entered the city with guards, and Severianus mounted the pulpit, and began to preach, pretending to show the deposition of the saint to have been legal and just. But the people would not suffer him to proceed, and ran about as if distracted, loudly demanding in a body the restoration of their holy pastor. The next night the city was shook with an earthquake. This brought the empress to reflect with remorse on what she had done against the holy bishop. She applied immediately to the emperor, under the greatest consternation, for his being recalled; crying out: "Unless John be recalled, our empire is undone:" and with his consent she dispatched letters the same night, inviting him home with tender expressions of affection and esteem, and protesting her ignorance of his banishment. Almost all the city went out to meet him, and great numbers of lighted torches were carried before him. He stopped to the suburbs, refusing to enter the city till he had been declared innocent by a more numerous assembly of bishops. But the people would suffer no delay: the enemies of the saint fled, and he resumed his functions, and preached to his flock. He pressed the emperor to call Theophilus to a legal synod: but that obstinate persecutor alleged that he could not return without danger of his life. However, Sozomen relates that threescore bishops ratified his return: but the fair weather did not last long. A silver statue of the empress having been erected on a pillar before the great church of St. Sophia, the dedication of it was celebrated with public games, which, besides disturbing the divine service, engaged the spectators in extravagances and superstition. St. Chrysostom had often preached against licentious shows; and the very place rendered these the more criminal. On this occasion, fearing lest his silence should be construed as an approbation of the thing, he, with his usual freedom and courage, spoke loudly against it. Though this could only affect the Manichæan overseer of those games, the vanity of the empress made her take the affront to herself, and her desires of revenge were implacable.[32] His enemies were invited back: Theophilus {248} durst not come, but sent three deputies. Though St. John had forty-two bishops with him, this second cabal urged to the emperor certain canons of an Arian council of Antioch, made only to exclude St. Athanasius, by which it was ordained that no bishop who had been deposed by a synod, should return to his see till he was restored by another synod. This false plea overruled the justice of the saint's cause, and Arcadius sent him an order to withdraw. He refused to forsake a church committed to him by God, unless forcibly compelled to leave it. The emperor sent troops to drive the people out of the churches on Holy-Saturday, and the holy places were polluted with blood and all manner of outrages. The saint wrote to pope Innocent, begging him to declare void all that had been done; for no injustice could be more notorious.[33] He also wrote to beg the concurrence of certain other holy bishops of the West. The pope having received from Theophilus the acts of the false council at the Oak, even by them saw the glaring injustice of its proceedings, and wrote to him, exhorting him to appear in another council, where sentence should be given according to the canons of Nice, meaning by those words to condemn the Arian canons of Antioch. He also wrote to St. Chrysostom, to his flock, and several of his friends: and endeavored to redress these evils by a new council: as did also the emperor Honorius. But Arcadius and Eudoxia found means to prevent its assembling, the very dread of which made Theophilus, Severianus, and other ringleaders of the faction to tremble. St. Chrysostom was suffered to remain at Constantinople two months after Easter. On Thursday, in Whitsun-week, the emperor sent him an order for his banishment. The holy man, who received it in the church, said to those about him, "Come, let us pray, and take leave of the angel of the church." He took leave of the bishops, and, stepping into the baptistery, also of St. Olympias and the other deaconesses, who were overwhelmed with grief and bathed in tears. He then retired privately out of the church, to prevent a sedition, and was conducted by Lucius, a brutish captain, into Bithynia, and arrived at Nice on the 20th of June, 404. After his departure, a fire breaking out, burnt down the great church and the senate-house, two buildings which were the glory of the city: but the baptistery was spared by the flames, as it were to justify the saint against his calumniators; for not one of the rich vessels was found wanting. In this senate-house perished the incomparable statues of the muses from Helicon, and other like ornaments, the most valuable then known: so that Zozimus looks upon this conflagration as the greatest misfortune that had ever befallen that city. Palladius ascribes the fire to the anger of heaven. Many of the saint's friends were put to the most exquisite tortures on this account, but no discovery could be made. The Isaurians plundered Asia, and the Huns several other provinces. Eudoxia ended her life and crimes in childbed on the 6th of October following, five days after a furious hail-storm had made a dreadful havoc in the city. The emperor wrote to St. Nilus, to recommend himself and his empire to his prayers. The hermit answered him with a liberty of speech which became one who neither hoped nor feared any thing from the world. "How do you hope," said he, "to see Constantinople delivered from the destroying angel of God, after such enormities authorized by laws? after having banished the most blessed John, the pillar of the church, the lamp of truth, the trumpet of Jesus Christ!"[34] And again: "You have banished John, the greatest light of the earth:--At least, {249} do not persevere in your crime."[35] His brother, the emperor Honorius, wrote still in stronger terms,[36] and several others. But in vain; for certain implacable court ladies and sycophants, hardened against all admonitions and remorse, had much too powerful an ascendant over the unhappy emperor, for these efforts of the saint's friends to meet with success. Arsacius, his enemy and persecutor, though naturally a soft and weak man, was by the emperor's authority intruded into his see. The saint enjoyed himself comfortably at Nice: but Cucusus was pitched upon by Eudoxia for the place of his banishment. He set out from Nice in July, 404, and suffered incredible hardships from heats, fatigues, severity of guards, almost perpetual watchings, and a fever which soon seized him with pains in his breast. He was forced to travel almost all night, deprived of every necessary of life, and was wonderfully refreshed if he got a little clear water to drink, fresh bread to eat, or a bed to take a little rest upon. All he lamented was the impenitence of his enemies, for their own sake: calling impunity in sin, and honor conferred by men on that account, the most dreadful of all judgments.[37] About the end of August, after a seventy days' journey, he arrived at Cucusus, a poor town in Armenia, in the deserts of Mount Taurus. The good bishop of the place vied with his people in showing the man of God the greatest marks of veneration and civility, and many friends met him there, both from Constantinople and Antioch. In this place, by sending missionaries and succors, he promoted the conversion of many heathen countries, especially among the Goths, in Persia and Phoenicia. He appointed Constantius, his friend, a priest of Antioch, superior of the apostolic missions in Phoenicia and Arabia. The letters of Constantius are added to those of St. Chrysostom. The seventeen letters of our saint to St. Olympias might be styled treatises. He tells her,[38] "I daily exult and am transported with joy in my heart under my sufferings, in which I find a hidden treasure: and I beg that you rejoice on the same account, and that you bless and praise God, by whose mercy we obtain to such a degree the grace of suffering." He often enlarges on the great evils and most pernicious consequences of sadness and dejection of spirit, which he calls[39] "the worst of human evils, a perpetual domestic rack, a darkness and tempest of the mind, an interior war, a distemper which consumes the vigor of the soul, and impairs all her faculties." He shows[40] that sickness is the greatest of trials, a time not of inaction, but of the greatest merit, the school of all virtues, and a true martyrdom. He advises her to use physic, and says it would be a criminal impatience to wish for death to be freed from sufferings. He laments the fall of Pelagius, whose heresies he abhorred. He wrote to this lady his excellent treatise, That no one can hurt him who does not hurt himself. Arsacius dying in 405, many ambitiously aspired to that dignity, whose very seeking it was sufficient to prove them unworthy. Atticus, one of this number, a violent enemy to St. Chrysostom, was preferred by the court, and placed in his chair. The pope refused to hold communion with Theophilus or any of the abettors of the persecution of our saint.[41] He and the emperor Honorius sent five bishops to Constantinople to insist on a council, and that, in the mean time, St. Chrysostom should be restored to his see, his deposition having been notoriously unjust.[42] But the deputies were cast into prison in Thrace, because they refused to communicate with Atticus. The persecutors saw that, if the council was held, they would be inevitably condemned and deposed by it, therefore they stuck at nothing to prevent its meeting. The incursions of the Isaurian plunderers obliged St. Chrysostom to take shelter in the castle of Arabissus, on{250} Mount Taurus. He enjoyed a tolerable state of health during the year 406 and the winter following, though it was extremely cold in those mountains, so that the Armenians were surprised to see how his thin, weak body was able to support it. When the Isaurians had quitted the neighborhood, he returned to Cucusus. But his impious enemies, seeing the whole Christian world both honor and defend him, resolved to rid the world of him. With this view they procured an order from the emperor that he should be removed to Arabissus, and thence to Pytius, a town situated on the Euxine sea, near Colchis, at the extremity of the empire, on the frontiers of the Sarmatians, the most barbarous of the Scythians. Two officers were ordered to convey him thither in a limited number of days, through very rough roads, with a promise of promotion, if, by hard usage, he should die in their hands. One of these was not altogether destitute of humanity, but the other could not bear to hear a mild word spoken to him. They often travelled amidst scorching heats, from which his head, that was bald, suffered exceedingly. In the most violent rains they forced him out of doors, obliging him to travel till the water ran in streams down his back and bosom. When they arrived at Comana Pontica, in Cappadocia, he was very sick; yet was hurried five or six miles to the martyrium or chapel in which lay the relics of the martyr St. Basiliscus.[43] The saint was lodged in the oratory of the priest. In the night, that holy martyr appearing to him, said, "Be of good courage, brother John; to-morrow we shall be together." The confessor was filled with joy at this news, and begged that he might stay there till eleven o'clock. This made the guards drag him out the more violently; but when they had travelled four miles, perceiving him in a dying condition, they brought him back to the oratory. He there changed all his clothes to his very shoes, putting on his best attire, which was all white, as if he meant it for his heavenly nuptials. He was yet fasting, and having received the holy sacrament, poured forth his last prayer, which he closed with his usual doxology: Glory be to God for all things. Having said Amen, and signed himself with the sign of the cross, he sweetly gave up his soul to God on the feast of the exaltation of the holy cross, the 14th of September, as appears from the Menæa, in 407, having been bishop nine years and almost seven months.[44] His remains were interred by the body of St. Basiliscus, a great concourse of holy virgins, monks, and persons of all ranks from a great distance flocking to his funeral. The pope refused all communion with those who would not allow his name a place in the Dyptics or registers of Catholic bishops deceased. It was inserted at Constantinople by Atticus, in 417, and at Alexandria, by St. Cyril, in 419: for Nestorius tells him that he then venerated the ashes of John against his will.[45] His body was translated to Constantinople in 434, by St. Proclus, with the utmost pomp, the emperor Theodosius and his sister Pulcheria accompanying St. Proclus in the procession, and begging pardon for the sins of their parents, who had unadvisedly persecuted this servant of God. The precious remains were laid in the church of the apostles, the burying-place of the emperors and bishops, on the 27th of January, 438; on which day he is honored by the Latins: {251} but the Greeks keep his festival on the 13th of November.[46] His ashes were afterwards carried to Rome, and rest under an altar which bears his name in the Vatican church. The saint was low in stature; and his thin, mortified countenance bespoke the severity of his life. The austerities of his youth, his cold solitary abode in the mountains, and the fatigues of continual preaching, had weakened his breast, which occasioned his frequent distempers. But the hardships of his exile were such as must have destroyed a person of the most robust constitution. Pope Celestine, St. Austin, St. Nilus, St. Isidore of Pelusium, and others, call him the illustrious doctor of churches, whose glory shines on every side, who fills the earth with the light of his profound sacred learning, and who instructs by his works the remotest corners of the world, preaching everywhere, even where his voice could not reach. They style him the wise interpreter of the secrets of God, the sun of the whole universe, the lamp of virtue, and the most shining star of the earth. The incomparable writings of this glorious saint, make his standing and most authentic eulogium. In the character which St. Chrysostom has in several places drawn of divine and fraternal charity and holy zeal, we have a true portraiture of his holy soul. He excellently shows, from the words of our Lord to St. Peter,[47] that the primary and essential disposition of a pastor of souls is a pure and most ardent love of God, whose love for these souls is so great, that he has delivered his Son to death for them. Jesus Christ shed his blood to save this flock, which he commits to the care of St. Peter. Nothing can be stronger or more tender than the manner in which this saint frequently expresses his charity and solicitude for his spiritual children.[48] When he touches this topic, his words are all fire and flame, and seem to breathe the fervor of St. Peter, the zeal of St. Paul, and the charity of Moses. This favorite of God was not afraid, for the salvation of his people, to desire to be separated from the company of the saints, provided this could have been done without falling from the love of God; though he knew that nothing would more closely unite him forever to God, than this extraordinary effort of his love. The apostle of nations desired to be an anathema for his brethren, and for their salvation;[49] and the prince of the apostles gave the strongest proof of the ardor of his love for Christ, by the floods of tears which he shed for his flock. From the same furnace of divine love, St. Chrysostom drew the like sentiments towards his flock, joined with a sovereign contempt of all earthly things; another distinguishing property of charity, which he describes in the following words:[50] "Those who burn with a spiritual love, consider as nothing all that is shining or precious on earth. We are not to be surprised if we understand not this language, who have no experience of this sublime virtue. For whoever should be inflamed with the fire of the perfect love of Jesus Christ, would be in such dispositions with regard to the earth, that he would be indifferent both to its honors and to its disgrace, and would be no more concerned about its trifles than if he was alone in the world. He would despise sufferings, scourges, and dungeons, as if they were endured in another's body, not in his own; and would be as insensible to the pleasures and enjoyments of the world; as we are to the bodies of the dead, or as the dead are to their own bodies. He would be as pure from the stain of any inordinate passions, as gold perfectly refined is from all rust or spot. And as flies beware of falling into the flames, and keep at a distance, so irregular passions dare not approach him." Footnotes: 1. S. Chrys. ad Vid. jun. t. 1, p. 340. 2. Sozom. l. 8, c. 22. 3. Liban. ep. ad Joan. apud S. Isidor. Pelus. l. 2, ep. 42. 4. L. 3, de Sacerd. c. 14, p. 390. 5. L. 3, de Sacerd. c. 14. 6. Hom. 72 (ol. 73) and 69 (ol. 69,) in Matt. Hom. 14, in 1 Tim. t. 11, pp. 628, 630, {}3, contra vitup. vita Mon. c. 14. 7. Lib. de Compunct. p. {1}32. 8. Lib. 1, de Compunct. &c. 9. Flavian I. was a native of Antioch, of honorable extraction, and possessed of a plentiful estate, which he employed in the service of the church and relief of the poor. He was remarkably grave and serious, and began early to subdue his flesh by austerities and abstinence, in which he remitted nothing even in his old age. Thus was his heart prepared to receive and cherish the seeds of divine grace, the daily increase of which rendered him so conspicuous in the world, and of such advantage to the church. The Arians being at that time masters of the church of Antioch, Flavian and his associate Diodorus, afterwards bishop of Tarsus, equally distinguished by their birth, fortune, learning, and virtue, were the great supports of the flock St. Eustathius had been forced to abandon. In 348, they undertook the defence of the Catholic faith against Leontius, the Arian bishop, who made use of all his craft and authority to establish Arianism to that city; one of whose chief expedients was to promote none to holy orders but Arians. The scarcity of Catholic pastors, on this account called for all their zeal and charity in behalf of the abandoned flock. The Arians being in possession of the churches to the city, these two zealous laymen assembled them without the walls, at the tombs of the martyrs, for the exercise of religious duties. They introduced among them the manner of singing psalms alternately, and of concluding each psalm with _Glory be to the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost; as it was,_ &c., which pious custom was soon after spread over all the eastern and western churches. Theodoret (l. 2, c. 19) says, that Flavian and Diodorus were the first who directed the psalms to be sung in this manner by two choirs: though Socrates (l. 6, c. 8) attributes its institution to St. Ignatius the martyr: who having, as he there relates, heard angels in a vision singing the divine praises alternately, instituted that manner of singing in the church of Antioch; but this might have been disused. Pliny's famous letter to Trajan shows, that singing was then in use among the Christians In Bithynia; and it appears from Philo, that the Therapeuts did the same before that time. Leontius stood so much in awe of Flavian and Diodorus while they were only laymen, that in compliance with their demands he deposed Aëtius that most impious and barefaced blasphemer of all the Arians, from the rank of deacon. St. Meletius, on his being promoted to the see of Antioch, about the year 361, raised these both to the priesthood, and they took care of that church, as his delegates, during his banishment by Constantius. Thus they continued together their zealous labors till Diodorus was made bishop of Tarsus. In 381, St. Meletius took Flavian with him to the general council which was assembled at Constantinople; but dying in that capital, Flavian was chosen to succeed him. His life was a perfect copy of the eminent episcopal virtues, and especially of the meekness, the candor, and affability of his worthy predecessor. Unhappily the schism, which for a long time had divided the church of Antioch, was not yet extinguished. The occasion was this: after the death of St. Eustathius, they could not agree in the choice of his successor; those who were most attached to this holy prelate, with St. Athanasius and the West, followed Paulinus: the Apollinarists declared for Vitalis: and the greatest body of the orthodox of Antioch, with Flavian, Diodorus, and all the East, adhered to St. Meletius, who, as we have seen already, was succeeded by Flavian. Paulinus, bishop of that part of the Catholics called Eustathians, from their attachment to that prelate, though long since dead, still disputed that see with Flavian; but dying in 383, the schism of Antioch must have ended, had not his abettors kept open the breach by choosing Evagrius in his room; though it does not appear that he had one bishop in communion with him, Egypt and the West being now neuter, and the East all holding communion with Flavian. Evagrius dying in 395, the Eustathians, though now without a pastor, still continued their separate meetings, and kept up the schism several years longer. St. Chrysostom being raised to the see of Constantinople, in 398, labored hourly to abolish this fatal schism, which was brought about soon after by commissioners constituted for this purpose by the West, Egypt, and all the other parties concerned, and the Eustathians received Flavian as their bishop. In the year 404, when St. Chrysostom was banished, Flavian testified his indignation against so unjust a proceeding, and wrote upon that subject to the clergy of Constantinople. But he did not live to be witness of all the sufferings his dear friend was to meet with, dying about three years before him, in 404. The general council of Chalcedon calls him blessed, (Conc. t. 4, p. 840,) and Theodoret (l. 5, c. 232) gives him the titles of the great, the admirable saint. St. Chrysostom is lavish in his praises of him. Flavian's sermons and other writings are all lost except his discourse to Theodosius, preserved by St. Chrysostom. No church or Martyrology, whether among the Greeks or Latins, ever placed Falvius I. of Antioch in the catalogue of the saints. Whence Chatelain, in his notes, speaking of St. Meletius, February the 12th, p. 630; and on St. Flavian of Constantinople, February the 17th, p. 685, expresses his surprise at the boldness of Baillet and some others, who, without regard to the decrees of Urban VIII., presumed to do it of their own private authority, and without any reason, have assigned for his feast the 21st of February. Chatelain, in his additions to his Universal Martyrology, p. 711, names him with the epithet of venerable only, on the 26th of September. He is only spoken of here, to answer our design of giving in the notes some account of the most eminent fathers of the church who have never been ranked among the saints. On St. Flavian II. of Antioch, banished by the emperor Anastasius with St. Elias of Jerusalem, for their zeal in defending the council of Chalcedon against the Eutychians, see July {} 4th, on which these two confessors are commemorated in the Roman Martyrology. 10. St. Chrys. Hom. 21, ad Pap. Antioch. seu de Statius. t. 2. 11. Sozom. l. 8, c. 2, &c. 12. Socrat. c. 2. See Stilting, §35, p. 511. 13. St. Chrys. l. Quod regulares foeminæ, t. 1, p. 250. 14. Stilting, §41, p. 526. 15. Phot. Cod. 59. Socr. l. 6, c. 21. Stilting, §40, p. 523. 16. [Greek: Kai sunêgores elambanomen]. Chrys. Serm. contra ludos et spect. t. 6, p. 272. Ed. Ben. [Greek: Andreas Paulon kai Timotheon]. 17. Mich. vi. 3. Jer. ii. 5. 18. Hom. 13, in Ephes. t. 11, p. 95 19. Pallad in Vit. Chrysost. Item S. Chrysost. Hom. in 1 Tim. v. 5, l. 3, de Sacerd. c. 8, and l. ad V{}oior. Stilting, §67, p. 603. 20. [Greek: Iôannês hu tês eleêmosunês]. Pallad. c. 12. 21. Hom. 2, & 25, in Acta. Hom. 14, in Hebr. Pallad. in Vit. S. Chrys. 22. S. Procl. Or. 22. p. 581. 23. L. 2, Ep. 294, p. 266. 24. L. 3, de Sacerd. 25. Stilting, §43, p. 530, et seq. 26. About this time the poet Claudian wrote his two books against Eutropius, as he had done before against Rufinus. 27. Pallad. Dial. {} 127. Stilting, §47, p. 542. 28. T. 3, p. 411. 29. S. Joan. Damasc. Orat. 3, de Imaginibus, p. 480, {} Billii. See F. Sollier in Hist. Chronol. Patriarch Alexand. in Theophilo, p. 52. 30. See Stilting, §54, 55, 5{}, p. 567. 31. T. 3, p. 415. 32. Socrates and Sozomen say that he preached another sermon against the empress, beginning with these words: Herodias is again became furious. But Montfaucon refutes this slander, trumped up by his enemies. The sermon extant under that title is a manifest forgery, t. {}n spuriis, p. 1. See Montfaucon, and Stilting, §63, p. 503. 33. {}p t. 3, p. 515. Pallad. Dial. Stilting, §58, p. 578. 34. S. Nilus, l. 2, ep. 265. 35. L. 3, ep. 279. 36. T. 3, p. 525. 37. Ep. 8. 38. Ep. 8, p. 589. 39. Ibid. 3, p. 552. 40. Ibid. 4, p. 570. 41. Pallad. Theodoret, l. 5, c. 34. 42. Pallad. Sozom. l. 8. c. 28. 43. The passage of Palladius, in which St. Basiliscus is called bishop of Comana, is evidently falsified by the mistake of copiers, as Stilting demonstrates; who shows this Basiliscus to have suffered not at Nicomedia, but near Comana, in the country where his relics remained; the same that is honored on the 2d of March. It is without grounds that Tillemont, Le Quien, &c., imagine there were two martyrs of the same name, the one a soldier, who suffered at Comana under Galerius Maximian; the other, bishop of that city. T. 5, in S. Basilisc. note 4. See Stilting, §83, p. 665. 44. Sir Harry Saville is of opinion that he was only fifty-two years old: but he must have been sixty-three, as born in 344. 45. Nestorius, Or. 12, apud Marium Mercat. par. 2, p. 86, ed. Gamier. Stilting, §88, p. 685. 46. Jos. Assemani. Comm. In Calend. Univ. t. 6. p. 105, and Stilting. 47. Joan. xxi. 17. St. Chrys. l. 2, de Sacred. c. 1. 48. Hom. 3 & 44, in Act. et alibi sæpe. 49. See St. Chrys. hom. 16, in Rom. 50. Hom. 52, in Acta. {252} ON THE WRITINGS OF ST. JOHN CHRYSOSTOM. IN the Benedictine edition of his works given by Dom Montfaucon, we have in the first tome his two Exhortations to Theodorus; three books against the Adversaries of a Monastic Life; the Comparison between a King and a Monk; two books on Compunction; three books to Stagirius the monk, on Tribulation and Providence; against those Clergymen who harbor Women under their roof to serve them; another treatise to prove that Deaconesses, or other Regular Women, ought not to live under the same roof with men; On Virginity; To a Young Widow; On the Priesthood; and a considerable number of scattered homilies. Theodorus, after renouncing the advantages which high birth, a plentiful estate, a polite education, and an uncommon stock of learning offered him in the world, and having solemnly consecrated himself to God in a monastic state, violated his sacred engagement, returned into the world, took upon him the administration of his estate, fell in love with a beautiful young woman named Hermione, and desired to marry her. St. Chrysostom, who had formerly been his school-fellow, under Libanius, and been afterwards instrumental in inducing him to forsake the world, and some time his companion in a religious state, grievously lamented his unhappy fall; and by two most tender and pathetic exhortations to repentance, gained him again to God. Every word is dictated by the most ardent zeal and charity, and powerfully insinuates itself into the heart by the charm of an unparalleled sweetness, which gives to the strength of the most persuasive eloquence an irresistible force. Nothing of the kind extant is more beautiful, or more tender, than these two pieces, especially the former. The saint, in the beginning, borrows the most moving parts of the lamentations of Jeremy, showing that he had far more reason to abandon himself to bitter grief than that prophet; for he mourned not for a material temple and city with the holy ark and the tables of the law, but for an immortal soul, far more precious than the whole material world. And if one soul which observes the divine law is greater and better than ten thousand which transgress it, what reason had he to deplore the loss of one which had been sanctified, and the holy living temple of God, and shone with the grace of the Holy Ghost: one in which the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost had dwelt; but was stripped of its glory and fence, robbed of its beauty, enslaved by the devil, and fettered with his bolts and chains. Therefore the saint invites all creatures to mourn with him, and declares he will receive no comfort, nor listen to those who offer him any, crying out with the prophet: _Depart from me: I will weep bitterly: offer not to comfort me_. Isa. xxii. 4. His grief, he says, was just, because he wept for a soul that was fallen from heaven to hell, from grace into sin: it was reasonable, because by tears she might yet be recovered; and he protests that he would never interrupt them, till he should learn that she was risen again. To fortify his unhappy friend against the temptation of despair, he shows by the promises, examples, and parables of the Old and New Testaments, that no one can doubt of the power or goodness of God, who is most ready to pardon every sinner that sues for mercy. Observing that hell was not created for man, but heaven, he conjures him not to defeat the design of God in his creation, and destroy the work of his mercy by persevering in sin. The difficulties which seemed to stand in his way, and dispirited him, the saint shows would be all removed, and would even vanish of themselves, if he undertook the work with courage and resolution: this makes the conversion of a soul easy. He terrifies him by moving reflections on death, and the divine judgments, by a dreadful portraiture which he draws of the fire of hell, which resembles not our fire, but burns souls, and is eternal; lastly, by the loss of heaven, on the joys of which kingdom he speaks at large; on its immortality, the company of the angels, the joy, liberty, beauty, and glory of the blessed, adding, that such is this felicity, that in its loss consists the most dreadful of all the torments of the damned. Penance averts these evils, and restores to a soul all the titles and advantages which she had forfeited by her fall: and its main difficulty and labor are vanquished by a firm resolution, and serious beginning of the work. This weakens and throws down the enemy: if he be thoroughly vanquished in that part where he was the strongest, the soul will pursue, with ease and cheerfulness, the delightful and beautiful course of virtue upon which she has entered. He conjures Theodorus, by all that is dear, to have compassion on himself; also to have pity on his mourning friends, and not by grief send them to their graves: he exhorts him resolutely to break his bonds at once, not to temporize only with his enemy, or pretend to rise by degrees; and he entreats him to exert his whole strength in laboring to {253} be of the happy number of those who, from being the last, are raised by their fervor to the first rank in the kingdom of God. To encourage him by examples, he mentions a young nobleman of Phoenicia, the son of one Urbanus, who, having embraced with fervor the monastic state, insensibly fell into lukewarmness, and at length returned into the world, where he enjoyed large possessions, lived in pomp, and abandoned himself to the pursuit of vanity and pleasures; till, opening his eyes upon the remonstrances of certain pious friends, he distributed his whole estate among the poor, and spent the rest of his life in the desert with extraordinary fervor. Another ascetic, falling by degrees, in an advanced age, committed the crime of fornication; but immediately rising, attained to an eminent degree of sanctity, and was honored with the gift of miracles. The disciple of St. John, who had been a captain of a troop of robbers and murderers, became an illustrious penitent. In like manner, our saint exhorts and conjures this sinner to rise without delay, before he was overtaken by the divine judgments, and to confess his sins with compunction of heart, abundant bitter tears, and a perfect change of life, laboring to efface his crimes by good works, to the least of which Christ has promised a reward. St. Chrysostom begins his second Exhortation to Theodorus, which is much shorter than the first, by expressing his grief as follows: (t. 1, p. 35:) "If tears and groans could have been conveyed by letters, this would have been filled. I grieve not that you have taken upon you the administration of your affairs; but that you have trampled under your feet the sacred engagement you had made of yourself to Christ. For this I suffer excessive trouble and pain; for this I mourn; for this I am seized with fear and trembling, having before my eyes the severe damnation which so treacherous and base a perfidiousness deserves." He tells him yet "that the case is not desperate for a person to have been wounded, but for him to neglect the cure of his wounds. A merchant after shipwreck labors to repair his losses; many wrestlers, after a fall, have risen and fought so courageously as to have been crowned; and soldiers, after a defeat, have rallied and conquered. You allege," says he, "that marriage is lawful. This I readily acknowledge; but it is not now in your power to embrace that state: for it is certain that one who, by a solemn engagement, has given himself to God as his heavenly spouse, if he violates this contract, he commits an adultery, though he should a thousand times call it marriage. Nay, he is guilty of a crime so much the more enormous as the majesty of God surpasses man. Had you been free, no one would charge you with desertion; but since you are contracted to so great a king, you are not at your own disposal." St. Chrysostom pathetically shows him the danger, baseness, and crime of deferring his repentance, sets before him hell, the emptiness of the world, the uneasiness and troubles which usually attend a married life, and the sweetness of the yoke of Christ. He closes this pressing exhortation by mentioning the tears and prayers of his friends, which they would never interrupt, till they had the comfort of seeing him raised from his fall. St. Chrysostom wrote these two exhortations about the year 369, which was the second that he spent in his mother's house at Antioch when he led there an ascetic life. The fruit of his zeal and charity was the conversion of Theodorus, who broke his engagements with the world, and returned to his solitude. In 381 he was made bishop of Mopsuestia. In opposing the Apollinarist heresy, he had the misfortune to lay the seeds of Nestorianism in a book which he composed on the Incarnation, and other writings. He became a declared protector of Julian the Pelagian, when he took refuge in the East; wrote an express treatise against original sin; and maintained the Pelagian errors in a multitude of other works, which were all condemned after his death, though only fragments of them have reached us, preserved chiefly in Facundus, Photius, and several councils. He died in 428, before the solemn condemnation of his errors, and in the communion of the Catholic church. See Tillemont, t. 12. During St. Chrysostom's retreat in the mountains, two devout servants of God desired of him certain instructions on the means of attaining to the virtue of compunction. Demetrius, the first of these, though he was arrived at a high degree of perfection in an ascetic life, always ranked himself among those who crawl on the earth, and said often to St. Chrysostom, kissing his hand, and watering it with tears, "Assist me to soften the hardness of my heart." St. Chrysostom addressed to him his first book on Compunction, in which he tells him that he was not unacquainted with this grace, of which he had a pledge in the earnestness of his desire to obtain it, his love of retirement, his watching whole nights, and his abundant tears, even those with which, squeezing him by the hand, he lead begged the succor of his advice and prayers, in order to soften his dry, stony heart into compunction. With the utmost confusion for his own want of this virtue, he yielded to his request, begging in return his earnest prayers for the conversion of his own soul. Treating first on the necessities and motives of compunction, he takes notice that Christ pronounces those blessed who mourn, and says we ought never to cease weeping for our own sins, and those of the whole world, which deserves and calls for our tears so much the more loudly, as it is insensible of its own miseries. We should never cease weeping, if we considered how much sin reigns among men. The saint considers the sin of rash judgment as a general vice among men, from which he thinks scarce any one will be found to have lived always free. He {254} says the same of anger; then of detraction; and considering how universally these crimes prevail among men, cries out: "What hopes of salvation remain for the generality of mankind, who commit, without reflection, some or other of these crimes, one of which is enough to damn a soul?" He mentions also, as general sins, swearing, evil words, vain-glory, not giving alms, want of confidence in divine providence, and of resignation to his will, covetousness, and sloth in the practice of virtue. He complains that whereas the narrow path only leads to heaven, almost all men throw themselves into the broad way, walking with the multitude in their employs and actions, seeking their pleasure, interest, or convenience, not what is safest for their souls. Here what motives for our tears! A life of mortification and penance he prescribes, as an essential condition for maintaining a spirit of compunction; saying that water and fire are not more contrary to each other, than a life of softness and delights is to compunction; pleasure being the mother of dissolute laughter and madness. A love of pleasure renders the soul heavy and altogether earthly; but compunction gives her wings, by which she raises herself above all created things. We see worldly men mourn for the loss of friends and other temporal calamities. And are not we excited to weep for our spiritual miseries? We can never cease if we have always before our eyes our sins, our distance from heaven, the pains of hell, God's judgments, and our danger of losing Him, which is the most dreadful of all the torments of the damned. In his second book On Compunction, which is addressed to Stelechius, he expresses his surprise that he should desire instructions on compunction of one so cold in the divine service as he was; but only one whose breast is inflamed with divine love, and whose words are more penetrating than fire, can speak of that virtue. He says that compunction requires in the first place, solitude, not so much that of the desert, as that which is interior, or of the mind. For seeing that a multitude of objects disturbs the sight, the soul must restrain all the senses, remain serene, and without tumult or noise within herself, always intent on God, employed in his love, deaf to corporeal objects. As men placed on a high mountain hear nothing of the noise of a city situated below them, only a confused stir which they no way heed; so a Christian soul, raised on the mountain of true wisdom, regards not the hurry of the world; and though she is not destitute of senses, is not molested by them, and applies herself and her whole attention to heavenly things. Thus St. Paul was crucified and insensible to the world, raised as far above its objects as living men differ from carcasses. Not only St. Paul, amid a multiplicity of affairs, but also David, living in the noise of a great city and court, enjoyed solitude of mind, and the grace of perfect compunction, and poured forth tears night and day, proceeding from an ardent love and desire of God and his heavenly kingdom, the consideration of the divine judgments, and the remembrance of his own sins. Persons that are lukewarm and slothful, think of what they do or have done in penance to cancel their debts; but David nourished perpetually in his breast a spirit of compunction, by never thinking on the penance he had already done, but only on his debts and miseries, and on what he had to do in order to blot out or deliver himself from them. St. Chrysostom begs his friend's prayers that he might be stirred up by the divine grace to weep perpetually under the load of his spiritual evils, so as to escape everlasting torments. The saint's three books, On Providence, are an exhortation to comfort, patience, and resignation, addressed to Stagirius, a monk possessed by an evil spirit. This Stagirius was a young nobleman, who had exasperated his father by embracing a monastic state: but some time after fell into lukewarmness, and was cruelly possessed by an evil spirit, and seized with a dreadful melancholy, from which those who had received a power of commanding evil spirits were not able to deliver him. St. Chrysostom wrote these books soon after he was ordained deacon in 380. In the first, he shows that all things are governed by divine providence, by which even afflictions are always sent and directed for the good of the elect. For any one to doubt of this is to turn infidel: and if we believe it, what can we fear whatever tribulations befall us, and to whatever height their waves ascend? Though the conduct of divine providence, with regard to the just, be not uniform, it sends to none any tribulations which are not for their good; when they are most heavy, they are designed by God to prepare men for the greatest crowns. Moreover, God is absolute master to dispose of us, as a potter of his clay. What then have we to say? or how dare we presume to penetrate into his holy counsels? The promise of God can never fail: this gives us an absolute security of the highest advantages, mercy, and eternal glory, which are designed us in our afflictions. St. Chrysostom represents to Stagirius that his trials had cured his former vanity, anger, and sloth, and it was owing to them that he now spent nights and days in fasting, prayer, and reading. In the second book, he presses Stagirius strenuously to reject all melancholy and gloomy thoughts, and not to be uneasy either about his cure, or the grief his situation was likely to give his father, but leaving the issue to God, with perfect resignation to ask of him this mercy, resting in the entire confidence that whatever God ordained would turn to his greatest advantage. In the third book, he mentions to Stagirius several of his acquaintance, whose sufferings, both in mind and body, were more grievous than those with which he was afflicted. He bids him also pay a visit to the hospitals and prisons; for he would there see that his cross was light in comparison of what many others endured. {255} He tells him that sin ought to be to him the only subject of grief; and that he ought to rejoice in sufferings as the means by which his sins were to be expiated. A firm confidence in God, a constant attention to his presence, and perpetual prayer, he calls the strong ramparts against sadness. When the Arian emperor Valens, in 375, commanded the monks to be turned out of their deserts, and enrolled in the troops, and several Catholics reviled them as bigots and madmen, St. Chrysostom took up his pen to justify them, by three books, entitled, Against the Impugners of a Monastic State. T. 1, p. 44, he expresses his surprise that any Christians could speak ill of a state which consists in the most perfect means of attaining to true virtue, and says they hurt themselves, not the monks, whose merit they increase; as Nero's persecution of St. Paul, because he had converted one of the tyrant's concubines, enhanced the apostle's glory. A more dreadful judgment is reserved to these enemies of the love of Christ. They said, they drew no one from his faith. The saint retorts: What will faith avail without innocence and virtue? They alleged that a Christian may be saved without retiring into the desert. He answers: Would to God men lived so in the world that monasteries were of no advantage! but seeing all disorders prevail in it, who can blame those who seek to shelter themselves from the storm? He elegantly shows that the number of those that are saved in the world is exceeding small, and that the gate of life is narrow. The multitude perished in Noah's flood, and only eight escaped in the ark. How foolish would it have been to rely carelessly on safety in such danger! Yet here the case is far more dreadful, everlasting fire being the portion of those that are lost. Yet in the world how few resist the torrent, and are not carried down with the crowd, sliding into anger, detraction, rash judgment, covetousness, or some other sin. Almost all, as if it were by common conspiracy, throw themselves into the gulf, where the multitude of companions will be no comfort. Is it not, then, a part of wisdom to fly from these dangers, in order to secure our only affair in the best manner possible? Whereas parents sometimes opposed the vocation of their children to a monastic state, in his second book he addresses himself to a Pagan father, who grieved to see his son and heir engaged in that profession. He tells him he has the greatest reason to rejoice; proving from Socrates, and other heathen philosophers, that his son is more happy in voluntary poverty and contempt of the world, than he could have been in the possession of empires: that he is richer than his father, whom the loss of one bag of his treasures would afflict, whereas the monk, who possessed only a single cloak, could see without concern even that stolen, and would even rejoice though condemned to banishment or death. He is greater than emperors, more happy than the world, out of the reach of its malice or evil, whom no one could hurt if he desired it. A father who loves his son ought more to rejoice at his so great happiness than if he had seen him a thousand times king of the whole earth, and his life and kingdom secured to him for ten thousand years. What treasures would not have been well employed to purchase for him such a soul as his was rendered by virtue, could this blessing have been procured for money? He displays the falsehood of worldly pleasure; the inconstancy, anxiety, trouble, grief, and bitterness of all its enjoyments, and says that no king can give so sensible a joy as the very sight of a virtuous man inspires. As he speaks to a Pagan, he makes a comparison between Plato and Dionysius the tyrant; then mentions an acquaintance of his own. This was a holy monk, whom his Pagan father, who was a rich nobleman, incensed at his choice of that state, disinherited; but was at length so overcome by the virtue of this son, that he preferred him to all his other children, who were accomplished noblemen in the world, often saying that none of them was worthy to be his slave; and he honored and respected him as if he had been his own father. In the third book, St. Chrysostom directs his discourse to a Christian father, whom he threatens with the judgment of Hell, if he withdrew his children from this state of perfection, in which they would have become suns in heaven, whereas, if they were saved in the world, their glory would probably be only that of stars. He inveighs against parents, who, by their discourse and example, instil into their children a spirit of vanity, and sow in their tender minds the seeds of covetousness, and all those sins which overrun the world. He compares monks to angels, in their uninterrupted joy and attention to God; and observes that men in the world are bound to observe the same divine law with the monks, but cannot so easily acquit themselves of this obligation, as he that is hampered with cords cannot run so well as he that is loose and at liberty. He exhorts parents to breed up their children for some years in monasteries, and to omit nothing in forming them to perfect virtue. In his elegant short treatise, entitled A Comparison between a King and a Monk, t. 1, p. 116, he beautifully shows that a pious monk is incomparably more honorable, more glorious, and more happy than the greatest monarch, by enjoying the favor of heaven, and possessing God; by the empire over himself and his own passions, by which he is king in his own breast, exercising the most glorious command; by the sweetness and riches of divine grace; by the kingdom of God established in his soul; by prayer, by which all things are in his power; by his universal benevolence and beneficence to others, procuring to every one all spiritual advantages as far as lies in him; by the comfort which he finds in death which is terrible {256} to kings, but by which he is translated to an immortal crown, &c. This book is much esteemed by Montfaucon and the devout Blosius. St. Chrysostom, in his treatise on Virginity, t. 1, p. 268, says this virtue is a privilege peculiar to the true church, not to be found, at least pure, among heretics: he proves against the Manichees, that marriage is good: yet says that virginity as far excels it as angels men, but that all its excellency is derived from the consecration of a soul to God, and her attention to please him, without which this state avails nothing. After he was ordained deacon at Antioch, he composed his book To a Young Widow, (t. 1, p. 337,) a lady who had lost her husband Tarasius, candidate for the prefectship of the city. He draws motives to comfort her from the spiritual advantages of holy widowhood, and the happiness to which her husband was called. His second book To the Widow, (t. 1, p. 349,) is a dissuasive from second marriages, when they are contracted upon worldly motives. His six incomparable books on the Priesthood, he composed to excuse himself to his friend Basil, who complained that he had been betrayed by him into the episcopal charge; for Chrysostom persuaded him they had time yet to conceal themselves; yet secretly absconded himself and left the other to be chosen. Basil, when he met him afterwards, was not able to speak for some time but by a flood of tears; and at length broke through them only to give vent to his grief in bitter complaints against the treachery of his friend. This work is wrote in a dialogue between the two friends. St. Chrysostom, in the first book, alleges (t. 1, p. 362) that he could not deprive the church of a pastor so well qualified to serve it as Basil was; nor undertake himself a charge for which he had not the essential talents, and in which he should involve others and himself in ruin. In the second book he justifies his own action in not hindering the promotion of his friend to the episcopacy, by observing that to undertake the charge of souls is the greatest proof we can give of our love for Christ, which He declared by putting the question thrice to St. Peter whether he loved him, before he committed to him the care of his flock. John xxi. 15. If we think it an argument of our love for a friend to take care of his servants or cattle, much more will God recompense faithful pastors, who feed those dear souls to save which God died. The pastoral charge is certainly the first of all others in merit and dignity. The saint therefore thinks he should have prevaricated if he had deprived the church of a minister capable of serving it. But in order to justify his own flight, he adds that the dangers and difficulties of this state are proportioned to its pre-eminence and advantages. For what can be more difficult and dangerous than the charge of immortal souls, and of applying to them remedies, which, to take effect, depend upon their own co-operation and consent, and must be always proportioned to their dispositions and character, which must be sounded, as well as to their wounds? Remissness leaves a wound half cured: and a suitable penance often exasperates and makes it wider. Herein the greatest sagacity and prudence are necessary: Nor is the difficulty less in bringing back to the church members which are separated from it. Basil replied to this discourse of St. Chrysostom: "You then love not Christ, who fly from the charge of souls." St. Chrysostom answered, that he loved him, and fled from this charge because he loved him, fearing to offend him by taking upon him such an office, for which he was every way unqualified. Basil retorts with warmth, that his treachery towards himself was unpardonable, because he was acquainted with his friend's incapacity. Chrysostom answers, that he should never have betrayed him into that dignity, if he had not known his charity and other qualifications. In order to show that he had reason to shun that charge, he in his third book sets forth the excellence and obligations of that dignity; for it is not earthly, but altogether heavenly, and its ministry would do honor to the angels; and a pastor ought to look upon himself as placed among the heavenly spirits, and under an obligation of being no less pure and holy. This he shows, first, from the tremendous sacrifice of the altar, which requires in the offerer a purity truly becoming heaven, and even far surpassing the sanctity which was required in so terrible a manner of priests in the Old Law, a mere shadow of ours. "For," says he, "when you behold the Lord himself lying the victim on the altar, and offered, and the priest attending, and praying over the sacrifice, purpled with his precious blood, do you seem to remain among men and on earth, or not rather to be translated into heaven? O wonderful prodigy! O excess of the divine mercy! He who is seated above at the right hand of the Father, is in that hour held by all in their hands, and gives himself to be touched and received. Figure to yourself Elias before the altar, praying alone, the multitude standing around him in silence, and trembling, and the fire falling from heaven and consuming the sacrifice. What is now done is far more extraordinary, more awful, and more astonishing. The priest is here standing, and calls down from heaven, not fire, but the Holy Ghost: he prays a long time, not that a flame may be kindled, but that grace may touch the sacrifice, and that the hearts of all who partake of it may be purged by the same." c. 5, p. 385. (See the learned prelate Giacomelli's Note on St. Chrysostom's doctrine on the real presence of the body of Christ in the Eucharist, and on the sacrifice of the altar, in hunc librum, c. 4, p. 340.) Secondly, he mentions the eminent prerogative of binding and loosing, not bodies, but souls, with which the priesthood of the New Law is {257} honored: a power reaching the heavens, where God confirms the sentence pronounced by priests below: a power never given to angels, yet granted to men. John xx. 22. All power was given by the Father to the Son, who again transferred it on men. It is esteemed a great authority if an emperor confers on a private person power to imprison others or to set them at liberty. How great then is the authority with which God honors the priesthood. The priests of the Old Law declared lepers healed; those of the New really cleanse and heal our souls. They are our spiritual parents, by whom we are reborn to eternal life; they regenerate us by baptism, again remit our sins by extreme unction, (James v. 14,) and by their prayers appease God whom we have offended. From all which he infers that it is arrogance and presumption to seek such a dignity, which made St. Paul himself tremble (1 Cor. xi. 3, &c.) If the people in a mad phrensy should make an ignorant cobble general of their army, every one would commend such a wretch if he fled and hid himself that he might not be instrumental in his own and his country's ruin. "If any one," says he, "should appoint me pilot, and order me to steer a large vessel in the dangerous Egæn or Tyrrhenian sea, I should be alarmed and struck with fear, and rather fly than drown both myself and crew." The saint proceeds to mention the principal temptations to which a pastor of souls is himself exposed, and the storms by which he is assailed; as vain-glory, for instance, a more dreadful monster than the sirens of the poets, which passengers, by standing on their guard, could sail by and escape. "This rock," says he, "is so troublesome to me even now, when no necessity drives me upon it, that I do not quite escape being hurt by it. But if any one had placed me on so high a pinnacle, it would have been as if, having tied my hands behind my back, he had exposed me to wild beasts to be torn in pieces." He adds the danger of human respect, fear of the great ones, contempt or neglect of the poor; observing that none can encounter such dangers, but such as are perfect in virtue, disinterested, watchful over themselves, inured to mortification by great abstinence, resting on hard beds, and assiduous labor: lastly, what is most rare, dead to themselves by meekness, sweetness, and charity, which no injuries or reproaches, no ingratitude, no perverseness, or malice, can ever weary or overcome: for a perfect victory over anger is a most essential part of the character of a good pastor, without which all his virtues will be tarnished, and he will reap no fruit of his labors. He makes this dreadful remark, that within the circle of his own acquaintance he had known many who in solitude led lives pleasing to God, but being advanced to the priesthood, lost both themselves and others. If no Christian can call to mind, without trembling, the dreadful account which he is to give at the tribunal of Christ for his own sins, how must he tremble at this thought, who sees himself charged with the sins and souls of others? Heb. xiii. 17. In the fourth book he proves that one unfit for the pastoral charge is not excused because it is imposed on him by others, as one unacquainted with the rules of architecture can by no means undertake to build, nor one to practise medicine who is a stranger to that profession. He speaks of the crime of those who choose unworthy pastors, and of the learning necessary for this charge, especially in applying suitable remedies to every spiritual disorder, in confuting Pagans, Jews, and heretics, and in instructing the faithful. A talent for preaching is an indispensable qualification. In the fifth book he prescribes the manner in which a preacher ought to announce the word of God, with what indefatigable pains, and with what purity of intention, desiring only to please God and plant his love in all hearts, and despising the applause of men, insensible both to their praise and censures. His discourse must be set off by piety, natural eloquence, plain simplicity, and dignity, that all may hear the divine word willingly, and with respect and pleasure, so as to wish at the end of the sermon that it were longer. The extreme danger of vain-glory so much alarmed him, that in the close of this book he again speaks against that vice, and says, that he who entirely subdued this furious wild beast, and cut off its numberless heads, enjoys a great interior calm, with infinite spiritual advantages; and that every one is bound to stand always armed against its assaults. In the sixth book, he shows that priests will be punished for the sins of others. It is no excuse for a watchman to say, _I heard not the trumpet: I saw not the enemy approach_, (Ezech. xxxiii. 3,) for he is appointed sentinel to watch and announce the danger to others. If a single soul perishes through his neglect, this will condemn him at the last day. In how great watchfulness must he live not to be infected with the contagion of the world, with which he is obliged to converse! With what zeal, vigilance, and fervor is he bound to acquit himself of all his duties and functions! For priests are ambassadors of heaven, sent not to one city, but to the whole earth, with a strict charge never to cease scattering the divine seed, preaching and exhorting with so great diligence, that no secret sinner may be able to escape them. They are moreover appointed by God mediators to intercede with him for the sins both of the living and the dead; to offer the tremendous sacrifice, and hold the common Lord of all things in their hands. With what purity, with what sanctity ought he to be adorned, who exercises so sublime a function? In it angels attend the priest, all the choir of heaven joins, and the holy place near the altar is occupied by legions of blessed spirits, in honor of Him who is laid upon it. This he confirms by a vision of a holy old man, who saw a multitude of bright spirits surrounding the altar, profoundly bowing their heads. "Another," says the {258} saint, "assured me, that he had both seen himself, and heard from others, that the souls of those who receive the holy mysteries before death, depart out of their bodies attended by angels as troops of heavenly guards." Lastly, he shows that sins are more easily committed, and are more grievous, in the episcopal ministry than in holy retirement. Basil, at this discourse, almost swooned away in the excess of grief and fear with which he was seized, till after some time, recovering himself, he said in the bitterness of his heart, What has the church of God committed to have deserved so dreadful a calamity, that the pastoral charge should be intrusted to the most unworthy of men? For he had before his eyes on one side the glory, the sanctity, the spiritual beauty and wisdom of the sacred spouse of Christ; and on the other, the sins and miseries of his own soul; and this consideration drew from him a flood of tears. Chrysostom said, that as to himself, upon the first news of his danger he had swooned away, and only returned to himself to vent his grief by abundance of tears; in which agony he passed all that time. He adds: "I will now discover to you the deplorable state of my mind at that time, that out of mere compassion you may forgive me what I have done; and I wish I could show you my wretched heart itself.--But all my alarms are now converted into joy." Basil replied: "But I am now plunged in bitter sorrow and tears: and what protection can I seek? If you have still any bowels of tenderness and compassion for my soul, any consolation in Christ, I conjure you never to forsake me in the dangers in which you have engaged me." St. Chrysostom answered, smiling, "In what can I serve you in your exalted station? However, when a respite from your functions affords you any leisure, I will wait upon you, and will never be wanting in any thing in my power." Basil at this arose weeping. St. John, embracing him and kissing his head, said, "Be of good courage, trusting in Christ, who has called you to his holy ministry." In the first tome of his works, p. 228, we have a book which he composed when he was first made bishop of Constantinople, in 397, Against those who have sub-introduced Women; that is, against such of the clergy as kept deaconesses, or spiritual sisters, under the same roof to take care of their household. Saint Chrysostom condemns this custom as criminal in itself, both because dangerous, and because scandalous to others. Whatever pretext such persons allege of imaginary necessities, and of their security and precautions against the danger, he shows that there is always danger of their finding a lurking pleasure in such company. Though they perceive not any secret passion, he will not believe them exempt; for men are often the greatest strangers to their own hearts. He urges that this conduct is at least criminal, because it is an occasion and incentive of evil. Job, so holy a man, so dead to himself by long habits of mortification, durst not cast his eyes upon a virgin. St. Paul, not content with his continual fatigues and sufferings, added voluntary chastisements of his flesh to subdue it. What austerities do anchorets practise to tame their bodies, by perpetual fasts, watching, and sackcloth! yet never suffer even visits of persons of the other sex. Ironically inveighing against the presumption of such as had not the like saving apprehension of danger, he tells them; "I must indeed call these strong men happy, who have nothing to fear from such a danger, and I could wish myself to be endowed with equal strength," (t. 1, p. 231.) But he tells them this is as impossible as for a man to carry fire in his bosom without being burnt. "You bid me," says he, "believe that though I see you converse with a virgin, this is a work of piety, not passion. O wonderful man! this may be said of those who live not with men, but among stones," (t. 1, p. 235.) Our zealous pastor shows that the capital point in this warfare is, not to awake our domestic enemy, but by watchfulness to shun whatever can rouse him: and he adds, that though a man were invulnerable, he ought not to scandalize the weak, and by his example, draw them into a like snare. The stronger a person is, the more easy must it be to him not to give scandal. To the pretext of necessity, he answers, that this is mere madness, for a clergyman ought not to be so nice, either in his furniture or table. The saint addressed a like book to women, under this title: That regular (or religious) Women ought not to live in the same house with Men, (t. 1, p. 248.) Besides condemning this abuse and scandal, he zealously inveighs against the airy, light dress of many ladies, and pathetically invites all servants of God to mingle floods of tears with his in the bitter anguish of his soul, for a scandal by which snares are laid for others, souls murdered, (though undesignedly,) and sin against the divine Majesty propagated. St. Chrysostom seems to have been only deacon when he compiled his book On St. Babylas, against the Gentiles; in which he speaks of the miracles wrought at his relics, as of facts to which he and his auditors had been eye-witnesses, (t. 2, p. 530.) Montfaucon refers to the same time his Synopsis of the Old Testament: in which he places in the canon the deutero-canonical books of Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus, Esther, Toby, and Judith: and out of the seven canonical epistles counts only three, viz: that of St. James, one of St. Peter, and one of St. John, (no others being received by the Syrians, as appears from Cosmas Indicopleustes,) t. 6, p. 308. St Chrysostom was ordained priest by the patriarch Flavian, in 386, and appointed his ordinary preacher. On this occasion the saint made a sermon, (t. 1, p. 436,) in which he expresses his dread and surprise at his promotion, earnestly begs the prayers of the people, {259} and says he desires to entertain them on the praises of God, but was deterred by the checks of his conscience, and remorse for his sins: for the royal prophet, who invites all creatures, even dragons and serpents, to sound forth the praises of God, passes by sinners as unworthy to be allowed a place in that sacred choir: they are ignominiously ejected, as a musician cuts off a string that is not tunable with the rest. The holy doctor, grieving for the spiritual blindness of many who were seduced by heresy, and considering their dangers as most grievous, and their miseries most pressing, preached five most eloquent sermons on the Incomprehensible Nature of God, against the Anomæans. He had taken notice that these heretics, who were very numerous in Syria, resorted willingly to his sermons with the Catholics, which afforded him an opportunity of more easily reclaiming them. The Anomæans were the followers of Eunomius, who, to the errors of the rankest Arianism, added a peculiar blasphemy, asserting that both the blessed in heaven, and also men in this mortal life, not only know God, but also comprehend and fathom the divine nature as clearly as we know our own, and even as perfectly as God comprehends himself. This fanaticism and impiety St. Chrysostom confutes in these five homilies, demonstrating, from the infinitude of the divine attributes, and from holy scriptures, that God is essentially incomprehensible to the highest angels. He strongly recommends to Catholics a modest and mild behavior towards heretics; for nothing so powerfully gains others as meekness and tender charity; this heals all wounds, whereas harshness exasperates and alienates the mind. (Hom. 2, p. 461.) His method is to close every discourse with some pathetic moral exhortation. In his third homily, On the Incomprehensible, he complains bitterly that many who heard his sermon with patience, left the church when it was at an end, without attending the celebration of the divine mysteries. He shows the efficacy of public prayer to be far greater than that of private, and a far more glorious homage to be paid by it to God: by this St. Peter was delivered from his chains; to it the apostles ascribed the wonderful success of their preaching. He mentions, that ten years ago, when a magistrate condemned for high treason was led to execution with a halter about his neck, the citizens ran in a body to the hippodrome to beg a reprieve; and the emperor, who was not able to reject the request of the whole city, readily granted the criminal a full pardon. Much more easily will the Father of mercy suffer himself to be overcome by the concord of many in prayer, and show mercy to sinners. Not only men join the tremendous voice during the sacred mysteries, but the angels and archangels present to the Father of all things the body of the Lord, entreating him to have mercy on them for whom he shed his blood, and sacrificed this very body. "By your acclamations you testify your approbation of what is said; but by your compliance show that your applause is sincere. This is the only applause that can give me pleasure or joy," &c., (p. 471.) In the following sermon (Hom. 4, p. 477) he commends their compliance by all assisting to the end of the public office, but severely finds fault that some conversed together in the church, and in that awful hour when the deacon cried out, "Let us stand attentive." He bids them call to mind that they are then raised above created things, placed before the throne of God, and associated with the seraphims and cherubims in sounding forth his praises, (p. 477.) In the fifth homily he again makes fervent and humble prayer, by which all things are obtained and effected, the subject of his moral exhortation. Public prayer is a duty which he frequently inculcates as a most essential obligation, a homage most honorable to God, and a most powerful means of grace to ourselves and all mankind. (See Hom. de Obscur. Prophet, t. 6, p. 187, &c.) We have seen other homilies of this father against the Anomæans, in which he proves the consubstantiality of God the Son; subjoining exhortations to prayer, humility, good works, &c. His sermon Upon not Anathematizing, (t. 1, p. 691,) was the fruit of his pious zeal to induce the Meletians and Paulinians to concord, and prevent private persons from anathematizing or branding others with the crime of heresy or schism; censures being reserved to the chief pastors, who are very sparing in using them. The spirit of Christ is meekness, and compassion and tenderness the means to gain souls. By this discourse he healed the sores left in the church of Antioch by the late schism. The Jews and the Gentiles shared in the fruits of his zeal and charity. Eight sermons which he preached against the Jews, whom he proves to have been cast off by God, and their ceremonial rites abolished, have reached us, and many others are lost. In his book Against the Jews and Gentiles, he demonstrates the Christian religion from the propagation of the gospel, the martyrs, prophecies, and the triumph of the cross: this ensign now adorns the crowns of emperors, is carried by every one on his forehead, and placed everywhere with honor, in houses, market-places, deserts, highways, mountains, hills, woods, ships, beds, clothes, arms, vessels, jewels, and pictures; on the bodies of beasts when sick, on energumens, &c. We are all more adorned with it than with crowns and a thousand precious stones; all eagerly visit the wood on which the sacred body was crucified; men and women have small particles of it set in gold, which they hang about their necks. On the 20th of December, 386, our saint pronounced his discourse on St. Philogonius, the twenty-fast bishop of Antioch. who had zealously opposed the rising heresy of Arius, and died on this day in 322. St. Chrysostom left the subject of the panegyric to his bishop Flavian, who {260} was to speak after him, and entertained his people with an exhortation to the holy communion on Christmas-day, five days after. He tells them the Magi had the happiness only of adoring Christ, but that they who should approach him with a pure conscience, would receive him and carry him with them; that he whose life is holy and free from crimes, may communicate every day; but he who is guilty in the sight of God, not even on the greatest festival. Nevertheless, the sinner ought to prepare himself, by a sincere conversion and by good works, during the interval of five days, and then communicate. The Ninevites appeased the divine vengeance in three days by the fervor of their penance. In his homily On the Calends, or First Day of the Year, (t. 1, p. 697,) he inveighs with great zeal against rioting and revels usual in that season, and strongly exhorts all to spend that day in works of piety, and in consecrating the year to God. As builders raise a wall by a ruler or plummet, that no unevenness may spoil their work, so must we make the sincere intention of the divine glory our rule in our prayers, fasts, eating, drinking, buying, selling, silence, and discourse. This must be our great staff, our arms, our rampart, our immense treasure: wherever we are, and whatever we say or do, we must bear this motto always written on our heart: "To the glory of God;" ever glorifying God, not barely in words, but by all our actions in the sincere affections of our hearts, that we may receive glory from him who says: "Those who glorify me, I will crown with glory," (p. 697.) In seven discourses, On Lazarus and the Rich Man, he shows that a life of sensuality and pleasures is condemned by Christ; laments that any Christian should abandon himself to debauchery, and declares he will never cease to pursue sinners by his exhortations, as Christ did Judas, to the last moment: if any remain obstinately incorrigible, he shall esteem it a great happiness if he reclaim but one soul, or even prevent but one sin; at least that he can never see God offended and remain silent. (Hom. 1.) He sets off the advantages of afflictions, which are occasions of all virtue, and even in the reprobate, at least abate the number of their sins, and the torments of another life. In the seventh homily, he severely condemns the diversions of the circus, and expresses the most tender grief that any Christian should so far forget God as to frequent them. He paternally exhorts all such to repentance; proves afflictions and the cross to be the portion of the just in this life, and says, "That they whom God does not visit with tribulations, ought at least to afflict themselves by the labors of penance, the only path which can conduct us with Lazarus to God," (p. 736.) In the second tome, we have the holy doctor's twenty-one sermons to the people of Antioch, or, On the Statues; the following discourses, to the number of sixty, in the old editions not being genuine, but patched up by modern Greeks, chiefly out of several works of this father. The great sedition happened at Antioch on the 26th of February, 387, just after the saint had preached the first of the sermons, in which he spoke against drunkenness and blasphemy, pressing all persons to expel their company any one who should blaspheme. After the sedition, he was silent, in the general grief and consternation, for seven days: then made his second sermon, in which he tells the people that their confusion and remorse is itself a greater punishment than it was in the power of the emperor to inflict; he exhorts them to alms-deeds, and to hope in the mercy of Christ, who, leaving the earth, left us his own flesh, which yet he carried with him to heaven, and that blood which he spilt for us, he again imparted to us. After this, what will he refuse to do for our salvation? The third sermon being made in the beginning of Lent, the preacher inculcates the obligation of fasting: from his words it is clear that Christians then abstained from wine and fish no less than from fowls and all flesh. He insists chiefly on the moral fast of the will from all sin, and of all the senses by self-denials in each of them. Detraction he singles out as the most common sin, and exhorts us to abhor, with the royal prophet, every one who secretly detracts another; to say to such, "If you have any thing to say to the advantage of another, I will hear you with pleasure; but if you have only ill to tell me, this is what I cannot listen to." If detracters were thoroughly persuaded that by their evil speeches they rendered themselves more odious than those of whom they speak ill, they would be effectually cured of this pestilential habit. The saint draws an inference from what the people then saw before their eyes, and represented to them that if emperors punish with extreme rigor those who injure their statues, with what severity will God revenge the injury done by the detracter to his living image, and that offered by the blasphemer to his own adorable name. In the fourth homily, he speaks on the usefulness of afflictions, which withdraw men from many dangers of sin, and make them earnestly seek God. In the fifth, he continues the same subject, and shows that they ought not to fear death, if they prepare themselves for it by sincere penance. Their conversion he would have them begin by correcting the habit of swearing, which had taken deep root among many of them. This victory, he says, would be easy if every one who had contracted such a habit would enjoin himself some penance for every oath which should escape him, as the loss of a meal. "Hunger and thirst," says the saint, "will put you in mind always to watch over yourself, and you will stand in need of no other exhortation." In the sixth, he shows that death is desirable to a Christian, who, by a penitential life, in imitation of the holy anchorets, is dead to the world and himself. {261} In the fourteenth, he describes the dreadful consternation with which the whole city was filled at the sight of new troops, and of a tribunal erected; and, to awake sinners to a sincere repentance, he sets before their eyes the terrors of the last judgment. In the twentieth, he exhorts them to redouble their fervor in preparing their souls for the Paschal communion, the nearer that time approached; especially by forgiving all injuries. In the twenty-first, which was spoken on Easter-day, after the return of the patriarch, he recites great part of Flavian's speech, and the emperor's gracious answer, whose clemency he elegantly extols, with a pathetic exhortation to the people never to forget the divine mercy. From the mention he makes of Flavian's speech, (Hom. 3, p. 35,) it appears that our saint had concerted it with him. He preached every day this Lent; but only these twenty-one have reached us: and only two catechetical discourses, out of many others which he made about Easter that year to the catechumens. In the first he censures those who defer baptism, and explains the names and fruits of that great sacrament; in the second, he exhorts them always to bear in mind, and to repeat to themselves, on every occasion, those solemn words, "I renounce thee, Satan;" and to make it the study of their whole lives to be ever faithful to this most sacred engagement. He next puts them in mind, that they ought to pray without intermission, and always to have God before their eyes, at work, in the shop, abroad, sitting, or whatever else they were doing. About the year 392, Diodorus, bishop of Tarsus, formerly St. Chrysostom's master, happened to preach at Antioch, and in his sermon highly commended our saint, whom he called John the Baptist, the voice of the church, and the rod of Moses. The people, by loud acclamations, testified how agreeable these encomiums of their preacher were to them: only St. Chrysostom heard them with grief and confusion, and ascribed them to the fondness of a good master, and the charity of the people. Afterwards, ascending the pulpit, he said that every word of the discourse had struck him to the heart, and made him sigh within himself: for praises sting the conscience no less than sins, when a soul is conscious to herself how far she is from what is said of her: they only set before her eyes the last day, in which, to her greater confusion, all things will appear naked and as they are; for we shall not be judged by the masks which are put on us by other men. T. 3, F. 747. In three sermons On the Devil, he shows that the divine mercy has restored us more by grace in our redemption, than the devil has robbed us of by the sin of Adam; and that the punishment itself of that sin served to set forth the excess of the divine mercy and goodness, (Hom. 1, de Diabolo, t. 2, p. 246;) that temptations and the devil's malice are occasions of great advantage, if we make a good use of them: that temporal calamities are sent by God: we fall into sin only by our own malice: the devil has no power against us but by the divine permission, and all his efforts are weak, unless by our sloth we give him power over us. He draws a parallel between Adam sinning in paradise by his free will, and Job victorious by patience on his dunghill under his sufferings, of which he gives a lively description, showing them to have been far more grievous than all the calamities under which we so easily lose our patience and crown. In nine homilies On Penance, he extols its efficacy, and invites all sinners to repentance. Hom. 6, p. 316, he vehemently condemns stage entertainments, which he calls the school of pleasure, the seat of pestilence, and the furnace of Babylon. Hom. 3, he calls alms the queen of virtues, and charity and compassion the key of the divine mercy. Hom. 9, p. 347, he presses all to assist assiduously at the divine mysteries, but with attention, awe, and trembling. In two homilies On the Treason of Judas, (p. 376,) he recommends meekness towards persecutors, and the pardon of injuries, by which we reap from them, without trouble of expense, the most precious of all advantages, grace and the pardon of our sins. Speaking on the holy eucharist, he says, that Christ gives us in it the same body which he delivered to death for us, and that he refused not to present to Judas the very blood which that traitor sold. (Hom. 1, de proditione Judæ, t. 2, p. 383.) He repeats the same thing, (Hom. 2, ib. p. 393.) He observes, that as God, by his word, (Gen. i. 28,) propagates and multiplies all things in nature to the end of the world, so it is not the priest, but Christ, by the words pronounced by the priest, and by virtue of those which he spoke at his last supper, saying, "This is my body," who changes the offering (or bread and wine) in every church from that to this time, and consummates the sacrifice till his coming. (Hom. 1, ib. p. 383.) In two homilies, On the Cross, and on the Good Thief, preached on Good Friday, he makes many excellent reflections on the conversion of the latter, and on the precept of our forgiving injuries, by which we become true imitators of Christ, and inherit the privileges of his disciples. The cross he commends as the instrument of Christ's glorious triumph, and of our happiness. In a homily On the Resurrection of the Dead, he proves this article to be the foundation, both of our faith, and of our morals. In that On the Resurrection of our Lord, he tells his flock, that on that day (which was the solemnity of Easter) they were no longer obliged to drink only water, to abstain from the bath, to live on herbs and pulse, and to fast as in Lent; but that they were bound to shun intemperance: he speaks against drunkenness, {262} and says the poor have equal reason for joy and thanksgiving with the rich on that solemnity, the advantages which it brings consisting in spiritual graces, not in feasting or pomp. In the first homily, On Whitsunday, he proves, that though the descent of the Holy Ghost is no longer manifested by miracles, since the faith had been sufficiently established by them, it was not less real, though made in an invisible manner in our souls, by his grace and peace. In the second, on the same feast, he calls Whitsunday the accomplishment of all the mysteries of our faith; and teaches that the Holy Ghost delayed his descent, that he might not come upon the apostles in vain, or without having been long and earnestly desired; and that he manifested his descent by the emblem of tongues of fire, to represent that he consumes like fire the thorns of our souls, and that his principal gift is charity. His seven homilies On St. Paul, are standing proofs of his singular veneration for that great apostle, and admiration of his divine virtues. In the third, speaking of that apostle's ardent love of God, which made ignominies and torments for his sake a triumph, and a subject of joy and pleasure, he seems to surpass himself, (p. 481.) In the sixth, he speaks of miracles wrought at the relics of St. Babylas at Daphne, and says, that the devil trembled at the name of Christ, and fled whenever it was pronounced. In many other homilies he speaks in raptures on the admirable virtues of St. Paul, whose spirit he had imbibed and studied in his writings and example. The miracles of St. Babylas are the subject of a panegyric, which St. Chrysostom has left us on that holy martyr, (ib. p. 531.) We have his panegyrics or homilies on St. Meletius, St. Lucian, SS. Juventinus and Maximin, St. Pelagia, St. Ignatius, St. Eustathius, St. Romanus, the Maccabees, SS. Bernice, Prosodoche, and Domnina, St. Drosis, St. Phocas, &c., in which he frequently and strongly recommends the most devout veneration for their relics. See that on St. Ignatius, p. 593, &c. In homily 1, On the Martyrs, (p. 650,) he says that the very sight of their relics more strongly moves to virtue than the most pathetic sermons, and that their shrines are more precious than the richest earthly treasures, and that the advantages which these relics afford, are not diminished by their division, but multiplied. Some being surprised that in this discourse he had compared the crime of an unworthy communion to that of the Jews, who crucified Christ, he made another under this title, That we are not to preach to please Men; in which he repeats and enforces the same comparison; but adds a serious exhortation to frequent communion, after a sincere repentance, and the distinct confession of every sin; "For it is not enough to say, I am a sinner, but every kind of sin is to be expressed," (p, 667.) Though some circumstances aggravate a sacrilegious communion beyond the crime of Judas and that of the crucifiers of Christ; the last was doubtless, as St. Thomas Aquinas shows, far more enormous in itself; an injury offered to Christ in his own natural form differing from an insult which he receives hid under sacramental veils, though it is hard to imagine that any crime into which a Christian can fall since the death of Christ, can be more enormous than an unworthy communion. St. Chrysostom, in his second sermon On the Martyrs, (p. 668,) bids the faithful remain a long time in prayer at their tombs, and devoutly kiss their shrines, which abound with blessings. In that On the Martyrs of Egypt, (p. 699,) he calls their relics dispersed in different places, "the ramparts of the cities," &c. In that On the Earthquake, he expresses a deep and tender concern for the public calamity, but rejoices at the spiritual advancement of the people, saying, that this scourge had wrought such a change in them, that they seemed to be become angels. Two books On Prayer, bear the name of St. Chrysostom: if they are not mentioned by the ancients among his works, that most important subject is treated in them in a manner not unworthy his pen. This book is made use of in many pious schools as a Greek classic, with another On the Education of Children, full of excellent maxims, ascribed to our saint; but unjustly, for it is a compilation, made without much method, out of several of his sermons and other works. The first part of the third tome, in the Benedictin edition, presents us thirty-four elegant sermons of this saint on divers texts of holy scripture, and on various Christian virtues and duties. Those on forgiving injuries, humility, alms, prayer, widowhood, and three on marriage, particularly deserve attention. That On Alms he took occasion to preach from the extreme miseries under which he saw the beggars groan, lying abandoned in the streets as he passed through them coming to the church; whence it is inferred by Tillemont and others, that it was spoken extempore, or without preparation. He says, that water does not so easily wash away the spots of our clothes, as alms blot out the stains of our souls. On Marriage, he proves that state to be holy, and will not have it dishonored by profane pomps, which no custom can authorize; as by them God is offended. Christ is to be invited to give the nuptial blessing in the persons of the priests, and what many throw away on musicians, would be a grateful sacrifice to God if bestowed on the poor. Every one ought to be ambitious to set the example of so wholesome and holy a custom, which others would imitate. What incomparable advantages does a wife bring to a house, when she enters it loaded with the blessings of heaven? This is a fortune far beyond all the riches of the world. In the third discourse, he speaks of the inviolable precept of mutual tender love which the husband and wife are bound constantly to bear each other, and of forgetting one another's faults, as {263} a man in engaging in this state seeks a companion for life, the saint observes that nothing is busier than for him to make it an affair of traffic, or a money job. A wife with a moderate fortune usually brings more complaisance and submission, and blesses a house with peace, union, and friendship. How many rich men, by marrying great fortunes, in seeking to increase their estates, have forfeited the repose of their minds for the rest of their lives. A virtuous wife gives every succor and comfort to a family, by the virtuous education of her children, by possessing the heart of her husband, and by furnishing supplies for every necessity, and comfort in every distress. Virtue was the only quality and circumstance which Abraham was solicitous about in the choice which he made of a wife for his son. Among the letters of the saint, which, with certain scattered homilies, fill up the latter part of this volume, the seventeen addressed to St. Olympias, both by the subjects and style, deserve rather the title of treatises than of epistles. The fourth tome contains sixty-seven homilies on Genesis, which were preached at Antioch during Lent, some year later than 386. Photius takes notice, that in these his style is less correct than in any of his other writings, and as far beneath his comments on the Acts of the Apostles, as those fall short of his most eloquent discourses on Isaiah, or on the epistles of St. Paul. His parentheses are sometimes so long, that he forgets to wind up his discourse and return to his subject: for speaking not only with little or no preparation, but without much attention to a regular method, for the instruction of the peoples, he suffered himself often to be carried sway with the ardor with which some new important thought inspired him. Yet the purity of his language, the liveliness of his images and similes, the perspicuity of his expression, and the copiousness of his invention, never fall: his thoughts and words flow everywhere in a beautiful stream, like an impetuous river. He interweaves excellent moral instructions against vain-glory, detraction, rash judgment, avarice, and the cold words mine and thine; on prayer, &c. His encomiums of Abraham and other patriarchs, are set off by delicate strokes. In the first thirty-two he often explains the conditions of the Lent fast. In the year 386, during Lent, at which time the church read the book of Genesis, he explained the beginning thereof in eight elegant sermons, t. 4, p. 615. In the first, he congratulates with the people for the great joy and holy eagerness for penance with which they received the publication of the Lent fast, this being the most favorable season for obtaining the pardon of sins, and reaping the most abundant heavenly blessings and graces; a season in which the heavens are in a particular manner open, through the joint prayers, fasts, and alms of the whole church. These are usually called sermons on Genesis, in order to be distinguished from the foregoing homilies, which were posterior to them in time. Five sermons On Anna, the mother of Samuel, (t. 4, p. 6{}9,) were preached at Antioch in 387, after the emperor had granted his gracious pardon for the sedition. The saint treats in them on fasting, the honor due to martyrs and their relics, on purity, the education of children, the spiritual advantages of poverty, and on perpetual earnest prayer, which he recommends to be joined with every ordinary action, and practised at all times, by persons while they spun, walked, sat, lay down, &c. Invectives against stage-entertainments occur both in those, and in the following three discourses On David, in which he says many excellent things also on patience, and on forgiving injuries. (T. 4, p. 747.) The fifth tome presents us with fifty-eight sermons on the Psalms. He explained the whole Psalter; but the rest of the discourses are lost; a misfortune much to be regretted, these being ranked among the most elegant and beautiful of his works. In them notice is taken of several differences in the Greek translations of Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion; also in the Hebrew text, though written in Greek letters, as in Origen s Hexapla. The critics find the like supply for restoring parts of these ancient versions also in the spurious homilies in the appendix of this volume, compiled by some other ancient Greek preacher. In this admired work of St. Chrysostom the moral instructions are most beautiful, on prayer, especially that of the morning, meekness, compunction, careful self-examination every evening, fasting, humility, alms, &c. In Pa. 43, p. 146, he thus apostrophizes the rich: "Hear this, you all who are slack in giving alms: hear this, you who, by hoarding up your treasures, lose them yourselves: hear me you, who, by perverting the end of your riches, are no better by them than those who are rich only in a dream; nay, your condition is fair worse," &c. He says that the poor, though they seem so weak, have arms more powerful and more terrible than the greatest magistrates and princes; for the sighs and groans which they send forth in their distresses, pierce the heavens, and draw down vengeance without thinking to demand it, upon the rich, upon cities, upon whole nations. In Ps. 11, p. 120, he will have prayer to be made effectual by the exercise of all virtues and good works, especially by a pure love of God, hunger after his justice alone, and disengagement of the heart from all love of earthly things. In P. 41, p. 190, this prayer by aspirations, which may be borrowed from the psalms, he recommends to be practised in all places and times. Ib. He insists, that with David we begin the day by prayer, doing nothing before this duty to God be complied with: and that with him we consecrate part of the night to compunction and prayer. In. Ps. 6, he says many excellent things on the remedies we are bound to employ against concupiscence, especially assiduous prayer, shunning {264} all occasions which can prove incentives to this enemy or to our senses, and above all dangerous company; assiduous meditation on death and hell, &c. Ib. God only afflicts the just out of the excess of his love for them, and desire to unite them closely to himself. In Ps. 114, p. 308, as the Jews obtained not their return from their captivity to Jerusalem but by long and earnestly desiring it, so only an ardent and pure desire of the heavenly Jerusalem can raise us thither; and an attachment to earthly goods and pleasures links us to our slavery, and chains us down too fast for us ever to rise so high. In Ps. Graduales, p. 328, it was the custom at Antioch for all the faithful to recite, every morning, the 140th psalm, which he desires them carefully to understand, so as to penetrate the riches of the excellent sentiments every word contains, in order to repeat it with more dilated affections of the heart. In like manner he mentions that the 62d psalm was recited by all every evening. From his exposition of Ps. 41, p. 131, it appears that the people answered by repeating the first verse of every psalm, after every verse, as it was sung by the clergy. In the sixth tome occur his excellent discourses on the seven first chapters of Isaiah: then his four homilies on the fall of king Ozias, (Isa. vi.,) in which he sets forth the danger of pride, and necessity of perseverance and constant watchfulness. (T. 6, p. 94.) After several homilies on certain texts of Jeremy, Daniel, &c., we have his two elegant discourses On the Obscurity of the Prophets, in which he shows that the wisdom of Providence is displayed; for too great perspicuity would not have so well answered the various ends of the Old Law. The advantages of public prayer are here strongly set forth; and in the second the saint declaims against detraction, a vice which brings neither profit nor pleasure, yet is most enormous even in those who only listen to it. If he who scandalizes one brother is so grievously punished, what will be the chastisement of him who scandalizes so many? We are bound to cover, not to proclaim the faults of others; but it is our duty to endeavor to reclaim and save sinners, according to the precept of Christ. The very company of detracters ought to be shunned: to correct, or at least set a mark upon such, he wishes, in order that they may be known and avoided, they were publicly branded with the name of flies, because, like these insects, they delight to dwell on filth and corruption. In the homily On Perfect Charity, he draws a most amiable portraiture of that virtue in society; and another, in striking colors, of the day of judgment. It is uncertain by what accident the imperfect work of St. Matthew was formerly taken by some for a performance of St. Chrysostom. The mistake is notorious; for the author declares himself an advocate for Arian ism, (Hom. 19, 22, 28, &c.,) and for the re-baptization of heretics. (Hom. 13 and 15.) He seems to have written about the beginning of the seventh century, and to have been a Latin, (not a Greek,) for he follows closely the Latin text. The commentary of St. Chrysostom on St. Matthew fills the seventh tome, and consists of ninety homilies: the old Latin version, by dividing the nineteenth into two, counts ninety-one. They were preached at Antioch, probably in the year 390. This literal and most pious exposition of that gospel contains the whole practical science of virtues and vices, and is an inexhausted source of excellent morality, and a finished model of preaching the word of God, and of expounding the oracles of eternal life for the edification of souls. St. Thomas Aquinas was possessed only of a bad Latin translation of this unparalleled work, yet said he would rather be master of this single book than of the whole city of Paris. The example of the saint shows that the most essential preparation for the study of the holy scriptures consists in simplicity and purity of heart, an eminent spirit of prayer, and habitual profound meditation on the sacred oracles. Thus qualified, he, with admirable sagacity and piety, penetrates and unfolds the unbounded spiritual riches of the least tittle in the divine word; and explains its sacred truths with incomparable ease, perspicuity, elegance, and energy of style. The moral instructions are enforced by all the strength and ornaments of the most sweet and persuasive eloquence. Inveighing against the stage, he calls it the reign of vice and iniquity, and the ruin of cities: and commends the saying of that ancient Roman, who, hearing an account of the usual entertainments which were represented on the stage, and how eagerly the citizens ran to them, cried out, "Have they then neither wives nor children at home?" giving to understand, that men ought not to seek diversion abroad which they would more rationally procure at home with those whom they love. (Hom. 37, p. 414.) On the precept of self-denial he takes notice, that by it Christ commands us, first, to be crucified to our own flesh and will; secondly, to spare ourselves in nothing; thirdly, not only to deny ourselves, but thoroughly to deny ourselves; by this little particle _thoroughly_, adding great force to his precept. He says further, _Let him take up his cross_; this is, bearing not only all reproaches and injurious words, but also every kind of sufferings or death. (Hom. 55, p. 556.) On Vain Glory, he calls it the most tyrannical of all the diseases of the soul, (Hom. 19, p. 244,) and pathetically laments the extreme misery of a soul that forsakes God, who would commend and reward her, to court the empty esteem of the vainest of all creatures, and those who will the more hate and despise her as she more eagerly hunts after applause. He compares her to a king's daughter who should abandon a most amiable and rich prince, to run night and day through the streets after fugitives and slaves, that hate and fly from her as the {265} basest of prostitutes. Those she seeks to have for witnesses and applauders, or rather she herself, act the part of robbers, and rifle treasures laid up even in heaven in a place of safety. The devil sees them inaccessible to his arts, therefore employs this worm to devour them. When you bestow an alms, shut your door; let him alone to whom you give it be witness, nor even him if possible; of others see you they will proclaim your vain-glory, and be published by God himself. (Hom. 71.) Speaking on alms, (Hom. 66,) he says, that the Church of Antioch was then possessed only of the revenue of one rich and of one poor man, yet maintained three thousand virgins and widows, besides hospitals &c. What then is not one rich man able to do? But they have children. The saint replies, that the best fortune they can leave is a treasure laid up in heaven. Every one is bound at least to count the poor among his children, and allot to them one half, a third, or at least a tenth part. He declares (Hom. 88.) that he will never cease preaching on the obligation, efficacy, and advantages of alms. He asserts, (Hom. 85,) that in the church of Antioch were contained one hundred thousand souls; besides whom as many Jews and idolaters dwelt in that city. (Hom. in St. Ignat. t. 2, p. 591.) He applauds the constancy and virtue of a famous actress, (Hom. 67,) who being converted to God, would not be compelled by the threats of the governor or any punishment, to appear again upon the stage. In Hom. 68 and 69, he gives an amiable and edifying account of the lives of the monks of Syria: and (Hom. 47, 80, 81, 90, &c.) commends a state of voluntary poverty, and preaches on the contempt of the world. On visiting the tombs of martyrs, to obtain health of body and every spiritual advantage, see Hom. 37, 424. On the sign of the cross he says, (Hom. 54, p. 551,) "Let us carry about the cross of Christ as a crown, and let no one blush at the ensign of salvation. By it is every thing in religion done: the cross is employed if a person is regenerated, or fed with the mystical food, or ordained; whatever else is to be done, this ensign of victory is ever present; therefore we have it in our houses, paint it on our walls and windows, make it on our foreheads, and always carry it devoutly in our hearts. We must not content ourselves with forming it with our fingers, but must do it with great sentiments of faith and devotion. If you thus form it on your face, no unclean spirit will be able to stand against you when he beholds the instrument which has given him the mortal stab. If we tremble at the sight of the place where criminals are executed, think what the devils must suffer when they see that weapon by which Christ stripped them of their power, and cut off the head of their leader. Be not ashamed of so great a good which has been bestowed on you, lest Christ should be ashamed of you when he shall appear in glory, and this standard be borne before him brighter than the rays of the sun; for then the cross shall appear speaking as it were with a loud voice. This sign, both in the time of our forefathers and in our own, has opened gates, deadened malignant poisons, and healed wounds made by the sting or bite of venomous creatures. If it has broken down the gates of hell, unbolted those of paradise, destroyed the empire and weakened the powers of the devil, what wonder if it overcomes poisons and wild beasts?" On the virtue of the sign of the cross, see also Hom. 8, ib. and Hom. 4, de St. Paolo, t. 2, 9. 494, et de libello repudii, t. 3, p. 204, &c. On the Holy Eucharist, he gives frequent and admirable instructions. Speaking of the sick, who were cured by touching the hem of Christ's garments, he adds, (Hom. 50, p. 517,) "What grace is not in our power to receive by touching and receiving his holy body? What if you hear not his voice; you see him laid. He has given us himself to eat, and has set himself in the state of a victim sacrificed before us," &c. And Hom. 82, p. 787, he writes: "How many now say, they wish to see his shape, his garments? You desire to see his garments, but he gives himself to you not only to be seen, but to be touched, to be eaten, to be received within you. Then what beam of the sun ought not that hand to be more which divides this flesh? that mouth which is filled with this spiritual fire? that tongue which is purpled with this adorable blood? The angels beholding it tremble, and dare not look thereupon through awe and fear, and on account of the rays which dart from that wherewith we are nourished, with which we are mingled, being made one body, one flesh with Christ. What shepherd ever fed his sheep with his own limbs? nay, many mothers give their children to other nurses; whereas he feeds us with his own blood," &c. It is a familiar reflection of our saint, that by the communion we become of one flesh and of one body with Christ, to express the close union of our souls with him in this divine sacrament. In the same Homily, 82, (olim 83,) on St. Matthew, p. 782, t. 7, he says, the apostles were not affrighted when they heard Christ assure them, _This is my body_; because he had before initiated them in most wonderful mysteries, and made them witnesses to many prodigies and miracles, and had already instructed them in this very sacrament, at which they had been at first much struck, and some of them scandalized. John vi. Moreover, that they might not fear, or say, Shall we then drink his blood and eat his flesh? he set the example in taking the cup, and drinking his own blood the first of all. The saint charges us (ib. p. 787) not to question or contradict the words of Christ, but to captivate our reason and understanding in obeying him, and believing his word, which cannot deceive us, whereas our senses often lead us into mistakes. When, therefore, he tells us, _This is_ {266} _my body_, we must believe him, and consider the mystery with spiritual eyes; for we learn from him, that what he gives us is something spiritual, which falls not under our senses. See this further on the same subject, Hom. 50, (olim 51,) in Matt. pp. 516, 517, 518. Hom. de Baptismo Christi, t. 2, pp. 374, 375. Hom. in Laudem Martyrum, t. 2, p. 654. Hom non esse ad gratiam concionandum, ib. pp. 658, 659. Expos. in Ps. 46, t. 5, p. 189, and in Pd. 133, p. 382. Hom. 5, in illud: Vidi Dominum, t. 6, p. 143. Hom. de St. Philogonio, t. 1, p. 498, besides the passages quoted in this abstract. In the same comments on St. Matthew, t. 7, Hom. 82, p. 788, he vehemently exhorts the faithful to approach the holy table with a burning thirst and earnest desire to suck in the spiritual milk, as it were, from the divine breasts. As children throw themselves into the bosom of their nurse or mother, and eagerly suck their breast, so ought we with far greater ardor to run to the sacred mysteries, to draw into our hearts, as the children of God, the grace of his Holy Spirit. To be deprived of this heavenly food ought to be to us the most sensible, nay, our only grief, (ib p. 788.) Nothing can be more tender than his exhortations to frequent communion; he even recommends it daily, (Hom. de St. Philogonio, t. 1, pp. 499, 500,) provided persons lead Christian lives, and bring suitable dispositions. But no solemnity can be a reason for those who are under the guilt of sin ever to approach in that state. (Ib,) No terms can be stronger than those in which he speaks in many places of the enormity of a sacrilegious communion, which he compares to the crime of Judas who betrayed Christ, of the Jews who crucified him, sud of Herod who sought to murder him in his cradle, (Hom. 7, in Matt. p. 112, &c.,) and frequently explains the dispositions requisite to approach worthily the holy table, insisting chiefly on great purity of soul, fervent devotion, and a vehement hunger and thirst after this divine banquet. (Hom. 17, in Heb. t. 12, p. 169. Hom. 24, in 1 Cor t. 10, p. 218, &c.) He denounces the most dreadful threats of divine vengeance against unfaithful ministers who admit to it notorious sinners. (Hom. 72, in Matt. t. 7, pp. 789, 790.) "Christ," says he, "will demand of you an account of his blood, if you give it to those who are unworthy. If any such person presents himself, though he were general of the army, or emperor, drive him from the holy table. The power with which you are invested is above that of an emperor. If you dare not refuse to admit the unworthy, inform me. I will rather suffer my blood to be spilt than offer this sacred blood to one who is unworthy," &c. (Ib.) In this work of St. Chrysostom upon St. Matthew, we meet with beautiful instructions on almost every Christian virtue. Read Hom. 38, on humility, which he styles the queen of all virtues; Hom. 58, where he calls it the beginning of a virtuous life; and Hom. 65, where he shows that it exalts a man above the highest dignities. On the entire contempt of the world as a nothing, Hom. 12, 33, &c. On the happiness of him who serves God, whom the whole world cannot hurt, Hom. 24, 56, 90. Against avarice, Hom. 28, 74, 63. Against drunkenness, Hom. 70. On compunction, Hom. 41, where he proves it indispensable from the continual necessity of penance for hidden sins, and for detraction, vain-glory, avarice, &c. We ought also to weep continually for our dangers. Speaking on the same virtue, Hom. 6, p. 94, he, teaches that compunction is the daughter of divine love, which consumes in the heart all affections for temporal things, so that a man is disposed with pleasure to part with the whole world and life itself. A soul is by it made light, and soaring above all things visible, despises them as nothing. He who is penetrated with this spirit of love and compunction, frequently breaks into floods of tears; but these tears afford him incredible sweetness and pleasure. He lives in cities as if he were in a wilderness; so little notice does he take of the things of this life. He is never satiated with tears which he pours forth for his own sins and those of others. Hence the saint takes occasion to launch forth into the commendation of the gift of holy tears, pp. 96, 97. He inveighs against stage entertainments, Hom. 6, 7, 17, 37, &c. See especially Hom. contra ludos et theatra, t. 6, 274. On Hell, he says (Hom. 23, in Matt.) that the loss of God is the greatest of all the pains which the damned endure, nay, more grievous than a thousand hells. Many tremble at the name of hell; but he much more at the thought of losing God, which the state of damnation implies. (Ib.) He distinguishes in hell the loss of God, and secondly, fire and the other pains of sense. (Hom. 47.) He shows that company abates nothing in its torments. (Hom. 43.) Some object that to meditate on those torments is too frightful; to whom he answers, that this is most agreeable, because by it we learn to shun them, the hope of which inspires joy, and so great earnestness in the practice of penance, that austerities themselves become agreeable. (Ib.) He often mentions grace before and after meat; and, Hom. 55, p. 561, recites that which the monks about Antioch used before their meals, as follows: "Blessed God, who feedest me from my youth, who givest nourishment to all flesh, fill our hearts with joy, that being supported by thy bounty we may abound in every good work to Christ Jesus our Lord, with whom be all honor, praise, and glory given with the Holy Ghost, world without end. Amen. Glory be to thee, O Lord; glory be to thee, O Holy; glory be to thee, O King, because Thou hast given us food in joyfulness. Fill us with thy Holy Spirit, that we may be found acceptable in thy sight, that we may not be covered with confusion when Thou shalt render to every one according to his works:" This whole prayer is {267} admirable, says the saint, but especially the close, the remembrance of the last day being a bridle and check to sensuality and concupiscence. (Ib.) The saint shows (Horn. 86, p. 810) the malice and danger of small faults wilfully committed, which many are apt to make slight of; but from such the most dreadful falls take their rise. The old Latin translation of St. Chrysostom's homilies on St. Matthew, is too full of words, and often inaccurate. Anian, the author, seems to have been the Pelagian deacon of that name, who assisted at the council of Diospolis in 415. The new Latin translation is far more exact, but very unequal in elegance and dignity of expression to the original. The eighth tome is composed of the homilies of St. Chrysostom upon St. John, which are eighty-eight in number, though in former Latin editions, in imitation of Morellus, the first is called preface, and only eighty-seven bear the title of homilies. They were preached at Antioch, about the year 394, at break of day, long before the usual hour of the sermon (Hom. 31.) We find here the same elevation of thought, the same genius and lively imagination, and the same strength of reasoning which we admire in those on St. Matthew; but the method is different. After a short literal exposition of the text, the holy doctor frequently inserts polemical discussions, in which he proves the Consubstantiality of the Son against the Anomæans. Hence his moral reflections in the end are short: in which, nevertheless, he is always admirable, especially when he speaks of the love which God testifies for us in the mystery of the Incarnation. (See Hom. 27, olim 26, p. 156.) He observes that Christ miraculously multiplied five loaves, before he gave his solemn promise of the Eucharist, which he calls "The miracle of mysteries," and this he did, says our saint, "That being taught by that miracle, they might not doubt in giving credit to his words--that not only by love, but in reality, we are mingled with his flesh." (Hom. 46, olim 45, in Joan. t. 8, p. 272.) Christ by this institution thus invites us to his heavenly banquet, says our saint. "I feed you with my flesh, I give you myself for your banquet. I would become your brother: for your sake, I took upon myself flesh and blood: Again, I give you the flesh and blood, by which I have made myself of the same nature and kindred with you, ([Greek: suggenês], congener.) This blood by being poured forth has cleansed the whole world. This blood has purified the sanctuaries and the Holy of Holies. If its figure had so great efficacy in the temple of the Hebrews, and sprinkled on the doors of Egypt, the truth will have much greater." (Ib. p. 273.) He calls the holy Eucharist "the tremendous mysteries, the dreadful altar," [Greek: frikta ontôs ta musêria, frikton ontôs to fusiastêrion], (ib.,) and says, "When you approach the sacred cup, come as if you were going to drink the blood flowing from his side." (Hom. 85, olim 84, in Joan. p. 507.) The fifty-five homilies _On the Acts of the Apostles_, he preached at Constantinople in the third year of his episcopal dignity, of our Lord 401, as appears from Hom. 44, p. 335, t. 9. The famous censure of Erasmus, who judged them absolutely unworthy of our saint, (ep. ad Warham. archiepiscopum Cantuarens,) is well known: Billius, on the contrary, thinks them very elegant. Both judgments show how far prepossession is capable of misleading the most learned men. That this work is undoubtedly genuine, is demonstrated by Sir Henry Saville. Photius justly admires an admirable eloquence, rich veins of gold scattered through it, and the moral instructions are so noble and beautiful, that no other genius but that of a Chrysostom could have formed them. The style indeed, in many parts of the comments, is not regular or correct; which might be owing to some indisposition, or to an extraordinary hurry of troublesome affairs, to a confusion of mind, and to alarms, the city being then in imminent danger by the revolt and blockade of Gainas, and in daily fears of being plundered by that barbarian. In the first homily our saint speaks against those who deferred to receive baptism, for fear of forfeiting the grace by relapsing into sin: which delay he shows to imply a wilful and obstinate contempt of God and his grace, with the guilt of a base and inexcusable sloth, like one who should desire to enrol himself in the army when the war was over, yet expect a share in the triumph; or a wrestler who should enter the lists when the games are closed. He adds, that in sickness, under alarms and pains, it is scarce to be hoped that a person will be able to dispose himself for so great a sacrament. Prudent men make their wills while in health, imagining that at best they will retain their senses but by halves at the approaches of death; and can we think dying men capable of duly making so solemn an engagement with God? He assures his flock that he is notable to express the consternation, grief, and agony, with which he is seized whenever he hears of any one being dead without baptism or penance, (p. 13.) In Hom. 3, p. 30, he exaggerates the grievousness of sin in a priest, and has these remarkable words, "I do not believe that many priests are saved; but that far the greater number are lost: for this dignity requires a great soul and much courage." In Hom. 7, he draws a most amiable and beautiful portraiture of the charity which reigned in the primitive church, when all with joy cast away their money; setting no value but on the inestimably greater treasures which they possessed in God; when all lived without envy, jealousy, pride, contempt of any one, and without any cunning or ill-will; and when the cold words mine and thine were banished from among them, pp. 58,59. A passage often quoted by those who write on the small number of the elect occurs Hom. 24, p. 198, "How many," says he, "do you think there are in this city {268} who will be saved? What I am going to say is frightful indeed; yet I will speak it. Out of so many thousands not one hundred belongs to the number of the elect: and even of these I doubt. How much vice among the youth! What sloth in the old! No one takes due care of the education of his children. If we see a man truly devout in his old age, he is imitated by nobody. I see persons behave disrespectfully and without due attention in the church, and even when the priest is giving his blessing. Can any insolence be found equal to this? Amidst such scandals, what hopes can we entertain of the salvation of many? At a ball every one dances in his rank, every thing is regulated, and done without confusion. And here in the company of angels, and singing the praises of God with the blessed spirits, you talk and laugh. Should we be surprised if thunder fell from heaven to punish such impiety?" The monks then lived without the walls, and could not be included by him: nor probably the clergy, deaconesses, or others particularly consecrated to a devout life; as appears from his invective. Nor does he speak this with any certitude, but from his private apprehension by comparing the lives of the generality of the people with the severe maxims of the gospel. This is manifest from the proof he draws from the manners of the people, and from a like invective in Hom. 61, olim 62, on St. Matthew, (t. 7, p. 612,) spoken at Antioch ten years before. See also l. 1, adv. Oppugnatores Vitæ Mon. n. 8, t. 1, p. 55. Speaking on the general impiety of the world, (Hom. 10, in 1 Tim,) he says: "We have great reason to weep: scarce the least part of the world is saved: almost all live in danger of eternal death." But he shows that the multitude will only increase the torments of the wicked, as if a man saw his wife and children to be burnt alive with him. St. Chrysostom counts in Constantinople, at that time, one hundred thousand Christians, (Hom. 11, in Acts,) and says that the poor in that city amounted to fifty thousand, and the riches of the particulars to about one million pounds of gold. Yet he reckons the assembly of the Christians greater at Antioch than at Constantinople. (Hom. 1, adv. Judæos. p. 592, t. 1.) If the estate of one rich and that of one poor man maintained three thousand poor at Antioch, and the like estates of ten rich men would have supported all the poor of that city, it is inferred that there were in Antioch only thirty thousand poor, though it might perhaps have more inhabitants than Constantinople. See Bandurius on the site and extent of Constantinople under the emperors Arcadius and Honorius; and Hasius de magnitudine urbium, p. 47. St. Chrysostom teaches that grace is conferred by God at the imposition of hands in the ordination of priests, Hom. 14, in Acta. p. 114, also Hom. 3, de Resurrect. t. 2, p. 436, and Hom. 21, in Acta. p. 175, that "Oblations (or masses) are not offered in vain for the dead." It is his pious counsel (Hom. 17, in Acta.) that when we find ourselves provoked to anger, we form on our breast the sign of the cross; and Hom. 26, he exhorts all Christians, even the married, and both men and women, to rise every midnight to pray in their own houses, and to awake little children at that hour that they may say a short prayer in bed. He says that saints and martyrs are commemorated in the holy mysteries, because this is doing them great honor, (Hom. 21, in Acta. p. 276,) and by the communion with them in their virtues, the rest of the faithful departed reap much benefit. (Hom. 51, in 1 Corinth. t. 10, p. 393.) For a specimen of the zeal and charity with which this great preacher instructed his flock, two or three passages are here inserted. Hom. 3, in Acta. p. 31, t. 9. "I wish," says he, "I could set before your eyes the tender charity and love which I bear you: after this no one could take it amiss or be angry if I ever seem to use too harsh words in correcting disorders. Nothing is dearer to me than you; not even life or light. I desire a thousand times over to lose my sight, if by this means I could convert your souls to God; so much more sweet is your salvation to me. If it happens that any of you fall into sin, you are present even in my sleep: through grief I am like persons struck with a palsy, or deprived of their senses. For what hope or comfort can I have left, if you advance not in virtue? And if you do well, what can afflict me? I seem to feel myself taking wing when I hear any good of you. _Make my joy complete_. Phil. ii. 2. Your progress is my only desire. You are to me all, father and mother, and brothers and children." Hom. 44, in Act. p. 335, having appealed to his closet and secret retreats to bear witness how many tears he shed without intermission for them, he says, "What shall I do? I am quite spent daily crying out to you: Forsake the stage. Yet many laugh at our words: Refrain from oaths and avarice, and no one listens to us. For your sakes I have almost abandoned the care of my own soul and salvation; and while I weep for you, I bewail also my own spiritual miseries, to which, through solicitude for you, I am not sufficiently attentive: so true it is that you are all things to me. If I see you advance in virtue, through joy I feel not my own ills; and if I perceive you make no progress, here again through grief I forget my own miseries. Though I am sinking under them, on your account, I am filled with joy: and whatever subject of joy I have in myself, I am overwhelmed with grief if all is not well with you. For what comfort, what life, what hope can a pastor have, if his flock be perishing? How will he stand before God? What will he say? Though he should be innocent of the blood of them all, still he will be pierced with bitter sorrow which nothing will be able to assuage. For though parents were no way in fault, they would suffer the most {269} cruel anguish for the ruin or loss of their children. Whether I shall be demanded an account of year souls or no, this will not remove my grief. I am not anxious that you may attain to happiness by my labors, but that you be saved at any rate, or by any means. You know not the impetuous tyranny of spiritual travails, and how he who spiritually brings forth children to God desires a thousand times over to be hewn to pieces rather than to see one of his children fall or perish. Though we could say with assurance, we have done all that lay in us, and are innocent of his blood, this will not be enough to comfort us. Could my heart be laid open and exposed to your view, you would see that you are every one there, and much dilated, women, children, and men. So great is the power of charity that it makes a soul wider than the heavens. St. Paul bore all Corinth within his breast. 2 Cor. vii. 2. I can make you no reproaches for any indifference towards me on your side. I am sensible of the love which you reciprocally bear me. But what will be the advantage either of your love for me or of mine for you, if the duties you owe to God are neglected? It is only an occasion of rendering my grief more heavy. You have never been wanting in any thing towards me. Were it possible, you would have given me your very eyes: and on our side we were desirous to give you with the gospel also our lives. Our love is reciprocal. But this is not the point. We must in the first place love Christ. This obligation both you and I have great need to study: not that we entirely neglect it; but the pains we take are not adequate to this great end." To abolish the sacrilegious custom of swearing at Constantinople, as he had done at Antioch, he strained every sinew, and in several sermons he exerted his zeal with uncommon energy, mingled with the most tender charity. In Hom. 8, in Act t. 9, pp. 66, 67, he complains that some who had begun to correct their criminal habit, after having fallen through surprise, or by a sudden fit of passion, had lost courage. These he animates to a firmer resolution and vigor, which would crown them with victory. He tells them he suffers more by grief for them than if he languished in a dungeon, or was condemned to the mines; and begs, by the love which they bear him, they would give the only comfort which could remove the weight of his sorrow by an entire conversion. It will not justify him, he says, at the last day, to allege that he had reprimanded those who swore. The judge will answer: "Why didst not thou check, command, and by laws restrain those that disobeyed?" Heli reprimanded his sons; but was condemned for not having done it, because he did not use sufficient severity. 1 Kings xi. 24. "I every day cry aloud," says the saint, "yet am not heard. Fearing to be myself condemned at the last day for too great lenity and remissness, I raise my voice, and denounce aloud to all, that if any swear, I forbid them the church. Only this month is allowed for persons to correct their habit." His voice he calls a trumpet, with which in different words he proclaims thrice this sentence of excommunication against whosoever should persist refractory, thought he were a prince, or he who wears the diadem. Hom. 9, p. 76, he congratulates with his audience for the signs of compunction and amendment which they had given since his last sermon, and tells the greatest part of the difficulty is already mastered by them. To inspire them with a holy dread and awe for the adorable name of God, he puts them in mind that in the Old Law only the high priest was allowed ever to pronounce it, and that the devils trembled at its sound. Hom. 10, he charges them never to name God but in praising him or in imploring his mercy. He takes notice that some among them still sometimes swore, but only for want of attention, by the force of habit, just as they made the sign of the cross by mere custom, without attention, when they entered the baths, or lighted a candle. He tells them (Hom. 11, p. 95) that the term of a month, which he had fixed, was almost elapsed, and most affectionately conjures them to make their conversion entire. A sight of one such conversion, he says, gave him more joy, than if a thousand imperial diadems of the richest jewels had been placed upon his head. Other specimens of the saint's ardent love for his people at Constantinople, see Hom. 9, in Hebr. t. 12, p. 100; Hom. 23, in Hebr. p. 217; Hom. 9, in 1 Thes. t. 11, p. 494; Hom. 7, in 1 Coloss. Hom. 39, in Act. p. 230, &c. For his people at Antioch, t. 3, p. 362, t. 2, p. 279, t. 7, p. 374, &c. On his humility, t. 2, p. 455, t. 4, p. 339. On his desire to suffer for Christ, t. 1, p. 453, t. 7, p. 243, t. 11, pp. 53, 55. The inspired epistles of St. Paul were the favorite subject of this saint's intense meditation, in which he studied the most sublime maxims, and formed in himself the most perfect spirit of Christian virtue. The epistle to the Romans is expounded by him in thirty-two homilies, (t. 9, p. 429,) which he made at Antioch, as is clear from Hom. 8, p. 508, and Hom. 30, p. 743. Nothing can go beyond the commendations which St Isidore of Pelusium bestows on this excellent work, (l. 5, ep. 32,) to which all succeeding ages have subscribed. The errors of Pelagius, which were broached soon after in the West, are clearly guarded against by the holy preacher, though he is more solicitous to confute the opposite heresy of the Manichees, which then reigned in many parts of the East. He also confounds frequently the Jews. But what we most admire is the pious sagacity with which he unfolds the deep sense of the sacred text, and its author, the true disciple of Christ, and the perspicuity and eloquence with which he enforces his moral instructions. Whoever reads anyone of these homilies, will hear testimony to this eulogium. See Hom. 24. (t. 9, p. 694,) {270} on the shortness of human life: Hom. 8, on fraternal charity and forgiving injuries: Hom. 20, on our obligation of offering to God a living sacrifice of our bodies by the exercise of all virtues, and the sanctity of our affections: Hom. 22 and 27, on patience in bearing all injuries, by which we convert them into our greatest treasure: Hom. 5, on the fear of God's judgments, and on his love, to which he pathetically says, it would be more grievous to offend God than to suffer all the torments of hell, which every one incurs who is not in this disposition, (p. 469,) though it is a well-known maxim that persons ought not to propose to themselves in too lively a manner such comparisons, or to become their own tempters: Hom. 7, against envy, and on alms, he says this is putting out money at interest for one hundred fold from God, who is himself our security, and who herein considers not the sum, but the will, as he did in St. Peter, who left for him only a broken net, a line, and a hook. The promise of a hundred fold made to him, is no less made to us. The commentary On the First Epistle to the Corinthians, (t. 10,) in forty-four homilies, was likewise the fruit of his zeal at Antioch, and is one of the most elaborate and finished of his works. The interpreter seems animated with the spirit of the great apostle whose sacred oracle he expounds, so admirably does he penetrate the pious energy of the least tittle. If St. Paul uses the words _My God_, he observes, that out of the vehement ardor and tenderness of his love he makes Him his own, who is the common God of all men; and that he names Him with a sentiment of burning affection and profound adoration, because he had banished all created things from his heart, and all his affections were placed in God. He extols the merit and advantages of holy virginity, (Hom. 19,) and Hom. 26, speaks on the duties of a married state, especially that of mutual love and meekness in bearing each other's faults: this he bids them learn from Socrates, a pagan, who chose a very shrew for his wife, and being asked how he could bear with her, said: "I have a school of virtue at home, in order to learn meekness and patience by the daily practice." The saint adds, it was a great grief to him to see Christians fall short of the virtue of a heathen, whereas they ought to be imitators of the angels, nay, of God himself. Recommending the most profound respect for the holy eucharist, and a dread of profaning it, he says, Hom. 24, pp. 217, 218, "No one dares touch the king's garments with dirty hands. When you see Him (_i.e._ Christ) exposed before you, say to yourself: This body was pierced with nails; this body which was scourged, death did not destroy; this body was nailed to a cross, at which spectacle the sun withdrew its rays; this body the Magi venerated," &c. The saint inveighs against several superstitious practices of that age, Hom. 12. His discourses are animated and strong on the characters of fraternal charity, and against avarice, envy, &c. The thirty homilies, On the Second Epistle to the Corinthians, (t. 10, p. 417,) were also preached at Antioch: for he speaks of Constantinople as at a distance, (Hom. 26,) which passage Sir Henry Saville has mistaken, as Montfaucon clearly shows. This commentary is inferior to the last, though not in elegance, yet in fire, the moral instructions being shorter. The saint mentions several of the ceremonies used still at mass, or in the public office of the church. Hom. 18, p. 568. Hom. 30, p. 6{5}0. On visiting the shrines of martyrs, he says, Hom. 26, p. 629, "The tombs of those who served the crucified Christ surpass in splendor the courts of kings. Even he who wears purple visits and devoutly kisses them, and standing suppliant, prays the saint to be a protection to him before God." He adds that emperors sue for their patronage, and count it an honor to be porters to them in their graves. By this he alludes to the burial of Constantine the Great in the porch of the church of the apostles. He proves, Hom. 3, p. 441, and Hom. 14, p. 537, that the essence of repentance consists in a change of the heart: that without an amendment of life, penance is only a mask and a shadow, what fasts or other works soever attend it, and that it must be founded not barely in the fear of hell, but in the love of so good and loving a God. He teaches, Hom. 10, p. 505, that a Christian ought to rejoice at the approaches of death. He speaks in many places on the precept of alms-deeds with great vehemence. He says, Hom. 16, that to be animated with a spirit of charity and compassion is something greater than to raise the dead to life: our alms must be liberal, plentiful, voluntary, and given with joy. He says, Hom. 19, that Christ stripped himself of his immense glory and riches for love of us; yet men refuse him a morsel of bread. They throw away on dogs, and what is superfluous among servants, that which Christ wants in his members, to whom all strictly belongs whatever we enjoy beyond what is necessary for life. He enters into a severe and elegant detail of these superfluities, Hom. 19, p. 570. The apostle, as he observes, (Hom. 20, p. 577,) justly calls alms a seed, because it is not lost, but sown, and produces a most plentiful harvest. His commentary On the Epistle to the Galatians (t. 10) is an accurate interpretation of the text, with frequent remarks against the Anomoeans, Marcionites, and Manichees, but very sparing in moral exhortations: these the saint probably added in the pulpit, and gave to the work the form of discourses; for it appears to have been delivered in homilies to the people, though it is not now divided into discourses. It was certainly compiled at Antioch. The twenty-four homilies On the Epistle to the Ephesians (t. 11) were preached at Antioch; and though some passages might have received a higher polish from a second touch of the saint's masterly file, are a most useful and excellent work. From Hom. 3, p. 16, it {271} is clear that his predecessor Nectarius had not abolished canonical public penances, when he removed the public penitentiary; but that this office, as before the institution of such a charge, was exercised altogether by the bishop. For St. Chrysostom having taken notices that many assisted at mass who did not communicate, tells them, that those who were guilty of any grievous sin could not approach the holy table even on the greatest solemnity; but that such persons ought to be in a course of penance, and consequently not at mass with the rest of the faithful: and he terrifies them by exaggerating the danger and crime of delaying to do penance. Those who are not excluded by such an obstacle, he exhorts strongly to frequent communion, seeming desirous that many would communicate at every day's mass. "With a pure conscience," says he, "approach always; without this disposition, never. In vain is the daily sacrifice offered; to no purpose do we assist at the altar: no one communicates. I say not this to induce any one to approach unworthily, but to engage all to render yourselves worthy. The royal table is prepared, the administering angels are present, the King himself is there waiting for you: yet you stand with indifference," &c. (Hom. 3, in Ephes. p. 23.) The virtues of St. Paul furnish the main subject of his sixth and seventh homilies; in the eighth he speaks of that apostle's sufferings for Christ, and declares, in a kind of rapturous exclamation, that he prefers his chains to gold and diadems, and his company in prison to heaven itself. He wishes he could make a pilgrimage to Rome, to see and kiss those chains at which the devils tremble, and which the angels reverence, while they venerate the hands which were bound with them. For it is more desirable and more glorious to suffer with Christ, than to be honored with him in glory: this is an honor above all others. Christ himself left heaven to meet his cross: and St. Paul received more glory from his chains, than by being rapt up to the third heaven, or by curing the sick by the touch of his scarfs, &c. He desires to feast his heart by dwelling still longer on the chains of this apostle, being himself fettered with a chain from which he would not be separated: for he declares himself to be closer and faster linked to St. Paul's chains by desire, than that apostle was in prison. In the like strain he speaks of the chains of St. Peter, and of St. John Baptist. In the next Homily, (9,) he returns in equal raptures to St. Paul in chains for Christ; in which state he calls him a spectacle of glory far beyond all the triumphs of emperors and conquerors. Our saint gives excellent instructions on the duties of married persons, Hom. 20; on the education of children in the practice and spirit of obedience and piety, Hom. 21; and on the duties of servants, Hom. 22. The eighteen homilies On the First Epistle to Timothy, and ten On the Second, seem also to have been preached at Antioch, (t. 11, p. 146.) They are not equally polished, but contain excellent instructions against covetousness, and the love of the world; on alms, on the duties of bishops, and those of widows, &c.; on the education of children, Hom. 10, p. 596. The six, On the Epistle to Titus, are more elaborate: also three On the Epistle to Philemon, which seem all to have been finished at Antioch. In the eleventh tome we have also eleven sermons, which St. Chrysostom preached at Constantinople about the end of the year 398. Tile second was spoken upon the following occasion, (ib. p. 332:) The empress Eudoxia procured a solemn procession and translation of the relics of certain martyrs, to be made from the great church in Constantinople to the church of St. Thomas the apostle in Drypia, on the sea-shore, nine miles out of town. The princes without any retinue, priests, monks, nuns, ladies, and the people, attended the procession in such multitudes, that from the light of the burning tapers which they carried in their hands the sea seemed as it were on fire. The empress walked all the way behind, touching the shrine and the veil which covered it. The procession set out in the beginning of the night, passed through the market-place, and arrived at Drypia about break of day. There St. Chrysostom made an extemporary sermon, in which he described the pomp of this ceremony, commended the piety of the empress, and proved that if the clothes, handkerchiefs, and even shadow of saints on earth had wrought many miracles, a blessing is certainly derived from their relics upon those who devoutly touch them. The next day the emperor Arcadius, attended by his court and guards, arrived, and the soldiers having laid aside their arms, and the emperor his diadem, he paid his devotions before the shrine. After his departure St. Chrysostom preached again, (p. 336.) St. Chrysostom was removed to Constantinople in 397. The fifteen (or, if with some editors we include the prologue, sixteen) homilies On the Epistle to the Philippians, (t. 11, p. 189,) were preached in that capital of the empire. The moral instructions turn mostly on alms and riches. The order which prudence prescribes in the distribution of alms, he explains, (Hom. 1, t. 11, p. 201,) and condemns too anxious an inquiry and suspicion of imposture in the poor, as contrary to Christian simplicity and charity, affirming that none are so frequently imposed upon by cheat as the most severe inquirers. Prudence and caution he allows to be necessary ingredients of alms, in which those whose wants are most pressing, or who are most deserving, ought to be first considered. Hom. 3, p. 215, he lays it down as a principle, that catechumens who die without baptism, and penitents without absolution, "are excluded heaven with the damned;" which we are to understand, unless they were purified by perfect contrition joined with a desire of the sacrament, as St. Ambrose, St. {272} Austin, and all the fathers and councils declare. St. Chrysostom adds, that it is a wholesome ordinance of the apostles in favor of the faithful departed, to commemorate them in the adorable mysteries: for how is it possible God should be deaf to our prayers for them, at a time when all the people stand with stretched forth hands with the priests, in presence of the most adorable sacrifice? But the catechumens are deprived of this comfort, though not of all succor, for alms may be given for them, from which they receive some relief or mitigation of their pains. Though such not dying within the exterior pale of the church cannot be commemorated in its public suffrages and sacrifices; yet if by desire they were interiorly its members, and by charity united to Christ its head, they may be benefited by private suffrages which particulars may offer for them. This is the meaning of this holy doctor. Exhorting the faithful to live in perpetual fear of the dangers with which we are surrounded, (Hom. 8, in Ephes. t. 11,) he says, "A builder on the top of a house always apprehends the danger of falling, and on this account is careful how he stands: so ought we much more to fear, how much soever we may be advanced in virtue. The principal means always to entertain in our souls this saving fear, is to have God always before our eyes, who is everywhere present, hears and sees all things, and penetrates the most secret foldings of our hearts. Whether you eat, go to sleep, sit at dainty tables, are inclined to anger, or any other passion, or whatever else you do, remember always," says he, "that God is present, and you will never fall into dissolute mirth, or be provoked to anger; but will watch over yourselves in continual fear." With great elegance he shows (Hom. 10, p. 279,) that precious stones serve for no use, are not so good even as common stones, and that all their value is imaginary, and consists barely in the mad opinion of men; and he boldly censures the insatiable rapaciousness and unbounded prodigality of the rich, in their sumptuous palaces, marble pillars, and splendid clothes and equipages. Houses are only intended to defend us from the weather, and raiment to cover our nakedness. All vanities he shows to be contrary to the designs of nature, which is ever content with little. In Hom. 12, we have an excellent instruction on that important maxim in a spiritual life, That we must never think how far we have run, but what remains of our course, as in a race a man thinks only on what is before him. It will avail nothing to have begun, unless we finish well our course. In Hom. 13, he excellently explains the mystery of the cross, which we bear if we study continually to crucify ourselves by self-denial. We must in all places arm ourselves with the sign of the cross. The Exposition of the epistle to the Colossians, in twelve homilies, (t. 11) was made at Constantinople in the year 399. In the second homily (p. 333) he says, that a most powerful means to maintain in ourselves a deep sense of gratitude to God, and to increase the flame of his love in our hearts, is to bear always in mind his numberless benefits to us, and the infinite evils from which he has mercifully delivered us. In Hom. 8, p. 319, he teaches, that no disposition of our souls contributes more effectually to our sanctification, than that of returning thanks to God under the severest trials of adversity, a virtue little inferior to martyrdom. A mother who, without entertaining the least sentiment of complaint at the sickness and death of her dearest child, thanks God with perfect submission to his will, will receive a recompense equal to that of martyrs. After condemning the use of all superstitious practices for the cure of distempers, he strongly exhorts mothers rather to suffer their children to die, than ever to have recourse to such sacrilegious methods; and contenting themselves with making the sign of the cross upon their sick children to answer those who suggested any superstitious remedy: "These are my only arms; I am utterly a stranger to other methods of treating this distemper." The tenth homily (p. 395) contains a strong invective against the excessive luxury and immodesty of ladies in their dress, and their vanity, pride, and extravagance. The empress Eudoxia, who was at the head of these scandalous customs, and the mistress of court fashions and vices, could not but be highly offended at this zealous discourse. The saint says, that many ladies used vessels of silver for the very meanest uses, and that the king of Persia wore a golden beard. The eleven homilies On the First Epistle to the Thessalonians, were also part of the fruit of his episcopal labors at Constantinople. (T. 11.) In the second he shows the excellency of fraternal love and friendship, by which every thing is, as it were, possessed in common, and those cold words mine and thine, the seed of all discords, are banished as they were from the primitive Christians. In the third, he doubts not but perfect patience, under grievous sicknesses, may equal the merit of martyrdom. In the fifth, he speaks incomparably on the virtue of purity, and against occasions which may kindle in the heart the contrary passion, which, with St. Paul, he will not have so much as earned, especially against the stage, and all assemblies where women make their appearance dressed out to please the eyes and wound the hearts of others. In Hom. 6, he condemns excessive grief for the death of friends. To indulge this sorrow for their sake, he calls want of faith: to grieve for our own sake because we are deprived of a comfort and support in them, he says, must proceed from a want of confidence in God; as if any friend on earth could be our safeguard, but God alone. God took this friend away, because he is jealous of our hearts and will have us love him without a rival, (p. 479.) In Hom. 10, we are instructed, that {273} the best revenge we can take of an enemy is to forgive him, and to bear injuries patiently. In Hom. 11, p. 505, he gives an account, that a certain lady being offended at a slave for a great crime, resolved to sell him and his wife. The latter wept bitterly; and a mediator, whose good offices with her mistress in her behalf she implored, conjured the lady in these words: "May Christ appear to you at the last day in the same manner in which you now receive our petition." Which words so strongly affected her, that she forgave the offence. The night following Christ appeared to her in a comfortable vision, as St. Chrysostom was assured by herself. In Hom. 7, (ib.,) he shows the possibility of the resurrection of the flesh, against infidels. The five homilies On the Second Epistle to the Thessalonians, were also preached at Constantinople, (t. 11, p. 510.) In the second, he exhorts all to make the torments of hell a frequent subject of their meditation, that they may never sin; and to entertain little children often with some discourse on them instead of idle stories, that sentiments of holy fear and virtue may strike deep roots in their tender hearts. On traditions received by the church from the apostles he writes as follows: (Hom. 4, in 2 Thess. p. 532.) "Hence it is clear that they did not deliver all things by their epistles, but communicated also many things without writing: and these likewise deserve our assent or faith. It is a tradition: make no further inquiry." In the same Hom. 4, p. 534, he expresses how much he trembled at the thought of being, by the obligation of his office, the mediator betwixt God and his people; and declares, that he ceased not most earnestly to pour forth his prayers for them both at home and abroad. Hom. 4, ib., he severely reprimands those who reproach the poor in harsh words, adding to the weight of their affliction and misery. The thirty-four homilies On the Epistle to the Hebrews, (t. 12, p. 1,) were compiled at Constantinople. In the seventh he shows, that the evangelical precepts and counsels belong to all Christians, not only to monks, if we except the vow of perpetual virginity: though also men engaged in a married state are bound to be disentangled in spirit, and to use the world as if they used it not. Hom. 17, ib. p. 169, he explains that the sacrifice of the New Law is one, because the same body of Christ is every day offered; not one day one sheep, another day a second, &c. (On this sacrifice see also Hom. 5, in 1 Tim. t. 11, p. 577, Hom. 3, contra Judæos. t. 1, p. 611. Hom. 7, contra Judæos. t. 1, p. 664. Hom. in St. Eustath. t. 2, p. 606. Hom. 24, in 1 Cor. t. 10, p. 213.) In Hom. 34, ad Hebr. p. 313, he expresses his extreme fears for the rigorous account which a pastor is obliged to give for every soul committed to his charge, and cries out, "I wonder that any superior of others is saved." A letter to a certain monk called Cæsarius, has passed under the name of St. Chrysostom ever since Leontius and St. John Damascen; and not only many Protestants, but also F. Hardouin, (Dissert. de ep. ad Cæsarium Monachum) Tillemont, (t. 11, art. 130, p. 340,) and Tournely, (Tr. de Euchar. t. 1, p. 282, and Tract. de Incarnat. p. 486,) are not unwilling to look upon it as a genuine work of our holy doctor. But it is demonstrated by F. Le Quien, (Diss. 3, in St. Joan. Damasc.) Dom Montfaucon, (in Op. St. Chrys. t. 3, p. 737,) Ceillier, (t. 9, p. 249,) F. Merlin in his learned dissertations on this epistle, (in Mémoires de Trevoux an. 1737, pp. 252, 516, and 917,) and F. Stilting, the Bollandist, (t. 4, Sept. Comment. in vitam St. Chrys. §82, p. 656,) that it has been falsely ascribed to him, and is a patched work of some later ignorant Greek writer, who has borrowed some things from the first letter of St. Chrysostom to Olympias, as Stilting shows. Merlin thinks the author discovers himself to have been a Nestorian heretic. At least the style is so opposite to that of St. Chrysostom, both in the diction and in the manner of reasoning, that the reader must find himself quite in another world, as Montfaucon observes. The author's long acquaintance with this Cæsarius seems not easily reconcilable with the known history of St. Chrsysostom's life. This piece, moreover, is too direct a confutation of the Eutychian error to have been written before its birth: or if it had made its appearance, how could it have escaped all the antagonists of that heresy? Whoever the author was, he is far from opposing the mystery of the real presence, or that of transubstantiation, in the blessed eucharist, for both which he is an evident voucher in these words, not to mention others: "The nature of bread and that of our Lord's body are not two bodies, but one body of the Son," which he introduces to make a comparison with the unity of Christ's Person in the Incarnation. It is true, indeed, that he says the nature of bread remains in the sacrament: but it is easy to show that by the nature of bread he means its external natural qualities or accidents. Among former Latin translations of St. Chrysostom's works, only those made by the learned Jesuit Fronto-le-Duc are accurate. These are retained by Montfaucon, who has given us a new version of those writings which Le Duc had not translated. The edition of Montfaucon in twelve volumes, an. 1718, is of all others the most complete. But it is much to be wished that he had favored us with a more elegant Latin translation, which might bear some degree of the beauty of the original. The Greek edition, made by Sir Henry Saville at Eton, in nine volumes, in 1612, is more correct and more beautiful than that of the learned Benedictin, and usually preferred by those who stand in need of no translation. {274} As to the French translations, that of the homilies on the epistles to the Romans, Ephesians, &c., by Nicholas Fontaine, the Port-Royalist, in 1693, was condemned by Harlay, archbishop of Paris; and recalled by the author, who undesignedly established in it the Nestorian error. The French translation of the homilies on St. John, was given us by Abbé le Merre: of those on Genesis and the Acts, with eighty-eight chosen discourses, by Abbé de Bellegarde, though for some time attributed to de Marsilly, and by others to Sacy. That of the homilies on St. Matthew, ascribed by many to de Marsilly, was the work of le Maitre and his brother Sacy. That of the homilies to the People of Antioch, was given to by Abbé de Maucroix in 1671. That of the saint's panegyrics on the martyrs, is the work of F. Durauty de Bourecueil, an Oratorian, and made its appearance in 1735. St Chrysostom wrote comments on the whole scripture, as Cassiodorus and Suidas testify; but of these many, with a great number of sermons, &c., are lost. Theophylactus, �cumenius, and other Greek commentators, are chiefly abridgers of St. Chrysostom. Even Theodoret is his disciple in the excellent concise notes he composed on the sacred text. Nor can preachers or theologians choose a more useful master or more perfect model in interpreting the scripture; but ought to join with him some judicious, concise, critical commentator. As in reading the classics, grammatical niceties have some advantage in settling the genuine text; yet if multiplied or spun out in notes, are extremely pernicious, by deadening the student's genius and spirit, and burying them in rubbish, while they ought to be attentive to what will help them to acquire true taste, to be employed on the beauties, ease, and gentleness of the style, and on the greatness, delicacy, and truth of the thoughts or sentiments, and to be animated by the life, spirit, and fire of an author; so much more in the study of the sacred writings, a competent skill in resolving grammatical and historical scruples in the text is of great use, and sometimes necessary in the church: in which, among the fathers, Origen and St. Jerom are our models. Yet from the conduct of divine providence over the church, and the example of the most holy and most learned among the primitive fathers, it is clear, as the learned doctor Hare, bishop of Chichester, observes, that assiduous, humble, and devout meditation on the spirit and divine precepts of the sacred oracles, is the true method of studying them, both for our own advantage, and for that of the church. Herein St. Chrysostom's comments are our most faithful assistant and best model: The divine majesty and magnificence of those writings is above the reach, and beyond the power, of all moral wit. None but the Spirit of God could express his glory, and display either the mysteries of his grace, or the oracles of his holy law. And none but they whose hearts are disengaged from objects of sense, and animated with the most pure affections of every sublime virtue, and whose minds are enlightened by the beams of heavenly truth, can penetrate the spirit of these divine writings, and open it to us. Hence was St. Chrysostom qualified to become the interpreter of the word of God, to discover its hidden mysteries of love and mercy, the perfect spirit of all virtues which it contains, and the sacred energy or each word or least circumstance. The most ingenious Mr. Blackwall, in his excellent Introduction to the Classics, writes as follows on the style of St. Chrysostom, p. 139: "I would fain beg room among the classics for three primitive writers of the church--St. Chrysostom, Minutius Felix, and Lactantius. St. Chrysostom is easy and pleasant to new beginners; and has written with a purity and eloquence which have been the admiration of all ages. This wondrous man in a great measure possesses all the excellences of the most valuable Greek and Roman classics. He has the invention, copiousness, and perspicuity of Cicero; and all the elegance and accuracy of composition which is admired in Isocrates, with much greater variety and freedom. According as his subject requires, he has the easiness and sweetness of Xenophon, and the pathetic force and rapid simplicity of Demosthenes. His judgment is exquisite, his images noble, his morality sensible and beautiful. No man understands human nature to greater perfection, nor has a happier power of persuasion. He is always clear and intelligible upon the loftiest and greatest subjects, and sublime and noble upon the least." All that has been said of St. Chrysostom's works is to be understood only of those which are truly his. The irregular patched compilations from different parts of his writings, made by modern Greeks, may be compared to scraps of rich velvet, brocade, and gold cloth, which are clumsily sewed together with {}thread. {275} ST. JULIAN, FIRST BISHOP OF MANS, C. TOWARDS THE END OF THE THIRD CENTURY. HE was succeeded by St. Turibius. His head is shown in the cathedral of Mans, but the most of his relics in the neighboring Benedictin abbey of nuns called St. Julian's du Prè, famous for miracles; though the greatest part of these relics was burnt, or scattered in the wind by the Huguenots, who plundered the shrine of St. Julian, in 1562. He was much honored in France, and many churches built during the Norman succession in England, especially about the reign of Henry II., who was baptized in the church of St. Julian, at Mans, bear his name: one in particular at Norwich, which the people by mistake imagine to have been dedicated under the title of the venerable Juliana, a Benedictin nun at Norwich, who died in the odor of sanctity, but never was publicly invoked as a saint. St. Julian of Mans had an office in the Sarum breviary. See Tillem. t. 4, pp. 448, 729. Gal. Christ. Nov. &c. ST. MARIUS, ABBOT. DYNAMIUS, patrician of the Gauls who is mentioned by St. Gregory of Tours, (l. 6, c. 11,) and who was for some time steward of the patrimony of the Roman church in Gaul, in the time of St. Gregory the Great, as appears by a letter of that pope to him, (in which he mentions that he sent him in a reliquary some of the filings of the chains of St. Peter, and of the gridiron of St. Laurence,) was the author of the lives of St. Marius and of St. Maximus of Ries. From the fragments of the former in Bollandus, we learn that he was born at Orleans, became a monk, and after some time was chosen abbot at La-Val-Benois, in the diocese of Sisteron, in the reign of Gondebald, king of Burgundy, who died in 509. St. Marius made a pilgrimage to St. Martin's, at Tours, and another to the tomb of St. Dionysius, near Paris, where, falling sick, he dreamed that he was restored to health by an apparition of St. Dionysius, and awaking, found himself perfectly recovered. St. Marius, according to a custom received in many monasteries before the rule of St. Bennet, in imitation of the retreat of our divine Redeemer, made it a rule to live a recluse in a forest during the forty days of Lent. In one of these retreats, he foresaw, in a vision, the desolation which barbarians would soon after spread in Italy, and the destruction of his own monastery, which he foretold before his death, in 555. The abbey of La-Val-Benois[1] being demolished, the body of the saint was translated to Forcalquier, where it is kept with honor in a famous collegiate church which bears his name, and takes the title of Concathedral with Sisteron. St. Marius is called in French St. May, or St. Mary, in Spain, St. Mere, and St. Maire, and in some places, by mistake, St. Marrus. See fragments of his life compiled by Dynamius, extant in Bollandus, with ten preliminary observations. Footnotes: 1. In Latin Vallis Bodonensis. Baillet and many others call it at present Beuvons, or Beuvoux: but there is no such village. Bevons indeed is the name of a village in Provence, one league from Sisteron; but the ruins of the abbey La-Val-Benois are very remarkable, in a village called St. May, in Dauphiné, sixteen leagues from Sisteron, in which diocese it is. See many mistakes of martyrologists and geographers concerning this saint and abbey rectified by Chatelain, p. 424. {276} JANUARY XXVIII. SAINT AGNES, V.M. A SECOND commemoration of St. Agnes occurs on this day in the ancient Sacramentaries of pope Gelasius and St. Gregory the Great; as also in the true Martyrology of Bede. It was perhaps the day of her burial, or of a translation of her relics, or of some remarkable favor obtained through her intercession soon after her death. ST. CYRIL, PATRIARCH OF ALEXANDRIA. From Socrates, Marius Mercator, the councils, and his works. See Tillemont, t. 14, p. 272. Ceillier, t. 13, p. 241. A.D. 444. ST. CYRIL was raised by God to defend the faith of the Incarnation of his Son, "of which mystery he is styled the doctor, as St. Austin is of that of grace," says Thomassin. He studied under his uncle Theophilus, and testifies[1] that he made it his rule never to advance any doctrine which he had not learned from the ancient Fathers. His books against Julian the Apostate show that he had read the profane writers. He often says himself that he neglected human eloquence: and it is to be wished that he had written in a clearer style, and with greater purity of the Greek tongue. Upon the death of Theophilus, in 412, he was raised by the people to the patriarchal dignity. He began to exert his authority by causing the churches of the Novatians in the city to be shut up, and their sacred vessels and ornaments to be seized; an action censured by Socrates, a favorer of those heretics; but we do not know the reasons and authority upon which he proceeded. He next drove the Jews out of the city, who were very numerous, and enjoyed great privileges there from the time of Alexander the Great. Seditions, and several acts of violence committed by them, excited him to this, which grievously offended Orestes the governor, but was approved by the emperor Theodosius: and the Jews never returned. St. Cyril sent to conjure the governor by the holy gospels that he would consent to a reconciliation, and that he would join in sincere friendship with him: but his offers were rejected. This unhappy disagreement produced pernicious effects. Hypatia, a pagan lady, kept a public school of philosophy in the city. Her reputation for learning was so great, that disciples flocked to her from all parts. Among these was the great Synesius, who afterwards submitted his works to her censure. She was consulted by philosophers of the first rank on the most intricate points of learning, and of the Platonic philosophy in particular, in which she was remarkably well versed.[2] She was much respected and consulted by the governor, and often visited him. The mob, which was nowhere more unruly, or more fond of riots and tumults than in that populous city, the second in the world for extent, upon a {277} suspicion that she incensed the governor against their bishop, seditiously rose, pulled her out of her chariot, cut and mangled her flesh, and tore her body in pieces in the streets, in 415, to the great grief and scandal of all good men, especially of the pious bishop.[3][4] He had imbibed certain prejudices from his uncle against the great St. Chrysostom: but was prevailed on by St. Isidore of Pelusium, and others, to insert his name in the Dyptics of his church, in 419: after which, pope Zozimus sent him letters of communion.[5] Nestorius, a monk and priest of Antioch, was made bishop of Constantinople in 428. The retiredness and severity of his life, joined with a hypocritical exterior of virtue, a superficial learning, and a fluency of words, gained him some reputation in the world. But being full of self conceit, he neglected the study of the Fathers, was a man of weak judgment, extremely vain, violent, and obstinate. This is the character he bears in the history of those times, and which is given him by Socrates, and also by Theodoret, whom he had formerly imposed upon by his hypocrisy. Marius Mercator informs us, that he was no sooner placed in the episcopal chair, but he began to persecute, with great fury, the Arians, Macedonians, Manichees, and Quartodecimans, whom he banished out of his diocese. But though he taught original sin, he is said to have denied the necessity of grace; on which account he received to his communion Celestius and Julian, who had been condemned by the popes Innocent and Zozimus, and banished out of the West by the emperor Honorius, for Pelagianism. Theodosius obliged them to leave Constantinople, notwithstanding the protection of the bishop. Nestorius and his mercenary priests broached also new errors from the pulpit, teaching two distinct persons in Christ, that of God, and that of man, only joined by a moral union, by which he said the Godhead dwelt in the humanity merely as in its temple. Hence he denied the Incarnation, or that God was made man: and said the Blessed Virgin ought not to be styled the mother of God, but of the man who was Christ, whose humanity was only the temple of the divinity, not a nature hypostatically assumed by the divine Person; though at length convicted by the voice of antiquity, he allowed her the empty title of mother of God, but continued to deny the mystery. The people were shocked at these novelties, and the priests, St. Proclus, Eusebius, afterwards bishop of Dorylæum, and others, separated themselves from his communion, after having attempted in vain to reclaim him by remonstrances. His homilies, wherever they appeared, gave great offence, and excited everywhere clamors against the errors and blasphemies they contained. St. Cyril having read them, sent him a mild expostulation ob the subject, but was answered with haughtiness and contempt. Pope Celestine, being applied to by both parties, examined his doctrine in a council at Rome; condemned it, and pronounced a sentence of excommunication and deposition against the author, unless within ten days after notification of the sentence, he publicly condemned and retracted it, appointing St. Cyril as his vicegerent in this affair, to see that the sentence was put in execution.[6] Our saint, together with his third and last summons, sent Nestorius twelve propositions with anathemas, hence called anathematisms, to be signed by him as a proof of his orthodoxy, but the heresiarch appeared more {278} obstinate than ever. This occasioned the calling of the third general council opened at Ephesus, in 431, by two hundred bishops, with St. Cyril at their head, as pope Celestine's legate and representative.[7] Nestorius, though in the town, and thrice cited, refused to appear. His heretical sermons were read, and depositions received against him, after which his doctrine was condemned, and the sentence of excommunication and deposition was pronounced against him and notified to the emperor. Six days after, John, patriarch of Antioch, arrived at Ephesus with forty-one oriental bishops; who secretly favoring the person but not the errors of Nestorius, of which they deemed him innocent, had advanced but slowly on their journey to the place. Instead of associating with the council, they assembled by themselves, and presumed to excommunicate St. Cyril and his adherents. Both sides had recourse to the emperor for redress, by whose order, soon after, St. Cyril and Nestorius were both arrested and confined, but our saint the worst treated of the two. Nay, through his antagonist's greater interest at court, he was upon the point of being banished, when three legates from pope Celestine--Arcadius and Projectus, bishops, and Philip, a priest--arrived at Ephesus, which gave a new turn to affairs in our saint's favor. The three new legates having considered what had been done under St. Cyril, the condemnation of Nestorius was confirmed, the saint's conduct approved, and the sentence pronounced against him declared null and invalid. Thus, matters being cleared up, he was enlarged with honor. The Orientals, indeed, continued their schism till 433, when they made their peace with St. Cyril, condemned Nestorius, and gave a clear and orthodox exposition of their faith. That heresiarch, being banished from his see, retired to his monastery in Antioch. John, though formerly his friend, yet finding him very perverse and obstinate in his heresy, and attempting to pervert others, entreated the emperor Theodosius to remove him. He was therefore banished to Oasis, in the deserts of Upper Egypt, on the borders of Libya, in 431, and died miserably and impenitent in his exile. His sect remains to this day very numerous in the East.[8] St. Cyril triumphed over this heresiarch by his meekness, intrepidity, and courage; thanking God for his sufferings, and professing himself ready to spill his blood with joy for the gospel.[9] He arrived at Alexandria on the 30th of October, 431, and spent the remainder of his days in maintaining the faith of the church in its purity, in promoting peace and union among the faithful, and the zealous labors of his pastoral charge, till his glorious death in 444, on the 28th of June, that is, the 3d of the Egyptian month Epiphi, as the Alexandrians, the Copts, and the Ethiopians unanimously affirm, who, by abridging his name, call him Kerlos, and give him the title of Doctor of the world. The Greeks keep the 18th of January in his honor; and have a second commemoration of him again on the 9th of June.[10] The Roman Martyrology mentions him on this day. Pope Celestine styles him, "The generous defender of the church and faith, the Catholic doctor, and an apostolical man."[11] The extraordinary devotion of this holy doctor towards the holy sacrament appears from the zeal with which he frequently inculcates the glorious effects which it produces in the soul of him who worthily receives it, especially in healing all his spiritual disorders, strengthening him against temptations,{279} subduing the passions, giving life, and making us one with Christ by the most sacred union, not only in spirit, but also with his humanity. Hence this father says that by the holy communion we are made concorporeal with Christ.[12] The eminent dignity and privileges of the ever glorious Virgin Mary were likewise a favorite subject on which he often dwells. In his tenth homily,[13] after having often repeated her title of Mother of God, he thus salutes her: "Hail, O Mary, mother of God, rich treasure of the world,[14] inextinguishable lamp, crown of virginity, sceptre of the true doctrine, temple which cannot fall, the residence of him whom no place can contain, Mother and Virgin, by whom He is who cometh Blessed in the name of the Lord. Hail, Mary, who in your virgin womb contained Him who is immense and incomprehensible: You through whom the whole blessed Trinity is glorified and adored, through whom the precious cross is honored and venerated over the whole world, through whom heaven exults, the angels and archangels rejoice, the devils are banished, the tempter is disarmed, the creature that was fallen is restored to heaven, and comes to the knowledge of the truth, through whom holy baptism is instituted, through whom is given the oil of exultation, through whom churches are founded over the whole earth, through whom nations are brought to penance. And what need of more words? Through whom the only begotten Son of God has shone the light to those who sat in darkness and in the shade of death, &c.--What man can celebrate the most praiseworthy Mary according to her dignity?" Footnotes: 1. Ep. 56, and 35 apud Lupum. 2. Synesius, ep. 153. 3. Vie d'Hypacie par l'abbé Goujet. Mémoires de Littérature, t. 5. 4. It is very unjust in some moderns to charge him as conscious of so horrible a crime, which shocks human nature. Great persons are never to be condemned without proofs which amount to conviction. The silence of Orestes, and the historian Socrates, both his declared enemies, suffices to acquit him. 5. We have nothing further of the life of this father, until the year 428, when his zeal was first exerted in defence of the faith against Nestorianism: we shall introduce this period of his labors with some account of the author of this heresy. 6. Conc. t. 3, p. 343. Liberat. in Breviar. c. 4. 7. St. Leo, Ep. 72, c. 3. Conc. t. 3, p. 656, 980. 8. They have a liturgy under the name of Nestorius, and two others which they pretend to be still more ancient. See Renaudot, liturg. orient. t. 2, and Le Brun, liturg. t. 3. The former contains a clear profession of transubstantiation and the sacrifice of the mass. 9. Ep. ad Theopomp, t. 3. Conc. p. 771. 10. Smith on the present state of the Greek church, p. 13. Thomassin Tr. des Fêtes, l. 1, ch. 7. 11. Conc. t. 3, p. 1077. 12. {Footnote not found in text.} L. 4, contra Nestor, t. 6, parte 1, p. 110. l. 7, de adoratione in spiritu et verit. t. 1, p. 231, c. 10, in Joan. t. 1, c. 13. 13. T. 5, parte 2, p. 380. Item Conc. t. 3, p. 583. 14. [Greek: Keimêlion tês oikomenês]. The rich furniture of the world. APPENDIX ON THE WRITINGS OF ST. CYRIL OF ALEXANDRIA. The old Latin translations of the works of this father were extremely faulty, before the edition of Paris, by John Aubert, in 1638, in six tomes, folio, bound in seven, which yet might be improved. Baluze and Lupus have published some letters of this holy doctor, which had escaped Aubert and Labbe. If elegance, choice of thoughts, and beauty of style be wanting in his writings, these defects are compensated by the justness and precision with which he expresses the great truths of religion, especially in clearing the terms concerning the mystery of the Incarnation. Hence his controversial works are the most valuable part of his writings. His books against Nestorius, those against Julian, and that called The Treasure, are the most finished and important. His treatise On Adoration in Spirit and Truth, with which he begins his commentary on the Bible, contains, in seventeen books, an exposition of several passages of the Pentateuch, or five books of Moses, (though not in order,) in moral and allegorical interpretations. In the thirteen books entitled Glaphyrs, _i.e._ profound or elegant, the longer passages of the same books are explained allegorically of Christ and his church. In his commentaries on Isaiah, and the twelve lesser prophets, he gives both the literal and allegorical sense. On the Gospel of St. John, we have ten books entire, and fragments of the seventh and eighth. In the old editions, the fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth books, which were entirely wanting, were patched up by Clictou from the writings of other fathers: which, for want of reading the preface, have been quoted by some as St. Cyril's. In this great work, the {280} saint gives not only the literal and spiritual senses of the sacred text, but likewise refutes the reigning heresies of that age, especially those against the consubstantiality of the Son, as the Eunomians. He also answers all the objections of the Manichees. He is very clear in establishing in the holy sacrament of the altar the reality of Christ's body contained in it and the holy sacrifice, teaching that "the holy body of Christ gives life to us when received, and preserves us in it, being the very body of life itself, according to nature, and containing all the virtue of the Word united to it, and being endued with all his efficacy by whom all things receive life, and are preserved." (L. 4, in Joan. p. 324.) That we shall, by tasting it, "have life in us, being united together with his body as it is with the Word dwelling in it." (Ibid. p. 361.) That "as death had devoured all human nature, he who is life, being in us by his flesh, might overcome that tyrant." (Ibid. p. 272.) "Christ by his flesh, hides in us life and a seed of immortality, which destroys in us all corruption," (Ibid. p. 363,) and "heals our diseases, assuaging the law of the flesh raging in our members." (ibid. p. 365.) In the tenth look he is most diffusive and clear on this sacrament, extolling its miraculous institution, the most exalted of all God's mysteries, above our comprehension, and the wonderful manner by which we are united and made one with him; not by affection, but by natural participation; which he calls "a mixture, an incorporation, a blending together; for as wax melted and mingled with another piece of melted wax, makes one; so by partaking of his precious body and blood, he is united in us, and we in him," &c. (L. 10, in Joan. pp. 862, 863, item pp. 364, 365.) See the longer and clearer texts of this doctrine in this book itself, and in the controversial writers upon that subject. Also, in his works Against Nestorius, whom he confutes from the blessed eucharist, proving Christ's humanity to be the humanity of the divine Person. "This," says he, "I cannot but add in this place, namely, that when we preach the death of the only begotten Son of God, that is, of Jesus Christ, and his resurrection from the dead, and confess his ascension into heaven, we celebrate the unbloody sacrifice in the church, and do by this means approach the mystical benedictions, and are sanctified, being made partakers of the sacred flesh and precious blood of Christ, the Saviour of us all. And we do not receive it as common flesh, ([Greek: mê genoito],) God forbid; nor as the flesh of man who is sanctified and joined to the Word by a unity of dignity, or as having a divine habitation; but we receive it, as it is truly, the life-giving and proper flesh of the Word." (Ep. ad Nestorium, de Excommun. p. 72, t. 5, par. 2, and in Declaratione undecimi Anathematismi, t. 6, p. 156.) In this latter place he speaks of it also as a true sacrifice: "We perform in the churches the holy and life-giving and unbloody sacrifice, believing the body which is placed, and the precious blood to be made the very body and blood of the Word, which gives life to all things, &c. He proves that it is only to be offered in Catholic churches, in the only one house of Christ" (L. adv. Anthropomorph. t. 6, p. 380.) He heard that some imagined that the mystical benediction is lost if the eucharist is kept to another day; but says, "they are mad; for Christ is not altered, nor his body changed." (T. 6, p. 365, ep. ad Calosyrium.) In his fourth book on St. John, (t. 4, p. 358,) he as expressly confutes the Jewish doubt about the possibility of the holy sacrament, as if he had the modern Sacramentarians in view. To refute the whole system of Arianism, he wrote the book which he called The Treasure, which he divided into thirty-five titles or sections. He answers in it all the objections of those heretics, and establishes from scripture the divinity of the Son of God; and from title thirty-three, that of the Holy Ghost. His book On the Holy and Consubstantial Trinity, consists of seven dialogues, and was composed at the request of Nemesm and Hermias. This work was also written to prove the consubstantiality of Christ, but is more obscure than the former. The holy doctor added two other Dialogues, the eighth and ninth, On the Incarnation, against the errors of Nestorius, then only known by report at Alexandria. He afterwards subjoined Scholia, to answer certain objections; likewise a short book On the Incarnation, in which he proves the holy Virgin to be, as she is called, the Mother of God; as Jesus Christ is at the same time both the Son of God, and the Son of man. By his skirmishes with the Arians he was prepared to oppose and crush the extravagances of Nestorius, broached at that time against the same adorable mystery of the Incarnation, of which God raised our holy doctor the champion in his church; for by his writings he both stifled the heresy of Nestorius in the cradle, and furnished posterity with arms against that of Eutyches, says Basil of Seleucia. (T. 4, Conc. p. 925.) St. Cyril composed at Ephesus his three treatises On the Right Faith, against Nestorius. The first is addressed to the Emperor Theodosius. It contains an enumeration of the heresies against the Incarnation, namely, of Cerinthus, Photinus, Apollinaris, and Nestorius, with a refutation of each, especially the last. The second is inscribed to the princesses Pulcheria, Arcadia, and Marina, the emperor's sisters, all virgins, consecrated to God. This contains the proofs of the Catholic faith against Nestorius. The third is a confutation of the heretics' objections against it. His five books against Nestorius, are the neatest and best penned of his polemic writings. They contain a refutation of the blasphemous homilies of that heresiarch, who yet is never {281} named in them; by which circumstance they seem to have been written before his condemnation. St. Cyril sent to Nestorius twelve Anathematisms against his errors. This work was read in the council of Ephesus, and is entirely orthodox, yet some censured it as favoring Apollinarism, or as denying the distinction of two natures in Christ, the divine and human, after the Incarnation; and the Eutychians afterwards strained them in favor of their heresy. John, patriarch of Antioch, prepossessed against St. Cyril, pretended for some time to discover that error in them; and persuaded Andrew, bishop of Samosata, and the great Theodoret of Cyr, to write against them. St. Cyril gave in his clear Explication of them to the council of Ephesus, at its desire, extant, p. 145. He also wrote, soon after that synod, two Apologies of the Anathematisms; one against Andrew of Samosata, and other Oriental prelates, who through mistake were offended at them; and the other, against Theodoret of Cyr. And lastly, An Apologetic for them to the emperor Theodosius, to remove some sinister suspicions which his enemies had endeavored to give that prince against his sentiments in that work. The Anthropomorphite heretics felt likewise the effects of St. Cyril's zeal. These were certain ignorant monks of Egypt, who having been taught by the elders, in order to help their gross minds in the continual practice of the presence of God, to represent him to themselves under a corporeal human figure, by which they at length really believed him to be not a pure spirit, but corporeal, like a man; because man was created to his image. Theophilus immediately condemned, and the whole church exploded, this monstrous absurdity. St. Cyril wrote a letter to confute it to Calosyrius, bishop of Arsinoe, showing that man is framed according to the Divine image, not in his body, for God being the most pure Spirit, can have no sensible figure, but in being endued with reason, and capable of virtue. In the same letter he rejects a second error of other ignorant monks, who imagined that the blessed Eucharist lost its consecration if kept to the following day. He reprehends other anchorets, who, upon a pretence of continual prayer, did not work at certain hours of the day, making it a cloak of gluttony and laziness. The saint has left us another book against the Anthropomorphites, in which he proves that man is made to God's image, by bearing the resemblance of his sanctity, by grace and virtue. So he says the angels are likewise made to his likeness. He answers in this book twenty-seven dogmatical questions put to him by the same monks. He wrote, in the years 437 and 438, two Dogmatical Letters (pp. 51 and 52) against certain propositions of Theodorus of Mopsuestia, the forerunner of Nestorius, though he had died in the communion of the church. The book on the Trinity cannot be St. Cyril's; for it refutes the Monothelite heresy, not known before the year 620. Julian the Apostate, while he was preparing for the Persian war, had, with the assistance of Maximus and his other impious philosophers, published three books against the holy gospels, which were very prejudicial to weak minds; though nothing was advanced in them that had not been said by Celsus, and fully answered by Origen in his books against that philosopher, and by Eusebius in his Evangelical Preparation. St. Cyril, out of zeal, composed ten books against Julian, which he dedicated to the emperor Theodosius; and also sent to John of Antioch to show the sincerity of his reconciliation. In this work he has preserved us Julian's words, omitting only his frequent repetitions and puerilities. Nor have we any thing else of that work of the Apostate, but what is preserved here by St. Cyril. He begins by warning the emperor against bad company, by which Julian fell into such extravagant impieties. In the first book he justifies Moses's history of the world, and proves with great erudition from profane history that its events are posterior, and the heathen sages and historians younger than that divine lawgiver, from whom they all borrowed many things. In the second, he compares the sacred history of the creation, which Julian had pretended to ridicule, with the puerilities and absurdities of Pythagoras, Thales, Plato, &c., of whom Julian was an admirer to a degree of folly. In the third, he vindicates the history of the Serpent, and of Adam's fall; and retorts the ridiculous Theogony of Hesiod, &c. In the fourth, he shows that God governs all things by himself, not by inferior deities, as Julian pretended, the absurdity of which he sets forth: demonstrating, likewise, that things are ruled by a wise free providence; not by destiny or necessity, which even Porphyry and the wiser heathens had justly exploded, though the Apostate adopted that monstrous doctrine. He justifies against his cavils the history of the Tower of Babel: and in his fifth book, the Ten Commandments; showing in the same, that God is not subject to jealousy, anger, or other passions, though he has an infinite horror of sin. Julian objected that we also adore God the Son, consequently have two gods. St. Cyril answers that he is the same God with the Father. In the sixth book he reports the shameful vices of Socrates, Plato, and their other heroes of paganism, in opposition to the true virtues of the prophets and saints. Julian reproached Christ that he did not appear great in the world, and only cured the pool, and delivered demoniacs in villages; he reprehended Christians for refusing to adore the noble ensign, the gift of Jupiter or Mars; yet, says he, you adore the wood of {282} the cross, make its sign on your forehead, and engrave it on the porches of your houses ([Greek: To toutu saurou proskuneite tzolon, eikonas autou skiagrafountes en tô metôpô, kai pro tôn opennatôs eggrafontes.] L. 6, adv. Jul. t. 6, p. 194.) To which St. Cyril answers, (p. 195:) We glory in this sign of the precious cross, since Christ triumphed on it; and it is to us the admonition of all virtue. This father says in another place, (in Isaiam, t. 4, p. 294:) "The faithful arm and intrench themselves with the sign of the cross, overthrowing and breaking by it the power, and every assault of the devils: for the cross is to us an impregnable rampart." In this sixth book he produces the open acknowledgment of Julian that the heathenish oracles had all ceased; but this he ascribed to old age and length of time. St. Cyril shows the extravagance of this supposition, and that the true reason was, because the power of the devil had been restrained by the coming of Christ. He mentions the same in his Commentary on Isaiah, (t. 2, p. 596.) In the seventh book, he proves that the great men in the true religion far surpassed in virtue all the heroes of paganism. In the eighth and ninth, that Christ was foretold by the ancient prophets, and that the Old and New Law are in substance the same. In the tenth he proves, that not only St. John, but all the Evangelists, teach Christ to be truly God. Julian objects, (pp. 333, 335, 339, and 350,) that we also adore the martyrs and their sepulchres: "Why do you prostrate yourselves at the sepulchres?--which it is to be believed your Apostles did after the death of their Master, and taught you this art magic," (p. 339.) The saint answers, We make an infinite difference between God and the martyrs: which he had before told him, (l. 6, pp. 201 and 203,) where he writes, "We neither call the martyrs gods, nor adore them with divine worship; but with affection and honor reverence them: we pay them the highest honors, because they contemned their life for the truth," &c. We have in the second part of the fifth tome several Homilies and Letters of this saint. It was ordained by the council of Nice that the bishop of Alexandria, in which city chiefly flourished the sciences of mathematics and astronomy, should at the end of every year examine carefully on what day the next Easter was to be kept. They, by custom, acquainted by a circular letter other bishops near them, and in particular the bishop of Rome, that he might notify it to all the prelates of the West. St. Cyril was very exact in this duty. Possevin says he saw his paschal discourses in the Vatican library, for every year of hie episcopacy, namely thirty-one, from the year 414. We have but twenty-nine printed: those for 443 and 444 being wanting. He spoke them to his own flock, as well as sent them to other bishops; and marks in each the beginning of Lent, the Monday and Saturday in Holy Week, and Easter-day, counting Lent exactly of forty days. In these paschal homilies he exceedingly recommends the advantages of fasting; which he shows (Hom. 1.) to be the "source of all virtues, the image of an angelical life, the extinction of lust, and the preparation of a soul to heavenly communications." He says, "If it seems at first bitter and laborious, its fruits and reward infinitely compensate the pains; for more should seem nothing for the purchase of virtue: even in temporal things, nothing valuable can be obtained without labor and cost. If we are afraid of fasting here, we shall fall into eternal flames hereafter; an evil infinitely worse, and quite intolerable." In the following homilies he extols the absolute necessity of this mortification, to crucify in us the old man, and punish past irregularities; but shows it must be accompanied with alms and other good works. In his latter paschal discourses, and others extant, he explains the mystery of the Incarnation against Nestorianism and other heresies. The ninth homily is On the Mystical Supper, or Holy Banquet of the Communion and Sacrifice, in which "the tremendous mystery is performed, and the Lamb of God sacrificed, (p. 271;) in which (p. 272) the Eternal Wisdom distributes his body as bread, and his saving blood as wine: the Maker gives himself to the work of his own hands. Life bestows itself to be eat and drunk by men," &c. At this divine table he cries out, (p. 376,) "I am filled with dread when I behold it. I am transported cut of myself with astonishment when I consider it," &c. He proves, against Nestorianism, (p. 318,) that there is but one Person in Christ, because in this holy sacrament is received his true body and blood: not the Divinity alone, which nobody could receive, nor a pure man's body, which could not give life; but a man made the Word of God--who is Christ, the Son of the living God, one of the adorable Trinity. He remains the priest and the victim: he who offers, and he who is offered. ([Greek: Oti autos menei hiereus kai lusia, autos ho prosferôn kai ho prosferomenos.] p. 378.) In the tenth homily he pronounces an encomium of the blessed Mary, mother of God. This was delivered at Ephesus, in an assembly of bishops, during the council; for he apostrophizes that city, and St. John the Evangelist, its protector. In it he calls the pope "the most holy Celestine, the father and archbishop of the whole world, and the patriarch of the great city Rome." (Ib. Encom. in St. Mariam. part 2, p. 384.) He more clearly extols the supreme prerogative of the church of Rome, founded on the faith of Peter; which church is perpetual, impregnable to hell, and confirmed beyond the danger of falling. (Dial. 4, de Trinit. pp. 507, 508.) His eleventh homily is On the Presentation, or, as the Greeks call it, [Greek: apantêsis]. The meeting of the Lord in the Temple, and The Purification of our Lady, in which he speaks of the lamp or candles used on that festival. He has a pathetic Sermon on the Pains of {283} Hell: he paints the terrors of the last Judgment in a manner which cannot fail to make a strong impression upon all who read it. (Or. de Exitu animi, et de secundo Adventu.) The epistles which we have from his pen all relate to the public affairs of the church, and principally those of Nestorius. His second letter to that heresiarch, and his letter to the Orientals, were adopted by the general councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon, and are a rule of the Catholic faith. His sixteenth letter is placed among the canons of the Greek church. In it be recommends to the bishops of Libya and Pentapolis, the strictest scrutiny of the capacity and manners of those who are admitted to holy Orders; and the greatest solicitude and watchfulness that no one die without baptism, if only a catechumen, and the Holy Eucharist or Viaticum. See Beveridge. SS. THYRSUS, LEUCIUS, AND CALLINICUS, MM. THEIR Greek and Latin Acts agree that, after suffering many torments, they were put to death, on three different days, at Apollonia, in Phrygia, in the persecution of Decius. Sozomen tells us that Cæsarius, who had been prefect and consul, built at Constantinople a magnificent church under the invocation of St. Thyrsus, with a portion of whose relics it was enriched. Another church within the city bore his name, as appears from the Menæa, on the 14th of December. In the cathedral of our Lady at Sisteron, in a church at Limoges, &c., St. Thymus is one of the patrons. Many churches in Spain bear his name. Silon, King of Oviedo and Asturia, in a letter to Cyxilas, archbishop of Toledo in 777, says that the queen had sent presents to the church of St. Thyrsus, which the archbishop had built, viz. a silver chalice and paten, a basin to wash the hands in, with a pipe and a diadem on the cover, to be used when the blood of our Lord was distributed to the people. Footnotes: 1. Cum suo naso. Du Cange, not understanding this word, substitutes vaso. But nasus here signifies a silver pipe or quill to suck up the blood of Christ at the communion, such as the pope sometimes uses. Such a one is kept at St. Denys's, near Paris. The ancient Ordo Romanus calls that _pugillar_ which is here called nasus, because it sucks up as a nose draws up air. In the reign of Philip II., in 1595, in certain ruins near the cathedral of Toledo, this cover of the chalice was discovered with the diadem. Chatelain, p. 440. ST. JOHN OF REOMAY, A. NOW CALLED MOUTIER-SAINT-JEAN, IN BURGUNDY HE was a native of the diocese of Langres, and took the monastic habit at Lerins. He was called into his own country by the bishop of Langres to found the abbey from which he received his surname. He settled it under the rule of St. Macarius, governed it many years with great reputation of sanctity, and was rendered famous by miracles. He went to God about the year 540, being almost one hundred and twenty years old, and was one of the holy institutors of the monastic state in France. St. Gregory of Tours gives an account of him in the eighty-seventh chapter of his book, On the Glory of Confessors. His life was also compiled by Jonas, the disciple of Columban, extant in Bollandus. See P. Rover, Hist. Monast. S. Joan. Reom. Paris, 1637. {284} B. MARGARET, PRINCESS OF HUNGARY, V. SHE was daughter to Bala IV., the pious king of Hungary. Her parents consecrated her to God by a vow before her birth, and when but three years and a half old she was placed in the monastery of Dominican nuns at Vesprin, and at ten removed to a new nunnery of that order, founded by her father in an isle of the Danube, near Buda, called from her the isle of St. Margaret. She was professed at twelve.[1] In her tender age she outstripped the most advanced in devotion, and was favored with extraordinary communications from heaven. It was her delight to serve everybody, and to practise every kind of humiliation: she never spoke of herself, as if she was beneath all notice: never loved to see her royal parents, or to speak of them, saying it was her misfortune that she was not of poor parentage. Her mortifications were excessive. She endeavored to conceal her sicknesses for fear of being dispensed with or shown any indulgence in the rule. From her infancy she conceived the most ardent devotion towards her crucified Redeemer, and kissed very often, both by day and night, a little cross made of the wood of our Saviour's cross, which she always carried about her. She commonly chose to pray before the altar of the cross. Her affection for the name of Jesus made her have it very frequently in her mouth, which she repeated with incredible inward feeling and sweetness. Her devotion to Christ in the blessed sacrament was most remarkable: she often wept abundantly, or appeared in ecstasies during the mass, and much more when she herself received the divine spouse of her soul: on the eve she took nothing but bread and water, and watched the night in prayer. On the day itself she remained in prayer and fasting till evening, and then took a small refection. She showed a sensible joy in her countenance when she heard any festival of our Lady announced, through devotion to the mother of God; she performed on them, and during the octaves, one thousand salutations each day, prostrating herself on the ground at each, besides saying the office of our blessed Lady every day. If any one seemed offended at her, she fell at their feet and begged their pardon. She was always the first in obedience, and was afraid to be excepted if others were enjoined penance for a breach of silence or any other fault. Her bed was a coarse skin, laid on the bare floor, with a stone for her pillow. She was favored with the gift of miracles and prophecy. She gave up her pure soul to God, after a short illness, on the 18th of January, in the year 1271, and of her age the twenty-eighth. Her body is preserved at Presbourg. See her life by Guerinus, a Dominican, by order of his general, in 1340: and an abridgment of the same by Ranzano. She was never canonized, but is honored with an office in all the churches in Hungary, especially those of the Dominicans in that kingdom, by virtue of a decree of Pope Pius II, as Touron assures us.[2] Footnotes: 1. Touron, Vies des Hommes Illustres de l'Ordre de St. Dominique, in Humbert des Romains, fifth general of the Dominicans, t. 1, p. 325. 2. Touron, ib. in Innocent V. t. 1, p. 384. ST. PAULINUS, PATRIARCH OF AQUILEIA, C. ONE of the most illustrious and most holy prelates of the eighth and ninth centuries was Paulinus, patriarch of Aquileia, who seems to have been born {285} about the year 728, in a country farm, not far from Friuli. His family could boast of no advantages of fortune, and his parents having no other revenue than what arose from the tillage of their farm, he spent part of his youth in agriculture. Yet he found leisure for his studios, and in process of time became so eminent a grammarian and professor, that Charlemagne honored him with a rescript, in which he styles him Master of Grammar, and Very Venerable. This epithet seems to imply that he was then priest. The same prince, in recompense of his extraordinary merit, bestowed on him an estate in his own country. It seems to have been about the year 776, that Paulinus was promoted, against his will, to the patriarchate of Aquileia, which dignity had not then been long annexed to that see, after the extinction of the schism of Istria. From the zeal, abilities, and piety of St. Paulinus, this church derived its greatest lustre. Such was his reputation, that Charlemagne always expressed a particular desire that he should be present at all the great councils which were assembled in his time, though in the remotest part of his dominions. He assisted at those of Aix-la-Chapelle in 789, of Ratisbon in 792, and of Frankfort in 794; and held himself one at Friuli, in 791, or 796, against the errors which some had begun to spread in that age concerning the Procession of the Holy Ghost, and the mystery of the Incarnation. Felix, bishop of Urgel in Catalonia, in a letter to Elipandus, bishop of Toledo, who had consulted him on that subject, before the year 783, pretended to prove that Christ as man is not the natural, but only the adoptive Son of God: which error he had already advanced in his public discourses.[1] The rising error was vigorously opposed by Beatus, a priest and abbot, and his disciple Etherius, who was afterwards bishop of Osma. Soon after it was condemned by a council at Narbonne, in 788,[2] and by another at Ratisbon, in 792, while Charlemagne kept his court in that city. Felix revoked his error first in this council at Ratisbon, and afterwards before pope Leo III. at Rome.[3] Yet after his return into Spain he continued both by letters and discourses to spread his heresy; which was therefore again condemned in the great council of Frankfort, in 794, in which a work of our saint, entitled Sacro-Syllabus, against the same, was approved, and ordered to be sent into Spain, to serve for all antidote against the spreading poison.[4] From this book of St. Paulinus it is clear that Elipandus also returned to the vomit. Alcuin returning from England, where he had stayed three years, in 793, wrote a tender moving letter to Felix, exhorting him sincerely to renounce his error. But the unhappy man, in a long answer, endeavored to establish his heresy so roundly as to fall into downright Nestorianism, which indeed is a consequence of his erroneous principle. For Christ as man cannot be called the adoptive Son of God, unless his human nature subsist by a distinct person from the divine.[5] By an order of Charlemagne, Alcuin and St. Paulinus solidly confuted the writings of these two heresiarchs, the former in seven, our saint in three books. Alcuin wrote four other books against the pestilential writings of Elipandus, in which he testifies that Felix was then at Rome, and converted to the Catholic faith. Elipandus, who was not a subject of Charlemagne, could not be compelled to appear before the councils held in his dominions, Toledo being at that time subject to the Moors. Felix, after his relapse, returned to the faith with his principal followers in the council of Aix-la-Chapelle, in 797.[6] From that time he concealed his heresy, but continued in secret to defend it, and at his {286} death, in 815, left a written profession of his heresy.[7] Elipandus died in 809.[8] The zeal of St. Paulinus was not less successful in the conversion of infidels than in the extinction of this heresy. Burning with zeal for the salvation of souls, and a vehement desire of laying down his life for Christ, he preached the gospel to the idolaters, who had remained to that time obstinately attached to their superstition among the Carantani in Carinthia and Stiria; in which provinces also St. Severinus the abbot, who died in 481, and afterwards St. Virgilius, bishop of Saltzburg, who died in 785, planted several numerous churches. Whence a contest arising between Arno, St. Virgilius's successor, and Ursus, the successor of Paulinus, to which see Carinthia ought to be annexed, it was settled in 811, that the churches which are situated on the south of the Drave should be subject of the patriarchate of Aquileia, and those on the north to the archbishopric of Saltzburg.[9] The Avares, a barbarous nation of Huns, who were settled in part of Pannonia, and were twice subdued by Charlemagne, received the faith by the preaching of St. Paulinus, and of certain missionaries sent by the archbishops of Saltzburg.[10] Henry, a virtuous nobleman, being appointed by Charlemagne Duke of Friuli, and governor of that country which he had lately conquered, St. Paulinus wrote for his use an excellent book Of Exhortation, in which he strongly invites him to aspire with his whole heart after Christian perfection, and lays down the most important rules on the practice of compunction and penance: on the remedies against different vices, especially pride, without which he shows that no sin ever was, or will be committed, this being the beginning, end, and cause of all sin:[11] on an earnest desire and study to please God with all our strength in all our actions:[12] on assiduous prayer and its essential dispositions: on the holy communion, of the preparation to which after sin he shows confession and penance to be an essential part:[13] on shunning bad company, &c. He closes the book with a most useful prayer; and in the beginning promises his prayers for the salvation of the good duke. By tears and prayers he ceased not to draw down the blessings of the divine mercy on the souls committed to his charge. Alcuin earnestly besought him as often as bathed in tears he offered the spotless victim to the divine Majesty, to implore the divine mercy in his behalf.[14] In 802, St. Paulinus assembled a council at Altino, a city near the Adriatic sea, which had been destroyed by Attila, and was at that time only a shadow of what it had been, though famous for a monastery, in which this synod was probably held.[15] It is long since entirely decayed. St. Paulinus closed a holy life by a happy death on the 11th of January, in 804, as Madrisius proves.[16] His festival occurs on this day in the old missal of Aquileia, and in several German Martyrologies: but it is at present kept at Aquileia, Friuli, and in some other places, on the 28th of January.[17] See the life of St. Paulinus of Aquileia, compiled by Nicoletti, {287} with the notes of Madrisius; and far more accurately by Madrisius himself an Oratorian of U{}na, who in 1737 published at Venice the works of this father in folio, illustrated with long notes and dissertations on every circumstance relating to the history or writings of our saint. See also Ceillier t. 18, p. 262, and Bollandus ad 11 Januarii. Footnotes: 1. See Madrisius, Dissert. 4, p. 214. 2. On this council see Baluse, additam. ad. e. 25, l. 6, Petri de Marca, de Concord. Sacerd. et. Imp. 3. Leo III. in Conc. Rom. 799. Act. 2, et Eginard in Annal. &c. 4. See Madrisius, dissert. 4, p. 219. 5. See Natal. Alex. Sæc. 8. diss. 5. 6. Alcuin, l. 1, contra Elipand. 7. Agobard, l. 1, adv. Felicem. n. 1 & 5. 8. From certain false chronicles, Iamayo and Ceillier (in St. Beatus. t. 18, p. 364,) relate that Ellpandus revoked his error in a council which he held at Toledo, and died penitent. Madrisius shows this circumstance to be uncertain, (Diss. 4, in op. S. Paulini, p. 225,) and Nicolas Antony of Seville, in his Bibl. Hisp. l. 6, c. 2, n. 42, has proved the monuments upon which it is founded to be of no authority. Claudius, bishop of Turin, a disciple of Felix of Urgel, renewed this heresy in Italy, and denied the veneration due to holy images, and was refuted by Jonas, bishop of Orleans, and others. 9. Sconleben, Annal. Austr. and Madrisius, Vit. S. Paulini, c. 8. 10. Alcuin. ep. 112. F. Inchofer, in Annal. Hungar. Eccl. ad an. 795. Madrisius, in Vit. St. Paulini, c. 8, p. 31. 11. St. Paulin. l, Exhort. ad Henr. ducem. c. 19, p. 29. 12. C. 24, p. 34. 13. C. 33, p. 29. See 1 Corinth. xi. 28, St. Cypr. ep. 9, 10, 11, and Tract. de Lapsis. 14. Alcuin, ep. 113, and Poem. 214. 15. See Madrisius, Dissert. 6. 16. Mardis. in Vitâ St. Paulini, c. 13, p. 37. 17. Besides the polemical and spiritual works of St. Paulinus of Aquileia, mentioned above, we have several poems of his composition: the first contains a rule of faith against the Arians, Nestorians, and Eutychians: the rest are hymns or rhythms on the Chair of St. Peter, and on several other festivals and saints. Among his letters the second is most remarkable, in which he complains severely to Charlemagne that several bishops attending the court neglected to reside in their dioceses. Against this abuse he quotes the council of Sardica, which forbade any bishop to be absent from his see above three weeks. Madrisius, p. 188. B. CHARLEMAGNE, EMPEROR. CHARLEMAGNE, or Charles the Great, son of king Pepin, was born in 742, and crowned king of France in 768; but his youngest brother Carloman reigned in Austrasia till his death, in 771. Charlemagne vanquished Hunauld, duke of Aquitaine, and conquered the French Gothia or Languedoc; subdued Lombardy; conferred on pope Adrian the exarchate of Ravenna, the duchy of Spoletto, and many other dominions; took Pavia, (which had been honored with the residence of twenty kings,) and was crowned king of Lombardy in 774. The emir Abderamene in Spain, having shaken off the yoke of the caliph of the Saracens, in 736, and established his kingdom at Cordova, and other emirs in Spain setting up independency, Charlemagne, in 778, marched as far as the Ebro and Saragossa, conquered Barcelona, Gironne, and many other places, and returned triumphant. His cousin Roland, who followed him with the rear of his army, in his return was set upon in the Pyrenean mountains by a troop of Gascon robbers, and slain; and is the famous hero of numberless old French romances and songs. The Saxons having in the king's absence plundered his dominions upon the Rhine, he flew to the Weser, and compelled them to make satisfaction. Thence he went to Rome, and had his infant sons crowned kings, Pepin of Lombardy, and Lewis of Aquitaine. The great revolt of the Saxons, in 782, called him again on that side. When they were vanquished, and sued for pardon, he declared he would no more take their oaths which they had so often broken, unless they became Christians. Witikind embraced the condition, was baptized with his chief followers in 785, and being created duke of part of Saxony, remained ever after faithful in his religion and allegiance. From him are descended, either directly or by intermarriages, many dukes of Bavaria, and the, present houses of Saxony, Brandenburg, &c., as may be seen in the German genealogists. Some other Saxons afterwards revolted, and were vanquished and punished in 794, 798, &c., so that, through their repeated treachery and rebellions, this Saxon war continued at intervals for the space of thirty-three years. Thassillon, duke of Bavaria, for treasonable practices, was attacked by Charlemagne in 788, vanquished, and obliged to put on a monk's cowl to save his life: from which time Bavaria was annexed to Charlemagne's dominions. To punish the Abares for their inroads, he crossed the Inns into their territories, sacked Vienna, and marched to the mouth of the Raab, upon the Danube. In 794, he assisted at the great council of Frankfort, held in his royal palace there. He restored Leo III. at Rome, quelled the seditions there, and was crowned by him on Christmas-day, in 800, emperor of Rome and of the West: in which quality he was afterwards solemnly acknowledged by Nicephorus, emperor of Constantinople. Thus was the western empire restored, which had been extinct in Momylus Agustulus in the fifth century. In 805, Charlemagne quelled and conquered the Sclavonians. The Danube, {288} the Teisse, and the Oder on the East, and the Ebro and the ocean on the West, were the boundaries of his vast dominions. France, Germany, Dacia, Dalmatia, Istria, Italy, and part of Pannonia and Spain, obeyed his laws. It was then customary for kings not to reside in great cities, but to pass the summer often in progresses or campaigns, and the winter at some country palace. King Pepin resided at Herstal, now Jopin, in the territory of Liege, and sometimes at Quiercy on the Oise: Charlemagne often at Frankfort or Aix-la-Chapelle, which were country seats; for those towns were then inconsiderable places: though the latter had been founded by Serenas Granus in 124, under Adrian. It owes its greatness to the church built there by Charlemagne. This prince was not less worthy of our admiration in the quality of a legislator than in that of a conqueror; and in the midst of his marches and victories, he gave the utmost attention to the wise government of his dominions, and to every thing that could promote the happiness of his people, the exaltation of the church, and the advancement of piety and every branch of sacred and useful learning.[1] What pains he took for the reformation of monasteries, and for the sake of uniformity introducing in them the rule of St. Bennet, appears from his transactions, and several ecclesiastical assemblies in 789. His zeal for the devout observance of the rites of the church is expressed in his book to Alcuin on that subject, and in his encyclical epistle on the rites of baptism,[2] and in various works which he commissioned Alcuin and others to compile. For the reformation of manners, especially of the clergy, he procured many synods to be held, in which decrees were framed, which are called his Capitula.[3] His Capitulars, divided into many chapters, are of the same nature. The best edition of these Capitulars is given by Baluzius, with dissertations, in 1677, two vols. folio. The Carolin Books are a theological work, (adopted by this prince, who speaks in the first person,) compiled in four books, against a falsified copy of the second council of Nice, sent by certain Iconoclasts from Constantinople, on which see F. Daniel[4] and Ceillier.[5] There never was a truly great man, who was not a lover and encourager of learning, as of the highest improvement of the human mind. Charlemagne, by most munificent largesses, invited learned men over from foreign parts, as Alcuin, Peter of Pisa, Paul the deacon, &c., found no greater pleasure than in conversing with them, instituted an academy in his own palace, and great schools at Paris, Tours, &c., assisted at literary disputations, was an excellent historian, and had St. Austin's book, On the City of God, laid every night under his pillow to read if he awaked. Yet Eginhard assures us that whatever pains he took, he could never learn to write, because he was old when he first applied himself to it. He was skilled in astronomy, arithmetic, music, and every branch of the mathematics; understood the Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Syriac, also the Sclavonian, and several other living languages, so as never to want an interpreter to converse with ambassadors of neighboring nations. He meditated assiduously on the scriptures, assisted at the divine office, even that of midnight, if possible; had good books read to him at table, and took but one meal a day, which he was obliged to anticipate before the hour of evening on fasting days, that all his officers and servants might dine before midnight. He was very abstemious, had a paternal care of the poor in all his dominions, and honored good men, especially among the clergy. Charlemagne died January the 28th, in 814, seventy-two years old, and was buried at Aix-la-Chapelle. The incontinence into {289} which he fell in his youth, he expiated by sincere repentance, so that several churches in Germany and France honor him among the saints. In the university of Paris, the most constant nation of the Germans, (which was originally called the English nation, in 1250, when the distinction of nations n the faculty of arts was there established,) take Charlemagne for their patron, but only keep his festival since the year 1480, which is now common to the other three nations of French, Picards, and Normans, since 1661.[6] Footnotes: 1. See Hardion, Hist. Universelle, t. 10. 2. Apud Mabill. Analect. t. 1, p. 21. 3. Conc. t. 6 & 7, ed. Labbe. 4. Hist. de France in Charlem. French edit. in fol. 5. Ceillier, pp. 376 & 400. 6. Pagi (in Breviario Rom. Pontif. t. 3, in Alex. III. p. 82) proves that suffrages for the soul of Charlemagne were continued at Aix-la-Chapelle, till the antipope Pascal, at the desire of Frederic Barbarossa, enshrined his remains in that city, and published a decree for his canonization. From the time of this enshrining of his remains, he is honored among the saints in many churches in Germany and the Low Countries, as Goujet (De Festis propriis Sanctor. l. 1, c. 5, quæst. 9) and Bollandus (ad 28 Jan. and t. 2, Febr. Schemate 19) show. The tacit approbation of the popes is to be looked upon as equivalent to a beatification, as Benedict XIV. proves (De Canoniz. l. 1, c. 9, n. 5, p. 72.) Molanus, (in Natal. SS. Belg.,) Natalis Alexander. (Hist. Sæc. 9 and 10., cap. 7, a. 1,) and many others, have made the same observation. ST. GLASTIAN, B.C. IN SCOTLAND. HE was a native of the county of Fife, and discharged in the same, during many years, the duties of the episcopal character with which he was honored. Amidst the desolation which was spread over the whole country, in the last bloody civil war between the Scots and Picts, in which the latter were entirely subdued, St. Glastian was the comforter, spiritual father, and most charitable protector of many thousands of both nations. He died in 830, at Kinglace in Fifeshire, and was particularly honored in that country, and in Kyntire. According to the ancient custom of that country, his name is frequently written Mac-Glastian, the word Mac signifying son. See the Breviary of Aberdeen; King in his Calendar, &c. JANUARY XXIX. SAINT FRANCIS OF SALES, BISHOP AND CONFESSOR. From his writings and authentic lives, chiefly that written by his nephew, Charles Augustus de Sales: also that by F. Goulu, general of the Feuillans: that by Henry de Maupas du Tour, bishop of Puy, afterwards of Evreux: and that by Madame de Bussi-Rabutin, nun of the Visitation See his life, collected by M. Marsoillier, and done into English by the late Mr. Crathorne. See also the bull of his canonization, and an excellent collection of his maxims and private actions, compiled by his intimate friend and real admirer, M. Peter Caums, bishop of Bellay, in his book, entitled, L'Espirit de St. François de Sales, and in his scarce and incomparable work under the title. Quel est le meilleur Gouvernement, le rigoureux ou le dour, printed at Paris without the name of the author, 1636. Though I find not this book in any catalogue of bishop Camus's works, the conformity of style, and in several places the repetition of the same expressions which occur in the last-mentioned work, seem to prove this to be also the production of his pen. See also the excellent new edition of the letters of St. Francis of Sales, in six volumes, 12mo. 1758. A.D. 1622. THE parents of this saint were Francis, count of Sales, and Frances of Sionas. The countess being with child, offered her fruit to God with the most fervent prayers, begging he would preserve it from the corruption of the world, and rather deprive her of the comfort of seeing herself a mother, than suffer her to give birth to a child who should ever become his enemy by sin. The saint was born at Sales, three leagues from Annecy, the seat of that noble family; and his mother was delivered of him when she was {290} but seven months advanced in her pregnancy.[1] Hence he was reared with difficulty, and was so weak, that his life, during his infancy, was often despaired of by physicians. However, he escaped the danger, and grew robust: he was very beautiful, and the sweetness of his countenance won the affections of all who saw him: but the meekness of his temper, the pregnancy of his wit, his modesty, tractableness, and obedience, were far more valuable qualifications. The countess could scarce suffer the child out of her sight, lest any tincture of vice might infect his soul. Her first care was to inspire him with the most profound respect for the church, and all holy things; and she had the comfort to observe in him a recollection and devotion at his prayers far above his age. She read to him the lives of the saints, adding recollections suited to his capacity; and she took care to have him with her when she visited the poor, making him the distributer of her alms, and to do such little offices for them as he was able. He would set by his own meat for their relief, and when he had nothing left to bestow on them, would beg for them of all his relations. His horror of a lie, even in his infancy, made him prefer any disgrace or chastisement to the telling of the least wilful untruth. His mother's inclination for a domestic preceptor, to prevent his being corrupted by wicked youth in colleges, was overruled by her husband's persuasion of the usefulness of emulation for advancing children in their studies; hoping his son's virtue and modesty would, under God, be a sufficient guard of his innocency. He was accordingly sent to Rocheville, at six years of age, and some time after to Annecy. An excellent memory, a solid judgment, and a good application, could not fail of great progress. The young count spent as much of his time as possible in private studies and lectures of piety, especially that of the lives of saints; and by his diligence always doubled or trebled his school tasks. He showed an early inclination for the ecclesiastical state, and obtained his father's consent, though not without some reluctance, for his receiving tonsure in the year 1578, and the eleventh of his age. He was sent afterwards, under the care of a virtuous priest, his preceptor, to pursue his studies in Paris; his mother having first instilled into him steady principles of virtue, a love of prayer, and a dread of sin and its occasions. She often repeated to him those words of queen Blanche to her son St. Louis, king of France: "I had rather see you dead, than hear you had committed one mortal sin." On his arrival at Paris, he entered the Jesuits' schools, and went through his rhetoric and philosophy with great applause. In pure obedience to his father's orders, he learned in the academy to ride, dance, and fence, whence he acquired that easy behavior which he retained ever after. But these exercises, as matters of amusement, did not hinder his close application to the study of the Greek and Hebrew languages, and of positive divinity, for six years, under the famous Genebrard and Maldonatus. But his principal concern all this time was a regular course of piety, by which he labored to sanctify himself and all his actions. Pious meditation, and the study of the holy scripture, were his beloved entertainments: and he never failed to carry about him that excellent book, called the Spiritual Combat. He sought the conversation of the virtuous, particularly of F. Angelus Joyeuse, who, from a duke and marshal of France, was become a Capuchin friar. The frequent discourses of this good man on the necessity of mortification, induced the count to add, to his usual austerities, the wearing of a hair shirt three days in the week. His chief resort during his stay at Paris, was to some churches, that especially of Saint Stephen des Grez, as being one of the most retired. Here, he made {291} a vow of perpetual chastity, putting himself under the special patronage of the Blessed Virgin. God, to purify his heart, permitted a thick darkness insensibly to overspread his mind, and a spiritual dryness and melancholy to overwhelm him. He seemed, from a perfect tranquillity and peace of mind, to be almost brought to the brink of despair. Seized with the greatest terrors, he passed nights and days in tears and lamentations, and suffered more than can be conceived by those who have not felt the severity of such interior conflicts. The bitterness of his grief threw him into a deep jaundice; he could neither eat, drink, nor sleep. His preceptor labored, but all in vain, to discover the cause of this disorder, and find out a remedy. At last, Francis, being at prayer in the same church of St. Stephen, cast his eyes on a picture of our Lady: this awaking his confidence in her intercession, he prostrated himself on the ground, and, as unworthy to address the Father of all consolation, begged that she would be his advocate, and procure him the grace to love God with his whole heart. That very moment he found himself eased of his grief as of a heavy weight taken off his heart, and his former peace and tranquillity restored, which he ever after enjoyed. He was now eighteen years old, when his father recalled him from Paris, and sent him to Padua, to study the law, where his master was the celebrated Guy Pancirola; this was in the year 1554. He chose the learned and pious Jesuit, Antony Possevin, for his spiritual director; who at the same time explained to him St. Thomas's Sum, and they read together Bellarmin's controversies. His nephew, Augustus, gives us his written rule of life, which he made at Padua: it chiefly shows his perpetual attention to the presence of God, his care to offer up every action to him, and implore his aid at the beginning of each. Falling sick, he was despaired of by the physicians, and he himself expected with joy his last moment. His preceptor, Deage, who had ever attended him, asked him with tears, what he had to order about his funeral and other matters. "Nothing," answered he, cheerfully, "unless it be, that my body be given to the anatomy theatre to be dissected; for it will be a comfort to me if I can be of any advantage when dead, having been of none while alive. Thus I may also prevent some of the disorders and quarrels which happen between the young physicians and the friends of the dead, whose bodies they often dig up." However, he recovered; and by his father's orders, being twenty years of age, commenced doctor in laws, with great applause and pomp, in presence of forty-eight doctors. After which he travelled through Italy to see the antiquities, and visit the holy places there. He went to Rome by Ferrara, and returned by Loretto and Venice. To any insult offered him on the road he returned only meekness; for which he met with remarkable blessings from heaven. The sight of the pompous remains of ancient Rome gave him a feeling contempt of worldly grandeur: but the tombs of the martyrs drew everywhere tears of devotion from his eyes. Upon his return his father received him with great joy, at his castle of Tuille, where he had prepared for him a good library of books. All persons were charmed with the young count, but none so much as the great Antony Favre, afterwards first president of the parliament of Chamberry, and Claudius Cranier, the learned and truly apostolic bishop of Geneva, who already consulted him as an oracle. His father had a very good match in view for him, and obtained in his behalf, from the duke of Savoy, patents creating him counsellor of the parliament of Chamberry. Francis modestly, but very firmly, refused both; yet durst not propose to his parents his design of receiving holy orders; for the tonsure was not all absolute renouncing of the world. At last, he discovered it to his pious preceptor, Deage, and begged of him to mention it to his father: but this he {292} declined, and used his utmost endeavors to dissuade the young count from such a resolution, as he was the eldest son, and destined by the order of nature for another state. Francis answered all his reasonings, but could not prevail on him to charge himself with the commission. He had then recourse to a cousin, Lewis of Sales, a priest and canon of Geneva, who obtained the consent of his parents, but not without the greatest difficulty. His cousin also obtained for him from the pope, without his knowledge, the provostship of the church of Geneva, then vacant: but the young clergyman held out a long time before he would accept of it. At last he yielded, and took possession of that dignity, and was in a short time after promoted to holy orders by his diocesan, who, as soon as he was deacon, employed him in preaching. His first sermons gained him an extraordinary reputation, and were accompanied with incredible success. He delivered the word of God with a mixture of majesty and modesty; had a strong, sweet voice, and an animated manner of gesture, far from any affectation or vanity: but what chiefly affected the hearts of his hearers was the humility and unction with which he spoke from the abundance of his own heart. Before he preached, he always renewed the fervor of his heart before God, by secret sighs and prayer. He studied as much at the foot of the crucifix as in books, being persuaded that the essential quality of a preacher is to be a man of prayer. He received the holy order of priesthood with extraordinary preparation and devotion, and seemed filled by it with an apostolic spirit. He every day began his functions by celebrating the holy mysteries early in the morning, in which, by his eyes and countenance of fire, the inward flames of his soul appeared. He then heard the confessions of all sorts of people, and preached. He was observed to decline with the utmost care whatever might gain him the applause of men, seeking only to please God, and to advance his glory. He chiefly resorted to cottages, and country villages, instructing an infinity of poor people. His piety, his charity to the poor, his disinterestedness, his care of the sick and those in prison, endeared him to all: but nothing was so moving as his meekness, which no provocation was ever capable of disturbing. He conversed among all as their father, with a fellow-feeling of all their wants, being all to all. He was indeed naturally of a hasty and passionate temper, as he himself confesses; and we find in his writings a certain fire and impetuosity which renders it unquestionable. On this account from his youth he made meekness his favorite virtue, and by studying in the school of a God who was meek and humble of heart, he learned that important lesson to such perfection, as to convert his predominant passion into his characteristical virtue. The Calvinists ascribed principally to his meekness the wonderful conversions he made among them. They were certainly the most obstinate of people at that time, near Geneva; yet St. Francis converted no less than seventy-two thousand of them. Before the end of this first year of his ministry, in 1591, he erected at Annecy a confraternity of the Holy Cross, the associates of which were obliged to instruct the ignorant, to comfort and exhort the sick and prisoners, and to beware of all lawsuits, which seldom fail to shipwreck Christian charity. A Calvinistical minister took occasion from this institution to write against the honor paid by Catholics to the cross. Francis answered him by his book entitled, The Standard of the Cross. At this time, fresh matter presented itself for the exercise of the saint's zeal. The bishop of Geneva was formerly lord of that city, paying an acknowledgment to the duke of Savoy. While these two were disputing about the sovereignty, the Genevans expelled them both, and formed themselves into a republic in alliance with the Switzers; and their city became the centre of Calvinism. {293} Soon after, the Protestant canton of Bern seized the country of Vaux, and the republic of Geneva, the dutchy of Chablais, with the bailiwicks of Gex, Terni, and Gaillard; and there by violence established their heresy, which from that time had kept quiet possession for sixty years. The duke Charles Emmanuel had recovered these territories, and resolving to restore the Catholic religion, wrote in 1594 to the bishop of Geneva, to recommend that work to him. The wise ones, according to this world, regarded the undertaking as impracticable; and the most resolute, whether ecclesiastics or religious, were terrified at its difficulties and dangers. Francis was the only one that offered himself for the work, and was joined by none but his cousin-german Lewis de Sales. The tears and remonstrances of his parents and friends to dissuade him from the undertaking, made no impression on his courageous soul. He set out with his cousin on the 9th of September, in 1594. Being arrived on the frontiers of Chablais, they sent back their horses, the more perfectly to imitate the apostles. On his arrival at Thonon, the capital of Chablais, situate on the lake of Geneva, he found in it only seven Catholics. After having commended the souls to God, and earnestly implored his mercy through the intercession of the guardian angels, and tutelar saints of the country, he was obliged to take up his quarters in the castle of Allinges, where the governor and garrison were Catholics, two leagues from Thonon, whither he went every day, visiting also the neighboring country. The Calvinists for a long time shunned him, and some even attempted his life. Two assassins, hired by others, having missed him at Thonon, lay in wait to murder him on his return; but a guard of soldiers had been sent to escort him safe, the conspiracy having taken wind. The saint obtained their pardon, and, overcome by his lenity and formed by his holy instructions, they both became very virtuous converts. All our saint's relations, and many friends, whom he particularly respected for their great virtue and prudence, solicited him by the most pressing letters to abandon such a dangerous and fruitless enterprise. His father, to the most tender entreaties, added his positive commands to him to return home, telling him that all prudent persons called his resolution to continue his mission a foolish obstinacy and madness; that he had already done more than was needful, and that his mother was dying of grief for his long absence, the fear of losing him entirely, and the hardships, atrocious slanders, and continual alarms and dangers in which he lived. To compel him to abandon this undertaking, the father forbade his friends to write any more to him, or to send him necessary supplies. Nevertheless, St. Francis persevered, and at length his patience, zeal, and eminent virtue, wrought upon the most obdurate, and insensibly wore away their prejudices. His first converts were among the soldiers, whom he brought over, not only to the faith, but also to an entire change of manners and strict virtue, from habits of swearing, duelling, and drunkenness. He was near four years, however, without any great fruit among the inhabitants, till the year 1597, when God was pleased to touch several of them with his grace. The harvest daily increased both in the town and country so plentifully, that a supply of new laborers from Annecy was necessary, and the bishop sent some Jesuits and Capuchins to carry on the good work with Francis and under his direction. In 1598 the public exercise of the Catholic religion was restored, and Calvinism banished by the duke's orders over all Chablais, and the two bailiwicks of Terni and Gaillard. Though the plague raged violently at Thonon, this did not hinder Francis either by day or night from assisting the sick in their last moments; and God preserved him from the contagion, which seized and swept off several of his fellow-laborers. It is incredible what fatigues and hardships he underwent in the course of his mission; with what devotion {294} and tears he daily recommended the work of God: with what invincible courage he braved the greatest dangers: with what meekness and patience he bore all manner of affronts and calumnies. Baron D'Avuli, a man of quality, and of great worth and learning, highly esteemed among the Calvinists, and at Geneva, being converted by him, induced him to go thither, to have a conference with the famous minister La Faye. The minister, during the whole conference, was ever shifting the matter in debate, as he found himself embarrassed and pressed by his antagonist. His disadvantage being so evident that be himself could read it in the countenance of every one present, he broke off the conference by throwing out a whole torrent of injurious language on Francis, who bore it with so much meekness as not to return the least sharp answer. During the whole course of his ministry in these parts, the violent measures, base cowardice in declining all dispute, and the shameful conduct of the ministers in other respects, set the saint's behavior and his holy cause still in a more shining light. In 1597 he was commissioned by pope Clement VIII. to confer with Theodore Beza at Geneva, the most famous minister of the Calvinist party, in order to win him back to the Catholic church. He accordingly paid him four visits in that city, gained a high place in that heresiarch's esteem, and made him often hesitate in deep silence and with distracted looks, whether he should return to the Roman Catholic church or not, wherein he owned from the beginning that salvation was attainable. St. Francis had great hopes of bringing him over in a fifth visit, but his private conferences had alarmed the Genevans so much that they guarded Beza too close for him to find admittance to him again, and Beza died soon after. 'Tis said, that a little before death he lamented very much he could not see Francis.[2] It is certain, from his first conference with him, he had ever felt a violent conflict within himself, between truth and duty on one hand, and on the other, the pride of being head of a party, the shame of recanting, inveterate habits, and certain secret engagements in vice, to which he continued enslaved to the last. The invincible firmness and constancy of the saint appeared in the recovery of the revenues of the curacies and other benefices which had been given to the Orders of St. Lazarus and St. Maurice; the restoration of which, after many difficulties, he effected by the joint authority of the pope and the duke of Savoy. In 1596 he celebrated mass on Christmas-day in the church of St. Hippolytus at Thonon, and had then made seven or eight hundred converts. From this time he charged himself with the parish of the town, and established two other Catholic parishes in the country. In the beginning of the year 1599 he had settled zealous clergymen in all the parishes of the whole territory. The honors the saint received from the pope, the duke of Savoy, the cardinal of Medicis, and all the church, and the high reputation which his virtues had acquired him, never made the least impression on his humble mind, dead to all motions of pride and vanity. His delight was with the poor: the most honorable functions he left to others, and chose for himself the meanest and most laborious. Every one desired to have him for their director, wherever he went: and his extraordinary sweetness, in conjunction with his eminent piety, reclaimed as many vicious Catholics as it converted heretics. In 1599, he went to Annecy to visit his diocesan, Granier, who had procured him to be made his coadjutor. The fear of resisting God, in refusing this charge, when pressed upon him by the pope, in conjunction with his bishop and the duke of Savoy, at last extorted his consent; but the apprehension of the obligations annexed to the episcopacy was so strong that it threw him into an illness which had like to have cost him his life. {295} On his recovery he set out for Rome to receive his bulls, and to confer with his Holiness on matters relating to the missions of Savoy. He was highly honored by all the great men at Rome, and received of the pope the bulls for being consecrated bishop of Nicopolis; and coadjutor of Geneva. On this occasion he made a visit of devotion to Loretto, and returned to Annecy before the end of the year 1599. Here he preached the Lent the year following, and assisted his father during his last sickness, heard his general confession, and administered to him the rites of the church. An illness he was seized with at Annecy made him defer his consecration. On his recovery he was obliged to go to Paris, on affairs of his diocese, and was received there by all sorts of persons with all the regard due to his extraordinary merit. The king was then at Fontainebleau; but the saint was desired to preach the Lent to the court in the chapel of the Louvre. This he did in a manner that charmed every one, and wrought innumerable wonderful conversions. The duchesses of Morcoeur and Longueville sent him thereupon a purse of gold: he admired the embroidery, but gave it back, with thanks to them for honoring his discourses with their presence and good example. He preached a sermon against the pretended reformation, to prove it destitute of a lawful mission; it being begun at Meaux, by Peter Clark, a wool-carder; at Paris, by Masson Riviere, a young man called to the ministry by a company of laymen; and elsewhere after the like manner. This sermon converted many Calvinists; among others the countess of Perdrieuville, who was one of the most obstinate learned ladies of the sect: she consulted her ministers, and repaired often to Francis's conferences, till she had openly renounced Calvinism with all her numerous family. The whole illustrious house of Raconis followed her example, and so many others, even of the most inveterate of the sect, that it made cardinal Perron, a man famous for controversy, say: "I can confute the Calvinists; but, to persuade and convert them, you must carry them to the coadjutor of Geneva." Henry IV. was charmed with his preaching, and consulted him several times in matters relating to the direction of his conscience. There was no project of piety going forward about which he was not advised with. He promoted the establishment of the Carmelite nuns in France, and the introduction of F. Berulle's congregation of the oratory. The king himself earnestly endeavored to detain him in France, by promises of 20,000 livres pension, and the first vacant bishopric: but Francis said, God had called him against his will to the bishopric of Geneva, and he thought it his obligation to keep it till his death; that the small revenue he had sufficed for his maintenance, and more would only be an incumbrance. The king was astonished at his disinterestedness, when he understood that the bishopric of Geneva, since the revolt of that city, did not yield the incumbent above four or five thousand livres, that is, not two hundred and fifty-nine pounds, a-year. Some envious courtiers endeavored to give the king a suspicion of his being a spy. The saint heard this accusation just as he was going into the pulpit; yet he preached as usual without the least concern; and that prince was too well convinced of the calumny, by his sanctity and candor. After a nine months' stay in Paris, he set out with the king's letters,[3] and heard on the road, that Granier, bishop of Geneva, was dead. He hastened to Sales-Castle, and as soon as clear of the first visits, made a twenty days' retreat to prepare himself for his consecration. He made a general confession, and {296} laid down a plan of life, which he ever punctually observed. This was, never to wear any silk or camlets, or any clothes but woollen, as before; to have no paintings in his house but of devotions: no magnificence in furniture: never to use coach or litter, but to make his visits on foot: his family to consist of two priests, one for his chaplain, the other to take care of his temporalities and servants: nothing but common meats to be served to his table: to be always present at all feasts of devotion, kept in any church in town: his regulation with respect to alms was incredible, for his revenues: to go to the poor and sick in person: to rise every day at four, make an hour's meditation, say lauds and prime, then morning prayers with his family: to read the scripture till seven, then say mass, which he did every day, afterwards to apply to affairs till dinner, which being over, he allowed an hour for conversation; the rest of the afternoon he allotted to business and prayer. After supper he read a pious book to his family for an hour, then night prayers; after which he said matins. He fasted all Fridays and Saturdays, and our Lady's eves: be privately wore a hair shirt, and used the discipline, but avoided all ostentatious austerities. But his exact regularity and uniformity of life, with a continued practice of internal self-denials, was the best mortification. He redoubled his fasts, austerities, and prayers, as the time of his consecration drew nearer. This was performed on the 3d of December, 1602. He immediately applied himself to preaching and the other functions of his charge. He was exceedingly cautious in conferring holy orders. He ordained but few, neither was it without the strictest scrutiny passed upon all their qualifications for the priesthood. He was very zealous, both by word and example, in promoting the instruction of the ignorant by explanations of the catechism, on Sundays and holidays; and his example had a great influence over the parish-priests in this particular, as also over the laity, both young and old. He inculcated to all the making, every hour when the clock struck, the sign of the cross, with a fervent aspiration on the passion of Christ. He severely forbade the custom of Valentines or giving boys, in writing, the names of girls to be admired and attended on by them; and, to abolish it, he changed it into giving billets with the names of certain saints for them to honor and imitate in a particular manner. He performed the visitation of his diocese as soon as possible, published a new ritual, set on foot ecclesiastical conferences, and regulated all things; choosing St. Charles Borromeo for his model. Above all things he hated lawsuits, and strictly commanded all ecclesiastics to avoid them, and refer all disputes to arbitration. He said they were such occasions of sins against charity, that, if any one during the course of a lawsuit had escaped them, that alone would suffice for his canonization. Towards the close of the visitation of his diocese, he reformed several monasteries. That of Six appealed to the parliament of Chamberry: but our saint was supported there, and carried his point. While Francis was at Six, he heard that a valley, three leagues off, was in the utmost desolation, by the tops of two mountains that had fallen, and buried several villages, with the inhabitants and cattle. He crawled over impassable ways to comfort and relieve these poor people, who had neither clothes to cover, nor cottages to shelter them, nor bread to stay their hunger; he mingled his tears with theirs, relieved them, and obtained from the duke a remission of their taxes. The city of Dijon having procured leave from the duke of Savoy, the saint preached the Lent there in 1604, with wonderful fruit; but refused the present offered him by the city on that occasion. Being solicited by Henry IV. to accept of a considerable abbey, the saint refused it; alleging, that he dreaded riches as much as others could desire them; and that, the less he had of them the less he would have to answer for. That king {297} offered to name him to the dignity of cardinal at the next promotion; but the saint made answer, that though he did not despise the offered dignity, he was persuaded that great titles would not sit well upon him, and might raise fresh obstacles to his salvation. He was also thought of at Rome as a very fit person to be promoted to that dignity, but was himself the only one who everywhere opposed and crossed the design. Being desired on another occasion by the same king to accept of a pension; the saint begged his majesty to suffer it to remain in the hands of his comptroller till he should call for it; which handsome refusal much astonished that great prince, who could not forbear saying: "That the bishop of Geneva, by the happy independence in which his virtue had placed him, was as far above him, as he by his royal dignity was above his subjects." The saint preached the next Lent at Chamberry, at the request of the parliament, which notwithstanding at that very time seized his temporalities for refusing to publish a monitory at its request; the saint alleging, that it was too trifling an affair, and that the censures of the church were to be used more reservedly. To the notification of the seizure he only answered obligingly, that he thanked God for teaching him by it, that a bishop is to be altogether spiritual. He neither desisted from preaching, nor complained to the duke, but heaped most favors on such as most insulted him, till the parliament, being ashamed, granted him of their own accord a replevy. But the great prelate found more delight in preaching in small villages than amidst such applause, though he everywhere met with the like fruit; and he looked on the poor as the object of his particular care. He took a poor dumb and deaf man into his family, taught him by signs, and by them received his confession. His steward often found it difficult to provide for his family by reason of his great alms, and used to threaten to leave him. The saint would answer: "You say right; I am an incorrigible creature, and what is worse, I look as if I should long continue so." Or at other times, pointing to the crucifix; "How can we deny any thing to a God who reduced himself to this condition for the love of us!" Pope Paul V. ordered our saint to be consulted about the school dispute between the Dominicans and Jesuits on the grace of God, or de auxiliis. His opinion appears from his book On the Love of God: but he answered his Holiness in favor of neutrality, which he ever observed in school opinions; complaining often in how many they occasioned the breach of charity, and spent too much of their precious time, which, by being otherwise employed, might be rendered more conducive to God's honor. In 1609 he went to Bellay, and consecrated bishop John Peter Camus, one of the most illustrious prelates of the church of France, and linked to our saint by the strictest bands of holy friendship. He wrote the book entitled, The Spirit of St. Francis of Sales, consisting of many of his ordinary sayings and actions, in which his spirit shines with great advantage, discovering a perpetual recollection always absorbed in God, and a constant overflowing of sweetness and divine love. His writings to this day breathe the same; every word distils that love and meekness with which his heart was filled. It is this which makes his epistles, which we have to the number of five hundred and twenty-nine, in seven books, to be an inestimable treasure of moving instructions, suitable to all sorts of persons and circumstances. His incomparable book, the Introduction to a Devout Life, was originally letters to a lady in the world, which, at the pressing instances of many friends, he formed into a book and finished, to show that devotion suited Christians in a secular life, no less than in cloisters. Villars, the archbishop of Vienna, wrote to him upon it: "Your book charms, inflames, and puts me in raptures, as often as I open any part of it." The author received {298} the like applause and commendations from all parts, and it was immediately translated into all the languages of Europe. Henry IV. of France was extremely pleased with it; his queen, Mary of Medicis, sent it richly bound and adorned with jewels to James I. of England, who was wonderfully taken with it, and asked his bishops why none of them could write with such feeling and unction.[4] There was, however, one religious Order in which this book was much censured, as if it had allowed of gallantry and scurrilous jests, and approved of balls and comedies, which was very far from the saint's doctrine. A preacher of that Order had the rashness and presumption to declaim bitterly against the book in a public sermon, to cut it in pieces, and bum it in the very pulpit. The saint bore this outrage without the least resentment; so perfectly was he dead to self-love. This appears more wonderful to those who know how jealous authors are of their works, as the offspring of their reason and judgment, of which men are of all things the fondest. His book of the Love of God cost him much more reading, study, and meditation. In it he paints his own soul. He describes the feeling sentiments of divine love, its state of fervor, of dryness, of trials, sufferings, and darkness: in explaining which he calls in philosophy to his assistance. He writes on this sublime subject what he had learned by his own experience. Some parts of this book are only to be understood by those souls who have gone through these states: yet the author has been ever justly admired for the performance. The general of the Carthusians had written to him upon his Introduction, advising him to write no more, because nothing else could equal that book. But seeing this, he bade him never cease writing, because his latter works always surpassed the former; and James 1. was so delighted with the book, that he expressed a great desire to see the author. This being told the saint, he cried out: "Ah! who will give me the wings of a dove, and I will fly to the king, into that great island, formerly the country of saints; but now overwhelmed with the darkness of error. If the duke will permit me, I will arise, and go to that great Ninive: I will speak to the king, and will announce to him, with the hazard of my life, the word of the Lord." In effect, he solicited the duke of Savoy's consent, but could never obtain it.[5] That jealous sovereign feared lest he should be drawn in to serve another state, or sell to some other his right to Geneva; on which account he often refused him leave to go to preach in France, when invited by many cities. His other works are sermons which are not finished as they were preached, except, perhaps, that on the Invention of the Cross. We have also his Preparation for Mass: his Instructions for Confessors: a collection of his Maxims, pious Breathings and Sayings, written by the bishop of Bellay; some Fragments, and his Entertainments to his nuns of the Visitation, in which he recommends to them the most perfect interior self-denial, a disengagement of affections from all things temporal, and obedience. The institution of that Order may be read in the life of B. Frances Chantal. Saint Francis designing his new Order to be such, that all, even the sickly and weak, might be admitted into it, he chose for it the rule of St. Austin, as commanding few extraordinary bodily austerities, and would have it possess funds and settlements in common, to prevent being carried off from the interior life by anxious cares about necessaries. But then he requires from each person so strict a practice of poverty, as to allow no one the property or even the long use of any thing; and orders them every year to change chambers, beds, crosses, beads, and books. He will have no manner of account to be made of birth, wit, or talents; but only of humility; {299} he obliges them only to the little office of our Lady, which all might easily learn to understand; meditations, spiritual reading, recollection, and retreats, abundantly compensating the defect. All his regulations tend to instil a spirit of piety, charity, meekness, and simplicity. He subjects his Order to the bishop of each place, without any general. Pope Paul V. approved it, and erected the congregation of the Visitation into a religious Order. St. Francis, finding his health decline, and his affairs to multiply, after having consulted cardinal Frederic Borromeo, archbishop of Milan, chose for his coadjutor in the bishopric of Geneva, his brother John Francis of Sales, who was consecrated bishop of Chalcedon at Turin, in 1618. But the saint still applied himself to his functions as much as ever. He preached the Lent at Grenoble, in 1617, and again in 1618, with his usual conquests of souls; converting many Calvinists, and among these the duke of Lesdiguieres. In 1619, he accompanied to Paris the cardinal of Savoy, to demand the sister of king Louis XIII., Christina of France, in marriage for the prince of Piedmont. He preached the Lent in St. Andre-des-Arcs, and had always such a numerous audience, that cardinals, bishops, and princes could scarce find room. His sermons and conferences, and still more the example of his holy life, and the engaging sweetness of his conversation, most powerfully moved not only the devout, but also heretics, libertines, and atheists; while his eloquence and learning convinced their understandings. The bishop of Bellay tells us, that he entreated the saint at Paris not to preach twice every day, morning and evening, for the sake of his health. St. Francis answered him with a smile: "That it cost him much less to preach a sermon than to find an excuse for himself when invited to perform that function." He added: "God has appointed me a pastor and a preacher: and is not every one to follow his profession? But I am surprised that the people in this great city flock so eagerly to my sermons: for my tongue is slow and heavy, my conceptions low, and my discourses flat, as you yourself are witness." "Do you imagine," said the other, "that eloquence is what they seek in your discourses? It is enough for them to see you in the pulpit. Your heart speaks to them by your countenance, and by your eyes, were you only to say the Our Father with them. The most common words in your mouth, burning with the fire of charity, pierce and melt all hearts. There is I know not what so extraordinary in what you say, that every word is of weight, every word strikes deep into the heart. You have said every thing even when you seem to have said nothing. You are possessed of a kind of eloquence which is of heaven: the power of this is astonishing." St. Francis, smiling, turned off the discourse.[6] The match being concluded, the princess Christina chose Francis for her chief almoner, desiring to live always under his direction: but all her entreaties could neither prevail on him to leave his diocese, though he had a coadjutor, nor to accept of a pension: and it was only on these two conditions he undertook the charge, always urging that nothing could dispense with him from residence. The princess made him a present of a rich diamond, by way of an investiture, desiring him to keep it for her sake. "I will," said he, "unless the poor stand in need of it." She answered, she would then redeem it. He said, "This will happen so often, that I shall abuse your bounty." Finding it given to the poor afterwards at Turin, she gave him another, richer, charging him to keep that at least. He said. "Madam, I cannot promise you: I am very unfit to keep things of value." Inquiring after it one day, she was told it was always in pawn for the poor, and that {300} the diamond belonged not to the bishop, but to all the beggars of Geneva. He had indeed a heart which was not able to refuse any thing to those in want. He often gave to beggars the waistcoat off his own back, and sometimes the cruets of his chapel. The pious cardinal, Henry de Gondi, bishop of Paris, used all manner of arguments to obtain his consent to be his coadjutor in the see of Paris; but he was resolved never to quit the church which God had first committed to his charge. Upon his return to Annecy he would not touch a farthing of his revenue for the eighteen months he was absent; but gave it to his cathedral, saying, it could not be his, for he had not earned it. He applied himself to preaching, instructing, and hearing confessions with greater zeal than ever. In a plague which raged there, he daily exposed his own life to assist his flock. The saint often met with injurious treatment, and very reviling words, which he ever repaid with such meekness and beneficence as never failed to gain his very enemies. A lewd wretch, exasperated against him for his zeal against a wicked harlot, forged a letter of intrigue in the holy prelate's name, which made him pass for a profligate and a hypocrite with the duke of Nemours and many others: the calumny reflected also on the nuns of the Visitation. Two years after, the author of it, lying on his death-bed, called in witnesses, publicly justified the saint, and made an open confession of the slander and forgery. The saint had ever an entire confidence in the divine providence, was ever full of joy, and resigned to all the appointments of heaven, to which he committed all events. He had a sovereign contempt of all earthly things, whether riches, honors, dangers, or sufferings. He considered only God and his honor in all things: his soul perpetually breathed nothing but his love and praises; nor could he contain this fire within his breast, for it discovered itself in his countenance; which, especially while he said mass, or distributed the blessed eucharist, appeared shining, as it were, with rays of glory, and breathing holy fervor. Often he could not contain himself in his conversation, and would thus express himself to his intimate friends: "Did you but know how God treats my heart, you would thank his goodness, and beg for me the strength to execute the inspirations which he communicates to me. My heart is filled with an inexpressible desire to be forever sacrificed to the pure and holy love of my Saviour. Oh! it is good to live, to labor, to rejoice only in God. By his grace I will forevermore be nothing to any creature; nor shall any creature be anything to me but in him and for him." At another time, he cried out to a devout friend: "Oh! if I knew but one string of my heart which was not all God's, I would instantly tear it out. Yes; if I knew that there was one thread in my heart which was not marked with the crucifix, I would not keep it one moment." In the year 1622, he received an order from the duke of Savoy to go to Avignon to wait on Louis XIII., who had just finished the civil wars in Languedoc. Finding himself indisposed, he took his last leave of his friends, saying, he should see them no more; which drew from them floods of tears. At Avignon he was at his prayers during the king's triumphant entry, and never went to the window to see any part of that great pomp. He was obliged to attend the king and the cardinal of Savoy to Lyons, where he refused all the grand apartments offered him by the intendant of he province and others, to lodge to the poor chamber of the gardener to the monastery of the Visitation: as he was never better pleased than when he could most imitate the poverty of his Saviour. He received from the king and queen-mother, and from all the princes, the greatest marks of honor and esteem: and though indisposed, continued to preach and perform all his {301} functions, especially on Christmas-day, and St. John's in the morning. After dinner he began to fall gradually into an apoplexy, was put to bed by his servant, and received extreme unction; but as he had said mass that day and his vomiting continued, it was thought proper not to give him the viaticum. He repeated with great fervor: "My heart and my flesh rejoice in the living God; I will sing the mercies of the Lord to all eternity. When shall I appear before his face? Show me, my beloved, where thou feedest, where thou restest at noonday. O my God, my desire is before thee, and my sighs are not hidden from thee. My God and my all! my desire is that of the hills eternal." While the physicians applied blistering plasters, and hot irons behind his neck, and a caustic to the crown of his head, which burned him to the bone, he shed abundance of tears under excess of pain, repeating: "_Wash me, O Lord, from my iniquities, and cleanse me from my sin. Still cleanse me more and more_. What do I here, my God, distant from thee, separated from thee?" And to those about him: "Weep not, my children; must not the will of God be done?" One suggesting to him the prayer of St. Martin, "If I am still necessary for thy people, I refuse not to labor:" he seemed troubled at being compared to so great a saint, and said, he was an unprofitable servant, whom neither God nor his people needed. His apoplexy increasing, though slowly, he seemed at last to lose his senses, and happily expired on the feast of Holy Innocents, the 28th of December, at eight o'clock at night, in the year 1622, the fifty-sixth of his age, and the twentieth of his episcopacy. His corpse was embalmed, and carried with the greatest pomp to Annecy, where he had directed by will it should be interred. It was laid in a magnificent tomb near the high altar in the church of the first monastery of the Visitation. After his beatification by Alexander VII., in 1661, it was placed upon the altar in a rich silver shrine. He was canonized in 1665 by the same pope, and his feast fixed to the 29th of January, on which day his body was conveyed to Annecy. His heart was kept in a leaden case, in the church of the Visitation at Lyons: it was afterwards exposed in a silver one, and lastly in one of gold, given by king Louis XIII. Many miracles, as the raising to life two persons who were drowned, the curing of the blind, paralytic, and others, were authentically attested to have been wrought by his relics and intercession; not to mention those he had performed in his lifetime, especially during his missions. Pope Alexander VII., then cardinal Chigi, and plenipotentiary in Germany, Louis XIII., XIV., and others, attributed their cures in sickness to this saint's patronage. Among his ordinary remarkable sayings, we read that he often repeated to bishop Camus, "That truth must be always charitable; for bitter zeal does harm instead of good. Reprehensions are a food of hard digestion, and ought to be dressed on a fire of burning charity so well, that all harshness be taken off; otherwise, like unripe fruit, they will only produce gripings. Charity seeks not itself nor its own interests, but purely the honor and interest of God: pride, vanity, and passion cause bitterness and harshness: a remedy injudiciously applied may be a poison. A judicious silence is always better than a truth spoken without charity." St. Francis, seeing a scandalous priest thrown into prison, fell at his feet, and with tears conjured him to have compassion on him, his pastor, on his religion, which he scandalized, and on his own soul; which sweetness converted the other, so that he became an example of virtue. By his patience and meekness under all injuries, he overcame the most obstinate, and ever after treated them with singular affection, calling them dearer friends, because regained. A great prelate observes, from his example, that the meek are kings of other hearts, which they powerfully attract, and can turn as they please; and in {302} an express and excellent treatise, proposes him as an accomplished model of all the qualifications requisite in a superior to govern well. * * * * * Meekness was the favorite virtue of St. Francis de Sales. He once was heard to say, that he had employed three years in studying it in the school of Jesus Christ, and that his heart was still far from being satisfied with the progress he had made. If he, who was meekness itself, imagined, nevertheless, that he had possessed so little of it; what shall we say of those, who, upon every trifling occasion, betray the bitterness of their hearts in angry words and actions of impatience and outrage? Our saint was often tried in the practice of this virtue, especially when the hurry of business and the crowds that thronged on him for relief in their various necessities, scarce allowed him a moment to breathe. He has left us his thoughts upon this situation, which his extreme affability rendered very frequent to him. "God," says he, "makes use of this occasion to try whether our hearts are sufficiently strengthened to bear every attack. I have myself been sometimes in this situation: but I have made a covenant with my heart and with my tongue, in order to confine them within the bounds of duty. I considered those persons who crowd in one upon the other, as children who run into the embraces of their father: as the hen refuseth not protection to her little ones when they gather around her, but, on the contrary, extendeth her wings so as to cover them all; my heart, I thought, was in like manner expanded, in proportion as the numbers of these poor people increased. The most powerful remedy against sudden starts of impatience is a sweet and amiable silence; however little one speaks, self-love will have a share in it, and some word will escape that may sour the heart, and disturb its peace for a considerable time. When nothing is said, and cheerfulness preserved, the storm subsides, anger and indiscretion are put to flight, and nothing remains but a joy, pure and lasting. The person who possesses Christian meekness, is affectionate and tender towards every one; he is disposed to forgive and excuse the frailties of others; the goodness of his heart appears in a sweet affability that influences his words and actions, and presents every object to his view in the most charitable and pleasing light; he never admits in his discourse any harsh expression, much less any term that is haughty or rude. An amiable serenity is always painted on his countenance, which remarkably distinguishes him from those violent characters, who, with looks full of fury, know only how to refuse; or who, when they grant, do it with so bad a grace, that they lose all the merit of the favor they bestow." Some persons thinking him too indulgent towards sinners, expressed their thoughts one day with freedom to him on this head. He immediately replied: "If there was any thing more excellent than meekness, God would have certainly taught it us; and yet there is nothing to which he so earnestly exhorts us, as to be _meek and humble of heart_. Why would you hinder me to obey the command of my Lord, and follow him in the exercise of that virtue which he so eminently practised and so highly esteems? Are we then better informed in these matters than God himself?" But his tenderness was particularly displayed in the reception of apostates and other abandoned sinners; when these prodigals returned to him, he said, with all the sensibility of a father: "Come, my dear children, come, let me embrace you; ah, let me hide you in the bottom of my heart! God and I will assist you: all I require of you is not to despair: I shall take on myself the labor of the rest." Looks full of compassion and love expressed the sincerity of his feelings: his affectionate and charitable care of them extended even to their bodily wants and his purse was open to them as well as his heart; {303} he justified this proceeding to some, who, disedified at his extreme indulgence, told him it served only to encourage the sinner, and harden him still more in his crimes, by observing, "Are they not a part of my flock? Has not our blessed Lord given them his blood, and shall I refuse them my tears? These wolves will be changed into lambs: a day will come when, cleansed from their sins, they will be more precious in the sight of God than we are: if Saul had been cast off, we would never have had a St. Paul." Footnotes: 1. It is a problem in nature, discussed without success by several great physicians, why children born in their seventh month more frequently live than those that are brought forth in their eighth month. 2. Aug. Sales de Vit. l. {} p. 123. 3. The saint being on his return to Savoy, was informed that a convent of religious women, of the order of Fontevrault, received superfluous pensions. He wrote about it to those religious, and after giving testimony to their virtue, in order to gain their confidence, he conjured them, in the strongest and most pathetic terms, to banish such an abuse from their monastery; persuaded that such pensions were not exempt from sin, were an obstacle to monastic perfection, and opposite to their essential vow of poverty; lamenting that after doing so much they should, for the sake of one small reserve, destroy the merit of their whole sacrifice. This letter is extremely useful and beautiful. L. 1, ep. 41, t. 1, p. 136. 4. Aug. Sales in Vit. 5. Aug. Sales in Vit. 6. Quel est le meilleur Gouvernment, &c. ch. 8, p. 298. SAINT SULPICIUS SEVERUS[1] DISCIPLE OF ST. MARTIN. HE was born in Aquitaine, not at Agen, as Scaliger, Vossius, Baillet, &c., have falsely inferred from a passage of his history,[2] but near Toulouse. That he was of a very rich and illustrious Roman family, we are assured by the two Paulinus's, and Gennadius.[3] His youth he spent in studying the best Roman authors of the Augustan age, upon whom he formed his style, not upon the writers of his own time: he also applied himself to the study of the laws, and surpassed all his contemporaries in eloquence at the bar. His wife was a lady of a consular family, whom he lost soon after their marriage, but he continued to enjoy a very great estate which he had inherited by her. His mother-in-law, Bassula, loved him constantly, as if he had been her own son: they continued to live several years in the same house, and had in all things the same mind.[4] The death of his beloved consort contributed to wean his heart from the world: in which resolution he seems to have been confirmed by the example and exhortations of his pious mother-in-law. His conversion from the world happened in the same year with that of St. Paulinus of Nola,[5] though probably somewhat later: and St. Paulinus mentions that Sulpicius was younger than himself, and at that time (that is, about the year 392) in the flower of his age. De Prato imagines Sulpicius to have been ten years younger than St. Paulinus, consequently that he was converted in the thirty-second year of his age. Whereas St. Paulinus distributed his whole fortune among the poor at once; Sulpicius reserved his estates to himself and his heirs, employing the yearly revenue on the poor, and in other pious uses, so that he was no more than a servant of the church and the poor, to keep accounts for them.[6] But he sold so much of them as was necessary to discharge him of all obligations to others. Gennadius tells us that he was promoted to the priesthood; but from the silence of St. Paulinus, St. Jerom, and others, Tillemont and De Prato doubt of this circumstance. Sulpicius suffered much from the censures of friends, who condemned his retreat, having chosen for his solitude a cottage at Primuliacus, a village now utterly unknown in Aquitaine, probably in Languedoc. In his kitchen nothing was ever dressed but pulse and herbs, boiled without any seasoning, except a little vinegar: he ate also coarse bread. He and his few disciples had no other beds but straw of sackcloth spread on the ground. He set at liberty several of his slaves, and admitted them, and some of his old servants, to familiar intercourse and {304} conversation. About the year 394, not long after his retreat, he made a visit to St. Martin at Tours, and was so much taken with his saintly comportment, and edified by his pious discourses and counsels, that he became from that time his greatest admirer, and regulated his conduct by his direction. Ever after he visited that great saint once or twice almost every summer as long as he lived, and passed some time with him, that he might study more perfectly to imitate his virtues. He built and adorned several churches. For two which he founded at Primuliacus, he begged some relics of St. Paulinus, who sent him a piece of the cross on which our Saviour was crucified, with the history of its miraculous discovery by St. Helena.[7] This account Sulpicius inserted in his ecclesiastical history. These two saints sent frequent presents to each other, of poor garments or the like things, suitable to a penitential life, upon which they make in their letters beautiful pious reflections, that show how much they were accustomed to raise their thoughts to God from every object.[8] Our saint recommending to St. Paulinus a cook, facetiously tells him that he was utterly a stranger to the art of making sauces, and to the use of pepper, or any such incentives of gluttony, his skill consisting only in gathering and boiling herbs in such a manner that monks, who only eat after having fasted long, would find delicious. He prays his friend to treat him as he would his own son, and wishes he could himself have served him and his family in that quality.[9] In the year 399 St. Paulinus wrote to our saint that he hoped to have met him at Rome, whither he went to keep the feast of the prince of the apostles, and where he had stayed ten days, but without seeing any thing but the tombs of the apostles, before which he passed the mornings, and the evenings were taken up by friends who called to see him.[10] Sulpicius answered, that an indisposition had hindered him from undertaking that journey. Of the several letters mentioned by Gennadius, which Sulpicius Severus wrote to the devout virgin Claudia, his sister, two are published by Baluze.[11] Both are strong exhortations to fervor and perseverance. In the first, our saint assures her that he shed tears of joy in reading her letter, by which he was assured of her sincere desire of serving God. In a letter to Aurelius the deacon, he relates that one night in a dream he saw St. Martin ascend to heaven in great glory, and attended by the holy priest Clarus, his disciple, who was lately dead: soon after, two monks arriving from Tours, brought news of the death of St. Martin. He adds, that his greatest comfort in the loss of so good a master, was a confidence that he should obtain the divine blessings by the prayers of St. Martin in heaven. St. Paulinus mentions this vision in an inscription in verse, which he made and sent to be engraved on the marble altar of the church of Primuliacus.[12] St. Sulpicius wrote the life of the incomparable St. Martin, according to Tillemont and most others, before the death of that saint: but De Prato thinks, that though it was begun before, it was neither finished nor published till after his death. The style of this piece is plainer and more simple than that of his other writings. An account of the death of St. Martin, which is placed by De Prato in the year 400, is accurately given by St. Sulpicius in a letter to Bassula, his mother-ill-law, who then lived at Triers. The three dialogues of our saint are the most florid of all his writings. In the first Posthumian, a friend who had spent three years in the deserts of Egypt and the East, and was then returned, relates to him and Gallus, a disciple of St. Martin, (with whom our saint then lived under the same roof,) the wonderful examples of virtue he had seen abroad. In the second dialogue, Gallus recounts {305} many circumstances of the life of St. Martin, which St. Sulpicius had omitted in his history of that saint. In the third, under the name of the same Gallus, several miracles wrought by St. Martin are proved by authentic testimonies.[13] The most important work of our saint is his abridgment of sacred history from the beginning of the world down to his own time, in the year 400. The elegance, conciseness, and perspicuity with which this work is compiled, have procured the author the name of the Christian Sallust; some even prefer it to the histories of the Roman Sallust, and look upon it as the most finished model extant of abridgments.[14] His style is the most pure of any of the Latin fathers, though also Lactantius, Minutius Felix, we may almost add St. Jerom, and Salvian of Marseilles, deserve to be read among the Latin classics. The heroic sanctity of Sulpicius Severus is highly extolled by St. Paulinus of Nola, Paulinus of Perigueux, about the year 460.[15] Venantius Fortunatus, and many others, down to the present {306} age. Gennadius tells us, that he was particularly remarkable for his extraordinary love of poverty and humility. After the death of St. Martin, in 400, St. Sulpicius Severus passed five years in that illustrious saint's cell at Marmoutier. F. Jerom de Prato thinks that he at length retired to a monastery at Marseilles, or in that neighborhood; because in a very ancient manuscript copy of his works, transcribed in the seventh century, kept in the library of the chapter of Verona, he is twice called a monk of Marseilles. From the testimony of this manuscript, the Benedictin authors of the new treatise On the Diplomatique,[16] and the continuators of the Literary History of France,[17] regard it as undoubted that Sulpicius Severus was a monk at Marseilles before his death. While the Alans, Sueves, and Vandals from Germany and other barbarous nations, laid waste most provinces in Gaul in 406, Marseilles enjoyed a secure peace under the government of Constantine, who, having assumed the purple, fixed the seat of his empire at Arles from the year 407 to 410. After the death of St. Chrysostom in 407, Cassian came from Constantinople to Marseilles, and founded there two monasteries, one for men, the other for women. Most place the death of St. Sulpicius Severus about the year 420, Baronius after the year 432; but F. Jerom de Prato about 410, when he supposes him to have been near fifty years old, saying that Gennadius, who tells us that he lived to a very great age, is inconsistent with himself. Neither St. Paulinus nor any other writer mentions him as living later than the year 407, which seems to prove that he did not survive that epoch very many years. Guibert, abbot of Gemblours, who died in 1208, in his Apology for Sulpicius Severus,[18] testifies that his festival was kept at Marmoutier with great solemnity on the 29th of January. Several editors of the Roman Martyrology, who took Sulpicius Severus, who is named in the calendars on this day, to have been this saint, added in his eulogium, Disciple of St. Martin, famous for his learning and merits. Many have proved that this addition was made by the mistake of private editors, and that the saint originally meant here in the Roman Martyrology was Sulpicius Severus, bishop of Bourges;[19] and Benedict XIV. proves and declares[20] that Sulpicius Severus, the disciple of St. Martin, is not commemorated in the Roman Martyrology. Nevertheless, he has been ranked among the saints at Tours from time immemorial, and is honored with a particular office on this day in the new breviary used in all that diocese. See his works correctly printed, with various readings, notes, dissertations, and the life of this saint, at Verona in 1741, in two volumes folio, by F. Jerom de Prato, an Italian Oratorian of Verona: also Gallia Christiana tum Vetus tum Nova: Tillemont, t. 12. Ceillier, t. 10, p. 635. Rivet, Hist. Littér. de la France, t. 2, p. 95. Footnotes: 1. Severus was his own proper name, Sulpicius that of his family, as is testified by Gennadius and all antiquity. Vossius, Dupin, and some others, on this account, will have him called Severus Sulpicius, with Eugippius and St. Gregory of Tours. But other learned men agree, that after the close of the republic of Rome, under the emperors, the family name was usually placed first, though still called Cognomen, and the other Prænomen, because the proper name went anciently before the other. Thus we say Cæcilius Cyprianus, Eusebius Hieronymus, Aurelius Agustinus, &c. See Sirmond, Ep. præfixe Op. Serva. Lapi, and Hier. De Prato in vita Sulpicii Severi, p. 56, &c. 2. Sulp. Sev. Hist. l. 2, c. 44. 3. {Footnote not in text} Ib. c. 48, and Ep. ad Bassulam. de Prato, p. 57. 4. S. Paulinus, Ep. 5 & 35. 5. Ib. Ep. 11, n. 6. 6. S. Paulinus, Ep. 1 & 24. 7. Ib. Ep. 52. 8. Sulpic. Sev. Ep. ad Paulin. ed à D'Achery in Spicileg. t. 52, p. 532, et inter opera S. Paulini, p. 119. 9. Ibid. 10. S. Paulin. Ep. ad Sulpic. Sev. p. 96. 11. Baluze, t. 1, Miscellan. p. 329. 12. S. Paulinus, Ep. 32, p. 204. 13. Many, upon the authority of St. Jerom, rank Sulpicius Severus among the Millenarians, though all allow that he never defended any error so as to be out of the communion of the church. But that he could not be properly a Millenarian, seems clear from several parts of his writings. For, Ep. 2 and 3, he affirms, that the souls of St. Martin and St. Clarus passed from this world to the immediate beatific vision of God. He establishes the same principles, Ep. 1, ad Claudiam Soror., c. 5. And in his Sacred History, l. 2, c. 3, explaining the dream of Nabachodonosor, he teaches that the destruction of the kingdoms of this world will be immediately succeeded by the eternal reign of Christ with his saints in heaven. In the passage, Dial. 2, c. 14, upon which the charge is founded, Sulpicius relates, in the discourse of Gallus, that St. Martin, on a certain occasion, said, that the reign of Nero in the West, and his persecution, were immediate forerunners of the last day: as is the reign of Antichrist in the East, who will rebuild Jerusalem and its temple, reside in the same, restore circumcision, kill Nero, and subject the whole world to his empire. Where he advances certain false conjectures about the reign of Nero, and the near approach of the last judgment at that time: likewise the restoration of Jerusalem by Antichrist; though this last is maintained probable by cardinal Bellarmin, l. 3, de Rom. Pontif. c. 13. But the Millenarian error is not so much as insinuated. Nor could it have been inserted by the author in that passage and omitted by copiers, as De Prato proves, against that conjecture of Tillemont. St. Jerom, indeed, l. 11, in Ezech. c. 36, represents certain Christian writers who imitated some later Jews in their Deuteroseis in a carnal manner of expounding certain scripture prophecies, expecting a second Jerusalem of gold and precious stones, a restoration of bloody sacrifices, circumcision, and a Sabbath. Among these he names Tertullian, in his book De Spe Fidelium, (now lost,) Lactantius, Victorious Petabionensis, and Severus, (Sulpicius,) in his dialogue entitled, Gallus, then just published: and among the Greeks, Irenæus and Apollinarius. De Prato thinks he only speaks of Sulpicius Severus by hearsay, because he mentions only one dialogue called Gallus, whereas two bear that title. At least St. Jerom never meant to ascribe all these errors to each of those he names; for none of them maintained them all except Apollinarius. His intention was only to ascribe one point or other of such carnal interpretations to each, and to Sulpicius the opinion that Jerusalem, with the temple and sacrifices, will be restored by Antichrist, &c., which cannot be called erroneous; though St. Jerom justly rejects that interpretation, because the desolation foretold by Daniel is to endure to the end. In the decree of Gelasius this dialogue of Gallus is called Apocryphal, but in the same sense in which it was rejected by St. Jerom. Nor is this exposition advanced otherwise than as a quotation from St. Martin's answer on that subject. See the justification of Sulpicius Severus, in a dissertation printed at Venice in 1738, in Racolta di Opuscoli Scientifici, t. 18, and more amply by F. Jerom de Prato, Disser. 5, in Opera Sulpicii Severi, t. 1, p. 259, commended in the Acta Eruditor. Lipsiæ, ad an. 1760. Gennadius, who wrote about the year 494, tells us, (Cat. n. 19.) that Sulpicius was deceived in his old age by the Pelagians, but soon opening his eyes, condemned himself to five years' rigorous silence to expiate this fault. From the silence of other authors, and the great commendations which the warmest enemies of the Pelagians bestow on our saint, especially Paulinus of Milan, in his life of St. Ambrose, (written at latest in 423,) and St. Paulinus of Nola, and Paulinus of Perigueux, (who in 461 wrote in verse the life of St. Martin,) l. 5, v, 193, &c., some look upon this circumstance as a slander, which depends wholly on the testimony of so inaccurate a writer, who is inconsistent with himself in other matters relating to Sulpicius Severus, whose five years' silence might have other motives. If the fact be true, it can only be understood of the semi-Pelagian error, which had then many advocates at Marseilles, and was not distinguished in its name from Pelagianism till some years after our saint's death, nor condemned by the church before the second council of Orange in 529. Pelagius was condemned by the councils of Carthage and Milevis in 416, and by pope Innocent I. in 412. If Sulpicius Severus fell into any error, especially before it had been clearly anathematized by the church, at least he cannot be charged with obstinacy, having so soon renounced it. We must add, that even wilful offences are blotted out by sincere repentance. See F. Jerom de Pram in vita Sulp. Sev., §12, pp. 69 and 74, t. 1, Op. Veronæ, 1741. 14. The sacred history of Sulpicius Severus is a most useful classic for Christian schools; but not to be studied in the chosen fragments mangled by Chompré, and prescribed for the schools in Portugal. True improvement of the mind is impossible without the beauties of method and the advantages of taste, which are nowhere met with but by seeing good compositions entire, and by considering the art with which the whole is wound up. A small edition of Sulpicius's history, made from that correctly published by De Prato, would be of great service. Nevertheless, Sulpicius, though he has so well imitated the style of the purest ages, declares that he neglects elegance; and he takes the liberty to use certain terms and phrases which are not of the Augustan standard, sometimes because they were so familiar in his time that he otherwise would not have seemed to write with ease, and sometimes because they are necessary to express the mysteries of our faith. How shocking is the delicacy of Bembo; who, for fear of not being Ciceronian, conjures the Venetians, _per Deos immortales_, and uses the words _Dea Lauretana!_ or that of Justus Lipsius, who used _Fatum_ or destiny, for Providence, because this latter word is not in Cicero, who with the Pagans, usually speaks according to the notion of an overruling destiny in events which they by believed ordained by heaven. For this term some of Lipsius's works were censured, and by him recalled. 15. Vit. St. Martin, versu expressa, l. 5, v. 193, &c. 16. Tr. de Diplomatique, t. 3. 17. Hist. Litter. t. 11, Advertissement preliminaire, p. 5. 18. Published by Bollandus ad 29 Jan. p. 968. 19. See Annalus, Theolog. positivæ, l. 4, c. 26, and Dominic Georgi in Notis ad Martyrol. Adonis, ad {} Jan. 20. Benedict. XIV. in litteris apost. præfixis novæ suæ editioni Romani Martyrologii, (Romæ, 1749,), §47, p. 34. ST. GILDAS THE WISE, OR BADONICUS, ABBOT. HE was son to a British lord, who, to procure him a virtuous education, placed him in his infancy in the monastery of St. Iltutus in Glamorganshire. The surname of Badonicus was given him, because, as we learn from his writings, he was born in the year in which the Britons under Aurelius Ambrosius, or, according to others, under king Arthur, gained the famous victory over the Saxons at Mount Badon, now Bannesdown, near Bath, in Somersetshire. This Bede places in the forty-fourth year after the first {307} coming of the Saxons into Britain, which was in 451. Our saint, therefore, seems to have been born in 494; he was consequently younger than St. Paul, St. Samson, and his other illustrious school-fellows in Wales: but by his prudence and seriousness in his youth he seemed to have attained to the maturity of judgment and gravity of an advanced age. The author of the life of St. Paul of Leon, calls him the brightest genius of the school of St. Iltut. His application to sacred studies was uninterrupted, and if he arrived not at greater perfection in polite literature, this was owing to the want of masters of that branch in the confusion of those times. As to improve himself in the knowledge of God and himself was the end of all his studies, and all his reading was reduced to the study of the science of the saints, the greater progress he made in learning, the more perfect he became in all virtues. Studies which are to many a source of dissipation, made him more and more recollected, because in all books he found and relished only God, whom alone he sought. Hence sprang that love for holy solitude, which, to his death, was the constant ruling inclination of his heart. Some time after his monastic profession, with the consent, and perhaps by the order of his abbot, St. Iltut, he passed over into Ireland, there to receive the lessons of the admirable masters of a religious life, who had been instructed in the most sublime maxims of an interior life, and formed to the practice of perfect virtue, by the great St. Patrick. The author of his Acts compares this excursion, which he made in the spring of his life, to that of the bees in the season of flowers, to gather the juices which they convert into honey. In like manner St. Gildas learned, from the instructions and examples of the most eminent servants of God, to copy in his own life whatever seemed most perfect. So severe were his continual fasts, that the motto of St. John Baptist might in some degree be applied to him, that he scarce seemed to eat or drink at all. A rough hair-cloth, concealed under a coarse cloak, was his garment, and the bare floor his bed, with a stone for his bolster. By the constant mortification of his natural appetites, and crucifixion of his flesh, his life was a prolongation of his martyrdom, or a perpetual sacrifice which he made of himself to God in union with that which he daily offered to him on his altars. If it be true that he preached in Ireland in the reign of king Ammeric, he must have made a visit to that island from Armorica, that prince only beginning to reign in 560: this cannot be ascribed to St. Gildas the Albanian, who died before that time. It was about the year 527, in the thirty-fourth of his age, that St. Gildas sailed to Armorica, or Brittany, in France:[1] for he wrote his invective ten years {308} after his arrival there, and in the forty-fourth year of his age, as is gathered from his life and writings. Here he chose for the place of his retirement the little isle of Houac, or Houat, between the coast of Rhuis and the island of Bellisle, four leagues from the latter. Houat exceeds not a league in length; the isle of Hoedre is still smaller, not far distant: both are so barren as to yield nothing but a small quantity of corn. Such a solitude, which appeared hideous to others, offered the greatest charms to the saint, who desired to fly, as much as this mortal state would permit, whatever could interrupt his commerce with God. Here he often wanted the common necessaries and conveniences of life; but the greater the privation of earthly comforts was in which he lived, the more abundant were those of the Holy Ghost which he enjoyed, in proportion as the purity of his affections and his love of heavenly things were more perfect. The saint promised himself that he should live here always unknown to men: but it was in vain for him to endeavor to hide the light of divine grace under a bushel, which shone forth to the world, notwithstanding all the precautions which his humility took to conceal it. Certain fishermen who discovered him were charmed with his heavenly deportment and conversation, and made known on the continent the treasure they had found. The inhabitants flocked from the coast to hear the lessons of divine wisdom which the holy anchoret gave with a heavenly unction which penetrated their hearts. To satisfy their importunities, St. Gildas at length consented to live among them on the continent, and built a monastery at Rhuis, in a peninsula of that name, which Guerech, the first lord of the Britons about Vannes, is said to have bestowed upon him. This monastery was soon filled with excellent disciples and holy monks. St. Gildas settled them in good order; then, sighing after closer solitude, he withdrew, and passing beyond the gulf of Vannes, and the promontory of Quiberon, chose for his habitation a grot in a rock, upon the bank of the river Blavet, where he found a cavern formed by nature extended from the east to the west, which on that account he converted into a chapel. However, he often visited this abbey of Rhuis, and by his counsels directed many in the paths of true virtue. Among these was St. Trifina, daughter of Guerech, first British count of Vannes. She was married to count Conomor, lieutenant of king Childebert, a brutish and impious man, who afterwards murdered her, and the young son which he had by her, who at his baptism received the name of Gildas, and was godson to our saint: but he is usually known by the surname of Treuchmeur, or Tremeur, in Latin Trichmorus. SS. Trifina and Treuchmeur are invoked in the English Litany of the seventh century, in Mabillon. The great collegiate church of Carhaix bears the name of St. Treuchmeur: the church of Quimper keeps his feast on the 8th of November, on which day he is commemorated in several churches in Brittany, and at St. Magloire's at Paris. A church situated between Corlai and the abbey of Coetmaloen in Brittany, is dedicated to God tinder the invocation of St. Trifina.[2] St. Gildas wrote eight canons of discipline, and a severe invective against the crimes of the Britons, called De Excidio Britanniæ, that he might confound {309} those whom he was not able to convert, and whom God in punishment delivered first to the plunders of the Picts and Scots, and afterwards to the perfidious Saxons, the fiercest of all nations. He reproaches their kings, Constantine, (king of the Danmonians, in Devonshire and Cornwall,) Vortipor, (of the Dimetians, in South Wales,) Conon, Cuneglas, and Maglocune, princes in other parts of Britain, with horrible crimes: but Constantine was soon after sincerely converted, as Gale informs us from an ancient Welsh chronicle.[3] According to John Fordun[4] he resigned his crown, became a monk, preached the faith to the Scots and Picts, and died a martyr in Kintyre: but the apostle of the Scots seems to have been a little more ancient than the former.[5] Our saint also wrote an invective against the British clergy, whom he accuses of sloth, of seldom sacrificing at the altar, &c. In his retirement he ceased not with tears to recommend to God his own cause, or that of his honor and glory, and the souls of blind sinners, and died in his beloved solitude in the island of Horac, (in Latin Horata,) according to Usher, in 570, but according to Ralph of Disse, in 581.[6] St. Gildas is patron of the city of Vannes. The abbey which bears his name in the peninsula of Rhuis, between three and four leagues from Vannes, is of the reformed congregation of St. Maur since the year 1649. The relics of St. Gildas were carried thence for fear of the Normans into Berry, about the year 919, and an abbey was erected there on the banks of the river Indre, which was secularized and united to the collegiate church of Chateauroux in 1623. St. Gildas is commemorated in the Roman Martyrology on the 29th of January. A second commemoration of him is made in some places on the 11th of May, on account of the translation of his relics. His life, compiled from the ancient archives of Rhuis by a monk of that house, in the eleventh century, is the best account we have of him, though the author confounds him sometimes with St. Gildas the Albanian. It is published in the library of Fleury, in Bollandus, p. 954, and most correctly in Mabillon, Act. SS. Ord. Saint Belled. t. 1, p. 138. See also Dom Lobineau, Vies des Saints de Bretagne, (fol. an. 1725,) p. 72, and Hist. de la {310} Bretagne, (2 vol. fol. an. 1707,) and the most accurate Dom Morice, Mémoires Sur l'Histoire de Bretagne, 3 vol. fol. in 1745, and Hist. de la Bretagne, 2 vol. fol. an. 1750. Footnotes: 1. Armorica, which word in the old Celtic language signified a maritime country, comprised that part of Celtic Gaul which is now divided into Brittany, Lower Normandy, Anjou, Maine, and Touraine. Tours was the capital, and still maintains the metropolitical dignity. By St. Gatian, about the middle of the third century, the faith was first planted in those parts: but the entire extirpation of idolatry was reserved to the zeal of British monks. Dom Morice distinguishes three principal transmigrations of inhabitants from Great Britain into Armorica: the first, when many fled from the arms of Carausius and Allectus, who successively assumed the purple in Great Britain: Constance made these fugitives welcome in Gaul, and allowed them to settle on the coast of Armorica about the year 293. A second and much larger colony of Britons was planted here under Conan, a British prince by Maximus, whom all the British youth followed into Gaul in 383. After the defeat of Maximus, these Armorican Britons chose this Conan, surnamed Meriedec, king, formed themselves into an independent state, and maintained their liberty against several Roman generals in the decline of that empire, and against the Alans, Vandals, Goths, and other barbarians. Des Fontaines, (Diss. p. 118,) and after him Dom Morice. demonstrates that Brittany was an independent state before the year 421. The third transmigration of Britons hither was completed at several intervals while the Saxons invaded and conquered Britain, where Hengist first landed in 470. Brittany was subjected to the Romans during four centuries: an independent state successively under the title of a kingdom, county, and duchy, for the space of about eleven hundred and fifty years, and has been united to the kingdom of France ever since the year 1532, by virtue of the marriage of king Charles VIII. with Anne, sole heiress of Brittany, daughter of duke Francis, celebrated in 1491. This province was subdued by Clovis I., who seems to have treacherously slain Budic, king of Brittany. This prince left six sons, Howel I., Ismael, bishop of Menevia, St. Tifel, honored as a martyr at Pennalun, St. Oudecee, bishop of Landaff, Urbian or Concur, and Dinot, father of St. Kineda. Brittany remained subject to the sons of Clovis, and it was by the authority of Childobert that St. Paul was made bishop of Leon in 512. But Howel, returning from the court of king Arthur in 513, recovered the greater part of these dominions. See Dom Morice, Hist. t. 1, p. 14. Howel I., often called Rioval, that is, king Rowel, was a valiant prince, and liberal to churches and monasteries. Among many sons whom he left behind him, Howel II. succeeded him, and two are honored among the saints, viz. St. Leonor or Lunaire, and St. Tudgual or Pabutual, first Bishop of Treguier. See Morice. t. 1, pp. 14. and 729. Howel III., alias Juthael, recovered all Brittany. King Pepin again conquered this country, and Charlemagne and Louis le Débonnaire quelled it when it thrice rebelled. The latter established the Benedictin rule at Llandevenec. which probably was soon imitated in others: for the monastic rule which first prevailed here was that of the Britons in Wales, borrowed from the Orientals. After the straggles made by this province for its liberty, Charles the Bald yielded it up in 858, and some time after treated Solomon III. as king of Brittany. See Morice, Des Fontaines, &c. 2. In this churchyard stands an ancient pyramid, on which are engraved letters of an unknown alphabet, supposed to be that of the Britons and Gauls before the Roman alphabet was introduced among them. Letters of the same alphabet are found upon some other monuments of Brittany. See Lobineau, Vies des Saints de la Bretagne. in St. Treuchmeur, p. 8. Dom Morice endeavors to prove that the Welsh, the old British, and the Celtic, are the same language. (Hist. t. 1, p. 867.) That they are so in part is unquestionable. 3. Mr. Vaughan, in his British Antiquities revived, printed at Oxford in 1662, shows that there were at this time many princes or chieftains among the Britons in North Wales, but that they all held their lands of one sovereign, though each in his own district was often honored with the title of king. The chief prince at this time was Maelgun Gwynedth, the lineal heir and eldest descendant of Cuneda, who flourished in the end of the fourth, or beginning of the fifth century, and from one or other of whose eight sons all the princes of North Wales, also those of Cardigan, Dimetia, Glamorgan, and others in South Wales, derived their descent. The ancient author, published at the end of Nenbius, says Maelgun began his reign one hundred and forty-six years after Cuaedha, who was his Atavus, or great-grandfather's grandfather. Maelgun was prince only of Venedotia for twenty-five years before he was acknowledged in 564, after the death of Arthur, chief king of the Britons in Wales, while St. David was primate, Arthur king of the Britons in general, Gurthmyll king, and St. Kentigern bishop of the Cumbrian Britons. "He had received a good education under the elegant instructor of almost all Britain," says Gildas, pointing out probably St. Iltutus. Yet he fell into enormous vices. Touched with remorse, he retired into a monastery in 552; but being soon tired of that state, reassumed his crown, and relapsed into his former impieties. He died in 565. Gildas, who wrote his epistle De Excidio Britanniæ, between the years 564 and 570, that of his death, hints that Veralam was then fallen into the hands of the Saxons: which is certain of London, &c. The other princes reprehended by Gildas were lesser toparchs, as Aurelius Canon, Vortipor, Cuneglas, and Constantine. These were chieftains, Vortipor in Pembrokeshire, the rest in some quarter or other of Britain, all living when Gildas wrote. Constantine, whom Gildas represents as a native of Cornwall, and as he is commonly understood, also as prince of that country, did penance. The chief crime imputed to him is the murder of two royal youths in a church, and of two noblemen who had the charge of their education. Those Carte imagines to have been the sons of Caradoc Ureich Uras, who was chief prince of the Cornish Britons in the latter end of king Arthur's reign, as is attested by the author of the Triades. The prelates whom Gildas reproves, were such as Maelgun had promoted: for the sees of South-Wales were at that time filled with excellent prelates, whose virtues Gildas desired to copy. Carte, t. 1, p. 214. 4. Scoti-chron. c. 26. 5. Gildas's epistle, De Excidio Britanniæ, was published extremely incorrect and incomplete, till the learned Thomas Gale gave us a far more accurate and complete edition, t. 3, Scriptor. Britan., which is reprinted with notes by Bertrame in Germany, Hanniæ imp. an. 1757, together with Nennius's history of the Britons, and Richard Corin, of Westminster, De Situ Britanniæ. Gildas's Castigatio Cleri is extant in the library of the fathers, ed. Colon. t. 5, part 3, p. 682. 6. Dom Morice shows that about one hundred and twenty years were an ordinary term of human life among the ancient Britons, and that their usual liquor, called Kwrw, made of barley and water, was a kind of beer, a drink most suitable to the climate and constitutions of the inhabitants. See Dom Morice, Mémoires sur l'Histoire de Bretange, t. 1, preface; and Lamery, Diss. sur les Boissons. ST. GILDAS THE ALBANIAN, OR THE SCOT, C.[1] HIS father, who was called Caunus, and was king of certain southern provinces in North Britain, was slain in war by king Arthur. St. Gildas improved temporal afflictions into the greatest spiritual advantages, and, despising a false and treacherous world, aspired with his whole heart to a heavenly kingdom. Having engaged himself in a monastic state, he retired with St. Cado, abbot of Llan-carvan, into certain desert islands, whence they were driven by pirates from the Orcades. Two islands, called Ronech and Ecni, afforded him for some time a happy retreat, which he forsook to preach to sinners the obligation of doing penance, and to invite all men to the happy state of divine love. After discharging this apostolical function for several years, he retired to the southwest part of Britain into the abbey of Glastenbury, where he died and was buried in 512. William of Malmesbury[2] and John Fordun[3] mention his prophecies and miracles. See F. Alford, an. 512. Dom Lobineau, Saints de Bret. p. 72. Dom Morice, Hist. de Bret. t. 1, in the notes. Footnotes: 1. Mr. Gale has cleared up the dispute about the two Gildases, and demonstrates this to have been a distinct person from the former, which is also proved by Dom Lobineau and Dom Morice. 2. Gul. Malmesb. de Antiq. Glast. 3. Scoti-chron. c. 22. On this day is commemorated in the Roman Martyrology, ST. SABINIANUS of TROYES in CHAMPAGNE, a martyr of the third century. His festival is kept at Troyes on the 24th. See Bollan. 29th Jan. p. 937. Tillem. Hist. des Emp, t. 3, p. 541. Also, ST. SULPICIUS, surnamed SEVERUS, Bishop of Bourges in 591. See Greg. Tour. Hist. Franc. l. 6, c. 39. Gall. Christ. and Ben. XIV. Pref. in Mart. Rom. JANUARY XXX. ST. BATHILDES, QUEEN OF FRANCE. From her life written by a contemporary author, and a second life, which is the same with the former, except certain additions of a later date, in Bollandus and Mabillon, sec. 4, Ben. p. 447, and Act. Sanct. Ben. t. 2. See also Dubois, Hist. Eccl. Paris, p. 198, and Chatelain. Notes on the Martyr. 30 Jan. p. 462. See Historia St. Bathildis et Fundationem ejus, among the MS. lives of saints in the abbey of Jumieges, t. 2. Also her MS. life at Bec, &c. A.D. 680. ST. BATHILDES, or BALDECHILDE, in French Bauteur, was an English-woman, who was carried over very young into France, and there sold for a slave, at a very low price, to Erkenwald, otherwise called Erchinoald, and, Archimbald, mayor of the palace under King Clovis II. When she grew up he was so much taken with her prudence and virtue, that he committed to her the care of his household. She was no ways puffed up, but seemed {311} the more modest, more submissive to her fellow-slaves, and always ready to serve the meanest of them in the lowest offices. King Clovis II. in 649 took her for his royal consort, with the applause of his princes and whole kingdom: such was the renown of her extraordinary endowments. This unexpected elevation, which would have turned the strongest head of a person addicted to pride, produced no alteration in a heart perfectly grounded to humility and other virtues. She seemed even to become more humble than before, and more tender of the poor. Her present station furnished her with the means of being truly their mother, which she was before in the inclination and disposition of her heart. All other virtues appeared more conspicuous in her, but above the rest an ardent zeal for religion. The king gave her the sanction of his royal authority for the protection of the church, the care of the poor, and the furtherance of all religions undertakings. She bore him three sons, who all successively wore the crown, Clotaire III., Childeric II., and Thierry I. He dying in 655, when the eldest was only five years old, left her regent of the kingdom. She seconded the zeal of St. Owen, St. Eligius, and other holy bishops, and with great pains banished simony out of France, forbade Christians to be made slaves,[1] did all in her power to promote piety, and filled France with hospitals and pious foundations. She restored the monasteries of St. Martin, St. Denys, St. Medard, &c., founded the great abbey of Corbie for a seminary of virtue and sacred learning, and the truly royal nunnery of Chelles,[2] on the Marne, which had been begun by St. Clotildis. As soon as her son Clotaire was of an age to govern, she with great joy shut herself up in this monastery of Chelles, in 665, a happiness which she had long earnestly desired, though it was with great difficulty that she obtained the consent of the princes. She had no sooner taken the veil but she seemed to have forgotten entirely her former dignity, and was only to be distinguished from the rest by her extreme humility, serving them in the lowest offices, and obeying the holy abbess St. Bertilla as the last among the sisters. She prolonged her devotions every day with many tears, and made it her greatest delight {312} to visit and attend the sick, whom she comforted and served with wonderful charity. St. Owen, in his life of St. Eligius, mentions many instances of the great veneration which St. Bathildes bore that holy prelate, and relates that St. Eligius, after his death, in a vision by night, ordered a certain courtier to reprove the queen for wearing jewels and costly apparel in her widowhood, which she did not out of pride, but because she thought it due to her state while she was regent of the kingdom. Upon this admonition, she laid them aside, distributed a great part to the poor, and with the richest of her jewels made a most beautiful and sumptuous cross, which she placed at the head of the tomb of St. Eligius. She was afflicted with long and severe colics and other pains, which she suffered with an admirable resignation and joy. In her agony she recommended to her sisters charity, care of the poor, fervor, and perseverance, and gave up her soul in devout prayer, on the 30th of January, in 680, on which day she is honored in France, but is named on the 26th in the Roman Martyrology. * * * * * A Christian, who seriously considers that he is to live here but a moment, and will live eternally in the world to come, must confess that it is a part of wisdom to refer all his actions and views to prepare himself for that everlasting dwelling, which is his true country. Our only and necessary affair is to live for God, to do his will, and to sanctify and save our souls. If we are employed in a multiplicity of exterior business, we must imitate St. Bathildes, when she bore the whole weight of the state. In all we do God and his holy will must be always before our eyes, and to please him must be our only aim and desire. Shunning the anxiety of Martha, and reducing all our desires to this one of doing what God requires of us, we must with her call in Mary to our assistance. In the midst of action, while our hands are at work, our mind and heart ought to be interiorly employed on God, at least virtually, that all our employments may be animated with the spirit of piety: and hours of repose must always be contrived to pass at the feet of Jesus, where in the silence of all creatures we may listen to his sweet voice, refresh in him our wearied souls, and renew our fervor. While we converse with the world, we must tremble at the sight of its snares, and be upon our guard that we never be seduced so far as to be in love with it, or to learn its spirit. To love the world, is to follow its passions; to be proud, covetous, and sensual, as the world is. The height of its miseries and dangers, is that blindness by which none who are infected with its spirit, see their misfortune, or are sensible of their disease. Happy are they who can imitate this holy queen in entirely separating themselves from it! Footnotes: 1. The Franks, when they established themselves in Gaul, allowed the Roman Gauls to live according to their own laws and customs, and tolerated their use of slaves, but gradually mitigated their servitude. Queen Bathildes alleviated the heaviest conditions, gave great numbers their liberty, and declared all capable of property. The Franks still retained slaves with this condition, attached to certain manors or farms, and bound to certain particular kinds of servitude. The kings of the second race often set great numbers free, and were imitated by other lords. Queen Blanche and Saint Lewis contributed more than any others to ease the condition of vassals, and Louis Hutin abolished slavery in France, declaring all men free who live in that kingdom according to the spirit of Christianity, which teaches us to treat all men as our brethren. See the life of St. Bathildes, and Gratigny, [OE]vres posthumes, an. 1757. Disc. sur la Servitude et son Abolition en France. 2. In the village of Chelles, in Latin Cala, four leagues from Paris, the kings of the first race had a palace. St. Clotildis founded near it a small church under the invocation of St. George, with a small number of cells adjoining for nuns. St. Bathildes so much enlarged this monastery as to be looked upon as the principal foundress. The old church of St. George falling to decay, Saint Bathildes built there the magnificent church of the Holy Cross, in which she was buried. Gisela, sister to the emperor Charlemagne, abbess of this house, rebuilt the great church, which some pretend to be the same that is now standing. At present here are three churches together; the first, which is small, the oldest, and only a choir, is called the church of the Holy Cross, and is used by six monks who assist the nuns; the lowest church is called St. George's, and is a parochial church for the seculars who live within the jurisdiction of the monastery: the great church which serves the nuns is dedicated under the invocation of the Blessed Virgin, and is said to be the same that was built by the abbess Gisela, and much enlarged and enriched by Hegilvich, abbess of this monastery, mother to the empress Judith, whose husband, Louis le Débonnaire, caused the remains of our saint to be translated into this new church, in 833, and from this treasure it is more frequently called the church of St. Bathlides, than our Lady's. Two rich silver shrines are placed over the iron rails of the chancel, in one of which rest the sacred remains of St. Bathildes, in the other those of St. Bertilla, first abbess of Chelles: these rails, which are of admirable workmanship, were the present of an illustrious princess of the house of Bourbon, Mary Adelaide of Orleans, abbess of this house in 1725, who not thinking her sacrifice complete by having renounced the world, after some years abdicated her abbacy, and died in the condition of humble obedience, and of a private religious woman, near the shrines of SS. Bathildes and Bertilla, and those of St. Genesius of Lyons, St. Eligius and Radegondes of Chelles, called also little St. Bathildes. The last-mentioned princess was god-daughter to our saint, and died in her childhood, in this monastery, two or three days before her. See Piganiol's Descr. de Paris, t. 1 and S. Chatelain's notes in martyr. p. 464, and especially Le Boeuf, Hist. du Diocese de Paris, t. 6, p. 32. This author gives (p. 43) the full relation of a miracle approved by John Francis Gondy, archbishop of Paris, mentioned in a few words by Mabillon and Baillet. Six nuns were cured of inveterate distempers, attended with frequent fits of convulsions, by touching the relics of Saint Bathildes, when her shrine was opened on the 13th of July, in 1631. ST. MARTINA, V.M. SHE was a noble Roman virgin, who glorified God, suffering many torments and a cruel death for his faith, in the capital city of the world, in the third century. There stood a chapel consecrated to her memory in Rome, which was frequented with great devotion in the time of St. Gregory the Great. Her relics were discovered in a vault, in the ruins of her old church, and translated with great pomp in the year 1634, under the pope Urban VIII., who built a new church in her honor, and composed himself the hymns used in her office in the Roman Breviary. The city of Rome ranks her among its particular patrons. She is mentioned in the Martyrologies of Ado, Usuard, &c. The history of the discovery of her relics was published by Honoratus of Viterbo, an Oratorian. See Bollandus. {313} ST. ALDEGONDES, V. ABBESS. SHE was daughter of Walbert, of the royal blood of France, and born in Hainault about the year 630. She consecrated herself to God by a vow of virginity, when very young, and resisted all solicitations to marriage, serving God in the house of her holy parents, till, in 638, she took the religious veil, and founded and governed a great house of holy virgins at Maubeuge.[1] She was favored with an eminent gift of prayer, and many revelations; but was often tried by violent slanders and persecutions, which she looked upon as the highest favors of the divine mercy, begging of God that she might be found worthy to suffer still more for his sake. His divine providence sent her a lingering and most painful cancer in her breast. The saint bore the torture of her distemper, also the caustics and incisions of the surgeons, not only with patience, but even with joy, and expired in raptures of sweet love, on the 30th of January, in 660, according to Bollandus. Her relics are enshrined in the great church of Maubeuge, where her monastery is now a college of noble virgins canonesses. Her name occurs on this day in the ancient breviary of Autun, and in the martyrologies of Rabanus, Usuard, and Notker: also in the Roman. At St. Omer, where a parish church bears her name, she is called Saint Orgonne. See her life written some time after her death: a second a century later, and a third by Hucbald, a learned monk of St. Armand's, in 900, with the remarks of Mabillon, (Act. Bened. t. 2, p. 937,) and the Bollandists. Consult also Miræus's Fasti Belgici, and La Vie de St. Aldegonde, par P. Binet, Jesuite, in 12mo. Paris, 1625. Footnotes: 1. The act of this foundation, published by Miræus, is spurious, as mention is made therein of persons who were not living at that time: neither could it have been made in the twentieth year of Dagobert, as it contains facts which cannot be reconciled with the history of that prince. See the note of Bollandus, t. 2, p. 1039, and Chatelain, p 461. ST. BARSIM�US, B.M. CALLED BY THE SYRIANS BARSAUMAS. HE was the third bishop of Edessa from St. Thaddæus, one of the seventy-two disciples. St. Barsaumas was crowned with martyrdom, being condemned to die for his zeal in converting great multitudes to the faith, by the president Lysias, in the reign of Trajan, when that prince, having passed the Euphrates, made the conquest of Mesopotamia in 114. St. Barsimæus is mentioned on the 30th of January in the Roman Martyrology, and in the Greek Mænology. {314} JANUARY XXXI. SAINT PETER NOLASCO, C. FOUNDER OF THE ORDER OF OUR LADY FOR THE REDEMPTION OF CAPTIVES. From Chronica Sacri et Militaris Ordinis B.M. de Mercede, per Bern. de Vargas, ej. Ord. 2 vol. in fol. Panormi, 1622, and by John de Latomis in 12mo. in 1621, and especially the Spanish history of the same by Alonso Roman, 2 vol. fol. at Madrid, in 1618, and the life of the saint compiled in Italian by F. Francis Olihano, in 4to. 1668. See also Baillet, and Hist. des Ordres Relig. par Helyot, and Hist de l'Ordre de Notre Dame de la Merci, par les RR. Pères de la Merci, de la Congrégation de Paris, fol. printed at Amiens, in 1685. A.D. 1258. PETER, of the noble family of Nolasco, in Languedoc, was born in the diocese of St. Papoul, about the year 1189. His parents were very rich, but far more illustrious for their virtue. Peter, while an infant, cried at the sight of a poor man, till something was given him to bestow on the object of his compassion. In his childhood he gave to the poor whatever he received for his own use. He was exceeding comely and beautiful; but innocence and virtue were his greatest ornaments. It was his pious custom to give a very large alms to the first poor man he met every morning, without being asked. He rose at midnight, and assisted at matins in the church, as then the more devout part of the laity used to do, together with all the clergy. At the age of fifteen he lost his father, who left him heir to a great estate: and he remained at home under the government of his pious mother, who brought him up in extraordinary sentiments and practices of virtue. Being solicited to marry, he betook himself to the serious consideration of the vanity of all earthly things; and rising one night full of those thoughts, prostrated himself in fervent prayer, which he continued till morning, most ardently devoting himself to God in the state of celibacy, and dedicating his whole patrimony to the promoting of his divine honor. He followed Simon of Montfort, general of the holy war against the Albigenses, an heretical sect, which had filled Languedoc with great cruelties, and over spread it with universal desolation. That count vanquished them, and in the battle of Muret defeated and killed Peter, king of Aragon, and took his son James prisoner, a child of six years old. The conqueror having the most tender regard and compassion for the prince his prisoner, appointed Peter Nolasco, then twenty-five years old, his tutor, and sent them both together into Spain. Peter, in the midst of the court of the king at Barcelona,[1] where the kings of Aragon resided, led the life of a recluse, practising the austerities of a cloister. He gave no part of his time to amusements, but spent all the moments which the instruction of his pupil left free, in holy prayer, meditation, and pious reading. The Moors at that time were possessed of a considerable part of Spain, and great numbers of Christians groaned under their tyranny in a miserable slavery both there and in Africa. Compassion for the poor had always been the distinguishing virtue of Peter. The sight of so many moving objects in captivity, and the consideration of the spiritual dangers to which their faith and virtue stood exposed under their Mahometan masters, touched his heart to the quick, and he soon spent his whole estate in redeeming as many as he could. Whenever he saw {315} any poor Christian slaves, he used to say: "Behold eternal treasures which never fail." By his discourses he moved others to contribute large alms towards this charity, and at last formed a project for instituting a religious order for a constant supply of men and means whereby to carry on so charitable an undertaking. This design met with great obstacles in the execution, but the Blessed Virgin, the true mother of mercy, appearing to St. Peter, the king, and St. Raymund of Pennafort, in distinct visions the same night, encouraged them to prosecute the holy scheme under the assurance of her patronage and protection. St. Raymund was the spiritual director both of St. Peter and of the king, and a zealous promoter of this charitable work. The king declared himself the protector of the Order, and assigned them a large quarter of his own palace for their abode. All things being settled for laying the foundation of it, on the feast of St. Laurence, in the year 1223, the king and St. Raymund conducted St. Peter to the church and presented him to Berengarius, the bishop of Barcelona, who received his three solemn religious vows, to which the saint added a fourth, to devote his whole substance and his very liberty, if necessary, to the ransoming of slaves; the like vow he required of all his followers. St. Raymund made an edifying discourse on the occasion, and declared from the pulpit, in the presence of this august assembly, that it had pleased Almighty God to reveal to the king, to Peter Nolasco, and to himself, his will for the institution of an Order for the redemption of the faithful, detained in bondage among the infidels. This was received by the people with the greatest acclamations of joy, happy presages of the future success of the holy institute.[2] After this discourse, St. Peter received the new habit (as Mariana and pope Clement VIII. in his bull say) from St. Raymund, who established him first general of this new Order, and drew up for it certain rules and constitutions. Two other gentlemen were professed at the same time with St. Peter. When St. Raymund went to Rome, he obtained from pope Gregory IX., in the year 1225, the confirmation of this Order, and of the rule and constitutions he had drawn up. He wrote an account of this from Rome to St. Peter, informing him how well pleased his Holiness was with the wisdom and piety of the institute. The religious chose a white habit, to put them continually in mind of innocence: they wear a scapular, which is likewise white: but the king would oblige them, for his sake, to bear the royal arms of Aragon, which are interwoven on their habit upon the breast. Their numbers increasing very fast, the saint petitioned the king for another house; who, on this occasion, built for them, in 1232, a magnificent convent at Barcelona.[3] King James having conquered the kingdom of Valencia, founded in it several rich convents; one was in the city of Valencia, which was taken by the aid of the prayers of St. Peter, when the soldiers had despaired of {316} success, tired out by the obstinacy of the besieged and strength of the place. In thanksgiving for this victory, the king built the rich monastery in the royal palace of Uneza, near the same city, on a spot where an image of our Lady was dug up, which is still preserved in the church of this convent end is famous for pilgrimages. It is called the monastery of our Lady of mercy del Puche.[4] That prince attributed to the prayers of Saint Peter thirty great victories which he obtained over the infidels, and the entire conquest of the two kingdoms of Valencia and Murcia. St. Peter, after his religious profession, renounced all his business at court, and no entreaties of the king could ever after prevail with him to appear there but once, and this was upon a motive of charity to reconcile two powerful noblemen, who by their dissension had divided the whole kingdom, and kindled a civil war. The saint ordained that two members of the Order should be sent together among the infidels, to treat about the ransom of Christian slaves, and they are hence called Ransomers. One of the two first employed in this pious work was our saint; and the kingdom of Valencia was the first place that was blessed with his labors; the second was that of Granada. He not only comforted and ransomed a great number of captives, but by his charity and other rare virtues, was the happy instrument of inducing many of the Mahometans to embrace the faith of Christ. He made several other journeys to the coasts of Spain, besides a voyage to Algiers, where, among other sufferings, he underwent imprisonment for the faith. But the most terrifying dangers could never make him desist from his pious endeavors for the conversion of the infidels, burning with a holy desire of martyrdom. He begged earnestly of his Order to be released from the burden of his generalship: but by his tears could only obtain the grant of a vicar to assist him in the discharge of it. He employed himself in the meanest offices of his convent, and coveted above all things to have the distribution of the daily alms at the gate of the monastery: he at the same time instructed the poor in the knowledge of God and in virtue. St. Louis IX. of France wrote frequently to him, and desired much to see him. The saint waited on him in Languedoc, in the year 1243, and the king, who tenderly embraced him, requested him to accompany him in his expedition to recover the Holy Land. St. Peter earnestly desired it, but was hindered by sickness, with which he was continually afflicted during the last years of his life, the effect of his fatigues and austerities, and he bore it with incomparable patience. In 1249, he resigned the offices of Ransomer and General, which was six or seven years before his death. This happened on Christmas-day, in 1256. In his agony, he tenderly exhorted his religious to perseverance, and concluded with those words of the psalmist: _Our Lord hath sent redemption to his people; he hath commanded his covenant forever_.[5] He then recommended his soul to God by that charity with which Christ came from heaven to redeem us from the captivity of the devil, and melting into tears of compunction and divine love, he expired, being in the sixty-seventh year of his age. His relics are honored by many miracles. He was canonized by pope Urban VIII. His festival was appointed by Clement VIII. to be kept on the 31st of January. * * * * * Charity towards all mankind was a distinguishing feature in the character of the saints. This benevolent virtue so entirely possessed their hearts, that they were constantly disposed to sacrifice even their lives to the relief and assistance of others. Zealously employed in removing their temporal necessities, they labored with redoubled vigor to succor their spiritual wants, {317} by rooting out from their souls the dominion of sin, and substituting in its room the kingdom of God's grace. Ingratitude and ill-treatment, which was the return they frequently met with for their charitable endeavors, were not able to allay their ardent zeal: they considered men on these occasions as patients under the pressure of diseases, more properly the object of compassion than of resentment. They recommended them to God in their private devotions, and earnestly besought his mercy in their favor. This conduct of the saints, extraordinary as it is, ceases to appear surprising when we recollect the powerful arguments our Blessed Saviour made use of to excite us to the love of our neighbor. But how shall we justify our unfeeling hard-heartedness, that seeks every trifling pretence to exempt us from the duty of succoring the unfortunate? Have we forgot that Jesus Christ our Redeemer, who alone hath bestowed on us whatever we possess, hath made charity towards our fellow-creature, but especially towards the needy, an indispensable precept? Do we not know that he bids us consider the suffering poor as members of the same head, heirs of the same promises, as our brethren and his children who represent him on earth? He declares, that whatever we bestow upon them he will esteem it as given to himself; and pledges his sacred word that he will reward our alms with an eternity of bliss. Such motives, says St. Chrysostom, would be sufficient to touch a heart of stone: but there is something still more cogent, continues the same holy father, which is, that the same Jesus Christ, whom we refuse to nourish in the persons of the poor, feeds our souls with his precious body and blood. If such considerations move not our hearts to commiserate and assist the indigent, what share of mercy and relief can we hope for in the hour of need? Oh, incomprehensible blindness! we perhaps prepare for ourselves an eternal abyss, by those very means which, properly applied, would secure as the conquest of a kingdom which will never have an end.[6] Footnotes: 1. A century before, the counts of Barcelona were become kings of Aragon by a female title, and had joined Catalonia to Aragon, making Barcelona their chief residence and capital. 2. F. Tonron, in the life of St. Raymund, p. 20, quotes an original letter of St. Raymund, which mentions this revelation. The authenticity of this letter cannot be called in question, being proved by F. Bremond, Bullar. Ord. Præd. t. 1, not. in Constit. 36, Greg. X. The same revelation is inserted in the bull of the saint's canonization, in the Histories of Zumel, Vargas, Penia, &c. Benedict XIV. also mentions it, Canoniz. SS. l. 1, c. 41, and proves that it cannot reasonably be contested. 3. This Order consisted at first of some knights, who were dressed like seculars, wearing only a scarf or scapular; and of friars who were in holy orders, and attended the choir. The knights were to guard the coast against the Saracens, but were obliged to choir when not on duty. St. Peter himself was never ordained priest; and the first seven generals or commanders were chosen out of the knights, though the friars were always more numerous. Raymond Albert, in 1317. was the first priest who was raised to that dignity; and the popes Clement V., and John XXII., ordered that the general should be always a priest after which, the knight were incorporated into other military Orders, or were rarely renewed. It is styled, "The royal military religious Order of our Lady of Mercy for the redemption of Captives." It is divided into commanderies, which in Spain are very rich. It has eight provinces in America, three in Spain, and one, the poorest, in the southern part of France, called the province of Guienne. Whereas this Order is not bound to many extraordinary domestic austerities, a reformation, obliging the members to go barefoot, was established among them in the sixteenth century, and approved by pope Clement VIII. It observes the strictest poverty, recollection, solitude, and abstinence, and has two provinces in Spain, and one in Sicily, besides several nunneries. It was erected by F. John Baptist Gonzales, or of the holy sacrament, who died in the year 1{}18, and is said to have been honored with miracles. 4. Podoniensis. 5. Ps. cx. 9. 6. S. Chrys. Hom. in illud: Vidua eligatur, &c. t. 3, p. 397. Ed. Ben. ST. SERAPION, M. HE was a zealous Englishman, whom St. Peter Nolasco received into his Order at Barcelona. He made two journeys among the Moors for the ransom of captives, in 1240. The first was to Murcia, in which he purchased the liberty of ninety-eight slaves: the second to Algiers, in which he redeemed eighty-seven, but remained himself a hostage for the full payment of the money. He boldly preached Christ to the Mahometans, and baptized several: for which he was cruelly tortured, scourged, cut and mangled, at length fastened to a cross, and was thereon stabbed and quartered alive in the same year, 1240. Pope Benedict XIII. declared him a martyr, and proved his immemorial veneration in his Order, by a decree in 1728, as Benedict XIV. relates. L. 2, de Canoniz. c. 24, p. 296. SS. CYRUS AND JOHN, MM. CYRUS, a physician of Alexandria, who by the opportunities which his profession gave him, had converted many sick persons to the faith; and John, an Arabian, hearing that a lady called Athanasia, and her three daughters, of which the eldest was only fifteen years of age, suffered torments for the name of Christ at Canope in Egypt, went thither to encourage them. They were apprehended themselves, and cruelly beaten: their sides {318} were burnt with torches, and salt and vinegar poured into their wounds in the presence of Athanasia and her daughters, who were also tortured after them. At length the four ladies, and a few days after, Cyrus and John, were beheaded, the two latter on this day. The Syrians, Egyptians, Greeks, and Latins, honor their memory. See their acts[1] by St. Sophronius commended in the seventh general council, and published with remarks by Bollandus. Footnotes: 1. St. Cyrus is the same as Abba-Cher, mentioned in the Coptic calendar on this day, which is the 8th of their month Mechir. He is called Abbacyrus in the life of St. John the Almoner, written by Leontius, in many ancient Martyrologies, and other monuments of antiquity. Abbacyrus is a Chaldaic word, signifying the Father Cyr. As this saint was an Egyptian, it is probable he was originally called Pa-Cher, or Pa-Cyrus, the Egyptians having been accustomed to prefix the article Pa to the names of men, as we see in Pa-chomis, Pa-phantis, Pa-phantis, &c. It is said in the acts of our two martyrs, that they were buried at Canopus, twelve furlongs from Alexandria, and that their relics were afterwards translated to Manutha, a village near Canopus, which was celebrated for a great number of miracles wrought there. These relies are now in a church at Rome called Sant' Apassara: this word being corrupted by the Italians from Abbacyrus. Formerly there were many churches in that city dedicated under the invocation of these two holy martyrs. See Chatelain, notes on the Rom. Mart, p. 469, et seq. ST. MARCELLA, WIDOW. SHE IS styled by St. Jerom the glory of the Roman ladies. Having lost her husband in the seventh month of her marriage, she rejected the suit of Cerealis the consul, uncle of Gallus Cæsar, and resolved to imitate the lives of the ascetics of the East. She abstained from wine and flesh, employed all her time in pious reading, prayer, and visiting the churches of the apostles and martyrs, and never spoke with any man alone. Her example was followed by many virgins of the first quality, who put themselves under her direction, and Rome was in a short time filled with monasteries. We have eleven letters of St. Jerom to her in answer to her religious queries. The Goths under Alaric plundered Rome in 410. St. Marcella was scourged by them for the treasures which she had long before distributed among the poor. All that time she trembled only for her dear spiritual pupil, Principia (not her daughter, as some have reputed her by mistake,) and falling at the feet of the cruel soldiers, she begged, with many tears, that they would offer her no insult. God moved them to compassion. They conducted them both to the church of St. Paul, to which Alaric had granted the right of sanctuary with that of St. Peter. St. Marcella, who survived this but a short time, which she spent in tears, prayers, and thanksgiving, closed her eyes by a happy death, in the arms of St. Principia, about the end of August, in 410, but her name occurs in the Roman Martyrology on the 31st of January. See St. Jerom, Ep. 96, ol. 16, ad Principiam, t. 4, p. 778. Ed. Ben. Baronius ad ann. 410, and Bollandus, t. 2, p. 1105. ST. MAIDOC, OR MAODHOG, CALLED ALSO AIDAN AND MOGUE, BISHOP OF FERNS, IN IRELAND. HE was born in Connaught, a province of Ireland, and seemed from his infancy to be deeply impressed with the fear of God. He passed in his early days into Wales, where he lived for a considerable time under the direction of the holy abbot David. He returned afterwards to his own country, accompanied with several monks of eminent piety, founded a great number of churches and monasteries, and was made bishop of Ferns. He {319} died in 632, according to Usher. His name is celebrated among the Irish saints. It appears from Cambrensis that his festival was observed in Wales in the twelfth century. He was also honored in Scotland.[1] See Colgan, Jan. 31, pp. 208, 223. Chatelain, notes, p. 481. Footnotes: 1. There is found in the chronicle of Scone, and in the Breviary of Aberdeen, an ancient collect, in which the Divine mercy is implored through his intercession. Chatelain tells us that in Lower Brittany he is called St. De, (contracted from the Latin word Aideus, or Aidanus,) and that the village and church which bear his name, celebrate his festival on the 18th of March, the day perhaps on which they received some portion of his relics. {320 blank page} {321} _Only Complete and Unabridged Edition with nearly 100 pages of Chronological and General Index, Alphabetical and Centenary Table, etc._ THE LIVES OF THE FATHERS, MARTYRS, AND OTHER PRINCIPAL SAINTS; COMPILED FROM ORIGINAL MONUMENTS, AND OTHER AUTHENTIC RECORDS; ILLUSTRATED WITH THE REMARKS OF JUDICIOUS MODERN CRITICS AND HISTORIANS, BY THE REV. ALBAN BUTLER. _With the approbation of MOST REV. M. A. CORRIGAN, D.D., Archbishop of New York._ VOL. II. NEW YORK: P.J. KENEDY, PUBLISHER TO THE HOLY SEE, EXCELSIOR CATHOLIC PUBLISHING HOUSE, 5 BARCLAY STREET. 1903. {322 blank page} {323} /* CONTENTS. FEBRUARY. 1. PAGE St. IGNATIUS, Bishop of Antioch, Martyr........ 325 St. Pionius, Priest and Martyr................. 333 St. Bridget, Virgin and Abbess, Patroness of Ireland...................................... 334 St Kinnia, Virgin, of Ireland.................. 334 St. Sigebert, King of Austrasia, Confessor..... 337 2. The Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary.... 337 St. Laurence, Archbishop of Canterbury......... 342 3. St Blaze, Bishop and Martyr.................... 343 St. Anscharius, Archbishop of Hamburgh and Bremen, Confessor............................ 344 St. Wereburge, Virgin and Abbess, in England, Patroness of Chester......................... 345 St. Margaret, Virgin in England................ 348 4. St. Andrew Corsini, Bishop and Confessor....... 349 St. Phileas and Philoromus, Bishop of Thmuis, Martyrs...................................... 351 St. Gilbert, Abbot, Founder of the Gilbertins.. 353 St. Jean, or Joan, of Valois, Queen of France.. 353 St. Isidore of Pelusium, Priest................ 354 St Rembert, Archbishop of Bremen, Confessor.... 355 St. Modan, Abbot in Scotland, Confessor........ 355 St. Joseph of Leonissa, Confessor.............. 356 5. St. Agatha, Virgin and Martyr.................. 357 The Martyrs of Japan........................... 359 Appendix to the Martyrs of China............... 362 SS. Martyrs of Pontus, under Dioclesian........ 366 St. Avitus, Archbishop of Vienne, Confessor.... 366 St. Alice, or Adelaide, Virgin and Abbess...... 366 St. Abraamius, Bishop of Arbela, Martyr........ 367 6. St. Dorothy, Virgin and Martyr................. 367 St. Vedast, Bishop of Arras, Confessor......... 368 St. Amandus, Bishop and Confessor.............. 369 St. Barsanuphius, Anchoret..................... 370 7. St. Romuald, Abbot and Confessor, Founder of the Order of Camaldoli....................... 370 St. Richard, King in England, and Confessor.... 377 St. Theodorus, of Heraclea, Martyr............. 377 St. Tresain, or Tresanus, Priest and Confessor. 378 St. Augulus, Bishop in England, and Martyr..... 379 8. St. John of Matha, Confessor, Founder of the Order of Trinitarians........................ 379 St. Stephen of Grandmont, Abbot................ 382 Appendix to the Life of St. Stephen............ 384 St. Paul, Bishop of Verdun, Confessor.......... 384 St. Cuthman, in England, Confessor............. 385 9. St. Apollonia, Virgin and Martyr............... 388 St. Nicephorus, Martyr......................... 388 St. Theliau, Bishop in England, and Confessor.. 489 St. Ansbert, Archbishop of Rouen in 695, Confessor.................................... 390 St. Attracta, or Tarahata, Virgin, in Ireland.. 390 St. Erhard, Abbot and Confessor, native of Scotland..................................... 390 10. St. Scholastica, Virgin........................ 391 St. Soteris, Virgin and Martyr................. 393 St. William of Maleval, Hermit, and Institutor of the Order of Gulielmites.................. 393 St. Erlulph, Bishop and Martyr, native of Scotland..................................... 305 11. SS. Saturninus, Dativus, and others, Martyrs of Africa....................................... 395 St. Severinus, Abbot of Agaunum................ 397 St. Theodora, Empress.......................... 398 12. St. Benedict of Anian, Abbot................... 398 St. Meletius, Patriarch of Antioch, Confessor.. 401 St. Eulalia, Virgin, of Barcelona, Martyr...... 405 St. Antony Cauleas, Patriarch of Constantinople, Confessor.................... 405 13. St. Catharine de Ricci, Virgin................. 406 St. Licinius, Bishop of Angers, Confessor...... 408 St. Polyeuctus, Martyr......................... 409 St. Gregory II., Pope and Confessor............ 410 St. Martinianus, Hermit at Athens.............. 412 St. Modomnoc, or Dominick, of Ossory, Bishop and Confessor................................ 413 St. Stephen, Abbot............................. 413 B. Roger, Abbot and Confessor.................. 413 14. St. Valentine, Priest and Martyr............... 413 St. Maro, Abbot................................ 414 St. Abraames, Bishop of Carres................. 415 St. Auxentius, Hermit.......................... 415 St. Conran, Bishop of Orkney, Confessor........ 416 15. SS. Faustinus and Jovita, Martyrs.............. 416 St. Sigefride, or Sigfrid, Bishop. Apostle of Sweden....................................... 417 16. St. Onesimus, Disciple of St. Paul............. 418 SS. Elias, Jeremy, Isaias, Samuel, Daniel, and other Holy Martyrs at Cæsarea, in Palestine. 419 St. Juliana, Virgin and Martyr................. 420 St. Gregory X., Pope and Confessor............. 420 St. Tanco, or Tatta, Bishop and Martyr, native of Scotland.................................. 422 {324} 17. St. Flavian, Archbishop of Constantinople, Martyr....................................... 422 SS. Theodulus and Julian, Martyrs.............. 425 St. Silvin of Auchy, Bishop and Confessor...... 426 St. Loman, or Luman, Bishop in Ireland, Confessor.................................... 426 St. Fintan, Abbot of Cluian-Ednech, in Ireland. 427 18. St. Simeon, Bishop of Jerusalem, Martyr........ 427 SS. Leo and Paregorius, Martyrs................ 429 19. St. Barbatus, or Barbas, Bishop of Benevento, Confessor.................................... 431 20. SS. Tyrannio, Bishop of Tyre, Zenobius, and other Martyrs in Phoenicia................... 433 St. Sadoth, Bishop of Seleucia and Ctesiphon, with 128 Companions, Martyrs................. 434 St. Eleutherius, Bishop of Tourney, Martyr..... 436 St. Mildred, Virgin and Abbess................. 436 St. Eucherius, Bishop of Orleans, Confessor.... 437 St. Ulrick, Recluse in England................. 438 21. St. Severianus, Bishop of Scythopolis, Martyr.. 439 SS. German, Abbot of Granfel, and Randaut, Martyrs...................................... 440 SS. Daniel, Priest, and Verde, Virgin, Martyrs. 441 B. Pepin of Landen, Mayor of the Palace........ 441 22. The Chair of St. Peter, at Antioch............. 442 St. Margaret of Cortona, Penitent.............. 443 SS. Thalassius and Limneus, Confessors......... 444 St. Baradat, Confessor......................... 444 23. St. Serenas, a Gardener, Martyr................ 445 St. Milburge, Virgin in England................ 447 St. Dositheus, Monk............................ 447 B. Peter Damian, Cardinal, Bishop of Ostia..... 448 St. Boisil, Prior of Melross, Confessor........ 431 24. St. Matthias, Apostle.......................... 453 SS. Montanus, Lucius, Flavian, Julian, Victoricus, Primolus, Rhenus, and Donatian, Martyrs at Carthage.......................... 453 St. Lethard, Bishop of Senlis, Confessor....... 459 B. Robert, of Arbrissel, Priest................ 459 St. Pretextatus, or Prix, Archbishop of Rouen, Martyr....................................... 460 St. Ethelbert, Confessor, First Christian King among the English............................ 462 25. St. Tarasius, Patriarch of Constantinople, Confessor.................................... 463 St. Victorinus, and Six Companions, Martyrs.... 468 St. Walburge, Abbess in England................ 469 St. Cæsarius, Physician, Confessor............. 470 St. Alexander, Patriarch of Alexandria, Confessor.................................... 470 St. Porphyrius, Bishop of Gaza, Confessor...... 473 St. Victor, or Vittre, of Arcis in Champagne, Anchoret and Confessor....................... 477 26. St. Leander, Bishop of Seville, Confessor...... 478 SS. Julian, Chronion, and Besas, Martyrs ...... 480 St. Thalilæus, a Cilician, Recluse in Syria.... 481 St. Galmier, of Lyons.......................... 481 St. Nestor, Bishop and Martyr.................. 481 St. Alnoth, Anchoret and Martyr................ 482 28. Martyrs who died in the Great Pestilence in Alexandria................................... 482 St. Proterius, Patriarch of Alexandria, Martyr. 482 SS. Romanus and Lupicinus, Abbots.............. 484 29. St. Oswald, Bishop of Worcester, and Archbishop of York........................... 484 */ {325} FEBRUARY I. ST. IGNATIUS, BISHOP OF ANTIOCH, M. From his genuine epistles; also from the acts of his martyrdom, St. Chrys. Hom. In St. Ignat. M. t. 3, p. {}{9}2. Ed. Nov. Eusebius. See Tillemont, t. 2, p. 191. Cave, t. 1, p. 100. Dom Ceillier. Dom Marechal Concordance des Pères Grecs et Latins, t. 1, p. 58. A.D. 107. ST. IGNATIUS, surnamed Theophorus,[1] a word implying a divine or heavenly person, was a zealous convert and an intimate disciple of St. John the Evangelist, as his acts assure us; also the apostles SS. Peter and Paul, who united their labors in planting the faith at Antioch.[2] It was by their direction that he succeeded Evodius in the government of that important see, as we are told by St. Chrysostom,[3] who represents him as a perfect model of virtue in that station, in which he continued upwards of forty years. During the persecution of Domitian, St. Ignatius defended his flock by prayer, fasting, and daily preaching the word of God. He rejoiced to see peace restored to the church on the death of that emperor, so far as this calm might be beneficial to those committed to his charge: but was apprehensive that he had not attained to the perfect love of Christ, nor the dignity of a true disciple, because he had not as yet been called to seal the truth of his religion with his blood, an honor he somewhat impatiently longed for. The peaceable reign of Nerva lasted only fifteen months. The governors of several provinces renewed the persecution under Trajan his successor: and it appears from Trajan's letter to Pliny the younger, governor of Bithynia, that the Christians were ordered to be put to death, if accused; but it was forbid to make any inquiry after them. That emperor sullied his clemency and bounty, and his other pagan virtues, by incest with his sister, by an excessive vanity, which procured him the surname of Parietmus, (or dauber of every wall with the inscriptions of his name and actions,) and by blind superstition, which rendered him a persecutor of the true followers of virtue, out of a notion of gratitude to his imaginary deities, especially after his victories over the Daci and Scythians in 101 and 105. In the year 106, which was the ninth of his reign, he set out for the East on an expedition {326} against the Parthians, and made his entry into Antioch on the 7th of January, 107, with the pomp of a triumph. His first concern was about the affair of religion and worship of the gods, and for this reason he resolved to compel the Christians either to acknowledge their divinity and sacrifice to them, or suffer death in case of refusal. Ignatius, as a courageous soldier, being concerned only for his flock, willingly suffered himself to be taken, and carried before Trajan, who thus accosted him: "Who art thou, wicked demon, that durst transgress my commands, and persuade others to perish?" The saint answered: "No one calls Theophorus a wicked demon." Trajan said: "Who is Theophorus?" Ignatius answered: "He who carrieth Christ in his breast." Trajan replied: "And do not we seem to thee to bear the gods in our breasts, whom we have assisting us against our enemies?" Ignatius said: "You err in calling those gods who are no better than devils: for there is only one God, who made heaven and earth, and all things that are in them: and one Jesus Christ his only Son, into whose kingdom I earnestly desire to be admitted." Trajan said: "Do not you mean him that was crucified under Pontius Pilate?" Ignatius answered: "The very same, who by his death has crucified with sin its author, who overcame the malice of the devils, and has enabled those, who bear him in their heart, to trample on them." Trajan said: "Dost thou carry about Christ within thee?" Ignatius replied, "Yes; for it is written: _I will dwell and walk in them_."[4] Then Trajan dictated the following sentence: "It is our will that Ignatius, who saith that he carrieth the crucified man within himself, be bound and conducted to Rome, to be devoured there by wild beasts, for the entertainment of the people." The holy martyr, hearing this sentence, cried out with joy: "I thank thee, O Lord, for vouchsafing to honor me with this token of perfect love for thee, and to be bound with chains of iron, in imitation of thy apostle Paul, for thy sake." Having said this, and prayed for the church, and recommended it with tears to God, he joyfully put on the chains, and was hurried away by a savage troop of soldiers to be conveyed to Rome. His inflamed desire of laying down his life for Christ, made him embrace his sufferings with great joy. On his arrival at Seleucia, a sea-port, about sixteen miles from Antioch, he was put on board a ship which was to coast the southern and western parts of Asia Minor. Why this route was pitched upon, consisting of so many windings, preferably to a more direct passage from Seleucia to Rome, is not known; probably to render the terror of his punishment the more extensive, and of the greater force, to deter men from embracing and persevering in the faith: but providence seems to have ordained it for the comfort and edification of many churches. Several Christians of Antioch, taking a shorter way, got to Rome before him, where they waited his arrival. He was accompanied thither from Syria by Reus, Philo, a deacon, and Agathopodus, who seem to have written these acts of his martyrdom. He was guarded night and day, both by sea and land, by ten soldiers, whom he calls ten leopards, on account of their inhumanity and merciless usage who, the kinder he was to them, were the more fierce and cruel to him. This voyage, however, gave him the opportunity of confirming in faith and piety the several churches he saw on his route; giving them the strictest caution against heresies and schism, and recommending to them an inviolable attachment to the tradition of the apostles. St. Chrysostom adds, that he taught them admirably to despise the present life, to love only the good things to come, and never to fear any temporal evils whatever. The faithful {327} flocked from the several churches he came near, to see him, and to render him all the service in their power, hoping to receive benefit from the plenitude of his benediction. The cities of Asia, besides deputing to him their bishops and priests, to express their veneration for him, sent also deputies in their name to bear him company the remainder of his journey; so that he says he had many churches with him. So great was his fervor and desire of suffering, that by the fatigues and length of the voyage, which was a very bad one, he appeared the stronger and more courageous. On their reaching Smyrna, he was suffered to go ashore, which he did with great joy, to salute St. Polycarp, who had been his fellow-disciple under St. John the Evangelist. Their conversation was upon topics suitable to their character, and St. Polycarp felicitated him on his chains and sufferings in so good a cause. At Smyrna he was met by deputies of several churches, who were sent to salute him. Those from Ephesus were Onesimus, the bishop; Burrhus, the deacon; Crocus, Euplus, and Fronto. From Magnesia in Lydia, Damas the bishop, Bassus and Apollo, priests, and Sotio, deacon. From Tralles, also in Lydia, Polybius the bishop. From Smyrna, St. Ignatius wrote four letters: in that to the church of Ephesus, he commends the bishop Onesimus, and the piety and concord of the people, and their zeal against all heresies, and exhorts them to glorify God all manner of ways: to be subject, in unanimity, to their bishop and priests; to assemble, as often as possible, with them in public prayer, by which the power of Satan is weakened: to oppose only meekness to anger, humility to boasting, prayers to curses and reproaches, and to suffer all injuries without murmuring. He says, that because they are spiritual, and perform all they do in a spiritual manner, that all, even their ordinary actions, are spiritualized, because they do all in Jesus Christ. That he ought to have been admonished by them, but his charity would not suffer him to be silent: wherefore he prevents them, by admonishing first, that both might meet in the will of God. He bids them not be solicitous to speak, but to live well, and to edify others by their actions; and recommends himself and his widow-church of Antioch to their prayers. Himself he calls their outcast, yet declares that he is ready to be immolated for their sake, and says they were persons who had found mercy, but he a condemned man: they were strengthening in grace, but he struggling in the midst of dangers. He calls them fellow-travellers in the road to God, which is charity, and says they bore God and Christ in their breasts, and were his temples, embellished with all virtues, and that he exulted exceedingly for the honor of being made worthy to write to them, and rejoice in God with them: for setting a true value on the life to come, they loved nothing but God alone. Speaking of heretics, he says, that he who corrupts the faith for which Christ died, will go into unquenchable fire, and also he who heareth him. It is observed by him, that God concealed from the devil three mysteries: the virginity of Mary, her bringing forth, and the death of the Lord: and he calls the Eucharist the medicine of immortality, the antidote against death, by which we always live in Christ. "Remember me, as I pray that Jesus Christ be mindful of you. Pray for the church of Syria, from whence I am carried in chains to Rome, being the last of the faithful who are there. Farewell in God the Father, and in Jesus Christ, our common hope." The like instructions he repeats with a new and most moving turn of thought, in his letters to the churches of Magnesia, and of the Trallians; inculcates the greatest abhorrence of schism and heresy, and begs their prayers for himself and his church in Syria, of which he is not worthy to be called a member, being the last of them.[5] His {328} fourth letter was written to the Christians of Rome. The saint knew the all-powerful efficacy of the prayers of the saints, and feared lest they should obtain of God his deliverance from death. He therefore besought St. Polycarp and others at Smyrna, to join their prayers with his, that the cruelty of the wild beasts might quickly rid the world of him, that he might be presented before Jesus Christ. With this view he wrote to the faithful at Rome, to beg that they would not endeavor to obtain of God that the beasts might spare him, as they had several other martyrs; which might induce the people to release him, and so disappoint him of his crown. The ardor of divine love which the saint breathes throughout this letter, is as inflamed as the subject is extraordinary. In it he writes: "I fear your charity, lest it prejudice me: for it is easy for you to do what you please; but it will be difficult for me to attain unto God if you spare me. I shall never have such an opportunity of enjoying God: nor can you, if ye shall now be silent, ever be entitled to the honor of a better work. For if ye be silent in my behalf, I shall be made partaker of God; but if ye love my body, I shall have my course to run again. Therefore, a greater kindness you cannot do me, than to suffer me to be sacrificed unto God, while the altar is now ready; that so becoming a choir in love, in your hymns ye may give thanks to the Father by Jesus Christ, that God has vouchsafed to bring me, the bishop of Syria, from the East unto the West, to pass out of the world unto God, that I may rise again unto him. Ye have never envied any one. Ye have taught others. I desire, therefore, that you will firmly observe that which in your instructions you have prescribed to others. Only pray for me, that God would give me both inward and outward strength, that I may not only say, but do: that I may not only be called a Christian, {329} but be found one: for if I shall be found a Christian, I may then deservedly be called one; and be thought faithful, when I shall no longer appear to the world. Nothing is good that is seen. A Christian is not a work of opinion, but of greatness, when he is hated by the world. I write to the churches, and signify to them all, that I am willing to die for God, unless you hinder me. I beseech you that you show not an unseasonable good-will towards me. Suffer me to be the food of wild beasts, whereby I may attain unto God: I am the wheat of God, and I am to be ground by the teeth of the wild beasts, that I may be found the pure bread of Christ. Rather entice the beasts to my sepulchre, that they may leave nothing of my body, that, being dead, I may not be troublesome to any. Then shall I be a true disciple of Jesus Christ, when the world shall not see so much as my body. Pray to Christ for me, that in this I may become a sacrifice to God. I do not, as Peter and Paul, command you; they were apostles, I am an inconsiderable person: they were free, I am even yet a slave. But if I suffer, I shall then become the freeman of Jesus Christ, and shall arise a freeman in him. Now I am in bonds for him, I learn to have no worldly or vain desires. From Syria even unto Rome, I fight with wild beasts, both by sea and land, both night and day, bound to ten leopards, that is, to a band of soldiers; who are the worse for kind treatment. But I am the more instructed by their injuries; yet am I not thereby justified.[6] I earnestly wish for the wild beasts that are prepared for me, which I heartily desire may soon dispatch me; whom I will entice to devour me entirely and suddenly, and not serve me as they have done some whom they have been afraid to touch; but if they are unwilling to meddle with me, I will even compel them to it.[7] Pardon me this matter, I know what is good for me. Now I begin to be a disciple. So that I have no desire after any thing visible or invisible, that I may attain to Jesus Christ. Let fire, or the cross, or the concourse of wild beasts, let cutting or tearing of the flesh, let breaking of bones and cutting off limbs, let the shattering in pieces of my whole body, and all the wicked torments of the devil come upon me, so I may but attain to Jesus Christ. All the compass of the earth, and the kingdoms of this world, will profit me nothing. It is better for me to die for the sake of Jesus Christ, than to rule unto the ends of the earth. Him I seek who died for us: Him I desire who rose again for us. He is my gain at hand. Pardon me, brethren: be not my hinderance in attaining to life, for Jesus Christ is the life of the faithful; while I desire to belong to God, do not ye yield me back to the world. Suffer me to partake of the pure light. When I shall be there, I shall be a man of God. Permit me to imitate the passion of Christ my God. If any one has him within himself, let him consider what I desire, and let him have compassion on me, as knowing how I am straitened. The prince of this world endeavors to snatch me away, and to change the desire with which I burn of being united to God. Let none of you who are present attempt to succor me. Be rather on my side, that is, on God's. Entertain no desires of the world, having Jesus Christ in your mouths. Let no envy find place in your breasts. Even were I myself to entreat you when present, do not obey me; but rather believe what I now signify to you by letter. Though I am alive at the writing of this, yet my desire is to die. My love is crucified. The fire that is within me does not crave any water; but being alive and springing within, says: Come to the Father. I take no pleasure in the food of corruption, nor in the pleasure of this life. I desire {330} the bread of God, which is the flesh of Jesus Christ, and for drink, his blood, which is incorruptible charity. I desire to live no longer according to men; and this will be, if you are willing. Be, then, willing, that you may be accepted by God. Pray for me that I may possess God. If I shall suffer, ye have loved me: if I shall be rejected, ye have hated me. Remember in your prayers the church of Syria, which now enjoys God for its shepherd instead of me. I am ashamed to be called of their number, for I am not worthy, being the last of them, and an abortive: but through mercy I have obtained that I shall be something, if I enjoy God." The martyr gloried in his sufferings as in the highest honor, and regarded his chains as most precious jewels. His soul was raised above either the love or fear of any thing on earth; and, as St. Chrysostom says, he could lay down his life with as much ease and willingness as another man could put off his clothes. He even wished, every step of his journey, to meet with the wild beasts; and though that death was most shocking and barbarous, and presented the most frightful ideas, sufficient to startle the firmest resolution; yet it was incapable of making the least impression upon his courageous soul. The perfect mortification of his affections appears from his heavenly meekness; and he expressed how perfectly he was dead to himself and the world, living only to God in his heart, by that admirable sentence: "My love is crucified."[8] To signify, as he explains himself afterwards, that his appetites and desires were crucified to the world, and to all the lusts and pleasures of it. The guards pressed the saint to leave Smyrna, that they might arrive at Rome before the shows were over. He rejoiced exceedingly at their hurry, desiring impatiently to enjoy God by martyrdom. They sailed to Troas, where he was informed that God had restored peace to his church at Antioch: which freed him from the anxiety he had been under, fearing lest there should be some weak ones in his flock. At Troas he wrote three other letters, one to the church of Philadelphia, and a second to the Smyrnæans, in which he calls the heretics who denied Christ to have assumed true flesh, and the Eucharist to be his flesh, wild beasts in human shape; and forbids all communication with them, only allowing them to be prayed for, that they may be brought to repentance, which is very difficult. His last letter is addressed to St. Polycarp, whom he exhorts to labor for Christ without sparing himself; for the measure of his labor will be that of his reward.[9] The style of the martyr everywhere follows the impulses of a burning charity, rather than the rules of grammar, and his pen is never able to express the sublimity of his thoughts. In every word there is a fire and a beauty not to be paralleled: every thing is full of a deep sense. He everywhere breathes the most profound humility and contempt of himself as an abortive, and the last of men; a great zeal for the church, and abhorrence of schisms: the most ardent love of God and his neighbor, and tenderness for his own flock: begging the prayers of all the churches in its behalf to whom he wrote, and entreating of several that they would send an embassy to his church at Antioch, to comfort and exhort them. The {331} seven epistles of this apostolic father, the same which were quoted by St. Irenæus, Origen, Eusebius, St. Athanasius, St. Chrysostom, Theodoret, Gildas, &c., are published genuine by Usher, Vossius, Cotelier, &c., and in English by archbishop Wake, in 1710. St. Ignatius, not being allowed time to write to the other churches of Asia, commissioned St. Polycarp to do it for him. From Troas they sailed to Neapolis in Macedonia, and went thence to Philippi, from which place they crossed Macedonia and Epirus on foot; but took shipping again at Epidamnum in Dalmatia, and sailing by Rhegium and Puteoli, were carried by a strong gale into the Roman port, the great station of the navy near Ostia, at the mouth of the Tiber, sixteen miles from Rome. He would gladly have landed at Puteoli, to have traced St. Paul's steps, by going on foot from that place to Rome, but the wind rendered it impracticable. On landing, the authors of these acts, who were his companions, say they were seized with great grief, seeing they were soon to be separated from their dear master; but he rejoiced to find himself so near the end of his race. The soldiers hastened him on, because the public shows were drawing to an end. The faithful of Rome came out to meet him, rejoicing at the sight of him, but grieving that they were so soon to lose him by a barbarous death. They earnestly wished that he might be released at the request of the people. The martyr knew in spirit their thoughts, and said much more to them than he had done in his letter on the subject of true charity, conjuring them not to obstruct his going to the Lord. Then kneeling with all the brethren, he prayed to the Son of God for the Church, for the ceasing of the persecution, and for perpetual charity and unanimity among the faithful. He arrived at Rome the 20th of December, the last day of the public entertainments, and was presented to the prefect of the city, to whom the emperor's letter was delivered at the same time. He was then hurried by the soldiers into the amphitheatre. The saint hearing the lions roar, cried out: "I am the wheat of the Lord; I must be ground by the teeth of these beasts to be made the pure bread of Christ." Two fierce lions being let out upon him, they instantly devoured him, leaving nothing of his body but the larger bones: thus his prayer was heard. "After having been present at this sorrowful spectacle," say our authors, "which made us shed many tears, we spent the following night in our house in watching and prayer, begging of God to afford us some comfort by certifying us of his glory." They relate, that their prayer was heard, and that several of them in their slumber saw him in great bliss. They are exact in setting down the day of his death, that they might assemble yearly thereon to honor his martyrdom.[10] They add, that his bones were taken up and carried to Antioch, and there laid in a chest as an inestimable treasure. St. Chrysostom says his relics were carried in triumph on the shoulders of all the cities from Rome to Antioch. They were first laid in the cemetery without the Daphnitic gate, but in the reign of Theodosius the younger were translated thence with great pomp to a church in the city, which had been a temple of Fortune, but from this time bore his name, as Evagrius {332} relates.[11] St. Chrysostom exhorts all people to visit them, assuring them they would receive thereby many advantages, spiritual and corporal, which he proves at length.[12] They are now at Rome, in the church of St. Clement, pope, whither they were brought about the time when Antioch fell into the hands of the Saracens in the reign of Heraclius, in 637.[13] The regular canons at Arouaise near Bapaume in Artois, the Benedictin monks at Liesse in Haynault, and some other churches, have obtained each some bone of this glorious martyr.[14] The Greeks keep his feast a holyday on the day of his death, the 20th of December. His martyrdom happened in 107. * * * * * The perfect spirit of humility, meekness, patience, charity, and all other Christian virtues, which the seven epistles of St. Ignatius breathe in every part, cannot fail deeply to affect all who attentively read them. Critics confess that they find in them a sublimity, an energy and beauty of thought and expression, which they cannot sufficiently admire. But the Christian is far more astonished at the saint's perfect disengagement of heart from the world, the ardor of his love for God, and the earnestness of his desire of martyrdom. Every period in them is full of profound sense, which must be attentively meditated on before we can discover the divine sentiments of all virtues which are here expressed. Nor can we consider them without being inspired by some degree of the same, and being covered with confusion to find ourselves fall so far short of the humility and fervor of the primitive saints. Let us listen to the instructions which this true disciple of Christ gives in his letter to the Philadelphians, an abstract of his other six epistles being given above. He begins it by a strenuous recommendation of union with their bishop, priests, and deacons; and gives to their bishop (whom he does not name) great praises, especially for his humility and meekness, insomuch that he says his silence was more powerful than the vain discourses of others, and that conversing with an unchangeable serenity of mind, and in the sweetness of the living God, he was utterly a stranger to anger. He charges them to refrain from the pernicious weeds of heresy and schism, which are not planted by the Father, nor kept by Christ. "Whoever belong to God and Jesus Christ, these are with the bishop. If any one follows him who maketh a schism, he obtains not the inheritance of the kingdom of God. He who walks in the simplicity of obedience is not enslaved to his passion. Use one eucharist: for the flesh of the Lord Jesus Christ is one, and the cup is one in the unity of his blood. There is one altar, as there is one bishop, with the college of the priesthood and the deacons, my fellow-servants, that you may do all things according to God. My brethren, my heart is exceedingly dilated in the tender love which I bear you, and exulting beyond bounds, I render you secure and cautious; not I indeed, but Jesus Christ, in whom being bound I fear the more for myself, being yet imperfect. But your prayer with God will make me perfect, that I may obtain the portion which his mercy assigns me." Having cautioned them against adopting Jewish ceremonies, and against divisions and schisms, he mentions one that had lately happened among them, and speaks of a revelation which he had received of it as follows: "When I was among you, I cried out with a loud voice, with the voice of God, saying: Hearken to your bishop, and the priesthood, and the deacons. Some suspected that I said this from a foresight of the division which some afterwards {333} made. But He for whom I am in chains is my witness, that I knew it not from man, but the Spirit declared it, saying: Do ye nothing without your bishop. Keep your body holy as the temple of God. Be lovers of unity; shun all divisions. Be ye imitators of Jesus Christ, as he is of the Father. I therefore did what lay in me, as one framed to maintain union. Where disagreement or anger is found, there God never dwells. But God forgives all penitents." He charges them to send some person of honor from their church to congratulate with his church in Syria upon peace being restored to it, and calls him blessed who should be honored with this commission. Footnotes: 1. The accent placed on the penultima of [Greek: Theophoros], as the word is written in the saint's acts, denotes it of an active signification, _one that carrieth God_; but of the passive, _carried of God_, if placed on the antepenultima. 2. St. Gregory tells us, (l. 4, ep. 37,) that he was a disciple of St. Peter. The apostolic constitutions add, also of St. Paul, (l. 7, c. 46.) We are assured by St. Chrysostom (Hom. in St. Ignat.) and Theodoret, (Dial. 1, p. 33,) that he was made bishop by the direction of the apostles, and by the imposition of their hands. St. Chrysostom says, that St. Peter appointed him bishop to govern the see of Antioch, when he quitted it himself; which seems also to be affirmed by Origen, (in Luc. Hom. 6,) St. Athanasius, (de Syn. p. 922,) F{}dus, &c. Baronius thinks he was left by St. Peter, bishop of the Jewish converts, and became bishop also of the Gentiles in 68: for Eusebius (Hist. l. 3, c. 22, 36.) says, that St. Evodius succeeded St. Peter at Antioch; he adds in his chronicle, in the year 43, that he died in 68, and was succeeded by St. Ignatius. Some think there is a mistake in the chronicle of Eusebius, as to the year of the death of Evodius, and that this happened before the martyrdom of St. Peter, who appointed St. Ignatius his successor. See Cotelier, not. p. 299. Tillem. not. t. 2. p. 619. The Greek Menæa mentions Evodius on the 7th of September. 3. Hom. in St. Ignat. t. 2, p. 592. See also Theodoret. Dial. 1, p. 33. 4. 2 Cor. v. 16. 5. In his letter to the Magnesians, after saluting them, he says, he rejoices exceedingly in their charity and faith, and adds: "Having the honor to bear a name of divine dignity, on account to the chains which I carry, I sing the glow of the churches, and wish them the union of the flesh and spirit of Jesus Christ our perpetual life, of faith, and of charity, than which nothing is more excellent; and what is chiefest, of Jesus and the Father, in whom, bearing with patience the whole power of the prince of this world, and escaping him, we shall possess God." The saint much commends their bishop Damas, and exhorts them to yield him perfect obedience, notwithstanding his youth. Setting death before their eyes as near at hand to every one, he puts them in mind that we must bear the mark of Jesus Christ, (which is charity,) not that of the world. "If we are not ready to die, in imitation of his sufferings, his life is not in us," says he. "I recommend to you that you do all things in the concord of God, the bishop presiding for God, the priests in the place of the college of the apostles, and my dearest deacons, to whom is the ministry of Jesus Christ, who was with the Father before all ages, and has appeared in the end. Therefore, following all the same conduct, respect one another, and let no one consider his neighbor according to the flesh, but ever love each other in Jesus Christ. As the Lord did nothing without the Father, so neither do you say thing without the priests. Meeting together, have one prayer, one mind, one hope in charity, in holy joy. All of you meet as in one church of God, as to one altar, as to one Jesus Christ, who proceeds from one Father, exists in one, and returns to him in Unity." He cautions them against admitting the Jewish ceremonies, and against the errors of the Docetes. Then adds: "I shall enjoy you in all things if I am worthy. For though I am in chains, I am not to be compared to any one of you who enjoy your liberty. I know there is in you no pride; for you have Jesus Christ within you. And when I commend you, I know that you are more confounded, as it is written: _The just man is his own accuser_." Prov. xviii. 18. He again tenderly exhorts them to concord, and to obedience to their bishop, and commends himself, that he may attain to God and his church, of which he is not worthy to be called one, to their prayers, adding: "I stand much in need of your united prayer and charity in God, that the church in Syria may deserve to be watered by your church." The epistle to the Trallians he begins thus: "I know that your sentiments are pure, your hearts inseperable in patience and meekness, which is not passing, but as it were natural; as I learn from your bishop Polybius who congratulated with me in my chains in Christ Jesus, in such manner that in him I beheld your whole multitude. Receiving through him your good-will in God, I gloried, finding you to be, as I knew, imitators of God. As you are subject to the bishop as to Christ, you seem not to live according to men, but according to Jesus Christ." He bids them respect the deacons (whom be calls the ministers of the mysteries of Jesus Christ) as the precept of Christ; the priests as the senate of God, and the bishop as representing God. "Without these the very name of a church is not given," says he--"I know many things in God, but I measure myself, lest by glorying I perish. Now I have reason more to fear: nor must I listen to those who speak kindly to me; for they who speak to commend me, scourge me. I desire indeed to suffer: but I know not whether I am worthy. Though I am in chains, and understand heavenly things, the ranks of angels and principalities, things visible and invisible; am I on this account a disciple? for many things are wanting to us that we be not separated from God. I conjure you, not I, but the charity of Jesus Christ, to use Christian food, and to refrain from foreign weed, which is heresy. Heretics join Jesus Christ with what is defiled, giving a deadly poison in a mixture of wine and honey which they who take, drink with pleasure their own death without knowing it. Refrain from such, which you will do if you remain united to God, Jesus Christ, and the bishop, and the precepts of the apostles. He who is within the altar is clean, but he who is without it, that is, without the bishop, priests, and deacons, is not clean." He adds his usual exhortations to union, and begs their prayers for himself and his church, of which he is not worthy to be called one, being the last of them, and yet fighting is danger. "May my spirit sanctify you, not only now, but also when I shall enjoy God." 6. 1 Cor. iv. 4. 7. Not that he would really incite the beasts to dispatch him, without a special inspiration, because that would have been self-murder; but this expresses the courage and desire of his soul. 8. [Greek: Ho hemos erôs estanrôtai.] 9. See an account of these two last in the life of St. Polycarp. Orsi draws a proof in favor of the supremacy of the see of Rome, from the title which St. Ignatius gives it at the head of his epistle. In directing his other letters, and saluting other churches, he only writes: "To the blessed church which is at Ephesus:" [Greek: Tê esê en Ephesô] "at Magnesia near the Mæander: at Tralles: at Philadelphia: at Smyrna:" but in that to the Romans he changes his style, and addresses his letter: "To the beloved church which is enlightened, (by the will of Him who ordaineth all things which are according to the charity of Jesus Christ our God,) which presides in the country of the Romans, [Greek: êtis prokathêtai en topô chores Rômaiôn], worthy of God, most adorned, justly happy, most commended, fitly regulated and governed, most chaste, and presiding in charity, &c." 10. According to the common opinion, St. Ignatius was crowned with martyrdom in the year 107. The Greek copies of a homily of the sixth age, On the False Prophets, among the works of St. Chrysostom, say on the 20th; but Bede, in his Martyrology, on the 17th of December. Antoni Pagi, convinced by the letter of Dr. Loyde, bishop of St. Asaph's, places his martyrdom about the end of the year 116: for John Malalas of Antioch tells us the great earthquake, in which Dion Cassias mentions that Trajan narrowly escaped at Antioch, happened in that journey of Trajan in which he condemned St. Ignatius. Now Trajan marching to the Parthian war, arrived at Antioch on the 8th of January, in 113, the sixteenth year of his reign: and in his return from the East, above two years later, passed again through Antioch in 116, when this earthquake happened. St. Ignatius suffered at Rome towards the end of that year. Le Quien prefers this date, because it best agrees with the chronology of his successors to Theophilus. Orien. Christ. t. 2, p. 700. 11. Evagr. Hist. Eccl. l. 1, c. 16, Ed. Vales. 12. Or. in S. Ignat. t. 2, p. 600. Ed. Nov. 13. See Baron. Annal. ad an. 637, and Not. ad Martyr. Rom. ad 17 Dec. 14. See Henschenius, Feb. t. 1, p. 35. ST. PIONIUS, M. HE was priest of Smyrna, a true heir of the spirit of St. Polycarp, an apostolic man, who converted multitudes to the faith. He excelled in eloquence, and in the science of our holy religion. The paleness of his countenance bespoke the austerity of his life. In the persecution of Decius, in 250, on the 23d of February, he was apprehended with Sabina and Asclepiades, while they were celebrating the anniversary festival of St. Polycarp's martyrdom. Pionius, after having fasted the eve with his companions, was forewarned thereof by a vision. On the morning after their solemn prayer, taking the holy bread (probably the eucharist) and water, they were surprised and seized by Polemon, the chief priest, and the guardian of the temple. In prolix interrogatories before him, they resisted all solicitations to sacrifice; professed they were ready to suffer the worst of torments and deaths rather than consent to his impious proposals, and declaring that they worshipped one only God, and that they were of the Catholic church. Asclepiades being asked what God he adored, made answer: "Jesus Christ." At which Polemon said: "Is that another God?" Asclepiades replied: "No; he is the same they have just now confessed." A clear confession of the consubstantiality of God the Son, before the council of Nice. Being all threatened to be burnt alive, Sabina smiled. The pagans said: "Dost thou laugh? thou shalt then be led to the public stews." She answered: "God will be my protector on that occasion." They were cast into prison, and preferred a lower dungeon, that they might be more at liberty to pray when alone. They were carried by force into the temple, and all manner of violence was used to compel them to sacrifice. Pionius tore the impious garlands which were put upon his head, and they resisted with all their might. Their constancy repaired the scandal given by Eudæmon, the bishop of Smyrna, there present, who had impiously apostatized and offered sacrifice. In the answers of St. Pionius to the judges, and in all the circumstances of his martyrdom, we admire the ardent piety and courage of one who had entirely devoted himself to God, and employed his whole life in his service. When Quintilian the proconsul arrived at Smyrna, he caused Pionius to be hung on the rack, and his body to be torn with iron hooks, and afterwards condemned him to be burned alive; he was accordingly nailed to a trunk or post, and a pile heaped round him and set on fire. Metrodorus, a Marcionite priest, underwent the same punishment with him. His acts were written by eye-witnesses, quoted by Eusebius, l. 4, c. 15, and are extant genuine in Ruinart, p. 12. See Tillemont t. 3, p. 397; Bollandus, Feb. t. 1, p. 37. {334} ST. BRIDGIT, OR BRIDGET, V. AND BY CONTRACTION, BRIDE, ABBESS, AND PATRONESS OF IRELAND. SHE was born at Fochard, in Ulster, soon after Ireland had been blessed with the light of faith. She received the religious veil in her youth, from the hands of St. Mel, nephew and disciple of St. Patrick. She built herself a cell under a large oak, thence called Kill-dara, or cell of the oak; living, as her name implies, the bright shining light of that country by her virtues. Being joined soon after by several of her own sex, they formed themselves into a religious community, which branched out into several other nunneries throughout Ireland; all which acknowledged her for their mother and foundress, as in effect she was of all in that kingdom. But a full account of her virtues has not been transmitted down to us, together with the veneration of her name. Her five modern lives mention little else but wonderful miracles. She flourished in the beginning of the sixth century, and is named in the Martyrology of Bede, and in all others since that age. Several churches in England and Scotland are dedicated to God under her name, as, among others, that of St. Bride in Fleet-street; several also in Germany, and some in France. Her name occurs in most copies of the Martyrology which bears the name of St. Jerom, especially in those of Esternach and Corbie, which are most ancient. She is commemorated in the divine office in most churches of Germany, and in that of Paris, till the year 1607, and in many others in France. One of the Hebrides, or western islands which belong to Scotland, near that of Ila, was called, from a famous monastery built there in her honor, Brigidiani. A church of St. Brigit, in the province of Athol, was reputed famous for miracles, and a portion of her relics was kept with great veneration in a monastery of regular canons at Aburnethi, once capital of the kingdom of the Picts, and a bishopric, as Major mentions.[1] Her body was found with those of SS. Patrick and Columba, in a triple vault in Down-Patrick, in 1185, as Giraldus Cambrensis informs us:[2] they were all three translated to the cathedral of the same city;[3] but their monument was destroyed in the reign of king Henry VIII. The head of St. Bride is now kept in the church of the Jesuits at Lisbon.[4] See Bollandus, Feb. t. 1, p. 99. Footnotes: 1. Major de Gestis Scotor. l. 2, c. 14. 2. Topogr. Hibern. dist. 3, c. 18. Camden, &c. 3. {Footnote not in text} Camden. 4. Bolland. p. 112 and p. 941, t. 1, Februarii. ST. KINNIA. V. HER memory was long sacred in Ireland, and her relics were in veneration at Lowth, in the southern part of Ulster; but we have no other authentic account of her actions, than that she was baptized by St. Patrick, and received the religious veil at his hand. See Jocelin's life of St. Patrick, Colgan, and Bollandus, ad 1 Feb. p. 96. ST. SIGEBERT II., FRENCH KING OF AUSTRASIA, C. DAGOBERT I., king of France, led for some time a very dissolute life, but was touched by an extraordinary grace upon the birth of his son Sigebert {335} and from that time entirely converted to God. Bagnetrude, our saint's mother, is only styled the concubine of Dagobert, though he was publicly married to her. The father desiring to have his son baptized by the most holy prelate of his dominions, recalled St. Amand, bishop of Masstricht, whom he had banished for his zeal in reproving his vices, fell at his feet at Clichi, near Paris, to ask his pardon, promised amendment, and by the advice of St. Owen and St. Eligius, then laymen in his court, engaged him to initiate his son in the sacrament of regeneration. The ceremony was performed with great pomp at Orleans, Charibert, king of part of Aquitaine, and brother to Dagobert, being god-father. The young prince's education was intrusted by the father to the blessed Pepin of Landen, mayor of his palace, who being forced by the envy of the nobility to withdraw for some time, carried Sigebert into the dominions of Charibert in Aquitaine, where he enjoyed a considerable estate, the paternal patrimony of his wife, the blessed Itta. Pepin remained there about three years; after which term he was recalled to the court of Dagobert, who declared his son Sigebert, though only three years old, in 633, king of Austrasia, and gave him for his ministers, St. Cunibert, archbishop of Cologne, and duke Adelgise, and committed the administration of the whole kingdom to Pepin, whom he always kept near his own person. Dagobert's second son, Clovis II., was born in the following year, 634, and to him the father allotted for his inheritance all the western part of France, containing all Neustria and part of Burgundy.[1] Austrasia, or Eastern France, (in which sense Austria retains a like name in Germany,) at that time comprised Provence and Switzerland, (dismembered from the ancient kingdom of Burgundy,) the Albigeois, Auvergne, Quercy, the Cevennes, Champagne, Lorraine, Upper Picardy, the archbishopric of Triers, and other states, reaching to the borders of Friesland; Alsace, the Palatinate, Thuringia, Franconia, Bavaria, Suabia, and the country which lay betwixt the Lower Rhine and Old Saxony. Dagobert died in 638, and was buried at the abbey of St. Denys, of which he was the munificent founder. According to the settlement which he had made, he was succeeded in Austrasia by St. Sigebert, and in the rest of France by his youngest son Clovis II. Pepin of Landen, who had been mayor of the palace to the father, discharged the same office to his death under St. Sigebert, and not content to approve himself a faithful minister, and true father to the prince, he formed him from the cradle to all heroic Christian virtues. By his prudence, virtue, and valor, St. Sigebert in his youth was beloved and respected by his subjects, and feared by all his enemies. Pepin dying in 640, the virtuous king appointed his son Grimoald mayor of his palace. He reigned in perfect intelligence with his brother, of which we have few examples among the Merovingian kings whenever the French monarchy was divided. The Thuringians revolting, he reduced them to their duty; and this is the only war in which he was engaged. The love of peace disposed his heart to be a fit temple of the Holy Ghost, whom he invited into his soul by assiduous prayer, and the exercise of all Christian virtues. His patrimony he employed in relieving the necessitous, and in building or endowing monasteries, churches, and hospitals. He founded twelve monasteries, the four principal of which were Cougnon, now a priory, not far from Bouillon; Stavelo and Malmedi, two miles from each other, and St. Martin's, near Metz. St. Remaclus brought from Solignac the rule of St. Columban, which king Sigebert {336} in his charter to Cougnon calls the rule of the ancient fathers. This that holy abbot established first at Cougnon, and afterwards at Malmedi and Stavelo. A life filled with good works, and devoted all to God, can never be called short. God was pleased to call this good king from the miseries of this world to the recompense of his labors on the 1st of February, in the year 656, the eighteenth of his reign, and the twenty-fifth of his age.[2] He was interred in the abbey of St. Martin's, near Metz, which he had built. His body was found incorrupt in 1063, and placed in a monument on the side of the high altar: and in 1170 it was enshrined in a silver case. The monastery of St. Martin's, and all others in the suburbs, were demolished by Francis of Lorraine, duke of Guise, in 1552, when Charles V. laid siege to Metz. The relics of St. Sigebert are now deposited in the collegiate church of our Lady at Nancy. He is honored among the saints in great part of the dominions which he governed, and in the monasteries and churches which he founded. See Fredegarius and his continuator, Sigebert of Gemblours, in his life of this saint, with the learned remarks of Henschenius, p. 40. Also Calmet, Hist. de Lorraine, t. 1, p. 419. Schoëpflin, Alsatia Illustrata, Colmariæ, an. 1751. Sect. 2, p. 742. Footnotes: 1. Charibert, though he took the title of king, and resided at Toulouse, held his estates of his brother Dagobert, and by his gift. After Charibert's death, Chilperic, his eldest son, was put to death by Dagobert; but his second son, Boggis, left a numerous posterity, which was only extinguished in Louis d'Armagnac, duke of Nemours, slain at the battle of Cerignole, where he commanded for Louis XII. against Gonzales de Cordova, surnamed The Great Captain, for the Catholic king Ferdinand in 1503, by which the French lost the kingdom of Naples. So long did the family of Clovis II. subsist. See Vaisette, Hist de Languedoc, Henault, Abr. de l'Hist. de France, t. 1, pp. 26, and 818. 2. St. Sigebert left his son Dagobert, about seven years old, under the care of Grimoald, mayor of his palace, who treacherously sent him into Ireland, and placed his own son Childebert on the throne. This usurper reigned seven months, as Schoëpflin proves from the express testimony of Chronicon Brevissimum, and from circumstances mentioned by Fredegarius, against the mistake of the authors, l'Art de vérifier les Dates, p. 481, who say he only reigned seven days. By an insurrection of the people, Grimoald and his son were deposed, and both perished in prison: but Dagobert not being found, Clovis II. united Austrasia to his other dominions. Dagobert II., by the assistance of St. Wilfrid, afterwards archbishop of York, returned into France eighteen years after the death of his father, and recovered Alsace and some other provinces by the cession either of Childeric II., son of Clovis II., (then monarch of all France,) or of his brother Theodoric III., who succeeded him before the month of April, in 674: for the reign of Dagobert II must be dated from the latter end of 673, with Henault, or from 674, with Schoëpflin. The spirit of religion and piety, which he had learned in the school of afflictions, and under the great masters of a spiritual life, who then flourished among the Scots and Irish, was eminently the distinguishing part of his character. As he resided chiefly in Alsace, he filled that country, in the first place, with monuments of his devotion, being so liberal in founding and endowing monasteries and churches, that though his reign was only of six years, Schoëpflin assures us that the French church is not more indebted to any reign than to this, at least in those parts, (p. 740.) St. Wilfrid, bishop of York, had exceedingly promoted his return into France; and when that prelate was compelled to leave England Dagobert entertained him with the most cordial affection, and, upon the death of St. Arbogastus, earnestly pressed him to accept of that see. St. Wilfrid declined that dignity, promising, however, to call upon this good king in his return from Rome, where he obtained a sentence of pope Agatho in his favor. But coming but into France, he found his royal friend cut off by a violent death. It is the general persuasion of the French historians, that the impious Ebroin, mayor of the palace to Theodoric III., king of Burgundy and Noustria, was the author of his death, with a view to seize his dominions. Dagobert was murdered by assassins at Stenay upon the Meuse, now the best town in the duchy of Bar in Lorraine. The people, however, chose Pepin and Martin dukes or governors of Austrasia, who defended their liberty against Ebroin. Martin was afterwards assassinated by the contrivance of Ebroin, and Ebroin by Ermenfrid; but Pepin, in 687, defeated Theodoric III. at Testry, took Paris, and the king himself; from which time, under the title of mayor, he enjoyed the supreme power in the French monarchy. The death of St. Dagobert happened in 679, on the 23d of December, on which day he is commemorated in the Martyrology of Ado and others, and honored as a martyr at Stenay, in the diocese of Verdun, ever since the eighth century. The church of Strasburg was much enriched by this prince, as maybe seen in Schoëpflin's Alsatia Illustrata. The same author gives an account of some of the monasteries which were founded by this prince in those parts, (c. 11, §254, p. 736,) and shows from his charters that the palace where he chiefly resided was at Isenburg in Alsace. (Sect. 1, c. 10, §146, p. 693.) The year of the death of Dagobert II. is learned from the life of St. Wilfrid, who returned from Rome when St. Agatho sat in St. Peter's chair. See on this holy king the lives of St. Wilfrid and St. Salaberga; also his charters; and, among the moderns, Dan. Schoëpflin, professor of history and eloquence at Strasburg, in his Alsatia Illustrata, anno 1751. Sect. 2, c. 1, §3, pp. 740, 743, and §1, c. 10, §146, p. 693, c. 11, §254, p. 736. Also Calmet, Hist. de Lorraine, t. 1, l. 10, n. 16, p. 432. The first edition of this work was given in 1728, in three volumes folio, but the second edition is so much enlarged as to fill six volumes folio. The reign of Dagobert II. escaped most of the French historians; which omission, and a false epoch of the beginning of the reign of Dagobert I., brought incredible confusion into the chronology and history of most of the Merovingian kings, which Adrian Valois, Henschenius, Le Cointe, Pagi, Louguerue and others have taken great pains to clear up. {337} FEBRUARY II. THE PURIFICATION, COMMONLY CALLED CANDLEMAS-DAY. THE law of God, given by Moses to the Jews, to insinuate both to us and to them, that by the sin of Adam man is conceived and born in sin, and obnoxious to his wrath, ordained that a woman, after childbirth, should continue for a certain time in a state which that law calls unclean; during which she was not to appear in public, nor presume to touch any thing consecrated to God.[1] This term was of forty days upon the birth of a son, and the time was double for a daughter: on the expiration of which, the mother was to bring to the door of the tabernacle, or temple, a lamb of a year old, and a young pigeon or turtle-dove. The lamb was for a holocaust, or burnt-offering, in acknowledgment of the sovereignty of God, and in thanksgiving for her own happy delivery; the pigeon or turtle-dove was for a sin-offering. These being sacrificed to Almighty God by the priest, the woman was cleansed of the legal impurity, and reinstated in her former privileges. A young pigeon, or turtle-dove, by way of a sin-offering, was required of all, whether rich or poor: but whereas the charge of a lamb might be too burdensome on persons of narrow circumstances, in that case, nothing more was required than two pigeons, or two turtle-doves, one for a burnt, the other for a sin-offering.[2] Our Saviour having been conceived by the Holy Ghost, and his blessed Mother remaining always a spotless virgin, it is most evident from the terms of the law,[3] that she was, in reality, under no obligation to it, nor within the intent of it. She was, however, within the letter of the law, in the eye of the world, who were as yet strangers to her miraculous conception. And her humility making her perfectly resigned, and even desirous to conceal her privilege and dignity, she submitted with great punctuality and exactness to every humbling circumstance which the law required. Pride indeed proclaims its own advantages, and seeks honors not its due; but the humble find their delight in obscurity and abasement, they shun all distinction and esteem, which they clearly see their own nothingness and baseness to be most unworthy of: they give all glory to God alone, to whom it is due. Devotion also and zeal to honor God by every observance prescribed by his law, prompted Mary to perform this act of religion, though evidently exempt from the precept. Being poor herself, she made the offering appointed for the poor: accordingly is this part of the law mentioned by St. Luke,[4] as best agreeing with the meanness of her worldly condition. But her offering, however mean in itself, was made with a perfect heart, which is what God chiefly regards in all that is offered to him. The King of Glory would appear everywhere in the robes of poverty, to point out to us the advantages of a suffering and lowly state, and to repress our pride, by which, though really poor and mean in the eyes of God, we covet to appear rich, and, though sinners, would be deemed innocents and saints. A second great mystery is honored this day, regarding more immediately {338} the person of our Redeemer, viz. his presentation in the temple.[5] Besides the law which obliged the mother to purify herself, there was another which ordered that the first-born son should be offered to God: and in these two laws were included several others, as, that the child, after its presentation, should be ransomed[6] with a certain sum of money,[7] and peculiar sacrifices offered on the occasion. Mary complies exactly with all these ordinances. She obeys not only in the essential points of the law, as in presenting herself to be purified, and in her offering her first-born, but has strict regard to all the circumstances. She remains forty days at home, she denies herself all this time the liberty of entering the temple, she partakes not of things sacred, though the living temple of the God of Israel; and on the day of her purification, she walks several miles to Jerusalem, with the world's Redeemer in her arms. She waits for the priest at the gate of the temple, makes her offerings of thanksgiving and expiation, presents her divine Son by the hands of the priest to his eternal Father, with the most profound humility, adoration, and thanks giving. She then redeems him with five shekels, as the law appoints, and receives him back again as a depositum in her special care, till the Father shall again demand him for the full accomplishment of man's redemption. It is clear that Christ was not comprehended in the law; "The king's son, to whom the inheritance of the crown belongs, is exempt from servitude:--much more Christ, who was the Redeemer both of our souls and bodies, was not subject to any law by which he was to be himself redeemed," as St. Hilary observes.[8] But he would set an example of humility, obedience, and devotion: and would renew, in a solemn and public manner, and in the temple, the oblation of himself to his Father for the accomplishment of his will, and the redemption of man, which he had made privately in the first moment of his Incarnation. With what sentiments did the divine Infant offer himself to his Father at the same time! the greatest homage of his honor and glory the Father could receive, and a sacrifice of satisfaction adequate to the injuries done to the Godhead by our sins, and sufficient to ransom our souls from everlasting death! With what cheerfulness and charity did he offer himself to all his torments! to be whipped, crowned with thorns, and ignominiously put to death for us! Let every Christian learn hence to offer himself to God with this divine victim, through which he may be accepted by the Father; let him devote himself with all his senses and faculties to his service. If sloth, or any other vice, has made us neglectful of this essential duty, we must bewail past omissions, and make a solemn and serious consecration of ourselves this day to the divine majesty with the greater fervor, crying out with St. Austin, in compunction of heart: "Too late have I known thee, too late have I begun to love thee, O beauty more ancient than the world!" But our sacrifice, if we desire it may be accepted, must not be lame and imperfect. It would be an insult to offer to God, in union with his Christ, a divided heart, or a heart infected with wilful sin. It must therefore first be cleansed by tears of sincere compunction: its affections must be crucified to the world by perfect mortification. Our offering must be sincere and fervent, without reserve, allowing no quarter to any of our vicious passions and inclinations, and no division in any of our affections. It must also be universal; to suffer and to do all for the divine honor. If we give our hearts to Christ in this manner, we shall receive him with his graces and {339} benedictions. He would be presented in the temple by the hands of his mother: let us accordingly make the offering of our souls through Mary and beg his graces through the same channel. The ceremony of this day was closed by a third mystery, the meeting in the temple of the holy persons, Simeon and Anne, with Jesus and his parents, from which this festival was anciently called by the Greeks Hypante, the meeting.[9] Holy Simeon, on that occasion, received into his arms the object of all his desires and sighs, and praised God in raptures of devotion for being blessed with the happiness of beholding the so much longed-for Messias. He foretold to Mary her martyrdom of sorrow; and that Jesus brought redemption to those who would accept of it on the terms it was offered them; but a heavy judgment on all infidels who should obstinately reject it, and on Christians also whose lives were a contradiction to his holy maxims and example. Mary, hearing this terrible prediction, did not answer one word, felt no agitation of mind from the present, no dread for the future; but courageously and sweetly committed all to God's holy will. Anne also, the prophetess, who, in her widowhood, served God with great fervor, had the happiness to acknowledge and adore in this great mystery the world's Redeemer. Amidst the crowd of priests and people, the Saviour of the world is known only by Simeon and Anne. Even when he disputed with the doctors, and when he wrought the most stupendous miracles, the learned, the wise, and the princes did not know him. Yet here, while a weak, speechless child, carried in the arms of his poor mother, he is acknowledged and adored by Simeon and Anne. He could not hide himself from those who sought him with fervor, humility, and ardent love. Unless we seek him in these dispositions, he will not manifest himself, nor communicate his graces to us. Simeon, having beheld his Saviour in the flesh, desired no longer to see the light of this world, nor any creatures on earth. If we truly love God, our distance from him must be a continual pain: and we must sigh after that desired moment which will free us from the danger of ever losing him by sin, and will put us in possession of Him who is the joy of the blessed, and the infinite treasure of heaven. Let us never cease to pray that he purify our hearts from all earthly dross, and draw them to himself: that he heal, satiate, and inflame our souls, as he only came upon earth to kindle in all hearts the fire of his love. Footnotes: 1. Lev. xii. 2. 2. Lev. xii. 8. 3. Ibid. 2. 4. Luke ii. 64. 5. {Footnote not in text} Luke ii. 23. 6. Exod. xiii. 13. 7. This, from Levit. xxvii. 6, and Numb. iii. 47, appears to have been five shekels, each shekel weighing according to Prideaux, (Preface to Connection of the Old and New Testament, p. xvii.) about three shillings of our money: so that the five amounted to about fifteen shillings sterling. 8. S. Hilar. in Matt. c. 17, n. 11, pp. 696, 697. 9. [Greek: Hypantê], from [Greek: hupantaô], occurro. _On blessing the candles and the procession._ The procession with lighted tapers on this day is mentioned by pope Gelasius I., also by St. Ildefonsus, St. Eligius,[1] St. Sophronius, patriarch of Jerusalem, St. Cyril of Alexandria, &c., in their sermons on this festival, St. Bernard says:[2] "This holy procession was first made by the virgin mother, St. Joseph, holy Simeon, and Anne, to be afterwards performed in all places and by every nation, with the exultation of the whole earth, to honor this mystery." In his second sermon on this feast he describes it thus:[3] "They walk two and two, holding in their hands candles lighted, not from common fire, but from that which had been first blessed in the church by the priests,[4] and singing in the ways of the Lord, because great is his glory." He shows that the concurrence of many in the procession and prayer is a symbol of our union and charity, and renders our praises {340} the more honorable and acceptable to God. We _walk_ while we sing to God, to denote that to stand still in the paths of virtue is to go back. The lights we bear in our hands represent the divine fire of love with which our hearts ought to be inflamed, and which we are to offer to God without any mixture of strange fire, the fire of concupiscence, envy, ambition, or the love of creatures. We also hold these lights in our hands to honor Christ, and to acknowledge him as the _true light_,[5] whom they represent under this character, and who is called by holy Simeon in this mystery, _a light for the enlightening of the Gentiles;_[6] for he came to dispel our spiritual darkness. The candles likewise express that by faith his light shines in our souls: as also that we are to _prepare his way_ by good works, by which we are to be _a light to_ men.[7] Lights are used by the church during the celebration of the divine mysteries, while the gospel is read, and the sacraments administered, on a motive of honor and respect. On the same account lamps burned before the Lord in the tabernacle[8] and temple. Great personages were anciently received and welcomed with lights, as was king Antiochus by Jason and others on his entering Jerusalem.[9] Lights are likewise expressive of joy, and were anciently used on this account in receiving Roman emperors, and on other public occasions, as at present. "Throughout all the churches of the East," says St. Jerom, "when the gospel is to be read, though the sun shines, torches are used, not to chase away darkness, but for a sign of joy."[10] The apostolic canons mention incense, and oil for the lamps, then used in the churches.[11] Many out of devotion burned lamps before the bodies of saints, as we read in Prudentius,[12] St. Paulinus,[13] &c. The corporeal creatures, which we use, are the gifts of God: it is therefore just that we should honor and glorify him by them. Besides, in our embodied state, they contribute to excite our souls to devotion; they are to our eyes, what words are to our ears, and by our organs move the affections of our hearts.[14] Though piety consists in the fervor of the soul, and is interior and spiritual, yet many sensible things concur to its aid and improvement; and we may as well condemn the use of words, which are corporeal, and affect the soul by the sense of hearing, as the use of suitable approved ceremonies. Christ made use of sensible signs in the institution of his most divine sacraments, and in several miraculous cures, &c. The church always used external rites and ceremonies in the divine worship. These contribute to the majesty and dignity of religion, which in our present condition would appear naked, if destitute of all exterior. The candles are blessed previously to the use of them, because the church blesses and sanctifies, by prayer, what ever is employed in the divine service. We are to hold the candles in our hands on this day, while the gospel is read or sung; also from the elevation to the communion, in the most fervent spirit of sacrifice, offering ourselves to God with our divine Redeemer, and desiring to meet in spirit this blessed company in this mystery; likewise to honor the mother of God in her purification, and still more so, with the most profound adoration and gratitude, our divine Saviour in his presentation in our flesh for us. The same lively sentiments of devotion ought to inflame our breasts on this occasion, as if we had been present with holy Simeon and the rest in the temple, while we carry in our hands these emblems of our spiritual joy and homage, and of the consecration of ourselves in union with our heavenly victim, through the intercession of his virgin mother. Footnotes: 1. Serm. 2. 2. Serm. de Purif. p. 959. 3. Serm. 2, p. 961. 4. According to the ceremonies then in use. 5. John i. 9. 6. Luke ii. 3. 7. Matt. v. 6. 8. Exod. xxviii. 20. 9. 2 Macch. iv. 22. 10. Adv. Vigil. p. 304. 11. Can. 3. 12. Hymn 2. 13. Nat. iii. v. 98. 14. See the pastoral charge of the late Dr. Butler, bishop of Durham. {341} _On the Christian rite of churching women after childbirth._ God, in the old law, declared several actions unclean, which, though innocent and faultless it themselves, had a constant but remote regard to sin. One of these was childbirth, to denote the impurity of man's origin by his being conceived and born in sin. For the removal of legal uncleanness in general, God established certain expiatory rites, consisting of ablutions and sacrifices, to which all were strictly obliged who desired to be purified; that is, restored to the privileges of their brethren, and declared duly qualified members of the synagogue or Jewish church. It would be superstitious since the death of Christ, and the publication of the new law, to stand in awe of legal uncleannesses, or to have recourse to Jewish purifications on account of any of them, whether after childbirth or in any other cases. It is not, therefore, with that intention, that Christian mothers come to the church, as Jewish women did to the tabernacle, in order to be purified from any uncleanness they contract by childbirth. It is not on any consideration peculiar to the Jews that this ceremony was established in the Christian church, but on a motive common to all mankind, the performing the duty of thanksgiving and prayer. Hence in the canon law, pope Innocent III. speaks of it as follows: "If women after childbearing desire immediately to enter the church, they commit no sin by so doing, nor are they to be hindered. Nevertheless, if they choose to refrain out of respect for some time, we do not think their devotion ought to be reprehended."[1] In some dioceses this term is limited to a certain number of days. Where this is not regulated by custom, or by any particular statute, the party may perform this duty as soon as she is able to go abroad. Her first visit is to be to the church: first, to give God thanks for her safe delivery: secondly, to implore his blessing on herself and her child. It ought to be her first visit, to show her readiness to acquit herself of this duty to God, and to give him the first-fruits of her recovery and blessing received; as the first-fruits in every thing are most particularly due to God, and most agreeable to him, and which, in the old law, he was most jealous in exacting of his people. The acknowledgment of a benefit received, is the least return we can make for it: the law of nature dictates the obligation of this tribute; God strictly requires it, and this is the means to draw down new blessings on us, the flowing of which is by nothing more effectually obstructed than by insensibility and ingratitude: wherefore, next to the praise and love of God, thanksgiving is the principal homage we owe him in the sacrifice of our hearts, and is a primary act of prayer. The book of psalms abounds with acts of thanksgiving; the apostle everywhere recommends and inculcates it in the strongest terms. The primitive Christians had these words, _Thanks be to God_, always in their mouths, and used them as their ordinary form of salutation on all occasions, as St. Austin mentions,[2] who adds, "What better thing can we bear in our hearts, or pronounce with our tongues, or express with our pens, than, _Thanks be to God_?" It is the remark of St. Gregory of Nyssa,[3] that besides past benefits, and promises of other inestimable benefits to come, we every instant of our lives receive from God fresh favors; and therefore we ought, if it were possible, every moment to make him a return of thanks with our whole hearts, and never cease from this duty. We owe a particular thanksgiving for his more remarkable blessings. A mother regards her safe delivery, and her happiness is being blessed with a child, as signal benefits, and therefore she owes a {342} particular holocaust of thanks for them. This she comes to offer at the foot of the altar. She comes also to ask the succors of divine grace. She stands in need of an extraordinary aid from above, both for herself and her child. For herself, that, by her example, instructions, and watchfulness, she may fulfil her great obligations as a mother. For her child, that it may reap the advantage of a virtuous education, may live to God, and become one day a citizen of the heavenly Jerusalem: otherwise, what will it avail her to have been a mother, or the child to have been born? Now prayer is the channel which God has appointed for the conveyance of his graces to us. The mother, therefore, must be assiduous in begging daily of the Father of mercies all necessary succors for these purposes: but this she should make the subject of her most zealous petitions on the occasion of her first solemn appearance after childbed before his altar. She should, at the same time, make the most perfect offering and consecration of her child to the divine Majesty. Every mother, in imitation of the Blessed Virgin, ought to perform this triple duty of thanksgiving, petition, and oblation, and through her hands, who, on the day of her purification, set so perfect a pattern of this devotion. Footnotes: 1. Cap. unico de Purif. post partum. 2. Ep. 41. olim 77. 3. Or. 1, de præst. t. 1, p. 715 ST. LAURENCE, ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY. HE was one of those who accompanied St. Austin into this island, about the year 597, and was his immediate successor in the see of Canterbury, in 608, in which he sat eleven years. When Eadbald, son and successor to the holy king Ethelbert, not only refused to follow his father's example in embracing the faith, but gave into idolatry, and incestuously took to his bed his father's widow, Laurence having labored hard for his conversion to no purpose, and despairing of reclaiming him, thought of nothing but retiring into France, as some others had already done. But he was severely scourged by St. Peter, in a dream, on the eve of his intended departure, with reproaches for designing to forsake that flock for which Christ had laid down his life. This did not only prevent his going, but had such an effect upon the king, when he was shown the marks of the stripes he had received on this occasion, that he became a thorough convert, doing whatever was required of him, both for his own sanctification, and the propagation of Christianity in his dominions. St. Laurence did not long survive this happy change, dying in the year 619. He is mentioned in the Roman Martyrology. See Bede, Hist. b. 2, c. 4, 6, 7.[1] Malmesb. l. 1, Pontif. Angl. Footnotes: 1. From these words of Bede, b. 1, c. 27, Austin sent to Rome Laurence the priest, and Peter the monk, some modern historians infer that St. Laurence was no monk, but a secular priest; though this proof is wreak. See Collier, Dict. Suppl. Henschenius, p. 290. and Le Quien, Oriens Christ. t. 1, p. 421. {343} FEBRUARY III. ST. BLASE, BISHOP AND MARTYR. The four modern different Greek acts of this Saint are of small authority. Bollandus has supplied this deficiency by learned remarks. A D. 316. HE was bishop of Sebaste in Armenia, and was crowned with martyrdom in the persecution of Licinius, in 316, by the command of Agricolaus, governor of Cappadocia and the lesser Armenia. It is mentioned in the acts of St. Eustratius, who received the crown of martyrdom in the reign of Dioclesian, and is honored on the 13th of December, that St. Blase, the bishop of Sebaste, honorably received his relics, deposited them with those of St. Orestes, and punctually executed every article of the last will and testament of St. Eustratius. His festival is kept a holiday in the Greek church on the 11th of February. He is mentioned in the ancient Western Martyrologies which bear the name of St. Jerom. Ado and Usuard, with several more ancient manuscript Martyrologies, quoted by Chatelain, place his name on the 15th. In the holy wars his relics were dispersed over the West, and his veneration was propagated by many miraculous cures, especially of sore throats. He is the principal patron of the commonwealth of Ragusa.[1] No other reason than the great devotion of the people to this celebrated martyr of the church, seems to have given occasion to the wool-combers to choose him the titular patron of their profession: on which account his festival is still kept by them with a solemn guild at Norwich. Perhaps also his country might in part determine them to this choice: for it seems that the first branch, or at least hint of this manufacture, was borrowed from the remotest known countries of the East, as was that of silk: or the iron combs, with which he is said to have been tormented, gave occasion to this choice. * * * * * The iron combs, hooks, racks, swords, and scaffolds, which were purpled with the blood of the martyrs, are eternal proofs of their invincible courage and constancy in the divine service. But are they not at the same time subjects of our condemnation and confusion? How weak are our resolutions! How base our pusillanimity and cowardice in the pursuit of virtue! We have daily renewed our most sacred baptismal engagements, and our purposes of faithfully serving God: these we have often repeated at the feet of God's ministers, and in presence of his holy altars; and we have often begun our conversation with great fervor. Yet these fair blossoms were always nipped in the bud: for want of constancy we soon fell back into our former sloth and disorders, adding to our other prevarications that of base infidelity. Instead of encountering gibbets and wild beasts, we were scared at the sight of the least difficulty; or we had not courage to make the least sacrifice of our passions, or to repulse the weakest and most contemptible assaults of the world. Its example, or that dangerous company from which we had not resolution to separate ourselves, carried us {344} away; and we had not courage to withstand those very maxims which we ourselves condemn in the moments of our serious reflections, as contrary to the spirit of the gospel. Perhaps we often flew back for fear of shadows, and out of apprehensions frequently imaginary, lest we should forfeit some temporal advantage, some useful or agreeable friend. Perhaps we were overcome by the difficulties which arose barely from ourselves, and wanted resolution to deny our senses, to subdue our passions, to renounce dangerous occasions, or to enter upon a penitential life. Blinded by self-love, have we not sheltered our dastardly pusillanimity under the cloak of pretended necessity, or even virtue? Footnotes: 1. See Bollandus, Pagi ad an. 316. Chatelain, Notes on the Martyr. p. 507, and Jos. Assemani in Cal. Univ. ad 11 Feb. t. 6, p. 123. ST. ANSCHARIUS, C., ARCHBISHOP OF HAMBURG AND BREMEN. From his excellent life compiled by St. Rembert, his successor, with the remarks of Mabillon, Act. Bened t. 4, p. 401, and the preliminary discourse of Henschenius, p. 391. Adam Bremensis, Hist. Episc. Hamb. and Olof Dolin, in his new excellent history of Sweden in the reigns of Listen, Bel, and Bagnar, c. 16. A.D. 865. HE was a monk, first of Old Corbie in France, afterwards of Little Corbie in Saxony. Harold, or Heriold, prince of Denmark, having been baptized in the court of the emperor Louis Débonnaire, Anscarius preached the faith with great success, first to the Danes, afterwards to the Swedes, and lastly in the north of Germany. In 832, he was made archbishop of Hamburg, and legate of the holy see, by pope Gregory IV. That city was burnt by an army of Normans, in 845. The saint continued to support his desolate churches, till, in 849, the see of Bremen becoming vacant, pope Nicholas united it to that of Hamburg, and appointed him bishop of both. Denmark and Sweden had relapsed into idolatry, notwithstanding the labors of many apostolical missionaries from New Corbie, left there by our saint. His presence soon made the faith flourish again in Denmark, under the protection of king Horick. But in Sweden the superstitious king Olas cast lots whether he should be admitted or no. The saint, grieved to see the cause of God and religion committed to the cast of a die, recommended the issue to the care of heaven. The lot proved favorable, and the bishop converted many of the lower rank, and established many churches there, which he left under zealous pastors at his return to Bremen. He wore a rough hair shirt, and, while his health permitted him, contented himself with a small quantity of bread and water. He never undertook any thing without recommending it first to God by earnest prayer, and had an extraordinary talent for preaching. His charity to the poor had no bounds; he washed their feet, and waited on them at table. He ascribed it to his sins, that he never met with the glory of martyrdom in all that he had suffered for the faith. To excite himself to compunction and to the divine praise, he made a collection of pathetic sentences, some of which he placed at the end of each psalm; several of which are found in certain manuscript psalters, as Fleury takes notice. The learned Fabricius, in his Latin Library of the middle ages, calls them an illustrious monument of the piety of this holy prelate. St. Anscharius died at Bremen in the year 865, the sixty-seventh of his age, and thirty-fourth of his episcopal dignity; and was honored with miracles. His name occurs in the Martyrologies soon after his death. In the German language he is called St. Scharies, and his collegiate church of Bremen Sant-Scharies. That at Hamburg, which bore his name, has been converted by the Lutherans into an hospital for orphans. His name was rather Ansgar, as it {345} is written in his own letter, and in a charter of Louis Débonnaire. In this letter[1] he attributes all the fruits and glory of the conversion of the Northern nations, to which he preached, to the zeal of that emperor and of Ebbo, archbishop of Rheims, without taking the least notice of himself or his own labors. The life of St. Willehad, first bishop of Bremen, who died in 789 or 791, compiled by St. Anscharius, is a judicious and elegant work, and the preface a masterpiece for that age. It is abridged and altered by Surius, but published entire at Cologne, in 1642; and more correctly by Mabillon; and again by Fabricius, among the historians of Hamburg, t. 2. Footnotes: 1. Ap. Bolland. et. Mabill. ST. WEREBURGE, V. ABBESS. PATRONESS OF CHESTER. From Harpsfield, Bede, Brompton, Florence of Worcester, Higden, Langhorn's Chronicle, Leland's Collections, Powel's History of Wales, the Saxon Chronicle, Simeon of Durham, and her curious life, written in old English metre, from the Passionary of the monastery of Chester, by Henry Bradshaw, a monk of that house, who died in 1521, on whom see Wood, Athen. Oxon., vol. 1, p. 9, n. 14, and Tanner, Bibl. p. 121. This scarce history was printed in 1521, by Richard Pynson, printer to king Henry VIII. See her ancient life, a MS. copy of which Camden sent to F. Rosweide, published by Henschenius, with notes, p. 386. See also the summary of the life of St. Wereburge, with an historical account of the images carved on her shine, (now the episcopal throne,) in the choir of the cathedral of Chester, by William Cooper, M.D., at Chester 1749. Seventh Age. ST. WEREBURGE was daughter of Wulfere, king of Mercia, by St. Ermenilde, daughter of Ercombert, king of Kent, and St. Sexburge. In her was centred the royal blood of all the chief Saxon kings; but her glory was the contempt of a vain world, even from her cradle, on the pure motive of the love of God. She had three brothers, Wulfade and Rufin, who died martyrs, and Kenred, who ended his life at Rome in the odor of sanctity. Her father, Wulfere, resided near Stone, in Staffordshire. His eldest brother, Peada, had begun to plant the faith in Mercia. Wulfere promised at his marriage to extirpate the remains of idolatry, and was then a Christian; but worldly motives made him delay the performance of his promise. Ermenilde endeavored to soften the fierceness of his temper; but she found it a far more easy task to dispose the minds of her tender nursery to be faithful to divine grace; and, under her care, all her children grew up fruitful plants in the garden of the saints. Wereburge excelled the rest in fervor and discretion. She was humble, obedient, and meek; never failed of assisting with her mother at the daily performance of the whole church office; besides spending many hours on her knees in private devotion in her closet. She eagerly listened to every instruction and exhortation of piety. At an age in which youth is the fondest of recreations, pleasures, and vanities, she was always grave, reserved, and mortified. She was a stranger to any joy but that which the purity of her conscience afforded her; and in holy compunction bewailed before God, without ceasing, her distance from him, and her other spiritual miseries. She trembled at the thought of the least danger that could threaten her purity; fasting and prayer were her delight, by which she endeavored to render her soul acceptable to her heavenly bridegroom. Her beauty and her extraordinary qualifications, rendered more conspicuous by the greater lustre of her virtue, drew to her many suitors for marriage. But a mountain might sooner be moved than her resolution shaken. The prince of the West-Saxons waited on her with rich presents; but she refused to accept them or listen to his proposals, saying she had chosen the Lord Jesus, the Redeemer of mankind, for the Spouse of her {346} soul, and had devoted herself to his service in the state of virginity. But her greatest victory was over the insidious attempts of Werbode, a powerful, wicked knight of her father's court. The king was greatly indebted to the valor and services of this knight for his temporal prosperity, and entertained a particular affection for him. The knight, sensible of this, and being passionately fond of Wereburge, made use of all his interest with the king to obtain his consent to marry her, which was granted, on condition he could gain that of the royal virgin. Queen Ermenilde and her two sons, Wulfade and Rufin, were grievously afflicted at the news. These two princes were then upon their conversion to Christianity, and for this purpose resorted to the cell of St. Chad, bishop of Litchfield, under pretence of going a hunting; for the saint resided in a hermitage, situate in a forest. By him they were instructed in the faith, and baptized. Werbode, finding them an obstacle to his design, contrived their murder, for which he is said to have moved the father to give an order in a fit of passion, by showing him the young princes returning from the bishop, and incensing him against them by slanders: for the king was passionate, and had been likewise prevailed on by his perfidious minister to countenance and favor idolatry. Werbode died miserably soon after, and Wulfere no sooner heard that the murder was perpetrate but, stung with grief and remorse, he entered into himself, did great penance, and entirely gave himself up to the advice of his queen and St. Chad. He destroyed all the idols, converted their temples into churches, founded the abbey of Peterborough, and the priory of Stone, where the two martyrs were buried, and exceedingly propagated the worship of the true God, by his zealous endeavors and example. Wereburge, seeing this perfect change in the disposition of her father, was no longer afraid to disclose to him her earnest desire of consecrating herself to God in a religious state of life. Finding him averse, and much grieved at the proposal, she pleaded her cause with so many tears, and urged the necessity of preparing for death in so pathetic a manner, that her request was granted. Her father even thanked God with great humility for so great a grace conferred on her, though not without many tears which such a sacrifice cost him. He conducted her in great state to Ely, attended by his whole court, and was met at the gate of the monastery by the royal abbess St. Audry, with her whole religious family in procession, singing holy hymns to God. Wereburge, falling on her knees, begged to be admitted in quality of a penitent. She obtained her request, and Te Deum was sung. She went through the usual trials with great humility and patience, and with joy exchanged her rich coronet, purple, silks, and gold, for a poor veil and a coarse habit, and resigned herself into the hands of her superior, to live only to Christ. King Wulfere, his three brothers, and Egbright, or Egbert, king of Kent, and Adulph, king of the East-Angles, together with the great lords of their respective states, were present at these her solemn espousals with Christ,[1] and were entertained by Wulfere with a royal magnificence. The virgin here devoted herself to God with new fervor in all her actions, and made the exercises of obedience, prayer, contemplation, humility, and penance, her whole occupation, instead of that circle of vanities and amusements which employ the slaves of the world. King Wulfede dying in 675, was buried at Litchfield. Kenred, his son, being then too young to govern, his brother Ethelred succeeded him. St. Ermenilde was no sooner at liberty, but she took the religions veil at Ely, under her mother, St. Sexburge, at whose death she was chosen third abbess, and honored in England among the saints on the 13th of February. Her daughter, St. Wereburge, at her {347} uncle king Ethelred's persuasion, left Ely to charge herself, at his request, with the superintendency of all the houses of religious women in his kingdom, that she might establish in them the observance of the most exact monastic discipline. By his liberality she founded those of Trentham in Staffordshire, of Hanbury, near Tutbury, in the county of Stafford, (not in the county of Huntingdon, as some mistake,) and of Wedon, one of the royal palaces in Northamptonshire. This king also founded the collegiate church of St. John Baptist, in the suburbs of West-Chester, and gave to St. Egwin the ground for the great abbey of Evesham; and after having reigned twenty-nine years, embraced the monastic state in his beloved monastery of Bardney, upon the river Witham, not far from Lincoln, of which he was afterwards chosen abbot. He resigned his crown to Kenred, his nephew, brother to our saint, having been chosen king only on account of the nonage of that prince. Kenred governed his realm with great prudence and piety, making it his study, by all the means in his power, to prevent and root out all manner of vice, and promote the knowledge and love of God. After a reign of five years, he recommended his subjects to God, took leave of them, to their inexpressible grief, left his crown to Coelred, his uncle's son, and, making a pilgrimage to Rome, there put on the monastic habit in 708, and persevered in great fervor till his happy death. St. Wereburge, both by word and example, conducted to God the souls committed to her care. She was the most perfect model of meekness, humility, patience, and purity. Besides the church office, she recited every day the psalter on her knees, and, after matins, remained in the church in prayer, either prostrate on the ground or kneeling, till daylight, and often bathed in tears. She never took more than one repast in the day, and read with wonderful delight the lives of the fathers of the desert. She foretold her death, visited all places under her care, and gave her last orders and exhortations. She prepared herself for her last hour by ardent invitations of her heavenly bridegroom, and languishing aspirations of divine love, in which she breathed forth her pure soul on the 3d of February, at Trentham, about the end of the seventh century. Her body, as she had desired, was interred at Hanbury. Nine years after, in 708, it was taken up in presence of king Coelred, his council, and many bishops, and being found entire and uncorrupt, was laid in a costly shrine on the 21st of June. In 875 her body was still entire; when, for fear of the Danish pirates, who were advanced as far as Repton, in the county of Derby, a royal seat (not Ripon, as Guthrie mistakes) within six miles of Hanbury, (in the county of Stafford,) her shrine was carried to West-Chester, in the reign of king Alfred, who, marrying his daughter Elfleda to Ethelred, created him first earl of Mercia, after the extinction of its kings. This valiant earl built, and endowed with secular canonries, a stately church, as a repository for the relics of St. Wereburge, which afterwards became the cathedral. His lady rebuilt other churches, walled in the city, and fortified it with a strong castle against the Welsh.[2] The great kings, Athelstan and Edgar, devoutly visited and enriched the church of St. Wereburge. In the reign of St. Edward the Confessor, Leofrick, earl of Mercia, and his pious wife, Godithe, rebuilt many churches and monasteries in those parts, founded the abbeys of Leonence, near Hereford, also that of Coventry, which city this earl made free. At Chester they repaired the collegiate church of St. John, and out of their singular devotion to St. Wereburge, rebuilt her minster in a most stately {348} manner. William the Conqueror gave to his kinsman and most valiant knight, Hugh Lupus, the earldom of Chester, with the sovereign dignity of a palatinate, on condition he should win it. After having been thrice beaten and repulsed, he at last took the city, and divided the conquered lands of the country among his followers. In 1093, he removed the secular canons of St. Wereburge, and in their stead placed monks under an abbot, brought over from Bec in Normandy. Earl Richard, son and heir to Lupus, going in pilgrimage to St. Winefrid's at Holywell, attributed to the intercession of St. Wereburge his preservation from an army of Welshmen, who came with an intention to intercept him. In memory of which, his constable, William, gave to her church the village of Newton, and founded the abbey of Norton on the Dee, at the place where his army miraculously forded that great river to the succor of his master, which place is still called Constable Sondes, says Bradshaw. The same learned author relates, from the third book of the Passionary of the Abbey, many miraculous cures of the sick, and preservations of that city from the assaults of the Welsh, Danes, and Scots, and, in 1180, from a terrible fire, which threatened to consume the whole city, but was suddenly extinguished when the monks carried in procession the shrine of the virgin in devout prayer. Her body fell to dust soon after its translation to Chester. These relics being scattered in the reign of Henry VIII., her shrine was converted into the episcopal throne in the same church, and remains in that condition to this day. This monument is of stone, ten feet high, embellished with thirty curious antique images of kings of Mercia and other princes, ancestors or relations of this saint. See Cooper's remarks on each. Footnotes: 1. Some authors in Leland's Collectanea place her religious profession after the death of her father; but our account is supported by the authority of Bradshaw. 2. This noble lady, heiress of the great virtues of her royal father, rebuilt, after the death of her husband, the churches and towns of Stafford, Warwick, Tamworth, and Shrewsbury; and founded, besides some others, the great abbey of St. Peter's in Gloucester, which church she enriched with the relics of St. Oswalk, king and martyr, and in which she herself was buried. See Bradshaw, Dugdale, Launden. ST. MARGARET SURNAMED OF ENGLAND, V. HER body is preserved entire, and resorted to with great devotion, in the church of the Cistercian nuns of Seauve Benoite,[1] in the diocese of Puy, is Velay, eight leagues from that city toward Lyons. The brothers of Sainte Marthe, in the old edition of Gallia Christiana,[2] and Dom Besunier, the Maurist monk,[3] confirm the tradition of the place, that she was an English woman, and that her shrine is famous for miracles. Yet her life in old French, (a manuscript copy of which is preserved by the Jesuits of Clermont college, in Paris, with remarks of F. Peter Francis Chifflet,) tells us that she was by birth a noble Hungarian. Her mother, probably at least of English extraction, after the death of her husband, took her with her on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem; and both led a very penitential religious life, first in that city, and afterwards at Bethlehem. St. Margaret having buried her mother in that country, made a pilgrimage to Montserrat, in Spain, and afterwards to our Lady's, at Puy in Velay. Then she retired to the Cistercian nunnery of Seauve Benoite,[4] where she happily ended her mortal course in the twelfth century. See Gallia Christ. Nova in Dioec. Aniciensi seu Podiensi, t. 2, p. 777. Footnotes: 1. Sylva Benedicta. 2. Gallia Christ. vetus, t. 4, p. 828. 3. Recueil Hist. des Abbayes de France, t. 1, p. 314. 4. This St. Margarey perhaps never professed the Cistercian order. At least Henriquez, in the annals of that order, speak only of one Margaret, and English woman, whose brother Thomas was banished by Henry II. among the friends and relations of St. Thomas of Canterbury. By this brother's advice she made her profession in the Cistercian nunnery at Laon, where she died in odor of sanctity in 1192. See Henriquez ad eum annum. {349} FEBRUARY IV. SAINT ANDREW CORSINI BISHOP AND CONFESSOR. From his two original lives, written, the one by a disciple, the other by Peter Andrew Castagna, a friar of his Order, one hundred years after his death. See the same compiled in Latin by Francis Venturius bishop of San-Severo, printed at Rome in 1620, in quarto, and abridged by the elegant Jesuit Maffei. A.D. 1373. THIS saint at his baptism was called Andrew, from the apostle of that name, on whose festival he was born in Florence, in 1302. The family of the Corsini was then one of the most illustrious of that commonwealth. This child was the fruit of the prayers of his pious parents, who consecrated him by vow to God before his birth. But notwithstanding the care his parents took to instil good principles into him, he spent the first part of his youth in vice and extravagance, in the company of such as were as wicked as himself. His devout mother Peregrina never ceased weeping and praying for his conversion, and one day said to him, with many sighs, in the bitterness of her grief: "I see you are the wolf I saw in my sleep;" giving him to understand, that when with child of him she had dreamed she was brought to bed of a wolf, which running into a church, was turned into a lamb. She added, that she and her husband had in a particular manner devoted him, while in the womb, to the service of God, under the protection of the blessed Virgin; and that in consequence of his being born not for them, nor for the world, but for God, a very different kind of life from what he led was expected from him. This discourse made so strong an impression on his heart, that he went immediately to the church of the Carmelite friars, and having prayed there for some time with great fervor before the altar of our Lady, he was so touched by God, that he took a resolution upon the spot to return no more to his father's house, but to embrace the religious state of life professed in that convent. He was readily admitted, in the year 1318, and after a novitiate of a year and some months, during which he eluded the artifices of his worldly companions, and resolutely rejected the solicitations of an uncle who sought to draw him back into the world, he made his solemn profession. He never departed from the first fervor of his conversion. He strenuously labored to subdue his passions by extreme humiliations, obedience even to the last person in the house, by silence and prayer; and his superiors employed him in the meanest offices, often in washing the dishes in the scullery. The progress he made in learning, particularly in the holy scriptures and in divinity, was very great. In the year 1328 he was ordained priest; but to prevent the music and feast which his family had prepared, according to custom, for the day on which he was to say his first mass, he privately withdrew to a little convent seven miles out of town, where he offered, unknown, his first-fruits to God, with wonderful recollection and devotion. After some time employed in preaching at Florence, he was sent to Paris, where he studied three years, and took some degrees. He prosecuted his studies some time at Avignon, with his uncle, cardinal Corsini; and in 1332, returning to Florence, was chosen prior of that convent by a provincial chapter. God honored his extraordinary {350} virtue with the gifts of prophecy and miracles; and the astonishing fruits of his example and zealous preaching made him be looked upon as a second apostle of his country. Among other miracles and conquests of hardened souls, was the conversion of his cousin John Corsini, an infamous gamester; and the miraculous cure of an ulcer in his neck. The bishop of Fiesoli, a town three miles from Florence, being dead, the chapter unanimously chose our saint to fill up the vacant see. Being informed of their proceedings, he hid himself, and remained so long concealed that the canons, despairing to find him, were going to proceed to a second election; when, by a particular direction of divine providence, he was discovered by a child. Being consecrated bishop in the beginning of the year 1360, he redoubled his former austerities. To his hair-shirt he added an iron girdle. He daily said the seven penitential psalms and the litany of the saints, and gave himself a severe discipline while he recited the litany. His bed was of vine-branches strewed on the floor. All his time was taken up in prayer or in his functions. Holy meditation and reading the scriptures he called his recreation from his labors. He avoided discourse with women as much as possible, and would never listen to flatterers or informers. His tenderness and care of the poor were incredible, and he had a particular regard for the bashful among them, that is, such as were ashamed to make known their distress: these he was diligent in seeking out, and assisted them with all possible secrecy. By an excellent talent for composing differences and dissensions, he never failed to reconcile persons at variance, and to appease all seditions that happened in his time, either at Fiesoli, or at Florence. Urban V., on this account, sent him vested with legatine power to Bologna, where the nobility and people were miserably divided. He happily pacified them, and their union continued during the remainder of his life. He was accustomed every Thursday to wash, with singular charity and humility, the feet of the poor: one excused himself, alleging that his feet were full of ulcers and corruption; the saint insisted upon washing them notwithstanding, and they were immediately healed. In imitation of St. Gregory the Great, he kept a list of the names of all the poor, and furnished them all with allowances. He never dismissed any without an alms, for which purpose he once miraculously multiplied bread. He was taken ill while he was singing high mass on Christmas-night, in the year 1372. His fever increasing, he gave up his happy soul to God with a surprising joy and tranquillity, on the 6th of January, 1373, being seventy-one years and five weeks old, having been twelve years bishop. He was honored with many miracles, and immediately canonized by the voice of the people. The state of Florence has often sensibly experienced his powerful intercession. Pope Eugenius IV. allowed his relics to be exposed to public veneration. He was canonized by Urban VIII. in 1629. His festival was transferred to the 4th of February. Clement XII. being of this family, in conjunction with his nephew, the marquis of Corsini, sumptuously adorned the chapel of the Carmelite friars' church in Florence, in which the saint's body is kept. He also built and endowed a magnificent independent chapel in the great church of St. John Lateran, under the name of this his patron, in which the corpse of that pope is interred. * * * * * The example of all the saints confirms the fundamental maxim of our divine Redeemer, that the, foundation of all solid virtue and of true sanctity, is to be laid by subduing the passions and dying to ourselves. Pride, sensuality, covetousness, and every vice must be rooted out of the heart, the senses must be mortified, the inconstancy of the mind must be settled, and its inclination to roving and dissipation fixed by recollection, and all depraved {351} affections curbed. Both in cloisters and in the world, many Christians take pains to become virtuous by multiplying religious practices, yet lose in a great measure the fruit of their labors, because they never study with their whole hearts to die to themselves. So long as self-love reigns in their souls, almost without control, this will often blind and deceive them, and will easily infect even their good works, and their devotion will be liable to a thousand illusions, and always very imperfect. Hence religious persons, after many years spent in the rigorous observance of their rule, still fail upon the least trial or contradiction which thwarts their favorite inclination, and are stopped in their spiritual progress as it were by every grain of sand in their way: their whole life they crawl like base insects in the mire of their imperfections, whereas if they studied once in good earnest to curb sensuality and to renounce their own lights, their own will, and the inordinate love of themselves, difficulties would disappear before them, and they would in a short time arrive at the perfection of true virtue, and enjoy the liberty of the children of God, and his interior peace, the true road to which is only humility, meekness, and perfect self-denial. Did we know the treasure and happiness which this would procure us, we should, in imitation of the ancient holy monks, desire to meet with superiors who would exercise us by the severest trials, and think ourselves most obliged to those who apply the strongest remedies to purge and cure our sick souls. SS. PHILEAS, MM. BISHOP OF THMUIS, AND PHILOROMUS. PHILEAS was a rich nobleman of Thmuis[1] in Egypt, very eloquent and learned. Being converted to the faith, he was chosen bishop of that city; but was taken and carried prisoner to Alexandria by the persecutors, under the successors of Dioclesian. Eusebius has preserved part of a letter which he wrote in his dungeon, and sent to his flock to comfort and encourage them.[2] Describing the sufferings of his fellow confessors at Alexandria, he says that every one had full liberty allowed to insult, strike, and beat them with rods, whips, or clubs. Some of the confessors, with their hands behind their backs, were tied to pillars, their bodies stretched out with engines, and their sides, belly, thighs, legs, and cheeks, hideously torn with iron hooks: others were hung by one hand, suffering excessive pain by the stretching of their joints: others hung by both hands, their bodies being drawn down. The governor thought no treatment too bad for Christians. Some expired on the racks; others expired soon after they were taken down: others were laid on their backs in the dungeons, with their legs stretched out in the wooden stocks to the fourth hole, &c. Culcian, who had been prefect of Thebais, was then governor of all Egypt, under the tyrant Maximinus, but afterwards lost his head in 313, by the order of Licinius. We have a long interrogatory of St. Phileas before him from the presidial registers. Culcian, after many other things, asked him, "Was Christ God?" The saint answered, "Yes;" and alleged his miracles as a proof of his divinity. The governor professed a great regard for his quality and merit, and said: "If you were in misery, or necessity, you should be {352} dispatched without more ado; but as you have riches and estates sufficient not only for yourself and family, but for the maintenance almost of a whole province, I pity you, and will do all in my power to save you." The counsellors and lawyers, desirous also of saving him, said: "He had already sacrificed in the Phrontisterium, (or academy for the exercises of literature.") Phileas cried out: "I have not by any immolation; but say barely that I have sacrificed, and you will say no more than the truth." Having been confined there some time, he might perhaps have said mass in that place.[3] His wife, children, brother, and other relations, persons of distinction, and Pagans, were present at the trial. The governor, hoping to overcome him by tenderness, said:--"See how sorrowful your wife stands with her eyes fixed upon you." Phileas replied: "Jesus Christ, the Saviour of souls, calls me to his glory: and he can also, if he pleases, call my wife." The counsellors, out of compassion, said to the judge: "Phileas begs a delay." Culcian said to him: "I grant it you most willingly, that you may consider what to do." Phileas replied: "I have considered, and it is my unchangeable resolution to die for Jesus Christ." Then all the counsellors, the emperor's lieutenant, who was the first magistrate of the city, all the other officers of justice, and his relations, fell down together at his feet, embracing his knees, and conjuring him to have compassion on his disconsolate family, and not to abandon his children in their tender years, while his presence was absolutely necessary for them. But he, like a rock unshaken by the impetuous waves that dash against it, stood unmoved; and raising his heart to God, protested aloud that he owned no other kindred but the apostles and martyrs. Philoromus, a noble Christian, was present: he was a tribune or colonel, and the emperor's treasurer-general in Alexandria, and had his tribunal in the city, where he sat every day hearing and judging causes, attended by many officers in great state. Admiring the prudence and inflexible courage of Phileas, and moved with indignation against his adversaries, he cried out to them: "Why strive ye to overcome this brave man, and to make him, by an impious compliance with men, renounce God? Do not you see that, contemplating the glory of heaven, he makes no account of earthly things?" This speech drew upon him the indignation of the whole assembly, who in rage demanded that both might be condemned to die. To which the judge readily assented. As they were led out to execution, the brother of Phileas, who was a judge, said to the governor: "Phileas desires his pardon." Culcian there fore called him back, and asked him if it was true. He answered: "No; God forbid. Do not listen to this unhappy man. Far from desiring the reversion of my sentence, I think myself much obliged to the emperors, to you, and to your court: for by your means I become coheir with Christ, and shall enter this very day into the possession of his kingdom." Hereupon he was remanded to the place of execution, where having made his prayer aloud, and exhorted the faithful to constancy and perseverance, he was beheaded with Philoromus. The exact time of their martyrdom is not known, but it happened between the years 306 and 312. Their names stand in the ancient martyrologies. See Eusebius, Hist. l. 8, c. 9. St. Hier. in Catal. in Philea; and their original beautiful acts, published by Combefis, Henschenius, and Ruinart. Footnotes: 1. Thmuis, capital of the Nomos, or district of Mendes, is called, by Strata, Mendes: which word in the Egyptian tongue signifies a goat, Pan being there worshipped with extraordinary superstition under the figure of a goat. This city was anciently one of the largest and richest in Egypt, as Amm. Marcellinus (l. 22) testifies; but is now reduced to the condition of a mean village, and called Themoi, or rather Them{o}wia. See Le Quien. Oriens Christ. t. 2. p. 53{}. 2. Eus. Hist. l. 8, c. 10, p. 302. 3. See Tillemont and Ceillier. {353} ST. GILBERT, A. FOUNDER OF THE GILBERTINS HE was born at Sempringham in Lincolnshire, and, after a clerical education, was ordained priest by the bishop of Lincoln. For some time he taught a free-school, training up youth in regular exercises of piety and learning. The advowson of the parsonages of Sempringham and Tirington being the right of his father, he was presented by him to those united livings, in 1123. He gave all the revenues of them to the poor, except a small sum for bare necessaries, which he reserved out of the first living. By his care his parishioners seemed to lead the lives of religious men, and were known to be of his flock, by their conversation, wherever they went. He gave a rule to seven holy virgins, who lived in strict enclosure in a house adjoining to the wall of his parish church of St. Andrew at Sempringham, and another afterwards to a community of men, who desired to live under his direction. The latter was drawn from the rule of the canon regulars; but that given to his nuns, from St. Bennet's: but to both he added many particular constitutions. Such was the origin of the Order of the Gilbertins, the approbation of which he procured from pope Eugenius III. At length he entered the Order himself, but resigned the government of it some time before his death, when he lost his sight. His diet was chiefly roots and pulse, and so sparing, that others wondered how he could subsist. He had always at table a dish which he called, The plate of the Lord Jesus, in which he put all that was best of what was served up; and this was for the poor. He always wore a hair shirt, took his short rest sitting, and spent great part of the night in prayer. In this, his favorite exercise, his soul found those wings on which she continually soared to God. During the exile of St. Thomas of Canterbury, he and the other superiors of his Order were accused of having sent him succors abroad. The charge was false: yet the saint chose rather to suffer imprisonment and the danger of the suppression of his Order, than to deny it, lest he should seem to condemn what would have been good and just. He departed to our Lord on the 3d of February, 1190, being one hundred and six years old. Miracles wrought at his tomb were examined and approved by Hubert, archbishop of Canterbury, and the commissioners of pope Innocent III. in 1201, and he was canonized by that pope the year following. The Statutes of the Gilbertins, and Exhortations to his Brethren, are ascribed to him. See his life by a contemporary writer, in Dugdale's Monasticon, t. 2, p. 696; and the same in Henschenius, with another from Capgrave of the same age. See also, Harpsfield, Hist. Angl. cent. 12, c. 37. De Visch, Bibl. Cisterc. Henschenius, p. 567. Helyot, &c. ST. JANE, JOAN, OR JOANNA OF VALOIS, QUEEN OF FRANCE. SHE was daughter of king Louis XI. and Charlotte of Savoy, born to 1464. Her low stature and deformed body rendered her the object of her father's aversion, who, notwithstanding, married her to Louis duke of Orleans, his cousin-german, in 1476. She obtained his life of her brother, Charles VIII., who had resolved to put him to death for rebellion. Yet {354} nothing could conquer his antipathy against her, from which she suffered every thing with patience, making exercises of piety her chief occupation and comfort. Her husband coming to the crown of France in 1498, under the name of Louis XII., having in view an advantageous match with Anne, the heiress of Brittany, and the late king's widow, alleging also the nullity of his marriage with Jane, chiefly on account of his being forced to it by Louis XI., applied to pope Alexander VI. for commissaries to examine the matter according to law. These having taken cognizance of the affair, declared the marriage void; nor did Jane make any opposition to the divorce, but rejoiced to see herself at liberty, and in a condition to serve God in a state of greater perfection, and attended with fewer impediments in his service. She therefore meekly acquiesced in the sentence, and the king, pleased at her submission, gave her the duchy of Berry, besides Pontoise and other townships. She resided at Bourges, wore only sackcloth, and addicted herself entirely to the exercises of mortification and prayer, and to works of charity, in which she employed all her great revenues. By the assistance of her confessarius, a virtuous Franciscan friar, called Gabriel Maria, as he always signed his name, she instituted, in 1500, the Order of nuns of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin.[1] It was approved by Julius II., Leo X., Paul V., and Gregory XV. The nuns wear a black veil, a white cloak, a red scapular, and a brown habit with a cross, and a cord for a girdle. The superioress is only called Ancelle, or servant, for humility. St. Jane took the habit herself in 1504, but died on the 4th of February, 1505. The Huguenots burned her remains at Bourges, in 1562.[2] She was canonized by Clement XII. in 1738, but had been venerated at Bourges from the time of her death. See the brief of Benedict XIV., concerning her immemorial veneration, t. 2, de Canoniz. l. 2, c. 24, p. 296. Bullarii, t. 16, p. 104, and Helyot, Hist. des Ord. Rel. t. 7, p. 339. Also, Henschenius, p. 575. Chatelain's Notes on the Mart. Her life, compiled by Andrew Fremiot, archbishop of Bourges; by Hilarion de Coste, of the Order of Minims, among his illustrious ladies; another printed by the order of Doni d'Attichi, bishop of Autun, in 1656, (who had from his youth professed the same Order of the Minims, of which he wrote the Annals, and a History of the French Cardinals.) See also, on St. Jane, Godeau, Eloges des Princesses, &c. Footnotes: 1. The imitation of the ten principal virtues, of which the mysteries of the Blessed Virgin, honored by the Church in her yearly festivals, furnish perfect models, is the peculiar end of this religious institute, which takes its name from the first and principal of the joyful mysteries of the mother of God. These nuns wear a gray habit with a red scapular, with a gold cross (or of silver gilt) hanging before their breast, and a gold ring on one of their fingers. A noble Genoese widow, called Mary Victoria Fornaro, instituted in 1604 another Order of the same title, called of the Celestial Annunciades, Annuntiatæ Coelestinæ. As an emblem of heaven, their habit is white, with a blue mantle to represent the azure of the heavens. The most rigorous poverty, and a total separation from the world, are prescribed. The religious are only allowed to speak to externs six times in a year, and then only to near relations, the men to those of the first, the women to those of the first and second degree. See the life of ven. Mary Victoria Fornaro, by F. Ambrose Spinola, Jesuit; and Hist. des Ordres Relig. t. 4, p. 297. 2. See Henschenius, p. 578. ST. ISIDORE OF PELUSIUM. HE was a monk from his youth, and became superior of a monastery in the neighborhood of that city, in the fifth age. Facundus and Suidas assure us that he was promoted to the dignity of priest. He was looked upon as a living rule of religious perfection, and treated by his patriarch, St. Cyril, and the other prelates of his time, as their father. He chose St. Chrysostom for his model. We have still extant two thousand and twelve of his letters, abounding with excellent instructions of piety, and with theological {355} and critical learning. They are concise, and the style natural, very elegant, agreeable, full of fire and penetration. Possevin laments that they are not in use as a classic author for the Greek language. His prudence, undaunted zeal, profound humility, ardent love of God, and other virtues, shine admirably in them. He died about the year 449. See Photius, Bibl. Cod. 232 and 228. Tillem. t. 15, p. 97. Bolland. 4 Feb, p. 468. ST. REMBERT, ARCHBISHOP OF BREMEN, C. HE was a native of Flanders, near Bruges, and a monk in the neighboring monastery of Turholt. St. Anscharius called him to his assistance in his missionary labors, and in his last sickness recommended him for his successor, saying: "Rembert is more worthy to be archbishop, than I to discharge the office of his deacon." After his death, in 865, St. Rembert was unanimously chosen archbishop of Hamburg and Bremen, and superintended all the churches of Sweden, Denmark, and the Lower Germany, finishing the work of their conversion. He also began the conversion of the Sclavi and the Vandals, now called Brandenburghers. He sold the sacred vessels to redeem captives from the Normans; and gave the horse on which he was riding for the ransom of a virgin taken by the Sclavi. He was most careful never to lose a moment of time from serious duties and prayer, and never to interrupt the attention of his mind to God in his exterior functions. He died on the 11th of June, in 888, but is commemorated in the Roman Martyrology on the 4th of February, the day on which he was chosen archbishop. His life of St. Anscharius is admired, both for the author's accuracy and piety, and for the elegance and correctness of the composition. His letter to Walburge, first abbess of Nienherse, is a pathetic exhortation to humility and virginity. The see of Hamburg being united to Bremen by St. Anscharius, this became the metropolitan church of all the north of Germany: but the city becoming Lutheran, expelled the archbishop in the reign of Charles V. This see and that of Ferden were secularized and yielded to the Swedes by the treaty of Westphalia, in 1648. See his life written soon after his death, in Henschenius, p. 555. Mabillon, Act. Bened., &c. ST. MODAN, ABBOT IN SCOTLAND, C. DRYBURGH, situated near Mailros, was anciently one of the most famous monasteries in Scotland: in this house of saints, Modan dedicated himself to God, about the year 522. Being persuaded that Christian perfection is to be attained by holy prayer and contemplation, and by a close union of our souls with God, he gave six or seven hours every day to prayer, and moreover seasoned with it all his other actions and employments. A spirit of prayer is founded in the purity of the affections, the fruit of self-denial, humility, and obedience. Hence proceeded the ardor with which our saint studied to crucify his flesh and senses by the practice of the greatest austerities, to place himself beneath all creatures by the most profound and sincere humility, and in all things to subject his will to that of his superiors with such an astonishing readiness and cheerfulness, that they unanimously declared they never saw any one so perfectly divested of all self-will, and dead to himself, as Modan. The abbacy falling vacant, he was raised against his will to that dignity. In this charge, his conduct was a clear proof of the well-known maxim, that no man possesses the art of governing {356} others well, unless he is perfectly master of that of obeying. His inflexible firmness, in maintaining every point of monastic discipline, was tempered by the most winning sweetness and charity, and an unalterable calmness and meekness. Such, moreover, was his prudence, and such the unction of his words in instructing or reproving others, that his precepts and very reprimands gave pleasure, gained all hearts, and inspired the love, and communicated the spirit of every duty. He preached the faith at Stirling, and in other places near the Forth, especially at Falkirk; but frequently interrupted his apostolic employments to retire among the craggy mountains of Dunbarton, where he usually spent thirty or forty days at once in the heavenly exercises of devout contemplation, in which he enjoyed a kind of anticipation or foretaste of the delights in which consists the happiness of the blessed. He died in his retirement near Alcluid, (a fortress on the river Cluid,) since called Dunbritton, now Dunbarton. His death is usually placed in the seventh century, though some think he flourished later. His relics were kept with singular veneration in a famous church of his name at Rosneith. He is also titular saint of the great church at Stirling, and honored particularly at Dunbarton and Falkirk. See Hector Boetius, Lesley, King, in his Calendar, the Breviary of Aberdeen, and the Chronicle of Scone: also Bollandus, p. 497. ST. JOSEPH OF LEONISSA, C. THIS saint was born to 1556, at Leonissa a small town near Otricoli, in the ecclesiastical state, and at eighteen years of age made his profession among the Capuchin friars, in the place of his birth, taking the name of Joseph; for before he was called Eufranius. He was always mild, humble, chaste, patient, charitable, mortified, and obedient to an heroic degree: with the utmost fervor, and on the most perfect motive of religion, he endeavored to glorify God in all his actions. Three days in the week he usually took no other sustenance than bread and water, and passed several Lents in the year after the same manner. His bed was hard boards, with the trunk of a vine for his pillow. The love of injuries, contumelies, and humiliations, made him find in them his greatest joy. He looked upon himself as the basest of sinners, and said, that indeed God by his infinite mercy had preserved him from grievous crimes; but that by his sloth, ingratitude, and infidelity to the divine grace, he deserved to have been abandoned by God above all creatures. By this humility and mortification he crucified in himself the _old man with his deeds_, and prepared his soul for heavenly communications in prayer and contemplation, which was his assiduous exercise. The sufferings of Christ were the favorite and most ordinary object of his devotions. He usually preached with a crucifix in his hands, and the fire of his words kindled a flame in the hearts of his hearers and penitents. In 1587 he was sent by his superiors into Turkey, to labor as a missioner among the Christians at Pera, a suburb of Constantinople, He there encouraged and served the Christian galley-slaves with wonderful charity and fruit, especially during a violent pestilence, with which he himself was seized, but recovered. He converted many apostates, one of whom was a bashaw. By preaching the faith to the Mahometans he incurred the utmost severity of the Turkish laws, was twice imprisoned, and the second time condemned to a cruel death. He was hung on a gibbet by one hand, which was fastened by a chain, and pierced with a sharp hook at the end of the chain; and by one foot in the same manner. Having been some time on {357} the gibbet, he was released,[1] and the sentence of death was changed by the sultan into banishment. Wherefore, embarking for Italy, he landed at Venice; and after two years' absence arrived at Leonissa. He resumed his apostolic labors in his Own country with extraordinary zeal, and an uncommon benediction from heaven. To complete his sacrifice, he suffered very much towards the end of his life from a painful cancer, to extirpate which he underwent two incisions without the least groan or complaint, only repeating: "Holy Mary, pray for us miserable afflicted sinners:" and holding all the while a crucifix to his hand, on which he fixed his eyes. When some said, before the operation, that he ought to be bound or held, he pointed to the crucifix, saying: "This is the strongest band: this will hold me unmoved better than any cords could do." The operation proving unsuccessful, the saint happily expired, on the 4th day of February, in 1612, being fifty-eight years old. His name was inserted in the Roman Martyrology on the 4th of February. See the history of his miracles in the acts of his beatification, which ceremony was performed by Clement XII. in 1737, and in those of his canonization by Benedict XIV. in 1746. Acta Canonizationis 5 Sanctorum, viz. Fidelis a Sigmaringa, M. Camilli de Lelia, Petri Regalati, Josephi a Leonissa, and Catharinæa de Riccis, a Benedicto XIV., an. 1746, printed at Rome an. 1749, pp. 11, 85, and the bull for his canonization, p. 558. Also Bollan. t. 15, p. 127. Footnotes: 1. Some say he was released by an angel, after hanging three days, but this circumstance is not mentioned by Benedict XIV., in the decree for his canonization, p. 559. FEBRUARY V. ST. AGATHA, VIRGIN AND MARTYR. We have her panegyrics by St. Aldhelm, in the seventh, and St. Methodius, patriarch of Constantinople, in the ninth, centuries; also a hymn in her honor among the poems of pope Damasus, and another by St. Isidore of Seville, in Bollandus, p. 596. The Greeks have interpolated her acts, but those in Latin are very ancient. They are abridged by Tillemont, t. 3, p. 409. See also Rocci Pyrrho, in Sicilia Sacra on Palermo, Catana, and Malta. A. D 251. THE cities of Palermo and Catana, in Sicily, dispute the honor of her birth: but they do much better who, by copying her virtues, and claiming her patronage, strive to become her fellow-citizens in heaven. It is agreed that she received the crown of martyrdom at Catana, in the persecution of Decius, in the third consulship of that prince, in the year of our Lord 251. She was of a rich and illustrious family, and having been consecrated to God from her tender years, triumphed over many assaults upon her chastity. Quintianus, a man of consular dignity, bent on gratifying both his lust and avarice, imagined he should easily compass his wicked designs on Agatha's person and estate, by means of the emperor's edict against the Christians. He therefore caused her to be apprehended and brought before him at Catana. Seeing herself in the hands of the persecutors, she made this prayer: "Jesus Christ, Lord of all things, you see my heart, you know my desire: possess alone all that I am. I am your sheep, make me worthy to overcome the devil." She wept, and prayed for courage and strength all the way she {358} went. On her appearance, Quintianus gave orders for her being put into the hands of Aphrodisia, a most wicked woman, who with six daughters, all prostitutes, kept a common stew. The saint suffered in this infamous place, assaults and stratagems against her virtue, infinitely more terrible to her than any tortures or death itself. But placing her confidence in God, she never ceased with sighs and most earnest tears to implore his protection, and by it was an overmatch for all their hellish attempts, the whole month she was there. Quintianus being informed of her constancy after thirty days, ordered her to be brought before him. The virgin, in her first interrogatory, told him, that to be a servant of Jesus Christ was the most illustrious nobility, and true liberty. The judge, offended at her resolute answers, commanded her to be buffeted, and led to prison. She entered it with great joy, recommending her future conflict to God. The next day she was arraigned a second time at the tribunal, and answered with equal constancy that Jesus Christ was her life and her salvation. Quintianus then ordered her to be stretched on the rack, which torment was usually accompanied with stripes, the tearing of the sides with iron hooks, and burning them with torches or matches. The governor, enraged to see her suffer all this with cheerfulness, commanded her breast to be tortured, and afterwards to be cut off. At which she made him this reproach: "Cruel tyrant, do you not blush to torture this part of my body, you that sucked the breasts of a woman yourself?" He remanded her to prison with a severe order, that neither salves nor food should be allowed her. But God would be himself her physician, and the apostle St. Peter in a vision comforted her, healed all her wounds, and filled her dungeon with a heavenly light. Quintianus, four days after, not the least moved at the miraculous cure of her wounds, caused her to be rolled naked over live coals mixed with broken potsherds. Being carried back to prison, she made this prayer: "Lord, my Creator, you have ever protected me from the cradle. You have taken from me the love of the world, and given me patience to suffer: receive now my soul." After which words she sweetly gave up the ghost. Her name is inserted in the canon of the mass, in the calendar of Carthage, as ancient as the year 530, and in all martyrologies of the Latins and Greeks. Pope Symmachus built a church in Rome on the Aurelian way, under her name, about the year 500, which is fallen to decay.[1] St. Gregory the Great enriched a church which he purged from the Arian impiety, with her relics,[2] which it still possesses. This church had been rebuilt in her honor by Ricimer, general of the western empire, in 460. Gregory II. built another famous church at Rome, under her invocation, in 726, which Clement VIII. gave to the congregation of the Christian doctrine. St. Gregory the Great[3] ordered some of her relics to be placed in the church of the monastery of St. Stephen, in the Isle of Capreæ, now Capri. The chief part, which remained at Catana, was carried to Constantinople by the Greek general, who drove the Saracens out of Sicily about the year 1040: these were brought back to Catana in 1127, a relation of which translation, written by Mauritius, who was then bishop, is recorded by Rocci Pyrrho, and Bollandus.[4] The same authors relate in what manner the torrent of burning sulphur and stones which issue from mount �tna, in great eruptions, was several times averted from the walls of Catana by the veil of St. Agatha, (taken out of her tomb,) which was carried in procession. Also that through her intercession, Malta (where she is honored as patroness of the island) was preserved from the Turks who invaded it in 1551. Small portions of relics of St. Agatha are said to be distributed in many places. {359} * * * * * The perfect purity of intention by which St. Agatha was entirely dead to the world and herself, and sought only to please God, is the circumstance which sanctified her sufferings, and rendered her sacrifice complete. The least cross which we bear, the least action which we perform in this disposition, will be a great holocaust, and a most acceptable offering. We have frequently something to suffer--sometimes an aching pain in the body, at other times some trouble of mind, often some disappointment, some humbling rebuke, or reproach, or the like. If we only bear these trials with patience when others are witnesses, or if we often speak of them, or are fretful under them, or if we bear patiently public affronts or great trials, yet sink under those which are trifling, and are sensible to small or secret injuries, it is evident that we have not attained to true purity of intention in our patience; that we are not dead to ourselves, and love not to disappear to the eyes of creatures, but court them, and take a secret complacency in things which appear great. We profess ourselves ready to die for Christ; yet cannot bear the least cross or humiliation. How agreeable to our divine spouse is the sacrifice of a soul which suffers in silence, desiring to have no other witness of her patience than God alone, who sends her trials; which shuns superiority and honors, but takes all care possible that no one knows the humility or modesty of such a refusal; which suffers humiliations, and seeks no comfort or reward but from God. This simplicity and purity of heart; this love of being hid in God, through Jesus Christ, is the perfection of all our sacrifices, and the complete victory over self-love, which it attacks and forces out of its strongest intrenchments: this says to Christ, with St. Agatha, "Possess alone all that I am." Footnotes: 1. Fronteau Cal. p. 25. 2. Disi. l. 3, c. 30. 3. L. 1, ep. 52. 4. Feb. {}1, p. 647. THE MARTYRS OF JAPAN. See the triumph of the martyrs of Japan. by F. Trigault, from the year 1612 to 1640, the history of Japan, by F. Crasset, to the year 1658, and that by the learned F. Charlevoix in nine volumes: also the life of F. Spinola, &c. THE empire of Japan, so called from one of the islands of which it is composed, was discovered by certain Portuguese merchants, about the year 1541. It is generally divided into several little kingdoms, all which obey one sovereign emperor. The capital cities are Meaco and Jedo. The manners of this people are the reverse of ours in many things. Their characteristic is pride, and an extravagant love of honor. They adore idols of grotesque shapes, by which they represent certain famous wicked ancestors: the chiefest are Amida and Xacha. Their priests are called Bonzas, and all obey the Jaco, or high-priest. St. Francis Xavier arrived in Japan in 1549, baptized great numbers, and whole provinces received the faith. The great kings of Arima, Bungo, and Omura, sent a solemn embassy of obedience to pope Gregory XIII. in 1582: and in 1587 there were in Japan above two hundred thousand Christians, and among these several kings, princes, and bonzas, but in 1588, Cambacundono, the haughty emperor, having usurped the honors of a deity, commanded all the Jesuits to leave his dominions within six months: however, many remained there disguised. In 1593, the persecution was renewed, and several Japanese converts received the crown of martyrdom. The emperor Tagcosama, one of the proudest and most vicious of men, was worked up into rage and jealousy by a suspicion suggested by certain European merchants desirous of the monopoly of this trade, that the view of the missionaries in preaching the Christian faith was to facilitate the conquest of their country by the Portuguese or Spaniards. Three Jesuits and six Franciscans were crucified on {360}a hill near Nangasaqui in 1597. The latter were partly Spaniards and partly Indians, and had at their head F. Peter Baptist, commissary of his Order, a native of Avila, in Spain. As to the Jesuits, one was Paul Michi, a noble Japanese and an eminent preacher, at that time thirty-three years old. The other two, John Gotto and James Kisai, were admitted into the Society in prison a little before they suffered. Several Japanese converts suffered with them. The martyrs were twenty-six in number, and among them were three boys who used to serve the friars at mass; two of them were fifteen years of age, and the third only twelve, yet each showed great joy and constancy in their sufferings. Of these martyrs, twenty-four had been brought to Meaco, where only a part of their left ears was cut off, by a mitigation of the sentence which had commanded the amputation of their noses and both ears. They were conducted through many towns and public places, their cheeks stained with blood, for a terror to others. When the twenty-six soldiers of Christ were arrived at the place of execution near Nangasaqui, they were allowed to make their confession to two Jesuits of the convent, in that town, and being fastened to crosses by cords and chains, about their arms and legs, and an iron collar about their necks, were raised into the air, the foot of each cross falling into a hole prepared for it in the ground. The crosses were planted in a row, about four feet asunder, and each martyr had an executioner near him with a spear ready to pierce his side, for such is the Japanese manner of crucifixion. As soon as all the crosses were planted, the executioners lifted up their lances, and at a signal given, all pierced the martyrs almost in the same instant; upon which they expired and went to receive the reward of their sufferings. Their blood and garments were procured by Christians, and miracles were wrought by them. Urban VIII. ranked them among the martyrs, and they are honored on the 5th of February, the day of their triumph. The rest of the missionaries were put on board a vessel, and carried out of the dominions, except twenty-eight priests, who stayed behind in disguise. Tagcosama dying, ordered his body should not be burned, as was the custom in Japan, but preserved enshrined in his palace of Fuximi, that he might be worshipped among the gods under the title of the new god of war. The most stately temple in the empire was built to him, and his body deposited in it. The Jesuits returned soon after, and though the missionaries were only a hundred in number, they converted, in 1599, forty thousand, and in 1600, above thirty thousand, and built fifty churches; for the people were highly scandalized to see him worshipped as a god, whom they had remembered a most covetous, proud, and vicious tyrant. But in 1602, Cubosama renewed the bloody persecution, and many Japanese converts were beheaded, crucified, or burned. In 1614, new cruelties were exercised to overcome their constancy, as by bruising their feet between certain pieces of wood, cutting off or squeezing their limbs one after another, applying red-hot irons or slow fires, flaying off the skin of the fingers, putting burning coals to their hands, tearing off the flesh with pincers, or thrusting reeds into all parts of their bodies, and turning them about to tear their flesh, till they should say they would forsake their faith: all which, innumerable persons, even children, bore with invincible constancy till death. In 1616, Xogun succeeding his father Cubosama in the empire, surpassed him in cruelty. The most illustrious of these religious heroes was F. Charles Spinola. He was of a noble Genoese family, and entered the Society at Nola, while his uncle cardinal Spinola was bishop of that city. Out of zeal and a desire of martyrdom, he begged to be sent on the Japanese mission. He arrived there in 1602; labored many years in that mission, gained many to Christ, by his mildness, and lived in great austerity, for his usual food was only a little rice and {361} herbs. He suffered four years a most cruel imprisonment, during which, in burning fevers, he was not able to obtain of his keepers a drop of cold water out of meals: yet he wrote from his dungeon: "Father, how sweet and delightful is it to suffer for Jesus Christ! I have learned this better by experience than I am able to express, especially since we are in these dungeons where we fast continually. The strength of my body fails me, but my joy increases as I see death draw nearer. O what a happiness for me, if next Easter I shall sing the heavenly Alleluia in the company of the blessed!" In a long letter to his cousin Maximilian Spinola, he said: "O, if you had tasted the delights with which God tills the souls of those who serve him, and suffer for him, how would you contemn all that the world can promise! I now begin to be a disciple of Jesus Christ, since for his love I am in prison, where I suffer much. But I assure you, that when I am fainting with hunger, God hath fortified me by his sweet consolations, so that I have looked upon myself as well recompensed for his service. And though I were yet to pass many years in prison, the time would appear short, through the extreme desire which I feel of suffering for him, who even here so well repays our labors. Besides other sickness, I have been afflicted with a continual fever a hundred days without any remedies or proper nourishment. All this time my heart was so full of joy, that it seemed to me too narrow to contain it. I have never felt any equal to it, and I thought myself at the gates of paradise." His joy was excessive at the news that he was condemned to be burnt alive, and he never ceased to thank God for so great a mercy, of which he owned himself unworthy. He was conducted from his last prison at Omura to Nangasaqui, where fifty martyrs suffered together on a hill within sight of that city-nine Jesuits, four Franciscans, and six Dominicans, the rest seculars: twenty-five were burned, the rest beheaded. The twenty-five stakes were fixed all in a row, and the martyrs tied to them. Fire was set to the end of the pile of wood twenty-five feet from the martyrs, and gradually approached them, two hours before it reached them. F. Spinola stood unmoved, with his eyes lifted up towards heaven, till the cords which tied him being burnt, he fell into the flames, and was consumed, on the 2d of September, in 1622, being fifty-eight years old. Many others, especially Jesuits, suffered variously, being either burnt at slow fires, crucified, beheaded, or thrown into a burning mountain, or hung with their heads downward in pits, which cruel torment usually put an end to their lives in three or four days. In 1639, the Portuguese and all other Europeans, except the Dutch, were forbid to enter Japan, even for trade; the very ambassadors which the Portuguese sent thither were beheaded. In 1642, five Jesuits landed secretly in Japan, but were soon discovered, and after cruel tortures were hung in pits till they expired. Thus hath Japan encouraged the church militant, and filled the triumphant with glorious martyrs: though only the first-mentioned have as yet been publicly declared such by the holy See, who are mentioned in the new edition of the Roman Martyrology published by Benedict XIV. in 1749. {362} APPENDIX ON THE MARTYRS OF CHINA. THE devil set all his engines to work, that he might detain in his captivity those great nations, which, by the inscrutable judgments of God, lay yet buried in the night of infidelity, and by their vicious habits and prejudices had almost extinguished the law written in their breast by their Creator. The pure light of the gospel sufficed to dispel the dark clouds of idolatry by its own brightness; but the passions of men were not to be subdued but by the omnipotent hand of Him who promised that his holy faith and salvation should be propagated throughout all nations. All the machinations of hell were not able to defeat the divine mercy, not even by the scandal of those false Christians, whom jealousy, covetousness, and the spirit of the world blinded and seared to every feeling, not only of religion, but even of humanity. Religious missionaries, filled with the spirit of the apostles, and armed with the power of God, baffled obstacles which seemed insurmountable to flesh and blood; and by their zeal, charity, patience, humility, meekness, mortification, and invincible courage, triumphantly planted the standard of the cross in a world heretofore unknown to us, and but lately discovered, not by blind chance, but for these great purposes of divine providence. It appears from the Chinese annals, in F. Du Halde's History of China, that this vast empire is the most ancient in the world. Mr. Shuckford (B. 1, 2, 6) thinks, that their first, king, Fo-hi, was Noah himself, whom he imagines to have settled here soon after the deluge. Mr. Swinton, in the twentieth tome of the Universal History, justly censures this conjecture, and rejects the first dynasty of the Chinese history; which Mr. Jackson in his chronology, with others, vindicates. We must own that the Chinese annals are unanimous in asserting this first dynasty, whatever some have, by mistake, wrote against it; and this antiquity agrees very well with the chronology of the Septuagint, or that of the Samaritan Pentateuch, one of which several learned men seem at present much inclined to embrace. As for this notion that the Chinese are originally an Egyptian colony, and that their first dynasty is borrowed from the latter; notwithstanding my great personal respect for the worthy author of that system, it stands in need of proofs founded in facts, not in conjectures. A little acquaintance with languages shows, that we frequently find in certain words and circumstances a surprising analogy, in some things, between several words or customs of the most disparate languages and manners of very distant countries: several Persian words are the same in English, and it would be as plausible a system to advance that one of these nations was a colony of the other. From such circumstances it only results, that all nations have one common original. Allowing therefore the Chinese an antiquity of which they are infinitely jealous, Fo-hi was perhaps either Sem himself, or one that lived very soon after the flood, from whom this empire derives its origin. Confucius was the great philosopher of this people, who drew up the plan of their laws and religion. He is thought to have flourished about the time of king Solomon, or not much later. He was of royal extraction, and a man of severe morals. His writings contain many sublime moral truths, and show him to have been the greatest philosopher that ever lived. As he came nearer to the patriarchs in time, and received a more perfect tradition from them, he surpassed, in the excellency of his moral precepts, Pythagoras, Socrates, and Plato. He taught men to obey, honor, and fear the Lord of Heaven, to love their neighbor as themselves, to subdue irregular inclinations, and to be guided in all things by reason; that God is the original and ultimate end of all things, which he produced and preserves, himself eternal, infinite, and immutable; one, supremely holy, supremely intelligent, and invisible. He often mentioned the expectation of a Messias to come, a perfect guide and teacher of virtue; calling him the holy man, and the holy person, who is expected to come on earth. It is a tradition in China, that he was often heard to say, "That in the West the Holy One will appear." This he delivered from the patriarchal tradition; but he not only mentions heavenly spirits, the ministers of God, but he also ordains the worship of these spirits by religious rites and sacrifices, and concurs with the idolatry which was established in his time. St. Francis Xavier had made the conversion of China the object of his zealous wishes; but died, like another Moses, in sight of it. His religious brethren long attempted in vain to gain admittance into that country; but the jealousy of the inhabitants refused entrance to all strangers. However, God was pleased, at the repeated prayers of his servants, to crown them with success. The Portuguese made a settlement at Macao. an island within sight of China, and obtained leave to go thither {363} twice a year for to trade at the fairs of Canton. F. Matthew Ricci, a Roman Jesuit, a good mathematician, and a disciple of Clavius, being settled a missionary at Macao, went over with them several times into China, and in 1593, obtained leave of the governor to reside there with two other Jesuits. A little catechism which he published, and a map of the world, in which he placed the first meridian in China, to make it the middle of the world, according to the Chinese notion, gained him many friends and admirers. In 1595, he established a second residence of Jesuits, at Nanquin; and made himself admired them by teaching the true figure of the earth, the cause of lunar eclipses, &c. He also built an observatory, and converted many to the faith. In 1600, he went to Pekin, and carried with him a clock, a watch, and many other presents to the emperor, who granted him a residence in that capital. He converted many, and among these several officers of the court, one of whom was Paul Siu, afterwards prime minister, under whose protection a flourishing Church was established in his country, Xankai, (in the province of Nanquin,) in which were forty thousand Christians when the late persecution began. Francis Martinez, a Chinese Jesuit, having converted a famous doctor, was beaten several times, and at length expired under the torment. Ricci died in 1617, having lived in favor with the emperor Vanlie. F. Adam Schall, a Jesuit from Cologn, by his mathematics, became known to the emperor Zonchi: but in 1636, that prince laid violent hands upon himself, that he might not fall into the hands of two rebels who had taken Pekin. The Chinese called in Xuute, king of a frontier nation of the Tartars, to their assistance, who recovered Pekin, but demanded the empire for the prize of his victory: and his son Chunchi obtained quiet possession of it in 1650. From that time the Tartars have been emperors of China, but they govern it by its own religion and laws. They frequently visit their original territories, but rather treat them as the conquered country. Chunchi esteemed F. Schall, called him father, and wag favorable to the Christians. After his death the four regents pat to death five Christian mandarins for their faith, and condemned F. Schall, but granted him a reprieve; during which he died. The young emperor Camhi coming of age, put a stop to the persecution, and employed F. Verbiest, a Jesuit, to publish the yearly Chinese calendar, declared him president of the mathematics in his palace, and consequently a mandarin. The first year he opened the Christian churches, which was in 1671, above twenty thousand souls were baptized: and in the year following, an uncle of the emperor, one of the eight perpetual generals of the Tartar troops, and several other persons of distinction. The succeeding emperors were no less favorable to the Christians, and permitted them to build a most sumptuous church within the enclosures of their own palace, which in many respects surpassed all the other buildings of the empire. It was finished in 1702. The Dominican friars, according to Touron, (Hommes Illustr. t. 6,) entered China in 1556, converted many to the faith, and, in 1631, laid the foundation of the most numerous church of Fokieu, great part of which province they converted to the faith. Four priests of this order received the crown of martyrdom in 1647, and a fifth, named Francis de Capillas, from the convent of Valladolid, the apostle of the town of Fogau, was cruelly beaten, and soon after beheaded, on the 15th of January, 1648; "because," as his sentence imported, "he contemned the spirits and gods of the country." Relations hereof were transmitted to the Congregation de Propagandâ Fide, under pope Urban VIII. Upwards of a hundred thousand souls zealously professed the faith, and they had above two hundred churches. But a debate arose whether certain honors paid by the Chinese to Confucius and their deceased ancestors, with certain oblations made, either solemnly, by the mandarins and doctors at the equinoxes, and at the now and full moons, or privately, in their own houses or temples, were superstitious and idolatrous. Pope Clement XI., in 1704, condemned those rites as superstitious, _utpote superstitione imbutos_, the execution of which decree he committed to the patriarch of Antioch, afterwards cardinal Tournon, whom he sent as his commissary into that kingdom. Benedict XIV. confirmed the same more amply and severely by his constitution, _ex quo singulari_, in 1742, in which he declares, that the faithful ought to express God, in the Chinese language, by the name Thien Chu, _i.e._ the Lord of heaven: and that the words Tien, the heaven, and Xang Ti, the Supreme Ruler, are not to be used, because they signify the supreme god of the idolaters, a kind of fifth essence, or intelligent nature, in the heaven itself: that the inscription, King Tien, worship thou the heaven, cannot be allowed. The obedience of those who had formerly defended these rites to be merely political and civil honors, not sacred, was such, that from that time they have taken every occasion of testifying it to the world. By a like submission end victory over himself, Fenelon was truly greater than by all his other illustrious virtues and actions. The emperor Kang-hi protected the Christian religion in the most favorable manner. Whereas his successor, Yongtching, banished the missionaries out of the chief cities, but kept those religious in his palace who were employed by him in painting, mathematics, and other liberal arts, and who continued mandarins of the court. Kien-long, the next emperor, carried the persecution to the greatest rigors of cruelty. The tragedy was begun by the viceroy of Fokieu, who stirred up the emperor himself. A great number of Christians of {364} all ages and sexes were banished, beaten, and tortured divers ways, especially by being buffeted on the face with a terrible kind of armed ferula, one blow of which would knock the teeth out, and make the head swell exceedingly. All which torments even the young converts bore with incredible constancy, rather than discover where the priest lay hid, or deliver up the crosses, relics, or sacred books, or do any thing contrary to the law of God. Many priests and others died of their torments, or of the hardships of their dungeons. One bishop and six priests received the crown of martyrdom. Peter Martyr Sanz, a Spanish Dominican friar, arrived in China in 1715, where he had labored fifteen years, when he was named by the congregation bishop of Mauricastre, and ordained by the bishop of Nanquin, assisted by the bishops of Pekin and Macao, and appointed Apostolic Vicar for the province of Fokieu. In 1732, the emperor, by an edict, banished all the missionaries. Peter Sauz retired to Macao, but returned to Fokieu, in 1738, and founded several new churches for his numerous converts, and received the vows of several virgins who consecrated themselves to God. The viceroy, provoked at this, caused him to be apprehended, amidst the tears of his dear flock, with four Dominican friars, his fellow-laborers. They were beaten with clubs, buffeted on the face with gauntlets made of several pieces of leather, and at length condemned to lose their heads. The bishop was beheaded on the same day, the 26th of May, 1747. The Chinese superstitiously imagine, that the soul of one that is put to death seizes the first person it meets, and therefore all the spectators run away as soon as they see the stroke of death given; but none of them did so at the death of this blessed martyr. On the contrary, admiring the joy with which he died, and esteeming his holy soul happy, they thought it a blessing to come the nearest to him, and to touch his blood; which they did as respectfully as Christians could have done, for whom a pagan gathered the blood, because they durst not appear. The other four Dominican friars, who were also Spaniards, suffered much during twenty-eight months' cruel imprisonment, and were strangled privately in their dungeons on the 28th of October, 1748. Pope Benedict XIV. made a discourse to the cardinals on the precious death of this holy bishop, September 16, 1748. See Touron, t. 6, p. 729. These four fellow-martyrs of the Order of St. Dominic, were, Francis Serranus, fifty-two years old, who had labored nineteen years in the Chinese mission, and during his last imprisonment was nominated by pope Benedict XIV., bishop of Tipasa: Joachim Roio, fifty-six years old, who had preached in that empire thirty-three years: John Alcober, forty-two years old, who had spent eighteen years in that mission: and Francis Diaz, thirty-three years old, of which he had employed nine in the same vineyard. During their imprisonment, a report that their lives would be spared, filled them not with joy, but with grief, to the great admiration of the infidels, as pope Benedict XIV. mentions in his discourse to the consistory of cardinals, on their death, delivered in 1752: in which he qualifies them crowned, but not declared martyrs: _martyres consummatos, nondum martyres vindicatos_. In the same persecution, two Jesuits, F. Joseph of Attemis, an Italian, and F. Antony Joseph Heuriquez, a Portuguese, were apprehended in December, 1747, and tortured several times, to compel them to renounce their religion. They were at length condemned to death by the mandarins, and the sentence, according to custom, being sent to the emperor, was confirmed by him, and the two priests were strangled in prison on the 12th of September, 1748. On these martyrs see F. Touron, Hommes Illustres de l'Ordre de S. Domin., t. 6, and the letters of the Jesuit missionaries. On the history of China, F. Du Halde's Description of China, in four vols. fol. Mullerus de Chataiâ, Navarrete, Tratados Históricos de la China, an. 1676. Lettres Edifiantes et Curieuses des Missionaires, vols. 27, 28. Jackson's Chronology, &c. In Tonquin, a kingdom southwest of China, in which the king and mandarins follow the Chinese religion, though various sects of idolatry and superstition reign among the people, a persecution was raised against the Christians in 1713. In this storm one hundred and fifty churches were demolished, many converts were beaten with a hammer on their knees, and tortured various other ways; and two Spanish missionary priests of the order of St. Dominick suffered martyrdom for the faith, F. Francis Gil de Federich, and F. Matthew Alfonso Leziniana. F. Gil arrived there in 1735, and found above twenty thousand Christians in the west of the kingdom, who had been baptized by priests of his order. This vineyard he began assiduously to cultivate; but was apprehended by a neighboring Bonza, in 1737, and condemned to die the year following. The Touquinese usually execute condemned persons only in the last moon of the year, and a rejoicing or other accidents often cause much longer delays. The confessor was often allowed the liberty of saying mass in the prison: and was pressed to save his life, by saying that he came into Tonquin as a merchant; but this would have been a lie, and he would not suffer any other to give in such an answer for him. Father Matthew, a priest of the same order, after having preached ten years in Tonquin, was seized while he was saying mass; and because he refused to trample on a crucifix, was condemned to die in 1743; and in May, 1744, was brought into the same prison with F. Gil. The idolaters were so astonished to see their ardor to die, and the sorrow of the latter upon an offer of his life, that they cried out: "Others desire to live, but {365} these men to die." They were both beheaded together on the 22d of January, 1744. See Touron, t. 6, and Lettres Edif. of Curieuses des Missionaires. Many other vast countries, both in the eastern and western parts of the world, received the light of the gospel in the sixteenth century; in which great work several apostolic men were raised by God, and some were honored with the crown of martyrdom. Among the zealous missionaries who converted to the faith the savage inhabitants of Brazil, in America, of which the Portuguese took possession in 1500, under king John II., F. Joseph Anchieta is highly celebrated. He was a native of the Canary islands, but took the Jesuit's habit at Coimbra; died in Brazil, on the 9th of June, 1597, of his age sixty-four; having labored in cultivating that vineyard forty-seven years. He was a man of apostolic humility, patience, meekness, prayer, zeal, and charity. The fruit of his labors was not less wonderful than the example of his virtues. See his life by F. Peter Roterigius, and by F. Sebastian Beretarius. The sanctity of the venerable F. Peter Claver, who labored in the same vineyard, was so heroic, that a process has been commenced for his canonization. F. Peter Claver was nobly born in Catalonia, and entered himself in the Society at Tarragon, in 1602, when about twenty years old. From his infancy he looked upon nothing small in which the service of God was concerned; for the least action or circumstance which is referred to his honor is great and precious, and requires our utmost application: in this spirit of fervor he considered God in every neighbor and superior; and upon motives of religion was humble and meek towards all, and ever ready to obey and serve every one. From the time of his religious profession, he applied himself with the greatest ardor to seek nothing in the world, but what Jesus Christ sought in his mortal life, that is, the kingdom of his grace: for the only aim of this servant of God was, the sanctification of his own soul, and the salvation of others. He was thoroughly instructed that a man's spiritual progress depends very much upon the fervor of his beginning; and he omitted nothing both to lay a solid foundation, and continually to raise upon it the structure of all virtues; and he sought and found God in all things. The progress which he made was very great, because he set out by the most perfect exterior and interior renunciation of the world and himself. Being sent to Majorca, to study philosophy and divinity, he contracted a particular friendship with a lay-brother, Alphonsus Rodriguez, then porter of the college, an eminent contemplative, and perfect servant of God: nor is it to be expressed how much the fervent disciple improved himself in the school of this humble master, in the maxims of Christian perfection. His first lessons were, to speak little with men, and much with God: to direct every action in the beginning with great fervor, to the most perfect glory of God, in union with the holy actions of Christ: to have God always present in his heart; and to pray continually for the grace never to offend God: never to speak of any thing that belongs to clothing, lodging, and such conveniences, especially eating or drinking: to meditate often on the sufferings of Christ, and on the virtues of his calling. F. Claver, in 1610, was, at his earnest request, sent with other missionaries to preach the faith to the infidels at Carthagena, and the neighboring country in America. At the first sight of the poor negro slaves, he was moved with the strongest sentiments of compassion, tenderness, and zeal, which never forsook him; and it was his constant study to afford them all the temporal comfort and assistance in his power. In the first place he was indefatigable in instructing and baptizing them, and in giving them every spiritual succor: the title in which he gloried was that of the Slave of the Slaves, or of the Negroes; and incredible were the fatigues which he underwent night and day with them, and the many heroic acts of all virtues which he exercised in serving them. The Mahometans, the Pagans, and the very Catholics, whose scandalous lives were a reproach to their holy religion; the hospitals and the prisons, were other theatres where he exercised his zeal. The history of his life furnishes us with most edifying instances, and gives all account of two persons raised to life by him, and of other miracles; though his assiduous prayer, and his extraordinary humility, mortification of his senses, and perfect self-denial, might be called the greatest of his miracles. In the same rank we may place the wonderful conversions of many obstinate sinners, and the heroic sanctity of many great servants of God, who were by him formed to perfect virtue. Among his maxims of humility, he used especially to inculcate, that he who is sincerely humble desires to be contemned; he seeks not to appear humble, but worthy to be humbled, is subject to all in his heart, and ready to obey the whole world. By the holy hatred of ourselves, we must secretly rejoice in our hearts when we meet with contempt end affronts; but must take care, said this holy man, that no one think we rejoice at them, but rather believe that we are confounded and grieved at the ill-treatment which we receive. F. Claver died on the 8th of September, 1651, being about seventy-two years old; having spent in the Society fifty-five years, in the same uniform crucified life, and in the constant round of the same uninterrupted labors, which perhaps requires a courage more heroic than martyrdom. In the process for his canonization, the scrutiny relating to his life and virtues is happily finished; and Benedict XIV. confirmed the decree of the Congregation of Rites, in 1747, by which it is declared, that the proofs of the heroic degree of the Christian virtues which he practised, are competent and sufficient. See his life by F. Fleuriau. {366} MANY Martyrs in Pontus, under Dioclesian. Some were tortured with melted lead poured upon them, others with sharp reeds thrust under their nails, and such like inventions, several times repeated: at length they various ways completed their martyrdom. See Eusebius, Hist. l. 8, c. 12, p. 306. ST. AVITUS, ARCHBISHOP OF VIENNE, C. ST. ALCIMUS ECDITIUS AVITUS was of a senatorian Roman family, but born in Auvergne. His father, Isychius, was chosen archbishop of Vienne upon the death of St. Mammertus, and was succeeded in that dignity by our saint, in 490. Ennodius, in his life of St. Epiphanius of Pavia, says of him, that he was a treasure of learning and piety; and adds, that when the Burgundians had crossed the Alps, and carried home many captives out of Liguria, this holy prelate ransomed a great number. Clovis, king of France, while yet a pagan, and Gondebald, king of Burgundy, though an Arian, held him in great veneration. This latter, for fear of giving offence to his subjects, durst not embrace the Catholic faith, yet gave sufficient proofs that he was convinced of the truth by our saint, who, in a public conference, reduced the Arian bishops to silence in his presence, at Lyons. Gondebald died in 516. His son and successor, Sigismund, was brought over by St. Avitus to the Catholic faith. In 517, our saint presided in the famous council of Epaone, (now called Yenne,) upon the Rhone, in which forty canons of discipline were framed. When king Sigismund had imbrued his hands in the blood of his son Sigeric, upon a false charge brought against him by a stepmother, St. Avitus inspired him with so great a horror of his crime, that he rebuilt the abbey of Agaunum, or St. Maurice, became a monk, and died a saint. Most of the works of St. Avitus are lost: we have yet his poem on the praises of virginity, to his sister Fuscina, a nun, and some others; several epistles; two homilies On the Rogation days; and a third on the same, lately published by Dom Martenne;[1] fragments of eight other homilies; his conference against the Arians is given us in the Spicilege.[2] St. Avitus died in 525, and is commemorated in the Roman Martyrology on the 5th of February; and in the collegiate church of our Lady at Vienne, where he was buried, on the 20th of August. Ennodius, and other writers of that age, extol his learning, his extensive charity to the poor, and his other virtues. See St. Gregory of Tours, Hist. l. 2. His works, and his life in Henschenius;[3] and Gallia Christ. Nova, t. 2, p. 242. Footnotes: 1. Martenne Thesaur. Anecdot. t. 5, p. 49. 2. Spicil. t. 5. 3. F. Sirmond published the works of St. Avitus, with judicious short notes, in 8vo., 1643. See them in Sirmond's works, t. 2, and Bibl. Patr. His close manner of confuting the Arians in some of his letters, makes us regret the loss of many other works, which he wrote against them. ST. ALICE, OR ADELAIDE, V. ABBESS. SHE was daughter of Megendose, count of Guelders, and governed the nunnery of Bellich on the Rhine, near Bonn, (now a church of canonesses,) but died in 1015, abbess of our Lady's in Cologne, both monasteries having been founded by her father. Her festival, with an octave, is kept at Bellich, or Vilich, where the nunnery which she instituted, of the order of St. Bennet, is now converted into a church of canonesses. See her life in Surius and Bollandus; also Miræus, in Fastis Belgicis, &c. {367} ST. ABRAAMIUS, BISHOP OF ARBELA, M. THIS city, after the fall of Ninive, was long the capital of Adiabene, in Assyria, and was one bishopric with Hazza, anciently called Adiab. Arbeta, now called Irbil, was famous for the victory of Alexander; but received far greater lustre from the martyrdom of St. Abraamius, its bishop, who sealed his faith with his blood, after having suffered horrible torments, which were inflicted by order of an arch magian, in the fifth year of king Sapor's persecution, that is, of Christ 348. See Sozomen, l. 2, c. 12 and the Greek Menæa and Synaxary. FEBRUARY VI. ST. DOROTHY, VIRGIN AND MARTYR. See S. Aldhelm, Ado, Usuard, &c., in Bollandus, p. 771. ST. ALDHELM relates from her acts,[1] that Fabritius, the governor of Cæsarea, in Cappadocia, inflicted on her most cruel torments, because she refused to marry, or to adore idols: that she converted two apostate women sent to seduce her: and that being condemned to be beheaded, she converted one Theophilus, by sending him certain fruits and flowers miraculously obtained of her heavenly spouse. She seems to have suffered under Dioclesian. Her body is kept in the celebrated church which bears her name, beyond the Tiber, in Rome. She is mentioned on this day in the ancient Martyrology under the name of St. Jerom. There was another holy virgin, whom Rufin calls Dorothy, a rich and noble lady of the city of Alexandria, who suffered torments and a voluntary banishment, to preserve her faith and chastity against the brutish lust and tyranny of the emperor Maximinus, in the year 308, as is recorded by Eusebius[2] and Rufinus:[3] but many take this latter, whose name is not mentioned by Eusebius, to be the famous St. Catharine of Alexandria. * * * * * The blood of the martyrs flourished in its hundred-fold increase, as St. Justin has well observed: "We are slain with the sword, but we increase and multiply: the more we are persecuted and destroyed, the more are added to our numbers. As a vine, by being pruned and cut close, shoots forth new suckers, and bears a greater abundance of fruit; so is it with us."[4] Among other false reflections, the baron of Montesquieu, an author too much admired by many, writes:[5] "It is hardly possible that Christianity should ever be established in China. Vows of virginity, the assembling of women in the churches, their necessary intercourse with the ministers of religion, their participation of the sacraments, auricular confession, the marrying but one wife; all this oversets the manners and customs, and strikes at the religion and laws of the country." Could he forget that the gospel overcame {368} all these impediments where it was first established, in spite of the most inveterate prejudices, and of all worldly opposition from the great and the learned; whereas philosophy, though patronized by princes, could never in any age introduce its rules even into one city. In vain did the philosopher Plotinus solicit the emperor Gallienus to rebuild a ruined city in Campania, that he and his disciples might establish in it the republic of Plato: a system, in some points, flattering the passions of men, almost as Mahometism fell in with the prejudices and passions of the nations where it prevailed. So visibly is the church the work of God. Footnotes: 1. L. de Laud. Virgin. c. 25. 2. L. 8, c. 14. 3. L. 1, c. 17. 4. Apol. 2, ol. 1. 5. L'Esprit des Loix, b. xix. 18. ST. VEDAST, BISHOP OF ARRAS, C. From a very short life of his, written soon after his death, and another longer, corrected by Alcuin, both published by Henschenius, with remarks, p. 782, t. 1. Febr. See Alcuin's Letter ad Monachos Vedastinos, in Martenne, Ampl. Collectio, t. l, p. 50. Gallia Christ. Nova, t. 3, p. 3. A.D. 539. ST. VEDAST left his own country very young, (which seems to have been in the west of France,) and led a holy life concealed from the world in the diocese of Toul, where the bishop, charmed with his virtue, promoted him to the priesthood. Clovis I., king of France, returning from his victory over the Alemanni, hastening to Rheims to receive baptism, desired at Toul some priest who might instruct and prepare him for that holy sacrament on the road. Vedast was presented to his majesty for this purpose. While he accompanied the king at the passage of the river Aisne, a blind man begging on the bridge besought the servant of God to restore him to his sight: the saint, divinely inspired, prayed, and made the sign of the cross on his eyes, and he immediately recovered it. The miracle confirmed the king in the faith, and moved several of his courtiers to embrace it. St. Vedast assisted St. Remigius in converting the French, till that prelate consecrated him bishop of Arras, that he might re-establish the faith in that country. As he was entering that city in 499, he restored sight to a blind man, and cured one that was lame. These miracles excited the attention, and disposed the hearts of many infidels to a favorable reception of the gospel, which had been received here when the Romans were masters of the country: but the ravages of the Vandals and the Alans having either dispersed or destroyed the Christians, Vedast could not discover the least footsteps of Christianity, save only in the memory of some old people, who showed him without the walls a poor ruinous church, where Christians used to hold their religious assemblies. He sighed to see the Lord's field so overgrown with bushes and brambles, and become the haunt of wild beasts; whereupon he made it his most earnest supplication to God, that he would in his mercy vouchsafe to restore his worship in that country. A national faith is so great a blessing, that we seldom find it granted a second time to those, who, by imitating the ingratitude of the Jews, have drawn upon themselves the like terrible chastisement. St. Vedast found the infidels stupid and obstinate; yet persevered, till by his patience, meekness, charity, and prayers, he triumphed over bigoted superstition and lust, and planted throughout that country the faith and holy maxims of Christ. The great diocese of Cambray, which was extended beyond Brussels, was also committed to the care of this holy pastor, by St. Remigius, in 510, and the two sees remained a long time united. St. Vedast continued his labors almost forty years, and left his church flourishing in sanctity at his decease, on the 6th of February, in 539. He was buried in the cathedral, which is dedicated to God, under the patronage {369} of the Blessed Virgin; but a hundred and twenty-eight years after, St. Aubertus, the seventh bishop, changed a little chapel which St. Vedast had built in honor of St. Peter, without the walls, into an abbey, and removed the relics of St. Vedast into this new church, leaving a small portion of them in the cathedral. The great abbey of St. Vedast was finished by St. Vindicianus, successor to St. Aubertus, and most munificently endowed by king Theodoric or Thierry, who lies buried in the church with his wife Doda. Our ancestors had a particular devotion to St. Vedast, whom they called St. Foster, whence descends the family name of Foster, as Camden takes notice in his Remains. Alcuin has left us a standing monument of his extraordinary devotion to St. Vedast, not only by writing his life, but also by compiling an office and mass in his honor, for the use of his monastery at Arras, and by a letter to the monks of that house, in 769, in which he calls this saint his protector. See this letter in Martenne, Ampliss. Collect. t. 1, p. 50. SAINT AMANDUS, B.C. HE was born near Nantes, of pious parents, lords of that territory. At twenty years of age, he retired into a small monastery in the little isle of Oye, near that of Rhé. He had not been there above a year, when his father found him out, and made use of every persuasive argument in his power to prevail with him to quit that state of life. To his threats of disinheriting him, the saint cheerfully answered: " Christ is my only inheritance." The saint went to Tours, and a year after to Bourges, where he lived near fifteen years under the direction of St. Austregisilus, the bishop, in a cell near the cathedral. His clothing was a single sackcloth, and his sustenance barley-bread and water. After a pilgrimage to Rome, he was ordained in France a missionary bishop, without any fixed see, in 628, and commissioned to preach the faith to infidels. He preached the gospel in Flanders, and among the Sclavi in Carinthia and other provinces near the Danube:[1] but being banished by king Dagobert, whom he had boldly reproved for his scandalous crimes, he preached to the pagans of Gascony and Navarre. Dagobert soon recalled him, threw himself at his feet to beg his pardon, and caused him to baptize his new-born sort, St. Sigebert, afterwards king. The idolatrous people about Ghent were so savage, that no preacher durst venture himself among them. This moved the saint to choose that mission; during the course of which he was often beaten, and sometimes thrown into the river: he continued preaching, though for a long time he saw no fruit, and supported himself by his labor. The miracle of his raising a dead man to life, at last opened the eyes of the barbarians, and the country came in crowds to receive baptism, destroying the temples of their idols with their own hands. In 633 the saint having built them several churches, founded two great monasteries in Ghent, both under the patronage of St. Peter; one was named Blandinberg, from the hill Blandin on which it stands, now the rich abbey of St. Peter's; the other took the name of St. Bavo, from him who gave his estate for its foundation; this became the cathedral in 1559, when the city was created a bishop's see. Besides many pious foundations, both in France and Flanders, in 639, he built the great abbey three leagues from Tourney, called Elnon, from the river on which it stands; but it has long since taken the name of St. Amand, with its town and warm mineral baths. In 649 he was chosen bishop of Maestricht; but three years after he resigned that see to St. Remaclus, and returned to his missions, to which his compassion for the blindness of infidels always inclined {370} his heart. He continued his labors among them till the age of eighty-six, when, broken with infirmities, he retired to Orion, which house he governed as abbot four years more, spending that time in preparing his soul for his passage to eternity, which happened in 675. His body is honorably kept in that abbey. The Sarum Breviary honored St. Amandus and St. Vedast with an office of nine lessons. See Buzelin, Gallo-Flandria, and Henschenius, 6 Feb. p. 815, who has published five different lives of this saint. Footnotes: 1. See Henschenius. p. 828. ST. BARSANUPHIUS, ANCHORET. HAVING renounced the world, he passed some years in the monastery of St. Seridon, near Gaza in Palestine, in the happy company of that holy abbot, John the prophet, the blessed Dorotheus, and St. Dositheus. That he might live in the constant exercise of heavenly contemplation, the sweetness of which he had begun to relish, he left the monastery about the year 540, and in a remote cell led a life rather angelical than human. He wrote a treatise against the Origenist monks, which Montfaucon has published in his Bibl. Coislin. The Greeks held this saint in so great veneration, that his picture was placed in the sanctuary of the church of Sancta Sophia in Constantinople, with those of St. Antony and St. Ephrem, as we are informed by the Studite monk who wrote the preface to the Instructions of St. Dorotheus, translated into French by abbot Rance of la Trappe. The relics of St. Barsanuphius were brought in the ninth century to Oria, near Siponto in Italy, where he is honored as principal patron, on the 7th of February. The Greek Synaxaries have his office on the 6th of this month. Baronius placed his name in the Roman Martyrology on the 11th of April. See on him Evagrius, (who finished his history in 593,) l. 4, c. 33. Pagi ad an. 548, n. 10. Bulteau, Hist. Mon. d'Orient. l. 4, c. 9, p. 695. FEBRUARY VII. ST. ROMUALD, ABBOT, C. FOUNDER OF THE ORDER OF CAMALDOLI. From his life, written by St. Peter Damian, fifteen years after his death. See also Magnotii, Eremi Camaldol. descriptio, Romæ, an. 1570. Historarium Camaldulensium, libri 3. anth. Aug. Florentino, in 4to. Florentiæ, 1575. Earumdem pans posterior, in 4to. Venetiis, 1579. Dissertationes Camaldulenses, in quibus agitui de institutione Ordinis, ætate St. Romualdi, &c. auth. Guidone Grando, ej. Ord. Lucæ, 1707. The Lives of the Saints of this Order, in Italian, by Razzi, 1600, and in Latin, by F. Thomas de Minis, in two vols. in 4to. an. 1605, 1606. Annales Camaldulenses Ordinis St. Benedicti, auctoribus Jo. Ben. Mittarelli, abbate, et Ans. Costadoni, presbyteris et monachis è Cong. Camald. Venetiis, in four vols fol., of which the fourth is dedicated to pope Clement XIII., in 1760. A.D. 1027. ST. ROMUALD, of the family of the dukes of Ravenna, called Honesti, was born in that capital about the year 956. Being brought up in the maxims of the world, in softness and the love of pleasure, he grew every day more and more enslaved to his passions: yet he often made a resolution of undertaking something remarkable for the honor of God; and when he went a hunting, if he found an agreeable solitary place in the woods, he would stop in it to pray, and would cry out: "How happy were the ancient hermits, who had {371} such habitations! With what tranquillity could they serve God, free from the tumult of the world!" His father, whose name was Sergius, a worldly man, agreed to decide a dispute he had with a relation about an estate by a duel. Romuald was shocked at the criminal design; but by threats of being disinherited if he refused, was engaged by his father to be present as a spectator: Sergius slew his adversary. Romuald, then twenty years of age, struck with horror at the crime that had been perpetrated, though he had concurred to it no further than by his presence, thought himself, however, obliged to expiate it by a severe course of penance for forty days in the neighboring Benedictine monastery of Classis, within four miles of Ravenna. He performed great austerities, and prayed and wept almost without intermission. His compunction and fervor made all these exercises seem easy and sweet to him: and the young nobleman became every day more and more penetrated with the fear and love of God. The good example which he saw, and the discourses of a pious lay-brother, who waited on him, concerning eternity and the contempt of the world, wrought so powerfully upon him, that he petitioned in full chapter to be admitted as a penitent to the religious habit. After some demurs, through their apprehensions of his father's resentment, whose next heir the saint was, his request was granted. He passed seven years in this house in so great fervor and austerity, that his example became odious to certain tepid monks, who could not bear such a continual reproach of their sloth. They were more exasperated when his fervor prompted him to reprove their conduct, insomuch, that some of the most abandoned formed a design upon his life, the execution of which he prevented by leaving that monastery, with the abbot's consent, and retiring into the neighborhood of Venice, where he put himself under the direction of Marinus, a holy hermit, who there led an austere ascetic life. Under this master, Romuald made great progress in every virtue belonging to a religious state of life. Peter Urseoli was then doge of Venice. He had been unjustly raised to that dignity two years before by a faction which had assassinated his predecessor Peter Candiano; in which conspiracy he is said by some to have been an accomplice: though this is denied by the best Venetian historians.[1] This murder, however, paved the way for his advancement to the sovereignty, which the stings of his conscience would not suffer him quietly to enjoy. This put him upon consulting St. Guarinus, a holy abbot of Catalonia, then at Venice, about what he was to do to be saved. The advice of St. Marinus and St. Romuald was also desired. These three unanimously agreed in proposing a monastic state, as affording the best opportunities for expiating his crimes. Urseoli acquiesced, and, under pretence of joining with his family at their villa, where he had ordered a great entertainment, set out privately with St. Guarinus, St. Romuald, and John Gradenigo, a Venetian nobleman of singular piety, and his son-in-law John Moresini, for St. Guarinus's monastery of St. Michael of Cusan, in that part of Catalonia which was then subject to France. Here Urseoli and Gradenigo made their monastic profession: Marinus and Romuald, leaving them under the conduct of Guarinus, retired into a desert near Cusan, and there led an eremitical life. Many flocked to them, and Romuald being made superior, first practised himself what he taught others, joining rigorous fasts, solitude, and continual prayer, with hard manual labor. He had an extraordinary ardor {372} for prayer, which he exceedingly recommended to his disciples, in whom he could not bear to see the least sloth or tepidity with regard to the discharge of this duty; saying, they had better recite one psalm with fervor; than a hundred with less devotion. His own fasts and mortifications were extremely rigorous, but he was more indulgent to others, and in particular to Urseoli, who had exchanged his monastery for St. Romuald's desert, where he lived under his conduct; who, persevering in his penitential state, made a most holy end, and is honored in Venice as a saint, with an office, on the 14th of January: and in the Roman Martyrology, published by Benedict XIV., on the 10th of that month. Romuald, in the beginning of his conversion and retreat from the world, was molested with various temptations. The devil sometimes directly solicited him to vice; at other times he represented to him what he had forsaken, and that he had left it to ungrateful relations. He would sometimes suggest that what he did could not be agreeable to God; at other times, that his labors and difficulties were too heavy for man to bear. These and the like attempts of the devil he defeated by watching and prayer, in which he passed the whole night; and the devil strove in vain to divert him from this holy exercise by shaking his whole cell, and threatening to bury him in the ruins. Five years of grievous interior conflicts and buffetings of the enemy, wrought in him a great purity of heart, and prepared him for most extraordinary heavenly communications. The conversion of count Oliver, or Oliban, lord of that territory, added to his spiritual joy. That count, from a voluptuous worldling, and profligate liver, became a sincere penitent, and embraced the order of St. Benedict. He carried great treasures with him to mount Cassino, but left his estate to his son. The example of Romuald had also such an influence on Sergius, his father, that, to make atonement for his past sins and enormities, he had entered the monastery of St. Severus, near Ravenna; but after some time spent there, he yielded so far to the devil's temptations, as to meditate a return into the world. This was a sore affliction to our saint, and determined him to return to Italy, to dissuade his father from leaving his monastery. But the inhabitants of the country where he lived, had such an opinion of his sanctity, that they were resolved not to let him go. They therefore formed a brutish extravagant design to kill him, that they might keep at least his body among them, imagining it would be their protection and safeguard on perilous occasions. The saint being informed of their design, had recourse to David's stratagem, and feigned himself mad upon which the people, losing their high opinion of him, guarded him no longer. Being thus at liberty to execute his design, he set out on his journey to Ravenna, through the south of France. He arrived there in 994, and made use of all the authority his superiority in religion gave him over his father; and by his exhortations, tears, and prayers, brought him to such an extraordinary degree of compunction and sorrow, as to prevail with him to lay aside all thoughts of leaving his monastery, where he spent the remainder of his days in great fervor, and died with the reputation of sanctity. Romuald, having acquitted himself of his duty towards his father, retired into the marsh of Classis, and lived in a cell, remote from all mankind. The devil pursued him here with his former malice; he sometimes overwhelmed his imagination with melancholy, and once scourged him cruelly in his cell. Romuald at length cried out: "Sweetest Jesus, dearest Jesus, why hast thou forsaken me? hast thou entirely delivered me over to my enemies?" At that sweet name the wicked spirits betook themselves to flight, and such an excess of divine sweetness and compunction filled the breast of Romuald, that he melted into tears, and his heart seemed quite dissolved. {373} He sometimes insulted his spiritual enemies, and cried out: "Are all your forces spent? have you no more engines against a poor despicable servant of God?" Not long after, the monks of Classis chose Romuald for their abbot. The emperor, Otho III. who was then at Ravenna, made use of his authority to engage the saint to accept the charge, and went in person to visit him in his cell, where he passed the night lying on the saint's poor bed. But nothing could make Romuald consent, till a synod of bishops then assembled at Ravenna, compelled him to it by threats of excommunication. The saint's inflexible zeal for the punctual observance of monastic discipline, soon made these monks repent of their choice, which they manifested by their irregular and mutinous behavior. The saint being of a mild disposition, bore with it for some time, in hopes of bringing them to a right sense of their duty. At length, finding all his endeavors to reform them ineffectual, he came to a resolution of leaving them, and went to the emperor, then besieging Tivoli, to acquaint him of it; whom, when he could not prevail upon to accept of his resignation, the saint, in the presence of the archbishop of Ravenna, threw down his crosier at his feet. This interview proved very happy for Tivoli; for the emperor, though he had condemned that city to plunder, the inhabitants having rebelled and killed duke Matholin, their governor, spared it at the intercession of St. Romuald. Otho having also, contrary to his solemn promise upon oath, put one Crescentius, a Roman senator, to death, who had been the leader in the rebellion of Tivoli, and made his widow his concubine; he not only performed a severe public penance enjoined him by the saint, as his confessor, but promised, by St. Romuald's advice, to abdicate his crown and retire into a convent during life; but this he did not live to perform. The saint's remonstrances had a like salutary effect on Thamn, the emperor's favorite, prime minister and accomplice in the treachery before mentioned, who, with several other courtiers, received the religious habit at the hands of St. Romuald, and spent the remainder of his days in retirement and penance. It was a very edifying sight to behold several young princes and noblemen, who a little before had been remarkable for their splendid appearance and sumptuous living, now leading an obscure, solitary, penitential life in humility, penance, fasting, cold, and labor. They prayed, sung psalms, and worked. They all had their several employments: some spun, others knit, others tilled the ground, gaining their poor livelihood by the sweat of their brow. St. Boniface surpassed all the rest in fervor and mortification. He was the emperor's near relation, and so dear to him, that he never called him by any other name than, My soul! he excelled in music, and in all the liberal arts and sciences, and after having spent many years under the discipline of St. Romuald, was ordained bishop, and commissioned by the pope to preach to the infidels of Russia, whose king he converted by his miracles, but was beheaded by the king's brothers, who were themselves afterwards converted on seeing the miracles wrought on occasion of the martyr's death. Several other monks of St. Romuald's monastery met with the same cruel treatment in Sclavonia, whither they were sent by the pope to preach the gospel. St. Romuald built many other monasteries, and continued three years at one he founded near Parenzo, one year in the community to settle it, and two in a neighboring cell. Here he labored some time under a spiritual dryness, not being able to shed one tear; but he ceased not to continue his devotions with greater fervor. At last being in his cell, at those words of the psalmist; _I will give thee understanding, and will instruct thee_, he was suddenly visited by God with an extraordinary light and spirit of compunction, which from that time never left him. By a supernatural light, the fruit of prayer, he understood the holy scriptures, and wrote an exposition of the {374} psalms full of admirable unction. He often foretold things to come, and gave directions full of heavenly wisdom to all who came to consult him, especially to his religious, who frequently came to ask his advice how to advance in virtue, and how to resist temptations; he always sent them back to their cells full of an extraordinary cheerfulness. Through his continual weeping he thought others had a like gift, and often said to his monks: "Do not weep too much; for it prejudices the sight and the head." It was his desire, whenever he could conveniently avoid it, not to say mass before a number of people, because he could not refrain from tears in offering that august sacrifice. The contemplation of the Divinity often transported him out of himself; melting in tears, and burning with love, he would cry out: "Dear Jesus! my dear Jesus! my unspeakable desire! my joy! joy of the angels! sweetness of the saints!" and the like, which he was heard to speak with a jubilation which cannot be expressed. To propagate the honor of God, he resolved, by the advice of the bishop of Pola and others, to exchange his remote desert, for one where he could better advance his holy institute. The bishop of Paienzo forbade any boat to carry him off, desiring earnestly to detain him; but the bishop of Pola sent one to fetch him. He miraculously calmed a storm at sea, and landed safe at Capreola. Coming to Bifurcum, he found the monks' cells too magnificent, and would lodge in none but that of one Peter, a man of extraordinary austerity, who never would live in a cell larger than four cubits. This Peter admired the saint's spirit of compunction, and said, that when he recited the psalms alternately with him, the holy man used to go out thirty times in a night as if for some necessity, but he saw it was to abandon himself a few moments to spiritual consolation, with which he overflowed at prayer, or to sighs and tears which he was not able to contain. Romuald sent to the counts of the province of Marino, to beg a little ground whereon to build a monastery. They hearing Romuald's name, offered him with joy whatever mountains, woods, or fields he would choose among them. He found the valley of Castro most proper. Exceeding great was the fruit of the blessed man's endeavors, and many put themselves with great fervor under his direction. Sinners, who did not forsake the world entirely, were by him in great multitudes moved to penance, and to distribute great part of their possessions liberally among the poor. The holy man seemed in the midst of them as a seraph incarnate, burning with heavenly ardors of divine love, and inflaming those who heard him speak. If he travelled, he rode or walked at a distance behind his brethren, reciting psalms, and watering his cheeks almost without ceasing with tears that flowed in great abundance. The saint had always burned with an ardent desire of martyrdom, which was much increased by the glorious crowns of some of his disciples, especially of St. Boniface. At last, not able to contain the ardor of his charity and desire to give his life for his Redeemer, he obtained the pope's license, and set out to preach the gospel in Hungary, in which mission some of his disciples accompanied him. He had procured two of them to be consecrated archbishops by the pope, declining himself the episcopal dignity; but a violent illness which seized him on his entering Hungary, and returned as often as he attempted to proceed on his intended design, was a plain indication of the will of God in this matter; so he returned home with seven of his associates. The rest, with the two archbishops, went forward, and preached the faith under the holy king, St. Stephen, suffering much for Christ, but none obtained the crown of martyrdom. Romuald in his return built some monasteries in Germany, and labored to reform others; but this drew on him many persecutions. Yet all, even the great ones of the world, trembled in his presence. He refused to accept either water or wood, without {375} paying for it, from Raynerius; marquis of Tuscia, because that prince had married the wife of a relation whom he had killed. Raynerius, though a sovereign, used to say, that neither the emperor nor any mortal on earth could strike him with so much awe as Romuald's presence did. So powerful was the impression which the Holy Ghost, dwelling in his breast, made on the most haughty sinners. Hearing that a certain Venetian had by simony obtained the abbey of Classis, he hastened thither. The unworthy abbot strove to kill him, to preserve his unjust dignity. He often met with the like plots and assaults from several of his own disciples, which procured him the repeated merit, though not the crown, of martyrdom. The pope having called him to Rome, he wrought there several miracles, built some monasteries in its neighborhood, and converted innumerable souls to God. Returning from Rome, he made a long stay at Mount Sitria. A young nobleman addicted to impurity, being exasperated at this saint's severe remonstrances, had the impudence to accuse him of a scandalous crime. The monks, by a surprising levity, believed the calumny, enjoined him a most severe penance, forbid him to say mass, and excommunicated him. He bore all with patience and in silence, as if really he had been guilty, and refrained from going to the altar for six months. In the seventh month he was admonished by God to obey no longer so unjust and irregular a sentence pronounced without any authority and without grounds. He accordingly said mass again, and with such raptures of devotion, as obliged him to continue long absorbed in ecstasy. He passed seven years in Sitria, in his cell, in strict silence, but his example did the office of his tongue and moved many to penance. In bis old age, instead of relaxing, he increased his austerities and fasts. He had three hair-shirts which he now and then changed. He never would admit of the least thing to give a savor to the herbs or meal-gruel on which he supported himself. If any thing was brought him better dressed, he, for the greater self-denial, applied it to his nostrils, and said: "O gluttony, gluttony, thou shalt never taste this; perpetual war is declared against thee." His disciples also were remarkable for their austere lives, went always barefoot, and looked excessive pale with continual fasting. No other drink was known among them but water, except in sickness. St. Romuald wrought in this place many miraculous cures of the sick. At last, having settled his disciples here in a monastery which he had built for them, he departed for Bifurcum. The holy emperor St. Henry II., who had succeeded Otho III., coming into Italy, and being desirous to see the saint, sent an honorable embassy to him to induce him to come to court. At the earnest request of his disciples he complied, but not without great reluctance on his side. The emperor received him with the greatest marks of honor and esteem, and rising out of his chair, said to him: "I wish my soul was like yours." The saint observed a strict silence the whole time the interview lasted, to the great astonishment of the court. The emperor being convinced that this did not proceed from pride or disdain, but from humility and a desire of being despised, was so far from being offended at it, that it occasioned his conceiving a higher esteem and veneration for him. The next day he received from him wholesome advice in his closet. The German noblemen showed him the greatest respect as he passed through the court, and plucked the very hairs out of his garments for relics, at which he was so much grieved, that he would have immediately gone back if he had not been stopped. The emperor gave him a monastery on Mount Amiatus. The most famous of all his monasteries is that of Camaldoli, near Arezzo, in Tuscany, on the frontiers of the ecclesiastical state, thirty miles east from Florence, founded by him about the year 1009. It lies beyond a mountain, {376} very difficult to pass over, the descent from which, on the opposite side, is almost a direct precipice looking down upon a pleasant large valley, which then belonged to a lord called Maldoli, who gave it the saint, and from him it retained the name Camaldoli.[2] In this place St. Romuald built a monastery, and by the several observances he added to St. Benedict's rule, gave birth to that new order called Camaldoli, in which he united the cenobitic and eremitical life. After seeing in a vision his monks mounting up a ladder to heaven all in white, he changed their habit from black to white. The hermitage is two short miles distant from the monastery. It is a mountain quite overshaded by a dark wood of fir-trees. In it are seven clear springs of water. The very sight of this solitude in the midst of the forest helps to fill the mind with compunction, and a love of heavenly contemplation. On entering it, we meet with a chapel of St. Antony for travellers to pray in before they advance any further. Next are the cells and lodgings for the porters. Somewhat further is the church, which is large, well built, and richly adorned. Over the door is a clock, which strikes so loud that it may be heard all over the desert. On the left side of the church is the cell in which St. Romuald lived, when he first established these hermits. Their cells, built of stone, have each a little garden walled round. A constant fire is allowed to be kept in every cell, on account of the coldness of the air throughout the year: each cell has also a chapel in which they may say mass: they call their superior, major. The whole hermitage is now enclosed with a wall: none are allowed to go out of it; but they may walk in the woods and alleys within the enclosure at discretion. Every thing is sent them from the monastery in the valley: their food is every day brought to each cell; and all are supplied with wood and necessaries, that they may have no dissipation or hinderance in their contemplation. Many hours of the day are allotted to particular exercises; and no rain or snow stops any one from meeting in the church to assist at the divine office. They are obliged to strict silence in all public common places; and everywhere during their Lents, also on Sundays, Holydays, Fridays, and other days of abstinence, and always from Complin till prime the next day. For a severer solitude, St. Romuald added a third kind of life; that of a recluse. After a holy life in the hermitage, the superior grants leave to any that ask it, and seem called by God, to live forever shut up in their cells, never speaking to any one but to the superior when he visits them, and to the brother who brings them necessaries. Their prayers and austerities are doubled, and their fasts more severe and more frequent. St. Romuald condemned himself to this kind of life for several years; and fervent imitators have never since failed in this solitude. St. Romuald died in his monastery in the valley of Castro, in the marquisate of Ancona. As he was born about the year 956, he must have died seventy years and some months old, not a hundred and twenty, as the present copies of his life have it. The day of his death was the 19th of June; but his principal feast is appointed by Clement VIII. on the 7th of February, the day of his translation. His body was found entire and uncorrupt five years after his death, and again in 1466. But his tomb being sacrilegiously opened, and his body stolen in 1480, it fell to dust, in which state it was translated to Fabriano, and there deposited in the great church, all but the remains of one arm, sent to Camaldoli. God has honored his relics with many miracles. The order of Camaldoli is now divided into five congregations, under so many generals or majors. The life of the hermits is very severe, though something mitigated since the time of St. Romuald. The {377} Cenobites are more like Benedictines, and perhaps were not directly established by St. Romuald, says F. Helyot. * * * * * If we are not called to practise the extraordinary austerities of many saints, we cannot but confess that we lie under an indispensable necessity of leading mortified lives, both in order to fulfil our obligation of doing penance, and to subdue our passions and keep our senses and interior faculties under due command. The appetites of the body are only to be reduced by universal temperance, and assiduous mortification and watchfulness over all the senses. The interior powers of the soul must be restrained, as the imagination, memory, and understanding: their proneness to distraction, and the itching curiosity of the mind, must be curbed, and their repugnance to attend to spiritual things corrected by habits of recollection, holy meditation, and prayer. Above all, the will must be rendered supple and pliant by frequent self-denial, which must reach and keep in subjection all its most trifling sallies and inclinations. If any of these, how insignificant soever they may seem, are not restrained and vanquished, they will prove sufficient often to disturb the quiet of the mind, and betray one into considerable inconveniences, faults, and follies. Great weaknesses are sometimes fed by temptations which seem almost of too little moment to deserve notice. And though these infirmities should not arise to any great height, they always fetter the soul, and are an absolute impediment to her progress towards perfection. Footnotes: 1. Sanuti tells us, that St. Peter Urseoli, from his cradle, devoted himself with his whole heart to the divine service, and proposed to himself in all his actions the holy will and the greater glory of God. He built in the church of St. Mark a chapel, in which the body of that evangelist was secretly laid, the place being known by very few. Being chosen doge, he refused that dignity for a long time with great obstinacy, but at length suffered himself to be overcome by the importunity of the people. He had held it only two years and eight months, when he retired. Sanuti. Vite de Duchi di Venezia, c. 976. Maramri, Rerum Italicar. Scriptores, t. 22, p. 564. 2. Contracted from Campo Maldoli. ST. RICHARD, KING AND C. THIS saint was an English prince, in the kingdom of the West-Saxons, and was perhaps deprived of his inheritance by some revolution in the state or he renounced it to be more at liberty to dedicate himself to the pursuit of Christian perfection. His three children, Winebald, Willibald, and Warburga, are all honored as saints. Taking with him his two sons, he undertook a pilgrimage of penance and devotion, and sailing from Hamble-haven, landed in Neustria on the western coasts of France. He made a considerable stay at Rouen, and made his devotions in the most holy places that lay in his way through France. Being arrived at Lucca in Italy, in his road to Rome, he there died suddenly, about the year 722, and was buried in St. Fridian's church there. His relics are venerated to this day in the same place, and his festival kept at Lucca with singular devotion. St. Richard, when living, obtained by his prayers the recovery of his younger son Willibald, whom he laid at the foot of a great crucifix erected in a public place in England, when the child's life was despaired of in a grievous sickness and since his death, many have experienced the miraculous power of his intercession with God, especially where his relics invite the devotion of the faithful. His festival is kept at Lucca, and his name honored in the Roman Martyrology on the 7th of February. See the Life of St. Willibald by his cousin, a nun of Heidenhelm, to Canisius's Lectiones Antiquæ, with the notes of Basnage. Henschenius, Feb. t. 2, p. 70. ST. THEODORUS OF HERACLEA, M. AMONG those holy martyrs whom the Greeks honor with the title of Megalomartyrs, (_i.e._ great martyrs,) as St. George, St. Pantaleon, &c., four are {378} distinguished by them above the rest as principal patrons, namely, St. Theodorus of Heraclea, surnamed Stratilates, (_i.e._ general of the army,) St. Theodorus of Amasea, surnamed Tyro, St. Procopius, and St. Demetrius. The first was general of the forces of Licinius, and governor of the country of the Mariandyni, who occupied part of Bithynia, Pontus, and Paphlagonia, whose capital at that time was Heraclea of Pontus, though originally a city of Greeks, being founded by a colony from Megara. This was the place of our saint's residence, and here he glorified God by martyrdom, being beheaded for his faith by an order of the emperor Licinius, the 7th of February, on a Saturday, in 319, as the Greek Menæa and Menologies all agree: for the Greek Acts of his martyrdom, under the name of Augarus, are of no authority. It appears from a Novella of the emperor Manuel Comnenus, and from Balsamon's Scholia on the Nomocanon of Photius,[1] that the Greeks kept as semi-festivals, that is, as holydays till noon, both the 7th of February, which was the day of his martyrdom, and that of the translation of his relics, the 8th of June, when they were conveyed soon after his death, according to his own appointment, to Euchaia, or Euchaitæ, where was the burial-place of his ancestors, a day's journey from Amasea, the capital of all Pontus. This town became so famous for his shrine, that the name of Theodoropolis was given it; and out of devotion to this saint, pilgrims resorted thither from all parts of the east, as appears from the Spiritual Meadow,[2] Zonaras,[3] and Cedrenus.[4] The two latter historians relate, that the emperor John I., surnamed Zemisces, about the year 970, ascribed a great victory which he gained over the Saracens, to the patronage of this martyr: and in thanksgiving rebuilt in a stately manner the church where his relics were deposited at Euchaitæ.[5] The republic of Venice has a singular veneration for the memory of St. Theodorus of Heraclea, who, as Bernard Justiniani proves,[6] was titular patron of the church of St. Mark in that city, before the body of that evangelist was translated into it from another part of the city. A famous statue of this St. Theodorus is placed upon one of the two fine pillars which stand in the square of St. Mark. The relics of this glorious martyr are honored in the magnificent church of St. Saviour at Venice, whither they were brought by Mark Dandolo in 1260, from Constantinople; James Dandolo having sent them to that capital from Mesembria, an archiepiscopal maritime town in Romania, or the coast of Thrace, when in 1256 he scoured the Euxine sea with a fleet of galleys of the republic, as the Venetian historians inform us.[7] See archbishop Falconius, Not. in Tabulis Cappon. and Jos. Assemani in Calend. Univ. on the 8th and 17th of February, and the 8th of June;[8] also Lubin. Not. in Martyr. Rom. p. 283, and the Greek Synaxary. Footnotes: 1. Tit. 7, c. 1, Thomassin, l. 1, c. 7, n. 3. 2. Prat. Spir. c. 180. 3. Zonar. 3, parte Annal. 4. Ced. in Joanne Zemisce Imp. 5. See Baronius in his notes on the Martyrology, (ad 9 Nov.,) who justly censures those who confound this saint with St. Theodoras Tyro, as Fabricius has since done. (t. 9, Bibl. Græcæ, p. 147.) Yet himself falsely places Tyro's shrine at Euchaitæ, and ascribes to him these pilgrimages and miracles which certainly belong to St. Theodorus Stratilates, or of Heraclea. 6. De Rebus Venetis, l. 6. 7. Sansovin, l. 13, Hist. &c. 8. The modern Greeks have transferred his feast from the 7th to the 8th of February. ST. TRESAIN, IN LATIN, TRESANUS, PRIEST, C. He was a holy Irish priest, who, having left his own country, preached with great zeal in France, and died curate of Mareuil upon the Marne, in the sixth century. His relics are held in great veneration at Avenay in Champagne. See his life in Colgan and Bollandus. {379} ST. AUGULUS, B M. HIS name occurs with the title of bishop in all the manuscript copies of the ancient Western Martyrology, which bears the name of St. Jerom. That of the abbey of Esternach, which is very old, and several others, style him martyr. He probably received that crown soon after St. Alban. All martyrologies place him in Britain, and at Augusta, which name was given to London, as Amm. Marcellinus mentions; never to York, for which Henschenius would have it to be taken in this place, because it was at that time the capital of Britain. In the ancient copy of Bede's martyrology, which was used at St. Agnan's at Orleans, he is called St. Augustus; in some others St. Augurius. The French call him St. Aule. Chatelain thinks him to be the same saint who is famous in some parts of Normandy under the name of St. Ouil. FEBRUARY VIII. ST. JOHN OF MATHA, FOUNDER OF THE ORDER OF THE TRINITARIANS From several bulls of Innocent III. and the many authors of his life, especially that compiled by Robert Gagnin, the learned general of this Order, in 1490, collected by Baillet, and the Hist. des Ordres Relig. by F. Helyot. See also Annales Ordinis SS. Trinitatis, auctore Bon. Baro, Ord. Minor. Romæ. 1684, and Regula et Statuta Ord. SS. Trinitatis, in 12mo. 1570. A.D. 1213. ST. JOHN was born of very pious and noble parents, at Faucon, on the borders of Provence, June the 24th, 1169, and was baptized John, in honor of St. John the Baptist. His mother dedicated him to God by a vow from his infancy. His father, Euphemius, sent him to Aix, where he learned grammar, fencing, riding, and other exercises fit for a young nobleman. But his chief attention was to advance in virtue. He gave the poor a considerable part of the money his parents sent him for his own use: he visited the hospital every Friday, assisting the poor sick, dressing and cleansing their sores, and affording them all the comfort in his power. Being returned home, he begged his father's leave to continue the pious exercises he had begun, and retired to a little hermitage not far from Faucon, with the view of living at a distance from the world, and united to God alone by mortification and prayer. But finding his solitude interrupted by the frequent visits of his friends, he desired his father's consent to go to Paris to study divinity, which he easily obtained. He went through these more sublime studies with extraordinary success, and proceeded doctor of divinity with uncommon applause, though his modesty gave him a reluctancy in that honor. He was soon after ordained priest, and said his first mass in the bishop of Paris's chapel, at which the bishop himself, Maurice de Sully, the abbots of St. Victor and of St. Genevieve. and the rector of the {380} university, assisted; admiring the graces of heaven in him, which appeared in his extraordinary devotion on this occasion, as well as at his ordination. On the day he said his first mass, by a particular inspiration from God, he came to a resolution of devoting himself to the occupation of ransoming Christian slaves from the captivity they groaned under among the infidels: considering it as one of the highest acts of charity with respect both to their souls and bodies. But before he entered upon so important a work, he thought it needful to spend some time in retirement, prayer, and mortification. And having heard of a holy hermit, St. Felix Valois, living in a great wood near Gandelu, in the diocese of Meux, he repaired to him and begged he would admit him into his solitude, and instruct him in the practice of perfection. Felix soon discovered him to be no novice, and would not treat him as a disciple, but as a companion. It is incredible what progress these two holy solitaries made in the paths of virtue, by perpetual prayer, contemplation, fasting, and watching. One day, sitting together on the bank of a spring, John disclosed to Felix the design he had conceived on the day on which he said his first mass, to succor the Christians under the Mahometan slavery, and spoke so movingly upon the subject that Felix was convinced that the design was from God, and offered him his joint concurrence to carry it into execution. They took some time to recommend it to God by prayer and fasting, and then set out for Rome in the midst of a severe winter, towards the end of the year 1197, to obtain the pope's benediction. They found Innocent III. promoted to the chair of St. Peter, who being already informed of their sanctity and charitable design by letters of recommendation from the bishop of Paris, his holiness received them as two angels from heaven; lodged them in his own palace, and gave them many long private audiences. After which he assembled the cardinals and some bishops in the palace of St. John Lateran, and asked their advice. After their deliberations he ordered a fast and particular prayers to know the will of heaven. At length, being convinced that these two holy men were led by the spirit of God, and that great advantages would accrue to the church from such an institute, he consented to their erecting a new religious order, and declared St. John the first general minister. The bishop of Paris, and the abbot of St. Victor, were ordered to draw up their rules, which the pope approved by a bull, in 1198. He ordered the religious to wear a white habit, with a red and blue cross on the breast, and to take the name of the order of the Holy Trinity. He confirmed it some time after, adding new privileges by a second bull, dated in 1209. The two founders having obtained the pope's blessing and certain indults or privileges, returned to France, and presented themselves to the king, Philip Augustus, who authorized the establishment of their Order in his kingdom, and favored it with his liberalities. Gaucher III., lord of Chatillon, gave them land whereon to build a convent. Their number increasing, the same lord, seconded by the king, gave them Cerfroid, the place in which St. John and St. Felix concerted the first plan of their institute. It is situated in Brie, on the confines of Valois. This house of Cerfroid, or De Cervo frigido, is the chief of the order. The two saints founded many other convents in France, and sent several of their religious to accompany the counts of Flanders and Blois, and other lords, to the holy war. Pope Innocent III. wrote to recommend these religious to Miramolin, king of Morocco; and St. John sent thither two of his religions in 1201, who redeemed one hundred and eighty-six Christian slaves the first voyage. The year following, St. John went himself to Tunis, where he purchased the liberty of one hundred and ten more. He returned into Provence, and there received great charities, which he carried into Spain, and redeemed many in captivity {381} under the Moors. On his return he collected large alms among the Christians towards this charitable undertaking. His example produced a second order of Mercy, instituted by St. Peter Nolasco, in 1235. St. John made a second voyage to Tunis in 1210, in which he suffered much from the infidels, enraged at his zeal and success in exhorting the poor slaves to patience and constancy in their faith. As he was returning with one hundred and twenty slaves he had ransomed, the barbarians took away the helm from his vessel, and tore all its sails, that they might perish in the sea. The saint, full of confidence in God, begged him to be their pilot, and hung up his companions' cloaks for sails, and, with a crucifix in his hands, kneeling on the deck, singing psalms, after a prosperous voyage, they all landed safe at Ostia, in Italy. Felix, by this time, had greatly propagated his order in France, and obtained for it a convent in Paris, in a place where stood before a chapel of St. Mathurin, whence these religious in France are called Mathurins. St. John lived two years more in Rome, which he employed in exhorting all to penance with great energy and fruit. He died on the 21st of December, in 1213, aged sixty-one. He was buried in his church of St. Thomas, where his monument yet remains, though his body has been translated into Spain. Pope Honorius III. confirmed the rule of this order a second time. By the first rule, they were not permitted to buy any thing for their sustenance except bread, pulse, herbs, oil, eggs, milk, cheese, and fruit; never flesh nor fish: however, they might eat flesh on the principal festivals, on condition it was given them. They were not, in travelling, to ride on any beasts but asses.[1] * * * * * St. Chrysostom[2] elegantly and pathetically extols the charity of the widow of Sarepta, whom neither poverty nor children, nor hunger, nor fear of death, withheld from affording relief to the prophet Elias, and he exhorts every one to meditate on her words, and keep her example present to his mind. "How hard or insensible soever we are," says he, "they will make a deep impression upon us, and we shall not be able to refuse relief to the poor, when we have before our eyes the generous charity of this widow. It is true, you will tell me, that if you meet with a prophet in want, you could not refuse doing him all the good offices in your power. But what ought you not to do for Jesus Christ, who is the master of the prophets? He takes whatsoever you do to the poor as done to himself." When we consider the zeal and joy with which the saints sacrificed themselves for their neighbors, how must we blush at, and condemn our insensibility at the spiritual and the corporal calamities of others! The saints regarded affronts, labors, and pains, as nothing for the service of others in Christ: we cannot bear the least word or roughness of temper. Footnotes: 1. A mitigation of this rule was approved by pope Clement IV. in 1267, which allows them to use horses, and to buy fish, flesh, and all other necessaries: on which mitigations see Historia prolixior Priorum Grandimont, published by Martenne, Ampliff. Collectio, t. 6, p. 138. This order is possessed of about two hundred and fifty monasteries, divided into thirteen provinces, in France, Spain, Italy, and Portugal. That formerly in England had forty-three houses; that in Scotland nine, and that in Ireland fifty-two. The general of the order is chosen by a general chapter, which is always held at Cerfroid. Each house is governed by a superior who is called minister. Those in the provinces of Champagne, Normandy, and Picardy (which last includes Flanders) are perpetual but to Italy and Spain, triennial. Their rule is that of the canons regular of St. Austin. Their principal exercises are to sing the divine office at the canonical hours, praising and glorifying the adorable Trinity, as angel of the earth; and to gather and carry alms in Barbary for the redemption of slaves, to which work one third of the revenues of each house is applied. A reformation was made in this order in the years 1573 and 1576, which, by degrees, has been introduced into the greater part of the convents, and into that of Cerfroid itself. These never eat meat except on Sundays, sing matins at midnight, and wear no linen. The reformation of the barefooted Trinitarians, still much more severe, was set on foot in Spain, in 1594, by John Baptist of the Conception, who suffered many persecutions in the undertaking, and died in 1613, in great reputation for sanctity and miracles, the examination of which has been commenced in order to his beatification. 2. Hom. de Eila et Vidua Sarept. pp. 33, 338, ed. Montf. {382} ST. STEPHEN OF GRANDMONT, ABBOT. His life was written by Stephen de Liciaco, fourth prior of Grandmont, in 1141: but this work seems now lost. Gerard Ithier, seventh prior, and his abridger, fell into several anachronisms and mistakes, which are to be corrected by the remarks of Dom Martenne, who has given us a new and accurate edition of this life, and other pieces relating to it, Ver. Scriptorum Ampliff. Collectio, t. 6, p. 1043. See also Dom Rivet, Hist. Littér. de la France, t. 10, p. 410. Gallia Christ. Nova, t. 2, p. 646. A.D. 1124. ST. STEPHEN was son of the virtuous viscount of Thiers, the first nobleman of Auvergne. From his infancy he gave presages of an uncommon sanctity. Milo, a pious priest, at that time dean of the church of Paris, was appointed his tutor, and being made bishop of Beneventum in 1074, kept the saint with him, continued to instruct him in sacred learning, and in the maxims of Christian perfection, and ordained him deacon. After his death in 1076, Stephen pursued his studies in Rome during four years. All this time he seemed to himself continually solicited by an interior voice to seek a sanctuary for his soul in holy solitude, considering the dangers of the pastoral charge, the obligations of leading a penitential life, and the happiness of the exercises of holy retirement. He desired to imitate the rigorous institute of a certain monastery which he had seen in Calabria, and obtained leave of pope Gregory VII. to embrace an eremitical life. He therefore returned to the castle of Thiers, the seat of his late parents, to settle his affairs. He had always been their favorite child, and regarded by them as the blessing bestowed on their prayers and fasts, by which they had begged him of God. Being both exceeding pious, they had rejoiced to see him so virtuously inclined; but they being now dead, his other friends vehemently opposed his design of renouncing the world. Stephen left them privately, and travelling through many deserts, arrived at Muret, a desolate, barren mountain, in the neighborhood of Limoges, haunted by wild beasts, and of an exceeding cold situation. Here he took up his abode, and, by a vow, consecrated himself to the divine service, in these words: "I, Stephen, renounce the devil and his pomps, and do offer and dedicate myself to the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, one God in three Persons." This engagement he wrote and kept always by him with a ring as the symbol. He built himself a hut with the boughs of trees, and in this place passed forty-six years in prayer, and the practice of such austerities as almost surpassed the strength of a human body.[1] He lived at first on wild herbs and roots. In the second summer he was discovered by certain shepherds, who brought him a little coarse bread; which some country people from that time continued to do as long as he lived. He always wore next his skin a hair-cloth with iron plates and hoops studded with sharp spikes, over which his only garment, made of the coarsest stuff, was the same both in summer and winter. When overcome by sleep, he took a short rest on rough boards, laid in the form of a coffin. When he was not employed in manual labor, he lay prostrate on the ground in profound adoration of the majesty of God. The sweetness which he felt in divine contemplation made him often forget to take any refreshment for two or three days together. When sixty years of {383} age, finding his stomach exceeding weak, he suffered a few drops of wine to be mixed with the water which he drank. Many were desirous to live with him and become his disciples. Though most rigorous to himself, he was mild to those under his direction, and proportioned their mortifications to their strength. But he allowed no indulgence with regard to the essential points of a solitary life, silence, poverty, and the denial of self-will. He often exhorted his disciples to a total disengagement of their hearts from all earthly things, and to a love of holy poverty for that purpose. He used to say to those who desired to be admitted into his community: "This is a prison without either door or hole whereby to return into the world, unless a person makes for himself a breach. And should this misfortune befall you, I could not send after you, none here having any commerce with the world any more than myself." He behaved himself among his disciples as the last of them, always taking the lowest place, never suffering any one to rise up to him; and while they were at table, he would seat himself on the ground in the midst of them, and read to them the lives of the saints. God bestowed on him a divine light, by which he often told others their secret thoughts. The author of his life gives a long history of miracles which he wrought. But the conversions of many obstinate sinners were still more miraculous: it seemed as if no heart could resist the grace which accompanied his words. Two cardinals coming into France, as legates to the king from the pope, one of whom was afterwards pope Innocent II., paid the saint a visit to his desert. They asked him whether he was a canon, a monk, or a hermit. He said he was none of those. Being pressed to declare what he was: "We are sinners," said he, "whom the mercy of God hath conducted into this wilderness to do penance. The pope himself hath imposed on us these exercises, at our request, for our sins. Our imperfection and frailty deprive us of courage to imitate the fervor of those holy hermits who lived in divine contemplation almost without any thought for their bodies. You see that we neither wear the habit of monks nor of canons. We are still further from usurping those names, which we respect and honor at a distance in the persons of the priests, and in the sanctity of the monks. We are poor, wretched sinners, who, terrified at the rigor of the divine justice, still hope, with trembling, by this means, to find mercy from our Lord Jesus Christ in the day of his judgment." The legates departed exceedingly edified at what they saw and heard. Eight days after the saint was admonished by God of the end of his mortal course, after which he most earnestly sighed. He redoubled his fervor in all his exercises, and falling sick soon after, gave his disciples his last instructions, and exhorted them to a lively confidence in God, to whom he recommended them by a humble prayer. His exhortation was so moving and strong that it dispelled their fears in losing him, and they seemed to enter into his own sentiments. He caused himself to be carried into the chapel, where he heard mass, received extreme unction and the viaticum: and on the 8th day of February, 1124, being fourscore years old, expired in peace, repeating those words: "_Lord, into thy hands I commend my spirit_." He had passed in his desert fifty years, bating two months. His disciples buried him privately, to prevent the crowds of people breaking in. But the news of his death drew incredible numbers to his tomb, which was honored by innumerable miracles. Four months after his death, the priory of Ambazac, dependent on the great Benedictin abbey of St. Austin, to Limoges, put in a claim to the land of Muret. The disciples of the holy man, who had inherited his maxims and spirit, abandoned the ground to them without any contention, and retired to Grandmont, a desert one league distant, carrying with them his precious remains. From this place the order {384} took its name. The saint was canonized by Clement III., in 1189, at the request of king Henry II. of England. See Gallia Christ. Nova, t. 2, p. 646. APPENDIX TO THE LIFE OF ST. STEPHEN OF GRANDMONT. Such was the fervor and sanctity of the first disciples of St. Stephen of Grandmont, that they were the admiration of the world in the age wherein they lived. Peter, the learned and pious abbot of Celles, calls them angels, and testifies that he placed an extraordinary confidence in their prayers. (Petr. Cellens. ep. 8.) John of Salisbury, a contemporary author, represents them as men who, being raised above the necessities of life, had conquered not only sensuality and avarice, but even nature itself. (Joan. Salisb. Poly. l. 7, c. 23.) Stephen, bishop of Tournay, speaks of them in as high strains. (Steph. Tournac. ep. 2.) Trithemius, Yepez, and Miræus, imagined that St. Stephen made the rule of St. Bennet the basis of his order; and Mabillon at first embraced this opinion, (Mabill. Præf. in part 2, sec. 6, Bened.,) but changed it afterwards, (Annul. Bened. l. 64, n. 37 and 112,) proving that this saint neither followed the rule of Saint Bennet nor that of St. Austin. Dom Martenne has set this in a much fuller light in his preface to the sixth tome of his great collection. (Amplise Collect. t. 6, n. 20, &c.) Baillet, Helyot, and some others, pretend that St. Stephen never wrote any thing himself, and that his rule was compiled by some of his successors from his sayings, and from the discipline which he had established. But some of the very passages to which these critics appeal, suffice to confute them, and St. Stephen declares himself the author of the written rule both in the prologue, and in several other places, (Regula Grandim. c. 9, 11, 14,) as Mabillon, or rather Martenne, (who was author of this addition to his annals,) takes notice. (Annal. t. 6, l. 74, n. 9l.) The rule of this holy founder consists of seventy-five chapters. In a pathetic prologue he puts his disciples in mind, that the rule of rules, and the origin of all monastic rules, is the gospel: they are but streams derived from this source, and in it are all the means of arriving at Christian perfection pointed out. He recommends strict poverty and obedience, as the foundation of a religious life; forbids his religious ever to receive any retributions for their masses, or to open the door of their oratory to secular persons on Sundays or holydays, because on these days they ought to attend their parish churches. He forbids his religious all lawsuits. (Reg. c. 15. See Chatelain, Notes sur le Martyr. p. 378.) He forbids them the use of flesh meat even in time of sickness, and prescribes rigorous fasts, with only one meal a day for a great part of the year. This rule, which was approved by Urban III. in 1186, was mitigated by pope Innocent IV. in 1247, and again by Clement V. in 1309. It is printed at Rouen in 1672. Besides this rule, certain maxims or instructions of St. Stephen are extant, and were collected together by his disciples after his death. They were printed at Paris in Latin and French, in 1704. Baillet published a new translation of them in 1707. In them we admire the beauty and fruitfulness of the author's genius, and still much more the great sentiments of virtue which they contain, especially concerning temptations, vain-glory, ambition, the sweetness of God's service, and his holy commandments; the obligation without bounds which all men have of loving God, the incomprehensible advantages of praising him, the necessity of continually advancing in fervor, and of continually gathering, by the practice of good works, new flowers, of which the garland of our lives ought to be composed. This useful collection might doubtless have been made much more ample by his disciples. Several other holy maxims and short lessons delivered by him, occur in the most ancient of his lives, entitled, Stephani Dicta et Facta, compiled by the care of St. Stephen de Liciaco. (Martenne, t. 6, p. 1046.) Footnotes: 1. William of Dandina, an accurate writer, in the life of Hugh of Lacerta, the most famous among the first disciples of St. Stephen, published by Martenne, (t. 6, p. 1143,) says, that the saint died in the forty-sixth year after his conversion. His retreat, therefore, cannot be dated before the year 1076, and the foundation of his order, which some place in 1076, must have been posterior to this. Gerard Ithier mistakes when he says that St. Stephen went to Benevento in the twelfth year of his age; and remained there twelve years. He went only then to Paris to Milo, who was bishop only two years. See Martenne, p. 1053. ST. PAUL, BISHOP OF VERDUN, C. HAVING lived in the world a perfect pattern of perfection by alms, fasts, assiduous prayer, meekness, and charity, he retired among the hermits of {385} Mount Voge, near Triers, on a hill called from him Paulberg. King Dagobert placed him in the episcopal chair of Verdun, and was his protector in his zealous labors and ample foundations of that church. The saint died in 631. See his authentic anonymous life in Henschenius. Also Calmet, Hist. de Lorraine, t. 1, l. 9, n. 41, p. 402. Bollandus, Feb. t. 2, p. 169. ST. CUTHMAN, C. THE spiritual riches of divine grace were the happy portion of this saint, who seemed from his cradle formed to perfect virtue. His name demonstrates him to have been an English-Saxon, not of British extraction, either from Wales or Cornwall, as Bollandus conjectured. He was born in the southern parts of England, and, from the example of his pious parents, inherited the most perfect spirit of Christian piety. From his infancy he never once transgressed their orders in the least article, and when sent by his father to keep his sheep, he never failed coming home exactly at the time appointed. This employment afforded him an opportunity of consecrating his affections to God, by the exercises of holy prayer, which only necessary occasions seemed to interrupt, and which he may be said to have always continued in spirit, according to that of the spouse in the Canticles: I sleep, but my heart watcheth. By the constant union of his soul with God, and application to the functions and exercises of the angels, the affections of his soul were rendered daily more and more pure, and his sentiments and whole conduct more heavenly and angelical. What gave his prayer this wonderful force in correcting and transforming his affections, was the perfect spirit of simplicity, disengagement from creatures, self-denial, meekness, humility, obedience, and piety, in which it was founded. We find so little change in our souls by our devotions, because we neglect the practice of self-denial and mortification, live wedded to the world, and slaves to our senses and to self-love, which is an insuperable obstacle to this principal effect of holy prayer. Cuthman, after the death of his father, employed his whole fortune and all that he gained by the labor of his hands, in supporting his decrepit mother: and afterwards was not ashamed to beg for her subsistence. To furnish her necessaries by the sweat of his brow, and by the charitable succors of others, he removed to several places; nor is it to be expressed what hardships and austerities he voluntarily and cheerfully suffered, which he embraced as part of his penance, increasing their severity in order more perfectly to die to himself and to his senses, and sanctifying them by the most perfect dispositions in which he bore them. Finding, at a place called Steninges, a situation according to his desire, he built there a little cottage to be a shelter from the injuries of the air, in which, with his mother, he might devote himself to the divine service, without distraction. His hut was no sooner finished but he measured out the ground near it for the foundation of a church, which he dug with his own hands. The inhabitants, animated by his piety and zeal, contributed liberally to assist him in completing this work. The holy man worked himself all day, conversing at the same time in his heart with God, and employed a considerable part of the night in prayer. Here he said in his heart: "Whither shall I go from thy spirit, O Lord! this is the place of my rest for ever and ever, in which I will every day render to thee my vows." His name was rendered famous by many miracles, of which God was pleased to make him the instrument, both living and after his death. He flourished about the eighth century, and his relics were honored at Steninges. This place Saint Edward {386} the Confessor bestowed on the great abbey of Fecam in Normandy, which was enriched with a portion of his relics. This donation of Steninges, together with Rye, Berimunster, and other neighboring places, made to the abbey of Fecam, was confirmed to the same by William the Conqueror, and the two first Henries, whose charters are still kept among the archives of that house, and were shown me there. This parish, and that of Rye, were of the exemption of Fecam, that is, were not subject to the jurisdiction of the diocesan, but to this abbey, as twenty-four parishes in Normandy are to this day. For in the enumeration of the parishes which belong to this exemption in the bulls of several popes, in which it is confirmed, Steninges and Rye are always mentioned with this additional clause, that those places are situated in England.[1] St. Cuthman was titular patron of Steninges or Estaninges, and is honored to this day, on the 8th of February, in the great abbeys of Fecam, Jumieges, and others in Normandy: and his name occurs in the old Missal, used by the English Saxons before the Norman conquest, kept in the monastery of Jumieges, in which a proper mass is assigned for his feast on the 8th of February. In the account of the principal shrines of relics of saints, honored anciently in England, published by the most learned Dr. Hickes, mention is made of St. Cuthman's, as follows: "At Steninge, on the river Bramber, among the South-Saxons, rests St. Cuthman." See Narratio de Sanctis qui in Anglia quiescunt, published by Hickes, in his Thesaurus Linguarum veterum Septentr. t. 1, in Dissert. Epistol. p. 121. See also two lives of St. Cuthman, in Bollandus, t. 2, Feb. p. 197, and the more accurate lessons for his festival in the breviary of Fecam. He is honored in most of the Benedictin abbeys in Normandy. Footnotes: 1. Bollandus had not seen these charters and bulls, or he could not have supposed Steninges to be situated in Normandy, and St. Cuthman to have died in that province. Dom Le Noir, a learned Benedictin monk of the congregation of St. Maur, and library-keeper at Fecam, who is employed in compiling a history of Normandy, gives me the following information by a letter from Fecam: "On tient ici à Féca, pas une espèce de tradition que Hastings, port d'Angleterre, sur la Manche, dens le comté de Sossex, et dans le voisinage de Rye, est le Staninges de l'Abbaye de Fécam. Si le nom est un pen différent aujourd'hui on voit des noms des lieux qui ont souffert des plus grandes altérations." This pretended tradition is an evident mistake. Hastings was a famous sea-port under the same name, in the ninth century, and Stening is at this day a borough in Sussex, situated under the reins of Bramber castle, not far from the river, which was formerly navigable so high, though at present even Shoreham at its month has no harbor, the sea having made frequent changes on this coast, especially in the twelfth century. FEBRUARY IX. ST. APOLLONIA, VIRGIN AND MARTYR. Her acts are of no authority, and falsely place her triumph at Rome, instead of Alexandria. See Tillemont, t. 3, p. 495. Her authentic history is in the letter of St. Dionysius, then bishop of Alexandria, preserved by Eusebius, l. 6, c. 41, 42, p. 236. Ed. Val. A.D. 249. ST. DIONYSIUS of Alexandria wrote to Fabius, bishop of Antioch, a relation of the persecution raised at Alexandria by the heathen populace of that city, in the last year of the reign of the emperor Philip. A certain poet of Alexandria, who pretended to foretell things to come, stirred up this great city against the Christians on the motive of religion. The first victim of their rage was a venerable old man, named Metras, or Metrius, whom they would have compelled to utter impious words against the worship of {387} the true God: which, when he refused to do, they beat him with staffs, thrust splinters of reeds into his eyes, and having dragged him into one of the suburbs, stoned him to death. The next person they seized was a Christian woman, called Quinta, whom they carried to one of their temples to pay divine worship to the idol. She loaded the execrable divinity with many reproaches, which so exasperated the people that they dragged her by the heels upon the pavement of sharp pebbles, cruelly scourged her, and put her to the same death. The rioters, by this time, were in the height of their fury. Alexandria seemed like a city taken by storm. The Christians mads no opposition, but betook themselves to flight, and beheld the loss of their goods with joy; for their hearts had no ties on earth. Their constancy was equal to their disinterestedness; for of all who fell into their hands, St. Dionysius knew of none that renounced Christ. The admirable Apollonia, whom old age and the state of virginity rendered equally venerable, was seized by them. Their repeated blows on her jaws beat out all her teeth. At last they made a great fire without the city, and threatened to cast her into it, if she did not utter certain impious words. She begged a moment's delay, as if it had been to deliberate on the proposal; but, to convince her persecutors that her sacrifice was perfectly voluntary, she no sooner found herself at liberty, than of her own accord she leaped into the flames. They next exercised their fury on a holy man called Serapion, and tortured him in his own house with great cruelty. After bruising his limbs, disjointing and breaking his bones, they threw him headlong from the top of the house on the pavement, and so completed his martyrdom. A civil war among the pagan citizens put an end to their fury this year, but the edict of Decius renewed it in 250. See the rest of the relation on the 27th of February. An ancient church in Rome, which is frequented with great devotion, bears the name of St. Apollonia: under whose patronage we meet with churches and altars in most parts of the Western church. * * * * * The last part of our saint's conduct is not proposed to our imitation, as self-murder is unjustifiable. If any among the Fathers have commended it, they presumed, with St. Austin, that it was influenced by a particular direction of the Holy Ghost, or was the effect of a pious simplicity, founded in motives of holy zeal and charity. For it can never be lawful for a person by any action wilfully to concur to, or hasten his own death, though many martyrs out of an ardent charity, and desire of laying down their lives for God, and being speedily united to him, anticipated the executioners in completing their sacrifice. Among the impious, absurd, and false maxims of the Pagan Greeks and Romans, scarce any thing was more monstrous than the manner in which they canonized suicide in distress, as a remedy against temporal miseries, and a point of heroism. To bear infamy and all kind of sufferings with unshaken constancy and virtue, is true courage and greatness of soul, and the test and triumph of virtue: and to sink under misfortunes, is the most unworthy baseness of soul. But what name can we find for the pusillanimity of those who are not able so much as to look humiliations, poverty, or affliction in the face? Our life we hold of God, and he who destroys it injures God, to whom he owes it. He refuses also to his friends and to the republic of mankind, the comfort and succors which they are entitled in justice or charity to receive from him. Moreover, if to murder another is the greatest temporal injustice a man can commit against a neighbor, life being of all temporal blessings the greatest and most noble, suicide is a crime so much more enormous, as the charity which every one owes to himself, especially to his immortal soul, is stricter, {388} more noble and of a superior order to that which he owes to his neighbor. SAINT NICEPHORUS, M. From his genuine Acts in Ruinart, p. 244. Tillemont, t. 4, p. 16. THERE dwelt in Antioch a priest called Sapricius, and a layman, named Nicephorus, who had been linked together for many years by the strictest friendship. But the enemy of mankind sowing between them the seeds of discord, this their friendship was succeeded by the most implacable hatred, and they declined meeting each other in the streets. Thus it continued a considerable time. At length, Nicephorus, entering into himself, and reflecting on the grievousness of the sin of hatred, resolved on seeking a reconciliation. He accordingly deputed some friends to go to Sapricius to beg his pardon, promising him all reasonable satisfaction for the injury done him. But the priest refused to forgive him. Nicephorus sent other friends to him on the same errand, but though they pressed and entreated him to be reconciled, Sapricius was inflexible. Nicephorus sent a third time, but to no purpose; Sapricius having shut his ears not to men only, but to Christ himself, who commands us to forgive as we ourselves hope to be forgiven. Nicephorus, finding him deaf to the remonstrances of their common friends, went in person to his house, and casting himself at his feet, owned his fault, and begged pardon for Christ's sake; but all in vain. The persecution suddenly began to rage under Valerian and Gallien in the year 260. Sapricius was apprehended and brought before the governor, who asked him his name. "It is Sapricius," answered he. Governor. "Of what profession are you?" Sapricius. "I am a Christian." Governor. "Are you of the clergy?" Sapricius. "I have the honor to be a priest." He added: "We Christians acknowledge one Lord and Master Jesus Christ, who is God; the only and true God, who created heaven and earth. The gods of nations are devils." The president, exasperated at his answer, gave orders for him to be put into an engine, like a screw-press, which the tyrants had invented to torment the faithful. The excessive pain of this torture did not shake Sapricius's constancy, and he said to the judges: "My body is in your power; but my soul you cannot touch. Only my Saviour Jesus Christ is master of this." The president seeing him so resolute, pronounced this sentence: "Sapricius, priest of the Christians, who is ridiculously persuaded that he shall rise again, shall be delivered over to the executioner of public justice to have his head severed from his body, because he has contemned the edict of the emperors." Sapricius seemed to receive the sentence with great cheerfulness, and was to haste to arrive at the place of execution in hopes of his crown. Nicephorus ran out to meet him, and casting himself at his feet, said: "Martyr of Jesus Christ, forgive me my offence." But Sapricius made him no answer. Nicephorus waited for him in another street which he was to pass through, and as soon as he saw him coming up, broke through the crowd, and falling again at his feet, conjured him to pardon the fault he had committed against him, through frailty rather than design. This he begged by the glorious confession he had made of the divinity of Jesus Christ. Sapricius's heart was more and more hardened, and now he would not so much as look on him. The soldiers laughed at Nicephorus, saying: "A greater fool than thou was never seen, in being so solicitous for a man's {389} pardon who is upon the point of being executed." Being arrived at the place of execution, Nicephorus redoubled his humble entreaties and supplications: but all in vain; for Sapricius continued as obstinate as ever, in refusing to forgive. The executioners said to Sapricius: "Kneel down that we may cut off your head." Sapricius said. "Upon what account?" They answered: "Because you will not sacrifice to the gods, nor obey the emperor's orders, for the love of that man that is called Christ." The unfortunate Sapricius cried out: "Stop, my friends; do not put me to death: I will do what you desire: I am ready to sacrifice." Nicephorus, sensibly afflicted at his apostacy, cried aloud to him: "Brother, what are you doing? renounce not Jesus Christ our good master. Forfeit not a crown you have already gained by tortures and sufferings." But Sapricius would give no manner of attention to what he said. Whereupon, Nicephorus, with tears of bitter anguish for the fall of Sapricius, said to the executioner: "I am a Christian, and believe in Jesus Christ, whom this wretch has renounced; behold me here ready to die in his stead." All present were astonished at such an unexpected declaration. The officers of justice being under an uncertainty how to proceed, dispatched a lictor or beadle to the governor, with this message: "Sapricius promiseth to sacrifice, but here is another desirous to die for the same Christ, saying: I am a Christian, and refuse to sacrifice to your gods, and comply with the edicts of the emperors." The governor, on hearing this, dictated the following sentence: "If this man persist in refusing to sacrifice to the immortal gods, let him die by the sword:" which was accordingly put in execution. Thus Nicephorus received three immortal crowns, namely, of faith, humility, and charity, triumphs which Sapricius had made himself unworthy of. The Greek and the Roman Martyrologies mention him on this day. SAINT THELIAU, BISHOP AND CONFESSOR. HE was born in the same province with St. Samson at Eccluis-Guenwa{}, near Monmouth. His sister Anaumed went over to Armorica in 490, and upon her arrival was married to Budic, king of the Armorican Britons. Before she left her own country she promised St. Theliau to consecrate her first child in a particular manner to God. Our saint was educated under the holy discipline of St. Dubritius, and soon after the year 500, made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem with his schoolfellows St. David and St. Paternus. In their return St. David stopped at Dole, with Sampson the elder, who had been bishop of York, but being expelled by the Saxons, fled into Armorica and was made bishop of Dole. This prelate and St. Theliau planted a great avenue, three miles long, from Dole to Cai, which for several ages was known by their names. The people of Dole, with the bishop and king Budic, pressed our saint to accept of that bishopric; but in vain. After his return into the island, St. Dubritius being removed from the see of Landaff to that of Caërleon, in 495, Theliau was compelled to succeed him in Landaff, of which church he has always been esteemed the principal patron. His great learning, piety, and pastoral zeal, especially in the choice and instruction of his clergy, have procured him a high reputation which no age can ever obliterate, says Leland.[1] His authority alone decided whatever controversies arose in his time. When the yellow plague depopulated Wales, he exerted his courage and charity with an heroic intrepidity. Providence preserved his life for the sake of others, and he died {390} about the year 580, in a happy old age, in solitude, where he had for some time prepared himself for his passage. The place where he departed to our Lord was called from him Llan deilo-vaur, that is, the church of the great Theliau: it was situated on the bank of the river Tovy in Caermarthenshire. The Landaff register names among the most eminent of his disciples his nephew St. Oudoceus, who succeeded him in the see of Landaff, St. Ismael, whom he consecrated bishop, St. Tyfhei, martyr, who reposeth in Pennalun, &c. See Capgrave, Harpsfield, Wharton, Brown-Willis, D. Morice, Hist. de Bretagne, t. 1, p. 22, and the notes, pp. 785 and 819. Bolland. Feb. t. 2, p. 303. Footnotes: 1. De Script. Brit. c. 30. ST. ANSBERT, ARCHBISHOP OF ROUEN, C. IN 695. HE had been chancellor to king Clotaire III., in which station he had united the mortification and recollection of a monk with the duties of wedlock, and of a statesman. Quitting the court, he put on the monastic habit at Fontenelle, under St. Wandregisile, and when that holy founder's immediate successor, St. Lantbert, was made bishop of Lyons, Ansbert was appointed abbot of that famous monastery. He was confessor to king Theodoric III., and with his consent was chosen archbishop of Rouen, upon the death of St. Owen in 683. By his care, good order, learning, and piety flourished in his diocese; nevertheless Pepin, mayor of the palace, banished him, upon a false accusation, to the monastery of Aumont, upon the Sambre in Hainault, where he died in the year 698. See Mab. Sæc. 2, Ben. and Annal. l. 18.. Rivet, Hist. Littér. t. 4, p. 33, and t. 3, p. 646. Henschenius, Feb. t. 2, p. 342. ST. ATTRACTA, OR TARAHATA, AN IRISH VIRGIN. SHE received the veil from St. Patrick, and lived at a place called from her Kill-Attracta to this day, in Connaught. Her acts in Colgan are of no authority. ST. ERHARD, ABBOT, C. CALLED BY MERS�US AND OTHER GERMANS, EBERHARDUS. HE was a Scotchman by birth, and being well instructed in the scriptures, went into Germany to preach the gospel, with two brothers. He taught the sacred sciences at Triers, when St. Hydulphus was bishop of that city, whom Welser and some others take for a Scot, and one of our saint's brothers. When St. Hydulphus resigned his bishopric to end his days in retirement in 753, St. Erhard withdrew to Ratisbon, where he founded a small monastery, and is said to have been honored with miracles, both living and after his death, which happened to that city. He was commemorated on this day in Scotland, but in Germany on the 8th of January. See Peter Merssæus, Catal. Archiep. Trevirens. M. Welserus, l. 5. Rerum B{}iocar, ad ab, 753. Pantaleon, Prosopographiæ, part 1. {391} FEBRUARY X. ST. SCHOLASTICA, VIRGIN. From St. Gregory the Great, Dial. l. 2, c. 33 and 34. About the year 543. THIS saint was sister to the great St. Benedict. She consecrated herself to God from her earliest youth, as St. Gregory testifies. Where her first monastery was situated is not mentioned; but after her brother removed to Mount Cassino, she chose her retreat at Plombariola, in that neighborhood, where she founded and governed a nunnery about five miles distant to the south from St. Benedict's monastery.[1] St. Bertharius, who was abbot of Cassino three hundred years after, says, that she instructed in virtue several of her own sex. And whereas St. Gregory informs us, that St. Benedict governed nuns as well as monks, his sister must have been their abbess under his rule and direction. She visited her holy brother once a year, and as she was not allowed to enter his monastery, he went out with some of his monks to meet her at a house at some small distance. They spent these visits in the praises of God, and in conferring together on spiritual matters, St. Gregory relates a remarkable circumstance of the last of these visits. Scholastica having passed the day as usual in singing psalms, and pious discourse, they sat down in the evening to take their refection. After it was over, Scholastica, perhaps foreknowing it would be their last interview in this world, or at least desirous of some further spiritual improvement, was very urgent with her brother to delay his return till the next day, that they might entertain themselves till morning upon the happiness of the other life. St. Benedict, unwilling to transgress his rule, told her he could not pass a night out of his monastery: so desired her not to insist upon such a breach of monastic discipline. Scholastica, finding him resolved on going home, laying her hands joined upon the table and her head upon them, with many tears begged of Almighty God to interpose in her behalf. Her prayer was scarce ended, when there happened such a storm of rain, thunder, and lightning, that neither St. Benedict nor any of his companions could set a foot out of doors. He complained to his sister, saying: "God forgive you, sister; what have you done?" She answered: "I asked you a favor, and you refused it me: I asked it of Almighty God, and he has granted it me." St. Benedict was therefore obliged to comply with her request, and they spent the night in conferences on pious subjects, chiefly on the felicity of the blessed, to which both most ardently aspired, and which she was shortly to enjoy. The nest morning they parted, and three days after St. Scholastica died in her solitude. St. Benedict was then alone in contemplation on Mount Cassino, and lifting up his eyes to heaven, he saw the soul of his sister ascending thither in the shape of a dove. Filled with joy at her happy passage, he gave thanks for it to God, and declared her death to his brethren; some of whom he sent to bring her corpse to his monastery, where {392} he caused it to be laid in the tomb which he had prepared for himself. She must have died about the year 543. Her relics are said to have been translated into France, together with those of St. Bennet, in the seventh century, according to the relation given by the monk Adrevald.[2] They are said to have been deposited at Mans, and kept in the collegiate church of St. Peter in that city in a rich silver shrine.[3] In 1562 this shrine was preserved from being plundered by the Huguenots, as is related by Chatelain. Her principal festival at Mans is kept a holyday on the 11th of July, the day of the translation of her relics. She was honored in some places with an office of three lessons, in the time of St. Louis, as appears from a calendar of Longchamp, written in his reign. Lewis of Granada, treating on the perfection of the love of God, mentions the miraculous storm obtained by St. Scholastica, to show with what excess of goodness God is always ready to hear the petitions and desires of his servants. This pious soul must have received strong pledges and most sensible tokens of his love, seeing she depended on receiving so readily what she asked of him. No child could address himself with so great confidence to his most tender parent. The love which God bears us, and his readiness to succor and comfort us, if we humbly confess and lay before him our wants, infinitely surpasses all that can be found in creatures. Nor can we be surprised that he so easily heard the prayer of this holy virgin, since at the command of Joshua he stopped the heavens, God obeying the voice of man. He hears the most secret desires of those that fear and love him, and does their will: if he sometimes seem deaf to their cries, it is to grant their main desire by doing what is most expedient for them, as St. Austin frequently observes. The short prayer by which St. Scholastica gained this remarkable victory over her brother, who was one of the greatest saints on earth, was doubtless no more than a single act of her pure desires, which she continually turned towards, and fixed on her beloved. It was enough for her to cast her eye interiorly upon him with whom she was closely and inseparably united in mind and affections, to move him so suddenly to change the course of the elements in order to satisfy her pious desire. By placing herself, as a docile scholar, continually at the feet of the Divine Majesty, who filled all the powers of her soul with the sweetness of his heavenly communications, she learned that sublime science of perfection in which she became a mistress to so many other chaste souls by this divine exercise. Her life in her retirement, to that happy moment which closed her mortal pilgrimage, was a continued uniform contemplation, by which all her powers were united to, and transformed into God. Footnotes: 1. This nunnery underwent the same fate with the abbey of Mount Cassino, both being burnt to the ground by the Lombards. When Rachim, king of that nation, having been converted to the Catholic faith by the exhortations of pope Zachary, re-established that abbey, and taking the monastic habit, ended his life there, his queen Tasai and his daughter Ratruda rebuilt and richly endowed the nunnery of Plombariola, in which they lived with great regularity to their deaths, as is related by Leo of Ostia in his Chronicle of Mount Cassino, ad an. 750. It has been since destroyed, so that at present the land is only a farm belonging to the monastery of Mount Cassino. See Dom Mege, Vie de St. Benoit, p. 412. Chatelain, Notes, p. 605. Murarori, Antichita, &c. t. 3. p. 400. Diss. 66, del Monasteri delle Monache. 2. See Paul the deacon, Hist. Longob. and Dom Mege, Vie de St. Bénoit, p. 48. 3. That the relics of St. Bennet were privately carried off from Mount Cassino, in 660, soon after the monastery was destroyed, and brought to Fleury on the Loire by Algiulph the monk, and those of St. Scholastica, by certain persons of Mans to that city, is maintained by Mabillon, Menard, and Bosche. But that the relics of both these saints still remain at Mount Cassino, is strenuously affirmed by Loretus Angelus de Nuce, and Marchiarelli, the late learned monk of the Order of Camaldoli: and this assertion Benedict XIV. looks upon as certain, (de Canoniz. l. 4, part 2, c. 24, t, 4, p. 245.) For pope Zachary in his bull assures us, that he devoutly honored the relics of SS. Benedict and Scholastica, at Mount Cassino, in 746. Leo Ostiensis and Peter the deacon visited them and found them untouched in 1071, as Alexander II. affirms in the bull he published when he consecrated the new church there. By careful visitations made by authority, in 1486 and 1545, the same is proved. Yet Angelus de Nuce allows some portions of both saints to be at Mans and Fleury, on the Loire. Against the supposed translation of the whole shrines of St. Benedict and St. Scholastica into France, see Muratori, Antichita, &c., dissert. 58, t. 3, p. 244. {393} ST. SOTERIS, VIRGIN AND MARTYR. From St. Ambrose, Exhort. Virginit, c. 12, and l. 3. de Virgin. c. 6 Tillemont, t. 5, p. 259. FOURTH AGE. ST. AMBROSE boasts of this saint as the greatest honor of his family. St. Soteris was descended from a long series of consuls and prefects: but her greatest glory was her despising, for the sake of Christ, birth, riches, great beauty, and all that the world prizes as valuable. She consecrated her virginity to God, and to avoid the dangers her beauty exposed her to, neglected it entirely, and trampled under her feet all the vain ornaments that might set it off. Her virtue prepared her to make a glorious confession of her faith before the persecutors, after the publication of the cruel edicts of Dioclesian and Maximian against the Christians. The impious judge commanded her face to be buffeted. She rejoiced to be treated as her divine Saviour had been, and to have her face all wounded and disfigured by the merciless blows of the executioners. The judge ordered her to be tortured many other ways, but without being able to draw from her one sigh or tear. At length, overcome by her constancy and patience, he commanded her head to be struck off. The ancient martyrologies mention her. ST. WILLIAM OF MALEVAL, H. AND INSTITUTER OF THE ORDER OF GULIELMITES. From l'Hist des Ordres Relig., t. 6, p. 155, by F. Helyot. A.D. 1157 WE know nothing of the birth or quality of this saint: he seems to have been a Frenchman, and is on this account honored in the new Paris Missal and Breviary. He is thought to have passed his youth in the army, and to have given into a licentious manner of living, too common among persons of that profession. The first accounts we have of him represent him as a holy penitent, filled with the greatest sentiments of compunction and fervor, and making a pilgrimage to the tombs of the apostles at Rome. Here he begged pope Eugenius III. to put him into a course of penance, who enjoined him a pilgrimage to Jerusalem in the year 1145. In performing this, with great devotion, the saint spent eight years. Returning into Tuscany, in 1153, he retired into a desert. He was prevailed upon to undertake the government of a monastery in the isle of Lupocavio, in the territory of Pisa, but not being able to bear with the tepidity and irregularity of his monks, he withdrew, and settled on Mount Pruno, till, finding disciples there no less indocile to the severity of his discipline than the former, he was determined to pursue himself that rigorous plan of life which he had hitherto unsuccessfully proposed to others. He pitched upon a desolate valley for this purpose, the very sight of which was sufficient to strike the most resolute with horror. It was then called the Stable of Rhodes, but since, Maleval; and is situated in the territory of Sienna, in the diocese of Grosseto. He entered this frightful solitude in September, 1155, and had no other lodging than a cave in the ground, till being discovered some months after, the lord of Buriano built him a cell. During the first four months, he had no other company than that of wild beasts eating only the herbs on which they fed. {394} On the feast of the Epiphany, in the beginning of the year 1156, he was joined by a disciple or companion, called Albert, who lived with him to his death, which happened thirteen months after, and who has recorded the last circumstances of his life. The saint, discoursing with others, always treated himself as the most infamous of criminals, and deserving the worst of deaths; and that these were his real sentiments, appeared from that extreme severity which he exercised upon himself. He lay on the bare ground: though he fed on the coarsest fare, and drank nothing but water, he was very sparing in the use of each; saying, sensuality was to be feared even in the most ordinary food. Prayer, divine contemplation, and manual labor, employed his whole time. It was at his work that he instructed his disciple in his maxims of penance and perfection, which he taught him the most effectually by his own example, though in many respects so much raised above the common, that it was fitter to be admired than imitated. He had the gift of miracles, and that of prophecy. Seeing his end draw near, he received the sacraments from a priest of the neighboring town of Chatillon, and died on the 10th of February, in 1157, on which day he is named in the Roman and other martyrologies. * * * * * Divine Providence moved one Renauld, a physician, to join Albert, a little before the death of the saint. They buried St. William's body in his little garden, and studied to live according to his maxims and example. Some time after, their number increasing, they built a chapel over their founder's grave, with a little hermitage. This was the origin of the Gulielmites, or Hermits of St. William, spread in the next age over Italy, France, Flanders, and Germany. They went barefoot, and their fasts were almost continual: but pope Gregory IX. mitigated their austerities, and gave them the rule of St. Benedict, which they still observe. The order is now become a congregation united to the hermits of St. Austin, except twelve houses to the Low Countries, which still retain the rule of the Gulielmites, which is that of St. Benedict, with a white habit like that of the Cistercians. The feast of St. William is kept at Paris in the Abbey of Blancs-Manteaux, so called from certain religious men for whom it was founded, who wore white cloaks, and were of a mendicant Order, called of the Servants of the Virgin Mary: founded at Marseilles, and approved by Alexander IV., in 1257. This order being extinguished, by virtue of the decree of the second council of Lyons, in 1274, by which all mendicants, except the four great Orders of Dominicans, Franciscans, Carmelites, and Austin friars, were abolished, this monastery was bestowed on the Gulielmites, who removed hither from Montrouge, near Paris, in 1297. The prior and monks embraced the order of St. Bennet, and the reformation of the Congregation of St. Vanne of Verdun, soon after called in France, of St. Maur, in 1618, and this is in order the fifth house of that Congregation in France, before the abbeys of St. Germany-des-Prez, and St. Denys.[1] Footnotes: 1. Villefore confounds this saint with St. William, founder of the hermits of Monte Virgine in the kingdom of Naples, who lived in great repute with king Roger, and is commemorated in the Roman Martyrology, June 25. Others confound him with St. William, duke of Aquitaine, a monk of Gellone. He was a great general, and often vanquished the Saracens who invaded Languedoc. In recompense, Charlemagne made him duke or governor of Aquitaine, and appointed Toulouse for his residence. Some years after, in 806, having obtained the consent of his duchess, (who also renounced the world,) and or Charlemagne, though with great difficulty, he made his monastic profession at Gellone, a monastery which he had founded in a valley of that name, a league distant from Aniane, in the diocese of Lodeve. St. William received the habit at the hands of St. Benedict of Aniane, was directed by him in the exercises of a religious life, and sanctified himself with great fervor, embracing the most humbling and laborious employments, and practising extraordinary austerities, till his happy death in 812, on the 28th of May, on which day his festival is kept in the monastery of Gellone, (now called St. Guillem de Desert, founded by this saint in 804,) and in the neighboring churches. See, on him, Mabillon, Sæc. Ben. 4, p. 88. Henschenius, diss, p. 488. Bultea p. 367. and Hist. Gén. du Languedoc par deux Bénédictins, l. 9. Many have also confounded our saint with William, the last duke of Guienne, who, after a licentious youth, and having been an abettor of the anti-pope, Peter Leonis, was wonderfully converted by St. Bernard, sent to him by pope Innocent II., in the year 1135. The year following he renounced his estates, which his eldest daughter brought in marriage to Louis the Young, king of France; and clothed with hair-cloth next his skin, end in a tattered garment expressive of the sincerity of his repentance and contrition, undertook a pilgrimage to Compostella, and died in that journey, in 1137. See Ordericus Vitalis, Hist. Norman. et Armoldus Bonæ-Vallis, in vita Bernardi; with the Historical Dissert. of Henschenius on the 10th of February; and Abrégé Chronol. des Grands Fiefs, p. 223. {395} SAINT ERLULPH, BISHOP AND MARTYR. SEVERAL Scottish missionaries passed into the northwestern parts of Germany, to sow there the seeds of the faith, at the time when Charlemagne subdued the Saxons. In imitation of these apostolic men, St. Erlulph, a holy Scotchman, went thither, and after employing many years with great success in that arduous mission, was chosen the tenth bishop of Verdun. His zeal in propagating the faith enraged the barbarous infidels, and he was slain by them at a place called Eppokstorp, in 830. See Krantzius, l. 3. Metrop. c. 30. Democh. Gatal. episc. Verd. Pantaleon, &c.[1] Footnotes: 1. This saint must not be confounded with Ernulph, a most holy man, the apostle of Iceland, who flourished in the year 890; on whom see Jonas, Histor. Islandiæ. FEBRUARY XI. SS. SATURNINUS, DATIVUS, AND MANY OTHER MARTYRS, OF AFRICA. From their contemporary acts, received as authentic by St. Austin, Brevic. Coll. die 3, c. 17. The Donatists added a preface to them and a few glosses, in which condition they are published by Baluzius, t. 2. But Bollandus and Ruinart give them genuine. A.D. 304 THE emperor Dioclesian had commanded all Christians, under pain of death, to deliver up the holy scriptures to be burnt. This persecution had raged a whole year in Africa; some had betrayed the cause of religion, but many more had defended it with their blood, when these saints were apprehended. Abitina, a city of the proconsular province of Africa, was the theatre of their triumph. Saturninus, priest of that city, celebrated the divine mysteries on a Sunday, in the house of Octavius Felix. The magistrates having notice of it, came with a troop of soldiers, and seized forty-nine persons of both sexes. The principal among them were the priest Saturninus, with his four children, viz.: young Saturninus and Felix, both Lectors, Mary, who had consecrated her virginity to God, and Hilarianus, yet a child; also, Dativus, a noble senator, Ampelius, Rogatianus, and Victoria. Dativus, the ornament of the senate of Abitina, whom God destined to be one of the principal senators of heaven, marched at the head of this holy troop. Saturninus walked by his side, surrounded by his illustrious family. The others followed in silence. Being brought before the magistrates, they confessed Jesus Christ so resolutely, that their very judges applauded their courage, which repaired the infamous sacrilege committed there a little before by Fundanus, the bishop of Abitina, who in that same place had given up to the magistrates the sacred books to be burnt: but a violent shower suddenly falling, put out the fire, and a prodigious hail ravaged the whole country. {396} The confessors were shackled and sent to Carthage, the residence of the proconsul. They rejoiced to see themselves in chains for Christ, and sung hymns and canticles during their whole journey to Carthage, praising and thanking God. The proconsul, Anulinus, addressing himself first to Dativus, asked him of what condition he was, and if he had assisted at the collect or assembly of the Christians. He answered, that he was a Christian, and had been present at it. The proconsul bid him discover who presided, and in whose house those religious assemblies were held: but without waiting for his answer, commanded him to be put on the rack and torn with iron hooks, to oblige him to a discovery. They underwent severally the tortures of the rack, iron hooks, and cudgels. The weaker sex fought no less gloriously, particularly the illustrious Victoria; who, being converted to Christ in her tender years, had signified a desire of leading a single life, which her pagan parents would not agree to, having promised her in marriage to a rich young nobleman. Victoria, on the day appointed for the wedding, full of confidence in the protection of Him, whom she had chosen for the only spouse of her soul, leaped out of a window, and was miraculously preserved from hurt. Having made her escape, she took shelter in a church; after which she consecrated her virginity to God, with the ceremonies then used on such occasions at Carthage, in Italy, Gaul, and all over the West.[1] To the crown of virginity, she earnestly desired to join that of martyrdom. The proconsul, on account of her quality, and for the sake of her brother, a pagan, tried all means to prevail with her to renounce her faith. He inquired what was her religion. Her answer was: "I am a Christian." Her brother, Fortunatianus, undertook her defence, and endeavored to prove her lunatic. The saint, fearing his plea might be the means of her losing the crown of martyrdom, made it appear by her wise confutations of it, that she was in her perfect senses, and protested that she had not been brought over to Christianity against her will. The proconsul asked her if she would return with her brother? She said: "She could not, being a Christian, and acknowledging none as brethren but those who kept the law of God." The proconsul then laid aside the quality of judge to become her humble suppliant, and entreated her not to throw away her life. But she rejected his entreaties with disdain, and said to him: "I have already told you my mind. I am a Christian, and I assisted at the collect." Anulinus, provoked at this constancy, reassumed his rage, and ordered her to prison with the rest, to wait the sentence of death which he not long after pronounced upon them all. The proconsul would yet try to gain Hilarianus, Saturninus's youngest son, not doubting to vanquish one of his tender age. But the child showed more contempt than fear of the tyrant's threats, and answered his interrogatories: "I am a Christian: I have been at the collect, and it was of my own voluntary choice, without any compulsion." The proconsul threatened him with those little punishments with which children are accustomed to be chastised, little knowing that God himself fights in his martyrs. The child only laughed at him. The governor then said to him: "I will cut off your nose and ears." Hilarianus replied: "You may do it; but I am a Christian." The proconsul, dissembling his confusion, ordered him to prison. Upon which the child said: "Lord, I give thee thanks." These martyrs ended their lives under the hardships of their confinement, and are honored in the ancient calendar of Carthage, and the Roman Martyrology, on the 11th of February, though only two (of the name of Felix) died on that day of their wounds. {397} * * * * * The example of these martyrs condemns the sloth with which many Christians in this age celebrate the Lord's Day. When the judge asked them, how they durst presume to hold their assembly against the imperial orders, they always repeated, even on the rack: "The obligation of the Sunday is indispensable. It is not lawful for us to omit the duty of that day. We celebrated it as well as we could. We never passed a Sunday without meeting at our assembly. We will keep the commandments of God at the expense of our lives." No dangers nor torments could deter them from this duty. A rare example of fervor in keeping that holy precept, from which too many, upon lame pretences, seek to excuse themselves. As the Jew was known by the religious observance of the Sabbath, so is the true Christian by his manner of celebrating the Sunday. And as our law is more holy and more perfect than the Jewish, so must be our manner of sanctifying the Lord's Day. This is the proof of our religion, and of our piety towards God. The primitive Christians kept this day in the most holy manner, assembling to public prayer in dens and caves, knowing that, "without this religious observance, a man cannot be a Christian," to use the expression of an ancient father. Footnotes: 1. These were, by laying her head on the altar to offer it to God, and all her life after wearing her hair long as the ancient Nazarenes did: (Act. p. 417. St. Optatas, l. 6. S. Ambr. ad Virg. c. 8.) Whereas the ceremony of this consecration in Egypt and Syria was for the virgin to cut off her hair in the presence of a priest. (Bulteau, Hist. Mon. p. 170.) ST. SEVERINUS, ABBOT OF AGAUNUM. From his ancient short life, in Mabillon App. Sæc. l. Ben. The additions in Surius and Bollandus are too modern. See Chatelain, Notes on the Martyrol., p. 618. A.D. 507. ST. SEVERINUS, of a noble family in Burgundy, was educated in the Catholic faith, at a time when the Arian heresy reigned in that country. He forsook the world in his youth, and dedicated himself to God in the monastery of Agaunum, which then only consisted of scattered cells, till the Catholic king Sigismund, son and successor to the Arian Gondebald, who then reigned in Burgundy, built there the great abbey of St. Maurice. St. Severinus was the holy abbot of that place, and had governed his community many years in the exercise of penance and charity, when, in 504, Clovis, the first Christian kin; of France, lying ill of a fever, which his physicians had for two years ineffectually endeavored to remove, sent his chamberlain to conduct him to court; for he heard how the sick from all parts recovered their health by his prayers. St. Severinus took leave of his monks, telling them he should never see them more in this world. On his journey he healed Eulalius, bishop of Nevers, who had been for some time deaf and dumb, also a leper at the gates of Paris; and coming to the palace, he immediately restored the king to perfect health, by putting on him his own cloak. The king in gratitude distributed large alms to the poor, and released all his prisoners.[1] St. Severinus returning towards Agaunum, stopped at Chateau-Landon, in Gatinois, where two priests served God in a solitary chapel, among whom he was admitted, at his request, as a stranger, and was soon greatly admired by them for his sanctity. He foresaw his death, which happened shortly after, in 507. The place is now an abbey of reformed canons regular of St. Austin. The Huguenots scattered the greatest part of his relics, when they plundered this church. He is mentioned in the Roman Martyrology, and a large parish in Paris takes its name from this saint, not from the hermit who was St. Cloud's master. Footnotes: 1. {Footnote not in text} See Le Boeuf, Hist. du Diocèse de Paris, t. 1, p. 151, 157, and Le Fevre, Calend. Hist de Paris, p. 40{}. {398} THE EMPRESS THEODORA. WHOM THE GREEKS RANK AMONG THE SAINTS. BY her mildness and patience she often softened the cruel temper of her brutish husband, Theophilus, and protected the defenders of holy images from the fury of his persecution. Being left by his death regent of the empire during the minority of her son, Michael III., she put an end to the Iconoclast heresy, one hundred and twenty years after the first establishment of it by Leo the Isaurian: and the patriarch Methodius with great solemnity restored holy images in the great church in Constantinople, on the first Sunday of Lent, which we call the second, of which event the Greeks make an annual commemoration, calling it the feast of Orthodoxy. After she had governed the empire with great glory twelve years, she was banished by her unnatural son and his impious uncle, Bardas. She prepared herself for death by spending the last eight years of her life in a monastery, where she gave up her soul to God in 867. She is ranked among the saints in the Menology of the emperor Basil, in the Menæa, and other calendars of the Greeks. See the compilations of Bollandus from the authors of the Byzantine history. FEBRUARY XII. ST. BENEDICT, OF ANIAN, ABBOT. From his life, written with great piety, gravity, and erudition, by St. Ardo Smaragdus, his disciple, to whom he committed the government of his monastery of Anian, when he was called by the emperor near the court. Ardo died March the 7th, in 843, and is honored at Anian among the saints. He is not to be confounded with Smaragdus, abbot in the diocese of Verdun, author of a commentary on the rules of St. Bennet. This excellent life is published by Dom Menard, at the head of St. Bennet's Concordia Regularum; by Henschenius, 12 Feb., and by Dom Mabillon, Acta SS. Ben., vol. 5, pp. 191, 817. See Helyot, Hist. des Ord. Relig. t. 5, p. 139. See also Bulteau, Hist. de l'Ord. de S. Bénoit, l. 5, c. 2, p. 342. Eckart. de Reb. Fran. t. 2, pp. 117, 163. A.D. 821. HE was the son of Aigulf, count or governor of Languedoc, and served king Pepin and his son Charlemagne in quality of cupbearer, enjoying under them great honors and possessions. Grace made him sensible of the vanity of all perishable goods, and at twenty years of age he took a resolution of seeking the kingdom of God with his whole heart. From that time he led a most mortified life in the court itself for three years, eating very sparingly and of the coarsest fare, allowing himself very little sleep, and mortifying all his senses. In 774, having narrowly escaped being drowned in the Tesin, near Pavia, in endeavoring to save his brother, he made a vow to quit the world entirely. Returning to Languedoc, he was confirmed in his resolution by the pious advice of a hermit of great merit and virtue, called Widmar; and under a pretext of going to the court at Aix-la-Chapelle, he went to the abbey of St. Seine, five leagues from Dijon, and having sent back all his attendants, became a monk there. He spent two years and a half in wonderful abstinence, treating his body as a furious wild beast, to {399} which he would show no other mercy than barely not to kill it. He took no other sustenance on any account but bread and water; and when overcome with weariness, he allowed himself nothing softer than the bare ground whereon to take a short rest; thus making even his repose a continuation of penance. He frequently passed the whole night in prayer, and stood barefoot on the ground in the sharpest cold. He studied to make himself contemptible by all manner of humiliations, and received all insults with joy, so perfectly was he dead to himself. God bestowed on him an extraordinary spirit of compunction, and the gift of tears, with an infused knowledge of spiritual things to an eminent degree. Not content to fulfil the rule of St. Benedict in its full rigor, he practised all the severest observances prescribed by the rules of St. Pachomius and St. Basil. Being made cellarist, he was very solicitous to provide for others whatever St. Benedict's rule allowed, and had a particular care of the poor and of the guests. His brethren, upon the abbot's death, were disposed to choose our saint, but he, being unwilling to accept of the charge on account of their known aversion to a reformation, left them, and returned to his own country, Languedoc, in 780, where he built a small hermitage, near a chapel of St. Saturninus, on the brook Anian, near the river Eraud, upon his own estate. Here he lived some years in extreme poverty, praying continually that God would teach him to do his will, and make him faithfully correspond with his eternal designs. Some solitaries, and with them the holy man Widmar, put themselves under his direction, though he long excused himself. They earned their livelihood by their labor, and lived on bread and water, except on Sundays and solemn festivals, on which they added a little wine and milk when it was given them in alms. The holy superior did not exempt himself from working with the rest in the fields, either carrying wood or plugging; and sometimes he copied good books. The number of his disciples increasing, he quitted the valley, and built a monastery in a more spacious place, in that neighborhood. He showed his love of poverty by his rigorous practice of it: for he long used wooden, and afterwards glass or pewter chalices at the altar; and if any presents of silk ornaments were made him, he gave them to other churches. However, he some time after changed his way of thinking with respect to the church; built a cloister, and a stately church adorned with marble pillars, furnished it with silver chalices, and rich ornaments, and bought a great number of books. He had in a short time three hundred religious under his direction, and also exercised a general inspection over all the monasteries of Provence, Languedoc, and Gascony, which respected him as their common parent and master. At last he remitted something in the austerities of the reformation he had introduced among them. Felix, bishop of Urgel, had advanced that Christ was not the natural, but only the adoptive son of the eternal Father. St. Benedict most learnedly opposed this heresy, and assisted, in 794, at the council assembled against it at Frankfort. He employed his pen to confute the same, in four treatises, published in the miscellanies of Clausius. Benedict was become the oracle of the whole kingdom, and he established his reformation in many great monasteries with little or no opposition. His most illustrious colony was the monastery of Gellone, founded in 804, by William, duke of Aquitaine, who retired into it himself, whence it was called St. Guillem du Desert. By the councils held under Charlemagne, in 813, and by the Capitulars of that prince, published the same year, it was ordained that the canons should live according to the canons and laws of the church, and the monks according to the rule of St. Bennet: by which regulation a uniformity was introduced in the monastic order in the West. The emperor Louis Débonnaire, who succeeded his father on the 28th of {400} January, 814, committed to the saint the inspection of all the abbeys in his kingdom. To have him nearer his own person, the emperor obliged him to live in the abbey of Marmunster, in Alsace; and as this was still too remote, desirous of his constant assistance in his councils, he built the monastery of Inde, two leagues from Aix-la-Chapelle, the residence of the emperor and court. Notwithstanding St. Benedict's constant abode in this monastery, he had still a hand in restoring monastic discipline throughout France and Germany; as he also was the chief instrument in drawing up the canons for the reformation of prebendaries and monks in the council of Aix-la-Chapelle, in 817, and presided in the assembly of abbots the same year, to enforce restoration of discipline. His statutes were adopted by the order, and annexed to the rule of St. Benedict, the founder. He wrote, while a private monk at Seine, the Code of Rules, being a collection of all the monastic regulations which he found extant; as also a book of homilies for the use of monks, collected, according to the custom of that age, from the works of the fathers: likewise a Penitential, printed in the additions to the Capitulars. In his Concord of Rules he gives that of St. Benedict, with those of other patriarchs of the monastic order, to show their uniformity in the exercises which they prescribe.[1] This great restorer of the monastic order in the West, worn out at length with mortification and fatigues, suffered much from continual sickness the latter years of his life. He died at Inde, with extraordinary tranquillity and cheerfulness, on the 11th of February, 821, being then about seventy-one years of age, and was buried in the same monastery, since called St. Cornelius's, the church being dedicated to that holy pope and martyr. At Anian his festival is kept on the 11th, but by most other Martyrologies on the 12th of February, the day of his burial. His relics remain in the monastery of St. Cornelius, or of Inde, in the duchy of Cleves, and have been honored with miracles. * * * * * St. Bennet, by the earnestness with which he set himself to study the spirit of his holy rule and state, gave a proof of the ardor with which he aspired to Christian perfection. The experienced masters of a spiritual life, and the holy legislators of monastic institutes, have in view the great principles of an interior life, which the gospel lays down: for in the exercises which they prescribe, powerful means are offered by which a soul may learn perfectly to die to herself, and be united in all her powers to God. This dying to, and profound annihilation of ourselves, is of such importance, that so long as a soul remains in this state, though all the devils in hell were leagued together, they can never hurt her. All their efforts will only make her sink more deeply in this feeling knowledge of herself, in which she finds her strength, her repose, and her joy, because by it she is prepared to receive the divine grace: and if self-love be destroyed, the devil can have no power over us; for he never makes any successful attacks upon us but by the secret intelligence which he holds with this domestic enemy. The crucifixion of the old man, and perfect disengagement of the heart, by the practice of universal self-denial, is absolutely necessary before a soul can ascend the mountain of the God of Jacob, on which his infinite majesty is seen, separated from all creatures; as Blosius,[2] and all other directors in the paths of an interior life, strongly inculcate. Footnotes: 1. See Codex Regularum, collectus a B. Benedicto Anianæ, auctus a Lucâ Holstenio, printed by Holstenias at Rome, in 1661. Also, Concordia Regularum, authore B. Benedicto Anianæ abbate, edita ab. Hug. Menardo Benedictia{} Parisiis, 1638. 2. Instit. Spir. c. 1, n. 6, &c. {401} ST. MELETIUS, PATRIARCH OF ANTIOCH, C. HE was of one of the best families of Lesser Armenia, and born a Melitene, which Strabo and Pliny place to Cappadocia; but Ptolemy, and all succeeding writers, in Lesser Armenia, of which province it became the capital. The saint, in his youth, made fasting and mortification his choice, to the midst of every thing that could flatter the senses. His conduct was uniform and irreproachable, and the sweetness and affability of his temper gained him the confidence and esteem both of the Catholics and Arians; for he was a nobleman of charming simplicity and sincerity, and a great lover of peace. Eustathius, bishop of Sebaste, a semi-Arian, being deposed by the Arians, in a council held at Constantinople, in 360, Meletius was promoted to that see; but meeting with too violent opposition, left it, and retired first into the desert, and afterwards to the city of Beræa, in Syria, of which Socrates falsely supposes him to have been bishop. The patriarchal church of Antioch had been oppressed by the Arians, ever since the banishment of Eustathius, in 331. Several succeeding bishops, who were intruded into that chair, were infamous abettors of that heresy. Eudoxus, the last of these, had been removed from the see of Germanicia to that of Antioch, upon the death of Leontius, an Arian like himself, but was soon expelled by a party of Arians, in a sedition, and be shortly after usurped the see of Constantinople. Both the Arians and several Catholics agreed to raise St. Meletius to the patriarchal chair at Antioch, and the emperor ordered him to be put in possession of that dignity in 361; but some among the Catholics refused to acknowledge him, regarding his election as irregular, on account of the share which the Arians had had in it. The Arians hoped that he would declare himself of their party, but were undeceived when, the emperor Constantius arriving at Antioch, he was ordered, with certain other prelates, to explain in his presence that text of the Proverbs,[1] concerning the wisdom of God: _The Lord hath created me in the beginning of his ways_. George of Laodicea first explained it in an Arian sense, next Acacius of Cæsarea, in a sense bordering on that heresy; but the truth triumphed in the mouth of Meletius, who, speaking the third,[2] showed that this text is to be understood not of a strict creation, but of a new state or being, which the Eternal Wisdom received in his incarnation. This public testimony thunderstruck the Arians, and Eudoxus, then the bishop of Constantinople, prevailed with the emperor to banish him into Lesser Armenia, thirty days after his installation. The Arians intruded the impious Euzoius into that see, who, formerly being deacon at Alexandria, had been deposed and expelled the church, with the priest and arch-heretic Arius, by St. Alexander, bishop of Alexandria. From this time is dated the famous schism of Antioch, in 360, though it drew its origin from the banishment of St. Eustathius about thirty years before. Many zealous Catholics always adhered to St. Eustathius, being convinced that his faith was the only cause of his unjust expulsion. But others, who were orthodox in their principles, made no scruple, at least for some time, to join communion in the great church with the intruded patriarchs; in which their conscience was more easily imposed upon, as, by the artifices of the Arians, the cause of St. Eustathius appeared merely personal and secular, or at least mixed; and his two first short-lived successors Eulalius and Euphronius, do not appear to have declared themselves Arians, otherwise than by their intrusion. Placillus the Third joined in condemning St. Athanasius in the councils of Tyre, in 335, and of Antioch {402} in 341. His successors, Stephen I., (who at Philippopolis opposed the council of Sardica,) Leontius, and Eudoxus, appeared everywhere leagued with the heads of the Arians. But the intrusion of Euzoius, with the expulsion of St. Meletius, rendered the necessity of an entire separation to communion more notorious; and many who were orthodox in their faith, yet, through weakness or ignorance of facts, had till then communicated with the Arians in the great church, would have no communion with Euzoius, or his adherents; but under the protection of Diodorus and Flavian, then eminent and learned laymen, afterwards bishops, held their religious assemblies with their own priests, in the church of the apostles without the city, in a suburb called Palæa, that is, the old suburb or church. They attempted in vain to unite themselves to the Eustathians, who for thirty years past had held their separate assemblies; but these refused to admit them, or to allow the election of Meletius, on account of the share the Arians had had therein: they therefore continued their private assemblies within the city. The emperor Constantius, in his return from the Persian war, with an intention to march against his cousin Julian, Cæsar, in the West, arrived at Antioch, and was baptized by the Arian bishop Euzoius; but died soon after, in his march at Mopsucrêne, in Cilicia, on the 3d of November, 361. Julian having allowed the banished bishops to go to their respective churches, St. Meletius returned to Antioch about the end of the year 362, but had the affliction to see the breach made by the schism grow wider. The Eustathians not only refused still to receive him, but proceeded to choose a bishop for themselves. This was Paulinus, a person of great meekness and piety, who had been ordained priest by St. Eustathius himself, and had constantly attended his zealous flock. Lucifer, bishop of Cagliari, passing by Antioch in his return from exile, consecrated Paulinus bishop, and by this precipitate action, riveted the schism which divided this church near fourscore and five years, and in which the discussion of the facts upon which the right of the claimants was founded, was so intricate that the saints innocently took part on both sides. It was an additional affliction to St. Meletius, to see Julian the Apostate make Antioch the seat of the superstitious abominations of idolatry, which he restored; and the generous liberty with which he opposed them, provoked that emperor to banish him a second time. But Jovian soon after succeeding that unhappy prince, in 363, our saint returned to Antioch. Then it appeared that the Arians were men entirely guided by ambition and interest, and that as nothing could be more insolent than they had shown themselves when backed by the temporal power, so nothing was more cringing and submissive, when they were deprived of that protection. For the emperor warmly embracing the Nicene faith, following in all ecclesiastical matters the advice of St. Athanasius, and expressing a particular regard for St. Meletius; the moderate Arians, with Acacius of Cæsarea, in Palestine, at their head, went to Antioch, where our saint held a council of twenty-seven bishops, and there subscribed an orthodox profession of faith. Jovian dying, after a reign of eight months, Valens became emperor of the East, who was at first very orthodox, but afterwards, seduced by the persuasions of his wife, he espoused the Arian heresy, and received baptism from Eudoxus, bishop of Constantinople, who made him promise upon oath to promote the cause of that sect. The cruel persecution which this prince raised against that church, and the favor which he showed not only to the Arians, but also to Pagans, Jews, and all that were not Catholics, deterred not St. Meletius from exerting his zeal in defence of the orthodox faith. This prince coming from Cæsarea, where he had been vanquished by the constancy of St. Basil, arrived at Antioch in April, 372, where he left nothing unattempted {403} to draw Meletius over to the interest of his sect; but meeting with no success, ordered him a third time into banishment. The people rose tumultuously to detain him among them, and threw stones at the governor, who was carrying him off, so that he only escaped with his life by our saint's stepping between him and the mob, and covering him with his cloak. It is only to this manner that the disciples of Jesus Christ revenge injuries, as St. Chrysostom observes.[3] Hermant and Fleury suppose this to have happened at his first banishment. By the order of Valens, he was conducted into Lesser Armenia, where he made his own estate at Getasus, near Nicopolis, the place of his residence. His flock at Antioch, by copying his humility, modesty, and patience, amid the persecution which fell upon them, showed themselves the worthy disciples of so great a master. They were driven out of the city, and from the neighboring mountains, and the banks of the river, where they attempted to hold their assemblies; some expired under torments, others were thrown into the Orontes. In the mean time, Valens allowed the pagans to renew their sacrifices, and to celebrate publicly the feasts of Jupiter, Ceres, and Bacchus.[4] Sapor, king of Persia, having invaded Armenia, took by treachery king Arsaces, bound him in silver chains, (according to the Persian custom of treating royal prisoners,) and caused him to perish in prison. To, check the progress of these ancient enemies of the empire, Valens sent an army towards Armenia, and marched himself to Edessa, in Mesopotamia. Thus the persecution at Antioch was abated, to which the death of Valens put an end, who was burnt by the Goths in a cottage, after his defeat near Adrianople, in 378. His nephew Gratian, who then became master of the East, went in all haste to Constantinople, by his general, Theodosius, vanquished the Goths, and by several edicts recalled the Catholic prelates, and restored the liberty of the church in the Eastern empire. St. Meletius, upon his return, found that the schism had begun to engage distant churches in the division. Most of the Western prelates adhered to the election of Paulinus. St. Athanasius communicated with him, as he had always done with his friends the Eustathian Catholics, though, from the beginning, he disapproved of the precipitation of Lucifer of Cagliari in ordaining him, and he afterwards communicated also with St. Meletius. St. Basil, St. Amphilochius of Iconium, St. Pelagius of Laodicea, St. Eusebius of Samosata, St. Cyril of Jerusalem, St. Gregory of Nyasa, St. Gregory of Nazianzum, St. Chrysostom, and the general council of Constantinople, with almost the unanimous suffrage of all the East, zealously supported the cause of St. Meletius. Theodosius having, after his victory over the Goths, been associated by Gratian, and taken possession of the Eastern empire, sent his general, Sapor, to Antioch, to re-establish there the Catholic pastors. In an assembly which was held in his presence, in 379, St. Meletius, Paulinus, and Vitalis, whom Apollinarius had consecrated bishop of his party there, met, and St. Meletius, addressing himself to Paulinus, made the following proposal:[5] "Since our sheep have but one religion, and the same faith, let it be our business to unite them into one flock; let us drop all disputes for precedency, and agree to feed them together. I am ready to share this see with you, and let the survivor have the care of the whole flock." After some demur the proposal was accepted of, and Sapor put St. Meletius in possession of the churches which he had governed before his last banishment, and of those which were in the hands of the Arians, and Paulinus was continued in his care of the Eustathians. St. Meletius zealously reformed the disorders which heresy and divisions {404} had produced, and provided his church with excellent ministers. In 379 he presided in a council at Antioch, in which the errors of Apollinarius were condemned without any mention of his name. Theodosius, whom Gratian declared Augustus, and his partner in the empire at Sirmich, on the 19th of January, soon after his arrival at Constantinople, concurred zealously in assembling the second general council which was opened at Constantinople, in the year 381. Only the prelates of the Eastern empire assisted, so that we find no mention of legates of pope Damasus, and it was general, not in the celebration, but by the acceptation of the universal church. St. Meletius presided as the first patriarch that was present; in it one hundred and fifty Catholic bishops, and thirty-six of the Macedonian sect, made their appearance; but all these latter chose rather to withdraw than to retract their error, or confess the divinity of the Holy Ghost. The council approved of the election of St. Gregory of Nazianzen to the see of Constantinople, though he resigned it to satisfy the scruples and complaints of some, who, by mistake, thought it made against the Nicene canon, which forbade translations of bishops; which could not be understood of him who had never been allowed to take possession of his former see. The council then proceeded to condemn the Macedonian heresy, and to publish the Nicene creed, with certain additions. In the second, among the seven canons of discipline, the two oriental patriarchates of Alexandria and Antioch were acknowledged. In the third, the prerogative of honor, next to the see of Rome, is given to that of Constantinople, which before was subject to the metropolitan of Heraclea, in Thrace. This canon laid the foundation of the patriarchal dignity to which that see was raised by the council of Calcedon, though not allowed for some time after in the West. St. Meletius died at Constantinople while the council was sitting, to the inexpressible grief of the fathers, and of the good emperor. By an evangelical meekness, which was his characteristic, he had converted the various trials that he had gone through into occasions of virtue, and had exceedingly endeared himself to all that had the happiness of his acquaintance. St. Chrysostom assures us, that his name was so venerable to his flock at Antioch, that they gave it their children, and mentioned it with all possible respect. They cut his image upon their seals, and upon their plate, and carved it in their houses. His funeral was performed at Constantinople with the utmost magnificence, and attended by the fathers of the council, and all the Catholics of the city. One of the most eminent among the prelates, probably St. Amphilochius of Iconium, pronounced his panegyric in the council. St. Gregory of Nyssa made his funeral oration in presence of the emperor, in the great church, in the end of which he says, "He now sees God face to face, and prays for us, and for the ignorance of the people." St. Meletius's body was deposited in the church of the apostles, till it was removed before the end of the same year, with the utmost pomp, to Antioch, at the emperor's expense, and interred near the relics of St. Babylas, in the church which he had erected in honor of that holy martyr. Five years after, St. Chrysostom, whom our saint had ordained deacon, spoke his elegant panegyric on the 12th of February, on which his name occurs in the Menæa, and was inserted by Baronius in the Roman Martyrology; though it is uncertain whether this be the day of his death, or of his translation to Antioch. On account of his three banishments and great sufferings, he is styled a martyr by St. John Damascen.[6] His panegyrics, by St. Gregory of Nyssa, and St. Chrysostom, are extant. See also Socrates, l. 5, c. 5, p. 261. Sozom. l. 4, c. 28, p. 586. Theodoret, l. 3, c. 5, p. 128, l. 2, c. 27, p. 634. Jos. Assem. in Cal. Univer. t. 6, p. 125. Footnotes: 1. Prov. viii. 22. 2. St. Epiph. hær. 73, n. 29. 3. Hom. in St. Melet. t. 2. 4. Theod. l. 4, c. 23, 24. Sozom. l. 6, c. 17. 5. Socr. l. 5, c. 5. Sozom. l. 7, c. 3. Theodoret. l. 5, c. 22. 6. Or. 2. de Imagin. {405} ST. EULALIA, OF BARCELONA, V.M. THIS holy virgin was brought up in the faith, and in the practice of piety, at Barcelona in Spain. In the persecution of Dioclesian, under the cruel governor Dacian, she suffered the rack, and being at last crucified on it, joined the crown of martyrdom with that of virginity. Her relics are preserved at Barcelona, by which city she is honored as its special patroness. She is titular saint of many churches, and her name is given to several villages of Guienne and Languedoc, and other neighboring provinces, where, in some places, she is called St. Eulalie, in others St. Olaire, St. Olacie, St. Occille, St. Olaille, and St. Aulazie. Sainte-Aulaire and Sainte-Aulaye are names of two ancient French families taken from this saint. Her acts deserve no notice. See Tillemont, t. 5, in his account from Prudentius, of St. Eulalia of Merida, with whom Vincent of Beauvais confounds her; but she is distinguished by the tradition of the Spanish churches, by the Mozarabic missal, and by all the martyrologies which bear the name of St. Jerom, Ado, Usuard, &c. ST. ANTONY CAULEAS, CONFESSOR, PATRIARCH OF CONSTANTINOPLE. HE was by extraction of a noble Phrygian family, but born at a country seat near Constantinople, where his parents lived retired for fear of the persecution and infection of the Iconoclasts. From twelve years of age he served God with great fervor, in a monastery of the city, which some moderns pretend to have been that of Studius. In process of time he was chosen abbot, and, upon the death of Stephen, brother to the emperor Leo VI., surnamed the Wise, or the Philosopher, patriarch of Constantinople in 893. His predecessor had succeeded Photius in 886, (whom this emperor expelled,) and labored strenuously to extinguish the schism he had formed, and restore the peace of the church over all the East. St. Antony completed this great work, and in a council in which he presided at Constantinople, condemned or reformed all that had been done by Photius during his last usurpation of that see, after the death of St. Ignatius. The acts of this important council are entirely lost, perhaps through the malice of those Greeks who renewed this unhappy schism. A perfect spirit of mortification, penance, and prayer, sanctified this great pastor, both in his private and public life. He died in the year 896, of his age sixty-seven, on the 12th of February, on which day his name is inserted in the Greek Menæa, and in the Roman Martyrology. See an historical panegyric on his virtues, spoken soon after his death by a certain Greek philosopher named Nicephorus, in the Bollandists. Le Quien, Oriens Christianus, t. 3; also t. 1, p. 250. {406} FEBRUARY XIII. ST. CATHARINE DE RICCI, V, O.S.D. See her life, written by F. Seraphin Razzi, a Dominican friar, who knew her, and was fifty-eight years old when she died. The nuns of her monastery gave an ample testimony that this account was conformable partly to what they knew of her, and partly to MS. memorials left by her confessor and others concerning her. Whence F. Echard calls this life a work accurately written. It was printed in 4to. at Lucca, in 1594. Her life was again compiled by F. Philip Galdi, confessor to the saint and to the duchess of Urbino, and printed at Florence, in two vols. 4to., in 1622. FF. Michael Pio and John Lopez, of the same order, have given abstracts of her life. See likewise Bened. XIV. de Can. Serv. Dei, t. 5, inter Act. Can. 5. SS. Append. A.D. 1589. THE Ricci are an ancient family, which still subsists in a flourishing condition in Tuscany. Peter de Ricci, the father of our saint, was married to Catharine Bonza, a lady of suitable birth. The saint was born at Florence in 1522, and called at her baptism Alexandrina: but she took the name of Catharine at her religious profession. Having lost her mother in her infancy, she was formed to virtue by a very pious godmother, and whenever she was missing, she was always to be found on her knees in some secret part of the house. When she was between six and seven years old, her father placed her in the convent of Monticelli, near the gates of Florence, where her aunt, Louisa de Ricci, was a nun. This place was to her a paradise: at a distance from the noise and tumult of the world, she served God without impediment or distraction. After some years her father took her home. She continued her usual exercises in the world as much as she was able; but the interruptions and dissipation, inseparable from her station, gave her so much uneasiness, that, with the consent of her father, which she obtained, though with great difficulty, in the year 1535, the fourteenth of her age, she received the religious veil in the convent of Dominicanesses at Prat, in Tuscany, to which her uncle, F. Timothy de Ricci, was director. God, in the merciful design to make her the spouse of his crucified Son, and to imprint in her soul dispositions conformable to his, was pleased to exercise her patience by rigorous trials. For two years she suffered inexpressible pains under a complication of violent distempers, which remedies themselves served only to increase. These sufferings she sanctified by the interior dispositions with which she bore them, and which she nourished principally by assiduous meditation on the passion of Christ, in which she found an incredible relish, and a solid comfort and joy. After the recovery of her health, which seemed miraculous, she studied more perfectly to die to her senses, and to advance in a penitential life and spirit, in which God had begun to conduct her, by practising the greatest austerities which were compatible with the obedience she had professed: she fasted two or three days a week on bread and water, and sometimes passed the whole day without taking any nourishment, and chastised her body with disciplines and a sharp iron chain which she wore next her skin. Her obedience, humility, and meekness, were still more admirable than her spirit of penance. The least shadow of distinction or commendation gave her inexpressible uneasiness and confusion, and she would have rejoiced to be able to lie hid in the centre of the earth, in order to be entirely unknown to, and blotted out of the hearts of all mankind, such were the sentiments of annihilation and contempt of herself in which she constantly lived. It was by profound {407} humility and perfect interior self-denial that she learned to vanquish in her heart the sentiments or life of the first Adam, that is, of corruption, sin, and inordinate self-love. But this victory over herself, and purgation of her affections, was completed by a perfect spirit of prayer: for by the union of her soul with God, and the establishment of the absolute reign of his love in her heart, she was dead to, and disengaged from all earthly things. And in one act of sublime prayer, she advanced more than by a hundred exterior practices in the purity and ardor of her desire to do constantly what was most agreeable to God, to lose no occasion of practising every heroic virtue, and of vigorously resisting all that was evil. Prayer, holy meditation, and contemplation were the means by which God imprinted in her soul sublime ideas of his heavenly truths, the strongest and most tender sentiments of all virtues, and the most burning desire to give all to God, with an incredible relish and affection for suffering contempt and poverty for Christ. What she chiefly labored to obtain, by meditating on his life and sufferings, and what she most earnestly asked of him was, that he would be pleased, in his mercy, to purge her affections of all poison of the inordinate love of creatures, and engrave in her his most holy and divine image, both exterior and interior, that is to say, both in her conversation and affections, that so she might be animated, and might think, speak, and act by his most holy Spirit. The saint was chosen, very young, first, mistress of the novices, then sub-prioress, and, in the twenty-fifth year of her age, was appointed perpetual prioress. The reputation of her extraordinary sanctity and prudence drew her many visits from a great number of bishops, princes, and cardinals, among others, of Cervini, Alexander of Medicis, and Aldobrandini, who all three were afterwards raised to St. Peter's chair, under the names of Marcellus II., Clement VIII., and Leo XI. Something like what St. Austin relates of St. John of Egypt, happened to St. Philip Neri and St. Catharine of Ricci. For having some time entertained together a commerce of letters, to satisfy their mutual desire of seeing each other, while he was detained at Rome she appeared to him in a vision, and they conversed together a considerable time, each doubtless being in a rapture. This St. Philip Neri, though most circumspect in giving credit to, or in publishing visions, declared, saying, that Catharine de Ricci, while living, had appeared to him in vision, as his disciple Galloni assures us in his life.[1] And the continuators of Bollandus inform us that this was confirmed by the oaths of five witnesses.[2] Bacci, in his life of St. Philip, mentions the same thing, and pope Gregory XV., in his bull for the canonization of St. Philip Neri, affirms, that while this saint lived at Rome, he conversed a considerable time with Catharine of Ricci, a nun, who was then at Prat, in Tuscany.[3] Most wonderful were the raptures of St. Catharine in meditating on the passion of Christ, which was her daily exercise, but to which she totally devoted herself every week from Thursday noon to three o'clock in the afternoon on Friday. After a long illness, she passed from this mortal life to everlasting bliss and the possession of the object of all her desires, on the feast of the Purification of our Lady, on the 2d of February, in 1589, the sixty-seventh year of her age. The ceremony of her beatification was performed by Clement XII., in 1732, and that of her canonization by Benedict XIV., in 1746. Her festival is deferred to the 13th of February. * * * * * In the most perfect state of heavenly contemplation which this life admits of, there must be a time allowed for action, as appears from the most {408} eminent contemplatives among the saints, and those religious institutes which are most devoted to this holy exercise. The mind of man must be frequently unbent, or it will be overset. Many, by a too constant or forced attention, have lost their senses. The body also stands in need of exercise, and in all stations men owe several exterior duties both to others and themselves, and to neglect any of these, upon pretence of giving the preference to prayer, would be a false devotion and dangerous illusion. Though a Christian be a citizen of heaven, while he is a sojourner in this world, he is not to forget the obligations or the necessities to which this state subjects him, or to dream of flights which only angels and their fellow inhabitants of bliss take. As a life altogether taken up in action and business, without frequent prayer and pious meditation, alienates a soul from God and virtue, and weds her totally to the world, so a life spent wholly in contemplation, without any mixture of action, is chimerical, and the attempt dangerous. The art of true devotion consists very much in a familiar and easy habit of accompanying exterior actions and business with a pious attention to the Divine Presence, frequent secret aspirations, and a constant union of the soul with God. This St. Catharine of Ricci practised at her work, in the exterior duties of her house and office, in her attendance on the sick, (which was her favorite employment, and which she usually performed on her knees,) and in the tender care of the poor over the whole country. But this hindered not the exercises of contemplation, which were her most assiduous employment. Hence retirement and silence were her delight, in order to entertain herself with the Creator of all things, and by devout meditation, kindling in her soul the fire of heavenly love, she was never able to satiate the ardor of her desire in adoring and praising the immense greatness and goodness of God. Footnotes: 1. {Footnote not in text} Gallon. apud Contin. Bolland. Acta Sanctorum, Maii, t. 6, p. 503, col. 2, n. 146. 2. Ibid. p. 504, col. 2. 3. In Bolland. Cherubini, t. 4, p. 8. ST. LICINIUS, CONFESSOR, CALLED BY THE FRENCH, LESIN, BISHOP OF ANGERS. HE was born of a noble family, allied to the kings of France, about the year 540. He was applied to learning as soon as he was capable of instruction, and sent to the court of king Clotaire I., (whose cousin he was,) being about twenty years of age. He signalized himself by his prudence and valor, both in the court and in the army, and acquitted himself of all Christian duties with extraordinary exactitude and fervor. Fasting and prayer were familiar to him, and his heart was always raised to God. King Chilperic made him count or governor of Anjou, and being overcome by the importunities of his friends, the saint consented to take a wife about the year 578. But the lady was struck with a leprosy on the morning before it was to be solemnized. This accident so strongly affected Licinius, that he resolved to carry into immediate execution a design he had long entertained of entirely renouncing the world. This he did in 580, and leaving all things to follow Jesus Christ, he entered himself among the clergy, and hiding himself from the world in a community of ecclesiastics, found no pleasure but in the exercises of piety and the most austere penance, and in meditating on the holy scriptures. Audouin, the fourteenth bishop of Angers, dying towards the year 600, the people, remembering the equity and mildness with which Licinius had governed them, rather as their father than as a judge or master, demanded him for their pastor. The voice of the clergy seconded that of the people, and, the concurrence of the court of Clotaire II. in his minority, under the regency of his mother Fredegonda, overcame {409} all the opposition his humility could make. His time and his substance were divided in feeding the hungry, comforting and releasing prisoners, and curing the bodies and souls of his people. Though he was careful to keep up exact discipline in his diocese, he was more inclined to indulgence than rigor, in imitation of the tenderness which Jesus Christ showed for sinners. Strong and persuasive eloquence, the more forcible argument of his severe and exemplary life, and God himself speaking by miracles, qualified him to gain the hearts of the most hardened, and make daily conquest of souls to Christ. He renewed the spirit of devotion and penance by frequent retreats, and desired earnestly to resign his bishopric, and hide himself in some solitude: but the bishops of the province, whose consent he asked, refusing to listen to such a proposal, he submitted, and continued to spend the remainder of his life in the service of his flock. His patience was perfected by continual infirmities in his last years, and he finished his sacrifice about the year 618, in the sixty-fifth of his age. He was buried in the church of St. John Baptist, which he had founded, with a monastery, which he designed for his retreat. It is now a collegiate church, and enriched with the treasure of his relics. His memory was publicly honored in the seventh age: the 1st of November was the day of his festival, though he is now mentioned in the Roman Martyrology on the 13th of February. At Angers he is commemorated on the 8th of June, which seems to have been the day of his consecration, and on the 21st of June, when his relics were translated or taken up, 1169, in the time of Henry II., king of England, count of Anjou. See his life, written from the relation of his disciples soon after his death; and again by Marbodius, archdeacon of Angers, afterwards bishop of Rennes, both in Bollandus. ST. POLYEUCTUS, M. THE city of Melitine, a station of the Roman troops in the Lesser Armenia, is illustrious for a great number of martyrs, whereof the first in rank is Polyeuctus. He was a rich Roman officer, and had a friend called Nearchus, a zealous Christian, who, when the news of the persecution, raised by the emperor against the church, reached Armenia, prepared himself to lay down his life for his faith; and grieving to leave Polyeuctus in the darkness of Paganism, was so successful in his endeavors to induce him to embrace Christianity, as not only to gain him over to the faith, but to inspire him with an eager desire of laying down his life for the same. He openly declared himself a Christian, and was apprehended and condemned to cruel tortures. The executioners being weary with tormenting him, betook themselves to the method of argument and persuasion, in order to prevail with him to renounce Christ. The tears and cries of his wife Pauline, of his children, and of his father-in-law, Felix, were sufficient to have shaken a mind not superior to all the assaults of hell. But Polyeuctus, strengthened by God, grew only the firmer in his faith, and received the sentence of death with such cheerfulness and joy, and exhorted all to renounce their idols with so much energy, on the road to execution, that many were converted. He was beheaded on the 10th of January, in the persecution of Decius, or Valerian, about the year 250, or 257. The Christians buried his body in the city. Nearchus gathered his blood in a cloth, and afterwards wrote his acts. The Greeks keep his festival very solemnly: and all the Latin martyrologies mention him. There was in Melitine a famous church of St. Polyeuctus, in the fourth age, in which St. Euthymius often prayed. There was also a very stately one in Constantinople, under {410} Justinian, the vault of which was covered with plates of gold, in which it was the custom for men to make their most solemn oaths, as is related by St. Gregory of Tours.[1] The same author informs us, in his history of the Franks,[2] that the kings of France, of the first race, used to confirm their treaties by the name of Polyeuctus. The martyrology ascribed to St. Jerom, and the most ancient Armenian calendars, place his feast on the 7th of January, which seems to have been the day of his martyrdom. The Greeks defer his festival to the 9th of January: but it is marked on the 13th of February in the ancient martyrology, which was sent from Rome to Aquileia in the eighth century, and which is copied by Ado, Usuard, and the Roman Martyrology. See his acts taken from those written by Nearchus, the saint's friend, and Tillem. t. 3, p. 424. Jos. Assemani, in Calend. ad 9 Januarii, t. 6. Footnotes: 1. De Glor. Mart. c. 103. 2. Hist. l. 7, c. 6. ST. GREGORY II., POPE, C. HE was born in Rome, to an affluent fortune, and being educated in the palace of the popes, acquired great skill in the holy scriptures and in ecclesiastical affairs, and attained to an eminent degree of sanctity. Pope Sergius I., to whom he was very dear, ordained him subdeacon. Under the succeeding popes, John the sixth and seventh, Sisinnius, and Constantine, he was treasurer of the church, and afterwards library keeper, and was charged with several important commissions. The fifth general council had been held upon the affair of the three chapters, in 553, in the reign of Justinian, and the sixth against the Monothelites, in those of Constantine Pogonatus and pope Agatho, in 660. With a view of adding a supplement of new canons to those of the aforesaid two councils, the bishops of the Greek church, to the number of two hundred and eleven, held the council called Quini-sext, in a hall of the imperial palace at Constantinople, named Trullus, in 692, which laid a foundation of certain differences to discipline between the Eastern and Western churches; for in the thirteenth canon it was enacted, that a man who was before married should be allowed to receive the holy orders of subdeacon, deacon, or priest, without being obliged to leave his wife, though this was forbid to bishops. (can. 12.) It was also forbid, (canon 55,) to fast on Saturdays, even in Lent. Pope Sergius I. refused to confirm this council; and, in 695, the emperor, Justinian II., surnamed Rhinotmetus, who had succeeded his father, Constantine Pogonatus, in 685, was dethroned for his cruelty, and his nose being slit, (from which circumstance he received his surname,) banished into Chersonesus. First Leontius, then Apsimarus Tiberius, ascended the throne; but Justinian recovered it in 705, and invited pope Constantine into the East, hoping to prevail upon him to confirm the council in Trullo. The pope was received with great honor, and had with him our saint, who, in his name, answered the questions put by the Greeks concerning the said council. After their return to Rome, upon the death of Constantine, Gregory was chosen pope, and ordained on the 19th of May, 715. The emperor Justinian being detested both by the army and people, Bardanes, who took the name of Philippicus, an Armenian, one of his generals, revolted, took Constantinople, put him and his son Tiberius, only seven years old, to death, and usurped the sovereignty in December, 711. In Justinian II was extinguished the family of Heraclius. Philippicus abetted warmly the heresy of the Monothelites, and caused the sixth council to be proscribed in a pretended synod at Constantinople. His reign was very short, for Artemius, his secretary, {411} who took the name of Anastasius II., deposed him, and stepped into the throne on the fourth of June, 713. By him the Monothelites were expelled; but, after a reign of two years and seven months, seeing one Theodosius chosen emperor by the army, which had revolted in January, 716, he withdrew, and took the monastic habit at Thessalonica. The eastern army having proclaimed Leo III., surnamed the Isaurian, emperor, on the 25th of March, 717, Theodosius and his son embraced an ecclesiastical state, and lived in peace among the clergy. Pope Gregory signalized the beginning of his popedom by deposing John VI., the Monothelite, false patriarch of Constantinople, who had been nominated by Philippicus, and he promoted the election of St. Germanus, who was translated to that dignity from Cyzicus, in 715. With unwearied watchfulness and zeal he laid himself out in extirpating heresies on all sides, and in settling a reformation of manners. Besides a hospital for old men, he rebuilt the great monastery near the church of St. Paul at Rome, and, after the death of his mother, in 718, changed her house into the monastery of St. Agatha. The same year he re-established the abbey of Mount Cassino, sending thither, from Rome, the holy abbot St. Petronax, to take upon him the government, one hundred and forty years after it had been laid in ruins by the Lombards. This holy abbot lived to see monastic discipline settled here in so flourishing a manner, that in the same century, Carloman, duke or prince of the French, Rachis, king of the Lombards, St. Willebald, St. Sturmius, first abbot of Fulda, and other eminent persons, fled to this sanctuary.[1] Our holy pope commissioned zealous missionaries to preach the faith in Germany, and consecrated St. Corbinian bishop of Frisingen, and St. Boniface bishop of Mentz. Leo, the Isaurian, protected the Catholic church during the first ten years of his reign, and St. Gregory II. laid up among the archives of his church several letters which he had received from him, from the year 717 to 726, which proved afterwards authentic monuments of his perfidy. For, being infatuated by certain Jews, who had gained an ascendant over him by certain pretended astrological predictions, in 726 he commanded holy images to be abolished, and enforced the execution of his edicts of a cruel persecution. St. Germanus, and other orthodox prelates in the East, endeavored to reclaim him, refused to obey his edicts, and addressed themselves to pope Gregory. Our saint employed long the arms of tears and entreaties, yet strenuously maintained the people of Italy in their allegiance to their prince, as Anastasius assures us. A rebellion was raised in Sicily, but soon quelled by the death of Artemius, who had assumed the purple. The pope vigorously opposed the mutineers, both here and in other parts of the West. When he was informed that the army at Ravenna and Venice, making zeal a pretence for rebellion, had created a new emperor, he effectually opposed their attempt, and prevented the effect. Several disturbances which were raised in Rome were pacified by his care. Nevertheless, he by letters encouraged the pastors of the church to resist the heresy which the emperor endeavored to establish by bloodshed and violence. The tyrant sent orders to several of his officers, six or seven times, to murder the pope: but he was so faithfully guarded by the Romans and Lombards, that he escaped all their snares. St. Gregory II. held the pontificate fifteen years, eight months, and twenty-three days, and died in 731, on the 10th of February; but the Roman Martyrology consecrates to his memory the 13th which was probably the day on which his corpse was deposited in the Vatican church. Footnotes: 1. Bulteau, Hist. Mon. d'Occid. t. 2, l. 4, c. 2, p. 8. {412} ST. MARTINIANUS, HERMIT AT ATHENS. MARTINIANUS was born at Cæsarea in Palestine, during the reign of Constantius. At eighteen years of age he retired to a mountain near that city, called, The place of the Ark, where he lived for twenty-five years among many holy solitaries in the practice of all virtues, and was endowed with the gift of miracles. A wicked strumpet of Cæsarea, called Zoe, hearing his sanctity much extolled, at the instigation of the devil undertook to pervert him. She feigned herself a poor woman, wandering in the desert late at night, and ready to perish. By this pretext she prevailed on Martinianus to let her remain that night in his cell. Towards morning she threw aside her rags, put on her best attire, and going in to Martinianus, told him she was a lady of the city, possessed of a large estate and plentiful fortune, all which she came to offer him with herself. She also instanced, in the examples of the saints of the Old Testament, who were rich and engaged in the conjugal state, to induce him to abandon his purpose. The hermit, who should have imitated the chaste Joseph in his flight, was permitted, in punishment perhaps of some secret presumption, to listen to her enchanting tongue, and to consent in his heart to her proposal. But as it was near the time that he expected certain persons to call on him to receive his blessing and instructions, he told her he would go and meet them on the road and dismiss them. He went out with this intent, but being touched with remorse, he returned speedily to his cell, where, making a great fire, he thrust his feet into it. The pain this occasioned was so great, that he could not forbear crying out aloud. The woman at the noise ran in and found him lying on the ground, bathed in tears, and his feet half burned. On seeing her he said: "Ah! if I cannot bear this weak fire, how can I endure that of hell?" This example excited Zoe to sentiments of grief and repentance; and she conjured him to put her in a way of securing her salvation. He sent her to Bethlehem, to the monastery of St. Paula, to which she lived in continual penance, and lying on the bare floor, with no other sustenance than bread and water. Martinianus, as soon as his legs were healed, which was not till seven months after, not being able all that time to rise from the ground, retired to a rock surrounded with water on every side, to be secure from the approach of danger and all occasions of sin. He lived here exposed always to the open air, and without ever seeing any human creature, except a boatman, who brought him twice a year biscuit and fresh water, and twigs wherewith to make baskets. Six years after this, he saw a vessel split and wrecked at the bottom of his rock. All on board perished, except one girl, who, floating on a plank, cried out for succor. Martinianus could not refuse to go down and save her life: but fearing the danger of living on the same mountain with her till the boatman should come, as was expected in two months, resolved to leave her there to subsist on his provisions till that time, and she chose to end her days on this rock in imitation of his penitential life. He, trusting himself to the waves and Providence, to shun all danger of sin, swam to the main land, and travelled through many deserts to Athens, where he made a happy end towards the year 400, being about fifty years old. His name, though not mentioned in the Roman Martyrology, occurs in the Greek Menæa, and was in great veneration in the East, particularly at Constantinople, in the famous church near Sancta Sophia. See his acts in the Bollandists, and in most compilers of the lives of the saints. Also Jos. Assemani in Cal. Univ. ad 13 Feb. t. 6, p. 145. {413} ST. MODOMNOC, OR DOMINICK, OF OSSORY, C. HE is said to have been of the noble race of the O'Neils, and, passing into Wales, to have studied under St. David in the Vale of Ross. After his return home he served God at Tiprat Fachna, in the western part of Ossory. He is said to have been honored there with the Episcopal dignity, about the middle of the sixth century. The see of Ossory was translated from Seirkeran, the capital of this small county, to Aghavoa, in the eleventh century, and in the twelfth, in the reign of Henry II., to Kilkenny. See Sir James Ware, l. De Antiquitatibus Hiberniæ, and l. De Episcopal. Hibern. ST. STEPHEN, ABBOT. HE was abbot of a monastery near the walls of Rieti in Italy, and a man of admirable sanctity. He had despised all things for the love of heaven. He shunned all company to employ himself wholly in prayer. So wonderful was his patience, that he looked upon them as his greatest friends and benefactors, who did him the greatest injuries, and regarded insults as his greatest gain. He lived in extreme poverty, and a privation of all the conveniences of life. His barns, with all the corn in them, the whole subsistence of his family, were burned down by wicked men. He received the news with cheerfulness, grieving only for their sin by which God was offended. In his agony angels were seen surrounding him to conduct his happy soul to bliss. He lived in the sixth age. He is named in the Roman Martyrology. See St. Gregory, hom. 35, in Evang. t. 1, p. 1616, and l. 4, Dial. c. 19. B. ROGER, ABBOT, C. HAVING embraced the Cistercian order at Loroy, or Locus Regis, in Berry, he was chosen abbot of Elan near Retel in Champagne, and died about the year 1175. His remains are enshrined in a chapel which bears his name, in the church at Elan, where his festival is kept with a mass in his honor on the 13th of February. His life was written by a monk of Elan. See Chatelain, on the 4th of January, on which day his name occurs in a Cistercian calendar printed at Dijon. FEBRUARY XIV. ST. VALENTINE, PRIEST AND MARTYR. His acts are commended by Henschenius, but objected to by Tillemont, &c. Here is given only an abridgment of the principal circumstances, from Tillem. l. 4, p. 678. THIRD AGE. VALENTINE was a holy priest in Rome, who, with St. Marius and his family, assisted the martyrs in the persecution under Claudius II. He was {414} apprehended, and sent by the emperor to the prefect of Rome; who, on finding all his promises to make him renounce his faith ineffectual, commanded him to be beaten with clubs, and afterwards to be beheaded, which was executed on the 14th of February, about the year 270. Pope Julius I. is said to have built a church near Ponte Mole to his memory, which for a long time gave name to the gate, now called Ports del Popolo, formerly Porta Valentini. The greatest part of his relics are now in the church of St. Praxedes. His name is celebrated as that of an illustrious martyr, in the sacramentary of St. Gregory, the Roman missal of Thomasius, in the calendar of F. Fronto, and that of Allatius, in Bede, Usuard, Ado, Notker, and all other martyrologies on this day. To abolish the heathen's lewd superstitious custom of boys drawing the names of girls, in honor of their goddess Februata Juno, on the 15th of this month, several zealous pastors substituted the names of saints in billets given on this day. See January 29, on St. Francis de Sales. ST. MARO, ABBOT. From Theodoret Philoth. c. 16, 22, 24, 30, Tillem. t. 12, p. 412. Le Quien, Oriens Christ. t. 3, p. 5, Jos Assemani Bibl. Orient. t. 1, p. 497. A.D. 433. ST. MARO made choice of a solitary abode on a mountain in the diocese of Syria and near that city, where, out of a spirit of mortification, he lived for the most part in the open air. He had indeed a little hut, covered with goat skins, to shelter him from the inclemencies of the weather; but he very seldom made use of it for that purpose, even on the most urgent occasions. Finding here a heathen temple, he dedicated it to the true God, and made it his house of prayer. Being renowned for sanctity, he was raised, in 405, to the dignity of priesthood. St. Chrysostom, who had a singular regard for him, wrote to him from Cucusus, the place of his banishment, and recommended himself to his prayers, and begged to hear from him by every opportunity.[1] St. Zebinus, our saint's master, surpassed all the solitaries of his time, with regard to assiduity in prayer. He devoted to this exercise whole days and nights, without being sensible of any weariness or fatigue: nay, his ardor for it seemed rather to increase than slacken by its continuance. He generally prayed in an erect posture; but in his old age was forced to support his body by leaning on a staff. He gave advice in very few words to those that came to see him, to gain the more time for heavenly contemplation. St. Maro imitated his constancy in prayer: yet he not only received all visitants with great tenderness, but encouraged their stay with him; though few were willing to pass the whole night in prayer standing. God recompensed his labors with most abundant graces, and the gift of curing all distempers, both of body and mind. He prescribed admirable remedies against all vices. This drew great multitudes to him, and he erected many monasteries in Syria, and trained up holy solitaries. Theodoret, bishop of Cyr, says, that the great number of monks who peopled his diocese were the fruit of his instructions. The chief among his disciples was St. James of Cyr, who gloried that he had received from the hands of St. Maro his first hair-cloth. God called St. Maro to his glory after a short illness, which showed, says Theodoret, the great weakness to which his body was reduced. A {415} pious contest ensued among the neighboring provinces about his burial. The inhabitants of a large and populous place carried off the treasure, and built to his honor a spacious church over his tomb, to which a monastery was adjoined, which seems to have been the monastery of St. Maro in the diocese of Apamea.[2] Footnotes: 1. St. Chrys. ep. 36. 2. It is not altogether certain whether this monastery near Apamea, or another on the Orontes, between Apamea and Emesa, or a third in Palmyrene, (for each of them bore his name,) possessed his body, or gave name to the people called Maronites. It seems most probable of the second, the abbot of which is styled primate of all the monasteries of the second Syria, in the acts of the second council of Constantinople, under the patriarch Mennas, in 536, and he subscribes first a common letter to pope Hormisdas, in 517. The Maronites were called so from these religious, in the fifth century, and adhered to the council of Chalcedon against the Eutychians. They were joined in communion with the Melchites or Loyalists, who maintained the authority of the council of Chalcedon. The Maronites, with their patriarch, who live in Syria, towards the seacoast, especially about mount Libanus, are steady in the communion of the Catholic church, and profess a strict obedience to the pope, as its supreme pastor; and such has always been the conduct of that nation, except during a very short time, that they were inveigled into the Greek schism; and some fell into Eutychianism, and a greater number into Nestorianism; they returned to the communion of the Catholic church under Gregory XIII. and Clement VIII., as Stephen Assemani proves, (Assemani, Act. Mart. t. 2, p. 410,) against the slander of Eutychius in his Arabic Annals, which had imposed upon Renaudot. The Maronites keep the feast of St. Maro on the 9th, the Greeks on the 14th of February. The seminary of the Maronites at Rome, founded by Gregory XIII. under the direction of the Jesuits, had produced several great men, who have exceedingly promoted true literature especially the Oriental; such as Abraham Eckellensis, the three Assemani, Joseph, Stephen Evodius, and Lewis, known by his Judicious writings on the ceremonies of the church. The patriarch of the Maronites, styled of Antioch, resides in the monastery of Canabine, at the foot of mount Libanus; he is confirmed by the pope, and has under him five metropolitans, namely, of Tyre, Damascus, Tripolis, Aleppo, and Niocsia, in Cyprus. See Le Quien. Oriens Christianus. t. 3, p. 46. ST. ABRAAMES, BISHOP OF CARRES. HE was a holy solitary, who, going to preach to an idolatrous village on Mount Libanus, overcame the persecutions of the heathens by meekness and patience. When he had narrowly escaped death from their hands, he borrowed money wherewith to satisfy the demands of the collectors of the public taxes, for their failure in which respect they were to be cast into prison; and by this charity he gained them all to Christ. After instructing them for three years, he left them in the care of a holy priest, and returned to his desert. He was some time after ordained bishop of Canes, in Mesopotamia, which country he cleared of idolatry, dissensions, and other vices. He joined the recollection and penance of a monk with the labors of his functions, and died at Constantinople, in 422, having been sent for to court by Theodosius the Younger, and there treated with the greatest honor on account of his sanctity. The emperor kept one of his mean garments, and wore it himself on certain days, out of respect. See Theodoret Philoth. c. 17, t. 3, p. 847. ST. AUXENTIUS, H. HE was a holy hermit in Bithynia, in the fifth age. In his youth he was one of the equestrian guards of Theodosius the Younger, but this state of life, which he discharged with the utmost fidelity to his prince, did not hinder him from making the service of God his main concern. All his spare time was spent in solitude and prayer; and he often visited holy hermits, to spend the nights with them in tears and singing the divine praises, prostrate on the ground. The fear of vain-glory moved him to retire to the desert mountain of Oxen, in Bithynia, eight miles from Constantinople. After the council of Chalcedon, where he appeared upon summons by order of the emperor Marcian, against Eutyches, he chose a cell on the mountain of Siope, near Chalcedon, in which he contributed to the sanctification of many who resorted to him for advice; he finished his martyrdom of penance, together {416} with his life, about 470. Sozomen commended exceedingly his sanctity while he was yet living.[1] St. Stephen the Younger caused the church of his monastery to be dedicated to God, under the invocation of our saint; and mount Siope is called to this day mount St. Auxentius. See his life, written from the relation of his disciple Vendimian, with the remarks of Henschenius. Footnotes: 1. Sozom. l. 7, c. 21. ST. CONRAN, BISHOP OF ORKNEY, CONFESSOR. THE isles of Orkney are twenty-six in number, besides the lesser, called Holmes, which are uninhabited, and serve only for pasture. The faith was planted here by St. Palladius, and St. Sylvester, one of his fellow-laborers, who was appointed by him the first pastor of this church, and was honored in it on the 5th of February. In these islands formerly stood a great number of holy monasteries, the chief of which was Kirkwall. This place was the bishop's residence, and is at this day the only remarkable town in these islands. It is situated in the largest of them, which is thirty miles long, called anciently Pomonia, now Mainland. This church is much indebted to St. Conran, who was bishop here in the seventh century, and whose name, for the austerity of his life, zeal, and eminent sanctity, was no less famous in those parts, so long as the Catholic religion flourished there, than those of St. Palladius and of St. Kentigern. The cathedral of Orkney was dedicated under the invocation of St. Magnus, king of Norway. On St. Conran, see bishop Lesley, Hist. Scot. l. 4. Wion, in addit. c. 3. Ligni Vitæ. King, in Calend. FEBRUARY XV. SS. FAUSTINUS AND JOVITA, MM. A.D. 121. FAUSTINUS and JOVITA were brothers, nobly born, and zealous professors of the Christian religion, which they preached without fear in their city of Brescia, while the bishop of that place lay concealed during the persecution. The acts of their martyrdom seeming of doubtful authority, all we can affirm with certainty of them is, that their remarkable zeal excited the fury of the heathens against them, and procured them a glorious death for their faith at Brescia, in Lombardy, under the emperor Adrian. Julian, a heathen lord, apprehended them; and the emperor himself passing through Brescia, when neither threats nor torments could shake their constancy, commanded them to be beheaded. They seem to have suffered about the year 121.[1] The city of Brescia honors them as its chief patrons, and possesses their relics. A very ancient church in that city bears their name, and all the martyrologies mention them. The spirit of Christ is a spirit of martyrdom, at least of mortification and penance. It is always the spirit of the cross. The remains of the old man, of sin and of death, must be extinguished, before one can be made heavenly by putting on affections which are divine. What mortifies the {417} senses and the flesh gives life to the spirit, and what weakens and subdues the body strengthens the soul. Hence the divine love infuses a spirit of mortification, patience, obedience, humility, and meekness, with a love of sufferings and contempt, in which consists the sweetness of the cross. The more we share in the suffering life of Christ, the greater share we inherit in his spirit, and in the fruit of his death. To souls mortified to their senses and disengaged from earthly things, God gives frequent foretastes of the sweetness of eternal life, and the most ardent desire of possessing him in his glory. This is the spirit of martyrdom, which entitles a Christian to a happy resurrection and to the bliss of the life to come. Footnotes: 1. See Tillemont, t. 2, p. 249. Pagi, &c. ST. SIGEFRIDE, OR SIGFRID, BISHOP, APOSTLE OF SWEDES. From Joan. Magnus, Hist. Goth. l. 17, c. 20, quoted by Bollandus, and chiefly from a life of this saint, compiled at Wexlow about the year 1205, published from an ancient MS. by the care of Ericus Benzelius junior, in his Monuments Historica vetera Ecclesiæ Suevogothicæ, printed at Upsal in 1709, p. 1, ad p. 14, and in Prolegom. Sect. 1. The editor was not able to discover the author's name: upon which he repeats the remark of the learned Maussac, (in Diss. Critica ad Harpocrat.,) that "many monkish writers endeavored to conceal their names out of humility." On which see Mabillon, Diar. Ital. p. 36. Benzelius gives us a considerable fragment of a second life of this holy prelate, ib. p. 21, ad 29, and some verses of bishop Brynoth the third, on St. Sigfrid and the other bishops of this province, ib. p. 72. Our zealous ancestors having received the light of our faith, propagated the same throughout all the northern provinces of Europe. St. Anscarius had planted the faith in, in 830; but it relapsed soon into idolatry. King Olas Scobcong entreated king Edred, who died in 91{} to send him missionaries to preach the gospel in his country. Sigefride, an eminent priest of York, undertook that mission, and on the 21st of June, in 950, arrived at Wexiow, in Gothland, in the territory of Smaland. He first erected a cross, then built a church of wood, celebrated the divine mysteries, and preached to the people. Twelve principal men of the province were converted by him, and one who died, was buried after the Christian manner, and a cross placed upon his grave. So great numbers were in a short time brought to the faith, that the cross of Christ was triumphantly planted in all the twelve tribes into which the inhabitants of South-Gothland were divided. The fountain near the mountain of Ostrabo, since called Wexiow, in which St. Sigefride baptized the catechumens, long retained the names of the twelve first converts, engraved on a monument. King Olas was much pleased with the accounts he heard of the man of God, and many flocked from remote parts, out of mere curiosity to hear his doctrine, and to see him minister at the altar, admiring the rich ornaments of linen, and over them of silk, which he wore in celebrating the divine mysteries, with a mitre on his head, and a crosier, or pastoral staff, in his hand. Also the gold and silver vessels which he had brought with him for the use of the altar, and the dignity and majesty of the ceremonies of the Christian worship, attracted their attention. But the sublime truths of our religion, and the mortification, disinterestedness, zeal, and sanctity of the apostolic missionaries, engaged them to give them a favorable reception, and to open their eyes to the evidence of the divine revelation. St. Sigefride ordained two bishops, the one of East, the other of West Gothland, or Lingkoping, and Scara. The see of Wexiow he continued himself to govern so long as he lived. His three nephews, Unaman, a priest, and Sunaman and Wiaman, the one a deacon, the other a subdeacon, were his chief assistants in his apostolic labors. Haring intrusted the administration of his see of Wexiow to Unaman, and left his two brothers to assist and comfort him, the saint himself set out to carry {418} the light of the gospel into the midland and northern provinces. King Olas received him with great respect, and was baptized by him, with his whole court and his army. St. Sigefride founded many churches, and consecrated a bishop of Upsal, and another of Strengues. The former of these sees had been founded by St. Anscharius, in 830, and the bishop was declared by pope Alexander III., in 1160, metropolitan and primate of the whole kingdom. During the absence of our saint, a troop of idolatrous rebels, partly out of hatred of the Christian religion, and partly for booty, plundered the church of Wexiow, and barbarously murdered the holy pastor Unaman and his two brothers. Their bodies they buried in the midst of a forest, where they have always remained hid. But the murderers put the heads of the martyrs into a box, which, with a great stone they had fastened to it, they threw into a great pond. But they were afterwards taken out, and kept richly enshrined in the church of Wexiow till their relics were removed by the Lutherans. These three holy martyrs were honored in Sweden. Upon the news of this massacre St. Sigefride hastened to Wexiow to repair the ruins of his church. The king resolved to put the murderers to death; but Sigefride, by his earnest entreaties, prevailed on him to spare their lives. However, he condemned them to pay a heavy fine, which he would have bestowed on the saint, but he refused accepting a single farthing of it, notwithstanding his extreme poverty, and the difficulties which he had to struggle with, in laying the foundation of that new church. He had inherited the spirit of the apostles in an heroic degree. Our saint died about the year 1002, and was buried in his cathedral at Wexiow, where his tomb became famous for miracles. He was canonized about the year 1158, by pope Adrian IV.,[1] an Englishman, who had himself labored zealously, and with great success, in the conversion of Norway, and other northern countries, about a hundred and forty years after St. Sigefride, who was honored by the Swedes as their apostle, till the change of religion among them.[2] Footnotes: 1. Vastove, Vinea Aquilonis. 2. In the life of St. Sigefride, published by Benzelius, it is mentioned, that St. Sigefride, upon his first arrival in Sweden, preached chiefly by interpreters. FEBRUARY XVI. ST. ONESIMUS, DISCIPLE OF ST. PAUL. HE was a Phrygian by birth, slave to Philemon, a person of note of the city of Colossæ, converted to the faith by St. Paul. Having robbed his master, and being obliged to fly, he providentially met with St. Paul, then a prisoner for the faith at Rome, who there converted and baptized him, and sent him with his canonical letter of recommendation to Philemon, by whom he was pardoned, set at liberty, and sent back to his spiritual father, whom he afterwards faithfully served. That apostle made him, with Tychicus, the bearer of his epistle to the Colossians,[1] and afterwards, as St. Jerom[2] and other fathers witness, a preacher of the gospel, and a bishop. The Greeks say he was crowned with martyrdom under Domitian, in the year 95, and {419} keep his festival on the 15th. Bede, Ado, Usuard, the Roman and other Latin martyrologists mention him on the 16th of February.[3] Baronius and some others confound him with St. Onesimus, the third bishop of Ephesus, after St. Timothy, who was succeeded first by John, then by Caius. This Onesimus showed great respect and charity to St. Ignatius, when on his journey to Rome, in 107, and is highly commended by him.[4] * * * * * When a sinner, by the light and power of an extraordinary grace, is snatched like a firebrand out of the fire, and rescued from the gates of hell, we cannot wonder if he is swallowed up by the deepest and most lively sense of his own guilt, and of the divine mercy; if such a one loves much, because much has been forgiven him; if he endeavors to repair his past crimes by heroic acts of penance and all virtues, and if he makes haste to redeem his lost time by a zeal and vigilance hard to be imitated by others. Hence we read of the _first love of the church of Ephesus_[5] as more perfect. The ardor of the compunction and love of a true penitent, is compared to the unparalleled _love of Judah in the day of her espousal_.[6] This ardor is not to be understood as a passing sally of the purest passions, as a shortlived fit of fervor, or desire of perfection, as a transient taste or sudden transport of the soul: it must be sincere and constant. With what excess of goodness does God communicate himself to souls which thus open themselves to him! With what caresses does he often visit them! With what a profusion of graces does he enrich and strengthen them! It often happens that, in the beginning, God, either to allure the frailty of a new convert, or to fortify his resolution against hazardous trials, favors him with more than usual communications of the sweetness of his love, and ravishes him by some glances, as it were, of the beatific vision. His tenderness was not less, when, for their spiritual advancement, their exercise in heroic virtues, and the increase of their victories and glory, he conducted them through severe trials. On the other side, with what fidelity and ardor did these holy penitents improve themselves daily in divine love and all virtues! Alas! our coldness and insensibility, since our pretended conversion from the world and sin, is a far greater subject of amazement than the extraordinary fervor of the saints in the divine service. Footnotes: 1. Colos. iv. 2. Ep. 62, c. 2. 3. Tillem. t. 1, p. 294, and note 10, on St. Paul. 4. Ep. ad Ephes. 5. Apoc. 11. 4. 6. Jerem. 11. 2. SS. ELIAS, JEREMY, ISAIAS, SAMUEL, AND DANIEL, WITH OTHER HOLY MARTYRS AT C�SAREA, IN PALESTINE. From Eusebius's relation of the martyrs of Palestine, at the end of the eighth book of his history, c. 11, 12, p. 346. Ed. Vales. A.D. 309. In the year 309, the emperors Galerius Maximianus and Maximinus continuing the persecution begun by Dioclesian, these five pious Egyptians went to visit the confessors condemned to the mines in Cilicia, and on their return were stopped by the guards of the gates of Cæsarea, in Palestine, as they were entering the town. They readily declared themselves Christians, together with the motive of their journey; upon which they were apprehended. The day following they were brought before Firmilian, the governor of Palestine, together with St. Pamphilus and others. The judge, before {420} he began his interrogatory, ordered the five Egyptians to be laid on the rack, as was his custom. After they had long suffered all manner of tortures, he addressed himself to him who seemed to be their chief, and asked him his name and his country. They had changed their names, which, perhaps, before their conversion, were those of some heathen gods, as was customary in Egypt. The martyr answered, according to the names they had given themselves, that he was called Elias, and his companions, Jeremy, Isaias, Samuel, and Daniel. Firmilian then asked their country; he answered, Jerusalem, meaning the heavenly Jerusalem, the true country of all Christians. The judge inquired in what part of the world that was, and ordered him to be tormented with fresh cruelty. All this while the executioners continued to tear his body with stripes, while his hands were bound behind him, and his feet squeezed in the woodstocks, called the Nervus. The judge, at last, tired with tormenting them, condemned all five to be beheaded, which was immediately executed. Porphyrius, a youth who was a servant of St. Pamphilus, hearing the sentence pronounced, cried out, that at least the honor of burial ought not to be refused them. Firmilian, provoked at this boldness, ordered him to be apprehended, and finding that he confessed himself a Christian, and refused to sacrifice, ordered his sides to be torn so cruelly, that his very bones and bowels were exposed to view. He underwent all this without a sigh or tear, or so much as making the least complaint. The tyrant, not to be overcome by so heroic a constancy, gave orders for a great fire to be kindled, with a vacant space to be left in the midst of it, for the martyr to be laid in, when taken off the rack. This was accordingly done, and he lay there a considerable time, surrounded by the flames, singing the praises of God, and invoking the name of Jesus; till at length, quite broiled by the fire, he consummated a slow, but glorious martyrdom. Seleucus, an eye-witness of this victory, was heard by the soldiers applauding the martyr's resolution; and being brought before the governor, he, without more ado, ordered his head to be struck off. ST. JULIANA, VIRGIN AND MARTYR. AFTER many torments, she was beheaded at Nicomedia, under Galerius Maximianus. St. Gregory the great mentions that her bones were translated to Rome. Part of them are now at Brussels, in the church of our Lady of Sablon. This saint is much honored in the Low Countries. Her acts in Bollandus deserve no notice. Bede, and martyrologies ascribed to St. Jerom, call this the day of her martyrdom, which the ancient Corbie manuscript places at Nicomedia. See Chatelain's notes on the martyrology, p. 667. ST. GREGORY X., POPE, C. HE was of an illustrious family, born at Placentia, and at his baptism was called Theobald. In his youth he was distinguished for his extraordinary virtue, and his progress in his studies, especially of the canon law, which he began in Italy, and pursued at Paris, and lastly at Liege. He was archdeacon of this last church when he received an order from the pope to preach the crusade for the recovery of the Holy Land. Incredible were the pains which he took in executing this commission, and in reconciling the Christian princes, who were at variance. The death of St. Lewis, in 1270, {421} struck a damp upon the spirits of the Christians in the East, though the prince of Wales, soon after Edward I., king of England, sailed from Sicily, in March, 1271, to their assistance, took Jaffa and Nazareth, and plundered Antioch. A tender compassion for the distressed situation of the servants of Christ in those parts, moved the holy archdeacon of Liege to undertake a dangerous pilgrimage to Palestine, in order to comfort them, and at the same time to satisfy his devotion by visiting the holy places. The see of Rome had been vacant almost three years, from the death of Clement IV. to November, 1268, the cardinals who were assembled at Viterbo not coming to an agreement in the choice of a pope, till, by common consent, they referred his election to six among them, who, on the 1st of September, in 1271, nominated Theobald, the archdeacon of Liege. Upon the news of his election, he prepared himself to return to Italy. Nothing could be more tender and moving than his last farewell to the disconsolate Christians of Palestine, whom he promised, in a most solemn manner, never to forget. He arrived at Rome in March, and was first ordained priest, then consecrated bishop, and crowned on the 27th of the same month, in 1272. He took the name of Gregory X., and, to procure the most effectual succor to the Holy Land, called a general council to meet at Lyons, where pope Innocent IV. had held the last in 1245, partly for the same purpose of the holy war, and partly to endeavor to reclaim the emperor Frederick II. The city of Lyons was most convenient for the meeting of those princes whose succors were principally expected for the holy war; and was most unexceptionable, because at that time it acknowledged no other sovereign than its archbishop. Henry III., king of England, died on the 16th of November, 1272, and Edward I., who had concluded a peace of ten years with the Saracens, in the name of the Christians in Syria and Palestine, returned for England, and on the road at Trapani, in Sicily, met the news of his father's death. In the same place he received most obliging letters from pope Gregory X. The fourteenth general council, the second of Lyons, was opened in that city in May, 1274, in which were assembled five hundred bishops and seventy abbots. In the fourth session, the Greek ambassadors (who were, Germanus, formerly patriarch of Constantinople, Theophanes, archbishop of Nice, and the senator, George Acropolita, great logothete, or chancellor) were admitted. The logothete abjured the schism in the name of the emperor Michael Palæologus; and the pope, while Te Deum was sung, stood with his cheeks all the time bathed in tears. St. Thomas Aquinas died on the 7th of March, before the opening of the council, and St. Bonaventure at Lyons, on the 15th of July. The council was closed by the fifth and last session, on the 17th of July. The more our holy pope was overwhelmed with public affairs, the more watchful he was over his own soul, and the more earnest in the interior duties of self-examination, contemplation, and prayer. He spoke little, conversing assiduously in his heart with God; he was very abstemious in his diet, and most rigorous to himself in all things. By this crucified life, his soul was prepared to taste the hidden manna which is concealed in the divine word, with which he continually nourished it in holy meditation. After the council he was taken up in concerting measures for carrying its decrees into execution, particularly those relating to the crusade in the East. By his unwearied application to business, and the fatigues of his journey, in passing the Alps in his return to Rome, he contracted a distemper, of which he died at Arezzo, on the 10th of January, in 1276, three years and nine months after his consecration, and four years, four months, and ten days after his election. His name is inserted in the Roman Martyrology, published by Benedict XIV., on the 16th of February. See Platina, Ciacconius, St. Antoninus, Hist. part 3, it. 20, c. 2. The account of his life and miracles in {422} the archives of the tribunal of the Rota, and in Benedict XIV. de Canoniz. l. 2, t. 2, Append. 8, p. 673; the proofs of his miracles, ib. p. 709; also, ib. l. 2, c. 24, sec. 37 and 42; and l. 1, c. 20, n. 17. See likewise his life, copied from a MS. history of several popes, by Bernard Guidonis, published by Muratori, Scriptor. Ital. t. 3, p. 597, and another life of this pope, written before the canonization of St. Lewis, in which mention is made of miraculous cures performed by him, ibid. pp. 599, 604. ST. TANCO, OR TATTA, B.M. PATTON, abbot of Amabaric, in Scotland, passing into Germany to preach the gospel, and being chosen bishop of Verdun, Tanco, who had served God many years in that abbey in great reputation for his singular learning and piety, was raised to the dignity of abbot. Out of an ardent thirst after martyrdom, he resigned this charge, and followed his countryman and predecessor into Germany, where, after some time, he succeeded him in the see of Verdun, of which he was the third bishop. His success in propagating the faith was exceeding great, but it was to him a subject of inexpressible grief to see many who professed themselves Christians, live enslaved to shameful passions. In order to convert, or at least to confound them, he preached a most zealous sermon against the vices which reigned among them; at which a barbarous mob was so enraged as fiercely to assault him; and one of them, stabbing him with a lance, procured him the glorious crown of martyrdom, about the year 815. This account of him is given us by Krantzius, (l. 1, Metrop. c. 22 & 29.) Lesley, l. 5, Hist. Wion, l. 3, Ligni Vitæ. FEBRUARY XVII. ST. FLAVIAN, M. ARCHBISHOP OF CONSTANTINOPLE. From the councils, and historians Cedrenus, Evagrius, Theophanes, &c. See Baronius, Henschenius. t. 3, Feb. p. 71. Fleury, l. 27, 28. Quesnel, in his edition of the works of St. Leo, t. 2, diss. 1, and F. Cacciari, t. 3, Exercit. in opera St. Leonis, Romæ, an. 1755. Dissert. 4, de Eutychiana Hær. l. 1, c. 2, p. 322; c. 8, p. 383; c. 9, p. 393, c. 11, p. 432. A.D. 449 ST. FLAVIAN was a priest of distinguished merit, and treasurer of the church of Constantinople, when he succeeded St. Proclus in the archiepiscopal dignity in 447. The eunuch Chrysaphius, chamberlain to the emperor Theodosius the Younger, and a particular favorite, suggested to his master, a weak prince, to require of him a present, out of gratitude to the emperor for his promotion. The holy bishop sent him some blessed bread, according to the custom of the church at that time, as a benediction and symbol of communion. Chrysaphius let him know that it was a present of a very different kind that was expected from him. St. Flavian, an enemy to simony, answered resolutely, than the revenues and treasure of the church were designed for other uses, namely, the honor of God and the relief of his poor. The eunuch, highly provoked at the bishop's refusal, from that moment {423} resolved to contrive his ruin. Wherefore, with a view to his expulsion, he persuaded the emperor, by the means of his wife Eudoxia, to order the bishop to make Pulcheria, sister to Theodosius, a deaconess of his church. The saint's refusal was a second offence in the eyes of the sycophants of the court. The next year Chrysaphius was still more grievously offended with our saint for his condemning the errors of his kinsman Eutyches, abbot of a monastery of three hundred monks, near the city, who had acquired a reputation for virtue, but in effect was no better than an ignorant, proud, and obstinate man. His intemperate zeal against Nestorius, for asserting two distinct persons in Christ, threw him into the opposite error, that of denying two distinct natures after the incarnation. In a council, held by St. Flavian in 448, Eutyches was accused of this error by Eusebius of Dorylæum, his former friend, and it was there condemned as heretical, and the author was cited to appear to give an account of his faith. On the day appointed in the last summons he appeared before the council, but attended by two of the principal officers of the court, and a troop of the imperial guards. Being admitted and interrogated on the point in question, that is, his faith concerning the incarnation; he declared that he acknowledged indeed two natures before the union, but after it only one. To all reasonings and authority produced against his tenet, his reply was, that he did not come thither to dispute, but to satisfy the assembly what his faith was. The council, upon this, anathematized and deposed him, and St. Flavian pronounced the sentence, which was subscribed by thirty-two bishops and twenty-three abbots, of which last eighteen were priests. Eutyches said privately to his guards, that he appealed to the bishops of Rome, Egypt, and Jerusalem; and in a letter he wrote to St. Leo to complain of his usage in the council, he endeavored to impose on the pope. But his Holiness being informed of the state of the affair by St. Flavian, wrote to him an ample declaration of the orthodox faith upon the point which was afterwards read, and inserted in the acts of the council of Chalcedon, in which the errors of Eutyches were solemnly condemned. Chrysaphius, however, had interest enough with the weak emperor to obtain an order for a re-examination of the cause between St. Flavian and Eutyches in another council. This met in April, 449, consisting of about thirty bishops, one third whereof had assisted at the late council. St. Flavian being looked on as a party, Thalassius, bishop of Cæsarea, presided in his room. After the strictest scrutiny into every particular, the impiety of Eutyches, and the justice of our saint's proceedings, clearly appeared. St. Flavian presented to the emperor a profession of his faith, wherein he condemned the errors of both Eutyches and Nestorius, his adversaries pretending that he favored the latter. Chrysaphius, though baffled in his attempts, was still bent on the ruin of the holy bishop, and employed all his craft and power to save Eutyches and destroy Flavian. With this view he wrote to Dioscorus, a man of a violent temper, who had succeeded St. Cyril in the patriarchal see of Alexandria, promising him his friendship and favor in all his designs, if he would undertake the defence of the deposed abbot against Flavian and Eusebius. Dioscorus came into his measures; and, by their joint interest with the empress Eudoxia, glad of an opportunity to mortify Pulcheria, who had a high esteem for our saint, they prevailed with the emperor to order a council to be called at Ephesus, to determine the dispute. Dioscorus was invited by the emperor to come and preside in it, accompanied with ten metropolitans and other bishops, together with the archimandrite, or abbot Barsumas, a man strongly attached to Eutyches and Dioscorus. The like directions were sent to the other patriarchs. St. Leo, who was invited, though late, sent legatee to act {424} in his name, Julius, bishop of Puteoli, Renatus, a priest, who died on the road, Hilarius, a deacon, and Dulcitius, a notary. He sent by them a learned letter to St. Flavian, in which he taxes the ignorance of Eutyches in the holy scriptures, and explains the Catholic doctrine against that heresiarch, which he also did by other letters. The false council of Ephesus, for the violences therein used commonly called the Latrocinale, was opened on the 8th of August, in 449, and consisted of one hundred and thirty bishops, or their deputies, from Egypt and the East. Eutyches was there, and two officers from the emperor, with a great number of soldiers. Every thing was carried on, by violence and open faction, in favor of Eutyches, by those officers and bishops who had espoused his party and formed a cabal. The pope's legates were never suffered to read his letters to the council. The final result of the proceedings was, to pronounce sentence of deposition against St. Flavian and Eusebius. The pope's legates protested against the sentence. Hilarius, the deacon, cried out aloud, "contradicitur," opposition is made; which Latin word was inserted in the Greek acts of the synod. And Dioscorus no sooner began to read the sentence, but he was interrupted by several of the bishops, who, prostrating themselves before him, besought him, in the most submissive terms, to proceed no further in so unwarrantable an affair. Upon this he starts up, and calls aloud for the imperial commissioners, Elpidius and Eulogius, who, without more ado, ordered the church doors to be set open; upon which Proclus, the proconsul of Asia, entered, surrounded with a band of soldiers, and followed by a confused multitude with chains, clubs, and swords. This struck such a terror into the whole assembly, that, when the bishops were required by Dioscorus and his creatures to subscribe, few or none had the courage to withstand his threats, the pope's legates excepted, who protested aloud against these violent proceedings; one of whom was imprisoned; the other, Hilarius, got off with much difficulty, and came safe to Rome. St. Flavian, on hearing the sentence read by Dioscorus, appealed from him to the holy see, and delivered his acts of appeal in writing to the pope's legates, then present. This so provoked Dioscorus,[1] that, together with Barsumas and others of their party,[2] after throwing the holy bishop on the ground, they so kicked and bruised him, that he died within a few days, in 449, not at Ephesus, as some have said by mistake, but in his exile at Epipus, two days' journey from that city, situated near Sardes in Lydia, as Marcellinus testifies in his chronicle. The council being over, Dioscorus, with two of his Egyptian bishops, had the insolence to excommunicate St. Leo. But violence and injustice did not triumph long. For the emperor's eyes being opened on his sister Pulcheria's return to court, whom the ambition of Chrysaphius had found means to remove in the beginning of these disturbances, the eunuch was disgraced, and soon after put to death; and the empress Eudoxia obliged to retire to Jerusalem. The next year the emperor died, as Cedrenus says, penitent; and Pulcheria, ascending the throne in 450, ordered Saint Flavian's body to be brought with great honor to Constantinople, and there magnificently interred, among his predecessors in that see. St. Leo had, upon the first news of these proceedings, written to him to comfort him, as also to Theodosius, Pulcheria, and the clergy of Constantinople, in his defence. The general council of Chalcedon declared him a saint and martyr, and paid great honors to his memory, in 451. The same council honorably restored Eusebius of Dorylæum to his see. Pope Hilarius, who had been St. Leo's legate at Ephesus, had so great a veneration for the saint, that he caused his martyrdom {425} to be represented in mosaic work, in the church which he built in honor of the holy Cross. The wicked Dioscorus was condemned by the council of Chalcedon, in 451, and died obstinate and impenitent, in the Eutychian heresy, and his other crimes, in his banishment at Gangres, in 454. * * * * * It was the glory of St. Flavian to die a martyr of the mystery of the incarnation of the Son of God. This is the fundamental article of the Christian religion, and, above all other mysteries, challenges our most profound homages and constant devotion. In it hath God displayed, in the most incomprehensible manner, the astonishing immensity of his power, mercy, wisdom, and love, the contemplation of which will be the sweet occupation of angels and saints to all eternity. The servants of God on earth find their greatest delight in meditating on this great mystery, and in profound adoration and transports of love, honoring, praising, and glorifying their divine Saviour, and studying to put on his spirit by the constant union in mind and heart, or of their thoughts and affections, with him. Is it possible that we who believe in this God, who annihilated himself, and died for us most miserable and ungrateful sinners, should not die of love for him? At least, how is it possible we should not always have him present to our minds, and prostrate ourselves at his feet a thousand times a day to return him our most humble thanks, and to pay him the homages of our adoration, love, and praise? The more he is insulted in this mystery of goodness itself, by the blasphemies of unbelievers and heretics, the greater ought to be our zeal and fervor in honoring it. But as the incarnation is the mystery of the unfathomed humility of a God to heal the wound of our pride, it is only by humility, and the annihilation of creatures in our hearts, that we can be disposed to contemplate or honor it with fruit. The dreadful fall and impenitence of Eutyches, after he had renounced the world with a view to give himself to God, were owing to the fatal sin of a secret pride. Footnotes: 1. Evag. l. xi. c. 11. 2. Conc. Calced. act. 4. SS. THEODULUS AND JULIAN, MM. THEY suffered at Cæsarea, in Palestine, at the same time with those mentioned yesterday, but are named on this day in the Roman Martyrology. Theodulus was an old man of eminent virtue and wisdom, who enjoyed one of the most honorable posts in the household of Firmilian, the governor of Palestine, and had several sons. His personal merit gained him the love of all that knew him, and the governor had a particular esteem for him. This holy man had seen the invincible courage and patience of the five Egyptian martyrs at Cæsarea, and, going to the prisons, made use of their example to encourage the other confessors, and prepare them for the like battles. Firmilian, vexed at this conduct of an old favorite servant, sent for him, reproached him strongly with ingratitude, and, without hearing his defence, condemned him to be crucified. Theodulus received the sentence with joy, and went with transports to a death which was speedily to unite him to his Saviour, and in which he was thought worthy to bear a near resemblance to him. Julian, who shared the glory of that day with the other martyrs, was a Cappadocian, as was also St. Seleucus; he was only a catechumen, though highly esteemed by the faithful for his many great virtues, and he was just then come to Cæsarea. At his arrival, hearing of the conflicts of the martyrs, he ran to the place, and finding the execution over, expressed his veneration for them, by kissing and embracing the bodies which had been animated by those heroic and happy souls. The guards apprehended {426} him, and carried him to the governor, who, finding him as inflexible as the rest, would not lose his time in useless interrogatories, but immediately ordered him to be burnt. Julian, now master of all he wished for, gave God thanks for the honor done him by this sentence, and begged he would be pleased to accept of his life as a voluntary sacrifice. The courage and cheerfulness which he maintained to his last moment, filled his executioners with surprise and confusion. See Eusebius, an eye-witness, l. de Mart. Palæst. c. 12, p. 337. ST. SILVIN OF AUCHY, B.C. HE was born of a considerable family in the territory of Thoulouse, and passed his first years at the court of two successive kings, Childeric II. and Theodoric III. Every thing was ready for his marriage, when, powerfully touched by divine grace, he renounced all worldly prospects, and retired from court. His thoughts were now bent upon Jesus Christ alone, and he longed for nothing so much as to enjoy silence and solitude. After several devout penitential pilgrimages to Jerusalem and other places, he took orders at Rome, and was consecrated bishop, some say of Thoulouse, others of Terouenne. But his name is not found in any ancient register of either of those churches, and it is now agreed, among the most judicious critics, that he was ordained a regionary bishop to preach the gospel to infidels. His zeal carried him into the north of France, and he spent most of his time in the diocese of Terouenne, which was then full of Pagans, and Christians but one remove from them. He was indefatigable in preaching to them the great truths and essential obligations of our holy faith, and taught them to despise and renounce the pleasures of this life, by appearing on all occasions a strong lesson of self-denial and mortification. Instructing them thus, both by words and actions, he gathered a large harvest in a wild and uncultivated field. After many years thus spent, he died at Auchy, in the county of Artois, on the 15th of February, in 718. He is commemorated in Usuard, the Belgic and Roman Martyrologies, on the 17th, which was the day of his burial: but at Auchy on the 15th. The greatest part of his relics is now at St. Bertin's, at St. Omers, whither they were carried in 951, for fear of the Normans. Usuard is the first who styles St. Silvin bishop of Terouenne. Some think he was born, not at Thoulouse, but at Thosa, or Doest, near Bruges; or rather at another Thosa, now Doesbury, in Brabant; for in his life it is said that he travelled westward to preach the gospel. His original life, which was ascribed to Antenor, a disciple of the saint, is lost: that which we have was compiled in the ninth century. See Bolland. t. 3, Feb. p. 29, Mabillon, Act. Bened. Sæc. 3, par. 1, p. 298. Chatelain's Notes, p. 659. ST. LOMAN, OR LUMAN, B.C. JOCELIN calls him a nephew of St. Patrick, by a sister. He was at least a disciple of that saint, and first bishop of Trim, in Meath. Port-Loman, a town belonging to the Nugents in West-meath, takes its name from him, and honors his memory with singular veneration. St. Forcher{n}, son of the lord of that territory, was baptized by St. Loman, succeeded him in the bishopric of Trim, and is honored among the saints in Ireland, both on this same day and on the 11th of October. See Colgan on the 17th Febr. Usher's Antiqu. ad ann. 433. {427} ST. FINTAN, ABBOT OF CLUAINEDNECH, WHICH Usher interprets the Ivy-Cave, in the diocese of Lethglean, in Leinster, in the sixth century. He had for disciple St. Comgal, the founder of the abbey of Benchor, and master of St. Columban. Colgan reckons twenty-four Irish saints of the name of Fintan; but probably several of these were the same person honored in several places. Another St. Fintan, surnamed Munnu, who is honored on the 21st of October, was very famous. See Colgan, Usher, and Henschenius. FEBRUARY XVIII. ST. SIMEON, BISHOP OF JERUSALEM, M. From Euseb. l. 3, c. 32. Tillem. t. 1, p. 186, and t. 2. Le Quien, Oriens Christ. t. 3, p. 140. A.D. 116 ST. SIMEON was the son of Cleophas, otherwise called Alpheus, brother to St. Joseph, and of Mary, sister of the Blessed Virgin. He was therefore nephew both to St. Joseph and to the Blessed Virgin, and cousin-german to Christ. Simeon and Simon are the same name, and this saint is, according to the best interpreters of the holy scripture, the Simon mentioned,[1] who was brother to St. James the Lesser, and St. Jude, apostles, and to Joseph or José. He was eight or nine years older than our Saviour. We cannot doubt but he was an early follower of Christ, as his father and mother and three brothers were, and an exception to that of St. John,[2] that our Lord's relations did not believe in him. Nor does St. Luke[3] leave us any room to doubt but that he received the Holy Ghost on the day of Pentecost, with the blessed Virgin and the apostles; for he mentions present St. James and St. Jude, and the brothers of our Lord. St. Epiphanius relates,[4] that when the Jews massacred St. James the Lesser, his brother Simeon reproached them for their atrocious cruelty. St. James, bishop of Jerusalem, being put to death in the year 62, twenty-nine years after our Saviour's resurrection, the apostles and disciples met at Jerusalem to appoint him a successor. They unanimously chose St. Simeon, who had probably before assisted his brother in the government of that church. In the year 66, in which SS. Peter and Paul suffered martyrdom at Rome, the civil war began in Judea, by the seditions of the Jews against the Romans. The Christians in Jerusalem were warned by God of the impending destruction of that city, and by a divine revelation[5] commanded to leave it, as Lot was rescued out of Sodom. They therefore departed out of it the same year, before Vespasian, Nero's general, and afterward emperor, entered Judæa, and retired beyond Jordan to a small city called Pella; having St. Simeon at their head. After the taking and burning of Jerusalem they returned thither again, and settled themselves amidst its {428} ruins, till Adrian afterwards entirely razed it. St. Epiphanius[6] and Eusebius[7] assure us, that the church here flourished extremely, and that multitudes of Jews were converted by the great number of prodigies and miracles wrought in it. St. Simeon, amidst the consolations of the Holy Ghost and the great progress of the church, had the affliction to see two heresies arise within its bosom, namely, those of the Nazareans and the Ebionites; the first seeds of which, according to St. Epiphanius, appeared at Pella. The Nazareans were a sect of men between Jews and Christians, but abhorred by both. They allowed Christ to be the greatest of the prophets, but said he was a mere man, whose natural parents were Joseph and Mary: they joined all the ceremonies of the old law with the new, and observed both the Jewish Sabbath and the Sunday. Ebion added other errors to these, which Cerenthus had also espoused, and taught many superstitions, permitted divorces, and allowed of the most infamous abominations. He began to preach at Cocabe, a village beyond Jordan, where he dwelt; but he afterwards travelled into Asia, and thence to Rome. The authority of St. Simeon kept the heretics in some awe during his life, which was the longest upon earth of any of our Lord's disciples. But, as Eusebius says, he was no sooner dead than a deluge of execrable heresies broke out of hell upon the church, which durst not openly appear during his life. Vespasian and Domitian had commanded all to be put to death who were of the race of David. St. Simeon had escaped their searches; but Trajan having given the same order, certain heretics and Jews accused him, as being both of the race of David and a Christian, to Atticus, the Roman governor in Palestine. The holy bishop was condemned by him to be crucified: who, after having undergone the usual tortures during several days, which, though one hundred and twenty years old, he suffered with so much patience that he drew on him a universal admiration, and that of Atticus in particular, he died in 107, according to Eusebius in his chronicle, but in 116, according to Dodwell, bishop Loyde, and F. Pagi. He must have governed the church of Jerusalem about forty-three years. * * * * * The eminent saints among the primitive disciples of Jesus Christ, were entirely animated by his spirit, and being dead to the world and themselves, they appeared like angels among men. Free from the secret mixture of the sinister views of all passions, to a degree which was a miracle of grace, they had in all things only God, his will and honor, before their eyes, equally aspiring to him through honor and infamy. In the midst of human applause they remained perfectly humbled in the centre of their own nothing: when loaded with reproaches and contempt, and persecuted with all the rage that malice could inspire, they were raised above all these things so as to stand fearless amid racks and executioners, inflexibly constant in their fidelity to God, before tyrants, invincible under torments, and superior to them almost as if they had been impassible. Their resolution never failed them, their fervor seemed never slackened. Such wonderful men wrought continual miracles in converting souls to God. We bear the name of Christians, and wear the habit of Saints; but are full of the spirit of worldlings, and our actions are infected with its poison. We secretly seek ourselves, even when we flatter ourselves that God is our only aim, and while we undertake to convert the world, we suffer it to pervert us. When shall we begin to study to crucify our passions and die to ourselves, that we may lay a solid foundation of true virtue, and establish its reign in our hearts? Footnotes: 1. Matt. xiii.55. 2. John vii. 5. 3. Acts i. 14. 4. Hær. 78. c. 14. 5. Eus. l. 3, c. 5, Epiph. hær. 29, c. 7, hær. 30, c. 2. 6. L. de Pond. et Mensur. c. 15. 7. Demonst. l. 3, c. 5. {429} SS. LEO AND PAREGORIUS, MARTYRS From their ancient authentic acts in Ruinart, Bollandus, &c. THIRD AGE. ST. PAREGORIUS having spilt his blood for the faith at Patara, in Lycia, St. Leo, who had been a witness of his conflict, found his heart divided between joy for his friend's glorious victory, and sorrow to see himself deprived of the happiness of sharing in it. The proconsul of Asia being absent in order to wait on the emperors, probably Valerian and Galien, the governor of Lycia, residing at Patara, to show his zeal for the idols, published an order on the festival of Serapis, to oblige all to offer sacrifice to that false god. Leo seeing the heathens out of superstition, and some Christians out of fear, going in crowds to adore the idol, sighed within himself, and went to offer up his prayers to the true God, on the tomb of St. Paregorius, to which he passed before the temple of Serapis, it lying in his way to the martyr's tomb. The heathens that were sacrificing in it knew him to be a Christian by his modesty. He had exercised himself from his childhood in the austerities and devotions of an ascetic life, and possessed, in an eminent degree, chastity, temperance, and all other virtues. His clothes were of a coarse cloth made of camel's hair. Not long after his return home from the tomb of the martyr, with his mind full of the glorious exit of his friend, he fell asleep, and from a dream he had on that occasion, understood, when he awaked, that God called him to a conflict of the same kind with that of St. Paregorius, which filled him with inexpressible joy and comfort. Wherefore, the next time he visited the martyr's tomb, instead of going to the place through by-roads, he went boldly through the market-place, and by the Tychæaum, or temple of Fortune, which he saw illuminated with lanterns. He pitied their blindness; and, being moved with zeal for the honor of the true God, he made no scruple to break as many of the lanterns as were within reach, and trampled on the tapers in open view, saying: "Let your gods revenge the injury if they are able to do it." The priest of the idol having raised the populace, cried out: "Unless this impiety be punished, the goddess Fortune will withdraw her protection from the city." An account of this affair soon reached the ears of the governor, who ordered the saint to be brought before him, and on his appearance addressed him in this manner; "Wicked wretch, thy sacrilegious action surely bespeaks thee either ignorant of the immortal gods, or downright mad, in flying in the face of our most divine emperors, whom we justly regard as secondary deities and saviours." The martyr replied with great calmness: "You are under a great mistake, in supposing a plurality of gods; there is but one, who is the God of heaven and earth, and who does not stand in need of being worshipped after that gross manner that men worship idols. The most acceptable sacrifice we can offer him is that of a contrite and humble heart." "Answer to your indictment," said the governor, "and don't preach your Christianity. I thank the gods, however, that they have not suffered you to lie concealed after such a sacrilegious attempt. Choose therefore either to sacrifice to them, with those that are here present, or to suffer the punishment due to your impiety." The martyr said: "The fear of torments shall never draw me from my duty. I am ready to suffer all you shall inflict. All your tortures cannot reach beyond death. Eternal life is not to be attained but by the way of tribulations; the scripture accordingly {430} informs us, _that narrow is the way that leads to life_." "Since you own the way you walk in is narrow," said the governor, "exchange it for ours, which is broad and commodious." "When I called it narrow," said the martyr, "this was only because it is not entered without difficulty, and that its beginnings are often attended with afflictions and persecutions for justice sake. But being once entered, it is not difficult to keep in it by the practice of virtue, which helps to widen it and render it easy to those that persevere in it, which has been done by many." The multitude of Jews and Gentiles cried out to the judge to silence him. But he said, he allowed him liberty of speech, and even offered him his friendship if he would but sacrifice. The confessor answered: "You seem to have forgot what I just before told you, or you would not have urged me again to sacrifice. Would you have me acknowledge for a deity that which has nothing in its nature of divine?" These last words put the governor in a rage, and he ordered the saint to be scourged. While the executioners were tearing his body unmercifully, the judge said to him: "This is nothing to the torments I am preparing for you. If you would have me stop here, you must sacrifice." Leo said: "O judge, I will repeat to you again what I have so often told you: I own not your gods, nor will I ever sacrifice to them." The judge said: "Only say the gods are great, and I will discharge you. I really pity your old age." Leo answered: "If I allow them that title, it can only be with regard to their power of destroying their worshippers." The judge in a fury said: "I will cause you to be dragged over rocks and stones, till you are torn to pieces." Leo said: "Any kind of death is welcome to me, that procures me the kingdom of heaven, and introduces me into the company of the blessed." The judge said: "Obey the edict, and say the gods are the preservers of the world, or you shall die." The martyr answered: "You do nothing but threaten: why don't you proceed to effects?" The mob began to be clamorous, and the governor, to appease them, was forced to pronounce sentence on the saint, which was, that he should be tied by the feet, and dragged to the torrent, and there executed; and his orders were immediately obeyed in a most cruel manner. The martyr being upon the point of consummating his sacrifice, and obtaining the accomplishment of all his desires, with his eyes lifted up to heaven, prayed thus aloud: "I thank thee, O God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, for not suffering me to be long separated from thy servant Paregorius. I rejoice in what has befallen me as the means of expiating my past sins. I commend my soul to the care of thy holy angels, to be placed by them where it will have nothing to fear from the judgments of the wicked. But thou, O Lord, who willest not the death of a sinner, but his repentance, grant them to know thee, and to find pardon for their crimes, through the merits of thy only Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen." He no sooner repeated the word Amen, together with an act of thanksgiving, but he expired. His executioners then took the body and cast it down a great precipice into a deep pit; and notwithstanding the fall, it seemed only to have received a few slight bruises. The very place which was before a frightful precipice, seemed to have changed its nature; and the acts say, no more dangers or accidents happened in it to travellers. The Christians took up the martyr's body, and found it of a lively color, and entire, and his face appeared comely and smiling; and they buried it in the most honorable manner they could. The Greeks keep his festival on the 18th of February. {431} FEBRUARY XIX. ST. BARBATUS, OR BARBAS, C. BISHOP OF BENEVENTO. From his two authentic lives in Bollandus, t. 3, Febr. p. 139. See Ughelli, Italia Sacra, t. 8, p. l3. A.D. 682. ST. BARBATUS was born in the territory of Benevento, in Italy, towards the end of the pontificate of St. Gregory the Great, in the beginning of the seventh century. His parents gave him a Christian education, and Barbatus in his youth laid the foundation of that eminent sanctity which recommends him to our veneration. Devout meditation on the holy scriptures was his chief entertainment; and the innocence, simplicity, and purity of his manners, and extraordinary progress in all virtues, qualified him for the service of the altar, to which he was assumed by taking holy orders as soon as the canons of the church would allow it. He was immediately employed by his bishop in preaching, for which he had an extraordinary talent; and, after some time, made curate of St. Basil's, in Morcona, a town near Benevento. His parishioners were steeled in their irregularities, and averse from whatever looked like establishing order and discipline among them. As they desired only to slumber on in their sins, they could not bear the remonstrances of their pastor, who endeavored to awake them to a sense of their miseries, and to sincere repentance: they treated him as a disturber of their peace, and persecuted him with the utmost violence. Finding their malice conquered by his patience and humility, and his character shining still more bright, they had recourse to slanders, in which, such was their virulence and success, that he was obliged to withdraw his charitable endeavors among them. By these fiery trials, God purified his heart from all earthly attachments, and perfectly crucified it to the world. Barbatus returned to Benevento, where he was received with joy by those who were acquainted with his innocence and sanctity. The seed of Christianity had been first sown at Benevento by St. Potin, who is said to have been sent thither by St. Peter, and is looked upon as the first bishop of this see. We have no names of his successors till St. Januarius, by whom this church was exceedingly increased, and who was honored with the crown of martyrdom in 305. Totila, the Goth, laid the city of Benevento in ruins, in 545. The Lombards having possessed themselves of that country, repaired it, and king Autharis gave it to Zotion, a general among those invaders, with the title of a duchy, about the year 598, and his successors governed it, as sovereign dukes, for several ages. These Lombards were at that time chiefly Arians; but among them there remained many idolaters, and several at Benevento had embraced the Catholic faith, even before the death of St. Gregory the Great, with their duke Arichis, a warm friend of that holy pope. But when St. Barbatus entered upon his ministry in that city, the Christians themselves retained many idolatrous superstitions, which even their duke, or prince Romuald, authorized by his example, though son of Grimoald, king of the Lombards, who had edified all Italy by his conversion. They expressed a religious veneration to a golden viper, and prostrated themselves before it: they paid also a superstitious honor to a tree, on which they hung {432} the skin of a wild beast, and these ceremonies were closed by public games, in which the skin served for a mark at which bowmen shot arrows over their shoulder. St. Barbatus preached zealously against these abuses, and labored long to no purpose: yet desisted not, but joined his exhortations with fervent prayer and rigorous fasting, for the conversion of this unhappy people. At length he roused their attention by foretelling the distress of their city, and the calamities which it was to suffer from the army of the emperor Constans, who, landing soon after in Italy, laid siege to Benevento. In their extreme distress, and still more grievous alarms and fears, they listened to the holy preacher, and, entering into themselves, renounced their errors and idolatrous practices. Hereupon St. Barbatus gave them the comfortable assurance that the siege should be raised, and the emperor worsted: which happened as he had foretold. Upon their repentance, the saint with his own hand cut down the tree which was the object of their superstition, and afterwards melted down the golden viper which they adored, of which he made a chalice for the use of the altar. Ildebrand, bishop of Benevento, dying during the siege, after the public tranquillity was restored, St. Barbatus was consecrated bishop on the 10th of March, 653; for this see was only raised to the archiepiscopal dignity by pope John XIII., about the year 965. Barbatus, being invested with the episcopal character, pursued and completed the good work which he had so happily begun, and destroyed every trace or the least remain of superstition in the prince's closet, and in the whole state. In the year 680 he assisted in a council held by pope Agatho at Rome, and the year following in the sixth general council held at Constantinople against the Monothelites. He did not long survive this great assembly, for he died on the 29th of February, 682, being about seventy years old, almost nineteen of which he had spent in the episcopal chair. He is named in the Roman Martyrology, and honored at Benevento among the chief patrons of that city. * * * * * Many sinners are moved by alarming sensible dangers or calamities to enter into themselves, on whom the terrors of the divine judgment make very little impression. The reason can only be a supine neglect of serious reflection, and a habit of considering them only transiently, and as at a distance; for it is impossible for any one who believes these great truths, if he takes a serious review of them, and has them present to his mind, to remain insensible: transient glances effect not a change of heart. Among the pretended conversions which sickness daily produces, very few bear the characters of sincerity, as appears by those who, after their recovery, live on in their former lukewarmness and disorders.[1] St. Austin, in a sermon which he made upon the news that Rome had been sacked by the barbarians, relates,[2] that not long before, at Constantinople, upon the appearance of an unusual meteor, and a rumor of a pretended prediction that the city would be destroyed by fire from heaven, the inhabitants were seized with a panic fear, all began to do penance like Ninive, and fled, with the emperor at their head, to a great distance from the city. After the term appointed for its pretended destruction was elapsed, they sent scouts to the city, which they had left quite empty, and, hearing that it was still standing, returned to it, and with their fears forgot their repentance and all their good resolutions. To prevent the danger of penitents imposing upon themselves by superficial conversions, St. Barbatus took all necessary precautions to improve their {433} first dispositions to a sincere and perfect change of heart, and to cut off and remove all dangerous occasions of temptations. Footnotes: 1. The devil was sick, the devil a monk would be; The devil was well, the devil no monk was he. 2. S. Aug. Serm. de Excidio Urbis, c. 6, t. 6, p. 627, ed. Ben. FEBRUARY XX. SS. TYRANNIO, BISHOP OF TYRE, ZENOBIUS, AND OTHERS, MARTYRS IN PHOENICIA, ETC. From Eusebius, Hist l. 8, c.7, 13, 25. St. Jerom in Chron. Euseb. A.D. 304, 310. EUSEBIUS, the parent of church history, and an eye-witness of what he relates concerning these martyrs, gives the following account of them. "Several Christians of Egypt, whereof some had settled in Palestine, others at Tyre, gave astonishing proofs of their patience and constancy in the faith. After innumerable stripes and blows, which they cheerfully underwent, they were exposed to wild beasts, such as leopards, wild bears, boars, and bulls. I myself was present when these savage creatures, accustomed to human blood, being let out upon them, instead of devouring them, or tearing them to pieces, as it was natural to expect, stood off, refusing even to touch or approach them, at the same time that they fell foul on their keepers, and others that came in their way.[1] The soldiers of Christ were the only persons they refused, though these martyrs, pursuant to the order given them, tossed about their arms, which was thought a ready way to provoke the beasts, and stir them up against them. Sometimes, indeed, they were perceived to rush towards them with their usual impetuosity, but, withheld by a divine power, they suddenly withdrew; and this many times, to the great admiration of all present. The first having done no execution, others were a second and a third time let out upon them, but in vain; the martyrs standing all the while unshaken, though many of them very young. Among them was a youth of not yet twenty, who had his eyes lifted up to heaven, and his arms extended in the form of a cross, not in the least daunted, nor trembling, nor shifting his place, while the bears and leopards, with their jaws wide open, threatening immediate death, seemed just ready, to tear him to pieces; but, by a miracle, not being suffered to touch him, they speedily withdrew. Others were exposed to a furious bull, which had already gored and tossed into the air several infidels who had ventured too near, and left them half dead: only the martyrs he could not approach; he stopped, and stood scraping the dust with his feet, and though he seemed to endeavor it with his utmost might, butting with his horns on every side, and pawing the ground with his feet, being also urged on by red-hot iron goads, it was all to no purpose. After repeated trials of this kind with other wild beasts, with as little success as the former, the saints were slain by the sword, and their bodies cast into the sea. Others who refused to sacrifice were beaten {434} to death, or burned, or executed divers other ways." This happened in the year 304, under Veturius, a Roman general, in the reign of Dioclesian. The church on this day commemorates the other holy martyrs, whose crown was deferred till 310. The principal of these was St. Tyrannio, bishop of Tyre, who had been present at the glorious triumph of the former, and encouraged them in their conflict. He had not the comfort to follow them till six years after; when, being conducted from Tyre to Antioch, with St. Zenobius, a holy priest and physician of Sidon, after many torments he was thrown into the sea, or rather into the river Orontes, upon which Antioch stands, at twelve miles distance front the sea. Zenobius expired on the rack, while his sides and body were furrowed and laid open with iron hooks and nails. St. Sylvanus, bishop of Emisa, in Phoenicia, was, some time after, under Maximinus, devoured by wild beasts in the midst of his own city, with two companions, after having governed that church forty years. Peleus and Nilus, two other Egyptian priests, in Palestine, were consumed by fire with some others. St. Sylvanus, bishop of Gaza, was condemned to the copper mines of Phoenon, near Petra, in Arabia, and afterwards beheaded there with thirty-nine others. St. Tyrannio is commemorated on the 20th of February, in the Roman Martyrology, with those who suffered under Veturius, at Tyre, in 304. St. Zenobius, the priest and physician of Sidon, who suffered with him at Antioch, on the 29th of October: St. Sylvanus of Emisa, to whom the Menology gives many companions, on the 6th of February: St. Sylvanus of Gaza, on the 29th of May. * * * * * The love of Christ triumphed in the hearts of so many glorious martyrs, upon racks, in the midst of boiling furnaces, or flames, and in the claws or teeth of furious wild beasts. How many inflamed with his love have forsaken all things to follow him, despising honors, riches, pleasures, and the endearments of worldly friends, to take up their crosses, and walk with constancy in the narrow paths of a most austere penitential life! We also pretend to love him: but what effect has this love upon us? what fruit does it produce in our lives? If we examine our own hearts, we shall be obliged to confess that we have great reason to fear that we deceive ourselves. What pains do we take to rescue our souls from the slavery of the world, and the tyranny of self-love, to purge our affections of vice, or to undertake any thing for the divine honor, and the sanctification of our souls? Let us earnestly entreat our most merciful Redeemer, by the power of this his holy love, to triumph over all his enemies, which are our unruly passions, in our souls, and perfectly to subdue our stubborn hearts to its empire. Let it be our resolution, from this moment, to renounce the love of the world, and all self-love, to seek and obey him alone. Footnotes: 1. Rufinus adds, that these beasts killed several of the keepers and spectators. It is in this sense that some have translated this passage with Nicephorus. See Vales. In Annot. p. 165. But it seems improbable that the spectators, who were separated from the arena by iron rails, and seated on stone benches gradually ascending ten or twenty men deep all round, should be killed or injured by the beasts, unless some were so rash as to venture within the rails with the keepers; which we see several do in the combats of wild beasts. This, therefore, we are to restrain to the keepers and those who kept them company. S. SADOTH, BISHOP OF SELEUCIA AND CTESIPHON, WITH 128 COMPANIONS, MARTYRS. From his genuine acts in Metaphrastes, Bollandus, and Ruinart; but more correctly in the original Chaldaic given us by Assemani, t. 1, p. 83. Orsi, Hist. t. 5, l. 13. See Le Quien, Oriens Christ. t. 2, p. 1108. A.D. 342. SADOTH, as he is called by the Greeks and Latins, is named in the original Persian language, Schiadustes, which signifies "friend of the king," from _schiah_, king, and _dust_, friend. His unspotted purity of heart, his ardent zeal, and the practice of all Christian virtues, prepared him, from his {435} youth, for the episcopal dignity, and the crown of martyrdom. St. Simeon, bishop of Selec, or Seleucia, and Ctesiphon, then the two capital cities of Persia, situate on the river Tigris, being translated to glory by martyrdom, in the beginning of the persecution raised by Sapor II., in 341, St. Sadoth was chosen three months after to fill his see, the most important in that empire, but the most exposed to the storm. This grew more violent on the publication of a new edict against the Christians, which made it capital to confess Christ. To wait with patience the manifestation of the divine will, St. Sadoth, with part of his clergy, lay hid for some time; which did not however hinder him from affording his distressed flock all proper assistance and encouragement, but rather enabled him to do it with the greater fruit. During this retreat he had a vision which seemed to indicate that the time was come for the holy bishop to seal his faith with his blood. This he related to his priests and deacons, whom he assembled for that purpose. "I saw," said he, "in my sleep, a ladder environed with light and reaching from earth to the heavens. St. Simeon was at the top of it, and in great glory. He beheld me at the bottom, and said to me, with a smiling countenance: 'Mount up, Sadoth, fear not. I mounted yesterday, and it is your turn to-day:' which means, that as he was slain last year, so I am to follow him this." He was not wanting on this occasion to exhort his clergy, with great zeal and fervor, to make a provision of good works, and employ well their time, till they should be called on in like manner, that they might be in readiness to take possession of their inheritance. "A man that is guided by the Spirit," says St. Maruthas, author of these acts, "fears not death; he loves God, and goes to him with an incredible ardor; but he who lives according to the desires of the flesh, trembles, and is in despair at its approach: he loves the world, and it is with grief that he leaves it." The second year of the persecution, king Sapor coming to Seleucia, Sadoth was apprehended, with several of his clergy, some ecclesiastics of the neighborhood, end certain monks and nuns belonging to his church, to the amount of one hundred and twenty-eight persons. They were thrown into dungeons, where, during five months' confinement, they suffered incredible misery and torments. They were thrice called out, and put to the rack or question; their legs were straight bound with cords, which were drawn with so much violence, that their bones breaking, were heard to crack like sticks in a fagot. Amidst these tortures the officers cried out to them: "Adore the sun, and obey the king, if you would save your lives." Sadoth answered in the name of all, that the sun was but a creature, the work of God, made for the use of mankind; that they would pay supreme adoration to none but the Creator of heaven and earth, and never be unfaithful to him; that it was indeed in their power to take away their lives, but that this would be the greatest favor they could do them; wherefore he conjured them not to spare them, or delay their execution. The officers said: "Obey! or know that your death is certain, and immediate." The martyrs all cried out with one voice: "We shall not die, but live and reign eternally with God and his Son Jesus Christ. Wherefore inflict death as soon as you please; for we repeat it to you that we will not adore the sun, nor obey the unjust edicts." Then sentence of death was pronounced upon them all by the king; for which they thanked God, and mutually encouraged each other. They were chained two and two together, and led out of the city to execution, singing psalms and canticles of joy as they went. Being arrived at the place of their martyrdom, they raised their voices still higher, blessing and thanking God for his mercy in bringing them thither, and begging the grace of perseverance, and that by this baptism of their blood they might enter into his glory. These prayers and praises of God did not cease but with {436} the life of the last of this blessed company. St. Sadoth, by the king's orders, was separated from them, and sent into the province of the Huzites, where he was beheaded. He thus rejoined his happy flock in the kingdom of glory. Ancient Chaldaic writers quoted by Assemani say, St. Schiadustes, or Sadoth, was nephew to Simeon Barsaboe, being son to his sister. He governed his church only eight months, and finished his martyrdom after five months imprisonment, in the year 342, and of king Sapor II. the thirty-third. These martyrs are honored in the Roman Martyrology on this day. ST. ELEUTHERIUS, MARTYR, BISHOP OF TOURNAY. A.D. 532. HE was born at Tournay, of Christian parents, whose family had been converted to Christ by St. Piat, one hundred and fifty years before. The faith had declined at Tournay ever since St. Piat's martyrdom, by reason of its commerce with the heathen islands of Taxandria, now Zealand, and by means of the heathen French kings, who resided some time at Tournay. Eleutherius was chosen bishop of that city in 486; ten years after which king Clovis was baptized at Rheims. Eleutherius converted the greatest part of the Franks in that country to the faith, and opposed most zealously certain heretics who denied the mystery of the Incarnation, by whom he was wounded on the head with a sword, and died of the wound five weeks after, on the first of July, in 532. The most ancient monuments, relating to this saint, seem to have perished in a great fire which consumed his church, and many other buildings at Tournay, in 1092, with his relics. See Miræus, and his life written in the ninth century, extant in Bollandus, p. 187.[1] Of the sermons ascribed to St. Eleutherius, in the Library of the Fathers t. 8, none seem sufficiently warranted genuine, except three on the Incarnation and Birth of Christ, and the Annunciation. See Dom. Rivet, Hist. Littér., t. 3, p. 154, and t. 5, pp. 40, 41. Gallia Christ. Nova, t. 3, p. 571, and Henschenius, p 180. Footnotes: 1. This author wrote before the invasion of the Normans, and the translation of the saint's relics; but long after the saint's death, and by making him born in the reign of Dioclesian, yet contemporary with St. Medard, destroys his own credit. Some years after, another author much enlarged this life, and inserted a history of the translation of the relics of this saint, made in 897. A third writer added a relation of later miracles, and of the translation of these relics into the city of Tourney, in 1164. All these authors deserve little notice, except in relating facts of their own time. ST. MILDRED, V. ABBESS. EORMENBURGA,[1] pronounced Ermenburga, otherwise called Domneva, was married to Merwald, a son of king Penda, and had by him three daughters and a son, who all consecrated their whole estates to pious uses, and were all honored by our ancestors among the saints. Their names were Milburg, Mildred, Mildgithe, and Mervin. King Egbert caused his two nephews, Ethelred and Ethelbright, to be secretly murdered in the isle of Thanet. Count Thunor, whom he had charged with that execrable commission, buried the bodies of the two princes under the king's throne, in the {437} royal palace at Estrage, now called Estria. The king is said to have been miraculously terrified by seeing a ray of bright light dart from the heavens upon their grave, and, in sentiments of compunction, he sent for their sister Eormenburga, out of Mercia, to pay her the weregeld, which was the mulct for a murder, ordained by the laws to be paid to the relations of the persons deceased. In satisfaction for the murder, he settled on her forty-eight ploughs of land, which she employed in founding a monastery, in which prayers might be continually put up to God for the repose of the souls of the two princes. This pious establishment was much promoted by the king, and thus the monastery was founded about the year 670; not 596, as Leland[2] and Speed mistake. The monastery was called Menstrey, or rather Minstre, in the isle of Thanet. Domneva sent her daughter Mildred to the abbey of Chelles, in France, where she took the religious veil, and was thoroughly instructed in all the duties of that state, the perfect spirit of which she had imbibed from her tender years. Upon her return to England she was consecrated first abbess of Minstre, in Thanet, by St. Theodorus, archbishop of Canterbury, and at the same time received to the habit seventy chosen virgins. She behaved herself by humility as the servant of her sisters, and conducted them to virtue by the authority of her example, for all were ashamed not to imitate her watching, mortification, and prayer, and not to walk according to her spirit. Her aunt, Ermengitha, served God in the same house with such fervor, that after her death she was ranked among the saints, and her tomb, situated a mile from the monastery, was famous for the resort of devout pilgrims. St. Mildred died of a lingering, painful illness, towards the close of the seventh century. This great monastery was often plundered by the Danes, and the nuns and clerks murdered, chiefly in the years 980 and 1011. After the last of these burnings, here were no more nuns, but only a few secular priests. In 1033, the remains of St. Mildred were translated to the monastery of St. Austin's at Canterbury, and venerated above all the relics of that holy place, says Malmesbury,[3] who testifies frequent miracles to have been wrought by them: Thorn and others confirm the same. Two churches in London bear her name. See Thorn's Chronicle, inter Decem Scriptores, coll. 1770, 1783, 1906. Harpsfield: an old Saxon book, entitled, Narratio de Sanctis qui in Angliâ quiescunt published by Hickes, Thesaur., t. 1, in Dissert. Epistolari, p. 116. Monast. Anglic. t. 1, p. 84. Stevens Supplem. vol. 1, p. 518. Reyneri Apostolat. Bened. t. 1, p. 61, and Lewis's History of the isle of Thanet, (printed at London in 1723, in 4to.,) pp. 51, 62, and in Append. n. 23. Footnotes: 1. Eadbald, king of Kent, had by his queen Emma, daughter to a king of the French, St. Eanswithe, (whose relics were venerated at Folkstone, till the change of religion,) and two sons, Eorcombert (afterwards king) and Eormenred, surnamed Clito. This last left four children by his wife Oslave, namely, Eurmenburga and St. Eormengitha, with two sons, St. Ethelred and St. Ethelbright. King Eorcombert had, by his queen Sexburga, Egbert and Lothaire, successively kings, and St. Eormenilda and St. Ercongota. Eormenburga was surnamed Moldeva, as we are assured by the ancient English Saxon account of these saints, published by Hickes: though Capgrave frequently speaks of them as different women. 2. Leland, Collect. t. 1, p. 97. 3. L. 2, de Reg. Angl. c. 13. ST. EUCHERIUS, BISHOP OF ORLEANS, C. OUR saint's mother, who was a lady of eminent virtue, and of the first quality at Orleans, while she was with child of him, made a daily offering of him to God, and begged nothing for him but divine grace. When he was born, his parents dedicated him to God, and set him to study when he was but seven years old, resolving to omit nothing that could be done towards cultivating his mind, or forming his heart. His improvement in virtue kept pace with his progress in learning: he meditated assiduously on the sacred writings, especially on St. Paul's manner of speaking on the world, and its enjoyments, as mere empty shadows, that deceive us and vanish away;[1] and took particular notice that the apostle says, the wisdom of those who love the pleasures and riches of this life is no better than folly before God. {438} These reflections at length sunk so deep into his mind, that he resolved to quit the world. To put this design in execution, about the year 714, he retired to the abbey of Jumiege, on the banks of the Seine, in the diocese of Rouen. When he had spent six or seven years here, in the practice of penitential austerities and obedience, Suavaric, his uncle, bishop of Orleans, died: the senate and people, with the clergy of that city, deputed persons to Charles Martel, mayor of the palace, to beg his permission to elect Eucherius to the vacant see. That prince granted their request, and sent with them one of his principal officers of state to conduct him from his monastery to Orleans. The saint's affliction at their arrival was inexpressible, and he entreated the monks to screen him from the dangers that threatened him. But they preferred the public good to their private inclinations, and resigned him up for that important charge. He was received at Orleans, and consecrated with universal applause, in 721. Though he received the episcopal character with grievous apprehensions of its obligations and dangers, he was not discouraged, but had recourse to the supreme pastor for assistance in the discharge of his duties, and devoted himself entirely to the care of his church. He was indefatigable in instructing and reforming his flock, and his zeal and even reproofs were attended with so much sweetness and charity, that it was impossible not to love and obey him. Charles Martel, to defray the expenses of his wars and other undertakings, and to recompense those that served him, often stripped the churches of their revenues, and encouraged others to do the same. St. Eucherius reproved these encroachments with so much zeal, that flatterers represented it to the prince as an insult offered to his person; therefore, in the year 737, Charles, in his return to Paris, after having defeated the Saracens in Aquitaine, took Orleans in his way, ordered Eucherius to follow him to Verneuil upon the Oise, in the diocese of Beauvais, where he then kept his court, and banished him to Cologne. The extraordinary esteem which his virtue procured him in that city, moved Charles to order him to be conveyed thence to a strong place in Hasbain, now called Haspengaw, in the territory of Liege, under the guard of Robert, governor of that country. The governor was so charmed with his virtue, that he made him the distributer of his large alms, and allowed him to retire to the monastery of Sarchinium, or St. Tron's. Here prayer and contemplation were his whole employment, till the year 743, in which he died on the 20th of February. He is named in the Roman, and other martyrologies. See his original life by one of the same age, with the preliminary dissertation of Henschenius, and the remarks of Mabillon, sæc. 3, Ben. The pretended vision of the damnation of Charles Martel, is an evident interpolation, found only in later copies and in Surius. Footnotes: 1. 1. Cor. vii {}, m. 19. ST. ULRICK, A RECLUSE. HE was born near Bristol, and being promoted to the priesthood, took great pleasure in hunting, till being touched by divine grace, he retired near Hoselborough in Dorsetshire, where he led a most austere and holy life. He died on the 20th of February, in 1154. See Matthew Paris, Ford Henry of Huntingdon, and Harpsfield, sæc. 12, c. 29 {439} FEBRUARY XXI. ST. SEVERIANUS, MARTYR. BISHOP OF SCYTHOPHOLIS. From the life of St. Euthymius, written by Cyril the monk; a letter of the emperor Marcia{}agrius, l. 2, c. 5. Nicephorus Calixt. l. 15, c. 9, collected by Bollandus, p. 246. A.D. 452, or 453. IN the reign of Marcian and St. Pulcheria, the council of Chalcedon which condemned the Eutychian heresy, was received by St. Euthymius, and by a great part of the monks of Palestine. But Theodosius, an ignorant Eutychian monk, and a man of a most tyrannical temper, under the protection of the empress Eudoxia, widow of Theodosius the Younger, who lived at Jerusalem, perverted many among the monks themselves, and having obliged Juvenal, bishop of Jerusalem, to withdraw, unjustly possessed himself of that important see, and in a cruel persecution which he raised, filled Jerusalem with blood, as the emperor Marcian assures us: then, at the head of a band of soldiers, he carried desolation over the country. Many, however, had the courage to stand their ground. No one resisted him with greater zeal and resolution than Severianus, bishop of Scythopolis, and his recompense was the crown of martyrdom; for the furious soldiers seized his person, dragged him out of the city, and massacred him in the latter part of the year 452, or in the beginning of the year 453. His name occurs in the Roman Martyrology, on the 21st of February. * * * * * Palestine, the country which for above one thousand four hundred years had been God's chosen inheritance under the Old Law, when other nations were covered with the abominations of idolatry, had been sanctified by the presence, labors, and sufferings of our divine Redeemer, and had given birth to his church, and to so many saints, became often the theatre of enormous scandals, and has now, for many ages, been enslaved to the most impious and gross superstitions. So many flourishing churches in the East which were planted by the labors of the chiefest among the apostles, watered with the blood of innumerable glorious martyrs, illustrated with the bright light of the Ignatiuses, the Polycarps, the Basils, the Ephrems, and the Chrysostoms, blessed by the example and supported by the prayers of legions of eminent saints, are fallen a prey to almost universal vice and infidelity. With what floods of tears can we sufficiently bewail so grievous a misfortune, and implore the divine mercy in behalf of so many souls! How ought we to be alarmed at the consideration of so many dreadful examples of God's inscrutable judgments, and tremble for ourselves! _Let him who stands beware lest he fall_. _Hold fast what thou hast_, says the oracle of the Holy Ghost to every one of us, _lest another bear away thy crown_. {440} SS. GERMAN, ABBOT OF GRANFEL, AND RANDAUT, OR RANDOALD, MARTYRS. From their acts, written by the priest Babolen in the same age, in Bollandus, Le Cointe, ad an. 662. Bulteau, Hist. Mon. d'Occid. l. 3, c. 44, p. 661. ABOUT THE YEAR 666. ST. GERMAN, or GERMANUS, was son of a rich senator of Triers, and brought up from the cradle under the care of Modoald, bishop of Triers. At seventeen years of age, he gave all he could dispose of to the poor, and with Modoald's consent applied himself to St. Arnoul, who having resigned his dignities of bishop of Metz, and minister of state under Dagobert, then led an eremitical life in a desert in Lorrain, near Romberg, or Remiremont. That great saint, charmed with the innocence and fervor of the tender young nobleman, received him in the most affectionate manner, and gave him the monastic tonsure. Under such a master the holy youth made great progress in a spiritual life, and after some time, having engaged a younger brother, called Numerian, to forsake the world, he went with him to Romberg, or the monastery of St. Romaric, a prince of royal blood, who, resigning the first dignity and rank which he enjoyed in the court of king Theodebert, had founded in his own castle, in concert with his friend St. Arnoul, a double house, one larger for nuns, the other less for monks; both known since under the name of Remiremont, situated on a part of Mount Vosge. St. Romaric died in 653, and is named in the Roman Martyrology on the 8th of December, on which his festival is kept at Remiremont, and that of the Blessed Virgin deferred to the day following. He settled here the rule of Luxeu, or of St. Columban.[1] St. German made the practices of all manner of humiliations, penance, and religion, the object of his earnest ambition, and out of a desire of greater spiritual advancement, after some time passed with his brother to the monastery of Luxeu, then governed by the holy abbot, St. Walbert. Duke Gondo, one of the principal lords of Alsace, having founded a monastery in the diocese of Basil, called the Great Valley, in German, Granfel, and now more commonly Munster-thal, or the Monastery of the valley, St. Walbert appointed St. German abbot of the colony which he settled there. Afterwards the two monasteries of Ursiein, commonly called St. Ursitz, and of St. Paul Zu-Werd, or of the island, were also put under his direction, though he usually resided at Granfel. Catihe, called also Boniface, who succeeded Gondo in the duchy, inherited no share of his charity and religion, and oppressed both the monks and poor inhabitants with daily acts of violence and arbitrary tyranny. The holy abbot bore all private injuries in silence, but often pleaded the cause of the poor. The duke had thrown the magistrates of several villages into prison, and many ways distressed the other inhabitants, laying waste their lands at pleasure, and destroying all the fruits of their toil, and all the means of their poor subsistence. As he was one day ravaging their lands and plundering their houses at the head of a troop of soldiers, St. German went out to meet him, to entreat him to spare a distressed and innocent people. The duke listened to his remonstrances and promised to desist; but while the saint stayed to offer up his prayers in the church of St. Maurice, the {441} soldiers fell again to killing, burning, and plundering: and while St. German was on his road to return to Granfel, with his companion Randoald, commonly called Randaut, they first stripped them, and then, while they were at their prayers, pierced them both with lances, about the year 666. Their relics were deposited at Granfel, and were exposed in a rich shrine till the change of religion, since which time the canonries, into which this monastery was converted, are removed to Telsberg, or Delmont. Footnotes: 1. Remiremont was destroyed in the tenth century by the Hungarians or New Huns, but rebuilt in the reign of Louis III., in the plain beyond the Moselle, at the bottom of the mountain, where a town is formed. It has been, if not from its restoration, at least for several centuries, a noble collegiate church for canonesses, who make proof of nobility for two hundred years, but can marry if they resign their p{}ends; except the abbess, who makes solemn religious vows. SS. DANIEL, PRIEST, AND VERDA, VIRGIN, MARTYRS. From their authentic acts, written by St. Maruthas, in Syriac, and published by Stephen Assemani among the Oriental Martyrs, t. 1, p. 103. A.D. 344. Two years after the martyrdom of St. Milles, Daniel, a priest, and a virgin consecrated to God, named Verda, which in Chaldaic signifies a rose, were apprehended in the province of the Razicheans, in Persia, by an order of the governor, and put to all manner of torments for three months, almost without intermission. Among other tortures, their feet being bored through, were put into frozen water for five days together. The governor, seeing it impossible to overcome their constancy, condemned them to lose their heads. They were crowned on the 25th of the moon of February, which was that year the 21st of that month, in the year of Christ 344, and of king Sapor II., the thirty-fifth. Their names were not known either to the Greek or Latin martyrologists: and their illustrious triumph is recorded in few words by St. Maruthas: but was most glorious in the sight of heaven. B. PEPIN OF LANDEN, MAYOR OF THE PALACE TO THE KINGS CLOTAIRE II., DAGOBERT, AND SIGEBERT. HE was son of Carloman, the most powerful nobleman of Austrasia, who had been mayor to Clotaire I., son of Clovis I. He was grandfather to Pepin of Herstal, the most powerful mayor, whose son was Charles Martel, and grandson Pepin the Short, king of France, in whom began the Carlovingian race. Pepin of Landen, upon the river Geete, in Brabant, was a lover of peace, the constant defender of truth and justice, a true friend to all servants of God, the terror of the wicked, the support of the weak, the father of his country, the zealous and humble defender of religion. He was lord of great part of Brabant, and governor of Austrasia, when Theodebert II., king of that country, was defeated by Theodoric II., king of Burgundy, and soon after assassinated in 612: and Theodoric dying the year following, Clotaire II., king of Soissons, reunited Burgundy, Neustria, and Austrasia to his former dominions, and became sole monarch of France. For the pacific possession of Austrasia he was much indebted to Pepin, whom he appointed mayor of the palace to his son Dagobert I., when, in 622, he declared him king of Austrasia and Neustria. The death of Clotaire II., in 628, put him in possession of all France, except a small part of Aquitaine, with Thoulouse, which was settled upon his younger brother, Charibert. When king Dagobert, forgetful of the maxims instilled into him in his youth, had given himself up to a shameful lust, this faithful minister {442} boldly reproached him with his ingratitude to God, and ceased not till he saw him a sincere and perfect penitent. This great king died in 638, and was buried at St. Denys's. He had appointed Pepin tutor to his son Sigebert from his cradle, and mayor of his palace when he declared him king of Austrasia, in 633. After the death of Dagobert, Clovis II. reigning in Burgundy and Neustria, (by whom Erchinoald was made mayor for the latter, and Flaochat for the former,) Pepin quitted the administration of those dominions, and resided at Metz, with Sigebert, who always considered him as his father, and under his discipline became himself a saint, and one of the most happy among all the French kings. Pepin was married to the blessed Itta, of one of the first families in Aquitaine, by whom he had a son called Grimoald, and two daughters, St. Gertrude, and St. Begga. The latter, who was the elder, was married to Ansigisus, son of St. Arnoul, to whom she bore Pepin of Herstal. B. Pepin, of Landen, died on the 21st of February, in 640, and was buried at Landen; but his body was afterwards removed to Nivelle, where it is now enshrined, as are those of the B. Itta, and St. Gertrude in the same place. His name stands in the Belgi martyrologies, though no other act of public veneration has been paid to his memory, than the enshrining of his relics, which are carried in processions. His name is found in a litany published by the authority of the archbishop of Mechlin. See Bollandus, t. 3, Fehr. p. 250, and Dom Bouquet, Recueil des Hist. de France, t. 2, p. 603. FEBRUARY XXII. THE CHAIR OF ST. PETER AT ANTIOCH. Baronius, Annot. In Martyrol. ad 18 Januarii, the Bollandists, ib. t. 2 p. 182, sect. 5 and 6, and especially Jos. Bianchini, Dissecr. De Romanâ Cathedrâ in notis in Anastatium Biblioth. t. 4, p. 150. THAT Saint Peter, before he went to Rome, founded the see of Antioch, is attested by Eusebius,[1] Origen,[2] St. Jerom,[3] St. Innocent,[4] Pope Gelasius, in his Roman Council,[5] Saint Chrysostom, and others. It was just that the prince of the apostles should take this city under his particular care and inspection, which was then the capital of the East, and in which the faith took so early and so deep root as to give birth in it to the name of Christians. St. Chrysostom says, that St. Peter made there a long stay: St. Gregory the Great,[6] that he was seven years bishop of Antioch; not that he resided there all that time, but only that he had a particular care over that church. If he sat twenty-five years at Rome, the date of his establishing his church at Antioch must be within three years after our Saviour's ascension; for in that supposition he must have gone to Rome in the second year of Claudius. The festival of St. Peter's chair in general, Natale Petri de Cathedrâ, is marked on this day in the most ancient calendar extant, made in the time of pope Liberius, about the year 354.[7] It also occurs in Gregory's sacramentary, {443} and in all the martyrologies. It was kept in France in the sixth century, as appears from the council of Tours,[8] and from Le Cointo.[9] * * * * * In the first ages it was customary, especially in the East, for every Christian to keep the anniversary of his baptism, on which he renewed his baptismal vows, and gave thanks to God for his heavenly adoption: this they called their spiritual birthday. The bishops in like manner kept the anniversary of their own consecration, as appears from four sermons of St. Leo, on the anniversary of his accession or assumption to the pontifical dignity, and this was frequently continued by the people after their decease, out of respect to their memory. St. Leo says, we ought to celebrate the chair of St. Peter with no less joy than the day of his martyrdom; for as in this he was exalted to a throne of glory in heaven, so by the former he was installed head of the church on earth.[10] On this festival we are especially bound to adore and thank the divine goodness for the establishment and propagation of his church, and earnestly to pray that in his mercy he preserve the same, and dilate its pale, that his name may be glorified by all nations, and by all hearts, to the boundaries of the earth, for his divine honor and the salvation of souls, framed to his divine image, and the price of his adorable blood. The church of Christ is his spiritual kingdom: he is not only the architect and founder, but continues to govern it, and by his spirit to animate its members to the end of the world as its invisible head: though he has left in St. Peter and his successors a vicar, or lieutenant, as a visible head, with an established hierarchy for its exterior government. If we love him and desire his honor, if we love men on so many titles linked with us, can we cease weeping and praying, that by his sweet omnipotent grace he subdue all the enemies of his church, converting to it all infidels and apostates? In its very bosom sinners fight against him. Though these continue his members by faith, they are dead members, because he lives not in them by his grace and charity, reigns not in their hearts, animates them not with his spirit. He will indeed always live by grace and sanctity in many members of his mystical body. Let us pray that by the destruction of the tyranny of sin all souls may subject themselves to the reign of his holy love. Good Jesus! for your mercy's sake, hear me in this above all other petitions: never suffer me to be separated from you by forfeiting your holy love: may I remain always _rooted and grounded in your charity_, as is the will of your Father. Eph. iii. Footnotes: 1. Chron. and Hist., l. 3, c. 30. 2. Hom. 6, in Luc. 3. In Catal. c. 1. 4. Ep. 18, t. 2, Conc. p. 1269. 5. Conc. t. 4, p. 1262. 6. Ep. 40, l. 7, t. 2, p. 888, Ed. Ben. 7. Some have imagined that the feast of the chair of St. Peter was not known, at least in Africa, because it occurs not in the ancient calendar of Carthage. But how should the eighth day before the calends of March now appear in it, since the part is lost from the fourteenth before the calends of March to the eleventh before the calends of May? Hence St. Pontius, deacon and martyr, on the eighth before the Ides of March; St. Donatus, and some other African martyrs are not there found. At least it is certain that it was kept at Rome long before that time. St. Leo preached a sermon on St. Peter's chair, (Serm. 100, t. 1, p. 285, ad. Rom.) Quesnel denied it to be genuine in his first edition; but in the second at Lyons, to 1700, he corrected this mistake, and proved this sermon to be St. Leo's; which is more fully demonstrated by Cacciari in his late Roman edition of St. Leo's works, t. 1, p. 285. 8. Can. 22. 9. Ad an. 566. 10. St. Leo Serm. 100, in Cathedrâ S. Petri, t. 1, p. 285, ed. Romanæ. ST. MARGARET OF CORTONA, PENITENT. From her life written by her confessor, in the Acta Sanctorum; by Bollandus, p. 298. Wadding, Annal. FF. Minorum ad an. 1297; and the Lives of the SS. of Third Ord. by Barb. t. 1, p. 508. A.D. 1297 MARGARET was a native of Alviano, in Tuscany. The harshness of a stepmother, and her own indulged propension to vice, cast her headlong into the greatest disorders. The sight of the carcass of a man, half putrefied, {444} who had been her gallant, struck her with so great a fear of the divine judgments, and with so deep a sense of the treachery of this world, that she in a moment became a perfect penitent. The first thing she did was to throw herself at her father's feet, bathed in tears, to beg his pardon for her contempt of his authority and fatherly admonitions. She spent the days and nights in tears: and to repair the scandal she had given by her crimes, she went to the parish church of Alviano; with a rope about her neck, and there asked public pardon for them. After this she repaired to Cortona, and made her most penitent confession to a father of the Order of St. Francis, who admired the great sentiments of compunction with which she was filled, and prescribed her austerities and practices suitable to her fervor. Her conversion happened in the year 1274, the twenty-fifth of her age. She was assaulted by violent temptations of various kinds, but courageously overcame them, and after a trial of three years, was admitted to her profession among the penitents of the third Order of St. Francis, in Cortona. The extraordinary austerities with which she punished her criminal flesh soon disfigured her body. To exterior mortification she joined all sorts of humiliations; and the confusion with which she was covered at the sight of her own sins, pushed her on continually to invent many extraordinary means of drawing upon herself all manner of confusion before men. This model of true penitents, after twenty-three years spent in severe penance, and twenty of them in the religious habit, being worn out by austerities, and consumed by the fire of divine love, died on the 22d of February, in 1297. After the proof of many miracles, Leo X. granted an office in her honor to the city of Cortona, which Urban VIII. extended to the whole Franciscan Order, in 1623, and she was canonized by Benedict XIII. in 1728. SS. THALASSIUS AND LIMNEUS, CC. THEY were contemporaries with the great Theodoret, bishop of Cyr, and lived in his diocese. The former dwelt in a cavern in a neighboring mountain, and was endowed with extraordinary gifts of the Holy Ghost, but was a treasure unknown to the world. His disciple St. Limneus was famous for miraculous cures of the sick, while he himself bore patiently the sharpest colics and other distempers without any human succor. He opened his enclosure only to Theodoret, his bishop, but spoke to others through a window. See Theodoret, Phil. c. 22. ST. BARADAT, C. HE lived in the same diocese, in a solitary hut, made of wood in trellis, like windows, says Theodoret,[1] exposed to all the severities of the weather. He was clothed with the skins of wild beasts, and by conversing continually with God, he attained to an eminent degree of wisdom, and knowledge of heavenly things. He left his wooden prison by the order of the patriarch of Antioch, giving a proof of his humility by his ready obedience. He studied to imitate all the practices of penance, which all the other solitaries of those parts exercised, though of a tender constitution himself. The fervor of his soul, and the fire of divine love, supported him under his incredible labors {445} though his body was weak and infirm. It is sloth that makes us so often allege a pretended weakness of constitution, in the practice of penance and the exercises of devotion, which courage and fervor would not even feel. See Theodoret, Phil. c. 22, t. 3, p. 868, and c. 27. Footnotes: 1. This passage of Theodoret shows, that the windows of the ancients were made of trellis or wicker before the invention of glass; though not universally; for in the ruins of Herculaneum, near Portichi were found windows of a diaphanous thin slate, such as the rich in Rome sometimes used. FEBRUARY XXIII. ST. SERENUS, A GARDENER, MARTYR. From his genuine acts in Ruinart, p. 546. A.D. 327. SERENUS was by birth a Grecian. He quitted estate, friends, and country, to serve God in an ascetic life, that is, in celibacy, penance, and prayer. Coming with this design to Sirmium, in Pannonia or Hungary, he there bought a garden, which he cultivated with his own hands, and lived on the fruits and herbs it produced. The apprehension of the persecution made him hide himself for some months; after which he returned to his garden. On a certain day, there came thither a woman, with her two daughters, to walk. Serenus seeing them come up to him, said, "What do you seek here?" "I take a particular satisfaction," she replied, "in walking in this garden." "A lady of your quality," said Serenus, "ought not to walk here at unseasonable hours, and this you know is an hour you ought to be at home. Some other design brought you hither. Let me advise you to withdraw, and be more regular in your hours and conduct for the future, as decency requires in persons of your sex and condition." It was usual for the Romans to repose themselves at noon, as it is still the custom in Italy. The woman, stung at our saint's charitable remonstrance, retired in confusion, but resolved on revenging the supposed affront. She accordingly writes to her husband, who belonged to the guards of the emperor Maximian, to complain of Serenus as having insulted her. Her husband, on receiving her letter, went to the emperor to demand justice, and said: "While we are waiting on your majesty's person, our wives in distant countries are insulted." Whereupon the emperor gave him a letter to the governor of the province to enable him to obtain satisfaction. With this letter he set out for Sirmium, and presented it to the governor, conjuring him, in the name of the emperor his master, to revenge the affront offered to him in the person of his wife during his absence. "And who is that insolent man," said the magistrate, "who durst insult such a gentleman's wife?" "It is," said he, "a vulgar pitiful fellow, one Serenus, a gardener." The governor ordered him to be immediately brought before him, and asked him his name. "It is Serenus," said he. The judge said: "Of what profession are you?" He answered: "I am a gardener." The governor said: "How durst you have the insolence and boldness to affront the wife of this officer?" Serenus: "I never insulted any woman, to my knowledge, in my life." The governor then said: "Let the witnesses be called in to convict this fellow of the affront he offered this lady in a garden." Serenus, hearing the garden mentioned, recalled this woman to mind, and answered: "I remember that, some time ago, a lady came into my garden at an unseasonable hour, with a design, as she said, to take a walk: and I own I took the liberty to tell her it was against decency {446} for one of her sex and quality to be abroad at such an hour." This plea of Serenus having put the officer to the blush for his wife's action, which was too plain an indication of her wicked purpose and design, he dropped his prosecution against the innocent gardener, and withdrew out of court. But the governor, understanding by this answer that Serenus was a man of virtue, suspected by it that he might be a Christian, such being the most likely, he thought, to resent visits from ladies at improper hours. Wherefore, instead of discharging him, he began to question him on this head, saying: "Who are you, and what is your religion?" Serenus, without hesitating one moment, answered: "I am a Christian." The governor said: "Where have you concealed yourself? and how have you avoided sacrificing to the gods?" "It has pleased God," replied Serenus, "to reserve me for this present time. It seemed awhile ago as if he rejected me as a stone unfit to enter his building, but he has the goodness to take me now to be placed in it; I am ready to suffer all things for his name, that I may have a part in his kingdom with his saints." The governor, hearing this generous answer, burst into rage, and said: "Since you sought to elude by flight the emperor's edicts, and have positively refused to sacrifice to the gods, I condemn you for these crimes to lose your head." The sentence was no sooner pronounced, but the saint was carried off and led to the place of execution, where he was beheaded, on the 23d of February, in 307. The ancient Martyrology attributed to St. Jerom, published at Lucca by Florentinius, joins with him sixty-two others, who, at different times, were crowned at Sirmium. The Roman Martyrology, with others, says seventy-two. The garden affords a beautiful emblem of a Christian's continual progress to the path of virtue. Plants always mount upwards, and never stop in their growth till they have attained to that maturity which the author of nature has prescribed: all the nourishment they,receive ought to tend to this end; if any part wastes itself in superfluities, this is a kind of disease. So in a Christian, every thing ought to carry him towards that perfection which the sanctity of his state requires; and every desire of his soul, every action of his life, to be a step advancing to this in a direct line. When all his inclinations have one uniform bent, and all his labors the same tendency, his progress must be great, because uninterrupted, however imperceptible it may often appear. Even his temporal affairs must be undertaken with this intention, and so conducted as to fall within the compass of this his great design. The saints so regulated all their ordinary actions, their meals, their studies, their conversation and visits, their business and toil, whether tilling a garden or superintending an estate, as to make the love of God their motive, and the accomplishment of his will their only ambition in every action. All travail which leadeth not towards this end is but so much of life misspent and lost, whatever names men may give to their political or military achievements, study of nature, knowledge of distant shores, or cunning in the mysteries of trade, or arts of conversation. Though such actions, when of duty, fall under the order of our salvation, and must be so moderated, directed, and animated with a spirit of religion, as to be made means of our sanctification. But in a Christian life the exercises of devotion, holy desires, and tender affections, which proceed from a spirit of humble compunction, and an ardent love of our Saviour, and by which a soul raises herself up to, and continually sighs after him, are what every one ought most assiduously and most earnestly to study to cultivate. By these is the soul more and more purified, and all her powers united to God, and made heavenly {447} These are properly the most sweet and beautiful flowers of paradise, or of a virtuous life. ST. MILBURGE, V. See Malmesb. l. 2, Regibus, & l. 4, de Pontif. Angl. c. 3. Thorn's Chron. Capgrave Harpsfield, &c. SEVENTH CENTURY. ST. MILBURGE was sister to St. Mildred, and daughter of Merowald, son of Penda, king of Mercia. Having dedicated herself to God in a religious state, she was chosen abbess of Wenlock, in Shropshire, which house she rendered a true paradise of all virtue. The more she humbled herself, the more she was exalted by God; and while she preferred sackcloth to purple and diadems, she became the invisible glory of heaven. The love of purity of heart and holy peace were the subject of her dying exhortation to her dear sisters. She closed her mortal pilgrimage about the end of the seventh century. Malmesbury and Harpsfield write, that many miracles accompanied the translation of her relics, in 1101, on the 26th of May; which Capgrave and Mabillon mistake for the day of her death: but Harpsfield, who had seen the best ancient English manuscripts, assures us that she died on the 23d of February, which is confirmed by all the manuscript additions to the Martyrologies of Bede and others, in which her name occurs, which are followed by the Roman on this day. The abbey of Wenlock was destroyed by the Danes: but a monastery of Cluni monks was afterwards erected upon the same spot, by whom her remains were discovered in a vault in 1101, as Malmesbury, who wrote not long after, relates. B. DOSITHEUS, MONK. From his life, by a fellow-disciple, in Bollandus, p. 38, and from S. Dorotheus, Docum. 1. DOSITHEUS, a young man who had spent his first years in a worldly manner, and in gross ignorance of the first principles of Christianity, came to Jerusalem on the motive of curiosity, to see a place he had heard frequent mention made of in common discourse. Here he became so strongly affected by the sight of a picture representing hell, and by the exposition given him of it by an unknown person, that, on the spot, he forsook the world, and entered into a monastery, where the abbot Seridon gave him the monastic habit, and recommended him to the care of one of his monks, named Dorotheus. This experienced director, sensible of the difficulty of passing from one extreme to another, left his pupil at first pretty much to his own liberty in point of eating, but was particularly careful to instil into him the necessity of a perfect renunciation of his own will in every thing, both great and little. As he found his strength would permit, he daily diminished his allowance, till the quantity of six pounds of bread became reduced to eight ounces. St. Dorotheus proceeded with his pupil after much the same manner in other monastic duties; and thus, by a constant and unreserved denial of his own will, and a perfect submission to his director, he surpassed in virtue the greatest fasters of the monastery. All his actions seemed to have nothing of choice, nothing of his own humor in any circumstance of them, the will of God alone reigned in his heart. At the end of five years he was intrusted with the care of the sick, an office he discharged with such an incomparable vigilance, charity, and sweetness, as procured him a high and {448} universal esteem: the sick in particular were comforted and relieved by the very sight of him. He fell into a spitting of blood and a consumption, but continued to the last denying his own will, and was extremely vigilant to prevent any of its suggestions taking place in his heart; being quite the reverse of those persons afflicted with sickness, who, on that account, think every thing allowed them. Unable to do any thing but pray, he asked continually, and followed, in all his devotions, the directions of his master; and when he could not perform his long exercises of prayer, he declared this with his ordinary simplicity to St. Dorotheus, who said to him: "Be not uneasy, only have Jesus Christ always present in your heart." He begged of a holy old man, renowned in that monastery for sanctity, to pray that God would soon take him to himself. The other answered: "Have a little patience, God's mercy is near." Soon after he said to him: "Depart in peace, and appear in joy before the blessed Trinity, and pray for us." The same servant of God declared after his death, that he had surpassed the rest in virtue, without the practice of any extraordinary austerity. Though he is honored with the epithet of saint, his name is not placed either in the Roman or Greek calendars. B. PETER DAMIAN, OR OF DAMIAN, CARDINAL, BISHOP OF OSTIA. From his life by his disciple, John of Lodi, in Mabill., s. 6. Ben. and from his own writings. Fleury, {} 99, n. 48, and Hist des Ordres Relig. Ceillier, t. 20, p. 512. Henschenius ad 23 Febr. p. 406. A.D. 1072. PETER, surnamed of Damian, was born about the year 988, in Ravenna, of a good family, but reduced. He was the youngest of many children, and, losing his father and mother very young, was left in the hands of a brother who was married, in whose house he was treated more like a slave, or rather like a beast, than one so nearly related; and when grown up, he was sent to keep swine. He one day became master of a piece of money, which, instead of laying it out in something for his own use, he chose to bestow in alms on a priest, desiring him to offer up his prayers for his father's soul. He had another brother called Damian, who was archpriest of Ravenna, and afterwards a monk; who, taking pity on him, had the charity to give him an education. Having found a father in this brother, he seems from him to have taken the surname of Damian, though he often styles himself the Sinner, out of humility. Those who call him De Honestis, confound him with Peter of Ravenna, who was of the family of Honesti. Damian sent Peter to school, first at Faenza, afterwards at Parma, where he had Ivo for his master. By the means of good natural parts and close application, it was not long before he found himself in a capacity to teach others, which he did with great applause, and no less advantage by the profits which accrued to him from his professorship. To arm himself against the allurements of pleasure and the artifices of the devil, he began to wear a rough hair shirt under his clothes, and to inure himself to fasting, watching, and prayer. In the night, if any temptation of concupiscence arose, he got out of bed and plunged himself into the cold river. After this he visited churches, reciting the psalter while he performed this devotion, till the church office began. He not only gave much away in alms, but was seldom without some poor person at his table, and took a pleasure in serving such, or rather Jesus Christ in their persons, with his own hands. But {449} thinking all this to be removing himself from the deadly poison of sin but by halves, he resolved entirely to leave the world and embrace a monastic life, and at a distance from his own country, for the sake of meeting with the fewer obstacles to his design. While his mind was full of these thoughts, two religious of the order of St. Benedict, belonging to Font-Avellano, a desert at the foot of the Apennine in Umbria, happened to call at the place of his abode; and being much edified at their disinterestedness, he took a resolution to embrace their institute, as he did soon after. This hermitage had been founded by blessed Ludolf, about twenty years before St. Peter came thither, and was then in the greatest repute. The hermits here remained two and two together in separate cells, occupied chiefly in prayer and reading. They lived on bread and water four days in the week: on Tuesdays and Thursdays they ate pulse and herbs, which every one dressed in his own cell: on their fast days all their bread was given them by weight. They never used any wine, (the common drink of the country,) except for mass, or in sickness: they went barefoot, used disciplines, made many genuflections, struck their breasts, stood with their arms stretched out in prayer, each according to his strength and devotion. After the night office they said the whole psalter before day. Peter watched long before the signal for matins, and after, with the rest. These excessive watchings brought on him an insomnie, or wakefulness, which was cured with very great difficulty. But he learned from this to use more discretion. He gave a considerable time to sacred studies, and became as well versed in the scriptures, and other sacred learning, as he was before in profane literature. His superior ordered him to make frequent exhortations to the religious, and as he had acquired a very great character for virtue and learning, Guy, abbot of Pomposia, begged his superior to send him to instruct his monastery, which consisted of a hundred monks. Peter stayed there two years, preaching with great fruit, and was then called back by his abbot, and sent to perform the same function in the numerous abbey of St. Vincent, near the mountain called Pietra Pertusa, or the Hollow Rock. His love for poverty made him abhor and be ashamed to put on a new habit, or any clothes which were not threadbare and most mean. His obedience was so perfect, that the least word of any superior, or signal given, according to the rule of the house, for the performance of any duty, made him run that moment to discharge, with the utmost exactness, whatever was enjoined. Being recalled home some time after, and commanded by his abbot, with the unanimous consent of the hermitage, to take upon him the government of the desert after his death, Peter's extreme reluctance only obliged his superior to make greater use of his authority till he acquiesced. Wherefore, at his decease, in 1041, Peter took upon him the direction of that holy family, which he governed with the greatest reputation for wisdom and sanctity. He also founded five other numerous hermitages; in which he placed priors under his inspection. His principal care was to cherish in his disciples the spirit of solitude, charity, and humility. Among them many became great lights of the church, as St. Ralph, bishop of Gubio, whose festival is kept on the 26th of June, St. Dominick, surnamed Loricatus, the 14th of October; St. John of Lodi, his successor in the priory of the Holy Cross, who was also bishop of Gubio, and wrote St. Peter's life; and many others. He was for twelve years much employed in the service of the church by many zealous bishops, and by four popes successively, namely: Gregory VI., Clement II., Leo IX., and Victor II. Their successor, Stephen IX., in 1057, prevailed with him to quit his desert, and made him cardinal bishop of Ostia. But such was his reluctance to the dignity, that nothing less than the pope's {450} threatening him with excommunication, and his commands, in virtue of obedience, could induce Peter to submit. Stephen IX. dying in 1058, Nicholas II. was chosen pope, a man of deep penetration, of great virtue and learning, and very liberal in alms, as our saint testifies, who assisted him in obliging John, bishop of Veletri, an antipope, set up by the capitaneos or magistrates of Rome, to quit his usurped dignity. Upon complaints of simony in the church of Milan, Nicholas II. sent Peter thither as his legate, who chastised the guilty. Nicholas II. dying, after having sat two years and six months, Alexander was chosen pope, in 1062. Peter strenuously supported him against the emperor, who set up an antipope, Cadolaus, bishop of Parma, on whom the saint prevailed soon after to renounce his pretensions, in a council held at Rome; and engaged Henry IV., king of Germany, who was afterwards emperor, to acquiesce in what had been done, though that prince, who in his infancy had succeeded his pious father, Henry III., had sucked in very early the corrupt maxims of tyranny and irreligion. But virtue is amiable in the eyes of its very enemies, and often disarms them of their fury. St. Peter had, with great importunity, solicited Nicholas II. for leave to resign his bishopric, and return to his solitude; but could not obtain it. His successor, Alexander II., out of affection for the holy man, was prevailed upon to allow it, in 1062, but not without great difficulty, and the reserve of a power to employ him in church matters of importance, as he might have occasion hereafter for his assistance. The saint from that time thought himself discharged, not only from the burden of his flock, but also from the quality of superior, with regard to the several monasteries, the general inspection of which he had formerly charged himself with, reducing himself to the condition of a simple monk. In this retirement he edified the church by his penance and compunction, and labored by his writings to enforce the observance of discipline and morality. His style is copious and vehement, and the strictness of his maxims appears in all his works, especially where he treats of the duties of clergymen and monks. He severely rebuked the bishop of Florence for playing a game at chess.[1] That prelate acknowledged his amusement to be a faulty sloth in a man of his character, and received the saint's remonstrance with great mildness, and submitted to his injunction by way of penance, namely: to recite three times the psalter, to wash the feet of twelve poor men, and to give to each a piece of money. He shows those to be guilty of manifold simony, who serve princes or flatter them for the sake of obtaining ecclesiastical preferments.[2] He wrote a treatise to the bishop of Besanzon,[3] against the custom which the canons of that church had of saying the divine office sitting; though he allowed all to sit during the lessons. This saint recommended the use of disciplines whereby to subdue and punish the flesh, which was adopted as a compensation for long penitential fasts. Three thousand lashes, with the recital of thirty psalms, were a redemption of a canonical penance of one year's continuance. Sir Thomas More, St. Francis of Sales, and others, testify that such means of mortification are great helps to tame the flesh, and inure it to the labors of penance; also to remove a hardness of heart and spiritual dryness, and to soften the soul into compunction. But all danger of abuses, excess, and singularity, is to be shunned, and other ordinary bodily mortifications, as watching and fasting, are frequently more advisable. This saint wrote most severely on the obligations of religious men,[4] particularly against their strolling abroad; for one of the most essential qualities of their state is solitude, or at least the spirit {451} of retirement. He complained loudly of certain evasions, by which many palliated real infractions of their vow of poverty. He justly observed: "We can never restore what is decayed of primitive discipline; and if we, by negligence, suffer any diminution in what remains established, future ages will never be able to repair such breaches. Let us not draw upon ourselves so base a reproach; but let us faithfully transmit to posterity the examples of virtue which we have received from our forefathers."[5] The holy man was obliged to interrupt his solitude in obedience to the pope, who sent him in quality of his legate into France, in 1063, commanding the archbishops and others to receive him as himself. The holy man reconciled discords, settled the bounds of the jurisdiction of certain dioceses, and condemned and deposed in councils those who were convicted of simony. He, notwithstanding, tempered his severity with mildness and indulgence towards penitents, where charity and prudence required such a condescension. Henry IV., king of Germany, at eighteen years of age, began to show the symptoms of a heart abandoned to impiety, infamous debauchery, treachery, and cruelty. He married, in 1066, Bertha, daughter to Otho, marquis of Italy, but afterwards, in 1069, sought a divorce, by taking his oath that he had never been able to consummate his marriage. The archbishop of Mentz had the weakness to be gained over by his artifices to favor his desires, in which view he assembled a council at Mentz. Pope Alexander II. forbade him ever to consent to so enormous an injustice, and pitched upon Peter Damian for his legate to preside in that synod, being sensible that a person of the most inflexible virtue, prudence, and constancy, was necessary for so important and difficult an affair, in which passion, power, and craft, made use of every engine in opposition to the cause of God. The venerable legate met the king and bishops at Frankfort, laid before them the orders and instructions of his holiness, and in his name conjured the king to pay a due respect to the law of God, the canons of the church, and his own reputation, and seriously reflect on the public scandal of so pernicious an example. The noblemen likewise all rose up and entreated his majesty never to stain his honor by so foul an action. The king, unable to resist so cogent an authority, dropped his project of a divorce; but remaining the same man in his heart, continued to hate the queen more than ever. Saint Peter hastened back to his desert of Font-Avellano. Whatever austerities he prescribed to others he was the first to practise himself, remitting nothing of them even in his old age. He lived shut up in his cell as in a prison, fasted every day, except festivals, and allowed himself no other subsistence than coarse bread, bran, herbs, and water, and this he never drank fresh, but what he had kept from the day before. He tortured his body with iron girdles and frequent disciplines, to render it more obedient to the spirit. He passed the three first days of every Lent and Advent without taking any kind of nourishment whatever; and often for forty days together lived only on raw herbs and fruits, or on pulse steeped in cold water, without touching so much as bread, or any thing which had passed the fire. A mat spread on the floor was his bed. He used to make wooden spoons and such like useful mean things, to exercise himself at certain hours in manual labor. Henry, archbishop of Ravenna, having been excommunicated for grievous enormities, St. Peter was sent by Pope Alexander II. in quality of legate, to adjust the affairs of the church. When he arrived at Ravenna, in 1072, he found the unfortunate prelate just dead; but brought {452} the accomplices of his crimes to a sense of their guilt, and imposed on them a suitable penance. This was his last undertaking for the church, God being pleased soon after to call him to eternal rest, and to the crown of his labors. Old age and the fatigues of his journey did not make him lay aside his accustomed mortifications, by which he consummated his holocaust. In his return towards Rome, he was stopped by a fever in the monastery of our Lady without the gates of Faenza, and died there on the eighth day of his sickness, while the monks were reciting matins round about him. He passed from that employment which had been the delight of his heart on earth, to sing the same praises of God in eternal glory, on the 22d of February, 1072, being fourscore and three years old. He is honored as patron at Faenza and Font-Avellano, on the 23d of the same month. Footnotes: 1. Opusc. 20, c. 7. 2. Ib. 22. 3. Ib. 29, Nat. Alex. Theo Dogm. l. 2, c. 8, reg. 8. 4. Opusc. 12. 5. The works of St. Peter Damien, printed in three volumes, at Lyons, in 1623, consist of one hundred and fifty-eight letters, fifteen sermons, five lives of saints, namely, of St. Odilo, abbot of Cluni; St. Maurus, bishop of Cesene; St. Romuald; St. Ralph, bishop of Gubio; and St. Dominick Luricatus, and SS. Lucillia and Flora. The third volume contains sixty small tracts, with several prayers and hymns. ST. BOISIL, PRIOR OF MAILROSS, OR MELROSS, C. THE famous abbey of Mailross, which in later ages embraced the Cistercian rule, originally followed that of St. Columba. It was situated upon the river Tweed, in a great forest, and in the seventh century was comprised in the kingdom of the English Saxons in Northumberland, which was extended in the eastern part of Scotland as high as the Frith. Saint Boisil was prior of this house under the holy abbot Eata, who seem to have been both English youths, trained up in monastic discipline by St. Aidan. Boisil was, says Bede, a man of sublime virtues, and endued with a prophetic spirit. His eminent sanctity determined St. Cuthbert to repair rather to Mailross than to Lindisfarne in his youth, and he received from this saint the knowledge of the holy scriptures, and the example of all virtues. St. Boisil had often in his mouth the holy names of the adorable Trinity, and of our divine Redeemer Jesus, which he repeated with a wonderful sentiment of devotion, and often with such an abundance of tears as excited others to weep with him. He would say, frequently, with the most tender affection, "How good a Jesus have we!" At the first sight of St. Cuthbert, he said to the bystanders: "Behold a servant of God." Bede produces the testimony of St. Cuthbert, who declared that Boisil foretold him the chief things that afterwards happened to him in the sequel of his life. Three years beforehand, he foretold the great pestilence of 664, and that he himself should die of it, but Eata, the abbot, should outlive it. Boisil, not content continually to instruct and exhort his religious brethren by word and example, made frequent excursions into the villages to preach to the poor, and to bring straying souls into the paths of truth and of life. St. Cuthbert was taken with the pestilential disease: when St. Boisil saw him recovered, he said to him: "Thou seest, brother, that God hath delivered thee from this disease, nor shalt thou any more feel it, nor die at this time: but my death being at hand, neglect not to learn something of me so long as I shall be able to teach thee, which will be no more than seven days." "And what," said Cuthbert, "will be best for me to read, which may be finished in seven days?" "The gospel of St. John," said he, "which we may in that time read over, and confer upon as much as shall be necessary." For they only sought therein, says Bede, the sincerity of faith working through love, and not the treating of profound questions. Having accomplished this reading in seven days, the man of God, Boisil, falling ill of the aforesaid disease, came to his last day, which he passed over in extraordinary jubilation of soul, out of his earnest desire of being with Christ. In his last moments he often repeated those words of St. Stephen: "Lord Jesus receive my spirit!" Thus he {453} entered into the happiness of eternal light, in the year 664. The instructions which he was accustomed most earnestly to inculcate to his religious brethren were: "That they would never cease giving thanks to God for the gift of their religious vocation; that they would always watch over themselves against self-love, and all attachment to their own will and private judgment, as against their capital enemy; that they would converse assiduously with God by interior prayer, and labor continually to attain to the most perfect purity of heart, this being the true and short road to the perfection of Christian virtue." Out of the most ardent and tender love which he bore our divine Redeemer, and in order daily to enkindle and improve the sane, he was wonderfully delighted with reading every day a part of the gospel of St. John, which for this purpose he divided into seven parts or tasks. St. Cuthbert inherited from him this devotion, and in his tomb was fouled a Latin copy of St. John's gospel, which was in the possession of the present earl of Litchfield, and which his lordship gave to Mr. Thomas Philips, canon of Tongres. Bede relates[1] as an instance that St. Boisil continued after his death to interest himself particularly in obtaining for his country and friends the divine mercy and grace, that he appeared twice to one of his disciples, giving him a charge to assure St. Egbert, who had been hindered from going to preach the gospel to the infidels in Germany, that God commanded him to repair to the monasteries of St. Columba, to instruct them in the right manner of celebrating Easter. These monasteries were, that in the island of Colm-Kill, or Iona, (which was the ordinary burial-place of the kings of Scotland down to Malcolm III.,) and that of Magis, in the isles of Orkney, built by bishop Colman. The remains of St. Boisil were translated to Durham, and deposited near those of his disciple St. Cuthbert, in 1030. Wilson and other English authors mention St. Boisil on the 7th of August; but in the Scottish calendars his name occurs on the 23d of February. See Bede, Hist. l. 4, c. 27, l. 5, c. 10, and in Vitâ S. Cuthberti, c. 8. Footnotes: 1. Hist. l. 5, c. 10. FEBRUARY XXIV. SAINT MATTHIAS, APOSTLE. From Acts i. 21. See Tillemont, t. 1, p. 406. Henschenius, p. 434. ST. CLEMENT of Alexandria[1] assures us, from tradition, that this saint was one of the seventy-two disciples, which is confirmed by Eusebius[2] and St. Jerom;[3] and we learn from the Acts[4] of the apostles, that he was a constant attendant on our Lord, from the time of his baptism by St. John to his ascension. St. Peter having, in a general assembly of the faithful held soon after, declared from holy scripture, the necessity of choosing a twelfth apostle, in the room of Judas; two were unanimously pitched upon by the assembly, as most worthy of the dignity, Joseph, called Barsabas, and, on account of his extraordinary piety, surnamed the Just, and Matthias. After devout prayer to God, that he would direct them in their choice, they proceeded in {454} it by way of lot, which falling by the divine direction on Matthias, he was accordingly associated with the eleven, and ranked among the apostles. When in deliberations each side appears equally good, or each candidate of equally approved merit, lots may be sometimes lawfully used; otherwise, to commit a thing of importance to such a chance, or to expect a miraculous direction of divine providence in it, would be a criminal superstition and a tempting of God, except he himself, by an evident revelation or inspiration, should appoint such a means for the manifestation of his will, promising his supernatural interposition in it, which was the case on this extraordinary occasion. The miraculous dreams or lots, which we read of in the prophets, must no ways authorize any rash superstitious use of such means in others who have not the like authority. * * * * * We justly admire the virtue of this holy assembly of saints. Here were no solicitations or intrigues. No one presented himself to the dignity. Ambition can find no place in a virtuous or humble heart. He who seeks a dignity either knows himself unqualified, and is on this account guilty of the most flagrant injustice with regard to the public, by desiring a charge to which he is no ways equal: or he thinks himself qualified for it, and this self-conceit and confidence in his own abilities renders him the most unworthy of all others. Such a disposition deprives a soul of the divine assistance, without which we can do nothing; for God withdraws his grace and refuses his blessing where self-sufficiency and pride have found any footing. It is something of a secret confidence in ourselves, and a presumption that we deserve the divine succor, which banishes him from us. This is true even in temporal undertakings; but much more so in the charge of souls, in which all success is more particularly the special work of the Holy Ghost, not the fruit of human industry. These two holy candidates were most worthy of the apostleship, because perfectly humble, and because they looked upon that dignity with trembling, though they considered its labors, dangers, and persecutions with holy joy, and with a burning zeal for the glory of God. No regard was had to worldly talents, none to flesh and blood. God was consulted by prayer, because no one is to be assumed to his ministry who is not called by him, and who does not enter it by the door,[5] and with the undoubted marks of his vocation. Judas's misfortune filled St. Matthias with the greater humility and fervor, lest he also should fall. We Gentiles are called upon the disinherison of the Jews, and are ingrafted on their stock.[6] We ought therefore to learn to stand always in watchfulness and fear, or we shall be also cut off ourselves, to give place to others whom God will call in our room, and even compel to enter, rather than spare us. The number of his elect depends not on us. His infinite mercy has invited us without any merit on our side; but if we are ungrateful, he can complete his heavenly city without us, and will certainly make our reprobation the most dreadful example of his justice, to all eternity. The greater the excess of his goodness and clemency has been towards us, the more dreadful will be the effects of his vengeance. _Many shall come from the east and the west, and shall sit down with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of God; but the sons of the kingdom shall be cast forth_.[7] St. Matthias received the Holy Ghost with the rest soon after his election; and after the dispersion of the disciples, applied himself with zeal to the functions of his apostleship, in converting nations to the faith. He is recorded by St. Clement of Alexandria,[8] to have been remarkable for inculcating the necessity of the mortification of the flesh with regard to all {455} its sensual and irregular desires, an important lesson he had received from Christ, and which he practised assiduously on his own flesh. The tradition of the Greeks in their menologies tells us that St: Matthias planted the faith about Cappadocia and on the coasts of the Caspian sea, residing chiefly near the port Issus. He must have undergone great hardships and labors amidst so savage a people. The same authors add that he received the crown of martyrdom in Colchis, which they call �thiopia. The Latins keep his festival on the 24th of February. Some portions of his relics are shown in the abbatical church of Triers, and in that of St. Mary Major in Rome, unless these latter belong to another Matthias, who was one of the first bishops of Jerusalem: on which see the Bollandists. As the call of St. Matthias, so is ours purely the work of God, and his most gratuitous favor and mercy. What thanks, what fidelity and love do we not owe him for this inestimable grace! When he decreed to call us to his holy faith, cleanse us from sin, and make us members of his spiritual kingdom, and heirs of his glory, he saw nothing in us which could determine him to such a predilection. We were infected with sin, and could have no title to the least favor, when God said to us, _I have loved Jacob_: when he distinguished us from so many millions who perish in the blindness of infidelity and sin, drew us out of the mass of perdition, and bestowed on us the grace of his adoption, and all the high privileges that are annexed to this dignity. In what transports of love and gratitude ought we not, without intermission, to adore his infinite goodness to us, and beg that we may be always strengthened by his grace to advance continually in humility and his holy love, lest, by slackening our pace in his service, we fall from this state of happiness, forfeit this sublime grace, and perish with Judas. Happy would the church be, if all converts were careful to maintain themselves in the same fervor in which they returned to God. But by a neglect to watch over themselves, and to shun dangers, and by falling into sloth, they often relapse into a condition much worse than the former. Footnotes: 1. Strom. l. 4, p. 488. 2. L. 1, c. {1}. 3. In Catal. 4. C. i. 21. 5. Jo. x. 1. 6. Rom. xi. 12. 7. Matt. viii. 11. 8. Strom. l. 3, p. 436. SS. MONTANUS, LUCIUS, FLAVIAN, JULIAN, VICTORICUS, PRIMOLUS, RHENUS, AND DONATIAN, MARTYRS AT CARTHAGE. From their original acts written, the first part by the martyrs themselves, the rest by an eye-witness. They are published more correctly by Ruinart than by Surius and Bollandus. See Tillemont, t. 4, p. 206. A.D. 259. THE persecution, raised by Valerian, had raged two years, during which many had received the crown of martyrdom, and, among others, St. Cyprian, in September, 258. The proconsul Galerius Maximus, who had pronounced sentence on that saint, dying himself soon after, the procurator, Solon, continued the persecution, waiting for the arrival of a new proconsul from Rome. After some days, a sedition was raised in Carthage against him, in which many were killed. The tyrannical man, instead of making search after the guilty, vented his fury upon the Christians, knowing this would be agreeable to the idolaters. Accordingly he caused these eight Christians, all disciples of St. Cyprian, and most of them of the clergy, to be apprehended. As soon as we were taken, say the authors of the acts, we were given in custody to the officers of the quarter:[1] when the governor's soldiers told us that we should be condemned to the flames, we prayed to God with great fervor to be delivered from that punishment: and he in {456} whose hands are the hearts of men, was pleased to grant our request. The governor altered his first intent, and ordered us into a very dark and incommodious prison, where we found the priest, Victor, and some others: but we were not dismayed at the filth and darkness of the place, our faith and joy in the Holy Ghost reconciled us to our sufferings in that place, though these were such as it is not easy for words to describe; but the greater our trials, the greater is he who overcomes them in us. Our brother Rhenus, in the mean time, had a vision, in which he saw several of the prisoners going out of prison with a lighted lamp preceding each of them, while others, that had no such lamp, stayed behind. He discerned us in this vision, and assured us that we were of the number of those who went forth with lamps. This gave us great joy. for we understood that the lamp represented Christ, the true light, and that we were to follow him by martyrdom. The next day we were sent for by the governor, to be examined. It was a triumph to us to be conducted as a spectacle through the market-place and the streets, with our chains rattling. The soldiers, who knew not where the governor would hear its, dragged us from place to place, till, at length, he ordered us to be brought into his closet. He put several questions to us; our answers were modest, but firm: at length we were remanded to prison; here we prepared ourselves for new conflicts. The sharpest trial was that which we underwent by hunger and thirst, the governor having commanded that we should be kept without meat and drink for several days, insomuch that water was refused us after our work: yet Flavian, the deacon, added great voluntary austerities to these hardships, often bestowing on others what little refreshment which was most sparingly allowed us at the public charge. God was pleased himself to comfort us in this our extreme misery, by a vision which he vouchsafed to the priest Victor, who suffered martyrdom a few days after. "I saw last night," said he to us, "an infant, whose countenance was of a wonderful brightness, enter the prison. He took us to all parts to make us go out, but there was no outlet; then he said to me, 'You have still some concern at your being retained here, but be not discouraged. I am with you: carry these tidings to your companions, and let them know that they shall have a more glorious crown.' I asked him where heaven was; the infant replied, 'Out of the world.' 'Show it me,' says Victor. The infant answered, 'Where then would be your faith?' Victor said, 'I cannot retain what you command me: tell me a sign that I may give them.' He answered, 'Give them the sign of Jacob, that is, his mystical ladder, reaching to the heavens.'" Soon after this vision, Victor was put to death. This vision filled us with joy. God gave us, the night following, another assurance of his mercy by a vision to our sister Quartillosia, a fellow-prisoner, whose husband and son had suffered death for Christ three days before, and who followed them by martyrdom a few days after. "I saw," says she, "my son, who suffered; he was in the prison sitting on a vessel of water, and said to me: 'God has seen your sufferings.' Then entered a young man of a wonderful stature, and he said: 'Be of good courage, God hath remembered you.'" The martyrs had received no nourishment the preceding day, nor had they any on the day that followed this vision; but at length Lucian, then priest, and afterwards bishop of Carthage, surmounting all obstacles, got food to be carried to them in abundance by the subdeacon, Herermian, and by Januarius, a catechumen. The acts say they brought the never-failing food[2] {457} which Tillemont understands of the blessed eucharist, and the following words still more clearly determine it in favor of this sense. They go on: We have all one and the same spirit, which unites and cements us together in prayer, in mutual conversation, and in all our actions. These are those amiable bands which put the devil to flight, are most agreeable to God, and obtain of him, by joint prayer, whatever they ask. These are the ties which link hearts together, and which make men the children of God. To be heirs of his kingdom we must be his children, and to be his children we must love one another. It is impossible for us to attain to the inheritance of his heavenly glory, unless we keep that union and peace with all our brethren which our heavenly Father has established among us. Nevertheless, this union suffered some prejudice in our troop, but the breach was soon repaired. It happened that Montanus had some words with Julian, about a person who was not of our communion, and who was got among us, (probably admitted by Julian.) Montanus on this account rebuked Julian, and they, for some time afterwards, behaved towards each other with coldness, which was, as it were, a seed of discord. Heaven had pity on them both, and, to reunite them, admonished Montanus by a dream, which he related to us as follows: "It appeared to me that the centurions were come to us, and that they conducted us through a long path into a spacious field, where we were met by Cyprian and Lucius. After this we came into a very luminous place, where our garments became white, and our flesh became whiter than our garments, and so wonderfully transparent, that there was nothing in our hearts but what was clearly exposed to view: but in looking into myself, I could discover some filth in my own bosom; and, meeting Lucian, I told him what I had seen, adding, that the filth I had observed within my breast denoted my coldness towards Julian. Wherefore, brethren, let us love, cherish, and promote, with all our might, peace and concord. Let us be here unanimous in imitation of what we shall be hereafter. As we hope to share in the rewards promised to the just, and to avoid the punishments wherewith the wicked are threatened: as, in fine, we desire to be and reign with Christ, let us do those things which will lead us to him and his heavenly kingdom." Hitherto the martyrs wrote in prison what happened to them there: the rest was written by those persons who were present, to whom Flavian, one of the martyrs, had recommended it. After suffering extreme hunger and thirst, with other hardships, during an imprisonment of many months, the confessors were brought before the president, and made a glorious confession. The edict of Valerian condemned only bishops, priests, and deacons to death. The false friends of Flavian maintained before the judge that he was no deacon, and, consequently, was not comprehended within the emperor's decree; upon which, though he declared himself to be one, he was not then condemned; but the rest were adjudged to die. They walked cheerfully to the place of execution, and each of them gave exhortations to the people. Lucius, who was naturally mild and modest, was a little dejected on account of his distemper and the inconveniences of the prison; he therefore went before the rest, accompanied but by a few persons, lest he should be oppressed by the crowd, and so not have the honor to spill his blood. Some cried out to him, "Remember us." "Do you also," says he, "remember me." Julian and Victoricus exhorted a long while the brethren to peace, and recommended to their care the whole body of the clergy, those especially who had undergone the hardships of imprisonment. Montanus, who was endued with great strength, both of body and mind, cried out, "He that sacrificeth to any God but the true one, shall be utterly destroyed." This he often repeated. He also checked the pride and wicked obstinacy of the heretics, telling them {458} that they might discern the true church by the multitude of its martyrs. Like a true disciple of Saint Cyprian, and a zealous lover of discipline, he exhorted those that had fallen not to be over hasty, but fully to accomplish their penance. He exhorted the virgins to preserve their purity, and to honor the bishops, and all the bishops to abide to concord. When the executioner was ready to give the stroke, he prayed aloud to God that Flavian, who had been reprieved at the people's request, might follow them on the third day. And, to express his assurance that his prayer was heard, he rent in pieces the handkerchief with which his eyes were to be covered, and ordered one half of it to be reserved for Flavian, and desired that a place might be kept for him where he was to be interred, that they might not be separated even in the grave. Flavian, seeing his crown delayed, made it the object of his ardent desires and prayers. And as his mother stuck close by his side with the constancy of the mother of the holy Maccabees, and with longing desires to see him glorify God by his sacrifice, he said to her "You know, mother, how much I have longed to enjoy the happiness of dying by martyrdom." In one of the two nights which he survived, he was favored with a vision, in which one said to him: "Why do you grieve? You have been twice a confessor, and you shall suffer martyrdom by the sword." On the third day he was ordered to be brought before the governor. Here it appeared how much he was beloved by the people, who endeavored by all means to save his life. They cried out to the judge that he was no deacon; but he affirmed that he was. A centurion presented a billet which set forth that he was not. The judge accused him of lying to procure his own death. He answered: "Is that probable? and not rather that they are guilty of an untruth who say the contrary?" The people demanded that he might be tortured, in hopes he would recall his confession on the rack; but the judge condemned him to be beheaded. The sentence filled him with joy, and he was conducted to the place of execution, accompanied by a great multitude, and by many priests. A shower dispersed the infidels, and the martyr was lead into a house where he had an opportunity of taking his last leave of the faithful without one profane person being present. He told them that in a vision he had asked Cyprian whether the stroke of death is painful, and that the martyr answered: "The body feels no pain when the soul gives herself entirely to God." At the place of execution he prayed for the peace of the church and the union of the brethren; and seemed to foretell Lucian that he should be bishop of Carthage, as he was soon after. Having done speaking, he bound his eyes with that half of the handkerchief which Montanus had ordered to be kept for him, and, kneeling in prayer, received the last stroke. These saints are joined together on his day in the present Roman and in ancient Martyrologies. Footnotes: 1. Apud regionantes. 2. Alimentum indeficiens. ST. LETHARD, BISHOP OF SENLIS, C. CALLED BY VENERABLE BEDE, LUIDHARD. BEDE, William of Malmesbury, and other historians relate, that when Bertha, daughter of Charibert, king of the French, was married to Ethelbert, king of Kent, about the year 566, this holy French prelate accompanied her into England, and resided at Canterbury in quality of almoner and chaplain to the queen. Though his name does not occur in the imperfect catalogue of the bishops of Senlis, which is found in the ancient copy of St. Gregory's sacramentary, which belonged to that church in 880, nor in the old edition of Gallia Christiana yet, upon the authority of the English historians, {459} is inserted in the new edition, the thirteenth, from St. Regulus, the founder of that see, one of the Roman missionaries in Gaul about the time of St. Dionysius. The relics of St. Regulus are venerated in the ancient collegiate church which bears his name in Senlis, and his principal festival is kept on the 23d of April. St. Lethard having resigned this see to St. Sanctinus, was only recorded in England. On the high altar of St. Augustine's monastery at Canterbury, originally called SS. Peter and Paul's, his relics were exposed in a shrine near those of the holy king Ethelbert, as appears from the Monasticon. St. Lethard died at Canterbury about the year 596. Several miracles are recorded to have been obtained by his intercession, particularly a ready supply of rain in time of drought. See Bede, l. 1, c. 25. Will. of Malmesbury, de Pontif. l. 1. Monas. Angl. t. 1, p. 24. Tho. Sprot, in his History of the Abbey of Canterbury, Thorn, Henschenius ad 24 Feb., Gallia Christ. Nova, t. 10, p. 1382. B. ROBERT OF ARBRISSEL, SO CALLED FROM THE PLACE OF HIS BIRTH. HE was archpriest and grand vicar of the diocese of Rennes, and chancellor to the duke of Brittany; but divested himself of these employments, and led a most austere eremitical life, in the forest of Craon, in Anjou. He soon filled that desert with anchorets, and built in it a monastery of regular canons. This is the abbey called De la Roe, in Latin De Rotâ, which was founded, according to Duchesne, in 1093, and confirmed by pope Urban II., in 1096. This pope having heard him preach at Angers, gave him the powers of an apostolical missionary. The blessed man therefore preached in many places, and formed many disciples. In 1099 he founded the great monastery of Fontevraud, Fons Ebraldi, a league from the Loire, in Poitou. He appointed superioress Herlande of Champagne, a near kinswoman to the duke of Brittany; and Petronilla of Craon, baroness of Chemillé, coadjutress. He settled it under the rule of St. Benedict, with perpetual abstinence from flesh, even in all sicknesses, and put his order under the special patronage of the blessed Virgin. By a singular institution, he appointed the abbess superioress over the men, who live in a remote monastery, whose superiors she nominates. The holy founder prescribed so strict silence in his order, as to forbid any one to speak, even by signs, without necessity. The law of enclosure was not less rigorous, insomuch that no priest was allowed to enter even the infirmary of the nuns, to visit the sick, if it could possibly be avoided, and the sick, even in their agonies, were carried into the church, that they might there receive the sacraments. Among the great conversions of which St. Robert was the instrument, none was more famous than that of queen Bertrade, the daughter of Simon Montfort, and sister of Amauri Montfort, count of Evreux. She was married to Fulk, count of Anjou, in 1089, but quitted him in 1092, to marry Philip I., king of France, who was enamored of her. Pope Urban II. excommunicated that prince on this account in 1094, and again in 1100, because the king, after having put her away, had taken her again. These censures were taken off when she and the king had sworn upon the gospels, in the council of Poitiers, never to live together again. Bertrade, when she had retired to an estate which was her dower, in the diocese of Chartres, was so powerfully moved by the exhortations of St. Robert, that, renouncing the world, of which she had been long the idol, she took the religious veil at Fontevraud, and led there an exemplary life till her death. Many other princesses embraced the same state {460} under the direction of the holy founder: among others Hersande of Champagne, widow of William of Monsoreau; Agnes of Montroëil, of the same family; Ermengarde, wife of Alin Fergan, duke of Brittany; {}pa, countess of Thoulouse, wife of William IX., duke of Aquitaine, &c. After the death of St. Robert, several queens and princesses had taken sanctuary in this monastery, flying from the corruption of the world. Among its abbesses are counted fourteen princesses, of which five were of the royal house of Bourbon. The abbot Suger, writing to pope Eugenius III., about fifty years after the death of the founder, says there were at that time in this order between five and six thousand religious persons. The order of Fontevraud, in France, is divided into four provinces. B. Robert lived to see above three thousand nuns in this one house. He died in 1116, on the 25th of February, St. Matthias's day, it being leap-year, in the seventieth of his age, at the monastery of Orsan, near Linieres, in Berry. His body was conveyed to Fontevraud, and there interred. The bishop of Poitiers, in 1644, took a juridical information of many miracles wrought by his intercession.[1] From the time of his death he has been honored with the title of blessed, and is invoked in the litany of his order, which keeps his festival only with a mass of the Trinity on St. Matthias's day. See his life by Baldric, bishop of Dole, his contemporary; Helyot, Hist. des Ordres Relig. t. 6, p. 83, Dom Lobineau, Hist. de Bretagne, fol. 1707, p. 113, and, in the first place, Chatelain, Notes on the Martyrol. p. 736 to 758, who clearly confutes those who place his death in 1117. Footnotes: 1. Some have raked up most groundless slanders to asperse the character of this holy man, as, that he admitted all to the religious habit that asked it, and was guilty of too familiar conversation with women. These slanders were spread in a letter of Roscelin, whose errors against faith were condemned in the council of Soissons in 1095. Such scandalous reports excited the zeal of some good men, and they are mentioned in a letter ascribed to Marbodius, bishop of Rennes, and in another of Godfrey, abbot of Vendome, addressed to the holy man himself. This last letter seems genuine, though some have denied it. But the charge was only gathered from hearsay, and notoriously false, as the very authors of these letters were soon convinced. It is not surprising that a man who bade open defiance to all sinners, and whose reputation ran so high in the world, should excite the murmurs of some and envy of others, which zeal and merit never escape. But his boldness to declaim against the vices of great men, and the most hardened sinners; the high encomiums and favorable testimonies which all who knew him gave to his extraordinary sanctity, which forced even envy itself to respect him; and his most holy comportment and happy death, furnish most invincible proofs of his innocence and purity; which he preserved only by humility, and the most scrupulous flight of all dangerous occasions. Godfrey of Vendome was afterwards perfectly satisfied of the sanctity of this great servant of God and became his warmest friend and patron; as is evident from several of his letters. See l. 1, ep. 24, and 26, l. 3, ep.2, l. 4, ep. 32. He entered into an association of prayers with the monastery of Fontevraud in 1114; and so much did he esteem his virtue that he made a considerable foundation at Fontevraud, often visited the church, and built himself a house near it, called Hotel de Vendome, that he might more frequently enjoy the converse of St. Robert, and promote his holy endeavors. The letter of Marbodius is denied to be genuine by Mainferme and Natalis Alexander, and suspected by D. Beaugendre, who published the works of Marbodius at Paris, in 1708. But the continuator of the Hist. Littér. t. 10, p. 359, clearly shows this letter to have been written by Marbodius, who, in it, speaks of these rumors without giving credit to them, and with tenderness and charity exhorts Robert to reform his conduct if the reports were true; to dissipate them by justifying himself, if they were false. Marbodius was soon satisfied as to these calumnies, and was the saint's great protector, in 1101, in his missions in Brittany, particularly in his diocese of Rennes; whither he seems to have invited him. Ermengarde, countess of Brittany, was so moved by St. Robert's sermons, that she earnestly desired to renounce the world, and retire to Fontevraud. The saint exhorted her to continue in the world, and to sanctify her soul by her duties in her public station, especially by patience and prayer: yet, some years after, she took the veil at Fontevaud. See F. de la Mainferme, in his three apologetic volumes in vindication of this patriarch of his order, Natalis Alexander, sæc. xii. diss. 6, and especially Sorin's Apologetique du Saint. in 1702, a polite and spirited work. ST. PRETEXTATUS, OR PRIX, M. ARCHBISHOP OF ROUEN. HE was chosen archbishop of Rouen in 549, and in 557 assisted at the third council of Paris held to abolish incestuous marriages, and remove other crying abuses: also at the second council of Tours in 566. By his zeal in reproving Fredegonda for her injustices and cruelties, he had incurred her indignation. King Clotaire I., in 562, had left the French monarchy {461} divided among his four sons. Charibert was king of Paris, Gontran of Orleans and Burgundy, Sigebert I. of Austrasia, and Chilperic I. of Soissons. Sigebert married Brunehault, younger daughter of Athanagilde, king of the Visigoths in Spain, and Chilperic her elder sister Galsvinda; but after her death he took to wife Fredegonda, who had been his mistress, and was strongly suspected to have contrived the death of the queen by poison. Hence Brunehault stirred up Sigebert against her and her husband. But Fredegonda contrived the assassination of king Sigebert in 575, and Chilperic secured Brunehault his wife, her three daughters, and her son Childebert. This latter soon made his escape, and fled to Metz, where he was received by his subjects, and crowned king of Austrasia. The city of Paris, after the death of Charibert in 566, by the agreement of the three surviving brothers, remained common to them all, till Chilperic seized it. He sent Meroveus, his son by his first wife, to reduce the country about Poitiers, which belonged to the young prince Childebert. But Meroveus, at Ronen, fell in love with his aunt Brunehault, then a prisoner in that city; and bishop Prix, in order to prevent a grievous scandal, judging circumstances to be sufficiently cogent to require a dispensation, married them: for which he was accused of high treason by king Chilperic before a council at Paris, in 577, in the church of St. Peter, since called St. Genevieve. St. Gregory of Tours there warmly defended his innocence, and Prix confessed the marriage, but denied that he had been privy to the prince's revolt; but was afterwards prevailed upon, through the insidious persuasion of certain emissaries of Chilperic, to plead guilty, and confess that out of affection he had been drawn in to favor the young prince, who was his godson. Whereupon he was condemned by the council, and banished by the king into a small island upon the coast of Lower Neustria, near Coutances. His sufferings he improved to the sanctification of his soul by penance and the exercise of all heroic Christian virtues. The rage and clamor with which his powerful enemies spread their slanders to beat down his reputation, staggered many of his friends: but St. Gregory of Tours never forsook him. Meroveus was assassinated near Terouanne, by an order of his stepmother Fredegonda, who was also suspected to have contrived the death of her husband Chilperic, who was murdered at Chelles, in 584. She had three years before procured Clovis, his younger son by a former wife, to be assassinated, so that the crown of Soissons devolved upon her own son Clotaire II.: but for his and her own protection, she had recourse to Gontran, the religious king of Orleans and Burgundy. By his order Prix, after a banishment of six years, was restored with honor to his see; Ragnemond, the bishop of Paris, who had been a principal flatterer of Chilperic in the persecution of this prelate, having assured this prince that the council had not deposed him, but only enjoined him penance. St. Prix assisted at the council of Macon in 585, where he harangued several times, and exerted his zeal in framing many wise regulations for the reformation of discipline. He continued his pastoral labors in the care of his flock, and by just remonstrances often endeavored to reclaim the wicked queen Fredegonda, who frequently resided at Rouen, and filled the kingdom with scandals, tyrannical oppressions, and murders. This Jezabel grew daily more and more hardened in iniquity, and by her secret order St. Prix was assassinated while he assisted at matins in his church in the midst of his clergy on Sunday the 25th of February. Happy should we be if under all afflictions, with this holy penitent, we considered that sin is the original fountain from whence all those waters of bitterness flow, and by laboring effectually to cut off this evil, convert its punishment into its remedy and a source of benedictions. St. Prix of Rouen to honored in the Roman and Gallican Martyrologies. Those who with {462} Chatelain, &c. place his death on the 14th of April, suppose him to have been murdered on Easter-day, but the day of our Lord's Resurrection in this passage of our historian, means no more than Sunday. See St. Gregory of Tours, Hist. Franc. l. 5, c. 10, 15. Fleury, l. 34, n. 52. Gallia Christiana Nova, t. 11, pp. 11 and 638. Mons. Levesque de la Ravaliere in his Nouvelle Vie de S. Gregoire, Evêque de Tours, published in the Mémoires de l'Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres, An. 1760, t. 26, pp. 699, 60. F. Daniel, Hist. de France, t. 1, p. 242. ST. ETHELBERT, C. FIRST CHRISTIAN KING AMONG THE ENGLISH. HE was king of Kent, the fifth descendant from Hengist, who first settled the English Saxons in Britain, in 448, and the foundation of whose kingdom is dated in 445. Ethelbert married, in his father's lifetime, Bertha, the only daughter of Charibert, king of Paris, and cousin-german to Clotaire, king of Soissons, and Childebort, king of Austrasia, whose two sons, Theodobert and Theodoric, or Thierry, reigned after his death, the one in Austrasia, the other in Burgundy. Ethelbert succeeded his father Ermenric, in 560. The kingdom of Kent having enjoyed a continued peace for about a hundred years, was arrived at a degree of power and riches which gave it a pre-eminence in the Saxon heptarchy in Britain, and so great a superiority and influence over the rest, that Ethelbert is said by Bede to have ruled as far as the Humber, and Ethelbert is often styled king of the English. His queen Bertha was a very zealous and pious Christian princess, and by the articles of her marriage had free liberty to exercise her religion; for which purpose she was attended by a venerable French prelate, named Luidhard, or Lethard, bishop of Senlis. He officiated constantly in an old church dedicated to St. Martin, lying a little out of the walls of Canterbury. The exemplary life of this prelate, and his frequent discourses on religion, disposed several Pagans about the court to embrace the faith. The merit of the queen in the great work of her husband's conversion is acknowledged by our historians, and she deserved by her piety and great zeal to be compared by St. Gregory the Great to the celebrated St. Helen.[1] Divine providence, by these means, mercifully prepared the heart of a great king to entertain a favorable opinion of our holy religion, when St. Augustine landed in his dominions: to whose life the reader is referred for all account of this monarch's happy conversion to the faith. From that time he appeared quite changed into another man, it being for the remaining twenty years of his life his only ambition and endeavor to establish the perfect reign of Christ, both in his own soul and in the hearts of all his subjects. His ardor in the exercises of penance and devotion never suffered any abatement, this being a property of true virtue, which is not to be acquired without much labor and pains, self-denial and watchfulness, resolution and constancy. Great were, doubtless, the difficulties and dangers which he had to encounter in subduing his passions, and in vanquishing many obstacles which the world and devil failed not to raise: but these trials were infinitely subservient to his spiritual advancement, by rousing him continually to greater vigilance and fervor, and by the many victories and the exercise of all heroic virtues of which they furnished the occasions. In the government of his kingdom, his thoughts were altogether turned upon the means of best promoting the {463} welfare of his people. He enacted most wholesome laws, which were held in high esteem in succeeding ages in this island: he abolished the worship of idols throughout his kingdom, and shut up their temples, or turned them into churches. His royal palace at Canterbury he gave for the use of the archbishop St. Austin: he founded in that city the cathedral called Christ Church, and built without the walls the abbey and church of SS. Peter and Paul, afterwards called St. Austin's. The foundation of St. Andrew's at Rochester, St. Paul's at London, and many other churches, affords many standing proofs of his munificence to the church, and the servants of God. He was instrumental in bringing over to the faith of Christ, Sebert, king of the East-Saxons, with his people, and Redwald, king of the East-Angles, though the latter afterwards relapsing, pretended to join the worship of idols with that of Christ. King Ethelbert, after having reigned fifty-six years, exchanged his temporal diadem for an eternal crown, in 616, and was buried in the church of SS. Peter and Paul. His remains were afterwards deposited under the high altar in the same church, then called St. Austin's. St. Ethelbert is commemorated on this day in the British and Roman Martyrologies: he was vulgarly called by our ancestors St. Albert, under which name he is titular saint of several churches in England; particularly of one in Norwich, which was built before the cathedral, an account of which is given by Blomfield, in his history of Norfolk, and the city of Norwich. Polydore Virgil tells us that a light was kept always burning before the tomb of St. Ethelbert, and was sometimes an instrument of miracles, even to the days of Henry VIII. See Bede, Hist. Ang. l. 1, c. 25, &c. Henschen. t. 3, Febr. p. 471. Footnotes: 1. St. Greg. M. l. 9, ep. 60. FEBRUARY XXV. SAINT TARASIUS, CONFESSOR, PATRIARCH OF CONSTANTINOPLE. From his life written by Ignatius, his disciple, afterwards bishop of Nice, and from the church historians of his time. See Bollandus, t. 5, p. 576. Fleury, B. 44. A.D. 806. TARASIUS was born about the middle of the eighth century. His parents were both of patrician families. His father, George, was a judge in great esteem for his well-known justice, and his mother, Eucratia, no less celebrated for her piety. She brought him up in the practice of the most eminent virtues. Above all things, she recommended to him to keep no company but that of the most virtuous. The young man, by his talents and virtue, gained the esteem of all, and was raised to the greatest honors of the empire, being made consul, and afterwards first secretary of state to the emperor Constantine and the empress Irene, his mother. In the midst of the court, and in its highest honors, surrounded by all that could flatter pride, or gratify sensuality, he led a life like that of a religious man. Leo, the Isaurian, his son Constantine Copronymus, and his grandson Leo, surnamed Chazarus, three successive emperors, had established, with all their power, the heresy of the Iconoclasts, or image-breakers, in the {464} East. The empress Irene, wife to the last, was always privately a Catholic, though an artful, ambitious woman. Her husband dying miserably in 780, after a five years' reign, and having left his son Constantine, but ten years old, under her guardianship, she so managed the nobility in her favor as to get the regency and whole government of the state into her hands, and put a stop to the persecution of the Catholics. Paul, patriarch of Constantinople, the third of that name, had been raised to that dignity by the late emperor. Though, contrary to the dictates of his own conscience, he had conformed in some respects to the then reigning heresy, he had however several good qualities; and was not only singularly beloved by the people for his charity to the poor, but highly esteemed by the empress and the whole court for his great prudence. Finding himself indisposed, and being touched with remorse for his condescension to the Iconoclasts in the former reign, without communicating his design to any one, he quitted the patriarchal see, and put on a religious habit in the monastery of Florus, in Constantinople. The empress was no sooner informed of it, but taking with her the young emperor, went to the monastery to dissuade a person so useful to her from persisting in such a resolution, but all in vain, for the patriarch assured them with tears, and bitter lamentations, that, in order to repair the scandal he had given, he had taken an unalterable resolution to end his days in that monastery; so desired them to provide the church of Constantinople with a worthy pastor in his room. Being asked whom he thought equal to the charge, he immediately named Tarasius, and dying soon after this declaration, Tarasius was accordingly chosen patriarch by the unanimous consent of the court, clergy, and people. Tarasius finding it in vain to oppose his election, declared, however, that he thought he could not in conscience accept of the government of a see which had been cut off from the Catholic communion, but upon condition that a general council should be called to compose the disputes which divided the church at that time, in relation to holy images. This being agreed to, he was solemnly declared patriarch, and consecrated soon after, on Christmas-day. He was no sooner installed, but he sent his synodal letters to pope Adrian, to whom the empress also wrote in her own and her son's name on the subject of a general council; begging that he would either come in person, or at least send some venerable and learned men as his legates to Constantinople. Tarasius wrote likewise a letter to the patriarchs of Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem, wherein he desires them to send their respective legates to the intended council. His letter to the pope was to the same effect. The pope sent his legates, as desired, and wrote by them to the emperor, the empress, and the patriarch; applauded their zeal, showing at large the impiety of the Iconoclast heresy, insisting that the false council of the Iconoclasts, held under Copronymus for the establishment of Iconoclasm, should be first condemned in presence of his legates, and conjuring them before God to re-establish holy images at Constantinople, and in all Greece, on the footing they were before. He recommends to the emperor and empress his two legates to the council, who were Peter, archpriest of the Roman church, and Peter, priest and abbot of St. Sabas, in Rome. The eastern patriarchs being under the Saracen yoke, could not come for fear of giving offence to their jealous masters, who prohibited, under the strictest penalties, all commerce with the empire. However, with much difficulty and through many dangers, they sent their deputies. The legates of the pope and the oriental patriarchs being arrived, as also the bishops under their jurisdiction, the council was opened on the 1st of August, in the church of the apostles at Constantinople, in 786. But the assembly being disturbed by the violences of the Iconoclasts, and desired {465} by the empress to break up and withdraw for the present, the council met again the year following in the church of St. Sophia, at Nice. The two legates from the pope are named first in the Acts, St. Tarasms next, and after him the legates of the Oriental patriarchs, namely, John, priest and monk, for the patriarchs of Antioch and Jerusalem; and Thomas, priest and monk, for the patriarch of Alexandria. The council consisted of three hundred and fifty bishops, besides many abbots and other holy priests and confessors,[1] who having declared the sense of the present church, in relation to the matter in debate, which was found to be the allowing to holy pictures and images a relative honor, the council was closed with the usual acclamations and prayers for the prosperity of the emperor and empress. After which, synodal letters were sent to all the churches, and in particular to the pope, who approved the council. The good patriarch, pursuant to the decrees of the synod, restored holy images throughout the extent of his jurisdiction. He also labored zealously to abolish simony, and wrote a letter upon that subject to pope Adrian, to which, by saying it was the glory of the Roman church to preserve the purity of the priesthood, he intimated that that church was free from this reproach. The life of this holy patriarch was a model of perfection to his clergy and people. His table had nothing of the superfluity, nor his palace any thing of the magnificence, of several of his predecessors. He allowed himself very little time for sleep, being always up the first and last in his family. Reading and prayer filled all his leisure hours. It was his pleasure, in imitation of our blessed Redeemer, to serve others instead of being served by them;{466} on which account he would scarce permit his own servants to do any thing for him. Loving humility in himself, he sought sweetly to induce all others to the love of that virtue. He banished the use of gold and scarlet from among the clergy, and labored to extirpate all the irregularities among the people. His charity and love for the poor seemed to surpass his other virtues. He often took the dishes of meat from his table to distribute among them with his own hands: and he assigned them a large fixed revenue. And that none might be overlooked, he visited all the houses and hospitals in Constantinople. In Lent, especially, his bounty to them was incredible. His discourses were powerful exhortations to the universal mortification of the senses, and he was particularly severe against all theatrical entertainments. Some time after, the emperor became enamored of Theodota, a maid of honor to his wife, the empress Mary, whom he had always hated; and forgetting what he owed to God, he was resolved to divorce her in 795, after seven years' cohabitation. He used all his efforts to gain the patriarch, and sent a principal officer to him for that purpose, accusing his wife of a plot to poison him. St. Tarasius answered the messenger, saying: "I know not how the emperor can bear the infamy of so scandalous an action in the sight of the universe: nor how he will be able to hinder or punish adulteries and debaucheries, if he himself set such an example. Tell him that I will rather suffer death and all manner of torments than consent to his design." The emperor hoping to prevail with him by flattery, sent for him to the palace, and said to him: "I can conceal nothing from you, whom I regard as my father. No one can deny but I may divorce one who has attempted my life. She deserves death or perpetual penance." He then produced a vessel, as he pretended, full of the poison prepared for him. The patriarch, with good reason, judging the whole to be only an artful contrivance to impose upon him, answered: that he was too well convinced that his passion for Theodota was at the bottom of all his complaints against the empress. He added, that, though she were guilty of the crime he laid to her charge, his second marriage during her life, with any other, would still be contrary to the law of God, and that he would draw upon himself the censures of the church by attempting it. The monk John, who had been legate of the eastern patriarchs in the seventh council, being present, spoke also very resolutely to the emperor on the subject, so that the pretors and patricians threatened to stab him on the spot: and the emperor, boiling with rage, drove them both from his presence. As soon as they were gone, he turned the empress Mary out of his palace, and obliged her to put on a religious veil. Tarasius persisting in his refusal to marry him to Theodota, the ceremony was performed by Joseph, treasurer of the church of Constantinople. This scandalous example was the occasion of several governors and other powerful men divorcing their wives, or taking more than one at the same time, and gave great encouragement to public lewdness. SS. Plato and Theodorus separated themselves from the emperor's communion to show their abhorrence of his crime. But Tarasius did not think it prudent to proceed to excommunication, as he had threatened, apprehensive that the violence of his temper, when further provoked, might carry him still greater lengths, and prompt him to re-establish the heresy which he had taken such effectual measures to suppress. Thus the patriarch, by his moderation, prevented the ruin of religion, but drew upon himself the emperor's resentment, who persecuted him many ways during the remainder of his reign. Not content to set spies and guards over him under the name of Syncelli, who watched all his actions, and suffered no one to speak to him without their leave, he banished many of his domestics and relations. This confinement gave the saint the more leisure for contemplation, and he {467} never ceased in it to recommend his flock to God. The ambitious Irene, finding that all her contrivances to render her son odious to his subjects had proved ineffectual to her design, which was to engross the whole power to herself, having gained over to her party the principal officers of the court and army, she made him prisoner, and caused his eyes to be plucked out; this was executed with so much violence that the unhappy prince died of it in 797. After this she reigned alone five years, during which she recalled all the banished; but at length met with the deserved reward of her ambition and cruelty from Nicephorus, a patrician, and the treasurer general; who, in 802, usurped the empire, and having deposed her, banished her into the isle of Lesbos, where she soon after died with grief. St. Tarasius, on the death of the late emperor, having interdicted and deposed the treasurer Joseph, who had married and crowned Theodota, St. Plato, and others, who had censured his lenity, became thoroughly reconciled to him. The saint, under his successor Nicephorus, persevered peaceably in his practices of penance, and in the functions of his pastoral charge. In his last sickness he still continued to offer daily the holy sacrifice as long as he was able to move. A little before his death he fell into a kind of trance, as the author of his life, who was an eye-witness, relates, wherein he was heard to dispute and argue with a number of accusers, very busy in sifting his whole life, and objecting all they could to it. He seemed in a great fright and agitation on this account, and, defending himself, answered every thing laid to his charge. This filled all present with fear, seeing the endeavors of the enemy of man to find something to condemn even in the life of so holy and so irreprehensible a bishop. But a great serenity succeeded, and the holy man gave up his soul to God in peace, on the 25th of February, 806, having sat twenty-one years and two months. God honored his memory with miracles, some of which are related by the author of his life. His festival began to be celebrated under his successor. The Latin and Greek churches both honor his memory on this day. Fourteen years after his decease, Leo, the Armenian, the Iconoclast emperor, dreamed a little before his own death, that he saw St. Tarasius highly incensed against him, and heard him command one Michael to stab him. Leo, judging this Michael to be a monk in the saint's monastery, ordered him the next morning to be sought for, and even tortured some of the religious to oblige them to a discovery of the person: but it happened there was none of that name among them; and Leo was killed six days after by Michael Balbus. * * * * * The virtue of St. Tarasius was truly great, because constant and crowned with perseverance, though exposed to continual dangers of illusion or seduction, amidst the artifices of hypocrites and a wicked court. St. Chrysostom observes,[2] that the path of virtue is narrow, and lies between precipices, in which it is easier for the traveller to be seized with giddiness even near the end of his course, and fall. Hence this father most grievously laments the misfortune of king Ozias, who, after long practising the most heroic virtues, fell, and perished through pride; and he strenuously exhorts all who walk in the service of God, constantly to live in fear, watchfulness, humility, and compunction. "A soul," says he, "often wants not so much spurring in the beginning of her conversion; her own fervor and cheerfulness make her run vigorously. But this fervor, unless it be continually nourished, cools by degrees: then the devil assails her with all his might. Pirates wait for and principally attack ships when they are upon the return home laden with {468} riches, rather than empty vessels going out of the port. Just so the devil, when he sees a soul has gathered great spiritual riches, by fasts, prayer, alms, chastity, and all other virtues, when he sees our vessel fraught with rich commodities, then he falls upon her, and seeks on all sides to break in. What exceedingly aggravates the evil, is the extreme difficulty of ever rising again after such a fall. To err in the beginning may be in part a want of experience; but to fall after a long course is mere negligence, and can deserve no excuse or pardon." Footnotes: 1. In the third session the letters of the patriarchs of Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem were read, all teaching the same doctrine of paying a relative honor to sacred images, no less than the letters of pope Adrian. Their deputies, John and Thomas, then added, that the absence of those patriarchs should not affect the authority of the council, because the tyranny under which they lived made their presence impossible, and because they had sent their deputies and professions of faith by letter: that none of the oriental patriarchs had been at the sixth general Council, laboring then under the yoke of the barbarians, yet it was not less an [oe]cumenical synod, especially "as the apostolic Roman pope agreed to it, and presided in it by his legates." This is a clear testimony of the eastern churches in favor of the authority of the holy see in general councils, and it cannot in the least be suspected of fluttery. In the fourth session were read many passages of the fathers in favor of the relative honor due to holy images. After which, all cried out, they were sons of obedience, who placed their glory in following the tradition of their holy mother the church; and they pronounced many anathemas against all image-breakers, that is, those who do not honor holy images, or those who call them Idols. In the end they add a confession of filth, in which they declare, that they honor the mother of God, who is above all the heavenly powers: then the angels, apostles, prophets, martyrs, doctors, and all the saints; as also their pictures: for though the angels are incorporeal, they have appeared like men. This profession of faith was subscribed by the pope's legates, St. Turasius, the legates of the three other patriarchs, and three hundred and one bishops present, besides a great many priests and deacons, deputies of absent bishops, and by one hundred and thirty abbots. In the fifth session were read many passages of fathers falsified and corrupted by the Iconoclasts, as was clearly shown. The archpriest, the pope's legate, demanded that an image should be then set up in the midst of the assembly, and honored by all, which was done; and that the books written against holy images night be condemned and burned, which the council also ratified. In the sixth session the sham council of the Iconoclasts under Copronymus was condemned and refuted as to every article: as first, that it falsely styled itself a _general_ council; for it was not received but anathematized by the other bishops of the church. Secondly, because the pope of Rome had no ways concurred to it, neither by himself nor by his legates, nor by a circular letter, according to the custom of councils: nor had the western bishops assisted at it. Thirdly, there had not been obtained any consent of the patriarchs of Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem, nor of the bishops of their respective districts. These are conditions necessary to a general council, which were all wanting to that sham synod. The council goes on refuting it, because it accused the church of idolatry; which is giving the lie to Christ, whose kingdom, according to scripture, is everlasting, and whose power over hell can never be wrested from him. To accuse the whole church is to do fill injury to Christ. They added, that the sham synod had contradicted itself by admitting that the six general councils had preserved the faith entire, and yet condemned the use of images, which it must allow to be more ancient than the sixth council, and which is of as great antiquity as the apostolic age. And that whereas the same synod had advanced that the clergy having fallen Into Idolatry, God had raised faithful emperors to destroy the fortresses of the devil; the council of Nice vehemently condemns this, because the bishops are the depositaries of tradition, and not the emperors. It adds, that the Iconoclasts falsely called the blessed Eucharist the only image, for it is not an image nor a figure, but the true body and blood of Christ. In the seventh session was read the definition of filth, declaring, that images ought to be set up in churches as well as crosses, (which last the Iconoclasts allowed of,) also to be figured on the sacred vessels and ornaments, on the walls, ceilings, houses, &c. For the oftener people behold holy images or pictures, the oftener are they excited to the remembrance of what they represent: that these images are to be honored, but not with the worship called Latria, which can only be given to God: that they shall be honored with incense and candles, as the cross, the gospels, and other holy things are, all according to the pious customs of the ancients. For the honor paid to images, passes to the archetypes, or things represented, and he who reveres the image reveres the person it represents. This the council declared to be the doctrine of the fathers, and tradition of the Catholic church. 2. Chrysos. Hom. 3. de Ozia, t. 6, p. 14. ed Ben. ST. VICTORINUS, AND SIX COMPANIONS, MARTYRS. From their genuine acts published from the Chaldaic by Monsignor Steph. Assemani. Act. Mart. Occid. t. 2. p. 60. See also Henschenius on this day. A.D. 284. THESE seven martyrs were citizens of Corinth, and confessed their faith before Tertius the proconsul, in their own country, in 249, in the beginning of the reign of Decius. After their torments they passed into Egypt, whether by compulsion or by voluntary banishment is not known, and there finished their martyrdom at Diospolis, capital of Thebais, in the reign of Numerian, in 284, under the governor Sabinus. After the governor had tried the constancy of the martyrs by racks, scourges, and various inventions of cruelty, he caused Victorinus to be thrown into a great mortar, (the Greek Menology says, of marble.) The executioners began by pounding his feet and legs, saying to him at every stroke: "Spare yourself, wretch. It depends upon you to escape this death, if you will only renounce your new God." The prefect grew furious at his constancy, and at length commanded his head to be beat to pieces. The sight of this mortar, so far from casting a damp on his companions, seemed to inspire them with the greater ardor to be treated in the like manner. So that when the tyrant threatened Victor with the same death, he only desired him to hasten the execution; and, pointing to the mortar, said: "In that is salvation and true felicity prepared for me!" He was immediately cast into it and beaten to death. Nicephorus, the third martyr, was impatient of delay, and leaped of his own accord into the bloody mortar. The judge, enraged at his boldness, commanded not one, but many executioners at once to pound him in the same manner. He caused Claudian, the fourth, to be chopped in pieces, and his bleeding joints to be thrown at the feet of those that were yet living. He expired after his feet, hands, arms, legs, and thighs were cut off. The tyrant, pointing to his mangled limbs and scattered bones, said to the other three: "It concerns you to avoid this punishment; I do not compel you to suffer." The martyrs answered with one voice: "On the contrary, we rather pray that if you have any other more exquisite torment you would inflict it on us. We are determined never to violate the fidelity which we owe to God, or to deny Jesus Christ our Saviour, for he is our God, from whom we have our being, and to whom alone we aspire." The tyrant became almost distracted with fury, and commanded Diodorus to be burned alive, Serapion to be beheaded, and Papias to be drowned. This happened on the 25th of February; on which day the Roman and other western Martyrologies name them; but the Greek Menæa, and the Menology of the emperor Basil Porphyrogenitus, honor them on the 21st of January, the day of their confession at Corinth. {469} ST. WALBURGE,[1] V. ABBESS. SHE was daughter to the holy king St. Richard, and sister to SS. Willibald and Winebald; was born in the kingdom of the West-Saxons in England, and educated in the monastery of Winburn in Dorsetshire, where she took the religious veil. After having passed twenty-seven years in this holy nunnery, she was sent by the abbess Tetta, under the conduct of St. Lioba, with several others, into Germany, at the request of her cousin, St. Boniface.[2] Her first settlement in that country was under St. Lioba, in the monastery of Bischofsheim, in the diocese of Mentz. Two years after she was appointed abbess of a nunnery founded by her two brothers, at Heidenheim in Suabia, (now subject to the duke of Wirtemberg,) where her brother, St. Winebald, took upon him at the same time the government of an abbey of monks. This town is situated in the diocese of Aichstadt, in Franconia, upon the borders of Bavaria, of which St. Willibald, our saint's other brother, had been consecrated bishop by St. Boniface. So eminent was the spirit of evangelical charity, meekness, and piety, which all the words and actions of St. Walburge breathed, and so remarkable was the fruit which her zeal and example produced in others, that when St. Winebald died, in 760, she was charged with a superintendency also over the abbey of monks till her death. St. Willibald caused the remains of their brother Winebald to be removed to Aichstadt, sixteen years after his death; at which ceremony St. Walburge assisted. Two years after she passed herself to eternal rest; on the 25th of February, in 779, having lived twenty-five years at Heidenheim. Her relics were translated, in the year 870, to Aichstadt, on the 21st of September, and the principal part still remains there in the church anciently called of the Holy Cross, but since that time of St. Walburge. A considerable portion is venerated with singular devotion at Furnes, where, by the pious zeal of Baldwin, surnamed of Iron, it was received on the 25th of April, and enshrined on the 1st of May, on which day her chief festival is placed in the Belgic Martyrologies, imitated by Baronius in the Roman. From Furnes certain small parts have been distributed in several other towns in the Low Countries, especially at Antwerp, Brussels, Tiel, Arnhem, Groningue, and Zutphen; also Cologne, Wirtemberg, Ausberg, Christ Church at Canterbury, and other places, were enriched with particles of this treasure from Aichstadt. St. Walburge is titular saint of many other great churches in Germany, Brabant, Flanders, and several provinces of France, especially in Poitou, Perche, Normandy, Burgundy, Lorraine, Alsace, &c. Her festival, on account of various translations of her relics, is marked on several days of the year, but the principal is kept in most places on the day of her death. A portion of her relics was preserved in a rich shrine in the repository of relics in the electoral palace of Hanover, as appears from the catalogue printed in folio at Hanover in 1713. See her life written by Wolfhard, a devout priest of Aichstadt, in the following century, about the year {470} 890, again by Adelbold, nineteenth bishop of Utrecht, (of which diocese Heda calls her patroness;) thirdly, by an anonymous author; fourthly, by the poet Medibard; fifthly, by Philip, bishop of Aichstadt; sixthly, by an anonymous author, at the request of the nuns of St. Walburge of Aichstadt. All these six lives are published by Henschenius. See also Raderus, in Bavaria Sancta, t. 3, p. 4. Gretser, de Sanctis Eystettensibus, &c. Footnotes: 1. This saint is corruptly called, in Perche, St. Gauburge, in Normandy and Champagne, St. Vaubourg, about Luzon, St. Falbourg, in ether parts of Poitou, St. Avougourg, in Germany, Walburge, Waltpurde, Walpourc, and in some places Warpurg. Her English-Saxon name Walburge, is the same with the Greek Eucharia, and signifies gracious. See Camden's Remains. 2. St. Boniface being sensible of how great importance it is for the public advantage of the church, and the general advancement of the kingdom of Christ in the souls of men, called over from England into Germany many holy nuns whom he judged best qualified to instruct and train up others in the maxims and spirit of the Gospel. Among these he placed St. Tecla in the monastery of Kitzingen, founded by Alheide, daughter of king Pepin; St. Lioba was appointed by him abbess at Bischofsheim; St. Cunihilt, aunt of St. Lulius, and her daughter Berathgit, called also Bergitis, were mistresses of religious schools in Thuringia, and were honored in that country among the saints. Cunihildls is also called Gunthildis and Bilhildis. See Thuringia Sacra, printed at Frankfort, an. 1737. SAINT C�SARIUS, C. HE was a physician, and brother to St. Gregory Nazianzen. When the latter repaired to Cæsarea, in Palestine, where the sacred studies flourished, Cæsarius went to Alexandria, and with incredible success ran through the circle of the sciences, among which oratory, philosophy, and especially medicine, fixed his attention. In this last he became the first man of his age. He perfected himself in this profession at Constantinople, but excused himself from settling there, as the city and the emperor Constantius earnestly requested him to do. He was afterwards recalled thither, singularly honored by Julian the Apostate, nominated his first physician, and excepted in several edicts which that prince published against the Christians. He resisted strenuously the insinuating discourses and artifices with which that prince endeavored to seduce him, and was prevailed upon by the remonstrances of his father and brother to resign his places at court, and prefer a retreat, whatever solicitations Julian could use to detain him. Jovian honorably restored him, and Valens, moreover, created him treasurer of his own private purse, and of Bithynia. A narrow escape in an earthquake at Nice, in Bithynia, in 368, worked so powerfully on his mind, that he renounced the world, and died shortly after, in the beginning of the year 369, leaving the poor his heirs. The Greeks honor his memory on the 9th of March, as Nicephorus testifies, (Hist. l. 11, c. 19,) and as appears from the Menæa: in the Roman Martyrology he is named on the 25th of February. FEBRUARY XXVI. ST. ALEXANDER, CONFESSOR, PATRIARCH OF ALEXANDRIA. From Theodoret, St. Athanasius, &c. See Hennant, Tillemont, t. 6, pp. 213, 240. Ceillier, t. 4. A.D. 326. ST. ALEXANDER succeeded St. Achillas in the see of Alexandria, in 313. He was a man of apostolic doctrine and life, mild, affable, exceeding charitable to the poor, and full of faith, zeal, and fervor. He assumed to the sacred ministry chiefly those who had first sanctified themselves in holy solitude, and was happy in the choice of bishops throughout all Egypt. The devil, enraged to see the havoc made in his usurped empire over mankind, by the disrepute idolatry was generally fallen into, used his utmost endeavors to repair the loss to his infernal kingdom, by procuring the establishment of a most impious heresy. Arius, a priest of Alexandria, was his {471} principal instrument for that purpose. This heresiarch was well versed in profane literature, was a subtle dialectician, had an exterior show of virtue, and an insinuating behavior; but was a monster of pride, vain-glory, ambition, envy, and jealousy. Under an affected modesty he concealed a soul full of deceit, and capable of all crimes. He joined Meletius, the bishop of Lycopolis, in the beginning of his schism against St. Peter, our saint's predecessor, in 300; but quitting that party after some time, St. Peter was so well satisfied of the sincerity of his repentance, that he ordained him deacon. Soon after Arius discovered his turbulent spirit, in accusing his archbishop, and raising disturbances in favor of the Meletians. This obliged St. Peter to excommunicate him, nor could he ever be induced to revoke that sentence. But his successor, St. Achillas, upon his repentance, admitted him to his communion, ordained him priest, and made him curate of the church of Baucales, one of the quarters of Alexandria. Giving way to spite and envy, on seeing St. Alexander preferred before him to the see of Alexandria,[1] he became his mortal enemy: and as the saint's life and conduct were irreproachable, all his endeavors to oppose him were levelled at his doctrine, in opposition to which the heresiarch denied the divinity of Christ. This error he at first taught only in private; but having, about the year 319, gained followers to support him, he boldly advanced his blasphemies in his sermons, affirming, with Ebion, Artemas, and Theodotus, that Christ was not truly God; adding, what no heretic had before asserted in such a manner, that the Son was a creature, and made out of nothing; that there was a time when he did not exist, and that he was capable of sinning, with other such impieties. St. Athanasius informs us,[2] that he also held that Christ had no other soul than his created divinity, or spiritual substance, made before the world: consequently, that it truly suffered on the cross, descended into hell, and rose again from the dead. Arius engaged in his errors two other curates of the city, a great many virgins, twelve deacons, seven priests, and two bishops. One Colluthus, another curate of Alexandria, and many others, declaimed loudly against these blasphemies. The heretics were called Arians, and these called the Catholics Colluthians. St. Alexander, who was one of the mildest of men, first made use of soft and gentle methods to recover Arius to the truth, and endeavored to gain him by sweetness and exhortations. Several were offended at his lenity, and Colluthus carried his resentment so far as to commence a schism; but this was soon at an end, and the author of it returned to the Catholic communion. But St. Alexander, finding Arius's party increase, and all his endeavors to reclaim him ineffectual, he summoned him to appear in an assembly of his clergy, where, being found obstinate and incorrigible, he was excommunicated, together with his adherents. This sentence of excommunication the saint confirmed soon after, about the end of the year 320, in a council at Alexandria, at the head of near one hundred bishops, at which Arius was also present, who, repeating his former blasphemies, and adding still more horrible ones was unanimously condemned by the synod, which loaded him and all his followers with anathemas. Arius lay hid for some time after this in Alexandria, but being discovered, went into Palestine, and found means to gain over to his party Eusebius, bishop of Cæsarea, also Theognis of Nice, and Eusebius of Nicomedia, which last was, of all others, his most declared protector, and had great authority with the emperor Constantine, who resided even at Nicomedia, or rather with his sister Constantia. Yet it is clear, from Constantine himself, that he was a wicked, proud, ambitious, intriguing man. {472} It is no wonder, after his other crimes, that he became an heresiarch, and that he should have an ascendant over many weak, but well-meaning men, on account of his high credit and reputation at court. After several letters that had passed between these two serpents, Arius retired to him at Nicomedia, and there composed his Thalia, a poem stuffed with his own praises, and his impious heresies. Alexander wrote to the pope, St. Sylvester, and, in a circular letter, to the other bishops of the church, giving them an account of Arius's heresy and condemnation. Arius, Eusebius, and many others, wrote to our saint, begging that he would take off his censures. The emperor Constantine also exhorted him by letter to a reconciliation with Arius, and sent it by the great Osius to Alexandria, with express orders to procure information of the state of the affair. The deputy returned to the emperor better informed of the heresiarch's impiety and malice, and the zeal, virtue, and prudence of St. Alexander: and having given him a just and faithful account of the matter, convinced him of the necessity of a general council, as the only remedy adequate to the growing evil, and capable of restoring peace to the church. St. Alexander had already sent him the same advice in several letters.[3] That prince, accordingly, by letters of respect, invited the bishops to Nice, in Bithynia, and defrayed their expenses. They assembled in the imperial palace of Nice, on the 19th of June, in 325, being three hundred and eighteen in number, the most illustrious prelates of the church, among whom were many glorious confessors of the faith. The principal were our saint, St. Eustathius, patriarch of Antioch, St. Macarius of Jerusalem, Cecilian, archbishop of Carthage, St. Paphnutius, St. Potamon, St. Paul of Neocesarea, St. James of Nisibis, &c. St. Sylvester could not come in person, by reason of his great age; but he sent his legates, who presided in his name.[4] The emperor Constantine entered the council without guards, nor would he sit till he was desired by the bishops, says Eusebius.[5] Theodoret says,[6] that he asked the bishops' leave before he would enter. The blasphemies of Arius, who was himself present, were canvassed for several days. Marcellus of Ancyra, and St. Athanasius, whom St. Alexander had brought with him, and whom he treated with the greatest esteem, discovered all the impiety they contained, and confuted the Arians with invincible strength. The heretics, fearing the indignation of the council, used a great deal of dissimulation in admitting the Catholic terms. The fathers, to exclude all their subtleties, declared the Son consubstantial to the {473} Father, which they inserted in the profession of their faith, called the Nicene creed, which was drawn up by Osius, and to which all subscribed, except a small number of Arians. At first they were seventeen, but Eusebius of Cæsarea received the creed the day following, as did all the others except five, namely, Eusebius of Nicomedia, Theognis of Nice, Marie of Chalcedon, Theonas and Secundus of Lybia, the two bishops who had first joined Arius. Of these also Eusebius, Marie, and Theognis conformed through fear of banishment. The Arian historian Philostorgius[7] pretends to excuse his heroes, Eusebius of Nicomedia and Theognis, by saying they inserted an iota, and signed[8] like in substance, instead of of the same substance;[9] a fraud in religion which would no way have excused their hypocrisy. Arius, Theonas, and Secundus, with some Egyptian priests, were banished by the order of Constantine, and Illyricum was the place of their exile. The council received Meletius and his schismatical adherents upon their repentance; but they afterwards relapsed into their schism, and part of them joined the Arians. The council added twenty canons of discipline, and was closed about the 25th of August.[10] Constantine gave all the prelates a magnificent entertainment, and dismissed them with great presents to their respective sees. St. Alexander, after this triumph of the faith, returned to Alexandria; where, after having recommended St. Athanasius for his successor, he died in 326, on the 26th of February, on which day he is mentioned in the Roman Martyrology. * * * * * A true disciple of Christ, by a sincere spirit of humility and distrust in himself, is, as it were, naturally inclined to submission to all authority appointed by God, in which he finds his peace, security, and joy. This happy disposition of his soul is his secure fence against the illusions of self-sufficiency and blind pride, which easily betrays men into the most fatal errors. On the contrary, pride is a spirit of revolt and independence: he who is possessed with this devil is fond of his own conceits, self-confident, and obstinate. However strong the daylight of evidence may be in itself, such a one will endeavor to shut up all the avenues of light, though some beams force themselves into his soul to disturb his repose, and strike deep the sting of remorse: jealousy and a love of opposition foster the disorder, and render it incurable. This is the true portraiture of Arius, and other heresiarchs and firebrands of the universe. Can we sufficiently detest jealousy and pride, the fatal source of so great evils? Do we not discover, by fatal symptoms, that we ourselves harbor this monster in our breasts? Should the eye be jealous that the ear hears, and disturb the functions of this or the other senses, instead of regarding them as its own and enjoying their mutual advantage and comfort, what confusion would ensue! Footnotes: 1. Theodoret, l. 1, c. {}. Socrates, l. 1, c. 5. 2. L. de Adv. Chr., p. 635. 3. Rufinus (l. 1, Hist. c. 1) says, that the council was assembled by the advice of the priests. Ex sacerdotum sententia. And the third council of Constantinople attributes convocation to St. Sylvester as much as to the emperor. Constantinus et Sylvester magnam in Nicea synodum congregabant. Conc. Constantinopolitanum tertium, Act. 18, p. 1049, t. 6. Conc. 4. This is acknowledged by the oriental bishops, assembled at Constantinople, in 552, (t. 5, Conc. pp. 337, 338.) The legates were Vito, or Victor, and Vincent, two Roman priests, to whom the pope joined Osius, bishop of Cordova, as being the most renowned prelate of the West, and highly esteemed by the emperor. Ipse etiam Osius ex Hispanis nominis et famæ celebritate insignis, qui Sylvestri episcoli maximæ Romæ locum obtinebat, una cum Romanis presbyteris Vitone et Vincentio adfuit; says Gelasius of Cyzicus. (Hist. Conc. Nicen. l. 2, c. 5, t. 2. Conc, p. 155.) The same is affirmed by pope Adrian, (t. 6, Conc. p. 1810.) In all the editions of this council, Osius with the two priests. Vito and Vincent, is first named among the subscribers. Socrates also names them first, and before the patriarchs. Osius Episc. Cordubæ, ita credo, ut sup. dictum est. Vito et Vincentius presbyteri urbis Romæ. Egypti Alexander Episc. Antiochiæ Eustathius, &c. (Socr. l. 1, c.13.) It is then false what Blondel (de la primantè de l'Eglise, p. 1195) pretends, that St. Eustathius of Antioch presided. He is indeed called, by Facundus, (l. 8, c. 1, & l. 11, c. 1.) the first of the council; and by Nicephorus, (Chronol. p. 146,) the chief of the bishops, because he was the first among the orientals; for St. Alexander of Egypt was certainly before him in rank. Theodoret (l. 1, c. 6) says, he sat the first on the right hand in the assembly. And it appears from Eusebius, that the pope's legates and the patriarch of Alexandria sat at the head on the left side. This might be the more honorable on several accounts, as being on the right to those that came in. It is certain that the pope's legate presided in the council of Chalcedon where they, in the same manner, sat first on the left above the patriarch of Alexandria, and the patriarch of Antioch was placed on the right. 5. L. 3. de vit. Constant. c. 10. 6. L. 1, c. 7. 7. L. 1, c. 9. 8. [Greek: Homoiusios]. 9. [Greek: Homousious]. 10. The Arabic canons are falsely ascribed to the Nicene council, being collected out of other ancient synods. ST. PORPHYRIUS, BISHOP OF GAZA, CONFESSOR From his life, written with great accuracy by his faithful disciple Mark. See Fleury, t. 5. Tillemont, t. 10. Chatelain, p. 777. In the king's library at Paris is a Greek MS. life Of St. Porphyrius, (abridged from that of Mark,) which has never been translated. A.D. 420. PORPHYRIUS, a native of Thessalonica in Macedonia, was of a noble and wealthy family. The desire of renouncing the world made him leave his {474} friends and country at twenty-five years of age, in 378, to pass into Egypt, where he consecrated himself to God in a famous monastery in the desert of Sceté. After five years spent there in the penitential exercises of a monastic life, he went into Palestine to visit the holy places of Jerusalem. After this he took up his abode in a cave near the Jordan, where he passed other five years in great austerity, till he fell sick, when a complication of disorders obliged him to leave that place and return to Jerusalem. There he never failed daily to visit devoutly all the holy places, leaning on a staff, for he was too weak to stand upright. It happened about the same time that Mark, an Asiatic, and the author of his life, came to Jerusalem with the same intent, where he made some stay. He was much edified at the devotion with which Porphyrius continually visited the place of our Lord's resurrection, and the other oratories. And seeing him one day labor with great pain in getting up the stairs in the chapel built by Constantine, he ran to him to offer him his assistance, which Porphyrius refused, saying: "It is not just that I who am come hither to beg pardon for my sins, should be eased by any one: rather let me undergo some labor and inconvenience that God, beholding it, may have compassion on me." He, in this condition, never omitted his usual visits of piety to the holy places, and daily partook of the mystical table, that is, of the holy sacrament. And as to his distemper, so much did he contemn it, that he seemed to be sick in another's body and not in his own. His confidence in God always supported him. The only thing which afflicted him was, that his fortune had not been sold before this for the use of the poor. This he commissioned Mark to do for him, who accordingly set out for Thessalonica, and in three months' time returned to Jerusalem with money and effects to the value of four thousand five hundred pieces of gold. When the blessed man saw him, he embraced him with tears of joy for his safe and speedy return. But Porphyrius was now so well recovered, that Mark scarce knew him to be the same person; for his body had no signs of its former decay, and his face looked full, fresh, and painted with a healthy red. He, perceiving his friend's amazement at his healthy looks, said to him with a smile, "Be not surprised, Mark, to see me in perfect health and strength, but admire the unspeakable goodness of Christ, who can easily cure what is despaired of by men." Mark asked him by what means he had recovered. He replied: "Forty days ago, being in extreme pain, I made a shift to reach Mount Calvary, where, fainting away, I fell into a kind of trance or ecstasy, during which I seemed to see our Saviour on the cross, and the good thief in the same condition near him. I said to Christ,_ Lord, Remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom_: whereupon he ordered the thief to come to my assistance, who, raising me off the ground on which I lay, bade me go to Christ. I ran to him, and he, coming off his cross, said to me: _Take this wood_ (meaning his cross) _into thy custody_. In obedience to him, methought I laid it on my shoulders, and carried it some way. I awaked soon after, and have been free from pain ever since, and without the least appearance of my having ever ailed any thing." Mark was so edified with the holy man's discourse and good example, that he became more penetrated with esteem and affection for him than ever, which made him desirous of living always with him in order to his own improvement; for he seemed to have attained to a perfect mastery over all his passions: he was endued at the same time with a divine prudence, an eminent spirit of prayer, and the gift of tears. Being also well versed in the holy scriptures and spiritual knowledge, and no stranger to profane learning, he confounded all the infidels and heretics who attempted to dispute with him. As to the money and effects which Mark had brought him, he distributed all among the necessitous in Palestine and Egypt, so {475} that, in a very short time, he had reduced himself to the necessity of laboring for his daily food. He therefore learned to make shoes and dress leather, while Mark, being well skilled in writing, got a handsome livelihood by copying books, and to spare. He therefore desired the saint to partake of his earnings. But Porphyrius replied, in the words of St. Paul: _He that doth not work let him not eat_. He led this laborious and penitential life till he was forty years of age, when the bishop of Jerusalem ordained him priest, though much against his will, and committed to him the keeping of the holy cross: this was in 393. The saint changed nothing in his austere penitential life, feeding only upon roots and the coarsest bread, and not eating till after sunset, except on Sundays and holidays, when he ate at noon, and added a little oil and cheese: and on account of a great weakness of stomach, he mingled a very small quantity of wine in the water he drank. This was his method of living till his death. Being elected bishop of Gaza, in 396, John, the metropolitan and archbishop of Cæsarea, wrote to the patriarch of Jerusalem to desire him to send over Porphyrius, that he might consult him on certain difficult passages of scripture. He was sent accordingly, but charged to be back in seven days. Porphyrius, receiving this order, seemed at first disturbed, but said: "God's will be done." That evening he called Mark, and said to him: "Brother Mark, let us go and venerate the holy places and the sacred cross, for it will be long before we shall do it again." Mark asked him why he said so. He answered: Our Saviour had appeared to him the night before, and said: "Give up the treasure of the cross which you have in custody, for I will marry you to a wife, poor indeed and despicable, but of great piety and virtue. Take care to adorn her well; for, however contemptible she may appear, she is my sister." "This," said he, "Christ signified to me last night: and I fear, in consequence, my being charged with the sins of others, while I labor to expiate my own; but the will of God must be obeyed." When they had venerated the holy places and the sacred cross, and Porphyrius had prayed long before it, and with many tears, he shut up the cross in its golden case, and delivered the keys to the bishop; and having obtained his blessing, he and his disciple Mark set out the next day, with three others, among whom was one Barochas, a person whom the saint had found lying in the street almost dead, and had taken care of, cured, and instructed; who ever after served him with Mark. They arrived the next day, which was Saturday, at Cæsarea. The archbishop obliged them to sup with him. After spiritual discourses they took a little sleep, and then rose to assist at the night service. Next morning the archbishop bid the Gazæans lay hold on St. Porphyrius, and, while they held him, ordained him bishop. The holy man wept bitterly, and was inconsolable for being promoted to a dignity he judged himself so unfit for. The Gazæans, however, performed their part in endeavoring to comfort him, and, having assisted at the Sunday office, and stayed one day more at Cæsarea, they set out for Gaza, lay at Diospolis, and, late on Wednesday night, arrived at Gaza, much harassed and fatigued. For the heathens living in the villages near Gaza, having notice of their coming, had so damaged the roads in several places, and clogged them with thorns and logs of wood, that they were scarce passable. They also contrived to raise such a smoke and stench, that the holy men were in danger of being blinded or suffocated. There happened that year a very great drought, which the pagans ascribed to the coming of the new Christian bishop, saying that their god Marnas had foretold that Porphyrius would bring public calamities and disasters on their city. In Gaza stood a famous temple of that idol, which the emperor Theodosius the Elder had commanded to be shut up, but not demolished, {476} on account of its beautiful structure. The governor afterwards had permitted the heathens to open it again. As no rain fell the two first months after St. Porphyrius's arrival, the idolaters, in great affliction, assembled in this temple to offer sacrifices, and make supplications to their god Marnas, whom they called the Lord of rains. These they repeated for seven days, going also to a place of prayer out of the town; but seeing all their endeavors ineffectual, they lost all hopes of a supply of what they so much wanted. A dearth ensuing, the Christians, to the number of two hundred and eighty, women and children included, after a day's fast, and watching the following night in prayer, by the order of their holy bishop, went out in procession to St. Timothy's church, in which lay the relics of the holy martyr St. Meuris, and of the confessor St. Thees, singing hymns of divine praise. But at their return to the city they found the gates shut against them, which the heathens refused to open. In this situation the Christians, and St. Porphyrius above the rest, addressed almighty God with redoubled fervor for the blessing so much wanted; when in a short time, the clouds gathering, as at the prayers of Elias, there fell such a quantity of rain that the heathens opened their gates, and, joining them, cried out "Christ alone is God: He alone has overcome." They accompanied the Christians to the church to thank God for the benefit received, which was attended with the conversion of one hundred and seventy-six persons, whom the saint instructed, baptized, and confirmed, as he did one hundred and five more before the end of that year. The miraculous preservation of the life of a pagan woman in labor, who had been despaired of, occasioned the conversion of that family and others, to the number of sixty-four. The heathens, perceiving their number decrease, grew very troublesome to the Christians, whom they excluded from commerce and all public offices, and injured them all manner of ways. St. Porphyrius, to screen himself and his flock from their outrages and vexations, had recourse to the emperor's protection. On this errand he sent Mark, his disciple, to Constantinople, and went afterwards himself in company with John, his metropolitan, archbishop of Cæsarea. Here they applied themselves to St. John Chrysostom, who joyfully received them, and recommended them to the eunuch Amantius, who had great credit with the empress, and was a zealous servant of God. Amantius having introduced them to the empress, she received them with great distinction, assured them of her protection, and begged their prayers for her safe delivery, a favor she received a few days after. She desired them in another visit to sign her and her newborn son, Theodosius the Younger, with the sign of the cross, which they did. The young prince was baptized with great solemnity, and on that occasion the empress obtained from the emperor all that the bishops had requested, and in particular that the temples of Gaza should be demolished; an imperial edict being drawn up for this purpose and delivered to Cynegius, a virtuous patrician, and one full of zeal, to see it executed. They stayed at Constantinople during the feast of Easter, and at their departure the emperor and empress bestowed on them great presents. When they landed in Palestine, near Gaza, the Christians came out to meet them with a cross carried before them, singing hymns. In the place called Tetramphodos, or Four-ways-end, stood a marble statue of Venus, on a marble altar, which was in great reputation for giving oracles to young women about the choice of husbands, but had often grossly deceived them, engaging them to most unhappy marriages; so that many heathens detested its lying impostures. As the two bishops, with the procession of the Christians, and the cross borne before them, passed through that square, this idol fell down of itself, and was {477} broken to pieces: whereupon thirty-two men and seven women were converted. Ten days after arrived Cynegius, having with him a consular man and a duke, or general, with a strong guard of soldiers, besides the civil magistrates of the country. He assembled the citizens and read to them the emperor's edict, commanding their idols and temples to be destroyed, which was accordingly executed, and no less than eight public temples in the city were burnt; namely, those of the Sun, Venus, Apollo, Proserpine, Hecate, the Hierion, or of the priests, Tycheon, or of Fortune, and Marnion of Marnas, their Jupiter. The Marnion, in which men had been often sacrificed, burned for many days. After this, the private houses and courts were all searched; the idols were everywhere burned or thrown into the common sewers, and all books of magic and superstition were cast into the flames. Many idolaters desired baptism; but the saint took a long time to make trial of them, and to prepare them for that sacrament by daily instructions. On the spot where the temple of Marnas had stood, was built the church of Eudoxia in the figure of a cross. She sent for this purpose precious pillars and rich marble from Constantinople. Of the marble taken out of the Marnion, St. Porphyrius made steps and a road to the church, that it might be trampled upon by men, dogs, swine, and other beasts, whence many heathens would never walk thereon. Before he would suffer the church to be begun, he proclaimed a fast, and the next morning, being attended by his clergy and all the Christians in the city, they went in a body to the place from the church Irene, singing the Venite exultemus Domino, and other psalms, and answering to every verse Alleluia, Barochas carrying a cross before them. They all set to work, carrying stones and other materials, and digging the foundations according to the plan marked out and directed by Rufinus, a celebrated architect, singing psalms and saying prayers during their work. It was begun in 403, when thirty high pillars arrived from Constantinople, two of which, called Carostiæ, shone like emeralds when placed in the church. It was five years a building, and when finished in 408, the holy bishop performed the consecration of it on Easter-Day with the greatest pomp and solemnity. His alms to the poor on that occasion seemed boundless, though they were always exceeding great. The good bishop spent the remainder of his life in the zealous discharge of all pastoral duties; and though he lived to see the city clear for the most part of the remains of paganism, superstition, and idolatry, he had always enough to suffer from such as continued obstinate in their errors. Falling sick, he made his pious will, in which he recommended all his dear flock to God. He died in 420, being about sixty years of age, on the 26th of February, on which day both the Greeks and Latins make mention of him. The pious author of his life concludes it, saying: "He is now in the paradise of delight, interceding for us with all the saints, by whose prayers may God have mercy on us." ST. VICTOR, OR VITTRE, OF ARCIES, OR ARCIS, IN CHAMPAGNE, ANCHORET AND CONFESSOR, IN THE SEVENTH AGE. HE was of noble parentage in the diocese of Troyes in Champagne educated under strict discipline in learning and piety, and a saint from his cradle. In his youth, prayer, fasting, and alms-deeds were his chief delight, and, embracing an ecclesiastical state, he took orders; but the love of heavenly contemplation being always the prevalent inclination in his soul he {478} preferred close retirement to the mixed life of the care of souls. In this choice the Holy Ghost was his director, for he lived in continual union with God by prayer and contemplation, and seemed raised above the condition of this mortal life, and almost as if he lived without a body. God glorified him by many miracles; but the greatest seems to have been the powerful example of his life. We have two pious panegyrics made upon this saint by St. Bernard, who says:[1] "Now placed in heaven, he beholds God clearly revealed to him, swallowed up in joy, but not forgetting us. It is not a land of oblivion in which Victor dwells. Heaven doth not harden or straiten hearts, but it maketh them more tender and compassionate it doth not distract minds, nor alienate them from us: it doth not diminish, but it increaseth affection and charity: it augmenteth bowels of pity. The angels, although they behold the face of their Father, visit, run, and continually assist us; and shall they now forget us who were once among us, and who once suffered themselves what they see us at present laboring under? No: _I know the just expect me till thou renderest to me my reward_.[2] Victor is not like that cupbearer of Pharaoh, who could forget his fellow-captive. He hath not so put on the stole of glory himself, as to lay aside his pity, or the remembrance of our misery." St. Victor died at Saturniac, now called Saint-Vittre, two leagues from Arcies in the diocese of Troyes. A church was built over his tomb at Saturniac; but in 837 his relics were translated thence to the neighboring monastery of Montier-Ramey, or Montirame, so called from Arremar, by whom it was founded in 837. It is situated four leagues from Troyes, of the Benedictin Order, and is still possessed of this sacred treasure. At the request of these monks, St. Bernard composed an office of St. Victor, extant in his works, (ep. 312, vet. ed. seu 398, nov. edit.) See the two sermons of St. Bernard on St. Victor, and his ancient life in Henschenius and others: from which it appears that this saint never was a monk, never having professed any monastic Order, though he led an eremitical life. Footnotes: 1. Serm. 2, p. 966. 2. Ps. cxii. 8. FEBRUARY XXVII. ST. LEANDER, BISHOP OF SEVILLE, CONFESSOR. From St. Isidore of Seville, St. Gregory the Great, and St. Gregory of Tours, hist l. 5. See Fleury, b. 34, 35, 38. Mabillon, Sæc. Ben. 1. Ceillier, t. 17. A.D. 596. ST. LEANDER was of an illustrious family, and born at Carthagena in Spain. He had two brothers, St. Fulgentius, bishop of Ecija and Carthagena, and St. Isidore, our saint's successor in the see of Seville. He had also one sister, Florentia by name, who had consecrated herself to God in the state of virginity. He set them an example of that piety which they faithfully imitated. He entered into a monastery very young, where he lived many years, and attained to an eminent degree of virtue and sacred learning. These qualities occasioned his being promoted to the see of Seville: but his change of condition made little or no alteration in his method {479} of life, though it brought on him a great increase of care and solicitude for the salvation of those whom God had put under his care, as well as for the necessities of the whole church, that of Spain in particular. This kingdom was then possessed by the Visigoths, or Western-Goths; who, while Theodoric settled the Ostrogoths, or Eastern-Goths, in Italy, had passed the Alps, and founded their kingdom, first in Languedoc, and soon after, about the year 470, in Spain. These Goths, being for the generality all infected with Arianism, established this heresy wherever they came; so that when St. Leander was made bishop, it had reigned in Spain a hundred years. This was his great affliction: however, by his tears and prayers to God, and by his most zealous and unwearied endeavors, both at home and abroad, he became the happy instrument of the conversion of that nation to the Catholic faith. But he suffered much from king Leovigild on this account, and was at length forced into banishment; the saint having converted, among others, Hermenegild, the king's eldest son and heir apparent. This pious prince his unnatural father put to death the year following, for refusing to receive the communion from the hands of an Arian bishop. But, touched with remorse not long after, he recalled our saint, and falling sick, and finding himself past hopes of recovery, he sent for St. Leander, whom he had so much persecuted, and recommended to him his son Recared, whom he left his successor, to be instructed in the true faith; though out of fear of his people, as St. Gregory laments, he durst not embrace it himself. His son Recared, by listening to St. Leander, soon became a Catholic. The king also spoke with so much wisdom on the controverted points to the Arian bishops, that by the force of his reasoning, rather than by his authority, he brought them over to own the truth of the Catholic doctrine; and thus he converted the whole nation of the Visigoths. He was no less successful in the like pious endeavors with respect to the Suevi, a people of Spain, whom his father Leovigild had perverted. It was a subject of great joy to the whole church to behold the wonderful blessing bestowed by Almighty God on the labors of our saint, but to none more than St. Gregory the Great, who wrote to St. Leander to congratulate him on the subject. This holy prelate was no less zealous in the reformation of manners, than in restoring the purity of faith; and he planted the seeds of that zeal and fervor which afterwards produced so many martyrs and saints. His zeal in this regard appeared in the good regulations set on foot with this intent in the council of Seville, which was called by him, and of which he was, as it were, the soul. In 589, he assisted at the third council of Toledo, of seventy-two bishops, or their deputies, in which were drawn up twenty-three canons, relating to discipline, to repair the breaches the Arian heresy had made in fomenting disorders of several kinds. One of these was, that the Arian clergy cohabited with their wives; but the council forbade such of them as were converted to do so, enjoining them a separation from the same chamber, and, if possible, from the same house.[1] This council commanded also the rigorous execution of all penitential canons without any abatement. The pious cardinal D'Aguirre has written a learned dissertation ton this subject.[2] St. Leander, sensible of the importance of prayer, which is in a devout life what a spring is in a watch, or the main wheel in an engine, labored particularly to encourage true devotion in all persons, but particularly those of the monastic profession, of which state it is the very essence and constituent. His letter to his sister Florentina, a holy virgin, is called his Rule of a Monastic Life. It turns chiefly on the contempt of the world, and on {480} the exercises of prayer. This saint also reformed the Spanish liturgy.[3] In this liturgy, and in the third council of Toledo, in conformity to the eastern churches, the Nicene creed was appointed to be read at mass, to express a detestation of the Arian heresy. Other western churches, with the Roman, soon imitated this devotion. St. Leander was visited by frequent distempers, particularly the gout, which St. Gregory, who was often afflicted with the same, writing to him, calls a favor and mercy of heaven. This holy doctor of Spain died about the year 596, on the 27th of February, as Mabillon proves from his epitaph. The church of Seville has been a metropolitan see ever since the third century. The cathedral is the most magnificent, both as to structure and ornament, of any in all Spain. * * * * * The contempt of the world which the gospel so strongly inculcates, and which St. Leander so eminently practised and taught, it the foundation of a spiritual life; but is of far greater extent than most Christians conceive, for it requires no less than a total disengagement of the affections from earthly things. Those whom God raises to perfect virtue, and closely unites to himself, must cut off and put away every thing that can be an obstacle to this perfect union. Their will must be thoroughly purified from all dross of inordinate affections before it can be perfectly absorbed in his. This they who are particularly devoted to the divine service, are especially to take notice of. If this truth was imprinted in the manner that it ought, in the hearts of those who enrol themselves in the service of the church, or who live in cloisters, they would be replenished with heavenly blessings, and the church would have the comfort of seeing apostles of nations revive among her clergy, and the monasteries again filled with Antonies, Bennets, and Bernards; whose sanctity, prayers, and example, would even infuse into many others the true spirit of Christ, amid the desolation and general blindness of this unhappy age. Footnotes: 1. Conc. t. 5, p. 998. 2. Diss. 3. in Conc. Hisp. 3. The church of Spain first received the faith from Rome, as pope Innocent I. Informs us. (Ep. ad. Decent.) Whence St. Isidore says their divine office was instituted by St. Peter, (l. l, c. 15, Eccl. Offic.) Their ceremonies and discipline, as of fasting on Saturdays, and other rites mentioned in their councils, are Roman. And the Roman liturgy was used in Africa beyond Spain. But the Goths used a liturgy formed by Ulphilas from the Orientals. St. Leander is said to have compiled a liturgy from both, and also from the Gaulish and oriental liturgies: St. Isidore and St. Ildefonse perfected it. When the Saracens or Arabians became masters of Spain, the Christians of that country were called Mixt-Arabs, and their liturgy, Mozarabic. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries this liturgy gave place to the Roman. Cardinal Ximenes re-established the daily use of the Mozarabic in a chapel of the cathedral of Toledo: it is also used in the same city by seven old Mozarabic churches, but on the days of their patrons only. See Le Brun, liturg. t. 2, p. 272. F. Flores thinks the Mozarabic liturgy was that of the Roman and African churches retained by St. Leander, without any alteration or mixture from the Orientals, except certain very inconsiderable rites. See his Spans. Sagrada, t. 3, Diss. de la Missa Antigua de Espagna, pp.187, 198, &c. But though it much resembles it, we are assured by F. Burriel, the learned Jesuit, in his letter on the literary monuments found in Spain, that in some parts there are considerable differences. We shall be fully informed of this, also what masses were added by St. Ildefonse, and of other curious particulars, when we are favored with the collections he has made from the Gothic MSS. in Spain on this subject, and the new edition of all the liturgies of Christian churches which the Assemani are preparing at Rome in fifteen volumes folio. The Mozarabic liturgy has been printed at Rome in folio, by the care of F. Leeley, a Scotch Jesuit. SS. JULIAN, CHRONION, AND BESAS, MM. WHEN the persecution of Decius filled the city of Alexandria with dread and terror, many, especially among the nobles, the rich, and those who held any places in the state, sacrificed to idols, but pale and trembling, so as to show they had neither courage to die, nor heart to sacrifice. Several generous soldiers repaired the scandal given by these cowards. Julian, who was grievously afflicted with the gout, and one of his servants, called Chronion, were set on the backs of camels, and, cruelly scourged through the {481} whole city, and at length were consumed by fire. Besas, a soldier, was beheaded. See St. Dionysius of Alex. in Eusebius, l, 6, c. 41, ed Val. ST. THALIL�US, A CILICIAN HE lived a recluse on a mountain in Syria, and shut himself up ten years in an open cage of wood. Theodoret asked him why he had chosen so singular a practice. The penitent answered: "I punish my criminal body, that God, seeing my affliction for my sins, may be moved to pardon them, and to deliver me from, or at least to mitigate the excessive torments of the world to come, which I have deserved." See Theodoret, Phil. c. 28. John Mosch in the Spiritual Meadow, c. 59, p. 872, relates that Thalihæus, the Cilician, spent sixty years in an ascetic life, weeping almost without intermission; and that he used to say to those that came to him: "Time is allowed us by the divine mercy for repentance and satisfaction, and wo {sic} to us if we neglect it." ST. GALMIER, IN LATIN, BALDOMERUS. HE was a locksmith in Lyons, who lived in great poverty and austerity, and spent all his leisure moments in holy reading and prayer. He gave his gains to the poor, and sometimes even his tools. He repeated to every one: "In the name of the Lord let us always give thanks to God." Vivencius, abbot of St. Justus, (afterwards archbishop of Lyons,) admired his devotion in the church, but was more edified and astonished when he had conversed with him. He gave him a cell in his monastery, in which the servant of God sanctified himself still more and more by all the exercises of holy solitude, and by his penitential labor. He died a subdeacon about the year 650. His relics were very famous for miracles, and a celebrated pilgrimage, till they were scattered in the air by the Huguenots, in the sixteenth century. The Roman Martyrology names him on the day of his death, the 27th of February. ST. NESTOR, B.M. EPOLIUS, whom the emperor Decius had appointed governor of Lycia, Pamphylia, and Phrygia, sought to make his court to that prince by surpassing his colleagues in the rage and cruelty with which he persecuted the meek disciples of Christ. At that time Nestor, bishop of Sida in Pamphylia, (as Le Quien demonstrates, not of Perge, or of Mandis, or Madigis, as some by mistake affirm,) was distinguished in those parts for his zeal in propagating the faith, and for the sanctity of his life. His reputation reached the governor, who sent an Irenarch to apprehend him. The martyr was conducted to Perge, and there crucified, in imitation of the Redeemer of the world, whom he preached. His triumph happened in 250. His Latin Acts, given by the Bollandists, are to be corrected by those in Greek, found among the manuscript acts of Saints, honored by the Greeks in the month of February in the king's library at Paris, Cod. 1010, written in the tenth century. {482} ST. ALNOTH, ANCHORET, M. WEDON, in Northamptonshire, was honored with a palace of Wulphere, king of Mercia, in the middle of England, and was bestowed by that prince upon his daughter St. Wereburge, who converted it into a monastery. Alnoth was the bailiff of St. Wereburge in that country, and the perfect imitator of her heroic virtues. After her retreat he led an anchoretical life in that neighborhood, and was murdered by robbers in his solitude. His relics were kept with veneration in the church of the village of Stow, near Wedon. Wilson places his festival on the 27th of February, in the first edition of his English Martyrology, and in the second on the 25th of November. See the life of St. Wereburge, which Camden sent to F. Rosweide, written, as it seems, by Jocelin. See also Harpsfield, Sæc. 7, c. 23, and Bollandus, p. 684. FEBRUARY XXVIII. MARTYRS, WHO DIED IN THE GREAT PESTILENCE IN ALEXANDRIA. From Eusebius, Hist. l. 7, c. 21, 22, p. 268. A.D. 261, 262, 263. A VIOLENT pestilence laid waste the greatest part of the Roman empire during twelve years, from 249 to 263. Five thousand persons died of it in one day in Rome, in 262. St. Dionysius of Alexandria relates, that a cruel sedition and civil war had filled that city with murders and tumults; so that it was safer to travel from the eastern to the western parts of the then known world, than to go from one street of Alexandria to another. The pestilence succeeded this first scourge, and with such violence, that there was not a single house in that great city which entirely escaped it, or which had not some dead to mourn for. All places were filled with groans, and the living appeared almost dead with fear. The noisome exhalations of carcasses, and the very winds, which should have purified the air, loaded with infection and pestilential vapors from the Nile, increased the evil. The fear of death rendered the heathens cruel towards their nearest relations. As soon as any of them had caught the contagion, though their dearest friends, they avoided and fled from them as their greatest enemies. They threw them half dead into the streets, and abandoned them without succor; they left their bodies without burial, so fearful were they of catching that mortal distemper, which, however, it was very difficult to avoid, notwithstanding all their precautions. This sickness, which was the greatest of calamities to the pagans, was but an exercise and trial to the Christians, who showed, on that occasion, how contrary the spirit of charity is to the interestedness of self love. During the persecutions of Decius, Gallus, and Valerian, they durst not appear, but were obliged to keep their assemblies in solitudes, or in ships tossed on the waves, or in infected prisons, or the like places, which the sanctity of our mysteries made venerable. Yet in the {483} time of this public calamity, most of them, regardless of the danger of their own lives to assisting others, visited, relieved, and attended the sick, and comforted the dying. They closed their eyes, carried them on their shoulders, laid them out, washed their bodies, and decently interred them, and soon after shared the same fate themselves; but those who survived still succeeded to their charitable office, which they paid to the very pagans their persecutors. "Thus," adds St. Dionysius, "the best of our brethren have departed this life; some of the most valuable, both of priests, deacons, and laics; and it is thought that this kind of death is in nothing different from martyrdom." And the Roman Martyrology says, the religious faith of pious Christians honors them as martyrs. * * * * * In these happy victims of holy charity we admire how powerfully perfect virtue, and the assured expectation of eternal bliss, raises the true Christian above all earthly views. He who has always before his eyes the incomprehensible happiness of enjoying God in his glory, and seriously considers the infinite advantage, peace, and honor annexed to his divine service; he who is inflamed with ardent love of God, and zeal for his honor, sets no value on any thing but in proportion as it affords him a means of improving his spiritual stock, advancing the divine honor, and more perfectly uniting his soul to God by every heroic virtue: disgraces, dangers, labor, pain, death, loss of goods or friends, and every other sacrifice here become his gain and his greatest joy. That by which he most perfectly devotes himself to God, and most speedily and securely attains to the bliss of possessing him, he regards as his greatest happiness. ST. PROTERIUS, PATRIARCH OF ALEXANDRIA, M. HE was ordained priest by St. Cyril, but opposed Dioscorus, his successor, on his patronizing Eutyches, and giving into his errors, notwithstanding his endeavor to gain him to his interest, by making him archpriest, and entrusting him with the care of his church. Dioscorus being condemned and deposed by the council of Chalcedon, Proterius was elected in his room, and was accordingly ordained and installed in 552. The people of Alexandria, famed for riots and tumults, then divided; some demanding the return of Dioscorus, others supporting Proterius. The factious party was headed by two vicious ecclesiastics, Timothy, surnamed Elurus, and Peter Mongus, whom the saint had canonically excommunicated. And so great and frequent were the tumults and seditions they raised against him, that during the whole course of his pontificate he was never out of danger of falling a sacrifice to the schismatical party, regardless both of the imperial orders and decisions of the council of Chalcedon. In the height of one of those tumults, Elurus, having caused himself to be ordained by two bishops of his faction, that had been formerly deposed, took possession of the episcopal throne, and was proclaimed by his party the sole lawful bishop of Alexandria. But being soon after driven out of the city by the imperial commander, this so inflamed the Eutychian party, that their barefaced attempts obliged the holy patriarch to take sanctuary in the baptistery adjoining to the church of St. Quirinus, where the schismatical rabble breaking in, they stabbed him on Good-Friday, in the year 557. Not content with this, they dragged his dead body through the whole city, cut it in pieces, burnt it and scattered the ashes in the air. The bishops of Thrace, to a letter to the emperor Loo, soon after his death, declared that they placed him among {484} the martyrs, and hoped to find mercy through his intercession. Sanctissimum Proterium in ordine et choro sanctorum martyrum ponimus, et ejus intercessionibus misericordem et propitium Deum nobis fieri postulamus. Conc. t. 4, p. 907. His name occurs in the Greek calendars on the 28th of February.--See Evagrius, Hist. Eccl. l. 2, c. 4. Liberat. Disc. in Breviar. c. 15. Theophanes in Marciano et Leone. Theodor. Lect. l. 1 F. Cacciari, Diss. in Op. S. Leonia, t. 3. Henschenius, t. 3, Febr. p. 729. SS. ROMANUS AND LUPICINUS, ABBOTS. ROMANUS at thirty-five years of age left his relations, and spent some time in the monastery of Ainay, (called in Latin Athanacense,) at Lyons, at the great church at the conflux of the Saone and Rhone, which the faithful had built over the ashes of the famous martyrs of that city; for their bodies being burnt by the pagans, their ashes were thrown into the Rhone, but a great part of them was gathered by the Christians, and deposited in this place. Romanus, a short time after, took with him the institutions and conferences of Cassian, and retired into the forests of mount Iura, between France and Switzerland, and fixed his abode at a place called Condate, at the conflux of the rivers Bienne and Aliere, where he found a spot of ground fit for culture, and some trees which furnished him with a kind of wild fruit. Here he spent his time in praying, reading, and laboring for his subsistence. Lupicinus, his brother, came to him some time after in company with others, who were followed by several more, drawn by the fame of the virtue and miracles of these two saints. Here they built the monastery of Condate, and, their numbers increasing, that of Leuconne, two miles distant to the north, and, on a rock, a nunnery called La Beaume, (now St. Remain de la Roche,) which no men were allowed ever to enter, and where St. Romanus chose his burial-place. The brothers governed the monks jointly and in great harmony, though Lupicinus was more inclined to severity of the two. He usually resided at Leuconne with one hundred and fifty monks. The brethren at Condate, when they were enriched with many lands, changed their diet, which was only bread made of barley and bran, and pulse dressed often without salt or oil, and brought to table wheat-bread, fish, and variety of dishes. Lupicinus being informed hereof by Romanus, came to Condate on the sixth day after this innovation, and corrected the abuse. The abstinence which he prescribed his monks was milder than that practised by the oriental monks, and by those of Lerins, partly because the Gauls were naturally great eaters, and partly because they were employed in very hard manual labor. But they never touched fowls or any flesh-meat, and only were allowed milk and eggs in time of sickness. Lupicinus, for his own part, used no other bed than a chair or a hard board; never touched wine, and would scarce ever suffer a drop either of oil or milk to be poured on his pulse. In summer his subsistence for many years was only hard bread moistened in cold water, so that he could eat it with a spoon. His tunic was made of various skins of beasts sewn together, with a cowl: he used wooden shoes, and wore no stockings unless when he was obliged to go out of the monastery. St. Romanus died about the year 460, and is mentioned in the Roman Martyrology on the 28th of February. St. Lupicinus survived him almost twenty years, and is honored in the Roman Martyrology on the 21st of March. He was succeeded in the abbacy of Condate by Minaucius, who, in 480, chose St. Eugendus his coadjutor. See the lives of the two brothers, SS. Romanus and Lupicinus, and that of St. Eugendus or Oyend, compile a by a monk of Condate of the same age; St. Gregory of Tours, {in} {485} de Vitis Patr. c. 1. Mabill. Annal. Ben. l. 1, ad an. 510, t. 1, p. 23. Tillemont, t. 16, p. 142. Bulteau, l. 1. FEBRUARY XXIX. ST. OSWALD, BISHOP OF WORCESTER AND ARCHBISHOP OF YORK. From his life written by Eadmer; also from Florence of Worcester, William of Malmesbury, and, above all, the elegant and accurate author of the history of Ramsey, published by the learned Mr. Gale, p. 385. The life of this saint, written by Fulcard, abbot of Thorney, in 1068, Wharton thinks not extant. Mabillon doubts whether it is not that which we have in Capgrave and Surius. See also Portiforium 8. Oswaldi Archiep. Eborac. Codex MS. crassus in 8vo. exarates circa annum 1064, in Bennet College, Cambridge, mentioned by Waneley, Catal. p. 110. A.D. 992. ST. OSWALD was nephew to St. Odo, archbishop of Canterbury, and to Oskitell, bishop first of Dorcester, afterwards of York. He was educated by St. Odo, and made dean of Winchester; but passing into France, took the monastic habit at Fleury. Being recalled to serve the church, he succeeded St. Dunstan in the see of Worcester about the year 959. He shone as a bright star in this dignity, and established a monastery of monks at Westberry, a village in his diocese. He was employed by duke Aylwin in superintending his foundation of the great monastery of Ramsey, in an island formed by marshes and the river Ouse in Huntingdonshire, in 972. St. Oswald was made archbishop of York in 974, and he dedicated the church of Ramsey under the names of the Blessed Virgin, St. Benedict, and all holy virgins. Nothing of this rich mitred abbey remains standing except an old gate-house, and a neglected statue of the founder, Aylwin, with keys and a ragged staff in his hand to denote his office; for he was cousin to the glorious king Edgar, the valiant general of his armies, and the chief judge and magistrate of the kingdom, with the title of alderman of England, and half king, as the historian of Ramsey usually styles him.[1] {486} St. Oswald was almost always occupied in visiting his diocese, preaching without intermission and reforming abuses. He was a great encourager of learning and learned men. St. Dunstan obliged him to retain the see of Worcester with that of York. Whatever intermission his function allowed him he spent it at St. Mary's, a church and monastery of Benedictins, which he had built at Worcester, where he joined with the monks in their monastic exercises. This church from that time became the cathedral. The saint, to nourish in his heart the sentiments of humility and charity, had everywhere twelve poor persons at his table, whom he served, and also washed and kissed their feet. After having sat thirty-three years he fell sick at St. Mary's in Worcester, and having received the extreme unction and viaticum, continued in prayer, repeating often, "Glory be to the Father," &c., with which words he expired amidst his monks, on the 29th of February, 992. His body was taken up ten years after and enshrined, by Adulph his successor, and was illustrated by miracles. It was afterwards translated to York, on the 15th of October, which day was appointed his principal festival. * * * * * St. Oswald made quick progress in the path of perfect virtue, because he studied with the utmost earnestness to deny himself and his own will, listening attentively to that fundamental maxim of the Eternal Truth, which St. Bennet, of whose holy order he became a bright light, repeats with great energy. This holy founder declares in the close of his rule, that, He who desires to give himself up to God, must trample all earthly things under his feet, renounce every thing that is not God, and die to all earthly affections, so as to attain to a perfect disengagement and nakedness of heart, that God may fill and entirely possess it, in order to establish therein the kingdom of his grace and pure love forever. And in his prologue he cries out aloud, that he addresses himself only to him who is firmly resolved in all things to deny his own will, and to hasten with all diligence to arrive at his heavenly kingdom. Footnotes: 1. The titles of honor among our Saxon ancestors were, Etheling, prince of the blond: chancellor, assistant to the king in giving judgments: alderman, or ealderman, (not earldonnan, as Rapin Thoyras writes this word in his first edition,) governor or viceroy. It is derived from the word ald or old, like senator in Latin. Provinces, cities, and sometimes wapentakes, had their alderman to govern them, determine lawsuits, judge criminals, &c. That office gave place to the title of earl, which was merely Danish, and introduced by Canute. Sheriffe or she-reeve, was the deputy of the alderman, chosen by him, sat judge in some courts, and saw sentence executed; hence he was called vicecomes. Heartoghan signified, among our Saxon ancestors, generals of armies, or dukes. Hengist, in the Saxon chronicle, is heartogh; such were the dukes appointed by Constantine the Great, to command the forces in the different provinces of the Roman empire. These titles began to become hereditary with the offices or command annexed under Pepin and Charlemagne, and grew more frequent by the successors of these princes granting many hereditary fiefs to noblemen, to which they annexed titular dignities. Fiefs were an establishment of the Lombards, from whom the emperors of Germany, and the kings of France, borrowed this custom, and with it the feodal laws, of which no mention is made in the Routun code. Titles began frequently to become merely honorary about the time of Otho I. in Germany. Reeve among the English Saxons was a steward. The bishop's reeve was a bishop's steward for secular affairs, attending in his court. Thanes, _i.e._, servants, were officers of the crown whom the king recompensed with lands, sometimes to descend to their posterity, but always to be held of him with some obligation of service, homage, or acknowledgment. There were other lords of lands and vassals, who enjoyed the title of thanes, and were distinguished from the king's thanes. The ealdermen and dukes were all king's thanes, and all others who held lands of the king by knight's service in chief, and were immediately great tenants of the king's estates. These were the greater thanes, and were succeeded by the barons, which title was brought in by the Normans, and is rarely found before the Conqueror. Mass thanes were those who held lands in fee of the church. Middle thanes were such as held very small estates of the king, or parcels of lands of the king's greater thanes. They were called by the Normans vavassors, and their lands vavassories. They who held lands of these, were thanes of the lowest class, and did not rank as gentlemen. All thanes disposed of the lands which they held (and which were called Blockland) to their heirs, but with the obligations due to those of whom they were held. Ceorle (whence our word churl) was a countryman or artisan who was a freeman. Those ceorles who held lands in leases were called sockmen, and their land sockland, of which they could not dispose, being barely tenants. Those ceorles who acquired possession of five hides of land with a large house, court, and bell to call together their servants, were raised to the rank of thanes of the lowest class. A hide of land was as much as one plough could till. The villains or slaves in the country were laborers, bound to the service of particular persons; were all capable of possessing money in property, consequently were not strictly slaves in the sense of the Roman law. Witan or Wites, (_i. e._ wisemen,) were the magistrates and lawyers. Burghwitten signified the magistrates of cities. Some shires (or counties) are mentioned before king Alfred; and Asserius speaks of earls (or counts) of Somerset, and Devonshire, in the reign of Ethelwolph. But Alfred first divided the whole kingdom into shires, the shires into tithings, lathes, or wapentacks, the tithings into hundreds, and the hundreds into tenths. Each division had a court subordinate to those that were superior, the highest in each shire being the shire-gemot, or folck-mote, which was held twice a year, and in which the bishop or his deputy, and the ealderman, or his viceregent, the sheriff, presided. See Seldon on the Titles of Honor; Speman's Glossary, ad. noviss. Squires on the Government of the English Saxons. Dr. William Howel, in his learned General History, t. 5, p. 273, &c. N.B. The titles of earls and hersen were first given by Ifwar Widfame, king of Sweden, to two ministers of state in 824; on which see many remarks of Olof Delin, in his excellent new history of Sweden, c. 5, t. {}, p. {}34. {487} _Only Complete and Unabridged Edition with nearly 100 pages of Chronological and General Index, Alphabetical and Centenary Table, etc._ THE LIVES THE FATHERS, MARTYRS, AND OTHER PRINCIPAL SAINTS; COMPILED FROM ORIGINAL MONUMENTS, AND OTHER AUTHENTIC RECORDS; ILLUSTRATED WITH THE REMARKS OF JUDICIOUS MODERN CRITICS AND HISTORIANS BY THE REV. ALBAN BUTLER _With the approbation of MOST REV. M.A. CORRIGAN, D.D., Archbishop of New York._ VOL. III. NEW YORK: P.J. KENEDY, PUBLISHER TO THE HOLY SEE, EXCELSIOR CATHOLIC PUBLISHING HOUSE, 5 BARCLAY STREET. 1903 {488 blank page} {489} CONTENTS MARCH. 1. PAGE ST. DAVID, Archbishop, Patron of Wales.......... 491 St. Swidbert, or Swibert, the ancient, Bishop and Confessor................................. 493 St. Albinus, Bishop of Angers, Confessor........ 494 St. Monan, Martyr............................... 495 2. Martyrs under the Lombards...................... 496 St. Ceada, or Chad, Bishop and Confessor........ 497 St. Simplicius, Pope and Confessor.............. 498 St. Marnan, Bishop and Confessor................ 499 St. Charles the Good, Earl of Flanders, Martyr.. 500 St. Joavan, or Joevin, Bishop and Confessor..... 501 3. St. Cunegundes, Empress......................... 501 SS. Marinus and Asterius, or Astyrius, Martyrs.. 503 SS. Emeterius and Chelidonius, Martyrs.......... 503 St. Winwaloe, or Winwaloc, Abbot................ 504 St. Lamalisse, Confessor........................ 506 4. St. Casimir, Prince of Poland................... 506 St. Lucius, Pope and Martyr..................... 508 St. Adrian, Bishop of St. Andrew's, Martyr...... 509 5. SS. Adrian and Eubulus, Martyrs................. 510 St. Kiaran, or Kenerin, Bishop and Confessor.... 511 St. Roger, Confessor............................ 512 St. John Joseph of the Cross.................... 512 6. St. Chrodegang, Bishop of Metz, Confessor....... 519 B. Coleus, Virgin and Abbess.................... 520 St. Fridolin, Abbot............................. 522 St. Baldrede, Bishop of Glasgow, Confessor...... 522 SS. Kyneburge, Kyneswide, and Tibba............. 522 St. Cadroe. Confessor........................... 523 7. St Thomas of Aquino, Doctor of the Church and Confessor................................. 523 SS. Perpetua and Felicitas, &c., Martyrs........ 533 St. Paul, Anchoret.............................. 540 8. St. John of God, Confessor...................... 541 Venerable John of Avila, Apostle of Andalusia... 542 St. Felix, Bishop and Confessor................. 547 SS. Apollonius, Philemon, &c., Martyrs.......... 548 St. Julian, Archbishop of Toledo, Confessor..... 548 St. Duthak, Bishop of Ross, in Scotland, Confessor..................................... 549 St. Rosa, of Viterbo, Virgin.................... 549 St. Senan, Bishop and Confessor.. .............. 549 St. Psalmod, or Saumay, Anchoret................ 550 9. St. Frances, Widow ............................. 550 Gregory of Nyasa, Bishop and Confessor.......... 552 On the Writings of St. Gregory.................. 553 St. Pacian, Bishop of Barcelona, Confessor...... 557 On the Writings of St. Pacian................... 557 St. Catherine of Bologna, Virgin and Abbess..... 559 10. SS. The Forty Martyrs of Sebaste................ 560 St. Droctovæus, Abbot........................... 563 St. Mackessoge, or Kessoge, Confessor........... 564 11. St. Eulogius of Cordova, Priest and Martyr...... 564 St. Sophronius, Patriarch of Jerusalem, Confessor..................................... 566 St. �ngus, Bishop and Confessor................. 567 St. Constantine, Martyr......................... 568 12. St. Gregory the Great, Pope and Confessor....... 568 On the Life of St. Gregory...................... 580 St. Maximilian, Martyr.......................... 581 St. Paul, Bishop of Leon, Confessor............. 581 13. St. Nicephorus, Patriarch of Constantinople, Confessor..................................... 582 St. Euphrasia, Virgin........................... 585 St. Theophanes, Abbot and Confessor............. 587 St. Kennocha, Virgin in Scotland................ 588 St. Gerald, Bishop.............................. 588 St. Mochoemoc, in Latin Pulcherius, Abbot....... 588 14. St. Maud, or Mathildis, Queen of Germany........ 589 SS. Acepsimas, Bishop, Joseph, Priest, and Aithilahas, Deacon, Martyrs................... 591 St. Boniface, Bishop of Ross, Confessor......... 594 15. St. Abraham, Hermit............................. 594 St. Zachary, Pope and Confessor................. 596 16. St. Julian, of Cilicia, Martyr.................. 597 St. Finian, surnamed Lobhar, or the Leper....... 598 17. St. Patrick, Bishop and Confessor, Apostle of Ireland....................................... 599 SS. Martyrs of Alexandria....................... 604 St. Joseph of Arimathea......................... 605 St. Gertrude, Virgin and Abbess of Nivelle ..... 605 18 St. Alexander, Bishop of Jerusalem, Martyr...... 606 St. Cyril, Archbishop of Jerusalem, Confessor... 607 {490} On the Writings of St. Cyril.................... 614 St. Edward, Ring and Martyr..................... 617 St. Anselm, Bishop of Lucca, Confessor.......... 618 St. Fridian, Bishop of Lucca, Confessor......... 619 19. St Joseph....................................... 620 St. Alcmund, Martyr............................. 624 20. St. Cuthbert, Bishop and Confessor.............. 625 St. Wulfran, Archbishop of Seas................. 629 21. St. Benedict, Abbot............................. 639 St. Serapion, the Sindonite..................... 638 St. Serapion, Abbot of Arsinoe.................. 639 St. Serapion, Bishop of Thmuis in Egypt......... 640 St. Enna, or Endeus, Abbot...................... 641 22. St. Basil of Ancyra, Priest and Martyr.......... 641 St. Paul, Bishop of Narbonne, Confessor......... 644 St. Lea, Widow.................................. 644 St. Deogratias, Bishop of Carthage, Confessor... 644 St. Catherine of Sweden, Virgin................. 644 23. St. Alphonsus Turibius, Bishop and Confessor.... 645 SS. Victorian, Proconsul of Carthage. &c., Martyrs....................................... 649 St. Edelwald, Priest and Confessor.............. 650 24. St. Irenæus, Bishop of Sirmium, Martyr.......... 651 St. Simon, an Infant, Martyr.................... 653 St. William of Norwich, Martyr.................. 653 25. The Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary..... 661 St. Cammin, Abbot............................... 666 26. St. Ludger, Bishop of Munster, Apostle of Saxony........................................ 661 St. Braulio, Bishop of Saragossa, Confessor..... 663 27. St. John of Egypt, Hermit....................... 664 St. Rupert, or Robert, Bishop and Confessor..... 688 28. SS. Priscus, Malchus, and Alexander, Martyrs.... 669 St. Sixtus III., Pope........................... 670 St. Gontran, King and Confessor................. 671 29. SS. Jonas, Barachisius, &c., Martyrs............ 672 SS. Armogastes, Archinimus, and Saturns, Martyrs....................................... 674 St. Eustasius, or Eustachius, Abbot............. 675 St. Gundleus, Confessor......................... 673 St. Mark, Bishop and Confessor.................. 675 30. St. John Climacus, Abbot........................ 677 St. Zozimus, Bishop of Syracuse................. 681 St. Regulus, or Rieul........................... 681 31. St. Benjamin, Deacon, Martyr.................... 691 St. Acacias, or Achates, Bishop of Antioch in Asia Minor, Confessor......................... 683 St. Guy, Confessor.............................. 685 {491} MARCH I. SAINT DAVID, ARCHBISHOP, PATRON OF WALES. See his life by Giralduc Cambrensis, in Wharton's Anglia Sacra, t. 2; also Doctor Brown Willis, and Wilkins, Conc. Britain. & Hibern. t. 1. About the year 544. ST. DAVID, in Welsh Dewid, was son of Xantus, prince of Ceretice, now Cardiganshire. He was brought up in the service of God, and, being ordained priest, retired into the Isle of Wight, and embraced an ascetic life, under the direction of Paulinus, a learned and holy man, who had been a disciple of St. Germanus of Auxerre. He is said by the sign of the cross to have restored sight to his master, which he had lost by old age, and excessive weeping in prayer. He studied a long time to prepare himself for the functions of the holy ministry. At length, coming out of his solitude, like the Baptist out of the desert, he preached the word of eternal life to the Britons. He built a chapel at Glastenbury, a place which had been consecrated to the divine worship by the first apostles of this island. He founded twelve monasteries, the principal of which was in the vale of Ross,[1] near Menevia, where he formed many great pastors and eminent servants of God. By his rule he obliged all his monks to assiduous manual labor in the spirit of penance: he allowed them the use of no cattle to ease them at their work in tilling the ground. They were never suffered to speak but on occasions of absolute necessity, and they never ceased to pray, at least mentally, during their labor. They returned late in the day to the monastery, to read, write, and pray. Their food was only bread and vegetables, with a little salt, and they never drank any thing better than a little milk mingled with water. After their repast they spent three hours in prayer and adoration; then took a little rest, rose at cock-crowing, and continued in prayer till they went out to work. Their habit was of the skins of beasts. When any one petitioned to be admitted, he waited ten days at the door, during which time he was tried by harsh words, repeated refusals, and painful labors, that he might learn to die to himself. When he was admitted, he left all his worldly substance behind him, for the monastery never received any thing on the score of admission. All the monks discovered their most secret thoughts and temptations to their abbot. The Pelagian heresy springing forth a second time in Britain, the bishops, in order to suppress it, held a synod at Brevy, in Cardiganshire, in 512, or rather in 519.[2] St. David, being invited to it, went thither, and in that venerable assembly confuted and silenced the infernal monster by his eloquence,{492} learning, and miracles. On the spot where this council was held, a church was afterwards built called Llan-Devi Brevi, or the church of St. David near the river Brevi. At the close of the synod, St. Dubritius, the archbishop of Caerleon, resigned his see to St. David, whose tears and opposition were only to be overcome by the absolute command of the synod, which however allowed him, at his request, the liberty to transfer his see from Caerleon, then a populous city, to Menevia, now called St. David's, a retired place, formed by nature for solitude, being, as it were, almost cut off from the rest of the island, though now an intercourse is opened to it from Milford-Haven. Soon after the former synod, another was assembled by St. David at a place called Victoria, in which the acts of the first were confirmed, and several canons added relating to discipline which were afterwards confirmed by the authority of the Roman church; and these two synods were, as it were, the rule and standard of the British churches. As for St. David, Giraldus adds, that he was the great ornament and pattern of his age. He spoke with great force and energy, but his example was more powerful than his eloquence; and he has in all succeeding ages been the glory of the British church. He continued in his last see many years; and having founded several monasteries, and been the spiritual father of many saints, both British and Irish, died about the year 544, in a very advanced age. St. Kentigtern saw his soul borne up by angels into heaven. He was buried in his church of St. Andrew, which hath since taken his name, with the town and the whole diocese. Near the church stand several chapels, formerly resorted to with great devotion: the principal is that of St. Nun, mother of St. David, near which is a beautiful well still frequented by pilgrims. Another chapel is sacred to St. Lily, surnamed Gwas-Dewy, that is, St. David's man; for he was his beloved disciple and companion in his retirement. He is honored there on the 3d, and St. Nun, who lived and died the spiritual mother of many religious women, on the 2d of March. The three first days of March were formerly holidays in South Wales in honor of these three saints; at present only the first is kept a festival throughout all Wales. John of Glastenbury[3] informs us, that in the reign of king Edgar, in the year of Christ 962, the relics of St. David were translated with great solemnity from the vale of Ross to Glastenbury, together with a portion of the relics of St. Stephen the Protomartyr. * * * * * By singing assiduously the divine praises with pure and holy hearts, dead to the world and all inordinate passions, monks are styled angels of the earth. The divine praise is the primary act of the love of God; for a soul enamored of his adorable goodness and perfections, summons up all her powers to express the complacency she takes in his infinite greatness and bliss, and sounds forth his praises with all her strength. In this entertainment she feels an insatiable delight and sweetness, and with longing desires aspires after that bliss in which she will love and praise without intermission or impediment. By each act of divine praise, the fervor of charity and its habit, and with it every spiritual good and every rich treasure, is increased in her: moreover, God in return heaps upon her the choicest blessings of his grace. Therefore, though the acts of divine praise seem directly to be no more than a tribute or homage of our affections, which we tender to God, the highest advantages accrue from these exercises to our souls. St. Stephen of Grandmont was once asked by a disciple, why we are so frequently exhorted in the scriptures to bless and praise God, who, being infinite, can receive no increase from our homages. {493} To which the saint replied: "A man who blesses and praises God receives from thence the highest advantage imaginable; for God, in return, bestows on him all his blessings, and for every word that he repeats in these acts, says: 'For the praises and blessings which you offer me, I bestow my blessings on you; what you present to me returns to yourself with an increase which becomes my liberality and greatness.' It is the divine grace," goes on this holy doctor, "which first excites a man to praise God, and he only returns to God his own gift: yet by his continually blessing God, the Lord pours forth his divine blessings upon him, which are so many new increases of charity in his soul." Footnotes: 1. This denomination was given to the valley from the territory where it was situated, which was called Ross. Frequent mention is made of this monastery in the acts of several Irish saints, under the name of Rosnat or Rosnant. 2. See Wilkins, Conc. t. 1. 3. Maximes de S. Etienne de Grandmort, ch. 105, p. 228. Item {} Sententuarum S. Stephani Grand. c. {}05, p. 103. ST. SWIDBERT, OR SWIBERT, THE ANCIENT, B.C. He was an English monk, educated near the borders of Scotland, and lived some time under the direction of the holy priest and monk, St. Egbert, whom he accompanied into Ireland. St. Egbert was hindered himself from passing into Lower Germany, according to his zealous desire, to preach the gospel to the infidels: and Wigbert, who first went into Friesland upon that errand, was thwarted in all his undertakings by Radbod, prince of that country, and returned home without success. St. Egbert, burning with an insatiable zeal for the conversion of those souls, which he ceased not with many tears to commend to God, stirred up others to undertake that mission. St. Swidbert was one of the twelve missionaries, who, having St. Willibrord at their head, sailed into Friesland, in 690, according to the direction of St. Egbert. They landed at the mouth of the Rhine, as Alcuin assures us, and travelled as high as Utrecht, where they began to announce to the people the great truths of eternal life. Pepin of Herstal, mayor of the French palace, had conquered part of Friesland, eighteen months before, and compelled Radbod, who remained sovereign in the northern part, to pay an annual tribute. The former was a great protector and benefactor to these missionaries, nor did the latter oppose their preaching. St. Swidbert labored chiefly in Hither Friesland, which comprised the southern part of Holland, the northern part of Brabant, and the countries of Gueldres and Cleves: for in the middle age, Friesland was extended from the mouths of the Meuse and the Rhine, as far as Denmark and ancient Saxony. An incredible number of souls was drawn out of the sink of idolatry, and the most shameful vices, by the zeal of St. Swidbert. St. Willibrord was ordained archbishop of Utrecht by pope Sergius I., at Rome, in 696. St. Swidbert was pressed by his numerous flock of converts, and by his fellow-laborers, to receive the episcopal consecration: for this purpose he returned to England soon after the year 697, where he was consecrated regionary bishop to preach the gospel to infidels, without being attached to any see, by Wilfrid, bishop of York, who happened to be then banished from his own see, and employed in preaching the faith in Mercia. Either the see of Canterbury was still vacant after the death of St. Theodorus, or Brithwald, his successor, was otherwise hindered from performing that ceremony, and St. Swidbert had probably been formerly known personally to St. Wilfrid, being both from the same kingdom of Northumberland. Our saint invested with that sacred character, returned to his flock, and settled the churches which he had founded in good order: then leaving them to the care of St. Willibrord and his ten companions, he penetrated further into {494} the country, and converted to the faith a considerable part of the Boructuarians, who inhabited the countries now called the duchy of Berg, and the county of La Marck. His apostolic labors were obstructed by an invasion of the Saxons, who, after horrible devastations, made themselves masters of the whole country of the Boructuarians. St. Swidbert, being at length desirous to prepare himself for his last hour, in retirement, by fervent works of penance, received of Pepin of Herstal the gift of a small island, formed by different channels of the Rhine, and another river, called Keiserswerdt, that is, island of the emperor; werdt, in the language of that country, signifying an island. Here the saint built a great monastery, which flourished for many ages, till it was converted into a collegiate church of secular canons. A town, which was formed round this monastery, bore long the name of St. Swidbert's Isle, but is now called by the old name, Keiserswerdt, and is fortified: it is situated on the Rhine, six miles below Dusseldorp: a channel of the Rhine having changed its course, the place is no longer an island. St. Swidbert here died in peace, on the 1st of March, in 713. His feast was kept with great solemnity in Holland and other parts where he had preached. Henschenius has given us a panegyric on him, preached on this day by Radbod, bishop of Utrecht, who died in 917. His relics were found in 1626 at Keiserswerdt, in a silver shrine, together with those of St. Willeic, likewise an Englishman, his successor in the government of this abbey; and are still venerated in the same place, except some small portions given to other churches by the archbishop of Cologne.[1] See Bede, Hist. l. 5, c. 10, 12, and the historical collection of Henschenius, l. Mart. p. 84; Fleury, l. 40; Batavia Sacra; and the Roman Martyrology, in which his name occurs on this day. His successor, St. Willeic, is commemorated on the 2d of March, by Wilson, in his English Martyrology, in the first edition, an. 1608, (though omitted in the second edition, an. 1628,) and is mentioned among the English saints, by F. Edward Maihew, Trop{}ea Congregationis Anglicanæ Bened. Rhemis, 1625; and F. Jerom Porter, in his Flores Sanctorum Angliæ, Scotiæ, et Hiberniæ. Duaci, 1632. Footnotes: 1. The acts of St. Swidbert, under the name of Marcellinus, pretended to be St. Marchelm, a disciple or colleague of the saint, extant in Surius, are a notorious piece of forgery of the fifteenth century. We must not, with these false acts and many others, confound St. Swidbert of Keiserswerdt with a younger saint of the same name, also an Englishman, first bishop of Verden or Ferden, in Westphaly, in 807, in the reign of Charlemagne; whose body was taken up at Verden, together with those of seven bishops his successors, in 1630. St. Swidbert the younger is mentioned in some Martyrologies on the 30th of April, though many moderns have confounded him with our saint. Another holy man, called Swidbert, forty years younger than our saint, whom some have also mistaken for the same with him, is mentioned by Bede, (l. 4, c. 32) and was abbot of a monastery in Cumberland, upon the river Decors, which does not appear to hive been standing since the Conquest. See Leland, Collect. t. 2, p. 152, and Camden's Britannia; by Gibson, col. 831. Tanner's Notitia Mon. p. 73. ST. ALBINUS, BISHOP OF ANGERS, C. HE was of an ancient and noble family in Brittany,[1] and from his childhood was fervent in every exercise of piety. He ardently sighed after the happiness which a devout soul finds in being perfectly disengaged from all earthly things. Having embraced the monastic state at Cincillac, called afterwards Tintillant, a place somewhere near Angers, he shone a perfect model of virtue, especially of prayer, watching, universal mortification of the senses, and obedience, living as if in all things he had been without any will of his own, and his soul seemed so perfectly governed by the Spirit of Christ as to live only for him. At the age of thirty-five years, he was chosen {495} abbot, in 504, and twenty-five years afterwards, bishop of Angers. He everywhere restored discipline, being inflamed with a holy zeal for the honor of God. His dignity seemed to make no alteration either in his mortifications, or in the constant recollection of his soul. Honored by all the world, even by kings, he was never affected with vanity. Powerful in works and miracles, he looked upon himself as the most unworthy and most unprofitable among the servants of God, and had no other ambition than to appear such in the eyes of others, as he was in those of his own humility. By his courage in maintaining the law of God and the canons of the church, he showed that true greatness of soul is founded in the most sincere humility. In the third council of Orleans, in 538, he procured the thirtieth canon of the council of Epaoue to be revived, by which those are declared excommunicated who presume to contract incestuous marriages in the first or second degree of consanguinity or affinity. He died on the 1st of March, in 549. His relics were taken up and enshrined by St. Germanus of Paris, and a council of bishops, with Eutropius, the saint's successor, at Angers, in 556; and the most considerable part still remains in the church of the famous abbey of St. Albinus at Angers, built upon the spot where he was buried, by king Childebert, a little before his relics were enshrined. Many churches in France, and several monasteries and villages, bear his name. He was honored by many miracles, both in his life-time and after his death. Several are related in his life written by Fortunatus, bishop of Poitiers, who came to Angers to celebrate his festival seven years after his decease; also by St. Gregory of Tours, (l. de Glor. Confess. c. 96.) See the Notes of Henschenius on his life. Footnotes: 1. It is proved by Leland in his Itinerary, published by Hearne, (t. 3, p. 4,) that the ancestors of St. Albinus of Angers came from Great Britain, and that two branches of his family flourished long after, one in Cornwall, the other in Somersetshire. ST. MONAN, IN SCOTLAND, M. ST. ADRIAN, bishop of St. Andrews, trained up this holy man from his childhood, and when he had ordained him priest, and long employed him in the service of his own church, sent him to preach the gospel in the isle of May, lying to the bay of Forth. The saint exterminated superstition and many other crimes and abuses, and having settled the churches of that island in good order, passed into the county of Fife, and was there martyred; being slain with above 6000 other Christians, by an army of infidels who ravaged that country in 874. His relics were held in great veneration at Innerny, in Fifeshire, the place of his martyrdom, and were famous for miracles. King David II. having himself experienced the effect of his powerful intercession with God, rebuilt his church at Innerny of stone, to a stately manner, and founded a college of canons to serve it. See King's calendar, and the manuscript life of this martyr in the Scottish college at Paris and the Breviary of Aberdeen. {496} MARCH II. MARTYRS UNDER THE LOMBARDS. From St. Gregory, Dial. l. 3, c. 26, 27. t. 2, p. 337. SIXTH AGE. THE Lombards, a barbarous idolatrous nation which swarmed out of Scandinavia and Pomerania, settled first in the counties now called Austria and Bavaria; and a few years after, about the middle of the sixth century, broke into the north of Italy. In their ravages about the year 597, they attempted to compel forty husbandmen, whom they had made captives, to eat meats which had been offered to idols. The faithful servants of Christ constantly refusing to comply, were all massacred. Such meats might, in some circumstances, have been eaten without sin, but not when this was exacted out of a motive of superstition. The same barbarians endeavored to oblige another company of captives to adore the head of a goat, which was their favorite idol, and about which they walked, singing, and bending their knees before it; but the Christians chose rather to die than purchase their lives by offending God. They are said to have been about four hundred in number. St. Gregory the Great mentions, that these poor countrymen had prepared themselves for the glorious crown of martyrdom, by lives employed in the exercises of devotion and voluntary penance, and by patience in bearing afflictions; also, that they had the heroic courage to suffer joyfully the most cruel torments and death, rather than offend God by sin, because his love reigned in their hearts. "True love," says St. Peter Chrysologus,[1] "makes a soul courageous and undaunted; it even finds nothing hard, nothing bitter, nothing grievous; it braves dangers, smiles at death, conquers all things." If we ask our own hearts, if we examine our lives by this test, whether we have yet begun to love God, we shall have reason to be confounded, and to tremble at our remissness and sloth. We suffer much for the world, and we count labor light, that we may attain to the gratification of our avarice, ambition, or other passion in its service, yet we have not fervor to undertake any thing to save our souls, or to crucify our passions. Here penance, watchfulness over ourselves, or the least restraint, seems intolerable. Let us begin sincerely to study to die to ourselves, to disengage our hearts from all inordinate love of creatures, to raise ourselves above the slavery of the senses, above the appetites of the flesh and all temporal interest; and in order to excite ourselves to love God with fervor, let us seriously consider what God, infinite in goodness and in all perfections, and whose love for us is eternal and immense, deserves at our hands; what the joys of heaven are, how much we ought to do for such a bliss, and what Christ has done to purchase it for us, and to testify the excess of his love; also what the martyrs have suffered for his sake, and to attain to the happiness of reigning eternally with him. Let us animate ourselves with their fervor: "Let us love Christ as they did," said St. Jerom to the virgin Eustochium, "and every thing that now appears difficult, will become easy to us." To find this {497} hidden treasure of divine love we must seek it earnestly; we must sell all things, that is, renounce in spirit all earthly objects; we must dig a deep foundation of sincere humility in the very centre of our nothingness, and must without ceasing beg this most precious of all gifts, crying out to God in the vehement desire of our hearts. Lord, when shall I love thee! Footnotes: 1. St. Peter Chrysol. Serm. 4. ST. CEADA OR CHAD, B.C. HE was brother to St. Cedd, bishop of London, and the two holy priests Celin and Cymbel, and had his education in the monastery of Lindisfarne, under St. Aidan. For his greater improvement in sacred letters and divine contemplation he passed into Ireland, and spent a considerable time in the company of St. Egbert, till he was called back by his brother St. Cedd to assist him in settling the monastery of Lestingay, which he had founded in the mountains of the Deiri, that is, the Woulds of Yorkshire. St. Cedd being made bishop of London, or of the East Saxons, left to him the entire government of this house. Oswi having yielded up Bernicia, or the northern part of his kingdom, to his son Alcfrid, this prince sent St. Wilfrid into France, that he might be consecrated to the bishopric of the Northumbrian kingdom, or of York; but he stayed so long abroad that Oswi himself nominated St. Chad to that dignity, who was ordained by Wini, bishop of Winchester, assisted by two British prelates, in 666. Bede assures us that he zealously devoted himself to all the laborious functions of his charge, visiting his diocese on foot, preaching the gospel, and seeking out the poorest and most abandoned persons to instruct and comfort, in the meanest cottages, and in the fields. When St. Theodorus, archbishop of Canterbury, arrived in England, in his general visitation of all the English churches, he adjudged the see of York to St. Wilfrid. St. Chad made him this answer: "If you judge that I have not duly received the episcopal ordination, I willingly resign this charge, having never thought myself worthy of it: but which, however unworthy, I submitted to undertake in obedience." The archbishop was charmed with his candor and humility, would not admit his abdication, but supplied certain rites which he judged defective in his ordination: and St. Chad, leaving the see of York, retired to his monastery of Lestingay, but was not suffered to bury himself long in that solitude. Jaruman, bishop of the Mercians, dying, St. Chad was called upon to take upon him the charge of that most extensive diocese.[1] He was the fifth bishop of the Mercians, and first fixed that see at Litchfield, so called from a great number of martyrs slain and buried there under Maximianus Herculeus; the name signifying the field of carcasses. Hence this city bears for its arms a landscape, covered with the bodies of martyrs. St. Theodorus considering St. Chad's old age, and the great extent of his diocese, absolutely forbade him to make his visitations on foot, as he used to do at York. When the laborious duties of his charge allowed him to retire, he enjoyed God in solitude with seven or eight monks, whom he had settled in a place near his cathedral. Here he gained new strength and fresh graces for the discharge of his functions; he was so strongly affected with the fear of the divine judgments, that as often as it thundered he went to the church and prayed prostrate all the time the storm continued, in remembrance of the dreadful day in which Christ will come to judge the world. By the bounty of king Wulfere, he founded a monastery at a place called Barrow, in the province {498} of Lindsay, (in the northern part of Lincolnshire,) where the footsteps of the regular life begun by him remained to the time of Bede. Carte conjectures that the foundation of the great monastery of Bardney, in the same province, was begun by him. St. Chad governed his diocese of Litchfield, two years and a half, and died in the great pestilence on the 2d of March, in 673. Bede gives the following relation of his passage. "Among the eight monks whom he kept with him at Litchfield, was one Owini, who came with queen Ethelred, commonly called St. Audry, from the province of the East Angles, and was her major-domo, and the first officer of her court, till quitting the world, clad in a mean garment, and carrying an axe and a hatchet in his hand, he went to the monastery of Lestingay, signifying that he came to work, and not to be idle; which he made good by his behavior in the monastic state. This monk declared, that he one day heard a joyful melody of some persons sweetly singing, which descended from heaven into the bishop's oratory, filled the same for about half an hour, then mounted again to heaven. After this, the bishop opening his window, and seeing him at his work, bade him call the other seven brethren. When the eight monks were entered his oratory, he exhorted them to preserve peace and religiously observe the rules of regular discipline; adding, that the amiable guest who was wont to visit their brethren, had vouchsafed to come to him that day, and to call him out of this world. Wherefore he earnestly recommended his passage to their prayers, and pressed them to prepare for their own, the hour of which is uncertain, by watching, prayer, and good works." The bishop fell presently into a languishing distemper, which daily increased, till, on the seventh day, having received the body and blood of our Lord, he departed to bliss, to which he was invited by the happy soul of his brother St. Cedd, and a company of angels with heavenly music. He was buried in the church of St. Mary, in Litchfield; but his body was soon after removed to that of St. Peter, in both places honored by miraculous cures, as Bede mentions. His relics were afterwards translated into the great church which was built in 1148, under the invocation of the B. Virgin and St. Chad, which is now the cathedral, and they remained them till the change of religion. See Bede, l. 3, c. 28, l. 4, c. 2 and 3. Footnotes: 1. The first bishop of the Mercians was Diuma, a Scot; the second, Keollach, of the same nation: the third, Trumhere, who had been abbot of Gethling in the kingdom of the Northumbrians: the fourth Jaruruan. ST. SIMPLICIUS, POPE, C. HE was the ornament of the Roman clergy under SS. Leo and Hilarius, and succeeded the latter in the pontificate in 497. He was raised by God to comfort and support his church amidst the greatest storms. All the provinces of the Western empire, out of Italy, were fallen into the hands of barbarians, infected for the greatest part with idolatry or Arianism. The ten last emperors, during twenty years, were rather shadows of power than sovereigns, and in the eighth year of the pontificate of Simplicius, Rome itself fell a prey to foreigners. Salvian, a learned priest of Marseilles in 440, wrote an elegant book On Divine Providence, in which he shows that these calamities were a just chastisement of the sins of the Christians; saying, that if the Goths were perfidious, and the Saxons cruel, they were however both remarkable for their chastity; as the Franks were for humanity, though addicted to lying: and that though these barbarians were impious, they had not so perfect a knowledge of sin, nor consequently were so criminal as those whom God chastised by them. The disorders of the Roman state paved the way for this revolution. Excessive taxes were levied in the most arbitrary ways. The governors oppressed the people at discretion, and many were obliged to take shelter among the barbarians: for the Bagaude, {499} Franks, Huns, Vandals, and Goths raised no taxes upon their subjects: on which account nations once conquered by them were afraid of falling again under the Roman yoke, preferring what was called slavery, to the empty name of liberty. Italy, by oppressions and the ravages of barbarians, was left almost a desert without inhabitants; and the imperial armies consisted chiefly of barbarians, hired under the name of auxiliaries, as the Suevi, Alans, Heruli, Goths, and others. Those soon saw their masters were in their power. The Heruli demanded one third of the lands of Italy, and, upon refusal, chose for their leader Odoacer, one of the lowest extraction, but a tall, resolute, and intrepid man, then an officer in the guards, and an Arian heretic, who was proclaimed king at Rome in 476. He put to death Orestes, who was regent of the empire for his son Augustulus, whom the senate had advanced to the imperial throne. The young prince had only reigned eight months, and his great beauty is the only thing mentioned of him. Odoacer spared his life, and appointed him a salary of six thousand pounds of gold, and permitted him to live at full liberty near Naples. Pope Simplicius was wholly taken up in comforting and relieving the afflicted, and in sowing the seeds of the Catholic faith among the barbarians. The East gave his zeal no less employment and concern. Zeno, son and successor to Leo the Thracian, favored the Eutychians. Basiliscus his admiral, who, on expelling him, usurped the imperial throne in 476, and held it two years, was a most furious stickler for that heresy. Zeno was no Catholic, though not a stanch Eutychian: and having recovered the empire, published, in 482, his famous decree of union, called the Henoticon, which explained the faith ambiguously, neither admitting nor condemning the council of Chalcedon. Peter Cnapheus, (that is, the Dyer,) a violent Eutychian, was made by the heretics patriarch of Antioch; and Peter Mongus, one of the most profligate of men, that of Alexandria. This latter published the Henoticon, but expressly refused to anathematize the council of Chalcedon; on which account the rigid Eutychians separated themselves from his communion, and were called Acephali, or, without a head. Acacias, the patriarch of Constantinople, received the sentence of St. Simplicius against Cnapheus, but supported Mongus against him and the Catholic church, promoted the Henoticon, and was a notorious changeling, double-dealer, and artful hypocrite, who often made religion serve his own private ends. St. Simplicius at length discovered his artifices, and redoubled his zeal to maintain the holy faith which he saw betrayed on every side, while the patriarchal sees of Alexandria and Antioch were occupied by furious wolves, and there was not one Catholic king in the whole world. The emperor measured every thing by his passions and human views. St. Simplicius having sat fifteen years, eleven months, and six days, went to receive the reward of his labors, in 483. He was buried in St. Peter's on the 2d of March. See his letters: also the historians Evagrius, Theophanes, Liberatus, and amongst the moderns, Baronius, Henschenius, Ceillier, t. 15, p. 123. ST. MARNAN, B.C. To his holy prayers Aidan, king of the Scots, ascribed a wonderful victory which he gained over Ethelfrid, the pagan king of the Northumbrian English; and by his councils Eugenius IV., who succeeded his father Aidan in the kingdom soon after this battle, treated all the prisoners with the utmost humanity and generosity, by which they were gained to the Christian faith. The Northumbrian princes, Oswald and Oswi, were instructed in our holy religion, and grounded in its spirit by St. Marnan, {500} who died in Annandale in the year 620. His head was kept with singular devotion at Moravia, and was carried in processions attended by the whole clan of the Innis's, which from the earliest times was much devoted to this saint. See the Breviary of Aberdeen, Buchanan, l. 5, in Aidano et Eugenio Regibus, and MS. Memoirs in the Scottish college at Paris. St. Marnan is titular saint of the church of Aberkerdure upon the river Duvern, formerly much frequented out of devotion to his relics kept there. ST. CHARLES THE GOOD, EARL OF FLANDERS, M. HE was the son of St. Canutus, king of Denmark, and of Alice of Flanders, who, after the death of his father, carried him, then an infant, into Flanders, in 1086. His cousin-german Baldwin the Seventh, earl of Flanders, dying without issue in 1119, left him his heir by will, on account of his extraordinary valor and merit. The young earl was a perfect model of all virtues, especially devotion, charity, and humility. Among his friends and courtiers, he loved those best who admonished him of his faults the most freely. He frequently exhausted his treasury on the poor, and often gave the clothes off his back to be sold for their relief. He served them with his own hands, and distributed clothes and bread to them in all places where he came. It was observed that in Ipres he gave away, in one day, no less than seven thousand eight hundred loaves. He took care for their sake to keep the price of corn and provisions always low, and he made wholesome laws to protect them from the oppressions of the great. This exasperated Bertulf, who had tyrannically usurped the provostship of St. Donatian's in Bruges, to which dignity was annexed the chancellorship of Flanders, and his wicked relations, the great oppressors of their country. In this horrible conspiracy they were joined by Erembald, castellan or chief magistrate of the territory of Bruges, with his five sons, provoked against their sovereign because he had repressed their unjust violences against the noble family De Straten. The holy earl went every morning barefoot to perform his devotions early before the altar of the Blessed Virgin in St. Donatian's church. Going thither one day, he was informed of a conspiracy, but answered; "We are always surrounded by dangers, but we belong to God. If it be his will, can we die in a better cause than that of justice and truth?" While he was reciting the penitential psalms before the altar, the conspirators rushing in, his head was cloven by Fromold Borchard, nephew to Bertulf, in 1124. He was buried in St. Christopher's church at Bruges, not in that of St. Donatian, as Pantoppidan proves. Borchard was broke alive on the wheel, and Bertulf was hung on a rack at Ipres, and exposed on it to be torn by furious dogs, and at length was stoned to death by beggars while he remained on that engine. St. Charles's shrine was placed by an order of Charles Philip Rodoan, fourth bishop of Bruges, in 1606, in the chapel of the blessed Virgin, and ever since the year 1610 a high mass in honor of the Trinity is sung on his festival. See the life of this good earl by Walter, archdeacon of Terouenne, and more fully by Gualbert, syndic of Bruges, and by �lnoth a monk of Canterbury and Danish missionary at that time. See also Molanus and Miræus in their martyrologies; Henschenius, p. 158; Robertus de Monte a Append, ad. Chronicon Sigeberti ad an. 1127; Jac. Maierus, Annal. Flandriæ, l. 4, pp. 45, 46. Likewise Ericus Pantoppidanus in his Gesta Danorum extra Daniam. Hafniæ, 1740 t. 2, sec. 1, c. 5, sec. 32, p. 398. {501} ST. JOAVAN, OR JOEVIN, B.C. This saint was a fervent disciple of St. Paul of Leon, in Great Britain, his own country, accompanied him into Armorica, led an anchoretical life near him in the country of Ack, and afterwards in the isle of Baz. That great saint chose him coadjutor in his bishopric, when he retired a little before his death. St. Joavan survived him only one year. He is titular saint of two parish churches in the diocese of St. Paul of Leon, &c. See Lobineau, Vies des Saints de la Bretagne, p. 71, from the breviary and tradition of that church, though the life of St. Jovian, copied by Albert the Great. &c., deserves no regard. MARCH III. ST. CUNEGUNDES, EMPRESS. From her life written by a canon of Bamberg, about the year 1152: also the Dissertation of Henschenius, p. 267. A.D. 1040. ST. CUNEGUNDES was the daughter of Sigefride, the first count of Luxemburgh, and Hadeswige his pious wife. They instilled into her from her cradle the most tender sentiments of piety, and married her to St. Henry, duke of Bavaria, who, upon the death of the emperor Otho III., was chosen king of the Romans, and crowned at Mentz on the 6th of June, 1002. She was crowned at Paderborn on St. Laurence's day, on which occasion she made great presents to the churches of that city. In the year 1014 she went with her husband to Rome, and received the imperial crown with him from the hands of Pope Benedict VIII. She had, by St. Henry's consent before her marriage, made a vow of virginity. Calumniators afterwards accused her to him of freedoms with other men. The holy empress, to remove the scandal of such a slander, trusting in God the protector of innocence, in proof of hers, walked over red-hot ploughshares without being hurt. The emperor condemned his too scrupulous fears and credulity, and made her ample amends. They lived from that time in the strictest union of hearts conspiring to promote in every thing God's honor, and the advancement of piety. Going once to make a retreat in Hesse, she fell dangerously ill, and made a vow to found a monastery, if she recovered, in a place then called Capungen, now Kaffungen, near Cassel, in the diocese of Paderborn, which she executed in a stately manner, and gave it to nuns of the Order of St. Benedict. Before it was finished St. Henry died, in 1024. She earnestly recommended his soul to the prayers of others, especially to her dear nuns, and expressed her longing desire of joining them. She had already exhausted her treasures and her patrimony in founding bishoprics and monasteries, and in relieving the poor. Whatever was rich or magnificent she thought better suited churches than her palace. She had therefore little now left to give. {502} But still thirsting to embrace perfect evangelical poverty, and to renounce all to serve God without obstacle, on the anniversary day of her busband's death, 1025, she assembled a great number of prelates to the dedication of her church of Kaffungen; and after the gospel was sung at mass, offered on the altar a piece of the true cross, and then put off her imperial robes, and clothed herself with a poor habit: her hair was cut off, and the bishop put on her a veil, and a ring as the pledge of her fidelity to her heavenly spouse. After she was consecrated to God in religion, she seemed entirely to forget that she had been empress, and behaved as the last in the house, being persuaded that she was so before God. She feared nothing more than what ever could bring to her mind the remembrance of her former dignity. She prayed and read much, worked with her hands, abhorred the least appearance of worldly nicety, and took a singular pleasure in visiting and comforting the sick. Thus she passed the fifteen last years of her life, never suffering the least preference to be given her above anyone in the community. Her mortifications at length reduced her to a very weak condition, and brought on her last sickness. Her monastery and the whole city of Cassel were grievously afflicted at the thought of their approaching loss; she alone appeared without concern, lying on a coarse hair-cloth, ready to give up the ghost, while the prayers of the agonizing were read by her side. Perceiving they were preparing a cloth fringed with gold to cover her corpse after her death, she changed color and ordered it to be taken away; nor could she be at rest till she was promised she should be buried as a poor religious in her habit. She died on the 3d of March, 1040. Her body was carried to Bamberg, and buried near that of her husband. The greatest part of her relics still remains in the same church. She was solemnly canonized by Innocent III. in 1200. The author of her life relates many miracles wrought at the tomb, or by the intercession of this holy virgin and widow. * * * * * Few arrive at any degree of perfection amongst those who aspire after virtue, because many behave as if they placed it barely in multiplying exercises of piety and good works. This costs little to self-love, which it rather feeds by entertaining a secret vanity, or self-complacency, in those who are not very careful in watching over their hearts. It is a common thing to see persons who have passed forty or fifty years in the constant practice of penance and all religious exercises, and the use of the most holy sacraments, still subject to habitual imperfections, and venial disorders, incompatible with a state of sanctity or perfection. They give marks of sudden resentment, if they happen to be rebuked or despised: are greedy of the esteem of others, take a secret satisfaction in applause, love too much their own ease and conveniences, and seek those things which flatter self-love. How much are these souls their own enemies by not giving themselves to God without reserve, and taking a firm resolution to labor diligently in watching over themselves, and cutting off all irregular attachments, and purifying their hearts! The neglect of this fosters many habitual little disorders and venial sins, which incredibly obstruct the work of our sanctification, and the advancement of the kingdom of divine grace in our souls. These little enemies wilfully caressed, weaken our good desires, defile even our spiritual actions with a thousand imperfections, and stop the abundant effusion with which the Holy Ghost is infinitely desirous to communicate himself to our souls, and to fill them with his light, grace, peace, and holy joy. The saints, by the victory over themselves, and by making it their principal study to live in the most perfect disengagement and purity of heart, offered to God, even in their smallest actions, pure and full sacrifices of love, praise, and obedience. If we desire to cultivate this purity of heart, we {503} must carefully endeavor to discover the imperfections and disorders of their souls, especially such as are habitual, and strenuously labor to root them out. Secondly, we must keep our senses under a strict guard, and accustom them to restraint by frequent denials. Thirdly, we must live as much as may be in a habit of recollection, and the practice of the divine presence, and, after any dissipating affairs, return eagerly to close retirement for some short time. Fourthly, we must, with perfect simplicity, lay open our whole interior to our spiritual director, and be most solicitous to do this, with particular candor and courage, in things in which we are tempted to use any kind of duplicity or dissimulation. Lastly, we must propose to ourselves, in all our thoughts and actions, the most perfect accomplishment of the will of God, and study to square our whole lives by this great rule, watching in all we do with particular care against motives of vanity, pride, sensuality, interest, and aversions, the great enemies to purity of intention. SS. MARINUS AND ASTERIUS, OR ASTYRIUS, 1131. ST. MARINUS was a person remarkable both for his wealth and family at Cæsarea in Palestine, about the year 272, and was in course to succeed to the place of a centurion, which was vacant, and about to obtain it; when another came up and said, that according to the laws Marinus could not have that post, on account of his being a Christian. Achæus, the governor of Palestine, asked Marinus if he was a Christian; who answered in the affirmative: whereupon the judge gave him three hours space to consider whether he would abide by his answer, or recall it. Theotecnus, the bishop of that city, being informed of the affair, came to him, when withdrawn from the tribunal, and taking him by the hand led him to the church. Here, pointing to the sword which he wore, and then to a book of the gospels, asked him which of the two he made his option. Marinus, in answer to the query, without the least hesitation, stretched out his right hand, and laid hold of the sacred book. "Adhere steadfastly then to God," says the bishop, "and he will strengthen you, and you shall obtain what you have chosen. Depart in peace." Being summoned again before the judge, he professed his faith with greater resolution and alacrity than before, and was immediately led away just as he was, and beheaded. St. Asterius, or Astyrius, a Roman senator, in great favor with the emperor, and well known to all on account of his high birth and great estate, being present at the martyrdom of St. Marinus, though he was richly dressed, took away the dead body on his shoulders, and having sumptuously adorned it, gave it a decent burial. Thus far the acts in Ruinart. Rufinus adds, that he was beheaded for this action. See Eus. Hist. l. 7, c. 15, 16, 17. SS. EMETERIUS, &c., MM. COMMONLY CALLED MADIR, AND CHELIDONIUS THEY were soldiers of distinguished merit in the Roman army in Spain, and suffered martyrdom at Calahorra, but it is not known in what persecution. Their courage and cheerfulness seemed to increase with their sharpest torments, and to them fires and swords seemed sweet and agreeable. Prudemius says, that the persecutors burned the acts of their martyrdom, envying us the history of so glorious a triumph. He adds, that their festival was kept in Spain with great devotion by all ranks of people; that strangers {504} came in devout pilgrimages to visit their relics, praying to these patrons of the world; and that none poured forth their pure prayers to them who were not heard and their tears dried up: "For," says he, "they immediately hear every petition, and carry it to the ear of the eternal king." See Prudentius, de Coro, hymn 1. ST. WINWALOE, OF WINWALOC, ABBOT. FRAGAN or Fracan, father of this saint, was nearly related to Cathoun, one of the kings or princes of Wales, and had by his wife Gwen three sons, Guethenoc, Jacut, and Winwaloe, whom they bound themselves by vow to consecrate to God from his birth, because he was their third son. The invasions of the Saxons, and the storms which soon after overwhelmed his own country, obliged him to seek a harbor in which he might serve God in peace. Riwal had retired a little before, with many others, from Wales into Armorica, and had been there kindly received; several Britons, who had followed the tyrant Maximus, having settled in that country long before. Fragan therefore transported his whole family, about the middle of the fifth century, and fixed his habitation at a place called from him to this day, Ploufragan, situated on the river Gouct, which ancient British and Gaulish word signifies blood. All accounts of our saint agree that his two elder brothers were born in Great Britain, but some place the birth of St. Winwaloe, and of his sister Creirvie, much younger than him, in Armorica. The pious parents brought up their children in the fear of God, but out of fondness delayed to place Winwaloe in a monastery, till he was now grown up. At length, touched by God, the father conducted him to the monastery of St. Budoc, in the isle of Laurels,[1] now called Isleverte, or Green Island, not far from the isle of Brehat. St. Budoc was an abbot in Great Britain, eminent for piety and learning, and flying from the swords of the Saxons, took refuge among his countrymen in Armorica, and in this little island assembled several monks, and opened a famous school for youth. Under his discipline Winwaloe made such progress, that the holy abbot appointed him superior over eleven monks, whom he sent to lay the foundation of a new monastery. They travelled through Domnonea, or the northern coast of Brittany, and finding a desert island near the mouth of the river Aven, now called Chateaulin, they built themselves several little huts or cells. From these holy inhabitants the name of Tibidy, that is, House of Prayers, was given to that island, which it still retains. This place is exposed to so violent winds and storms, that after three years St. Winwaloe and his community abandoned it, and built themselves a monastery on the continent, in a valley sheltered from the winds, called Landevenech, three leagues from Brest, on the opposite side of the bay. Grallo, count of Cornouailles, in which province this abbey is situated, in the diocese of Quimper-Corentin, gave the lands, and was at the expense of the foundation of this famous monastery. St. Winwaloe, from the time he left his father's house, never wore any other garments but what were made of the skins of goats, and under these a hair shirt; day and night, winter and summer, his clothing was the same. In his monastery neither wheat-bread nor wine was used, but for the holy sacrifice of the mass. No other drink was allowed to the community but water, which was sometimes boiled with a small decoction of certain wild herbs. The monks ate only coarse barley-bread, boiled herbs and roots, or barley-meal and herbs mixed, except on Saturdays and Sundays, on which {505} they were allowed cheese and shellfish, but of these the saint never tasted himself. His coarse barley-bread he always mingled with ashes, and their quantity he doubled in Lent, though even then it must have been very small, only to serve for mortification, and an emblem of penance. In Lent he took his refreshment only twice a week; his bed was composed of the rough bark of trees or of sand, with a stone for his pillow. From the relaxation in the rule of abstinence on Saturdays, it is evident that this monastic rule, which was the same in substance with that received in other British, Scottish; and Irish monasteries, was chiefly borrowed from Oriental rules, Saturday being a fast-day according to the discipline of the Roman church. This rule was observed at Landevenech, till Louis le Débonnaire, for the sake of uniformity, caused that of St. Benedict to be introduced there in 818. This house was adopted into the congregation of St. Maur, in 1636. St. Winwaloe was sensible that the spirit of prayer is the soul of a religious state, and the comfort and support of all those who are engaged in it: as to himself, his prayer, either mental or vocal, was almost continual, and so fervent, that he seemed to forget that he lived in a mortal body. From twenty years of age, till his death he never sat in the church, but always prayed either kneeling or standing unmoved, in the same posture, with his hands lifted up to heaven, and his whole exterior bespoke the profound veneration with which he was penetrated. He died on the 3d of March, about the year 529, in a very advanced age. His body was buried in his own church, which he had built of wood, on the spot upon which the abbatial house now stands. These relics were translated into the new church when it was built, but during the ravages of the Normans they were removed to several places in France, and at length into Flanders. At present the chief portions are preserved at Saint Peter's, at Blaudinberg, at Ghent, and at Montreuil in Lower Picardy, of which he is titular patron. In Picardy, he is commonly called St. Vignevaley, and more commonly Walovay; in Brittany, Guignole, or more frequently Vennole; in other parts of France, Guingalois; in England, Winwaloe or Winwaloc. His name occurs in the English litany of the seventh age, published by Mabillon.[2] He is titular saint of St. Guingualoe, a priory at Chateau du Loir, dependent on Marmoutier at Tours, and of several churches and parishes in France. His father, St. Fragan, is titular saint of a parish in the diocese of St. Brieuc, called Plou-Fragan, of which he is said to have been lord, and of another in the diocese of Leon, called St. Frogan; also, St. Gwen his mother, of one in the same diocese called Ploe-Gwen, and of another in that of Quimper. In France she is usually called St. Blanche, the British word Gwen signifying Blanche or White. His brothers are honored in Brittany, St. Guethenoc, on the 5th of November, and St. Jacut or James, on the 8th of February and the 3d of March; the latter is patron of the abbey of St. Jagu, in the diocese of Dol. St. Balay, or Valay, chief patron of the parish of Plou-balai, in the diocese of St. Malo, and a St. Martin, are styled disciples of St. Winwaloe, and before their monastic profession were lords of Rosmeur, and Ros-madeuc. Some other disciples of our saint are placed in the calendars of several churches in Brittany, as St. Guenhael his successor, St. Idunet or Yonnet, St. Dei, &c. See the ancient life of St. Winwaloe, the first of the three given by Bollandus and Henschenius; that in Surius and Cressy not being genuine. See also Baillet and Lobineau, Lives of the Saints of Brittany, pp. 43 and 48. Footnotes: 1. Laureaca. 2. Mabil. in Analect. {506} ST. LAMALISSE, C. HE flourished in great sanctity in the isle of Aran, on the west of Scotland, in the seventh century, and from him a neighboring small island is called to this day St. Lamalisse's Isle. See MS. memoirs in the Scottish College at Paris. MARCH IV. ST. CASIMIR, PRINCE OF POLAND. From his life compiled by Zachary Ferrier, legate of Leo X., in Poland, thirty-six years after his death; and an authentic relation of his miracles, with many circumstances of his life, by Gregory Swiecicki, canon of Vilna; also the commentary of Henschenius, p. 337. A D. 1483 ST. CASIMIR was the third among the thirteen children of Casimir III., king of Poland, and of Elizabeth of Austria, daughter to the emperor Albert II., a most virtuous woman, who died in 1505. He was born in 1458, on the 5th of October. From his childhood he was remarkably pious and devout. His preceptor was John Dugloss, called Longinus, canon of Cracow, a man of extraordinary learning and piety, who constantly refused all bishoprics, and other dignities of the church and state, which were pressed upon him. Uladislas, the eldest son, was elected king of Bohemia, in 1471, and became king of Hungary in 1490. Our saint was the second son: John Albert, the third son, succeeded the father in the kingdom of Poland in 1492; and Alexander, the fourth son, was called to the same in 1501. Casimir and the other princes were so affectionately attached to the holy man who was their preceptor, that they could not bear to be separated from him. But Casimir profited most by his pious maxims and example. He consecrated the flower of his age to the exercises of devotion and penance, and had a horror of that softness and magnificence which reign in courts. His clothes were very plain, and under them be wore a hair shirt. His bed was frequently the ground, and he spent a considerable part of the night in prayer and meditation, chiefly on the passion of our Saviour. He often went out in the night to pray before the church-doors; and in the morning waited before them till they were opened to assist at matins. By living always under a sense of the divine presence he remained perpetually united to, and absorbed in, his Creator, maintained an uninterrupted cheerfulness of temper, and was mild and affable to all. He respected the least ceremonies of the church: every thing that tended to promote piety was dear to him. He was particularly devout to the passion of our blessed Saviour, the very thought of which excited him to tears, and threw him into transports of love. He was no less piously affected towards the sacrifice of the altar, at which he always assisted with such reverence and attention that he seemed in raptures. And as a mark of his singular devotion to the Blessed Virgin, he composed, or at least frequently recited, the long hymn that bears his name, a copy of {507} which was, by his desire, buried with him. His love for Jesus Christ showed itself in his regard for the poor, who are his members, to whose relief he applied whatever he had, and employed his credit with his father, and his brother Uladislas, king of Bohemia, to procure them succor. His compassion made him feel in himself the afflictions of every one. The Palatines and other nobles of Hungary, dissatisfied with Matthias Corvin, their king, son of the great Huniades, begged the king of Poland to allow them to place his son Casimir on the throne. The saint, not then quite fifteen years of age, was very unwilling to consent; but in compliance with his father's will he went, at the head of an army of twenty thousand men, to the frontiers, in 1471. There, hearing that Matthias had formed an army of sixteen thousand men to defend him, and that all differences were accommodated between him and his people, and that pope Sixtus IV. had sent an embassy to divert his father from that expedition, he joyfully returned, having with difficulty obtained his father's consent so to do. However, as his dropping this project was disagreeable to the king his father, not to increase his affliction by appearing before him, he did not go directly to Cracow, but retired to the castle of Dobzki, three miles from that city, where he continued three months in the practice of penance. Having learned the injustice of the attempt against the king of Hungary, in which obedience to his father's command prevailed upon him to embark when he was very young, he could never be engaged to resume it by a fresh pressing invitation of the Hungarians, or the iterated orders and entreaties of his father. The twelve years he lived after this, he spent in sanctifying himself in the same manner as he had done before. He observed to the last an untainted chastity, notwithstanding the advice of physicians who excited him to marry, imagining, upon some false principle, this to be a means necessary to preserve his life. Being wasted with a lingering consumption, he foretold his last hour, and having prepared himself for it by redoubling his exercises of piety, and receiving the sacraments of the church, he made a happy end at Vilna, the capital of Lithuania, on the 4th of March, 1482, being twenty three years and five months old. He was buried in the church of St. Stanislas. So many were the miracles wrought by his intercession, that Swiecicki, a canon of Vilna, wrought a whole volume of them from good memoirs, in 1604. He was canonized by pope Leo X., whose legate in Poland, Zachary Ferrier, wrote the saint's life. His body and all the rich stuffs it was wrapped in, were found quite entire, and exhaling a sweet smell one hundred and twenty years after his death, notwithstanding the excessive moisture of the vault. It is honored in a large rich chapel of marble, built on purpose in that church. St. Casimir is the patron of Poland, and several other places, and is proposed to youth as a particular pattern of purity. His original picture is to be seen in his chapel in St. Germain des Prez in Paris, built by John Casimir, king of Poland, the last of the family of Waza, who, renouncing his crown, retired to Paris, and died abbot of St. Germain's, in 1668. * * * * * What is there on earth which can engage the affections of a Christian, or be the object of his ambition, in whose soul God desires to establish his kingdom? Whoever has conceived a just idea of this immense happiness and dignity, must look upon all the glittering bubbles of this world as empty and vain, and consider every thing in this life barely as it can advance or hinder the great object of all his desires. Few arrive at this happy and glorious state, because scarce any one seeks it with his whole heart, and has the courage sincerely to renounce all things and die to himself: and this precious jewel cannot be purchased upon any other terms. The kingdom {508} of God can only be planted in a soul upon the ruins of self-love: so long as this reigns, it raises insuperable obstacles to the perfect establishment of the empire of divine love. The amiable Jesus lives in all souls which he animates by his sanctifying grace, and the Holy Ghost dwells in all such. But in most of these how many worldly maxims and inclinations diametrically opposite to those of our most holy heavenly king, hold their full sway! how many secret disorders and irregular attachments are cherished! how much is found of self-love, with which sometimes their spiritual exercises themselves are infected! The sovereign king of men and their merciful Redeemer is properly said to reign only in those souls which study effectually, and without reserve, to destroy in their affections whatever is opposite to his divine will, to subdue all their passions, and to subject all their powers to his holy love. Such fall not into any venial sins with full deliberation, and wipe away those of frailty into which they are betrayed, by the compunction and penance in which they constantly live, and by the constant attention with which they watch daily over themselves. They pray with the utmost earnestness that God deliver them from all the power of the enemy, and establish in all their affections the perfect empire of his grace and love; and to fulfil his will in the most perfect manner in all their actions, is their most earnest desire and hearty endeavor. How bountifully does God reward, even in this life, those who are thus liberal towards him! St. Casimir, who had tasted of this happiness, and learned truly to value the heavenly grace, loathed all earthly pomp and delights. With what joy ought not all Christians, both rich and poor, to be filled when they hear: The kingdom of God is within you! With what ardor ought they not to devote themselves to make God reign perfectly in their hearts! How justly did St. Casimir prefer this pursuit to earthly kingdoms! ST. LUCIUS, POPE AND MARTYR. From Eus. l. 7. c. 2 and St. Cyprian's letters. See Tillem. t. 4. p. 118. Pagi, Ceillier, t. 3, p. 118, and Pearson, Annal. Cyprian. pp. 31, 33. A.D. 253. ST. Lucius was a Roman by birth, and one of the clergy of that church under SS. Fabian and Cornelius. This latter being crowned with martyrdom, in 252, St. Lucius succeeded him in the pontificate. The emperor Gallus having renewed the persecution of his predecessor Decius, at least in Rome, this holy pope was no sooner placed in the chair of St. Peter, but he was banished with several others, though to what place is uncertain. "Thus," says St. Dionysius of Alexandria, "did Gallus deprive himself of the succor of heaven, by expelling those who every day prayed to God for his peace and prosperity." St. Cyprian wrote to St. Lucius to congratulate him both on his promotion, and for the grace of suffering banishment for Christ. Our saint had been but a short time in exile, when he was recalled, with his companions, to the incredible joy of his people, who went out of Rome in crowds to meet him. St. Cyprlan wrote him a second letter of congratulation on this occasion.[1] He says, "He had not lost the dignity of martyrdom because he had the will, as the three children in the furnace, though preserved by God from death: this glory added a new dignity to his priesthood, that a bishop assisted at God's altar, who exhorted his flock to martyrdom by his own example as well as by his words. By giving such graces to his pastors, God showed where his true church was: for he denied {509} the like glory of suffering to the Novatian heretics. The enemy of Christ only attacks the soldiers of Christ: heretics he knows to be already his own, and passes them by. He seeks to throw down those who stand against him." He adds, in his own name and that of his colleagues: "We do not cease in our sacrifices and prayers (in sacrificiis et orationibus nostris) to God the Father, and to Christ his Son, our Lord, giving thanks and praying together, that he who perfects all may consummate in you the glorioius crown of your confession, who perhaps has only recalled you that your glory might not be hidden; for the victim, which owes his brethren an example of virtue and faith, ought to be sacrificed in their presence."[2] St. Cyprian, in his letter to pope Stephen, avails himself of the authority of St. Lucius against the Novatian heretics, as having decreed against them, that those who were fallen were not to be denied reconciliation and communion, but to be absolved when they had done penance for their sin. Eusebius says, he did not sit in the pontifical chair above eight months; and he seems, from the chronology of St. Cyprian's letters, to have sat only five or six, and to have died on the 4th of March, in 253, under Gallus, though we know not in what manner. The most ancient calendars mention him on the 5th of March, others, with the Roman, on the 4th, which seems to have been the day of his death, as the 5th that of his burial. His body was found in the Catacombs, and laid in the church of St. Cecily in Rome, where it is now exposed to public veneration by the order of Clement VIII. Footnotes: 1. Ep. 58 Pamelio.--61. Fello, p. 272. 2. Ep. 67 Pamelio.--68. Fello, in Ed. Oxo. ST. ADRIAN, BISHOP OF ST. ANDREWS M., IN SCOTLAND. WHEN the Danes, in the ninth century, made frequent descents upon the coast of Scotland, plundered several provinces, and massacred great part of the inhabitants, this holy pastor often softened their fury, and converted several among them to Christ. In a most cruel invasion of these pirates, he withdrew into the isle of May, in the bay of the river Forth; but the barbarians plundering also that island, discovered him there, and slew him with another bishop named Stalbrand, and a great number of others: the Aberdeen Breviary says six thousand six hundred. This massacre happened in the reign of Constantine II., in the year 874. A great monastery was built of polished stone in honor of St. Adrian, in the isle of May, the church of which, enriched with his relics, was a place of great devotion. See bishop Lesley, Hist. l. 5. Breviar. Aberdon. and Chronica Skonensia. {510} SS. ADRIAN. AND EUBULUS, OF PALESTINE. MARTYRS. From Eusebius's History of the Martyrs of Palestine, c. 11, p. 341. A.D. 309. IN the seventh year of Dioclesian's persecution, continued by Galerius Maximianus, when Firmilian, the most bloody governor of Palestine, had stained Cæsarea with the blood of many illustrious martyrs, Adrian and Eubulus came out of the country called Magantia to Cæsarea, in order to visit the holy confessors there. At the gates of the city they were asked, as others were, whither they were going, and upon what errand. They ingenuously confessed the truth, and were brought before the president, who ordered them to be tortured, and their sides to be torn with iron hooks, and then condemned them to be exposed to wild beasts. Two days after, when the pagans at Cæsarea celebrated the festival of the public Genius, Adrian was exposed to a lion, and not being dispatched by that beast, but only mangled, was at length killed by the sword. Eubulus was treated in the same manner, two days later. The judge offered him his liberty if he would sacrifice to idols; but the saint preferred a glorious death, and was the last that suffered in this persecution at Cæsarea, which had now continued twelve years under three successive governors, Flavian, Urban, and Firmilian. Divine vengeance pursuing the cruel Firmilian, he was that same year beheaded for his crimes, by the emperor's order, as his predecessor Urban had been two years before. * * * * * It is in vain that we take the name of Christians, or pretend to follow Christ, unless we carry our crosses after him. It is in vain that we hope to share in his glory, and in his kingdom, if we accept not the condition.[1] We cannot arrive at heaven by any other road but that which Christ held, who bequeathed his cross to all his elect as their portion and inheritance in this world. None can be exempted from this rule, without renouncing his title to heaven. Let us sound our own hearts, and see if our sentiments are conformable to these principles of the holy religion which we profess. Are our lives a constant exercise of patience under all trials, and a continual renunciation of our senses and corrupt inclinations, by the practice of self-denial and penance? Are we not impatient under pain or sickness, fretful under disappointments, disturbed and uneasy at the least accidents which are disagreeable to our nature, harsh and peevish in reproving the faults of others, and slothful and unmortified in endeavoring to correct our own? What a monstrous contradiction is it to call ourselves followers of Christ, yet to live irreconcilable enemies to his cross! We can never separate Christ from his cross, on which he sacrificed himself for us, that he might unite us on it eternally to himself. Let us courageously embrace it, and he will be our comfort and support, as he was of his martyrs. Footnotes: 1. Matt. xvi. 24. Luke xxiv. 26. {511} ST. KIARAN, OR KENERIN, B.C. CALLED BY THE BRITONS, PIRAN. AMONG the Irish saints who were somewhat older than St. Patrick, the first and most celebrated is St. Kiaran, whom the Irish style the first-born of their saints. According to some he was a native of the country of Ossory, according to others, of Cork. Usher places his birth about the year 352. Having received some imperfect information about the Christian faith, at thirty years of age he took a journey to Rome, that he might be instructed in its heavenly doctrine, and learn faithfully to practise its precepts. He was accompanied home by four holy clerks, who were all afterwards bishops; their names are, Lugacius, Columban, Lugad, and Cassan. The Irish writers suppose him to have been ordained bishop at Rome; but what John of Tinmouth affirms, seems far more probable, that he was one of the twelve whom St. Patrick consecrated bishops in Ireland to assist him in planting the gospel in that island. For his residence, he built himself a cell in a place encompassed with woods, near the water of Fuaran, which soon grew into a numerous monastery. A town was afterwards built there called Saigar, now from the saint Sier-keran. Here he converted to the faith his family, and whole clan, which was that of the Osraigs, with many others. Having given the religious veil to his mother, whose name was Liadan, he appointed her a cell or monastery near his own, called by the Irish Ceall Lidain. In his old age, being desirous to prepare himself for his passage to eternity in close retirement., he passed into Cornwall, where he led an eremitical life, near the Severn sea, fifteen miles from Padstow. Certain disciples joined him, and by his words and example formed themselves to a true spirit of Christian piety and humility. In this place he closed his mortal pilgrimage by a happy death: a town upon the spot is to this day called from him St. Piran's in the Sands, and a church is there dedicated to God in his memory, where was formerly a sanctuary near St. Mogun's church, upon St. Mogun's creek.[1] See John of Tinmouth, Usher, &c., collected by Henschenius: also Leland's Collections, published by Hearne, t. 3, pp. 10 and 174. Footnotes: 1. A great number of other Irish saints retired to Cornwall, where many towns and churches still retain their names. Thus St. Burian's is so called from an Irish virgin called Buriana, to whose church and college here king Athelstan, in 936, granted the privilege of sanctuary. See Leland. Collect t. 3, pp. 7, 8. ST. IA, WAS daughter to an Irish nobleman, and a disciple of St. Barricus; Iä and Erwine, and many others, came out of Ireland into Cornwall, and landed at Pendinas, a stony rock and peninsula. At her request Dinan, a lord of the country, built there a church, since called St. Iës, eighteen miles from St. Piran's in the Sands, on the Severn. St Carantoke's is two miles above St. Piran's. Iës stands two miles from Lannant; St. Erth is a parish church two miles above Lannant. St. Cua and St. Tedy's parishes are situated in the same part. St. Lide's island, where her tomb was formerly visited by the whole country, still retains her name. See the life of St. Ia quoted by Leland, Coll. t. 3, p. 11. ST. BREACA, V. SHE was born in Ireland on the borders of Leinster and Ulster, and consecrated herself to God in a religious state under the direction of St. Bridget, who built for her a separate oratory, and afterwards a monastery, in a place since called the field of Breaca. She afterwards passed into Cornwall in company with abbot Sinnin, a disciple of St. Patrick, Maruan, a monk, Germoch, or Gemoch, king Elwen, Crewenna, and Helen. St. Breaca landed at Revyer, otherwise called Theodore's castle, situated on the eastern bank of the river Hayle, long since, as it seems, swallowed up by the sands on the coast of the northern sea of Cornwall. Tewder, a Welshman, slew part of this holy company. St. Breaca proceeded to Pencair, a hill in Penibro parish, now commonly called St. Banka. She afterwards built two churches, one at Trene, with the other at Talmeneth, two mansion places in the parish of Pembro, as is related in the life of St. Elwin. See Leland's Itinerary, published by Hearne, p. 5. ST. GERMOKE'S church is three miles from St. Michael's Mount, by east-south-east, a mile from the sea. His tomb is yet seen there, and his chair is shown in the churchyard, and his well a little without the Churchyard. Leland, ib. p. 6. ST. MAWNOUN'S church stands at the point of the haven towards Falmouth, ib. p. 13. {512} SAINT ROGER, C. A DISCIPLE Of St. Francis of Assisio, who received him into his Order in 1216, and sent him into Spain, though Wading calls him a layman. The spirit of poverty which he professed, he inherited of his holy father in the most perfect degree, and St. Francis commended his charity above all his other disciples. The gifts of prophecy and miracles rendered him illustrious both living and after his death, which happened in 1236. His head is kept at Villa Franca, in the diocese of Asturia, and his body at Todi in Italy, where he is honored with a particular office ratified by Gregory IX. See Wading's Annals, published by Fonseca, at Rome, in 1732, t. 2, pp. 413, 414, also Henschenius, p. 418. Pope Benedict XIV. granted to the Franciscans for {his} festival the 5th of March. ST. JOHN JOSEPH OF THE CROSS. (SUPPLEMENT _to Butler's Lives of the Saints_--SADLIERS' EDITION.) St. John Joseph of the Cross was canonized on Trinity Sunday, May 26th, 1839. His biography was written by the reverend postulator who conducted the process of his canonization, from authentic documents in his possession, and published at Rome in 1838, in a work entitled--_Compendio della Vita di Giangiuseppe della Croce_. The following account of the life of this eminent saint is compiled from the English translation of the above work, and thought worthy of being incorporated in this edition of the "Lives of the Saints." A.D. 1654-1734. HE was born on the Feast of the Assumption, in the year of our Lord 1654, at the town of Ischia, in the island of that name, belonging to the kingdom of Naples, of respectable parents, Joseph Calosirto and Laura Garguilo, and was upon the same day christened Charles Cajetan. He early discovered the seeds of those virtues that in a special manner enriched his soul, and sanctified his life in the religious state,--humility, sweetness, obedience, and an incomparable modesty; and at the same time manifested a marvellous inclination to silence, retirement, and prayer. Wherefore, even in childhood, he made choice of a room in the most secluded quarter of the house, and therein fitting up a little altar to Our blessed Lady, (on whose great festival he had the happiness to be born, and towards whom, through life, he cherished a tender and filial devotion,) he spent his whole time in study and pious exercises. Here, too, he early manifested his attachment to the cross, sleeping upon a narrow hard bed, and fasting on appointed days during the week; and as he mortified the flesh betimes, so also he checked all pride, by wearing constantly mean clothes, notwithstanding his birth and station, in despite of remonstrances and reproach. His horror of sin was equal to his love of virtue, so that his mind, from the first dawn of reason, shrunk like a delicate plant from the very shadow of guilt, and was all-imbued with zeal for God's glory. Idleness, levity, vanity, and falsehood, even in trivial matters, were censured by him as faults severely reprehensible. And when his efforts to check sin drew upon him the hostility of others, he was so far from losing patience, that he therein only discovered a fresh opportunity of practising virtue. Towards the poor he overflowed with tenderness, reserving for them the choicest portion of his meals, and devoting to their use the pocket-money he received. The sanctity of his boyhood merited for him the grace of a divine call to a state of holiness; and feeling an interior movement to quit the world, he {513} sedulously sought counsel from the Father of lights, as to the manner in which he should obey this inspiration. For this end he redoubled his ordinary devotions and mortifications; performed a novena to the Holy Ghost, and threw himself upon the tender patronage and powerful intercession of Our Lady. God hearkened to his fervent appeal; for his providence so disposed that at this period the renowned servant of God, Father John da San Bernardo, a Spanish Alcantarine, came into the country of our saint, with the view of establishing his order in the kingdom of Naples. The mean habit and devout demeanor of this holy man and his companions, touched and won the heart of Joseph; he desired to imitate what he beheld, and doubted not but the desire came from God. Wherefore he journeyed to Naples, that he might impart to the fathers of the order his inclination; and they, having prudently considered his vocation, admitted him to the novitiate. He manifested so much ardor, that the superiors deemed it fitting to clothe him with the habit before the usual time had expired. This happy consummation of his wishes took place before he had completed his sixteenth year. He adopted the name of John Joseph of the Cross, and on the feast of St. John the Baptist, in the year of our Lord 1671, he completed his edifying novitiate, and took the solemn vows of his order; whose holy founder, St. Francis of Asisi, and St. Peter of Alcantara, he proposed to himself as models. In obedience to the express desire of his superior, our saint submitted to receive the dignity of the priesthood, and was appointed to hear confessions; in which task he displayed a profound theological learning, which he had acquired solely at the foot of the cross. But, carried onward by an ardent love of the cross, whose treasures he more and more discovered as he advanced in the dignity and functions of the sacred ministry, he resolved to establish in the wood adjoining his convent a kind of solitude, where, after the manner of the ancient Fathers of the Desert, he might devote himself entirely to grayer and penitential austerities, and give to the Church an illustrious and profitable example of the sacerdotal spirit exercised in a perfect degree. There was found in the wood a pleasant fountain, whose waters healed the sick; and hard by he erected a little church, and round about it, at intervals, five small hermitages, wherein, with his companions, he renewed the austere and exalted life of the old anchorites, and advanced greatly in spirituality. And in order that no care or worldly thought might ruffle the sublime tranquillity of this contemplative life, the convent had charge of daily supplying the holy solitary with food. But the superiors, who knew the rich treasure they possessed in our saint, when he had attained the age of twenty-four, chose him for master of the novices; in which new office, so far from allowing himself the smallest dispensation, he was foremost in setting the example of a scrupulous observance of every rule; assiduous in his attendance in choir, constant in silence, in prayer, and recollection. He was careful to instil into the hearts of those under his charge an ardent love of Our Lord Jesus, and a desire of imitating him; as also a special veneration for, and tender attachment to His blessed mother. From Naples, where he was employed as master of the novices, our saint was transferred to Piedimonte, and invested with the office of guardian. The zeal which this new and more responsible charge called for, was surpassed only by the profound humility its exercise demanded. Ever a rigid enforcer of the rule, he was careful to make his enactments agreeable to others, by being the first to observe them himself. The beneficial result of such conduct was soon made manifest, for he thereby won the hearts of all the religious, who under him, advanced with rapid strides towards the most heroic {514} perfection. Still his humble and gentle spirit sighed to be disburdened of so heavy a charge; and having, after two years, obtained the desired release, turned its charitable energies to the direction of souls, the assistance and alleviation of the dying and distressed, and the conversion of sinners. When he was released from his post of guardian, it was only to reassume that of master of the novices, which be held for four successive years, and exercised partly in Naples, and partly in Piedimonte. But now succeeded the accustomed visitation of crosses, to be afterwards followed by an increase of grace and supernatural favors; an alternation which checkered the whole course of his life. He was summoned to his native country, Ischia, to order to discharge the painful duty of filial affection, and receive the last sighs of his dying mother. Her death ensued, full of hope, and calm, in the presence of her beloved; and, stifling the swelling emotions of sensible grief, this incomparable son followed her remains to the church, and offered up for her soul the sacrifice of propitiation. Who shall adequately conceive his feelings during the celebration of that mass? Was his grief less filial, less poignant, because it was reasonable and Christian? and because, instead of breaking into wild laments and barren demonstrations, it remained pent up in the recesses of his strong heart, and left free play and exercise to calm judgment and the salutary measures of Christian charity? Christian fortitude requires that we should bear up against the stroke of death not despondingly, because inevitable, but firmly and cheerfully, because it is the season of better hope, whereby we plant the ensign of salvation upon the grave. This will be no unnatural check to those emotions, which it is so great and yet so painful a consolation to indulge. They will flow no less freely, and far more profitably, when the calls of religion have first been satisfied. Was St. Bernard a violator of the sentiments of humanity, when he followed with tearless eyes and calm countenance the body of his brother to the grave, assisting at all the offices of religion, and officiating thereat himself? Was that great heart insensible, when its uncontrollable grief burst out in the midst of a discourse on other topics, into an impassioned address to his departed brother, and a magnificent tribute to the virtues of this partner of his soul and affections? Or does not such an instance of Christian fortitude and magnanimity favorably contrast with the pusillanimous and almost heathen despondency and desolation which overwhelm many at the sight or news of death, even as the Catholic faith--warm, generous, and confident--cheers beyond that cold and gloomy creed, that bids farewell to hope at the brink of the grave? In the provincial chapter of 1690, he was appointed to the office of definitor, in addition to that which he already held. The difficulties of these two functions, requiring a union of the virtues of the active and contemplative life, our saint marvellously and happily surmounted. But now an event happened which well-nigh extinguished the institute to which he belonged, in Italy, and which gave occasion to an illustrious evidence of his exceeding utility to the order. The Spanish Alcantarines, having some differences with the Italian, procured from the apostolic see their dismemberment from the latter, who, being thus abandoned, recurred to our saint for succor. Suffering himself to be overcome by their entreaties, he undertook the advocacy of their cause with the pontiff, and succeeded, in a congregation held in 1702, in changing the sentiments of the cardinals and bishops, previously disposed to their suppression; so that on the day after the feast of St. Thomas the Apostle, a decree was issued by which the order was established in Italy under the form of a province. A chapter was convoked, in which the arduous task of government was, by the unanimous voice of {515} all, forced upon the humility of our saint, who, surmounting incredible hardships and obstacles, had at length the satisfaction of seeing the necessary means provided, and the order firmly established. Before the chapter-general of the order met, he was named definitor by the provincial chapter; but on his remonstrances at being thus so often compelled to assume offices, in spite of his repugnance, he at length obtained a papal brief, exempting him from all charges, and annulling even his active and passive vote in the chapter. During the course of the year 1722, another brief made over to the Alcantarines the convent of St. Lucy, in Naples, and thither our saint retired, never afterwards to be brought out into the public light, which he so much shunned, but left to edify his brethren during the remainder of his life, and to build up the fabric of those extraordinary virtues, of which we shall now proceed to give a sketch. Faith, like the keystone of the arch, is that which gives the fabric of Christian virtue solidity and stability. Of the attachment of our saint to this necessary virtue, it would be superfluous to say any thing, as his whole life was a speaking evidence of that attachment, as well as of the eminent degree in which it pleased God to enable him to appreciate its consoling mysteries. But he was content to thank God for having admitted him to the truth, without rashly or profanely lifting the veil of the sanctuary, and scrutinizing that which is within. He was persuaded that the attempt to fathom the secrets of God, or to measure his designs, would prove as hopeless as it would be impious, and therefore he bowed to the truths of faith with implicit submission. From this attachment of our saint to the virtue of faith, proceeded his zeal to instruct the ignorant in the mysteries of religion, as well as the force, fervor, and clearness, with which he expounded the sublime dogmas of the Trinity and Incarnation, and even of predestination and grace; the gift he possessed of quieting doubts respecting faith; and finally, that constant exercise of the presence of God which he practised uninterruptedly, and constantly recommended, saying: "Whoever walks always in God's presence, will never commit sin, but will preserve his innocence and become a great saint." Hope in God rendered our saint of even temper in the midst of the various contradictions he experienced in establishing his order in Italy. He used to say to his companions, when they were dismayed by the persecutions they suffered, "Let us hope in God, and doubtless we shall be comforted:" and to the distressed who flocked to him, "God is a tender father, who loves and succors all;" or, "Doubt not; trust in God, He will provide." Hence his heart enjoyed a peace which no sufferings could molest, and which did not desert him even when he lay under the stroke of apoplexy that terminated in his death. For his hope was based upon the Catholic principle, that God, who destined him for an eternal kingdom, would not refuse the succors necessary to attain it. Still, though his hopes, through the merits of our Lord's blessed passion, knew no bounds, yet was he tremblingly sensible of the guilt of sin, and the awful character of God's judgments; whence were derived that intense grief with which sin inspired him, and that astonishing humility which led him to bewail unceasingly his want of correspondence to divine grace, to proclaim himself everywhere a sinner, and implore the prayers of others. To complete the crown of theological virtues, charity in both its branches pre-eminently characterized our saint. This divine virtue burned so warmly in his heart, as to be transfused through his features, over which it spread a superhuman and celestial glow, and gave to his discourse a melting tenderness. "Were there neither heaven nor hell," he would say, "still would I ever wish to love God, who is a father so deserving of our love." Or: {516} "Let us love our Lord, love him verily and indeed, for the love of God is a great treasure. Blessed is he that loveth God." Our saint, who so ardently loved God, whom he saw not, was not without bowels of tenderness for his neighbor, whom he beheld. It was the constant practice of his life to feed the poor; and when he was superior, he ordered that no beggar should be dismissed from the convent gate without relief: in time of scarcity he devoted to their necessities his own portion, and even that of the community, relying upon Providence to supply their wants; and when he was only a private monk, he earnestly recommended this charity to the superiors. But it was towards the sick that his charity displayed itself. He used to attend the infirm in his convent with unwearied assiduity; nor was he less anxious to serve those who were without, but generously sought them out, and visited them, even during the most inclement seasons. And as God maketh his sun to shine upon the wicked as well as the good, so our saint would not exclude even his enemies from the boundless range of his charity. For one who had insulted him he once labored strenuously to procure some advantageous post; and being warned that the man was his enemy, he replied, "that therefore he was under the greater obligation of serving him." Besides these general virtues, he possessed in the highest degree those which belonged to his religious state, especially a prompt and implicit obedience to all commands, however painful or difficult. That obedience which he practised himself, he was careful to enforce upon others, which his office of superior made it his duty, for he justly regarded this virtue as essential to a religious. Nor was his love of poverty less remarkable. A rouge seat and a table, a bed, consisting of two narrow planks, with two sheep-skins and a wretched woollen coverlet, a stool to rest his wounded legs upon, these, with his breviary, formed the whole furniture of his cell. And although the order allowed each one to possess two habits, yet during the forty-six years that he was a member of it, he never had any other than that which he put on in the novitiate. But it was in his vigilant guard over chastity, that our saint was most remarkable. His unremitting mortifications, his extreme modesty, and perpetual watchfulness over all his senses, preserved him from the slightest breath of contamination. Never during the sixty years of his life was he known to look any one not of his own sex in the face. His every word and action bespoke purity, and inspired the love thereof. Our saint, so solidly grounded in this virtue, was not without its only sure foundation,--humility. He delighted in performing menial offices in the convent, and when the task allotted to him was finished, he was anxious to fulfil that of others. Hence he also avoided all posts and honor, as much as was consistent with his vow of obedience. When he journeyed through Italy as provincial, he would not make himself known at the inns, where he lodged, lest any distinction should be paid him. To the same cause may be ascribed his unwillingness to revisit his native country, his aversion to being in company with the great, when their spiritual affairs did not require it, his not accepting the invitations of the viceroy and his consort to the palace; his calling himself, as he was wont, the greatest sinner in the whole world, ungrateful to God for his benefits, a worm on the face of the earth; his custom of frequently kissing the hands of priests; his unwillingness to declare his opinion in council; his care to break off every discourse touching upon his birth or connections; his gratitude to God for enlightening those who disparaged him; his never being scandalized at the sins of others, how great soever; and finally, his never evincing the smallest resentment at any insult or injury. He was studious to conceal and dissemble the great gifts of miracles and prophecy with which God favored {517} him; ascribing the miracles he performed to the faith of those in whose behalf they were wrought, or to the intercession of the saints. Not unfrequently he desired those whom he restored to health, to take some certain medicine, that the cure might be attributed to a mere natural remedy; and with regard to his prophecies, which were numerous, he affected to judge from analogy and experience. To the numerous penitential austerities enjoined by his order, he added as many more as an ingenious self-denial could devise. Silent as long as possible, when he spoke, it was in a low voice. Bareheaded in all seasons, he wore under his rough and heavy habit divers hair-shirts and chains, which he was careful to vary to keep the sense of torment ever fresh. Besides, he used the discipline to a severe degree; and when, at the age of forty, his superior obliged him to wear sandals, he placed between them and his feet a quantity of small nails; but the most tremendous instrument of torture, which he devised against himself, was a cross about a foot in length, set with rows of sharp nails, which he fastened tight over his shoulders, so as to open there a wound which never afterwards closed. In sooth, these things would appear incredible, did we not remember that St. John Joseph of the Cross had taken up the instrument of our Lord Jesus's blessed passion, and was miraculously supported under its weight. If we are not blessed with equal strength, still we are all capable of enduring much more than is demanded of us for gaining heaven. Is not the life of a worldling more irksome and more painful than that of a mortified religious man? How many heart-burnings, and aching heads, and palled appetites, and disordered faculties, and diseased frames, could bear out this assertion,--that the way to heaven would be easy on the score of mortification, if men could consent to sacrifice to virtue but one half what they sacrifice to feed their passions? It was usual for our saint to be absorbed and rapt in heavenly ecstasies and visions. In this state he was lost to all that passed around him; seeing, hearing, and feeling nothing, he stood like a statue of marble, and when he was awakened, his countenance glowed like a burning coal. In a condition so closely resembling that of the blessed, he was, from time to time, made a partaker of their glories. Thus, during prayer a halo of light often encircled his head; and, during mass, a supernatural brightness overspread his countenance. In the practice of every virtue, and in the enjoyment of sublime graces, our saint passed the days of his pilgrimage, glorifying God and giving alms and doing good, until it pleased the Lord to close his career on earth, not without a previous forewarning as to the time and circumstances of his death. In the year when it occurred, his nephew writing to him from Vienna, that he would return home in May, he sent back answer that he would not then find him living. And only a week before his departure, discoursing with his brother. Francis, he said, "I have never asked a boon of you till now; do me the charity to pray to Almighty God for me, next Friday, do you hear? mind, do not forget." It was the very day he died. Two days before his last mortal attack, accosting Vincent of Laines, "We shall never," said he, "meet on earth again." Now, upon the last day of February, after hearing mass, and receiving communion with extraordinary fervor, he betook himself to his room, to deliver to the crowds that resorted to him his last paternal admonitions. He continued without interruption till mid-day, and at that hour precisely, turning to the lay-brother that assisted him, said, "Shortly a thunderclap will lay me prostrate on the ground, you will have to raise me thence, but this is the last I shall experience." Accordingly, at two hours and a half after sunset, an apoplectic stroke threw him on the ground. At first the nature of his disease was mistaken. It was thought that over-fatigue had brought on giddiness but the next day {518} the symptoms manifested themselves alarmingly, and spread in defiance of remedies. Yet though he was thus, to all appearances, senseless during the five days that he survived, doubtless his soul was occupied in interior ecstasies and profound contemplation; as indeed his countenance, his lips, and gestures, expressive of the tenderest devotion, indicated. His eyes, generally shut, opened frequently to rest upon the mild image of Our Lady, whose picture was opposite him. Sometimes, too, he turned them towards his confessor, as if demanding absolution, according to what had been previously concerted between them. A pressure of the eyes and an inclination of the head were also perceptible, and he was seen to strike his breast when he received, for the last time, the sacramental absolution from the hands of the superior. At length the morning dawned, which was to witness the passage of our saint from this vale of tears and land of sorrow to a better life. It was Friday, the 5th of March, a day yet unoccupied in the calendar, as if purposely left for him. He had spent the previous night in unceasing fervent acts of contrition, resignation, love, and gratitude, as his frequent beating of his breast, lifting his hands towards heaven, and blessing himself, testified. Before the morning was far advanced, turning to the lay-brother that attended him, as if awoke out of an ecstasy, he said, "I have but a few moments to live." Hereupon the lay-brother ran in all speed to give notice to the superior, who, with the whole community, at that moment in choir, hastened to the cell of the dying man. The recommendation of a departing soul was recited with an abundance of tears. The father-guardian perceiving he was in his agony, imparted to him the last sacramental absolution; which he, bowing his head to receive, instantly raised it again; opened, for the last time, his eyes, now swimming in joy, and inebriated with heavenly delight; fixed them, just as they were closing, with a look of ineffable tenderness, upon the image of Out blessed Lady, and composing his lips to a sweet smile, without farther movement or demonstration, ceased to breathe. Thus expired, without a struggle, John Joseph of the Cross, the mirror of religious life, the father of the poor, the comforter of the distressed, and the unconquerable Christian hero: but when death came to pluck him from the tree he dropped like a ripe fruit, smiling, into his hands: or, even as a gentle stream steals unperceived into the ocean, so calmly that its surface is not fretted with a ripple, his soul glided into eternity. To die upon the field of battle, amidst the shouts of victory, in presence of an admiring throng, surrounded by the badges of honor and respect, bequeathing to history a celebrated name, may merit the ambition of the world; or to perish in some noble cause, buoyed up by enthusiasm, conscious worth, and the certainty of having the sympathy and applause of all from whom meed is valuable, may make even selfishness generous, and cowardice heroic, but to suffer during life the lingering martyrdom of the cross; and then to expire, not suddenly, but like a taper, burnt out; to fall like a flower, not in its prime and beauty but gradually shedding its leaves and perfume, and bearing its fibres to the last, till it droops and lies exhaled and prostrate in the dust; is a death too pure, too self-devoted, too sublime, for any but the annals of Christian heroism to supply. And assuredly a day will come when the conqueror's crown shall not be brighter than the Christian's halo, nor the patriot's laurel-branch bear richer foliage than the palms of Paradise, which the humblest denizen of heaven shall carry. A day will come that will give to all their proper measure and dimensions; yet even before that day shall God glorify those who have died the peaceful death of the just, by embalming their memory and rendering their tombs and relics illustrious, so that, for the one who shall have heard of the hero, thousands shall bless and invoke the Saint. {519} * * * * * He alone is a perfect Christian who is crucified to the world, and to whom the world is crucified, and who glorieth in nothing save the cross of out Lord Jesus. Nor without embracing the cross at least in heart and affection, can any one belong to the religion of Christ. Upon entering life we are marked with the cross; through the various vicissitudes thereof our every step is encountered by it--go whithersoever thou wilt and thou shalt find it impossible to escape the cross--and it accompanies us even unto death and the grave. For a Christian dieth pressing the cross to his lips; and the cross is engraven upon his tomb that it may bear witness of his faith and hope. But if Our Lord has said, in general terms, "Whosoever will be my disciple, let him take up his cross and follow me;" and if it be true that through many tribulations it is necessary to enter into the kingdom of heaven, then are all without exception called upon to assume this burden. It is not strange, then, that saints should have delighted to blend their names with the cross wherewith their hearts were so closely entwined; or that men, after their departure to glory, should have designated them by the title of that whereof they were so deeply enamored. MARCH VI. ST. CHRODEGANG, BISHOP OF METZ, CONFESSOR. From Paul the Deacon, l. 2 de Gest. Longob. c. 16. Henschenius, p. 453. Mabill. Annal. Ben. l. 22, t. 2, & Act. SS. Ord. Ben. t. 4, p. 184. Ceillier, t. 18, p. 176. His life, published by George Von Eckart, Hist Francie Orient. t. 1, p. 912. Also Meurisse, Hist. des Evêques de Metz, l. 2. A.D. 766. THIS saint, nobly born in Brabant, then called Hasbain, was educated in the abbey of St. Tron, and for his great learning and virtue was made referendary, chancellor of France, and prime minister, by Charles Martel, mayor of the French palace, in 737. He was always meanly clad from his youth; he macerated his body by fasting, watching, and hair-cloths, and allowed his senses no superfluous gratifications of any kind. His charity to all in distress seemed to know no bounds; he supported an incredible number of poor, and was the protector and father of orphans and widows. Soon after the death of Charles Martel, he was chosen bishop of Metz, in 742. Prince Pepin, the son and successor of Charles, uncle to our saint by his mother, Landrada, would not consent to his being ordained, but on the condition that he should still continue at the helm of the state. Chrodegang always retained the same sweetness, humility, recollection, and simplicity in his behavior and dress. He constantly wore a rough hair-shirt under his clothes, spent good part of the night in watching, and usually at his devotions watered his cheeks with tears. Pope Stephen III. being oppressed by the Lombards, took refuge in France. Chrodegang went to conduct him over the Alps, and king Pepin was no sooner informed that he had passed these mountains in his way to France, but he sent Charles, his eldest son, to accompany him to Pont-yon, in Champagne, where the king was to receive him. The pope being three miles distant from that city, the king came to meet him, and having joined him, alighted from his horse, and prostrated himself, as did the queen, his children, and the lords of his court; and the king walked some time by the side of his horse to do him honor. The pope {520} retired to the monastery of St. Deny's; and king Pepin, in the year 754, sent St. Chrodegang on an embassy to Astulph, king of the Lombards, praying him out of respect to the holy apostles not to commit any hostilities against Rome, nor to oblige the Romans to superstitions contrary to their laws, and to restore the towns which he had taken from the holy see; but this embassy was without effect. The saint, in 755, converted the chapter of secular canons of his cathedral into a regular community, in which he was imitated by many other churches. He composed for his regular canons a rule, consisting of thirty-four articles. In the first he lays down humility for the foundation of all the rest.[1] He obliged the canons to confess at least twice a year to the bishop, before the beginning of Advent and Lent.[2] But these churches, even that of Metz, have again secularized themselves. The saint built and endowed the monasteries of St. Peter, that of Gorze, and a third in the diocese of Worms, called Lorsh or Laurisham. He died on the 6th of March. in 766, and was buried at Gorze, to which by his will, which is still extant, he demised several estates. He is named in the French, German, and Belgic Martyrologies. * * * * * The zeal of St. Chrodegang in restoring the primitive and apostolic spirit in the clergy, particularly their fervor and devotion in the ministry of the altar, is the best proof of his ardor to advance the divine honor. To pay to Almighty God the public homage of praise and love, in the name of the whole church, is a function truly angelical. Those, who by the divine appointment are honored with this sublime charge, resemble those glorious heavenly spirits who always assist before the throne of God. What ought to be the sanctity of their lives! how pure their affections, how perfectly disengaged from all inordinate attachments to creatures, particularly how free from the least filth of avarice, and every other vice! All Christians have a part in this heavenly function. Footnotes: 1. Ch. 14. 2. See the other regulations abridged in Fleury, &c., the entire rule published genuine in {Le Cointe Amaise} t. 5, and in the later editions of the councils{}. B. COLETTE, VIRGIN AND ABBESS. From her life, written by her confessor, Peter de Vaux. See Helyot, Hist. des Ord. Relig. t. 7, p. 96. Miraeus and Barbaza, Vies des Saints du Tiers Ordre de St. François, t. 2, p. 51. A.D. 1447. COLETTE BOILET, a carpenter's daughter, was born at Corbie, in Picardy, in 1380. Her parents, out of devotion to St. Nicholas, gave her the name of Colette, the diminutive of Nicholas. She was brought up in the love of humiliations and austerities. Her desire to preserve her purity without the least blemish made her avoid as much as possible all company, even of persons of her own sex, unless it was sometimes to draw them from the love of the world by her moving discourses, which were attended with a singular blessing from almighty God. Humility was her darling virtue; and her greatest delight seemed to be in seeing herself contemned. She was so full of confusion at her own miseries and baseness, and was so contemptible in her own eyes, that she was ashamed to appear before any one, placed herself far below the greatest sinners, and studied by all sorts of humiliations to prevent the least motion of secret pride or self-conceit in her heart. She served the poor and the sick with an affection that charmed and comforted them. She lived in strict solitude in a small, poor, abandoned apartment in {521} her father's house, and spent her time there in manual labor and prayer. Being very beautiful, she begged of God to change her complexion, and her face became so pale and thin, that she could scarce be known for the same person. Yet a certain majesty of virtue, shining in her countenance, gave her charms conducive to the edification of others by the sweetness, modesty, and air of piety and divine love discernible in her looks. Her parents, who, though poor, were virtuous, and exceeding charitable, according to their abilities, and great peacemakers among their neighbors, seeing her directed by the Spirit of God, allowed her full liberty in her devotions. After their death she distributed the little they left her among the poor, and retired among the Beguines, devout societies of women, established in several parts of Flanders, Picardy, and Lorrain, who maintain themselves by the work of their hands, leading a middle kind of life between the secular and religious, but make no solemn vows. Not finding this way of life austere enough, she, by her confessor's advice, took the habit of the third order of St. Francis, called the Penitents; and, three years after, that of the mitigated Clares or Urbanists, with the view of reforming that order, and reducing it to its primitive austerity. Having obtained of the abbot of Corbie a small hermitage, she spent in it three years in extraordinary austerity, near that abbey. After this, in order to execute the project she had long formed of re-establishing the primitive spirit and practice of her order, she went to the convent at Amiens, and from thence to several others. To succeed in her undertaking, it was necessary that she should be vested with proper authority: to procure which she made a journey to Nice in Provence, to wait on Peter de Luna, who, in the great schism, was acknowledged pope by the French under the name of Benedict XIII., and happened then to be in that city. He constituted her superioress-general of the whole order of St. Clare, with full power to establish in it whatever regulations she thought conducive to God's honor and the salvation of others. She attempted to revive the primitive rule and spirit of St. Francis in the convents of the diocese of Paris, Beauvais, Noyon, and Amiens; but met with the most violent opposition, and was treated as a fanatic. She received all injuries with joy, and was not discouraged by human difficulties. Some time after she met with a more favorable reception in Savoy, and her reformation began to take root there, and passed thence into Burgundy, France, Flanders, and Spain. Many ancient houses received it, that of Besanzon being the first, and she lived to erect seventeen new ones. Several houses of Franciscan friars received the same. But Leo X., in 1517, by a special bull, united all the different reformations of the Franciscans under the name of Observantines: and thus the distinction of Colettines is extinct. So great was her love for poverty, in imitation of that of Christ, that she never put on so much as sandals, going always barefoot, and would have no churches or convents but what were small and mean. Her habit was not only of most coarse stuff, but made of above a hundred patches sewed together. She continually inculcated to her nuns the denial of their own wills in all things, as Christ, from his first to his last breath, did the will of his heavenly Father: saying, that all self-will was the broad way to hell. The sacred passion of Christ was the subject of her constant meditation. On Fridays, from six in the morning till six at night, she continued in this meditation, without eating or doing any other thing, but referring all her thoughts and affections to it with a flood of tears; also during the Holy-Week, and whenever she assisted at mass: she often fell into ecstasies when she considered it. She showed a particular respect to the holy cross; but, above all, to Christ present in the blessed eucharist, when she appeared in raptures of adoration and love. She often purified her conscience by sacramental confession before she heard mass, to {522} assist thereat with the greater purity of soul. Her zeal made her daily to pour forth many fervent prayers for the conversion of sinners, and also for the souls in purgatory, often with many tears. Being seized with her last sickness in her convent at Ghent, she received the sacraments of the church, foretold her death, and happily expired in her sixty-seventh year, on the 6th of March, in 1447. Her body is exposed to veneration in the church of that convent called Bethleem, in Ghent. She was never canonized, nor is she named in the Roman Martyrology: but Clement VIII., Paul V., Gregory XIII., and Urban VIII., have approved of an office in her honor for the whole Franciscan order, and certain cities. Her body was taken up at Ghent, in 1747, and several miracles wrought on the occasion were examined by the ordinary of the place, who sent the process and relation of them to Rome. ST. FRIDOLIN, A. HE was an Irish or Scotch abbot, who, leaving his own country, founded several monasteries in Austria, Burgundy, and Switzerland: the last was that of Sekingen, in an isle in the Rhine, now one of the four forest towns belonging to the house of Austria. In this monastery he died, in 538. He is the tutelar patron of the Swiss canton of Glaris, who carry in their coat of arms his picture in the Benedictin habit, though he was not of that order. See Molanus, Addit. ad Usuard; Pantaleon, Prosopographiæ Vir. Illustr. German. ad an. 502; King in Calend Wion, Lignum Vitæ, l. 3. ST. BALDREDE, BISHOP OF GLASGOW, C. HE was immediate successor of St. Mungo, in that see, established many nunneries in Scotland, and died in the province of Laudon, about the year 608. His relics were very famous in many churches in Scotland. See Adam King, in Calend., and the historians Boetius, Major, Leslie, &c. SS. KYNEBURGE, KYNESWIDE, AND TIBBA. THE two first were daughters of Penda, the cruel pagan king of Mercia, and sisters to three successive Christian kings, Peada, Wulfere, and Ethelred, and to the pious prince Merowald. Kyneburge, as Bede informs us,[1] was married to Alefrid, eldest sort of Oswi, and in his father's life-time king of Bernicia. They are said to have lived in perpetual continency. By his death she was left a widow in the bloom of life, and, renouncing the world, governed a nunnery which she built; or, according to others, found built by her brother Wulfere, in a moist fenny place, on the confines of the counties of Huntingdon and Northampton, then called Dormundcaster, afterwards, from her, Kyneburgecaster, now Caster. The author of her life in Capgrave says, that she lived here a mirror of all sanctity, and that no words can express the bowels of charity with which she cherished the souls which served God under her care; and how watchful she was over their comportment, and how zealous in instructing and exhorting them; and with what floods of tears she implored for them the divine grace and mercy. She had a wonderful compassion for the poor, and strongly exhorted her royal brothers {523} to alms-giving and works of mercy. Kyneswide and Kynedride (though many confounded the latter with St. Kyneburge) were also daughters of Penda, left very young at his death. By an early consecration of their virginity to God, they devoted themselves to his service, and both embraced a religious state. Kyneswide took the holy veil in the monastery of Dormundcaster. The bodies of these saints were translated to Peterborough, where their festival was kept on the 6th of March, together with that of Saint Tibba, a holy virgin, their kinswoman, who, having spent many years in solitude and devotion, passed to glory on the 13th of December. Camden informs us, that she was honored with particular devotion at Rihal, a town near the river Wash, in Rutlandshire. See Ingulphus, Hist. p. 850; Will. of Malmesbury l. 4, de Pontif. p. 29; Capgrave and Harpsfield, sæc. 7, c. 23. Footnotes: 1. Bede Hist. l. 3, c. 21. 2. Camdem in Rutlandshire. ST. CADROE, C. HE was a noble Scotsman, son of count (or rather laird) Fokerstrach, and travelling into France, he took the monastic habit at Saint Bennet's on the Loire. He afterwards reformed the monastery of St. Clement, at Metz, in 960, and died in a visit which he made to Adelaide, mother of the emperor Otho I., at Neristein, about the year 975. His relics are kept at St. Clement's, at Metz, and he is honored on the 6th of March. See Mabillon, sec. 5, Ben. p. 480, and sec. 6, p. 28; Henschenius; and Calmet, Hist. de Lor. l. 19, n. 67, p. 1011. MARCH VII. ST. THOMAS OF AQUINO, DOCTOR OF THE CHURCH AND CONFESSOR. From his life written by Bartholomew of Lucca, some time the saint's confessor: also another life compiled for his canonization by William of Tocco, prior of Benevento, who had been personally acquainted with the saint, &c. See F. Touron, in his life of St. Thomas, in quarto, Paris, 1737. A.D. 1274. THE counts of Aquino, who have flourished in the kingdom of Naples these last ten centuries, derive their pedigree from a certain Lombard prince. They were allied to the kings of Sicily and Aragon, to St. Lewis of France, and many other sovereign houses of Europe. Our saint's grandfather having married the sister of the emperor Frederick I., he was himself grand nephew to that prince, and second cousin to the emperor Henry VI., and in the third degree to Frederick II.[1] His father, Landulph, was count of Aquino, and lord of Loretto and Belcastro: his mother Theodora was daughter to the count of Theate. The saint was born towards the end of the year 1226. St. Austin observes,[2] that the most tender age is subject to various passions, {524} as of impatience, choler, jealousy, spite, and the like, which appear to children: no such thing was seen in Thomas. The serenity of his countenance, the constant evenness of his temper, his modesty and sweetness, were sensible marks that God prevented him with his early graces. The count of Aquino conducted him to the abbey of Mount Cassino, when he was but five years old, to be instructed by those good monks in the first principles of religion and learning; and his tutors soon saw with joy the rapidity of his progress, his great talents, and his happy dispositions to virtue. He was but ten years of age when the abbot told his father that it was time to send him to some university. The count, before he sent him to Naples, took him for some months to see his mother at his seat at Loretto, the place which, about the end of that century, grew famous for devotion to our Lady. Thomas was the admiration of the whole family. Amidst so much company, and so many servants, he appeared always as much recollected, and occupied on God, as he had been in the monastery; he spoke little, and always to the purpose: and he employed all his time in prayer, or serious and profitable exercises. His great delight seemed to be to intercede for, and to distribute, his parents' plentiful alms among the poor at the gate, whom he studied by a hundred ingenious contrivances to relieve. He robbed himself of his own victuals for that purpose; which his father having discovered, he gave him leave to distribute things at discretion, which liberty he made good use of for the little time he stayed. The countess, apprehensive of the dangers her son's innocence might be exposed to in an academy, desired that he should perform his studies with a private preceptor under her own eyes; but the father, knowing the great advantages of emulation and mutual communication in studies, was determined to send him to Naples, where the emperor Frederick II., being exasperated against Bologna, had lately, in 1224, erected a university, forbidding students to resort to any other in Italy. This immediately drew thither great numbers of students, and with them disorder and licentiousness, like that described by St. Austin in the great schools of Carthage.[3] Thomas soon perceived the dangers, and regretted the sanctuary of Mount Cassino: but by his extraordinary watchfulness, he lived here like the young Daniel in the midst of Babylon; or Toby in the infidel Ninive. He guarded his eyes with an extreme caution, shunned entirely all conversation with any woman whatever, and with any young men whose steady virtue did not render him perfectly secure as to their behavior. While others went to profane diversions, he retired into some church or into his closet, making prayer and study his only pleasure. He learned rhetoric under Peter Martin and philosophy under Peter of Hibernia, one of the most learned men of his age, and with such wonderful progress, that he repeated the lessons more clearly than the master had explained them yet his greater care was to advance daily in the science of the saints, by holy prayer, and all good works. His humility concealed them; but his charity and fervor sometimes betrayed his modesty, and discovered them, especially in his great alms, for which ne deprived himself of almost all things, and in which he was careful to hide from his left-hand what his right did. The Order of St. Dominick, who had been dead twenty-two years, then abounded with men full of the spirit of God. The frequent conversations Thomas had with one of that body, a very interior holy man, filled his heart with heavenly devotion and comfort, and inflamed him daily with a more ardent love of God, which so burned in his breast that at his prayers his countenance seemed one day, as it were, to dart rays of light, and he conceived {525} a vehement desire to consecrate himself wholly to God in that Order. His tutor perceived his inclinations and informed the count of the matter who omitted neither threats nor promises to defeat such a design. But the saint, not listening to flesh and blood in the call of heaven, demanded with earnestness to be admitted into the Order, and accordingly received the habit in the convent of Naples, in 1243, being then seventeen years old. The countess Theodora his mother, being informed of it, set out for Naples to disengage him, if possible, from that state of life. Her son, on the first news of her journey, begged his superiors to remove him, as they did first to the convent of St. Sabina in Rome, and soon after to Paris, out of the reach of his relations. Two of his brothers, Landulph and Reynold, commanders in the emperor's army in Tuscany, by her direction so well guarded all the roads that he fell into their hands, near Acqua-pendente{?}. They endeavored to pull off his habit, but he resisted them so violently that they conducted him in it to the seat of his parents, called Rocca-Secca. The mother, overjoyed at their success, made no doubt of overcoming her son's resolution. She endeavored to persuade him that to embrace such an Order, against his parents' advice, could not be the call of heaven; adding all manner of reasons, fond caresses, entreaties, and tears. Nature made her eloquent and pathetic. He appeared sensible of her affliction, but his constancy was not to be shaken. His answers were modest and respectful, but firm, in showing his resolution to be the call of God, and ought consequently to take place of all other views whatsoever, even for his service any other way. At last, offended at his unexpected resistance, she expressed her displeasure in very choleric words, and ordered him to be more closely confined and guarded, and that no one should see him but his two sisters. The reiterated solicitations of the young ladies were a long and violent assault. They omitted nothing that flesh and blood could inspire on such an occasion, and represented to him the danger of causing the death of his mother by grief. He on the contrary spoke to them in so moving a manner, on the contempt of the world, and the love of virtue, that they both yielded to the force of his reasons for his quitting the world, and, by his persuasion, devoted themselves to a sincere practice of piety. This solitude furnished him with the most happy opportunity for holy contemplation and assiduous prayer. Some time after, his sisters conveyed to him some books, viz., a Bible, Aristotle's logics, and the works of the Master of the Sentences. During this interval his two brothers, Landulph and Reynold, returning home from the army, found their mother in the greatest affliction, and the young novice triumphant in his resolution. They would needs undertake to overcome him, and began their assault by shutting him up in a tower of the castle. They tore in pieces his habit on his back, and after bitter reproaches and dreadful threats they left him, hoping his confinement, and the mortifications every one strove to give him, would shake his resolution. This not succeeding, the devil suggested to these two young officers a new artifice for diverting him from pursuing his vocation. They secretly introduced one of the most beautiful and most insinuating young strumpets of the country into his chamber, promising her a considerable reward in case she could draw him into sin. She employed all the arms of Satan to succeed in so detestable a design. The saint, alarmed and affrighted at the danger, profoundly humbled himself, and cried out to God most earnestly for his protection; then snatching up a firebrand struck her with it, and drove her out of his chamber. After this victory, not moved with pride, but blushing with confusion for having been so basely assaulted, he fell on his knees and thanked God for his merciful preservation, consecrated to him anew his chastity, and redoubled his prayers, and the earnest cry of his {526} heart with sighs and tears, to obtain the grace of being always faithful to his promises. Then falling into a slumber, as the most ancient historians of his life relate,[4] he was visited by two angels, who seemed to gird him round the waist with a cord so tight that it awaked him, and made him to cry out. His guards ran in, but he kept his secret to himself. It was only a little before his death that he disclosed this incident to F. Reynold, his confessor, adding that he had received this favor about thirty years before, from which time he had never been annoyed with temptations of the flesh; yet he constantly used the utmost caution and watchfulness against that enemy, and he would otherwise have deserved to forfeit that grace. One heroic victory sometimes obtains of God a recompense and triumph of this kind. Our saint having suffered in silence this imprisonment and persecution upwards of a twelvemonth, some say two years, at length, on the remonstrances of Pope Innocent IV. and the emperor Frederick, on account of so many acts of violence in his regard, both the countess and his brothers began to relent. The Dominicans of Naples being informed of this, and that his mother was disposed to connive at measures that might be taken to procure his escape, they hastened in disguise to Rocca-Secca, where his sister, knowing that the countess no longer opposed his escape, contrived his being let down out of his tower in a basket. He was received by his brethren in their arms, and carried with joy to Naples. The year following he there made his profession, looking on that day as the happiest of his whole life in which he made a sacrifice of his liberty that he might belong to God alone. But his mother and brothers renewed their complaints to Pope Innocent IV., who sent for Thomas to Rome, and examined him on the subject of his vocation to the state of religion, in their presence; and having received entire satisfaction on this head, the pope admired his virtue, and approved of his choice of that state of life, which from that time he was suffered to pursue in peace. Albertus Magnus teaching then at Cologne, the general, John the Teutonic, took the saint with him from Rome to Paris, and thence to Cologne. Thomas gave all his time, which was not employed in devotion and other duties, to his studies, retrenching part of that which was allowed for his meals and sleep, not out of a vain passion, or the desire of applause, but for the advancement of God's honor and the interests of religion, according to what he himself teaches.[5] His humility made him conceal his progress and deep penetration, insomuch that his schoolfellows thought he learned nothing, and on account of his silence, called him The dumb Ox, and the Great Sicilian Ox. One of them even offered to explain his lessons to him, whom he thankfully listened to without speaking, though he was then capable of teaching him. They who know how much scholars and masters usually seek to distinguish themselves, and display their science, will give to so uncommon an humility its due praise. But the brightness of his genius, his quick and deep penetration and learning were at last discovered, in spite of all his endeavors to conceal them: for his master Albertus, having propounded to him several questions on the most knotty and obscure points, his answers, which the duty of obedience extorted, astonished the audience; and Albertus, not able to contain his joy and admiration, said, "We call him the dumb ox, but he will give such a bellow in learning as will be heard all over the world." This applause made no impression on the humble saint. He continued the same in simplicity, modesty, silence, and recollection, because his heart was the same; equally insensible to praises and humiliations, full of nothing but of God and his own insufficiency, never reflecting on his own qualifications, or on what was the opinion of others concerning him. In his first year, {527} under Albertus Magnus, he wrote comments on Aristotle's Ethics. The general chapter of the Dominicans, held at Cologne in 1245, deputed Albertus to teach at Paris, in their college of St. James, which the university had given them; and it is from that college they are called in France Jacobins. St. Thomas was sent with him to continue his studies there. His school exercises did not interrupt his prayer. By an habitual sense of the divine presence, and devout aspirations, he kept his heart continually raised to God; and in difficult points redoubled with more earnestness his fervor in his prayers than his application to study. This he found attended with such success, that he often said that he had learned less by books than before his crucifix, or at the foot of the altar. His constant attention to God always filled his soul with joy, which appeared in his very countenance, and made his conversation altogether heavenly. His humility and obedience were most remarkable in all things. One day while he read at table, the corrector, by mistake, bid him read a word with a false quantity, and he readily obeyed, though he knew the error. When others told him he ought notwithstanding to have given it the right pronunciation, his answer was, "It matters not how a word is pronounced, but to practise on all occasions humility and obedience is of the greatest importance." He was so perfectly mortified, and dead to his senses, that he ate without reflecting either on the kind or quality of his food, so that after meals he often knew not what he had been eating. In the year 1248, being twenty-two years of age, he was appointed by the general chapter to teach at Cologne, together with his old master Albertus, whose high reputation he equalled in his very first lessons. He then also began to publish his first works, which consist of comments on the Ethics, and other philosophical works of Aristotle. No one was more courteous and affable, but it was his principle to shun all unnecessary visits. To prepare himself for holy orders he redoubled his watchings, prayer, and other spiritual exercises. His devotion to the blessed Sacrament was extraordinary. He spent several hours of the day and part of the night before the altar, humbling himself in acts of profound adoration, and melting with love in contemplation of the immense charity of that Man-God, whom he there adored. In saying mass he seemed to be in raptures, and often quite dissolved in tears; a glowing frequently appeared in his eyes and countenance which showed the ardor with which his heart burned within him. His devotion was most frequent during the precious moments after he had received the divine mysteries; and after saying mass he usually served at another, or at least heard one. This fire and zeal appeared also in his sermons at Cologne, Paris, Rome, and in other cities of Italy. He was everywhere heard as an angel; even the Jews ran of their own accord to hear him, and many of them were converted. His zeal made him solicitous, in the first place, for the salvation of his relations. His example and exhortations induced them to an heroic practice of piety. His eldest sister consecrated herself to God in St. Mary's, at Capua, and died abbess of that monastery: the younger, Theodora, married the count of Marsico, and lived and died in great virtue; as did his mother. His two brothers, Landulph and Reynold, became sincere penitents; and having some time after left the emperor's service, he, in revenge, burnt Aquino, their seat, in 1250, and put Reynold to death; the rest were obliged to save themselves by a voluntary banishment, but were restored in 1268. St. Thomas, after teaching four years at Cologne, was sent, in 1252, to Paris. His reputation for perspicuity and solidity drew immediately to his school a great number of auditors.[6] St. Thomas, with great reluctancy, compelled by holy obedience {528} consented to be admitted doctor, on the 23d of October, in 1257, being then thirty-one years old. The professors of the university of Paris being divided about the question of the accidents remaining really, or only in appearance, in the blessed sacrament of the altar, they agreed, in 1258, to consult our saint. The young doctor, not puffed up by such an honor, applied himself first to God by prayer, then he wrote upon that question the treatise still extant, and, carrying it to the church, laid it on the altar. The most ancient author of his life assures us, that while the saint remained in prayer on that occasion, some of the brethren who were present, saw him raised a little above the ground.[7] The holy king, St. Louis, had so great an esteem for St. Thomas, that he consulted him in affairs of state, and ordinarily informed him, the evening before, of any affair of importance that was to be treated of in council, that he might be the more ready to give advice on the point. The saint avoided the honor of dining with the king as often as be could excuse himself: and, when obliged to assist at court, appeared there as recollected as in his convent. One day at the king's table, the saint cried out: "The argument is conclusive against the Manichees."[8] His prior, being with him, bade him remember where he was. The saint would have asked the king's pardon, but that good prince, fearing he should forget the argument that had occurred to his mind, caused his secretary to write it down for him. In the year 1259 St. Thomas assisted at the thirty-sixth general chapter of his order, held at Valenciennes, which deputed him, in conjunction with Albertus Magnus and three others, to draw up rules for studies, which are still extant in the acts of that chapter. Returning to Paris, he there continued his lectures. Nothing was more remarkable than his meekness on all occasions. His temper was never ruffled in the heat of any dispute, nor by any insult. It was owing to this sweetness, more than to his invincible force of reasoning, that he brought a young doctor to retract on the spot a dangerous opinion, which he was maintaining a second time in his thesis. In 1261, Urban IV. called St. Thomas to Rome, and, by his order, the general appointed him to teach here. His holiness pressed him with great importunity to accept of some ecclesiastical dignity,{529} but he knew how much safer it is to refuse than to accept a bishopric. The pope, however, obliged him always to attend his person. Thus it happened that the saint taught and preached in all the towns where that pope ever resided, as in Rome, Viterbo, Orvieto, Fondi, and Perugia. He also taught at Bologna, Naples, &c.[9] The fruits of his preaching were no less wonderful than those of his pen. While he was preaching, on Good Friday, on the love of God for man, and our ingratitude to him, his whole auditory melted into tears to such a degree that he was obliged to stop several times, that they might recover themselves. His discourse on the following Sunday, concerning the glory of Christ, and the happiness of those who rise with him by grace, was no less pathetic and affecting. William of Tocco adds, that as the saint was coming out of St. Peter's church the same day, a woman was cured of the bloody flux by touching the hem of his garment. The conversion of two considerable Rabbins seemed still a greater miracle. St. Thomas had held a long conference with them at a casual meeting in cardinal Richard's villa, and they agreed to resume it the next day. The saint spent the foregoing night in prayer, at the foot of the altar. The next morning these two most obstinate Jews came to him of their own accord, not to dispute, but to embrace the faith, and were followed by many others. In the year 1263, the Dominicans held their fortieth general chapter in London; St. Thomas assisted at it, and obtained soon after to be dismissed from teaching. He rejoiced to see himself reduced to the state of a private religious man. Pope Clement IV. had {530} such a regard for him, that, in 1265, among other ecclesiastical preferments, he made him an offer of the archbishopric of Naples, but could not prevail with him to accept of that or any other. The first part of his theological Summ St. Thomas composed at Bologna: he was called thence to Naples. Here it was that, according to Tocco and others, Dominick Caserte beheld him, while in fervent prayer, raised from the ground, and heard a voice from the crucifix directed to him in these words: "Thou hast written well of me, Thomas: what recompense dost thou desire?" He answered: "No other than thyself, O Lord."[10] From the 6th of December, in 1273, to the 7th of March following, the day of his death, he neither dictated nor wrote any thing on theological matters. He from that time laid aside his studies, to fix his thoughts and heart entirely on eternity, and to aspire with the greatest ardor and most languishing desires to the enjoyment of God in perfect love. Pope Gregory X. had called a general council, the second of Lyons, with the view of extinguishing the Greek schism, and raising succors to defend the holy land against the Saracens. The ambassadors of the emperor Michael Palaeologus, together with the Greek prelates, were to assist at it. The council was to meet on the 1st of May, in 1274. His holiness, by brief directed to our saint, ordered him to repair thither, and to prepare himself to defend the Catholic cause against the Greek schismatics. Though indisposed, he set out from Naples about the end of January. His dear friend, F. Reynold of Piperno, was appointed his companion, and ordered to take care that he did not neglect himself, which the saint was apt to do. St. Thomas on the road called at the castle of Magenza, the seat of his niece, Francisca of Aquino, married to the count of Cecan. Here his distemper increased, which was attended with a loss of appetite. One day he said, to be rid of their importunities, that he thought he could eat a little of a certain fish which he had formerly eaten in France, but which was not easily to be found in Italy. Search however was made, and the fish procured; but the saint refused to touch it, in imitation of David on the like occasion. Soon after his appetite returned a little, and his strength with it; yet he was assured that his last hour was at hand. This however did not hinder him from proceeding on his journey, till, his fever increasing, he was forced to stop at Fossa-Nuova, a famous abbey of the Cistercians, in the diocese of Terracina, where formerly stood the city called Forum Appii. Entering the monastery, he went first to pray before the Blessed Sacrament, according to his custom. He poured forth his soul with extraordinary fervor, in the presence of Him who noto called him to his kingdom. Passing thence into the cloister, which he never lived to go out of, he repeated these words:[11] _This is my rest for ages without end_. He was lodged in the abbot's apartment, where he lay ill for near a month. The good monks treated him with uncommon veneration and esteem, and as if he had been an angel from heaven. They would not employ any of their servants about him, but chose to serve him themselves in the meanest offices, as in cutting or carrying wood for him to burn, &c. His patience, humility, constant recollection, and prayer, were equally their astonishment and edification. The nearer he saw himself to the term of all his desires, the entering into the joy of his Lord, the more tender and inflamed were his longings after death. He had continually in his mouth these words of St. Austin,[12] "Then shall I truly live, when I shall be quite filled with you alone, and your love; {531} now I am a burden to myself, because I am not entirely full of you." In such pious transports of heavenly love, he never ceased sighing after the glorious day of eternity. The monks begged he would dictate an exposition of the book of Canticles, in imitation of St. Bernard. He answered: "Give me St. Bernard's spirit, and I will obey." But at last, to renounce perfectly his own will, he dictated the exposition of that most mysterious of all the divine books. It begins: Solomon inspiratus: It is not what his erudition might have suggested, but what love inspired him with in his last mordents, when his pure soul was hastening to break the chains of mortality, and drown itself in the ocean of God's immensity, and in the delights of eternity.[13] The holy doctor at last finding himself too weak to dictate any more, begged the religious to withdraw, recommending himself to their prayers, and desiring their leave to employ the few precious moments he had to live with God alone. He accordingly spent them in fervent acts of adoration, praise, thanksgiving, humility, and repentance. He made a general confession of his whole life to F. Reynold, with abundance of tears for his imperfections and sins of frailty; for in the judgment of those to whom he had manifested his interior, he had never offended God by any mortal sin. And he said to F. Reynold, before his death, that he thanked God with his whole heart for having prevented him with his grace, and always conducted him as it were by the hand, and preserved him from any known sin that destroys charity in the soul; adding, that this was purely God's mercy to which he was indebted for his preservation from every sin which he had not committed.[14] Having received absolution in the sentiments of the most perfect penitent, he desired the Viaticum. While the abbot and community were preparing to bring it, he begged to be taken off his bed, and laid upon ashes spread upon the floor. Thus lying on the ground, weak in body but vigorous in mind, he waited for the priest with tears of the most tender devotion. When he saw the host in the priest's hand, he said: "I firmly believe that Jesus Christ, true God and true Man, is present in this august sacrament. I adore you, my God and my Redeemer: I receive You, the price of my redemption, the Viaticum of my pilgrimage; for whose honor I have studied, labored, preached, and taught. I hope I never advanced any tenet as your word, which I had not learned from you. If through ignorance I have done otherwise, I revoke every thing of that kind, and submit all my writing, to the judgment of the holy Roman church." Then recollecting himself, after other acts of faith, adoration, and love, he received the holy Viaticum; but remained on the ashes till he had finished his thanksgiving. Growing still weaker, amid his transports of love, he desired extreme unction, which he received, answering himself to all the prayers. After this he lay in peace and joy, as appeared by the serenity of his countenance; and he was heard to pronounce these aspirations: "Soon, soon will the God of all comfort complete his mercies on me, and fill all my desires. I shall shortly be satiated in him, and drink of the torrent of his delights: be inebriated from the abundance of his house, and in him who is the source of life, I shall behold the true light." Seeing all in tears about him, he comforted them, saying: Death was his gain and his joy. F. Reynold said he had hoped to see him triumph over the adversaries of the church in the council of Lyons, and placed in a rank in which he might do it some signal service. The saint answered: "I have begged of God, as the greatest favor, to die a simple religious man, and I now thank him for it. It is a {532} greater benefit than he has granted to many of his holy servants, that he is pleased to call me out of this world so early, to enter into his joy; wherefore grieve not for me, who am overwhelmed with joy." He returned thanks to the abbot and monks of Fossa-Nuova for their charity to him. One of the community asked him by what means we might live always faithful to God's grace. He answered: "Be assured that he who shall always walk faithfully in his presence, always ready to give him an account of all his actions, shall never be separated from him by consenting to sin." These were his last words to men, after which he only spoke to God in prayer, and gave up the ghost, on the 7th of March, in 1274, a little after midnight: some say in the fiftieth year of his age. But Ptolemy of Lucca, and other contemporary authors, say expressly in his forty-eighth, which also agrees with his whole history. He was very tall, and every way proportioned. The concourse of people at the saint's funeral was extraordinary: several monks of that house, and many other persons, were cured by his relics and intercession, of which many instances, juridically proved, are mentioned by William of Tocco, in the bull of his canonization, and other authors. The Bollandists give us other long authentic relations of the like miracles continued afterwards, especially in the translation of those holy relics. The University of Paris sent to the general and provincial of the Dominicans a letter of condolence upon his death, giving the highest commendations to the saint's learning and sanctity, and begging the treasure of his holy body. Naples, Rome, and many other universities, princes, and Orders, contended no less for it. One of his hands, uncorrupt, was cut off in 1288, and given to his sister, the countess Theodora, who kept it in her domestic chapel of San Severino. After her death it was given to the Dominicans' convent of Salerno. After several contestations, pope Urban V., many years after his death, granted his body to the Dominicans to carry to Paris or Toulouse, as Italy already possessed the body of St. Dominick at Bologna. The sacred treasure was carried privately into France, and received at Thoulouse in the most honorable mariner: one hundred and fifty thousand people came to meet and conduct it into the city, having at their head Louis duke of Anjou, brother to king Charles V., the archbishops of Thoulouse and Narbonne, and many bishops, abbots, and noblemen. It rests now in the Dominican's church at Thoulouse, in a rich shrine, with a stately mausoleum over it, which reaches almost up to the roof of the church, and hath four faces. An arm of the saint was at the same time sent to the great convent of the Dominicans at Paris, and placed in St. Thomas's chapel in their church, which the king declared a royal chapel. The faculty of theology meets to assist at a high mass there on the anniversary festival of the saint. The kingdom of Naples, after many pressing solicitations, obtained, in 1372, from the general chapter held at Thoulouse, a bone of the other arm of St. Thomas. It was kept in the church of the Dominicans at Naples till 1603, when the city being delivered from a public calamity by his intercession, it was placed in the metropolitan church among the relics of the other patrons of the country. That kingdom, by the briefs of Pius V. in 1567, and of Clement VIII. in 1603, confirmed by Paul V., honors him as a principal patron. He was solemnly canonized by pope John XXII. in 1323. Pope Pius V., in 1567, commanded his festival and office to be kept equal with those of the four doctors of the western church. * * * * * Many in their studies, as in other occupations, take great pains to little purpose, often to draw from them the poison of vanity or error; or at least to drain their affections, and rather to nourish pride and other vices in the heart than to promote true virtue. Sincere humility and simplicity of heart {533} are essential conditions for the sanctification of studies, and for the improvement of virtue by them. Prayer must also both go before and accompany them. St. Thomas spoke much to God by prayer, that God might speak to him by enlightening his understanding in his reading and studies; and he received in this what he asked in the other exercise. This prodigy of human wit, this unparalleled genius, which penetrated the most knotty difficulties in all the sciences, whether sacred or profane, to which he applied himself, was accustomed to say that he learned more at the foot of the crucifix than in books. We ought never to set ourselves to read or study any thing without having first made our morning meditation, and without imploring in particular the divine light in every thing we read; and seasoning our studies by frequent aspirations to God in them, and by keeping our souls in an humble attention to his presence. In intricate difficulties, we ought more earnestly, prostrate at the foot of a crucifix, to ask of Christ the resolution of our doubts. We should thus receive, in the school of so good a master, that science which makes saints, by giving, with other sciences, the true knowledge of God and ourselves, and purifying and kindling in the will the fire of divine love with the sentiments of humility and other virtues. By a little use, fervent aspirations to God will arise from all subjects in the driest studies, and it will become easy, and as it were natural in them, to raise our heart earnestly to God, either despising the vain pursuits, or detesting the vanity, and deploring the blindness of the world, or aspiring after heavenly gifts, or begging light, grace, or the divine love. This is a maxim of the utmost importance in an interior or spiritual life, which otherwise, instead of being assisted, is entirely overwhelmed and extinguished by studies, whether profane or sacred, and in its place a spirit of self-sufficiency, vanity, and jealousy is contracted, and the seeds of all other spiritual vices secretly sown. Against this danger St. Bonaventure warns all students strongly to be upon their guard, saying, "If a person repeats often in his heart, Lord, when shall I love thee? he will feel a heavenly fire kindled in his soul much more than by a thousand bright thoughts or fine speculations on divine secrets, on the eternal generation of the Word, or the procession of the Holy Ghost."[15] Prayer and true virtue even naturally conduce to the perfection of learning, in every branch; for purity of the heart, and the disengagement of the affections from all irregular passions, render the understanding clear, qualify the mind to judge impartially of truth in its researches, divest it of many prejudices, the fatal sources of errors, and inspire a modest distrust to a person's own abilities and lights. Thus virtue and learning mutually assist and improve each other. Footnotes: 1. St. Thomas was born at Belcastro: on his ancient illustrious pedigree and its branches, which still flourish in Calabria, see Barrius, de Antiquitate et Situ Calabriæ, with the notes of Thomas Aceti, l. 4, c. 2, p. 288, &c, where he refutes the Bollandists, who place his birth at Aquino in Campania, on the border of that province. 2. L. 1, Conf. c. 7. 3. Conf. l. 5, c. 3. 4. Gul. Tocco. Bern. Guid. Antonin. Malvend. 5. Footnote: 2. 2dæ, q. 188, a. 5. 6. The manner of teaching then was not, as it is generally at present, by dictating lessons, which the scholars write, but it was according to the practice that still obtains in some public schools, as in Padua, &c. The master delivered his explanation like an harangue; the scholars retained what they could, and often privately took down short notes to help their memory. Academical degrees were then also very different from what they now are; being conferred on none but those who taught. To be Master of Arts, a man must have studied six years at least, and be twenty-one years old. And to be qualified for teaching divinity, he must have studied eight years more, and be at least thirty-five years old. Nevertheless, St. Thomas, by a dispensation of the university, on account of his distinguished merit, was allowed to teach at twenty-five. The usual way was for one named bachelor to explain the Master of the Sentences for a year in the school of some doctor, upon whose testimony, after certain rigorous public examinations, and other formalities, the bachelor was admitted in the degree of licentiate; which gave him the license of a doctor, to teach or hold a school himself. Another year, which was likewise employed in expounding the Master of the Sentences, completed the degree of doctor, which the candidate received from the chancel for of the university, and then opened a school in form, with a bachelor to teach under him. In 1253, St. Thomas began to teach as licentiate; but a stop was put to his degrees for some time, by a violent disagreement between the regulars, principally Dominicans and Franciscans, and the university which had at first admitted them into their body, and even given the Dominicans a college. In these disputes St. Thomas was not spared, but he for a long time had recourse to no other vindication of himself than that of modesty and silence. On Palm Sunday he was preaching in the Dominican's church of St. James, when a beadle coming in commanded silence, and read a long written invective against him and his colleagues. When he had done, the saint, without speaking one word to justify himself or his Order, continued his sermon with the greatest tranquillity and unconcern of mind. William de Saint-Amour, the most violent among the secular doctors, published a book, On the dangers of the latter Times, a bitter invective against the mendicant Orders, which St. Louis sent to pope Alexander IV. SS. Thomas and Bonaventure were sent into Italy to defend their Orders. And to confute that book, St. Thomas published his nineteenth Opusculum, with an Apology for the mendicant Orders, showing they lay under no precept that all should apply themselves to manual labor, and that spiritual occupations were even preferable. The pope, upon this apology, condemned the book, and also another, called the Eternal Gospel, in defence of the error of the abbot Joachim. who had advanced that the church was to have an end, and be succeeded by a new church which should be formed perfectly according to the Spirit: this heresy, and the errors of certain other fanatics, were refuted by our saint at Rome. In his return to Paris, a violent storm terrified all the mariners and passengers; only Thomas appeared without the least fear, and continued in quiet prayer till the tempest had ceased. William de Saint-Amour being banished Paris, peace was restored in the university. 7. Gul. Tocco. 8. Conclusum est contra Manichæos. 9. The works of St. Thomas are partly philosophical, partly theological; with some comments on the holy scriptures, and several treatises of piety. The elegance of Plato gave his philosophy the greater vogue among the Gentiles; and the most learned of the Christian fathers were educated is the maxims or his school. His noble sentiments on the attributes of the Deity, particularly his providence, and his doctrine on the rewards and punishments in a future state, seemed favorable to religion. Nor can it be doubted but he had learned, in his travels in Egypt and Phoenicia, many traditional truths delivered down from the patriarchal ages, before the corruptions of idolatry. On the other hand, the philosophy of Aristotle was much less in request among the heathens, was silent as to all traditional truths, and contained some glaring errors, which several heretics of the first ages adopted against the gospel. On which account he is called by Tertullian the patriarch of heretics, and his works were procribed by a council of Paris, about the year 1209. Nevertheless it must be acknowledged, by all impartial judges, that Aristotle was the greatest and most comprehensive genius of antiquity, and perhaps of any age: and he was the only one that had laid down complete rules, and explained the laws of reasoning, and had given a thorough system of philosophy. Boetius had penetrated the depth of his genius, and the usefulness of his logic; yet did not redress his mistakes. Human reasoning is too weak without the light of revelation; and Aristotle, by relying too much on it fell into the same gross errors. Not only many ancient heretics, but also several in the twelfth and thirteenth ages, as Peter Aballard, the Albigenses, and other heretics, made a bad use of his philosophy. But above all, the Saracens of Arabaia and Spain wrote with incredible subtilty on his principles. St. Thomas opposed the enemies of truth with their own weapons, and employed the philosophy of Aristotle in defence of the faith, in which he succeeded to a miracle. He discerned and confuted his errors, and set in a clear and new light the great truths of reason which that philosopher had often wrapt up in obscurity. Thus Aristotle, who had been called the terror of Christians, in the hands of Thomas became orthodox, and furnished faith with new arms against idolatry and atheism. For this admirable doctor, though he had only a bad Latin translation of the works of that philosopher, has corrected his errors, and shown that his whole system of philosophy, as far as it is grounded in truth, is subservient to divine revelation. This he has executed through the nicest metaphysical speculations, in the five first volumes of his works. He everywhere strikes out a new track for himself; and enters into the most secret recesses of this shadowy region; so as to appear new even on known and beaten subjects. For his writings are original efforts of genius and reflection, and every point he handles in a manner that makes it appear new. If his speculations are sometimes spun fine, and his divisions run to niceties, this was the fault of the age in which he lived, and of the speculative refining geniuses of the Arabians, whom he had undertaken to pursue and confute throughout their whole system. His comments on the four books of the Master of the Sentences contain a methodical course of theology, and make the sixth and seventh volumes of his works; the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth give us his Summ, Or incomparable abridged body of divinity, though this work he never lived to finish. Among the fathers, St. Austin is principally his guide; so that the learned cardinals, Norris and Aguirre, call St. Thomas his most faithful Interpreter. He draws the rules of practical duties and virtues principally from the morals of St. Gregory on Job. He compassed his Summ against the Gentiles, at the request of St. Raymund of Pennafort, to serve the preachers in Spain in converting the Jews and Saracens to the faith. He wrote comments on most parts of the holy scriptures, especially on the epistles of St. Paul, in which latter he seemed to outdo himself. By the order of pope Urban IV., he compiled the office of the blessed sacrament, which the church uses to this day, on the feast and during the Octave of Corpus-Christi. His Opuscula, or lesser treatises, have in view the confutation of the Greek schismatics and several heresies; or discuss various points of philosophy and theology; or are comments on the creed, sacraments, decalogue, Lord's prayer, and Hail Mary. In his treatises on piety he reduces the rules of an interior life to these two gospel maxims: first. That we must strenuously labor by self-denial and mortification to extinguish in our hearts all the sparks of pride, and the inordinate love of creatures; secondly, That by assiduous prayer, meditation, and doing the will of God in all things, we must kindle his perfect love in our souls. (Opusc. 17 & 18; His works are printed in nineteen volumes folio.) 10. Bene scripsisti de me, Thoma: quam mercedem addipies? Non aliam, nisi te Domine. 11. Psalm cxxxi. 14. 12. Conf. l. 10, c. 28. 13. There is another commentary on the same book which sometimes bears his name, and begins: Sonet vox tua in auribus meis: which was not the work of this saint, but of Hayme{}, bishop of Halberstadt. See Echard, t. 1, p. 323. Touron, p. 714. Le Long. Bibl. Sacra. n. 766. 14. Tibi debo et quod non feci. St. Au{}. 15. St. Bonav. l. de Mystica Theol. a. ult. SS. PERPETUA, AND FELICITAS, MM. WITH THEIR COMPANIONS. From their most valuable genuine acts, quoted by Tertullian, l. de anima, c. 55, and by St. Austin, serm. {}, 283, 294. The first part of these acts, which reaches to the eve of her martyrdom, was written by St. Perpetua. The vision of St. Saturus was added by him. The rest was subjoined by an eye-witness of their death. See Tillemont, t. 3, p. 139. Ceillier, t. 2, p. 213. These acts have been often republished; but are extant, most ample and correct, in Ruinart. They were publicly read in the churches of Africa, as appears from St. Austin, Serm. 180. See them vindicated from the suspicion of Montanism, by O{}, Vindicæ Act. SS. Perpetuæ et Felicitatis. A. D 203. A VIOLENT persecution being set on foot by the emperor Severus, in 202, reached Africa the following year; when, by order of Minutius Timinianus, {534} (or Firminianus,) five catechumens were apprehended at Carthage for the faith: namely, Rovocatus, and his fellow-slave Felicitas, Saturninus, and Secundulus, and Vibia Perpetua. Felicitas was seven months gone with child; and Perpetua had an infant at her breast, was of a good family, twenty-two years of age, and married to a person of quality in the city. She had a father, a mother, and two brothers; the third, Dinocrates, died about seven years old. These five martyrs were joined by Saturus, probably brother to Saturninus, and who seems to have been their instructor: he underwent a voluntary imprisonment, because he would not abandon them. The father of St. Perpetua, who was a pagan, and advanced in years, loved her more than all his other children. Her mother was probably a Christian, as was one of her brothers, the other a catechumen. The martyrs were for some days before their commitment kept under a strong guard in a private house: and the account Perpetua gives of their sufferings to the eve of their death, is as follows: "We were in the hands of our persecutors, when my father, out of the affection he bore me, made new efforts to shake my resolution. I said to him: 'Can that vessel, which you see, change its name?' He said: 'No.' I replied: 'Nor can I call myself any other than I am, that is to say, a Christian.' At that word my father in a rage fell upon me, as if he would have pulled my eyes out, and beat me: but went away in confusion, seeing me invincible: after this we enjoyed a little repose, and in that interval received baptism. The Holy Ghost, on our coming out of the water, inspired me to pray for nothing but patience under corporal pains. A few days after this we were put into prison: I was shocked at the horror and darkness of the place;[1] for till then I knew not what such sort of places were. We suffered much that day, chiefly on account of the great heat caused by the crowd, and the ill-treatment we met with from the soldiers. I was moreover tortured with concern, for that I had not my infant. But the deacons, Tertius and Pomponius, who assisted us, obtained, by money, that we might pass some hours in a more commodious part of the prison to refresh ourselves. My infant being brought to me almost famished, I gave it the breast. I recommended him afterwards carefully to my mother, and encouraged my brother; but was much afflicted to see their concern for me. After a few days my sorrow was changed into comfort, and my prison itself seemed agreeable. One day my brother said to me: 'Sister, I am persuaded that you are a peculiar favorite of Heaven: pray to God to reveal to you whether this imprisonment will end in martyrdom or not, and acquaint me of it.' I, knowing God gave me daily tokens of his goodness, answered, full of confidence, 'I will inform you to-morrow.' I therefore asked that favor of God, and had this vision. I saw a golden ladder which reached from earth to the heavens; but so narrow, that only one could mount it at a time. To the two sides were fastened all sorts of iron instruments, as swords, lances, hooks, and knives; so that if any one went up carelessly he was in great danger of having his flesh torn by those weapons. At the foot of the ladder lay a dragon of an enormous size, who kept guard to turn back and terrify those that endeavored to mount it. The first that went up was Saturus, who was not apprehended with us, but voluntarily surrendered himself afterwards on our account: when he was got to the top of the ladder, he turned towards me and said: 'Perpetua, I wait for you; but take care lest the dragon bite you.' I answered: 'In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, he shall not hurt me.' Then the dragon, as if afraid of me, gently lifted his head from under the ladder, and I, having got upon the first step, set my foot upon his head. Thus I mounted to the top, and there {535} I saw a garden of an immense space, and in the middle of it a tall man sitting down dressed like a shepherd, having white hair. He was milking his sheep, surrounded with many thousands of persons clad in white. He called me by my name, bid me welcome, and gave me some curds made of the milk which he had drawn: I put my hands together and took and ate them; and all that were present said aloud, Amen. The noise awaked me, chewing something very sweet. As soon as I had related to my brother this vision, we both concluded that we should suffer death. "After some days, a rumor being spread that we were to be examined, my father came from the city to the prison overwhelmed with grief: 'Daughter,' said he, 'have pity on my gray hairs, have compassion on your father, if I yet deserve to be called your father; if I myself have brought you up to this age: if you consider that my extreme love of you, made me always prefer you to all your brothers, make me not a reproach to mankind. Have respect for your mother and your aunt; have compassion on your child that cannot survive you; lay aside this resolution, this obstinacy, lest you ruin us all: for not one of us will dare open his lips any more if any misfortune befall you.' He took me by the hands at the same time and kissed them; he threw himself at my feet in tears, and called me no longer daughter, but, my lady. I confess, I was pierced with sharp sorrow when I considered that my father was the only person of our family that would not rejoice at my martyrdom. I endeavored to comfort him, saying: 'Father, grieve not; nothing will happen but what pleases God; for we are not at our own disposal.' He then departed very much concerned. The next day, while we were at dinner, a person came all on a sudden to summon us to examination. The report of this was soon spread, and brought together a vast crowd of people into the audience-chamber. We were placed on a sort of scaffold before the judge, who was Hilarian, procurator of the province, the proconsul being lately dead. All who were interrogated before me confessed boldly Jesus Christ. When it came to my turn, my father instantly appeared with my infant. He drew me a little aside, conjuring me in the most tender manner not to be insensible to the misery I should bring on that innocent creature to which I had given life. The president Hilarian joined with my father and said: 'What! will neither the gray hairs of a father you are going to make miserable, nor the tender innocence of a child, which your death will leave an orphan, move you? Sacrifice for the prosperity of the emperor.' I replied, 'I will not do it.' 'Are you then a Christian?' said Hilarian. I answered: 'Yes, I am.' As my father attempted to draw me from the scaffold, Hilarian commanded him to be beaten off, and he had a blow given him with a stick, which I felt as much as if I had been struck myself, so much was I grieved to see my father thus treated in his old age. Then the judge pronounced our sentence, by which we were all condemned to be exposed to wild beasts. We then joyfully returned to our prison; and as my infant had been used to the breast, I immediately sent Pomponius, the deacon, to demand him of my father, who refused to send him. And God so ordered it that the child no longer required to suck, nor did my milk incommode me." Secundulus, being no more mentioned, seems to have died in prison before this interrogatory. Before Hilarian pronounced sentence, he had caused Saturus, Saturninus, and Revocatus, to be scourged; and Perpetua and Felicitas to be beaten on the face. They were reserved for the shows which were to be exhibited for the soldiers in the camp, on the festival of Geta, who had been made Cæsar tour years before by his father Severus, when his brother Caracalla was created Augustus. St. Perpetua relates another vision with which she was favored, as follows: "A few days after receiving sentence, when we were all together in {536} prayer, I happened to name Dinocrates, at which I was astonished, because I had not before had him in my thoughts; and I that moment knew that I ought to pray for him. This I began to do with great fervor and sighing before God; and the same night I had the following vision: I saw Dinocrates coming out of a dark place, where there were many others, exceeding hot and thirsty; his face was dirty, his complexion pale, with the ulcer in his face of which he died at seven years of age, and it was for him that I had prayed. There seemed a great distance between him and me, so that it was impossible for us to come to each other. Near him stood a vessel full of water, whose brim was higher than the statue of an infant: he at tempted to drink, but though he had water he could not reach it. This mightily grieved me, and I awoke. By this I knew my brother was in pain, but I trusted I could by prayer relieve him: so I began to pray fer him, beseeching God with tears, day and night, that he would grant me my request; as I continued to do till we were removed to the damp prison: being destined for a public show on the festival of Cæsar Geta. The day we were in the stocks[2] I had this vision: I saw the place, which I had beheld dark before, now luminous; and Dinocrates, with his body very clean and well clad, refreshing himself, and instead of his wound a scar only. I awoke, and I knew he was relieved from his pain.[3] "Some days after, Pudens, the officer who commanded the guards of the prison, seeing that God favored us with many gifts, had a great esteem of us, and admitted many people to visit us for our mutual comfort. On the day of the public shows my father came to find me out, overwhelmed with sorrow. He tore his beard, he threw himself prostrate on the ground, cursed his years, and said enough to move any creature; and I was ready to die with sorrow to see my father in so deplorable a condition. On the eve of the shows I was favored with the following vision. The deacon Pomponius methought, knocked very hard at the prison-door, which I opened to him. He was clothed with a white robe, embroidered with innumerable pomegranates of gold. He said to me: 'Perpetua, we wait for you, come along.' He then took me by the hand and, led me through very rough places into the middle of the amphitheatre, and said: 'Fear not.' And, leaving me, said again: 'I will be with you in a moment, and bear a part with you in your pains.' I was wondering the beasts were not let out against us, when there appeared a very ill-favored Egyptian, who came to encounter me with others. But another beautiful troop of young men declared for me, and anointed me with oil for the combat. Then appeared a man of prodigious stature, in rich apparel, having a wand in his hand like the masters of the gladiators, and a green bough on which hung golden apples. Having ordered silence, he said that the bough should be my prize, if I vanquished {537} the Egyptian--but that if he conquered me, he should kill me with a sword. After a long and obstinate engagement, I threw him on his face, and trod upon his head. The people applauded my victory with loud acclamations. I then approached the master of the amphitheatre, who gave me the bough with a kiss, and said: 'Peace be with you, my daughter.' After this I awoke, and found that I was not so much to combat with wild beasts as with the devils." Here ends the relation of St. Perpetua. St. Saturus had also a vision which he wrote himself. He and his companions were conducted by a bright angel into a most delightful garden, in which they met some holy martyrs lately dead, namely, Jocundus, Saturninus, and Artaxius, who had been burned alive for the faith, and Quintus, who died in prison. They inquired after other martyrs of their acquaintance, say the acts, and were conducted into a most stately place, shining like the sun: and in it saw the king of this most glorious place surrounded by his happy subjects, and heard a voice composed of many, which continually cried: "Holy, holy, holy." Saturus, turning to Perpetua, said: "You have here what you desired." She replied: "God be praised. I have more joy here than ever I had in the flesh." He adds, Going out of the garden they found before the gate, on the right hand, their bishop of Carthage, Optatus, and on the left, Aspasius, priest of the same church, both of them alone and sorrowful. They fell at the martyr's feet, and begged they would reconcile them together, for a dissension had happened between them. The martyrs embraced them, saying: "Are not you our bishop, and you a priest of our Lord? It is our duty to prostrate ourselves before you." Perpetua was discoursing with them; but certain angels came and drove hence Optatus and Aspasius; and bade them not to disturb the martyrs, but be reconciled to each other. The bishop Optatus was also charged to heal the divisions that reigned among several of his church. The angels, after these reprimands, seemed ready to shut the gates of the garden. "Here," says he, "we saw many of our brethren and martyrs likewise. We were fed with an ineffable odor, which delighted and satisfied us." Such was the vision of Saturus. The rest of the acts were added by an eye-witness. God had called to himself Secondulus in prison. Felicitas was eight months gone with child, and as the day of the shows approached, she was inconsolable lest she should not be brought to bed before it came; fearing that her martyrdom would be deferred on that account, because women with child were not allowed to be executed before they were delivered: the rest also were sensibly afflicted on their part to leave her alone in the road to their common hope. Wherefore they unanimously joined in prayer to obtain of God that she might be delivered against the shows. Scarce had they finished their prayer, when Felicitas found herself in labor. She cried out under the violence of her pain: one of the guards asked her, if she could not bear the throes of childbirth without crying out, what she would do when exposed to the wild beasts. She answered: "It is I that suffer what I now suffer; but then there will be another in me that will suffer for me, because I shall suffer for him." She was then delivered of a daughter, which a certain Christian woman took care of, and brought up as her own child. The tribune, who had the holy martyrs in custody, being informed by some persons of little credit, that the Christians would free themselves out of prison by some magic enchantments, used them the more cruelly on that account, and forbade any to see them. Thereupon Perpetua said to him: "Why do you not afford us some relief, since we are condemned by Cæsar, and destined to combat at his festival? Will it not be to your honor that we appear well fed?" At this the tribune trembled and blushed, and ordered them to be used with more humanity, and their friends to be admitted to see them. Pudens, {538} the keeper of the prison, being already converted, secretly did them all the good offices in his power. The day before they suffered they gave them, according to custom, their last meal, which was called a free supper, and they ate in public. But the martyrs did their utmost to change it into an Agape, or Love-feast. Their chamber was full of people, whom they talked to with their usual resolution, threatening them with the judgments of God, and extolling the happiness of their own sufferings. Saturus, smiling at the curiosity of those that came to see them, said to them, "Will not to-morrow suffice to satisfy your inhuman curiosity in our regard? However you may seem now to pity us, to-morrow you will clap your hands at our death, and applaud our murderers. But observe well our faces, that you may know them again at that terrible day when all men shall be judged." They spoke with such courage and intrepidity, as astonished the infidels, and occasioned the conversion of several among them. The day of their triumph being come, they went out of the prison to go to the amphitheatre. Joy sparkled in their eyes, and appeared in all their gestures and words. Perpetua walked with a composed countenance and easy pace, as a woman cherished by Jesus Christ, with her eyes modestly cast down: Felicitas went with her, following the men, not able to contain her joy. When they came to the gate of the amphitheatre the guards would have given them, according to custom, the superstitious habits with which they adorned such as appeared at these sights. For the men, a red mantle, which was the habit of the priests of Saturn: for the women, a little fillet round the head, by which the priestesses of Ceres were known. The martyrs rejected those idolatrous ceremonies; and, by the mouth of Perpetua, said, they came thither of their own accord on the promise made them that they should not be forced to any thing contrary to their religion. The tribune then consented that they might appear in the amphitheatre habited as they were. Perpetua sung, as being already victorious; Revocatus, Saturninus, and Saturus threatened the people that beheld them with the judgments of God: and as they passed over against the balcony of Hilarian, they said to him: "You judge us in this world, but God will judge you to the next." The people, enraged at their boldness, begged they might be scourged, which was granted. They accordingly passed before the Venatores,[4] or hunters, each of whom gave them a lash. They rejoiced exceedingly in being thought worthy to resemble our Saviour in his sufferings. God granted to each of them the death they desired; for when they were discoursing together about what kind of martyrdom would be agreeable to each, Saturninus declared that be would choose to be exposed to beasts of several sorts in order to the aggravation of his sufferings. Accordingly he and Revocatus, after having been attacked by a leopard, were also assaulted by a bear. Saturus dreaded nothing so much as a bear, and therefore hoped a leopard would dispatch him at once with his teeth. He was then exposed to a wild boar, but the beast turned upon his keeper, who received such a wound from him that he died in a few days after, and Saturus was only dragged along by him. Then they tied the martyr to the bridge near a bear, but that beast came not out of his lodge, so that Saturus, being sound and not hurt, was called upon for a second encounter. This gave him an opportunity of speaking to Pudens, the jailer that had been converted. The martyr encouraged him to constancy in the faith, and said to him: "You see I have not yet been hurt by any beast, as I desired and foretold; believe then steadfastly in Christ; I am going where you will {539} see a leopard with one bite take away my life." It happened so, for a leopard being let out upon him, covered him all over with blood, whereupon the people jeering, cried out, "He is well baptized." The martyr said to Pudens, "Go, remember my faith, and let our sufferings rather strengthen than trouble you. Give me the ring you have on your finger." Saturus, having dipped it in his wound, gave it him back to keep as a pledge to animate him to a constancy in his faith, and fell down dead soon after. Thus he went first to glory to wait for Perpetua, according to her vision. Some with Mabillon,[5] think this Pudens is the martyr honored in Africa, on the 29th of April. In the mean time, Perpetua and Felicitas had been exposed to a wild cow; Perpetua was first attacked, and the cow having tossed her up, she fell on her back. Then putting herself in a sitting posture, and perceiving her clothes were torn, she gathered them about her in the best manner she could, to cover herself, thinking more of decency than her sufferings. Getting up, not to seem disconsolate, she tied up her hair, which was fallen loose, and perceiving Felicitas on the ground much hurt by a toss of the cow, she helped her to rise. They stood together, expecting another assault from the beasts, but the people crying out that it was enough, they were led to the gate Sanevivaria, where those that were not killed by the beasts were dispatched at the end of the shows by the confectores. Perpetua was here received by Rusticus, a catechumen, who attended her. This admirable woman seemed just returning to herself out of a long ecstasy, and asked when she was to fight the wild cow. Being told what had passed, she could not believe it till she saw on her body and clothes the marks of what she had suffered, and knew the catechumen. With regard to this circumstance of her acts, St. Austin cries out, "Where was she when assaulted and torn by so furious a wild beast, without feeling her wounds, and when, after that furious combat, she asked when it would begin? What did she, not to see what all the world saw? What did she enjoy who did not feel such pain. By what love, by what vision, by what potion was she so transported out of herself, and as it were divinely inebriated, to seem without feeling in a mortal body?" She called for her brother, and said to him and Rusticus, "Continue firm in the faith, love one another, and be not scandalized at our sufferings." All the martyrs were now brought to the place of their butchery. But the people, not yet satisfied with beholding blood, cried out to have them brought into the middle of the amphitheatre, that they might have the pleasure of seeing them receive the last blow. Upon this, some of the martyrs rose up, and having given one another the kiss of peace, went of their own accord into the middle of the arena; others were dispatched without speaking, or stirring out of the place they were in. St. Perpetua fell into the hands of a very timorous and unskilful apprentice of the gladiators, who, with a trembling hand, gave her many slight wounds, which made her languish a long time. Thus, says St. Austin, did two women, amidst fierce beasts and the swords of gladiators, vanquish the devil and all his fury. The day of their martyrdom was the 7th of March, as it is marked in the most ancient martyrologies, and in the Roman calendar as old as the year 354, published by Bucherins. St. Prosper says they suffered at Carthage, which agrees with all the circumstances. Their bodies were in the great church of Carthage, in the fifth age, as St. Victor[6] informs us. Saint Austin says, their festival drew yearly more to honor their memory in their church, than curiosity had done to their martyrdom. They are mentioned in the canon of the Mass. Footnotes: 1. The prisons of the ancient Romans, still to be seen in many old amphitheatres, &c., are dismal holes: having at most one very small aperture for light, just enough to show day. 2. These stocks, called Nervus, were a wooden machine with many holes, in which the prisoners' feet were fastened and stretched to great distances, as to the fourth or fifth holes, for the increase of their torment. St. Perpatua remarks, they were chained, and also set in this engine during their stay in the camp prison, which seems to have been several days, in expectation of the day of the public show. 3. By the conclusions which St. Perpetua was led to make from her two visions, it evidently appears, that the church, in that early age, believed the doctrine of the expiation of certain sins after death, and prayed for the faithful departed. This must be allowed, even though it should be pretended that her visions were not from God. But neither St. Austin, nor any other ancient father, ever entertained the least suspicion on that head. Nor can we presume that the goodness of God would permit one full of such ardent love at him to be imposed upon in a point of this nature. The Oxonian editor of these acts knew not what other answer to make to this ancient testimony, than that St. Perpetua seems to have been Montanist (p. 14.) But this unjust censure Oodwell (Diss. Cypr. A. n. 8, p. 15) and others have confuted. And could St. Austin, with the whole Catholic church, have ranked a Montanist among the most illustrious martyrs? That father himself, in many places of his works, clearly explains the same doctrine of the Catholic faith, concerning a state of temporary sufferings in the other world, and conformably to it speaks of these visions. (L. de Orig. Animæ, l. 1, c. 10, p. 343, and l. 4, c. 18, p. 401, t. 10, &c.) He says, that Dinocrates must have received baptism, but afterwards sinned, perhaps by having been seduced by his pagan father into some act of superstition, or by lying, or by some other faults of which children in that tender age may be guilty. Illus ætatis pueri at mentiri et verum iniqui, at confiteri et negare jam possum. Lib. 1. c. 10. See Orsi Diss. de Actis SS. Perpetuæ et Felicitatis. Florentiæ 1738, {}. 4. Pro ordine venatorum. Venatores, is the name given to those that were armed to encounter the beast; who put themselves in ranks, with whips in their hands, and each of them gave a last to the Bestiarii, or those condemned to the beasts, whom they obliged to pass naked before them in the middle of the pit of arena. 5. Analect. t. 3, p. 403. 6. Victor, l. 1, p. 4. {540} ST. PAUL. ANCHORET. FROM his ignorance of secular learning, and his extraordinary humility, he was surnamed the Simple. He served God in the world to the age of sixty, in the toils of a poor and laborious country life. The incontinency of his wife contributed to wean his soul from all earthly ties. Checks and crosses which men meet with in this life are great graces. God's sweet providence sows our roads with thorns, that we may learn to despise the vanity, and hate the treachery of the world. "When mothers would wean their children," says St. Austin, "they anoint their breasts with aloes, that the babe, being offended at the bitterness, may no more seek the nipple." Thus has God in his mercy filled the world with sorrow and vexation; but woe to those who still continue to love it! Even in this life miseries will be the wages of their sin and folly, and their eternal portion will be the second death. Paul found true happiness because he converted his heart perfectly from the world to God. Desiring to devote himself totally to his love, he determined to betake himself to the great St. Antony. He went eight days' journey into the desert, to the holy patriarch, and begged that he would admit him among his disciples, and teach him the way of salvation. Antony harshly rejected him, telling him he was too old to bear the austerities of that state. He therefore bade him return home, and follow the business of his calling, and sanctify it by the spirit of recollection and assiduous prayer. Having said this he shut his door: but Paul continued fasting and praying before his door, till Antony, seeing his fervor, on the fourth day opened it again, and going out to him, after several trials of his obedience, admitted him to the monastic state, and prescribed him a rule of life; teaching him, by the most perfect obedience, to crucify in himself all attachment to his own will, the source of pride; by the denial of his senses and assiduous hard labor, to subdue his flesh; and by continual prayer at his work, and at other times, to purify his heart, and inflame it with heavenly affections.[1] He instructed him how to pray, and ordered him never to eat before sunset, nor so much at a meal as entirely to satisfy hunger. Paul, by obedience and humility, laid the foundation of an eminent sanctity in his soul, which being dead to all self-will and to creatures, soared towards God with great fervor and purity of affections. Among the examples of his ready obedience, it is recorded, that when he had wrought with great diligence in making mats and hurdles, praying at the same time without intermission, St. Antony disliked his work, and bade him undo it and make it over again. Paul did so, without any dejection in his countenance, or making the least reply, or even asking to eat a morsel of bread, though he had already passed seven days without taking any refreshment. After this, Antony ordered him to moisten in water four loaves of six ounces each; for their bread in the deserts was exceeding hard and dry. When their refection was prepared, instead of eating, he bade Paul sing psalms with him, then to sit down by the loaves, and at night, after praying together, to take his rest. He called him up at midnight to pray with him: this exercise the old man continued with great cheerfulness till three o'clock in the afternoon the following day. After sunset, each ate one loaf, and Antony asked Paul if he would eat another. "Yes, if you do," said Paul; "I am a monk," said Antony; "And I desire to be one," replied the disciple; whereupon they arose, sung twelve psalms, and recited twelve other {541} prayers. After a short repose, they both arose again to prayer at midnight. The experienced director exercised his obedience by frequent trials, bidding him one day, when many monks were come to visit him to receive his spiritual advice, to spill a vessel of honey, and then to gather it up without any dust. At other times he ordered him to draw water a whole day and pour it out again; to make baskets and pull them to pieces; to sew and unsew his garments, and the like.[2] What victories over themselves and their passions might youth and others, &c., gain! what a treasure of virtue might they procure, by a ready and voluntary obedience and conformity of their will to that of those whom Providence bath placed over them! This they would find the effectual means to crush pride, and subdue their passions. But obedience is of little advantage, unless it bend the will itself, and repress all wilful interior murmuring and repugnance. When Paul had been sufficiently exercised and instructed in the duties of a monastic life, St. Antony placed him in a cell three miles from his own, where he visited him from time to time. He usually preferred his virtue to that of all his other disciples, and proposed him to them as a model. He frequently sent to Paul sick persons, or those possessed by the devil, whom he was not able to cure; as not having received the gift; and by the disciple's prayers they never failed of a cure. St. Paul died some time after the year 330. He is commemorated both by the Greeks and Latins, on the 7th of March. See Palladius, Rufinus, and Sozomen, abridged by Tillemont, t. 7, p. 144. Also by Henschenius, p. 645. Footnotes: 1. Pallad. Lausiac. c. 28, p. 942. Rufin. Vit. Patr. c. 31. Sozom. l. 1, c. 13. 2. Rufin. & Pallad. loc. cit. MARCH VIII. ST. JOHN OF GOD, C. FOUNDER OF THE ORDER OF CHARITY. From his life, written by Francis de Castro, twenty-five years after his death, abridged by Vaillet, p. 98, and F. Helyot, Hist. des Ordres Relig. t. 4. p. 131. A.D. 1550 ST. JOHN, surnamed of God, was born in Portugal, in 1495. His parents were of the lowest rank in the country, but devout and charitable. John spent a considerable part of his youth in service, under the mayoral or chief shepherd of the count of Oropeusa in Castile, and in great innocence and virtue. In 1522, he listed himself in a company of foot raised by the count, and served in the wars between the French and Spaniards; as he did afterwards in Hungary, against the Turks, while the emperor Charles V. was king of Spain. By the licentiousness of his companions, he by degrees lost his fear of offending God, and laid aside the greatest part of his practices of devotion. The troop which he belonged to being disbanded, he went into Andalusia in 1536, where he entered the service of a rich lady near Seville, in quality of shepherd. Being now about forty years of age, stung with remorse for his past misconduct, he began to entertain very serious thoughts of a change of life, and doing penance for his sins. He accordingly employed the greatest part of his time, both by day and night, in the exercises {542} of prayer and mortification, bewailing almost continually his ingratitude towards God, and deliberating how he could dedicate himself in the most perfect manner to his service. His compassion for the distressed moved him to take a resolution of leaving his place, and passing into Africa, that he might comfort and succor the poor slaves there, not without hopes of meeting with the crown of martyrdom. At Gibraltar he met with a Portuguese gentleman condemned to banishment, and whose estate had also been confiscated by king John III. He was then in the hands of the king's officers, together with his wife and children, and on his way to Ceuta, in Barbary, the place of his exile. John, out of charity and compassion, served him without any wages. At Ceuta, the gentleman falling sick with grief and the change of air, was soon reduced to such straits as to be obliged to dispose of the small remains of his shattered fortune for the family's support. John, not content to sell what little stock he was master of to relieve them, went to day-labor at the public works, to earn all he could for their subsistence. The apostacy of one of his companions alarmed him; and his confessor telling him that his going in quest of martyrdom was an illusion, he determined to return to Spain. Coming back to Gibraltar, his piety suggested to him to turn pedler, and sell little pictures and books of devotion, which might furnish him with opportunities of exhorting his customers to virtue. His stock increasing considerably, he settled in Granada, where he opened a shop, in 1538, being then forty-three years of age. The great preacher and servant of God, John D'Avila, {543} Apostle of Andalusia, preached that year at Granada, on St. Sebastian's day, which is there kept as a great festival. John, having heard his sermon, was so affected with it, that, melting into tears, he filled the whole church with his cries and lamentations; detesting his past life, beating his breast, {544} and calling aloud for mercy. Not content with this, he ran about the streets like a distracted person, tearing his hair, and behaving in such a manner that he was followed everywhere by the rabble with sticks and stones, and came home all besmeared with dirt and blood. He then gave away all he had in the world, and having thus reduced himself to absolute poverty, that he might die to himself, and crucify all the sentiments of the old man, he began again to counterfeit the madman, running about the streets as before, till some had the charity to take him to the venerable John D'Avila, covered with dirt and blood. The holy man, full of the Spirit of God, soon discovered in John the motions of extraordinary graces, spoke to him in private, heard his general confession, and gave him proper advice, and promised his assistance ever after. John, out of a desire of the greatest humiliations, returned soon after to his apparent madness and extravagances. He was, thereupon, taken up and put into a madhouse, on supposition of his being disordered in his senses, where the severest methods were used to bring him to himself, all which he underwent in the spirit of penance, and by way of atonement for the sins of his past life. D'Avila, being informed of his conduct, came to visit him, and found him reduced almost to the grave by weakness, and his body covered with wounds and sores; but his soul was still vigorous, and thirsting with the greatest ardor after new sufferings and humiliations. D'Avila however told him, that having now been sufficiently exercised in that so singular a method of penance and humiliation, he advised him to employ himself for the time to come in something more conducive to his own and the public good. His exhortation had its desired effect; and he grew instantly calm and sedate, to the great astonishment of his keepers. He continued, however, some time longer in the hospital, serving the sick, but left it entirely on St. Ursula's day, in 1539. This his extraordinary conduct is an object of our admiration, not of our imitation: in this saint it was the effect of the fervor of his conversion, his desire of humiliation, and a holy hatred of himself and his past criminal life. By it he learned in a short time perfectly to die to himself and the world; which prepared his soul for the graces which God afterwards bestowed on him. He then thought of executing his design of doing something for the relief of the poor; and, after a pilgrimage to our Lady's in Guadaloupa, to recommend himself and his undertaking to her intercession, in a place celebrated for devotion to her, he began by selling wood in the market-place, to feed some poor by the means of his labor. Soon after he hired a house to harbor poor sick persons in, whom he served and provided for with an ardor, prudence, economy, and vigilance, that surprised the whole city. This was the foundation of the order of charity, in 1540, which, by the benediction of heaven, has since been spread all over Christendom. John was occupied all day in serving his patients: in the night he went out to carry in new objects of charity, rather than to seek out provisions for them; for people, of their own accord, brought him in all necessaries for his little hospital. The archbishop of Granada, taking notice of so excellent an establishment, and admiring the incomparable order observed in it, both for the spiritual and temporal care of the poor, furnished considerable sums to increase it, and favored it with his protection. This excited all persons to vie with each other in contributing to it. Indeed the charity, patience, and modesty of St. John, and his wonderful care and foresight, engaged every one to admire and favor the institute. The bishop of Tuy, president of the royal court of judicature in Granada, having invited the holy man to dinner, put {545} several questions to him, to all which he answered in such a manner, as gave the bishop the highest esteem of his person. It was this prelate that gave him the name of John of God, and prescribed him a kind of habit, though St. John never thought of founding a religious order: for the rules which bear his name were only drawn up in 1556, six years after his death; and religious vows were not introduced among his brethren before the year 1570. To make trial of the saint's disinterestedness, the marquis of Tarisa came to him in disguise to beg an alms, on pretence of a necessary lawsuit, and he received from his hands twenty-five ducats, which was all he had. The marquis was so much edified by his charity, that, besides returning the sum, he bestowed on him one hundred and fifty crowns of gold, and sent to his bospital every day, during his stay at Granada, one hundred and fifty loaves, four sheep, and six pullets. But the holy man gave a still more illustrious proof of his charity when the hospital was on fire; for he carried out most of the sick on his own back: and though he passed and repassed through the flames, and stayed in the midst of them a considerable time, he received no hurt. But his charity was not confined to his own hospital: he looked upon it as his own misfortune if the necessities of any distressed person in the whole country had remained unrelieved. He therefore made strict inquiry into the wants of the poor over the whole province, relieved many in their own houses, employed in a proper manner those that were able to work, and with wonderful sagacity laid himself out every way to comfort and assist all the afflicted members of Christ. He was particularly active and vigilant in settling and providing for young maidens in distress to prevent the danger to which they are often exposed, of taking bad courses. He also reclaimed many who were already engaged in vice: for which purpose he sought out public sinners, and holding a crucifix in his hand, with many tears exhorted them to repentance. Though his life seemed to be taken up in continual action, he accompanied it with perpetual prayer and incredible corporal austerities. And his tears of devotion, his frequent raptures, and his eminent spirit of contemplation, gave a lustre to his other virtues. But his sincere humility appeared most admirable in all his actions, even amid the honors which he received at the court of Valladolid, whither business called him. The king and princes seemed to vie with each other who should show him the greatest courtesy, or put the largest alms in his hands; whose charitable contributions he employed with great prudence in Valladolid itself, and the adjacent country. Only perfect virtue could stand the test of honors, amid which he appeared the most humble. Humiliations seemed to be his delight: these he courted and sought, and always underwent them with great alacrity. One day, when a woman called him hypocrite, and loaded him with invectives, he gave her privately a piece of money, and desired her to repeat all she had said in the market-place. Worn out at last by ten years' hard service in his hospital, he fell sick. The immediate occasion of his distemper seemed to be excess of fatigue in saving wood and other such things for the poor in a great flood, in which, seeing a person in danger of being drowned, he swam in his long clothes to endeavor to rescue him, not without imminent hazard of his own life: but he could not see his Christian brother perish without endeavoring at all hazards to succor him. He at first concealed his sickness, that he might not be obliged to diminish his labors and extraordinary austerities; but in the mean time he carefully revised the inventories of all things belonging to his hospital, and inspected all the accounts. He also reviewed all the excellent regulations which he had made for its administration, the distribution of {546} time, and the exercises of piety to be observed in it. Upon a complaint that he harbored idle strollers and bad women, the archbishop sent for him, and laid open the charge against him. The man of God threw himself prostrate at his feet, and said: "The Son of God came for sinners, and we are obliged to promote their conversion, to exhort them, and to sigh and pray for them. I am unfaithful to my vocation because I neglect this; and I confess that I know no other bad person in my hospital but myself; who, as I am obliged to own with extreme confusion, am a most base sinner, altogether unworthy to eat the bread of the poor." This he spoke with so much feeling and humility that all present were much moved, and the archbishop dismissed him with respect, leaving all things to his discretion. His illness increasing, the news of it was spread abroad. The lady Anne Ossorio was no sooner informed of his condition, but she came in her coach to the hospital to see him. The servant of God lay in his habit in his little cell, covered with a piece of an old coat instead of a blanket, and having under his head, not indeed a stone, as was his custom, but a basket, in which he used to beg alms in the city for his hospital. The poor and sick stood weeping round him. The lady, moved with compassion, dispatched secretly a message to the archbishop, who sent immediately an order to St. John to obey her as he would do himself, during his illness. By virtue of this authority she obliged him to leave his hospital. He named Anthony Martin superior in his place, and gave moving instructions to his brethren, recommending to them, in particular, obedience and charity. In going out he visited the blessed sacrament, and poured forth his heart before it with extraordinary fervor; remaining there absorbed in his devotions so long, that the lady Anne Ossorio caused him to be taken up and carried into her coach, in which she conveyed him to her own house. She herself prepared with the help of her maids, and gave him with her own hands, his broths and other things, and often read to him the history of the passion of our Redeemer. He complained that while our Saviour, in his agony, drank gall, they gave him, a miserable sinner, broths. The whole city was in tears; all the nobility visited him; the magistrates came to beg he would give his benediction to their city. He answered, that his sins rendered him the scandal and reproach of their country; but recommended to them his brethren, the poor, and his religious that served them. At last, by order of the archbishop, he gave the city his dying benediction. His exhortations to all were most pathetic. His prayer consisted of most humble sentiments of compunction and inflamed aspirations of divine love. The archbishop said mass in his chamber, heard his confession, gave him the viaticum and extreme unction, and promised to pay all his debts, and to provide for all his poor. The saint expired on his knees, before the altar, on the 8th of March, in 1550, being exactly fifty-five years old. He was buried by the archbishop at the head of all the clergy, both secular and regular, accompanied by all the court, noblesse, and city, with the utmost pomp. He was honored by many miracles, beatified by Urban VIII. in 1630, and canonized by Alexander VIII. in 1690. His relics were translated into the church of his brethren in 1664. His order of charity to serve the sick was approved of by pope Pius V. The Spaniards have their own general: but the religious in France and Italy obey a general who resides at Rome. They follow the rule of St. Austin. * * * * * One sermon perfectly converted one who had been long enslaved to the world and his passions, and made him a saint. How comes it that so many sermons and pious books produce so little fruit in our souls? It is altogether owing to our sloth and wilful hardness of heart, that we receive God's {547} omnipotent word in vain, and to our most grievous condemnation. The heavenly seed can take no root in hearts which receive it with indifference and insensibility, or it is trodden upon and destroyed by the dissipation and tumult of our disorderly affections, or it is choked by the briers and thorns of earthly concerns. To profit by it, we must listen to it with awe and respect, in the silence of all creatures, in interior solitude and peace, and must carefully nourish it in our hearts. The holy law of God is comprised in the precept of divine love; a precept so sweet, a virtue so glorious and so happy, as to carry along with it its present incomparable reward. St. John, from the moment of his conversion, by the penitential austerities which he performed, was his own greatest persecutor; but it was chiefly by heroic works of charity that he endeavored to offer to God the most acceptable sacrifice of compunction, gratitude, and love. What encouragement has Christ given us in every practice of this virtue, by declaring, that whatever we do to others he esteems as done to himself! To animate ourselves to fervor, we may often call to mind what St. John frequently repeated to his disciples, "Labor without intermission to do all the good works in your power, while time is allowed you." His spirit of penance, love, and fervor he inflamed by meditating assiduously on the sufferings of Christ, of which he often used to say: "Lord, thy thorns are my roses, and thy sufferings my paradise." Footnotes: 1. The venerable John of Avila, or Avilla, who may be called the father of the most eminent saints that flourished in Spain in the sixteenth century, was a native of the diocese of Toledo. At fourteen years of age he was sent to Salamanca, and trained up to the law. From his infancy he applied himself with great earnestness to prayer, and all the exercises of piety and religion; and he was yet very young when he found his inclinations strongly bent towards an ecclesiastical state in order to endeavor by his tears and labors to kindle the fire of divine love in the hearts of men. From the university his parents called him home, but were surprised and edified to see the ardor with which he pursued the most heroic practices of Christian perfection; which, as they both feared God, they were afraid in the least to check, or damp his fervor. His diet was sparing, and as coarse as he could choose, without an appearance of singularity or affectation; he contrived to sleep on twigs, which he secretly laid on his bed, wore a hair shirt, and used severe disciplines. What was most admirable in his conduct, was the universal denial of his will, by which he labored to die to himself, added to his perfect humility, patience, obedience, and meekness, by which he subjected his spirit to the holy law of Christ. All his spare time was devoted to prayer, and he approached very frequently the holy sacraments. In that of the blessed Eucharist he began to find a wonderful relish and devotion, and he spent some hours in preparing himself to receive it with the utmost purity of heart and fervor of love he was able to bring to that divine banquet. In the commerce of the world he appeared so much out of his element, that he was sent to the university of Alcala, where he finished his studies in the same manner he had began them, and bore the first prize in philosophy and his other classes. F. Dominic Soto, the learned Dominican professor, who was his master, conceived for him the warmest affection and the highest esteem, and often declared how great a man he doubted not this scholar would one day become. Peter Guerrera, who was afterwards archbishop of Toledo, was also from that time his great admirer, and constant friend. Both his parents dying about that time, John entered into holy orders. On the same day on which he said his first mass, instead of giving an entertainment according to the custom, he provided a dinner for twelve poor persons, on whom he waited at table, and whom he clothed at his own expense, and with his own hands. When he returned into his own country, he sold his whole estate, for he was the only child and heir of his parents: the entire price he gave to the poor, reserving nothing for himself besides an old suit of mean apparel, desiring to imitate the apostles, whom Christ forbade to carry either purse or scrip. Taking St. Paul for his patron and model, he entered upon the ministry of preaching, in which sublime function his preparation consisted not merely in the study and exercise of oratory, and in a consummate knowledge of faith, and of the rules of Christian virtue, but much more in a perfect victory over himself and his passions, the entire disengagement of his heart and affections from the world and all earthly things, an eminent spirit of humility, tender charity, and inflamed zeal for the glory of God, and the sanctification of souls. He once said to a young clergyman, who consulted him by what method he could learn the art of preaching with fruit, that it was no other than that of the most ardent love of God. Of this he was himself a most illustrious example. Prayer, and an indefatigable application to the duties of his ministry, divided his whole time; and such was his thirst of the salvation of souls, that the greatest labors and dangers were equally his greatest gain and pleasure; he seemed even to gather strength from the former, and confidence and courage from the latter. His inflamed sermons, supported by the admirable example of his heroic virtue, and the most pure maxims of the gospel, delivered with an eloquence and an unction altogether divine, from the overflowings of a heart burning with the most ardent love of God, and penetrated with the deepest sentiments of humility and compunction, had a force which the most hardened hearts seemed not able to withstand. Many sacred orators preach themselves rather than the word of God, and speak with so much art and care, that their hearers consider more how they speak than what they say. This true minister of the gospel never preached or instructed others without having first, for a considerable time, begged of God with great earnestness to move both his tongue and the hearts of his hearers: he mounted the pulpit full of the most sincere distrust in his own abilities and endeavors, and contempt of himself; and with the most ardent thirst of the salvation of the souls of all his hearers. He cast his nets, or rather sowed the seed, of eternal life. The Holy Ghost, who inspired and animated his soul, seemed to speak by the organ of his voice; and gave so fruitful a blessing to his words, that wonderful were the conversions he everywhere wrought. Whole assemblies came from his sermons quite changed, and their change appeared immediately in their countenances and behavior. He never ceased to exhort those that were with him by his inflamed discourses, and the absent by his letters. A collection of these, extant in several languages, is a proof of his elo quence, experimental science of virtue, and tender and affecting charity. The ease with which he wrote them without study, shows how richly his mind was stored with an inexhausted fund of excellent motives and reflections on every subject matter of piety, with what readiness he disposed those motives in an agreeable methodical manner, and with what unction he expressed them, insomuch that his style appears to be no other than the pure language of his heart, always bleeding for his own sins and those of the world. So various are the instructions contained in these letters, that any one may find such as are excellently suited to his particular circumstances, whatever virtue he desires to obtain, or vice to shun, and under whatever affliction he seeks for holy advice and comfort. It was from the school of an interior experienced virtue that he was qualified to be so excellent a master. This spirit of all virtues he cultivated in his soul by their continual exercise. Under the greatest importunity of business, besides his office and mass, with a long preparation and thanksgiving, he never failed to give to private holy meditation two hours, when he first rose in the morning, from three till five o'clock, and again two hours in the evening before he took his rest, for which he never allowed himself more than four hours of the night, from eleven till three o'clock. During the time of his sickness, towards the latter end of his life, almost his whole time was devoted to prayer, he being no longer able to sustain the fatigue of his functions. His clothes were always very mean, and usually old; his food was such as he bought in the streets, which wanted no dressing, as herbs, fruit, or milk; for he would never have a servant. At the tables of others he ate sparingly of whatever was given him, or what was next at hand. He exceedingly extolled, and was a true lover of holy poverty, not only as it is an exercise of penance, and cuts off the root of many passions, but also as a state dear to those who love our divine Redeemer, who was born, lived, and died, in extreme poverty. Few persons ever appeared to be more perfectly dead to the world than this holy man. A certain nobleman, who was showing him his curious gardens, canals, and buildings, expressed his surprise to see that no beauties and wonders of art and nature could fix his attention or raise his curiosity. The holy man replied, "I trust confess that nothing of this kind gives me any satisfaction because my heart takes no pleasure in them." This holy man was so entirely possessed with God, and filled with the love of invisible things, as to loathe all earthly things, which seemed not to have a direct and immediate tendency to them. He preached at Seville, Cordova, Granada, Baeza, and over the whole country of Andalusia. By his discourses and instructions, St. John of God, St. Francis of Borgia, St. Teresa, Lewis of Granada, and many others, were moved, and assisted to lay the deep foundation of perfect virtue to which the divine grace raised them. Many noblemen and ladies were directed by him in the paths of Christian perfection, particularly the Countess of Feria and the Marchioness of Pliego, whose conduct, first in a married state, and afterwards in holy widowhood, affords most edifying instances of heroic practices and sentiments of all virtues. This great servant of God taught souls to renounce and cast away that false liberty by which they are the worst of slaves under the tyranny of their passions, and to take up the sweet chains of the divine love which gives men a true sovereignty, not only over all other created things, but also over themselves. He lays down in his works the rules by which he conducted so many to perfect virtue, teaching us that we must learn to know both God and ourselves, not by the lying glass of self-love, but by the clear beam of truth: ourselves, that we may see the depth of our miseries, and fly with all our might from the cause thereof, which is our pride, and other sins: God, that we may always tremble before his infinite majesty, may believe his unerring truth, may hope for a share in his inexhausted mercy, and may vehemently love that incomprehensible abyss of goodness and charity. These lessons he lays down with particular advice how to subside our passions. In his treatise on the Audi filia, or on those words of the Holy Ghost, Psa. xliv, _Hear me, daughter, bend thine ear, forget thy house,_ &c. The occasion upon which he composed this book was as follows: Donna Soncha Carilla, daughter of Don Lewis Fernandez of Cordoba, lord of Guadalcazar, a young lady of great beauty and accomplishments, was called to court to serve in quality of lady of honor to the queen. Her father furnished her with an equipage, and every thing suitable; but before her journey, she went to cast herself at the feet of Avila, and make her confession. She afterwards said he reproved her sharply for coming to the sacred tribunal of penance too richly attired, and in a manner not becoming a penitent whose heart was broken with compunction. What else passed in their conference is unknown; but coming from the church, she begged to be excused from going to court, laid aside all sumptuous attire, and gave herself up entirely to recollection and penance. Thus she led a retired most holy life in her father's house till she died, most happily, about ten years after. Her pious director wrote this book for her instruction in the practice of an interior life, teaching her how she ought to subdue her passions, and vanquish temptations, especially that of pride; also by what means she was to labor to obtain the love of God, and all virtues. He dwells at length on assiduous meditation, on the passion of Christ, especially on the excess of love with which he suffered so much for us. His other works, and all the writers who speak of this holy man, bear testimony to his extraordinary devotion towards the passion of Christ. From this divine book he learned the perfect spirit of all virtues, especially a desire of suffering with him and for him. Upon this motive he exhorts us to give God many thanks when he sends us an opportunity of enduring some little, that by our good use of this little trial, our Lord nay be moved to give us strength to suffer more, and may send us more to undergo. Envy raising him enemies, he was accused of shutting heaven to the rich, and upon that senseless slander thrown into the prison of the inquisition at Seville. This sensible disgrace and persecution he bore with incredible sweetness and patience, and after he was acquitted, returned only kindnesses to his calumniators. In the fiftieth year of his age he began to be afflicted with the stone, frequent fevers, and a complication of other painful disorders: under the sharpest pains he used often to repeat this prayer, "Lord. increase my sufferings, but give me also patience." Once, in a fit of exquisite pain, he begged our Redeemer to assuage it: and that instant he found it totally removed, and he fell into a gentle slumber. He afterwards reproached himself as guilty of pusillanimity. It is not to be expressed how much he suffered from sickness during the seventeen last years of his life. He died with great tranquillity and devotion, on the 10th of May, 1569. The venerable John of Avila was a man powerful in words and works, a prodigy of penance, the glory of the priesthood, the edification of the church by his virtues, its support by his zeal, its oracle by his doctrine. A profound and universal genius, a prudent and upright director, a celebrated preacher, the apostle of Andalusia, a man revered by all Spain, known to the whole Christian world. A man of such sanctity and authority, that princes adopted his decisions, the learned were improved by his enlightened knowledge, and St. Teresa regarded him as her patron and protector, consulted him as her master, and followed him as her guide and model. See the edifying life of the venerable John of Avila, written by F. Lewis of Granada; also by Lewis Munnoz: and the abstract prefixed by Arnauld d' Andilly to the French edition of his works in folio, at Paris, in 1673. ST. FELIX, B.C. HE was a holy Burgundian priest, who converted and baptized Sigebert, prince of the East-Angles, during his exile in France, whither he was forced to retire, to secure himself from the insidious practices of his relations. Sigebert being called home to the crown of his ancestors, invited out of France his spiritual father St. Felix, to assist him in bringing over his idolatrous subjects to the Christian faith: these were the inhabitants of Norfolk, Suffolk, and Cambridgeshire. Our saint being ordained bishop by Honorius, archbishop of Canterbury, and deputed by him to preach to the East-Angles, was surprisingly successful in his undertaking, and made almost a thorough conversion of that country. The most learned and most Christian king, Sigebert, as he is styled by Bede, concurred with him in all things, and founded churches, monasteries, and schools. From those words of Bede, that "he set up a school for youth, in which Felix furnished him with masters," some have called him the founder of the university of Cambridge. St. Felix established schools at Felixstow; Cressy adds at Flixton or Felixton. King Sigebert, after two years, resigned his crown to Egric, his cousin, and became a monk at Cnobersburgh, now Burgh-castle, in Suffolk, which monastery he had founded for St. Fursey. Four years after this, the people dragged him out of his retirement by main force, and conveyed him into the army, to defend them against the cruel king Penda, who had made war upon the East-Angles. He refused to bear arms, as inconsistent with the monastic profession; and would have nothing but a wand in his hand. Being slain with Egric in 642, he was honored as a martyr in the English calendars, on the 27th of September, and in the Gallican on the 7th of August. Egric was succeeded by the good king Annas, the father of many saints; as, SS. Erconwald, bishop; Ethelrede, Sexburge, Ethelburge, and Edilburge, abbesses; and Withburge. He was slain fighting against the pagans, after a reign of nineteen years, and buried at Blitheburg: his remains were afterwards removed to St. Edmond's-bury. St. Felix established his see at Dumraoc, now Dunwich, in Suffolk, and governed it seventeen years, dying in {548} 646. He was buried at Dunwich; but his relics were translated to the abbey of Ramsey, under king Canutus. See Bede, l. 2, Malmesbury; Wharton, t. 1, p. 403.[1] Footnotes: 1. Dunwich was formerly a large city, with fifty-two religious houses in it, but was gradually swallowed up by the sea. The remains of the steeples are still discoverable, under water, about five miles from the shore. See Mr. Gardiner's History and Antiquities of Dunwich. 4to. in 1754. SS. APOLLONIUS, PHILEMON, &c., MARTYRS. APOLLONIUS was a zealous holy anchoret, and was apprehended by the persecutors at Antinous in Egypt. Many heathens came to insult and affront him while in chains; and among others one Philemon, a musician, very famous, and much admired by the people. He treated the martyr as an impious person and a seducer, and one that deserved the public hatred. To his injuries the saint only answered, "My son, may God have mercy on thee, and not lay these reproaches to thy charge." This his meekness wrought so powerfully on Philemon, that he forthwith confessed himself a Christian. Both were brought before the judge whom Metaphrastes and Usuard call Arian, and who had already put to death SS. Asclas, Timothy, Paphnutius, and several other martyrs: after making them suffer all manner of tortures, he condemned them to be burnt alive. When the fire was kindled about them, Apollonius prayed: "Lord, deliver not to beasts the souls who confess thee; but manifest thy power." At that instant a cloud of dew encompassed the martyrs, and put out the fire. The judge and people cried out at this miracle: "The God of the Christians is the great and only God." The prefect of Egypt being informed of it, caused the judge and the two confessors to be brought, loaded with irons, to Alexandria. During the journey, Apollonius, by his instructions, prevailed so far upon those who conducted him, that they presented themselves also to the judge with their prisoners, and confessed themselves likewise to be Christians. The prefect, finding their constancy invincible, caused them all to be thrown into the sea, about the year 311. Their bodies were afterwards found on the shore, and were all put into one sepulchre. "By whom," says Rufinus, "many miracles are wrought to the present time, and the vows and prayers of all are received, and are accomplished. Hither the Lord was pleased to bring me, and to fulfil my requests." See Rufinus, Vit. Patr l. 2, c. 19, p. 477. Palladius Lausiac. c. 65, 66. ST. JULIAN, ARCHBISHOP OF TOLEDO, C. HE presided in the fourteenth and fifteenth councils of Toledo. King Wemba, falling sick, received penance and the monastic habit from his hands, and recovering, lived afterwards a monk. St. Julian has left us a History of the Wars of king Wemba, a book against the Jews, and three books On Prognostics, or on death, and the state of souls after death. He teaches that love, and a desire of being united to God, ought to extinguish in us the natural fear of death: that the saints in heaven pray for us, earnestly desire our happiness, and know our actions, either in God whom they behold, and in whom they discover all truth which it concerns them to know; or by the angels, the messengers of God on earth: but that the damned do not ordinarily know what passes on earth, because they neither see God nor converse with our angels. He says that prayers for the dead are thanksgivings for the good, a propitiation for the souls in purgatory, but {549} no relief to the damned. He was raised to the see of Toledo in 680, and died in 690. See Ildefonse of Toledo, Append. Hom. Illustr. ST. DUTHAK, BISHOP OF ROSS, IN SCOTLAND, C HIS zeal and labors in preaching the word of God, his contempt of himself, his compassion for the poor and for sinners, his extreme love of poverty, never reserving any thing for himself, and the extraordinary austerity of his life, to which he had inured himself from his childhood, are much extolled by the author of his life. The same writer assures us, that he was famous for several miracles and predictions, and that he foretold an invasion of the Danes, which happened ten years after his death, in 1263, in the reign of Alexander III., when, with their king Achol, they were defeated by Alexander Stuart, great-grandfather to Robert, the first king of that family. This victory was ascribed to the intercession of St. Andrew and St. Duthak. Our saint, after longing desires of being united to God, passed joyfully to bliss, in 1253. His relics, kept in the collegiate church of Thane, in the county of Ross, were resorted to by pilgrims from all parts of Scotland. Lesley, the pious bishop of Ross, (who, after remaining four years in prison with queen Mary, passed into France, was chosen suffragan of Rouen, by cardinal Bourbon, and died at Brussels, in 1591,) had an extraordinary devotion to this saint, the chief patron of his diocese. See Lesley, Descript. Scot. p. 27, and the MS. life of St. Duthak, compiled by a Scottish Jesuit, nephew by the mother to bishop Lesley, and native of that diocese. See also King in Calend. ST. ROSA, OF VITERBO, VIRGIN. FROM her childhood she addicted herself entirely to the practice of mortification and assiduous prayer; she was favored with the gift of miracles, and an extraordinary talent of converting the most hardened sinners. She professed the third rule of St. Francis, living always in the house of her father in Viterbo, where she died in 1261. See Wading's Annals, and Barbaza, Vies des SS. du Tiers Ordre, t. 2, p. 77. ST. SENAN, B.C. HE was born in the country of Hy-Conalls, in Ireland, in the latter part of the fifth century, was a disciple of the abbots Cassidus and Natal, or Naal: then travelled for spiritual improvement to Rome, and thence into Britain. In this kingdom he contracted a close friendship with St. David. After his return he founded many churches in Ireland, and a great monastery in Inis-Cathaig, an island lying at the mouth of the river Shannon, which he governed, and in which he continued to reside after he was advanced to the episcopal dignity. The abbots, his successors for several centuries, were all bishops, till this great diocese was divided into three, namely, of Limerick, Killaloe, and Ardfert. St. Senan died on the same day and year with St. David; but was honored in the Irish church on the 8th of March. A town in Cornwall bears the name of St. Senan. See his acts in Colgan, p. 602. {550} ST. PSALMOD, OR SAUMAY, ANCRORET. HE was born in Ireland, and, retiring into France, led an eremitical life at Limousin, where he acquired great reputation for his sanctity and miracles. He died about 589. See the Martyrology of Evreux. MARCH IX. ST. FRANCES, WIDOW, FOUNDRESS OF THE COLLATINES. Abridged from her life by her confessor Canon. Mattiotti; and that by Magdalen Dell'A{}ara, superioress of the Oblates, or Coliatines. Helyot, Hist. des Ordr. Mon. t. 6, p. 208. A.D. 1440. ST. FRANCES was born at Rome in 1384. Her parents, Paul de Buxo and Jacobella Rofredeschi, were both of illustrious families. She imbibed early sentiments of piety, and such was her love of purity from her tender age, that she would not suffer her own father to touch even her hands, unless covered. She had always an aversion to the amusements of children, and loved solitude and prayer. At eleven years of age she desired to enter a monastery, but, in obedience to her parents, was married to a rich young Roman nobleman, named Laurence Ponzani, in 1396. A grievous sickness showed how disagreeable this kind of life was to her inclinations. She joined with it her former spirit; kept herself as retired as she could, shunning feastings and public meetings. All her delight was in prayer, meditation, and visiting churches. Above all, her obedience and condescension to her husband was inimitable, which engaged such a return of affection, that for forty years which they lived together, there never happened the least disagreement; and their whole life was a constant strife and emulation to prevent each other in mutual complaisance and respect. While she was at her prayers or other exercises, if called away by her husband, or the meanest person of her family, she laid all aside to obey without delay, saying: "A married woman must, when called upon, quit her devotions to God at the altar, to find him in her household affairs." God was pleased to show her the merit of this her obedience; for the authors of her life relate, that being called away four times in beginning the same verse of a psalm in our Lady's office, returning the fifth time, she found that verse written in golden letters. She treated her domestics not as servants, but as brothers and sisters, and future co-heirs in heaven; and studied by all means in her power to induce them seriously to labor for their salvation. Her mortifications were extraordinary, especially when, some years before her husband's death, she was permitted by him to inflict on her body what hardships she pleased. She from that time abstained from wine, fish, and dainty meats, with a total abstinence from flesh, unless in her greatest sicknesses. Her ordinary diet was hard and mouldy bread. She would procure secretly, out of the pouches of the beggars, their dry crusts in exchange for better bread. When she {551} fared the best, she only added to bread a few unsavory herbs without oil, and drank nothing but water, making use of a human skull for her cup. She ate but once a day, and by long abstinence had lost all relish of what she took. Her garments were of coarse serge, and she never wore linen, not even in sickness. Her discipline was armed with rowels and sharp points. She wore continually a hair shirt, and a girdle of horse-hair. An iron girdle had so galled her flesh, that her confessor obliged her to lay it aside. If she inadvertently chanced to offend God in the least, she severely that instant punished the part that had offended; as the tongue, by sharply biting it, &c. Her example was of such edification, that many Roman ladies having renounced a life of idleness, pomp, and softness, joined her in pious exercises, and put themselves under the direction of the Benedictin monks of the congregation of Monte-Oliveto, without leaving the world, making vows, or wearing any particular habit. St. Frances prayed only for children that they might be citizens of heaven, and when she was blessed with them, it was her whole care to make them saints. It pleased God, for her sanctification, to make trial of her virtue by many afflictions. During the troubles which ensued upon the invasion of Rome by Ladislas, king of Naples, and the great schism under pope John XXIII. at the time of opening the council of Constance, in 1413, her husband, with his brother-in-law Paulucci, was banished Rome, his estate confiscated, his house pulled down, and his eldest son, John Baptist, detained a hostage. Her soul remained calm amidst all those storms: she said with Job: "_God hath given, and God hath taken away._ I rejoice in these losses, because they are God's will. Whatever he sends I shall continually bless and praise his name for." The schism being extinguished by the council of Constance, and tranquillity restored at Rome, her husband recovered his dignity and estate. Some time after, moved by the great favors St. Frances received from heaven, and by her eminent virtue, he gave her full leave to live as she pleased; and he himself chose to serve God in a state of continency. He permitted her in his own life-time to found a monastery of nuns, called Oblates, for the reception of such of her own sex as were disposed to embrace a religious life. The foundation of this house was in 1425. She gave them the rule of St. Benedict, adding some particular constitutions of her own, and put them under the direction of the congregation of the Olivetans. The house being too small for the numbers that fled to this sanctuary from the corruption of the world, she would gladly have removed her community to a larger house; but not finding one suitable, she enlarged it, in 1433, from which year the founding of the Order is dated. It was approved by pope Eugenius IV. in 1437. They are called Collatines, perhaps from the quarter of Rome in which they are situated; and Oblates, because they call their profession an oblation, and use in it the word offero, not profiteer. St. Frances could not yet join her new family; but as soon as she had settled her domestic affairs, after the death of her husband, she went barefoot, with a cord about her neck, to the monastery which she had founded, and there, prostrate on the ground, before the religious, her spiritual children, begged to be admitted. She accordingly took the habit on St. Benedict's day, in 1437. She always sought the meanest employments in the house, being fully persuaded she was of all the most contemptible before God; and she labored to appear as mean in the eyes of the world as she was in her own. She continued the same humiliations, and the same universal poverty, though soon after chosen superioress of her congregation. Almighty God bestowed on her humility, extraordinary graces, and supernatural favors, as frequent visions, raptures, and the gift of prophecy. She enjoyed the familiar conversation of her angel-guardian, as her life and the process of her canonization {552} attest. She was extremely affected by meditating on our Saviour's passion, which she had always present to her mind. At mass she was so absorbed in God as to seem immoveable, especially after holy communion: she often fell into ecstasies of love and devotion. She was particularly devout to St. John the Evangelist, and above all to our Lady, under whose singular protection she put her Order. Going out to see her son John Baptist, who was dangerously sick, she fell so ill herself that she could not return to her monastery at night. After having foretold her death, and received the sacraments, she expired on the 9th of March, in the year 1440, and of her age the fifty-sixth. God attested her sanctity by miracles: she was honored among the saints immediately after her death, and solemnly canonized by Paul V. in 1608. Her shrine in Rome is most magnificent and rich: and her festival is kept as a holyday in the city, with great solemnity. The Oblates make no solemn vows, only a promise of obedience to the mother-president, enjoy pensions, inherit estates, and go abroad with leave. Their abbey in Rome is filled with ladies of the first rank. In a religious life, in which a regular distribution of holy employments and duties takes up the whole day, and leaves no interstices of time for idleness, sloth, or the world, hours pass in these exercises with the rapidity of moments, and moments by fervor of the desires bear the value of years. There is not an instant in which a soul is not employed for God, and studies not with her whole heart to please him. Every step, every thought and desire, is a sacrifice of fidelity, obedience, and love offered to him. Even meals, recreation, and rest, are sanctified by this intention; and from the religious vows and habitual purpose of the soul of consecrating herself entirely to God in time and eternity, every action, as St. Thomas teaches, renews and contains the fervor and merit of this entire consecration, of which it is a part. In a secular life, a person by regularity in the employment of his time, and fervor in devoting himself to God in all his actions and designs, may in some degree enjoy the same happiness and advantage. This St. Frances perfectly practised, even before she renounced the world. She lived forty years with her husband without ever giving him the least occasion of offence; and by the fervor with which she conversed of heaven, she seemed already to have quitted the earth, and to have made paradise her ordinary dwelling. ST. GREGORY OF NYSSA, B.C. HE was younger brother to St. Basil the Great; was educated in polite and sacred studies, and married to a virtuous lady. He afterwards renounced the world, and was ordained lector; but was overcome by his violent passion for eloquence to teach rhetoric. St. Gregory Nazianzen wrote to him in the strongest terms, exhorting him to renounce that paltry or ignoble glory, as he elegantly calls it.[1] This letter produced its desired effect. St. Gregory returned to the sacred ministry in the lower functions of the altar: after some time he was called by his brother Basil to assist him in his pastoral duties, and in 372 was chosen bishop of Nyssa, a city of Cappadocia, near the Lesser Armenia. The Arians, who trembled at his name, prevailed with Demosthenes, vicar or deputy-governor of the province, to banish him. Upon the death of the Arian emperor, Valens, in 378, St. Gregory was restored to his see by the emperor Gratian. Our holy prelate was chosen by his colleagues to redress the abuses and dissensions which heresy had introduced {553} in Arabia and Palestine. He assisted at the council of Constantinople in 381, and was always regarded as the centre of the Catholic communion in the East. Those prelates only who joined themselves to him, were looked upon as orthodox. He died about the year 400, probably on the 10th of January, on which the Greeks have always kept his festival: the Latins honor his memory on the 9th of March. The high reputation of his learning and virtue procured him the title of Father of the Fathers, as the seventh general council testifies. His sermons are the monuments of his piety; but his great penetration and learning appear more in his polemic works, especially in his twelve books against Eunomius. See his life collected from his works, St. Greg. Nazianzen, Socrates, and Theodoret, by Hermant, Tillemont, t. 9, p. 561; Ceillier, t. 8, p. 200. Dr. Cave imagines, that St. Gregory continued to cohabit with his wife after he was bishop. But St. Jerom testifies that the custom of the eastern churches did not suffer such a thing. She seems to have lived to see him bishop, and to have died about the year 384; but she professed a state of continency: hence St. Gregory Nazianzen, in his short eulogium of her, says, she rivalled her brothers-in-law who were in the priesthood, and calls her sacred, or one consecrated to God; probably she was a deaconess. Footnotes: 1. [Greek: {apstzên eaostzian}], Naz. {}. APPENDIX ON THE WRITINGS OF ST. GREGORY OF NYSSA. ST. GREGORY OF NYSSA wrote many learned works extant in three volumes in folio, published by the learned Jesuit, Fronto le Duc, at Paris, an. 1615 and 1638. They are eternal monuments of this father's great zeal, piety, and eloquence. Photius commends his diction, as surpassing that of all other rhetoricians, in perspicuity, elegance, and a pleasing turn of expression, and says, that in the beauty and sweetness of his eloquence, and the copiousness of his arguments in his polemic works against Eunomius, he far outwent the rest who handled the same subjects. He wrote many commentaries on holy scripture. The first is his Hexæmeron, or book on the six days' work of the creation of the world. It is a supplement to his brother Basil's work on the same subject, who had omitted the obscurer questions, above the reach of the vulgar, to whom he preached. Gregory filled up that deficiency, at the request of many learned men, with an accuracy that became the brother of the great Basil. He shows in this work a great knowledge of philosophy. He finishes it by saying, The widow that offered her two mites did not hinder the magnificent presents of the rich, nor did they who offered skins, wood, and goats' hair towards the tabernacle, hinder those who could give gold, silver, and precious stones. "I shall be happy," says he, "if I can present hairs; and shall rejoice to see others add ornaments of purple, or gold tissue." His book, On the Workmanship of Man, may be looked upon as a continuation of the former, though it was written first. He shows it was suitable that man, being made to command in quality of king all this lower creation, should find his palace already adorned, and that other things should be created before he appeared who was to be the spectator of the miracles of the Omnipotent. His frame is so admirable, his nature so excellent, that the whole Blessed Trinity proceeds as it were by a council, to his formation. He is a king, by his superiority and command over all other creatures by his gift of reason; is part spiritual, by which he can unite himself to God; part material, by which he has it in his power to use and even enslave himself to creatures. Virtue is his purple garment, immortality his sceptre, and eternal glory his crown. His resemblance to his Creator consist in the soul only, that is, in its moral virtues and God's grace; which divine resemblance men most basely efface in themselves by sin. He speaks of the dignity and spiritual nature of the soul, and the future resurrection of the body, and concludes with an anatomical description of it, which shows him to have been well skilled in medicine, and in that branch of natural philosophy, for that age. The two homilies on the words, _Let us make man_, are falsely ascribed to him. When {554} desired by one Cæsarius to prescribe him rules of a perfect virtue, he did this by his Life of Moses, the pattern of virtue. He closes it with this lesson, that perfection consists not in avoiding sin for fear of torments, as slaves do, nor for the hope of recompense, as mercenaries do; but in "fearing, as the only thing to be dreaded, to lose the friendship of God; and in having only one desire, viz., of God's friendship, in which alone man's spiritual life consists. This is to be obtained by fixing the mind only on divine and heavenly things." We have next his two treatises, On the Inscriptions of the Psalms, and An Exposition of the sixth Psalm, full of allegorical and moral instructions. In the first of these, extolling the divine sentiments and instructions of those holy prayers, he says, that all Christians learned them, and thought that time lost in which they had them not in their mouths: even little children and old men sung them; all in affliction found them their comfort sent by God those who travelled by land or sea, those who were employed in sedentary trades; and the faithful of all ages, sexes, and conditions, sick and well, made the Psalms their occupation. These divine canticles were sung by them in all times of joy, in marriages and festivals; by day, and in the night vigils, &c. His eight homilies, On the three first Chapters of Ecclesiastes, are an excellent moral instruction and literal explication of that book. He addressed his fifteen homilies, On the Book of Canticles, which he had preached to his flock, to Olympias, a lady of Constantinople, who, after twenty months' marriage, being left a widow, distributed a great estate to the church and poor, a great part by the hands of our saint, whom she had settled an acquaintance with in a journey he had made to the imperial city. St. Gregory extols the excellency of that divine book, not to be read but by pure hearts, disengaged from all love of creatures, and free from all corporeal images. He says the Holy Ghost instructs us by degrees; by the book of Proverbs to avoid sin; by Ecclesiastes to draw our affections from creatures; by this of Canticles he teaches perfection, which is pure charity. He explains it mystically. He has five orations On the Lord's Prayer. In the first, he elegantly shows the universal, indispensable necessity of prayer, which alone unites the heart to God, and preserves it from the approach of sin. Every breath we draw ought also to be accompanied with thanksgiving, as it brings us innumerable benefits from God, which we ought continually to acknowledge. But we must only pray for spiritual, not temporal things. In the second, he shows that none can justly call God Father, who remain in sin, without desires of repentance, and who consequently bear the ensigns of the devil. Resemblance with God is the mark of being his son; that title further obliges us to have our minds and hearts always in heaven. By the next we pray that God alone may reign in us, and his will be ever done by us; and that the devil or self-love never have any share in our hearts or actions. By the fourth we ask bread, _i.e._, absolute necessaries, not dainties, not riches, or any thing superfluous, or for the world, and even bread only for today, without solicitude for to-morrow, which perhaps will never come: all irregular desires and all occasions of them must be excluded. "The serpent is watching at your heel, but do you watch his head: give him no admittance into your mind: from the least entrance he will draw in after him the foldings of his whole body. If Eve's counsellor persuades you that any thing looks beautiful and tastes sweet, if you listen you are soon drawn into gluttony, and lust, and avarice, &c." The fifth petition he thus paraphrases, "I have forgiven my debtors, do not reject your suppliant. I dismissed my debtor cheerful and free. I am your debtor, send me not away sorrowful. May my dispositions, my sentence prevail with you. I have pardoned, pardon: I have showed compassion, imitate your servant's mercy. My offences are indeed far more grievous; but consider how much you excel in all good. It is just that you manifest to sinners a mercy suiting your infinite greatness. I have given proof of mercy in little things, according to the capacity of my nature; but your bounty is not to be confined by the narrowness of my power, &c." His eight sermons, On the Eight Beatitudes, are written in the same style. What he says in them on the motives of humility, which he thinks is meant by the first beatitude, of poverty of spirit, and on meekness, proves how much his heart was filled with those divine virtues. Besides what we have of St. Gregory on the holy scripture, time has preserved us many other works of piety of this father. His discourse entitled, On his Ordination, ought to be called, On the Dedication. It was spoken by him in the consecration of a magnificent church, built by Rufin, (præfect of the prætorium,) ann. 394, at the Borough of the Oak, near Chalcedon. His sermon, On loving the Poor, is a pathetic exhortation to alms, from the last sentence on the wicked for a neglect of that duty. "At which threat," he says, "I am most vehemently terrified, and disturbed in mind." He excites to compassion for the lepers in particular, who, under their miseries, are our brethren, and it is only God's favor that has preserved us sound rather than them; and who knows what we ourselves may become? His dialogue Against Fate was a disputation with a heathen philosopher, who maintained a destiny or overruling fate in all things. His canonical epistle to Letoius, bishop of Melitine, metropolis of Armenia, has a place among the canons of penance in the Greek church, published by Beveridge. He condemns apostacy to perpetual penance, deprived of the sacraments till the article of death: if only extorted by torments, for nine years; the same law for witchcraft; nine years for simple fornication; eighteen for adultery; twenty-seven for {555} murder, or for rapine. But he permits the terms to be abridged in cases of extraordinary fervor. Simple theft he orders to be expiated by the sinner giving all his substance to the poor; if he has none, to work to relieve them. His discourse against those who defer baptism, is an invitation to sinners to penance, and chiefly of catechumens to baptism, death being always uncertain. He is surprised to see an earthquake or pestilence drive all to penance and to the font: though an apoplexy or other sudden death may as easily surprise men any night of their lives. He relates this frightful example. When the Nomades Scythians plundered those parts, Archias, a young nobleman of Comanes, whom he knew very well, and who deferred his baptism, fell into their hands, and was shot to death by their arrows, crying out lamentably, "Mountains and woods, baptize me; trees and rocks, give me the grace of the sacrament." Which miserable death more afflicted the city than all the rest of the war. His sermons, Against Fornication, On Penance, On Alms, On Pentecost, are in the same style. In that against Usurers, he exerts a more than ordinary zeal, and tells them: "Love the poor. In his necessity he has recourse to you to assist his misery, but by lending him on usury you increase it; you sow new miseries on his sorrows, and add to his afflictions. In appearance you do him a pleasure, but in reality ruin him, like one who, overeome by a sick man's importunities, gives him wine, a present satisfaction, but a real poison. Usury gives no relief, but makes your neighbor's want greater than it was. The usurer is no way profitable to the republic, neither by tilling the ground, by trade, &c.; yet idle at home, would have all to produce to him; hates all he gains not by. But though you were to give alms of these unjust exactions, they would carry along with them the tears of others robbed by them. The beggar that receives, did he know it, would refuse to be fed with the flesh and blood of a brother; with bread extorted by rapine, from other poor. Give it back to him from whom you unjustly took it. But to hide their malice, they change the name usury into milder words, calling it interest or moderate profit, like the heathens, who called their furies by the soft name Eumenides." He relates that a rich usurer of Nyssa, so covetous as to deny himself and children necessaries, and not to use the bath to save three farthings, dying suddenly, left his money all hid and buried where his children could never find it, who by that means were all reduced to beggary. "The usurers answer me," says he, "then we will not lend; and what will the poor do? I bid them give, and exhort to lend, but without interest; for he that refuses to lend, and he that lends at usury, are equally criminal;" viz. if the necessity of another be extreme. His sermon On the Lent Fast displays the advantage of fasting for the health of both body and soul; he demands these forty days' strenuous labor to cure all their vices, and insists on total abstinence from wine at large, and that weakness of constitution and health is ordinarily a vain pretence. Saint Gregory's great Catechistical Discourse is commended by Theodoret, (dial. 2 & 3;) Leontius, (b. 3;) Enthymius, (Panopl. p. 215;) Germanus, patr. of Constantinople, (in Photius, cod. 233, &c.) The last lines are an addition. In the fortieth chapter he expounds to the catechumens the mysteries of the Unity and Trinity of God, and the Incarnation: also the two sacraments of baptism and the body of Christ, in which latter Christ's real body is mixed with our corruptible bodies, to bestow on us immortality and grace. In his book upon Virginity he extols its merit and dignity. St. Gregory was much scandalized in his journey to Jerusalem to see contentions reign in that holy place; yet he had the comfort to find there several persons of great virtue, especially three very devout ladies, to whom he afterwards wrote a letter, in which he says, (t. 3, pp. 655, 656:) "When I saw those holy places, I was filled with a joy and pleasure which no tongue can express." Soon after his return, he wrote a short treatise on those who go to Jerusalem, (t. 3. app. p. 72,) in which he condemns pilgrimages, when made an occasion of sloth, dissipation of mind, and other dangers; and observes that they are no part of the gospel precepts. Dr. Cave (p. 44) borrows the sophistry of Du Moulin to employ this piece against the practice of pilgrimages; but in part very unjustly, as Gretser (not. in Notas Molinei) demonstrates. Some set too great a value on pilgrimages, and made them an essential part of perfection: and by them even many monks and nuns exchanged their solitude into a vagabond life. These abuses St. Gregory justly reproves. What he says, that he himself received no good by visiting the holy places, must be understood to be a Miosis, or extenuation to check the monks' too ardent passion for pilgrimages, and only means, the presence of those holy places, barely of itself, contributes nothing to a man's sanctification: but he does not deny it to be profitable by many devout persons uniting together in prayer and mortification, and by exciting hearts more powerfully to devotion. "Movemur locis ipsis in quibus eorum quos admiramur aut diligimus adsunt vestigia," said Atticas in Cicero. "Me quidem illæ ipsæ nostræ Athenæ, non tam operibus magnificis exquisitisque antiquorum artibus delectant, quam recordatione summorum virorum, ubi quis habitare, ubi sedere, ubi disputare sit, solitus, studiuseque eorum sepulchra contemplor." Much more must the sight of the places of Christ's mysteries stir up our sentiments and love. Why else did St. Gregory go over Calvary, Golgotha, Olivet, Bethlehem? What was the unspeakable (spiritual, certainly, not corporal) pleasure he was filled with at their sight? a real spiritual {556} benefit, and that which is sought by true pilgrims. Does he not relate and approve the pilgrimages of his friend, the monk Olympius? Nor could he be ignorant of the doctrice and practice of the church. He must know in the third century that his countryman Alexander, a bishop in Cappadocia, admonished by divine oracle, went to Jerusalem to pray, and to visit the holy places, &c., as Eusebius relates; (Hist. lib. 6, cap. 11, p. 212,) and that this had been always the tradition and practice; "Longum est nuns ab ascensu Domini usque ad præsentem diem per singulas ætates currere, qui episcoporum, qui martyrum, qui eloquentium in doctrine ecclesiastica, virorum venerint Hierosolymam, putantes se minus religionis, minus habere scientiæ, nec summam ut dicitur manum accepisse virtutum, nisi in illis Christum adorassent locis de quibus primum Evangelium de patibulo coruscaverat." St. Jerom, in ep. Paulæ et Eustochii ad Marcellam, (T. 4, p. 550, ed. Ben) As for the abuses which St. Gregory censures, they are condemned in the canon law, by all divines and men of sound judgment. If with Benedict XIV. we grant this father reprehended the abuses of pilgrimages, so as to think the devotion itself not much to be recommended, this can only regard the circumstances of many who abuse them, which all condemn. He could not oppose the torrent of other fathers, and the practice of the whole church. And his devotion to holy places, relics, &c. is evident in his writings, and in the practice of St. Macrina and his whole family. His discourse On the Resurrection is the dialogue he had with his sister St. Macrina the day before her death. His treatise On the Name and Profession of a Christian, was written to show no one ought to bear that name, who does not practise the rules of this profession, and who has not its spirit, without which, a man may perform exterior duties, but will upon occasions betray himself, and forget his obligation. When a mountebank at Alexandria had taught an ape dressed in woman's clothes to dance most ingeniously, the people took it for a woman, till one threw some almonds on the stage; for then the beast could no longer contain, but tearing off its clothes, went about the stage picking up its dainty fruit, and showed itself to be an ape. Occasions of vain-glory, ambition, pleasure, &c., are the devil's baits and prove who are Christians, and who hypocrites and dissemblers under so great a name, whose lives are an injury and blasphemy against Christ and his holy religion. His book On Perfection teaches, that that life is most perfect which resembles nearest the life of Christ in humility and charity, and in dying to all passions and to the love of creatures that in which Christ most perfectly lives, and which is his best living image, which appears in a man's thoughts, words, and actions; for these show the image which is imprinted on the soul. But there is no perfection which is not occupied in continually advancing higher. His book On the Resolution of Perfection to the monks, shows perfection to consist in every action being referred to God, and done perfectly conformable to his will in the spirit of Christ. St. Gregory had excommunicated certain persons, who instead of repenting, fell to threats and violence. The saint made against them his sermon, entitled, Against those who do not receive chastisement submissively; in which, after exhorting them to submission, he offers himself to suffer torments and death, closing it thus: "How can we murmur to suffer, who are the ministers of a God crucified? yet under all you inflict, I receive your insolences and persecutions as a father and mother do from their dearest children, with tenderness." In the discourse On Children dying without Baptism, he shows that such can never enjoy God; yet feel not the severe torments of the rest of the damned. We have his sermons On Pentecost, Christ's Birth, Baptism, Ascension, and On his Resurrection, (but of these last only the first, third, and fourth are St. Gregory's) and two On St. Stephen, three On the forty Martyrs: the lives of St. Gregory Thaumaturgus, St. Theodorus, St. Ephrem, St. Meletius, and his sister, St. Macrina: his panegyric on his brother St. Basil the Great, the funeral oration of Pulcheria, daughter to the Emperor Theodosius, six years old, and that of his mother, the empress Flaccilla, who died soon after her at the waters in Thrace. St. Gregory was invited to make these two discourses, in 385, when he was at Constantinople. We have only five of St. Gregory's letters in his works. Zacagnius has published fourteen others out of the Vatican library. Caraccioli of Pisa, in 1731, has given us seven more with tedious notes. Saint Gregory surpasses himself in perspicuity and strength of reasoning, in his polemic works against all the chief heretics of his time. His twelve books against Eunomius, were ever most justly valued above the rest. St. Basil had refuted that heresiarch's apology; nor durst he publish any answer till after the death of that eloquent champion of the faith. Then the Apology of his Apology began to creep privately abroad. St. Gregory got at last a copy, and wrote his twelve excellent books, in which he vindicates St. Basil's memory, and gives many secret histories of the base Eunomius's life. He proves against him the Divinity and Consubstantiality of God the Son. Though he employs the scripture with extraordinary sagacity, he says, tradition, by succession from the apostles, is alone sufficient to condemn heretics. (Or. 3, contra Eunom. p. 123.) We have his treatise To Ablavius, that there are not three gods. A treatise On Faith also against the Arians. That On Common Notions is an explication of the terms used about the Blessed Trinity. We have his Ten Syllogisms against the Manichees, proving that evil cannot be a God. The heresy {557} of the Apollinarists beginning to be broached, St. Gregory wrote to Theophilus patriarch of Alexandria, against them, showing there is but one Person in Christ. But his great work against Apollinaris is his Antirretic, quoted by Leontius, the sixth general council, &c. Only a fragment was printed in the edition of this father's works; but it was published from MSS. by Zacagnius, prefect of the Vatican Library, in 1698. He shows in it that the Divinity could not suffer, and that there must be two natures in Christ, who was perfect God and perfect man. He proves also, against Apollinaris, that Christ had a human soul with a human understanding. His book of Testimonies against the Jews is another fruit of his zeal. St. Gregory so clearly establishes the Procession of the Holy Ghost from the Son, that some Greeks, obstinate in that heresy, erased out of his writings the words _out of_, as they confessed in a council at Constantinople, in 1280. He expressly condemned Nestorianism before it was broached, and says, "No one dare call the holy Virgin and mother of God, mother of man." (Ep. ad Eustath. p. 1093.) He asserts her virginity in and after the birth of Christ. (Or. contr. Ennom. p. 108, and Serm. in natale Christi, p. 776.) He is no less clear for transubstantiation in his great catechistical discourse (c. 37, pp. 534, 535,) for the sacrifice and the altar. Or in Bapt. Christi, p. 801. Private confession of sins is plain from his epistle to Letoius, (p. 954,) in which he writes thus: "Whoever secretly steals another man's goods, if he afterwards discovers his sins by declaration to the priest, his heart being changed, he will cure his wound, giving what he has to the poor." This for occult theft, for which no canonical penance was prescribed. He inculcates the authority of priests of binding and loosing before God, (Serm. do Castig. 746, 747,) and calls St. Peter "prince of the apostolic choir," (Serm. 2, de Sancto Stephano edito a Zacagnio, p. 339,) and (ib. p. 343,) "the head of the apostles;" and adds, "In glorifying him all the members of the church are glorified, and that it is founded on him." He writes very expressly and at length on the invocation of saints, and says they enjoy the beatific vision immediately after death, in his sermons on St. Theodorus, on the Forty Martyrs, St. Ephrem, St. Meletius, &c. ST. PACIAN, BISHOP OF BARCELONA, C. WAS a great ornament of the church in the fourth century. He was illuustrious by birth, and had been engaged in marriage in the world. His son Dexter was raised to the first dignities in the empire, being high chamberlain to the emperor Theodosius, and præfectus-prætorio under Honorius. St. Pacian having renounced the world, was made bishop in 373. St. Jerom, who dedicated to him his Catalogue of illustrious men, extols his eloquence and learning, and more particularly the chastity and sanctity of his life. We have his Exhortation to Penance, and three letters to Sympronianus, a Novatian nobleman, on Penance, and on the name of Catholic; also a sermon on Baptism. See St. Jerom, Catal. Vir. Illust. c. 106, p. 195 t 4: Ceillier, t. 6; Tillem. t. 8. APPENDIX ON THE WRITINGS OF ST. PACIAN OF BARCELONA. WHEN he was made bishop of Barcelona, in 373, there lived in the neighborhood of that city one Sympronian, a man of distinction, whom the bishop calls brother and lord, who was a Donatist, and also engaged in the heresy of the Novatians, who, following the severity of the Montanists, denied penance and pardon for certain sins. He sent St. Pacian a letter by a servant, in which he censured the church for allowing repentance to all crimes, and for taking the title of Catholic. St. Pacian answers him in three learned letters. In the first he sums up the principal heresies from Simon Magus to the Novatians and asks Sympronian, which he will choose to stand by: entreats him to examine the true church with docility and candor, laying aside all obstinacy, the enemy to truth. He says {558} the name Catholic comes from God, and is necessary to distinguish the dove, the undivided virgin church, from all sects which are called from their particular founders. This name we learned from the holy doctors, confessors, and martyrs. "My name," says he, "is Christian, my surname Catholic: the one distinguishes me, the other points me out to others." "Christianus mihi nomen est; Catholicus veto cognomen: illud me nuncupat, istud ostendit; hoc probor, inde significor." He says that no name can be more proper to express the church, which is all obedient to Christ, and one and the same through the whole world. "As to penance," says he, "God grant it be necessary to none of the faithful; that none after baptism fall into the pit of death--but accuse not God's mercy, who has provided a remedy even for those that are sick. Does the infernal serpent continually carry poison, and has not Christ a remedy? Does the devil kill, and cannot Christ relieve? Fear sin, but not repentance. Be ashamed to be in danger, not to be delivered out of it. Who will snatch a plank from one lost by shipwreck? Who will envy the healing of wounds?" He mentions the parables of the lost drachma, the lost sheep, the prodigal son, the Samaritan, and God's threats, adding: "God would never threaten the impenitent, if he refused pardon. But you'll say, only God can do this. It is true; but what he does by his priests, is his power. What is that he says to his apostles? Whatsoever you shall bind, &c., Mat. xvi. Why this, if it was not given to men to bind and to loosen? Is this given only to the apostles? Then it is only given to them to baptize, to give the Holy Ghost, (in confirmation,) to cleanse the sins of infidels, because all this was commanded to no other than to the apostles. If therefore the power of baptism and of chrism, (confirmation,) which are far greater gifts, descended from the apostles to bishops; the power of binding and loosing also came to them." He concludes with these words: "I know, brother, this pardon of repentance is not promiscuously to be given to all, nor to be granted before the signs of the divine will, or perchance the last sickness; with great severity and strict scrutiny, after many groans, and shedding of tears; after the prayers of the whole church. But pardon is not denied to true repentance, that no one prevent or put by the judgment of Christ." St. Pacian answers his reply by a second letter, that remedies seem often bitter, and says, "How can you be offended at my catalogue of heresies, unless you was a heretic? I congratulate with you for agreeing upon our name Catholic, which if you denied, the thing itself would cry out against you." St. Pacian denies that St. Cyprian's people were ever called Apostatics or Capitoline, or by any name but that of Catholics, which the Novatians, with all their ambition for it, could never obtain, nor ever be known but by the name of Novatians. He says, the emperors persecuted the Novatians of their own authority, not at the instigation of the church. "You say I am angry," says he, "God forbid. I am like the bee which sometimes defends its honey with its sting." He vindicates the martyr St. Cyprian, and denies that Novatian ever suffered for the faith; adding, that "if he had, he could not have been crowned, because he was out of the church, out of which, no one can be a martyr. Etsi occisus, non tamen coronatus: quidni? Extra Ecclesiæ pacem, extra concordiam, extra eam matrem cujus portio debet esse, qui martyr est. Si charitatem non habeam, nihil sum. 1 Cor. xiii." In his third letter he confutes the Novatian error: that the church could not forgive mortal sin after baptism. "Moses, St. Paul, Christ, express tender charity for sinners; who then broached this doctrine? Novatian. But when? Immediately from Christ? No; almost three hundred years after him: since Decius's reign. Had he any prophets to learn it from? any proof of his revelation? had he the gift of tongues? did he prophesy? could he raise the dead? for he ought to have some of these to introduce a new gospel. Nay, St. Paul (Gal. i.) forbids a novelty in faith to be received from an angel. You will say, Let us dispute our point. But I am secure; content with the succession and tradition of the church, with the communion of the ancient body. I have sought no arguments." He assents that the church is holy, and more than Sympronian had given it: but says it cannot perish by receiving sinners. The good have always lived amidst the wicked. It is the heretic who divides it, and tears it, which is Christ's garment, asunder. The church is diffused over the whole world, and cannot be reduced to one little portion, or as it were chained to a part, as the Novatians, whose history he touches upon. Sympronian objected, that Catholic bishops remitted sin. St. Pacian answers, "Not I, but only God, who both blots out sin in baptism, and does not reject the tears of penitents. What I do is not in my own name, but in the Lord's. Wherefore, whether we baptize, or draw to penance, or give pardon to penitents, we do it by Christ's authority. You must see whether Christ can do it, and did it--Baptism is the sacrament of our Lord's passion; the pardon of penitents is the merit of confession. All can obtain that, because it is the gratuitous gift of God, but this labor is but of a small number who rise after a fall, and recover by tears, and by destroying the flesh." The saint shows the Novatians encourage sin by throwing men into despair; whereas repentance heals and stops it. Christ does not die a second time indeed for the pardon of sinners, but he is a powerful Advocate interceding still to his Father for sinners. Can he forsake those he redeemed at so dear a rate? Can the devil enslave, and Christ not absolve his servants? He alleges St. Peter denying Christ after he had been baptized, St. {559} Thomas incredulous, even after the resurrection; yet pardoned by repentance. He answers his objections from scripture, and exhorts him to embrace the Catholic faith; for the true church cannot be confined to a few, nor be new. "If she began before you, if she believed before you, if she never left her foundation, and was never divorced from her body, she must be the spouse; it is the great and rich house of all. God did not purchase with his blood so small a portion, nor is Christ so poor. The church of God dilates its tabernacles from the rising to the setting of the sun." Next to these three letters we have his excellent Paraenesis, or exhortation to penance. In the first part he reduces the sins subjected to courses of severe public penance by the canons to three, idolatry, murder, and impurity; and shows the enormity of each. In the second he addresses himself to those sinners, who out of shame, or for fear of the penances to be enjoined, did not confess their crimes. He calls them shamefully timorous and bashful to do good, after having been bold and impudent to sin, and says, "And you do not tremble to touch the holy mysteries, and to thrust your defiled soul into the holy place, in the sight of the angels, and before God himself, as if you were innocent." He mentions Oza lain for touching the ark, (2 Kings vi.,) and the words of the apostle, (1 Cor. xi.,) adding, "Do not you tremble when you hear, he shall be guilty of the body and blood of the Lord? One guilty of the blood of a man would not rest, and can he escape who has profaned the body of the Lord? What do you do by deceiving the priest, or hiding part of your load? I beseech you no longer to cover your wounded conscience. Rogo vos etiam pro periculo men, per illum Dominum quem occulta non fallunt, desinite vulneratam tegere conscientiam. Men sick are not backward to show their sores to physicians, and shall the sinner be afraid or ashamed to purchase eternal life by a momentary confusion? Will he draw back his wounds from the Lord, who is offering his hand to heal them? Peccator timebit? peccator erubeseet perpetuam vitam præsenti pudore mercari? et offerenti manus Domino vulnera male tecta subducet?" In his third part he speaks to those who confessed their sins entirely, but feared the severity of the penance. He compares these to dying men who should not have the courage to take a dose which would restore their health, and says, "This is to cry out, behold I am sick, I am wounded; but I will not he cured." He deplores their delicacy, and proposes to them king David's austere penance. He describes thus the life of a penitent. "He is to weep in the sight of the church, to go meanly clad, to mourn, to fast, to prostrate himself, to renounce the bath, and such delights. If invited to a banquet, he is to say, such things are for those who have not had the misfortune to have sinned; I have offended the Lord, and am in danger of perishing forever: what have I to do with feasts? Ista felicibus: ego deliqui in Dominum, et periclitor in æternum perire: quo mihi epulas qui Dominum læsi? You must moreover sue for the prayers of the poor, of the widows, of the priest, prostrating yourself before them, and of the whole church; to do every thing rather than to perish. Omnia prius tentare ne pereas." He presses sinners to severe penance, for fear of hell, and paints a frightful image of it from the fires of Vesuvius and ætna. His treatise or Sermon On Baptism, is an instruction on original sin, and the effects of this sacrament, by which we are reborn, as by chrism or confirmation we receive the Holy Ghost by the hands of the bishop. He adds a moving exhortation that, being delivered from sin, and having renounced the devil, we no more return to sin; such a relapse after baptism being much worse. "Hold, therefore, strenuously," says he, "what you have received, preserve it faithfully; sin no more; keep yourselves pure and spotless for the day of out Lord." Besides these three books, he wrote one against the play of the stag, commended by St. Jerom, but now lost. The heathens had certain infamous diversions with a little stag at the beginning of every year, mentioned by St. Ambrose, (in Ps. 141,) and by Nilus, (ep. 81.) It seems from the sermons, 129, 130, in the appendix to St. Augustine's, (t. 5,) that it consisted of masquerades, dressed in the figures of wild beasts. Some Christians probably joined in them. St. Pacian's zeal dictated that book against it, but the effect it produced at that time, seemed chiefly to make many more curious and more eager to see that wicked play, as St. Pacian himself says in the beginning of his exhortation to penance. The beauty of this holy doctor's writings can only be dis covered by reading them. His diction is elegant, his reasoning just and close, and his thoughts beautiful: he is full of unction when he exhorts to virtue, and of strength when he attacks vice. ST. CATHERINE OF BOLOGNA, VIRGIN, ABBESS OF THE POOR CLARES IN THAT CITY. SHE was born of noble parentage at Bologna, in 1413. Early ardent sentiments of piety seemed to have prevented in her the use of reason. {560} At twelve years of age she was placed in quality of a young maid of honor in the family of the princess Margaret, daughter to Nicholas of Est, marquis of Ferrara. Two years after, upon the marriage of that princess, she found means to recover her liberty, and entered herself in a community of devout ladies of the Third Order of St. Francis, at Ferrara, who soon after formed themselves into a regular monastery, and adopted the austere rule of St. Clare. A new nunnery of Poor Clares being founded at Bologna, St. Catherine was chosen first prioress, and sent thither by Leonarda, abbess of the monastery of Corpus Christi, in which she had made her religions profession at Ferrara. Catherine's incredible zeal and solitude for the souls of sinners made her pour forth prayers and tears, almost without intermission, for their salvation. She always spoke to God, or of God, and bore the most severe interior trials with an heroic patience and cheerfulness. She looked upon it as the greatest honor to be in any thing the servant of the spouses of Christ, and desired to be despised by all, and to serve all in the meanest employments. She was favored with the gifts of miracles and prophecy: but said she had been sometimes deceived by the devil. She died on the 9th of March, 1453, in the fiftieth year of her age. Her body is still entire, and shown in the church of her convent through bars and glass, sitting richly covered, but the hands, face, and feet naked. It was seen and described by Henschenius, Lassels, and other travellers. Her name was inserted in the Roman Martyrology by Clement VIII., in 1592. The solemnity of her canonization was performed by Clement XI., though the bull was only published by Benedict XIII., in 1724.[1] A book of her revelations was printed at Bologna, in 1511. She also left notes in her prayer-book of certain singular favors which she had received from God. These revelations were published and received their dress from another hand, which circumstance is often as great a disadvantage in such works as if an illiterate and bold transcriber were to copy, from a single defective manuscript, Lycophron, or some other obscure author, which he did not understand. St. Catherine wrote some treatises in Italian, others in Latin, in which language she was well skilled. The most famous of her works is the book entitled, On the Seven Spiritual Arms. See her life in Bollandus, written by F. Paleotti, fifty years after her death. Footnotes: 1. Bullar. Roman. t. 13, p. 87. MARCH X. THE FORTY MARTYRS OF SEBASTE. From St. Basil's Homily on their festival, Hom. 20, t. 1, p. 453, and three discourses of St. Gregory of Nyssa, t. 2, p. 203, t. 3, pp. 499, 504, followed by St. Ephrem. ed. Vatic. Gr. and Let. t. 2, p. 341. St. Gaudeatis, St. Chrysostom, quoted by Photius. See Tillemont, t. 5, p. 518. Ruinart, p. 523. Ceillier, t. 4, l. 62 Jos. Assemani in Cal. Univ. ad 11 Martii, t. 6, p. 172. A.D. 320. THESE holy martyrs suffered at Sebaste, in the Lesser Armenia, under the emperor Licinius, in 320. They were of different countries, but enrolled in the same troop; all in the flower of their age, comely, brave, and robust, and were become considerable for their services. St. Gregory of Nyssa and Procopius say, they were of the thundering legion, so famous {561} under Marcus Aurelius for the miraculous rain and victory obtained by their prayers. This was the twelfth legion, and then quartered in Armenia. Lysias was duke or general of the forces, and Agricola the governor of the province. The latter having signified to the army the orders of the emperor Licinius, for all to sacrifice, these forty went boldly up to him, and said they were Christians, and that no torments should make them ever abandon their holy religion. The judge first endeavored to gain them by mild usage; as by representing to them the dishonor that would attend their refusal to do what was required, and by making them large promises of preferment and high favor with the emperor in case of compliance. Finding these methods of gentleness ineffectual, he had recourse to threats, and these the most terrifying, if they continued disobedient to the emperor's order, but all in vain. To his promises they answered, that he could give them nothing equal to what he would deprive them of: and to his threats, that his power only extended over their bodies, which they had learned to despise when heir souls were at stake. The governor, finding them all resolute, caused them to be torn with whips, and their sides to be rent with iron hooks. After which they were loaded with chains, and committed to jail. After some days, Lysias, their governor, coming from Cæsarea to Sebaste, they were re-examined, and no less generously rejected the large promises made them than they despised the torments they were threatened with. The governor, highly offended at their courage, and that liberty of speech with which they accosted him, devised an extraordinary kind of death; which being slow and severe, he hoped would shake their constancy. The cold in Armenia is very sharp, especially in March, and towards the end of winter, when the wind is north, as it than was; it being also at that time a severe frost. Under the walls of the town stood a pond, which was frozen so hard that it would bear walking upon with safety. The judge ordered the saints to be exposed quite naked on the ice.[1] And in order to tempt them the more powerfully to renounce their faith, a warm bath was prepared at a small distance from the frozen pond, for any of this company to go to, who were disposed to purchase their temporal ease and safety on that condition. The martyrs, on hearing their sentence, ran joyfully to the place, and without waiting to be stripped, undressed themselves, encouraging one another in the same manner as is usual among soldiers in military expeditions attended with hardships and dangers; saying, that one bad night would purchase them a happy eternity.[2] They also made this their joint prayer: "Lord, we are forty who are engaged in this combat; grant that we may be forty crowned, and that not one be wanting to this sacred number." The guards in the mean time ceased not to persuade them to sacrifice, that by so doing they might be allowed to pass to the warm bath. But though it is not easy to form a just idea of the bitter pain they must have undergone, of the whole number only one had the misfortune to be overcome; who, losing courage, went off from the pond to seek the relief in readiness for such as were disposed to renounce their faith: but as the devil usually deceives his adorers, the apostate no sooner entered the warm water but he expired. This misfortune afflicted the martyrs; but they were quickly comforted by seeing his place and their number miraculously filled up. A sentinel was warming himself near the bath, having been posted there to observe if any of the martyrs were inclined to submit. While he was attending, he had a vision of blessed spirits descending from heaven on the martyrs, and distributing, {562} as from their king, rich presents, and precious garments, St. Ephrem adds crowns, to all these generous soldiers, one only excepted, who was their faint-hearted companion, already mentioned. The guard, being struck with the celestial vision and the apostate's desertion, was converted upon it; and by a particular motion of the Holy Ghost, threw off his clothes, and placed himself in his stead among the thirty-nine martyrs. Thus God heard their request, though in another manner than they imagined: "Which, ought to make us adore the impenetrable secrets of his mercy and justice," says St. Ephrem, "in this instance, no less than in the reprobation of Judas, and the election of St. Matthias." In the morning the judge ordered both those that were dead with the cold, and those that were still alive, to be laid on carriages, and cast into a fire. When the rest were thrown into a wagon to be carried to the pile, the youngest of them (whom the acts call Melito) was found alive; and the executioners, hoping he would change his resolution when he came to himself, left him behind. His mother, a woman of mean condition, and a widow, but rich in faith, and worthy to have a son a martyr, observing this false compassion, reproached the executioners; and when she came up to her son, whom she found quite frozen, not able to stir, and scarce breathing, he looked on her with languishing eyes, and made a little sign with his weak hand to comfort her. She exhorted him to persevere to the end, and, fortified by the Holy Ghost, took him up, and put him with her own hands into the wagon with the rest of the martyrs, not only without shedding a tear, but with a countenance full of joy, saying, courageously: "Go, go, son, proceed to the end of this happy journey with thy companions, that thou mayest not be the last of them that shall present themselves before God." Nothing can be more inflamed or more pathetic than the discourse which St. Ephrem puts into her mouth, by which he expresses her contempt of life and all earthly things, and her ardent love and desire of eternal life. This holy father earnestly entreats her to conjure this whole troop of martyrs to join in imploring the divine mercy in favor of his sinful soul.[3] Their bodies were burned, and their ashes thrown into the river; but the Christians secretly carried off, or purchased part of them with money. Some of these precious relies were kept at Cæsarea, and St. Basil says of them: "Like bulwarks, they are our protection against the inroads of enemies."[4] He adds, that every one implored their succor, and that they raised up those that had fallen, strengthened the weak, and invigorated the fervor of the saints. SS. Basil and Emmelia, the holy parents of St. Basil the Great, St. Gregory of Nyssa, St. Peter of Sebaste, and St. Macrina, procured a great share of these relics.[5] St. Emmelia put some of them in the church she built near Anneses, the village where they resided. The solemnity with which they were received was extraordinary, and they were honored by miracles, as St. Gregory relates. One of these was a miraculous cure wrought on a lame soldier, the truth of which he attests from his own knowledge, both of the fact and the person, who published it everywhere. He adds: "I buried the bodies of my parents by the relics of these holy martyrs, that in the resurrection they may rise with the encouragers of their faith; for I know they have great power with God, of which I have seen clear proofs and undoubted testimonies." St. Gaudentius, bishop of Brescia, writes in his sermon on these martyrs: "God gave me a share of these venerable relics and granted me to found this church in their honor."[6] He says, that the two nieces of St. Basil, both abbesses, gave them to him as {563} he passed by Cæsarea, in a journey to Jerusalem; which venerable treasure they had received from their uncle. Portions of their relics were also carried to Constantinople, and there honored with great veneration, as Sozomen[7] and Procopius[8] have recorded at large, with an account of several visions and miracles, which attended the veneration paid to them in that city. * * * * * Though we are not all called to the trial of martyrdom, we are all bound daily to fight and to conquer too. By multiplied victories which we gain over our passions and spiritual enemies, by the exercise of meekness, patience, humility, purity, and all other virtues, we shall render our triumph complete, and attain to the crown of bliss. But are we not confounded at our sloth in our spiritual warfare, when we look on the conflicts of the martyrs? "The eloquence of the greatest orators, and the wisdom of the philosophers were struck dumb: the very tyrants and judges stood amazed, and were not able to find words to express their admiration, when they beheld the faith, the cheerfulness and constancy of the holy martyrs in their sufferings. But what excuse shall we allege in the tremendous judgment, who, without meeting with such cruel persecution and torments, are so remiss and slothful in maintaining the spiritual life of our souls, and the charity of God! What shall we do in that terrible day, when the holy martyrs, placed near the throne of God, with great confidence shall display their glorious scars, the proofs of their fidelity? What shall we then show? shall we produce our love for God? true faith? a disengagement of our affections from earthly things? souls freed from the tyranny of the passions? retirement and peace of mind? meekness? alms-deeds and compassion? holy and pure prayer? sincere compunction? watching and tears? Happy shall he be whom these works shall attend. He shall then be the companion of the martyrs, and shall appear with the same confidence before Christ and his angels. We beseech you, O most holy martyrs, who cheerfully suffered torments and death for his love, and are now more familiarly united to him, that you intercede with God for us slothful and wretched sinners, that he bestow on us the grace of Christ, by which we may be enlightened and enabled to love him."[9] Footnotes: 1. The acts and the greater part of the writers of their lives, suppose that they were to stand in the very water. But this is a circumstance which Tillemont, Badlet, Ruinart, Ceillier and others, correct from St. Basil and St. Gregory of Nyssa. 2. St. Gregory of Nyssa says, that they endured three days and three nights, this lingering death, which carried off their limbs one after another. 3. S. Ephrem, Or. in 40 Mart. t. 2, Op. Gr. and Lat. p. 354, ed. Nov. Vatic. an. 1743. 4. St. Basil, Or. 20, 459. 5. St. Greg. Nyss. Or. 3, de 40 Mart. t. 2, pp. 212, 213. 6. S. Gaud. Bris. Serm. 17, de 40 Mart. 7. L. 9, c. 1, 2. 8. L. 1, de ædific. Justinian, c. 7. 9. S. Ephrem in Homil. in SS. Martyres, Op Gr. and Lat. ed. Vat. an 174{} t. 2, p. 341. ST. DROCTOV�US, ABBOT. KING CHILDEBERT having built at Paris a famous abbey in honor of St. Vincent; this saint, who was a native of the diocese of Autun, had been educated under St. Germanus, abbot of St. Symphorian's at Autun, and was a person eminent for his learning and extraordinary spirit of mortification and prayer, was appointed the second, according to Duplessis, according to others, the first abbot of this house, since called St. Germain-des-Prez, in which he died about the year 580. His body is kept in that abbey, and he is honored by the church on the 10th of March. His original life being lost, Gislemar, a Benedictin monk of this house, in the ninth age, collected from tradition and scattered memoirs that which we have in Bollandus and more accurately in Mabillon. Footnotes: 1. Duplessis' Annales de Paris, pp. 60, 68. {564} ST. MACKESSOGE, OR KESSOGE, C. BISHOP IN THE PROVINCES OF LEVIN AND BOIN, IN SCOTLAND. BY his instructions and counsels the pious king Congal II. governed with extraordinary prudence, zeal, and sanctity. This saint was illustrious for miracles, and died in 560. A celebrated church in that country still bears the title of St. Kessoge-Kirk. The Scots, for their cry in battle, for some time used his name, but afterwards changed it for that of St. Andrew. They sometimes painted St. Kessoge in a soldier's habit, holding a bow bent with an arrow in it. See the Aberdeen Breviary, the chronicle of Pasley, (a great monastery of regular canons in the shire of Renfrew,) Florarium, and Buchanan, l. 5. MARCH XI. ST. EULOGIUS OF CORDOVA, P.M. From his authentic life by Alvarus, his intimate friend, and from his works, Bibl. Patr. t 9. See Acts Sanct. t. 7. Fleury, b. 48. p. 57. A.D. 859. ST. EULOGIUS was of a senatorian family of Cordova, at that time the capital of the Moors or Saracens, in Spain. Those infidels had till then tolerated the Christian religion among the Goths, exacting only a certain tribute every new moon. Our saint was educated among the clergy of the church of St. Zoilus, a martyr, who suffered at Cordova, with nineteen others, under Dioclesian, and is honored on the 27th of June. Here he distinguished himself by his virtue and learning; and being made priest, was placed at the head of the chief ecclesiastical school in Spain, which then flourished at Cordova. He joined assiduous watchings, fasting, and prayer, to his studies: and his humility, mildness, and charity, gained him the affection and respect of every one. He often visited the monasteries for his further instruction in virtue, and prescribed rules of piety for the use of many fervent souls that desired to serve God. Some of the Christians were so indiscreet as openly to inveigh against Mahomet, and expose the religion established by him. This occasioned a bloody persecution at Cordova, in the 29th year of Abderrama III., the eight hundred and fiftieth year of Christ. Reccafred, an apostate bishop, declared against the martyrs: and, at his solicitation, the bishop of Cordova, and some others, were imprisoned, and many priests, among whom was St. Eulogius, as one who encouraged the martyrs by his instructions. It was then that he wrote his Exhortation to Martyrdom,[1] addressed to the virgins Flora and Mary, who were beheaded the 24th of November, in 851. These virgins promised to pray as soon as they should be with God, that their fellow-prisoners might be restored to their liberty. Accordingly, St. Eulogius and the rest were enlarged six days after their death. In the year 852, several suffered the like martyrdom, {565} namely, Gumisund and Servus-Dei: Aurelius and Felix, with their wives: Christopher and Levigild: Rogel and Servio-Deo. A council at Cordova, in 852, forbade any one to offer himself to martyrdom. Mahomet succeeded his father upon his sudden death by an apoplectic fit; but continued the persecution, and put to death, in 853, Fandila, a monk, Anastasius, Felix, and three nuns, Digna, Columba, and Pomposa. St. Eulogius encouraged all these martyrs to their triumphs, and was the support of that distressed flock. His writings still breathe an inflamed zeal and spirit of martyrdom. The chief are his history of these martyrs, called the Memorial of the Saints, in three books; and his Apology for them against calumniators, showing them to be true martyrs, though without miracles.[2] His brother was deprived of his place, one of the first dignities of the kingdom. St. Eulogius himself was obliged by the persecutors to live always, after his releasement, with the treacherous bishop Reccafred, that wolf in sheep's clothing. Wherefore he refrained from saying mass, that he might not communicate with that domestic enemy. The archbishop of Toledo dying in 858, St. Eulogius was canonically elected to succeed him; but there was some obstacle that hindered him from being consecrated; though he did not outlive his election two months. A virgin, by name Leocritia, of a noble family among the Moors, had been instructed from her infancy in the Christian religion by one of her relations, and privately baptized. Her father and mother perceiving this, used her very ill, and scourged her day and night to compel her to renounce the faith. Having made her condition known to St. Eulogius and his sister Anulona, intimating that she desired to go where she might freely exercise her religion, they secretly procured her the means of getting away from her parents, and concealed her for some time among faithful friends. But the matter was at length discovered, and they were all brought before the cadi. Eulogius offered to show the judge the true road to heaven, and to demonstrate Mahomet to be an impostor. The cadi threatened to have him scourged to death. The martyr told him his torments would be to no purpose; for he would never change his religion. Whereupon the cadi gave orders that he should be carried to the palace, and presented before the king's council. One of the lords of the council took the saint aside, and said to him: "Though the ignorant unhappily run headlong to death, a man of your learning and virtue ought not to imitate their folly. Be ruled by me, I entreat you: say but one word, since necessity requires it: you may afterwards resume your own religion, and we will promise that no inquiry shall be made after you." Eulogius replied, smiling: "Ah! if you could but conceive the reward which waits for those who persevere in the faith to the end, you would renounce your temporal dignity in exchange for it." He then began boldly to propose the truths of the gospel to them. But to prevent their hearing him, the council condemned him immediately to lose his head. As they were leading him to execution, one of the eunuchs of the palace gave him a blow on the face for having spoken against Mahomet: he turned the other cheek, and patiently received a second. He received the stroke of death out of the city-gates, with great cheerfulness, on the 11th of March, 859. St. Leocritia was beheaded four days after him, and her body thrown into the river Boetis, or Guadalquivir, but taken out by the Christians. The Church honors both of them on the days of their martyrdom. * * * * * If we consider the conduct of Christ towards his Church, which he planted {566} at the price of his precious blood, and treats as his most beloved spouse, we shall admire a wonderful secret in the adorable councils of his tender providence. This Church, so dear to him, and so precious in his eyes, he formed and spread under a general, most severe, and dreadful persecution. He has exposed it in every age to frequent and violent storms, and seems to delight in always holding at least some part or other of it in the fiery crucible. But the days of its severest trials were those of its most glorious triumphs. Then it shone above all other periods of time with the brightest examples of sanctity, and exhibited both to heaven and to men on earth the most glorious spectacles and triumphs. Then were formed in its bosom innumerable most illustrious heroes of all perfect virtue, who eminently inherited, and propagated in the hearts of many others, the true spirit of our crucified Redeemer. The same conduct God in his tender mercy holds with regard to those chosen souls which he destines to raise, by special graces, highest in his favor. When the counsels of divine Providence shall be manifested to them in the next life, then they shall clearly see that their trials were the most happy moments, and the most precious graces of their whole lives. In sickness, humiliations, and other crosses, the poison of self-love was expelled from their hearts, their affections weaned from the world, opportunities were afforded them of practising the most heroic virtues, by the fervent exercise of which their souls were formed in the school of Christ, and his perfect spirit of humility, meekness, disengagement, and purity of the affections, ardent charity, and all other virtues, in which true Christian heroism consists. The forming of the heart of one saint is a great and sublime work, the masterpiece of divine grace, the end and the price of the death of the Son of God. It can only be finished by the cross on which we were engendered in Christ, and the mystery of our predestination is accomplished. Footnotes: 1. Documentum martyrii, t. 9. Bibl. Patr. p. 699. 2. Some objected to these martyrs, that they were not honored with frequent miracles as those had been who suffered in the primitive ages. ST. SOPHRONIUS, PATRIARCH OF JERUSALEM, C. HE was a native of Damascus, and made such a progress in learning that he obtained the name of the Sophist. He lived twenty years near Jerusalem, under the direction of John Moschus, a holy hermit, without engaging himself in a religious state. These two great men visited together the monasteries of Egypt, and were detained by St. John the Almoner, at Alexandria, about the year 610, and employed by him two years in extirpating the Eutychians, and in reforming his diocese. John Moschus wrote there his Spiritual Meadow, which he dedicated to Sophronius. He made a collection in that book of the edifying examples of virtue which he had seen or heard of among the monks, and died shortly after at Rome. Athanasius, patriarch of the Jacobites or Eutychians, in Syria, acknowledged two distinct natures in Christ, the divine and the human; but allowed only one will. This Demi-Eutychianism was a glaring inconsistency; because the will is the property of the nature. Moreover, Christ sometimes speaks of his human will distinct from the divine, as in his prayer in his agony in the garden. This Monothelite heresy seemed an expedient whereby to compound with the Eutychians. The emperor Heraclius confirmed it by an edict called Ecthesis, or the Exposition, declaring that there is only one will in Christ, namely, that of the Divine Word: which was condemned by pope John IV. Cyrus, bishop of Phasis, a virulent Monothelite, was by Heraclius preferred to the patriarchate of Alexandria, in 629. St. Sophronius, falling at his feet, conjured him not to publish his erroneous articles--but in vain. He therefore {567} left Egypt, and came to Constantinople, where he found Sergius, the crafty patriarch, sowing the same error in conjunction with Theodorus of Pharan. Hereupon he travelled into Syria, where, in 634, he was, against his will, elected patriarch of Jerusalem. He was no sooner established in his see, than he assembled a council of all the bishops of his patriarchate, in 634, to condemn the Monothelite heresy, and composed a synodal letter to explain and prove the Catholic faith This excellent piece was confirmed in the sixth general council. St. Sophronius sent this learned epistle to pope Honorius and to Sergius. This latter had, by a crafty letter and captious expressions, persuaded pope Honorius to tolerate a silence as to one or two wills in Christ. It is evident from the most authentic monuments, that Honorius never assented to that error, but always adhered to the truth.[1] However, a silence was ill-timed, and though not so designed, might be deemed by some a kind of connivance; for a rising heresy seeks to carry on its work under ground without noise: it is a fire which spreads itself under cover. Sophronius, seeing the emperor and almost all the chief prelates of the East conspire against the truth, thought it his duty to defend it with the greater zeal. He took Stephen, bishop of Doria, the eldest of his suffragans, led him to Mount Calvary, and there adjured him by Him who was crucified on that place, and by the account which he should give him at the last day, "to go to the apostolic see, where are the foundations of the holy doctrine, and not to cease to pray till the holy persons there should examine and condemn the novelty." Stephen did so, and stayed at Rome ten years, till he saw it condemned by pope Martin I. in the council of Lateran, in 649. Sophronius was detained at home by the invasion of the Saracens. Mahomet had broached his impostures at Mecca, in 608, but being rejected there, fled to Medina, in 622. Aboubeker succeeded him in 634 under the title of Caliph, or vicar of the prophet. He died after a reign of two years. Omar, his successor, took Damascus in 636, and after a siege of two years, Jerusalem, in 638. He built a mosque in the place of Solomon's temple, and because it fell in the night, the Jews told him it would not stand unless the cross of Christ, which stood on Mount Calvary, was taken away: which the Caliph caused to be done.[2] Sophronius, in a sermon on the exaltation of the cross, mentions the custom of taking the cross out of its case at Mid-Lent to be venerated.[3] Photius takes notice that his works breathe an affecting piety, but that the Greek is not pure. They consist of his synodal letter, his letter to pope Honorius, and a small number of scattered sermons. He deplored the abomination of desolation set up by the Mahometans in the holy place. God called him out of those evils to his kingdom on the 11th of March, 639, or, as Papebroke thinks,[4] in 644. See the council of Lateran, t. 6, Conc. Fleury, b. 37, 38, and Le Quien, Oriens Christ. t. 3, p. 264. Footnotes: 1. See Nat. Alexander, Sæc. 7. Wittasse and Tourneiy Tr. de Incarn. 2. Theophanes, p. 284. 3. In medio jejunii, adorationis gratiâ proponi solet vitale lignun venerandæ crucis. Sophr. Serro. in Excalt. Crucis. Bibl. Patr. t. 12 p. 214, e. apud Gretser, t. 2 de Cruce, p. 88. 4. Papebr. Tr. prælim. ad t. 3 Maii n. 144, p. 32 ST. �NGUS, B.C. THIS saint is distinguished by the surname of Kele-De, that is, Worshipper of God; which began in his time to be the denomination of monks to the Scottish language, commonly called Culdees. He was born in Ireland, in the eighth century, of the race of the Dalaradians, kings of Ulster. In his youth, renouncing all earthly pretensions, he chose Christ for his inheritance, {568} embracing a religious state in the famous monastery of Cluain-Edneach in East-Meath. Here he became so great a proficient both in learning and sanctity, that no one in his time could be found in Ireland that equalled him in reputation for every kind of virtue, and for sacred knowledge. To shun the esteem of the world, he disguised himself, and going to the monastery of Tamlâcht, three miles from Dublin, lived there seven years unknown, in the quality of a lay brother, performing all the drudgery of the house, appearing fit for nothing but the vilest employs, while his interior by perfect love and contemplation was absorbed in God. Being at length discovered, he some time after returned to Cluain-Edneach, where the continual austerity of his life, and his constant application to God in prayer, may be more easily admired than imitated. He was chosen abbot, and at length raised to the episcopal dignity: for it was usual then in Ireland for eminent abbots in the chief monasteries to be bishops. He was remarkable for his devotion to the saints, and he left both a longer and a shorter Irish Martyrology, and five other books concerning the saints of his country, contained in what the Irish call Saltair-na-Rann. He died about the year 824, not at Cluain-Edneach, but at Desert �nguis, which became also a famous monastery, and took its name from him. See his acts in Colgan, p. 579. ST. CONSTANTINE, M. HE is said to have been a British king, who, after the death of his queen, resigned the crown to his son, and became a monk in the monastery of St. David. It is added that he afterwards went into North Britain, and joined St. Columba in preaching the gospel among the Picts, who then inhabited a great part of what is now called Scotland. He founded a monastery at Govane, near the river Cluyd, converted all the land of Cantire to the faith of Christ, and died a martyr by the hands of infidels, towards the end of the sixth century. He was buried in his monastery of Govane, and divers churches were erected in Scotland, under his invocation. But it seems most probable that the Scottish martyr is not the same person with the British king. Colgan supposes him to have been an Irish monk, who had lived in the community of St. Carthag, at Rathane. Footnotes: 1. See the MS. Lives of Scottish Saints, compiled by a Jesuit, who was nephew of bishop Lesley, kept in the Scottish College at Paris. Several Scottish historians give the title of saint to Constantine III. king of the Scots, who, forsaking his crown and the world, entered himself among the Culdees, to religious ma at St. Andrew's, in 946. MARCH XII. ST. GREGORY THE GREAT, POPE, C. From his works, Bede, and Paul, deacon of Monte Cassino, towards the end of the eighth century. His life in four books, by John deacon of Rome in the ninth age, is full of mistakes, as Baronius observes. See his history, compiled in French by Dom Dionysius of Sainte-Marthe, superior-general of the Maurist monks, printed at Rouen in 4to. 1697, and more accurately in Latin by the same author, in the 4to. tome of this father's works, in 1705. See also Fleury, b. 34, 35, 36. Mabillon, Annal. Bened. l. 6, t. 1. Ceillier, t. 17, p. 128. F. Wietrowski, S.J. Historia de rebus in Pontificatu, S. Gregorii M. gestis, in fol. Gradonici, S. Gregorius, M. Pontifex, a criminationibus Oudini vindicatus, and Hieron. Muzio in Coro Pontifcale. A.D. 604. ST. GREGORY, from his illustrious actions and extraordinary virtues, surnamed the Great, was born at Rome, about the year 540. Gordlanus, his {569} father, enjoyed the dignity of a senator, and was very wealthy; but after the birth of our saint, renounced the world, and died Regionarius, that is, one of the seven cardinal deacons who took care of the ecclesiastical districts of Rome. His mother, Sylvia, consecrated herself to God in a little oratory near St. Paul's. Our saint was called Gregory, which in Greek implies a watchman, as Vigilius and Vigilantius in Latin. In his youth he applied himself, with unabated diligence, to the studies of grammar, rhetoric, and philosophy; and after these first accomplishments, to the civil law and the canons of the church, in which he was perfectly skilled. He was only thirty-four years old when, in 574, he was made, by the emperor Justin the Younger, pretor, or governor and chief magistrate of Rome. By this dignity he was the chief judge of the city; his pomp and state differed little from that of a consul, and he was obliged to wear the Trabea, which was a rich robe of silk, magnificently embroidered, and sparkling with precious stones: a garment only allowed to the consuls and pretor. But he could say, with Esther, that his heart always detested the pride of the world. From his infancy he loved and esteemed only heavenly things, and it was his chief delight to converse with holy monks, or to be retired in his closet, or in the church at his devotions. After the death of his father, he built and endowed six monasteries in Sicily out of the estates which he had in that island, and founded a seventh in his own house in Rome, which was the famous monastery of St. Andrew, on the hill Scaurus,[1] now possessed by the Order of Camaldoli. The first abbot of this house was Hilarion, the second Valentinus, under whom St. Gregory himself took the monastic habit, in 575, he being thirty-five years old. In this retirement, Gregory applied himself with that vigor to fasting and the study of the sacred writings, that he thereby contracted a great weakness in his stomach, and used to fall into fits of swooning if he did not frequently eat. What gave him the greatest affliction was his not being able to fast on an Easter-Eve, a day on which, says John the deacon, every one, not even excepting little children, are used to fast. His great desire of conforming to the universal practice on that day occasioned his applying to a monk of eminent sanctity, named Eleutherius, with whom having prayed, and besought God to enable him to fast at least on that sacred day, he found himself on a sudden so well restored, that he not only fasted that day, but quite forgot his illness, as he himself relates.[2] It was before his advancement to the see of Rome, or even to the government of his monastery, that he first, as Paul the deacon testifies, projected the conversion of the English nation. This great blessing took its rise from the following occasion.[3] Gregory happened one day to walk through the market, and here taking notice that certain youths of fine features and complexion were exposed to sale, he inquired what countrymen they were, and was answered, that they came from Britain. He asked if the people of that country were Christians or heathens, and was told they were still heathens. Then Gregory, fetching a deep sigh, said: "It was a lamentable consideration that the prince of darkness should be master of so much beauty, and have so comely persons in his possession: and that so fine an outside should have nothing of God's grace to furnish it within."[4] This incident {570} made so great an impression upon him, that he applied himself soon after to pope Benedict I., and earnestly requested that some persons might be sent to preach Christianity in Britain. And not finding any one disposed to undertake that mission, he made an offer of himself for the service, with the pope's consent and approbation. Having obtained leave, he privately set forward on his journey, in company with several monks of his own monastery. But when his departure was known, the whole city was in an uproar, and the people ran in a body to the pope, whom they met going to St. Peter's church. They cried out to him in the utmost consternation: "Apostolical father, what have you done? In suffering Gregory to go away, you have destroyed Rome: you have undone us, and offended St. Peter." At these pressing instances the pope dispatched messengers to recall him and the saint being overtaken by them on the third day, was obliged, though with great reluctance, to return to Rome. Not long after, the same pope, according to John the deacon, and the Benedictins, or, as Paul the deacon and Baronius say, his successor Pelagius II., made him one of the seven deacons of the church at Rome, who assisted the pope. Pelagius II. sent him to Constantinople in quality of Apocrisiarius, or Nuncio of the holy see, to the religious emperor Tiberius, by whom the saint was received and treated with the highest distinction. This public employment did not make him lay aside the practices of a monastic life, in order to which he had taken with him certain monks of his house, with whom he might the better continue them, and by their example excite himself to recollection and prayer. At the request of St. Leander, bishop of Seville, whom he saw at Constantinople, he wrote in that city his thirty-five books of Morals upon Job, giving chiefly the moral and allegorical interpretations of that sacred book, in such a manner as to reduce into one body the most excellent principles of morality, and also of an interior life, of both which this admirable work hath been ever since regarded as the great storehouse and armory. Out of it St. Isidore, St. Thomas, and other masters of those holy sciences have chiefly drawn their sublime maxims. Mauritius having married the daughter of Tiberius, in 582, who had the empire for her dowry, St. Gregory was pitched upon to stand godfather to his eldest son. Eutychius was at that time patriarch of Constantinople.[5] This prelate, having suffered for the faith under Justinian, fell at length into an error, importing, that after the general resurrection the glorified bodies of the elect will be no longer palpable, but of a more subtile texture than air. This error he couched in a certain book which he wrote. St. Gregory was alarmed, and held several conferences with the patriarch upon that subject, both in private and before the emperor, and clearly demonstrated from the scriptures, that the glorified bodies of the saints will be the same which they had on earth, only delivered from the appendices of mortality; and that they will be palpable as {571} that of Christ was after his resurrection.[6] The good bishop being docile and humble, retracted his mistake and shortly after falling sick, in presence of the emperor, who had honored him with a visit, taking hold of his skin with his hand, said: "I profess the belief that we shall all rise in this very flesh."[7] Pope Pelagius recalled St. Gregory in 584. He brought with him to Rome an arm of St. Andrew, and the head of St. Luke, which the emperor had given him. He placed both these relics in his monastery of St. Andrew, where the former remains to this day; but the latter has been removed thence to St. Peter's, where it still continues. The saint with joy saw himself restored to the tranquillity of his cell, where he eagerly desired to bury himself with regard to the world, from which he had fled naked into this secure harbor; because, as he signified to St. Leander, he saw how difficult a thing it is to converse with the world without contracting inordinate attachments.[8] Pope Pelagius also made him his secretary. He still continued to govern his monastery, in which he showed a remarkable instance of severity. Justus, one of his monks, had acquired and kept privately three pieces of gold, which he confessed on his death-bed. St. Gregory forbade the community to attend and pray by his bedside, according to custom; but could not refuse him the assistance of a priest, which the council of Nice ordained that no one should be deprived of at the hour of death. Justus died in great sentiments of compunction; yet, in compliance with what the monastic discipline enjoins in such cases, in imitation of what St. Macarius had prescribed on the like occasion, he ordered his corpse to be buried under the dunghill, and the three pieces of money to be thrown into the grave with it. Nevertheless, as he died penitent, he ordered mass to be daily offered up for him during thirty days.[9] St. Gregory says,[10] that after the mass of the thirtieth day, Justus, appearing to his brother Copiosus, assured him that he had been in torments, but was then released. Pope Pelagius II. dying in the beginning of the great pestilence, in January, 590, the clergy, senate, and Roman people unanimously agreed to choose St. Gregory for their bishop, although he opposed his election with all his power. It was then the custom at the election of a pope to consult the emperor as the head of the senate and people. Our saint, trusting to his friendship with Mauritius, to whose son he stood godfather, wrote to him privately to conjure him not to approve of this choice. He wrote also with great earnestness to John, patriarch of Constantinople, and to other powerful friends in that city, begging them to employ their interest with the emperor for that purpose: but complains in several letters afterwards that they had all refused to serve him. The governor of Rome intercepted his letters to the emperor, and sent others to him, in the name of the senate and people, to the contrary effect. In the mean time, the plague continued to rage at Rome with great violence; and, while the people waited for the emperor's answer, St. Gregory took occasion from their calamities to exhort them to repentance. Having made them a pathetic sermon on that subject,[11] he appointed a solemn litany, or procession, in seven companies, with a {572} priest at the head of each, who were to march from different churches, and all to meet in that of St. Mary Major; singing Kyrie Eleison as they went along the streets. During this procession there died in one hour's time fourscore of those who assisted at it. But St. Gregory did not forbear to exhort the people, and to pray till such time as the distemper ceased.[12] During the public calamity, St. Gregory seemed to have forgot the danger he was in of being exalted to the pontifical throne; for he feared as much to lose the security of his poverty as the most avaricious can do to lose their treasures. He had been informed that his letters to Constantinople had been intercepted; wherefore, not being able to go out of the gates of Rome, where guards were placed, he prevailed with certain merchants to carry him off disguised, and shut up in a wicker basket. Three days he lay concealed in the woods and caverns, during which time the people of Rome observed fasts and prayers. Being miraculously discovered,[13] and no longer able, as he says himself,[14] to resist, after the manifestations of the divine will, he was taken, brought back to Rome with great acclamations, and consecrated on the 3d of September, in 590. In this ceremony he was conducted, according to custom, to the Confession of St. Peter, as his tomb is called; where he made a profession of his faith, which is still extant in his works. He sent also to the other patriarchs a synodal epistle, in which was contained the profession of his faith.[15] In it he declares, that he received the four general councils as the four gospels. He received congratulatory letters upon his exaltation; to all which he returned for answer rather tears than words, in the most feeling sentiments of profound humility. To Theoctista, the emperor's sister, he wrote thus:[16] "I have lost the comfort of my calm, and, appearing to be outwardly exalted, I am inwardly and really fallen.--My endeavors were to banish corporeal objects from my mind, that I might spiritually behold heavenly joys. Neither desiring not fearing any thing in the world, I seemed raised above the earth, but the storm had cast me on a sudden into alarms and fears: I am come into the depth of the sea, and the tempest hath drowned me." He adds: "The emperor hath made an ape to be called a lion; but cannot make him become one." In his letter to Narses, the patrician, he says:[17] "I am so overcome with grief, that I am scarce able to speak. My mind is encompassed with darkness. All that the world thinks agreeable, brings to me trouble and affliction." To St. Leander he writes: "I remember with tears that I have lost the calm harbor of my repose, and with many a sigh I look upon the firm land which I cannot reach. If you love me, assist me with your prayers." He often invites others to weep with him, and conjures them to pray for him. John, archbishop of Ravenna, modestly reprehended his cowardice in endeavoring, by flight, to decline the burden of the pastoral charge. In answer to his censure, and to instruct all pastors, soon after his exaltation, he wrote his incomparable book, On the Pastoral Care, setting forth the dangers, duties, and obligations of that charge, which he calls, from St. Gregory Nazianzen, the art of arts, and science of sciences. So great was the reputation of this performance, as soon as it appeared, that the emperor Mauritius sent to Rome for a copy; and Anastasius, the holy patriarch of Antioch, translated it into Greek. Many popes and councils have exhorted and commanded pastors of souls frequently to read it, and {573} in it, as in a looking glass, to behold themselves.[18] Our English saints made it always their rule, and king Alfred translated it into the Saxon tongue. In this book we read a transcript of the sentiments and conduct of our excellent pastor. His zeal for the glory of God, and the angelic function of paying him the constant tribute of praise in the church, moved him, in the beginning of his pontificate, to reform the church music.[19] Preaching he regarded as the principal and most indispensable function of every pastor of souls, as it is called by St. Thomas, and was most solicitous to feed his flock with the word of God. His forty homilies on the gospels, which are extant, show that he spoke in a plain and familiar style, and without any pomp of words, but with a surprising eloquence of the heart. The same may be said of his twenty-two homilies on Ezekiel, which he preached while Rome was besieged by the Lombards, in 592. In the nineteenth he, in profound humility, applies to himself, with tears, whatever the prophet spoke against slothful mercenary pastors. Paul the deacon relates, that after the saint's death, Peter the deacon, his most intimate friend, testified that he had seen in a vision, as an emblem of the Holy Ghost, a dove appear on his head, applying his bill to his ear while he was writing on the latter part of Ezekiel. This great pope always remembered, that, by his station, he was the common father of the poor. He relieved their necessities with so much sweetness and affability, as to spare them the confusion of receiving the alms; and the old men among them he, out of deference, called his fathers. He often entertained several of them at his own table. He kept by him an exact catalogue of the poor, called by the ancients matriculæ; and he liberally provided for the necessities of each. In the beginning of every month he {574} distributed to all the poor, corn, wine, pulse, cheese, fish, flesh, and oil: he appointed officers for every street to send every day necessaries to all the needy sick; before he ate he always sent off meats from his own table to some poor persons. One day a beggar being found dead in a corner of a by-street, he is said to have abstained some days from the celebration of the divine mysteries, condemning himself of a neglect in seeking the poor with sufficient care. He entertained great numbers of strangers both at Rome and in other countries, and had every day twelve at his own table whom his sacristan invited. He was most liberal in redeeming captives taken by the Lombards, for which he permitted the bishop of Fano to break and sell the sacred vessels,[20] and ordered the bishop of Messana to do the same.[21] He extended his charity to the heretics, whom he sought to gain by mildness. He wrote to the bishop of Naples to receive and reconcile readily those who desired it, taking upon his own soul the danger,[22] lest he should be charged with their perdition if they should perish by too great severity. Yet he was careful not to give them an occasion of triumphing by any unreasonable condescension; and much more not to relax the severity of the law of God in the least tittle.[23] He showed great moderation to the schismatics of Istria, and to the very Jews. When Peter, bishop of Terracina, had taken from the latter their synagogue, St. Gregory ordered it to be restored to them, saying, they are not to be compelled, but converted by meekness and charity.[24] He repeated the same orders for the Jews of Sardinia, and for those of Sicily.[25] In his letters to his vicar in Sicily, and to the stewards of the patrimony of the Roman church in Africa, Italy, and other places, he recommends mildness and liberality towards his vassals and farmers; orders money to be advanced to those that were in distress, which they might repay by little and little, and most rigorously forbids any to be oppressed. He carefully computed and piously distributed the income of his revenues at four terms in the year. In his epistles, we find him continually providing for the necessities of all churches, especially of those in Italy, which the wars of the Lombards and other calamities had made desolate. Notwithstanding his meekness and condescension, his courage was undaunted, and his confidence in the divine assistance unshaken amidst the greatest difficulties. "You know me," says he,[26] "and that I tolerate a long while; but when I have once determined to bear no longer, I go with joy against all dangers." Out of sincere humility he styled himself "the basest of men, devoured by sloth and laziness."[27] Writing to St. Leander, he says,[28] he always desired to be the contempt of men and the outcast of the people. He declares,[29] "I am ready to be corrected by all persons, and him only do I look upon as my friend by whose tongue I learn to wash away the stains of my mind." He subscribed himself in all his letters, Servant of the servants of God, which custom has been retained by his successors. Indeed, what is a pastor or superior but the servant of those for whom he is to give a rigorous account to God? The works of St. Gregory were everywhere received with the greatest applause. Marinianus, archbishop of Ravenna, read his comments on Job to the people in the church. The saint was afflicted and confounded that his writings should be thought to deserve a place among the approved works of the fathers; and wrote to that prelate that his book was not proper for the church, admonishing him rather to read St. Austin on the psalms.[30] He was no less dead to himself in his great actions, {575} and all other things. He saw nothing in himself but imperfections; and subjects of confusion and humiliation. ST. JOHN CALYBITE, RECLUSE. It is incredible how much he wrote, and, during the thirteen years that he governed the church, what great things he achieved for the glory of God, the good of the church, the reformation of manners, the edification of the faithful, the relief of the poor, the comfort of the afflicted, the establishment of ecclesiastical discipline, and the advancement of piety and religion. But our surprise redoubles upon us, when we remember his continual bad state of health and frequent sicknesses, and his assiduity in prayer and holy contemplation; though this exercise it was that gave always wings to his soul. In his own palace he would allow of no furniture but what was mean and simple, nor have any attendants near his person but clergymen or monks of approved virtue, learning, and prudence. His household was a model of Christian perfection; and by his care, arts, sciences, and the heroic practice of piety, flourished, especially in the city of Rome. The state of Christendom was at that time on every side miserably distracted, and stood in need of a pastor, whose extraordinary sanctity, abilities, and courage should render him equal to every great enterprise. And such a one was Gregory. The eastern churches were wretchedly divided and shattered by the Nestorians, and the numerous spawn of the Eutychians, all which he repressed. In the west, England was buried in idolatry, and Spain, under the Visigoths, was overrun with the Arian heresy. These two flourishing countries owe their conversion, in a great measure, to his zeal, especially the former. In Africa he extirpated the Donatists, converted many schismatics in Istria and the neighboring provinces; and reformed many grievous abuses in Gaul, whence he banished simony, which had almost universally infected that church. A great part of Italy was become a prey to the Lombards,[31] who were partly Arians, partly idolaters. St. Gregory often stopped the fury of their arms, and checked their oppressions of the people: by his zeal he also brought over many to the Catholic faith, and had the comfort to see Agilulph, their king, renounce the Arian heresy to embrace it. In 592, Romanus, exarch, or governor of Italy for the emperor, with a view to his own private interest, perfidiously broke the solemn treaty which he had made with the Lombards,[32] and took Perugia and several other towns. But the barbarians, who were much the stronger, revenged this insult with great cruelty, and besieged Rome itself. St. Gregory neglected nothing to protect the oppressed, and raised troops for the defence of several places. At length, by entreaties and great presents, he engaged the Lombards to retire into their own territories. He reproved the exarch for his breach of faith, but to no other effect than to draw upon himself the indignation of the governor and his master. Such were the extortions and injustices of this and other imperial officers, that the yoke of the barbarians was lighter than the specious shadow of liberty under the tyranny of the empire: and with such rigor were the heaviest taxes levied, that to pay them, many poor inhabitants of Corsica were forced to sell their own children to the barbarians. These oppressions cried to heaven for vengeance: and St. Gregory wrote boldly to the {576} empress Constantina,[33] entreating that the emperor, though he should be a loser by it, would not fill his exchequer by oppressing his people, nor suffer taxes to be levied by iniquitous methods, which would be an impediment to his eternal salvation. He sent to this empress a brandeum, or veil, which had touched the bodies of the apostles, and assured her that miracles had been wrought by such relics.[34] He promised to send her also some dust-filings of the chains of St. Paul; of which relics he makes frequent mention in his epistles. At Cagliari, a curtain rich Jew, having been converted to the faith, had seized the synagogue in order to convert it into a church, and had set up in it an image of the Virgin Mary and a cross. Upon the complaint of the other Jews, St. Gregory ordered[35] the synagogue to be restored to them, but that the image and cross should be first removed with due veneration and respect.[36] Writing to Theodelinda, queen of the Lombards, he mentions,[37] that he sent her son, the young king, a little cross, in which was a particle of the wood of the true Cross, to carry about his neck. Secundinus, a holy hermit near Ravenna, godfather to this young king, begged of the pope some devout pictures. St. Gregory, in his answer, says: "We have sent you two cloths, containing the picture of God our Saviour, and of Mary the holy Mother of God, and of the blessed apostles Peter and Paul, and one cross: also for a benediction, a key which hath been applied to the most holy body of St. Peter, the prince of the apostles, that you may remain defended from the enemy."[38] But when Serenus, bishop of Marseilles, had broken certain sacred images which some persons lately converted from idolatry honored with their former idolatrous superstitions, St. Gregory commended his zeal for suppressing this abuse, but reproved him for breaking the images.[39] When the archbishop of Ravenna used the pallium, not only at mass, but also in other functions, St. Gregory wrote him a severe reprimand, telling him that no ornament shines so bright on the shoulders of a bishop as humility.[40][41] He extended his pastoral zeal and solicitude over all churches; and he frequently takes notice that the care of the churches of the whole world was intrusted to St. Peter, and his successors in the see of Rome.[42] This authority he exerted in the oriental patriarchates. A certain monk having been accused of Manicheism, and beaten by the order of John the patriarch of Constantinople, appealed to pope Gregory, who sharply reprimanded the patriarch, exhorting him to eject a certain wicked young man by whom he suffered himself to be governed, and to do penance, and telling him: "If you do not keep the canons, I know not who you are."[43] He absolved the monk, with his colleague, a priest, re-established them in their monastery, and sent them back into the East, having received their profession of faith. He also absolved John, a priest of Chalcedon, who had been unjustly condemned by the delegates of the Matriarch. This patriarch, John, surnamed the Faster, usurped the arrogant title of [oe]cumenical, or universal patriarch. This epithet was only used of a general council which represents the whole church. In this sense an {577} ecumenical bishop should mean a bishop who represents the whole church, so that all other bishops are only his vicars. St. Gregory took the word in that sense: which would be blasphemy and heresy, and as such he condemned it.[44] John indeed only meant it in a limited sense for an archbishop over many, as we call him a general who commands many; but even so it savored of arrogance and novelty. In opposition to this, St. Gregory took no other titles than those of humility. Gregoria, a lady of the bedchamber to the empress, being troubled with scruples, wrote to St. Gregory, that she should never be at ease till he should obtain of God, by a revelation, an assurance that her sins were forgiven her. To calm her disturbed mind, he sent her the following answer.[45] "You ask what is both difficult and unprofitable. Difficult, because I am unworthy to receive any revelation: unprofitable, because an absolute assurance of your pardon does not suit your state till you can no longer weep for your sins. You ought always to fear and tremble for them, and wash them away by daily tears. Paul had been taken up to the third heaven, yet trembled lest he should become a reprobate.--Security is the mother of negligence." The emperor forbade any to be admitted in monasteries, who, having been in office, had not yet given up their accounts, or who were engaged in the military service. This order he sent to each of the patriarchs, to be by then notified to all the bishops of their respective districts. St. Gregory, who was at that time sick, complied with the imperial mandate, so far as to order the edict to be signified to the western bishops,[46] as appears from a letter which he wrote to the emperor as soon as his health was re-established. We learn from another letter, which he wrote some years after to the bishops of the empire, that, on this occasion, he exhorted the bishops to comply with the first part, and as to the second, not to suffer persons engaged in the army to be admitted among the clergy or to the monastic habit, unless their vocation had been thoroughly tried for the space of three years, that it might be evident they were converted from the world, and sought not to change one kind of secular life for another. He made to Mauritius the strongest remonstrances against this edict, saying, "It is not agreeable to God, seeing by it the way to heaven was shut to several; for many cannot be saved unless they forsake all things." He, therefore, entreated the emperor to mitigate this law, approving the first article as most just, unless the monastery made itself answerable for the debts of such a person received in it. As to the second, he allows that the motives and sincerity of the conversion of such soldiers are to be narrowly examined before they ought to be admitted to the monastic habit. Mauritius, who had before conceived certain prejudices against St. Gregory, was offended at his remonstrances, and showed his resentment against him for some years, but at length agreed to the mitigations of each article proposed by St. Gregory: which the holy pope, with great pleasure, notified by a letter addressed to the bishops of the empire.[47] The emperor Mauritius, having broken his league with the Avari, a Scythian {578} nation, then settled on the banks of the Danube,[48] was defeated, and obliged to purchase an ignominious peace. He also refused to ransom the prisoners they had taken, though they asked at first only a golden penny a head, and at last only a sixth part, or four farthings; which refusal so enraged the barbarians, that they put them all to the sword. Mauritius began then to be stung with remorse, gave large alms, and prayed that God would rather punish him in this life than in the next. His prayer was heard. His avarice and extortions had rendered him odious to all his subjects; and, in 602, he ordered the army to take winter quarters in the enemy's country, and to subsist on freebooting, without pay. The soldiers, exasperated at this treatment, chose one Phocas, a daring ambitious man, to be their leader, and marched to Constantinople, where he was crowned emperor. Mauritius had made his escape, but was taken with his family thirty miles out of the city, and brought back. His five sons were slain before his eyes at Chalcedon: he repeated all the while as a true penitent these words: "Thou art just, O Lord, and thy judgments are righteous."[49] When the nurse offered her own child instead of his youngest, he would not suffer it. Last of all he himself was massacred, after a reign of twenty years. His empress, Constantina, was confined with her three daughters, and murdered with them a few months after. The tyrant was slain by Heraclius, governor of Africa, after a tottering reign of eight years. When Phocas mounted the throne, his images were received and set up at Rome: nor could St. Gregory, for the sake of the public good, omit writing to him letters of congratulation.[50] In them he makes some compliments to Phocas, which are not so much praises as respectful exhortations to a tyrant in power, and wishes of the public liberty, peace, and happiness.[51] The saint nowhere approved his injustices or tyranny, though he regarded him, like Jehu, as the instrument of God to punish other sinners. He blamed Mauritius, but in things truly blameable; and drew from his punishment a seasonable occasion of wholesome advice which he gave to Phocas, whom the public safety of all Italy obliged him not to exasperate. This holy pope had labored many years under a great weakness of his breast and stomach, and was afflicted with slow fevers, and frequent fits of the gout, which once confined him to his bed two whole years. On the 25th of January, 604, he gave to the church of St. Paul several parcels of land to furnish it with lights: the act of donation remains to this day engraved on a marble stone in the same church. God called him to himself on the 12th of March, the same year, about the sixty-fourth of his age, after he had governed the church thirteen years, six months, and ten days. His pallium, the reliquary which he wore about his neck, and his girdle, were preserved long after his death, when John the deacon wrote, who describes his picture drawn from the life, then to be seen in the monastery of St. Andrew.[52] His holy remains rest in the Vatican church. Both the Greek and Latins honor his name. The council of Clif, or Cloveshove, under archbishop Cuthbert, in 747, commanded his feast to be observed a holyday in all the monasteries in England; which the council of Oxford, in 1222, {579} extended to the whole kingdom. This law subsisted till the change of religion.[53] * * * * * Every superior, who is endued with the sincere spirit of humility and charity, looks upon himself with this great hope, as the servant of all, bound to labor and watch night and day, to bear every kind of affront, to suffer all manner of pains, to do all in his power, to put on every shape, and sacrifice his own ease and life to procure the spiritual improvement of the least of those who are committed to his charge. He is incapable of imperious haughtiness, which alienates the minds of inferiors, and renders their obedience barely exterior and a forced hypocrisy. His commands are tender entreaties, and if he is obliged to extend his authority, this he does with secret repugnance, losing sight of himself, intent only on God's honor and his neighbor's salvation, placing himself in spirit beneath all his subjects, and all mankind, and esteeming himself the last of all creatures. St. Paul, though vested with the most sublime authority, makes use of terms so mild and so powerfully ravishing, that they must melt the hardest heart. Instead of commanding in the name of God, see how he usually expresses himself: "I entreat you, O Timothy, by the love which you bear me. I conjure you, by the bowels of Jesus Christ. I beseech you, by the meekness of Christ. If you love me, do this." And see how he directs us to reprove those who sin: "If any one should fall, do you who are spiritual remind him in that spirit of meekness, remembering that you may also fall," and into a more grievous crime. St. Peter, who had received the keys of the kingdom of heaven, shed more tears of tender charity than he speaks words. What heart can be so savage and unnatural, as to refuse to obey him who, having authority to lay injunctions, and thunder out anathemas, weeps instead of commanding. If SS. Peter and Paul pour out the water of tears and mildness, St. John casts darts of fire into the hearts of those whom he commands. "My little children," says he, "if you love Christ, do this. I conjure you, by Christ, our good Master, love affectionately, and this is enough. Love will teach you what to do. The unction of the Holy Ghost will instruct you." This is the true spirit of governing; a method sure to gain the hearts of others, and to inspire them with a love of the precept itself and of virtue. St. Macarius of Egypt was styled the god of the monks, so affectionately and readily was he obeyed by them, because he never spoke a word with anger or impatience. Moses was chosen by God to be the leader and legislator of his people, because he was the meekest of men: and with what astonishing patience did he bear the murmurs and rebellions of an ungrateful and stiff-necked people! David's meekness towards Saul and others purchased him the crown, and was one of the principal virtues by which he was rendered a king according to God's own heart. Those who command with imperious authority show they are puffed up with the empty wind of pride, which makes them feel an inordinate pleasure in the exercise of power, the seed of tyranny, and the bane of virtue in their souls. Anger and impatience, which are more dangerous, because usually canonized under the name of zeal, demonstrate persons to be very ill-qualified for governing others, who are not masters of themselves or their own passions. How few are so crucified to themselves, and so perfectly grounded in humility, {580} patience, meekness, and charity, that power and authority infect not their souls with the deadly poison of secret pride, or in whom no hurry, importunity, or perverseness can extinguish the spirit of meekness, in which, in all occurrences, they preserve the same evenness of mind, and the same angelical sweetness of countenance. Yet with this they are sons of thunder in resisting evil, and in watching against all the artifices of the most subtle and flattering passions of sinners, and are firm and inflexible in opposing every step towards any dangerous relaxation. St. Gregory, by his whole conduct, sets us an example of this perfect humility and meekness, which he requires as an essential qualification in every pastor, and in all who are placed over others.[54] He no less excelled in learning, with which, he says, that humility must be accompanied, lest the pastor should lead others astray. But above all other qualities for the pastoral charge, he requires an eminent gift of prayer and contemplation. Præ cæteris contemplatione suspensus. Pastor. Cura, part 2, c. 5. Footnotes: 1. See Annot. at the end of his life, p. 580 {original footnote has incorrect page reference} infra. 2. Dial. l. 3, c. 33. 3. Hist. b. 2, c. 1. 4. Bede adds, that he again asked, what was the name of that nation, and was answered, that they were called Angli or Angles. "Right," said he, "for they have angelical faces, and it becomes such to be companions with the angels in heaven. What is the name (proceeded he) of the province from which they are brought?" It was replied, that the natives of that were called Deiri. "Truly Deiri, because withdrawn from wrath, and called to the mercy of Christ," said he, alluding to the Latin, De irâ Dei eruti. He asked further, "How is the king of that province called?" They him that his name was All{} and he making an allusion to the word, said: "Alleluiah, the praise of God the Creator, must be sung in those parts." Some censure this conversation of St. Gregory as a piece of low punning. But the taste of that age must be considered. St. Austin found it necessary to play sometimes with words to please auditors whose ears had, by custom, caught an itch to be sometimes tickled by quibbles to their fancy. The ingenious author of the late life of the lord chancellor Bacon, thought custom an apology for the most vicious style of that great man, of whom he writes: "His style has been objected to as full of affectation, full of false eloquence. But that was the vice, not of the man, but of the times he lived in; and particularly of a court that delighted in the tinsel of wit and learning, in the poor ingenuity of punning and quibbling." St. Gregory was a man of a fine genius and of true learning: yet in familiar converse might confirm to the taste of the age. Far from censuring his wit, or the judgment of his historian, we ought to admire his piety, which, from every circumstance, even from words, drew allusions to nourish devotion, and turn the heart to God. This we observe in other saints, and if it be a fault, we might more justly censure on this account the elegant epistles of St. Paulinus, or Sulpitius Severus, than this dialogue of St. Gregory. 5. Eutychius had formerly defended the Catholic faith with at zeal against the Eutychians and the errors of the emperor Justinian, who, though he condemned those heretics, yet adopted one part of their blasphemies, asserting that Christ assumed a body which was by its own nature incorruptible, not formed of the Blessed Virgin, and subject to pain, hunger, or alteration only by a miracle. This was called the heresy of the Incorrupticolæ, of which Justinian declared himself the abetter; and, after many great exploits to retrieve the ancient glory of the empire, tarnished his reputation by persecuting the Catholic Church and banishing Eutychius. 6. St. Greg. Moral. l. 14, c. 76, t. 1, p. 465. 7. He died in 582 and is ranked by the Greeks among the saints. See the Bollandists in vitâ S. Eutychil ad 6 Apr. 8. Fleury thinks he was chosen abbot before his embassy to Constantinople; but Ceillier and others prove, that this only happened after his return. 9. It appears from the life of St. Theodosius the Cenobiarch, from St. Ambrose's funeral oration on Valentinian, and other monuments, that it was the custom, from the primitive ages, to keep the third, seventh, and thirtieth, or sometimes fortieth day after the decease of a Christian, with solemn prayers and sacrifices for the departed soul. From this fact of St. Gregory, a trental of masses for a soul departed are usually called the Gregorian masses, on which see Gavant and others. 10. Dial. l. 4, c. 55, p. 465, t. 2. 11. It is inserted by St. Gregory of Tours in his history. Greg. Touron. l. 10 c. 1. 12. Some moderns say, an angel was seen sheathing his sword on the stately pile of Adrian's sepulchre. But no such circumstance is mentioned by St. Gregory of Tours, Bede, Paul, or John. 13. Paul the deacon says, it was by a pillar of light appearing over the place where he lay concealed. 14. L. 1, ep. 21, l. 7, ep. 4. 15. L. 1, ep. 25. 16. L. 1, ep. 5, p. 491. 17. L. 1, ep. 6, p. 498. 18. Conc. 3, Touron. can. 3. See Dom Bulteau's Preface to his French translation of S. Gregory's Pastoral, printed in 1629. 19. He reformed the Sacramentary, or Missal and Ritual of the Roman church. In the letters of SS. Innocent I., Celestine I., and St. Leo, we find mention made of a written Roman Order of the mass: in this the essential parts were always the same; but accidental alterations in certain prayers have been made Pope Gelasius thus augmented and revised the liturgy, in 490; his genuine Sacramentary was published at Rome by Thomasi, in 1680. In it are mentioned the public veneration of the cross on Good Friday, the solemn benediction of the holy oils, the ceremonies of baptism, frequent invocation of saints, veneration shown to their relics, the benediction of holy water, votive masses for travellers, for the sick and the dead, masses on festivals of saints, and the like. The Sacramentary of St. Gregory, differs from that of Gelasius only in some collects or prayers. The conformity between the present church office and the ancient appears from this work, and the saint's Antiphonarius and Responsorium. The like ceremonies and benedictions are found in the apostolic constitutions, and all other ancient liturgic writings; out of which Grabe, Hickes, Deacon, and others have formed new liturgies very like the present Roman, and several of them have restored the idea of a true sacrifice. Dom Menard has enriched the Sacramentary of St. Gregory with most learned and curious notes. Besides his Comments or Morals on the book of Job, which he wrote at Constantinople, about the year 582, in which we are not to look for an exposition of the text, but an excellent compilation of the main principles of morality, and an interior life, we have his exposition of Ezekiel, in twenty-two homilies. These were taken in short hand as he pronounced them, and were preached by him at Rome, in 592, when Ag{}ulph the Lombard was laying waste the whole territory of Rome. See l. 2, in Ezech. hom. 6, and Paul the deacon, l. 4, hist. Longob. c. 8. The exposition of the text is allegorical, and only intended for ushering in {} moral reflections, which are much shorter than in the books on Job. His forty homilies on the gospels he preached on several solemnities while he was pope. His incomparable book, On the Pastoral Care, which is an excellent instruction of pastors, and was drawn up by him when he saw himself placed in the pontificate, consists of four parts. In the first he treats of the dispositions requisite in one who is called to the pastoral charge; in the second of duties of a pastor; in the third on the instruction which he owes to his flock; and, in the fourth, on his obligation of watching over his own heart, and of diligent self-examination. In four books of dialogues, between himself and his disciple Peter, he recounts the miracles of his own times, upon the authority of vouchers, on whose veracity he thought he could rely. He so closely adheres to their relations, that the style is much lower than in his other writings. See the preface of the Benedictin editor on this work. His letters are published in fourteen books, and are a very interesting compilation. We have St. Gregory's excellent exposition of the Book of Canticles, which Ceillier proves to be genuine against Oudin, the apostate, and some others. The six books on the first book of Kings are valuable work but cannot be ascribed to St. Gregory the Great. The commentary on the seven penitential psalms Ceillier thinks to be his work: but it seems doubtful. Paterius, a notary, one of St. Gregory's auditors, compiled, out of his writings and sermons, several comments on the scriptures. Claudius, abbot of Classius, a disciple of our saint, did the same. Alulphus, a monk at Tournay, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, made the like compilations from his writings. Dom Dionysius of St. Marthe, a Maurist Benedictin monk, favored the world with an accurate edition of the works of St. Gregory the Great, published at Paris in four volumes folio, in 1705. This has been reprinted at Verona and again at Ausburg, in 1758, with the addition of the useful anonymous book, De formula Prælatorum. 20. L. 6, Ep. 35. 21. L. 7, Ep. 26. 22. Animæ nostra pericula, l. 1, Ep. 14. 23. L. 1, Ep. 35, &c. 24. L. 1, Ep. 35. 25. L. 7, Ep. 5, l. 12, Ep. 30. 26. L. 4, Ep. 47. 27. Præf. in Dial. 28. L. 9, Ep. 22. 29. L. 2, Ep. 121. 30. L. 12, Ep. 24. 31. The Lombards came originally from Scandinavia, and settled first in Pomerania, and afterwards with the Hunns in Pannonia, who had remained there when they returned out of Italy under Attila. Narses, the patrician, after having governed Italy sixteen years with great glory, was recalled by the emperor Justin the Younger. But resenting this treatment, he invited the Lombards into that country. Those barbarians leaving Pannonia to the Hunns, entered Italy, easily made themselves masters of Milan, under their king Alboinus, in 568; and extending their dominions, often threatened Rome itself. In the reign of Charles the Fat, the Hunns were expelled Pannonia by the Hongres, another swarm from the same northern hive, akin to the Hunns, who gave to that kingdom the name of Hungary. That the Lombards were so called, not from their long swords, as some have pretended, but from their long beards, see demonstrated from the express testimony of Paul the Deacon, himself a Lombard of Constantine Porphyrogenetta, by Jos. Assemani. Hist. Ital. scriptor. t. 1, c. 3, p. 33. 32. Paul Diac. de Gest Longobard. l. 4, c. 8. S. Greg. l. 2, Ep. 46. 33. L. 5. Ep. 41. 34. L. 4, Ep. 30. 35. Sublatâ exinde, quâ par est veneratione, imagine et cruce. L. 9, Ep. 6, p. 930. 36. L. 9, Ep. 6, p. 930. 37. L. 14, Ep. 12, p. 1270. 38. These words are quoted by Paul the deacon, in the council of Rome, Conc. t. 6, p. 1462, and pope Adrian I., in his letter to Charlemagne in defence of holy images. 39. L. 11, Ep. 13. 40. L. 3, Ep. 56; l. 3, Ep. 53; l. 9, Ep. 59; l. 6, Ep. 66; l. 7, Ep. 19; l. 5, Ep. 20. 41. St. Gregory was always a zealous asserter of the celibacy of the clergy, which law he extended also to subdeacons, who had before been ranked among the clergy of the Minor orders, (l. 1, ep. 44, l. 4, Ep. 34.) The Centuriators, Heylin, and others, mention a forged letter, under the name of Udalrirus, said to be written to pope Nicholas, concerning the heads of children found by St. Gregory in a pond. But a smore ridiculous fable was never invented, as is demonstrated from many inconsistencies of that forged letter: and St. Gregory in his epistles everywhere mentions the law of the celibacy of the clergy as ancient and inviolable. Nor was any pope Nicholas contemporary with St. Udalricus. See Baronius and Dom de {Sainte} Marthe, in his life of St. Gregory. 42. L. 3, Ep. 29; l. 5, Ep. 13. 43. L. 6, Ep. 15, 16, 17. 44. L. 11, Ep. 28; olim 58, p. 1180, &c. 45. L. 7, Ep. 25. 46. Some Protestants slander St. Gregory, as if by this publication of the imperial edict he had concurred to what he condemned as contrary to the divine law. Dr. Mercier, in his letter in favor of a law commanding silence, with regard to the constitution Unigenitus in France, in 1759, pretends that this holy pope thought obedience to the emperor a duty even in things of a like nature. But Dr. Launay, Réponse à la Lettre d'un Docteur de Sorbunne, partie 2, p. 51, and Dr. N., Examen de la Lettre d'un Docteur de Sorboune sur la nécessité de garder In silence sur la Constitution Unigenitus, p. 33, t. 1, demonstrate that St. Gregory regarded the matter, as it really is, merely as a point of discipline, and nowhere says the edict was contrary to the divine law, but only not agreeable to God, and tending to prejudice the interest of his greater glory. In matters of faith or essential obligation, he calls forth the zeal and fortitude of prelates to stand upon their guard as opposing unjust laws, even to martyrdom, as the same authors demonstrate. 47. Ep. 55. 48. Theophanes Chronogr. 49. Ps. 118. 50. L. 13, ep. 31, 38. 51. We say the same of the compliments which he paid to the impious French queen Brunehault, at which lord Bolingbroke takes offence; but a respect is due to persons in power. St. Gregory nowhere flatters their vices, but admonishes by compliments those who could not be approached without them. Thus did St. Paul address Agrippa and Festas, &c. In refusing the sacraments of the church to impenitent wicked princes, and in checking their crimes by seasonable remonstrances, St. Gregory was always ready to exert the zeal of a Baptist: as he opposed the unjust projects of Mauritius, so would he have done those of Phocas when in his power. 52. The antiquarian will read with pleasure the curious notes of Angelus Rocca, and the {}enedic{ons on} the pictures of St. Gregory and his parents, and on this holy pope's pious donations. 53. St. Gregory gave St. Austin a small library which was kept in his monastery at Canterbury. Of it there still remain a book of the gospels in the Bodleian library, and another in that of Corpus-Christi in Cambridge. The other books were psalters, the Pastorals, the Passionarium Sanctorium, and the like. See Mr. Wauley, in his catalogue of S{} on manuscripts, at the end of Dr. Hickes's Thesaurus, p. 172. Many rich vestments, vessels, relics, and a pall given by St. Gregory to St. Austin, were kept in the same monastery. Their original inventory, drawn up by Thomas of Elmham, in the reign of Henry V., is preserved in the Harleian library, and published by the learned lady, Mrs. E. Elstob, at the end of a Saxon panegyric on St. Gregory. 54. Gregor. M. in l. 1. Reg. c. 16, v. 3 and 9. ANNOTATION ON THE LIFE OF ST. GREGORY. BARONIUS thinks that his monastery of Saint Andrew's followed the rule of St. Equitius, because its first abbots were drawn out of his province, Valeria. On another side, Dom Ma-billon (t. 1. Actor. Sanct. & t. 2, Analect. and Annal. Bened. l, 6,) maintains that it followed the rule of St. Benedict, which St. Gregory often commends and prefers to all other rules. His colleagues, in their life of St. Gregory, Natalis Alexander, in his Church History, and others, have written to support the same opinion: who all, with Mabillon, borrow all their arguments from the learned English Benedictin, Clemens Reynerus, in his Apostolatus Benedictinorum in Anglia. Others object that St. Gregory in his epistles ordains many things contrary to the rule of St. Benedict, and think he who has written so much concerning St. Benedict, would have mentioned by some epithet the circumstance of being his disciple, and would have called the rule of that patriarch his own. These antiquaries judge it most probable that the monastery of St. Andrew had its own rule prescribed by the first founders, and borrowed from different places: for this was the ordinary method of most monasteries in the west, till afterwards the rule of St. Benedict was universally received for better uniformity and discipline: to which the just commendations of St. Gregory doubtless contributed. F. Clement Reyner, in the above-mentioned book, printed at Doway, in folio, in 1626, displays much erudition in endeavoring to prove that St. Austin, and the other monks sent by Saint Gregory to convert the English, professed the order of St. Benedict. Mabillon borrows his arguments on this subject in his preface to the Acts of the Benedictins, against the celebrated Sir John Marsham, who, in his long preface to the Monasticon, sets himself to show that the first English monks followed rules instituted by their own abbots, often gleaned out of many. Dr. Hickes confirms this assertion against Mabillon with great erudition, (Diss. pp. 67, 68,) which is espoused by Dr. Tanner, bishop of St. Asaph's, in his preface to nis exact Notitia Monastica, by the author of Biographia Britannica, in the life of Bede, t. 1, p. 656, and by the judicious William Thomas, in his additions to the new edition of Dugdale's Antiquities of Warwickshire, (t. 1, p. 157.) These authors think that the rule of St. Benedict was not generally received by the English monks before the regulations of St. Dunstan; nor perfectly till after the Norman conquest. For pope Constantine, in 709, in the bull wherein he establishes the rule of St. Benedict to be followed in the abbey of Evesham, says of it: "Which does not prevail in those parts." "Quæ minus in illis partibus habetur." In 747, Cuthbert archbishop of Canterbury, in a synod held in presence of Ethelbaid, king of the Mercians, at Cloveshove, (which town some place in Kent, others more probably in Mercia, about Reading,) published Monastic Constitutions, which were {581} followed by the English monks till the time of St. Dunstan. In these we find no mention of the rule of Saint Benedict; nor in Bede. The charter of king Ethelbald which mentions the Black monks, is a manifest forgery. Even that name was not known before the institution of the Camaldulenses, in 1020, and the Carthusians, who distinguished themselves by white habits. Dom Mege, in his commentary on the rule of St. Benedict, shows that the first Benedictins wore white, not black. John of Glastenbury, and others, published by Hearne, who call the apostles of the English Black Monks, are too modern, unless they produce some ancient vouchers. The monastery of Evesham adopted the rule of Saint Benedict, in 709. St. Bennet Biscop and St. Wilfrid both improved the monastic order in the houses which they founded, from the rule of St. Benedict, at least borrowing some constitutions from it. The devastations of the Danes scarce left a convent of monks standing in England, except those of Glastenbury and Abingdon, which was their state in the days of king Alfred, as Leland observes. St. Dunstan, St. Oswald, and St. Ethelwold, restored the monasteries, and propagated exceedingly the monastic state. St. Oswald had professed the order of Saint Benedict in France, in the monastery of Fleury; and, together with the aforesaid two bishops, he established the same in a great measure in England. St. Dunstan published a uniform rule for the monasteries of this nation, entitled, Regularis Concordiæ Anglicæ Nationis, extant in Reyner, and Spelman, (in Spicilegio ad Eadmerum, p. 145,) in which he adopts, in a great measure, the rule of St. Benedict, joining with it many ancient monastic customs. Even after the Norman conquest, the synod of London, under Lanfranc, in 1075, says the regulations of monks were drawn from the rule of St. Bennet and the ancient custom of regular places, as Baronius takes notice, which seems to imply former distinct institutes. From that time down to the dissolution, all the cathedral priories, except that of Carlisle, and most of the rich abbeys in England, were held by monks of the Benedictin order. See Dr. Brown Willis, in his separate histories of Cathedral Priories, Mitred Abbeys, &c. ST. MAXIMILIAN, M. HE was the son of Victor, a Christian soldier in Numidia. According to the law which obliged the sons of soldiers to serve in the army at the age of twenty-one years, his measure was taken, that he might be enrolled in the troops, and he was found to be of due stature, being five Roman feet and ten inches high,[1] that is, about five feet and a half of our measure. But Maximilian refused to receive the mark, which was a print on the band, and a leaden collar about the neck, on which were engraved the name and motto of the emperor. His plea was, that in the Roman army superstitions, contrary to the Christian faith, were often practised, with which he could not defile his soul. Being condemned by the proconsul to lose his head, he met death with joy in the year 296. See his acts in Ruinart. Footnotes: 1. See Tr. ur la Milice Romaine, t. 1. ST. PAUL, BISHOP OF LEON, C. HE was a noble Briton, a native of Cornwall, cousin of St. Samson, and his fellow-disciple under St. Iltutus. We need no other proof of his wonderful fervor and progress in virtue, and all the exercises of a monastic life, than the testimony of St. Iltutus, by whose advice St. Paul left the monastery to embrace more perfect eremetical life in a retired place in the same country. Some time after, our saint sailing from Cornwall, passed into Armorica, and continued the same austere eremitical life in a small island on the coast of the Osismians, a barbarous idolatrous people in Armorica, or Little Britain. Prayer and contemplation were his whole employment, and bread and water his only food, except on great festivals, on which he took {582} with his bread a few little fish. The saint, commiserating the blindness of the pagan inhabitants on the coast, passed over to the continent, and instructed them in the faith. Withur, count or governor of Bas, and all that coast, seconded by king Childebert, procured his ordination to the episcopal dignity, notwithstanding his tears to prevent it. Count Withur, who resided in the Isle of Bas, bestowed his own house on the saint to be converted into a monastery; and St. Paul placed in it certain fervent monks, who had accompanied him from Wales and Cornwall. He was himself entirely taken up in his pastoral functions, and his diligence in acquitting himself of every branch of his obligations was equal to his apprehension of their weight. When he had completed the conversion of that country, he resigned his bishopric to a disciple, and retired into the isle of Bas, where he died in holy solitude, on the 12th of March, about the year 573, near one hundred years old.[1] During the inroads of the Normans, his relics were removed to the abbey of Fleury, or St. Bennet's on the Loire, but were lost when the Calvinists plundered that church. Leon, the ancient city of the Osismians, in which he fixed his see, takes his name. His festival occurs in the ancient breviary of Leon, on the 10th of October, perhaps the day of the translation of his relics. For in the ancient breviary of Nantes, and most others, he is honored on the 12th of March. See Le Cointe's Annals, the Bollandists on this day, and Lobineau in the Lives of the Saints of Brittany, from his acts compiled by a monk of Fleury, about the close of the tenth century. Footnotes: 1. St. Paul was ordained priest before he left Great Britain, about the year 530. The little island on the coast of Armorica, where he chose his first abode in France, was called Medonia, and seems to the present Molene, situated between the isle of Ushant and the coast. The first oratory which he built on the continent, very near this islands seems to be the church called from him Lan-Pol. MARCH XIII. ST. NICEPHORUS, C. PATRIARCH OF CONSTANTINOPLE From his life by Ignatius, deacon of Constantinople, afterwards bishop of Nice, a contemporary author; and from the relation of his banishment by Theophanes. See Fleury, l. 45, 46, 47. Ceillier, t. 18, p. 487. A.D. 828. THEODORUS, the father of our saint, was secretary to the emperor Constantine Copronymus: but when that tyrant declared himself a persecutor of the Catholic church, the faithful minister, remembering that we are bound to obey God rather than man, maintained the honor due to holy images with so much zeal, that he was stripped of his honors, scourged, tortured, and banished. The young Nicephorus was from his cradle animated to the practice of virtue by the domestic example of his father: and in his education, as his desires of improvement were great, and the instructions he had very good, the progress he made was as considerable; till, by the maturity of his age, and of his study, he made his appearance in the world. When Constantine and Irene were placed on the imperial throne, and restored the Catholic faith, our saint was quickly introduced to their notice, and by his merits attained a large share in their favor. He was by them advanced to his father's {583} dignity, and, by the lustre of his sanctity, was the ornament of the court, and the support of the state. He distinguished himself by his zeal against the Iconoclasts, and was secretary to the second council of Nice. After the death of St. Tarasius, patriarch of Constantinople, in 806, no one was found more worthy to succeed him than Nicephorus. To give an authentic testimony of his faith, during the time of his consecration he held in his hand a treatise which he had written in defence of holy images, and after the ceremony laid it up behind the altar, as a pledge that he would always maintain the tradition of the church. As soon as he was seated in the patriarchal chair, he began to consider how a total reformation of manners might be wrought, and his precepts from the pulpit received a double force from the example he set to others in an humble comportment, and steady uniform practice of eminent piety.[1] He applied himself with unwearied diligence to all the duties of the ministry; and, by his zealous labors and invincible meekness and patience, kept virtue in countenance, and stemmed the tide of iniquity. But these glorious successes rendered him not so conspicuous as the constancy with which he despised the frowns of tyrants, and suffered persecution for the sake of justice. The government having changed hands, the patrician Leo the Armenian, governor of Natolia, became emperor in 813, and being himself an Iconoclast, endeavored both by artifices and open violence to establish that heresy. He studied in the first place, by crafty suggestions, to gain over the holy patriarch to favor his design. But St. Nicephorus answered him: "We cannot change the ancient traditions: we respect holy images as we do the cross and the book of the gospels." For it must be observed that the ancient Iconoclasts venerated the book of the gospels, and the figure of the cross, though by an inconsistency usual in error, they condemned the like relative honor with regard to holy images. The saint showed, that far from derogating from the supreme honor of God, we honor him when for his sake we pay a subordinate respect to his angels, saints, prophets, and ministers: also when we give a relative inferior honor to inanimate things which belong to his service, as sacred vessels, churches, and images. But the tyrant was fixed in his errors, which he at first endeavored to propagate by stratagems. He therefore privately encouraged soldiers to treat contemptuously an image of Christ which was on a great cross at the brazen gate of the city; and thence took occasion to order the image to be taken off the cross, pretending he did it to prevent a second profanation. Saint Nicephorus saw the storm gathering, and spent most of his time in prayer with several holy bishops and abbots. Shortly after, the emperor, having assembled together certain Iconoclast bishops in his palace, sent for the patriarch and his fellow-bishops. They obeyed the summons, but entreated his majesty to leave the government of the church to its pastors. Emilian, bishop of Cyzicus, one of their body, said: "If this is an ecclesiastical affair, let it be discussed in the church, according to custom, not in the palace." Euthymius, bishop of Sardes said: "For these eight hundred years past, since the coming of Christ, there have been always pictures of him, and he has been honored in them. Who shall now have the boldness to abolish so ancient a tradition?" St. Theodorus, the Studite, spoke after the bishops, and said to the emperor: "My Lord, do not disturb the order of the church. God hath placed in it apostles, prophets, pastors, and teachers.[2] You he hath intrusted with the care of the state; but leave the church to its pastors." The emperor, {584} in a rage, drove them from his presence. Sometime after, the Iconoclast bishops held a pretended council in the imperial palace, and cited the patriarch to appear before them. To their summons he returned this answer: "Who gave you this authority? was it the pope, or any of the patriarchs? In my diocese you have no jurisdiction." He then read the canon which declares those excommunicated who presume to exercise any act of jurisdiction in the diocese of another bishop. They, however, proceeded to pronounce against him a mock sentence of deposition; and the holy pastor, after several attempts made secretly to take away his life, was sent by the emperor into banishment. Michael the Stutterer, who in 820 succeeded Leo in the imperial throne, was engaged in the same heresy, and also a persecutor of our saint, who died in his exile, on the 2d of June, in the monastery of St. Theodorus, which he had built in the year 828, the fourteenth of his banishment, being about seventy years old. By the order of the empress Theodora, his body was brought to Constantinople with great pomp, in 848, on the 13th of March, on which day he is commemorated in the Roman Martyrology.[3] * * * * * It is by a wonderful effect of his most gracious mercy and singular love, that God is pleased to visit all his faithful servants with severe trials, and to purify their virtue in the crucible, that by being exercised it may be made heroic and perfect. By suffering with patience, and in a Christian spirit, a soul makes higher and quicker advances in pure love, than by any other means or by any other good works. Let no one then repine, if by sickness, persecution, or disgraces, they are hindered from doing the good actions which they desire, or rendered incapable of discharging the duties of their station, or of laboring to convert others. God always knows what is best for us and others: we may safely commend to him his own cause, and all souls, which are dearer to him than they can be to us. By this earnest prayer and perfect sacrifice of ourselves to God, we shall more effectually draw upon ourselves the divine mercy than by any endeavors of our own. Let us leave to God the choice of his instruments and means in the salvation of others. As to ourselves, it is our duty to give him what he requires of us: nor can we glorify him by any sacrifice either greater or more honorable, and more agreeable to him, than that of a heart under the heaviest pressure, ever submissive to him, embracing with love and joy every order of his wisdom, and placing its entire happiness and comfort in the accomplishment of his adorable most holy will. The great care of a Christian in this state, in order to sanctify his sufferings, must be to be constantly {585} united to God, and to employ his affections in the most fervent interior exercises of entire sacrifice and resignation, of confidence, love, praise, adoration, penance, and compunction, which he excites by suitable aspirations. Footnotes: 1. The Confession of Faith which, upon his promotion, he sent to pope Leo III., is published by Baronius ad an. 811 and in the seventh tome of Labbe's councils, &c. In it the saint gives a clear exposition of the principal mysteries of faith, of the invocation of saints, and the veneration due to relics and holy images. 2. Eph. iv. 11. 3. St. Nicephorus has left us a chronicle from the beginning of the world: of which the best editions are that of F. Goar, with the chronicle of George Syncellus at Paris, in 1652, and that of Venice among the Byzantine historians, in 1729. Also a short history from the reign of Mauritius to that of Constantine and Irene, published at Paris, in 1616, by F. Petau; and reprinted among the Byzantine historians, at Paris, in 1649, and again at Venice, in 1729. The style is justly commended by Photius. (col. 66.) The seventeen canons of St. Nicephorus are extant in the collection of the councils, t. 7, p. 1297, &c. In the second he declares it unlawful to travel on Sundays without necessity. Cotelier has published four others of this saint, with five of the foregoing, and his letter to Hilarion and Eustrasius, containing learned resolutions of several cases. (Monum. Græc. t. 3, p. 451.) St. Nicephorus wrote several learned tracts against the Iconoclasts, as three Antirrhetics or Confutations, &c. Some of these are printed in the Library of the Fathers, and F. Combefis's Supplement or Auctuarium, t. 1, in Canisius's Lectiones Antiquæ, republished by Basnage, part 2, &c. But a great number are only found in MSS. in the libraries of England, Paris, and Rome. The saint often urges that the Iconoclasts condemned themselves by allowing veneration to the cross, for the image of Christ upon the cross is more than the bare cross. In the second Antirrhetic he most evidently establishes the real presence of the Body of Christ in the Eucharist; which passage is quoted by Leo Allatius. (l. 3, de Consens. Ecclesiæ Occident. et Orient. c. 15, p. 1223.) He does the same almost in the same words, l. de Cherubinis a Moyse Factis, c. 7, apud Canis. t. 2, ed. Basm. part 2, p. 19, & t. 9, Bibl. Patr. Three Antirrhetics are entitled, against Mamonas (i. e. Constantine Copronytnus) and the Iconoclasts. A fourth was written by him against Eusebius and Epiphanides to prove that Eusebius of Cæsarea was an obstinate Arian, and Epiphanides a favorer of Manicheism, and a very different person from St. Epiphanius of Salamine. F. Anselm Bauduri, a Benedictin monk of Ragusa, undertook at Paris a complete edition of the works of St. Nicephorus, in two volumes in folio: but his death prevented the publication. His learned Prospectus, dated in the monastery of St. Germain-des-Prez, in 1785, is inserted by Fabricius in Biblioth. Gr. t. 6, p. 640, and in part by Oudin, de Scrip. t. 2, p. 13. ST. EUPHRASIA, V. ANTIGONUS, the father of this saint, was a nobleman of the first rank and quality in the court of Theodosius the younger, nearly allied in blood to that emperor, and honored by him with several great employments in the state. He was married to Euphrasia, a ladv no less illustrious for her birth and virtue, by whom he had one only daughter and heiress, called also Euphrasia, the saint of whom we treat. After her birth, her pious parents, by mutual consent, engaged themselves by vow, to pass the remainder of their lives in perpetual continence, that they might more perfectly aspire to the invisible joys of the life to come; and from that time they lived together as brother and sister, in the exercises of devotion, alms-deeds, and penance. Antigonus died within a year, and the holy widow, to shun the importunate addresses of young suitors for marriage, and the distraction of friends, not long after withdrew privately, with her little daughter, into Egypt, where she was possessed of a very large estate. In that country she fixed her abode near a holy monastery of one hundred and thirty nuns, who never used any other food than herbs and pulse, which they took only after sunset, and some only once in two or three days; they wore and slept on sackcloth, wrought with their hands, and prayed almost without interruption. When sick, they bore their pains with patience, esteeming them an effect of the divine mercy, and thanking God for the same: nor did they seek relief from physicians, except in cases of absolute necessity, and then only allowed of ordinary general remedies, as the monks of La Trappe do at this day. Delicate and excessive attention to health nourishes self-love and immortification,[1] and often destroys that health which it studies anxiously to preserve. By the example of these holy virgins, the devout mother animated herself to fervor in the exercises of religion and charity, to which she totally dedicated herself. She frequently visited these servants of God, and earnestly entreated them to accept a considerable annual revenue, with an obligation that they should always be bound to pray for the soul of her deceased husband. But the abbess refused the estate, saying: "We have renounced all the conveniences of the world, in order to purchase heaven. We are poor, and such we desire to remain." She could only be prevailed upon to accept a small matter to supply the church-lamp with oil, and for incense to be burned on the altar. The young Euphrasia, at seven years of age, made it her earnest request to her mother, that she might be permitted to serve God in this monastery. The pious mother, on hearing this, wept for joy, and not long after presented her to the abbess, who, taking up an image of Christ, gave it into her hands. The tender virgin kissed it, saying: "By vow I consecrate myself to Christ." Then the mother led her before an image of our Redeemer, and lifting up her hands to heaven, said: "Lord Jesus Christ, receive this child under your special protection. You alone doth she love and seek: to you doth she recommend herself."[2] Then turning to her dear daughter, she said: "May God, who laid the foundations of the mountains, strengthen you always in his holy fear." And leaving her in the hands of {586} the abbess, she went out of the monastery weeping. Some time after this she fell sick, and being forewarned of her death, gave her last instructions to her daughter, in these words: "Fear God, honor your sisters, and serve them with humility. Never think of what you have been, nor say to yourself that you are of royal extraction. Be humble and poor on earth, that you may be rich in heaven." The good mother soon after slept in peace. Upon the news of her death, the emperor Theodosius sent for the noble virgin to court, having promised her in marriage to a favorite young senator. But the virgin wrote him, with her own hand, the following answer: "Invincible emperor, having consecrated myself to Christ in perpetual chastity, I cannot be false to my engagement, and marry a mortal man, who will shortly be the food of worms. For the sake of my parents, be pleased to distribute their estates among the poor, the orphans, and the church. Set all my slaves at liberty, and discharge my vassals and servants, giving them whatever is their due. Order my father's stewards to acquit my farmers of all they owe since his death, that I may serve God without let or hinderance, and may stand before him without the solicitude of temporal affairs. Pray for me, you and your empress, that I may be made worthy to serve Christ." The messengers returned with this letter to the emperor, who shed many tears in reading it. The senators who heard it burst also into tears, and said to his majesty: "She is the worthy daughter of Antigonus and Euphrasia, of your royal blood, and the holy offspring of a virtuous stock." The emperor punctually executed all she desired, a little before his death, in 395. St. Euphrasia was to her pious sisters a perfect pattern of humility, meekness, and charity. If she found herself assaulted by any temptation, she immediately discovered it to the abbess, to drive away the devil by that humiliation, and to seek a remedy. The discreet superioress often enjoined her, on such occasions, some humbling and painful penitential labor; as sometimes to carry great stones from one place to another; which employment she once, under an obstinate assault, continued thirty days together with wonderful simplicity, till the devil being vanquished by her humble obedience and chastisement of her body, he left her in peace. Her diet was only herbs or pulse, which she took after sunset, at first every day, but afterwards only once in two or three, or sometimes seven days. But her abstinence received its chief merit from her humility; without which it would have been a fast of devils. She cleaned out the chambers of the other nuns, carried water to the kitchen, and, out of obedience, cheerfully employed herself in the meanest drudgery; making painful labor a part of her penance. To mention one instance of her extraordinary meekness and humility: it is related, that one day a maid in the kitchen asked her why she fasted whole weeks, which no other attempted to do besides the abbess. Her answer was, that the abbess had enjoined her that penance. The other called her a hypocrite. Upon which Euphrasia fell at her feet, begging her to pardon and pray for her. In which action it is hard to say, whether we ought more to admire the patience with which she received so unjust a rebuke and slander, or the humility with which she sincerely condemned herself; as if, by her hypocrisy and imperfections, she had been a scandal to others. She was favored with miracles both before and after her death, which happened in the year 410, and the thirtieth of her age. Her name is recorded on this day in the Roman Martyrology. See her ancient authentic life in Rosweide, p. 351, D'Andilly, and most correct in the Acta Sanctorum, by the Bollandists. Footnotes: 1. It is severely condemned by St. Bernard, ep. 345, ol. 321, p. 318, and serm. 50, in Cant. St. Ambrose serm. 22, in Ps. 118, and by Abbot Rance, the reformer of La Trappe. 2. This passage is quoted by St. John Damascene, Or. 3, de Imagin. {587} ST. THEOPHANES, ABBOT, C. HIS father, who was governor of the isles of the Archipelago, died when he was only three years old, and left him heir to a very great estate, under the guardianship of the Iconoclast emperor, Constantine Copronymus. Amidst the dangers of such an education, a faithful pious servant instilled into his tender mind the most generous sentiments of virtue and religion. Being arrived at man's estate, he was compelled by his friends to take a wife; but on the day of his marriage, he spoke in so moving a manner to his consort on the shortness and uncertainty of this life, that they made a mutual vow of perpetual chastity. She afterwards became a nun, and he for his part built two monasteries in Mysia; one of which, called Megal-Agre, near the Propontis, he governed himself. He lived, as it were, dead to the world and the flesh, in the greatest purity of life, and in the exercises of continual mortification and prayer. In 787, he assisted at the second council of Nice, where all admired to see one, whom they had formerly known in so much worldly grandeur, now so meanly clad, so modest, and so full of self-contempt as he appeared to be. He never laid aside his hair shirt; his bed was a mat, and his pillow a stone; his sustenance was hard coarse bread and water. At fifty years of age, he began to be grievously afflicted with the stone and nephritic colic; but bore with cheerfulness the most excruciating pains of his distemper. The emperor Leo, the Armenian, in 814, renewed the persecution against the church, and abolished the use of holy images, which had been restored under Constantine and Irene. Knowing the great reputation and authority of Theophanes, he endeavored to gain him by civilities and crafty letters. The saint discovered the hook concealed under his alluring baits, which did not, however, hinder him from obeying the emperor's summons to Constantinople, though at that time under a violent fit of the stone; which distemper, for the remaining part of his life, allowed him very short intervals of ease. The emperor sent him this message: "From your mild and obliging disposition, I flatter myself you are come to confirm my sentiments on the point in question with your suffrage. It is your readiest way for obtaining my favor, and with that the greatest riches and honors for yourself, your monastery, and relations, which it is in the power of an emperor to bestow. But if you refuse to comply with my desires in this affair, you will incur my highest displeasure, and draw misery and disgrace on yourself and friends." The holy man returned for answer: "Being now far advanced in years, and much broken with pains and infirmities, I have neither relish nor inclination for any of these things which I despised fox Christ's sake in my youth, when I was in a condition to enjoy the world. As to my monastery and my friends, I recommend them to God. If you think to frighten me into a compliance by your threats, as a child is awed by the rod, you only lose your labor. For though unable to walk, and subject to many other corporeal infirmities, I trust in Christ that he will enable me to undergo, in defence of his cause, the sharpest tortures you can inflict on nay weak body." The emperor employed several persons to endeavor to overcome his resolution, but in vain: so seeing himself vanquished by his constancy, he confined him two years in a close stinking dungeon, where he suffered much from his distemper and want of necessaries. He was also cruelly scourged, having received three hundred stripes. In 818, he was, removed out of his dungeon, and banished into the isle of Samothracia, where he died in seventeen days after his arrival, on the 12th of March. His relics were honored by many miraculous cures. He has {588} left us his Chronographia, or short history from the year 824, the first of Dioclesian, where George Syncellus left off, to the year 813.[1] His imprisonment did not allow him leisure to polish the style. See his contemporary life, and the notes of Goar and Combefis, two learned Dominicans, on his works, printed at Paris, in 1655. Footnotes: 1. George Syncellus, (i. e. secretary to the patriarch St. Tarasius,) a holy monk, and zealous defender of holy images, was a close friend of St. Theophanes, and died about the year 800. In his chronicle are preserved excellent fragments of Manetho, the Egyptian, of Julius Africanus, Eusebius, &c. SAINT KENNOCHA, VIRGIN IN SCOTLAND, IN THE REIGN OF KING MALCOLM II. FROM her infancy she was a model of humility, meekness, modesty, and devotion. Though an only daughter, and the heiress of a rich and noble family, fearing lest the poison which lurks in the enjoyment of perishable goods should secretly steal into her affections, or the noise of the world should be a hinderance to her attention to heavenly things and spiritual exercises, she rejected all solicitations of suitors and worldly friends, and, in the bloom of life, made an entire sacrifice of herself to God, by making her religious profession in a great nunnery, in the county of Fife. In this holy state, by an extraordinary love of poverty and mortification, a wonderful gift of prayer, and purity or singleness of heart, she attained to the perfection of all virtues. Several miracles which she wrought made her name famous among men, and she passed to God in a good old age, in the year 1007. Several churches in Scotland bore her name, particularly one near Glasgow, still called St. Kennoch's Kirk, and another called by an abbreviation of her name Kyle, in which her relics were formerly kept with singular veneration. In the Aberdeen Breviary she is honored with a particular prayer. She is mentioned by Adam King, in his calendar, and an account of her life is given us in the Chronicle of Scone. ST. GERALD, BISHOP. HE was an Englishman, who, passing into Ireland, became a monk in the abbey of Megeo, or Mayo, founded by Colman of Lindisfarne, for the English. Gerald was advanced successively to the dignity of abbot and bishop, and founded the abbey of Elytheria, or Tempul-Gerald in Connaught, that of Teagh-na-Saxon, and a nunnery which he put under the care of his sister Segretia. He departed to our Lord in 732, and was buried at Mayo, where a church dedicated to God under his patronage remains to this day. See Colgan. ST. MOCHOEMOC, IN LATIN, PULCHERIUS, ABBOT. HAVING been educated under St. Comgal, in the monastery of Benchor, he laid the foundation of the great monastery of Liath-Mochoemoc, around which a large town was raised, which still bears that name. His happy death is placed by the chronologists on the 13th of March, in 635. See Usher's Antiquities in Tab. Chron. and Colgan. {589} MARCH XIV. ST. MAUD, OR MATHILDIS, QUEEN OF GERMANY. From her life written forty years after her death, by the order of St. Henry; Acta Sanct. t. 7, p. 361. A.D. 968. THIS princess was daughter of Theodoric, a powerful Saxon count. Her parents, being sensible that piety is the only true greatness, placed her very young in the monastery of Erford, of which her grandmother Maud, who had renounced the world in her widowhood, was then abbess. Here our saint acquired an extraordinary relish for prayer and spiritual reading; and learned to work at her needle, and to employ all the precious moments of life in something serious and worthy the great end of her creation. She remained in that house an accomplished model of all virtues, till her parents married her to Henry, son of Otho, duke of Saxony, in 913. Her husband, surnamed the Fowler, from his fondness for the diversion of hawking, then much in vogue, became duke of Saxony by the death of his father, in 916; and in 919, upon the death of Conrad, was chosen king of Germany. He was a pious and victorious prince, and very tender of his subjects. His solicitude in easing their taxes, made them ready to serve their country in his wars at their own charges, though he generously recompensed their zeal after his expeditions, which were always attended with success. While he by his arms checked the insolence of the Hungarians and Danes, and enlarged his dominions by adding to them Bavaria, Maud gained domestic victories over her spiritual enemies, more worthy of a Christian, and far greater in the eyes of heaven. She nourished the precious seeds of devotion and humility in her heart by assiduous prayer and meditation; and, not content with the time which the day afforded for these exercises, employed part of the night the same way. The nearer the view was which she took of worldly vanities, the more clearly she discovered their emptiness and dangers, and sighed to see men pursue such bubbles to the loss of their souls; for, under a fair outside, they contain nothing but poison and bitterness. It was her delight to visit, comfort, and exhort the sick and the afflicted, to serve and instruct the poor, teaching them the advantages of their state from the benedictions and example of Christ; and to afford her charitable succors to prisoners, procuring them their liberty where motives of justice would permit it; or at least easing the weight of their chains by liberal alms; but her chief aim was to make them shake off their sins by sincere repentance. Her husband, edified by her example, concurred with her in every pious undertaking which she projected. After twenty-three years' marriage, God was pleased to call the king to himself by an apoplectic fit, in 936. Maud, during his sickness, went to the church to pour forth her soul in prayer for him at the foot of the altar. As soon as she understood, by the tears and cries of the people, that he had expired, she called for a priest that was fasting, to offer the holy sacrifice for his soul; and at the same time cut off the jewels which she wore, and gave them to the priest, as a pledge that she renounced from that moment the pomp of the world. She had three sons; Otho, afterwards emperor; Henry, duke of Bavaria, and St. Bruno, archbishop of Cologne. Otho was crowned king of Germany in 937, {590} and emperor at Rome in 962, after his victories over the Bohemians and Lombards. Maud, in the contest between her two elder sons for the crown, which was elective, favored Henry, who was the younger, a fault she expiated by severe afflictions and penance. These two sons conspired to strip her of her dowry, on the unjust pretence that she had squandered away the revenues of the state on the poor. This persecution was long and cruel, coming from all that was most dear to her in this world. The unnatural princes at length repented of their injustice, were reconciled to her, and restored her all that had been taken from her. She then became more liberal in her alms than ever, and founded many churches, with five monasteries; of which the principal were that of Polden in the duchy of Brunswick, in which she maintained three thousand monks; and that of Quedlinbourg in the duchy of Saxony.[1] She buried her husband in this place, and when she had finished the buildings, made it her usual retreat. She applied herself totally to her devotions, and to works of mercy. It was her greatest pleasure to teach the poor and ignorant how to pray, as she had formerly taught her servants. In her last sickness she made her confession to her grandson William, the archbishop of Mentz, who yet died twelve days before her, on his road home. She again made a public confession before the priests and monks of the place, received a second time the last sacraments, and lying on a sackcloth with ashes on her head, died on the 14th of March, in 968. Her body remains at Quedlinbourg. Her name is recorded to the Roman Martyrology on this day. * * * * * The beginning of true virtue is most ardently to desire it, and to ask it of God with the utmost assiduity and earnestness,[2] preferring it with all the saints to kingdoms and thrones, and considering riches as nothing in comparison of this our only and inestimable treasure. Fervent prayer, holy meditation, and reading pious books, are the principal means by which it is to be constantly improved, and the interior life of the soul to be strength ened. These are so much the more necessary in the world than in a religious state, as its poison and distractions threaten her continually with the greatest danger. Amidst the pomp, hurry, and amusements of a court, St. Maud gave herself up to holy contemplation with such earnestness, that though she was never wanting to any exterior or social duties, her soul was raised above all perishable goods, dwelt always in heaven, and sighed after that happy moment which was to break the bonds of her slavery, and unite her to God in eternal bliss and perfect love. Is it possible that so many Christians, capable of finding in God their sovereign felicity, should amuse themselves with pleasures which flatter the senses, with reading profane books, and seeking an empty satisfaction in idle visits, vain conversation, news, and sloth, in which they pass those precious hours which they might employ in exercises of devotion, and in the duties and serious employments of their station! What trifles do they suffer to fill their minds and hearts, and to rob them of the greatest of all treasures! Conversation and visits in the world must only be allowed as far as they are social duties, must be regulated by charity and necessity, sanctified by simplicity, prudence, and every virtue, animated by the spirit of God, and seasoned with a holy unction which divine grace gives to those whom it perfectly replenishes and possesses. Footnotes: 1. The abbess of this latter is the first princess of the empire. 2. Sap. vii. 6. {591} SS. ACEPSIMAS, BISHOP, JOSEPH, PRIEST; AND AITHILAHAS, DEACON, MM. ST. MARUTHAS closes, with the acts of these martyrs, his history of the persecution of king Sapor, which raged without intermission during forty years. The venerable author assures us, that, living in the neighborhood, he had carefully informed himself of the several circumstances of their combats from those who were eye-witnesses, and ushers in his account with the following address: "Be propitious to me, O Lord, through the prayers of these martyrs--Being assisted by the divine grace, and strengthened by your protection, O ye incomparable men, I presume to draw the outlines of your heroic virtue and incredible torments. But the remembrance of your bitter sufferings covers me with shame, confusion, and tears, for myself and my sins. O! you who hear this relation, count the days and the hours of three years and a half, which they spent in prison, and remember they passed no month without frequent tortures, no day free from pain, no hour without the threat of immediate death. The festivals and new moons were black to them by fresh racks, beatings, clubs, chains, hanging by their limbs, dislocations of their joints, &c." In the thirty-seventh year of this persecution, a fresh edict was published, commanding the governors and magistrates to punish all Christians with racks, scourges, stoning, and every sort of death, laying to their charge the following articles: "They abolish our doctrine; they teach men to worship one only God, and forbid them to adore the sun or fire; they use water for profane washing; they forbid persons to marry, to be soldiers in the king's armies, or to strike any one; they permit all sorts of animals to be killed, and they suffer the dead to be buried; they say that serpents and scorpions were made, not by the devil, but by God himself." Acepsimas, bishop of Honita in Assyria, a man above fourscore years old, but of a vigorous and strong constitution of body, was apprehended, and conducted in chains to Arbela, before the governor. This judge inquired how he could deny the divinity of the sun, which all the East adored. The martyr answered him, expressing his astonishment how men could prefer a creature to the Creator. By the orders of the governor he was laid on the ground with his feet bound, and in that posture barbarously scourged, till his whole body was covered with blood; after which he was thrown into prison. In the mean time one Joseph, a holy priest of Bethcatuba, and Aithilahas, a deacon of Beth-nudra, famed for eloquence, sanctity, and learning, were brought before the same governor. To his interrogatories, Joseph answered, that he was a Christian, and had always taught the sun to be an inanimate creature. The issue was, that he was stretched flat on the ground, and beaten with thick twigs stripped of the thorns, by ten executioners who succeeded one another, till his body seemed one continued wound. At the sight of himself in this condition the martyr with joy said: "I return you the greatest thanks I am able, Christ, the Son of God, who have granted me this mercy, and washed me with this second baptism of my blood, to wipe away my sins." His courage the persecutors deemed an insult, and redoubled their fury in tearing and bruising his blessed body. After he was loosened, loaded with heavy chains, and cast into the same dungeon with Acepsimas, Aithilahas was called upon. The governor said to him: "Adore {592} the sun, which is a divinity, eat blood, marry,[1] and obey the king, and you shall live." The martyr answered: "It is better to die, in order to live eternally." By the judge's command, his hands were tied under his knees, and his body fastened to a beam: in this posture it was squeezed and pulled many ways, and afterwards scourged. His bones were in many places broken or dislocated, and his flesh mangled. At length, not being able to stand, he was carried back to prison on men's shoulders. On the next day, they were all three again brought forth and stretched on the ground, bound fast with cords, and their legs, thighs, and ribs so squeezed and strained by stakes, that the noise of the bones breaking filled the place with horror. Yet to every solicitation of the judge or officers, their answer was: "We trust in one God, and we will not obey the king's edicts." Scarce a day passed in which some new torture or other was not invented and tried upon them. After they had for three years suffered the hardships of imprisonment and daily torments, the king coming into Media, the martyrs were brought before Adarsapor, the chief of all the governors of the East, several other Satrapes and governors sitting with him in the palace. They were carried thither, for they were not able to walk, and they scarce retained the figure of human bodies. The very sight of such spectacles moved all who saw them to compassion, and many to tears. They courageously professed themselves Christians, and declared that they would never abandon their faith. Adarsapor said, he saw by their wounds what they had already suffered, and used both threats and entreaties to work them into a compliance with the law. When they begged him to hasten the execution of his threats, he told them: "Death frees criminals from pain: but I will render life to you as grievous as a continued death, that others of your sect may tremble." Acepsimas said: "In vain do you threaten. God, in whom we trust, will give us courage and constancy." At this answer, fury flashed in the eyes of Adarsapor, and he swore by the fortune of king Sapor, that if they did not that instant obey the edicts, he would sprinkle their gray hairs with their blood, would destroy their bodies, and would cause their dead remains to be beaten to powder. Acepsimas said: "To you we resign our bodies, and commend to God our souls. Execute what you threaten. It is what we desire." The tyrant, with rage painted in every feature of his countenance, ordered the venerable old man to be stretched on the ground, and thirty men, fifteen on each side, to pull and haul him by cords tied to his arms, legs, and other limbs, so as to dislocate and almost tear them asunder; and two hangmen in the mean time to scourge his body with so much cruelty, as to mangle and tear off the flesh in many parts: under which torment the martyr expired. His body was watched by guards appointed for that purpose, till after three days it was stolen away by the Christians, and buried by the care of a daughter of the king of Armenia, who was at that time a hostage in Media. Joseph and Aithilahas underwent the same punishment, but came alive out of the hands of the executioners. The latter said to the judge under his torments: "Your tortures are too mild, increase them as you please." Adarsapor, struck with astonishment at their courage, said: "These men are greedy of torments as if they were banquets, and are fond of a kingdom that is invisible." He then caused them to be tormented afresh, so that every part of their bodies was mangled, and their shoulders and arms disjointed. Adarsapor gave an order that if they did not die of their torments, they should be carried back into their own country, to be there put to death. {593} The two martyrs, being not able to sit, were tied on the backs of beasts, and conveyed with great pain to Arbela, their guards treating them on the way with no more compassion than if they had been stones. Jazdundocta, an illustrious lady of the city Arbela, for a great sum of money, obtained leave of the governor, that they should be brought to her house, to take a short refreshment. She dressed their wounds, bathed their bodies with her tears, and was exceedingly encouraged by their faith and exhortations. The blessed martyrs were soon taken from her house to prison, where they languished six months longer. A new governor at length came into that province, the most savage of men, bringing an edict of the king, commanding that Christians who were condemned to death, should be stoned by those who professed the same religion. The news of his arrival drove the Christians into the woods and deserts, that they might not be compelled to imbrue their hands in the blood of martyrs. But soldiers there hunted them like wild beasts, and many were taken. The two confessors were presented before this new judge. Joseph was hung up by the toes, and scourged during two hours, in the presence of the judge, who, hearing him discourse on the resurrection, said: "In that resurrection how do you design to punish me?" The martyr replied: "We are taught meekness, to return good for evil, and to pray for enemies." "Well," said the judge, "then I shall meet with kindness from your hands for the evil which you here receive from me." To which the martyr answered: "There will be then no room for pardon or favor: nor will one be able to help another. I will pray that God may bring you to the knowledge of himself in this life." The judge said: "Consider these things in the next world, whither I am going to send you: at present obey the king." The old man answered: "Death is our desire." The emperor then began to interrogate Aithilahas, and caused him to be hung up by the heels a long time together. He was at length taken down, and to move him to a compliance, he was shown a certain Manichaean heretic who had renounced his religion for fear of torments, and was killing ants, which those heretics held unlawful, teaching that insects and beasts have rational souls. The saint, lying on the ground, was scourged till he fell into a swoon, and then was hauled aside like a dog. A certain Magian, out of pity, threw a coat over his wounds to cover his naked body; for which act of compassion he received two hundred lashes, till he fainted. Thamsapor arriving at his castle of Beth-Thabala, in that country, the governor caused the martyrs to be carried before him. They were ordered to eat the blood of beasts: which they refused to do. One told them, that if they would eat the juice of red grapes curdled, which the people might think to be blood, this would satisfy the judges. They answered: "God forbid we should dissemble our faith." We have elsewhere taken notice that the Christians then observed in many places the positive temporary law of the apostles.[2] Thamsapor and the governor, after a short consultation, condemned both to be stoned to death by the Christians. Joseph was executed at Arbela. He was put into the ground up to the neck. The guards had drawn together five hundred Christians to his execution. The noble lady Jazdundocta was brought thither, and earnestly pressed to throw but a feather at the martyr, that she might seem to obey the order of the king. But she resolutely resisted their entreaties and threats, desiring to die with the servant of God. Many, however, having the weakness to comply, a shower of stones fell upon the martyr, which put an end to his life. When he was dead, guards were set to watch his body; but the Christians found means to steal it away on the third night, during a {594} dark tempest. St. Aithilahas suffered in the province of Beth-Nubadra; the lord of that country, who had been a Christian, by a base apostasy, becoming one of his murderers. St. Maruthas adds, that angels were heard singing at the place of this martyrdom, and many miracles wrought. These martyrs suffered in the year 380, the seventieth and last of the reign of Sapor, and the fortieth of his persecution. They are mentioned by Sozomen,[3] and are named in the Roman Martyrology on the 22d of April. See their genuine Chaldaic acts, by St. Maruthas in Assemani, t. 1, p. 171. Act. Martyr. Orient. Footnotes: 1. From this, and many other passages, it is clear, that the obligation of perpetual chastity was annexed to Holy Orders in the eastern churches no less than in the western. 2. Acts xv. 29. 3. B. 2, ch. 13. ST. BONIFACE, BISHOP OF ROSS, IN SCOTLAND, C. AN ardent zeal for the salvation of souls brought this servant of God from Italy to North-Britain. Near the mouth of the Tees, where he landed, he built a church under the invocation of St. Peter, another at Tellein, three miles from Alect, and a third at Restennet. This last was served by a famous monastery of regular canons of the order of St. Austin, when religious houses were abolished in Scotland. St. Boniface, by preaching the word of God, reformed the manners of the people in the provinces of Angus, Marris, Buchan, Elgin, Murray, and Ross. Being made bishop in this last country, he filled it with oratories and churches, and by planting the true spirit of Christ in the hearts of many, settled that church in a most flourishing condition. He died about the year 630, and was buried at Rosmark, the capital of the county of Ross. The Breviary of Aberdeen mentions that he founded one hundred and fifty churches and oratories in Scotland, and ascribes many miracles to his intercession after his death. See that Breviary, and King on this day, bishop Lesley, l. 4. Hist. Scot. and Hector Boetius, l. 9. Hist. MARCH XV. ST. ABRAHAM, HERMIT, AND HIS NIECE ST. MARY, A PENITENT. From his life written by his friend, St. Ephrem, Op. t. 2, p. 1, Ed. nov. Vatic. See other acts of St. Abraham, given in Latin by Lipoman. 29 Oct., and by Surius, 16 March, mentioned in Greek by Lambecius, Bibl. Vind. t. 8, pp. 255, 260, 266, and by Montfaucon, Bibl. Coislin. p. 211. Two other kinds of Greek Acts are found among the MSS. at the ahbey of St. Germain-des Prez, at Paris, Bibl. Coisl. ib. See also Jos. Assemani, Bibl. Orient. t. 1, pp. 38 and 396, from the Chronicle of Edessa: likewise Kohlius, Introductio in historiam et rem literariam Sclavorum, p. 316. Aitonaviæ, A.D. 1729. About the year 360. ST. ABRAHAM was born at Chidana, in Mesopotamia, near Edessa, of wealthy and noble parents, who, after giving him a most virtuous education, were desirous of engaging him in the married state. In compliance with their inclinations, Abraham took to wife a pious and noble virgin: but earnestly desiring to live and die in the state of holy virginity, as soon as the marriage ceremony and feast were over, having made known his resolution {595} to his new bride, be secretly withdrew to a cell two miles from the city Edessa; where his friends found him at prayer after a search of seventeen days. By earnest entreaties he obtained their consent, and after their departure walled up the door of his cell, leaving only a little window, through which he received what was necessary for his subsistence. He spent his whole time in adoring and praising God, and imploring his mercy. He every day wept abundantly. He was possessed of no other earthly goods but a cloak and a piece of sackcloth which he wore, and a little vessel out of which he both ate and drank. For fifty years he was never wearied with his austere penance and holy exercises, and seemed to draw from them every day fresh vigor. Ten years after he had left the world, by the demise of his parents, he inherited their great estates, but commissioned a virtuous friend to distribute the revenues in alms-deeds. Many resorted to him for spiritual advice, whom he exceedingly comforted and edified by his holy discourses. A large country town in the diocese of Edessa remained till that time addicted to idolatry, and its inhabitants had loaded with injuries and outrages, all the holy monks and others who had attempted to preach the gospel to them. The bishop at length cast his eye on Abraham, ordained him priest, though much against his will, and sent him to preach the faith to those obstinate infidels. He wept all the way as he went, and with great earnestness repeated this prayer: "Most merciful God, look down on my weakness: assist me with thy grace, that thy name may be glorified. Despise not the works of thine own hands." At the sight of the town, reeking with the impious rites of idolatry, he redoubled the torrents of his tears: but found the citizens resolutely determined not to hear him speak. Nevertheless, he continued to pray and weep among them without intermission, and though he was often beaten and ill-treated, and thrice banished by them, he always returned with the same zeal. After three years the infidels were overcome by his meekness and patience, and being touched by an extraordinary grace, all demanded baptism. He stayed one year longer with them to instruct them in the faith; and on their being supplied with priests and other ministers, he went back to his cell. His brother dying soon after his return thither, left an only daughter, called Mary, whom the saint undertook to train up in a religious life. For this purpose he placed her in a cell near his own, where, by the help of his instructions, she became eminent for her piety and penance. At the end of twenty years she was unhappily seduced by a wolf in sheep's clothing, a wicked monk, who resorted often to the place under color of receiving advice from her uncle. Hereupon falling into despair, she went to a distant town, where she gave herself up to the most criminal disorders. The saint ceased not for two years to weep and pray for her conversion. Being then informed where she dwelt, he dressed himself like a citizen of that town, and going to the inn where she lived in the pursuit of her evil courses, desired her company with him at supper. When he saw her alone, he took off his cap which disguised him, and with many tears said to her: "Daughter Mary, don't you know me? What is now become of your angelical habit, of your tears and watchings in the divine praises?" &c. Seeing her struck and filled with horror and confusion, he tenderly encouraged her and comforted her, saying that he would take her sins upon himself if she would faithfully follow his advice, and that his friend Ephrem also prayed and wept for her. She with many tears returned him her most hearty thanks, and promised to obey in all things his injunctions. He set her on his horse, and led the beast himself on foot. In this manner he conducted her back to his desert, and shut her up in a cell behind his own. {596} There she spent the remaining fifteen years of her life in continual tears and the most perfect practices of penance and other virtues. Almighty God was pleased, within three years after her conversion, to favor her with the gift of working miracles by her prayers. And as soon as she was dead, "her countenance appeared to us," says St. Ephrem, "so shining, that we understood that choirs of angels had attended at her passage out of this life into a better." St. Abraham died five years before her: at the news of whose sickness almost the whole city and country flocked to receive his benediction. When he had expired, every one strove to procure for themselves some part of his clothes, and St. Ephrem, who was an eye-witness, relates, that many sick were cured by the touch of these relics. SS. Abraham and Mary were both dead when St. Ephrem wrote, who died himself in 378.[1] St. Abraham is named in the Latin, Greek, and Coptic calendars, and also St. Mary in those of the Greeks. St. Abraham converted his desert into a paradise, because he found in it his God, whose presence makes Heaven. He wanted not the company of men, who enjoyed that of God and his angels; nor could he ever be at a loss for employment, to whom both the days and nights were too short for heavenly contemplation. While his body was employed in penitential manual labor, his mind and heart were sweetly taken up in God, who was to him All in All, and the centre of all his desires and affections. His watchings were but an uninterrupted sacrifice of divine love, and by the ardor of his desire, and the disposition of his soul and its virtual tendency to God, his sleep itself was a continuation of his union with God, and exercise of loving him. He could truly say with the spouse, _I sleep, but my heart watcheth_. Thus the Christians, who are placed in distracting stations, may also do, if they accustom themselves to converse interiorly with God in purity of heart, and in all their actions and desires have only his will in view. Such a life is a kind of imitation of the Seraphims, to whom to live and to love are one and the same thing. "The angels," says St. Gregory the Great, "always carry their Heaven about with them wheresoever they are sent, because they never depart from God, or cease to behold him; ever dwelling in the bosom of his immensity, living and moving in him, and exercising their ministry in the sanctuary of his divinity." This is the happiness of every Christian who makes a desert, by interior solitude, in his own heart. Footnotes: 1. Bollandus, Papebroke, and Pagi, pretend that St. Abraham the hermit lived near the Hellespont, and long after St. Ephrem: but are clearly confuted by Jos. Assemani, Bibl. Orient. t, l, and Com. In Calend. Univ. t. 5. p. 324, ad 29 Oct. The chronicle of Edessa assures us that he was a native of Chidana, and was living in the year of the Greeks, 667, of Christ, 356. ST. ZACHARY, POPE, C. HE succeeded Gregory III., in 741, and was a man of singular meekness and goodness; and so far from any thought of revenge, that he heaped benefits on those who had persecuted him before his promotion to the pontificate. He loved the clergy and people of Rome to that degree, that he hazarded his life for them on occasion of the troubles which Italy fell into by the rebellion of the dukes of Spoletto and Benevento against king Luitprand. Out of respect to his sanctity and dignity, that king restored to the church of Rome all the places which belonged to it: Ameria, Horta, Narni, Ossimo, Ancona, and the whole territory of Sabina, and sent back the captives without ransom. The Lombards were moved to tears at the devotion with which they heard him perform the divine service. By a journey to Pavia, {597} he obtained also of Luitprand, though with some difficulty, peace for the territory of Ravenna, and the restitution of the places which he had taken from the exarchate. The zeal and prudence of this holy pope appeared in many wholesome regulations, which he had made to reform or settle the discipline and peace of several churches. St. Boniface, the apostle of Germany, wrote to him against a certain priest, named Virgilius; that he labored to sow the seeds of discord between him and Odilo, duke of Bavaria, and taught, besides other errors, that there were other men under the earth, another sun and moon, and another world.[1] Pope Zachary answered, that if he taught such an error he ought to be deposed. This cannot be understood as a condemnation of the doctrine of Antipodes, or the spherical figure of the earth, as some writers have imagined by mistake. The error here spoken of is that of certain heretics, who maintained that there was another race of men, who did not descend from Adam, and were not redeemed by Christ. Nor did Zachary pronounce any sentence in the case: for in the same letter he ordered that Virgilius should be sent to Rome, that this doctrine might be examined. It seems that he cleared himself: for we find this same Virgilius soon after made bishop of Saltzburgh.[2] Certain Venetian merchants having bought at Rome many slaves to sell to the Moors in Africa, St. Zachary forbade such an iniquitous traffic, and, paying the merchants their price, gave the slaves their liberty. He adorned Rome with sacred buildings, and with great foundations in favor of the poor and pilgrims, and gave every year a considerable sum to furnish oil for the lamps in St. Peter's church. He died in 752, in the month of March, and is honored in the Roman Martyrology on this day. See his letters and the Pontificals, t. 6, Conc., also Fleury, l. 42, t. 9, p. 349. Footnotes: 1. Quod alius mundus et alii homines sub terra sunt, seu alius sol et luna. (Ep. 10, t 6, Conc. pp. 15, 21, et Bibl. Patr. Inter. Epist. S. Bonif.) To imagine different worlds of men upon earth, some not descending from Adam, nor redeemed by Christ, is contrary to the holy scriptures, and therefore justly condemned as erroneous, as Baronius observes, (add. ann. 784, n. 12.) 2. Many ancient philosophers thought the earth flat, not spherical, and believed no Antipodes. Several fathers adopted this vulgar error in philosophy, in which faith no way interferes, as St. Austin, (l. 16, de Civ. Dei, c. 9,) Bede, (l. 4, de Principiis Philos.,) and Cosmas the Egyptian, surnamed Indicopleustes. It is, however, a mistake to imagine, with Montfaucon, in his preface to this last-mentioned author, that this was the general opinion of Christian philosophers down to the fifteenth century. For the learned Philophonus demonstrated before the modern discoveries, (de Mundi Creat. l. 3, c. 13,) that the greater part of the fathers teach the world to be a sphere, as St. Basil, the two SS. Gregories, of Nazianzum and of Nyssa, St. Athanasins, &c. And several among them mention Antipodes, as St. Hilary, (in Ps. 2, n. 32,) Origen, (l. 2, de princip. c. 3,) St. Clement, pope, &c. MARCH XVI. ST. JULIAN, OF CILICIA, M. From the panegyric of St. Chrysostom, t. 2, p. 671. Ed. Ben. Tillem. t. 5, p. 573. THIS saint was a Cilician, of a senatorian family in Anazarbus, and a minister of the gospel. In the persecution of Dioclesian he fell into the hands of a judge, who, by his brutal behavior, resembled more a wild beast than a man. The president, seeing his constancy proof against the sharpest torments, hoped to overcome him by the long continuance of his martyrdom. He caused him to be brought before his tribunal everyday; sometimes he caressed him, at other times threatened him with a thousand tortures. For a whole year together he caused him to be dragged as a malefactor through all the towns of Cilicia, imagining that this shame and confusion might vanquish {598} him: but it served only to increase the martyr's glory, and gave him an opportunity of encouraging in the faith all the Christians of Cilicia by his example and exhortations. He suffered every kind of torture. The bloody executioners had torn his flesh, furrowed his sides, laid his bones bare, and exposed his very bowels to view. Scourges, fire, and the sword, were employed various ways to torment him with the utmost cruelty. The judge saw that to torment him longer was laboring to shake a rock, and was forced at length to own himself conquered by condemning him to death: in which, however, he studied to surpass his former cruelty. He was then at �gea, a town on the sea-coast; and he caused the martyr to be sewed up in a sack with scorpions, serpents, and vipers, and so thrown into the sea. This was the Roman punishment for parricides, the worst of malefactors, yet seldom executed on them. Eusebius mentions, that St. Ulpian of Tyre suffered a like martyrdom, being thrown into the sea in a leather sack, together with a dog and an aspick. The sea gave back the body of our holy martyr, which the faithful conveyed to Alexandria of Cilicia, and afterwards to Antioch, where St. Chrysostom pronounced his panegyric before his shrine. He eloquently sets forth how much these sacred relics were honored; and affirms, that no devil could stand their presence, and that men by them found a remedy for their bodlily distempers, and the cure of the evils of the soul. * * * * * The martyrs lost with joy their worldly honors, dignity, estates, friends, liberty, and lives, rather than forfeit for one moment their fidelity to God. They courageously bade defiance to pleasures and torments, to prosperity and adversity, to life and death, saying, with the apostle: _Who shall separate us from the love of Jesus Christ?_ Crowns, sceptres, worldly riches, and pleasures, you have no charms which shall ever tempt me to depart in the least tittle from the allegiance which I owe to God. Alarming fears of the most dreadful evils, prisons, racks, fire, and death, in every shape of cruelty, you shall never shake my constancy. Nothing shall ever separate me from the love of Christ. This must be the sincere disposition of every Christian. Lying protestations of fidelity to God cost us nothing: but he sounds the heart. Is our constancy such as to bear evidence to our sincerity, that rather than to fail in the least duty to God, we are ready to resist to blood? and that we are always upon our guard to keep our ears shut to the voices of those syrens which never cease to lay snares to our senses? ST. FINIAN, SURNAMED LOBHAR, OR THE LEPER, WAS son of Conail, descended from Kian, the son of Alild, king of Munster. He was a disciple of St. Brendan, and flourished about the middle of the sixth century. He imitated the patience of Job, under a loathsome and tedious distemper, from which his surname was given him. The famous abbey of Innis-fallen, which stood in an island of that name, in the great and beautiful lake of Lough-Lane in the county of Kerry, was found ed by our saint.[1] A second, called from him Ardfinnan, he built in Tipperary; and a third at Cluainmore Madoc, in Leinster, where he was buried. He died on the 2d of February; but, says Colgan, his festival is kept on the 16th of March at all the above-mentioned places. Sir James Ware {599} speaks of two MS. histories of his life. See also Usher, (Antiq. c. 17,) Colgan, 17 Martii. Mr. Smith, in his natural and civil history of the county of Kerry, in 1755, p. 127. Footnotes: 1. In the monastery of Innis-fallen was formerly kept a chronicle called the Annals of Innis-fallen. They contain a sketch of universal history, from the creation to the year 430. From that time the annalist amply enough prosecutes the affairs of Ireland down to the year 1215, when he wrote. They were continued by another hand to 1320. They are often quoted by Bishop Usher and Sir James Ware. An imperfect transcript is kept among the MSS. of the library of Trinity college, Dublin. Bishop Nicholson, in his {}ian Historical Library, informs us, that the late duke of Chandos had a complete copy of them. MARCH XVII. SAINT PATRICK, B.C. APOSTLE OF IRELAND. The Irish have many lives of their great apostle, whereof the two principal are, that compiled by Jocelin, a Cistercian monk, in the twelfth century, who quotes four lives written by disciples of the saint; and that by Probus, who, according to Bollandus, lived in the seventh century. But in both are intermixed several injudicious popular reports. We, with Tillemont, chiefly confine ourselves to the saint's own writings, his Confession, and his letter to Corotic, which that judicious critic doubts not to be genuine. The style in both is the same; he is expressed in them to be the author; the Confession is quoted by all the authors of his life, and the letter was written before the conversion of the Franks under king Clovis, in 496. See Tillemont, t. 16, p. 455, and Brininnia Sancta. A.D. 464. IF the virtue of children reflects an honor on their parents, much more justly is the name of St. Patrick rendered illustrious by the innumerable lights of sanctity with which the church of Ireland, planted by his labors in the most remote corner of the then known world, shone during many ages; and by the colonies of saints with which it peopled many foreign countries; for, under God, its inhabitants derived from their glorious apostle the streams of that eminent sanctity by which they were long conspicuous to the whole world. St. Patrick was born in the decline of the fourth century;[1] and, as he informs us in his Confession, in a village called Bonaven Taberniæ, which seems to be the town of Killpatrick, on the mouth of the river Cluyd, in Scotland, between Dunbriton and Glasgow. He calls himself both a Briton and a Roman, or of a mixed extraction, and says his father was of a good family, named Calphurnius, and a denizen of a neigh-boring city of the Romans, who, not long after, abandoned Britain, in 409. Some writers call his mother Conchessa, and say she was niece to St. Martin of Tours. At fifteen years of age he committed a fault, which appears not to have been a great crime, yet was to him a subject of tears during the remainder of his life. He says, that when he was sixteen, he lived still ignorant of God, meaning of the devout knowledge and fervent love of God, for he was always a Christian: he never ceased to bewail this neglect, and wept when he remembered that he had been one moment of his life insensible to the divine love. In his sixteenth year he was carried into captivity by certain barbarians, together with many of his father's vassals and slaves, taken upon his estate. They took him into Ireland, where he was obliged to keep cattle on the mountains and in the forests, in hunger and nakedness, amidst snows, rain, and ice. While he lived in this suffering condition, God had pity on his soul, and quickened him to a sense of his duty by the impulse of a strong interior grace. The young man had recourse to him with his whole heart in fervent prayer and fasting; and from that time, faith and the love of God acquired continually new strength in his {600} tender soul. He prayed often in the day, and also many times in the night, breaking off his sleep to return to the divine praises. His afflictions were to him a source of heavenly benedictions, because he carried his cross with Christ, that is, with patience, resignation, and holy joy. St. Patrick, after six months spent in slavery under the same master, was admonished by God in a dream to return to his own country, and informed that a ship was then ready to sail thither. He repaired immediately to the sea-coast, though at a great distance, and found the vessel; but could not obtain his passage, probably for want of money. Thus new trials ever await the servants of God. The saint returned towards his hut, praying as he went, but the sailors, though pagans, called him back, and took him on board. After three days' sail, they made land, probably in the north of Scotland: but wandered twenty-seven days through deserts, and were a long while distressed for want of provisions, finding nothing to eat. Patrick had often entertained the company on the infinite power of God: they therefore asked him, why he did not pray for relief. Animated by a strong faith, he assured them that if they would address themselves with their whole hearts to the true God, he would hear and succor them. They did so, and on the same day met with a herd of swine. From that time provisions never failed them till on the twenty-seventh day they came into a country that was cultivated and inhabited. During their distress, Patrick refused to touch meats which had been offered to idols. One day a great stone from a rock happened to fall upon him, and had like to have crushed him to death, while he was laid down to take a little rest. But he invoked Elias, and was delivered from the danger. Some years afterwards, he was again led captive; but recovered his liberty after two months. When he was at home with his parents, God manifested to him, by divers visions, that he destined him to the great work of the conversion of Ireland. He thought he saw all the children of that country from the wombs of their mothers, stretching out their hands, and piteously crying to him for relief.[2] Some think he had travelled into Gaul before be undertook his mission, and we find that, while he preached in Ireland, he had a great desire to visit his brethren in Gaul, and to see those whom he calls the saints of God, having been formerly acquainted with them. The authors of his life say, that after his second captivity, he travelled into Gaul and Italy, and had seen St. Martin, St. Germanus of Auxerre, and pope Celestine, and that he received his mission, and the apostolical benediction, from this pope, who died in 432. But it seems, from his Confession, that he was ordained deacon, priest, and bishop, for his mission in his own country. It is certain that he spent many years in preparing himself for those sacred functions. Great opposition was made against his episcopal consecration and mission, both by his own relations and by the clergy. These made him great offers in order to detain him among them, and endeavored to affright him by exaggerating the dangers to which he exposed himself amidst the enemies of the Romans and Britons, who did not know God. Some objected, with the same view, the fault which he had committed thirty years before as an obstacle to his ordination. All these temptations threw the saint into great perplexities, {601} and had like to have made him abandon the work of God. But the Lord, whose will he consulted by earnest prayer, supported him, and comforted him by a vision; so that he persevered in his resolution. He forsook his family, sold, as he says, his birthright and dignity, to serve strangers, and consecrated his soul to God, to carry his name to the end of the earth. He was determined to suffer all things for the accomplishment of his holy design, to receive in the same spirit both prosperity and adversity, and to return thanks to God equally for the one as for the other, desiring only that his name might be glorified, and his divine will accomplished to his own honor. In this disposition he passed into Ireland, to preach the gospel, where the worship of idols still generally reigned. He devoted himself entirely for the salvation of these barbarians, to be regarded as a stranger, to be contemned as the last of men, to suffer from the infidels imprisonment and all kinds of persecution, and to give his life with joy, if God should deem him worthy to shed his blood in his cause. He travelled over the whole island, penetrating into the remotest corners, without fearing any dangers, and often visited each province. Such was the fruit of his preachings and sufferings, that he consecrated to God, by baptism, an infinite number of people, and labored effectually that they might be perfected in his service by the practice of virtue. He ordained everywhere clergymen, induced women to live in holy widowhood and continence, consecrated virgins to Christ, and instituted monks. Great numbers embraced these states of perfection with extreme ardor. Many desired to confer earthly riches on him who had communicated to them the goods of heaven; but he made it a capital duty to decline all self-interest, and whatever might dishonor his ministry. He took nothing from the many thousands whom he baptized, and often gave back the little presents which some laid on the altar, choosing rather to mortify the fervent than to scandalize the weak or the infidels. On the contrary, he gave freely of his own, both to pagans and Christians, distributed large alms to the poor in the provinces where he passed, made presents to the kings--judging that necessary for the progress of the gospel--and maintained and educated many children, whom he trained up to serve at the altar. He always gave till he had no more to bestow, and rejoiced to see himself poor, with Jesus Christ, knowing poverty and afflictions to be more profitable to him than riches and pleasures. The happy success of his labors cost him many persecutions. A certain prince named Corotick, a Christian, though in name only, disturbed the peace of his flock. He seems to have reigned in some part of Wales, after the Britons had been abandoned by the Romans. This tyrant, as the saint calls him, having made a descent into Ireland, plundered the country where St. Patrick had been just conferring the holy chrism, that is, confirmation, on a great number of Neophytes, who were yet in their white garments after baptism. Corotick, without paying any regard to justice, or to the holy sacrament, massacred many, and carried away others, whom he sold to the infidel Picts or Scots. This probably happened at Easter or Whitsuntide. The next day the saint sent the barbarian a letter by a holy priest whom he had brought up from his infancy, entreating him to restore the Christian captives, and at least part of the booty he had taken, that the poor people might not perish for want; but was only answered by railleries, as if the Irish could not be the same Christians with the Britons: which arrogance and pride sunk those barbarous conquerors beneath the dignity of men, while by it they were puffed up above others in their own hearts.. The saint, therefore, to prevent the scandal which such a flagrant enormity gave to his new converts, wrote with his own hand a public circular letter. In it he styles himself a sinner and an ignorant man; for such is the sincere {602} humility of the saints, (most of all when they are obliged to exercise any acts of authority,) contrary to the pompous titles which the world affects. He declares, nevertheless, that he is established bishop of Ireland, and pronounces Corotick and the other parricides and accomplices separated from him and from Jesus Christ, whose place he holds, forbidding any to eat with them, or to receive their alms, till they should have satisfied God by the tears of sincere penance, and restored the servants of Jesus Christ to their liberty. This letter expresses his most tender love for his flock and his grief for those who had been slain, yet mingled with joy, because they reign with the prophets, apostles, and martyrs. Jocelin assures us, that Corotick was overtaken by the divine vengeance. St. Patrick wrote his Confession as a testimony of his mission, when he was old.[3] It is solid, full of good sense and piety, expresses an extraordinary humility and a great desire of martyrdom, and is written with spirit. The author was perfectly versed in the holy scriptures. He confesses everywhere his own faults with a sincere humility, and extols the great mercies of God towards him in this world, who had exalted him, though the most undeserving of men: yet, to preserve him in humility, afforded him the advantage of meeting with extreme contempt from others, that is, from the heathens. He confesses, for his humiliation, that, among other temptations, he felt a great desire to see again his own country, and to visit the saints of his acquaintance in Gaul; but durst not abandon his people; and says, that the Holy Ghost had declared to him that to do it would be criminal. He tells us, that a little before he wrote this, he himself and all his companions had been plundered and laid in irons for his having baptized the son of a certain king against the will of his father: but were released after fourteen days. He lived in the daily expectation of such accidents, and of martyrdom; but feared nothing, having his hope as a firm anchor fixed in heaven, and reposing himself with an entire confidence in the arms of the Almighty. He says, that he had lately baptized a very beautiful young lady of quality, who some days after came to tell him that she had been admonished by an angel to consecrate her virginity to Jesus Christ, that she might render herself the more acceptable to God. He gave God thanks, and she made her vows with extraordinary fervor six days before he wrote this letter. St. Patrick held several councils to settle the discipline of the church which he had planted. The first, the acts of which are extant under his name in the editions of the councils, is certainly genuine. Its canons regulate several points of discipline, especially relating to penance.[4] St. Bernard and the tradition of the country testify, that St. Patrick fixed his metropolitan see at Armagh. He established some other bishops, as appears by his Council and other monuments. He not only converted the whole country by his preaching and wonderful miracles, but also cultivated this vineyard with so fruitful a benediction and increase from heaven, as to render Ireland a most flourishing garden in the church of God, and a country of saints. And those nations, which had for many ages esteemed all others barbarians, did not blush to receive from the utmost extremity of {603} the uncivilized or barbarous world, their most renowned teachers and guides in the greatest of all sciences, that of the saints. Many particulars are related of the labors of St. Patrick, which we pass over. In the first year of his mission he attempted to preach Christ in the general assembly of the kings and states of all Ireland, held yearly at Taraghe, or Themoria, in East-Meath, the residence of the chief king, styled the monarch of the whole island, and the principal seat of the Druids or priests, and their paganish rites. The son of Neill, the chief monarch, declared himself against the preacher: however, he converted several, and, on his road to that place, the father of St. Benen, or Benignus, his immediate successor in the see of Armagh. He afterwards converted and baptized the kings of Dublin and Munster, and the seven sons of the king of Connaught, with the greatest part of their subjects, and before his death almost the whole island. He founded a monastery at Armagh; another called Domnach-Padraig, or Patrick's church; also a third, named Sabhal-Padraig, and filled the country with churches and schools of piety and learning; the reputation of which, for the three succeeding centuries, drew many foreigners into Ireland.[5] Nennius, abbot of Bangor, in 620, in his history of the Britons,[6] published by the learned Thomas Gale, says, that St. Patrick took that name only when he was ordained bishop, being before called Maun; that he continued his missions over all the provinces of Ireland, during forty years; that he restored sight to many blind, health to the sick, and raised nine dead persons to life.[7] He died and was buried at Down in Ulster. His body was found there in a church of his name in 1185, and translated to another part of the same church. His festival is marked on the 17th of March, in the Martyrology of Bede, &c. * * * * * The apostles of nations were all interior men, endowed with a sublime spirit of prayer. The salvation of souls being a supernatural end, the instruments ought to bear a proportion to it, and preaching proceed from a grace which is supernatural. To undertake this holy function, without a competent stock of sacred learning, and without the necessary precautions of human prudence and industry, would be to tempt God. But sanctity of life, and the union of the heart with God, are qualifications far more essential than science, eloquence, and human talents. Many almost kill themselves with studying to compose elegant sermons, which flatter the ear yet reap very little fruit. Their hearers applaud their parts, but very few are converted. Most preachers, now-a-days, have learning, but are not sufficiently grounded in true sanctity, and a spirit of devotion. Interior humility, purity of heart, recollection, and the spirit and the assiduous practice of holy prayer, are the principal preparation for the ministry of the word, and the true means of acquiring the science of the saints. A short devout meditation and fervent prayer, which kindle a fire in the affections, furnish {604} more thoughts proper to move the hearts of the hearers, and inspire them with sentiments of truer virtue, than many years employed barely in reading and study. St. Patrick, and other apostolic men, were dead to themselves and the world, and animated with the spirit of perfect charity and humility, by which they were prepared by God to be such powerful instruments of his grace, as, by the miraculous change of so many hearts, to plant in entire barbarous nations not only the faith, but also the spirit of Christ. Preachers, who have not attained to a disengagement and purity of heart, suffer the petty interests of self-love secretly to mingle themselves in their zeal and charity, and have reason to suspect that they inflict deeper wounds in their own souls than they are aware, and produce not in others the good which they imagine. Footnotes: 1. According to Usher and Tillemont, in 372. The former places his death in 493: but Tillemont, about the year 455. Nennius, published by Mr. Gale, says he died fifty-seven years before the birth of St. Columba, consequently in 464. 2. St. Prosper, in his chronicle, assures us that pope Celestine ordained St. Palladius bishop of the Scots in 431, and by him converted their country to the faith; this apostle seems to have preached to this nation first in Ireland, and afterwards in Scotland. Though Palladius be styled by St. Prosper and Bede their first bishop, yet the light of the faith had diffused its rays from Britain into Ireland before that time, as several monuments produced by Usher demonstrate. But the general conversion of the inhabitants of this Island was reserved for St. Patrick. The Scot are distinguished from the native Irish in the works of St. Patrick, and in other ancient monuments. As to their original, the most probable conjecture seems to be, that they were a foreign warlike nation, who made a settlement in Ireland before the arrival of St. Patrick. We find them mentioned there in the fourth century. Several colonies of them passed not long after into Scotland. But the inhabitants of Ireland were promiscuously called Scots or Irish, for many ages. 3. The style is not polished; but the Latin edition is perhaps only a translation: or his captivities might have prevented his progress in polite learning being equal to that which he made in the more sublime and more necessary studies. 4. A second council, extant in the same collection, ought rather to be ascribed to a nephew of this saint. Other Irish canons, published in the ninth tome of D'Achery's Spicilege, and more by Martenne, (Anecd. tome 4, part 2,) though they bear the name of St. Patrick, are judged to have been framed by some of his successors. See Wilkins, Conc. Britan. & Hibern. t. 1, p. 3. The treatise, of the Twelve Abuses, published among the works of St. Austin and St. Cyprian, is attributed to St. Patrick, in a collection of ecclesiastical ordinances made in Ireland, in the eighth age, by Arbedoc, and in other ancient monuments. The style is elegant; but it may be a translation from an Irish original. Sir James Ware published the works of St. Patrick at London, in 1658, in octavo. 5. It seems demonstrated that the St. Patrick who flourished among the hermits of Glastonbury, and was there buried, was distinct from our saint, and somewhat older. 6. C. 55, 56, 57, 58, 61. 7. The popular tradition attributes the exemption of their country from venomous creatures to the benediction of St. Patrick, given by his staff, called the staff of Jesus, which was kept with great veneration in Dublin, as is mentioned in the year 1360, by Ralph Higden, in his Polychronicon, published by Mr. Gale and by others. The isle of Malta is said to derive a like privilege from St. Paul, who was there bit by a viper. St. Patrick's purgatory is a cave in an island in the lake Dearg, in the county of Donnegall, near the borders of Fermanagh. Bollandus shows the falsehood of many things related concerning it. Upon complaint of certain superstitious and false notions of the vulgar, in 1497, it was stopped up by an order of the pope. See Bollandus, Tillemont, p. 787, Alemand in his Monastic History of Ireland, and Thiers, Hist. des Superst. t. 4. ed. Nov. It was soon after opened again by the inhabitants; but only according to the original institution, as Bollandus takes notice, as a penitential retirement for those who voluntarily chose it, probably in imitation of St. Patrick, or other saints, who had there dedicated themselves to a penitential state. The penitents usually spend there several days, living on bread and water, lying on rushes or furze, and praying much, with daily stations which they perform barefoot. MANY MARTYRS AT ALEXANDRIA, IN 892. THEOPHILIIS, patriarch of Alexandria, obtained a rescript of the emperor Theodosius, to convert an old deserted temple of Bacchus into a Christian church. In clearing this place, in the subterraneous secret caverns, called by the Greeks Adyta, and held by the pagans as sacred, were found infamous and ridiculous figures, which Theophilus caused to be exposed in public, to show the extravagant superstitions of the idolaters. The heathens in tumults raised a sedition, killed many Christians in the streets, and then retired into the great temple of Serapis as their fortress. In sallies they seized many Christians, and upon their refusing to sacrifice to Serapis, put them to death by cruel torments, crucifying them, breaking their legs, and throwing them into the sinks and jakes of the temple with the blood of their victims. The principal ancient divinities of Egypt were Apis, called also Osiris, once a great king and benefactor of that country, who was worshipped under the figure of a bull, and the wife of Apis, named Isis, who is said to have taught or improved agriculture.[1] The temple of Serapis, in Alexandria, was most stately and rich, built on an eminence raised by art, in a beautiful spacious square, with an ascent of one hundred steps, surrounded with lofty edifices for the priests and officers. The temple was built of marble, supported with precious pillars, and the walls on the inside were covered with plates of brass, silver, and gold. The idol was of so enormous a size, that its arms being extended, they reached to the opposite walls of the temple: its figure was that of a venerable old man, with a beard and long hair; but with it was joined a monstrous figure of an animal, with three heads: the biggest, in the middle, was that of a lion; that of a dog fawning came out on the right side, and that of ravenous wolf on the left: a serpent was represented twining round these three animals, and laying its head on the right hand of Serapis: on the idol's head was placed a bushel, an emblem of the fertility of the earth. The statue was made of precious stones, wood, and all sorts of metal together; its color was at first blue, but the steams or moisture of the place had turned it black. A hole in the temple was contrived, to admit the sun's rays upon its mouth at the hour when the idol of the sun was brought in to visit it. Many other artifices were employed to deceive the people into an opinion of its miracles. No idol was so much respected in Egypt; and on its account Alexandria was looked upon as a holy city. The emperor, being informed of the sedition, called those happy who {605} had received by it the crown of martyrdom: and not to dishonor their triumph, he pardoned their murderers, but sent an order to demolish the temples in Egypt. When this letter was read at Alexandria, the pagans raised hideous cries; many left the city, and all withdrew from the temple of Serapis. The idol was cast down by pieces, and thrown into a fire. The heathens were persuaded, that if any one should touch it the heavens would fall, and the world return into the state of its primitive chaos. Seeing no such judgment threaten, they began themselves to deride a senseless trunk reduced to ashes. The standard of the Nile's increase was kept in this temple, but it was on this occasion removed into the cathedral. The idolaters expected the river would swell no more: but finding the succeeding years very fertile, they condemned the vanity of their superstitions, and embraced the faith. Two churches were built on the place where this temple stood, and its metal was converted to the use of churches. The busts of Serapis on the walls, doors, and windows of the houses, were broken and taken away. The temples all over Egypt were demolished, during the two following years. In pulling down those of Alexandria, the cruel mysteries of Mithra were discovered, and in the secret Adyta were found the heads of many infants cut off, cruelly mangled, and superstitiously painted. The artifices of the priests of the idols were likewise detected: there were hollow idols of wood and brass, placed against a wall, with subterraneous passages, through which the priests entered the hollow trunks of the idols, and gave answers as oracles, as is related by Theodoret,[2] and Rufinus.[3] Where the idols were cast down, figures of the cross were set up in their places. These martyrs suffered in the year 392. See Theodoret, Rufinus, Socrates, Sozomen, Fleury, b. 19. Tillemont in the history of Theodosius, art. 52-55. Footnotes: 1. Those mistake the truth, who confound Serapis with Osiris, or who imagine him to have been the patriarch Joseph. Serapis was a modern divinity, raised by the Ptolemies. See Celmet, Banier on Mythology, &c. 2. B. 5, c. 22. 3. Ib. 2, c. 25. ST. JOSEPH OF ARIMATHEA. HE was a member of the Jewish Sanhedrim, but a faithful disciple of Jesus. It was no small proof of his great piety, that, though he had riches and honors to lose, he feared not the malice of men, but at a time when the apostles trembled, boldly declared himself a follower of Jesus who was crucified; and with the greatest devotion embalmed and buried his sacred body. This saint was the patron of Glastenbury, where a church and hermitage, very famous in the times of the ancient Britons,[1] were built by the first apostles of this island: among whom some moderns have placed St. Joseph himself, and Aristobulus. Footnotes: 1. See Matthew of Westminster, and John of Glastenbury in their histories of that famous abbey published by Hearne; also Tanner's Notitia Monastica. ST. GERTRUDE, VIRGIN, ABBESS OF NIVELLE. SHE was daughter of Pepin of Landen, mayor of the palace to the French kings of Austrasia, and younger sister to St. Begga. She was born in 626. Her father's virtuous palace was the sanctuary of her innocence, and the school of her tender piety. Being pressed to marry, she declared in presence of king Dagobert: "I have chosen for my spouse him from {606} whose eternal beauty all creatures derive their glory, whose riches are immense, and whom the angels adore." The king admired her gravity and wisdom in so tender an age, and would not suffer her to be any more disturbed on that account. Her mother, the blessed Itta, employed St. Amand to direct the building of a great nunnery at Nivelle, in Brabant, for Gertrude. It is now a double chapter of canons and canonesses. The virgin was appointed abbess when only twenty years of age. Her mother, the blessed Itta, lived five years under her conduct, and died in the twelfth year of her widowhood, in 652. She is honored in the Belgic Martyrologies on the 8th of May. Gertrude governed her monastery with a prudence, zeal, and virtue, that astonished the most advanced in years and experience. She loved extreme holy poverty in her person and house; but enriched the poor. By assiduous prayer and holy meditation she obtained wonderful lights from heaven. At thirty years of age, she resigned her abbey to her niece Wilfe{t}rude, and spent the three years which she survived, in preparing her soul for her passage to eternity, which happened on the 17th of March, in 659. Her festival is a holyday at Louvain, and throughout the duchy of Brabant. It is mentioned in the true Martyrology of Bede, &c. See her life, written by one who was present at her funeral, and an eye-witness to the miracles, of which there is an account in Mabillon, and the Acts of the Saints. See also Rivet, Hist. Littér. t. 4, p. 39. An anonymous author much enlarged this life in the tenth century, but the additions are of small authority. This work was printed by Ryckel, abbot of St. Gertrude's, at Louvain, in 1632. See Hist. Littér. t. 6, p. 292. Also La Vie de S. Gertrude, abbesse de Nivelle, par Gul. Descoeuvres, in 12mo. at Paris, Ann. 1612. Consult likewise Dom Bouquet, Recueil des Hist. de France, t. 2, p. 603, &c. MARCH XVIII. SAINT ALEXANDER, B.M. BISHOP OF JERUSALEM. From St. Jerom, Catal. c. G. Euseb. Hist. b. 6, c. 8, 10, 14, 20. See Tillemont, t. 3, p. 415, and Le Quien Oriens Christ. t. 3, p. 150. A.D. 251. ST. ALEXANDER studied with Origen in the great Christian school of Alexandria, under St. Pantenus and his successor, St. Clement. He was chosen bishop of a certain city in Cappadocia. In the persecution of Severus, in 204, he made a glorious confession of his faith, and though he did not then seal it with his blood, he suffered several years' imprisonment, till the beginning of the reign of Caracalla, in 211, when he wrote to congratulate the church of Antioch upon the election of St. Asclepias, a glorious confessor of Christ, to that patriarchate; the news of which, he says, had softened and made light the irons with which he was loaded. He sent that letter by the priest St. Clement of Alexandria, a man of great virtue, whom God had sent into Cappadocia to instruct and govern his people during his confinement. {607} St. Alexander being enlarged soon after, in 212, was commanded by a revelation from God to go to Jerusalem to visit the holy places.[1] The night before his arrival, St. Narcissus, bishop of Jerusalem, and some other saints of that church, had a revelation, in which they heard a distinct voice commanding them to go out of the city and take for bishop him whom God sent them. St. Narcissus was then very old and decrepit: he and his flock seized Alexander, and by the consent of all the bishops of Palestine, assembled in a council, made him his coadjutor and joint bishop of Jerusalem. SS. Narcissus and Alexander still governed this church together, when the latter wrote thus to the Antinoits: "I salute you in the name of Narcissus, who held here the place of bishop before me, and, being above one hundred and sixteen years old, is now united with me by prayer. He conjures you with me to live in inviolable peace and union." St. Alexander collected at Jerusalem a great library, consisting of the writings and letters of eminent men, which subsisted when Eusebius wrote. He excelled all other holy prelates and apostolic men in mildness and in the sweetness of his discourses, as Origen testifies. St. Alexander was seized by the persecutors under Decius, confessed Christ a second time, and died in chains at Cæsarea, about the end of the year 251, as Eusebius testifies. He is styled a martyr by St. Epiphanius, St. Jerom, and the Martyrologies, and honored in the Roman Martyrology on the 18th of March; by the Greeks on the 16th of May and the 22d of December. * * * * * A pastor must first acquire a solid degree of interior virtue, before he can safely undertake to labor in procuring the salvation of others, or employ himself in exterior functions of the ministry. He must have mortified the deeds of the flesh by compunction, and the habitual practice of self-denial; and the fruits of the spirit must daily more and more perfectly subdue his passions. These fruits of the spirit are charity and humility, which stifle all the motions of anger, envy, and pride: holy joy, which banishes carnal sadness, sloth, and all disrelish in spiritual exercises; peace, which crushes the seeds of discord, and the love and relish of heavenly things, which extinguish the love of earthly goods and sensual pleasures. One whose soul is slothful, sensual, and earthly, deserves not to bear the name of a Christian, much less of a minister of the gospel. There never was a saint who did not carry his cross, and walk in the steps of Christ crucified. St. Alexander would have thought a day lost in which he did not add something to the sacrifice of his penance in order to continue and complete it. By this he prepared himself to die a victim of fidelity and charity. This is the continued martyrdom by which every true Christian earnestly labors to render himself every day more and more pleasing to God, making his body a pure holocaust to him by mortification, and his soul, by the fervor of his charity and compunction. Footnotes: 1. Eus. b. 6, c. 14. S. Hieron. in Catal. SAINT CYRIL, CONFESSOR, ARCHBISHOP OF JERUSALEM. From the church historians, and his works collected by Dom Touttée in his excellent edition of them at Paris, in 1720. A.D. 386. CYRIL was born at or near the city of Jerusalem, about the year 315. So perfectly was he versed in the holy scriptures, that many of his discourses,{608} and some of these pronounced extempore, are only passages of the sacred writings connected and interwoven with each other. He had read diligently both the fathers and the pagan philosophers. Maximus, bishop of Jerusalem, ordained him priest about the year 345, and soon after appointed him his preacher to the people, likewise his catechist to instruct and prepare the catechumens for baptism; thus committing to his care the two principal functions of his own pastoral charge. St. Cyril mentions his sermons to the faithful every Sunday.[1] Catechumens ordinarily remained two years in the course of instruction and prayer, and were not admitted to baptism till they had given proof of their morals and conduct, as well as of their constancy in the faith.[2] This office St. Cyril performed for several years; but we have only the course of his catechetical sermons for the year 348, or 347. Perhaps the others were never committed to writing. He succeeded Maximus in the see of Jerusalem about the end of the year 350. The beginning of his episcopacy was remarkable for a prodigy by which God was pleased to honor the instrument of our redemption. It is related by Socrates,[3] Philostorgius,[4] the chronicle of Alexandria, &c. St. Cyril, an eye-witness, wrote immediately to the emperor Constantius, an exact account of this miraculous phenomenon: and his letter is quoted as a voucher for it by Sozomen,[5] Theophanes,[6] Eutychius,[7] John of Nice,[8] Glycas, and others. Dr. Cave has inserted it at length in his life of St. Cyril.[9] The relation he there gives of the miracle is as follows: "On the nones (or 7th) of May, about the third hour, (or nine in the morning,) a vast luminous body, in the form of a cross, appeared in the heavens, just over the holy Golgotha, reaching as far as the holy mount of Olivet, (that is, almost two English miles in length,) seen not by one or two persons, but clearly and evidently by the whole city. This was not, as may be thought, a momentary transient phenomenon: for it continued several hours together visible to our eyes, and brighter than the sun; the light of which would have eclipsed it, had not this been stronger. The whole city, struck with a reverential fear, tempered with joy, ran immediately to the church, young and old, Christians and heathens, citizens and strangers, all with one voice giving praise to our Lord Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, the worker of miracles; finding by experience the truth of the Christian doctrine, to which the heavens bear witness." He concludes his letter with wishes that the emperor may always glorify the holy and consubstantial Trinity.[10] Philostorgius and the Alexandrian chronicle affirm, that this cross of light was encircled with a large rainbow.[11] The Greek church commemorates this miracle on the 7th of May. {609} Some time after this memorable event, a difference happened between our saint and Acacius, archbishop of Cæsarea, first a warm Semi-Arian, afterwards a thorough Arian. It began on the subject of metropolitical jurisdiction, which Acacius unjustly claimed over the Church of Jerusalem; and what widened the breach between them was their difference of sentiments with regard to the consubstantiality of the Son, which St. Cyril had always most zealously asserted.[12] This was sufficient to render him odious in the eyes of Acacius, who in a council of Arian bishops convened by him, declared St. Cyril deposed for not appearing, after two years' warning, to answer to the crimes alleged against him. One of them was that he had lavished away the goods of the Church, and had applied its sacred ornaments to profane uses. The ground of the accusation was, that, in time of a great famine at Jerusalem, he had sold some of the Church plate, and precious stuffs, to relieve the wants of the poor. St. Cyril, not looking upon the members of the council as qualified judges, appealed to higher powers,[13] but yielding to violence withdrew to Antioch, and thence removed to Tarsus, were he was honorably entertained by the bishop Sylvaims, and had in great respect, notwithstanding the sentence of Acacius and his council against him. Here living in communion with Sylvanus, Eustathius of Sebaste, Basil of Ancyra. and others, who soon after appeared at the head of the Semi-Arian faction, this gave rise to the calumny that St. Cyril himself had espoused it. But nothing could be more falsely alleged against him, he having always maintained the Catholic faith. He had accordingly, in 349, together with his predecessor Maximus, received the decrees of the council of Sardica, and consequently those of Nice. And we have already seen, in his letter to Constantius, that he made an undaunted profession of the Consubstantial Trinity. To which we may add, that in the council of Constantinople, in 381, he joined with the other bishops in condemning the Semi-Arians and Macedonians. And the orthodox bishops assembled in the same city, in 382, writing to pope Damasus and to the western bishops, gave a most ample testimony to his faith, declaring, "That the most reverend and beloved of God, Cyril, bishop of Jerusalem, had been canonically elected by the bishops of the province, and had suffered many persecutions-for the faith."[14] Upon the death of Constantius, in 361, Julian the apostate, partly out of aversion to his uncle, and partly in hopes to see the Christian sects and the orthodox more at variance, suffered all the banished bishops to return to their churches. Thus did God make use of the malice of his enemy to restore St. Cyril to his see. He shortly after made him an eye-witness to the miraculous manifestation of his power, by which he covered his blaspheming enemies with confusion. The following most authentic history of that remarkable event is gathered from the original records, and vindicated against the exceptions of certain skeptics by Tillemont,[15] and by our most learned Mr. Warburton, in his Julian. In vain had the most furious tyrants exerted the utmost cruelty, and bent the whole power which the empire of the world put into their hands, to extirpate, if it had been possible, the Christian name. The faith increased under axes, and the blood of martyrs was a fruitful seed, which multiplied {610} the Church over all nations. The experience how weak and ineffectual a means brute force was to this purpose, moved the emperor Julian, the most implacable, the most crafty, and the most dangerous instrument which the devil ever employed in that design, to shift his ground, and change his artillery and manner of assault. He affected a show of great moderation, and in words disclaimed open persecution; but he sought by every foul and indirect means to undermine the faith, and sap the foundations of the Christian religion. For this purpose he had recourse to every base art of falsehood and dissimulation, in which he was the most complete master. He had played off the round of his machines to no purpose, and seemed reduced to his last expedient of the pacific kind, the discrediting the Christian religion by bringing the scandal of imposture upon its divine author. This he attempted to do by a project of rebuilding the Jewish temple--which, if he could have compassed, it would have sufficiently answered his wicked design; Christ and the prophet Daniel having in express terms foretold not only its destruction, which was effected by the Romans under Titus, but its final ruin and desolation. The Jewish religion was a temporary dispensation, intended by its divine author, God himself, to prefigure one more complete and perfect, and prepare men to embrace it. It not only essentially required bloody sacrifices, but it enjoined a fixed and certain place for them to be performed in; this was the temple at Jerusalem. Hence the final destruction of this temple was he abolition of the sacrifices, which annihilated the whole system of this religious institution. Whence St. Chrysostom[16] shows that the destruction of Jerusalem is to be ascribed, not to the power of the Romans, for God had often delivered it from no less dangers; but to a special providence, which was pleased to put it out of the power of human perversity to delay or respite the extinction of those ceremonial observances. "As a physician," says that father, "by breaking the cup, prevents his patient from indulging his appetite in a noxious draught; so God withheld the Jews from their sacrifices by destroying the whole city itself, and making the place inaccessible to all of them." St. Gregory Nazianzen, Socrates, Theodoret, and other Christian writers, are unanimous in what they say of Julian's motive, ascribing to him the intention already mentioned, of falsifying the scripture prophecies, those of Daniel and Christ, which his actions sufficiently evidence. His historian, indeed, says, that he undertook this work out of a desire of rendering the glory of his reign immortal by so great an achievement:[17] but this was only an after-thought or secondary motive; and Sozomen in particular assures us that not only Julian, but that the idolaters who assisted in it, pushed it forward upon that very motive, and for the sake thereof suspended their aversion to the Jewish nation. Julian himself wrote a letter to the body or community of the Jews, extant among his works,[18] mentioned by Sozomen,[19] and translated by Dr. Cave, in his life of St. Cyril. In it he declares them free from all exactions and taxes, and orders Julus or Illus, (probably Hillel,) their most reverend patriarch, to abolish the apostoli, or gatherers of the said taxes; begs their prayers, (such was his hypocrisy,) and promises, after his Persian expedition, when their temple should be rebuilt, to make Jerusalem his residence, and to offer up his joint prayers together with them. After this he assembled the chief among the Jews, and asked them why they offered no bloody sacrifices, since they were prescribed by their law. They replied, that they could not offer any but in the temple, which then lay in ruins. Whereupon he commanded them to repair to Jerusalem, rebuild {611} their temple, and re-establish their ancient worship, promising them his concurrence towards carrying on the work. The Jews received the warrant with inexpressible joy, and were so elated with it, that, flocking from all parts to Jerusalem, they began insolently to scorn and triumph over the Christians, threatening to make them feel as fatal effects of their severity, as they themselves had heretofore from the Roman powers.[20] The news was no sooner spread abroad than contributions came in from all hands. The Jewish women stripped themselves of their most costly ornaments to contribute towards the expense of the building. The emperor also, who was no less impatient to see it finished, in order to encourage them in the undertaking, told them he had found in their mysterious sacred books that this was the time in which they were to return to their country, and that their temple and legal observances were to be restored.[21] He gave orders to his treasurers to furnish money and every thing necessary for the building, which would require immense sums: he drew together the most able workmen from all quarters, and appointed for overseers persons of the highest rank, placing at their head his intimate friend Alypius, who had formerly been Pro-prefect of Britain; charging him to make them labor in this great work without ceasing, and to spare no expense. All things were in readiness, workmen were assembled from all quarters; stone, brick, timber, and other materials, in immense quantities, were laid in. The Jews of both sexes and of all degrees bore a share in the labor; the very women helping to dig the ground and carry out the rubbish in their aprons and skirts of their gowns. It is even said that the Jews appointed some pickaxes, spades, and baskets to be made of silver for the honor of the work. But the good bishop St. Cyril, lately returned from exile, beheld all these mighty preparations without any concern, relying on the infallible truth of the scripture prophecies: as, that the desolation of the Jewish temple should last till the end;[22] and that one stone should not be left on another;[23] and being full of the spirit of God, he foretold, with the greatest confidence, that the Jews, so far from being able to rebuild their ruined temple, would be the instruments whereby that prophecy of Christ would be still more fully accomplished than it had been hitherto, and that they would not be able to put one stone upon another,[24] and the event justified the prediction. Till then the foundations and some ruins of the walls of the temple subsisted, as appears from St. Cyril:[25] and Eusebius says,[26] the inhabitants still carried away the stones for their private buildings. These ruins the Jews first demolished with their own hands, thus concurring to the accomplishment of our Saviour's prediction. Then they began to dig the new foundation, in which work many thousands were employed. But what they had thrown up in the day was, by repeated earthquakes, the night following cast back again into the trench. "And when Alypius the next day earnestly pressed on the work, with the assistance of the governor of the province, there issued," says Ammianus, "such horrible balls of fire out of the earth near the foundations,[27] which rendered the place, from time to time, inaccessible to the scorched and blasted workmen. And the victorious element continuing in this manner obstinately and resolutely bent as it were to drive them to a distance, Alypius thought proper to give over the enterprise."[28] {612} This is also recorded by the Christian authors, who, besides the earthquake and fiery eruption, mention storms, tempests, and whirlwinds, lightning, crosses impressed on the bodies and garments of the assistants, and a flaming cross in the heavens, surrounded with a luminous circle. The order whereof seems to have been as follows. This judgment of the Almighty was ushered in by storms and whirlwinds, by which prodigious heaps of lime and sand and other loose materials were carried away.[29] After these followed lightning, the usual consequence of collision of clouds in tempests. Its effects were, first the destroying the more solid materials, and melting down the iron instruments;[30] and secondly, the impressing shining crosses on the bodies and garments of the assistants without distinction, in which there was something that in art and elegance exceeded all painting or embroidery; which when the infidels perceived, they endeavored, but in vain, to wash them out.[31] In the third place came the earthquake which cast out the stones of the old foundations, and shook the earth into the trench or cavity dug for the new; besides overthrowing the adjoining buildings and porticoes wherein were lodged great numbers of Jews designed for the work, who were all either crushed to death, or at least maimed or wounded. The number of the killed or hurt was increased by the fiery eruption in the fourth place, attended both with storms and tempests above, and with an earthquake below.[32] From this eruption, many fled to a neighboring church for shelter, but could not obtain entrance; whether on account of its being closed by a secret invisible hand, as the fathers state the case, or at least by a special providence, through the entrance into the oratory being choked up by a frighted crowd, all pressing to be foremost. "This, however," says St. Gregory Nazianzen,[33] "is invariably affirmed and believed by all, that as they strove to force their way in by violence, the _Fire_, which burst from the foundations of the temple, met and stopped them, and one part it burnt and destroyed, and another it desperately maimed, leaving them a living monument of God's commination and wrath against sinners." This eruption was frequently renewed till it overcame the rashness of the most obdurate, to use the words of Socrates; for it continued to be repeated as often as the projectors ventured to renew their attempt, till it had fairly tired them out. Lastly, on the same evening, there appeared over Jerusalem a lucid cross, shining very bright, as large as that in the reign of Constantine, encompassed with a circle of light. "And what could be so proper to close this tremendous scene, or to celebrate this decisive victory, as the Cross triumphant, encircled with the _Heroic_ symbol of conquest?" This miraculous event, with all its circumstances, is related by the writers of that age; by St. Gregory Nazianzen in the year immediately following it; by St. Chrysostom, in several parts of his works, who says that it happened not twenty years before, appeals to eye-witnesses still living and young, and to the present condition of those foundations, "of which," says he, "we are all witnesses;" by St. Ambrose in his fortieth epistle, written in 388; Rufinus, who had long lived upon the spot; Theodoret, who lived in the neighborhood in Syria; Philostorgius, the Arian; Sozomen, who says many were alive when he wrote who had it from eye-witnesses, and mentions the visible marks still subsisting; Socrates, &c. The testimony of the heathens corroborates this evidence; as that of Ammianus Marcellinus above quoted, a nobleman of the first rank, who then lived in the court of Julian at Antioch and in an office of distinction, and who probably wrote his {613} account from the letter of Alypius to his master at the time when the miracle happened. Libanius, another pagan friend and admirer of Julian, both in the history of his own life, and in his funeral oration on Julian's death, mentions these earthquakes in Palestine, but with a shyness which discovers the disgrace of his hero and superstition. Julian himself speaks of this event in the same covert manner. Socrates testifies, that at the sight of the miracles, the Jews at first cried out that Christ is God; yet returned home as hardened as ever. St. Gregory Nazianzen says, that many Gentiles were converted upon it, and went over to the Church. Theodoret and Sozomen say many were converted; but as to the Jews, they evidently mean a sudden flash of conviction, not a real and lasting conversion. The incredulous blinded themselves by various pretences: but the evidence of the miracle leaves no room for the least cavil or suspicion. The Christian writers of that age are unanimous in relating it with its complicated circumstances yet with a diversity which shows their agreement, though perfect, could not have been concerted. The same is confirmed by the testimony of the most obstinate adversaries. They who, when the temple at Daphne was consumed about the same time, by lightning, pretended that it was set on fire by Christians, were not able to suspect any possibility of contrivance in this case: nor could the event have been natural. Every such suspicion is removed by the conformity of the event with the prophecies: the importance of the occasion, the extreme eagerness of Jews and Gentiles in the enterprise, the attention of the whole empire fixed on it, and the circumstances of the fact. The eruption, contrary to its usual nature, was confined to one small spot; it obstinately broke out by fits, and ceased with the project, and this in such a manner, that Ammianus himself ascribes it to an intelligent cause. The phenomena of the cross in the air, and on the garments, were admirably fitted, as moral emblems, to proclaim the triumph of Christ over Julian, who had taken the cross out of the military ensigns, which Constantine had put there to be a lasting memorial of that cross which he had seen in the air that presaged his victories. The same was again erected in the heavens to confound the vanity of its impotent persecutor. The earthquake was undoubtedly miraculous; and though its effects were mostly such as might naturally follow, they were directed by a special supernatural providence, as the burning of Sodom by fire from heaven. Whence Mr. Warburton concludes his dissertation on this subject with the following corollary. "New light continually springing up from each circumstance as it passes in review, by such time as the whole event is considered, this illustrious miracle comes out in one full blaze of evidence."[34] Even Jewish Rabbins, who do not copy from Christian writers, relate this event in the same manner with the fathers from their own traditions and records.[35] This great event happened in the beginning of the year 363. St. Chrysostom admires the wonderful conduct of divine providence in this prodigy, and observes, that had not the Jews set about to rebuild their temple, they might have pretended they could have done it: therefore did God permit them thrice to attempt it; once under Adrian, when they brought a greater desolation upon themselves; a second time under Constantine the Great, who dispersed them, cut off their ears, and branded their bodies with the marks of rebellion. He then relates this third attempt, "in our own time," as he says, "not above twenty years ago, in which God himself visibly baffled their endeavors, to show that no human power could reverse his decree; and this at a time {614} when our religion was oppressed, lay under the axes, and had not the liberty even to speak; that impudence itself might not have the least shadow of pretence." St. Cyril adored the divine power in this miracle, of which he had ocular demonstration. Orosius says that Julian had destined him to slaughter after his Persian expedition, but the death of the tyrant prevented his martyrdom. He was again driven from his see by the Arian emperor, Valens, in 367, but recovered it in 378, when Gratian, mounting the throne, commanded the churches to be restored to those who were in communion with pope Damasus. He found his flock miserably divided by heresies and schisms under the late wolves to whom they had fallen a prey; but he continued his labors and tears among them. In 381 he assisted at the general council of Constantinople, in which he condemned the Semi-Arians and Macedonians, whose heresy he had always opposed, though he had sometimes joined their prelates against the Arians before their separation from the church, as we have seen above; and as St. Hilary, St. Meletius, and many others had done. He had governed his church eight years in peace from the death of Valens, when, in 386, he passed to a glorious immortality, in the seventieth year of his age. He is honored by the Greeks and Latins on this day, which was that of his death. Footnotes: 1. Cat. 5, 10, 14. 2. See Fleury, Moeurs des Chrétiens, p. 42. 3. B. 2, c. 28. 4. Ib. 3, c. 26. 5. Ib. 5, c. 5. 6. Ad an. 353. 7. Annal. p. 475. 8. Auetuar. Combefis, t. 2, p. 382. 9. T. 2, p. 344. 10. [Greek: Tên homousion Triada]. This is an argument of his firm adherence to the Nicene faith, and that by the praises which he bestows on an Arlan emperor in this piece, he meant not to flatter him in his heterodox sentiments; they being only compliments of course in an address to an eastern emperor, and his own sovereign. 11. Certain moderns imagine that the luminous crosses which appeared in the air in the reigns of Constantine and Constantius were merely natural solar halos; and that under Julian, which appeared in the night, a lunar halo, or circle of colors, usually red, round those celestial bodies. But in opposition to this hypothesis we must observe that those natural phenomena do not ordinarily appear in the figure of a cross, but of a ring or circle, as both experience and the natural cause show. We ought also to take nonce, that this prodigy appeared thrice in the same century, and always on extraordinary occasions, in which many circumstances rendered a miraculous manifestation of the divine power highly credible. Moreover, how will these secretaries and confidents of the intrigues of nature, as Mr. Warburton styles them, account for the inscription, _In this conquer_, which was formed in bright letters round the cross, which appeared in the air to Constantlne and his whole army, as that emperor himself affirmed upon oath, and as Eusebius assures us from his testimony, and that of other eye-witnesses. (l. 1, de Vit. Constant., c. 28, olim 22.) Fabricius very absurdly pretends that [Greek: graphên] may here signify an emblem, not an inscription. Mr. Jor tin, after taking much pains on this subject, is obliged to confess (vol. 3, p. 6) that, "After all, it seems more natural to interpret [Greek: graphên legousan] of a writing than of a picture. It is an ugly circumstance," says this author, "and I wish we could fairly get rid of it." Those who can explain the scripture account of the passage of the Israelites through the Red Sea by a natural strong wind, and an extraordinary ebbing of the waters, can find no knot too hard for them. To deny a supernatural interposition they can swallow contradictions, and build hypotheses far more wonderful than the greatest miracles. 12. Sozomen indeed says, (b. 4, c. 24,) that Acacius fought for Arianism, Cyril for Semi-Arianism: but this is altogether a mistake. For Acacius himself was at that time a Semi-Arian, and in 341, in the council of Antioch, affirmed Christ to be like, though not equal to his Father. It was only in 358, that he closed in with Eudoxius, and the other rigid Arians. And as to St. Cyril, it is also clear from the facts above mentioned, and from his writings, that he always professed the Catholic faith with regard to the article of the Consubstantiality of the Son of God. This is demonstrated by Dom Toutée, in his life of St. Cyril, and by his colleague Dom Mares, in his dissertation on the Semi-Arians, printed at Paris, in 1721, to vindicate this father against a certain author in the memoirs of Trevoux, an 1721. 13. Sozom. b. 4, c. 24. 14. Apud Theod. Hist. b. 5, c. 9. 15. Tillem. t. 7, p. 409. 16. Hom. 6, adv. Judæ, t. 1, p. 646, ed. Ben. 17. Amm. Marcell. l. 3, c. 1. 18. Ep. 25, p. 153. 19. Soz. l. 5, c. 22. 20. It was about this time that the Jews demolished the great church of Alexandria, two more at Damascus, and others elsewhere. 21. Naz. Or. 4, adv. Julian. 22. Dan. ix. 27. 23. Matt. xxiv. 2. 24. Rufin. Hist. l. 10, c. 37. 25. Catech. 15, n. 15. 26. Dem. Evang. l. 8, p. 406. 27. Out of the very foundations themselves, according to St. Chrysostom, Sozomen, and Theodoret. 28. Hocque modo elemento destinatius repellente. Amm. Marcel. l. xxiii. c. 1. A very emphatical expression in the mouth of a pagan. He seems by it to ascribe sense to the element, by which he discovers the finger of God visibly detesting the obstinacy of the undertaking, and a renewal of the eruption so often, till it overcame the rashness of the most obstinate. 29. Theod. Hist. l. 3, c. 20. 30. Soc. lib. 3, c. 20. 31. St. Greg. Naz Or. 4 adv. Julian. Theodoret, indeed, says that these crosses were shaded with s dark color: but this without any real contradiction to St. Gregory's relation of the matter, because, like the phosphorus, they were {} a darkish hue by day, and lucid by night. 32. St. Greg. Naz. Or. 9. 33. Or. 4. adv. Julian. 34. This learned author demonstrates, lib. 2, ch. 4, that the exceptions of Mr. Basnage are founded on glaring mistakes and misrepresentations of his authorities. 35. See Warburton, p. 88. APPENDIX ON THE WRITINGS OF ST. CYRIL OF JERUSALEM ST. MAXIMUS, bishop of Jerusalem, having appointed St. Cyril both his preacher and his catechist, our saint diligently acquitted himself of both these functions, the most important of the episcopal charge. St. Cyril mentions his sermons which he made to the people every Sunday. (Cat. 5, 10, 14.) One of these is extant in the new edition of his works. It is a moral discourse against sin, as the source of all our miseries, drawn from the gospel upon the sick man healed at the Probatic pond. (John v.) He preached every year a course of catechetical sermons for the instruction of the catechumens, to prepare them for baptism and the holy communion. Only those which he preached in 347, or rather in 348, seem to have been committed to writing. These consist of eighteen to the competentes, or Illuminati, that is, catechumens before baptism; and of five mystagogic catechetical discourses, so called either because they were addressed to the catechumens immediately after they were initiated in the holy mysteries of Baptism, Confirmation, and the Eucharist, or because these sacraments are fully explained in them, which were never expounded to those who were not initiated, out of respect, and for fear of giving occasion to their profanation by the blasphemies of infidels. In the first eighteen St. Cyril explains the doctrine of the church concerning the pardon of sin, prayer, and all the articles of the Apostles' Creed. The style is clear, suitable to an exposition of doctrine such as is here given, and the work is one of the most important of Christian antiquity. The Latin translation of Grodecius, canon of Warmia in Poland, printed first in 1563, though often corrected, was very inaccurate; and the Greek editions very incorrect and imperfect, before that given of Thomas Miller at Oxford, in 1703, which is very valuable, though the author in part of his notes, where he endeavors to maintain the principles of the Protestant church, is very inconsistent. Dom Tontée, a Maurist monk, who died in 1718, prepared an excellent and complete edition of the works of St. Cyril; which was published by Dom Maran, in 1720, in one volume in folio. The journalists of Trevoux, in their memoirs for December, in 1721, criticised some of the notes concerning the Semi-Arians, and the temporary neutrality of St. Cyril. Dom Maran answered them by a learned and curious dissertation, Sur le Semi-Ariens, printed by Vincent, in 1722. Three French Calvinists, Aubertin, Rivet, (Critici Sacri, l. 3, c. 8, 9, 10, and 11,) one the apostate Casimir Oudin, (De Ser. Eccl. t. {}, p. 459,) deny these catecheses, at least the {615} mystagogics, to be the work of St. Cyril. Oudin, to his usual inaccuracy, adds many affected blunders, and shows a dread of his unanswerable authority in favor of many articles which he was unwilling to allow was his chief motive for raising such a contest about the author; though if this was not St. Cyril, these critics must confess, from six hundred passages in the discourses, that they were delivered at Jerusalem, about the middle of the fourth century. Other Protestants, especially the English, are more sincere, and prove them this father's most undoubted work, as Doctor Cave, in St. Cyril's life, Thomas Milles, in his preface and notes to his edition of St. Cyril, Whittaker, Vossius. Bull, &c. They were preached at Jerusalem, seventy years after Manes broached his heresy, whom some then alive had seen, (Cat. 6,) which agrees only to the year 347. They are mentioned by St. Jerom, in the same age, (Catal. c. 112,) quoted by Theodoret, (Dial. Inconfusus, p. 106,) and innumerable other fathers in every age downwards. As for the five mystagogics, they are inseparable from the rest, and as undoubted. The author promises them in his eighteenth, and mentions his first eighteen in the first mystagogic. (n. 9.) They are quoted by Eustrasius, (under Justinian,) by Anastius the Sinaite, Nico the monk, and other ancients produced by Dom Touttée. (Disc. 2, p. cv.) In his first catechetic instructions, he commands the catechumens not to divulge any part of our mysteries to any infidel, as unworthy, and exhorts them to the dispositions and preparation for holy baptism, _viz._ to a pure intention, assiduity in prayer, and at church devoutly receiving the exorcisms, fasting, sincere repentance, confessing their sins, whatever they had committed. (Catceh. 1, n. 5.) In the fourth he gives a summary of the Christian faith, and reckons up the canonical books of scripture, in which he omits the Apocalypse, and some of the deutero-canonical books, though he quotes these in other places as God's word. In the following discourses he explains very distinctly and clearly every article of our creed: he teaches Christ's descent into the subterraneous dungeons ([Greek: eis ta katachthonia]) to deliver the ancient just. (Cat. 4, n. 11, p. 57.) The porters of hell stood astonished to behold their conqueror, and fled: the prophets and saints, with Moses, Abraham, David, &c., met him, now redeemed by him. (Cat. 14, n. 19, p. 214.) He extols exceedingly the state of virginity as equal to that of the angels. (Cat. 4, n. 24; Cat. 12, n. 33, 34.) He says it will in the day of judgment, in the list of good works, carry off the first crowns. (Cat. 15, n. 23.) He compares it to gold, and marriage, which is yet good and honorable, to silver; but prescribes times of continency to married persons for prayer. (Cat. 4, n. 26.) He calls Lent the greatest time of fasting and penance, but says, "Thou dost not abstain from wine and flesh as bad in themselves, as the Manichees, for so thou wilt have no reward; but thou retrenchest them, good indeed in themselves, for better spiritual recompenses which are promised." (Cat. 4, n. 27.) He mentions the fasts and watchings of superposition, _i.e._ of holy week before Easter, as most austere. (Cat. 18.) He expresses on all occasions the tenderest devotion to the holy cross of Christ, and a great confidence in it, with which he endeavors also to inspire others. "Let us not be ashamed of the cross of Christ," says he: "sign it openly on thy forehead, that the devils, seeing the royal standard, may fly far trembling; make this sign when thou eatest or drinkest, sittest, liest, risest, speakest, walkest, in a word, in every action [Greek: en pantipragmati]." (Cat. 4, p. 58.) And again, "when thou art going to dispute against an infidel, make with thy hand the sign of the cross, and thy adversary will be struck dumb; be not ashamed to confess the cross. The angels glory in it, saying, Whom do you seek? Jesus, the crucified, Mat. xxviii. 6. You could have said, O Angel, My Lord: but the cross is his crown." (Cat. 13, n. 22, p. 194.) St. Porphyry of Gaza, instructed by St. Cyril's successor, John, following this rule, by beginning a disputation with a famous Manichean woman, struck her miraculously dumb. St. Cyril, in his thirteenth catechesis, thus addresses his catechumen, (n. 36, p. 200:) "Be careful to form with your finger on your forehead boldly, the sign of the cross for a signet and standard, and that before every thing,--while we eat our bread, or drink our cups, in coming in and going out, before sleep, and in rising, in walking, and in standing still." He testifies, in his tenth catechesis, (n. 19,) that the holy wood of the cross kept at Jerusalem, had, in the few years since its invention by St. Helena, already filled the whole world, being carried everywhere by those who, full of devotion, cut of littie chips, (p. 146.) We learn from Rufin, (Hist. b. 1, c. 10,) that the holy cross was covered by St. Helena with a silver case; and from S. Paulinus, (Ep. 31, n. 6,) that it was kept in an inner treasury in the church, into which the passage lay through a portico or gallery, as appears from the Spiritual Meadow. (C. 105.) A lamp burned before the cross, by the oil whereof St. Sabas and St. Cyriacus wrought many miracles, as we read in their lives. A priest was appointed by the bishop to be the guardian of this sacred treasury, which honor was conferred on St. Porphyry of Gaza, soon after St. Cyril's death; and then the case of the cross was of gold. St. Paulmus rays, it was exposed to the public veneration of the people once a year, at Easter, which some think to have been on Good Friday. St. Sophronius of Jerusalem, (Or. 1,) besides other days, in his time, says it was on Easter Monday. At extraordinary times the bishop gave leave for it to be shown to pilgrims to be venerated, and for them to cut off small chips, by which, miraculously, the cross never diminished, as St. Paulinus wrote seventy {616} years after its invention. The devotion of St. Cyril to the holy cross, was doubtless more inflamed by the sacred place in which he made all his sermons, which was the church built by St. Helena and Constantine, sometimes called of the Holy Cross, which was kept in it; sometimes of the Resurrection, because it contained in it the sepulchre, out of which Christ arose from death. It is curiously described as it stood, before it was destroyed by the Saracens, in 1011, by Dom Touttée, in a particular dissertation in the end of St. Cyril's works, (p. 423.) It was since rebuilt, but not exactly in the same place. St. Cyril inculcates also an honor due to the relics of saints, which he proves (Cat. 17, n. 30, 31) from the Holy Ghost performing miracles by the handkerchiefs of St. Paul, how much more by the saints' bodies? This he shows (Cat. 18, n. 16, p. 293) by the man raised to life by touching the dead body of Eliseus. (4 Reg. xiii. 21.) He gives the Blessed Virgin the title of Mother of God, [Greek: theotokos]. (Cat. 10, n. 19, p. 146.) He is very clear in explaining the eternity and consubstantiality of God the Son, (Cat. 4, 10, 11, 15,) which would alone justify him from all suspicion of semi-Arianism. He is no less explicit against the Macedonians, on the divinity of the Holy Ghost. On that article: _I believe in the Holy Ghost_, "Believe of him," says he, "the same as of the Father and of the Son," &c. (Cat. 4, n. 16, pp. 59, 60.) On the article of the holy Catholic Church, he observes that the very name of Catholic distinguishes it from all heresies, which labor in vain to usurp it; this always remains proper to the spouse of Christ, as we see, if a stranger ask in any city, Where is the Catholic Church? (Cat. 18, n. 26.) That it is catholic, or universal, because spread over the whole world, from one end to the other; and because universally and without failing or error, [Greek: katholikôs kai anelleipôs], it teaches all truths of things visible and invisible, (ib. n. 23, p. 296,) which he proves from Matt. xvi. 18. _The gates of hell shall never prevail against it._ 1 Tim. iii. 15. _It is the pillar and ground of truth._ Malach. i. 11. _From the rising of the sun to the setting, my name is glorified._ He is very earnest in admonishing, that no book is to be received as divine, but by the authority of the Church, and by tradition from the apostles, end the ancient bishops, the rulers of the Church. (Cat. 4, n. 23, 35, 36.) By the same channel of the tradition of tire Church, he teaches the sign of the cross, the honoring of that holy wood of our Saviour's sepulchre, and of saints' relics, exorcisms, and their virtue, insufflations, oil sanctified by exorcisms, (Cat. 20,) holy chrism, (Cat. 21,) blessing the baptismal water, (Cat. 3,) prayers, and sacrifices for the dead, (Cat. 23,) the perpetual virginity of the Virgin Mary, (Cat. 12,) &c. He made these eighteen catecheses to the catechumens during Lent: the five following he spoke to them after they were baptized during Easter week, to instruct them perfectly in the mysteries of the three sacraments they had received together--baptism, confirmation, and the eucharist--which it was thought a profanation to explain fully to any before baptism. Hence these five are called mystagogic catecheses. As to baptism, St. Cyril teaches (Procat. n. 16, p. 12) that it imprints an indelible signet, or spiritual character in the soul, which, he says, (Cat. 1, n. 2) is the mark by which we belong to Christ's flock: he adds, this is conferred by the regeneration, by and in the lotion with water. (Cat. 4 & 12; Cat. 16, n. 24.) He calls the character given by confirmation the signet of the communication of the Holy Ghost, (Cat. 18, n. 33,) and says (Cat. 22, n. 7) it is imprinted on the soul, while the forehead is anointed with chrism, (Cat. 22, n. 7,) and after by baptism. (ib. n. 33,) by which he clearly distinguishes the characters of these two different sacraments, though Mr. Milles (not. in Procat.) has taken great pains to confound them. St. Cyril teaches that baptism perfectly remits all sin; but penance, the remedy for sins after it, does not quite efface them, as wounds that are healed leave still scars. (Cat. 18, n. 20.) He attributes great virtue to the exorcisms for purifying the soul, (Procat. n. 9,) and says, as incantations give a diabolical virtue to defile the soul, so does the invocation of the Holy Ghost give a virtue to the water, and gives it the power to sanctify. (Cat. 3, n. 3.) He says the same of the blessed oil, (Cat. 20, n. 3, p. 3,) and establishes clearly confirmation to be a distinct sacrament from baptism: he calls it the chrism and the mystical ointment, (Cat. 21,) and says it is to arm and fortify us against the enemies of our salvation, (ib. p. 317, n. 4,) and that while the body is anointed with this visible ointment, the soul is sanctified by the holy and life-giving spirit. (ib. n. 3.) In his nineteenth catechesis, the first mystagogic, he explains the force of the baptismal renunciations of the devil and his pomps. In the twentieth, the other ceremonies of baptism, and what they mean; in the twenty-first, the sacrament of confirmation; in the twenty-second, that of the blessed eucharist; in the twenty-third, or last, the liturgy or sacrifice of the mass and communion. As to the blessed eucharist, he says, by it we are made _concorporeal_ and _consanguineal_ with Christ by his body and blood being distributed through our bodies. (Cat. 22, n. 1, 3.) This same strong expression, which wonderfully declares the strict union which is the effect of this sacrament, is used by St. Chrysostom, (Horm. 6, in Hebr. &c.,) St. Isidore of Pelusium, (l. 3, ep. 195,) St. Cyril of Alexandria, (l. 10, in Joan. p. 862, dial. de Trin. p. 407,) &c. Our holy doctor explains to his neophytes the doctrine of transubstantiation in so plain terms, that no one can doubt of its being the faith of the Church in the fourth age. The learned Lutheran Ffaffius, (Dis. de oblatione Euchar. c. 38, p. 327,) owns it cannot be denied that this is Cyril's opinion. Grebe affirms the same, (not. in 1. 5, Irenæ. c. 2, p. 339.) {617} This twenty-second catechesis alone puts it out of dispute. "Do not look apor the bread and wine as bare and common elements, for they are the Body and Blood of Christ, as our Lord assures us. Although thy sense suggest this to thee, let faith make thee firm and sure. Judge not of the thing by the taste, but be certain from faith that thou hast been honored with the gift of Christ's Body and Blood. (Cat. 22, n. 6, p. 321.) When he has pronounced and said of the bread: 'This is my body,' who will, after this, dare to doubt? and when he has assured and said, 'This is my blood,' who can ever hesitate, saying it is not his blood? (n. 1, p. 32.) He changed water into wine, which is akin to blood, in Cana; and shall we not think him worthy our belief, when he has changed, [Greek: metaballôn], wine into blood? (n. 2,) &c. Wherefore let us receive them with an entire belief as Christ's Body and Blood, for under the figure of bread is given to thee his Body, and under the figure of wine his Blood, that when thou hast received Christ's Body and Blood, thou be made one body and blood with him: for so we carry him about in us, his Body and Blood being distributed through our bodies." (n. 3, p. 320.) We learn the manner of receiving the blessed sacrament from his Catech. 23. "Putting your left hand under your right," says he, "form a throne of your right hand to receive the king; hold it hollow, receiving on it the Body of Christ. Answer, Amen. Carefully sanctify your eyes, by touching them with the holy Body, being very watchful that no part of it fall. Approach to the cup of the Blood, bowed in a posture of adoration and reverence; saying, Amen, take of the Blood of Christ. While yet something of the moisture sticks on your lips, touch them with your hand, and by applying it then to your eyes, forehead, and other senses, sanctify them." In his twenty-third or last catechesis, he calls the mass an unbloody sacrifice, a victim of propitiation, a supreme worship, &c. (n. 8, p. 327.) He explains the Preface, and the other principal parts of it, especially the Communion, and mentions the priest from the altar crying out to the faithful, before they approached to receive, [Greek: Ta hagia tois hagiois]. He expounds the Lord's Prayer, and mentions the commemorations for the living and the dead. Of the latter he writes thus: (n. 9, p. 328.) "We also pray for the deceased holy fathers, bishops, and all in general who are dead, believing that this will be a great succor to those souls for which prayer is offered, while the holy and most tremendous victim lies present." And, (n. 10, ib.,) "If a king, being offended at certain persons, had banished them, and their friends offer him a rich garland for them, will not he be moved to release their punishment? In like manner, we, offering prayers to God for the dead, though they be sinners, do not make a garland, but we offer Christ sacrificed for our sins, striving to appease and make our merciful God propitious both to them and ourselves." This very passage is quoted out of St. Cyril, in the sixth century, by Eustratius, a priest of Constantinople, author of the life of the patriarch Eutychius, in his book on praying for the dead, or on the state of the dead, published by Leo Allatius, l. De Consensu Eccl. Orient. et Occid. De Purgat., and in Bibl. Patr. t. 27. It is also cited by Nicon the monk, in his Pandect. St. Cyril's famous letter to Constantius, On the Apparition of the Cross in the Heavens, was written by him soon after he was raised to the episcopal dignity, either in the same year, 350, or in the following. A sermon, On the Feast of the Purification of the Blessed Virgin, and the Presentation of Christ in the Temple, bears the name of St. Cyril of Jerusalem, in almost all the MSS.; but the custom of carrying blessed candles in procession that day, mentioned in this discourse, was only introduced at Jerusalem at the suggestion of a devout lady named Icelia, about the middle of the fifth century, about sixty years after the death of St. Cyril. Other passages in this discourse seem clearly levelled against the heresy of Nestorius. The style is also more pompous and adorned than that of St. Cyril, nor abounds with parenthesis like his. It is a beautiful, eloquent, and solid piece, and was probably composed by some priest of the church of Jerusalem, whose name was Cyril, about the sixth century, when either Sallust or Elias was patriarch. See Dom. Touttée, and Ceillier, t. 6, p. 544. ST. EDWARD, KING AND MARTYR. HE was monarch of all England, and succeeded his father, the glorious king Edgar, in 975, being thirteen years old. He followed in all things the counsels of St. Dunstan; and his ardor in the pursuit of all virtues is not to be expressed. His great love of purity of mind and body, and his fervent devotion, rendered him the miracle of princes, while by his modesty, clemency, prudence, charity, and compassion to the poor, he was the blessing and the delight of his subjects.' His stepmother, Elfrida, had attempted {618} to set him aside, that the crown might fall on her own son, Ethelred, then seven years old. Notwithstanding her treasonable practices, and the frequent proofs of her envy and jealousy, Edward always paid her the most dutiful respect and deference, and treated his brother with the most tender affection. But the fury of her ambition made her insensible to all motives of religion, nature, and gratitude. The young king had reigned three years and a half, when, being one day weary with hunting in a forest near Wareham, in Dorsetshire, he paid a visit to his stepmother at Corfesgeate, now Corfe-castle, in the isle of Purbeck, and desired to see his young brother at the door. The treacherous queen caused a servant to stab him in the belly while he was stooping, out of courtesy, after drinking. The king set spurs to his horse, but fell off dead, on the 18th of March, 979, his bowels being ripped open so as to fall out. His body was plunged deep into a marsh, but discovered by a pillar of light, and honored by many miraculous cures of sick persons. It was taken up and buried in the church of our Lady at Wareham; but found entire in three years after, and translated to the monastery at Shaftesbury. His lungs were kept at the village called Edwardstow, in 1001; but the chiefest part of his remains were deposited at Wareham, as the Saxon Chronicle and Florence of Worcester say: but part was afterwards removed to Shaftesbury, not Glastenbury, as Caxton mistakes. The long thin knife with which he was stabbed, was kept in the church at Faversham, before the suppression of the monasteries, as Hearne mentions. His name is placed in the Roman Martyrology. The impious Elfrida, being awaked by the stings of conscience, and by the voice of miracles, retired from the world, and built the monasteries of Wherwell and Ambresbury, in the first of which she lived and died in the practice of penance. The reign of her son Ethelred was weak and unfortunate, and the source of the greatest miseries to the kingdom, especially from the Danes. See Malmesbury, Brompton, abbot of Jorval, in Yorkshire, and Ranulf Higden, in his Polychronicon, published by Gale. Also an old MS. life of the saint, quoted by Hearne, on Langtoft's Chronicle, t. 2, p. 628, and from the MS. lives of saints, in the hands of Mr. Sheldon, of Weston. ST. ANSELM, BISHOP OF LUCCA, C. HE was a native of Mantua, and was educated there in grammer and dialectics. Having entered himself among the clergy, he spent some time in the study of theology and the canon law, and laid that foundation of learning, which, joined with his natural genius and eminent virtue, qualified him to rise to the highest degree of excellence. Anselm Badagius, a Milanese, bishop of Lucca, was chosen pope in 1061, and took the name of Alexander II. He nominated our saint his successor in the see of Lucca; and he took a journey into Germany to the emperor, Henry IV., but out of a scruple refused to receive the investiture of the bishopric from that prince, so that the pope was obliged to keep in his own hands the administration of the see of Lucca. St. Gregory VII., who succeeded Alexander II., in 1073, ordered Anselm to receive the investiture from Henry. This compliance gave our saint such remorse, that he left his see, and took the monastic habit at Cluni. The pope obliged him to return to his bishopric, which he did. His zeal soon raised him enemies: by virtue of a decree of pope Gregory IX. he attempted to reform the canons of his cathedral, and to oblige them to live in community: this they obstinately refused to do, though they were interdicted by the pope, and afterwards excommunicated in a council, in which Peter Igneus, the famous bishop of Albano, presided in the name of {619} his holiness. The holy countess, Maud, undertook to expel the refractory canons, but they raised a sedition, and, being supported by the emperor Henry, drove the bishop out of the city, in 1079. St. Anselm retired to the countess Maud, whose director he was; for he was eminently experienced in the paths of an interior life, and, in the greatest hurry of business, he always reserved several hours in the day, which he consecrated to prayer, and attended only to God and himself. While he studied or conversed with others, his heart was virtually united to God, and every object served as it were naturally to raise his affections afresh to his Creator. Pope Gregory suffered him not to bury himself in his retreat, but, during his exile, appointed him apostolic legate in Lombardy, charging him with the care of several dioceses in those parts, which, through the iniquity of the times, had continued long vacant. St. Anselm wrote an apology for Gregory VII., in which he shows that it belongs not to temporal princes to give pastors to the church of Christ, and to confute the pretensions of the antipope, Guibert.[1] In another work he proves, that temporal princes cannot dispose of the revenues of the church. St. Anselm died at Mantua on the 18th of March, in 1086. His name occurs on this day in the Roman Martyrology, and he is honored at Mantua as patron of that city. Baldus, his penitentiary, has written his life, in which he ascribes to him several miracles. See it in Canisius's Lect. Antiq. t. 3, p. 372. Footnotes: 1. This work is published by Canisius, Lect. Antiq. t. 3, p. 389, and Bibl. Patr. Lugdun, t. 18, Colon. t. 1{2}. ST. FRIDIAN, ERIGDIAN, OR FRIGDIAN, C. BISHOP OF LUCCA. HE is said to have been son to a king of Ulster in Ireland, at least he is looked upon as of Irish extraction. Travelling into Italy, to improve himself in ecclesiastical learning and virtue, he made such progress that, upon the death of Geminian, bishop of Lucca, he was chosen bishop of that extensive diocese, the eleventh from St. Paulinus, founder of that church, said to have been a disciple of St. Peter. St. Gregory the Great assures us, that he miraculously checked an impetuous flood of the river Auser, now called the Serchio, when it threatened to drown great part of the city. St. Fridian died in 578, and was buried in a place where the church now stands, which bears his name. Pope Alexander II. sent for some regular canons from this church to establish that order in the churches of St. John Lateran, and of the cross of Jerusalem, at Rome, but, in 1507, the congregation of St. Frigdian was united to that of St. John Lateran.[1] See St. Gregory the Great, l. 3, Dial. c. 9, Bede, Notker, Raban, Usuard, and the Roman Martyrology, on the 18th of March. Also Innocent III. c. 34, de Testibus et Attestationibus. In Decreto Gregoriano. Rursus id c. 8, de Testibus cogendis. Ib. iterum, de Verborum Significatione. See also Dempster (of the family of the barons of Muresk, a Scotchman, public professor, first in several towns in Flanders, afterwards at Pisa, and lastly, at Bononia, where he died in 1625) in his Etruria Regalis, t. 2, l. 5, c. 6, p. 299, which work was printed with many cuts, in two volume, folio, at Florence, in 1723, at the expense of Thomas Coke, late earl of Leicester, then on his travels. And principally, see the Ecclesiastical History of Lucca, printed in that city, in 1736, and again in 1741, in 12mo. Footnotes: 1. See F. Hebb{oi}, t. 2, p. 50. {620} MARCH XIX. ST. JOSEPH. THE glorious St. Joseph was lineally descended from the greatest kings of the tribe of Juda, and from the most illustrious of the ancient patriarchs; but his true glory consisted in his humility and virtue. The history of his life hath not been written by men; but his principal actions are recorded by the Holy Ghost himself. God intrusted him with the education of his divine Son, manifested in the flesh. In this view he was espoused to the Virgin Mary. It is an evident mistake of some writers, that by a former wife he was the father of St. James the Less, and of the rest who are styled in the gospels the brothers of our Lord; for these were only cousin-germans to Christ, the sons of Mary, sister to the Blessed Virgin, wife of Alphæus, who was living at the time of our Redeemer's crucifixion. St. Jerom assures us,[1] that St. Joseph always preserved his virgin chastity; and it is of faith that nothing contrary thereto ever took place with regard to his chaste spouse, the blessed Virgin Mary. He was given her by heaven to be the protector of her chastity, to secure her from calumnies in the birth of the Son of God, and to assist her in his education, and in her journeys, fatigues, and persecutions. How great was the purity and sanctity of him who was chosen the guardian of the most spotless Virgin! This holy man seems, for a considerable time, to have been unacquainted that the great mystery of the Incarnation had been wrought in her by the Holy Ghost. Conscious therefore of his own chaste behavior towards her, it could not but raise a great concern in his breast, to find that, notwithstanding the sanctity of her deportment, yet he might be well assured that she was with child. But being _a just man_, as the scripture calls him, and consequently possessed of all virtues, especially of charity and mildness towards his neighbor, he was determined to leave her privately, without either condemning or accusing her, committing the whole cause to God. These his perfect dispositions were so acceptable to God, the lover of justice, charity, and peace, that before he put his design in execution, he sent an angel from heaven not to reprehend any thing in his holy conduct, but to dissipate all his doubts and fears, by revealing to him this adorable mystery. How happy should we be if we were as tender in all that regards the reputation of our neighbor; as free from entertaining any injurious thought or suspicion, whatever certainty our conjectures or our senses may seem to rely on; and as guarded in our tongue! We commit these faults only because in our hearts we are devoid of that true charity and simplicity, whereof St. Joseph sets us so eminent an example on this occasion. In the next place we may admire in secret contemplation, with what devotion, respect, and tenderness, he beheld and adored the first of all men, the new-born Saviour of the world, and with what fidelity he acquitted himself of his double charge, the education of Jesus, and the guardianship of his blessed mother. "He was truly the faithful and prudent servant," says St. Bernard,[2] "whom our Lord appointed the master of his household, the comfort and support of his mother, his fosterfather, and most faithful co-operator to the execution of his deepest counsels on earth." "What a happiness," {621} says the same father, "not only to see Jesus Christ, but also to hear him, to carry him in his arms, to lead him from place to place, to embrace and caress him, to feed him, and to be privy to all the great secrets which were concealed from the princes of this world!" "O astonishing elevation! O unparalleled dignity!" cries out the pious Gerson,[3] in a devout address to St. Joseph, "that the mother of God, queen of heaven, should call you her lord; that God himself, made man, should call you father, and obey your commands. O glorious Triad on earth, Jesus, Mary, Joseph, how dear a family to the glorious Trinity in heaven, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost! Nothing is on earth so great, so good, so excellent." Amidst these his extraordinary graces, what more wonderful than his humility! He conceals his privileges, lives as the most obscure of men, publishes nothing of God's great mysteries, makes no further inquiries into them, leaving it to God to manifest them at his own time, seeks to fulfil the order of providence in his regard, without interfering with any thing but what concerns himself. Though descended from the royal family which had long been in possession of the throne of Judaea, he is content with his condition, that of a mechanic or handicraftsman,[4] and makes it his business, by laboring in it, to maintain himself, his spouse, and the divine Child. We should be ungrateful to this great saint, if we did not remember that it is to him, as the instrument under God, that we are indebted for the preservation of the infant Jesus from Herod's jealousy and malice, manifested in the slaughter of the Innocents. An angel appearing to him in his sleep, bade him arise, take the child Jesus, and fly with him into Egypt, and remain there till he should again have notice from him to return. This sudden and unexpected flight must have exposed Joseph to many inconveniences and sufferings in so long a journey, with a little babe and a tender virgin, the greater part of the way being through deserts, and among strangers; yet he alleges no excuses, nor inquires at what time they were to return. St. Chrysostom observes that God treats thus all his servants, sending them frequent trials, to clear their hearts from the rust of self-love, but intermixing seasons of consolation.[5] "Joseph," says he, "is anxious on seeing the Virgin with child; an angel removes that fear; he rejoices at the child's birth, but a great fear succeeds; the furious king seeks to destroy the child, and the whole city is in an uproar to take away his life. This is followed by another joy, the adoration of the Magi; a new sorrow then arises; he is ordered to fly into a foreign unknown country, without help or acquaintance." It is the opinion of the fathers, that upon their entering Egypt, at the presence of the child Jesus, all the oracles of that superstitions country were struck dumb, and the statues of their gods trembled, and in many places fell to the ground, according to that of Isaiah xix. _And the statues of the Egyptians shall be shaken in his presence._[6] The fathers also attribute to this holy visit the spiritual benediction poured on that country, which made it for many ages most fruitful in saints.[7] After the death of king Herod, which was notified to St. Joseph by a vision, God ordered him to return with the child and his mother into the land of Israel, which our saint readily obeyed. But when he arrived in Judæa, {622} hearing that Archelaus succeeded Herod in that part of the country, apprehensive he might be infected with his father's vices--cruelty and ambition--he feared on that account to settle there, as he would otherwise probably have done, for the more commodious education of the child. And, therefore, being directed by God in another vision, he retired into the dominions of his brother, Herod Antipas, in Galilee, to his former habitation in Nazareth, where the wonderful occurrences of our Lord's birth were less known. St. Joseph being a strict observer of the Mosaic law, in conformity to its direction, annually repaired to Jerusalem to celebrate the passover. Archelaus being banished by Augustus, and Judæa made a Roman province, he had now nothing more to fear at Jerusalem. Our Saviour being advanced to the twelfth year of his age, accompanied his parents thither; who having performed the usual ceremonies of the feast, were now returning with many of their neighbors and acquaintance towards Galilee, and never doubting but that Jesus had joined himself with some of the company, they travelled on for a whole day's journey without further inquiry after him, before they discovered that he was not with them. But when night came on, and they could hear no tidings of him among their kindred and acquaintance, they, in the deepest affliction, returned with the utmost speed to Jerusalem: where, after an anxious search of three days, they found him in the temple, sitting among the learned doctors of the law, hearing them discourse, and asking them such questions as raised the admiration of all that heard him, and made them astonished at the ripeness of his understanding: nor were his parents less surprised on this occasion. And when his mother told him with what grief and earnestness they had sought him, and to express her sorrow for that, though short, privation of his presence, said to him: "Son, why hast thou thus dealt with us? Behold, thy father and I sought thee in great affliction of mind;" she received for answer, that being the Messias and Son of God, sent by his Father into the world in order to redeem it, he must be about his Father's business, the same for which he had been sent into the world; and therefore that it was most likely for them to find him in his Father's house: intimating that his appearing in public on this occasion was to advance his Father's honor, and to prepare the princes of the Jews to receive him for their Messias; pointing out to them from the prophets the time of his coming. But though in thus staying in the temple, unknown to his parents, he did something without their leave, in obedience to his heavenly Father, yet in all other things he was obedient to them, returning with them to Nazareth, and there living in all dutiful subjection to them. Aelred, our countryman, abbot of Rieval, in his sermon on losing the child Jesus in the temple, observes that this his conduct to his parents is a true representation of that which he shows us, while he often withdraws himself for a short time from us to make us seek him the more earnestly. He thus describes the sentiments of his holy parents on this occasion.[8] "Let us consider what was the happiness of that blessed company, in the way to Jerusalem, to whom it was granted to behold his face, to hear his sweet words, to see in him the signs of divine wisdom and virtue; and in their mutual discourse to receive the influence of his saving truths and example. The old and young admire him. I believe boys of his age were struck with astonishment at the gravity of his manners and words. I believe such rays of grace darted from his blessed countenance as drew on him the eyes, ears, and hearts of every one. And what tears do they shed when he is not with them." He goes on considering what must be the grief of his parents when they had lost him; what their sentiments, and how earnest their {623} search: but what their joy when they found him again. "Discover to me," says he, "O my Lady, Mother of my God, what were your sentiments, what your astonishment and your joy when you saw him again, and sitting, not among boys, but amidst the doctors of the law: when you saw every one's eyes fixed on aim, every one's ears listening to him, great and small, learned and unlearned, intent only on his words and motions. You now say: I have found him whom I love. I will hold him, and will no more let him part from me. Hold him, sweet Lady, hold him fast; rush on his neck, dwell on his embraces, and compensate the three days' absence by multiplied delights in your present enjoyment of him. You tell him that you and his father sought him in grief. For what did you grieve? not for fear of hunger or want in him whom you knew to be God: but I believe you grieved to see yourself deprived of the delights of his presence even for a short time; for the Lord Jesus is so sweet to those who taste him, that his shortest absence is a subject of the greatest grief to them." This mystery is an emblem of the devout soul, and Jesus sometimes withdrawing himself, and leaving her to dryness, that she may be more earnest in seeking him. But, above all, how eagerly ought the soul which has lost God by sin, to seek him again, and how bitterly ought she to deplore her extreme misfortune! As no further mention is made of St. Joseph, he must have died before the marriage of Cana, and the beginning of our divine Saviour's ministry. We cannot doubt but he had the happiness of Jesus and Mary attending at his death, praying by him, assisting and comforting him in his last moments. Whence he is particularly invoked for the great grace of a happy death, and the spiritual presence of Jesus in that tremendous hour. The church reads the history of the patriarch Joseph on his festival, who was styled the saviour of Egypt, which he delivered from perishing by famine; and was appointed the faithful master of the household of Potiphar, and of that of Pharaoh and his kingdom. But our great saint was chosen by God the saviour of the life of him who was the true Saviour of the souls of men, rescuing him from the tyranny of Herod. He is now glorified in heaven, as the guardian and keeper of his Lord on earth. As Pharaoh said to the Egyptians in their distress: "Go to Joseph;" so may we confidently address ourselves to the mediation of him to whom God, made man, was subject and obedient on earth. The devout Gerson expressed the warmest devotion to St. Joseph, which he endeavored by letters and sermons to promote. He composed an office in his honor, and wrote his life in twelve poems, called Josephina. He enlarged on all the circumstances of his life by pious affection, and meditations. St. Teresa chose him the chief patron of her order. In the sixth chapter of her life she writes thus: "I chose the glorious St. Joseph for my patron, and I commend myself in all things singularly to his intercession. I do not remember ever to have asked of God any thing by him which I did not obtain. I never knew any one, who, by invoking him, did not advance exceedingly in virtue: for he assists in a wonderful manner all who address themselves to him." St. Francis of Sales, throughout his whole nineteenth entertainment, extremely recommends devotion to him, and extols his merits, principally his virginity, humility, constancy, and courage. The Syrians and other eastern churches celebrate his festival on the 20th of July; the western church, on the 19th of March. Pope Gregory XV., in 1621, and Urban VIII., in 1642, commanded it to be kept a holyday of obligation. The holy family of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, presents to us the most perfect model of heavenly conversation on earth. How did those two seraphims, Mary and Joseph, live in their poor cottage! They always enjoyed {624} the presence of Jesus, always burning with the most ardent love for him: inviolably attached to his sacred person, always employed and living only for him. What were their transports in beholding him, their devotion it, listening to him, and their joy in possessing him! heavenly life! anticipation of the heavenly bliss! divine conversation! We may imitate them, and share some degree of this advantage, by conversing often with Jesus, and by the contemplation of his most amiable goodness, kindling the fire of his holy love in our breasts. The effects of this love, if it be sincere, will necessarily appear in our putting on his spirit, and imitating his example and virtues; and in our studying to walk continually in the divine presence, finding God everywhere, and esteeming all the time lost which we do not spend with God, or for his honor. Footnotes: 1. L. adv. Helvid. c. 9. 2. Hom. 2. super missus est, n. 16, p. 742. 3. Serm. de Nativ. 4. This appears from Mat. xiii. 55. St. Justin, (Dial. n. 89, ed. Ben. p. 186,) St. Ambrose, (in Luc. p. 3,) and Theodoret (b. 3, Hist. c. 18) say he worked in wood, as a carpenter. St. Hilary (in Mat. c. 14, p. 17) and St. Peter Chrysologus (Serm. 48) say he wrought in iron as a smith; probably he wrought both in iron and in wood; which opinion St. Justin favors, by saying: "He and Jesus made ploughs and yokes for oxen." 5. Hom. 8, in Mat. t. 7, p. 123, ed. Ben. 6. This is affirmed by St. Athanasius, (l. de Incarn.) Eusebius, (Demonstrat. Evang. l. 6, c. 20.) St. Cyril (Cat. 10,) St. Ambrose, (in Ps. 118, Octon. 5,) St. Jerom, (in Isai. 19,) St. Chrysostom, St. Cyril of Alexandria, (in Isai.) Sozomen, (l. 5. c. 20,) &c. 7. See the Lives of the Fathers of the desert. 8. Bibl. Patr. t. 13. ST. ALCMUND, M. HE was son of Eldred, and brother of Osred, kings of the Northumbrians. During his temporal prosperity, the greater he was in power, so much the more meek and humble was he in his heart, and so much the more affable to others. He was poor amidst riches, because he knew no greater pleasure than to strip himself for the relief of the distressed. Being driven from his kingdom, together with his father, by rebellious subjects, in league with Danish plunderers, he lived among the Picts above twenty years in banishment; learning more heartily to despise earthly vanities, and making it his whole study to serve the King of kings. His subjects, groaning under the yoke of an insupportable tyranny, took up arms against their oppressors, and induced the royal prince, upon motives of compassion for their distress and a holy zeal for religion, to put themselves at their head. Several battles were prosperousiy fought; but at length the pious prince was murdered by the contrivance of king Eardulf, the usurper, as Matthew of Westminster, Simeon of Durham, and Florence of Worcester, say. Dr. Brown Willis, in his Notitia of parliamentary boroughs, writes, with some ancients, that he was slain by the Danes, about the year 819. His body was interred at Lilleshult, in Shropshire; but afterwards translated to Derby, where he was honored with great devotion as patron of the town, on the 19th of March. An old manuscript sermon preached in his church at Derby, about the year 1140, extant in a manuscript collection of sermons of that age in my hands, folio 138, gives a particular history of this translation of his relies to Derby, where his church became famous for miracles, and for the resort of pilgrims. See on this saint the history of John of Glastonbury, Matthew of Westminster, the manuscript sermon above mentioned, and Henschenius t. 3, Mart. p. 47. {625} MARCH XX. ST. CUTHBERT, CONFESSOR. BISHOP OF LINDISFARNE. From his life written by Bede, and from that author's Church-History, b. 4 c. 27 to c. 32. Simeon Dunelm, or rather Turgot, Hist. Dunelm, published by Bedford: the old Latin hymn On St. Cuthbert, MS. in Bibl. Cotton. n. 41, spud Wanley, p. 184, and four Latin prayers, in honor of St. Cuthbert, MS. n. 190 in the library of Durham church. Warmley, Catal. t. 2, p. 297. Harpsiald, sæc. 7, c. 34. Hearne on Langtoft, t. 2, p. 687. N.B. The history of Durham, which is here quoted, was compiled by Turgot, prior of Durham, down to the year 1104, and continued to the year 1161 by Simeon. A.D. 687. WHEN the Northumbrians, under the pious king Oswald, had, with great fervor, embraced the Christian faith, the holy bishop St. Aidan founded two monasteries, that of Mailros, on the bank of the Tweed, and another in the isle of Lindisfarne, afterwards called Holy Island, four miles distant from Berwick. In both he established the rule of St. Columba; and usually resided himself in the latter. St. Cuthbert[1] was born not very far from Mailros, and in his youth was much edified by the devout deportment of the holy inhabitants of that house, whose fervor in the service of God, and the discharge of the duties of a monastic life, he piously endeavored to imitate on the mountains where he kept his father's sheep. It happened one night, that, while he was watching in prayer, near his flock, according to his custom, he saw the soul of St. Aidan carried up to heaven by angels, at the very instant that holy man departed this life in the isle of Lindisfarne. Serious reflections on the happiness of such a death determined the pious young man to repair, without delay, to Mailros, where he put on the monastic habit, while Eata was abbot, and St. Boisil prior. He studied the holy scriptures under the latter, and in fervor surpassed all his brethren in every monastic exercise. Eata being called to govern the new monastery of Rippon, founded by king Alcfrid, he took with him St. Cuthbert, and committed to him the care of entertaining strangers; which charge is usually the most dangerous in a religious state. Cuthbert washed the feet of others and served them with wonderful humility and meekness, always remembering that Christ himself is served in his members. And he was most careful that the functions of Martha should never impair his spirit of recollection. When St. Wilfred was made abbot of Rippon, St. Cuthbert returned with Eata to Mailros; and St. Boisil dying of the great pestilence, in 664, he was chosen provost or prior in his place. In this station, not content by word and example to form his monks to perfect piety, be labored assiduously among the people to bring them off from several heathenish customs and superstitious practices which still obtained among them. For this purpose, says our venerable historian, he often went out, sometimes on horseback, but oftener on foot, to preach the way of life to such as were gone astray. Parochial churches being at this time very scarce in the country, it was the custom for the country people to flock about a priest or ecclesiastical person when he came into any village, for the sake of his instructions; hearkening willingly to his words, and more willingly practising the good lessons he taught them. St. Cuthbert {626} excelled all others by a most persuasive and moving eloquence; and such a brightness appeared in his angelical face in delivering the word of God to the people, that none of them durst conceal from him any part of their misbehavior, but all laid their conscience open before him, and endeavored by his injunctions and counsels to expiate the sins they had confessed, by worthy fruits of penance. He chiefly visited those villages and hamlets at a distance, which, being situate among high and craggy mountains, and inhabited by the most rustic, ignorant, and savage people, were the less frequented by other teachers. After St. Cuthbert had lived many years at Mailros, St. Eata, abbot also of Lindisfarne, removed him thither, and appointed him prior of that larger monastery. By the perfect habit of mortification and prayer the saint had attained to so eminent a spirit of contemplation, that he seemed rather an angel than a man. He often spent whole nights in prayer, and sometimes, to resist sleep, worked or walked about the island while he prayed. If he heard others complain that they had been disturbed in their sleep, he used to say, that he should think himself obliged to any one that awaked him out of his sleep, that he might sing the praises of his Creator, and labor for his honor. His very countenance excited those who saw him to a love of virtue. He was so much addicted to compunction, and inflamed with heavenly desires, that he could never say mass without tears. He often moved penitents, who confessed to him their sins, to abundant tears, by the torrents of his own, which he shed for them. His zeal in correcting sinners was always sweetened with tender charity and meekness. The saint had governed the monastery of Lindisfarne, under his abbot, several years, when earnestly aspiring to a closer union with God, he retired, with his abbot's consent, into the little isle of Farne, nine miles from Lindisfarne, there to lead an austere eremitical life. The place was then uninhabited, and afforded him neither water, tree, nor corn. Cuthbert built himself a hut with a wall and trench about it, and, by his prayers, obtained a well of freshwater in his own cell. Having brought with him instruments of husbandry, he sowed first wheat, which failed; then barley, which, though sowed out of season, yielded a plentiful crop. He built a house at the entry of the island from Lindisfarne, to lodge the brethren that came to see him, whom he there met and entertained with heavenly conferences. Afterwards he confined himself within his own wall and trench, and gave spiritual advice only through a window, without ever stirring out of his cell. He could not, however, refuse an interview with the holy abbess and royal virgin Elfleda, whom her father, king Oswi, had dedicated to God from her birth, and who, in 680, succeeded St. Hilda in the government of the abbey of Whitby. This was held in the isle of Cocket, then filled with holy anchorets. This close solitude was to our saint an uninterrupted exercise of divine love, praise, and compunction; in which he enjoyed a paradise of heavenly delights, unknown to the world. In a synod of bishops, held by St. Theodorus at Twiford, on the river Alne, in the kingdom of Northumberland, it was resolved that Cuthbert should be raised to the episcopal see of Lindisfarne. But as neither letters nor messengers were of force to obtain his consent to undertake the charge, king Egfrid, who had been present at the council, and the holy bishop Trumwin, with many others, sailed over to his island, and conjured him, on their knees, not to refuse his labors, which might be attended with so much advantage to souls. Their remonstrances were so pressing, that the saint could not refuse going with them, at least to the council, but weeping most bitterly. He received the episcopal consecration at York, the Easter following, from the hands of St. Theodorus, assisted by six other bishops. In {627} this new dignity the saint continued the practice of his former austerities; but remembering what he owed to his neighbor, he went about preaching and instructing with incredible fruit, and without any intermission. He made it everywhere his particular care to exhort, feed, and protect the poor. By divine revelation he saw and mentioned to others, at the very instant it happened, the overthrow and death of king Egfrid, by the Picts, in 685. He cured, by water which he had blessed, the wife of a noble Thane, who lay speechless and senseless at the point of death, and many others. For his miracles he was called the Thaumaturgus of Britain. But the most wonderful of his miracles was that which grace wrought in him by the perfect victory which it gave him over his passions. His zeal for justice was most ardent; but nothing seemed ever to disturb the peace and serenity of his mind. By the close union of his soul with God, whose will alone he sought and considered in all things, he overlooked all temporal events, and under all accidents his countenance was always cheerful, always the same; particularly in bearing all bodily pains, and every kind of adversity with joy, he was invincible. His attention to, and pure view of God in all events, and in all his actions, arose from the most tender and sweet love, which was in his soul a constant source of overflowing joy. Prayer was his centre. His brethren discovered sometimes that he spent three or four nights together in that heavenly exercise, allowing himself very little or no sleep. When St. Ebba, the royal virgin, sister to the kings St. Oswald and Oswi, abbess of the double monastery of Coldingham, invited him to edify that house by his exhortations, he complied, and stayed there some days. In the night, while others were asleep, he stole out to his devotions according to his custom in other places. One of the monks who watched and followed him one night, found that the saint, going down to the seashore, went into the water up to the armpits, and there sung praises to God. In this manner he passed the silent time of the night. Before the break of day he came out, and having prayed awhile on the sands, returned to the monastery, and was ready to join in morning lauds. St. Cuthbert, foreseeing his death to approach, resigned his bishopric, which he had held two years, and retired to his solitude in Farne Island, to prepare himself for his last passage. Two months after he fell sick, and permitted Herefrid, the abbot of Lindisfarne, who came to visit him, to leave two of his monks to attend him in his last moments. He received the viaticum of the body and blood of Christ from the hands of the abbot Herefrid, at the hour of midnight prayer, and immediately lifting up his eyes, and stretching out his hands, sweetly slept in Christ on the 20th day of March, 687. He died in the island of Farne: but, according to his desire, his body was buried in the monastery of St. Peter in Lindisfarne, on the right side of the high altar. Bede relates many miracles performed at his tomb; and adds, that eleven years after his death, the monks taking up his body, instead of dust which they expected, found it unputrefied, with the joints pliable, and the clothes fresh and entire.[2] They put it into a new coffin, placed above the pavement, over the former grave: and several miracles were there wrought, even by touching the clothes which covered the coffin. William of Malmesbury[3] writes, that the body was again found incorrupt four hundred and fifteen years afterwards at Durham, and publicly shown. In the Danish invasions, the monks carried it away from Lindisfarne; and, after several removals on the continent, settled with their treasure on a woody hill almost surrounded by the river Were, formed by nature for a place of, defence. They built there a church of stone, which {628} Aldhune, bishop of Lindisfarne, dedicated in 995, and placed in it the body of St. Cuthbert with great solemnity, transferring hither his episcopal see.[4] Many princes enriched exceedingly the new monastery and cathedral, in honor of St. Cuthbert. Succeeding kings, out of devotion to this saint, declared the bishop a count palatine, with an extensive civil jurisdiction.[5] The great king Alfred, who honored St. Cuthbert as his particular patron, and ascribed to his intercession some of his greatest victories, and other blessings which he received, was a special benefactor to this church.[6] The present cathedral was built in 1080. When the shrine of the saint was plundered and demolished by the order of king Henry VIII., the body of St. Cuthbert, which was found still entire, as Harpsfield testifies, met with greater regard than many others; for it was not burnt, as were those of St. Edmund, king and martyr, St. Thomas, and others. After the king's officers had carried away the plunder of his shrine, it was privately buried under the place where the shrine before stood, though the spot is now unknown. His ring, in which a sapphire is enchased, was given by lord viscount Montaigne to the bishop of Chalcedon,[7] who had long been sheltered from the persecution in the house of that nobleman,[8] and was by him left in the monastery of English canonesses at Paris, which is also possessed of a tooth of St. Cuthbert. A copy of St. John's gospel, which, after the example of his master St. Poisil, he often read to nourish the fire of divine love in his soul, was put into his coffin when he was buried, and found in his tomb. It is now in the possession of Mr. Thomas Philips, canon of, Tongres, on whom the present earl of Litchfield bestowed it. The copy is judged undoubtedly genuine by our ablest Protestant antiquaries, who carefully examined it. * * * * * The life of St. Cuthbert was almost a continual prayer. There was no business, no company, no place, how public soever, which did not afford him an opportunity, and even a fresh motive to pray. Not content to pass the day in this exercise, he continued it constantly for several hours of the night, which was to him a time of light and interior delights. Whatever he saw seemed to speak to him of God, and to invite him to his love. His conversation was on God or heavenly things, and he would have regretted a single moment, which had not been employed with God or for his honor, as utterly lost. The inestimable riches which he found in God, showed him how precious every moment is, in which he had it in his power to enjoy the divine converse. The immensity of God, who is present in us and in all creatures, and whom millions of worlds cannot confine or contain; his eternity, to which all time coexists, and which has neither beginning, end, nor succession; the unfathomed abyss of his judgments; the sweetness of his providence; his adorable sanctity; his justice, wisdom, goodness, mercy, and love, especially as displayed in the wonderful mystery of the Incarnation, and in the doctrine, actions, and sufferings of our Blessed Redeemer, in a word, all the incomprehensible attributes of the Divinity, and the mysteries of his grace and mercy, successively filled his mind and heart, and kindled in his soul the most sweet and ardent affections, in which his thirst {629} and his delight, which were always fresh and always insatiable, gave him a kind of anticipated taste of paradise. For holy contemplation discovers to a soul a new and most wonderful world, whose beauty, riches, and pure delights, astonish and transport her out of herself. St. Teresa, coming from prayer, said she came from a world greater and more beautiful beyond comparison, than a thousand worlds, like that which we behold with our corporal eyes, could be. St. Bernard was always torn from this holy exercise with regret, when obliged to converse with men in the world, in which he trembled, lest he should contract some attachment to creatures, which would separate him from the chaste embraces of his heavenly spouse. The venerable priest, John of Avila, when he came from the altar, always found commerce with men insipid and insupportable. Footnotes: 1. Cuthbert signifies Illustrious for skill: or G{}bbertus, Worthy of God. 2. Bede, Hist. b. 4, c. 30. 3. L. 4, Pontif. Angl. 4. Dunelm, or Durham, signifies a hill upon waters, from the Saxon words Dun, a bill, and Holme, a place situate in or among the waters. 5. See Dugdale's history of the cathedral of Durham; and Dr. Brown Willis on the same. 6. See Hickes, Thes. Ling. Septentr. Præf. p. 8. 7. Bp. Smith, Flores Hist. Eccles. p. 120. 8. Dr. Richard Smith, bishop of Chalcedon, relates in his life of Margaret lady Montaigne, that queen Elizabeth, out of her singular regard for this lady, from the time she had been lady of honor in the court of queen Mary and king Philip, tacitly granted her house a kind of privilege, by never, allowing it to be searched on account of religious persecution; so that sometimes sixty priests at once lay hid in it. ST. WULFRAN, ARCHBISHOP OF SENS. AND APOSTOLIC MISSIONARY IN FRISELAND. HIS father was an officer in the armies of king Dagobert, and the saint spent some years in the court of king Clotaire III., and of his mother St. Bathildes, but occupied his heart only on God, despising worldly greatness as empty and dangerous, and daily advancing in virtue in a place where virtue is often little known. His estate of Maurilly he bestowed on the abbey of Fontenelle, or St. Vandrille, in Normandy. He was chosen and consecrated archbishop of Sens, in 682, which diocese he governed during two years and a half with great zeal and sanctity. A tender compassion for the blindness of the idolaters of Friseland, and the example of the English zealous preachers in those parts, moved him to resign his bishopric with proper advice, and, after a retreat at Fontenelle, to enter Friseland in quality of a poor missionary priest. He baptized great multitudes, with a son of king Radbod, and drew the people from the barbarous custom of sacrificing men to idols. The lot herein decided, on great festivals, who should be the victim; and the person was instantly hanged, or cut in pieces. The lot having fallen on one Ovon, St. Wulfran earnestly begged his life of king Radbod: but the people ran tumultuously to the palace, and would not suffer what they called a sacrilege. After many words, they consented that if the God of Wulfran should save Ovon's life, he should ever serve him, and be Wulfran's slave. The saint betook himself to prayer, and the man, after hanging on the gibbet two hours, being left for dead, by the cord breaking, fell to the ground; and being found alive was given to the saint, and became a monk and priest at Fontenelle. Wulfran also miraculously rescued two children from being drowned in the sea, in honor of the idols. Radbod, who had been an eye-witness to this last miracle, promised to become a Christian, and was instructed among the catechumens. But his criminal delays rendered him unworthy such a mercy. As he was going to step into the baptismal font, he asked where the great number of his ancestors and nobles were in the next world. The saint replied, that hell is the portion of all who die guilty of idolatry. At which the prince drew back, and refused to be baptized, saying, he would go with the greater number. This tyrant sent afterwards to St. Willebrord, to treat with him about his conversion; but before the arrival of the saint, was found dead. St. Wulfran retired to Fontenelle, that he might prepare himself for death, and died there on the 20th of April, in 720. His relies were removed to Abbeville, where he is honored as patron. See his life, written by Jonas, monk of Foutenelle, eleven years after his death, purged from spurious additions by Mabillon, {630} sæc. 3, Ben. Fleury, b. 41, t. 9, p. 190. See also the history of the discovery of his relics at St. Vandrille's, accompanied with miracles, and their translation to Rouen in 1062, well written by an anonymous author who assisted at that ceremony, several parts of which work are published by D'Achery, Spicil. t. 3, p. 248, the Bollandists, and Mabillon. The Bollandists have added a relation of certain miracles, said to have been performed by the relics of this saint at Abbeville. MARCH XXI. ST. BENEDICT, ABBOT, PATRIARCH OF THE WESTERN MONKS. From St. Gregory, (Dial. l. 2, c. 1,) who assures us that he received his account of this saint from four abbots, the saint's disciples; namely, Constantine, his successor at Monte Cassino, Simplicius, third abbot of that house, Valentinian, the first abbot of the monastery of Lateran, and Honoratus, who succeeded St. Benedict at Subiaco. See the remarks of Mabillon, Annal. Ben. l. 1, p. 3, and l. 2, p. 38. and Act. Sanct. Bened. t. 1, p. 80. Also Dom. Mege, Vie de St. Benoit, avec one Histoíre Abrégée de son Ordre, in 4to. An. 1690. Hæften's Disquisitions, and abbot Steingelt's abridgment of the same, and Ziegelbauer and Legipont, Historia Literaria Ord. S. Benedicti, Ann. 1754, t. 1, p. 3, and principally t. 3, p. 2. A.D. 543. ST. BENEDICT, or KENNET, was a native of Norcia, formerly an episcopal see in Umbria, and was descended from a family of note, and born about the year 480. The name of his father was Eutropius, and that of his grandfather, Justinian. When he was fit for the higher studies, he was sent by his parents to Rome, and there placed in the public schools. He, who till that time knew not what vice was, and trembled at the shadow of sin, was not a little shocked at the licentiousness which he observed in the conduct of some of the Roman youth, with whom he was obliged to converse; and he was no sooner come into the world, but he resolved to bid an eternal farewell to it, not to be entangled in its snares. He therefore left the city privately, and made the best of his way towards the deserts. His nurse, Cyrilla, who loved him tenderly, followed him as far as Afilum, thirty miles from Rome, where he found means to get rid of her, and pursued his journey alone to the desert mountains of Sublacum,[1] near forty miles from Rome. It is a barren, hideous chain of rocks, with a river and lake in the valley. Near this place the saint met a monk of a neighboring monastery, called Romanus, who gave him the monastic habit, with suitable instructions, and conducted him to a deep narrow cave in the midst of these mountains, almost inaccessible to men. In this cavern, now called the Holy Grotto, the young hermit chose his abode: and Romanus, who kept his secret, brought him hither, from time to time, bread and the like slender provisions, which he retrenched from his own meals, and let them down to the holy recluse with a line, hanging a bell to the cord to give him notice. Bennet seems to have been about fourteen or fifteen years old when he came to Sublacum; St. Gregory says, he was yet a child. He lived three years in this manner, known only to Romanus. But God was pleased to manifest his servant to men, that he might shine forth as a light to many. In 497, a certain pious priest in that country, while he was preparing a dinner for {631} himself on Easter-Sunday, heard a voice which said: "You are preparing for yourself a banquet, while my servant Bennet, at Sublacum, is distressed with hunger." The priest immediately set out in quest of the hermit, and with much difficulty found him out. Bennet was surprised to see a man come to him; but before he would enter into conversation with him, he desired they might pray together. They then discoursed for some time on God and heavenly things. At length the priest invited the saint to eat, saying it was Easter-day, on which it is not reasonable to fast; though St. Bennet answered him, that he knew not that it was the day of so great a solemnity, nor is it to be wondered at, that one so young should not be acquainted with the day of a festival, which was not then observed by all on the same day, or that he should not understand the Lunar Cycle, which at that time was known by very few. After their repast the priest returned home. Soon after certain shepherds discovered the saint near his cave, but at first took him for a wild beast; for he was clad with the skins of beasts, and they imagined no human creature could live among those rocks. When they found him to be a servant of God, they respected him exceedingly, and many of them were moved by his heavenly discourses to embrace with fervor a course of perfection. From that time he began to be known, and many visited him, and brought him such sustenance as he would accept: in requital for which he nourished their souls with spiritual instructions. Though he lived sequestered from the world, he was not yet secure from the assaults of the tempter. Wherever we fly the devil still pursues us, and we carry a domestic enemy within our own breasts. St. Gregory relates, that while St. Bennet was employed in divine contemplation, the fiend endeavored to withdraw his mind from heavenly objects, by appearing in the shape of a little black-bird; but that, upon his making the sign of the cross, the phantom vanished. After this, by the artifices of this restless enemy, the remembrance of a woman whom the saint had formerly seen at Rome, occurred to his mind, and so strongly affected his imagination, that he was tempted to leave his desert. But blushing at so base a suggestion of the enemy, he threw himself upon some briers and nettles which grew in the place where he was, and rolled himself a long time in them, till his body was covered with blood. The wounds of his body stifled all inordinate inclinations, and their smart extinguished the flame of concupiscence. This complete victory seemed to have perfectly subdued that enemy; for he found himself no more molested with its stings. The fame of his sanctity being spread abroad, it occasioned several to forsake the world, and imitate his penitential manner of life. Some time after, the monks of Vicovara,[2] on the death of their abbot, pitched upon him to succeed him. He was very unwilling to take upon him that charge, which he declined in the spirit of sincere humility, the beloved virtue which he had practised from his infancy, and which was the pleasure of his heart, and is the delight of a God humbled even to the cross, for the love of us. The saint soon found by experience that their manners did not square with his just idea of a monastic state. Certain sons of Belial among them carried their aversion so far as to mingle poison with his wine: but when, according to his custom, before he drank of it he made the sign of the cross over the glass, it broke as if a stone had fallen upon it. "God forgive you, brethren," said the saint, with his usual meekness and tranquillity of soul, "you now see I was not mistaken when I told you that your manners and mine would not agree." He therefore returned to Sublacum; which desert he soon peopled with monks, for whom be built twelve monasteries, {632} placing in each twelve monks with a superior.[3] In one of these twelve monasteries there lived a monk, who, out of sloth, neglected and loathed the holy exercise of mental prayer, insomuch that after the psalmody or divine office was finished, he every day left the church to go to work, while his brethren were employed in that holy exercise; for by this private prayer in the church, after the divine office, St. Gregory means pious meditation, as Dom. Mege demonstrates. This slothful monk began to correct his fault upon the charitable admonition of Pompeian, his superior; but, after three days, relapsed into his former sloth. Pompeian acquainted St. Benedict, who said, "I will go and correct him myself." Such indeed was the danger and enormity of this fault, as to require the most effectual and speedy remedy. For it is only by assiduous prayer that the soul is enriched with the abundance of the heavenly water of divine graces, which produces in her the plentiful fruit of all virtues. If we consider the example of all the saints, we shall see that prayer was the principal means by which the Holy Ghost sanctified their souls, and that they advanced in perfection in proportion to their progress in the holy spirit of prayer. If this be neglected, the soul becomes spiritually barren, as a garden loses all its fruitfulness, and all its beauty, if the pump raises not up a continual supply of water, the principle of both. St. Benedict, deploring the misfortune and blindness of this monk, hastened to his monastery, and coming to him at the end of the divine office, saw a little black boy leading him by the sleeve out of the church. After two days' prayer, St. Maurus saw the same, but Pompeian could not see this vision, by which was represented that the devil studies to withdraw men from prayer, in order that, being disarmed and defenceless, they may easily be made a prey. On the third day, St. Benedict finding the monk still absent from church in the time of prayer, struck him with a wand, and by that correction the sinner was freed from the temptation. Dom. German Millet[4] tells us, from the tradition and archives of the monastery of St. Scholastica, that this happened in St. Jerom's. In the monastery of St. John, a fountain sprung up at the prayers of the saint; this, and two other monasteries, which were built on the summit of the mountain, being before much distressed for want of water. In that of St. Clement, situate on the bank of a lake, a Goth, who was a monk, let fall the head of a sickle into the water as he was cutting down thistles and weeds in order to make a garden; but St. Maur, who with St. Placidus lived in that house, holding the wooden handle in the water, the iron of its own accord swam, and joined it again, as St. Gregory relates. St. Benedict's reputation drew the most illustrious personages from Rome and other remote parts to see him. Many, who came clad in purple, sparkling with gold and precious stones, charmed with the admirable sanctity of the servant of God, {633} prostrated themselves at his feet to beg his blessing and prayers, and some imitating the sacrifice of Abraham, placed their sons under his conduct in their most tender age, that they might be formed to perfect virtue from their childhood. Among others, two rich and most illustrious senators, Eutychius, or rather Equitius, and Tertullus, committed to his care their two sons Maurus, then twelve years old, and Placidus, also a child, in 522.[5] The devil, envying so much good, stirred up his wicked instruments to disturb the tranquillity of the servant of God. Florentius, a priest in the neighboring country, though unworthy to bear that sacred character, moved by a secret jealousy, persecuted the saint, and aspersed his reputation with grievous slanders. Bennet, being a true disciple of Christ, knew no revenge but that of meekness and silence: and not to inflame the envy of his adversary, left Sublacum, and repaired to Mount Cassino. He had not got far on his journey, when he heard that Florentius was killed by the fall of a gallery in which he was. The saint was much afflicted at his sudden and unhappy death, and enjoined Maurus a penance for calling it a deliverance from persecution. Cassino is a small town, now in the kingdom of Naples, built on the brow of a very high mountain, on the top of which stood an old temple of Apollo, surrounded with a grove in which certain idolaters still continued to offer their abominable sacrifices. The man of God having, by his preaching and miracles, converted many of them to the faith, broke the idol to pieces, overthrew the altar, demolished the temple, and cut down the grove. Upon the ruins of which temple and altar he erected two oratories or chapels; one bore the name of St. John the Baptist, the other of St. Martin. This was the origin of the celebrated abbey of Mount Cassino, the foundation of which the saint laid in 529, the forty-eighth year of his age, the third of the emperor Justinian: Felix IV. being pope, and Athalaric king of the Goths in Italy. The patrician, Tertullus, came about that time to pay a visit to the saint, and to see his son Placidus; and made over to this monastery several lands which he possessed in that neighborhood, and also a considerable estate in Sicily. St. Bennet met on Mount Cassino one Martin, a venerable old hermit, who, to confine himself to a more austere solitude, had chained himself to the ground in his cell, with a long iron chain. The holy abbot, fearing this singularity might be a mark of affectation, said to him: "If you are a servant of Jesus Christ, let the chain of his love, not one of iron, hold you fixed in your resolution." Martin gave proof of his humility by his obedience, and immediately laid aside his chain. St. Bennet governed also a monastery of nuns, situate near Mount Cassino, as is mentioned by St. Gregory: he founded an abbey of men at Terracina, and sent St. Placidus into Sicily to establish another in that island. Though ignorant of secular learning, he was eminently replenished with the Spirit of God, and an experimental science of spiritual things: on which account he is said by St. Gregory the Great to have been "learnedly ignorant and wisely unlettered."[6] For the alphabet of this great man is infinitely more desirable than all the empty science of the world, as St. Arsenius said of St. Antony. From certain very ancient pictures of St. Benedict, and old inscriptions, {634} Mabillon proves this saint to have been in holy orders, and a deacon. Several moderns say he was a priest; but, as Muratori observes, without grounds.[7] By the account which St. Gregory has given us of his life, it appears that he preached sometimes in neighboring places, and that a boundless charity opening his hand, he distributed among the needy all that he had on earth, to lay up his whole treasure in heaven. St. Bennet, possessing perfectly the science of the saints, and being enabled by the Holy Ghost to be the guide of innumerable souls in the most sublime paths of Christian perfection, compiled a monastic rule, which, for wisdom and discretion, St. Gregory the Great preferred to all other rules; and which was afterwards adopted, for some time, by all the monks of the West. It is principally founded on silence, solitude, prayer, humility, and obedience.[8] St. Bennet calls his Order a school in which men learn how to serve God: and his life was to his disciples a perfect model for their imitation, and a transcript of his rule. Being chosen by God, like another Moses, to conduct faithful souls into the true promised land, the kingdom of heaven, he was enriched with eminent supernatural gifts, even those of miracles and prophecy. He seemed, like another Eliseus, endued by God with an extraordinary power, commanding all nature; and like the ancient prophets, foreseeing future events. He often raised the sinking courage of his monks, and baffled the various artifices of the devil with the sign of the cross, rendered the heaviest stone light in building his monastery by a short prayer, and, in presence of a multitude of people, raised to life a novice who had been crushed by the fall of a wall at Mount Cassino. He foretold, with {635} many tears, that this monastery should be profaned and destroyed; which happened forty years after, when the Lombards demolished it about the year 580. He added, that he had scarce been able to obtain of God that the inhabitants should be saved.[9] It was strictly forbid by the rule of St. Benedict, for any monk to eat out of his monastery, unless he was at such a distance {636} that he could not return home that day, and this rule, says Saint Gregory, was inviolably observed. Indeed, nothing more dangerously engages monks in the commerce of the world; nothing more enervates in them the discipline of abstinence and mortification, than for them to eat and drink with seculars abroad. St. Gregory tells us, that St. Bennet knew by revelation the fault of one of his monks who had accepted of an invitation to take some refreshment when he was abroad on business.[10] A messenger who brought the saint a present of two bottles of wine, and had hid one of them, was put in mind by him to beware of drinking of the other, in which he afterwards found a serpent. One of the monks, after preaching to the nuns, had accepted of some handkerchiefs from them, which he hid in his bosom; but the saint, upon his return, reproved him for his secret sin against the rule of holy poverty. A novice, standing before him, was tempted with thoughts of pride on account of his birth: the saint discovered what passed in his soul, and bid him make the sign of the cross on his breast. When Belisarius, the emperor's general, was recalled to Constantinople, Totila, the Arian king of the Goths, invaded and plundered Italy. Having heard wonders of the sanctity of St. Bennet, and of his predictions and miracles, he resolved to try whether he was really that wonderful man which he was reported to be. Therefore, as he marched through Campania, in 542, he sent the man of God word that he would pay him a visit. But instead of going in person, he dressed one of his courtiers, named Riggo, in his royal purple robes, and sent him to the monastery, attended by the three principal lords of his court, and a numerous train of pages. St. Bennet, who was then sitting, saw him coming to his cell, and cried out to him at some distance: "Put off, my son, those robes which you wear, and which belong not to you." The mock king, being struck with a panic for having attempted to impose upon the man of God, fell prostrate at his feet, together with all his attendants. The saint, coming up, raised him with his hand; and the officer returning to his master, related trembling what had befallen him. The king then went himself, but was no sooner come into the presence of the holy abbot, but he threw himself on the ground and continued prostrate till the saint, going to him, obliged him to rise. The holy man severely reproved him for the outrages he had committed, and said: "You do a great deal of mischief, and I foresee you will do more. You will take Rome: you will cross the sea, and will reign nine years longer: but death will overtake you in the tenth, when you shall be arraigned before a just God to give an account of your conduct." All which came to pass as St. Benedict had foretold him. Totila was seized with fear, and recommended himself to his prayers. From that day the tyrant became more humane; and when he took Naples, shortly after, treated the captives with greater lenity than could be expected from an enemy and a barbarian.[11] When the bishop of Canusa afterwards said to that saint, that Totila would leave Rome a heap of stones, and that it would be no longer inhabited, he answered "No: but it shall be beaten with storms and earthquakes, and shall be like a tree which withers by the decay of its root." Which prediction St. Gregory observes to have been accomplished. The death of this great saint seems to have happened soon after that of his sister St. Scholastica, and in the year after his interview with Totila. He foretold it his disciples, and caused his grave to be opened six days before. When this was done he fell ill of a fever, and on the sixth day would be carried into the chapel, where he received the body and blood of our {637} Lord,[12] and having given his last instructions to his sorrowful disciples, standing and leaning on one of them, with his hands lifted up, he calmly expired, in prayer, on Saturday, the 21st of March, probably in the year 543, and of his age the sixty-third; having spent fourteen years at Mount Cassino. The greatest part of his relics remains still in that abbey; though, some of his bones were brought into France, about the close of the seventh century, and deposited in the famous abbey of Fleury, which, on that account, has long borne the name of St. Bennet's on the Loire.[13] It was founded in the reign of Clovis II., about the year 640, and belongs at present to the congregation of St. Maur. * * * * * St. Gregory, in two words, expresses the characteristical virtue of this glorious patriarch of the monastic order, when he says, that, returning from Vicovara to Sublaco, he dwelt alone with himself;[14] which words comprise a great and rare perfection, in which consists the essence of holy retirement. A soul dwells not in true solitude, unless this be interior as well as exterior, and unless she cultivates no acquaintance but with God and herself, admitting no other company. Many dwell in monasteries, or alone, without possessing the secret of living with themselves. Though they are removed from the conversation of the world, their minds still rove abroad, wandering from the consideration of God and themselves, and dissipated amid a thousand exterior objects which their imagination presents to them, and which they suffer to captivate their hearts, and miserably entangle their will with vain attachments and foolish desires. Interior solitude requires the silence of the interior faculties of the soul, no less than of the tongue and exterior senses: without this, the enclosure of walls is a very weak fence. In this interior solitude, the soul collects all her faculties within herself, employs all her thoughts on herself and on God, and all her strength and affections in aspiring after him. Thus, St. Benedict dwelt with himself, being always busied in the presence of his Creator, in bewailing the spiritual miseries of {638} his soul and past sins, in examining into the disorders of his affections, in watching over his senses, and the motions of his heart, and in a constant attention to the perfection of his state, and the contemplation of divine things. This last occupied his soul in the sweet exercises of divine love and praise; but the first-mentioned exercises, or the consideration of himself, and of his own nothingness and miseries, laid the foundation by improving in him continually the most profound spirit of humility and compunction. The twelve degrees of humility, which he lays down in his Rule,[15] are commended by St. Thomas Aquinas.[16] The first is a deep compunction of heart, and holy fear of God and his judgments, with a constant attention to walk in the divine presence, sunk under the weight of this confusion and fear. 2. The perfect renunciation of our own will. 3. Ready obedience. 4. Patience under all sufferings and injuries. 5. The manifestation of our thoughts and designs to our superior or director. 6. To be content, and to rejoice, in all humiliations; to be pleased with mean employments, poor clothes, &c., to love simplicity and poverty, (which he will have among monks, to be extended even to the ornaments of the altar,) and to judge ourselves unworthy, and bad servants in every thing that is enjoined us. 7. Sincerely to esteem ourselves baser and more unworthy than every one, even the greatest sinners.[17] 8. To avoid all love of singularity in words or actions. 9. To love and practise silence. 10. To avoid dissolute mirth and loud laughter. 11. Never to speak with a loud voice, and to be modest in our words. 12. To be humble in all our exterior actions, by keeping our eyes humbly cast down with the publican,[18] and the penitent Manasses.[19] St. Benedict adds, that divine love is the sublime recompense of sincere humility, and promises, upon the warrant of the divine word, that God will raise that soul to perfect charity, which, faithfully walking in these twelve degrees, shall have happily learned true humility. Elsewhere he calls obedience with delay the first degree of humility,[20] but means the first among the exterior degrees; for he places before it interior compunction of soul, and the renunciation of our own will. Footnotes: 1. Called by the Italians, who frequently soften _l_ into _i_, Subiaco. 2. Vicovara, anciently Varronis Vicus, a village between Subiaco and Tivoli. 3. These twelve monasteries were situated in the same neighborhood, in the province Valeria. Moderns disagree in their names and description; according to the account of Dom. Mege, which appears most accurate, the first was called Columbaria, now St. Clement's, and stood within sixty paces from the saint's cave, called the Holy Grotto; the second was named of SS. Cosmos and Damian, now St. Scholastica's; the third, St. Michael's; the fourth, of St. Donatus, bishop and martyr; the fifth, St. Mary's, now St. Laurence's; the sixth, St. John Baptist's, situated on the highest part of the rock, but from a fountain which St. Bennet produced there by his prayers, and which still subsists, it is at present called St. John dell' Acqua; the seventh, St. Jerom's; the eighth, Vita �terna; the ninth, St. Victorian or Victorin's, called from a martyr of that name, who is patron of the province of Valeria; the tenth, at the neighboring village Trebare; the eleventh, at St. Angelus's; the twelfth, at a fountain near the ancient castle, called Roca de Bore. These monasteries have been all united in that of St. Scholastica, which remains in a very flourishing condition, and is regarded as the mother-house of the whole Order, being certainly more ancient than that of Mount Cassino. It is a member of the Congregation of St. Justina, and though it is usually given in commendam, by a peculiar distinction, it is governed by a regular abbot chosen by the General Chapter. Of the rest of these twelve monasteries, only some cells or ruins remain. Besides the hundred and forty-four monks which were distributed in these twelve monasteries, St. Gregory tells us that the holy patriarch retained a small number with himself, by which it appears that he continued to live ordinarily in a distinct little monastery or hermitage about his grotto, though he always superintended and governed all these houses. 4. See Dom. Mege, p. 84. 5. It has been related in the life of St. Maurus, how he walked on the water to save the life of Placidus, then a child, who, going to the lake to fetch water, had fallen in; for to monasteries no distinction was shown to noblemen or their children, nor were they exempted from their share in manual labor, or other severities of the Rule. Such exemptions and privileges granted to many on pretence of health, first opened the door to a relaxation of monastic discipline. Placidus said, that when he was drawn by Maurus out of the water, he saw over his head the melotes of the abbot, and seemed to be saved by it, whence the miracle was by the disciples ascribed to St. Benedict. Dom Hæften thinks by the melotes is meant a cowl, to which that name is given by Paul the deacon, and the Roman Order or Ceremonial. But most understand a habit made of skins of goats, such as the Eastern monks wore, in imitation of the ancient prophets, as Cassian describes. (Instit. l. 1, c. 8.) 6. Scienter nesciens, et sapienter indoctus. 7. {Footnote not in text} Annal. Bened. t. 5, p. 122, ad an. 543. See also Muratori, Script. Ital. t. 4, p. 217. 8. By it the abbot is charged with the entire government of the monastery. Seven hours a day are allotted the monks for manual labor, and two for pious reading, besides meditation from matins till break or day. But manual labor has been exchanged in most places for sacred studies and spiritual functions. The rule commands perpetual abstinence from flesh-meat, not only of four-footed animals, but also of fowls, which at that time were only served at the tables of princes as most exquisite dainties, as Mabillon shows from the testimony of St. Gregory of Tours. This law of abstinence is restored in the reformed congregation of St. Maur, and others. The hemina of wine allowed by St. Bennet per day, in countries where wine and water are only drunk, has been the subject of many dissertations, this measure having not been the same at all times, nor in all countries. The Roman hemina, which was half a sextarius, contained ten ounces, as Montfaucon demonstrates, (Antiqu. expl. t. 3, l. 4, c. 7, pp. 149, 152,) and as Mabillon allows. (Præf. in Sæc. 4.) Lancelot endeavors to show, in a dissertation on this subject, that St. Bennet is to be understood of this Roman hemina. Menard takes it to have been only seven ounces and a half. Mabillon (Pr. in Sæc. 4, p. cxv.) and Martenne (in c. 40, Règ.) think the holy founder speaks not of the ordinary of Roman hemina, and understand him of the Grecian, which contained a pound and a half, or eighteen ounces. Calmet looks upon Lancelot's opinion as most probable. He shows from the clear tradition of Benedictin writers and monuments, that St. Benedict's hemina contained three glasses or draughts. See Calmet, (in c. 40, Règ. t. 2, p. 62.) But St. Benedict allows and commends a total abstinence from wine. The portion of bread allowed by this holy patriarch to each monk, was a pound and a half, or eighteen ounces a day, as it is explained by the famous council held at Aix-la-Chapelle in the reign of Charlemagne. The holy rule of St. Benedict, which the great Cosmus of Medicis, and other wise legislators read frequently, in order to learn the maxims of perfect government, has been explained by a great number of learned and pious commentators, of whom Calmet gives a list, (t. 1. p. 1.) The principal among the moderns are Hæften, prior of Affligem, in twelve books of monastic disquisitions, &c. Steingelt, abbot of Anhusen, gave a judicious abridgment of this work. Dom. Menard has written upon this rule in his Comments on the Concord of Rules of St. Benedict of Anian. Dom. Mege's Commentaires sur le Rège de St. Benoít, in 4to. printed at Paris in 1687, have been much blamed by his brethren for laxity. Dom. Martenne published with more applause his Commentarius in Regulam S. Benedicti, in 4to., in 1690. Son édition de la Règle est la plus exacte qu'on nous a donné; et son Commentaire également judicieux et scavant. Il ne parle pas de celui de Dom. Mege, qui avoit parut trois ans avant le sien; parceque ses sentiments relâchés ses confreres, de sorte qu'en plusiers monastères reformés de cet ordre on ne le met pas entre les mains des jeunes religieux Voyez le Cerf, Bibl. des Ecr. de la Congr. de St. Maur, p. 348. Hist. Literaria Ord. St. Bened. t. 3, p. 21. Dom. Calmet printed in 1734, in two volumes, in 4to., Commentaire Litéral Historique et Moral sur la Règle de St. Benoít, a work which, both for edification and erudition, is far superior to all the former, and is the masterpiece of this laborious writer, though not entirely exempt from little slips of memory, as when St. Cuthbert is called in it the founder of the monastery of Lindisfarne, (p. 18, t. 1.) The chief modern ascetical treatise on this subject is, La Règle de St. Benoít, traduite et expliquée par M. de Rancé, abbé de la Trappe, 2 vols. 4to. 1690, an excellent work for those who are, bound to study, and imbibe the spirit of this holy rule. It is reduced into meditations; which, as Calmet was informed by Mabillon, was done by a Benedictin nun. We have also Meditations on the Rule of St. Benedict, compiled by Dom. Morelle, author of many other works of piety and devotion. We have also very devout reflections on the prayers used in the religious profession of this order, under the following title: Sentiments de Piété sur la Profession religieuse, par un religieux Bènédictin de la Congrégation de St. Maur. Dom. Berthelet, of the congregation of St. Vannes, proves abstinence from flesh to have been anciently an essential duty of the monastic state, by an express book, entitled, Traíté Historique et Moral de l'Abstinence de la Viande, 1731. 9. When the Lombards destroyed this famous abbey, in 580, St. Bennet, the abbot, escaped with all his monks to Rome, carrying with him only a copy of the Rule, written by St. Benedict himself, some of the habits which he and his sister St. Scholastica had worn, and the weight of the bread and measure of the wine which were the daily allowance for every monk. Pope Pelagius II. lodged these fathers near the Lateran church, where they built a monastery. In the pontificate of Gregory II., about the year 720, they were conducted back by abbot Petronax to Mount Cassino. This abbey was again ruined by the Saracens in 884: also by the Normans in 1046, and by the emperor Frederick II. in 1239. But was as often rebuilt. It is at this day very stately, and the abbot exercises an eplscopal jurisdiction over the town of San Germano, three little miles distant, and over twenty-one other parishes. The regular abbot of Saint Scholastica at Subiaco, is temporal and spiritual lord of twenty-five villages. The Benedictins reckon in their order, comprising all its branches and filiations, thirty-seven thousand houses. As to the number of emperors, kings, queens, princes, and princesses, who embraced this order, and that of saints, popes, and writers of note, which it has given the church, see F. Helyot, Dom. Mege, Calmet, and especially F. Ziegellaver, Hist. Liter. Ord. S. Bened., 4 vol. folio, Aug. Vindel. An. 1754. The monastic order settled by St. Athanasius at Milan and Triers, during his banishment into the West; by St. Eusebius of Vercelli, in his diocese, and by St. Hilary and St. Martin in Gaul, was founded upon the plan of the Oriental monasteries: being brought by those holy prelates from Egypt and Syria. The same is to be said of the first monasteries founded in Great Britain and Ireland. After the coming of St. Columban from Ireland into France, his Rule continued long most in vogue, and was adopted by the greater part of the monasteries that flourished in that kingdom. But it was customary in those ages, for founders of great monasteries frequently to choose out of different rules such religious practices and regulations, and to add such others as they judged most expedient: and the Benedictin Rule was sometimes blended with that of St. Columban, or others. In the reigns of Charlemagne and Louis the Débonnaire. for the sake of uniformity, it was enacted by the council of Aix-la-Chapelle in 802, and several other decrees, that the Rule of St. Benedict should alone be followed in all the monasteries in the dominions of those princes. F. Reyner, a most learned English Benedictin, in his Apostolatus Benedictinorum in Anglia, has, with profound erudition, produced all the monuments and authorities by which it can be made to appear that St. Gregory the Great established the Rule of St. Benedict in his monastery of St. Andrew at Rome, and was settled by St. Austin and the other monks who were sent by St. Gregory to convert the English in all the monasteries which they founded in this island. These proofs were abridged by Mabillon, Natalia Alexander, and others, who have judged that they amount to demonstration. Some, however, still maintain that the monastic rule brought hither by St. Austin, was a compilation from several different rules: that St. Bennet Biscop, and soon after St. Wilfrid, introduced several new regulations borrowed from the Rule of St. Benedict; that St. Dunstan established it in England more perfectly, still retaining several of the ancient constitutions of the English monasteries, and that it was not entirely adopted in England before Lanfranc's time. This opinion is warmly abetted by Dr. Lay, in his additions to Dugdale's Antiquities of Warwickshire, and Tanner's Pref. to Notitia Monastica, in folio. The Order of St. Benedict has branched out, since the year 900, into several independent congregations, and the Orders of Camaldoly, Vallis Umrosa, Fontevrault, the Gilbertins, Silvestrins, Cistercians, and some others, are no more than reformations of the same, with certain particular additional constitutions. Among the Reformations or distinct Congregations of Benedictins, the first is that of Cluni, so called from the great monastery of that name, in the diocese of Macon, founded by William the Pious, duke of Aquitaine, about the year 910. St. Berno, the first abbot, his successor St. Odo, afterwards St. Hugh, St. Odilo, St. Mayeul, Peter the Venerable, and other excellent abbots, exceedingly raised the reputation of this reform, and propagated the same. A second Reformation was established in this Congregation in 1621, by the Grand Prior de Veni, resembling those of St. Vanne and St. Maur. Those monks who would not adopt it in their houses, are called Ancient monks of Cluni. The Congregation of Cava was called from the great monastery of that name in the province of Salerno, founded in 980, under the observance of Cluni: it was the head of a Congregation of twenty-nine other abbeys, and ninety-one conventual priories; but a bishopric being erected in the town of Cava, by Boniface IX. in 1394, and the abbot's revenue and temporal jurisdiction being united to it by Leo X. in 1514, the monastery of the Blessed Trinity of Cava was much diminished, but is still governed by a regular abbot. In 1485, it was united, with all its dependencies, to the Congregation of St. Justina and Mount Cassino. The church of St. Justina at Padua, was founded by the Consul Opilius, in the fifth century, and the great monastery of Benedictin monks was built there in the ninth. The Reformation which was established in this house by Lewis Barbus, a patrician of Venice, in 1409, was soon adopted by a great number of monasteries in Italy: but when in 1504 the abbey of Mount Cassino joined this Congregation, it took the name of this mother-house. The Congregation of Savigni, founded by St. Vitalis, a disciple of B. Robert of Arbrissel, in the forest of Savigni, in Normandy in 1112, was united to the Cistercians in 1153. The Congregation of Tiron, founded by B. Bernard of Abbeville, another disciple of B. Robert of Arbrissel, in 1109, in the forest of Tiron, in Le Perche. It parsed into the Congregation of St. Maur, in 1629. These of Savigni and Tiron had formerly several houses in England. The Congregation of Bursfield in Germany, was established by a Reformation in 1461: that of Molck, vulgarly Mock, in Austria, in the diocese of Passaw, in 1418: that of Hirsauge, in the diocese of Spire, was instituted by St. William, abbot of S. Aurel, in 1080. The history of this abbey was written by Trithemius. After the change of religion it was secularized, and, by the treaty of Westphalia, ceded to the duke of Wirtemberg. The independent great Benedictin abbeys in Flanders, form a Congregation subject only to the Pope, but the abbots hold assemblies to judge appeals, in which the abbot of St. Vaast of Arms is president. The Congregation of Monte-Virgine, in Italy, was instituted by St. William, in 1119. That of St. Benedict's of Valladolid, in Spain, dates its establishment in 1390. In England, archbishop Lanfranc united the Benedictin monasteries in one Congregation, which began from that time to hold regular general chapters, and for some time bore his name. This union was made stricter by many new regulations in 1335, under the name of the Black Monks. It is one of the most illustrious of all the orders, or bodies of religious men, that have ever adorned the Church, and, in spite of the most grievous persecutions, still subsists. The congregation of Benedictin nuns of Mount Calvary owes it original to a Reformation, according to the primitive austerity of this order, introduced first in the nunnery at Poitiers, in 1614, by the abbess Antoinette of Orleans, with the assistance of the famous F. Joseph, the Capuchin. It has two houses at Paris, and eighteen others in several parts of France. See Helyot, t. {} and 6. Calmet, Comment. sur la Règle de St. Benoít, t. 2, p. 525. Hermant Schoonbeck, &c. 10. St. Greg. Dial. l. 2, c. 12; Dom. Mege, p. 180. 11. Procop. l. 3, de Bello Gothico. Baronius, &c. 12. Exitum suum Dominici corporis et sanguinis perceptione communivit. St. Greg. Dial. b. 2, c.37. 13. Some have related that Aigulph, a monk of Fleury, and certain citizens from Mans, going to Mount Cassino in 653, when that monastery lay in ruins, brought thence the remains of St. Benedict and St. Scholastics, and placed those of the former at Fleury, and those of the latter at Mans. The author of this relation is either Adrevald or rather Adalbert, a monk of Fleury, whom some imagined contemporary with Aigulph, but he certainly lived at least two hundred years later, as he himself declares, and his account is in many capital circumstances inconsistent with those of the life of Aigulph, and with the authentic and certain history of that age, as is demonstrated by F. Stilting, the Bollandist, in the life of St. Aigulph, (t. 1, Sept. p. 744,) and by others. It is printed in the Bibliotheca Floriacensis, (or of Fleury,) t. 1, p. 1, and more correctly in Mabillon's Acta Ben. t. 2, p. 337, and the Bollandists, 21 Martij, p. 300. Soon after this relation was compiled by Adalbert, we find it quoted by Adrevald, a monk of the same house, in his history of several miracles wrought by the relics of this holy patriarch. (See Dom. Clemencez, Hist. Liter. t. 5, p. 516.) This Adrevald wrote also the life of St. Aigulph, who, passing from Fleury to Lerins, and being made abbot of that house, established there an austere reformation of the order: but by the contrivance of certain rebellious monks, joined in a conspiracy with the count of Usez, and some other powerful men, was seized by violence, and carried to the isle Caprasia, (now called Capraia,) situated between Corsica and the coast of Tuscany, where he was murdered, with three companions, about the year 679, on the 3rd day of September, on which he is honored as a martyr at Lerins. The relics of these martyrs were honorably conveyed thither soon after their death. F. Vincent Barrali, in his History of Lerins, affirms that they still remain there; but this can be only true of part, for the body of St. Aigulph was translated to the Benedictin priory at Provins, in the diocese of Sens, and is to this day honored there, as Mabillon (Sæc. 2 Ben. pp. 666 and 742) and Stilting (t. 1. Sept.) demonstrate, from the constant tradition of that monastery, and the authority of Peter Cellensis and several other irrefragable vouchers. That the greatest part at least of the relics of St. Benedict and St. Scholastica still remain at Mount Casino, is demonstrated by Angelus de Nuce, in his dissertation on this subject, by F. Stilting, in his comments on the life of St. Aigulph, t. 1. Sept., by pope Benedict XIV., De Servor. Dei Beatif. and Canoniz. l. 4, part 2, c. 24, n. 53, t. 5, p. 245, and Macchiarelli, the monk of Camaldoli. Soon after Mount Cassino was restored, pope Zachary visited that monastery and devoutly venerated the relics of St. Benedict and St. Scholastica in 746, as he testifies in his Bull. When pope Alexander II. consecrated the new church of that abbey in 1071, these sacred bones were inspected and found all to remain there, as we learn from his Bull, and by Leo of Ostia, and Peter the deacon. The same is affirmed in the acts of two visitations made of them in 1545 and 1650. Nevertheless, Angelus de Nuce (who relates in his Chronicle of Mount Cassino, that, in 1650, he saw these relics, with all the monks of that house, in the visitation then made) and Stilting allow that some of the bones of this saint were conveyed into France, not by St. Aigulph, but soon after his time, and this is expressly affirmed by Paul the Deacon, in his History of the Lombards, l. 6, c. 2. 14. Habitavit secum. 15. S. Bened. Reg. c. 7. 16. S. Thos. 2. 2. qu. 161. a. 6. 17. No one can, without presumption, pride, and sin, prefer himself before the worst of sinners; first, because the judgments of God are always secret and unknown to us. (See St. Aug. de Virginit. St. Thos 2.2. qu. 161. ad 1. Cassian, St. Bern., &c.) Secondly, the greatest sinners, had they received the graces with which we have been favored, would not have been so ungrateful; and if we had been in their circumstances, into what precipices should not we have fallen? Thirdly, instead of looking upon notorious sinners, we ought to turn our eyes towards those who serve God with fervor, full of confusion to see how far so many thousands are superior to us in every virtue. Thus we must practise the lesson laid down by St. Paul, never to measure ourselves with any one so as to prefer ourselves to another; but to look upon all others as superior to us, and less ungrateful and base than ourselves. Our own wretchedness and sinfulness we are acquainted with; but charity inclines us to judge the best of others. 18. Luke xviii. 18. 19. Orat. ejus inter Apocryph. 20. St. Bened. Règ. p. 210. ST. SERAPION, CALLED the Sindonite, from a single garment of coarse linen which he always wore. He was a native of Egypt. Exceeding great was the austerity of his penitential life. Though he travelled into several countries, he always lived in the same poverty, mortification, and recollection. In a certain town, commiserating the spiritual blindness of an idolater, who was also a comedian, he sold himself to him for twenty pieces of money. His only sustenance in this servitude was bread and water. He acquitted himself at the same time of every duty belonging to his condition with the utmost diligence and fidelity, joining with his labor assiduous prayer and meditation. Having converted his master and the whole family to the faith, and induced him to quit the stage, he was made free by him, but could not be {639} prevailed upon to keep for his own use, or even to distribute to the poor, the twenty pieces of coin he had received as the price of his liberty. Soon after this he sold himself a second time, to relieve a distressed widow. Having spent some time with his new master, in recompense of signal spiritual services, besides his liberty, he also received a cloak, a tunic, or undergarment, and a book of the gospels. He was scarce gone out of doors, when, meeting a poor man, he bestowed on him his cloak; and shortly after, to another starving with cold, he gave his tunic; and was thus reduced again to his single linen garment. Being asked by a stranger who it was that had stripped him and left him in that naked condition, showing his book of the gospels, he said: "This it is that hath stripped me." Not long after, he sold the book itself for the relief of a person in extreme distress. Being met by an old acquaintance, and asked what was become of it, he said "Could you believe it? this gospel seemed continually to cry to me: Go, sell all thou hast, and give it to the poor. Wherefore I have also sold it, and given the price to the indigent members of Christ." Having nothing now left but his own person, he disposed of that again on several other occasions, where the corporal or spiritual necessities of his neighbor called for relief: once to a certain Manichee at Lacedæmon, whom he served for two years, and before they were expired, brought both him and his whole family over to the true faith. St. John the Almoner having read the particulars of this history, called for his steward, and said to him, weeping: "Can we flatter ourselves that we do any great matters because we give our estates to the poor? Here is a man who could find means to give himself to them, and so many times over." St. Serapion went from Lacedæmon to Rome, there to study the most perfect, models of virtue, and, returning afterwards into Egypt, died in the desert, being sixty years old, some time before Palladius visited Egypt in 388. Henschenius, in his Notes on the Life of St. Auxentius,[1] and Bollandus[2] take notice that in certain Menæa he is honored on the 21st of March; yet they have not given his acts on that day. Baronius confounds him with St. Serapion, the Sidonian martyr. See Pallad. Lausiac. ch. 83, and Leontius in the Life of St. John the Almoner. Footnotes: 1. Henschen. Not. in Vit. S. Auxentii, ad 24 Feb {} 3 Febr. 2. Bolland ad 23 Jan. p. 508, t. 2, Jan. ST. SERAPION, ABBOT of Arsinoe, in Upper Egypt. He governed ten thousand monks, dispersed in the deserts and monasteries near that town. These religious men hired themselves to the farmers of the country to till their lands and reap their corn; joining assiduous prayer and other exercises of their state with their labor. Each man received for his wages twelve artabes, or about forty Roman bushels or modii, says Palladius: all which they put into the hands of their holy abbot. He gave to every one a sufficient allowance for his subsistence during the ensuing year, according to their abstemious manner of living. The remainder was all distributed among the poor. By this economy, all the necessities of the indigent in that country were supplied, and several barges loaded with corn were sent yearly by the river to Alexandria, for the relief of the poor of that great city. St. Serapion was honored with the priesthood, and with admirable sanctity applied himself to the sacred functions of the ministry: yet found time to join his brethren in their penitential labor, not to lose his share in their charity. His name is inserted by Canisius in his Germanic Martyrology on this day, from certain copies of the Greek Menæa. See Palladius, c. 76, p. 760; Rufin. Vit. Patr. l. 2, c. 18; Sozomen, l. 6, c. 28. {640} ST. SERAPION, BISHOP OF THMUIS IN EGYPT, C. THE surname of the Scholastic, which was given him, is a proof of the reputation which he acquired, by his penetrating genius, and by his extensive learning, both sacred and profane. He presided for some time in the catechetical school of Alexandria, but, to apply himself more perfectly to the science of the saints, to which he had always consecrated himself, his studies, and his other actions, he retired into the desert, and became a bright light in the monastic state. St. Athanasius assures us, in his life of St. Antony, that in the visits which Serapion paid to that illustrious patriarch, St. Antony often told on his mountain things which passed in Egypt at a distance; and that at his death, he left him one of his tunics of hair. St. Serapion was drawn out of his retreat, to be placed in the episcopal see of Thmuis, a famous city of Lower Egypt, near Diospolis, to which Stephanus and Ptolemy give the title of a metropolis. The name in the Egyptian tongue signified a goat, which animal was anciently worshipped there, as St. Jerom informs us. St. Serapion was closely linked with St. Athanasius in the defence of the Catholic faith, for which he was banished by the emperor Constantius; whence St. Jerom styles him a confessor. Certain persons, who confessed God the Son consubstantial to the Father, denied the divinity of the Holy Ghost. This error was no sooner broached, but our saint strenuously opposed it, and informed St. Athanasius of this new inconsistent blasphemy; and that zealous defender of the adorable mystery of the Trinity, the fundamental article of the Christian faith, wrote against this rising monster. The four letters which St. Athanasius wrote to Serapion, in 359, out of the desert, in which at that time he lay concealed, were the first express confutation of the Macedonian heresy that was published. St. Serapion ceased not to employ his labors to great advantage, against both the Arians and Macedonians. He also compiled an excellent book against the Manichees, in which he shows that our bodies may be made the instruments of good, and that our souls may be perverted by sin; that there is no creature of which a good use may not be made; and that both just and wicked men are often changed, the former by falling into sin, the latter by becoming virtuous. It is, therefore, a self-contradiction to pretend with the Manichees that our souls are the work of God, but our bodies of the devil, or the evil principle.[1] St..Serapion wrote several learned letters, and a treatise on the Titles of the Psalms, quoted by St. Jerom, which are now lost. At his request, St. Athanasius composed several of his works against the Arians; and so great was his opinion of our saint, that he desired him to correct, or add to them what he thought wanting. Socrates relates[2] that St. Serapion gave an abstract of his own life, and an abridged rule of Christian perfection, in very few words, which he would often repeat, saying: "The mind is purified by spiritual knowledge, (or by holy meditation and prayer,) the spiritual passions of the soul by charity, and the irregular appetites by abstinence and penance." This saint died in his banishment in the fourth age, and is commemorated on this day in the Roman Martyrology. See his works, those of St. Athanasius in several places, St. Jerom, Catall. c. 99; Socrates {641}, l. 4, c. 23; Sozom. l. 4, c. 9; Photius, Col. 85; Tillem. t. 8; Ceillier, t. 6, p. 36. Footnotes: 1. A Latin translation of St. Serapion's book against the Manichees, given F. Turrianus the Jesuit, is published in the Bibliotheca Patrum, printed at Lyons. and in F. Canisius's Lectiones Antiquæ, t. 5, part 1, p. 35. The learned James Basnage, who republished this work of Canisius with curios additions and {notes}, has added the Greek text, t. 1, p. 37. 2. Socrat. Hist. l. 4, c. 23. ST. ENNA, OR ENDEUS, ABBOT HIS father, Conall Deyre, was lord of Ergall, a large territory in Ulster, in which principality Enna succeeded him; but by the pious exhortations of his sister, St. Fanchea, abbess of Kill-Aine, at the foot of mount Bregh, in the confines of Meath, he left the world, and became a monk. Going abroad, by her advice, he lived some time in the abbey of Rosnal, or the vale of Ross, under the abbot Mansenus. At length returning home, he obtained of �ngus, king of Munster, a grant of the isle of Arra, or Arn, wherein he founded a great monastery, in which he trained up many disciples, illustrious for sanctity, insomuch that the island was called Arran of the Saints. His death must have happened in the beginning of the sixth century. The chief church of the island is dedicated to God in his name, and called Kill-Enda. His tomb is shown in the churchyard of another church, in the same island, named Teglach-Enda. See F. Colgan, March 21. MARCH XXII. ST. BASIL OF ANCYRA, PRIEST, M. From the authentic acts of his martyrdom in Ruinart, Henschenius, and Tillemont, t. 7, p. 375. A.D. 362. MARCELLUS, bishop of Ancyra, distinguished himself by his zeal against the Arians, on which account he was banished by Constantius in 336.[1] Basil, a ringleader of the Semi-Arians, was intruded into that see, but was himself deposed by the stanch Arians, in 360; and is mentioned by Socrates to have survived our saint, though he continued still in banishment under Jovian. The holy martyr of whom we speak was also called Basil. He was priest of Ancyra under the bishop Marcellus, and a man of a most holy life, and unblemished conversation, and had been trained up by saints in the practices of perfect piety. He preached the word of God with great assiduity, and when the Arian wolf, who bore his name, attempted to plant his heresy in that city, he never ceased to cry out to the people, with the zeal and intrepidity of a prophet, exhorting their to beware of the snares which {642} were laid for them, and to remain steadfast in the Catholic faith. He was forbidden by the Arian bishops, in 360, to hold ecclesiastical assemblies: but he despised the unjust order; and as boldly defended the Catholic faith before Constantius himself. When Julian the Apostate re-established idolatry, and left no means untried to pervert the faithful, Basil ran through the whole city, exhorting the Christians to continue steadfast, and not pollute themselves with the sacrifices and libations of the heathens, but fight manfully in the cause of God. The heathens laid violent hands on him; and dragged him before Saturninus the proconsul, accusing him of sedition, of having overturned altars, that he stirred up the people against the gods, and had spoken irreverently of the emperor and his religion. The proconsul asked him if the religion which the emperor had established was not the truth? The martyr answered: "Can you yourself believe it? Can any man endued with reason persuade himself that dumb statues are gods?" The proconsul commanded him to be tortured on the rack, and scoffing, said to him, under his torments: "Do not you believe the power of the emperor to be great, who can punish those who disobey him? Experience is an excellent master, and will inform you better. Obey the emperor, worship the gods, and offer sacrifice." The martyr, who prayed during his torments with great earnestness, replied: "It is what I never will do." The proconsul remanded him to prison, and informed his master Julian of what he had done. The emperor approved of his proceedings, and dispatched Elpidius and Pegasus, two apostate courtiers, in quality of commissaries, to assist the proconsul in the trial of the prisoner. They took with them from Nicomedia one Aslepius, a wicked priest of Esculapius, and arrived at Ancyra. Basil did not cease to praise and glorify God in his dungeon, and Pegasus repaired thither to him in hopes, by promises and entreaties, to work him into compliance: but came back to the proconsul highly offended at the liberty with which the martyr had reproached him with his apostacy. At the request of the commissaries, the proconsul ordered him to be again brought before them, and tormented on the rack with greater cruelty than before; and afterwards to be loaded with the heaviest irons, and lodged in the deepest dungeon. In the mean time Julian set out from Constantinople for Antioch, in order to prepare for his Persian expedition. From Chalcedon he turned out of his road to Pessinunte, a town in Galatia, there to offer sacrifice in a famous temple of Cibele. In that town he condemned a certain Christian to be beheaded for the faith, and the martyr went to execution with as much joy as if he had been called to a banquet. When Julian arrived at Ancyra, St. Basil was presented before him, and the crafty emperor, putting on an air of compassion, said to him: "I myself am well skilled in your mysteries; and I can inform you, that Christ, in whom you place your trust, died under Pilate, and remains among the dead." The martyr answered: "You are deceived; you have renounced Christ at a time when he conferred on you the empire. But he will deprive you of it, together with your life. As you have thrown down his altars, so will he overturn your throne: and as you have violated his holy law, which you had so often announced to the people, (when a reader in the church,) and have trodden it under your feet, your body shall be cast forth without the honor of a burial, and shall be trampled upon by men." Julian replied: "I designed to dismiss thee: but thy impudent manner of rejecting my advice, and uttering reproaches against me, force me to use thee ill. It is therefore my command, that every day thy skin be torn off thee in seven different places, till thou hast no more left." He then gave it in charge to count Frumentinus, the captain of his guards, to see this barbarous sentence executed. The saint, after having suffered with wonderful patience the first incisions, desired to speak to the emperor. {643} Frumentinus would be himself the bearer of this message to Julian, not doubting but Basil intended to comply and offer sacrifice. Julian instantly ordered that the confessor should meet him in the temple of Esculapius. He there pressed him to join him in making sacrifices. But the martyr replied, that he could never adore blind and deaf idols. And taking a piece of his flesh which had been cut out of his body that day, and still hung to it by a bit of skin, he threw it upon Julian. The emperor went out in great indignation: and count Frumentinus, fearing his displeasure, studied how to revenge an insult, for which he seemed responsible to his master. He therefore mounted his tribunal, and ordered the torments of the martyr to be redoubled; and so deep were the incisions made in his flesh, that his bowels were exposed to view, and the spectators wept for compassion. The martyr prayed aloud all the time, and at evening was carried back to prison. Next morning Julian set out for Antioch, and would not see Frumentinus. The count resolved to repair his disgrace, or at least to discharge his resentment by exerting his rage upon the servant of Christ. But to his thundering threats Basil answered: "You know how many pieces of flesh have been torn from my body: yet look on my shoulders and sides; see if any wounds appear? Know that Jesus Christ this night hath healed me. Send this news to your master Julian, that he may know the power of God whom he hath forsaken. He hath overturned his altars, who was himself concealed under them when he was sought by Constantius to be put to death. But God hath discovered to me that his tyranny shall be shortly extinguished with his life." Frumentinus seemed no longer able to contain his rage, and commanded the saint to be laid upon his belly, and his back to be pierced with red-hot iron spikes. The martyr expired under these torments on the 29th of June, in 362. But his name is honored both by the Latins and Greeks on the 22d of March. The love of God, which triumphed in the breasts of the martyrs, made them regard as nothing whatever labors, losses, or torments they suffered for its sake, according to that of the Canticles: _If a man shall have given all that he possesses, he will despise it as nothing._ If the sacrifice of worldly honors, goods, friends, and life be required of such a one, he makes it with joy, saying with the royal prophet, _What have I desired in heaven, or on earth, besides thee, O God! Thou art my portion forever._ If he lives deprived of consolation and joy, in interior desolation and spiritual dryness, he is content to bear his cross, provided he be united to his God by love, and says, My God and my all, if I possess you, I have all things in you alone: whatever happens to me, with the treasure of your love I am rich and sovereignly happy. This he repeats in poverty, disgraces, afflictions, and persecutions. He rejoices in them, as by them he is more closely united to his God, gives the strongest proof of his fidelity to him, and perfect submission to his divine appointments, and adores the accomplishment of his will. If it be the property of true love to receive crosses with content and joy, to sustain great labors, and think them small, or rather not to think of them at all, as they bear no proportion to the prize, to what we owe to God, or to what his love deserves: to suffer much, and think all nothing, and the longest and severest trials short: is it not a mark of a want of this love, to complain of prayer, fasts, and every Christian duty? How far is this disposition from the fervor and resolution of all the saints, and from the heroin courage of the martyrs! Footnotes: 1. Marcellus wrote a famous book against the Arians, which Eusebius of Cæsarea and all the Arians condemned, as reviving the exploded heresy of Sabellius. But Sabellianism was a general slander with which they aspersed all orthodox pastors. It is indeed true, that St. Hilary, St. Basil, St. Chrysostom, and Sulpicius Severus charge Marcellus with that error; but were deceived by the clamors of the Arians. For Marcellus appealing to pope Julius, and repairing to Rome, was acquitted, and his book declared orthodox by that pope in 341, and also by the council of Sardica in 347; as St. Hilary (fragm. 3, pp. 1308, 1311) and St. Athanasins (Apol. contra Arianos, p. 165) testify. It was a calumny of the Arians, though believed by St. Hilary, that St. Athanasius at length abandoned and condemned him. It is demonstrated by Dom Montfaucon from the works of St. Athanasius, that he ever defended the innocence of Marcellus, (t. 2 Collect Patr.) Moreover, Marcellus being informed that St. Basil had suggested to St. Athanasius certain suspicions of his faith, in 372, towards the end of his life, sent St. Athanasius his most orthodox confession of faith, in which he explicitly condemns Sabellianism; which authentic monument was published by Montfaucon, (t. 2, Collect Patr. p. 55.) If Patavius, Bull, and others, who censure Marcellus, had seen this confession, they would have cleared him of the imputation of Sabellianism, and expounded favorably certain ambiguous expressions which occurred in his book against the Arises, which is now lost, and was compiled against a work of Asterius the Sophist, surnamed the advocate of the Arians. {644} ST. PAUL, BISHOP OF NARBONNE, C. ST. GREGORY of Tours informs us,[1] that he was sent with other preachers from Rome to plant the faith in Gaul. St. Saturninus of Thoulouse, and St. Dionysius of Paris, were crowned with martyrdom: but St. Paul of Narbonne, St. Trophimus of Arles, St. Martial of Limoges, and St. Gatian of Tours, after having founded those churches, amidst many dangers, departed in peace. Prudentius says,[2] that the name of Paul had rendered the city of Narbonne illustrious. Footnotes: 1. Hist. Franc. l. 1, c. 30. 2. Hymn. 4. ST. LEA. WIDOW. SHE was a rich Roman lady; after the death of her husband she mortified her flesh by wearing rough sackcloth, passed whole nights in prayer, and by humility seemed every one's menial servant. She died in 384, and is honored on this day in the Roman Martyrology. St. Jerom makes an elegant comparison between her death and that of Prætextatus, a heathen, who was that year appointed consul, but snatched away by death at the same time. See St. Jerom, Ep. 20, (olim 24,) to Marcella, t. 4, p. 51, Ed. Ben. ST. DEOGRATIAS, BISHOP OF CARTHAGE, C. GENSERIC, the Arian king of the Vandals, took Carthage in 439, filled the city with cruelties, and caused Quodvultdeus, the bishop, and many others, to be put on board an old leaky vessel, who, notwithstanding, arrived safe at Naples. After a vacancy of fourteen years, in 454, St. Deogratias was consecrated archbishop. Two years after, Genseric plundered Rome, and brought innumerable captives from Italy, Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica, into Africa, whom the Moors and Vandals shared among them on the shore, separating without any regard or compassion weeping wives from their husbands, and children from their parents. Deogratias sold every thing, even the gold and silver vessels of the church, to redeem as many as possible; he provided them with lodgings and beds, and furnished them with all succors, and though in a decrepit old age, visited those that were sick every day, and often in the night. Worn out by these fatigues, he died in 457, to the inexpressible grief of the prisoners, and of his own flock. The ancient calendar of Carthage, written in the fifth age, commemorates him on the 5th of January; but the Roman on the 22d of March. See St. Victor Vitensis, l. 1, c. 3. ST. CATHARINE OF SWEDEN, VIRGIN. SHE was daughter of Ulpho, prince of Nericia, in Sweden, and of St. Bridget. The love of God seemed almost to prevent in her the use of her reason. At seven years of age she was placed in the nunnery of Risburgh, and educated in piety under the care of the holy abbess of that house. Being very beautiful, she was, by her father, contracted in marriage to Egard {645} a young nobleman of great virtue: but the virgin persuaded him to join with her in making a mutual vow of perpetual chastity. By her discourses he became desirous only of heavenly graces, and, to draw them down upon his soul more abundantly, he readily acquiesced in the proposal. The happy couple, having but one heart and one desire, by a holy emulation excited each other to prayer, mortification, and works of charity. After the death of her father, St. Catharine, out of devotion to the passion of Christ, and to the relies of the martyrs, accompanied her mother in her pilgrimages and practices of devotion and penance. After her death at Rome, in 1373, Catherine returned to Sweden, and died abbess of Vadzstena, or Vatzen,[1] on the 24th of March, in 1381.[2] For the last twenty-five years of her life she every day purified her soul by a sacramental confession of her sins. Her name stands in the Roman Martyrology on the 22d of March. See her life written by Ulpho, a Brigittine friar, thirty years after her death, with the remarks of Henschenius. Footnotes: 1. The great monastery of our Saviour at Wasten, or Vatzen, in the diocese of Lincopen, was first founded by St. Bridget, in 1344; but rebuilt in a more convenient situation in 1384, when the nuns and friars were introduced with great solemnity by the bishop of Lincopen. This is called its foundation in the exact chronicle of Sweden, published by Benzelius, Monum. Suec. p. 94. 2. St. Catharine of Sweden compiled a pious book, entitled, Sielinna Troëst, that is, Consolation to the Soul, which fills one hundred and sixty-five leaves in folio, in a MS., on vellum, mentioned by Starnman, Sur l'Etat des Sciences en Suède, dans les temps reculés. The saint modestly says in her preface, that as a bee gathers honey out of various flowers, and a physician makes choice of medicinal roots for the composition of his remedies, and a virgin makes up a garland out of a variety of flowers, so she has collected from the holy scriptures and other good books, chosen rules and maxims of virtue. MARCH XXIII. ST. ALPHONSUS TURIBIUS, ARCHBISHOP OF LIMA, CONFESSOR. From his life by F. Cyprian de Herrera, dedicated to pope Clement X., and the acts of his canonization. A.D. 1606. ST. TORIBIO, or TIIRIBIUS ALPHONSUS MOGROBEJO, was second son to the lord of Mogrobejo, and born in the kingdom of Leon, on the 16th of November, in 1538. From his infancy he discovered a strong inclination to piety; and, in his childhood, it was his delight, at times of recreation, to erect and adorn altars, and to serve the poor. He trembled at the very shadow of sin. One day, seeing a poor pedler-woman angry because she had lost something out of her pack, he most movingly entreated and exhorted her, that she would not offend God by passion; and, in order to appease her, gave her the value of her loss, which he had begged of his mother for that purpose. He was very devout to the Blessed Virgin, said every day her Office and Rosary, and fasted every Saturday in her honor. While at school, he usually gave part of his slender dinner to the poor, and was so much addicted to fasting, that his superiors were obliged, by strict commands, to compel him to moderate his austerities. He began his higher studies at Valladolid, but completed them at Salamanca. He was introduced early to the notice of king Philip II., honored by him with several dignities, and made president or chief judge at Granada. This office he discharged during five years with so much integrity, prudence, and virtue, that the eyes of the whole kingdom were fixed on him, and his life in the world {646} was a holy noviceship to the pastoral charge. The pressing necessities of the infant church of Peru required a prelate who inherited, in a distinguished manner, the spirit of the apostles; and the archbishopric of Lima falling vacant, Turibius was unanimously judged the person of all others the best qualified to be an apostle of so large a country, and to remedy the scandals which obstructed the conversion of the infidels. The king readily nominated him to that dignity, and all parties concerned applauded the choice. Turibius was thunderstruck at this unexpected news, and had no sooner received the message, but he cast himself on the ground at the foot of his crucifix, praying with many tears that God would deliver him from so heavy a burden, which he thought absolutely above his strength. He wrote the most urgent letters to the king's council, in which he pleaded his incapacity, and other impediments, and laid great stress on the canons, which forbid laymen to be promoted to such dignities in the church. This humility it was that obtained the succor of heaven by which he performed wonders in the service of souls. Being compelled by obedience to acquiesce, he at length testified his submission by falling on his knees and kissing the ground. After a suitable preparation, he received the four minor orders on four successive Sundays, the better to dispose himself for the functions of each; and after passing through the other orders, he was consecrated bishop. Immediately after which he set out for Peru, and landed at Lima, in the year 1581, of his age the forty-third. That diocese is extended one hundred and thirty leagues along the coast, comprising three cities, and many towns and villages, with innumerable cottages scattered over two ridges of the mountains of the Andes, esteemed the highest and the most rugged in the whole world. Some of the European generals, who first invaded that country, were men who seemed to measure every thing by their insatiable avarice and ambition, and had so far lost all sentiments of humanity towards the poor savages, that they deserved the name rather of tyrants and plunderers than of conquerors. Civil wars and dissensions completed the misfortune of that country; and covetousness, cruelty, treachery, fraud, and debauchery, seemed triumphant. Nor were the repeated orders of the Spanish court able to redress these evils. The sight of these disorders moved the good pastor often to tears, but his prudence and zeal overcame all difficulties, extirpated public scandals, and made that kingdom a flourishing portion of the Christian church. Upon his arrival he immediately began a visitation of his vast diocese: an undertaking of incredible fatigue, and attended with many dangers. He often crept over the steepest and most rugged mountains, covered with ice or snow, to visit some poor hut of Indians, and give them suitable comfort and instruction. He travelled often on foot, and sometimes barefoot, and by fasting and prayer never ceased to implore the divine mercy for the salvation of the souls committed to his charge. He placed everywhere able and zealous pastors, and took care that no one in the most remote corners of the rocks should be left destitute of the means of instruction and of the benefit of the sacraments. To settle and maintain discipline, he appointed diocesan synods to be held every two years, and provincial synods every seven; and was vigilant and severe in chastising the least scandal, especially of avarice, in the clergy. Without respect of persons, he reproved injustice and vice, and made use of all the means which his authority put into his hands, to check the insolence of public sinners, and to protect the poor from oppression. Many of the first conquerors and governors of Peru, before the arrival of the most virtuous viceroy Francis of Toledo, were men who often sacrificed every thing to their passions, and for their private ends. From some of these saint suffered many persecutions, and was {647} often thwarted by them in the discharge of his duty. But by the arms of meekness and patience he overcame all affronts and injuries, and with an invincible constancy he maintained the rights of justice and truth. He showed that many sinners misconstrued the law of God to make it favor their passions; but that, as Tertullian observes, "Christ calls himself the truth, not custom," and will weigh our actions not in the false balance of the world, but in the true scales of the sanctuary. Thus he extirpated the most inveterate abuses,[1] and established with so great fervor the pure maxims of the gospel, as to revive in many the primitive spirit of Christianity. To extend and perpetuate the advantages of religion, which by his zeal he had procured, he filled this country with seminaries, churches, and many hospitals; but would never suffer his own name to be recorded in any of his munificent charities or foundations. When he was at Lima, he every day visited several hospitals, comforted and exhorted the sick, and administered the sacraments. When a pestilence, though that calamity is seldom known in Peru, raged in some parts of his diocese, Turibius distributed his own necessaries in relieving the afflicted: he preached penance, because sins are the cause of chastisements, and infinitely the worst of evils. He walked in the processions, bathed in tears, with his eyes always fixed on a crucifix, and offering himself to God for his flock; fasted, watched, and prayed for them, without intermission, till God was pleased to remove his scourge. Nothing gave the saint so much pleasure as the greatest labors and dangers, to procure the least spiritual advantage to one soul. Burning with the most vehement desire of laying down his life for his flock, and of suffering all things for him who died for us, he feared no dangers. When he heard that poor Indians wandered in the mountains and deserts, he sought them out; and to comfort, instruct, or gain one of them, he often suffered incredible fatigues, and dangers in the wildernesses, and boldly travelled through the haunts of lions and tigers. He spent seven years in performing his first visitation: his second employed him four years, but the third was shorter. He converted innumerable infidels, and left everywhere monuments of his charity. In travelling, he either prayed or discoursed on heavenly things. On his arrival at a place, it was his custom to repair first to the church to pray before the altar. To catechise the poor, he would sometimes stay two or three days in places where he had neither bed nor any kind of food. He visited every part of his vast diocese: and when others suggested to him the dangers that threatened him from rocks, precipices, marshes, rivers, robbers, {648} and savages, his answer was that Christ came from heaven to save man, we ought not therefore to fear dangers for the sake of immortal glory. He preached and catechised without intermission, having for this purpose learned, in his old age, all the various languages of the barbarous nations of that country. Even on his journeys he said mass every day with wonderful fervor and devotion. He always made a long meditation before and after it, and usually went to confession every morning; though they who best knew his interior, testified, that they were persuaded he had never in his whole life forfeited his baptismal innocence by any mortal sin. He seemed to have God and the divine honor alone before his eyes in all his words and actions, so as to give little or no attention to any thing else; by which means his prayer was perpetual. He retired in private to that exercise often in the day, and for a long time together. In it his countenance seemed often to shine with a divine light. The care with which he studied to disguise and conceal his great mortifications and works of piety, was the proof of his sincere humility. His munificence in relieving the poor of every class, especially those who were too bashful to make their necessities publicly known, always exhausted his revenues. The decrees of his provincial councils are monuments of his zeal, piety, learning, and discretion: they have been ever since esteemed, not only in the new world, but also in Europe, and at Rome itself, as oracles. The flourishing state of the church of Peru, the great number of saints and eminent pastors with which it abounded, and the establishment of innumerable seminaries of piety and learning, and hospitals for the poor, were the fruit of his zeal. If he did not originally plant the faith, he was at least the great propagator of it, and the chief instrument of God in removing scandals and advancing true piety in that vast country, which till then had been a land of abominations; while Francis of Toledo, the great viceroy, first settled the civil government in peace and tranquillity by salutary laws, which have procured him the title of the Legislator of Peru. St. Turibius, in the sixty-eighth year of his age, in 1606, during the visitation of his diocese, fell sick at Santa, a town one hundred and ten leagues distant from Lima. He foretold his death, and ordered him to be rewarded who should bring him the first account from his physician, that his recovery was despaired of. The ardor of his faith, his hope, his love of his Creator and Redeemer, his resignation and perfect sacrifice of himself, gathered strength in the fervent exercises and aspirations which he repeated almost without ceasing in his illness. By his last will he ordered what he had about him to be distributed among his servants, and whatever else he otherwise possessed to be given to the poor. He would be carried to the church, there to receive the holy viaticum: but received extreme unction in his sick bed. He often repeated those words of St. Paul: _I desire to be dissolved, and to be with Christ._ And in his last moments he ordered to be sung, by his bedside, those of the Psalmist: _I rejoiced in the ibwgs that were said to me: We shall go into the house of the Lord._ He died on the 23d of March, repeating those other words of the same prophet: _Into thy hands I commend my spirit._ His body being translated the year after to Lima, was found incorrupt, the joints flexible, and the skin soft. His historian, and the acts of the canonization, mention many sick restored to their health, and a girl raised to life by him while he was living: also many miracles wrought through his intercession after his death. He was beatified by Innocent XI. in 1679,[2] and solemnly canonized by pope Benedict XIII. in 1726. On the miracles wrought by his intercession, see Benedict XIV.,[3] and especially the acts of his canonization. {649} A pastor of souls must be careful to animate all his exterior actions and labors in the service of his neighbor, with the interior spirit of compunction, humility, zeal, charity, and tender devotion. Without this he loses the fruit of all the pains he takes, and by them will often deserve only chastisements in the world to come; so much will his intention and the affections of his heart be infected with self-love, and depraved by various imperfections, and secret sinister desires even in the most holy functions. Therefore, a fervent novitiate, employed in the exercises of an interior life, ought to be a part of the preparation for this state; and in the discharge of his duties, a person ought always to unite contemplation with action, and reserve to himself sufficient time for conversing with God and his own soul, and taking a frequent review of his own interior. From his labors he must return frequently to prayer, and constantly nourish in his soul a spirit of fervent devotion, which will thus accompany all his exterior actions, and keep his thoughts and affections always united to God. Those who are not faithful in thus maintaining and improving in themselves an interior spirit of piety, and in watching with fear and compunction over the motions of their own hearts, will generally advance very little the kingdom of Christ in the souls of others, and are in great danger of losing their own. This is what St. Bernard feared in his disciple pope Eugeuius III., whom he conjured with tears never to give himself up entirely to the care of others, so as not to live also for himself; so to communicate a spirit of piety to others, as not to suffer it to be drained in his own heart; to be a basin to hold it, not a pipe for it to run through.[4] This lesson is applicable, with due proportion, to other states, especially that of teaching the sciences, in which the exercises of an interior life are so much the more necessary, as the employment is more distracting, more tumultuous, and more exposed to the waves of vanity, jealousy, and other secret petty passions. Footnotes: 1. The Indians were infamous for their debaucheries, and became so fond of the Spanish wines, after having once tasted them, that to purchase a small quantity they would give all their gold, and were never sober as long as they had wine to drink. But their crimes, which justly provoked the anger of heaven, could not justify the cruelty of their European enemies, in whom avarice seemed to have extinguished the sentiments both of humanity and religion. The missionary priests endeavored in vain to put a stop to the outrages of their countrymen; and the Dominicans carried repeated complaints against them to the kings of Spain. At their remonstrances, Ferdinand, king of Castile, declared the Indians free, and forbade the Spaniards to employ them in carrying burdens, or to use a stick or whip in chastising them. The emperor, Charles V., was prevailed upon to send into America severe orders and regulations in their favor, but to very little effect. The officers, who assumed the haughty titles of conquerors of Mexico and Peru, would not be controlled. Bartholomew de las Casas, a Dominican, and bishop of Chiapa, in New Spain, made four fruitless voyages into Castile to plead the cause of the poor Indians; he obtained ample rescripts from the king, and was constituted by him protector-general of the Indians in America. But these expedients proved too weak against men that were armed. He therefore resigned his bishopric into the hands of the pope, in 1551, and returned into the convent of his order at Valhutolid; where he wrote his books, On the Destruction of the Indians by the Spaniards, and On the Tyranny of the Spaniards in the Indies, both dedicated to king Philip II. The archbishop of Seville, and the universities of Salamanca and Alcala, forbade the impression of the answers which some wrote to defend the Spanish governors, on principles repugnant to the law of nature and of nations. These books of las Casas, being translated into French, were scattered among the people in the Low Countries, who had taken up arms against the Spaniards, and animated them exceedingly in their revolt. But the crimes of some ought not to be imputed to a nation: and the same country which gave birth to some monsters was most fruitful in saints, and produced the most zealous apostles and defenders of the Indians. The great principle which las Casas defended in the emperor's council, and in his writings, was, that the conquered Indians could not, without injustice, be made slaves to the Spaniards, which the king's council and the divines agreed to with regard to those who had not been taken armed in just wars. See the history of the Isle of St. Domingo, by {} Charlevoix. 2. Bened. XIV. De Beatif. et Canoniz. {} 1. Append. p. 496. 3. De Servor. Dei Canoniz. Roma. 1728. {}4. Tr. de Miraculis, c. 16, p. 196. 4. Tuus esto ubique: concha esto non canalis. S. Bern. l. d. Consid. SS. VICTORIAN, PROCONSUL OF CARTHAGE, AND OTHERS, MARTYRS UNDER THE VANDALS. HUNERIC, the Arian king of the Vandals in Africa, succeeded his father Genseric in 477. He behaved himself at first with moderation towards the Catholics, so that they began to hold their assemblies in those places where they had been prohibited by Genseric: but in 480, he began a grievous persecution of the clergy and holy virgins, which, in 484, became general, and occasioned vast numbers of the Catholics to be put to death. Victorian, a citizen of Adrumetum, one of the principal lords of the kingdom, had been made by him governor of Carthage with the Roman title of proconsul. He was the wealthiest subject the king had, who placed great confidence in him, and he had ever behaved with an inviolable fidelity. The king, after he had published his cruel edicts, sent a message to the proconsul in the most obliging terms, promising, if he would conform to his religion, and execute his orders, to heap on him the greatest wealth and the highest honors which it was in the power of a prince to bestow. The proconsul, who amidst the glittering pomp of the world perfectly understood its emptiness, made on the spot this generous answer: "Tell the king that I trust in Christ. If his majesty pleases, he may condemn me to the flames, or to wild beasts, or to any torments: but I shall never consent to renounce the Catholic church in which I have been baptized. Even if, there were no other life after this, I would never be ungrateful and perfidious to God, who hath granted me the {650} happiness of knowing him, and who hath bestowed on me his most precious graces." The tyrant became furious at this answer: nor can the tortures be imagined which he caused the saint to endure. Victorian suffered them with joy, and amidst them finished his glorious martyrdom. The Roman Martyrology joins with him on this day four others who were crowned in the same persecution. Two brothers of the city of Aquæ-regiæ, in the province of Byzacena, were apprehended for the faith, and conducted to Tabaia in the same province. They had promised each other, if possible, to die together; and they begged it of God, as a favor, that they might both suffer the same torments. The persecutors hung them in the air with great weights at their feet. One of them, under the excess of pain, begged to be taken down for a little ease. His brother, fearing this desire of ease might by degrees move him to deny his faith, cried out from the rack on which he was hanging: "God forbid, dear brother, that you should ask such a thing. Is this what we promised to Jesus Christ? Should not I accuse you at his terrible tribunal? Have you forgotten what we have sworn upon his body and blood, to suffer death together for his holy name?" By these words the other was so wonderfully encouraged that he cried out: "No, no; I ask not to be released: on the contrary, add new weights, if you please, increase my tortures, exert all your cruelties till they are exhausted upon me." They were then burnt with red-hot plates of iron, and tormented so long, and by so many new engines of torture, that the executioners at last left them, saying: "Everybody follows their example, no one now embraces our religion." This they said, chiefly because, notwithstanding they had been so long and so grievously tormented, there were no scars or bruises to be seen upon them. Two merchants of Carthage, who both bore the name of Frumentius, suffered martyrdom about the same time, and are joined with St. Victorian in the martyrologies. Among many glorious confessors at that time, one Liberatus, an eminent physician, was sent into banishment with his wife. He only grieved to see his infant children torn from him. His wife checked his tears by these generous words: "Think no more of them, Jesus Christ himself will have care of them, and protect their souls." While in prison, she was told by the heretics that her husband had conformed: accordingly, when she met him at the bar before the judge she upbraided him in open court for having basely abandoned God: but discovered by his answer that a cheat had been put upon her, to deceive her into her ruin. Twelve young children, when dragged away by the persecutors, held their companions by the knees till they were torn away by violence. They were most cruelly beaten and scourged every day for a long time; yet by God's grace every one of them persevered to the end of the persecution firm in the faith. See St. Victor, De Persec. Vandal. l. 5, n. 4. ST. EDELWALD,[1] PRIEST, C. HE was, for his eminent sanctity, honored with the priesthood while he lived in the monastery of Rippon. Afterwards he led an eremitical life in the isle of Farne, where he died in 669, about eleven years after St. Cuthbert. His body was translated to Lindisfarne, afterwards to Durham. See Bede in vita S. Cuthberti, n. 68. Footnotes: 1. Edelwald, or Ethelwald. signifies _noble, potent_. {651} MARCH XXIV. ST. IREN�US, BISHOP OF SIRMIUM, M From the original authentic acts of his trial in Henschenius, Ruinart, p. 403. Tillemont. t. 4, p. 248. Ceillier, t. 3, p. 497. A.D. 304. ST. IREN�US, bishop of Sirmium, capital of part of Pannonia, (now Sirmisch, a village in Hungary, twenty-two leagues from Buda to the south,) in the persecution of Dioclesian was apprehended and conducted before Probus, the governor of Pannonia, who said to him: "The divine laws oblige all men to sacrifice to the gods." Irenæus answered: "Into hell fire shall be thrown, whoever shall sacrifice to the gods." PROBUS. "The edicts of the most clement emperors ordain that all sacrifice to the gods, or suffer according to law." IREN�US. "But the law of my God commands me rather to suffer all torments than to sacrifice to the gods." PROBU.. "Either sacrifice, or I will put you to the torture." IREN�US. "You cannot do me a greater pleasure; for by that means you will make the partake of the sufferings of my Saviour." The proconsul commanded him to be put on the rack; and while he was tortured, he said to him: "What do you say now, Irenæus? Will you sacrifice?" IREN�US. "I sacrifice to my God, by confessing his holy name, and so have I always sacrificed to him." All Irenæus's family was in the utmost concern for him. His mother, his wife, and his children surrounded him. His children embraced his feet, crying out: "Father, dear father, have pity on yourself and on us." His wife, dissolved in tears, cast herself about his neck, and, tenderly embracing him, conjured him to preserve himself for her, and his innocent children, the pledges of their mutual love. His mother, with a voice broken with sobs, sent forth lamentable cries and sighs, which were accompanied with those of their servants, neighbors, and friends; so that all round the rack on which the martyr was hanging, nothing was heard but sobs, groans, and lamentations. Irenæus resisted all these violent assaults, opposing those words of our Lord: _If any one renounce me before men, I will renounce him before my Father who is to Heaven_. He made no answer to their pressing solicitations, but raised his soul above all considerations of flesh and blood to him who was looking down on his conflict from above, waiting to crown his victory with immortal glory; and who seemed to cry out to him from his lofty throne in heaven: "Come, make haste to enjoy me." The governor said to him: "Will you be insensible to such marks of tenderness and affection? can you see so many tears shed for you without being moved? It is not beneath a great courage to be touched with compassion. Sacrifice, and do not destroy yourself in the flower of your age." Irenæus said: "It is that I may not destroy myself that I refuse to sacrifice." The governor sent him to prison, where he remained a long time, suffering divers torments. At the second time of examination, the governor, after having pressed him to sacrifice, asked him if he had a wife, parents, or children, alive. The saint answered all these questions in the negative. "Who then were those that wept for you at your first examination?" Irenæus made answer: "Our Lord Jesus Christ hath said: _He that loveth father or mother, wife or children, brothers or relations more than me, is not worthy of {652} me_. So, when I lift up my eyes to contemplate that God whom I adore, and the joys he hath promised to those who faithfully serve him, I forget that I am a father, a husband, a son, a master, a friend." Probus said: "But you do not therefore cease to be so. Sacrifice at least for their sakes." Irenmus replied: "My children will not lose much by my death; for I leave them for father that same God whom they adore with me; so let nothing hinder you from executing the orders of your emperor upon me." PROBUS. "Throw not yourself away. I cannot avoid condemning you." IREN�US. "You cannot do me a greater favor, or give me a more agreeable pleasure." Then Probus passed sentence after this manner: "I order that Irenæus, for disobeying the emperor's commands, be cast into the river."[1] Irenæus replied: "After so many threats, I expected something extraordinary, and you content yourself with drowning me. How comes this? You do me an injury; for you deprive me of the means of showing the world how much Christians, who have a lively faith, despise death, though attended with the most cruel torments." Probus, enraged at this, added to the sentence that he should be first beheaded. Irenæus returned thanks to God as for a second victory. When arrived on the bridge of Diana, from which he was to be thrown, stripping off his clothes, and lifting up his hands to heaven, he prayed thus: "Lord Jesus Christ, who condescendedst to suffer for the salvation of the world, command the heavens to open, that the angels may receive the soul of thy servant Irenæus, who suffers for thy name, and for thy people of the Catholic church of Sirmium." Then, his head being struck off, he was thrown into the river, on the 25th of March, on which day his name occurs in the Roman Martyrology. He suffered in the year 304. He was married before he was ordained bishop; but lived continent from that time, as the laws of the church required. The martyrs most perfectly accomplished the precept of renouncing all things for Christ; but all who desire truly to become his disciples, are bound to do it in spirit. Many aspire to perfection by austere practices of exterior mortification and long exercises of devotion; yet make little progress, and, after many years, remain always subject to many imperfections and errors in a spiritual life. The reason is, because they neglected to lay the foundation by renouncing themselves. This requires constant watchfulness, courageous self-denial, a perfect spirit of humility, meekness and obedience, and sincere compunction, in which a soul examines and detects her vices, bewails her past sins and those of the whole world, sighs at the consideration of its vanity and slavery, and of her distance from heaven, labors daily to cleanse her mind from all idle thoughts, and her heart from all sin, all irregular attachments, and superfluous desires, flies the vain joys of the world, and often entertains herself on the bloody passion of Christ. If the affections are thus purified, and this cleanness of heart daily more and more cultivated, the rest costs very little, and the soul makes quick progress in the paths of holy love, by the assiduous exercises of contemplation and prayer, a constant fidelity in all her actions, and the most fervent and pure attention to the divine will and presence. Voluntary imperfections and failings, especially if habitual, both blind and defile the soul, disquiet her, extremely weaken her, and damp the fervor of her good desires and resolutions. They must therefore be retrenched with the utmost resolution and vigilance, especially those which arise from any secret vanity, sensuality, or want of the most perfect sincerity, candor, and simplicity. An habitual attachment to any failing, how trifling soever it may appear, how subtle and secret {653} soever it may be, and under whatever pretences it may be disguised, exceedingly obstructs the operations of the Holy Ghost, and the effusion of divine grace in a soul. Footnotes: 1. Meaning the Boswethe, which runs through Sirmisch, and falls into the sea five leagues lower. ST. SIMON, AN INFANT, MARTYR AT TRENT. IN the year 1472, when the Jews of Trent (famous for the last general council held there) met in their synagogue on Tuesday in Holy Week, to deliberate on the preparations for the approaching festival of the Passover, which fell that year on the Thursday following, they came to a resolution of sacrificing to their inveterate hatred of the Christian name, some Christian infant on the Friday following, or Good Friday. A Jewish physician undertook to procure such an infant for the horrid purpose. And while the Christians were at the office of Tenebræ on Wednesday evening, he found a child called Simon, about two years old, whom, by caresses, and by showing him a piece of money, he decoyed from the door of a house, the master and mistress whereof were gone to church, and carried him off. On Thursday evening the principal Jews shut themselves up in a chamber adjoining to their synagogue, and at midnight began their cruel butchery of this innocent victim. Having stopped his mouth with an apron, to prevent his crying out, they made several incisions in his body, gathering his blood in a basin. Some, all this while, held his arms stretched out in the form of a cross: others held his legs. The child being half dead, they raised him on his feet, and while two of them held him by the arms, the rest pierced his body on all sides with their awls and bodkins. When they saw the child had expired, they sung round it: "In the same manner did we treat Jesus, the God of the Christians: thus may our enemies be confounded forever." The magistrates and parents making strict search after the lost child, the Jews hid it first in a barn of hay, then in a cellar, and at last threw it into the river. But God confounded all their endeavors to prevent the discovery of the fact, which being fully proved upon them, with its several circumstances, they were put to death: the principal actors in the tragedy being broke upon the wheel and burnt. The synagogue was destroyed, and a chapel was erected on the spot where the child was martyred. God honored this innocent victim with many miracles. The relics lie in a stately tomb in St. Peter's church at Trent: and his name occurs in the Roman Martyrology. See the authentic account of Tiberinus, the physician who inspected the child's body; and the juridical acts in Surius and the Bollandists, with Henschenius's notes on this day: also Martenne, Ampl. Collectio Vet. t. 2, p. 1516, and Bened. XIV. de Canoniz. l. 1, c. 14, p. 105. ST. WILLIAM OF NORWICH, M. THIS martyr was another victim of the implacable rage of the Jews against our holy religion. He suffered in the twelfth year of his age. Having been not long bound an apprentice to a tanner in Norwich, a little before Easter, in 1137, the Jews of that city having enticed him into their houses, seized and gagged him: then they bound, mocked, and crucified him, in derision of Christ: they also pierced his left side. On Easter-day they put the body into a sack, and carried it into Thorp-wood, now a heath, near the gates of the city, there to bury it; but being discovered, left it hinging on a tree. The body was honored with miracles, and, in 1144, {654} removed into the churchyard of the cathedral of the Holy Trinity, by the monks of that abbey; and in 1150, into the choir. On the place in Thorpwood, where the body of the martyred child was found, a chapel was built, called St. William in the wood. Mr. Weever writes, that "the Jews in the principal cities of the kingdom, did use sometimes to steal away, circumcise, crown with thorns, whip, torture, and crucify some neighbor's male-child, in mockery and scorn of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. St. Richard of Pontoise, in France, was martyred by them in that manner. As also St. Hugh, (according to Matthew Paris and John Capgrave,) a child crucified at Lincoln, in 1255." Nevertheless, it is a notorious slander of some authors, who, from these singular and extraordinary instances, infer this to have been at any time the custom or maxim of that people. The English calendars commemorated St. William on the 24th of March. See the history of his martyrdom and miracles by Thomas of Monmouth, a contemporary monk; also the Saxon Chronicle of the same age, and Bloomfield's History of Norfolk.[1] Footnotes: 1. Pope Benedict XIV., l. 1, de Canon. c. 14, p. 103, shows that children who die after baptism before the use of reason, though saints, ought not to be canonized, because they never practised any heroic degree of virtue; and because this was never authorized by tradition in the church. Martyrs only, or infants, whether baptized or not, which were slain out of hatred to the name of Christ, are to be accepted, as is clear from the example of the Holy Innocents, who are styled martyrs by St. Irenæus, Origen, and other fathers; and the most ancient missals and homilies of fathers on their festival, prove them to have been honored as such from the primitive ages. Hence infants murdered by Jews, out of hatred to Christ, have been ranked among the martyrs, as St. Simon of Trent, by the authority of the bishop of that city, afterwards confirmed by the decrees of the popes Sixtus V. and Gregory XIII.; also St. William of Norwich in England, (though this child having attained to the use of reason, is rather to be called an adult martyr.) And St. Richard of Pontoise, also about twelve years old, murdered in 1182 by certain Jews in the reign of Philip Augustus, who for this and other crimes banished the Jews out of France, in April, that same year. The body of St. Richard was translated to Paris, and enshrined in the parish church of the Holy Innocents, where his feast is kept on the 30th of March, but at Pontoise on the 25th. The celebrated F. Gaguin has written the history of his martyrdom, with an account of several miracles wrought at his shrine. His head is still shown in that church; the rest of his relics are said to have been carried off by the English, when they were masters of Paris. MARCH XXV. THE ANNUNCIATION OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN MARY. THIS great festival takes its name from the happy tidings brought by the angel Gabriel to the Blessed Virgin Mary, concerning the incarnation of the Son of God. It commemorates the most important embassy that was ever known: an embassy sent by the King of kings, performed by one of the chief princes of his heavenly court; directed, not to the kings or emperors of the earth, but to a poor, unknown, retired virgin, who, being endowed with the most angelic purity of soul and body, being withal perfectly humble and devoted to God, was greater in his eyes than all the sceptres in the world could make a universal monarch. Indeed God, by the choice which he is pleased to make of a poor virgin, for the accomplishment of the greatest of all mysteries and graces, clearly demonstrates that earthly diadems, dignities, and treasures are of no consideration with him; and that perfect humility and sanctity alone constitute true greatness. God, who is almighty, can do all things by himself, without making use of the concurrence of creatures Nevertheless he vouchsafes, in his exterior works, {655} most frequently to use their co-operation. If he reveals his will and speaks to men, it is by the intervention of his prophets, and these he then enlightens by the ministry of angels. Many of the ancient patriarchs were honored by him with the most sublime commissions. By Moses he delivered his people from the Egyptian slavery, by him he gave them his law, and he appointed him mediator in his alliance with them. When the Son of God became man, he could have taken upon him our nature without the co-operation of any creature; but was pleased to be born of a woman. In the choice of her whom he raised to this most sublime of all dignities to which any pure creature could be exalted, he pitched upon her who, by the riches of his grace and virtues, was of all others the most holy and the most perfect. The design of this embassy of the archangel is as extraordinary as the persons concerned in it. It is to give a Saviour to the world, a victim of propitiation to the sinner, a model to the just, a son to this Virgin, remaining still a virgin, and a new nature to the Son of God, the nature of man, capable of suffering pain and anguish in order to the satisfaction of God's justice for our transgressions. And the Son of God being to take a human body formed of her substance, the Holy Ghost, who, by a power all-divine, was to her in place of a spouse, was not content to render her body capable of giving life to a Man-God, but likewise enriched her soul with a fulness of grace, that there might be a sort of proportion between the cause and the effect, and she the better qualified to co-operate towards this mystery of sanctity. The angel begins his address to her with _Hail! full of grace_.[1] This is not the first time that angels appeared to women. But we find not that they were ever treated with that respect which the angel Gabriel shows to Mary. Sarah and Agar were visited by these celestial spirits, but not with an honor like that wherewith the angel on this occasion addresses the Blessed Virgin, saying, _Hail! full of grace_. He considers her as the greatest object among creatures of God's favor, affection, and complacency. He admires in her those wonderful effects of the divine liberality, those magnificent gifts and graces, those exalted virtues, which have placed the very foundation of her spiritual edifice on the holy mountains,[2] in a degree of perfection surpassing that of all pure creatures. He admires that perfect gratitude with which she always received God's grace, and her perfect fidelity in corresponding with it, and advancing in sanctity by the help thereof, with a solicitude answerable to her love and gratitude for the preservation and increase of so inestimable a treasure. _Full of grace_. The first encomium which St. John gives us of the glory of the Word made flesh is, that he was _full of grace and truth_.[3] God forbid that we should say that Mary was full of grace in the same manner as her Son; for he is the very source and origin of it, _from whose fulness all_ the saints, Mary not excepted, _have received_[4] whatever degree they possess of grace and sanctity. St. Luke assures us also, that St. Stephen was full of grace and the Holy Ghost,[5] but it was a fulness in regard to a less capacity, and in relation to a lower function. Moreover, to St. Stephen and other saints, who have received large portions of heavenly grace, we may say, in those other words of the angel, _You have found favor with God_; but those very favors, though very great in themselves, were not to be compared with that which from all eternity was reserved for Mary. God made the saints the object of his gratuitous election, and he qualified them with his graces to be the messengers of his Son, the preachers and witnesses of his gospel; but Mary, was his choice, and was furnished with his graces to bear the most illustrious, {656} the most exalted title of honor that heaven could bestow on a pure creature to conceive of her proper substance the divine Word made man. If then the grace of God so raises a person in worth and merit, that there is not any prince on earth who deserves to be compared with a soul that is dignified with the lowest degree of sanctifying grace; what shall we say or think of Mary, in whom the fulness of grace was only a preparation to her maternity? What shall we think of ourselves, (but in an opposite light,) who wilfully expose this greatest of all treasures on so many occasions to be lost, whereas we ought wilfully to forego and renounce all the advantages and pleasures of this world, rather than hazard the loss of the least degree of it, and be most fervent in our supplications to God for the gaining, preserving, and increasing so great a treasure: forasmuch as it is a pledge of God's love, a participation of his Spirit, and a title to the possession of his heavenly kingdom. But who can be surprised at those inestimable treasures which God, on this occasion, with so liberal a hand, bestows on Mary, if he considers the purport of the following words of the angel to her: _The Lord is with thee_. He is with her in a manner more intimate, more perfect, and more divine, than he ever was or will be with any other creature. He is with her, not only by his essence, by his presence, by his power; for he is thus with all his creatures: He is with her, not only by his actual grace touching her heart and enlightening her understanding; he is thus many times with the sinner: He is with her, not only with his sanctifying grace, making her agreeable in his sight, and placing her in the number of his children; he is present in this manner with all the just: He is with her, not only by a special protection guiding her in his ways, and leading her securely to the term of salvation; this he does for the elect: but he is also with her by a substantial and corporeal presence, residing personally and really in her. In her, and of her substance, is this day formed his adorable body; in her he reposes for nine months, with his whole divinity and humanity. It is in this ineffable manner that he is with Mary, and with none but Mary. O glorious Virgin, thrice happy Mother, from this source and ocean of all grace what heavenly blessings in so long a space of time must have flowed upon you! and what honors must be due to one so nearly allied to our great Creator! What intercession so prevalent as that of the _Mother of divine grace!_ The angel concludes his address with these words: _Blessed art thou among women_.[6] _Blessed_, as being chosen preferably to all of her sex, to be the glorious instrument, in the hand of God, for removing the maledictions laid on mankind in punishment of their sins, and in communicating to them the source of all good. And on this account it was, that _all_ succeeding _generations_, as she foretold of herself, _should call her Blessed_;[7] regarding her as the centre in which all the blessings of the Old and New Testament are drawn together. Though we are obliged to consider the eminent quality of Mother of God as the source of all other graces bestowed on the Blessed Virgin, it must yet be owned it is not the greatest, and that she was happier in loving Jesus Christ, than in having conceived him and brought him forth. She is blessed among women and above the rest of creatures, not precisely on account of her maternity, but because she received a fulness of grace proportioned to the dignity to which she was chosen. So that, according to the remark of the holy fathers, she was happier for her sanctity than for her dignity: for her virtues, than for her privileges. Among her virtues, that of purity seems particularly deserving of notice on this solemnity, as the epistle for this festival {657} records that memorable prophecy of Isaias, _That a Virgin should conceive and bring forth a son_;[8] the most remarkable of all the signs God had promised the world for making known the accomplishment of the mystery of man's redemption. And, indeed, right reason seemed to require that she, who was to be the mother of God, should be of an integrity above reproach, and incapable of yielding to any solicitation: it was highly fit her virginity should be perfectly pure, and removed as far as possible from the least suspicion of blemish. For this reason, the moment God had chosen her to be his mother, he exacted from her the most authentic proofs of an inviolable attachment to purity. Thus, it is not in a crowd, or in idle conversation, but in a retreat, that the angel finds her. It is not from the distraction of diversions and entertainments that he calls her aside to deliver his message: no; she is alone in her house, with the door shut; "and," as St. Ambrose says, "he must be an angel that gets entrance there."[9] Hence, according to the same holy father, it was not the angel's appearance that gave her trouble, for he will not have it to be doubted but heavenly visions and a commerce with the blessed spirits had been familiar to her. But what alarmed her, he says, was the angel's appearing in human form, in the shape of a young man. What might add to her fright on the occasion, was his addressing her in the strain of praise, which kind of words flattery often puts in the mouths of ill-designing men. And how few, alas! are able to withstand such dangers? But Mary, guarded by her modesty, is in confusion at expressions of this sort, and dreads the least appearance of deluding flattery. Such high commendations make her cautious how she answers, till in silence she has more fully considered of the matter: _She revolved in her mind_, says St. Luke, _what manner of salutation this should be_.[10] Ah! what numbers of innocent souls have been corrupted for want of using the like precautions! Mary is retired, but how seldom now-a-days are young virgins content to stay at home! Mary is silent when commended, and answered not a word till she had well considered what she ought to say: but now it is to be feared that young women never think so little as when they are entertained with flattery. Every soothing word is but too apt to slide from the ear to the heart; and who can tell what multitudes, by their unwary methods, suffer shipwreck of their modesty, and then of their purity. For how can this be long-lived after having lost all its guardians? No, it cannot be. Unless a virgin be assiduous in prayer and spiritual reading, modest in her dress, prudent and wary in her choice of company, and extremely careful in the government of her eyes and tongue when she happens to be in conversation with the other sex, there is but too much reason to apprehend that either her heart is already betrayed, or in danger of being vanquished by the next assault of her spiritual enemy. A dread of, and a speedy flight from all dangerous occasions is the only security of virtue and innocence. Presumption wants no other tempter. Even Mary, though confirmed in grace, was only secure by this fear and distrust in herself. A second cause why Mary was disturbed at the words of the angel was, because they contained her praises. Humble souls always tremble and sink with confusion in their own minds when they hear themselves commended; because they are deeply penetrated with a sense of their own weakness and insufficiency, and they consider contempt as their due. They know that the glory of all gifts belongs solely to God, and they justly fear lest the poison of praise should insinuate itself into their minds; being sensible how infinitely dangerous honors and flattery are to humility. Are {658} these our sentiments? Do we never speak of ourselves to our own advantage? Do we never artfully praise ourselves, or willingly lend an ear to what flatterers say to applaud us? Are we troubled when we hear ourselves praised? What gives trouble but to too many is, that men give them not what they take to be their right; and that their praises equal not the notion they have framed of their merits. The high eulogiums bestowed on Mary by the angel she answers no otherwise than by a profound silence, by a saintly trouble of mind, which, with a modest blush, appears in her countenance. The angel, to calm her disquiets, says to her: _Fear not, Mary, for thou hast found favor before God_. He then informs her that she is to conceive and bring forth a son whose name shall be Jesus, who shall be great, and the son of the Most High, and possessed of the throne of David, her illustrious ancestor. Mary, who, according to St. Austin,[11] had consecrated her virginity to God by vow, is not at all weakened by the prospect of such a dignity, in her resolution of living a virgin: but, on the contrary, out of a just concern to know how she may comply with the will of God without prejudice to her vow, neither moved by curiosity, nor doubting of the miracle or its possibility, she inquires, _How shall this be_? Nor does she give her consent till the heavenly messenger acquaints her that it is to be a work of the Holy Ghost, who, in making her fruitful, will not intrench in the least upon her virginal purity, but cause her to be a mother, still remaining, as she desires, a pure virgin. Moreover, had not Mary been deep-rooted in humility, what impression must not these great promises have made in her heart, at a time especially when the first transports are so apt to overflow the soul on the sudden news of an unexpected glory. The world knows, from too frequent experience, how strongly the promise and expectation of new dignities raise the spirits, and alter the words, the looks, and the whole carriage of proud men. But Mary is still the same, or rather much more lowly and meek in spirit upon the accession of this unparalleled dignity. She sees no cause to pride herself in her virtues, graces, and privileges, knowing that the glory of all these are due only to the divine Author and Bestower of them. In submission, therefore, to God's will, without any further inquiries, she expresses her assent in these humble but powerful words: _Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it done to me according to thy word_. What faith and confidence does her answer express! What profound humility and perfect obedience! She was saluted mother of God, yet uses no word of dignity, but styles herself nothing more than his handmaid, to be commanded and employed by him as he shall think fittest. The world, as heaven had decreed, was not to have a Saviour till she had given her consent to the angel's proposal; she gives it, and behold the power and efficacy of her submissive Fiat. That moment, the mystery of love and mercy promised to mankind four thousand years before, foretold by so many prophets, desired by so many saints, is wrought on earth. That moment, the Word of God is forever united to humanity: the soul of Jesus Christ, produced from nothing, begins to enjoy God, and to know all things past, present, and to come: that moment, God begins to have an adorer, who is infinite, and the world a mediator, who is omnipotent; and, to the working of this great mystery, Mary alone is chosen to co-operate by her free assent. The prophets represent the earth as moved out of its place, and the mountains as melting away before the very countenance of God looking down upon the world. Now that he descends in person, who would not expect that the whole heavens should be moved? But another kind of appearance best suited his coming on this occasion, which was with {659} the view of curing our pride by his wonderful humiliations, and thereby repair the injury the Godhead had suffered from our unjust usurpation; and not to show forth his grandeur, and display his all-glorious majesty. How far are the ways of God above those of men! how greatly does divine wisdom differ from human folly! how does every circumstance in this mystery confound the pride, the pomp, and the vain titles of worldly grandeur, and recommend to us the love of silence and sincere humility! Shall the disciples of Christ have other sentiments? But what tongue can express the inward feelings and affections which then filled the glowing heart of the most pure Mother of God? What light shone in her understanding to penetrate the mysteries and the excess of the unfathomed goodness of God! what ardors of holy love inflamed her will! what jubilee filled her soul! Let men redeemed exult and praise, returning to God their best homages of adoration, thanksgiving, and love. It is for this duty that the church has appointed this present festival, which we ought chiefly to consecrate to the contemplation of this adorable mystery with hymns of love, praise, and thanksgiving. It was the hope and comfort of all the ancient saints, and the great object of all their earnest prayers, tears, and sighs. The prophets had a view to it in all their predictions, this being the principal point in all the wonderful revelations of God made to his church since the fall of Adam in Paradise, whom he immediately comforted with a promise and glimpse of this glorious mercy. Every ordinance in the law which he gave the Jews was typical, and had either an immediate, or at least an indirect relation to Christ, and our redemption by him. Among the numberless religious rites and sacrifices which were prescribed them, there was not one which did not in some manner represent or allude to this mystery. How high an idea ought this circumstance to give us of its incomprehensible greatness, which its nature and wonderful effects and fruits must enhance beyond the power of words! We are lost in astonishment when we contemplate this prodigy of omnipotence, and infinite wisdom and mercy, and adore it in raptures and silence. Gerson cries out on this mystery: "What ought every heart to say or think! every religious, every loving and faithful heart? It ought to rejoice exceedingly in this singular comfort, and to salute you with Gabriel: _O blessed among women_. On this day is accomplished the great desire of the holy ancient patriarchs and prophets, who often languished to hasten it, in their sighs, prayers, and writings, crying out aloud to _the desire of the eternal hills_. On this day is the Saviour of mankind, true God and man, conceived in the womb of Mary. This day our Lady received a name more sublime than can be understood, and the most noble of all names possible after that of her Son, by which she is called the Mother of God. On this day the greatest of miracles is wrought. Hear the wonders of love and mercy on this festival: God is made man; and man, in the divine person, God: he that is immortal is become mortal, and the Eternal is born in time. A virgin is a mother, a woman the mother of God; a creature has conceived her Creator!" St. Peter Chrysologus expresses the fruits of this mystery as follows: "One virgin so receives and contains God in the lodging of her breast as to procure peace for the earth, glory for heaven, salvation for the lost, life for the dead, an alliance of those on earth with the blessed in heaven, and the commerce of God with the flesh."[12] From the example of the Virgin Mary in this mystery, how ardent a love ought we to conceive of purity and humility! According to St. Gregory of Nyssa, and St. Jerom,[13] she would rather be the spouse of God in spirit, by {660} spotless virginity, than his mother in the flesh; and so acceptable was this her disposition to God, that she deserved immediately to hear, that she should bring forth the Son of the Most High, still remaining a most pure virgin: nor would God have otherwise raised her to this astonishing honor. The Holy Ghost is invited by purity to dwell in souls, but is chased away by the filth of the contrary vice. The dreadful havoc which it now-a-days makes among Christian souls, calls for torrents of tears, and is the source of the infidelity and universal desolation which spreads on every side. Humility is the foundation of a spiritual life. By it Mary was prepared for the extraordinary graces, and all virtues with which she was enriched, and for the eminent dignity of Mother of God. St. Austin says, that according to an ancient tradition, this mystery was completed on the 25th of March.[14] Both eastern and western churches celebrate it on this day, and have done so at least ever since the fifth century. This festival is mentioned by pope Gelasius I., in 492. The council of Constantinople, in 692, orders the missa præsanctificatorum, as on Good-Friday, to be said on all days in Lent, except Saturdays, Sundays, and the feast of the Annunciation.[15] The tenth council of Toledo, in 656, calls this solemnity, The festival of the Mother of God,[16] by way of excellence. To praise the divine goodness for this incomprehensible mystery of the incarnation, Urban II., in the council of Clermont, in 1095, ordered the bell to be rung every day for the triple Angelical Salutation, called Angelus Domini, at morning, noon, and night. Which practice of devotion several popes have recommended by indulgences; as John XXII., Calixtus III., Paul III., Alexander VII., and Clement X. The late Benedict XIII. has augmented them to those who at the aforesaid hours shall devoutly recite this prayer kneeling. Footnotes: 1. Luke i. 28. 2. Ps. lxxxvi. 3. John 1. 14. 4. Ibid. 16. 5. Acts iv. 8. 6. Luke i. 22. 7. Ibid. 48. 8. Isai. vii. 14. 9. O hospitium solis angelis pervium: S. Amb. in Luc. 10. Luke i. 29. 11. Quid profecto non diceret nisi se virginem ante vovisset. L. de Virg. c. 4, t. 6, p. 343. 12. Serm. 146. 13. St. Greg. Nyss. Tr. de Nativ. 14. L. 4. de Trin. c. 5. 15. See Thomasin des Fêtes, p. 229. 16. Festum Sanctæ Virginis Genitricis dies, festivitas matris--nam quod festum est matris nisi incarnatio Verbi? Conc. Folêt X. ST. CAMMIN, ABBOT. AMONG the most celebrated saints of Ireland, published by Usher, is placed St. Cammin, who in his youth retired from the noise of the world into the island of Irish-Kealtair, in the lake of Derg-Derch, or Dergid, in the confines of Thomond and Galway. Here several disciples resorting to him, he built a monastery, which, out of veneration for his extraordinary sanctity, was long very famous among the Irish. The church of that place still retains, from him, the name of Tempul-Cammin. His happy death is placed in the Inis-Fallen annals, about the year 653. See Usher's Antiqu. p. 503. {661} MARCH XXVI. ST. LUDGER, BISHOP OF MUNSTER, APOSTLE OF SAXONY. From his life, written by Altfrid, one of his successors, and another compiled by a monk of Werden, about sixty years after the death of St. Ludger, of inferior authority to the former, both extant in Mabillon, Act. Bened. t. 4, p. 489: also a third life in Surius and the Bollandists, written by the monks of Werden perhaps twenty years after the latter. See Hist. Littér. Fr. t. 5, p. 660. A.D. 809. ST. LUDGER was born in Friseland, about the year 743. His father, who was a nobleman of the first rank in that country, at the child's own request, committed him very young to the care of St. Gregory, the disciple of St. Boniface, and his successor in the government of the see of Utrecht. Ludger had the happiness to have seen that holy martyr, and received from him strong impressions of virtue. Gregory educated him in his monastery, and admiring his progress in learning and piety, gave him the clerical tonsure. Ludger, desirous of further improvement, passed over into England, and spent four years and a half under Alcuin, who was rector of a famous school at York. He was careful to employ his whole time in the exercises of piety, and the study of the holy scriptures and fathers. In 773 he returned home, and St. Gregory dying in 776, his successor, Alberic, compelled our saint to receive the holy order of priesthood, and employed him for several years in preaching the word of God in Friseland, where he converted great numbers, both among the pagans and vicious Christians, founded several monasteries, and built many churches. This was the state of affairs, when the pagan Saxons, ravaging the country, obliged him to leave Friseland. Whereupon he travelled to Rome, to consult pope Adrian II. what course to take, and what he thought God required of him. He then retired for three years and a half to Mount Cassino, where he wore the habit of the Order, and conformed to the practice of the rule during his stay, but made no religious vows. In 787, Charlemagne overcame the Saxons and conquered Friseland, and the coast of the Germanic ocean as far as Denmark. Ludger hearing that by this revolution the mission was again opened, returned into east Friseland, where he converted the Saxons to the faith; as he also did the province of Sudergou, now called Westphalia. He founded the monastery of Werden,[1] in the county of La Mark, twenty-nine miles from Cologne. His old master Alcuin being come into France, made his merit known to the emperor Charlemagne. In 802, Hildebald, archbishop of Cologne, not regarding his strenuous resistance, ordained him bishop of Mimigardeford, (or ford of the river Mimigard,) a city which afterwards changed this name for that of Munster, from the great monastery of regular canons which St. Ludger built there, to serve for his cathedral. He joined to his diocese five cantons of Friseland, which he had converted, and also founded the monastery of Helmstad, afterwards called Lodger-Clooster, or Ludger's cloister, in the duchy of Brunswick. He was very learned in the holy scriptures, and read daily lectures thereon to his disciples. He fasted and watched much, and always wore a hair shirt, but secretly, se that no one knew of it till a little before his death. {662} He ate some flesh at certain times, chiefly to conform to others, but always observing a strict temperance. When invited to any entertainment, his discourse the whole time was on religious subjects, and he withdrew immediately after. To the poor he was affable and courteous, but firm and resolute to the proud rich. He exerted an episcopal vigor against impenitent sinners, and refused all manner of presents from an incestuous lady, and at length excommunicated her. Except what was absolutely necessary for his subsistence, he employed the revenues of his own estate, and those of his bishopric, in charities. He was accused to the emperor Charlemagne, among other things, of wasting his income, and neglecting the embellishment of churches within his jurisdiction. And this prince, who loved to see churches magnificent, giving ear to the information, ordered him to appear at court. The morning after his arrival, the emperor's chamberlain brought him word that his attendance was required. The saint, being then at his prayers, told the officer that he would follow him as soon as he had finished them. He was sent for three several times before he was ready, which the courtiers represented as a contempt of his majesty; and the emperor, with some emotion, asked him why he had made him wait so long, though he had sent for him so often. The bishop answered, that though he had the most profound respect for his majesty, yet God was infinitely above him; that while we are occupied with him, it is our duty to forget every thing else; and that in this he judged he had rather obeyed than neglected his majesty's orders, who, when he was chosen bishop, had recommended to him ever to prefer the service of God to that of men. This answer made such an impression on the emperor, in favor of the saint, that he looked upon it as a complete justification of his conduct as to every particular that had been laid to his charge: he accordingly dismissed him with honor, and disgraced his accusers. The saint took this liberty with a religious prince, that he might condemn the sloth of many who suffer distractions or earthly trifles to interrupt their commerce with God; but they who leave prayer for necessary works of charity or obedience, find God still in the exercises of those virtues. St. Ludger required so devout an attention at divine service, that being at prayers one night with his clergy, and one of them stooping down to mend the fire and hinder it from smoking, the saint after prayer severely rebuked him for it, and inflicted on him a penance for some days. St. Ludger was favored with the gift of miracles and prophecy. He foretold the invasions of the Normans from Denmark and Norway, and what ravages they would make in the French empire, and this at a time when there was not the least apprehension of any such thing. His great zeal inclined him to go and preach the faith to these northern nations, but the king would not allow of it. His last sickness, though violent did not hinder him from continuing his functions to the very last day of his life, which was Passion-Sunday, on which day he preached very early in the morning, said mass towards nine, and preached again before night, foretelling withal to those that were about him, that he should die the following night; and fixing upon a place in his monastery of Werden where he chose to be interred. He died accordingly on the 26th of March, at midnight. His relics are still kept at Werden. Joseph, an Englishman, a disciple of Alcuin, whom he attended into France, wrote, in sixteen verses, an eulogium of St. Ludger, published by Vossius[2] and Mabillon, as a specimen of good poetry for that age. * * * * * Nothing so much scandalizes the very infidels, or shows the decay of piety, and loss of all sense of religion among Christians, as their disrespectful {663} behavior in the house of God and at the time of prayer. An awful, strict silence, the most profound exterior respect, and penetrating inward devotion of heart, must essentially accompany our homages when we present them before the throne of God, in whose presence the highest seraphims annihilate themselves. This silence we must observe not only with our tongues, but also with our bodies and all our limbs, both out of respect to the presence of God and his altar, and also not to give the least occasion of distraction to others. Prayer is an action so sublime and supernatural, that the church in her canonical hours teaches us to begin it by a fervent petition of grace to perform it well. What an insolence and mockery is it to join with this petition an open disrespect and a neglect of all necessary precautions against distractions! We ought never to appear before God, to tender him our homages or supplications, without trembling, and without being deaf to all creatures, and shutting all our senses to every object that can distract our minds from God. In the life of F. Simon Gourdan, a regular canon of St. Victor's at Paris, who died in the odor of sanctity, in the year 1729, the eighty-fifth of his age, it is related that king Louis XIV. came to see him, and to recommend himself to his prayers. The servant of God made him wait till he had finished his thanksgiving after mass, which edified that great prince, who said, "he does well; for he is employed in attending on a much greater king." Though St. Francis of Sales on the like occasions chose rather to forego or defer his own private devotions, than not to be ready immediately to wait on others, in order to give them all the spiritual advice they desired; yet at prayer at least he and all truly religious persons seemed in some degree to rival the heavenly spirits in their awe and reverence. Silence at that holy time, or place, has always been esteemed a thing so sacred, that when the temple of Solomon was building, God commanded that there should not be heard so much as the sound of a hamster, or any other instrument. Even when we come from conversing with God, we ought to appear all penetrated with the divine presence, and rather as angels than men. Sanctity, modesty, and the marks of a heavenly spirit, ought to shine in our exterior, and to inspire others by our very sight with religious awe and devotion. Footnotes: 1. Some have, by mistake, confounded this place with Ferden, or Werden, beyond the Weser. 2. Voss. de histor. lat. l. 2, c. 3. ST. BRAULIO, BISHOP OF SARAGOSSA, C. HE was the great assistant of St. Isidore of Seville in settling the discipline of the church of Spain, and is one of those holy pastors to whose zeal, learning, and labors it has always professed itself much indebted. He died in 646, in the twentieth year of his episcopacy. He has left us two letters to St. Isidore, an eulogium of that saint, and a catalogue of his works; also a hymn in Iambic verse in honor of St. Emilian, and the life of that servant of God, who, after living long a hermit, was called to serve a parish in the diocese of Tarragon, where a famous monastery now bears his name. {664} MARCH XXVII. ST. JOHN OF EGYPT, HERMIT. From Rufinus, in the second book of the lives of the fathers; and from Pallaudius in his Lausiaca; the last had often seen him. Also St. Jerom, St. Austin, Cassian, &c. See Tillemont, t. 10, p. 9. See also the Wonders of God in the Wilderness, p. 160. A.D. 394. ST. JOHN was born about the year 305, was of a mean extraction, and brought up to the trade of a carpenter. At twenty-five years of age he forsook the world, and put himself under the guidance and direction of an ancient holy anchoret with such an extraordinary humility and simplicity as struck the venerable old man with admiration; who inured him to obedience by making him water a dry stick for a whole year as if it were a live plant, and perform several other things as seemingly ridiculous, all which he executed with the utmost fidelity. To the saint's humility and ready obedience, Cassian[1] attributes the extraordinary gifts he afterwards received from God. He seems to have lived about twelve years with this old man, till his death, and about four more in different neighboring monasteries. Being about forty years of age, he retired alone to the top of a rock of very difficult ascent, near Lycopolis.[2] His cell he walled up, leaving only a little window through which he received all necessaries, and spoke to those who visited him what might be for their spiritual comfort and edification. During five days in the week he conversed only with God: but on Saturdays and Sundays all but women had free access to him for his instructions and spiritual advice. He never ate till after sunset, and then very sparingly; but never any thing that had been dressed by fire, not so much as bread. In this manner did he live from the fortieth or forty-second to the ninetieth year of his age. For the reception of such as came to him from remote parts, he permitted a kind of hospital to be built near his cell or grotto, where some of his disciples took care of them. He was illustrious for miracles, and a wonderful spirit of prophecy, with the power of discovering to those that came to see him, their most secret thoughts and hidden sins. And such was the fame of his predictions, and the lustre of his miracles which he wrought on the sick, by sending them some oil which he had blessed, that they drew the admiration of the whole world upon him. Theodosius the Elder was then emperor, and was attacked by the tyrant Maximus, become formidable by the success of his arms, having slain the emperor Gratian in 383, and dethroned Valentinian in 387. The pious emperor, finding his army much inferior to that of his adversary, caused this servant of God to be consulted concerning the success of the war against Maximus. Our saint foretold him that he should be victorious almost without blood. The emperor, full of confidence in the prediction, marched into the West, defeated the more numerous armies of Maximus twice in Pannonia; crossed the Alps, took the tyrant in Aquileia, and suffered {665} his soldiers to cut off his head. He returned triumphant to Constantinople, and attributed his victories very much to the prayers of St. John, who also foretold him the events of his other wars, the incursions of barbarians, and all that was to befall his empire. Four years after, in 392, Eugenius, by the assistance of Arbogastes, who had murdered the emperor Valentinian the Younger, usurped the empire of the West. Theodosius sent Eutropius the Eunuch into Egypt, with instructions to bring St. John with him to Constantinople, if it was possible; but that if he could not prevail with him to undertake the journey, to consult whether it was God's will that he should march against Eugenius, or wait his arrival in the East. The man of God excused himself as to his journey to court, but assured Eutropius that his prince should be victorious, but not without loss and blood: as also that he would die in Italy, and leave the empire of the West to his son; all which happened accordingly. Theodosius marched against Eugenius, and in the first engagement lost ten thousand men, and was almost defeated: but renewing the battle on the next day, the 6th of September, in 394, he gained an entire victory by the miraculous interposition of heaven, as even Claudian, the heathen poet, acknowledges. Theodosius died in the West, on the 17th of January, in 395, leaving his two sons emperors, Arcadius in the East, and Honorius in the West. This saint restored sight to a senator's wife by some of the oil he had blessed for healing the sick. It being his inviolable custom never to admit any woman to speak to him, this gave occasion to a remarkable incident related by Evagrius, Palladius, and St. Austin in his treatise of Care for the Dead. A certain general officer in the emperor's service visiting the saint, conjured him to permit his wife to speak to him; for she was come to Lycopolis, and had gone through many dangers and difficulties to enjoy that happiness. The holy man answered, that during his stricter enclosure for the last forty years since he had shut himself up in that rock, he had imposed on himself an inviolable rule not to see or converse with women; so he desired to be excused the granting her request. The officer returned to Lycopolis very melancholy. His wife, who was a person of great virtue, was not to be satisfied. The husband went back to the blessed man, told him that she would die of grief if he refused her request. The saint said to him: "Go to your wife, and tell her that she shall see me tonight, without coming hither or stirring out of her house." This answer he carried to her, and both were very earnest to know in what manner the saint would perform his promise. When she was asleep in the night, the man of God appeared to her in her dream, and said: "Your great faith, woman, obliged me to come to visit you; but I must admonish you to curb the like desires of seeing God's servants on earth. Contemplate only their life, and imitate their actions. As for me, why did you desire to see me? Am I a saint, or a prophet like God's true servants? I am a sinful and weak man. It is therefore only in virtue of your faith that I have had recourse to our Lord, who grants you the cure of the corporal diseases with which you are afflicted. Live always in the fear of God, apd never forget his benefits." He added several proper instructions for her conduct, any disappeared. The woman awaking, described to her husband the person she had seen in her dream, with all his features, in such a manner as to leave no room to doubt but it was the blessed man that had appeared to her. Whereupon he returned the next day to give him thanks for the satisfaction he had vouchsafed his wife. But the saint on his arrival prevented him, saying: "I have fulfilled your desire, I have seen your wife, and satisfied her in all things she had asked: go in peace." The officer received his benediction, and continued his journey to Seyne. What the man of God foretold happened to him, as, {666} among other things, that he should receive particular honors from the emperor. Besides the authors of the saint's life, St. Austin relates this history which he received from a nobleman of great integrity and credit, who had it from the very persons to whom it happened. St. Austin adds, had he seen St. John, he would have inquired of him, whether he himself really appeared to this woman, or whether it was an angel in his shape, or whether the vision only passed in her imagination.[3] In the year 394, a little before the saint's death, he was visited by Palladius, afterwards bishop of Helenopolis, who is one of the authors of his life. Several anchorets of the deserts of Nitria, all strangers, the principal of whom were Evagrius, Albinus, Ammonius, had a great desire to see the saint. Palladius, one of this number, being young, set out first in July, when the flood of the Nile was high. Being arrived at this mountain, he found the door of his porch shut, and that it would not be open till the Saturday following. He waited that time in the lodgings of strangers. On Saturday, at eight o'clock, Palladius entered the porch, and saw the saint sitting before his window, and giving advice to those who applied to him for it. Having saluted Palladius by an interpreter, he asked him of what country he was, and what was his business, and if he was not of the company or monastery of Evagrius: Palladius owned he was. In the mean time arrived Alypius, governor of the province, in great haste. The saint, on the arrival of Alypius, broke off his discourse with Palladius, who withdrew to make room for the governor to discourse with the saint. Their conversation was very long, and Palladius being, weary, murmured within himself against the venerable old man, as guilty of exception of persons. He was even just going away, when the saint, knowing his secret thoughts, sent Theodorus, his interpreter, to him, saying: "Go, bid that brother not to be impatient: I am going to dismiss the governor, and then will speak to him." Palladius, astonished that his thoughts should be known to him, waited with patience. As soon as Alypius was gone, St. John called Palladius, and said to him: "Why was {sic} you angry, imputing to me in your mind what I was no way guilty of? To you I can speak at any other time, and you have many fathers and brethren to comfort and direct you in the paths of salvation. But this governor being involved in the hurry of temporal affairs, and being come to receive some wholesome advice during the short time his affairs will allow him time to breathe in, how could I give you the preference?" He then told Palladius what passed in his heart, and his secret temptations to quit his solitude; for which end the devil represented to him his father's regret for his absence, and that he might induce his brother and sister to embrace a solitary life. The holy man bade him despise such suggestions; for they had both already renounced the world, and his father would yet live seven years. He foretold him that he should meet with great persecutions and sufferings, and should be a bishop, but with many afflictions: all which came to pass, though at that time extremely improbable. The same year, St. Petronius, with six other monks, made a long journey to pay St. John a visit. He asked them if any among them was in holy orders. They said: No. One, however, the youngest in the company, was a deacon, though this was unknown to the rest. The saint, by divine instinct, knew this circumstance, and that the deacon had concealed his orders out of a false humility, not to seem superior to the others, but their inferior, as he was in age. Therefore, pointing to him, he said: "This man is a deacon." The other denied it, upon the false persuasion that to lie with a view to one's own humiliation was no sin. St. John took him by {667} the hand, and kissing it, said to him: "My son, take care never to deny the grace you have received from God, lest humility betray you into a lie. We must never lie, under any pretence of good whatever, because no untruth can be from God." The deacon received this rebuke with great respect. After their prayer together, one of the company begged of the saint to be cured of the tertian ague. He answered: "You desire to be freed from a sickness which is beneficial to you. As nitre cleanses the body, so distempers and other chastisements purify the soul." However, he blessed some oil and gave it to him: he vomited plentifully after it, and was from that moment perfectly cured. They returned to their lodgings, where, by his orders, they were treated with all proper civility, and cordial hospitality. When they went to him again, he received them with joyfulness in his countenance, which evidenced the interior spiritual joy of his soul; he bade them sit down, and asked them whence they came. They said, from Jerusalem. He then made them a long discourse, in which he first endeavored to show his own baseness; after which he explained the means by which pride and vanity are to be banished out of the heart, and all virtues to be acquired. He related to them the examples of many monks, who, by suffering their hearts to be secretly corrupted by vanity, at last fell also into scandalous irregularities; as of one, who, after a most holy and austere life, by this means fell into fornication, and then by despair into all manner of disorders: also of another, who, from vanity, fell into a desire of leaving his solitude; but by a sermon he preached to others, in a monastery on his road, was mercifully converted, and became an eminent penitent. The blessed John thus entertained Petronius and his company for three days, till the hour of None. When they were leaving him, he gave them his blessing, and said: "Go in peace, my children; and know that the news of the victory which the religious prince Theodosius has gained over the tyrant Eugenius, is this day come to Alexandria: but this excellent emperor will soon end his life by a natural death." Some days after their leaving him to return home, they were informed he had departed this life. Having been favored by a foresight of his death, he would see nobody for the last three days. At the end of this term he sweetly expired, being on his knees at prayer, towards the close of the year 394, of the beginning of 395. It might probably be on the 17th of October, on which day the Copths, or Egyptian Christians, keep his festival: the Roman and other Latin Martyrologies mark it on the 27th of March. * * * * * The solitude which the Holy Ghost recommends, and which the saints embraced, resembled that of Jesus Christ, being founded in the same motive or principle, and having the same exercises and employments, and the same end. Christ was conducted by the Holy Ghost into the desert, and he there spent his time in prayer and fasting. Woe to those whom humor or passion leads into solitude, or who consecrate it not to God by mortification, sighs of penance, and hymns of divine praise. To those who thus sanctify their desert, or cell, it will be an anticipated paradise, an abyss of spiritual advantages and comforts, known only to such as have enjoyed them. _The Lord will change the desert into a place of delights, and will make the solitude a paradise and a garden worthy of himself._[4] In it only joy and jubilee shall be seen, nothing shall be heard but thanksgiving and praise. It is the dwelling of a terrestrial seraph, whose sole employment is to labor to know, and correct, all secret disorders of his own soul, to forget the world, and all objects of vanity which could distract or entangle him; to subdue his senses, to purify the faculties of his soul, and entertain in his {668} heart a constant fire of devotion, by occupying it assiduously on God, Jesus Christ, and heavenly things, and banishing all superfluous desires and thoughts; lastly, to make daily progress in purity of conscience, humility, mortification, recollection, and prayer, and to find all his joy in the most fervent and assiduous adoration, love, and praise of his sovereign Creator and Redeemer. Footnotes: 1. Coll. b. 4, c. 21, p. 81. 2. A city in the north of Thebais, in Egypt. 3. S. Aug. l. pro curâ de mortuis, c. 17, p. 294. 4. Isa. lxiii. ST. RUPERT, OR ROBERT, C. BISHOP OF SALTZBOURG. HE was by birth a Frenchman, and of royal blood; but still more illustrious for his learning, and the extraordinary virtues he practised from his youth. He exercised himself is austere fasting, watching, and other mortifications; was a great lover of chastity and temperance; and so charitable as always to impoverish himself to enrich the poor. His reputation drew persons from remote provinces to receive his advice and instructions. He removed all their doubts and scruples, comforted the afflicted, cured the sick, and healed the disorders of souls. So distinguished a merit raised him to the episcopal see of Worms. But that people, being for the most part idolaters, could not bear the lustre of such a sanctity, which condemned their irregularities and superstitions. They beat him with rods, loaded him with all manner of outrages, and expelled him the city. But God prepared for him another harvest. Theodon, duke of Bavaria, hearing of his reputation and miracles, sent messengers to him, earnestly beseeching him to come and preach the gospel to the Baioarians, or Bavarians. This happened two years after his expulsion from Worms: during which interval he had made a journey to Rome. He was received at Ratisbon by Theodon and his court with all possible distinction, in 697, and found the hearts both of the nobles and people docile to the word of God. The Christian faith had been planted in that country two hundred years before, by St. Severinus, the apostle of Noricum. After his death, heresies and heathenish superstitions had entirely extinguished the light of the gospel. Bagintrude, sister of duke Theodon, being a Christian, disposed her brother and the whole country to receive the faith. Rupert, with the help of other zealous priests, whom he had brought with him, instructed, and, after a general fast, baptized, the duke Theodon and the lords and people of the whole country. God confirmed his preaching by many miracles. He converted also to Christianity the neighboring nations. After Ratisbon, the capital, the second chief seat of his labors was Laureacum, now called Lorch,[1] where he healed several diseases by prayer, and made many converts. However, it was not Lorch, nor the old Reginum, thence called Regensbourg, now Ratisbon, the capital of all those provinces, that was pitched upon to be the seat of the saint's bishopric, but old Juvavia, then almost in ruins, since rebuilt and called Saltzbourg. The duke Theodon adorned and enriched it with many magnificent donations, which enabled St. Rupert to found there several rich churches and monasteries. After the prince's death, his son Theodebert, or Diotper, inheriting his zeal and piety, augmented considerably the revenues of this church. St. Rupert took a journey into France to procure a new supply of able laborers, and brought back to Saltzbourg twelve holy missionaries, with his niece St. Erentrude, a virgin consecrated to God, for whom he built a great monastery, called Nunberg, of which {669} she was the first abbess.[2] St. Rupert labored several years in this see, and died happily on Easter-day, which fell that year on the 27th of March, after he had said mass and preached; on which day the Roman and other Martyrologies mention him. His principal festival is kept with the greatest solemnity in Austria and Bavaria on the 25th of September, the day of one of the translations of his relics, which are kept in the church under his name in Saltzbourg. Mabillon and Bulteau, upon no slight grounds, think this saint to have lived a whole century later than is commonly supposed, and that he founded the church of Saltzbourg about the year 700. See his life, published by Canisius, Henschenius, and Mabillon, with the notes of the last-mentioned editor. Footnotes: 1. A village on the Danube in the midway between Ratisbon and Vienna, the capital of eastern Bavaria, at present Austria. 2. The bishop of Saltzbourg was, under Charlemagne, made an archbishop and metropolitan of Bavaria, Austria, and its hereditary territories. He is one of the first ecclesiastical princes of the empire, and is elected by the canons of the cathedral, who are all of noble extraction. MARCH XXVIII. PRISCUS, MALCHUS, AND ALEXANDER, MARTYRS. From Eus. Hist. b. 7, c. 12, p. 262. A.D. 260. THESE eminent Christians, Priscus, Malchus, and Alexander, led a retired holy life in the country near Cæsarea, in Palestine. During the fury of the persecution under Valerian, they often called to mind the triumphs of the martyrs, and secretly reproached themselves with cowardice, as living like soldiers who passed their time in softness and ease, while their brethren and fellow-warriors bore all the heat of the battle. They could not long smother these warm sentiments in their breast; but expressed them to one another. "What," said they, "while the secure gate of heaven is open, shall we shut it against ourselves? Shall we be so faint-hearted as not to suffer for the name of Christ, who died for us? Our brethren invite us by their example: their blood is a loud voice, which presses us to tread in their steps. Shall we be deaf to a cry calling us to the combat, and to a glorious victory?" Full of this holy ardor, they all, with one mind, repaired to Cæsarea, and of their own accord, by a particular instinct of grace, presented themselves before the governor, declaring themselves Christians. While all others were struck with admiration at the sight of their generous courage, the barbarous judge appeared not able to contain his rage. After having tried on them all the tortures which he employed on other martyrs, he condemned them to be exposed to wild beasts. They are honored on this day in the Roman Martyrology. * * * * * In consecrating ourselves to the service of God, and to his pure love, the first and most essential condition is that we do it without reserve, with an earnest desire of attaining to the perfection of our state, and a firm resolution of sparing nothing, and being deterred by no difficulties from pursuing this end with our whole strength; and it must be our chief care constantly to maintain, and always increase this desire in our souls. Upon this condition {670} depends all out spiritual progress. This is more essential in a religious state than the vows themselves; and it is this which makes the difference betwixt the fervent and the lukewarm Christian. Many deceive themselves in this particular, and flatter themselves their resolution of aspiring after perfection, with all their strength, is sincere, whereas it is very imperfect. Of this we can best judge by their earnestness to advance in a spirit of prayer, and in becoming truly spiritual; in crucifying self-love, overcoming their failings, and cutting off all occasions of dissipation, and all impediments of their spiritual advancement. Mortification and prayer, which are the principal means, present usually the greatest difficulties: but these, as St. Terasa observes, are better than half vanquished and removed by a firm resolution of not being discouraged by any obstacles, but of gathering from them fresh vigor and strength. Patience and fortitude crown in the saints what this fervent resolution began. ST. SIXTUS III., POPE. HE was a priest among the Roman clergy in 418, when pope Zozimus condemned the Pelagian heretics. Sixtus was the first, after this sentence, who pronounced publicly anathema against them, to stop their slander in Africa that he favored their doctrine, as we are assured by St. Austin and St. Prosper in his chronicle. The former sent him two congratulatory letters the same year, in which he applauds this testimony of his zeal, and in the first of these letters professes a high esteem of a treatise written by him in defence of the grace of God against its enemies. It was that calumny of the Pelagian heretics that led Garnier into the mistake that our saint at first favored their errors. But a change of this kind would not have been buried in silence. After the death of St. Celestine, Sixtus was chosen pope in 432. He wrote to Nestorius to endeavor to reclaim him after his condemnation at Ephesus, in 431: but his heart was hardened, and he stopped his ears against all wholesome admonitions. The pope had the comfort to see a happy reconciliation made, by his endeavors, between the Orientals and St. Cyril: in which he much commended the humility and pacific dispositions of the latter. He says "that he was charged with the care and solicitude of all the churches in the world,[1] and that it is unlawful for any one to abandon the faith of the apostolic Roman church, in which St. Peter teaches in his successors what he received from Christ."[2] When Bassus, a nobleman of Rome, had been condemned by the emperor, and excommunicated by a synod of bishops for raising a grievous slander against the good pope, the meek servant of Christ visited and assisted him in person, administered him the viaticum in his last sickness; and buried him with his own hands. Julian of Eclanum or Eculanum, the famous Pelagian, earnestly desiring to recover his see, made great efforts to be admitted to the communion of the church, pretending that he was become a convert, and used several artifices to convince our saint that he really was so: but he was too well acquainted with them to be imposed on. This holy pope died soon after, on the 28th of March, in 440, having sat in the see near eight years. See his letters, Anastasius's Pontifical, with the notes of Bianchini, &c. Footnotes: 1. Ep. 1, ad Episc. Orient. p. 1236. Ep. decret. t. 1. 2. Ep. 6, and Joan. Antioch. contra Nestor. {671} ST. GONTRAN, KING AND CONFESSOR. HE was son of king Clotaire, and grandson of Clovis I. and St. Clotildis. Being the second son, while his brothers Charibert reigned at Paris, and Sigebert in Austrasia, residing at Metz, he was crowned king of Orleans and Burgundy in 561, making Challons on the Saone his capital. When compelled to take up arms against his ambitious brothers and the Lombards, he made no other use of his victories under the conduct of a brave general called Mommol, than to give peace to his dominions. He protected his nephews against the practices of the wicked dowager queens, Brunehault of Sigebert, and Fredegonde of Chilperic, the firebrands of France. The putting to death the physicians of the queen, at her request, on her death-bed, and the divorcing his wife Mercatrude, are crimes laid to his charge, in which the barbarous manners of his nation involved him: but these he effaced by tears of repentance. He governed his kingdom, studying rather to promote the temporal happiness of others than his own, a stranger to the passions of pride, jealousy, and ambition, and making piety the only rule of his policy. The prosperity of his reign, both in peace and war, condemn those who think that human policy cannot be modelled by the maxims of the gospel, whereas nothing can render a government more flourishing. He always treated the pastors of the church with respect and veneration, regarding them as his fathers, and honoring and consulting them as his masters. He was the protector of the oppressed, and the tender parent of his subjects, whom he treated as his children. He poured out his treasures among them with a holy profusion; especially in the time of a pestilence and famine. He gave the greatest attention to the care of the sick. He fasted, prayed, wept, and offered himself to God night and day, as a victim ready to be sacrificed on the altar of his justice, to avert his indignation, which he believed he himself had provoked, and drawn down upon his innocent people. He was a severe punisher of crimes in his officers and others, and, by many wholesome regulations, restrained the barbarous licentiousness of his troops, but no man was more ready to forgive offences against his own person. He contented himself with imprisoning a man who, through the instigation of queen Fredegonde, had attempted to stab him, and he spared another assassin sent by the same wicked woman, because he had taken shelter in a church. With royal magnificence he built and endowed many churches and monasteries. St. Gregory of Tours relates many miracles performed by him both before and after his death, to some of which he was an eye-witness. This good king, like another penitent David, having spent his life after his conversion, though on the throne, in the retirement and penance of a recluse, (as St. Hugh of Cluny says of him, exhorting king Philip I. to imitate his example,) died on the 28th of March, in 593, in the sixty-eighth year of his age, having reigned thirty-one and some months. He was buried in the church of St. Marcellus, which he had founded. The Huguenots scattered his ashes in the sixteenth century: only his skull escaped their fury, and is now kept there in a silver case. He is mentioned in the Roman Martyrology. See St. Gregory of Tours, Fredegarius, and Baillet. {672} MARCH XXIX. SS. JONAS, BARACHISIUS, AND THEIR COMPANIONS, MARTYRS. From their genuine acts compiled by Esalas, a noble Armenian knight in the troops of king Sapor, an eye witness; published in the original Chaldaic, by Stephen Assemani, Act. Mart. Orient. t. 1, p. 211. They were much adulterated by the Greeks in Metaphrastes. Ruinart and Tillemont think Sapor raised no persecution before his fortieth year: but Assemani proves from these acts, and several other monuments, a persecution in his eighteenth year. See Præf. Gen. and p. 214, app. A.D. 327. KING SAPOR, in the eighteenth year of his reign, raised a bloody persecution against the Christians, and demolished their churches and monasteries. Jonas and Barachisius, two brothers of the city Beth-Asa, hearing that several Christians lay under sentence of death at Hubaham, went thither to encourage and serve them. Nine of that number received the crown of martyrdom. After their execution, Jonas and Barachisius were apprehended for having exhorted them to die. The president mildly entreated the two brothers to obey the king of kings, meaning the king of Persia, and to worship the sun, moon, fire, and water. Their answer was, that it was more reasonable to obey the immortal King of heaven and earth than a mortal prince. The Magians were much offended to hear their king called mortal. By their advice the martyrs were separated, and Barachisius was cast into a very narrow close dungeon. Jonas they detained with them, endeavoring to persuade him to sacrifice to fire, the sun, and water. The prince of the Magians, seeing him inflexible, caused him to be laid fiat on his belly with a stake under his navel, and to be beaten both with knotty clubs and with rods. The martyr all the time continued in prayer, saying: "I thank you, O God of our father Abraham. Enable me, I beseech you, to offer to you acceptable holocausts. _One thing I have asked of the Lord: this will I seek after_.[1] The sun, moon, fire, and water I renounce: I believe and confess the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost." The judge ordered him next to be set in a frozen pond, with a cord tied to his foot. After supper, and a short nap, he sent for Barachisius, and told him his brother had sacrificed. The martyr said it was impossible that he should have paid divine honors to fire, a vile creature, and spoke much on the immensity and power of God, and with such, eloquence and force that the Magians were astonished to hear him, and said one to another, that if he were permitted to speak in public, he would draw over many from their religion. Whereupon they concluded for the future to hold his interrogatories in the night. In the mean time they caused two red-hot iron plates, and two red-hot hammers, to be applied under each arm, and said to him: "If you shake off either of these, by the king's fortune, you deny Christ." He meekly replied: "I fear not your fire; nor shall I throw off your instruments of torture. I beg you to try without delay all your torments on me. He who is engaged in combat for God is full of courage." They ordered melted lead to be dropped into his nostrils and eyes; and that he should then be carried to prison, and there hung up by one foot. Jonas, after this, being brought out of his pool, the Magians said to him: "How do you find yourself this morning? We imagine you passed the {673} last night out very uncomfortably." "No," replied Jonas; "from the day I came into the world, I never remember a night more sweet and agreeable: for I was wonderfully refreshed by the remembrance of Christ's sufferings." The Magians said: "Your companion hath renounced." The martyr, interrupting them, answered: "I know that he hath long ago renounced the devil and his angels." The Magians urged: "Take care lest you perish, abandoned both by God and man." Jonas replied: "If you are really wise, as you boast, judge if it be not better to sow the corn than to keep it hoarded up. Our life is a seed sown to rise again in the world to come, when it will be renewed by Christ in immortal light." The Magians said: "Your books have drawn many aside." Jonas answered: "They have indeed drawn many from worldly pleasures. When a servant of Christ is in his sufferings inebriated with love from the passion of his Lord, he forgets the transitory state of this short life, its riches, estates, gold, and honors; regardless of kings and princes, lords and noblemen, where an eternity is at stake, he desires nothing but the sight of the only true King, whose empire is everlasting, and whose power reaches to all ages." The judges commanded all his fingers and toes to be cut off, joint by joint, and scattered about. Then they said to him: "Now wait the harvest to reap other hands from this seed." To whom he said: "Other hands I do not ask. God is present, who first framed me, and who will give me new strength." After this, the skin was torn off the martyr's head, his tongue was cut out, and he was thrown into a vessel of boiling pitch; but the pitch by a sudden ebullition running over, the servant of God was not hurt by it. The judges next ordered him to be squeezed in a wooden press till his veins, sinews, and fibres burst. Lastly, his body was sawn with an iron saw, and, by pieces, thrown into a dry cistern. Guards were appointed to watch the sacred relics, lest Christians should steal them away. The judges then called upon Barachisius to spare his own body. To whom he said: "This body I did not frame, neither will I destroy it. God its maker will again restore it and will judge you and your king." Hormisdatscirus, turning to Maharnarsces, said: "By our delays we affront the king. These men regard neither words nor torments." They therefore agreed that he should be beaten with sharp-pointed rushes; then that splinters of reeds should be applied to his body, and by cords strait drawn and pulled, should be pressed deep into his flesh, and that in this condition his body, pierced all over with sharp spikes, armed like a porcupine, should be rolled on the ground. After these tortures, he was put into the screw or press, and boiling pitch and brimstone were poured into his mouth. By this last torment he obtained a crown equal to that of his brother. Under their most exquisite tortures they thought they bought heaven too cheap. Upon the news of their death, Abtusciatus, an old friend, came and purchased their bodies for five hundred drachms and three silk garments, binding himself also by oath never to divulge the sale. The acts are closed by these words: "This book was written from the mouths of witnesses, and contains the acts of the saints, Jonas, Barachisius, and others, martyrs of Christ, who by his succor fought, triumphed, and were crowned, in whose prayers we beg place may be found, by Esaias, son of Adabus of Arzun, in Armenia, of the troop of royal horsemen, who was present at their interrogatories and tortures, and who wrote the history of their conflicts." They were crowned on the 29th of the moon of December. This was the 24th of that month, in the year of Christ 327, of Sopar II. the 18th. The Roman Martyrology mentions them on the 29th of March. * * * * * Those powerful motives which supported the martyrs under the sharpest {674} torments, ought to inspire us with patience, resignation, and holy joy, under sickness and all crosses or trials. These are the times of the greatest spiritual harvest, by the exercise of the most perfect virtues. For nothing is more heroic in the practice of Christian virtue, nothing more precious in the sight of God, than the sacrifice of patience, submission, constant fidelity and charity in a state of suffering. Under sickness we are too apt eagerly to desire health, that we may be able to do something for God, and to discharge the obligations of our profession, as we persuade ourselves. This is a mere invention of self-love, which is impatient under the weight of humiliation. Nothing, indeed, is more severe to nature than such a state of death, and there is nothing which it is not desirous of doing, to recover that active life, which carries an air of importance by making an appearance in the tumultuous scene of the world. But how much does the soul generally lose by such an exchange! Ah! did we but truly know how great are the spiritual advantages and riches, and how great the glory of patience founded upon motives of true charity, and how precious the victories and triumphs are which it gains over self-love, we should rejoice too much in a state of suffering and humiliation ever to entertain any inordinate desires of changing it. We should only ask for health in sickness under this condition, if it be more expedient for God's honor and our spiritual advancement. With St. Paul, we should find a joy and delight in a state of privation and suffering, in which we enter into a true sense of our absolute weakness, feel that we are nothing, and have no reliance but on God alone. Footnotes: 1. Psa. xxvi 4. SS. ARMOGASTES, ARCHINIMUS, AND SATURUS, MARTYRS. GENSERIC, the Arian king of the Vandals, to Africa, having, on his return out of Italy, in 457, enacted new penal laws, and severer than any he had till then put in force against Catholics, count Armogastes was on that occasion deprived of his honors and dignities at court, and most cruelly tortured. But no sooner had the jailers bound him with cords, but they broke of themselves, as the martyr lifted up his eyes to heaven; and this happened several times. And though they afterwards hung him up by one foot with his head downwards for a considerable time, the saint was no more affected by this torment than if he had lain all the while at his ease on a feather-bed. Theodoric, the king's son, thereupon ordered his head to be struck off: but one of his Arian priests diverted him from it, advising him to take other measures with him to prevent his being looked upon as a martyr by those of his party, which would be of disservice to the opposite cause. He was therefore sent into Byzacena to work in the mines; and some time after, for his greater disgrace, he was removed thence into the neighborhood of Carthage, and employed in keeping cows. But he looked upon it as his glory to be dishonored before men in the cause of God. It was not long before he had a revelation that his end drew near. So having foretold the time of his death, and given orders to a devout Christian about the place where he desired to be interred, the holy confessor, a few days after, went to receive the rewards of those that suffer in the cause of truth. Archinimus, of the city Mascula, in Numidia, resisted all the artifices which the king could use to overcome his faith, and was condemned to be beheaded, but was reprieved while he stood under the axe. Satur, or Saturus, was master of the household to Huneric, by whom he was threatened to be deprived of his estate, goods, slaves, wife, and children for his faith. {675} His own wife omitted nothing in her power to prevail with him to purchase his pardon at the expense of his conscience. But he courageously answered her in the words of Job: "_You have spoken like one of the foolish women_.[1] If you loved me, you would give me different advice, and not push me on to a second death. Let them do their worst: I will always remember our Lord's words: _If any man come to me, and hate not his father and mother, his wife and children, his brethren and sisters, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple_."[2] He suffered many torments, was stripped of all his substance, forbid ever to appear in public, and reduced to great distress. But God enriched him with his graces, and called him to himself. See St. Victor Vitensis, Hist. Persec. Vandal, l. 1, n. 14. Footnotes: 1. Job ii. 9. 2. Luke xiv. 26. ST. EUSTASIUS, OR EUSTACHIUS, ABBOT OF LUXEU, SUCCEEDED his master St. Columban in that charge, in 611. He sanctified himself by humility, continual prayer, watching, and fasting; was the spiritual father of six hundred monks, and of many holy bishops and saints, and died in 625. He is named in the Martyrologies of Ado, and in the Roman. See his life by Jonas, his colleague, in the Bollandists, and in Mabillon. ST. GUNDLEUS, CONFESSOR. THIS saint, who was formerly honored with great devotion in Wales, was son to the king of the Dimetians in South-Wales. After the death of his father, though the eldest son, he divided the kingdom with his six brothers who nevertheless respected and obeyed him as if he had been their sovereign. He married Gladusa, daughter of Braghan, prince of that country, which is called from him Brecknockshire, and was father of St. Canoe and St. Keyna. St. Gundleus had by her the great St. Cadoc, who afterwards founded the famous monastery of Llancarvan, three miles from Cowbridge, in Glamorganshire. Gundleus lived so as to have always in view the heavenly kingdom for which we are created by God. To secure this, he retired wholly from the world long before his death, and passed his time in a solitary little dwelling near a church which he had built. His clothing was sackcloth, his food barley-bread, upon which he usually strewed ashes, and his drink was water. Prayer and contemplation were his constant occupation, to which he rose at midnight, and he subsisted by the labor of his hands: thus he lived many years. Some days before his death he sent for St. Dubritius and his son St. Cadoc, and by their assistance, and the holy rites of the church, prepared himself for his passage to eternity. He departed to our Lord towards the end of the fifth century, and was glorified by miracles. See his life in Capgrave and Henschenius, from the collection of John of Tinmouth. See also bishop Usher. ST. MARK, BISHOP AND CONFESSOR. SOME Greeks rank among the saints on this day, Mark, bishop of Arethusa, in Syria, in the fourth age. When Constantius put to death his uncle, {676} Julius Constantius, brother of Constantine the Great, with his eldest son; the two younger, Gallus and Julian, narrowly escaped the sword. In that danger Mark concealed Julian, and secretly supplied him with necessaries for his subsistence. When Julian became emperor, he commanded that the temples which had been demolished by Christians, during the two preceding reigns, should be rebuilt at their expense. Mark had, by the authority of Constantius, demolished a very magnificent temple which was held in great veneration by the idolaters: he had also built a church, and converted a great number of infidels. Authorized by the law of Julian, the heathens of Arethusa, when they saw themselves uppermost, fell on the Christians; and Mark, finding that they were ready to show their resentment against him in particular, which they had long concealed, he at first, pursuant to the gospel precept, betook himself to flight to escape their fury. But understanding that they had apprehended some of his flock instead of him, he returned and delivered himself up to the persecutors, to animate others in the same cause by his example and instructions. They seized him soon after his return, dragged him through the streets by the hair, or any part they could lay hold of, without the least compassion for his age, or regard for his virtue and learning. Having stripped him, and scourged him all over his body, joining ignominy and insults with cruelty, they threw him into the stinking public jakes. Having taken him from thence, they left him to the children, ordering them to prick and pierce him, without mercy, with their writing-styles, or steel pencils. They bound his legs with cords so tight as to cut and bruise his flesh to the very bone; they wrung off his ears with small strong threads; and in this maimed, bloody condition, they pushed him from one to another. After this they rubbed him over with honey and fat broth; and shutting him up in a kind of cage, hung him up in the air where the sun was most scorching, at noonday, in the midst of summer, in order to draw the wasps and gnats upon him, whose stings are exceeding sharp and piercing in those hot countries. He was so calm in the midst of his sufferings, that, though so sorely wounded and covered with flies and wasps, he bantered them as he hung in the air; telling them, that while they were grovelling on the earth, he was raised by them towards heaven. They frequently solicited him to rebuild their temple, but though they reduced their demands by degrees to a trifling sum, he constantly answered, that it would be an impiety to give them one farthing towards such a work. This indeed would be to concur to idolatrous worship; but his demolishing the temple would have been against the order of law and justice, had he done it without public authority. At length the fury of the people was turned into admiration of his patience, and they set him at liberty; and several of them afterwards begged of him to instruct them in the principles of a religion which was capable of inspiring such a resolution. Having spent the remainder of his life in the faithful discharge of the duties of his station, he died in peace under Jovian or Valens. He is not named in the Roman Martyrology, nor venerated by the church among the saints. He had been long engaged in the errors and intrigues of the Semi-Arians; but the encomiums given him by St. Gregory Nazianzen, Theodoret, and Sozomen, when they relate his sufferings, show that towards the end of the reign of Constantius, he joined in the orthodox communion. {677} MARCH XXX. ST. JOHN CLIMACUS, ABBOT. From his life written by Daniel, a monk of Raithu, soon after his death, and from his own works. See Bulteau, Hist Monast. d'Orient, and d'Andilly, or rather his nephew, Le Maître, in his life prefixed to the French translation of his works. See also Jos. Assemani, in Cal. Univ. ad 30 Martii, t. 6, p. 213. A.D. 605. ST. JOHN, generally distinguished by the appellation of Climacus, from his excellent book entitled Climax, or the Ladder to Perfection, was born about the year 525, probably in Palestine. By his extraordinary progress in the arts and sciences, he obtained very young the surname of the Scholastic. But at sixteen years of age he renounced all the advantages which the world promised him, to dedicate himself to God in a religious state, in 547. He retired to Mount Sinai, which, from the time of the disciples of St. Antony and St. Hilarion, had been always peopled by holy men, who, in imitation of Moses, when he received the law on that mountain, lived in the perpetual contemplation of heavenly things. Our novice, fearing the danger of dissipation and relaxation, to which numerous communities are generally more exposed than others, chose not to live in the great monastery on the summit, but in a hermitage on the descent of the mountain, under the discipline of Martyrius, a holy ancient anchoret. By silence, he curbed the insolent itch of talking about every thing, an ordinary vice in learned men, but usually a mark of pride and self-sufficiency. By perfect humility and obedience, he banished the dangerous desire of self-complacency in his actions. He never contradicted, never disputed with any one. So perfect was his submission, that he seemed to have no self-will. He undertook to sail through the deep sea of this mortal life securely, under the direction of a prudent guide, and shunned those rocks which he could not have escaped, had he presumed to steer alone, as he tells us.[1] From the visible mountain he raised his heart, without interruption, in all his actions, to God, who is invisible; and, attentive to all the motions of his grace, studied only to do his will. Four years he spent in the trial of his own strength, and in learning the obligations of his state, before he made his religious profession, which was in the twentieth year of his age. In his writings, he severely condemns engagements made by persons too young, or before a sufficient probation. By fervent prayer and fasting he prepared himself for the solemn consecration of himself to God, that the most intense fervor might make his holocaust the more perfect: and from that moment he seemed to be renewed in spirit; and his master admired the strides with which, like a mighty giant, the young disciple advanced, daily more and more, towards God by self-denial, obedience, humility, and the uninterrupted exercises of divine love and prayer. In the year 560, and the thirty-fifth of his age, he lost Martyrius by death, having then spent nineteen years in that place in penance and holy contemplation. By the advice of a prudent director, he then embraced an eremitical life in a plain called Thole, near the foot of Mount Sinai. His cell was five miles from the church, probably the same which had been built a little {678} before, by order of the emperor Justinian, for the use of the monks, at the bottom of this mountain, in honor of the Blessed Virgin, as Procopius mentions.[2] Thither he went every Saturday and Sunday to assist, with all the other anchorets and monks of that desert, at the holy office and at the celebration of the divine mysteries, when they all communicated. His diet was very sparing, though, to shun ostentation and the danger of vain-glory, he ate of every thing that was allowed among the monks of Egypt, who universally abstained from flesh, fish, &c. Prayer was his principal employment; and he practised what he earnestly recommends to all Christians, that in all their actions, thoughts, and words, they should keep themselves with great fervor in the presence of God, and direct all they do to his holy will.[3] By habitual contemplation he acquired an extraordinary purity of heart, and such a facility of lovingly beholding God in all his works, that this practice seemed in him a second nature. Thus he accompanied his studies with perpetual prayer. He assiduously read the holy scriptures, and fathers, and was one of the most learned doctors of the church. But, to preserve the treasure of humility, he concealed, as much as possible, both his natural and acquired talents, and the extraordinary graces with which the Holy Ghost enriched his soul. By this secrecy he fled from the danger of vain-glory, which, like a leech, sticks to our best actions, and sucking from them its nourishment, robs us of their fruit. As if this cell had not been sufficiently remote from the eyes of men, St. John frequently retired into a neighboring cavern, which he had made in the rock, where no one could come to disturb his devotions, or interrupt his tears. So ardent were his charity and compunction, that his eyes seemed two fountains, which scarce ever ceased to flow; and his continual sighs and groans to heaven, under the weight of the miseries inseparable from his moral pilgrimage, were not to be equalled by the vehemency of the cries of those who suffer from knives and fire. Overcome by importunities, he admitted a holy anchoret named Moyses to live with him as his disciple. God bestowed on St. John an extraordinary grace of healing the spiritual disorders of souls. Among others, a monk called Isaac, was brought almost to the brink of despair by most violent temptations of the flesh. He addressed himself to St. John; who perceived by his tears how much he underwent from that conflict and struggle which he felt within himself. The servant of God commended his faith, and said: "My son, let us have recourse to God by prayer." They accordingly prostrated themselves together on the ground in fervent supplication for a deliverance, and from that time the infernal serpent left Isaac to peace. Many others resorted to St. John for spiritual advice: but the devil excited some to jealousy, who censured him as one who, out of vanity, lost much time in unprofitable discourse. The saint took this accusation, which was a mere calumny, in good part, and as a charitable admonition; he therefore imposed on himself a rigorous silence for near a twelvemonth. This his humility and modesty so much astonished his calumniators, that they joined the rest of the monks in beseeching him to reassume his former function of giving charitable advice to all that resorted to him for it, and not to bury that talent of science which he had received for the benefit of many. He who knew not what it was to contradict others, with the same humility and deference again opened his mouth to instruct his neighbor in the rules of perfect virtue: in which office, such was the reputation of his wisdom and experience, that he was regarded as another Moses in that holy place. St. John was now seventy-five years old, and had spent forty of them in {679} his hermitage, when, in the year six hundred, he was unanimously chosen abbot of Mount Sinai, and superior-general of all the monks and hermits in that country. Soon after he was raised to this dignity, the people of Palestine and Arabia, in the time of a great drought and famine, made their application to him as to another Elias, begging him to intercede with God in their behalf. The saint failed not with great earnestness to recommend their distress to the Father of mercies, and his prayer was immediately recompensed with abundant rains. St. Gregory the Great., who then sat in St. Peter's chair, wrote to our holy abbot,[4] recommending himself to his prayers, and sent him beds, with other furniture and money, for his hospital, for the use of pilgrims near Mount Sinai. John, who had used his utmost endeavors to decline the pastoral charge, when he saw it laid upon him, neglected no means which might promote the sanctification of all those who were entrusted to his care. That posterity might receive some share in the benefit of his holy instructions, John, the learned and virtuous abbot of Raithu, a monastery-situate towards the Red Sea, entreated him by that obedience he had ever practised, even with regard to his inferiors, that he would draw up the most necessary rules by which fervent souls might arrive at Christian perfection. The saint answered him, that nothing but extreme humility could have moved him to write to so miserable a sinner, destitute of every sort of virtue; but that he received his commands with respect, though far above his strength, never considering his own insufficiency. Wherefore, apprehensive of falling into death by disobedience, he took up his pen in haste, with great eagerness mixed with fear, and set himself to draw some imperfect outlines as an unskilful painter, leaving them to receive from him, as a great master, the finishing strokes. This produced the excellent work which he called Climax, or the ladder of religious perfection. This book being written in sentences, almost in the manner of aphorisms, abounds more in sense than words. A certain majestic simplicity, an inexpressible unction and spirit of humility, joined with conciseness and perspicuity, very much enhance the value of this performance: but its chief merit consists in the sublime sentiments, and perfect description of all Christian virtues, which it contains. The author confirms his precepts by several edifying examples, as of obedience and penance.[5] In describing a monastery of three hundred and thirty monks, which he had visited near Alexandria in Egypt, he mentions one of the principal citizens of that city, named Isidore, who, petitioning to be admitted into the house, said to the abbot: "As iron is in the hands of the smith, so am I in your hands." The abbot ordered him to remain without the gate, and to prostrate himself at the feet of everyone that passed by, begging their prayers for his soul struck with a leprosy. Thus he passed seven years in profound humility and patience. He told St. John, that during the first year he always considered himself as a slave condemned for his sins, and sustained violent conflicts. The second year he passed in tranquillity and confidence; and the third with relish and pleasure in his humiliations. So great was his virtue, that the abbot determined to present him to the bishop in order to be promoted to the priesthood, but the humility of the holy penitent prevented the execution of that design; for having begged at least a respite, he died within ten days. St. John could not help admiring the cook of this numerous community, who seemed always recollected, and generally bathed in tears amidst his continual occupation, and asked him by what means he nourished so perfect a spirit of compunction, in the midst of such a dissipating laborious employment. He said, that serving the monks, he represented to himself that he was serving not men, but God in his servants {680} and that the fire he always had before his eyes, reminded him of that fire which will burn souls for all eternity. The moving description which our author gives of the monastery of penitents called the Prison, above a mile from the former, hath been already abridged in our language. John the Sabaite told our saint, as of a third person, that seeing himself respected in his monastery, he considered that this was not the way to satisfy for his sins. Wherefore, with the leave of his abbot, he repaired to a severe monastery in Pontus, and after three years saw in a dream a schedule of his debts, to the amount in appearance of one hundred pounds of gold, of which only ten were cancelled. He therefore repeated often to himself: "Poor Antiochus, thou hast still great debt to satisfy." After passing over thirteen years in contempt and the most fervent practices of penance, he deserved to see in a vision his whole debt blotted out. Another monk, in a grievous fit of illness, fell into a trance, in which he lay as if he had been dead for the space of an hour: but recovering, he shut himself up in his cell, and lived a recluse twelve years, almost continually weeping, in the perpetual meditation of death. When he was near death, his brethren could only extort from him these words of edification: "He who hath death always before his eyes, will never sin." John, abbot of Raithu, explained this book of our saint by judicious comments, which are also extant. We have likewise a letter of St. John Climacus to the same person, concerning the duties of a pastor, in which he exhorts him in correcting others to temper severity with mildness, and encourages him zealously to fulfil the obligations of his charge; for nothing is greater or more acceptable to God than to offer him the sacrifice of rational souls sanctified by penance and charity. St. John sighed continually under the weight of his dignity, during the four years that he governed the monks of Mount Sinai: and as he had taken upon him that burden with fear and reluctance, he with joy found means to resign the same a little before his death. Heavenly contemplation, and the continual exercise of divine love and praise, were his delight and comfort in his earthly pilgrimage: and in this imitation of the functions of the blessed spirits in heaven he placeth the essence of the monastic state.[6] In his excellent maxims concerning the gift of holy tears, the fruit of charity,[7] we seem to behold a lively portraiture of his most pure soul. He died in his hermitage on the 30th day of March, in 605, being fourscore years old. His spiritual son George, who had succeeded him in the abbacy, earnestly begged of God that he might not be separated from his dear master and guide, and followed him by a happy death within a few days. On several Greek commentaries on St. John Climacus's ladder, see Montfaucon, Biblioth. Coisliana, pp. 305, 306. * * * * * St. John Climacus, speaking of the excellence and the effects of charity, does it with a feeling and energy worthy of such a subject. "A mother," says he,[8] "feels less pleasure when she folds within her arms the dear infant whom she nourishes with her own milk, than the true child of charity does, when united, as he incessantly is, to his God, and folded as if were in the arms of his heavenly Father.[9]--Charity operates in some persons so as to carry them almost entirely out of themselves. It illuminates others, and fills them with such sentiments of joy, that they cannot help crying out: _The Lord is my helper and my protector: in him hath my heart confided, and I have been helped. And my flesh hath flourished again, and with my will I will give praise to him_.[10] This joy which they feel in their hearts, is reflected on their countenances; and when once God has united, or, as we may say, {681} incorporated them with his charity, he displays in their exterior, as in the reflection of a mirror, the brightness and serenity of their souls: even as Moses, being honored with a sight of God, was encompassed round by his glory." St. John Climacus composed the following prayer to obtain the gift of charity: "My God, I pretend to nothing upon this earth, except to be so firmly united to you by prayer, that to be separated from you may be impossible: let others desire riches and glory; for my part, I desire but one thing, and that is, to be inseparably united to you, and to place in you alone all my hopes of happiness and repose." Footnotes: 1. Gr. l. 2. Procop. l. 5 de ædif. Justin. 3. S. Jo. Clim. gr. 27, n. 67. 4. St. Greg. l. 11; Ep. 1, l. 12; Ep. 16, t. 2, p. 1091. 5. Gr. 4 and 5. 6. Gr. 1. 7. Gr. 7, 27, 30. 8. Grad. 30, n. 12. 9. Gr {} n. 14. 10. Ps. xxvii. S. ZOZIMUS, BISHOP OF SYRACUSE, WAS successor to the holy bishop Peter; and faithfully discharged all the duties of a worthy pastor until his death, which happened in 660. His, name is mentioned in the Roman and Sicilian Martyrologies. See the Bollandists and Baillet. ST. REGULUS, OR RIEUL, WHO having converted the country of Senlis to the faith, about the same time that St. Dionysius preached in France, was made first bishop of Senlis, and died in peace in the midst of his flock. See the Bollandists and Tillem. t. 4, p. 719. MARCH XXXI. SAINT BENJAMIN, DEACON, M. From Theodoret, Hist. Eccles. l. 5, c. 39, &c. A.D. 429. ISDEGERDES, son of Sapor III., put a stop to the crael persecutions against the Christians in Persia, which had been begun by Sapor II., and the Church had enjoyed twelve years' peace in that kingdom, when, in 420, it was disturbed by the indiscreet zeal of one Abdas, a Christian bishop, who burned down the Pyræum, or temple of fire, the great divinity of the Persians. King Isdegerdes threatened to demolish all the churches of the Christians, unless he would rebuild it. Abdas had done ill in destroying the temple, but did well in refusing to rebuild it; for nothing can make it lawful to contribute to any act of idolatry, or to the building a temple, as Theodoret observes. Isdegerdes therefore demolished all the Christian churches in Persia, put to death Abdas, and raised a general persecution against the Church, which continued forty years with great fury. Isdegerdes died the year following, in 421. But his son and successor, Varanes, carried on the persecution with greater inhumanity. The very description which Theodoret, a contemporary writer, and one that lived in the neighborhood gives of the cruelties he exercised on the Christians, strikes us with {682} horror: some were flayed alive in different parts of the body, and suffered all kinds of torture that could be invented: others, being stuck all over with sharp reeds, were hauled and rolled about in that condition; others were tormented divers other ways, such as nothing but the most hellish malice was capable of suggesting. Among these glorious champions of Christ was St. Benjamin, a deacon. The tyrant caused him to be beaten and imprisoned. He had lain a year in the dungeon, when an ambassador from the emperor obtained his enlargement, on condition he should never speak to any of the courtiers about religion. The ambassador passed his word in his behalf that he would not: but Benjamin, who was a minister of the gospel, declared that he could not detain the truth in captivity, conscious to himself of the condemnation of the slothful servant for having hid his talent. He therefore neglected no opportunity of announcing Christ. The king, being informed that he still preached the faith in his kingdom, ordered him to be apprehended; but the martyr made no other reply to his threats than by putting this question to the king: What opinion he would have of any of his subjects who should renounce his allegiance to him, and join in war against him. The enraged tyrant caused reeds to be run in between the nails and the flesh both of his hands and feet, and the same to be thrust into other most tender parts, and drawn out again, and this to be frequently repeated with violence. He lastly ordered a knotty stake to be thrust into his bowels to rend and tear them, in which torment he expired in the year 424. The Roman Martyrology places his name on the 31st of March. * * * * * St. Ephrem, considering the heroic constancy of the martyrs, makes on them the following pious reflections: "The wisdom of philosophers, and the eloquence of the greatest orators, are dumb through amazement, when they contemplate the wonderful spectacle and glorious actions of the martyrs: the tyrants and judges were not able to express their astonishment when they beheld the faith, the constancy, and the cheerfulness of these holy champions. What excuse shall we have in the dreadful day of judgment, if we who have never been exposed to any cruel persecutions, or to the violence of such torments, shall have neglected the love of God and the care of a spiritual life? No temptations, no torments, were able to draw them from that love which they bore to God: but we, living in rest and delights, refuse to love our most merciful and gracious Lord. What shall we do in that day of terror, when the martyrs of Christ, standing with confidence near his throne, shall show the marks of their wounds? What shall we then show? Shall we present a lively faith? true charity towards God? a perfect disengagement of our affections from earthly things? souls freed from the tyranny of the passions? silence and recollection? meekness? alms-deeds? prayers poured forth with clean hearts? compunction, watchings, tears? Happy shall he be whom such good works shall attend. He will be the partner of the martyrs, and, supported by the treasure of these virtues, shall appear with equal confidence before Christ and his angels. We entreat you, O most holy martyrs, who cheerfully suffered most cruel torments for God our Saviour and his love, on which account you are now most intimately and familiarly united to him, that you pray to the Lord for us miserable sinners, covered with filth, that he infuse into us the grace of Christ, that it may enlighten our souls that we may love him, &c."[1] Footnotes: 1. St. Ephrem. Hom. In SS. Martyres. t. 3. Op. Gr. et Lat. p. 251. ed Vatic. an. 1746. {683} ST. ACACIUS, OR ACHATES, BISHOP OF ANTIOCH IN ASIA MINOR, C. ST. ACACIUS was bishop of Antioch, probably the town of that name in Phrygia, where the Marcionites were numerous. He was surnamed Agathangel, or Good-angel, and extremely respected by the people for his sanctity. It was owing to his zeal that not one of his flock renounced Christ by sacrificing to idols during the persecution of Decius, a weakness which several of the Marcionite heretics had betrayed. Our saint himself made a glorious confession of his faith; of which the following relation, transcribed from the public register, is a voucher. Martian, a man of consular dignity, arriving at Antioch, a small town of his government, ordered the bishop to be brought before him. His name was Acacius, and he was styled the buckler and refuge of that country for his universal charity and episcopal zeal. Martian said to him: "As you have the happiness to live under the Roman laws, you are bound to love and honor our princes, who are our protectors." Acacius answered: "Of all the subjects of the empire, none love and honor the emperor more than the Christians. We pray without intermission for his person, and that it may please God to grant him long life, prosperity, success, and all benedictions; that he may be endowed by him with the spirit of justice and wisdom to govern his people; that his reign be auspicious, and prosperous, blessed with joy, peace, and plenty, throughout all the provinces that obey him." MARTIAN.-"All this I commend; but that the emperor may be the better convinced of your submission and fidelity, come now and offer him a sacrifice with me." ACACIUS.-"I have already told you that I pray to the great and true God for the emperor; but he ought not to require a sacrifice from us, nor is there any due to him or to any man whatsoever." MARTIAN.-"Tell us what God you adore, that we may also pay him our offerings and homages." ACACIUS.-"I wish from my heart you did but know him to your advantage." MARTIAN.-"Tell me his name." ACACIUS.-"He is called the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob." MARTIAN.-"Are these the names of gods?" ACACIUS.-"By no means, but of men to whom the true God spoke; he is the only God, and he alone is to be adored, feared, and loved." MARTIAN.-"What is this God?" ACACIUS.-"He is the most high Adonia, who is seated above the cherubims and seraphims." MARTIAN.-"What is a seraph?" ACACIUS.-"A ministering spirit of the most high God, and one of the principal lords of the heavenly court." MARTIAN.-"What chimeras are these? Lay aside these whims of invisible beings, and adore such gods as you can see." ACACIUS.-"Tell me who are those gods to whom you would have me sacrifice?" MARTIAN.-"Apollo, the saviour of men, who preserves us from pestilence and famine, who enlightens, preserves, and governs the universe." ACACIUS.-"Do you mean that wretch that could not preserve his own life: who, being in love with a young woman, (Daphne,) ran about distracted in pursuit of her, not knowing that he was never to possess the object of his desires? It is therefore evident that he could not foresee things to come, since he was in the dark as to his own fate: and as clear that he could be no god, who was thus cheated by a creature. All know likewise that he had a base passion for Hyacinth, a beautiful boy, and was so awkward as to break the head of that minion, the fond object of his criminal passion, with a quoit. Is not he also that god who, with Neptune, turned mason, hired himself to a king, (Laomedon of Troy,) and built the walls of a city? Would you {684} oblige me to sacrifice to such a divinity, or to Esculapius, thunderstruck by Jupiter? or to Venus, whose life was infamous, and to a hundred such monsters, to whom you offer sacrifice? No, though my life itself depended on it, ought I to pay divine honors to those whom I should blush to imitate, and of whom I can entertain no other sentiments than those of contempt and execration? You adore gods, the imitators of whom you yourselves would punish." MARTIAN.-"It is usual for you Christians to raise several calumnies against our gods; for which reason I command you to come now with me to a banquet in honor of Jupiter and Juno, and acknowledge and perform what is due to their majesty." ACACIUS.-"How can I sacrifice to a man whose sepulchre is unquestionably in Crete? What! Is he risen again?" MARTIAN.-"You must either sacrifice or die." ACACIUS.-"This is the custom of the Dalmatian robbers; when they have taken a passenger in a narrow way, they leave him no other choice but to surrender his money or his life. But, for my part, I declare to you that I fear nothing that you call do to me. The laws punish adulterers, thieves, and murderers. Were I guilty of any of those things, I should be the first man to condemn myself. But if my whole crime be the adoring of the true God, and I am on this account to be put to death, it is no longer a law but an injustice." MARTIAN.-"I have no order to judge but to counsel you to obey. If you refuse, I know how to force you to a compliance." ACACIUS.-"I have a law which I will obey: this commands me not to renounce my God. If you think yourself bound to execute the orders of a man who in a little time hence must leave the world, and his body become the food of worms, much more strictly am I bound to obey the omnipotent God, who is infinite and eternal, and who hath declared, _Whoever shall deny me before men, him will I deny before my Father_." MARTIAN.-"You now mention the error of your sect which I have long desired to be informed of: you say then that God hath a son?" ACACIUS.-"Doubtless he hath one." MARTIAN.-"Who is this son of God?" ACACIUS.-"The Word of truth and grace." MARTIAN.-"Is that his name?" ACACIUS.-"You did not ask me his name, but what he is." MARTIAN.-"What then is his name?" ACACIUS.-"Jesus Christ." Martian having inquired of the saint by what woman God had this son, he replied, that the divine generation of the Word is of a different nature from human generation, and proved it from the language the royal prophet makes use of in the forty-fourth psalm. MARTIAN.-"Is God then corporeal?" ACACIUS.-"He is known only to himself. We cannot describe him; he is invisible to us in this mortal state, but we are sufficiently acquainted with his perfections to confess and adore him." MARTIAN.-"If God hath no body, how can he have a heart or mind?" ACACIUS.-"Wisdom hath no dependence or connection with an organized body. What hath body to do with understanding?" He then pressed him to sacrifice from the example of the Cataphrygians, or Montanists, and engage all under his care to do the same. Acacius replied: "It is not me these people obey, but God. Let them hear me when I advise them to what is right; but let them despise me, if I offer them the contrary and endeavor to pervert them." MARTIAN.-"Give me all their names." ACACIUS.-"They are written in heaven, in God's invisible registers." MARTIAN.-"Where are the magicians, your companions, and the teachers of this cunningly devised error?" by which he probably meant the priests. ACACIUS.-"No one in the world abhors magic more than we Christians." MARTIAN.-"Magic is the new religion which you introduce." ACACIUS.-"We destroy those gods whom you fear, though you made them yourselves. We, on the contrary, fear not him whom we have made with our hands, but him who created us, and who is the Lord and Master of all nature: who {685} loved us as our good father, and redeemed us from death and hell as the careful and affectionate shepherd of our souls." MARTIAN.-"Give the names I require, if you would avoid the torture." ACACIUS.-"I am before the tribunal, and do you ask me my name, and, not satisfied with that, you must also know those of the other ministers? Do you hope to conquer many; you, whom I alone am able thus to confound? If you desire to know our names, mine is Acacius. If you would know more, they call me Agathangelus, and my two companions are Piso, bishop of the Trojans, and Menander, a priest. Do now what you please." MARTIAN.-"You shall remain in prison till the emperor is acquainted with what has passed on this subject, and sends his orders concerning you." The emperor Decius having read the interrogatory, recompensed Martian by making him governor of Pamphilia, but admired so much the prudence and constancy of Acacius, that he ordered him to be discharged, and suffered him to profess the Christian religion. This his glorious confession is dated on the 29th of March, and happened under Decius in 250, or 251. How long St. Acacius survived does not appear. The Greeks, Egyptians, and other oriental churches, honor his name on the 31st of March; though his name occurs not in the Roman Martyrology. See his authentic acts in Ruinart, p. 152; Tillemont, t. 2, p. 357; Fleury, t. 2; Ceillier, t. 3, p. 560. ST. GUY, C. HE is called by the Germans Witen, and was forty years abbot of Pomposa, in the dutchy of Ferrara, in Italy, a man eminent in all virtues, especially patience, the love of solitude, and prayer. He died in 1046. The emperor, Henry III., caused his relics to be translated to Spire, which city honors him as its principal patron. See his life, by a disciple, in the Acta Sanctorium of Henschenius, and another, shorter, of the same age. END OF VOLUME ONE. 
8120	----	The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus Transcriber's Note: Corrections suggested in the Corrigenda, p. [viii] of the original text, have been made. Section number added for L 3.9, since both the translator's preface and the index refer to it. Footnotes gathered at the ends of chapters. Typographical errors in two Scriptural quotations have been corrected: In L 21 note 10, I have changed "Quæ præparavit Deus iis qui" to "Quæ præparavit Deus his qui;" and in L 29 note 12, I have changed "As the longing of the heart" to "As the longing of the hart." The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus Re-imprimatur. + Franciscus Archiepiscopus Westmonast. Die 27 Sept., 1904. The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus, of the Order of Our Lady of Carmel. Written by Herself. Translated from the Spanish by David Lewis. Third Edition Enlarged. With additional Notes and an Introduction by Rev. Fr. Benedict Zimmerman, O.C.D. London: Thomas Baker. New York: Benziger Bros. MCMIV. Contents. Chap. Introduction to the Third Edition, by Rev. B. Zimmerman St. Teresa's Arguments of the Chapters Preface by David Lewis Annals of the Saint's Life Prologue I. Childhood and early Impressions--The Blessing of pious Parents--Desire of Martyrdom--Death of the Saint's Mother II. Early Impressions--Dangerous Books and Companions--The Saint is placed in a Monastery III. The Blessing of being with good people--How certain Illusions were removed IV. Our Lord helps her to become a Nun--Her many Infirmities V. Illness and Patience of the Saint--The Story of a Priest whom she rescued from a Life of Sin VI. The great Debt she owed to our Lord for His Mercy to her--She takes St. Joseph for her Patron VII. Lukewarmness--The Loss of Grace--Inconvenience of Laxity in Religious Houses VIII. The Saint ceases not to pray--Prayer the way to recover what is lost--All exhorted to pray--The great Advantage of Prayer, even to those who may have ceased from it IX. The means whereby our Lord quickened her Soul, gave her Light in her Darkness, and made her strong in Goodness X. The Graces she received in Prayer--What we can do ourselves--The great Importance of understanding what our Lord is doing for us--She desires her Confessors to keep her Writings secret, because of the special Graces of our Lord to her, which they had commanded her to describe XI. Why men do not attain quickly to the perfect Love of God--Of Four Degrees of Prayer--Of the First Degree--The Doctrine profitable for Beginners, and for those who have no sensible Sweetness XII. What we can ourselves do--The Evil of desiring to attain to supernatural States before our Lord calls us XIII. Of certain Temptations of Satan--Instructions relating thereto XIV. The Second State of Prayer--Its supernatural Character XV. Instructions for those who have attained to the Prayer of Quiet--Many advance so far, but few go farther XVI. The Third State of Prayer--Deep Matters--What the Soul can do that has reached it--Effects of the great Graces of our Lord XVII. The Third State of Prayer--The Effects thereof--The Hindrance caused by the Imagination and the Memory XVIII. The Fourth State of Prayer--The great Dignity of the Soul raised to it by our Lord--Attainable on Earth, not by our Merit, but by the Goodness of our Lord XIX. The Effects of this Fourth State of Prayer--Earnest Exhortations to those who have attained to it not to go back nor to cease from Prayer, even if they fall--The great Calamity of going back XX. The Difference between Union and Rapture--What Rapture is--The Blessing it is to the Soul--The Effects of it XXI. Conclusion of the Subject--Pain of the Awakening--Light against Delusions XXII. The Security of Contemplatives lies in their not ascending to high Things if our Lord does not raise them--The Sacred Humanity must be the Road to the highest Contemplation--A Delusion in which the Saint was once entangled XXIII. The Saint resumes the History of her Life--Aiming at Perfection--Means whereby it may be gained--Instructions for Confessors XXIV. Progress under Obedience--Her Inability to resist the Graces of God--God multiplies His Graces XXV. Divine Locutions--Delusions on that Subject XXVI. How the Fears of the Saint vanished--How she was assured that her Prayer was the Work of the Holy Spirit XXVII. The Saint prays to be directed in a different way--Intellectual Visions XXVIII. Visions of the Sacred Humanity and of the glorified Bodies--Imaginary Visions--Great Fruits thereof when they come from God XXIX. Of Visions--The Graces our Lord bestowed on the Saint--The Answers our Lord gave her for those who tried her XXX. St. Peter of Alcantara comforts the Saint--Great Temptations and Interior Trials XXXI. Of certain outward Temptations and Appearances of Satan--Of the Sufferings thereby occasioned--Counsels for those who go on unto Perfection XXXII. Our Lord shows St. Teresa the Place which she had by her Sins deserved in Hell--The Torments there--How the Monastery of St. Joseph was founded XXXIII. The Foundation of the Monastery hindered--Our Lord consoles the Saint XXXIV. The Saint leaves her Monastery of the Incarnation for a time, at the command of her superior--Consoles an afflicted Widow XXXV. The Foundation of the House of St. Joseph--Observance of holy Poverty therein--How the Saint left Toledo XXXVI. The Foundation of the Monastery of St. Joseph--Persecution and Temptations--Great interior Trial of the Saint, and her Deliverance XXXVII. The Effects of the divine Graces in the Soul--The inestimable Greatness of one Degree of Glory XXXVIII. Certain heavenly Secrets, Visions, and Revelations--The Effects of them in her Soul XXXIX. Other Graces bestowed on the Saint--The Promises of our Lord to her--Divine Locutions and Visions XL. Visions, Revelations, and Locutions The Relations. Relation. I. Sent to St. Peter of Alcantara in 1560 from the Monastery of the Incarnation, Avila II. To one of her Confessors, from the House of Dona Luisa de la Cerda, in 1562 III. Of various Graces granted to the Saint from the year 1568 to 1571, inclusive IV. Of the Graces the Saint received in Salamanca at the end of Lent, 1571 V. Observations on certain Points of Spirituality VI. The Vow of Obedience to Father Gratian which the Saint made in 1575 VII. Made for Rodrigo Alvarez, S.J., in the year 1575, according to Don Vicente de la Fuente; but in 1576, according to the Bollandists and F. Bouix VIII. Addressed to F. Rodrigo Alvarez IX. Of certain spiritual Graces she received in Toledo and Avila in the years 1576 and 1577 X. Of a Revelation to the Saint at Avila, 1579, and of Directions concerning the Government of the Order XI. Written from Palencia in May, 1581, and addressed to Don Alonzo Velasquez, Bishop of Osma, who had been when Canon of Toledo, one of the Saint's Confessors Introduction to the Present Edition. When the publisher entrusted me with the task of editing this volume, one sheet was already printed and a considerable portion of the book was in type. Under his agreement with the owners of the copyright, he was bound to reproduce the text and notes, etc., originally prepared by Mr. David Lewis without any change, so that my duty was confined to reading the proofs and verifying the quotations. This translation of the Life of St. Teresa is so excellent, that it could hardly be improved. While faithfully adhering to her wording, the translator has been successful in rendering the lofty teaching in simple and clear language, an achievement all the more remarkable as in addition to the difficulty arising from the transcendental nature of the subject matter, the involved style, and the total absence of punctuation tend to perplex the reader. Now and then there might be some difference of opinion as to how St. Teresa's phrases should be construed, but it is not too much to say that on the whole Mr. Lewis has been more successful than any other translator, whether English or foreign. Only in one case have I found it necessary to make some slight alteration in the text, and I trust the owners of the copyright will forgive me for doing so. In Chapter XXV., § 4, St. Teresa, speaking of the difference between the Divine and the imaginary locutions, says that a person commending a matter to God with great earnestness, may think that he hears whether his prayer will be granted or not: y es muy posible, "and this is quite possible," but he who has ever heard a Divine locution will see at once that this assurance is something quite different. Mr. Lewis, following the old Spanish editions, translated "And it is most impossible," whereas both the autograph and the context demand the wording I have ventured to substitute. When Mr. Lewis undertook the translation of St. Teresa's works, he had before him Don Vicente de la Fuente's edition (Madrid, 1861-1862), supposed to be a faithful transcript of the original. In 1873 the Sociedad Foto-Tipografica-Catolica of Madrid published a photographic reproduction of the Saint's autograph in 412 pages in folio, which establishes the true text once for all. Don Vicente prepared a transcript of this, in which he wisely adopted the modern way of spelling but otherwise preserved the original text, or at least pretended to do so, for a minute comparison between autograph and transcript reveals the startling fact that nearly a thousand inaccuracies have been allowed to creep in. Most of these variants are immaterial, but there are some which ought not to have been overlooked. Thus, in Chapter XVIII. § 20, St. Teresa's words are: Un gran letrado de la orden del glorioso santo Domingo, while Don Vicente retains the old reading De la orden del glorioso patriarca santo Domingo. Mr. Lewis possessed a copy of this photographic reproduction, but utilised it only in one instance in his second edition. [1] The publication of the autograph has settled a point of some importance. The Bollandists (n. 1520), discussing the question whether the headings of the chapters (appended to this Introduction) are by St. Teresa or a later addition, come to the conclusion (against the authors of the Reforma de los Descalços) that they are clearly an interpolation (clarissime patet) on account of the praise of the doctrine contained in these arguments. Notwithstanding their high authority the Bollandists are in this respect perfectly wrong, the arguments are entirely in St. Teresa's own hand and are exclusively her own work. The Book of Foundations and the Way of Perfection contain similar arguments in the Saint's handwriting. Nor need any surprise be felt at the alleged praise of her doctrine for by saying: this chapter is most noteworthy (Chap. XIV.), or: this is good doctrine (Chap. XXI.), etc., she takes no credit for herself because she never grows tired of repeating that she only delivers the message she has received from our Lord. [2] The Bollandists, not having seen the original, may be excused, but P. Bouix (whom Mr. Lewis follows in this matter) had no right to suppress these arguments. It is to be hoped that future editions of the works of S. Teresa will not again deprive the reader of this remarkable feature of her writings. What she herself thought of her books is best told by Yepes in a letter to Father Luis de Leon, the first editor of her works: "She was pleased when her writings were being praised and her Order and the convents were held in esteem. Speaking one day of the Way of Perfection, she rejoiced to hear it praised, and said to me with great content: Some grave men tell me that it is like Holy Scripture. For being revealed doctrine it seemed to her that praising her book was like praising God." [3] A notable feature in Mr. Lewis's translation is his division of the chapters into short paragraphs. But it appears that he rearranged the division during the process of printing, with the result that a large number of references were wrong. No labour has been spared in the correction of these, and I trust that the present edition will be the more useful for it. In quoting the Way of Perfection and the Interior Castle (which he calls Inner Fortress!) Mr. Lewis refers to similar paragraphs which, however, are to be found in no English edition. A new translation of these two works is greatly needed, and, in the case of the Way of Perfection, the manuscript of the Escurial should be consulted as well as that of Valladolid. Where the writings of S. John of the Cross are quoted by volume and page, the edition referred to is the one of 1864, another of Mr. Lewis's masterpieces. The chapters in Ribera's Life of St. Teresa refer to the edition in the Acts of the Saint by the Bollandists. These and all other quotations have been carefully verified, with the exception of those taken from the works on Mystical theology by Antonius a Spiritu Sancto and Franciscus a S. Thoma, which I was unable to consult. I should have wished to replace the quotations from antiquated editions of the Letters of our Saint by references to the new French edition by P. Grégoire de S. Joseph (Paris, Poussielgue, 1900), which may be considered as the standard edition. In note 2 to Chap. XI. Mr. Lewis draws attention to a passage in a sermon by S. Bernard containing an allusion to different ways of watering a garden similar to St. Teresa's well-known comparison. Mr. Lewis's quotation is incorrect, and I am not certain what sermon he may have had in view. Something to the point may be found in sermon 22 on the Canticle (Migne, P. L. Vol. CLXXXIII, p. 879), and in the first sermon on the Nativity of our Lord (ibid., p. 115), and also in a sermon on the Canticle by one of St. Bernard's disciples (Vol. CLXXXIV., p. 195). I am indebted to the Very Rev. Prior Vincent McNabb, O.P., for the verification of a quotation from St. Vincent Ferrer (Chap. XX. § 31). Since the publication of Mr. Lewis's translation the uncertainty about the date of St. Teresa's profession has been cleared up. Yepes, the Bollandists, P. Bouix, Don Vicente de la Fuente, Mr. Lewis, and numerous other writers assume that she entered the convent of the Incarnation [4] on November 2nd, 1533, and made her profession on November 3rd, 1534. The remaining dates of events previous to her conversion are based upon this, as will be seen from the chronology printed by Mr. Lewis at the end of his Preface and frequently referred to in the footnotes. It rests, however, on inadequate evidence, namely on a single passage in the Life [5] where the Saint says that she was not yet twenty years old when she made her first supernatural experience in prayer. She was twenty in March, 1535, and as this event took place after her profession, the latter was supposed by Yepes and his followers to have taken place in the previous November. Even if we had no further evidence, the fact that St. Teresa is not always reliable in her calculation should have warned us not to rely too much upon a somewhat casual statement. In the first chapter, § 7, she positively asserts that she was rather less than twelve years old at the death of her mother, whereas we know that she was at least thirteen years and eight months old. As to the profession we have overwhelming evidence that it took place on the 3rd of November, 1536, and her entrance in the convent a year and a day earlier. To begin with, we have the positive statement of her most intimate friends, Julian d'Avila, Father Ribera, S.J., and Father Jerome Gratian. Likewise doña Maria Pinel, nun of the Incarnation, says in her deposition: "She (Teresa of Jesus) took the habit on 2 November, 1535." [6] This is corroborated by various passages in the Saint's writings. Thus, in Relation VII., written in 1575, she says, speaking of herself: "This nun took the habit forty years ago." Again in a passage of the Life written about the end of 1564 or the beginning of the following year, [7] she mentions that she has been a nun for over twenty-eight years, which points to her profession in 1536. But there are two documents which place the date of profession beyond dispute, namely the act of renunciation of her right to the paternal inheritance and the deed of dowry drawn up before a public notary. Both bear the date 31 October, 1536. The authors of the Reforma de los Descalços thought that they must have been drawn up before St. Teresa took the habit, and therefore placed this event in 1536 and the profession in 1537, but neither of these documents is necessarily connected with the clothing, yet both must have been completed before profession. The Constitutions of Blessed John Soreth, drawn up in 1462, which were observed at the convent of the Incarnation, contain the following rule with regard to the reception and training of novices: [8] Consulimus quod recipiendus ante susceptionem habitus expediat se de omnibus quae habet in saeculo nisi ex causa rationabili per priorem generalem vel provincialem fuerit aliter ordinatum. There was, indeed, good reason in the case of St. Teresa to postpone these legal matters. Her father was much opposed to her becoming a nun, but considering his piety it might have been expected that before the end of the year of probation he would grant his consent (which in the event he did the very day she took the habit), and make arrangements for the dowry. One little detail concerning her haste in entering the convent has been preserved by the Reforma and the Bollandists, [9] though neither seem to have understood its meaning. On leaving the convent of the Incarnation for St. Joseph's in 1563, St. Teresa handed the prioress of the former convent a receipt for her bedding, habit and discipline. This almost ludicrous scrupulosity was in conformity with a decision of the general chapter of 1342 which said: Ingrediens ordinem ad sui ipsius instantiam habeat lectisternia pro se ipso, sin autem recipiens solvat lectum illum. As St. Teresa entered the convent without the knowledge of her father she did not bring this insignificant trousseau with her; accordingly the prioress became responsible for it and obtained a receipt when St. Teresa went to the new convent. The dowry granted by Alphonso Sanchez de Cepeda to his daughter consisted of twenty-five measures, partly wheat, partly barley, or, in lieu thereof, two hundred ducats per annum. Few among the numerous nuns of the Incarnation could have brought a better or even an equal dowry. The date of St. Teresa's profession being thus fixed on the 3rd of November, 1536, some other dates of the chronology must be revised. Her visit to Castellanos de la Canada must have taken place in the early part of 1537. But already before this time the Saint had an experience which should have proved a warning to her, and the neglect of which she never ceased to deplore, namely the vision of our Lord; [10] her own words are that this event took place "at the very beginning of her acquaintance with the person" who exercised so dangerous an influence upon her. Mr. Lewis assigns to it the date 1542, which is impossible seeing that instead of twenty-six it was only twenty-two years before she wrote that passage of her life. Moreover, it would have fallen into the midst of her lukewarmness (according to Mr. Lewis's chronology) instead of the very beginning. P. Bouix rightly assigns it to the year 1537, but as he is two years in advance of our chronology it does not agree with the surrounding circumstances as described by him. Bearing in mind the hint St. Teresa gives [11] as to her disposition immediately after her profession, we need not be surprised if the first roots of her lukewarmness show themselves so soon. From Castellanos she proceeded to Hortigosa on a visit to her uncle. While there she became acquainted with the book called Tercer Abecedario. Don Vicente remarks that the earliest edition known to him was printed in 1537, which tells strongly against the chronology of the Bollandists, P. Bouix, and others. Again, speaking of her cure at Bezadas she gives a valuable hint by saying that she remained blind to certain dangers for more than seventeen years until the Jesuit fathers finally undeceived her. As these came to Avila in 1555 the seventeen years lead us back to 1538, which precisely coincides with her sojourn at Bezadas. She remained there until Pascua florida of the following year. P. Bouix and others understand by this term Palm Sunday, but Don Vicente shows good reason that Easter Sunday is meant, which in 1539 was April the 6th. She then returned to Avila, more dead than alive, and remained seriously ill for nearly three years, until she was cured through the miraculous intervention of St. Joseph about the beginning of 1542. Now began the period of lukewarmness which was temporally interrupted by the illness and death of her father, in 1544 or 1545, and came to an end about 1555. Don Vicente, followed by Mr. Lewis, draws attention to what he believes to be a "proof of great laxity of the convent," that St. Teresa should have been urged by one of her confessors to communicate as often as once a fortnight. It should be understood that frequent communion such as we now see it practised was wholly unknown in her time. The Constitutions of the Order specified twelve days on which all those that were not priests should communicate, adding: Verumtamen fratres professi prout Deus eis devotionem contulerit diebus dominicis et festis duplicibus (i.e., on feasts of our Lady, the Apostles, etc.), communicare poterunt si qui velint. Thus, communicating about once a month St. Teresa acted as ordinary good Religious were wont to do, and by approaching the sacrament more frequently she placed herself among the more fervent nuns. [12] St. Teresa wrote quite a number of different accounts of her life. The first, addressed to Father Juan de Padranos, S.J. [13] and dated 1557, is now lost. The second, written for St. Peter of Alcantara, is Relation I. at the end of this volume; a copy of it, together with a continuation (Relation II.) was sent to Father Pedro Ibañez in 1562. It is somewhat difficult to admit that in the very same year she wrote another, more extensive, account to the same priest, which is generally called the "first" Life. At the end of the Life such as we have it now, St. Teresa wrote: "This book was finished in June, 1562," and Father Bañez wrote underneath: "This date refers to the first account which the Holy Mother Teresa of Jesus wrote of her life; it was not then divided into chapters. Afterwards she made this copy and inserted in it many things which had taken place subsequent to this date, such as the foundation of the monastery of St. Joseph of Avila." Elsewhere Father Bañez says: [14] "Of one of her books, namely, the one in which she recorded her life and the manner of prayer whereby God had led her, I can say that she composed it to the end that her confessors might know her the better and instruct her, and also that it might encourage and animate those who learn from it the great mercy God had shown her, a great sinner as she humbly acknowledged herself to be. This book was already written when I made her acquaintance, her previous confessors having given her permission to that effect. Among these was a licentiate of the Dominican Order, the Reverend Father Pedro Ibañez, reader of Divinity at Avila. She afterwards completed and recast this book." These two passages of Bañez have led the biographers of the Saint to think that she wrote her Life twice, first in 1561 and the following year, completing it in the house of Doña Luisa de la Cerda at Toledo, in the month of June; and secondly between 1563 and 1565 at St. Joseph's Convent of Avila. They have been at pains to point out a number of places which could not have been in the "first" Life, but must have been added in the second; [15] and they took it for granted that the letter with which the book as we now have it concludes, was addressed to Father Ibañez in 1562, when the Saint sent him the "first" Life. It bears neither address nor date, but from its contents I am bound to conclude that it was written in 1565, that it refers to the "second" Life, and that whomsoever it was addressed to, it cannot have been to Father Ibañez, who was already dead at the time. [16] Saint Teresa asks the writer to send a copy of the book to Father Juan de Avila. Now we know from her letters that as late as 1568 this request had not been complied with, and that St. Teresa had to write twice to Doña Luisa for this purpose; [17] but if she had already given these instructions in 1562, it is altogether incomprehensible that she did not see to it earlier, especially when the "first" Life was returned to her for the purpose of copying and completing it. The second reason which prevents me from considering this letter as connected with the "first" Life will be examined when I come to speak of the different ends the Saint had in view when writing her Life. It is more difficult to say to whom the letter was really addressed. The Reforma suggests Father Garcia de Toledo, Dominican, who bade the Saint write the history of the foundation of St. Joseph's at Avila [18] and who was her confessor at that convent. It moreover believes that he it is to whom Chapter XXXIV. §§ 8-20 refers, and this opinion appears to me plausible. As to the latter point, Yepes thinks the Dominican at Toledo was Father Vicente Barron, the Bollandists offer no opinion, and Mr. Lewis, in his first edition gives first the one and then the other. If, as I think, Father Garcia was meant, the passage in Chapter XVI. § 10, beginning "O, my son," would concern him also, as well as several passages where Vuestra Merced--you, my Father--is addressed. For although the book came finally into the hands of Father Bañez, it was first delivered into those of the addressee of the letter. Whether the previous paper was a mere "Relation," or really a first attempt at a "Life," [19] there can be no dispute about its purpose: St. Teresa speaks of it in the following terms: "I had recourse to my Dominican father (Ibañez); I told him all about my visions, my way of prayer, the great graces our Lord had given me, as clearly as I could, and begged him to consider the matter well, and tell me if there was anything therein at variance with the Holy Writings, and give me his opinion on the whole matter." [20] The account thus rendered had the object of enabling Father Ibañez to give her light upon the state of her soul. But while she was drawing it up, a great change came over her. During St. Teresa's sojourn at Toledo she became from a pupil an experienced master in Mystical knowledge. "When I was there a religious" (probably Father Garcia de Toledo) "with whom I had conversed occasionally some years ago, happened to arrive. When I was at Mass in a monastery of his Order, I felt a longing to know the state of his soul." [21] Three times the Saint rose from her seat, three times she sat down again, but at last she went to see him in a confessional, not to ask for any light for herself, but to give him what light she could, for she wished to induce him to surrender himself more perfectly to God, and this she accomplished by telling him how she had fared since their last meeting. No one who reads this remarkable chapter can help being struck by the change that has come over Teresa: the period of her schooling is at an end, and she is now the great teacher of Mystical theology. Her humility does not allow her to speak with the same degree of openness upon her achievements as she did when making known her failings, yet she cannot conceal the Gift of Wisdom she had received and the use she made of it. St. Teresa's development, if extraordinary considering the degree of spirituality she reached, was nevertheless gradual and regular. With her wonderful power of analysis, she has given us not only a clear insight into her interior progress, but also a sketch of the development of her understanding of supernatural things. "It is now (i.e., about the end of 1563) some five or six years, I believe, since our Lord raised me to this state of prayer, in its fulness, and that more than once,--and I never understood it, and never could explain it; and so I was resolved, when I should come thus far in my story, to say very little or nothing at all." [22] In the following chapter she adds: "You, my father, will be delighted greatly to find an account of the matter in writing, and to understand it; for it is one grace that our Lord gives grace; and it is another grace to understand what grace and what gift it is; and it is another and further grace to have the power to describe and explain it to others. Though it does not seem that more than the first of these--the giving of grace--is necessary, it is a great advantage and a great grace to understand it." [23] These words contain the clue to much that otherwise would be obscure in the life of our Saint: great graces were bestowed upon her, but at first she neither understood them herself nor was she able to describe them. Hence the inability of her confessors and spiritual advisers to guide her. Her natural gifts, great though they were, did not help her much. "Though you, my father, may think that I have a quick understanding, it is not so; for I have found out in many ways that my understanding can take in only, as they say, what is given it to eat. Sometimes my confessor used to be amazed at my ignorance: and he never explained to me--nor, indeed, did I desire to understand--how God did this, nor how it could be. Nor did I ever ask." [24] At first she was simply bewildered by the favours shown her, afterwards she could not help knowing, despite the fears of over anxious friends, that they did come from God, and that so far from imperilling her soul made a different woman of her, but even then she was not able to explain to others what she experienced in herself. But shortly before the foundation of St. Joseph's convent she received the last of the three graces mentioned above, the Gift of Wisdom, and the scene at Toledo is the first manifestation of it. This explains the difference of the "Life" such as we know it from the first version or the "Relations" preceding it. Whatever this writing was, it still belonged to the period of her spiritual education, whereas the volume before us is the first-fruit of her spiritual Mastership. The new light that had come to her induced her confessors [25] to demand a detailed work embodying everything she had learned from her heavenly Teacher. [26] The treatise on Mystical theology contained in Chapters X. to XXI., the investigation of Divine locutions, Visions and Revelations in the concluding portion of the work could have had no place in any previous writing. While her experiences before she obtained the Gift of Wisdom influenced but three persons (one of them being her father), a great many profited by her increased knowledge. [27] The earlier writings were but confidential communications to her confessors, and if they became known to larger circles this was due to indiscretion. But her "Life" was written from the beginning with a view to publication. Allusions to this object may be found in various places [28] as well as in the letter appended to the book, [29] but the decisive utterances must be sought for elsewhere, namely in the "Way of Perfection." This work was written immediately after the "Life," while the Saint was as yet at the convent of St. Joseph's. It was re-written later on and is now only known in its final shape, but the first version, the original of which is preserved at the Escurial and has been reproduced photographically, leaves no doubt as to the intentions of St. Teresa in writing her "Life." "I have written a few days ago a certain Relation of my Life. But since it might happen that my confessor may not permit you (the Sisters of St. Joseph's) to read it, I will put here some things concerning prayer which are conformable to what I have said there, as well as some other things which appear to me to be necessary." [30] Again: "As all this is better explained in the book which I say I have written, there is no need for me to speak of it with so much detail. I have said there all I know. Those of you who have been led by God to this degree of contemplation (and I say that some have been led so far), should procure the book because it is important for you, after I am dead." [31] At the end she writes: "Since the Lord has taught you the way and has inspired me as to what I should put in the book which I say has been written, how they should behave who have arrived at this fountain of living water and what the soul feels there, and how God satiates her and makes her lose the thirst for things of this world and causes her to grow in things pertaining to the service of God; that book, therefore, will be of great help for those who have arrived at this state, and will give them much light. Procure it. For Father Domingo Bañez, presentado of the Order of St. Dominic who, as I say, is my confessor, and to whom I shall give this, has it: if he judges that you should see this, and gives it to you, he will also give you the other." [32] While the first and second of these quotations may be found, somewhat weakened, in the final version of the "Way of Perfection," the last one is entirely omitted. Nor need this surprise us, for Father Bañez had his own ideas about the advisability of the publication of the "Life." In his deposition, already referred to, he says: "It was not convenient that this book should become public during her lifetime, but rather that it should be kept at the Holy Office (the Inquisition) until we knew the end of this person; it was therefore quite against my will that some copies were taken while it was in the hands of the bishop Don Alvaro Mendoza, who, being a powerful prelate and having received it from the said Teresa of Jesus, allowed it to be copied and showed it to his sister, doña Maria de Mendoza; thus certain persons taking an interest in spiritual matters and knowing already some portions of this treatise (evidently the contents of the divulged Relations) made further copies, one of which became the property of the Duchess of Alba, doña Maria Enriquez, and is now, I think, in the hands of her daughter-in-law, doña Maria de Toledo. All this was against my wish, and I was much annoyed with the said Teresa of Jesus, though I knew well it was not her fault but the fault of those to whom she had confided the book, and I told her she ought to burn the original because it would never do that the writings of women should become public property; to which she answered she was quite aware of it and would certainly burn it if I told her to do so; but knowing her great humility and obedience I did not dare to have it destroyed but handed it to the Holy Office for safe-keeping, whence it has been withdrawn since her death and published in print." [33] From this it will be seen that Bañez, who had given a most favourable opinion when the "Life" was denounced to the Inquisition (1574), resulting in the approbation by Cardinal de Quiroga to the great joy of St. Teresa, [34] returned it to the Holy Office for safety's sake. It was withdrawn by the Ven. Mother Anne of Jesus when the Order had decided upon the publication of the works of the Saint, but too late to be utilised then. Father Luis de Leon, the editor, had to content himself with the copy already alluded to. St. Teresa wrote her "Life" slowly. It was begun in spring, 1563, [35] and completed in May or June, 1565. She complains that she can only work at it by stealth on account of her duties at the distaff; [36] but the book is written with so much order and method, the manuscript is so free from mistakes, corrections and erasures, that we may conclude that while spinning she worked it out in her mind, so that the apparent delay proved most advantageous. In this respect the "Life" is superior to the first version of the "Way of Perfection." This latter work was printed during her lifetime, though it appeared only after her death. In 1586 the Definitory of the province of Discalced Carmelites decided upon the publication of the complete works of the Saint, but for obvious reasons deemed not only the members of her own Order but also Dominicans and Jesuits ineligible for the post of editor. Such of the manuscripts as could be found were therefore confided to the Augustinian Father, Luis de Leon, professor at Salamanca, who prepared the edition but did not live to carry it through the press. The fact that he did not know the autograph of the "Life" accounts for the numerous inaccuracies to be found in nearly all editions, but the publication of the original should ensure a great improvement for the future. St. Teresa's canonisation took place before the stringent laws of Urban VIII. came into force. Consequently, the writings of the Saint were not then enquired into, the Holy See contenting itself with the approbations granted by the Spanish Inquisition, and by the congregation of the Rota in Rome. A certain number of passages selected from various works having been denounced by some Roman theologians as being contrary to the teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas and other authorities, Diego Alvarez, a Dominican, and John Rada, a Franciscan, were commissioned to examine the matter and report on it. The twelve censures with the answers of the two theologians and the final judgment of the Rota seem to have remained unknown to the Bollandists. [37] The "heavenly doctrine" of St. Teresa is alluded to not only in the Bull of canonisation but even in the Collect of the Mass of the Saint. Concerning the English translations of the "Life" noticed by Mr. Lewis it should be mentioned that the one ascribed to Abraham Woodhead is only partly his work. Father Bede of St. Simon Stock (Walter Joseph Travers), a Discalced Carmelite, labouring on the English Mission from 1660 till 1692, was anxious to complete the translation of St. Teresa's works into English. He had not proceeded very far when he learnt that "others were engaged in the same task. On enquiry he found that a new translation was contemplated by two graduates of the University of Cambridge, converts to the Faith, most learned and pious men, who were leading a solitary life, spending their time and talents in the composition of controversial and devotional works for the good of their neighbour and the glory of God." One of these two men was Woodhead, who, however, was an Oxford man, but the name of the other, who must have been a Cambridge man, is not known. They undertook the translation while Father Bede provided the funds and bore the risks of what was then a dangerous work. As there existed already two English translations of the "Life," the first volume to appear (1669) contained the Book of Foundations, to which was prefixed the history of the foundation of St. Joseph's from the "Life." When, therefore, the new translation of the latter appeared, in 1671, this portion of the book was omitted. [38] The translation was made direct from the Spanish but "uniformly with the Italian edition." Mr. Lewis, whose translation is the fifth, was born on the 12th of November, 1814, and died on January the 23rd, 1895. The first edition was printed in 1870, the second in 1888. It is regrettable that the latter edition, of which the present is a reprint, omitted the marginal notes which would have been so helpful to the reader. St. Teresa's life and character having always been a favourite study of men and women of various schools of thought, it may be useful to notice here a few recent English and foreign works on the subject:-- The Life of Saint Teresa, by the author of "Devotions before and after Holy Communion" (i.e., Miss Maria Trench), London, 1875. The Life of Saint Teresa of the Order of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. Edited with a preface by the Archbishop of Westminster (Cardinal Manning), London, 1865. (By Miss Elizabeth Lockhart, afterwards first abbess of the Franciscan convent, Notting Hill.) Frequently reprinted. The Life and Letters of St. Teresa, by Henry James Coleridge, S.J. Quarterly Series. 3 vols (1881, 1887, 1888). And, from another point of view: The Life of St. Teresa, by Gabriela Cunninghame-Graham, 2 vols, London, 1894. Histoire de Sainte Thérèse d'après les Bollandistes. 2 vols, Nantes, 1882. Frequently reprinted. The author is Mlle. Adelaide Lecornu (born 5 July, 1852, died at the Carmelite convent at Caen, 14 December, 1901. Her name in religion was Adelaide-Jéronyme-Zoe-Marie du Sacré-Coeur). An excellent character sketch of the Saint has appeared in the "Les Saints" series (Paris, Lecoffre, 1901): Sainte Thérèse, par Henri Joly. Although the attempt at explaining the extraordinary phenomena in the life of St. Teresa by animal Magnetism and similar obscure theories had already been exploded by the Bollandists, it has lately been revived by Professor Don Arturo Perales Gutierrez of Granada, and Professor Don Fernando Segundo Brieva Salvatierra of Madrid, who considered her a subject of hysterical derangements. The discussion carried on for some time, not only in Spain but also in France, Germany, and other countries, has been ably summed up and disposed of by P. Grégoire de S. Joseph: La prétendue Hystérie de Sainte Thérèse. Lyons. The Bibliographie Thérèsienne, by Henry de Curzon (Paris, 1902) is, unfortunately, too incomplete, not to say slovenly, to be of much use. Finally, it is necessary to say a word about the spelling of the name Teresa. In Spanish and Italian it should be written without an h as these languages do not admit the use of Th; in English, likewise, where this combination of letters represents a special sound, the name should be spelt with T only. But the present fashion of thus writing it in Latin, German, French, and other languages, which generally maintain the etymological spelling, is intolerable: The name is Greek, and was placed on the calendar in honour of a noble Spanish lady, St. Therasia, who became the wife of a Saint, Paulinus of Nola, and a Saint herself. See Sainte Thérèse, Lettres au R. P. Bouix, by the Abbé Postel, Paris, 1864. The derivation of the name from the Hebrew Thersa can no longer be defended (Father Jerome-Gratian, in Fuente, Obras, Vol. VI., p. 369 sqq.). Benedict Zimmerman, Prior O.C.D. St. Luke's Priory, Wincanton, Somerset. 16th July, 1904. 1. Chap. xxxiv., note 5. 2. Chap. xviii. § 11. 3. Fuente, Obras (1881), vol. vi. p. 133. 4. See the licence granted by Leo X. to the prioress and convent of the Incarnation to build another house for the use of the said convent, and to migrate thither (Vatican Archives, Dataria, Leo X., anno i., vol. viii., fol. 82). Also a licence to sell or exchange certain property belonging to it (ibid., anno iv., vol. vii., f. 274; and a charge to the Bishop of Avila concerning a recourse of the said convent (ibid., anno vii., vol. iv., f. 24). 5. Chap. iv § 9. 6. Lettres de Ste. Thérèse, edit. P. Grégoire de S. Joseph, vol. iii, p. 419, note 2. 7. Chap. xxxvi. § 10. The date of this part of the Life can be easily ascertained from the two following chapters. In xxxvii. § 18, St. Teresa says that she is not yet fifty years old, consequently the chapter must have been written before the end of March, 1565; and in the next chapter, xxxviii. § 15, she speaks of the death of Father Pedro Ibañez, which appears to have taken place on 2nd February. This, at least, is the date under which his name appears in the Année Dominicaine, and the Very Rev. Prior Vincent McNabb tells me that there is every reason to think that it is the date of his death. 8. When about A.D. 1452 certain communities of Beguines demanded affiliation to the Carmelite Order, they were given the Constitutions of the friars without any alterations. These Constitutions were revised in 1462, but neither there nor in the Acts of the General Chapters, so far as these are preserved, is there the slightest reference to convents of nuns. The colophon of the printed edition (Venice, 1499) shows that they held good for friars and nuns: Expliciunt sacrae constitutiones novae fratrum et sororum beatae Mariae de Monte Carmelo. They contain the customary laws forbidding the friars under pain of excommunication, to leave the precincts of their convents without due licence, but do not enjoin strict enclosure, which would have been incompatible with their manner of life and their various duties. St. Teresa nowhere insinuates that the Constitutions, such as they were, were not kept at the Incarnation; her remarks in chap. vii. are aimed at the Constitutions themselves, which were never made for nuns, and therefore did not provide for the needs of their convents. 9. Reforma lib. i., cap. 47. Bollandists. no. 366. 10. Chap. vii. § 11. 11. Chap. v. § 2. 12. Constitutions of 1462. Part i., cap. x. 13. Chap. xxiii. § 17. 14. Deposition for the process of canonisation, written in 1591. Fuente, Obras, vol. vi., p. 174. 15. See the notes to chapters vii. § 11; xvi. § 10; xx. § 6; xxiv. § 4; xxvii. § 17. At the end of chapter xxxi. we are told on the authority of Don Vicente that the "first" Life must have ended at this point. 16. Bollandists, no. 1518. 17. Lettres, edit. Grégoire. I., pp. 13 (18 May, 1568); 21 (27 May); 35 (2 November). 18. Reforma, vol. i., lib. v., cap. xxxv., no. 9. Bollandists, no. 1518. 19. If the latter, it must have been very much shorter than the second edition, and can scarcely have contained more than the first nine chapters (perhaps verbatim) and an account of the visions, locutions, etc., contained in chapters xxiii.-xxxi., without comment. 20. Chap. xxxiii. § 7. 21. Chap. xxxiv. § 8. 22. Chap. xvi. § 2. 23. Chap. xvii. § 7. 24. Chap. xxviii. § 10. 25. In the Prologue to the Book of Foundations, Father Garcia de Toledo, her confessor at St. Joseph's Convent, is said to be responsible for the order to rewrite the "Life"; but in the Preface to the "Life" St. Teresa speaks of her "confessors" in the plural. Fathers Ibañez and Bañez may be included in the number. See also ch. xxx. § 27. 26. Chap. xviii. § 11. 27. Chap. xiii. § 22. In chap. xvi. § 12, the Saint says: "I wish we five who now love one another in our Lord, had made some such arrangement, etc." Fuente is of opinion that these five were, besides the Saint, Father Julian de Avila, Don Francisco de Salcedo, St. John of the Cross, and Don Lorenzo de Cepeda, St. Teresa's brother: but this is impossible at the date of this part of the "Life." It is more probable that she meant Francisco de Salcedo, Gaspar Daza, Julian de Avila, and Father Ibañez, the latter being still alive in the beginning of 1564, when this chapter was written. It is more difficult to say who the three confessors were whom St. Teresa desired to see the "Life" (ch. xl. § 32). If, as I think, the book was first handed to Father Garcia de Toledo, the others may have been Francisco de Salcedo, Baltasar Alvarez, and Gaspar de Salazar. 28. Chap. x. §§ 11 and 12. 29. This is the second reason why the letter could not have been addressed to Father Ibañez in 1562. 30. Edited by Don Francisco Herrero Bayona, 1883 p. 4. 31. Ibid., chap. xli. (see Dalton's translation, chap. xxv.). 32. Ibid., chap. lxxiii. See the difference in Dalton's translation, chap. xlii. 33. Fuente, Obras, vol. vi., p. 275. 34. See the following Preface, p. xxxvii. Lettres, ed. Grégoire, ii., p. 65. P. Bertholde-Ignace, Vie de la Mère Anne de Jésus, i., p. 472. 35. In the Prologue to the Book of Foundations, St. Teresa says that Father Garcia de Toledo ordered her to rewrite the book the same year in which St. Joseph's Convent was founded, i.e. 1562, but seeing that she only spent a few hours there and that the principal difficulties only arose after her return to the Incarnation, it appears more probable that Father Garcia's command was not made until the spring of the following year, when she went to live at St. Joseph's. 36. Chap. x. § 11. 37. See Historia Generalis Fratrum Discalceatorum Ordinis B. Virginis Mariae de Monte Carmelo Congregationis Eliae. Romae, 1668, vol. i., pp. 340-358 ad ann. 1604. 38. See Carmel in England, by Rev. Father B. Zimmerman, p. 240 sqq. St. Teresa's Arguments of the Chapters. J.H.S. J.H.S. Chapter I. [1]--In which she tells how God [2] began to dispose this soul from childhood for virtue, and how she was helped by having virtuous parents. Chapter II.--How she lost these virtues and how important it is to deal from childhood with virtuous persons. Chapter III.--In which she sets forth how good company was the means of her resuming good intentions, and in what manner God began to give her some light on the deception to which she was subjected. Chapter IV.--She explains how, with the assistance of God, she compelled herself to take the (Religious) habit, and how His Majesty began to send her many infirmities. Chapter V.--She continues to speak of the great infirmities she suffered and the patience God gave her to bear them, and how He turned evil into good, as is seen from something that happened at the place where she went for a cure. Chapter VI.--Of the great debt she owes God for giving her conformity of her will (with His) in her trials, and how she turned towards the glorious St. Joseph as her helper and advocate, and how much she profited thereby. Chapter VII.--Of the way whereby she lost the graces God had granted her, and the wretched life she began to lead; she also speaks of the danger arising from the want of a strict enclosure in convents of nuns. Chapter VIII.--Of the great advantage she derived from not entirely abandoning prayer so as not to lose her soul; and what an excellent remedy this is in order to win back what one has lost. She exhorts everybody to practise prayer, and shows what a gain it is, even if one should have given it up for a time, to make use of so great a good. Chapter IX.--By what means God began to rouse her soul and give light in the midst of darkness, and to strengthen her virtues so that she should not offend Him. Chapter X.--She begins to explain the graces God gave her in prayer, and how much we can do for ourselves, and of the importance of understanding God's mercies towards us. She requests those to whom this is to be sent to keep the remainder (of this book) secret, since they have commanded her to go into so many details about the graces God has shown her. Chapter XI.--In which she sets forth how it is that we do not love God perfectly in a short time. She begins to expound by means of a comparison four degrees of prayer, of the first of which she treats here; this is most profitable for beginners and for those who find no taste in prayer. Chapter XII.--Continuation of the first state. She declares how far, with the grace of God, we can proceed by ourselves, and speaks of the danger of seeking supernatural and extraordinary experiences before God lifts up the soul. Chapter XIII.--She continues to treat of the first degree, and gives advice with respect to certain temptations sometimes sent by Satan. This is most profitable. Chapter XIV.--She begins to explain the second degree of prayer in which God already gives the soul special consolations, which she shows here to be supernatural. This is most noteworthy. Chapter XV.--Continuing the same subject, she gives certain advice how one should behave in the prayer of quiet. She shows that many souls advance so far, but that few go beyond. The matters treated of in this chapter are very necessary and profitable. Chapter XVI.--On the third degree of prayer; she declares things of an elevated nature; what the soul that has come so far can do, and the effect of such great graces of God. This is calculated to greatly animate the spirit to the praise of God, and contains advice for those who have reached this point. Chapter XVII.--Continues to declare matters concerning the third degree of prayer and completes the explanation of its effects. She also treats of the impediment caused by the imagination and the memory. Chapter XVIII.--She treats of the fourth degree of prayer, and begins to explain [3] in what high dignity God holds a soul that has attained this state; this should animate those who are given to prayer, to make an effort to reach so high a state since it can be obtained in this world, though not by merit but only through the goodness of God. [4] Chapter XIX.--She continues the same subject, and begins to explain the effects on the soul of this degree of prayer. She earnestly exhorts not to turn back nor to give up prayer even if, after having received this favour, one should fall. She shows the damage that would result (from the neglect of this advice). This is most noteworthy and consoling for the weak and for sinners. Chapter XX.--She speaks of the difference between Union and Trance, and explains what a Trance is; she also says something about the good a soul derives from being, through God's goodness, led so far. She speaks of the effects of Union. [5] Chapter XXI.--She continues and concludes this last degree of prayer, and says what a soul having reached it feels when obliged to turn back and live in the world, and speaks of the light God gives concerning the deceits (of the world). This is good doctrine. Chapter XXII.--In which she shows that the safest way for contemplatives is not to lift up the spirit to high things but to wait for God to lift it up. How the Sacred Humanity of Christ is the medium for the most exalted contemplation. She mentions an error under which she laboured for some time. This chapter is most profitable. Chapter XXIII.--She returns to the history of her life, how she began to practise greater perfection. This is profitable for those who have to direct souls practising prayer that they may know how to deal with beginners, and she speaks of the profit she derived from such knowledge. Chapter XXIV.--She continues the same subject and tells how her soul improved since she began to practise obedience, and how little she was able to resist God's graces, and how His Majesty continued to give them more and more abundantly. Chapter XXV.--Of the manner in which Locutions of God are perceived by the soul without being actually heard; and of some deceits that might take place in this matter, and how one is to know which is which. This is most profitable for those who are in this degree of prayer, because it is very well explained, and contains excellent doctrine. Chapter XXVI.--She continues the same subject; explains and tells things that have happened to her which caused her to lose fear and convinced her that the spirit which spoke to her was a good one. Chapter XXVII.--Of another way in which God teaches a soul, and, without speaking, makes His Will known in an admirable manner. She goes on to explain a vision, though not an imaginary one, and a great grace with which God favoured her. This chapter is noteworthy. Chapter XXVIII.--She treats of the great favours God showed her, and how He appeared to her for the first time; she explains what an imaginary vision is, and speaks of the powerful effects it leaves and the signs whether it is from God. This chapter is most profitable and noteworthy. Chapter XXIX.--She continues and tells of some great mercies God showed her, and what His Majesty said to her in order to assure her (of the truth of these visions), and taught her how to answer contradictors. Chapter XXX.--She continues the history of her life, and how God sent her a remedy for all her anxieties by calling the holy Friar Fray Pedro de Alcantara of the Order of the glorious St. Francis to the place where she lived. She mentions some great temptations and interior trials through which she sometimes had to pass. Chapter XXXI.--She speaks of some exterior temptations and apparitions of Satan, and how he ill-treated her. She mentions, moreover, some very good things by way of advice to persons who are walking on the way of perfection. Chapter XXXII.--She narrates how it pleased God to put her in spirit in that place of Hell she had deserved by her sins. She tells a little [6] of what she saw there compared with what there was besides. She begins to speak of the manner and way of founding the convent of St. Joseph where she now lives. Chapter XXXIII.--She continues the subject of the foundation of the glorious St. Joseph. How she was commanded to have nothing (further) to do with it, how she abandoned it, also the troubles it brought her and how God consoled her in all this. Chapter XXXIV.--She shows how at that time it happened that she absented herself from this place and how her Superior commanded her to go away at the request of a very noble lady who was in great affliction. She begins to tell what happened to her there, and the great grace God bestowed upon her in determining through her instrumentality a person of distinction to serve Him truly; and how that person found favour and help in her (Teresa). This is noteworthy. Chapter XXXV.--Continuation of the foundation of this house of our glorious Father St. Joseph; in what manner our Lord ordained that holy poverty should be observed there; the reason why she left the lady with whom she had been staying, and some other things that happened. Chapter XXXVI.--She continues the same subject, and shows how the foundation of this convent of the glorious St. Joseph was finally accomplished, and the great contradictions and persecutions she had to endure after the Religious had taken the habit, and the great trials and temptations through which she passed, and how God led her forth victorious to His own glory and praise. Chapter XXXVII.--Of the effects which remained when God granted her some favour; together with other very good doctrine. She shows how one ought to strive after and prize every increase in heavenly glory, and that for no trouble whatever one should neglect a good that is to be perpetual. Chapter XXXVIII.--She treats of some great mercies God showed her, even making known to her heavenly secrets by means of visions and revelations His Majesty vouchsafed to grant her; she speaks of the effects they caused and the great improvement resulting in her soul. Chapter XXXIX.--She continues the same subject, mentioning great graces granted her by God; how He promised to hear her requests on behalf of persons for whom she should pray. Some remarkable instances in which His Majesty thus favoured her. Chapter XL.--Continuation of the same subject of great mercies God has shown her. From some of these very good doctrine may be gathered, and this, as she declares, was, besides compliance with obedience, her principal motive (in writing this book), namely to enumerate such of these mercies as would be instructive to souls. This chapter brings the history of her Life, written by herself, to an end. May it be for the glory of God. Amen. 1. St. Teresa wrote no title, either of the whole book or of the Preface, but only the monogram J.H.S., which is repeated at the beginning of the first chapter and at the end of the last, previous to the letter with which the volume concludes. 2. "El Señor" is everywhere translated by "God" in distinction to "Nuestro Señor," "Our Lord." 3. "In an excellent manner," scored through by the Saint herself. 4. "To be read with great care, as it is explained in a most delicate way, and contains many noteworthy points," also scored through by St. Teresa herself. 5. "This is most admirable," scored through by the Saint. 6. "Una cifra," a mere nothing. Preface by David Lewis. St. Teresa was born in Avila on Wednesday, March 28, 1515. Her father was Don Alfonso Sanchez de Cepeda, and her mother Doña Beatriz Davila y Ahumada. The name she received in her baptism was common to both families, for her great-grandmother on the father's side was Teresa Sanchez, and her grandmother on her mother's side was Teresa de las Cuevas. While she remained in the world, and even after she had become a nun in the monastery of the Incarnation, which was under the mitigated rule, she was known as Doña Teresa Sanchez Cepeda Davila y Ahumada; for in those days children took the name either of the father or of the mother, as it pleased them. The two families were noble, but that of Ahumada was no longer in possession of its former wealth and power. [1] Doña Beatriz was the second wife of Don Alfonso, and was related in the fourth degree to the first wife, as appears from the dispensation granted to make the marriage valid on the 16th of October, 1509. Of this marriage Teresa was the third child. Doña Beatriz died young, and the eldest daughter, Maria de Cepeda, took charge of her younger sisters--they were two--and was as a second mother to them till her marriage, which took place in 1531, when the Saint was in her sixteenth year. But as she was too young to be left in charge of her father's house, and as her education was not finished, she was sent to the Augustinian monastery, the nuns of which received young girls, and brought them up in the fear of God. [2] The Saint's own account is that she was too giddy and careless to be trusted at home, and that it was necessary to put her under the care of those who would watch over her and correct her ways. She remained a year and a half with the Augustinian nuns, and all the while God was calling her to Himself. She was not willing to listen to His voice; she would ask the nuns to pray for her that she might have light to see her way; "but for all this," she writes, "I wished not to be a nun." [3] By degrees her will yielded, and she had some inclination to become a religious at the end of the eighteen months of her stay, but that was all. She became ill; her father removed her, and the struggle within herself continued,--on the one hand, the voice of God calling her; on the other, herself labouring to escape from her vocation. At last, after a struggle which lasted three months, she made up her mind, and against her inclination, to give up the world. She asked her father's leave, and was refused. She besieged him through her friends, but to no purpose. "The utmost I could get from him," she says, "was that I might do as I pleased after his death." [4] How long this contest with her father lasted is not known, but it is probable that it lasted many months, for the Saint was always most careful of the feelings of others, and would certainly have endured much rather than displease a father whom she loved so much, and who also loved her more than his other children. [5] But she had to forsake her father, and so she left her father's house by stealth, taking with her one of her brothers, whom she had persuaded to give himself to God in religion. The brother and sister set out early in the morning, the former for the monastery of the Dominicans, and the latter for the Carmelite monastery of the Incarnation, in Avila. The nuns received her into the house, but sent word to her father of his child's escape. Don Alfonso, however, yielded at once, and consented to the sacrifice which he was compelled to make. In the monastery of the Incarnation the Saint was led on, without her own knowledge, to states of prayer so high, that she became alarmed about herself. In the purity and simplicity of her soul, she feared that the supernatural visitations of God might after all be nothing else but delusions of Satan. [6] She was so humble, that she could not believe graces so great could be given to a sinner like herself. The first person she consulted in her trouble seems to have been a layman, related to her family, Don Francisco de Salcedo. He was a married man, given to prayer, and a diligent frequenter of the theological lectures in the monastery of the Dominicans. Through him she obtained the help of a holy priest, Gaspar Daza, to whom she made known the state of her soul. The priest, hindered by his other labours, declined to be her director, and the Saint admits that she could have made no progress under his guidance. [7] She now placed herself in the hands of Don Francis, who encouraged her in every way, and, for the purpose of helping her onwards in the way of perfection, told her of the difficulties he himself had met with, and how by the grace of God he had overcome them. But when the Saint told him of the great graces which God bestowed upon her, Don Francis became alarmed; he could not reconcile them with the life the Saint was living, according to her own account. He never thought of doubting the Saint's account, and did not suspect her of exaggerating her imperfections in the depths of her humility: "he thought the evil spirit might have something to do" with her, [8] and advised her to consider carefully her way of prayer. Don Francis now applied again to Gaspar Daza, and the two friends consulted together; but, after much prayer on their part and on that of the Saint, they came to the conclusion that she "was deluded by an evil spirit," and recommended her to have recourse to the fathers of the Society of Jesus, lately settled in Avila. The Saint, now in great fear, but still hoping and trusting that God would not suffer her to be deceived, made preparations for a general confession; and committed to writing the whole story of her life, and made known the state of her soul to F. Juan de Padranos, one of the fathers of the Society. F. Juan understood it all, and comforted her by telling her that her way of prayer was sound and the work of God. Under his direction she made great progress, and for the further satisfaction of her confessor, and of Don Francis, who seems to have still retained some of his doubts, she told everything to St. Francis de Borja, who on one point changed the method of direction observed by F. Juan. That father recommended her to resist the supernatural visitations of the spirit as much as she could, but she was not able, and the resistance pained her; [9] St. Francis told her she had done enough, and that it was not right to prolong that resistance. [10] The account of her life which she wrote before she applied to the Jesuits for direction has not been preserved; but it is possible that it was made more for her own security than for the purpose of being shown to her confessor. The next account is Relation I., made for St. Peter of Alcantara, and was probably seen by many; for that Saint had to defend her, and maintain that the state of her soul was the work of God, against those who thought that she was deluded by Satan. Her own confessor was occasionally alarmed, and had to consult others, and thus, by degrees, her state became known to many; and there were some who, were so persuaded of her delusions, that they wished her to be exorcised as one possessed of an evil spirit, [11] and at a later time her friends were afraid that she might be denounced to the Inquisitors. [12] During the troubles that arose when it became known that the Saint was about to found the monastery of St. Joseph, and therein establish the original rule of her Order in its primitive simplicity and austerity, she went for counsel to the Father Fra Pedro Ibañez, [13] the Dominican, a most holy and learned priest. That father not only encouraged her, and commended her work, but also ordered her to give him in writing the story of her spiritual life. The Saint readily obeyed, and began it in the monastery of the Incarnation, and finished it in the house of Doña Luisa de la Cerda, in Toledo, in the month of June, 1562. On the 24th of August, the feast of St. Bartholomew, in the same year, the Reform of the Carmelites began in the new monastery of St. Joseph in Avila. What the Saint wrote for Fra Ibañez has not been found. It is, no doubt, substantially preserved in her Life, as we have it now, and is supposed to have reached no further than the end of ch. xxxi. What follows was added by direction of another Dominican father, confessor of the Saint in the new monastery of St. Joseph, Fra Garcia of Toledo, who, in 1562, bade her "write the history of that foundation, and other matters." But as the Saint carried a heavy burden laid on her by God, a constant fear of delusion, she had recourse about the same time to the Inquisitor Soto, who advised her to write a history of her life, send it to Juan of Avila, the "Apostle of Andalucia," and abide by his counsel. As the direction of Fra Garcia of Toledo and the advice of the Inquisitor must have been given, according to her account, about the same time, the Life, as we have it now, must have occupied her nearly six years in the writing of it, which may well be owing to her unceasing care in firmly establishing the new monastery of St. Joseph. The book at last was sent to Blessed Juan of Avila by her friend Doña Luisa de la Cerda, and that great master of the spiritual life wrote the following censure of it: "The grace and peace of Jesus Christ be with you always. "1. When I undertook to read the book sent me, it was not so much because I thought myself able to judge of it, as because I thought I might, by the grace of our Lord, learn something from the teachings it contains: and praised be Christ; for, though I have not been able to read it with the leisure it requires, I have been comforted by it, and might have been edified by it, if the fault had not been mine. And although, indeed, I may have been comforted by it, without saying more, yet the respect due to the subject and to the person who has sent it will not allow me, I think, to let it go back without giving my opinion on it, at least in general. "2. The book is not fit to be in the hands of everybody, for it is necessary to correct the language in some places, and explain it in others; and there are some things in it useful for your spiritual life and not so for others who might adopt them, for the special ways by which God leads some souls are not meant for others. These points, or the greater number of them, I have marked for the purpose of arranging them when I shall be able to do so, and I shall not fail to send them to you; for if you were aware of my infirmities and necessary occupations, I believe they would make you pity me rather than blame me for the omission. "3. The doctrine of prayer is for the most part sound, and you may rely on it, and observe it; and the raptures I find to possess the tests of those which are true. What you say of God's way of teaching the soul, without respect to the imagination and without interior locutions, is safe, and I find nothing to object to it. St. Augustine speaks well of it. "4. Interior locutions in these days have been a delusion of many, and exterior locutions are the least safe. It is easy enough to see when they proceed from ourselves, but to distinguish between those of a good and those of an evil spirit is more difficult. There are many rules given for finding out whether they come from our Lord or not, and one of them is, that they should be sent us in a time of need, or for some good end, as for the comforting a man under temptation or in doubt, or as a warning of coming danger. As a good man will not speak unadvisedly, neither will God; so, considering this, and that the locutions are agreeable to the holy writings and the teaching of the Church, my opinion is that the locutions mentioned in the book came from God. "5. Imaginary or bodily visions are those which are most doubtful, and should in no wise be desired, and if they come undesired still they should be shunned as much as possible, yet not by treating them with contempt, unless it be certain that they come from an evil spirit; indeed, I was filled with horror, and greatly distressed, when I read of the gestures of contempt that were made. [14] People ought to entreat our Lord not to lead them by the way of visions, but to reserve for them in Heaven the blessed vision of Himself and the saints, and to guide them here along the beaten path as He guides His faithful servants, and they must take other good measures for avoiding these visions. "6. But if the visions continue after all this is done, and if the soul derives good from them, and if they do not lead to vanity, but deeper humility, and if the locutions be at one with the teaching the Church, and if they continue for any time, and that with inward satisfaction--better felt than described--there is no reason for avoiding them. But no one ought to rely on his own judgment herein; he should make everything known to him who can give him light. That is the universal remedy to be had recourse to in such matters, together with hope in God, Who will not let a soul that wishes to be safe lie under a delusion, if it be humble enough to yield obedience to the opinion of others. "7. Nor should any one cause alarm by condemning them forthwith, because he sees that the person to whom they are granted is not perfect, for it is nothing new that our Lord in His goodness makes wicked people just, yea, even grievous sinners; by giving them to taste most deeply of His sweetness. I have seen it so myself. Who will set bounds to the goodness of our Lord?--especially when these graces are given, not for merit, nor because one is stronger; on the contrary, they are given to one because he is weaker; and as they do not make one more holy, they are not always given to the most holy. "8. They are unreasonable who disbelieve these things merely because they are most high things, and because it seems to them incredible that infinite Majesty humbles Himself to these loving relations with one of His creatures. It is written, God is love, and if He is love, then infinite love and infinite goodness, and we must not be surprised if such a love and such a goodness breaks out into such excesses of love as disturb those who know nothing of it. And though many know of it by faith, still, as to that special experience of the loving, and more than loving, converse of God with whom He will, if not had, how deep it reaches can never be known; and so I have seen many persons scandalized at hearing of what God in His love does for His creatures. As they are themselves very far away from it, they cannot think that God will do for others what He is not doing for them. As this is an effect of love, and that a love which causes wonder, reason requires we should look upon it as a sign of its being from God, seeing that He is wonderful in His works, and most especially in those of his compassion; but they take occasion from this to be distrustful, which should have been a ground of confidence, when other circumstances combine as evidences of these visitations being good. "9. It seems from the book, I think, that you have resisted, and even longer than was right. I think, too, that these locutions have done your soul good, and in particular that they have made you see your own wretchedness and your faults more clearly, and amend them. They have lasted long, and always with spiritual profit. They move you to love God, and to despise yourself, and to do penance. I see no reasons for condemning them, I incline rather to regard them as good, provided you are careful not to rely altogether on them, especially if they are unusual, or bid you do something out of the way, or are not very plain. In all these and the like cases you must withhold your belief in them, and at once seek for direction. "10. Also it should be considered that, even if they do come from God, Satan may mix with them suggestions of his own; you should therefore be always suspicious of them. Also, when they are known to be from God, men must not rest much on them, seeing that holiness does not lie in them, but in a humble love of God and our neighbour; everything else, however good, must be feared, and our efforts directed to the gaining of humility, goodness, and the love of our Lord. It is seemly, also, not to worship what is seen in these visions, but only Jesus Christ, either as in Heaven or in the Sacrament, or, if it be a vision of the Saints, then to lift up the heart to the Holy One in Heaven, and not to that which is presented to the imagination: let it suffice that the imagination may be made use of for the purpose of raising me up to that which it makes me see. "11. I say, too, that the things mentioned in this book befall other persons even in this our day, and that there is great certainty that they come from God, Whose arm is not shortened that He cannot do now what He did in times past, and that in weak vessels, for His own glory. "12. Go on your road, but always suspecting robbers, and asking for the right way; give thanks to our Lord, Who has given you His love, the knowledge of yourself, and a love of penance and the cross, making no account of these other things. However, do not despise them either, for there are signs that most of them come from our Lord, and those that do not come from Him will not hurt you if you ask for direction. "13. I cannot believe that I have written this in my own strength, for I have none, but it is the effect of your prayers. I beg of you, for the love of Jesus Christ our Lord, to burden yourself with a prayer for me; He knows that I am asking this in great need, and I think that is enough to make you grant my request. I ask your permission to stop now, for I am bound to write another letter. May Jesus be glorified in all and by all! Amen. "Your servant, for Christ's sake. "Juan de Avila "Montilla, 12th Sept., 1568." Her confessors, having seen the book, "commanded her to make copies of it," [15] one of which has been traced into the possession of the Duke and Duchess of Alva. The Princess of Eboli, in 1569, obtained a copy from the Saint herself, after much importunity; but it was more out of vanity or curiosity, it is to be feared, than from any real desire to learn the story of the Saint's spiritual life, that the Princess desired the boon. She and her husband promised to keep it from the knowledge of others, but the promise given was not kept. The Saint heard within a few days later that the book was in the hands of the servants of the Princess, who was angry with the Saint because she had refused to admit, at the request of the Princess, an Augustinian nun into the Order of Carmel in the new foundation of Pastrana. The contents of the book were bruited abroad, and the visions and revelations of the Saint were said to be of a like nature with those of Magdalene of the Cross, a deluded and deluding nun. The gossip in the house of the Princess was carried to Madrid, and the result was that the Inquisition began to make a search for the book. [16] It is not quite clear, however, that it was seized at this time. The Princess became a widow in July, 1573, and insisted on becoming a Carmelite nun in the house she and her husband, Ruy Gomez, had founded in Pastrana. When the news of her resolve reached the monastery, the mother-prioress, Isabel of St. Dominic, exclaimed, "The Princess a nun! I look on the house as ruined." The Princess came, and insisted on her right as foundress; she had compelled a friar to give her the habit before her husband was buried, and when she came to Pastrana she began her religious life by the most complete disobedience and disregard of common propriety. Don Vicente's description of her is almost literally correct, though intended only for a general summary of her most childish conduct: "On the death of the Prince of Eboli, the Princess would become a nun in her monastery of Pastrana. The first day she had a fit of violent fervour; on the next she relaxed the rule; on the third she broke it, and conversed with secular people within the cloisters. She was also so humble that she required the nuns to speak to her on their knees, and insisted upon their receiving into the house as religious whomsoever she pleased. Hereupon complaints were made to St. Teresa, who remonstrated with the Princess, and showed her how much she was in the wrong, whereupon she replied that the monastery was hers; but the Saint proved to her that the nuns were not, and had them removed to Segovia." [17] The nuns were withdrawn from Pastrana in April, 1574, and then the anger of the Princess prevailed; she sent the Life of the Saint, which she had still in her possession, to the Inquisition, and denounced it as a book containing visions, revelations, and dangerous doctrines, which the Inquisitors should look into and examine: The book was forthwith given to theologians for examination, and two Dominican friars, of whom Bañes was one, were delegated censors of it by the Inquisition. [18] Fra Bañes did not know the Saint when he undertook her defence in Avila against the authorities of the city, eager to destroy the monastery of St. Joseph; [19] but from that time forth he was one of her most faithful friends, strict and even severe, as became a wise director who had a great Saint for his penitent. He testifies in the process of her beatification that he was firm and sharp with her; while she herself was the more desirous of his counsel, the more he humbled her, and the less he appeared to esteem her. [20] When he found that copies of her life were in the hands of secular people,--he had probably also heard of the misconduct of the Princess of Eboli,--he showed his displeasure to the Saint, and told her he would burn the book, it being unseemly that the writings of women should be made public. The Saint left it in his hands, but Fra Bañes, struck with her humility, had not the courage to burn it; he sent it to the Holy Office in Madrid. [21] Thus the book was in a sense denounced twice,--once by an enemy, the second time by a friend, to save it. Both the Saint and her confessor, Fra Bañes, state that the copy given up by the latter was sent to the Inquisition in Madrid, and Fra Bañes says so twice in his deposition. The Inquisitor Soto returned the copy to Fra Bañes, desiring him to read it, and give his opinion thereon. Fra Bañes did so, and wrote his "censure" of the book on the blank leaves at the end. That censure still remains, and is one of the most important, because given during the lifetime of the Saint, and while many persons were crying out against her. Bañes wished it had been published when the Saint's Life was given to the world by Fra Luis de Leon; but notwithstanding its value, and its being preserved in the book which is in the handwriting of the Saint, no one before Don Vicente made it known. It was easy enough to praise the writings of St. Teresa, and to admit her sanctity, after her death. Fra Bañes had no external help in the applause of the many, and he had to judge the book as a theologian, and the Saint as one of his ordinary penitents. When he wrote, he wrote like a man whose whole life was spent, as he tells us himself, "in lecturing and disputing." [22] That censure is as follows: "1. This book, wherein Teresa of Jesus, Carmelite nun, and foundress of the Barefooted Carmelites, gives a plain account of the state of her soul, in order to be taught and directed by her confessors, has been examined by me, and with much attention, and I have not found anywhere in it anything which, in my opinion, is erroneous in doctrine. On the contrary, there are many things in it highly edifying and instructive for those who give themselves to prayer. The great experience of this religious, her discretion also and her humility, which made her always seek for light and learning in her confessors, enabled her to speak with an accuracy on the subject of prayer that the most learned men, through their want of experience, have not always attained to. One thing only there is about the book that may reasonably cause any hesitation till it shall be very carefully examined; it contains many visions and revelations, matters always to be afraid of, especially in women, who are very ready to believe of them that they come from God, and to look on them as proofs of sanctity, though sanctity does not lie in them. On the contrary, they should be regarded as dangerous trials for those who are aiming at perfection, because Satan is wont to transform himself into an angel of light, [23] and to deceive souls which are curious and of scant humility, as we have seen in our day: nevertheless, we must not therefore lay down a general rule that all revelations and visions come from the devil. If it were so, St. Paul could not have said that Satan transforms himself into an angel of light, if the angel of light did not sometimes enlighten us. "2. Saints, both men and women, have had revelations, not only in ancient, but also in modern times; such were St. Dominic, St. Francis, St. Vincent Ferrer, St. Catherine of Siena, St. Gertrude, and many others that might be named; and as the Church of God is, and is to be, always holy to the end, not only because her profession is holiness, but because there are in her just persons and perfect in holiness, it is unreasonable to despise visions and revelations, and condemn them in one sweep, seeing they are ordinarily accompanied with much goodness and a Christian life. On the contrary, we should follow the saying of the Apostle in 1 Thess. v. 19-22: 'Spiritum nolite extinguere. Prophetias nolite spernere. Omnia [autem] probate: quod bonum est tenete. Ab omni specie mala abstinete vos.' He who will read St. Thomas on that passage will see how carefully they are to be examined who, in the Church of God, manifest any particular gift that may be profitable or hurtful to our neighbour, and how watchful the examiners ought to be lest the fire of the Spirit of God should be quenched in the good, and others cowed in the practices of the perfect Christian life. "3. Judging by the revelations made to her, this woman, even though she may be deceived in something, is at least not herself a deceiver, because she tells all the good and the bad so simply, and with so great a wish to be correct, that no doubt can be made as to her good intention; and the greater the reason for trying spirits of this kind, because there are persons in our day who are deceivers with the appearance of piety, the more necessary it is to defend those who, with the appearance, have also the reality, of piety. For it is a strange thing to see how lax and worldly people delight in seeing those discredited who have an appearance of goodness. God complained of old, by the Prophet Ezekiel, ch. xiii., of those false prophets who made the just to mourn and who flattered sinners, saying: 'Maerere fecisti cor justi mendaciter, quem Ego non contristavi: et comfortastis manus impii.' In a certain sense this may be said of those who frighten souls who are going on by the way of prayer and perfection, telling them that this way is singular and full of danger, that many who went by it have fallen into delusions, and that the safest way is that which is plain and common, travelled by all. "4. Words of this kind, clearly, sadden the hearts of those who would observe the counsels of perfection in continual prayer, so far as it is possible for them, and in much fasting, watching, and disciplines; and, on the other hand, the lax and the wicked take courage and lose the fear of God, because they consider the way on which they are travelling as the safer: and this is their delusion,--they call that a plain and safe road which is the absence of the knowledge and consideration of the dangers and precipices amidst which we are all of us journeying in this world. Nevertheless, there is no other security than that which lies in our knowing our daily enemies, and in humbly imploring the compassion of God, if we would not be their prisoners. Besides, there are souls whom God, in a way, constrains to enter on the way of perfection, and who, if they relaxed in their fervour, could not keep a middle course, but would immediately fall into the other extreme of sins, and for souls of this kind it is of the utmost necessity that they should watch and pray without ceasing; and, in short, there is nobody whom lukewarmness does not injure. Let every man examine his own conscience, and he will find this to be the truth. "5. I firmly believe that if God for a time bears with the lukewarm, it is owing to the prayers of the fervent, who are continually crying, 'et ne nos inducas in tentationem.' I have said this, not for the purpose of honouring those whom we see walking in the way of contemplation; for it is another extreme into which the world falls, and a covert persecution of goodness, to pronounce those holy forthwith who have the appearance of it. For that would be to furnish them with motives for vain-glory, and would do little honour to goodness; on the contrary, it would expose it to great risks, because, when they fall who have been objects of praise, the honour of goodness suffers more than if those people had not been so esteemed. And so I look upon this exaggeration of their holiness who are still living in the world to be a temptation of Satan. That we should have a good opinion of the servants of God is most just, but let us consider them always as people in danger, however good they may be, and that their goodness is not so evident that we can be sure of it even now. "6. Considering myself that what I have said is true, I have always proceeded cautiously in the examination of this account of the prayer and life of this nun, and no one has been more incredulous than myself as to her visions and revelations,--not so, however as to her goodness and her good desires, for herein I have had great experience of her truthfulness, her obedience, mortification, patience, and charity towards her persecutors, and of her other virtues, which any one who will converse with her will discern; and this is what may be regarded as a more certain proof of her real love of God than these visions and revelations. I do not, however, undervalue her visions, revelations, and ecstasies; on the contrary, I suspect them to be the work of God, as they have been in others who were Saints. But in this case it is always safer to be afraid and wary; for if she is confident about them, Satan will take occasion to interfere, and that which was once, perhaps, the work of God, may be changed into something else, and that will be the devil's. "7. I am of opinion that this book is not to be shown to every one, but only to men of learning, experience, and Christian discretion. It perfectly answers the purpose for which it was written, namely, that the nun should give an account of the state of her soul to those who had the charge of it, in order that she might not fall into delusions. Of one thing I am very sure, so far as it is possible for a man to be,--she is not a deceiver; she deserves, therefore, for her sincerity, that all should be favourable to her in her good purposes and good works. For within the last thirteen years she has, I believe, founded a dozen monasteries of Barefooted Carmelite nuns, the austerity and perfection of which are exceeded by none other; of which they who have been visitors of them, as the Dominican Provincial, master in theology, [24] Fra Pedro Fernandez, the master Fra Hernando del Castillo, and many others, speak highly. This is what I think, at present, concerning the censure of this book, submitting my judgment herein to that of Holy Church our mother, and her ministers. "Given in the College of St. Gregory, Valladolid, on the sixth day of July, 1575. "Fra Domingo Bañes." The book remained in the keeping of the Inquisition, and the Saint never saw it again. But she heard of it from the Archbishop of Toledo, Cardinal Quiroga, President of the Supreme Court of the Inquisition, when she applied to him for license to found a monastery in Madrid. Jerome of the Mother of God was with her; and heard the Cardinal's reply. His Eminence said he was glad to see her; that a book of hers had been in the Holy Office for some years, and had been rigorously examined; that he had read it himself, and regarded it as containing sound and wholesome doctrine. He would grant the license, and do whatever he could for the Saint. When she heard this, she wished to present a petition to the Inquisition for the restitution of her book; but Gratian thought it better to apply to the Duke of Alba for the copy which he had, and which the Inquisitors had allowed him to retain and read. The Duke gave his book to Fra Jerome, who had copies of it made for the use of the monasteries both of men and women. [25] Anne of Jesus, in 1586, founding a monastery of her Order in Madrid,--the Saint had died in 1582,--made inquiries about the book, and applied to the Inquisition for it, for she was resolved to publish the writings of her spiritual mother. The Inquisitors made no difficulty, and consented to the publication. In this she was seconded by the Empress Maria, daughter of Charles V., and widow of Maximilian II., who had obtained one of the copies which Fra Jerome of the Mother of God had ordered to be made. Fra Nicholas Doria, then Provincial, asked Fra Luis de Leon, the Augustinian, to edit the book, who consented. He was allowed to compare the copy furnished him with the original in the keeping of the Inquisition; but his edition has not been considered accurate, notwithstanding the facilities given him, and his great reverence for the Saint. It was published in Salamanca, A.D. 1588. With the Life of the Saint, Fra Luis de Leon received certain papers in the handwriting of the Saint, which he published as an additional chapter. Whether he printed all he received, or merely made extracts, may be doubtful, but anyhow that chapter is singularly incomplete. Don Vicente de la Fuente, from whose edition (Madrid, 1861, 1862) this translation has been made, omitted the additional chapter of Fra Luis de Leon, contrary to the practice of his predecessors. But he has done more, for he has traced the paragraphs of that chapter to their sources, and has given us now a collection of papers which form almost another Life of the Saint, to which he has given their old name of Relations, [26] the name which the Saint herself had given them. [27] Some of them are usually printed among the Saint's letters, and portions of some of the others are found in the Lives of the Saint written by Ribera and Yepes, and in the Chronicle of the Order; the rest was published for the first time by Don Vicente: the arrangement of the whole is due to him. The Relations are ten in the Spanish edition, and eleven in the translation. The last, the eleventh, has hitherto been left among the letters, and Don Vicente, seemingly not without some hesitation, so left it; but as it is of the like nature with the Relations, it has now been added to them. The original text, in the handwriting of the Saint, is preserved in the Escurial, not in the library, but among the relics of the Church. Don Vicente examined it at his leisure, and afterwards found in the National Library in Madrid an authentic and exact transcript of it, made by order of Ferdinand VI. His edition is, therefore, far better than any of its predecessors; but it is possible that even now there may still remain some verbal errors for future editors to correct. The most conscientious diligence is not a safeguard against mistakes. F. Bouix says that in ch. xxxiv. § 12, the reading of the original differs from that of the printed editions; yet Don Vicente takes no notice of it, and retains the common reading. It is impossible to believe that F. Bouix has stated as a fact that which is not. Again, in ch. xxxix. § 29, the printed editions have after the words, "Thou art Mine, and I am thine," "I am in the habit . . . . sincerity;" but Don Vicente omits them. This may have been an oversight, for in general he points out in his notes all the discrepancies between the printed editions and the original text. A new translation of the Life of St. Teresa seems called for now, because the original text has been collated since the previous translations were made, and also because those translations are exceedingly scarce. The first is believed to be this--it is a small quarto: "The Lyf of the Mother Teresa of Jesus, Foundresse of the Monasteries of the Discalced or Bare-footed Carmelite Nunnes and Fryers of the First Rule. "Written by herself at the commaundement of her ghostly father, and now translated into English out of Spanish. By W.M., of the Society of Jesus. "Imprinted in Antwerp by Henry Jaye. Anno MDCXI." Some thirty years afterwards, Sir Tobias Matthew, S.J., dissatisfied, as he says, with the former translation, published another, with the following title; the volume is a small octavo in form: "The Flaming Hart, or the Life of the glorious St. Teresa, Foundresse of the Reformation of the Order of the All-Immaculate Virgin Mother, our B. Lady of Mount Carmel. "This History of her Life was written by the Saint in Spanish, and is newly translated into English in the year of our Lord God 1642. 'Aut mori aut pati: Either to dye or else to suffer.'--Chap. xl. "Antwerpe, printed by Joannes Meursius. Anno MDCXLII." The next translation was made by Abraham Woodhead, and published in 1671, without the name of the translator, or of the printer, or of the place of publication. It is in quarto, and bears the following title: "The Life of the Holy Mother St. Teresa, Foundress of the Reformation of the Discalced Carmelites according to the Primitive Rule. Printed in the year MDCLXXI." It is not said that the translation was made from the Spanish, and there are grounds for thinking it to have been made from the Italian. Ch. xxxii. is broken off at the end of § 10; and ch. xxxiii., therefore, is ch. xxxvii. That which is there omitted has been thrown into the Book of the Foundations, which, in the translation of Mr. Woodhead, begins with § 11 of ch. xxxii. of the Life, as it also does in the Italian translation. It is due, however, to Mr. Woodhead to say that he has printed five of the Relations separately, not as letters, but as what they really are, and with that designation. The last translation is that of the Very Reverend John Dalton, Canon of Northampton, which is now, though twice published, almost as scarce as its predecessors. The title is: "The Life of St. Teresa, written by herself, and translated from the Spanish by the Rev. John Dalton. London, MDCCCLI." Septuagesima, 1870. 1. Fr. Anton. a St. Joseph, in his note on letter 16, but letter 41, vol. iv. ed. Doblado. 2. Reforma de los Descalços. lib. i. ch. vii. § 3. 3. Ch. iii. § 2. 4. Ch. iii. § 9. 5. Ch. i. § 3. 6. Ch. xxiii. § 2. 7. Ch. xxiii. § 8. 8. Id. § 12. 9. Ch. xxiv. § 1. 10. Id. § 4. 11. Ch. xxix. § 4. 12. Ch. xxxiii. § 6. 13. The Saint held him in great reverence, and in one of her letters--lett. 355, but lett. 100, vol. ii. ed. Doblado--calls him a founder of her Order, because of the great services he had rendered her, and told her nuns of Seville that they need not be veiled in his presence, though they must be so in the presence of everybody else, and even the friars of the Reform. 14. See Life, ch. xxix. § 6. 15. Rel. vii. § 9. 16. Reforma de los Descalços, lib. ii. c. xxviii. § 6. 17. Introduccion al libro de la Vida, vol. i. p. 3. 18. Jerome Gratian, Lucidario, c. iv. 19. Life, ch. xxxvi. § 15. 20. The Saint says of herself, Rel. vii. § 18, that "she took the greatest pains not to submit the state of her soul to any one who she thought would believe that these things came from God, for she was instantly afraid that the devil would deceive them both." 21. Rel. vii. § 16. 22. "Como hombre criado toda mi vida en leer y disputar" (De la Fuente, ii. p. 376). 23. 2 Cor. xi. 14: "Ipse enim Satanas transfigurat se in angelum lucis." 24. The other theologian appointed by the Inquisition, with Fra Bañes, to examine the "Life." 25. This took place in the year 1580, according to the Chronicler of the Order (Reforma de los Descalços, lib. v. c. xxxv. § 4); and the Bollandists (n. 1536) accept his statement. Fra Jerome says he was Provincial of his Order at the time; and as he was elected only on the 4th of March, 1581, according to the Chronicler and the Bollandists, it is more likely that the audience granted to them by the Cardinal took place in 1581. 26. Reforma de los Descalços, lib. v. c. xxxiv. § 4: "Relaciones de su espiritu." 27. Rel. ii. § 18. Annals of the Saint's Life. By Don Vicente de la Fuente. These are substantially the same with those drawn up by the Bollandists, but they are fuller and more minute, and furnish a more detailed history of the Saint. 1515. St. Teresa is born in Avila, March 28th. [1] 1522. She desires martyrdom, and leaves her father's house with one of her brothers. 1527. [2] Death of her mother. 1529. Writes romances of chivalry, and is misled by a thoughtless cousin. 1531. Her sister Maria's marriage, and her removal from home to the Augustinian monastery, where she remains till the autumn of next year. 1533. [3] Nov. 2, enters the monastery of the Incarnation. 1534. Nov. 3, makes her profession. 1535. Goes to Castellanos de la Cañada, to her sister's house, where she remains till the spring of 1536, when she goes to Bezadas. 1537. Returns to Avila on Palm Sunday. In July seriously ill, and in a trance for four days, when in her father's house. Paralysed for more than two years. 1539. Is cured of her paralysis by St. Joseph. 1541. Begins to grow lukewarm, and gives up mental prayer. 1542. Our Lord appears to her in the parlour of the monastery, "stern and grave " [ch. vii. § 11, see note there]. 1555. Ceases to converse with secular people, moved thereto by the sight of a picture of our Lord on the cross [ch. ix. § 1]. The Jesuits come to Avila and the Saint confesses to F. Juan de Padranos. 1556. Beginning of the supernatural visitations. 1557. St. Francis de Borja comes to Avila, and approves of the spirit of the Saint. 1558. First rapture of the Saint [ch. xxiv. § 7]. The vision of Hell [ch. xxxii. § 1]. Father Alvarez ordained priest. 1559. She takes F. Alvarez for her confessor. The transpiercing of her heart [ch. xxix. § 17]. Vision of our Lord risen from the dead [ch. xxvii. § 3, ch. xxviii. § 2]. 1560. The vow of greater perfection. St. Peter of Alcantara approves of her spirit, and St. Luis Beltran encourages her to proceed with her plan of founding a new monastery. 1561. F. Gaspar de Salazar, S.J., comes to Avila; her sister Doña Juana comes to Avila from Alba de Tormes to help the Saint in the new foundation [ch. xxxiii. § 13]. Restores her nephew to Life [ch. xxxv. § 14, note]. Fra Ibañez bids her write her Life. Receives a sum of money from her brother in Peru, which enables her to go on with the building of the new house. 1562. Goes to Toledo, to the house of Doña Luisa de la Cerda, and finishes the account of her Life. Makes the acquaintance of Fra Bañes, afterwards her principal director, and Fra Garcia of Toledo, both Dominicans. Receives a visit from Maria of Jesus. Has a revelation that her sister, Doña Maria, will die suddenly [ch. xxxiv. § 24]. Returns to Avila and takes possession of the new monastery, August 24. Troubles in Avila. The Saint ordered back to the monastery of the Incarnation. Is commanded by Fra Garcia of Toledo to write the history of the foundation of St. Joseph. 1. In the same year St. Philip was born in Florence. St. Teresa died in 1582, and St. Philip in 1595; but they were canonised on the same day, with St. Isidore, St. Ignatius, and St. Francis Xavier. The three latter were joined together in the three final consistories held before the solemn proclamation of their sanctity, and St. Teresa and St. Philip were joined together in the same way in the final consistories held specially, as usual, for them. 2. This must be an error. See ch. i. § 7, note 7. 3. There is a difficulty about this. The Bollandists maintain that she went to the monastery of the Incarnation in the year 1533. On the other hand Ribera, her most accurate biographer--with whom Fra Jerome agrees,--says that she left her father's house in 1535, when she was more than twenty years of age; Yepes, that she was not yet twenty; and the Second Relation of the Rota, that she was in her twentieth year. The Bull of Canonisation and the Office in the Breviary also say that she was in her twentieth year, that is, A.D. 1534. The Chronicler of the Order differs from all and assigns the year 1536 as the year in which she entered the monastery. The Life of the Holy Mother Teresa of Jesus. Written by Herself. Prologue. As I have been commanded and left at liberty to describe at length my way of prayer, and the workings of the grace of our Lord within me, I could wish that I had been allowed at the same time to speak distinctly and in detail of my grievous sins and wicked life. But it has not been so willed; on the contrary, I am laid herein under great restraint; and therefore, for the love of our Lord, I beg of every one who shall read this story of my life [1] to keep in mind how wicked it has been; and how, among the Saints who were converted to God, I have never found one in whom I can have any comfort. For I see that they, after our Lord had called them, never fell into sin again; I not only became worse, but, as it seems to me, deliberately withstood the graces of His Majesty, because I saw that I was thereby bound to serve Him more earnestly, knowing, at the same time, that of myself I could not pay the least portion of my debt. May He be blessed for ever Who waited for me so long! I implore Him with my whole heart to send me His grace, so that in all clearness and truth I may give this account of myself which my confessors command me to give; and even our Lord Himself, I know it, has also willed it should be given for some time past, but I had not the courage to attempt it. And I pray it may be to His praise and glory, and a help to my confessors; who, knowing me better, may succour my weakness, so that I may render to our Lord some portion of the service I owe Him. May all creatures praise Him for ever! Amen. 1. The Saint, in a letter written November 19, 1581, to Don Pedro de Castro, then canon of Avila, speaking of this book, calls it the book "Of the compassions of God"--Y ansi intitule ese libro De las Misericordias de Dios. That letter is the 358th in the edition of Don Vicente de la Fuente, and the 8th of the fourth volume of the Doblado edition of Madrid. "Vitam igitur suam internam et supernaturalem magis pandit quam narrat actiones suas mere humanas" (Bollandists, n. 2). Chapter I. Childhood and Early Impressions. The Blessing of Pious Parents. Desire of Martyrdom. Death of the Saint's Mother. 1. I had a father and mother, who were devout and feared God. Our Lord also helped me with His grace. All this would have been enough to make me good, if I had not been so wicked. My father was very much given to the reading of good books; and so he had them in Spanish, that his children might read them. These books, with my mother's carefulness to make us say our prayers, and to bring us up devout to our Lady and to certain Saints, began to make me think seriously when I was, I believe, six or seven years old. It helped me, too, that I never saw my father and mother respect anything but goodness. They were very good themselves. My father was a man of great charity towards the poor, and compassion for the sick, and also for servants; so much so, that he never could be persuaded to keep slaves, for he pitied them so much: and a slave belonging to one of his brothers being once in his house, was treated by him with as much tenderness as his own children. He used to say that he could not endure the pain of seeing that she was not free. He was a man of great truthfulness; nobody ever heard him swear or speak ill of any one; his life was most pure. 2. My mother also was a woman of great goodness, and her life was spent in great infirmities. She was singularly pure in all her ways. Though possessing great beauty, yet was it never known that she gave reason to suspect that she made any account whatever of it; for, though she was only three-and-thirty years of age when she died, her apparel was already that of a woman advanced in years. She was very calm, and had great sense. The sufferings she went through during her life were grievous, her death most Christian. [1] 3. We were three sisters and nine brothers. [2] All, by the mercy of God, resembled their parents in goodness except myself, though I was the most cherished of my father. And, before I began to offend God, I think he had some reason,--for I am filled with sorrow whenever I think of the good desires with which our Lord inspired me, and what a wretched use I made of them. Besides, my brothers never in any way hindered me in the service of God. 4. One of my brothers was nearly of my own age; [3] and he it was whom I most loved, though I was very fond of them all, and they of me. He and I used to read Lives of Saints together. When I read of martyrdom undergone by the Saints for the love of God, it struck me that the vision of God was very cheaply purchased; and I had a great desire to die a martyr's death,--not out of any love of Him of which I was conscious, but that I might most quickly attain to the fruition of those great joys of which I read that they were reserved in Heaven; and I used to discuss with my brother how we could become martyrs. We settled to go together to the country of the Moors, [4] begging our way for the love of God, that we might be there beheaded; [5] and our Lord, I believe, had given us courage enough, even at so tender an age, if we could have found the means to proceed; but our greatest difficulty seemed to be our father and mother. 5. It astonished us greatly to find it said in what we were reading that pain and bliss were everlasting. We happened very often to talk about this; and we had a pleasure in repeating frequently, "For ever, ever, ever." Through the constant uttering of these words, our Lord was pleased that I should receive an abiding impression of the way of truth when I was yet a child. 6. As soon as I saw it was impossible to go to any place where people would put me to death for the sake of God, my brother and I set about becoming hermits; and in an orchard belonging to the house we contrived, as well as we could, to build hermitages, by piling up small stones one on the other, which fell down immediately; and so it came to pass that we found no means of accomplishing our wish. Even now, I have a feeling of devotion when I consider how God gave me in my early youth what I lost by my own fault. I gave alms as I could--and I could but little. I contrived to be alone, for the sake of saying my prayers [6]--and they were many--especially the Rosary, to which my mother had a great devotion, and had made us also in this like herself. I used to delight exceedingly, when playing with other children, in the building of monasteries, as if we were nuns; and I think I wished to be a nun, though not so much as I did to be a martyr or a hermit. 7. I remember that, when my mother died, [7] I was about twelve years old--a little less. When I began to understand my loss, I went in my affliction to an image of our Lady, [8] and with many tears implored her to be my mother. I did this in my simplicity, and I believe that it was of service to me; for I have by experience found the royal Virgin help me whenever I recommended myself to her; and at last she has brought me back to herself. It distresses me now, when I think of, and reflect on, that which kept me from being earnest in the good desires with which I began. 8. O my Lord, since Thou art determined to save me--may it be the pleasure of Thy Majesty to effect it!--and to bestow upon me so many graces, why has it not been Thy pleasure also--not for my advantage, but for Thy greater honour--that this habitation, wherein Thou hast continually to dwell, should not have contracted so much defilement? It distresses me even to say this, O my Lord, because I know the fault is all my own, seeing that Thou hast left nothing undone to make me, even from my youth, wholly Thine. When I would complain of my parents, I cannot do it; for I saw nothing in them but all good, and carefulness for my welfare. Then, growing up, I began to discover the natural gifts which our Lord had given me--they were said to be many; and, when I should have given Him thanks for them, I made use of every one of them, as I shall now explain, to offend Him. 1. See ch. xxxvii. § 1; where the Saint says that she saw them in a vision both in Heaven. 2. Alfonso Sanchez de Cepeda, father of the Saint, married first Catalina del Peso y Henao, and had three children--one daughter, Maria de Cepeda, and two sons. After the death of Catalina, he married Beatriz Davila y Ahumada, by whom he had nine children--seven boys and two girls. The third of these, and the eldest of the daughters, was the Saint, Doña Teresa Sanchez Cepeda Davila y Ahumada. In the Monastery of the Incarnation, where she was a professed nun for twenty-eight years, she was known as Doña Teresa; but in the year 1563, when she left her monastery for the new foundation of St. Joseph, of the Reform of the Carmelites, she took for the first time the name of Teresa of Jesus (De la Fuente). The Saint was born March 28, 1515, and baptized on the 4th of April, in the church of St. John; on which day Mass was said for the first time in the Monastery of the Incarnation, where the Saint made her profession. Her godfather was Vela Nuñez, and her godmother Doña Maria del Aguila. The Bollandists and Father Bouix say that she was baptized on the very day of her birth. But the testimony of Doña Maria de Pinel, a nun in the Monastery of the Incarnation, is clear: and Don Vicente de La Fuente, quoting it, vol. i. p. 549, says that this delay of baptism was nothing singular in those days, provided there was no danger of death. 3. Rodrigo de Cepeda, four years older than the Saint, entered the army, and, serving in South America, was drowned in the river Plate, Rio de la Plata. St. Teresa always considered him a martyr, because he died in defence of the Catholic faith (Ribera, lib. i. ch. iii.). Before he sailed for the Indies, he made his will, and left all his property to the Saint, his sister (Reforma de los Descalços, vol. i. lib. i. ch. iii. § 4). 4. The Bollandists incline to believe that St. Teresa may not have intended to quit Spain, because all the Moors were not at that time driven out of the country. The Bull of the Saint's canonization, and the Lections of the Breviary, say that she left her father's house, ut in Africam trajiceret. 5. The two children set out on their strange journey--one of them seven, the other eleven, years old--through the Adaja Gate; but when they had crossed the bridge, they were met by one of their uncles, who brought them back to their mother, who had already sent through Avila in quest of them. Rodrigo, like Adam, excused himself, and laid the blame on the woman (Ribera, lib. i. ch. iii.). Francisco de Santa Maria, chronicler of the Order, says that the uncle was Francisco Alvarez de Cepeda (Reforma de los Descalços, lib. i. ch. v. § 4). 6. She was also marvellously touched by the story of the Samaritan woman at the well, of whom there was a picture in her room (Ribera, lib. i. ch. iv.). She speaks of this later on. (See ch. xxx. § 24.) 7. The last will and testament of Doña Beatriz de Ahumada was made November 24, 1528 and she may have died soon after. If there be no mistake in the copy of that instrument, the Saint must have been more than twelve years old at that time. Don Vicente, in a note, says, with the Bollandists, that Doña Beatriz died at the end of the year 1526, or in the beginning of 1527; but it is probable that, when he wrote that note, he had not read the copy of the will, which he has printed in the first volume of the Saint's writings, p. 550. 8. Our Lady of Charity, in the church of the hospital where the poor and pilgrims were received in Avila (Bouix). Chapter II. Early Impressions. Dangerous Books and Companions. The Saint Is Placed in a Monastery. 1. What I shall now speak of was, I believe, the beginning of great harm to me. I often think how wrong it is of parents not to be very careful that their children should always, and in every way, see only that which is good; for though my mother was, as I have just said, so good herself, nevertheless I, when I came to the use of reason, did not derive so much good from her as I ought to have done--almost none at all; and the evil I learned did me much harm. She was very fond of books of chivalry; but this pastime did not hurt her so much as it hurt me, because she never wasted her time on them; only we, her children, were left at liberty to read them; and perhaps she did this to distract her thoughts from her great sufferings, and occupy her children, that they might not go astray in other ways. It annoyed my father so much, that we had to be careful he never saw us. I contracted a habit of reading these books; and this little fault which I observed in my mother was the beginning of lukewarmness in my good desires, and the occasion of my falling away in other respects. I thought there was no harm in it when I wasted many hours night and day in so vain an occupation, even when I kept it a secret from my father. So completely was I mastered by this passion, that I thought I could never be happy without a new book. 2. I began to make much of dress, to wish to please others by my appearance. I took pains with my hands and my hair, used perfumes, and all vanities within my reach--and they were many, for I was very much given to them. I had no evil intention, because I never wished any one to offend God for me. This fastidiousness of excessive neatness [1] lasted some years; and so also did other practices, which I thought then were not at all sinful; now, I see how wrong all this must have been. 3. I had some cousins; for into my father's house no others were allowed an entrance. In this he was very cautious; and would to God he had been cautious about them!--for I see now the danger of conversing, at an age when virtue should begin to grow, with persons who, knowing nothing themselves of the vanity of the world, provoke others to throw themselves into the midst of it. These cousins were nearly of mine own age--a little older, perhaps. We were always together; and they had a great affection for me. In everything that gave them pleasure, I kept the conversation alive,--listened to the stories of their affections and childish follies, good for nothing; and, what was still worse, my soul began to give itself up to that which was the cause of all its disorders. If I were to give advice, I would say to parents that they ought to be very careful whom they allow to mix with their children when young; for much mischief thence ensues, and our natural inclinations are unto evil rather than unto good. 4. So it was with me; for I had a sister much older than myself, [2] from whose modesty and goodness, which were great, I learned nothing; and learned every evil from a relative who was often in the house. She was so light and frivolous, that my mother took great pains to keep her out of the house, as if she foresaw the evil I should learn from her; but she could not succeed, there being so many reasons for her coming. I was very fond of this person's company, gossiped and talked with her; for she helped me in all the amusements I liked, and, what is more, found some for me, and communicated to me her own conversations and her vanities. Until I knew her, I mean, until she became friendly with me, and communicated to me her own affairs--I was then about fourteen years old, a little more, I think--I do not believe that I turned away from God in mortal sin, or lost the fear of Him, though I had a greater fear of disgrace. This latter fear had such sway over me, that I never wholly forfeited my good name--and, as to that, there was nothing in the world for which I would have bartered it, and nobody in the world I liked well enough who could have persuaded me to do it. Thus I might have had the strength never to do anything against the honour of God, as I had it by nature not to fail in that wherein I thought the honour of the world consisted; and I never observed that I was failing in many other ways. In vainly seeking after it I was extremely careful; but in the use of the means necessary for preserving it I was utterly careless. I was anxious only not to be lost altogether. 5. This friendship distressed my father and sister exceedingly. They often blamed me for it; but, as they could not hinder that person from coming into the house, all their efforts were in vain; for I was very adroit in doing anything that was wrong. Now and then, I am amazed at the evil one bad companion can do,--nor could I believe it if I did not know it by experience,--especially when we are young: then is it that the evil must be greatest. Oh, that parents would take warning by me, and look carefully to this! So it was; the conversation of this person so changed me, that no trace was left of my soul's natural disposition to virtue, and I became a reflection of her and of another who was given to the same kind of amusements. 6. I know from this the great advantage of good companions; and I am certain that if at that tender age I had been thrown among good people, I should have persevered in virtue; for if at that time I had found any one to teach me the fear of God, my soul would have grown strong enough not to fall away. Afterwards, when the fear of God had utterly departed from me, the fear of dishonour alone remained, and was a torment to me in all I did. When I thought that nobody would ever know, I ventured upon many things that were neither honourable nor pleasing unto God. 7. In the beginning, these conversations did me harm--I believe so. The fault was perhaps not hers, but mine; for afterwards my own wickedness was enough to lead me astray, together with the servants about me, whom I found ready enough for all evil. If any one of these had given me good advice, I might perhaps have profited by it; but they were blinded by interest, as I was by passion. Still, I was never inclined to much evil,--for I hated naturally anything dishonourable,--but only to the amusement of a pleasant conversation. The occasion of sin, however, being present, danger was at hand, and I exposed to it my father and brothers. God delivered me out of it all, so that I should not be lost, in a manner visibly against my will, yet not so secretly as to allow me to escape without the loss of my good name and the suspicions of my father. 8. I had not spent, I think, three months in these vanities, when they took me to a monastery [3] in the city where I lived, in which children like myself were brought up, though their way of life was not so wicked as mine. This was done with the utmost concealment of the true reason, which was known only to myself and one of my kindred. They waited for an opportunity which would make the change seem nothing out of the way; for, as my sister was married, it was not fitting I should remain alone, without a mother, in the house. 9. So excessive was my father's love for me, and so deep my dissembling, that he never would believe me to be so wicked as I was; and hence I was never in disgrace with him. Though some remarks were made, yet, as the time had been short, nothing could be positively asserted; and, as I was so much afraid about my good name, I had taken every care to be secret; and yet I never considered that I could conceal nothing from Him Who seeth all things. O my God, what evil is done in the world by disregarding this, and thinking that anything can be kept secret that is done against Thee! I am quite certain that great evils would be avoided if we clearly understood that what we have to do is, not to be on our guard against men, but on our guard against displeasing Thee. 10. For the first eight days, I suffered much; but more from the suspicion that my vanity was known, than from being in the monastery; for I was already weary of myself--and, though I offended God, I never ceased to have a great fear of Him, and contrived to go to confession as quickly as I could. I was very uncomfortable; but within eight days, I think sooner, I was much more contented than I had been in my father's house. All the nuns were pleased with me; for our Lord had given me the grace to please every one, wherever I might be. I was therefore made much of in the monastery. Though at this time I hated to be a nun, yet I was delighted at the sight of nuns so good; for they were very good in that house--very prudent, observant of the rule, and recollected. 11. Yet, for all this, the devil did not cease to tempt me; and people in the world sought means to trouble my rest with messages and presents. As this could not be allowed, it was soon over, and my soul began to return to the good habits of my earlier years; and I recognized the great mercy of God to those whom He places among good people. It seems as if His Majesty had sought and sought again how to convert me to Himself. Blessed be Thou, O Lord, for having borne with me so long! Amen. 12. Were it not for my many faults, there was some excuse for me, I think, in this: that the conversation I shared in was with one who, I thought, would do well in the estate of matrimony; [4] and I was told by my confessors, and others also, whom in many points I consulted, used to say, that I was not offending God. One of the nuns [5] slept with us who were seculars, and through her it pleased our Lord to give me light, as I shall now explain. 1. The Saint throughout her life was extremely careful of cleanliness. In one of her letters to Father Jerome Gratian of the Mother of God (No. 323, Letter 28, vol. iii. ed. Doblado), she begs him, for the love of God, to see that the Fathers had clean cells and table; and the Ven. Mother Anne of St. Bartholomew, in her life (Bruxelles, 1708, p. 40), says that she changed the Saint's linen on the day of her death, and was thanked by her for her carefulness. "Her soul was so pure," says the Ven. Mother, "that she could not bear anything that was not clean." 2. Maria de Cepeda, half-sister of the Saint. She was married to Don Martin de Guzman y Barrientos; and the contract for the dowry was signed January 11, 1531 (Reforma de los Descalços lib. i. ch. vii. § 4). 3. The Augustinian Monastery of Our Lady of Grace. It was founded in 1509 by the venerable Fra Juan of Seville, Vicar-General of the Order (Reforma de los Descalços lib. i. ch. vii. n. 2). There were forty nuns in the house at this time (De la Fuente). 4. Some have said that the Saint at this time intended, or wished, to be married; and Father Bouix translates the passage thus: "une alliance honorable pour moi." But it is more probable that the Saint had listened only to the story of her cousin's intended marriage; for in ch. v. § 11, she says that our Lord had always kept her from seeking to be loved of men. 5. Doña Maria Brizeño, mistress of the secular children who were educated in the monastery (Reforma, lib. i. ch. vii. § 3). Chapter III. The Blessing of Being with Good People. How Certain Illusions Were Removed. 1. I began gradually to like the good and holy conversation of this nun. How well she used to speak of God! for she was a person of great discretion and sanctity. I listened to her with delight. I think there never was a time when I was not glad to listen to her. She began by telling me how she came to be a nun through the mere reading of the words of the Gospel "Many are called, and few are chosen." [1] She would speak of the reward which our Lord gives to those who forsake all things for His sake. This good companionship began to root out the habits which bad companionship had formed, and to bring my thoughts back to the desire of eternal things, as well as to banish in some measure the great dislike I had to be a nun, which had been very great; and if I saw any one weep in prayer, or devout in any other way, I envied her very much; for my heart was now so hard, that I could not shed a tear, even if I read the Passion through. This was a grief to me. 2. I remained in the monastery a year and a half, and was very much the better for it. I began to say many vocal prayers, and to ask all the nuns to pray for me, that God would place me in that state wherein I was to serve Him; but, for all this, I wished not to be a nun, and that God would not be pleased I should be one, though at the same time I was afraid of marriage. At the end of my stay there, I had a greater inclination to be a nun, yet not in that house, on account of certain devotional practices which I understood prevailed there, and which I thought overstrained. Some of the younger ones encouraged me in this my wish; and if all had been of one mind, I might have profited by it. I had also a great friend [2] in another monastery; and this made me resolve, if I was to be a nun, not to be one in any other house than where she was. I looked more to the pleasure of sense and vanity than to the good of my soul. These good thoughts of being a nun came to me from time to time. They left me very soon; and I could not persuade myself to become one. 3. At this time, though I was not careless about my own good, our Lord was much more careful to dispose me for that state of life which was best for me. He sent me a serious illness, so that I was obliged to return to my father's house. 4. When I became well again, they took me to see my sister [3] in her house in the country village where she dwelt. Her love for me was so great, that, if she had had her will, I should never have left her. Her husband also had a great affection for me--at least, he showed me all kindness. This too I owe rather to our Lord, for I have received kindness everywhere; and all my service in return is, that I am what I am. 5. On the road lived a brother of my father [4]--a prudent and most excellent man, then a widower. Him too our Lord was preparing for Himself. In his old age, he left all his possessions and became a religious. He so finished his course, that I believe him to have the vision of God. He would have me stay with him some days. His practice was to read good books in Spanish; and his ordinary conversation was about God and the vanity of the world. These books he made me read to him; and, though I did not much like them, I appeared as if I did; for in giving pleasure to others I have been most particular, though it might be painful to myself--so much so, that what in others might have been a virtue was in me a great fault, because I was often extremely indiscreet. O my God, in how many ways did His Majesty prepare me for the state wherein it was His will I should serve Him!--how, against my own will, He constrained me to do violence to myself! May He be blessed for ever! Amen. 6. Though I remained here but a few days, yet, through the impression made on my heart by the words of God both heard and read, and by the good conversation of my uncle, I came to understand the truth I had heard in my childhood, that all things are as nothing, the world vanity, and passing rapidly away. I also began to be afraid that, if I were then to die, I should go down to hell. Though I could not bend my will to be a nun, I saw that the religious state was the best and the safest. And thus, by little and little, I resolved to force myself into it. 7. The struggle lasted three months. I used to press this reason against myself: The trials and sufferings of living as a nun cannot be greater than those of purgatory, and I have well deserved to be in hell. It is not much to spend the rest of my life as if I were in purgatory, and then go straight to Heaven--which was what I desired. I was more influenced by servile fear, I think, than by love, to enter religion. 8. The devil put before me that I could not endure the trials of the religious life, because of my delicate nurture. I defended myself against him by alleging the trials which Christ endured, and that it was not much for me to suffer something for His sake; besides, He would help me to bear it. I must have thought so, but I do not remember this consideration. I endured many temptations during these days. I was subject to fainting-fits, attended with fever,--for my health was always weak. I had become by this time fond of good books, and that gave me life. I read the Epistles of St. Jerome, which filled me with so much courage, that I resolved to tell my father of my purpose,--which was almost like taking the habit; for I was so jealous of my word, that I would never, for any consideration, recede from a promise when once my word had been given. 9. My father's love for me was so great, that I could never obtain his consent; nor could the prayers of others, whom I persuaded to speak to him, be of any avail. The utmost I could get from him was that I might do as I pleased after his death. I now began to be afraid of myself, and of my own weakness--for I might go back. So, considering that such waiting was not safe for me, I obtained my end in another way, as I shall now relate. 1. St. Matt. xx. 16: "Multi enim sunt vocati, pauci vero electi." 2. Juana Suarez, in the Monastery of the incarnation, Avila (Reforma, lib. i. ch. vii. § 7). 3. Maria de Cepeda, married to Don Martin Guzman y Barrientos. They lived in Castellanos de la Cañada, where they had considerable property; but in the later years of their lives they were in straitened circumstances (De la Fuente). See below, ch. xxxiv. § 24. 4. Don Pedro Sanchez de Cepeda. He lived in Hortigosa, four leagues from Avila (De la Fuente). Chapter IV. Our Lord Helps Her to Become a Nun. Her Many Infirmities. 1. In those days, when I was thus resolved, I had persuaded one of my brothers, [1] by speaking to him of the vanity of the world, to become a friar; and we agreed together to set out one day very early in the morning for the monastery where that friend of mine lived for whom I had so great an affection: [2] though I would have gone to any other monastery, if I thought I should serve God better in it, or to any one my father liked, so strong was my resolution now to become a nun--for I thought more of the salvation of my soul now, and made no account whatever of mine own ease. I remember perfectly well, and it is quite true, that the pain I felt when I left my father's house was so great, that I do not believe the pain of dying will be greater--for it seemed to me as if every bone in my body were wrenched asunder; [3] for, as I had no love of God to destroy my love of father and of kindred, this latter love came upon me with a violence so great that, if our Lord had not been my keeper, my own resolution to go on would have failed me. But He gave me courage to fight against myself, so that I executed my purpose. [4] 2. When I took the habit, [5] our Lord at once made me understand how He helps those who do violence to themselves in order to serve Him. No one observed this violence in me; they saw nothing but the greatest good will. At that moment, because I was entering on that state, I was filled with a joy so great, that it has never failed me to this day; and God converted the aridity of my soul into the greatest tenderness. Everything in religion was a delight unto me; and it is true that now and then I used to sweep the house during those hours of the day which I had formerly spent on my amusements and my dress; and, calling to mind that I was delivered from such follies, I was filled with a new joy that surprised me, nor could I understand whence it came. 3. Whenever I remember this, there is nothing in the world, however hard it may be, that, if it were proposed to me, I would not undertake without any hesitation whatever; for I know now, by experience in many things, that if from the first I resolutely persevere in my purpose, even in this life His Majesty rewards it in a way which he only understands who has tried it. When the act is done for God only, it is His will before we begin it that the soul, in order to the increase of its merits, should be afraid; and the greater the fear, if we do but succeed, the greater the reward, and the sweetness thence afterwards resulting. I know this by experience, as I have just said, in many serious affairs; and so, if I were a person who had to advise anybody, I would never counsel any one, to whom good inspirations from time to time may come, to resist them through fear of the difficulty of carrying them into effect; for if a person lives detached for the love of God only, that is no reason for being afraid of failure, for He is omnipotent. May He be blessed for ever! Amen. 4. O supreme Good, and my Rest, those graces ought to have been enough which Thou hadst given me hitherto, seeing that Thy compassion and greatness had drawn me through so many windings to a state so secure, to a house where there are so many servants of God, from whom I might learn how I may advance in Thy service. I know not how to go on, when I call to mind the circumstances of my profession, the great resolution and joy with which I made it, and my betrothal unto Thee. I cannot speak of it without tears; and my tears ought to be tears of blood, my heart ought to break, and that would not be much to suffer because of the many offences against Thee which I have committed since that day. It seems to me now that I had good reasons for not wishing for this dignity, seeing that I have made so sad a use of it. But Thou, O my Lord, hast been willing to bear with me for almost twenty years of my evil using of Thy graces, till I might become better. It seems to me, O my God, that I did nothing but promise never to keep any of the promises then made to Thee. Yet such was not my intention: but I see that what I have done since is of such a nature, that I know not what my intention was. So it was and so it happened, that it may be the better known, O my Bridegroom, Who Thou art and what I am. 5. It is certainly true that very frequently the joy I have in that the multitude of Thy mercies is made known in me, softens the bitter sense of my great faults. In whom, O Lord, can they shine forth as they do in me, who by my evil deeds have shrouded in darkness Thy great graces, which Thou hadst begun to work in me? Woe is me, O my Maker! If I would make an excuse, I have none to offer; and I only am to blame. For if I could return to Thee any portion of that love which Thou hadst begun to show unto me, I would give it only unto Thee, and then everything would have been safe. But, as I have not deserved this, nor been so happy as to have done it, let Thy mercy, O Lord, rest upon me. 6. The change in the habits of my life, and in my food, proved hurtful to my health; and though my happiness was great, that was not enough. The fainting-fits began to be more frequent; and my heart was so seriously affected, that every one who saw it was alarmed; and I had also many other ailments. And thus it was I spent the first year, having very bad health, though I do not think I offended God in it much. And as my illness was so serious--I was almost insensible at all times, and frequently wholly so--my father took great pains to find some relief; and as the physicians who attended me had none to give, he had me taken to a place which had a great reputation for the cure of other infirmities. They said I should find relief there. [6] That friend of whom I have spoken as being in the house went with me. She was one of the elder nuns. In the house where I was a nun, there was no vow of enclosure. [7] 7. I remained there nearly a year, for three months of it suffering most cruel tortures--effects of the violent remedies which they applied. I know not how I endured them; and indeed, though I submitted myself to them, they were, as I shall relate, [8] more than my constitution could bear. 8. I was to begin the treatment in the spring, and went thither when winter commenced. The intervening time I spent with my sister, of whom I spoke before, [9] in her house in the country, waiting for the month of April, which was drawing near, that I might not have to go and return. The uncle of whom I have made mention before, [10] and whose house was on our road, gave me a book called Tercer Abecedario, [11] which treats of the prayer of recollection. Though in the first year I had read good books--for I would read no others, because I understood now the harm they had done me--I did not know how to make my prayer, nor how to recollect myself. I was therefore much pleased with the book, and resolved to follow the way of prayer it described with all my might. And as our Lord had already bestowed upon me the gift of tears, and I found pleasure in reading, I began to spend a certain time in solitude, to go frequently to confession, and make a beginning of that way of prayer, with this book for my guide; for I had no master--I mean, no confessor--who understood me, though I sought for such a one for twenty years afterwards: which did me much harm, in that I frequently went backwards, and might have been even utterly lost; for, anyhow, a director would have helped me to escape the risks I ran of sinning against God. 9. From the very beginning, God was most gracious unto me. Though I was not so free from sin as the book required, I passed that by; such watchfulness seemed to me almost impossible. I was on my guard against mortal sin--and would to God I had always been so!--but I was careless about venial sins, and that was my ruin. Yet, for all this, at the end of my stay there--I spent nearly nine months in the practice of solitude--our Lord began to comfort me so much in this way of prayer, as in His mercy to raise me to the prayer of quiet, and now and then to that of union, though I understood not what either the one or the other was, nor the great esteem I ought to have had of them. I believe it would have been a great blessing to me if I had understood the matter. It is true that the prayer of union lasted but a short time: I know not if it continued for the space of an Ave Maria; but the fruits of it remained; and they were such that, though I was then not twenty years of age, I seemed to despise the world utterly; and so I remember how sorry I was for those who followed its ways, though only in things lawful. 10. I used to labour with all my might to imagine Jesus Christ, our Good and our Lord, present within me. And this was the way I prayed. If I meditated on any mystery of His life, I represented it to myself as within me, though the greater part of my time I spent in reading good books, which was all my comfort; for God never endowed me with the gift of making reflections with the understanding, or with that of using the imagination to any good purpose: my imagination is so sluggish, [12] that even if I would think of, or picture to myself, as I used to labour to picture, our Lord's Humanity, I never could do it. 11. And though men may attain more quickly to the state of contemplation, if they persevere, by this way of inability to exert the intellect, yet is the process more laborious and painful; for if the will have nothing to occupy it, and if love have no present object to rest on, the soul is without support and without employment--its isolation and dryness occasion great pain, and the thoughts assail it most grievously. Persons in this condition must have greater purity of conscience than those who can make use of their understanding; for he who can use his intellect in the way of meditation on what the world is, on what he owes to God, on the great sufferings of God for him, his own scanty service in return, and on the reward God reserves for those who love Him, learns how to defend himself against his own thoughts, and against the occasions and perils of sin. On the other hand, he who has not that power is in greater danger, and ought to occupy himself much in reading, seeing that he is not in the slightest degree able to help himself. 12. This way of proceeding is so exceedingly painful, that if the master who teaches it insists on cutting off the succours which reading gives, and requires the spending of much time in prayer, then, I say, it will be impossible to persevere long in it: and if he persists in his plan, health will be ruined, because it is a most painful process. Reading is of great service towards procuring recollection in any one who proceeds in this way; and it is even necessary for him, however little it may be that he reads, if only as a substitute for the mental prayer which is beyond his reach. 13. Now I seem to understand that it was the good providence of our Lord over me that found no one to teach me. If I had, it would have been impossible for me to persevere during the eighteen years of my trial and of those great aridities because of my inability to meditate. During all this time, it was only after Communion that I ever ventured to begin my prayer without a book--my soul was as much afraid to pray without one, as if it had to fight against a host. With a book to help me--it was like a companion, and a shield whereon to receive the blows of many thoughts--I found comfort; for it was not usual with me to be in aridity: but I always was so when I had no book; for my soul was disturbed, and my thoughts wandered at once. With one, I began to collect my thoughts, and, using it as a decoy, kept my soul in peace, very frequently by merely opening a book--there was no necessity for more. Sometimes, I read but little; at other times, much--according as our Lord had pity on me. 14. It seemed to me, in these beginnings of which I am speaking, that there could be no danger capable of withdrawing me from so great a blessing, if I had but books, and could have remained alone; and I believe that, by the grace of God, it would have been so, if I had had a master or any one to warn me against those occasions of sin in the beginning, and, if I fell, to bring me quickly out of them. If the devil had assailed me openly then, I believe I should never have fallen into any grievous sin; but he was so subtle, and I so weak, that all my good resolutions were of little service--though, in those days in which I served God, they were very profitable in enabling me, with that patience which His Majesty gave me, to endure the alarming illnesses which I had to bear. I have often thought with wonder of the great goodness of God; and my soul has rejoiced in the contemplation of His great magnificence and mercy. May He be blessed for ever!--for I see clearly that He has not omitted to reward me, even in this life, for every one of my good desires. My good works, however wretched and imperfect, have been made better and perfected by Him Who is my Lord: He has rendered them meritorious. As to my evil deeds and my sins, He hid them at once. The eyes of those who saw them, He made even blind; and He has blotted them out of their memory. He gilds my faults, makes virtue to shine forth, giving it to me Himself, and compelling me to possess it, as it were, by force. 15. I must now return to that which has been enjoined me. I say, that if I had to describe minutely how our Lord dealt with me in the beginning, it would be necessary for me to have another understanding than that I have: so that I might be able to appreciate what I owe to Him, together with my own ingratitude and wickedness; for I have forgotten it all. May He be blessed for ever Who has borne with me so long! Amen. 1. Antonio de Ahumada; who, according to the most probable opinion, entered the Dominican monastery of St. Thomas, Avila. It is said that he died before he was professed. Some said he joined the Hieronymites; but this is not so probable (De la Fuente). Ribera, however, says that he did enter the novitiate of the Hieronymites. but died before he was out of it (lib. i. ch. vi.). 2. Juana Suarez, in the Monastery of the Incarnation, Avila. 3. See Relation, vi. § 3. 4. The nuns sent word to the father of his child's escape, and of her desire to become a nun, but without any expectation of obtaining his consent. He came to the monastery forthwith, and "offered up his Isaac on Mount Carmel" (Reforma, lib. i. ch. viii. § 5). 5. The Saint entered the Monastery of the Incarnation Nov. 2, 1533, and made her profession Nov. 3, 1534 (Bollandists and Bouix). Ribera says she entered November 2, 1535; and the chronicler of the Order, relying on the contract by which her father bound himself to the monastery, says that she took the habit Nov. 2, 1536, and that Ribera had made a mistake. 6. Her father took her from the monastery in the autumn of 1535, according to the Bollandists, but of 1538, according to the chronicler, who adds, that she was taken to her uncle's house--Pedro Sanchez de Cepeda--in Hortigosa, and then to Castellanos de la Cañada, to the house of her sister, Doña Maria, where she remained till the spring, when she went to Bezadas for her cure (Reforma, lib. i. ch. xi. § 2). 7. It was in 1563 that all nuns were compelled to observe enclosure (De la Fuente). 8. Ch. v. § 15. 9. Ch. iii. § 4. 10. Ch. iii. § 5. 11. By Fray Francisco de Osuna, of the Order of St. Francis (Reforma, lib. i. ch. xi. § 2). 12. See ch. ix. §§ 4, 7. Chapter V. Illness and Patience of the Saint. The Story of a Priest Whom She Rescued from a Life of Sin. 1. I forgot to say how, in the year of my novitiate, I suffered much uneasiness about things in themselves of no importance; but I was found fault with very often when I was blameless. I bore it painfully and with imperfection; however, I went through it all, because of the joy I had in being a nun. When they saw me seeking to be alone, and even weeping over my sins at times, they thought I was discontented, and said so. 2. All religious observances had an attraction for me, but I could not endure any which seemed to make me contemptible. I delighted in being thought well of by others, and was very exact in everything I had to do. All this I thought was a virtue, though it will not serve as any excuse for me, because I knew what it was to procure my own satisfaction in everything, and so ignorance does not blot out the blame. There may be some excuse in the fact that the monastery was not founded in great perfection. I, wicked as I was, followed after that which I saw was wrong, and neglected that which was good. 3. There was then in the house a nun labouring under a most grievous and painful disorder, for there were open ulcers in her body, caused by certain obstructions, through which her food was rejected. Of this sickness she soon died. All the sisters, I saw, were afraid of her malady. I envied her patience very much; I prayed to God that He would give me a like patience; and then, whatever sickness it might be His pleasure to send, I do not think I was afraid of any, for I was resolved on gaining eternal good, and determined to gain it by any and by every means. 4. I am surprised at myself, because then I had not, as I believe, that love of God which I think I had after I began to pray. Then, I had only light to see that all things that pass away are to be lightly esteemed, and that the good things to be gained by despising them are of great price, because they are for ever. His Majesty heard me also in this, for in less than two years I was so afflicted myself that the illness which I had, though of a different kind from that of the sister, was, I really believe, not less painful and trying for the three years it lasted, as I shall now relate. 5. When the time had come for which I was waiting in the place I spoke of before [1]--I was in my sister's house, for the purpose of undergoing the medical treatment--they took me away with the utmost care of my comfort; that is, my father, my sister, and the nun, my friend, who had come from the monastery with me,--for her love for me was very great. At that moment, Satan began to trouble my soul; God, however, brought forth a great blessing out of that trouble. 6. In the place to which I had gone for my cure lived a priest of good birth and understanding, with some learning, but not much. I went to confession to him, for I was always fond of learned men, although confessors indifferently learned did my soul much harm; for I did not always find confessors whose learning was as good as I could wish it was. I know by experience that it is better, if the confessors are good men and of holy lives, that they should have no learning at all, than a little; for such confessors never trust themselves without consulting those who are learned--nor would I trust them myself: and a really learned confessor never deceived me. [2] Neither did the others willingly deceive me, only they knew no better; I thought they were learned, and that I was not under any other obligation than that of believing them, as their instructions to me were lax, and left me more at liberty--for if they had been strict with me, I am so wicked, I should have sought for others. That which was a venial sin, they told me was no sin at all; of that which was most grievously mortal, they said it was venial. [3] 7. This did me so much harm, that it is no wonder I should speak of it here as a warning to others, that they may avoid an evil so great; for I see clearly that in the eyes of God I was without excuse, that the things I did being in themselves not good, this should have been enough to keep me from them. I believe that God, by reason of my sins, allowed those confessors to deceive themselves and to deceive me. I myself deceived many others by saying to them what had been said to me. 8. I continued in this blindness, I believe, more than seventeen years, till a most learned Dominican Father [4] undeceived me in part, and those of the Company of Jesus made me altogether so afraid, by insisting on the erroneousness of these principles, as I shall hereafter show. [5] 9. I began, then, by going to confession to that priest of whom I spoke before. [6] He took an extreme liking to me, because I had then but little to confess in comparison with what I had afterwards; and I had never much to say since I became a nun. There was no harm in the liking he had for me, but it ceased to be good, because it was in excess. He clearly understood that I was determined on no account whatever to do anything whereby God might be seriously offended. He, too, gave me a like assurance about himself, and accordingly our conferences were many. But at that time, through the knowledge and fear of God which filled my soul, what gave me most pleasure in all my conversations with others was to speak of God; and, as I was so young, this made him ashamed; and then, out of that great goodwill he bore me, he began to tell me of his wretched state. It was very sad, for he had been nearly seven years in a most perilous condition, because of his affection for, and conversation with, a woman of that place; and yet he used to say Mass. The matter was so public, that his honour and good name were lost, and no one ventured to speak to him about it. I was extremely sorry for him, because I liked him much. I was then so imprudent and so blind as to think it a virtue to be grateful and loyal to one who liked me. Cursed be that loyalty which reaches so far as to go against the law of God. It is a madness common in the world, and it makes me mad to see it. We are indebted to God for all the good that men do to us, and yet we hold it to be an act of virtue not to break a friendship of this kind, though it lead us to go against Him. Oh, blindness of the world! Let me, O Lord, be most ungrateful to the world; never at all unto Thee. But I have been altogether otherwise through my sins. 10. I procured further information about the matter from members of his household; I learned more of his ruinous state, and saw that the poor man's fault was not so grave, because the miserable woman had had recourse to enchantments, by giving him a little image made of copper, which she had begged him to wear for love of her around his neck; and this no one had influence enough to persuade him to throw away. As to this matter of enchantments, I do not believe it to be altogether true; but I will relate what I saw, by way of warning to men to be on their guard against women who will do things of this kind. And let them be assured of this, that women--for they are more bound to purity than men--if once they have lost all shame before God, are in nothing whatever to be trusted; and that in exchange for the gratification of their will, and of that affection which the devil suggests, they will hesitate at nothing. 11. Though I have been so wicked myself, I never fell into anything of this kind, nor did I ever attempt to do evil; nor, if I had the power, would I have ever constrained any one to like me, for our Lord kept me from this. But if He had abandoned me, I should have done wrong in this, as I did in other things--for there is nothing in me whereon anyone may rely. 12. When I knew this, I began to show him greater affection: my intention was good, but the act was wrong, for I ought not to do the least wrong for the sake of any good, how great soever it may be. I spoke to him most frequently of God; and this must have done him good--though I believe that what touched him most was his great affection for me, because, to do me a pleasure, he gave me that little image of copper, and I had it at once thrown into a river. When he had given it up, like a man roused from deep sleep, he began to consider all that he had done in those years; and then, amazed at himself, lamenting his ruinous state, that woman came to be hateful in his eyes. Our Lady must have helped him greatly, for he had a very great devotion to her Conception, and used to keep the feast thereof with great solemnity. In short, he broke off all relations with that woman utterly, and was never weary of giving God thanks for the light He had given him; and at the end of the year from the day I first saw him, he died. 13. He had been most diligent in the service of God; and as for that great affection he had for me, I never observed anything wrong in it, though it might have been of greater purity. There were also occasions wherein he might have most grievously offended, if he had not kept himself in the near presence of God. As I said before, [7] I would not then have done anything I knew was a mortal sin. And I think that observing this resolution in me helped him to have that affection for me; for I believe that all men must have a greater affection for those women whom they see disposed to be good; and even for the attainment of earthly ends, women must have more power over men because they are good, as I shall show hereafter. I am convinced that the priest is in the way of salvation. He died most piously, and completely withdrawn from that occasion of sin. It seems that it was the will of our Lord he should be saved by these means. 14. I remained three months in that place, in the most grievous sufferings; for the treatment was too severe for my constitution. In two months--so strong were the medicines--my life was nearly worn out; and the severity of the pain in the heart, [8] for the cure of which I was there was much more keen: it seemed to me, now and then, as if it had been seized by sharp teeth. So great was the torment, that it was feared it might end in madness. There was a great loss of strength, for I could eat nothing whatever, only drink. I had a great loathing for food, and a fever that never left me. I was so reduced, for they had given me purgatives daily for nearly a month, and so parched up, that my sinews began to shrink. The pains I had were unendurable, and I was overwhelmed in a most deep sadness, so that I had no rest either night or day. 15. This was the result; and thereupon my father took me back. Then the physicians visited me again. All gave me up; they said I was also consumptive. This gave me little or no concern; what distressed me were the pains I had--for I was in pain from my head down to my feet. Now, nervous pains, according to the physicians, are intolerable; and all my nerves were shrunk. Certainly, if I had not brought this upon myself by my sins, the torture would have been unendurable. 16. I was not more than three months in this cruel distress, for it seemed impossible that so many ills could be borne together. I now am astonished at myself, and the patience His Majesty gave me--for it clearly came from Him--I look upon as a great mercy of our Lord. It was a great help to me to be patient, that I had read the story of Job, in the Morals of St. Gregory (our Lord seems to have prepared me thereby); and that I had begun the practice of prayer, so that I might bear it all, conforming my will to the will of God. All my conversation was with God. I had continually these words of Job in my thoughts and in my mouth: "If we have received good things of the hand of our Lord, why should we not receive evil things?" [9] This seemed to give me courage. 17. The feast of our Lady, in August, came round; from April until then I had been in great pain, but more especially during the last three months. I made haste to go to confession, for I had always been very fond of frequent confession. They thought I was driven by the fear of death; and so my father, in order to quiet me, would not suffer me to go. Oh, the unreasonable love of flesh and blood! Though it was that of a father so Catholic and so wise--he was very much so, and this act of his could not be the effect of any ignorance on his part--what evil it might have done me! 18. That very night my sickness became so acute, that for about four days I remained insensible. They administered the Sacrament of the last Anointing, and every hour, or rather every moment, thought I was dying; they did nothing but repeat the Credo, as if I could have understood anything they said. They must have regarded me as dead more than once, for I found afterwards drops of wax on my eyelids. My father, because he had not allowed me to go to confession, was grievously distressed. Loud cries and many prayers were made to God: blessed be He Who heard them. 19. For a day-and-a-half the grave was open in my monastery, waiting for my body; [10] and the Friars of our Order, in a house at some distance from this place, performed funeral solemnities. But it pleased our Lord I should come to myself. I wished to go to confession at once. I communicated with many tears; but I do not think those tears had their source in that pain and sorrow only for having offended God, which might have sufficed for my salvation--unless, indeed, the delusion which I laboured under were some excuse for me, and into which I had been led by those who had told me that some things were not mortal sins which afterwards I found were so certainly. 20. Though my sufferings were unendurable, and my perceptions dull, yet my confession, I believe, was complete as to all matters wherein I understood myself to have offended God. This grace, among others, did His Majesty bestow on me, that ever since my first Communion never in confession have I failed to confess anything I thought to be a sin, though it might be only a venial sin. But I think that undoubtedly my salvation was in great peril, if I had died at that time--partly because my confessors were so unlearned, and partly because I was so very wicked. It is certainly true that when I think of it, and consider how our Lord seems to have raised me up from the dead, I am so filled with wonder, that I almost tremble with fear. [11] 21. And now, O my soul, it were well for thee to look that danger in the face from which our Lord delivered thee; and if thou dost not cease to offend Him out of love thou shouldst do so out of fear. He might have slain thee a thousand times, and in a far more perilous state. I believe I exaggerate nothing if I say a thousand times again, though he may rebuke me who has commanded me to restrain myself in recounting my sins; and they are glossed over enough. I pray him, for the love of God, not to suppress one of my faults, because herein shines forth the magnificence of God, as well as His long-suffering towards souls. May He be blessed for evermore, and destroy me utterly, rather than let me cease to love Him any more! 1. Ch. iv. § 6. The person to whom she was taken was a woman famous for certain cures she had wrought, but whose skill proved worse than useless to the Saint (Reforma, lib. i. ch. xi. § 2). 2. Schram, Theolog. Mystic., § 483. "Magni doctores scholastici, si non sint spirituales, vel omni rerum spiritualium experientia careant, non solent esse magistri spirituales idonei--nam theologia scholastica est perfectio intellectus; mystica, perfectio intellectus et voluntatis: unde bonus theologus scholasticus potest esse malus theologus mysticus. In rebus tamen difficilibus, dubiis, spiritualibus, præstat mediocriter spiritualem theologum consulere quam spiritualem idiotam." 3. See Way of Perfection, ch. viii. § 2; but ch. v. Dalton's edition. 4. F. Vicente Barron (Bouix). 5. See ch. xxiii. 6. § 6. 7. § 9. 8. Ch. iv. § 6. 9. Job ii. 10: "Si bona suscepimus de manu Dei, mala quare non suscipiamus?" 10. Some of the nuns of the Incarnation were in the house, sent thither from the monastery; and, but for the father's disbelief in her death, would have taken her home for burial (Ribera, lib. i. ch. iv.). 11. Ribera, lib. i. ch. iv., says he heard Fra Bañes, in a sermon, say that the Saint told him she had, during these four days, seen hell in a vision. And the chronicler says that though there was bodily illness, yet it was a trance of the soul at the same time (vol. i. lib. i. ch. xii. § 3). Chapter VI. The Great Debt She Owed to Our Lord for His Mercy to Her. She Takes St. Joseph for Her Patron. 1. After those four days, during which I was insensible, so great was my distress, that our Lord alone knoweth the intolerable sufferings I endured. My tongue was bitten to pieces; there was a choking in my throat because I had taken nothing, and because of my weakness, so that I could not swallow even a drop of water; all my bones seemed to be out of joint, and the disorder of my head was extreme. I was bent together like a coil of ropes--for to this was I brought by the torture of those days--unable to move either arm, or foot, or hand, or head, any more than if I had been dead, unless others moved me; I could move, however, I think, one finger of my right hand. Then, as to touching me, that was impossible, for I was so bruised that I could not endure it. They used to move me in a sheet, one holding one end, and another the other. This lasted till Palm Sunday. [1] 2. The only comfort I had was this--if no one came near me, my pains frequently ceased; and then, because I had a little rest, I considered myself well, for I was afraid my patience would fail: and thus I was exceedingly happy when I saw myself free from those pains which were so sharp and constant, though in the cold fits of an intermittent fever, which were most violent, they were still unendurable. My dislike of food was very great. 3. I was now so anxious to return to my monastery, that I had myself conveyed thither in the state I was in. There they received alive one whom they had waited for as dead; but her body was worse than dead: the sight of it could only give pain. It is impossible to describe my extreme weakness, for I was nothing but bones. I remained in this state, as I have already said, [2] more than eight months; and was paralytic, though getting better, for about three years. I praised God when I began to crawl on my hands and knees. I bore all this with great resignation, and, if I except the beginning of my illness, with great joy; for all this was as nothing in comparison with the pains and tortures I had to bear at first. I was resigned to the will of God, even if He left me in this state for ever. My anxiety about the recovery of my health seemed to be grounded on my desire to pray in solitude, as I had been taught; for there were no means of doing so in the infirmary. I went to confession most frequently, spoke much about God, and in such a way as to edify everyone; and they all marvelled at the patience which our Lord gave me--for if it had not come from the hand of His Majesty, it seemed impossible to endure so great an affliction with so great a joy. 4. It was a great thing for me to have had the grace of prayer which God had wrought in me; it made me understand what it is to love Him. In a little while, I saw these virtues renewed within me; still they were not strong, for they were not sufficient to sustain me in justice. I never spoke ill in the slightest degree whatever of any one, and my ordinary practice was to avoid all detraction; for I used to keep most carefully in mind that I ought not to assent to, nor say of another, anything I should not like to have said of myself. I was extremely careful to keep this resolution on all occasions though not so perfectly, upon some great occasions that presented themselves, as not to break it sometimes. But my ordinary practice was this: and thus those who were about me, and those with whom I conversed, became so convinced that it was right, that they adopted it as a habit. It came to be understood that where I was, absent persons were safe; so they were also with my friends and kindred, and with those whom I instructed. Still, for all this, I have a strict account to give unto God for the bad example I gave in other respects. May it please His Majesty to forgive me, for I have been the cause of much evil; though not with intentions as perverse as were the acts that followed. 5. The longing for solitude remained, and I loved to discourse and speak of God; for if I found any one with whom I could do so, it was a greater joy and satisfaction to me than all the refinements--or rather to speak more correctly, the real rudeness--of the world's conversation. I communicated and confessed more frequently still, and desired to do so; I was extremely fond of reading good books; I was most deeply penitent for having offended God; and I remember that very often I did not dare to pray, because I was afraid of that most bitter anguish which I felt for having offended God, dreading it as a great chastisement. This grew upon me afterwards to so great a degree, that I know of no torment wherewith to compare it; and yet it was neither more nor less because of any fear I had at any time, for it came upon me only when I remembered the consolations of our Lord which He gave me in prayer, the great debt I owed Him, the evil return I made: I could not bear it. I was also extremely angry with myself on account of the many tears I shed for my faults, when I saw how little I improved, seeing that neither my good resolutions, nor the pains I took, were sufficient to keep me from falling whenever I had the opportunity. I looked on my tears as a delusion; and my faults, therefore, I regarded as the more grievous, because I saw the great goodness of our Lord to me in the shedding of those tears, and together with them such deep compunction. 6. I took care to go to confession as soon as I could; and, as I think, did all that was possible on my part to return to a state of grace. But the whole evil lay in my not thoroughly avoiding the occasions of sin, and in my confessors, who helped me so little. If they had told me that I was travelling on a dangerous road, and that I was bound to abstain from those conversations, I believe, without any doubt, that the matter would have been remedied, because I could not bear to remain even for one day in mortal sin, if I knew it. 7. All these tokens of the fear of God came to me through prayer; and the greatest of them was this, that fear was swallowed up of love--for I never thought of chastisement. All the time I was so ill, my strict watch over my conscience reached to all that is mortal sin. 8. O my God! I wished for health, that I might serve Thee better; that was the cause of all my ruin. For when I saw how helpless I was through paralysis, being still so young, and how the physicians of this world had dealt with me, I determined to ask those of heaven to heal me--for I wished, nevertheless, to be well, though I bore my illness with great joy. Sometimes, too, I used to think that if I recovered my health, and yet were lost for ever, I was better as I was. But, for all that, I thought I might serve God much better if I were well. This is our delusion; we do not resign ourselves absolutely to the disposition of our Lord, Who knows best what is for our good. 9. I began by having Masses and prayers said for my intention--prayers that were highly sanctioned; for I never liked those other devotions which some people, especially women, make use of with a ceremoniousness to me intolerable, but which move them to be devout. I have been given to understand since that they were unseemly and superstitious; and I took for my patron and lord the glorious St. Joseph, and recommended myself earnestly to him. I saw clearly that both out of this my present trouble, and out of others of greater importance, relating to my honour and the loss of my soul, this my father and lord delivered me, and rendered me greater services than I knew how to ask for. I cannot call to mind that I have ever asked him at any time for anything which he has not granted; and I am filled with amazement when I consider the great favours which God hath given me through this blessed Saint; the dangers from which he hath delivered me, both of body and of soul. To other Saints, our Lord seems to have given grace to succour men in some special necessity; but to this glorious Saint, I know by experience, to help us in all: and our Lord would have us understand that as He was Himself subject to him upon earth--for St. Joseph having the title of father, and being His guardian, could command Him--so now in heaven He performs all his petitions. I have asked others to recommend themselves to St. Joseph, and they too know this by experience; and there are many who are now of late devout to him, [3] having had experience of this truth. 10. I used to keep his feast with all the solemnity I could, but with more vanity than spirituality, seeking rather too much splendour and effect, and yet with good intentions. I had this evil in me, that if our Lord gave me grace to do any good, that good became full of imperfections and of many faults; but as for doing wrong, the indulgence of curiosity and vanity, I was very skilful and active therein. Our Lord forgive me! 11. Would that I could persuade all men to be devout to this glorious Saint; for I know by long experience what blessings he can obtain for us from God. I have never known any one who was really devout to him, and who honoured him by particular services, who did not visibly grow more and more in virtue; for he helps in a special way those souls who commend themselves to him. It is now some years since I have always on his feast asked him for something, and I always have it. If the petition be in any way amiss, he directs it aright for my greater good. 12. If I were a person who had authority to write, it would be a pleasure to me to be diffusive in speaking most minutely of the graces which this glorious Saint has obtained for me and for others. But that I may not go beyond the commandment that is laid upon me, I must in many things be more brief than I could wish, and more diffusive than is necessary in others; for, in short, I am a person who, in all that is good, has but little discretion. But I ask, for the love of God, that he who does not believe me will make the trial for himself--when he will see by experience the great good that results from commending oneself to this glorious patriarch, and being devout to him. Those who give themselves to prayer should in a special manner have always a devotion to St. Joseph; for I know not how any man can think of the Queen of the angels, during the time that she suffered so much with the Infant Jesus, without giving thanks to St. Joseph for the services he rendered them then. He who cannot find any one to teach him how to pray, let him take this glorious Saint for his master, and he will not wander out of the way. 13. May it please our Lord that I have not done amiss in venturing to speak about St. Joseph; for, though I publicly profess my devotion to him, I have always failed in my service to him and imitation of him. He was like himself when he made me able to rise and walk, no longer a paralytic; and I, too, am like myself when I make so bad a use of this grace. 14. Who could have said that I was so soon to fall, after such great consolations from God--after His Majesty had implanted virtues in me which of themselves made me serve Him--after I had been, as it were, dead, and in such extreme peril of eternal damnation--after He had raised me up, soul and body, so that all who saw me marvelled to see me alive? What can it mean, O my Lord? The life we live is so full of danger! While I am writing this--and it seems to me, too, by Thy grace and mercy--I may say with St. Paul, though not so truly as he did: "It is not I who live now, but Thou, my Creator, livest in me." [4] For some years past, so it seems to me, Thou hast held me by the hand; and I see in myself desires and resolutions--in some measure tested by experience, in many ways, during that time--never to do anything, however slight it may be, contrary to Thy will, though I must have frequently offended Thy Divine Majesty without being aware of it; and I also think that nothing can be proposed to me that I should not with great resolution undertake for Thy love. In some things Thou hast Thyself helped me to succeed therein. I love neither the world, nor the things of the world; nor do I believe that anything that does not come from Thee can give me pleasure; everything else seems to me a heavy cross. 15. Still, I may easily deceive myself, and it may be that I am not what I say I am; but Thou knowest, O my Lord, that, to the best of my knowledge, I lie not. I am afraid, and with good reason, lest Thou shouldst abandon me; for I know now how far my strength and little virtue can reach, if Thou be not ever at hand to supply them, and to help me never to forsake Thee. May His Majesty grant that I be not forsaken of Thee even now, when I am thinking all this of myself! 16. I know not how we can wish to live, seeing that everything is so uncertain. Once, O Lord, I thought it impossible to forsake Thee so utterly; and now that I have forsaken Thee so often, I cannot help being afraid; for when Thou didst withdraw but a little from me, I fell down to the ground at once. Blessed for ever be Thou! Though I have forsaken Thee, Thou hast not forsaken me so utterly but that Thou hast come again and raised me up, giving me Thy hand always. Very often, O Lord, I would not take it: very often I would not listen when Thou wert calling me again, as I am going to show. 1. March 25, 1537. 2. Ch. v. § 17. The Saint left her monastery in 1535; and in the spring of 1536 went from her sister's house to Bezadas; and in July of that year was brought back to her father's house in Avila, wherein she remained till Palm Sunday, 1537, when she returned to the Monastery of the Incarnation. She had been seized with paralysis there, and laboured under it nearly three years, from 1536 to 1539, when she was miraculously healed through the intercession of St. Joseph (Bolland, n. 100, 101). The dates of the Chronicler are different from these. 3. Of the devotion to St. Joseph, F. Faber (The Blessed Sacrament, bk. ii. p. 199, 3rd ed.) says that it took its rise in the West, in a confraternity in Avignon. "Then it spread over the church. Gerson was raised up to be its doctor and theologian, and St. Teresa to be its Saint, and St. Francis of Sales to be its popular teacher and missionary. The houses of Carmel were like the holy house of Nazareth to it; and the colleges of the Jesuits, its peaceful sojourns in dark Egypt." 4. Galat. ii. 20: "Vivo autem, jam non ego; vivit vero in me Christus." Chapter VII. Lukewarmness. The Loss of Grace. Inconvenience of Laxity in Religious Houses. 1. So, then, going on from pastime to pastime, from vanity to vanity, from one occasion of sin to another, I began to expose myself exceedingly to the very greatest dangers: my soul was so distracted by many vanities, that I was ashamed to draw near unto God in an act of such special friendship as that of prayer. [1] As my sins multiplied, I began to lose the pleasure and comfort I had in virtuous things: and that loss contributed to the abandonment of prayer. I see now most clearly, O my Lord, that this comfort departed from me because I had departed from Thee. 2. It was the most fearful delusion into which Satan could plunge me--to give up prayer under the pretence of humility. I began to be afraid of giving myself to prayer, because I saw myself so lost. I thought it would be better for me, seeing that in my wickedness I was one of the most wicked, to live like the multitude--to say the prayers which I was bound to say, and that vocally: not to practise mental prayer nor commune with God so much; for I deserved to be with the devils, and was deceiving those who were about me, because I made an outward show of goodness; and therefore the community in which I dwelt is not to be blamed; for with my cunning I so managed matters, that all had a good opinion of me; and yet I did not seek this deliberately by simulating devotion; for in all that relates to hypocrisy and ostentation--glory be to God!--I do not remember that I ever offended Him, [2] so far as I know. The very first movements herein gave me such pain, that the devil would depart from me with loss, and the gain remained with me; and thus, accordingly, he never tempted me much in this way. Perhaps, however, if God had permitted Satan to tempt me as sharply herein as he tempted me in other things, I should have fallen also into this; but His Majesty has preserved me until now. May He be blessed for evermore! It was rather a heavy affliction to me that I should be thought so well of; for I knew my own secret. 3. The reason why they thought I was not so wicked was this: they saw that I, who was so young, and exposed to so many occasions of sin, withdrew myself so often into solitude for prayer, read much, spoke of God, that I liked to have His image painted in many places, to have an oratory of my own, and furnish it with objects of devotion, that I spoke ill of no one, and other things of the same kind in me which have the appearance of virtue. Yet all the while--I was so vain--I knew how to procure respect for myself by doing those things which in the world are usually regarded with respect. 4. In consequence of this, they gave me as much liberty as they did to the oldest nuns, and even more, and had great confidence in me; for as to taking any liberty for myself, or doing anything without leave--such as conversing through the door, or in secret, or by night--I do not think I could have brought myself to speak with anybody in the monastery in that way, and I never did it; for our Lord held me back. It seemed to me--for I considered many things carefully and of set purpose--that it would be a very evil deed on my part, wicked as I was, to risk the credit of so many nuns, who were all good--as if everything else I did was well done! In truth, the evil I did was not the result of deliberation, as this would have been, if I had done it, although it was too much so. 5. Therefore, I think that it did me much harm to be in a monastery not enclosed. The liberty which those who were good might have with advantage--they not being obliged to do more than they do, because they had not bound themselves to enclosure--would certainly have led me, who am wicked, straight to hell, if our Lord, by so many remedies and means of His most singular mercy, had not delivered me out of that danger--and it is, I believe, the very greatest danger--namely, a monastery of women unenclosed--yea, more, I think it is, for those who will be wicked, a road to hell, rather than a help to their weakness. This is not to be understood of my monastery; for there are so many there who in the utmost sincerity, and in great perfection, serve our Lord, so that His Majesty, according to His goodness, cannot but be gracious unto them; neither is it one of those which are most open for all religious observances are kept in it; and I am speaking only of others which I have seen and known. 6. I am exceedingly sorry for these houses, because our Lord must of necessity send His special inspirations not merely once, but many times, if the nuns therein are to be saved, seeing that the honours and amusements of the world are allowed among them, and the obligations of their state are so ill-understood. God grant they may not count that to be virtue which is sin, as I did so often! It is very difficult to make people understand this; it is necessary our Lord Himself should take the matter seriously into His own hands. 7. If parents would take my advice, now that they are at no pains to place their daughters where they may walk in the way of salvation without incurring a greater risk than they would do if they were left in the world, let them look at least at that which concerns their good name. Let them marry them to persons of a much lower degree, rather than place them in monasteries of this kind, unless they be of extremely good inclinations, and God grant that these inclinations may come to good! or let them keep them at home. If they will be wicked at home, their evil life can be hidden only for a short time; but in monasteries it can be hidden long, and, in the end, it is our Lord that discovers it. They injure not only themselves, but all the nuns also. And all the while the poor things are not in fault; for they walk in the way that is shown them. Many of them are to be pitied; for they wished to withdraw from the world, and, thinking to escape from the dangers of it, and that they were going to serve our Lord, have found themselves in ten worlds at once, without knowing what to do, or how to help themselves. Youth and sensuality and the devil invite them and incline them to follow certain ways which are of the essence of worldliness. They see these ways, so to speak, considered as safe there. 8. Now, these seem to me to be in some degree like those wretched heretics who will make themselves blind, and who will consider that which they do to be good, and so believe, but without really believing; for they have within themselves something that tells them it is wrong. 9. Oh, what utter ruin! utter ruin of religious persons--I am not speaking now more of women than of men--where the rules of the Order are not kept; where the same monastery offers two roads: one of virtue and observance, the other of inobservance, and both equally frequented! I have spoken incorrectly: they are not equally frequented; for, on account of our sins, the way of the greatest imperfection is the most frequented; and because it is the broadest, it is also the most in favour. The way of religious observance is so little used, that the friar and the nun who would really begin to follow their vocation thoroughly have reason to fear the members of their communities more than all the devils together. They must be more cautious, and dissemble more, when they would speak of that friendship with God which they desire to have, than when they would speak of those friendships and affections which the devil arranges in monasteries. I know not why we are astonished that the Church is in so much trouble, when we see those, who ought to be an example of every virtue to others, so disfigure the work which the spirit of the Saints departed wrought in their Orders. May it please His Divine Majesty to apply a remedy to this, as He sees it to be needful! Amen. 10. So, then, when I began to indulge in these conversations, I did not think, seeing they were customary, that my soul must be injured and dissipated, as I afterwards found it must be, by such conversations. I thought that, as receiving visits was so common in many monasteries, no more harm would befall me thereby than befell others, whom I knew to be good. I did not observe that they were much better than I was, and that an act which was perilous for me was not so perilous for them; and yet I have no doubt there was some danger in it, were it nothing else but a waste of time. 11. I was once with a person--it was at the very beginning of my acquaintance with her when our Lord was pleased to show me that these friendships were not good for me: to warn me also, and in my blindness, which was so great, to give me light. Christ stood before me, stern and grave, giving me to understand what in my conduct was offensive to Him. I saw Him with the eyes of the soul more distinctly than I could have seen Him with the eyes of the body. The vision made so deep an impression upon me, that, though it is more than twenty-six years ago, [3] I seem to see Him present even now. I was greatly astonished and disturbed, and I resolved not to see that person again. 12. It did me much harm that I did not then know it was possible to see anything otherwise than with the eyes of the body; [4] so did Satan too, in that he helped me to think so: he made me understand it to be impossible, and suggested that I had imagined the vision--that it might be Satan himself--and other suppositions of that kind. For all this, the impression remained with me that the vision was from God, and not an imagination; but, as it was not to my liking, I forced myself to lie to myself; and as I did not dare to discuss the matter with any one, and as great importunity was used, I went back to my former conversation with the same person, and with others also, at different times; for I was assured that there was no harm in seeing such a person, and that I gained, instead of losing, reputation by doing so. I spent many years in this pestilent amusement; for it never appeared to me, when I was engaged in it, to be so bad as it really was, though at times I saw clearly it was not good. But no one caused me the same distraction which that person did of whom I am speaking; and that was because I had a great affection for her. 13. At another time, when I was with that person, we saw, both of us, and others who were present also saw, something like a great toad crawling towards us, more rapidly than such a creature is in the habit of crawling. I cannot understand how a reptile of that kind could, in the middle of the day, have come forth from that place; it never had done so before, [5] but the impression it made on me was such, that I think it must have had a meaning; neither have I ever forgotten it. Oh, the greatness of God! with what care and tenderness didst Thou warn me in every way! and how little I profited by those warnings! 14. There was in that house a nun, who was related to me, now grown old, a great servant of God, and a strict observer of the rule. She too warned me from time to time; but I not only did not listen to her, but was even offended, thinking she was scandalized without cause. I have mentioned this in order that my wickedness and the great goodness of God might be understood, and to show how much I deserved hell for ingratitude so great, and, moreover, if it should be our Lord's will and pleasure that any nun at any time should read this, that she might take warning by me. I beseech them all, for the love of our Lord, to flee from such recreations as these. 15. May His Majesty grant I may undeceive some one of the many I led astray when I told them there was no harm in these things, and assured them there was no such great danger therein. I did so because I was blind myself; for I would not deliberately lead them astray. By the bad example I set before them--I spoke of this before [6]--I was the occasion of much evil, not thinking I was doing so much harm. 16. In those early days, when I was ill, and before I knew how to be of use to myself, I had a very strong desire to further the progress of others: [7] a most common temptation of beginners. With me, however, it had good results. Loving my father so much, I longed to see him in the possession of that good which I seemed to derive myself from prayer. I thought that in this life there could not be a greater good than prayer; and by roundabout ways, as well as I could, I contrived make him enter upon it; I gave him books for that end. As he was so good--I said so before [8]--this exercise took such a hold upon him, that in five or six years, I think it was, he made so great a progress that I used to praise our Lord for it. It was a very great consolation to me. He had most grievous trials of diverse kinds; and he bore them all with the greatest resignation. He came often to see me; for it was a comfort to him to speak of the things of God. 17. And now that I had become so dissipated, and had ceased to pray, and yet saw that he still thought I was what I used to be, I could not endure it, and so undeceived him. I had been a year and more without praying, thinking it an act of greater humility to abstain. This--I shall speak of it again [9]--was the greatest temptation I ever had, because it very nearly wrought my utter ruin; [10] for, when I used to pray, if I offended God one day, on the following days I would recollect myself, and withdraw farther from the occasions of sin. 18. When that blessed man, having that good opinion of me, came to visit me, it pained me to see him so deceived as to think that I used to pray to God as before. So I told him that I did not pray; but I did not tell him why. I put my infirmities forward as an excuse; for though I had recovered from that which was so troublesome, I have always been weak, even very much so; and though my infirmities are somewhat less troublesome now than they were, they still afflict me in many ways; specially, I have been suffering for twenty years from sickness every morning, [11] so that I could not take any food till past mid-day, and even occasionally not till later; and now, since my Communions have become more frequent, it is at night, before I lie down to rest, that the sickness occurs, and with greater pain; for I have to bring it on with a feather, or other means. If I do not bring it on, I suffer more; and thus I am never, I believe, free from great pain, which is sometimes very acute, especially about the heart; though the fainting-fits are now but of rare occurrence. I am also, these eight years past, free from the paralysis, and from other infirmities of fever, which I had so often. These afflictions I now regard so lightly, that I am even glad of them, believing that our Lord in some degree takes His pleasure in them. 19. My father believed me when I gave him that for a reason, as he never told a lie himself; neither should I have done so, considering the relation we were in. I told him, in order to be the more easily believed, that it was much for me to be able to attend in choir, though I saw clearly that this was no excuse whatever; neither, however, was it a sufficient reason for giving up a practice which does not require, of necessity, bodily strength, but only love and a habit thereof; yet our Lord always furnishes an opportunity for it, if we but seek it. I say always; for though there may be times, as in illness, and from other causes, when we cannot be much alone, yet it never can be but there must be opportunities when our strength is sufficient for the purpose; and in sickness itself, and amidst other hindrances, true prayer consists, when the soul loves, in offering up its burden, and in thinking of Him for Whom it suffers, and in the resignation of the will, and in a thousand ways which then present themselves. It is under these circumstances that love exerts itself for it is not necessarily prayer when we are alone; and neither is it not prayer when we are not. 20. With a little care, we may find great blessings on those occasions when our Lord, by means of afflictions, deprives us of time for prayer; and so I found it when I had a good conscience. But my father, having that opinion of me which he had, and because of the love he bore me, believed all I told him; moreover, he was sorry for me; and as he had now risen to great heights of prayer himself, he never remained with me long; for when he had seen me, he went his way, saying that he was wasting his time. As I was wasting it in other vanities, I cared little about this. 21. My father was not the only person whom I prevailed upon to practise prayer, though I was walking in vanity myself. When I saw persons fond of reciting their prayers, I showed them how to make a meditation, and helped them and gave them books; for from the time I began myself to pray, as I said before, [12] I always had a desire that others should serve God. I thought, now that I did not myself serve our Lord according to the light I had, that the knowledge His Majesty had given me ought not to be lost, and that others should serve Him for me. [13] I say this in order to explain the great blindness I was in: going to ruin myself, and labouring to save others. 22. At this time, that illness befell my father of which he died; [14] it lasted some days. I went to nurse him, being more sick in spirit than he was in body, owing to my many vanities--though not, so far as I know, to the extent of being in mortal sin--through the whole of that wretched time of which I am speaking; for, if I knew myself to be in mortal sin, I would not have continued in it on any account. I suffered much myself during his illness. I believe I rendered him some service in return for what he had suffered in mine. Though I was very ill, I did violence to myself; and though in losing him I was to lose all the comfort and good of my life--he was all this to me--I was so courageous, that I never betrayed my sorrows, concealing them till he was dead, as if I felt none at all. It seemed as if my very soul were wrenched when I saw him at the point of death--my love for him was so deep. 23. It was a matter for which we ought to praise our Lord--the death that he died, and the desire he had to die; so also was the advice he gave us after the last anointing, how he charged us to recommend him to God, and to pray for mercy for him, how he bade us serve God always, and consider how all things come to an end. He told us with tears how sorry he was that he had not served Him himself; for he wished he was a friar--I mean, that he had been one in the Strictest Order that is. I have a most assured conviction that our Lord, some fifteen days before, had revealed to him he was not to live; for up to that time, though very ill, he did not think so; but now, though he was somewhat better, and the physicians said so, he gave no heed to them, but employed himself in the ordering of his soul. 24. His chief suffering consisted in a most acute pain of the shoulders, which never left him: it was so sharp at times, that it put him into great torture. I said to him, that as he had so great a devotion to our Lord carrying His cross on His shoulders, he should now think that His Majesty wished him to feel somewhat of that pain which He then suffered Himself. This so comforted him, that I do not think I heard him complain afterwards. 25. He remained three days without consciousness; but on the day he died, our Lord restored him so completely, that we were astonished: he preserved his understanding to the last; for in the middle of the creed, which he repeated himself, he died. He lay there like an angel--such he seemed to me, if I may say so, both in soul and disposition: he was very good. 26. I know not why I have said this, unless it be for the purpose of showing how much the more I am to be blamed for my wickedness; for after seeing such a death, and knowing what his life had been, I, in order to be in any wise like unto such a father, ought to have grown better. His confessor, a most learned Dominican, [15] used to say that he had no doubt he went straight to heaven. [16] He had heard his confession for some years, and spoke with praise of the purity of his conscience. 27. This Dominican father, who was a very good man, fearing God, did me a very great service; for I confessed to him. He took upon himself the task of helping my soul in earnest, and of making me see the perilous state I was in. [17] He sent me to Communion once a fortnight; [18] and I, by degrees beginning to speak to him, told him about my prayer. He charged me never to omit it: that, anyhow, it could not do me anything but good. I began to return to it--though I did not cut off the occasions of sin--and never afterwards gave it up. My life became most wretched, because I learned in prayer more and more of my faults. On one side, God was calling me; on the other, I was following the world. All the things of God gave me great pleasure; and I was a prisoner to the things of the world. It seemed as if I wished to reconcile two contradictions, so much at variance one with another as are the life of the spirit and the joys and pleasures and amusements of sense. [19] 28. I suffered much in prayer; for the spirit was slave, and not master; and so I was not able to shut myself up within myself--that was my whole method of prayer--without shutting up with me a thousand vanities at the same time. I spent many years in this way; and I am now astonished that any one could have borne it without abandoning either the one or the other. I know well that it was not in my power then to give up prayer, because He held me in His hand Who sought me that He might show me greater mercies. 29. O my God! if I might, I would speak of the occasions from which God delivered me, and how I threw myself into them again; and of the risks I ran of losing utterly my good name, from which He delivered me. I did things to show what I was; and our Lord hid the evil, and revealed some little virtue--if so be I had any--and made it great in the eyes of all, so that they always held me in much honour. For although my follies came occasionally into light, people would not believe it when they saw other things, which they thought good. The reason is, that He Who knoweth all things saw it was necessary it should be so, in order that I might have some credit given me by those to whom in after years I was to speak of His service. His supreme munificence regarded not my great sins, but rather the desires I frequently had to please Him, and the pain I felt because I had not the strength to bring those desires to good effect. 30. O Lord of my soul! how shall I be able to magnify the graces which Thou, in those years, didst bestow upon me? Oh, how, at the very time that I offended Thee most, Thou didst prepare me in a moment, by a most profound compunction, to taste of the sweetness of Thy consolations and mercies! In truth, O my King, Thou didst administer to me the most delicate and painful chastisement it was possible for me to bear; for Thou knewest well what would have given me the most pain. Thou didst chastise my sins with great consolations. I do not believe I am saying foolish things, though it may well be that I am beside myself whenever I call to mind my ingratitude and my wickedness. 31. It was more painful for me, in the state I was in, to receive graces, when I had fallen into grievous faults, than it would have been to receive chastisement; for one of those faults, I am sure, used to bring me low, shame and distress me, more than many diseases, together with many heavy trials, could have done. For, as to the latter, I saw that I deserved them; and it seemed to me that by them I was making some reparation for my sins, though it was but slight, for my sins are so many. But when I see myself receive graces anew, after being so ungrateful for those already received, that is to me--and, I believe, to all who have any knowledge or love of God--a fearful kind of torment. We may see how true this is by considering what a virtuous mind must be. Hence my tears and vexation when I reflected on what I felt, seeing myself in a condition to fall at every moment, though my resolutions and desires then--I am speaking of that time--were strong. 32. It is a great evil for a soul to be alone in the midst of such great dangers; it seems to me that if I had had any one with whom I could have spoken of all this, it might have helped me not to fall. I might, at least, have been ashamed before him--and yet I was not ashamed before God. 33. For this reason, I would advise those who give themselves to prayer, particularly at first, to form friendships; and converse familiarly, with others who are doing the same thing. It is a matter of the last importance, even if it lead only to helping one another by prayer: how much more, seeing that it has led to much greater gain! Now, if in their intercourse one with another, and in the indulgence of human affections even not of the best kind, men seek friends with whom they may refresh themselves, and for the purpose of having greater satisfaction in speaking of their empty joys, I know no reason why it should not be lawful for him who is beginning to love and serve God in earnest to confide to another his joys and sorrows; for they who are given to prayer are thoroughly accustomed to both. 34. For if that friendship with God which he desires be real, let him not be afraid of vain-glory; and if the first movements thereof assail him, he will escape from it with merit; and I believe that he who will discuss the matter with this intention will profit both himself and those who hear him, and thus will derive more light for his own understanding, as well as for the instruction of his friends. He who in discussing his method of prayer falls into vain-glory will do so also when he hears Mass devoutly, if he is seen of men, and in doing other good works, which must be done under pain of being no Christian; and yet these things must not be omitted through fear of vain-glory. 35. Moreover, it is a most important matter for those souls who are not strong in virtue; for they have so many people, enemies as well as friends, to urge them the wrong way, that I do not see how this point is capable of exaggeration. It seems to me that Satan has employed this artifice--and it is of the greatest service to him--namely, that men who really wish to love and please God should hide the fact, while others, at his suggestion, make open show of their malicious dispositions; and this is so common, that it seems a matter of boasting now, and the offences committed against God are thus published abroad. 36. I do not know whether the things I am saying are foolish or not. If they be so, your reverence will strike them out. I entreat you to help my simplicity by adding a good deal to this, because the things that relate to the service of God are so feebly managed, that it is necessary for those who would serve Him to join shoulder to shoulder, if they are to advance at all; for it is considered safe to live amidst the vanities and pleasures of the world, and few there be who regard them with unfavourable eyes. But if any one begins to give himself up to the service of God, there are so many to find fault with him, that it becomes necessary for him to seek companions, in order that he may find protection among them till he grows strong enough not to feel what he may be made to suffer. If he does not, he will find himself in great straits. 37. This, I believe, must have been the reason why some of the Saints withdrew into the desert. And it is a kind of humility in man not to trust to himself, but to believe that God will help him in his relations with those with whom he converses; and charity grows by being diffused; and there are a thousand blessings herein which I would not dare to speak of, if I had not known by experience the great importance of it. It is very true that I am the most wicked and the basest of all who are born of women; but I believe that he who, humbling himself, though strong, yet trusteth not in himself, and believeth another who in this matter has had experience, will lose nothing. Of myself I may say that, if our Lord had not revealed to me this truth, and given me the opportunity of speaking very frequently to persons given to prayer, I should have gone on falling and rising till I tumbled into hell. I had many friends to help me to fall; but as to rising again, I was so much left to myself, that I wonder now I was not always on the ground. I praise God for His mercy; for it was He only Who stretched out His hand to me. May He be blessed for ever! Amen. 1. See Way of Perfection, ch. xl.; but ch. xxvii. of the former editions. 2. See Relation, i. § 18. 3. A.D. 1537, when the Saint was twenty-two years old (Bouix). This passage, therefore, must be one of the additions to the second Life; for the first was written in 1562, twenty-five years only after the vision. 4. See ch. xxvii. § 3. 5. In the parlour of the monastery of the Incarnation, Avila, a painting of this is preserved to this day (De la Fuente). 6. Ch. vi. § 4. 7. See Inner Fortress, v. iii. § 1. 8. Ch. i. § i. 9. Ch. xix. §§ 9, 17. 10. See § 2, above. 11. See ch. xi. § 23: Inner Fortress, vi. i. § 8. 12. § 16. 13. See Inner Fortress, v. iii. § 1. 14. In 1541, when the Saint was twenty-five years of age (Bouix). 15. F. Vicente Barron (Reforma, lib. i. ch. xv.). 16. See ch. xxxviii. § 1. 17. See ch. xix. § 19. 18. The Spanish editor calls attention to this as a proof of great laxity in those days--that a nun like St. Teresa should be urged to communicate as often as once in a fortnight. 19. See ch. xiii. §§ 7, 8. Chapter VIII. The Saint Ceases Not to Pray. Prayer the Way to Recover What Is Lost. All Exhorted to Pray. The Great Advantage of Prayer, Even to Those Who May Have Ceased from It. 1. It is not without reason that I have dwelt so long on this portion of my life. I see clearly that it will give no one pleasure to see anything so base; and certainly I wish those who may read this to have me in abhorrence, as a soul so obstinate and so ungrateful to Him Who did so much for me. I could wish, too, I had permission to say how often at this time I failed in my duty to God, because I was not leaning on the strong pillar of prayer. I passed nearly twenty years on this stormy sea, falling and rising, but rising to no good purpose, seeing that I went and fell again. My life was one of perfection; but it was so mean, that I scarcely made any account whatever of venial sins; and though of mortal sins I was afraid, I was not so afraid of them as I ought to have been, because I did not avoid the perilous occasions of them. I may say that it was the most painful life that can be imagined, because I had no sweetness in God, and no pleasure in the world. 2. When I was in the midst of the pleasures of the world, the remembrance of what I owed to God made me sad; and when I was praying to God, my worldly affections disturbed me. This is so painful a struggle, that I know not how I could have borne it for a month, let alone for so many years. Nevertheless, I can trace distinctly the great mercy of our Lord to me, while thus immersed in the world, in that I had still the courage to pray. I say courage, because I know of nothing in the whole world which requires greater courage than plotting treason against the King, knowing that He knows it, and yet never withdrawing from His presence; for, granting that we are always in the presence of God, yet it seems to me that those who pray arc in His presence in a very different sense; for they, as it were, see that He is looking upon them; while others may be for days together without even once recollecting that God sees them. 3. It is true, indeed, that during these years there were many months, and, I believe, occasionally a whole year, in which I so kept guard over myself that I did not offend our Lord, gave myself much to prayer, and took some pains, and that successfully, not to offend Him. I speak of this now, because all I am saying is strictly true; but I remember very little of those good days, and so they must have been few, while my evil days were many. Still, the days that passed over without my spending a great part of them in prayer were few, unless I was very ill, or very much occupied. 4. When I was ill, I was well with God. I contrived that those about me should be so, too, and I made supplications to our Lord for this grace, and spoke frequently of Him. Thus, with the exception of that year of which I have been speaking, during eight-and-twenty years of prayer, I spent more than eighteen in that strife and contention which arose out of my attempts to reconcile God and the world. As to the other years, of which I have now to speak, in them the grounds of the warfare, though it was not slight, were changed; but inasmuch as I was--at least, I think so--serving God, and aware of the vanity of the world, all has been pleasant, as I shall show hereafter. [1] 5. The reason, then, of my telling this at so great a length is that, as I have just said, [2] the mercy of God and my ingratitude, on the one hand, may become known; and, on the other, that men may understand how great is the good which God works in a soul when He gives it a disposition to pray in earnest, though it may not be so well prepared as it ought to be. If that soul perseveres in spite of sins, temptations, and relapses, brought about in a thousand ways by Satan, our Lord will bring it at last--I am certain of it--to the harbour of salvation, as He has brought me myself; for so it seems to me now. May His Majesty grant I may never go back and be lost! He who gives himself to prayer is in possession of a great blessing, of which many saintly and good men have written--I am speaking of mental prayer--glory be to God for it; and, if they had not done so, I am not proud enough, though I have but little humility, to presume to discuss it. 6. I may speak of that which I know by experience; and so I say, let him never cease from prayer who has once begun it, be his life ever so wicked; for prayer is the way to amend it, and without prayer such amendment will be much more difficult. Let him not be tempted by Satan, as I was, to give it up, on the pretence of humility; [3] let him rather believe that His words are true Who says that, if we truly repent, and resolve never to offend Him, He will take us into His favour again, [4] give us the graces He gave us before, and occasionally even greater, if our repentance deserve it. And as to him who has not begun to pray, I implore him by the love of our Lord not to deprive himself of so great a good. 7. Herein there is nothing to be afraid of, but everything to hope for. Granting that such a one does not advance, nor make an effort to become perfect, so as to merit the joys and consolations which the perfect receive from God, yet he will by little and little attain to a knowledge of the road which leads to heaven. And if he perseveres, I hope in the mercy of God for him, seeing that no one ever took Him for his friend that was not amply rewarded; for mental prayer is nothing else, in my opinion, but being on terms of friendship with God, frequently conversing in secret with Him Who, we know, loves us. Now, true love and lasting friendship require certain dispositions: those of our Lord, we know, are absolutely perfect; ours, vicious, sensual, and thankless; and you cannot therefore, bring yourselves to love Him as He loves you, because you have not the disposition to do so; and if you do not love Him, yet, seeing how much it concerns you to have His friendship, and how great is His love for you, rise above that pain you feel at being much with Him Who is so different from you. 8. O infinite goodness of my God! I seem to see Thee and myself in this relation to one another. O Joy of the angels! when I consider it, I wish I could wholly die of love! How true it is that Thou endurest those who will not endure Thee! Oh, how good a friend art Thou, O my Lord! how Thou comfortest and endurest, and also waitest for them to make themselves like unto Thee, and yet, in the meanwhile, art Thyself so patient of the state they are in! Thou takest into account the occasions during which they seek Thee, and for a moment of penitence forgettest their offences against Thyself. 9. I have seen this distinctly in my own case, and I cannot tell why the whole world does not labour to draw near to Thee in this particular friendship. The wicked, who do not resemble Thee, ought to do so, in order that Thou mayest make them good, and for that purpose should permit Thee to remain with them at least for two hours daily, even though they may not remain with Thee but, as I used to do, with a thousand distractions, and with worldly thoughts. In return for this violence which they offer to themselves for the purpose of remaining in a company so good as Thine--for at first they can do no more, and even afterwards at times--Thou, O Lord, defendest them against the assaults of evil spirits, whose power Thou restrainest, and even lessenest daily, giving to them the victory over these their enemies. So it is, O Life of all lives, Thou slayest none that put their trust in Thee, and seek Thy friendship; yea, rather, Thou sustainest their bodily life in greater vigour, and makest their soul to live. 10. I do not understand what there can be to make them afraid who are afraid to begin mental prayer, nor do I know what it is they dread. The devil does well to bring this fear upon us, that he may really hurt us by putting me in fear, he can make me cease from thinking of my offences against God, of the great debt I owe Him, of the existence of heaven and hell, and of the great sorrows and trials He underwent for me. That was all my prayer, and had been, when I was in this dangerous state, and it was on those subjects I dwelt whenever I could; and very often, for some years, I was more occupied with the wish to see the end of the time I had appointed for myself to spend in prayer, and in watching the hour-glass, than with other thoughts that were good. If a sharp penance had been laid upon me, I know of none that I would not very often have willingly undertaken, rather than prepare myself for prayer by self-recollection. And certainly the violence with which Satan assailed me was so irresistible, or my evil habits were so strong, that I did not betake myself to prayer; and the sadness I felt on entering the oratory was so great, that it required all the courage I had to force myself in. They say of me that my courage is not slight, and it is known that God has given me a courage beyond that of a woman; but I have made a bad use of it. In the end, our Lord came to my help; and then, when I had done this violence to myself, I found greater peace and joy than I sometimes had when I had a desire to pray. 11. If, then, our Lord bore so long with me, who was so wicked--and it is plain that it was by prayer all my evil was corrected--why should any one, how wicked soever he may be, have any fear? Let him be ever so wicked, he will not remain in his wickedness so many years as I did, after receiving so many graces from our Lord. Is there any one who can despair, when He bore so long with me, only because I desired and contrived to find some place and some opportunities for Him to be alone with me--and that very often against my will? for I did violence to myself, or rather our Lord Himself did violence to me. 12. If, then, to those who do not serve God, but rather offend Him, prayer be all this, and so necessary, and if no one can really find out any harm it can do him, and if the omission of it be not a still greater harm, why, then, should they abstain from it who serve and desire to serve God? Certainly I cannot comprehend it, unless it be that men have a mind to go through the troubles of this life in greater misery, and to shut the door in the face of God, so that He shall give them no comfort in it. I am most truly sorry for them, because they serve God at their own cost; for of those who pray, God Himself defrays the charges, seeing that for a little trouble He gives sweetness, in order that, by the help it supplies, they may bear their trials. 13. But because I have much to say hereafter of this sweetness, which our Lord gives to those who persevere in prayer, [5] I do not speak of it here; only this will I say: prayer is the door to those great graces which our Lord bestowed upon me. If this door be shut, I do not see how He can bestow them; for even if He entered into a soul to take His delight therein, and to make that soul also delight in Him, there is no way by which He can do so; for His will is, that such a soul should be lonely and pure, with a great desire to receive His graces. If we put many hindrances in the way, and take no pains whatever to remove them, how can He come to us, and how can we have any desire that He should show us His great mercies? 14. I will speak now--for it is very important to understand it--of the assaults which Satan directs against a soul for the purpose of taking it, and of the contrivances and compassion wherewith our Lord labours to convert it to Himself, in order that men may behold His mercy, and the great good it was for me that I did not give up prayer and spiritual reading, and that they may be on their guard against the dangers against which I was not on my guard myself. And, above all, I implore them for the love of our Lord, and for the great love with which He goeth about seeking our conversion to Himself, to beware of the occasions of sin; for once placed therein, we have no ground to rest on--so many enemies then assail us, and our own weakness is such, that we cannot defend ourselves. 15. Oh, that I knew how to describe the captivity of my soul in those days! I understood perfectly that I was in captivity, but I could not understand the nature of it; neither could I entirely believe that those things which my confessors did not make so much of were so wrong as I in my soul felt them to be. One of them--I had gone to him with a scruple--told me that, even if I were raised to high contemplation, those occasions and conversations were not unfitting for me. This was towards the end, when, by the grace of God, I was withdrawing more and more from those great dangers, but not wholly from the occasions of them. 16. When they saw my good desires, and how I occupied myself in prayer, I seemed to them to have done much; but my soul knew that this was not doing what I was bound to do for Him to Whom I owed so much. I am sorry for my poor soul even now, because of its great sufferings, and the little help it had from any one except God, and for the wide door that man opened for it, that it might go forth to its pastimes and pleasures, when they said that these things were lawful. 17. Then there was the torture of sermons, and that not a slight one; for I was very fond of them. If I heard any one preach well and with unction, I felt, without my seeking it, a particular affection for him, neither do I know whence it came. Thus, no sermon ever seemed to me so bad, but that I listened to it with pleasure; though, according to others who heard it, the preaching was not good. If it was a good sermon, it was to me a most special refreshment. To speak of God, or to hear Him spoken of, never wearied me. I am speaking of the time after I gave myself to prayer. At one time I had great comfort in sermons, at another they distressed me, because they made me feel that I was very far from being what I ought to have been. 18. I used to pray to our Lord for help; but, as it now seems to me, I must have committed the fault of not putting my whole trust in His Majesty, and of not thoroughly distrusting myself. I sought for help, took great pains; but it must be that I did not understand how all is of little profit if we do not root out all confidence in ourselves, and place it wholly in God. I wished to live, but I saw clearly that I was not living, but rather wrestling with the shadow of death; there was no one to give me life, and I was not able to take it. He Who could have given it me had good reasons for not coming to my aid, seeing that He had brought me back to Himself so many times, and I as often had left Him. 1. Ch. ix. § 10. 2. § 1, above. 3. Ch. vii. § 17; ch. xix. § 8. 4. Ezech. xviii. 21: "Si autem impius egerit poenitentiam, . . . vita vivet, et non morietur. Omnium iniquitatum ejus . . . non recordabor." 5. See ch. x. § 2, and ch. xi. § 22. Chapter IX. The Means Whereby Our Lord Quickened Her Soul, Gave Her Light in Her Darkness, and Made Her Strong in Goodness. 1. My soul was now grown weary; and the miserable habits it had contracted would not suffer it to rest, though it was desirous of doing so. It came to pass one day, when I went into the oratory, that I saw a picture which they had put by there, and which had been procured for a certain feast observed in the house. It was a representation of Christ most grievously wounded; and so devotional, that the very sight of it, when I saw it, moved me--so well did it show forth that which He suffered for us. So keenly did I feel the evil return I had made for those wounds, that I thought my heart was breaking. I threw myself on the ground beside it, my tears flowing plenteously, and implored Him to strengthen me once for all, so that I might never offend Him any more. 2. I had a very great devotion to the glorious Magdalene, and very frequently used to think of her conversion--especially when I went to Communion. As I knew for certain that our Lord was then within me, I used to place myself at His feet, thinking that my tears would not be despised. I did not know what I was saying; only He did great things for me, in that He was pleased I should shed those tears, seeing that I so soon forgot that impression. I used to recommend myself to that glorious Saint, that she might obtain my pardon. 3. But this last time, before that picture of which I am speaking, I seem to have made greater progress; for I was now very distrustful of myself, placing all my confidence in God. It seems to me that I said to Him then that I would not rise up till He granted my petition. I do certainly believe that this was of great service to me, because I have grown better ever since. [1] 4. This was my method of prayer: as I could not make reflections with my understanding, I contrived to picture Christ as within me; [2] and I used to find myself the better for thinking of those mysteries of His life during which He was most lonely. It seemed to me that the being alone and afflicted, like a person in trouble, must needs permit me to come near unto Him. 5. I did many simple things of this kind; and in particular I used to find myself most at home in the prayer in the Garden, whither I went in His company. I thought of the bloody sweat, and of the affliction He endured there; I wished, if it had been possible, to wipe away that painful sweat from His face; but I remember that I never dared to form such a resolution--my sins stood before me so grievously. I used to remain with Him there as long as my thoughts allowed me, and I had many thoughts to torment me. For many years, nearly every night before I fell asleep, when I recommended myself to God, that I might sleep in peace, I used always to think a little of this mystery of the prayer in the Garden--yea, even before I was a nun, because I had been told that many indulgences were to be gained thereby. For my part, I believe that my soul gained very much in this way, because I began to practise prayer without knowing what it was; and now that it had become my constant habit, I was saved from omitting it, as I was from omitting to bless myself with the sign of the cross before I slept. 6. And now to go back to what I was saying of the torture which my thoughts inflicted upon me. This method of praying, in which the understanding makes no reflections, hath this property: the soul must gain much, or lose. I mean, that those who advance without meditation, make great progress, because it is done by love. But to attain to this involves great labour, except to those persons whom it is our Lord's good pleasure to lead quickly to the prayer of quiet. I know of some. For those who walk in this way, a book is profitable, that by the help thereof they may the more quickly recollect themselves. It was a help to me also to look on fields, water, and flowers. [3] In them I saw traces of the Creator--I mean, that the sight of these things was as a book unto me; it roused me, made me recollected, and reminded me of my ingratitude and of my sins. My understanding was so dull, that I could never represent in the imagination either heavenly or high things in any form whatever until our Lord placed them before me in another way. [4] 7. I was so little able to put things before me by the help of my understanding, that, unless I saw a thing with my eyes, my imagination was of no use whatever. I could not do as others do, who can put matters before themselves so as to become thereby recollected. I was able to think of Christ only as man. But so it was; and I never could form any image of Him to myself, though I read much of His beauty, and looked at pictures of Him. I was like one who is blind, or in the dark, who, though speaking to a person present, and feeling his presence, because he knows for certain that he is present--I mean, that he understands him to be present, and believes it--yet does not see him. It was thus with me when I used to think of our Lord. This is why I was so fond of images. Wretched are they who, through their own fault, have lost this blessing; it is clear enough that they do not love our Lord--for if they loved Him, they would rejoice at the sight of His picture, just as men find pleasure when they see the portrait of one they love. 8. At this time, the Confessions of St. Augustine were given me. Our Lord seems to have so ordained it, for I did not seek them myself, neither had I ever seen them before. I had a very great devotion to St. Augustine, because the monastery in which I lived when I was yet in the world was of his Order; [5] and also because he had been a sinner--for I used to find great comfort in those Saints whom, after they had sinned, our Lord converted to Himself. I thought they would help me, and that, as our Lord had forgiven them, so also He would forgive me. One thing, however, there was that troubled me--I have spoken of it before [6]--our Lord had called them but once, and they never relapsed; while my relapses were now so many. This it was that vexed me. But calling to mind the love that He bore me, I took courage again. Of His mercy I never doubted once, but I did very often of myself. 9. O my God, I amazed at the hardness of my heart amidst so many succours from Thee. I am filled with dread when I see how little I could do with myself, and how I was clogged, so that I could not resolve to give myself entirely to God. When I began to read the Confessions, I thought I saw myself there described, and began to recommend myself greatly to this glorious Saint. When I came to his conversion, and read how he heard that voice in the garden, it seemed to me nothing less than that our Lord had uttered it for me: I felt so in my heart. I remained for some time lost in tears, in great inward affliction and distress. O my God, what a soul has to suffer because it has lost the liberty it had of being mistress over itself! and what torments it has to endure! I wonder now how I could live in torments so great: God be praised Who gave me life, so that I might escape from so fatal a death! I believe that my soul obtained great strength from His Divine Majesty, and that He must have heard my cry, and had compassion upon so many tears. 10. A desire to spend more time with Him began to grow within me, and also to withdraw from the occasions of sin: for as soon as I had done so, I turned lovingly to His Majesty at once. I understood clearly, as I thought, that I loved Him; but I did not understand, as I ought to have understood it, wherein the true love of God consists. I do not think I had yet perfectly disposed myself to seek His service when His Majesty turned towards me with His consolations. What others strive after with great labour, our Lord seems to have looked out for a way to make me willing to accept--that is, in these later years to give me joy and comfort. But as for asking our Lord to give me either these things or sweetness in devotion, I never dared to do it; the only thing I prayed Him to give me was the grace never to offend Him, together with the forgiveness of my great sins. When I saw that my sins were so great, I never ventured deliberately to ask for consolation or for sweetness. He had compassion enough upon me, I think--and, in truth, He dealt with me according to His great mercy--when He allowed me to stand before Him, and when He drew me into His presence; for I saw that, if He had not drawn me, I should not have come at all. 11. Once only in my life do I remember asking for consolation, being at the time in great aridities. When I considered what I had done, I was so confounded, that the very distress I suffered from seeing how little humility I had, brought me that which I had been so bold as to ask for. I knew well that it was lawful to pray for it; but it seemed to me that it is lawful only for those who are in good dispositions, who have sought with all their might to attain to true devotion--that is, not to offend God, and to be disposed and resolved for all goodness. I looked upon those tears of mine as womanish and weak, seeing that I did not obtain my desires by them; nevertheless, I believe that they did me some service; for, specially after those two occasions of great compunction and sorrow of heart, [7] accompanied by tears, of which I am speaking, I began in an especial way to give myself more to prayer, and to occupy myself less with those things which did me harm--though I did not give them up altogether. But God Himself, as I have just said, came to my aid, and helped me to turn away from them. As His Majesty was only waiting for some preparation on my part, the spiritual graces grew in me as I shall now explain. It is not the custom of our Lord to give these graces to any but to those who keep their consciences in greater pureness. [8] 1. In the year 1555 (Bouix). 2. See ch. iv. § 10; ch. x. § 1. 3. See Relation, i. § 12. 4. See ch. iv. § 11. 5. Ch. ii. § 8. 6. In the Prologue. 7. § 1. 8. Ch. iv. § 11. Chapter X. The Graces She Received in Prayer. What We Can Do Ourselves. The Great Importance of Understanding What Our Lord Is Doing for Us. She Desires Her Confessors to Keep Her Writings Secret, Because of the Special Graces of Our Lord to Her, Which They Had Commanded Her to Describe. 1. I used to have at times, as I have said, [1] though it used to pass quickly away--certain commencements of that which I am going now to describe. When I formed those pictures within myself of throwing myself at the feet of Christ, as I said before, [2] and sometimes even when I was reading, a feeling of the presence of God would come over me unexpectedly, so that I could in no wise doubt either that He was within me, or that I was wholly absorbed in Him. It was not by way of vision; I believe it was what is called mystical theology. The soul is suspended in such a way that it seems to be utterly beside itself. The will loves; the memory, so it seems to me, is as it were lost; and the understanding, so I think, makes no reflections--yet is not lost: as I have just said, it is not at work, but it stands as if amazed at the greatness of the things it understands; for God wills it to understand that it understands nothing whatever of that which His Majesty places before it. 2. Before this, I had a certain tenderness of soul which was very abiding, partially attainable, I believe, in some measure, by our own efforts: a consolation which is not wholly in the senses, nor yet altogether in the spirit, but is all of it the gift of God. However, I think we can contribute much towards the attaining of it by considering our vileness and our ingratitude towards God--the great things He has done for us--His Passion, with its grievous pains--and His life, so full of sorrows; also, by rejoicing in the contemplation of His works, of His greatness, and of the love that He bears us. Many other considerations there are which he who really desires to make progress will often stumble on, though he may not be very much on the watch for them. If with this there be a little love, the soul is comforted, the heart is softened, and tears flow. Sometimes it seems that we do violence to ourselves and weep; at other times, our Lord seems to do so, so that we have no power to resist Him. His Majesty seems to reward this slight carefulness of ours with so grand a gift as is this consolation which He ministers to the soul of seeing itself weeping for so great a Lord. I am not surprised; for the soul has reason enough, and more than enough, for its joy. Here it comforts itself--here it rejoices. 3. The comparison which now presents itself seems to me to be good. These joys in prayer are like what those of heaven must be. As the vision of the saints, which is measured by their merits there, reaches no further than our Lord wills, and as the blessed see how little merit they had, every one of them is satisfied with the place assigned him: there being the very greatest difference between one joy and another in heaven, and much greater than between one spiritual joy and another on earth--which is, however, very great. And in truth, in the beginning, a soul in which God works this grace thinks that now it has scarcely anything more to desire, and counts itself abundantly rewarded for all the service it has rendered Him. And there is reason for this: for one of those tears--which, as I have just said, are almost in our own power, though without God nothing can be done--cannot, in my opinion, be purchased with all the labours of the world, because of the great gain it brings us. And what greater gain can we have than some testimony of our having pleased God? Let him, then, who shall have attained to this, give praise unto God--acknowledge himself to be one of His greatest debtors; because it seems to be His will to take him into His house, having chosen him for His kingdom, if he does not turn back. 4. Let him not regard certain kinds of humility which exist, and of which I mean to speak. [3] Some think it humility not to believe that God is bestowing His gifts upon them. Let us clearly understand this, and that it is perfectly clear God bestows His gifts without any merit whatever on our part; and let us be grateful to His Majesty for them; for if we do not recognize the gifts received at His hands, we shall never be moved to love Him. It is a most certain truth, that the richer we see ourselves to be, confessing at the same time our poverty, the greater will be our progress, and the more real our humility. 5. An opposite course tends to take away all courage; for we shall think ourselves incapable of great blessings, if we begin to frighten ourselves with the dread of vain-glory when our Lord begins to show His mercy upon us. [4] Let us believe that He Who gives these gifts will also, when the devil begins to tempt us herein, give us the grace to detect him, and the strength to resist him--that is, He will do so if we walk in simplicity before God, aiming at pleasing Him only, and not men. It is a most evident truth, that our love for a person is greater, the more distinctly we remember the good he has done us. 6. If, then, it is lawful, and so meritorious, always to remember that we have our being from God, that He has created us out of nothing, that He preserves us, and also to remember all the benefits of His death and Passion, which He suffered long before He made us for every one of us now alive--why should it not be lawful for me to discern, confess, and consider often that I was once accustomed to speak of vanities, and that now our Lord has given me the grace to speak only of Himself? 7. Here, then, is a precious pearl, which, when we remember that it is given us, and that we have it in possession, powerfully invites us to love. All this is the fruit of prayer founded on humility. What, then, will it be when we shall find ourselves in possession of other pearls of greater price, such as contempt of the world and of self, which some servants of God have already received? It is clear that such souls must consider themselves greater debtors--under greater obligations to serve Him: we must acknowledge that we have nothing of ourselves, and confess the munificence of our Lord, Who, on a soul so wretched and poor, and so utterly undeserving, as mine is,--for whom the first of these pearls was enough, and more than enough,--would bestow greater riches than I could desire. 8. We must renew our strength to serve Him, and strive not to be ungrateful, because it is on this condition that our Lord dispenses His treasures; for if we do not make a good use of them, and of the high estate to which He raises us, He will return and take them from us, and we shall be poorer than ever. His Majesty will give the pearls to him who shall bring them forth and employ them usefully for himself and others. For how shall he be useful, and how shall he spend liberally, who does not know that he is rich? It is not possible, I think, our nature being what it is, that he can have the courage necessary for great things who does not know that God is on his side; for so miserable are we, so inclined to the things of this world, that he can hardly have any real abhorrence of, with great detachment from, all earthly things who does not see that he holds some pledges for those things that are above. It is by these gifts that our Lord gives us that strength which we through our sins have lost. 9. A man will hardly wish to be held in contempt and abhorrence, nor will he seek after the other great virtues to which the perfect attain, if he has not some pledges of the love which God bears him, together with a living faith. Our nature is so dead, that we go after that which we see immediately before us; and it is these graces, therefore, that quicken and strengthen our faith. It may well be that I, who am so wicked, measure others by myself, and that others require nothing more than the verities of the faith, in order to render their works most perfect; while I, wretched that I am! have need of everything. 10. Others will explain this. I speak from my own experience, as I have been commanded; and if what I say be not correct, let him [5] to whom I send it destroy it; for he knows better than I do what is wrong in it. I entreat him, for the love of our Lord, to publish abroad what I have thus far said of my wretched life, and of my sins. I give him leave to do so; and to all my confessors, also,--of whom he is one--to whom this is to be sent, if it be their pleasure, even during my life, so that I may no longer deceive people who think there must be some good in me. [6] Certainly, I speak in all sincerity, so far as I understand myself. Such publication will give me great comfort. 11. But as to that which I am now going to say, I give no such leave; nor, if it be shown to any one, do I consent to its being said who the person is whose experience it describes, nor who wrote it. This is why I mention neither my own name, nor that of any other person whatever. I have written it in the best way I could, in order not to be known; and this I beg of them for the love of God. Persons so learned and grave as they are [7] have authority enough to approve of whatever right things I may say, should our Lord give me the grace to do so; and if I should say anything of the kind, it will be His, and not mine--because I am neither learned nor of good life, and I have no person of learning or any other to teach me; for they only who ordered me to write know that I am writing, and at this moment they are not here. I have, as it were, to steal the time, and that with difficulty, because my writing hinders me from spinning. I am living in a house that is poor, and have many things to do. [8] If, indeed, our Lord had given me greater abilities and a better memory, I might then profit by what I have seen and read; but my abilities are very slight. If, then, I should say anything that is right, our Lord will have it said for some good purpose; that which may be wrong will be mine, and your reverence will strike it out. 12. In neither case will it be of any use to publish my name: during my life, it is clear that no good I may have done ought to be told; after death, there is no reason against it, except that it will lose all authority and credit, because related of a person so vile and so wicked as I am. And because I think your reverence and the others who may see this writing will do this that I ask of you, for the love of our Lord, I write with freedom. If it were not so, I should have great scruples, except in declaring my sins: and in that matter I should have none at all. For the rest, it is enough that I am a woman to make my sails droop: how much more, then, when I am a woman, and a wicked one? 13. So, then, everything here beyond the simple story of my life your reverence must take upon yourself--since you have so pressed me to give some account of the graces which our Lord bestowed upon me in prayer--if it be consistent with the truths of our holy Catholic faith; if it be not, your reverence must burn it at once--for I give my consent. I will recount my experience, in order that, if it be consistent with those truths, your reverence may make some use of it; if not, you will deliver my soul from delusion, so that Satan may gain nothing there where I seemed to be gaining myself. Our Lord knows well that I, as I shall show hereafter, [9] have always laboured to find out those who could give me light. 14. How clear soever I may wish to make my account of that which relates to prayer, it will be obscure enough for those who are without experience. I shall speak of certain hindrances, which, as I understand it, keep men from advancing on this road--and of other things which are dangerous, as our Lord has taught me by experience. I have also discussed the matter with men of great learning, with persons who for many years had lived spiritual lives, who admit that, in the twenty-seven years only during which I have given myself to prayer--though I walked so ill, and stumbled so often on the road--His Majesty granted me that experience which others attain to in seven-and-thirty, or seven-and-forty, years; and they, too, being persons who ever advanced in the way of penance and of virtue. 15. Blessed be God for all, and may His infinite Majesty make use of me! Our Lord knoweth well that I have no other end in this than that He may be praised and magnified a little, when men shall see that on a dunghill so foul and rank He has made a garden of flowers so sweet. May it please His Majesty that I may not by my own fault root them out, and become again what I was before. And I entreat your reverence, for the love of our Lord, to beg this of Him for me, seeing that you have a clearer knowledge of what I am than you have allowed me to give of myself here. 1. The Saint interrupts her history here to enter on the difficult questions of mystical theology, and resumes it in ch. xxiii. 2. Ch. ix. § 4. 3. Ch. xxx. §§ 10 and 11. 4. See ch. xiii. § 5. 5. F. Pedro Ybañez, of the Order of St. Dominic. 6. See ch. xxxi. § 17. 7. See ch. xv. § 12. 8. See ch. xiv. § 12. 9. See ch. xxiv. § 5. Chapter XI. Why Men Do Not Attain Quickly to the Perfect Love of God. Of Four Degrees of Prayer. Of the First Degree. The Doctrine Profitable for Beginners, and for Those Who Have No Sensible Sweetness. 1. I speak now of those who begin to be the servants of love; that seems to me to be nothing else but to resolve to follow Him in the way of prayer, who has loved us so much. It is a dignity so great, that I have a strange joy in thinking of it; for servile fear vanishes at once, if we are, as we ought to be, in the first degree. O Lord of my soul, and my good, how is it that, when a soul is determined to love Thee--doing all it can, by forsaking all things, in order that it may the better occupy itself with the love of God--it is not Thy will it should have the joy of ascending at once to the possession of perfect love? I have spoken amiss; I ought to have said, and my complaint should have been, why is it we do not? for the fault is wholly our own that we do not rejoice at once in a dignity so great, seeing that the attaining to the perfect possession of this true love brings all blessings with it. 2. We think so much of ourselves, and are so dilatory in giving ourselves wholly to God, that, as His Majesty will not let us have the fruition of that which is so precious but at a great cost, so neither do we perfectly prepare ourselves for it. I see plainly that there is nothing by which so great a good can be procured in this world. If, however, we did what we could, not clinging to anything upon earth, but having all our thoughts and conversation in Heaven, I believe that this blessing would quickly be given us, provided we perfectly prepared ourselves for it at once, as some of the saints have done. We think we are giving all to God; but, in fact, we are offering only the revenue or the produce, while we retain the fee-simple of the land in our own possession. 3. We resolve to become poor, and it is a resolution of great merit; but we very often take great care not to be in want, not simply of what is necessary, but of what is superfluous: yea, and to make for ourselves friends who may supply us; and in this way we take more pains, and perhaps expose ourselves to greater danger, in order that we may want nothing, than we did formerly, when we had our own possessions in our own power. 4. We thought, also, that we gave up all desire of honour when we became religious, or when we began the spiritual life, and followed after perfection; and yet, when we are touched on the point of honour, we do not then remember that we had given it up to God. We would seize it again, and take it, as they say, out of His Hands, even after we had made Him, to all appearance, the Lord of our own will. So is it in every thing else. 5. A pleasant way this of seeking the love of God! we retain our own affections, and yet will have that love, as they say, by handfuls. We make no efforts to bring our desires to good effect, or to raise them resolutely above the earth; and yet, with all this, we must have many spiritual consolations. This is not well, and we are seeking things that are incompatible one with the other. So, because we do not give ourselves up wholly and at once, this treasure is not given wholly and at once to us. May it be the good pleasure of our Lord to give it us drop by drop, though it may cost us all the trials in the world. 6. He showeth great mercy unto him to whom He gives the grace and resolution to strive for this blessing with all his might; for God withholds Himself from no one who perseveres. He will by little and little strengthen that soul, so that it may come forth victorious. I say resolution, because of the multitude of those things which Satan puts before it at first, to keep it back from beginning to travel on this road; for he knoweth what harm will befall him thereby--he will lose not only that soul, but many others also. If he who enters on this road does violence to himself, with the help of God, so as to reach the summit of perfection, such a one, I believe, will never go alone to Heaven; he will always take many with him: God gives to him, as to a good captain, those who shall be of his company. 7. Thus, then, the dangers and difficulties which Satan puts before them are so many, that they have need, not of a little, but of a very great, resolution, and great grace from God, to save them from falling away. 8. Speaking, then, of their beginnings who are determined to follow after this good, and to succeed in their enterprise--what I began to say [1] of mystical theology--I believe they call it by that name--I shall proceed with hereafter--I have to say that the labour is greatest at first; for it is they who toil, our Lord, indeed, giving them strength. In the other degrees of prayer, there is more of fruition; although they who are in the beginning, the middle, and the end, have their crosses to carry: the crosses, however, are different. They who would follow Christ, if they do not wish to be lost, must walk in the way He walked Himself. Blessed labours! even here, in this life, so superabundantly rewarded! 9. I shall have to make use of a comparison; I should like to avoid it, because I am a woman, and write simply what I have been commanded. But this language of spirituality is so difficult of utterance for those who are not learned, and such am I. I have therefore to seek for some means to make the matter plain. It may be that the comparison will very rarely be to the purpose--your reverence will be amused when you see my stupidity. I think, now, I have either read or heard of this comparison; but as my memory is bad, I know not where, nor on what occasion; however, I am satisfied with it for my present purpose. [2] 10. A beginner must look upon himself as making a garden, wherein our Lord may take His delight, but in a soil unfruitful, and abounding in weeds. His Majesty roots up the weeds, and has to plant good herbs. Let us, then, take for granted that this is already done when a soul is determined to give itself to prayer, and has begun the practice of it. We have, then, as good gardeners, by the help of God, to see that the plants grow, to water them carefully, that they may not die, but produce blossoms, which shall send forth much fragrance, refreshing to our Lord, so that He may come often for His pleasure into this garden, and delight Himself in the midst of these virtues. 11. Let us now see how this garden is to be watered, that we may understand what we have to do: how much trouble it will cost us, whether the gain be greater than the trouble, or how long a time it will take us. It seems to me that the garden may be watered in four ways: by water taken out of a well, which is very laborious; or with water raised by means of an engine and buckets, drawn by a windlass--I have drawn it this way sometimes--it is a less troublesome way than the first, and gives more water; or by a stream or brook, whereby the garden is watered in a much better way--for the soil is more thoroughly saturated, and there is no necessity to water it so often, and the labour of the gardener is much less; or by showers of rain, when our Lord Himself waters it, without labour on our part--and this way is incomparably better than all the others of which I have spoken. 12. Now, then, for the application of these four ways of irrigation by which the garden is to be maintained; for without water it must fail. The comparison is to my purpose, and it seems to me that by the help of it I shall be able to explain, in some measure, the four degrees of prayer to which our Lord, of His goodness, has occasionally raised my soul. May He graciously grant that I may so speak as to be of some service to one of those who has commanded me to write, whom our Lord has raised in four months to a greater height than I have reached in seventeen years! He prepared himself better than I did, and therefore is his garden without labour on his part, irrigated by these four waters--though the last of them is only drop by drop; but it is growing in such a way, that soon, by the help of our Lord, he will be swallowed up therein, and it will be a pleasure to me, if he finds my explanation absurd, that he should laugh at it. 13. Of those who are beginners in prayer, we may say, that they are those who draw the water up out of the well--a process which, as I have said, is very laborious; for they must be wearied in keeping the senses recollected, and this is a great labour, because the senses have been hitherto accustomed to distractions. It is necessary for beginners to accustom themselves to disregard what they hear or see, and to put it away from them during the time of prayer; they must be alone, and in retirement think over their past life. Though all must do this many times, beginners as well as those more advanced; all, however, must not do so equally, as I shall show hereafter. [3] Beginners at first suffer much, because they are not convinced that they are penitent for their sins; and yet they are, because they are so sincerely resolved on serving God. They must strive to meditate on the life of Christ, and the understanding is wearied thereby. Thus far we can advance of ourselves--that is, by the grace of God--for without that, as every one knows, we never can have one good thought. 14. This is beginning to draw water up out of the well. God grant there may be water in it! That, however, does not depend on us; we are drawing it, and doing what we can towards watering the flowers. So good is God, that when, for reasons known to His Majesty--perhaps for our greater good--it is His will the well should be dry, He Himself preserves the flowers without water--we, like good gardeners, doing what lies in our power--and makes our virtues grow. By water here I mean tears, and if there be none, then tenderness and an inward feeling of devotion. 15. What, then, will he do here who sees that, for many days, he is conscious only of aridity, disgust, dislike, and so great an unwillingness to go to the well for water, that he would give it up altogether, if he did not remember that he has to please and serve the Lord of the garden; if he did not trust that his service was not in vain, and did not hope for some gain by a labour so great as that of lowering the bucket into the well so often, and drawing it up without water in it? It will happen that he is often unable to move his arms for that purpose, or to have one good thought: working with the understanding is drawing water out of the well. 16. What, then, once more, will the gardener do now? He must rejoice and take comfort, and consider it as the greatest favour to labour in the garden of so great an Emperor; and as he knows that he is pleasing Him in the matter--and his purpose must not be to please himself, but Him--let him praise Him greatly for the trust He has in him--for He sees that, without any recompense, he is taking so much care of that which has been confided to him; let him help Him to carry the Cross, and let him think how He carried it all His life long; let him not seek his kingdom here, nor ever intermit his prayer; and so let him resolve, if this aridity should last even his whole life long, never to let Christ fall down beneath the Cross. [4] 17. The time will come when he shall be paid once for all. Let him have no fear that his labour is in vain: he serves a good Master, Whose eyes are upon him. Let him make no account of evil thoughts, but remember that Satan suggested them to St. Jerome also in the desert. [5] These labours have their reward, I know it; for I am one who underwent them for many years. When I drew but one drop of water out of this blessed well, I considered it was a mercy of God. I know these labours are very great, and require, I think, greater courage than many others in this world; but I have seen clearly that God does not leave them without a great recompense, even in this life; for it is very certain that in one hour, during which our Lord gave me to taste His sweetness, all the anxieties which I had to bear when persevering in prayer seem to me ever afterwards perfectly rewarded. 18. I believe that it is our Lord's good pleasure frequently in the beginning, and at times in the end, to send these torments, and many other incidental temptations, to try those who love Him, and to ascertain if they will drink the chalice, [6] and help Him to carry the Cross, before He intrusts them with His great treasures. I believe it to be for our good that His Majesty should lead us by this way, so that we may perfectly understand how worthless we are; for the graces which He gives afterwards are of a dignity so great, that He will have us by experience know our wretchedness before He grants them, that it may not be with us as it was with Lucifer. 19. What canst Thou do, O my Lord, that is not for the greater good of that soul which Thou knowest to be already Thine, and which gives itself up to Thee to follow Thee whithersoever Thou goest, even to the death of the Cross; and which is determined to help Thee to carry that Cross, and not to leave Thee alone with it? He who shall discern this resolution in himself has nothing to fear: no, no; spiritual people have nothing to fear. There is no reason why he should be distressed who is already raised to so high a degree as this is of wishing to converse in solitude with God, and to abandon the amusements of the world. The greater part of the work is done; give praise to His Majesty for it, and trust in His goodness who has never failed those who love Him. Close the eyes of your imagination, and do not ask why He gives devotion to this person in so short a time, and none to me after so many years. Let us believe that all is for our greater good; let His Majesty guide us whithersoever He will: we are not our own, but His. He shows us mercy enough when it is His pleasure we should be willing to dig in His garden, and to be so near the Lord of it: He certainly is near to us. If it be His will that these plants and flowers should grow--some of them when He gives water we may draw from the well, others when He gives none--what is that to me? Do Thou, O Lord, accomplish Thy will; let me never offend Thee, nor let my virtues perish; if Thou hast given me any, it is out of Thy mere goodness. I wish to suffer, because Thou, O Lord, hast suffered; do Thou in every way fulfil Thy will in me, and may it never be the pleasure of Thy Majesty that a gift of so high a price as that of Thy love, be given to people who serve Thee only because of the sweetness they find thereby. 20. It is much to be observed, and I say so because I know by experience, that the soul which, begins to walk in the way of mental prayer with resolution, and is determined not to care much, neither to rejoice nor to be greatly afflicted, whether sweetness and tenderness fail it, or our Lord grants them, has already travelled a great part of the road. Let that soul, then, have no fear that it is going back, though it may frequently stumble; for the building is begun on a firm foundation. It is certain that the love of God does not consist in tears, nor in this sweetness and tenderness which we for the most part desire, and with which we console ourselves; but rather in serving Him in justice, fortitude, and humility. That seems to me to be a receiving rather than a giving of anything on our part. 21. As for poor women, such as I am, weak and infirm of purpose, it seems to me to be necessary that I should be led on through consolations, as God is doing now, so that I might be able to endure certain afflictions which it has pleased His Majesty I should have. But when the servants of God, who are men of weight, learning, and sense, make so much account, as I see they do, whether God gives them sweetness in devotion or not, I am disgusted when I listen to them. I do not say that they ought not to accept it, and make much of it, when God gives it--because, when He gives it, His Majesty sees it to be necessary for them--but I do say that they ought not to grow weary when they have it not. They should then understand that they have no need of it, and be masters of themselves, when His Majesty does not give it. Let them be convinced of this, there is a fault here; I have had experience of it, and know it to be so. Let them believe it as an imperfection: they are not advancing in liberty of spirit, but shrinking like cowards from the assault. 22. It is not so much to beginners that I say this--though I do insist upon it, because it is of great importance to them that they should begin with this liberty and resolution--as to others, of whom there are many, who make a beginning, but never come to the end; and that is owing, I believe, in great measure, to their not having embraced the Cross from the first. They are distressed, thinking they are doing nothing; the understanding ceases from its acts, and they cannot bear it. Yet, perhaps, at that very time, the will is feeding and gathering strength, and they know it not. 23. We must suppose that our Lord does not regard these things; for though they seem to us to be faults, yet they are not. His Majesty knoweth our misery and natural vileness better than we do ourselves. He knoweth that these souls long to be always thinking of Him and loving Him. It is this resolution that He seeks in us; the other anxieties which we inflict upon ourselves serve to no other end but to disquiet the soul--which, if it be unable to derive any profit in one hour, will by them be disabled for four. This comes most frequently from bodily indisposition--I have had very great experience in the matter, and I know it is true; for I have carefully observed it and discussed it afterwards with spiritual persons--for we are so wretched, that this poor prisoner of a soul shares in the miseries of the body. The changes of the seasons, and the alterations of the humours, very often compel it, without fault of its own, not to do what it would, but rather to suffer in every way. Meanwhile, the more we force the soul on these occasions, the greater the mischief, and the longer it lasts. Some discretion must be used, in order to ascertain whether ill-health be the occasion or not. The poor soul must not be stifled. Let those who thus suffer understand that they are ill; a change should be made in the hour of prayer, and oftentimes that change should be continued for some days. Let souls pass out of this desert as they can, for it is very often the misery of one that loves God to see itself living in such wretchedness, unable to do what it would, because it has to keep so evil a guest as the body. 24. I spoke of discretion, because sometimes the devil will do the same work; and so it is not always right to omit prayer when the understanding is greatly distracted and disturbed, nor to torment the soul to the doing of that which is out of its power. There are other things then to be done--exterior works, as of charity and spiritual reading--though at times the soul will not be able to do them. Take care, then, of the body, for the love of God, because at many other times the body must serve the soul; and let recourse be had to some recreations--holy ones--such as conversation, or going out into the fields, as the confessor shall advise. Altogether, experience is a great matter, and it makes us understand what is convenient for us. Let God be served in all things--His yoke is sweet; [7] and it is of great importance that the soul should not be dragged, as they say, but carried gently, that it may make greater progress. 25. So, then, I come back to what I advised before [8]--and though I repeat it often, it matters not; it is of great importance that no one should distress himself on account of aridities, or because his thoughts are restless and distracted; neither should he be afflicted thereat, if he would attain to liberty of spirit, and not be always in trouble. Let him begin by not being afraid of the Cross, and he will see how our Lord will help him to carry it, how joyfully he will advance, and what profit he will derive from it all. It is now clear, if there is no water in the well, that we at least can put none into it. It is true we must not be careless about drawing it when there is any in it, because at that time it is the will of God to multiply our virtues by means thereof. NOTES 1. Ch. x. § 1. 2. Vide St. Bernard, in Cantic. Serm. 30. n. 7, ed. Ben. 3. Ch. xiii. § 23. 4. See ch. xv. § 17. 5. Epist. 22, ad Eustochium: "O quoties ego ipse in eremo constitutus, et in illa vasta solitudine quæ exusta solis ardoribus horridum monachis præstat habitaculum putabam me Romanis interesse deliciis. Sedebam solus. . . Horrebant sacco membra deformia. . . . Ille igitur ego, qui ob Gehennæ metum tali me carcere damnaveram, scorpionum tantum socius et ferarum, sæpe choris intereram puellarum, pallebant ora jejuniis, et mens desideriis æstuabat in frigido corpore, et ante hominem sua jam carne præmortuum sola libidinum incendia bulliebant." 6. St. Matt. xx. 22: "Potestis bibere calicem?" 7. St. Matt. xi. 30: "Jugum enim meum suave est." 8. § 18. Chapter XII. What We Can Ourselves Do. The Evil of Desiring to Attain to Supernatural States Before Our Lord Calls Us. 1. My aim in the foregoing chapter--though I digressed to many other matters, because they seemed to me very necessary--was to explain how much we may attain to of ourselves; and how, in these beginnings of devotion, we are able in some degree to help ourselves: because thinking of, and pondering on, the sufferings of our Lord for our sakes moves us to compassion, and the sorrow and tears which result therefrom are sweet. The thought of the blessedness we hope for, of the love our Lord bore us, and of His resurrection, kindle within us a joy which is neither wholly spiritual nor wholly sensual; but the joy is virtuous, and the sorrow is most meritorious. 2. Of this kind are all those things which produce a devotion acquired in part by means of the understanding, though it can neither be merited nor had, if God grants it not. It is best for a soul which God has not raised to a higher state than this not to try to rise of itself. Let this be well considered, because all the soul will gain in that way will be a loss. In this state it can make many acts of good resolutions to do much for God, and enkindle its love; other acts also, which may help the growth of virtues, according to that which is written in a book called The Art of Serving God, [1] a most excellent work, and profitable for those who are in this state, because the understanding is active now. 3. The soul may also place itself in the presence of Christ, and accustom itself to many acts of love directed to His sacred Humanity, and remain in His presence continually, and speak to Him, pray to Him in its necessities, and complain to Him of its troubles; be merry with Him in its joys, and yet not forget Him because of its joys. All this it may do without set prayers, but rather with words befitting its desires and its needs. 4. This is an excellent way whereby to advance, and that very quickly. He that will strive to have this precious companionship, and will make much of it, and will sincerely love our Lord, to whom we owe so much, is one, in my opinion, who has made some progress. There is therefore no reason why we should trouble ourselves because we have no sensible devotion, as I said before. [2] But let us rather give thanks to our Lord, who allows us to have a desire to please Him, though our works be poor. This practice of the presence of Christ is profitable in all states of prayer, and is a most safe way of advancing in the first state, and of attaining quickly to the second; and as for the last states, it secures us against those risks which the devil may occasion. 5. This, then, is what we can do. He who would pass out of this state, and upraise his spirit, in order to taste consolations denied him, will, in my opinion, lose both the one and the other. [3] These consolations being supernatural, and the understanding inactive, the soul is then left desolate and in great aridity. As the foundation of the whole building is humility, the nearer we draw unto God the more this virtue should grow; if it does not, everything is lost. It seems to be a kind of pride when we seek to ascend higher, seeing that God descends so low, when He allows us, being what we are, to draw near unto Him. 6. It must not be supposed that I am now speaking of raising our thoughts to the consideration of the high things of heaven and of its glory, or unto God and His great wisdom. I never did this myself, because I had not the capacity for it--as I said before; [4] and I was so worthless, that, as to thinking even of the things of earth, God gave me grace to understand this truth: that in me it was no slight boldness to do so. How much more, then, the thinking of heavenly things? Others, however, will profit in that way, particularly those who are learned; for learning, in my opinion, is a great treasury in the matter of this exercise, if it be accompanied with humility. I observed this a few days ago in some learned men who had shortly before made a beginning, and had made great progress. This is the reason why I am so very anxious that many learned men may become spiritual. I shall speak of this by and by. [5] 7. What I am saying--namely, let them not rise if God does not raise them--is the language of spirituality. He will understand me who has had any experience; and I know not how to explain it, if what I have said does not make it plain. 8. In mystical theology--of which I spoke before [6]--the understanding ceases from its acts, because God suspends it--as I shall explain by and by, if I can; [7] and God give me the grace to do so. We must neither imagine nor think that we can of ourselves bring about this suspension. That is what I say must not be done; nor must we allow the understanding to cease from its acts; for in that case we shall be stupid and cold, and the result will be neither the one nor the other. For when our Lord suspends the understanding, and makes it cease from its acts, He puts before it that which astonishes and occupies it: so that without making any reflections, it shall comprehend in a moment [8] more than we could comprehend in many years with all the efforts in the world. 9. To have the powers of the mind occupied, and to think that you can keep them at the same time quiet, is folly. I repeat it, though it be not so understood, there is no great humility in this; and, if it be blameless, it is not left unpunished--it is labour thrown away, and the soul is a little disgusted: it feels like a man about to take a leap, and is held back. Such a one seems to have used up his strength already, and finds himself unable to do that which he wished to have done: so here, in the scanty gain that remains, he who will consider the matter will trace that slight want of humility of which I have spoken; [9] for that virtue has this excellence: there is no good work attended by humility that leaves the soul disgusted. It seems to me that I have made this clear enough; yet, after all, perhaps only for myself. May our Lord open their eyes who read this, by giving them experience; and then however slight that experience may be, they will immediately understand it. 10. For many years I read much, and understood nothing; and for a long time, too, though God gave me understanding herein, I never could utter a word by which I might explain it to others. This was no little trouble to me. When His Majesty pleases, He teaches everything in a moment, so that I am lost in wonder. One thing I can truly say: though I conversed with many spiritual persons, who sought to make me understand what our Lord was giving me, in order that I might be able to speak of it, the fact is, that my dulness was so great, that I derived no advantage whatever, much or little, from their teaching. 11. Or it may be, as His Majesty has always been my Master--may He be blessed for ever! for I am ashamed of myself that I can say so with truth--that it was His good pleasure I should meet with no one to whom I should be indebted in this matter. So, without my wishing or asking it--I never was careful about this, for that would have been a virtue in me, but only about vanity--God gave me to understand with all distinctness in a moment, and also enabled me to express myself, so that my confessors were astonished but I more than they, because I knew my own dulness better. It is not long since this happened. And so that which our Lord has not taught me, I seek not to know it, unless it be a matter that touches my conscience. 12. Again I repeat my advice: it is of great moment not to raise our spirit ourselves, if our Lord does not raise it for us; and if He does, there can be no mistaking it. For women, it is specially wrong, because the devil can delude them--though I am certain our Lord will never allow him to hurt any one who labours to draw near unto God in humility. On the contrary, such a one will derive more profit and advantage out of that attack by which Satan intended to hurt him. 13. I have dwelt so long upon this matter because this way of prayer is the most common with beginners, and because the advice I have given is very important. It will be found much better given elsewhere: that I admit; and I admit, also, that in writing it I am ashamed of myself, and covered with confusion--though not so much so as I ought to be. Blessed for ever be our Lord, of whose will and pleasure it is that I am allowed, being what I am, to speak of things which are His, of such a nature, and so deep. 1. Arte de servir a Dios, by Rodrigue de Solis, friar of the Augustinian Order (Bouix). Arte para servir a Dios, by Fra. Alonso de Madrid (De la Fuente). 2. Ch. xi. §§ 20, 25. 3. That is, he will lose the prayer of acquired quiet, because he voluntarily abandons it before the time; and will not attain to the prayer of infused quiet, because he attempts to rise into it before he is called (Francis. de Sancto Thoma, Medulla Mystica, tr. iv. ch. xi. n. 69). 4. Ch. iv. § 10. 5. Ch. xxxiv. § 9. 6. Ch. x. § 1. 7. Ch. xvi. § 4. 8. "En un credo." 9. § 5. Chapter XIII. Of Certain Temptations of Satan. Instructions Relating Thereto. 1. I have thought it right to speak of certain temptations I have observed to which beginners are liable--some of them I have had myself--and to give some advice about certain things which to me seem necessary. In the beginning, then, we should strive to be cheerful and unconstrained; for there are people who think it is all over with devotion if they relax themselves ever so little. It is right to be afraid of self; so that, having no confidence in ourselves, much or little, we may not place ourselves in those circumstances wherein men usually sin against God; for it is a most necessary fear, till we become very perfect in virtue. And there are not many who are so perfect as to be able to relax themselves on those occasions which offer temptations to their natural temper; for always while we live, were it only to preserve humility, it is well we should know our own miserable nature; but there are many occasions on which it is permitted us--as I said just now [1]--to take some recreation, in order that we may with more vigour resume our prayer. 2. Discretion is necessary throughout. We must have great confidence; because it is very necessary for us not to contract our desires, but put our trust in God; for, if we do violence to ourselves by little and little, we shall, though not at once, reach that height which many Saints by His grace have reached. If they had never resolved to desire, and had never by little and little acted upon that resolve, they never could have ascended to so high a state. 3. His Majesty seeks and loves courageous souls; but they must be humble in their ways, and have no confidence in themselves. I never saw one of those lag behind on the road; and never a cowardly soul, though aided by humility, make that progress in many years which the former makes in a few. I am astonished at the great things done on this road by encouraging oneself to undertake great things, though we may not have the strength for them at once; the soul takes a flight upwards and ascends high, though, like a little bird whose wings are weak, it grows weary and rests. 4. At one time I used often to think of those words of St. Paul: "That all things are possible in God." [2] I saw clearly that of myself I could do nothing. This was of great service to me. So also was the saying of St. Augustine: "Give me, O Lord, what Thou commandest, and command what Thou wilt." [3] I was often thinking how St. Peter lost nothing by throwing himself into the sea, though he was afterwards afraid. [4] These first resolutions are a great matter--although it is necessary in the beginning that we should be very reserved, controlled by the discretion and authority of a director; but we must take care that he be one who does not teach us to crawl like toads, nor one who may be satisfied when the soul shows itself fit only to catch lizards. Humility must always go before: so that we may know that this strength can come out of no strength of our own. 5. But it is necessary we should understand what manner of humility this should be, because Satan, I believe, does great harm; for he hinders those who begin to pray from going onwards, by suggesting to them false notions of humility. He makes them think it is pride to have large desires, to wish to imitate the Saints, and to long for martyrdom. He tells us forthwith, or he makes us think, that the actions of the Saints are to be admired, not to be imitated, by us who are sinners. I, too, say the same thing; but we must see what those actions are which we are to admire, and what those are which we are to imitate; for it would be wrong in a person who is weak and sickly to undertake much fasting and sharp penances to retire into the desert, where he could not sleep, nor find anything to eat; or, indeed, to undertake any austerities of this kind. 6. But we ought to think that we can force ourselves, by the grace of God, to hold the world in profound contempt--to make light of honour, and be detached from our possessions. Our hearts, however, are so mean that we think the earth would fail us under our feet, if we were to cease to care even for a moment for the body, and give ourselves up to spirituality. Then we think that to have all we require contributes to recollection, because anxieties disturb prayer. It is painful to me that our confidence in God is so scanty, and our self-love so strong, as that any anxiety about our own necessities should disturb us. But so it is; for when our spiritual progress is so slight, a mere nothing will give us as much trouble as great and important matters will give to others. And we think ourselves spiritual! 7. Now, to me, this way of going on seems to betray a disposition to reconcile soul and body together, in order that we may not miss our ease in this world, and yet have the fruition of God in the next; and so it will be if we walk according to justice, clinging to virtue; but it is the pace of a hen--it will never bring us to liberty of spirit. It is a course of proceeding, as it seems to me, most excellent for those who are in the married state, and who must live according to their vocation; but for the other state, I by no means wish for such a method of progress, neither can I be made to believe it to be sound; for I have tried it, and I should have remained in that way, if our Lord in His goodness had not taught me another and a shorter road. 8. Though, in the matter of desires, I always had generous ones; but I laboured, as I said before, [5] to make my prayer, and, at the same time, to live at my ease. If there had been any one to rouse me to a higher flight, he might have brought me, so I think, to a state in which these desires might have had their effects; but, for our sins, so few and so rare are they whose discretion in that matter is not excessive. That, I believe, is reason enough why those who begin do not attain more quickly to great perfection; for our Lord never fails us, and it is not His fault; the fault and the wretchedness of this being all our own. 9. We may also imitate the Saints by striving after solitude and silence, and many other virtues that will not kill these wretched bodies of ours, which insist on being treated so orderly, that they may disorder the soul; and Satan, too, helps much to make them unmanageable. When he sees us a little anxious about them, he wants nothing more to convince us that our way of life must kill us, and destroy our health; even if we weep, he makes us afraid of blindness. I have passed through this, and therefore I know it; but I know of no better sight or better health that we can desire, than the loss of both in such a cause. Being myself so sickly, I was always under constraint, and good for nothing, till I resolved to make no account of my body nor of my health; even now I am worthless enough. 10. But when it pleased God to let me find out this device of Satan, I used to say to the latter, when he suggested to me that I was ruining my health, that my death was of no consequence; when he suggested rest, I replied that I did not want rest, but the Cross. His other suggestions I treated in the same way. I saw clearly that in most things, though I was really very sickly, it was either a temptation of Satan, or a weakness on my part. My health has been much better since I have ceased to look after my ease and comforts. It is of great importance not to let our own thoughts frighten us in the beginning, when we set ourselves to pray. Believe me in this, for I know it by experience. As a warning to others, it may be that this story of my failures may be useful. 11. There is another temptation, which is very common: when people begin to have pleasure in the rest and the fruit of prayer, they will have everybody else be very spiritual also. Now, to desire this is not wrong, but to try to bring it about may not be right, except with great discretion and with much reserve, without any appearance of teaching. He who would do any good in this matter ought to be endowed with solid virtues, that he may not put temptation in the way of others. It happened to me--that is how I know it--when, as I said before, [6] I made others apply themselves to prayer, to be a source of temptation and disorder; for, on the one hand, they heard me say great things of the blessedness of prayer, and, on the other, saw how poor I was in virtue, notwithstanding my prayer. They had good reasons on their side, and afterwards they told me of it; for they knew not how these things could be compatible one with the other. This it was that made them not to regard that as evil which was really so in itself, namely, that they saw me do it myself, now and then, during the time that they thought well of me in some measure. 12. This is Satan's work: he seems to take advantage of the virtues we may have, for the purpose of giving a sanction, so far as he can, to the evil he aims at; how slight soever that evil may be, his gain must be great, if it prevail in a religious house. How much, then, must his gain have been, when the evil I did was so very great! And thus, during many years, only three persons were the better for what I said to them; but now that our Lord has made me stronger in virtue, in the course of two or three years many persons have profited, as I shall show hereafter. [7] 13. There is another great inconvenience in addition to this: the loss to our own soul; for the utmost we have to do in the beginning is to take care of our own soul only, and consider that in the whole world there is only God and our soul. This is a point of great importance. 14. There is another temptation--we ought to be aware of it, and be cautious in our conduct: persons are carried away by a zeal for virtue, through the pain which the sight of the sins and failings of others occasions them. Satan tells them that this pain arises only out of their desire that God may not be offended, and out of their anxiety about His honour; so they immediately seek to remedy the evil. This so disturbs them, that they cannot pray. The greatest evil of all is their thinking this an act of virtue, of perfection, and of a great zeal for God. I am not speaking of the pain which public sins occasion, if they be habitual in any community, nor of wrongs done to the Church, nor of heresies by which so many souls are visibly lost; for this pain is most wholesome, and being wholesome is no source of disquiet. The security, therefore, of that soul which would apply itself to prayer lies in casting away from itself all anxiety about persons and things, in taking care of itself, and in pleasing God. This is the most profitable course. 15. If I were to speak of the mistakes which I have seen people make, in reliance on their own good intentions, I should never come to an end. Let us labour, therefore, always to consider the virtues and the good qualities which we discern in others, and with our own great sins cover our eyes, so that we may see none of their failings. This is one way of doing our work; and though we may not be perfect in it at once, we shall acquire one great virtue--we shall look upon all men as better than ourselves; and we begin to acquire that virtue in this way, by the grace of God, which is necessary in all things--for when we have it not, all our endeavours are in vain--and by imploring Him to give us this virtue; for He never fails us, if we do what we can. 16. This advice, also, they must take into their consideration who make much use of their understanding, eliciting from one subject many thoughts and conceptions. As to those who, like myself, cannot do it, I have no advice to give, except that they are to have patience, until our Lord shall send them both matter and light; for they can do so little of themselves, that their understanding is a hindrance to them rather than a help. 17. To those, then, who can make use of their understanding, I say that they are not to spend the whole time in that way; for though it be most meritorious, yet they must not, when prayer is sweet, suppose that there never will be a Sunday or a time when no work ought to be done. They think it lost time to do otherwise; but I think that loss their greatest gain. Let them rather, as I have said, [8] place themselves in the presence of Christ, and, without fatiguing the understanding, converse with Him, and in Him rejoice, without wearying themselves in searching out reasons; but let them rather lay their necessities before Him, and the just reasons there are why He should not suffer us in His presence: at one time this, at another time that, lest the soul should be wearied by always eating of the same food. These meats are most savoury and wholesome, if the palate be accustomed to them; they will furnish a great support for the life of the soul, and they have many other advantages also. 18. I will explain myself further; for the doctrine of prayer is difficult, and, without a director, very hard to understand. Though I would willingly be concise, and though a mere hint is enough for his clear intellect who has commanded me to write on the subject of prayer, yet so it is, my dulness does not allow me to say or explain in a few words that which it is so important to explain well. I, who have gone through so much, am sorry for those who begin only with books; for there is a strange difference between that which we learn by reading, and that which we learn by experience. 19. Going back, then, to what I was saying. We set ourselves to meditate upon some mystery of the Passion: let us say, our Lord at the pillar. The understanding goeth about seeking for the sources out of which came the great dolours and the bitter anguish which His Majesty endured in that desolation. It considers that mystery in many lights, which the intellect, if it be skilled in its work, or furnished with learning, may there obtain. This is a method of prayer which should be to everyone the beginning, the middle, and the end: a most excellent and safe way, until our Lord shall guide them to other supernatural ways. 20. I say to all, because there are many souls who make greater progress by meditation on other subjects than on the Sacred Passion; for as there are many mansions in heaven, so there are also many roads leading thither. Some persons advance by considering themselves in hell, others in heaven--and these are distressed by meditations on hell. Others meditate on death; some persons, if tender-hearted, are greatly fatigued by continual meditations on the Passion; but are consoled and make progress when they meditate on the power and greatness of God in His creatures, and on His love visible in all things. This is an admirable method--not omitting, however, from time to time, the Passion and Life of Christ, the Source of all good that ever came, and that ever shall come. 21. He who begins is in need of instruction, whereby he may ascertain what profits him most. For this end it is very necessary he should have a director, who ought to be a person of experience; for if he be not, he will make many mistakes, and direct a soul without understanding its ways, or suffering it to understand them itself; for such a soul, knowing that obedience to a director is highly meritorious, dares not transgress the commandments it receives. I have met with souls cramped and tormented, because he who directed them had no experience: that made me sorry for them. Some of them knew not what to do with themselves; for directors who do not understand the spirit of their penitents afflict them soul and body, and hinder their progress. [9] 22. One person I had to do with had been kept by her director for eight years, as it were, in prison; he would not allow her to quit the subject of self-knowledge; and yet our Lord had already raised her to the prayer of quiet; so she had much to suffer. 23. Although this matter of self-knowledge must never be put aside--for there is no soul so great a giant on this road but has frequent need to turn back, and be again an infant at the breast; and this must never be forgotten. I shall repeat it, [10] perhaps, many times, because of its great importance--for among all the states of prayer, however high they may be, there is not one in which it is not often necessary to go back to the beginning. The knowledge of our sins, and of our own selves, is the bread which we have to eat with all the meats, however delicate they may be, in the way of prayer; without this bread, life cannot be sustained, though it must be taken by measure. When a soul beholds itself resigned, and clearly understands that there is no goodness in it--when it feels itself abashed in the presence of so great a King, and sees how little it pays of the great debt it owes Him--why should it be necessary for it to waste its time on this subject? Why should it not rather proceed to other matters which our Lord places before it, and for neglecting which there is no reason? His Majesty surely knows better than we do what kind of food is proper for us. 24. So, then, it is of great consequence that the director should be prudent--I mean, of sound understanding--and a man of experience. If, in addition to this, he is a learned man, it is a very great matter. But if these three qualities cannot be had together, the first two are the most important, because learned men may be found with whom we can communicate when it is necessary. I mean, that for beginners learned men are of little use, if they are not men of prayer. I do not say that they are to have nothing to do with learned men, because a spirituality, the foundations of which are not resting on the truth, I would rather were not accompanied with prayer. Learning is a great thing, for it teaches us who know so little, and enlightens us; so when we have come to the knowledge of the truths contained in the holy writings, we do what we ought to do. From silly devotions, God deliver us! 25. I will explain myself further, for I am meddling, I believe, with too many matters. It has always been my failing that I could never make myself understood--as I said before [11]--but at the cost of many words. A nun begins to practise prayer; if her director be silly, and if he should take it into his head, he will make her feel that it is better for her to obey him than her own superior. He will do all this without any evil purpose, thinking that he is doing right. For if he be not a religious himself, he will think this right enough. If his penitent be a married woman, he will tell her that it is better for her to give herself unto prayer, when she ought to attend to her house, although she may thereby displease her husband. And so it is, he knows not how to make arrangements for time and business, so that everything may be done as it ought to be done; he has no light himself, and can therefore give none to others, however much he may wish to do so. 26. Though learning does not seem necessary for discretion, my opinion has always been, and will be, that every Christian should continue to be guided by a learned director if he can, and the more learned the better. They who walk in the way of prayer have the greater need of learning; and the more spiritual they are the greater is that need. Let them not say that learned men not given to prayer are not fit counsellors for those who pray: that is a delusion. I have conversed with many; and now for some years I have sought them the more, because of my greater need of them. I have always been fond of them; for though some of them have no experience, they do not dislike spirituality, neither are they ignorant of what it is, because in the sacred writings with which they are familiar they always find the truth about spirituality. I am certain myself that a person given to prayer, who treats of these matters with learned men, unless he is deceived with his own consent, will never be carried away by any illusions of the devil. I believe that the evil spirits are exceedingly afraid of learned men who are humble and virtuous, knowing that they will be found out and defeated by them. 27. I have said this because there are opinions held to the effect that learned men, if they are not spiritual, are not suited for persons given to prayer. I have just said that a spiritual director is necessary; but if he be not a learned man, he is a great hindrance. It will help us much if we consult those who are learned, provided they be virtuous; even if they be not spiritual, they will be of service to me, and God will enable them to understand what they should teach; He will even make them spiritual, in order that they may help us on. I do not say this without having had experience of it; and I have met with more than two. 28. I say, then, that a person who shall resign his soul to be wholly subject to one director will make a great mistake, if he is in religion, unless he finds a director of this kind, because of the obedience due to his own superior. His director may be deficient in the three requisites I speak of, [12] and that will be no slight cross, without voluntarily subjecting the understanding to one whose understanding is none of the best. At least, I have never been able to bring myself to do it, neither does it seem to me to be right. 29. But if he be a person living in the world, let him praise God for the power he has of choosing whom he will obey, and let him not lose so excellent a liberty; yea, rather let him be without a director till he finds him--for our Lord will give him one, if he is really humble, and has a desire to meet with the right person. I praise God greatly--we women, and those who are unlearned, ought always to render Him unceasing thanks--because there are persons who, by labours so great, have attained to the truth, of which we unlearned people are ignorant. I often wonder at learned men--particularly those who are in religion--when I think of the trouble they have had in acquiring that which they communicate to me for my good, and that without any more trouble to me than the asking for it. And yet there are people who will not take advantage of their learning: God grant it may not be so! 30. I see them undergo the poverty of the religious life, which is great, together with its penances, its meagre food, the yoke of obedience, which makes me ashamed of myself at times; and with all this, interrupted sleep, trials everywhere, everywhere the Cross. I think it would be a great evil for any one to lose so great a good by his own fault. It may be some of us, who are exempted from these burdens--who have our food put into our mouths, as they say, and live at our ease--may think, because we give ourselves a little more to prayer, that we are raised above the necessity of such great hardships. Blessed be Thou, O Lord, who hast made me so incapable and so useless; but I bless Thee still more for this--that Thou quickenest so many to quicken us. Our prayer must therefore be very earnest for those who give us light. What should we be without them in the midst of these violent storms which now disturb the Church? If some have fallen, the good will shine more and more. [13] May it please our Lord to hold them in His hand, and help them, that they may help us. 31. I have gone far away from the subject I began to speak of; but all is to the purpose for those who are beginners, that they may begin a journey which is so high in such a way as that they shall go on by the right road. Coming back, then, to what I spoke of before, [14] the meditation on Christ bound to the pillar, it is well we should make reflections for a time, and consider the sufferings He there endured, for whom He endured them, who He is who endured them, and the love with which He bore them. But a person should not always fatigue himself in making these reflections, but rather let him remain there with Christ, in the silence of the understanding. 32. If he is able, let him employ himself in looking upon Christ, who is looking upon him; let him accompany Him, and make his petitions to Him; let him humble himself, and delight himself in Christ, and keep in mind that he never deserved to be there. When he shall be able to do this, though it may be in the beginning of his prayer, he will find great advantage; and this way of prayer brings great advantages with it--at least, so my soul has found it. I do not know whether I am describing it aright; you, my father, will see to it. May our Lord grant me to please Him rightly for ever! Amen. 1. Ch. xi. § 24. 2. Philipp. iv. 13; "Omnia possum in Eo." 3. Confess. x. ch. 29: "Da quod jubes, et jube quod vis." 4. St. Matt. xiv. 30: "Videns vero ventum validum, timuit." 5. Ch. vii. §§ 27, 31. 6. Ch. vii. § 16. 7. See ch. xxxi. § 7, and ch. xxxix. § 14. 8. Ch. xii. § 3. 9. See St. John of the Cross, Living Flame, pp. 267, 278-284, Engl. trans. 10. See ch. xv. § 20. 11. § 18. 12. Prudence, experience, and learning; see § 24. 13. Dan. xii. 3: "Qui autem docti fuerint, fulgebunt quasi splendor firmamenti." 14. § 19. Chapter XIV. The Second State of Prayer. Its Supernatural Character. 1. Having spoken of the toilsome efforts and of the strength required for watering the garden when we have to draw the water out of the well, let us now speak of the second manner of drawing the water, which the Lord of the vineyard has ordained; of the machine of wheel and buckets whereby the gardener may draw more water with less labour, and be able to take some rest without being continually at work. This, then, is what I am now going to describe; and I apply it to the prayer called the prayer of quiet. 2. Herein the soul begins to be recollected; it is now touching on the supernatural--for it never could by any efforts of its own attain to this. True, it seems at times to have been wearied at the wheel, labouring with the understanding, and filling the buckets; but in this second degree the water is higher, and accordingly the labour is much less than it was when the water had to be drawn up out of the well; I mean, that the water is nearer to it, for grace reveals itself more distinctly to the soul. 3. This is a gathering together of the faculties of the soul within itself, in order that it may have the fruition of that contentment in greater sweetness; but the faculties are not lost, neither are they asleep: the will alone is occupied in such a way that, without knowing how it has become a captive, it gives a simple consent to become the prisoner of God; for it knows well what is to be the captive of Him it loves. O my Jesus and my Lord, how pressing now is Thy love! [1] It binds our love in bonds so straitly, that it is not in its power at this moment to love anything else but Thee. 4. The other two faculties help the will, that it may render itself capable of the fruition of so great a good; nevertheless, it occasionally happens, even when the will is in union, that they hinder it very much: but then it should never heed them at all, simply abiding in its fruition and quiet. [2] For if it tried to make them recollected, it would miss its way together with them, because they are at this time like doves which are not satisfied with the food the master of the dovecot gives them without any labouring for it on their part, and which go forth in quest of it elsewhere, and so hardly find it that they come back. And so the memory and the understanding come and go, seeking whether the will is going to give them that into the fruition of which it has entered itself. 5. If it be our Lord's pleasure to throw them any food, they stop; if not, they go again to seek it. They must be thinking that they are of some service to the will; and now and then the memory or the imagination, seeking to represent to it that of which it has the fruition, does it harm. The will, therefore, should be careful to deal with them as I shall explain. Everything that takes place now in this state brings the very greatest consolation; and the labour is so slight, that prayer, even if persevered in for some time, is never wearisome. The reason is, that the understanding is now working very gently, and is drawing very much more water than it drew out of the well. The tears, which God now sends, flow with joy; though we feel them, they are not the result of any efforts of our own. 6. This water of grand blessings and graces, which our Lord now supplies, makes the virtues thrive much more, beyond all comparison, than they did in the previous state of prayer; for the soul is already ascending out of its wretched state, and some little knowledge of the blissfulness of glory is communicated to it. This, I believe, is it that makes the virtues grow the more, and also to draw nearer to essential virtue, God Himself, from Whom all virtues proceed; for His Majesty has begun to communicate Himself to this soul, and will have it feel how He is communicating Himself. 7. As soon as the soul has arrived thus far, it begins to lose the desire of earthly things, [3] and no wonder; for it sees clearly that, even for a moment, this joy is not to be had on earth; that there are no riches, no dominion, no honours, no delights, that can for one instant, even for the twinkling of an eye, minister such a joy; for it is a true satisfaction, and the soul sees that it really does satisfy. Now, we who are on earth, as it seems to me, scarcely ever understand wherein our satisfaction lies, for it is always liable to disappointment; but in this, at that time, there is none: the disappointment cometh afterwards, when the soul sees that all is over, and that it has no power to recover it, neither does it know how; for if it cut itself in pieces by penance and prayer, and every other kind of austerities, all would be of little use, if our Lord did not grant it. God, in His great mercy, will have the soul comprehend that His Majesty is so near to it, that it need not send messengers to Him, but may speak to Him itself, and not with a loud crying, because so near is He already, that He understands even the movements of its lips. 8. It seems absurd to say this, seeing that we know that God understands us always, and is present with us. It is so, and there can be no doubt of it; but our Emperor and Lord will have us now understand that He understands us; and also have us understand what His presence bringeth about, and that He means in a special way to begin a work in the soul, which is manifested in the great joy, inward and outward, which He communicates, and in the difference there is, as I said just now, between this joy and delight and all the joys of earth; for He seems to be filling up the void in our souls occasioned by our sins. 9. This satisfaction lies in the innermost part of the soul, and the soul knows not whence, nor how, it came, very often it knows not what to do, or wish, or pray for. It seems to find all this at once, and knoweth not what it hath found; nor do I know how to explain it, because learning is necessary for many things. Here, indeed, learning would be very much to the purpose, in order to explain the general and particular helps of grace; for there are many who know nothing about them. Learning would serve to show how our Lord now will have the soul to see, as it were, with the naked eye, as men speak, this particular help of grace, and be also useful in many other ways wherein I am likely to go astray. But as what I write is to be seen by those who have the learning to discover whether I make mistakes or not, I go on without anxiety; for I know I need have none whatever about either the letter or the spirit, because it is in their power to whom it is to be sent to do with it as they will: they will understand it, and blot out whatever may be amiss. 10. I should like them to explain this, because it is a principal point, and because a soul, when our Lord begins to bestow these graces upon it, does not understand them, and does not know what to do with itself; for if God leads it by the way of fear, as He led me, its trial will be heavy, if there be no one who understands the state it is in; and to see itself as in a picture is a great comfort; and then it sees clearly that it is travelling on that road. The knowledge of what it has to do is a great blessing for it, so that it may advance forwards in every one of these degrees of prayer; for I have suffered greatly, and lost much time, because I did not know what to do; and I am very sorry for those souls who find themselves alone when they come to this state; for though I read many spiritual books, wherein this very matter is discussed, they threw very little light upon it. And if it be not a soul much exercised in prayer, it will find it enough to understand its state, be the books ever so clear. 11. I wish much that our Lord would help me to describe the effects on the soul of these things, now that they begin to be supernatural, so that men might know by these effects whether they come from the Spirit of God. I mean, known as things are known here below--though it is always well to live in fear, and on our guard; for even if they do come from God, now and then the devil will be able to transform himself into an angel of light; [4] and the soul, if not experienced herein, will not understand the matter; and it must have so much experience for the understanding thereof, that it is necessary it should have attained to the highest perfection of prayer. 12. The little time I have helps me but little, and it is therefore necessary His Majesty should undertake it Himself; for I have to live in community, and have very many things to employ me, as I am in a house which is newly founded--as will appear hereafter; [5] and so I am writing, with very many interruptions, by little and little at a time. I wish I had leisure; for when our Lord gives the spirit, it is more easily and better done; it is then as with a person working embroidery with the pattern before her; but if the spirit be wanting, there is no more meaning in the words than in gibberish, so to speak, though many years may have been spent in prayer. And thus I think it a very great advantage to be in this state of prayer when I am writing this; for I see clearly that it is not I who speak, nor is it I who with her understanding has arranged it; and afterwards I do not know how I came to speak so accurately. [6] It has often happened to me thus. 13. Let us now return to our orchard, or flower-garden, and behold now how the trees begin to fill with sap for the bringing forth of the blossoms, and then of the fruit--the flowers and the plants, also, their fragrance. This illustration pleases me; for very often, when I was beginning--and our Lord grant that I have really begun to serve His Majesty--I mean, begun in relation to what I have to say of my life,--it was to me a great joy to consider my soul as a garden, and our Lord as walking in it. I used to beseech Him to increase the fragrance of the little flowers of virtues--which were beginning, as it seemed to bud--and preserve them, that they might be to His glory; for I desired nothing for myself. I prayed Him to cut those He liked, because I already knew that they would grow the better. 14. I say cut; for there are times in which the soul has no recollection of this garden--everything seems parched, and there is no water to be had for preserving it--and in which it seems as if the soul had never possessed any virtue at all. This is the season of heavy trials; for our Lord will have the poor gardener suppose all the trouble he took in maintaining and watering the garden to have been taken to no purpose. Then is the time really for weeding and rooting out every plant, however small it may be, that is worthless, in the knowledge that no efforts of ours are sufficient, if God withholds from us the waters of His grace; and in despising ourselves as being nothing, and even less than nothing. In this way we gain great humility--the flowers grow afresh. 15. O my Lord and my Good! I cannot utter these words without tears, and rejoicing in my soul; for Thou wilt be thus with us, and art with us, in the Sacrament. We may believe so most truly; for so it is, and the comparison I make is a great truth; and, if our sins stand not in the way, we may rejoice in Thee, because Thou rejoicest in us; for Thou hast told us that Thy delight is to be with the children of men. [7] O my Lord, what does it mean? Whenever I hear these words, they always give me great consolation, and did so even when I was most wicked. 16. Is it possible, 0 Lord, that there can be a soul which, after attaining to this state wherein Thou bestowest upon it the like graces and consolations, and wherein it understands that Thou delightest to be with it, can yet fall back and offend Thee after so many favours, and such great demonstrations of the love Thou bearest it, and of which there cannot be any doubt, because the effect of it is so visible? Such a soul there certainly is; for I have done so, not once, but often. May it please Thy goodness, O Lord, that I may be alone in my ingratitude--the only one who has committed so great an iniquity, and whose ingratitude has been so immeasurable! But even out of my ingratitude Thine infinite goodness has brought forth some good; and the greater my wickedness, the greater the splendour of the great mercy of Thy compassions. Oh, what reasons have I to magnify them for ever! 17. May it be so, I beseech Thee, O my God, and may I sing of them for ever, now that Thou hast been pleased to show mercies so great unto me that they who see them are astonished, mercies which draw me out of myself continually, that I may praise Thee more and more! for, remaining in myself, without Thee, I could do nothing, O my Lord, but be as the withered flowers of the garden; so that this miserable earth of mine becomes a heap of refuse, as it was before. Let it not be so, O Lord!--let not a soul which Thou hast purchased with so many labours be lost, one which Thou hast so often ransomed anew, and delivered from between the teeth of the hideous dragon! 18. You, my father, must forgive me for wandering from the subject; and, as I am speaking to the purpose I have in view, you must not be surprised. What I write is what my soul has understood; and it is very often hard enough to abstain from the praises of God when, in the course of writing, the great debt I owe Him presents itself before me. Nor do I think that it can be disagreeable to you; because both of us, I believe, may sing the same song, though in a different way; for my debt is much the greater, seeing that God has forgiven me more, as you, my father, know. 1. 2 Cor. v. 14: "Charitas enim Christi urget nos." 2. See ch. xvii. § 12; Way of Perfection, ch. liii., but xxxi. of the old editions. 3. See Relation, i. § 12. 4. 2 Cor. xi. 14: "Ipse enim Satanas transfigurat se in angelum lucis." 5. See ch. x. § 11. As that passage refers probably to the monastery of the Incarnation, this must refer to that of St. Joseph, newly founded in Avila; for that of the Incarnation was founded a short time before the Saint was born; and she could hardly say of it, now that she was at least in her forty-seventh year, that it was newly founded. The house, however, was poor; for she says, ch. xxxii. § 12, that the nuns occasionally quitted the monastery for a time, because of its poverty. 6. See ch. xviii. § 10. In the second Report of the Rota, p. 477--quoted by Benedict XIV., De Canoniz. iii. 26, n. 12, and by the Bollandists in the Acta, 1315--we have these words, and they throw great light on the text: "Sunt et alli testes de visu affirmantes quod quando beata Teresa scribebat libros, facies ejus resplendebat." In the information taken in Granada, the Mother Anne of the Incarnation says she saw the Saint one night, while writing the Fortress of the Soul, with her face shining; and Mary of St. Francis deposes to the same effect in the informations taken in Medina (De la Fuente, vol. ii. pp. 389, 392). 7. Prov. viii. 31: "Deliciæ meæ esse cum filiis hominum." Chapter XV. Instructions for Those Who Have Attained to the Prayer of Quiet. Many Advance So Far, but Few Go Farther. 1. Let us now go back to the subject. This quiet and recollection of the soul makes itself in great measure felt in the satisfaction and peace, attended with very great joy and repose of the faculties, and most sweet delight, wherein the soul is established. [1] It thinks, because it has not gone beyond it, that there is nothing further to wish for, but that its abode might be there, and it would willingly say so with St. Peter. [2] It dares not move nor stir, because it thinks that this blessing it has received must then escape out of its hands; now and then, it could wish it did not even breathe. [3] The poor little soul is not aware that, as of itself it could do nothing to draw down this blessing on itself, it is still less able to retain it a moment longer than our Lord wills it should remain. 2. I have already said that, in the prior recollection and quiet, [4] there is no failure of the powers of the soul; but the soul is so satisfied in God that, although two of its powers be distracted, yet, while the recollection lasts, as the will abides in union with God, so its peace and quiet are not disturbed; on the contrary, the will by degrees brings the understanding and the memory back again; for though the will is not yet altogether absorbed, it continues still occupied without knowing how, so that, notwithstanding all the efforts of the memory and the understanding, they cannot rob it of its delight and joy [5]--yea, rather, it helps without any labour at all to keep this little spark of the love of God from being quenched. 3. Oh, that His Majesty would be gracious unto me, and enable me to give a clear account of the matter; for many are the souls who attain to this state, and few are they who go farther: and I know not who is in fault; most certainly it is not God; for when His Majesty shows mercy unto a soul, so that it advances so far, I believe that He will not fail to be more merciful still, if there be no shortcomings on our part. 4. And it is of great importance for the soul that has advanced so far as this to understand the great dignity of its state, the great grace given it by our Lord, and how in all reason it should not belong to earth; because He, of His goodness, seems to make it here a denizen of heaven, unless it be itself in fault. And miserable will that soul be if it turns back; it will go down, I think so, even to the abyss, as I was going myself, if the mercy of our Lord had not brought me back; because, for the most part, it must be the effect of grave faults--that is my opinion: nor is it possible to forsake so great a good otherwise than through the blindness occasioned by much evil. 5. Therefore, for the love of our Lord, I implore those souls to whom His Majesty has given so great a grace--the attainment of this state--to know and make much of themselves, with a humble and holy presumption, in order that they may never return to the flesh-pots of Egypt. And if through weakness and wickedness, and a mean and wretched nature, they should fall, as I did, let them always keep in mind the good they have lost; let them suspect and fear--they have reason to do so--that, if they do not resume their prayer, they may go on from bad to worse. I call that a real fall which makes us hate the way by which so great a good was obtained. I address myself to those souls; but I am not saying that they will never offend God, nor fall into sin,--though there are good reasons why those who have received these graces should keep themselves carefully from sin; but we are miserable creatures. What I earnestly advise is this: let there be no giving up of prayer; it is by prayer they will understand what they are doing, and obtain from our Lord the grace to repent, and strength to rise again; they must believe and believe again that, if they cease from praying, they run--so I think--into danger. I know not if I understand what I am saying; for, as I said before, I measure others by myself. [6] 6. The prayer of quiet, then, is a little spark of the true love of Himself, which our Lord begins to enkindle in the soul; and His will is, that the soul should understand what this love is by the joy it brings. This quiet and recollection and little spark, if it is the work of the Spirit of God, and not a sweetness supplied by Satan, or brought about by ourselves, produces great results. A person of experience, however, cannot possibly fail to understand at once that it is not a thing that can be acquired, were it not that our nature is so greedy of sweetness, that it seeks for it in every way. But it becomes cold very soon; for, however much we try to make the fire burn, in order to obtain this sweetness, it does not appear that we do anything else but throw water on it, to put it out. This spark, then, given of God, however slight it may be, causes a great crackling; and if men do not quench it by their faults, it is the beginning of the great fire, which sends forth--I shall speak of it in the proper place [7]--the flames of that most vehement love of God which His Majesty will have perfect souls to possess. 7. This little spark is a sign or pledge which God gives to a soul, in token of His having chosen it for great things, if it will prepare to receive them. It is a great gift, much too great for me to be able to speak of it. It is a great sorrow to me; because, as I said before, [8] I know that many souls come thus far, and that those who go farther, as they ought to go, are so few, that I am ashamed to say it. I do not mean that they are absolutely few: there must be many, because God is patient with us, for some reasons; I speak of what I have seen. 8. I should like much to recommend these souls to take care that they do not hide their talent; for it may be that God has chosen them to be the edification of many others, especially in these days, when the friends of God should be strong, in order that they may support the weak. Those who discern in themselves this grace, must look upon themselves as such friends, if they would fulfil the law which even the honourable friendship of the world respects; if not, as I said just now, [9] let them fear and tremble, lest they should be doing mischief to themselves--and God grant it be to themselves only! 9. What the soul has to do at those seasons wherein it is raised to the prayer of quiet is nothing more than to be gentle and without noise. By noise, I mean going about with the understanding in search of words and reflections whereby to give God thanks for this grace, and heaping up its sins and imperfections together to show that it does not deserve it. All this commotion takes place now, and the understanding comes forward, and the memory is restless, and certainly to me these powers bring much weariness at times; for, though my memory is not strong, I cannot control it. Let the will quietly and wisely understand that it is not by dint of labour on our part that we can converse to any good purpose with God, and that our own efforts are only great logs of wood, laid on without discretion to quench this little spark; and let it confess this, and in humility say, O Lord, what can I do here? what has the servant to do with her Lord, and earth with heaven? or words of love that suggest themselves now, firmly grounded in the conviction that what it says is truth; and let it make no account of the understanding, which is simply tiresome. 10. And if the will wishes to communicate to the understanding any portion of that the fruition of which itself has entered on, or if it labours to make the understanding recollected, it shall not succeed; for it will often happen that the will is in union and at rest, while the understanding is in extreme disorder. It is better for it to leave it alone, and not to run after it--I am speaking of the will; for the will should abide in the fruition of that grace, recollected itself, like the prudent bee; for if no bees entered the hive, and each of them wandered abroad in search of the rest, the honey would hardly be made. In the same way, the soul will lose much if it be not careful now, especially if the understanding be acute; for when it begins to make reflections and search for reasons, it will think at once that it is doing something if its reasons and reflections are good. 11. The only reason that ought to be admitted now is to understand clearly that there is no reason whatever, except His mere goodness, why God should grant us so great a grace, and to be aware that we are so near Him, and to pray to His Majesty for mercies, to make intercession for the Church, for those who had been recommended to us, and for the souls in purgatory,--not, however, with noise of words, but with a heartfelt desire to be heard. This is a prayer that contains much, and by it more is obtained than by many reflections of the understanding. Let the will stir up some of those reasons, which proceed from reason itself, to quicken its love, such as the fact of its being in a better state, and let it make certain acts of love, as what it will do for Him to whom it owes so much,--and that, as I said just now, without any noise of the understanding, in the search after profound reflections. A little straw,--and it will be less than straw, if we bring it ourselves,--laid on with humility, will be more effectual here, and will help to kindle a fire more than many fagots of most learned reasons, which, in my opinion, will put it out in a moment. 12. This is good for those learned men who have commanded me to write, [10] and who all, by the goodness of God, have come to this state; for it may be that they spend the time in making applications of passages of the Scriptures. And though learning could not fail to be of great use to them, both before and after prayer, still, in the very time of prayer itself, there is little necessity for it, in my opinion, unless it be for the purpose of making the will tepid; for the understanding then, because of its nearness to the light, is itself illuminated; so that even I, who am what I am, seem to be a different person. And so it is; for it has happened to me, who scarcely understand a word of what I read in Latin, and specially in the Psalms, when in the prayer of quiet, not only to understand the Latin as if it were Spanish, but, still more, to take a delight in dwelling on the meaning of that I knew through the Spanish. We must make an exception: if these learned men have to preach or to teach, they will do well to take advantage of their learning, that they may help poor people of little learning, of whom I am one. Charity is a great thing; and so always is ministering unto souls, when done simply for God. 13. So, then, when the soul is in the prayer of quiet, let it repose in its rest--let learning be put on one side. The time will come when they may make use of it in the service of our Lord--when they that possess it will appreciate it so highly as to be glad that they had not neglected it even for all the treasures of the world, simply because it enables them to serve His Majesty; for it is a great help. But in the eyes of Infinite Wisdom, believe me, a little striving after humility, and a single act thereof, are worth more than all the science in the world. This is not the time for discussing, but for understanding plainly what we are, and presenting ourselves in simplicity before God, who will have the soul make itself as a fool--as, indeed, it is--in His presence, seeing that His Majesty so humbles Himself as to suffer it to be near Him, we being what we are. 14. Moreover, the understanding bestirs itself to make its thanksgiving in phrases well arranged; but the will, in peace, not daring to lift up its eyes with the publican, [11] makes perhaps a better act of thanksgiving than the understanding, with all the tropes of its rhetoric. In a word, mental prayer is not to be abandoned altogether now, nor even vocal prayer, if at any time we wish, or can, to make use of either of them; for if the state of quiet be profound, it becomes difficult to speak, and it can be done only with great pain. 15. I believe myself that we know whether this proceeds from the Spirit of God, or is brought about by endeavours of our own, in the commencement of devotion which God gives; and we seek of ourselves, as I said before, [12] to pass onwards to this quiet of the will. Then, no effect whatever is produced; it is quickly over, and aridity is the result. If it comes from Satan, the practised soul, in my opinion, will detect it, because it leaves trouble behind, and scant humility and poor dispositions for those effects which are wrought if it comes from God; it leaves neither light in the understanding nor steadiness in the truth. [13] 16. Here Satan can do little or no harm, if the soul directs unto God the joy and sweetness it then feels; and if it fixes the thoughts and desires on Him, according to the advice already given, the devil can gain nothing whatever--on the contrary, by the permission of God, he will lose much by that very joy which he causes in the soul, because that joy will help the soul, inasmuch as it thinks the joy comes from God, to betake itself often to prayer in its desire for it. And if the soul is humble, indifferent to, and detached from, all joy, however spiritual, and if it loves the cross, it will make no account of the sweetness which Satan sends. But it cannot so deal with that which comes from the Spirit of God; of that it will make much. Now, when Satan sends it, as he is nothing but a lie, and when he sees that the soul humbles itself through that joy and sweetness--and here, in all things relating to prayer and sweetness, we must be very careful to endeavour to make ourselves humble,--Satan will not often repeat his work, when he sees that he loses by it. 17. For this and for many other reasons, when I was speaking of the first degree of prayer, and of the first method of drawing the water, [14] I insisted upon it that the great affair of souls is, when they begin to pray, to begin also to detach themselves from every kind of joy, and to enter on it resolved only on helping to carry the cross of Christ like good soldiers, willing to serve their King without present pay, because they are sure of it at last, having their eyes directed to the true and everlasting kingdom at the conquest of which we are aiming. 18. It is a very great matter to have this always before our eyes, especially in the beginning; afterwards, it becomes so clear, that it is rather a matter of necessity to forget it, in order to live on. Now, labouring to keep in mind that all things here below are of short duration, that they are all nothing, that the rest we have here is to be accounted as none,--all this, I say, seems to be exceedingly low; and so, indeed, it is,--because those who have gone on to greater perfection would look upon it as a reproach, and be ashamed of themselves, if they thought that they were giving up the goods of this world because they are perishable, or that they would not be glad to give them up for God--even if they were to last for ever. The greater the perfection of these persons, the greater their joy, and the greater also would that joy be if the duration of these worldly goods were greater. 19. In these persons, thus far advanced, love is already grown, and love is that which does this work. But as to beginners, to them it is of the utmost importance, and they must not regard this consideration as unbecoming, for the blessings to be gained are great,--and that is why I recommend it so much to them; for they will have need of it--even those who have attained to great heights of prayer--at certain times, when God will try them, and when His Majesty seems to have forsaken them. 20. I have said as much already, and I would not have it forgotten, [15] in this our life on earth, the growth of the soul is not like that of the body. We, however, so speak of it--and, in truth, it does grow. A youth that is grown up, whose body is formed, and who is become a man, does not ungrow, nor does his body lessen in size; but as to the soul, it so is by our Lord's will, so far as I have seen it in my own experience,--but I know nothing of it in any other way. It must be in order to humble us for our greater good, and to keep us from being careless during our exile; seeing that he who has ascended the higher has the more reason to be afraid, and to be less confident in himself. A time may come when they whose will is so wrapt up in the will of God--and who, rather than fall into a single imperfection, would undergo torture and suffer a thousand deaths--will find it necessary, if they would be delivered from offending God, and from the commission of sin, to make use of the first armour of prayer, to call to mind how everything is coming to an end, that there is a heaven and a hell, and to make use of other reflections of that nature, when they find themselves assailed by temptations and persecutions. 21. Let us go back to what I was saying. The great source of our deliverance from the cunning devices and the sweetness which Satan sends is to begin with a resolution to walk in the way of the Cross from the very first, and not to desire any sweetness at all, seeing that our Lord Himself has pointed out to us the way of perfection, saying, "Take up thy cross and follow Me." [16] He is our example; and whosoever follows His counsels only to please Him has nothing to fear. In the improvement which they detect in themselves, they who do so will see that this is no work of Satan and if they fall, they have a sign of the presence of our Lord in their rising again at once. They have other signs, also, of which I am going to speak. 22. When it is the work of the Spirit of God, there is no necessity for going about searching for reasons, on the strength of which we may elicit acts of humility and of shame, because our Lord Himself supplies them in a way very different from that by which we could acquire them by our own poor reflections, which are as nothing in comparison with that real humility arising out of the light which our Lord here gives us, and which begets a confusion of face that undoes us. The knowledge with which God supplies us, in order that we may know that of ourselves we have no good in us, is perfectly apprehended--and the more perfectly, the greater the graces. It fills us with a great desire of advancing in prayer, and of never giving it up, whatever troubles may arise. The soul offers to suffer everything. A certain security, joined with humility and fear concerning our salvation, casts out servile fear at once from the soul, and in its place plants a loyal fear [17] of more perfect growth. [18] There is a visible beginning of a love of God, utterly divested of all self-interest, together with a longing after seasons of solitude, in order to obtain a greater fruition of this good. 23. In short, not to weary myself, it is the beginning of all good; the flowers have so thriven, that they are on the point of budding. And this the soul sees most clearly, and it is impossible to persuade it now that God was not with it, till it turns back upon itself, and beholds its own failings and imperfections. Then it fears for everything; and it is well it should do so--though there are souls whom the certain conviction that God is with them benefits more than all the fear they may ever have. If a soul love greatly, and is thankful naturally, the remembrance of the mercies of God makes it turn to Him more effectually than all the chastisements of hell it can ever picture to itself--at least, it was so with me, though I am so wicked. 24. As I shall speak at greater length of the signs of a good spirit [19]--it has cost me much labour to be clear about them--I do not treat of them here. I believe, too, that, with the help of God, I shall be able to speak somewhat to the point, because--setting aside the experience I have had, and by which I learned much--I have had the help of some most learned men and persons of great holiness, whom we may reasonably believe in the matter. Souls, therefore, are not to weary themselves so much as I did, when, by the goodness of our Lord, they may have come to this state. 1. See Way of Perfection, ch. liii., but ch. xxxii of the old edition. 2. St. Matt. xvii. 4: "Bonum est nos hic esse." 3. See ch. xvii. § 6. 4. Ch. x. § 1. 5. Ch. xiv. §§ 3, 4. 6. Ch. x. § 9. 7. Ch. xviii. § 4, and ch. xxi. § 9. 8. § 3. 9. § 5. 10. Ch. x. § 1. 11. St. Luke xviii. 13: "Nolebat nec oculos ad coelum levare." 12. Ch. xii. § 5. 13. "Firmeza en la verdad." Francisco de St. Thoma, in his Medulla Mystica, p. 204, quoting this passage, has, "firmeza en la voluntad." Philip a SS. Trinitate, Theolog. Mystic. p. 354, and his Abbreviator, Anton. a Sp. Sancto, Direct. Mystic. tr. iv. disp. i. § 11, n. 94, seem also to have preferred "voluntad" to "verdad;" for the words they use are, "nec intellectui lux nec voluntati firmitas;" and, "defectus lucis in intellectu, et firmitatis in voluntate." 14. Ch. xi. § 16. 15. Ch. xiii. § 23. 16. St. Matt. xvi. 24: "Tollat crucem suam et sequatur Me." 17. "Fiel temor." In the previous editions it was filial. 18. Ch. xi. § 1. 19. See ch. xxv. Chapter XVI. The Third State of Prayer. Deep Matters. What the Soul Can Do That Has Reached It. Effects of the Great Graces of Our Lord. 1. Let us now speak of the third water wherewith this garden is watered,--water running from a river or from a brook,--whereby the garden is watered with very much less trouble, although there is some in directing the water. [1] In this state our Lord will help the gardener, and in such a way as to be, as it were, the Gardener Himself, doing all the work. It is a sleep of the powers of the soul, which are not wholly lost, nor yet understanding how they are at work. The pleasure, sweetness, and delight are incomparably greater than in the former state of prayer; and the reason is, that the waters of grace have risen up to the neck of the soul, so that it can neither advance nor retreat--nor does it know how to do so; it seeks only the fruition of exceeding bliss. It is like a dying man with the candle in his hand, on the point of dying the death desired. It is rejoicing in this agony with unutterable joy; to me it seems to be nothing else but a death, as it were, to all the things of this world, and a fruition of God. I know of no other words whereby to describe it or to explain it; neither does the soul then know what to do,--for it knows not whether to speak or be silent, whether it should laugh or weep. It is a glorious folly, a heavenly madness, wherein true wisdom is acquired; and to the soul a kind of fruition most full of delight. [2] 2. It is now some five or six years, I believe, since our Lord raised me to this state of prayer, in its fulness, and that more than once,--and I never understood it, and never could explain it; and so I was resolved, when I should come thus far in my story, to say very little or nothing at all. I knew well enough that it was not altogether the union of all the faculties, and yet most certainly it was higher than the previous state of prayer; but I confess that I could not determine and understand the difference. 3. The humility of your reverence, willing to be helped by a simplicity so great as mine, has been the cause, I believe, why our Lord, to-day, after Communion, admitted me to this state of prayer, without the power of going further, and suggested to me these comparisons, and taught me how to speak of it, and of what the soul must do therein. Certainly, I was amazed, and in a moment understood it all. I have often been thus, as it were, beside myself, drunk with love, and yet never could understand how it was. I knew well that it was the work of God, but I never was able to understand the manner of His working here; for, in fact, the faculties are almost all completely in union, yet not so absorbed that they do not act. I have been singularly delighted in that I have been able to comprehend the matter at last. Blessed be our Lord, who has thus consoled me! 4. The faculties of the soul now retain only the power of occupying themselves wholly with God; not one of them ventures to stir, neither can we move one of them without making great efforts to distract ourselves--and, indeed, I do not think we can do it at all at this time. Many words are then uttered in praise of God--but disorderly, unless it be that our Lord orders them himself. At least, the understanding is utterly powerless here; the soul longs to send forth words of praise, but it has no control over itself,--it is in a state of sweet restlessness. The flowers are already opening; they are beginning to send forth their fragrance. 5. The soul in this state would have all men behold and know of its bliss, to the praise of God, and help it to praise Him. It would have them to be partakers of its joy; for its joy is greater than it can bear. It seems to me that it is like the woman in the Gospel, who would, or used to, call in her neighbours. [3] The admirable spirit of David, the royal prophet, must have felt in the same way, so it seems to me, when he played on the harp, singing the praises of God. I have a very great devotion to this glorious king; [4] and I wish all had it, particularly those who are sinners like myself. 6. O my God, what must that soul be when it is in this state? It wishes it were all tongue, in order that it may praise our Lord. It utters a thousand holy follies, striving continually to please Him by whom it is thus possessed. I know one [5] who, though she was no poet, yet composed, without any preparation, certain stanzas, full of feeling, most expressive of her pain: they were not the work of her own understanding; but, in order to have a greater fruition of that bliss which so sweet a pain occasioned her, she complained of it in that way to God. She was willing to be cut in pieces, soul and body, to show the delight she felt in that pain. To what torments could she be then exposed, that would not be delicious to endure for her Lord? She sees clearly that the martyrs did little or nothing, so far as they were concerned, when they endured their tortures, because the soul is well aware that its strength is derived from another source. 7. But what will be its sufferings when it returns to the use of the senses, to live in the world, and go back to the anxieties and the fashions thereof? I do not think that I have exaggerated in any way, but rather have fallen short, in speaking of that joy, which our Lord, of His good pleasure, gives to the soul in this its exile. Blessed for ever be Thou, O Lord! and may all created things praise Thee for ever! 8. O my King, seeing that I am now, while writing this, still under the power of this heavenly madness, an effect of Thy mercy and goodness,--and it is a mercy I never deserved,--grant, I beseech Thee, that all those with whom I may have to converse may become mad through Thy love, or let me converse with none, or so order it that I may have nothing to do in the world, or take me away from it. This Thy servant, O my God, is no longer able to endure sufferings so great as those are which she must bear when she sees herself without Thee if she must live, she seeks no repose in this life,--and do Thou give her none. This my soul longs to be free--eating is killing it, and sleep is wearisome; it sees itself wasting the time of this life in comforts, and that there is no comfort for it now but in Thee; it seems to be living contrary to nature--for now, it desires to live not in itself, but in Thee. 9. O my true Lord and my happiness! what a cross hast Thou prepared for those who attain to this state!--light and most heavy at the same time: light, because sweet; heavy, because now and then there is no patience left to endure it--and yet the soul never wishes to be delivered from it, unless it be that it may come to Thee. When the soul remembers that it has never served Thee at all, and that by living on it may do Thee some service, it longs for a still heavier cross, and never to die before the end of the world. Its own repose it counts as nothing in comparison with doing a slight service to Thee. It knows not what to desire; but it clearly understands that it desires nothing else but Thee. 10. O my son, [6] so humble is he to whom this writing is directed, and who has commanded me to write, that he suffers himself to be thus addressed,--you, my father, only must see these things, in which I seem to have transgressed all bounds; for no reason can keep me reasonable when our Lord draws me out of myself. Since my communion this morning, [7] I do not believe that I am the person who is speaking; I seem to be dreaming the things I see, and I wish I might never see any but people ill, as I am now. I beseech you, my father, let us all be mad, for the love of Him who for our sakes suffered men to say of Him that He was mad. [8] 11. You, my father, say that you wish me well. I wish you would prove it by disposing yourself so that God may bestow this grace upon you; for I see very few people who have not too much sense for everything they have to do: and it may be that I have more than anybody else. Your reverence must not allow it; you are my father, for you are my confessor, and the person to whom I have trusted my soul; disperse my delusions by telling the truth; for truths of this sort are very rarely told. 12. I wish we five, who now love one another in our Lord, had made some such arrangement as this: as others in these times have met together in secret [9] to plot wickedness and heresies against His Majesty, so we might contrive to meet together now and then, in order to undeceive one another, to tell each other wherein we might improve ourselves, and be more pleasing unto God; for there is no one that knows himself as well as he is known of others who see him, if it be with eyes of love and the wish to do him good. I say; in secret; for language of this kind is no longer in use; even preachers go about arranging their sermons so as to displease no one. [10] They have a good intention, and their work is good; yet still few amend their lives. But how is it that they are not many who, in consequence of these sermons, abstain from public sins? Well, I think it is because the preachers are highly sensible men. They are not burning with the great fire of the love of God, as the Apostles were, casting worldly prudence aside; and so their fire throws out but little heat. I do not say that their fire ought to burn like that of the Apostles, but I do wish it were a stronger fire than I see it is. Do you, my father, know wherein much of this fire consists? In the hatred of this life, in the desertion of its honours, in being utterly indifferent whether we lose or gain anything or everything, provided the truth be told and maintained for the glory of God; for he who is courageously in earnest for God, looks upon loss or gain indifferently. I do not say that I am a person of this kind, but I wish I was. 13. Oh, grand freedom, to regard it as a captivity to be obliged to live and converse with men according to the laws of the world! It is the gift of our Lord; there is not a slave who would not imperil everything that he might escape and return to his country; and as this is the true road, there is no reason why we should linger; for we shall never effectually gain a treasure so great, so long as this life is not ended. May our Lord give us His grace for that end! You, my father, if it shall seem good to you, will tear up what I have written, and consider it as a letter for yourself alone, and forgive me that I have been very bold. 1. "The third degree, or third water, of the Saint, must begin, I think, with the prayer of infused recollection, include that of infused quiet, and end in that of inebriation; because it is not in our power to draw this water--all we can do is to direct the stream." (Francis. de St. Thoma, Medulla Mystica, tr. iv. ch. xii. p. 208). 2. See St. John of the Cross, Spirit. Canticle, stanza xvii. vol. ii. p. 98, Engl. trans. 3. St. Luke xv. 9: "Convocat amicas et vicinas." 4. Foundations, ch. xxix. § 9. 5. The Saint herself (De la Fuente). 6. This was either F. Ybañez or the Inquisitor Soto, if the expression did not occur in the first Life. F. Dom. Bañes struck out "son," and wrote "father" in its place, omitting the words, "so humble is he" (De la Fuente). 7. See § 3, above. 8. St. John x. 20: "Dæmonium habet et insanit." 9. The Saint refers to the secret meetings of heretics in Valladolid, under the direction of a fallen priest, the Doctor Agostino Cazalla, whose vanity led him to imitate Luther. Some nuns in Valladolid were imprisoned, Cazalla strangled, and his body burnt, in 1559 (De la Fuente). 10. Father Bañes wrote here on the margin of the Saint's MS, "Legant prædicatores" (De la Fuente). Chapter XVII. The Third State of Prayer. The Effects Thereof. The Hindrance Caused by the Imagination and the Memory. 1. Enough has been said of this manner of prayer, and of what the soul has to do, or rather, to speak more correctly, of what God is doing within it; for it is He who now takes upon Himself the gardener's work, and who will have the soul take its ease; except that the will is consenting to the graces, the fruition of which it has, and that it must resign itself to all that the True Wisdom would accomplish in it--for which it is certain it has need of courage; because the joy is so great, that the soul seems now and then to be on the very point of going forth out of the body: and what a blessed death that would be! Now, I think it is for the soul's good--as you, my father, have been told--to abandon itself into the arms of God altogether; if He will take it to heaven, let it go; if to hell, no matter, as it is going thither with its sovereign Good. If life is to come to an end for ever, so it wills; if it is to last a thousand years, it wills that also: His Majesty may do with it as with His own property,--the soul no longer belongs to itself, it has been given wholly to our Lord; let it cast all care utterly away. 2. My meaning is that, in a state of prayer, so high as this, the soul understands that God is doing His work without any fatiguing of the understanding, except that, as it seems to me, it is as if amazed in beholding our Lord taking upon Himself the work of the good gardener, refusing to let the soul undergo any labour whatever, but that of taking its pleasure in the flowers beginning to send forth their fragrance; for when God raises a soul up to this state, it can do all this, and much more,--for these are the effects of it. 3. In one of these visits, how brief soever it may be, the Gardener, being who He is,--in a word, the Creator of the water,--pours the water without stint; and what the poor soul, with the labour, perhaps, of twenty years in fatiguing the understanding, could not bring about, that the heavenly Gardener accomplishes in an instant, causing the fruit both to grow and ripen; so that the soul, such being the will of our Lord, may derive its sustenance from its garden. But He allows it not to divide the fruit with others, until by eating thereof, it is strong enough not to waste it in the mere tasting of it,--giving to Him none of the produce, nor making any compensation for it to Him who supplies it,--lest it should be maintaining others, feeding them at its own cost, and itself perhaps dying of hunger. [1] The meaning of this is perfectly clear for those who have understanding enough to apply it--much more clear than I can make it; and I am tired. 4. Finally, the virtues are now stronger than they were during the preceding prayer of quiet; for the soul sees itself to be other than it was, and it knows not how it is beginning to do great things in the odour which the flowers send forth; it being our Lord's will that the flowers should open, in order that the soul may believe itself to be in possession of virtue; though it sees most clearly that it cannot, and never could, acquire them in many years, and that the heavenly Gardener has given them to it in that instant. Now, too, the humility of the soul is much greater and deeper than it was before; because it sees more clearly that it did neither much nor little, beyond giving its consent that our Lord might work those graces in it, and then accepting them willingly. 5. This state of prayer seems to me to be a most distinct union of the whole soul with God, but for this, that His Majesty appears to give the faculties leave to be intent upon, and have the fruition of, the great work He is doing then. It happens at times, and indeed very often, that, the will being in union, the soul should be aware of it, and see that the will is a captive and in joy, that the will alone is abiding in great peace,--while, on the other hand, the understanding and the memory are so free, that they can be employed in affairs and be occupied in works of charity. I say this, that you, my father, may see it is so, and understand the matter when it shall happen to yourself; at least, it carried me out of myself, and that is the reason why I speak of it here. 6. It differs from the prayer of quiet, of which I have spoken, [2] though it does seem as if it were all one with it. In that prayer, the soul, which would willingly neither stir nor move, is delighting in the holy repose of Mary; but in this prayer it can be like Martha also. [3] Accordingly, the soul is, as it were, living the active and contemplative life at once, and is able to apply itself to works of charity and the affairs of its state, and to spiritual reading. Still, those who arrive at this state, are not wholly masters of themselves, and are well aware that the better part of the soul is elsewhere. It is as if we were speaking to one person, and another speaking to us at the same time, while we ourselves are not perfectly attentive either to the one or the other. It is a state that is most easily ascertained, and one, when attained to, that ministers great joy and contentment, and that prepares the soul in the highest degree, by observing times of solitude, or of freedom from business, for the attainment of the most tranquil quietude. It is like the life of a man who is full, requiring no food, with his appetite satisfied, so that he will not eat of everything set before him, yet not so full either as to refuse to eat if he saw any desirable food. So the soul has no satisfaction in the world, and seeks no pleasure in it then; because it has in itself that which gives it a greater satisfaction, greater joys in God, longings for the satisfaction of its longing to have a deeper joy in being with Him--this is what the soul seeks. 7. There is another kind of union, which, though not a perfect union, is yet more so than the one of which I have just spoken; but not so much so as this spoken of as the third water. You, my father, will be delighted greatly if our Lord should bestow them all upon you, if you have them not already, to find an account of the matter in writing, and to understand it; for it is one grace that our Lord gives grace; and it is another grace to understand what grace and what gift it is; and it is another and further grace to have the power to describe and explain it to others. Though it does not seem that more than the first of these--the giving of the grace--is necessary to enable the soul to advance without confusion and fear, and to walk with the greater courage in the way of our Lord, trampling under foot all the things of this world, it is a great advantage and a great grace to understand it; for every one who has it has great reason to praise our Lord; and so, also, has he who has it not: because His Majesty has bestowed it upon some person living who is to make us profit by it. 8. This union, of which I would now speak, frequently occurs, particularly to myself. God has very often bestowed such a grace upon me, whereby He constrains the will, and even the understanding, as it seems to me, seeing that it makes no reflections, but is occupied in the fruition of God: like a person who looks on, and sees so many things, that he knows not where to look--one object puts another out of sight, and none of them leaves any impression behind. 9. The memory remains free, and it must be so, together with the imagination; and so, when it finds itself alone, it is marvellous to behold what war it makes on the soul, and how it labours to throw everything into disorder. As for me, I am wearied by it, and I hate it; and very often do I implore our Lord to deprive me of it on these occasions, if I am to be so much troubled by it. Now and then, I say to Him: O my God, when shall my soul praise Thee without distraction, not dissipated in this way, unable to control itself! I understand now the mischief that sin has done, in that it has rendered us unable to do what we desire--to be always occupied in God. [4] 10. I say that it happens to me from time to time,--it has done so this very day, and so I remember it well,--to see my soul tear itself, in order to find itself there where the greater part of it is, and to see, at the same time, that it is impossible: because the memory and the imagination assail it with such force, that it cannot prevail against them; yet, as the other faculties give them no assistance, they are not able to do it any harm--none whatever; they do enough when they trouble its rest. When I say they do no harm, my meaning is, that they cannot really hurt it, because they have not strength enough, and because they are too discursive. As the understanding gives no help, neither much nor little, in the matters put before the soul, they never rest anywhere, but hurry to and fro, like nothing else but gnats at night, troublesome and unquiet: and so they go about from one subject to another. 11. This comparison seems to me to be singularly to the purpose; for the memory and the imagination, though they have no power to do any harm, are very troublesome. I know of no remedy for it; and, hitherto, God has told me of none. If He had, most gladly would I make use of it; for I am, as I say, tormented very often. This shows our wretchedness and brings out most distinctly the great power of God, seeing that the faculty which is free hurts and wearies us so much; while the others, occupied with His Majesty, give us rest. 12. The only remedy I have found, after many years of weariness, is that I spoke of when I was describing the prayer of quiet: [5] to make no more account of it than of a madman, but let it go with its subject; for God alone can take it from it,--in short, it is a slave here. We must bear patiently with it, as Jacob bore with Lia; for our Lord showeth us mercy enough when we are allowed to have Rachel with us. 13. I say that it remains a slave; for, after all, let it do what it will, it cannot drag the other faculties in its train; on the contrary, they, without taking any trouble, compel it to follow after them. Sometimes God is pleased to take pity on it, when He sees it so lost and so unquiet, through the longing it has to be united with the other faculties, and His Majesty consents to its burning itself in the flame of that divine candle by which the others are already reduced to ashes, and their nature lost, being, as it were, supernaturally in the fruition of blessings so great. 14. In all these states of prayer of which I have spoken, while explaining this last method of drawing the water out of the well, so great is the bliss and repose of the soul, that even the body most distinctly shares in its joy and delight,--and this is most plain; and the virtues continue to grow, as I said before. [6] It seems to have been the good pleasure of our Lord to explain these states of prayer, wherein the soul finds itself, with the utmost clearness possible, I think, here on earth. 15. Do you, my father, discuss it with any spiritual person who has arrived at this state, and is learned. If he says of it, it is well, you may believe that God has spoken it, and you will give thanks to His Majesty; for, as I said just now, [7] in the course of time you will rejoice greatly in that you have understood it. Meanwhile, if He does not allow you to understand what it is, though He does give you the possession of it, yet, with your intellect and learning, seeing that His Majesty has given you the first, you will know what it is, by the help of what I have written here. Unto Him be praise for ever and ever! Amen. 1. See ch. xix. § 4. 2. Ch. xv. § 1. 3. See Relation, viii. § 6; and Way of Perfection, ch. liii., but ch xxxi. of former editions. See also Concept. of the Love of God, ch. vii. 4. See Relation, viii. § 17. 5. Ch. xiv. § 4. See also Way of Perfection, ch. liii., but ch. xxxi. of the old editions. 6. Ch. xiv. § 6. 7. § 7. Chapter XVIII. The Fourth State of Prayer. The Great Dignity of the Soul Raised to It by Our Lord. Attainable on Earth, Not by Our Merit, but by the Goodness of Our Lord. 1. May our Lord teach me words whereby I may in some measure describe the fourth water. [1] I have great need of His help--even more than I had while speaking of the last; for in that the soul still feels that it is not dead altogether. We may thus speak, seeing that to the world it is really dead. But, as I have said, [2] it retains the sense to see that it is in the world, and to feel its own loneliness; and it makes use of that which is outward for the purpose of manifesting its feelings, at least by signs. In the whole of the prayer already spoken of, and in all the states of it, the gardener undergoes some labour: though in the later states the labour is attended with so much bliss and comfort of the soul, that the soul would never willingly pass out of it,--and thus the labour is not felt as labour, but as bliss. 2. In this the fourth state there is no sense of anything, only fruition, without understanding what that is the fruition of which is granted. It is understood that the fruition is of a certain good containing in itself all good together at once; but this good is not comprehended. The senses are all occupied in this fruition in such a way that not one of them is at liberty, so as to be able to attend to anything else, whether outward or inward. 3. The senses were permitted before, as I have said, [3] to give some signs of the great joy they feel; but now, in this state, the joy of the soul is incomparably greater, and the power of showing it is still less; for there is no power in the body, and the soul has none, whereby this fruition can be made known. Everything of that kind would be a great hindrance, a torment, and a disturbance of its rest. And I say, if it really be a union of all the faculties, that the soul, even if it wished,--I mean, when it is in union,--cannot make it known; and if it can, then it is not union at all. 4. How this, which we call union, is effected, and what it is, I cannot tell. Mystical theology explains it, and I do not know the terms of that science; nor can I understand what the mind is, nor how it differs from the soul or the spirit either: all three seem to me but one; though I do know that the soul sometimes leaps forth out of itself, like a fire that is burning and is become a flame; and occasionally this fire increases violently--the flame ascends high above the fire; but it is not therefore a different thing: it is still the same flame of the same fire. Your learning, my fathers, will enable you to understand the matter; I can go no further. 5. What I undertake to explain is that which the soul feels when it is in the divine union. It is plain enough what union is--two distinct things becoming one. O my Lord, how good Thou art! Blessed be Thou for ever, O my God! Let all creatures praise Thee, Who hast so loved us that we can truly speak of this communication which Thou hast with souls in this our exile! Yea, even if they be good souls, it is on Thy part great munificence and magnanimity,--in a word, it is Thy munificence, O my Lord, seeing that Thou givest like Thyself. O infinite Munificence!--how magnificent are Thy works! Even he whose understanding is not occupied with the things of earth is amazed that he is unable to understand these truths. Why, then, give graces so high to souls who have been such great sinners? Truly, this passeth my understanding; and when I come to think of it, I can get no further. Is there any way at all for me to go on which is not a going back? For, as to giving Thee thanks for mercies so great, I know not how to do it. Sometimes I relieve myself by giving utterance to follies. It often happens to me, either when I receive these graces, or when God is about to bestow them,--for, in the midst of them, I have already said, [4] I was able to do nothing,--that I would break out into words like these. 6. O Lord, consider what Thou art doing; forget not so soon the great evils that I have done. To forgive me, Thou must already have forgotten them; yet, in order that there may be some limit to Thy graces, I beseech Thee remember them. O my Creator, pour not a liquor so precious into a vessel so broken; for Thou hast already seen how on other occasions I allowed it to run waste. Lay not up treasure like this, where the longing after the consolations of this life is not so mortified as it ought to be; for it will be utterly lost. How canst Thou commit the defence of the city, and the keys of its fortress to a commander so cowardly, who at the first assault will let the enemy enter within? Oh, let not Thy love be so great, O King Eternal, as to imperil jewels so precious! O my Lord, to me it seems that it becomes a ground for undervaluing them, when Thou puttest them in the power of one so wretched, so vile, so frail, so miserable, and so worthless as I am, who, though she may labour not to lose them, by the help of Thy grace,--and I have need of no little grace for that end, being what I am,--is not able to win over any one to Thee,--in short, I am a woman, not good, but wicked. It seems to me that the talents are not only hidden, but buried, when they are committed to earth so vile. It is not Thy wont, O Lord, to bestow graces and mercies like these upon a soul, unless it be that it may edify many. 7. Thou, O my God, knowest already that I beg this of Thee with my whole will, from the bottom of my heart, and that I have done so more than once, and I account it a blessing to lose the greatest blessings which may be had on earth, if Thou wouldst but bestow these graces upon him who will make a better use of them to the increase of Thy glory. These, and expressions like these, it has happened to me often to utter. I saw afterwards my own foolishness and want of humility; for our Lord knoweth well what is expedient, and that there is no strength in my soul to be saved, if His Majesty did not give it with graces so great. 8. I purpose also to speak of the graces and effects which abide in the soul, and of that which the soul itself can do, or rather, if it can do anything of itself towards attaining to a state so high. The elevation of the spirit, or union, comes together with heavenly love but, as I understand it, union is a different thing from elevation in union itself. To him who may not have had any experience of the latter, it must seem that it is not; and, according to my view of it, even if they are both one, the operations of our Lord therein are different: there is a growth of the soul's detachment from creatures more abundantly still in the flight of the spirit. [5] I have clearly seen that this is a particular grace, though, as I say, it may be the same, or seem to be so, with the other; but a little fire, also, is as much fire as a great fire--and yet there is a visible difference between them. Before a small piece of iron is made red-hot in a little fire, some time must pass; but if the fire be great, the iron very quickly, though bulky, loses its nature altogether in appearance. 9. So, it seems to me, is it with these two kinds of graces which our Lord bestows. He who has had raptures will, I am sure, understand it well; to him who has not had that experience, it must appear folly. And, indeed, it may well be so; for if a person like myself should speak of a matter of this kind, and give any explanation at all of that for the description of which no words ever can possibly be found, it is not to be wondered at that I may be speaking foolishly. 10. But I have this confidence in our Lord, that He will help me here; for His Majesty knoweth that my object in writing--the first is to obey--is to inspire souls with a longing after so high a good. I will speak of nothing that I do not know by great experience: and so, when I began to describe the last kind of water, I thought it more impossible for me to speak of it at all than to speak Greek. It is a very difficult matter; so I left it, and went to Communion. Blessed be our Lord, who is merciful to the ignorant! Oh, virtue of obedience! it can do everything! God enlightened my understanding--at one time suggesting the words, at another showing me how to use them; for, as in the preceding state of prayer, so also now, His Majesty seems to utter what I can neither speak nor understand. [6] 11. What I am saying is the simple truth; and therefore whatever is good herein is His teaching; what is erroneous, clearly comes out of that sea of evil--myself. If there be any--and there must be many--who, having attained to these states of prayer whereunto our Lord in His mercy has brought me--wretch that I am!--and who, thinking they have missed their way, desire to treat of these matters with me, I am sure that our Lord will help His servant to declare the truth more plainly. 12. I am now speaking of the water which cometh down from heaven to fill and saturate in its abundance the whole of this garden with water. If our Lord never ceased to pour it down whenever it was necessary, the gardener certainly would have plenty of rest; and if there were no winter, but an ever temperate season, fruits and flowers would never fail. The gardener would have his delight therein; but in this life that is impossible. We must always be careful, when one water fails, to obtain another. This water from heaven comes down very often when the gardener least expects it. 13. The truth is that, in the beginning, this almost always happens after much mental prayer. Our Lord advances step by step to lay hold of the little bird, and to lay it in the nest where it may repose. He observed it fluttering for a long time, striving with the understanding and the will, and with all its might, to seek God and to please Him; so now it is His pleasure to reward it even in this life. And what a reward!--one moment is enough to repay all the possible trials of this life. 14. The soul, while thus seeking after God, is conscious, with a joy excessive and sweet, that it is, as it were, utterly fainting away in a kind of trance: breathing, and all the bodily strength, fail it, so that it cannot even move the hands without great pain; the eyes close involuntarily, and if they are open, they are as if they saw nothing; nor is reading possible,--the very letters seem strange, and cannot be distinguished,--the letters, indeed, are visible, but, as the understanding furnishes no help, all reading is impracticable, though seriously attempted. The ear hears; but what is heard is not comprehended. The senses are of no use whatever, except to hinder the soul's fruition; and so they rather hurt it. It is useless to try to speak, because it is not possible to conceive a word; nor, if it were conceived, is there strength sufficient to utter it; for all bodily strength vanishes, and that of the soul increases, to enable it the better to have the fruition of its joy. Great and most perceptible, also, is the outward joy now felt. 15. This prayer, however long it may last, does no harm--at least, it has never done any to me; nor do I remember, however ill I might have been when our Lord had mercy upon me in this way, that I ever felt the worse for it--on the contrary, I was always better afterwards. But so great a blessing, what harm can it do? The outward effects are so plain as to leave no doubt possible that there must have been some great cause, seeing that it thus robs us of our bodily powers with so much joy, in order to leave them greater. 16. The truth is, it passes away so quickly in the beginning--at least, so it was with me--that neither by the outward signs, nor by the failure of the senses, can it be perceived when it passes so quickly away. But it is plain, from the overflowing abundance of grace, that the brightness of the sun which had shone there must have been great, seeing that it has thus made the soul to melt away. And this is to be considered; for, as it seems to me, the period of time, however long it may have been, during which the faculties of the soul were entranced, is very short; if half an hour, that would be a long time. I do not think that I have ever been so long. [7] The truth of the matter is this: it is extremely difficult to know how long, because the senses are in suspense; but I think that at any time it cannot be very long before some one of the faculties recovers itself. It is the will that persists in the work; the other two faculties quickly begin to molest it. As the will is calm, it entrances them again; they are quiet for another moment, and then they recover themselves once more. 17. In this way, some hours may be, and are, passed in prayer; for when the two faculties begin to drink deep, and to perceive the taste of this divine wine, they give themselves up with great readiness, in order to be the more absorbed: they follow the will, and the three rejoice together. But this state of complete absorption, together with the utter rest of the imagination,--for I believe that even the imagination is then wholly at rest,--lasts only for a short time; though the faculties do not so completely recover themselves as not to be for some hours afterwards as if in disorder: God, from time to time, drawing them to Himself. 18. Let us now come to that which the soul feels interiorly. Let him describe it who knows it; for as it is impossible to understand it, much more is it so to describe it. When I purposed to write this, I had just communicated, and had risen from the very prayer of which I am speaking. I am thinking of what the soul was then doing. Our Lord said to me: It undoes itself utterly, My daughter, in order that it may give itself more and more to Me: it is not itself that then lives, it is I. As it cannot comprehend what it understands, it understands by not understanding. [8] 19. He who has had experience of this will understand it in some measure, for it cannot be more clearly described, because what then takes place is so obscure. All I am able to say is, that the soul is represented as being close to God; and that there abides a conviction thereof so certain and strong, that it cannot possibly help believing so. All the faculties fail now, and are suspended in such a way that, as I said before, [9] their operations cannot be traced. If the soul is making a meditation on any subject, the memory of it is lost at once, just as if it had never been thought of. If it reads, what is read is not remembered nor dwelt upon; neither is it otherwise with vocal prayer. Accordingly, the restless little butterfly of the memory has its wings burnt now, and it cannot fly. The will must be fully occupied in loving, but it understands not how it loves; the understanding, if it understands, does not understand how it understands--at least, it can comprehend nothing of that it understands: it does not understand, as it seems to me, because, as I said just now, this cannot be understood. I do not understand it at all myself. 20. In the beginning, it happened to me that I was ignorant of one thing--I did not know that God was in all things: [10] and when He seemed to me to be so near, I thought it impossible. Not to believe that He was present, was not in my power; for it seemed to me, as it were, evident that I felt there His very presence. Some unlearned men used to say to me, that He was present only by His grace. I could not believe that, because, as I am saying, He seemed to me to be present Himself: so I was distressed. A most learned man, of the Order of the glorious Patriarch St. Dominic, delivered me from this doubt; for he told me that He was present, and how He communed with us: this was a great comfort to me. 21. It is to be observed and understood that this water from heaven,--this greatest grace of our Lord--always leaves in the soul the greatest fruits, as I shall now show. 1. See ch. xi. § 11. 2. Ch. xvi. §§ 7, 8. 3. Ch. xvii. § 5. 4. § 3. 5. See ch. xx. § 10; and Relation, viii. § 10. 6. See ch. xiv. § 12. 7. See Anton. a Sp. Sancto, Director. Mystic. tr. iv. § 9, n. 72. 8. Thomas à Jesu, De Contemplatione Divina, lib. v. c. xiii.: "Quasi dicat: cum intellectus non possit Dei immensam illam claritatem et incomprehensibilem plenitudinem comprehendere, hoc ipsum est illam conspicere ac intelligere, intelligere se non posse intellectu cognoscere: quod quidem nihil aliud est quam Deum sub ratione incomprehensibilitatis videre ac cognoscere." Philip. à SS. Trinitate, Theolog. Mystic. Disc. Proem. art. iv. p. 6: "Cum ipsa [S. Teresa] scire vellet, quid in illa mystica unione operaretur intellectus, respondit [Christus] illi, cum non possit comprehendere quod intelligit, est non intelligere intelligendo: tum quia præ claritate nimia quodammodo offuscatur intellectus, unde præ altissima et supereminentissima Dei cognitione videtur anima potius Deum ignorare quam cognoscere." 9. Ch. x. § 1, and ch. xviii. § 16. 10. See Inner Fortress, v. ch. i. § 11. Chapter XIX. The Effects of This Fourth State of Prayer. Earnest Exhortations to Those Who Have Attained to It Not to Go Back, Nor to Cease from Prayer, Even if They Fall. The Great Calamity of Going Back. 1. There remains in the soul, when the prayer of union is over, an exceedingly great tenderness; so much so, that it would undo itself--not from pain, but through tears of joy it finds itself bathed therein, without being aware of it, and it knows not how or when it wept them. But to behold the violence of the fire subdued by the water, which yet makes it burn the more, gives it great delight. It seems as if I were speaking an unknown language. So it is, however. 2. It has happened to me occasionally, when this prayer was over, to be so beside myself as not to know whether I had been dreaming, or whether the bliss I felt had really been mine; and, on finding myself in a flood of tears--which had painlessly flowed, with such violence and rapidity that it seemed as if a cloud from heaven [1] had shed them--to perceive that it was no dream. Thus it was with me in the beginning, when it passed quickly away. The soul remains possessed of so much courage, that if it were now hewn in pieces for God, it would be a great consolation to it. This is the time of resolutions, of heroic determinations, of the living energy of good desires, of the beginning of hatred of the world, and of the most clear perception of its vanity. The soul makes greater and higher progress than it ever made before in the previous states of prayer; and grows in humility more and more, because it sees clearly that neither for obtaining nor for retaining this grace, great beyond all measure, has it ever done, or ever been able to do, anything of itself. It looks upon itself as most unworthy--for in a room into which the sunlight enters strongly, not a cobweb can be hid; it sees its own misery; self-conceit is so far away, that it seems as if it never could have had any--for now its own eyes behold how very little it could ever do, or rather, that it never did anything, that it hardly gave even its own consent, but that it rather seemed as if the doors of the senses were closed against its will in order that it might have more abundantly the fruition of our Lord. It is abiding alone with Him: what has it to do but to love Him? It neither sees nor hears, unless on compulsion: no thanks to it. Its past life stands before it then, together with the great mercy of God, in great distinctness; and it is not necessary for it to go forth to hunt with the understanding, because what it has to eat and ruminate upon, it sees now ready prepared. It sees, so far as itself is concerned, that it has deserved hell, and that its punishment is bliss. It undoes itself in the praises of God, and I would gladly undo myself now. 3. Blessed be Thou, O my Lord, who, out of a pool so filthy as I am, bringest forth water so clean as to be meet for Thy table! Praised be Thou, O Joy of the Angels, who hast been thus pleased to exalt so vile a worm! 4. The good effects of this prayer abide in the soul for some time. Now that it clearly apprehends that the fruit is not its own, the soul can begin to share it with others, and that without any loss to itself. It begins to show signs of its being a soul that is guarding the treasures of heaven, and to be desirous of communicating them to others, [2] and to pray to God that itself may not be the only soul that is rich in them. It begins to benefit its neighbours, as it were, without being aware of it, or doing anything consciously: its neighbours understand the matter, because the odour of the flowers has grown so strong as to make them eager to approach them. They understand that this soul is full of virtue: they see the fruit, how delicious it is, and they wish to help that soul to eat it. 5. If this ground be well dug by troubles, by persecutions, detractions, and infirmities,--they are few who ascend so high without this,--if it be well broken up by great detachment from all self-interest, it will drink in so much water that it can hardly ever be parched again. But if it be ground which is mere waste, and covered with thorns (as I was when I began); if the occasions of sin be not avoided; if it be an ungrateful soil, unfitted for so great a grace,--it will be parched up again. If the gardener become careless,--and if our Lord, out of His mere goodness, will not send down rain upon it,--the garden is ruined. Thus has it been with me more than once, so that I am amazed at it; and if I had not found it so by experience, I could not have believed it. 6. I write this for the comfort of souls which are weak, as I am, that they may never despair, nor cease to trust in the power of God; even if they should fall after our Lord has raised them to so high a degree of prayer as this is, they must not be discouraged, unless they would lose themselves utterly. Tears gain everything, and one drop of water attracts another. 7. One of the reasons that move me, who am what I am, under obedience to write this, and give an account of my wretched life, and of the graces our Lord has wrought in me,--though I never served Him, but offended Him rather,--is what I have just given: and, certainly, I wish I was a person of great authority, that people might believe what I say. I pray to our Lord that His Majesty would be pleased to grant me this grace. I repeat it, let no one who has begun to give himself to prayer be discouraged, and say: If I fall into sin, it will be worse for me if I go on now with the practice of prayer. I think so too, if he gives up prayer, and does not correct his evil ways; but if he does not give up prayer, let him be assured of this--prayer will bring him to the haven of light. 8. In this the devil turned his batteries against me, and I suffered so much because I thought it showed but little humility if I persevered in prayer when I was so wicked, that--as I have already said [3]--I gave it up for a year and a half--at least, for a year, but I do not remember distinctly the other six months. This could not have been, neither was it, anything else but to throw myself down into hell; there was no need of any devils to drag me thither. O my God, was there ever blindness so great as this? How well Satan prepares his measures for his purpose, when he pursues us in this way! The traitor knows that he has already lost that soul which perseveres in prayer, and that every fall which he can bring about helps it, by the goodness of God, to make greater progress in His service. Satan has some interest in this. 9. O my Jesus, what a sight that must be--a soul so highly exalted falling into sin, and raised up again by Thee; who, in Thy mercy, stretchest forth Thine hand to save! How such a soul confesses Thy greatness and compassion and its own wretchedness! It really looks on itself as nothingness, and confesses Thy power. It dares not lift up its eyes; it raises them, indeed, but it is to acknowledge how much it oweth unto Thee. It becomes devout to the Queen of Heaven, that she may propitiate Thee; it invokes the Saints, who fell after Thou hadst called them, for succour. Thou seemest now to be too bountiful in Thy gifts, because it feels itself to be unworthy of the earth it treads on. It has recourse to the Sacraments, to a quickened faith, which abides in it at the contemplation of the power which Thou hast lodged in them. It praises Thee because Thou hast left us such medicines and ointment for our wounds, which not only heal them on the surface, but remove all traces whatever of them. 10. The soul is amazed at it. Who is there, O Lord of my soul, that is not amazed at compassion so great and mercy so surpassing, after treason so foul and so hateful? I know not how it is that my heart does not break when I write this, for I am wicked. With these scanty tears which I am now weeping, but yet Thy gift,--water out of a well, so far as it is mine, so impure,--I seem to make Thee some recompense for treachery so great as mine, in that I was always doing evil, labouring to make void the graces Thou hast given me. Do Thou, O Lord, make my tears available; purify the water which is so muddy; at least, let me not be to others a temptation to rash judgments, as I have been to myself, when I used to think such thoughts as these. Why, O Lord, dost Thou pass by most holy persons, who have always served Thee, and who have been tried; who have been brought up in religion, and are really religious--not such as I am, having only the name--so as to make it plain that they are not recipients of those graces which Thou hast bestowed upon me? 11. I see clearly now, O Thou my Good, Thou hast kept the reward to give it them all at once: my weakness has need of these succours. They, being strong, serve Thee without them, and Thou dealest with them as with a strong race, free from all self-interest. But yet Thou knowest, O my Lord, that I have often cried unto Thee, making excuses for those who murmured against me; for I thought they had reason on their side. This I did then when Thou of Thy goodness hadst kept me back from offending Thee so much, and when I was departing from everything which I thought displeasing unto Thee. It was when I did this that Thou, O Lord, didst begin to lay open Thy treasures for Thy servant. It seemed as if Thou wert looking for nothing else but that I should be willing and ready to receive them; accordingly, Thou didst begin at once, not only to give them, but also to make others know that Thou wert giving them. 12. When this was known, there began to prevail a good opinion of her, of whom all had not yet clearly understood how wicked she was, though much of that wickedness was plain enough. Calumny and persecution began at once, and, as I think, with good reason; so I looked on none of them as an enemy, but made my supplications to Thee, imploring Thee to consider the grounds they had. They said that I wished to be a saint, and that I invented novelties; but I had not then attained in many things even to the observance of my rule; nor had I come near those excellent and holy nuns who were in the house,--and I do not believe I ever shall, if God of His goodness will not do that for me Himself; on the contrary, I was there only to do away with what was good, and introduce customs which were not good; at least, I did what I could to bring them in, and I was very powerful for evil. Thus it was that they were blameless, when they blamed me. I do not mean the nuns only, but the others as well: they told me truths; for it was Thy will. 13. I was once saying the Office,--I had had this temptation for some time,--and when I came to these words, "Justus es, Domine, et rectum judicium tuum," [4] I began to think what a deep truth it was. Satan never was strong enough to tempt me in any way to doubt of Thy goodness, or of any article of the faith: on the contrary, it seems to me that the more these truths were above nature, the more firmly I held them, and my devotion grew; when I thought of Thy omnipotence, I accepted all Thy wonderful works, and I say it again, I never had a doubt. Then, as I was thinking how it could be just in Thee to allow so many, who, as I said, are Thy most faithful servants, to remain without those consolations and graces which Thou hast given to me, who am what I am, Thou, O my Lord, didst answer me: Serve thou Me, and meddle not with this. 14. This was the first word which I ever heard Thee speak to me, and it made me greatly afraid. But as I shall speak hereafter [5] of this way of hearing, and of other matters, I say nothing here; for to do so would be to digress from my subject, and I have already made digressions enough. I scarcely know what I have said, nor can it be otherwise; but you, my father, must bear with these interruptions; for when I consider what God must have borne with from me, and when I see the state I am in, it is not strange that I should wander in what I am saying, and what I have still to say. 15. May it please our Lord that my wanderings may be of this kind, and may His Majesty never suffer me to have strength to resist Him even in the least; yea, rather than that, may He destroy me this moment. It is evidence enough of His great compassions, that He has forgiven so much ingratitude, not once, but often. He forgave St. Peter once; but I have been forgiven many times. Satan had good reasons for tempting me: I ought never to have pretended to a strict friendship with One, my hatred of whom I made so public. Was there ever blindness so great as mine? Where could I think I should find help but in Thee? What folly to run away from the light, to be for ever stumbling! What a proud humility was that which Satan devised for me, when I ceased to lean upon the pillar, and threw the staff away which supported me, in order that my fall might not be great! [6] 16. I make the sign of the cross this moment. I do not think I ever escaped so great a danger as this device of Satan, which he would have imposed upon me in the disguise of humility. [7] He filled me with such thoughts as these: How could I make my prayer, who was so wicked, and yet had received so many mercies? It was enough for me to recite the Office, as all others did; but as I did not that much well, how could I desire to do more? I was not reverential enough, and made too little of the mercies of God. There was no harm in these thoughts and feelings in themselves; but to act upon them, that was an exceedingly great wickedness. Blessed be Thou, O Lord; for Thou camest to my help. This seems to me to be in principle the temptation of Judas, only that Satan did not dare to tempt me so openly. But he might have led me by little and little, as he led Judas, to the same pit of destruction. 17. Let all those who give themselves to prayer, for the love of God, look well to this. They should know that when I was neglecting it, my life was much worse than it had ever been; let them reflect on the excellent help and the pleasant humility which Satan provided for me: it was a grave interior disquietude. But how could my spirit be quiet? It was going away in its misery from its true rest. I remembered the graces and mercies I had received, and felt that the joys of this world were loathsome. I am astonished that I was able to bear it. It must have been the hope I had; for, as well as I can remember now, it is more than twenty-one years ago. I do not think I ever gave up my purpose of resuming my prayer; but I was waiting to be very free from sin first. 18. Oh, how deluded I was in this expectation! The devil would have held it out before me till the day of judgment, that he might then take me with him to hell. Then, when I applied myself to prayer and to spiritual reading,--whereby I might perceive these truths, and the evil nature of the way I was walking in, and was often importunate with our Lord in tears,--I was so wicked, that it availed me nothing; when I gave that up, and wasted my time in amusing myself, in great danger of falling into sin, and with scanty helps,--and I may venture to say no help at all, unless it was a help to my ruin,--what could I expect but that of which I have spoken? 19. I believe that a certain Dominican friar, a most learned man, has greatly merited in the eyes of God; for it was he who roused me from this slumber. He made me--I think I said so before [8]--go to Communion once a fortnight, and be less given to evil; I began to be converted, though I did not cease to offend our Lord all at once: however, as I had not lost my way, I walked on in it, though slowly, falling and rising again; and he who does not cease to walk and press onwards, arrives at last, even if late. To lose one's way is--so it seems to me--nothing else but the giving up of prayer. God, of His mercy, keeps us from this! 20. It is clear from this,--and, for the love of God, consider it well,--that a soul, though it may receive great graces from God in prayer, must never rely on itself, because it may fall, nor expose itself in any way whatever to any risks of sin. This should be well considered because much depends on it; for the delusion here, wherein Satan is able to entangle us afterwards, though the grace be really from God, lies in the traitor's making use of that very grace, so far as he can, for his own purpose, and particularly against persons not grown strong in virtues, who are neither mortified nor detached; for these are not at present strong enough--as I shall explain hereafter [9]--to expose themselves to dangerous occasions, notwithstanding the noble desires and resolutions they may have. 21. This doctrine is excellent, and not mine, but the teaching of God, and accordingly I wish ignorant people like myself knew it; for even if a soul were in this state, it must not rely so much upon itself as to go forth to the battle, because it will have enough to do in defending itself. Defensive armour is the present necessity; the soul is not yet strong enough to assail Satan, and to trample him under foot, as those are who are in the state of which I shall speak further on. [10] 22. This is the delusion by which Satan prevails: when a soul sees itself so near unto God, when it sees the difference there is between the things of heaven and those of earth, and when it sees the love which our Lord bears it, there grows out of that love a certain trust and confidence that there is to be no falling away from that the fruition of which it then possesses. It seems to see the reward distinctly, as if it were impossible for it to abandon that which, even in this life, is so delicious and sweet, for anything so mean and impure as worldly joy. Through this confidence, Satan robs it of that distrust which it ought to have in itself; and so, as I have just said, [11] the soul exposes itself to dangers, and begins, in the fulness of its zeal, to give away without discretion the fruit of its garden, thinking that now it has no reason to be afraid for itself. Yet this does not come out of pride; for the soul clearly understands that of itself it can do no good thing; but rather out of an excessive confidence in God, without discretion: because the soul does not see itself to be unfledged. It can go forth out of its nest, and God Himself may take it out, but still it cannot fly, because the virtues are not strong, and itself has no experience wherewith to discern the dangers; nor is it aware of the evil which trusting to itself may do it. 23. This it was that ruined me. Now, to understand this, and everything else in the spiritual life, we have great need of a director, and of conference with spiritual persons. I fully believe, with respect to that soul which God raises to this state, that He will not cease to be gracious to it, nor suffer it to be lost, if it does not utterly forsake His Majesty. But when that soul--as I said--falls, let it look to it again and again, for the love of our Lord, that Satan deceive it not by tempting it to give up prayer, as he tempted me, through that false humility of which I have spoken before, [12] and would gladly speak of again and again. Let it rely on the goodness of God, which is greater than all the evil we can do. When we, acknowledging our own vileness, desire to return into His grace, He remembers our ingratitude no more,--no, not even the graces He has given us, for the purpose of chastising us, because of our misuse of them; yea, rather, they help to procure our pardon the sooner, as of persons who have been members of His household, and who, as they say, have eaten of His bread. 24. Let them remember His words, and behold what He hath done unto me, who grew weary of sinning before He grew weary of forgiving. He is never weary of giving, nor can His compassion be exhausted. Let us not grow weary ourselves of receiving. May He be blessed for ever, Amen; and may all created things praise Him! 1. See ch. xx. § 2. 2. See ch. xvii. § 3. 3. Ch. vii. § 17, and ch. viii. § 5. 4. Psalm cxviii. 137: "Thou art just, O Lord, and Thy judgment is right." 5. See ch. xxv. 6. See ch. viii. § 1. 7. Ch. vii. § 17. 8. Ch. vii. § 27. 9. Ch. xxxi. § 21. 10. Ch. xx. § 33, and ch. xxv. § 24. 11. Ch. xix. § 4. 12. See § 16. Chapter XX. The Difference Between Union and Rapture. What Rapture Is. The Blessing It Is to the Soul. The Effects of It. 1. I wish I could explain, with the help of God, wherein union differs from rapture, or from transport, or from flight of the spirit, as they speak, or from a trance, which are all one. [1] I mean, that all these are only different names for that one and the same thing, which is also called ecstasy. [2] It is more excellent than union, the fruits of it are much greater, and its other operations more manifold; for union is uniform in the beginning, the middle, and the end, and is so also interiorly. But as raptures have ends of a much higher kind, they produce effects both within and without. [3] As our Lord has explained the other matters, so also may He explain this; for certainly, if He had not shown me in what way and by what means this explanation was in some measure possible, I should never have been able to do it. 2. Consider we now that this last water, of which I am speaking, is so abundant that, were it not that the ground refuses to receive it, we might suppose that the cloud of His great Majesty is here raining down upon us on earth. And when we are giving Him thanks for this great mercy, drawing near to Him in earnest, with all our might, then it is our Lord draws up the soul, as the clouds, so to speak, gather the mists from the face of the earth, and carries it away out of itself,--I have heard it said that the clouds, or the sun, draw the mists together, [4]--and as a cloud, rising up to heaven, takes the soul with Him, and begins to show it the treasures of the kingdom which He has prepared for it. I know not whether the comparison be accurate or not; but the fact is, that is the way in which it is brought about. During rapture, the soul does not seem to animate the body, the natural heat of which is perceptibly lessened; the coldness increases, though accompanied with exceeding joy and sweetness. [5] 3. A rapture is absolutely irresistible; whilst union, inasmuch as we are then on our own ground, may be hindered, though that resistance be painful and violent; it is, however, almost always impossible. But rapture, for the most part, is irresistible. It comes, in general, as a shock, quick and sharp, before you can collect your thoughts, or help yourself in any way, and you see and feel it as a cloud, or a strong eagle rising upwards, and carrying you away on its wings. 4. I repeat it: you feel and see yourself carried away, you know not whither. For though we feel how delicious it is, yet the weakness of our nature makes us afraid at first, and we require a much more resolute and courageous spirit than in the previous states, in order to risk everything, come what may, and to abandon ourselves into the hands of God, and go willingly whither we are carried, seeing that we must be carried away, however painful it may be; and so trying is it, that I would very often resist, and exert all my strength, particularly at those times when the rapture was coming on me in public. I did so, too, very often when I was alone, because I was afraid of delusions. Occasionally I was able, by great efforts, to make a slight resistance; but afterwards I was worn out, like a person who had been contending with a strong giant; at other times it was impossible to resist at all: my soul was carried away, and almost always my head with it,--I had no power over it,--and now and then the whole body as well, so that it was lifted up from the ground. 5. This has not happened to me often: once, however, it took place when we were all together in choir, and I, on my knees, on the point of communicating. It was a very sore distress to me; for I thought it a most extraordinary thing, and was afraid it would occasion much talk; so I commanded the nuns--for it happened after I was made Prioress--never to speak of it. But at other times, the moment I felt that our Lord was about to repeat the act, and once, in particular, during a sermon,--it was the feast of our house, some great ladies being present,--I threw myself on the ground; then the nuns came around me to hold me; but still the rapture was observed. 6. I made many supplications to our Lord, that He would be pleased to give me no more of those graces which were outwardly visible; for I was weary of living under such great restraint, and because His Majesty could not bestow such graces on me without their becoming known. It seems that, of His goodness, He has been pleased to hear my prayer; for I have never been enraptured since. It is true that it was not long ago. [6] 7. It seemed to me, when I tried to make some resistance, as if a great force beneath my feet lifted me up. I know of nothing with which to compare it; but it was much more violent than the other spiritual visitations, and I was therefore as one ground to pieces; for it is a great struggle, and, in short, of little use, whenever our Lord so wills it. There is no power against His power. 8. At other times He is pleased to be satisfied when He makes us see that He is ready to give us this grace, and that it is not He that withholds it. Then, when we resist it out of humility, He produces those very effects which would have resulted if we had fully consented to it. 9. The effects of rapture are great: one is that the mighty power of our Lord is manifested; and as we are not strong enough, when His Majesty wills it, to control either soul or body, so neither have we any power over it; but, whether we like it or not, we see that there is one mightier than we are, that these graces are His gifts, and that of ourselves we can do nothing whatever; and humility is deeply imprinted in us. And further, I confess that it threw me into great fear, very great indeed at first; for when I saw my body thus lifted up from the earth, how could I help it? Though the spirit draws it upwards after itself, and that with great sweetness, if unresisted, the senses are not lost; at least, I was so much myself as to be able to see that I was being lifted up. The majesty of Him who can effect this so manifests itself, that the hairs of my head stand upright, [7] and a great fear comes upon me of offending God, who is so mighty. This fear is bound up in exceedingly great love, which is acquired anew, and directed to Him, who, we see, bears so great a love to a worm so vile, and who seems not to be satisfied with attracting the soul to Himself in so real a way, but who will have the body also, though it be mortal and of earth so foul, such as it is through our sins, which are so great. 10. Rapture leaves behind a certain strange detachment also, which I shall never be able to describe; I think I can say that it is in some respects different from--yea, higher than--the other graces, which are simply spiritual; for though these effect a complete detachment in spirit from all things, it seems that in this of rapture our Lord would have the body itself to be detached also: and thus a certain singular estrangement from the things of earth is wrought, which makes life much more distressing. Afterwards it causes a pain, which we can never inflict of ourselves, nor remove when once it has come. 11. I should like very much to explain this great pain, and I believe I shall not be able; however, I will say something if I can. And it is to be observed that this is my present state, and one to which I have been brought very lately, after all the visions and revelations of which I shall speak, and after that time, wherein I gave myself to prayer, in which our Lord gave me so much sweetness and delight. [8] Even now I have that sweetness occasionally; but it is the pain of which I speak that is the most frequent and the most common. It varies in its intensity. I will now speak of it when it is sharpest; for I shall speak later on [9] of the great shocks I used to feel when our Lord would throw me into those trances, and which are, in my opinion, as different from this pain as the most corporeal thing is from the most spiritual; and I believe that I am not exaggerating much. For though the soul feels that pain, it is in company with the body; [10] both soul and body apparently share it, and it is not attended with that extremity of abandonment which belongs to this. 12. As I said before, [11] we have no part in causing this pain; but very often there springs up a desire unexpectedly,--I know not how it comes,--and because of this desire, which pierces the soul in a moment, the soul begins to be wearied, so much so that it rises upwards above itself, and above all created things. God then so strips it of everything, that, do what it may, there is nothing on earth that can be its companion. Neither, indeed, would it wish to have any; it would rather die in that loneliness. If people spoke to it, and if itself made every effort possible to speak, it would be of little use: the spirit, notwithstanding all it may do, cannot be withdrawn from that loneliness; and though God seems, as it were, far away from the soul at that moment, yet He reveals His grandeurs at times in the strangest way conceivable. That way is indescribable; I do not think any one can believe or comprehend it who has not previously had experience of it. It is a communication made, not to console, but to show the reason why the soul must be weary; because it is far away from the Good which in itself comprehends all good. 13. In this communication the desire grows, so also does the bitterness of that loneliness wherein the soul beholds itself, suffering a pain so sharp and piercing that, in that very loneliness in which it dwells, it may literally say of itself,--and perhaps the royal prophet said so, being in that very loneliness himself, except that our Lord may have granted to him, being a saint, to feel it more deeply,--"Vigilavi, et factus sum sicut passer solitarius in tecto." [12] These words presented themselves to me in such a way that I thought I saw them fulfilled in myself. It was a comfort to know that others had felt this extreme loneliness; how much greater my comfort, when these persons were such as David was! The soul is then--so I think--not in itself, but on the house-top, or on the roof, above itself, and above all created things; for it seems to me to have its dwelling higher than even in the highest part of itself. 14. On other occasions, the soul seems to be, as it were, in the utmost extremity of need, asking itself, and saying, "Where is Thy God?" [13] And it is to be remembered, that I did not know how to express in Spanish the meaning of those words. Afterwards, when I understood what it was, I used to console myself with the thought, that our Lord, without any effort of mine, had made me remember them. At other times, I used to recollect a saying of St. Paul's, to the effect that he was crucified to the world. [14] I do not mean that this is true of me: I know it is not; but I think it is the state of the enraptured soul. No consolation reaches it from heaven, and it is not there itself; it wishes for none from earth, and it is not there either; but it is, as it were, crucified between heaven and earth, enduring its passion: receiving no succour from either. 15. Now, the succour it receives from heaven--which, as I have said, [15] is a most marvellous knowledge of God, above all that we can desire--brings with it greater pain; for the desire then so grows, that, in my opinion, its intense painfulness now and then robs the soul of all sensation; only, it lasts but for a short time after the senses are suspended. It seems as if it were the point of death; only, the agony carries with it so great a joy, that I know of nothing wherewith to compare it. It is a sharp martyrdom, full of sweetness; for if any earthly thing be then offered to the soul, even though it may be that which it habitually found most sweet, the soul will have none of it; yea, it seems to throw it away at once. The soul sees distinctly that it seeks nothing but God; yet its love dwells not on any attribute of Him in particular; it seeks Him as He is, and knows not what it seeks. I say that it knows not, because the imagination forms no representation whatever; and, indeed, as I think, during much of that time the faculties are at rest. Pain suspends them then, as joy suspends them in union and in a trance. 16. O Jesus! oh, that some one would clearly explain this to you, my father, were it only that you may tell me what it means, because this is the habitual state of my soul! Generally, when I am not particularly occupied, I fall into these agonies of death, and I tremble when I feel them coming on, because they are not unto death. But when I am in them, I then wish to spend therein all the rest of my life, though the pain be so very great, that I can scarcely endure it. Sometimes my pulse ceases, as it were, to beat at all,--so the sisters say, who sometimes approach me, and who now understand the matter better,--my bones are racked, and my hands become so rigid, that I cannot always join them. Even on the following day I have a pain in my wrists, and over my whole body, as if my bones were out of joint. [16] Well, I think sometimes, if it continues as at present, that it will end, in the good pleasure of our Lord, by putting an end to my life; for the pain seems to me sharp enough to cause death; only, I do not deserve it. 17. All my anxiety at these times is that I should die: I do not think of purgatory, nor of the great sins I have committed, and by which I have deserved hell. I forget everything in my eagerness to see God; and this abandonment and loneliness seem preferable to any company in the world. If anything can be a consolation in this state, it is to speak to one who has passed through this trial, seeing that, though the soul may complain of it, no one seems disposed to believe in it. 18. The soul is tormented also because the pain has increased so much, that it seeks solitude no longer, as it did before, nor companionship, unless it be that of those to whom it may make its complaint. It is now like a person, who, having a rope around his neck, and being strangled, tries to breathe. This desire of companionship seems to me to proceed from our weakness; for, as pain brings with it the risk of death,--which it certainly does; for I have been occasionally in danger of death, in my great sickness and infirmities, as I have said before, [17] and I think I may say that this pain is as great as any,--so the desire not to be parted, which possesses soul and body, is that which raises the cry for succour in order to breathe, and by speaking of it, by complaining, and distracting itself, causes the soul to seek means of living very much against the will of the spirit, or the higher part of the soul, which would not wish to be delivered from this pain. 19. I am not sure that I am correct in what I say, nor do I know how to express myself, but to the best of my knowledge it comes to pass in this way. See, my father, what rest I can have in this life, now that what I once had in prayer and loneliness--therein our Lord used to comfort me--has become in general a torment of this kind; while, at the same time, it is so full of sweetness, that the soul, discerning its inestimable worth, prefers it to all those consolations which it formerly had. It seems also to be a safer state, because it is the way of the cross; and involves, in my opinion, a joy of exceeding worth, because the state of the body in it is only pain. It is the soul that suffers and exults alone in that joy and contentment which suffering supplies. 20. I know not how this can be, but so it is; it comes from the hand of our Lord, and, as I said before, [18] is not anything that I have acquired myself, because it is exceedingly supernatural, and I think I would not barter it for all the graces of which I shall speak further on: I do not say for all of them together, but for any one of them separately. And it must not be forgotten that, as I have just said, these impetuosities came upon me after I had received those graces from our Lord [19] which I am speaking of now, and all those described in this book, and it is in this state our Lord keeps me at this moment. [20] 21. In the beginning I was afraid--it happens to me to be almost always so when our Lord leads me by a new way, until His Majesty reassures me as I proceed--and so our Lord bade me not to fear, but to esteem this grace more than all the others He had given me; for the soul was purified by this pain--burnished, or refined as gold in the crucible, so that it might be the better enamelled with His gifts, and the dross burnt away in this life, which would have to be burnt away in purgatory. 22. I understood perfectly that this pain was a great grace; but I was much more certain of it now and my confessor tells me I did well. And though I was afraid, because I was so wicked, I never could believe it was anything wrong: on the other hand, the exceeding greatness of the blessing made me afraid, when I called to mind how little I had deserved it. Blessed be our Lord, who is so good! Amen. 23. I have, it seems, wandered from my subject; for I began by speaking of raptures, and that of which I have been speaking is even more than a rapture, and the effects of it are what I have described. Now let us return to raptures, and speak of their ordinary characteristics. I have to say that, when the rapture was over, my body seemed frequently to be buoyant, as if all weight had departed from it; so much so, that now and then I scarcely knew that my feet touched the ground. But during the rapture itself the body is very often as if it were dead, perfectly powerless. It continues in the position it was in when the rapture came upon it--if sitting, sitting; if the hands were open, or if they were shut, they will remain open or shut. [21] For though the senses fail but rarely, it has happened to me occasionally to lose them wholly--seldom, however, and then only for a short time. But in general they are in disorder; and though they have no power whatever to deal with outward things, there remains the power of hearing and seeing; but it is as if the things heard and seen were at a great distance, far away. 24. I do not say that the soul sees and hears when the rapture is at the highest,--I mean by at the highest, when the faculties are lost, because profoundly united with God,--for then it neither sees, nor hears, nor perceives, as I believe; but, as I said of the previous prayer of union, [22] this utter transformation of the soul in God continues only for an instant; yet while it continues no faculty of the soul is aware of it, or knows what is passing there. Nor can it be understood while we are living on the earth--at least, God will not have us understand it, because we must be incapable of understanding it. I know it by experience. 25. You, my father, will ask me: How comes it, then, that a rapture occasionally lasts so many hours? What has often happened to me is this,--I spoke of it before, when writing of the previous state of prayer, [23]--the rapture is not continuous, the soul is frequently absorbed, or, to speak more correctly, our Lord absorbs it in Himself; and when He has held it thus for a moment, the will alone remains in union with Him. The movements of the two other faculties seem to me to be like those of the needle of sun-dials, which is never at rest; yet when the Sun of Justice will have it so, He can hold it still. 26. This I speak of lasts but a moment; yet, as the impulse and the upraising of the spirit were vehement, and though the other faculties bestir themselves again, the will continues absorbed, and causes this operation in the body, as if it were the absolute mistress; for now that the two other faculties are restless, and attempt to disturb it, it takes care--for if it is to have enemies, the fewer the better--that the senses also shall not trouble it: and thus it comes to pass that the senses are suspended; for so our Lord wills it. And for the most part the eyes are closed, though we may not wish to close them; and if occasionally they remain open, as I said just now, the soul neither discerns nor considers what it sees. 27. What the body then can do here is still less in order that, when the faculties come together again, there may not be so much to do. Let him, therefore, to whom our Lord has granted this grace, be not discouraged when he finds himself in this state--the body under constraint for many hours, the understanding and the memory occasionally astray. The truth is that, in general, they are inebriated with the praises of God, or with searching to comprehend or understand that which has passed over them. And yet even for this they are not thoroughly awake, but are rather like one who has slept long, and dreamed, and is hardly yet awake. 28. I dwell so long on this point because I know that there are persons now, even in this place, [24] to whom our Lord is granting these graces; and if their directors have had no experience in the matter, they will think, perhaps, that they must be as dead persons during the trance--and they will think so the more if they have no learning. It is piteous to see what those confessors who do not understand this make people suffer. I shall speak of it by and by. [25] Perhaps I do not know what I am saying. You, my father, will understand it, if I am at all correct; for our Lord has admitted you to the experience of it: yet, because that experience is not very great, it may be, perhaps, that you have not considered the matter so much as I have done. 29. So then, though I do all I can, my body has no strength to move for some time; the soul took it all away. Very often, too, he who was before sickly and full of pain remains healthy, and even stronger; for it is something great that is given to the soul in rapture; and sometimes, as I have said already, [26] our Lord will have the body rejoice, because it is obedient in that which the soul requires of it. When we recover our consciousness, the faculties may remain, if the rapture has been deep, for a day or two, and even for three days, so absorbed, or as if stunned,--so much so, as to be in appearance no longer themselves. 30. Here comes the pain of returning to this life; here it is the wings of the soul grew, to enable it to fly so high: the weak feathers are fallen off. Now the standard of Christ is raised up aloft, which seems to be nothing else but the going up, or the carrying up, of the Captain of the fort to the highest tower of it, there to raise up the standard of God. The soul, as in a place of safety, looks down on those below; it fears no dangers now--yea, rather, it courts them, as one assured beforehand of victory. It sees most clearly how lightly are the things of this world to be esteemed, and the nothingness thereof. The soul now seeks not, and possesses not, any other will but that of doing our Lord's will, [27] and so it prays Him to let it be so; it gives to Him the keys of its own will. Lo, the gardener is now become the commander of a fortress! The soul will do nothing but the will of our Lord; it will not act as the owner even of itself, nor of anything, not even of a single apple in the orchard; only, if there be any good thing in the garden, it is at His Majesty's disposal; for from henceforth the soul will have nothing of its own,--all it seeks is to do everything for His glory, and according to His will. 31. This is really the way in which these things come to pass; if the raptures be true raptures, the fruits and advantages spoken of abide in the soul; but if they did not, I should have great doubts about their being from God--yea, rather, I should be afraid they were those frenzies of which St. Vincent speaks. [28] I have seen it myself, and I know it by experience, that the soul in rapture is mistress of everything, and acquires such freedom in one hour, and even in less, as to be unable to recognize itself. It sees distinctly that all this does not belong to it, neither knows it how it came to possess so great a good; but it clearly perceives the very great blessing which every one of these raptures always brings. No one will believe this who has not had experience of it, and so they do not believe the poor soul: they saw it lately so wicked, and now they see it pretend to things of so high an order; for it is not satisfied with serving our Lord in the common way,--it must do so forthwith in the highest way it can. They consider this a temptation and a folly; yet they would not be astonished, if they knew that it comes not from the soul, but from our Lord, to whom it has given up the keys of its will. 32. For my part, I believe that a soul which has reached this state neither speaks nor acts of itself, but rather that the supreme King takes care of all it has to do. O my God, how clear is the meaning of those words, and what good reason the Psalmist had, and all the world will ever have, to pray for the wings of a dove! [29] It is plain that this is the flight of the spirit rising upwards above all created things, and chiefly above itself: but it is a sweet flight, a delicious flight--a flight without noise. 33. Oh, what power that soul possesses which our Lord raises to this state! how it looks down upon everything, entangled by nothing! how ashamed it is of the time when it was entangled! how it is amazed at its own blindness! how it pities those who are still in darkness, especially if they are men of prayer, and have received consolations from God! It would like to cry out to them, that they might be made to see the delusions they are in: and, indeed, it does so now and then; and then a thousand persecutions fall upon it as a shower. People consider it wanting in humility, and think it means to teach those from whom it should learn, particularly if it be a woman. Hence its condemnation; and not without reason; because they know not how strong the influence is that moves it. The soul at times cannot help itself; nor can it refrain from undeceiving those it loves, and whom it longs to see delivered out of the prison of this life; for that state in which the soul itself had been before neither is, nor seems to be, anything else but a prison. 34. The soul is weary of the days during which it respected points of honour, and the delusion which led it to believe that to be honour which the world calls by that name; now it sees it to be the greatest lie, and that we are all walking therein. It understands that true honour is not delusive, but real, esteeming that which is worthy of esteem, and despising that which is despicable; for everything is nothing, and less than nothing, whatever passeth away, and is not pleasing unto God. The soul laughs at itself when it thinks of the time in which it regarded money, and desired to possess it,--though, as to this, I verily believe that I never had to confess such a fault; it was fault enough to have regarded money at all. If I could purchase with money the blessings which I possess, I should make much of it; but it is plain that these blessings are gained by abandoning all things. 35. What is there that is procurable by this money which we desire? Is it anything of worth, and anything lasting? Why, then, do we desire it? A dismal resting place it provides, which costs so dear! Very often it obtains for us hell itself, fire everlasting, and torments without end. Oh, if all men would but regard it as profitless dross, how peaceful the world would be! how free from bargaining! How friendly all men would be one with another, if no regard were paid to honour and money! I believe it would be a remedy for everything. 36. The soul sees how blind men are to the nature of pleasure--how by means of it they provide for themselves trouble and disquietude even in this life. What restlessness! how little satisfaction! what labour in vain! It sees, too, not only the cobwebs that cover it, and its great faults, but also the specks of dirt, however slight they may be; for the sun shines most clearly; and thus, however much the soul may have laboured at its own perfection, it sees itself to be very unclean, if the rays of the sun fall really upon it. The soul is like water in a vessel, which appears pellucid when the sun does not shine through it; but if it does, the water then is found to be full of motes. 37. This comparison is literally correct. Before the soul fell into the trance, it thought itself to be careful about not offending God, and that it did what it could in proportion to its strength; but now that it has attained to this state, in which the Sun of Justice shines upon it, and makes it open its eyes, it beholds so many motes, that it would gladly close them again. It is not so truly the child of the noble eagle, that it can gaze upon the sun; but, for the few instants it can keep them open, it beholds itself wholly unclean. It remembers the words: "Who shall be just in Thy presence?" [30] When it looks on this Divine Sun, the brightness thereof dazzles it,--when it looks on itself, its eyes are blinded by the dust: the little dove is blind. So it happens very often: the soul is utterly blinded, absorbed, amazed, dizzy at the vision of so much grandeur. 38. It is in rapture that true humility is acquired--humility that will never say any good of self, nor suffer others to do so. The Lord of the garden, not the soul, distributes the fruit thereof, and so none remains in its hands; all the good it has, it refers to God; if it says anything about itself, it is for His glory. It knows that it possesses nothing here; and even if it wished, it cannot continue ignorant of that. It sees this, as it were, with the naked eye; for, whether it will or not, its eyes are shut against the things of this world, and open to see the truth. 1. See Inner Fortress, vi. ch. v.; Philippus a SS. Trinitate, Theolog. Mystic. par. iii. tr. i, disp. iii., art. 3; "Hæc oratio raptus superior est præcedentibus orationis gradibus, etiam oratione unionis ordinariæ, et habet effectus multo excellentiores et multas alias operationes." 2. "She says that rapture is more excellent than union; that is, that the soul in a rapture has a greater fruition of God, and that God takes it then more into His own hands. That is evidently so; because in a rapture the soul loses the use of its exterior and interior faculties. When she says that union is the beginning, middle, and end, she means that pure union is almost always uniform; but that there are degrees in rapture, of which some are, as it were, the beginning, some the middle, others the end. That is the reason why it is called by different names; some of which denote the least, others the most, perfect form of it, as it will appear hereafter."--Note in the Spanish edition of Lopez (De la Fuente). 3. Anton. a Spirit. Sancto, Direct. Mystic. tr. 4, d. i. n. 95: "Licet oratio raptus idem sit apud mysticos ac oratio volatus, seu elevationis spiritus seu extasis; reipsa tamen raptus aliquid addit super extasim; nam extasis importat simplicem excessum mentis in seipso secundum quem aliquis extra suam cognitionem ponitur. Raptus vero super hoc addit violentiam quandam ab aliquo extrinseco." 4. The words between the dashes are in the handwriting of the Saint--not however, in the text, but on the margin (De la Fuente). 5. See Inner Fortress, vi. ch. v. "Primus effectus orationis ecstaticæ est in corpore, quod ita remanet, ac si per animam non informaretur, infrigidatur enim calore naturali deficiente, clauduntur suaviter oculi, et alii sensus amittuntur: contingit tamen quod corpus infirmum in hac oratione sanitatem recuperat." Anton. a Spirit. Sancto, Direct. Mystic. tr. iv. d. 2, § 4, n. 150. 6. This passage could not have been in the first Life; for that was written before she had ever been Prioress. 7. Job. iv. 15: "Inhorruerunt pili carnis meæ." (See St. John of the Cross. Spiritual Canticle, sts. 14, 15, vol. ii p. 83, Engl. trans.) 8. See ch. xxix. 9. See ch. xx. § 21. 10. § 9, supra. 11. § 10. 12. Psalm ci. 8: "I have watched, and become as a sparrow alone on the house-top." 13. Psalm xli. 4: "Ubi est Deus tuus?" 14. Galat. vi. 14: "In cruce Jesu Christi: per quem mihi mundus crucifixus est, et ego mundo." 15. §§ 9 and 12. 16. Daniel x. 16: "In visione tua dissolutæ sunt compages meæ." See St. John of the Cross, Spiritual Canticle, st. 14, vol. ii. p. 84, Engl. trans.; and also Relation, viii. § 13, where this is repeated. 17. Ch. v. § 18. 18. § 12. 19. The words from "I have just said" to "our Lord" are in the margin of the text, but in the handwriting of the Saint (De la Fuente). 20. See § 11. 21. See Relation, viii. § 8. 22. Ch. xviii. § 16. 23. Ch. xviii. § 17. 24. Avila. 25. Ch. xxv. § 18. 26. § 9. 27. "Other will . . . Lord's will." These words--in Spanish, "Otra voluntad, sino hacer la de nuestro Señor"--are not in the handwriting of the Saint; perhaps it was Father Bañes who wrote them. The MS. is blurred, and the original text seems to have been, "libre alvedrio ni guerra" (De la Fuente). 28. St. Vincent. Ferrer, Instruct. de Vit. Spirit. c. xiv. p. 14: "Si dicerent tibi aliquid quod sit contra fidem, et contra Scripturam Sacram, aut contra bonos mores, ahhorreas earum visionem et judicia, tanquam stultas dementias, et earum raptus, sicut rabiamenta"--which word the Saint translates by "rabiamientos." 29. Psalm liv. 7: "Quis dabit mihi pennas sicut columbæ?" 30. Job iv. 17: "Numquid homo Dei comparatione justificabitur?" Chapter XXI. Conclusion of the Subject. Pain of the Awakening. Light Against Delusions. 1. To bring this matter to an end, I say that it is not necessary for the soul to give its consent here; it is already given: the soul knows that it has given up its will into His hands, [1] and that it cannot deceive Him, because He knoweth all things. It is not here as it is in the world, where all life is full of deceit and double-dealing. When you think you have gained one man's good will, because of the outward show he makes, you afterwards learn that all was a lie. No one can live in the midst of so much scheming, particularly if there be any interests at stake. 2. Blessed, then, is that soul which our Lord draws on to the understanding of the truth! Oh, what a state for kings! How much better it would be for them if they strove for this, rather than for great dominions! How justice would prevail under their rule! What evils would be prevented, and might have been prevented already! Here no man fears to lose life or honour for the love of God. What a grand thing this would be to him who is more bound than those beneath him to regard the honour of our Lord!--for it is kings whom the crowd must follow. To make one step in the propagation of the faith, and to give one ray of light to heretics, I would forfeit a thousand kingdoms. And with good reason: for it is another thing altogether to gain a kingdom that shall never end, because one drop of the water of that kingdom, if the soul but tastes it, renders the things of this world utterly loathsome. 3. If, then, the soul should be wholly engulfed, what then? O Lord, if Thou wert to give me the right to publish this abroad, people would not believe me--as they do not believe many who are able to speak of it in a way very different from mine; but I should satisfy myself, at least. I believe I should count my life as nothing, if I might make others understand but one of these truths. I know not what I shall do afterwards, for I cannot trust myself; though I am what I am, I have a violent desire, which is wasting me, to say this to those who are in authority. And now that I can do no more, I betake myself to Thee, O my Lord, to implore a remedy for all. Thou knowest well that I would gladly divest myself of all the graces which Thou hast given me,--provided I remained in a condition never to offend Thee,--and give them up to those who are kings; for I know it would then be impossible for them to allow what they allow now, or fail to receive the very greatest blessings. 4. O my God, make kings to understand how far their obligations reach! Thou hast been pleased to distinguish them on earth in such a way that--so I have heard--Thou showest signs in the heavens when Thou takest any of them away. Certainly, when I think of this, my devotion is stirred, because Thou wilt have them learn, O my King, even from this, that they must imitate Thee in their lives, seeing that, when they die, signs are visible in the heavens, as it was when Thou wert dying Thyself. 5. I am very bold; if it be wrong, you, my father, will tear this out: only believe that I should speak much more to the purpose in the presence of kings,--if I might, or thought they would listen to me,--for I recommend them greatly to God, and I wish I might be of service to them. All this makes one risk life; for I long frequently to lose mine,--and that would be to lose a little for the chance of gaining much; for surely it is not possible to live, when we see with our eyes the great delusion wherein we are walking, and the blindness in which we are living. 6. A soul that has attained to this is not limited to the desires it has to serve God; for His Majesty gives it strength to bring those desires to good effect. Nothing can be put before it into which it will not throw itself, if only it thinks that God may be served thereby: and yet it is doing nothing, because, as I said before, [2] it sees clearly that all is nothing, except pleasing God. The trial is, that those who are so worthless as I am, have no trial of the kind. May it be Thy good pleasure, O my God, that the time may come in which I may be able to pay one farthing at least, of the heavy debt I owe Thee! Do Thou, O Lord, so dispose matters according to Thy will, that this Thy servant may do Thee some service. Other women there have been who did heroic deeds for Thee; I am good only to talk; and so it has not been Thy pleasure, O my God, that I should do any thing: all ends in talk and desires--that is all my service. And yet even in this I am not free, because it is possible I might fail altogether. 7. Strengthen Thou my soul, and prepare it, O Good of all good; and, my Jesus, then ordain Thou the means whereby I may do something for Thee, so that there may be not even one who can bear to receive so much, and make no payment in return. Cost what it may, O Lord, let me not come before Thee with hands so empty, [3] seeing that the reward of every one will be according to his works. [4] Behold my life, behold my good name and my will; I have given them all to Thee; I am Thine: dispose of me according to Thy will. I see well enough, O Lord, how little I can do; but now, having drawn near to Thee,--having ascended to this watchtower, from which the truth may be seen,--and while Thou departest not from me, I can do all things; but if Thou departest from me, were it but for a moment, I shall go thither where I was once--that is, to hell. [5] 8. Oh, what it is for a soul in this state to have to return to the commerce of the world, to see and look on the farce of this life, [6] so ill-ordered; to waste its time in attending to the body by sleeping and eating! [7] All is wearisome; it cannot run away,--it sees itself chained and imprisoned; it feels then most keenly the captivity into which the body has brought us, and the wretchedness of this life. It understands the reason why St. Paul prayed to God to deliver him from it. [8] The soul cries with the Apostle, and calls upon God to deliver it, as I said on another occasion. [9] But here it often cries with so much violence, that it seems as if it would go out of the body in search of its freedom, now that they do not take it away. It is as a slave sold into a strange land; and what distresses it most is, that it cannot find many who make the same complaint and the same prayer: the desire of life is more common. 9. Oh, if we were utterly detached,--if we never placed our happiness in anything of this world,--how the pain, caused by living always away from God, would temper the fear of death with the desire of enjoying the true life! Sometimes I consider, if a person like myself--because our Lord has given this light to me, whose love is so cold, and whose true rest is so uncertain, for I have not deserved it by my works--frequently feels her banishment so much, what the feelings of the Saints must have been. What must St. Paul and the Magdalene, and others like them, have suffered, in whom the fire of the love of God has grown so strong? Their life must have been a continual martyrdom. It seems to me that they who bring me any comfort, and whose conversation is any relief, are those persons in whom I find these desires--I mean, desires with acts. I say with acts, for there are people who think themselves detached, and who say so of themselves,--and it must be so, for their vocation demands it, as well as the many years that are passed since some of them began to walk in the way of perfection,--but my soul distinguishes clearly, and afar off, between those who are detached in words, and those who make good those words by deeds. The little progress of the former, and the great progress of the latter, make it plain. This is a matter which a person of any experience can see into most clearly. 10. So far, then, of the effects of those raptures which come from the Spirit of God. The truth is, that these are greater or less. I say less, because in the beginning, though the effects are wrought, they are not tested by works, and so it cannot be clear that a person has them; and perfection, too, is a thing of growth, and of labouring after freedom from the cobwebs of memory; and this requires some time. Meanwhile, the greater the growth of love and humility in the soul, the stronger the perfume of the flowers of virtues is for itself and for others. The truth is, that our Lord can so work in the soul in an instant during these raptures, that but little remains for the soul to do in order to attain to perfection. No one, who has not had experience of it, will ever be able to believe what our Lord now bestows on the soul. No effort of ours--so I think--can ever reach so far. 11. However, I do not mean to say that those persons who during many years make use of the method prescribed by writers on prayer,--who discuss the principles thereof, and the means whereby it may be acquired,--will not, by the help of our Lord, attain to perfection and great detachment with much labour; but they will not attain to it so rapidly as by the way of raptures, in which our Lord works independently of us, draws the soul utterly away from earth, and gives it dominion over all things here below, though the merits of that soul may not be greater than mine were: I cannot use stronger language, for my merits are as nothing. Why His Majesty doeth this is, because it is His pleasure, and He doeth it according to His pleasure; even if the soul be without the fitting disposition, He disposes it for the reception of that blessing which He is giving to it. Although it be most certain that He never fails to comfort those who do well, and strive to be detached, still He does not always give these effects because they have deserved them at His hands by cultivating the garden, but because it is His will to show His greatness at times in a soil which is most worthless, as I have just said, and to prepare it for all good: and all this in such a way that it seems as if the soul was now, in a manner, unable to go back and live in sin against God, as it did before. 12. The mind is now so inured to the comprehension of that which is truth indeed, that everything else seems to it to be but child's play. It laughs to itself, at times, when it sees grave men--men given to prayer, men of religion--make much of points of honour, which itself is trampling beneath its feet. They say that discretion, and the dignity of their callings, require it of them as a means to do more good; but that soul knows perfectly well that they would do more good in one day by preferring the love of God to this their dignity, than they will do in ten years by considering it. 13. The life of this soul is a life of trouble: the cross is always there, but the progress it makes is great. When those who have to do with it think it has arrived at the summit of perfection, within a little while they see it much more advanced; for God is ever giving it grace upon grace. God is the soul of that soul now; it is He who has the charge of it; and so He enlightens it; for He seems to be watching over it, always attentive to it, that it may not offend Him,--giving it grace, and stirring it up in His service. When my soul reached this state, in which God showed me mercy so great, my wretchedness came to an end, and our Lord gave me strength to rise above it. The former occasions of sin, as well as the persons with whom I was accustomed to distract myself, did me no more harm than if they had never existed; on the contrary, that which ordinarily did me harm, helped me on. Everything contributed to make me know God more, and to love Him; to make me see how much I owed Him, as well as to be sorry for being what I had been. 14. I saw clearly that this did not come from myself, that I had not brought it about by any efforts of my own, and that there was not time enough for it. His Majesty, of His mere goodness, had given me strength for it. From the time our Lord began to give me the grace of raptures, until now, this strength has gone on increasing. He, of His goodness, hath held me by the hand, that I might not go back. I do not think that I am doing anything myself--certainly I do not; for I see distinctly that all this is the work of our Lord. For this reason, it seems to me that the soul in which our Lord worketh these graces,--if it walks in humility and fear, always acknowledging the work of our Lord, and that we ourselves can do, as it were, nothing,--may be thrown among any companions, and, however distracted and wicked these may be, will neither be hurt nor disturbed in any way; on the contrary, as I have just said, that will help it on, and be a means unto it whereby it may derive much greater profit. 15. Those souls are strong which are chosen by our Lord to do good to others; still, this their strength is not their own. When our Lord brings a soul on to this state, He communicates to it of His greatest secrets by degrees. True revelations--the great gifts and visions--come by ecstasies, all tending to make the soul humble and strong, to make it despise the things of this world, and have a clearer knowledge of the greatness of the reward which our Lord has prepared for those who serve Him. [10] 16. May it please His Majesty that the great munificence with which He hath dealt with me, miserable sinner that I am, may have some weight with those who shall read this, so that they may be strong and courageous enough to give up everything utterly for God. If His Majesty repays us so abundantly, that even in this life the reward and gain of those who serve Him become visible, what will it be in the next? 1. Ch. xx. § 30. 2. Ch. xx. § 34. 3. Exod. xxiii. 15: "Non apparebis in conspectu meo vacuus." 4. Apoc. ii. 23: "Dabo unicuique vestrum secundum opera sua." 5. See ch. xxxii. § 1. 6. "Farsa de esta vida tan mal concertada." 7. Inner Fortress, iv. ch. i. § 11. 8. Rom. vii. 24: "Quis me liberabit de corpore mortis hujus?" 9. Ch. xvi. § 7. 10. 1 Cor. ii. 9: "Quæ præparavit Deus his qui diligunt Illum." Chapter XXII. The Security of Contemplatives Lies in Their Not Ascending to High Things if Our Lord Does Not Raise Them. The Sacred Humanity Must Be the Road to the Highest Contemplation. A Delusion in Which the Saint Was Once Entangled. 1. There is one thing I should like to say--I think it important: and if you, my father, approve, it will serve for a lesson that possibly may be necessary; for in some books on prayer the writers say that the soul, though it cannot in its own strength attain to this state,--because it is altogether a supernatural work wrought in it by our Lord,--may nevertheless succeed, by lifting up the spirit above all created things, and raising it upwards in humility, after some years spent in a purgative life, and advancing in the illuminative. I do not very well know what they mean by illuminative: I understand it to mean the life of those who are making progress. And they advise us much to withdraw from all bodily imagination, and draw near to the contemplation of the Divinity; for they say that those who have advanced so far would be embarrassed or hindered in their way to the highest contemplation, if they regarded even the Sacred Humanity itself. [1] They defend their opinion [2] by bringing forward the words [3] of our Lord to the Apostles, concerning the coming of the Holy Ghost; I mean that Coming which was after the Ascension. If the Apostles had believed, as they believed after the Coming of the Holy Ghost, that He is both God and Man, His bodily Presence would, in my opinion, have been no hindrance; for those words were not said to the Mother of God, though she loved Him more than all. [4] They think that, as this work of contemplation is wholly spiritual, any bodily object whatever can disturb or hinder it. They say that the contemplative should regard himself as being within a definite space, God everywhere around, and himself absorbed in Him. This is what we should aim at. 2. This seems to me right enough now and then; but to withdraw altogether from Christ, and to compare His divine Body with our miseries or with any created thing whatever, is what I cannot endure. May God help me to explain myself! I am not contradicting them on this point, for they are learned and spiritual persons, understanding what they say: God, too, is guiding souls by many ways and methods, as He has guided mine. It is of my own soul that I wish to speak now,--I do not intermeddle with others,--and of the danger I was in because I would comply with the directions I was reading. I can well believe that he who has attained to union, and advances no further,--that is, to raptures, visions, and other graces of God given to souls,--will consider that opinion to be best, as I did myself: and if I had continued in it, I believe I should never have reached the state I am in now. I hold it to be a delusion: still, it may be that it is I who am deluded. But I will tell you what happened to me. 3. As I had no director, I used to read these books, where, by little and little, I thought I might understand something. I found out afterwards that, if our Lord had not shown me the way, I should have learned but little from books; for I understood really nothing till His Majesty made me learn by experience: neither did I know what I was doing. So, in the beginning, when I attained to some degree of supernatural prayer,--I speak of the prayer of quiet,--I laboured to remove from myself every thought of bodily objects; but I did not dare to lift up my soul, for that I saw would be presumption in me, who was always so wicked. I thought, however, that I had a sense of the presence of God: this was true, and I contrived to be in a state of recollection before Him. This method of prayer is full of sweetness, if God helps us in it, and the joy of it is great. And so, because I was conscious of the profit and delight which this way furnished me, no one could have brought me back to the contemplation of the Sacred Humanity; for that seemed to me to be a real hindrance to prayer. 4. O Lord of my soul, and my Good! Jesus Christ crucified! I never think of this opinion, which I then held, without pain; I believe it was an act of high treason, though done in ignorance. Hitherto, I had been all my life long so devout to the Sacred Humanity--for this happened but lately; I mean by lately, that it was before our Lord gave me the grace of raptures and visions. I did not continue long of this opinion, [5] and so I returned to my habit of delighting in our Lord, particularly at Communion. I wish I could have His picture and image always before my eyes, since I cannot have Him graven in my soul as deeply as I wish. 5. Is it possible, O my Lord, that I could have had the thought, if only for an hour, that Thou couldst be a hindrance to my greatest good? Whence are all my blessings? are they not from Thee? I will not think that I was blamable, for I was very sorry for it, and it was certainly done in ignorance. And so it pleased Thee, in Thy goodness, to succour me, by sending me one who has delivered me from this delusion; and afterwards by showing Thyself to me so many times, as I shall relate hereafter, [6] that I might clearly perceive how great my delusion was, and also tell it to many persons; which I have done, as well as describe it as I am doing now. I believe myself that this is the reason why so many souls, after advancing to the prayer of union, make no further progress, and do not attain to very great liberty of spirit. 6. It seems to me, that there are two considerations on which I may ground this opinion. Perhaps I am saying nothing to the purpose, yet what I say is the result of experience; for my soul was in a very evil plight, till our Lord enlightened it: all its joys were but sips; and when it had come forth therefrom, it never found itself in that company which afterwards it had in trials and temptations. 7. The first consideration is this: there is a little absence of humility--so secret and so hidden, that we do not observe it. Who is there so proud and wretched as I, that, even after labouring all his life in penances and prayers and persecutions, can possibly imagine himself not to be exceedingly rich, most abundantly rewarded, when our Lord permits him to stand with St. John at the foot of the cross? I know not into whose head it could have entered to be not satisfied with this, unless it be mine, which has gone wrong in every way where it should have gone right onwards. 8. Then, if our constitution--or perhaps sickness--will not permit us always to think of His Passion, because it is so painful, who is to hinder us from thinking of Him risen from the grave, seeing that we have Him so near us in the Sacrament, where he is glorified, and where we shall not see Him in His great weariness--scourged, streaming with blood, faint by the way, persecuted by those to whom He had done good, and not believed in by the Apostles? Certainly it is not always that one can bear to meditate on sufferings so great as were those He underwent. Behold Him here, before His ascension into heaven, without pain, all-glorious, giving strength to some and courage to others. In the most Holy Sacrament, He is our companion, as if it was not in His power to withdraw Himself for a moment from us. And yet it was in my power to withdraw from Thee, O my Lord, that I might serve Thee better! It may be that I knew Thee not when I sinned against Thee; but how could I, having once known Thee, ever think I should gain more in this way? O Lord, what an evil way I took! and I was going out of the way, if Thou hadst not brought me back to it. When I see Thee near me, I see all good things together. No trial befalls me that is not easy to bear, when I think of Thee standing before those who judged Thee. 9. With so good a Friend and Captain ever present, Himself the first to suffer, everything can be borne. He helps, He strengthens, He never fails, He is the true Friend. I see clearly, and since then have always seen, that if we are to please God, and if He is to give us His great graces, everything must pass through the hands of His most Sacred Humanity, in whom His Majesty said that He is well pleased. [7] I know this by repeated experience: our Lord has told it me. I have seen clearly that this is the door [8] by which we are to enter, if we would have His supreme Majesty reveal to us His great secrets. 10. So, then, I would have your reverence seek no other way, even if you were arrived at the highest contemplation. This way is safe. Our Lord is He by whom all good things come to us; He will teach you. Consider His life; that is the best example. What more can we want than so good a Friend at our side, who will not forsake us when we are in trouble and distress, as they do who belong to this world! Blessed is he who truly loves Him, and who always has Him near him! Let us consider the glorious St. Paul, who seems as if Jesus was never absent from his lips, as if he had Him deep down in his heart. After I had heard this of some great Saints given to contemplation, I considered the matter carefully; and I see that they walked in no other way. St. Francis with the stigmata proves it, St. Antony of Padua with the Infant Jesus; St. Bernard rejoiced in the Sacred Humanity; so did St. Catherine of Siena, and many others, as your reverence knows better than I do. 11. This withdrawing from bodily objects must no doubt be good, seeing that it is recommended by persons who are so spiritual; but, in my opinion, it ought to be done only when the soul has made very great progress; for until then it is clear that the Creator must be sought for through His creatures. All this depends on the grace which our Lord distributes to every soul. I do not intermeddle here. What I would say is, that the most Sacred Humanity of Christ is not to be counted among the objects from which we have to withdraw. Let this be clearly understood. I wish I knew how to explain it. [9] 12. When God suspends all the powers of the soul,--as we see He does in the states of prayer already described,--it is clear that, whether we wish it or not, this presence is withdrawn. Be it so, then. The loss is a blessed one, because it takes place in order that we may have a deeper fruition of what we seem to have lost; for at that moment the whole soul is occupied in loving Him whom the understanding has toiled to know; and it loves what it has not comprehended, and rejoices in what it could not have rejoiced in so well, if it had not lost itself, in order, as I am saying, to gain itself the more. But that we should carefully and laboriously accustom ourselves not to strive with all our might to have always--and please God it be always!--the most Sacred Humanity before our eyes,--this, I say, is what seems to me not to be right: it is making the soul, as they say, to walk in the air; for it has nothing to rest on, how full soever of God it may think itself to be. 13. It is a great matter for us to have our Lord before us as Man while we are living and in the flesh. This is that other inconvenience which I say must be met with. The first--I have already begun to describe it--is a little failure in humility, in that the soul desires to rise of itself before our Lord raises it, and is not satisfied with meditation on so excellent a subject,--seeking to be Mary before it has laboured with Martha. If our Lord will have a soul to be Mary, even on the first day, there is nothing to be afraid of; but we must not be self-invited guests, as I think I said on another occasion. [10] This little mote of want of humility, though in appearance a mere nothing, does a great deal of harm to those who wish to advance in contemplation. 14. I now come back to the second consideration. We are not angels, for we have a body; to seek to make ourselves angels while we are on the earth, and so much on the earth as I was, is an act of folly. In general, our thoughts must have something to rest on, though the soul may go forth out of itself now and then, or it may be very often so full of God as to be in need of no created thing by the help of which it may recollect itself. But this is not so common a case; for when we have many things to do, when we are persecuted and in trouble, when we cannot have much rest, and when we have our seasons of dryness, Christ is our best Friend; for we regard Him as Man, and behold Him faint and in trouble, and He is our Companion; and when we shall have accustomed ourselves in this way, it is very easy to find Him near us, although there will be occasions from time to time when we can do neither the one nor the other. 15. For this end, that is useful which I spoke of before: [11] we must not show ourselves as labouring after spiritual consolations; come what may, to embrace the cross is the great thing. The Lord of all consolation was Himself forsaken: they left Him alone in His sorrows. Do not let us forsake Him; for His hand will help us to rise more than any efforts we can make; and He will withdraw Himself when He sees it be expedient for us, and when He pleaseth will also draw the soul forth out of itself, as I said before. [12] 16. God is greatly pleased when He beholds a soul in its humility making His Son a Mediator between itself and Him, and yet loving Him so much as to confess its own unworthiness, even when He would raise it up to the highest contemplation, and saying with St. Peter: [13] "Go Thou away from me, O Lord, for I am a sinful man." I know this by experience: it was thus that God directed my soul. Others may walk, as I said before, [14] by another and a shorter road. What I have understood of the matter is this: that the whole foundation of prayer must be laid in humility, and that the more a soul humbles itself in prayer, the more God lifts it up. I do not remember that He ever showed me any of those marvellous mercies, of which I shall speak hereafter, [15] at any other time than when I was as one brought to nothing, [16] by seeing how wicked I was. Moreover, His Majesty contrived to make me understand matters that helped me to know myself, but which I could never have even imagined of myself. 17. I believe myself that if a soul makes any efforts of its own to further itself in the way of the prayer of union, and though it may seem to make immediate progress, it will quickly fall back, because the foundations were not duly laid. I fear, too, that such a soul will never attain to true poverty of spirit, which consists in seeking consolation or sweetness, not in prayer,--the consolations of the earth are already abandoned,--but rather in sorrows, for the love of Him who always lived in sorrows Himself; [17] and in being calm in the midst of sorrows and aridities. Though the soul may feel it in some measure, there is no disquiet, nor any of that pain which some persons suffer, who, if they are not always labouring with the understanding and with a sense of devotion, think everything lost,--as if their efforts merited so great a blessing! 18. I am not saying that men should not seek to be devout, nor that they should not stand with great reverence in the presence of God, but only that they are not to vex themselves if they cannot find even one good thought, as I said in another place; [18] for we are unprofitable servants. [19] What do we think we can do? Our Lord grant that we understand this, and that we may be those little asses who drive the windlass I spoke of: [20] these, though their eyes are bandaged, and they do not understand what they are doing, yet draw up more water than the gardener can draw with all his efforts. We must walk in liberty on this road, committing ourselves into the hands of God. If it be His Majesty's good pleasure to raise us and place us among His chamberlains and secret councillors, we must go willingly; if not, we must serve Him in the lower offices of His house, and not sit down on the upper seats. [21] As I have sometimes said, [22] God is more careful of us than we are ourselves, and knows what each one of us is fit for. 19. What use is there in governing oneself by oneself, when the whole will has been given up to God? I think this less endurable now than in the first state of prayer, and it does much greater harm; for these blessings are supernatural. If a man has a bad voice, let him force himself ever so much to sing, he will never improve it; but if God gives him a good voice, he has no need to try it twice. Let us, then, pray Him always to show His mercy upon us, with a submissive spirit, yet trusting in the goodness of God. And now that the soul is permitted to sit at the feet of Christ, let it contrive not to quit its place, but keep it anyhow. Let it follow the example of the Magdalene; and when it shall be strong enough, God will lead it into the wilderness. [23] 20. You, then, my father, must be content with this until you meet with some one of more experience and better knowledge than I am. If you see people who are beginning to taste of God, do not trust them if they think that they advance more, and have a deeper fruition of God, when they make efforts of their own. Oh, when God wills it, how He discovers Himself without these little efforts of ours! We may do what we like, but He throws the spirit into a trance as easily as a giant takes up a straw; no resistance is possible. What a thing to believe, that God will wait till the toad shall fly of itself, when He has already willed it should do so! Well, it seems to me still more difficult and hard for our spirit to rise upwards, if God does not raise it, seeing that it is burdened with earth, and hindered in a thousand ways. Its willingness to rise is of no service to it; for, though an aptness for flying be more natural to it than to a toad, yet is it so sunk in the mire as to have lost it by its own fault. 21. I come, then, to this conclusion: whenever we think of Christ, we should remind ourselves of the love that made Him bestow so many graces upon us, and also how great that love is which our Lord God has shown us, in giving us such a pledge of the love He bears us; for love draws forth love. And though we are only at the very beginning, and exceedingly wicked, yet let us always labour to keep this in view, and stir ourselves up to love; for if once our Lord grants us this grace, of having this love imprinted in our hearts, everything will be easy, and we shall do great things in a very short time, and with very little labour. May His Majesty give us that love,--He knows the great need we have of it,--for the sake of that love which He bore us, and of His glorious Son, to whom it cost so much to make it known to us! Amen. 22. There is one thing I should like to ask you, my father. How is it that, when our Lord begins to bestow upon a soul a grace so great as this of perfect contemplation, it is not, as it ought to be, perfect at once? Certainly, it seems it should be so; for he who receives a grace so great ought never more to seek consolations on earth. How is it, I ask, that a soul which has ecstasies and so far is more accustomed to receive graces, should yet seem to bring forth fruits still higher and higher,--and the more so, the more it is detached,--when our Lord might have sanctified it at once, the moment He came near it? How is it, I ask again, that the same Lord brings it to the perfection of virtue only in the course of time? I should be glad to learn the reason, for I know it not. I do know, however, that in the beginning, when a trance lasts only the twinkling of an eye, and is almost imperceptible but for the effects it produces, the degree of strength which God then gives is very different from that which He gives when this grace is a trance of longer duration. 23. Very often, when thinking of this, have I imagined the reason might be, that the soul does not despise itself all at once, till our Lord instructs it by degrees, and makes it resolute, and gives it the strength of manhood, so that it may trample utterly upon everything. He gave this strength to the Magdalene in a moment. He gives the same grace to others, according to the measure of their abandonment of themselves into the hands of His Majesty, that He may do with them as He will. We never thoroughly believe that God rewards a hundredfold even in this life. [24] 24. I also thought of this comparison: supposing grace given to those who are far advanced to be the same with that given to those who are but beginners, we may then liken it to a certain food of which many persons partake: they who eat a little retain the savour of it for a moment, they who eat more are nourished by it, but those who eat much receive life and strength. Now, the soul may eat so frequently and so abundantly of this food of life as to have no pleasure in eating any other food, because it sees how much good it derives from it. Its taste is now so formed upon it, that it would rather not live than have to eat any other food; for all food but this has no other effect than to take away the sweet savour which this good food leaves behind. 25. Further, the conversation of good people does not profit us in one day as much as it does in many; and we may converse with them long enough to become like them, by the grace of God. In short, the whole matter is as His Majesty wills. He gives His grace to whom He pleases; but much depends on this: he who begins to receive this grace must make a firm resolution to detach himself from all things, and esteem this grace according to reason. 26. It seems also to me as if His Majesty were going about to try those who love Him,--now one, now another,--revealing Himself in supreme joy, so as to quicken our belief, if it should be dead, in what He will give us, saying, Behold! this is but a drop of the immense sea of blessings; for He leaves nothing undone for those He loves; and as He sees them receive it, so He gives, and He gives Himself. He loves those who love Him. Oh, how dear He is!--how good a Friend! O my soul's Lord, who can find words to describe what Thou givest to those who trust in Thee, and what they lose who come to this state, and yet dwell in themselves! Oh, let not this be so, O my Lord! for Thou doest more than this when Thou comest to a lodging so mean as mine. Blessed be Thou for ever and ever! 27. I now humbly ask you, my father, if you mean to discuss what I have written on prayer with spiritual persons, to see that they are so really; for if they be persons who know only one way, or who have stood still midway, they will not be able to understand the matter. There are also some whom God leads at once by the highest way; these think that others might advance in the same manner--quiet the understanding, and make bodily objects none of their means; but these people will remain dry as a stick. Others, also, there are who, having for a moment attained to the prayer of quiet, think forthwith that, as they have had the one, so they may have the other. These instead of advancing, go back, as I said before. [25] So, throughout, experience and discretion are necessary. May our Lord, of His goodness, bestow them on us! 1. See Inner Fortress, vi. 7, § 4. 2. This opinion is supposed to be justified by the words of St. Thomas, 3 Sent. dist. 22, qu. 3, art. 1, ad quintum. "Corporalis præsentia Christi in duobus poterat esse nociva. Primo, quantum ad fidem, quia videntes Eum in forma in qua erat minor Patre, non ita de facili crederent Eum æqualem Patri, ut dicit glossa super Joannem. Secundo, quantum ad dilectionem, quia Eum non solum spiritualiter, sed etiam carnaliter diligeremus, conversantes cum Ipso corporaliter, et hoc est de imperfectione dilectionis." 3. St. John xvi. 7: "Expedit vobis ut Ego vadam; si enim non abiero, Paracletus non veniet ad vos." 4. This sentence is in the margin of the original MS., not in the text, but in the handwriting of the Saint (De la Fuente). 5. "I mean by lately . . . and visions" is in the margin of the MS., but in the handwriting of the Saint (De la Fuente). 6. Ch. xxviii. § 4. 7. St. Matt. iii. 17: "Hic est Filius Meus dilectus, in quo Mihi complacui." 8. St. John x. 7, 9: "Ego sum ostium." 9. See St. John of the Cross, Mount Carmel, bk. iii. ch. i. p. 212. 10. Ch. xii. §§ 5, 7. 11. Ch. xv. § 21. 12. Ch. xx. § 2. 13. St. Luke v. 8: "Exi a me, quia homo peccator sum, Domine." 14. Ch. xii. § 6. 15. Ch. xxviii. 16. Psalm lxxii. 22: "Et ego ad nihilum redactus sum, et nescivi." 17. Isaias liii. 3: "Virum dolorum, et scientem infirmitatem." 18. Ch. xi. § 15. 19. St. Luke xvii. 10: "Servi inutiles sumus." 20. Ch. xi. § 11. 21. St. Luke xiv. 8: "Non discumbas in primo loco." See Way of Perfection, ch. xxvi. § 1; but ch. xvii. of the old editions. 22. Ch. xi. § 23, ch. xviii. § 6. 23. Os. ii. 14: "Ducam eam in solitudinem." 24. St. Matt. xix. 29: "Qui reliquerit domum, . . . centuplum accipiet." 25. Ch. xii. § 5. Chapter XXIII. The Saint Resumes the History of Her Life. Aiming at Perfection. Means Whereby It May Be Gained. Instructions for Confessors. 1. I shall now return to that point in my life where I broke off, [1] having made, I believe, a longer digression than I need have made, in order that what is still to come may be more clearly understood. Henceforth, it is another and a new book,--I mean, another and a new life. Hitherto, my life was my own; my life, since I began to explain these methods of prayer, is the life which God lived in me,--so it seems to me; for I feel it to be impossible that I should have escaped in so short a time from ways and works that were so wicked. May our Lord be praised, who has delivered me from myself! 2. When, then, I began to avoid the occasions of sin, and to give myself more unto prayer, our Lord also began to bestow His graces upon me, as one who desired, so it seemed, that I too should be willing to receive them. His Majesty began to give me most frequently the grace of the prayer of quiet, and very often that of union, which lasted some time. But as, in these days, women have fallen into great delusions and deceits of Satan, [2] I began to be afraid, because the joy and sweetness which I felt were so great, and very often beyond my power to avoid. On the other hand, I felt in myself a very deep conviction that God was with me, especially when I was in prayer. I saw, too, that I grew better and stronger thereby. 3. But if I was a little distracted, I began to be afraid, and to imagine that perhaps it was Satan that suspended my understanding, making me think it to be good, in order to withdraw me from mental prayer, hinder my meditation on the Passion, and debar me the use of my understanding: this seemed to me, who did not comprehend the matter, to be a grievous loss but, as His Majesty was pleased to give me light to offend Him no more, and to understand how much I owed Him, this fear so grew upon me, that it made me seek diligently for spiritual persons with whom I might treat of my state. I had already heard of some; for the Fathers of the Society of Jesus had come hither; [3] and I, though I knew none of them, was greatly attracted by them, merely because I had heard of their way of life and of prayer; but I did not think myself fit to speak to them, or strong enough to obey them; and this made me still more afraid; for to converse with them, and remain what I was, seemed to me somewhat rude. 4. I spent some time in this state, till, after much inward contention and fear, I determined to confer with some spiritual person, to ask him to tell me what that method of prayer was which I was using, and to show me whether I was in error. I was also resolved to do everything I could not to offend God; for the want of courage of which I was conscious, as I said before, [4] made me so timid. Was there ever delusion so great as mine, O my God, when I withdrew from good in order to become good! The devil must lay much stress on this in the beginning of a course of virtue; for I could not overcome my repugnance. He knows that the whole relief of the soul consists in conferring with the friends of God. Hence it was that no time was fixed in which I should resolve to do this. I waited to grow better first, as I did before when I ceased to pray, [5]--and perhaps I never should have become better; for I had now sunk so deeply into the petty ways of an evil habit,--I could not convince myself that they were wrong,--that I needed the help of others, who should hold out a hand to raise me up. Blessed be Thou, O Lord!--for the first hand outstretched to me was Thine. 5. When I saw that my fear was going so far, it struck me--because I was making progress in prayer--that this must be a great blessing, or a very great evil; for I understood perfectly that what had happened was something supernatural, because at times I was unable to withstand it; to have it when I would was also impossible. I thought to myself that there was no help for it, but in keeping my conscience pure, avoiding every occasion even of venial sins; for if it was the work of the Spirit of God, the gain was clear; and if the work of Satan, so long as I strove to please, and did not offend, our Lord, Satan could do me little harm; on the contrary, he must lose in the struggle. Determined on this course, and always praying God to help me, striving also after purity of conscience for some days, I saw that my soul had not strength to go forth alone to a perfection so great. I had certain attachments to trifles, which, though not very wrong in themselves, were yet enough to ruin all. 6. I was told of a learned ecclesiastic, [6] dwelling in this city, whose goodness and pious life our Lord was beginning to make known to the world. I contrived to make his acquaintance through a saintly nobleman [7] living in the same place. This latter is a married man; but his life is so edifying and virtuous, so given to prayer, and so full of charity, that the goodness and perfection of it shine forth in all he does: and most justly so; for many souls have been greatly blessed through him, because of his great gifts, which, though his condition of a layman be a hindrance to him, never lie idle. He is a man of great sense, and very gentle with all people; his conversation is never wearisome, but so sweet and gracious, as well as upright and holy, that he pleases everybody very much with whom he has any relations. He directs it all to the great good of those souls with whom he converses and he seems to have no other end in view but to do all he may be permitted to do for all men, and make them content. 7. This blessed and holy man, then, seems to me, by the pains he took, to have been the beginning of salvation to my soul. His humility in his relations with me makes me wonder; for he had spent, I believe, nearly forty years in prayer,--it may be two or three years less,--and all his life was ordered with that perfection which his state admitted. His wife is so great a servant of God, and so full of charity, that nothing is lost to him on her account, [8]--in short, she was the chosen wife of one who God knew would serve Him so well. Some of their kindred are married to some of mine. Besides, I had also much communication with another great servant of God, married to one of my first cousins. 8. It was thus I contrived that the ecclesiastic I speak of, who was so great a servant of God, and his great friend, should come to speak to me, intending to confess to him, and to take him for my director. When he had brought him to speak to me, I, in the greatest confusion at finding myself in the presence of so holy a man, revealed to him the state of my soul, and my way of prayer. He would not be my confessor; he said that he was very much occupied: and so, indeed, he was. He began with a holy resolution to direct me as if I was strong,--I ought to have been strong, according to the method of prayer which he saw I used,--so that I should in nothing offend God. When I saw that he was resolved to make me break off at once with the petty ways I spoke of before, [9] and that I had not the courage to go forth at once in the perfection he required of me, I was distressed; and when I perceived that he ordered the affairs of my soul as if I ought to be perfect at once, I saw that much more care was necessary in my case. In a word, I felt that the means he would have employed were not those by which my soul could be helped onwards; for they were fitted for a soul more perfect than mine; and though the graces I had received from God were very many, I was still at the very beginning in the matter of virtue and of mortification. 9. I believe certainly, if I had only had this ecclesiastic to confer with, that my soul would have made no progress; for the pain it gave me to see that I was not doing--and, as I thought, could not do--what he told me, was enough to destroy all hope, and make me abandon the matter altogether. I wonder at times how it was that he, being one who had a particular grace for the direction of beginners in the way of God, was not permitted to understand my case, or to undertake the care of my soul. I see it was all for my greater good, in order that I might know and converse with persons so holy as the members of the Society of Jesus. 10. After this, I arranged with that saintly nobleman that he should come and see me now and then. It shows how deep his humility was; for he consented to converse with a person so wicked as I was. He began his visits, he encouraged me, and told me that I ought not to suppose I could give up everything in one day; God would bring it about by degrees: he himself had for some years been unable to free himself from some very slight imperfections. O humility! what great blessings thou bringest to those in whom thou dwellest, and to them who draw near to those who possess thee! This holy man--for I think I may justly call him so--told me of weaknesses of his own, in order to help me. He, in his humility, thought them weaknesses; but, if we consider his state, they were neither faults nor imperfections; yet, in my state, it was a very great fault to be subject to them. 11. I am not saying this without a meaning, though I seem to be enlarging on trifles; but these trifles contribute so much towards the beginning of the soul's progress and its flight upwards, though it has no wings, as they say; and yet no one will believe it who has not had experience of it; but, as I hope in God that your reverence will help many a soul, I speak of it here. My whole salvation depended on his knowing how to treat me, on his humility, on the charity with which he conversed with me, and on his patient endurance of me when he saw that I did not mend my ways at once. He went on discreetly, by degrees showing me how to overcome Satan. My affection for him so grew upon me, that I never was more at ease than on the day I used to see him. I saw him, however, very rarely. When he was long in coming, I used to be very much distressed, thinking that he would not see me because I was so wicked. 12. When he found out my great imperfections, they might well have been sins, though since I conversed with him I am somewhat improved,--and when I recounted to him, in order to obtain light from him, the great graces which God had bestowed upon me, he told me that these things were inconsistent one with another; that these consolations were given to people who had made great progress, and led mortified lives; that he could not help being very much afraid--he thought that the evil spirit might have something to do in my case; he would not decide that question, however, but he would have me carefully consider my whole method of prayer, and then tell him of it. That was the difficulty: I did not understand it myself, and so I could tell him nothing of my prayer; for the grace to understand it--and, understanding it, to describe it--has only lately been given me of God. This saying of his, together with the fear I was in, distressed me exceedingly, and I cried; for certainly I was anxious to please God, and I could not persuade myself that Satan had anything to do with it. But I was afraid, on account of my great sins, that God might leave me blind, so that I should understand nothing. 13. Looking into books to see if I could find anything there by which I might recognise the prayer I practised, I found in one of them, called the Ascent of the Mount, [10] and in that part of it which relates to the union of the soul with God, all those marks which I had in myself, in that I could not think of anything. This is what I most dwelt on--that I could think of nothing when I was in prayer. I marked that passage, and gave him the book, that he, and the ecclesiastic mentioned before, [11] saint and servant of God, might consider it, and tell me what I should do. If they thought it right, I would give up that method of prayer altogether; for why should I expose myself to danger, when, at the end of nearly twenty years, during which I had used it, I had gained nothing, but had fallen into a delusion of the devil? It was better for me to give it up. And yet this seemed to me hard; for I had already discovered what my soul would become without prayer. Everything seemed full of trouble. I was like a person in the middle of a river, who, in whatever direction he may turn, fears a still greater danger, and is well-nigh drowned. This is a very great trial, and I have gone through many like it, as I shall show hereafter; [12] and though it does not seem to be of any importance, it will perhaps be advantageous to understand how the spirit is to be tried. 14. And certainly the affliction to be borne is great, and caution is necessary, particularly in the case of women,--for our weakness is great,--and much evil may be the result of telling them very distinctly that the devil is busy with them; yea, rather, the matter should be very carefully considered, and they should be removed out of reach of the dangers that may arise. They should be advised to keep things secret; and it is necessary, also, that their secret should be kept. I am speaking of this as one to whom it has been a sore trouble; for some of those with whom I spoke of my prayer did not keep my secret, but, making inquiries one of another, for a good purpose, did me much harm; for they made things known which might well have remained secret, because not intended for every one and it seemed as if I had made them public myself. [13] 15. I believe that our Lord permitted [14] this to be done without sin on their part, in order that I might suffer. I do not say that they revealed anything I discussed with them in confession; still, as they were persons to whom, in my fears, I gave a full account of myself, in order that they might give me light, I thought they ought to have been silent. Nevertheless, I never dared to conceal anything from such persons. My meaning, then, is, that women should be directed with much discretion; their directors should encourage them, and bide the time when our Lord will help them, as He has helped me. If He had not, the greatest harm would have befallen me, for I was in great fear and dread; and as I suffered from disease of the heart, [15] I am astonished that all this did not do me a great deal of harm. 16. Then, when I had given him the book, and told the story of my life and of my sins, the best way I could in general,--for I was not in confession, because he was a layman; yet I gave him clearly to understand how wicked I was,--those two servants of God, with great charity and affection, considered what was best for me. When they had made up their minds what to say,--I was waiting for it in great dread, having begged many persons to pray to God for me, and I too had prayed much during those days,--the nobleman came to me in great distress, and said that, in the opinion of both, I was deluded by an evil spirit; that the best thing for me to do was to apply to a certain father of the Society of Jesus, who would come to me if I sent for him, saying I had need of him; that I ought, in a general confession, to give him an account of my whole life, and of the state I was in,--and all with great clearness: God would, in virtue of the Sacrament of Confession, give him more light concerning me; for those fathers were very experienced men in matters of spirituality. Further, I was not to swerve in a single point from the counsels of that father; for I was in great danger, if I had no one to direct me. 17. This answer so alarmed and distressed me, that I knew not what to do--I did nothing but cry. Being in an oratory in great affliction, not knowing what would become of me, I read in a book--it seemed as if our Lord had put it into my hands--that St. Paul said, God is faithful; [16] that He will never permit Satan to deceive those who love Him. This gave me great consolation. I began to prepare for my general confession, and to write out all the evil and all the good: a history of my life, as clearly as I understood it, and knew how to make it, omitting nothing whatever. I remember, when I saw I had written so much evil, and scarcely anything that was good, that I was exceedingly distressed and sorrowful. It pained me, also, that the nuns of the community should see me converse with such holy persons as those of the Society of Jesus; for I was afraid of my own wickedness, and I thought I should be obliged to cease from it, and give up my amusements; and that if I did not do so, I should grow worse: so I persuaded the sacristan and the portress to tell no one of it. This was of little use, after all; for when I was called down there was one at the door, as it happened, who told it to the whole convent. But what difficulties and what terrors Satan troubles them with who would draw near unto God! 18. I communicated the whole state of my soul to that servant of God [17] and he was a great servant of His, and very prudent. He understood all I told him, explained it to me, and encouraged me greatly. He said that all was very evidently the work of the Spirit of God; only it was necessary for me to go back again to my prayer, because I was not well grounded, and had not begun to understand what mortification meant,--that was true, for I do not think I knew it even by name,--that I was by no means to give up prayer; on the contrary, I was to do violence to myself in order to practise it, because God had bestowed on me such special graces as made it impossible to say whether it was, or was not, the will of our Lord to do good to many through me. He went further, for he seems to have prophesied of that which our Lord afterwards did with me, and said that I should be very much to blame if I did not correspond with the graces which God bestowed upon me. It seems to me that the Holy Ghost was speaking by his mouth in order to heal my soul, so deep was the impression he made. He made me very much ashamed of myself, and directed me by a way which seemed to change me altogether. What a grand thing it is to understand a soul! He told me to make my prayer every day on some mystery of the Passion, and that I should profit by it, and to fix my thoughts on the Sacred Humanity only, resisting to the utmost of my power those recollections and delights, to which I was not to yield in any way till he gave me further directions in the matter. 19. He left me consoled and fortified: our Lord came to my succour and to his, so that he might understand the state I was in, and how he was to direct me. I made a firm resolution not to swerve from anything he might command me, and to this day I have kept it. Our Lord be praised, who has given me grace to be obedient to my confessors, [18] however imperfectly!--and they have almost always been those blessed men of the Society of Jesus; though, as I said, I have but imperfectly obeyed them. My soul began to improve visibly, as I am now going to say. 1. At the end of ch. ix. The thirteen chapters interposed between that and this--the twenty-third--are a treatise on mystical theology. 2. She refers to Magdalene of the Cross (Reforma de los Descalços, vol. i. lib. i. c. xix. § 2). 3. The college of the Society at Avila was founded in 1555; but some of the Fathers had come thither in 1553 (De la Fuente). 4. Ch. vii. § 37. 5. Ch. xix. §§ 7, 8. 6. Gaspar Daza had formed a society of priests in Avila, and was a very laborious and holy man. It was he who said the first Mass in the monastery of St. Joseph, founded by 5t. Teresa, whom he survived, dying Nov. 24, 1592. He committed the direction of his priests to F. Baltasar Alvarez (Bouix). Juan of Avila acted much in the same way when the Jesuits settled in Avila (De la Fuente). 7. Don Francisco de Salcedo. After the death of his wife, he became a priest, and was chaplain and confessor of the Carmelite nuns of St. Joseph. For twenty years of his married life he attended regularly the theological lectures of the Dominicans, in the house of St. Thomas. His death took place Sept. 12, 1580, when he had been a priest for ten years (St. Teresa's Letters, vol. iv. letter 43, note 13: letter 368, ed. of De la Fuente). 8. Doña Mencia del Aguila (De la Fuente, in a note on letter 10, vol. ii. p. 9, where he corrects himself,--having previously called her Mencia de Avila). 9. § 4. 10. Subida del Monte Sion, by a Franciscan friar, Bernardino de Laredo (Reforma, vol. i. lib. i. c. xix. § 7). 11. § 6. 12. See ch. xxv. § 18. 13. See ch. xxviii. § 18. 14. See Relation, vii. § 17. 15. See ch. iv. § 6. 16. 1 Cor. x. 13: "Fidelis autem Deus est, qui non patietur vos tentari supra id quod potestis." 17. F. Juan de Padranos, whom St. Francis de Borja had sent in 1555, with F. Fernando Alvarez del Aguila, to found the house of the Society in Avila (De la Fuente). Ribera, i. 5, says he heard that F. Juan de Padranos gave in part the Exercises of St. Ignatius to the Saint. 18. See Relation, i. § 9. Chapter XXIV. Progress Under Obedience. Her Inability to Resist the Graces of God. God Multiplies His Graces. 1. After this my confession, my soul was so docile that, as it seems to me, there was nothing in the world I was not prepared to undertake. I began at once to make a change in many things, though my confessor never pressed me--on the contrary, he seemed to make light of it all. I was the more influenced by this, because he led me on by the way of the love of God; he left me free, and did not press me, unless I did so myself, out of love. I continued thus nearly two months, doing all I could to resist the sweetness and graces that God sent. As to my outward life, the change was visible; for our Lord gave me courage to go through with certain things, of which those who knew me--and even those in the community--said that they seemed to them extreme; and, indeed, compared with what I had been accustomed to do, they were extreme: people, therefore, had reason to say so. Yet, in those things which were of obligation, considering the habit I wore, and the profession I had made, I was still deficient. By resisting the sweetness and joys which God sent me, I gained this, that His Majesty taught me Himself; for, previously, I used to think that, in order to obtain sweetness in prayer, it was necessary for me to hide myself in secret places, and so I scarcely dared to stir. Afterwards, I saw how little that was to the purpose; for the more I tried to distract myself, the more our Lord poured over me that sweetness and joy which seemed to me to be flowing around me, so that I could not in any way escape from it: and so it was. I was so careful about this resistance, that it was a pain to me. But our Lord was more careful to show His mercies, and during those two months to reveal Himself more than before, so that I might the better comprehend that it was no longer in my power to resist Him. 2. I began with a renewed love of the most Sacred Humanity; my prayer began to be solid, like a house, the foundations of which are strong; and I was inclined to practise greater penance, having been negligent in this matter hitherto because of my great infirmities. The holy man who heard my confession told me that certain penances would not hurt me, and that God perhaps sent me so much sickness because I did no penance; His Majesty would therefore impose it Himself. He ordered me to practise certain acts of mortification not very pleasant for me. [1] I did so, because I felt that our Lord was enjoining it all, and giving him grace to command me in such a way as to make me obedient unto him. 3. My soul was now sensitive to every offence I committed against God, however slight it might be; so much so, that if I had any superfluity about me, I could not recollect myself in prayer till I had got rid of it. I prayed earnestly that our Lord would hold me by the hand, and not suffer me to fall again, now that I was under the direction of His servants. I thought that would be a great evil, and that they would lose their credit through me. 4. At this time, Father Francis, who was Duke of Gandia, [2] came here; he had left all he possessed some years before, and had entered the Society of Jesus. My confessor, and the nobleman of whom I spoke before, [3] contrived that he should visit me, in order that I might speak to him, and give him an account of my way of prayer; for they knew him to be greatly favoured and comforted of God: he had given up much, and was rewarded for it even in this life. When he had heard me, he said to me that it was the work of the Spirit of God, [4] and that he thought it was not right now to prolong that resistance; that hitherto it had been safe enough,--only, I should always begin my prayer by meditating on some part of the Passion and that if our Lord should then raise up my spirit, I should make no resistance, but suffer His Majesty to raise it upwards, I myself not seeking it. He gave both medicine and advice, as one who had made great progress himself; for experience is very important in these matters. He said that further resistance would be a mistake. I was exceedingly consoled; so, too, was the nobleman, who rejoiced greatly when he was told that it was the work of God. He always helped me and gave me advice according to his power,--and that power was great. 5. At this time, they changed my confessor's residence. I felt it very much, for I thought I should go back to my wickedness, and that it was not possible to find another such as he. My soul was, as it were, in a desert, most sorrowful and afraid. I knew not what to do with myself. One of my kinswomen contrived to get me into her house, and I contrived at once to find another confessor, [5] in the Society of Jesus. It pleased our Lord that I should commence a friendship with a noble lady, [6] a widow, much given to prayer, who had much to do with the fathers. She made her own confessor [7] hear me, and I remained in her house some days. She lived near, and I delighted in the many conferences I had with the fathers; for merely by observing the holiness of their way of life, I felt that my soul profited exceedingly. 6. This father began by putting me in the way of greater perfection. He used to say to me, that I ought to leave nothing undone that I might be wholly pleasing unto God. He was, however, very prudent and very gentle at the same time; for my soul was not at all strong, but rather very weak, especially as to giving up certain friendships, though I did not offend God by them: there was much natural affection in them, and I thought it would be an act of ingratitude if I broke them off. And so, as I did not offend God, I asked him if I must be ungrateful. He told me to lay the matter before God for a few days, and recite the hymn, "Veni, Creator," that God might enlighten me as to the better course. One day, having prayed for some time, and implored our Lord to help me to please Him in all things, I began the hymn; and as I was saying it, I fell into a trance--so suddenly, that I was, as it were, carried out of myself. I could have no doubt about it, for it was most plain. 7. This was the first time that our Lord bestowed on me the grace of ecstasy. I heard these words: "I will not have thee converse with men, but with angels." This made me wonder very much; for the commotion of my spirit was great, and these words were uttered in the very depth of my soul. They made me afraid,--though, on the other hand, they gave me great comfort, which, when I had lost the fear,--caused, I believe, by the strangeness of the visitation,--remained with me. 8. Those words have been fulfilled; for I have never been able to form friendship with, nor have any comfort in, nor any particular love for, any persons whatever except those who, as I believe, love God, and who strive to serve Him. It has not been in my power to do it. It is nothing to me that they are my kindred, or my friends, if I do not know them to be lovers of God, or persons given to prayer. It is to me a painful cross to converse with any one. This is the truth, so far as I can judge. [8] From that day forth, I have had courage so great as to leave all things for God, who in one moment--and it seems to me but a moment--was pleased to change His servant into another person. Accordingly, there was no necessity for laying further commands upon me in this matter. When my confessor saw how much I clung to these friendships, he did not venture to bid me distinctly to give them up. He must have waited till our Lord did the work--as He did Himself. Nor did I think myself that I could succeed; for I had tried before, and the pain it gave me was so great that I abandoned the attempt, on the ground that there was nothing unseemly in those attachments. Now our Lord set me at liberty, and gave me strength also to use it. 9. So I told my confessor of it, and gave up everything, according to his advice. It did a great deal of good to those with whom I used to converse, to see my determination. God be blessed for ever! Who in one moment set me free, while I had been for many years making many efforts, and had never succeeded, very often also doing such violence to myself as injured my health; but, as it was done by Him Who is almighty, and the true Lord of all, it gave me no pain whatever. 1. The Saint now treated her body with extreme severity, disciplining herself even unto blood (Reforma, vol. i. lib. i. c. xx. § 4). 2. St. Francis de Borja came to Avila, where St. Teresa lived, in 1557 (De la Fuente). This passage must have been written after the foundation of St. Joseph, for it was not in the first Life, as the Saint says, ch. x. § 11, that he kept secret the names of herself and all others. 3. Ch. xxiii. § 6. 4. See Relation, viii. § 6. 5. Who he was is not certainly known. The Bollandists decline to give an opinion: but F. Bouix thinks it was F. Ferdinand Alvarez, who became her confessor on the removal of F. Juan de Padranos, and that it was to him she confessed till she placed herself under the direction of F. Baltasar Alvarez, the confessor of Doña Guiomar, as it is stated in the next paragraph,--unless the confessor there mentioned was F. Ferdinand. 6. Doña Guiomar de Ulloa. See below, ch. xxxii. § 13. 7. If this confessor was F. Baltasar Alvarez, the Saint, F. Bouix observes, passes rapidly over the history of the year 1557, and the greater part, perhaps, of 1558; for F. Baltasar was ordained priest only in the latter year. 8. See Relation, i. § 6. Chapter XXV. Divine Locutions. Discussions on That Subject. 1. It will be as well, I think, to explain these locutions of God, and to describe what the soul feels when it receives them, in order that you, my father, may understand the matter; for ever since that time of which I am speaking, when our Lord granted me that grace, it has been an ordinary occurrence until now, as will appear by what I have yet to say. [1] 2. The words are very distinctly formed; but by the bodily ear they are not heard. They are, however, much more clearly understood than they would be if they were heard by the ear. It is impossible not to understand them, whatever resistance we may offer. When we wish not to hear anything in this world, we can stop our ears, or give attention to something else: so that, even if we do hear, at least we can refuse to understand. In this locution of God addressed to the soul there is no escape, for in spite of ourselves we must listen; and the understanding must apply itself so thoroughly to the comprehension of that which God wills we should hear, that it is nothing to the purpose whether we will it or not; for it is His will, Who can do all things. We should understand that His will must be done; and He reveals Himself as our true Lord, having dominion over us. I know this by much experience; for my resistance lasted nearly two years, [2] because of the great fear I was in: and even now I resist occasionally; but it is of no use. 3. I should like to explain the delusions which may happen here, though he who has had much experience will run little or no risk, I think; but the experience must be great. I should like to explain also how those locutions which come from the Good Spirit differ from those which come from an evil spirit; and, further, how they may be but an apprehension of the understanding,--for that is possible,--or even words which the mind addressed to itself. I do not know if it be so but even this very day I thought it possible. I know by experience in many ways, when these locutions come from God. I have been told things two or three years beforehand, which have all come to pass; and in none of them have I been hitherto deceived. There are also other things in which the Spirit of God may be clearly traced, as I shall relate by and by. [3] 4. It seems to me that a person commending a matter to God with great love and earnestness may think that he hears in some way or other whether his prayer will be granted or not, and this is quite possible; but he who has heard the divine locution will see clearly enough what this is, because there is a great difference between the two. If it be anything which the understanding has fashioned, however cunningly it may have done so, he sees that it is the understanding which has arranged that locution, and that it is speaking of itself. This is nothing else but a word uttered by one, and listened to by another: in that case, the understanding will see that it has not been listening only, but also forming the words; and the words it forms are something indistinct, fantastic, and not clear like the divine locutions. It is in our power to turn away our attention from these locutions of our own, just as we can be silent when we are speaking; but, with respect to the former, that cannot be done. 5. There is another test more decisive still. The words formed by the understanding effect nothing; but, when our Lord speaks, it is at once word and work; and though the words may not be meant to stir up our devotion, but are rather words of reproof, they dispose a soul at once, strengthen it, make it tender, give it light, console and calm it; and if it should be in dryness, or in trouble and uneasiness, all is removed, as if by the action of a hand, and even better; for it seems as if our Lord would have the soul understand that He is all-powerful, and that His words are deeds. 6. It seems to me that there is as much difference between these two locutions as there is between speaking and listening, neither more nor less; for when I speak, as I have just said, [4] I go on with my understanding arranging what I am saying; but if I am spoken to by others, I do nothing else but listen, without any labour. The human locution is as something which we cannot well make out, as if we were half asleep; but the divine locution is a voice so clear that not a syllable of its utterance is lost. It may occur, too, when the understanding and the soul are so troubled and distracted that they cannot form one sentence correctly; and yet grand sentences, perfectly arranged, such as the soul in its most recollected state never could have formed, are uttered, and at the first word, as I said, [5] change it utterly. Still less could it have formed them if they are uttered in an ecstasy, when the faculties of the soul are suspended; for how should the soul then comprehend anything, when it remembers nothing?--yea, rather, how can it remember them then, when the memory can hardly do anything at all, and the imagination is, as it were, suspended? 7. But it is to be observed, that if we see visions and hear words it never is as at the time when the soul is in union in the very rapture itself,--so it seems to me. At that moment, as I have shown,--I think it was when I was speaking of the second water, [6]--all the faculties of the soul are suspended; and, as I think, neither vision, nor understanding, nor hearing, is possible at that time. The soul is then wholly in the power of another; and in that instant--a very brief one, in my opinion--our Lord leaves it free for nothing whatever; but when this instant is passed, the soul continuing still entranced, then is the time of which I am speaking; for the faculties, though not completely suspended, are so disposed that they are scarcely active, being, as it were, absorbed, and incapable of making any reflections. 8. There are so many ways of ascertaining the nature of these locutions, that if a person be once deceived, he will not be deceived often. I mean, that a soul accustomed to them, and on its guard, will most clearly see what they are; for, setting other considerations aside which prove what I have said, the human locution produces no effect, neither does the soul accept it,--though it must admit the other, whether we like it or not,--nor does it believe it; on the contrary, it is known to be a delusion of the understanding, and is therefore put away as we would put away the ravings of a lunatic. 9. But as to the divine locution, we listen to that as we do to a person of great holiness, learning, or authority, whom we know to be incapable of uttering a falsehood. And yet this is an inadequate illustration; for these locutions proceed occasionally in such great majesty that, without our recollecting who it is that utters them, they make us tremble if they be words of reproof, and die of love if words of love. They are also, as I have said, [7] matters of which the memory has not the least recollection; and expressions so full are uttered so rapidly, that much time must have been spent in arranging them, if we formed them ourselves; and so it seems to me that we cannot possibly be ignorant at the time that we have never formed them ourselves at all. 10. There is no reason, therefore, why I should dwell longer on this matter. It is a wonder to me that any experienced person, unless he deliberately chooses to do so, can fall into delusions. It has often happened to me, when I had doubts, to distrust what I had heard, and to think that it was all imagination,--but this I did afterwards: for at the moment that is impossible,--and at a later time to see the whole fulfilled; for our Lord makes the words dwell in the memory so that they cannot be forgotten. Now, that which comes forth from our understanding is, as it were, the first movement of thought, which passes away and is forgotten; but the divine locution is a work done; and though some of it may be forgotten, and time have lapsed, yet is not so wholly forgotten that the memory loses all traces of what was once spoken,--unless, indeed, after very long time, or unless the locution were words of grace or of instruction. But as to prophetic words, they are never forgotten, in my opinion; at least, I have never forgotten any,--and yet my memory is weak. 11. I repeat it, unless a soul be so wicked as to pretend that it has these locutions, which would be a great sin, and say that it hears divine words when it hears nothing of the kind, it cannot possibly fail to see clearly that itself arranges the words, and utters them to itself. That seems to me altogether impossible for any soul that has ever known the Spirit of God. If it has not, it may continue all its life long in this delusion, and imagine that it hears and understands, though I know not how that can be. A soul desires to hear these locutions, or it does not; if it does not, it is distressed because it hears them, and is unwilling to listen to them, because of a thousand fears which they occasion, and for many other reasons it has for being quiet in prayer without these interruptions. How is it that the understanding has time enough to arrange these locutions? They require time. 12. But, on the other side, the divine locutions instruct us without loss of time, and we understand matters which seem to require a month on our part to arrange. The understanding itself, and the soul, stand amazed at some of the things we understand. So it is; and he who has any experience of it will see that what I am saying is literally true. I give God thanks that I have been able thus to explain it. I end by saying that, in my opinion, we may hear the locutions that proceed from the understanding whenever we like, and think that we hear them whenever we pray. But it is not so with the divine locutions: for many days I may desire to hear them, and I cannot; and at other times, even when I would not, as I said before, [8] hear them, I must. It seems to me that any one disposed to deceive people by saying that he heard from God that which he has invented himself, might as easily say that he heard it with his bodily ears. It is most certainly true that I never imagined there was any other way of hearing or understanding till I had proof of it in myself; and so, as I have said before, [9] it gave me trouble enough. 13. Locutions that come from Satan not only do not leave any good effects behind, but do leave evil effects. This has happened to me; but not more than two or three times. Our Lord warned me at once that they came from Satan. Over and above the great aridity which remains in the soul after these evil locutions, there is also a certain disquiet, such as I have had on many other occasions, when, by our Lord's permission, I fell into great temptations and travail of soul in diverse ways; and though I am in trouble often enough, as I shall show hereafter, [10] yet this disquiet is such that I know not whence it comes; only the soul seems to resist, is troubled and distressed, without knowing why; for the words of Satan are good, and not evil. I am thinking whether this may not be so because one spirit is conscious of the presence of another. 14. The sweetness and joy which Satan gives are, in my opinion, of a very different kind. By means of these sweetnesses he may deceive any one who does not, or who never did, taste of the sweetness of God,--by which I mean a certain sweet, strong, impressive, delightsome, and calm refreshing. Those little, fervid bursts of tears, and other slight emotions,--for at the first breath of persecution these flowers wither,--I do not call devotion, though they are a good beginning, and are holy impressions; but they are not a test to determine whether these locutions come from a good or an evil spirit. It is therefore best for us to proceed always with great caution; for those persons who have advanced in prayer only so far as this may most easily fall into delusions, if they have visions or revelations. For myself, I never had a single vision or revelation till God had led me on to the prayer of union,--unless it be on that occasion, of which I have spoken before, [11] now many years ago, when I saw our Lord. Oh, that His Majesty had been pleased to let me then understand that it was a true vision, as I have since understood it was! it would have been no slight blessing to me. 15. After these locutions of the evil one, the soul is never gentle, but is, as it were, terrified, and greatly disgusted. 16. I look upon it as a most certain truth, that the devil will never deceive, and that God will not suffer him to deceive, the soul which has no confidence whatever in itself; which is strong in faith, and resolved to undergo a thousand deaths for any one article of the creed; which in its love of the faith, infused of God once for all,--a faith living and strong,--always labours, seeking for further light on this side and on that, to mould itself on the teaching of the Church, as one already deeply grounded in the truth. No imaginable revelations, not even if it saw the heavens open, could make that soul swerve in any degree from the doctrine of the Church. If, however, it should at any time find itself wavering even in thought on this point, or stopping to say to itself, If God says this to me, it may be true, as well as what He said to the Saints--the soul must not be sure of it. I do not mean that it so believes, only that Satan has taken the first step towards tempting it; and the giving way to the first movements of a thought like this is evidently most wrong. I believe, however, that these first movements will not take place if the soul is so strong in the matter--as that soul is to whom our Lord sends these graces--that it seems as if it could crush the evil spirits in defence of the very least of the truths which the Church holds. 17. If the soul does not discern this great strength in itself, and if the particular devotion or vision help it not onwards, then it must not look upon it as safe. For though at first the soul is conscious of no harm, great harm may by degrees ensue; because, so far as I can see, and by experience understand, that which purports to come from God is received only in so far as it corresponds with the sacred writings; but if it varies therefrom ever so little, I am incomparably more convinced that it comes from Satan than I am now convinced it comes from God, however deep that conviction may be. In this case, there is no need to ask for signs, nor from what spirit it proceeds, because this varying is so clear a sign of the devil's presence, that if all the world were to assure me that it came from God, I would not believe it. The fact is, that all good seems to be lost out of sight, and to have fled from the soul, when the devil has spoken to it; the soul is thrown into a state of disgust, and is troubled, able to do no good thing whatever--for if it conceives good desires, they are not strong; its humility is fictitious, disturbed, and without sweetness. Any one who has ever tasted of the Spirit of God will, I think, understand it. 18. Nevertheless, Satan has many devices; and so there is nothing more certain than that it is safer to be afraid, and always on our guard, under a learned director, from whom nothing is concealed. If we do this, no harm can befall us, though much has befallen me through the excessive fears which possessed some people. For instance, it happened so once to me, when many persons in whom I had great confidence, and with good reason, had assembled together,--five or six in number, I think,--and all very great servants of God. It is true, my relations were with one of them only; but by his orders made my state known to the others. They had many conferences together about my necessities; for they had great affection for me, and were afraid I was under a delusion. I, too, was very much afraid whenever I was not occupied in prayer; but when I prayed, and our Lord bestowed His graces upon me, I was instantly reassured. My confessor told me they were all of opinion that I was deceived by Satan; that I must communicate less frequently, and contrive to distract myself in such a way as to be less alone. 19. I was in great fear myself, as I have just said, and my disease of the heart [12] contributed thereto, so that very often I did not dare to remain alone in my cell during the day. When I found so many maintain this, and myself unable to believe them, I had at once a most grievous scruple; for it seemed to me that I had very little humility, especially as they all led lives incomparably better than mine: they were also learned men. Why should I not believe them? I did all I could to believe them. I reflected on my wicked life, and therefore what they said to me must be true. 20. In this distress, I quitted the church, [13] and entered an oratory. I had not been to Communion for many days, nor had I been alone, which was all my comfort. I had no one to speak to, for every one was against me. Some, I thought, made a mock of me when I spoke to them of my prayer, as if I were a person under delusions of the imagination; others warned my confessor to be on his guard against me; and some said it was clear the whole was an operation of Satan. My confessor, though he agreed with them for the sake of trying me, as I understood afterwards, always comforted me: and he alone did so. He told me that, if I did not offend God, my prayer, even if it was the work of Satan, could do me no harm; that I should be delivered from it. He bade me pray much to God: he himself, and all his penitents, and many others did so earnestly; I, too, with all my might, and as many as I knew to be servants of God, prayed that His Majesty would be pleased to lead me by another way. This lasted, I think, about two years; and this was the subject of my continual prayer to our Lord. 21. But there was no comfort for me when I thought of the possibility that Satan could speak to me so often. Now that I was never alone for prayer, our Lord made me recollected even during conversation: He spoke what He pleased,--I could not avoid it; and, though it distressed me, I was forced to listen. I was by myself, having no one in whom I could find any comfort; unable to pray or read, like a person stunned by heavy trials, and by the dread that the evil one had deluded me; utterly disquieted and wearied, not knowing what would become of me. I have been occasionally--yea, very often--in distress, but never before in distress so great. I was in this state for four or five hours; there was no comfort for me, either from heaven or on earth--only our Lord left me to suffer, afraid of a thousand dangers. 22. O my Lord, how true a friend art Thou! how powerful! Thou showest Thy power when Thou wilt; and Thou dost will it always, if only we will it also. Let the whole creation praise Thee, O Thou Lord of the world! Oh, that a voice might go forth over all the earth, proclaiming Thy faithfulness to those who love Thee! All things fail; but Thou, Lord of all, never failest! They who love Thee, oh, how little they have to suffer! oh, how gently, how tenderly, how sweetly Thou, O my Lord, dealest with them! Oh, that no one had ever been occupied with any other love than Thine! It seems as if Thou didst subject those who love Thee to a severe trial: but it is in order that they may learn, in the depths of that trial, the depths of Thy love. O my God, oh, that I had understanding and learning, and a new language, in order to magnify Thy works, according to the knowledge of them which my soul possesses! Everything fails me, O my Lord; but if Thou wilt not abandon me, I will never fail Thee. Let all the learned rise up against me,--let the whole creation persecute me,--let the evil spirits torment me,--but do Thou, O Lord, fail me not; for I know by experience now the blessedness of that deliverance which Thou dost effect for those who trust only in Thee. In this distress,--for then I had never had a single vision,--these Thy words alone were enough to remove it, and give me perfect peace: "Be not afraid, my daughter: it is I; and I will not abandon thee. Fear not." [14] 23. It seems to me that, in the state I was in then, many hours would have been necessary to calm me, and that no one could have done it. Yet I found myself, through these words alone, tranquil and strong, courageous and confident, at rest and enlightened; in a moment, my soul seemed changed, and I felt I could maintain against all the world that my prayer was the work of God. Oh, how good is God! how good is our Lord, and how powerful! He gives not counsel only, but relief as well. His words are deeds. O my God! as He strengthens our faith, love grows. So it is, in truth; for I used frequently to recollect how our Lord, when the tempest arose, commanded the winds to be still over the sea. [15] So I said to myself: Who is He, that all my faculties should thus obey Him? Who is He, that gives light in such darkness in a moment; who softens a heart that seemed to be made of stone; who gives the waters of sweet tears, where for a long time great dryness seems to have prevailed; who inspires these desires; who bestows this courage? What have I been thinking of? what am I afraid of? what is it? I desire to serve this my Lord; I aim at nothing else but His pleasure; I seek no joy, no rest, no other good than that of doing His will. I was so confident that I had no other desire, that I could safely assert it. 24. Seeing, then, that our Lord is so powerful,--as I see and know He is,--and that the evil spirits are His slaves, of which there can be no doubt, because it is of faith,--and I a servant of this our Lord and King,--what harm can Satan do unto me? Why have I not strength enough to fight against all hell? I took up the cross in my hand,--I was changed in a moment into another person, and it seemed as if God had really given me courage enough not to be afraid of encountering all the evil spirits. It seemed to me that I could, with the cross, easily defeat them altogether. So I cried out, Come on, all of you; I am the servant of our Lord: I should like to see what you can do against me. 25. And certainly they seemed to be afraid of me, for I was left in peace: I feared them so little, that the terrors, which until now oppressed me, quitted me altogether; and though I saw them occasionally,--I shall speak of this by and by, [16]--I was never again afraid of them--on the contrary, they seemed to be afraid of me. [17] I found myself endowed with a certain authority over them, given me by the Lord of all, so that I cared no more for them than for flies. They seem to be such cowards; for their strength fails them at the sight of any one who despises them. These enemies have not the courage to assail any but those whom they see ready to give in to them, or when God permits them to do so, for the greater good of His servants, whom they may try and torment. 26. May it please His Majesty that we fear Him whom we ought to fear, [18] and understand that one venial sin can do us more harm than all hell together; for that is the truth. The evil spirits keep us in terror, because we expose ourselves to the assaults of terror by our attachments to honours, possessions, and pleasures. For then the evil spirits, uniting themselves with us,--we become our own enemies when we love and seek what we ought to hate,--do us great harm. We ourselves put weapons into their hands, that they may assail us; those very weapons with which we should defend ourselves. It is a great pity. But if, for the love of God, we hated all this, and embraced the cross, and set about His service in earnest, Satan would fly away before such realities, as from the plague. He is the friend of lies, and a lie himself. [19] He will have nothing to do with those who walk in the truth. When he sees the understanding of any one obscured, he simply helps to pluck out his eyes; if he sees any one already blind, seeking peace in vanities,--for all the things of this world are so utterly vanity, that they seem to be but the playthings of a child,--he sees at once that such a one is a child; he treats him as a child, and ventures to wrestle with him--not once, but often. 27. May it please our Lord that I be not one of these; and may His Majesty give me grace to take that for peace which is really peace, that for honour which is really honour, and that for delight which is really a delight. Let me never mistake one thing for another--and then I snap my fingers at all the devils, for they shall be afraid of me. I do not understand those terrors which make us cry out, Satan, Satan! when we may say, God, God! and make Satan tremble. Do we not know that he cannot stir without the permission of God? What does it mean? I am really much more afraid of those people who have so great a fear of the devil, than I am of the devil himself. Satan can do me no harm whatever, but they can trouble me very much, particularly if they be confessors. I have spent some years of such great anxiety, that even now I am amazed that I was able to bear it. Blessed be our Lord, who has so effectually helped me! 1. Philip. a SS. Trinitate, Theolog. Mystic. par. 2, tr. iii. disc. iv. art. v.: "Tres sunt modi divinæ locutionis; completur enim divina locutio vel verbis successivis, vel verbis formalibus, vel verbis substantialibus. Completur verbis successivis cum anima in semetipsa multum collecta quosdam discursus internos de Deo vel de aliis divina format directione; hujusmodi quippe discursus, quamvis ab ipsa sibi formati, a Deo tamen dirigente procedunt. Completur verbis formalibus cum anima vel in se collecta, vel aliis occupata, percipit quædam verba formaliter ac distincte divinitus expressa, ad quorum formationem anima passive penitus se habet. Completur verbis substantialibus cum anima vel in se collecta, vel etiam distracta, percipit quædam verba viva et efficacia, divinitus ad se directa, quæ virtutem aut substantialem effectum per ipsa significatum fortiter ac infallibiliter causant." See also St. John of the Cross, Ascent of Mount Carmel, b. ii. ch. xxviii. and the following, p. 188. 2. From 1555 to 1557, when the Saint was advised by St. Francis de Borja to make no further resistance (Bouix). 3. See ch. xxvii. § 4. 4. § 4. 5. § 5. 6. The doctrine here laid down is not that of the second water,--chs. xiv. and xv.,--but that of the third, ch. xvi. The Saint herself speaks doubtfully; and as she had but little time for writing, she could not correct nor read again what she had written (De la Fuente). 7. § 6. 8. § 2. 9. Ch. vii. § 12. 10. Ch. xxviii. § 6, ch. xxx. § 10. 11. Ch. vii. § 11. 12. Ch. iv. § 6, ch. v. § 14. 13. It was the church of the Jesuits (Bouix). 14. See Inner Fortress, vi. 3, § 5. 15. St. Matt. viii. 26; "Imperavit ventis et mari, et facta est tranquillitas magna." 16. Ch. xxxi. § 2. 17. St. John of the Cross, Spiritual Canticle, st. 24, p. 128, Eng. trans. 18. St. Matt. x. 26, 28; "Ne ergo timueritis eos, . . . sed potius timete Eum." 19. St. John viii. 44: "Mendax est, et pater ejus." Chapter XXVI. How the Fears of the Saint Vanished. How She Was Assured That Her Prayer Was the Work of the Holy Spirit. 1. I look upon the courage which our Lord has implanted in me against evil spirits as one of the greatest mercies which He has bestowed upon me; for a cowardly soul, afraid of anything but sin against God, is a very unseemly thing, when we have on our side the King omnipotent, our Lord most high, who can do all things, and subjects all things to Himself. There is nothing to be afraid of if we walk, as I said before, [1] in the truth, in the sight of His Majesty, with a pure conscience. And for this end, as I said in the same place, I would have myself all fears, that I may not for one instant offend Him who in that instant is able to destroy us. If His Majesty is pleased with us, whoever resists us--be he who he may--will be utterly disappointed. 2. It may be so, you will say; but, then, where is that soul so just as to please Him in everything?--and that is the reason why we are afraid. Certainly it is not my soul, which is most wretched, unprofitable, and full of misery. God is not like man in His ways; He knows our weakness. But the soul perceives, by the help of certain great signs, whether it loves God of a truth; for the love of those souls who have come to this state is not hidden as it was at first, but is full of high impulses, and of longings for the vision of God, as I shall show hereafter--or rather, as I have shown already. [2] Everything wearies, everything distresses, everything torments the soul, unless it be suffered with God, or for God. There is no rest which is not a weariness, because the soul knows itself to be away from its true rest; and so love is made most manifest, and, as I have just said, impossible to hide. 3. It happened to me, on another occasion to be grievously tried, and much spoken against on account of a certain affair,--of which I will speak hereafter, [3]--by almost everybody in the place where I am living, and by the members of my Order. When I was in this distress, and afflicted by many occasions of disquiet wherein I was placed, our Lord spoke to me, saying: "What art thou afraid of? knowest thou not that I am almighty? I will do what I have promised thee." And so, afterwards, was it done. I found myself at once so strong, that I could have undertaken anything, so it seemed, immediately, even if I had to endure greater trials for His service, and had to enter on a new state of suffering. These locutions are so frequent, that I cannot count them; many of them are reproaches, and He sends them when I fall into imperfections. They are enough to destroy a soul. They correct me, however; for His Majesty--as I said before [4]--gives both counsel and relief. There are others which bring my former sins into remembrance,--particularly when He is about to bestow upon me some special grace,--in such a way that the soul beholds itself as being really judged; for those reproaches of God put the truth before it so distinctly, that it knows not what to do with itself. Some are warnings against certain dangers to myself or others; many of them are prophecies of future things, three or four years beforehand; and all of them have been fulfilled: some of them I could mention. Here, then, are so many reasons for believing that they come from God, as make it impossible, I believe, for anybody to mistake them. 4. The safest course in these things is to declare, without fail, the whole state of the soul, together with the graces our Lord gives me, to a confessor who is learned, and obey him. I do so; and if I did not, I should have no peace. Nor is it right that we women, who are unlearned, should have any: there can be no danger in this, but rather great profit. This is what our Lord has often commanded me to do, and it is what I have often done. I had a confessor [5] who mortified me greatly, and now and then distressed me: he tried me heavily, for he disquieted me exceedingly; and yet he was the one who, I believe, did me the most good. Though I had a great affection for him, I was occasionally tempted to leave him; I thought that the pain he inflicted on me disturbed my prayer. Whenever I was resolved on leaving him, I used to feel instantly that I ought not to do so; and one reproach of our Lord would press more heavily upon me than all that my confessor did. Now and then, I was worn out--torture on the one hand, reproaches on the other. I required it all, for my will was but little subdued. Our Lord said to me once, that there was no obedience where there was no resolution to suffer; that I was to think of His sufferings, and then everything would be easy. 5. One of my confessors, to whom I went in the beginning, advised me once, now that my spiritual state was known to be the work of God, to keep silence, and not speak of these things to any one, on the ground that it was safer to keep these graces secret. To me, the advice seemed good, because I felt it so much whenever I had to speak of them to my confessor; [6] I was also so ashamed of myself, that I felt it more keenly at times to speak of them than I should have done in confessing grave sins, particularly when the graces I had to reveal were great. I thought they did not believe me, and that they were laughing at me. I felt it so much,--for I look on this as an irreverent treatment of the marvels of God,--that I was glad to be silent. I learned then that I had been ill-advised by that confessor, because I ought never to hide anything from my confessor; for I should find great security if I told everything; and if I did otherwise, I might at any time fall into delusions. [7] 6. Whenever our Lord commanded me to do one thing in prayer, and if my confessor forbade it, our Lord Himself told me to obey my confessor. His Majesty afterwards would change the mind of that confessor, so that he would have me do what he had forbidden before. When we were deprived of many books written in Spanish, and forbidden to read them,--I felt it deeply, for some of these books were a great comfort to me, and I could not read them in Latin,--our Lord said to me, "Be not troubled; I will give thee a living book." I could not understand why this was said to me, for at that time I had never had a vision. [8] But, a very few days afterwards, I understood it well enough; for I had so much to think of, and such reasons for self-recollection in what I saw before me and our Lord dealt so lovingly with me, in teaching me in so many ways, that I had little or no need whatever of books. His Majesty has been to me a veritable Book, in which I saw all truth. Blessed be such a Book, which leaves behind an impression of what is read therein, and in such a way that it cannot be forgotten! 7. Who can look upon our Lord, covered with wounds, and bowed down under persecutions, without accepting, loving, and longing for them? Who can behold but a part of that glory which He will give to those who serve Him without confessing that all he may do, and all he may suffer, are altogether as nothing, when we may hope for such a reward? Who can look at the torments of lost souls without acknowledging the torments of this life to be joyous delights in comparison, and confessing how much they owe to our Lord in having saved them so often from the place of torments? [9] But as, by the help of God, I shall speak more at large of certain things, I wish now to go on with the story of my life. Our Lord grant that I have been clear enough in what I have hitherto said! I feel assured that he will understand me who has had experience herein, and that he will see I have partially succeeded; but as to him who has had no such experience, I should not be surprised if he regarded it all as folly. It is enough for him that it is I who say it, in order to be free from blame; neither will I blame any one who shall so speak of it. Our Lord grant that I may never fail to do His will! Amen. 1. Ch. xxv. § 26. 2. Ch. xv. § 6. 3. Ch. xxxiii.; the foundation of the house of St. Joseph. 4. Ch. xxv. § 23. 5. The Bollandists, n. 185, attribute some of the severity with which her confessor treated the Saint to the spirit of desolation with which he was then tried himself; and, in proof of it, refer to the account which F. Baltasar Alvarez gave of his own prayer to the General of the Society. 6. See Relation, vii. § 7. 7. St. John of the Cross, Mount Carmel, bk. ii. ch. 22, § 14. 8. The visions of the Saint began in 1558 (De la Fuente) or, according to Father Bouix, in 1559. 9. St. Luke xvi. 28: "Ne et ipsi veniant in hunc locum tormentorum." Chapter XXVII. The Saint Prays to Be Directed by a Different Way. Intellectual Visions. 1. I now resume the story of my life. I was in great pain and distress; and many prayers, as I said, [1] were made on my behalf, that our Lord would lead me by another and a safer way; for this, they told me, was so suspicious. The truth is, that though I was praying to God for this, and wished I had a desire for another way, yet, when I saw the progress I was making, I was unable really to desire a change,--though I always prayed for it,--excepting on those occasions when I was extremely cast down by what people said to me, and by the fears with which they filled me. 2. I felt that I was wholly changed; I could do nothing but put myself in the hands of God: He knew what was expedient for me; let Him do with me according to His will in all things. I saw that by this way I was directed heavenwards, and that formerly I was going down to hell. I could not force myself to desire a change, nor believe that I was under the influence of Satan. Though I was doing all I could to believe the one and to desire the other, it was not in my power to do so. I offered up all my actions, if there should be any good in them, for this end; I had recourse to the Saints for whom I had a devotion, that they might deliver me from the evil one; I made novenas; I commended myself to St. Hilarion, to the Angel St. Michael, to whom I had recently become devout, for this purpose; and many other Saints I importuned, that our Lord might show me the way,--I mean, that they might obtain this for me from His Majesty. 3. At the end of two years spent in prayer by myself and others for this end, namely, that our Lord would either lead me by another way, or show the truth of this,--for now the locutions of our Lord were extremely frequent,--this happened to me. I was in prayer one day,--it was the feast of the glorious St. Peter, [2]--when I saw Christ close by me, or, to speak more correctly, felt Him; for I saw nothing with the eyes of the body, nothing with the eyes of the soul. He seemed to me to be close beside me; and I saw, too, as I believe, that it was He who was speaking to me. As I was utterly ignorant that such a vision was possible, [3] I was extremely afraid at first, and did nothing but weep; however, when He spoke to me but one word to reassure me, I recovered myself, and was, as usual, calm and comforted, without any fear whatever. Jesus Christ seemed to be by my side continually, and, as the vision was not imaginary, I saw no form; but I had a most distinct feeling that He was always on my right hand, a witness of all I did; and never at any time, if I was but slightly recollected, or not too much distracted, could I be ignorant of His near presence. [4] 4. I went at once to my confessor, [5] in great distress, to tell him of it. He asked in what form I saw our Lord. I told him I saw no form. He then said: "How did you know that it was Christ?" I replied, that I did not know how I knew it; but I could not help knowing that He was close beside me,--that I saw Him distinctly, and felt His presence,--that the recollectedness of my soul was deeper in the prayer of quiet, and more continuous,--that the effects thereof were very different from what I had hitherto experienced,--and that it was most certain. I could only make comparisons in order to explain myself; and certainly there are no comparisons, in my opinion, by which visions of this kind can be described. Afterwards I learnt from Friar Peter of Alcantara, a holy man of great spirituality,--of whom I shall speak by and by, [6]--and from others of great learning, that this vision was of the highest order, and one with which Satan can least interfere; and therefore there are no words whereby to explain,--at least, none for us women, who know so little: learned men can explain it better. 5. For if I say that I see Him neither with the eyes of the body, nor with those of the soul,--because it was not an imaginary vision,--how is it that I can understand and maintain that He stands beside me, and be more certain of it than if I saw Him? If it be supposed that it is as if a person were blind, or in the dark, and therefore unable to see another who is close to him, the comparison is not exact. There is a certain likelihood about it, however, but not much, because the other senses tell him who is blind of that presence: he hears the other speak or move, or he touches him; but in these visions there is nothing like this. The darkness is not felt; only He renders Himself present to the soul by a certain knowledge of Himself which is more clear than the sun. [7] I do not mean that we now see either a sun or any brightness, only that there is a light not seen, which illumines the understanding so that the soul may have the fruition of so great a good. This vision brings with it great blessings. 6. It is not like that presence of God which is frequently felt, particularly by those who have attained to the prayer of union and of quiet, when we seem, at the very commencement of our prayer, to find Him with whom we would converse, and when we seem to feel that He hears us by the effects and the spiritual impressions of great love and faith of which we are then conscious, as well as by the good resolutions, accompanied by sweetness, which we then make. This is a great grace from God; and let him to whom He has given it esteem it much, because it is a very high degree of prayer; but it is not vision. God is understood to be present there by the effects He works in the soul: that is the way His Majesty makes His presence felt; but here, in this vision, it is seen clearly that Jesus Christ is present, the Son of the Virgin. In the prayer of union and of quiet, certain inflowings of the Godhead are present; but in the vision, the Sacred Humanity also, together with them, is pleased to be our visible companion, and to do us good. 7. My confessor next asked me, who told me it was Jesus Christ. [8] I replied that He often told me so Himself; but, even before He told me so, there was an impression on my understanding that it was He; and before this He used to tell me so, and I saw Him not. If a person whom I had never seen, but of whom I had heard, came to speak to me, and I were blind or in the dark, and told me who he was, I should believe him; but I could not so confidently affirm that he was that person, as I might do if I had seen him. But in this vision I could do so, because so clear a knowledge is impressed on the soul that all doubt seems impossible, though He is not seen. Our Lord wills that this knowledge be so graven on the understanding, that we can no more question His presence than we can question that which we see with our eyes: not so much even; for very often there arises a suspicion that we have imagined things we think we see; but here, though there may be a suspicion in the first instant, there remains a certainty so great, that the doubt has no force whatever. So also is it when God teaches the soul in another way, and speaks to it without speaking, in the way I have described. 8. There is so much of heaven in this language, that it cannot well be understood on earth, though we may desire ever so much to explain it, if our Lord will not teach it experimentally. Our Lord impresses in the innermost soul that which He wills that soul to understand; and He manifests it there without images or formal words, after the manner of the vision I am speaking of. Consider well this way in which God works, in order that the soul may understand what He means--His great truths and mysteries; for very often what I understand, when our Lord explains to me the vision, which it is His Majesty's pleasure to set before me, is after this manner; and it seems to me that this is a state with which the devil can least interfere, for these reasons; but if these reasons are not good, I must be under a delusion. The vision and the language are matters of such pure spirituality, that there is no toil of the faculties, or of the senses, out of which--so seems to me--the devil can derive any advantage. 9. It is only at intervals, and for an instant, that this occurs; for generally--so I think--the senses are not taken away, and the faculties are not suspended: they preserve their ordinary state. It is not always so in contemplation; on the contrary, it is very rarely so; but when it is so, I say that we do nothing whatever ourselves: no work of ours is then possible; all that is done is apparently the work of our Lord. It is as if food had been received into the stomach which had not first been eaten, and without our knowing how it entered; but we do know well that it is there, though we know not its nature, nor who it was that placed it there. In this vision, I know who placed it; but I do not know how He did it. I neither saw it, nor felt it; I never had any inclination to desire it, and I never knew before that such a thing was possible. 10. In the locutions of which I spoke before, [9] God makes the understanding attentive, though it may be painful to understand what is said; then the soul seems to have other ears wherewith it hears; and He forces it to listen, and will not let it be distracted. The soul is like a person whose hearing was good, and who is not suffered to stop his ears, while people standing close beside him speak to him with a loud voice. He may be unwilling to hear, yet hear he must. Such a person contributes something of his own; for he attends to what is said to him; but here there is nothing of the kind: even that little, which is nothing more than the bare act of listening, which is granted to it in the other case, is now out of its power. It finds its food prepared and eaten; it has nothing more to do but to enjoy it. It is as if one without ever learning, without taking the pains even to learn to read, and without studying any subject whatever, should find himself in possession of all knowledge, not knowing how or whence it came to him, seeing that he had never taken the trouble even to learn the alphabet. This last comparison seems to me to throw some light on this heavenly gift; for the soul finds itself learned in a moment, and the mystery of the most Holy Trinity so clearly revealed to it, together with other most deep doctrines, that there is no theologian in the world with whom it would hesitate to dispute for the truth of these matters. 11. It is impossible to describe the surprise of the soul when it finds that one of these graces is enough to change it utterly, and make it love nothing but Him who, without waiting for anything itself might do, renders it fit for blessings so high, communicates to it His secrets, and treats it with so much affection and love. Some of the graces He bestows are liable to suspicion because they are so marvellous, and given to one who has deserved them so little--incredible, too, without a most lively faith. I intend, therefore, to mention very few of those graces which our Lord has wrought in me, if I should not be ordered otherwise; but there are certain visions of which I shall speak, an account of which may be of some service. In doing so, I shall either dispel his fears to whom our Lord sends them, and who, as I used to do, thinks them impossible, or I shall explain the way or the road by which our Lord has led me; and that is what I have been commanded to describe. 12. Now, going back to speak of this way of understanding, what it is seems to me to be this: it is our Lord's will in every way that the soul should have some knowledge of what passes in heaven; and I think that, as the blessed there without speech understand one another,--I never knew this for certain till our Lord of His goodness made me see it; He showed it to me in a trance,--so is it here: God and the soul understand one another, merely because His Majesty so wills it, without the help of other means, to express the love there is between them both. In the same way on earth, two persons of sound sense, if they love each other much, can even, without any signs, understand one another only by their looks. It must be so here, though we do not see how, as these two lovers earnestly regard each the other: the bridegroom says so to the bride in the Canticle, so I believe, and I have heard that it is spoken of there. [10] 13. Oh, marvellous goodness of God, in that Thou permittest eyes which have looked upon so much evil as those of my soul to look upon Thee! May they never accustom themselves, after looking on Thee, to look upon vile things again! and may they have pleasure in nothing but in Thee, O Lord! Oh, ingratitude of men, how far will it go! I know by experience that what I am saying is true, and that all we can say is exceedingly little, when we consider what Thou doest to the soul which Thou hast led to such a state as this. O souls, you who have begun to pray, and you who possess the true faith, what can you be in search of even in this life, let alone that which is for ever, that is comparable to the least of these graces? Consider, and it is true, that God gives Himself to those who give up everything for Him. God is not an accepter of persons. [11] He loves all; there is no excuse for any one, however wicked he may be, seeing that He hath thus dealt with me, raising me to the state I am in. Consider, that what I am saying is not even an iota of what may be said; I say only that which is necessary to show the kind of the vision and of the grace which God bestows on the soul; for that cannot be told which it feels when our Lord admits it to the understanding of His secrets and of His mighty works. The joy of this is so far above all conceivable joys, that it may well make us loathe all the joys of earth; for they are all but dross; and it is an odious thing to make them enter into the comparison, even if we might have them for ever. Those which our Lord gives, what are they? One drop only of the waters of the overflowing river which He is reserving for us. 14. It is a shame! And, in truth, I am ashamed of myself; if shame could have a place in heaven, I should certainly be the most ashamed there. Why do we seek blessings and joys so great, bliss without end, and all at the cost of our good Jesus? Shall we not at least weep with the daughters of Jerusalem, [12] if we do not help to carry his cross with the Cyrenean? [13] Is it by pleasure and idle amusements that we can attain to the fruition of what He purchased with so much blood? It is impossible. Can we think that we can, by preserving our honour, which is vanity, recompense Him for the sufferings He endured, that we might reign with Him for ever? This is not the way; we are going by the wrong road utterly, and we shall never arrive there. You, my father, must lift up your voice, and utter these truths aloud, seeing that God has taken from me the power of doing it. I should like to utter them to myself for ever. I listened to them myself, and came to the knowledge of God so late, as will appear by what I have written, that I am ashamed of myself when I speak of this; and so I should like to be silent. 15. Of one thing, however, I will speak, and I think of it now and then,--may it be the good pleasure of our Lord to bring me on, so that I may have the fruition of it!--what will be the accidental glory and the joy of the blessed who have entered on it, when they see that, though they were late, yet they left nothing undone which it was possible for them to do for God, who kept nothing back they could give Him, and who gave what they gave in every way they could, according to their strength and their measure,--they who had more gave more. How rich will he be who gave up all his riches for Christ! How honourable will he be who, for His sake, sought no honours whatever, but rather took pleasure in seeing himself abased! How wise he will be who rejoiced when men accounted him as mad!--they did so of Wisdom Itself! [14] How few there are of this kind now, because of our sins! Now, indeed, they are all gone whom people regarded as mad, [15] because they saw them perform heroic acts, as true lovers of Christ. 16. O world, world! how thou art gaining credit because they are few who know thee! But do we suppose that God is better pleased when men account us wise and discreet persons? We think forthwith that there is but little edification given when people do not go about, every one in his degree, with great gravity, in a dignified way. Even in the friar, the ecclesiastic, and the nun, if they wear old and patched garments, we think it a novelty, and a scandal to the weak; and even if they are very recollected and given to prayer. Such is the state of the world, and so forgotten are matters of perfection, and those grand impetuosities of the Saints. More mischief, I think, is done in this way, than by any scandal that might arise if the religious showed in their actions, as they proclaim it in words, that the world is to be held in contempt. Out of scandals such as this, our Lord obtains great fruit. If some people took scandal, others are filled with remorse: anyhow, we should have before us some likeness of that which our Lord and His Apostles endured; for we have need of it now more than ever. 17. And what an excellent likeness in the person of that blessed friar, Peter of Alcantara, God has just taken from us! [16] The world cannot bear such perfection now; it is said that men's health is grown feebler, and that we are not now in those former times. But this holy man lived in our day; he had a spirit strong as those of another age, and so he trampled on the world. If men do not go about barefooted, nor undergo sharp penances, as he did, there are many ways, as I have said before, [17] of trampling on the world; and our Lord teaches them when He finds the necessary courage. How great was the courage with which His Majesty filled the Saint I am speaking of! He did penance--oh, how sharp it was!--for seven-and-forty years, as all men know. I should like to speak of it, for I know it to be all true. 18. He spoke of it to me and to another person, from whom he kept few or no secrets. As for me, it was the affection he bore me that led him to speak; for it was our Lord's will that he should undertake my defence, and encourage me, at a time when I was in great straits, as I said before, and shall speak of again. [18] He told me, I think, that for forty years he slept but an hour and a half out of the twenty-four, and that the most laborious penance he underwent, when he began, was this of overcoming sleep. For that purpose, he was always either kneeling or standing. When he slept, he sat down, his head resting against a piece of wood driven into the wall. Lie down he could not, if he wished it; for his cell, as every one knows, was only four feet and a half in length. In all these years, he never covered his head with his hood, even when the sun was hottest, or the rain heaviest. He never covered his feet: the only garment he wore was made of sackcloth, and that was as tight as it could be, with nothing between it and his flesh; over this, he wore a cloak of the same stuff. He told me that, in the severe cold, he used to take off his cloak, and open the door and the window of his cell, in order that when he put his cloak on again, after shutting the door and the window, he might give some satisfaction to his body in the pleasure it might have in the increased warmth. His ordinary practice was to eat but once in three days. He said to me, "Why are you astonished at it? it is very possible for any one who is used to it." One of his companions told me that he would be occasionally eight days without eating: that must have been when he was in prayer; for he was subject to trances, and to the impetuosities of the love of God, of which I was once a witness myself. 19. His poverty was extreme; and his mortification, from his youth, was such,--so he told me,--that he was three years in one of the houses of his Order without knowing how to distinguish one friar from another, otherwise than by the voice; for he never raised his eyes: and so, when he was obliged to go from one part of the house to the other, he never knew the way, unless he followed the friars. His journeys, also, were made in the same way. For many years, he never saw a woman's face. He told me that it was nothing to him then whether he saw it or not: but he was an aged man when I made his acquaintance; and his weakness was so great, that he seemed like nothing else but the roots of trees. With all his sanctity, he was very agreeable; though his words were few, unless when he was asked questions; he was very pleasant to speak to, for he had a most clear understanding. 20. Many other things I should like to say of him, if I were not afraid, my father, that you will say, Why does she meddle here? and it is in that fear I have written this. So I leave the subject, only saying that his last end was like his life--preaching to, and exhorting, his brethren. When he saw that the end was comes he repeated the Psalm, [19] "Lætatus sum in his quæ dicta sunt mihi;" and then, kneeling down, he died. 21. Since then, it has pleased our Lord that I should find more help from him than during his life. He advises me in many matters. I have often seen him in great glory. The first time he appeared to me, he said: "O blessed penance, which has merited so great a reward!" with other things. A year before his death, he appeared to me being then far away. I knew he was about to die, and so I sent him word to that effect, when he was some leagues from here. When he died, he appeared to me, and said that he was going to his rest. I did not believe it. I spoke of it to some persons, and within eight days came the news that he was dead--or, to speak more correctly, he had begun to live for evermore. [20] 22. Behold here, then, how that life of sharp penance is perfected in such great glory: and now he is a greater comfort to me, I do believe, than he was on earth. Our Lord said to me on one occasion, that persons could not ask Him anything in his name, and He not hear them. I have recommended many things to him that he was to ask of our Lord, and I have seen my petitions granted. God be blessed for ever! Amen. 23. But how I have been talking in order to stir you up never to esteem anything in this life!--as if you did not know this, or as if you were not resolved to leave everything, and had already done it! I see so much going wrong in the world, that though my speaking of it is of no other use than to weary me by writing of it, it is some relief to me that all I am saying makes against myself. Our Lord forgive me all that I do amiss herein; and you too, my father, for wearying you to no purpose. It seems as if I would make you do penance for my sins herein. 1. Ch. xxv. § 20. 2. See ch. xxviii. § 5, and ch. xxix. § 1. The vision took place, it seems, on the 29th June. See ch. xxix. § 6. 3. See ch. vii. § 12. 4. See Anton. a Spiritu Sancto, Direct. Mystic. tr. iii. disp. v. § 3. 5. See Inner Fortress, vi. 8, § 3. 6. § 17, infra. 7. See Relation, vii. § 26. 8. Inner Fortress, vi. 8, § 3. 9. Ch. xxv. § 1. 10. Cant. vi. 4: "Averte oculos tuos a me, quia ipsi me avolare fecerunt." St. John of the Cross, Mount Carmel, bk. ii. ch. xxix. n. 6, Engl. trans. 11. Acts x. 34: "Non est personarum acceptor Deus." 12. St. Luke xxiii. 28: "Filiæ Jerusalem, nolite flere super Me, sed super vos ipsas flete." 13. St. Matt. xxvii. 32: "Hunc angariaverunt ut tolleret crucem Ejus." 14. St. John x. 20: "Dæmonium habet et insanit: quid Eum auditis?" 15. Sap. v. 4: "Nos insensati vitam illorum æstimabamus insaniam." 16. 18th Oct. 1562. As the Saint finished the first relation of her life in June, 1562, this is one of the additions subsequently made. 17. Ch. xiv. § 7. 18. Ch. xxvi. § 3, ch. xxxii. § 16. 19. Psalm cxxi. The words in the MS. are: "Letatun sun yn is que dita sun miqui" (De la Fuente). 20. See ch. xxx. § 2. Chapter XXVIII. Visions of the Sacred Humanity, and of the Glorified Bodies. Imaginary Visions. Great Fruits Thereof When They Come from God. 1. I now resume our subject. I spent some days, not many, with that vision [1] continually before me. It did me so much good, that I never ceased to pray. Even when I did cease, I contrived that it should be in such a way as that I should not displease Him whom I saw so clearly present, an eye-witness of my acts. And though I was occasionally afraid, because so much was said to me about delusions, that fear lasted not long, because our Lord reassured me. 2. It pleased our Lord, one day that I was in prayer, to show me His Hands, and His Hands only. The beauty of them was so great, that no language can describe it. This put me in great fear; for everything that is strange, in the beginning of any new grace from God, makes me very much afraid. A few days later, I saw His divine Face, and I was utterly entranced. I could not understand why our Lord showed Himself in this way, seeing that, afterwards, He granted me the grace of seeing His whole Person. Later on, I understood that His Majesty was dealing with me according to the weakness of my nature. May He be blessed for ever! A glory so great was more than one so base and wicked could bear; and our merciful Lord, knowing this, ordered it in this way. 3. You will think, my father, that it required no great courage to look upon Hands and Face so beautiful. But so beautiful are glorified bodies, that the glory which surrounds them renders those who see that which is so supernatural and beautiful beside themselves. It was so with me: I was in such great fear, trouble, and perplexity at the sight. Afterwards there ensued a sense of safety and certainty, together with other results, so that all fear passed immediately away. [2] 4. On one of the feasts of St. Paul, [3] when I was at Mass, there stood before me the most Sacred Humanity, [4] as painters represent Him after the resurrection, in great beauty and majesty, as I particularly described it to you, my father, when you had insisted on it. It was painful enough to have to write about it, for I could not describe it without doing great violence to myself. But I described it as well as I could, and there is no reason why I should now recur to it. One thing, however, I have to say: if in heaven itself there were nothing else to delight our eyes but the great beauty of glorified bodies, that would be an excessive bliss, particularly the vision of the Humanity of Jesus Christ our Lord. If here below, where His Majesty shows Himself to us according to the measure which our wretchedness can bear, it is so great, what must it be there, where the fruition of it is complete! 5. This vision, though imaginary, I never saw with my bodily eyes, nor, indeed, any other, but only with the eyes of the soul. Those who understand these things better than I do, say that the intellectual vision is more perfect than this; and this, the imaginary vision, much more perfect than those visions which are seen by the bodily eyes. The latter kind of visions, they say, is the lowest; and it is by these that the devil can most delude us. [5] I did not know it then; for I wished, when this grace had been granted me, that it had been so in such a way that I could see it with my bodily eyes, in order that my confessor might not say to me that I indulged in fancies. 6. After the vision was over, it happened that I too imagined--the thought came at once--I had fancied these things; so I was distressed, because I had spoken of them to my confessor, thinking that I might have been deceiving him. There was another lamentation: I went to my confessor, and told him of my doubts. He would ask me whether I told him the truth so far as I knew it; or, if not, had I intended to deceive him? I would reply, that I told the truth; for, to the best of my belief, I did not lie, nor did I mean anything of the kind; neither would I tell a lie for the whole world. [6] This he knew well enough; and, accordingly, he contrived to quiet me; and I felt so much the going to him with these doubts, that I cannot tell how Satan could have put it into my head that I invented those things for the purpose of tormenting myself. 7. But our Lord made such haste to bestow this grace upon me, and to declare the reality of it, that all doubts of the vision being a fancy on my part were quickly taken away, and ever since I see most clearly how silly I was. For if I were to spend many years in devising how to picture to myself anything so beautiful, I should never be able, nor even know how, to do it for it is beyond the reach of any possible imagination here below: the whiteness and brilliancy alone are inconceivable. It is not a brilliancy which dazzles, but a delicate whiteness and a brilliancy infused, furnishing the most excessive delight to the eyes, never wearied thereby, nor by the visible brightness which enables us to see a beauty so divine. It is a light so different from any light here below, that the very brightness of the sun we see, in comparison with the brightness and light before our eyes, seems to be something so obscure, that no one would ever wish to open his eyes again. 8. It is like most pellucid water running in a bed of crystal, reflecting the rays of the sun, compared with most muddy water on a cloudy day, flowing on the surface of the earth. Not that there is anything like the sun present here, nor is the light like that of the sun: this light seems to be natural; and, in comparison with it, every other light is something artificial. It is a light which knows no night; but rather, as it is always light, nothing ever disturbs it. In short, it is such that no man, however gifted he may be, can ever, in the whole course of his life, arrive at any imagination of what it is. God puts it before us so instantaneously, that we could not open our eyes in time to see it, if it were necessary for us to open them at all. But whether our eyes be open or shut, it makes no difference whatever; for when our Lord wills, we must see it, whether we will or not. No distraction can shut it out, no power can resist it, nor can we attain to it by any diligence or efforts of our own. I know this by experience well, as I shall show you. 9. That which I wish now to speak of is the manner in which our Lord manifests Himself in these visions. I do not mean that I am going to explain how it is that a light so strong can enter the interior sense, or so distinct an image the understanding, so as to seem to be really there; for this must be work for learned men. Our Lord has not been pleased to let me understand how it is. I am so ignorant myself, and so dull of understanding, that, although people have very much wished to explain it to me, I have never been able to understand how it can be. 10. This is the truth: though you, my father, may think that I have a quick understanding, it is not so; for I have found out, in many ways, that my understanding can take in only, as they say, what is given to it to eat. Sometimes my confessor used to be amazed at my ignorance: and he never explained to me--nor, indeed, did I desire to understand--how God did this, nor how it could be. Nor did I ever ask; though, as I have said, [7] I had converse for many years with men of great learning. But I did ask them if this or that were a sin or not: as for everything else, the thought that God did it all was enough for me. I saw there was no reason to be afraid, but great reason to praise Him. On the other hand, difficulties increase my devotion; and the greater the difficulty the greater the increase. 11. I will therefore relate what my experience has shown me; but how our Lord brought it about, you, my father, will explain better than I can, and make clear all that is obscure, and beyond my skill to explain. Now and then it seemed to me that what I saw was an image; but most frequently it was not so. I thought it was Christ Himself, judging by the brightness in which He was pleased to show Himself. Sometimes the vision was so indistinct, that I thought it was an image; but still not like a picture, however well painted--and I have seen many good pictures. It would be absurd to suppose that the one bears any resemblance whatever to the other, for they differ as a living person differs from his portrait, which, however well drawn, cannot be lifelike, for it is plain that it is a dead thing. But let this pass, though to the purpose, and literally true. 12. I do not say this by way of comparison, for comparisons are never exact, but because it is the truth itself, as there is the same difference here that there is between a living subject and the portrait thereof, neither more nor less: for if what I saw was an image, it was a living image,--not a dead man, but the living Christ: and He makes me see that He is God and man,--not as He was in the sepulchre, but as He was when He had gone forth from it, risen from the dead. He comes at times in majesty so great, that no one can have any doubt that it is our Lord Himself, especially after Communion: we know that He is then present, for faith says so. He shows Himself so clearly to be the Lord of that little dwelling-place, that the soul seems to be dissolved and lost in Christ. O my Jesus, who can describe the majesty wherein Thou showest Thyself! How utterly Thou art the Lord of the whole world, and of heaven, and of a thousand other and innumerable worlds and heavens, the creation of which is possible to Thee! The soul understands by that majesty wherein Thou showest Thyself that it is nothing for Thee to be Lord of all this. 13. Here it is plain, O my Jesus, how slight is the power of all the devils in comparison with Thine, and how he who is pleasing unto Thee is able to tread all hell under his feet. Here we see why the devils trembled when Thou didst go down to Limbus, and why they might have longed for a thousand hells still lower, that they might escape from Thy terrible Majesty. I see that it is Thy will the soul should feel the greatness of Thy Majesty, and the power of Thy most Sacred Humanity, united with Thy Divinity. Here, too, we see what the day of judgment will be, when we shall behold the King in His Majesty, and in the rigour of His justice against the wicked. Here we learn true humility, imprinted in the soul by the sight of its own wretchedness, of which now it cannot be ignorant. Here, also, is confusion of face, and true repentance for sins; for though the soul sees that our Lord shows how He loves it, yet it knows not where to go, and so is utterly dissolved. 14. My meaning is, that so exceedingly great is the power of this vision, when our Lord shows the soul much of His grandeur and majesty, that it is impossible, in my opinion, for any soul to endure it, if our Lord did not succour it in a most supernatural way, by throwing it into a trance or ecstasy, whereby the vision of the divine presence is lost in the fruition thereof. It is true that afterwards the vision is forgotten; but there remains so deep an impression of the majesty and beauty of God, that it is impossible to forget it, except when our Lord is pleased that the soul should suffer from aridity and desolation, of which I shall speak hereafter; [8] for then it seems to forget God Himself. The soul is itself no longer, it is always inebriated; it seems as if a living love of God, of the highest kind, made a new beginning within it; for though the former vision, which I said represented God without any likeness of Him, [9] is of a higher kind, yet because of our weakness, in order that the remembrance of the vision may last, and that our thoughts may be well occupied, it is a great matter that a presence so divine should remain and abide in our imagination. These two kinds of visions come almost always together, and they do so come; for we behold the excellency and beauty and glory of the most Holy Humanity with the eyes of the soul. And in the other way I have spoken of,--that of intellectual vision,--we learn how He is God, is mighty, can do all things, commands all things, governs all things, and fills all things with His love. 15. This vision is to be esteemed very highly; nor is there, in my opinion, any risk in it, because the fruits of it show that the devil has no power here. I think he tried three or four times to represent our Lord to me, in this way, by a false image of Him. He takes the appearance of flesh, but he cannot counterfeit the glory which it has when the vision is from God. Satan makes his representations in order to undo the true vision which the soul has had: but the soul resists instinctively; is troubled, disgusted, and restless; it loses that devotion and joy it previously had, and cannot pray at all. In the beginning, it so happened to me three or four times. These satanic visions are very different things; and even he who shall have attained to the prayer of quiet only will, I believe, detect them by those results of them which I described when I was speaking of locutions. [10] They are most easily recognised; and if a soul consents not to its own delusion, I do not think that Satan will be able to deceive it, provided it walks in humility and singleness of heart. He who shall have had the true vision, coming from God, detects the false visions at once; for, though they begin with a certain sweetness and joy, the soul rejects them of itself; and the joy which Satan ministers must be, I think, very different--it shows no traces of pure and holy love: Satan very quickly betrays himself. 16. Thus, then, as I believe, Satan can do no harm to anyone who has had experience of these things; for it is the most impossible of all impossible things that all this may be the work of the imagination. There is no ground whatever for the supposition; for the very beauty and whiteness of one of our Lord's Hands [11] are beyond our imagination altogether. How is it that we see present before us, in a moment, what we do not remember, what we have never thought of, and, moreover, what, in a long space of time, the imagination could not compass, because, as I have just said, [12] it far transcends anything we can comprehend in this life? This, then, is not possible. Whether we have any power in the matter or not will appear by what I am now going to say. 17. If the vision were the work of a man's own understanding,--setting aside that such a vision would not accomplish the great results of the true one, nor, indeed, any at all,--it would be as the act of one who tries to go to sleep, and yet continues awake, because sleep has not come. He longs for it, because of some necessity or weakness in his head: and so he lulls himself to sleep, and makes efforts to procure it, and now and then thinks he has succeeded; but, if the sleep be not real, it will not support him, nor supply strength to his head: on the contrary, his head will very often be the worse for it. So will it be here, in a measure; the soul will be dissipated, neither sustained nor strengthened; on the contrary, it will be wearied and disgusted. But, in the true vision, the riches which abide in the soul cannot be described; even the body receives health and comfort. 18. I urged this argument, among others, when they told me that my visions came from the evil one, and that I imagined them myself,--and it was very often,--and made use of certain illustrations, as well as I could, and as our Lord suggested to me. But all was to little purpose; for as there were most holy persons in the place,--in comparison with whom I was a mass of perdition,--whom God did not lead by this way, they were at once filled with fear; they thought it all came through my sins. And so my state was talked about, and came to the knowledge of many; though I had spoken of it to no one, except my confessor, or to those to whom he commanded [13] me to speak of it. 19. I said to them once, If they who thus speak of my state were to tell me that a person with whom I had just conversed, and whom I knew well, was not that person, but that I was deluding myself, and that they knew it, I should certainly trust them rather than my own eyes. But if that person left with me certain jewels,--and if, possessing none previously, I held the jewels in my hand as pledges of a great love,--and if I were now rich, instead of poor as before,--I should not be able to believe this that they said, though I might wish it. These jewels I could now show them, for all who knew me saw clearly that my soul was changed,--and so my confessor said; for the difference was very great in every way--not a pretence, but such as all might most clearly observe. As I was formerly so wicked, I said, I could not believe that Satan, if he wished to deceive me and take me down to hell, would have recourse to means so adverse to his purpose as this, of rooting out my faults, implanting virtues and spiritual strength; for I saw clearly that I had become at once another person through the instrumentality of these visions. 20. My confessor, who was, as I said before, [14] one of the fathers of the Society of Jesus, and a really holy man, answered them in the same way,--so I learnt afterwards. He was a most discreet man, and of great humility; but this great humility of his brought me into serious trouble: for, though he was a man much given to prayer, and learned, he never trusted his own judgment, because our Lord was not leading him by this way. He had, therefore, much to suffer on my account, in many ways. I knew they used to say to him that he must be on his guard against me, lest Satan should delude him through a belief in anything I might say to him. They gave instances of others who were deluded. [15] All this distressed me. I began to be afraid I should find no one to hear my confession, [16] and that all would avoid me. I did nothing but weep. 21. It was a providence of God that he was willing to stand by me and hear my confession. But he was so great a servant of God, that he would have exposed himself to anything for His sake. So he told me that if I did not offend God, nor swerve from the instructions he gave me, there was no fear I should be deserted by him. He encouraged me always, and quieted me. He bade me never to conceal anything from him; and I never did. [17] He used to say that, so long as I did this, the devil, if it were the devil, could not hurt me; on the contrary, out of that evil which Satan wished to do me, our Lord would bring forth good. He laboured with all his might to make me perfect. As I was very much afraid myself, I obeyed him in everything, though imperfectly. He had much to suffer on my account during three years of trouble and more, because he heard my confession all that time; for in the great persecutions that fell upon me, and the many harsh judgments of me which our Lord permitted,--many of which I did not deserve,--everything was carried to him, and he was found fault with because of me,--he being all the while utterly blameless. 22. If he had not been so holy a man, and if our Lord had not been with him, it would have, been impossible for him to bear so much; for he had to answer those who regarded me as one going to destruction; and they would not believe what he said to them. On the other hand, he had to quiet me, and relieve me of my fears; when my fears increased, he had again to reassure me; for, after every vision which was strange to me, our Lord permitted me to remain in great fear. All this was the result of my being then, and of having been, a sinner. He used to console me out of his great compassion; and, if he had trusted to his own convictions, I should not have had so much to suffer; for God revealed the whole truth to him. I believe that he received this light from the Blessed Sacrament. 23. Those servants of God who were not satisfied had many conversations with me. [18] As I spoke to them carelessly, so they misunderstood my meaning in many things. I had a great regard for one of them; for my soul owed him more than I can tell. He was a most holy man, and I felt it most acutely when I saw that he did not understand me. He had a great desire for my improvement, and hoped our Lord would enlighten me. So, then, because I spoke, as I was saying, without careful consideration, they looked upon me as deficient in humility; and when they detected any of my faults--they might have detected many--they condemned me at once. They used to put certain questions to me, which I answered simply and carelessly. Then they concluded forthwith that I wished to teach them, and that I considered myself to be a learned woman. All this was carried to my confessor,--for certainly they desired my amendment--and so he would reprimand me. This lasted some time, and I was distressed on many sides; but, with the graces which our Lord gave me, I bore it all. 24. I relate this in order that people may see what a great trial it is not to find any one who knows this way of the spirit by experience. If our Lord had not dealt so favourably with me, I know not what would have become of me. There were some things that were enough to take away my reason; and now and then I was reduced to such straits that I could do nothing but lift up my eyes to our Lord. [19] The contradiction of good people, which a wretched woman, weak, wicked, and timid as I am, must bear with, seems to be nothing when thus described; but I, who in the course of my life passed through very great trials, found this one of the heaviest. [20] 25. May our Lord grant that I may have pleased His Majesty a little herein; for I am sure that they pleased Him who condemned and rebuked me, and that it was all for my great good. 1. Ch. xxvii. § 3. 2. Philipp. a SS. Trinitate, Theolog. Mystic. par. 2, tr. 3, disc. iv., art. 8: "Quamvis in principio visiones a dæmone fictæ aliquam habeant pacem ac dulcedinem, in fine tamen confusionum et amaritudinem in anima relinquunt; cujus contrarium est in divinis visionibus, quæ sæpe turbant in principio, sed semper in fine pacem animæ relinquunt." St. John of the Cross, Spiritual Canticle, st. 14, p. 84: "In the spiritual passage from the sleep of natural ignorance to the wakefulness of the supernatural understanding, which is the beginning of trance or ecstasy, the spiritual vision then revealed makes the soul fear and tremble." 3. See ch. xxix. § 4. 4. "The holy Mother, Teresa of Jesus, had these imaginary visions for many years, seeing our Lord continually present before her in great beauty, risen from the dead, with His wounds and the crown of thorns. She had a picture made of Him, which she gave to me, and which I gave to Don Fernando de Toledo, Duke of Alva" (Jerome Gratian, Union del Alma, cap. 5. Madrid, 1616). 5. Anton. a Sp. Sancto, Direct. Mystic. tr. iii. disp. 5, § I, n. 315: "Visio corporea est infima, visio imaginaria est media, visio intellectualis est suprema." N. 322: "Apparitio visibilis, cum sit omnium infima, est magis exposita illusioni diaboli, nisi forte huic visioni corporali visio intellectualis adjungatur, ut in apparitione S. Gabrielis archangeli facta Beatæ Virgini." 6. See ch. xxx. § 18. 7. Ch. xxv. § 18. 8. Ch. xxx. §§ 9, 10. See St. John of the Cross, Obscure Night, bk. ii. ch. 7. 9. Ch. xxvii. § 3. 10. Ch. xxv. § 8. 11. See § 2. 12. § 7, supra. 13. See ch. xxiii. § 14. 14. Ch. xxiv. § 5. 15. There were in Spain, and elsewhere, many women who were hypocrites, or deluded. Among others was the prioress of Lisbon, afterwards notorious, who deceived Luis of Granada (De la Fuente). 16. Inner Fortress, vi. 1, § 4. 17. Ch. xxvi. § 5; Inner Fortress, vi. 9, § 7. 18. See ch. xxv. § 18. 19. 2 Paralip. xx. 12: "Sed cum ignoremus quid agere debeamus, hoc solum habemus residui, ut oculos nostros dirigamus ad Te." 20. See ch. xxx. § 6. Chapter XXIX. Of Visions. The Graces Our Lord Bestowed on the Saint. The Answers Our Lord Gave Her for Those Who Tried Her. 1. I have wandered far from the subject; for I undertook to give reasons why the vision was no work of the imagination. For how can we, by any efforts of ours, picture to ourselves the Humanity of Christ, and imagine His great beauty? No little time is necessary, if our conception is in any way to resemble it. Certainly, the imagination may be able to picture it, and a person may for a time contemplate that picture,--the form and the brightness of it,--and gradually make it more perfect, and so lay up that image in his memory. Who can hinder this, seeing that it could be fashioned by the understanding? But as to the vision of which I am speaking, there are no means of bringing it about; only we must behold it when our Lord is pleased to present it before us, as He wills and what He wills; and there is no possibility of taking anything away from it, or of adding anything to it; nor is there any way of effecting it, whatever we may do, nor of seeing it when we like, nor of abstaining from seeing; if we try to gaze upon it--part of the vision in particular--the vision of Christ is lost at once. 2. For two years and a half God granted me this grace very frequently; but it is now more than three years since He has taken away from me its continual presence, through another of a higher nature, as I shall perhaps explain hereafter. [1] And though I saw Him speaking to me, and though I was contemplating His great beauty, and the sweetness with which those words of His came forth from His divine mouth,--they were sometimes uttered with severity,--and though I was extremely desirous to behold the colour of His eyes, or the form of them, so that I might be able to describe them, yet I never attained to the sight of them, and I could do nothing for that end; on the contrary, I lost the vision altogether. And though I see that He looks upon me at times with great tenderness, yet so strong is His gaze, that my soul cannot endure it; I fall into a trance so deep, that I lose the beautiful vision, in order to have a greater fruition of it all. 3. Accordingly, willing or not willing, the vision has nothing to do with it. Our Lord clearly regards nothing but humility and confusion of face, the acceptance of what He wishes to give, and the praise of Himself, the Giver. This is true of all visions without exception: we can contribute nothing towards them--we cannot add to them, nor can we take from them; our own efforts can neither make nor unmake them. Our Lord would have us see most clearly that it is no work of ours, but of His Divine Majesty; we are therefore the less able to be proud of it: on the contrary, it makes us humble and afraid; for we see that, as our Lord can take from us the power of seeing what we would see, so also can He take from us these mercies and His grace, and we may be lost for ever. We must therefore walk in His fear while we are living in this our exile. 4. Our Lord showed Himself to me almost always as He is after His resurrection. It was the same in the Host; only at those times when I was in trouble, and when it was His will to strengthen me, did He show His wounds. Sometimes I saw Him on the cross, in the Garden, crowned with thorns,--but that was rarely; sometimes also carrying His cross because of my necessities,--I may say so,--or those of others; but always in His glorified body. Many reproaches and many vexations have I borne while telling this--many suspicions and much persecution also. So certain were they to whom I spoke that I had an evil spirit, that some would have me exorcised. I did not care much for this; but I felt it bitterly when I saw that my confessors were afraid to hear me, or when I knew that they were told of anything about me. 5. Notwithstanding all this, I never could be sorry that I had had these heavenly visions; nor would I exchange even one of them for all the wealth and all the pleasures of the world. I always regarded them as a great mercy from our Lord; and to me they were the very greatest treasure,--of this our Lord assured me often. I used to go to Him to complain of all these hardships; and I came away from prayer consoled, and with renewed strength. I did not dare to contradict those who were trying me; for I saw that it made matters worse, because they looked on my doing so as a failure in humility. I spoke of it to my confessor; he always consoled me greatly when he saw me in distress. 6. As my visions grew in frequency, one of those who used to help me before--it was to him I confessed when the father-minister [2] could not hear me--began to say that I was certainly under the influence of Satan. He bade me, now that I had no power of resisting, always to make the sign of the cross when I had a vision, to point my finger at it by way of scorn, [3] and be firmly persuaded of its diabolic nature. If I did this, the vision would not recur. I was to be without fear on the point; God would watch over me, and take the vision away. [4] This was a great hardship for me; for, as I could not believe that the vision did not come from God, it was a fearful thing for me to do; and I could not wish, as I said before, that the visions should be withheld. However, I did at last as I was bidden. I prayed much to our Lord, that He would deliver me from delusions. I was always praying to that effect, and with many tears. I had recourse also to St. Peter and St. Paul; for our Lord had said to me--it was on their feast that He had appeared to me the first time [5]--that they would preserve me from delusion. I used to see them frequently most distinctly on my left hand; but that vision was not imaginary. These glorious Saints were my very good lords. 7. It was to me a most painful thing to make a show of contempt whenever I saw our Lord in a vision; for when I saw Him before me, if I were to be cut in pieces, I could not believe it was Satan. This was to me, therefore, a heavy kind of penance; and accordingly, that I might not be so continually crossing myself, I used to hold a crucifix in my hand. This I did almost always; but I did not always make signs of contempt, because I felt that too much. It reminded me of the insults which the Jews heaped upon Him; and so I prayed Him to forgive me, seeing that I did so in obedience to him who stood in His stead, and not to lay the blame on me, seeing that he was one of those whom He had placed as His ministers in His Church. He said to me that I was not to distress myself--that I did well to obey; but He would make them see the truth of the matter. He seemed to me to be angry when they made me give up my prayer. [6] He told me to say to them that this was tyranny. He gave me reasons for believing that the vision was not satanic; some of them I mean to repeat by and by. 8. On one occasion,when I was holding in my hand the cross of my rosary, He took it from me into His own hand. He returned it; but it was then four large stones incomparably more precious than diamonds; for nothing can be compared with what is supernatural. Diamonds seem counterfeits and imperfect when compared with these precious stones. The five wounds were delineated on them with most admirable art. He said to me, that for the future that cross would appear so to me always; and so it did. I never saw the wood of which it was made, but only the precious stones. They were seen, however, by no one else,--only by myself. [7] 9. When they had begun to insist on my putting my visions to a test like this, and resisting them, the graces I received were multiplied more and more. I tried to distract myself; I never ceased to be in prayer: even during sleep my prayer seemed to be continual; for now my love grew, I made piteous complaints to our Lord, and told Him I could not bear it. Neither was it in my power--though I desired, and, more than that, even strove--to give up thinking of Him. Nevertheless, I obeyed to the utmost of my power; but my power was little or nothing in the matter; and our Lord never released me from that obedience; but though He bade me obey my confessor, He reassured me in another way, and taught me what I was to say. He has continued to do so until now; and He gave me reasons so sufficient, that I felt myself perfectly safe. 10. Not long afterwards His Majesty began, according to His promise, to make it clear that it was He Himself who appeared, by the growth in me of the love of God so strong, that I knew not who could have infused it; for it was most supernatural, and I had not attained to it by any efforts of my own. I saw myself dying with a desire to see God, and I knew not how to seek that life otherwise than by dying. Certain great impetuosities [8] of love, though not so intolerable as those of which I have spoken before, [9] nor yet of so great worth, overwhelmed me. I knew not what to do; for nothing gave me pleasure, and I had no control over myself. It seemed as if my soul were really torn away from myself. Oh, supreme artifice of our Lord! how tenderly didst Thou deal with Thy miserable slave! Thou didst hide Thyself from me, and didst yet constrain me with Thy love, with a death so sweet, that my soul would never wish it over. 11. It is not possible for any one to understand these impetuosities if he has not experienced them himself. They are not an upheaving of the breast, nor those devotional sensations, not uncommon, which seem on the point of causing suffocation, and are beyond control. That prayer is of a much lower order; and those agitations should be avoided by gently endeavouring to be recollected; and the soul should be kept in quiet. This prayer is like the sobbing of little children, who seem on the point of choking, and whose disordered senses are soothed by giving them to drink. So here reason should draw in the reins, because nature itself may be contributing to it and we should consider with fear that all this may not be perfect, and that much sensuality may be involved in it. The infant soul should be soothed by the caresses of love, which shall draw forth its love in a gentle way, and not, as they say, by force of blows. This love should be inwardly under control, and not as a caldron, fiercely boiling because too much fuel has been applied to it, and out of which everything is lost. The source of the fire must be kept under control, and the flame must be quenched in sweet tears, and not with those painful tears which come out of these emotions, and which do so much harm. 12. In the beginning, I had tears of this kind. They left me with a disordered head and a wearied spirit, and for a day or two afterwards unable to resume my prayer. Great discretion, therefore, is necessary at first, in order that everything may proceed gently, and that the operations of the spirit may be within; all outward manifestations should be carefully avoided. 13. These other impetuosities are very different. It is not we who apply the fuel; the fire is already kindled, and we are thrown into it in a moment to be consumed. It is by no efforts of the soul that it sorrows over the wound which the absence of our Lord has inflicted on it; it is far otherwise; for an arrow is driven into the entrails to the very quick, [10] and into the heart at times, so that the soul knows not what is the matter with it, nor what it wishes for. It understands clearly enough that it wishes for God, and that the arrow seems tempered with some herb which makes the soul hate itself for the love of our Lord, and willingly lose its life for Him. It is impossible to describe or explain the way in which God wounds the soul, nor the very grievous pain inflicted, which deprives it of all self-consciousness; yet this pain is so sweet, that there is no joy in the world which gives greater delight. As I have just said, [11] the soul would wish to be always dying of this wound. 14. This pain and bliss together carried me out of myself, and I never could understand how it was. Oh, what a sight a wounded soul is!--a soul, I mean, so conscious of it, as to be able to say of itself that it is wounded for so good a cause; and seeing distinctly that it never did anything whereby this love should come to it, and that it does come from that exceeding love which our Lord bears it. A spark seems to have fallen suddenly upon it, that has set it all on fire. Oh, how often do I remember, when in this state, those words of David: "Quemadmodum desiderat cervus ad fontes aquarum"! [12] They seem to me to be literally true of myself. 15. When these impetuosities are not very violent they seem to admit of a little mitigation--at least, the soul seeks some relief, because it knows not what to do--through certain penances; the painfulness of which, and even the shedding of its blood, are no more felt than if the body were dead. The soul seeks for ways and means to do something that may be felt, for the love of God; but the first pain is so great, that no bodily torture I know of can take it away. As relief is not to be had here, these medicines are too mean for so high a disease. Some slight mitigation may be had, and the pain may pass away a little, by praying God to relieve its sufferings: but the soul sees no relief except in death, by which it thinks to attain completely to the fruition of its good. At other times, these impetuosities are so violent, that the soul can do neither this nor anything else; the whole body is contracted, and neither hand nor foot can be moved: if the body be upright at the time, it falls down, as a thing that has no control over itself. It cannot even breathe; all it does is to moan--not loudly, because it cannot: its moaning, however, comes from a keen sense of pain. 16. Our Lord was pleased that I should have at times a vision of this kind: I saw an angel close by me, on my left side, in bodily form. This I am not accustomed to see, unless very rarely. Though I have visions of angels frequently, yet I see them only by an intellectual vision, such as I have spoken of before. [13] It was our Lord's will that in this vision I should see the angel in this wise. He was not large, but small of stature, and most beautiful--his face burning, as if he were one of the highest angels, who seem to be all of fire: they must be those whom we call cherubim. [14] Their names they never tell me; but I see very well that there is in heaven so great a difference between one angel and another, and between these and the others, that I cannot explain it. 17. I saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the iron's point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, [15] and to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God. The pain was so great, that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it. The soul is satisfied now with nothing less than God. The pain is not bodily, but spiritual; though the body has its share in it, even a large one. It is a caressing of love so sweet which now takes place between the soul and God, that I pray God of His goodness to make him experience it who may think that I am lying. [16] 18. During the days that this lasted, I went about as if beside myself. I wished to see, or speak with, no one, but only to cherish my pain, which was to me a greater bliss than all created things could give me. [17] 19. I was in this state from time to time, whenever it was our Lord's pleasure to throw me into those deep trances, which I could not prevent even when I was in the company of others, and which, to my deep vexation, came to be publicly known. Since then, I do not feel that pain so much, but only that which I spoke of before,--I do not remember the chapter, [18]--which is in many ways very different from it, and of greater worth. On the other hand, when this pain, of which I am now speaking, begins, our Lord seems to lay hold of the soul, and to throw it into a trance, so that there is no time for me to have any sense of pain or suffering, because fruition ensues at once. May He be blessed for ever, who hath bestowed such great graces on one who has responded so ill to blessings so great! 1. Ch. xl. 2. Baltasar Alvarez was father-minister of the house of St. Giles, Avila, in whose absence she had recourse to another father of that house (Ribera, i. ch. 6). 3. Y diese higas. "Higa es una manera de menosprecio que hacemos cerrando el puño, y mostrando el dedo pulgar por entre el dedo indice, y el medio" (Cobarruvias, in voce). 4. See Book of the Foundations, ch. viii. § 3, where the Saint refers to this advice, and to the better advice given her later by F. Dominic Bañes, one of her confessors. See also Inner Fortress, vi. 9, § 7. 5. See ch. xxvii. § 3, and ch. xxviii. § 4. 6. Ch. xxv. § 18. 7. The cross was made of ebony (Ribera). It is not known where that cross is now. The Saint gave it to her sister, Doña Juana de Ahumada, who begged it of her. Some say that the Carmelites of Madrid possess it; and others, those of Valladolid (De la Fuente). 8. See Relation, i. § 3. 9. Ch. xx. § 11. 10. Inner Fortress, vi. 11, § 2; St. John of the Cross, Spiritual Canticle, st. 1, p. 22, Engl. trans. 11. § 10. 12. Psalm xli. 2: "As the longing of the hart for the fountains of waters, so is the longing of my soul for Thee, O my God." 13. Ch. xxvii. § 3. 14. In the MS. of the Saint preserved in the Escurial, the word is "cherubines;" but all the editors before Don Vicente de la Fuente have adopted the suggestion, in the margin, of Bañes, who preferred "seraphim." F. Bouix, in his translation, corrected the mistake; but, with his usual modesty, did not call the reader's attention to it. 15. See Relation, viii. § 16. 16. "The most probable opinion is, that the piercing of the heart of the Saint took place in 1559. The hymn which she composed on that occasion was discovered in Seville in 1700 ("En las internas entrañas"). On the high altar of the Carmelite church in Alba de Tormes, the heart of the Saint thus pierced is to be seen; and I have seen it myself more than once" (De la Fuente). 17. Brev. Rom. in fest. S. Teresiæ, Oct. 15, Lect. v.: "Tanto autem divini amoris incendio cor ejus conflagravit, ut merito viderit Angelum ignito jaculo sibi præcordia transverberantem." The Carmelites keep the feast of this piercing of the Saint's heart on the 27th of August. 18. Ch. xx. § 11. Chapter XXX. St. Peter of Alcantara Comforts the Saint. Great Temptations and Interior Trials. 1. When I saw that I was able to do little or nothing towards avoiding these great impetuosities, I began also to be afraid of them, because I could not understand how this pain and joy could subsist together. I knew it was possible enough for bodily pain and spiritual joy to dwell together; but the coexistence of a spiritual pain so excessive as this, and of joy so deep, troubled my understanding. Still, I tried to continue my resistance; but I was so little able, that I was now and then wearied. I used to take up the cross for protection, and try to defend myself against Him who, by the cross, is the Protector of us all. I saw that no one understood me. I saw it very clearly myself, but I did not dare to say so to any one except my confessor; for that would have been a real admission that I had no humility. 2. Our Lord was pleased to succour me in a great measure,--and, for the moment, altogether,--by bringing to the place where I was that blessed friar, Peter of Alcantara. Of him I spoke before, and said something of his penance. [1] Among other things, I have been assured that he wore continually, for twenty years, a girdle made of iron. [2] He is the author of certain little books, in Spanish, on prayer, which are now in common use; for, as he was much exercised therein, his writings are very profitable to those who are given to prayer. He kept the first rule of the blessed St. Francis in all its rigour, and did those things besides of which I spoke before. 3. When that widow, the servant of God and my friend, of whom I have already spoken, [3] knew that so great a man had come, she took her measures. She knew the straits I was in, for she was an eye-witness of my afflictions, and was a great comfort to me. Her faith was so strong, that she could not help believing that what others said was the work of the devil was really the work of the Spirit of God; and as she is a person of great sense and great caution, and one to whom our Lord is very bountiful in prayer, it pleased His Majesty to let her see what learned men failed to discern. My confessors gave me leave to accept relief in some things from her, because in many ways she was able to afford it. Some of those graces which our Lord bestowed on me fell to her lot occasionally, together with instructions most profitable for her soul. So, then, when she knew that the blessed man was come, without saying a word to me, she obtained leave from the Provincial for me to stay eight days in her house, in order that I might the more easily confer with him. In that house, and in one church or another, I had many conversations with him the first time he came here; for, afterwards, I had many communications with him at diverse times. 4. I gave him an account, as briefly as I could, of my life, and of my way of prayer, with the utmost clearness in my power. I have always held to this, to be perfectly frank and exact with those to whom I make known the state of my soul. [4] Even my first impulses I wish them to know; and as for doubtful and suspicious matters, I used to make the most of them by arguing against myself. Thus, then, without equivocation or concealment, I laid before him the state of my soul. I saw almost at once that he understood me, by reason of his own experience. That was all I required; for at that time I did not know myself as I do now,so as to give an account of my state. It was at a later time that God enabled me to understand myself, and describe the graces which His Majesty bestows upon me. It was necessary, then, that he who would clearly understand and explain my state should have had experience of it himself. 5. The light he threw on the matter was of the clearest; for as to these visions, at least, which were not imaginary, I could not understand how they could be. And it seemed that I could not understand, too, how those could be which I saw with the eyes of the soul; for, as I said before, [5] those visions only seemed to me to be of consequence which were seen with the bodily eyes: and of these I had none. The holy man enlightened me on the whole question, explained it to me, and bade me not to be distressed, but to praise God, and to abide in the full conviction that this was the work of the Spirit of God; for, saving the faith, nothing could be more true, and there was nothing on which I could more firmly rely. He was greatly comforted in me, was most kind and serviceable, and ever afterwards took great care of me, and told me of his own affairs and labours; and when he saw that I had those very desires which in himself were fulfilled already,--for our Lord had given me very strong desires,--and also how great my resolution was, he delighted in conversing with me. 6. To a person whom our Lord has raised to this state, there is no pleasure or comfort equal to that of meeting with another whom our Lord has begun to raise in the same way. At that time, however, it must have been only a beginning with me, as I believe; and God grant I may not have gone back now. He was extremely sorry for me. He told me that one of the greatest trials in this world was that which I had borne,--namely, the contradiction of good people, [6]--and that more was in reserve for me: I had need, therefore, of some one--and there was no one in this city--who understood me; but he would speak to my confessor, and to that married nobleman, already spoken of, [7] who was one of those who tormented me most, and who, because of his great affection for me, was the cause of all these attacks. He was a holy but timid man, and could not feel safe about me, because he had seen how wicked I was, and that not long before. The holy man did so; he spoke to them both, explained the matter, and gave them reasons why they should reassure themselves, and disturb me no more. My confessor was easily satisfied,--not so the nobleman; for though they were not enough to keep him quiet, yet they kept him in some measure from frightening me so much as he used to do. 7. We made an agreement that I should write to him and tell him how it fared with me, for the future, and that we should pray much for each other. Such was his humility, that he held to the prayers of a wretch like me. It made me very much ashamed of myself. He left me in the greatest consolation and joy, bidding me continue my prayer with confidence, and without any doubt that it was the work of God. If I should have any doubts, for my greater security, I was to make them known to my confessor, and, having done so, be in peace. Nevertheless, I was not able at all to feel that confidence, for our Lord was leading me by the way of fear; and so, when they told me that the devil had power over me, I believed them. Thus, then, not one of them was able to inspire me with confidence on the one hand, or fear on the other, in such a way as to make me believe either of them, otherwise than as our Lord allowed me. Accordingly, though the holy friar consoled and calmed me, I did not rely so much on him as to be altogether without fear, particularly when our Lord forsook me in the afflictions of my soul, of which I will now speak. Nevertheless, as I have said, I was very much consoled. 8. I could not give thanks enough to God, and to my glorious father St. Joseph, who seemed to me to have brought him here. He was the commissary-general of the custody [8] of St. Joseph, to whom, and to our Lady, I used to pray much. 9. I suffered at times--and even still, though not so often--the most grievous trials, together with bodily pains and afflictions arising from violent sicknesses; so much so, that I could scarcely control myself. At other times, my bodily sickness was more grievous; and as I had no spiritual pain, I bore it with great joy: but, when both pains came upon me together, my distress was so heavy, that I was reduced to sore straits. 10. I forgot all the mercies our Lord had shown me, and remembered them only as a dream, to my great distress; for my understanding was so dull, that I had a thousand doubts and suspicions whether I had ever understood matters aright, thinking that perhaps all was fancy, and that it was enough for me to have deceived myself, without also deceiving good men. I looked upon myself as so wicked as to have been the cause, by my sins, of all the evils and all the heresies that had sprung up. This is but a false humility, and Satan invented it for the purpose of disquieting me, and trying whether he could thereby drive my soul to despair. I have now had so much experience, that I know this was his work; so he, seeing that I understand him, does not torment me in the same way as much as he used to do. That it is his work is clear from the restlessness and discomfort with which it begins, and the trouble it causes in the soul while it lasts; from the obscurity and distress, the aridity and indisposition for prayer and for every good work, which it produces. It seems to stifle the soul and trammel the body, so as to make them good for nothing. 11. Now, though the soul acknowledges itself to be miserable, and though it is painful to us to see ourselves as we are, and though we have most deep convictions of our own wickedness,--deep as those spoken of just now, [9] and really felt,--yet true humility is not attended with trouble; it does not disturb the soul; it causes neither obscurity nor aridity: on the contrary, it consoles. It is altogether different, bringing with it calm, sweetness, and light. It is no doubt painful; but, on the other hand, it is consoling, because we see how great is the mercy of our Lord in allowing the soul to have that pain, and how well the soul is occupied. On the one hand, the soul grieves over its offences against God; on the other, His compassion makes it glad. It has light, which makes it ashamed of itself; and it gives thanks to His Majesty, who has borne with it so long. That other humility, which is the work of Satan, furnishes no light for any good work; it pictures God as bringing upon everything fire and sword; it dwells upon His justice; and the soul's faith in the mercy of God--for the power of the devil does not reach so far as to destroy faith--is of such a nature as to give me no consolation: on the contrary, the consideration of mercies so great helps to increase the pain, because I look upon myself as bound to render greater service. 12. This invention of Satan is one of the most painful, subtle, and crafty that I have known him to possess; I should therefore like to warn you, my father, of it, in order that, if Satan should tempt you herein, you may have some light, and be aware of his devices, if your understanding should be left at liberty: because you must not suppose that learning and knowledge are of any use here; for though I have none of them myself, yet now that I have escaped out of his hands I see clearly that this is folly. What I understood by it is this: that it is our Lord's pleasure to give him leave and license, as He gave him of old to tempt Job; [10] though in my case, because of my wretchedness, the temptation is not so sharp. 13. It happened to me to be tempted once in this way; and I remember it was on the day before the vigil of Corpus Christi,--a feast to which I have great devotion, though not so great as I ought to have. The trial then lasted only till the day of the feast itself. But, on other occasions, it continued one, two, and even three weeks and--I know not--perhaps longer. But I was specially liable to it during the Holy Weeks, when it was my habit to make prayer my joy. Then the devil seizes on my understanding in a moment; and occasionally, by means of things so trivial that I should laugh at them at any other time, he makes it stumble over anything he likes. The soul, laid in fetters, loses all control over itself, and all power of thinking of anything but the absurdities he puts before it, which, being more or less unsubstantial, inconsistent, and disconnected, serve only to stifle the soul, so that it has no power over itself; and accordingly--so it seems to me--the devils make a football of it, and the soul is unable to escape out of their hands. It is impossible to describe the sufferings of the soul in this state. It goes about in quest of relief, and God suffers it to find none. The light of reason, in the freedom of its will, remains, but it is not clear; it seems to me as if its eyes were covered with a veil. As a person who, having travelled often by a particular road, knows, though it be night and dark, by his past experience of it, where he may stumble, and where he ought to be on his guard against that risk, because he has seen the place by day, so the soul avoids offending God: it seems to go on by habit--that is, if we put out of sight the fact that our Lord holds it by the hand, which is the true explanation of the matter. 14. Faith is then as dead, and asleep, like all the other virtues; not lost, however,--for the soul truly believes all that the church holds; but its profession of the faith is hardly more than an outward profession of the mouth. And, on the other hand, temptations seem to press it down, and make it dull, so that its knowledge of God becomes to it as that of something which it hears of far away. So tepid is its love that, when it hears God spoken of, it listens and believes that He is what He is, because the Church so teaches; but it recollects nothing of its own former experience. Vocal prayer or solitude is only a greater affliction, because the interior suffering--whence it comes, it knows not--is unendurable, and, as it seems to me, in some measure a counterpart of hell. So it is, as our Lord showed me in a vision; [11] for the soul itself is then burning in the fire, knowing not who has kindled it, nor whence it comes, nor how to escape it, nor how to put it out: if it seeks relief from the fire by spiritual reading, it cannot find any, just as if it could not read at all. On one occasion, it occurred to me to read a life of a Saint, that I might forget myself, and be refreshed with the recital of what he had suffered. Four or five times, I read as many lines; and, though they were written in Spanish, I understood them less at the end than I did when I began: so I gave it up. It so happened to me on more occasions than one, but I have a more distinct recollection of this. 15. To converse with any one is worse, for the devil then sends so offensive a spirit of bad temper, that I think I could eat people up; nor can I help myself. I feel that I do something when I keep myself under control; or rather our Lord does so, when He holds back with His hand any one in this state from saying or doing something that may be hurtful to his neighbours and offensive to God. Then, as to going to our confessor, that is of no use; for the certain result is--and very often has it happened to me--what I shall now describe. Though my confessors, with whom I had to do then, and have to do still, are so holy, they spoke to me and reproved me with such harshness, that they were astonished at it afterwards when I told them of it. They said that they could not help themselves; for, though they had resolved not to use such language, and though they pitied me also very much,--yea, even had scruples on the subject, because of my grievous trials of soul and body,--and were, moreover, determined to console me, they could not refrain. They did not use unbecoming words--I mean, words offensive to God; yet their words were the most offensive that could be borne with in confession. They must have aimed at mortifying me. At other times, I used to delight in this, and was prepared to bear it; but it was then a torment altogether. I used to think, too, that I deceived them; so I went to them, and cautioned them very earnestly to be on their guard against me, for it might be that I deceived them. I saw well enough that I would not do so advisedly, nor tell them an untruth; [12] but everything made me afraid. One of them, on one occasion, when he had heard me speak of this temptation, told me not to distress myself; for, even if I wished to deceive him, he had sense enough not to be deceived. This gave me great comfort. 16. Sometimes, almost always,--at least, very frequently,--I used to find rest after Communion; now and then, even, as I drew near to the most Holy Sacrament, all at once my soul and body would be so well, that I was amazed. [13] It seemed to be nothing else but an instantaneous dispersion of the darkness that covered my soul: when the sun rose, I saw how silly I had been. 17. On other occasions, if our Lord spoke to me but one word, saying only, "Be not distressed, have no fear,"--as I said before, [14]--I was made whole at once; or, if I saw a vision, I was as if I had never been amiss. I rejoiced in God, and made my complaint to Him, because He permitted me to undergo such afflictions; yet the recompense was great; for almost always, afterwards, His mercies descended upon me in great abundance. The soul seemed to come forth as gold out of the crucible, most refined, and made glorious to behold, our Lord dwelling within it. These trials afterwards are light, though they once seemed to be unendurable; and the soul longs to undergo them again, if that be more pleasing to our Lord. And though trials and persecutions increase, yet, if we bear them without offending our Lord, rejoicing in suffering for His sake, it will be all the greater gain: I, however, do not bear them as they ought to be borne, but rather in a most imperfect way. At other times, my trials came upon me--they come still--in another form; and then it seems to me as if the very possibility of thinking a good thought, or desiring the accomplishment of it, were utterly taken from me: both soul and body are altogether useless and a heavy burden. However, when I am in this state, I do not suffer from the other temptations and disquietudes, but only from a certain loathing of I know not what, and my soul finds pleasure in nothing. 18. I used to try exterior good works, in order to occupy myself partly by violence; and I know well how weak a soul is when grace is hiding itself. It did not distress me much, because the sight of my own meanness gave me some satisfaction. On other occasions, I find myself unable to pray or to fix my thoughts with any distinctness upon God, or anything that is good, though I may be alone; but I have a sense that I know Him. It is the understanding and the imagination, I believe, which hurt me here; for it seems to me that I have a good will, disposed for all good; but the understanding is so lost, that it seems to be nothing else but a raving lunatic, which nobody can restrain, and of which I am not mistress enough to keep it quiet for a minute. [15] 19. Sometimes I laugh at myself, and recognise my wretchedness: I watch my understanding, and leave it alone to see what it will do. Glory be to God, for a wonder, it never runs on what is wrong, but only on indifferent things, considering what is going on here, or there, or elsewhere. I see then, more and more, the exceeding great mercy of our Lord to me, when He keeps this lunatic bound in the chains of perfect contemplation. I wonder what would happen if those people who think I am good knew of my extravagance. I am very sorry when I see my soul in such bad company; I long to see it delivered therefrom, and so I say to our Lord: When, O my God, shall I see my whole soul praising Thee, that it may have the fruition of Thee in all its faculties? Let me be no longer, O Lord, thus torn to pieces, and every one of them, as it were, running in a different direction. This has been often the case with me, but I think that my scanty bodily health was now and then enough to bring it about. 20. I dwell much on the harm which original sin has done us; that is, I believe, what has rendered us incapable of the fruition of so great a good. My sins, too, must be in fault; for, if I had not committed so many, I should have been more perfect in goodness. Another great affliction which I suffered was this: all the books which I read on the subject of prayer, I thought I understood thoroughly, and that I required them no longer, because our Lord had given me the gift of prayer. I therefore ceased to read those books, and applied myself to lives of Saints, thinking that this would improve me and give me courage; for I found myself very defective in every kind of service which the Saints rendered unto God. Then it struck me that I had very little humility, when I could think that I had attained to this degree of prayer; and so, when I could not come to any other conclusion, I was greatly distressed, until certain learned persons, and the blessed friar, Peter of Alcantara, told me not to trouble myself about the matter. 21. I see clearly enough that I have not yet begun to serve God, though He showers down upon me those very graces which He gives to many good people. I am a mass of imperfection, except in desire and in love; for herein I see well that our Lord has been gracious to me, in order that I may please Him in some measure. I really think that I love Him; but my conduct, and the many imperfections I discern in myself, make me sad. 22. My soul, also, is subject occasionally to a certain foolishness,--that is the right name to give it,--when I seem to be doing neither good nor evil, but following in the wake of others, as they say, without pain or pleasure, indifferent to life and death, pleasure and pain. I seem to have no feeling. The soul seems to me like a little ass, which feeds and thrives, because it accepts the food which is given it, and eats it without reflection. The soul in this state must be feeding on some great mercies of God, seeing that its miserable life is no burden to it, and that it bears it patiently but it is conscious of no sensible movements or results, whereby it may ascertain the state it is in. 23. It seems to me now like sailing with a very gentle wind, when one makes much way without knowing how; for in the other states, so great are the effects, that the soul sees almost at once an improvement in itself, because the desires instantly are on fire, and the soul is never satisfied. This comes from those great impetuosities of love, spoken of before, [16] in those to whom God grants them. It is like those little wells I have seen flowing, wherein the upheaving of the sand never ceases. This illustration and comparison seem to me to be a true description of those souls who attain to this state; their love is ever active, thinking what it may do; it cannot contain itself, as the water remains not in the earth, but is continually welling upwards. So is the soul, in general; it is not at rest, nor can it contain itself, because of the love it has: it is so saturated therewith, that it would have others drink of it, because there is more than enough for itself, in order that they might help it to praise God. 24. I call to remembrance--oh, how often!--that living water of which our Lord spoke to the Samaritan woman. That Gospel [17] has a great attraction for me; and, indeed, so it had even when I was a little child, though I did not understand it then as I do now. I used to pray much to our Lord for that living water; and I had always a picture of it, representing our Lord at the well, with this inscription, "Domine, da mihi aquam." [18] 25. This love is also like a great fire, which requires fuel continually, in order that it may not burn out. So those souls I am speaking of, however much it may cost them, will always bring fuel, in order that the fire may not be quenched. As for me, I should be glad, considering what I am, if I had but straw even to throw upon it. And so it is with me occasionally--and, indeed, very often. At one time, I laugh at myself; and at another, I am very much distressed. The inward stirring of my love urges me to do something for the service of God; and I am not able to do more than adorn images with boughs and flowers, clean or arrange an oratory, or some such trifling acts, so that I am ashamed of myself. If I undertook any penitential practice, the whole was so slight, and was done in such a way, that if our Lord did not accept my good will, I saw it was all worthless, and so I laughed at myself. The failure of bodily strength, sufficient to do something for God, is no light affliction for those souls to whom He, in His goodness, has communicated this fire of His love in its fulness. It is a very good penance; for when souls are not strong enough to heap fuel on this fire, and die of fear that the fire may go out, it seems to me that they become fuel themselves, are reduced to ashes, or dissolved in tears, and burn away: and this is suffering enough, though it be sweet. 26. Let him, then, praise our Lord exceedingly, who has attained to this state; who has received the bodily strength requisite for penance; who has learning, ability, and power to preach, to hear confessions, and to draw souls unto God. Such a one neither knows nor comprehends the blessing he possesses, unless he knows by experience what it is to be powerless to serve God in anything, and at the same time to be receiving much from Him. May He be blessed for ever, and may the angels glorify Him! Amen. 27. I know not if I do well to write so much in detail. But as you, my father, bade me again not to be troubled by the minuteness of my account, nor to omit anything, I go on recounting clearly and truly all I can call to mind. But I must omit much; for if I did not, I should have to spend more time--and, as I said before, [19] I have so little to spend, and perhaps, after all, nothing will be gained. 1. Ch. xxvii. §§ 17, 18, 19. 2. Hoja de lata, "cierta hoja de hierro muy delgada" (Cobarruvias, Tesoro, in voce). 3. Ch. xxiv. § 5. Doña Guiomar de Ulloa. 4. Ch. xxvi. § 5. 5. Ch. vii. § 12. 6. See ch. xxviii. § 24. 7. Ch. xxiii. § 7. 8. A "custody" is a division of the province, in the Order of St. Francis, comprising a certain number of convents. 9. § 10. 10. Job i. 11. See ch. xxxii. § 1, &c. 12. See ch. xxviii. § 6. 13. See Way of Perfection, ch. lxi. § 2; but ch. xxxiv. § 8 of the earlier editions. 14. Ch. xx. § 21, ch. xxv. § 22, ch. xxvi. § 3. 15. "Un Credo." 16. Ch. xxix. § 11. 17. St. John iv. 5-42: the Gospel of Friday after the Third Sunday in Lent, where the words are, "hanc aquam." 18. "Lord, give me this water" (St. John iv. 15). See ch. i. § 6; and Way of Perfection, ch. xxix. § 5; ch. xix. § 5 of the earlier editions. 19. Ch. xiv. § 12. Chapter XXXI. Of Certain Outward Temptations and Appearances of Satan. Of the Sufferings Thereby Occasioned. Counsels for Those Who Go on Unto Perfection. 1. Now that I have described certain temptations and troubles, interior and secret, of which Satan was the cause, I will speak of others which he wrought almost in public, and in which his presence could not be ignored. [1] 2. I was once in an oratory, when Satan, in an abominable shape, appeared on my left hand. I looked at his mouth in particular, because he spoke, and it was horrible. A huge flame seemed to issue out of his body, perfectly bright, without any shadow. He spoke in a fearful way, and said to me that, though I had escaped out of his hands, he would yet lay hold of me again. I was in great terror, made the sign of the cross as well as I could, and then the form vanished--but it reappeared instantly. This occurred twice; I did not know what to do; there was some holy water at hand; I took some, and threw it in the direction of the figure, and then Satan never returned. 3. On another occasion, I was tortured for five hours with such terrible pains, such inward and outward sufferings, that it seemed to me as if I could not bear them. Those who were with me were frightened; they knew not what to do, and I could not help myself. I am in the habit, when these pains and my bodily suffering are most unendurable, to make interior acts as well as I can, imploring our Lord, if it be His will, to give me patience, and then to let me suffer on, even to the end of the world. So, when I found myself suffering so cruelly, I relieved myself by making those acts and resolutions, in order that I might be able to endure the pain. It pleased our Lord to let me understand that it was the work of Satan; for I saw close beside me a most frightful little negro, gnashing his teeth in despair at losing what he attempted to seize. When I saw him, I laughed, and had no fear; for there were some then present who were helpless, and knew of no means whereby so great a pain could be relieved. My body, head, and arms were violently shaken; I could not help myself: but the worst of all was the interior pain, for I could find no ease in any way. Nor did I dare to ask for holy water, lest those who were with me should be afraid, and find out what the matter really was. 4. I know by frequent experience that there is nothing which puts the devils to flight like holy water. They run away before the sign of the cross also, but they return immediately: great, then, must be the power of holy water. As for me, my soul is conscious of a special and most distinct consolation whenever I take it. Indeed, I feel almost always a certain refreshing, which I cannot describe, together with an inward joy, which comforts my whole soul. This is no fancy, nor a thing which has occurred once only; for it has happened very often, and I have watched it very carefully. I may compare what I feel with that which happens to a person in great heat, and very thirsty, drinking a cup of cold water--his whole being is refreshed. I consider that everything ordained by the Church is very important; and I have a joy in reflecting that the words of the Church are so mighty, that they endow water with power, so that there shall be so great a difference between holy water and water that has never been blessed. Then, as my pains did not cease, I told them, if they would not laugh, I would ask for some holy water. They brought me some, and sprinkled me with it; but I was no better. I then threw some myself in the direction of the negro, when he fled in a moment. All my sufferings ceased, just as if some one had taken them from me with his hand; only I was wearied, as if I had been beaten with many blows. It was of great service to me to learn that if, by our Lord's permission, Satan can do so much evil to a soul and body not in his power, he can do much more when he has them in his possession. It gave me a renewed desire to be delivered from a fellowship so dangerous. 5. Another time, and not long ago, the same thing happened to me, though it did not last so long, and I was alone at the moment. I asked for holy water; and they who came in after the devil had gone away,--they were two nuns, worthy of all credit, and would not tell a lie for anything,--perceived a most offensive smell, like that of brimstone. I smelt nothing myself; but the odour lasted long enough to become sensible to them. 6. On another occasion, I was in choir, when, in a moment, I became profoundly recollected. I went out in order that the sisters might know nothing of it; yet those who were near heard the sound of heavy blows where I was, and I heard voices myself, as of persons in consultation, but I did not hear what they said: I was so absorbed in prayer that I understood nothing, neither was I at all afraid. This took place almost always when our Lord was pleased that some soul or other, persuaded by me, advanced in the spiritual life. Certainly, what I am now about to describe happened to me once; there are witnesses to testify to it, particularly my present confessor, for he saw the account in a letter. I did not tell him from whom the letter came, but he knew perfectly who the person was. 7. There came to me a person who, for two years and a half, had been living in mortal sin of the most abominable nature I ever heard. During the whole of that time, he neither confessed it nor ceased from it; and yet he said Mass. He confessed his other sins but of this one he used to say, How can I confess so foul a sin? He wished to give it up, but he could not prevail on himself to do so. I was very sorry for him, and it was a great grief to me to see God offended in such a way. I promised him that I would pray to God for his amendment, and get others who were better than I to do the same. I wrote to one person, and the priest undertook to get the letter delivered. It came to pass that he made a full confession at the first opportunity; for our Lord God was pleased, on account of the prayers of those most holy persons to whom I had recommended him, to have pity on this soul. I, too, wretched as I am, did all I could for the same end. 8. He wrote to me, and said that he was so far improved, that he had not for some days repeated his sin; but he was so tormented by the temptation, that it seemed to him as if he were in hell already, so great were his sufferings. He asked me to pray to God for him. I recommended him to my sisters, through whose prayers I must have obtained this mercy from our Lord; for they took the matter greatly to heart; and he was a person whom no one could find out. I implored His Majesty to put an end to these torments and temptations, and to let the evil spirits torment me instead, provided I did not offend our Lord. Thus it was that for one month I was most grievously tormented; and then it was that these two assaults of Satan, of which I have just spoken, took place. 9. Our Lord was pleased to deliver him out of this temptation, so I was informed; for I told him what happened to myself that month. His soul gained strength, and he continued free; he could never give thanks enough to our Lord and to me as if I had been of any service--unless it be that the belief he had that our Lord granted me such graces was of some advantage to him. He said that, when he saw himself in great straits, he would read my letters, and then the temptation left him. He was very much astonished at my sufferings, and at the manner of his own deliverance: even I myself am astonished, and I would suffer as much for many years for the deliverance of that soul. May our Lord be praised for ever! for the prayers of those who serve Him can do great things; and I believe the sisters of this house do serve Him. The devils must have been more angry with me only because I asked them to pray, and because our Lord permitted it on account of my sins. At that time, too, I thought the evil spirits would have suffocated me one night, and when the sisters threw much holy water about I saw a great troop of them rush away as if tumbling over a precipice. These cursed spirits have tormented me so often, and I am now so little afraid of them,--because I see they cannot stir without our Lord's permission,--that I should weary both you, my father, and myself, if I were to speak of these things in detail. 10. May this I have written be of use to the true servant of God, who ought to despise these terrors, which Satan sends only to make him afraid! Let him understand that each time we despise those terrors, their force is lessened, and the soul gains power over them. There is always some great good obtained; but I will not speak of it, that I may not be too diffuse. I will speak, however, of what happened to me once on the night of All Souls. I was in an oratory, and, having said one Nocturn, was saying some very devotional prayers at the end of our Breviary, when Satan put himself on the book before me, to prevent my finishing my prayer. I made the sign of the cross, and he went away. I then returned to my prayer, and he, too, came back; he did so, I believe, three times, and I was not able to finish the prayer without throwing holy water at him. I saw certain souls at that moment come forth out of purgatory--they must have been near their deliverance, and I thought that Satan might in this way have been trying to hinder their release. It is very rarely that I saw Satan assume a bodily form; I know of his presence through the vision I have spoken of before, [2] the vision wherein no form is seen. 11. I wish also to relate what follows, for I was greatly alarmed at it: on Trinity Sunday, in the choir of a certain monastery, and in a trance, I saw a great fight between evil spirits and the angels. I could not make out what the vision meant. In less than a fortnight, it was explained clearly enough by the dispute that took place between persons given to prayer and many who were not, which did great harm to that house; for it was a dispute that lasted long and caused much trouble. On another occasion, I saw a great multitude of evil spirits round about me, and, at the same time, a great light, in which I was enveloped, which kept them from coming near me. I understood it to mean that God was watching over me, that they might not approach me so as to make me offend Him. I knew the vision was real by what I saw occasionally in myself. The fact is, I know now how little power the evil spirits have, provided I am not out of the grace of God; I have scarcely any fear of them at all, for their strength is as nothing, if they do not find the souls they assail give up the contest, and become cowards; it is in this case that they show their power. 12. Now and then, during the temptations I am speaking of, it seemed to me as if all my vanity and weakness in times past had become alive again within me; so I had reason enough to commit myself into the hands of God. Then I was tormented by the thought that, as these things came back to my memory, I must be utterly in the power of Satan, until my confessor consoled me; for I imagined that even the first movement towards an evil thought ought not to have come near one who had received from our Lord such great graces as I had. 13. At other times, I was much tormented--and even now I am tormented--when I saw people make much of me, particularly great people, and when they spake well of me. I have suffered, and still suffer, much in this way. I think at once of the life of Christ and of the Saints, and then my life seems the reverse of theirs, for they received nothing but contempt and ill-treatment. All this makes me afraid; I dare not lift up my head, and I wish nobody saw me at all. It is not thus with me when I am persecuted; then my soul is so conscious of strength, though the body suffers, and though I am in other ways afflicted, that I do not know how this can be; but so it is,--and my soul seems then to be a queen in its kingdom, having everything under its feet. 14. I had such a thought now and then--and, indeed, for many days together. I regarded it as a sign of virtue and of humility; but I see clearly now it was nothing else but a temptation. A Dominican friar, of great learning, showed it to me very plainly. When I considered that the graces which our Lord had bestowed upon me might come to the knowledge of the public, my sufferings became so excessive as greatly to disturb my soul. They went so far, that I made up my mind, while thinking of it, that I would rather be buried alive than have these things known. And so, when I began to be profoundly recollected, or to fall into a trance, which I could not resist even in public, I was so ashamed of myself, that I would not appear where people might see me. 15. Once, when I was much distressed at this, our Lord said to me, What was I afraid of? one of two things must happen--people would either speak ill of me, or give glory to Him. He made me understand by this, that those who believed in the truth of what was going on in me would glorify Him; and that those who did not would condemn me without cause: in both ways I should be the gainer, and I was therefore not to distress myself. [3] This made me quite calm, and it comforts me whenever I think of it. 16. This temptation became so excessive, that I wished to leave the house, and take my dower to another monastery, where enclosure was more strictly observed than in that wherein I was at this time. I had heard great things of that other house, which was of the same Order as mine; it was also at a great distance, and it would have been a great consolation to me to live where I was not known; but my confessor would never let me go. These fears deprived me in a great measure of all liberty of spirit; and I understood afterwards that this was not true humility, because it disturbed me so much. And our Lord taught me this truth; if I was convinced, and certainly persuaded, that all that was good in me came wholly and only from God, and if it did not distress me to hear the praises of others,--yea, rather, if I was pleased and comforted when I saw that God was working in them,--then neither should I be distressed if He showed forth His works in me. 17. I fell, too, into another extreme. I begged of God, and made it a particular subject of prayer, that it might please His Majesty, whenever any one saw any good in me, that such a one might also become acquainted with my sins, in order that he might see that His graces were bestowed on me without any merit on my part: and I always greatly desire this. My confessor told me not to do it. But almost to this day, if I saw that any one thought well of me, I used in a roundabout way, or any how, as I could, to contrive he should know of my sins: [4] that seemed to relieve me. But they have made me very scrupulous on this point. This, it appears to me, was not an effect of humility, but oftentimes the result of temptation. It seemed to me that I was deceiving everybody--though, in truth, they deceived themselves, by thinking that there was any good in me. [5] I did not wish to deceive them, nor did I ever attempt it, only our Lord permitted it for some end; and so, even with my confessors, I never discussed any of these matters if I did not see the necessity of it, for that would have occasioned very considerable scruples. 18. All these little fears and distresses, and semblance of humility, I now see clearly were mere imperfections, and the result of my unmortified life; for a soul left in the hands of God cares nothing about evil or good report, if it clearly comprehends, when our Lord is pleased to bestow upon it His grace, that it has nothing of its own. Let it trust the Giver; it will know hereafter why He reveals His gifts, and prepare itself for persecution, which in these times is sure to come, when it is our Lord's will it should be known of any one that He bestows upon him graces such as these; for a thousand eyes are watching that soul, while a thousand souls of another order are observed of none. In truth, there was no little ground for fear, and that fear should have been mine: I was therefore not humble, but a coward; for a soul which God permits to be thus seen of men may well prepare itself to be the world's martyr--because, if it will not die to the world voluntarily, that very world will kill it. 19. Certainly, I see nothing in the world that seems to me good except this, that it tolerates no faults in good people, and helps them to perfection by dint of complaints against them. I mean, that it requires greater courage in one not yet perfect to walk in the way of perfection than to undergo an instant martyrdom; for perfection is not attained to at once, unless our Lord grant that grace by a special privilege: yet the world, when it sees any one beginning to travel on that road, insists on his becoming perfect at once, and a thousand leagues off detects in him a fault, which after all may be a virtue. He who finds fault is doing the very same thing,--but, in his own case, viciously,--and he pronounces it to be so wrong in the other. He who aims at perfection, then, must neither eat nor sleep,--nor, as they say, even breathe; and the more men respect such a one, the more do they forget that he is still in the body; and, though they may consider him perfect, he is living on the earth, subject to its miseries, however much he may tread them under his feet. And so, as I have just said, great courage is necessary here for, though the poor soul have not yet begun to walk, the world will have it fly; and, though its passions be not wholly overcome, men will have it that they must be under restraint, even upon trying occasions, as those of the Saints are, of whom they read, after they are confirmed in grace. 20. All this is a reason for praising God, and also for great sorrow of heart, because very many go backwards who, poor souls, know not how to help themselves; and I too, I believe, would have gone back also, if our Lord had not so mercifully on His part done everything for me. And until He, of His goodness, had done all, nothing was done by me, as you, my father, may have seen already, beyond falling and rising again. I wish I knew how to explain it, because many souls, I believe, delude themselves in this matter; they would fly before God gives them wings. 21. I believe I have made this comparison on another occasion, [6] but it is to the purpose here, for I see certain souls are very greatly afflicted on that ground. When these souls begin, with great fervour, courage, and desire, to advance in virtue,--some of them, at least outwardly, giving up all for God,--when they see in others, more advanced than themselves, greater fruits of virtue given them by our Lord,--for we cannot acquire these of ourselves,--when they see in all the books written on prayer and on contemplation an account of what we have to do in order to attain thereto, but which they cannot accomplish themselves,--they lose heart. For instance, they read that we must not be troubled when men speak ill of us, that we are to be then more pleased than when they speak well of us; that we must despise our own good name, be detached from our kindred; avoid their company, which should be wearisome to us, unless they be given to prayer; with many other things of the same kind. The disposition to practise this must be, in my opinion, the gift of God; for it seems to me a supernatural good, contrary to our natural inclinations. Let them not distress themselves; let them trust in our Lord: what they now desire, His Majesty will enable them to attain to by prayer, and by doing what they can themselves; for it is very necessary for our weak nature that we should have great confidence, that we should not be fainthearted, nor suppose that, if we do our best, we shall fail to obtain the victory at last. And as my experience here is large, I will say, by way of caution to you, my father, do not think--though it may seem so--that a virtue is acquired when we have not tested it by its opposing vice: we must always be suspicious of ourselves, and never negligent while we live; for much evil clings to us if, as I said before, [7] grace be not given to us fully to understand what everything is: and in this life there is nothing without great risks. 22. I thought a few years ago, not only that I was detached from my kindred, but that they were a burden to me; and certainly it was so, for I could not endure their conversation. An affair of some importance had to be settled, and I had to remain with a sister of mine, for whom I had always before had a great affection. The conversation we had together, though she is better than I am, did not please me; for it could not always be on subjects I preferred, owing to the difference of our conditions--she being married. I was therefore as much alone as I could; yet I felt that her troubles gave me more trouble than did those of my neighbours, and even some anxiety. In short, I found out that I was not so detached as I thought, and that it was necessary for me to flee from dangerous occasions, in order that the virtue which our Lord had begun to implant in me might grow; and so, by His help, I have striven to do from that time till now. 23. If our Lord bestows any virtue upon us, we must make much of it, and by no means run the risk of losing it; so it is in those things which concern our good name, and many other matters. You, my father, must believe that we are not all of us detached, though we think we are; it is necessary for us never to be careless on this point. If any one detects in himself any tenderness about his good name, and yet wishes to advance in the spiritual life, let him believe me and throw this embarrassment behind his back, for it is a chain which no file can sever; only the help of God, obtained by prayer and much striving on his part, can do it. It seems to me to be a hindrance on the road, and I am astonished at the harm it does. I see some persons so holy in their works, and they are so great as to fill people with wonder. O my God, why is their soul still on the earth? Why has it not arrived at the summit of perfection? What does it mean? What keeps him back who does so much for God? Oh, there it is!--self-respect! and the worst of it is, that these persons will not admit that they have it, merely because Satan now and then convinces them that they are under an obligation to observe it. 24. Well, then, let them believe me: for the love of our Lord, let them give heed to the little ant, who speaks because it is His pleasure. If they take not this caterpillar away, though it does not hurt the whole tree, because some virtues remain, the worm will eat into every one of them. Not only is the tree not beautiful, but it also never thrives, neither does it suffer the others near it to thrive; for the fruit of good example which it bears is not sound, and endures but a short time. I say it again and again, let our self-respect be ever so slight, it will have the same result as the missing of a note on the organ when it is played,--the whole music is out of tune. It is a thing which hurts the soul exceedingly in every way, but it is a pestilence in the way of prayer. 25. Are we striving after union with God? and do we wish to follow the counsels of Christ,--who was loaded with reproaches and falsely accused,--and, at the same time, to keep our own reputation and credit untouched? We cannot succeed, for these things are inconsistent one with another. Our Lord comes to the soul when we do violence to ourselves, and strive to give up our rights in many things. Some will say, I have nothing that I can give up, nor have I any opportunity of doing so. I believe that our Lord will never suffer any one who has made so good a resolution as this to miss so great a blessing. His Majesty will make so many arrangements for him, whereby he may acquire this virtue,--more frequently, perhaps, than he will like. Let him put his hand to the work. I speak of the little nothings and trifles which I gave up when I began--or, at least, of some of them: the straws which I said [8] I threw into the fire; for I am not able to do more. All this our Lord accepted: may He be blessed for evermore! 26. One of my faults was this: I had a very imperfect knowledge of my Breviary and of my duties in choir, simply because I was careless and given to vanities; and I knew the other novices could have taught me. But I never asked them, that they might not know how little I knew. It suggested itself to me at once, that I ought to set a good example: this is very common. Now, however, that God has opened my eyes a little, even when I know a thing, but yet am very slightly in doubt about it, I ask the children. I have lost neither honour nor credit by it--on the contrary, I believe our Lord has been pleased to strengthen my memory. My singing of the Office was bad, and I felt it much if I had not learned the part intrusted to me,--not because I made mistakes before our Lord, which would have been a virtue, but because I made them before the many nuns who heard me. I was so full of my own reputation, that I was disturbed, and therefore did not sing what I had to sing even so well as I might have done. Afterwards, I ventured, when I did not know it very well, to say so. At first, I felt it very much; but afterwards I found pleasure in doing it. So, when I began to be indifferent about its being known that I could not sing well, it gave me no pain at all, and I sang much better. This miserable self-esteem took from me the power of doing that which I regarded as an honour, for every one regards as honourable that which he likes. 27. By trifles such as these, which are nothing,--and I am altogether nothing myself, seeing that this gave me pain,--by little and little, doing such actions, and by such slight performances,--they become of worth because done for God,--His Majesty helps us on towards greater things; and so it happened to me in the matter of humility. When I saw that all the nuns except myself were making great progress,--I was always myself good for nothing,--I used to fold up their mantles when they left the choir. I looked on myself as doing service to angels who had been there praising God. I did so till they--I know not how--found it out; and then I was not a little ashamed, because my virtue was not strong enough to bear that they should know of it. But the shame arose, not because I was humble, but because I was afraid they would laugh at me, the matter being so trifling. 28. O Lord, what a shame for me to lay bare so much wickedness, and to number these grains of sand, which yet I did not raise up from the ground in Thy service without mixing them with a thousand meannesses! The waters of Thy grace were not as yet flowing beneath them, so as to make them ascend upwards. O my Creator, oh, that I had anything worth recounting amid so many evil things, when I am recounting the great mercies I received at Thy hands! So it is, O my Lord. I know not how my heart could have borne it, nor how any one who shall read this can help having me in abhorrence when he sees that mercies so great had been so ill-requited, and that I have not been ashamed to speak of these services. Ah! they are only mine, O my Lord; but I am ashamed I have nothing else to say of myself; and that it is that makes me speak of these wretched beginnings, in order that he who has begun more nobly may have hope that our Lord, who has made much of mine, will make more of his. May it please His Majesty to give me this grace, that I may not remain for ever at the beginning! Amen. [9] 1. 2 Cor. ii. 11: "Non enim ignoramus cogitationes ejus." 2. Ch. xxvii. § 4. 3. See Inner Fortress, vi. ch. iv. § 12. 4. Way of Perfection, ch. lxv. § 2; but ch. xxxvi. of the previous editions. 5. See ch. x. § 10. 6. Ch. xiii. § 3. 7. Ch. xx. § 38. 8. Ch. xxx. § 25. 9. Don Vicente de la Fuente thinks the first "Life" ended here; that which follows was written under obedience to her confessor, F. Garcia of Toledo, and after the foundation of the monastery of St. Joseph, Avila. Chapter XXXII. Our Lord Shows St. Teresa the Place Which She Had by Her Sins Deserved in Hell. The Torments There. How the Monastery of St. Joseph Was Founded. 1. Some considerable time after our Lord had bestowed upon me the graces I have been describing, and others also of a higher nature, I was one day in prayer when I found myself in a moment, without knowing how, plunged apparently into hell. I understood that it was our Lord's will I should see the place which the devils kept in readiness for me, and which I had deserved by my sins. It was but a moment, but it seems to me impossible I should ever forget it even if I were to live many years. 2. The entrance seemed to be by a long narrow pass, like a furnace, very low, dark, and close. The ground seemed to be saturated with water, mere mud, exceedingly foul, sending forth pestilential odours, and covered with loathsome vermin. At the end was a hollow place in the wall, like a closet, and in that I saw myself confined. All this was even pleasant to behold in comparison with what I felt there. There is no exaggeration in what I am saying. 3. But as to what I then felt, I do not know where to begin, if I were to describe it; it is utterly inexplicable. I felt a fire in my soul. I cannot see how it is possible to describe it. My bodily sufferings were unendurable. I have undergone most painful sufferings in this life, and, as the physicians say, the greatest that can be borne, such as the contraction of my sinews when I was paralysed, [1] without speaking of others of different kinds, yea, even those of which I have also spoken, [2] inflicted on me by Satan; yet all these were as nothing in comparison with what I felt then, especially when I saw that there would be no intermission, nor any end to them. 4. These sufferings were nothing in comparison with the anguish of my soul, a sense of oppression, of stifling, and of pain so keen, accompanied by so hopeless and cruel an infliction, that I know not how to speak of it. If I said that the soul is continually being torn from the body, it would be nothing, for that implies the destruction of life by the hands of another but here it is the soul itself that is tearing itself in pieces. I cannot describe that inward fire or that despair, surpassing all torments and all pain. I did not see who it was that tormented me, but I felt myself on fire, and torn to pieces, as it seemed to me; and, I repeat it, this inward fire and despair are the greatest torments of all. 5. Left in that pestilential place, and utterly without the power to hope for comfort, I could neither sit nor lie down: there was no room. I was placed as it were in a hole in the wall; and those walls, terrible to look on of themselves, hemmed me in on every side. I could not breathe. There was no light, but all was thick darkness. I do not understand how it is; though there was no light, yet everything that can give pain by being seen was visible. 6. Our Lord at that time would not let me see more of hell. Afterwards, I had another most fearful vision, in which I saw the punishment of certain sins. They were most horrible to look at; but, because I felt none of the pain, my terror was not so great. In the former vision, our Lord made me really feel those torments, and that anguish of spirit, just as if I had been suffering them in the body there. I know not how it was, but I understood distinctly that it was a great mercy that our Lord would have me see with mine own eyes the very place from which His compassion saved me. I have listened to people speaking of these things, and I have at other times dwelt on the various torments of hell, though not often, because my soul made no progress by the way of fear; and I have read of the diverse tortures, and how the devils tear the flesh with red-hot pincers. But all is as nothing before this; it is a wholly different matter. In short, the one is a reality, the other a picture; and all burning here in this life is as nothing in comparison with the fire that is there. 7. I was so terrified by that vision,--and that terror is on me even now while I am writing,--that, though it took place nearly six years ago, [3] the natural warmth of my body is chilled by fear even now when I think of it. And so, amid all the pain and suffering which I may have had to bear, I remember no time in which I do not think that all we have to suffer in this world is as nothing. It seems to me that we complain without reason. I repeat it, this vision was one of the grandest mercies of our Lord. It has been to me of the greatest service, because it has destroyed my fear of trouble and of the contradiction of the world, and because it has made me strong enough to bear up against them, and to give thanks to our Lord, who has been my Deliverer, as it now seems to me, from such fearful and everlasting pains. 8. Ever since that time, as I was saying, everything seems endurable in comparison with one instant of suffering such as those I had then to bear in hell. I am filled with fear when I see that, after frequently reading books which describe in some manner the pains of hell, I was not afraid of them, nor made any account of them. Where was I? How could I possibly take any pleasure in those things which led me directly to so dreadful a place? Blessed for ever be Thou, O my God! and, oh, how manifest is it that Thou didst love me much more than I did love Thee! How often, O Lord, didst Thou save me from that fearful prison! and how I used to get back to it contrary to Thy will. 9. It was that vision that filled me with the very great distress which I feel at the sight of so many lost souls,--especially of the Lutherans,--for they were once members of the Church by baptism,--and also gave me the most vehement desires for the salvation of souls; for certainly I believe that, to save even one from those overwhelming torments, I would most willingly endure many deaths. If here on earth we see one whom we specially love in great trouble or pain, our very nature seems to bid us compassionate him; and if those pains be great, we are troubled ourselves. What, then, must it be to see a soul in danger of pain, the most grievous of all pains, for ever? Who can endure it? It is a thought no heart can bear without great anguish. Here we know that pain ends with life at last, and that there are limits to it; yet the sight of it moves our compassion so greatly. That other pain has no ending; and I know not how we can be calm, when we see Satan carry so many souls daily away. 10. This also makes me wish that, in a matter which concerns us so much, we did not rest satisfied with doing less than we can do on our part,--that we left nothing undone. May our Lord vouchsafe to give us His grace for that end! When I consider that, notwithstanding my very great wickedness, I took some pains to please God, and abstained from certain things which I know the world makes light of,--that, in short, I suffered grievous infirmities, and with great patience, which our Lord gave me; that I was not inclined to murmur or to speak ill of anybody; that I could not--I believe so--wish harm to any one; that I was not, to the best of my recollection, either avaricious or envious, so as to be grievously offensive in the sight of God; and that I was free from many other faults,--for, though so wicked, I had lived constantly in the fear of God,--I had to look at the very place which the devils kept ready for me. It is true that, considering my faults, I had deserved a still heavier chastisement; but for all that, I repeat it, the torment was fearful, and we run a great risk whenever we please ourselves. No soul should take either rest or pleasure that is liable to fall every moment into mortal sin. Let us, then, for the love of God, avoid all occasions of sin, and our Lord will help us, as He has helped me. May it please His Majesty never to let me out of His hands, lest I should turn back and fall, now that I have seen the place where I must dwell if I do. I entreat our Lord, for His Majesty's sake, never to permit it. Amen. 11. When I had seen this vision, and had learned other great and hidden things which our Lord, of His goodness, was pleased to show me,--namely, the joy of the blessed and the torment of the wicked,--I longed for the way and the means of doing penance for the great evil I had done, and of meriting in some degree, so that I might gain so great a good; and therefore I wished to avoid all society, and to withdraw myself utterly from the world. I was in spirit restless, yet my restlessness was not harassing, but rather pleasant. I saw clearly that it was the work of God, and that His Majesty had furnished my soul with fervour, so that I might be able to digest other and stronger food than I had been accustomed to eat. I tried to think what I could do for God, and thought that the first thing was to follow my vocation to a religious life, which His Majesty had given me, by keeping my rule in the greatest perfection possible. 12. Though in that house in which I then lived there were many servants of God, and God was greatly served therein, yet, because it was very poor, the nuns left it very often and went to other places, where, however, we could serve God in all honour and observances of religion. The rule also was kept, not in its original exactness, but according to the custom of the whole Order, authorised by the Bull of Mitigation. There were other inconveniences also: we had too many comforts, as it seemed to me; for the house was large and pleasant. But this inconvenience of going out, though it was I that took most advantage of it, was a very grievous one for me; for many persons, to whom my superiors could not say no, were glad to have me with them. My superiors, thus importuned, commanded me to visit these persons; and thus it was so arranged that I could not be long together in the monastery. Satan, too, must have had a share in this, in order that I might not be in the house, where I was of great service to those of my sisters to whom I continually communicated the instructions which I received from my confessors. 13. It occurred once to a person with whom I was speaking to say to me and the others that it was possible to find means for the foundation of a monastery, if we were prepared to become nuns like those of the Barefooted Orders. [4] I, having this desire, began to discuss the matter with that widowed lady who was my companion,--I have spoken of her before, [5]--and she had the same wish that I had. She began to consider how to provide a revenue for the home. I see now that this was not the way,--only the wish we had to do so made us think it was; but I, on the other hand, seeing that I took the greatest delight in the house in which I was then living, because it was very pleasant to me, and, in my own cell, most convenient for my purpose, still held back. Nevertheless, we agreed to commit the matter with all earnestness to God. 14. One day, after Communion, our Lord commanded me to labour with all my might for this end. He made me great promises,--that the monastery would be certainly built; that He would take great delight therein; that it should be called St. Joseph's; that St. Joseph would keep guard at one door, and our Lady at the other; that Christ would be in the midst of us; that the monastery would be a star shining in great splendour; that, though the religious Orders were then relaxed, I was not to suppose that He was scantily served in them,--for what would become of the world, if there were no religious in it?--I was to tell my confessor what He commanded me, and that He asked him not to oppose nor thwart me in the matter. 15. So efficacious was the vision, and such was the nature of the words our Lord spoke to me, that I could not possibly doubt that they came from Him. I suffered most keenly, because I saw in part the great anxieties and troubles that the work would cost me, and I was also very happy in the house I was in then; and though I used to speak of this matter in past times, yet it was not with resolution nor with any confidence that the thing could ever be done. I saw that I was now in a great strait; and when I saw that I was entering on a work of great anxiety, I hesitated; but our Lord spoke of it so often to me, and set before me so many reasons and motives, which I saw could not be gainsaid,--I saw, too, that such was His will; so I did not dare do otherwise than put the whole matter before my confessor, and give him an account in writing of all that took place. 16. My confessor did not venture definitely to bid me abandon my purpose; but he saw that naturally there was no way of carrying it out; because my friend, who was to do it, had very little or no means available for that end. He told me to lay the matter before my superior, [6] and do what he might bid me do. I never spoke of my visions to my superior, but that lady who desired to found the monastery communicated with him. The Provincial was very much pleased, for he loves the whole Order, gave her every help that was necessary, and promised to acknowledge the house. Then there was a discussion about the revenues of the monastery, and for many reasons we never would allow more than thirteen sisters together. Before we began our arrangements, we wrote to the holy friar, Peter of Alcantara, telling him all that was taking place; and he advised us not to abandon our work, and gave us his sanction on all points. 17. As soon as the affair began to be known here, there fell upon us a violent persecution, which cannot be very easily described--sharp sayings and keen jests. People said it was folly in me, who was so well off in my monastery; as to my friend, the persecution was so continuous, that it wearied her. I did not know what to do, and I thought that people were partly in the right. When I was thus heavily afflicted, I commended myself to God, and His Majesty began to console and encourage me. He told me that I could then see what the Saints had to go through who founded the religious Orders: that I had much heavier persecutions to endure than I could imagine, but I was not to mind them. He told me also what I was to say to my friend; and what surprised me most was, that we were consoled at once as to the past, and resolved to withstand everybody courageously. And so it came to pass; for among people of prayer, and indeed in the whole neighbourhood, there was hardly one who was not against us, and who did not think our work the greatest folly. 18. There was so much talking and confusion in the very monastery wherein I was, that the Provincial began to think it hard for him to set himself against everybody; so he changed his mind, and would not acknowledge the new house. He said that the revenue was not certain, and too little, while the opposition was great. On the whole, it seemed that he was right; he gave it up at last, and would have nothing to do with it. It was a very great pain to us,--for we seemed now to have received the first blow,--and in particular to me, to find the Provincial against us; for when he approved of the plan, I considered myself blameless before all. They would not give absolution to my friend, if she did not abandon the project; for they said she was bound to remove the scandal. 19. She went to a very learned man, and a very great servant of God, of the Order of St. Dominic, [7] to whom she gave an account of all this matter. This was even before the Provincial had withdrawn his consent; for in this place we had no one who would give us advice; and so they said that it all proceeded solely from our obstinacy. That lady gave an account of everything, and told the holy man how much she received from the property of her husband. Having, a great desire that he would help us,--for he was the most learned man here, and there are few in his Order more learned than he,--I told him myself all we intended to do, and some of my motives. I never said a word of any revelation whatever, speaking only of the natural reasons which influenced me; for I would not have him give an opinion otherwise than on those grounds. He asked us to give him eight days before he answered, and also if we had made up our minds to abide by what he might say. I said we had; but though I said so, and though I thought so, I never lost a certain confidence that the monastery would be founded. My friend had more faith than I; nothing they could say could make her give it up. As for myself, though, as I said, it seemed to me impossible that the work should be finally abandoned, yet my belief in the truth of the revelation went no further than in so far as it was not against what is contained in the sacred writings, nor against the laws of the Church, which we are bound to keep. Though the revelation seemed to me to have come really from God, yet, if that learned man had told me that we could not go on without offending God and going against our conscience, I believe I should have given it up, and looked out for some other way; but our Lord showed me no other way than this. 20. The servant of God told me afterwards that he had made up his mind to insist on the abandonment of our project, for he had already heard the popular cry: moreover, he, as everybody did, thought it folly; and a certain nobleman also, as soon as he knew that we had gone to him, had sent him word to consider well what he was doing, and to give us no help; that when he began to consider the answer he should make us, and to ponder on the matter, the object we had in view, our manner of life, and the Order, he became convinced that it was greatly for the service of God, and that we must not give it up. Accordingly, his answer was that we should make haste to settle the matter. He told us how and in what way it was to be done; and if our means were scanty, we must trust somewhat in God. If anyone made any objections, they were to go to him--he would answer them; and in this way he always helped us, as I shall show by and by. [8] 21. This answer was a great comfort to us; so also was the conduct of certain holy persons who were usually against us: they were now pacified, and some of them even helped us. One of them was the saintly nobleman [9] of whom I spoke before; [10] he looked on it--so, indeed, it was--as a means of great perfection, because the whole foundation was laid in prayer. He saw also very many difficulties before us, and no way out of them,--yet he gave up his own opinion, and admitted that the work might be of God. Our Lord Himself must have touched his heart, as He also did that of the doctor, the priest and servant of God, to whom, as I said before, [11] I first spoke, who is an example to the whole city,--being one whom God maintains there for the relief and progress of many souls: he, too, came now to give us his assistance. 22. When matters had come to this state, and always with the help of many prayers, we purchased a house in a convenient spot; and though it was small, I cared not at all for that, for our Lord had told me to go into it as well as I could,--that I should see afterwards what He would do; and how well I have seen it! I saw, too, how scanty were our means; and yet I believed our Lord would order these things by other ways, and be gracious unto us. 1. See ch. v. § 14, ch. vi. § 1. 2. Ch. xxxi. § 3. 3. In 1558 (De la Fuente). 4. This was said by Maria de Ocampo, niece of St. Teresa, then living in the monastery of the Incarnation, but not a religious; afterwards Maria Bautista, Prioress of the Carmelites at Valladolid (Ribera, i. 7). 5. Ch. xxiv. § 5. Doña Guiomar de Ulloa. 6. The Provincial of the Carmelites: F. Angel de Salasar (De la Fuente). 7. F. Pedro Ibañez (De la Fuente). 8. Ch. xxxiii. § 8. 9. Francis de Salcedo. 10. Ch. xxiii. § 6. 11. Gaspar Daza. See ch. xxiii. § 6. Chapter XXXIII. The Foundation of the Monastery Hindered. Our Lord Consoles the Saint. 1. When the matter was in this state--so near its conclusion, that on the very next day the papers were to be signed--then it was that the Father Provincial changed his mind. I believe that the change was divinely ordered--so it appeared afterwards; for while so many prayers were made, our Lord was perfecting His work and arranging its execution in another way. When the Provincial refused us, my confessor bade me forthwith to think no more of it, notwithstanding the great trouble and distress which our Lord knows it cost me to bring it to this state. When the work was given up and abandoned, people were the more convinced that it was altogether the foolishness of women; and the complaints against me were multiplied, although I had until then this commandment of my Provincial to justify me. 2. I was now very much disliked throughout the whole monastery, because I wished to found another with stricter enclosure. It was said I insulted my sisters; that I could serve God among them as well as elsewhere, for there were many among them much better than I; that I did not love the house, and that it would have been better if I had procured greater resources for it than for another. Some said I ought to be put in prison; others--but they were not many--defended me in some degree. I saw well enough that they were for the most part right, and now and then I made excuses for myself; though, as I could not tell them the chief reason, which was the commandment of our Lord, I knew not what to do, and so was silent. 3. In other respects God was most merciful unto me, for all this caused me no uneasiness; and I gave up our design with much readiness and joy, as if it cost me nothing. No one could believe it, not even those men of prayer with whom I conversed; for they thought I was exceedingly pained and sorry: even my confessor himself could hardly believe it. I had done, as it seemed to me, all that was in my power. I thought myself obliged to do no more than I had done to fulfil our Lord's commandment, and so I remained in the house where I was, exceedingly happy and joyful; though, at the same time, I was never able to give up my conviction that the work would be done. I had now no means of doing it, nor did I know how or when it would be done; but I firmly believed in its accomplishment. 4. I was much distressed at one time by a letter which my confessor wrote to me, as if I had done anything in the matter contrary to his will. Our Lord also must have meant that suffering should not fail me there where I should feel it most; and so, amid the multitude of my persecutions, when, as it seemed to me, consolations should have come from my confessor, he told me that I ought to recognise in the result that all was a dream; that I ought to lead a new life by ceasing to have anything to do for the future with it, or even to speak of it any more, seeing the scandal it had occasioned. He made some further remarks, all of them very painful. This was a greater affliction to me than all the others together. I considered whether I had done anything myself, and whether I was to blame for anything that was an offence unto God; whether all my visions were illusions, all my prayers a delusion, and I, therefore, deeply deluded and lost. This pressed so heavily upon me, that I was altogether disturbed and most grievously distressed. But our Lord, who never failed me in all the trials I speak of, so frequently consoled and strengthened me, that I need not speak of it here. He told me then not to distress myself; that I had pleased God greatly, and had not sinned against Him throughout the whole affair; that I was to do what my confessors required of me, and be silent on the subject till the time came to resume it. I was so comforted and so happy, that the persecution which had befallen me seemed to be as nothing at all. 5. Our Lord now showed me what an exceedingly great blessing it is to be tried and persecuted for His sake; for the growth of the love of God in my soul, which I now discerned, as well as of many other virtues, was such as to fill me with wonder. It made me unable to abstain from desiring trials, and yet those about me thought I was exceedingly disheartened; and I must have been so, if our Lord in that extremity had not succoured me with His great compassion. Now was the beginning of those more violent impetuosities of the love of God of which I have spoken before, [1] as well as of those profounder trances. I kept silence, however, and never spoke of those graces to any one. The saintly Dominican [2] was as confident as I was that the work would be done; and as I would not speak of it, in order that nothing might take place contrary to the obedience I owed my confessor, he communicated with my companion, and they wrote letters to Rome and made their preparations. 6. Satan also contrived now that persons should hear one from another that I had had a revelation in the matter; and people came to me in great terror, saying that the times were dangerous, that something might be laid to my charge, and that I might be taken before the Inquisitors. I heard this with pleasure, and it made me laugh, because I never was afraid of them; for I knew well enough that in matters of faith I would not break the least ceremony of the Church, that I would expose myself to die a thousand times rather than that any one should see me go against it or against any truth of Holy Writ. So I told them I was not afraid of that, for my soul must be in a very bad state if there was anything the matter with it of such a nature as to make me fear the Inquisition; I would go myself and give myself up, if I thought there was anything amiss; and if I should be denounced, our Lord would deliver me, and I should gain much. 7. I had recourse to my Dominican father; for I could rely upon him, because he was a learned man. I told him all about my visions, my way of prayer, the great graces our Lord had given me, as clearly as I could, and I begged him to consider the matter well, and tell me if there was anything therein at variance with the Holy Writings, and give me his opinion on the whole matter. He reassured me much, and, I think, profited himself; for though he was exceedingly good, yet, from this time forth, he gave himself more and more to prayer, and retired to a monastery of his Order which was very lonely, that he might apply himself more effectually to prayer, where he remained more than two years. He was dragged out of his solitude by obedience, to his great sorrow: his superiors required his services; for he was a man of great ability. I, too, on my part, felt his retirement very much, because it was a great loss to me, though I did not disturb him. But I knew it was a gain to him; for when I was so much distressed at his departure, our Lord bade me be comforted, not to take it to heart, for he was gone under good guidance. 8. So, when he came back, his soul had made such great progress, and he was so advanced in the ways of the spirit, that he told me on his return he would not have missed that journey for anything in the world. And I, too, could say the same thing; for where he reassured and consoled me formerly by his mere learning, he did so now through that spiritual experience he had gained of supernatural things. And God, too, brought him here in time; for He saw that his help would be required in the foundation of the monastery, which His Majesty willed should be laid. 9. I remained quiet after this for five or six months, neither thinking nor speaking of the matter; nor did our Lord once speak to me about it. I know not why, but I could never rid myself of the thought that the monastery would be founded. At the end of that time, the then Rector [3] of the Society of Jesus having gone away, His Majesty brought into his place another, [4] of great spirituality, high courage, strong understanding, and profound learning, at the very time when I was in great straits. As he who then heard my confession had a superior over him--the fathers of the Society are extremely strict about the virtue of obedience and never stir but in conformity with the will of their superiors,--so he would not dare, though he perfectly understood my spirit, and desired the accomplishment of my purpose, to come to any resolution; and he had many reasons to justify his conduct. I was at the same time subject to such great impetuosities of spirit, that I felt my chains extremely heavy; nevertheless, I never swerved from the commandment he gave me. 10. One day, when in great distress, because I thought my confessor did not trust me, our Lord said to me, Be not troubled; this suffering will soon be over. I was very much delighted, thinking I should die shortly; and I was very happy whenever I recalled those words to remembrance. Afterwards I saw clearly that they referred to the coming of the rector of whom I am speaking, for never again had I any reason to be distressed. The rector that came never interfered with the father-minister who was my confessor. On the contrary, he told him to console me,--that there was nothing to be afraid of,--and not to direct me along a road so narrow, but to leave the operations of the Spirit of God alone; for now and then it seemed as if these great impetuosities of the spirit took away the very breath of the soul. 11. The rector came to see me, and my confessor bade me speak to him in all freedom and openness. I used to feel the very greatest repugnance to speak of this matter; but so it was, when I went into the confessional, I felt in my soul something, I know not what. I do not remember to have felt so either before or after towards any one. I cannot tell what it was, nor do I know of anything with which I could compare it. It was a spiritual joy, and a conviction in my soul that his soul must understand mine, that it was in unison with it, and yet, as I have said, I knew not how. If I had ever spoken to him, or had heard great things of him, it would have been nothing out of the way that I should rejoice in the conviction that he would understand me; but he had never spoken to me before, nor I to him, and, indeed, he was a person of whom I had no previous knowledge whatever. 12. Afterwards, I saw clearly that my spirit was not deceived; for my relations with him were in every way of the utmost service to me and my soul, because his method of direction is proper for those persons whom our Lord seems to have led far on the way, seeing that He makes them run, and not to crawl step by step. His plan is to render them thoroughly detached and mortified, and our Lord has endowed him with the highest gifts herein as well as in many other things beside. As soon as I began to have to do with him, I knew his method at once, and saw that he had a pure and holy soul, with a special grace of our Lord for the discernment of spirits. He gave me great consolation. Shortly after I had begun to speak to him, our Lord began to constrain me to return to the affair of the monastery, and to lay before my confessor and the father-rector many reasons and considerations why they should not stand in my way. Some of these reasons made them afraid, for the father-rector never had a doubt of its being the work of the Spirit of God, because he regarded the fruits of it with great care and attention. At last, after much consideration, they did not dare to hinder me. [5] 13. My confessor gave me leave to prosecute the work with all my might. I saw well enough the trouble I exposed myself to, for I was utterly alone, and able to do so very little. We agreed that it should be carried on with the utmost secrecy; and so I contrived that one of my sisters, [6] who lived out of the town, should buy a house, and prepare it as if for herself, with money which our Lord provided for us. [7] I made it a great point to do nothing against obedience; but I knew that if I spoke of it to my superiors all was lost, as on the former occasion, and worse even might happen. In holding the money, in finding the house, in treating for it, in putting it in order, I had so much to suffer; and, for the most part, I had to suffer alone, though my friend did what she could: she could do but little, and that was almost nothing. Beyond giving her name and her countenance, the whole of the trouble was mine; and that fell upon me in so many ways, that I am astonished now how I could have borne it. [8] Sometimes, in my affliction, I used to say: O my Lord, how is it that Thou commandest me to do that which seems impossible?--for, though I am a woman, yet, if I were free, it might be done; but when I am tied in so many ways, without money, or the means of procuring it, either for the purpose of the Brief or for any other,--what, O Lord, can I do? 14. Once when I was in one of my difficulties, not knowing what to do, unable to pay the workmen, St. Joseph, my true father and lord, appeared to me, and gave me to understand that money would not be wanting, and I must hire the workmen. So I did, though I was penniless; and our Lord, in a way that filled those who heard of it with wonder, provided for me. The house offered me was too small,--so much so, that it seemed as if it could never be made into a monastery,--and I wished to buy another, but had not the means, and there was neither way nor means to do so. I knew not what to do. There was another little house close to the one we had, which might have formed a small church. One day, after Communion, our Lord said to me, I have already bidden thee to go in anyhow. And then, as if exclaiming, said: Oh, covetousness of the human race, thinking that even the whole earth is too little for it! how often have I slept in the open air, because I had no place to shelter Me! [9] I was alarmed, and saw that He had good reasons to complain. I went to the little house, arranged the divisions of it, and found that it would make a sufficient, though small, monastery. I did not care now to add to the site by purchase, and so I did nothing but contrive to have it prepared in such a way that it could be lived in. Everything was coarse, and nothing more was done to it than to render it not hurtful to health--and that must be done everywhere. 15. As I was going to Communion on her feast, St. Clare appeared to me in great beauty, and bade me take courage, and go on with what I had begun; she would help me. I began to have a great devotion to St. Clare; and she has so truly kept her word, that a monastery of nuns of her Order in our neighbourhood helped us to live; and, what is of more importance, by little and little she so perfectly fulfilled my desire, that the poverty which the blessed Saint observes in her own house is observed in this, and we are living on alms. It cost me no small labour to have this matter settled by the plenary sanction and authority of the Holy Father, [10] so that it shall never be otherwise, and we possess no revenues. Our Lord is doing more for us--perhaps we owe it to the prayers of this blessed Saint; for, without our asking anybody, His Majesty supplies most abundantly all our wants. May He be blessed for ever! Amen. 16. On one of these days--it was the Feast of the Assumption of our Lady--I was in the church of the monastery of the Order of the glorious St. Dominic, thinking of the events of my wretched life, and of the many sins which in times past I had confessed in that house. I fell into so profound a trance, that I was as it were beside myself. I sat down, and it seemed as if I could neither see the Elevation nor hear Mass. This afterwards became a scruple to me. I thought then, when I was in that state, that I saw myself clothed with a garment of excessive whiteness and splendour. At first I did not see who was putting it on me. Afterwards I saw our Lady on my right hand, and my father St. Joseph on my left, clothing me with that garment. I was given to understand that I was then cleansed from my sins. When I had been thus clad--I was filled with the utmost delight and joy--our Lady seemed at once to take me by both hands. She said that I pleased her very much by being devout to the glorious St. Joseph; that I might rely on it my desires about the monastery were accomplished, and that our Lord and they too would be greatly honoured in it; that I was to be afraid of no failure whatever, though the obedience under which it would be placed might not be according to my mind, because they would watch over us, and because her Son had promised to be with us [11]--and, as a proof of this, she would give me that jewel. She then seemed to throw around my neck a most splendid necklace of gold, from which hung a cross of great value. The stones and gold were so different from any in this world, that there is nothing wherewith to compare them. The beauty of them is such as can be conceived by no imagination,--and no understanding can find out the materials of the robe, nor picture to itself the splendours which our Lord revealed, in comparison with which all the splendours of earth, so to say, are a daubing of soot. This beauty, which I saw in our Lady, was exceedingly grand, though I did not trace it in any particular feature, but rather in the whole form of her face. She was clothed in white and her garments shone with excessive lustre that was not dazzling, but soft. I did not see St. Joseph so distinctly, though I saw clearly that he was there, as in the visions of which I spoke before, [12] in which nothing is seen. Our Lady seemed to be very young. 17. When they had been with me for a while,--I, too, in the greatest delight and joy, greater than I had ever had before, as I think, and with which I wished never to part,--I saw them, so it seemed, ascend up to heaven, attended by a great multitude of angels. I was left in great loneliness, though so comforted and raised up, so recollected in prayer and softened, that I was for some time unable to move or speak--being, as it were, beside myself. I was now possessed by a strong desire to be consumed for the love of God, and by other affections of the same kind. Everything took place in such a way that I could never have a doubt--though I often tried--that the vision came from God. [13] It left me in the greatest consolation and peace. 18. As to that which the Queen of the Angels spoke about obedience, it is this: it was painful to me not to subject the monastery to the Order, and our Lord had told me that it was inexpedient to do so. He told me the reasons why it was in no wise convenient that I should do it but I must send to Rome in a certain way, which He also explained; He would take care that I found help there: and so I did. I sent to Rome, as our Lord directed me,--for we should never have succeeded otherwise,--and most favourable was the result. 19. And as to subsequent events, it was very convenient to be under the Bishop, [14] but at that time I did not know him, nor did I know what kind of a superior he might be. It pleased our Lord that he should be as good and favourable to this house as it was necessary he should be on account of the great opposition it met with at the beginning, as I shall show hereafter, [15] and also for the sake of bringing it to the condition it is now in. Blessed be He who has done it all! Amen. 1. Ch. xxi. § 6, ch. xxix. §§ 10, 11. 2. Pedro Ibañez. See ch. xxxviii. § 15. 3. Dionisio Vasquez. Of him the Bollandists say that he was very austere and harsh to his subjects, notwithstanding his great learning: "homini egregie docto ac rebus gestis claro, sed in subditos, ut ex historia Societatis Jesu liquet, valde immiti" (n. 309). 4. Gaspar de Salazar was made rector of the house in Avila in 1561, therein succeeding Vasquez (Bollandists, ibid.). 5. St. Teresa was commanded by our Lord to ask Father Baltasar Alvarez to make a meditation on Psalm xci. 6: "Quam magnificata sunt opera Tua." The Saint obeyed, and the meditation was made. From that moment, as F. Alvarez afterwards told Father de Ribera (Life of St. Teresa, i. ch. vii.), there was no further hesitation on the part of the Saint's confessor. 6. Juana de Ahumada, wife of Juan de Ovalle. 7. The money was a present from her brother, Don Lorenzo de Cepeda; and the Saint acknowledges the receipt of it, and confesses the use made of it, in a letter to her brother, written in Avila, Dec. 31, 1561 (De la Fuente). 8. One day, she went with her sister--she was staying in her house--to hear a sermon in the church of St. Thomas. The zealous preacher denounced visions and revelations; and his observations were so much to the point, that there was no need of his saying that they were directed against St. Teresa, who was present. Her sister was greatly hurt, and persuaded the Saint to return to the monastery at once (Reforma, i. ch. xlii. § 1). 9. St. Luke ix. 58: "Filius autem hominis non habet ubi caput reclinet." 10. Pius IV., on Dec. 5, 1562, (Bouix). See ch. xxxix. § 19. 11. Ch. xxxii. § 14. 12. See ch. xxvii. § 7. 13. "Nuestro Señor," "our Lord," though inserted in the printed editions after the word "God," is not in the MS., according to Don V. de la Fuente. 14. Don Alvaro de Mendoza, Bishop of Avila, afterwards of Palencia. 15. See ch. xxxvi. § 15; Way of Perfection, ch. v. § 10; Foundations, ch. xxxi. § 1. Chapter XXXIV. The Saint Leaves Her Monastery of the Incarnation for a Time, at the Command of Her Superior. Consoles an Afflicted Widow. 1. Now, though I was very careful that no one should know what we were doing, all this work could not be carried on so secretly as not to come to the knowledge of divers persons; some believed, in it, others did not, I was in great fear lest the Provincial should be spoken to about it when he came, and find himself compelled to order me to give it up; and if he did so, it would have been abandoned at once. Our Lord provided against it in this way. In a large city, more than twenty leagues distant, was a lady in great distress on account of her husband's death. [1] She was in such extreme affliction, that fears were entertained about her life. She had heard of me, a poor sinner,--for our Lord had provided that,--and men spoke well to her of me, for the sake of other good works which resulted from it. This lady knew the Provincial well; and as she was a person of some consideration, and knew that I lived in a monastery the nuns of which were permitted to go out, our Lord made her desire much to see me. She thought that my presence would be a consolation to her, and that she could not be comforted otherwise. She therefore strove by all the means in her power to get me into her house, sending messages to the Provincial, who was at a distance far away. 2. The Provincial sent me an order, charging me in virtue of my obedience to go immediately, with one companion. I knew of it on Christmas night. It caused me some trouble and much suffering to see that they sent for me because they thought there was some good in me; I, knowing myself to be so wicked, could not bear it. I commended myself earnestly to God, and during Matins, or the greater part of them, was lost in a profound trance. Our Lord told me I must go without fail, and give no heed to the opinions of people, for they were few who would not be rash in their counsel; and though I should have troubles, yet God would be served greatly: as to the monastery, it was expedient I should be absent till the Brief came, because Satan had contrived a great plot against the coming of the Provincial; that I was to have no fear,--He would help me. I repeated this to the rector, and he told me that I must go by all means, though others were saying I ought not to go, that it was a trick of Satan to bring some evil upon me there, and that I ought to send word to the Provincial. 3. I obeyed the rector, and went without fear, because of what I had understood in prayer, though in the greatest confusion when I thought of the reasons why they sent for me, and how very much they were deceived. It made me more and more importunate with our Lord that He would not abandon me. It was a great comfort that there was a house of the Society of Jesus there whither I was going, and so I thought I should be in some degree safe under the direction of those fathers, as I had been here. 4. It was the good pleasure of our Lord that the lady who sent for me should be so much consoled that a visible improvement was the immediate result she was comforted every day more and more. This was very remarkable, because, as I said before, her suffering had reduced her to great straits. Our Lord must have done this in answer to the many prayers which the good people of my acquaintance made for me, that I might prosper in my work. She had a profound fear of God, and was so good, that her great devotion supplied my deficiencies. She conceived a great affection for me--I, too, for her, because of her goodness; but all was as it were a cross for me; for the comforts of her house were a great torment, and her making so much of me made me afraid. I kept my soul continually recollected--I did not dare to be careless: nor was our Lord careless of me; for while I was there, He bestowed the greatest graces upon me, and those graces made me so free, and filled me with such contempt for all I saw,--and the more I saw, the greater my contempt,--that I never failed to treat those ladies, whom to serve would have been a great honour for me, with as much freedom as if I had been their equal. 5. I derived very great advantages from this, and I said so. I saw that she was a woman, and as much liable to passion and weakness as I was; that rank is of little worth, and the higher it is, the greater the anxiety and trouble it brings. People must be careful of the dignity of their state, which will not suffer them to live at ease; they must eat at fixed hours and by rule, for everything must be according to their state, and not according to their constitutions; and they have frequently to take food fitted more for their state than for their liking. 6. So it was that I came to hate the very wish to be a great lady. God deliver me from this wicked, artificial life!--though I believe that this lady, notwithstanding that she was one of the chief personages of the realm, was a woman of great simplicity, and that few were more humble than she was. I was very sorry for her, for I saw how often she had to submit to much that was disagreeable to her, because of the requirements of her rank. Then, as to servants, though this lady had very good servants, how slight is that little trust that may be put in them! One must not be conversed with more than another; otherwise, he who is so favoured is envied by the rest. This of itself is a slavery, and one of the lies of the world is that it calls such persons masters, who, in my eyes, are nothing else but slaves in a thousand ways. 7. It was our Lord's pleasure that the household of that lady improved in the service of His Majesty during my stay there, though I was not exempted from some trials and some jealousies on the part of some of its members, because of the great affection their mistress had for me. They perhaps must have thought I had some personal interest to serve. Our Lord must have permitted such matters, and others of the same kind, to give me trouble, in order that I might not be absorbed in the comforts which otherwise I had there; and He was pleased to deliver me out of it all with great profit to my soul. 8. When I was there, a religious person of great consideration, and with whom I had conversed occasionally some years ago, [2] happened to arrive. When I was at Mass, in a monastery of his Order, near the house in which I was staying, I felt a longing to know the state of his soul,--for I wished him to be a great servant of God,--and I rose up in order to go and speak to him. But as I was then recollected in prayer, it seemed to me a waste of time--for what had I to do in that matter?--and so I returned to my place. Three times, I think I did this, and at last my good angel prevailed over the evil one, and I went and asked for him; and he came to speak to me in one of the confessionals. We began by asking one another of our past lives, for we had not seen one another for many years. I told him that my life had been one in which my soul had had many trials. He insisted much on my telling him what those trials were. I said that they were not to be told, and that I was not to tell them. He replied that the Dominican father, [3] of whom I have spoken, knew them, and that, as they were great friends, he could learn them from him, and so I had better tell them without hesitation. 9. The fact is, that it was not in his power not to insist, nor in mine, I believe, to refuse to speak; for notwithstanding all the trouble and shame I used to feel formerly, I spoke of my state, to him, and to the rector whom I have referred to before, [4] without any difficulty whatever; on the contrary, it was a great consolation to me; and so I told him all in confession. He seemed to me then more prudent than ever; though I had always looked upon him as a man of great understanding. I considered what high gifts and endowments for great services he had, if he gave himself wholly unto God. I had this feeling now for many years, so that I never saw any one who pleased me much without wishing at once he were given wholly unto God; and sometimes I feel this so keenly, that I can hardly contain myself. Though I long to see everybody serve God, yet my desire about those who please me is very vehement, and so I importune our Lord on their behalf. 10. So it happened with respect to this religious. He asked me to pray much for him to God. There was no necessity for his doing so, because I could not do anything else, and so I went back to my place where I was in the habit of praying alone, and began to pray to our Lord, being extremely recollected, in that my simple, silly way, when I speak without knowing very often what I am saying. It is love that speaks, and my soul is so beside itself, that I do not regard the distance between it and God. That love which I know His Majesty has for it makes it forget itself, and think itself to be one with Him; and so, as being one with Him, and not divided from Him, the soul speaks foolishly. When I had prayed with many tears that the soul of this religious might serve Him truly,--for, though I considered it good, it was not enough for me; I would have it much better,--I remember I said, "O Lord, Thou must not refuse me this grace; behold him,--he is a fit person to be our friend." 11. Oh, the great goodness and compassion of God! How He regards not the words, but the desire and the will with which they are spoken! How He suffered such a one as I am to speak so boldly before His Majesty! May He be blessed for evermore! 12. I remember that during those hours of prayer on that very night I was extremely distressed by the thought whether I was in the grace of God, and that I could never know whether I was so or not,--not that I wished to know it; I wished, however, to die, in order that I might not live a life in which I was not sure that I was not dead in sin, for there could be no death more dreadful for me than to think that I had sinned against God. I was in great straits at this thought. I implored Him not to suffer me to fall into sin, with great sweetness, dissolved in tears. Then I heard that I might console myself, and trust [5] that I was in a state of grace, because a love of God like mine, together with the graces and feelings with which His Majesty filled my soul, was of such a nature as to be inconsistent with a state of mortal sin. 13. I was now confident that our Lord would grant my prayer as to that religious. He bade me repeat certain words to him. This I felt much, because I knew not how to speak to him; for this carrying messages to a third person, as I have said, [6] is what I have always felt the most, especially when I did not know how that person would take them, nor whether he would not laugh at me. This placed me in great difficulties, but at last I was so convinced I ought to do it, that I believe I made a promise to God I would not neglect that message; and because of the great shame I felt, I wrote it out, and gave it in that way. The result showed clearly enough that it was a message from God, for that religious resolved with great earnestness to give himself to prayer, though he did not do so at once. Our Lord would have him for Himself, so He sent me to tell him certain truths which, without my understanding them, were so much to the purpose that he was astonished. Our Lord must have prepared him to receive them as from His Majesty; and though I am but a miserable sinner myself, yet I made many supplications to our Lord to convert him thoroughly, and to make him hate the pleasures and the things of this life. And so he did--blessed be God!--for every time that he spoke to me I was in a manner beside myself; and if I had not seen it, I should never have believed that our Lord would have given him in so short a time graces so matured, and filled him so full of God, that he seemed to be alive to nothing on earth. 14. May His Majesty hold him in His hand! If he will go on--and I trust in our Lord he will do so, now that he is so well grounded in the knowledge of himself--he will be one of the most distinguished servants of God, to the great profit of many souls, because he has in a short time had great experience in spiritual things: that is a gift of God, which He gives when He will and as He will, and it depends not on length of time nor extent of service. I do not mean that time and service, are not great helps, but very often our Lord will not give to some in twenty years the grace of contemplation, while He gives it to others in one,--His Majesty knoweth why. We are under a delusion when we think that in the course of years we shall come to the knowledge of that which we can in no way attain to but by experience; and thus many are in error, as I have said [7] when they would understand spirituality without being spiritual themselves. I do not mean that a man who is not spiritual, if he is learned, may not direct one that is spiritual; but it must be understood that in outward and inward things, in the order of nature, the direction must be an act of reason; and in supernatural things, according to the teaching of the sacred writings. In other matters, let him not distress himself, nor think that he can understand that which he understandeth not; neither let him quench the Spirit; [8] for now another Master, greater than he, is directing these souls, so that they are not left without authority over them. 15. He must not be astonished at this, nor think it impossible: all things are possible to our Lord; [9] he must strive rather to strengthen his faith, and humble himself, because in this matter our Lord imparts perhaps a deeper knowledge to some old woman than to him, though he may be a very learned man. Being thus humble, he will profit souls and himself more than if he affected to be a contemplative without being so; for, I repeat it, if he have no experience, if he have not a most profound humility, whereby he may see that he does not understand, and that the thing is not for that reason impossible, he will do himself but little good, and still less to his penitent. But if he is humble, let him have no fear that our Lord will allow either the one or the other to fall into delusion. 16. Now as to this father I am speaking of, as our Lord has given him light in many things, so has he laboured to find out by study that which in this matter can be by study ascertained; for he is a very learned man, and that of which he has no experience himself he seeks to find out from those who have it,--and our Lord helps him by increasing his faith, and so he has greatly benefited himself and some other souls, of whom mine is one. As our Lord knew the trials I had to undergo, His Majesty seems to have provided that, when He took away unto Himself some of those who directed me, others might remain, who helped me in my great afflictions, and rendered me great services. 17. Our Lord wrought a complete change in this father, so much so that he scarcely knew himself, so to speak. He has given him bodily health, so that he may do penance, such as he never had before; for he was sickly. He has given him courage to undertake good works, with other gifts, so that he seems to have received a most special vocation from our Lord. May He be blessed for ever! 18. All these blessings, I believe, came to him through the graces our Lord bestowed upon him in prayer; for they are real. It has been our Lord's pleasure already to try him in certain difficulties, out of which he has come forth like one who knows the true worth of that merit which is gained by suffering persecutions. I trust in the munificence of our Lord that great good will, by his means, accrue to some of his Order and to the Order itself. This is beginning to be understood. I have had great visions on the subject, and our Lord has told me wonderful things of him and of the Rector of the Society of Jesus, whom I am speaking of, [10] and also of two other religious of the Order of St. Dominic, particularly of one who, to his own profit, has actually learned of our Lord certain things which I had formerly understood of him. But there were greater things made known of him to whom I am now referring: one of them I will now relate. 19. I was with him once in the parlour, when in my soul and spirit I felt what great love burned within him, and became as it were lost in ecstasy by considering the greatness of God, who had raised that soul in so short a time to a state so high. It made me ashamed of myself when I saw him listen with so much humility to what I was saying about certain matters of prayer, when I had so little myself that I could speak on the subject to one like him. Our Lord must have borne with me in this on account of the great desire I had to see that religious making great progress. My interview with him did me great good,--it seems as if it left a new fire in my soul, burning with desire to serve our Lord as in the beginning. O my Jesus! what is a soul on fire with Thy love! How we ought to prize it, and implore our Lord to let it live long upon earth! He who has this love should follow after such souls, if it be possible. 20. It is a great thing for a person ill of this disease to find another struck down by it,--it comforts him much to see that he is not alone; they help one another greatly to suffer and to merit. They are strong with a double strength who are resolved to risk a thousand lives for God, and who long for an opportunity of losing them. They are like soldiers who, to acquire booty, and therewith enrich themselves, wish for war, knowing well that they cannot become rich without it. This is their work--to suffer. Oh, what a blessing it is when our Lord gives light to understand how great is the gain of suffering for Him! This is never understood till we have left all things; for if anybody is attached to any one thing, that is a proof that he sets some value upon it; and if he sets any value upon it, it is painful to be compelled to give it up. In that case, everything is imperfect and lost. The saying is to the purpose here,--he who follows what is lost, is lost himself; and what greater loss, what greater blindness, what greater calamity, can there be than making much of that which is nothing! 21. I now return to that which I had begun to speak of. I was in the greatest joy, beholding that soul. It seemed as if our Lord would have me see clearly the treasures He had laid up in it; and so, when I considered the favour our Lord had shown me, in that I should be the means of so great a good, I recognised my own unworthiness for such an end. I thought much of the graces our Lord had given him, and held myself as indebted for them more than if they had been given to myself. So I gave thanks to our Lord, when I saw that His Majesty had fulfilled my desires and heard my petition that He would raise up persons like him. And now my soul, no longer able to bear the joy that filled it, went forth out of itself, losing itself that it might gain the more. It lost sight of the reflections it was making; and the hearing of that divine language which the Holy Ghost seemed to speak threw me into a deep trance, which almost deprived me of all sense, though it did not last long. I saw Christ, in exceeding great majesty and glory, manifesting His joy at what was then passing. He told me as much, and it was His pleasure that I should clearly see that He was always present at similar interviews, and how much He was pleased when people thus found their delight in speaking of Him. 22. On another occasion, when far away from this place, I saw him carried by angels in great glory. I understood by that vision that his soul was making great progress: so it was; for an evil report was spread abroad against him by one to whom he had rendered a great service, and whose reputation and whose soul he had saved. He bore it with much joy. He did also other things greatly to the honour of God, and underwent more persecutions. I do not think it expedient now to speak further on this point; if, however, you, my father, who know all, should hereafter think otherwise, more might be said to the glory of our Lord. 23. All the prophecies spoken of before, [11] relating to this house, as well as others, of which I shall speak hereafter, relating to it and to other matters, have been accomplished. Some of them our Lord revealed to me three years before they became known, others earlier and others later. But I always made them known to my confessor, and to the widow my friend; for I had leave to communicate with her, as I said before. [12] She, I know, repeated them to others, and these know that I lie not. May God never permit me, in any matter whatever,--much more in things of this importance,--to say anything but the whole truth! 24. One of my brothers-in-law [13] died suddenly; and as I was in great distress at this, because he had no opportunity of making his confession, our Lord said to me in prayer that my sister also was to die in the same way; that I must go to her, and make her prepare herself for such an end. I told this to my confessor; but as he would not let me go, I heard the same warning again; and now, when he saw this, he told me I might go, and that I should lose nothing by going. My sister was living in the country; and as I did not tell her why I came, I gave her what light I could in all things. I made her go frequently to confession, and look to her soul in everything. She was very good, and did as I asked her. Four or five years after she had begun this practice, and keeping a strict watch over her conscience, she died, with nobody near her, and without being able to go to confession. This was a blessing to her, for it was little more than a week since she had been to her accustomed confession. It was a great joy to me when I heard of her death. She was but a short time in purgatory. 25. I do not think it was quite eight days afterwards when, after Communion, our Lord appeared to me, and was pleased that I should see Him receive my sister into glory. During all those years, after our Lord had spoken to me, until her death, what I then learnt with respect to her was never forgotten either by myself or by my friend, who, when my sister was thus dead, came to me in great amazement at the fulfilment of the prophecy. God be praised for ever, who takes such care of souls that they may not be lost! 1. Doña Luisa de la Cerda, sister of the Duke of Medina-Coeli, was now the widow of Arias Pardo, Marshal of Castille, Lord of Malagon and Paracuellos. Don Arias was nephew of Cardinal Tabera, Archbishop of Toledo (De la Fuente). 2. F. Vicente Barron, Dominican (see ch. v. § 8), according to F. Bouix, on the authority of Ribera and Yepez; but the Carmelite Father, Fr. Antonio of St. Joseph, in his note on the first Fragment (Letters, vol. iv. p. 408), says that it was Fr. Garcia of Toledo, brother of Don Fernando, Duke of Alva; and Don Vicente de la Fuente thinks the opinion of Fr. Antonio the more probable. 3. Pedro Ibañez (Bouix). 4. Ch. xxxiii. § 11. 5. Father Bouix says that here the word "confiar," "trust," in the printed text, has been substituted by some one for the words "estar cierta," "be certain," which he found in the MS. But Don Vicente de la Fuente retains the old reading "confiar," and makes no observation on the alleged discrepancy between the MS. and the printed text. The observation of F. Bouix, however, is more important, and deserves credit,--for Don Vicente may have failed, through mere inadvertence, to see what F. Bouix saw; and it is also to be remembered that Don Vicente does not say that the MS. on this point has been so closely inspected as to throw any doubt on the positive testimony of F. Bouix. Six years after this note was written Don Vicente published a facsimile by photography of the original text in the handwriting of the Saint, preserved in the Escurial. The words are not "confiar," but "estar cierta." 6. Ch. xxxiii. § 12. 7. Ch. xiv. § 10. 8. 1 Thess. v. 19: "Spiritum nolite extinguere." 9. St. Matt. xix. 26: "Apud Deum autem omnia possibilia sunt." 10. F. Gaspar de Salazar. 11. Ch. xxvi. § 3. 12. Ch. xxx. § 3. Doña Guiomar de Ulloa. 13. Don Martin de Guzman y Barrientos, husband of Maria de Cepeda, the Saint's sister. Chapter XXXV. The Foundation of the House of St. Joseph. The Observation of Holy Poverty Therein. How the Saint Left Toledo. 1. When I was staying with this lady, [1] already spoken of, in whose house I remained more than six months, our Lord ordained that a holy woman [2] of our Order should hear of me, who was more than seventy leagues away from the place. She happened to travel this way, and went some leagues out of her road that she might see me. Our Lord had moved her in the same year, and in the same month of the year, that He had moved me, to found another monastery of the Order; and as He had given her this desire, she sold all she possessed, and went to Rome to obtain the necessary faculties. She went on foot, and barefooted. She is a woman of great penance and prayer, and one to whom our Lord gave many graces; and our Lady appeared to her, and commanded her to undertake this work. Her progress in the service of our Lord was so much greater than mine, that I was ashamed to stand in her presence. She showed me Briefs she brought from Rome, and during the fortnight she remained with me we laid our plan for the founding of these monasteries. 2. Until I spoke to her, I never knew that our rule, before it was mitigated, required of us that we should possess nothing; [3] nor was I going to found a monastery without revenue, [4] for my intention was that we should be without anxiety about all that was necessary for us, and I did not think of the many anxieties which the possession of property brings in its train. This holy woman, taught of our Lord, perfectly understood--though she could not read--what I was ignorant of, notwithstanding my having read the Constitutions [5] so often; and when she told me of it, I thought it right, though I feared they would never consent to this, but would tell me I was committing follies, and that I ought not to do anything whereby I might bring suffering upon others. If this concerned only myself, nothing should have kept me back,--on the contrary, it would have been my great joy to think that I was observing the counsels of Christ our Lord; for His Majesty had already given me great longings for poverty. [6] 3. As for myself, I never doubted that this was the better part; for I had now for some time wished it were possible in my state to go about begging, for the love of God--to have no house of my own, nor anything else. But I was afraid that others--if our Lord did not give them the same desire--might live in discontent. Moreover, I feared that it might be the cause of some distraction: for I knew some poor monasteries not very recollected, and I did not consider that their not being recollected was the cause of their poverty, and that their poverty was not the cause of their distraction: distraction never makes people richer, and God never fails those who serve Him. In short, I was weak in faith; but not so this servant of God. 4. As I took the advice of many in everything, I found scarcely any one of this opinion--neither my confessor, nor the learned men to whom I spoke of it. They gave me so many reasons the other way, that I did not know what to do. But when I saw what the rule required, and that poverty was the more perfect way, I could not persuade myself to allow an endowment. And though they did persuade me now and then that they were right, yet, when I returned to my prayer, and saw Christ on the cross, so poor and destitute, I could not bear to be rich, and I implored Him with tears so to order matters that I might be poor as He was. 5. I found that so many inconveniences resulted from an endowment, and saw that it was the cause of so much trouble, and even distraction, that I did nothing but dispute with the learned. I wrote to that Dominican friar [7] who was helping us, and he sent back two sheets by way of reply, full of objections and theology against my plan, telling me that he had thought much on the subject. I answered that, in order to escape from my vocation, the vow of poverty I had made, and the perfect observance of the counsels of Christ, I did not want any theology to help me, and in this case I should not thank him for his learning. If I found any one who would help me, it pleased me much. The lady in whose house I was staying was a great help to me in this matter. Some at first told me that they agreed with me; afterwards, when they had considered the matter longer, they found in it so many inconveniences that they insisted on my giving it up. I told them that, though they changed their opinion so quickly, I would abide by the first. 6. At this time, because of my entreaties,--for the lady had never seen the holy friar, Peter of Alcantara,--it pleased our Lord to bring him to her house. As he was a great lover of poverty, and had lived in it for so many years, he knew well the treasures it contains, and so he was a great help to me; he charged me on no account whatever to give up my purpose. Now, having this opinion and sanction,--no one was better able to give it, because he knew what it was by long experience,--I made up my mind to seek no further advice. 7. One day, when I was very earnestly commending the matter to God, our Lord told me that I must by no means give up my purpose of founding the monastery in poverty; it was His will, and the will of His Father: He would help me. I was in a trance; and the effects were such, that I could have no doubt it came from God. On another occasion, He said to me that endowments bred confusion, with other things in praise of poverty; and assured me that whosoever served Him would never be in want of the necessary means of living: and this want, as I have said, [8] I never feared myself. Our Lord changed the dispositions also of the licentiate,--I am speaking of the Dominican friar, [9]--who, as I said, wrote to me that I should not found the monastery without an endowment. Now, I was in the greatest joy at hearing this; and having these opinions in my favour, it seemed to me nothing less than the possession of all the wealth of the world, when I had resolved to live in poverty for the love of God. 8. At this time, my Provincial withdrew the order and the obedience, in virtue of which I was staying in that house. [10] He left it to me to do as I liked: if I wished to return I might do so; if I wished to remain I might also do so for a certain time. But during that time the elections in my monastery [11] would take place and I was told that many of the nuns wished to lay on me the burden of superiorship. The very thought of this alone was a great torment to me; for though I was resolved to undergo readily any kind of martyrdom for God, I could not persuade myself at all to accept this; for, putting aside the great trouble it involved,--because the nuns were so many,--and other reasons, such as that I never wished for it, nor for any other office,--on the contrary, had always refused them,--it seemed to me that my conscience would be in great danger; and so I praised God that I was not then in my convent. I wrote to my friends and asked them not to vote for me. 9. When I was rejoicing that I was not in that trouble, our Lord said to me that I was on no account to keep away; that as I longed for a cross, there was one ready for me, and that a heavy one: that I was not to throw it away, but go on with resolution; He would help me, and I must go at once. I was very much distressed, and did nothing but weep, because I thought that my cross was to be the office of prioress; and, as I have just said, I could not persuade myself that it would be at all good for my soul--nor could I see any means by which it would be. I told my confessor of it, and he commanded me to return at once: that to do so was clearly the most perfect way; and that, because the heat was very great,--it would be enough if I arrived before the election,--I might wait a few days, in order that my journey might do me no harm. 10. But our Lord had ordered it otherwise. I had to go at once, because the uneasiness I felt was very great; and I was unable to pray, and thought I was failing in obedience to the commandments of our Lord, and that as I was happy and contented where I was, I would not go to meet trouble. All my service of God there was lip-service: why did I, having the opportunity of living in greater perfection, neglect it? If I died on the road, let me die. Besides, my soul was in great straits, and our Lord had taken from me all sweetness in prayer. In short, I was in such a state of torment, that I begged the lady to let me go; for my confessor, when he saw the plight I was in, had already told me to go, God having moved him as He had moved me. The lady felt my departure very much, and that was another pain to bear; for it had cost her much trouble, and diverse importunities of the Provincial, to have me in her house. 11. I considered it a very great thing for her to have given her consent, when she felt it so much; but, as she was a person who feared God exceedingly,--and as I told her, among many other reasons, that my going away tended greatly to His service, and held out the hope that I might possibly return,--she gave way, but with much sorrow. I was now not sorry myself at coming away, for I knew that it was an act of greater perfection, and for the service of God. So the pleasure I had in pleasing God took away the pain of quitting that lady,--whom I saw suffering so keenly,--and others to whom I owed much, particularly my confessor of the Society of Jesus, in whom I found all I needed. But the greater the consolations I lost for our Lord's sake, the greater was my joy in losing them. I could not understand it, for I had a clear consciousness of these two contrary feelings--pleasure, consolation, and joy in that which weighed down my soul with sadness. I was joyful and tranquil, and had opportunities of spending many hours in prayer; and I saw that I was going to throw myself into a fire; for our Lord had already told me that I was going to carry a heavy cross,--though I never thought it would be so heavy as I afterwards found it to be,--yet I went forth rejoicing. I was distressed because I had not already begun the fight, since it was our Lord's will that I should be in it. Thus His Majesty gave me strength, and established it in my weakness. [12] 12. As I have just said, I could not understand how this could be. I thought of this illustration: if I were possessed of a jewel, or any other thing which gave me great pleasure, and it came to my knowledge that a person whom I loved more than myself, and whose satisfaction I preferred to my own, wished to have it, it would give me great pleasure to deprive myself of it, because I would give all I possessed to please that person. Now, as the pleasure of giving pleasure to that person surpasses any pleasure I have in that jewel myself, I should not be distressed in giving away that or anything else I loved, nor at the loss of that pleasure which the possession of it gave me. So now, though I wished to feel some distress when I saw that those whom I was leaving felt my going so much, yet, notwithstanding my naturally grateful disposition,--which, under other circumstances, would have been enough to have caused me great pain,--at this time, though I wished to feel it, I could feel none. 13. The delay of another day was so serious a matter in the affairs of this holy house, that I know not how they would have been settled if I had waited. Oh, God is great! I am often lost in wonder when I consider and see the special help which His Majesty gave me towards the establishment of this little cell of God,--for such I believe it to be,--the lodging wherein His Majesty delights; for once, when I was in prayer, He told me that this house was the paradise of his delight. [13] It seems, then, that His Majesty has chosen these whom he has drawn hither, among whom I am living very much ashamed of myself. [14] I could not have even wished for souls such as they are for the purpose of this house, where enclosure, poverty, and prayer are so strictly observed; they submit with so much joy and contentment, that every one of them thinks herself unworthy of the grace of being received into it,--some of them particularly; for our Lord has called them out of the vanity and dissipation of the world, in which, according to its laws, they might have lived contented. Our Lord has multiplied their joy, so that they see clearly how He had given them a hundredfold for the one thing they have left, [15] and for which they cannot thank His Majesty enough. Others He has advanced from well to better. To the young He gives courage and knowledge, so that they may desire nothing else, and also to understand that to live away from all things in this life is to live in greater peace even here below. To those who are no longer young, and whose health is weak, He gives--and has given--the strength to undergo the same austerities and penance with all the others. 14. O my Lord! how Thou dost show Thy power! There is no need to seek reasons for Thy will; for with Thee, against all natural reason, all things are possible: so that thou teachest clearly there is no need of anything but of loving Thee [16] in earnest, and really giving up everything for Thee, in order that Thou, O my Lord, might make everything easy. It is well said that Thou feignest to make Thy law difficult: [17] I do not see it, nor do I feel that the way that leadeth unto Thee is narrow. I see it as a royal road, and not a pathway; a road upon which whosoever really enters, travels most securely. No mountain passes and no cliffs are near it: these are the occasions of sin. I call that a pass,--a dangerous pass,--and a narrow road, which has on one side a deep hollow, into which one stumbles, and on the other a precipice, over which they who are careless fall, and are dashed to pieces. He who loves Thee, O my God, travels safely by the open and royal road, far away from the precipice: he has scarcely stumbled at all, when Thou stretchest forth Thy hand to save him. One fall--yea, many falls--if he does but love Thee, and not the things of the world, are not enough to make him perish; he travels in the valley of humility. I cannot understand what it is that makes men afraid of the way of perfection. 15. May our Lord of His mercy make us see what a poor security we have in the midst of dangers so manifest, when we live like the rest of the world; and that true security consists in striving to advance in the way of God! Let us fix our eyes upon Him, and have no fear that the Sun of justice will ever set, or suffer us to travel to our ruin by night, unless we first look away from Him. People are not afraid of living in the midst of lions, every one of whom seems eager to tear them: I am speaking of honours, pleasures, and the like joys, as the world calls them: and herein the devil seems to make us afraid of ghosts. I am astonished a thousand times, and ten thousand times would I relieve myself by weeping, and proclaim aloud my own great blindness and wickedness, if, perchance, it might help in some measure to open their eyes. May He, who is almighty, of His goodness open their eyes, and never suffer mine to be blind again! 1. Doña Luisa de la Cerda. 2. Maria of Jesus was the daughter of a Reporter of Causes in the Chancery of Granada; but his name and that of his wife are not known. Maria married, but became a widow soon afterwards. She then became a novice in the Carmelite monastery in Granada, and during her noviciate had revelations, like those of St. Teresa, about a reform of the Order. Her confessor made light of her revelations, and she then referred them to F. Gaspar de Salazar, a confessor of St. Teresa, who was then in Granada. He approved of them, and Maria left the noviciate, and went to Rome with two holy women of the Order of St. Francis. The three made the journey on foot, and, moreover, barefooted. Pope Pius IV. heard her prayer, and, looking at her torn and bleeding feet, said to her, "Woman of strong courage, let it be as thou wilt." She returned to Granada, but both the Carmelites and the city refused her permission to found her house there, and some went so far as to threaten to have her publicly whipped. Doña Leonor de Mascareñas gave her a house in Alcala de Henares, of which she took possession Sept. 11, 1562; but the house was formally constituted July 23, 1563, and subjected to the Bishop ten days after (Reforma, i. c. 59; and Don Vicente, vol. i. p. 255). The latter says that the Chronicler is in error when he asserts that this monastery of Maria of Jesus was endowed. 3. The sixth chapter of the rule is: "Nullus fratrum sibi aliquid proprium, esse dicat, sed sint vobis omnia communia." 4. See ch. xxxii. § 13. 5. The Constitutions which the Saint read in the Monastery of the Incarnation must have been the Constitutions grounded on the Mitigated Rule which was sanctioned by Eugenius IV. (Romani Pontificis, A.D. 1432). 6. See Relation, i. § 10. 7. F. Pedro Ibañez. 8. Ch. xi. § 3. 9. F. Pedro Ibañez. 10. The house of Doña Luisa, in Toledo. 11. The monastery of the Incarnation, Avila. 12. 2 Cor. xii. 9: "Virtus in infirmitate perficitur." 13. See Way of Perfection, ch. xxii.; but ch. xiii. ed. Doblado. 14. See Foundations, ch. I, § 1. 15. St. Matt. xix. 29: "Et omnis qui reliquerit domum . . . propter nomen Meum, centuplum accipiet, et vitam æternam possidebit." 16. When the workmen were busy with the building, a nephew of the Saint, the child of her sister and Don Juan de Ovalle, was struck by some falling stones and killed. The workmen took the child to his mother: and the Saint, then in the house of Doña Guiomar de Ulloa, was sent for. Doña Guiomar took the dead boy into her arms, gave him to the Saint, saying that it was a grievous blow to the father and mother, and that she must obtain his life from God. The Saint took the body, and, laying it in her lap, ordered those around her to cease their lamentations, of whom her sister was naturally the loudest, and be silent. Then, covering her face and her body with her veil, she prayed to God, and God gave the child his life again. The little boy soon after ran up to his aunt and thanked her for what she had done. In after years the child used to say to the Saint that, as she had deprived him of the bliss of heaven by bringing him back to life, she was bound to see that he did not suffer loss. Don Gonzalo died three years after St. Teresa, when he was twenty-eight years of age (Reforma, i. c. 42, § 2). 17. Psalm xciii. 20: "Qui fingis laborem in præcepto." Chapter XXXVI. The Foundation of the Monastery of St. Joseph. Persecution and Temptations. Great Interior Trial of the Saint, and Her Deliverance. 1. Having now left that city, [1] I travelled in great joy, resolved to suffer most willingly whatever our Lord might be pleased to lay upon me. On the night of my arrival here, [2] came also from Rome the commission and the Brief for the erection of the monastery. [3] I was astonished myself, and so were those who knew how our Lord hastened my coming, when they saw how necessary it was, and in what a moment our Lord had brought me back. [4] I found here the Bishop and the holy friar, [5] Peter of Alcantara, and that nobleman, [6] the great servant of God, in whose house the holy man was staying; for he was a man who was in the habit of receiving the servants of God in his house. These two prevailed on the Bishop to accept the monastery, which was no small thing, because it was founded in poverty; but he was so great a lover of those whom he saw determined to serve our Lord, that he was immediately drawn to give them His protection. It was the approbation of the holy old man, [7] and the great trouble he took to make now this one, now that one, help us, that did the whole work. If I had not come at the moment, as I have just said, I do not see how it could have been done; for the holy man was here but a short time,--I think not quite eight days,--during which he was also ill; and almost immediately afterwards our Lord took him to Himself. [8] It seems as if His Majesty reserved him till this affair was ended, because now for some time--I think for more than two years--he had been very ill. 2. Everything was done in the utmost secrecy; and if it had not been so, I do not see how anything could have been done at all; for the people of the city were against us, as it appeared afterwards. Our Lord ordained that one of my brothers-in-law [9] should be ill, and his wife away, and himself in such straits that my superiors gave me leave to remain with him. Nothing, therefore, was found out, though some persons had their suspicions;--still, they did not believe. It was very wonderful, for his illness lasted only no longer than was necessary for our affair; and when it was necessary he should recover his health, that I might be disengaged, and he leave the house empty, our Lord restored him; and he was astonished at it himself. [10] 3. I had much trouble in persuading this person and that to allow the foundation; I had to nurse the sick man, and obtain from the workmen the hasty preparation of the house, so that it might have the form of a monastery; but much remained still to be done. My friend was not here, [11] for we thought it best she should be away, in order the better to hide our purpose. I saw that everything depended on haste, for many, reasons, one of which was that I was afraid I might be ordered back to my monastery at any moment. I was troubled by so many things, that I suspected my cross had been sent me, though it seemed but a light one in comparison with that which I understood our Lord meant me to carry. 4. When everything was settled, our Lord was pleased that some of us should take the habit on St. Bartholomew's Day. The most Holy Sacrament began to dwell in the house at the same time. [12] With full sanction and authority, then, our monastery of our most glorious father St. Joseph was founded in the year 1562. [13] I was there myself to give the habit, with two nuns [14] of the house to which we belonged, who happened then to be absent from it. As the house which thus became a monastery was that of my brother-in-law--I said before [15] that he had bought it, for the purpose of concealing our plan--I was there myself with the permission of my superiors; and I did nothing without the advice of learned men, in order that I might not break, in a single point, my vow of obedience. As these persons considered what I was doing to be most advantageous for the whole Order, on many accounts, they told me--though I was acting secretly, and taking care my superiors should know nothing--that I might go on. If they had told me that there was the slightest imperfection in the whole matter, I would have given up the founding of a thousand monasteries,--how much more, then, this one! I am certain of this; for though I longed to withdraw from everything more and more, and to follow my rule and vocation in the greatest perfection and seclusion, yet I wished to do so only conditionally: for if I should have learnt that it would be for the greater honour of our Lord to abandon it, I would have done so, as I did before on one occasion, [16] in all peace and contentment. 5. I felt as if I were in bliss, when I saw the most Holy Sacrament reserved, with four poor orphans, [17]--for they were received without a dowry,--and great servants of God, established in the house. It was our aim from the beginning to receive only those who, by their example, might be the foundation on which we could build up what we had in view--great perfection and prayer--and effect a work which I believed to be for the service of our Lord, and to the honour of the habit of His glorious Mother. This was my anxiety. It was also a great consolation to me that I had done that which our Lord had so often commanded me to do, and that there was one church more in this city dedicated to my glorious father St. Joseph. Not that I thought I had done anything myself, for I have never thought so, and do not think so even now; I always looked upon it as the work of our Lord. My part in it was so full of imperfections, that I look upon myself rather as a person in fault than as one to whom any thanks are due. But it was a great joy to me when I saw His Majesty make use of me, who am so worthless, as His instrument in so grand a work. I was therefore in great joy,--so much so, that I was, as it were, beside myself, lost in prayer. 6. When all was done--it might have been about three or four hours afterwards--Satan returned to the spiritual fight against me, as I shall now relate. He suggested to me that perhaps I had been wrong in what I had done; perhaps I had failed in my obedience, in having brought it about without the commandment of the Provincial. I did certainly think that the Provincial would be displeased because I had placed the monastery under the jurisdiction of the Bishop [18] without telling him of it beforehand; though, as he would not acknowledge the monastery himself, and as I had not changed mine, it seemed to me that perhaps he would not care much about the matter. Satan also suggested whether the nuns would be contented to live in so strict a house, whether they could always find food, whether I had not done a silly thing, and what had I to do with it, when I was already in a monastery? All our Lord had said to me, all the opinions I had heard, and all the prayers which had been almost uninterrupted for more than two years, were completely blotted out of my memory, just as if they had never been. The only thing I remembered was my own opinion; and every virtue, with faith itself, was then suspended within me, so that I was without strength to practise any one of them, or to defend myself against so many blows. 7. The devil also would have me ask myself how I could think of shutting myself up in so strict a house, when I was subject to so many infirmities; how could I bear so penitential a life, and leave a house large and pleasant, where I had been always so happy, and where I had so many friends?--perhaps I might not like those of the new monastery; I had taken on myself a heavy obligation, and might possibly end in despair. He also suggested that perhaps it was he himself who had contrived it, in order to rob me of my peace and rest, so that, being unable to pray, I might be disquieted, and so lose my soul. Thoughts of this kind he put before me; and they were so many, that I could think of nothing else; and with them came such distress, obscurity, and darkness of soul as I can never describe. When I found myself in this state, I went and placed myself before the most Holy Sacrament, though I could not pray to Him; so great was my anguish, that I was like one in the agony of death. I could not make the matter known to any one, because no confessor had as yet been appointed. 8. O my God, how wretched is this life! No joy is lasting; everything is liable to change. Only a moment ago, I do not think I would have exchanged my joy with any man upon earth; and the very grounds of that joy so tormented me now, that I knew not what to do with myself. Oh, if we did but consider carefully the events of our life, every one of us would learn from experience how little we ought to make either of its pleasures or of its pains! Certainly this was, I believe, one of the most distressing moments I ever passed in all my life; my spirit seemed to forecast the great sufferings in store for me, though they never were so heavy as this was, if it had continued. But our Lord would not let His poor servant suffer, for in all my troubles He never failed to succour me; so it was now. He gave me a little light, so that I might see it was the work of the devil, and might understand the truth,--namely, that it was nothing else but an attempt on his part to frighten me with his lies. So I began to call to mind my great resolutions to serve our Lord, and my desire to suffer for His sake; and I thought that if I carried them out, I must not seek to be at rest; that if I had my trials, they would be meritorious; and that if I had troubles, and endured them in order to please God, it would serve me for purgatory. What was I, then, afraid of? If I longed for tribulations, I had them now; and my gain lay in the greatest opposition. Why, then, did I fail in courage to serve One to whom I owed so much? 9. After making these and other reflections, and doing great violence to myself, I promised before the most Holy Sacrament to do all in my power to obtain permission to enter this house, and, if I could do it with a good conscience, to make a vow of enclosure. When I had done this, the devil fled in a moment, and left me calm and peaceful, and I have continued so ever since; and the enclosure, penances, and other rules of this house are to me, in their observance, so singularly sweet and light, the joy I have is so exceedingly great, that I am now and then thinking what on earth I could have chosen which should be more delightful. I know not whether this may not be the cause of my being in better health than I was ever before, or whether it be that our Lord, because it is needful and reasonable that I should do as all the others do, gives me this comfort of keeping the whole rule, though with some difficulty. However, all who know my infirmities, are astonished at my strength. Blessed be He who giveth it all, and in whose strength I am strong! 10. Such a contest left me greatly fatigued, and laughing at Satan; for I saw clearly it was he. As I have never known what it is to be discontented because I am a nun--no, not for an instant--during more than twenty-eight years of religion, I believe that our Lord suffered me to be thus tempted, that I might understand how great a mercy He had shown me herein, and from what torment He had delivered me, and that if I saw any one in like trouble I might not be alarmed at it, but have pity on her, and be able to console her. 11. Then, when this was over, I wished to rest myself a little after our dinner; for during the whole of that night I had scarcely rested at all, and for some nights previously I had had much trouble and anxiety, while every day was full of toil; for the news of what we had done had reached my monastery, and was spread through the city. There arose a great outcry, for the reasons I mentioned before, [19] and there was some apparent ground for it. The prioress [20] sent for me to come to her immediately. When I received the order, I went at once, leaving the nuns in great distress. I saw clearly enough that there were troubles before me; but as the work was really done, I did not care much for that. I prayed and implored our Lord to help me, and my father St. Joseph to bring me back to his house. I offered up to him all I was to suffer, rejoicing greatly that I had the opportunity of suffering for his honour and of doing him service. I went persuaded that I should be put in prison at once but this would have been a great comfort, because I should have nobody to speak to, and might have some rest and solitude, of which I was in great need; for so much intercourse with people had worn me out. 12. When I came and told the prioress what I had done, she was softened a little. They all sent for the Provincial, and the matter was reserved for him. When he came, I was summoned to judgment, rejoicing greatly at seeing that I had something to suffer for our Lord. I did not think I had offended against His Majesty, or against my Order, in anything I had done; on the contrary, I was striving with all my might to exalt my Order, for which I would willingly have died,--for my whole desire was that its rule might be observed in all perfection. I thought of Christ receiving sentence, and I saw how this of mine would be less than nothing. I confessed my fault, as if I had been very much to blame; and so I seemed to every one who did not know all the reasons. After the Provincial had rebuked me sharply--though not with the severity which my fault deserved, nor according to the representations made to him--I would not defend myself, for I was determined to bear it all; on the contrary, I prayed him to forgive and punish, and be no longer angry with me. 13. I saw well enough that they condemned me on some charges of which I was innocent, for they said I had founded the monastery that I might be thought much of, and to make myself a name, and for other reasons of that kind. But on other points I understood clearly that they were speaking the truth, as when they said that I was more wicked than the other nuns. They asked, how could I, who had not kept the rule in that house, think of keeping it in another of stricter observance? They said I was giving scandal in the city, and setting up novelties. All this neither troubled nor distressed me in the least, though I did seem to feel it, lest I should appear to make light of what they were saying. 14. At last the Provincial commanded me to explain my conduct before the nuns, and I had to do it. As I was perfectly calm, and our Lord helped me, I explained everything in such a way that neither the Provincial nor those who were present found any reason to condemn me. Afterwards I spoke more plainly to the Provincial alone; he was very much satisfied, and promised, if the new monastery prospered, and the city became quiet, to give me leave to live in it. Now the outcry in the city was very great, as I am going to tell. Two or three days after this, the governor, certain members of the council of the city and of the Chapter, came together, and resolved that the new monastery should not be allowed to exist, that it was a visible wrong to the state, that the most Holy Sacrament should be removed, and that they would not suffer us to go on with our work. 15. They assembled all the Orders--that is, two learned men from each--to give their opinion. Some were silent, others condemned; in the end, they resolved that the monastery should be broken up. Only one [21]--he was of the Order of St. Dominic, and objected, not to the monastery itself, but to the foundation of it in poverty--said that there was no reason why it should be thus dissolved, that the matter ought to be well considered, that there was time enough, that it was the affair of the bishop, with other things of that kind. This was of great service to us, for they were angry enough to proceed to its destruction at once, and it was fortunate they did not. In short, the monastery must exist; our Lord was pleased to have it, and all of them could do nothing against His will. They gave their reasons, and showed their zeal for good, and thus, without offending God, made me suffer together with all those who were in favour of the monastery; there were not many, but they suffered much persecution. The inhabitants were so excited, that they talked of nothing else; every one condemned me, and hurried to the Provincial and to my monastery. 16. I was no more distressed by what they said of me than if they had said nothing; but I was afraid the monastery would be destroyed: that was painful; so also was it to see those persons who helped me lose their credit and suffer so much annoyance. But as to what was said of myself I was rather glad, and if I had had any faith I should not have been troubled at all. But a slight failing in one virtue is enough to put all the others to sleep. I was therefore extremely distressed during the two days on which those assemblies of which I have spoken were held. In the extremity of my trouble, our Lord said to me: "Knowest thou not that I am the Almighty? what art thou afraid of?" He made me feel assured that the monastery would not be broken up, and I was exceedingly comforted. The informations taken were sent up to the king's council, and an order came back for a report on the whole matter. 17. Here was the beginning of a grand lawsuit: the city sent delegates to the court, and some must be sent also to defend the monastery: but I had no money, nor did I know what to do. Our Lord provided for us for the Father Provincial never ordered me not to meddle in the matter. He is so great a lover of all that is good, that, though he did not help us, he would not be against our work. Neither did he authorise me to enter the house till he saw how it would end. Those servants of God who were in it were left alone, and did more by their prayers than I did with all my negotiations, though the affair needed the utmost attention. Now and then everything seemed to fail; particularly one day, before the Provincial came, when the prioress ordered me to meddle no more with it, and to give it up altogether. I betook myself to God, and said, "O Lord, this house is not mine; it was founded for Thee; and now that there is no one to take up the cause, do Thou protect it." I now felt myself in peace, and as free from anxiety as if the whole world were on my side in the matter; and at once I looked upon it as safe. [22] 18. A very great servant of God, and a lover of all perfection, a priest [23] who had helped me always, went to the court on this business, and took great pains. That holy nobleman [24] of whom I have often spoken laboured much on our behalf, and helped us in every way. He had much trouble and persecution to endure, and I always found a father in him, and do so still. All those who helped us, our Lord filled with such fervour as made them consider our affair as their own, as if their own life and reputation were at stake; and yet it was nothing to them, except in so far as it regarded the service of our Lord. His Majesty visibly helped the priest I have spoken of before, [25] who was also one of those who gave us great help when the Bishop sent him as his representative to one of the great meetings. There he stood alone against all; at last he pacified them by means of certain propositions, which obtained us a little respite. But that was not enough; for they were ready to spend their lives, if they could but destroy the monastery. This servant of God was he who gave the habit and reserved the most Holy Sacrament, and he was the object of much persecution. This attack lasted about six months: to relate in detail the heavy trials we passed through would be too tedious. 19. I wondered at what Satan did against a few poor women, and also how all people thought that merely twelve women, with a prioress, could be so hurtful to the city,--for they were not to be more,--I say this to those who opposed us,--and living such austere lives; for if any harm or error came of it, it would all fall upon them. Harm to the city there could not be in any way; and yet the people thought there was so much in it, that they opposed us with a good conscience. At last they resolved they would tolerate us if we were endowed, and in consideration of that would suffer us to remain. I was so distressed at the trouble of all those who were on our side--more than at my own--that I thought it would not be amiss, till the people were pacified, to accept an endowment, but afterwards to resign it. At other times, too, wicked and imperfect as I am, I thought that perhaps our Lord wished it to be so, seeing that, without accepting it, we could not succeed; and so I consented to the compromise. 20. The night before the settlement was to be made, I was in prayer,--the discussion of the terms of it had already begun,--when our Lord said to me that I must do nothing of the kind; for if we began with an endowment, they would never allow us to resign it. He said some other things also. The same night, the holy friar, Peter of Alcantara, appeared to me. He was then dead. [26] But he had written to me before his death--for he knew the great opposition and persecution we had to bear--that he was glad the foundation was so much spoken against; it was a sign that our Lord would be exceedingly honoured in the monastery, seeing that Satan was so earnest against it; and that I was by no means to consent to an endowment. He urged this upon me twice or thrice in that letter, and said that if I persisted in this everything would succeed according to my wish. 21. At this time I had already seen him twice since his death, and the great glory he was in, and so I was not afraid,--on the contrary, I was very glad; for he always appeared as a glorified body in great happiness, and the vision made me very happy too. I remember that he told me, the first time I saw him, among other things, when speaking of the greatness of his joy, that the penance he had done was a blessed thing for him, in that it had obtained so great a reward. But, as I think I have spoken of this before, [27] I will now say no more than that he showed himself severe on this occasion: he merely said that I was on no account to accept an endowment, and asked why it was I did not take his advice. He then disappeared. I remained in astonishment, and the next day told the nobleman--for I went to him in all my trouble, as to one who did more than others for us in the matter,--what had taken place, and charged him not to consent to the endowment, but to let the lawsuit go on. He was more firm on this point than I was, and was therefore greatly pleased; he told me afterwards how much he disliked the compromise. 22. After this, another personage--a great servant of God, and with good intentions--came forward, who, now that the matter was in good train, advised us to put it in the hands of learned men. This brought on trouble enough; for some of those who helped me agreed to do so; and this plot of Satan was one of the most difficult of all to unravel. Our Lord was my helper throughout. Writing thus briefly, it is impossible for me to explain what took place during the two years that passed between the beginning and the completion of the monastery: the last six months and the first six months were the most painful. 23. When at last the city was somewhat calm, the licentiate father, the Dominican friar [28] who helped us, exerted himself most skilfully on our behalf. Though not here at the time, our Lord brought him here at a most convenient moment for our service, and it seems that His Majesty brought him for that purpose only. He told me afterwards that he had no reasons for coming, and that he heard of our affair as if by chance. He remained here as long as we wanted him, and on going away he prevailed, by some means, on the Father Provincial to permit me to enter this house, and to take with me some of the nuns [29]--such a permission seemed impossible in so short a time for the performance of the Divine Office--and the training of those who were in this house: the day of our coming was a most joyful day for me. [30] 24. While praying in the church, before I went into the house, and being as it were in a trance, I saw Christ; who, as it seemed to me, received me with great affection, placed a crown on my head, and thanked me for what I had done for His Mother. On another occasion, when all of us remained in the choir in prayer after Compline, I saw our Lady in exceeding glory, in a white mantle, with which she seemed to cover us all. I understood by that the high degree of glory to which our Lord would raise the religious of this house. 25. When we had begun to sing the Office, the people began to have a great devotion to the monastery; more nuns were received, and our Lord began to stir up those who had been our greatest persecutors to become great benefactors, and give alms to us. In this way they came to approve of what they had condemned; and so, by degrees, they withdrew from the lawsuit, and would say that they now felt it to be a work of God, since His Majesty had been pleased to carry it on in the face of so much opposition. And now there is not one who thinks that it would have been right not to have founded the monastery: so they make a point of furnishing us with alms; for without any asking on our part, without begging of any one, our Lord moves them to, succour us; and so we always have what is necessary for us, and I trust in our Lord it will always be so. [31] As the sisters are few in number, if they do their duty as our Lord at present by His grace enables them to do, I am confident that they will always have it, and that they need not be a burden nor troublesome to anybody; for our Lord will care for them, as He has hitherto done. 26. It is the greatest consolation to me to find myself among those who are so detached. Their occupation is to learn how they may advance in the service of God. Solitude is their delight; and the thought of being visited by any one, even of their nearest kindred, is a trial, unless it helps them to kindle more and more their love of the Bridegroom. Accordingly, none come to this house who do not aim at this; otherwise they neither give nor receive any pleasure from their visits. Their conversation is of God only; and so he whose conversation is different does not understand them, and they do not understand him. 27. We keep the rule of our Lady of Carmel, not the rule of the Mitigation, but as it was settled by Fr. Hugo, Cardinal of Santa Sabina, and given in the year 1248, in the fifth year of the pontificate of Innocent IV., Pope. All the trouble we had to go through, as it seems to me, will have been endured to good purpose. 28. And now, though the rule be somewhat severe,--for we never eat flesh except in cases of necessity, fast eight months in the year, and practise some other austerities besides, according to the primitive rule, [32]--yet the sisters think it light on many points, and so they have other observances, which we have thought necessary for the more perfect keeping of it. And I trust in our Lord that what we have begun will prosper more and more, according to the promise of His Majesty. 29. The other house, which the holy woman of whom I spoke before [33] laboured to establish, has been also blessed of our Lord, and is founded in Alcala: it did not escape serious opposition, nor fail to endure many trials. I know that all duties of religion are observed in it, according to our primitive rule. Our Lord grant that all may be to the praise and glory of Himself and of the glorious Virgin Mary, whose habit we wear. Amen. 30. I think you must be wearied, my father, by the tedious history of this monastery; and yet it is most concise, if you compare it with our labours, and the wonders which our Lord has wrought here. There are many who can bear witness to this on oath. I therefore beg of your reverence, for the love of God, should you think fit to destroy the rest of this my writing, to preserve that part of it which relates to this monastery, and give it, when I am dead, to the sisters who may then be living in it. It will encourage them greatly, who shall come here both to serve God and to labour, that what has been thus begun may not fall to decay, but ever grow and thrive, when they see how much our Lord has done through one so mean and vile as I. As our Lord has been so particularly gracious to us in the foundation of this house it seems to me that she will do very wrong, and that she will be heavily chastised of God, who shall be the first to relax the perfect observance of the rule, which our Lord has here begun and countenanced, so that it may be kept with so much sweetness: it is most evident that the observance of it is easy, and that it can be kept with ease, by the arrangement made for those who long to be alone with their Bridegroom Christ, in order to live for ever in Him. 31. This is to be the perpetual aim of those who are here, to be alone with Him alone. They are not to be more in number than thirteen: I know this number to be the best, for I have had many opinions about it; and I have seen in my own experience, that to preserve our spirit, living on alms, without asking of anyone, a larger number would be inexpedient. May they always believe one who with much labour, and by the prayers of many people, accomplished that which must be for the best! That this is most expedient for us will be seen from the joy and cheerfulness, and the few troubles, we have all had in the years we have lived in this house, as well as from the better health than usual of us all. If any one thinks the rule hard, let her lay the fault on her want of the true spirit, and not on the rule of the house, seeing that delicate persons, and those not saints,--because they have the true spirit,--can bear it all with so much sweetness. Let others go to another monastery, where they may save their souls in the way of their own spirit. 1. Toledo. 2. Avila. In the beginning of June, 1562. 3. See ch. xxxiv. § 2. The Brief was dated Feb. 7, 1562, the third year of Pius IV. (De la Fuente). 4. The Brief was addressed to Doña Aldonza de Guzman, and to Doña Guiomar de Ulloa, her daughter. 5. Don Alvaro de Mendoza (De la Fuente). 6. Don Francisco de Salcedo. 7. St. Peter of Alcantara. "Truly this is the house of St. Joseph," were the Saint's words when he saw the rising monastery; "for I see it is the little hospice of Bethlehem" (De la Fuente). 8. In less than three months, perhaps; for St. Peter died in the sixty-third year of his age, Oct. 18, 1562, and in less than eight weeks after the foundation of the monastery of St. Joseph. 9. Don Juan de Ovalle. 10. When he saw that the Saint had made all her arrangements, he knew the meaning of his illness, and said to her, "It is not necessary I should be ill any longer" (Ribera, i. c. 8). 11. Doña Guiomar de Ulloa was now in her native place, Ciudad Toro. 12. The Mass was said by Gaspar Daza. See infra, § 18; Reforma, i. c. xlvi. § 3. 13. The bell which the Saint had provided for the convent weighed less than three pounds, and remained in the monastery for a hundred years, till it was sent, by order of the General, to the monastery of Pastrana, where the general chapters were held. There the friars assembled at the sound of the bell, which rang for the first Mass of the Carmelite Reform (Reforma, i. c. xlvi. § 1). 14. They were Doña Ines and Doña Ana de Tapia, cousins of the Saint. There were present also Don Gonzalo de Aranda, Don Francisco Salcedo, Julian of Avila, priest; Doña Juana de Ahumada, the Saint's sister; with her husband, Juan de Ovalle. The Saint herself retained her own habit, making no change, because she had not the permission of her superiors (Reforma, i. c. xlvi. § 2). 15. Ch. xxxiii. § 13. 16. Ch. xxxiii. § 3. 17. The first of these was Antonia de Henao, a penitent of St. Peter of Alcantara, and who wished to enter a religious house far away from Avila, her home. St. Peter kept her for St. Teresa. She was called from this day forth Antonia of the Holy Ghost. The second was Maria de la Paz, brought up by Doña Guiomar de Ulloa. Her name was Maria of the Cross. The third was Ursola de los Santos. She retained her family name as Ursola of the Saints. It was Gaspar Daza who brought her to the Saint. The fourth was Maria de Avila, sister of Julian the priest, and she was called Mary of St. Joseph. It was at this house, too, that the Saint herself exchanged her ordinary designation of Doña Teresa de Ahumada for Teresa of Jesus (Reforma, i. c. xlvi. § 2). 18. See Foundations, ch. ii. § 1, and ch. xxxi, § 1. 19. Ch. xxxiii. §§ 1, 2. 20. Of the Incarnation. 21. F. Domingo Bañes, the great commentator on St. Thomas. On the margin of the MS., Bañes has with his own hand written: "This was at the end of August, 1562. I was present, and gave this opinion. I am writing this in May" (the day of the month is not legible) "1575, and the mother has now founded nine monasteries en gran religion" (De la Fuente). At this time Bañes did not know, and had never seen, the Saint; he undertook her defence simply because he saw that her intentions were good, and the means she made use of for founding the monastery lawful, seeing that she had received the commandment to do so from the Pope. Bañes testifies thus in the depositions made in Salamanca in 1591 in the Saint's process. See vol. ii. p. 376 of Don Vicente's edition. 22. See Ch. xxxix. § 25. 23. Gonzalo de Aranda (De la Fuente). 24. Don Francisco de Salcedo (ibid.). 25. Ch. xxiii. § 6; Gaspar Daza (ibid.). 26. He died Oct. 18, 1562. 27. Ch. xxvii. § 21. 28. "El Padre Presentado, Dominico. Presentado en algunas Religiones es cierto titulo de grado que es respeto del Maestro como Licenciado" (Cobarruvias, in voce Presente). The father was Fra Pedro Ibañez. See ch. xxxviii. § 15. 29. From the monastery of the Incarnation. These were Ana of St. John, Ana of All the Angels, Maria Isabel, and Isabel of St. Paul. St. Teresa was a simple nun, living under obedience to the prioress of St. Joseph, Ana of St. John, and intended so to remain. But the nuns applied to the Bishop of Avila and to the Provincial of the Order, who, listening to the complaints of the sisters, compelled the Saint to be their prioress. See Reforma, i. c. xlix. § 4. 30. Mid-Lent of 1563. 31. See Way of Perfection, ch. ii. 32. "Jejunium singulis diebus, exceptis Dominicis, observetis a Festo Exaltationis Sanctæ Crucis usque ad diem Dominicæ Resurrectionis, nisi infirmitas vel debilitas corporis, aut alia justa causa, jejunium solvi suadeat; quia necessitas non habet legem. Ab esu carnium abstineatis, nisi pro infirmitatis aut debilitatis remedio sint sumantur." That is the tenth section of the rule. 33. See ch. xxxv. § 1. Maria of Jesus had founded her house in Alcala de Henares; but the austerities practised in it, and the absence of the religious mitigations which long experience had introduced, were too much for the fervent nuns there assembled. Maria of Jesus begged Doña Leonor de Mascareñas to persuade St. Teresa to come to Alcala. The Saint went to the monastery, and was received there with joy, and even entreated to take the house under her own government (Reforma, ii. c. x. §§ 3, 4). Chapter XXXVII. The Effects of the Divine Graces in the Soul. The Inestimable Greatness of One Degree of Glory. 1. It is painful to me to recount more of the graces which our Lord gave me than these already spoken of; and they are so many, that nobody can believe they were ever given to one so wicked: but in obedience to our Lord, who has commanded me to do it, [1] and you, my fathers, I will speak of some of them to His glory. May it please His Majesty it may be to the profit of some soul! For if our Lord has been thus gracious to so--miserable a thing as myself, what will He be to those who shall serve Him truly? Let all people resolve to please His Majesty, seeing that He gives such pledges as these even in this life. [2] 2. In the first place, it must be understood that, in those graces which God bestows on the soul, there are diverse degrees of joy: for in some visions the joy and sweetness and comfort of them so far exceed those of others, that I am amazed at the different degrees of fruition even in this life; for it happens that the joy and consolation which God gives in a vision or a trance are so different, that it seems impossible for the soul to be able to desire anything more in this world: and, so, in fact, the soul does not desire, nor would it ask for, a greater joy. Still, since our Lord has made me understand how great a difference there is in heaven itself between the fruition of one and that of another, I see clearly enough that here also, when our Lord wills, He gives not by measure; [3] and so I wish that I myself observed no measure in serving His Majesty, and in using my whole life and strength and health therein; and I would not have any fault of mine rob me of the slightest degree of fruition. 3. And so I say that if I were asked which I preferred, to endure all the trials of the world until the end of it, and then receive one slight degree of glory additional, or without any suffering of any kind to enter into glory of a slightly lower degree, I would accept--oh, how willingly!--all those trials for one slight degree of fruition in the contemplation of the greatness of God; for I know that he who understands Him best, loves Him and praises Him best. I do not mean that I should not be satisfied, and consider myself most blessed, to be in heaven, even if I should be in the lowest place; for as I am one who had that place in hell, it would be a great mercy of our Lord to admit me at all; and may it please His Majesty to bring me thither, and take away His eyes from beholding my grievous sins. What I mean is this,--if it were in my power, even if it cost me everything, and our Lord gave me the grace to endure much affliction, I would not through any fault of mine lose one degree of glory. Ah, wretched that I am, who by so many faults had forfeited all! 4. It is also to be observed that, in every vision or revelation which our Lord in His mercy sent me, a great gain accrued to my soul, and that in some of the visions this gain was very great. The vision of Christ left behind an impression of His exceeding beauty, and it remains with me to this day. One vision alone of Him is enough to effect this; what, then, must all those visions have done, which our Lord in His mercy sent me? One exceedingly great blessing has resulted therefrom, and it is this,--I had one very grievous fault, which was the source of much evil; namely, whenever I found anybody well disposed towards myself, and I liked him, I used to have such an affection for him as compelled me always to remember and think of him, though I had no intention of offending God: however, I was pleased to see him, to think of him and of his good qualities. All this was so hurtful, that it brought my soul to the very verge of destruction. 5. But ever since I saw the great beauty [4] of our Lord, I never saw any one who in comparison with Him seemed even endurable, or that could occupy my thoughts. For if I but turn mine eyes inwardly for a moment to the contemplation of the image which I have within me, I find myself so free, that from that instant everything I see is loathsome in comparison with the excellences and graces of which I had a vision in our Lord. Neither is there any sweetness, nor any kind of pleasure, which I can make any account of, compared with that which comes from hearing but one word from His divine mouth. What, then, must it be when I hear so many? I look upon it as impossible--unless our Lord, for my sins, should permit the loss of this remembrance--that I should have the power to occupy myself with anything in such a way as that I should not instantly recover my liberty by thinking of our Lord. 6. This has happened to me with some of my confessors, for I always have a great affection for those who have the direction of my soul. As I really saw in them only the representatives of God, I thought my will was always there where it is most occupied; and as I felt very safe in the matter, I always showed myself glad to see them. [5] They, on the other hand, servants of God, and fearing Him, were afraid that I was attaching and binding myself too much to them, though in a holy way, and treated me with rudeness. This took place after I had become so ready to obey them; for before that time I had no affection whatever for them. I used to laugh to myself, when I saw how much they were deceived. Though I was not always putting before them how little I was attached to anybody, as clearly as I was convinced of it myself, yet I did assure them of it; and they, in their further relations with me, acknowledged how much I owed to our Lord in the matter. These suspicions of me always arose in the beginning. 7. My love of, and trust in, our Lord, after I had seen Him in a vision, began to grow, for my converse with Him was so continual. I saw that, though He was God, He was man also; that He is not surprised at the frailties of men, that He understands our miserable nature, liable to fall continually, because of the first sin, for the reparation of which He had come. I could speak to Him as to a friend, though He is my Lord, because I do not consider Him as one of our earthly Lords, who affect a power they do not possess, who give audience at fixed hours, and to whom only certain persons may speak. If a poor man have any business with these, it will cost him many goings and comings, and currying favour with others, together with much pain and labour before he can speak to them. Ah, if such a one has business with a king! Poor people, not of gentle blood, cannot approach him, for they must apply to those who are his friends, and certainly these are not persons who tread the world under their feet; for they who do this speak the truth, fear nothing, and ought to fear nothing; they are not courtiers, because it is not the custom of a court, where they must be silent about those things they dislike, must not even dare to think about them, lest they should fall into disgrace. 8. O King of glory, and Lord of all kings! oh, how Thy kingly dignity is not hedged about by trifles of this kind! Thy kingdom is for ever. We do not require chamberlains to introduce us into Thy presence. The very vision of Thy person shows us at once that Thou alone art to be called Lord. Thy Majesty is so manifest that there is no need of a retinue or guard to make us confess that Thou art King. An earthly king without attendants would be hardly acknowledged; and though he might wish ever so much to be recognised, people will not own him when he appears as others; it is necessary that his dignity should be visible, if people are to believe in it. This is reason enough why kings should affect so much state; for if they had none, no one would respect them; this their semblance of power is not in themselves, and their authority must come to them from others. 9. O my Lord! O my King! who can describe Thy Majesty? It is impossible not to see that Thou art Thyself the great Ruler of all, that the beholding of Thy Majesty fills men with awe. But I am filled with greater awe, O my Lord, when I consider Thy humility, and the love Thou hast for such as I am. We can converse and speak with Thee about everything whenever we will; and when we lose our first fear and awe at the vision of Thy Majesty, we have a greater dread of offending Thee,--not arising out of the fear of punishment, O my Lord, for that is as nothing in comparison with the loss of Thee! 10. Thus far of the blessings of this vision, without speaking of others, which abide in the soul when it is past. If it be from God, the fruits thereof show it, when the soul receives light; for, as I have often said, [6] the will of our Lord is that the soul should be in darkness, and not see this light. It is, therefore, nothing to be wondered at that I, knowing myself to be so wicked as I am, should be afraid. 11. It is only just now it happened to me to be for eight days in a state wherein it seemed that I did not, and could not, confess my obligations to God, or remember His mercies; but my soul was so stupefied, and occupied with I know not what nor how: not that I had any bad thoughts; only I was so incapable of good thoughts, that I was laughing at myself, and even rejoicing to see how mean a soul can be if God is not always working in it. [7] The soul sees clearly that God is not away from it in this state, and that it is not in those great tribulations which I have spoken of as being occasionally mine. Though it heaps up fuel, and does the little it can do of itself, it cannot make the fire of the love of God burn: it is a great mercy that even the smoke is visible, showing that it is not altogether quenched. Our Lord will return and kindle it; and until then the soul--though it may lose its breath in blowing and arranging the fuel--seems to be doing nothing but putting it out more and more. 12. I believe that now the best course is to be absolutely resigned, confessing that we can do nothing, and so apply ourselves--as I said before [8]--to something else which is meritorious. Our Lord, it may be, takes away from the soul the power of praying, that it may betake itself to something else, and learn by experience how little it can do in its own strength. 13. It is true I have this day been rejoicing in our Lord, and have dared to complain of His Majesty. I said unto Him: How is it, O my God, that it is not enough for Thee to detain me in this wretched life, and that I should have to bear with it for the love of Thee, and be willing to live where everything hinders the fruition of Thee; where, besides, I must eat and sleep, transact business, and converse with every one, and all for Thy love? how is it, then,--for Thou well knowest, O my Lord, all this to be the greatest torment unto me,--that, in the rare moments when I am with Thee, Thou hidest Thyself from me? How is this consistent with Thy compassion? How can that love Thou hast for me endure this? I believe, O Lord, if it were possible for me to hide myself from Thee, as Thou hidest Thyself from me--I think and believe so--such is Thy love, that Thou wouldest not endure it at my hands. But Thou art with me, and seest me always. O my Lord, I beseech Thee look to this; it must not be; a wrong is done to one who loves Thee so much. 14. I happened to utter these words, and others of the same kind, when I should have been thinking rather how my place in hell was pleasant in comparison with the place I deserved. But now and then my love makes me foolish, so that I lose my senses; only it is with all the sense I have that I make these complaints, and our Lord bears it all. Blessed be so good a King! 15. Can we be thus bold with the kings of this world? And yet I am not surprised that we dare not thus speak to a king, for it is only reasonable that men should be afraid of him, or even to the great lords who are his representatives. The world is now come to such a state, that men's lives ought to be longer than they are if we are to learn all the new customs and ceremonies of good breeding, and yet spend any time in the service of God. I bless myself at the sight of what is going on. The fact is, I did not know how I was to live when I came into this house. Any negligence in being much more ceremonious with people than they deserve is not taken as a jest; on the contrary, they look upon it as an insult deliberately offered; so that it becomes necessary for you to satisfy them of your good intentions, if there happens, as I have said, to have been any negligence; and even then, God grant they may believe you. 16. I repeat it,--I certainly did not know how to live; for my poor soul was worn out. It is told to employ all its thoughts always on God, and that it is necessary to do so if it would avoid many dangers. On the other hand, it finds it will not do to fail in any one point of the world's law, under the penalty of affronting those who look upon these things as touching their honour. I was worn out in unceasingly giving satisfaction to people; for, though I tried my utmost, I could not help failing in many ways in matters which, as I have said, are not slightly thought of in the world. 17. Is it true that in religious houses no explanations are necessary, for it is only reasonable we should be excused these observances? Well, that is not so; for there are people who say that monasteries ought to be courts in politeness and instruction. I certainly cannot understand it. I thought that perhaps some saint may have said that they ought to be courts to teach those who wish to be the courtiers of heaven, and that these people misunderstood their meaning; for if a man be careful to please God continually, and to hate the world, as he ought to do, I do not see how he can be equally careful to please those who live in the world in these matters which are continually changing. If they could be learnt once for all, it might be borne with: but as to the way of addressing letters, there ought to be a professor's chair founded, from which lectures should be given, so to speak, teaching us how to do it; for the paper should on one occasion be left blank in one corner, and on another in another corner; and a man must be addressed as the illustrious who was not hitherto addressed as the magnificent. 18. I know not where this will stop: I am not yet fifty, and yet I have seen so many changes during my life, that I do not know how to live. What will they do who are only just born, and who may live many years? Certainly I am sorry for those spiritual people who, for certain holy purposes, are obliged to live in the world; the cross they have to carry is a dreadful one. If they could all agree together, and make themselves ignorant, and be willing to be considered so in these sciences, they would set themselves free from much trouble. But what folly am I about! from speaking of the greatness of God I am come to speak of the meanness of the world! Since our Lord has given me the grace to quit it, I wish to leave it altogether. Let them settle these matters who maintain these follies with so much labour. God grant that in the next life, where there is no changing, we may not have to pay for them! Amen. 1. The Saint, having interrupted her account of her interior life in order to give the history of the foundation of the monastery of St. Joseph, Avila,--the first house of the Reformed Carmelites,--here resumes that account broken off at the end of § 10 of ch. xxxii. 2. Ephes. i. 14: "Pignus hæreditatis nostræ." 3. St. John iii. 34: "Non enim ad mensuram dat Deus spiritum." 4. Ch. xxviii. §§ 1-5. 5. See ch. xl. § 24; Way of Perfection, ch. vii. § 1; but ch. iv. of the previous editions. 6. See ch. xx. § 14. 7. See ch. xxx. § 19. 8. See ch. xxx. §§ 18, 25. Chapter XXXVIII. Certain Heavenly Secrets, Visions, and Revelations. The Effects of Them in Her Soul. 1. One night I was so unwell that I thought I might be excused making my prayer; so I took my rosary, that I might employ myself in vocal prayer, trying not to be recollected in my understanding, though outwardly I was recollected, being in my oratory. These little precautions are of no use when our Lord will have it otherwise. I remained there but a few moments thus, when I was rapt in spirit with such violence that I could make no resistance whatever. It seemed to me that I was taken up to heaven; and the first persons I saw there were my father and my mother. I saw other things also; but the time was no longer than that in which the Ave Maria might be said, and I was amazed at it, looking on it all as too great a grace for me. But as to the shortness of the time, it might have been longer, only it was all done in a very short space. 2. I was afraid it might be an illusion; but as I did not think so, I knew not what to do, because I was very much ashamed to go to my confessor about it. It was not, as it seemed to me, because I was humble, but because I thought he would laugh at me, and say: Oh, what a St. Paul!--she sees the things of heaven; or a St. Jerome. And because these glorious Saints had had such visions, I was so much the more afraid, and did nothing but cry; for I did not think it possible for me to see what they saw. At last, though I felt it exceedingly, I went to my confessor; for I never dared to keep secret anything of this kind, however much it distressed me to speak of them, owing to the great fear I had of being deceived. When my confessor saw how much I was suffering, he consoled me greatly, and gave me plenty of good reasons why I should have no fear. 3. It happened, also, as time went on, and it happens now from time to time, that our Lord showed me still greater secrets. The soul, even if it would, has neither the means not the power to see more than what He shows it; and so, each time, I saw nothing more than what our Lord was pleased to let me see. But such was the vision, that the least part of it was enough to make my soul amazed, and to raise it so high that it esteems and counts as nothing all the things of this life. I wish I could describe, in some measure, the smallest portion of what I saw; but when I think of doing it, I find it impossible; for the mere difference alone between the light we have here below, and that which is seen in a vision,--both being light,--is so great, that there is no comparison between them; the brightness of the sun itself seems to be something exceedingly loathsome. In a word, the imagination, however strong it may be, can neither conceive nor picture to itself this light, nor any one of the things which our Lord showed me in a joy so supreme that it cannot be described; for then all the senses exult so deeply and so sweetly that no description is possible; and so it is better to say nothing more. 4. I was in this state once for more than an hour, our Lord showing me wonderful things. He seemed as if He would not leave me. He said to me, "See, My daughter, what they lose who are against Me; do not fail to tell them of it." Ah, my Lord, how little good my words will do them, who are made blind by their own conduct, if Thy Majesty will not give them light! Some, to whom Thou hast given it, there are, who have profited by the knowledge of Thy greatness; but as they see it revealed to one so wicked and base as I am, I look upon it as a great thing if there should be any found to believe me. Blessed be Thy name, and blessed be Thy compassion; for I can trace, at least in my own soul, a visible improvement. Afterwards I wished I had continued in that trance for ever, and that I had not returned to consciousness, because of an abiding sense of contempt for everything here below; all seemed to be filth; and I see how meanly we employ ourselves who are detained on earth. 5. When I was staying with that lady of whom I have been speaking, [1] it happened to me once when I was suffering from my heart,--for, as I have said, [2] I suffered greatly at one time, though not so much now,--that she, being a person of great charity, brought out her jewels set in gold, and precious stones of great price, and particularly a diamond, which she valued very much. She thought this might amuse me; but I laughed to myself, and was very sorry to see what men made much of; for I thought of what our Lord had laid up for us, and considered how impossible it was for me, even if I made the effort, to have any appreciation whatever of such things, provided our Lord did not permit me to forget what He was keeping for us. 6. A soul in this state attains to a certain freedom, which is so complete that none can understand it who does not possess it. It is a real and true detachment, independent of our efforts; God effects it all Himself; for His Majesty reveals the truth in such a way, that it remains so deeply impressed on our souls as to make it clear that we of ourselves could not thus acquire it in so short a time. 7. The fear of death, also, was now very slight in me, who had always been in great dread of it; now it seems to me that death is a very light thing for one who serves God, because the soul is in a moment delivered thereby out of its prison, and at rest. This elevation of the spirit, and the vision of things so high, in these trances seem to me to have a great likeness to the flight of the soul from the body, in that it finds itself in a moment in the possession of these good things. We put aside the agonies of its dissolution, of which no great account is to be made; for they who love God in truth, and are utterly detached from the things of this life, must die with the greater sweetness. 8. It seems to me, also, that the rapture was a great help to recognise our true home, and to see that we are pilgrims here; [3] it is a great thing to see what is going on there and to know where we have to live; for if a person has to go and settle in another country, it is a great help to him, in undergoing the fatigues of his journey, that he has discovered it to be a country where he may live in the most perfect peace. Moreover, it makes it easy for us to think of the things of heaven, and to have our conversation there. [4] It is a great gain, because the mere looking up to heaven makes the soul recollected; for as our Lord has been pleased to reveal heaven in some degree, my soul dwells upon it in thought; and it happens occasionally that they who are about me, and with whom I find consolation, are those whom I know to be living in heaven, and that I look upon them only as really alive; while those who are on earth are so dead, that the whole world seems unable to furnish me with companions, particularly when these impetuosities of love are upon me. Everything seems a dream, and what I see with the bodily eyes an illusion. What I have seen with the eyes of the soul is that which my soul desires; and as it finds itself far away from those things, that is death. 9. In a word, it is a very great mercy which our Lord gives to that soul to which He grants the like visions, for they help it in much, and also in carrying a heavy cross, since nothing satisfies it, and everything is against it; and if our Lord did not now and then suffer these visions to be forgotten, though they recur again and again to the memory, I know not how life could be borne. May He be blessed and praised for ever and ever! I implore His Majesty by that Blood which His Son shed for me, now that, of His good pleasure, I know something of these great blessings, and begin to have the fruition of them, that it may not be with me as it was with Lucifer, who by his own fault forfeited it all. I beseech Thee, for Thine own sake, not to suffer this; for I am at times in great fear, though at others, and most frequently, the mercy of God reassures me, for He who has delivered me from so many sins will not withdraw His hand from under me, and let me be lost. I pray you, my father, to beg this grace for me always. 10. The mercies, then, hitherto described, are not, in my opinion, so great as those which I am now going to speak of, on many accounts, because of the great blessings they have brought with them, and because of the great fortitude which my soul derived from them; and yet every one separately considered is so great, that there is nothing to be compared with them. 11. One day--it was the eve of Pentecost--I went after Mass to a very lonely spot, where I used to pray very often, and began to read about the feast in the book of a Carthusian; [5] and reading of the marks by which beginners, proficients, and the perfect may know that they have the Holy Ghost, it seemed to me, when I had read of these three states, that by the goodness of God, so far as I could understand, the Holy Ghost was with me. I praised God for it; and calling to mind how on another occasion, when I read this, I was very deficient,--for I saw most distinctly at that time how deficient I was then from what I saw I was now,--I recognised herein the great mercy of our Lord to me, and so began to consider the place which my sins had earned for me in hell, and praised God exceedingly, because it seemed as if I did not know my own soul again, so great a change had come over it. 12. While thinking of these things, my soul was carried away with extreme violence, and I knew not why. It seemed as if it would have gone forth out of the body, for it could not contain itself, nor was it able to hope for so great a good. The impetuosity was so excessive that I had no power left, and, as I think, different from what I had been used to. I knew not what ailed my soul, nor what it desired, for it was so changed. I leaned for support, for I could not sit, because my natural strength had utterly failed. 13. Then I saw over my head a dove, very different from those we usually see, for it had not the same plumage, but wings formed of small shells shining brightly. It was larger than an ordinary dove; I thought I heard the rustling of its wings. It hovered above me during the space of an Ave Maria. But such was the state of my soul, that in losing itself it lost also the sight of the dove. My spirit grew calm with such a guest; and yet, as I think, a grace so wonderful might have disturbed and frightened it; and as it began to rejoice in the vision, it was delivered from all fear, and with the joy came peace, my soul continuing entranced. The joy of this rapture was exceedingly great; and for the rest of that festal time I was so amazed and bewildered that I did not know what I was doing, nor how I could have received so great a grace. I neither heard nor saw anything, so to speak, because of my great inward joy. From that day forth I perceived in myself a very great progress in the highest love of God, together with a great increase in the strength of my virtues. May He be blessed and praised for ever! Amen. 14. On another occasion I saw that very dove above the head of one of the Dominican fathers; but it seemed to me that the rays and brightness of the wings were far greater. I understood by this that he was to draw souls unto God. 15. At another time I saw our Lady putting a cope of exceeding whiteness on that Licentiate of the same Order, of whom I have made mention more than once. [6] She told me that she gave him that cope in consideration of the service he had rendered her by helping to found this house, [7] that it was a sign that she would preserve his soul pure for the future, and that he should not fall into mortal sin. I hold it for certain that so it came to pass, for he died within a few years; his death and the rest of his life were so penitential, his whole life and death so holy, that, so far as anything can be known, there cannot be a doubt on the subject. One of the friars present at his death told me that, before he breathed his last, he said to him that St. Thomas was with him. [8] He died in great joy, longing to depart out of this land of exile. 16. Since then he has appeared to me more than once in exceedingly great glory, and told me certain things. He was so given to prayer, that when he was dying, and would have interrupted it if he could because of his great weakness, he was not able to do so; for he was often in a trance. He wrote to me not long before he died, and asked me what he was to do; for as soon as he had said Mass he fell into a trance which lasted a long time, and which he could not hinder. At last God gave him the reward of the many services of his whole life. 17. I had certain visions, too, of the great graces which our Lord bestowed upon that rector of the Society of Jesus, of whom I have spoken already more than once; [9] but I will not say anything of them now, lest I should be too tedious. It was his lot once to be in great trouble, to suffer great persecution and distress. One day, when I was hearing Mass, I saw Christ on the Cross at the elevation of the Host. He spoke certain words to me, which I was to repeat to that father for his comfort, together with others, which were to warn him beforehand of what was coming, and to remind him of what He had suffered on his behalf, and that he must prepare for suffering. This gave him great consolation and courage; and everything came to pass afterwards as our Lord had told me. 18. I have seen great things of members of the Order to which this father belongs, which is the Society of Jesus, and of the whole Order itself; I have occasionally seen them in heaven with white banners in their hands, and I have had other most wonderful visions, as I am saying, about them, and therefore have a great veneration for this Order; for I have had a great deal to do with those who are of it, and I see that their lives are conformed to that which our Lord gave me to understand about them. 19. One night, when I was in prayer, our Lord spoke to me certain words, whereby He made me remember the great wickedness of my past life. They filled me with shame and distress; for though they were not spoken with severity, they caused a feeling and a painfulness which were too much for me: and we feel that we make greater progress in the knowledge of ourselves when we hear one of these words, than we can make by a meditation of many days on our own misery, because these words impress the truth upon us at the same time in such a way that we cannot resist it. He set before me the former inclinations of my will to vanities, and told me to make much of the desire I now had that my will, which had been so ill employed, should be fixed on Him, and that He would accept it. 20. On other occasions He told me to remember how I used to think it an honourable thing to go against His honour; and, again, to remember my debt to Him, for when I was most rebellious He was bestowing His graces upon me. If I am doing anything wrong--and my wrong-doings are many--His Majesty makes me see it in such a way that I am utterly confounded; and as I do so often, that happens often also. I have been found fault with by my confessors occasionally; and on betaking myself to prayer for consolation, have received a real reprimand. 21. To return to what I was speaking of. When our Lord made me remember my wicked life, I wept; for as I considered that I had then never done any good, I thought He might be about to bestow upon me some special grace; because most frequently, when I receive any particular mercy from our Lord, it is when I have been previously greatly humiliated, in order that I may the more clearly see how far I am from deserving it. I think our Lord must do it for that end. 22. Almost immediately after this I was so raised up in spirit that I thought myself to be, as it were, out of the body; at least, I did not know that I was living in it. [10] I had a vision of the most Sacred Humanity in exceeding glory, greater than I had ever seen It in before. I beheld It in a wonderful and clear way in the bosom of the Father. I cannot tell how it was, for I saw myself, without seeing, as it seemed to me, in the presence of God. My amazement was such that I remained, as I believe, some days before I could recover myself. I had continually before me, as present, the Majesty of the Son of God, though not so distinctly as in the vision. I understood this well enough; but the vision remained so impressed on my imagination, that I could not get rid of it for some time, though it had lasted but a moment; it is a great comfort to me, and also a great blessing. 23. I have had this vision on three other occasions, and it is, I think, the highest vision of all the visions which our Lord in His mercy showed me. The fruits of it are the very greatest, for it seems to purify the soul in a wonderful way, and destroy, as it were utterly, altogether the strength of our sensual nature. It is a grand flame of fire, which seems to burn up and annihilate all the desires of this life. For though now--glory be to God!--I had no desire after vanities, I saw clearly in the vision how all things are vanity, and how hollow are all the dignities of earth; it was a great lesson, teaching me to raise up my desires to the Truth alone. It impresses on the soul a sense of the presence of God such as I cannot in any way describe, only it is very different from that which it is in our own power to acquire on earth. It fills the soul with profound astonishment at its own daring, and at any one else being able to dare to offend His most awful Majesty. 24. I must have spoken now and then of the effects of visions, [11] and of other matters of the same kind, and I have already said that the blessings they bring with them are of various degrees; but those of this vision are the highest of all. When I went to Communion once I called to mind the exceeding great majesty of Him I had seen, and considered that it was He who is present in the most Holy Sacrament, and very often our Lord was pleased to show Himself to me in the Host; the very hairs on my head stood, [12] and I thought I should come to nothing. 25. O my Lord! ah, if Thou didst not throw a veil over Thy greatness, who would dare, being so foul and miserable, to come in contact with Thy great Majesty? Blessed be Thou, O Lord; may the angels and all creation praise Thee, who orderest all things according to the measure of our weakness, so that, when we have the fruition of Thy sovereign mercies, Thy great power may not terrify us, so that we dare not, being a frail and miserable race, persevere in that fruition! 26. It might happen to us as it did to the labourer--I know it to be a certain fact--who found a treasure beyond his expectations, which were mean. When he saw himself in possession of it, he was seized with melancholy, which by degrees brought him to his grave through simple distress and anxiety of mind, because he did not know what to do with his treasure. If he had not found it all at once, and if others had given him portions of it by degrees, maintaining him thereby, he might have been more happy than he had been in his poverty, nor would it have cost him his life. 27. O Thou Treasure of the poor! how marvellously Thou sustainest souls, showing to them, not all at once, but by little and little, the abundance of Thy riches! When I behold Thy great Majesty hidden beneath that which is so slight as the Host is, I am filled with wonder, ever since that vision, at Thy great wisdom; and I know not how it is that our Lord gives me the strength and courage necessary to draw near to him, were it not that He who has had such compassion on me, and still has, gives me strength, nor would it be possible for me to be silent, or refrain from making known marvels so great. 28. What must be the thoughts of a wretched person such as I am, full of abominations, and who has spent her life with so little fear of God, when she draws near to our Lord's great Majesty, at the moment He is pleased to show Himself to my soul? How can I open my mouth, that has uttered so many words against Him, to receive that most glorious Body, purity and compassion itself? The love that is visible in His most beautiful Face, sweet and tender, pains and distresses the soul, because it has not served Him, more than all the terrors of His Majesty. What should have been my thoughts, then, on those two occasions when I saw what I have described? Truly, O my Lord and my joy, I am going to say that in some way, in these great afflictions of my soul, I have done something in Thy service. Ah! I know not what I am saying, for I am writing this as if the words were not mine, [13] because I am troubled, and in some measure beside myself, when I call these things to remembrance. If these thoughts were really mine, I might well say that I had done something for Thee, O my Lord; but as I can have no good thought if Thou givest it not, no thanks are due to me; I am the debtor, O Lord, and it is Thou who art the offended One. 29. Once, when I was going to Communion, I saw with the eyes of the soul, more distinctly than with those of the body, two devils of most hideous shape; their horns seemed to encompass the throat of the poor priest; and I beheld my Lord, in that great majesty of which I have spoken, [14] held in the hands of that priest, in the Host he was about to give me. It was plain that those hands were those of a sinner, and I felt that the soul of that priest was in mortal sin. What must it be, O my Lord, to look upon Thy beauty amid shapes so hideous! The two devils were so frightened and cowed in Thy presence, that they seemed as if they would have willingly run away, hadst Thou but given them leave. So troubled was I by the vision, that I knew not how I could go to Communion. I was also in great fear, for I thought, if the vision was from God, that His Majesty would not have allowed me to see the evil state of that soul. [15] 30. Our Lord Himself told me to pray for that priest; that He had allowed this in order that I might understand the power of the words of consecration, and how God failed not to be present, however wicked the priest might be who uttered them; and that I might see His great goodness in that He left Himself in the very hands of His enemy, for my good and for the good of all. I understood clearly how the priests are under greater obligations to be holy than other persons; and what a horrible thing it is to receive this most Holy Sacrament unworthily, and how great is the devil's dominion over a soul in mortal sin. It did me a great service, and made me fully understand what I owe to God. May He be blessed for evermore! 31. At another time I had a vision of a different kind, which frightened me very much. I was in a place where a certain person died, who as I understood had led a very bad life, and that for many years. But he had been ill for two years, and in some respects seemed to have reformed. He died without confession; nevertheless, I did not think he would be damned. When the body had been wrapped in the winding-sheet, I saw it laid hold of by a multitude of devils, who seemed to toss it to and fro, and also to treat it with great cruelty. I was terrified at the sight, for they dragged it about with great hooks. But when I saw it carried to the grave with all the respect and ceremoniousness common to all, I began to think of the goodness of God, who would not allow that person to be dishonoured, but would have the fact of his being His enemy concealed. 32. I was almost out of my senses at the sight. During the whole of the funeral service, I did not see one of the evil spirits. Afterwards, when the body was about to be laid in the grave, so great a multitude of them was therein waiting to receive it, that I was beside myself at the sight, and it required no slight courage on my part not to betray my distress. I thought of the treatment which that soul would receive, when the devils had such power over the wretched body. Would to God that all who live in mortal sin might see what I then saw,--it was a fearful sight; it would go, I believe, a great way towards making them lead better lives. 33. All this made me know more of what I owe to God, and of the evils from which He has delivered me. I was in great terror. I spoke of it to my confessor, and I thought it might be an illusion of Satan, in order to take away my good opinion of that person, who yet was not accounted a very good Christian. The truth is, that, whether it was an illusion or not, it makes me afraid whenever I think of it. 34. Now that I have begun to speak of the visions I had concerning the dead, I will mention some matters which our Lord was pleased to reveal to me in relation to certain souls. I will confine myself to a few for the sake of brevity, and because they are not necessary; I mean that they are not for our profit. They told me that one who had been our Provincial--he was then of another province--was dead. He was a man of great virtue, with whom I had had a great deal to do, and to whom I was under many obligations for certain kindnesses shown me. When I heard that he was dead, I was exceedingly troubled, because I trembled for his salvation, seeing that he had been superior for twenty years. That is what I dread very much; for the cure of souls seems to me to be full of danger. I went to an oratory in great distress, and gave up to him all the good I had ever done in my whole life,--it was little enough,--and prayed our Lord that His merits might fill up what was wanting, in order that this soul might be delivered up from purgatory. 35. While I was thus praying to our Lord as well as I could, he seemed to me to rise up from the depths of the earth on my right hand, and I saw him ascend to heaven in exceeding great joy. He was a very old man then, but I saw him as if he were only thirty years old, and I thought even younger, and there was a brightness in his face. This vision passed away very quickly; but I was so exceedingly comforted by it, that I could never again mourn his death, although many persons were distressed at it, for he was very much beloved. So greatly comforted was my soul, that nothing disturbed it, neither could I doubt the truth of the vision; I mean that it was no illusion. 36. I had this vision about a fortnight after he was dead; nevertheless, I did not omit to obtain prayers for him and I prayed myself, only I could not pray with the same earnestness that I should have done if I had not seen that vision. For when our Lord showed him thus to me, it seemed to me afterwards, when I prayed for him to His Majesty,--and I could not help it,--that I was like one who gave alms to a rich man. Later on I heard an account of the death he died in our Lord--he was far away from here; it was one of such great edification, that he left all wondering to see how recollected, how penitent, and how humble he was when he died. 37. A nun, who was a great servant of God, died in this house. On the next day one of the sisters was reciting the lesson in the Office of the Dead, which was said in choir for that nun's soul, and I was standing myself to assist her in singing the versicle, when, in the middle of the lesson, I saw the departed nun as I believe, in a vision; her soul seemed to rise on my right hand like the soul of the Provincial, and ascend to heaven. This vision was not imaginary, like the preceding, but like those others of which I have spoken before; [16] it is not less certain, however, than the other visions I had. 38. Another nun died in this same house of mine, she was about eighteen or twenty years of age, and had always been sickly. She was a great servant of God, attentive in choir, and a person of great virtue. I certainly thought that she would not go to purgatory, on account of her exceeding merits, because the infirmities under which she had laboured were many. While I was saying the Office, before she was buried,--she had been dead about four hours,--I saw her rise in the same place and ascend to heaven. 39. I was once in one of the colleges of the Society of Jesus, and in one of those great sufferings which, as I have said, [17] I occasionally had, and still have, both in soul and body, and then so grievously that I was not able, as it seemed to me, to have even one good thought. The night before, one of the brothers of that house had died in it; and I, as well as I could, was commending his soul to God, and hearing the Mass which another father of that Society was saying for him when I became recollected at once, and saw him go up to heaven in great glory, and our Lord with him. I understood that His Majesty went with him by way of special grace. 40. Another brother of our Order, a good friar, was very ill; and when I was at Mass, I became recollected and saw him dead, entering into heaven without going through purgatory. He died, as I afterwards learned, at the very time of my vision. I was amazed that he had not gone to purgatory. I understood that, having become a friar and carefully kept the rule, the Bulls of the Order had been of use to him, so that he did not pass into purgatory. I do not know why I came to have this revealed to me; I think it must be because I was to learn that it is not enough for a man to be a friar in his habit--I mean, to wear the habit--to attain to that state of high perfection which that of a friar is. 41. I will speak no more of these things, because as I have just said, [18] there is no necessity for it, though our Lord has been so gracious to me as to show me much. But in all the visions I had, I saw no souls escape purgatory except this Carmelite father, the holy friar Peter of Alcantara, and that Dominican father of whom I spoke before. [19] It pleased our Lord to let me see the degree of glory to which some souls have been raised, showing them to me in the places they occupy. There is a great difference between one place and another. 1. Ch. xxxiv. Doña Luisa de la Cerda, at Toledo. 2. Ch. iv. § 6. 3. 1 St. Peter ii. 11: "Advenas et peregrinos." 4. Philipp. iii. 20: "Nostra autem conversatio in coelis est." 5. The Life of Christ, by Ludolf of Saxony. 6. F. Pedro Ibañez. See ch. xxxiii. § 5, ch. xxxvi. § 23. "This father died Prior of Trianos," is written on the margin of the MS. by F. Bañes (De la Fuente). 7. St. Joseph, Avila, where St. Teresa was living at this time. 8. See below, § 41. 9. F. Gaspar de Salazar: see ch. xxxiii. § 9, ch. xxxiv. § 2. It appears from the 179th letter of the Saint (lett. 20, vol. i. of the Doblado edition) that F. Salazar was reported to his Provincial, F. Juan Suarez, as having desire to quit the Society for the Carmelite Order. 10. 2 Cor. xii. 2: "Sive in corpore nescio, sive extra corpus nescio." 11. See ch. xxviii. 12. Job iv. 15: "Inhorruerunt pili carnis meæ." 13. The biographers of the Saint say that she often found, on returning from an ecstasy, certain passages written, but not by herself; this seems to be alluded to here (De la Fuente). 14. § 22. 15. St. John of the Cross, Ascent of Mount Carmel, bk. ii. ch. xxvi. vol. i. p. 183. 16. See ch. xxvii. 17. Ch. xxx. § 9. 18. § 34. 19. § 15. Fr. Pedro Ibañez. Chapter XXXIX. Other Graces Bestowed on the Saint. The Promises of Our Lord to Her. Divine Locutions and Visions. 1. I was once importuning our Lord exceedingly to restore the sight of a person who had claims upon me, and who was almost wholly blind. I was very sorry for him, and afraid our Lord would not hear me because of my sins. He appeared to me as at other times, and began to show the wound in His left hand; with the other He drew out the great nail that was in it, and it seemed to me that, in drawing the nail, He tore the flesh. The greatness of the pain was manifest, and I was very much distressed thereat. He said to me, that He who had borne that for my sake would still more readily grant what I asked Him, and that I was not to have any doubts about it. He promised me there was nothing I should ask that He would not grant; that He knew I should ask nothing that was not for His glory, and that He would grant me what I was now praying for. Even during the time when I did not serve Him, I should find, if I considered it, I had asked nothing that He had not granted in an ampler manner than I had known how to ask; how much more amply still would He grant what I asked for, now that He knew I loved Him! I was not to doubt. I do not think that eight days passed before our Lord restored that person to sight. My confessor knew it forthwith. It might be that it was not owing to my prayer; but, as I had had the vision, I have a certain conviction that it was a grace accorded to me. I gave thanks to His Majesty. 2. Again, a person was exceedingly ill of a most painful disease; but, as I do not know what it was, I do not describe it by its name here. What he had gone through for two months was beyond all endurance; and his pain was so great that he tore his own flesh. My confessor, the rector of whom I have spoken, [1] went to see him; he was very sorry for him, and told me that I must anyhow go myself and visit him; he was one whom I might visit, for he was my kinsman. I went, and was moved to such a tender compassion for him that I began, with the utmost importunity, to ask our Lord to restore him to health. Herein I saw clearly how gracious our Lord was to me, so far as I could judge; for immediately, the next day, he was completely rid of that pain. 3. I was once in the deepest distress, because I knew that a person to whom I was under great obligations was about to commit an act highly offensive to God and dishonourable to himself. He was determined upon it. I was so much harassed by this that I did not know what to do in order to change his purpose; and it seemed to me as if nothing could be done. I implored God, from the bottom of my heart, to find a way to hinder it; but till I found it I could find no relief for the pain I felt. In my distress, I went to a very lonely hermitage,--one of those belonging to this monastery,--in which there is a picture of Christ bound to the pillar; and there, as I was imploring our Lord to grant me this grace, I heard a voice of exceeding gentleness, speaking, as it were, in a whisper. [2] My whole body trembled, for it made me afraid. I wished to understand what was said, but I could not, for it all passed away in a moment. 4. When my fears had subsided, and that was immediately, I became conscious of an inward calmness, a joy and delight, which made me marvel how the mere hearing a voice,--I heard it with my bodily ears,--without understanding a word, could have such an effect on the soul. I saw by this that my prayer was granted; and so it was; and I was freed from my anxieties about a matter not yet accomplished, as it afterwards was, as completely as if I saw it done. I told my confessors of it, for I had two at this time, both of them learned men, and great servants of God. 5. I knew of a person who had resolved to serve God in all earnestness, and had for some days given himself to prayer, in which he bad received many graces from our Lord, but who had abandoned his good resolutions because of certain occasions of sin in which he was involved, and which he would not avoid; they were extremely perilous. This caused me the utmost distress, because the person was one for whom I had a great affection, and one to whom I owed much. For more than a month I believe I did nothing else but pray to God for his conversion. One day, when I was in prayer, I saw a devil close by in a great rage, tearing to pieces some paper which he had in his hands. That sight consoled me greatly, because it seemed that my prayer had been heard. So it was, as I learnt afterwards; for that person had made his confession with great contrition, and returned to God so sincerely, that I trust in His Majesty he will always advance further and further. May He be blessed for ever! Amen. 6. In answer to my prayers, our Lord has very often rescued souls from mortal sins and led others on to greater perfection. But as to the delivering of souls out of purgatory, and other remarkable acts, so many are the mercies of our Lord herein, that were I to speak of them I should only weary myself and my reader. But He has done more by me for the salvation of souls than for the health of the body. This is very well known, and there are many to bear witness to it. 7. At first it made me scrupulous, because I could not help thinking that our Lord did these things in answer to my prayer; I say nothing of the chief reason of all--His pure compassion. But now these graces are so many, and so well known to others, that it gives me no pain to think so. I bless His Majesty, and abase myself, because I am still more deeply in His debt; and I believe that He makes my desire to serve Him grow, and my love revive. 8. But what amazes me most is this: however much I may wish to pray for those graces which our Lord sees not to be expedient, I cannot do it; and if I try, I do so with little earnestness, force, and spirit: it is impossible to do more, even if I would. But it is not so as to those which His Majesty intends to grant. These I can pray for constantly, and with great importunity; though I do not carry them in my memory, they seem to present themselves to me at once. [3] 9. There is a great difference between these two ways of praying, and I know not how to explain it. As to the first, when I pray for those graces which our Lord does not mean to grant,--even though they concern me very nearly,--I am like one whose tongue is tied; who, though he would speak, yet cannot; or, if he speaks, sees that people do not listen to him. And yet I do not fail to force myself to pray, though not conscious of that fervour which I have when praying for those graces which our Lord intends to give. In the second case, I am like one who speaks clearly and intelligibly to another, whom he sees to be a willing listener. 10. The prayer that is not to be heard is, so to speak, like vocal prayer; the other is a prayer of contemplation so high that our Lord shows Himself in such a way as to make us feel He hears us, and that He delights in our prayer, and that He is about to grant our petition. Blessed be He for ever who gives me so much and to whom I give so little! For what is he worth, O my Lord, who does not utterly abase himself to nothing for Thee? How much, how much, how much,--I might say so a thousand times,--I fall short of this! It is on this account that I do not wish to live,--though there be other reasons also,--because I do not live according to the obligations which bind me to Thee. What imperfections I trace in myself! what remissness in Thy service! Certainly, I could wish occasionally I had no sense, that I might be unconscious of the great evil that is in me. May He who can do all things help me! 11. When I was staying in the house of that lady of whom I have spoken before, [4] it was necessary for me to be very watchful over myself, and keep continually in mind the intrinsic vanity of all the things of this life, because of the great esteem I was held in, and of the praises bestowed on me. There was much there to which I might have become attached, if I had looked only to myself; but I looked to Him who sees things as they really are, not to let me go out of His hand. Now that I speak of seeing things as they really are, I remember how great a trial it is for those to whom God has granted a true insight into the things of earth to have to discuss them with others. They wear so many disguises, as our Lord once told me,--and much of what I am saying of them is not from myself, but rather what my Heavenly Master has taught me; and therefore, in speaking of them, when I say distinctly I understood this, or our Lord told me this, I am very scrupulous neither to add nor to take away one single syllable; so, when I do not clearly remember everything exactly, that must be taken as coming from myself, and some things, perhaps, are so altogether. I do not call mine that which is good, for I know there is no other good in me but only that which our Lord gave me when I was so far from deserving it: I call that mine which I speak without having had it made known to me by revelation. 12. But, O my God, how is it that we too often judge even spiritual things, as we do those of the world, by our own understanding, wresting them grievously from their true meaning? We think we may measure our progress by the years which we have given to the exercise of prayer; we even think we can prescribe limits to Him who bestows His gifts not by measure [5] when He wills, and who in six months can give to one more than to another in many years. This is a fact which I have so frequently observed in many persons, that I am surprised how any of us can deny it. 13. I am certainly convinced that he will not remain under this delusion who possesses the gift of discerning spirits, and to whom our Lord has given real humility; for such a one will judge of them by the fruits, by the good resolutions and love,--and our Lord gives him light to understand the matter; and herein He regards the progress and advancement of souls, not the years they may have spent in prayer; for one person may make greater progress in six months than another in twenty years, because, as I said before, our Lord gives to whom He will, particularly to him who is best disposed. 14. I see this in certain persons of tender years who have come to this monastery,--God touches their hearts, and gives them a little light and love. I speak of that brief interval in which He gives them sweetness in prayer, and then they wait for nothing further, and make light of every difficulty, forgetting the necessity even of food; for they shut themselves up for ever in a house that is unendowed, as persons who make no account of their life, for His sake, who, they know, loves them. They give up everything, even their own will; and it never enters into their mind that they might be discontented in so small a house, and where enclosure is so strictly observed. They offer themselves wholly in sacrifice to God. 15. Oh, how willingly do I admit that they are better than I am! and how I ought to be ashamed of myself before God! What His Majesty has not been able to accomplish in me in so many years,--it is long ago since I began to pray, and He to bestow His graces upon me,--He accomplished in them in three months, and in some of them even in three days, though he gives them much fewer graces than He gave to me: and yet His Majesty rewards them well; most assuredly they are not sorry for what they have done for Him. 16. I wish, therefore, we reminded ourselves of those long years which have gone by since we made our religious profession. I say this to those persons, also, who have given themselves long ago to prayer, but not for the purpose of distressing those who in a short time have made greater progress than we have made, by making them retrace their steps, so that they may proceed only as we do ourselves. We must not desire those who, because of the graces God has given them, are flying like eagles, to become like chickens whose feet are tied. Let us rather look to His Majesty, and give these souls the reins, if we see that they are humble; for our Lord, who has had such compassion upon them, will not let them fall into the abyss. 17. These souls trust themselves in the hands of God, for the truth, which they learn by faith, helps them to do it; and shall not we also trust them to Him, without seeking to measure them by our measure which is that of our meanness of spirit? We must not do it; for if we cannot ascend to the heights of their great love and courage,--without experience none can comprehend them--let us humble ourselves, and not condemn them; for, by this seeming regard to their progress, we hinder our own, and miss the opportunity our Lord gives us to humble ourselves, to ascertain our own shortcomings, and learn how much more detached and more near to God these souls must be than we are, seeing that His Majesty draws so near to them Himself. 18. I have no other intention here, and I wish to have no other, than to express my preference for the prayer that in a short time results in these great effects, which show themselves at once; for it is impossible they should enable us to leave all things only to please God, if they were not accompanied with a vehement love. I would rather have that prayer than that which lasted many years, but which at the end of the time, as well as at the beginning, never issued in a resolution to do anything for God, with the exception of some trifling services, like a grain of salt, without weight or bulk, and which a bird might carry away in its mouth. Is it not a serious and mortifying thought that we are making much of certain services which we render our Lord, but which are too pitiable to be considered, even if they were many in number? This is my case, and I am forgetting every moment the mercies of our Lord. I do not mean that His Majesty will not make much of them Himself, for He is good; but I wish I made no account of them myself, or even perceived that I did them, for they are nothing worth. 19. But, O my Lord, do Thou forgive me, and blame me not, if I try to console myself a little with the little I do, seeing that I do not serve Thee at all; for if I rendered Thee any great services, I should not think of these trifles. Blessed are they who serve Thee in great deeds; if envying these, and desiring to do what they do, were of any help to me, I should not be so far behind them as I am in pleasing Thee; but I am nothing worth, O my Lord; do Thou make me of some worth, Thou who lovest me so much. 20. During one of those days, when this monastery, which seems to have cost me some labour, was fully founded by the arrival of the Brief from Rome, which empowered us to live without an endowment; [6] and I was comforting myself at seeing the whole affair concluded, and thinking of all the trouble I had had, and giving thanks to our Lord for having been pleased to make some use of me,--it happened that I began to consider all that we had gone through. Well, so it was; in every one of my actions, which I thought were of some service, I traced so many faults and imperfections, now and then but little courage, very frequently a want of faith; for until this moment, when I see everything accomplished, I never absolutely believed; neither, however, on the other hand, could I doubt what our Lord said to me about the foundation of this house. I cannot tell how it was; very often the matter seemed to me, on the one hand, impossible; and, on the other hand, I could not be in doubt; I mean, I could not believe that it would not be accomplished. In short, I find that our Lord Himself, on His part, did all the good that was done, while I did all the evil. I therefore ceased to think of the matter, and wished never to be reminded of it again, lest I should do myself some harm by dwelling on my many faults. Blessed be He who, when He pleases, draws good out of all my failings! Amen. 21. I say, then, there is danger in counting the years we have given to prayer; for, granting that there is nothing in it against humility, it seems to me to imply something like an appearance of thinking that we have merited, in some degree, by the service rendered. I do not mean that there is no merit in it at all, nor that it will not be well rewarded; yet if any spiritual person thinks, because he has given himself to prayer for many years, that he deserves any spiritual consolations, I am sure he will never attain to spiritual perfection. Is it not enough that a man has merited the protection of God, which keeps him from committing those sins into which he fell before he began to pray, but he must also, as they say, sue God for His own money? 22. This does not seem to me to be deep humility, and yet it may be that it is; however, I look on it as great boldness, for I, who have very little humility, have never ventured upon it. It may be that I never asked for it, because I had never served Him; perhaps, if I had served Him, I should have been more importunate than all others with our Lord for my reward. 23. I do not mean that the soul makes no progress in time, or that God will not reward it, if its prayer has been humble; but I do mean that we should forget the number of years we have been praying, because all that we can do is utterly worthless in comparison with one drop of blood out of those which our Lord shed for us. And if the more we serve Him, the more we become His debtors, what is it, then, we are asking for? for, if we pay one farthing of the debt, He gives us back a thousand ducats. For the love of God, let us leave these questions alone, for they belong to Him. Comparisons are always bad, even in earthly things; what, then, must they be in that, the knowledge of which God has reserved to Himself? His Majesty showed this clearly enough, when those who came late and those who came early to His vineyard received the same wages. [7] 24. I have sat down so often to write, and have been so many days writing these three leaves,--for, as I have said, [8] I had, and have still, but few opportunities,--that I forgot what I had begun with, namely, the following vision. [9] 25. I was in prayer, and saw myself on a wide plain all alone. Round about me stood a great multitude of all kinds of people, who hemmed me in on every side; all of them seemed to have weapons of war in their hands, to hurt me; some had spears, others swords; some had daggers, and others very long rapiers. In short, I could not move away in any direction without exposing myself to the hazard of death, and I was alone, without any one to take my part. In this my distress of mind, not knowing what to do, I lifted up my eyes to heaven, and saw Christ, not in heaven, but high above me in the air, holding out His hand to me, and there protecting me in such a way that I was no longer afraid of all that multitude, neither could they, though they wished it, do me any harm. 26. At first the vision seemed to have no results; but it has been of the greatest help to me, since I understood what it meant. Not long afterwards, I saw myself, as it were, exposed to the like assault, and I saw that the vision represented the world, because everything in it takes up arms against the poor soul. We need not speak of those who are not great servants of our Lord, nor of honours, possessions, and pleasures, with other things of the same nature; for it is clear that the soul, if it be not watchful, will find itself caught in a net,--at least, all these things labour to ensnare it; more than this, so also do friends and relatives, and--what frightens me most--even good people. I found myself afterwards so beset on all sides, good people thinking they were doing good, and I knowing not how to defend myself, nor what to do. 27. O my God, if I were to say in what way, and in how many ways, I was tried at that time, even after that trial of which I have just spoken, what a warning I should be giving to men to hate the whole world utterly! It was the greatest of all the persecutions I had to undergo. I saw myself occasionally so hemmed in on every side, that I could do nothing else but lift up my eyes to heaven, and cry unto God. [10] I recollected well what I had seen in the vision, and it helped me greatly not to trust much in any one, for there is no one that can be relied on except God. In all my great trials, our Lord--He showed it to me--sent always some one on His part to hold out his hand to help me, as it was shown to me in the vision, so that I might attach myself to nothing, but only please our Lord; and this has been enough to sustain the little virtue I have in desiring to serve Thee: be Thou blessed for evermore! 28. On one occasion I was exceedingly disquieted and troubled, unable to recollect myself, fighting and struggling with my thoughts, running upon matters which did not relate to perfection; and, moreover, I did not think I was so detached from all things as I used to be. When I found myself in this wretched state, I was afraid that the graces I had received from our Lord were illusions, and the end was that a great darkness covered my soul. In this my distress our Lord began to speak to me: He bade me not to harass myself, but learn, from the consideration of my misery, what it would be if He withdrew Himself from me, and that we were never safe while living in the flesh. It was given me to understand how this fighting and struggling are profitable to us, because of the reward, and it seemed to me as if our Lord were sorry for us who live in the world. Moreover, He bade me not to suppose that He had forgotten me; He would never abandon me, but it was necessary I should do all that I could myself. 29. Our Lord said all this with great tenderness and sweetness; He also spoke other most gracious words, which I need not repeat. His Majesty, further showing His great love for me, said to me very often: "Thou art Mine, and I am thine." I am in the habit of saying myself, and I believe in all sincerity: "What do I care for myself?--I care only for Thee, O my Lord." 30. These words of our Lord, and the consolation He gives me, fill me with the utmost shame, when I remember what I am. I have said it before, I think, [11] and I still say now and then to my confessor, that it requires greater courage to receive these graces than to endure the heaviest trials. When they come, I forget, as it were, all I have done, and there is nothing before me but a picture of my wretchedness, and my understanding can make no reflections; this, also, seems to me at times to be supernatural. 31. Sometimes I have such a vehement longing for Communion; I do not think it can be expressed. One morning it happened to rain so much as to make it seem impossible to leave the house. When I had gone out, I was so beside myself with that longing, that if spears had been pointed at my heart, I should have rushed upon them; the rain was nothing. When I entered the church I fell into a deep trance, and saw heaven open--not a door only, as I used to see at other times. I beheld the throne which, as I have told you, my father, I saw at other times, with another throne above it, whereon, though I saw not, I understood by a certain inexplicable knowledge that the Godhead dwelt. 32. The throne seemed to me to be supported by certain animals; I believe I saw the form of them: I thought they might be the Evangelists. But how the throne was arrayed, and Him who sat on it I did not see, but only an exceedingly great multitude of angels, who seemed to me more beautiful, beyond all comparison, than those I had seen in heaven. I thought they were, perhaps, the seraphim or cherubim, for they were very different in their glory, and seemingly all on fire. The difference is great, as I said before; [12] and the joy I then felt cannot be described, either in writing or by word of mouth; it is inconceivable to any one what has not had experience of it. I felt that everything man can desire was all there together, and I saw nothing; they told me, but I know not who, that all I could do there was to understand that I could understand nothing, and see how everything was nothing in comparison with that. So it was; my soul afterwards was vexed to see that it could rest on any created thing: how much more, then, if it had any affection thereto; for everything seemed to me but an ant-hill. I communicated, and remained during Mass. I know not how it was: I thought I had been but a few minutes, and was amazed when the clock struck; I had been two hours in that trance and joy. 33. I was afterwards amazed at this fire, which seems to spring forth out of the true love of God; for though I might long for it, labour for it, and annihilate myself in the effort to obtain it, I can do nothing towards procuring a single spark of it myself, because it all comes of the good pleasure of His Majesty, as I said on another occasion. [13] It seems to burn up the old man, with his faults, his lukewarmness, and misery; so that it is like the phoenix, of which I have read that it comes forth, after being burnt, out of its own ashes into a new life. Thus it is with the soul: it is changed into another, whose desires are different, and whose strength is great. It seems to be no longer what it was before, and begins to walk renewed in purity in the ways of our Lord. When I was praying to Him that thus it might be with me, and that I might begin His service anew, He said to me: "The comparison thou hast made is good; take care never to forget it, that thou mayest always labour to advance." 34. Once, when I was doubting, as I said just now, [14] whether these visions came from God or not, our Lord appeared, and, with some severity, said to me: "O children of men, how long will you remain hard of heart!" I was to examine myself carefully on one subject,--whether I had given myself up wholly to Him, or not. If I had,--and it was so,--I was to believe that He would not suffer me to perish. I was very much afflicted when He spoke thus, but He turned to me with great tenderness and sweetness, and bade me not to distress myself, for He knew already that, so far as it lay in my power, I would not fail in anything that was for His service; that He Himself would do what I wished,--and so He did grant what I was then praying for; that I was to consider my love for Him, which was daily growing in me, for I should see by this that these visions did not come from Satan; that I must not imagine that God would ever allow the devil to have so much power over the souls of His servants as to give them such clearness of understanding and such peace as I had. 35. He gave me also to understand that, when such and so many persons had told me the visions were from God, I should do wrong if I did not believe them. [15] 36. Once, when I was reciting the psalm Quicumque vult, [16] I was given to understand the mystery of One God and Three Persons with so much clearness, that I was greatly astonished and consoled at the same time. This was of the greatest help to me, for it enabled me to know more of the greatness and marvels of God; and when I think of the most Holy Trinity, or hear It spoken of, I seem to understand the mystery, and a great joy it is. 37. One day--it was the Feast of the Assumption of the Queen of the Angels, and our Lady--our Lord was pleased to grant me this grace. In a trance He made me behold her going up to heaven, the joy and solemnity of her reception there, as well as the place where she now is. To describe it is more than I can do; the joy that filled my soul at the sight of such great glory was excessive. The effects of the vision were great; it made me long to endure still greater trials: and I had a vehement desire to serve our Lady, because of her great merits. 38. Once, in one of the colleges of the Society of Jesus, when the brothers of the house were communicating, I saw an exceedingly rich canopy above their heads. I saw this twice; but I never saw it when others were receiving Communion. 1. Ch. xxxiii. § 10. F. Gaspar de Salazar. 2. 3 Kings xix. 12: "Sibilus auræ tenuis." 3. See St. John of the Cross, Ascent of Mount Carmel, bk. iii. ch. i, p. 210). 4. Ch. xxxiv. § 1. 5. St. John iii. 34: "Non enim ad mensuram dat Deus spiritum." 6. See ch. xxxiii. § 15. 7. St. Matt. xx. 9-14: "Volo autem et huic novissimo dare sicut et tibi." 8. Ch. xiv. § 12. 9. The Saint had this vision when she was in the house of Doña Luisa de la Cerda in Toledo, and it was fulfilled in the opposition she met with in the foundation of St. Joseph of Avila. See ch. xxxvi. § 18. 10. 2 Paralip. xx. 12: "Hoc solum habemus residui, ut oculos nostros dirigamus ad Te." 11. Ch. xx. § 4. 12. Ch. xxix. § 16. 13. Ch. xxix. § 13. 14. § 28. 15. See ch. xxviii. §§ 19, 20. 16. Commonly called the Creed of St. Athanasius. Chapter XL. Visions, Revelations, and Locutions. 1. One day, in prayer, the sweetness of which was so great that, knowing how unworthy I was of so great a blessing, I began to think how much I had deserved to be in that place which I had seen prepared for me in hell,--for, as I said before, [1] I never forget the way I saw myself there,--as I was thinking of this, my soul began to be more and more on fire, and I was carried away in spirit in a way I cannot describe. It seemed to me as if I had been absorbed in, and filled with, that grandeur of God which, on another occasion, I had felt. [2] In that majesty it was given me to understand one truth, which is the fulness of all truth, but I cannot tell how, for I saw nothing. It was said to me, I saw not by whom, but I knew well enough it was the Truth Itself: "This I am doing to thee is not a slight matter; it is one of those things for which thou owest Me much; for all the evil in the world comes from ignorance of the truths of the holy writings in their clear simplicity, of which not one iota shall pass away." [3] I thought that I had always believed this, and that all the faithful also believed it. Then he said,: "Ah, My daughter, they are few who love Me in truth; for if men loved Me, I should not hide My secrets from them. Knowest thou what it is to love Me in truth? It is to admit everything to be a lie which is not pleasing unto Me. Now thou dost not understand it, but thou shalt understand it clearly hereafter, in the profit it will be to thy soul." 2. Our Lord be praised, so I found it; for after this vision I look upon everything which does not tend to the service of God as vanity and lies. I cannot tell how much I am convinced of this, nor how sorry I am for those whom I see living in darkness, not knowing the truth. I derived other great blessings also from this, some of which I will here speak of, others I cannot describe. 3. Our Lord at the same time uttered a special word of most exceeding graciousness. I know not how it was done, for I saw nothing; but I was filled, in a way which also I cannot describe, with exceeding strength and earnestness of purpose to observe with all my might everything contained in the divine writings. I thought that I could rise above every possible hindrance put in my way. 4. Of this divine truth, which was put before me I know not how, there remains imprinted within me a truth--I cannot give it a name--which fills me with a new reverence for God; it gives me a notion of His Majesty and power in a way which I cannot explain. I can understand that it is something very high. I had a very great desire never to speak of anything but of those deep truths which far surpass all that is spoken of here in the world,--and so the living in it began to be painful to me. 5. The vision left me in great tenderness, joy, and humility. It seemed to me, though I knew not how, that our Lord now gave me great things; and I had no suspicion whatever of any illusion. I saw nothing; but I understood how great a blessing it is to make no account of anything which does not lead us nearer unto God. I also understood what it is for a soul to be walking in the truth, in the presence of the Truth itself. What I understood is this: that our Lord gave me to understand that He is Himself the very Truth. 6. All this I am speaking of I learnt at times by means of words uttered; at other times I learnt some things without the help of words, and that more clearly than those other things which were told me in words. I understood exceedingly deep truths concerning the Truth, more than I could have done through the teaching of many learned men. It seems to me that learned men never could have thus impressed upon me, nor so clearly explained to me, the vanity of this world. 7. The Truth of which I am speaking, and which I was given to see, is Truth Itself, in Itself. It has neither beginning nor end. All other truths depend on this Truth, as all other loves depend on this love, and all other grandeurs on this grandeur. I understood it all, notwithstanding that my words are obscure in comparison with that distinctness with which it pleased our Lord to show it to me. What think you must be the power of His Majesty, seeing that in so short a time it leaves so great a blessing and such an impression on the soul? O Grandeur! Majesty of mine! what is it Thou art doing, O my Lord Almighty! Consider who it is to whom Thou givest blessings so great! Dost Thou not remember that this my soul has been an abyss of lies and a sea of vanities, and all my fault? Though Thou hadst given me a natural hatred of lying yet I did involve myself in many lying ways. How is this, O my God? how can it be that mercies and graces so great should fall to the lot of one who has so ill deserved them at Thy hands? 8. Once, when I was with the whole community reciting the Office, my soul became suddenly recollected, and seemed to me all bright as a mirror, clear behind, sideways, upwards, and downwards; and in the centre of it I saw Christ our Lord, as I usually see Him. It seemed to me that I saw Him distinctly in every part of my soul, as in a mirror, and at the same time the mirror was all sculptured--I cannot explain it--in our Lord Himself by a most loving communication which I can never describe. I know that this vision was a great blessing to me, and is still whenever I remember it, particularly after Communion. 9. I understood by it, that, when a soul is in mortal sin, this mirror becomes clouded with a thick vapour, and utterly obscured, so that our Lord is neither visible nor present, though He is always present in the conservation of its being. In heretics, the mirror is, as it were, broken in pieces, and that is worse than being dimmed. There is a very great difference between seeing this and describing it, for it can hardly be explained. But it has done me great good; it has also made me very sorry on account of those times when I dimmed the lustre of my soul by my sins, so that I could not see our Lord. 10. This vision seems to me very profitable to recollected persons, to teach them to look upon our Lord as being in the innermost part of their soul. It is a method of looking upon Him which penetrates us more thoroughly, and is much more fruitful, than that of looking upon Him as external to us, as I have said elsewhere, [4] and as it is laid down in books on prayer, where they speak of where we are to seek God. The glorious St. Augustin, [5] in particular, says so, when he says that neither in the streets of the city, nor in pleasures, nor in any place whatever where he sought Him, did he find Him as he found Him within himself. This is clearly the best way; we need not go up to heaven, nor any further than our own selves, for that would only distress the spirit and distract the soul, and bring but little fruit. 11. I should like to point out one result of a deep trance; it may be that some are aware of it. When the time is over during which the soul was in union, wherein all its powers were wholly absorbed,--it lasts, as I have said, [6] but a moment,--the soul continues still to be recollected, unable to recover itself even in outward things; for the two powers--the memory and the understanding--are, as it were, in a frenzy, extremely disordered. This, I say, happens occasionally, particularly in the beginnings. I am thinking whether it does not result from this: that our natural weakness cannot endure the vehemence of the spirit, which is so great, and that the imagination is enfeebled. I know it to be so with some. I think it best for these to force themselves to give up prayer at that time, and resume it afterwards, when they may recover what they have lost, and not do everything at once, for in that case much harm might come of it. I know this by experience, as well as the necessity of considering what our health can bear. 12. Experience is necessary throughout, so also is a spiritual director; for when the soul has reached this point, there are many matters which must be referred to the director. If, after seeking such a one, the soul cannot find him, our Lord will not fail that soul, seeing that He has not failed me, who am what I am: They are not many, I believe, who know by experience so many things, and without experience it is useless to treat a soul at all, for nothing will come of it, save only trouble and distress. But our Lord will take this also into account, and for that reason it is always best to refer the matter to the director. I have already more than once said this, [7] and even all I am saying now, only I do not distinctly remember it; but I do see that it is of great importance, particularly to women, that they should go to their confessor, and that he should be a man of experience herein. There are many more women than men to whom our Lord gives these graces; I have heard the holy friar Peter of Alcantara say so, and, indeed, I know it myself. He used to say that women made greater progress in this way than men did; and he gave excellent reasons for his opinion, all in favour of women; but there is no necessity for repeating them here. 13. Once, when in prayer, I had a vision, for a moment,--I saw nothing distinctly, but the vision was most clear,--how all things are seen in God and how all things are comprehended in Him. I cannot in any way explain it, but the vision remains most deeply impressed on my soul, and is one of those grand graces which our Lord wrought in me, and one of those which put me to the greatest shame and confusion whenever I call my sins to remembrance. I believe, if it had pleased our Lord that I had seen this at an earlier time, or if they saw it who sin against Him, we should have neither the heart nor the daring to do so. I had the vision, I repeat it, but I cannot say that I saw anything; however, I must have seen something, seeing that I explain it by an illustration, only it must have been in a way so subtile and delicate that the understanding is unable to reach it, or I am so ignorant in all that relates to these visions, which seem to be not imaginary. In some of these visions there must be something imaginary, only, as the powers of the soul are then in a trance, they are not able afterwards to retain the forms, as our Lord showed them to it then, and as He would have it rejoice in them. 14. Let us suppose the Godhead to be a most brilliant diamond, much larger than the whole world, or a mirror like that to which I compared the soul in a former vision, [8] only in a way so high that I cannot possibly describe it; and that all our actions are seen in that diamond, which is of such dimensions as to include everything, because nothing can be beyond it. It was a fearful thing for me to see, in so short a time, so many things together in that brilliant diamond, and a most piteous thing too, whenever I think of it, to see such foul things as my sins present in the pure brilliancy of that light. 15. So it is, whenever I remember it, I do not know how to bear it, and I was then so ashamed of myself that I knew not where to hide myself. Oh, that some one could make this plain to those who commit most foul and filthy sins, that they may remember their sins are not secret, and that God most justly resents them, seeing that they are wrought in the very presence of His Majesty, and that we are demeaning ourselves so irreverently before Him! I saw, too, how completely hell is deserved for only one mortal sin, and how impossible it is to understand the exceeding great wickedness of committing it in the sight of majesty so great, and how abhorrent to His nature such actions are. In this we see more and more of His mercifulness, who, though we all know His hatred of sin, yet suffers us to live. 16. The vision made me also reflect, that if one such vision as this fills the souls with such awe, what will it be in the day of judgment, when His Majesty will appear distinctly, and when we too shall look on the sins we have committed! O my God, I have been, oh, how blind! I have often been amazed at what I have written; and you, my father, be you not amazed at anything, but that I am still living,--I, who see such things, and know myself to be what I am. Blessed for ever be He who has borne with me so long! 17. Once, in prayer, with much recollection, sweetness, and repose, I saw myself, as it seemed to me, surrounded by angels, and was close unto God. I began to intercede with His Majesty on behalf of the church. I was given to understand the great services which a particular Order would render in the latter days, and the courage with which its members would maintain the faith. 18. I was praying before the most Holy Sacrament one day; I had a vision of a Saint, whose Order was in some degree fallen. In his hands he held a large book, which he opened, and then told me to read certain words, written in large and very legible letters; they were to this effect: "In times to come this Order will flourish; it will have many martyrs." [9] 19. On another occasion, when I was at Matins in choir, six or seven persons, who seemed to me to be of this Order, appeared and stood before me with swords in their hands. The meaning of that, as I think, is that they are to be defenders of the faith; for at another time, when I was in prayer, I fell into a trance, and stood in spirit on a wide plain, where many persons were fighting; and the members of this Order were fighting with great zeal. Their faces were beautiful, and as it were on fire. Many they laid low on the ground defeated, others they killed. It seemed to me to be a battle with heretics. 20. I have seen this glorious Saint occasionally, and he has told me certain things, and thanked me for praying for his Order, and he has promised to pray for me to our Lord. I do not say which Orders these are,--our Lord, if it so pleased Him, could make them known,--lest the others should be aggrieved. Let every Order, or every member of them by himself, labour, that by his means our Lord would so bless his own Order that it may serve Him in the present grave necessities of His Church. Blessed are they whose lives are so spent. 21. I was once asked by a person to pray God to let him know whether his acceptance of a bishopric would be for the service of God. After Communion our Lord said to me: "When he shall have clearly and really understood that true dominion consists in possessing nothing, he may then accept it." I understood by this that he who is to be in dignity must be very far from wishing or desiring it, or at least he must not seek it. 22. These and many other graces our Lord has given, and is giving continually, to me a sinner. I do not think it is necessary to speak of them, because the state of my soul can be ascertained from what I have written; so also can the spirit which our Lord has given me. May He be blessed for ever, who has been so mindful of me! 23. Our Lord said to me once, consoling me, that I was not to distress myself,--this He said most lovingly,--because in this life we could not continue in the same state. [10] At one time I should be fervent, at another not; now disquieted, and again at peace, and tempted; but I must hope in Him, and fear not. 24. I was one day thinking whether it was a want of detachment in me to take pleasure in the company of those who had the care of my soul, and to have an affection for them, and to comfort myself with those whom I see to be very great servants of God. [11] Our Lord said to me: "It is not a virtue in a sick man to abstain from thanking and loving the physician who seems to restore him to health when he is in danger of death. What should I have done without these persons? The conversation of good people was never hurtful; my words should always be weighed, and holy; and I was not to cease my relations with them, for they would do me good rather than harm." 25. This was a great comfort to me, because, now and then, I wished to abstain from converse with all people; for it seemed to me that I was attached to them. Always, in all things, did our Lord console me, even to the showing me how I was to treat those who were weak, and some other people also. Never did He cease to take care of me. I am sometimes distressed to see how little I do in His service, and how I am forced to spend time in taking care of a body so weak and worthless as mine is, more than I wish. 26. I was in prayer one night, when it was time to go to sleep. I was in very great pain, and my usual sickness was coming on. [12] I saw myself so great a slave to myself, and, on the other hand, the spirit asked for time for itself. I was so much distressed that I began to weep exceedingly, and to be very sorry. This has happened to me not once only, but, as I am saying, very often; and it seems to make me weary of myself, so that at the time I hold myself literally in abhorrence. Habitually, however, I know that I do not hate myself, and I never fail to take that which I see to be necessary for me. May our Lord grant that I do not take more than is necessary!--I am afraid I do. 27. When I was thus distressed, our Lord appeared unto me. He comforted me greatly, and told me I must do this for His love, and bear it; my life was necessary now. And so, I believe, I have never known real pain since I resolved to serve my Lord and my Consoler with all my strength; for though he would leave me to suffer a little, yet He would console me in such a way that I am doing nothing when I long for troubles. And it seems to me there is nothing worth living for but this, and suffering is what I most heartily pray to God for. I say to Him sometimes, with my whole heart: "O Lord, either to die or to suffer! I ask of Thee nothing else for myself." It is a comfort to me to hear the clock strike, because I seem to have come a little nearer to the vision of God, in that another hour of my life has passed away. 28. At other times I am in such a state that I do not feel that I am living, nor yet do I desire to die but I am lukewarm, and darkness surrounds me on every side, as I said before; [13] for I am very often in great trouble. It pleased our Lord that the graces He wrought in me should be published abroad, [14] as He told me some years ago they should be. It was a great pain to me, and I have borne much on that account even to this day, as you, my father, know, because every man explains them in his own sense. But my comfort herein is that it is not my fault that they are become known, for I was extremely cautious never to speak of them but to my confessors, or to persons who I knew had heard of them from them. I was silent, however, not out of humility, but because, as I said before, [15] it gave me great pain to speak of them even to my confessors. 29. Now, however,--to God be the glory!--though many speak against me, but out of a zeal for goodness, and though some are afraid to speak to me, and even to hear my confession, and though others have much to say about me, because I see that our Lord willed by this means to provide help for many souls,--and also because I see clearly and keep in mind how much He would suffer, if only for the gaining of one,--I do not care about it at all. 30. I know not why it is so, but perhaps the reason may in some measure be that His Majesty has placed me in this corner out of the way, where the enclosure is so strict, and where I am as one that is dead. I thought that no one would remember me, but I am not so much forgotten as I wish I was, for I am forced to speak to some people. But as I am in a house where none may see me, it seems as if our Lord had been pleased to bring me to a haven, which I trust in His Majesty will be secure. Now that I am out of the world, with companions holy and few in number, I look down on the world as from a great height, and care very little what people say or know about me. I think much more of one soul's advancement, even if it were but slight, than of all that people may say of me; and since I am settled here it has pleased our Lord that all my desires tend to this. 31. He has made my life to me now a kind of sleep; for almost always what I see seems to me to be seen as in a dream, nor have I any great sense either of pleasure or of pain. If matters occur which may occasion either, the sense of it passes away so quickly that it astonishes me, and leaves an impression as if I had been dreaming,--and this is the simple truth; for if I wished afterwards to delight in that pleasure, or be sorry over that pain, it is not in my power to do so: just as a sensible person feels neither pain nor pleasure in the memory of a dream that is past; for now our Lord has roused my soul out of that state which, because I was not mortified nor dead to the things of this world, made me feel as I did, and His Majesty does not wish me to become blind again. 32. This is the way I live now, my lord and father; do you, my father, pray to God that He would take me to Himself, or enable me to serve Him. May it please His Majesty that what I have written may be of some use to you, my father! I have so little time, [16] and therefore my trouble has been great in writing; but it will be a blessed trouble if I have succeeded in saying anything that will cause one single act of praise to our Lord. If that were the case, I should look upon myself as sufficiently rewarded, even if you, my father, burnt at once what I have written. I would rather it were not burnt before those three saw it, whom you, my father, know of, because they are, and have been, my confessors; for if it be bad, it is right they should lose the good opinion they have of me; and if it be good, they are good and learned men, and I know they will recognise its source, and give praise to Him who hath spoken through me. 33. May His Majesty ever be your protector, and make you so great a saint that your spirit and light may show the way to me a miserable creature, so wanting in humility and so bold as to have ventured to write on subjects so high! May our Lord grant I have not fallen into any errors in the matter, for I had the intention and the desire to be accurate and obedient, and also that through me He might, in some measure, have glory,--because that is what I have been praying for these many years; and as my good works are inefficient for that end, I have ventured to put in order this my disordered life. Still, I have not wasted more time, nor given it more attention, than was necessary for writing it; yet I have put down all that has happened to me with all the simplicity and sincerity possible. 34. May our Lord, who is all-powerful, grant--and He can if He will--that I may attain to the doing of His will in all things! May He never suffer this soul to be lost, which He so often, in so many ways, and by so many means, has rescued from hell and drawn unto Himself! Amen. I.H.S. The Holy Spirit be ever with you, my father. [17] Amen. It would not be anything improper if I were to magnify my labour in writing this, to oblige you to be very careful to recommend me to our Lord; for indeed I may well do so, considering what I have gone through in giving this account of myself, and in retracing my manifold wretchedness. But, still, I can say with truth that I felt it more difficult to speak of the graces which I have received from our Lord than to speak of my offences against His Majesty. You, my father, commanded me to write at length; that is what I have done, on condition that you will do what you promised, namely, destroy everything in it that has the appearance of being wrong. I had not yet read it through after I had written it, when your reverence sent for it. Some things in it may not be very clearly explained, and there may be some repetitions; for the time I could give to it was so short, that I could not stop to see what I was writing. I entreat your reverence to correct it and have it copied, if it is to be sent on to the Father-Master, Avila, [18] for perhaps some one may recognise the handwriting. I wish very much you would order it so that he might see it, for I began to write it with a view to that I shall be greatly comforted if he shall think that I am on a safe road, now that, so far as it concerns me, there is nothing more to be done. Your reverence will do in all things that which to you shall seem good, and you will look upon yourself as under an obligation to take care of one who trusts her soul to your keeping. I will pray for the soul of your reverence to our Lord, so long as I live. You will, therefore, be diligent in His service, in order that you may be able to help me; for your reverence will see by what I have written how profitable it is to give oneself, as your reverence has begun to do, wholly unto Him who gives Himself to us so utterly without measure. Blessed be His Majesty for ever! I hope of His mercy we shall see one another one day, when we, your reverence and myself, shall see more clearly the great mercies He has shown us, and when we shall praise Him for ever and ever. Amen. This book was finished in June, 1562. "This date refers to the first account which the holy Mother Teresa of Jesus wrote of her life; it was not then divided into chapters. Afterwards she made this copy, and inserted in it many things which had taken place subsequent to this date, such as the foundation of the monastery of St. Joseph of Avila, as in p. 169. [19]--Fray Do Bañes." 1. Ch. xxxii. § 1. 2. Ch. xxviii. § 14. 3. St. Matt. v. 18: "Iota unum aut unus apex non præteribit a lege." 4. Ch. iv. § 10. 5. "Ecce quantum spatiatus sum in memoria mea quærens Te, Domine; et non Te inveni extra eam. . . . Ex quo didici Te, manes in memoria mea, et illic Te invenio cum reminiscor Tui et delector in Te" (Confess. x. 24). See Inner Fortress, Sixth Mansion, ch. iv. 6. Ch. xx. § 26. 7. Ch. xxv. § 18, ch. xxvi. § 4. See St. John of the Cross, Mount Carmel, bk. ii. ch. xxii. 8. § 8. 9. Yepez says that the Order here spoken of is the Carmelite, and Ribera understands the Saint to refer to that of St. Dominic. The Bollandists, n. 1638-1646, on the whole, prefer the authority of Ribera to that of Yepez and give good reasons for their preference, setting aside as insufficient the testimony of Fray Luis of the Assumption, who says he heard himself from the Venerable Anne of St. Bartholomew that the Order in question is the Order of our Lady of Mount Carmel. Don Vicente, the Spanish editor, rejects the opinion of Ribera, on the ground that it could not have been truly said of the Dominicans in the sixteenth century that the Order was in "some degree fallen," for it was in a most flourishing state. He therefore was inclined to believe that the Saint referred to the Augustinians or to the Franciscans. But, after he had printed this part of his book, he discovered among the MSS. in the public library of Madrid a letter of Anne of St. Bartholomew, addressed to Fray Luis of the Assumption, in which the saintly companion of St. Teresa says that the "Order was ours." Don Vicente has published the letter in the Appendix, p. 566. 10. Job xiv. 2: "Nunquam in eodem statu permanet." 11. See ch. xxxvii. §§ 4, 6. 12. See ch. vii. § 18. 13. Ch. xxx. § 10. 14. Ch. xxxi. §§ 16, 17. 15. Ch. xxviii. § 6. 16. See ch. xiv. § 12. 17. This letter, which seems to have accompanied the "Life," is printed among the other letters of the Saint, and is addressed to her confessor, the Dominican friar, Pedro Ibañez. It is the fifteenth letter in the first volume of the edition of Madrid; but it is not dated there. 18. Juan de Avila, commonly called the Apostle of Andalusia. 19. I.e. of the MS. See p. 337 [Transcriber's note: ch. xxxvi. § 15] of this translation. The Relations or Manifestations of Her Spiritual State Which St. Teresa Submitted to Her Confessors. The Relations. Relation 1. Sent to St. Peter of Alcantara in 1560 from the Monastery of the Incarnation, Avila. [1] 1. The method of prayer I observe at present is this: when I am in prayer, it is very rarely that I can use the understanding, because the soul becomes at once recollected, remains in repose, or falls into a trance, so that I cannot in any way have the use of the faculties and the senses,--so much so, that the hearing alone is left; but then it does not help me to understand anything. 2. It often happens, when I am not even thinking of the things of God, but engaged in other matters, and when prayer seems to be beyond my power, whatever efforts I might make, because of the great aridity I am in, bodily pains contributing thereto, that this recollection or elevation of spirit comes upon me so suddenly that I cannot withstand it, and the fruits and blessings it brings with it are in a moment mine: and this, without my having had a vision, or heard anything, or knowing where I am, except that when the soul seems to be lost I see it make great progress, which I could not have made if I had laboured for a whole year, so great is my gain. 3. At other times certain excessive impetuosities occur, accompanied with a certain fainting away of the soul for God, so that I have no control over myself; [2] my life seems to have come to an end, and so it makes me cry out and call upon God; and this comes upon me with great vehemence. Sometimes I cannot remain sitting, so great is the oppression of the heart; and this pain comes on without my doing anything to cause it, and the nature of it is such that my soul would be glad never to be without it while I live. And the longings I have are longings not to live; and they come on because it seems as if I must live on without being able to find any relief, for relief comes from the vision of God, which comes by death, and death is what I cannot take; and with all this my soul thinks that all except itself are filled with consolations, and that all find help in their troubles, but not itself. The distress thus occasioned is so intense that, if our Lord did not relieve it by throwing it into a trance, whereby all is made calm, and the soul rests in great quiet and is satisfied, now by seeing something of that which it desires, now by hearing other things, it would seem to be impossible for it to be delivered from this pain. 4. At other times there come upon me certain desires to serve God, with a vehemence so great that I cannot describe it, and accompanied with a certain pain at seeing how unprofitable I am. It seems to me then that there is nothing in the world, neither death, nor martyrdom, that I could not easily endure. This conviction, too, is not the result of any reflection, but comes in a moment. I am wholly changed, and I know not whence cometh such great courage. I think I should live to raise my voice, and publish to all the world how important it is for men not to be satisfied with the common way, and how great the good is that God will give us if we prepare ourselves to receive it. I say it again, these desires are such that I am melted away in myself, for I seem to desire what I cannot have. The body seems to me to hold me in prison, through its inability to serve God and my state [3] in anything; for if it were not for the body, I might do very great things, so far as my strength would allow; and thus, because I see myself without any power whatever to serve God, I feel this pain in a way wholly indescribable; the issue is delight, recollection, and the consolation of God. 5. Again, it has happened, when these longings to serve Him come upon me, that I wish to do penance, but I am not able. It would be a great relief to me, and it does relieve and cheer me, though what I do is almost nothing, because of my bodily weakness; and yet, if I were to give way to these my longings, I believe I should observe no moderation. 6. Sometimes, if I have to speak to any one, I am greatly distressed, and I suffer so much that it makes me weep abundantly; for my whole desire is to be alone, and solitude comforts me, though at times I neither pray nor read, and conversation--particularly of kindred and connections--seems oppressive, and myself to be as a slave, except when I speak to those whose conversation is of prayer and matters of the soul,--in these I find comfort and joy; [4] yet these occasionally are too much for me, and I would rather not see them, but go where I might be alone: though this is not often the case, for those especially who direct my conscience always console me. 7. At other times it gives me much pain that I must eat and sleep, and that I see I cannot forego these things, being less able to do so than any one. I submit that I may serve God, and thus I offer up those actions to him. Time seems to me too short, and that I have not enough for my prayer, for I should never be tired of being alone. I am always wishing I had time for reading, for I have been always fond of reading. I read very little, for when I take up a book I become recollected through the pleasure it gives me, and thus my reading is turned into prayer: and it is but rarely, for I have many occupations; and though they are good, they do not give me the pleasure which reading would give. And thus I am always wishing for more time, and everything becomes disagreeable, so I believe, because I see I cannot do what I wish and desire. 8. All these desires, with an increase in virtue, have been given me by our Lord since He raised me to this prayer of quiet, and sent these raptures. I find myself so improved that I look on myself as being a mass of perdition before this. These raptures and visions leave me in possession of the blessings I shall now speak of; and I maintain that, if there be any good in me, they are the occasions of it. 9. I have made a very strong resolution never to offend God, not even venially. I would rather die a thousand deaths than do anything of the kind knowingly. I am resolved never to leave undone anything I may consider to be the more perfect, or more for the honour of our Lord, if he who has the care of my soul and directs me tells me I may do it. Cost me what pain it might, I would not leave such an act undone for all the treasure of the world. If I were to do so, I do not think I could have the face to ask anything of God our Lord, or to make my prayer; and yet, for all this, I have many faults and imperfections. I am obedient to my confessor, [5] though imperfectly; but if I know that he wishes or commands anything, I would not leave that undone, so far as I understand it; if I did so, I should think myself under a grievous delusion. 10. I have a longing for poverty, though not free from imperfection; however, I believe, if I had wealth, I would not reserve any revenue, nor hoard money for myself, nor do I care for it; I wish to have only what is necessary. Nevertheless, I feel that I am very defective in this virtue; for, though I desire nothing for myself, I should like to have something to give away: still, I desire no revenue, nor anything for myself. [6] 11. In almost all the visions I have had, I have found good, if it be not a delusion of Satan; herein I submit myself to the judgment of my confessors. 12. As to fine and beautiful things, such as water, fields, perfume, music, etc., I think I would rather not have them, so great is the difference between them and what I am in the habit of seeing, and so all pleasure in them is gone from me. [7] Hence it is that I care not for them, unless it be at the first sight: they never make any further impression; to me they seem but dirt. 13. If I speak or converse with people in the world--for I cannot help it--even about prayer, and if the conversation be long, though to pass away the time, I am under great constraint if it be not necessary, for it gives me much pain. 14. Amusements, of which I used to be fond, and worldly things, are all disagreeable to me now, and I cannot look at them. 15. The longings, which I said I have, [8] of loving and serving and seeing God, are not helped by any reflections, as formerly, when I thought I was very devout, and shed many tears; but they flow out of a certain fire and heat so excessive that, I repeat it, if God did not relieve them by throwing me into a trance, wherein the soul seems to find itself satisfied, I believe my life would come to an end at once. 16. When I see persons making great progress, and thus resolved, detached, and courageous, I love them much; and I should like to have my conversation with such persons, and I think they help me on. People who are afraid, and seemingly cautious in those things, the doing of which is perfectly reasonable here, seem to vex me, and drive me to pray to God and the saints to make them undertake such things as these which now frighten us. Not that I am good for anything myself, but because I believe that God helps those who, for His sake, apply themselves to great things, and that He never abandons any one who puts his trust in Him only. And I should like to find any one who would help me to believe so, and to be without thought about food and raiment, but leave it all in the hands of God. [9] 17. This leaving in the hands of God the supply of all I need is not to be understood as excluding all labour on my part, but merely solicitude--I mean, the solicitude of care. And since I have attained to this liberty, it goes well with me, and I labour to forget myself as much as I can. I do not think it is a year ago since our Lord gave me this liberty. 18. Vainglory [10]--glory, be to God!--so far as I know, there is no reason why I should have any; for I see plainly that in these things which God sends me I have no part myself; on the contrary, God makes me conscious of my own wretchedness; for whatever reflections I might be able to make, I could never come to the knowledge of such deep truths as I attain to in a single rapture. 19. When I speak of these things a few days after, they seem to me as if they had happened to another person. Previously, I thought it a wrong to me that they should be known to others; but I see now that I am not therefore any the better, but rather worse, seeing that I make so little progress after receiving mercies so great. And certainly, in every way, it seems to me that there was not in the world anybody worse than myself; and so the virtues of others seem to me much more meritorious than mine, and that I do nothing myself but receive graces, and that God must give to others at once all that He is now giving unto me; and I pray Him not to reward me in this life; and so I believe that God has led me along this way because I am weak and wicked. 20. When I am in prayer, and even almost always when I am able to reflect at all, I cannot, even if I tried, pray to God for rest, or desire it; for I see that His life was one of suffering, and that I ask Him to send me, giving me first the grace to bear it. 21. Everything of this kind, and of the highest perfection, seems to make so deep an impression on me in prayer, that I am amazed at the sight of truths so great and so clear that the things of the world seem to be folly; and so it is necessary for me to take pains to reflect on the way I demeaned myself formerly in the things of the world, for it seems to me folly to feel for deaths and the troubles of the world,--at least, that sorrow for, or love of, kindred and friends should last long. I say I have to take pains when I am considering what I was, and what I used to feel. 22. If I see people do anything which clearly seems to be sin, I cannot make up my mind that they have offended God; and if I dwell upon this at all,--which happens rarely or never,--I never can make up my mind, though I see it plainly enough. It seems to me that everybody is as anxious to serve God as I am. And herein God has been very gracious unto me, for I never dwell on an evil deed, to remember it afterwards and if I do remember it, I see some virtue or other in that person. In this way these things never weary me, except generally: but heresies do; they distress me very often, and almost always when I think of them they seem to me to be the only trouble which should be felt. And also I feel, when I see people who used to give themselves to prayer fall away; this gives me pain, but not much, because I strive not to dwell upon it. 23. I find, also, that I am improved in the matter of that excessive neatness which I was wont to observe, [11] though not wholly delivered from it. I do not discern that I am always mortified in this; sometimes, however, I do. 24. All this I have described, together with a very constant dwelling in thought on God, is the ordinary state of my soul, so far as I can understand it. And if I must be busy about something else, without my seeking it, as I said before, [12] I know not who makes me awake,--and this not always, only when I am busy with things of importance; and such--glory be to God!--only at intervals demand my attention, and do not occupy me at all times. 25. For some days--they are not many, however--for three, or four, or five, all my good and fervent thoughts, and my visions, seem to be withdrawn, yea, even forgotten, so that, if I were to seek for it, I know of no good that can ever have been in me. It seems to have been all a dream, or, at least, I can call nothing to mind. Bodily pains at the same time distress me. My understanding is troubled, so that I cannot think at all about God, neither do I know under what law I live. If I read anything, I do not understand it; I seem to be full of faults, and without any resolution whatever to practise virtue; and the great resolution I used to have is come to this, that I seem to be unable to resist the least temptation or slander of the world. It suggests itself to me then that I am good for nothing, if any one would have me undertake more than the common duties. I give way to sadness, thinking I have deceived all those who trusted me at all. I should like to hide myself where nobody could see me; but my desire for solitude arises from want of courage, not from love of virtue. It seems to me that I should like to dispute with all who contradict me; I am under the influence of these impressions, only God has been so gracious unto me, that I do not offend more frequently than I was wont to do, nor do I ask Him to deliver me from them, but only, if it be His will I should always suffer thus, to keep me from offending Him; and I submit myself to His will with my whole heart, and I see that it is a very great grace bestowed upon me that He does not keep me constantly in this state. 26. One thing astonishes me; it is that, while I am in this state, through a single word of those I am in the habit of hearing, or a single vision, or a little self-recollection, lasting but an Ave Maria, or through my drawing near to communicate, I find my soul and body so calm, so sound, the understanding so clear, and myself possessing all the strength and all the good desires I usually have. And this I have had experience of very often--at least when I go to Communion; it is more than six months ago that I felt a clear improvement in my bodily health, [13] and that occasionally brought about through raptures, and I find it last sometimes more than three hours, at other times I am much stronger for a whole day; and I do not think it is fancy, for I have considered the matter, and reflected on it. Accordingly, when I am thus recollected, I fear no illness. The truth is, that when I pray, as I was accustomed to do before, I feel no improvement. 27. All these things of which I am speaking make me believe that it comes from God; for when I see what I once was, that I was in the way of being lost, and that soon, my soul certainly is astonished at these things, without knowing whence these virtues came to me; I did not know myself, and saw that all was a gift, and not the fruit of my labours. I understand in all truthfulness and sincerity, and see that I am not deluded, that it has been not only the means of drawing me to God in His service, but of saving me also from hell. This my confessors know, who have heard my general confession. 28. Also, when I see any one who knows anything about me, I wish to let him know my whole life, [14] because my honour seems to me to consist in the honour of our Lord, and I care for nothing else. This He knows well, or I am very blind; for neither honour, nor life, nor praise, nor good either of body or of soul, can interest me, nor do I seek or desire any advantage, only His glory. I cannot believe that Satan has sought so many means of making my soul advance, in order to lose it after all. I do not hold him to be so foolish. Nor can I believe it of God, though I have deserved to fall into delusions because of my sins, that He has left unheeded so many prayers of so many good people for two years, and I do nothing else but ask everybody to pray to our Lord that He would show me if this be for His glory, or lead me by another way. [15] I do not believe that these things would have been permitted by His Majesty to be always going on if they were not His work. These considerations, and the reasons of so many saintly men, give me courage when I am under the pressure of fear that they are not from God, I being so wicked myself. But when I am in prayer, and during those days when I am in repose, and my thoughts fixed on God, if all the learned and holy men in the world came together and put me to, all conceivable tortures, and I, too, desirous of agreeing with them, they could not make me believe that this is the work of Satan, for I cannot. And when they would have had me believe it, I was afraid, seeing who it was that said so; and I thought that they must be saying what was true, and that I, being what I was, must have been deluded. But all they had said to me was destroyed by the first word, or recollection, or vision that came, and I was able to resist no longer, and believed it was from God. [16] 29. However, I can think that Satan now and then may intermeddle here, and so it is, as I have seen and said; but he produces different results, nor can he, as it seems to me, deceive any one possessed of any experience. Nevertheless, I say that, though I do certainly believe this to be from God, I would never do anything, for any consideration whatever, that is not judged by him who has the charge of my soul to be for the better service of our Lord, and I never had any intention but to obey without concealing anything, for that is my duty. I am very often rebuked for my faults, and that in such a way as to pierce me to the very quick; and I am warned when there is, or when there may be, any danger in what I am doing. These rebukes and warnings have done me much good, in often reminding me of my former sins, which make me exceedingly sorry. 30. I have been very long, but this is the truth,--that, when I rise from my prayer, I see that I have received blessings which seem too briefly described. Afterwards I fall into many imperfections, and am unprofitable and very wicked. And perhaps I have no perception of what is good, but am deluded; still, the difference in my life is notorious, and compels me to think over all I have said--I mean, that which I verily believe I have felt. These are the perfections which I feel our Lord has wrought in me, who am so wicked and so imperfect. I refer it all to your judgment, my father, for you know the whole state of my soul. 1. Fra Anton. a Sancto Joseph, in his notes on this Relation, usually published among the letters of the Saint, ed. Doblado, vol. ii. letter 11, says it was written for St. Peter of Alcantara when he came to Avila in 1560, at the time when the Saint was so severely tried by her confessors and the others who examined her spirit, and were convinced that her prayer was a delusion of Satan: see the Life, ch. xxv. § 18. The following notes were discovered among the papers of the Saint in the monastery of the Incarnation, and are supposed to refer to this Relation. The Chronicler of the Order, Fra Francis a Sancta Maria, is inclined to the belief that they were written by St. Peter of Alcantara, to whom the Relation is addressed, and the more so because Ribera does not claim them for any member of the Society, notwithstanding the reference to them in §§ 22, 28. "1. The end God has in view is the drawing a soul to himself; that of the devil is the withdrawing it from God. Our Lord never does anything whereby anyone may be separated from Him, and the devil does nothing whereby any one may be made to draw near unto God. All the visions and the other operations in the soul of this person draw her nearer unto God, and make her more humble and obedient. "2. It is the teaching of St. Thomas that an angel of light may be recognised by the peace and quietness he leaves in the soul. She is never visited in this way, but she afterwards abides in peace and joy; so much so, that all the pleasures of earth together are not comparable to one of these visitations. "3. She never commits a fault, nor falls into an imperfection, without being instantly rebuked by Him who speaks interiorly to her. "4. She has never prayed for nor wished for them: all she wishes for is to do the will of God our Lord in all things. "5. Everything herein is consistent with the Scriptures and the teaching of the Church, and most true, according to the most rigorous principles of scholastic theology. "6. This soul is most pure and sincere, with the most fervent desires of being pleasing unto God, and of trampling on every earthly thing. "7. She has been told that whatever she shall ask of God, being good, she shall have. She has asked much, and things not convenient to put on paper lest it should be wearisome; all of which our Lord has granted. "8. When these operations are from God, they are always directed to the good of the recipient, to that of the community, or of some other. That she has profited by them she knows by experience, and she knows it, too, of other persons also. "9. No one converses with her, if he be not in evil dispositions, who is not moved thereby to devotion, even though she says nothing about it. "10. She is growing daily in the perfection of virtues, and learns by these things the way of a higher perfection. And thus, during the whole time in which she had visions, she was making progress, according to the doctrine of St. Thomas. "11. The spirit that speaks to her soul never tells her anything in the way of news, or what is unbecoming, but only that which tends to edification. "12. She has been told of some persons that they were full of devils: but this was for the purpose of enabling her to understand the state of a soul which has sinned mortally against our Lord. "13. The devil's method is, when he attempts to deceive a soul, to advise that soul never to speak of what he says to it; but the spirit that speaks to this soul warns her to be open with learned men, servants of our Lord, and that the devil may deceive her if she should conceal anything through shame. "14. So great is the progress of her soul in this way, and the edification she ministers in the good example given, that more than forty nuns in her monastery practise great recollection. "15. These supernatural things occur after long praying, when she is absorbed in God, on fire with His love, or at Communion. "16. They kindle in her a most earnest desire to be on the right road, and to escape the delusions of Satan. "17. They are in her the cause of the deepest humility; she understands that what she receives comes to her from the hand of our Lord, and how little worth she is herself. "18. When they are withheld, anything that occurs is wont to pain and distress her; but when she is in this state, she remembers nothing; all she is conscious of is a great longing for suffering, and so great is it that she is amazed at it. "19. They are to her sources of joy and consolation in her troubles, when people speak ill of her, and in her infirmities--and she has fearful pains about the heart, sicknesses, and many other afflictions, all of which leave her when she has these visions. "20. With all this, she undergoes great penances, fasting, the discipline, and mortifications. "21. All that on earth may give her any pleasure, and her trials, which are many, she bears with equal tranquillity of mind, without losing the peace and quiet of her soul. "22. Her resolution never to offend our Lord is so earnest that she has made a vow never to leave undone what she knows herself, or is told by those who understand the matter better, to be the more perfect. And though she holds the members of the Society to be saints, and believes that our Lord made use of them to bestow on her graces so great, she told me that, if she knew it would be more perfect to have nothing more to do with them, she would never speak to them again, nor see them, notwithstanding the fact that it was through them that her mind had been quieted and directed in these things. "23. The sweetnesses she commonly receives, her sense of God, her languishing with love, are certainly marvellous, and through these she is wont to be enraptured the whole day long. "24. She frequently falls into a trance when she hears God spoken of with devotion and earnestness, and cannot resist the rapture, do what she can; and in that state her appearance is such that she excites very great devotion. "25. She cannot bear to be directed by any one who will not tell her of her faults, and rebuke her; all that she accepts with great humility. "26. Moreover, she cannot endure people who are in a state of perfection, if they do not labour to become perfect, according to the spirit of their rule. "27. She is most detached from her kindred, has no desire to converse with people, and loves solitude. She has a great devotion to the saints, and on their feasts, and on the days on which the Church celebrates the mysteries of the faith, is filled with most fervent affections for our Lord. "28. If all the members of the Society, and all the servants of God upon earth, tell her that her state is an effect of the operations of Satan, or were to say so, she is in fear and trembling before the visions occur; but as soon as she is in prayer, and recollected, she cannot be persuaded, were they to tear her into a thousand pieces, that it is any other than God who is working in her and speaking to her. "29. God has given her a most wonderfully strong and valiant spirit: she was once timid; now she tramples on all the evil spirits. She has put far away from herself all the littleness and silliness of women; she is singularly free from scruples, and most sincere. "30. Besides, our Lord has given her the gift of most sweet tears, great compassion for her neighbours, the knowledge of her own faults, a great reverence for good people, and self-abasement; and I am certain that she has done good to many, of whom I am one. "31. She is continually reminding herself of God, and has a sense of His presence. All the locutions have been verified, and every one of them accomplished; and this is a very great test. "32. Her visions are a source of great clearness in her understanding, and an admirable illumination in the things of God. "33. It was said to her that she should lead those who were trying her spirit to look into the Scriptures, and that they would not find that any soul desirous of pleasing God had been so long deceived." 2. See Life, ch. xxix. §§ 9-13. 3. De la Fuente thinks she means the religious state. 4. See Life, ch. xxiv. § 8, and ch. xxxi. § 22. 5. See Life, ch. xxiii. § 19. 6. See Life, ch. xxxv. § 2. 7. See Life, ch. ix. § 6, and ch. xiv. § 7. 8. See § 3, above. 9. St. Matt. vi. 31: "Nolite ergo solliciti esse, dicentes: Quid manducabimus. . . . aut quo operiemur?" 10. See Life, ch. vii. § 2. 11. See Life, ch. ii. § 2. 12. § 2, above. 13. See Life, ch. xx. § 29. 14. See Life, ch. xxxi. § 17. 15. See Life, ch. xxv. § 20. 16. See Life, ch. xxv. §§ 18, 22. Relation II. To One of Her Confessors, from the House of Doña Luisa de la Cerda, in 1562. [1] Jesus. I think it is more than a year since this was written; God has all this time protected me with His hand, so that I have not become worse; on the contrary, I see a great change for the better in all I have to say: may He be praised for it all! 1. The visions and revelations have not ceased, but they are of a much higher kind. Our Lord has taught me a way of prayer, wherein I find myself far more advanced, more detached from the things of this life, more courageous, and more free. [2] I fall into a trance more frequently, for these ecstasies at times come upon me with great violence, and in such a way as to be outwardly visible, I having no power to resist them; and even when I am with others--for they come in such a way as admits of no disguising them, unless it be by letting people suppose that, as I am subject to disease of the heart, they are fainting-fits; I take great pains, however, to resist them when they are coming on--sometimes I cannot do it. 2. As to poverty, God seems to have wrought great things in me; for I would willingly be without even what is necessary, unless given me as an alms; and therefore my longing is extreme that I may be in such a state as to depend on alms alone for my food. It seems to me that to live, when I am certain of food and raiment without fail, is not so complete an observance of my vow or of the counsel of Christ as it would be to live where no revenue is possessed, and I should be in want at times; and as to the blessings that come with true poverty, they seem to me to be great, and I would not miss them. Many times do I find myself with such great faith, that I do not think God will ever fail those who serve Him, and without any doubt whatever that there is, or can be, any time in which His words are not fulfilled: I cannot persuade myself to the contrary, nor can I have any fear; and so, when they advise me to accept an endowment, I feel it keenly, and betake myself unto God. 3. I think I am much more compassionate towards the poor than I used to be, having a great pity for them and a desire to help them; for if I regarded only my good will, I should give them even the habit I wear. I am not fastidious with respect to them, even if I had to do with them or touched them with my hands,--and this I now see is a gift of God; for though I used to give alms for His love, I had no natural compassion. I am conscious of a distinct improvement herein. 4. As to the evil speaking directed against me,--which is considerable, and highly injurious to me, and done by many,--I find myself herein also very much the better. I think that what they say makes scarcely any more impression upon me than it would upon an idiot. I think at times, and nearly always, that it is just. I feel it so little that I see nothing in it that I might offer to God, as I learn by experience that my soul gains greatly thereby; on the contrary, the evil speaking seems to be a favour. And thus, the first time I go to prayer, I have no ill-feeling against them; the first time I hear it, it creates in me a little resistance, but it neither disturbs nor moves me; on the contrary, when I see others occasionally disturbed, I am sorry for them. So it is, I put myself out of the question; for all the wrongs of this life seem to me so light, that it is not possible to feel them, because I imagine myself to be dreaming, and see that all this will be nothing when I awake. 5. God is giving me more earnest desires, a greater love of solitude, a much greater detachment, as I said, with the visions; by these He has made me know what all that is, even if I gave up all the friends I have, both men and women and kindred. This is the least part of it: my kindred are rather a very great weariness to me; I leave them in all freedom and joy, provided it be to render the least service unto God; and thus on every side I find peace. 6. Certain things, about which I have been warned in prayer, have been perfectly verified. Thus, considering the graces received from God, I find myself very much better; but, considering my service to Him in return, I am exceedingly worthless, for I have received greater consolation than I have given, though sometimes that gives me grievous pain. My penance is very scanty, the respect shown me great, much against my own will very often. [3] However in a word, I see that I live an easy, not a penitential, life; God help me, as He can! 7. It is now nine months, more or less, since I wrote this with mine own hand; since then I have not turned my back on the graces which God has given me; I think I have received, so far as I can see, a much greater liberty of late. Hitherto I thought I had need of others, and I had more reliance on worldly helps. Now I clearly understand that all men are bunches of dried rosemary, and that there is no safety in leaning on them, for if they are pressed by contradictions or evil speaking they break down. And so I know by experience that the only way not to fall is to cling to the cross, and put our trust in Him who was nailed thereto. I find Him a real Friend, and with Him I find myself endowed with such might that, God never failing me, I think I should be able to withstand the whole world if it were against me. 8. Having a clear knowledge of this truth, I used to be very fond of being loved by others; now I do not care for that, yea, rather, their love seems to weary me in some measure, excepting theirs who take care of my soul, or theirs to whom I think I do good. Of the former I wish to be loved, in order that they may bear with me; and of the latter, that they may be more inclined to believe me when I tell them that all is vanity. 9. In the very grievous trials, persecutions, and contradictions of these months, [4] God gave me great courage; and the more grievous they were, the greater the courage, without weariness in suffering. Not only had I no ill-feeling against those who spoke evil of me, but I had, I believe, conceived a deeper affection for them. I know not how it was; certainly it was a gift from the hand of our Lord. 10. When I desire anything, I am accustomed naturally to desire it with some vehemence; now my desires are so calm, that I do not even feel that I am pleased when I see them fulfilled. Sorrow and joy, excepting in that which relates to prayer, are so moderated, that I seem to be without sense, and in that state I remain for some days. 11. The vehement longings to do penance which come, and have come, upon me are great; and if I do any penance, I feel it to be so slight in comparison with that longing, that I regard it sometimes, and almost always, as a special consolation; however, I do but little, because of my great weakness. 12. It is a very great pain to me very often, and at this moment most grievous, that I must take food, particularly if I am in prayer. It must be very great, for it makes me weep much, and speak the language of affliction, almost without being aware of it, and that is what I am not in the habit of doing, for I do not remember that I ever did so in the very heaviest trials of my life: I am not a woman in these things, for I have a hard heart. 13. I feel in myself a very earnest desire, more so than usual, that God may find those who will serve Him, particularly learned men, in all detachment, and who will not cleave to anything of this world, for I see it is all a mockery; for when I see the great needs of the Church, I look upon it as a mockery to be distressed about aught else. I do nothing but pray to God for such men, because I see that one person, who is wholly perfect in the true fervour of the love of God, will do more good than many who are lukewarm. 14. In matters concerning the faith, my courage seems to me much greater. I think I could go forth alone by myself against the Lutherans, and convince them of their errors. I feel very keenly the loss of so many souls. I see many persons making great progress; I see clearly it was the pleasure of God that such progress should have been helped by me; and I perceive that my soul, of His goodness, grows daily more and more in His love. 15. I think I could not be led away by vainglory, even if I seriously tried, and I do not see how I could imagine any one of my virtues to be mine, for it is not long since I was for many years without any at all; and now so far as I am concerned, I do nothing but receive graces, without rendering any service in return, being the most worthless creature in the world. And so it is that I consider at times how all, except myself, make progress; I am good for nothing in myself. This is not humility only, but the simple truth; and the knowledge of my being so worthless makes me sometimes think with fear that I must be under some delusion. Thus I see clearly that all my gain has come through the revelations and the raptures, in which I am nothing myself, and do no more to effect them than the canvas does for the picture painted on it. This makes me feel secure and be at rest; and I place myself in the hands of God, and trust my desires; for I know for certain that my desires are to die for Him, and to lose all ease, and that whatever may happen. 16. There are days wherein I remember times without number the words of St. Paul, [5]--though certainly they are not true of me,--that I have neither life, nor speech, nor will of my own, but that there is One in me by whom I am directed and made strong; and I am, as it were, beside myself, and thus life is a very grievous burden to me. And the greatest oblation I make to God, as the highest service on my part, is that I, when I feel it so painfully to be absent from Him, am willing to live on for the love of Him. I would have my life also full of great tribulations and persecutions; now that I am unprofitable, I should like to suffer; and I would endure all the tribulations in the world to gain ever so little more merit--I mean, by a more perfect doing of His will. 17. Everything that I have learnt in prayer, though it may be two years previously, I have seen fulfilled. What I see and understand of the grandeurs of God, and of the way He has shown them, is so high, that I scarcely ever begin to think of them but my understanding fails me,--for I am as one that sees things far higher than I can understand,--and I become recollected. 18. God so keeps me from offending Him, that I am verily amazed at times. I think I discern the great care He takes of me, without my taking scarcely any care at all, being as I was, before these things happened to me, a sea of wickedness and sins, and without a thought that I was mistress enough of myself to leave them undone. And the reason why I would have this known is that the great power of God might be made manifest. Unto Him be praise for ever and ever! Amen. Jesus. This Relation here set forth, not in my handwriting, is one that I gave to my confessor, and which he with his own hand copied, without adding or diminishing a word. He was a most spiritual man and a theologian: I discussed the state of my soul with him, and he with other learned men, among whom was Father Mancio. [6] They found nothing in it that is not in perfect agreement with the holy writings. This makes me calm now, though, while God is leading me by this way, I feel that it is necessary for me to put no trust whatever in myself. And so I have always done, though it is painful enough. You, my father, will be careful that all this goes under the seal of confession, according to my request. 1. Addressed, it is believed, to her confessor, F. Pedro Ibañez. This Relation corresponds with ch. xxxiv. of the Life (De la Fuente). 2. See Life, ch. xxvii. 3. See Life, ch. xxxi. § 15. 4. The Saint is supposed to refer to the troubles she endured during the foundation of the monastery of St. Joseph. 5. Gal. ii. 20: "Vivo autem, jam non ego; vivit vero in me Christus." 6. A celebrated Dominican, professor of theology in Salamanca (Bouix). Relation III. Of Various Graces Granted to the Saint from the Year 1568 to 1571 Inclusive. 1. When I was in the monastery of Toledo, and some people were advising me not to allow any but noble persons to be buried there, [1] our Lord said to me: "Thou wilt be very inconsistent, My daughter, if thou regardest the laws of the world. Look at Me, poor and despised of men: are the great people of the world likely to be great in My eyes? or is it descent or virtue that is to make you esteemed?" 2. After Communion, the second day of Lent, in St. Joseph of Malagon, our Lord Jesus Christ appeared to me in an imaginary vision, as He is I wont to do; and when I was looking upon Him I saw that He had on His head, instead of the crown of thorns, a crown of great splendour, over the part where the wounds of that crown must have been. And as I have a great devotion to the crowning with thorns, I was exceedingly consoled, and began to think how great the pain must have been because of the many wounds, and to be sorrowful. Our Lord told me not to be sad because of those wounds, but for the many wounds which men inflict upon Him now. I asked Him what I could do by way of reparation; for I was resolved to do anything. He replied: "This is not the time for rest;" that I must hasten on the foundations, for He would take His rest with the souls which entered the monasteries; that I must admit all who offered themselves, because there were many souls that did not serve Him because they had no place wherein to do it; that those monasteries which were to be founded in small towns should be like this; that the merit of those in them would be as great, if they only desired to do that which was done in the other houses; that I must contrive to put them all under the jurisdiction of one superior, [2] and take care that anxieties about means of bodily maintenance did not destroy interior peace, for He would help us, so that we should never be in want of food. Especial care was to be had of the sick sisters; the prioress who did not provide for and comfort the sick was like the friends of Job: He sent them sickness for the good of their souls, and careless superiors risked the patience of their nuns. I was to write the history of the foundation of the monasteries. I was thinking how there was nothing to write about in reference to the foundation of Medina, when He asked me, what more did I want to see than that the foundation there was miraculous? By this He meant to say that He alone had done it, when it seemed impossible. [3] I resolved to execute His commands. 3. Our Lord told me something I was to tell another, and as I was considering how I did not understand it at all,--though I prayed to Him, and was thinking it might be from Satan,--He said to me that it was not, and that He Himself would warn me when the time came. 4. Once, when I was thinking how much more purely they live who withdraw themselves from all business, and how ill it goes with me, and how many faults I must be guilty of, when I have business to transact, I heard this: "It cannot be otherwise, My daughter; but strive thou always after a good intention in all things, and detachment; lift up thine eyes to Me, and see that all thine actions may resemble Mine." 5. Thinking how it was that I scarcely ever fell into a trance of late in public, I heard this: "It is not necessary now; thou art sufficiently esteemed for My purpose; we are considering the weakness of the wicked." 6. One Tuesday after the Ascension, [4] having prayed for awhile after Communion in great distress, because I was so distracted that I could fix my mind on nothing, I complained of our poor nature to our Lord. The fire began to kindle in my soul, and I saw, as it seemed to me, the most Holy Trinity [5] distinctly present in an intellectual vision, whereby my soul understood through a certain representation, as a figure of the truth, so far as my dulness could understand, how God is Three and One; and thus it seemed to me that all the Three Persons spoke to me, that They were distinctly present in my soul, saying unto me "that from that day forth I should see that my soul had grown better in three ways, and that each one of the Three Persons had bestowed on me a distinct grace,--in charity, in suffering joyfully, in a sense of that charity in my soul, accompanied with fervour." I learnt the meaning of those words of our Lord, that the Three Divine Persons will dwell in the soul that is in a state of grace. [6] Afterwards giving thanks to our Lord for so great a mercy, and finding myself utterly unworthy of it, I asked His Majesty with great earnestness how it was that He, after showing such mercies to me, let me go out of His hand, and allowed me to become so wicked; for on the previous day I had been in great distress on account of my sins, which I had set before me. I saw clearly then how much our Lord on His part had done, ever since my infancy, to draw me to Himself by means most effectual, and yet, that all had failed. Then I had a clear perception of the surpassing love of God for us, in that He forgives us all this when we turn to Him, and for me more than for any other, for many reasons. The vision of the Three Divine Persons--one God--made so profound an impression on my soul, that if it had continued it would have been impossible for me not to be recollected in so divine a company. What I saw and heard besides is beyond my power to describe. 7. Once, when I was about to communicate,--it was shortly before I had this vision,--the Host being still in the ciborium, for It had not yet been given me, I saw something like a dove, which moved its wings with a sound. It disturbed me so much, and so carried me away out of myself, that it was with the utmost difficulty I received the Host. All this took place in St. Joseph of Avila. It was Father Francis Salcedo who was giving me the most Holy Sacrament. Hearing Mass another day, I saw our Lord glorious in the Host; He said to me that his sacrifice was acceptable unto Him. 8. I heard this once: "The time will come when many miracles will be wrought in this church; it will be called the holy church." It was in St. Joseph of Avila, in the year 1571. 9. I retain to this day, which is the Commemoration of St. Paul, the presence of the Three Persons of which I spoke in the beginning; [7] they are present almost continually in my soul. I, being accustomed to the presence of Jesus Christ only, always thought that the vision of the Three Persons was in some degree a hindrance, though I know the Three Persons are but One God. To-day, while thinking of this, our Lord said to me "that I was wrong in imagining that those things which are peculiar to the soul can be represented by those of the body; I was to understand that they were very different, and that the soul had a capacity for great fruition." It seemed to me as if this were shown to me thus: as water penetrates and is drunk in by the sponge, so, it seemed to me, did the Divinity fill my soul, which in a certain sense had the fruition and possession of the Three Persons. And I heard Him say also: "Labour thou not to hold Me within thyself enclosed, but enclose thou thyself within Me." It seemed to me that I saw the Three Persons within my soul, and communicating Themselves to all creatures abundantly without ceasing to be with me. 10. A few days after this, thinking whether they were right who disapproved of my going out to make new foundations, and whether it would not be better for me if I occupied myself always with prayer, I heard this: "During this life, the true gain consists not in striving after greater joy in Me, but in doing My will." It seemed to me, considering what St. Paul says about women, how they should stay at home, [8]--people reminded me lately of this, and, indeed, I had heard it before,--it might be the will of God I should do so too. He said to me: "Tell them they are not to follow one part of the Scripture by itself, without looking to the other parts also; perhaps, if they could, they would like to tie My hands." 11. One day after the octave of the Visitation, in one of the hermitages of Mount Carmel, praying to God for one of my brothers, I said to our Lord,--I do not know whether it was only in thought or not, for my brother was in a place where his salvation was in peril,--"If I saw one of Thy brethren, O Lord, in this danger, what would I not do to help him!" It seemed to me there was nothing that I could do which I would not have done. Our Lord said to me: "O daughter, daughter! the nuns of the Incarnation are thy sisters, and thou holdest back. Take courage, then. Behold, this is what I would have thee do: it is not so difficult as it seems; and though it seems to thee that by going thither thy foundations will be ruined, yet it is by thy going that both these and the monastery of the Incarnation will gain; resist not, for My power is great." [9] 12. Once, when thinking of the great penance practised by Doña Catalina de Cardona, [10] and how I might have done more, considering the desires which our Lord had given me at times, if it had not been for my obedience to my confessors, I asked myself whether it would not be as well if I disobeyed them for the future in this matter. Our Lord said to me: "No, My daughter; thou art on the sound and safe road. Seest thou all her penance? I think more of thy obedience." 13. Once, when I was in prayer, He showed me by a certain kind of intellectual vision the condition of a soul in a state of grace: in its company I saw by intellectual vision the most Holy Trinity, from whose companionship the soul derived a power which was a dominion over the whole earth. I understood the meaning of those words in the Canticle: "Let my Beloved come into His garden and eat." [11] He showed me also the condition of a soul in sin, utterly powerless, like a person tied and bound and blindfold, who, though anxious to see, yet cannot, being unable to walk or to hear, and in grievous obscurity. I was so exceedingly sorry for such souls, that, to deliver only one, any trouble seemed to me light. I thought it impossible for any one who saw this as I saw it,--and I can hardly explain it,--willingly to forfeit so great a good or continue in so evil a state. 14. One day, in very great distress about the state of the Order, and casting about for means to succour it, our Lord said to me: "Do thou what is in thy power, and leave Me to Myself, and be not disquieted by anything; rejoice in the blessing thou hast received, for it is a very great one. My Father is pleased with thee, and the Holy Ghost loves thee." 15. "Thou art ever desiring trials, and, on the other hand, declining them. I order things according to what I know thy will is, and not according to thy sensuality and weakness. Be strong, for thou seest how I help thee; I have wished thee to gain this crown. Thou shalt see the Order of the Virgin greatly advanced in thy days." I heard this from our Lord about the middle of February, 1571. 16. On the eve of St. Sebastian, the first year of my being in the monastery of the Incarnation [12] as prioress there, at the beginning of the Salve, I saw the Mother of God descend with a multitude of angels to the stall of the prioress, where the image of our Lady is, and sit there herself. I think I did not see the image then, but only our Lady. She seemed to be like that picture of her which the Countess [13] gave me; but I had no time to ascertain this, because I fell at once into a trance. Multitudes of angels seemed to me to be above the canopies of the stalls, and on the desks in front of them; but I saw no bodily forms, for the vision was intellectual. She remained there during the Salve, and said to me: "Thou hast done well to place me here; I will be present when the sisters sing the praises of my Son, and will offer them to Him." After this I remained in that prayer which I still practise, and which is that of keeping my soul in the company of the most Holy Trinity; and it seemed to me that the Person of the Father drew me to Himself, and spoke to me most comfortable words. Among them were these, while showing how He loved me: "I give thee My Son, and the Holy Ghost, and the Virgin: what canst thou give Me?" [14] 17. On the octave of the Holy Ghost, our Lord was gracious unto me, and gave me hopes of this house, [15] that it would go on improving--I mean the souls that are in it. 18. On the feast of the Magdalene, our Lord again confirmed a grace I had received in Toledo, electing me, in the absence of a certain person, in her place. 19. In the monastery of the Incarnation, and in the second year of my being prioress there, on the octave of St. Martin, when I was going to Communion, the Father, Fr. John of the Cross, [16]--divided the Host between me and another sister. I thought it was done, not because there was any want of Hosts, but that he wished to mortify me because I had told him how much I delighted in Hosts of a large size. Yet I was not ignorant that the size of the Host is of no moment; for I knew that our Lord is whole and entire in the smallest particle. His Majesty said to me: "Have no fear, My daughter; for no one will be able to separate thee from Me,"--giving me to understand that the size of the Host mattered not. 20. Then appearing to me, as on other occasions, in an imaginary vision, most interiorly, He held out His right hand and said: "Behold this nail! it is the pledge of thy being My bride from this day forth. Until now thou hadst not merited it; from henceforth thou shalt regard My honour, not only as of one who is Thy Creator, King, and God, but as thine, My veritable bride; My honour is thine, and thine is Mine." This grace had such an effect on me, that I could not contain myself: I became as one that is foolish, and said to our Lord: "Either ennoble my vileness or cease to bestow such mercies on me, for certainly I do not think that nature can bear them." I remained thus the whole day, as one utterly beside herself. Afterwards I became conscious of great progress, and greater shame and distress to see that I did nothing in return for graces so great. 21. Our Lord said this to me one day: "Thinkest thou, My daughter, that meriting lies in fruition? No; merit lies only in doing, in suffering, and in loving. You never heard that St. Paul had the fruition of heavenly joys more than once; while he was often in sufferings. [17] Thou seest how My whole life was full of dolors, and only on Mount Tabor hast thou heard of Me in glory. [18] Do not suppose, when thou seest My Mother hold Me in her arms, that she had that joy unmixed with heavy sorrows. From the time that Simeon spoke to her, My Father made her see in clear light all I had to suffer. The grand Saints of the desert, as they were led by God, so also did they undergo heavy penances; besides, they waged serious war with the devil and with themselves, and much of their time passed away without any spiritual consolation whatever. Believe Me, My daughter, his trials are the heaviest whom My Father loves most; trials are the measure of His love. How can I show My love for thee better than by desiring for thee what I desired for Myself? Consider My wounds; thy pains will never reach to them. This is the way of truth; thus shalt thou help Me to weep over the ruin of those who are in the world, for thou knowest how all their desires, anxieties, and thoughts tend the other way." When I began my prayer that day, my headache was so violent that I thought I could not possibly go on. Our Lord said to me: "Behold now, the reward of suffering. As thou, on account of thy health, wert unable to speak to Me, I spoke to thee and comforted thee." Certainly, so it was; for the time of my recollection lasted about an hour and a half, more or less. It was then that He spoke to me the words I have just related, together with all the others. I was not able to distract myself, neither knew I where I was; my joy was so great as to be indescribable; my headache was gone, and I was amazed, and I had a longing for suffering. He also told me to keep in mind the words He said to His Apostles: "The servant is not greater than his Lord." [19] 1. Alonzo Ramirez wished to have the right of burial in the new monastery, but the nobles of Toledo looked on his request as unreasonable. See Foundations, chs. xv. and xvi. 2. See Way of Perfection, ch. viii.; but ch. v. of the previous editions. 3. See Book of the Foundations, ch. iii. 4. In the copy kept in Toledo, the day is Tuesday after the Assumption (De la Fuente). 5. Ch. xxvii. § 10. 6. St. John xiv. 23: "Ad eum veniemus, et mansionem apud eum faciemus." 7. See § 6. 8. Titus ii. 5: "Sobrias, domus curam habentes." 9. This took place in 1571, when the Saint had been appointed prioress of the monastery of the Incarnation at Avila; the very house she had left in order to found that of St. Joseph, to keep the rule in its integrity. 10. See Book of the Foundations, ch. xxviii. 11. Cant. v. 1: "Veniat dilectus meus in hortum suum, et comedat." 12. A.D. 1572. 13. Maria de Velasco y Aragon, Countess of Osorno (Ribera, lib. iii. c. 1). 14. See Relation iv. § 2. 15. The monastery of the Incarnation, Avila (De la Fuente). 16. St. John of the Cross, at the instance of the Saint, was sent to Avila, with another father of the reformed Carmelites, to be confessor of the nuns of the Incarnation, who then disliked the observance of the primitive rule. 17. 2 Cor. xi. 27: "In labore et ærumna, in vigiliis multis." 18. St. Matt. xvii. 2: "Et transfiguratus est ante eos." 19. St. John xiii. 16: "Non est servus major domino suo." Relation IV. Of the Graces the Saint Received in Salamanca at the End of Lent, 1571. 1. I found myself the whole of yesterday in great desolation, and, except at Communion, did not feel that it was the day of the Resurrection. Last night, being with the community, I heard one [1] of them singing how hard it is to be living away from God. As I was then suffering, the effect of that singing on me was such that a numbness began in my hands, and no efforts of mine could hinder it; but as I go out of myself in raptures of joy, so then my soul was thrown into a trance through the excessive pain, and remained entranced; and until this day I had not felt this. A few days previously I thought that the vehement impulses were not so great as they used to be, and now it seems to be that the reason is what I have described; I know not if it is so. Hitherto the pain had not gone so far as to make me beside myself; and as it is so unendurable, and as I retained the control of my senses, it made me utter loud cries beyond my power to restrain. Now that it has grown, it has reached this point of piercing me; and I understand more of that piercing which our Lady suffered; for until to-day, as I have just said, I never knew what that piercing was. My body was so bruised, that I suffer even now when I am writing this; for my hands are as if the joints were loosed, and in pain. [2] You, my father, will tell me when you see me whether this trance be the effect of suffering, or whether I felt it, or whether I am deceived. 2. I was in this great pain till this morning; and, being in prayer, I fell into a profound trance; and it seemed to me that our Lord had taken me up in spirit to His Father, and said to Him: "Whom Thou hast given to Me, I give to Thee;" [3] and He seemed to draw me near to Himself. This is not an imaginary vision, but one most certain, and so spiritually subtile that it cannot be explained. He spoke certain words to me which I do not remember. Some of them referred to His grace, which He bestows on me. He kept me by Him for some time. 3. As you, my father, went away yesterday so soon, and I consider the many affairs which detain you, so that it is impossible for me to have recourse to you for comfort even when necessary,--for I see that your occupations are most urgent,--I was for some time in pain and sadness. As I was then in desolation,--as I said before,--that helped me; and as nothing on earth, I thought, had any attractions for me, I had a scruple, and feared I was beginning to lose that liberty. This took place last night; and to-day our Lord answered my doubt, and said to me "that I was not to be surprised; for as men seek for companions with whom they may speak of their sensual satisfactions, so the soul--when there is any one who understands it--seeks those to whom it may communicate its pleasures and its pains, and is sad and mourns when it can find none." He said to me: "Thou art prosperous now, and thy works please Me." As He remained with me for some time, I remembered that I had told you, my father, that these visions pass quickly away; He said to me "that there was a difference between these and the imaginary visions, and that there could not be an invariable law concerning the graces He bestowed on us; for it was expedient to give them now in one way, now in another." 4. After Communion, I saw our Lord most distinctly close beside me; and He began to comfort me with great sweetness, and said to me, among other things: "Thou beholdest Me present, My daughter,--it is I. Show me thy hands." And to me He seemed to take them and to put them to His side, and said: "Behold My wounds; thou art not without Me. Finish the short course of thy life." By some things He said to me, I understood that, after His Ascension, He never came down to the earth except in the most Holy Sacrament to communicate Himself to any one. He said to me, that when He rose again He showed Himself to our Lady, because she was in great trouble; for sorrow had so pierced her soul that she did not even recover herself at once in order to have the fruition of that joy. By this I saw how different was my piercing. [4] But what must that of the Virgin have been? He remained long with her then because it was necessary to console her. 5. On Palm Sunday, at Communion, I was in a deep trance,--so much so, that I was not able even to swallow the Host; and, still having It in my mouth, when I had come a little to myself, I verily believed that my mouth was all filled with Blood; and my face and my whole body seemed to be covered with It, as if our Lord had been shedding It at that moment. I thought It was warm, and the sweetness I then felt was exceedingly great; and our Lord said to me: "Daughter, My will is that My Blood should profit thee; and be not thou afraid that My compassion will fail thee. I shed It in much suffering, and, as thou seest, thou hast the fruition of It in great joy. I reward thee well for the pleasure thou gavest me to-day." He said this because I have been in the habit of going to Communion, if possible, on this day for more than thirty years, and of labouring to prepare my soul to be the host of our Lord; for I considered the cruelty of the Jews to be very great, after giving Him so grand a reception, in letting Him go so far for supper; and I used to picture Him as remaining with me, and truly in a poor lodging, as I see now. And thus I used to have such foolish thoughts--they must have been acceptable to our Lord, for this was one of the visions which I regard as most certain; and, accordingly it has been a great blessing to me in the matter of Communion. 6. Previous to this, I had been, I believe, for three days in that great pain, which I feel sometimes more than at others, because I am away from God; and during those days it had been very great, and seemingly more than I could bear. Being thus exceedingly wearied by it, I saw it was late to take my collation, nor could I do so,--for if I do not take it a little earlier, it occasions great weakness because of my sickness; and then, doing violence to myself, I took up some bread to prepare for collation, and on the instant Christ appeared, and seemed to be breaking the bread and putting it into my mouth. He said to me: "Eat, My daughter, and bear it as well as thou canst. I condole with thee in thy suffering; but it is good for thee now." My pain was gone, and I was comforted; for He seemed to be really with me then, and the whole of the next day; and with this my desires were then satisfied. The word "condole" made me strong; for now I do not think I am suffering at all. 1. Isabel of Jesus, born in Segovia, and whose family name was Jimena, told Ribera (vide lib. iv. c. v.) that she was the singer, being then a novice in Salamanca. 2. See Fortress of the Soul, vi. ch. xi. 3. See Relation, iii. § 16. 4. See above, § 1. Relation V. Observations on Certain Points of Spirituality. 1. "What is it that distresses thee, little sinner? Am I not thy God? Dost thou not see how ill I am treated here? If thou lovest Me, why art thou not sorry for Me? Daughter, light is very different from darkness. I am faithful; no one will be lost without knowing it. He must be deceiving himself who relies on spiritual sweetnesses; the true safety lies in the witness of a good conscience. [1] But let no one think that of himself he can abide in the light, any more than he can hinder the natural night from coming on; for that depends on My grace. The best means he can have for retaining the light is the conviction in his soul that he can do nothing of himself, and that it comes from Me; for, even if he were in the light, the instant I withdraw, night will come. True humility is this: the soul's knowing what itself can do, and what I can do. Do not neglect to write down the counsels I give thee, that thou mayest not forget them. Thou seekest to have the counsels of men in writing; why, then, thinkest thou that thou art wasting time in writing down those I give thee? The time will come when thou shalt require them all." On Union. 2. "Do not suppose, My daughter, that to be near to Me is union; for they who sin against Me are near Me, though they do not wish it. Nor is union the joys and comforts of union, [2] though they be of the very highest kind, and though they come from Me. These very often are means of winning souls, even if they are not in a state of grace." When I heard this, I was in a high degree lifted up in spirit. Our Lord showed me what the spirit was, and what the state of the soul was then, and the meaning of those words of the Magnificat, "Exultavit spiritus meus." He showed me that the spirit was the higher part of the will. 3. To return to union; I understood it to be a spirit, pure and raised up above all the things of earth, with nothing remaining in it that would swerve from the will of God, being a spirit and a will resigned to His will, and in detachment from all things, occupied in God in such a way as to leave no trace of any love of self, or of any created thing whatever. [3] Thereupon, I considered that, if this be union, it comes to this, that, as my soul is always abiding in this resolution, we can say of it that it is always in this prayer of union: and yet it is true that the union lasts but a very short time. It was suggested to me that, as to living in justice, meriting and making progress, it will be so; but it cannot be said that the soul is in union as it is when in contemplation; and I thought I understood, yet not by words heard, that the dust of our wretchedness, faults, and imperfections, wherein we bury ourselves, is so great, that it is not possible to live in such pureness as the spirit is in when in union with God, raised up and out of our wretched misery. And I think, if it be union to have our will and spirit in union with the will and Spirit of God, that it is not possible for any one not in a state of grace to attain thereto; and I have been told so. Accordingly, I believe it is very difficult to know when the soul is in union; to have that knowledge is a special grace of God, because nobody can tell whether he is in a state of grace or not. [4] 4. You will show me in writing, my father, what you think of this, and how I am in the wrong, and send me this paper back. 5. I had read in a book that it was an imperfection to possess pictures well painted,--and I would not, therefore, retain in my cell one that I had; and also, before I had read this, I thought that it was poverty to possess none, except those made of paper,--and, as I read this afterwards, I would not have any of any other material. I learnt from our Lord, when I was not thinking at all about this, what I am going to say: "that this mortification was not right. Which is better, poverty or charity? But as love was the better, whatever kindled love in me, that I must not give up, nor take away from my nuns; for the book spoke of much adorning and curious devices--not of pictures. [5] What Satan was doing among the Lutherans was the taking away from them all those means by which their love might be the more quickened; and thus they were going to perdition. Those who are loyal to Me, My daughter, must now, more than ever, do the very reverse of what they do." I understood that I was under great obligations to serve our Lady and St. Joseph, because, when I was utterly lost, God, through their prayers, came and saved me. 6. One day, after the feast of St. Matthew, [6] I was as is usual with me, after seeing in a vision the most Holy Trinity, and how It is present in a soul in a state of grace. [7] I understood the mystery most clearly, in such a way that, after a certain fashion and comparisons, I saw It in an imaginary vision. And though at other times I have seen the most Holy Trinity in an intellectual vision, for some days after the truth of it did not rest with me,--as it does now,--I mean, so that I could dwell upon it. I see now that it is just as learned men told me; and I did not understand it as I do now, though I believed them without the least hesitation; for I never had any temptations against the faith. 7. It seems to us ignorant women that the Persons of the most Holy Trinity are all Three, as we see Them painted, in one Person, after the manner of those pictures, which represent a body with three faces; and thus it causes such astonishment in us that we look on it as impossible, and so there is nobody who dares to think of it; for the understanding is perplexed, is afraid it may come to doubt the truth, and that robs us of a great blessing. 8. What I have seen is this: Three distinct Persons each one by Himself visible, and by Himself speaking. [8] And afterwards I have been thinking that the Son alone took human flesh, whereby this truth is known. The Persons love, communicate, and know Themselves. Then, if each one is by Himself, how can we say that the Three are one Essence, and so believe? That is a most deep truth, and I would die for it a thousand times. In the Three Persons there is but one will and one power and one might; neither can One be without Another: so that of all created things there is but one sole Creator. Could the Son create an ant without the Father? No; because the power is all one. The same is to be said of the Holy Ghost. Thus, there is one God Almighty, and the Three Persons are one Majesty. Is it possible to love the Father without loving the Son and the Holy Ghost? No; for he who shall please One of the Three pleases the Three Persons; and he who shall offend One offends All. Can the Father be without the Son and without the Holy Ghost? No; for They are one substance, and where One is there are the Three; for they cannot be divided. How, then, is it that we see the Three Persons distinct? and how is it that the Son, not the Father, nor the Holy Ghost, took human flesh? This is what I have never understood; theologians know it. I know well that the Three were there when that marvellous work was done, and I do not busy myself with much thinking thereon. All my thinking thereon comes at once to this: that I see God is almighty, that He has done what He would, and so can do what He will. The less I understand it, the more I believe it, and the greater the devotion it excites in me. May He be blessed for ever! Amen. 9. If our Lord had not been so gracious with me as He has been, I do not think I should have had the courage to do what has been done, nor strength to undergo the labours endured, with the contradictions and the opinions of men. And accordingly, since the beginning of the foundations, I have lost the fears I formerly had, thinking that I was under delusions,--and I had a conviction that it was the work of God: having this, I ventured upon difficult things, though always with advice and under obedience. I see in this that when our Lord willed to make a beginning of the Order, and of His mercy made use of me, His Majesty had to supply all that I was deficient in, which was everything, in order that the work might be effected, and that His greatness might be the more clearly revealed in one so wicked. 10. Antiochus was unendurable to himself, and to those who were about him, because of the stench of his many sins. [9] 11. Confession is for faults and sins, and not for virtues, nor for anything of the kind relating to prayer. These things are to be treated of out of confession with one who understands the matter,--and let the prioress see to this; and the nun must explain the straits she is in, in order that the proper helps may be found for her; for Cassian says that he who does not know the fact, as well as he who has never seen or learnt, that men can swim, will think, when he sees people throw themselves into the river, that they will all be drowned. [10] 12. Our Lord would have Joseph tell the vision to his brethren, and have it known, though it was to cost Joseph so much. 13. How the soul has a sense of fear when God is about to bestow any great grace upon it; that sense is the worship of the spirit, as that of the four [11] elders spoken of in Scripture. 14. How, when the faculties are suspended, it is to be understood that certain matters are suggested to the soul, to be by it recommended to God; that an angel suggests them, of whom it is said in the Scriptures that he was burning incense and offering up the prayers of the saints. [12] 15. How there are no sins where there is no knowledge; and thus our Lord did not permit the king to sin with the wife of Abraham, for he thought that she was his sister, not his wife. 1. 2 Cor. i. 12: "Gloria nostra hæc est, testimonium conscientiæ nostræ." 2. See St. John of the Cross, Mount Carmel, bk. ii. ch. v. 3. See Foundations, ch. v. § 10. 4. Eccl. ix. 1: "Nescit homo utrum amore an odio dignus sit." 5. See St. John of the Cross, Mount Carmel, bk. iii. ch. xxxiv. 6. The §§ 6, 7, and 8 are the thirteenth letter of the second volume, ed. Doblado. 7. See Relation iii. § 13. 8. Anton. a Sancto Joseph, in his notes on this passage, is anxious to save the Thomist doctrine that one of the Divine Persons cannot be seen without the other, and so he says that the Saint speaks of the Three Persons as she saw Them--not as They are in Themselves. 9. 2 Maccab. ix. 10, 12: "Eum nemo poterat propter intolerantiam foetoris portare, . . . . nec ipse jam foetorem suum ferre posset." 10. Cassian, Collat. vii. cap. iv. p. 311: "Nec enim si quis ignarus natandi, sciens pondus corporis sui ferre aquarum liquorem non posse, experimento suæ voluerit imperitiæ definire, neminem penitus posse liquidis elementis solida carne circumdatum sustineri." 11. Anton. a Sancto Joseph says that the Saint meant to write four-and-twenty, in allusion to Apoc. iv. 4. 12. Apoc. viii. 4. Relation VI. The Vow of Obedience to Father Gratian Which the Saint Made in 1575. 1. In the year 1575, in the month of April, when I was founding the monastery of Veas, Fra Jerome of the Mother of God Gratian happened to come thither. [1] I began to go to confession to him from time to time, though not looking upon him as filling the place of the other confessors I had, so as to be wholly directed by him. One day, when I was taking food, but without any interior recollection whatever, my soul began to be recollected in such a way that I thought I must fall into a trance; and I had a vision, that passed away with the usual swiftness, like a meteor. I seemed to see close beside me Jesus Christ our Lord, in the form wherein His Majesty is wont to reveal Himself, with F. Gratian on His right. Our Lord took his right hand and mine, and, joining them together, said to me that He would have me accept him in His place for my whole life, and that we were both to have one mind in all things, for so it was fitting. I was profoundly convinced that this was the work of God, though I remembered with regret two of my confessors whom I frequented in turn for a long time, and to whom I owed much; that one for whom I have a great affection especially caused a terrible resistance. Nevertheless, not being able to persuade myself that the vision was a delusion, because it had a great power and influence over me, and also because it was said to me on two other occasions that I was not to be afraid, that He wished this,--the words were different,--I made up my mind at last to act upon them, understanding it to be our Lord's will, and to follow that counsel so long as I should live. I had never before so acted with any one, though I had consulted many persons of great learning and holiness, and who watched over my soul with great care,--but neither had I received any such direction as that I should make no change; for as to my confessors, of some I understood that they would be profitable to me, and so also of these. 2. When I had resolved on this, I found myself in peace and comfort so great that I was amazed, and assured of our Lord's will; for I do not think that Satan could fill the soul with peace and comfort such as this: and so, whenever I think of it, I praise our Lord, and remember the words, "posuit fines tuos pacem," [2] and I wish I could wear myself out in the praises of God. 3. It must have been about a month after this my resolve was made, on the second day after Pentecost, when I was going to found the monastery in Seville, that we heard Mass in a hermitage in Ecija, and rested there during the hottest part of the day. Those who were with me remained in the hermitage while I was by myself in the sacristy belonging to it. I began to think of one great grace which I received of the Holy Ghost, on one of the vigils of His feast, [3] and a great desire arose within me of doing Him some most special service, and I found nothing that was not already done,--at least, resolved upon,--for all I do must be faulty; and I remembered that, though I had already made a vow of obedience, it might be made in greater perfection, and I had an impression it would be pleasing unto Him if I promised that which I was already resolved upon, to live under obedience to the Father-Master, Fr. Jerome. On the other hand, I seemed to be doing nothing, because I was already bent on doing it; on the other hand, it would be a very serious thing, considering that our interior state is not made known to the superiors who receive our vows, and that they change, and that, if one is not doing his work well, another comes in his place; and I believed I should have none of my liberty all my life long, either outwardly or inwardly, and this constrained me greatly to abstain from making the vow. This repugnance of the will made me ashamed, and I saw that, now I had something I could do for God, I was not doing it; it was a sad thing for my resolution to serve Him. The fact is, that the objection so pressed me, that I do not think I ever did anything in my life that was so hard--not even my profession--unless it be that of my leaving my father's house to become a nun. [4] The reason of this was that I had forgotten my affection for him, and his gifts for directing me; yea, rather, I was looking on it then as a strange thing, which has surprised me; feeling nothing but a great fear whether the vow would be for the service of God or not: and my natural self--which is fond of liberty--must have been doing its work, though for years now I have no pleasure in it. But it seemed to me a far other matter to give up that liberty by a vow, as in truth it is. After a protracted struggle, our Lord gave me great confidence; and I saw it was the better course, the more I felt about it: if I made this promise in honour of the Holy Ghost, He would be bound to give him light for the direction of my soul; and I remembered at the same time that our Lord had given him to me as my guide. Thereupon I fell upon my knees, and, to render this tribute of service to the Holy Ghost, made a promise to do whatever he should bid me do while I lived, provided nothing were required of me contrary to the law of God and the commands of superiors whom I am more bound to obey. I adverted to this, that the obligation did not extend to things of little importance,--as if I were to be importunate with him about anything, and he bade me cease, and I neglected his advice and repeated my request,--nor to things relating to my convenience. In a word, his commands were not to be about trifles, done without reflection; and I was not knowingly to conceal from him my faults and sins, or my interior state; and this, too, is more than we allow to superiors. In a word, I promised to regard him as in the place of God, outwardly and inwardly. I know not if it be so, but I seemed to have done a great thing in honour of the Holy Ghost--at least, it was all I could do, and very little it was in comparison with what I owe Him. 4. I give God thanks, who has created one capable of this work: I have the greatest confidence that His Majesty will bestow on him great graces; and I myself am so happy and joyous, that I seem to be in every way free from myself; and though I thought that my obedience would be a burden, I have attained to the greatest freedom. May our Lord be praised for ever! 1. See Foundations, ch. xxii. 2. Psalm cxlvii. 14: "He hath made thy borders peace." 3. Perhaps the Saint refers to what she has written in her Life, ch. xxxviii. §§ 11, 12. 4. Life, ch. iv. § 1. Relation VII. Made for Rodrigo Alvarez, S.J., in the Year 1575, According to Don Vicente de la Fuente; but in 1576, According to the Bollandists and F. Bouix. 1. This nun took the habit forty years ago, and from the first began to reflect on the mysteries of the Passion of Christ our Lord, and on her own sins, for some time every day, without thinking at all of anything supernatural, but only of created things, or of such subjects as suggested to her how soon the end of all things must come, discerning in creatures the greatness of God and His love for us. 2. This made her much more willing to serve Him: she was never under the influence of fear, and made no account of it, but had always a great desire to see God honoured, and His glory increased. To that end were all her prayers directed, without making any for herself; for she thought that it mattered little if she had to suffer in purgatory in exchange for the increase of His glory even in the slightest degree. 3. In this she spent about two-and-twenty years in great aridities, and never did it enter into her thoughts to desire anything else; for she regarded herself as one who, she thought, did not deserve even to think about God, except that His Majesty was very merciful to her in allowing her to remain in His presence, saying her prayers, reading also in good books. 4. It must be about eighteen years since she began to arrange about the first monastery of Barefooted Carmelites which she founded. It was in Avila, three or two years before,--I believe it is three,--she began to think that she occasionally heard interior locutions, and had visions and revelations interiorly. She saw with the eyes of the soul, for she never saw anything with her bodily eyes, nor heard anything with her bodily ears; twice, she thinks, she heard a voice, but she understood not what was said. It was a sort of making things present when she saw these things interiorly; they passed away like a meteor most frequently. The vision, however, remained so impressed on her mind, and produced such effects, that it was as if she saw those things with her bodily eyes, and more. 5. She was then by nature so very timid, that she would not dare to be alone even by day, at times. And as she could not escape from these visitations, though she tried with all her might, she went about in very great distress, afraid that it was a delusion of Satan, and began to consult spiritual men of the Society of Jesus about it, among whom were Father Araoz, who was Commissary of the Society, and who happened to go to that place, and Father Francis, who was Duke of Gandia,--him she consulted twice; [1] also a Provincial, now in Rome, called Gil Gonzalez, and him also who is now Provincial of Castille,--this latter, however, not so often,--Father Baltasar Alvarez who is now Rector in Salamanca; and he heard her confession for six years at this time; also the present Rector of Cuenca, Salazar by name; the Rector of Segovia, called Santander; the Rector of Burgos, whose name is Ripalda,--and he thought very ill of her when he heard of these things, till after he had conversed with her; the Doctor Paul Hernandez in Toledo, who was a Consultor of the Inquisition, him who was Rector in Salamanca when she talked to him; the Doctor Gutierrez, and other fathers, some of the Society, whom she knew to be spiritual men, these she sought out, if any were in those places where she went to found monasteries. 6. With the Father Fra Peter of Alcantara, who was a holy man of the Barefooted Friars of St. Francis, she had many communications, and he it was who insisted so much upon it that her spirit should be regarded as good. They were more than six years trying her spirit minutely, as it is already described at very great length, [2] as will be shown hereafter: and she herself in tears and deep affliction; for the more they tried her, the more she fell into raptures, and into trances very often,--not, however, deprived of her senses. 7. Many prayers were made, and many Masses were said, that our Lord would lead her by another way, [3] for her fear was very great when she was not in prayer; though in everything relating to the state of her soul she was very much better, and a great difference was visible, there was no vainglory, nor had she any temptation thereto, nor to pride; on the contrary, she was very much ashamed and confounded when she saw that people knew of her state, and except with her confessors or any one who would give her light, she never spoke of these things, and it was more painful to speak of them than if they had been grave sins; for it seemed to her that people must laugh at her, [4] and that these things were womanish imaginations, which she had always heard of with disgust. 8. About thirteen years ago, more or less, after the house of St. Joseph was founded, into which she had gone from the other monastery, came the present Bishop of Salamanca, Inquisitor, I think, of Toledo, previously of Seville, Soto by name. [5] She contrived to have a conference with him for her greater security, and told him everything. He replied, that there was nothing in all this that concerned his office, because everything that she saw and heard confirmed her the more in the Catholic faith, in which she always was, and is, firm, with most earnest desires for the honour of God and the good of souls, willing to suffer death many times for one of them. 9. He told her, when he saw how distressed she was, to give an account of it all, and of her whole life, without omitting anything, to the Master Avila, who was a man of great learning in the way of prayer, and to rest content with the answer he should give. She did so, and described her sins and her life. He wrote to her and comforted her, giving her great security. The account I gave was such that all those learned men who saw it--they were my confessors--said that it was very profitable for instruction in spiritual things; and they commanded her to make copies of it, and write another little book [6] for her daughters,--she was prioress,--wherein she might give them some instructions. 10. Notwithstanding all this, she was not without fears at times, for she thought that spiritual men also might be deceived like herself. She told her confessor that he might discuss these things with certain learned men, though they were not much given to prayer, for she had no other desire but that of knowing whether what she experienced was in conformity with the sacred writings or not. Now and then she took comfort in thinking that--though she herself, because of her sins, deserved to fall into delusions--our Lord would not suffer so many good men, anxious to give her light, to be led into error. 11. Having this in view, she began to communicate with fathers of the Order of the glorious St. Dominic, to which, before these things took place, she had been to confession--she does not say to them, but to the Order. [7] These are they with whom she afterwards had relations. The Father Fra Vicente Barron, at that time Consultor of the Holy Office, heard her confessions for eighteen months in Toledo, and he had done so very many years before these things began. He was a very learned man. He reassured her greatly, as did also the fathers of the Society spoken of before. All used to say, If she does not sin against God, and acknowledges her own misery, what has she to be afraid of? She confessed to the Father Fra Pedro Ibañez, who was reader in Avila; to the Father-Master Fra Dominic Bañes, who is now in Valladolid as rector of the college of St. Gregory, I confessed for six years, and whenever I had occasion to do so communicated with him by letter; also to the Master Chaves; to the Father-Master Fra Bartholomew of Medina, professor in Salamanca, of whom she knew that he thought ill of her; for she, having heard this, thought that he, better than any other, could tell her if she was deceived, because he had so little confidence in her. This was more than two years ago. She contrived to go to confession to him, and gave him a full account of everything while she remained there; and he saw what she had written, [8] for the purpose of attaining to a better understanding of the matter. He reassured her so much, and more than all the rest, and remained her very good friend. 12. She went to confession also to Fra Philip de Meneses, when she founded the monastery of Valladolid, for he was rector of the college of St. Gregory. He, having before that heard of her state, had gone to Avila, that he might speak to her,--it was an act of great charity,--being desirous of ascertaining whether she was deluded, so that he might enlighten her, and, if she was not, defend her when he heard her spoken against; and he was much satisfied. 13. She also conferred particularly with Salinas, Dominican Provincial, a man of great spirituality; with another licentiate named Lunar, who was prior of St. Thomas of Avila; and, in Segovia, with a reader, Fra Diego de Yangües. 14. Of these Dominicans some never failed to give themselves greatly to prayer, and perhaps all did. Some others also she consulted; for in so many years, and because of the fear she was in, she had opportunities of doing so, especially as she went about founding monasteries in so many places. Her spirit was tried enough, for everybody wished to be able to enlighten her, and thereby reassured her and themselves. She always, at all times, wished to submit herself to whatever they enjoined her, and she was therefore distressed when, as to these spiritual things, she could not obey them. Both her own prayer, and that of the nuns she has established, are always carefully directed towards the propagation of the faith; and it was for that purpose, and for the good of her Order, that she began her first monastery. 15. She used to say that, if any of these things tended to lead her against the Catholic faith and the law of God, she would not need to seek for learned men nor tests, because she would see at once that they came from Satan. She never undertook anything merely because it came to her in prayer; on the contrary, when her confessors bade her do the reverse, she did so without being in the least troubled thereat, and she always told them everything. For all that they told her that these things came from God, she never so thoroughly believed them that she could swear to it herself, though it did seem to her that they were spiritually safe, because of the effects thereof, and of the great graces which she at times received; but she always desired virtues more than anything else; and this it is that she has charged her nuns to desire, saying to them that the most humble and mortified will be the most spiritual. 16. All that is told and written she communicated to the Father-Master Fra Dominic Bañes, who is now in Valladolid, and who is the person with whom she has had, and has still, the most frequent communications. He sent her writings to the Holy Office in Madrid, so it is said. In all this she submits herself to the Catholic faith and the Roman Church. Nobody has found fault with them, because these things are not in the power of any man, and our Lord does not require what is impossible. 17. The reason why so much is known about her is that, as she was in fear about herself, and described her state to so many, these talked to one another on the subject and also the accident that happened to what she had written. [9] This has been to her a very grievous torment and cross, and has cost her many tears. She says that this distress is not the effect of humility, but of the causes already mentioned. Our Lord seems to have given permission [10] for this torture for if one spoke more harshly of her than others, by little and little he spoke more kindly of her. 18. She took the greatest pains not to submit the state of her soul to any one who she thought would believe that these things came from God, for she was instantly afraid that the devil would deceive them both. If she saw any one timid about these things, to him she laid bare her secrets with the greater joy; though also it gave her pain when, for the purpose of trying her, these things were treated with contempt, for she thought some were really from God, and she would not have people, even if they had good cause, condemn them so absolutely; neither would she have them believe that all were from God; and because she knew perfectly well that delusion was possible, therefore it was that she never thought herself altogether safe in a matter wherein there might be danger. 19. She used to strive with all her might never in any way to offend God, and was always obedient; and by these means she thought she might obtain her deliverance, by the help of God, even if Satan were the cause. 20. Ever since she became subject to these supernatural visitations, her spirit is always inclined to seek after that which is most perfect, and she had almost always a great desire to suffer; and in the persecutions she underwent, and they were many, she was comforted, and had a particular affection for her persecutors. She had a great desire to be poor and lonely, and to depart out of this land of exile in order to see God. Through these effects, and others like them, she began to find peace, thinking that a spirit which could leave her with these virtues could not be an evil one, and they who had the charge of her soul said so; but it was a peace that came from diminished weariness, not from the cessation of fear. 21. The spirit she is of never urged her to make any of these things known, but to be always obedient. [11] As it has been said already, [12] she never saw anything with her bodily eyes, but in a way so subtile and so intellectual that at first she sometimes thought that all was the effect of imagination; at other times she could not think so. These things were not continual, but occurred for the most part when she was in some trouble: as on one occasion, when for some days she had to bear unendurable interior pains, and a restlessness of soul arising out of the fear that she was deluded by Satan, as it is described at length in the account she has given of it, [13] and where her sins, for they have been so public, are mentioned with the rest: for the fear she was in made her forget her own good name. 22. Being thus in distress such as cannot be described, at the mere hearing interiorly these words, [14] "It is I, be not afraid," her soul became so calm, courageous, and confident, that she could not understand whence so great a blessing had come; for her confessor had not been able--and many learned men, with many words, had not been able--to give her that peace and rest which this one word had given her. And thus, at other times, some vision gave her strength, for without that she could not have borne such great trials and contradictions, together with infirmities without number, and which she still has to bear, though they are not so many,--for she is never free from some suffering or other, more or less intense. Her ordinary state is constant pain, with many other infirmities, though since she became a nun they are more troublesome, if she is doing anything in the service of our Lord. And the mercies He shows her pass quickly out of memory, though she often dwells on those mercies,--but she is not able to dwell so long upon these as upon her sins; these are always a torment to her, most commonly as filth smelling foully. 23. That her sins are so many, and her service of God so scanty, must be the reason why she is not tempted to vainglory. There never was anything in any of these spiritual visitations that was not wholly pure and clean, nor does she think it can be otherwise if the spirit be good and the visitations supernatural, for she utterly neglects the body and never thinks of it, being wholly intent upon God. 24. She is also living in great fear about sinning against God, and doing His will in all things; this is her continual prayer. And she is, she thinks, so determined never to swerve from this, that there is nothing her confessors might enjoin her, which she considers to be for the greater honour of our Lord, that she would not undertake and perform, by the help of our Lord. And confident that His Majesty helps those who have resolved to advance His service and glory, she thinks no more of herself and of her own progress, in comparison with that, than if she did not exist, so far as she knows herself, and her confessors think so too. 25. All that is written in this paper is the simple truth, and they, and all others who have had anything to do with her for these twenty years, can justify it. Most frequently her spirit urged her to praise God, and she wished that all the world gave itself up to that, even though it should cost her exceedingly. Hence the desire she has for the good of souls; and from considering how vile are the things of this world, and how precious are interior things, with which nothing can be compared, she has attained to a contempt of the world. 26. As for the vision about which you, my father, wish to know something, it is of this kind: she sees nothing either outwardly or inwardly, for the vision is not imaginary: but, without seeing anything, she understands what it is, and where it is, more clearly than if she saw it, only nothing in particular presents itself to her. She is like a person who feels that another is close beside her; but because she is in the dark she sees him not, yet is certain that he is there present. Still, this comparison is not exact; for he who is in the dark, in some way or other, through hearing a noise or having seen that person before, knows he is there, or knew it before; but here there is nothing of the kind, for without a word, inward or outward, the soul clearly perceives who it is, where he is, and occasionally what he means. [15] Why, or how, she perceives it, she knoweth not; but so it is; and while it lasts, she cannot help being aware of it. And when it is over,--though she may wish ever so much to retain the image thereof,--she cannot do it, for it is then clear to her that it would be, in that case, an act of the imagination, not the vision itself,--that is not in her power; and so it is with the supernatural things. And it is from this it comes to pass that he in whom God works these graces despises himself, and becomes more humble than he was ever before, for he sees that this is a gift of God, and that he can neither add to it nor take from it. The love and the desire become greater of serving our Lord, who is so mighty that He can do that which is more than our imagination can conceive here, as there are things which men, however learned they may be, can never know. Blessed for ever and ever be He who bestows this! Amen. 1. See Life, ch. xxiv. § 4. 2. See Life, ch. xxv. § 18. 3. See Life, ch. xxv. § 20, and ch. xxvii. § 1. 4. See Life, ch. xxvi. § 5. 5. Don Francisco de Soto y Salazar was a native of Bonilli de la Sierra, and Vicar-General of the Bishops of Astorga and Avila, and Canon of Avila; Inquisitor of Cordova, Seville, and Toledo; Bishop, successively, of Albarracin, Segorve, and Salamanca. He died at Merida, in 1576, poisoned, it was suspected, by the sect of the Illuminati, who were alarmed at his faithful zeal and holy life (Palafox, note to letter 19, vol. i. ed. Doblado). "She went to the Inquisitor, Don Francisco Soto de Salazar--he was afterwards Bishop of Salamanca--and said to him: 'My lord, I am subject to certain extraordinary processes in prayer, such as ecstasies, raptures, and revelations, and do not wish to be deluded or deceived by Satan, or to do anything that is not absolutely safe. I give myself up to the Inquisition to try me, and examine my ways of going on, submitting myself to its orders.' The Inquisitor replied: 'Señora, the business of the Inquisition is not to try the spirit, nor to examine ways of prayer, but to correct heretics. Do you, then, commit your experience to writing, in all simplicity and truth, and send it to the Father-Master Avila, who is a man of great spirituality and learning, and extremely conversant with matters of prayer; and when you shall have his answer, you may be sure there is nothing to be afraid of'" (Jerome Gratian, Lucidario, cap. iii.). 6. This book is the Way of Perfection, written by direction of F. Bañes. 7. The Saint had such great affection for the Order of St. Dominic, that she used to say of herself, "Yo soy la Dominica in passione," meaning thereby that she was in her heart a Dominicaness, and a child of the Order (Palafox, note to letter 16, vol. i. ed. Doblado). 8. When this father had read the Life, he had it copied, with the assent of F. Gratian, and gave the copy thus made to the Duchess of Alba (De la Fuente). 9. See Foundations, ch. xvii. § 12, note. 10. Life, ch. xxiii. § 15. 11. Life, ch. xxvi. § 5. 12. § 4. 13. Life, ch. xxv. § 19. 14. Life, ch. xxv. § 22. 15. See Life, ch. xxvii. § 5. Relation VIII. Addressed to F. Rodrigo Alvarez. 1. These interior things of the spirit are so difficult to describe, and, still more, in such a way as to be understood,--the more so as they pass quickly away,--that, if obedience did not help me, it would be a chance if I succeeded, especially in such difficult things. I implore you, my father, to take for granted that it is not in my mind to think this to be correct, for it may well be that I do not understand the matter; but what I can assure you of is this, that I will speak of nothing I have not had experience of at times, and, indeed, often. 2. I think it will please you, my father, if I begin by discussing that which is at the root of supernatural things; for that which relates to devotion, tenderness, tears, and meditations, which is in our power here to acquire by the help of our Lord, is understood. 3. The first prayer of which I was conscious,--in my opinion, supernatural,--so I call that which no skill or effort of ours, however much we labour, can attain to, though we should prepare ourselves for it, and that preparation must be of great service,--is a certain interior recollection [1] of which the soul is sensible; the soul seems to have other senses within itself then, which bear some likeness to the exterior senses it possesses; and thus the soul, withdrawing into itself, seeks to go away from the tumult of its outward senses, and accordingly it drags them away with itself; for it closes the eyes on purpose that it may neither see, nor hear, nor understand anything but that whereon the soul is then intent, which is to be able to converse with God alone. In this prayer there is no suspension of the faculties and powers of the soul; it retains the full use of them; but the use of them is retained that they may be occupied with God. This will be easily understood by him whom our Lord shall have raised to this state; but by him whom He has not, not; at least, such a one will have need of many words and illustrations. 4. Out of this recollection grow a certain quietude and inward peace most full of comfort; for the soul is in such a state that it does not seem to it that it wants anything; for even speaking wearies it,--I mean by this, vocal prayer and meditation; it would do nothing but love. This lasts some time, and even a long time. 5. Out of this prayer comes usually what is called a sleep of the faculties; but they are not so absorbed nor so suspended as that it can be called a trance; nor is it altogether union. 6. Sometimes, and even often, the soul is aware that the will alone is in union; and this it sees very clearly,--that is, it seems so to it. The will is wholly intent upon God, and the soul sees that it has no power to rest on, or do, anything else; and at the same time the two other faculties are at liberty to attend to other matters of the service of God,--in a word, Martha and Mary are together. [2] I asked Father Francis [3] if this was a delusion, for it made me stupid; and his reply was, that it often happened. 7. When all the faculties of the soul are in union, it is a very different state of things; for they can then do nothing whatever, because the understanding is as it were surprised. The will loves more than the understanding knows; but the understanding does not know that the will loves, nor what it is doing, so as to be able in any way to speak of it. As to the memory, the soul, I think, has none then, nor any power of thinking, nor are the senses awake, but rather as lost, so that the soul may be the more occupied with the object of its fruition: so it seems to me. They are lost but for a brief interval; it passes quickly away. By the wealth of humility, and other virtues and desires, left in the soul after this may be learnt how great the blessing is that flows from this grace, but it cannot be told what it is; for, though the soul applies itself to the understanding of it, it can neither understand nor explain it. This, if it be real, is, in my opinion, the greatest grace wrought by our Lord on this spiritual road,--at least, it is one of the greatest. 8. Raptures and trance, in my opinion, are all one, only I am in the habit of using the word trance instead of rapture, because the latter word frightens people; and, indeed, the union of which I am speaking may also be called a trance. The difference between union and trance is this, that the latter lasts longer and is more visible outwardly, because the breathing gradually diminishes, so that it becomes impossible to speak or to open the eyes; and though this very thing occurs when the soul is in union, there is more violence in a trance for the natural warmth vanishes, I know not how, when the rapture is deep; and in all these kinds of prayer there is more or less of this. When it is deep, as I was saying, the hands become cold, and sometimes stiff and straight as pieces of wood; as to the body, if the rapture comes on when it is standing or kneeling, it remains so; [4] and the soul is so full of the joy of that which our Lord is setting before it, that it seems to forget to animate the body, and abandons it. If the rapture lasts, the nerves are made to feel it. 9. It seems to me that our Lord will have the soul know more of that, the fruition of which it has, in a trance than in union, and accordingly in a rapture the soul receives most commonly certain revelations of His Majesty, and the effects thereof on the soul are great,--a forgetfulness of self, through the longing it has that God our Lord, who is so high, may be known and praised. In my opinion, if the rapture be from God, the soul cannot fail to obtain a deep conviction of its own helplessness, and of its wretchedness and ingratitude, in that it has not served Him who, of His own goodness only, bestows upon it graces so great; for the feeling and the sweetness are so high above all things that may be compared therewith that, if the recollection of them did not pass away, all the satisfactions of earth would be always loathsome to it; and hence comes the contempt for all the things of the world. 10. The difference between trance and transport [5] is this,--in a trance the soul gradually dies to outward things, losing the senses and living unto God. A transport comes on by one sole act of His Majesty, wrought in the innermost part of the soul with such swiftness that it is as if the higher part thereof were carried away, and the soul leaving the body. Accordingly it requires courage at first to throw itself into the arms of our Lord, that He may take it whithersoever He will; for, until His Majesty establishes it in peace there whither He is pleased to take it--by take it I mean the admitting of it to the knowledge of deep things--it certainly requires in the beginning to be firmly resolved to die for Him, because the poor soul does not know what this means--that is, at first. The virtues, as it seems to me, remain stronger after this, for there is a growth in detachment, and the power of God, who is so mighty, is the more known, so that the soul loves and fears Him. For so it is, He carries away the soul, no longer in our power, as the true Lord thereof, which is filled with a deep sorrow for having offended Him, and astonishment that it ever dared to offend a Majesty so great, with an exceedingly earnest desire that none may henceforth offend Him, and that all may praise Him. This, I think, must be the source of those very fervent desires for the salvation of souls, and for some share therein, and for the due praising of God. 11. The flight of the spirit--I know not how to call it--is a rising upwards from the very depths of the soul. I remember only this comparison, and I made use of it before, as you know, my father, in that writing where these and other ways of prayer are explained at length, [6] and such is my memory that I forget things at once. It seems to me that soul and spirit are one and the same thing; but only as a fire, if it is great and ready for burning; so, like fire burning rapidly, the soul, in that preparation of itself which is the work of God, sends up a flame,--the flame ascends on high, but the fire thereof is the same as that below, nor does the flame cease to be fire because it ascends: so here, in the soul, something so subtile and so swift, seems to issue from it, that ascends to the higher part, and goes thither whither our Lord wills. I cannot go further with the explanation; it seems a flight, and I know of nothing else wherewith to compare it: I know that it cannot be mistaken, for it is most evident when it occurs, and that it cannot be hindered. 12. This little bird of the spirit seems to have escaped out of this wretchedness of the flesh, out of the prison of this body, and now, disentangled therefrom, is able to be the more intent on that which our Lord is giving it. The flight of the spirit is something so fine, of such inestimable worth, as the soul perceives it, that all delusion therein seems impossible, or anything of the kind, when it occurs. It was afterwards that fear arose, because she who received this grace was so wicked; for she saw what good reasons she had to be afraid of everything, though in her innermost soul there remained an assurance and a confidence wherein she was able to live, but not enough to make her cease from the anxiety she was in not to be deceived. 13. By impetus I mean that desire which at times rushes into the soul, without being preceded by prayer, and this is most frequently the case; it is a sudden remembering that the soul is away from God, or of a word it has heard to that effect. This remembering is occasionally so strong and vehement that the soul in a moment becomes as if the reason were gone, just like a person who suddenly hears most painful tidings of which he knew not before, or is surprised; such a one seems deprived of the power of collecting his thoughts for his own comfort, and is as one lost. So is it in this state, except that the suffering arises from this, that there abides in the soul a conviction that it would be well worth dying in it. It seems that whatever the soul then perceives does but increase its suffering, and that our Lord will have its whole being find no comfort in anything, nor remember that it is His will that it should live: the soul seems to itself to be in great and indescribable loneliness, and abandoned of all, because the world, and all that is in it, gives it pain; and because it finds no companionship in any created thing, the soul seeks its Creator alone, and this it sees to be impossible unless it dies; and as it must not kill itself, it is dying to die, and there is really a risk of death, and it sees itself hanging between heaven and earth, not knowing what to do with itself. And from time to time God gives it a certain knowledge of Himself, that it may see what it loses, in a way so strange that no explanation of it is possible; and there is no pain in the world--at least I have felt none--that is equal or like unto this, for if it lasts but half an hour the whole body is out of joint, and the bones so racked, that I am not able to write with my hands: the pains I endure are most grievous. [7] 14. But nothing of all this is felt till the impetus shall have passed away. He to whom it comes has enough to do in enduring that which is going on within him, nor do I believe that he would feel if he were grievously tortured: he is in possession of all his senses, can speak, and even observe; walk about he cannot,--the great blow of that love throws him down to the ground. If we were to die to have this, it would be of no use, for it cannot be except when God sends it. It leaves great effects and blessings in the soul. Some learned men say that it is this, others that it is that, but no one condemns it. The Father-Master d'Avila wrote to me and said it was good, and so say all. The soul clearly understands that it is a great grace from our Lord; were it to occur more frequently, life would not last long. 15. The ordinary impetus is, that this desire of serving God comes on with a certain tenderness, accompanied with tears, out of a longing to depart from this land of exile; but as the soul retains its freedom, wherein it reflects that its living on is according to our Lord's will, it takes comfort in that thought, and offers its life to Him, beseeching Him that it may last only for His glory. This done, it bears all. 16. Another prayer very common is a certain kind of wounding; [8] for it really seems to the soul as if an arrow were thrust through the heart, or through itself. Thus it causes great suffering, which makes the soul complain; but the suffering is so sweet, that it wishes it never would end. The suffering is not one of sense, neither is the wound physical; it is in the interior of the soul, without any appearance of bodily pain; but as I cannot explain it except by comparing it with other pains, I make use of these clumsy expressions,--for such they are when applied to this suffering. I cannot, however, explain it in any other way. It is, therefore, neither to be written of nor spoken of, because it is impossible for any one to understand it who has not had experience of it,--I mean, how far the pain can go; for the pains of the spirit are very different from those of earth. I gather, therefore, from this, that the souls in hell and purgatory suffer more than we can imagine, by considering these pains of the body. 17. At other times, this wound of love seems to issue from the inmost depth of the soul; great are the effects of it; and when our Lord does not inflict it, there is no help for it, whatever we may do to obtain it; nor can it be avoided when it is His pleasure to inflict it. The effects of it are those longings after God, so quick and so fine that they cannot be described and when the soul sees itself hindered and kept back from entering, as it desires, on the fruition of God, it conceives a great loathing for the body, on which it looks as a thick wall which hinders it from that fruition which it then seems to have entered upon within itself, and unhindered by the body. It then comprehends the great evil that has befallen us through the sin of Adam in robbing us of this liberty. [9] 18. This prayer I had before the raptures and the great impetuosities I have been speaking of. I forgot to say that these great impetuosities scarcely ever leave me, except through a trance or great sweetness in our Lord, whereby He comforts the soul, and gives it courage to live on for His sake. 19. All this that I speak of cannot be the effect of the imagination; and I have some reasons for saying this, but it would be wearisome to enter on them: whether it be good or not is known to our Lord. The effects thereof, and how it profits the soul, pass all comprehension, as it seems to me. 20. I see clearly that the Persons are distinct, as I saw it yesterday when you, my father, were talking to the Father Provincial; only I saw nothing, and heard nothing, as, my father, I have already told you. But there is a strange certainty about it, though the eyes of the soul see nothing; and when the presence is withdrawn, that withdrawal is felt. How it is, I know not; but I do know very well that it is not an imagination, because I cannot reproduce the vision when it is over, even if I were to perish in the effort; but I have tried to do so. So is it with all that I have spoken of here, so far as I can see; for, as I have been in this state for so many years, I have been able to observe, so that I can say so with this confidence. The truth is,--and you, my father, should attend to this,--that, as to the Person who always speaks, I can certainly say which of Them He seems to me to be; of the others I cannot say so much. One of Them I know well has never spoken. I never knew why, nor do I busy myself in asking more of God than He is pleased to give, because in that case, I believe, I should be deluded by Satan, at once; nor will I ask now, because of the fear I am in. 21. I think the First spoke to me at times; but as I do not remember that very well now, nor what it was that He spoke, I will not venture to say so. It is all written,--you, my father, know where,--and more at large than it is here; I know not whether in the same words or not. [10] Though the Persons are distinct in a strange way, the soul knows One only God. I do not remember that our Lord ever seemed to speak to me but in His Human Nature; and--I say it again--I can assure you that this is no imagination. 22. What, my father, you say about the water, I know not; nor have I heard where the earthly paradise is. I have already said that I cannot but listen to what our Lord tells me; I hear it because I cannot help myself; but, as for asking His Majesty to reveal anything to me, that is what I have never done. In that case, I should immediately think I was imagining things, and that I must be in a delusion of Satan. God be praised, I have never been curious about things, and I do not care to know more than I do. [11] What I have learnt, without seeking to learn, as I have just said, has been a great trouble to me, though it has been the means, I believe, which our Lord made use of to save me, seeing that I was so wicked; good people do not need so much to make them serve His Majesty. 23. I remember another way of prayer which I had before the one I mentioned first,--namely, a presence of God, which is not a vision at all. It seems that any one, if he recommends himself to His Majesty, even if he only prays vocally, finds Him; every one, at all times, can do this, if we except seasons of aridity. May He grant I may not by my own fault lose mercies so great, and may He have compassion on me! 1. Inner Fortress, iv. ch. iii. 2. See Life, ch. xvii. § 5. 3. Compare Life, ch. xxiv. § 4. 4. See Life, ch. xx. § 23. 5. "Arrobamiento y arrebatamiento." 6. See Life, chs. xx. and xxi. 7. Life, ch. xx. § 16; Inner Fortress, vi. c. xi. 8. See Life, ch. xxix. § 17. 9. See Life, ch. xvii. § 9. 10. See Relation, iii. § 6. 11. See St. John of the Cross, Ascent of Mount Carmel, bk. ii. ch. xxii. Relation IX. Of Certain Spiritual Graces She Received in Toledo and Avila in the Years 1576 and 1577. 1. I had begun to go to confession to a certain person [1] in the city wherein I am at present staying, when he, though he had much good will towards me, and always has had since he took upon himself the charge of my soul, ceased to come here; and one night, when I was in prayer, and thinking how he failed me, I understood that God kept him from coming because it was expedient for me to treat of the affairs of my soul with a certain person on the spot. [2] I was distressed because I had to form new relations--it might be he would not understand me, and would disturb me--and because I had a great affection for him who did me this charity, though I was always spiritually content when I saw or heard the latter preach; also, I thought it would not do because of his many occupations. Our Lord said to me: "I will cause him to hear and understand thee. Make thyself known unto him; it will be some relief to thee in thy troubles." The latter part was addressed to me, I think, because I was then so worn out by the absence of God. His Majesty also said that He saw very well the trouble I was in; but it could not be otherwise while I lived in this land of exile: all was for my good; and he comforted me greatly. So it has been: he comforts me, and seeks opportunities to do so; he has understood me, and given me great relief; he is a most learned and holy man. 2. One day,--it was the Feast of the Presentation,--I was praying earnestly to God for a certain person, and thinking that after all the possession of property and of freedom was unfitting for that high sanctity which I wished him to attain to; I reflected on his weak health, and on the spiritual health which he communicated to souls; and I heard these words: "He serves Me greatly; but the great thing is to follow Me stripped of everything, as I was on the cross. Tell him to trust in Me." These last words were said because I thought he could not, with his weak health, attain to such perfection. 3. Once, when I was thinking of the pain it was to me to eat meat and do no penance, I understood that there was at times more of self-love in that feeling than of a desire for penance. 4. Once, when I was in great distress because of my offences against God, He said to me: "All thy sins in My sight are as if they were not. For the future, be strong; for thy troubles are not over." 5. One day, in prayer, I felt my soul in God in such a way that it seemed to me as if the world did not exist, I was so absorbed in Him. He made me then understand that verse of the Magnificat, "Et exultavit spiritus meus," so that I can never forget it. 6. Once, when I was thinking how people sought to destroy this monastery of the Barefooted Carmelites, and that they purposed, perhaps, to bring about the destruction of them all by degrees, I heard: "They do purpose it; nevertheless, they will never see it done, but very much the reverse." 7. Once, in deep recollection, I was praying to God for Eliseus; [3] I heard this: "He is My true son; I will never fail him," or to that effect; but I am not sure of the latter words. 8. Having one day conversed with a person who had given up much for God, and calling to mind that I had given up nothing for Him, and had never served Him in anything, as I was bound to do, and then considering the many graces He had wrought in my soul, I began to be exceedingly weary; and our Lord said to me: "Thou knowest of the betrothal between thee and Myself, and therefore all I have is thine; and so I give thee all the labours and sorrows I endured, and thou canst therefore ask of My Father as if they were thine." Though I have heard that we are partakers therein, [4] now it was in a way so different that it seemed as if I had become possessed of a great principality; for the affection with which He wrought this grace cannot be described. The Father seemed to ratify the gift; and from that time forth I look at our Lord's Passion in a very different light, as on something that belongs to me; and that gives me great comfort. [5] 9. On the Feast of the Magdalene, when thinking of the great love I am bound to have for our Lord, according to the words He spoke to, me in reference to this Saint, and having great desires to imitate her, our Lord was very gracious unto me, and said, I was to be henceforward strong; for I had to serve Him more than I had hitherto done. [6] He filled me with a desire not to die so soon, that I might have the time to occupy myself therein; and I remained with a great resolution to suffer. 10. On one occasion, I understood how our Lord was in all things, and how He was in the soul; and the illustration of a sponge filled with water was suggested to me. 11. When my brothers came,--and I owe so much to one of them, [7]--I remained in conversation with him concerning his soul and his affairs, which wearied and distressed me; and as I was offering this up to our Lord, and thinking that I did it all because I was under obligations to him, I remembered that by our Constitutions [8] we are commanded to separate ourselves from our kindred, and I was set thinking whether I was under any obligation, our Lord said to me: "No, My daughter; the regulations of the Order must be only in conformity with My law." The truth is, that the end of the Constitutions is, that we are not to be attached to our kindred; and to converse with them, as it seems to me, is rather wearisome, and it is painful to have anything to do with them. 12. After Communion, on St. Augustine's Day, I understood, and, as it were, saw,--I cannot tell how, unless it was by an intellectual vision which passed rapidly away,--how the Three Persons of the most Holy Trinity, whom I have always imprinted in my soul, are One. This was revealed in a representation so strange, and in a light so clear, that the impression made upon me was very different from that which I have by faith. From that time forth I have never been able to think of One of the Three Divine Persons without thinking of the Three; so that to-day, when I was considering how, the Three being One, the Son alone took our flesh upon Him, our Lord showed me how, though They are One, They are also distinct. These are marvels which make the soul desire anew to be rid of the hindrances which the body interposes between it and the fruition of them. Though this passes away in a moment, there remains a gain to the soul incomparably greater than any it might have made by meditation during many years; and all without knowing how it happens. 13. I have a special joy on the Feast of our Lady's Nativity. When this day was come, I thought it would be well to renew our vows; and thereupon I saw our Lady, by an illuminative vision; and it seemed as if we made them before her and that they were pleasing unto her. I had this vision constantly for some days, and our Lady was by me on my left hand. One day, after Communion, it seemed to me that my soul was really one with the most Holy Body of our Lord, then present before me; and that wrought a great work and blessing in me. 14. I was once thinking whether I was to be sent to reform a certain monastery; [9] and, distressed at it, I heard: "What art thou afraid of? What canst thou lose?--only thy life, which thou hast so often offered to Me. I will help thee." This was in prayer, which was of such a nature as to ease my soul exceedingly. 15. Once, having a desire to render some service to our Lord, I considered that I could serve Him but poorly, and said to myself: "Why, O Lord, dost Thou desire my works?" And He answered: "To see thy good will, My child." 16. Once our Lord gave me light in a matter that I was very glad to understand, and I immediately forgot it, so that I was never able to call it again to mind; and so, when I was trying to remember it, I heard: "Thou knowest now that I speak to thee from time to time. Do not omit to write down what I say; for, though it may not profit thee, it may be that it will profit others." As I was thinking whether I, for my sins, had to be of use to others, and be lost myself, He said to me: "Have no fear." 17. I was once recollected in that companionship which I ever have in my soul, and it seemed to me that God was present therein in such a way that I remembered how St. Peter said: "Thou art Christ, the Son of the living God;" [10] for the living God was in my soul. This is not like other visions, for it overpowers faith; so that it is impossible to doubt of the indwelling of the Trinity in our souls, by presence, power, and essence. To know this truth is of the very highest gain; and as I stood amazed to see His Majesty in a thing so vile as my soul, I heard: "It is not vile, My child, for it is made in My image." [11] I also learnt something of the reason why God delights in souls more than in any other creatures: it is so subtile that, though the understanding quickly comprehended it, I cannot tell it. 18. When I was in such distress, because of the troubles of our father, [12] that I had no rest, and after Communion one day was making most earnestly my petition to our Lord that, as He had given him to me, I might not lose him, He said to me: "Have no fear." 19. Once, with that presence of the Three Persons which I have in my soul, I was in light so clear that no doubt of the presence of the true and living God was possible; and I then came to the knowledge of things which afterwards I could not speak of. One of these things was, how the person of the Son only took human flesh. I cannot, as I have just said, explain it at all; for some of these things were wrought in the secret recesses of the soul, and the understanding seems to grasp them only as one who is in his sleep, or half awake, thinks he comprehends what is told him. I was thinking how hard it was to remain alive, seeing that it was living on that robbed us of that marvellous companionship; and so I said to myself: "O Lord, show me some way whereby I may bear this life!" He said unto me: "Think, my child, when life is over, thou canst not serve Me as thou art serving Me now, and eat for Me, and sleep for Me. Whatsoever thou doest, let it be done for Me as if thou wert no longer living, but I; for that is what St. Paul said." [13] 20. Once, after Communion, I saw how His Father within our soul accepts the most Holy Body of Christ. I have understood and seen how the Divine Persons are there, and how pleasing is this offering of His Son, because He has His joy and delight in Him, so to speak, here on earth; for it is not the Humanity only that is with us in our, souls, but the Divinity as well, and thus is it so pleasing and acceptable unto Him, and gives us graces so great. I understood also that He accepts the sacrifice, though the priest be in sin; but then the grace of it is not communicated to his soul as it is to their souls who are in a state of grace: not that the inflowings of grace, which proceed from this Communion wherein the Father accepts the sacrifice, cease to flow in their strength, but because of his fault who has to receive them; as it is not the fault of the sun that it does not illumine a lump of pitch, when its rays strike it as it illumines a globe of crystal. If I could now describe it, I should be better understood; it is a great matter to know this, because there are grand secrets within us when we are at Communion. It is sad that these bodies of ours do not allow us to have the fruition thereof. 21. During the Octave of All Saints, [14] I had two or three days of exceeding anguish, the result of my remembrance of my great sins, and I was also in great dread of persecutions, which had no foundation except that great accusations were brought against me, and all my resolutions to suffer anything for God failed me: though I sought to encourage myself, and made corresponding acts, and saw that all would be a great pain for me, it was to little purpose, for the fear never left me. It was a sharp warfare. I came across a letter, in which my good father [15] had written that St. Paul said that our God does not suffer us to be tempted beyond our power to bear. [16] This was a very great relief to me, but was not enough; yea, rather, on the next day I was in great distress at his absence, for I had no one to go to in this trouble, for I seemed to be living in great loneliness. And it added to my grief to see that I now find no one but he who can comfort me, and he must be more than ever away, which is a very sore trouble. 22. The next night after this, reading in a book, I found another saying of St. Paul, with which I began to be comforted; and being slightly recollected, I remained thinking how I had our Lord before present within me, so that I truly saw Him to be the living God. While thinking on this He spoke to me, and I saw Him in my inmost being, as it were beside my heart, in an intellectual vision; His words were: "I am here, only I will have thee see how little thou canst do without Me." I was on the instant reassured, and my fears left me; and while at Matins that very night our Lord Himself, in an intellectual vision so clear as to seem almost imaginary, laid Himself in my arms, as He is painted in the pictures of our Lady of Anguish. [17] The vision made me very much afraid, for it was so clear, and so close to me, that it made me think whether it was an illusion or not. He said to me, "Be not afraid of it, for the union of My Father with thy soul is incomparably closer than this." The vision has remained with me till now. What I have said of our Lord continued more than a month: now it has left me. 23. I was one night in great distress, because it was then a long time since I had heard anything of my father; [18] and, moreover, he was not well the last time he wrote to me. However, my distress was not so great as that I felt before, for I had hopes, and distress like that I never was in since; but still my anxiety hindered my prayer. He appeared to me on the instant; it could not have been the effect of imagination, for I saw a light within me, and himself coming by the way joyous, with a face all fair. It must have been the light I saw that made his face fair, for all the saints in heaven seem so; and I considered whether it be the light and splendour proceeding from our Lord that render them thus fair. I heard this: "Tell him to begin at once without fear, for the victory is his." 24. One day, after he came, when I was at night giving thanks to our Lord for the many mercies He had given unto me, He said to me: "O my child, what canst thou ask that I have not done?" 25. Our Lord said to me one day, in the monastery of Veas, that I was to present my petition to Him, for I was His bride. He promised to grant whatever I might ask of Him, and, as a pledge, gave me a very beautiful ring, with a stone set in it like an amethyst, but of a brilliancy very unlike, which He put on my finger. I write this to my own confusion, considering the goodness of God, and my wretched life; for I have deserved hell. Ah! my daughters, pray to God for me, and be devout to St. Joseph, who can do much. This folly I write . . . folly I write. . . . 26. On the eve of St. Laurence, at Communion, I was so distracted and dissipated in mind, that I had no power over it, and began to envy those who dwell in desert places; thinking that, as they see and hear nothing, they are exempt from distractions. I heard this: "Thou art greatly deceived, My daughter; on the contrary, the temptations of Satan are more violent there. Have patience while life lasts, it cannot be helped." While dwelling on this, I became suddenly recollected, and I saw a great light within me, so that I thought I was in another world, and my spirit found itself interiorly in a forest and in a garden of delights, which made me remember those words of the Canticle: [19] "Veniat dilectus meus in hortum suum." I saw my Eliseus [20] there, not at all swarthy, but in strange beauty: around his head was a garland of precious stones; a multitude of damsels went before him with palms in their hands, all singing hymns of praise unto God. I did nothing but open my eyes, to see whether I could not distract myself from the vision, but that failed to divert my attention; and I thought there was music also,--the singing of birds and of angels,--which filled my soul with joy, though I did not hear any. My soul was in joy, and did not consider that there was nobody else there. I heard these words: "He has merited to be among you, and all this rejoicing which thou beholdest will take place on the day he shall set aside for the honour of My Mother; [21] and do thou make haste, if thou wouldst reach the place where he is." This vision lasted more than an hour and a half. In this respect--differently from my other visions--I could not turn away from it, and it filled me with delight. The effect of the vision was a great affection for Eliseus, and a more frequent thinking of him in that beauty. I have had a fear of its being a temptation, for work of the imagination it could not possibly be. [22] 27. The day after the presentation of the Brief, [23] as I was in the most eager expectation, which utterly disturbed me, so that I could not even pray,--for I had been told that our father was in great straits because they would not let him come away, and that there was a great tumult,--I heard these words: "O woman of little faith, be quiet; everything is going on perfectly well." It was the Feast of the Presentation of our Lady, in the year 1575. I resolved within myself, if our Lady obtained from her Son that we might see ourselves and our father free of these friars, to ask him to order the solemn celebration of that feast every year in our monasteries of the Barefooted Carmelites. When I made this resolution, I did not remember what I had heard in a former vision, that he would establish this solemnity. Now, in reading again this little paper, I think this must be the feast referred to. [24] 1. F. Yepes, then prior of St. Jerome's, Toledo (De la Fuente). 2. Don Alonzo Velasquez, canon of Toledo, to whom Relation xi. is addressed. The Saint speaks of this in a letter to Fra Gratian in 1576. The letter is numbered 82 in the edition of Don Vicente, and 23 in the fourth volume of the edition of Doblado. 3. Fra Jerome Gratian (De la Fuente). 4. 1 St. Peter iv. 13: "Communicantes Christi passionibus, gaudete." 5. This took place in 1575, when she was going to found her monastery in Seville (Ribera, l. iv. c. v. n. 110). 6. See § 4, above. 7. This was in 1575, when the Saint was founding the monastery of Seville; and the brother was Don Lorenzo, returned from the Indies, and who now placed himself under the direction of his sister (De la Fuente). 8. In the Chapter "De la Clausura," § 16: "De tratar con deudos se desvien lo mas que pudieren." 9. The monastery of Paterna, of the unreformed Carmelites. This was in 1576 (De la Fuente). 10. St. Matt. xvi. 16: "Tu es Christus, Filius Dei vivi." 11. Gen. i. 26: "Ad imaginem et similitudinem Nostram." 12. Fra Jerome Gratian. This took place during the persecution that fell on the reformed Carmelites at the end of the year 1575, and during the following year. See the last paragraph of this Relation (De la Fuente; see, also, Relation vi. § 1). 13. Galat. ii. 20: "Vivo autem, jam non ego: vivit vero in me Christus." 14. A.D. 1577 (De la Fuente). 15. Jerome Gratian (id.). 16. 1 Cor. x. 13: "Fidelis autem Deus est qui non patietur vos tentari supra id quod potestis." 17. Don Vicente says, that here is a proof--if any were wanting--that the Saint wrote this after her sojourn in Seville; because in Avila and in Castile and Aragon the expression is, "our Lady of Dolors;" while in Andalucia it is our Lady of Anguish--"Nuestra Señora de las Angustias." 18. Fra Jerome Gratian. 19. Cant. v. 1. 20. This was the name given to Fra Jerome Gratian, when the Saint was driven, by the persecution raised against her, to distinguish her friends by other designations than those by which they were usually known: this fragment cannot have been written before the year 1578 (De la Fuente). 21. See the last section. 22. Don Vicente published §§ 25 and 26 as fragments separately (vol. i. pp. 524-526); but, as they seem to form a part of the series of events spoken of in this Relation, they have been placed here. 23. Fra Jerome Gratian exhibited the brief which made him Visitor-Apostolic to the unreformed Carmelites, who were very angry thereat, and rude in their vexation. 24. See § 26. Relation X. Of a Revelation to the Saint at Avila, 1579, and of Certain Directions Concerning the Government of the Order. In St. Joseph of Avila, on Pentecost eve, in the hermitage of Nazareth, thinking of one of the greatest graces our Lord had given me on that day some twenty years before, [1] more or less, my spirit was vehemently stirred and grew hot within me, [2] and I fell into a trance. In that profound recollection I heard our Lord say what I am now going to tell: I was to say to the Barefooted Fathers, as from Him, that they must strive to observe four things; and that so long as they observed them, the Order would increase more and more; and if they neglected them, they should know that they were falling away from their first estate. The first is, the superiors of the monasteries are to be of one mind. The second, even if they have many monasteries, to have but few friars in each. The third, to converse little with people in the world, and that only for the good of their souls. The fourth, to teach more by works than by words. This happened in the year 1579; and because it is a great truth, I have put my name to it. Teresa de Jesús. 1. See Life, ch. xxxviii. § 11. 2. Psalm xxxviii. 3: "Concaluit cor meum intra me." Relation XI. Written from Palencia in May 1581, and Addressed to Don Alonzo Velasquez, Bishop of Osma, Who Had Been, When Canon of Toledo, One of the Saint's Confessors. [1] Jesus. 1. Oh, that I could clearly explain to your Lordship the peace and quiet my soul has found! for it has so great a certainty of the fruition of God, that it seems to be as if already in possession, [2] though the joy is withheld. I am as one to whom another has granted by deed a large revenue, into the enjoyment and use of which he is to come at a certain time, but until then has nothing but the right already given him to the revenue. In gratitude for this, my soul would abstain from the joy of it, because it has not deserved it; it wishes only to serve Him, even if in great suffering, and at times it thinks it would be very little if, till the end of the world, it had to serve Him who has given it this right; for, in truth, it is in some measure no longer subject, as before, to the miseries of this world; though it suffers more, it seems as if only the habit were struck, for my soul is, as it were, in a fortress with authority, and accordingly does not lose its peace. Still, this confidence does not remove from it its great fear of offending God, nor make it less careful to put away every hindrance to His service, yea, rather, it is more careful than before. But it is so forgetful of its own interests as to seem, in some measure, to have lost itself, so forgetful of self is it in this. Everything is directed to the honour of God, to the doing of His will more and more, and the advancement of His glory. 2. Though this be so, yet, in all that relates to health and the care of the body, it seems to me that I am more careful than I was, that I mortify myself less in my food, and do fewer penances: it is not so with the desires I had; they seem to be greater. All this is done that I may be the better able to serve God in other things, for I offer to Him very often, as a great sacrifice, the care I take of my body, and that wearies me much, and I try it sometimes in acts of mortification; but, after all, this cannot be done without losing health, and I must not neglect what my superiors command. Herein, and in the wish for health, much self-love also must insinuate itself; but, as it seems to me, I feel that it would give me more pleasure, and it gave me more pleasure when I was strong, to do penance, for, at least, I seemed to be doing something, and was giving a good example, and I was free from the vexation which arises out of the fact that I am not serving God at all. Your Lordship will see what it will be best to do in the matter. 3. The imaginary visions have ceased, but the intellectual vision of the Three Persons and of the Sacred Humanity seems ever present, and that, I believe, is a vision of a much higher kind; and I understand now, so I think, that the visions I had came from God, because they prepared my soul for its present state; they were given only because I was so wretched and so weak: God led me by the way which He saw was necessary; but they are, in my opinion, of great worth when they come from God. 4. The interior locutions have not left me, for, whenever it is necessary, our Lord gives me certain directions; and now, in Palencia, were it not for these, there would have been committed a great blunder, though not a sin. [3] 5. The acts and desires do not seem to be so vigorous as they used to be, for, though they are great, I have one much greater to see the will of God accomplished and His glory increased; for as the soul is well aware that His Majesty knoweth what is expedient herein, and is so far removed from all self-seeking, these acts and desires quickly end, and, as it seems to me, have no strength. Hence the fear I have at times though without disquietude and pain as formerly, that my soul is dulled, and that I am doing nothing, because I can do no penance; acts of desire for suffering, for martyrdom, and of the vision of God, have no strength in them, and, most frequently, I cannot make them. I seem to live only for eating and drinking, and avoiding pain in everything; and yet this gives me none, except that sometimes, as I said before, I am afraid that this is a delusion; but I cannot believe it, because so far as I can see, I am not under the sway of any strong attachment to any created thing, not even to all the bliss of heaven, but only to the love of God; and this does not grow less,--on the contrary, I believe it is growing, together with the longing that all men may serve Him. 6. But, for all this, one thing amazes me: I have not the feelings I had formerly, so strong and so interior, which tormented me when I saw souls go to their ruin, and when I used to think I had offended God. I cannot have these feelings now, though I believe my desire that God be not sinned against is not less than it was. 7. Your Lordship must consider that in all this, in my present as well as in my previous state, I can do no more, and that it is not in my power to serve Him better: I might do so, if I were not so wicked. I may say, also, that if I were now to make great efforts to wish to die, I could not, nor can I make the acts I used to make, nor feel the pains I felt for having offended God, nor the great fears I had for so many years when I thought I was under a delusion: and accordingly, I have no need of learned men, or of speaking to anybody at all, only to satisfy myself that I am going the right road now, and whether I can do anything. I have consulted certain persons on this point, with whom I had taken counsel on the others, with Fra Dominic [i.e., Bañes], the Master Medina, and certain members of the Society. I will be satisfied with the answer which you, my Lord, may give me, because of the great trust I have in your Lordship. Consider it carefully, for the love of God! Neither do I cease to learn that certain souls of people connected with me when they died are in heaven: of others I learn nothing. Oh, in what solitude I find myself when I consider that the comparison of which I spoke to you, concerning the return from Egypt, does not apply to the child at my mother's breast. [4] 8. I am at peace within; and my likings and dislikings have so little power to take from me the Presence of the Three Persons, of which, while it continues, it is so impossible to doubt, that I seem clearly to know by experience what is recorded by St. John, that God will make His dwelling in the soul: [5] and not only by grace, but because He will have the soul feel that presence, and it brings with it so many blessings, particularly this, that there is no need to run after reflections to learn that God is there. This is almost always the state I am in, except when my great infirmities oppress me. Sometimes, God will have me suffer without any inward comfort; but my will never swerves--not even in its first movements--from the will of God. This resignation to His will is so efficacious, that I desire neither life nor death, except for some moments, when I long to see God; and then the Presence of the Three Persons becomes so distinct as to relieve the pain of the absence, and I wish to live--if such be His good pleasure--to serve Him still longer. And if I might help, by my prayers, to make but one soul love Him more, and praise Him, and that only for a short time, I think that of more importance than to dwell in glory. The unworthy servant and daughter of your Lordship, Teresa de Jesús. 1. This Relation is usually printed among the letters of the Saint, and Don Vicente did not change the practice, assigning as his reason the Saint's reference in § 4 to certain transactions in which she was engaged. The letter is the 333rd (336th in the second edition), and the 4th of vol. ii., ed. Doblado, and is probably the latest account of the state of her soul, for she died on October 4 in the following year. 2. See Inner Fortress, vii. ch. ii. 3. This relates to the taking of the hermitage of our Lady de la Calle, in Palencia (De la Fuente). See Foundations, ch. xxix. 4. "La soledad que me hace pensar no se puede dar aquel sentido à el que mama los pechos de mi madre, la ida de Egito!" This passage, Don Vicente observes, was omitted in all editions prior to his; he does not know what it means; and the translator can give no corresponding English words. [Transcriber's note: The Spanish quoted here was printed in the body of the text, p. 479; English rendition supplied from Corrigenda, p. [viii].] 5. St. John xiv. 23: "Mansionem apud eum faciemus." Index. Abecedario, Tercer, iv. 8. Agony in raptures, xx. 15. Ahumada, de, Antonio, iv. 1. Ahumada, de, Doña Beatriz, mother of St. Teresa, death of, i. 7; seen in heaven by the Saint, xxxviii. 1. Ahumada, de, Juana, sister of the Saint, xxxiii. 13. Alcala, monastery founded in, xxxvi. 29, note. Alcantara. See St. Peter of Alcantara. Almsgiving of the Saint, i. 6, Rel. ii. 3. Alvarez, F. Baltasar, xxiv. 6, xxv. 18; mortifies the Saint, xxvi. 4; humility of, xxviii. 20; promise of, to protect the Saint, xxviii. 21; always consoled the Saint, xxix. 5; hesitates about the new foundation, xxxii. 16; commands the Saint to abandon it, xxxiii. 4; orders her to proceed, xxxiii. 13. Alvarez, F. Rodrigo, Rel. viii. Amendment of life, the work of prayer, viii. 6-12. Amusements, vii. 1, Rel. i. 14. Angels and evil spirits, vision of, xxxi. 11. Angel, the Saint's vision of the, xxix. 16-18. Answers to the Saint's prayers, xxxix. 1-7. Antony, St., of Padua, xxii. 10. Aranda, de, Don Gonzalo, xxxvi. 18. Aridity, how it comes on in the second state of prayer, xv. 15. Art, the, of serving God, xii. 2. Ascent of the Mount, xxiii. 13. Assumption, the, vision of, xxxix. 37. Attachments, evil effects of worldly, xi. 5; xxiii. 5. Augustin, St., Confessions of, ix. 8; effect of reading them on the Saint, ix. 9; saying of, xiii. 4. Avila, birthplace of St. Teresa, troubled by the new foundation: xxxvi. 14. Avila, Bl., Juan of, Rel. vii. 9. Báñes, Fr. Dom., xxxvi. 15; transmits the Saint's writings to the Inquisition, Rel. vii. 16. Barrientos. See Martin. Barron, Fra Vicente, confessor of the Saint's father, vii. 26; hears the confession of the Saint, vii. 27, xix. 19. Beauty of our Lord, xxviii. 2, xxix. 2, xxxvii. 5; unimaginable, xxviii. 7. Beginners, must toil, xi. 13; and persevere, xi. 15-17; not to be afraid of the cross, xi. 25; must be content, xii. 2; certain temptations of, vii. 16, xiii. 9; must begin humbly, xv. 19. Bernard, St., xxii. 10. Betrothal spiritual, of the Saint, Rel. ix. 8, 25. Bird, the soul likened to a, xviii. 13, xix. 22. Bishopric, a, the Saint consulted about the acceptance of, xl. 21. Blessed, the, joys of, x. 3. Blindness healed through the prayer of the Saint, xxxix. 1. Body, the, shares the joy of the soul in certain states of prayer, xvii. 14, xviii. 15; state of, in raptures, xx. 2, 4, 23; our Lord seen by the Saint always in His glorified, xxix. 4. Book, a living, xxvi. 6. Books insufficient without a director, xxii. 3. Borja, de, St. Francis. See Francis. Brief, the, sanctioning the observances of St. Joseph's, xxxiv. 2, xxxvi. 1, xxxix. 20. Brizeño, Doña Maria, ii. 12; influences the Saint, iii. 1. Bulls, the Sabbatine, xxxviii. 40. Cardona, de, Doña Catalina, Rel. iii. 12. Carmel, the Order of, vision concerning, Rel. iii. 14; advice to, Rel. x. Caterpillar of self-respect, xxxi. 24. Catherine, St., of Siena, xxii. 10. Censoriousness of the world, xxxi. 19. Cepeda, de, Alfonso Sanchez, father of the Saint, fond of spiritual books, i. 1; gives his daughter Maria in marriage, ii. 4, note, 8; places the Saint at school in a monastery, ii. 8; would not consent to her becoming a nun, iii. 9; takes her to Bezadas to be cured, v. 5, 6; brings her to his house in Avila, v. 15; hinders her from making her confession in an illness, v. 17; persuaded by the Saint to practise mental prayer, vii. 16; makes progress therein, vii. 20; holy death of, vii. 22-25; seen in heaven by the Saint, xxxviii. 1. Cepeda, de, Don Lorenzo, finds money for the new monastery of St. Joseph, xxxiii. 13. Cepeda, de, Maria, sister of the Saint, ii. 4; sudden death of, xxxiv. 24; seen in heaven by the Saint, xxxiv. 25. Cerda, de la, Doña Luisa, xxxiv. 1; attracted by the Saint, xxxiv. 4; visited by St. Peter of Alcantara, xxxv. 6; tries to amuse the Saint by showing her diamonds, xxxviii. 5; the Saint's watchfulness over herself in the house of, xxxix. 11. Cheerfulness, importance of, xii. 1. Cherubim, xxix. 16. Choice of a director, xiii. 28, 29. Church, the, ceremonies of, xxxi. 4; the Saint's reverence for, xxxiii. 6. Clare, St., encourages the Saint, xxxiii. 15. Comforts, worldly, the Saint's fear of, xxxiv. 4. Communion, effects of the Saint's, xvi. 3-10, xviii. 10-18, xxx. 16, xxxviii. 24, Rel. iv. 5, Rel. ix. 13; the Saint's longing for, xxxix. 31; graces of, Rel. ix. 20. Complaint, loving, of the Saint, xxxvii. 13. Confession, frequent, of the Saint, v. 17; matter of, Rel. v. 11. Confessors, the Saint's difficulty in finding, iv. 8, 13; harm done by ill-instructed, v. 6, 20, vi. 6; one of them misleads the Saint, viii. 15; unskilful, xx. 28; wrong counsel of, xxvi. 5; of the Saint harsh with her, xxx. 15; obedience of the Saint to her, xxiii. 19, xxxiii. 4, 5, Rel, i. 9; the Saint rebuked for her affection to her, xxxvii. 6; names of the Saint's, Rel. vii. 5, 11, 12, 13. Consecration, power of the words of, xxxviii. 30. Consolations, xi. 21; not to be sought for, xxii. 15. Contemplation, xxii. 1; why granted to imperfect souls, xxii. 22, 23. Contempt, Satan shuns, xxxi. 10; the Saint directed to treat her visions with, xxix. 6. Contradiction of good people, xxviii. 24, xxx. 6. Conversation, worldly, vii. 10; danger of, ii. 5, vii. 10; delight of our Lord in spiritual, xxxiv. 20. Conversion of a wicked priest, v. 12; of a sinner, xxxix. 5. Courage of the Saint, viii. 10; necessity of, x. 8; effects of, xiii. 3; necessary in the way of perfection, xxxi. 19. Covetousness, xxxiii. 14. Cowardice, spiritual, xiii. 6. Creator, the, traces of, in things visible, ix. 6. Crosses, xi. 8; desired by souls in the prayer of imperfect union, xvi. 9. Cross, the, way of, xi. 8, xv. 17, 21; necessity of carrying, xxvii. 14. Daza, Gaspar, xxiii. 6; thought the Saint was deluded by an evil spirit, xxiii. 16; approved of the new foundation, xxxii. 21. Delusion, a, into which the Saint fell, xxii. 3; the Saint always prayed to be delivered from, xxix. 6. Delusions incidental to locutions, xxv. 3, 11. Desires, good, xiii. 8, xxi. 9, Rel. xi. 5. Desolation, spiritual, of the Saint, xxx. 10. Detachment, blessing of, xi. 2, xxxiv. 20; necessity of, for prayer, xi. 16, xv. 17; of the perfect, xv. 18; an effect of raptures, xviii. 8, xx. 10; takes away the fear of death, xxxviii. 7; the Saint's, from kindred, xxxi. 22, Rel. ii. 5, Rel. ix. 11; from directors, Rel. iv. 3. Detraction, avoided by the Saint, vi. 4, vii. 3; insensibility to, Rel. ii. 4. Detractors, the Saint prays for her, xix. 11. Devotion, sweetness in, never asked for by the Saint, ix. 10; but once, ix. 11; those who seek it censured, xi. 21; the Saint's, increased by difficulties, xxviii. 10. Die, either to, or suffer, xl. 27. Direction, unskilful, viii. 15, 16; importance of, xiii. 4; methods of wrong, xiii. 25; not to be the same for all, xxxix. 16. Directors ought to be experienced, xiii. 21; and prudent, xiii. 24; and learned, xiii. 26; choice of, xiii. 28; charity of, xiii. 29; should be secret, xxiii. 14; and humble, xxxiv. 15; should be trusted, xxxix. 35; necessary, xl. 12; the Saint preferred those who distrusted her, Rel. vii. 18. Discouragements, xi. 15; must be resisted, xix. 6; certain causes of, xxxi. 21. Discretion, xi. 23, xiii. 2; excessive, xiii. 8. Distraction of the understanding in the prayer of quiet, xv. 10, xxx. 19; in monasteries not caused by poverty, xxxv. 3. Distrust of self, viii. 18, ix. 3; necessity of, xix. 20. "Domine, da mihi aquam," xxx. 24. Dominicans, the, help St. Teresa, v. 8, Rel. vii. 11-14. Dominion, true, xl. 21. Dove, vision of a, xxxviii. 13, 14. Ecija, vow of the Saint in the hermitage of, Rel. vi. 3. Ecstasy, xx. 1; how wrought, xx. 2; fear during, xx. 9; first, of the Saint, xxiv. 7. Egypt, flesh-pots of, xv. 5. Elevation of the spirit not to be attempted in union, xviii. 8. Eliseus. See Jerome, Fra, of the Mother of God. Enclosure, observance of, how important, vii. 5. Endowments not accepted by the Saint for her monasteries, xxxv. 4, 5; offered for St. Joseph, xxxvi. 19; and forbidden by a Brief, xxxix. 20. Envy, a holy, xxxix. 19. Exorcisms, the Saint threatened with, Boll. 211, xxix. 4. Experience, more valuable than books, xiv. 10; a safeguard against delusion, xiv. 11. Faith, the, Satan was never able to make the Saint doubt, xix. 13; blessed effects of, xxv. 16. Falls turn to our good, xix. 8. Fear, xxv. 27; of God, xxvi. 1. Founders of religious Orders, xxxii. 17. Francis, St., xxii. 10. Francis, St., de Borja visits the Saint, xxiv. 4; consulted by her, Rel. vii. 5. Friendship, advantages of spiritual, vii. 33-37, xxx. 6; with God, xv. 8; the Saint's detachment from, xxiv. 8. Friendship, worldly, dangers of, ii. 4, v. 9; deceitfulness of, xxi. 1. Garden, the prayer in the, ix. 5; the soul likened to a, xi. 10, xiv. 13. Gifts of God, the, importance of discerning, x. 4; demand our gratitude, x. 7; supply strength, x. 8; a grace to understand, xvii. 7; the Saint erroneously advised to conceal, xxvi. 5; given according to His will, xxxiv. 14, xxxix. 12; the Saint's joy when others received, xxxiv. 21. God, sense of the presence of, x. 1; helps those who love Him, xi. 19; never fails those who trust Him, xiii. 15; munificence of, xviii. 5; the Saint has a vision of, xl. 13, 14; pain of absence from, Rel. iv. 6. Grace, prayer the door of, viii. 13; comes after trials, xi. 18; the Saint's distress because she could not know whether she was in a state of, xxxiv. 12; vision of a soul in, Rel. iii. 13. Guzman, de, y Barrientos, Don Martin, sudden death of, xxxiv. 24. Hardships of the religious life, xiii. 30. Health, anxiety about, v. 3-8; importance of, in the spiritual life, xi. 23; to be made little of, xiii. 9. Heaven, Queen of, xix. 9; revealed in raptures, xxxiii. 16, xxxviii. 8. Hell, a vision of, xxx. 14, xxxii. 1; effects of, on the Saint, xxxii. 7-10. Heretics, self-condemned, vii. 8; evil state of, xxxii. 9; resemble a broken mirror, xl. 9. Hilarion, St., the Saint commends herself to, xxvii. 2. Honour, point of, xxi. 12. Hugo, Fra, Cardinal of Santa Sabina, xxxvi. 27. Humanity, the Sacred, xii. 3, xxii. 1; mistake of the Saint concerning, xxii. 3; source of all grace, xxii. 9; never to be lost sight of in prayer, xxii. 11; the Saint directed to fix her thoughts on, xxiii. 18; the Saint renews her love of, xxiv. 2; vision of, xxviii. 4, xxxviii. 22. Humility, advantages of, vii. 37, xii. 9; false kinds of, x. 4, xiii. 4; the foundation of the Christian life, xii. 5; worth more than all the science in the world, xv. 13; grows most in the state of perfect union, xix. 2; dangers of false, xix. 15-23; acquired in raptures, xx. 38; foundation of prayer must be laid in, xxii. 16; a false, the most crafty device of Satan, xxx. 12; asking for consolations not consistent with, xxxix. 21-23. Hypocrisy, the Saint not tempted to, vii. 2, Rel. i. 18. Ibañez, Fra Pedro, x. 10, note, xvi. 10; note 6; consulted by the Saint about the new foundation, xxxii. 19; encourages the Saint to persevere, xxxii. 20; confident of success, xxxiii. 5; departs from Avila, xxxiii. 7; advises the Saint to accept an endowment for the new foundation, xxxv. 5; changes his opinion, xxxv. 7; and helps the Saint, xxxvi. 23; seen by the Saint in a vision, xxxviii. 15, 16. Illness of St. Teresa, iv. 6, v. 4; extreme severity of, v. 14. Image of our Lord not to be mocked, xxix. 7. Images, devotion of the Saint to, vii. 3; effects of, on her, ix. 1-3; great blessing of, ix. 7. Imagination of St. Teresa not active, ix. 6; wearisome to her, xvii. 9. Imitation of the Saints, xiii. 5-9. Imperfections, rooting up of, xiv. 14. Impetuosities in prayer, xxix. 11-13, Rel. i. 3, Rel. viii. 13. Impetuosities of divine love, xxix. 10, 11, 13, xxxiii. 9; physical effects of, xxix. 15. Incarnation, the monastery of the, the Saint enters, iv. 1; the nuns of, complain of the Saint, xix. 12; the Saint tempted to leave, xxxi. 16; the rule not strictly observed in, xxxii. 12; the Saint's affection for, xxxii. 13, xxxiii. 3; nuns of, object to the new foundation, xxxiii. 2; election of prioress, xxxv. 8; the Saint returns to, from Toledo, xxxv. 10, xxxvi. 1; troubled because of the new foundation, xxxvi. 11. Indisposition, bodily, evil effects of, on the spiritual life, xi. 23. Ingratitude, delusion arising from the dread of, xxiv. 6; the Saint bewails her, xiv. 16. Inquisition, the, threats of denouncing the Saint to, xxxiii. 6. Inspirations, good, not to be resisted, iv. 3. Intentions, good, no excuse for an evil act, v. 12. Jerome, Fra, of the Mother of God, Rel. vi. 1-3, Rel. ix. 7, 21, 23, 26. Jerome, St., xi. 17, xxxviii. 2; the Saint reads the letters of, iii. 8. Jesus, the Society of, helps the Saint, v. 8; sought by her, xxiii. 3, 19; visions concerning, xxxviii. 17, 39. Job, patience of, v. 16; trial of, xxx. 12. John, St., of the Cross, Rel. iii. 19. Joseph, St., great devotion of the Saint to, vi. 9, xxx. 8, xxxvi. 5; the teacher of prayer, vi. 12; encourages the Saint, xxxiii. 14; vision of, xxxiii. 16. Joseph, St., the monastery of, purchase of the site of, xxxii. 22; not to be subject to the Order, xxxiii. 18; paradise of God's delight, xxxv. 13; foundation of, xxxvi. 4; destruction of, threatened by the council of the city, xxxvi. 14; obtains the good will of the people, xxxvi. 25; goodness of the nuns of, xxxix. 14. Joys, of prayer, x. 3; of visions, xxvii. 13; of the saved, xxvii. 15. Judas, temptation of, xix. 16. Judgment, day of, xl. 16. Kindred, detachment from, xxxi. 22, Rel. ix. 11. Kings, obligations of, xxi. 2, 4; wherein lies the power of, xxxvii. 8. Labourer, story of a, xxxviii. 26. Laxity in religious houses, vii. 6-10. Learning, accompanied with humility, a help to prayer, xii. 6; useful in directors, xiii. 24-26; the Saint wishes for, xiv. 9; not necessary in prayer, xv. 12. Lie, a, Satan is, xxv. 26; the Saint's hatred of, xxviii. 6. Life, the, of the Saint, under what circumstances written, x. 11. Life, weariness of, xxi. 8; the illuminative, xxii. 1. Light of visions, xxviii. 7, xxxviii. 3. Locutions, divine, xix. 14, xxv. 1, 2; delusions incidental to, xxv. 3, 11; efficacy of, xxv. 5, 12; human, xxv. 8; Satanic, xxv. 13; tests of the Satanic, xxv. 17; nature of, xxvi. 3; state of the understanding during, xxvii. 10; effects of the divine, xxxviii. 19-21. Locutions heard by the Saint, xviii. 18, xix. 13, xxiv. 7, xxv. 22, xxvi. 3, 6, xxix. 7, xxx. 17, xxxi. 15, xxxii. 17, xxxiii. 10, 14, xxxv. 7, 9, xxxvi. 20, xxxviii. 4, 19, 20, xxxix. 29, 34, xl. 1, 21, 24, Rel. iii. 1, passim, Rel. iv. 4, 5, 6, Rel. ix. 1, passim. Lord, our, accounted mad, xxvii. 15. Love, joyous, in seeing a picture of Christ, ix. 7; servants of, xi. 1; wherein it consists, xi. 20; vehement in perfect souls, xv. 6; effects of divine, xxii. 21; makes itself known without words, xxvii. 12; impetuosities of, xxix. 10, 11; fire of, xxx. 25. Loyalty, worldly, v. 9. Ludolf of Saxony, xxxviii. 11. Lukewarmness, vii. 1. Lutherans, xxxii. 9, Rel. ii. 14; destroyers of images, Rel. v. 5. Madness, spiritual, xvi. 1-8, xxvii. 15. Magdalene, the, ix. 2, xxi. 9; her example to be followed, xxii. 19. Mancio, F., Rel. ii. 18. Mantles of the religious folded by the Saint, xxxi. 27. Maria of Jesus, xxxv. 1; founds a house in Alcala de Henares, xxxvi. 29. Martin, Don, Guzman y Barrientos, marries a sister of the Saint, ii. 4, note, iii. 4; sudden death of, xxxiv. 24. Martyrdom desired by the Saint, i. 4. Martyrs, the, sufferings of, xvi. 6. Mary and Martha, xvii. 6, xxii. 13. Meditation, advantage of, iv. 11; fruits of, xi. 20; example of a, xiii. 19; the perfect may have to return to, xv. 20. Memory, the, in the prayer of imperfect union, xvii. 5, 9; troublesome, but not hurtful, xvii. 11. Mendoza, de, Don Alvaro, Bishop of Avila, xxxiii. 19; protects the new monastery of St. Joseph, xxxvi. 18. Men, great, difficult of access, xxxvii. 7. Mercies of God, the remembrance of, xv. 23. Michael, St., the Saint commends herself to, xxvii. 2. Misdirection, a, corrected by the Saint, xiii. 22. Mitigation, the Bull of, xxxii. 12; disused in the new monastery, xxxvi. 27, 28. Monasteries, courts in politeness, xxxvii. 17. Munificence of God, xviii. 5, xxii. 26. Neatness, excessive, ii. 2, Rel. i. 23. Novices in St. Joseph's, xxxix. 15. Novitiate of the Saint, v. 1. Nun, illness of a, in the monastery of the Incarnation, v. 3; visions concerning a, xxxviii. 37, 38. Obedience, the Saint writes under, xviii. 10; strict observance of, in the Society of Jesus, xxxiii. 9; of the Saint to her confessors, xxiii. 19, Rel. i. 9, 29, Rel. vii. 14. Objects, natural, moved the Saint to devotion, ix. 6. Ocampo, de, Mary, xxxii. 13, note. Office, the divine, the Saint's imperfect knowledge of, xxxi. 26. Order, vision concerning a certain, xl. 18, 19. Osorno, Countess of, Rel. iii. 16. Ovalle, de, Don Juan, xxxv. 14, note; providential illness of, xxxvi. 2. Padranos, de, Juan, xxiii. 18; directs the Saint, xxiv. 1; removed from Avila, xxiv. 5. Pain of raptures, xx. 11; sweetness of, xx. 19. Paradise of His delight, xxxv. 13. "Passer solitarius," xx. 13. Passion, the, devotion of the Saint to, ix. 5; meditation on, xiii. 19, 20, xxii. 8. Patience of a nun, v. 3; of the Saint, v. 16; of God, viii. 8. Penance, necessity of, xxvii. 14; of the Saint, xxiv. 2, Rel. i. 5, Rel. ii. 11, Rel. xi. 2. Perfection, xxi. 10; true safety lies in, xxxv. 15; not always attained to because of many years spent in prayer, xxxix. 21. Persecution, of the Saint, xix. 12, xxxvi. 12; blessings of, xxxiii. 5. Perseverance in prayer, viii. 5; fruits of, xi. 6; reward of, certain, xi. 17; the Saint prays for, xiv. 17; and recommends, xix. 7. Peter, St., of Alcantara, xxvii. 4; penitential life of, xxvii. 17-21, xxx. 2; power of, with God, xxvii. 22; understands and comforts the Saint, xxx. 5, 7, Rel. vii. 6; quiets a scruple of the Saint, xxx. 20; approves of the new foundation, xxxii. 16; and of the observance of poverty in it, xxxv. 6; in Avila when the Saint came back from Toledo, xxxvi. 1; death of, xxxvi. 1, note; appears to the Saint, xxxvi. 20, 21; said that women make greater progress than men, xl. 12. Phoenix, the, xxxix. 33. Pilgrims, xxxviii. 8. Pillar, the, meditations on Christ at, xiii. 19, 31. Politeness, monasteries courts in, xxxvii. 17. Poverty, effects of defective, xi. 3; of spirit, xxii. 17; the Saint's love of, xxxv. 3, Rel. i. 10, Rel. ii. 2. Prayer, mental, viii. 7; blessings of, viii. 12; joys of, x. 3; the Saint's four states of, xi. 12; fruit of mental, xi. 20; vocal, xii. 3; doctrine of, difficult, xiii. 18; importance of persevering in, xv. 5; must have its foundations in humility, xxii. 16; of the Saint continued in sleep, xxix. 9; effects of intercessory, xxxi. 9; two kinds of, xxxix. 8-10; the Saint's method of, Rel. i. 1. Preachers, xvi. 12. Presence of God, the, xviii. 20; practice of the, xii. 3; effects of, in the prayer of quiet, xiv. 8; different from vision, xxvii. 6. Priest, conversion of an evil-living, v. 9, xxxi. 7; vision concerning a, xxxviii. 29. Progress made in the way of raptures, xxi. 11. Prophecies made to the Saint, xxxiv. 23; fulfilled, Rel. ii. 6, 17. Provincial, the, of the Carmelites offers to accept the new foundation, xxxii. 16; then declines it, xxxii. 18; sends the Saint to Toledo, xxxiv. 2; recalls her, xxxv. 8; reprimands the Saint, xxxvi. 12; allows the Saint to live in the new monastery, xxxvi. 23; death of, xxxviii. 34-36. Purgatory, the Saint saw certain souls who were not sent to, xxxviii. 41; and delivers others from, xxxix. 6. Queen of heaven, the, devotion to, xix. 9. Quiet, the prayer of, iv. 9, ix. 6, xiv. 1, passim; disturbed by the memory and the understanding, xiv. 5; joy of the soul in, xiv. 7; few souls pass beyond, xv. 3, 7; great fruits of, xv. 6; how the soul is to order itself in, xv. 9; difference between the true and false, xv. 15. Rank, slavery of, xxxiv. 6. Rapture, xx. 1; irresistible, xx. 3, xxii. 20; effects of, xx. 9, 30; pain of, xx. 11; loneliness of the soul in, xx. 13; characteristics of, xx. 23; duration of, xx. 25; physical effects of, xx. 29, Rel. i. 26, iv. 1; made the Saint long for heaven, xxxviii. 8; good effects of, Rel. i. 8, 15. Reading, spiritual, i. 1, iv. 12, 13; persevered in by the Saint, viii. 14; long unprofitable to her, xii. 10; impossible in the prayer of perfect union, xviii. 14; a delight, Rel. i. 7. Recollection, prayer of, xiv. 2, Rel. viii. 3. Recreation, xiii. 1. Reflections, making, when dangerous in prayer, xv. 11. Reform, the Carmelite, beginning of, xxxii. 13. Religious must despise the world, xxvii. 16. Resignation of the Saint, xxi. 6, Rel. i. 20. Revelations, the Saint never spoke of her, when she consulted her confessors, xxxii. 19. Rosary, the, of the Saint, xxix. 8. Rule, the Carmelite, mitigation of, xxxii. 12; restored by the Saint, xxxvi. 27; observance of, xxxvi. 30, 31. Salasar, de, Angel. See Provincial. Salazar, de, Gaspar, Rector of the Society of Jesus in Avila, xxxiii. 9; understands the state of the Saint, xxxiii. 11; bids the Saint go to Toledo, xxxiv. 2; vision of the Saint concerning, xxxviii. 17. Salcedo, de, Don Francisco, xxiii. 6; gives spiritual advice to the Saint, xxiii. 11; fears delusions, xxiii. 12; helps the Saint in her new foundation, xxxii. 21, xxxvi. 21; hospitable, xxxvi. 1; gives Communion to the Saint when a priest, Rel. iii. 7. Samaria, the woman of, xxx. 24. Satan, subtlety of, iv. 14; an artifice of, vii. 12, 35; suggests a false humility, xiii. 5; and a carefulness for health, xiii. 9; afraid of learned directors who are humble, xiii. 26; efforts of, to deceive, how thwarted, xv. 16; tempted the Saint to give up prayer, xix. 8; a lie, xxv. 26; unable to counterfeit intellectual visions, xxvii. 4-8; tries to counterfeit imaginary visions, xxviii. 15; appears to the Saint, xxxi. 2; dislikes contempt, xxxi. 10; wiles of, Rel. i. 29. Scandal, xxvii. 16. Scorn, signs of, not to be made during visions, xxix. 6. Self, contempt of, necessary in the spiritual life, xxxi. 23. Self-denial, necessity of, xxxi. 25. Self-knowledge, xiii. 23. Self-love, xi. 2; strong and hurtful, xi. 4, 5. Self-respect, harm of, xxi. 12. Senses, the, suspension of, in the prayer of perfect union, xviii. 19. Sensitiveness, xi. 4. Sermons, viii. 17; without simplicity, xvi. 12. Shame, good fruits of, v. 9. Sicknesses of the Saint, xxx. 9. Sickness sent for penance, xxiv. 2. Sight restored at the prayer of the Saint, xxxix. 1. Sincerity of the Saint, Rel. i. 28. Sin, occasions of, viii. 14; pain occasioned by the sins of others, xiii. 14; original, xxx. 20; the Saint, by her prayers, hinders a great, xxxix. 3; wickedness of, xl. 15; vision of a soul in, Rel. iii. 13. Sins, the Saint consents to the divulging of her, x. 10. Solitude, longings for, i. 6, vi. 5, Rel. i. 6. Sorcery, v. 10. Soto, de, the Inquisitor, Rel. vii. 8. Soul, our own, the first object, xiii. 13, 14; likened to a garden, xi. 10, xiv. 13; in the prayer of quiet, xv. 1; growth of, xv. 20; powers of, in the prayer of imperfect union, xvi. 1, 4; beside itself, xvi. 1-5; crucifixion of, in raptures, xx. 14; detachment of the enraptured, xx. 33; strengthened in raptures, xxi. 14; effects of visions in, xxvii. 11; helplessness of, without God, xxxvii. 11; vision of a lost soul, xxxviii. 31; the Saint's vision of her own, xl. 8; and of, in a state of grace, Rel. iii. 13, Rel. v. 6. Spirit, liberty of, xi. 25; poverty of, xxii. 17; flight of the, xviii. 8, Rel. viii. 11. Spirits, evil, put to flight, xxv. 25; by holy water, xxxi. 4. Spirituality influenced by bodily health, xi. 24. Suarez, Juana, iii. 2; accompanies the Saint to Bezadas, iv. 6. Sufferings, physical, of the Saint, iv. 7, v. 4, 14, vi. 1; of raptures, xx. 16; the Saint longs for, xl. 27. Sweetness, spiritual, never sought by the Saint but once, ix. 11; seekers of, censured, xi. 21; of the pain of raptures, xx. 19; the Saint unable to resist it at times, xxiv. 1. Tears, gift of, iv. 8, xxix. 11; of the Saint before a picture of the Passion, ix. 1; in the prayer of quiet, xiv. 5; in the prayer of perfect union, xix. 1, 2; the Saint prays God to accept her, xix. 10. Temptation, power of, xxx. 13. Tenderness of soul, x. 2. Teresa, St., desires martyrdom, i. 4; placed in a monastery, ii. 8; unwilling to become a nun, ii. 10; becomes more fervent, iii. 2; is resolved to follow her vocation, iii. 6; first fervours of, iv. 2; failure of health, iv. 6; God sends her an illness, v. 4; suffers grievously, vi. 1; afraid of prayer, vi. 5; leads her father to prayer, vii. 16; present at her father's death, vii. 22; perseveres in prayer, viii. 2; found it hard to pray, viii. 10; delights in sermons, viii. 17; devout to the Magdalene, ix. 2; never doubted of God's mercy, ix. 8; depreciates herself, x. 9; willing to have her sins divulged, x. 10; always sought for light, x. 13; complains of her memory, xi. 9; unable to explain the state of her soul, xii. 10; supernaturally enlightened, xii. 11; reads books on prayer to no purpose, xiv. 10; writes with many hindrances, xiv. 12, xl. 32; bewails her ingratitude, xiv. 16; scarcely understood a word of Latin, xv. 12; understands her state in the prayer of imperfect union, xvi. 3; and describes it, xvi. 6; bewails her unworthiness, xviii. 6; writes under obedience, xviii. 10; confesses ignorance, xviii. 20; abandons her prayers for a time, xix. 8; evil spoken of, xix. 12; misled by false humility, xix. 23; prays to be delivered from raptures, xx. 5, 6; never cared for money, xx. 34; gives up her whole being to God, xxi. 7; unable to learn from books, xxii. 3; afraid of delusions, xxiii. 3; is directed by a layman, xxiii. 10; severe to herself, xxiv. 2; her first ecstasy, xxiv. 7; had no visions before the prayer of union, xxv. 14; told by her confessor that she was deluded by Satan, xxv. 18; prays to be led by a different spiritual way, xxv. 20, xxvii. 3, Rel. vii. 7; not afraid of Satan, xxv. 27; spoken against, xxvi. 3; troubles of, because of visions, xxvii. 4, xxviii. 6; her defence when told that her visions were false, xxviii. 18, 19; afraid nobody would hear her confession, xxviii. 20; harshly judged by her directors, xxviii. 23; would not exchange her visions for all the pleasures of the world, xxix. 5; vehemence of her love, xxix. 10; her supernatural wound, xxix. 17; manifests her spiritual state to St. Peter of Alcantara, xxx. 4; bodily trials of, xxx. 17; finds no relief in exterior occupations, xxx. 18; buffeted by Satan, xxxi. 3; converts a great sinner, xxxi. 7; troubled because well thought of, xxxi. 13-17; her singing of the Office, xxxi. 26; commanded to labour for the reform of her Order, xxxii. 14; commanded to abandon her purpose, xxxiii. 1; her vision in the Dominican church, Avila, xxxiii. 16; goes to Toledo, xxxiv. 3; the nuns wish to have her as their Prioress, xxxv. 8; restores a child to life, xxxv. 14, note; begins the Reform, xxxvi. 4; her grievous trial, xxxvi. 6, 7; her health improved, xxxvi. 9; would suffer all things for one additional degree of glory, xxxvii. 3; her affection for her confessors, xxxvii. 6; supernaturally helped when writing, xxxviii. 28; obtains sight for a blind person, xxxix. 1; and the cure of one of her kindred, xxxix. 2; her spiritual state became known without her consent, xl. 28; submits all her writings to the Roman Church, Rel. vii. 16. Theology, mystical, x. 1, xi. 8, xii. 8; the Saint says she does not know the terms of, xviii. 4. Thomas, St., assisted at the deathbed of Fra P. Ibañez, xxxviii. 15. Throne, vision of a, xxxix. 31, 32. Trance, a, xviii. 17, xx. 1; outward effects of, xl. 11; gradual, Rel. viii. 10. Transport, Rel. viii. 10. Trials followed by graces, xi. 18; promised to the Saint, xxxv. 9; shown her in a vision, xxxix. 25. Trinity, the, mystery of, revealed to the Saint, xxxix. 36; visions of, Rel. iii. 6, Rel. v. 6-8, Rel. viii. 20, Rel. ix. 12. Truth, divine, xl. 3-7. Ulloa, de, Doña Guiomar, xxiv. 5; takes the Saint to her house, xxx. 3; helps the Saint to accomplish the reform, xxxii. 13; is refused absolution, xxxii. 18. Understanding, the, use of in prayer, xiii. 17; disorderly, xv. 10; powerless in the state of imperfect union, xvi. 4; and of the perfect union, xviii. 19; the Saint speaks humbly of her, xxviii. 10. Union, imperfect, prayer of, xvi. 1; a mystical death, ib.; the soul resigned therein, xvii. 1; how it differs from the prayer of quiet, xvii. 5, 6; another degree of, xvii. 7; the labour of the soul lessens in the later states of, xviii. 1. Union, perfect, prayer of, xviii. 1; the senses wholly absorbed in, xviii. 3, 14; duration of, xviii. 16; fruits of, xix. 4. Union, prayer of, iv. 9; followed by visions in the Saint, xxv. 14. Union, what it is, Rel. v. 2; of the faculties of the soul, Rel. viii. 7. Vainglory, vii. 2, 34, x. 5, Rel. i. 18, Rel. ii. 15, Rel. vii. 23. Vanity of possessions, xx. 35; the Saint's watchfulness over herself herein, xxxix. 11. Virtue, growth of, in the prayer of quiet, xiv. 6; and in that of imperfect union, xvii. 4. Visions, our Lord seen in, vii. 11, xxv. 14, xxvii. 3, xxviii. 2; intellectual, xxvii. 4; different from the sense of the presence of God, xxvii. 6; joy of, xxvii. 13; imaginary, xxviii. 5; effects of, in the soul, xxviii. 13; Satan tried to simulate, xxviii. 15; effects of, in the Saint, xxviii. 19; cessation of the Saint's imaginary, xxix. 2; of the Sacred Humanity, effects of, xxxviii. 23. Water, holy, puts evil spirits to flight, xxxi. 4, 5, 9, 10. Water, the first, xi. 13; the second, xiv. 1; the third, xvi. 1; the fourth, xviii. 1. Will, the state of, in the prayer of quiet, xiv. 4, xv. 2, 10; in the prayer of imperfect union, xviii. 16. Women, great care necessary in the direction of, xxiii. 14, 15; make greater progress than men, xl. 12. World, the, contempt of, x. 7, xxvii. 16; customs of, wearisome, xxxvii. 15, 16; hard on good people, xxxi. 19; vanity of, Rel. i. 21. Wound of the soul, Rel. viii. 16; of love, Rel. viii. 17. Ybañez. See Ibañez. Yepes, Rel. ix. 1. Zeal, indiscreet, xiii. 11.